The next few minutes would tell if she’d been right challenging the enemy in deep space, or whether her fleet would be too badly mauled to help defend Parthenon-Three.
Whatever happened next, it was going to be a long day.
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“Sixth Fleet is engaging the enemy, trying to cut down their numbers as it falls back towards Parthenon-Three,” Colonel Brighton said. “They aren’t going to stop them unless we’re luckier than we deserve. The Vipers will get here sooner rather than later. Best estimate is sixteen to eighteen hours from now, but they could make another warp jump and drop in on us within minutes.”
The 101st MEU was having a final officers’ meeting before the inevitable arrival of the ETs. It was a virtual meeting, relying on imp-generated holograms; everybody was already at their assigned posts, and nobody wanted to be shuttling back and forth when the Vipers could make landfall at any time.
“Based on the correlation of forces involved, Sixth Fleet will attrite but not destroy the enemy formation. Parthenon-Three’s defenses will add their firepower to the mix once the Nasstah reach orbital engagement range. That may be enough to destroy or successfully repel the Vipers, but our estimates are they will not. Once they reach Parthenon-Three, the enemy will deorbit land forces with the purpose of reducing the twenty-four Planetary Defense Bases protecting the planet. Their secondary objective will be to destroy all major cities’ force field systems, in order to allow the deployment of starship-launched genocide weapons.”
Images of burning Detroit danced in Fromm’s mind.
“The Hundred-and-First’s primary mission is to defend PDB-18 and the cities of New Burbank and Henderson, working in conjunction with Army, Guard and militia units in-theater. In addition to Marine assets, we will be assisted by two divisional-sized forces, including a field artillery brigade. Additional units are being mobilized and assembled in New Burbank, but they will take as long as two weeks to be ready for action.
“Our primary theater of operations will be Forge Valley,” Brighton went on, reviewing the battle plans they’d all been working on in the past couple of months. The holographic display provided a detailed 3D rendition of the central plateau, a roughly football shape surrounded by mountains and running on an east-west axis, wider around the middle and with two main gaps at each end. At the end of the eastern opening – Miller’s Crossing – lay PDB-18. Two villages – Davistown and Paradise Creek – and several hundred square miles of farmland filled most of the valley proper, broken up by expanses of hilly terrain and a mix of native and imported forests. A chain of hills nearly tall enough to be called mountains divided a third of the eastern side of the valley into two distinct regions; the villages were on opposite sides of the range. The other major terrain features in the plateau were two rivers – White River and Miller’s Stream – running west-to-east until they came together at the end of the dividing hills, near Miller’s Crossing, and then flowed towards the south. Five bridges spanned them at different points, and Fromm figured most of them would end up going down; orders were to blow them as soon as enemy forces came within a mile of them. Hills and rivers presented little obstacle to anti-grav vehicles, but Viper assault forces consisted mostly of light infantry; they would be severely inconvenienced by both.
On the other hand, there was a lot of terrain to cover, and not that many troops to do the job. Given the width and length of the valley, and assuming the enemy landed on the next plateau over, on the western side, a Marine battalion and attachments, plus two ad-hoc divisions and other dribs and drabs weren’t enough to plug either gap, let alone the plateau between them. The western pass was the worst one; it was wider and too far away from the planetary defense base to expect any support from it. The conservative play would be to evacuate the entire valley and make a stand on Miller’s Crossing, the eastern pass, which was narrower and far more defensible. But surrendering the plateau to the enemy would give them the chance to concentrate and hit the human defenders with everything they had, at a time of their choosing. You didn’t want to surrender the initiative to the opposing force; waiting passively for an attack was a last resort and an admission of weakness or sheer incompetence.
“The 101st and attached units will engage and destroy any enemy forces entering Forge Valley. If the landing strength makes that unfeasible, we will conduct a retrograde operation, using maneuver and movement to disrupt and slow down the enemy’s advance while we gradually fall back in an easterly direction. In that case, our primary goal will be to attrite the enemy through ambushes and counterattacks. We will maintain contact with the alien forces while avoiding a decisive engagement unless local conditions favor us.
“Once we reach the strongpoints at Miller’s Crossing, we will revert to a fixed defense, with mobile elements remaining in play to threaten the enemy’s flanks. At that point, our orders are to hold until relieved. Local commanders have latitude in ordering tactical retreats, but their units must not move beyond the outermost force field perimeter of PDB-18 unless such movement is approved by higher.”
Colonel Brighton leaned forward; the holographic projection showed the lines of tension marring his face. “I am not in the habit of giving suicide orders. If the situation becomes well and truly untenable, I will order a retreat and evacuation towards New Burbank, the closest city in the area. I will be the sole judge of what I consider to be an untenable situation. To make things abundantly clear, any unit that falls back beyond their assigned final protective line without my personal approval will be denied force field coverage and artillery support, and, if deemed necessary, will be engaged by our own artillery in order to close the gap in our defenses created by their unauthorized retreat. Make that clear to everyone under your command. To run means death. Is that understood?”
