* * *
Although Terey’s command managed to blunt Asotos’ strike force, his second and third waves of heavies as well as several squadrons of fighters dealt a blow to the MueoPoros Star System fleets. And Asotos’ ships were only one small part of a much larger attack expedition.
Lieutenant Commander Saleuo’s StarBall One, comprised of one hundred ninety-two fighters and sixty-eight heavies drawn from the Sophia and its accompanying taskforce, joined up with another four hundred twenty-nine fighters and one hundred sixteen heavies from the remainder of the First Fleet to strike at two enemy armadas off to Q-north and west.
To the south and west, another armada approached. Ships from the Fourth Fleet intercepted them, engaging in a ship o’line firefight, space style. Besides Nazareth’s and Tizkertinah’s battle groups, it was the only action on this day where big ships slugged it out against each other. Such engagements are often remembered most romantically - big guns against big guns - but a personal account written by then Midshipman RaniEleeo paints a much more realistic picture.
(Author’s note: The author has inserted this account to maintain the timeline of events as they took place.
Midshipman RaniEleeo was a runner aboard the imperial battle cruiser, Ennolia, the heaviest class of non-carrier battleship used by the Children’s Empire in the King’s War. It was the flagship for Taskforce Eight, Fourth Fleet, assigned to the carrier, ThrombolActron. As a runner, Midshipman Rani had opportunity to witness the fighting from several locations aboard the Ennolia. Thus, her account is of great value. It is presented here, in part.)
– “We were fourth in line, behind the frigate, CjaDiec, in a classic horseshoe formation, the ThrombolActron in the center. Our captain had drawn us up close, to within three leagues of the carrier, leaving us little maneuvering space. This also limited the enemy’s ability to get past our flank and attack the carrier. The cutters and barquentines were in the vanguard, dropping back toward us as the fleet drifted to starboard to engage the enemy.
“At one hundred leagues from the enemy fleet, spikers began falling on us. ‘Spikers’ was a nickname for a small, long-range missile designed to disable energy shields and disrupt low frequency communication by the use of high electron shrapnel bursts. This barrage continued until we reached some thirty leagues distance – a long time, considering our slow, ponderous speed.
“Although the taskforce received little damage from these missiles, it was still quite nerve-racking because of the screeching sound they made when exploding and noticeable shudder of the hull from their concussion. You also had to worry about larger missiles being hidden in a spiker storm. They are very hard to detect when thousands of spikers are creating such a cosmic disturbance.
“About this time, my commanding officer ordered me to go amidships to do a damage control check. The captain was a stickler for continual visual reports. My assignment was no easy task. When our ship was at general quarters, the elevators did not work, each deck being mechanically sealed from the next. Also, when the yellow lights were on, all automatic hatches were closed leaving only the manually operated emergency hatches.
“After struggling aft to the damage control room, I was sent to reconnoiter the outer portside bulkheads. This took me along the exterior hull of the ship, down into the bellows and up to the mid-gun emplacements. A considerable part of my job was to inspect the condition between the outer and inner hull, a most dangerous and lonely place during combat.
“The center hull of my ship was over six hundred long cubits in length, with three cylinder shaped outriders, each over one hundred forty long cubits. The center hull had seven decks at its high point. To inspect my assigned area under battle conditions, considering the countless hatches, cramped passageways, and narrow ladders, took twenty minutes. Another runner was assigned to my same area, but following my route from the opposite direction.
“Being a runner during a firefight was the most terrifying assignment I ever had. Most of the time I was alone and often in the dark, feeling my way along some corridor. High power energy blasts - very common - often knocked out lighting and signal communications to various parts of the ship - the reason for the runners.
“And then there was the ever-present danger of being injured or killed by an outer hull concussion blast. Ennolia had several double bulkheads, having hatches in each bulkhead. Many hatches were built with tiny portals, permitting a person to make a visible examination of the next chamber before opening the hatch. On more than one occasion, I barely missed death when the chamber ahead or behind me took a concussive hit.
“One time, I closed the hatch and it had just automatically locked when a missile exploded off the hull. Our energy field contained the hit but, being flexible as all energy fields are, the outer hull popped in and back out about a handbreadth, sending thousands of deadly metal shards across the passageway. The concussion alone could kill. Before combat was finished that day, I was bleeding from my nose, ears, and eyes from less pronounced hits, and that was with my emergency fire suit.
