by John Ringo
“Orders to Cuwwutoa group,” Gi’Tathajagh snapped after a glance at the tactical display. “Physical intercept.”
“General, that would be...”
“Try with light units, but do not let that...thing through! Send it!”
* * *
Captain Zoa Qa’Zafilach, commander of the Aggressor Battleship Cuwwutoa and Battle Group commander looked at the orders, looked at the tactical display and made an instant decision. His family was connected and he could worry about the Kazi later.
“Flight. Full power all engines.”
“Sir...” his maneuvering officer said. “Engine four is...”
“I said full power,” the captain said, sending a copy of the orders to the pilot. “All engines. Consonant with our orders to physically intercept an incoming mass kinetic projectile that is targeted on the AV Herraruo.”
“Physic... Full power, aye!”
* * *
“Cuwwutoa reports major engine failure. Acceleration drop to sixty percent.”
“Then send the...” General Gi’Tathajagh said then stopped. “Never mind. I can do the math.”
“Maneuvering fall-off,” Toghazen said. “I think we got it but...”
“But.”
* * *
There is a term in flight operations “near miss.” It is a misnomer. By definition a near miss is, in fact, a hit. One has nearly missed but not...quite. A nearby miss could perhaps be appropriate. A miss which is very nearby. A better term for a situation where two bodies almost connect is a near hit. Nearly hit but...not quite.
Thus, what occurred was a near miss in the correct meaning of the term. Mjolnir, peppered by high power lasers, its maneuvering systems junked, even its central processing core cored by an AV secondary laser, very nearly missed the ponderously maneuvering AV.
Nearly. Very. In space terms, it was a near run thing indeed. As near run as any could hope.
However, when a mass of three hundred thousand tons traveling at a blistering four hundred and twenty kilometers per second hits anything it more or less instantaneously converts to 265x10^17 joules of energy. (Unless it is made from neutronium and then the physics gets...rather complicated.)
The equivalent of a 13.25 gigaton bomb went off if not directly in the guts of the Assault Vector than, well...near enough.
* * *
“Yes!” Admiral Marchant screamed as the flagship AV cut in half in a welter of fire. Gases were jutting from it end to end. Some of the crew might have survived but the AV was toast as a fighting platform. “Yes, BABY!”
“We gotta get us more of those,” Captain Whisler said. “Whatever the hell it was.”
“We’re not out of the woods, yet,” Marchant said as the Jimmy Carter reeled out of the battle formation. Life pods blew out just before the Smiley turned into scrap and plasma. “But that gives us a chance. Full launch. Target the AV. Now, now, now.”
* * *
“EM Parker?”
The last person in the fucking galaxy Dana wanted to talk to right now was Senor Doctor Palencia.
“Doctor Palencia. I don’t know if you...”
“We have been getting a continuous update through our implants, EM. I... I am very sorry for your losses corazon. I do not know if it was...although you did not get along... Dario cared for you very much.”
“Sir...” Parker said, trying not to let the choking carry over the transmission. “You and Doctor Velasquez just lost sons.”
“You became the target of much analysis as I’m sure you are aware, Parker,” Palencia replied. “You just lost the closest things you have had in far too long to a mother in Chief Barnett and a father in EM Hartman.”
“Thank you for that...analysis, sir,” Parker said, bitterly.
“The reason that I read it, and paid attention, was...” Palencia paused. “Dario had approached me about... Despite the obvious issues he wished my assistance on the question of...courting you would be the closest term in English.”
“Oh, jeeze,” Dana said, trying not to chuckle. “I had sort of picked up on that, sir. He’d have gotten about as far as...as this shuttle would against that damned AV, sir. But... He was a great guy, sir. He’d gotten to be a damned good engineer. I know that doesn’t seem like enough to say, but...”
“Thank you, EM,” Palencia replied. “All language can be reduced in some ways to numbers. One of the other analyses I’ve paid attention to refers to the question of...praise. What the analysis indicated was that one took the praise from a Norte subculture such as yours and simply applied a multiplier. Or, rather, an inversion algorithm. For someone such as you to say he was “a damned good engineer” is...high praise indeed. And he is...was...a fine young man.”
“Shuttle bay’s pressurized, sir,” Parker said, clearing her throat. “Time to debark.”
“Yes,” Palencia said. “And to try to stop this debacle before those drifting in space are lost as well. Corazon, I say this in truth. If I must pull strings to make it an order. When this is done you shall visit us. You shall consider our home, Dario’s home, your home. You shall visit our ranch. You ride. You shall ride and I shall ride with you and we will visit Dario’s horses and his life and his memory. You shall not ride this path alone. And, I beg of you, do not allow me to ride it alone as well. In memory of...a damned good engineer.”
“I... I’ll try, sir,” Dana said. “But as far as I can tell, right now I’m the only fully qualified shuttle coxswain and engineer left in the system. I think I’m going to be sort of busy.”
“You shall make the time, corazon. I say this as a man who had become...you would say I was not completely dissatisfied with the idea of you being a daughter-in-law.”
