Rumors of Honor (System States Rebellion Book 2) (18 page)

“Romanov
to Bridge! What’s happening?” With the voice-activated com channel to the
Bridge now open, Romanov could hear the rising volume of background chatter as
Conqueror stirred itself and prepared for battle.

“HQ
has advised us that long range radars have detected 16 ships in formation
beyond the hyper-zone boundary, Commodore. I’ve ordered the ship to Battle
Stations on my own initiative. Commander Singh has been advised and is on her
way to the Bridge now, Sir.”

Romanov
recognized the voice of one of his flagship’s more junior Lieutenants who
obviously was in temporary command when the alert from HQ arrived. “You did the
right thing, Lieutenant. You can now tell the rest of the fleet to go to Battle
Stations too if they haven’t already done so. I’ll be back on the Flag Bridge
shortly. Romanov out.” As he sprinted out of his quarters and down the
corridor, he said a silent thank you to the designers who had had the foresight
to add a Flag Bridge to the new class of 400-meter diameter Light Cruisers AND
put it relatively close to the quarters that a flag officer would use. He also
wished that the first of the 500-meter Heavy Cruisers was finished, but it was
still three weeks from being commissioned. He would just have to make do with
the 24 ships his fleet had now. Twenty-four versus sixteen was three to two
odds in his favor. If the Union fleet commander was foolish enough to commit to
a no-holds barred battle, then maybe Majestic’s prediction of a lopsided
victory actually would occur, but he wasn’t going to assume anything. He would
fight this battle as if the odds were even and the outcome uncertain.

The
Flag Bridge was also buzzing with activity and noise. He walked over and stood
beside his Command Station in order to evaluate the situation that the large
3-D tactical display was showing. 1st Fleet was still in formation in a low
orbit around Earth as per Majestic’s recommendation. The Union fleet, which was
now designated as Alpha1, was still beyond the hyper-zone boundary on a vector
that was more or less parallel to the boundary and travelling at a moderate
velocity of only 55 kps. He nodded to himself. His opposite number was doing
exactly what he would have done. Stay beyond the hyper-zone at a speed that was
slow enough that the fleet could accelerate into the hyper-zone if they wanted
to fight, or change course away from Earth relatively quickly in order to jump
away if he decided that the odds were too great. Even if 1st Fleet fired now,
Alpha1 would still have plenty of time for its Commander to evaluate the
situation and take the appropriate action.

He
checked the display’s sidebar data. Some of his ships still weren’t at Battle
Stations, and he made a mental note to speak to those Commanders. The fleet had
apparently gotten soft after months of monotonous patrolling in Earth orbit.
Checking the chronometer, he saw that it was just over one minute since the
alert warning. Alpha1’s commander should have received enough data by now to
know that he or she was facing long odds, but the enemy fleet was still
coasting at 55 kps. Romanov shook his head. Unless those 16 ships were far more
capable than expected, he wouldn’t order them into battle against a fleet 50%
larger if he were in command, but perhaps the Union Commander didn’t have a
choice. His or her orders might not leave any room for discretion.

“Come
on, Alpha1…what’re you gonna do?” he muttered to himself. A ping told him that
his fleet was finally at Battle Stations. He checked the main display again.
1st Fleet was still orbiting around Earth, and unless he did something, and
soon, it would fly around to the side of the planet that was opposite to where
Alpha1 was. Their velocity was low enough that the ships could kill all forward
momentum and essentially hover in place, but that wasn’t necessarily the best
choice. If Alpha1 was just part of a bigger attack, with another group of ships
about to emerge from hyper-space somewhere else, and 1st Fleet brought its
forward velocity to zero, Romanov would be risking having his fleet out of
position to interdict a second or maybe even a third group of ships.

With
two minutes now since the alert, Romanov was beginning to wonder why his Union
counterpart was taking so long to make up his or her mind. The display pinged
again, and he saw from the sidebar data that Alpha1 was now accelerating
towards Earth.
My God, he’s actually going to fight us!

