Warlord 2: The Nobility

by CJ Williams

  Not officially, Captain. But the crew members in the communication office are visibly upset so rumors are starting to spread.

  Lindsey nodded. George had included him in his response. “We both need to nip that in the bud,” Lindsey said. “No one can keep this kind of thing a secret. George, inform Major Barrett to assemble the senior staff. I’ll join him directly.”

  Acknowledged, Governor.

  “Let Zach know as well, George,” Carrie said aloud. Zach was her first officer and chief of the tactical division. “Ask him to evaluate the Bakkui’s tactics. See if he can figure out what they might be doing differently.”

  Acknowledged, Captain.

  Carrie stood up. She felt a little better; not much, but at least the initial shock had worn off. She could cope. “Thank you, Governor. I’ll meet with my crew and develop a plan.”

  “Keep me in the loop,” Lindsey said.

  “Of course, sir.” She always did. Not because it was required. Commander Blackburn had been blunt about having two separate chains of command. To him, air power, or in this case, the space fleet, had to stay independent of the ground forces.

  “It has to be that way,” the Commander had told her. “A ground commander will gladly sacrifice air power to keep his army intact. But his vision is limited by his nature. Air supremacy is necessary to win the overall war, not just one battle. Never give a ground pounder the ultimate say-so.”

  Carrie agreed with the concept entirely, but it didn’t stop her from using the governor as a valued advisor. He’d been around a lot longer than her and had seen much more of life—and of combat, for that matter. She respected the man and the advice he gave.

  “Take me to Lulubelle,” Carrie ordered Jamie after settling into the pilot’s seat once more.

  “Course set, Captain,” the shuttle’s AI replied.

  Carrie watched the planet fall away and wished the Commander were here. This was his ballgame, after all.

  *.*.*.*

  Two years ago, Luke Blackburn, then a retired military pilot, was the manager of an out-of-the-way airport in central Nevada. A human named Sam had shown up in a small spacecraft powered by what he called a gravity drive. He’d given Luke an earpiece that acted as a translation device.

  Sam had claimed he was an emissary from the Nobility; a group of royal families near the center of the galaxy. He told Luke of the evil Bakkui, an alien force that was creeping its way inexorably toward Earth. They would swarm into a star system and wipe out the population of any inhabited planet and then move on. They didn’t raid, they didn’t steal resources, they just murdered and departed; drive-by shootings on a galactic scale.

  Sam then took Luke to a fledgling moonbase and introduced him to 3D printers, Nobility style; a process so sophisticated that everyone referred to the machines as replicators. Without much more than wishing Luke the best of luck from the Nobility, Sam had left, never to be seen again.

  Other than the replicators and gravity drives, his departing gift had been to introduce George, an incredible artificial intelligence.

  Based on the advice of George, Luke had refused to share his wondrous new technology with the governments of Earth. George had a thoroughly documented history of such failed attempts. Research had proven that worlds divided by international boundaries and conflicting political beliefs would not survive the incorporation of such a revolutionary technology.

  Instead of benefiting their own cultures, competing governments self-destructed when they used technology to eradicate the other side.

  But such planets were rare exceptions. Non-violence, it seemed, was the galactic standard. According to George, all of humanity, spread far and wide through the Milky Way Galaxy, did not believe in violence.

  Luke’s solution was to build a force with people recruited from all of Earth’s nations using his new moonbase as a launch point. With George as his partner, Luke assembled a team of immensely talented people and the Milky Way Alliance was born.

  Carrie and Lulubelle were part of the Alliance, a military space force whose mission was to seek out and destroy the Bakkui.

  *.*.*.*

  Seeing Lulubelle brought Carrie out of her reverie. The massive spacecraft was parked in a higher orbit than Sisko Station and the ship was just emerging from the planetary shadow. It was set off against the planet’s nighttime surface below and a brilliant sunrise above.

  “Landing authorization received,” Jamie said.

