EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5)

by Richard F. Weyand

  He also split his force into twenty separate forces at different locations around the sun.

  The Sintaran first-wave force thus dropped out of hyperspace in the same orbit as the enemy forces, and in between their locations. With plenty of targets in each of the Alliance formations, Admiral Mah ordered each of his ten forces to accelerate toward the Alliance formation closest to their down-transition point.

  “Sir, we have large hyperspace down-transitions at multiple points. Scanning makes them Sintaran picket ships. They’re in our orbit. Twenty locations, twenty-five hundred bogeys per location. They’re getting under way at ten gravities, toward our formations.”

  “Twenty-five hundred? Per location?” Preston Fleet Admiral Gunther Klein asked.

  “Yes, Sir. Fifty thousand total incoming.”

  “Orders to all formations. Battle stations. Coordinate point-defense. Defense Plan Alpha. Send that.”

  “Transmitting, Sir.”

  Klein called his chief of staff over with a gesture.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “What do you make of this, Dieter?”

  “Clearly someone figured out where we were going to be, Sir. Or were told.”

  “But directly into our orbit? That hasn’t been transmitted outside the system. The only people who knew that before we got here are my own staff.”

  “Lucky guess, Sir?”

  “Perhaps. Well, they’re here. And if they were just guessing, maybe we get lucky. If not, there’s likely more on the way. We need to get the hell out of here. Make plans to get under way just as soon as we can.”

  “And the ships that aren’t topped off yet, Sir?”

  “They can follow at their best speed. I want out of here, Dieter. Soonest. In hours. No more.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Each formation of Admiral Klein’s invasion force was five thousand warships, equally divided among battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. Of his seventy formations, just twenty were under attack.

  As in Annalia and Nederling, the point-defense gunners on the Alliance warships found their targeting systems ineffective in the outer half of their operational envelope due to the Sintaran spoofing of their sensors. In the inner half of the envelope, they managed to destroy a bit over twenty percent of the incoming attackers before the Sintaran picket ships slammed into their formations.

  “Report,” Klein ordered.

  “Point defense destroyed just over twenty percent of the attacking ships, Sir. We lost all the battleships and sixty percent of the heavy cruisers in twenty of our formations. The attackers were clearly targeting our heaviest ships. Death toll is on the order of a hundred and five million dead.”

  “Why wasn’t point defense more effective?”

  “Reports from survivors are that the Sintaran ships are operating with some sort of electronic spoofing system, Sir. That made our point-defense fire ineffective in the outer half of the point-defense envelope.”

  “Orders to all formations. Reprogram point-defense systems to operate only in the inner half of the point-defense envelope. Don’t waste your fire in the outer half of the envelope. Send that.”

  “Transmitting, Sir.”

  “You think there’s more on the way, Sir?” his chief of staff asked.

  “How many picket ships do you think Sintar has, Dieter? More than fifty thousand?”

  “Well, yes, Sir. Lots more.”

  “Get us out of here, Dieter.”

  “We’re working on it, Sir. I make it four hours until the bulk of our forces can get under way.”

  “Very well. Don’t let anything stupid slow us down. We need to get out of here before the rest of the Imperial Navy shows up.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Terre Autre

  In the Royaume de Terre Autre, the Alliance forces were mustering around an inhabited planet, Marseilles, the Terre Autre navy’s primary fleet base and headquarters. It was, basically, a fleet planet.

  The Alliance commander for the Terre Autre portion of the invasion fleet, Grand Admiral Jacques LeClerc, saw no reason to forgo the pleasures of being planet-based any longer than he had to. He hadn’t yet decided whether he would go along on the invasion itself, or command it in VR from his home, a lovely chateau in the wine-growing region on Marseilles.

  LeClerc found long voyages in hyperspace terribly dreary, and repeated drills to battle stations – while necessary, he supposed – disruptive of his personal routine. He personally had not been shipboard in several years, and had as yet seen no reason to disturb his long-time habits for this invasion. Commanding a navy, after all, was not the same thing as actually being in one.

  Secrecy of the mustering location was assured by the simple expedient of shutting down all off-planet communications by the lower classes. The upper classes, of course, could be trusted to keep a secret.

  LeClerc’s forces had finally all arrived and were being restocked in high orbit around Marseilles. In addition to military freighters from out-system, the ships of the invasion fleet were being serviced by shuttles directly from the ground.

  Imperial Navy Fleet Admiral George Brent waited on the flag bridge as the down-transition of his first-wave attack force in the Marseilles system approached.

  “I can’t believe they’re mustering around an inhabited planet, Sir,” his chief of staff said.

  “Marseilles is a port planet,” Brent answered. “The Terre Autre navy basically owns the whole system. With a setup like that, it kind of makes sense. It’s certainly a lot easier than mustering out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “But you think they’re mustering around the planet itself?”

  “If you’re going to muster in an inhabited system, why disavail yourself of the benefits the planet offers? Restocking directly from the ground, for example. My best guess is they’re in orbit about Marseilles.”

  “It’s going to be pretty cluttered with that many ships in orbit around an Earth-sized planet.”