“At the height of the battle - which lasted better than two hours - we were being hit so often the ship was in a continuous state of pitch and yaw. Shudders ran through the hull, sounding like a mother wailing her dead. The only way I could continue to carry out my assigned tasks was remembering that no place was really safe in a fight like this.
“Near the beginning of my third run, I came down an emergency ladder from the fourth deck level into a large maintenance locker. The room was lit up by only flashing red emergency lights, but I could see that fire or extreme heat had engulfed the place. What I first thought to be some kind of dark paint covered the floor and walls. Finding the room empty except for odd piles of litter, and unable to identify any immediate threat to the ship, I stumbled my way into an adjacent chamber through a hatch that went down to the next level and along a narrow corridor leading back to the aft torpedo room.
“Upon reaching the torpedo room, I was warned not to go up to the next level. A fiery explosion in a maintenance locker had killed an entire work crew, the blast causing a dangerous ammonia leak. They said no one had dared to go into the area since, fearing the caustic gasses. I dumbly nodded my head, thanking them for the warning. After checking their damage status, I hurried out of the torpedo room, running along the corridor until coming to a small drop-sink. There I promptly puked my innards out thinking about the locker.
- “As the battle continued, more areas of the ship became untenable. Fissures, holes, and seam ruptures were taxing the air pressure in some places, forcing the ventilation systems to be shut down here and there. It was the runner’s job to identify these locations, marking them as a warning.
“This meant that I often had to test a chamber for leaks. Although our suits were able to protect us, with all the crawling around and through places we did, there was always the chance that our suits could also rupture. One small leak in a vacuum-filled chamber often killed by fogging the brain through oxygen starvation.
- “By now, there were dozens of injured strewn along the corridors and in the galleries and mess halls. There were often no medics in these areas because the ship was sealed off. Many times the wounded were left to fend for themselves because the depleted crews were fully needed at their stations. I saw many of those with minor injuries tending to the needs of the more seriously wounded. This may sound cruel and careless to some, but under those conditions we had no choice.
“As bad as it was to see all the suffering and dying, it became almost impossible for me to leave a crowded hallway and enter an empty part of the ship. Singing songs or talking to a pretend companion helped a little. At times, I found myself crawling along from one bulkhead to another, sobbing, too afraid to stand.
- “The enemy also hit us with scorchers. These were armor-piercing missiles laden with highly flammable jelly-like chemicals and huge canisters of oxygen. The objective was to breach the hull o
f the ship with the armor-piercing warhead, releasing the flaming agent and then the oxygen to feed the fire. My ship was struck once with a scorcher. It incinerated an entire deck between the end and center bulkheads, two levels below me. I have no idea how many people were there, but no one survived. The heat was so intense, I burned my hands opening a bulkhead door to escape one of the outer hull chambers, and I was two levels up from the blaze.
- “I was relieved of my duty at nineteen hundred hours, about four hours after the battle began, and was too exhausted to remove my fire suit, which by now was little more than tatters and shreds. Crawling into a corner of the damage control room, I fell into such a deep sleep, twice medic crews attempted to remove me thinking I was possibly dead.
“Some twelve hours later I was waked by a flag officer telling me to report to sickbay. There I had my wounds tended to and was given a bite to eat and received some sedatives for my nerves. Despite this, I went into the shakes and cried uncontrollably for three days.
- “By the standards of the day, this battle had been successful in that it forced the enemy to abandon its attack on MueoPoros. But, oh, at what a price! My ship, the Ennolia, suffered extensive damage, with thirty-one killed and one hundred forty-seven wounded. This was out of a crew of sixteen-hundred. And we fared better than many.
“The frigate, CjaDiec, took losses of fifty percent, with over one hundred killed in action. Several of the smaller ships were destroyed, with major loss of life. Twenty-five percent of all fighters and sixty percent of the heavies never returned to their mother ships. All together, our task force of twenty-two ships lost seven hundred ninety-two killed and over four thousand wounded, a full twenty-five percent of people engaged in this battle.”
RaniEleeo continued to serve aboard the Ennolia throughout the King’s War, eventually becoming senior deck officer for damage control. The Ennolia remained a front-line fighting ship for well into the first decade of the war, eventually being relegated to convoy escort, and when refitted during the second half of the war, was converted into a heavily armed troop ship.
