Hours passed as the ships made their way into the depths of the inner systems towards Pessac. As each sixty minute period elapsed, Falk grew ever more worried. The vultures of Halifax struck without warning, and soon after a ship’s arrival in-system. If they were now delaying, they had a good, meaning nefarious, reason for doing so. Perhaps there was a trap of some kind ahead. The enemy was crafty. Maybe they were waiting until Falk’s ships had gathered with others ahead of them to pounce. It would not be out of the question. The damned DN captains never arrived on time, and the Halies would certainly prefer to hit a larger number of merchantmen all at once rather than a few here and a few there.
Falk would have rather gone it alone, and raced his ship, the fastest of the four, on to Pessac, but standing orders forbade that. Four widely separated ships, each moving at different speeds, would individually be easier to detect than a tight group, clustered in a narrow patch of void, so the Navy insisted that they travel together. If only they would send a warship to watch over them! That would have given the Halies something to worry about. But no, the glorious captains of the Domain Navy were unwilling to engage in such mundane, unglamorous duty. They would only come if and when the enemy made an appearance, and there was the prospect of a fight.
Falk’s sensor operator announced a contact when the Inerrant Courier was well into the fourth hour of its journey. “Contact ahead. Having trouble identifying it. It’s blowing a plume of hard radiation ten thousand kilometers long.”
“Stay out its wake,” Falk ordered. “I don’t want my ship spending a week in this hellhole being decontaminated. Tell the other ships to do the same.”
“Aye, captain.”
“Can we establish comms? It looks like it's been hit by the Halies.”
“Trying, captain. Very hard to establish a link. Wait. Here it is. Identifying as Captain Kinmont Lima of the mobile industrial ship Ironmonger. It’s poor quality. I’ll throw it up on the forward screen.”
The haunted visage of a middle-aged man resolved patchily. “Hail Emperor!” he wheezed.
“Hail Emperor! This is Captain Falk of the Inerrant Courier. What has happened to you?”
“Halies came out of nowhere,” Captain Lima said. “Hit us, left us for dead. They didn’t finish the job.”
“You’re venting a massive trail of radiation. We don’t dare come close,” Falk said.
“Agreed, “ said Lima. “Stay well away. We will remain on a parallel course with you. Once we close on Pessac, we’ll ask for further instructions from the Navy.”
“Good idea. Luck. Inerrant Courier out.”
Lima nodded, and his face dissolved from the vidscreen.
“Poor bastard,” Falk said. “Better him than us.”
*****
“They didn’t detect us at all,” More said as he watched the four Ajaxian freighters stay clear of the Ironmonger.
“This rad plume is longer than most planets are wide,” Kim said. “It’s horrendous and he has no desire to look too closely at it.” She smiled. “Your plan is working. Four ships hiding in the irradiated wake of a factory ship.”
“So far so good. Pran’s doing an excellent job of playing the beleaguered captain.”
“That’s because he so often is a beleaguered captain. You’ve given him a lot of practice.”
“He’s a patriot, and wants to save his system,” More replied. “Now we just have to hope that this Falk fellow doesn’t delve too deeply into the ID Pran gave him. There’s an Ajaxian factory ship called the Ironmonger, but we’ve no idea where it is, or what it looks like. I’m trusting that it won’t be popping into Aquitaine over the next ten hours.”
“Not likely. You showed Falk what he expected to see, which was an Ajaxian ship that was hit by us. That makes the cover more believable.”
“It has to work.” More said grimly. Too much of what he was doing was based on hope and inordinate risks, but this was war. Did he expect it to be different?
Chapter Eleven
Aboard DNS Arrogant, High Orbit, Pessac, Aquitaine system
Captain Heddrik spent one of the first restful evenings in his cabin aboard DNS Arrogant. The past month had been trying. He had been given an unenviable assignment of hunting down raiders inside the Aquitaine system, while at the same time protecting merchant ships as they made their way to the besieged planet of Pessac. It was an impossible task. His forces were insufficient to catch the marauders before they had done their damage and jumped away. If only he had four times the number of ships he actually had on hand, he would have enough to blanket the world’s approaches and pounce upon the raiders before they could make good their escapes.
