Homeworld: A Military Science Fiction Novel (2 page)

Resolute

Captain Robert Sheff of the Earth Republic Fleet Fracassare Class Battle Fortress Driscoll blankly stared at the extremely massive and expensive, technological marvel of the ultra high resolution Versatile Array that served as the bridge of his ship’s main vid screen.

The screen was truly vast, as far as manmade objects go, taking up the entire forward section of the bridge. The problem with looking at its gently curved surface for too long was that there was usually nothing to see.

The incomprehensibly vastness of space was never as apparent as when viewed through the Versatile Array. Even the luminous glow of a Hypergiant star became just another speck of light in the Cimmerian void of space.

Captain Sheff’s eyes wandered from the Versatile Array to survey his bridge and its crew. He often found that it helped keep his crew on their toes if they happened to glance up at him and see him glancing back.

The basic shape of the bridge was a vast three-tiered half orb. Directly in front of the view screen on the lowest tier was the “Pit” where the crewman responsible for maintaining the operation of the giant beast that was the Driscoll, spent their synthetic days and nights monitoring their vids for any blip of trouble.

Officially, this duty station was the Engineering Monitoring Station but the junior grade officers who directed the vast engineering staff from this tier had fondly and unofficially renamed it a long time ago.

The crew on this tier not only ensured that the carbon was scrubbed out of the ships atmosphere and a proper mixture of nitrogen and oxygen was maintained, but they also were the ones who made the liquid waste of the crew fresh and ready to serve its purpose again.

They also tirelessly converted the solid waste into fertilizer to be used by the Hydroponics Department to create nutritious vitamin enriched vegetables for the crew’s enjoyment. Further, they monitored the huge tubs of vat-grown meat to serve the carnivorous desires of the ship’s over 6000 person strong crew.

In their spare time, they made certain that if there ever was a need, and in a time of war like this there surely would be, the Battle Fortress would live up to its name. This entailed making sure all the offensive and defensive systems were maintained in peak operational efficiency. These proud service men and women were the ones who crawled through the belly of the great beast and knew all of its hidden nooks and crannies.

One unfortunate soul even had the responsibility to remotely seal the inner bulkheads in case of a hull breach.

Though the Captain knew the Engineering crew was a dedicated and competent lot, their fully authorized and necessary forays into the sacred land of the armory claimed by the Combat Technicians had earned them the affectionate nickname of “Morlocks.”

Such a slur could not go unanswered, which of course had earned the Combat Technicians the nickname of “Meat Hooks” because all they were good for was pulling triggers. The Captain knew however from the many proficiency tests and live fire drills that they had conducted that he had some of the best Combat Technicians in the fleet.

The Driscoll had seen twenty-five years of service. Some of the crew had spent their entire careers onboard, including himself, and if it were not for the outbreak of civil war, his ship would have been retired with an honorable ceremony with important officials and former crew saying their final farewells, with the type of long speeches that the Captain disliked and then scrapped for its constituent materials. If it were very lucky, the Driscoll would have been reclassified, renamed and spent another few years as a training craft before being very quietly scrapped for its materials.

When the Coalition had seceded from the Earth Republic and then started this damned civil war by invading Republic colonies, the Driscoll had not been decommissioned, as had been the plan. Instead, it had undergone some major refits which had installed some of the latest in ceramic ballistic weapon technology and defensive systems available to the Earth Republic Fleet. It was now equipped with 75 Ceramic Rail Guns for close combat that were capable of accelerating two ounce hardened ceramic projectiles up to speeds of almost 1/3 the speed of light.

Close encounters in space, after all, are a relative term so you want to make sure your target is still there when your projectile arrives.

The Driscoll also had the latest piece of hardware that the brains back at H.Q. had come up with.

Missiles had not been standard equipment on Earth Republic Ships in over half a century as their accuracy rates for long distance combat were abysmal. Yet some genius, or group of genius’, had created a missile that was capable of making small jumps in Null Space to accelerate itself directly to the target. During its microsecond intervals in Normal Space the missile was capable of reacquiring its target before performing another jump and repeat as necessary until it delivered its fusion payload to the target.

Captain Sheff would have wagered half year’s pay that the Republic was decades away from such a weapon but there they sat in his weapons bay.

These missiles were of course also mostly ceramic in nature and self-propelled in Normal Space. Otherwise, there was the chance that the opponent ship’s artificially generated magnetosphere could deflect or destroy the incoming missile.

Officially, these weapons were classified as Pulse Missile Mark 1. The Combat Technicians just called them Leap Frogs and the name had stuck throughout the E.R.F. This new technology was almost guaranteed to cause a hull breach on the target vessel and due to its explosive payload causing crippling collateral damage, not so much due to the explosion but rather the electromagnetic pulse it created. Apparently, they were also very expensive as the Driscoll was only equipped with ten of them and there were only two launchers on board one fore facing and the other aft.

When Captain Sheff had been briefed that this new surprise super-weapon was to be installed on his ship, he also got another surprise free of charge. All Earth Republic Fleet ships equipped with such technology had standing orders to self-destruct if their ship was incapacitated or in danger of losing critical systems. The Captain was ordered to destroy his own vessel so that the technology would not fall into the hands of the enemy.

Apparently, this new weapon was valued more than the 6000 loyal crewman and citizens of the Republic on board his ship that he was responsible for.

Many times the Captain had wondered if he would be able to carry out that order if the time ever came, but since he was in charge of this vessel, his psychological profile must have said that he would.

Now what did that say about him, he wondered?

