Riding the Red Horse (16 page)

There are points in time where these convoys are vulnerable; any time where they have to expend a certain amount of ΔV to make their destination is a place where an enterprising pirate can ply his trade, particularly if the pirate has the ΔV to go somewhere else. These points include the “flip over” burn and the sequence of burns needed to reach an insertion orbit around the final destination; in the Jovian system, this is the place where you meet the tug to ferry you through the radiation zones, and in the Jovian system, transit around the moons is a secondary traffic control mess.

Many rockets ships will have the ability to do one or two 600 milligee burns, probably from a chemical rocket carried for emergency purposes. This is situational rescue capability, either for yourself or to respond to a distress signal. They can also be used to make a least-fuel transit to a known safe location using a (fairly easily) calculated Hohmann transfer orbit. Hopefully, your life support can hold out for the months that a least-fuel transit will take…but that's a framework in which one could tell an interesting lifeboat-style story.

Space Combat

You'll notice that I haven't described the weapons used in this setting. I suspect space combat is going to be incredibly dull as a ship-to-ship action. With thrusts measured in single digit milligees to high performance military craft going into the tens of milligees, combat maneuvering won't matter for civilian craft, and might matter for military craft. In the Ten Worlds setting I made for
Attack Vector: Tactical
, I added a combat-mode thrust to give ships thrusts in the 0.75 to 1.5 G range; while the physics doesn't quite say that amount of thrust is impossible, it is highly speculative engineering and is included to make the game fun to play. Without that high thrust combat mode, the primary weapon will be a two-stage rocket. The first stage is a recoverable high ISp ion drive that spends days getting up to speed, then decouples and maneuvers for recovery. The second stage is chemically fueled rockets that light up in when certain launch parameters are met. The warheads will be fragmentation shot meant to hit the target with shrapnel at 3-10 km/sec of relative velocity. To be survivable, ships will have a lot of dispersed structure – they won't be armored. Even without armor, ships can take a lot of abuse; unlike naval or air-to-air combat, the operating environment won't destroy you with a loss of hull integrity. You may die when the life support system sprouts holes, but your ship won't blow up, sink, or suffer rapid aerodynamic disassembly.

Kinetic impact weapons moving at these velocities have defensive mechanisms that rely on giving the projectile something to spend its energy on. NASA calls these “Whipple shields” after the scientist who developed them. There's a thin shell of hard material, and a lot of aerogel behind it. A projectile will shatter on impact and the fragments, with more surface area, will convert their kinetic energy to heat as they move through the layers behind it. More active defensive measures are counter-missiles that run on opposite courses to kill the rocket before it fragments, or “spiderweb” drones aimed at setting up umbrellas of artificial fibers to catch fragments and let them break up on impact with something less valuable than the primary target.

Because kinetic energy goes up at the square of impact velocity, explosive warheads become passe in space combat. At 3 km/sec of impact velocity, an object delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT; at 3.5 km/sec of impact velocity, the kinetic energy conversion starts to exceed most reasonably stable military explosives. At 6-7 km/sec you're running four to five and a half times the energy density of TNT. Kinetic energy comparable to nuclear weapons start in the 80 to 100 km/sec of impact velocity. For those with a bent towards space opera, relativity gives a 1 percent boost to the kinetic energy of impact at 0.25 c, or 75,000 km/sec, and it rises rapidly from there.

In space, unlike air-to-air combat, firing solutions are easy—the target can't do a tight turn and change their direction of travel. Your firing solution will do Newtonian transformations, putting all the velocity in the firing platform, and will subtract the target's available thrust from the launch platform's, which is a simple enough trigonometry problem that I put it into a pen-and-paper wargame.

Expect a lot of drones in this environment, and close to planetary infrastructure, expect lasers and disposable focal mirrors designed to kill drones and missiles. Lasers will also be used to direct beamed power to ships that use it for propulsion. The forces near an industrialized planet can get significant performance boosts by simply using beam-rider rockets for their initial boost; every kilo of fuel they don't have to carry is a kilo of additional armament or defensive measures.

The combat actions won't be naval in nature, at least in the conventional Battle of Jutland sense. They'll be closer to anti-piracy actions in the Sea of Cebu or the Gulf of Aden; a pirate will lay in wait at a point where a ship must make a course correction – and where missing that correction by a few hours can result in everyone aboard dying of starvation – and capture the ship to hold for ransom. If you're using ice piracy from the Jovians with a crew on the sailcraft slinging ice, there's plenty of territory there for small unit actions and tense gunfights in hostile environments, both on the surface and in the caves carved in the iceberg.

