by Terry Mixon
Instead of the receptionist, however, the screen instantly connected to a luxurious but windowless office. It was prestige on Mars to be deeper into the underground tunnels, and the Guild was nothing if not prestigious, after all.
The walls were bare stone but had been worked into a series of friezes around bookshelves carved from actual wood. Like the office on Ganymede where he’d met her years before, this space spoke clearly, if silently, of the wealth and power of the Mercenary Guild.
The redheaded woman behind the solid wood desk had aged a bit since they’d last met. There were streaks of silver visible in her hair now, but she was still just as bright-eyed and beautiful as she’d been the first time they’d met.
“Brad,” she greeted him. “I was expecting you to call sooner or later.”
There was enough distance between Task Force Seventeen and Mars to build a few seconds of delay into the call. Not enough to interrupt a live conversation, just enough to be noticed.
“It’s nice to know that being a Fleet Admiral hasn’t made me any less predictable,” he said. “I see the Guild is treating you well.”
“It’s a living, especially if you don’t care which particular rock you’re living on,” Kernsky agreed. “Much as I’d love to catch up over a bottle of wine, I can’t imagine this is a social call…Admiral.”
Brad’s own video feed would be showing Incredible’s flag deck, swarming with personnel as Brad’s orders were being carried out.
“It’s not. I need an exception to the Guild’s neutrality policy,” he said calmly. “The Goldmisers are locked down in orbit by a Fleet order that I can overrule. The Vikings are a few hours out, as are Harding’s Guardians. All three of those companies were supposed to accompany me to Saturn.
“Now I need them to defend Mars, but there’s no loopholes or games I’m willing to play, Sara,” he told her. “In six hours, the Fleet will engage the Outer Worlds Navy flotilla heading for Mars.
“They can’t evade us, but we don’t have enough of an edge to guarantee their destruction or surrender. The survivors of their force are going to reach Mars, Sara. And the Martian Squadron is tearing itself apart.”
He shook his head grimly.
“That mess will be over soon enough, I hope, but the Squadron won’t be in a position to defend Mars, and the fixed defenses have been disabled.
“I need to contract with the Guild, with any ships you have at Mars or that can get to Mars in the next few hours, to engage and drive off whatever remains of the Outer Worlds force.”
Sara was silent for a few seconds.
“I can’t authorize that,” she finally said. “An overriding contract requires at least four director-level Factors, Brad.”
He blinked.
“I’m not asking for an overriding contract, Sara,” he pointed out. “Just the authorization to hire Guild companies to specifically defend Mars against the OWA when the Guild’s formal policy is not to take contracts in this war.”
“Brad…the OWA just attacked Mars. That neutrality policy isn’t going to last out the fucking day,” she told him. “An overriding contract will be harder, but authority to hire Guild companies to engage the OWN? You’ve got it.
“I thought you wanted to commandeer the entire Guild, like we did against Black Skull.”
Brad chuckled. There wasn’t a lot of humor to it, but it was honest. That whole story had an entirely different meaning for him now that he knew his parents had died aboard the pirate cruiser.
It was an ugly mess.
“I might still,” he told her. “But right now, I just want to post an open contract for mercenary ship companies to engage the OWN in defense of Mars. Can I do that?”
“Yes.” Sara appeared to look past Brad’s shoulder and smiled. “I was going to say have your staff draft one and send it over, but they look busy. I’ll have my staff send you something for your approval in the next twenty minutes, and I’ll start calling everyone with a damn spaceship near Mars.
“Got a budget, Admiral?”
“Sure. What’s Mars’s GDP again?” Brad asked bluntly. “Platinum rates for anyone willing to engage the OWN. Mars will not fall.”
“We’ll back you up, Admiral. You have my word.”
A quick text message later and he confirmed that the Goldmisers were free. He wasn’t contracting them to get involved in the ongoing mutiny, but getting them into space was a good starting point.
“Well, that certainly had an effect,” Werner noted a few minutes later.
