Heart of Steel: Book II of the Jonathan Pavel Series

by J. S. Hawn

  ‘Oh boy,’ was all Jonathan could think before she pounced on him, and he quit thinking completely with his head at least.

  Chapter II

  Dawson's Rock, Ozawa Stella System, Solarian Republic

  Solarian Naval Listening Post LP-115

  September 20th, 844 AE

  Sowing Eve was suppose to be a joyful time. Of course it was hard to make anything joyful on Dawson's Rock. Lieutenant Commander Morris Yung lamented, not for the first time, his decision to pursue the communication and signals career track when he’d gained his commission. Morris was anti-social in the extreme, a by-product of his youth, which had been spent on asteroid mining operations throughout the Solarian Republic. In all honesty, he’d joined the Navy because he didn't want to break rocks for the rest of his days, or buy and resell the content of those rocks as his father had done. His initial skill set with sensor systems and deep space communications equipment had quickly earned him a Specialist 1st rating with a promotion to Warrant Officer within four years. After ten years of service in the Fleet, his remarkable intelligence, good disciplinary record, and status as a natural born citizen had gained Morris a commission and an appointment to officer candidate school. He’d had a good 25 year career until the last two years, when as a result of his own competence he’d been given command of LP-115. Listening Post designation 115 was located on a dwarf planet called Dawson's Rock. It was a empty, sun blasted cratered piece of nickel and iron in a tidally locked orbit around Ozawa, the bright yellow star for which the system was named. Ozawa Stella was a barren system in the extreme. The star had three wormways, but no habitable worlds. In fact, it barely had any planets at all. Dawson’s Rock was half the size of Mercury in the Sol system, and it was the biggest thing in orbit around Ozawa. The system also lacked any valuable resources. Dawson's Rock had plenty of nickel-iron, but most of Ozawa’s other satellites were balls of ice and carbon, or lumps of worthless debris, the left over from the formation of the universe. As a result, aside from a few smugglers, less than successful prospectors, and fugitives, LP-115 was the only sign of human habitation in the Ozawa system at all. Despite its apparent lack of anything of value, Morris knew Ozawa was a vital system for no other reason than stellar geography. One of Ozawa’s three wormways led to Chaucer's Gap the primary Solarian military base in this sector. Another led to Novi Deivor, which was the central hub of the Colonial Confederacy’s entire eastern frontier. Tensions between the Solarian Republic and the Confederacy had been escalating steadily. Ever since the New Helsinki incident six months ago, when the out numbered, but not outgunned Solarian destroyer Titan had clashed with three Colonial Warships badly damaging one, destroying another and sending a third scampering back to Novi Toulouse with its tail between its legs. The Confederate government’s response had been schizophrenic to say the least, as pro and anti-war parties each tried to capitalize on the turn of events, and dueled viciously in the political arena. Anyone paying attention was stunned by the sudden shifts in loyalty. The sudden forming, and then just as sudden dissolution and reformation of coalitions from parts of the political spectrum considered incompatible, and the roller coaster poll numbers. Then three months ago the Consular Council, the Confederacy’s ruling body, unable to reach a majority on the appointment of a new Elector dissolved the central government for the seventh time since New Helsinki. This time though the pro-war, or more accurately anti-Solarian coalition, won a narrow majority. Ever since then, tensions had grown day by day, which was why Morris’s job was getting so difficult. Usually, the border stations mostly focused on monitoring smuggler and pirate activity. Now, he was getting daily reports of incursions by Colonial probes slipping through into Chaucer's Gap. Confederate warships were foraying into and out of the system in force, getting the lay of the land for the day war came. Morris poured himself a strong drink of whiskey and reclined in his chair. If war did come, it would be an ugly one. Morris had fought through the Third Dominion and he knew the face of modern warfare. Battles for star systems could last from weeks to years. Worlds would be ruined, men would be broken, and what had taken centuries to build could be obliterated in hours. Eight and a half centuries since man had first left the world of his birth, six since the first slow boats had set sail for other star systems, and the human race was still little better than what they had been the day Cain struck his brother over the head with that rock. Morris knew this was an important posting, and he knew he was a good choice for it, but it was so damn boring, and the holiday only confounded the isolation. Despite knowing he should be in the Wardroom at the miserable excuse of a party the annoyingly, constantly chipper XO Lt. Jackson Sung had put together, or in the Operations room cheering up the men who’d drawn the short straw and pulled duty, Morris was alone in his private quarters drinking and composing a letter to his husband Clarence. He would be at his parents with their two girls both in secondary school now. The oldest Kindra wanted to go into the Navy, and was already studying like mad for the Overwatch entry exam. Morris promised himself when his tour was up in three months that was it for the Navy. He’d take a civvy job someplace nice where he could watch the girls grow up. He smiled at Clarence’s smiling face, that damn man wanted to do artificial conception again. He wanted a son. Morris’s composition of his letter was interrupted by the beeping of his com terminal which he answered. On the screen he saw the face of his XO.