Heddrik frowned. That weasel, his executive officer, Stahl, continuously prattled on and on about the need for convoys. Convoys, convoys, convoys! Blah, blah, blah! The thought of such things made Heddrik ill. Such a craven response to enemy aggression! To sit back, huddling in fear, waiting for the foe to strike? That was not the Ajaxian way!
Heddrik sat up on his cot. He summoned a holodisplay of Arles and the volume of space surrounding it. Ever since he had come up with the idea for a second attack on Arles, he could scarcely think of anything else. Surprise would be crucial, he decided. The DN attack force was sure to possess a hefty numerical advantage, but the RHN squadron would have a ship-on-ship qualitative edge. Getting the jump on the RHN craft that they were certain to encounter would blunt that. If they could knock out one or two of the ships in the early stage of the fight, that would reduce the return fire that Heddrik’s flotilla would have to deal with, and save many of his ships from destruction.
Heddrik felt only unease when he thought of the light ships that would make up the bulk of the force he would take against Arles. The sloops and corvettes were scarcely bigger than the cutters used for revenue patrols or ordinary system defense gunboats. They had been utterly ineffective in the debacle that had occurred at the outset of the war for Aquitaine. He needed to do something unexpected, to throw the enemy off-balance.
He began experimenting with alternate battle arrays that he might use in the attack on Arles. He considered sending a token force ahead of the main body, thinking that this would compel the Halifaxian commander to show his hand or see the little vanguard pummel Arles unopposed. Since there were fewer of the Halifaxians than those of Ajax, he would not be able to hide much once he committed his ships.
Heddrik was dismayed that it had come to this. The best time to have destroyed Arles was at the outset of the Aquitaine operation, when the Domain Navy held the whip hand over the enemy. Imperial dictates had forced the Navy to stay that hand, though, all for the dubious prospect of tearing out a couple dozen old fusion reactors that would then be put inside the too-small ships they were going into battle with.
He simulated an attack in three echelons, followed by four, then five, before dismissing all of them as overly complicated. He also varied the angles of his approach to the station. It was the hallmark of a mediocre commander to think in only two dimensions. An experienced battle captain made full use of the tactical possibilities that the ability to maneuver in three dimensions offered. Heddrik decided that the vanguard force would make its approach level with the plane of the system, but his main force would descend, figuratively speaking, from above the plane. While it was hardly an unprecedented move, it would, at minimum, make his opponent divide his fire between the two widely separated attacking bodies.
After running several sims, he had to write off the vanguard force. No combination of ships or tactical formations could ensure that a single ship would survive the run inbound. The RHN defenders would be lobbing too much firepower at it. He therefore decided that he would form the vanguard only from the least valuable units, his Gremlin-class sloops. Most of their captains were drawn from the lower classes, so they would not be missed. Their mere presence in the Navy was a disheartening consequence of the rapid expansion of the fleet and the opening up of spots at the Imperial Naval Academy at Skagerrak to m
en of common birth. Before the great losses of the last generation, one had to be of the minor gentry, at minimum, to merit consideration for admission. Of late, after the misguided decision to conduct admission according to competitive examination, anyone not a serf or a slave could find his way inside the hallowed halls of Skagerrak, men such as the lowborn Stahl, a mere wineseller's son from a farming town whose name Heddrik had never bothered to learn.
Stahl. The rodent was always so delicate around Heddrik, as if he were afraid that his captain might hit him if he displeased him. The fool!
Heddrik only struck enlisted men.
