by John Lumpkin
The slower enemy missiles arrived and burst. Flechettes struck every ship in the allied squadron, but none suffered crippling damage. No nuclear weapons got through.
The enemy opened up with its lasers, scoring hits and killing a dozen crewmen on the American frigate Chinook before counterbatteries shut them down. The Chinese ships maneuvered, setting up lateral vectors aimed at moving the battle toward the main fleet engagement, now underway.
Neil wondered at that. “They’re using standoff tactics, like we usually do,” he commented to Davis.
Davis mused over the tactical plot. “You’re right. What of it?”
“Not sure, sir. I’ll work on it.”
The ships closed to gun range. Neil noted the Chinese and Korean shots were on a limited set of vectors – less an attempt to kill the allies than to herd them in certain directions. A Chinese frigate fell to San Jacinto’s and Swiftsure’s guns. Its riddled hull spun away from the battle.
They aren’t taking the shots that they should, Neil thought. Why not? On his console, he zoomed out the view to include the clusters of the blue-and-red dots marking the main engagement. They were still separate, but closing. As he watched, one of the blue dots – the battlecruiser Truman – blinked and fell away.
Closer, though, was another cluster of red … the Chinese assault carriers. He pressed a key to add their vectors to his view, and realization struck him.
They have made a mistake. Their assault carriers had stumbled into the threat envelope of San Jacinto, and only a single light cruiser was guarding them.
He pointed this out to Davis, who duplicated Neil’s work to convince himself. Sure enough, the slow assault carriers had dodged “down” to avoid the main fleet action even as San Jacinto’s little squadron had broken away, and they had been late in trying to reposition themselves. The ships fighting the San Jacinto now were trying to drive them away, but a good burst of acceleration would put the allies in range of the troop carriers within an hour.
Davis tried calling the Captain, who was strapped into her console on the far side of CIC, but the Hans were blanketing the ship with some kind of jamming that interfered with local comms. Even handhelds weren’t talking to the ship’s central router very well, and only the hardwired consoles were functioning quickly. He tried alerting her with a text chat on her console, but she either didn’t see it or ignored it.
So Davis shouted.
“Skipper! We can hit their carriers!”
A lot of heads jerked up at that. Neil punched up schematics on the vessels. They were reinforced-battalion transports, each carrying more than 1,000 troops. They had minimal defenses.
He then called up data on the escort … and was surprised to find it was a ship he knew, the Hangzhou, the cruiser they had seen battle the Japanese in the opening hours of the war. She was more than a match for San Jacinto.
Davis typed furiously to Thorne, who was now paying attention to her monitor. Neil read over his shoulder:
CDR THORNE: NO AUTHORIZATION, AND THE ADMIRAL IS TOO BUSY TO TALK TO US. OUR MISSION IS TO FLANK THE MAIN FLEET.
LCDR DAVIS: IF WE THREATEN THEIR CARRIERS, THEY WILL HAVE TO REACT, AND WE CAN DISRUPT THEIR OPERATIONS BETTER THAN WITH THE FLANKING ATTACK.
CDR THORNE: WHAT ABOUT THAT CRUISER?
LCDR DAVIS: LET’S HAVE FREMANTLE BREAK OFF WITH US, AND LEAVE SWIFTSURE AND THE OTHERS TO HANDLE THE SHIPS HERE.
CDR THORNE: THAT WILL LEAVE THEM AT A SEVERE DISADVANTAGE.
Davis waited, pondering another line of argument, but he didn’t need one.
CDR THORNE: ALL RIGHT. PUT UP SOME METAL AND BREAK AT HALF A GEE.
San Jacinto and Fremantle thrust together and slowly pulled away from the dogfight.
When the Chinese figured out their intent, they fired at them with everything they had. A laser from a Korean frigate caught San Jacinto amidships, burning through the armored belt that rotated the after gun turret, and locking the gun in place. Erin Quintana, lost in her firing patterns, swore loudly, and looked around, embarrassed at her momentary loss of composure.
But San Jacinto and Fremantle gained distance as the enemy struggled to build vectors to chase them. Swiftsure, Kiyokaze and the other ships hounded them with gunfire.