  “Which means we should have easy pickings. Assuming I’m right, of course.”

  “Well, we’ll see soon, Sir.”

  “Sir, massive down-transition. Scanning is estimating fifty thousand ships around Marseilles. They make them Sintaran picket ships. They’ve gone to ten gravities acceleration toward our position. They’re too close in to attack with missiles, Sir.”

  “Battle stations. Coordinate point-defense. Defense Plan Alpha,” said Berinia Fleet Admiral Philip Carter, the vice commander of the Alliance’s Terre Autre attack force.

  “Transmitted, Sir.”

  “Notify Admiral LeClerc.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  LeClerc was enjoying a fine cognac on his patio when the alert came in. He sighed. He would have to answer it or they would continue to pester him until he did.

  LeClerc appeared on the VR flag bridge, his avatar dressed in the rather flamboyant uniform of a Terre Autre Grand Admiral.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “We have fifty thousand Sintaran picket ships incoming, Sir,” Carter said. “They just made hyperspace down-transition around the planet.”

  LeClerc looked into the tactical plot.

  “Fifty thousand picket ships against our three hundred fifty thousand warships?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Well, destroy them, Admiral. I’ll expect a full report in the morning.”

  “Very well, Sir.”

  And with that, LeClerc disappeared.

  LeClerc’s diffidence toward all things navy as being below him could be maddening, but it meant Carter had a free hand. He supposed he should consider himself lucky. LeClerc could have been a micro-manager.

  “And there they are, Sir, just as you anticipated,” Admiral Brent’s chief of staff said.

  “A bit of luck. I’ll take it. Have we transmitted the system map?”

  His chief of staff looked over to the sensor console and he got a nod from the sensor tech specialist.

  “Yes, Sir. The second
wave should be getting under way now.”

  “Excellent.”

  The Alliance point-defense systems managed to score against just over twenty percent of the incoming wave of attackers, but thirty-nine thousand five hundred picket ships survived to make their attacks. They slammed into the Alliance battleships that were their primary targets, and those battleships were destroyed with all hands.

  “Report,” Admiral Carter ordered.

  “We’ve lost thirty-nine thousand five hundred battleships, Sir. Total death toll is in the hundred and twenty million range. We don’t have exact numbers yet.”

  “What happened to our point-defense?”

  “Some kind of counter-measure fooled our sensor systems, Sir. Point-defense fire was inaccurate in the outer half of the engagement envelope.”

  “Let’s send out orders to reprogram the point-defense system to engage only in the inner half of the envelope. Up our rate of fire there, and not waste it on targets in the outer half, at least until we can figure out their counter-measure.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Did we get good recordings of whatever they were doing?”

  “We do have recordings, Sir. Hopefully they have what we need.”

  “All right. George,” Carter called over to his chief of staff.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Let’s draw up plans to get out of here. I don’t want to hang around now the Imperial Navy knows where we are. I’ll want those in hand for my report to Admiral LeClerc in the morning.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The First-Wave Attacks Farside

  Doria

  In the Republic of Doria, the Alliance commander, Dorian Fleet Admiral Mark Linstrom, was mustering his ships around the largest of three gas-giant planets. Mustering around a planet compared to open space was much to be preferred, as it gave everyone a reference point for station keeping. Large fleets in open space tended to drift apart or cluster dangerously close to each other.

  It was the middle of the night shift when fifty thousand Sintaran picket ships down-transitioned from hyperspace and caught his command unprepared.

  Linstrom joined the flag bridge in VR from his bunk when the alert woke him.

  “Status report,” he ordered.

  “Fifty thousand Sintaran picket ships down-transitioned right on top of us, Sir. Too close for missile attack. I’ve ordered coordinated point-defense, Defense Plan Alpha.”

  “Excellent.”

  Linstrom settled into his command chair and considered the tactical plot. How the hell did the Imperial Navy find them? The mustering points were the most closely held secret he had ever seen, and the decision about where in the system to muster was his and wasn’t made until he had arrived. But if they had down-transitioned any closer, they would have been inside his formations.

  His speculations didn’t last long, however. The Sintaran ships that made it through the point defense targeted battleships, and his flagship, the DNS Lightning, was an early casualty.

  “Anybody else tagged this guy yet?” asked Captain David Conway of HMS Catalonia.

  “No, he’s clean, Sir.”

  “Tag him as ours and make your attack run.”

  “Yes, Sir. Tagged. System verifies. Aiming for her plasma bottle.”

  The picket ship the Catalonia crew was piloting modified its course slightly, angling toward the big Alliance battleship. The ship loomed larger and larger, its point-defense lasers firing, until it filled the entire forward view. Then the Catalonia slammed into the battleship.

  Conway dropped out of VR. One moment he was in the thick of the battle in distant Doria, and the next he found himself lying on his bunk in the captain’s cabin of HMS Catalonia’s deployment building on Imperial Fleet Base Odessa, several thousand light years away.

  “Wow. That’s disorienting as hell,” he said to the empty room.

