The Gathering Storm (The New Federation Book 4)

by Chris Hechtl

  Even though they were at the bottom, they were still a match for the Cobra class fighters the Federation forces flew. They were outfitted for interceptor work while the Executor had massive engines, an extra microreactor, and two outboard capital ship grasers. They were intended to hit warships.

  The Emperor class fighters were far fewer in number but just as dangerous. Like the other two, it had stronger shields and armor than the Cobra. It was also faster. A rare few of them still had their MAM reactors on board.

  Once the furball engaged, it was the Federation's turn to take heavy losses. Bill Paxton was one of the first casualties, but he was far from the last. To the survivor's dismay, they found that these enemies had far better ECM and were far better trained than the emergency fighters they'd tangled with not a short time ago.

  The Skull Squadron pilots were so intent on blooding themselves on the enemy fighters that they ignored the bomber force. Only when their CAG realized the danger did they turn and try to break from the furball.

  But, by that time it was too late. The bombers had taken advantage of the fighter's distraction in order to go to full afterburner past the battle zone and at the enemy forces.

  “They have fighters covering them,” Admiral Wong stated.

  “I'm moving my screen forward. They'll push them back,” Admiral Mueller scoffed.

  “Don't underestimate them,” Cyrano replied urgently. There was a thirty-second delay in his transmissions. His fleet was catching up with them, but until he was closer he couldn't afford the delay so had ceded control to Admiral Mueller for the moment.

  “Sure, we might get hurt but not a lot,” Admiral Mueller stated.

  “Still, I'm taking precautions,” Admiral Wong stated as he ordered Courageous back and deeper into their formation.

  “How courageous of you,” Admiral Mueller said scathingly.

  “You know a fleet carrier has no business in point defense,” Admiral Wong growled right back, eyes flashing.

  :::{)(}:::

  Commander Bleakly closed his eyes in pain as he noted the mounting losses. They outnumbered the enemy by 1.3 to 1, but that didn't seem to matter. For the first time, he felt betrayed by his own technology.

  Loosing Bill was just the tip of the iceberg he knew, so did Meia and the bomber pilots. The bombers were grimly keeping their course, corkscrewing through the enemy's long-range fire, and banking around the clouds of flack and targeting lasers to get ever closer to their launch zones.

  :::{)(}:::

  Lieutenant Commander Tomar Katic briefly wondered if he was in a nightmare before he did his best to put fear aside and focus on the situation. He was squadron commander and therefore in the front of his squadron. He was also the first bomber in the delta formations.

  “Good tone, we're ready. Ordinance primed and ready,” his bombardier stated over the ship's intercom.

  “On your order,” he said.

  “Mine?” the lieutenant yelped.

  “Don't waste time!” Lieutenant Shaw, the copilot, snarled.

  “Yes, sir. I mean Fox Three all! Torpedoes away!” the lieutenant said, putting words to action and triggering a magnum launch of torpedoes at the dreadnought spitting fire at them.

  Immediately Tomar kicked his bomber clear of the group as his crew switched to defensive operations. He didn't smile but he felt a surge of triumph as the bombers cycled their fire in a single wave and then turned away. Then his ship shook with a near miss.

  “Damn it. I wanted to see them hit,” his copilot muttered.

  “No, you didn't. It'd be the last thing you saw,” Tomar said just as a round from a destroyer tore his bomber apart.

  :::{)(}:::

  Meia saw the bombers cycle their fire, but she was busy firing off chaff and decoys to distract the enemy ships. When the bombers turned, she started to sigh in relief only to see the lead bomber disintegrate in enemy fire. She swore but was helpless to prevent it. The bomber wasn't the only one to die but then the enemy's fire turned on the torpedo spread.

  Their momentary inattention to the true threat was the undoing for some of them. The torpedoes locked on course and deployed their own penetration aides.

