For Honor We Stand (18 page)

“Proceed.”

“Your ship and the other moored ships . . . they are on internal power, not on power supplied from the mooring facility, aren’t they?”

“That is correct.”

“What’s the power source?”

“The same as on your vessels, standard auxiliary nuclear power units.  They all have G.E.-Westinghouse compact, pressurized, water cooled fission reactors, built on license by our naval reactor fabrication plant on Rashid V A.  I believe that every human power uses the old Rickover-type fission units to provide auxiliary power when the fusion reactors are offline.” 

“Will the Rickovers run inertial guidance, attitude control, maneuvering thrusters, and navigation scanners?”

“Certainly.  We like to be able to move the ships around the yard, get them in and out of repair hangars, and so on without having to start the main reactor.  But, they can creep about at twenty or thirty meters a second at most.”

“That’s all we’ll need.  Can they fire missiles?”

“No.  As on your ships, the missiles are targeted using the main sensor array, which requires more power than the fission power plant can provide.  Further, the missile tubes’ acceleration coils are not configured to receive power from the Rickover.”

“What about fire control?

“Fire control runs off of the ship’s main power grid which is tied to the Rickover, so one can operate the console, but it is useless without the sensor array to generate the data to compute a firing solution.”

“Unless it receives the data from some other source,” Max said to himself as much as to the Admiral.  “OK.  Can power be routed to the launch coils from the main grid?  Just enough to get the missiles out of their tubes?”

“What good would that do?  They would never get past the Krag point defense batteries without the acceleration from the coils.”

“Don’t worry about that for now.  Sir.  Can the power be rerouted?”

“Let me ask one of my engineers.”  There was a brief discussion in the background.  “Affirmative.  I am informed that it is a simple matter of operating a manual power shunt.”

“One more question.  Your fleet’s in a Clarke orbit.  Are they over the deuterium separation plant?”

“As a matter of fact, they are.”

“Then you might want to warn the people in the plant to get to their radiation shelters.  In about four and a half hours, things are going to get a little hot.”

***

It had been a busy four hours, but everything that could be done had been done and the pieces were in place.  As usual, Max made sure that everyone on board had the opportunity to eat before going into combat.  This included the Captain himself, who ate two of the ham sandwiches in his cooler, sandwiches which were already enshrined in the
Cumberland
’s
developing oral tradition as the “exploding” ham sandwiches.  The doctor had left CIC to be certain that the Casualty Station was ready to receive battle casualties, if any.  As a result, he had been absent when the plan for the coming battle had been formulated.  Upon his return to the Commodore’s Station, he found himself surrounded by people who refused to enlighten him as to what was in store. 

“Tactical data link with all vessels is stable.  Refresh rate is six cycles per second, and every ship in the provisional task force has confirmed that it is receiving and compiling data from every other ship.”  Chin announced. 

Max looked around the CIC.  No surprises.  Every man at his station, doing his job.  Maybe a bit nervously, but doing it nonetheless.  And, maybe not with the confident professionalism and calm proficiency that Max had become used to on the
Emeka Moro
and some of the other taut ships on which he had served, but head and shoulders above the brow-beaten, drug-addicted, down-hearted group of misfits who had greeted him when his feet had first touched the
Cumberland’s
deck two months ago almost to the day.  Admiral Hornmeyer was right when he said that these men have come a long way.  And, if they could just live through the next hour or two, Max was resolved to take them even further.

“All right, people,” Max announced to the CIC at large, “we’re the relief pitcher.  We spend most of the game in the dugout but, come the bottom of the seventh, the manager puts us in and it’s up to us to save the game.”  Baseball wasn’t popular on every world in the Union, but it was well known enough and had contributed so many expressions to the language that his people would get the analogy.  “Until then, let’s stay alert and pay attention to what all the players are doing.  We just might learn something.”

“As expected, attacking force is forming up into its own version of a Daggett Dagger,” Bartoli fulfilled his obligations as Tactical Officer by, in this case, making a formal announcement of what the youngest hatch hanger could deduce from a glance at the 3D tactical projection.  “Enemy formation consists of twenty-five ships, positively identified as
Dervish
Class Krag Destroyers.  Now at bearing two-two-five mark one-two-seven.  Heading is one-three-seven mark two-three-five.  Continuing to close at point-six-five c.  First Rashidian fighter squadron has just gone buster.” 

