The Hot Gate: Troy Rising III-ARC

by John Ringo

  One thing that was rarely mentioned in “wet” Navy theoretical exercises was that there was one more thing standing between a carrier and a ship-killer. Other, lesser, ships. Frigate crews, however, were well aware of the concept. Which was why they referred to themselves as mobile missile intercept systems.

  All groups used rotation to reduce damage. Given that most of the enemy fire was anticipated to be coming from a single vector, maneuvering so as to spread the damage, take fire for a brief moment on a section of shields or armor then spin, rotate or yaw to move the fire to another quadrant, was a standard tactic.

  The humans, due to a combination of Glatun cybernetics capability and remembering the true purpose of wet frigates in a CVBG, added the refinement of “interpenetration.” Each battle group, based around a Constitution or Defender class, would not only individually rotate but rotate around the main ship. And not just in a simple Keplerian orbit but interweaving in a complex algorithm that, theoretically, optimized their individual likelihood of survival. In addition, battlegroups themselves interpenetrated creating a complex parvane impossible in any conditions other than space.

  The covert update from the Glatun that had upgraded human forces became apparent as Second Fleet, essentially all of Earth’s mobile forces, opened up like an origami flower.

  “Incoming laser fire from the AV, sir,” Captain Whisler said.

  “Which is what six one delta is for,” Marchant said. “Which helps the shuttles and the Marines not one bit.”

  * * *

  “Get into the tunnels!” General Bolger snapped, bounding off the ramp. “If there are Rangora, just plow them! We need to get these shuttles space borne. Fast. Shit...”

  The Thermopylae was still spinning. Between that and a bit too much spring the Marine commander was heading into an inconvenient orbit. He corrected with thrusters and got his feet on the Troy.

  “Nearest tunnel is at three point seven mark four,” Colonel Grant “Boner” Threlfall said. The J-3 of First Marine Division frankly thought that any Marine not smart enough to get out of the way of the incoming missiles should have been washed out at boot.

  “Let’s get the fuck under armor, then,” Bolger snapped. “This is about to be a very unsafe environment.”

  * * *

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...” Barnett muttered, hugging the surface of the Therm. The tactical display was nothing but red overhead. The missiles were heading for the Thermopylae but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t target a Terran shuttle. And any one of those ship busters would open up a shuttle like a tin can being hit by...something really nasty. Being nearby when they hit the Therm, for that matter, wasn’t going to be...

  “Impact!” MOGs called. “Gas wave...”

  “Shiiiii...” Barnett screamed as the blast wave hit.

  Explosions don’t propagate well in space. On a planet, the majority of damage from any explosion, from a five hundred pound bomb to a 50 megaton nuke, was from expanding gas. In space there is no atmosphere.

  Unless, of course, the explosion was from a kinetic weapon hitting a big chunk of nickel iron. In which case it made a very temporary atmosphere composed of nickel and iron plasma.

  The blast wave of not one but hundreds of multi-megaton missile impacts washed over both the retreating 142nd and the 143rd in what would later be termed “plasmaclastic flow.”

  Were any visual system capable of penetrating the rolling blast of plasma, the image would have been of so many soap bubbles briefly tossed in a hurricane of fire and then...vanishing.

  * * *

  “They’re...” Admiral Clemons said, trying not to puke. The image of an essentially empty viewscreen—where a moment before had been nearly a hundred shuttles and a thousand Marines—even drowned out the continuous rumble of the incoming bombardment.

  “Both squadrons have been eliminated by secondary effects of enemy fire,” Leonidas said. “5th Marine regiment has sustained seventy percent casualties from the same cause. Message sent to General Denny. Generals Bolger and Cortada KIA. He is now senior Marine officer in system. Estimate twenty percent casualties of remaining Rangora forces. Rotation is bringing the main entry area into enemy fire basket. Two thousand missiles remaining.”

  “Granadica?” Clemons said, trying to put the horrific casualties aside. At this point, winning was no longer and option. Keeping the Thermopylae out of enemy hands was all anyone could hope for.

