Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  The carriers short jumped into the kill-box and launched their bombers then jumped out again. Not all of them made it. We lost over a thousand carriers in that battle but considering the number of enemy ships that survived the DJ-2s the numbers were not as high as they would have been in the original plan. Silent’s staff was already counting the numbers and would give us our kill to loss ratio when the battle was over.

  Watching the tactical display, I could see pink areas becoming black as the battle raged back and forth. Occasionally an area that had been black would start to grow pink and then within the pink a red spot would show, indicating some Plague ships had managed to rally around a globe ship or in many cases a trio and the battle in that area would rise to a crescendo. Then suddenly there would be a flare, and the spot would gutter out like a candle flame in a wind storm.

  Bombers backed by Swift Fangs performed picket duty to thwart the escape of Plague ships but wound up having little actual fighting to do. The only Plague they encountered were ships that had lost power or control and didn’t have the good graces to self-destruct. These were fallen upon by the pickets which ravaged them like wolves in a sheep pen before ultimately the enemy ships would die in a flare of actinic light when their anti-matter containment fields failed.

  The Plague leadership had apparently decided there would be no quarter given, none asked, and after generations upon generations of running from these creatures, many of our Confederation pilots were taking the collected rage of millennia out on the swarm and were content with dying if they could take just one more Plague ship with them. We were constantly reminding them that the mission wasn’t vengeance and we need them to survive for the next battle. There were always a few fanatics in the crowd. Five cycles later, when the fighting finally died down to mopping up, we were left with thousands of pilots who were sick of the slaughter to their very souls.

  I ordered all of the pilots to return to their carriers for a final time to rest, eat, grieve and make peace with their souls before they had to go out and do it again against the next swarm. Many of the pilots no longer had a carrier to go back to so we redirected them to any carrier that had space for them. It was ironic that most of the surviving carriers had full or nearly full compliments when all of the pilots had finally landed. I was dreading the butcher’s bill on this operation but wasn’t about to look at it until the second battle was over and gave orders to Silent to withhold numbers from any who inquired until we got back at Terra. I got no argument from him, only a compassionate smile and nod of the head.

  Thousands of Elsies equipped for search and rescue combed the battle zone for life support pods. Most of the crews ran round-the-clock shifts spelling each other as they looked for survivors and giving the coups de gras to the few enemy ships they found that still showed activity. A suited pair would fly over to the damaged ship and slap a few charges on it then beat feet back to their Elsie, send out a “Fire in the hole” squawk before touching off the charges that would break the anti-matter containment field and turn the ship to dust. Of the several thousand pods they found less than half contained living crew and by the time the mop-up was over I couldn’t tell who was more mind-sick, the pilots or the SAR crews.

  It took us another five cycles to reorganize the fleet and prepare for the fight against the second swarm. The Colds and Warms sent us several armoured freighters filled to capacity with DJ-3s and Cracker-3s. They were equipped to launch directly from their containers, this brought our compliment of armoured freighters up to forty-eight. We loitered in the area for two more cycles while all of our warships were reloaded and resupplied instead of doing it on the run. When I walked through some of the squad bays on a few of the carriers I visited I couldn’t help but see, regardless of species all were still exhausted and needed more rest before I sent them into the grinder again. When we were ready to move again, we jumped ahead to where our scouts were waiting.

  Like the last mission, we rallied our forces out of range of the Plague sensors, and it took us two more cycles of jockeying things around before we were ready. One encouraging bit of news was our training programs back on the motherships reported they had graduated another five thousand pilots and aircrew who would be forming up new flights and waiting for us when we got back. It was only useful in the sense it would cover about half of the pilots and crews who would never fly again after the next mission—our mission coordinators had already marked down several thousand who were not fit to fly. I was asked innocently by a Terran commander if I wanted him to pursue charges of cowardice against his pilots who were marked down and I just growled, “Don’t you fucking dare!”. No one asked that question again.

  Serena had been my silent shadow on this mission, I knew she was with me, I could feel her presence even in my sleep, but I hadn’t had much time to devote just to her until this night just before a big battle was about to begin. I was finally getting a little me time, she was lying next to me on my bunk when out of the blue she said, “You really should comm mom. She misses you, and I know part of the reason you are hurting now is the way things were left after you told her about ‘our Leviathan’. She loves you and is concerned about you, and yes, dammit, I have been talking with her almost every night.”

  “I would never want you to do otherwise, youngster. She and I both love you, and we both love each other, I’m just having a hard time reconciling myself to the fact I read her so wrong. Frankly, I threw myself into my work, so I didn’t have to deal with it while I needed to keep my wits sharp and my mind on my mission.

  “I miss her, I miss Ginger and Vanilla and Tux and all of my other friends, but I also understand why they have to be on different ships in different parts of our fleet. Missy is here and so is Shadow and I haven’t seen much of them either.

  “And believe me young one, about the only reason I’m still functioning, is I have your quiet peace to fall back on at night when I’m missing all of them. One of the nicest things anyone ever did for me was Johnny bringing you and your sibs to me to raise.”

