XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  A significant proportion of the debris, however, was going to move inside the intended orbital zone, moving in on an orbit that would slingshot it around the sun. That would, in about six months, see it intercepting the orbit of the first planet, the lovely little pearly world with the wide, sparkling collar of rings. The crew had named it Pellar, because of the pearly iridescence of the clouds. It wasn’t an official naming because it would not be published as such by the Cartographic Service, but it was, like all the other names they gave to planets and features in the system, recorded in the log, so Pellar the little world had become.

  There wouldn’t be much left of the sparkling rings after a few million asteroids had walloped through them at high speed. There might not be much left of Pellar itself, come to that, as some of the fragments were kilometres across and even one such impact would hit the planet like a bullet, blasting its surface.

  Nobody else, however, was concerned with the fate of another planet six months in the future. They were riveted by the drama happening right there in front of them. Nobody moved, or spoke, for several more seconds. Then the breathless silence was broken by a collective sigh, a low murmur.

  There was no cheering. It was too big a thing for cheering or yelling, something so magnificent and terrible that it could only be gazed at in awed quiet. Some faces were shining with delight, some were reverent, but all were still, nobody taking their eyes away from screens even for a moment.

  The first thing Alex looked at when he finally managed to drag his own eyes from the screen was Shion’s face, his first concern to see how she was reacting to the phenomenal destruction. Her eyes were wide and both hands were over the lower part of her face, but she looked astounded rather than distressed. Alex, reassured, glanced around the command deck and scanned monitors, checking on the welfare of passengers and crew.

  The Devast Industries team were not looking happy. The target world was destroyed, to be sure, but this was not the promised surgical strike. They knew, they knew immediately, that the Fleet would not even consider buying it on this basis. They would have to go back to the lab, figure out what had gone wrong, and decide whether it was fixable. Millions of dollars already invested in R&D was streaming away with that storm of debris. Mack McLaver had closed his eyes, Perry was aghast and Denni looked as if she might cry.

  It was about half an hour before Alex really understood why. That the trial had failed was immediately obvious, in that the missile had detonated too soon and created system-trashing quantities of debris. Mack and Perry were only concerned about that, the time and money it would take to find out what the issue had been and see if it could be fixed. There was also, very rapidly, a realisation that if Candra Pattello found out about this she would claim that it had been her own exclusion from the project, allowing the Fourth’s people to ‘mess with it’, that had caused the misfire.

  For Denni, however, it was all about the catastrophe she could see heading for the innermost world. Blowing up one planet on purpose was one thing, but for another to be devastated too merely as collateral damage was really upsetting her. And geologist that she was, she regarded the impact due in six months as being something happening right now.

  ‘There’s got to be something we can do, skipper,’ she pleaded with Alex. They were all having teas and coffees by then, though still watching the debris hurtle. It was mesmerising, like watching a waterfall. ‘We have a responsibility, here. Can’t you use some of your own missiles to take it out?’

  Alex looked at the screens that Denni had put before him. One showed the projected course of the debris, another was a simulation of what would happen when it impacted Pellar. As Denni had realised immediately, the impact would be beyond devastating. By the time the asteroid storm had swept through, the beautiful glittering rings would be no more than a ragged tatter, while the serene pearly clouds of the planet itself would be darkened by debris flung high into the stratosphere by multiple, continent-shattering asteroid strikes.

  Less than 0.001% of the debris from the fourth world was heading for the inner orbit, but that still amounted to more than four quadrillion tonnes. There were approximately eight hundred million fragments within it large enough to be classed as asteroids, ranging from some just a few metres across to the largest, a rough tumbling pyramid nearly ninety kilometres in diameter. The stream was stretching out, still part of the much larger mass of debris that would go into goldilocks orbit. Within a few days, it would be starting to peel away from the main mass as its trajectory carried it closer to the sun. It already occupied an area some two and a half million klicks long and a third of a million across. Only a small proportion of that was lit up red, though, destined to strike Pellar. They would only need to clear a gap around six thousand kilometres across for the debris to pass either side of Pellar and its rings. That amounted to around a hundred and sixty thousand pieces of debris, massing about eighteen million tonnes.

