Scaevola's Triumph (Gaius Claudius Scaevola trilogy Book 3)

by Ian Miller

  Actually, he mused, he did not know they were errors. Why would the enemy split itself in half? That gave his force the chance to wipe out a superior force in two bites, and that made no strategic sense. What did he actually know? A small force of the enemy had showed itself. Suppose there were only three times as many there? In this situation, Vipsania's force might well be sufficient. But suppose the whole fleet had headed out to this gas giant system? And the great bulk of the enemy fleet were here waiting to attack from the rear? It begged the question as to how the enemy knew the Ulsians would pause where they did, but the Lagrange point was the nearest gravitationally stable point to Ulse, so it might have been a lucky guess, and a cost-little guess if they were wrong.

  Suppose the enemy guessed what would happen when he went behind the gas giant? While he was behind the gas giant, why wouldn't the enemy launch directly and catch Vipsania's ships. Seeing a major fleet move, why not launch a surprise attack? That was, after all, the point of concealment. The gas giant might conceal his looped attack, but it would also conceal the enemy's departure. If the enemy were smart, and could launch all his ships sufficiently quickly, they could always be on the wrong side of the gas giant. And if Gerenthe did not inform him, he could spend far too much vital time searching empty moons.

  Suppose the reason no detectors had been found on this side of the second moon was because there were none! Perhaps there had not been time to install them before the Ulsian fleet arrived. If that were the case, they could creep up right behind the enemy, at least on the second moon. The time to do that was when the second moon was in line with the current position and the gas giant, which was now. The fourth moon would be difficult to surprise, because it was currently at right angles to the line between them and the gas giant, but suppose they observed the attack fleet going to the wrong moon, what would they do? If they got too clever, if Klendor's ships stayed close to his for as long as reasonable, and if they came in on the right line . . ?

  The more he thought about it, the more absurd Gerenthe's plan was. Then a voice from the past came to him: 'Fight your own battles!' But for Gerenthe, what would he do? That was easy! Drive directly at the second moon, and loop around the back. The point that Gerenthe seemed to have missed was that as soon as a major force set off anywhere, the hidden vessels would launch. It was only by taking the most direct route could he hope to catch ships underground.

  At last the fleet launched. Yes, he would leave it on the designated path, at least for a while, because the difference between the two lines was minimal. He gave Marcellus the order: plan a flight on this path for the longest time possible consistent with turning, flying behind the second moon, then circling around and attacking whatever was there. He then ordered the instructions to be sent to all companions, and on receipt a blanket ban on all communications other than direct movement orders until battle commenced. There was a protocol by which such a communications blackout could be imposed, although Gaius realized he would have some explaining to do later. But Gaius also recognized that subsequent inquiries were never severe on a victor, and if he lost, there would be no need for an enquiry.

  To his surprise, Marcellus accepted the change of plan and the orders without question, and even more to his surprise, his ships responded quickly. It turned out, he found out later, that Klendor also had no faith in the original plan, but had kept quiet only out of loyalty to Gaius, while his most recent promotions had equally little faith, and were so eager to embrace the new plan that at the key time they set off so quickly that Gaius would never have the opportunity to recall them. The remaining ships also set off at full acceleration. It was only later explained to him that the previous plan had had heads shaking, and the change was the one thing he could do to raise morale. Suddenly, they were doing what they all wanted to do. Each soldier felt personally responsible for making sure this plan worked.

  Gaius sat back in his command chair. The one thing he knew was that Gerenthe would be furious, but so what? Winning against the enemy was what mattered, and if he could do that, losing points in the post mortem discussions was hardly a terrible fate. Not that he was likely to have much in the way of discussions with Gerenthe. One of them would have difficulty surviving this battle with full rank.

  There followed an extensive period in which nothing seemed to happen. The energy being consumed by the fleet was enormous, but the distances were not small, and although they were soon travelling at an impressive speed, nothing seemed to change. Marcellus looked at him, as if expecting further orders, but Gaius shrugged, and said that the standing order of no communication must be maintained throughout the approach.

  The gas giant slowly began to grow in size, and the little dots that were the moons began to appear as tiny balls. They would be there very soon, and now it was imperative to get into attack formations. Gaius gave the order for the ships to separate into two fleets, then he gave operational control of the second fleet to Admiral Klendor. Then as the ships changed flight path, each fleet then began to assemble into attack squadrons, and some ships began to decelerate. The objective was to arrive in an extended line so that by the time the last squadrons had passed, the earliest would have returned and be able to prevent safe ground launches. There was no point in all arriving, alerting the enemy, then disappearing for long enough that the enemy could launch. Gradually the ships slowed and regrouped, and were now driving directly towards the rear of the target moons.

  Against all protocol, a stream of signals began to arrive from Gerenthe. What was going on? Why was the plan changing . . .

  Gaius sent a simple reply: Strategic reevaluation requires change. Maintain silence.

  To his surprise, Gerenthe complied.

