Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (15 page)

Chapter 13

At the Refuge/Victoria Wormhole

On the Dominion Battleship
Fortitude

Battles are often heralded by the smallest things.  A shout, the sound of a bugle, the beat of a drum, a radio message, sometimes simply the scuffle of running men.

This battle was heralded by the sparkle of forty reconnaissance drones breaking through the wormhole.  They swung in violent turns while their active sensors diagnosed the immediate area, then dove back through the wormhole again.

Ten of them survived the laser fire and missile mines to carry their message back to Admiral Kaeser.

“Sensor data is uploaded, Admiral!” Captain Fritz Bauer said briskly.

“Fire the missiles,” Kaeser said calmly, eyes on the holographic returns created by the reconnaissance drone data. The Combat AI had immediately assigned targets to the missiles, but he wanted to see the picture for himself. There were dozens of Victorian missile platforms, a half-moon shaped minefield and the ruins of the two Refuge forts that had been destroyed in the earlier raids.  Beyond that there were signs of many ships, but the sensor returns were too spotty to give any details.  The damn Vickies could have a dozen battleships out there or nothing but decoys.  Only time would tell.  Time and a damn good fight.

“This is the classic set-piece battle,” he told the young officers in the Command Center.  “The enemy admiral knows where I have to attack and is waiting for me.  In the early moments of this battle, there are no real surprises.  It is like chess; the opening moves are important insofar as they give me a base from which I can make more complex moves in the middle game.”

The dozen or so junior officers had turned and were facing him, listening intently.  Admiral Kaeser felt he had a duty to them.  They were the future of the Dominion of Unified Citizenry.  Some of them would one day be captains and admirals and would lead fleets in battles such as this one, and they had to learn as much as he could teach them.  It was not enough that they see what he did and how the enemy responded, it was important that they understand
why
he did what he did.

“Somewhere on a ship like this one,” he continued, “on the other side of that wormhole, the enemy admiral is watching just as we are.  Her name is Alyce Douthat.  She’s experienced and tough.  She knows I’m coming and she intends to stop me.”  He smiled wolfishly.  “She won’t.  I’ve got better crews, better ships, and as smart as she thinks she is, I’m smarter.”

The Command Center crew chuckled and nodded, then turned back to their monitors to watch the battle develop.

Three hundred missiles sped through the wormhole, targeted on specific defensive points.  They emerged in Refuge like a swarm of angry bees, each accelerating madly towards its target.  Mixed in among the missiles were dozens of jammers, designed to make it difficult for the Vickies to get a lock on the missiles and destroy them.

Of course, the Vickies in turn had their own jammers, designed to make it difficult for the Dominion missiles to find their targets.  The missiles would have to get close to burn through the jamming, which then made them vulnerable to the Vicky anti-missile batteries.  So the Dominions paid special attention to the anti-missile batteries, targeting each with up to three missiles.  But the Vickies anticipated that and ringed the anti-missile batteries with short-range Bofors and even more jammers and then used decoys to trick the Dominion missiles into wasting their destruction on empty space.

And so it went, back and forth, attack and feint and counter-attack and counter-defense.  The result was a ripple of explosions that started near the exit of the wormhole and spread out in a growing wave, a pyrotechnic tsunami that rolled through space seemingly destroying everything in its path…and itself. 

Most of the missiles never made it to their objective, but some did, leaving behind a trail of spalled, twisted metal and death that left holes in the Victorian defenses, waiting to be exploited.

* * * *

Two thousand miles away, Admiral Douthat sat in the Battle Center of the battleship
Lionheart.
  She and everyone around her watched grimly as the Duck missiles swept in towards the hundreds of missile platforms seeded in front of the wormhole.

“This is the opening move,” she told the young officers.  And they were young.   Most of them had been cadets when the war began, some not more than two years in the Academy.   Academy graduates had been promoted and assigned throughout the Fleet, trying to bring up the overall level of competence.  Many had already been killed in the endless skirmishes with the Ducks.   For these former cadets, she had reinstated the old rank of “Ensign,” unused for more than a century.  They still had so much to learn.  And so Alyce Douthat, First Admiral of the Fleet and Sea Lord of Victoria, took the occasion to make this battle a teaching moment.