  A hangar door opened in Lulubelle’s massive hull and Jamie oriented herself to a landing approach. Ten minutes later Carrie took a seat in front of the shaken faces of her senior officers.

  “All of you look like I did when I first got this message,” she admitted. “I just talked to Governor Lindsey about this. He pointed out that a single brief message probably didn’t paint the entire picture; there is more to come. Let’s pray we get better news soon. But whether we do or not, he reminded me that our mission is still to fight the Bakkui.”

  Lieutenant Alisha Duncan spoke up. “Aren’t you going back to Earth?”

  “If we decide that would be the best thing to do, then of course we will. But first, we’ll wait to hear more. I don’t want to make the trip to Earth for no reason and then come back to find that Bradley’s Planet was destroyed when we could have stopped it. In the meantime, Zach will analyze what the Bakkui could have done to walk over our forces. They haven’t shown that kind of capability here.”

  Alisha raised her hand. “What about J99?” she asked. “Are you still going?”

  Alisha’s concern was understandable. She was in charge of the solar system’s defense. Her job was to stay behind when the fleet went out.

  The reconnaissance analysts predicted the Bakkui would hit J99 sometime within the next three to four weeks and it would take almost two weeks to get there.

  “My initial answer is yes,” Carrie told Alisha. “But I won’t make the final decision just yet. I want to see Zach’s opinion on Bakkui tactics. And he said he’s about done with the reassessment of our own operation that you two have been working on.”

  “But still,” Alisha persisted. “Couldn’t you wait this one out? J99 is a small system. It’s got what, only three or four hundred million people?” She turned to the reconnaissance officer for confirmation. “Wasn’t that your estimate?”

  Carrie was surprised. Not just by the question, but by the supportive looks from some of her officers. “Would you listen to yourself?” she demanded. “Are you saying a few hundred million people don’t matter?”

  Some of those around the table had the decency to look ashamed.

  Carrie let her anger rise a few degrees so she could make the point. “Let’s stay focused on why we’re out here, people. When talking about human lives, I never again want to hear someone use the term only.”

  *.*.*.*

  Two days later Carrie examined the faces of her subordinates. She was in the new situation room on Sisko. Zach and Alisha looked exhausted. Johnny Grimes, Zach’s number one tactical analyst, was absolutely haggard.

  “Okay,” Carrie said. “I take it you reached some conclusions?”

  “We did,” Zach said. “You were correct. We’ve been going at this the wrong way.”

  “Explain it, please.” Carrie asked.

  “We’ve been using a one-size-fits-all approach. When we set out on one of our interdiction missions, we throw everything into every single attack. In doing so we leave this system without much protection.”

  “What should we do differently?”

  “Consider it this way,” Zach replied. “System J97 is our fleet headquarters; like Pearl Harbor is for the US Pacific Fleet. We should split our forces into two or more battle groups.”

  “You mean leave one force for system defense?”

  “That’s only part of it. We’re learning more about the Bakkui, thanks to our growing sensor array. Eventually, we’ll want to engage in multiple locations. But in the meantime, yes, it can provide system d
efense.”

  Carrie thought about it. “How much offensive capability are you asking me to give up? Aren’t we already investing in local defense?”

  “Yes. Thanks to Rico and Justin, we’ve made improvements, like their new defense missiles. But we should still cut back our attack force.”

  “How much?” Carrie asked again.

  “About sixty percent.”

  “That much?” That was a surprise. Carrie was thinking ten or twenty percent.

  “Here’s why,” Zach said. “In the last two months, thanks to Debbie’s sensor array, we were able to hit two Bakkui fleets. I ran several simulations on those engagements. In both cases, we could have done the same job with half of the warships and maybe a dozen fighters. And frankly, we don’t need any of the ground troops. It’s just a waste keeping those guys on board Lulubelle.”

  Carrie smiled inwardly. She agreed with him on that point. But cutting back on warships that much was a different matter.

  “I’m not convinced,” she told Zach. “Show me.”

