“Battlecruiser has increased her sublight drive to Emergency,” said Bartoli. The larger ship’s top speed was slower than the Destroyer’s and she accelerated more slowly; still, the increased acceleration substantially slowed the closure rate between the two ships. “Battlecruiser is sweeping us with targeting scanners . . . she’s initiating a lock sequence.”
“Fire the Egg Scrambler,” Max ordered. The communications flare shot from tube three and immediately detonated, making interstellar communications impossible. Unless they lived through the battle, any news the Krag passed on about this attack could travel no faster than the speed of light. It would be years before anyone heard it. “Evasive India Three. Countermeasures.” Immediately LeBlanc started giving a series of intricate orders to his men, jinking the highly maneuverable Destroyer erratically to slow the ability of the enemy to get a targeting lock while still continuing to close the range to the Battlecruiser. Meanwhile, one Countermeasures officer in CIC and seven of his Back Room colleagues activated and managed second by second various scrambling pulses, confusing echoes, jamming signals, infra-red drones, chaff dispensing missiles, and other kinds of legerdemain designed to confuse, deceive, distract, divert, or otherwise discombobulate the Krag targeting systems so that the Battlecruiser’s deadly pulse cannon could not get a killing shot.
Max stabbed the comm switch. “CIC to Mori.”
“Mori here.”
“You ready?”
“I’ve got my eye on the sun and my paddle in the water.” Mori was born on a tiny island in the Micronesia chain on Earth. His people, in an almost inconceivable feat of seamanship and navigation, had paddled dugout canoes across thousands of miles of the open Pacific without chart or compass to make precise landfall on tiny islands smaller than the average farm in the American Midwest. Mori himself had spent much of his childhood in such craft before deciding at age nine to venture into an infinitely vaster ocean.
“Go at the designated mark.”
“Affirmative. Three. Two. One. Now.” Mori engaged the powerful sublight drive on the Cutter which, even with the extra weight, quickly began to overtake the Destroyer. The accelerating Battlecruiser had not spotted him yet, having a more immediate threat to deal with.
As for the Destroyer, the evasive maneuvers combined with an excellent countermeasures suite were combining to defeat the Krag targeting systems, for now. Determining that they could not get a positive lock, the Krag decided to Fire by Bearing rather than Firing by Lock, meaning that they pointed their cannon along the measured bearing of the Destroyer rather than having a co-axial lock between the targeting scanner and the weapon bore. Brilliant pulse cannon bolts began streaking past the Cumberland, some passing within meters of her hull. Space was big, but it wasn’t that big. It was only a matter of time before the Krag got a hit by this method, or before the decreasing range allowed the targeting scanners to get a lock. The Cumberland began firing its own, somewhat less powerful, pulse cannon, on the off chance of doing some damage or at least helping confuse the enemy targeting systems. It was impossible to miss a non-evading target of that size at that range, so every shot scored a hit on the Battlecruiser, but her deflectors and immensely thick, armored hull protected her from receiving any major damage. The fifth shot did, however, actually manage to destroy one of the Battlecruiser’s two aft targeting scanners. With only one targeting scanner operating, the chances of getting a lock decreased significantly.
Meanwhile, the accelerating Cutter came up behind the Cumberland matching its speed at .60 c. The two ships exchanged quick digital signals verifying that each was prepared for the next step and starting a five second countdown clock on each vessel. When his clock reached zero, Mori nudged his drive controller forward and pulled around the Cumberland on its port side. Just as the Cutter drew even with the Cumberland’s missile tubes and reached a speed of .61c, the Cumberland fired a Raven heavy anti-ship missile from each of its two forward missile tubes.
At that same moment, four explosive bolts on the port side of the Cutter and four on the starboard detonated, each set releasing a hastily-fashioned bracket that had held a Raven to the hull of the Cutter. Following their recently-altered flight software, these two ravens yawed away from the cutter for two seconds at low power before their drives went to full stage and rapidly accelerated the missiles to attack speed, matching that of their two brethren just fired from the Cumberland.
