The shuttle dropped my exec and me back on the Grant, leaving enough doughnuts for my crew, and departed for the Constitution. It had been a nice interlude, but it was now over.
The following day, Admiral Lee ordered the Lee and Grant to relieve two Dresdens that had been shadowing the approaching sixth fleet. As an afterthought, his aide, who had verbally transmitted the orders to us ahead of the actual transmission of them, told me that after twenty-four full hours, seven ships still had not commed the admiral’s office as ordered. One of those seven was the Brezhnev. Some captains hadn’t seemed to get the memo that we were at war.
Elian and I accelerated away from our growing fleet, heading towards a point in space that would bring us once again back to the still decelerating sixth bug fleet. We jumped once, placing ourselves in front of the approaching ships, and roughly fifty million kilometers distant. We accelerated towards it at a relatively low rate, and transmitted an encrypted signal to the two Dresdens. They answered several hours later, letting us know that they would begin pulling back from their relatively close position to the bug fleet.
It took us three days to get into laser comm range of the two ships. The admiral had originally ordered us to replace the two Dresdens, but at the last minute he decided to leave them in place, effectively doubling our ability to observe the increasingly active alien fleet.
They forwarded copies of all their data as well as a much more useful synopsis of activity. The Dresdens reported that from day to day they had observed increasing fighter activity, including more total craft in space at any particular time, as well as more patrol activity. We set up a conference call that included all four captains, our execs and a small amount of technical support staff, mainly Etechs.
I started the ball rolling by posing a question: how would a species that had been in space for two millennia maintain equipment and train new crews? It didn’t appear that this question had been raised before, at least in this group. Elian said, “Well, maintenance of equipment would have to be first or second in priority, and the immense size of their mother ships suggests one method of dealing with that. Hell, those ships are big enough they could probably manufacture pretty much anything they required. As to training, unless these beings have exceptionally long lives or some form of hibernation, something our scientists seriously doubt in both cases, then they have multi-generational ships where as the crew ages it raises and trains its replacements. They may have gone through as many as fifty generations. I don’t see how they could have done it, but here they are, sitting right on our front door. My guess? As a species they may have once been creative and inventive, but I don’t see how they could be now, especially considering what we know about their social structure, which pretty much has to be authoritarian. Well, I’m assuming that this fleet is similar to the colony ships we have become so familiar with over the last year. I think that either these crews are the umpteenth iteration of the originals, or they have the ability to put their people into deep sleep, otherwise known by my friend and colleague as ‘corps-sickles’.
I heard mild chuckles over this very old joke. For decades, earth scientists tried with notable failure to develop techniques to put humans into a form of suspended animation. The development of FTL travel ended all or nearly all work on the technique.
The conversation lasted for over thirty minutes with no clear consensus as to what we faced. Yet, once again, that was not my goal. I wanted our crews to openly discuss our problems and possible solutions, if, for no other reason than that we would come to a common understanding of our options. The discussion had focused our thoughts on the possible consequences of a multi generation voyage, and everyone agreed to carefully observe their fighter craft, looking for any differences between individual ships, and for signs that would indicate how well or poorly trained the crews were.
By the conclusion of the meeting we had developed tactics that would place two ships in close proximity to the fleet while the other two sat well back. This would give their crews an opportunity to stand down from what amounted to battle stations and tackle any needed maintenance.
For the next three days the Lee and my Grant ghosted in a spiral around their fleet, recording everything we could. During this time the bug fleet stopped decelerating, causing us a little anxiety for a few moments. Elian commed me and the first thing he said was, “Rob, not only did all their ships shut down their drives, they did it nearly simultaneously. I wonder how they did that? We have never done that on a fleet scale. In fact, the only Fleet ships that can do that are the ones using the lovely Carolyn’s patented software elixir. I wonder, have you met the luminous Carolyn?”
I smiled at my probably very lonely friend and said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I did meet the aforementioned person. In fact, she kissed me. Well, she didn’t actually kiss me as I was a long way off - she kissed my wife, but you know what they say: a kiss is as good at a mile.”
Elian groaned, then put us back on track, “Yes, Lt. Cdr. Goof Ball, now, how do you account for that miraculous event?” I thought about it and said, “We’ve noted that their ships, and their ship movements seem to be centrally controlled, so this doesn’t actually surprise me. I wonder, however, what further changes we are going to see. I suggest that we go to a heightened state of readiness and begin looking for greatly increased activity.”
Elian looked sharply at me and asked, “You think they will begin preparations for their upcoming attack on the already defunct colony ships?” I shrugged and said, “We assume that by now they will be almost close enough to receive optical verification that the colony bugs engaged in a series of major battles. I would love to see their reactions to that! Anyway, they couldn’t know exactly what happened, but they will know it involved hundreds of nuclear weapons. Let’s assume these nut jobs are going to begin sending out scouts and probes. They will also probably increase their security around the major combatants, which is to say, virtually all their ships. In fact, I suggest that we move back to, say, ten million kilometers.”
