“Very well. Tom, I’m told we’re ready.”
Halifax’s tone became jocular. “Then hurry to your box seat, Ira. Curtain’s going up.” His private channel snicked off.
Ira reached behind him for the crown: a framework headpiece that included multipoint speakers and a 3-D monocle. “Ruth, I want Commander Clute wearing one of these in the auxiliary bridge.”
“Yes, sir. Mind telling me why?”
“Because I want to be ready to toss this damned personal theater away at a moment’s notice if I need to. But if I do, I need my senior tactical officer to stay In the Picture. I’ll want a detailed report of anything I missed, presuming I don’t have the time to sit through a playback.”
“Seth—er, Commander Clute—reports he’s already strapping on the crown, sir.”
“Very good. I say three times, XO, that, as per the InPic Command Augmentation Protocol, you have the con for routine operations.”
“I say three times, Admiral, I have the con for routine ops.”
Ira sighed, held the InPic crown at arm’s length. Putting it on would put him in two worlds at once: on the bridge of his own ship, and on the bridge of Halifax’s Trafalgar. Problem was, Ira didn’t like being in two worlds at once. In point of fact, he loathed it. His boyhood dream, and adult training, had focused on the command of a ship. A single ship. The one he felt under his feet. To lose complete awareness of that hull was anathema.
He had argued long and hard against expanding the use of InPic so that ranking officers of a joint command or dispersed task force could see, hear, and if necessary, remotely control activity on the bridge of another ship. He had foreseen and forestalled the abuses that could have resulted from rear echelon officers using their “remote telepresence” to tell line commanders how to do their jobs.
But Ira had been forced to concede that in some scenarios, such as this one, InPic conferred immense advantages. As RTF 1 engaged the Arat Kur boosting up out of Earth’s gravity well, he needed a full and immediate understanding of what Halifax’s first echelon was achieving, what it was not achieving, and what had produced its successes and failures, respectively. And if, God forbid, something happened to Tom Halifax and the HMS Trafalgar, then Ira would be in a position to direct the first echelon so that its ongoing combat operations would dovetail with the evolving strategy for Ira’s own second echelon.
And it was almost unavoidable that the battle plans would evolve significantly over the course of the engagement. Given the challenges of dealing with a largely unknown enemy that possessed at least marginally superior technology, the admirals of RTF 1 had kept their strategy fairly straightforward. The first, or “Foxtrot,” echelon was led by Halifax and was the second largest. It had left its carriers behind with Ira’s bigger second, or “Sierra,” echelon for safekeeping because Foxtrot had to be drone-, FOCAL- and cruiser-heavy. Given its twofold mission objective, this particular concentration of ship classes was essential. The cruisers were required to put serious hurt on the Arat Kur, and the drones and FOCALs were needed to scatter the enemy by threatening him from widely separated points of the battlesphere. It was also anticipated that Halifax’s command would take the heaviest casualties. They were first in and committed to trading killing blows wherever possible, even if it meant sacrificing ships at worse than one-to-one odds to achieve it. His echelon was also a guinea pig. The other two echelons would be watching to learn what they could about their enigmatic adversaries.
In contrast, Ira’s Sierra Echelon required the greatest operational flexibility, needing to be able to adapt to both the battlefield results and the enemy’s unknown capabilities and doctrine. If the Arat Kur had been significantly weakened by Halifax, it was Silverstein’s job to capitalize on that weakness by slowing to match vectors and hammer them harder, and to keep hammering until Tango Echelon under Vasarsky arrived to add its weight to the effort. If, however, the Arat Kur were still in relatively good formation and only moderately damaged after engaging Foxtrot Echelon, Sierra Echelon was to achieve what Foxtrot had not: the disruption and attrition of the enemy fleet, so that Vasarsky’s Tango Echelon could deliver a coup de grace.
Behind him, Altasso’s voice sounded vaguely teasing. “Sir, the technicians have assured me that the InPic crown will only work if the user actually places it on his or her head.”
Ira cut his eyes at her, made his voice a growl so that he wouldn’t succumb to his urge to smile. “Tend your duties, Commander”—and he put on the InPic headpiece, sliding the 3-D monocle into place with a click.
