Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (34 page)

The Dominion cruiser, meanwhile, wasted no time.  Pouring on the acceleration, it turned up and blasted directly away from the gunboats…and directly into the path of the
Lionheart
and
Wellington.
  Captain Hillson, always concerned he might run short of missiles, opened up at close range with four ten-inch lasers.  The damage was severe, but not enough to stop the Duck.  The Dominion captain counter-fired, sending two missiles directly into the bow of the
Wellington.
  Hillson cursed under his breath and fired ten of his twenty missiles.  The Duck cruiser staggered to the side, huge pieces of the hull plating peeling off its flanks.  A laser turret fired at the
Wellington
and missed despite the close range.  Three of the
Wellington’s
small laser turrets spotted the movement and fired on it, scouring it off the Dominion’s hull.

Then the
Lionheart
sped past, raking the Duck ship from stem to stern with twelve ten-inch lasers and countless smaller ones, plus anti-missile fire.  The enemy cruiser split in half lengthwise, the two lengths slowly drifting away from each other.  At first long tongues of fire leapt out, but in a moment the air had escaped and the fires snuffed out.  There were no escape pods.

The bridge crew of the
Wellington
watched the entire slaughter on video display.  Standing next to Captain Hillson, his Exec snarled, “That’ll teach the bastards!”   But Hillson, who was older and had grandchildren, simply muttered, “May the Gods have mercy upon them.”

The final note of the skirmish came as
Lionheart
sped on.  Eder radioed a terse message implicitly rebuking Captain Hillson for shooting only ten missiles
.
“
Wellington
, please remember you have a battery of twenty missile tubes.  Don’t pussy-foot with the bastards,
kill
them!”

* * * *

The second team of tugboats moved slowly forward, hauling their asteroid along behind them.  Rather than turn up and then dive down on the Siegestor, they were going to try a long, gently angled shot from behind.  They edged cautiously into the asteroid belt, avoiding the rocks, weaving around debris and working to get directly behind the shipyard.  Finally in line with the Siegestor, they accelerated.  Everything would depend on the momentum of the rock they hauled behind them.  There were no explosive warheads here, only brute kinetic force.  They swerved around a slower asteroid, straightened their path and began the countdown to the release point.

That was when the Dominion frigate appeared right in front of them.

Six missiles shot out at point blank range.  Three struck the first tug and three struck the second.  The frigate immediately flipped over and disappeared deeper into the asteroid belt.  Only one of the six gunboats escorting the tugboats even got a shot off.

“Bugger me!” the lead pilot screamed.  “Where did they go? Where did they go?”

Behind him, the Systems Officer frowned in consternation at his displays.  “The hell with where they went, where did they come from?”  He played back the last sixty seconds.  There was nothing on the screen, just asteroids, and then the frigate seemed to appear out of thin air.  He played it again, and then a third time before he saw it.  The frigate wasn’t hiding
behind
an asteroid; it had been sitting
on
it.  When the tugboats got close enough, it simply lifted off and shot its missiles.

“Aren’t you the clever little darling?” he muttered, torn between frustration and admiration.  He quickly typed up a short report, attached the sensor data and sent it to
Haifa.
  They’d see more of that damn frigate and next time they had to be ready.

Hiram Brill gritted his teeth in frustration.  Beside him Avi Yaffe keyed the mike.  “All
Haifa
grogin!  All
Haifa
grogin!  We need you to scrub a corridor from the tugboat launch area all the way to the Dominion shipyard.  Repeat, we need you to sterilize a corridor to the shipyard so the tugs can make their strike.  Next tug launches in five minutes!  Tugboats five and six, prepare for your run.  Tugs seven and eight, you are on deck.  Tugs nine and ten, you are also on deck.  We’re going to try a clean shot with Rock Three, but if it doesn’t work, we’re sending in Rocks Four and Five simultaneously.”

Yaffe turned to Hiram, who looked like he wanted to pound the table in frustration.  “Relax, my friend, this is why we have six asteroids, not just one.”