Stahl would prattle on and on about statistical analyses and attrition rates. Charts and graphs. More charts and graphs. Such things bored Heddrik nearly to tears. Simulations had their place. He used them often enough himself, but they could only inform his course of action, not decide it. Command was an art, not a science, despite the intrusion of technology into every facet of naval warfare. A proper commander assimilated all of the information at his disposal but relied, in the end, on his own instincts.
Heddrik banished that last of his simulations with a dismissive swipe. He had seen enough. He thought briefly to look at the attack plan that Stahl had delivered days ago. He sniffed in disgust. Why bother? It would only be cowardly rubbish from a cowardly officer. Heddrik would have to take the fight straight to the enemy, and get in close. This was going to be a vicious knife-fight. The fleet would move out at once.
*****
Stahl sifted through the last of his intelligence reports. He had composed a sound operational plan for the strike on Arles in one sleepless night. He’d then proudly cast it to Heddrik in the small hours of what passed for morning aboard the Arrogant. The document file had also contained an appendix, in seven sections, that detailed the likely forces they would face in minute detail. That was three days ago.
Stahl checked his comm logs. Again. Heddrik hadn’t bothered to open the document. When Stahl reported for duty on the bridge that first morning his captain hadn’t mentioned the plan. Not on that day, nor on the following two. Heddrik issued his own bespoke operational orders to the fleet that did not take into account any of the factors that Stahl had identified or the concerns that he had foreseen, including likely RHN countermeasures, emergency rally points, and secondary objectives in the case that the primary objectives were secured rapidly. Stahl held his tongue. There was nothing for him to say if Heddrik refused to discuss it. There was nothing to be done.
New intelligence arrived this day. It was more of a statistical analysis than intelligence of the traditional kind. There had been a noticeable, non-random decrease in RHN attacks on inbound Ajaxian shipping over the last two standard days. This was superficially welcome news, but it caused Stahl some disquiet. The decline had begun shortly after the DN strike fleet had started to assemble over Pessac. Might the RHN have guessed its target, and withdrawn forces to Arles to better protect it? If so, then Heddrik should certainly reconsider his own operational plan in light of the high probability that he would be facing a larger number of defending ships around the orbital station.
Stahl opened his mouth to speak, but then clamped his lips shut. Heddrik had that look on his face, the same look he got when he was hunting an enemy ship. At such times nothing could dissuade him from continuing the pursuit. There was nothing that Stahl could say would change Heddrik's mind, and he remained silent as he stood beside the captain's chair.
*****
Aboard DNS Bloody Flail, Pessac approaches, Aquitaine system
Strike Commander Diego Winn of the sloop DNS Bloody Flail spotted the approaching vessel at the same time that his sensor operator announced its presence. There was little chance that it could have been missed. It was trailing a plume of radiation that glowed a flaming orange on his ship’s forward viewscreen.
“It’s a blow torch, commander,” the operator declared. “She’s trailing hard radiation several thousand kilometers behind her.”
Winn’s face twisted into a snarl. “Fools! They dare approach Pessac in that condition?”
“They do, commander. Identifying as Captain Kinmont Lima of the industrial vessel Ironmonger. Moving along with her are three other cargo ships.” The operator clutched his earpiece. “Wait. She’s hailing us.”
“On screen,” huffed Winn.
Lima/Pran’s weary visage resolved at the fore of the Bloody Flail’s bridge. “This is Captain Lima. Hit by Halies as soon as we displaced, commander. We are in distress. Permission to dock requested.”
Winn pounded the arm of his chair. “You will do no such thing, Captain Lima! You are to cease your approach to Pessac this instant and await further instructions while we figure out what to do with you! Am I clear?”
“Very,” Pran said. “Where should we go?”
“Anywhere but near Pessac,” Winn snapped. “Why didn’t you send out a distress signal? We could have dealt with you further off, rather than on the doorstep of this planet!”
“And call the Halies down on us again? They left us alone after they hit us only because we played dead and they bought it. The rad plume is their doing. A distress signal would have alerted them that we were still alive and kicking.”
