Trial by Fire - eARC (66 page)

“And the drone sorties from the hidden lunar sites?”

“Apparently a complete surprise, sir. No interdiction to speak of. Forty percent have already reached the rear of our echelon. The remainder won’t catch us. They are dropping back to join the lead elements of Sierra Echelon.”

“Very good, Lieutenant Madratham. Lieutenant Pennington?”

“Yes, Lord Admiral?”

“Have our Gordon-class sloops achieved full drone integration, yet?”

“Not quite, sir. Although most of the lunar-launched drones are in the net, some of the non-Commonwealth models are proving a bit finicky on the data-handshake, sir.”

“Hrmph. Who are the culprits?”

“Mostly TOCIO-built drones, sir. There are discrepancies between the data protocols supplied by the bloc authorities and the actual systems on the drones. Appears that not all the drones were updated to the latest software standard, sir.”

“Well, bring them in line as best you can. Any that have less than ninety percent reliability are to be redesignated as decoys and expended accordingly. Commander Somers?”

“Aye, sir?”

“How’s our evolution into attack formation Bravo Two coming along, David?”

“Handsomely, sir.” His plasma pointer cast a glowing beam where it interacted with the colorless reactive gas inside the holotank mainplot. The luminous wand danced among blue motes of light arrayed as a open-based inverted cone. “Our control sloops are arrayed along our leading skirts here.” The light wand traced the open rim of the cone. “Here at the bottom of the well”—the wand of light moved to indicate a cluster of slightly larger blue lights at the rearward tip of the inverted cone—“is our main body. You’ll note all the cruisers in the core, our frigates in a screening ring, slightly farther out.”

“Very good, Commander Somers.” Halifax checked his watch. “I’d expect that our drones are about to come into range of their drones.”

“Coming up on their observed maximum ranges, sir.”

In the background, Ira could hear the ship’s captain, Ian Stead, rapping out orders to the bridge crew in the next room. “Lieutenant Worthington, let’s not get out ahead of our own formation. Bring back the plasma thrusters two percent. Lieutenant Dunn, deploy ordnance package two.” The hull thrummed—even Ira could sense it—as an immense disposable missile pod salvoed all its birds and was then jettisoned. “Watch the post-launch change in displacement, Mr. Worthingon; keep us in trim.”

Halifax nodded at his staff. “Very well, ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a look at the big picture, shall we?” He nodded at the ensign who oversaw the operation of the holotank.

The image changed abruptly. The inverted cone shrank to slightly less than one-tenth its former size. Red motes—the Arat Kur fleet—were approaching it. There were perhaps a third as many of them as there were blue motes in the cone of Foxtrot Echelon.

“Add in drones, if you please,” Halifax murmured.

The tidy arrangements of finite blue and red motes were suddenly half-lost amidst dense, pointillist shrouds of similarly colored pinpricks.

“Give me group markers, not individual guidons, Ensign.”

Who blushed and hastened to comply. The diaphanous veils of red and blue pinpricks shrank down into a finite number of red and blue triangles. The blue triangles were clustered in three predominant groups. The first were the lunar-launched drones drawing up from behind Foxtrot Echelon, beginning to form a protective sleeve around the cruisers clustered at the rear-facing point of the cone. The second group, Foxtrot’s own drones, was considerably larger, and was arrayed in a forward-deployed screen that looked like a slightly concave lid which had popped off the open end of the cone. And the third group, which was much larger again, was rising into the picture from the direction of Earth, moving decisively toward the lower right rear quadrant of the red motes’ battlesphere.

Halifax nodded his satisfaction, just as the space separating some of the red and blue triangles at the rear of the Arat Kur formation started flashing with pinhead pulses of white or yellow: threat and friend damage markers, respectively. “Right on time,” Halifax murmured. “Enemy reaction to the attack on their rear flank?”

“No reaction from their capital ships, sir. However, look at their drone squadrons.” A third of the red triangles were now drifting down in the direction of the right rear area of the Arat Kur fleet, shifting to intercept the drones that had been launched from Earth.

“Excellent,” Halifax muttered, drawing a well-seamed index finger across his snow-white moustaches. “Lieutenant Madratham, I would like a revised estimate of drone ratios at our projected point of contact with the enemy.”