  “I know, dad, that’s why I try to stay by your side as much as I can, but I really need for you to comm her before this next fight. Please.”

  “Ok, sweetheart, I’ll do it now.”

  I got up and poured myself three fingers of Scotch in a glass, sat in my chair leaned back and commed Elaine. Her duty station was on one of the armoured freighters we were using as a hospital ship. She answered almost immediately, “I’m glad you commed Jase. I’ve been thinking about you almost non-stop and was wondering, how are you?”

  “To be honest, not too good. I need you to know I love you and miss you. I wish we could be on the same ship, but you are needed where you are, and I’m needed where I am.”

  “What’s wrong, Jase?”

  “I’m sick of the dying Elaine. I’m sick of how horrible my spirit feels when so many people I send out to fight either come back broken or don’t come back at all. I need this to be over, and I need you to be with me. I didn’t know how much strength I got from you until this mission started. Just hearing your voice is helping me to settle. We have another fifteen to twenty cycles before we can head for home and prepare for the next battle and I’ve lost one of the allies I was counting on.

  “I kicked Livid and its buddies off my ship and told it neither it, not its kind, were welcome any longer in my fleet. They are all gone now, either to their Ark or mothership, I honestly don’t care which.”

  I continued to explain and give her more detail and just talking about it seemed to lift a heavy weight from me. We spoke for another few centas while she told me about her cycles, and as she signed off, she said those three little words I’d been dying to hear. I slept well for the first time in cycles, when I woke up, I was ready to take on the Plague.

  27

  UPON WAKING, I SHOWERED AND dressed quickly and headed for the command centre, stopping briefly in the mess to grab a couple of scones and a mug of coffee. Reports of readiness had stacked up in my mail queue. I
quickly scanned it and saw all the subject lines contained the attack element’s number and one word, “READY”.

  I watched the battle clock tick out the last few centas to H hour and when it hit zero, my mail queue again filled with messages with the word, “LAUNCHING”. I swung towards the holographic tactical display and waited to see the small bright lights fill our battle space. Over the next few centas, I saw hundreds of thousands of the tiny sparks that represented clusters of ten DJ-3s. appear in the kill-box and waited for the swarm to begin entering it.

  We decided to deviate from our original attack and lined our attack elements up along the course the second swarm was following but ahead of it. As soon as the DJ-3s were launched, our fleet reorganized itself into a truncated cone formation that would allow us to englobe the kill-box once the Plague swarm started dying. We also decided to try to reduce our casualties by using every DJ-3 we had left in the hopes of not only thinning the swarm but utterly destroying it.

  It was going to take decas for the swarm to fill the kill-box, and that meant the hardest thing of all, waiting. The swarm kept coming, and we kept waiting and just when we were ready to close the trap the ships in the swarm all made turns that would take them to the edges of the kill-box and towards our attack elements. Our battle controllers immediately sent the over-ride codes to our DJ-3s. The delay, while only a few ticks between our transmitters and the receivers on the DJ-3s, was long enough that when the weapons activated, close to half of them had no targets in range. They did what they had been programmed to do, went dormant and waited for pick-up. The swarm ships towards the narrow end of the cone died quickly and entirely as we had intended but all too many at the back of the cone survived, they were in a frenzy that put me in mind of hornets.

  Our battle controllers quickly gave the launch order to our carriers, and our pilots launched, clearing the carriers in moments so the big ships could jump back a light-tick and prepare their second wave. It had become standard operating procedure to stage both weapons packages, Cracker-3s and Goblins by each second wave bomber and arm them with the package required just before launch. We had been caught too many times with the second wave armed with the wrong weapons. It took too much time to unload and reload so now the ships stood with only the gimbal mounted Goblins loaded while it was determined by the battle controllers which underwing ordinance to mount. Even then, it wasn’t fool-proof, but it worked better than the original method.

  The count of surviving plague ships was a little under two million accompanied by five trios of globe ships. When the swarm filled the kill-box, we noticed another change in the enemy’s doctrine. They were clustering hundreds of harvesters around the trios of globe ships forming an almost solid shell around them. Extra weapons were installed on the harvesters in the shell, making them extremely dangerous to approach. Even the bombers, as small, fast and manoeuvrable as they were, were being swatted aside like so many flies. I sent out the order to avoid the shelled trios and concentrate on the lesser armed ships. If we could kill off more of the ships that would ultimately be broken up for reaction mass, we might be able to stall the remainder of the swarm in space and buy time to develop a tactic to overcome the trios with shells.

  The battle raged on and on, and we were making progress in decimating the swarm’s numbers, but our own forces were paying a high price—too high for this action to continue without more effective tactics. It was time to see if the AI Swift Fangs would be able to turn the tide, especially with their latest cannon updates. They were also carrying Cracker-3s on external mounts, and I asked that they try to take out a couple of the shelled trios since the new cannons would allow the Swift Fangs to operate just outside the range of the Plague beam weapons giving them time to launch the Cracker-3s.

  I watched with bated breath as the first flight of AI Swift Fangs deployed around one of the trios that had been all too effective in defending themselves. Two flights of bombers loaded with Goblins accompanied the AI Swift Fangs and began engaging the Plague ships that swarmed in to help protect the trios.