  Phalia

  In the Kingdom of Phalia, the Alliance invasion force was mustering around a large rocky planet. It was not habitable, because it had no atmosphere. Its center had long ago cooled and solidified, and, without a liquid center, there was no magnetic field to shield the atmosphere from the solar wind. The other possible choice had been a gas giant, but it had over fifty moons of various sizes and orbits, and the Alliance commander, Phalian Fleet Admiral Joseph Dern, had decided setting up fleet orbits around the moonless rocky planet would be simpler and would keep them out of the large gravity well of the gas giant.

  When the first-wave Sintaran attack down-transitioned from hyperspace, they did so around the gas giant planet, currently over a light-hour away.

  “Well, that’s disturbing,” Admiral Dern said to his chief of staff. “How the hell did they know where we are?”

  “They did come in on the wrong planet, Sir.”

  “Sure, sure. But that’s a decision I made when we got here, and it was a near thing for all that. It’s clear they knew where we were, in system terms, anyway.”

  “No argument there, Sir. Now what do we do?”

  “We get the hell out of here before the rest of the Imperial Navy shows up. Clearly they are not concerned about violating Phalian space. We’re nearly a week’s spacing from the Sintaran frontier. And they know which planet we’re around now.”

  “Understood, Sir. We’ll get working on a spacing plan.”

  “Good. I want to be under way out of here within hours.”

  “What about ships that haven’t topped off fuel and supplies yet, Sir?”

  “Make sure everybody has the minimum they need to get to the alternate mustering point, but let’s space individual squadrons as soon as they are able. I feel like I have a target painted on my back right now.”

  “Understood, Sir.”

  “Well, that sucks,” said Chief Petty Officer Ray ‘Smitty’ Smith to no one in particular.

  “Luck of the draw. La Loba guessed wrong. It happens,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Sean ‘Gilly’ McGill, the senior non-com aboard HMS Peregrine.

  “So now what do we do? We got no way out of here.”

  “We wait. When the second wave gets done, they’ll call in the hypergate cruisers. In the meantime, we got ringside seats to the second-wave attack.”

  “I guess that’s something, anyway.”

  The Sintaran commander, Admiral Maria della Espinoza, looked into her tactical display, a three-dimensional system map as large as the bridge itself, directly in front of her staff positions. She zoomed in on the rocky planet around which the Alliance forces were mustering.

  “A pity we dropped out on the wrong planet, Ma’am,” said Vice Admiral Kim Jae Seong, her chief of staff.

  “Doesn’t matter, Jay. That was never the point of this raid in the first place. We just had to bring enough ships along it wasn’t obvious it was nothing more than a mapping mission.”

  Espinoza considered the tactical display. Looked like the mustering forces were pretty evenly spaced out around the planet, in a high orbit to give such a large force maneuvering room.

  “Do we have a good map of the enemy forces?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Mapped and transmitted.”

  “All right. Time for the second act, I guess.”

  Espinoza moved her flag, and her VR flag bridge, to her second-wave attack force.

  The Rim

  In the Kingdom of the Rim, the Alliance commander, Rim Fleet Admiral Robert Musgrave, had the choice of three gas-giant planets. Rather than choose one, he split his mustering up among the three of them.

  “The common wisdom is not to split up your forces, Sir,” his chief of staff had noted.

  “Yes, but that does not consider this large a force,” Musgrave had answered, “and second, for resupply, when your forces are all just sitting there, gathering them up in one place just makes the enemy’s job easier. Powered up and under way, that’s a different story.”

  As a result, though he didn’t know it during his planning, the Sintaran commander, Imperial Navy Admiral Horace MacPherson,
had three chances to win. Any of the gas-giant planets offered his first-wave attack force over a hundred thousand targets, though only about thirty thousand of them would be the desired battleships.

  “Well, one can’t have everything, I suppose,” MacPherson said to his chief of staff as the attack force swept in on the Alliance vessels.

  MacPherson turned to his chief of staff.

  “Did we get the map away?”

  “Yes, Sir. The second-wave force is up-transitioning now.”

  “Very good. Very good.”

  “We lost all twenty-nine thousand battleships in the formation, Sir, plus another ten thousand heavy cruisers. Total death toll right now is on the order of a hundred and ten million. Point-defense teams are reporting their sensor systems were being jammed by the Sintaran vessels, making point defense inaccurate in the outer half of the engagement envelope.”

  “Steve, let’s reprogram those lasers not to waste their time on targets in the outer half of the envelope,” Admiral Musgrave said to his chief of staff. “Then let’s get a spacing plan together. I want to get out of here. Soon. Yesterday.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wingard

  In the Kingdom of Wingard, the Alliance forces were mustering around the largest gas giant in the system. Their commander, Wingard Fleet Admiral Aidan Rickman, was a no-frills sort of guy. He was also a no-nonsense guy, and had been pushing to get all his ships topped off with stores and fuel and ready to go as soon as possible.

  PO/2 Gertrude Winger was very much aware of that gas giant. It had been providing the light she worked by for days. She was beginning another eight-hour shift now, ferrying supplies to the ships of the invasion force. Primarily Garland ships. She, and her loadmaster, and her shuttle, and her freighter were all Garland Space Navy, and they were servicing the GSN ships in this formation.