The Void War (Empire Rising Book 1) (32 page)

Looking around James could see that no one was seriously hurt, just a little shaken up. “Damage Report,” he demanded.

“The valstronium armor held,” Romanov reported. We lost twenty percent of our point defense plasma cannons in that firing arc though. I’m also getting reports of minor damage and injuries in forward sections one through seven. All starboard missile tubes still report full functionality. Our next salvo will be ready to fire in two minutes.”

“Very well, fire when ready,” James responded, “see if you can re-train any of our other plasma cannons to cover that area before the next salvo gets here.”  Opening up a COM channel to Gupta on the auxiliary bridge James ordered, “Take over the damage control from Romanov, let him focus on getting ready to handle the next salvo.”

With
Gupta
on top of the damage control, James shifted his focus back to the Chinese cruiser. He could only watch the gravimetric sensors to see what was happening in real time. The twelve missiles began to quickly disappear off the plot as they were destroyed. Whoever was controlling the light cruiser’s defenses was good. Yet not good enough, for three missiles detonated close to the ship. As the visuals came through James saw that significant damage had been done to its stern. Still, the cruiser wasn’t giving up for as James watched it fired another salvo, this time at
Ghost
. The cruiser must have managed to fix the damage to its eighth missile tube for it had fired a full broadside.

Moments later a message came through from
Ghost
. “
Raptor
, this is Lightfoot, clear the engagement zone. I repeat, clear the engagement zone. Our last salvo has significantly damaged their main engines. That cruiser isn’t going anywhere fast, we’ll have plenty of time to accomplish what we came here for before they can effect repairs. It looks like they still have all their offensive weapons working so we’re not going to risk trying to destroy them. Please acknowledge.
Ghost
out.”

James thought Lightfoot had tried to add an extra level of sternness into his command. Not that he really needed to with his strong voice and intimidating build. Lightfoot must have been worried that James wouldn’t let an opportunity to destroy a Chinese ship pass. Certainly, there would be some British commanders who would pretend they hadn’t heard the last message and move in for the kill. While James was tempted - it would look good on his record to have a cruiser down as a confirmed kill, there was a mission to complete.

Speaking to the communication officer he ordered, “acknowledge
Ghost’s
orders.” He followed this up by ordering the navigation officer to pull
Raptor
back to the coordinates Lightfoot had sent over with his orders.

As
Raptor
began to change direction, the second salvo of Chinese missiles altered course to follow. The flak cannon again began to fill space with shrapnel. 

Ten seconds before it was programmed to cease firing to allow the other point defense weapons to open, the energy supply to one of the electromagnetic rings in the fourth barrel over loaded. The resultant surge in the magnetic force along one side of the barrel pulled the next three flak rounds off center before the safeties shut the flak cannon down. Two of the rounds excited the barrel, heading off in the wrong direction, but the third collided with the end of the barrel and exploded. As a thousand explosive ball bearings erupted from the explosion and detonated themselves the flak cannon was shredded along with a number of point defense plasma cannons.

Unaware of the confusion engulfing the bridge of
Raptor,
the remaining five Chinese missiles continued towards the ship. What was left of the point defense plasma cannons opened fire, taking out one missile. Another two fell as
Raptor
fired off as many anti-missile missiles as she could. Two still survived and they both homed in on the nose of the ship. As one they exploded only eight hundred meters from the ship when their seeker heads realized they wouldn’t get a direct hit. The explosive force of the thermonuclear detentions quickly dissipated in the void of space but not before a significant amount of the force crashed into
Raptor
.

This time the bridge crew were thrown about much more forcibly and two officers lost consciousness as their harnesses failed to stop the excessive g-forces from impacting them. Disorientated from the shockwave and the flickering of the damaged lights on the bridge, James shook himself to try and refocus. Romanov was hunched over at his console. His head lolled about from side to side and a thick stream of blood was making its way from his hairline down the back of his neck. After getting full command of his senses James keyed his command console. “Medical assistance to the bridge immediately,” he ordered on the medical COM channel. Then he switched command of the tactical console to his command chair. The first damage reports coming in showed almost all of the valstronium armor had been blasted off
Raptor’s
starboard nose section. The life like metal was already flowing from other parts of the ship to even out the armor’s thickness. It would strengthen the nose sections but would leave the rest of the ship generally weaker. Starboard missile tube six was reporting as inoperable but the remaining five were ready to fire. Checking that
Raptor’s
gravimetric sensors were still working, James updated the missiles with the latest data on the cruiser’s position and then pressed the command to fire.