  While the bombers held the smaller ships at bay one flight of Swift Fangs opened up with everything they had, concentrating on one part of the shell of harvesters. The other flight was right behind them and as the first flight’s Cracker-3s began to take their toll, the second flight got several of their squadrons through the opening using short jumps to carry them past the shell and into the heart of the trio formation. They immediately attacked the closest Globe ship, two Swift Fangs managed to get inside where they detonated their Cracker-3s. The surviving Swift Fangs short jumped to the other side of the trio just before there was a massive explosion and the penetrated globe ship disappeared from the tactical display. Several of the nearby harvesters were also destroyed.

  More squadrons of Swift Fangs took advantage of the new hole in the trio defence and joined the Swift Fangs inside and took out another globe ship within ticks and the rest of the second flight swarmed through the enlarged hole. A centa later the third globe ship died taking many of its harvester shell with it. Unfortunately, the remaining Swift Fangs that had penetrated the shell died with them.

  Two of the remaining trios responded to this tactic by deploying another two shells around themselves, on the tactical display the ships were so packed together the formations looked like threes huge ships. The other two trios didn’t attempt any such manoeuvre, and I flagged this to our ID people who acknowledged they had seen the new tactic and reported there was additional communications traffic coming from the fortified trios aimed at the single-shelled globe ships. They advised the Swift Fang tactics be used against the two lesser defended trios before they too forted up.

  The commanders of our attack elements had anticipated the order and launched more flights of AI Swift Fangs to close with the swarm and engage any trios that were lightly defended with the secondary mission to attack the outer shell of the two multi-shelled trios as they could on their way back to their fleet train for rearming.

  According to the tactical display we had destroyed or rendered inoperable close to a million more Plague vessels and as the Swift Fang flights approached all of the bombers that had returned to their carriers to rearm joined them as escorts. Their orders were simple: Defend the Swift Fangs until the two trios were destroyed then fight their way back to the carriers to rearm while a second wave took their place. We were asking many of our pilots to die today, and it wasn’t sitting well with me. When I asked if they had been ordered in I was told that they had all volunteered and no member of any squadron of any flight had held back.

  Johnny commed and said he and a few of the armoured freighter commanders in the various fleet trains wanted to try a tactic to attack the two fortified trios. When the swarm was thinned out some more, the freighter commanders wanted to fly their ships in close to the surviving trios and launch their loads of Cracker-3s in a continuous barrage by rotating their ships on their long axis and firing as their missile bays came to bear. The armoured freighters carried thousands of Cracker-3s in magazines that could launch the missiles in defence of the ship. The commanders didn’t see why their freighters couldn’t launch on the offensive, and I couldn’t see a reason why they couldn’t either.

  “Johnny, how many freighters are carrying full magazines right now?” I asked.

  “We have been consolidating loads and sending the empty freighters back to Terra to reload. We have twenty-two fully loaded and eight with partial loads that we are still consolidating. In a half-deca, we should have twenty-six we can use.

  “I recommend we deploy two stings of six freighters each with escorts of every fighter, bomber and AI Swift Fang we have left to defend them as soon as we can get everyone rearmed.”

  I replied, “Split the fighters and bombers into five elements, one to accompany each column of freighters, one to make a concentrated attack on the densest cluster of Plague ships in the swarm and two held in reserve for the freighters in case things go pear-shaped. Send a third of the AI S
wift Fangs with each freighter column and be ready to deploy the remainder on targets of opportunity once we see how the freighters are working out. When can you have them ready?”

  “They can be ready and in position in two decas.”

  “Very well, Johnny, make it so.”

  ◆◆◆

  The swarm had been reduced by another half million ships when the freighters began their attack run. Each freighter is actually two ships in one, the forward module which is not much larger than a Swift Fang and a long spine to which cargo modules are attached down all three sides and ending in a section containing propulsion systems including jump modules. The forward module also has a full propulsion suite which isn’t used unless the spine is detached. If necessary, it can be flown separately. I ordered each commander to be prepared to separate from their spine and jump for Terra if their spine lost propulsion. The spine can easily be replaced—trained and experienced crews cannot. Each commander gave me their oath to carry out my instructions, but I also knew some of these people personally. If they had a remote chance of pulling off their mission, they would do it, even if it meant dying in the process.

  In less than ten centas they would begin their run, I knew I was going to lose some courageous people when they did. The columns started materializing one ship at a time just out of harvester weapons range and commenced firing. They had to be travelling close to .1 C and went FTL as soon as they had shot themselves dry. The first three freighters made it through unscathed, and we got a farewell message from them as they disappeared heading for Terra and a new load of ordinance.

  The fourth freighter wasn’t so lucky, they were rammed by a harvester midships of the spine and went up in an explosion that took out a cone of harvesters all the way to the trio. A squadron of AI Swift Fangs capitalized on the hole and jumped through and into one of the globe ships before detonating. The globe ship disappeared in a bright, brief actinic flash of light and then the hole closed up.