Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  The enemy had only one advantage: the commander of the attacking ship was a gullible dumbass who took his ship into battle to impress a girl.

  I mean, hypothetically that’s what happened. All I can say is, that commander of the attacking ship is a real jerk.

  We not only knew where the Maxolhx were scheduled to rendezvous with the pair of light cruisers, at an automated refueling station. We also knew the star carrier planned to arrive near that star system early, to detach the ships it was carrying and rearrange them in a more efficient configuration so they could fit the light cruisers on adjacent docking platforms. What we did not know was exactly when and where the star carrier planned to rearrange its sock drawer, and we didn’t have a whole lot of time. The best we could do was to jump in near that red dwarf star system, and send out microwormholes inside missiles. Our unarmed missiles flew outward in a cone-shaped scattershot formation, covering as much area as possible. Would we find the lonely star carrier and catch it unaware, or had it already moved on to the rendezvous point? If we found a single star carrier, my plan was to jump in immediately, hit it and run away. If the carrier had flown to the rendezvous, I had decided to skip the attack. Adding two light cruisers, plus other ships that might unexpectedly be refueling, was too much risk. I was already having second thoughts about the attack, compounded by Skippy warning me that we had to take one of our railguns offline due to a crack in a magnet assembly. Loss of one railgun was not a significant blow to our combat power, I just felt it was a bad omen.

  Six hours later, we had a contact. “Bingo!” Skippy announced, annoying the bridge crew, who had seen the same sensor image. “Egg-zactly as I predicted,” he was extra smug. “One star carrier, by itself. Um, hmm, no. More data coming in now. It looks like there is one other ship about six hundred kilometers from the carrier. They must be still shuffling ships between docking platforms. We caught them with their pants down, Joe!”

  “No other signs of trouble?” I asked warily. A little voice in the back of my head was telling me to back away.

  Simms looked up from her console. “There’s something funky in the sensor data, on the other side of the star carrier. Some kind of gas cloud?”

  “Ah, nothing to worry about,” Skippy scoffed. “Look, Joe, you brought us all the way out here. Are we jumping in or not? This is just about the best opportunity we’ll ever get. With a ship maneuvering close by, the star carrier will have its interference gear switched off. We can jump in as close as we want! I’ve plotted a jump to bring us in precisely between the two ships. We fire one broadside at each ship, and we’re outa there before they can get their damping field generators warmed up.”

  Of course I wanted more information about the target. The motionless star carrier was so far from our microwormhole, that the sensor data was a bit fuzzy. If we waited for the microwormhole to get closer, or for us to task more microwormholes and develop a 3D image of the area, it would be too late. A flood of stupid clichés ran through my stupid brain. Go big or go home. Who dares wins. You’ll never know if you don’t try. You only live once.

  “Hold my beer,” I said to myself, though the sharp look Simms gave me meant I had spoken louder than I intended. “All right, let’s do this.” In my head, what I actually said was ‘let’s get this over with’. “XO, all stations ready?”

  “Ready in all respects, Colonel,” she reported, knowing that data was available to everyone on the main display.

  Usually, I did a Jim Kirk impression. That time, I switched it up by doing a Picard, dramatically pointing a finger at the holographic display. “Engage.”

  Skippy was first to notice something was wrong. While our jump drive was forming its distant endpoint, it sort of slid away from the place Skippy had aimed for. Because Skippy is stubborn, he kept trying to force the endpoint to focus on the correct emergence zone, with the result that by the time he realized that wasn’t going to happen, Valkyrie had already been pulled into the wildly twisted spacetime of a wormhole. Because Skippy is arrogant, he blamed the jump drive control system, and never considered that he might have been wrong about conditions at the target zone. Because Skippy is incomparably awesome, all of this happened in microseconds, too fast for any monkey to notice a problem or act on it.