He watched his own missiles streak off for a few seconds and then opened a channel to Gupta. “How bad is it Lieutenant?”

The auxiliary bridge was further forward than the bridge and Gupta looked well shaken up. Sweat was pouring down her face and her hair had shaken itself loose from her ponytail and was splayed everywhere. The look in her eyes was all James needed to see to be reassured that she was still in full control. “We’ve lost nearly sixty percent of our forward starboard point defensive network. Starboard missile six is damaged but I think it can be repaired. We’ve also lost our flak cannon. A review of the last few seconds of the attack indicates that the flak cannon malfunctioned and damaged itself along with some of our point defense cannons. So far I have reports of two fatalities and five serious injuries. They are all being taken to sickbay now. Everyone else is working flat out on the repairs.”

“Good work Lieutenant,” James said, “let me know if there are any more fatalities or injuries.” Before commanding
Drake,
James had not been on board a ship that had had a fatality. He had felt the deaths of his crew on
Drake
deeply and he knew it would be the same today. Maybe even some of the fatalities would be crew members who had followed him from
Drake
. Yet right now he had to get everyone else to safety and so he forced his feelings out of his mind and looked back to the holo display.

Ghost
was making her way out of the cruiser’s missile range at full speed. She had obviously weathered the cruiser’s first missile salvo but the second one was about to enter engagement range for the point defense weapons. Her own flak cannon dealt with four of the incoming eight missiles. Only one survived the closer range weapons. For a moment James thought it had scored a direct hit as the explosion played havoc with
Raptor’s
sensor feed. A few seconds later
Ghost
reappeared on the same vector, still accelerating at her top speed, indicating that any damage had been minimal.

From the cruiser another eight missiles shot out of their tubes towards
Ghost
. Someone had made a mistake though, probably out of rage. With
Ghost
and the crippled cruiser now pulling away from each other, the missiles didn’t have the range to catch
Ghost
. In vain they accelerated after the British warship but eventually their small fusion reactors ran out fuel and they faded off the gravimetric plot as their engines died.

The final missiles from
Ghost
and
Raptor
on the other hand, crashed into the cruiser’s point defenses five minutes apart. Only one managed to get a proximity hit and James hoped it had caused some internal damage to add to the time it would take for the cruiser to repair itself. From the visuals it was clear the light cruiser would still be able to put up a fight, if it could get into range of the British destroyers once its engines were back online, though James knew Lightfoot had no intention of sticking around to see how long that might take.

By the later stages of the First Interstellar Expansion Era the British Space Navy had become obsessed with stealth technology. This would go on to prove very useful for the whole human race.

-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD

12
th
May 2465 AD, HMS
Raptor
, Wi

A full two days after the battle with the light cruiser that had left the door to Wi Li open, James, Gupta and Romanov stood on the bridge of
Raptor
. They were watching the now fully regrouped ships of the system picket, including the somewhat repaired light cruiser, charging straight for
Ghost
and
Raptor
.

“They’re certainly putting on a good show,” Romanov said to the bridge at large.

“Indeed,” James agreed, “too little too late I’m afraid.” No doubt the Chinese Commander was trying to cover his back. At least it would look like he tried to engage the British destroyers once he had repaired his ship. It was just a pity his targets were about to jump out of the system, their mission complete.

After
Raptor
and
Ghost
met at the coordinates Lightfoot had sent to James, they had waited for over an hour before setting off together towards Wi Li. The wait had allowed the damaged cruiser and the two frigates that had eventually joined it to overshoot Wi Li. With the cruiser’s engines damaged, it hadn’t been able to slow down and enter orbit. Instead, it had been forced to continue further into the inner system and actually ended up well past the system’s star and on its way out towards the far side of the system before its engines were repaired enough to arrest its momentum.

The damage to the light cruiser left only two destroyers to oppose the British ships, the one that had been guarding Wi Liang and the one
Raptor
had exchanged fire with. They had both retreated to Wi Liang and had sat in orbit, obviously concluding that a missile duel with two destroyers equipped with flak cannons would be futile. Thankfully, they hadn’t realized that
Raptor’s
had been damaged.

