Jethro: First to Fight (75 page)

“What?” they demanded in unison when the
rating froze. “Spit it out Jersey!”

“Sir, we received a lot of data from
flag, could it have been in there? It blew through my firewall like it wasn't
there.”

“Crap. Find out. Do we have external
communications?”

“No sir. We might be able to rig a
whisker laser,” the rating said thoughtfully.

“Get on that. Until then,” the XO said
turning in place. “Drop the network into local station only. Take the central
net offline. Ops go through the stations one by one. I want physical breaks
between the damn network and your station if necessary! Get on that.”

“XO?” The Captain asked.

“Divide and conquer sir. We're screwed
either way, but at least this way we might get the damn virus out of some of
the sub systems. Work from system to system to clean it out.”

“Frack! That'll take forever!” the
Captain snarled, fist clenched.

“It'll take as long as it takes sir,”
the ops officer said. He turned to the JTO. “Get a runner to the weapons
mounts. Tell them to sever the link to the computer network and then clean
their systems. Then have them go to local control.”

“Sir, they could fire on friendlies,”
the JTO said hesitantly.

“Sucks to be on the receiving end. Get a
radio from someone. Security,” the XO said, turning to the remaining security
rating. “Get some radio's from the boson and hand them out to people. We'll
form a radio network. Verbal only. Pass orders that way,” he said. He rubbed at
his implant.

“Going to jack in?” the Captain asked.
Only a handful of officers and ratings had implants.

“Not if I can help it sir,” the XO
replied. “Whatever's tearing our network up could turn my implants and my head
into mush.”

“Enemy action?” the Captain asked
softly, leaning closer.

“He said from the Flag. Last time I
checked, flag was in the vicinity of the station. It's possible skipper.”

“Someone find out. Communications, lay a
whisker laser on the Flag. I don't care if you have to go out a lock to do it.
And someone get me an engineering feed. Tell Roberts I want a verbal update of
systems and progress on fighting this damn virus every ten minutes.”

“We're fighting blind,” the XO said.

“I wonder if it's just us, or the whole
fleet?” the Captain muttered.

...*...*...*...*...

War raged on three fronts, cyber war,
the coming naval battle, and soon, the Marine battle.

The Horathians however began to regain
their balance and fought back. Some fought back with desperation, they had
nowhere to go, it was fight or die. As fights raged in cyberspace the
Horathians cut back on broadband channels and only communicated with whisker
lasers between ships. They took a scorched earth approach to their own computer
networks, anything compromised was either shut down or beaten to death and
replaced with hardware from stores. But that took time.

Clio used her updated intel to fashion a
new attack. She hated viruses, but didn't mind using them when she wasn't on
the receiving end. She updated her template with the latest passwords they had
stolen, along with headers and other information. When she was ready she
launched a second wave of worms, but frowned when she didn't get a return
notice. She tried again, but there just wasn't anything there. “We're calling,
but no one's home it seems.”

“I think they cut us off.”

“Talk about cutting off their nose to
spite their faces,” Urania said.

“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” Clio
said, sounding disappointed and a bit put out. Definitely pouty. If she had had
a lower lip it would have been jutting out quite a bit.

“That's our bit for the war effort,”
Thalia replied. “I'm going to go see what other mischief we can get into, then
see if the Stewards or Averies or Templeton need my help.”

...*...*...*...*...

“Sir, we seriously need to rethink this
situation. It might be wise to get out of here, we're a sitting duck and the
fleet is no longer prepared to receive the enemy,” Captain Maul said, trying to
keep his temper with his stubborn boss.

“No.”

“Sir, if we get out of position, we can
reform and...”

“I said no,” the admiral said mildly,
still holding his back to the Captain. He stared at the plot, as if that would
give him salvation. The ship had finally lit off her drive, she was coming in
from the direction of the planet. They were fairly sure the ship was going to
use the planet as a brake, maneuver around it and then hammer the fleet.