  :::{)(}:::

  For Admiral Mueller, the incoming wave of torpedoes was something of a nightmare he had only experienced in a simulation. But this was no simulation he thought. He should be grateful that his flagship wasn't one of their targets. Obliterator was on the other side of the formation from them, but his trite relief was short lived as ordinance once committed to history began to go off.

  Each of the torpedoes had a conventional grav lance penetrator or it looked like one on first blush. It was twice as powerful as the ordinary ordinance with a 10 percent longer burn time. So, the torpedoes that survived the PDL fire, not only ripped down the shields of their targets with ease they also got within easy striking distance of the hull. Some getting so far as to actually kiss it before their actual warheads went off.

  And these were no ordinary megaton warheads either. Packed into each warhead was a plasma penetrator that rammed through the layers of armor. Behind it came the final warhead, a kilogram of antimatter and deuterium with a series of micrograv emitters.

  The resulting blasts tore the ships apart. It still took two or three hits to destroy a ship, but these were capital ships. Four battle cruisers and two dreadnoughts, Bellerephon XXI and Neptune, exploded in balls of debris and energy. Five destroyers and four cruisers met the same fate. Ten other ships were crippled in the three minutes of intense combat.

  :::{)(}:::

  “Son of a …” Admiral Wong, wide-eyed, ordered his fighters back to cover the main fleet. He was fortunate that Courageous was in the center of the formation. By the time the enemy had gotten through the screen and forward units, they'd expended their torpedoes and had exited the battle space.

  It took time to establish a connection to Obliterator. Obliterator's sister ship, Neptune, had shielded her division mate with her own ponderous body. However, her death and destruction had showered the battle space and the fleet with her debris. She wasn't alone in that; each of the destroyed ships had showered the area with debris. The debris had battered-down shields to crater armor underneath. Equipment on many hulls were scoured away in the carnage.

  :::{)(}:::

  Once they had shelled out their torpedoes, the surviving bombers broke off and got clear. When Skull Squadron broke off from the Federation wing, the surviving Federation fighters sent off a last present up their six in the form of their remaining missiles. Some of the Horathian fighters managed to defend against them, but not all. Six more E-class fighters were destroyed.

  It wasn't really a victory for the Federation forces to celebrate, more of an act of spite and defiance. They had taken the worse part of the exchange with just thirty-one of the one hundred twenty fighters that had been committed to the battle surviving to get clear. Commander Bleakly took stock for a moment and then began to issue orders to escort the damaged ships and arrange refueling points for the ships.

  :::{)(}:::

  Trajan grimaced as he saw the initial casualty reports. They were off, they always were. There were a lot of question marks too. Some of the fighters and bombers might be damaged or just out of contact.

  Still, it was grim reading. The good news was that they were finally in range of the fleet train. Supply shuttles and tugs had already been dispatched to the fleet despite the threat of a running battle.

  Replenishing while underway by shuttle purely sucked. They got small sips, and it was dangerous. But it was a scenario they'd trained for, so his people swung into action with smooth efficiency despite the threat hanging over them.

  The SITREP as resupply shuttles met up with the survivors of the two strike forces helped fill in some of the blanks on the missing craft a half hour later. They would have plenty of fuel and munitions to go around it seemed, Trajan thought darkly. Those ships that were too crippled were being stripped of their crew and then aband
oned with scuttle charges set. He was almost tempted to program their A.I. to go after the enemy fleet, but he doubted they'd buy it. It would be nice to kamikaze a few of the bastards though.

  Junior Valdez had similar thoughts. But he was thinking of all the people that had just been lost, the empty racks tomorrow, and the letters that would have to be written. But, first they had to survive to write them he reminded himself.

  :::{)(}:::

  “Spirits of space …” Admiral Wong said when they finally reestablished communications within the fleet. His ship was in chaos as fighters called in to resupply. Some had come back in order to land and hadn't gotten the coordinates of the resupply shuttles. That sucked.

  He knew it was far worse for Admiral Mueller. Obliterator had taken damage. She wasn't just scuffed; they'd lost some people due to damage. Admiral Mueller appeared livid but chastened by the experience.

