by Tori Harris
“All are in the green so far,” Zhukov replied.
“Alright, Dmitri, we’re going to alter course and attempt to rendezvous with your flight. Since our encounter with Charlie 4, however, I think the only reason we haven’t been taking fire from the Baldev is that she doesn’t have a clear line of fire at us without potentially finishing off the cruiser. So when we change course to meet you, we may draw their fire again. If that happens, we won’t be able to recover your fighters until after we finish off Bravo 1 … it’s just too risky for your pilots. Have your damaged ships stay together and continue on course at their best possible speed. If someone has to punch out, remind them to activate their locator beacon. I really can’t see Captain Yagani firing on survival pods or defenseless ships, but it will be up to the remaining pilots to decide whether they stay with the downed pilot or continue on course. One way or another, someone will pick them up soon, and with any luck, it will be us. In the meantime, we need you and your remaining operational fighters back in the fight. It looks as though Waffer might have a fight on his hands.”
“Understood, Captain. I will relay your instructions and we will be on our way momentarily. One last thing … after we were attacked, we destroyed the two anti-access weapons pods that hit us. We then completed a thorough scan of the immediate area out to a radius of about five light minutes with our active sensors. At the moment, I do not believe the Resistance ships have any more of these weapons pods deployed, but please be aware that they are small and difficult to detect. Based on their location, I assume the ones we encountered were most likely released by the first group of fighters we destroyed earlier.”
“Thank you, Captain Zhukov. Will do. Prescott out.”
“Commander, the longer this fight goes on, the more the situation favors the Resistance. We’ve got to do something decisive and get ourselves in a better situation to be able to handle their reinforcements before they arrive.”
“Yes, sir,” Reynolds replied. “Our point location attacks have been the only truly effective tactic so far. Another high speed run at Bravo 1’s drive section might at least force them to drop their supplemental shields. Frankly, I think that’s still our only option at the moment.”
“Agreed. Fisher, time to expected C-Jump, please,” Prescott asked.
“Zero eight seconds, sir.”
“Belay that C-Jump for the moment, please. I assume you also have a course plotted to pick up our damaged fighters?”
“Yes, sir. Ready on your mark.”
“Very well, let’s try it. If we start taking fire, correct back to the original course and put Charlie 4 between us and Bravo 1 again. Any questions?”
“No, sir, but the farther we get from Charlie 4, the harder it’s going to be to stay out of their line of sight. I think the only reason it has worked so far is because Bravo 1’s supplemental aft shields are preventing them from maneuvering.”
“That may be true, but it was exceptional thinking on your part and may well have saved our collective arses. Besides, we’ll take whatever advantage we can get at this point. Execute your course correction, please.”
“Thank you, sir. Aye, sir.”
As Fisher entered the required commands to alter Theseus’ course, the ship’s bow slowly rose above her former flight path in response while simultaneously easing into a slight turn to port. It took only moments for the Baldev to respond with a renewed hail of energy weapons fire streaming downrange to slam into the destroyer’s aft shields.
“Correcting back, Captain,” Fisher reported immediately. “We are also free of Bravo 1’s grav beam. C-Jump range 100.4 light years and stable.”
“Understood. Execute your C-Jump when ready. Dubashi, inform Captain Zhukov that we are unable to attempt a recovery mission at this time and will be transitioning for another attack on Bravo 1.”
“Aye, sir,” both officers replied in unison.
The message from Captain Yagani was clear — he would allow the damaged remnants of Badger 1 Flight to slowly make their way out of the combat zone unmolested, but ships that were still in the fight were fair game and subject to immediate attack for as long as the battle continued. For the moment at least, all damaged ships, both friendly and hostile, were simply on their own.
SCS Gunov, Location Crossbow
(5.93x1011 km from Location Dagger)
“Tactical and Helm workstations …” Commodore Sarafi announced.
“Yes, sir,” both Wek officers announced as one.
“I have designated the first formation of three Terran ships that we shall attack. Helm, you are to coordinate with our two sister ships and ensure that they are able to maintain their positions in formation. The AIs should assist you to some extent, but as the lead helmsman, formation integrity is largely your responsibility. Understood?”
“Yes, Commodore.”
“Very good. Tactical, each time we attack one of the ships in their formation, make your target the starboard ship. As I instructed Commander Freyda, your primary goal is to remove Terran ships from the battle, not destroy them completely … not yet, at least,” he smiled. “I will assist you in determining when to move on to the next target. Whenever possible, I want you to attack from either above or below their flight path until I tell you otherwise. After we hit them a time or two, we should be able to assess the effectiveness of their shields and adjust our tactics, as required. Any questions from either of you?”
“No, Commodore.”
“Then let us get about the business of avenging our comrades, shall we? Execute your attack.”
“Aye, sir,” both officers answered intently.
