The Synchronicity War Part 2 (26 page)

“Yes, Commander?”

“I just wanted you to know, Sir, that all of us
at the SPG think you did all that was humanly possible this
morning. I know we took a lot of losses but we stopped all those
missiles. That has to count for something, Sir.” Howard nodded and
patted her hand with his left one.

“I appreciate the sentiment, Commander. I doubt
if the Committee will agree with you. If they don’t sack me today,
they surely will when we get word of how badly Epsilon, Avalon and
Bradley get hit.” He could tell that Kelly was on the verge of
tears and he feared for her too. The Committee might not be content
to have just him fall on his sword. Before she could respond, the
main doors opened and the Chair, followed by the other members
filed in. They all had grim expressions on their faces. Howard felt
Kelly gently squeeze his shoulder before she pulled her hand
back.

Once all the members were seated, the Chair
leaned forward and spoke slowly with a somber tone.

“In light of this morning’s events, we’re going
to dispense with the usual preliminaries. Admiral Howard, since
most of the members, including myself, have only a vague idea of
what’s actually happened, I will now call on you to describe as
best you can, what actually transpired.” Howard got up and said in
an equally serious tone.

“Thank you, Mr. Chair. To make my briefing as
clear as possible, I’m going to be using the wall display to your
left. What you’ll see there is exactly what we all saw on the main
display in the Operations Center this morning. This is the
situation at 5:05 am local time when I entered the Ops Center.” The
display responded to Howard’s hand-held remote.”At this point, our
Deep Space radars, which orbit the moon and provide a complete 360
degree sweep of our surrounding space, had detected 55 ships
approaching at a speed of 14,989 kilometers per second. That may
sound fast but to give you a better idea of what that speed meant,
that fleet, which we designated as Beta1, would need over 28
minutes to reach Earth. So we had plenty of warning regarding
Beta1. I consulted with our Field Commander, who…”

“Just a moment, Admiral. Please identify who the
Field Commander was and tell us if he or she is in the room right
now.”

“The identity of the Field Commander is an A.I.
whose call sign is Iceman. He is not physically present in this
room because he’s still on the cruiser Undaunted, which is too
badly damaged to be able to maneuver into a lower orbit and our
Search and Rescue teams are still busy recovering injured crew from
other ships. We do have an audio channel to Undaunted and the
Committee can communicate with Iceman at any time.”

“Yes, we’ll definitely want to speak with Iceman
at some point today. Continue, Admiral.”

“Thank you, Sir. The Field Commander and I
agreed that the enemy was making it easy to see them so that we’d
have lots of time to shift our defenses closer to their projected
path and thereby weaken our defenses against attacks that might
come from other directions. As you can see from the tactical
playback, none of our mobile units were being redeployed. The Beta1
fleet wouldn’t have any way of knowing this. They were much too far
away from us to have any chance at all of using their smaller, less
powerful radars to see what we were doing but they could detect our
radar signals so they knew that we had detected them. 4 minutes and
32 seconds after our initial detection, Beta1 jumped away. We don’t
know with certainty where they jumped to but Iceman was able to
determine that they could have jumped to Epsilon Eridani after
making a very minor course change.” Howard paused. He was sure that
someone on the Committee would ask the obvious next question.
Someone did.

“Does that mean that our facilities in Epsilon
Eridani could be attacked as well?”

“Yes, that is a distinct possibility, Sir.”

“How many ships are defending that system,
Admiral?” asked the Chair.

“There are no warships in that system at the
moment, Sir. The only ship there is a supply vessel with minimal
armament. There is one squadron of CFPs with A.I. pilots undergoing
advanced tactical training. Even if they had enough warning to be
armed with attack drones and laser modules, which I doubt would be
the case; they’d still be heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the
55 ships in Beta1. All defending warships deployed there were
recalled in order to bolster Earth’s defenses.” The members of the
Committee were clearly shocked and upset by the news.

“So we should be prepared to discover that our
facilities and people there have been destroyed?” Howard hesitated.
He had to choose his words carefully and his fatigue wasn’t making
that job any easier.