  Alex did a rough mental calculation of the number of missiles it would take to clear that much mass from that big an area, and shook his head regretfully. They had three different types of missile on the Heron – short range scatters which went off like shrapnel grenades, firing out small masses which then detonated as they fell superlight, defensive counter-strikes which would take out incoming missiles or impact hazards, and long range stealth missiles only authorised for use in time of war – the missiles Devast was seeking to replace with the Ignite. A combination of scatter and counter-strikes could certainly take out the debris, given sufficient missiles and sufficient time. But superlight missiles of any variety were expensive, Alex could not justify the cost of firing so many merely to preserve an uninhabited planet.

  Even as he shook his head, though, an idea was forming.

  ‘We can’t use missiles for that,’ he said, and as Denni went to protest, ‘unless Devast is prepared to indemnify us for that and commit to reimbursing the Fleet eight and a half million dollars for the cost of the missiles it would need.’

  Denni closed her mouth, looking utterly miserable. She knew very well that there was no point even trying to get Perry Soames to agree to that. This system had been approved for missile testing, there was no way he or Devast would see that it even mattered if a second world got blasted, too.

  ‘Okay, skipper,’ she said, sounding choked, but accepting the inevitable.

  ‘We’ll do what we can, though,’ Alex assured her. He understood how Denni felt. More importantly, as the crew understood that the pearl of the system was going to be trashed, they would regret that, too. It would leave a sour note as they departed, and that would inevitably affect morale in the long weeks ahead. Shipboard morale was always very high on Alex’s list of priorities. To have come all this way and then have to leave with the test a failure, however spectacular, was bad enough. Leaving a mess they felt sorry about was not going to make anyone happy. ‘We can have a go at it with cannon fire,’ Alex observed.

  Denni gave him a look of deep reproach, perhaps even wondering if he was joking at her expense.

  ‘Skipper, there’s just no way you could...’ she started, and then saw the way that Alex’s eyebrows quirked up, meeting that challenge with an answering look that said Wanna bet?

  He was busy for an hour or so after that, working on astrogation screens, then called an all-officer’s briefing and put his plan before them.

  It was, typically of Alex’s plans, simple in concept but breathtaking in its vision, bringing his unique problem-solving approach to a situation most other people would have said was insoluble.

  ‘It’s a three stage plan,’ he told them. ‘Stage one, the fighters go in and clear a safe route for us, here,’ he indicated on the chart, a near vertical path that would sweep them in ahead of the debris cloud. ‘Stage two, we loop through on a two second orbit,’ another astrogation screen showed the frigate plunging through the system then looping vertically within it, flashing at high speed. ‘Turning port and starboard to alternate broadsides,’ Alex said. �
�We can’t possibly destroy all that mass with lasers in any reasonable timescale, so we’re not going to try – we’ll play shove-asteroid, instead. If the leading asteroids are turned and thrown back into the mass behind, they will impact and deflect others. With strategic targeting, I estimate that we could move sufficient debris out of impact path in about forty six thousand broadsides, or about twenty hours of sustained firing. I propose spreading this over two days, in blocks of five hours. In stage three, the fighters go back in and clear up any major fragments that remain on impact course but are beyond the effective range of our guns. We’ll be using Maylard settings, obviously.’

  What he meant by that was the adaptations to their cannon that had been made by Professor Maylard – initially they’d only had the Maylard system on four of their guns, for prototype field testing, but the Second had since fitted the same systems to all their cannon, on the usual three-year extended field trials basis. What that meant was that they could fire shots that would buzz other ships without causing them life-risking damage. The same settings used against asteroids would spin them off their trajectory rather than just blasting through them as normal lasers would.

  Alex looked around at the assembled officers. ‘Comments, questions?’