There was a chorus of imp acknowledgments. Fromm didn’t like the directive, but he realized it was aimed mostly at the Army, Guard and militia units that would be providing the bulk of the manpower for the final defensive battle. After months of joint training exercises, it’d become clear that many of those formations could best be classified as ‘shaky.’ Parthenon-Three had been a peaceful, prosperous world for far too long; the state government had grudgingly supplemented the federal funds needed to maintain the defensive installations on and in orbit around the planet, but had done the bare minimum to support the ground forces that were supposed to defend them. The Guard was poorly equipped and supplied; even worse, their training left a lot to be desired. The volunteer militia was a hodgepodge of units ranking from useless to somewhat better than the average Guard ones. The federally-funded Army was only in slightly better shape. The previous few months had not been enough to make up for those deficiencies, and there were serious doubts as to how well they would fare when exposed to combat, in most cases for the first time.
“A relief fleet is being assembled at Wolf 1061, comprising elements from Fifth Fleet deemed fit to return to action, alongside reinforcements from other sectors and newly-commissioned vessels. It will come to the system’s defense when it is ready, but the most optimistic estimate calls for no less than twelve weeks.
“We cannot afford to lose Sixth Fleet, so if it is facing annihilation, it will retreat from P-3’s orbit and assume a blocking position next to the warp valleys leading out of the system. At that point, it will be up to the forces on the ground – to us – to make sure that there is something worth saving when the fleet is reinforced and comes back.”
Before First Contact, human strategists and science-fiction writers had assumed an enemy who gained control of a planet’s orbitals would enjoy total supremacy. Ground defenses could do little to prevent orbital strikes that would utterly wreck a world’s biosphere; dropping large rocks on its surface would do the trick. The realities of Starfarer combat were different, however. Because of the simple but strictly-enforced rules imposed by the Elder Races, space-borne attackers had a limited choice of weapons they cold deploy against a planetary target.
‘Dinosaur-killer’ asteroids, nuclear or kinetic devices above one kiloton in yield, and energy weapons beyond certain numbers and intensities were all outlawed. Those rules put starships at a disadvantage when exchanging volleys with ground installations, which had many fewer restrictions. The best way to handle those installations was to send troops down to take them out.
Without Sixth Fleet providing cover, and even after its orbital fortresses were destroyed, Parthenon-Three and its twenty-four Planetary Defense Bases could hold off the Viper fleet. For a while, at least, assuming the ground forces protecting them did their duty.
“That is all.”
Someone shouted “Oorah!” Others echoed the battle cry, but Fromm remained silent; his mind was too busy mulling over things. Terrain, fields of fire, logistics, the men and women he would send out to do or die. The basic tools of war.
Concentrating on the details made it easier to ignore the big picture, especially when the big picture was almost too terrible to contemplate.
Eleven
Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC
From a merely human perspective, space combat is silent and lonely. Even in ‘tight’ formations, ships are too far apart to be seen with the naked eye. Missile launches are all but invisible even in the infrared spectrum, and beam weapons for the most part produce brief bursts of illumination, when they produce anything at all. An outside observer would be unable to tell a battle was happening – until the enemy volleys started impacting on his position, producing a far more impressive – although still deathly quiet – show.
The Vipers started the dance with an expected and dreaded massive missile launch. Over a hundred and sixty thousand vampires erupted from the alien armada and sped towards Sondra Givens’ ships. A similar deluge had wrecked Fifth Fleet at Heinlein and turned Admiral Kerensky into a shadow of his former self. Admiral Givens had studied every last bit of data about that battle and the smaller but still significant Lamprey attack on Melendez, and she’d come up with new tactics to deal with what some wags were beginning to call ‘the Sun-Blotter’ after the Persian boast at the battle of Thermopylae.
The first thing she’d done was have every anti-missile in Sixth Fleet reprogrammed for point defense. The slower-than-light weapons weren’t designed for defensive purposes, since beam weapons did a far better job, but they could the job with some adjustments. The ten-thousand-strong volley her ships could fire were saved for the last ten seconds of the attack, when the enemy ship-killers would be entering relatively-fixed trajectories, and after Sixth Fleet’s energy weapons had whittled down the swarm.
Every weapon platform capable of engaging an anti-ship munition had also been modified to excel at that job. Active sensors working at maximum power swept the space between the two fleets, detecting the incoming swarm at twice their normal range and allowing every ship’s main guns to engage it from well over a light-second away. An entire set of hastily-drafted defensive procedures were tried for the first time in the interplanetary depths of Parthenon System, a trial run where failure meant the savaging of dozens of vessels and thousands of deaths.
At Heinlein, Fifth Fleet had only managed to destroy about a hundred and twenty thousand vampires out of one-fifty; the remaining thirty thousand had destroyed seven ships outright and damaged every one of the survivors, many of them critically. Givens’ crews accounted for a hundred and thirty-six thousand before they made their final sprint – and were met head-on by her own missile swarm and every weapon in the fleet, resulting in an orgy of destruction that claimed over nine tenths of the remaining missile storm.
The survivors – still over a thousand strong – darted past the American vessels’ warp shields, aiming at the exposed sections between them. In most cases, they failed to get through their target’s force fields and armor plating. But some did.