“I hope I’m being too pessimistic, Sir, but that
would be the worst case scenario and we should be prepared for it,
yes.”

“I see. Continue please.” Howard took a deep
breath.

“48 seconds later, two more enemy fleets emerged
from jumpspace.” He clicked the remote and the display was filled
with red dots. Kelly saw some of the Committee members wince.
“These two fleets, which we designated as Beta2 and Beta3, total
110 ships. I’ve frozen the playback because events will now happen
very quickly, almost second by second and I’ll move the recording
forward accordingly. Less than a second later, all 110 ships fired
1,210 projectiles towards Earth. Those projectiles accelerated
under their own power. I’ll move the playback forward by three
seconds so that you’ll see them more clearly. Here we go.” The
display now zoomed in to reveal two swarms of dots in addition to
the enemy ships.

“Do we know what those projectiles carried,
Admiral?” Howard hesitated again.

“We don’t know for certain since all of them
were destroyed before they hit Earth’s atmosphere but analysis of
the radar data suggests that the warheads were very small. Very low
yield tactical nuclear devices might be small enough to fit into
that volume but it’s the opinion of our Strategic Planning Group
that these projectiles carried biological weapons.” Kelly heard
someone on the Committee say ‘My God!’ Howard took advantage of the
shocked responses to continue. “I fully endorse Iceman’s decision
to target all of our available lasers weapons on those projectiles.
I’ve reviewed the playback several times and the last few
projectiles were destroyed at literally the last possible moment. A
human Field Commander would not have been able to evaluate the
situation correctly AND issue the necessary orders in time to
prevent at least some of the projectiles from hitting the ground.
Unfortunately for our ships, while we were targeting their
projectiles, their ships were firing on our ships. When I resume
the playback at 1/4 speed, you’ll see green icons representing our
ships, change to yellow and orange. Yellow means our ships have
taken damage. Orange means the damage is either critical or the
ship has stopped maneuvering or both. If the icon disappears
altogether, that means the ship…or fighter has been shot to
pieces.” He activated the remote and the room fell dead quiet.
Howard lowered his head when Defiant’s icon went to yellow and then
almost immediately to orange. He looked up again and froze the
playback.

“As you can see now, all of our ships have taken
at least some damage. Almost half are critically damaged or unable
to maneuver. I’ll now resume playback for 5 more seconds of elapsed
time….At this point 6 of our ships have been destroyed, almost all
the rest are seriously damaged and the enemy now switched from
firing at our ships to firing at our CFPs. I’ll now resume playback
again.” Kelly made herself watch as fighters started disappearing
in rapid succession. Without any warning, the enemy ships jumped
away. Howard’s voice made her jump in surprise.

“When Beta2 and 3 emerged from jumpspace, they
were heading on vectors that would have brought them into our
gravity zone. After launching the projectiles, they veered away and
as soon as their ships were no longer pointed at any part of the
gravity zone, they took advantage of the ability to jump away and
did so. They did so even though many of the projectiles were still
heading toward Earth and our fighters were still firing at them.
The length of time from the second they launched their projectiles,
until they jumped away, lasted all of 54 seconds.” The dead silence
now ended as members of the Committee leaned over to talk to each
other and the Space Force personnel in the audience began to
whisper to each other too. Howard waited. Finally the Chair
said,

“I think I can speak for the Committee as a
whole when I say I had no idea that we came so close to disaster.
What did this victory cost us, Admiral?” Howard nodded, put down
the display remote and picked up a data tablet.

“6 Sentinel class frigates were destroyed
outright. 3 more are so badly damaged that they’re not worth
repairing. Every other ship is seriously damaged including both
cruisers but is repairable. We still don’t have a final count of
killed and injured but at this point, we know of 1,876 killed, 749
injured. We also lost 47 CFPs plus their A.I. pilots as well as 8
other A.I.s, who were killed while piloting ships. In addition to
that, one of the two Deep Space radars was destroyed and our base
on the moon was hit by several laser blasts. We were lucky there.
No one was killed, only 9 wounded and none seriously.”