But that was only one possibility, the
tactical officer had suggested that the ship could do the slingshot maneuver to
pick up speed and a new heading, cut through their force, hit targets of
opportunity, and then barrel right through and out the other side. Then cloak,
maneuver, and come back in from a different angle.

“No, we make our stand here. If we
maneuver she'll just adjust her heading. We've got the station on one flank,
she can't come in on that side. The moon is on the other. She's got to come on
the two axis, the Y or the Z. We'll be ready for either.”

“Very well sir,” the Captain sighed. He
frowned. At least he'd gotten his objections on the record for the bridge
recorders.

“Stick to the plan,” Lieutenant JG
Martha Huert said. She nervously checked her intervals. “Close it up Sticks, I
don't want you to get lost in the outer dark.” It had been a long nerve
wracking ride in, but it was about to pay off. All the thoughts of wanting to
stretch, take a shower, get out of the dirty diaper and stinky clothes... all
that crap was minor now. Showtime.

Their target was a destroyer, the light
tin can, an Arborth class. They were in stealth, coming in opposite the planet
and the incoming Firefly. It was beautiful, they were coming in right up the
enemy's six and they didn't even know it.

“Thanks boss, didn't know you cared,”
The Veraxin Ensign retorted, moving his cobra fighter in closer. “I feel all
bloated.”

“Here that gang? Sticks is preggers,”
Joker quipped over the whisker lasers.

“Not for long, he'll be giving birth
soon enough,” Martha “Hurt locker” Huert replied, checking her own torps. She
couldn't wait to unload them, they slowed her craft down. Bloated indeed, she
thought. They had something special, courtesy of admiral Irons. Each Cobra was
sporting a pair of mark 2013 medium torpedoes, the largest and heaviest torps
their general purpose fighters could carry.

Other medium torpedoes had a fusion
warhead, usually in the forty kiloton range. Admiral Irons had personally redesigned
the torpedo however. One of the things torpedoes always suffered from was
creep, everyone was trying to stuff more gear into each shell while keeping the
weight and balance the same. Which was a problem, for something to go in,
usually something else, something most likely critical had to come out.

Generations of torpedoes had suffered
from that, many had lost penaids or decoys, one generation had suffered by
loosing it's long range sensors and was damn near myopic until someone had
gotten wise and ended their production.

Fusion warheads were generally 'clean'
warheads, you could direct the energy with force emitters for a brief period of
time, directing what would normally be a spherical boom into a direction. A
general direction at least, turning it into a blowtorch.

But they lacked enough excessive
neutrons to kick up an electromagnetic pulse. Only if the bomb's electrons hit
the hull of a ship did an EMP go off, and that was usually due to the
interaction with the electrons stripping apart the metals and kicking off a
chain reaction of neutron release.

The first twenty five generations of
torpedoes had used fission warheads until some engineer had created an EMP
generator. Then they had moved on to fusion warheads.

What the admiral had done was turn back
the clock, he'd stuffed in a one megaton fission bomb into the great gaping
hole the fusion warhead had left behind, then with no need of the EMP
generators, he'd lovingly used the space to toss in a couple of bow force
emitters and even improved the sensor and AI computer to boot.

The completed torpedo wasn't pretty, but
she was cheaper and easier to make than the mark 2012 omega, or the mark 2011.

She was a bastard child, a fat slightly
flattened missile with three emitters on her nose, but she would do the job of
a heavy torpedo... hopefully.

...*...*...*...*...

“Fighters coming in on our six o'clock!
Four fighters coming in!” the voice from the CIC reported.

“Four? Just four?” Admiral Cartwright
demanded. “That's it?”

“Targets?” the Captain asked, also
looking up. He was tense. Four fighters could take out an equal number of
gunships or other craft if they got lucky. And he noted, the ships were already
maneuvering to face the new threat. He frowned. Firefly was still a half hour
out.

“Targets are... Viper and Cutlass sir!”

“Get on them!” the admiral snarled.
“We'll squash them like bugs! Firefly finally made a mistake!”

...*...*...*...*...