* * * *

Skimming along the bottom of the asteroid belt, the Dominion frigate
Draugr
turned toward the location where the Victorian tugboats were milling about, getting ready to launch their next strike.  Captain Astrid Drechsher was enjoying herself.  She’d picked off the Vicky tugboats and flitted back into the asteroid belt before the Vicky escort could react.  Now they’d be searching for her and desperately trying to protect the next pair of tugs on their run at the shipyard.  There would be dozen of those damn gunboats in front of the tugs, so she didn’t plan on being in
front
of the tugs.

At the Dominion War Academy, Astrid Drechsher had been quiet and bookish.  She had none of the bravado of some of the louder students, none of the ferociousness of others, nothing that marked her as a warrior or a leader of combat troops. She did not stand out. Most of her classmates did not even know her name.  A few of her instructors urged that she be dropped from the Academy, but others noted her high marks and her questions in class and said she should be kept on. 

Sometimes the late-blooming flower is the most breathtaking.

When her class finally began to study the strategy and tactics of space warfare, most of her fellow students gravitated to the battleships and cruisers and immersed themselves in fighting fleet against fleet, armada against armada.

Drechsher thought about submarines. Submarines that fought alone, always out-numbered, always hunted.

She studied the submarines from Old Earth, unquestionably the world with the richest military history.  She read about Richard O’Kane and Slade Cutter, about Max Valentiner and Otto Steinbrinck, and the Japanese submariner, Mochitsura Hashimoto and his dreaded I-58. She studied how the Old Earth Wolf Packs in World War II had brought Allied shipping to its knees.  She read histories about how Japanese and American submarines were some of the most feared warships in their respective navies.  She learned how one sneaky ship lurking in the shadows could raise havoc with the enemy and disrupt its planned movements.

In her first years, she gained a reputation for being distant and a bit of a recluse.  While her classmates socialized and partied, Drechsher spent hours, days and entire weekends in the simulators.  She found officers from visiting destroyers and cruisers and pleaded with them to teach her what they knew about stealth maneuvers and surprise attacks.  She traded her virginity to a frigate XO, Lt. Commander Johann Teller, in exchange for him playing war games with her over a three-day holiday weekend. 

She told him he could have her again if he caught her.  Teller had her twice on Saturday, once on Sunday, but not at all on Monday.  When they shut down the simulators on Monday night, he invited her to his hotel.  She shook his hand, turned and walked away, her mind swirling with everything she had learned.

“You’re learning how to be cunning,” Teller called after her, “but you were
born
ruthless.”

Then came the Third Year Exercises, the four-day battle simulation that would decide where the cadets would be assigned following graduation.  One half of her class fought the other half in real time.  Each student was allowed to choose the type of ship he or she wanted to fight.  Every student was assigned the role of Captain, Sensors Officer, Weapons Officer or Executive Officer.

Drechsher selected a frigate.  So few of her classmates wanted frigates that she was given the role of Captain.  One or two of the teaching cadre suggested kindly that she would be better off choosing a battleship or a cruiser, for they were the
real
warships of the Dominion Fleet.  Drechsher thanked them politely, but her mind was made up.

When the battle commenced and the two fleets groped towards one another in the war zone, Drechsher went to full stealth and crept far below the plane of advancement of the other ships.  Thirty-six hours later, when her side had been almost annihilated and was in flight, she maneuvered one hundred miles behind the enemy’s sole surviving battleship, almost spitting distance.  

A minute later the battleship was dead. 

Within twenty-four hours the two remaining enemy cruisers were dead. 

At that point the Third Year Exercise was terminated – the battle was a draw – and Drechsher staggered off to bed.  She woke three hours later to a knock on her door.  When she opened it an unassuming looking Captain stood there, holding his hat in his hands.  Drechsher brought herself to a bleary-eyed attention.

“You are Cadet Astrid Drechsher?” he asked politely.

A wave of concern spread through her.  Had she done something wrong in the exercise?   Was she going to be punished?  “Yes, sir,” she answered, painfully conscious she was standing there in bare feet, wrapped in an old, ratty-looking terrycloth robe.