“Would you care to share, Lieutenant Commander?” Brad asked delicately.
“Your orders broke free the merc companies in orbit. Went from just the Fleet duking it out with each other to six destroyers and eight corvettes jumping out. I don’t know if they were supposed to get involved in the mutiny, but, well…”
Werner put a recorded message on Brad’s screen.
The woman in it kept her head shaved to show an intricate abstract tattoo that started at the base of her neck and encompassed her entire head. There was no specific image in the swirling lines of blue and gold ink, but Brad suspected most people still found it intimidating.
“Fleet mutineers, this is Commodore Sonja Gold of the Goldmisers,” the tattooed woman barked in a slow accent. “I don’t know what your bullshit is, and I don’t care. The next ship that fires on a Fleet vessel inside my range envelope finds out why everyone is scared of me; am I clear?
“Any of you want to live through this bullshit, cut your engines and transmit your surrenders. I’ll leave cleanup to your own damn Marines, but fuck with me or fuck with Mars and you’ll meet my mass drivers.”
Brad snorted.
“If I wasn’t married, I think I might have just fallen in love,” he said aloud. “Any takers on her offer?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” Werner told him. “Looks like a bunch of mutinying destroyers and corvettes in her line of fire are standing down.”
An explosion marked Brad’s screen and he quickly checked.
Someone had decided to test Sonja Gold’s resolve. A Fleet destroyer had already been in the process of an attack run on a badly damaged cruiser, and her captain had decided to finish the job. Eight torpedoes flashed toward the cruiser, more than enough to finish her off.
Gold’s people had been watching, however, and a curtain of mass-driver fire filled the space between the two ships. None of the mutineer’s torpedoes survived—and by the time the last one had died, a dozen mercenary torpedoes had caught up with the mutineer destroyer.
Mixed in with a storm of gatling mass-driver fire, the destroyer’s defenses were overwhelmed and she came apart in a ball of fire.
“More surrender signals,” Werner concluded. “It looks like about a third of the mutineers near Gold just laid down their arms. The rest are getting a sharp lesson in how much more experienced mercenary ships are than most of the Fleet.”
“I’d feel better if the cruisers weren’t busy duking it out above Mars’s north pole,” Brad replied. Gold was able to intimidate the lighter ships, but four of the Martian Squadron’s cruisers had established a mutineer formation above the ice cap and were in a close engagement with five loyalist ships.
The mutineers had started the fight, giving them enough of a surprise to help even the odds. Brad didn’t expect them to win, but it was also clear there weren’t going to be many functional cruisers left from the Martian Squadron when this was over.
The most important result from that for him right now was that he couldn’t let any of the heavier ships from the OWN flotilla make it through. The mercenaries could fight off destroyers and lighter ships, but even a single cruiser or carrier could devastate the forces in Martian orbit.
The Commonwealth was winning this mess…but if Brad wasn’t careful, that victory could end being even more Pyrrhic than it was already looking.
Chapter Twelve
“Well, that answers the question of whether or not any of the big boys are carriers,” Brad
noted calmly as a swarm of new icons speckled his display. “Do we have a number on the drones?”
The Commonwealth Fleet had tried, hard, to keep the existence of the drone carrier program secret. There was a lot of concern around the idea of even semi-autonomous weapons platforms, and the drones ran their own heuristic AIs.
Unfortunately for that secrecy, the people who’d built eight of the ships for the Commonwealth had proceeded to build an unknown number of them for the Independence Militia, which meant that the Outer Worlds Navy had them.
“We’ve got sixty Javelins on the screens,” Lieutenant Commander Abelli reported. “They don’t seem to be holding any back, which would make two carriers.”
Brad nodded absently as he looked over the energy signatures.
“That fits,” he concluded. “Four ships bigger than the rest, two of them bigger than the other two. I was hoping for at least one Warrior, but it looks like I’m not that lucky.”