She had already worked it out. “After the Arat Kur reconfiguration, best estimates give us a five-to-one drone advantage.”

Ira smiled. At the disastrous second Jovian engagement, the drone ratio had been almost even and the consequences had been dire.
Now let’s see how your superior technology handles five-to-one odds against our most advanced systems, directed by
Gordon
-class FOCALs.

Ruth’s voice suggested she had seen Ira’s smile and was mildly amused. “Seeing things you like, Admiral?”

“Hush up and drive,” he hissed at her. “I’m watching my favorite show.”

“Yes, sir!”

In Halifax’s CIC, the pace of exchanges was speeding up. “Target assignment almost completed, Admiral,” announced Somers. “Visual tracking and ladar have filtered out forty percent of the initial target list as EW decoys. Estimating at least seventy-five percent confidence on remaining targets.”

“Estimated confidence results are suitable for a simulator exercise, Commander Somers.” Halifax’s normally warm and generous voice was now quick and clipped. “How many targets on the revised list are one hundred percent confidence?”

Even given through the visual pickups, Ira could see that Somers flushed deeply. “Twenty percent of the target list, Admiral. Most of those are thought to be cruisers, both shift and nonshift capable.”

“Then those are our targets. We’re here to hunt big game, and they are the biggest.” Halifax turned a reassuring smile upon Somers. “And if by some wild stroke of luck we exhaust that target list, I am quite sure we shall have no lack of new, one hundred percent confidence targets. After all, we will have closed to point blank range and I rather suspect they will all be shooting at us.”

“Yes, sir,” said Somers. “Any other targeting preferences or orders?”

“No. We follow engagement profile alpha as we rehearsed it. Unless any of those target signatures indicate we have shift-carriers to shoot at, of course.”

“No such high-value signatures in range, sir. Full confidence of that.”

“I would presume as much. The Arat Kur don’t want to be stranded in enemy territory, let alone the enemy’s well-developed home system.”

Madratham’s voice was tense. “Admiral, our drones are coming up on the range marker at which the enemy engaged us at Jovian— Sir! Enemy has commenced fire on our drones!”

“Hmm, starting the party early. A bit nervous about today’s outcome, I’ll wager. So, we dance in time with them on this step. Deploy all decoys.”

“Aye, sir. Deploying.”

Somers looked up. “Sir, since we are deploying early, I recommend we advance the clock on our first missile salvo, also.”

“Explain your reasoning, Mr. Somers.”

“Yes, sir. If we follow engagement profile alpha, missile launch is still three minutes away. However, the timing of that first salvo was based upon when we expected the enemy capital ships would begin firing upon our drones. Since they are engaging our drones at longer range, that might change the timing assumptions of our missile launch, as well.”

“Thank you, David. You are quite correct. Send to all ships: primary salvo is now to begin”—Halifax scanned the holotank, then the engagement clock above it—“seventy seconds earlier than in engagement profile alpha. All ships are to confirm receipt of this order.”

Madratham’s head came up from her screens. “Admiral, I now have visual feed from our lead drones.”

“Show me,” said Halifax, leaning forward.

The flat-screen image in Halifax’s command and information center became a vivid, 3-D, 360 by 360 degree “you are there” virtual reality in Ira’s monocle. The InPic not only showed him the view from the nose of the drone but, with faint subaudial pulses, gave him a sense of the relative position of the other allied drones around him. He fleetingly imagined that this is how migrating geese must feel when they fly south in vees, or dolphins when swimming in formation—

The sudden appearance and rapid growth of red guidons arrayed along his front also imparted a sense of the tremendous speed at which he was closing with the enemy, even though Earth—a distant blue and white disk—did not change in size. Data began scrolling along the left-hand margin of the field of view. Shortly after it did, inbound kinetic projectiles—rail-launched from an escort, probably—painted their way towards him as an advancing magenta line. He could feel the drone’s attitude control thrusters begin pulsing. The spacescape popped upwards, yawed, swung back, wiggled a little—and then the magenta line was safely off to his starboard side. The drone’s evasive maneuvers had apparently been successful.