With the invention of the Planetee bullet, energy defense shields could no longer be counted on to protect warships. New warships - the first were the Wolkker Class -were designed with hulls made from a molecular composite derived from polymers and titanium, these hulls necessitating being made from sixteen to twenty-eight inches thick in order to protect against the new offensive weapons.
New fighting ships became much smaller and their conventional shapes redesigned from the bulbous cylinder to squat and angular. Older ships were sometimes plated, having new skins put over their hulls. It was an expensive and time-consuming job reserved for more important ships like the carriers. The major part of the older Navy vessels like the Ennolia were not upgraded, eventually relegating them to second line defense and escort.
By the time the war ended, Garlock and his inventive team had developed a method of construction where the ship’s entire infrastructure was grown, test tube-style, into its respective shape. This became the standard practice for shipbuilding, and is still the standard used today. Because of the ease of repair - ‘re-growth’ or ‘self healing’ as some like to call it - and upgradeability, many of those first ships, now in converted form, are still being used to this day.
I inserted the above information to explain the demise of ship o’line combat. Fighters dominated the contest after the advent of the Planetee. The day of the big torpedo or missile was ended. A ship the size of a cutter could now pack enough of a punch to knock out the biggest warship. With the introduction of the Baby Pearl - a test tube fighter - production exploded. Near the end of the war, commanders would wield fighter squadrons like cavalry, advancing hundreds at a time into battle.
Senior Deck Officer Rani concludes with the long-term effects of her combat experiences aboard the Ennolia. (Note: Rani’s personal accounts of life aboard the Ennolia were first printed some seven millennia after the war. The following information, she recently provided me for this book.)
“This universe has greatly changed since my stint aboard the Ennolia. My companions have all returned to me from the Field of the Minds and the world has rested in peace from war for these hundred millennia. My children of many generations enjoy a sweet innocence of life that I no longer can remember. Did the war change me? Have I gotten over its ill effects?
“I forget the number of centuries that nightmares haunted me or crying spells would overcome me for no reason. For the longest time, I suffered fits of melancholy and depression. Happily, I can say that that period in my life is far behind me, but I do still vividly recall my experiences during the war.
“I was a seasoned veteran before the King’s War. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of the battles that just presented themselves after I left the Ennolia, but I think not. A battlefield, where death and destruction surrounds you, is soon left behind with only your memories of the conflict. Eventually, trees and grasses even change the landscape. Aboard a ship there is no such escape.
“A room filled with unspeakable carnage may be cleaned and repainted, but it still remains as an everyday reminder of what happened there. You have to walk decks that ran red with blood, eat at tables upon which the dying had been placed. Everywhere you go aboard the ship, you find reminders of each terrible conflict - a dent in the wall, a torn piece of carpet. Nowhere can you escape the reminders except when you close your eyes in the solitude of your cabin.
“Ah, but there is another curse... To this day, confined spaces are uncomfortable and empty rooms disquieting. I seek solitude for my mind’s sake, but my heart cries out in dread when I’m alone. So I have learned to find seclusion in a crowd. You can often see me sitting quietly while all around me are throngs of people. I satisfy my heart, for it hears and sees the others while my mind tunes the world out and hears only its own inner thoughts.
“Did the war change me? Yes, but I feel it has been for the better. I think about life more, about little things, about friends and lovers. The smell of a campfire on a summer day floods my heart with a joy the likes of which I never felt before the war. Something as small as a gentle touch I fondly savor, realizing just how precious and fleeting it is. My life is so much more focused now and I delight in each day as being something special.
“Do I regret my experiences? Does a mother regret the birth of a child? I say not, for the pains I suffered in the war are like those I have suffered in childbirth. Life is precious and when one has sacrificed something to attain that life, its preciousness is better understood and appreciated. As I would not exchange my children to forget my labor pains, I would never wish to surrender my memories of the war for the innocence of life.
“I am a better, wiser, kinder person today because, I believe, of the things I witnessed and suffered. One day I will forget all the pain the war delivered upon me, but I hope and pray it is not at the expense of who it has helped me become. Better to suffer forever the evils of the war than to forget its gifts.
“Let me sum up my feelings about my experiences of the war: I wept the day the Ennolia was decommissioned and sent to the salvage yard. Each year, on the anniversary of that event, my heart remembers and tears come. I feel like part of my soul was taken from me when the Ennolia was broken up for scrap.”)