With Wi Li at their mercy, the two British ships had moved into orbit. The planet, being recently colonized, didn’t yet have any orbital defenses. RSNI had identified two planetary weapons facilities, which
Ghost
had bombarded with ground assault missiles. They were simply anti-ship missiles with their nuclear devices replaced with a shaft of valstronium. Accelerated to very high relativistic speeds, when the missiles hit the surface of a planet the impact released megatons of explosive force without the radiation from a nuclear detonation. There had been a moment of alarm aboard
Raptor
when a third planetary defense instillation had been identified. The first sign of it had been when it began to spew missiles that accelerated out of the planet’s atmosphere and towards the ship. Thankfully, the instillation had only been partially completed and so only had six missiles ready to launch.

Throughout the human sphere, orbital defense platforms were the preferred defensive fortification as missiles fired from a planet’s surface spent a lot of their fuel boosting out of the planet’s gravity. The only drawback was that a system needed a well-established orbital industry to begin constructing something as large as a battlestation. Thankfully for
Raptor,
Romanov was quick on his toes. His quick thinking led him to take
Raptor
down deeper into the gravity well as the missiles accelerated up to reach them. This meant when the missiles got in range of the point defenses they were still travelling at very low speeds as they tried to overcome the planet’s gravity. The point defense network was designed to be able to intercept missiles coming at
Raptor
at speeds of up to 0.6c. The much slower missiles that were just breaking orbit didn’t prove much of a challenge even with the damage
Raptor
had already taken to her defenses.

Once safely in orbit, both ships had then begun picking off targets the RSNI had identified as either facilities used in the Chinese military industrial complex or belonging to Politburo members. Everything in orbit had been destroyed but the ground targets had been selected more carefully. With a limited supply of ground assault missiles, they had been reserved for heavily protected facilities. In each case, the British ships had given the occupants at least an hour’s warning before the facilities had been destroyed. For the rest of their targets, including ones that were in heavily populated areas, the marines had been sent in to plant demolition explosives. At a number of targets, firefights had broken out between the marines and the Chinese army contingents based on the planet. Yet there wasn’t a centralized garrison to coordinate the defense. Whoever had sent the army units to the planet as guards had simply assigned platoons or companies wherever they were needed and left them in charge of their own area. Thus, there had been no way to mount a coordinated defense. That left the Chinese army units sitting ducks for the Marines. Wherever the defenses had been too strong the marines’ shuttles had simply pulled back and poured heavy plasma cannon fire into the buildings, destroying them with their defenders inside.

After the first several hours a woman, claiming to be a RSNI agent, had contacted
Ghost
. She had been working on the planet for the last two years. Major Johnston had taken a squad of marines and picked her up. She had passed all the checks Lightfoot had been given before embarking on the raiding mission. She gave her name as Julia Bell and had provided the two destroyers with a number of secondary targets she had identified over the last two years. Two of which she insisted the marines assault in order to see what intel they could gather. To everyone’s surprise Julia had also insisted she accompany the marines and from Major Johnston’s report, she had clearly undertaken some special opps training in the past. After personally dispatching at least five Chinese soldiers, she had instructed the marines to carry out a number of Chinese computers and other hardware. The two shuttles carrying her and Major Johnston’s men had been so full after their two raids that they had struggled to get back up to orbit. At the time James had wondered just how many RSNI desk jockeys it would take to go through all the data Julia was bringing them.

Along with the damage to the planet’s infrastructure, the destroyers had also captured and destroyed six freighters carrying war material. In each case they had ordered the crew to abandon the freighters before they blew them up. The first Chinese Captain had refused and tried to escape out of orbit from Wi Li and head to the protection offered by the two destroyers at Wi Liang. Lightfoot had simply fired a missile with its acceleration reduced to minimum at the fleeing freighter. Without ECM or point defenses the freighter couldn’t escape and
Raptor’s
sensors had shown most of the freighter’s crew had abandoned ship just before the missile had caught up with them. James had hoped that if anyone had been left on board, the foolish Captain had been one of them.

When the ships had exhausted the list of targets supplied to them by RSNI and Julia they had broken orbit. Behind them they had left a traumatized planet. Every major population center had numerous smoldering ruins where buildings had been. Just outside the three main cities there were huge gouges in the countryside where bombardment missiles had been used to take out the three planetary defense instillations. Despite appearances, James had been confident that the people themselves would still recover. They hadn’t destroyed anything vital to their economy nor to their food production or distribution. Despite the Marines best efforts, it had been estimated that around two hundred civilians had been killed. Both Lightfoot and James regretted every single one of them but short of risking the lives of the marines by sending them to visually check every square inch of each target, preventing them had been impossible.