Elian grinned and said, “What, getting cautious in your old age? Yeah, let’s.”
Five minutes later our two ships, which had remained in very close proximity to each other despite the loss of effective scanner reach that entailed, began slowly edging away from the now quiescent fleet.
Thirty minutes later a veritable horde of fighters erupted from every single carrier in their fleet. At first we couldn’t ascertain any order to the movements, but over the next two hours we began to see them settle down into separate elements with as many as sixty or more fighters, accompanied by at least two destroyers in each. We counted sixteen separate flights with a total of over seven hundred fighters and forty destroyers.
We increased our acceleration to six G’s and continued arcing out rather than heading directly away from them. The elements raced outwards with strictly mathematical precision like an immense explosion. We hoped that our other two Dresdens were alert and didn’t let themselves get caught as we had been in our first battle with the fifth colony fleet.
We didn’t know how long this movement would last, but it certainly got our attention. After two hours we noted that their acceleration was dropping and they began changing their heading to curve back towards their own fleet. By four hours it was clear that they were all returning to their carriers. Elian said, “I think we’ve just seen their first fleet exercise. Scared the hell out of me. We don’t have seven hundred fighters in our entire Fleet, including mothballed ships. Did anything catch your eye?”
I had been looking at the gravity signatures of their ships and said, “Yeah, these fighters look to me to be better versions of the colony ships. They were accelerating at up to fifteen G’s, which is a little better than we saw previously, and they seemed to me to be emitting less, especially infra red. If our guesses about this species are correct, this bunch defeated its colony, so it would follow that these ships would be a little better. I think we ought to suggest that one of the other two Dres
dens depart for the Constitution.”
Elian said, “Agreed. Let’s angle around to meet up with them and discuss things.”
Twelve hours later we were within long-range laser comm range of the location they were supposed to be in. We couldn’t see anything, but we sent out an encrypted burst radio transmission and within one minute received a reply, with coordinates. It took us two more hours to close with them.
They had seen the maneuver and at first they thought we had been spotted. They almost moved in to support us, but after watching the maneuvers unfold, came to the same conclusion we had.
Both Dresdens were running low on food, so I ordered them both to head out. They left thirty minutes later, running in tandem and using our stealth system. We took the opportunity to watch them as they raced away from us, and within thirty minutes we lost sensor contact.
Over the next seven days we watched as the fleet conducted nearly continuous exercises. From the first to the last we saw very little evidence of lack of cohesion or raggedness. That was both frightening and another possible indication that their command and control systems were extremely centralized, which did open up the possibility that they could be pulled out of position fairly easily by a feint from one direction, while the actual attack came in from another.
We analyzed their tactics as we watched them engage in mock battles, using hundreds of fighters and destroyers. Our first reactions to their maneuvers were to dismiss them as highly coordinated but tactically poor. However, as we continued to watch, we changed our minds. Their tactics were designed to place overwhelming firepower on target, on time. Humanity had utilized that same tactic for hundreds of years, before space flight in fact, but we had never seen anyone coordinate hundreds of ships, both large and small, with so much precision and accuracy as we were seeing now. In the face of such overwhelming numbers our own capital ships and fighters would get slaughtered in a straight-up engagement. Fortunately, we had the Dresdens and we had the Hawks and Kestrels, which ships were not about to fight fair.
This fleet was both technically and militarily superior to the colony fleets, and as I watched them I felt in the depths of my heart that this species was never going to accept or even understand peace with its own kind, and I had serious doubts about their ability to even accept our presence in the same universe.
I commed Elian and after a very short conversation we ordered both Kestrels to undock and return to our fleet. I know that my very low ranking opinion would hold no water with most brass, but Admiral Lee would listen very carefully. I wanted him to know that if there was going to be a battle, it would be fought until there was only one species left standing.
The Kestrels moved silently out and were soon lost in the depths of space, leaving Elian and I and our two small destroyers in close proximity to the largest collection of armed military might in the known universe. Possibly not the deadliest, but certainly deadly.
We remained on station, staying well back from the fleet, dodging the nearly constant mock battles and screening elements that scoured the space around their mother ships out to a distance of ten million kilometers. We were forced to position ourselves further away than we desired, but we didn’t have any pressing need to remain any closer.
Elian wondered out loud about the amount of fuel they were using. They didn’t have an unlimited amount of water in those mother ships, but they seemed to have more than enough for a very high training tempo, plus enough left over for the expected combat, and an additional amount to allow them to reach a solar system. Elian commented, “Actually, during their long coasting stage between stars, they would be recycling all their water over and over again, save for having to run their fusion plants at what would probably be a minimum setting. Now, they’re using their reactor mass, getting ready for a battle. Afterwards, they would simply head for the nearest solar system to refuel”.