“Terrible…just terrible.” said the Chair. “And
how many enemy ships did we destroy or damage?”

“Our jump-capable CFPs were able to get close
enough to kill 34 enemy ships using our Mark 1B attack drones armed
with our new fusion warheads. We believe that was the reason why
the enemy disengaged when they did. If they had stayed longer, a
lot more of our CFPS would have gotten close enough to hit them. We
estimate that with another 10 seconds, we could have destroyed up
to 75% of them.”

“So they decided to call it quits so that they
could fight another day, is that your assessment, Admiral?”

“That would be one way of describing it, yes
Sir.” It was obvious to Kelly that the Admiral was uncomfortable
answering that question and she knew why. The Chair must have
picked up on that too. He leaned forward and said,

“I’m almost afraid to ask this, Admiral. Do you
have any idea where those two enemy fleets may have gone?” Howard
cleared his throat. All talking in the room stopped.

“Beta3 was lined up on the star system, which
would be the logical refueling stop if its destination were the
Bradley Base star system. Beta2…was lined up on the obvious
refueling stop if they intended to go to the Avalon system.” The
room erupted with anguished and in some cases, angry shouts. The
Committee members were also in an uproar. The Chair had to bang his
gavel half a dozen times to get the room back into some kind of
order.

“Admiral Howard, please tell us that the Avalon
Colony has some Space Force units to defend it!”

“All of the ships assigned there and the CFPs
assigned there, were recalled for the defense of Earth, Sir.” The
anger in the Chair’s voice was barely restrained.

“So in other words you just wrote off the 54,000
Avalon colonists just like that?” he snapped his fingers to
accentuate his point. Howard reminded himself to stay calm.

“I’ll answer your question this way. When our
Strategic Planning Group came to me with their assessment that
there was a high probability of an attack on Earth, I had to decide
on how to deploy our forces. The SPG also pointed out, and I agree
with their opinion, that if we had split our forces, we’d be
inviting defeat both at Avalon AND here. Given that Earth’s
population is in excess of 12 billion souls, I made the decision
that if I was going to be too cautious anywhere, it would be here.
I regret not having enough mobile forces to protect both worlds. I
don’t regret making the decision that Earth’s billions take
priority over Avalon’s thousands. Did I make the wrong decision,
Mr. Chair?” When the Chair didn’t say yes, his silence was clearly
the same thing as no.

“Is there anything else that we should know
about, that hasn’t already been brought to light, Admiral?”

“No, Sir.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. Does any member have
any questions for Admiral Howard?” To everyone’s surprise, no one
did.

“Very well then. I think I’d like to hear from
Commander Kelly at this point. Commander, I see you sitting in the
second row. Please move up and sit beside Admiral Howard so that we
can see you.” When Kelly had sat down, he continued.

“Commander, as the Head of the Strategic
Planning Group, did you inform Admiral Howard of a high probability
attack on Earth and did you also recommend concentrating our mobile
defenses here?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Is there anything we could have done
differently that would have resulted in a better outcome in our
opinion?”

“No, Sir. I can’t think of anything that would
have made a material difference.”

“Not even keeping the light carrier Valiant here
instead of sending her off to escort some freighters to Site B,
Commander?” Kelly was shocked by the question. Not everyone in the
room was cleared to even know that the Site B project existed. The
members of the Committee knew and they also knew it was supposed to
remain a highly secret project. Mentioning it now in a public forum
like this was a serious breach of security. She didn’t know if she
should answer that question or not. She looked at Howard. He nodded
and said,

“If I may answer that question, Mr. Chair?”

“No, Admiral, you may NOT. I want Cmdr. Kelly to
answer it. Well?”

“Valiant was not carrying any fi…CFPs. If she
had stayed here, her lasers would have marginally shortened the
time required to destroy all of the enemy projectiles but I’m as
certain as I can be, that the final result would not have been any
more favorable to our side and in fact, we’d have one less
operational carrier than we do now. Even if she was only damaged,
she’d still be out of action for weeks, perhaps even months,
Sir.”