The
Ajax
Incursion
The Memnon War: Book Three
Marc DeSantis
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Marc DeSantis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Chapter One
Aboard DNS Arrogant, Aquitaine system
“Contact! contact!” reported Ensign Pavel Adler, the sensor systems officer aboard the Ajaxian destroyer DNS Arrogant. “One Aquitainian sloop. Target identified as Sedge-class.”
Captain Giselher Heddrik leaned forward in his chair on the Arrogant’s bridge. “One Firebird. Two would be overkill, and a waste of the emperor’s money.”
“Aye, captain,” answered Lieutenant Taro Thune, the ship’s weapons officer.
A massive antiship missile lifted out of one of the dozens of launch cells on the ventral surface of the Arrogant, expelled by electromagnetic pulse. It traveled one hundred meters from its launching platform before banking ninety-five degrees and speeding toward its target, propelled by a long torch of ionized particles.
“Time to intercept?” Heddrik asked.
“Twenty-four seconds, captain,” answered Thune.
The seconds ticked away while the Firebird raced toward the sloop, its path traced on the forward vidscreen, with a bright-orange icon, indicating the missile, chasing a red icon, representing the Sedge.
“Any sign that it has detected us?”
“Not yet captain,” replied Adler.
Fourteen seconds later, the Sedge’s icon at last began to turn to port.
“We’ve been spotted,” Adler said. “The Sedge’s shield has gone to maximum and it’s burning hard.”
“Too late,” crowed Heddrik.
The Firebird crashed into the little sloop’s shield, its thermonuclear warhead bursting into a miniature supernova. The Sedge’s hull crumpled under the furious assault before it came apart in a violent blaze of orange-yellow fire.
“One for the Domain!” cried Heddrik. “May it be the first of many!”
“For the Domain!” roared the bridge crew in unison.
Heddrik basked in their cheers, proud to have served his nation so well. This was but the first step on a long road of redemption for. . .
A series of angry beeps echoed across the bridge.
“New contacts!” Adler reported. “Four missiles! The Sedge must have gotten them off before its destruction!”
“Shield to full power! Take evasive action!” the captain ordered.
Arrogant banked sharply to starboard, and its maneuver drives flared to life, leaving gigantic jets of roiling plasma in its wake.
The sloop’s antiship missiles were too fast to outrun. The distance between the four weapons and the Ajaxian destroyer decreased slowly, but steadily.
“Arrogant is identifying them as Grackle model antiship missiles,” Adler stated.
Damn, thought Heddrik. Older Halifaxian weapons, but dangerous enough.
“Superior weapons than your piss-poor intel warned us of,” Heddrik huffed to his executive officer, Commander Roland Stahl, who stood obsequiously to his right.
Stahl offered a curt nod. “I only passed along what I received from Domain Naval Intelligence,” he protested.
Heddrik would leave his chastisement of Stahl for another time. There was a more important matter before him. Battle had been joined. “Point defense systems?” he asked.
“Fully operational and waiting to engage,” said Thune. “Electronic countermeasures fully active.”
“Engage at first opportunity.”
“Aye, captain.”
Defensive antimissiles raced out of a box launcher attached to the black and red hull of the Arrogant. These claimed two of the incoming Grackles before they could come within lethal range. That left two others to deal with.
“Close-in lasers engaging the missiles,” Thune announced. There was a bright flare on the vidscreen as one of the missiles blew apart, its onboard nuclear reactor breaking open under a storm of laser fire.
One more.
“Point defense guns ineffectual,” Thune reported. “Magnasand projectors going active.”
Clouds of metal-coated grains of sand were electromagnetically spat from tubes dotting the Arrogant’s starboard flank. The final missile was shredded by the hypersonic micropellets, and it blossomed in a bright red-orange flare as the containment fields that restrained its reactor’s nuclear energies failed.
Heddrik sighed with relief. Perspiration beaded his brow. He quickly wiped this off with his sleeve, hoping that no one had noticed his nervous distress.
“They never stood a chance against us,” he sneered. He turned to Stahl, who hovered beside him, like a hound. “We have the coordinates for the Aquitainian fleet inloaded?”
Stahl nodded.
“Let’s see just how good your intel is, Stahl. It had better be.”
Stahl blanched, but said nothing.
“Helm,” Heddrik said. “We rejoin the fleet. There are enemy ships that require destruction.”
“Aye, captain. Forming displacement envelope.”
*****
Heddrik found his warships waiting for him close to Pessac, the third planet and leading world of the Aquitaine system. The fleet was a collection of mostly light vessels. A school of little killers, he thought with affection.
DNS Black Hatchet, a Deathbird-class corvette on detached duty, as had been the Arrogant, had returned to the pack shortly before Heddrik’s flagship materialized from hyperspace. Her captain, Tor Smitt, was gleefully reporting the annihilation of four outbound enemy freighters.
“Well done, Smitt,” Heddrik congratulated once he had collected all of his captains together via holopresence. “Well done. I am sure all of you will also be pleased to hear that we have an even more worthy opponent to tackle at this time. We have learned that almost the whole of the Aquitainian Navy will be venturing on this track to Nantes Station.” Heddrik cast the projected pathway of the Aquitainian ships to his commanders. “They think to go to its aid. We will surprise them and crush them instead. Enemy resistance in space will come to an end.”
