The Vipers started the dance with an expected and dreaded massive missile launch. Over a hundred and sixty thousand vampires erupted from the alien armada and sped towards Sondra Givens’ ships. A similar deluge had wrecked Fifth Fleet at Heinlein and turned Admiral Kerensky into a shadow of his former self. Admiral Givens had studied every last bit of data about that battle and the smaller but still significant Lamprey attack on Melendez, and she’d come up with new tactics to deal with what some wags were beginning to call ‘the Sun-Blotter’ after the Persian boast at the battle of Thermopylae.
The first thing she’d done was have every anti-missile in Sixth Fleet reprogrammed for point defense. The slower-than-light weapons weren’t designed for defensive purposes, since beam weapons did a far better job, but they could be effective with some adjustments. The ten-thousand-strong volley her ships could fire was saved for the last ten seconds of the attack, when the enemy ship-killers would be entering relatively-fixed trajectories and Sixth Fleet’s energy weapons had whittled down the swarm.
Every weapon platform capable of engaging an anti-ship munition had also been modified to excel at that job. Active sensors working at maximum power swept the space between the two fleets, detecting the incoming swarm at twice their normal range and allowing every ship’s main guns to engage it from well over a light-second away. An entire set of hastily-drafted defensive procedures were tried for the first time in the interplanetary depths of Parthenon System, a trial run where failure meant the savaging of dozens of vessels and thousands of deaths.
At Heinlein, Fifth Fleet had only managed to destroy about a hundred and twenty thousand vampires out of one-fifty; the remaining thirty thousand had destroyed seven ships outright and damaged every one of the survivors, many of them critically. Givens’ crews accounted for a hundred and thirty-six thousand before they made their final sprint – and were met head-on by her own missile swarm and every weapon in the fleet, resulting in an orgy of destruction that claimed over nine tenths of the remaining missile storm.
The survivors – still over a thousand strong – darted past the American vessels’ warp shields, aiming at the exposed sections between them. In most cases, they failed to get through their target’s force fields and armor plating. But some did.
Admiral Givens grimaced as the first fleet damage reports trickled in. The USS Baldwin took six direct hits; the unlucky destroyer broke apart with the loss of all eight hundred souls aboard. A frigate fell out of formation while its crew desperately tried to restore power to its graviton drive. Several other ships suffered non-critical damage. And that was all. They had weathered the largest missile launch in recent galactic history, and survived. She found herself breathing freely again, and smiled when the TFCC personnel cheered briefly before getting back to work.
Her crews had done an incredible job, but this had been the opening salvo, fired without the assistance of sapient control. The Vipers had recovered from emergence and were rushing into beam weapons range. The primary purpose of the missile swarm, to allow the aliens to emerge from warp unmolested, had been achieved, although without inflicting the heavy casualties their previous attacks had. The aliens’ external box launchers could not be reloaded during combat, so any follow-up barrages would be a fraction of the size of first one, but they would be more accurate, as well as impossible to engage with missiles of her own.
The only easy day was yesterday, she thought as the two fleets moved into direct fire range. She was starting the battle in much better shape than Kerensky. While victory was still unlikely, decimating the alien formation in a running battle towards Parthenon-Three would count as a solid win in her book.
Some ten minutes after the last Viper missile was dealt with, the ships entered ideal fighting range and began firing their main guns. Sixth Fleet stopped moving forward and reversed course, maintaining the range at which its warp shields rendered them nearly invulnerable to frontal fire. This was the kind of battle American space forces excelled at, an energy-weapon slugfest where they could face and destroy several times their tonnage in enemy vessels while taking minimal losses.
The Vipers had an answer to that as well.
Besides the new missile platforms, the fast-attack cruisers and frigates moving around the edges of the Vipers’ formation worried Admiral Givens. Those ships had no missiles and relatively light weapon mounts and shields; most of their tonnage was dedicated to gravity thrust systems. Once they reached one thousandth the speed of light, reactionless graviton thrusters hit steep diminishing returns, but you could make enough marginal gains to make a difference. By tripling their propulsion energy budgets, the Viper fast-attack ships could increase their flank speed by about five percent to ten percent, which meant they would eventually overtake Sixth Fleet’s, envelop its position, and engage it from multiple angles, allowing them to bypass the American ships’ warp shields. Even with their lighter armament, those fragile but swift vessels would make Givens’ position untenable unless she did something about them.