  “That bad? Courageous didn't get scratched, did she?” Cyrano asked as his fleet came up behind the battered reinforcements.

  “Bad enough. What the hell,” the older admiral was clearly shaken by the experience he'd just witnessed.

  He wasn't the only one. Commodore Couglin looked shaken as well. So did Admiral Mueller.

  “We need to press home the attack. They are rearming now,” Admiral Mueller grated. “Though I admit, at that loss ratio I don't know if it is worth it.”

  “You're damn right! We can't sustain that sort of losses! Who would call it a win if we're all dead??!?” Commodore Couglin erupted.

  “They didn't use those before,” Cyrano mused. “My thinking is that they were holding them in reserve. They might not have many.”

  “What they had was bad enough,” Admiral Mueller replied with a shudder. His mind was filled with images of the personnel in the corridor outside his flag bridge. Sickbay was overflowing with wounded, so much so that they'd taken over every MPR and cargo bay and had even taken to triaging some of the personnel nearby.

  He did his best to put the images out of his mind though he was aware they'd haunt him.

  “The only way to prevent it is to interdict their bombers. Be glad it is just on the bombers. If they put that into the warheads of all of their missiles, we are seriously screwed,” Commodore Couglin stated roughly.

  “Wong, can your people play defense? Keep them at bay?” Cyrano asked pointedly.

  “We aren't used to it,” the rear admiral admitted. “We're normally an offensive unit; it's what we've trained for. But if any more of those bombers get in, it’s game over for a lot more ships. I'll pass the word.”

  He had already gotten a report that the Executor class fighters that had been outfitted with grasers had been a liability. The slow-firing weapons had been useless in the freewheeling battle space where microseconds mattered. He'd already passed on orders to have the modules swapped out.

  “Good. My fighters will be able to join you and help out shortly.”

  “I honestly think we should let them go. I don't want to go through that again. But I know we may not get another shot like this for a while and killing every one of their ships is vital,” Admiral Mueller mused.

  “Agreed. Keep them running. Let's grind them down or chase them all the way back to their so-called capital and then burn it down to ash around their ears,” Cyrano growled, testing them.

  “If we can get around those weapons, I'm all for that,” Commodore Couglin replied cautiously.

  “Agreed,” the other admirals echoed.

  :::{)(}:::

  Once the small craft were clear, Admiral White ordered all of his ships to fire their rail guns to create an expanding cloud behind them and then had them dump chaff, flares, and nano-particle clouds to obscure them. By the time the enemy saw the cloud and reacted, his force had changed course. By the time they saw that beyond the cloud of chaff, his force had a ten-second lead to recover their craft and then speed up.

  He feared another running battle, but Aleck's numbers showed they were just out of range of the enemy's capital ships. He was pretty certain the enemy would keep their fighters on the defense. He hadn't seen any sign of bombers off of Courageous, so they might have lucked out there.

  Thirty minutes into their run he sent orders and a complete copy of the log to one of the couriers in the fleet train. Once the little ship received the download, she sent an acknowledgment and then leapt out at her top speed, easily outpacing the rest of the fleet. She would carry the warning to Dd01ns and to the Federation proper.

  It wasn't just a warning though he knew. It was news of a defeat. Another one, though he hadn't lost any ships this time around, just fighters and bombers. Those losses were painful enough. At least, he hadn't lost any ships yet, he reminded himself firmly. They still needed to get into deep space to microjump out. There were no guarantees that the enemy wouldn't be able to catch up to them when they decelerated and exacted vengeance.

  An hour into the run, he began to relax slightly though. His bombers and fighters had been recovered and rearmed, but the enemy was in no hurry to catch up. Granted they had battle-damaged ships to contend with, but he was pretty sure that wasn't the only thing. They'd been shaken to the core.