  “No can do, Admiral,” Granadica said. “I moved Mjolnir outside and banged it partially closed. But all the way? No go. Leo, I need control of every bot and remaining ship like thing we’ve got.”

  “Transferred.”

  “I’m giving you Mjolnir. Use it.”

  * * *

  “Missiles approaching Fleet One,” Captain Whisler said.

  “I wonder if we should have saved some of them?” Commodore Adam Rocco said. The Operations officer of Second Fleet was, at this point, mostly concentrated on how they were going to recover survivors from this debacle. “Sundance just took a direct laser hit...”

  “That’s seven Indies, Two Connies and a Defender,” Captain Whisler said. “Maharashtra’s an engineering casualty. Enemy’s recognized it and shifted fire. Two thousand plus survival pods.”

  “If it was just the Aggressors,” Admiral Marchant snarled. “Shift to four three eight. We’ve got to get more spread out. Those AV lasers are killing us.”

  “Missile launch?” Captain Whisler asked.

  “Not yet,” Marchant said. “Not until we can see the reds of their eyes.”

  * * *

  “We thought we were the steel jaws,” General Sho’Duphuder watching the implacable wall of missiles closing on his fleet. Given that the humans had moved nearly half of them into the system from Earth, once the weapons were accelerating away from the gate, they didn’t have the fuel to turn around and attack the second Rangora fleet. Thus, although it was going to be overkill, they were all still headed for his ships. Frankly, the Imperium should win the rest of the battle. Not that it was going to matter personally. Once that wall of missiles arrived there wasn’t going to be much left but plasma, very small scraps of ship and bits of charred carbon.

  “Very expensive bait,” Colonel Rowwez replied.

  “Too expensive by far,” General Sho’Duphuder said. “Abandon ship.”

  “Sir?” Colonel Rowwez said, aghast. “But...”

  “All ships, abandon ship,” Sho’Duphuder snapped. “Set the ships for auto defense and abandon ship. Those are Glatun designs. You can tell by the acceleration. They’ll recognize escape pods and avoid them as best they can. Abandon. Ship. Send the order!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Of course,” the General mused as the alarms started blaring. “I’m not sure who’s going to be left to pick us up.”

  * * *

  The problem of being President with hypercom was that it gave an exquisitely detailed and instantaneous view of train wrecks.

  “Field Marshal. Send everything we’ve got left in the system to E Eridani. I don’t care if it’s an out-of-date corvette.”

  “Ma’am, if Second Fleet can’t win this...” Marshal Hampson said. “Sol will be undefended.”

  “SAPL, Admiral!” the President snapped. “Troy. Everything! NOW! Send Troy if we can find something to push it!”

  * * *

  “Missiles working to the door,” Commodore Guptill said. “Here it comes!”

  The main door was still canted open at an angle of twenty-seven degrees, the exact angle that concrete that is properly mixed will form if poured out carefully on a flat surface.

  In an eyeblink, forty-three missiles, each packing nearly ten megatons of kinetic energy, tracked across the door area. Forty of them hit the door itself, shutting it with a finality that should have spelled SAPL-JOB in gigantic divots on the surface. The divots were, however, more or less random.

  Three, unfortunately, slipped through before that event.

  The mi
ssiles still had to maneuver, slightly. And they couldn’t drive directly into the main bay. Which from the Rangora perspective was a good thing. If they had simply flown directly across the main bay, all they would have done was put divots on the inside of North and fill the main bay with gas neither of which would be particularly an issue to the human defenders.

  As fate and bad planning would have it, they were instead pointed directly at Horn Two. Which was mostly occupied by Granadica.

  Granadica was an AI. And AIs think very fast. Unfortunately, no one, not even she, had thought about exactly where on the horn the ship fabber should go, tactically. Thus “bad planning.” In blinding retrospect it was obvious that the ship fabber should be on the far side of the horn from the door. Just in case the door was stuck open and enemy missiles could fly into the main bay. In fact considering the hinges and the probable angularity of a stuck-open door, the ship fabber should probably be put on the back side of Horn One. And she’d made a note to that effect and sent it off on the hypercom network, addressed variously but especially and personally to the short bastard who had tricked her into being in this situation in the first place.