Admiral Givens ordered all ships to concentrate their fire on the fast-attack classes. The losses among them started to mount, but that meant ignoring the enemy’s capital vessels, the dreadnoughts and battleships that kept pounding on the American formation with their main guns. Direct hits were nearly impossible, but carefully-aimed glancing shots would impart some of their energy into their targets even in the poorly-conductive vacuum of space. The damage inflicted in that was minimal, but it would build up over time, damaging shields and stressing other systems.
And a second volley of missiles erupted from the Vipers fleet of the line. A mere thirty thousand this time, but those ship-killers had a lot less distance to cover, and dealing with them meant diverting Sixth Fleet’s firepower away from the fast-attacks that were closing the distance at a steady fifteen miles per second. It would take some eighteen hours before they could overtake Sixth Fleet, but they would start scoring telling hits long before then.
The Halsey’s command center trembled under her feet. Something had applied enough momentum to overwhelm the dreadnought’s stabilizers, however slightly. A missile strike had made it through. A quick check revealed no damage to the ship. She didn’t bother to look any further into it. Fighting the flagship was up to the Halsey’s skipper, and she had a murthering great battle to conduct.
For eight hours, it went on. Sixth Fleet moved backwards steadily and traded salvos with the inexorably approaching enemy. Protected by warp shields, the American vessels were able to survive multiple hits from the fifty- and sixty-centimeter graviton cannon mounted on the alien heavies; most of those shots were absorbed by the impenetrable barriers protecting close to seventy percent of their surface area. The Halsey’s 20-inchers, on the other hand, only had to contend with conventional defenses, and they scored devastating hits on her targets. Which unfortunately consisted mainly of fast-attacks rather than capital ships.
One by one, the nimble alien tin cans fell out of line with heavy damage or blew up outright. Eight frigates and five cruisers were down or out already, versus one American destroyer and one frigate. That was the sort of exchange the US Navy was used to. Except this time it wasn’t going to continue much longer.
The lighter Viper ships were paying dearly as they closed the distance, but they kept advancing. By the time they’d closed to within a quarter of a light second, they had targeting solutions that even their relatively weak armament could exploit. Direct hits from their 100mm popguns began to impact on ordinary force fields and armor, hardly a threat for her heavies, but enough to start damaging cruisers and lighter vessels. And as soon as the first fast-attacks reached those improved firing ranges, the rest of the alien line unleashed an even heavier missile volley. Forty thousand vampires: they’d been saving them for this moment. A thousand made it through, and an American destroyer and two frigates broke apart. The death of USS Dickson marked the point where the tide turned. Sixth Fleet claimed another cruiser and four more frigates minutes later, but
an American light cruiser drifted to a stop almost at the same time, its status light flashing yellow. That was a death sentence for its two thousand crewmembers; rescue operations were impossible at flank speeds.
We are done here, Givens realized, seconds before a new Sun-Blotter launch was detected. ‘Only’ twenty-five thousand vampires this time.
The cold equations of the fight were obvious. She couldn’t afford the losses the enemy was inflicting, and the exchange ratio would only get worse.
No choice. “Prepare for warp transit. Sixth Fleet will fall back to Parthenon-Three.”
She had expected her ships to launch multiple hit-and-run attacks on the enemy, hammer the Vipers every step of the way and bleed them dry before the two forces arrived at Parthenon-Three. Instead, her ships would have to disengage after inflicting minimal losses, allowing the enemy to effect repairs, reload their magazines and rejoin the battle at a time of their choosing.
