Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (17 page)

“What if they spread out?” Rick asked.

“Of course, there are a dozen different variations on this – come in together, separate into groups, feints and so on. But in space – using normal drive, that is – it’s hard to change course. Running around burns energy, especially overcoming momentum to go a different direction. This means that once they commit to a course, their options diminish the closer they get and the faster they are going.”

Absen shifted his primitive visual aid again. “The very first Destroyer came in right along the ecliptic. That allowed him to peel off an assault force to hit Callisto base in one direction while he went the other way toward Mars. You remember he used it to slingshot and get a free course change to slip past the Aardvark swarm, like a running back going wide around the end. At the same time he kept our asteroid fortresses occupied with asteroid missiles of his own. He thought he had such a preponderance of force that he acted like a bigger fighter moving in on a smaller one, punching hard, left-right, left-right.”

“He was right, too,” Ford muttered cross-armed from his chair. “If it wasn’t for that crazy-ass Marine…”

“Exactly. Alan Denham. One man and a Meme ship that our tame Blend made into a weapon.” Unbidden, Raphaela’s magnificent face swam before Absen’s mind’s eye, and he fought to control his emotions. “So we won that one when we really shouldn’t have, and bought time. Then, in 2068, their second attack came. Eight Destroyers. In that instance they tried to split our defenses up, coming in simultaneously at eight different points of the system’s sphere. They had stopped in the Oort Cloud to feed, but they didn’t stay the extra year it would have taken to prepare an equally huge number of powered asteroids.”

“Why not?” Rick asked, more for the benefit of the onlookers than himself, as he had fought in that battle too.

Absen put the plate down. “EarthFleet’s Red Team believed they were trying to surprise us. Undoubtedly the Meme had studied the earlier battle and concluded, quite rightly, that we did not have another Meme ship to sacrifice. Besides, they wouldn’t fall for that this time, I was sure. No EarthTech ship could get close enough, going fast enough, to do that again. Bottom line, they were going to use more finesse, avoiding most of the asteroid fortresses.”

“Except around Earth.”

Absen nodded. “Of course. We brought in as many as we could to surround the planet, and fell all the mobile forces back too. They wanted us to fight eight separate battles. Had we done that, we had to win all eight. Losing any one of them would have left a Destroyer zooming past our task forces and straight in to Earth.”

“So you just fought one giant battle.”

“It was the only thing that made sense.” Absen had told the story many times in different forms, but never to this crew, and not to the other races, who seemed to be hanging on every word as well. Presumably his English was being translated for them – probably by Michelle, now that he thought of it, or by Rick’s computers.

“I’d rather fight one battle I had to win than eight, so I set up a layered defense in depth, with eight outer strongpoints of grouped asteroid fortresses corresponding to the Destroyers and their paths, and all of the warships inside as linebackers.”

“Don’t forget the fusion mines, sir,” Ford muttered.

“Yes, thank you, Mister Ford. Our cheerful weapons officer suggested we deploy thousands of stealthed contact fusion mines along the Destroyers’ paths, as they were so kindly telegraphing their courses. While by themselves they did not kill any enemy ships, they forced the Meme to expend effort looking for more of them, and burn fuel changing course or blazing away with fusors. It was quite a sight.” Absen smiled with the sweet memory of victory.

“And we ended up winning that one big battle,” Scoggins said.

“Rather handily, too. I used that political capital to push through the
Conquest
project, which is why we are here today.” Absen pointed at the screen. “It looks like they kept building sister ships, as I had advised.”

“Not enough of them, though,” Ford said. “I’d have thought they’d make more.”

Absen shot a glance at Rick, who wobbled a hand at him as if to say,
almost
.

Hope that means he cut Ford’s stupid comment off soon enough.
The captain looked out over the throng from the window of the control booth, but nothing seemed amiss.
Am I worrying too much? As a crew they may be green, but there are a lot of veterans here. They’ll be all right. If this turns out to be a disaster, it will just fire their blood for battle.

“Are we off speaker now? Good. Ford, it’s one thing to say such things to your fellow officers. It’s quite another to broadcast your morale-killing thoughts to the whole damn crew.”