“We will have to act quickly,” Heddrik added. “This intelligence places them in the area of Nantes Station for only a brief period. We must strike before they can escape.”
There came a chorus of approval, gratifying Heddrik. “We displace there, destroy whatever we find, and then jump away. There will be no independent actions. None. Hit hard, and leave. Am I clear?”
His captains’ excited murmurs assured him of their understanding.
“Good. Displacement is in five minutes.”
The officers took their leave, their holos winking out one after another, leaving Heddrik with Stahl, who was still standing obediently at his side.
“This day could either make your naval career, or end it,” Heddrik said to him.
“I understand,” Stahl said.
*****
Arrogant and her companions reemerged after a little more than a minute in hyperspace. The hunt was on for the reported transiting enemy fleet.
“Hard burn to the coordinates,” Heddrik ordered.
He sat back, feeling the heavy thrust of the destroyer’s powerful maneuver drives kick in. The bracing feeling, one of great power, was reassuring.
With time to spare, he began pondering his place in the universe. The
Ajax Domain needed him to be strong, like the drives that propelled Arrogant forward. It needed him to be ruthless too, to restore it to its proper place among the first-rank powers of the Great Sphere. He was an officer of the Domain Navy, and would willingly give his life, as well as those of his crew, to advance the interests of the empire across the stars. The last decades had not been kind to it. Where once it had sprawled in glorious dominion over many star systems, it was currently reduced to a mere handful, including the home system of Ajax itself.
Heddrik had been just a boy when the bigger powers of the Great Sphere had ganged up to bully Ajax and steal so many of its worlds from it. First the democratic weaklings of the Republic of Halifax had defeated the Domain Navy in several bruising battles. Later, sensing wounded prey, the upstart nation of Tartarus, led by its deranged King Evander I, had crushed much of the Domain Navy in the Eleven Minutes Battle at Nakajima.
Heddrik knew that it had not been due to superior skill that Ajax’s navy had been bested by either foe. No, the Halifaxians had numbers and more advanced technology on their side. Those were the only reasons they had come out on top in head-to-head encounters with the Domain Navy. As for the Armada of Tartarus, that star navy had the benefit of complete surprise when it had smashed the DN fleet at Nakajima. The outcome had been so calamitous that Ajaxian forces had been driven from several systems that had been held in its sure grip for generations. The people of the worlds who had been thus stolen by the filthy wretch Evander offered up joyful prayers for their deliverance from rightful Ajaxian rule.
Heddrik scoffed. Ajax was not a tyrannous nation. It was merely obedient to the laws that had governed all polities since the halcyon days of Lost Earth. The strong ruled. The weak obeyed. It was as simple as that.
Strength was truth, and there was no more bedrock principle in the galaxy than force. Either one could dominate another or one was bound to be dominated, so all Ajaxians believed. They lived by the principle that might made right. There could be no other way.
So it was that the setbacks of the previous twenty years had not dissuaded Ajax from its militaristic course. There would be no contemplation of peaceful coexistence with the other powers of the Sphere. Instead, defeat had taught its people that it had been lax in building its strength and safeguarding its territories. It had to bide its time before it undertook to reconquer those worlds that had been taken from it, but retake them it would, one day. Of that, none in Ajax harbored any doubt.
That day had come at last.
New ships had been built to replace those that had been destroyed. Though resources were more scarce since the outlying systems had been shorn from it, the empire had found a way to make up for any shortages. Halifax and Tartarus might have technical edges over the Domain Navy, but those could be overcome through sheer courage and determination.
The reconquest would be methodical. There would be no more wild grabs at worlds that would be hard or impossible to defend from counterattack. Ajax would push out its borders step by patient step, pausing to digest a conquered system, until it came to control it utterly, before moving on to the next. The native populations of the conquered worlds would ultimately be replaced by colonists from Ajax. The planets of the Ajax system were teeming with masses who deserved a better lot than the one that fate had assigned them. Ajaxians were tough and warlike. They therefore deserved to rule those who were weak and peaceful.
Heddrik snorted. Weak and peaceful. Those two words immediately brought to mind the most hated of Ajax’s enemies. This was the holier-than-thou Republic of Halifax. Somehow, the Halifaxians, despite their addiction to popular elections and the obscene fiction that all humans were created equal, had become the strongest of the powers of the Sphere. Democracy was repugnant to all right-thinking Ajaxians, and Heddrik was nothing if not a right-thinking Ajaxian. The thought of allowing the unwashed masses of any state to pick its leaders via a vote was imbecility in the extreme. Not for the first time did Heddrik give thanks that he had been born into one of the few sensible nations in the cluster.
