A Greater Interest: Samair in Argos: Book 4

by Michael Kotcher

  “I do wish we could sim with the big girl,” Gants said, patting one of the consoles fondly. “Maybe we could rent a compartment aboard the station.” He pursed his lips. “Something to look into. But if you could check on that for me and then report to the conference room for the debrief, I would appreciate it.”

  Paxton nodded, straightening briefly. “Of course, Colonel.”

  Malachai Gants was seated at his desk in his ready room aboard the Leytonstone, trying to make sense of the madness that was the aftermatch of the Fleet exercise. He’d had what he considered were substantial mobile forces at his command in the exercise: three groups of ships, each led by a large ship and supported by corvettes. In total, from the Navy’s side, there were two destroyers (Equinox and Curroth) and five corvettes. From the FP defense forces, there was one escort-frigate (Tsesuko) and then the three corvettes. It had been a significant increase in firepower over what First Principles had during the actual battle and Gants had been confident. He had transferred over to Equinox temporarily to command the small fleet for the duration of the war games.

  Arrayed against him was the same flotilla of pirate ships: a heavy cruiser, a pair of light cruisers, six corvettes, eight gunboats and twenty starfighters, with the assault transport in support. Instead of the blocky Sepulcres and the egg-shaped fighters the pirates had used, Samair had substituted the company’s manta-shaped Vision fighters. Gants had no real problem with this; it allowed the fighter pilots of the shipyard’s garrison to get some sim time against real opponents, but he did require a restriction to their firepower. The Visions would only be allowed six of their throat-ripper missiles instead of their usual magazine of twelve. It would make things a bit more interesting and difficult, but it wouldn’t tip the scales appreciably.

  Gants retained overall command of the engagement, but he broke his forces into three groups, each centered around one of his larger ships. He had studied the attack in detail, watching the sensor feeds, reading the after action reports and had developed a strategy. The pirates had come into the system in waves and that was how he was going to defeat them. He would take them on piecemeal, deal with each wave and then move on to the next. His three small flotillas would operate as three separate forces, but they would all take on the same targets from different angles, forcing each set of pirates to have to deal with multiple attackers. The FP corvettes had started out with that tactic in mind, but they’d lost unit cohesion fairly quickly during the battle and had gotten chewed apart when they got in range of the cruisers. There was no clear chain of command amongst them, which lead to their downfall.

  That, at least was the plan. The pirate force, however, didn’t behave as expected. “The bastards,” Gants snarled. “They’re not following the playbook. They aren’t coming in waves, at least not like they did last time.” This time, the fighters led the way, outdistancing the larger vessels by a considerable margin, but that was acceptable because they were nimble and fast enough to evade much of the defenders’ fire. They were smart enough to stay mostly out of point-blank range with the defenders, where the point defense weapons could savage the fighters. Six of the fighters dove in on Curroth and let fly a pair of missiles each. The destroyer’s weapons opened up, blanketing space with energy and railgun fire, and the corvette escorts lent their own weight of fire and in the end, only one missile made it through, causing little damage to Curroth’s shields. But their attack managed to disrupt Gants’ careful ballet, forcing Curroth’s attack group to break off to deal with the missiles, and once they had they were considerably behind the other two groups and were now unable to support them.

  “Keep moving,” he ordered to the other three flotillas. “Maintain your defensive fire if they dip back into attack range again. And watch your sterns; we don’t need a salvo of missiles taking out any of our engines.” He pointed to his main display. “Curroth, get into attack range as best you can. If you can swing it, try to time the arrival of your attack with when Equinox and Tsesuko make our second passes.”

  Greer, fuming over the nasty, stinging attack from the starfighters, acknowledged the order.

  The pirate corvettes formed a protective circle around the cruisers, instead of spearing forward like a vanguard. The light cruisers weren’t racing ahead leaving the transport or the heavy cruiser essentially uncovered, no now they were fighting as a cohesive unit, allowing for overlapping fields of fire, giving any ship that closed to attack range a blistering hail of fire.

