Battle Group Titan: Beyond Warp ((Battle Group Titan Series Vol 1))

by Michael Adams

  “Commander Inman” Bo Jr. paged.

  “Go ahead Bo” replied Inman.

  “Sir the JRay probes just picked up a course change for the Silirc fleet; they are headed right for us” Bo Jr. warned.

  “What is their ETA Bo” Inman asked.

  “About two week’s sir” Bo Jr. replied.

  “How is possible for them to travel and how could they know we are here?” queried Inman.

  “We do not know, an anomaly formed in front of the fleet and they went through it just after their course change” replied Bo Jr.

  “Executive Team” paged Inman, “please meet me in the conference room immediately.

  The entire team ported into the conference room, and within a minute everyone was present.

  “Ok Bo Junior, fill us in” commanded Inman.

  Bo Jr. filled the rest of the team in on the Silirc’s sudden change in course and surmised they were using a dimensional shift or wormhole to travel at faster than warp speeds.

  “How did they detect us, we should be in different time zones?” queried Cerro.

  “No idea how they did it” replied Bo Jr.

  “We are in the infancy stage of understanding time, gravity, and space. In reality, the shell generator discovery came about as much by accident as it did by research. We just do not have enough understanding; we do not even know what most of the different dimensions are, only the three we currently use. And the others are still a mystery” Bennett replied.

  “We need to put our thinking hats on. Our entire strategy is predicated on the Silirc ships being in a different time zone, if they can control the time zones, we need another plan, and it needs to come together quickly” Inman urged.

  “Bo Junior, are we making any headway in weapons research? I know you have been working on turning the Star Eaters systems into weapons, are you having any luck?” queried Cerro.

  “We have it operational, but we need it in the proximity of a star if it is going to harvest the energy and expel it” replied Bo Jr.

  “Can it be directed to eat spacecraft?” queried Evelyn Reeder Inman.

  “It eats anything producing energy. I would need to get it within striking distance to see what kind of damage it could produce. It would be precarious for the ship housing the energy attraction device, not only would it be a target, the amount of energy entering the system has to discharge almost instantaneously, or the systems will overheat, and self-destruct” Bo Jr. replied.

  “Bo, what if we redirected the energy collected through a modified jukebox. Something to redirect the collected energy in a concentrated form to a place we select. In essence, we suck the energy from a craft and then almost instantly port it onto their bridge, or into their systems, or just flood the ship with it; we don’t have to destroy the ship, we just have to disable it” theorized Bennett.

  “Sorry Leo, but I have to disagree with you; we have to destroy all life on those ships. It is their nature to kill and enslave, we have seen it, and if we leave them alive but dead in the water, they will repair their fleet, and we will have another encounter ahead of us. And as we have seen, they adapt to everything we have thrown at them” Inman replied to the agreement of everyone in the room.

  “I think I can make it work” replied Bo Jr.

  “Ok Bo, I want you to leave now and start working on the Star Eater conversion project. I think we should try and port the high energy blasts into all livable space on each craft. But let’s start by flooding the bridge then go from there, at least we can disable the battle cruisers and give us time to take the ship out with other weapons” Inman commanded.

  The strategy meeting went on for hours as the team assembled battle plans and readied the fleet for the inevitable fight ahead of them.

  “Bo Stockman” paged Inman.

  “I am here Will” replied Bo Sr. over the comlink.

  “Bo can you meet me for breakfast; I want to discuss something with you” Inman requested.

  Bo Stockman Sr. and Will Inman sat down to a hot cup of coffee and small talk before Will finally broke into what he wanted to discuss.

  “Bo, I want you to take the civilian ships in the fleet to a safe distance from the fight. We will have constant contact and will port injured directly to triage locations on the hospital ships. The battle will be a fight to the death, theirs or ours. We will stick with our battle plan of making bombing runs, but we will have casualties and possibly suffer a total loss. I will not allow complete destruction of our battle groups. If we cannot at least stop them or turn them around we will have to keep engaging until we are victorious or spent, we have no other option other than leaving earth at the mercy of the Silirc, and we will not go down without a fight” Inman began.