  “Grimes came up with all the numbers. Go ahead, John.”

  “Sisko,” Grimes said to the station AI. “Run attack simulation one.”

  “Attack Simulation One,” Sisko acknowledged in a smooth tenor voice.

  The center of the room filled with a hologram that displayed a reenactment of last month’s intercept of a Bakkui fleet in system J88. Carrie recognized it immediately because she’d directed the battle and seen the event live on Lulubelle’s bridge. Her fleet caught the Bakkui just after it entered the system.

  The hologram displayed the Bakkui force with yellow diamond icons, the larger ships with larger icons. A white oval icon appeared, representing Lulubelle. The Alliance fleet had emerged from light speed and caught the Bakkui from behind. The oval displaying Lulubelle’s location blossomed into a hundred white dots, their Ambrosia-class warships, and then sparkled with dozens of colored specks, their squadrons of one-man fighters.

  Carrie silently watched the battle in a high-speed playback. It was an accurate portrayal. In real time the battle took less than ten minutes and they wiped out over two hundred Bakkui without a loss.

  “Now run attack simulation two,” Grimes said.

  To Carrie, the battle replayed exactly as before. But she noted there were fewer icons for Alliance warships and none at all for the fighters. In the same amount of battle time, the result was unchanged.

  “What force configuration did you use?” she asked.

  “No fighters,” Grimes answered. “And only forty percent of our warships,”

  “Any assumptions?”

  “Several,” Grimes admitted. “But we’ve run variations that cover every eventuality we could come up with, even with inexperienced pilots and you not on the bridge. They all come out the same.”

  “How can that be?” Carrie wanted to know.

  “Our technology,” Grimes said blandly. “Our stuff is just so far ahead of them it’s ridiculous. My guess is that someone purposely designed the Bakkui to be ineffective against a modern armed space force.”

  “They were pretty effective against Bradley’s Planet,” Carrie said grimly. It was a harsh statement and she intended it to be. The Bakkui had wiped out the local population of over a billion people, and the Alliance’s reconnaissance probes had found hundreds of other worlds deep in Bakkui space where they had done the same. The death toll was unimaginable.

  “That’s our point,” Grimes said. “Against a defenseless planet, the Bakkui are terribly effective even though they fire rounds using a gunpowder-like charge.”

  “We’ve all wondered about that,” Carrie said. “Why would they use a solid propellant to launch explosive projectiles? They’re like World War II navy guns.”

  “Exactly. We’ve seen everything from twenty-four to forty-eight-inch shells. The reason they’re so effective against planets is because of kinetic energy. It’s basic Einsteinian mathematics; mass and velocity. Even if they were firing solid rock, like a meteor, the impact of an object that size produces about a thirty kiloton blast; almost double what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you surround a planet with two hundred Bakkui destroyers, all of them firing down on the surface, it doesn’t take long to kill everyone below. But use those same guns against a shielded warship, it’s another story. Conventional weapons are going to have a tough time against our shields.”

  “But they’ve got the same gravity drives we do,” Carrie argued.

  “True, but we’re faster. Our after-battle analysis of their debris shows a different alloy matrix in their drives. We’ve tested it and ours is more efficient. And look at our weapons. Originally we used big slugs of depleted uranium with a core of lithium deuteride. If we hit something solid enough, like a steel hull, the compression at impact generates enough heat to trigger a thermonuclear explosion. As you’ve seen, their shields sometimes reduce the impact velocity, so the result is just a heavy slug. Zach has more about that.”

  Zach picked up the explanation. “Justin’s upgrade a month ago included a shaped charge in the nose that does a much better job of penetrating their force fields. Instead of having to bludgeon our way through their shields with multiple rounds, now a single projectile can punch right through it. And last week, he added a gravity drive to each round with a limited capability to home in on a target. That means fewer misses. We used to fire thousands of rounds per engagement, but now, it shouldn’t be necessary.”