Kerensky had warned her about this. She’d thought that dealing with the initial missile barrage would allow her to fight longer and do better than her fellow commander. And she had, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
Retreating this early in the game stuck in her craw, but keeping her command intact was paramount. Last stands made for great drama, but only if there were any survivors to appreciate the stories. As long as Sixth Fleet remained to block the warp-lanes leading deeper into American space, the enemy could be held in the system. In retrospect, she probably should have declined a deep space engagement and kept her ships close to P-3. Effecting a warp retreat while under fire was neither easy nor painless.
Her orders were transmitted and Sixth Fleet prepared for transition before the missile storm could reach it. Their warp shields flickered for a fraction of a second before they could leave ordinary space-time, and that was enough for the Vipers to score several hits. Two destroyers and another cruiser – one of the last Presidential-class vessels still in service – became rapidly-expanding gas and debris before the chaos of warp space swallowed the retreating formation.
Givens’ warp nightmares were always informed by her deepest fear: failure. During the few seconds before she and her ships emerged in orbit around Parthenon-Three, she was regaled with images of the planet burning while the lifeless hulks of Sixth Fleet drifted idly above its skies. Her grandson Omar appeared before her, wordlessly expressing disapproval as he beckoned her to follow him into the dark. She shook her head and willed the waking nightmare to go away.
Had that been just a hallucination, or a vision of things to come? She’d find out soon enough.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“Come with us, Grampa!” Mar cried out from a passenger window of the ground-effect bus carrying the last load of refugees out of Davistown. Tears were running down her face.
“I can’t,” Morris said. His eyes were burning and his voice came out harsher than he intended. “I’ll see you when it’s over.”
“You won’t. You’ll go to Heaven like Mom and Dad, and I’ll never see you again!”
“Child…” he began to say, but the bus lifted from the ground and the whine of its fans made speech impossible. He waved to his granddaughter as the bus lurched forward, heading to the relative safety of New Burbank.
Very relative safety. If the regional force fields and planetary defense bases went down, Mariah and everyone in New Burbank would burn to death in the glare of Viper city-melters. That would only happen over Morris’ dead body. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen.
Morris watched the line of fleeing vehicles for a few moments before rubbing his eyes and looking around. He was far from the only militiaman saying goodbye; two dozen others were there, about half of his platoon. They were all in uniform; there weren’t enough field long-johns to go around, so his unit made do with locally-fabbed fatigues made of tough fabric but lacking all the sophisticated systems of real uniforms. At least the militia’s combat element had been issued clamshell breast plates and sealed helmets, the kind of stuff the Marines had worn about a hundred years ago, without any exoskeletal reinforcements and only light force fields that would stop shrapnel and a glancing beam but not a direct hit unless you got lucky. Better than nothing, but if it came to a serious firefight they were going to take big losses.
Good thing that the Marines were expected to do most of the fighting.
Morris’ platoon and the entire Forge Valley Volunteer Regiment would be providing support to the 101st MEU, along with the US Army’s 323rd and 331st Brigades and three National Guard regiments. For most of those troops, that meant being in the rear with the gear, doing the work the trigger-pullers needed done so they didn’t run out of power packs or snacks at the worst possible time. If the Volunteers had to fight, it meant the shit had well and truly hit the fan. Morris was still glad he and the rest of his platoon were being issued IW-3s when they reported in, because he expected the shit to hit the fan at some point. Probably sooner than anybody expected.
The troops of Bravo Company were scheduled to assemble at the town’s Green at 1200 hours. It was still early, but Morris headed there. The walk from the bus station to the Green was short; it was a short walk to anywhere in Davistown, given that downtown comprised of a whole four city blocks. Most of the stores and buildings were closed and shuttered; the only men and women he saw out and about were in uniform. The three churches around the Green were also closed. The only establishment still open for business was the Irish pub across from City Hall, and that would only last until the troops headed out and Davistown became a ghost town. The rats at City Hall had left hours ago, of course, except for the mayor and the sheriff, who were both officers in the Volunteers and pretty good people, for rats.