  “Sir, Tsesuko is requesting instructions,” the comms officer called. The images on the main display as well as the tactical screens were showing the formation of the enemy drawing ever closer.

  Gants did the only thing he could do; he made fast slashing attacks against the enemy formations, bringing Equinox and her group in on one flank, tearing at the corvettes. “E-group, T-group, make strafing runs against that formation. T-group, come from a rising vector, E-group hits the flank.” Tsesuko followed suit, but came in from “under” the enemy formation, racing past at top speed. “All strike groups, focus your fire on one or two targets. I want to maximize damage.”

  Of course, the enemy was doing the same, focusing all their fire on the bigger ships in each group, but it was turning out more difficult than expected considering the rate of speed of the firing passes and with the multiple attacks on different vectors. The pirates couldn’t completely concentrate their fire, though they had more of it they could bring to bear on the attackers. The battle was reasonably even, despite the difference in numbers and firepower.

  The damage, however, continued to rise on both sides. The first pirate corvette’s shields failed under a particularly vicious salvo, as three missiles from Curroth slammed home, blowing apart the forward half of the ship. Two other corvettes were destroyed by Equinox’s group and a fourth by Tsesuko. Things were looking up; the plan was working. But things quickly went awry after that.

  Greer eyed the tactical plot. The pirates were starting to change vector to bring them on a more direct course for the gas mine. “Bring us around,” he ordered, his face constricted in a scowl. Curroth took a wide parabolic course around to make another pass, not paying attention to the starfighters that were waiting there in ambush. Seven fighters pumped out two missiles each from inside short range and five of them managed to get through the small group’s combined counter missile and point defense fire. The weapons slammed home on the destroyer’s rear, knocking out the ship’s main propulsion units and sending her spinning out of control. The Navy captain pounded his fist on the arm of his chair so hard he felt something pop in his hand, but his rage was so great that he barely noticed. Greer certainly didn’t notice the looks he was getting from the rest of the bridge crew who had heard it.

  One of the Navy corvettes was in too tight and cut an evasive turn too sharp. They were unable to turn away from their vector and clipped the bow of the foundering destroyer, which broke the spine of the smaller vessel. “Damn, damn, damn!” Aloicius swore loudly, pounding the arm of the chair again and this time when one of the small bones in his hand snapped, he did feel it. Greer swore louder, clutching the hand in his opposite, wincing in pain. The fighters raced in for the kill, savaging the destroyer with another salvo of missiles, much to Greer’s humilation. His swearing was louder and more effusive.

  But his humiliation wasn’t to be the last for the defenders. The other two groups of ships slashed against the pirate formation again and again, but after the fourth pass, Gants thought he’d spotted an opening. One of the corvettes, one of the two remaining, was losing speed due to engine damage. It couldn’t maintain the speed of the rest of the formation and was ever so slowly falling back. “There’s a chance here,” the colonel said, staring at the displays, his eyes never wavering, never blinking from the sensor feeds. “There’s an opening against one of the light cruisers. From the far vectors on the flank, a force could race in and hit the cruiser in its aft section, while the bulk of the light cruiser itself blocked the targeti
ng of the heavy cruiser.” It was a small opening and it would close quickly. Gants considered it for only a moment. “E-group, move in on the attack vector I am providing. Helm, take us in.”

  But it had been a feint. The heavy cruiser suddenly bolted upward, while the light cruiser dove, opening up the firing arcs for both ships against the strike group. Two cruisers sent sheets of turbolaser and heavy laser fire against the incoming destroyer and corvettes, hammering the shields of the destroyer and punching holes in the hull. Gants held the attack vector about five seconds too long, too used to the great speed and slightly heavier armor of the battlecruiser and he misjudged the timing. By the time he realized his mistake, Equinox’s forward shields had failed and the forward section was breached in several places. His ship changed vector upward, taking a battering as it did so, so close to the three cruisers, of which all were now in range to hit the strike group. One of the corvettes was destroyed by hits from the heavy cruiser and another took heavy damage.

