~*~
Mike frowned at his screen. With nothing else for him to do until ground operations began, McCutcheon had him tracking the ORBAT or Order of Battle statistics. His monitor showed both a blue side and a red. The blue represented friendly forces and it wasn’t a pretty sight. The one functional enemy ship had struck the Sun Tzu, breaking the cruiser into three large pieces which went on to cripple two of the frigates that followed her.
The enemy’s second shot was also cleverly aimed and plowed straight through the centerline of the Yalu, carrying debris and plasma onto the St. Lawrence, stripping away almost all of her sensor gear. By that time, rounds from the fleet were almost on top of the enemy and she raised her shields.
In two minutes, one enemy ship had removed one cruiser and four frigates from the fight. Added to that were the loss of the Cu Chulainn and the Yangtze, both taken out of the fight before they even reached orbit. That meant that they had lost almost forty percent of their total combat power before even starting to fight. Now they had settled into a stalemate. Sporadic fire from the Human fleet kept the enemy’s shield up but no progress was being made.
Mike felt a chill. Was the other operational ship within communication range of the mother ship? He pulled up a sensor screen. He directed a part of the sensor array towards where the two ships had been as the fleet had hurtled past on their way to the atmosphere. “Shit,” he blurted.
McCutcheon was down in the CIC so Mike leaned over and yelled his news. “Zulu Alpha One is still active and heading our way. ETA ten minutes.” He looked up at the overview screen that showed the fleet-wide coordination of data. His new contact had been sent to the fleet almost immediately.
“All ships, this is Admiral Gao,” the second in command stated calmly, using the fleet circuit. “We don’t want to fight two of these things at once if we can help it. The Achilles is in a perfect position to open the door on Zulu Alpha Three. All vessels direct your fire on the bow of the enemy ship and we’ll get him to drop his shield.”
“If any ship isn’t following that order, I’ll want to know the reason why,” Towers called up into the hole.
Wes was expanding a unit-stats screen and he scrolled through the list quickly. “Mississippi, Mekong, Zambezi, Saladin and the Hermann are all firing. The Styx and the Arjuna are both maneuvering to comply,” he called down to the admiral. “The Achilles is accelerating straight down the enemy’s throat, he must plan on forcing them to fire.”
“Fire control, if we change our angle, can we get more Vulcans working?” Towers asked urgently.
“Six more guns sir,” came the quick reply, “but we would lose some of the aft 105mm guns.”
“Do it,” he snapped. “We can put out a better screen with those six Vulcans in action.”
With nothing to do, Mike pulled up a visual of the attack. The Achilles was slowly gaining steam as she closed on Zulu Alpha Three, spitting a hail of metal in front of her. It was becoming obvious that the only way for the enemy to stop her was to fire her rail gun. Their maneuverability would not be enough to get them out of the way at such close range. The entire region of shielding in front of the enemy bow was orange with impacts and the area in front of the gun was red from the concentrated fire.
“They have to fire now or deal with the impact.” Wes was leaning over to look at Mike’s screen, his white-knuckled hands gripping the armrests. “He’s going to have to time it right, and he’s going to need a hell of a lot of luck to get out of this.”
Wes was proven right as soon as he had spoken. The orange aura at the bow disappeared as the shield dropped and the bow started to take damage. There was a brilliant plume of exhaust plasma similar to before but an even brighter flash occurred at the bow of the enemy ship. The Achilles continued in one piece but her entire front half was shrouded in plasma and debris for a few heartbeats.
The enemy shield came back up, trapping much of the explosion inside. The entire forward third of the ship lost its hull plating and the bow of the ship forced its way out through the shield in several directions as it was split down the middle. The shielding was either too weak to deal with the intrusion or its generator had been destroyed by the contained force and it went down for good.
“Fleet wide,” Towers bellowed. “All ships cease fire. The Achilles is danger close. I say again: all ships cease fire.”
The Achilles continued to drift towards the stricken enemy. “She’s lost her bow thrusters,” Wes yelled down into the CIC. “She can’t avoid collision.”
Mike watched in horror as Gao’s cruiser ploughed into the mangled enemy ship. Her full armament, including her four 250mm forward guns, continued their silent fire in a desperate attempt to soften the ground before impact. The Achilles buried the first hundred feet of her six-hundred-foot hull into the wreck of the enemy ship. A series of secondary explosions rippled silently through the dorsal surface of the enemy vessel before she finally settled into sullen quiescence. Vented gas and drifting debris surrounded the two hulks like a slow-motion storm.
