A Deep Sleep (Valhalla Book 1) (8 page)

“Lieutenant, you’re only temporarily assigned to my command, but I think I can make this stick.” Colonel Summers stood and handed Lt Kim two boxes. The first, a Captain’s bars. The second was a small bronze star. “RASATs are known for their bravery, resolve, and stubborn dedication to mission and their fellow team members. Captain Kim, you displayed all of that and more. I know, I’ve seen the recordings and the overlays.”

“Thank you sir. I couldn’t have done it without my men, sir.” Captain Kim stood painfully. She straightened on reflex and immediately winced, favoring her injured side noticeably. She saluted more crisply than she had any right to be able to, Danford guessed it was pure willpower that she didn’t collapse to the floor in the fetal position. Colonel Summers returned the salute and Captain Kim shook her proffered hand.

“Nobody can, Captain, nobody can.” Summers offered her another small smile.

Alpha Centauri System

USS Tripoli (ACG-001)

“
Tripoli
arriving!” The announcement boomed over the ship’s speakers throughout the ship. Captain Athena Harper stepped onto her new command. She saluted the colors and then turned and saluted the officer waiting for her.

“Commander Joel Sanders.” Athena said, seeing her XO in person for the first time instead of the image in his briefing jacket. Her new XO had come to see her aboard, expected but Athena was glad that much at least was as expected about this ship.

“Yes sir. Welcome aboard sir.
Tripoli
is an odd ship sir, if you’ll excuse my saying so.” Athena noted immediately that the XO had no problem speaking his mind.

Can’t wait until I hear what he has to say about some of my plans.
She thought wrly.

“Pleasure to meet you XO. Let’s go to my day cabin and we can discuss what we think of the ship.” Athena smiled at her XO, she knew exactly what he meant. When she had been told that she would be serving on the first-in-class Assault Carrier-Gunboat, she had mixed reactions. On the one hand, they were giving her a new ship. After getting
Roberts
shot out from under her three months ago, she wasn’t sure they’d give her anything bigger than a gunboat. The brass wasn’t as upset when a gunboat was destroyed, they were building a hundred of those a year. Cruiser and light cruiser production, however, was closer to five or six per year. The fleet couldn’t afford to lose a lot of them. When she had woken up aboard the hospital ship, the battle for the system and the planets was over. Apparently she had taken some shrapnel when she was unconscious and being carried from the dying
Roberts
. The Admiral had come to see her then and they’d talked for a while. He told her that they’d done well, that destroying
Shanghai
was the best tactical decision and that he thought it was one hell of a call. Then he said that she had a new assignment, promotion to the rank of captain, and was to head to Alpha Centauri within the day.

The thing about it was that escort carriers were traditionally more of a picket force and system defense force. They guarded vulnerable systems and escorted convoys that were behind friendly lines. They were not where a combatant commander went to advance their careers, they were where you went to end one. Escort carriers only served to advance the careers of future fleet carrier commanders. Aggressive commanders didn’t captain escort carriers.

Once she accepted her fate and began to look at her new command, however, she noticed something odd about
Tripoli’s
design. For one, she was larger than any escort carrier she had seen, as long as a battlecruiser and as big in diameter. Her hull had a battlecruiser’s armor. The weapons configuration was stranger still.
Tripoli
barely carried more offensive guns and launchers than a destroyer, yet she carried two battlecruiser’s worth of point defense, ECM, and other countermeasures.

All of these systems served to support the carrier’s other unique feature. She could hard dock and connect to twelve Hornet-type gunboats. The gunboats maneuvered close and attached themselves to special arms that rotated out from the carrier’s hull. They then allowed for transport of everything between he ships. In this way the notoriously short legged gunboats range could be vastly improved by transiting with
Tripoli
and her upcoming sister ships.

Both the
Tripoli
and the gunboats she was to carry were designed and built by Aegis Defense, thus she was now in the Alpha Centauri system, where their main shipyard faculties were, to take on her new command. Her crew were a mixed bag of green crew and some fairly experienced crew from other ships that had been too damaged to be repaired. She knew that at least 50 of the crew from
Roberts
were here with her. She had specifically requested that Ensign, no Lieutenant, Daniels accompany her as her primary comm officer. She had even managed to convince the Admiral to give her all the marines from
Roberts
who got out of the ship. To avoid having to court martial Daniels and the two marines who pulled her off
Roberts
, the admiral had put them up for commendation. Funny how the military worked sometimes, either you get a medal or a court martial, never is anything just neutral.

Athena stepped into her day cabin with her XO in tow behind her. She indicated the chair facing her desk and he sat. She did the same behind the desk.

“So XO, how’s our ship?”

“Well, sir, mechanically speaking, she runs like a dream. Everything is not only new, but we’ve got less than a dozen trial cards left on critical systems. Even looking at non-critical systems we’ve only left one hundred and fifty or so to be fixed underway. The critical systems errors are mostly small things, out of tolerance alignments and such. They’d be bad to go into combat right now with, but they are all easy fixes.” He pressed on. “But it’s the design that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. We’re fast for a carrier, not fast like a frigate mind you, but we can outrun any cruiser or battleship out there including our own. We’ve got enough point defense, ECM, and other countermeasures to block a salvo from most cruiser squadrons, but our own offensive capability is limited to no better than a destroyer. Then you look at our repulsors; we have triple redundancy in the bow, triple! Even on the battleship I was on last we only had full double redundancy, with very select triple. The bow is like a ramming prow structurally. It’s a little confusing, sir.”