With the Gunov and her two consorts currently in a climbing turn to port relative to the other Resistance warships, the helm officer noted the position of their first target, then began the process of reversing their turn while smoothly increasing their angle of attack through the vertical. The three Gresav-class destroyers continued their maneuver until completing what their Human counterparts might refer to as a modified Cuban Eight. All three ships then rapidly accelerated, heading towards a location in space projected to be almost directly above their targets once they reached the optimum range for their energy weapons.
For her part, Commander Freyda was working at a near frenzied pace at her Command workstation. While her role of directing the fire of the task force’s six Rusalov-class battleships seemed simple enough, issuing the series of commands required to properly coordinate their attack required more time than she actually had available — particularly with the Terran warships rapidly closing on their remaining forces. After what seemed to her like an interminable period of time had passed, and during which she noticed Commodore Sarafi glancing impatiently in her direction at least twice, she finally completed the long series of required tasks and issued the order to open fire.
Having remained in active service for over one hundred Terran years past their expected lifetimes, the Rusalovs were, in many ways, relics from a bygone age. Designed by Wek engineers before energy weapons had reached a level of power output and reliability deemed worthy of their most powerful warships, the Rusalovs’ main armaments had originally included traditional, two-stage gas-powered main guns only marginally more advanced than those relying solely on gunpowder to launch their projectiles. While effective enough for short range space combat and planetary bombardment, the weapons could not propel their shells at sufficient speeds to eliminate the need for explosive warheads. In fact, these weapons had more in common with Terran ocean-going battleship guns dating back to the early twentieth century and beyond than they did modern, kinetic energy weapons. As the Sajeth Collective expanded, however, their designers gained access to increasingly advanced technology, and steadily upgraded existing ship designs to take advantage of the corresponding improvements in weapon systems. For the Rusalov-class battleships, this decades-long progression ultimately led to an interesting hodgepodge of systems — anachronisms extended and enhanced to ultimately become some of the most
powerful ever produced by the shipyards of Graca.
Perhaps the most significant upgrade, and the one most responsible for keeping the Rusalovs active in the Sajeth Collective fleet, was the replacement of the ships’ original main guns with electromagnetic projectile launchers that the Wek now referred to as simply “kinetics.” In spite of their “modernization,” the weapons still hurled massive shells at distant enemy targets — and at over eight hundred kilograms each, the projectiles rivaled the largest ever fired by seagoing battleships. Once fired, the Rusalovs’ self-guided rounds proceeded downrange at a comparatively glacial pace of only five thousand kilometers per second — technically placing them squarely in the archaic “hypervelocity” category. What they lacked in speed, however, the weapons did their best to make up for in terms of mass, accuracy, and the addition of a nuclear warhead approximately five times as powerful as those carried by most Sajeth Collective anti-ship missiles. While the Wek engineers knew all too well that speed trumped mass when it came to kinetics weapon design, the huge guns were still deemed viable. Ironically, this was partially due to the ongoing development of a defensive system still in the early stages of development when the battleships were first commissioned — shields.
In the years that followed, Wek shield systems had proven so effective that point defenses had been all but eliminated from most warship classes. The same was true of “small caliber” kinetics — such as the railguns favored by their Human rivals. This was in large part due to the practical difficulties associated with allowing steady streams of projectiles to pass through the shields on the way to their targets. This problem had been relatively easy to overcome for energy weapons by coordinating the phase and frequency of the beam emitters used. For kinetic energy weapons, however, the solution turned out to be much less exotic: fire fewer rounds and drop the shields for each. The Rusalovs’ main guns were, after all, only capable of firing at the leisurely rate of one round every thirty seconds. Accordingly, the designers had taken the eminently practical approach of switching off specific field emitters during the forty microseconds it took for a shell to pass through the space normally occupied by the vessels’ shields. In an effort to prevent an enemy from predicting the precise instant when this would occur, the ships’ AIs inserted random intervals of time between successive salvos. Otherwise, the mighty battleships relied on an impressive three meters of armor to render their enemies’ attacks a bitter exercise in futility — or so they hoped.
With the six Rusalov battleships now largely slaved to the Gunov, many of their hopelessly outdated command and control systems were rendered largely irrelevant as they became mere extensions of the flagship’s vastly more sophisticated AI. Now, as the Terran ships reached optimal range, the two massive “gunhouse” turrets mounted dorsally amidships rotated in the general direction of the lead ship in each enemy formation, paused momentarily, and opened fire.
“Will the Humans not simply execute a rapid series of transitions to avoid the incoming rounds?” Freyda asked, growing uncharacteristically nervous under Sarafi’s intense scrutiny.
Sarafi raised his eyebrows thoughtfully, as if he, himself, were considering the question for the first time. “Perhaps they will, but they most likely have gathered some data at this point regarding the effectiveness of our shields. If that is indeed the case, they will realize that executing rapid transitions will not be a particularly effective tactic. They cannot hope to destroy any of our remaining ships without first bringing down its shields … and they cannot hope to bring down our shields without a sustained, heavy bombardment. No, Commander, I suspect that they will attempt to utilize the combined firepower from each of their formations for that very purpose … relying on their own shields to protect them from the battleships’ main guns. Let us hope that doing so will prove a fateful mistake for the Humans.”