  “I understand Will, I will take good care of Evelyn and the kids” Bo replied.

  “I know you will Bo; we are lucky to have friends like you and Terry.”

  Will Inman got up and walked out of the diner without another word as the prospects of what lies ahead started to sink in. Bo sat quietly and motioned for Terry to join him.

  The badly damaged UB was chosen to house the Star Eater’s components, so, and the crews equipped it with a modification of the JRay jukebox system and a new specialized targeting system tightly coupled to the standard JRay probe system. Probes sent to the bridge of a ship and moved around internally at sub-second time intervals establish coordinates for the targeting system, with the exact targeting locations set the energy weapon could be delivered throughout the ship almost instantaneously.

  The most glaring hole in the plan to use the Star Eater as a weapon was the fact there was only one of them and five hundred thousand combat ships to destroy.

  Considering the limited effectiveness their battle plan, Inman and Cerro decided to hit the bridge of every ship with a ball of fire capable of wiping out the crews and equipment completely. The tactic would allow them to take out thousands of ships per minute which would give the rest of the fleet time to destroy those ships before they could recover.

  Battle

  “Newman, are all the battle groups synchronized?” asked Inman.

  “Yes sir, we are ready for departure” replied Newman.

  “Cerro, are the shuttle fighters ready to disembark immediately upon our arrival?” asked Inman.

  “Aye sir, we will hit them hard right off of the bat.”

  “I want the fleet widely disbursed over the enemy’s entire fleet; I don’t want them to be able to get firing solutions on us if at all possible. We need to make thousands of coordinated bombing runs, and they have to be within the Star Eater’s targeting range” Inman commanded. “Are the special ops boarding parties ready? I want them taking over the smaller ships and firing at the larger ships around them as quickly as they can.”

  “Yes sir, we are all set” Cerro responded with an apprehensive tone.

  “I know John; I’m just a little apprehensive about this plan too; I do not like having to depend so heavily upon an unproven technology.”

  “Let’s get out of here Newman” commanded Inman.

  Inman’s battle group led the others at high warp to meet up with the Silirc fleet. An hour into the flight Newman brought them out of warp right on top of the Silirc fleet. Instantly the shuttle fighters were launched into dispersing patterns over the top of the enemy firing as they proceeded toward the outer edge of the Silirc convoy.

  Almost as quickly as they arrived the Silirc began to return fire. This time the impact their weapons was absorbed by the shell generators which were now layered three deep on every ship in the human fleet.

  Giant Silirc ships could be seen exploding from within across the horizon.

  “Deploy the boarding parties” commanded Cerro.

  It would take a few minutes for the eight member parties to secure the bridge of the small attack ships they were sent to commandeer. The first party was sent in with live communications comlinks so Cerro and Inman could monitor the required force size and strength. Eigh
t soldier attack groups proved sufficient to prevail over the surprised Silirc crews of six on each of the smaller class attack ships.

  Within a couple of minutes, the soldiers had their commandeered ships firing at the other ships within their radius without any return fire.

  “Deploy all the rest of the teams” barked Cerro.

  “Is the Star Eater ready?” asked Inman.

  “Almost sir” responded Newman.

  “Good, I want to see how quickly we can get some of these larger battle cruisers offline. They are starting to penetrate the outer shells of the smaller ships” reported Cerro.

  Almost as quickly as Cerro asked, Silirc battleships started to drift out of control one at a time in intervals of about ten seconds, floating out into space like weightless fireflies. The Star Eater was doing her work, and she was located so far off of the fleet the Silirc had no way to counter attack.

  Will Inman looked up at the time, enemy ships disabled or destroyed and human fleet disabled counters on the overhead monitor. Time was already at thirty seconds, enemy ships registered over three hundred and the counter was moving quickly, fleet disabled or destroyed was still at zero.