  “What’s up Jacks?” Morris asked gruffly. Jackson was a good kid but an Overwatch ninny. This was his first posting following his Ensign cruise. “Begging your pardon sir,” the twenty-year old’s voice was a high pitched squeak. “But we have contacts headed through the wormway in force. Lidar from the trip wire probes paint them as one battlewagon, two cruisers, four destroyers, a light carrier, and two planetary assault ships.”

  Morris sunk in his chair. That wasn't a probe. It was an invasion force and there was only one piece of real estate in this Buddah forsaken system worth taking.

  “Time till they are in orbit Jacks?” Morris asked pouring another drink.

  “Six hours sir. This was planned. Our orbit is currently in transition at the point closest to the wormway. They’re deploying a CAP and the destroyers are launching hunter killer drones to take out our probes.”

  “Signal the fleet, then smash everything of value outside the Operations Room. Melt down all the drives, shred all the files, and eat anything that's left. Tell Colonel Talbot that it's time for his Marines to earn their pay, then get all Naval personnel issued weapons and placed under the Marines command.”

  Jackson was white as a sheet, but nodded solemnly, “Aye aye sir.” The display winked out. Morris looked at his half drunk bottle. They could hold that this was a listening post, and not a military base. LP 115 had a grand total of about 560 officers and men, 250 of whom were two reinforced Marine companies. The OD batteries would keep them from getting completely leveled by that battlewagon, but would not hold off a ground invasion. Morris picked up the bottle. Six hours? He could finish this before that. Looking back at his desk, Morris’s eyes rested on the photo of his husband and their two girls. Morris uncorked the bottle, and walked over to his sink and poured all the contents down the drain. He then straightened his uniform smiled one more time at his family, and headed for the Command Center.

  When Morris arrived he found the stations already manned and ready. The men and women at their stations, faces were sober and serious. Several had cups of coffee on hand to help mediate the effects of the aborted party. In the adjacent coms and SIGINT rooms, you could hear the smashing of machinery as the technicians destroyed their consoles so thoroughly that it was impossible to recover anything from them.

  Jackson saluted Morris as he came in.

  “Sir, we’ve melted down all code-word equipment. However, I held off on smashing short range intercept systems and long range transmitters. I thought we might glean some intel off these bastards.”

  Morris nodded, “Do we still have coms Jacks?”

&n
bsp; “There jamming us on subspace, but we still have the laser relay and will have it till they can knock it out.”

  “Okay keep transmitting until it’s gone.”

  “Aye sir.”

  The door opened as Colonel Talbot strode into Operations. He was a tall gruff fellow whose left eye had the pink new color of a regrown transplant.

  He and Morris shared a professional and courteous relationship, but had little in common.

  “Commander, I’ve activated the defense plans and we are moving Navy personnel to where they’ll be most useful.”

  “Sir..” One of the technicians called out “We are receiving a transmission from the Colonials, they want to know if we’d like to surrender.”

  Morris looked at the Colonel and Jackson, “I don't know about you gentleman, but I’m inclined to decline our visitor’s very rude request.”

  Talbot nodded, “Quite so.”

