"Surprise me."
Urant chuckled. The ship began to play a slow waltz that was believed to have originated during the Fourth Empire. It was somber and at the same time uplifting. Remarkably appropriate. Pran could not have made a better choice himself.
Simonetti and Bjorn had come to the bridge to spend their final moments with Pran and Urant.
"I wonder if Savvy understands that this is the end?" asked Simonetti.
"She understands that this is the end of her existence. I don't think she has any regrets."
“Thirty seconds, captain," reported the shipbrain. "I recommend that you and the other crew abandon ship. I can ready the ship's escape pod. "
"Thank you, Savvy, that will not be necessary."
Pran watched the chronometer tick down. Twenty seconds. "My mother wanted me to go into accounting."
"There's still time for you to count your last moments, skipper," Bjorn teased, pointing to the ship's chronometer.
Ten seconds.
"Taking longer than I expected, and I don't have any noble last words," said Pran.
"To hell with Ajax!" Urant roared.
Simonetti and Bjorn joined him. “To hell with Ajax!”
Pran smiled. "Well put."
Urant spun in his seat, his attention riveted on his screen. “Displacement bubble forming right behind us! It's Albacore!"
At last.
“Emergency countdown halt!” Pran shouted.
"Countdown halted," replied the shipbrain.
*****
More designated targets on the personal holodisplay that floated beside his command chair. "Don't waste time on missiles! Guns only! "
Three turrets, each containing two plasma cannons, swiveled to engage the Ajaxian sloops. With Albacore's target acquisition delayed by the time it took for her displacement to resolve, the smaller ships, already in normal space, had gotten the drop on her and fired first. Their guns were only light ordnance as naval weapons went, but the Halifaxian destroyer's shield took its time to come up once the jump had been completed. Two shots missed, but two others slammed into the Albacore's hull, cracking open the armor just forward of the engines.
More expanded the holo so that it embraced all of the ships and a volume of a diameter of one hundred kilometers. "When I said ‘close as possible,’ Ensign Mullins, I didn't think you intended to drop us right on top of them."
"Sorry, admiral! I was compensating for the randomness factor in our previous short jump. Albacore surprised me by landing exactly where I was aiming."
There was a ripple of mirth on the bridge at Mullins’ apology for doing too good a job.
“Well, we’re here,” More said. “That was our goal. Now let’s get rid of those sloops. I have a feeling that Savor the Moment has been wondering what took us so long.”
Chapter Eight
Aboard DNS Arrogant, High Orbit, Pessac, Aquitaine system
Captain Heddrik smashed his fist against the combat information display table, causing the holo floating above it to flicker briefly before it returned to normal.
“Twenty-nine cargo ships lost in almost as many days! This is unacceptable!”
Stahl nodded in agreement. It was entirely unacceptable. Heddrik had originally been given the job of stopping the blockade runners attempting to reach Pessac from somewhere deeper in the solar system. He had in large part ignored that task set for him by Admiral Ronner and instead had spent most of his time trying to catch the enemy warships that plagued Ajaxian merchantmen coming into the Aquitaine system. He’d had no success with that, but fighting warships was a nobler, more honorable pursuit than chasing blockade runners, and so he persisted.
The loss of one ship per day in a system that was putatively under the control of Imperial forces was alarmingly bad. That most of the problems that the Domain Navy was experiencing in Aquitaine could be traced to Heddrik’s own misguided tactics was something that Stahl felt it wise to keep to himself. He had served under Heddrik for two years, a loyal, dutiful, and thoroughly unappreciated underling, and thus had more than enough time to observe his captain and catalogue his flaws.