  My own first indication that we had a problem was provided by the main holographic display. What I expected to see was a symbol of Valkyrie in the center, with the nice big fat target of a star carrier on one side, and a destroyer on the other. What I actually saw was the star carrier and another ship off to the left, and the entire display glowing hotly orange from a damping field saturating the area. Multiple, overlapping damping fields.

  Then the big trouble smacked us in the face. Because Skippy had forced us to emerge closer than our jump drive wanted to, our entry was rough, sending waves of chaotic spacetime radiating outward like ripples on a pond. That chaos made it temporarily impossible for the star carrier’s stealth field to bend photons around it, and we were able to see through the false image. On the docking platforms were not the small warships we expected. There were three, no four heavy cruisers on the racks, and they were detaching as we watched. The star carrier must have blown its docking clamps when we jumped in, performing an emergency separation maneuver. The heavy cruisers were not the only cargo on the racks, there were three patrol cruisers, and I realized the ship flying free was not the destroyer we expected, it was another patrol cruiser.

  What a wonderful surprise.

  But wait! Things got even better for us!

  That ‘gas cloud’ Skippy told us not to worry about? Yeah, that was a second star carrier hidden in a stealth field. The spacetime ripples we created also stripped away that ship’s concealment. Seeing through the wavering stealth field, our sensors identified four more heavy cruisers, and six destroyers. Those ships were already joining the party, tumbling and spinning as they were ejected by their panicked mothership.

  Eight heavy cruisers. Four patrol cruisers. Six destroyers. Plus two star carriers, which had fired maser and particle cannons, railguns, and missiles at us before I could speak. Our own weapons, programmed ahead of the jump on the assumption we would emerge where Skippy intended, missed on the first salvo. Our masers and railgun darts went racing off into empty space, and our missiles had to turn and burn to curve back toward their targets. That violent activity made our missiles loud and visible and easy targets for the enemy’s point-defense systems. Opening my mouth to shout an order, my jaw clamped shut and I bit my tongue as the ship rocked. “Get us out of here!”

  “No can do, Joe!” Skippy was on the verge of panic. “We’re caught in three, no four, six, hell, lots of damping fields. Plus I sort of blew the jump drive on the way in. Wherever we’re going, we’re doing it the long way until I can fix the damned thing.”

  “Reed!” I barked.

  “Pedal to the metal, Sir.” Our chief pilot had the ship swinging around to take us away from the battle area. Valkyrie was fast. Masers, railgun darts and even missiles were faster. Our momentum was taking us toward the second star carrier, and the only good news was that our initial velocity relative to the enemy was forty thousand kilometers per hour. Enemy ships would need to accelerate hard to catch us, even if we weren’t accelerating as hard as our big battlecruiser’s reactionless thrust engines could push.

  Have you ever heard the cliché about a person’s life flashing before their eyes in a heartbeat? The events of my short life didn’t scroll through my brain, but it is amazing how fast a person can think when they need to. In the time it would take to snap my fingers, I took in all the details I needed about the tactical situation, analyzed our options, and decided that the next sixty seconds would determine whether we were screwed or not.

  My gut was leaning toward ‘screwed’, if you want to know.

  In the Army, I learned about the different types of battles and the tactics appropriate for each situation. What we had prepared for was an ambush. One side, in this case us, uses the
advantage of surprise to attack an unprepared enemy. In an ambush, the aggressor can assess the situation and decide whether to attack or not. If we had known the opposition was two star carriers and eight heavy cruisers, I would have ordered us to jump away.

  The situation we jumped into was not an ambush, it was a meeting engagement. We had not expected to encounter such a strong force, and the enemy hadn’t expected us to be there at all. Neither side was prepared for the battle. We sure as hell were not prepared to fight that many heavy ships plus their escorts. What I saw on the display was that the enemy was also not prepared for a battle right then. One of the heavy cruisers attached to the first star carrier had a reactor shut down, with much of the exterior plating removed. That same ship was missing armor panels in a line along the side facing us, apparently they were working on the big railgun that ran along the hull under that armor. The second star carrier had a heavy cruiser that was running on auxiliary power, we knew that because its energy shields were generating only enough power to deflect meteorites. My guess is the Maxolhx had planned a trap for us, but not right then or there.