  Things only got worse from there. The assault transport, unmolested up to this point, launched shuttles. They dove toward the gas giant, going into the upper atmosphere from the far side of the gas giant from the Kutok mine. They skirted the defensive platforms and raced around the planet. In short order, the shuttles had reached the gas mine and docked.

  The remaining ships managed a few more runs, but the damage accumulated was just too much. On a high note, however, E-group (what remained) and the lightly damaged Tsesuko and her strike group managed to inflict serious damage on the pirate light cruiser. Equinox and her one remaining corvette poured heavy laser fire into her port side, while Tsesuko and her escorts swooped in and pumped the same point with their own energy weapons, launching a volley of missiles to go with it. A quartet of missiles slipped through the point defense and made it into the breach where they promptly exploded. The combined force of the blast added with the secondary explosions from within tore the ship in half.

  The officers and crew involved in the sim cheered, but the victory was short lived. More maneuvers, more attacks, slashing and peeling away at the flanks of the two cruisers and their rapidly dwindling escorts. But increasing damage markers began to show on the defender ships as well. A lucky and intense salvo from the heavy cruiser battered Equinox, punched through her hull armor, and a follow up severed a series of primary plasma conduits, which killed power to the engines and aft third of the already damaged destroyer.

  The sim ended with roughly the same outcome as the real engagement, but this time the gas mine was in enemy hands. Follow up data provided by the sim’s computer indicated that the boarders on the gas mine had managed to disable the encryption for the controls to the defense platforms. They couldn’t take control of them, per se, but they could blow them up. Which they did. At that point it didn’t take much effort to move in and take whatever quantities of the precious fuel they wished. The miniscule number of defense ships couldn’t make a dent in the cruisers, not a serious one. The remaining light cruiser arrowed forward, speeding straight at Tsesuko’s strike group, guns blazing. The ship was relatively unharmed and in one firing run, in which the cruiser commander managed to maintain medium firing distance, he simply pounded on the lighter defender ships, reducing them to scrap.

  One small highlight, Gants thought bitterly. At least the First Principles ships got trashed just as much as ours did. Only two corvettes remaining of our original forces and they were too small and weak to attempt to take on two cruisers on their own.

  The chime to his ready room door sounded. “Enter.”

  The door slid open and a woman entered. She stepped forward and the door slipped shut behind her. “Colonel Gants.”

  He looked up from the display, then pressed a control to deactivate it. “Tamara Samair, as I live and breathe. Come to gloat?” He knew he was behaving badly, but he just couldn’t help himself.

  But the woman shook her head. “No, Colonel, I’m not. I didn’t get to be up in space with the rest of the defense forces, but I remember that fight. I remember hearing that ships crewed and commanded by people I knew had been destroyed.” She looked away. “It certainly wasn’t glorious.”

  He glared at her. “I never expected it to be glorious.”

  Tamara gave him a wan smile. “Yes you did. All of us do that enter the service. We all think that it’s going to be daring charges into the teeth of the enemy and then a string of victories to our name. Of course, no one will die, no one that we care about, anyway. Some nameless face that we can raise a glass to in the bar and tell how they died.”

  He blinked and then frowned at her. “In the service? Oh, wait, I heard a rumor that you used to be in the Republic Navy.”

  Tamara nodded, then sat herself in the chair in front of his desk. He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t object. “I did. A very long time ago, Colonel. I was a pilot and then an engineer.” She smiled wryly. “I still am, technically.”

  The colonel looked at her for a long moment. “Why are you here, Samair?”

  “I wanted to see how you are, Colonel.”

  “So you are here to gloat.”