First and foremost was Heddrik’s inability to learn from his mistakes and alter his tactics accordingly. He had refused to organize in-system traffic in Aquitaine into convoys. Doing so would have provided better defense against marauding RHN and Aquitainian ships. Instead, the transports and freighters bringing men and supplies to the system were being picked off one after another, alone, without the protection of Ajaxian warships, which were plentiful. Heddrik was so instinctively aggressive, he had such a need to take the fight to the enemy, that he had organized almost all of his warships into hunter-killer task groups and sent them to scour the darkness for enemy vessels. While such groups were justifiable, in theory, they could only be employed usefully when adequate provision had also been given to guarding the supply ships that made the war in Aquitaine possible.
Heddrik had done none of that, and so the RHN ships that they faced were finding it a simple thing to attack Ajaxian merchantmen without fear of reprisal. When DN ships, summoned by distress calls from besieged freighters, finally arrived on-scene after short-jumping in, they found the RHN attacker long gone and an irradiated debris field containing the glowing remnants of the merchantman.
It would have been better, Stahl believed, to have had the incoming freighters displace in-system as a group, and collect themselves into a convoy covered by DN escorts, before heading for Pessac. This way, the ships would almost certainly get through with their supplies for the Imperial forces on the surface, and any RHN captain looking to make an attack on any one of them would have to run the gauntlet of the DN’s escorting warships.
Such an idea, when Stahl had obliquely broached it to his commanding officer, had been anathema to Heddrik. It offended his very being to stand on the defensive. Heddrik’s rejection had been so vehement that Stahl immediately gave up any thought of delivering up any of the many solid reasons he had as to why a convoy would be appropriate. He knew that, historically, attackers’ losses were heaviest when attacking a convoy defended by a large number of escorts, so the more escorts the better. The overall size of the convoy, that is, how many merchantmen comprised it, mattered very little. What mattered was the absolute number of escorts protecting them. The reason for this was not difficult to deduce. An attacking vessel might evade one, two, or even three escorts, but not four, five, or six. The odds were heavily against the raider either conducting a successful attack or making good its escape if it did manage to destroy a freighter. All logic dictated that the Domain Navy implement a convoy system at once.
Logic did not rule either the hearts or minds of the emperor’s naval officers, unfortunately. Heddrik was a good battle commander, Stahl allowed, but he was ill-suited for a war in which he was forced to play defense, waiting for the enemy to come to him. Had Heddrik been the captain of a marauding destroyer, or in charge of a wolfpack of such vessels, he would have been in his element. Instead, he had been called upon to demonstrate huge amounts of patience, of which he had little.
That Heddrik had risen to a relatively high position pointed up the defects in the Domain Navy’s promotion structure. Flashy fighting types were advanced the fastest, while more thoughtful, circumspect officers were often passed over. It helped to have aggressive captains willing to get stuck in with the enemy. Wars weren’t won with theorizing; they had to be fought. There was, however, a fine line between laudable bellicosity and unthinking belligerence.
Heddrik, and too many officers like him, had found their ways into the middle and upper ranks of the DN. Yet war looked one way from the bridge of destroyer, and something very different from behind a desk back at Supreme Imperial Headquarters. The skills and temperament that made for an effective ship captain were often of little or no use in an admiral. Yet those officers who had excelled at the lower and middling levels of command were the ones most likely to be tapped to go to the Imperial Naval War College an
d then advanced to flag rank. All the while, officers with gifts better suited to higher commands were left to languish in obscurity beneath myopic superior officers.
Stahl grimaced as he considered this paradox. Had someone with a real grasp of strategy and tactics, such as himself, he believed humbly, had been in charge of transport defense, he would have done away with the enemy raiders weeks ago. The solution was simple - institute a convoy system - but Heddrik couldn’t recognize the necessity.
Stahl had wondered often if this was either an intellectual shortcoming or an emotional weakness in Heddrik. He had known Heddrik long enough by this date to decide that it was actually both, and that the captain’s intellectual and emotional imperfections were becoming glaringly obvious now that he had been promoted beyond his maximum level of competency. That he so often blamed Stahl for the low quality of the intelligence supplied by the DN was unfathomable. It was Stahl’s duty, as executive officer, to pass all intel he received along to his captain. He had no hand in either obtaining it or evaluating it. Nonetheless Heddrik held Stahl personally responsible for its errors and inadequacies.
