Beyond the Frontier: Steadfast

by Jack Campbell

  Geary sat back, glowering at his display in frustration. He was reaching to try another sim, one that pushed encounter velocity a little higher, when his hand paused in midmotion. Why am I only thinking in terms of going faster? Why am I locked into focusing on that one advantage? Because while intercepting that battleship as quickly as possible is necessary, is making the actual encounter at higher speeds a good thing? The sims keep telling me it isn’t. Instead of beating my head against a wall that just gets harder, why not try the opposite approach and see what happens?

  He cut the velocity of the encounter dramatically, enough so that the necessary braking maneuvers required far more time than he was comfortable with. But when the sim ran, he had partial success this time.

  He cut the velocity more. He tried some options.

  He smiled.

  Duellos noticed. “I hope that means you’ve found something.”

  “We can’t let the battle cruisers use their acceleration for the fastest possible attacks,” Geary explained.

  “We can’t—?” Duellos peered at Geary. “What? That’s why they’re battle cruisers.”

  “That’s how we usually employ them. Fast approaches and fast attacks. But what we need here is a slow approach.” Geary pulled up his most successful try. “Look. We come in at a slow relative velocity, aiming for sequential firing runs on the battleship’s stern. He starts pivoting to turn his stern away from us. He has to do that. Once he commits his maneuvering thrusters and momentum to that pivot, we use the battle cruisers’ superior capabilities to alter the order in which they attack. That completely changes how the battleship wants to be oriented to counter each individual firing run.”

  Duellos nodded, smiling with satisfaction as well. “He’ll see our vector changes, and start trying to change his pivot. But he’s got so much mass and momentum driving it at that point, and has less ability to alter how he’s moving, so we can readjust faster than he can.” His smile faded. “But at those relative velocities, our ships will make much better targets for him if he can bring enough firepower to bear.”

  “If we can keep our approaches directly off his stern, that will limit his available weapons. How precise is our knowledge of Syndic battleship maneuvering capabilities?” Geary asked.

  “On that model of ship? Very good. Alliance warships have watched them in action in many engagements and analyzed their movements afterwards. What we have in the sims is not perfect, but it is very accurate.”

  “So, we can predict when he’ll start trying to change his pivot and how long it will take the battleship to react. This wouldn’t work if the battleship had strong escorts to interfere with our movements and disrupt our attacks, or if there were two battleships that could cover each other’s stern from receiving multiple attacks over a short period. But against one battleship, which has decided to protect its escorts instead of having the escorts protect it, this can work.”

  This time Duellos did not reply immediately as he studied every aspect of Geary’s work. “Sir, I do feel obligated to point out that the extra braking time required to get the relative velocity to the battleship low enough for this is considerable. If this does not work, we won’t have much time to come up with alternatives before the battleship gets within range of the freighters.”

  “You’re right,” Geary said. “Anything else?”

  “Do you want me to set up the braking maneuvers for the three battle cruisers?”

  “Yes.” He knew he wasn’t the most talented ship driver in the world, not nearly as good as Tanya Desjani and probably not as good as Roberto Duellos. This would be a good chance to see Duellos at work up close.

  “Admiral,” the operations watch said as alerts sounded, “Flotilla One is altering vector. They’re turning outward and accelerating, coming onto an intercept with our Formation Echo.”

  “Preplanned maneuver,” Duellos said.

  Geary nodded. Flotilla One, light-hours distant near the inhabited world, had started its move hours ago. If the battleship flotilla had not been flushed early, it would have been sighted by Geary’s ships only a brief time ago, followed closely by the sight of Flotilla One also heading for the refugee ships. “It’ll be about an hour and a half yet before they realize their timing got thrown off. If they keep coming, Commander Pajari will handle them.”

  There was some superstition in that last statement, too, which was both an assertion of confidence in Pajari and an attempt to wish his hopes into reality with a bold assertion.

  He focused back on the battleship, trying to feel the motion of all of the ships and the time delays between them caused by the vast distances that light had to cross, trying to anticipate and be ready for whatever the next moves should be.

  He could hear the muffled sounds of the bridge watch-standers doing their jobs and speaking to each other in low voices, hear Duellos passing on the maneuvering orders and handling subsequent what-the-hell-are-we-doing? calls from the commanding officers of Formidable and Implacable.

  Inspire pitched over, coming almost completely around. Her main propulsion lit off again. Nearby, Formidable and Implacable matched the maneuvers. The huge velocities built up earlier were now being fought against, the propulsion systems laboring to shed momentum along one vector and build it up again in the same direction the battleship was going.

  The track of the battle cruisers through space bent, swinging downward toward the battleship and his escorts. The relative velocity kept slowing as the battle cruisers swept past the oncoming enemy, above and slightly to one side of the battleship, still out of range of all but long missile shots that the enemy chose not to attempt.

  A moment came, aft of the enemy flotilla, when their vectors momentarily matched. For that instant, the Alliance battle cruisers and the enemy flotilla were suspended in space, unmoving relative to each other.