“Do
we have any data on the size of those ships yet?” he asked no one in
particular.

“Tracking
says preliminary data suggests those ships are the same size as the ones we saw
briefly the last time they were here, Sir. Five are 400 meters, the rest 300
meters.”

It
gave him some comfort that he wasn’t facing 16 battleships, but now the
decision to attack made even less sense. “Any chance that they haven’t seen all
our ships?” he asked.

“Highly
unlikely, Sir. Our own satellites beyond the hyper-zone boundary are picking up
radar reflections from all our ships. If we can see ours, then they should be
able to as well.”

With
that information confirming his own suspicions, it was time for him to make a
decision. “Okay, order our ships to decelerate to zero forward velocity. We’ll
hold this position and altitude.” With the order acknowledged, he checked the
display data again. If his ships fired now, Alpha1 would have enough time to
veer off and get back beyond the boundary and jump away before his missiles
could reach it. He had to wait until they were deep enough inside the
hyper-zone that they couldn’t get away unscathed, and the slower their initial
velocity, the deeper they had to be before he could be sure of catching them.
They, on the other hand, could fire at his ships at any time, and there was no
way for 1st Fleet to avoid that fire. But unlike earlier in the war, an
exchange of missiles was not going to result in mutual destruction. All of his
ships had at least two of the new laser-powered, terminal missile defense
batteries. Much more accurate, with far more effective range than the old
railgun batteries, there was no way in hell that 16 light cruisers could fire
enough missiles to get past the collective missile defenses of 24 ships, unless
they concentrated all their missile fire on one target at a time. And if Alpha1
did that, it would take a lot of missile volleys to knock out all of his ships.

The
display now showed that 1st Fleet was hovering in place, relative to Earth and
to the enemy fleet. It should take about 25 seconds for the reflected radar
energy to reach Alpha1 and reveal that fact to the enemy commander. Shooting at
stationary targets would be so much easier. If he were commanding that fleet,
he would order it to fire just about…now. The display pinged and a new icon
appeared with the number 210 inside it.

“Alpha1’s
fired two one zero missiles!” said the ship’s Tactical Officer over the
loudspeaker from the Bridge. A quick check of the sidebar data showed that all
of the laser batteries of his ships were operational and ready to fire as soon
as their individual lidars were tracking an incoming missile.

“Everyone
into pressure suits,” said Romanov as he reached down below his Command Chair
to get his. After putting it on but leaving the helmet where he could reach it
quickly, he sat down and buckled himself in. One of the smaller screens at his
station had been continuously recalculating whether Alpha1 was deep enough into
the zone. Not yet, but it was getting close. As he waited, he took note that
there were now three enemy missile barrages, each with 210 missiles. The image
of over 600 missiles coming straight for his ships was slightly unnerving
considering that there would be 210 more missiles every 15-20 seconds, but
Romanov had been in simulations that looked a lot worse than this. He checked a
secondary screen showing what kind of missiles his ships were ready to launch.
All of them had Mark 1 fission warheads. Romanov suspected that the 400-meter
ships had neutron armor because Alpha1’s acceleration was low enough to match
the performance of the one enemy ship that was confirmed to have neutron armor
in that battle months ago. A hit by a Mark 1 warhead might not cripple the
bigger ships, but they would pretty much destroy the smaller, unarmored ships.

Romanov
knew that the armored ships carried 20 missile tubes each, and the unarmored
cruisers only carried 10 each. Knocking out the five larger ships quickly would
reduce enemy fire power by 47.6%. He opened the channel that automatically
connected him to all 24 ship commanders.

“This
is Romanov. The enemy fleet will soon be too deep within the zone to evade our
first missile volley, but I want them even further committed. We’ll hold our
fire until we can hit them with at least two volleys, regardless of what they
do. I want our first volley to concentrate on the five larger ships. Your
tactical officers will have to co-ordinate your fire so that each target gets the
same number of missiles fired at it. Tie your fire control to my Command
Station. We have enough Mark 1s to fire a second volley, but I want to hold
those in reserve. Therefore do not reload your missile tubes until I give the
order. Make sure your missile defense batteries are on automatic fire. That’s
all for now. Romanov out.”

