Heart of Steel: Book II of the Jonathan Pavel Series (23 page)

“Admiral, enemy formation is splitting.”

Li looked at his console. The man was right. The Colonials were splitting into three formations, two were comprised of about eight light ships each and headed away from
Treos,
but still toward the planet while the main Colonial formation headed straight for them. It was a neutralizer run. Light ships were the most vulnerable to ODBs, but they were also the most likely to survive them being able to maneuver out of the way of the great slugs. 

“Stay focused on the main formation and prepare to launch fighters and bombers. The fighters are to target the enemy carriers while
Glory
and
Levelflats
focus on enemy capital ships. Cruisers are to support battleships, and destroyers are to provide covering fire. Inform
Treos
their support is most welcome.”

Li ignored the acknowledgements and watched as the time to engagement range counted down. His squadron wouldn't be able to maneuver sticking close to the station, but they would benefit from its heavy firepower. Li just prayed he could hold them off long enough for the reinforcements to arrive. As the numbers kept scrolling down, Li hummed to himself.

One of the nearby ensigns hearing the notes softly sang the words to the tune the Rear Admiral was humming. No one reprimanded him for it.

“We always are ready,

Steady, boys steady..”
  

Rear Admiral Kittredge and his reinforcements arrived 58 hours later having made a record burn from Chaucer’s. They found New Helsinki under siege. The light squadrons had managed to create enough devastation in the eastern portion of New Helsinki's main continent for the planetary assault ships followed by lumbering transports to begin landing in relative safety. The fertile farm belt of the planet was now being laid waste as Solarian Army contingents backing their New Helsinki auxiliaries moved to engage, and the land and its people felt the full devastation of 29th century warfare. The invasion was two days old and the New Helsinkians had suffered 75,000 dead or wounded along with 12,000 Solarians. The Colonials had also taken heavy casualties, but had established their beachhead, hard fought as it was, and were bringing in more troops. The Naval battle had been fought to a bloody draw. A combination of unwavering determination and sheer fire power had left the Colonials short three
Bombards,
five cruisers, six destroyers, four frigates and a battleship.  Another battleship was heavily damaged and a carrier headed for drydock. The Solarian Task Force was not unscathed.
Treos
was a wreck though still a barely functional wreck, and of the original 14 Solarian ships only
Levelflats
and three of her consorts remained functional, though badly damaged. The Colonials had withdrawn to cover their incoming troop convoys in their mind having accomplished their objective of neutralizing the Solarian Naval force. Kittredge’s reinforcements were not the only ones to arrive. More Colonial warships retasked following the successful raid on Chaucer's were arriving, and it was clear that the battle of New Helsinki would not be a quick or bloodless affair. It would be a siege defined by brutal clashes both on the ground or in orbit until one side or the other was driven from the system. The Battle of New Helsinki was over, and the Siege of New Helsinki had just begun.  

