A Deep Sleep (Valhalla Book 1) (14 page)

“Fire missiles, full spread, at the lower destroyers.” Athena snapped out.
Tripoli
was already shaking and rocking violently from the Russian railgun fire still impacting her hull, so the shudder of launching missiles couldn’t even be felt in CIC.

“FTL event.” Johnson called out in surprise. She let out a small gasp as the ship revealed itself and dropped back to normal space. “It’s
Fort Worth
sir, she’s…inside the formation!”

Athena looked at the tactical plot and smiled for the first time since coming through the Alpha Centauri Slip Gate. Weklar had jumped his frigate into the region between
Rurik
and
Romanov
, a spacing of just 350 km. The Russians had assumed that, since it was mildly suicidal to jump to any region with that small of a spacing, that it wouldn’t be done.

If that shocks them, Athena thought with dark amusement, then what Weklar is about to do will be even more surprising.

“Missile launches,
Fort Worth
.” Johnson was clearly also shocked. “Two launches, target
Rurik
.
Fort Worth
is maneuvering, flapjack maneuver, firing. Four launches, target is
Romanov
.” The entire bridge crew was watching now, either in quick glances or locked stares on the tactical display. Athena was among them.
Fort Worth
’s missiles tracked in and detonated, achieving direct hits on
Rurik
and putting all four of her other missiles into close proximity around
Romanov
.

“
Rurik
has lost containment, she’s ejecting cores.
Romanov
is breaking up, her entire stern is coming apart. Secondary explosions.” Johnson was talking rapid fire as the two great Russian behemoths came apart and
Fort Worth
shot out from in-between the twin fires. Athena noticed that the Russian destroyers had also suffered losses, with only one still under power. The gunboats had done better, with five of eight still on the display.

Suddenly, Athena lurched in her chair and would have been thrown across the room if not for her restraints. It felt as if they had been rear-ended in a ground car. The Cheng came over Athena’s earpiece, his voice crackly and hard to hear.

“Breach in Engine Room 2, Fusion 2 is offline, cores ejected. Primary cooling to Fusion 1 is at 50% capacity and Fusion 1 has been throttled to 40% on my command. Another hit to that section and we could be in trouble sir.”

“Fire in Thruster Compartment 12, fire suppression not responding. Decompression alarms on F and G decks, frames 750 through 875.” The COB came over the speakers, full of more good news.

“Sir, maneuvering is sluggish, I’m getting delayed response across the board, lateral thrusters and vectoring nozzles on the mains.” Ensign Masters reported.

“Roll us over, show them our topside.” Athena ordered.

“Yes sir.”

“That’s taken a beating too sir.” Heath reminded her.

“But not as recently, it’ll have to hold.” Athena replied with a small shrug. “XO, status of point defense batteries?” Sanders was responsible for targeting and running the point defense zones of fire in Aux Con.

“We’ve lost most of our bottom turrets, but we’re okay on the rest of the ship, at least 50% effective.” Came the quick reply, Aux Con sounded busy. Interdicting constantly shifting railgun salvos made for busy work. They were smaller than missiles and thus did less damage, but they were also harder to target, the enemy could fire a lot more of them, and the vectors kept changing at a rapid pace. Luckily, the computers did most of the work.

“Do what you can, we’re about to receive a lot more fire. I need you to prioritize defense of the hull breach near Fusion 2. Engineering reports that more hits there could be unpleasant.”

“Oh but where’s the fun in that. I was getting a bit cold down here and I thought, you know what, a little uncontrolled fusion and high-energy plasma just might warm me up.” He replied sardonically.

“Thank you XO.” She replied cheerfully. “I knew I could count on you. We’ll play with the fusion reactors later.” That received a few odd glances from the CIC staff.

“Ensign Masters, let’s follow
Fort Worth
’s example. Flapjack and put us on course for the Russian corvettes.”

“It’ll be a slow crawl in sir, unless you want an FTL run. We’re dumping a lot of velocity to make that maneuver.” Masters replied.

