Center of Gravity (30 page)

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Arcturus System

1409 hours, TFT

This is always the hardest part,
Koenig thought, staring into the tactical display tank.
Waiting while other people are out there dying
. . . .

America
was now traveling at 53 percent of the speed of light, with another two hours before they began deceleration, nine hours to go until they reached Alchameth and Jasper. In the tank, both red and green icons had drifted apart from one another, filling the display with flecks of colored light. For some reason, he found himself thinking about the Solstice celebration weeks before, at the eudaimonium.

Of the thirty-six fighters sent in with the first assault, thirteen had been destroyed. Many more had been disabled, were on straight-line trajectories out of battlespace, maneuvering and grav drives out, unable to get back into the fight.

By now, many, too, would be out of expendable weaponry.

On the plus side of the tally sheet, both Beta-class battleships and both of the red-flagged mystery cruisers had been destroyed or badly damaged, and half of the smaller ships had been knocked out as well. There were still a lot of Turusch fighters hunting down individual Confederation Starhawks, but overall, the enemy fleet had been badly bloodied. One small group of five Turusch cruisers and destroyers had fallen into a tight formation and was accelerating out-system, well away from the incoming battlegroup. They would be light hours away by the time
America
reached circum-Alchameth space, and well out of the fight. The rest, many of them damaged and adrift after the fighter swarm’s assault, had been left behind.

And now it was up to the battlegroup.

The original battle plan had called for the carrier battlegroup to accelerate for nine hours before beginning to decelerate… but at thirteen hours after they’d left the emergence point, they would have come booming through the Alchameth-Jasper system at ninety thousand kilometers per second. With the Turusch fleet shot up by the fighter assault, the fleet’s heavies would have no problem mopping up. Many of the ships in the battlefleet were already positioning themselves to launch high-velocity kinetic-kill weaponry that would sweep through the battlespace before their arrival, targeting the drifting survivors.

The discovery by an AI probe that there were human survivors—prisoners of war, presumably—on board Arcturus Station changed everything.

Under the original plan, the CBG would have swept through the Alchameth-Jasper system at high speed, destroying everything they could reach, then would have slowed, performed a difficult turning maneuver, and returned at more sedate velocities to pick up the fighters… or have the fighters rendezvous or dock while the carrier was still under way. Disabled fighters, the ones drifting helplessly now without drives or maneuvering thrusters, would have to be tracked down and rescued by SAR tugs.

Success in battle often required a certain bloody-minded tenacity. You created the best plan you could, practiced it, and stuck with it, no matter what… because to change plans in the middle of a fleet action was absolutely guaranteed to screw everything to hell and gone.

But even more often, success in battle went to the fleet best able to adapt to changing circumstances, the most flexible fleet, the fleet with the greatest number of viable options.

“Okay,” Koenig said after a long moment’s thought. “Oplan Gamma. Here’s how we’re going to play it through.”

The strategic overview in the display tank vanished, replaced by schematics of the thirty-five ships of the
America
battlegroup, each model-sized and to scale, arrayed in orderly ranks. Koenig waved his hand, and the two largest ships moved off to opposite sides of the display. “The battlegroup will be divided into two squadrons,” he continued. “
America
and
Kinkaid
. MSU–17 and the supply ships will stay with us.
Kinkaid
will lead a group of eight cruisers and ten destroyers.

“The
America
squadron will stick with the original plan, beginning decelerating at the halfway point, which will have us entering Alchameth space after fourteen hours. The
Kinkaid
’s squadron will accelerate for nine hours total, passing through Alchameth space at boost-plus-thirteen hours, and with a relative velocity of ninety K kilometers per second.”

Koenig had worked through the details while they’d been waiting at Point Percival weeks before. Plan Alpha had assumed the enemy was at least as strong as the reconnaissance probe had indicated, allowing the entire CBG to pass through battlespace at high speed, slow, and return to pick up the fighters. Plan Bravo had assumed that enemy numbers in the Arcturus system were significantly greater than expected, so much greater that the battlegroup would have to withdraw from out-system without even making the attempt.

Oplan Gamma gave a third option, allowing the transports and carriers to decelerate to a rendezvous in Alchameth-Jasper space after fourteen hours, and one hour after the battlegroup’s big guns had passed through.

“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy,”
a voice whispered in his mind.

It took him a moment to realize that the voice was Karyn Mendelson’s, his personal assistant. God, he missed her… .

The words, of course, were five and a half centuries out of the past, the famous aphorism of
Generalfelldmarschall
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.

“The key,” Koenig added, “is for both squadrons to stay flexible, for both to keep their options open in order to be able to adapt to anything the enemy might still be able to spring on us.”

And yet, each decision he made, each change in the original battle plan, threw more variables into the mix, and made a decisive blunder more likely. Koenig’s order would divide the fleet, never a good idea in the face of a situationally aware opponent.

“The
Kinkaid
’s squadron will take time to decelerate and rejoin the CBG, of course,” he continued. “The Marine fighters off the
Nassau
and
Vera Cruz
will help cover the
America
’s squadron while we’re at Arcturus Station.”

“Almost a thousand POWs,” Lieutenant Commander Charles Hargrave said. “Where are we going to put them all?” Hargrave was with
America
’s tactical department, which meant he was already juggling ships, supplies, and personnel in his mind. “I think we’ll have to use the
Mars
.”