With that click, the CIC of the Trafalgar was suddenly all his right eye could see, and all he could hear through the speakers near his right ear. A young lieutenant leaned over toward the Lord Admiral, whispered in his ear. Halifax turned to wave in the general direction of Ira’s vantage point. “I’m told you’ve joined us, Ira. Hope you enjoy the show. Must get back to work.”
Halifax turned to his command staff. “Lieutenant Madratham, do you have a tactical summary on results of the Mousetrap deployment?”
“Aye, sir,” she responded crisply. “Estimating mission kills on almost sixty percent of the chase drones sent by the Arat Kur orbital blockade element, and significant dispersion of the remainder.”
“Net impact on our drones?”
“I do not have definitive figures yet, Admiral, but no more than twenty percent of our Earth-launched drones have been lost.”
“And the drone sorties from the hidden lunar sites?”
“Apparently a complete surprise, sir. No interdiction to speak of. Forty percent have already reached the rear of our echelon. The remainder won’t catch us. They are dropping back to join the lead elements of Sierra Echelon.”
“Very good, Lieutenant Madratham. Lieutenant Pennington?”
“Yes, Lord Admiral?”
“Have our Gordon-class sloops achieved full drone integration, yet?”
“Not quite, sir. Although most of the lunar-launched drones are in the net, some of the non-Commonwealth models are proving a bit finicky on the data-handshake, sir.”
“Hrmph. Who are the culprits?”
“Mostly TOCIO-built drones, sir. There are discrepancies between the data protocols supplied by the bloc authorities and the actual systems on the drones. Appears that not all the drones were updated to the latest software standard, sir.”
“Well, bring them in line as best you can. Any that have less than ninety percent reliability are to be redesignated as decoys and expended accordingly. Commander Somers?”
“Aye, sir?”
“How’s our evolution into attack formation Bravo Two coming along, David?”
“Handsomely, sir.” His plasma pointer cast a glowing beam where it interacted with the colorless reactive gas inside the holotank mainplot. The luminous wand danced among blue motes of light arrayed as a open-based inverted cone. “Our control sloops are arrayed along our leading skirts here.” The light wand traced the open rim of the cone. “Here at the bottom of the well”—the wand of light moved to indicate a cluster of slightly larger blue lights at the rearward tip of the inverted cone—“is our main body. You’ll note all the cruisers in the core, our frigates in a screening ring, slightly farther out.”
“Very good, Commander Somers.” Halifax checked his watch. “I’d expect that our drones are about to come into range of their drones.”
“Coming up on their observed maximum ranges, sir.”
In the background, Ira could hear the ship’s captain, Ian Stead, rapping out orders to the bridge crew in the next room. “Lieutenant Worthington, let’s not get out ahead of our own formation. Bring back the plasma thrusters two percent. Lieutenant Dunn, deploy ordnance package two.” The hull thrummed—even Ira could sense it—as an immense disposable missile pod salvoed all its birds and was then jettisoned. “Watch the post-launch change in displacement, Mr. Worthington; keep us in trim.”
Halifax nodded at his staff. “Very well, ladies and gentlemen, let’s t
ake a look at the big picture, shall we?” He nodded at the ensign who oversaw the operation of the holotank.
The image changed abruptly. The inverted cone shrank to slightly less than one-tenth its former size. Red motes—the Arat Kur fleet—were approaching it. There were perhaps a third as many of them as there were blue motes in the cone of Foxtrot Echelon.
“Add in drones, if you please,” Halifax murmured.
The tidy arrangements of finite blue and red motes were suddenly half-lost amidst dense, pointillist shrouds of similarly colored pinpricks.
“Give me group markers, not individual guidons, Ensign.”
Who blushed and hastened to comply. The diaphanous veils of red and blue pinpricks shrank down into a finite number of red and blue triangles. The blue triangles were clustered in three predominant groups. The first were the lunar-launched drones drawing up from behind Foxtrot Echelon, beginning to form a protective sleeve around the cruisers clustered at the rear-facing point of the cone. The second group, Foxtrot’s own drones, was larger and arrayed in a forward-deployed screen that looked like a slightly concave lid which had popped off the open end of the cone. And the third group, which was much larger again, was rising into the picture from the direction of Earth, moving decisively toward the lower right rear quadrant of the red motes’ battlesphere.