“Pour it on Ensign, use as much thrust as you can get out of the engines.” Athena told him.

“Yes sir, pouring it on.”

Athena looked back at the plot, taking in the remaining Russian ships. One of the gunboat groups had moved to engage the Russian corvettes and been wiped out to the last, destroying only two of the corvettes.
Fort Worth
had quickly finished off one of the battlecruisers, but the second one still had a good number of her railguns working, albeit at lower firing rates.
Fort Worth
was dancing around her, trying not to take too much damage while also working to score hits in the Russian’s damaged sections and hopefully trigger secondary explosions within.

The remaining gunboats were dancing among the frigates, already down to two Hornets. The survivors of the attacks on the destroyers were now closing on the frigates as well, firing away with their railguns and hoping to do some damage. The Russians, for their part, weren’t waiting to be destroyed. The corvettes were forming up for a run on
Fort Worth
, probably hoping to flush her into the battlecruiser’s field of fire for her main batteries. Athena wasn’t planning on allowing that.

“FTL snap jump, forward 1,000,000 km. All batteries, stand-by. Missiles as well.” Athena called out.

“Snap jump, aye.” Masters responded, bumping the FTL to 2x and jumping the ship forward the short distance. As
Tripoli
emerged 1000 km from the corvettes, their flying-V broke open, scrambling to get away from the bigger ship.

“Lieutenant Heath, if you would.” Athena gestured at the display.

“Firing, missiles for corvettes 1-4. Railguns on the rest.” This time the shudders could be felt.

“Return fire incoming.” Johnson reported. Athena gritted her teeth and glared at the tactical display. Now it was a brawl to the finish.

Sol: Martian Orbit

1
st
LRRS: USS
Tripoli

The Battle of Sol was over. Athena figured the name was a little bland, as there had been battles in Sol before during previous wars, but that was the name it had taken on. She looked around CIC one last time before departing for the hanger deck. A few Russian and Chinese stragglers were still in the outer reaches of the system, beyond the slip gates, but that was clean-up. Enough fresh assets had come forward from the rear areas to execute clean-up operations and hunt down those few ships.
Tripoli
was in no shape to pursue anyways. She was down to one fusion reactor, having lost Fusion 1 in the duel with the corvettes and then having to shut down Fusion 4 after a frigate put a lucky shot through her primary cooling. The reactor could be brought back on secondary cooling if need be, but the Cheng had requested some down time to repair some minor damage and repair the primary cooling.

Tripoli
had also lost two-thirds of her point defense, fired all her missiles, lost four of six main railgun turrets and several secondary batteries. Three of eight engines had been mangled, though the Cheng had promised to take a look at them today and get back to her on if they could be fixed outside of a shipyard slip. Athena hoped so, since there was only one left in Sol that was big enough for
Tripoli
. There had been more than thirty, but like most of the manufacturing, they’d been destroyed or heavily damaged in the joint Russian-Chinese attack. They hadn’t done any better, with an equal percentage of their total industry being decimated. The battle seemed a pyrrhic victory…no matter which side figured it had won.

1
st
LRRS certainly had paid a heavy toll. Just three gunboats had survived, and one of those was a right off that Athena was still surprised the crew had managed to hold together. Of the 288 crew on twelve Hornets, just 68 were left.
Tripoli
had lost nearly 100 of her crew . The butcher’s bill was even higher for the rest of allied command. Athena would find out just how high soon enough.

She walked briskly down the passageway, making her way quickly to the waiting shuttle. The engines were already idling and began to move to the transfer airlock before the hatch had even closed. Admiral Mondragon had called an all-hands briefing, assembling all of the major ship captains and flag officers in system, at least those that had survived. The shuttle moved off
Tripoli
’s apron and headed towards the only American battle station in orbit around the red planet,
Sword of Ares.
This was the largest battle station in Martian orbit and a fitting place for Naval HQ.