It was thus only just and proper that Ajax should recover its role of leadership in the Sphere. Given the hurts done to it, which when taken together had reduced the gross domestic product of the Domain by some fifty percent, a return to the first rank of stellar powers would not be easy. Fortunately, the lords of the Domain were practical men, and they had tempered their ambitions to match the resources at their disposal. With money in short supply, they had been forced to rethink the way in which they would build and organize their fleet. Prior to their defeats, the Domain Navy had been centered around large, ponderous battleships, as all of the other major navies of the Sphere were. The sight of majestic battlewagons cruising through space was enormously pleasing to Heddrik’s warrior heart, but they were far too costly to construct in anything but the smallest numbers, given the Domain’s straitened circumstances.
The emphasis would now be on building fleets composed of large numbers of smaller warships of light cruiser classes and below. These would be cheaper to produce and easier to crew and maintain. Each individual vessel would be much more vulnerable than the leviathans that Domain admirals had preferred, but what each ship lacked in individual durability would be made up by the sheer mass of firepower that a swarm of such vessels would bring to bear against an enemy.
Enemy. Heddrik let that concept play in his mind for several seconds. What did ‘enemy’ mean to a good Ajaxian? An enemy was anyone who was not of Ajax. That had been the stance of the Domain’s government since time immemorial. More specifically, for Ajaxian military officers, enemy was used as a catch-all for the most likely opponents in any foreseeable war. Within this more restricted meaning, enemy could mean only two states: Halifax and Tartarus. Ajaxian space abutted against the stellar territories of both, and each had come to blows with the Domain in living memory. Both were repugnant to Heddrik, albeit for different reasons. The Halifaxians were miserable democrats. Nothing more needed to be said to explain his dislike of them.
Of Tartarus, his feelings of disgust were mixed uncomfortably with genuine admiration. The Monarchonate of Tartarus was guided by a suitably authoritarian government and had risen very rapidly to the top of the Great Sphere heap. What he could never forgive Tartarus for was nature of the man who ruled it, King Evander I. Heddrik’s skin crawled when he thought of him. The king’s desire for conquest was wholly admirable. His self-admitted prior enslavement by aliens was revolting, however, and his claim of having lived for some sixty millennia was patently preposterous.
The first of the two flaws was by far the worse. No human who had been made a slave could ever be trusted. Besides, sentient aliens had never been encountered in all the time that humanity had sprawled out from its birthworld of Lost Earth tens of thousands of years before. Heddrik could not believe that Evander had actually had any contact with a nonhuman species. That this interloper from who knew where had thought it acceptable to claim such an absurd connection was nauseating. The alien had no place in the galaxy, the Domain’s philosophers, warlords, and strategists all agreed. The officers of the Domain Navy were under standing orders to destroy any alien creature that exhibited even the hint of an intellect higher than that of a beast. That order had never had to be followed, not once, Heddrik knew, but it existed for a good reason. Humans would never, and could never, coexist with nonhumans. And yet this Evander was all-too-ready to assert that he had been in their company for millennia without the slightest hint of embarrassment.
Both Halifax and Tartarus therefore deserved to be crushed. That would not come for many, many years, and Heddrik was under no illusion that he would live to see it. Come it would, however, that he swore. The new tactics of the Domain Navy were a good first step. Gone were the days when Ajaxian naval officers were encouraged to stand toe-to-toe with an enemy vessel and batter it into submission. The Domain Navy could not afford the big warships of heavy cruiser-size or bigger in the numbers that would make such tactics viable. Instead,
Ajaxian warships would strike first, hit hard, and then break off before the enemy could strike back. It was guerrilla warfare among the stars, some said. It was shrewd warmaking, Heddrik believed. Ajaxian forces would attack only when they outnumbered an enemy by a substantial margin or enjoyed a technological superiority over him that equated to a numerical edge.
Critical to the success of the reformed Domain Navy was the incorporation of new classes of small ships. The Scourge was the preeminent modern destroyer class, and his own Arrogant was a member of it. Examples were being churned out by virtually every yard large enough to produce them. The bulk of its armament consisted of Firebird antiship missiles, each of which was tipped with a gigantic fusion warhead. These would be launched en masse, when the situation called for it, to saturate an enemy vessel’s defenses. The sensor package in the nose of the weapon was nothing special, and had been developed and fielded with an emphasis on low-cost, just as the whole of the Firebird itself had been. The Navy’s strategists had crunched myriad numbers based upon the warshots fired in thousands of recent historical engagements. Most antiship missiles and fusion shells were being destroyed before they got close enough to detonate.
The conclusion drawn was that a sophisticated weapon, while granting an individual edge over a less-advanced unit, might matter when only a few shots were fired; in mass combat, by contrast, quantity counted for much more than quality. The Domain Navy had simply not been able to do enough damage to its opponents with its more advanced weaponry. It would now focus upon swamping the foe with so many weapons that a higher proportion would be bound to get through.
Heddrik agreed with the planners’ assessment, but could not help also thinking that the reorientation was also a tacit admission of the weakness of the Domain’s technological base, and thus that Ajax could not hope to pull abreast of developments in the Republic of Halifax Navy or in the Armada of Tartarus. Ajaxian equipment was typically a half-generation or more behind the latest that emerged from the yards and factories of either the Republic or the Monarchonate.
The Ajax Incursion Page 1
