New Frontiers- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Unless that’s what they want us to think and they’re hoping we’ll be so fixated on the wormhole that we’ll miss an attack from another angle.”

  “If I’m wrong, it will be easy to verify. Scanning for incoming ordnance along a known vector is a lot easier than scanning everywhere at once.”

  “True.”

  “Got it!” Cardinal said.

  Bishop went straight to the point. “The missiles would have had to leave the mouth of the wormhole approximately five minutes ago.”

  “Four minutes and fifty nine point two three seconds ago,” Cardinal added.

  “So where would that put them now?” McAdams asked.

  Alexander watched as a glowing red dot appeared on the tactical map along the trajectory he’d drawn between the wormhole and Earth. “Frost, get me eyes on that area of space. Account for targets moving at a velocity of point three C.”

  “Yes, sir… scanning.”

  Alexander turned to McAdams. “I hope you’re wrong about this.”

  She met his gaze with unblinking blue eyes. “So do I, sir.”

  “Multiple pings!” Frost called out.

  Alexander felt a sharp stab of adrenaline followed by a feeling of electricity sparking through his fingertips.

  “They’re moving fast! Thirty-two percent the speed of light,” Frost added.

  Alexander sat up straighter in his couch. “What are we looking at?”

  “Twenty-one targets, closely staggered! Looks like more missiles, same as before.”

  “Hayes, get that target data to Fleet Command.”

  “Aye, sir. At this range it’ll take eight minutes to reach them.”

  Alexander grimaced. Eight minutes before Earth could even react to the threat. “Cardinal, is there any way we can intercept those missiles?”

  “Calculating, sir…”

  Alexander was already checking their range to the targets to make some of his own calculations. They were over a hundred million kilometers away from the missiles. Since they weren’t maneuvering, it should have been a simple matter to fire projectiles or other missiles in their path and take them out, but at the speed the enemy ordnance was moving, any weapon the Adamantine fired would take far too long to get there.

  Meaning we’re shit out of luck.

  “We can’t intercept them from here, sir,” Cardinal reported, confirming Alexander’s suspicions, “but at the nearest point between our approach vectors the enemy missiles will pass just inside of our theoretical maximum effective laser range. Our window of attack will be a fraction of a second, and we’ll have to account for all kinds of sensor and firing latencies in order to hit something moving that fast, but it should be possible to intercept a few missiles if we concentrate our fire.”

  “Let’s make that more than a few. Bishop, get us as close as you can at ten Gs thrust. Let’s give this our best shot.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stone, launch drones and fighters and get them to intercept as well. We may as well throw everything we’ve got at this.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Frost, how long do we have before Earth impact?”

  “Forty three minutes and sixteen seconds, sir.”

  “Minus eight minutes before Earth even realizes they’ve got incoming,” McAdams said.

  Alexander turned to her. “That still gives them thirty five minutes to intercept. Thanks to you. That was a good call, Commander. If we’re lucky, someone else was thinking the same way and the fleet is already on its way to intercept.”

  “I hope so, sir. It only takes one of those missiles hitting Earth and a lot of people are going to die.”

  Alexander nodded absently.

  “Incoming message from fleet command!” Hayes announced.

  “It’s been eight minutes already?”

  “No, sir. They had to have sent this message before we sent ours.”

  “Patch it through to the main display.”

  Fleet Admiral Anderson appeared larger than life on the main forward screen. “Admiral Leon,” he said. “We’ve detected incoming ordnance moving at relativistic speeds. Same as what hit the Moon, but there’s more than twenty this time. All available ships are moving to intercept. That means the Adamantine, too. I sent you the target data with this message. Find the best place to intercept, and shoot those missiles down. Anderson out.”

  “Do you want to send a reply, sir?” Hayes asked.

  “Tell them we saw the missiles before their message reached us, and we’re already on an intercept course.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Cardinal—how long before we reach firing range?”

  “Seventeen minutes and eleven seconds, sir.”

  Alexander pressed his lips into a grim line. “Let’s hope we can improve those odds for everyone back home.”

  “Aye, sir. Unfortunately we’re not in the best position to intercept, but I’ll do my best.”

  “What’s the best position?” McAdams asked.

  “Directly in front of the incoming ordnance,” Cardinal replied. “The smaller the angle of deflection, the less the speed of the missiles will matter. Calculating an accurate deflection shot against targets moving a hundred thousand klicks per second is not an easy task. You just have to be off by a millionth of a degree or have an extra nanosecond of firing delay and you’ll miss.”

  “Sir!” Frost interrupted from sensors.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m getting a blip on our long-range scanners within a reasonable margin of the incoming missiles’ trajectory. It’s out over a billion klicks behind the wormhole. Dreadnought analog. The comm transponder identifies it as a Solarian ship—the S.R.S Crimson Warrior.”

  Alexander blinked. “A billion kilometers? What’s out there, Frost?”

  “Nothing, sir. Empty space.”

  “Isn’t Saturn about that distance from us?” McAdams asked. “The Solarians have a colony on Titan and water mining operations in Saturn’s rings. They might have a reasonable explanation for being that far out.”