  “Aye sir,” Jacks said smiling.

  “Technical, please reply to our uninvited guest. Inform them that they seem to be on the wrong side of the border, and we invite them to leave forthwith. As for surrender, tell them not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

  “Aye sir,” The technical replied typing in the response.

  So that was it, Morris thought, the die is cast. In truth, he had considered surrendering, but dismissed the idea just as quickly. The Solarian Navy had one cardinal rule, don’t give up the ship. LP-115 was his ship and he wouldn't be giving it up. It would have to be taken from him.

  The Battle of Ozawa, as it would be called, began not long after Morris Yung issued his final orders. The Colonial Task Force heavily outnumbered the tiny Solarian outpost, but The Solarian Naval Corps of Engineers were nothing if not professional, and they had built the Outpost to face overwhelming odds. The LP-115 was built beneath a natural crater on Dawson’s surface, the rim of the crater serving as a natural anchor point for overlapping kinetic barriers, while the thick rock and regolith protected the sprawling facility fifty feet beneath the surface. The only entry point to the base sat at the center of the crater, and was a hanger bay covered by a three foot thick, battle-steel door. It wasn’t just LP-115’s passive defenses that were impressive. She also had teeth. The Colonials approached in standard formation the battleship which LP-115 had identified as the Bruix and designated Tango-1 as the tip of the spear, while the two cruisers designated Tango-2 and 3 covered its flanks. The Carrier and Planetary Assault ships were at the center of the formation and the thin-skinned destroyers covered the rear.

  The Carriers combat wing was fully airborne with two full squadrons, twenty- four fighter bombers were on an attack run, while a single squadron of interceptors held back in case LP-115 launched any fighter craft. Morris didn’t have any fighters, but he did have something almost as good.

  Morris watched as the Colonials crossed the farthest point he could engage them. He did nothing and slowly as the minutes ticked by they drew in closer and closer. One of the bomber squadrons broke off and headed for the laser relay. The other stayed squarely focused on LP-115’s main hanger.

  “Fire the drones in 3...2...1..,” Morris said.

  At his command, six hatches popped open around the crater and four magnetic catapults pointed skyward from each. In a split second, a simple drone craft was launched into space speeding off of Dawson’s surface as fast as the magnetic catapult could propel it in low gravity before firing its own micro fusion engine and acquiring a target. The Colonial fighter bombers moved to intercept the squadron headed toward the laser relay, turning to help their comrades while the interceptors moved in.

  Lights began to twinkle as the Colonial FB-17 Cavalier’s chin mounted tri- barrel lasers winked to life. In the first three minutes, twenty-four drones were swatted from space, but every thirty seconds the robotic arms lifted another drone from the rack, loaded it onto the launcher and hurled it skyward. So it didn’t matter that 24 drones had been knocked down, because another 144 had been launched. The drones were not big, measuring no more than six feet long, with four stubby winglets used to mount maneuvering jets. They were fast though, and their heads were packed with explosives. From the moment of their launch, their tiny computer brain told them they had one task - seek and destroy. Seven Colonial fighter craft went down as the drones smashed into them exploding on impact. Four of the pilots ejected, three used their maneuvering rockets to come to a safe landing on Dawson’s surface. One miscalculated and slammed into the surface dying on impact. The drones gave the bailed out crews a wide berth, this was a civilized war after all.

  The Colonial fighter craft retreated losing two more as they did so. The drones now numbering close to 200 followed, but Morris discontinued the launch. Each hatch held a rack of 400 drones, 2,400 in all, but there was no need to waste them. The drones signatures winked out one by one as they followed the fighters into the Colonial defense envelope. Missile interceptors and point defense lasers worked equally well on drones. The Colonials, seeing this would be no easy raid, moved in full force. Their destroyers joining the fore to add their firepower to that of the heavier ships. This was precisely what Morris had wanted. He couldn’t hold off the attack, but he was going to take some of those Colonial bastards with him.

  “Order OD batteries to open fire, rail guns and hyper velocity missiles both to target the destroyers with everything you’ve got,” Morris commanded.

