by Dietmar Wehr
“They’ve obviously given a lot of thought to this attack. You’ve already vindicated my confidence in you, Iceman. A human CINCED would not have noticed the potential for a direct jump to EE.”
“Want to bet their other attacks will be lined up for secondary jump targets, Admiral?” asked Iceman.
“I won’t bet against that hypothesis but now that you’ve mentioned it, can you use that to project from where the other two groups will come from?”
“Ah, roger that, Admiral. Already computed. Check your tactical display. I predict one of the other two groups will line up for a jump to the Avalon system, while the other one will aim for either the Omaha Base or the Bradley Base systems. Bradley is the more likely target given how close it is to their systems. If we lose Bradley, then staging attacks on them will be more difficult.” As Iceman was talking, the tactical display showed two yellow lines added to the single red line bypassing Earth with the most probable jump destination for each. Howard marveled at how intelligently this attack was planned. All three projected trajectories would come within 960,000 kilometers of Earth without interfering with each other. But why didn’t they all jump into firing range of Earth at the same time, he wondered. Surely this first group, now designated Beta1 since they couldn’t be sure which of the three alphas it was, wasn’t going to come waltzing in at a mere 5% of light speed? The answer suddenly came to him.
“They’re going to microjump that last distance probably at the same time as the other two fleets jump in as well.” said Howard with certainty.
“Highly likely.” agreed Iceman. Something was still nagging at Howard. By letting the Deep Space radars detect them, the enemy had lost the element of surprise.
“Any idea why they gave up the element of surprise by letting us see them at a distance, Iceman?”
“The only rationale I can think of is misdirection. They want us focused on Beta1 while the main attack comes from another direction.”
“But you’ve computed the other directions.”
“Unless Beta1’s lining up with Epsilon Eridani is meant to mislead us too.”
“Are we still radar scanning all other avenues of approach?”
“Ah, roger that, Admiral. The lunar radars can continue to scan the entire sky while still keeping a close eye on Beta1.” They can’t…” The cluster of red dots comprising Beta1 disappeared from the tactical display. Howard wanted to say ‘they jumped away’ but Iceman beat him to it.
“They’ve jumped away, Admiral.”
“Yes I see that. Does that mean the attack is over?”
“Possibly. If they weren’t expected to be detected that far away, they may have decided to call off the attack altogether. Given their speed, it’s unlikely that they microjumped a short distance intending to reverse course. If the attack is indeed over, then my vision is wrong. For that reason alone I’m reluctant to declare a victory, Admiral.” Howard looked around him at the Ops Center. That staff were standing at their stations and clapping or shaking hands with each other. They clearly thought the attack was over. He looked up at the tactical display and the sidebar showing the status of all of the ships. The red status lights denoting Battle Stations, were starting to shift to the green of normal status.
“THAT’S what they’re up to!” yelled Howard smacking his right hand into his left palm. “They’re lulling us into a false sense of security! We think we’ve won and we’re letting our guard down! Iceman, tell all our ships to stay at or go back to Battle Stations and prepare for a mass emergence from jumpspace!”
“Ah, roger that, Admiral. Message sent. The acknowledgements are coming back slower than normal, Admiral.” Howard looked back at the status lights. A couple had shifted back to red but the rest of the greens were not changing and another red shifted to green. They’re not listening to him, God dammit!
“Give me a Fleet-wide Comm. channel! QUICK!” The Duty Officer looked confused by Howard’s obvious anger and seemed frozen by it.
“Don’t just stand there like an idiot! Put me on a Fleet-wide channel NOW!” yelled Howard. The sudden surge in volume made the officer jump with surprise.
“Ye…yes, Sir! Right away, Admiral.” When Howard got the hand signal confirmation that the channel was open, he said,
“This is Admiral Howard. I order all ships to return to Battle Stations IMMEDIATELY and stay that way until ordered otherwise! This battle is NOT over! Be prepared for a massive…” The tactical display suddenly was filled with red dots. The REAL battle was beginning.
Commander Tanaka forced herself to relax. The initial adrenaline rush resulting from CINCED’s call to Battle Stations was wearing off. With 24 1/2 minutes left to go before Beta1 reached Earth, they had time to consider their response carefully. She had her implant switched to receive the Fleet-wide channel being used by Iceman for verbal communications and Defiant’s A.I. Astro-Helmsman, Maverick, was also monitoring that channel. Tanaka could speak to him without automatically transmitting to Iceman but was able to hear both.