“Fleet wide,” Towers ordered. “All ships, this is Admiral Towers. Converge on Zulu Alpha One. Concentrate fire on the rail gun muzzle.”
McCutcheon drifted back up into the hole, nodding to Mike. “Good job catching Zulu Alpha One’s approach, Mike.” He grabbed a chair-back to stop himself. “That and the brave souls over on the Achilles kept us from getting wiped out. It’s a damn good thing she was built later than the Hermann or her magazine would have been directly behind the 250’s.” He looked over at Sgt. Davis. “Wes, lend me your screen for a minute.” He touched the screen and opened his own folder, selecting a file. “I was trying to collate some data from the boarding parties and I want you to take a look.”
A screen opened showing an isometric drawing of the enemy ship. The surfaces were transparent. Davis leaned in, dragging a part of the image to enlarge it. “Shield generator?” He looked back at the colonel. “This is nowhere close to the impact or even the secondaries that we saw. Could explain why it’s still up.”
He squinted at the screen. “There’s something worth looking at.” He turned to Mike. “Can you replay the ten seconds leading up to the failure of their shields?”
Mike brought it up. They watched as the massive sections were forced through the shield. “Stop right there.” Wes reached over and zoomed in on an area near where the bow used to be. One small beam was sticking through the shield which showed as a yellowish haze for a few feet around it.
Wes leaned back and looked at the two men. “I think we can penetrate those shields if we apply a slow steady force.” His face showed his excitement. “Artillery comes in too fast, but I bet a shuttle could gently push through just the way this debris did.”
“And if we can squeeze a shuttle inside…” the colonel ventured with a wolfish smile.
“Then we can take them out without losing another cruiser,” Wes finished.
“Our last cruiser,” Mike amended as he fished out a bag of cold coffee. “We’re down to 34% combat effective.”
Emergency Shelter
Tharsis Region, Mars
March 12th, 2028
“Please tell me that wasn’t one of ours,” Gus breathed as he watched the brilliant flash begin to dissipate in the sky above. “Something big just happened folks. Hopefully it’s in our favor.”
“Gus, you have another hour before the radiation levels start coming back up again,” Jennifer warned. “Morning is on its way.” Without a planet wide magnetosphere or even much of an atmosphere, solar radiation on the day side was several times the exposure in Earth orbit. It could spike to dangerous levels without warning.
“I think everyone in there should start to suit up,” Gus replied, still staring up at the sky but seeing nothing. “There’s no telling what the plan might be. We might see a rescue operation at any moment and they may not have a lot of time to sit around and wait for us to pack.” He felt a
shiver run up his spine. He’d been a fighter pilot before becoming an astronaut and mission commander. He had been nervous when first learning about the responsibilities that would face him at Vinland Station.
It was one thing to be responsible for a multi-million-dollar aircraft, it was quite another to find himself appointed as a military governor, responsible for the safety and conduct of civilian colonists. Their time in hiding had stretched everyone to their limits. The shelter had more room per person than they were accustomed to but they had no work to keep them occupied. Their surveys of the region couldn’t proceed with hostile patrols searching for them.
He still felt as though he were constantly being tested, keeping the unbalanced team together. More than half of the colonists had been killed or taken away during the initial attack and the remaining group no longer had the carefully-designed balance that it had started out with. The sooner he could get these people off the planet and hand them over, the better.
UNS Ares
Mars Orbit
March 12th, 2028
“Looks like she’s coming straight for us and I’m reading a full charge on her main armament.” Wes leaned over in his seat to call down into the CIC. “They don’t seem to see the shuttles as a threat.”
The three shuttles, approaching from both flanks as well as the dorsal surface of the enemy, were almost there. An orange glow showed at their bows as they began to push against the shield. Mike drew a zoom window around the bow of one of the shuttles and watched intently. “No penetration yet and the fleet is almost too close,” he announced.
“Powering up to thirty percent.” The young operator at shuttle control sounded far too dispassionate about the situation. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives depended on the next few minutes and, given the enemy’s current course, the Ares would be the first victim of failure.
How do you teach that? Mike wondered. How do you train someone to disassociate himself from the threat of imminent death? He leaned forward, an ancient reflex that made the image in front of him no clearer. “Wes, do you see that?” he asked in a low voice, as though speaking aloud would somehow reverse what was happening.
“The shuttles are pushing through,” Wes answered in the same quiet voice. “The shuttles are pushing through,” he called down into the CIC, breaking the spell, but the shuttles still continued in their progress through the shield. The orange glow closed behind the first one and then faded to nothing.
