Excelsior (6 page)

Chapter 3

“Ordnance is ready, Captain. Standing by,” Commander Korbin said.

Alexander hesitated. Six days had passed since they’d received their orders to start World War III. During that time President Baker had done his best to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict, but the Confederates insisted that they had a right to have access to the wormhole, and the Alliance insisted that they didn’t. Negotiations were at an impasse, and Alexander had just received clearance from Orbital One to open fire. In this case, that meant dead-dropping every nuke they had and letting the Confederates barrel straight into them.

It wasn’t his place to question orders, but he couldn’t help it. The fate of humanity hung in the balance, and there would be no going back from this. Alexander’s thoughts went to his wife, Catalina, back on Earth, and he grimaced.

This was it.

“Sir?”

Alexander took a deep breath and let it out again. “Gunnery—” he said.

“Yes, sir?” Lieutenant Cardinal replied.

“Commence dead-dropping.”

“Affirmative… The first dozen are away.”

“Williams, what’s the Confederate reaction?”

“Nothing so far,” Lieutenant Williams reported from the sensor station.

“Good. Let’s hope they don’t see it coming. Gunnery, please proceed.”

“Yes, sir.”

They dropped another nine waves of warheads, staggered enough to prevent simultaneous detonations.

Once all one hundred and twenty nukes were drifting away behind them, and the Lincoln’s rail-launchers were empty, Alexander felt a shortness of breath that had nothing to do with the ship’s current rate of deceleration. Under the guise of slowing down to join Lewis Station’s orbit around the sun, they had bled off more momentum than they needed to in order to allow the drifting warheads to reach their targets before the Confederates could reach Lewis Station.

That left the Confederates much closer now than they should have been, putting the Lincoln in danger of a retaliatory barrage.

“Davorian, decrease deceleration to point five Gs. Let’s try not to have the Confederates breathing down our necks by the time those nukes hit.”

“Yes, sir.”

Silence fell on the bridge. Beside him, Commander Korbin shook her head. “How long do we have?”

Alexander mentally summoned a tactical map from the holo projector between him and his XO. The Lincoln and her trajectory appeared on the map as a green icon with a line and an arrow pointing toward Lewis Station. Then came one hundred and twenty green dots with hair-thin vectors pointing in the opposite direction, each dot and vector corresponding to one of the nukes they’d dead-dropped. Finally, behind all of that, were the red icons of the Confederate fleet and the arrows of their trajectories.

Alexander drew a circle around the first wave of nukes, then he selected the leading Confederate warship. Giving a verbal command this time, he said, “Calculate time to nearest intersect.”

A new vector line appeared, connecting the wave of nukes to the Confederate warship. The difference in velocities was ten point six klicks per second in favor of the Confederate ship. Range between the targets was 697,562 klicks. Time to intersect was eighteen hours, sixteen minutes, and forty-seven seconds.

Forty-six seconds. Forty-five…

“So we have eighteen hours before World War III begins,” Korbin said.

Alexander grimaced. He had to try really hard not to see his guilt in the matter. He had given the order to drop the nukes, even if that order had ultimately come from someone else.

The minutes ticked away with agonizing slowness. Apart from the sound of life support cycling the Lincoln’s air, the steady drone of her thrusters, and the hushed verbal commands of her bridge crew, Alexander could hear nothing but the sound of his own heart thudding relentlessly in his chest.

“Captain!”

Thud!

Alexander recognized Williams’ voice a second before he saw the man sit suddenly bolt upright at his station.

“What is it, Williams?”

“We’re detecting the Confederate Fleet slowing down.”

Alexander felt ice creeping through his veins. They couldn’t have spotted the nukes at this range. “How fast?”

“Three Gs deceleration, sir. They’re slamming on the brakes.”

“They must have caught on to our strategy. Do we still have remote access to those warheads?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We may have to revive them.”

“If we do that, they’ll be detected immediately, and the enemy’s point defenses will have plenty of time to shoot them down,” Lieutenant Cardinal said from gunnery.

“One or two might still get through. That’s still enough for the purposes of a warning shot. Comms! Get me Lewis Station on the line.”

“Yes, sir.”

A moment later, a man with a shiny scalp and a nest of wrinkles around his eyes appeared on the right-hand holo display. Text above his transmission read Admiral Gaulle. Going by the admiral’s appearance, he’d clearly waited too long to begin his gener treatments. Either that or he’d opted to take the incentives as a credit to his savings account instead.

“Admiral, the enemy is decelerating. It would appear they’re on to us. Please advise.”

“We see it, Captain, but it’s unlikely they’ve detected your warheads.”

“Then they suspected that we might try something like this and they’re taking measures to evade.”

“Even so…” The admiral shook his head. “In half an hour I want you to alter your trajectory. Make it look like you’re heading straight for the Looking Glass.”

Alexander’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Our orders are to join your defensive screen, sir.”

“And you will, but while you’re still a day away from us we don’t need you getting hit by a bundle of dead-dropped nukes.”

Alexander’s eyes widened. The enemy might have slowed down to dead-drop their own missiles. But if that was the case, the Lincoln wasn’t the most significant Alliance target in the area. She was just over 300 meters long, while Lewis Station was a wheel-shaped megastructure with an outer ring that was over three kilometers in diameter.

“Sir, they might not have dropped nukes along our trajectory. They may have dropped them on yours.”

“There’s no way of knowing that yet, and it would take us the better part of a week to alter our heading enough to evade any missiles, so for now let’s just keep our eyes open, shall we? Let us know if you spot anything out there, Captain.”

Alexander swallowed thickly and nodded once. “What about our missiles?”

“Leave them alone for now. You can always fire them up later.”

