Barbarians at the Gates

by Nuttall, Christopher

  He reviewed ONI’s data and scowled. How many superdreadnaughts did Admiral Justinian have under his banner? Officially, he shouldn’t have had more than one hundred—not counting the losses he’d taken in the Battle of Earth—but if ONI was right and the admiral had spent nearly ten years preparing his rebellion, he’d had time to more than triple his fleet. And then, there was the question of what other forces might move to support Justinian. How many local defense forces had added their firepower to the admiral’s fleet?

  “Sir, Bogey Four is launching additional starfighters towards us,” the sensor officer reported. “Interception in nine minutes—mark.”

  “Launch the ready starfighters,” Marius ordered. The CSP would need to be reinforced, and quickly. Admiral Justinian was clearly intent on wearing Marius down as much as possible before he committed his superdreadnaughts to the battle, which was...interesting. If he was being sensitive to losses—starfighters were regarded as expendable, not an attitude that endeared senior officers to the fighter jocks—it suggested all kinds of interesting thoughts about how strong he actually happened to be. “Load the remaining starfighters with standard gun packages and prepare them for launch.”

  “Aye, sir,” the CAG said, through the datanet. “I am launching fighters now.”

  Marius allowed himself a tight smile. Admiral Justinian had committed one tiny, but potentially fatal error. He had given Marius as much time as he could possibly want to prepare his starfighters, switch out antishipping packages and replace them with gun packages, and even give his fighter jocks some rest before they were launched into combat. Standard tactical doctrine called for the immediate launch of all starfighters as soon as danger threatened—an attitude shaped by the loss of FNS Invincible in the assault on Crichton during the Inheritance Wars, when her commander had decided to shelter his pilots inside the bays for as long as possible, only to lose his ship to an enemy battlecruiser at point-blank range.

  Who knew—perhaps it wouldn’t be Marius’s force that was worn down after all.

  “Bring up the point defense datanet and hold it at condition two,” he ordered. They needed the datanet if they wanted to win this battle, as it linked the entire fleet into a single whole, coordinating point defense and making it far harder for starfighters to penetrate to engagement range. If it went down, Marius’ fleet would suddenly become a ragtag handful of starships, each one thrown back on its own resources to defend itself against incoming starfighters. “Switch the controlling hub randomly and set up alternate command networks. I do not want to lose the network, even for a second.”

  “Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said, nodding. Fighter jocks hated the datanet—datanet systems had killed more fighter jocks than any other invention, even antifighter missiles—and knocking the datanet down as fast as possible was standard tactical doctrine. “Condition one at engagement range?”

  “Yes,” Marius said, shortly. “Switch the datanet to condition one automatically as soon as they enter engagement range.” He settled back in his command chair as the enemy starfighters closed in on his ships.

  “Admiral,” the sensor officer said, “we have a reading on Enterprise. She’s adrift—very low power. There are no emissions from the hulk, not even her IFF. Bogey Seven is advancing on her position.”

  Marius was unwillingly impressed. There were plenty of stories about starships being disabled, rather than destroyed outright, but few of them had any basis in reality. Normally, inflicting enough damage on a starship to cripple it meant destroying it, either directly or when the target ship lost its antimatter containment fields and vaporized. But whatever had happened to the Enterprise, Admiral Justinian had managed to target his shots precisely, leaving behind a dead hulk. And that meant he intended to capture the fleet’s flagship and use it to bolster his cause.

  Not for the first time, Marius wondered just what had gone through Justinian’s mind when he decided to rebel. Did he have an ambition to become emperor, or did he have another aim in mind? And if so, what was it?

  “Get us as close to the Enterprise as you can,” he ordered finally. “Stand by to engage the enemy.”

  He knew it would take ten minutes to reach weapons range of Enterprise, providing they were not impeded. On the other hand, Bogey Seven was clearly much weaker than the other enemy fleets, unless they were superdreadnaughts posing as battlecruisers and Marine Landing Craft.