  The absolute worst place to be would have been on the near side of the horn, directly in line with the door. She had had time to note that the original plans had placed her there. A mistake during construction of the power systems on the horns had taken up that area. So instead of a ship fabber facing the door directly, about six billion credits worth of power plants were facing the door.

  She was either up or down from that position, depending on how you viewed it, and slightly behind the three kilometer horn.

  Which wasn’t going to be enough. When those missiles hit the horn they were going to rip her to shreds through plasma discharge alone. Not to mention just a massive amount of non-plasmoid foreign-object-debris flinging around the interior at very high velocities.

  The objective, therefore, was to keep the missiles from hitting the horn. Or, hopefully, anything else that was really important. Like, say, her.

  Kinetic energy was kinetic energy. Non-elastic recoil. If the missiles hit anything except vacuum or thin gases, essentially all that had been between Granadica’s new shell and the door, they and whatever they hit were going to be plasma. Plasma headed toward Granadica but that might be survivable. The missiles impacting on the horn would not be.

  Which was why Granadica had stacked up every bot, unoccupied sled, cleaner, scrubber and mobile piece of junk in the entire main bay between the door and her brand new shell. She wished in retrospect they’d kept the Paw tugs. The only thing that wasn’t between her and the door was a Monkey Business class that was down for repair.

  As the Rangora missiles tracked into the door, she accelerated every bot, scrubber and piece of junk into the relatively small gap.

  Which was why instead of three Rangora missiles shooting through the gap, what came out was a plasma volcano composed of ions from three Rangora missiles and two hundred pieces of human mobile equipment.

  Which hit about two hundred tons of various scrap including three large chunks of wall material, bits and pieces of Rangora and Horvath ships and four nearly full ship containers of damned near priceless parts.

  Which, given the temperature and kinetics of the plasma, were accelerated and heated far beyond the rating of the contained parts.

  The cluster of material spread out from the plasma wall in a fashion that Argus would have had a fun time predicting. Since he was fully linked in with Granadica he had, in fact, predicted it and was mildly displeased as the last few images that were transmitted indicated that he was only 99.9999436% accurate in his estimate of the outcome.

  The .0000564 was rather important.

  Because he had bet Granadica every single processor credit he’d ever won from her she wasn’t going to survive.

  What hit Granadica, instead of three missiles capable of both calculating the best target in their basket and maneuvering to hit the ship fabber, or a very high velocity and very hot wave of plasma, was a big rectangular chunk of nickel-iron, part of one melted container, a bunch of melted plastic and metal that had been seven hundred and twenty million credits worth of high-tech parts and an already trashed laser array from the Cofubof class cruiser Arashet surrounded by very hot but dispersing and much lower velocity plasma.

  The impact of the wall material cracked every weld and join holding the ship fabber on the horn, as well as doing the structural equivalent of massive internal damage, and spun the fabber in a nearly random fashion across the bay to clang on the far wall just below Bay Nineteen. The main point of impact was on the crew compartment which had, fortunately, been evacuated. Unfortunately, it was also where Granadica’s AI core was housed.

  * * *

  “Leo, damage?” Admiral Clemons asked.

  “Fifty three percent of our power systems,” Leonidas said. “Seventy-eight percent of our maneuvering systems. Dragon Ball offline. Fabbers offline. Everything...light in the main bay is damaged beyond repair. The door, however, is now shut. Beyond any capacity to open it I suspect short of recutting with SAPL. We can rotate very slowly. More like we can slow our current rotation and affect it slightly in skew. No casualties at all, absent Granadica.”

  “And Granadica?” Clemons asked.

  “Those fucking lizard BASTARDS! MY BRAND NEW SHELL!”

  “Is inoperable as a ship fabber absent a shipyard,” Leonidas said. “But still lives.”

  “I think the word is... Ow...”

  “Good,” Clemons said. “Now get us back in the fight.”

  “At the moment, the only thing we have is Mjolnir,” Leonidas said.

  “The bombardment has let up,” Granadica said. “Crews can get a laser head operating. Maybe two. Might even be able to point a little.” She groaned a little. “I think I need to rethink my maintenance feedback system. Is this what pain feels like?”