  The older Commodore was quickly approaching the moon. His ships reversed and applied maximum deceleration. Soon Gaius knew they would point themselves at the moon, to force themselves into an artificial orbit to loop around the moon, before again reversing against their new trajectory when velocity had to be lost to maintain an attack. Gaius had to admire the manoeuvre. The old Commodore was driving his ships to the limit, to show off in front of his commander. As long as his ships did not crash! Then, Gaius mused, he'd have his hide, if there were any hide to be had.

  Something was wrong! The ships were not driving at the moon, but had straightened, and just before going out of sight behind the moon, they seemed to be applying full power on a course that would take them away from the moon towards the gas giant. Any element of surprise would be lost, and any ground ships would begin to launch with nothing to stop them, for these lead ships would never return in time. There were two possible explanations for this failure to follow orders. One was plain stupidity or cowardice; the other was that the enemy had already launched and were in space. Getting this choice wrong would be disastrous. He thought for a moment, and finally decided that whatever else this older Commodore was no coward, and he was not stupid. He would base his plan on the supposition that the enemy had launched.

  Gaius immediately ordered two thirds of the fleet designated to this moon to fall in and follow him along the path taken by the older Commodore, while one third was to go around the moon the other way. He then sent orders to Klendor's fleet, to be prepared for the enemy to have launched, and to be somewhere other than on the moon.

  As his ship finally passed around the side of the moon, he saw empty space, a gas giant, and tiny specks of light indicating the exhausts of his squadron. The scene was so peaceful, but the Actium told him an entirely different story. If a line was drawn from where they were now that acted as a tangent to a circle about four times the radius of the gas giant, on the last tenth of that line squadrons of enemy ships were lined up like sharks awaiting a feed on unsuspecting fish due to swim around from the back of the gas giant.

  Gaius immediately ordered full power to the motors, and ordered a change of formation. The enemy ships had motors operating on minimum power, and these were directed so as to avoid giving motor signatures to ships at a
distance, and in particular, Gaius grimaced to himself, ships going around the back of the gas giant on the path he was supposed to be taking. The enemy clearly knew the plan, and Gerenthe clearly had a spy amongst his troops.

  Gaius immediately sent further orders to Klendor's fleet. He informed them of what he had seen, and he informed them that they should also expect their enemy to be launched. Klendor should consider where any Ulsian ships that came around the gas giant late would flee to, once they saw the trap. Wherever that was, that would be where the enemy ships were.

  He sat back in his command chair. It was quite remarkable, he thought, that although everything moved millions of times faster than in his time, everything seemed to happen that much more slowly. The images remained unchanged as his ships approached the gas giant. As he remarked to Marcellus, it appeared that the enemy had not seen them.

  "Visual sighting is difficult on such a warship, especially if you're looking the wrong way," Marcellus informed him, "and they're so deeply embedded in the gas giant's magnetosphere that all their sensory power has to be devoted forward to detect the prey they expect."

  "They appear to have chosen a remarkably poor deployment for what is about to happen," Gaius noted dryly.

  "Yes, but they've chosen a remarkably good deployment for what you were supposed to do," Marcellus noted equally dryly. "In the normal course of events, with our sensors sweeping all space and concentrating on distant moons, we'd probably never see them until they started firing. We only saw them on this line because the Commodore noted the massive exhaust residues going in that direction."

  How the enemy had come to know the plan was something that could be pursued later. While he could still see nothing, the precise enemy deployment could be displayed, and he ordered it. When the display came to life, there were the enemy, in nine lines of squadrons essentially on one curved surface, still apparently oblivious to what was about to happen. He would form nine groups to approach in a formation that was on an angle of about thirty degrees to the line of the enemy ships. At contact, the outer part of the enemy formation would be fired on from the outside, above and below, and as the Ulsian battle groups closed, a wall of fire would run along the enemy. He smiled to himself as he remembered his old general. This was not a square but a cube in which the gas giant closed one line of escape, his ships closed off the rear and the side away from the gas giant, while two other groups covered the "top" and "bottom" faces. They could only use the remaining escape route by exposing their motors, and that would lead to destruction. He gave the orders, and watched in fascination as the distances closed.

  "It appears that they have finally detected us," Marcellus noted.

  "How do you know that?" Gaius asked.

  "They are beginning to fire up motors."

  "I can't see any exhausts," Gaius frowned.

  "Neither, for that matter, can the Actium," Marcellus said, "but if you look carefully towards the southern hemisphere of the gas giant, you can see some simply enormous aurora. They would be rather pretty if we had time to watch them."

  "And they come from?"

  "The first stream of charged particles," Marcellus said, "but it won't do them any good. First contact from the advanced flight now."

  Gaius stared in fascination as he saw on his plot the small number of Ulsian ships tear along the back of the enemy line, stabbing the great whales with spits of fire that looked little better than sparks. But sparks tearing into finely balanced motors caused the most spectacular of explosions, and ship after ship disintegrated, before the Ulsian flight finally tore through their lines and disappeared into the distance, to commence a turning manoeuvre. Gaius sent a signal to cancel that turn, and instead the flight was to progress forward to help find any remaining enemy. Meanwhile the enemy before him were powering up to deal with this new pest. Despite the appearance of ships on this particular approach, there seemed to be no appreciation that this was also the approach of a main battle fleet, one flight of which had got a little ahead of itself through enthusiasm. Well, Gaius grinned to himself, if they thought that first flight was trouble, they were in for a real shock in a minute or so.

