The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan

by Jack Campbell

  Tarrani’s expression had shifted from puzzled to startled to admiring to considering. She took a few moments to answer. “Based on the way our fire-control systems work, Captain, the answer is yes. Keep the time differential down to less than a second, and the fire-control systems will not shift targets. They won’t change targeting priority based on that small an interval because recalculating time to fire and sending commands throughout the ship to shift weapon firing times takes just over one second. If we can cut the approaches of our three formations that fine, it will work. The dark ship fire-control systems will not reprioritize based on that small an interval.”

  “You realize that you’re betting not just your butt but your life on that answer?” Desjani asked.

  “Yes, Captain, I realize that. If you can make the maneuvering systems pull it off, then it will work. If it doesn’t work, it won’t be because I didn’t give you a good call on what the fire-control systems will do. It’ll be because the maneuvering systems screwed up their solutions.”

  “I’ll see what Chief Busek says,” Desjani began.

  “Uh, Captain, Chief Busek is pretty good, but she came up pretty fast because of the losses on her previous ships and those we took in engineering in the last year. Her experience is a bit limited,” Senior Chief Tarrani explained. “Yes, I’d ask her, but I’d also ask the person aboard the ship who has the most experience with maneuvering systems.”

  “And that would be?” Desjani asked in the manner of someone who already suspected the answer.

  “Master Chief Gioninni, Captain.”

  “Naturally. Inform Master Chief Gioninni and Chief Busek that I need to hear from them immediately.”

  Tarrani’s image vanished, to be replaced within a few seconds by the hefty figure of Master Chief Gioninni and the stick-thin shape of Chief Busek. Desjani once again explained what was intended. “Can the maneuvering systems make this happen?”

  Chief Busek began to nod, paused, then glanced at Master Chief Gioninni. “Captain, I think the answer is yes, but I would like to hear the Master Chief’s opinion.”

  Gioninni smiled with serene certainty. “We’re doing point one five light right now? And the enemy is coming at us at point zero five light?”

  “That’s right, Master Chief,” Geary said. “The dark ships are holding their velocity down to ensure they get good fire-control solutions on us when we encounter them.”

  “Which means we’ll meet them at a combined relative velocity of point two light,” Gioninni concluded. “That’s important, because the same relativity junk that messes with our fire-control systems can also throw off our maneuvering systems. But point two light is copacetic. Our systems can see precisely enough at that velocity to cut everything as fine as they have to. Yes, Captain, the maneuvering systems can do it. In theory.”

  “In theory?” Desjani pressed.

  “Well, Captain, you know how it is,” Gioninni explained. “There’s theory, and then there’s the real universe. The maneuvering systems can calculate those approaches and that final acceleration by the battleship formations so that it will play out exactly like you want. But the maneuvering systems can’t tell if the dark ships might do something a little different, or if the guide ship on one of the battleship formations might have a slight hiccup in its main propulsion when the acceleration burst order comes down, or something like that. Yes, our systems can do it, but there isn’t any one hundred percent guarantee that something as precise as that will not be impacted by some sort of friction in the process.”

  “It wouldn’t take much friction,” Chief Busek offered. “But it should work.”

  “Would you bet your butt on it?” Desjani asked.

  Chief Busek hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  Master Chief Gioninni scratched his head, thinking. “I’m not naturally the gambling type, Captain—”

  “You’re not the gambling type?” Desjani asked with obvious skepticism.

  “No, ma’am,” Gioninni protested. “Gambling is a game of chance. There’s risk and uncertainty as to whether or not you’ll win. I never gamble, Captain.”

  “You only bet on sure things?” Geary asked.

  “If you call that betting, yes, Admiral. I can’t help it if any other parties to the transaction think there’s any chance that they might win.”

  Desjani shook her head, looking briefly upward as if beseeching aid. “Do you regard the proposed maneuvers as a sure thing, Master Chief?”

  Gioninni hesitated only a moment longer, then nodded vigorously. “Close enough, Captain. I’d give it a shot. But, I have to say, if there is any interference with the automated systems, if there is anyone deciding they need to nudge this or that a little because they think the approach isn’t quite right, then all bets are off. There are things humans do really well, and things we do a lot better than automated systems, but something like this calls for split-second timing that is a bit beyond our capabilities.”

  “Thank you. We’ll keep that in mind, Master Chief.” Desjani dismissed the two chiefs, then looked at Geary. “Let’s do it, Admiral.”

  Inputting the instructions to the maneuvering systems was almost too simple. The three Alliance formations were here, here, and here, traveling along these vectors. Alter their vectors so that all three pass through the same intercept point with the oncoming dark ships at almost exactly the same time. Specify that the formation built around Dauntless be fractionally in the lead until the last possible moment, when a burst of acceleration from the battleships would push them ahead of Dauntless by just less than a second.

  The maneuvering systems contemplated the problem for all of two seconds before providing the necessary maneuvers.

  Geary studied the results, glancing at Desjani for her opinion.

  She shrugged. “Master Chief Gioninni is right. This has to be a hands-off set of maneuvers. The solution looks fine to me, but there is a really tiny margin of error.”