Romanov
checked the chronometer for elapsed time since Alpha1 began accelerating.
Almost ten minutes now. The range between the fleets had started out at just
over 5.5 million kilometers. 1st Fleet was not moving at all, and Alpha1 was
still only moving at 82.3 kps. Her first missile volley, on the other hand, was
now moving at over 2,106 kps due to its 350G acceleration, but it would still
take a total of almost 30 minutes flight time to reach 1st Fleet. His own first
volley would take almost as long to reach the enemy fleet, which was why he was
going to wait another ten minutes. At that point, it would take Alpha1 almost
65 minutes to decelerate to zero velocity and then re-accelerate back out to
get beyond the zone boundary. That was enough time to fire one volley, evaluate
the results of the interceptions, and fire another volley with enough time left
to catch the fleeing ships if they tried to get away. It would also give his
ships 10 minutes or so to try to intercept the enemy missiles with their laser
batteries.

Romanov
realized that he was holding his breath and made a conscious effort to breathe
normally. He had to stay calm. It would be all too easy to let the adrenaline
rush make him impulsively do something stupid, just for the sake of taking
action. At least Chief of Staff Chenko wasn’t second guessing him from the
ground. A quick check confirmed the fact that Romanov’s transmission to the
other commanders had also been transmitted to HQ. Chenko would have heard it
and understood what Romanov was planning. What Romanov couldn’t figure out was
why the enemy fleet commander was willing to risk his 16 ship fleet against
Romanov’s 24 ship fleet. Surely the Union leadership wouldn’t be so stupid as
to order an attack regardless of the odds, and yet that’s exactly what it
looked like to him.

The
next 10 minutes actually seemed to go fast. By now there were 12 separate
volleys. The fact that all 16 Union ships had stopped firing at the same time
told Romanov that they were holding some missiles back, since the larger ships
clearly had the capability to carry and fire more missiles than their smaller
cousins.  When the additional 10 minutes had passed, Romanov touched the Enable
Fleet Missile Launch virtual button on one of his smaller displays. The green
icon representing 1st Fleet on the tactical display vomited 360 missiles
simultaneously. They were aiming for the point where Alpha1 would be by the
time the missiles got there, if it continued on its same trajectory. If Alpha1
tried to veer off, the missiles would be redirected accordingly.

Romanov
waited the necessary length of time for the enemy commander to see the missile
launch via reflected radar energy. Alpha1 did not veer off. Even after another
minute had passed, the enemy fleet was still accelerating towards Earth. That
fleet commander had to be mad, or he was supremely confident that his missiles
would devastate 1st Fleet. For the last nine minutes before the enemy’s first
volley hit, Romanov wondered if he had made a huge mistake. His ships had a
total of 70 laser batteries versus 210 missiles in each volley. That meant that
each battery had to burn three missiles. By the end of the missiles’ roughly 30
minute flight time, they would have a velocity in excess of 6,205 kps. That
wasn’t as much of a problem as it seemed, because the missiles were heading
straight for his ships, and therefore from the point of view of the laser
battery’s low-powered lidar tracking laser, the targets weren’t moving sideways
at all. When the missiles were one light second away, each ship would turn on
its own radar to pinpoint the missiles’ locations. That would give his lidars a
starting point for their own search. As soon as a missile warhead was tracked
by lidar, that battery’s high-powered laser would fire at exactly the same
point. The system had been tested extensively and been proven successful.