“What the hell are they playing at?
They're fighters, they can't think they can hurt us?” the tactical officer
demanded, waving a hand to the fighters. “It's got to be some sort of trick!”
he said.

“If it's a trick they're either brave or
suicidal to attempt it,” Captain Virilin of HMSS Viper said, scowling blackly.
“Could they be remotes? Are they planning on a kamikaze run?” he demanded.

“I don't know sir,” the tactical offer
said, clearly flabbergasted.

“Well, figure it out!” Virlin demanded.
“Helm, get our ass around, turn our flank on them. Let's see how they like a
wall full of point defense lasers!”

...*...*...*...*...

“Getting near release point,” Hurt
locker reported, checking her lidar. She was nearing the one million kilometer
release point. “Sticks you ready?” she called, not bothering to glance to her
left. She could see him just fine through her implant feeds.

“All green lady, let's bring on the
hurt,” he replied eagerly.

“I intend to,” Martha replied, eyes
narrowing as she focused on her implants. The destroyer grew and grew, but she
ignored the incoming fire. Chaff missiles spat from their fighters, they
exploded in a fine dust of aluminum and gas ahead of them. The chaff cloud
served several purposes, it blinded the enemy lidar and radar, and it defused
their point defense lasers. Of course it did the same to the Cobra's as well,
so after a moment of enjoying the cover they jinked up a bit to pass it by
before the process started over again.

They kept jinking, a moving target was a
live
target after all. Movement was life in this deadly game of David
and Goliath.

The destroyer was still going wide as
the ship picked up on their threat and tried to turn, throwing off their aim.
The ship was fighting stupid, turning to expose it's flank to the fighters.
Sure it brought more guns to bear on them, but it gave them a bigger target and
threw off the chaser guns that had been lining them up.

Her thumb caressed the release toggle on
her flight stick. She frowned as the tone turned from a low pitch to a high and
her HUD went green. She pulled the trigger twice. “Cobra four, fox one, fox
one!” she said, indicating two birds in space. She immediately pulled back on
the stick, climbing. “I'm high and dry!” she said, executing the second step in
the attack.

Her fighter kicked into full throttle as
she climbed, angling to pitch up over the warship. She felt her vision edge and
did her crunches. The inertial dampeners in the cockpit behind her seat were
good, but they weren't perfect. That was why her flight suit was designed much
like the flight suits of the twentieth and twenty first century, sacks inflated
in the limbs to push her blood flow to her thorax and head to keep her
conscious.

That however left her limbs tingling as
blood flowed out of them, which was why she relied on her implants for control
of this maneuver.

“Going low and slow,” Sticks replied,
dropping down out of the fire. His fighter was slower than hers now, still
burdened by his torpedo load. They were performing a classic scissor, splitting
up to make the enemy choose between them, divide and conquer.

For a brief half second the destroyer's
point defense tried to stick with them before it dropped off and then refocused
on the more immediate threat, the incoming torpedoes.

...*...*...*...*...

“Torpedoes inbound on the port stern
quarter!” the defense officer exclaimed, looking up in alarm.

The Captain frowned ferociously. He'd
discounted the threat of the fighters, now that was coming back to haunt him.
The noisome flies had turned into wasps with very lethal stingers. “Intercept
the torpedoes! Ignore the fighters! Throw up a wall damn it! Reinforce shields
and get us around!”

“We're trying sir!”

“Try harder damn it!” The Captain raged,
slamming his fists against the arm rests of his chair in frustration.

...*...*...*...*...

Hurt locker grinned as her torps spun
off decoys from their flanks. They were coming in staggered, working together
through their limited dumb AI programming. Bundles of flash exploded around
them, throwing off the tin can's lidar.

Torpedo one screened her sister, using
her force emitter to plow the road. Despite the decoys some of the fire
targeted them, that's where their penetration aids and programming came in,
making them bob and weave while ghost emitters danced around them, making them
harder to target and hit.