“Why isn’t Iceman moving units into the projected path of Beta1, Maverick?” she asked.
“Iceman and the CSO have agreed that the enemy wants us to react to them now so that another force can jump in at high speed from the opposite direction, where we’d be weakest.” Tanaka cursed herself for not seeing the obvious. Tactics were not her strong suit but she should have been able to figure that out herself. The tactical display was showing data relayed from HQ Ops. To the red line of Beta1’s projected closest approach to Earth were now added two yellow lines coming from two different directions. Before Tanaka could ask, Maverick anticipated her question.
“Those are the trajectories for two other fleets, which Iceman thinks the enemy will use in order to jump to Avalon and Bradley Base systems with minimal course corrections after they fly past Earth. Beta1 can do the same for Epsilon Eridani if they wanted to.”
“Oh, great! All three of those systems have minimal defenses now because everything mobile was pulled back here.”
“Yes, this attack, if it happens this way, will have been carefully planned.” Whatever Tanaka was about to say next was pre-empted when the red dots of Beta1 suddenly disappeared. A quick check showed that the Deep Space radar was still operating and that had to mean that Beta1 had jumped away and hadn’t jumped closer.
“Did we just win?” asked Tanaka cautiously.
“Iceman is saying we should remain on guard. Some of the human controlled ships are standing down from Battle Stations.”
“We’re remaining on Battle Stations until CINCED gives us that ALL CLEAR.”
“CINCED to all ships. Remain at Battle Stations until told otherwise.” Tanaka heard Iceman’s voice command over the Fleet-wide channel. After several seconds, Maverick said,
“Most of the human-controlled ships are not obeying Iceman’s order.” Tanaka bit her lip. She had a bad feeling about all this. Suddenly she heard Admiral Howard’s voice.
“This is Admiral Howard. I order all ships to return to Battle Stations IMMEDIATELY and stay that way until ordered otherwise! This battle is NOT over! Be prepared for a massive…” Tanaka jumped when the tactical display gave a VERY loud ping and two groups of red dots appeared relatively close to Earth’s gravity zone boundary. Before she could say anything, each enemy fleet launched a swarm of tiny very fast objects that quickly turned on a direct heading for Earth. She felt the ship start to maneuver violently and heard the Weapons Officer yell out.
“Our turrets are acquiring targets…we’re firing!” The maneuvering was becoming increasingly violent. Maverick’s making the Old Girl evade for all she’s worth! I hope the crew were all strapped in! Out loud she said,
“What are we firing at, Maverick?”
“Iceman has ordered all ships and fighters to target the small objects accelerating towards Earth.”
“How many are there?” asked Tanaka.
“1144.”
“Oh, God! Can we stop them all?”
> “Unknown at this point.”
“Shouldn’t we be firing at their ships, Sir?” The Weapons Officer’s plea was tinged with fear.
“We follow Iceman’s orders, Lieutenant! Let Maverick do his job!” Tanaka concentrated on the tactical display which wasn’t easy with the sudden jerks of her head from the evasive maneuvers. The two enemy fleets seemed to be veering off in an attempt to stay out of Earth’s gravity zone. They’ve delivered their payload and I bet they’ll jump away as soon as they can avoid jumping into the gravity zone!
As soon as she finished that thought, the entire Bridge went dark for a fraction of a second followed by the activation of the battery-powered, emergency lights. Nothing else was working. The display was dark. The maneuvering had stopped and the artificial gravity was off. Shit! We’ve gone ballistic and that predictable course makes us a nice big fat target!
“Maverick, are you still with me?” she asked. No response. Without power, Maverick couldn’t communicate with her. She had to do something. As she started to unbuckle herself, the room was suddenly filled with a searing white light. She had just enough time to realize that the entire left side of her body was being burned but before she could scream, her consciousness faded to a deep, cool black.
Chapter 15 - I Don’t Report To You Anymore
Howard fought his exhaustion and looked around the Committee room. Unlike past sessions, there was no casual banter among the observers. Instead there were tense whispers. He checked his chronometer. Almost 8 hours since the battle. The Committee Chair had called for this emergency session but the members hadn’t all arrived yet. Those who had were caucusing in another room prior to starting the official meeting. He felt a hand on his right shoulder, looked around and saw Cmdr. Kelly with a sympathetic expression on her face.
“Yes, Commander?”
“I just wanted you to know, Sir, that all of us at the SPG think you did all that was humanly possible this morning. I know we took a lot of losses but we stopped all those missiles. That has to count for something, Sir.” Howard nodded and patted her hand with his left one.