Admiral Givens grimaced as the first fleet damage reports trickled in. The USS Baldwin took six direct hits; the unlucky destroyer broke apart with the loss of all eight hundred souls aboard. A frigate fell out of formation while its crew desperately tried to restore power to its graviton drive. Several other ships suffered non-critical damage. And that was all. They had weathered the largest missile launch in recent galactic history, and survived. She found herself breathing freely again, and smiled when the TFCC personnel cheered briefly before getting back to work.
Her crews had done an incredible job, but this had been the opening salvo, fired without the assistance of sapient control. The Vipers had recovered from emergence and rushing into beam weapons range. The primary purpose of the missile swarm, to allow the aliens to emerge from warp unmolested, had been achieved. Although without inflicting the heavy casualties their previous attacks had. The aliens’ external box launchers could not be reloaded during combat, so any follow-up barrages would be a fraction of the size of first one, but they would be more accurate, as well as impossible to engage with missiles of her own.
The only easy day was yesterday, she thought as the two fleets moved into direct fire range. She was starting the battle in much better shape than Kerensky. While victory was still unlikely, decimating the alien formation in a running battle towards Parthenon-Three count a solid win in her book.
Some ten minutes after the last Viper missile was dealt with, the ships entered ideal fighting range and began firing their main guns. Sixth Fleet stopped moving forward and reversed course, maintaining the range at which its warp shields rendered them nearly invulnerable to frontal fire. This was the kind of battle American space forces excelled at, an energy-weapon slugfest where they could face and destroy several times their tonnage in enemy vessels while taking minimal losses.
The Vipers had an answer to that as well.
Besides the new missile platforms, the fast-attack cruisers and frigates moving around the edges of the Vipers’ formation worried Admiral Givens. Those ships had no missiles and relatively light weapon mounts and shields; most of their tonnage was dedicated to gravity thrust systems. Once they reached one thousandth the speed of light, reactionless graviton thrusters hit steep diminishing returns, but you could make enough marginal gains to make a difference. By tripling their propulsion energy budgets, the Viper fast-attack ships could increase their flank speed by about five percent to ten percent, which meant they would eventually overtake Sixth Fleet’s, envelop its position, and engage it from multiple angles, allowing them to bypass the American ships’ warp shields. Even with their lighter armament, those fragile but swift vessels would make Givens’ position untenable unless she did something about them.
Admiral Givens ordered all ships to concentrate their fire on the fast-attack classes. The losses among them started to mount, but that meant ignoring the enemy’s capital vessels, the dreadnoughts and battleships that kept pounding on the American formation with their devastating man guns. Direct hits were nearly impossible, but carefully-aimed glancing shots would impart some of their energy into their targets even in the poorly-conductive vacuum of space. The damage inflicted in that was minimal, but it would build up over time, damaging shields and stressing other systems.
And a second volley of missiles erupted from the Vipers fleet of the line. A mere thirty thousand this time, but those ship-killers had a lot less distance to cover, and dealing with them meant diverting Sixth Fleet’s firepower away from the fast-attacks that were closing the distance at a steady fifteen miles per second. It would take some eighteen hours before they could overtake Sixth Fleet, but they would start scoring telling hits long before then.
The Halsey’s command center trembled under her feet. Something had applied enough momentum to overwhelm the dreadnought’s stabilizers, however slightly. A missile strike had made it through. A quick check revealed no damage to the ship. She didn’t bother to look any further into it. Fighting the flagship was up to the Halsey’s skipper, and she had a murthering great battle to conduct.
For eight hours, it went on. Sixth Fleet moved backwards steadily and traded salvos with the i
nexorably approaching enemy. Protected by warp shields, the American vessels were able to survive multiple hits from the fifty- and sixty-centimeter graviton cannon mounted on the alien heavies; most of those shots were absorbed by the impenetrable barriers protecting close to seventy percent of their surface area. The Halsey’s 20-inchers, on the other hand, only had to contend with conventional defenses, and they scored devastating hits on her targets. Which unfortunately consisted mainly of fast-attacks rather than capital ships.
One by one, the nimble alien tin cans fell out of line with heavy damage or blew up outright. Eight frigates and five cruisers were down or out already, versus one American destroyer and one frigate. That was the sort of exchange the US Navy was used to. Except this time it wasn’t going to continue much longer.
The lighter Viper ships were paying dearly as they closed the distance, but they kept advancing. By the time they’d closed to within a quarter of a light second, they had targeting solutions that even their relatively weak armament could exploit. Direct hits from their 100mm popguns began to impact on ordinary force fields and armor, hardly a threat for her heavies, but enough to start damaging cruisers and lighter vessels. And as soon as the first fast-attacks reached those improved firing ranges, the rest of the alien line unleashed an even heavier missile volley. Forty thousand vampires: they’d been saving them for this moment. A thousand made it through, and an American destroyer and two frigates broke apart. The death of USS Dickson marked the point where the tide turned. Sixth Fleet claimed another cruiser and four more frigates minutes later, but an American light cruiser drifted to a stop almost at the same time, its status light flashing yellow. That was a death sentence for its two thousand crewmembers; rescue operations were impossible at flank speeds.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 17