Ford blanched, then lowered his eyes. “Sorry, sir.”

“If you weren’t the best weapons officer I’ve ever seen, I’d have sidelined you and your mouth long ago, you know.”

“Yes, sir. No excuse, sir,” he said miserably.

“We could always install a shut-the-hell-up chip in his head,” Rick quipped.

For once Ford didn’t rise to the bait, but just rubbed his hands together between his knees. “Anyone want a drink?” He stood up and headed for the bar without waiting for a reply.

Rick shrugged, earning him a glare from Scoggins, who as Ford’s wife probably felt compelled to defend him.

“It will be interesting to see what their tactics will be this time,” Fletcher said, obviously trying to lighten the mood again.

“I think I already know,” Absen said. “Zoom back in on the enemy fleet. See if we can get some real opticals and data rather than just icons.”

Scoggins did that, and soon the entire main screen had focused in on the group of enemy getting ready to cross the orbit of Pluto, about 50 AUs out. She refined the view and added several layers of data, synthesizing the display until the Meme fleet’s disposition clarified.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Absen said. “Sixty-four large asteroids, each twenty to thirty kilometers in diameter.”

“And sixty-four Destroyers,” Rick said. “Each one pushing an asteroid, as if it was a giant drive and guidance package.”

“They are at almost point two lightspeed right now, and accelerating straight in.” Scoggins said. “Looks like about 1.3 G is all. Probably trying to keep the asteroids from crumbling under the stress. Thirty hours to Earth, roughly.”

Absen said, “They must have picked them up out in the Oort cloud after feeding. They’re in a three-dimensional flying wedge, a cone, with the nose pointing forward. And, I think you’ll find that the biggest rocks are up front.”

“They’re trying to just bull their way in?” Rick asked.

“To a point.”

“Why not just use something really big – a small moon, for example, a few hundred kilometers across?”

Absen sat back and lectured a bit. “If Ford were here, he could tell you. Anything that big would be an enormous target. The Meme would have two choices: go in ahead of it, running interference for it and let it be the weapon that smashed Earth, or use it as a battering ram and come in behind it. In either case, there’s no way to miss a nonmaneuvering target that big with any weapon. We could launch missiles from Earth orbit and get them up to half lightspeed before they impacted. If it were me, I’d put some small warships on computer control and use them as giant projectiles, not to mention billions of railgun shots and the beam weapons. We’d crack something like that apart long before it got near us.”

“Okay, so what’s the optimum size?” Rick asked.

“Like everything in war, there are tradeoffs. The rocks they are pushing right now are about right for their plan. See, they are spiraling a bit, weaving slightly while still heading to Earth. Even that minor jinking will cause anything not guided to miss. Also, look ahead of them.” Absen pointed at an icon out in front of the fleet.

When Scoggins brought it up, the order of battle list showed a cloud of over four thousand smaller craft. “Those look like the shark fighters they used on Callisto in the first Destroyer attack.”

“Correct, Rick. Those are there to attempt to pick off any guided missiles we may send.”

“They’ve got it all covered. How is EarthFleet going to fight them?”

Absen realized Rick had put him back on the public address system, as most of the crew outside on the flight deck sat or stood in attitudes of intense listening. “Direct overwhelming opposing force, for the rocks. If we go back to the overall picture…there, you’ll see Admiral Huen has been gathering his own asteroid fortresses from across the solar system and is feeding them into a line pointed straight at the Meme fleet. Those are also accelerating, and while the enemy has sixty-four big rocks, we have over seven hundred smaller ones, just in that train.”

“Then we should beat them easily?” Scoggins asked, surprised.

“If this were a simple fight between fleets, I would say yes. But like every attack on Earth, they only have to get one asteroid strike on Earth to do us terrible damage. Even though we’ve moved a lot into space, Earth is still the prize. So we don’t have to just win. We need absolute victory, every time. Though the odds of winning the asteroid fight are still in our favor.”

