“The evacuation of Loxley is complete,” Michelle reported to Admiral Absen as he drummed his fingers on the arm of his flag chair.
“Spread her crew around among Conquest’s, but keep her sections together. Make it clear to them that they’re not being broken up. At least, not now. If possible, I’ll give Riggin the next cruiser to come out of Jupiter’s shipyards.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Is the Exploder aboard?”
“Yes, sir. Mister Nightingale reports it’s been welded to the deck in a forward compartment, no special bracing, as you ordered.”
“Yes,” Absen said. “We want it to detonate when the ship takes catastrophic damage.”
“Understood.”
“What about Doughty and the Montgomery?”
“Evacuation is proceeding, but more slowly than Loxley’s,” Michelle replied.
“More evidence of a lack of enthusiasm. If you haven’t already, get some of your maintenance drones in to speed things up. Once that’s done, go ahead and bring the Senegal to dock for evacuation. I’ve decided to take Captain Figueroa’s offer as well.”
“If it doesn’t work, sir, we’ll have wasted three heavy cruisers for nothing,” Scoggins said.
“And if it does, it will guarantee our survival. Each heavy represents what, about three percent of Fleet’s raw combat power?” Absen asked.
“Three point one six percent, approximately,” Michelle said.
“Thank you, Mister Spock. I’ve decided it’s worth the risk, so do it.”
Michelle’s avatar and the admiral stared at each other for a moment.
Eventually, Absen said, “No need to delay further. Captain Scoggins, tell Okuda to push her out to sea.”
The captain cocked her head. “Viking funeral?”
“You got it. Go.”
Scoggins cleared her throat. “Helm, launch our fire-ship.”
“Pulse in three, two, one, mark,” Okuda responded immediately.
In the holotank, Absen watched as the Loxley’s icon moved rapidly toward a position on an imaginary line directly between the sun and the enemy flagship. At lightspeed, it took only minutes to get there.
Now, the suicide ship was out of their control. Light-minutes away, no transmission could move fast enough to provide data or instructions; the computer network aboard, programmed by Commander Johnstone, was running the ship.
Absen watched as the icon turned its tiny arrow, pointing toward the enemy and then moving again. As it did, the holotank view zoomed in closer and closer, scale adjusting continuously to show both ships.
The Loxley passed by the superdreadnought. It had been aimed directly at the flagship, but as expected, collisions with swarm craft had deflected it from a direct hit.
As soon as it dropped pulse, at a mere two hundred kilometers distance, it began to alter aspect, thrusters flaring violently to adjust the ship’s vector as quickly as possible.
“Come on,” Ford muttered, rising from his seat to grip the holotank rail.
Before it had made it far enough, the Loxley exploded.
“Damn,” Scoggins breathed. “What just happened?”
“Trying to reconstruct...” Fletcher replied, fingers skimming over his console, adjusting Conquest’s sensor feeds. The holotank froze, and then reset from the moment when Loxley dropped pulse.
Now in slow motion and with overlays of optical false color, synthetic aperture radar, gamma, neutron emissions and every other sensor type available, the picture became clearer.
A beam of energy reached out from within the flagship, boring a hole in its own inflated latticework to splash against the Loxley. Fletcher slowed the recording further, allowing all watching to see the cruiser’s armor ignite as if made of pure explosive.
Within half a realtime second on the chrono, the effect vaporized more than a hundred meters of the hardest armor known to Earthtech. A moment later, the cruiser vanished as the Exploder blew its antimatter containment, but at two hundred kilometers, nothing but a few dozen swarm craft died.
“What was that?” Absen asked.
“Graser, sir,” said Fletcher. “Gamma ray laser in the exawatt range. Almost as powerful as the moon Weapons were, sir. Bigger than anything we have now.”
“On a mobile warship,” Scoggins marveled. “Obviously set on automatic, as we suspected.”
“And I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they have more than one of them,” Absen said.
“How do you know, sir?”
“Think about it, Captain.” Absen fell silent, waiting.
Scoggins furrowed her brow for a moment. “The flagship barely adjusted its attitude before firing. So unless the Loxley just happened to drop pulse directly in front of its single main weapon, there must be multiples.”
Absen nodded. “Michelle, given equivalent technology to ours, estimate the amount of power that ship has available to give me a likely range of the number of weapons of that size they might have.”
“I’d call it more of a guess than an estimate, as we have no idea of the ship’s design. They might have a hundred beam projectors aiming in all directions, but only enough power to fire one at a time, for example,” Michelle replied. “Also, how much power can be stored in its capacitors? And there are a dozen lesser variables.”