The troopships and their lone shepherd saw what was coming and turned toward the only potential safe harbor … their main fleet, now fully engaged.
Neil watched as several red ships in the main Chinese fleet suddenly changed direction. They were breaking off to protect the assault carriers, leaving their flanks exposed! A Chinese cruiser suddenly winked out, victim of the Kitty Hawk’s spinal mount.
The vectors told no lies: The Hans wouldn’t make it in time.
San Jacinto and Fremantle underwent turnover to slow to engage the carriers and their escort. This brought the forward lasers to bear on their pursuit, and the closest Chinese frigate suffered multiple hits for it. Then, from behind, Swiftsure hit her with a missile barrage, and the ship cracked in two.
The rest of the pursuing ships fell away, losing ground as they dodged fire from Swiftsure and the other outriders. San Jacinto and Fremantle would have only Hangzhou to deal with.
The Chinese cruiser hung back with the transports. Sensible; if she left them behind, she risked being outmaneuvered should San Jacinto and Fremantle split up.
As the ships entered laser range, the American and Australian ships turned over again, and Hangzhou fired her missiles. The computer tallied 20, then 40, then 88 inbounds. Fifty targeted San Jacinto and the rest Fremantle, closing quickly.
All in: Thorne had San Jacinto and Fremantle fire off most of their remaining offensive missiles. The American salvo included six nukes. Interceptor missiles followed.
As before, the red and blue chevrons darted toward one another, their numbers dwindling as defenses picked them off. The nuclear missiles died early – bad luck, really; the Chinese had no way to pick them out from the others at that distance. Hangzhou did a superb job of protecting its flock, its lasers taking down most of the inbounds targeting the assault carriers. A few flechettes broke through, and two of the carriers showed some minor damage. Meanwhile, several missiles targeting San Jacinto survived long enough to explode, and scores of flechettes raced toward her.
“Turnover,” Thorne ordered. The helmsman wasted no time; Neil felt a push in his back as the ship fired its maneuvering thrusters to point its tail toward Hangzhou.
The maneuver worked; most of the incoming flechettes burned in the destroyer’s fusion candle flame.
“Who said ass-first was all bad?” Davis muttered, just loud enough that Neil and Tom, on either side of him, could hear.
Four loud thunks reverberated through the ship … a few darts had found their way through. One hit a telescope box on the hull. San Jacinto wasn’t blind, but another strike like that would leave her terribly nearsighted.
“All right,” Thorne said. “Let’s turn over again and kill this customer.”
Before the helmsman could respond, Tom shouted, “Captain! Fremantle’s hit!”
Oh no, Neil thought, punching up an image.
A late-bursting missile – and its score of flechettes – had beaten the Australian frigate’s layered defenses, and she was bleeding atmosphere from a dozen wounds.
She doesn’t look too bad, Neil thought, but a secondary explosion gave lie to the thought. Not a heat sink. Ordnance?
“Comms?” Thorne asked. “Any contact?”
“I last spoke to their comms officer about four minutes ago. Nothing now,” Vikram replied.
Neil checked his text chat with Kieran Wu, dormant for the last half-hour … nothing. He typed a message, but the connection came back as broken. He clenched his fist. He liked Kieran.
Fremantle coasted, her nose pointed toward Hangzhou, but she didn’t maneuver. She was out of action.
The loss must have shaken Thorne, for she changed her plan of attack.
“Garcia, unshutter the main lasers and fire on
that cruiser. Quintana, kinetics at 1,500 klicks.”
It was a mistake, Neil knew, but Davis didn’t argue, and Mendoza was in her usual combat exile on the bridge. They had been saving the lasers for the assault carriers; here, they were vulnerable to Hangzhou’s counterbatteries. Laser One’s optics were fried quickly; Laser Two managed to wreck one of Hangzhou’s gun mounts before going down. It would be fifteen minutes until they could shoot again.
Now came the punishment. Erin did her best, throwing deadly and complex patterns of metal in Hangzhou’s path, but the damaged turret belt limited her ability to cover everywhere Hangzhou might dodge. The Chinese cruiser, meanwhile, was firing her guns at San Jacinto, forcing the destroyer to jink and turn repeatedly.