  As the technician hit a switch, sixteen rail guns of the same make normally found on heavy cruisers, and eight hyper velocity missile batteries slid from beneath their camouflage around the rim of the crater.

  If space wasn’t a vacuum, the roar from their fire would have sounded like the dying moan of a god. The rail guns’ three hundred pound, depleted uranium slugs sped toward the Colonial ships at a quarter the speed of light. Six missed, ten impacted. At that range, there was little the Colonial kinetic barriers could do. The slugs tore into four of the destroyers. One only suffered a glancing blow, two received critical hits to their forward sections losing crewman, weapons, and defenses. The damage was mitigated though, because the slugs were so heavy they actually passed through the ships, the resulting damage coming from the kinetic force of their passing. The final destroyer the Leon, though, suffered a catastrophic hit. It took two slugs just feet apart and when the slugs struck the ship, through an act of random chance, the slugs actually collided inside the ship. The resulting release of energy was like a nuclear explosion. The Leon was gutted internally, her hull buckling out. The ship’s inner decks collapsed on themselves until they finally reached the rear section. The Leon’s auxiliary control and engineering survived, but of her 326 crew 276 were killed, smashed into human paste by the collapsing bulkheads and buckling decks.

  LP-115’s first salvo of railgun slugs was followed quickly by 32 hyper-velocity missiles. The ship killers fared worse than their larger slug brothers since they were more susceptible to the Colonial defense screens. Twenty missiles died before they could impact, but twelve got through. The hyper-velocities were the worst combination of the advantages of missiles and rail guns. Fired at incredible speeds, when they struck they released the raw kinetic energy of 1,200 pounds of TNT, and once they burrowed into the ship their warheads exploded, compounding the damage they had already done. One missile struck the bridge of the Colonial destroyer Liger, killing all hands. Three more went off target and struck Tango-2 the Cruiser Chevalier. Two wasted themselves on her barriers, and a third got through and caused moderate damage neutralizing a plasma cannon. The remaining eight missiles expanded themselves on the undamaged Colonial destroyers, inflicting damage and causing casualties, but none succeeded in knocking another ship out of the fight.

  In the control room Morris gripped the spine of the chair in front of him as the Colonials released their reply. The barrage was fearsome. The Solarian OD positions were armoured shielded, but nothing was impenetrable.

  Reluctantly, Morris ordered the batteries to switch to the heavier Colonial ships. T
he duel raged for a solid half hour both sides inflicting damage on one another. The Chevalier suffered several serious hits and needed to withdraw, but the Bruix and her other consorts knocked out fully a quarter of LP-115 batteries. The Colonial destroyers guided missiles also found one of the drone hangars and began searching for the rest, forcing Morris to launch all his remaining drones in a swarm attack. The Colonials moved their fighters to intercept, and reinforced by their defense screens the drones were massacred, only managing to knock down two more Colonial fighter craft. They did, however, screen a volley of hyper-velocity missiles which slammed into the Bruix causing sever damage to her port side secondary batteries, and knocking one of her rail gun turrets offline. It didn’t matter though, Bruix had eleven other turrets and 33 other rail guns, even though she could only bring half of them to bear at any given time. With the drones neutralized, the Colonial Planetary Assault ships began launching their ground troops.

  The drop pods of the first wave blasted toward the Rock. As they approached, LP-115’s final line of defenses, her chain guns and AA missile pods, opened up. Six drop pods were shot down, but thirty fell outside the crater’s rim. Once they were ground side, each one spat out a Platoon of elite Colonial Marines in full Combat Armour. Seven also opened to reveal Multi-purpose Combat Vehicles. MCVs, more popularly known as Walkers, were bulky ten-foot, two legged vehicles equipped with missile pods and rail guns. The Colonials began approaching the defense positions they’d tagged from orbit. The automated chain guns began to shift their target toward the ground troops. From bunkers around the rim of the crater, firing ports slid open and Solarian Navy personnel began to fire. The Solarian Marines had pulled back, leaving the Navy personnel in their thin suits alone, but in their reinforced bunkers all they had to do was point and shoot.