“TAO, the Lincoln has received and verified strike orders from the Military Committee. I have therefore assumed weapons release authority and responsibility for the ship’s sensors, fire control, and main power functions, and have commenced initial strikes upon our primary targets.”
“Thank you, Abe,” replied Yamada. Her breathing became shallow as she braced for what she knew would come next. “Overlay battle damage assessments to the targets list, and re-attack as necessary.”
So far, so good, Pierce thought as she watched the strikes. But she’s forgetting something. Pierce held her tongue, giving her new protégé a chance to figure it out.
A column of four displays to the left of the main screen showed the overhead views of Lincoln’s targets, magnified close up before the ship’s weapons drilled into them. The streaks of laser energy were invisible, but as they entered the atmosphere they scorched the air all the way to ground level. They continued penetrating well below the surface of their targets, producing explosions and columns of smoke. Lincoln’s cannons fired its six-hundred megawatt beams at a diameter of one meter each. Though some widening from the natural blooming effect was inevitable, the apertures set on them allowed the beams to strike the ground at diameters up to fifty.
Four beams at a time fired over the next three minutes while the crew inside the ship’s Command and Control Center, the C2C, watched as Abe located their targets and obliterated them. The other three warships holding positions in low orbit were striking their assigned targets as well. Scores of Hrąs al-M’umnyn anti-space systems from the coasts of Mauritania to the mountains of northern Pakistan were decimated by the combined fire.
There was nothing for the crew to do or say. Pierce caught Tech Officer Morelli, the brand-new helmsman, whispering a “Whoa” under his breath as he watched the beams incinerate targets within seconds. Just wait, Pierce thought. The views are likely to get even more impressive.
The kinetic weapons onboard the Lincoln –three hundred Mk-8 tungsten-cased missiles, not to mention over two thousand of various sizes onboard the arsenal ship Theodore Roosevelt– stood by in their magazines, in case LAO 6-1 escalated into an attack against larger structures. The directed energy weapons firing down at the surface were only against weapon systems, not powerful enough to destroy most buildings from space. Besides, many of the key military targets in the HM were either underground or built with a reflective layer of mirroring just below their roofs and exterior walls, a weak but still useful countermeasure against directed energy.
None of the HM’s ground tracking stations attempting to target the orbiting ships could do so before they were struck first. On the Lincoln’s viewscreens, the list of forty-four targets gradually changed font color from green to red, line by line, from top to bottom, as they were confirmed destroyed. A dozen on the list were briefly colored yellow while their damage assessments were verified, either due to the hazy infrared scanning used wherever cloud cover made optical targeting impossible, or due to aerosol smokescreens of ultrafine reflective particles sprayed in the air to diffuse the impact of the beams. All of these sites were struck a second time to ensure their destruction. In two cases, miniscule scout drones hiding nearby transmitted video to aid the damage assessments.
Jaana Pierce and her crew were only spectators at this stage of the action. The conduct of the strikes was entirely up to Abe.
The audio circuit erupted with noise on the bridge-to-bridge emergency channel. The voices on the other end were indistinct and laced with static, but they were the sounds of shouting.
“TAO, Tracking!” yelled Lieutenant Meyer again. “HMS Vanguard has been hit, unknown weapon source. Damage to Vanguard is not yet known, but they’re unable to comply with further strike orders.”
“TAO, aye,” replied Yamada. “Abe, review the Vanguard’s datalink information for the last known status of their strike orders. We’re the next closest ship. Add their remaining targets to our list and attack as necessary.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Abe increased Lincoln’s targets list from forty-four to eighty-seven, most of which were already destroyed. “TAO, there are five tier-three targets in northern Africa which the Vanguard had yet to strike. These targets are beyond our effective attack angle. Should I maneuver the ship away from control point two so that we may also engage those targets?”
“No. Not without instructions from MILCOM. We’ll need to stay at our control point in case we receive further orders. Tracking station, Lieutenant Meyer... keep trying to find out what hit the Vanguard, whether it was a DEW or kinetic weapon, or an explosion like what took out CS-Kenya. Abe, request permission from MILCOM to engage those last five targets with hardshots.”