On their way towards the mass shadow and the shift passage to New Shanghai,
Ghost
and
Raptor
had swung by the gas mining station. After calling for the workers to evacuate, they had poured plasma cannon bolts into the station until it had broken up and began to fall into the gravity well of the gas giant it orbited. Only then had the regrouped Chinese warships begun to charge after them, seeking revenge for the destruction done to Wi Li.

The plot on
Raptor’s
bridge showed the Chinese ships would catch up to her in two more hours. Yet in only another ten minutes she would reach the edge of mass shadow of the system and would be able to jump to shift space. The next target on Lightfoot’s mission brief was New Shanghai.

To pass the time as they waited to jump, James asked the bridge at large, “so how many billions of credits of damage does anyone think we have caused over the last forty eight hours?”

Romanov began to scratch his chin as he thought about an answer. Sub Lieutenant Becket was the first to speak. “It must be in the tens of billions Captain, I’d guess maybe eighty billion?”

Sub Lieutenant Graham, another transfer from
Drake
answered next, “It has to be way more than that. The gas mining station alone probably cost more than ten billion to construct. I’m going to go for two hundred billion.”

“I would guess even higher,” Romanov answered, “three hundred and fifty billion.”

Secretly James thought all three of their answers were a little naive. Even though his father had lost most of the family’s wealth, James still knew what it cost to operate and run even a moderate industrial enterprise. He suspected the damage done would run into the trillions. Before saying so he waited to see if anyone else would speak up. He didn’t think anyone else would but he wanted to give them an opportunity. None of the rest of the bridge crew knew him like Becket and Graham did. Hopefully though, seeing the ease at which they spoke up would help to break down the barriers that always went up between a crew and a new commanding officer.

As he was about to speak, Gupta beat him to it. “Well, if I had to guess I think I would have to put it somewhere round one trillion four hundred and fifty billion,” she said with a mischievous grin.

“Really?” James asked sarcastically, “and why exactly would you feel confident in being so precise may I ask?”

“It’s quite simple actually,” she answered again, smiling as she passed James a data pad. “In the last few hours Julia has been completing a preliminary report on the raid. That is her figure on the damage we have caused, including the loss in taxes the Chinese government will suffer from the reduced industrial output of the system.”

Romanov whistled in surprise at the figure and the look on all the Sub Lieutenants’ faces was priceless. None of them came from wealthy backgrounds and so James was sure they couldn’t even imagine how much a trillion credits was really worth.

“It looks like we’ll all have some interesting reading to do on our journey to New Shanghai,” James said, as he waved the datapad in the air. Almost everyone nodded. A silence then fell on the bridge as minds were turned towards thinking about the damage they had just caused. Everyone was wondering what impact it would have on the Chinese government and the Politburo members who had just seen some of their wealth evaporate. James knew it was not much more than a drop in the ocean for some of the leading Chinese government officials but he also knew
Ghost
and
Raptor
weren’t the only ships raiding Chinese space.

The silence that had descended on the bridge was broken by the COM officer, “
Ghost
has signaled that she is ready to jump.”

James looked at the status board on his command chair. “Confirm we are ready too. Jump on their command.”

With a brief flash both destroyers vanished from the Wi system, leaving an angry Chinese Commander behind. Three hours later another series of small flashes in the same area indicated a group of ships had just arrived, a squadron of reinforcements from New Shanghai. It took them a few hours to confirm what had happened at Wi but once they had, they turned around and jumped back towards New Shanghai in pursuit of the raiders.

*

After the stress of the assault on Wi Li James had felt drained and exhausted. The shift passage between Wi and New Shanghai was especially tight and twisty and so it had taken just over three days to reach their next target. During that time, James had made every effort to rest and prepare himself for what was coming next. New Shanghai had been colonized sixty-five years before the Wi system had even been discovered. It only had one habitable planet but the planet had an atmosphere that was breathable and, thus, as soon as it was discovered the Chinese government had begun to ship colonists out to it. Now it boasted a population of over a billion.  On the two main continents, the original flora and fauna was all but a distant memory as animals and plants from Earth had been imported and seeded into the environment. In orbit there was a growing shipyard, numerous smaller facilities utilized by the mining and trade industries and three large battlestations bristling with offensive weapons.