Freyda looked up from her Command workstation and stared openly at her commanding officer under a furrowed brow. She was becoming increasingly convinced that Sarafi had access to a great deal more information regarding the capabilities of the Terran forces than she did, which seemed equal parts confusing, troubling, and downright irritating from her perspective.
Noticing the look on her face, he leaned closer and spoke in a low tone that only she could hear. “We will discuss this topic at length when we are at leisure, Commander Freyda. For now, I would ask that you listen carefully to what I am able to tell you and take what I say at face value.”
“Understood, sir,” she replied after a moment’s consideration.
Seconds later, as the first thirty-six projectiles fired from the Rusalov battleships reached the attacking Terran warships all around the battlespace, all but eight (nearly eighty percent) of the massive shells breached their enemies’ shields and struck within just a few meters of their intended points of impact. Four of the six targeted Human warships suffered a minimum of four hits each, and the results were beyond Commodore Sarafi’s most optimistic expectations. All four were completely destroyed, with gigantic sections of their broken hulls spinning off into space in multiple directions. A huge section of one of the vessels even managed to collide with the neighboring ship in its formation — almost certainly removing it as an immediate threat in the current battle. The hulls of the final two ships targeted by the initial salvo remained intact, but both appeared to be heavily damaged and likely to be permanently dispatched with only minimal additional effort.
Glancing at the tactical situation display at his workstation, Sarafi called up the AI’s real-time analysis of one of the Terran vessels in the moments before it had been destroyed. As he had suspected, its shields, while obviously employing an entirely different type of technology than that used by Sajeth Collective vessels, were equally vulnerable to attacks from such large projectiles. A distant part of his mind mused momentarily that effective shield design perhaps wasn’t as simple as merely dissipating kinetic energy. Indeed, the huge shells fired from the Rusalov battleships carried less energy than the dramatically smaller projectiles fired by the Terran ships — which, by contrast, were traveling at relativistic speeds. Was there something about the sheer physical size of the shells that posed a greater challenge … and for both types of shield systems? Not for the first time, Sarafi silently cursed the shortsightedness of the bureaucrats who had steered the Governing Council’s military planning committee into largely abandoning kinetic energy weapons aboard all of their newer warship classes.
“I can now confirm Rusalov main battery hits on six of the Terran warships, sir.” Freyda reported. “Four have been completely destroyed. Three others appear to be heavily damaged … one of these was from collateral damage caused by a collision with debris.”
“Well done,” Sarafi replied. “The rest will likely get much more difficult to hit now that they realize how effective our guns are against their shields. Once they have time to accelerate, the Terran ships are much faster than the Rusalovs’ shells, after all. Get as many hits as you can as quickly as you can.”
“It will be my pleasure, sir,” she replied. “The second volley is already in flight. Time to impact, one six seconds.”
Sarafi barely heard his XO’s response, having already shifted his attention to the three-ship destroyer attack on, as luck would have it, one of the two Terran “formations” that was now composed of only a single warship. Understandably, the enemy ship had broken off to port after the other two vessels in its small group had been destroyed — seconds after beginning their own attack run on the nearest Rusalov battleship. In response, the Gunov’s AI had adjusted their course and speed to arrive at a point directly above their target — diving to close the remaining distance while offering the maximum number of beam emitter emplacements a clear line of fire.
“They have obviously detected our approach,” Freyda observed. “Why have they chosen not to open fire?”
As if in response to her question, all of the remaining Terran ships still capable of doing so transitioned into hyperspace in
ten simultaneous flashes of grayish-white light.
“They have transitioned again, sir,” Sarafi’s tactical officer reported.
“All of them?”
“There were ten hyperspace departure signatures. They appear to have left their three damaged warships to fend for themselves. Two of these appear to have lost power. The third is moving away from our forces using their sublight engines.”
“Time to intercept the third vessel from our current position?”
“She is very nearly on the opposite side of our perimeter, Commodore and accelerating rapidly at the moment. We can still catch her without transitioning to hyperspace, but it will take a while — approximately six minutes at her current rate of acceleration.”
“Very good, do it.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” Freyda interjected, “but can we not simply transition to a point just beyond the target to perform our intercept?”
“Ordinarily, I would say that is precisely what we should do, but, based on the fact that the Humans located our second rally point so quickly, we must assume that they have developed the capability to track our vessels in hyperspace. If we transition, we could very well be telegraphing our intentions. Have you not also noticed that they appear to be making lengthy transitions without significantly changing their locations?”
“Between their first and second attacks? Yes, sir, I did.”
“As you know, we have used such tactics ourselves at times, but doing so requires us to relocate our forces to an intermediate location, then transition back to the combat zone.”
“And you believe that they are simply entering hyperspace, remaining stationary — perhaps even repositioning their vessels — before returning to normal space? I realize that such a thing is possible, but do you believe them capable of that kind of technological prowess so recently after achieving interstellar travel? Our own ships cannot do so … even after centuries of hyperdrive development.”