  “We can’t help that. We have to hit the dark ships hard before the battle cruisers get close enough to engage us. This may be our only chance to inflict a nasty blow on the dark battleships.”

  Geary ordered the maneuvering commands sent to every ship in his fleet. “All units in First Fleet, this is Admiral Geary. You are receiving sets of automated maneuvering orders which must be implemented precisely. No variations and no interference are permitted. These are to be hands-off maneuvers. Captain Armus, Captain Jane Geary,” he said, naming the commanders of Colossus and Dreadnaught, who were also in charge of the two battleship formations, “I am counting on your formations inflicting devastating damage on the dark ships along our path through the enemy formation. While the enemy is targeting Dauntless and the ships with her, you need to blow a hole through the enemy formation that the battle cruisers will exploit.”

  “Understood,” Captain Jane Geary replied.

  “The battleships will be leading the way?” Captain Armus asked, deliberately needling the battle cruiser commanders who were used to being at the forefront of action.

  “That is correct,” Geary said, while Desjani quietly fumed beside him.

  “We will be happy to ease the path of our comrades on the battle cruisers,” Armus concluded. The dour battleship captain did not smile often, but he seemed to be having trouble not doing so now. “Understood, Admiral.”

  The automated maneuvers cut in, every ship in the Alliance force shifting vector, some accelerating as well as altering their track through space. The three diamonds of Geary’s subformations compressed into narrower wedges, all three now on paths that were rapidly bringing them together.

  Geary itched to issue commands, to insert himself directly into the maneuvers. But there were times to do that and times to trust in the equipment that men and women had painstakingly created. “We rarely notice them, do we?” he said to Desjani.

  She gave him a quest
ioning look, then nodded. “You mean the automated systems? All of the stuff we depend on to keep this ship working?”

  “Yeah. We only notice it when it breaks or malfunctions in some ways. The rest of the time, it’s just there.”

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” Desjani replied. “Transparent technology. It works without anyone having to worry about it or having to master arcane commands and rules. Sure, it needs a lot of tender, loving care and the occasional hard kick in the rear to keep it working right, but that’s why we have our enlisted specialists aboard, to provide the help the automated systems need so they can help humans kill each other.”

  “You are such a romantic soul,” Geary said, watching the time to contact with the enemy scrolling down rapidly. “I wonder how the dark ships handle maintenance and repair?”

  “They must have automated systems to look after the automated systems. And other automated systems to look after the automated systems that look after the automated systems. And maybe another layer beyond to look after those automated systems. Can you imagine the complexity and the cost of all that?”

  “Not easily.” He kept his eyes on his display, where the movements of every Alliance ship exactly matched their planned vectors, two hundred warships moving in a complex dance that would soon end in a brutal climax.

  Hands off. Having set it up, all he could do now was watch.

  “Five minutes to contact,” Lieutenant Castries said, echoing the information on Geary’s display.

  “Very well.” Desjani sat back in her command seat as if relaxed, but the expression she turned toward Geary betrayed some worry. “Isn’t this a little last-ditch and desperate for this stage of the battle, Admiral?” she murmured, too low for anyone else to hear.

  “We need to hit them really hard this time,” he repeated.

  “That should happen, but if the timing of our battleships is off by even a second, you and I and everyone else aboard Dauntless will never know it. We’ll take so many hits that the only thing left will be a cloud of dust heading really fast along our last vector.”

  “I know.” He had seen just that happen too many times already to too many warships, and he knew that Tanya had seen a lot more ships die in combat than he had. “If that happens, at least what used to be you and me will be part of the same dust cloud.”

  “Wow. Is that what you consider romantic, Admiral?”

  “It’s the best I’ve got at the moment, Captain.”

  She kept her eyes on her display, smiling. “See you on the other side.” Then, much louder, Desjani called out to the watch-standers. “I want every shot to hit. Take out as many of these soulless bastards as we can.”

  “Ready, Captain,” the watch-standers chorused.

  Geary could hear the tension in their voices but also the determination. He understood the mixed emotions because he felt them himself. Any firing pass was a gamble. No matter how good the maneuvering systems were at avoiding collisions, the fact remained that even the smallest error could result in two warships running into each other at velocities that instantly reduced both to tiny fragments. Or the enemy might choose to target your ship in particular, or a lucky hit might penetrate to a critical area, or . . .

  Some things were not worth worrying about, not when you couldn’t do a thing about them.

  But this was a particularly risky firing pass, and everyone knew it.

  “One minute to intercept,” Lieutenant Castries called out, her voice almost cracking on the first word but steadying and coming out clear and firm at the end.

  The six formations were rapidly converging, Geary’s three formations headed for that single point where the center of the dark ship main formation would be, and the dark ships coming on steadily, with the smaller formations on either side sliding closer to the main body.

  “Ten seconds.” This time Castries’ voice stayed steady. “We have confirmation that our battleship formations are accelerating.”