“I am Captain Scott Kaeser,” he explained.  “I was invited to watch the Third Year Exercises and I saw what you did.”  His eyes twinkled.  “Do you know that even now the captain of the enemy battleship still doesn’t know what killed him?”  He shook his head and chuckled softly.  “I would like to chat with you about how you learned to do what you did today and maybe a little about your career.”  He smiled almost shyly.  “But perhaps, Cadet, it would be better if you took a minute to freshen up and put on a uniform, lest someone get the wrong idea of just what type of discussion I had in mind.  There is a coffee shop down the block, we can meet there.”

A year later Astrid Drechsher graduated fourth in her class, with the prized Citizen Director’s Award of Merit for her role in the Third Year Exercise.  She was commissioned as a Junior Lieutenant assigned to the Dominion Frigate
Draugr.
 

Most of her classmates still didn’t know her name, but all of her instructors did.

Now Captain Drechsher sent some reconnaissance drones ahead of her to sniff out exactly where the remaining Vicky tugboats were.  Her passive sensors were picking up at least thirty gunboats actively searching the asteroid field behind them.  Let them; she wasn’t there.  A few minutes later her drones reported hearing tugboats and sent an exact location.  That was her target.

Where the Vickies wouldn’t expect her.

Chapter 34

Attacking Siegestor

Emily stared at the holo display, trying to keep up with the flow of the battle.  It helped her to orient herself by picturing the entire battle as if on a football field.  Why she used this approach she had no idea, but it seemed to work.  The field was not a simple plane; it was three dimensional, like a giant cube of space.  The enemy could attack her from below or above.

The asteroid field and the Siegestor shipyard were to her “front,” but at the very back of the field.  The asteroid belt spilled left and right off the field and out of sight. The
Lionheart
and
Wellington
were abreast of her to her left, fighting the two Duck cruisers and one destroyer.  The carrier
Fes
was a little bit in front of her, but its entire Wing was now off to the left, helping the
Lionheart
and
Wellington.
  Off to the right corner of the battlefield was the carrier
Haifa
, guarding the tugs on their mission to sling-shot asteroids at the Duck shipyard.  Also with them were the H.M.S.
Oxford
and
Edinburgh,
riding shotgun.  An enemy frigate had just attacked and destroyed two of the tugs, but the area was swarming with gunboats and confidence was high that the frigate had been driven off.

“Commander!” Toby Partridge called out.  “There’s an enemy cruiser here, heading toward the asteroid field.  Sensors show it received a radio message from Siegestor just before it turned for the asteroid belt.”

Emily swiveled her chair and zoomed in on the holo display.  Dammit, what was that doing loose?  “Where is it going, Toby?”

“Best guess is that it will turn toward the tugs and attack,” Partridge replied. “I think we have to assume the Ducks are aware of the tugboats and are calling in their forces to deal with them.”

Emily commed Grant Skiffington.  “Grant, scramble all of your gunboats to head northeast to the tugboat rally point.  Try to intercept the Duck cruiser that is in the area.” 

Skiffington immediately commed back.  “We chased that ship out of the chaff cloud and it ran.  It’s out of the fight,” he explained condescendingly.

Emily stared at the comm screen in disbelief. 
Didn’t he understand? 
“That cruiser is the Dominion
Swift Justice.
  We think it is going after the tugs.  Now scramble your gunboats to the tugs!  That’s an order!”

Skiffington gave her a sour look and cut the comm connection.  A minute later sensors showed the
Fes
Wing wheeling about and accelerating sharply toward the tugboats.  Okay then. She turned in her chair to Alex Rudd.  “Can you scramble the
Rabat’s
gunboats to back up the
Haifa
?”

“We’ve only got twenty-five effective gunboats left,” Rudd cautioned.

“Scramble them!” she said.  “This whole trip is wasted if the Ducks kill the tugs.”  She turned toward Partridge.  “Toby, call the
Haifa
and warn them a Duck cruiser is in-bound.  Then call the
Meknes
and tell them to launch anything that can fly and shoot.  Then call all ships and tell them to rally at the tugs.”  Lastly, she turned to Captain Zar.  “Captain, would you be kind enough to get us to the tugs, ASAP?”  She leaned back, mind churning, but for the moment there was nothing else to do.  She turned back to the holo display, watching as all of the Victorian forces began to converge on the northeast corner of her “football field.” 

They had to finish off the damn shipyard. 

And then, hopefully, find Cookie.