“Maneuvering, breakaway,” Max nearly shouted. “Missile rooms, reload with Talons.” LeBlanc gave the pre-planned orders to his men veering the Destroyer ninety degrees away from its previous course while continuing to accelerate at Emergency so that the Krag gunners would have to try to follow the fastest possible change in bearing. As the range opened up and the Cumberland continued to accelerate, the pulse cannon bolts trailed hopelessly behind.
Meanwhile, the four Raven missiles steered toward their target. Communicating with one another in microsecond long coded bursts, their sophisticated on board computers coordinated their attack second by second, working together like a pack of wolves to confuse and penetrate the enemy defenses. After flying together in a rough box formation for a few seconds, the missiles separated from one another, each approaching the huge vessel from amidships as though each was approaching from a different cardinal point of the compass. Within its designated target zone, each missile scanned its quarry, selecting a particularly vulnerable point—a hatch, a junction between two hull plates, a cluster of waste gas vents. Three missiles slowed slightly and one speeded up so that they would impact and detonate at exactly the same microsecond, placing the maximum stress on the structure, shielding, integrity fields, and blast suppression systems of the Krag vessel. Finally, at 99.28 percent of the speed of light, all four streaked past the Krag defenses and detonated as one.
Four 1.5 megaton fusion warheads ignited and did their deadly work—four suns born around the Krag’s hull, growing and merging into a gigantic four-lobed fireball consuming the Battlecruiser in less than a second. The orb of destruction assimilated metal and plastic, bone and flesh alike, taking atoms forged by nucleosynthesis billions of years ago in the cores of now long-dead supernovae and hurling them back into the void. Perhaps, after more billions of years have passed, those atoms would once again coalesce into the rock and air and water of another fertile world be evolved and dug up and refined and manufactured into the bodies of thinking beings and their intricate machines of war.
Max watched the expanding globe of light as it filled his screen. He had never seen four of the big warheads used on a target all at once and he was taken aback by the enormous destruction that could be unleashed at his order. And, by how powerful the bombs were in comparison to the puny men who made them.
The fireball faded. There was still work to do. “Tactical, what are our remaining friends doing?
“The Ore carrier’s course and speed are unchanged—he’s still headed for the jump point, ETA six hours, thirty-seven minutes. A reasonable hypothesis is that the vessel is automated. And the Corvettes are running for it—drives are redlined. Heading is two-two-five mark zero-one-five. That’s a course for the nearest edge of the zone messed up by the Egg Scrambler.” Not only did the Egg Scrambler prevent FTL communications, it also kept compression drives from being able to form a propulsive field.
“Can we get within pulse cannon range before they get there?”
Someone in Tactical’s Back Room who was paying close enough attention, either watching the overall situation or listening to the conversation in CIC or both, decided that just such a calculation would be needed, and had put it up on one of Tactical’s screens. “Affirmative, sir. With the main sublight at ‘Full,’ we can still catch them with about six minutes to spare. And, even if they get there, sir, Corpuscles have a top speed on Compression of only about twelve hundred c. We could overtake them pretty quickly.”
“That’s good to know, Tactical, but I prefer not to engage a superluminal target if I can help it. Man
euvering, reduce to Full and shape course to intercept the Corvettes.”
“Ahead Full, course to intercept Corvettes, aye.” LeBlanc implemented the drive setting change, spent a few moments with his console computing the new course, and then gave the course change orders.
Max’s Tactical Overview display showed that Destroyer was rapidly overtaking the two smaller ships and that the fleeing vessels were nearly in pulse cannon range. “Weapons, bring pulse cannon one and pulse cannon three to Prefire. Target cannon one on hotel two and cannon three on Hotel three. Hold pulse cannon two on Standby.”