“But…”

Absen said, “But I think the asteroids, like before, are just a powerful distraction. They are a threat we cannot ignore, but they are only rocks, after all. Even if we blast every one, that still leaves sixty-four Destroyers, and many of our asteroid fortresses will be hopelessly out of position.”

Rick nodded. “And if we don’t send all the asteroid fortresses we can, one of their rocks might make it through. It’s a good plan.”

“It’s an
effective
plan.” Absen felt a chill go through him. “If Huen doesn’t have anything up his sleeve, something we don’t know about, then it’s going to be a tough fight.”
And by that, I mean, we’re going to lose. What would I do in his place? What could they have developed in our absence?
He signaled to cut off the PA for now.

“I’m going to take a break,” Absen said. “Keep refining the setup here, record everything, and let me know if anything major happens. Don’t stay here too long. The big engagement won’t be for at least twenty-four hours, inside Mars orbit.”

The crew had normalized to the situation, coming in during off-shift times and checking the situation, restless. To Absen it was surreal, just waiting and watching from light-years away, with no way to affect the outcome.

The captain forced himself to visit Michelle in her room, where she could manifest as a hologram, and talked with her for several minutes. Much more and it would seem like favoritism, though he wondered if her rank and status was really just a fiction. She seemed happy and at peace, not frustrated by the limitations that had been placed on her. Absen hoped the slow loosening of restrictions would mimic the progress of any organic’s career path.

Now creeping, time finally progressed until he made his way back to his position in the control room overlooking the flight deck. When he got there, he wished he’d come sooner.

“Major Markis,” Absen said as he extended his hand to the slim, intense man awaiting him in a standard Aerospace Forces flight suit. “What can I do for you?”

“Where are the attack ships, Captain?” Markis asked without preamble. Absen looked a question, but did not speak. “The AA-36 Thunderchief IIs. The follow-on to the old Aardvarks.”

“What about them?”

“I’ve just spent the last ten hours with my squadron staff, looking through the intel and the operational order of battle data. We found a few Thuds here and there, but nothing larger than a flight of four. That can’t be right.”

Absen clapped Markis on the shoulder. “Good catch, Vango. I hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re Navy, sir. You were looking for ships. I looked for Aerospace craft.”

“There should be thousands at least,” the captain mused. “EarthFleet shifted to capital ship production since the Conquest class was introduced, but there are still plenty of jobs for heavily armed missile boats. They provide unmatched flexibility – small enough to deal with stingships but big enough to threaten Destroyers with their large bombs – which can only have gotten more powerful over the last decades.” Absen snapped his fingers as a thought occurred to him. “Ford!”

“Sir?” The weapons officer hurried over from where he had been standing, talking to his wife.

“What’s the yield on EarthFleet’s largest fusion bomb?”

“About one hundred megatons.”

“Why haven’t they made anything bigger?”

Ford considered. “Ah…at an educated guess, it’s a tradeoff. Bigger bombs, fewer of them, easier to intercept. But the data says they are far more effective than they used to be.”

“Explain.”

“Well, sir, we could make hundred-megaton warheads long ago, and we did. But these new ones are made like shaped charges. Instead of sending their energy in all directions, most of it goes in a focused cone, multiplying the effect by a factor of at least ten, probably more. And at the same time, they have the bomb-pumped graser head that takes some of the fusion blast and channels it into gamma ray lasers of immense power for just a fraction of a second before they are destroyed. Those can target specific weapons ports, sections of a ship, or even multiple smaller vessels.”

“Technology marches onward,” the captain mused.

“Yes, sir. Remember, they had all those years we have been traveling to do research and development. One more thing…”

“Yes?”

Ford waxed enthusiastic, as usually happened when talking about weapons. “The computers and detonation timing has gotten better. We sent thousands of heavy warheads against the first Destroyer. Had we been able to detonate them precisely at the skin of the enemy, we would have taken it down after a few dozen blasts, but that was impossible back then. Like World War Two airplanes dropping dumb bombs, we had to just send as many explosives their way as we could and hope to get lucky. Now, Admiral Huen has the equivalent of the smart bombs of the 1990s, where just one of them could take out a target that before would have needed hundreds to hit.”