  Then, their propulsion units straining at maximum, their hulls and inertial dampers protesting audibly at the forces being employed, the battle cruisers began accelerating straight for the battleship.

  Duellos still sat in his command seat as if relaxed, but his eyes were on Geary, waiting for the orders that would, hopefully, make the attack runs as successful as they needed to be.

  “All weapons ready,” the combat systems watch reported. “Shields at maximum. Damage control at full readiness.”

  A blip appeared on Geary’s display as two of the missile launchers on Implacable suddenly went out of commission. “Power junction failure!” Implacable’s captain reported, sounding as if she were ready to bite a hole in her own hull out of frustration. “I’ll have them operational when we get in range if I have to jump-start the damn things by hand!”

  She wouldn’t have long to work on the problem. The battle cruisers kept accelerating, closing on the battleship. Inspire was lined up to hit the battleship first, followed by Formidable, then Implacable. There wasn’t any fancy formation this time. Formidable was almost directly behind Inspire, but out slightly to one side, while Implacable was behind Formidable, slightly out on the opposite side. Geary had kept the formation as simple as possible, so as to present solutions as deceptively simple as possible for the automated maneuvering controls on the battleship and to lull the human officers into complacency.

  “They’re not cutting the escorts loose,” Geary murmured, relieved. If the battleship commander had told the heavy cruisers to move off and attack the Alliance battle cruisers, it would have seriously complicated Geary’s approach.

  “There he goes,” Duellos breathed in a very low voice.

  The battleship had begun pivoting, his stern dropping and his bow coming up and over. Geary didn’t have to check his maneuvering display to know that, if everyone kept on the same courses and speeds, the battleship would be pivoting at exactly the right rate to meet with its heaviest armament and armor in its bow each oncoming battle cruiser as it passed.

 
“Give him five more seconds to build up momentum,” Geary said. Three . . . two . . . one. “All units in Formation Alpha. Immediate execute, main propulsion at zero.”

  The battle cruisers shut off their main propulsion. They were still closing on the battleship, but as they were no longer accelerating, their rate of closure was no longer increasing.

  The automated systems controlling the battleship’s maneuvers would spot that, would take the necessary action to counter it, firing thrusters at maximum as they tried to slow the turn of the massive battleship, still trying to ensure that when Inspire reached weapons range the battleship’s bow would face the battle cruiser.

  If the person in charge of the battleship was sharp enough, experienced enough, they had time to spot what Geary was doing, to guess what his plans were. They had barely time enough to override the automated controls and swing the battleship’s bow back. The escorts could have done the same, and faster, but the overwhelmed command staff on the battleship had probably, for these few hectic, precious moments, forgotten that the heavy cruisers and HuKs couldn’t maneuver on their own until released from control.

  “Implacable, accelerate at maximum, adjust course as necessary to target main propulsion,” Geary ordered.

  Seconds later, “Formidable, accelerate at maximum, adjust course as necessary to target main propulsion.”

  And, as everyone on the bridge of Inspire waited anxiously, “Inspire, accelerate at maximum. Get his propulsion!”

  The battle cruisers leaped forward again, but their order had suddenly shifted. Now Implacable would be the first in line, then Formidable, and finally Inspire. Along with the order of the attack, the exact times when they would be within range of the battleship had changed. The battleship’s thrusters fired again in another attempt to compensate, trying to counter its own earlier moves. The enemy ship wavered under contending momentum and the push of its maneuvering controls, momentum trying to keep its huge mass turning in one direction while the maneuvering thrusters were working all out to reverse the direction of turn. A sudden shove from its main propulsion might have helped throw off the battle cruisers’ attacks, but that would have been an unconventional move, not something that automated systems or officers trained to do as they were told would think of.

  The battleship hung momentarily suspended between competing forces, its bow pointing straight “up.”

  The relatively few weapons on the battleship that could bear on a target coming in on its stern opened up for the very brief moment when Implacable was within range as the battle cruiser swept onward at a relative velocity of thousands of kilometers per second. Humans couldn’t aim and fire under such circumstances. Only automated fire-control systems could judge the precise instant when a target flying past at such a velocity could be hit.

  Geary saw Implacable’s two broken missile launchers report themselves ready to fire seconds before the battle cruiser tore past under the stern of the battleship, volleying out missiles, hell lances, and even grapeshot set for the smallest possible dispersion patterns at the farthest possible dispersal range. As the battle cruiser shot away from the battleship, Implacable’s hell lances fired repeatedly at missiles the battleship had launched despite the poor intercept angles, destroying most of the missiles before they could score hits.

  Formidable came right behind, hammering the same stern area, her missiles, hell lances, and grapeshot flashing against shields already fading under the blows being absorbed. But the battleship was better prepared this time, more weapons coming to bear as it angled a bit off the vertical, slamming blows at Formidable as well as another volley of missiles that pursued the battle cruiser as it opened the range once more.

  Geary had his eyes locked on his display, seeing the battleship begin to finally push over, more weapons coming to bear as Inspire made the last, most dangerous, and most important firing run.