“Aye, sir, Pulse one and three to Prefire, two remaining on Standby.” Weapons acknowledged. Eleven seconds passed as the systems that diverted plasma from the ship’s main reactor in measured amounts and routed it through shielded conduits into the cannons’ firing chambers were energized, their cooling systems powered up and engaged, and the cannon aiming systems enabled, Two green lights on the Weapons console came on. “Pulse one and pulse three at Prefire. Targeting now.” The huge magnetic coils that guided the pulse blasts came to life, drew aiming data from the targeting computer, and synched with the targeting scanner which had already locked on to the targets. Two more green lights came on. Each cannon’s target appeared on one of Tactical’s screens, along with the target’s ID, course, speed, and range. “Pulse one locked on Hotel two. Pulse three locked on Hotel three.”
“Pulse one and pulse three to Ready.”
Weapons stabbed two orange buttons, one for each cannon to be fired, that caused plasma to flow from the reactor into the firing chambers, building up sufficient quantity to fire the weapons. This took four seconds, after which two more green lights at Tactical winked on. “Pulse one and pulse three Ready.”
“Set for maximum power, synchronized firing.”
“Max power, synch firing, aye.”
“Range to targets?”
“Niner three five five kills to Hotel two, niner three five seven kills to Hotel three.” Maximum effective range was 10,500 kilometers.
“Confirm targets.”
“Pulse one is targeted on Krag Corvette designated Hotel two off our bow, range niner three five five kills. Pulse two is targeted on Krag Corvette designated Hotel three off our bow, range niner three five seven kills.”
“Captain, I think we are missing something important here,” Garcia interjected.
“Like what?” Max was not entirely successful in concealing his irritation at being interrupted just as he was about to kill these two targets.
“Why aren’t they evading? Corvettes are very maneuverable. I mean, as soon as we got in range these guys should have started jinking all over the place, right?”
Good question. Why the hell not? What could they possibly have to gain by not zig zagging? Max could think of only one thing: if the Corvettes maintained a constant course, then the Cumberland was more likely to maintain a constant course as well. Therefore, the Krag must want his ship to stay in a constant position relative to theirs. Why would they want that? Oh. Crap. “Forward deflectors to maximum—tune for metallic object about two meters in diameter with extremely low relative velocity. Point defense batteries, zone firing. Blanket thirty degree cone forward. Spaceframe reinforcement to maximum. All hands brace for impact.”
CIC held its breath for two and a half seconds, at which point the console screens showing output from the forward optical scanners flared white and then went dark, their receptors burned out. A split second later, the ship trembled mildly as the shock wave from the explosion, almost vanishingly tenuous in the vacuum of outer space, struck the hull.
“All right, now that we’ve got that settled, let’s fry the bastards. Weapons, fire pulse one and two.” Weapons pressed both Fire buttons and two glowing balls of compressed plasma about two meters in diameter streaked through space, each striking its target dead center and exploding as its containment field—generated by a tiny liquid helium cooled emitter inserted in the plasma pulse as it left the gun tube—shattered with the explosive force of about half a kiloton. It wasn’t much compared to a missile, but the blast equivalent of five hundred tons of TNT, not to mention the thermal and structural stress of being struck at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed by a ball of compressed, ionized gas as hot as the interior of the sun, was enough to spell the end of two superannuated Corvettes. Both ships tore themselves apart in twin orgies of glaring explosions and shredding metal.
A few moments later, as normalcy returned to CIC and the Destroyer shaped course to intercept the now defenseless ore carrier, the XO turned to his Skipper. “Sir, do you mind telling me what the hell just happened.”
“Oh, that.” Max managed to sound almost nonchalant. “New weapon. One of our spy ships witnessed a test of it inside Krag space a few months ago, but we didn’t know that it was deployed yet: code name ‘Remora’ or something like that. Nasty little fucker. It’s a stealthed, remote controlled, fusion bomb designed to kill an overtaking ship. The bastards launch it cold and it comes at you slowly and undetectably just as you think you are boring in at them on their six. The stealth is so good that the point defense grid doesn’t pick it up and the speed relative to the chasing ship is so low that the deflectors don’t even budge it. They just let it crawl back until they’ve got it snuggled right up against the hull and then BLAM. You never see it coming.” He turned toward Tactical. “That looked like, what, a one fifty or one sixty kt burst?”