  “That’s the right distance, but the wrong direction, Ma’am,” Frost replied. “They’re over three hundred million klicks from Saturn, and they don’t appear to be headed for Mars.”

  “Hayes, hail them,” Alexander said. “Ask for their flight plan and an explanation of what they’re doing out there.”

  “They’re not in our territory, sir. They may feel we have no right to know their business.”

  “In light of the recent attacks, we have every right to know. Explain the situation as tactfully as you can, but make it clear that we need to know what they’re doing if they don’t want us to suspect them. Also, send Fleet Command an update with the location of the Solarian dreadnought. It’s the only lead we have so far.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Alexander saw McAdams shaking her head. “Something on your mind, Commander?”

  “It doesn’t make sense for the Solarians to attack us. They own almost half of Alliance debt. If those missiles hit Earth, they’ll put us that much closer to defaulting on our loans.”

  “Maybe that’s what they want,” Alexander replied. “Then they’ll have an excuse to come and collect.”

  “Assuming we let them. Our fleet won’t be affected by an attack on Earth,” McAdams replied.

  “Not immediately maybe, but who’s going to pay for upkeep when the entire Alliance is in shambles? It won’t take long before it’s a ghost fleet being auctioned off to the Solarians for emergency funds. Look at the evidence—someone is using the wormhole to hide these attacks and trying to make us think it could be a surviving remnant of the old Confederate Fleet, or even aliens. That gives the Solarians anonymity. They can cripple us with a minimum of effort and expense, and without starting an all-out war that they’d surely lose. All they have to do is sit back and wait for the dust to settle before they make their move.”

  “It’s possible, sir.”

  “Cardina
l—how much longer to intercept?” Alexander asked.

  “Eleven minutes, sir.”

  “Put up a clock on the MHD.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Alexander kept his eyes glued to the clock as time ticked away and everyone went about their tasks. Below the clock, the MHD showed a broad, starry vista. A bright red target box glowed there, inching visibly closer to them with every passing second. He found himself mesmerized by the stars and the steadily approaching target. After a while, he glanced up to check the clock.

  Two minutes.

  In the next instant the red target box split into twenty-one smaller boxes, all of them streaking in at high speed…

  “Weapons hot!” Cardinal announced.

  “Stone, report.”

  “All drones and fighters are sitting five thousand klicks ahead of us, locked on and waiting.”

  “Good. Keep me posted.”

  The target boxes sped across the holo display, seeming to accelerate as they drew near—an illusion created by the angle between their trajectories and the narrowing distance between them.

  Thirty seconds… ten…

  Alexander realized he was squeezing the life out of the armrests of his couch, and forced himself to relax with deep, calming breaths. His surroundings might be virtual, but the stress was real, and he needed to keep a cool head.

  One second.

  Dozens of blue laser beams flashed across the void and converged on just a handful of the targets. Alexander blinked and then both the lasers and the glowing red target boxes were gone, leaving nothing but fading after images in their wake.

  “Report! What did we hit?” Alexander said.

  “Give me a second to reacquire, sir…” Frost replied. After just a moment, he let out a frustrated sigh. “All twenty-one blips are still headed for Earth.”

  “What the hell happened?” Alexander demanded.

  “I did my best to account for the sensor and firing delays, sir,” Cardinal replied, “but it looks like we missed by anywhere from fifty to a hundred klicks.”

  “The drones’ closest shot went wide by twenty,” Stone reported. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Twenty klicks? A hundred klicks? What’s the cross-section on one of those missiles from our perspective?”

  “The target is twenty meters long by two meters in diameter. That gives us a maximum of forty square meters to shoot at, sir,” Cardinal replied. “Our targeting systems simply aren’t precise enough to hit something that small moving that fast.”

  Alexander grimaced. “Well, you both did your best. Now it’s up to Earth.”

  “Aye, sir,” Cardinal said. “They have twenty minutes to intercept, but by now they should have been able to put themselves ahead of the targets and reduce the angle of deflection. They won’t have the same problem that we did.”

  Alexander sighed. “I hope you’re right.”

  “Admiral—” McAdams began in a whisper. “What if those missiles go evasive?”

  Good question. Relativistic missiles were hard enough to hit without adding randomly varying angles of deflection. It wouldn’t take much maneuvering to throw off intercepting fire. “Let’s hope they’re not programmed for evasion, Commander. Maybe they’ll need all of their available thrust to guide them to their targets, like what happened with the Moon attack. We shot down seven out of ten missiles. If there’d been another ship there with us, we’d have got them all.”

  McAdams looked ready to object, her lips frozen halfway to forming words. “Maybe,” she conceded.

  Alexander knew what she’d left unsaid. Those missiles didn’t need to hit a very precise target like a city in order to do damage on Earth. Just about anywhere they hit would be devastating.