  ‘We’re system diving,’ Martine was the first to speak, after a somewhat stunned silence, ‘Forty six thousand times?’

  ‘Only if the route is clear and we all agree it’s safe,’ Alex said. ‘If anyone feels it isn’t safe for any reason at any time, I will accept safety-concern veto from any officer.’ His gaze travelled around their faces, making it clear that he meant everyone from Buzz to Shion, as the most junior Sub on the ship.

  ‘I thought you said that system diving is insane,’ Shion observed, more puzzled than concerned.

  ‘It is for yachts,’ Alex confirmed. ‘They don’t have the scanner range, the defence systems or the speed and agility to do it safely. Their scanners can’t see anything like an entire solar system, for a start, so they’re going in part blind, and at best, their scanners will only pick up bodies more than a few centimetres across when they’re already less than two seconds away. We can see everything, right down to grains of dust, and we’ll be monitoring constantly, ensuring that our route is clear and open. It’s just like being in close orbit round the star, really, just looping vertically instead of in the horizontal plane. And we’re doing that because it’s safer, a clearer route giving us access to the debris.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Shion said, and raised her hand slightly to indicate that she had another question. ‘So – do I get to pilot a fighter in this?’

  ‘If you want to,’ Alex said, and explained, ‘I’ll be asking for volunteers, both for fighter and gunnery crews, not because it’s particularly dangerous but because there is no precedent for this in Fleet regs. Well, there is, there are protocols for everything, but it falls under the heading of ‘unorthodox manoeuvres’ and it is customary to ask for volunteers for those.’

  ‘I volunteer!’ Shion said, raising her hand up high immediately, which made people laugh.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said, and looked at their gunnery sub, who put his hand high in the air, too, grinning delightedly, getting another laugh. ‘We’ll go with manual targeting,’ Alex said, ‘if we have sufficient volunteers...’ That got another and much bigger burst of laughter, on the command deck and throughout the ship. Alex did not need to explain that decision, at least not to the officers and crew. Terese, though, did ask him about it after the briefing had been dismissed. It was about an hour later, by which time every officer and member of the crew had volunteered to take part in ‘Operation Dustpan,’ as Buzz had called it.

  ‘They all seem very pleased about it,’ Terese observed, as the atmosphere aboard ship was indeed very lively and enthusiastic, ‘which I don’t think is just about saving Pellar, is it?’

  ‘No – though there’s a feelgood factor to that, too, if we can prevent that becoming collateral damage,’ Alex agreed. ‘And there’s excitement, too, in doing something we don’t think any other Fleet ship has done before, at least in modern times. But mostly what they’re pleased about is the opportunity to score solid manual firing time at the guns. We could actually do this a lot more quickly on a faster orbit, using automated firing patterns. But gunners get a senior rating attached to their rank, you see, if they are certified as having fired more than a thousand live-fire shots at hard targets. That’s really difficult to get on most Fleet ships, which may not fire live cannon from one year to the next. There’s a small financial bonus to it, a few dollars a month salary increment, but it’s mostly about the status. We already have far more senior gunnery hands than any other frigate in the Fleet, and I rather think the crew is going to try to go for the ace, in that, with every single one of them carrying senior grade. That would be, you know, quite something, in the Fleet. So I’m rating this as an extended live-fire training exercise.’

  The fighters spent three hours that afternoon clearing a safe route for them. Shion had a wonderful time in that – no longer restricted to having to pilot within human capacity, she danced Firefly around, only pausing long enough for her gun crews to take out the target before spinning off to the next. Firefly, indeed, accounted for twice as many targets as Bluebottle and Wasp managed between them.