“Nothing happened,” Mike exclaimed in shock.
Wes shook his head as he stared at his screen. “As long as one of the shuttles is still passing through the shield, we have an open link with all three.” He rotated his view, picking up a new angle from the Arjuna’s sensor feed. “The last one is almost there, so we…”
His sentence never reached completion. As the shield closed around the stern of the last shuttle, the signal from the Ares was lost. No longer receiving the command to hold their firing circuits open, the five W87 thermonuclear warheads in each shuttle fired their detonators, each touching off a 475-kiloton explosion. It was a brutally elegant solution, using the shield to initiate the blasts as well as contain it against the enemy hull.
Mike watched in fascinated horror as more than seven megatons of explosive power completely obscured any view of the ship within the wedge of destruction. Within a few heartbeats, the blast was set free and expanded quickly towards them. Though he knew they had ample protection from radiation due to the ship’s exterior carbon hydrogen matrix, Mike flinched as the shock wave rushed towards him.
Everyone lurched forward in their seat as the wave struck. Below, an unfortunate crewman drifted into view and crashed into the back of the navigator’s seat. The screens faded to a fine gray static. The ship shuddered as the shock wave moved past and then it grew still. The screens slowly flickered back to life.
At first, Mike thought the sensors were still down but he could make out the night-side curve of the planet on the right edge of the screen. “There’s nothing left,” he said, stunned. “Not even debris.”
“They rely more on their shields,” Wes said quietly. “Remember the damage they took when they fired earlier; their hulls are just there to hold the atmosphere in and keep the crew from falling out.” He nodded at the screen. “Their shields are strong, too,” he shook his head. “They held in seven megatons right up until the shield generator was turned to vapor.”
“The fleet has reported in, sir,” the operations officer announced. “No serious damage from the nukes. All report ready for phase two.”
“Very well,” Towers acknowledged with relief. “Gentlemen,” he announced to the room in general, “we have achieved orbital superiority.” The tension finally broke as the bridge crew cheered themselves hoarse.
Wes slapped Mike on the back. “Looks like we might just get home in one piece after all!”
“My mortgage company will be so glad to hear it,” Mike answered with a grin.
Tower’s voice reminded them that they still had work to do. “Ops, line ‘em up. McCutcheon, start passing out ground targets.”
The colonel came up into the hole. “Mike, release the ORBAT file for team access.” When it was updated, he turned to Sgt Davis. ”Wes, run the target allocation macro and send it out.” The targets had been identified during the flight to Mars. Combat installations such as troop barracks, armored vehicle parks and aircraft landing zones were considered priority targets. The macro would assess the combat capabilities of the fleet from the ORBAT file and assign a list of targets to each remaining ship.
“Macro is on its way.” Wes leaned back in his seat as he watched the planet come into view on his screen. “How many crew do you figure were on that thing?”
“It probably had as many people aboard as this ship does,” McCutcheon answered firmly. “And don’t ever lose sight of that, Wes. They were waiting for a chance to use that rail gun on us and your idea saved a lot of our people, myself included.”
“Operations,” Towers called across the CIC. “Start the recall. I want every available pair of boots brought back from the captured ships and organized for planetary deployment. I want them ready to fight before the enemy realizes we own the sky.”
The rumble of mixed gunfire began anew. It seemed less urgent to Mike, now that there was no danger of incoming rounds. The heavy artillery was silent. Only the 105mm guns and the 30mm Vulcans had the specially coated ‘carbon carbon’ tungsten ammunition. A carbon-fiber-reinforced carbon shell coated each round, giving it the ability to survive the heat of its high-speed passage through the atmosphere. Each round took over four minutes to reach the target but struck with incredible force.
Mike opened a new set of menus on his screen. The landing sites had already been selected by operations officers based on a terrain analysis that Mike had prepared. Now, he had to fine-tune that analysis to include the waypoints that the infantry would use when they hit the ground. Without those waypoints, the infantry would choose their own path and, though they would be able to make progress on foot, their small, wheeled logistical vehicles might not be able to follow.
They could easily get bogged down in the wrong soil type or simply not have enough room between the boulders of the rocky terrain. Without those vehicles, it would be extremely difficult to resupply the troops or evacuate their wounded and the advance, coordinated to employ speed and aggression, would grind to a halt. It was important to ensure the various avenues of approach allowed for logistical support and that was Mike’s main reason for being on this ship.