“Yes, sir,”

“Lewis Station out.”

“This is a mess!” Korbin said, turning to him. “For all we know they just dropped a few thousand nukes; we’ve already dropped more than a hundred of our own, and everyone’s still pretending like no one has fired a shot! Lewis Station should be evacuating right now.”

Alexander shook his head. “And give up the Looking Glass? We’d be playing right into their hands. The station has fighters and drones to watch their backs. They also have us. That should be good enough.”

Korbin turned to him with a dubious look. “I hope you’re right, sir.”

*

Over the last day of the Lincoln’s approach, tensions reached an all-time high. They had managed to avoid any dead-dropped nukes that might have been heading their way by changing their trajectory multiple times during their approach. The Confederates had done likewise, and the Lincoln’s dead-dropped warheads would never reach them now—not without igniting thrusters and lighting them up for the Confederates’ sensors to see.

The opportunity for a surprise attack was gone, and now the Confederate Fleet was just fifty minutes from effective laser range (ELR) with Lewis Station. Meanwhile, the Alliance’s Third Fleet was racing up fast behind them with an ETA of just twenty minutes to ELR with the Confederates. All of the respective forces were well within missile range and projectile range of each other, but so far no one had been “seen” to fire anything.

The Lincoln now sat in a stable orbit beside Lewis Station. Over twelve hours ago, while still on approach, they’d launched both the 61st Squadron and a full squadron of accompanying drones to join Lewis Station’s fighter screen and help them scan for incoming dead-dropped missiles. Unfortunately, the only way to detect a piece of dead-dropped ordnance was to set it off. In this case, setting a missile off meant successfully bouncing active sensors off the missile’s EM-absorbing armor.

Once detected, missiles would split into a dozen or more pieces, most of them armed with lasers rather than explosives, making them deadly long before they reached their targets. Standard sweeping procedure was to send drones ahead of manned fighters, giving them more time to intercept before the lasers started zapping.

Tactics in space were all about jinking around and trying to hit each other with projectile weapons and missiles before getting into effective laser range.

Alexander watched the squadrons of Rapier fighters at high magnification on the Lincoln’s main holo display (MHD). The red-hot glow of their thrusters at full burn made them look like a swarm of fireflies in space.

“Nothing yet,” Commander Korbin whispered, her eyes on the Rapiers.

Alexander shook his head. “Maybe the Chancellor meant it when he said they wouldn’t fire the first shot.”

“And I was born a gener,” Korbin replied.

A few of the bridge crew chuckled at that. McAdams wasn’t one of them. She was the only gener on deck.

A crackle of static hissed over the bridge speakers, followed by the sound of the fighter group’s Wing Commander reporting in—Lieutenant Hayes had set the comms to the Alliance’s command channel and left it open so they could hear the updates.

“Lewis Station, we’re entering engagement zone sixty five now… stand by…”

Mission Control had pre-calculated a hundred different hypothetical engagement zones, each of them 5,000 klicks deep and as wide as the enemy formation. Drones were leading the fighter group by 30,000 klicks.

“We’re clear. Moving on to—strike that! Contact confirmed! Incoming missiles at 24,000 klicks. Five hundred plus detected.”

Admiral Gaulle replied, “That’s behind the drones, how did missiles get past them?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Never mind, open fire!”

“Engaging…”

Alexander glanced at the tactical map between him and Korbin in time to see the enemy missiles react to detection. Hundreds of red dots suddenly split into ten times as many smaller ones, all of them now going evasive and accelerating toward the Rapiers at full burn.

“Increase magnification on the MHD,” Alexander said as he looked up from the tactical map. Their visual of the Rapiers swelled, and Alexander watched the bright red glows of the fighters’ engines winking out of sight as they turned tail and accelerated away from the incoming ordnance. Their survival depended on staying out of ELR with the laser-armed fragments for as long as possible.

The Rapiers opened fire and so did the drones. Golden lines of hypervelocity rounds stuttered out, tracking the enemy missiles from both sides. After just a few seconds, a pinprick of light flashed—one of the enemy warheads detonating as the Rapiers’ fire found it. The explosion shouldn’t have been visible, nor the weapons fire, but the Lincoln’s combat computer did a good job of simulating visual and aural feedback. More pinpricks of fire appeared, dozens with every passing second.

Alexander checked the tactical map, comparing the vectors of the enemy missiles and the fighter group. ETA to laser range was a matter of seconds. Almost all of the enemy missiles would still be intact by then. Thirteen squadrons of twelve Rapier fighters was just over a hundred and fifty, and there were thousands of laser-armed missiles incoming.

The Rapiers didn’t stand a chance. Unless…

“Lieutenant Stone! Get me the Wing Commander on the comms.”

“Yes, sir.”

Korbin turned to him. “We’re not authorized to give orders to the fighter group.”

“I’m not going to give them orders. I’m going to give them a suggestion, and there’s no time to get Admiral Gaulle’s input.”

The comms crackled. “Lincoln, Wing Commander Archer here.”

“Commander, listen up. Flip back around and dead-drop your own missiles. Target the enemy’s ordnance with yours and have your missiles go live just before they reach ELR.”

“Our missiles are not armed with lasers, Lincoln. Going live at the enemy’s ELR will just get them shot down.”

“Exactly. Every laser they fire at one of your missiles is a laser they won’t be firing at you. The more missiles you can put out there the better.”

“Shit—roger that, Lincoln.”

A moment later they heard Commander Archer relay Alexander’s suggestion to the other squadrons like it was his own.

Korbin frowned. “Why didn’t Commander Archer think of that?”

“It’s hard to think straight while you’re pulling six Gs to get away from certain death. The better question is why Admiral Gaulle didn’t think of it.”