As he spoke her name, one of the ship images on the
America
side of the tank glowed with its own bright halo. She was a combat stores ship, an AFS, a clumsy-looking vessel half as long as
America
and massing nearly seventy thousand tons unloaded. Her pressurized cargo decks would be uncomfortable, chilly, and in zero-G for the three-week flight back to Earth, but the nanoreplicators on board would keep a thousand rescued prisoners supplied with air, food, and water for as long as necessary.

“Offload her supplies,” Koenig continued, “distribute what you can through the rest of the fleet, and load the POWs on board her for the trip back to Earth.”

“Mars,”
Commander Morgan said. He was the CBG’s logistics officer. “That’s Captain Conyer. I’ll talk to her and her AI about setting up a transfer schedule.”

“Good. Do it.”

“We may not be able to save all of the supplies, though. It could leave us short.”

“The most critical stores,” Koenig said, “are expendable munitions. We can find plenty of iceteroids and carbonaceous chondrites along the way for food, air, and water.” He looked up. “General Mathers?”

“Sir.” Joshua Mathers was the CO of the battlegroup’s Marine contingent, some twelve thousand men and women assigned to MSU–17. He and his command staff were present electronically, since they were at the moment on board the
Nassau
, the command vessel for the Marine assault force. Their images above the display tank were virtual avatars projected by
America
’s CIC AI.

“I leave it to you to put together an assault plan for Arcturus Station. You’ll need to burn your way on board, rescue the prisoners, and get them off onto the
Mars
as quickly as possible. Your two major headaches, not counting enemy forces on the station, will be the time it’s going to take to transfer supplies off of the
Mars
, and the fact that the prisoners are going to need breathing apparatus. According to our intel from the recon probe, only the mess hall-rec space has a breathable atmosphere. The rest of the station has an excess of CO
2
.”

“Yes, sir,” Mathers said. “We can set the replicators to cranking out breather masks, with simple filters to screen out the carbon dioxide. If we can set up a ship-to-station through-hull, we should be good to go.”

“Coordinate that with Captain Conyers, please.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“Okay… the rest of you, be looking at the tacsit and tell me what I’ve missed.”

“There is one thing, Admiral,” the CIC operations officer, Commander Katryn Craig, said. She sounded reluctant to bring it up.

Koenig gave a wry smile. “You’re about to mention that H’rulka warship.”

“Yes, sir. The recon probe last month spotted it inside the gas giant’s atmosphere. It followed the probe back to Sol, and we beat it off. Did it come back to Arcturus? Or are there more of them down in Alchameth’s deep atmosphere?”

“That,” Koenig said, nodding, “is a great question and I wish to hell we knew the answer.”

He had a feeling, though, that they would be finding out quite soon.

“All we can do is keep an eye out, and hope the H’rulka didn’t come back here,” he said. He shrugged. “If she did, we take her out. Any way we can.”

Dragonfire Nine

Alchameth-Jasper Space

Arcturus System

1413 hours, TFT

Prodded by his AI working through his cerebral link, Gray struggled back to consciousness. His body ached. Despite the padding provided as his acceleration couch had flowed over his body, he felt like someone, a very
large
someone, had worked him over with a length of plasteel pipe.

But a quick look at his instruments showed that his Starhawk was under power and under drive, hurtling across the face of Alchameth. His fighter had plunged into atmosphere and slowed sharply; he could feel the steady shudder as the craft plunged through roiling atmosphere. His AI had slowed him to prevent the incineration of his Starhawk, and he was now traveling at a mere few tens of kilometers per second. His fighter’s broad, forward-curving wings were generating lift.

The cloud tops were still far below him. Gas giant atmospheres—mostly cold hydrogen—tended to extend some thousands of kilometers above the highest of the colored cloud bands, which were rolling past far beneath him. He was over the night side of the planet, but a ghostly luminescence—and reflected light from bright Jasper—made the clouds eerily visible below. He could see the maws of vast, swirling storms, the sheer cliffs carved from clouds falling into dark depths thousands of kilometers deep. Lightning pulsed in those depths, flickers and flashes softly diffused, masked by the night-shrouded clouds.

And ahead and below he saw… lights.

At first, Gray thought he was seeing lightning, but these lights remained stubbornly steady, a rigid and tightly spaced constellation, like city lights on Earth, but spread out across a far vaster background. They appeared to delineate a structure of some kind; he had to remind himself that gas giants like Alchameth had no true surface, that the atmosphere itself kept going down deeper and deeper and deeper, becoming hotter and hotter, and under increasingly crushing pressures. Somewhere down there, deep inside the planet, gaseous hydrogen turned to a kind of semi-solid hydrogen slush at fierce pressures and temperatures. Those lights, whatever they were, had to be floating near the cloud tops.

And something large was rising from the lights.

Gray and the other pilots had been briefed on the data brought back by the recon probe a month before, and they’d watched tactical feeds of the H’rulka vessel during its incursion into the solar system. Gray didn’t know if this was the same or a different H’rulka vessel, but it was definitely of the same sort—bulbous, a flattened sphere in shape some twenty-two kilometers across.

The sheer scale of the thing was daunting, but so, too, was the scale of the planet from which it was rising. That titanic city or base, or whatever it was, lit by hundreds of starlike lights, must be more than two hundred kilometers across, but it was all but lost against the enormity of the world above which it drifted.