Upon arriving in the briefing room just a few minutes prior to start, Athena immediately noticed the shockingly small number of officers present. Athena counted no more than two hundred in attendance. There had been at least eight fleets involved in this action, in addition to other smaller groups such as her own. There had been nearly nine hundred command officers before the battle. The scale of this battle was almost inconceivable in her mind. The level of loss was simply staggering.

As everyone settled into seats, Athena turned towards the podium. She was mildly surprised to see Admiral Mondragon approach the podium. Mondragon commanded the Alpha Centauri-based fleets, not the Sol-based fleets. That wasn’t encouraging.

“I think I’ll get started. Welcome. I know it’s been a hard two days for everyone, but we’ve managed to piece together most of what happened and just what we’ve lost.” He brought up a series of screens and the large central 3D display, showing Sol. “On March 2
nd
, at approximately 0300 Zulu, a combined assault by Russian and Chinese forces entered the Sol system. The Chinese entered through the Foxtrot gate and the Russians through Hotel. Their fleet compositions are included in your briefing materials. We estimate that the two together committed nearly 50% of their total fleet capacity. The Russians committed roughly 40% of what we think they have, while the Chinese came in harder. They deployed at least 65% of their total available fleet strength. Since the Chinese ships tend to pack more firepower, this made them the most heavily committed in this theater.”

That’s surprising, Athena thought to herself, the Chinese are having a hard enough time pushing the Indians out from in between their two regions of control. Committing that much fleet strength must have substantially weakened their mobile defenses along those borders. That also ignored the fact that the EU was pressing hard against some of their holdings. A hand went up somewhere across the room. Mondragon nodded at the officer. A captain stood up and addressed the admiral.

“Sir, what about the Alpha Gate battlestation? How’d they get through those defenses?” He asked.

“Well son,” Mondragon said somberly but clearly. “They threw us a real curveball. They had infiltrated a number of freighters bound for UK holdings. As they approached the gate, they were seized and steered towards the station. On one of the ships they managed to smuggle some sort of device onto and this detonated near the station. No damage was incurred but their sensors were blinded, between the device itself and all of those civilian sensor systems doing constant max power sweeps. This occurred just as several individual vessels spread out nearby came out of FTL and fired several salvos of missiles. They did some damage, but the station was still in the fight.

”Having failed to take it down with their surprise attack, they committed eight battlegroups to bring her down and secure the Alpha Gate. They lost three quarters of that force to nail her, but they secured the gate and prevented anyone from getting through the gate to report the attack. When I came through the gate with 1
st
Fleet, we got chewed up pretty good, since we had no idea what was going on.” The captain nodded and sat back down.

“Now then, we committed the largest fraction of assets to defend our holdings in Sol. Approximately 50% of our total fleet strength participated at one point or another. Our allied contingents provided almost an equal total amount of tonnage. The bad news is the losses. More than half of our committed strength was destroyed and another 10% or so survived but are not repairable. The Brits suffered losses similar with our own. The Brazilian contingent, small as it was, had no survivors from its fighting near Jupiter. The Canadians are in nearly as bad a shape. The Aussie contingent actually go the better of their exchange out past Pluto, wiping the floor with the Chinese forces sent against them. The EU assisted there but suffered a bit more damage.

”The only consolation is Chinese and Russian losses. The Russians had no ship escape the system. Several surrendered or were knocked out, boarded, and taken by force. The majority were destroyed in combat or scuttled by their crews to prevent capture. Several more managed to elude capture and I received word just before this briefing that the diplomats have restored the truce in Sol, so those ships have effectively gained safe passage. The Chinese had a better angle on the foxtrot gate and managed to withdraw a dozen damaged ships and one mostly intact fleet. Still, their losses exceeded 90%. We’ve struck a hammer blow against this assault.” Mondragon continued to discuss other details of the battle, going through the various stages and several other outcomes and loss values. He then paused and switched the displays to show industrial numbers.