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Day 31/2539
It was just after dawn by the time Senior Lieutenant Roland Drake arrived at the System Defense Force gate. The guard at the gate had a grim expression as he waived Drake through, and he understood completely why that was. It was less than an hour until H-hour, the moment when military personnel loyal to the new System States Union would put green armbands over their black uniforms and seize control of all Federation navy and army assets on the planet Sparta. No one knew if they could pull it off without any shooting. In theory they should be able to. Most of the junior and middle officers of the Army’s Tank Battalion, and a considerable minority of the infantry battalions’ officers were part of the conspiracy. With control of the armory and tanks in SSU hands, it should be easy to sort out who among the enlisted ranks were sympathetic to the Cause and who had to be placed under guard. The Navy was a little different. Only one Patrol Cruiser was on the ground, and it happened to be the Yorktown, which Drake knew was only partially infiltrated. The plan was to use a platoon of contra-gravity tanks crewed by SSU army people to surround the Yorktown and force the Federation loyalists to turn the ship over to SSU control. And in the unlikely event that the Fed loyalists tried to use the Yorktown to either escape with a warning to Terra or fire on the SSU army units, it would be up to the Spartan System Defense Force to stop them. That meant that the one and so far only Missile Boat, of which Drake was Executive Officer, and which was only 70 meters in diameter, might have to slug it out with the 300 meter diameter Yorktown. Of course, he thought to himself as he parked his groundcar in the base parking lot, size wasn’t everything. The Yorktown was hyperjump capable, while MB101 was not, and the Anderman hyperdrive took up a LOT of space on the larger ship. In terms of ordnance, his missile boat was almost equal to the cruiser. Eight missile launch tubes versus ten for the Yorktown, and the missile boat actually had a very thin coating of collapsed matter armor, while the Yorktown had none at all. All things considered, he’d rather be in the missile boat than in the cruiser.
Drake pulled his carry-on bag from the cargo compartment and walked briskly to the SDF Base main building. When he entered, he saw that MB101’s small crew, except for her Skipper, were already assembled in the Ready Room. They greeted him with friendly but serious expressions. Everyone in the SDF knew about H-hour since they all had been handpicked for not only their skills but, first and foremost, for their loyalty to the people of Sparta.
Lt. Davidson, the Weapons Officer nodded to Drake and said, “The Skipper called ahead to say she would be delayed but would still make it here by ah...the deadline and that we should wait for her by the deployment truck.”
“Fine. Let’s all take our gear outside and wait by the truck.”
The vehicle that would carry the crew out to MB101, which was standing over a mile away, was far enough from the main building that they would have a good view of the FED Navy Base, which was adjacent to the SDF Base. When he got close to the truck, Drake pulled his pair of electronic binoculars from his carry-on bag and braced his arms on the truck to take a look at the navy base. As he zoomed in as close as possible, the transceiver in his ear, which was set to the SDF operations frequency, clicked to life.
“NC233 eta is now 5 hours, 45 minutes.”
NC meant Navy Courier, and the approaching ship would be secured after it landed, assuming that no one got off a warning message before then. It was unfortunate that a courier was inbound at the same time the planners had chosen for H hour, but since couriers did not keep to a fixed schedule, it was a case of just plain bad luck. In his field of vision, Drake saw the Yorktown sitting on her landing pad with her main ramp extended and no apparent movement nearby. He turned 90 degrees to look at the Army Base that was also adjacent to the Navy Base. This time he did see movement. Tanks and other armored contra-gravity vehicles were moving around. As he lowered the binoculars, he heard the distant wailing of the Navy Base’s alert siren. That wasn’t supposed to be happening, at least not this early. Something wasn’t right.
Drake turned to the others, speaking quickly. “Everybody climb aboard right now!” Throwing his carry-on bag into the cargo area, he climbed into the cab and looked at the driver who looked back and shrugged, obviously just as confused as he was. Just as Drake decided to use the truck’s radio to call the SDF Operations Center to ask what was happening, he heard the voice over his transceiver again.
“Attention all SDF personnel. Execute Dropkick now! I repeat...execute Dropkick now! MB101 to initiate emergency liftoff!” The order repeated but Drake was no longer listening. He was yelling at the driver to take them to the boat.
In the back, Davidson asked, “What about the Skipper?”
“There’s no time!” yelled Drake. Operations must have a reason why they wanted the 101 off the ground as fast as possible. It only took a few seconds for the truck to reach the boat and screech to a halt, but it seemed much longer. Drake jumped from the truck, reached in to grab his carry-on bag and ran for the boat’s ramp. As soon as everyone was off, the driver took off. Whatever was going on, he clearly didn’t want to be caught in the middle of it out in the open. Drake ran up the ramp and over to the main elevator that would take them up ten levels to the Control Center.
As the others piled in behind him, Drake said, “First stop is the CC! Other levels afterwards! Got that?” He heard someone acknowledge the order.