  Chapter 7

  Captain Grekov watched the bracketed red target box glowing dead center of the N.W.A.S. Washington’s main holo display. Each ship in the fleet had its own target to focus on. Countless drones and fighters raced out in a diffuse cloud ahead of the fleet, aiming their weapons at the incoming ordnance from slightly larger angles of deflection. Grekov glanced up at the clock at the top of the display. Five minutes and five seconds to intercept. That time was based on when the destroyer’s trajectory would line up exactly with that of the missile they were targeting rather than on any kind of specific weapons range.

  “Five minutes to target, sir,” Lieutenant Carver announced from the gunnery station.

  “This is the worst game of chicken I’ve ever played,” Grekov’s XO, Commander Clark commented. “If we miss, that missile is on a collision course with us.”

  Grekov turned to his XO with one eyebrow raised. “The collision course you should be worried about is with Earth, not our ship. We have less than one hundred crew, but if that missile gets by us, it will take out many millions on Earth.”

  “Obviously that would be worse, sir. I meant that it would be nice if no one were in the line of fire.”

  Grekov frowned. Westerners were always looking out for number one. People from old Confederate states like him were better citizens. The Alliance might span the entire globe now, but all the idealogical and genetic differences that had divided the East and West still remained. Parents still chose what traits to engineer into their children, and the old Confederate states still chose all of the same community-minded ones as before. Likewise, western states were still choosing to make their children more individualistic and independent. Of course, now with the ubiquity of the Mindscape, it almost didn’t matter. It was rare for anyone to actually have children anymore, so the status quo was likely to remain, leaving Grekov to feel like a stranger in a strange land for the rest of his immortal life—good book, he thought, smirking at his unintentional use of the title.

  Now that he’d been promoted to captain and given his own ship, it seemed that attitudes were changing. But rather than become more united, Earth had simply re-drawn the line that divided people. Instead of dividing the East from the West, that line ran between Human League districts and Utopian ones. The world was poised to split into a thousand political pieces. If they were lucky, maybe these attacks would delay the inevitable and unite people against their common enemy—whoever that might be.

  “One minute to firing, sir,” the gunnery officer announced.

  “Drones and fighters opening fire!” Lieutenant White reported from the fighter control station.

  Grekov nodded. “Good…” Hopefully the Washington wouldn’t even need to open fire.

  “Target is maneuvering! Shots are going wide, sir,” Lieutenant Carver said from gunnery.

  Grekov scowled and glanced at the clock. Thirty seconds. “Maneuvering how? Adjusting trajectory or evasive?” he asked.

  “Evasive, sir.”

  That was bad news. “Do your best to anticipate and track our target. Lay down as much covering fire as you can.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Twenty seconds.

  “The missiles just shot past our fighter screen,” sensors called out. “Nineteen out of twenty-one targets remaining.”

  Definitely bad news.

  “Incoming transmission from the Liberty!” the comms officer announced.

  “Patch it through,” Grekov said.

  “All ships open fire! Targets are maneuvering. Repeat, targets are maneuvering, do not wait for them to get any closer.”

  “Carver! Open fire!” Grekov bellowed.

  “Aye, sir!”

  The deck trembled with recoil from the destroyer’s hypervelocity cannons. Projectiles streaked out into the void in simulated golden streams. Missiles jetted along behind them on bright blue contrails. It would take a while for any of those weapons to reach their target, but at least they were on their way. Hopefully they’d have enough time to intercept.

  Wheels started spinning in Grekov’s brain, reminding him that math was one of the things his parents had engineered him for. There was an easy way to calculate the odds of interception.

  “How long before our target gets by us?
” he asked.

  “Four minutes and seven seconds, sir,” the sensor officer reported.

  That wasn’t much time.

  Grekov used his neural connection to the ship to make some calculations. The result was that each shot they took had a 1 in 31,411 chance to hit. Doing a few more calculations he found the probability that they would intercept their target. It came out to less than 10%. Making a quick decision, Grekov said, “Helm, come about and present our port side to the target.”

  “Sir, most of our guns are forward facing, and adding maneuvers at this point will only make it harder for us to intercept the target.”

  “Just do it, Lieutenant.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Commander Clark shot him a curious look. “What are you doing, sir?”

  “Do the math, Commander. We have less than a 10% chance to intercept our target. Once it enters effective laser range, our window of attack will be less than a twentieth of a second on approach, and another twentieth of a second as the missile flies past us. Even in the best case scenario, mechanical firing latencies will use up most of that time. Our laser-armed missiles will have the same problem. The ones carrying payloads may increase the odds by detonating in the targets’ path and creating a cloud of debris, but with the precise timing required for such a detonation, that is also unlikely to succeed. All of this means that we have at least a 50% chance to miss our target.

  “We are, however, conveniently situated directly in front of our target. The Washington has a cross-section of 120 meters by 60 meters with its broadside facing the target. That means we can position ourselves between the target and Earth like a shield, and we will have a 100% chance to intercept.”

  Clark looked horrified. “There won’t be time to evacuate the ship.”

  “No, Commander, there won’t. But take heart, there is still a chance to intercept the target before it reaches us.”

  “You Russians and your roulette!” Clark said, shaking his head. “How are we going to repel future attacks if we throw away the fleet? Imagine if all the other captains are thinking like you.”