It was a magnificent performance, but
even with her bow shield for protection she took a hit by the tin can's primary
graser mount and she kicked up from the force of the impact. She barely cleared
her sister's shield edge as she tumbled in space. A follow up shot tore the
torpedo apart.

“Damn!” Hurt locker swore. But she kept
watching the rear feed as the other torpedo used the cover of the explosion to
come in closer. It wove, adjusting its course briefly and then went hard over
and came boring in flat out at maximum drive thrust as it hit the terminal
attack point.

The torpedo's bow wall served four
purposes, it one shielded the torpedo at speed from particles, micrometeorites
and low energy incoming fire. The gravitic lens effect also served to magnify
and slightly distort the image of the torpedo. Third, it could act as a
tractor, latching onto the mass of its target and drawing itself in if it's
main drive failed. But fourth, it was a shield popper, a mini grav lance. When
two force emitters interacted, if they weren't synched and controlled by the
same computer bad things tended to happen. In this case the torpedo’s computer
deliberately oscillated the field strength and frequency up and down rapidly
over the microseconds it had, tearing the destroyer's shields apart, ripping a
hole through them and overloading the emitters.

In that fraction of a second the torpedo
passed through, the computer on board recognized where it was and detonated.

The single force emitter behind the
warhead drew the last of the torpedoes power, supercharging it for a brief
microsecond as the warhead went off. It formed a cone, with its open mouth
pointed to the target. The warhead's explosion was caught with its back to an
invisible wall, one that would only last briefly, but it followed the path of
least resistance, like a cannon it's gases were channeled into the direction of
the target.

One megaton of explosive force acted as
a blowtorch on the exposed flank of the ship, scouring away anything in its
path. Sensor arrays, communications antenna, drive pods, shields, weapon
mounts, anything. Any hole that was exposed was breached, with the gases
entering in through port holes or newly exposed wiring access points.

The EMP tore at the sensitive but still
hardened electronics on the hull and in the exposed part of the ship. The
neutrons followed the pathways, some copper, some superconductors, all to tear
at the electronics, forcing them to either shut themselves down in self doubt,
or to malfunction and fail.

Her weapons bay doors had been opened to
allow her grasers and point defense weapons to fire, now that came back to
haunt the ship. Entire gun crews were torn apart by the explosion. Capacitors
blew like firecrackers, tearing apart things around them and sending cascading
power surges back at the ship's power network or through anything they touched.
Equipment with surge protection handled the hammer of energy, but it had to go
somewhere. Breakers that had been left out or bypassed melted down, wiring melted,
and EPS conduits blew inward.

The ship rocked with the explosion,
bucking as her helmsman tried to recover. However he was now missing the RCS on
his port side so the job just got harder.

Hurt locker saw all this play out over
three seconds and yodeled over the radio. “Fire in the hole!”

“Hurt locker buy's the shots!” Joker
retorted. They had had a running bet, the first to go off script and yodel
would buy the shots.

Martha didn't have time to respond, she
was already maneuvering for the second stage of her attack. Her drive suddenly
cut and her beautiful fighter pitched end of end in a one eighty flip,
exchanging nose for tail. Suddenly she was drifting along her original course,
but pointed back at her enemy. She saw weapons fire go wide as it had been
programmed for her previous course. She hit the throttle again, boring in once
more and then she grinned, switching to her main gun.

“This is Cobra four, stage two, guns
ablazing!” she said as the tin can shuddered and it's bubble shield died. She
could see it's port hull was thoroughly torn up. She gleefully pulled the
trigger and added to the damage. Her implants linked to the computer, they
targeted items of opportunity, most importantly the ship's shields and weapons.
The primary targets were those that could shoot back at her of course, but
anything that she could hit she did. She zipped across the tin can and then
doubled back, making another run. Her spinal mount graser tore each target to
shreds.

“This is Cobra 3, making run,” Sticks
said over their shared link.

“Sticks go with one then go guns,” Hurt
locker said, biting one lip. She was chewing this sucker up, it's main guns
were gone on her dorsal. She was busy scouring the thing clean.