Halifax nodded his satisfaction, just as the space separating some of the red and blue triangles at the rear of the Arat Kur formation started flashing with pinhead pulses of white or yellow: threat and friend damage markers, respectively. “Right on time,” Halifax murmured. “Enemy reaction to the attack on their rear flank?”
“No reaction from their capital ships, sir. However, look at their drone squadrons.” A third of the red triangles were now drifting down in the direction of the right rear area of the Arat Kur fleet, shifting to intercept the drones that had been launched from Earth.
“Excellent,” Halifax muttered, drawing a well-seamed index finger across his snow-white moustaches. “Lieutenant Madratham, I would like a revised estimate of drone ratios at our projected point of contact with the enemy.”
She had already worked it out. “After the Arat Kur reconfiguration, best estimates give us a five-to-one drone advantage.”
Ira smiled. At the disastrous second Jovian engagement, the drone ratio had been almost even and the consequences had been dire. Now let’s see how your superior technology handles five-to-one odds against our most advanced systems, directed by Gordon-class FOCALs.
Ruth’s voice suggested she had seen Ira’s smile and was mildly amused. “Seeing things you like, Admiral?”
“Hush up and drive,” he hissed at her. “I’m watching my favorite show.”
“Yes, sir!”
In Halifax’s CIC, the pace of exchanges was speeding up. “Target assignment almost completed, Admiral,” announced Somers. “Visual tracking and ladar have filtered out forty percent of the initial target list as EW decoys. Estimating at least seventy-five percent confidence on remaining targets.”
“Estimated confidence results are suitable for a simulator exercise, Commander Somers.” Halifax’s normally warm and generous voice was now quick and clipped. “How many targets on the revised list are one hundred percent confidence?”
Even given through the visual pickups, Ira could see that Somers flushed deeply. “Twenty percent of the target list, Admiral. Most of those are thought to be cruisers, both shift and nonshift capable.”
“Then those are our targets. We’re here to hunt big game, and they are the biggest.” Halifax turned a reassuring smile upon Somers. “And if by some wild stroke of luck we exhaust that target list, I am quite sure we shall have no lack of new, one hundred percent confidence targets. After all, we will have closed to point blank range and I rather suspect they will all be shooting at us.”
“Yes, sir,” said Somers. “Any other targeting preferences or orders?”
“No. We follow engagement profile alpha as we rehearsed it. Unless any of those target signatures indicate we have shift-carriers to shoot at, of course.”
“No such high-value signatures in range, sir. Full confidence of that.”
“I would presume as much. The Arat Kur don’t want to be stranded in enemy territory, let alone the enemy’s well-developed home system.”
Madratham’s voice was tense. “Admiral, our drones are coming up on the range marker at which the enemy engaged us at Jovian— Sir! Enemy has commenced fire on our drones!”
“Hmm, starting the party early. A bit nervous about today’s outcome, I’ll wager. So, we dance in time with them on this step. Deploy all decoys.”
“Aye, sir. Deploying.”
Somers looked up. “Sir, since we are deploying early, I recommend we advance the clock on our first missile salvo, also.”
“Explain your reasoning, Mr. Somers.”
“Yes, sir. If we follow engagement profile alpha, missile launch is still three minutes away. However, the timing of that first salvo was based upon when we expected the enemy capital ships would begin firing upon our drones. Since they are engaging our drones at longer range, that might change the timing assumptions of our missile launch, as well.”
“Thank you, David. You are quite correct. Send to all ships: primary salvo is now to begin”—Halifax scanned the holotank, then the engagement clock above it—“seventy seconds earlier than in engagement profile alpha. All ships are to confirm receipt of this order.”
Madratham’s head came up from her screens. “Admiral, I now have visual feed from our lead drones.”
“Show me,” said Halifax, leaning forward.