It was hard to tell solid details at this range, but they could pick out which ships were bigger than the others. A Warrior-class destroyer wasn’t as big as a drone carrier, but she’d be bigger than anything else the OWN could field.
“We’re calling it two cruisers,” Abelli confirmed. “No classes, but I’m reasonably sure they’re not Tremendouses.”
“And the destroyers don’t appear to be Warriors,” Brad agreed. “Which, given that we know the Independence Militia had more Warriors than the Commonwealth Fleet, tells me something interesting.”
“Sir?” the operations officer asked.
“The Lord Protector sent an expendable fleet,” Bard told him. “No Warriors. No Tremendouses—and I’m pretty sure the bastard has at least two more of those we’ve missed. There might be some Invictus-class corvettes, but I wouldn’t put money on it.”
They’d still be modern ships, but they wouldn’t be the absolute top-of-the-line ships that the Cadre had convinced one of the Fleet’s main providers to build for them.
“Second-line ships, ships they can spare, with a pair of Spearthrowers to stiffen it up.” Brad shook his head. “If everything had gone according to plan, it would have been more than enough. But I’m guessing the plan was set into motion before anyone knew Task Force Seventeen was going to be going via Mars.”
“Those drones will be in range in under ten minutes,” Jahoda noted. “Our anti-torpedo suite is only really designed to handle maybe twenty incoming weapons at once. How many can those Javelins put in space?”
“One each,” Abelli replied. “If they throw them at one of our cruisers, that’s sixty torps at a single target.”
“Can the laser suite cover the other cruisers?” Brad asked. The Tremendous-class ships were piloting a brand-new anti-torpedo system based around lasers.
“No,” Jahoda said grimly. “The system doesn’t have the coherence for long-range engagement or the targeting flexibility to hit anything that isn’t coming straight at us. We can cover them with our mass drivers, but that’s it.”
“Well, then, I suggest we target those Javelins before they can launch,” Brad said. “The fifteen-centimeter guns are overkill, but we’ve got ammunition to spend. We’ll reload at Mars before we move on.
“Order all ships to target the drones with everything and fire at will.”
“We’re outside of range,” Jahoda objected.
“We’re outside of range of ships with live crews,” Brad replied. “Those drones are remote-controlled with AI subroutines. I’m betting that they don’t dodge as well as a warship does…and if they do, all we’ve lost are a few rounds we can replace.”
Those rounds weren’t free, Brad knew, but they were a lot cheaper than cruisers, and the Fleet had lost several of those today.
He wasn’t willing to lose any more.
He felt Incredible shiver under his feet as her heavy mass-driver turrets rotated. She could only bring thirty or so of her standard octobarrel gatling mass drivers to bear, but she was designed so that at least six of her eight turrets could bear on any target.
Even with the recoil-absorbing systems and automatic thrust adjustment for firing, the big ship jerked underneath them as twelve fifteen-centimeter mass drivers fired. The thirty standard gatlings maintained a continuous fire as Brad’s fleet walked mass-driver fire across space.
The drones were still over thirty thousand kilometers away. It took a full minute for the mass-driver fire to reach them, a minute in which they were evading—but as Brad had chosen to gamble, they were evading in a consistent pattern that the Fleet computers had already resolved.
A third of the drones vanished in a single salvo, and Brad watched in satisfaction as the mass drivers continued to walk their fire across the robotic spacecraft.
Anything that missed the drones was a threat to the OWN fleet behind them. He wasn’t likely to hit any of their ships, but he wasn’t going to turn down any luck that came his way today either.
“Remaining drones are launching torpedoes,” Abelli reported. “I’m reading…twenty-one inbound. Target is…Istanbul.”
Someone on the other side was being clever. They’d recognized that Brad had two Tremendous-class ships—and that his third cruiser didn’t have the same anti-torpedo suite.
“Fleet is to redirect standard mass drivers to cover Istanbul,” he ordered calmly. “Heavy drivers are to maintain fire on the drones until they’re gone.”