  The main part of his fleet then began to close. The first part of his formation had engaged, and a far more spectacular series of explosions began. The lines of ships tore along the line of the enemy, and as a battle group passed the line, they turned towards the gas giant, thus closing out the only escape route for the inner ships of the enemy fleet. The walls of energy, pulse cannon and mines were devastating. The overall scene became almost blinding, as beams of energy tore into enemy motor sections, each time causing an almost immediate total destruction of the target. If the motors survived, large pieces of ship were torn away, and control of the ships were made difficult, then more so as hundreds of tonnes of white hot metal from other exploding ships poured over them. For the less fortunate, the energy of motors disintegrating tore through them, vaporising the ship, and its crew. It was almost too easy. The Ulsian computers sent showers of small energy bursts as if directing spray from a hose, and it was almost as if each drop was sufficient. The enemy had insufficient time to turn, and if a ship tried it exposed its flank to the walls of fire, which usually lead to the ships themselves being torn apart.

  Within less than a minute, all his ships were through the enemy formation, except for a group deployed to follow behind and deal with any sections of enemy that somehow had survived. The immediate reports brought to Gaius persuaded him that this battle was already won. The enemy ships were in such close formation that as ships self-destructed through their motor sources exploding, any enemy undamaged immediately flew into a wall of destruction. Over eighty per cent of this enemy fleet had already received near critical damage. The only undamaged ships were a small group from the front of the line who had seen what was happening, and they had fled in the direction of the other battle.

  Gaius immediately ordered Marcellus to divide this fleet into two unequal parts. Sufficient was to be left to deal with what could be seen of the enemy fleet that was still viable, while he would lead the rest to help Klendor.

  As they travelled at near maximum acceleration, Gaius could see that a battle was already in place. Small tiny bursts of energy could be seen, little dots no bigger than the stars, but for a few moments, brighter.

  Gradually the dots became discernible as objects. Although it seemed wrong, because it could be critical for them to arrive as quickly as possible, it was also imperative that when they did arrive they could be there long enough for their presence to be critical to the outcome. He ordered the ships apply maximum deceleration for a brief period then to turn, then to close almost ballistically and cloaked.

  As the number of brighter dots increased, Gaius requested a diagram of the battle. The enemy here clearly outnumbered Klendor, and Gaius realized that his late analysis was correct: the enemy had not split his forces equally, and the bulk of them were in this zone. At least the worst outcome should not occur for Vipsania, and Gerenthe would have a victory, albeit a meaningless one. Yet by cleaning out half the space, he would claim half the victory! Gaius quickly pulled himself together. They had hardly won here yet.

  Because of numerical superiority, the battle was going against Klendor, and Klendor's fleet had subdivided into small squadrons that were engaged in a sequence of dogfights scattered throughout a large volume of space. Klendor's problem was that numerical inferiority meant that he could only force about half the enemy into these dogfights. The remainder were regrouping, obviously intending to form fresh squadrons to concentrate firepower at key points.

  The regrouped enemy split and began to divide the battle into two unequal portions. The major part kept Klendor's forces from doing anything about the remainder. This smaller section of the enemy began to wheel into two squadrons of Klendor's forces. Now the numerical advantage at that point would be so great that the Ulsians there would be wiped out at little cost. A strangely effective example of the dictum of concentrati
ng power at a decisive point. Then, when that battle was won, those ships could then concentrate on a further section and, in time must prevail. Yet, in a strange way, this superior tactic could now be turned upon the enemy. Gaius ordered his ships to fire up their motors, and took them on an intercept course for this regrouped wing.

  With all weapons firing, the stream of ships tore into the enemy formation. The first attack was well coordinated, and some element of surprise was obtained. Ship after ship of the enemy had huge portions torn from them from the effects of the pulse cannon, and where ships were tightly grouped, ships central to the group were targeted for the dephasing weapons. Ship after ship disintegrated into jets of energy, frequently these same jets tearing into neighbouring ships.

  Gaius' ships were soon through the enemy formation, and as they moved out into space to turn they deployed cloaked seek and destroy mines. As expected, a number of the enemy turned to deal with this new pest, and when Gaius finally began to accelerate back towards the battle, dozens of further flashes occurred in the mined zone. Worse, as the enemy ships became more damaged, they had to slow, and thus became further targets for the mines.

  Gaius smiled as he ordered his ships to follow. The enemy plan was a good one, so why not follow it? He would now divide the battle into two unequal parts, clean out the minor part, then move onto the rest.

  They drove into the battle and wheeled, and found five Ulsian squadrons being mauled by eleven of the M'starn. Eleven squadrons, however, was no match for a major battle group, even if by now it was a rather damaged battle group, which now progressed from dog-fight to dog-fight, each time presenting the locally outnumbered enemy with little chance. Before long, this section was cleared, and they could devote their attention to the last major battle, this time with numerical superiority across the entire battlefield. This battle was effectively won, even if the enemy had yet to acknowledge it.