“Our reading is one-five-two kilo tango, skipper,” Bartoli answered.
“OK, a hundred and fifty-two kiloton thermonuclear burst. Inside the deflectors. Right up against the hull. That’s a one hundred percent kill for anything from a medium Cruiser on down. Who knows how many times they’ve used it without us being the wiser? No warning. No survivors. Just another ship ‘missing, presumed lost.’ If it hadn’t been for your question, XO, they would have got us, too.” Max shook his head ruefully. Already he could think of five lost Union ships that had left debris patterns perfectly explained by what he had observed about this weapon. “Anyway, tuning the deflector for an object of the right size and relative velocity pushed it away from the ship where the point defense batteries were able to get a lock once the deflectors had it. The weapon’s on board AI figured out that it was about to be destroyed, so it detonated before we could hit it. We lived. They died.” This time. “That’s the name of the game.
“Chin, raise the Cutter.” Chin clicked a few keys.
“Cutter, Mori here.”
“Mori, this is the skipper. Didn’t want you to think you’d slipped our minds. What’s your status?”
“The Cutter lost some external antennae when that second Raven lit off, but other than that, no damage. I’ll be at the rendezvous point in thirteen minutes.”
“Excellent. See you there. Keep on piloting like that and I might just let you take the Cutter out again some time. Skipper out.”
Meanwhile, the Ore Carrier, which was the real target all along, continued to plow toward the jump point with dogged, robot determination. Its destruction was anticlimactic—a straightforward approach from the starboard beam, two shots from pulse cannon number two, and the half-million ton freighter and its bulky but strategically valuable cargo were a cloud of debris. None of that ore would ever be refined into metal to make Krag guns, Krag swords, and Krag ships. A small but measurable blow to enemy war production had been struck by the U.S.S Cumberland.
For the first time since its commissioning, the Cumberland had met the enemy in battle and had defeated him. Victory. It really does taste sweet.
Chapter 14
14:38Z Hours 26 January 2315
Beep. Once again, Max’s work station made the distinctive, not unpleasant, beep that indicated that a routine report or memorandum had just been filed to his electronic In Box. High priority items went Boop and normal items went Beep. Emergency items, of course, went Beep Boop. Or was it Boop Beep? Max hoped he never had to find out. He had had been writing his After
Action Report detailing the destruction of the Krag Battlecruiser, two Corvettes, and Ore Carrier for a little over an hour, trying to find the right balance between bland, passive voice, polysyllabic, Latinate bureaucratese and tooting his own horn and that of his crew in vigorous, active voice, laconic, Anglo-Saxon Standard. During that time, he had heard that beep at least seven times, maybe eight. That seemed excessive, but Max was focusing on getting his report written, as such things were best done when the engagement was fresh in one’s mind. Particularly now, when the adrenalin from the encounter with the Krag had worn off leaving nothing behind but the exhaustion that seemed to be his constant companion since he tore open that envelope in the ORDRDRM back on the Nimitz six days ago.
Finally, he completed the report, read over it, made a few changes, and hit the key that made it a part of the ship’s Log and queued it for transmission to the Task Force and to the Admiralty as soon as the ship came off of EMCON. Beep. One more. Max pulled up his In Box, which he had not checked for routine communications since sometime yesterday. The work station screen informed him: “Your In Box contains 57 items. Display as summary list or display full text in order of receipt?” Fifty-seven items? In less than a day? That’s more than one for every four people on board. Max keyed for a summary and scrolled down the list:
Time/Date: 11:12/25JAN15
Sender: Harbaugh
Subject: Daily Sensor Contact Report
Daily Sensor Contact Report? The Sensors section has been sending a separate written report every single day listing every single contact? Doesn’t the Captain already know what the contacts are? Aren’t contacts already being logged by the Officer of the Deck? Aren’t all contacts of any significance mentioned in the Captain’s own log? Come to think of it, he had seen this report from Sensors on each of the previous four days, but it hadn’t sunk in that “Daily” actually meant daily.
To Honor You Call Us Page 22