  Once they were back aboard and celebrating with the now traditional packet of cookies, scans confirmed that the route was now well within the definition of ‘safe and clear for superlight orbit’ in the Fleet handbook. So, they went to action stations, volunteer gunners poised at every gun. Alex conned the ship into its new course, looping around three times before he authorised the guns to start firing. There was a cheer from the crew as the first cannon shots lanced out. They all hit the selected asteroids exactly as the computer was suggesting. The firing was not random, each gunner using precise targeting systems to lock the cannon onto the selected targets with each pass. Asteroids, if they were hit in exactly the right place, would spin back, tumbling into the path of others behind them. Sometimes they would even break up, with two or more pieces hurtling away to impact others. It was a bit like throwing pebbles into an oncoming avalanche, and for the first few hundred passes, at least, didn’t look as if it was achieving anything very much. Within an hour, though, they had made a slight but definite dent in the leading edge of the swarm, reducing the density of the matter that would hit Pellar by 0.4%.

  After five hours, when they broke for lunch, that dent had become a rough cone, opening through the first quarter of the debris cloud. Projections still showed that Pellar would be devastated by the impact of the remaining debris, but it was clear that the plan was working.

  They stood down from action stations for their break, enabling everyone to get out of survival suits and eat in comfort. Thirty eight crew were celebrating having got their senior gunnery rating. Not every shot had hit where it was meant to – it was hard, fast work, keeping focussed, locking on target and firing in just a split second window every four seconds. You had to maintain at least a ninety six per cent accuracy rating to get the senior gunner grading, and more than 99.5% to be rated ‘sharpshooter’, an even more coveted status. Once a gunner had taken their current score up to a thousand shots they swapped out with the volunteer waiting to relieve them, maximising the opportunities for everyone. There was a certain amount of tension about it, a good deal of practising on the fighters’ guns as simulators while people were awaiting their turn, and some anxiety, too, about the couple of crew who might not make the grade.

  One of those was Rangi Tekawa. Alex was of the view that every member of his ship’s company should be able to do damage control, emergency technical work and operate a gun if needed. Other Fleet ships might be happy with the standard limit of thirty per cent of the crew being gun-qualified, but Alex did not consider that anyone could really call themselves warship crew unless they could, at need, jump into a gun station and fire. Even crew rated non-combatant, like Rangi, were expected to
be able to do that.

  So, Rangi had done the training, passing basic gun-competence certificates after about forty hours of theory and thirty seven hours logged in a simulator. He wasn’t very good, though. As his instructor had pointed out very patiently, Rangi’s accuracy would improve no end if he kept his eyes open when firing. Optimism was not high on Rangi being able to score more than 96% accuracy at anything he aimed at.

  Optimism wasn’t high that Ordinary Star Pelli Gervaise would achieve that, either. Pelli was eighteen years old and had been a member of the Fleet for just over a year, now. The Fleet, indeed, had snapped him up, rating his application very highly. He was intelligent, socially responsible, and had done everything right from the courses he’d taken at school and college, the experience he’d got as a Fleet Junior Cadet, even getting work experience as a deckhand on a freighter for three months.

  Since joining, though, he had rapidly been rated a bullock, not for any fault in conduct but because he was manifestly not living up to expectations. Someone of his IQ and ability should, by now, be rated Able Star, but he seemed content to be stuck at the very bottom of the lowest possible rank. It had become evident that he felt that this was all he needed to do, earning his keep while travelling the League. He’d applied for transfer to the Fourth after it had become clear that the Fleet was not prepared to let him continue with shipboard placements on that basis, making his only choices either to join the Fourth, spend the next nineteen years working at a base, or quit the Fleet entirely.

  He was not, it had to be said, their most enthusiastic recruit, since his attitude was still inclined to doing the least amount of work he could get away with while still being allowed to serve aboard ship. He had, however, picked up something of the ethos of the rest of the crew, since joining them at Therik, and was starting to put some effort in, now, to meet his target of being rated Able within five months. Gunnery, though, was still on the to do list. They were having to help him through the last bit of the theory work in order for him to qualify to have a go at live firing at all. Martine, indeed, had excused him all other duties so that he could get that studying done. A group of crew had appointed themselves as his tutors, on his case if he so much as looked up from the screens to stretch or went to take a pee.