A moment later, the starfield shuddered, and a chorus of faint, higher audio pulses gave him the impression that he was now surrounded by a covey of smaller drones, almost as if they had come out of his belly. Because that is exactly what had happened. Ira’s viewpoint drone was an advance recon/decoy dispenser. The smaller decoys spread rapidly outward. He could see some of them boosting ahead, the blue-white exhausts of their basic rockets propelling them at eight gees of acceleration. Soon they would start sending out signals that mimicked groups of drones or single control sloops. A larger image would not fool the Arat Kur: big hulls did not simply materialize at close range. But from the froth of small craft, drones, and actively homing or maneuvering submunitions that were now moving toward their fleet, the invaders would be far less able to distinguish if a new small signal was false, had been obscured by another, or was just starting to come into range. The decoys would not last long, of course. It would be miraculous if any survived for even half a minute. But every second that they distracted the enemy and overtasked his target tracking and discrimination systems was another second that some of his attacks were wasted.

New orders in Halifax’s CIC brought Ira out of the direct link to the drone. The
Trafalgar
’s acceleration couches extended out from the wall in full upright position. A small cavity opened in the base of each. Light duty vacc helmets sagged outward. The ship PA was already issuing the familiar orders. “All hands to battle stations. All hands to battle stations. Prepare for engagement. Report suit or helmet failures to technicians immediately. All hands, all hands—”

Halifax completed suiting up in half the time of his fastest staffer, making it look like an easy, almost relaxed exercise. He folded up the collar of his general quarters flight suit, swung the helmet down over his head, snagged the collar-tab and ran it in a circle around his neck. As he did, the smart sealing materials on the outside of his suit collar and the inside of his helmet collar met and fused. Not sturdy enough to last long in full vacuum, but five minutes of clear thought and free action could make the difference between life and death when the alternative was to struggle unprotected against the effects of explosive decompression.

The admiral reeled the environmental supply tube out of the acceleration couch’s base and connected it to the ball-and socket joint receptacle on the side of his helmet. The diagnostic lights alongside the headrest glowed green. His flight suit was both holding air and responding to data links. Halifax scanned the screens arrayed around the holotank. “It looks like we’re trading about two to one on the drones, Lieutenant Madratham.”

“Just about exactly that, Admiral. Our superiority in numbers is overwhelming their technological edge, sir.”

Halifax glanced at the holotank. The outer edge of the slightly decentered red formation now overlapped the wide skirts of the blue cone. Ira saw one of the blue motes denoting a Gordon class hunter/killer become a yellow smudge, then another. “Ensign,” Halifax murmured, “if you would be so kind as to show us what our fellows are seeing out there on the ragged edge…”

—And suddenly, Ira was riding on the nose of a
Gordon
class control sloop. The Arat Kur cruisers were distant, irregular specks. Just ahead, drones—friend and foe alike—were dying in droves. Some came apart, riddled by streams of Arat Kur rail-gun projectiles. Others streamed yellow fire when hit by a PDF laser, then disintegrated into a shower of debris expanding away from a bright orange ball of flame. A few others simply ceased to be, disappearing in a blue-white smear that signified a hit by a higher-energy laser.

Missiles came at Ira. The pilot in the
Gordon
tumbled his sloop, side boosted, deployed thermal chaff and decoys, spun again. Up ahead, one of the Arat Kur heavies seemed to flare brightly for a moment. A hit, probably by a missile from a drone. Ira felt the urge to cheer—and then the virtual world went blank. The data link was not merely broken but empty, its thin static a poignant epitaph.

Ira was back in Halifax’s CIC, where the now-solemn staff had witnessed the same outcome. Halifax cleared his throat, “Commander Somers, how long until missile launch?”

“Eight seconds, sir.”

Halifax nodded as the emergency klaxon sounded a single, half-duration blast, followed by a strident voice over the intraship. “Secure for engagement. All hands, secure for engagement.”

Halifax pulled his couch’s straps until they were snug, but not tight. His staff did the same. On the adjoining bridge, last orders were given. A moment passed, and then the world tremored slightly.

“Missiles away,” announced Somers. “One minute to outer PDF envelope of Arat Kur lead elements. Estimating—”

There was another bump, this one shorter, sharper, more uneven.