“Damn, sir,” Dana said. “I’ll try not to let that go to my head.”
“Communication is possible.”
* * *
“A laser, a laser, my kingdom for a laser,” Admiral Clemons muttered.
The Thermopylae for all its gargantuality needed certain things to be a battle station. And if the enemy had trashed every laser collimator, which it had, and every missile fabber, which it had, and most of the maneuvering systems, which the Rangora had, all you had left was a big ball of nickel iron with, fortunately, still functional air and water systems. And, alas, a functioning tactical display. In days of yore were this, say, the Yorktown limping back to Pearl Harbor from the battle of the Coral Sea Admiral Clemons would have been busy on the radio making preparations for their arrival and repair so that they could go forth and be sunk at Midway.
These days computers handled most of that. So the best use of his time was to watch as Admiral Marchant’s fleet was hammered into bits.
“And the ability to actually point it,” Commodore Guptill pointed out then snorted.
“Didn’t actually fall into the category of funny, Commodore.”
“Yes, sir,” Dexter said. “Just found a tiny slice of irony or something at two six two mark twenty nine. Range two hundred eighty thousand klicks.”
“What is that Rangora destroyer doing?” Clemons asked then frowned. “Where is it going? For that matter, where did it come from? Tell me there’s not another enemy fleet out there.”
“That’s the minor humor, sir,” Commodore Guptill said. “The commander of the first Rangora fleet apparently, and it was a good call, ordered all his personnel to abandon ship. Not sure who’s going to pick them up but those ships weren’t going to survive our missile cloud.”
“I agree, so...”
“So everybody punched. Grab that yellow bar and pull. Now, statistically, it was possible since they set their ships to auto defense that some ships were going to survive.”
Clemons back tracked the Rangora destroyer and snorted.
“Lord above,” he said, shaking his head. “The Flying Dutchman.”
“Just going to keep accelerating I guess until it runs out of fuel, sir,” Guptill said. “Which makes me realize I hope nobody is aboard.”
“I
’m wondering how we’re getting home,” Clemons said. “Any bright ideas cause I’m all out.”
“There are as many ideas as there are people aware of the facts, Admiral,” Leonidas interjected. “The exact number is one thousand four hundred and sixty-eight. That is the number who are generally aware of the current condition and with sufficient time on their hands to discuss possible amelioration.”
“Any bright ideas?” Guptill asked.
“By my count...six. None of them particularly good but better than spinning slowly off into the vastness of space as the battle rages behind us. I am...not good at running from a battle.”
“Synopsis,” Clemons said, sitting up.
“In what order?”
“Anything that might...work?”
“One. Bluff. We are reducing rotation. I’ve been working with maneuvering to reduce the rotation so that North is in the direction of the enemy AV. Damage control teams have installed one of our remaining laser collimators and two heavy shield generators protecting it. Adjust rotation and open fire. But, and this is very important, miss the AV.”
“Why?” Guptill asked.
“The enemy is aware we are heavily damaged but how damaged must be a mystery. If the laser impacts they will be aware that it is not full power. However, if it misses...there is no real way to detect the relative power of that sort of laser without physical contact.”
“So they think we’re back to full power but just missing due to range.”
“Correct, Admiral.”
“Do it,” Jack said then rubbed his jaw. “But it needs more. We need to get back in the fight. I agree on the missing. But we need to close to really bluff.”
“The Orion drive is destroyed, Admiral.”
“Yep,” Clemons said. “But the nukes ain’t. And we just happen to have a bunch of tailor made craters on the door to stick them in.”
“Ooo,” Guptill said. “Not sucking up, sir, but that’s brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant.”
* * *
“And here come their missiles.” Colonel Thoos Ishives was the tactical officer for the AV Jovian Crusher. And with the destruction of the AV Iramozh, tactical officer for the Jomaz Fleet. A nice position if he lived to keep it.
“We will take damage,” Captain Be’Sojahiph said, hands clasped calmly in front of him. With the loss of the Iramozh, and apparently Generals Sho’Duphuder and Gi’Tathajagh, he had acceded to command of the Fleet. “But that is all. Not even crippling. And then we will finish off their mobile units and reduce the former asteroid to...smaller asteroids.”
“Yes, sir,” Ishives replied.
“It was a tactical error on their commander’s part,” Be’Sojahiph said. “That missile array, even given their losses, would have severely reduced the Aggressor squadrons.”
“Yes, sir,” Ishives said, paying more than strictly necessary attention to the tactical display. Then he realized that he had better be paying actual attention to the tactical display. “Sir... The entire missile complement is targeted on us.”
“As I said, a tactical error on the enemy’s part.”
“Yes, sir,” Ishives replied. “But...it is also entirely targeted on our rear quadrant. Sir...they’re going for our engines.”
* * *
Humans knew a lot about Aggressors. They owned over forty that were in various stages of repair and upgrade as well as bits and pieces of hundreds more that had run afoul of Troy, Thermopylae and SAPL.