The flat-screen image in Halifax’s command and information center became a vivid, 3-D, 360-by-360-degree “you are there” virtual reality in Ira’s monocle. The InPic not only showed him the view from the nose of the drone but, with faint subaudial pulses, gave him a sense of the relative position of the other allied drones around him. He fleetingly imagined that this is how migrating geese must feel when they fly south in vees, or dolphins when swimming in formation—
The sudden appearance and rapid growth of red guidons arrayed along his front also imparted a sense of the tremendous speed at which he was closing with the enemy, even though Earth—a distant blue and white disk—did not change in size. Data began scrolling along the left-hand margin of the field of view. Shortly after it did, inbound kinetic projectiles—rail-launched from an escort, probably—painted their way towards him as an advancing magenta line. He could feel the drone’s attitude control thrusters begin pulsing. The spacescape popped upwards, yawed, swung back, wiggled a little—and then the magenta line was safely off to his starboard side. The drone’s evasive maneuvers had apparently been successful.
A moment later, the starfield shuddered, and a chorus of faint, higher audio pulses gave him the impression that he was now surrounded by a covey of smaller drones, almost as if they had come out of his belly. Because that is exactly what had happened. Ira’s viewpoint drone was an advance recon/decoy dispenser. The smaller decoys spread rapidly outward. He could see some of them boosting ahead, the blue-white exhausts of their basic rockets propelling them at eight gees of acceleration. Soon they would start sending out signals that mimicked groups of drones or single control sloops. A larger image would not fool the Arat Kur: big hulls did not simply materialize at close range. But from the froth of small craft, drones, and actively homing or maneuvering submunitions that were now moving toward their fleet, the invaders would be far less able to distinguish if a new small signal was false, had been obscured by another, or was just starting to come into range. The decoys would not last long, of course. It would be miraculous if any survived for even half a minute. But every second that they distracted the enemy and overtasked his target tracking and discrimination systems was another second that some of his attacks were wasted.
New orders in Halifax’s CIC brought Ira out of the direct link to the drone. The Trafalgar’s acceleration couches extended out f
rom the wall in full upright position. A small cavity opened in the base of each. Light duty vacc helmets sagged outward. The ship PA was already issuing the familiar orders. “All hands to battle stations. All hands to battle stations. Prepare for engagement. Report suit or helmet failures to technicians immediately. All hands, all hands—”
Halifax completed suiting up in half the time of his fastest staffer, making it look like an easy, almost relaxed exercise. He folded up the collar of his general quarters flight suit, swung the helmet down over his head, snagged the collar-tab and ran it in a circle around his neck. As he did, the smart sealing materials on the outside of his suit collar and the inside of his helmet collar met and fused. Not sturdy enough to last long in full vacuum, but five minutes of clear thought and free action could make the difference between life and death when the alternative was to struggle unprotected against the effects of explosive decompression.
The admiral reeled the environmental supply tube out of the acceleration couch’s base and connected it to the ball-and socket joint receptacle on the side of his helmet. The diagnostic lights alongside the headrest glowed green. His flight suit was both holding air and responding to data links. Halifax scanned the screens arrayed around the holotank. “It looks like we’re trading about two to one on the drones, Lieutenant Madratham.”
“Just about exactly that, Admiral. Our superiority in numbers is overwhelming their technological edge, sir.”
Halifax glanced at the holotank. The outer edge of the slightly decentered red formation now overlapped the wide skirts of the blue cone. Ira saw one of the blue motes denoting a Gordon-class hunter/killer become a yellow smudge, then another. “Ensign,” Halifax murmured, “if you would be so kind as to show us what our fellows are seeing out there on the ragged edge . . .”
—And suddenly, Ira was riding on the nose of a Gordon-class control sloop. The Arat Kur cruisers were distant, irregular specks. Just ahead, drones—friend and foe alike—were dying in droves. Some came apart, riddled by streams of Arat Kur rail-gun projectiles. Others streamed yellow fire when hit by a PDF laser, then disintegrated into a shower of debris expanding away from a bright orange ball of flame. A few others simply ceased to be, disappearing in a blue-white smear that signified a hit by a higher-energy laser.
Trial by Fire Page 52