  “No, I’m here to see how you’re faring,” she corrected, leaning back more comfortably in the chair and crossing her arms. “It was a difficult sim and things didn’t turn out as you’d hoped. But we need to learn from this. We need to shrug it off and learn from it.”

  “Learn to be humiliated?”

  Tamara shook her head. “Learn not to make the same mistakes. So that the next time they come here, and mark my words, Verrikoth will be back here, we can stab them in the guts and send them running.”

  “Very lurid,” he said dryly. “So I noticed you changed the sim.”

  She shrugged. “You were expecting things a certain way, so I changed them. But only in ways that I think the pirate lord will use in the future. He allowed his forces to get spread out the last time, unable to cover one another and the FP ships managed to tear them up fairly well before most of them were lost. Next time, I suspect he’s going to try something with a little more finesse. He’s going to try formation work, maybe not exactly like what I used, but he’s going to want to make sure that his forces work together.”

  “I see.”

  “But you managed your forces quite well, Colonel,” Tamara said approvingly.

  He scowled. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not. Your numbers and strengths weren’t enough to try and meet the pirate forces head on, so you changed tactics. Breaking into three speedy formations to slash at the escorts first and then the flanks of the formation, it was very good. If not for a few strokes of bad luck, things might have turned out differently.”

  “Like Greer’s snafu?”

  “Among others.” The she looked sheepish. “And I did increase the turbolaser fire on the cruisers by six percent. Enough to make a small difference but not so much as you’d notice until after.”

  He shook his head slowly, wanting to be angry, but then ended up chuckling. “I knew you were a cheat, Ms. Samair.”

  “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough,” she said in explanation, leaning back in the chair a bit. “That’s what we used to say in tactical school back in the Republic Navy. I’m sure that the sentiment lives on here in Seylonique.”

  “I may have heard it once or twice before.” Tamara hesitated. Gants’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, then his face relaxed in exasperation. “What?”

  “…And I may have had the fire control on all the ships managed by a pair of AI’s,” she admitted impishly. “Nasir and Apogee were interested in joining the excitement. So I brought them in to be part of the op force.”

  He snapped his fingers. “I wondered why it was you needed the Samarkand so close to the shipyards. So with those two controlling the gunnery on the pirates, I’m imagining a great deal more of their fire was hitting my forces than normally should have?”

  “A good deal more, yes,” Tamara replied. “Though I will say that we didn
’t really see any of the cruisers really cut loose with their weapons during the real battle. They really didn’t need to. So the levels of fire that your ships were experiencing, as was Tsesuko’s group, in case you think I was showing favoritism, was about thirty percent heavier than we actually saw during the battle.”

  “So it was much harder.” It wasn’t a question.

  Tamara shrugged. “Plan and train for the worst. That way you can be pleasantly surprised if the real enemy turns out to be less than you expect.”

  “’The more you sweat, the less you bleed’ you mean?” he asked wryly.

  “Exactly. So let’s go over things,” Tamara said. Then she backed down a bit. “If you like.”

  He eyed her for a few seconds. “I heard what happened with the councilor. About them restricting your company’s defense fleet.” He looked as though he was going to say more, but he ended up looking away.

  She shrugged. “I’m actually surprised that it took them as long as it did. Or after the first fight out at the gas mine that they would be willing to let me continue building warships for FP at all.” She grimaced at that, knowing where she was sitting and whom she was talking to.

  Clearly Gants wasn’t offended because he just waved his hand dismissively. ”I’m surprised that you were willing to help ou with the repair and refit of Leytonstone after that battle. I know that we got the fusion reactors from you.”

  “I didn’t want the system to lose its biggest defensive asset because I had a beef with the governing council,” Tamara told him. “Though I will admit I was worried that you, or if not you then whoever the council replaced you with, were going to get it into your head to exact some retribution. Even with the new defensive ships I had built by the time, this ship would still have rolled over us. Though I think I flatter my people when I say that they would have made you regret it.”

  “But with this ship…”