The drones had their own mass drivers, too. Standard fifteen-millimeter guns in a four-barrelled arrangement, they were about as light a weapon as qualified as a real threat in the battlespace.
Of course, they did qualify as a real threat and warning icons started to gleam on his lighter ships. None of them were more than “ablative armor expended” so far, but it was only the beginning.
Every strip of ablative armor Brad’s ships expended against the drones was a defense they weren’t going to have in an hour when the real battle started.
“Last drone is down,” Abelli reported. “Torpedoes neutralized. No damage to the fleet.”
Brad nodded his acknowledgement.
“They should have held them back,” he said quietly. “Used them in conjunction with the rest of their fleet—but sending them in ahead is our deployment doctrine.” He shook his head. “It makes sense when you’ve got a carrier facing off against a destroyer or two, but it’s the wrong doctrine for a fleet action.”
Which made sense, of course.
The Solar System had seen very few fleet actions yet, and none involving both cruisers and carriers.
Brad Madrid was going to be in command of the first.
Brad was convinced there had to be something he could do to minimize his losses and make sure he smashed the OWN force. Every ship that made it past Task Force Seventeen was going to be a headache at Mars.
“Current vectors are giving us a nine-minute engagement window starting in thirty-two minutes,” Abelli told him. “I’m not sure how much damage we’re going to pull off in that.”
He nodded silently, then glanced at Werner.
“Get me the Commodores,” he ordered.
His call apparently wasn’t a surprise to either of his Fleet subordinates. Both Nuremberg and Bailey were on his screens in seconds. Michelle had spent most of the trip linked with him, so he wasn’t surprised to get her instantly, either.
“Thirty minutes to contact, people,” he told them. They almost certainly already knew, but he wanted to be sure they were on the same page.
“I know what I’m thinking, but if you’ve got any brilliant ideas, I’m listening.”
“We’re already decelerating to draw out the engagement time,” Nuremberg replied. “Otherwise, the only clever idea I’ve got is to ignore the carriers.”
“Agreed.” The carriers weren’t defenseless, but with their drones gone, they had fewer weapons than most of the destroyers on the board. They were better armed than the corvettes that made up the majority of the OWN’s numbers, but there were still two cruiser
s and fifteen destroyers that were bigger threats.
“The only previous cruiser-on-cruiser engagement was the Augustus Logistics Facility,” Bailey said flatly. “We had three cruisers. The Cadre had one. We lost.”
“They opened that one with a long-range nuclear bombardment,” Brad pointed out. “We’ve scanned for heat shields and radiation signatures, Bailey. No one is sneaking up on us this time. It’s a straightforward, head-to-head fight.”
“Kill the cruisers and the destroyers,” Bailey told him. “Corvettes, even carriers, the mercenaries you recruited can clear up. They can’t fight cruisers, and the fewer destroyers we leave them, the better.”
“Agreed.” Brad nodded sharply as his thoughts fell into place. “We can’t change the vector of the engagement at this point, so what’s left to us is target prioritization and our own positioning.
“Let’s start by pulling the corvettes and frigates back,” he ordered. “They’re too fragile to take cruiser fire, and each of them still has a dozen Fleet personnel aboard. We’ll use their torpedoes for long-range fire, but they’ll operate their mass drivers in pure missile-defense mode.
“Move the cruisers and destroyers together, like this.” Brad was moving icons on a display as he spoke, sending his data over to his subordinates. It was a dome shape in space, with his three cruisers holding the top of the formation and the destroyers spreading out as a “skirt” beneath them.
“The cruisers can take hits from even fifteen-centimeter guns. Nothing else can, so we offer them up as a target,” he said bluntly. “Tremendous and Incredible are our toughest units. If they want to focus fire on us, let them. We can take it—and I intend to cut off their heaviest firepower immediately.
“We hit the cruisers first. Torpedoes, heavy mass drivers, light mass drivers from the destroyers and cruisers. Everything we’ve got. Nukes first,” he added after a moment. “How many do we have?”