  “Next time we lead with that. And there will be a next time,” he said to his tired staff. “Count on it. Take that to bed tonight. This isn't a loss, but it's not a victory either. I call it a stalemate. They might keep the system, but we've hurt them.”

  “What do we do when they come after us, sir?” Kyle asked tiredly.

  “We fight. But that's a problem for another day. Have you plotted our jump?”

  “Yes, sir. We'll be out of the star system in six hours. We'll need to begin to brake to make the microjump but we've got a healthy lead time ahead of the enemy.”

  “I know,” the admiral said as he stared balefully over to the plot. “This isn't over. Hell, it's hardly just begun it seems,” he said quietly.

  The other officers turned to look at the plot with the icons of the capital ships chasing them and then nodded grimly.

  Chapter 68

  Antigua

  The arrival of Federation 1 in Antigua was punctuated by fireworks in space as well as on the ground. Home Fleet turned out to escort the small ship in to the inner star system. Admiral Irons shook his head. “Apparently, I'm not as deep in the dog house as I'd thought,” he said wryly.

  “Are you watching the media feeds? There are celebrations on the planet too,” Georgi stated, flicking his ears to his fellow flag officers. “You are getting quite the turn out.”

  “I'd say awe shucks but I'd be lying,” the admiral replied with a shrug.

  “You say that now. Wait until the parades,” Admiral Champion stated.

  Admiral Irons gave her such a horrified look she couldn't help but chuckle. He shook his head at her levity. “You aren't serious! I was gone what, eleven months? They missed me that much?”

  “Apparently you don't have a sense of your own self-worth or how much they value you,” Admiral Creator of Things stated. The T'clock had enjoyed their time in transit; he'd spent a lot of the time going over some of Admiral Irons designs and talking with his A.I. as well as Proteus. It had been a fascinating experience to look at the admiral's new designs. He'd even contributed a little bit and had felt humbled that the admiral had taken to the ideas well.

  “Welcome home, sir,” the ship's A.I. stated.

  “Well, I suppose it's better than a firing squad,” Admiral Irons grumbled. “But no parades!” he said.

  Protector merely shook his head on his HUD.

  :::{)(}:::

  Moira sagged in relief when Admiral Irons appeared in the system network and took his rightful place as president once more. She now appreciated his job in a way she never thought she had. She also appreciated the downtime between jumps and speculated at how he had reacted to not knowing what was going on while in hyperspace.

  That was something she was going to have to deal with when she went on her first state trip. But the
admiral's recent travels had changed her own planned itinerary. She had already made a point of putting in a request to borrow Federation 1 to do it.

  That was, if he was going to stay put for a while. He'd better, she mentally groused as her eyes flicked through the various media feeds. Most were playing shots of Federation 1 sailing across the solar system with Home Fleet.

  “So, do you think it was good training for when you take his job for real, ma'am?” Nadine asked.

  Moira turned to her and pursed her lips. After a moment, she shrugged. “I think I can handle it in small doses. The pressure is intense. The political equation is a lot more fragile than I thought,” she admitted.

  Nadine studied her and then nodded. The secretary had been forced to make some concessions and agreements with members of the sector congress as they had started to examine their own powers and limitations. They'd attempted to put checks on the executive office, but Moira had managed to not only weather them but also negotiate compromises. In the process, she had managed to hold onto her office, but she hadn't made many friends.

  In Nadine's professional opinion, the secretary was a bit battered and a little shell shocked at having the job dropped in her lap but she'd adapted splendidly. Once the Admiralty won the war and they turned to peace, the secretary would have a much easier job in her opinion.

  But, that was a time period several years off. She nodded once and then pulled her tablet out. “Since Admiral Irons has resumed the presidency, I've been handing over some of the duties to his A.I. and staff once more. I've also been working on your schedule as secretary. We've got some work ahead of us if you still want to make that state visit. You stated you wanted to limit it to six months though, so that puts a sharp border on how far out we can go and get back in that time period …”

  :::{)(}:::

  “Miss me?” he teased Sprite once he had some alone time.