Sagus System, In Orbit of Noeva Cotopaxi,

Solarian Commonwealth Border

On Board the RSNS
Triumph

October 31st 844 AE

Direction and time in space is relative.  Though invisible to the naked eye, men and women who lived long in space would see seconds and even minutes added to their life span due to the effects of relativity. Yet somehow in ways no one quite knew, the wormways balanced out the effects. There were theories, many of them, but they were so numerous and contradictory that few paid them heed. The simple fact was that if you ran a clock on both sides of a wormway then transitioned one through the wormway, then both clocks would hold the same time. Laymen found comfort in this as it provided an equilibrium to their view of the universe. So just as time had been balanced out, so had direction. Every star system was set on the compass rose. Though the planets rotated around the star and the star moved with the movement of the universe, the placement of the wormways remained stable, holes in the fabric of space and time unmoving and unaltered. Using the wormways as fixed points, men determined the alignment of systems breaking them into the age old quadrants of North, South, East and West and from this they determined the directions of settled space using Sol the star around which mankind's birth world revolved as point zero. So from Sol all the directions of the galaxy could be determined.  In actuality, Solaria didn't really sit to the south east of the Confederacy with Chaucer's Gap at the southern end of the border and Saugus and the League at the North, that was how men perceived it to be and perception is 9/10ths of reality. Despite the fact that wormways were for all intents and purposes flat points in space, star systems were still vast distances across. The laws of physics dictated that nothing could cross them any faster than the speed of light. Messages between wormways could only move as fast as ships could fly or cross star systems via tight beam laser communication. News of the outbreak of war flew at full speed across the Republic, but it would still take three days to reach the 5th Fleet Headquarters at
Cylira
. The Colonials, however, had no such handicap as they had planned their offensive to kick off all at once. The Colonial forces in Joya launched their attack into Sagus in coordination with the offensive on Chaucer's and New Helsinki. Only a few minutes after the first Colonial ships entered New Helsinki space, Colonial ships began sailing through the Joya Sagus wormway. Solarian listening posts saw their screens light up as six Colonial battleships, two carriers, five battle cruisers, seven cruisers, and thirty light ships entered the system accompanied by half a dozen planetary assault ships.  The main strength of the 5th Fleet was still clustered around
Cylira, but ‘Hatchet’ Hopper, who had arrived with the fleet a mere three days before leaving Solaria, hours after chastising that young upstart Jonathan Pavel, had taken a sizeable formation including his flagship
Triumph
on an ‘active reconnaissance’ of Sagus. The Sagus system was a primordial one. A young, hot star with a few rocky planets, a singular gas giant and a sole habitable planet known as Noeva Cotopaxi. It was a warm volcanically active planet still in the early days of its formation. It’s seas teemed with life, but the only land creatures were a few species of amphibians and overly large crustaceans. Noeva Cotopaxi or Coto as the locals called it had been settled by eco-refugees from Earth. People who were sure that the home world was doomed due to mankind's ignorance and callousness toward nature, and convinced that if they did things right on a new world all would be well. Of course it hadn’t turned out like that, and Coto had been fought over continuously for its rich, deep sea resources, until the Republic had incorporated it a century ago. Coto was one of Solaria’s more interesting client states. Its population lived entirely on floating cities that migrated around the ever changing shorelines. It was also the key to northern Solaria space, and as such was well garrisoned and defended by a completed ODB net and an extensive network of automated hunter killer satellites. Like Scarva, it played host to an orbital dockyard, the
San Cristobal,
which was anchored to one of Coto’s rare non volcanic tropical islands. Hopper concluded quickly that the Colonial forces were under orders to destroy or neutralize
San Cristobal
if they were able. Standing in their way was five Solarian battle ships and the carrier
Xu Warren
along with twenty support ships. It was an even match or it would have been except Harry Hopper didn't play fair. Upon detecting the Colonial fleet's entrance into Sagus, Hopper sent half his Task Force to the far side of Coto, while the other half arrayed itself for battle. The Colonials advanced in a tight wedge formation with their capital ships at the tip, and with their light craft covering the flank and their carriers behind. Hopper seeing this arranged his forces encircling
San Cristobal.
It was a textbook battle formation on both sides, and when the two fleets finally met the results were as expected. The Solarian Task Force bent it’s light ships, attacking the Colonials flanks while the capital ships dueled in the center. Fighters  buzzed in the gap between fleets probing for weakness that the bombers could exploit. Once the Colonials were fully engaged, Hopper gave the signal and his hidden reserves on the far side of the planet made their move.  Firing their engines, the Solarian reserves led by the armored battle cruiser
Cao Cao
changed their orbit to intercept the Colonials. The Solarians rather than coming around the equator and thus exposing themselves for an extended period at range, instead came over the pole. This approach had the advantage of attacking in the Colonial's blind spot. The first that the 3rd Colonial Fleet was aware of the Solarian reserves bearing down on them, was when a volley of depleted uranium slugs, like the fury of an angry god, struck the carrier
Obuta Kunna.
The carrier, despite being heavily armored, was unable to resist the onslaught for long. Her barriers failed her as her armor buckled and her frame twisted from the impact before finally her back broke and she flew apart. Of her crew of 7,000, less than 500 made it to the life pods before the ship broke. Thankfully, her reactors automated emergency shutdown system worked sparing the survivors of having to endure a nuclear explosion. It was not all good news for the Solarians though. In splitting his force, Hopper had weakened his primary force. Minutes after
Obuta Kunna
broke up, the Solarian battleship
Pecking
lost one of her main kinetic barriers and received a hit directly on the bridge. This set off a secondary explosion which knocked out
Pecking’s
lidar array blinding the great ship. As her XO attempted to regain control from the auxiliary control, a wing of Colonial bombers broke through the Solarian line and headed straight for
San Cristobal.
Of the eight bombers, two were shot down by
San Cristobal’s
own point defense array. Six made it, each releasing four Mark V torpedoes and 12 Nexus missiles. The
San Cristobal’s
point defense systems managed to knock out half of the incoming projectiles, but couldn't stop them all. The Nexus missiles detonated first their plasma warheads, burning holes in the kinetic barrier of the station. It was through these gaps that eight of the slower torpedos got through and impacted. The damage was devastating. Torpedoes shredded the stations steel like paper, gutting crew quarters, maintenance bays, operations rooms, workshops and armories, leaving many opened to space and causing fires to spread throughout the station rapidly eating up the remaining oxygen. Of the stations 16,000 personnel, fully a third were killed outright with another 2,600 injured, many critically. Seeing the success, the Colonials pulled back into a tighter defensive formation and began a fighting withdrawal with the 5th fleet clinging to them like a Crag Dragon to the jugular of a mountain gruff. Focused on combat, Hopper practically bit the head off a an ensign that handed him a note. When he read it though, ice entered his veins. While he had been kicking the shit out of this Colonial Task Force, two more had entered Solarian space. One had jumped from Joya into the League apparently without being challenged by the League Navy, and then into Cylira where it was devastating the remaining skeleton defense of the 5th fleet's headquarters.  Another was in Mattehen the system directly south of Sagus. What was more, light ships and small squadrons were swarming into Solarian space. That wasn't the worst part. A few minutes later word came that League military units were fighting each other. Somebody had kicked off a coup in a couple of systems, and the whole ball of yarn was coming unraveled. Hopper had won the battle, but he was out flanked. Reluctantly, he ordered his Task Force to break off pursuit and pull back.    

Torch System, Freeport in Orbit of Primus IV, Free Worlds League

Solarian Embassy

November 2nd 844 AE

Ames watched from his place within the crowd that was gathering outside the Solarian embassy. Sheep, stupid sheep the lot of them. Things were proceeding better than Ames could have hoped. The supposed ‘coup’ in a couple of systems by pro-Solarian officers had been met with counter coups, infighting and civil unrest. League military units had been on the cusp of fighting each other when Henry Francisco, the beautiful foolish bastard, had taken to the airwaves along with a dozen other MPs and publically announced how the Solarians had blackmailed him and others to vote to abstain from adhering to as Francisco had put ‘an unequal treaty force dictated to us at the end of a gun.’ Unrest had grown worse. No one knew what to do. Parliament was in chaos. League military units were declaring loyalty either to their home systems or the central government. Protesters perhaps five or ten thousand had gathered outside the Solarian embassy. Many held anti-Republican slogans calling for the independance of Freeport and all the League Worlds, or at the very least a withdrawal of Solarian interest.