The doctor turned to Max.  “Buster?”

“More ‘impenetrable pilot jargon,’ doctor.  It means that the fighters have kicked in their afterfusers.  They’re injecting highly compressed pure deuterium into the densest part of the plasma stream in their thruster nozzles.  That initiates a second-stage inertially-confined fusion reaction, increasing thrust by about fifty percent but cutting their fuel economy roughly in half.  It’s analogous to going on afterburners in an old air breathing jet.”

Every man in CIC, and many men elsewhere in the
Cumberland
whose duties did not preclude them from doing so, was watching the events on a tactical repeater and could see what was happening.  It was like watching another person playing a TriDeo game while knowing your own life might depend on the outcome. 

The first Rashidian fighter squadron, consisting of 12 SF-89 Qibli fighters, bore down on the Destroyers which, in turn, made no effort to evade or expend precious ordinance on anything but their primary objective—the Rashidian capital ships moored helplessly in orbit around Rashid V B.  Realizing that they would not be fired upon, the Qibli pilots held their fire until they reached the optimum range for their anti-ship missiles, designated only by the unexciting model number C-57D.  Once they reached that point in space, a distance of 8,500 kilometers from their targets, each fighter fired all six of its missiles.  In an effort to overwhelm the Krag point defense systems with their somewhat less than state of the art missiles, the Rashidians theorized that an effective tactic might be for each two fighter element to fire all twelve of its missiles at a single Destroyer. 

So they did.  The twelve fighters selected the foremost six enemy Destroyers, paired up against them, closed to optimum missile range, and fired.  In three cases, the excellent Krag point defense and countermeasures systems engaged the Rashidian missiles and defeated them.  In two others, a single missile got through and in another, two reached their mutual target.  Each missile carried a 250 kiloton thermonuclear warhead which made quick work of the three unlucky
Dervishes
, swallowing them whole in newborn miniature suns of fiery destruction. 

Everyone in CIC knew what would happen next.  Everyone was wrong.  The first to catch on was Max, whose finely tuned tactical sense somehow told him the exact point at which the fighters should veer off to return to their carrier.  When they reached that point and continued to accelerate toward the Krag Destroyers, forward deflectors on maximum and drives firewalled, he heard himself say, “Oh, God.” 

Wortham-Biggs nodded grimly, the only man not surprised.  He spoke quietly.  “These men know what is at stake, Captain.  Their fleet, their Navy, their homes, their families, their whole world.  And all mankind besides.  I ask you, would you do anything different?”  He met the eyes of Max, DeCosta, Kasparov, Bartoli, Levy, and LeBlanc and saw his answer there.  “I thought not.  My brother issued a message to the fleet immediately before we left.  He said that Rashid did not join the war just to fight alongside our brothers.  We joined the war to turn the tide.  And, not only that, but that we were
going
to turn the tide.  At the Battle of Rashid V B.  These men are resolved to do that.  At all costs.  This is the day.  This is the hour.  Mankind’s victory over the Krag begins now.”

Discerning the fighters’ unexpected intentions, the Destroyers began firing their pulse cannons.  The fighters evaded.  They opened up their formation to give each other room and to reduce the likelihood that the destruction of one craft would cause damage to another, and then began weaving, dodging, twisting, sliding, jinking in three dimensions as unpredictably as possible to elude the rapid, computer-directed fire.  The Krag pulse cannons quickly eliminated three of the fighters, whose pilots were ever so slightly less skilled and inventive at evasive maneuvers than their fellows.  Five more succumbed to pulse cannon fire as the range closed, making hits easier to score.  Another was destroyed by a Destroyer’s point defense batteries, obliterated by a weapon that normally operated as an anti-missile missile.  The warhead was not, of itself, powerful enough to destroy the tough little fighter, but at a relative closing velocity of more than 90% of the speed of light, the impact between missile and fighter converted both into a cloud of glowing vapor and molten bits of metal, the eternal laws of kinetic energy rendering the missile’s tiny warhead irrelevant.