  Geary didn’t know whether he really saw any of the Alliance battleships, cruisers, and destroyers rushing in toward the same point where Dauntless and the other battle cruisers and their escorts were going. He didn’t know whether he really saw the dark ship formation suddenly loom directly ahead, going from tiny dots of light to massive warships in the blink of a human eye. Maybe he imagined those images, or maybe his brain manufactured them.

  He felt Dauntless’s weapons firing, felt the battle cruiser shudder from hits, waited for a moment of incredible force to smash himself and this ship.

  It took a few seconds for him to realize that they were past the encounter. Geary heard a couple of gasps of relief as some of the watch-standers absorbed the same knowledge.

  “Made it,” Desjani said, as if no other outcome had been plausible. “Status, people!”

  The watch-standers sprang to action to consolidate information for her, while Geary bent closer to his display, wondering whether the risk had paid off.

  The three Alliance formations had essentially merged in the final seconds prior to contact with the dark ships, a mass of warships whose movements had fortunately been coordinated by the fleet’s maneuvering systems. But that mass was slamming head-on into another mass, that of the dark ships. Only the fact that the dark ships held their vectors, sticking to their predicted courses, prevented any collisions.

  As the Alliance battleships had surged very slightly ahead of the battle cruisers, their weapons had fired, eighteen huge warships bristling with weaponry unloading everything they had at the dark ships preparing to fire on Dauntless and the other battle cruisers. Missiles leaped out, impacting on targets almost as soon as they launched. Hell-lance particle beams formed a brilliant forest of lethal energy that bored into their targets. Grapeshot struck within milliseconds of the other weapons, pounding warships whose shields and armor had already been battered by earlier hits. And where the battleships had passed close enough to targets, the glowing balls of null fields had eaten holes in opponents, dissolving the bonds that held molecules and atoms together.

  Geary had to drastically slow the playback generated by the fleet’s sensors to see that much. Immediately behind the Alliance battleships had come the battle cruiser formation, but instead of running into a wall of fire as well, the battle cruisers had faced only those surviving after the rampage of the battleships. Dauntless and her companions had fired, tearing apart smaller warships and adding to the damage inflicted on dark battleships already badly hurt. “We took some hits,” Geary said as his display lit with damage reports from other ships. “But we hit them a lot worse.”

  Three dark battleships were gone, blown to pieces despite their mammoth defenses. A fourth was crippled, so badly shot up that it had lost all weapons and all maneuvering control, tumbling helplessly onward in the wake of its companions.

  Between them, the Alliance formations had knocked out a dozen dark heavy cruisers, seven light cruisers, and twenty-three destroyers.

  The vast majority of the enemy ships in that part of their formation within range of the Alliance charge had their fire-control systems locked on Dauntless and the other battle cruisers. In the almost-a-second between the time when the Alliance battleships came within range and when Dauntless could have been engaged, most of the dark ship weapons had never had a chance to fire, being destroyed while awaiting a shot at their chosen targets.

  Few of the warships in Geary’s battleship formations had been targeted by the enemy, so few had received any hits. Many more ships in the battle cruiser formation had been hit, but even though half a dozen Alliance battle cruisers had suffered significant damage, only one heavy cruiser, Bunker, and a half dozen destroyers had been hit badly enough to be out of the fight.

  Bunker was staggering away from the other Alliance ships, trying to regain some maneuvering control. The destroyers Thunderbolt, Monitor, and Kopis had been completely obliterated. Patu, Lathi, and Nag
inata were still at least partly intact but so badly damaged that their surviving crew members were abandoning ship in any escape pods that remained in working condition.

  Both Incredible and Dragon had taken hits to their main propulsion, though, enough to limit their maneuverability, and the battleship Fearless had also lost a propulsion unit.

  “Several hits on Dauntless,” Lieutenant Yuon was summarizing. “Hell-lance battery 2A out of commission. Maneuvering thruster 3B off-line. No estimated times to repair yet. Hull penetrations are being sealed by damage control teams. Two dead confirmed. Seventeen wounded.”

  The losses hurt. Even one man or woman killed hurt. The destroyers that had not survived had lost their entire crews. Despite that, it had been a wildly successful tactic. But . . . “Given the firepower advantages of the dark ships,” Geary said, “we’ve only roughly evened the odds with their battleship formations.” He did not have to add that the dark battle cruiser formation charging their way would give the dark ships a major advantage.

  Desjani nodded, grimacing. “And we can’t do that again. The dark ships will already be analyzing what happened and preparing to counter it if they see us setting up another attack like that.”

  The dark battleships were already closing ranks in their formation, unfazed by their losses, filling in the gap that Geary’s ships had blown through them.

  He only had to repeat what he had just done, in terms of losses to the dark ships and losses suffered by his own side, at least twice more to even the odds, and perhaps half a dozen times to win.

  A moment of despair filled Admiral John Geary.

  Then he began issuing orders again. Because the people he commanded needed Black Jack if they were to survive.

  “Immediate execute, all units, come up zero nine five degrees.” His fleet, the three formations still intermingled, began curving upward and back toward another intercept with the dark battleships. Incredible, Dragon, Fearless, and a score of cruisers and destroyers struggled to match the maneuver due to the damage to their propulsion systems.