Winn frowned, unsatisfied by the explanation. “Very well. How are the rad levels?”
“We’re protected in the crew compartments.”
Winn cared nothing for the crew, and shook his head. “How is your shipboard machinery?”
“In good shape. Mostly industrial robots. Still completely usable.”
Winn nodded. Good. The machines were all that really mattered. With them an industrial ship such as the Ironmonger could repair almost all of the vehicles that the Imperial Army fielded on Pessac.
“Pull into a wide circular track far away from the planet,” he said to Lima/Pran. Winn tapped the holo in front of him. “Here are the coordinates. A full inspection and decontamination team will be on its way to you within the hour.”
Winn watched as the Ironmonger changed heading and moved on a meandering course to its prescribed holding pattern. He returned his attention to the other approaching ships. These all had to be screened before they could be allowed near the world behind the Bloody Flail. Picket duty was a boring, thankless task, but someone had to do it, and as a junior officer, it fell to him to carry it out on behalf of his emperor.
*****
Pran maneuvered his ship on a wobbling path that took him in the general direction of the assigned area but still left his ship on a rough line for Pessac.
“This is about as close as I can get you, admiral,” he said on the scratchy, audio-only comm with Albacore. “The Jaxers will get suspicious if I delay any more than I have.”
“Roger that,” More said. “Execute a hard burn, just like we discussed. We’ll follow you for a bit, then dump out of your rad wake. You get as far away as you can, and then jump to Arles. Savor the Moment is waiting for you there.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Pran laughed. “Good luck.”
Ironmonger boosted away, accelerating as quickly as her mediocre maneuver drives would allow.
“The rad plume will dissipate soon,” Kim noted. “We won’t be able to hide for very much longer. At this range our shields won’t be enough to conceal our energy signatures.”
“We won’t have to,” More said. He opened a comm channel to the other ships of the 34th Strike Squadron. “You still with me?”
“Starting to enjoy the taste of radioactive engine spew,” Matt Heyward laughed. “Very flavorful.”
“Gaining a new appreciation for my shield,” said Carey. “Glad to be alive.”
The radiation bath that his ships were receiving would have been enough to kill all living organisms on them but for the strong shields that they possessed.
“Ready for battle,” assured Yao.
“Good. On my mark. Thirty-second countdown. Mark. We head straight for the polar fleet. Shoot everything we see, and scoot.”
The four ships ignited their maneuver drives, sending huge jets of plasma screaming out behind them. Their drive flares were hidden for a crucial ten seconds in the malignant rad wake that Ironmonger dragged. The ships were within weapons range by the time the DN picket screen, inexplicably, just one small sloop, had detected their presence, and rose to challenge them.
****
Aboard Bloody Flail, Pessac approaches, Aquitaine system
“Contacts! Contacts!” Four bogies!” shouted the Bloody Flail’s sensor operator. “Classifying them as RHN!”
“Where the hell did they come from?” demanded Winn.
“Popped out of nowhere! Right behind the factory ship.”
Winn widened the holo to embrace the incoming RHN warships and the Ironmonger. The latter was overshooting its holding area and speeding away into the depths of space.
“The Ironmonger is forming a DP bubble,” the sensor tech announced.
“Of course it is.” Winn punched the holo before him. “Alert the fleet! We have intruders inbound. . .”
Winn never finished his message. Seven particle beams tore through the Bloody Flail’s shield, pried open its thin hull, and breached the lightly-protected fusion reactor. An expanding cloud of irradiated particles was all that was left of the sloop as the four Halifaxian warships raced past.
*****
Aboard RHS Albacore, Pessac, Aquitaine system
“Scratch one Jaxer,” More said. “Good shooting Mullins! Now for the rest. Fire at will.”
“Thank you, admiral,” Mullins replied, beaming. “More fried Jaxers, coming up.”
The Ajax Incursion Page 17
