“Sixteen minute alert, multiple inbounds,” called Lieutenant Cotillion, watch officer on the frigate EFS Abilard. “It can’t be Erasmus. Warm up the SLAMs.” Her calm voice belied the pounding of her heart as she observed her missile launch tech, Chief Japurna, lift the cover on a panel. He unlocked and moved a substantial lever from one position to another, powering up the targeting console.
This process ensured no accidental launch of the enormously expensive missiles was possible – at least, not until that switch was thrown. Now, Japurna touched the screens with precise motions. “SLAM activation template is up. First code input. Lieutenant?”
Cotillion leaned over Japurna’s shoulder to input her own code. By the time she had finished, Captain Haas had entered the Abilard’s tiny control center, still buttoning his tunic.
The lieutenant moved aside as the captain added his code to the sequence and pressed Enter. “Let’s see them, Chief.”
In response, Japurna threw up an optical view of the nearest of the SLAMs floating a hundred meters away, pointing directly toward Sol. It showed the telltale external lights of active power. In quick sequence the chief petty officer cycled the display, checking all twenty-four weapons. “Good to go.”
“Get us moving,” Haas ordered, and Cotillion hastened to her own console and plugged in her VR link. The frigate didn’t rate a dedicated helmsmen, but she was the ship’s pilot and thus had no trouble getting the small vessel maneuvering on cold thrusters, heading toward the stellar north, away from the sun.
Soon, the display showed a synthetic view “down” on the SLAMs, the software reducing Sol’s glare in the center to insignificance while highlighting the weapons.
“Ten minutes to emergence,” Japurna said. Technically, the delay from the speed of light meant the enemy would arrive seventy seconds earlier, but everything was calibrated to what they could observe. There was simply no point in constantly thinking about the lag. Only in targeting would that time have to be taken into account.
“SLAM IIs are reporting in,” Cotillion said. The fact that the newer, smarter weapons scattered around the Jericho line had also been activated was reassuring but largely irrelevant to them. The more-than-one-minute communication and detection delay meant the two overlapping systems had to operate independently. They provided redundancy, not complementarity.
In fact, the only point to using a SLAM at all was to catch Scourge motherships as they emerged with their millions of small craft not yet launched. Once the swarms moved away, the cores became largely irrelevant to the defense of the system, neither worth expending one of the super-missiles nor much of a threat to Earth.
Of course, they were strategically valuable, worth killing, but only with cheaper weapons.
All this ran through Cotillion’s head as she continued to thrust them out of the way of the SLAMs’ TacDrive field emission ranges.
“Separation achieved,” Japurna said. On the display, the SLAMs moved carefully apart, far enough that their drive fields wouldn’t affect one another. They now defined a ring several kilometers across. Each pointed at a notional spot along the stellar ecliptic, the plane of Sol’s equator, where the enemy might appear.
The display counted down inexorably toward zero. Captain Haas paced back and forth behind his open crash chair. The Abilard’s job was to launch, and then run home to add her weight of metal to Earth’s defense, so there was no need to seal themselves into VR yet. Full linkage was for combat only. VR syndrome was no joke, not to be risked lightly.
“Enabling automatic targeting network,” said Japurna, the final call in the official sequence. Now, Cotillion knew, it was in the hands of the computers. Every moment was simply too precious. Besides the agonizing seventy seconds each missile would have to travel, confirming targets were hostile and manually aiming up to twenty-four weapons would take much too long.
Fleet Intelligence analysis said that at least two minutes would pass before the motherships would begin maneuvering or spitting out small craft. It was this window of predictability that allowed the SLAMs to launch from so far away and still strike their targets. Therefore, the missiles and Abilard were linked in an ultrafast network of computers that would send one SLAM speeding to each enemy core. The kinetic energy of its lightspeed impact would do the rest.
The numbers reached zero. “Emergence any time now,” Cotillion said unnecessarily, her mouth dry. Haas stopped his pacing and nodded sharply, staring intently at the display as it pulled back to encompass the area out past the Jericho Line.
“Lieve God,” Haas gasped as the display filled with targets. “How many?”
“Forty-nine,” Cotillion replied. “Confirmed hostile: Scourge signatures.”
“We don’t have enough SLAMs even if they all hit. And what is that?” Haas pointed at one icon different from the others.
“Unknown. Its signature is different – bigger – but all targets are too close to the sun to get good optical. Some kind of flagship?”
“Did the network SLAM it?”
“No. It emerged about thirty seconds later than the rest.”
Haas threw himself into his chair and tapped at his console. On a ship this size the captain had to double as comms officer. Cursing, he plugged in his link and spoke aloud to record a message. “Abilard to all EarthFleet vessels. Observational data is already on its way. We note forty-eight motherships and one larger target, possibly a flagship. SLAMs have launched as programmed.”
Lifting his finger from the touchscreen he asked, “Hits?”
“Soon.”
The seconds had already counted down past zero. The small crew watched as the numbers ascended again toward seventy, at which time the light from the results should be visible.
Red icons on the display began to turn yellow. Four, five, nine...fifteen.
“That’s all?” Haas barked “Fifteen? What about the SLAM IIs?”
Cotillion turned with haunted eyes. “Sir, those were the IIs. All of ours missed.”
Haas gaped for a moment, and then closed his mouth to speak through clenched teeth. “The Scourges must have maneuvered early.”
Japurna’s eyes became as bleak as Cotillion’s. “We’re dead. Earth’s dead. There’s no way we can fight thirty-four swarms. The SLAMs –”
Captain Haas reached over to grab Japurna by the front of his tunic. “Pull yourself together, man. The SLAMs were only the first line of defense. We’ve been preparing for this for two years. We can hold.” He licked his lips as his eyes bore into the other man’s. “We can hold.”