“I appreciate the sentiment, Commander. I doubt if the Committee will agree with you. If they don’t sack me today, they surely will when we get word of how badly Epsilon, Avalon and Bradley get hit.” He could tell that Kelly was on the verge of tears and he feared for her too. The Committee might not be content to have just him fall on his sword. Before she could respond, the main doors opened and the Chair, followed by the other members filed in. They all had grim expressions on their faces. Howard felt Kelly gently squeeze his shoulder before she pulled her hand back.
Once all the members were seated, the Chair leaned forward and spoke slowly with a somber tone.
“In light of this morning’s events, we’re going to dispense with the usual preliminaries. Admiral Howard, since most of the members, including myself, have only a vague idea of what’s actually happened, I will now call on you to describe as best you can, what actually transpired.” Howard got up and said in an equally serious tone.
“Thank you, Mr. Chair. To make my briefing as clear as possible, I’m going to be using the wall display to your left. What you’ll see there is exactly what we all saw on the main display in the Operations Center this morning. This is the situation at 5:05 am local time when I entered the Ops Center.” The display responded to Howard’s hand-held remote.”At this point, our Deep Space radars, which orbit the moon and provide a complete 360 degree sweep of our surrounding space, had detected 55 ships approaching at a speed of 14,989 kilometers per second. That may sound fast but to give you a better idea of what that speed meant, that fleet, which we designated as Beta1, would need over 28 minutes to reach Earth. So we had plenty of warning regarding Beta1. I consulted with our Field Commander, who…”
“Just a moment, Admiral. Please identify who the Field Commander was and tell us if he or she is in the room right now.”
“The identity of the Field Commander is an A.I. whose call sign is Iceman. He is not physically present in this room because he’s still on the cruiser Undaunted, which is too badly damaged to be able to maneuver into a lower orbit and our Search and Rescue teams are still busy recovering injured crew from other ships. We do have an audio channel to Undaunted and the Committee can communicate with Iceman at any time.”
“Yes, we’ll definitely want to speak with Iceman at some point today. Continue, Admiral.”
“Thank you, Sir. The Field Commander and I agreed that the enemy was making it easy to see them so that we’d have lots of time to shift our defenses closer to their projected path and thereby weaken our defenses against attacks that might come from other directions. As you can see from the tactical playback, none of our mobile units were being redeployed. The Beta1 fleet wouldn’t have any way of knowing this. They were much too far away from us to have any chance at all of using their smaller, less powerful radars to see what we were doing but they could detect our radar signals so they knew that we had detected them. 4 minutes and 32 seconds after our initial detection, Beta1 jumped away. We don’t know with certainty where they jumped to but Iceman was able to determine that they could have jumped to Epsilon Eridani after making a very minor course change.” Howard paused. He was sure that someone on the Committee would ask the obvious next question. Someone did.
“Does that mean that our facilities in Epsilon Eridani could be attacked as well?”
“Yes, that is a distinct possibility, Sir.”
“How many ships are defending that system, Admiral?” asked the Chair.
“There are no warships in that system at the moment, Sir. The only ship there is a supply vessel with minimal armament. There is one squadron of CFPs with A.I. pilots undergoing advanced tactical training. Even if they had enough warning to be armed with attack drones and laser modules, which I doubt would be the case; they’d still be heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the 55 ships in Beta1. All defending warships deployed there were recalled in order to bolster Earth’s defenses.” The members of the Committee were clearly shocked and upset by the news.
“So we should be prepared to discover that our facilities and people there have been destroyed?” Howard hesitated. He had to choose his words carefully and his fatigue wasn’t making that job any easier.
“I hope I’m being too pessimistic, Sir, but that would be the worst case scenario and we should be prepared for it, yes.”
“I see. Continue please.” Howard took a deep breath.
“48 seconds later, two more enemy fleets emerged from jumpspace.” He clicked the remote and the display was filled with red dots. Kelly saw some of the Committee members wince. “These two fleets, which we designated as Beta2 and Beta3, total 110 ships. I’ve frozen the playback because events will now happen very quickly, almost second by second and I’ll move the recording forward accordingly. Less than a second later, all 110 ships fired 1,210 projectiles towards Earth. Those projectiles accelerated under their own power. I’ll move the playback forward by three seconds so that you’ll see them more clearly. Here we go.” The display now zoomed in to reveal two swarms of dots in addition to the enemy ships.
“Do we know what those projectiles carried, Admiral?” Howard hesitated again.