A largish group of militiamen were clustered around the Green, smoking or drinking coffee – or rather, Parthenon chicory, which was close enough for the name as long as you’d never had the real thing. Something in the planet made the real stuff impossible to grow, despite the fact the climate on the plateau should have been ideal for it. Morris had enjoyed Earth coffee during his time in the Corps, but since he couldn’t afford it anymore, he’d grown used to the local version.
“Heya, Gator,” one of the men in combat gear said.
Gator. It’d been a while since he’d heard his old handle. Not since Otis and Ruth had gone and gotten themselves killed; after that, he hadn’t been able to make it to town to drink with his old buddies.
“How goes, Lemon?” he said.
Boris ‘Lemon’ Nikolic smiled at him from under the raised visor of his helmet. The big guy was another retired leatherneck. He and Morris hadn’t served together but they had exchanged life histories over some fine booze during an American Legion-sponsored shindig, shortly after arriving to Parthenon-Three. They’d both been out on the sharp end: different planets, different wars, but in the end it all came down to killing the sorry bastards trying to kill you. Along with all the other combat vets in town who’d volunteered for militia duty, they’d been assigned to the recon-escort platoon in Bravo Company.
“Fair to middling,” Lemon said. “Sent the kid away?”
Morris nodded. “Should be safe enough at New Burbank.”
“Yeah.” Lemon didn’t sound convinced, but Morris didn’t mind; he was whistling in the dark, and they both knew it.
“Any scuttlebutt?”
“Sixth Fleet is in orbit now; gave the Eets a bloody nose but had to retreat. An old Chief I know – retired, but still plugged into the Chief’s network – tells me our fleet got a pretty bloody nose, too. He heard the Vipers met up with a supply squadron three days after they kicked Sixth Fleet’s ass, and have been fixing their cans, getting ready for round two.”
“They didn’t really kick our ass,” Morris protested. “They lost more ships than we did.”
Nikolic shrugged. “It’s all bubblehead BS to me, Gator, but that’s how Chief Hoover called it. Sixth Fleet should have kept up the pressure on the Vipers rather than running back here. T
hey didn’t because they couldn’t.”
“Yeah. Guess the Chief’s right.” Being outnumbered had rarely been a problem for the Fleet before, except when the odds were completely insane. But now they were outgunned, and that wasn’t good. The orbital and planetary defenses on Parthenon-Three were first-rate, but would they be enough to help Sixth Fleet keep the Vipers out? He didn’t think so.
Urgent FLASH traffic from his imp interrupted his musings. WARP EMERGENCE IMMINENT. ALL MILITARY PERSONNEL REPORT TO THEIR ASSIGNED STATIONS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Morris glanced up at the green-gray skies. It was close to noon, but he thought he saw a few lights blinking up there. Real or imagined, it didn’t matter. For the defenders out in the black, the light show would start soon enough.
“Guess it paid off to be early for the muster,” Lemon said, gesturing at the other militiamen running towards the Green.
Morris shrugged. “We should have a day or two before the Vipers can deploy any ground troops. We won’t be needed before then.”
He wasn’t sure he had another fight left in him, but the aliens weren’t giving him any choice.
* * *
“Drones gonna be doing a spot check in three, people,” Staff Sergeant Dragunov said. “Them camo blankies better be good and tight over everything or I’ll make you sorry your mama didn’t smother you in your crib.”
“I’m already sorry,” Russell muttered to himself. He wasn’t worried, though. His squad knew what they were doing; they’d broken in all the boots even before they left New Parris, so by the time they got into their first firefight on Parthenon-Four everybody knew what was what. Of course, that shindig had been against barbarians with a few Starfarer special ops types. Things were going to be different now.
“Should I go outside to make sure?” Nacle asked.
“Nah, we’re good. Nobody can spot us from overhead.”
They’d spent a good bit of time and effort camouflaging their position. There was an FOB back some ten klicks that was slightly less-well camouflaged on purpose, so when the Vipers came down they’d figure that was where the defensive line was. The idea was to give the Eets a nice surprise when they tried to enter Forge Valley, which as far as the aliens were concerned would soon become the valley of the shadow of death.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 50