The elevator doors closed and the ship’s computer asked, “Level?”
Drake answered with, “CC code red!” Immediately the elevator rose faster than usual. So fast in fact that a couple of the enlisted men looked like they might throw up when the elevator suddenly started to decelerate just as quickly. Drake was glad when he was able to get off the elevator and into the CC. Davidson and two other crewmen followed, the rest stayed on the elevator, which took them to their stations on other levels. Drake ran over to the Command Station which Commander Yamaguchi would have used had she made it on time.
He settled into the chair and began to speak. “MB101 Comp, this is XO Roland Drake. As senior officer on board I am assuming command of MB101. Do you acknowledge that I have the Con?”
“Voice pattern confirmed. The Executive Officer has control of the ship.”
“Initiate emergency power up procedures and advise when ready! MB101 to SDF Ops! We are preparing for emergency liftoff. What’s the situation?” With the channel to Operations now open, he could hear background chatter that sounded like a crisis was in progress.
“Ops to 101. Word of the takeover must have leaked. The Navy Base went on alert and we detected a transmission to NC233, which has changed course and is now accelerating away from the planet. We believe it’s attempting to jump away and warn the FEDs. Your orders are to lift off ASAP and intercept NC233. Use all necessary force to prevent it from jumping away. Repeat...all necessary force.”
“Shit.” Drake was being ordered to fire missiles at the retreating courier. Couriers weren’t designed for combat. They were small, compact craft, which if hit by either a kinetic energy or chemical explosive warhead were likely to be critically damaged, with a high probability of fatal injuries to its minimal crew. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot at any former comrades today, but it now looked like he would. Keeping the new System States Union a secret from the rest of the Federation for as long as possible was vital if the SSU were to have any chance of building up its defenses before the Federation could strike back. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was aware that he might go down in history as the man who ordered the first shot fired in the first civil war the Federation had ever faced after almost 500 years of peace. He put those thoughts aside before speaking.
“Order received and understood. Liftoff is imminent! What about the Yorktown?” There was a pause before the Operations voice responded.
“Status of the Yorktown is unknown at this point. We have unconfirmed reports of small arms fire at the Navy’s main building. Our tanks are on their way to secure the Yorktown and the Base. We’ll keep you advised if the situation becomes clearer. You’re cleared to liftoff. Good hunting, 101!”
“Acknowledge clearance for liftoff. 101 out.” Drake checked the Systems Status Board on his Command Station main screen and saw that most of the major systems were showing the green light indicating ready for operations. When the last red light shifted to green he heard the ship’s computer speak.
“Power up procedures complete. The ship is ready for liftoff.”
“Give me ship-wide intercom,” Drake ordered, and then waited for the two tone signal that a ship-wide announcement was about to be made before continuing. “XO to crew. Stand by for high G liftoff! Intercom off. Computer, liftoff will be at 5Gs! Initiate liftoff now!”
Even with the inertial compensators taking most of the strain, Drake felt himself being pushed down into the padding of the Command Station seat. At 5Gs, the ship would reach supersonic speed in 5.5 seconds. He hoped that anyone out in the open back on the ground had ear protectors on when the 30,000 ton missile boat broke the sound barrier relatively close to the ground. The sonic boom would be deafening. Almost immediately he heard the computer.
“Mach one...Mach two...Mach three...”
When the steel hull started to heat due to friction, Drake said, “Reduce speed to maintain hull temperatures at safe levels, then accelerate back to 5Gs when the ship clears the atmosphere.” He felt acceleration disappear as the ship’s engines put out only enough lift to keep the ship’s speed just low enough to prevent friction heating. With Sparta’s atmosphere almost 100 kilometers thick, it would take the boat over three minutes to reach space.
After checking to make sure that all systems were functioning properly, he said, “101 to Ops. Where’s the bogey now?”
“Ops to 101. We’re uploading our data to you now. Bogey has turned off her transponder, so our latest data is based on orbital radar only.”