  “I’m not sure,” Carrie said. “In the middle of the battle, it’s hard not to keep firing until you know they’re dead.”

  Zach nodded. “I know. I feel exactly the same way. I’d rather go dry on ammo rather than let a disabled enemy get off that one lucky shot.”

  “Is that why we lost ships, then?” Carrie asked. “Was it just bad luck?”

  “No, ma’am.” Zach turned to the display. “Sisko, depict a comparison of the Bakkui shields to our original version.”

  The center of the room filled with a scaled-down version of an Ambrosia-class warship facing a similar sized Bakkui destroyer. A thick translucent barrier surrounded each spacecraft.

  “The problem was our shields. This is what we previously used as a defensive shield. A basic walled barrier powered by an anti-gravity force. Effective, but enough concentrated firepower can bust through it. Riley Stevens on Moonbase designed our original version and we used it in our battles at Jigu and when we first arrived here.”

  “And we lost crews in both battles,” Carrie said pointedly.

  “I understand, Captain, but not any longer. Sisko, depict the operation of our current shields.”

  The display zoomed out reflecting a smaller scale. This time the Alliance warship’s shield was thinner. Instead of the standard oval shape, the new version was round and flat, more like the blade of a circular saw. It extended two thousand feet around the ship to a thin, razor-like edge. Close to the hull, the translucent shield thickened, surrounding the hull like a cushioned envelope. In the hologram, a slow-motion Bakkui destroyer fired repeatedly on the Alliance ship from varying angles. As it did, the envelope rotated along the warship’s axis so that no matter what direction the attacker fired from, the incoming projectile was always faced with the sharp edge that deflected the shot away from the hull.

  Zach continued his explanation. “We haven’t lost a single fighter or warship equipped with the new shield. It’s still possible that we might. For example, if one of our guys got himself surrounded, or if his gravity drive were disabled, and the enemy could mount a massed attack from several directions at once, the new shield would be no better than our original. But that’s unlikely. Our tactics are to retreat instead of trying to slug it out.”

  “So,” Carrie said to Zach. “Bottom line, are you willing to risk everything on your theory?”

  Zach grinned. “Absolutely. If you want, you can stay here and take care of system defense, and I’ll deploy with Lulubelle.”

  Carrie nodded without
smiling. “Nice try. Maybe someday. Okay, then. Keep five hundred ground troops onboard just in case. Move the rest planetside after working out the force drawdowns with the governor’s staff. And just to be on the safe side, limit the reduction of warships for this trip to fifty percent. I’d feel more comfortable with a ten percent hedge.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “We still have to depart on schedule. We can’t afford to wait. Anything that is still onboard goes with us.”

  “Understood. I’ll reassign the warships to Sisko this afternoon. Once the governor gives us his okay, we’ll transport his army troops down to wherever he wants.”

  Zach hurried out to get started and Carrie turned to Alisha who had been silent during the briefing. She was standing nervously in the background. “Relax,” Carrie said. “I’m not angry with you.”

  Alisha looked miserable. “I wanted to apologize. I feel terrible for what I said. I can’t believe I even suggested that.”

  Carrie waved away the apology. “We were all stressed out by the news. It makes people react without thinking. For now, focus on your job. Come up with a good plan for the ships I’m leaving behind.”

  “I will,” Alisha promised. “My team is already developing a new in-system defense strategy.”

  In the meantime, Carrie had a meeting scheduled with Governor Lindsey. It would be a good time to let him know he was going to get a bunch of new soldiers.

  *.*.*.*

  When Carrie arrived, Lindsey was in his office and waved her in, greeting her with a smile. She started by giving him some recent reconnaissance data and then told him she wanted to transfer the army troops.

  During her explanation, she pointed out there wasn’t much you could do with ground troops on a spaceship, except drill them endlessly with intruder alerts and emergency procedures. The exercises were required for normal training, but to keep the men busy, she was scheduling a lot more ship drills than necessary. She was at the point she hated the drills as much as they did.