“Guess, then. If EarthFleet designed that ship, how would we do it?”
Had Michelle’s mind been organic, she might have hesitated, but at AI speeds, she answered immediately. “If it were me and I had few resource constraints, I’d mount at least twenty of those guns pointing in all directions, with enough swivel on each that no matter where an enemy appeared, I could hit him almost immediately. Especially if I knew my enemy had TacDrive and I didn’t.”
“So this is a counter to TacDrive?” Scoggins asked.
Michelle said, “They did wait a year before this follow-up attack. Perhaps the first fleet sent an FTL drone back with a report. Or maybe they’ve encountered something like TacDrive before in one of the races they wiped out, but weren’t able to salvage the technology. This automated super-point-defense system is one way I’d counter my enemy’s advantage. The dense swarm is another way. Between the two, they’re damned hard to reach, much less kill.”
“Layered defense, like an old carrier battle group,” Absen said, chin in hand. “And probably more surprises to come, hidden by that shell. What’s our logical next move?”
“More improvised SLAMs – the Montgomery and the Senegal. Maybe one will make it through, sir,” Captain Scoggins replied.
“Maybe isn’t good enough. We need a plan. While Senegal is evacuating, you smart kids come up with one. We’re going to get a drink.” With that, Absen jerked his head at Timmons and together they walked off the bridge.
“My place or yours?” the COB asked.
“How about yours? I’m getting tired of drinking quality whiskey. Maybe some cheap hooch will do me good.”
The Chief of the Boat chuckled and led the way down a deck to his stateroom. Not nearly as grand as the admiral’s, still the most senior noncom aboard had enough space for several people to sit comfortably and shoot the breeze. When they arrived, he pulled an unlabeled bottle out of the freezer module of his personal cooler. “Try some of this, sir. It’ll make a real man of you.”
“So you haven’t tried it yet?”
“Ouch. Okay, I deserved that.” Timmons set down two battered steel cups and poured. They immediately began to sweat from the subzero temperature of the liquor he’d dispensed.
“Absent friends,” Absen toasted with his, and the COB murmured agreement. When the frigid stuff hit his tongue he gasped. “What the hell is this, battery acid?”
“Pepper vodka...sort of. Chief Yastrepsky makes a batch of it every now and again. A few bottles of it is my payoff to keep it quiet.”
“Keep it quiet? We’re not a dry service, COB.”
“Don’t tell him that, sir, or he’ll start charging me a hundred FleetCreds a fifth, like all the rest.”
Absen burst out laughing, and then he sobered. “I just realized something... We’re still in VR. I’d totally forgotten. We can get rip-roaring drunk within the space of a few minutes, and then tell Michelle to sober us up hangover-free when we need to get back to work.”
“That’s scraping the surface of what VR can do, boss...which is why it’s so addictive. As long as the AI is willing to indulge you, you can make all your problems disappear and do anything you want. Shoot heroin without getting hooked. Have an orgy with real people or virtual ones – not that you’ll know the difference. Lie on the beach for six months while a day passes in the real world. Make yourself Emperor of Earth. Hell, if we lost the battle, she could escape into space and make us all believe we won and were living long happy lives.”
“But Michelle would never go along with anything like that...right?”
Timmons shrugged. “Not anymore...but when the technology first came online, there weren’t enough rules and principles to guide her. She got quite an education in human vice before she really understood what she was seeing. Once Dr. Egolu and her team added some ethical structure, things settled down.”
“Oof. I never knew.”
“You’ve always had too much on your plate to worry about little things like that. That’s what you have smartass officers and crusty old chiefs for.”
Absen sipped at the liquid fire in his cup. “So why tell me now?”
Timmons shrugged and winked. “Have to talk about something while the rest brainstorm and the universe goes to hell. Might as well remind you that it’s me that really runs this ship.”
***
“We’ve come up with a plan, sir,” Captain Scoggins said as Absen strolled onto the bridge again, stone cold sober despite the amount of alcohol he’d seem to have drunk.
“Let’s hear it.”
Scoggins gestured to the holotank where a tactical diagram floated, showing the enemy flagship, its super-swarm and three Fleet ships off to the side. Two of the vessels were labeled Senegal and Montgomery. The other icon read Constitution. “You’re not going to like it, sir.”
“I may hate it, but I’ll do it if it fends these bastards off one more time.”
“Captain Huen is going to hate it even more.”
Absen’s voice rose slightly. “Spit it out, Captain.”
Scoggins stepped over to the holotank, nervously tucking her straight brown hair behind her ears. She reached into the display and lined up the ships as if playing with models. “The main problem we have is the swarm, sir. It’s a mobile shield that keeps us from TacDriving in point-blank and nailing the flagship. So, what we need is a battering ram to make a temporary hole in that shield.”