Drake looked at his main screen and saw it shift to a tactical plot of the space near the planet. The navy courier was accelerating laterally to shoot past the planet as the quickest way to break out into deep space again. Its velocity was just under 400 kilometers per second and Drake knew that a navy courier’s maximum acceleration was 10Gs, compared to his missile boat’s maximum of 5.5Gs. Courier ships were designed to get a message to the destination as fast as physically possible. Of the courier’s interior space, 99% was devoted to power plant, hyperdrive, maneuvering drive, life support, communications and astrogation equipment, with only the remaining 1% available for the use of the crew. She was still over 4.25 million kilometers from Sparta and was now frantically trying to get back out beyond the 5.5 million kilometer hyperzone boundary. Drake manipulated the tactical display and swore under his breath. Interception would be iffy at best. Even though the courier could out-accelerate his missile boat, it had a lot of momentum carrying it towards Sparta. By accelerating laterally, it was trying to convert that forward momentum to a sideways vector, rather than decelerate to a dead stop then accelerate back out in the opposite direction again. Drake knew that his boat’s missiles had a maximum powered range of just under five million kilometers and their tremendous acceleration of 350 Gs would in theory catch the bogey before it broke past the zone boundary. Whether those missiles would be accurate enough at the speed they’d be travelling to hit their target was another matter entirely. By the time they reached the projected interception point, the bogey would be traveling sideways across the missiles’ path, which was exactly the most difficult kind of interception scenario. He’d have to launch his missiles almost as soon as he cleared the atmosphere, and the distance to the target at that point would be over 13 light seconds. The missiles would have to be aimed at the point where the boat’s computer estimated the bogey would be by the time the missiles got there, which meant that if the bogey changed course radically enough and soon enough, the missiles’ terminal guidance radars might not see it in time to adjust their own vectors to compensate.
Drake looked up and said, “XO to Weapons.”
“Weapons Officer here.”
“Marcus, how many HE missiles are we carrying?” The answer came back almost immediately.
“As you know, we don’t have a full loadout yet, but right now we’re carrying 20 HEs and 10 KEs.”
“Okay, I want you to program all 20 HE missiles to launch in sequence, one second apart and to go active at the same time when the first missile is 30 seconds from interception. We’ll launch the KE missiles right after that, again in sequence. They go active at the same time as the HEs. We have to make sure we stop this bogey. Got all that?”
“I copy that, XO. Stand by.”
Drake didn’t know if his strategy would work, but if the first few missiles missed, the last few should in theory be able to home in on the target. The kinetic energy missiles were the last resort. If only one or two high explosive missiles hit, they might not cripple the hyperdrive, and therefore the KE missiles, with their ability to penetrate deep into the target, had the best chance to knock out the courier’s ability to jump away. A few seconds later he heard the Weapons Officer’s voice again.
“All missiles have been programmed as instructed. I’ve transferred missile launch control to the Command Station, XO.”
“Very good, Marcus. This is our only shot at this. Let’s hope it works.”
“Roger that!”
The trip through the planet’s atmosphere seemed to take forever. Drake kept his eyes on the tactical display that was being updated continuously by data from the orbiting radar satellites, but due to the distance to the bogey, there was a 13 second delay before the information reached the missile boat, and that was the problem. If the courier pilot was on the ball, he would initiate a radical course change seconds before the missile boat started firing her missile barrage, and the targeting computer on board the boat wouldn’t see the course change until after some missiles were already on their way to the wrong interception point. But by staggering the missile launch, at least some of the later missiles should be heading to the right place.
After what seemed an eternity, the 101 cleared the atmosphere and acceleration went back up to the max. The tactical screen showed a countdown readout for the optimum point to commence missile launch. It read 35 seconds and was dropping fast.
Just as the readout approached zero, Drake touched the highlighted ‘Enable Missile Launch’ part of the screen and said, “Firing now!”
On the Tactical screen, he could see the steady stream of missiles leaving the 101 and accelerating fast towards the calculated interception point. At this distance, it would take the missiles almost 20 minutes to cover the 2.4 million kilometers to the interception point, and by the time they got there, their speed would be up to almost 4100 kilometers per second.
Those 20 minutes went surprisingly fast. During that time he heard from Ops that the Yorktown had been secured and that the Navy Base was under SSU control. He also learned that the courier in fact did not make any course changes, much to his relief. Ops surmised that the courier pilot didn’t know about the missile boat and was basing his confidence on the fact that no warship was anywhere in space and near the planet when he got the order to bug out.
If the interception was successful, the Alliance would have a chance to mobilize and build defenses. SSU Navy volunteers would take captured courier ships back to Federation territory, where they still would pretend to be Federation Navy personnel, in order not to arouse any suspicions, and then jump back home when they were ordered to their next destination. When commercial freighters arrived on Sparta and other SSU planets, they would see what they expected to see, which was Navy and Army personnel wearing Federation uniforms and acting as if nothing had changed. Once the freighters were gone, everyone would change back into their SSU uniforms. Drake knew that eventually the true situation would be discovered and word would get back to the Federation, but a lot could be accomplished in the meantime.
When the interception actually occurred, it was almost anticlimactic. As soon as the first missile started actively searching with its onboard radar, the bogey started to maneuver evasively, and in fact the first few missiles missed but the others didn’t. By the time the bogey was hit with HE warheads for the fifth time, it was no longer accelerating, and by the time the kinetic energy warheads hit, there wasn’t really much left of the target. Long range radar scans from the 101 showed an expanding debris field. Drake knew that courier ships didn’t have any life pods, which meant that the crew was dead and he felt sorry for that. Base was already congratulating him for the first military victory in System States Union history, but it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like he had started something that he would ultimately regret, and that feeling stayed with him all the way back to Base.