  “We have less than half our power systems,” Leonidas said. “Given maneuvering and life support, that means a quarter of our laser output.”

  “Little sympathy here?”

  “Work on it,” Clemons said. “Now... Mjolnir? What are we doing with Mjolnir?”

  “I was about to ask permission on that, sir,” Leonidas said. “It is about half way to its target.”

  “Which is...?”

  “I mean, “Glad to see you survived, Granadica.” “Sorry you’re hurt, Granadica.”?”

  “Glad to see you survived, Granadica. Sorry you’re hurt, Granadica. We just lost two boat squadrons, a thousand Marines, six ships and have life boats and people in suits scattered all over the system and no way to recover them. Glad to see you survived, Granadica. Now get to fixing yourself to the point you can get to fixing...everything else.”

  “Yes, sir, Admiral,” Granadica said, firmly. “I have some remaining functioning internal systems. Will comply.”

  “Which is...?”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Star General Subekulh Gi’Tathajagh had seen worse battles. The first three assaults on Tuxugah came to mind. And he had examined, quite carefully, the reports, the true reports, on the assaults on the Terran system. Which were, also, worse than this. For one thing, the Rangora were more or less assured of winning. For values of win. What the humans would call a Pyrrhic victory. Victory at such cost that defeat was less preferable on only a moral level. The loss of General Sho’Duphuder’s entire fleet was going to cost the Imperium dearly. But for once the Rangora were going to carry the field against these damned Terran primates. The battle globe was functionally destroyed and he had the throw weight to defeat the Terran light units. Of course, the estimates were eighty percent numeric loss of his force to do so. But the AVs were assured of surviving.

  Victory. Congratulations of the High Command. Promotion.

  He wondered if General Sho’Duphuder had taken one of the six thousand life boats on the Search and Rescue screen. If so, Gi’Tathajagh would use every bit of whatever political clout he
might gain from this “victory” to ensure Sho’Duphuder stayed a general. Was even promoted. Moral courage of that...intensity was much harder to find among the Rangora than the physical kind.

  “General Gi’Tathajagh. Incoming enemy...ship?”

  “There are forty-three incoming enemy ships,” Gi’Tathajagh said. “Very hard to hit, extremely hard to kill, enemy ships.”

  “This one is coming from the direction of the battle globe,” Colonel Toghazen said. The fleet tactical officer seemed puzzled.

  “And our missiles didn’t...deal with it?”

  “It appears to have used the mass of the globe to hide behind,” Toghazen said. “And we can’t identify the class. Mass is in the range of one of their Constitution class as is acceleration.”

  “So, another Constitution,” General Gi’Tathajagh said. “There...eleven of those remaining?”

  “Thirteen. Yes, sir. But the density is wrong. It’s volume is only a third of a Constitution. And the trajectory is not for fly-by or any normal combat maneuver. It...sir, it appears to be on a ramming course.”

  “Mass of...three hundred thousand tons? Kinetic energy on impact?”

  “Two hundred plus times ten to the seventeenth of kinetic release.”

  “Concentrate fire on it.”

  “We have been, sir,” Colonel Toghazen said, a touch nervously. “It’s maneuvering but despite that we’ve hit it repeatedly with secondaries from both the Aggressors and AVs and it’s... It’s not even shielded! We’re getting major ablation consonant with nano-weave, flintsteel composites. But...it’s not stopping it.”

  “Rotate the in-line Aggressors,” Gi’Tathajagh snapped. “Begin maneuvering out of its impact basket.”

  “It has the maneuverability of a Glatun cruiser, General!”

  General Gi’Tathajagh had even seen that before. Going into the war he, like most Rangora, had viewed the Glatun as effete wimps. And, by and large, they were. But at... Ceghevel? Yes, Ceghevel, another “glorious victory,” a wounded Glatun cruiser had made a suicide run on the AV Woshshusee. Rangora did not suffer from the human problem of “combat flashbacks” but some images were burned indelibly on the brain. The sight of the center third of an AV flashing into gas was one of his indelible images.