  In a meeting engagement, neither side expected to fight a battle at that time and location. Either side can choose to disengage rather than conduct a fight they hadn’t chosen. That was my hope. The Maxolhx might have the same ‘Oh shit’ reaction as us, and decide to break away from our fearsome ghost ship.

  If the enemy instead chose to fight, they would pursue while we conducted a fighting withdrawal. Ideally, part of our force would remain as a rearguard to slow the enemy’s advance, while our main force disengaged and ran away to safety. The enemy would try to drive through or outflank our rearguard, and-

  All that analysis flashed through my mind in the blink of an eye. I didn’t need to think about it, because it had been pounded into my head. Training in the United States Army is outstanding, they even made a soldier out of me.

  The problem with all of my Army training is that it prepared me for fighting as part of a unit, on the ground. Valkyrie was alone, and we didn’t have a rearguard. We couldn’t take advantage of terrain to create a defensive position, and there was no prepared position nearby that we could run to. If the Maxolhx chose to pursue, we had to run until we either couldn’t run anymore, or until we reached the edge of the enemy damping fields and jumped away. After, of course, Skippy’s little helper elfbots fixed our busted jump drive. If they could.

  The next series of thoughts that raced through my mind was that because we wanted to disengage, we needed to discourage the enemy from pursuing. By turning away from contact and accelerating we had already shown that we didn’t want to fight. That was dangerous for us, it signaled weakness. To discourage the Maxolhx from chasing us deep into interstellar space, we had to give them a reason to think twice about sending their heavy ships after us. That meant we needed to demonstrate we could hit them hard. “Sim-” I started to shout an order to my XO before seeing that the crew was way ahead of me. They all knew the situation as well as I did, they had all reached the same conclusions. Our crew is excellent and we train until we’re exhausted, then we keep training. We train for every scenario so that when we get into a fight, we just have to repeat the actions we took over and over and over in simulations.

  From her console, Simms had directed the weapons control teams to focus their second volleys on the two vulnerable heavy cruisers. All she did was point at enemy ships in the 3D holographic display of her console, designating them as targets. In the same gesture, she had reserved our antienergy pulse cannon for her own control, to avoid wasting those shots against unshielded targets.

  The heavy cruiser running on auxiliary power was a sitting duck for our big guns, our cannons on the starboard and top side sliced right into it like the proverbial hot knife through a stick of butter. About a third of the way forward from the aft end, that cruiser’s hull was peppered with holes and jagged cuts starting in the center and moving outward. Secondary explosions rocked that ship as our particle beams cut through power conduits until a maser blast found the primary target: a missile magazine that was buried in the core of the hull. That ship suddenly was two shattered pieces, with the bow section propelled forward and lurching so that its nose crashed into and buckled that star carrier’s long frame.

  The cannons on Valkyrie’s port side and belly engaged a different ship; the heavy cruiser with the missing armor plating. That ship was under power and shielded, so Simms directed our antienergy pulse cannon to hammer that ship’s shields, while railguns launched darts those same shields needed to deflect. At such close range and under such concentrated fire from our battlecruiser, the target ship soon suffered a collapse of shields in one area. Without needing to be given orders, the weapons teams switched from railguns to directed energy cannons, pouring maser and particle beams into the breach.

  You might think the first ship was easier prey, because it had been running only on auxiliary power. That made it a sitting duck for our weapons, but it also meant we had limited options for ensuring it blew into a thousand pieces. The second ship was actually easier to knock out of the fight, as soon as we made a gap in its shields we hit two reactors and more importantly, the critical jump drive capacitors. When the enemy ship’s AI determined that shielding in that area was likely to temporarily be offline, it had commenced draining the stored energy from those capacitors.