  He ran through the converging vectors in his head and frowned. Admiral Justinian had timed it just right. If they attempted to save Enterprise, they would be caught by four converging enemy fleets and forced to accept an engagement on very unfavorable terms—assuming that all the enemy ships were real, which they couldn’t be.

  It was an old adage in military history—even back in the days when navies meant ships floating on the ocean—that a stern chase was a long one. On the other hand, the starfighters launched by Bogey Four were capable of accelerating to their maximum speed almost instantly, in harsh contrast to the lumbering superdreadnaughts, and were rapidly gaining on his fleet.

  He braced himself as the starfighters raced towards the blue sphere surrounding his craft on the display, the moment when they could be engaged by his point defense, wondering what particular tactics would be used by the enemy this time. Would they try to strip away his screening elements first, or would they ignore them and press in towards the superdreadnaughts? If Admiral Justinian anticipated a long battle, it would be the former; hell, that was what Marius would do, if the positions were reversed. Assuming that they couldn’t return to the Asimov Point they’d used to enter the system, it would take hours before they could retreat through another Asimov Point or escape the mass limit and go to stardrive.

  The CSP spread out to intercept the incoming starfighters. Standard doctrine stated that the best counter to one starfighter was another starfighter. Unlike some of the standard tactical doctrine, it wasn’t something Marius had any real objections to, even though he was a big ship admiral. Keeping the lethal little starfighters and their shield-penetrating shipkiller missiles as far as possible from the battle wagons struck him as a very good idea. The CSP had only seconds to intervene before the enemy fighters blew through them—their escorting fighters peeling off to take on the CSP, forcing the invading pilots to worry about defending themselves—allowing hundreds of starfighters to flash through and fall upon the fleet like wolves upon a herd of sheep. Some of the CSP moved in pursuit, leaving Marius to whisper a silent prayer under his breath that their IFF systems wouldn’t fail at a crucial moment. It was an unacknowledged reality that, far too often for comfort, the point defense networks had been known to engage friendly fighters.

  “Point defense network switching to condition one,” the tactical officer said. “Point defense engaging the enemy...now.”

  A single superdreadnaught mounted hundreds of point defense weapons. Seventy superdreadnaughts—and their escorting carriers, battlecruisers and destroyers—mounted enough point defense to make the cockiest of fighter jocks blanch. Now, with the datanet weaving the ships into a single entity, hundreds of starfighters were picked off one by one. No starfighter could survive a hit with a point defense weapon, although a lucky fighter jock might—might—manage to eject into space before his fighter disintegrated. Marius wondered grimly what would happen to his pilots if they were rescued by the enemy. The Inheritance Wars had seen a wide range of prisoner treatments—some had been treated well, others had been stranded on hellish worlds, if prisoners had been taken at all—but surely Admiral Justinian would be smart enough not to annoy the Senate any more than he already had.

  And then, there was the Federation Navy’s attitude to consider. Treating captured prisoners badly would fuel a desire for victory and revenge.

  “They’re targeting the carriers, sir,” the tactical officer said. The sheer randomness of the enemy flight paths had defeated any attempt to analyse their targeting priorities, until it was too late. “Illustrious and Shokaku are primar
y targets; Graf Zeppelin may be a third...”

  “Steer the CSP over to cover the carriers,” Marius ordered calmly. The enemy targeting made perfect sense. Picking off the carriers would destroy his ability to mount a proper CSP, leaving his ships naked and vulnerable to repeated fighter strikes. “Refocus point defense; defending the carriers has absolute priority.”

  It was too late. The starfighters had already started to launch their missiles towards Illustrious, hammering the fleet carrier hard. For a long moment, Marius allowed himself to hope that the carrier would survive, seconds before it blew up into a ball of radioactive plasma.