Heddrik was a philistine in so many ways, even for an Ajaxian military officer. He was bereft of any substantive cultural background, and at times seemed almost proud of his ignorance of the glorious legacy of human civilization.
Yet here they were. Stahl, someone with a genuine education, having to answer to Heddrik, for whom elementary strategy was beyond his ken.
“We should have the transports displace much closer to Pessac!” Heddrik fulminated. “Almost in orbit!”
Stahl stifled a sigh. They had been over this ground before, but Heddrik refused to give up on the unworkable notion.
“Civilian ships lack the ability to displace with the accuracy of military vessels. They could very well end up too deep in the planet’s gravity well and be pulled down to their dooms,” Stahl countered. “Such a maneuver would be dangerous even for a proper warship. That’s why the Navy forbids it.”
“So then why are we having them displace so far away? Doesn’t that make the run inward too long? Couldn’t we split the difference and have them emerge somewhere in the middle?”
These were questions asked and answered many times previously.
“As you will recall, Captain Heddrik, by having the ships displace at a good distance from their destination, we give them the chance to begin their approach outside of enemy sensor range. The RHN can’t be on guard in all places at the same time, and so our ships can increase their velocity to the point where their interception will be more difficult.”
“Won’t the RHN spot them no matter what?”
“That is a near certainty, captain, but the belief is that our ships can use the high speed they develop over time to blow by RHN ships that would otherwise be within interception range if they were moving at lower velocities. That ‘middle’ space that you mentioned is exactly where the RHN is patrolling most heavily. We’d actually be doing the Halifaxians a favor by displacing our transports in that area.”
There were a few seconds of silence. Perhaps he finally understood?
“There are just too many of them,” Heddrik complained.
Of course not.
Stahl fought down the urge to disagree aloud. No, there were not too many of them. Naval intelligence pointed to a small band of RHN warships operating in the system, perhaps five to seven. These were supplemented by the remainder of the Aquitainian fleet, which was largely engaged in the defense of the outer system planets. The refusal to institute a convoy system enabled a paltry few Halifaxian spacecraft to pick off the Domain’s cargo ships and troop transports one after another with virtual impunity. It would have to stop, but when?
If the menace was going to be reduced, or better yet, extinguished altogether, something would have to be done to make it more difficult for these raiders to operate in the environs of Pessac. There were enough DN ships around the planet to prevent the Halifaxians from launching a direct attack on the invasion fleet. That had not stopped them from pursuing a commerce raiding strategy aimed at slowing the flow of reinforcements and supplies reaching the surface. Aquitainian manufactories in hidden locations around the system were still producing equipment for the defending forces. Ordinarily, these forces would have been eradicated via carpet bombing whole swathes of enemy territory, but Pessac was deemed too valuable to be dealt with in this manner. Ajaxian hands had been tied by the order of the emperor himself. Pessac was to be the breadbasket of the renewed empire, just as it had been before.
Before. Before the damned Halifaxian War. Before the war with that devil King Evander. The Domain Navy had fought hard, but its faults had been glaringly exposed by both opponents. Ajax had been lucky. Had Halifax not called off its hounds prematurely, Ajax might have been crippled forever. Had the Armada of Tartarus not been operating at the extreme end of its logistical tether it might have toppled the empire on its own. The Domain had been preserved by a lack of will in one instance and sheer distance in the other.
Stahl worried. The empire could not count on being lucky again. Policy based on chance was a recipe for disaster. Something intelligent, with a reasonable prospect of success, would have to be done, if Imperial forces on Pessac were not to be cut off from supplies. Already, munitions and food stocks were running low. Convoying was out of the question for Heddrik, so what could be done? Stahl took a different tack with his commanding officer.