“Agreed, but I think I can offer some insights. This ship, and the others in her class, are the result of some innovative strategies involving gunboats in the forward sectors. As you may or may not know, I came up through the gunboats and so I have a certain, shall we say bold tactical thought process.” She paused to allow a smile to cross her face, seeing the XO’s own expression at calling gunboat captains merely ‘bold’ instead of ‘insane’. “My last command was the cruiser
Roberts
. Well, technically I was the XO but we lost CIC early on and I took over from Aux Con. It was also an extremely short command since the ship didn’t survive the mission. I know that’ll will fill you with confidence.” She watched Sanders carefully. What he thought about her would matter, since she needed to be able to rely on him to back her decisions.

“The reason that the
Roberts
was destroyed is because we took down a PRC battleship
Shanghai
. She was anchoring the line and our strike group was tasked with breaking the line. Unfortunately, enemy resistance was heavy on the way in and we lost fifty percent strength before reaching a useful engagement distance. As a result, we went to a shotgun formation and tried to take out what we could. I pulled in two gunboats into close formation behind me and drove straight for
Shanghai
.
Roberts
absorbed the damage all the way to point blank range and the Eagles unloaded into her from knife fighting range. She was completely destroyed and the rest of the fleet broke the enemy formation, sending the remaining PRC and Russian units fleeing out of the system. Now, I wasn’t the first to use this tactic. Apparently I was, however, the most successful and aggressive tactically, being the only one to bag a battleship.” Athena thought about how the admiral had told her that nobody else had taken it to the limit like that, nobody else had put two gunboats in a position to bag an undamaged battleship. “So that brings us to our new ship,
Tripoli
. We can guide our charges in close, getting the far more maneuverable gunboats in close. We can’t carry enough missile tubes to match their firepower or spread, not in any way that would survive the amount of punishment we’ll take. Plus, the gunboats can get closer than us. They’re a lot more maneuverable, so railgun and missile fire is less likely to take them down when they get real tight to the enemy. Places where even a ship as tough as this would get vaporized. There’s also the cold hard fact that one gunboat lost is less of a loss than one
Tripoli
. So they move in behind us, then spread out like buckshot from a shotgun and target the nearest ships with six missiles each.” Athena could see that it had all clicked for the XO.

“Yes sir, it does. We can charge in, let the enemy blaze away against us, then pop them close with fast, maneuverable gunboats. Instead of attrition of defenses, long range missile salvos with low damage potentials, we go for the throat and slug it out close.” He paused for a moment, considering the implications. “It’s going to mean high losses in those gunboats, even for them. Only one force is going to survive that close range brawl in any sort of fighting form, even at high velocities and short engagement windows, we’re talking gigatons of nuclear ordnance in close proximity to their targets. Plus, we’ll be putting this ship right in the fire every time. Not a typical carrier assignment sir.”

“I guess that’s why they gave it the A for Assault. With the long range frigate raiders having almost no effect these past two years, I think the Brass needed something to send deep and get the Chinese and the Russians to start putting more effort into defending their rear areas. The frigates have been having less and less luck, plus between you and I, I’ve heard rumors that a large minority of them just aren’t returning at all.” Athena’s face was serious now.

“Almost like they’ve got some hunter-killer groups to jump them as they come through. I’ve heard the same rumor once or twice. You know, they could also be mining the slip gates, remote controlled, turn them off when a friendly is coming through.”

“Possible, but that’s been evaluated as unlikely. I put the same thing forward to Captain Baker when I was transferred over to
Roberts
. He showed me a report from NavInt that indicated the PRC and Russian naval forces had experimented with the idea but found them too easy to interdict. Plus, high level commanders didn’t like the idea of accidently getting some of their own ships blown up or relying on civilians to remember to broadcast the right codes. About the time some important ore shipment or brand new electronics for warships got blown up and halted war production in some system, well, there’d be hell to pay there. Of course, that ignores the high level of difficulty involved in mining the entire region through which you could transit. That’s a lot of mines, even if they are missiles, trying to go from zero velocity to engage a potentially high C fraction warship, not good odds. I tend to agree with the assessment. It’s far less risky to just take them as they come through the gate or have your forces deployed in system to wait for them.”

“Yes sir, I think I can agree with that.” Sanders nodded his assent. Sanders surveyed his new commanding officer, putting a physical presence with the briefing jacket, and of course the legend. Athena, the maverick gunboat captain who always came out on top. He knew she hadn’t always come out on top, but the score was often enough that he understood the small legend that had built up around her. He was glad it didn’t seem to affect her presence, there was no cockiness to her demeanor, no superiority complex. She viewed the compartment with the same eyes any new officer would when first stepping aboard. He was glad for that. Her appearance was militarily perfect, every patch and pin arrayed as required. She looked to be about one hundred and eighty centimeters in height, athletically fit with long legs to match. She looked like the kind of person you would expect to fight, to lead. Sanders mentally nodded, he’d struck it pretty lucky in terms of commanding officers, if first impressions meant anything

“I thought you might. Now, in other news, we have our first mission coming up. Before we have the briefing with our gunboat captains and the captains of our escort frigates, I wanted to go over some of the details with you.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Thank you all for coming, let’s get started.” Athena brought the meeting to order. She had called in the captains of each gunboat and the captain and XO of each frigate. For this mission her small group consisted of
Tripoli
, 20 Hornet-type gunboats, and the fast frigates USS
Fort Worth
and USS
Fort Totten
. The fast frigates, originally intended to operate in wolf packs of 2 or 3, were attached to give some teeth to the group and a maneuverable element. Their combined firepower was equivalent to
Tripoli’s
own, at least offensively. “First, I’d like to officially welcome you all to 1
st
Long Range Recon and Strike (1
st
LRRS).  It is my pleasure to take command of this squadron and of the
Tripoli
. We’re going to be getting right down to business, so we won’t have the opportunity to really get to know one another before we’re relying on each other, but I have every confidence in you and your crews. I’ve briefly looked at everyone’s service history and I must say that I am impressed.”