“The Ducks have to degrade the missile platforms if they expect to be able to push through the wormhole without taking significant losses,” she explained.  “We, of course, know that and we’ve taken steps to protect the missile platforms.  This is like the opening moves in a chess game, but always remember that in this game lost pieces are not just removed from the board – in this game the pieces die.”

The junior officers looked somber.  One of them asked, “Admiral, why don’t we just send a continuous stream of missiles to explode at the wormhole entrance?  They’d have to come through a gauntlet of explosions.”

Douthat studied the holo display for a moment, and then looked at the junior officers.  “There are two answers to that. Anyone know the first?”

In the corner of the Battle Center, one of the ensigns was furiously tapping on his tablet.  He paused and looked up at her.  Douthat nodded.  “Jason, what do you think?”

Ensign Jason Applewhite furrowed his forehead.  “Well, Ma’am, the problem is we don’t have enough missiles.  I figured that to really be sure we’d destroy any enemy ships coming through, we’d have to have twenty missiles exploding every thirty seconds within a zone two hundred miles deep in front of the wormhole.  That’s forty missiles per minute or 2,400 per hour.  Even including all of the missiles stored on the colliers, and pretending for the moment we would actually have time to load them, we only have about 10,000 standard missiles.”  He looked again at his tablet.  “Uh, that means, uh, we’d run out of missiles in about four hours.”

“And?” Douthat prompted.  Behind her on the battle display, the Victorian and Dominion computers were fighting a frantic war of total annihilation.  The battle display readouts could no longer keep up with how many missiles were in flight and how many platforms had been destroyed.

“Well, Ma’am,” Applewhite said, his face a mask of concentration.  “If the Ducks were smart they’d sacrifice a bunch of decoys just to keep us thinking they were really coming through in force, and then when we ran out of missiles, they really
would
come through in force.”

“And?” Douthat said again.  Applewhite almost never volunteered answers in these impromptu sessions.  She wanted him to think it all the way through and know that he had gotten it right.

Uncharacteristically, Applewhite grinned.  “Well, by that time when they come through, we’d have to throw rocks at them because we sure as heck wouldn’t have anything else!”

“We would still have lasers, Mr. Applewhite, but your point is well taken,” Douthat replied.  She looked around at the staring faces.  “The original question was a good one, but the short answer is that our resources are finite!  We can’t afford to bombard empty space in the
hope
of destroying an enemy that might just wait us out and then crush us.”

She swept the room with her gaze.  “Okay, that’s part of the answer, what’s the rest?”

Oddly enough, it was the Communications Officer who answered.  “In the long term, it is not enough just to keep the Ducks from coming into Refuge.  In order to win, we need to
defeat
them, and that means we have to destroy their ships, a
lot
of their ships.”

Douthat smiled.  She’d have to tell Alex Rudd about this one.  “Go ahead, Claire.  What else?”

Ensign Claire Bellman thought for a moment.  “To really beat them, we need to get them here in Refuge, then lure them into a kill zone.”

“How would you do that?”

“A controlled retreat,” she said promptly, then paused, working it out.  “Then envelop them on one or both flanks.  Annihilate them.”

“Remind you of a famous battle?” Douthat asked.

Claire nodded slowly.  “The Battle of Cannae, where Hannibal defeated the Romans and destroyed their army.  Of some 86,000 Roman soldiers who fought that day, 70,000 were reportedly killed.”

“And how do you lure the enemy to his death like that?” Douthat asked.

“By making him think he’s winning,” Applewhite offered, his face pale.

“Exactly,” Douthat agreed.  “And while we are trying to do that to the Ducks, they are trying to do it to us.  Don’t ever forget that.”

* * * *

“Send in the next wave,” Admiral Kaeser said.