  “Sir, we are starting to get boarding party casualties” reported Cerro, “one dead and twenty wounded, but we are taking a large number of ships over, and it has added significant firepower to our fleet. The Silirc are not returning fire; it must be confusing them because they are just sitting ducks” reported Cerro.

  “Excellent” replied Inman.

  Time was now at one minute, enemy destroyed was already up to one thousand and fleet was still at zero. Just as Inman looked down to his console the fleet number changed to one as a large telltale explosion over the Silirc fleet delivered the visual reality, the fleet had her first casualty.

  “All shuttle fighters retreat” Cerro ordered, “Newman, give them all orders to group up on battle cruisers. All Cruisers resume the bombing run formations over the Silirc fleet as soon as the shuttle fighters are in position.”

  With fifteen seconds the shuttle fighters were tucked up inside the inner layer of shells as they continued their assault.

  Inman glanced at the counter again, three thousand and fleet still at one.

  “Sir, the outer shell on three of the cruisers has been penetrated, we estimate five more minutes until they have to retreat” reported Cerro.

  “When they penetrate the second shell have them pull away to a safe distance until they can get them both back up. Keep that protocol in place” instructed Inman.

  “Aye, sir” Cerro replied.

  Suddenly the attack on the Titan subsided, and Inman quickly scanned the three sixty portals for a visual queue as to what was going on, then instantly before his eyes he knew instinctively, the Silirc were concentrating fire on the Eagle.

  “Retrieve the fleet” Inman commanded.

  Within seconds the entire fleet was out of range as the Reeder drives synchronized across the fleet and delivered them from danger.

  “Damage report” commanded Inman as he glanced at the overhead tally monitor. “Seven thousand Silirc and one fleet ship,” Inman thought.

  “Not good commander” Cerro began, “we have over twenty dead and two to three hundred injured. Most of the dead were on the shuttle fighters, and the boarding parties suffered five casualties. Most of the injuries were aboard the Eagle in the last few moments of the battle, the concentration of fire took out the shells almost immediately, and the subsequent strikes caused massive internal fires and hull breaches. Fortunately, the new Instafoam sealing system fixed the breaches before to much damage.”

  “What is an Instafoam sealer” queried Inman.

  “One of the new scientists teamed up with some of the engineers on board and came up with the stuff, in a streak of good luck the new system was deployed for testing on the Eagle before we departed.”

  “Executive team to the conference room” commanded Inman.

  Will Inman walked into an empty conference room searching his mind for ideas on how to combat the Silirc strategies they had just encountered.

  As the room filled with his teammates Will was sullen if not defeated, the prospect of losing more men and women in battle was not an option Will was interested in engaging in at the moment.

  “We need a winning strategy and a more effective tactical advantage” Inman began. “They adapt as fast as we can change things up, and there are just too many of them.”

  “Sir, how about the Star Eater” Bo Junior exclaimed. “Why not use the Star Eater to deliver parts of a sun right into their formations. We would have to get them out of warp, but it has been easy to get them to drop out, as soon as we begin to attack they drop out.”

  “You know what this means” Evelyn Reeder exclaimed, “they hide the battle group within the civilian ships like terrorists; we will take out huge numbers of their population if we do this. And we do not know if the plasma energy will even destroy the ships anyway.”

  “If it is ineffective then it will not matter, they will survive. But the real issue is whether or not we have a choice. We cannot continue to take the casualties we will encounter with the way we have been attacking, we have to do something different if we want to keep our casualties down” replied Cerro.

  Will Inman was glad John responded to Evelyn’s comments, he did not want to be the bad guy having to respond to his bride, she was very sensitive to this issue, and the expressions on her face told him it bothered her greatly.

  “Let’s do a trial run, send a ball of fire at them from close enough range to make sure it only hits a military target” Inman commanded, “I want to see if this can work or us.”