The display ran forward, showing the EarthFleet dreadnought plowing through the swarm toward the flagship.
“I see where you’re going with this, Melissa. Pulse Constitution in and the two ships cruisers behind, hoping Connie is big enough to hold course and clear the way like an icebreaker. One of the three should slam into their flagship, and if not, they might be able to turn around and try again if they survive passage through to the other side.”
“Yes, sir. That’s one possible COA, and it’s part of another. Michelle?”
The AI avatar stepped forward, looking completely human in VR space. “My estimates say the icebreaker tactic has about a forty percent chance of success. We can improve this to better than seventy percent if we bring out our grand fleet – all three task forces – and engage the enemy conventionally. That should draw their forces toward us, thinning them out on the flanks and rear. They might even leave their backdoor completely open, in which case we can pulse the three ships individually.”
Absen stepped forward to the rail. “Where would our grand fleet meet them?”
The holotank reconfigured to show a medium-scale tactical diagram including the Earth-Moon system. “About two hours outside of the range of our lunar heavy batteries, unless you want to let them in closer. If we do that, though...”
“We risk a surprise, some kind of weapon aimed at Earth perhaps, especially if they think they’re losing. If I were them, I’d consider killing all life on the planet a victory, especially if they were able to fight their way back to Sol afterward and escape. No, you’re right; if we do it, we’ll have to hit them as far out as we can.” Absen stuck his index finger at the intersection of several movement plots, a point located some thirteen million kilometers from Earth.
“Sure wish we had a Weapon now,” grumbled Ford. “It could tear that damned super-ship apart at ten million klicks.”
“Wishes, fishes, James,” Absen replied. “It would have cost too much to rebuild after the first Scourge attack destroyed it, given that we thought we needed a larger number of smaller weapons, not a super-beam. Make do with what you have.”
“So sir...” Scoggins asked. “Captain Huen...”
“I’ll tell her,” Absen said. “Hail her and put her through to my ready room.”
Once inside the small, spare office, the desk screen lit up with realtime vid. “Here, Admiral,” the intense woman said.
“Sherrie, I have something to ask of you, and I’m sorry. It’s going to be hard.”
“I’m ready, sir. Just say the word.”
Absen sighed. “I need Connie as a battering ram to get through to that big bastard. I’d use Conquest, as yours is the newer ship and optimized against Scourge small craft, but –”
“But we’ve taken more damage, and more importantly, you can’t transfer the AI in time.”
“I’m glad you understand. I can’t condemn Michelle to death when a computer can make the suicide run.”
“Of course. What are your orders, sir?”
“You crew is too big for Conquest to absorb, so pick something that can – one of the dockyards, perhaps?”
Huen shook her head. “The lunar facilities. With no atmosphere, we can pulse in close and set down on the surface nearby. Everyone we can’t carry in small craft and rovers can march straight out onto the ground and walk toward the bases until they get a lift. Don’t worry, sir, we’ll handle it.”
“There’s enough room for you on Conquest’s bridge. You deserve a ringside seat.”
“Thank you, sir, but I have to decline. I’ll take care of my people and make sure Connie’s CyberComm systems are set up properly for remote control.”
Absen nodded. “I expected you to say that. Good luck, Captain, and sorry it worked out this way.”
“Luck to you and to EarthFleet, Admiral. Huen out.”
***
“I do not wish to convey defeatism, Council Archon, but our casualties seem excessive,” Battle Director Raklog said.
“More larva can always be hatched, more small craft produced. Our automated capital weaponry defeated their suicide vessel as expected. The plan continues,” Ikthor replied.
Clearly ambivalent, Raklog hesitated.
“Speak, Director.”
“Council Archon...my liege...my calculations show that when the infestation is brought to battle, we will not have enough swarm craft to both screen us and to attack. If we commit enough force to defeat them, a suicide vessel might make it through to strike us.”
“We may not have enough force according to approved tactics, perhaps. But we shall make another adjustment.”
“Our adjustments have been insufficient until now, my liege.”
Ikthor suppressed a surge of irritation. After all, he had insisted his subordinate speak freely. “All operations require adjustments, using approved tactics as a baseline. Do not cling so closely to tradition when confronting infestations, Raklog. We have enough of slavish submission in Center; we might as well dispense with some of it out here.”
Raklog seemed nonplussed, and Ikthor masked his amusement. The Brood was based on hierarchy; flexibility wasn’t one of its strong points, but one didn’t rise to the Council by mere dedication to orthodoxy.