Thirty Dominion war ships, including fifteen cruisers and as many destroyers, burst through the wormhole into Refuge space, ripple firing all of their missiles and energy beams.  All the while their active sensors probed and updated the picture of the Victorian defenses.  As soon as their missile tubes were empty and their lasers fired, they shot jammers and huge clouds of chaff, then wheeled back through the wormhole, leaving behind chaos and carnage.  So sudden and short was their assault that not one of the ships was lost.

“Sensor data is uploaded,” Bauer said again.  Kaeser looked intently at the updated hologram.  He nodded.  Some progress, not as much as he’d hoped, but some progress nevertheless.  The area immediately in front of the wormhole exit was littered with the dead husks of missile platforms, laser platforms and even some Victorian ships.  But there were dozens more, some identified, many not.  To the left wing the Vicky minefield seemed to be holding, but to the right he thought he could see it thinning out under the onslaught.  To the top and bottom there was a solid wall of jammers, leaving him to guess uneasily what might be lurking behind those jammers.

“Fire the second missile salvo with priority to the center and right.  Follow with reconnaissance drones to get a better identification of the ships behind the center minefield.”

Two hundred more missiles went out, along with forty jammers.  Once through the wormhole they divided into two groups and sped to their assigned targets.

“Incoming!  Missiles incoming!” shouted the
Fortitude’s
Sensors Officer. 

Kaeser mentally shrugged.  Well, of course. Nobody expected the Vickies to just sit there and take it.  But the incoming swarm was a little smaller than he had expected, and a little more spread out than it should have been for maximum effectiveness.  He pursed his lips.

“Sensors!  Is there any indication of Victorian battleships out there?”

The Sensors Officer rapidly scanned the drone data.  “Nothing yet, sir.  Still a lot of unidentified ships, though.”

Well, well, maybe that worm Hudis actually is on to something, Kaeser marveled.  Time to get a toehold.  “Send in the hedgehogs,” he instructed.

Eight minutes later ten hedgehogs slid through the wormhole and formed in a defensive arc just in front of it.  Immediately hundreds of missiles targeted them, but that was exactly what the hedgehogs had been designed for and, networked together by their AI, they swatted down the first wave.  Immediately behind the hedgehogs came seven cruisers towing missile pods.  The cruisers fired a generous array of jammers and decoys and the effective rate of incoming Vicky missiles dropped significantly.

Admiral Kaeser nodded in satisfaction.  Good!  The Dominions now had a toehold inside Refuge space.  A trifle tenuous, perhaps, but a toehold nevertheless.

“Do you see, Fritz?” he asked mildly.  “Both sides have exchanged some pawns, feeling each other out.  But now we are positioned a little forward of where we were, now we can see that the enemy’s minefield is thinner on the right than on the left.  Is it a weakness to be exploited or a trap?”  He grinned, enjoying himself despite the losses he had taken and knew he would suffer in the coming minutes.  “Now we find out, not only by what we see, but by what the enemy
does.
”

A steady loop of reconnaissance drones circled back and forth through the wormhole, providing the
Fortitude
with a constantly updated picture of what was happening on the Refuge side of the wormhole.  Kaeser could see the unidentified Vicky and Refuge ships gathering into discernible formations and moving forward, but not yet firing.

“Send in the next group,” he said.

Thirty Dominion destroyers, each towing four missile pods, emerged from the wormhole and quickly took up position between the hedgehogs.  Space in front of the Dominion line seemed to ripple and sensors picked up a small avalanche of in-bound missiles.  The hedgehogs frantically knocked them down with a devastating array of lasers, projectile weapons and zone defense explosions, but still more came.  The destroyers and cruisers, their anti-missile systems linked by AI, fired every defense system available.  The space in front of them frothed with explosions.  Soon the area in front of the Dominions was so filled with debris and explosions that the sensors could not keep up.  Several shaded areas appeared in the hologram, indicating that there was too much activity for the sensors to sort out.  When the sensor picture finally cleared some minutes later, two Dominion destroyers and one hedgehog were dead.  Damage reports from the others flooded in.