At last, Hangzhou unshuttered her own forward laser cannon and fired. Beams bore into San Jacinto’s flank. One destroyed the autoloader for the forward gun turret, leaving Erin with the single, stuck gun below. Another laser blasted a bulbous point-defense radar on the hull, which lost its moorings. It tumbled away, trailing debris.
Hangzhou’s third blast pierced an already damaged chunk of armor, penetrating into the engineering section and cutting the main cable bus that connected the ship’s helm to the drive. The drive’s control computer detected the signal loss from the helm computer and went into failure mode: It cut off the hydrogen remass flow and reduced the fusion reaction to the bare minimum to sustain it.
San Jacinto was now coasting; it could change its facing but not its velocity, and Hangzhou closed in for the kill. It would be twenty minutes or more until a damage control team could re-connect the damaged cable and bring the drive back on-line. The American destroyer pointed her nose at the Chinese cruiser, trying to shield her vitals with what armor she had left.
Hangzhou fired again. The beam sliced through the power lines feeding the ship’s four secondary gun batteries.
A yellow marker on Garcia’s console blinked green.
“I’ve got Laser One back!” he shouted.
“Target their forward lasers,” Thorne told him. “Fire Control, release the rest of the missiles.”
It was the battered San Jacinto’s last, desperate strike, but it worked. Missile flechettes ripped into the Hangzhou’s CIC, cutting into the weapons consoles and the men and women at them. Garcia’s repaired laser burned through a shutter and wrecked an enemy laser cannon before a Chinese counterbattery, operating on automatic, killed Laser One yet again, this time also hitting one of the main pipes that let Garcia transfer laser power to any emitter on the ship.
Neil hoped the Han might break off then, but it kept coming, looming larger in the external cameras. They’ll fight to the death. They have too many people to protect.
He realized Hangzhou had somehow changed since he had last stared at it, nearly a year ago, in the battle outside Vandenberg. There … something strange on the ship’s forward sphere. It triggered a memory in Neil, something he had read while skimming intelligence reports months ago.
Unconfirmed report ships in this series mounting particle cannons.
“Captain! Enemy may be bringing a particle weapon to bear!” he shouted. Everyone knew what that meant. Particle beams were brutal weapons that chopped into your cells, made you sterile, destroyed your organs. A direct hit could kill you. A glancing hit would mean a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning.
They were also short-range weapons, useful only at around 200 kilometers or less. The beams lost focus quickly, for one, and all ships, civilian and military, carried radiation shielding to protect those onboard from cosmic rays and solar flares, and it could handle a particle beam blast at greater distances. The United States didn’t mount particle cannon, more for practical reasons than ethical ones.
Hangzhou fired, and the beam hit forward, sweeping through several sections.
“Captain, I’ve lost contact with the bridge,” Tom said grimly. Mendoza was up there, along with Hayes.
“Get Avery up there,” Thorne said, to no one in particular. Tom called the medical officer on the internal comm, and Avery argued he should stay at his duty station so the injured could continue to come to him. Avery was in the right – the regs insisted he stay in medical – but a curt order from Thorne sent him racing through the ship.
San Jacinto was running out of teeth. All she had left were a few counterbattery and point-defense laser emitters, each able to muster only a few dozen megawatts, and the single, stuck coilgun turret. Thorne ordered the ship to rotate on its long axis to bring the gun to bear, and she wondered if the heat she felt on the back her neck was a harbinger of a vomiting death, or just an effect of her fear.
Hangzhou fired again. The particle beam hit aft, killing four members of the damage control team trying to reconnect the helm to the fusion candle. Screams briefly echoed through an open comm channel before Tom cut if off.
Neil stole a glance at the CIC crew around him. The fear was palpable. Crewmen were looking at one another, shaking their heads, wiping sweat from their brows.
“Stop the roll so I can shoot!” Erin yelled, and the helmsman fired thrusters to stop the ship’s rotation. The spin slowed. Erin stabbed at a key, and San Jacinto’s surviving gun turret fired a succession of shells at more than seven kilometers a second.
At this range, Hangzhou’s point defenses had no time to respond. The shells hit the looming cruiser square on the nose, wrecking the particle beam emitter and smashing the laser cannon mounts beyond any hope of repair.