Pierce kept her poker face on, refraining from saying what she wanted to say to Beth Yamada. Good call keeping us on station here. Orders are orders. But you definitely missed something. Let this be a learning experience.
Yamada leaned over to her captain and whispered, “Ma’am, the first one of these new targets, the tracking station on a hill south of Yefren… there’s a small settlement next to it on the eastern slope. Population one thousand, all inside the lethal zone.”
“Do your orders say anything about it?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then it’s not an issue for discussion, is it?”
“No, ma’am.” Yamada turned her attention back to the display screens while Pierce held her tongue again. That’s not the detail you overlooked, but I’m glad you’re learning that lesson. Orders. Are. Orders.
New directives were displayed on the screen: MILCOM granted approval to USS Lincoln for limited kinetic strikes. The five targets out of effective reach from the ship’s DEW cannons were to be destroyed by Mk-8 projectiles. Once more Yamada touched the “Command Acknowledge” button the instant it was displayed in front of her. Abe trained Lincoln’s coilgun towards the west and charged its capacitors. Abe also shut down Lincoln’s station-keeping thrusters to put the ship into a free-falling orbit, giving the ship more stability in the few minutes it needed to place its rounds. It was a move akin to a sniper holding his breath before a shot.
Each projectile was over two meters long, twenty centimeters thick in the middle and narrowing to a point at both ends. The electromagnetic coils inside the gun’s inner cylinder held the first round at the breech end of the chamber, the Mk-8 floating with a millimeter of vacuum between it and the walls of the gun’s barrel.
Unlike the DEW cannons which could fire at their targets as long as Lincoln had a good line of sight, the hardshots required a great deal more calculation. The reason was accuracy. Once fired, the Mk-8’s were nothing more than ballistic rounds, their guidance capabilities nonexistent. Lincoln needed precise positioning data triangulated from multiple ground stations, what the ship’s altitude was in order for the projectile to account for the orbital speeds, as well as whatever data was available on atmospheric conditions between the ship and the target: temperature variations throughout the atmosphere, humidity, wind conditions, et cetera. Even then, there were likely to be minor miscalculations due to unseen fluctuations such as air pockets. Destroying a target from space with kinetics was not unlike the way battleships from centuries past found their targets: a best guess for a first shot, then adjusting fire to bracket the accuracy closer and closer to dead center.
Abe had adequate information for a first shot. In one thousandth of a second the ship’s capacitors discharged half a million amps into the thirty-meter long barrel, and the coilgun’s superconducting magnets accelerated –or more accurately, pulled– the projectile through the chamber. The two-centimeter-thick casing of the Mk-8 was tungsten, with a higher melting point than any other natural metal at 3400°C, but it was the magnetic cobalt-nickel alloy core that the accelerator coils grabbed. The first round shot away from the ship at nine kilometers per second.
Until it hit the atmosphere, the hardshot’s arc would be a slight downward one, influenced by Earth’s gravity well. Travelling westwa
rd, its top speed was reduced due to Lincoln drifting in its natural eastward orbit, but distance and closure rate would shorten before impact since its target was moving east as well. The Mk-8’s target was in fact an optical tracking station on a hilltop in northwest Libya Province, but Earth rotated eastward. At thirteen hundred lateral kilometers away, Abe estimated just under three minutes between firing and impact.
The hardshot could not adjust its trajectory, but Lincoln would track it all the way to the ground and used the data to update the targeting for any following shots. Abe registered the trajectory deviations and made adjustments for additional shots before the first round was halfway to its target. Upon entering the upper atmosphere, the intense heat generated from pushing through even the thinnest air soon formed a plasma sheath around the missile. Countering forces worked on the Mk-8’s speed through the atmosphere: Earth’s gravity accelerated the projectile as its arc shifted closer to vertical, but as the air became denser towards the surface the resistance slowed it down some.