  Shokaku was luckier; one of her primary flight decks was wrecked, but the remainder of the ship survived intact. Her other flight decks would still be able to launch and recover fighters.

  The remainder of the enemy starfighters pulled back, abandoning the attack and racing back towards Bogey Four. Marius knew they’d be back.

  “Admiral,” the sensor officer snapped. “Look at Enterprise!”

  Marius stared.

  “What the...?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The following are not considered line officers under Case Omega: Engineers, Doctors, Intelligence Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers. They are not to be considered to be in the chain of command.

  -Federation Navy Regulations, 3900 A.D.

  Jefferson System, 4092

  Back at Luna Academy, each cadet had to go through a test that dated all the way back to the early days of human expansion into space. Indeed, its origins were somewhat mythological. The cadet was given command of a simulated starship—with the consoles manned, often, by a real starship crew—and ordered to complete a particular mission. What the cadet wasn’t told was that the simulation was rigged; no matter what the cadet did, the mission would lurch from disaster to disaster until the simulated starship was finally destroyed. Roman had, afterwards, asked the instructor why they were put through a test that had no victorious outcome. The instructor had replied that the test was intended to measure how they coped with stress, and how quickly they thought under combat conditions.

  “Get me a full damage report,” he ordered, duly aware that he was barking orders to the chief engineer, a man with more years of service than Roman had been alive. The temptation to just give up was overwhelming, yet who else was there to take over? Everyone who outranked him was dead or missing, presumed dead. The poor bastards who’d been on the bridge when spears of antimatter fury had burned through the shields and hull would have been vaporized. “How many sensors do we have left?”

  Enterprise was tumbling through space, but thankfully the gravity had remained operational, Even so, he could feel it in his inner ear, a sense that something wasn’t quite right. The carrier had not only been crippled, but punched out of formation and, without a clear idea of how badly damaged the ship actually was, he didn’t know if he dared power up the drives. The emergency systems had powered down the drives as soon as the ship had been hit and there was no way to know if they were still operational. The internal sensor network had been badly damaged and was barely functioning.

  “The external sensor network is largely intact,” Sultana said. She sounded icily calm and in control, shaming him. RockRats were supposed to know, in their blood, how dangerous space could be and how only quick action—and no panic—could save lives. “We have incoming.”

  Roman stared down at the tactical console. He should have taken the command chair in the center of the compartment, but there was no replacement for the tactical position, at least until they managed to find another lieutenant. Most of the tactical section would have been killed in the attack. There were enemy starships approaching Enterprise; four battlecruisers and a host of smaller craft. The sensors finally identified them as Marine Landing Craft. The rebels intended to board Enterprise!

  Over my dead body, Roman thought coldly. He’d admired and respected the captain and the XO. It would have been a betrayal of their memory to tamely surrender the carrier to Admiral Justinian and the rebels. Besides, they were coming in fat and happy, believing that Enterprise was completely crippled. And that, part of his mind insisted, offered an opportunity to strike back.

  The damage report started to scroll up in front of him as the internal datanet came back online. It wasn’t as bad as he had feared, even though it was still pretty bad. The main bridge and flag bridge—and surrounding compartments—were completely destroyed. The internal emergency system had sealed off the affected compartments before the atmosphere had been vented into space. One of the antimatter beams had gone through the port flight decks and effectively destroyed them, leaving the starfighter pilots stranded and unable to escape; another had destroyed one of the drive units. The remaining drive units—and shield generators—were intact, as were most of the weapons. Enterprise, given time, would be able to escape, yet it was doubtful that the rebels would give her time. It didn’t take years of experience to know that the damaged carrier was going to maneuver like a wallowing pig.

  He ran through the vectors in his mind and smiled. Admiral Justinian hadn’t brought his superdreadnaughts close to Enterprise, either out of suspicion or because he wanted to point them at Admiral Drake instead. The battlecruisers would be in short range—almost point-black range—within minutes, but the Marine Landing Craft would dock with Enterprise before the battlecruisers were close enough to have no hope of evading his fire.