  Too little, too late. BAM! That ship blew like the Death Star. There wasn’t any CGI-created ring like when they remastered the original movie, it just became a ball of intense white light. Three other heavy cruisers and the patrol cruisers were caught in the expanding blast, but the star carrier suffered the worst damage. When the bubble of plasma washed over us so we could see inside it, we saw one patrol cruiser lurching and slowly tumbling, and the star carrier was enveloped in its own cloud of superheated plasma vented from its reactors. That first star carrier’s frame was torn ragged, with bent and shattered structural pieces sticking out at jagged angles, pipes venting gases and fluids and severed cables flailing around. Two of the docking pads had broken away to fly off on their own.

  “Ignore the heavy ships!” I gave my first useful order of the battle. “Hit the patrol cruisers first!” It was not necessary to tell the crew not to waste weapons fire on the star carriers, those crippled space trucks could launch missiles but were not capable of joining a pursuit. It was necessary to order our weapons directed away from the remaining six heavy cruisers, because I saw on the main display they had been outlined as primary targets. Our crew, after knocking two major combatants out of the fight, had automatically switched their focus to the ships most capable of hurting us. That was entirely logical, and entirely wrong.

  What I knew, that the crew hadn’t time to think about, was that we had already done all we could to influence the enemy’s decision whether to pursue us or not. Losing two major warships in the first twelve seconds of the battle must have been a shock, and that maybe bought us some time. That did not mean the enemy commander would automatically order the remaining ships to turn and fly away from us. The other heavy cruisers were tough targets, they greatly outnumbered us in both hulls and firepower. If Valkyrie got trapped between formations of those heavy ships, we could be in serious trouble.

  Since we couldn’t influence the enemy’s decision of whether to pursue us or not, we had to prepare for being pursued. That is why I ordered our fire shifted to the patrol cruisers. Valkyrie could outrun the heavies, so we didn’t need to worry about them immediately. The destroyers could also hurt us, but I knew the patrol cruisers were the greatest threat in an extended pursuit. Patrol ships were an unhappy compromise design, intended to operate on their own for long patrols in the far-flung outskirts of Maxolhx territory. They were basically large, stretched destroyer hulls, with a few extra missile launchers, more powerful railguns and higher-capacity fuel tanks. Patrol cruisers were supposed to look for trouble and if they found it, run away to alert the heavy elements of the fleet. To survive, they re
lied on the ability to fly fast for long distances. In a pursuit, they could accelerate harder than Valkyrie and keep burning their engines to match our pace while the slow heavy cruisers fell behind. The enemy would assign the patrol cruisers to harass us and hope to get in a lucky shot at our engines, leaving us drifting helplessly in space while the heavies caught up.

  “Targeting patrol cruisers, aye,” Simms didn’t look at me as her fingers danced in the holographic controls of her console.

  My next action was simple and didn’t require me to dramatically bark orders from the command chair.

  I prayed.

  That was all I could do at that moment.

  There are many prayers used by soldiers before and during battle, you might have heard Psalm 91 referenced. That is a good one, but I’ve never actually heard anyone use it in the field. The prayers I’ve heard usually went something like ‘Please God don’t let my screw-ups get other people killed’.

  A version of that is what I muttered under my breath quietly, so I didn’t distract people who were busily doing something useful. Also I prayed the enemy commander would make the right decision.

  Either I hadn’t prayed loud enough or God decided I was on His ‘Naughty’ list. Or maybe the fault was with me for not specifying which ‘right’ decision I wanted the enemy commander to make.

  My life sucks.

  “Colonel!” Simms warned.

  “I see it.” Good captains keep the emotion from their voice, especially if that emotion is fear. My voice was flatly emotionless not from an effort of will, but because I was so stunned by nameless terror that I was barely capable of speaking.

  The enemy was pursuing. All six heavy cruisers were turning to follow us. We had no choice but to fight while we ran until we either escaped the overwhelming enemy force, or they trapped us and pounded Valkyrie into a disabled hulk. At that point, whoever was in command of the bridge would need to detonate our self-destruct nukes.