Nobody on the receiving end, though, would ever describe it as slow. The missile had no explosive warhead inside its shell, but the solid metal round hit the ground at thirteen kilometers per second. It traveled much too fast to be seen, let alone heard, and certainly too fast to be countered. Only the most sophisticated detection systems the HM possessed could track the incoming projectile and give any warning to the people in the target area to flee for their lives, and those tracking systems were already struck by DEW cannons. As the missile impacted the hillside surface it continued into the ground like a bullet into sand and produced a kinetic yield of fifty gigajoules of energy as it finally came to a stop. The entire hill beneath the tracking station exploded, and windowpanes and eardrums shattered for miles in every direction.
The Mk-8’s were the smallest kinetics that any celestial warships had in their magazines. Nothing smaller was accurate enough for use. The fleet’s largest hardshots, the Mk-23’s held in Theodore Roosevelt’s magazines, were 12 meters long, the size of roadside utility poles. The heavyweight rods could strike the ground with blast power closer to Hiroshima levels.
Eight minutes went by during the kinetic launches before the last targets listed on Lincoln’s main screen were displayed in red. Yamada and the others in the C2C all looked up at the screens from their own stations to see the overhead views of the Mk-8s’ massive explosions. Commander Robert Yates, the ship’s Executive Officer, sat on the other side of Pierce. It was a rare thing to see him smile, but Pierce managed to catch a glimpse. He folded his arms and grinned wide at the sight of Hrąs al-M’umnyn weapons being blown to bits.
Berlin and Theodore Roosevelt verified that their targets were all destroyed as well, all with direct energy cannons. The HM no longer had any known ground systems capable of attacking the DA’s military assets in space. Tactically, the war was already won.
“Captain, all assigned targets have been struck. Battle damage assessments confirmed,” reported Yamada, who breathed a quiet sigh as she smiled. “The condition of HMS Vanguard is still being determined by Lieutenant Meyer at the tracking station. Lincoln is standing by to receive additional orders from MILCOM.”
“Very well, but don’t smile yet. Is there something you may have overlooked?”
Yamada’s eyes widened. “Ma’am? I don’t–”
A flash of light exploded across the main viewscreen as the ship shuddered. Control screens flickered across the compartment, and Abe went offline. Watchstanders yelled out reports.
“Reactor casualty! We’re losing main power!”
“Maneuvering control is gone! Altitude dropping… I don’t have propulsion!”
“Hull breach! TAO, I’m showing a hull breach in engine compartment two!”
Yamada grimaced as she realized what must have happened. Vanguard was hit by a tiny hardshot from an orbiting electrothermal accelerator, a plasma cannon satellite. Over the last few years, Yamada recalled, there were unconfirmed reports that the HM had deployed such weapons, disguised as surveillance satellites. The Lincoln’s fire control sensors were operating on their default settings, concentrating on its strike operations and focusing on the planet for indications of a counterattack. Those sensors couldn’t detect the source of Vanguard’s attacker – it was literally out of their field of vision. That satellite burned itself out when it fired, but a sister satellite took its shot at Lincoln. Now, instead of supporting the operation against the HM, Lincoln’s crew would be neck-deep in trying to save their own ship. And time was short – the ship was losing altitude from its holding point. In thirty minutes, they’d drop below six hundred kilometers altitude and would come into range of HM ground-based railguns, if any were still functional. But in forty-five minutes they’d hit the atmosphere out of control and begin burning up.
“Every time,” Yamada muttered while switching her console to display the ship’s systems. “Something like this happens every time, no matter what.”
Pierce grinned. “Yes, that’s policy. These simulations always involve the ship taking one or two severe hits. The damage control teams need to stay in practice too. But take a look at your comms panel.”
Yamada saw her mistake. Encryption was unable to authenticate the Lincoln’s datalink from the Military Committee, and in practice that meant it was a mimic, uploading false information, and had been so since seconds before the Vanguard was struck. Normally the link would contain satellite tracking data relayed from ground stations, and it would’ve detected the source of the Vanguard attack the instant it happened. But the link was corrupted by a cyberattack, and Yamada knew she should have noticed the switch.
“Oh… dammit!”