Three fighters, however, eluded destruction by the Krag defenses.  They smashed through the Destroyers’ deflectors like Howitzer shells through plywood, their impact on the hulls of their targets shattering the fighters and nearly obliterating the Destroyers as an almost incalculable amount of kinetic energy transferred from one body to the other or was converted into heat and radiation.  The fusion plasma that had been contained in the Krag reactors finished the job, leaving behind scarcely a particle of solid matter, consuming the wreckage in spectacular secondary explosions that blossomed in the hearts of, and then overwhelmed, the first set of fireballs.

Chief Tanaka, after Chief Wendt the most senior enlisted man on the ship and a man who had seen more than his share of battles, said in a voice just loud enough to be heard throughout CIC, “Farewell my brothers.”

Several other men, Max included, almost reflexively said, “Amen.”

Now it was the turn of the second squadron.  The first squadron had approached the Destroyers roughly 45 degrees away from head on.  The second came at the enemy from dead ahead, afterfusers engaged, their drives maxed, as the enemy was now aware that no man had any concern for fuel consumption or shortening the service life of his craft’s engines.  Before they got inside the range of the Krag pulse cannon, they spread out and began evasive maneuvers.

Then, as did the first group, they launched their full load of missiles when they reached optimum range from their targets.  Unlike the first group, however, the fighters did not launch in pairs.  The fighters attacked only six of the destroyers, but in this effort each fighter launched one of its six missiles at each of the target Destroyers.  In that way, each Destroyer was targeted not just by twelve missiles, but by twelve missiles coming in from six different attack vectors, one from each fighter.  As the Rashidian weapons lacked the Cooperative Interactive Logic Mode of the more advanced Union missiles, this was the best tactic for creating the greatest challenge for the Krag defenses.  And, in comparison to the methodology employed in the first attack, it was successful.  Four of the Destroyers targeted in this way met swift thermonuclear ends, brief lightning flashes of death in the endless night. 

Like their late comrades, the pilots of the second squadron did not turn aside after firing but continued to bore in, weaving and dodging to evade and confuse the Krag pulse cannon fire, but otherwise on an unwavering course.  Unlike their comrades, however, who had lined up with each fighter aiming for a different Destroyer, these fighters lined up on attack vectors that demonstrated that each Destroyer under attack was being attacked by two fighters, hoping to divide the Destroyer’s defensive fire and point defense systems between them and increase the likelihood of one craft getting through.  The tactic initially made no difference, as the fighters were still far enough away to be engaged by the pulse cannons of almost the entire Destroyer formation, ships that were under attack and ships that were not being attacked, alike.  Direct hits quickly blew two of the twelve fighters to flaming atoms. 

But, as the range closed and the fighters moved out of the firing arcs of the ships that were not being engaged, the fighters’ choice of attack pattern started to pay off as each Destroyer was faced with the difficult choice of focusing its fire on one of the fighters and ignoring the other, or of halving its effective firepower by dividing its attention between the two.  Because the defensive fire was computer-directed, each ship made the same decision, the statistically sensible but counter-intuitive election to focus its fire on one of the two ships and ignore the other unless and until the first was destroyed.  In this way, two more fighters quickly met their end, the defiant light of their pilots’ courage and resolve snuffed out in an instant.

Eight remained.  And, as a result of the inexorable Darwinism of war, these eight were the smartest, the quickest, and the most skillful of the lot.  Not surprisingly, the eight survivors included their squadron leader, a man whose Arabic nickname translated into Standard as “the Mirage.”  In combat exercises, just as an opponent would get him in his sights or get a missile lock, the elusive Mirage would somehow evade, slip out of sight, and manage to reappear on his attacker’s tail.  The Mirage had more techniques (his opponents called them dirty tricks) for confusing and misdirecting his opponent than any three other squadron commanders combined and, with each new exercise, it seemed he had at least one new one that no one had ever seen before.  Now, he pulled up his fighter’s Tactical Direction Display, an interface that allowed him to give non-verbal instructions to the other fighters under his command, and tapped the key that sent a pre-loaded command.