  “It will take a couple of hours to get the Eater ship close to a star.At that point the wormhole exit location has to be fed to the delivery system with precise coordinates, so we have to have a ship in the immediate vicinity to get the kind of accuracy we need” replied the young Stockman.

  “Let’s get it done” Inman commanded.

  Bo Stockman Junior ported out of the room along with Elizabeth Murphy Stockman to begin preparations for the field test of the Star Eater.

  “So how do we beat them at their own game” Inman began, “if they can adapt within five minutes of our engagement with them, how can we stay one step ahead. We need a strategic advantage, something we can use as a tactical and strategic advantage.”

  “What about the Indo’s” Will Bennett offered, “We have tried destroying them, their numbers are staggering, and they seem to adapt to everything we throw at them very quickly. Do the Indo’s have a strategy we can use?”

  “Can we turn their numbers against them?” Bo Sr. offered, “How can we use their numbers and sheer size against them?”

  Leo Bennett jumped out of his seat and ported immediately out of the room. The sudden movement startled the rest of the team.

  “Will” began the page from Bennett, “I think I am on to something, I have to check on something, but I will be right back.”

  “We will be here” Inman sheepishly responded.

  Within two minutes Leo ported back into the room with a smile on his face.

  “Ok,” Leo said as he walked up to the glass board and began to draw, “these circles represent the clustered battle cruisers of the Silirc fleet, and there are a little over one hundred ships in one of their battle groups. We can spread a shell out and cover all the Silirc ships within a mile radius. Once we have deployed the shell, we can turn on the gravity to one hundred times normal.” Bennett drew a line around all of the ships he had drawn on the glass board, “All of the ships within a mile of the shell’s center will quickly collapse upon the center; it will be a miniature black hole of sorts.”

  “How long will it take” Inman queried.

  “I will need about ten seconds from the time the probe and the shell generator is delivered to activate the shell and engage the dimensional gravity array” replied Bennett.

  “Why did you have to leave the room?
” Evelyn asked.

  “I needed to do the calculations on the lab computers; I don’t have the generators modeled on the ship's systems, it would overload them” explained Bennett.

  “What are our risks?” Inman asked.

  “Two actually, we have to be close enough to control everything, just out of range of the generators. The second issue is a little more dangerous; we will also lose the shell generators in the middle of the mess. I think we will get a molten effect; I have to do some calculations to determine just what will happen at the center.”

  “Couldn’t they defeat the plan simply by spreading out over greater than a mile per ship” queried Bo Stockman Senior.

  “Yes, they could” replied Bennett. “We have to give them a reason to stay tightly grouped.”

  “Leo, you mentioned the Indo’s knack for deception” Inman began, “John, let’s get the two we captured in here and see if they can offer us up some ideas on getting the Silirc ships into a tight group.”

  Within a minute the two captured Indo soldiers were ported into the conference room with armed guards on either side of them.

  “Gentlemen” Inman began, “we are in life and death struggle with the Silirc force who attacked your people. We saw how you were able to cloak an entire planet; we just need to cloak a small ship.”

  “How can we help, we are not scientists, we are prisoners aboard your ship” replied the taller of the two Indo prisoners.

  “What can you tell us about your cloaking technology” Bennett asked.

  “It is not a cloaking device, it is a deception device” began the Indo soldier. “It is easy for an enemy to see what they expect to see. “This is our way; this is what I offer my generous captors.”

  Inman nodded to the soldiers and soon the Indo soldiers and their guards ported out of the room.

  “Of course” began Evelyn Reeder Inman, “they are displaying an image of what the viewer would expect to see, space. It is a matter of projecting space on all sides of the shell generator!”

  “Can you do it” queried Inman.

  “Of course, not difficult or time-consuming” replied Evelyn.

  Evelyn spent a few minutes going over the details of how it would be done in an excited tone until she realized she had lost her audience and in the nodding stage of changing the subject.