“The enemy operates out of a base inside the system. They need to repair and rearm. Intelligence reports point to Arles Station being the new center of their operations. Evacuation of the civilian populace has begun, clear evidence that it is their in-system naval base. It must be neutralized.”
There, Stahl thought. Let Heddrik do something offensive, and see himself as the attacker. Maybe that would be the way to check the RHN threat, and take some of the pressure off of Pessac.
Heddrik sighed discontentedly. “We tried taking out the orbital. Our operation failed.”
“Only because of the unforeseen intervention of the RHN. We now know they are here, in some strength, and can prepare appropriately.”
Heddrik was silent as he considered Stahl’s idea. Then he shook his head sadly. “I would dearly love to strike at Arles again, but operations here at Pessac have only grown more intense. We can’t spare the ships that would be needed to take out that station.”
“We tried a clever ruse to secure the orbital the last time,” Stahl said. “Now we must bring a mailed fist down on Arles, just as we did at Leiden. This would be in keeping with the Domain’s traditional procedure of slaughtering recalcitrant worlds.”
An appeal to tradition. That should do it.
“We will have to devote two, perhaps three, times as many ships to the suppression operation as we did the prior one,” observed Heddrik.
“Maybe, captain, but we will have an advantage. We may presume that the bulk of enemy forces in this system are either operating around Pessac or are in transit between it and Arles for repairs and resupply at any given moment. The number of RHN ships that we will likely face there will be far smaller than what we will bring to bear.”
“And what of Pessac? Will we not be leaving it more vulnerable if we strip it of warships?”
As if they were accomplishing anything of value chasing ghosts? Stahl kept that to himself.
“I don’t believe so, captain. The heavy units of the fleet will remain behind. They will offer adequate protection while we clear out this nest of vipers.”
“Securing authorization for this attack will not be easily forthcoming, though I would like to hammer them where they make their lair. The admirals have prioritized the preservation and capture of technology. Arles has value to the Domain Navy, especially the reactors that power it, and we can’t simply obliterate it.”
“Yes it does, but the worth of the reactors is minimal when set against that of Pessac. The raiders are hampering our invasion here, a place that is of much
more value to the Domain than the orbital, but only if it can be taken. And we won’t have to obliterate Arles, I think. We could damage it so heavily that it would be useless to the enemy forevermore, forcing its abandonment. That would make the conquest of Pessac all the easier. And when Pessac is in Imperial hands we will have, at a stroke, augmented the Domain’s food production by some fifty percent.”
“We will need to do something different,” Heddrik mused aloud. “I will see what Admiral Ronner has to say about this. I will retire to confer with the admiral.”
“I will await further instructions,” Stahl said.
*****
Stahl oversaw the bridge for the following three hours until he was relieved. He returned to his quarters and pulled up a display of Arles and its immediate environs. He began to run a series of simulated wargames of a plausible attack on the orbital. He could reasonably expect to find four or five RHN ships there. The Aquitainian fleet had its hands full defending the more distant worlds, those as yet unconquered, and so it relied heavily on the RHN to guard Arles. The Domain Navy was fortunate that the ongoing war between the Republic and the Monarchonate had sucked in so many of the RHN’s warships. Had it been able to send more than the barest fraction of its strength, the emperor’s navy would not have stood a chance.
A sudden strike, with the element of surprise, would be sufficient to overcome the orbital’s defenders and batter down its shield with particle weapons. Nuclear warheads would have been more effective, but using them would have also contravened every one of the Accords that had governed warfare in the Great Sphere for centuries. Worlds and orbital stations were protected by powerful shields as a matter of course, but these could be overcome by a lengthy hammering, either rapidly by atomics, or more slowly by energy weapons. What prevented the indiscriminate nuclear destruction of every world in the Sphere and the descent of another dark age was the threat of maximum retaliation against any power that violated the Accords. The knowledge that other states would either hit back so hard that the use of weapons of mass destruction was not worth the cost they entailed curbed their employment.
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