The third and final tier of the bridge was where the Captain was doing all of this musing. From there, he could see all that was going on in the bridge and had the ability to call any of the duty station’s individual vid screens up on the Virtual Array if he had any question about his crewman’s reading or interpretation. Also on this tier were the Helmsman and Communication Officer's duty stations as well as the Executive Officer's station. The Officer of the day also shared this tier and mostly spent his or her time cycling through the various vid screens at their disposal looking for something of interest.

Sensing someone to his left, he saw that a blond haired, blue eyed, brown-skinned male, His Yeoman, Fryrsen was offering him a piping hot cup of freshly poured bilge water that passed for coffee aboard his ship. While the taste and smell were horrible, the stimulants in it would allow him to maintain his vigilance for another hour or so as he would continue to stare at dullest show on all the vids of the entire universe.

While space is incomprehensibly large, it is also, for the most part, relatively empty. Utter and complete void was punctuated here and there by the dim light of a distant star or a few micrometeorites passing harmlessly by as they were deflected by the ship’s magnetosphere.

Most of the naturally occurring debris in space, thankfully, had enough iron or other metallic mineral in them to be harmlessly pushed out of the ships path by the magnetic field generated by a powerful magnetic deflector array. Incidentally, this array is also what kept his crew from developing those annoying cancerous tumors caused by all the radiation the human body would be exposed to without it.

The heated shielding integrated into the armored plates that covered the hull before they had a chance to cause a breach would vaporize the other small chunks of ice and dust that comprised the rest of the universe’s lonely wanderers.

The only reason that the E.R.F. Driscoll was stationed in this backwater of space was because it was one of the relatively rare places in the cosmos, without a planet nearby or something with a similarly strong gravity well, where ships could enter Null Space easily.

Null Space, as the captain understood it, was a dimension very close to their own, which had now been termed Normal Space. Transferring from one dimension to another, or Nulling as it was typically called, allowed you to get around the light speed barrier. Otherwise, the vast Earth Republic and its colonies would not exist.

Captain Sheff mused that he must be truly bored if he was rethinking his elementary level education and decided it was high time to take his first tentative sip from his metallic cup, with the Driscoll’s emblem finely engraved on it.

He changed the V.A. direction to check on the formation of the rest of his companions in this lonely and little used section of space.

The five “cruisers” were just merchant craft of the standard elliptical shape pressed into service and given a few older model but still military grade ceramic rail guns for self-defense.

While the owners of such ships were well compensated when the Earth Republic Fleet borrowed them, Captain Sheff thought that the folks who served aboard those metallic coffins were either insane or possessed of true grit or both.

Sure these cruisers had their own magnetic shield array and some armored plating slapped on to make them service worthy, but that was about all they had going for them. Compared to the Driscoll their hull could be easily compromised and the weather was especially chilly outside.

On a whim, the Captain adjusted the Virtual Array to display the outside of the Driscoll. The folks responsible for constructing the Driscoll twenty-five years ago had a good artistic sense about them; he would give them that.

The bulk of his almost completely black craft vaguely resembled a ram’s head with the curling horns, which contained the majority of the ship’s weaponry, curled up and behind the bow of the craft where they connected with the main propulsion system of the Driscoll, which was a state of the art Null Drive. The first models of which had allowed man to fully explore his own solar system and beyond. They were drifting now in a patrol ellipse at a cruising speed gifted to them by Newtonian physics in Normal Space, so the familiar purple glow of the engines was missing from the image.

The Captain shifted the V.A. back to fore view and settled in to his chair to enjoy a few precious moments with his coffee.

Alarms began to scream and screech from all of the duty stations throughout the bridge.

While his well trained crew were busy manipulating the much smaller vid screens at their duty stations and attempting to ascertain the reason for the sudden and unexpected electronic cacophony sounding from all around them. Captain Sheff could plainly see the reason in ultra-clear resolution complements of the enormous screen in front of him.

Jumping to his feet, the Captain’s coffee cup succumbed to the artificial gravity of his vessel as he involuntarily lost his grip on it due to his surprise and horror. His mouth, still slightly open from having tried to take a sip of the beverage now decorating his deck plating, was now opened fully agape in horror at what he was seeing.

Already, two dozen Coalition vessels had jumped in, filling what had just been empty space in front of his battle group, and more ships continued to emerge from the brilliant violet Null Point behind them. Space itself bent and curved as one Coalition vessel after another dropped out of Null Space.

Captain Sheff mentally calculated that he had already lost a good two seconds in response time due to his utter shock and disbelief before he told his inner monologue to shut up and let his instincts take over.

"Battle stations!" he barked to his bridge officers.

The Driscoll, old and battle hardened as she was, was one of the finest war ships in the Earth Republic Fleet and in the Captain’s opinion, it was crewed by the best trained men and women who had ever chosen the Fleet uniform, but she had only five cruisers for support and five cruisers to protect. No one had ever imagined the Coalition would actually manage to press this far into Earth space.

Earth was a mere twelve jumps beyond this point.

As the Driscoll's crew stood ready and awaiting orders to engage the enemy in the unavoidable battle, Captain Sheff assessed the Virtual Array, his eyes quickly darting between the target acquisition and information reticules that were displayed around the seven Coalition heavy battle cruisers. However, he didn't need the Republic’s fanciest movie theater to tell him what they were or that he was probably staring death in the face. Their grossly over sized arrow shaped hulls told him that.

The Human brain is capable of collecting and correlating information at tremendous speeds; the speed of light in fact but before he had time to assess the remaining threats, he perceived the enemies “Hail” from the enemy’s own version of ceramic rail guns hurtling towards the Driscoll. The Coalition also insisted on using obsolete particle beam weapons which would have no effect on the Driscoll’s hull as the Deflection Array had already been powered to full when he gave the order for Battle Stations. However, their ultra white light filled the Visual Array with an almost blinding luminosity before the system automatically compensated and dimmed the display.