Two weeks later, to the day, we received an encrypted transmission, giving us a location and time for linking up. We backed away still further before joining up with four Dresdens. They passed over a large amount of message traffic, much of which was from the admiral. In one of them he told us that six Dresdens ought to be able to fight their way clear of most any surprise engagement. He then told me he’d roast my ass if I got surprised. He said that the element of surprise that we retained was more important than getting a little more data, save for the operation about to get underway with the Kestrels.
We had a new translator to try out, requiring a Kestrel to get well inside the outer formations. Four of them detached from the newly arrived ships and slid away, heading towards the enemy. We had to position them between the mother ship and carriers and intercept those carrier waves. Due to the intense amount of combat patrols and general training exercises their job was not going to be easy.
I told them while they were still in laser comm range, “I want you to take all the time you need to penetrate their screens. It is important that we determine whether or not we can understand their communications, but it is imperative that we not reveal our presence to these beings. Right now, we believe that we can defeat them, but if they learn we’ve been poking around in their dirty laundry baskets, we just don’t know what will happen or how that will affect their tactics.”
These crews had been through a lot, most of it with me. One of them simply smiled and said, “I wondered why I was getting paid all those credits.” One of the other pilots said, “What? You’re getting paid? I was told they had to evaluate my performance first. Damn!” The third pilot said, “Well, at least you didn’t have to rent your Kestrel. I’m paying Fleet two hundred credits a month.”
By now I was laughing openly. The fourth, a very attractive female lieutenant said, “I’m smarter than all of you combined. I bought my Kestrel. Fleet said it was going to go up in value and I would be able to sell it back for a good profit.”
I smiled at her and said, “Well, if you get one single scratch on that ship, Fleet will repossess it and you will end up on a Dash 6, guarding the Brezhnev.” Everyone gasped in mock horror. Come to think of it, not so mock.
The four ships slid out of comm range and we pulled even further back to await their return. This operation was going to be a little dicey, as there were so many ships and fighters maneuvering around inside the outer screen and the carriers that it was going to require nearly constant maneuvering to avoid contact. Despite the Kestrels tough skin, a single large energy mount and twenty-four missiles, there were so many ships in the immediate vicinity that they would simply run out of weapons before they ran out of enemies. They were going to be very careful indeed not to get jumped.
It took them thirty hours to get in and out. Once finally in place, they only required ten minutes to verify that the new translator didn’t work. The failure mystified me until I learned – after their return - that the communication protocols previously used had been changed some time after the immense fleet ceased decelerating. Back to square one, and add yet another question.
Two Kestrels departed for our own relatively tiny fleet with our latest data, and the six remaining Dresdens separated into two elements, one with two ships in relatively close to the fleet, and the other four situated further out and reasonably safe from discovery. Due to our stealth technology, we were operating in matched pairs.
Our two ships got an opportunity to stand down from the near-battle station conditions we’d been under, and Elian and I distributed what was rapidly becoming the trademark treat of Admiral Lee. He’d sent along some frozen doughnuts for us.
Our orders from the admiral asked us to pay special attention to any changes in operational tempo, anything that indicated the bugs had become aware of the ‘changed circumstances’ of their assignment, and of the destruction of their ancient enemy. Light that illumined that distant battle was now reaching our present location, so it was about time for the home world fleet to witness the demise of the colony fleets.
Within several days of receiving these instructions we o
bserved evidence that something had changed. Within the space of just a few minutes, all their training operations ceased and fighters began streaming back to their carriers. Over the space of six hours virtually every fighter in their fleet docked, leaving only their destroyers for screening.
Elian and I decided to edge closer to their fleet. The two ships currently on duty were hopefully doing the same, although we didn’t want to radio them to find out. We could just about match their fighter’s acceleration, so as long as we didn’t sit around picking our noses, we could maintain a big enough separation if anything headed our way.
At about fourteen hours several of their carriers began launching dense streams of fighters. They headed directly out, where they hooked up with from two to four destroyers. We saw six separate flights of forty or more fighters plus the destroyers head out on headings that seemed to be designed to greatly increase their fleet’s sensor reach.
Two hours into this new operational tempo we saw additional carriers launch small flights of fighters than took up positions within the huge area between the carriers and the outer layer of destroyers. We found ourselves in an awkward position, as within several hours we would be potentially pinned between one or more of the still accelerating fighter/destroyer groups and the outer security elements of the fleet. We decided that discretion was the sensible reaction, and we began edging back away from their fleet.
Hawk Seven (Flight of the Hawk) Page 78