  Inspire raced past the battleship, hurling out shots toward the battleship’s immense main propulsion in the moments after the rear shields collapsed and before they could rebuild.

  Geary felt Inspire shudder, not just from the launching of her own weapons but from multiple hits. Inspire lurched heavily as something big struck aft, perhaps one or more missiles. Alarms went off, and portions of the display flickered as power was automatically rerouted. He could only hope the battle cruiser hadn’t been hit too badly and remain focused on the battleship as the sensors on Inspire and the other battle cruisers looked back and tried to evaluate what damage had been inflicted.

  “We’d better hope we took it down,” Duellos said, his voice grim. “I’ve momentarily lost maneuvering control of Inspire and half of my own main propulsion.”

  Geary could hear the different watch-standers reporting damage from hits. “Hell-lance batteries 1A and 3B are out of commission. Missile launchers are off-line. Hull has been holed in several areas aft of amidships. Aft shields have collapsed and are rebuilding using emergency power, now at ten percent. Personnel casualty numbers unknown.”

  Damage reports were also showing up from Implacable and Formidable. Both had taken far less damage than Inspire, but neither was unscathed.

  Debris from the weapons fired interfered with the evaluation of damage to the battleship, but Geary realized that the battleship’s maneuvering thrusters were still pushing it over at maximum. “What’s he doing?”

  Duellos tore his attention away from his own ship’s damage for a moment. “He’s hurt.”

  The battleship kept spinning bow over stern, coming around faster. “His maneuvering controls have jammed,” Geary said. “Wait. They’re pushing his stern partway toward us.”

  The display updated triumphantly and Geary fell back into his seat with a gasp of elation. “Thank you, ancestors. We did get him.”

  Inspire’s weapons had inflicted awful damage on the momentarily unshielded main propulsion units of the battleship. The massive, heavily armed and heavily armored ship was helpless to change her vector, spinning end over end through space. The impact of the hits had shoved the battleship slightly off of its earlier path, so that it would now pass slightly above the refugee ships instead of passing right through the middle of their very loose formation.

  Taking out the battleship using conventional weapons would still take a long time. But . . . “He can’t maneuver. Captain Duellos, do you have working planetary bombardment launchers?”

  Normally, a ship could evade large projectiles thrown at it. The distances in space were too large, the ability to simply alter course very slightly to cause the projectile to pass harmlessly by too easy to employ. Even a miss by a single meter was all that was needed to avoid damage.

  But the battleship couldn’t even do that. He was locked onto his current path until his crew managed to repair the damage to the maneuvering systems, and Geary knew that Syndic warships did not carry nearly the same damage-control capabilities as Alliance ships. To the Syndic CEOs, that wasn’t “cost-effective.”

  The ones who paid the price for that policy weren’t the CEOs, naturally.

  “I only have one that can bear on the battleship’s path,” Duellos said.

  “Fire when you can,” Geary ordered. “Formidable, Implacable, engage the enemy battleship with bombardment projectiles. Use everything you’ve got. Take it out before they can manage any repairs.”

  The battle cruisers began pumping out bombardment projectiles. The simple weapons, just solid metal shaped to pierce through atmosphere as they plunged toward targets on the surface of worlds, streamed toward the path of the battleship, forming an arc of deadly metal as they headed for the place it would be.

  Despite the energy that would be unleashed when solid metal objects moving at thousands of kilometers per second slammed into an obstacle, the battleship could have shrugged off a few hits. If it could have jogged even slightly in its path, the battleship could have avoided the majority of the projectiles aimed at
it.

  The two heavy cruisers and two HuKs that had been following very close to the battleship suddenly broke away, either because they had been ordered to stop slaving their maneuvers to that of the battleship or because they had no wish to die helplessly and finally took matters into their own hands.

  “Implacable and Formidable, get those heavy cruisers,” Geary ordered.

  “Get our maneuvering back online now!” Duellos roared at his crew, frustrated at being out of the fight.

  Escape pods began leaping off the battleship as its crew sought safety, first a few, then a rush as the thousands of crew members scrambled to survive.

  The first bombardment projectile hit, then a second, sparking massive flares as the battleship’s shields parried the blows. Another hit, then two more, the last penetrating to slam into armor. A half dozen projectiles hit in a flurry, smashing through the armor, vaporizing sections of the hull, one bashing into the already useless main propulsion units as the battleship continued to twirl helplessly.

  Three more hits, and in an instant the battleship vanished as its power core took too much damage and overloaded.

  Geary sighed, feeling sudden weariness filling him as the cloud of gas and small debris that had once been a Syndic-built battleship began spreading out to join with the wreckage of countless other warships destroyed at Batara in the last century.

  “Captain, we have partial maneuvering control back.”

  Duellos made a fist and rapped the arm of his command seat in barely repressed anger. “Those heavy cruisers and HuKs are going to get away,” he said to Geary.

  Sizing up the frantic flight of the escorts and the wide turns through space as Implacable and Formidable swung back in pursuit, Geary nodded. “You’re right. Unless they turn to fight, we won’t be able to get them. Cheer up, Roberto. Inspire got in the death blow on that battleship.”