They knew less about AVs. Not because they didn’t have pieces of them. Because that was pretty much all they had. And not nearly enough trained engineers to carefully sweep them up, put the jigsaw puzzle back together and examine them. They even had complete space docks for repairing them, captured in a previous battle in E Eridani space. But the specifications and blueprints had been purged.
So they didn’t know them as intimately as they did Aggressors. But they did know a few things about them besides that they were ten kilometers long, a kilometer wide, shaped sort of like a truncated Kentucky rifle barrel and absolute rat bastards to kill.
Each of the eight sides sported twenty-six missile launch tubes and twenty lasers identical to the spinal lasers of an Aggressor. For defense there were another thirty-two overlapping and interlocking shields each three times as strong as those on an Aggressor and impenetrable to any laser on a human “light” platform such as the Constitutions and Defenders. On each facet. The only way through the screens was penetrator missiles. Thus the forty-nine laser point defense batteries, thirty-two short range mass drivers and, of course, the dual mode attack/defense main missiles. On each facet.
They knew that the spinal laser of the AV was rated at sixty petawatts. While not a patch on the output of, say, Troy much less SAPL, that would kill a Defender’s screens in two point six seconds and a Constitutions in one point two. Armor lasted about a quarter of the time so if a Defender stayed in the range of the AV’s main gun for as long as four seconds it was destroyed.
Humans had managed to determine from the chunks, some large, of previously defeated AVs that they were sectional. And the Rangora were apparently big on eights since their were sixteen sections. The front three, besides supporting the side guns and defenses, were devoted to powering and managing the spinal gun. The next five were general power systems, primary life support, command sections and crew areas including mess. The last eight were devoted to maneuvering and engineering. While their were grav thrusters all along the facets, even shields could be used as such in a pinch, the main drive was the last eight sections. Six were devoted simply to powering the behemoth and the last two held the massive grav drives that permitted the two hundred and forty million ton super dreadnought a blistering six gravities of acceleration.
Every single penetrator missile in the human inventory in E Eridani was concentrated on segment sixteen. And the human missiles were...smart. Humans had not only taken Glatun technology and used it, they had studied it and applied their own understanding. Applied it well. While not technically artificial intelligences, the brains in the Thunderbolt missiles were...close.
Thus the missiles understood that they needed to not only drive through the defenses and drop the shields. They had to work together to do so and have enough survive the gauntlet to take out the massively armored engines.
If they had been truly sentient, which they were not, of course, their conversation would have gone something like this:
“I wanna be first! I wanna be first! Let me go!”
“No, Jamie’s first! He gets to soak up the lasers.”
“You’re a meanie! I wanna die from laser fire!”
“I’m not a meanie! You get the fun part. You get to...”
“I get to what? Oh, yeah, I get to hit the big mean ship in the engines.”
“Yeah! You’re lucky! All I get to do is take down the shie...”
“Wee, shields are down! I can go! I can go!”
Okay, so not terribly smart.
But smart enough.
THIRTY-THREE
“Damage control!”
“Segment sixteen is gone, captain. Estimate six missiles made it through all defenses. It’s simply...gone.”
“Now we’re drifting in space,” Colonel Ishives pointed out.
“I know that, Colonel.” There were times when the captain dearly wished it was the good old days when you could simply shoot subordinates and not worry about the paperwork.
“And we have incoming laser fire from Thermopylae.”
“What?!” The internal laser power of the Troy class battlestations was just one of many unpleasant surprises the humans had sprung on the Rangora. While not capable of immediately driving through an AV’s screens...
“Inaccurate so far,” Ishives said. “But...”
With the drive crippled and the Crusher unable to maneuver the distant battlestation would eventually get their range.
“And...neutrino trace from the Thermopylae indicates they have gotten their Orion drive
back online.”
“Impossible!”
“Neutrinos don’t lie, Captain.”
* * *
“And PUSH!”
As a younger lad, Butch Allen had thought about many things he might do when he finally grew up. When he was five he was going to be a cowboy. Then he found out that job skill had grown out of fashion and that it was no longer politically correct, or in fact legal, to shoot Injuns. Fireman looked good for a while. Police officer was on the list. By the time he was in junior high he had accepted that he would probably end up working the line at the GE plant, maybe be a shade-tree mechanic on the side.
Desperately trying to cut open another melted hatch on the outside of a three kilometer wide door while a nuke went off less than a kilometer away had never even crossed his mind. Ever. Not even close. Not in the same universe.
“Detonation in three...two...”
“Hang on!”
“Do we push or hang on, Mister Allen?”
“Just...”
Whatever Butch was about to say, and even he couldn’t remember afterwards, he hadn’t been following his own advice. The ten megaton pusher nuke that team six had installed on the other side of the door didn’t impart much energy to the Troy but it did impart enough to move it a bit. Just enough, and given some flexing on the part of the multimillion ton, kilometer thick, nickel iron door, for Butch’s sled to slam into the inside of the mostly, in fact nearly fully, cut away hatch.