Romanov
jumped in surprise when Conqueror’s Tactical Officer announced that the ship’s
lasers were firing. He quickly saw that the other ships of the fleet were doing
the same. The number inside the angry red icon representing the first enemy
volley started to drop, and quickly too. It reached zero when there was still
almost 20 seconds left before missile impact. Romanov heard the Flag Bridge
crew mutter expressions of relief. Over the internal com channel to the ship’s
Bridge, he heard the Bridge crew react with more enthusiasm. The first volley
had been stopped. His fleet’s lasers were already firing on the second volley.
Romanov queried his station’s tactical computer and stared flabbergasted at the
result. The first two volleys had been equally distributed among all his ships
in terms of targets, which was the worst possible thing for the enemy commander
to have done. If every volley had been concentrated on just one target, not all
of the fleet’s laser batteries would have been able to track missiles that were
moving across their firing arcs instead of straight at them. It was a huge blunder
by the opposing commander. The next six incoming volleys met the same fate,
although the distance left when the last missile in each volley was destroyed
was getting shorter. That was worrisome, but something else was bothering
Romanov, and he suddenly realized what it was. None of the 1680 missiles
destroyed so far had exploded with the kind of energy indicative of atomic
warheads. If those missiles had been armed with fission warheads, at least a
few of them should have been hit in just the right way to trigger a premature
detonation of the fission device. The fact that none had done so strongly
suggested that these incoming missiles were armed with either conventional HE
warheads or perhaps even the KE type.

“Ten
seconds to our missile interceptions!” said the excited Tactical Officer.
Romanov shifted his attention to the main display which now zoomed in on the
enemy fleet. The scale became small enough that he could see Alpha1 fire
counter-missiles. His first volley of 360 missiles started to suffer
interceptions, and the total number of remaining missiles dropped quickly.
However, by the time the interception countdown chronometer hit zero, there
were still 251 missiles left operational, and each one had a Mark 1 fission
warhead. The simultaneous release of that much energy momentarily overwhelmed
Conqueror’s sensors.

When
the figurative dust cleared, the enemy fleet was down to 11 ships. The other
five had been blown to pieces. Romanov quickly sent orders to reload all
missile tubes with standard HE warhead missiles. When all tubes on all ships
were ready to fire and had been allocated targets, Romanov touched the fire
button. With plenty of standard missiles to spare, he ordered another volley
set up and fired as soon as possible. Thirty-four seconds later, Alpha1 finally
began to veer off. The remaining missile volleys fired from Alpha1 were all
killed by laser fire before they reach his ships.

The
tactical display was now very simple to evaluate. He had two missile volleys
clawing their way up out of Earth’s gravity well towards an enemy fleet that
was now desperately trying to convert its forward downward momentum into a new
sideways vector that at the very least would make missile interception more
difficult. Romanov was willing to bet that the sideways vector would gradually
morph into an escape vector if Alpha1 had enough time to accomplish that task.
He didn’t think it would succeed. He was right.

When
his second volley reached the enemy fleet, all 11 of them stopped accelerating.
They had obviously taken damage to their maneuvering engines. Two of them
actually seemed to break up. The third volley finished off the others. All 11
ships were now a cloud of large pieces of metal coasting in formation. The
volume of the cheers from the Bridge over the loudspeakers was deafening. Even
the Flag Bridge crew were shouting with joy now.

Romanov
was stunned by the magnitude of his victory. None of his ships had suffered any
damage whatsoever, and 16 enemy cruisers had been shot to pieces. When the shouting
died down, he realized that Admiral Chenko was trying to reach him.

“Romanov
here, Admiral. Sorry to keep you waiting.” He could hear celebratory shouts in
the background from the HQ Operations Center personnel too.

“That’s
okay, Commodore. Quite understandable under the circumstances. I want to be the
first to congratulate you on a brilliant victory!” said Chenko.

“Thank
you, Sir. I’m not sure how brilliant it was though. Sixteen versus twenty-four
are pretty awful odds. They didn’t really have much of a chance.”

“Maybe
not, but you managed to defeat them without suffering any casualties yourself.
That’s worth some kudos. You still have half your Mark 1 load, don’t you?”

“Yessir.”
Romanov had a hunch where this conversation was going.