“That’s the main reason why these warships are manned, Commander, and why the DA doesn’t have weaponized satellites. Ships have better armor and maneuverability, but it’s the crew that keeps human control over everything. We can’t be hacked. And the chain of command needs to stay unbroken, from MILCOM all the way down to our cannons. Always keep one eye on your data sources. The HM might be able to do that for real.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll stay on top of it.”
“I know you will,” Pierce said, then leaned in to whisper. “And make sure you have a word with Lieutenant Crawford at the comms station. He should’ve spotted the problem even before you.”
It’s good experience for her, Pierce figured. The simulations at the Celestial War College weren’t as hands-on as this, with an actual crew to deal with rather than professional trainers who only made mistakes if the scenario called for them. It was also good for Yamada to criticize subordinates rather than the captain or Commander Yates doing it all themselves. Beth Yamada had the sort of high-cheekboned, bright-eyed face that seemed to come with a perpetual smile, and her features were only exacerbated by how young she looked. She was in fact thirty-six, and despite Lincoln being her first deployed assignment, a fourteen-year Space Command veteran, but like everyone else she looked much younger. Nearly everyone in the free world took the same synthetic telomerase drugs, all with the same results. Pierce herself was fifty but had more of a traditional mid-thirties look, and still a very athletic one at that. In Yamada’s case, she had at best a mid-twenties look. The younger guys in the wardroom don’t seem to treat the new department head with enough respect. They should know better, but it’s also partly on her. She could do with some toughening.
“TAO, I’m off to watch the damage control progress from engineering. Whether we live or die is now up to them,” she smiled. As she was at the door, Commander Yates went over to Lieutenant Crawford.
“Lieutenant, would you mind informing me of the purpose of your watch station?”
A deer-in-headlights look came over Crawford’s face. “Sir? To maintain our communication links with other commands, to serve as the command’s overseer of inbound and outbound data, to ensure proper cryptographic processing of all–”
“Good, I’m glad you have all that memorized,” Yates said, raising his voic
e louder. “So I assume you’re aware that you completely failed in those duties! Lieutenant Crawford, the integrity of our chain-of-command connections must never be compromised, especially during battle conditions…”
Yates continued his lecture as Yamada focused on her screens and avoided looking at them. Pierce kept her face impassive as she walked out of the room and made her way through the narrow passageways to engineering.
Boorish asshole. I’m going to have to talk with him again about our command philosophy. Things like this don’t just undermine me, they undermine others like Yamada. Anyway, half an hour left on this drill if all else goes well. There’s time to run another one in the late afternoon, but the crew’s getting weary. It’s the holiday season, and I don’t want to push them too hard. Having the ship sit stationary in an orbiting dock near CS-Kenya for the past three weeks was tiring enough, with technicians going to and from the Lincoln as they upgraded the ship’s four DEW cannons.
And yet we’re still technically on deployment. Non-operational status at the moment, but deployed nonetheless. What I wouldn’t give to be home with Jack and Ellie for the holidays. Well, duty is duty. Two more weeks of overhaul for the ship and running simulations for the crew, and then a day holding position over the far south Atlantic, testing the new cannons at the Vindication Island firing range. Then we’ll be off, on call to respond to an alert like this for real. A few days after New Year’s, the ship and crew will be in better shape.
Mediterranean Sea, north of Crete
11:15 a.m. (0915Z), 23 December 2065
The underwater strike team approached the shore. The three men travelled at fifteen meters below the surface of the Mediterranean in a Vatozi-type submersible for twenty exhausting hours, but at last they were almost ready to begin their mission. Beneath them, buried a meter under the silty sea floor, was the Heraklion 10RQ line, a fiber-optic cable connecting Crete to mainland Greece. The commercial lines connecting the island with the mainland were two kilometers to the west, but this one was for military use. From the island, it relayed airborne early warning radar data, secure communications, signals intelligence intercepts, et cetera. To the island, its most important information included commands from DA headquarters, such as targeting and launch order data for the six batteries of hypersonic cruise missiles embedded within the coastal hillsides of the island. The 10RQ cable was encrypted and nearly impossible to tap, but the special forces divers had not come to tap it.
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