  “Deploy the Marines,” he ordered. “Put them in position to repel boarders.”

  He spared a single thought for Elf, and then turned back to his console. His plan was insane—he’d have been reprimanded sharply for proposing it at the Academy—but if the enemy just knew that Enterprise was crippled, they might not be too careful. On the other hand, if he opened fire too soon, the battlecruisers would stand off and pound Enterprise into a drifting hulk.

  The enemy starfighters were engaging the remains of Enterprise’s CSP, clearing the fighter jocks away before the Marines moved in. Some of the pilots ignored the enemy fighters and targeted the Marine craft, thinning the force before they had a chance to dock with the Enterprise. Roman winced as he saw the starfighters wink out, one by one, knowing that each icon represented a living human being. How many of them had he known personally before the fleet had entered the Jefferson System?

  Somehow, he pushed the thought aside. There would be time to mourn the dead later.

  “Keep the active sensors offline,” he ordered as the enemy battlecruisers moved closer. A single active scan could tell him everything he wanted to know—at the cost of revealing Enterprise’s true condition. He had no doubts about how they would react if they realized the truth. “Track the battlecruisers with passive sensors only, but keep uploading the targeting data to the missile tubes.”

  Enterprise’s designers had sought to create a starship that was a cross between a carrier and a dreadnaught. Roman had been told by Commander Duggan that, like other ships that attempted to combine two separate roles, Enterprise managed to be mistress of neither. She couldn’t stand up to a superdreadnaught—or even a battleship—nor could she launch and recover her fighters as rapidly as a fleet carrier.

  On the other hand, at point blank range the battlecruisers wouldn’t know what was coming their way until it was far too late.

  “The enemy Marines are moving in to dock now,” Sultana said dispassionately.

  Roman turned to look at the internal display. The Marines—his Marines—had deployed themselves to repel boarders. The enemy was being predicable, heading for the holes they’d made in the hull. Roman wondered, suddenly, if Elf was thinking of him, perhaps cursing him for placing her in a death trap.

  “Roman...ah, sir...” Sultana said.

  “Spit it out,” Roman ordered sharply.

  “Two minutes until the battlecruisers are within point-blank range,” Sultana said. “Can I suggest that we open fire on the remaining landing craft at the same time?”

  “Make it s
o,” Roman said. The thought was a good one, even though the boarders might try to disable the ship’s weaponry as they advanced. “Prepare to fire.”

  Where would they go, once they boarded the ship? Justinian must know they’d destroyed the bridge and the secondary facilities, so...engineering? They hadn’t landed anywhere near the engineering compartments, but perhaps they intended to secure the interior of the ship first. Boarding actions were rare, so Roman couldn’t be sure; as it was, he couldn’t recall a single example of a successful boarding action against a carrier or a superdreadnaught.

  And this one’s not going to be the first…not if I can help it, he thought.

  The enemy battlecruisers were much closer now, their targeting sensors sweeping Enterprise’s hull. Roman hoped that didn’t mean they had missiles ready to fire. A single antimatter warhead would vaporize the entire carrier. He braced himself as the final seconds ticked down, keying the tactical console and uploading precise firing instructions. All four battlecruisers had to be targeted and destroyed in the opening barrage.

  “I have a message from the damage control parties in the starboard flight decks,” Sultana said. “They report that we can launch starfighters once they reroute power to the launch catapults. Many of the ready craft were destroyed when the ship was hit, but the remainder were held in their cradles and check out as being ready to fly.”

  “Tell them to get ready to launch,” Roman ordered. He caught himself a moment later. “No, belay that; no power emissions until we open fire. We don’t want to scare them off.”

  He looked back at the tactical console. The four enemy battlecruisers were just entering point-blank range. In terms of space travel, they were close enough to touch.

  “Fire,” he ordered, keying the switch.