Erin kept firing, but San Jacinto continued on its slow rotation.
“Damn it, stop the roll!” she shouted, watching the Hangzhou move beyond of the maximum elevation of her gun.
“I can’t! Only getting partial response! It will take thirty minutes to stop the roll entirely.”
The two ships were less than fifteen kilometers apart, both unable to fire.
“Something leaving the target’s hull!” a sensor tech shouted.
Thorne’s head snapped up. “Missiles?”
“Negative … they’re jumpers! I count four of them. I think they’re trying to board us!”
It was the only weapon Hangzhou had left.
Thorne pressed the all-hands key. “This is the captain. Prepare to repel boarders.” She switched to another circuit. “Sanchez, is your team on the flight deck?”
“We’re headed that way. I’m sending Thompson to the weapons locker. She’ll arm the damage control teams and then head up to Combat.”
Davis said, “Could we give them the candle?”
“At the current power output? They wouldn’t feel a warm breeze.”
Thorne asked, “How many are we up against?”
Neil scanned the schematic of the Han craft. “I’d say those could carry thirty each. We’re probably up against the ship’s complement of twenty Marines and the rest will be crew members.”
Thompson, the Marine, floated in a minute later, pulling a bulky pack behind her. She passed out sidearms to everyone in CIC.
“Everyone make sure you have a clip with a blue stripe,” she said. She posted herself at the open hatch connecting CIC to the main shaft through the ship, located at the front of the CIC theater.
“Blue stripe?” Neil asked Davis.
“Yep. Those are pre-fragmented. They won’t penetrate any bulkheads. Don’t want to hit anything vital or open up a hole in the hull. I take it you guys have no zero-g combat experience?”
“No, sir,” Neil said. Tom shook his head.
“Guess we should drill this from now on, eh? Look, if the bad guys get close, I’m going to turn over my console to you two. You’ll be in charge of the ship, such as it is. Neil, you take weapons and propulsion. Tom, you take over internal operations.” He shook his head. “Never thought it would come down like this.”
Erin, seated in front of Neil, held a hand to her ear, nodding excitedly. She clenched a fist. “Come on, a little more,” she whispered to her screen.
She pressed a key. “Gotcha! Negated one of
the birds, skipper! Freeman in Damage Control gave me one of the secondaries back. Tagged him as he crossed into my PD envelope.”
Outside, one of the Chinese shuttles spun wildly, having taken a shell through its forward window from one of San Jacinto’s small gun turrets. Thorne opened her mouth to respond, but an engineering tech shouted, “Hull breach, dropship bay!”
“Decompression?”
“Negative. Board reads green. They’re drilling from a pressurized compartment.”
They could only watch on the internal cameras. The flight deck crew had long cleared out; the dropship bay was the largest open space on the ship and could easily decompress during a battle.
At one end, a flash as a Chinese private finished cutting a meter-wide hole in the hull. The soldier pushed the disk into the bay, and it spun slowly away, shielding him.
More bright flashes, briefly overwhelming the cameras, as the Chinese troopers detonated stun grenades on the flight deck. Shouts and shots thundered through the communications links.
Sanchez, her voice too loud over the comms: “Two more hull breaches in the dropship bay! Harkins, get some fire on that hole right now!”
“What’s their game?” Tom asked quietly.
“Could they set a bomb in the hangar bay and push off?” Neil asked.
“Risky play,” Davis said. “While they are moving off, we could throw the bomb out of the ship before it blows. They are probably trying to capture the ship outright, or at least disable us. If they want to protect the carriers, and they can’t shoot us, taking CIC and our weapons stations is the only option they have.”
Neil imagined San Jacinto’s exterior, with the little boarding shuttles clutching it like remoras to a shark. The dropship bay was in the central section of the ship, well beneath CIC.
“Combat, this is Avery on the bridge. I’ve got six dead or expectant up here, radiation poisoning. The XO’s alive but in a bad way.”
Thorne: “Sanchez, Combat, what’s your status?”
Silence. She repeated the inquiry, and called for Staff Sergeant Harkins. Nothing. More jamming? If they weren’t at a wired comms panel, they would be out of touch. Or were they dead?