Long range military actions will be fascinating; sending an expeditionary force will take months in transit, while sending an email or arranging a (very laggy) video conference could resolve the conflict in hours at any point while the expeditionary force is en route. If the expeditionary force is going for the Jovian water mines, the residents will have six months to a year and a half, depending on orbital geometry, to get ready for them. Those troops will also be in a win-or-go-home situation. Until they secure the facilities to re-launch and re-provision the ship, the trip is functionally one way. If there's no cheap and readily reliable way to use suspended animation, then troop morale and training in transit become interesting discussions and background details. How do you keep your fighting edge when at any point in that transit, you may discover that your trip was a complete waste of time, and how do you train in the fairly cramped confines of a low-thrust ship?

Major Military Actions

Major military actions will be in strategically important locations. By and large, that will be planetary orbit around Earth, cislunar space, and planetary orbit around Mars. The prior actions described happen in interplanetary space, and will be low intensity conflicts of a sort, the kind of thing that would be a great “SEAL Team 6” adventure. In near-planetary orbital space, it's like a surface-warfare centric naval battle using current satellite recon: Everyone knows where everyone currently is, nobody can change their vectors by enough to matter, and the aim will be to do enough damage to infrastructure until it gets expensive enough to talk it over.

Functionally, this becomes warfare over offshore oil platforms, not war to the knife over land that's been in the family since the days of Saladin or Washington.

Conclusion

Most things related to space travel and space habitation come down to thermodynamics, and those thermodynamic constraints put paid to many genre tropes, like “Space is an Ocean”. Thermodynamically limited space opera is a greatly underserved niche, in the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram between Hard SF and military science fiction.

Chris Nuttall, a native Edinburgian and top 100 Amazon author, shot onto the Kindleverse from a standing start and burst across the ebook sky in a crescendo of bestelling fireworks. And that’s not even talking about what’s actually in the more than two-score books he’s published via Kindle or small press. I say “standing start”, but he spent years building his literary muscles for that shooting-star jump, and he deserves every accolade and every massive Amazon check he’s received.

“A Piece of Cake” is set in the universe of his
Ark Royal
series, currently four volumes and counting. It’s an interesting space opera series, pitting an outclassed Earth against a technologically superior enemy. It also had quite a lot to say about a military’s judgment on who should, and should not, be in charge of fighting our battles, how rarely we get that question right, and why it is that no English-speaking people has ever lost a naval war except to another English-speaking people. Battles, we may lose. Wars? Not yet.

The story is a prelude to
Warspite
, the fourth book in the series, and serves as a fair illustration of how the principles of war can extend down all the way to the lowest levels. More than that, though, it has things to say about imagination, innovativeness, and sheer determination…and how those things can be discovered in any group or any man.

And it is a story to make Gorgidas, Epaminondas, von Steuben, and Prince Eugene of Savoy, to name a few storied soldiers of the past, smile in their biers.

Historian’s Note: This story takes place just after the start of
The Nelson Touch
, prior to the Battle of Target One.

“You know,” Colin Richards said, “I feel all alone out here.”

John Naiser smiled at his wingman’s tone. “You
are
all alone out here,” he pointed out. “It’s a million miles to the carrier and dozens of light years back to civilisation.”

Richards snorted. “This is all your fault,” he said. “If it wasn't for the incident with the woman’s swim team…”

“Oh, shut up,” John countered. “It was
you
who told the Admiral that it was all in jest. And the Princess laughed.”

He sighed at the memory. In truth, neither of them had any idea if the events just prior to their graduation from the starfighter training centre had ensured their assignment to HMS
Canopus
, a bulk freighter that had been hastily converted into a starfighter carrier, but it was a sore spot. Most of his graduating class had been assigned to fleet carriers and sent to the front. He and Richards—and a bunch of half-trained reservists—had been sent to the backwaters of human space. No one really expected to run into the aliens here.

Which is why they sent the Canny Man
, he thought, as he glanced through the cockpit towards the frozen mass of Bluebell.
They weren't going to waste a fleet carrier on this piece of real estate.

Bluebell was beautiful, and under other circumstances, he would have enjoyed the long flight around the gas giant. She was easily as large as Jupiter, but a glowing blue set against the twinkling light of hundreds of distant stars. Like Saturn, she was surrounded by pieces of debris and asteroids; unlike Saturn, the debris had not formed into rings, but hung around the gas giant in a surprisingly stable orbit. The navigator had loudly proclaimed, to anyone who would listen, that the system wasn't natural at all, that someone or something had shattered moons into space debris for mining purposes, yet there was no clear proof. But then, only a year ago, the idea of alien life would have been laughable.

And then Vera Cruz taught us that we were not alone
, he reminded himself. He looked back at his instruments, seeing nothing.
It is better to be careful than dead
.

“Pity we can’t use the shadow tramline,” Richards called. “We could go somewhere
interesting
.”

“Yeah,” John said. “But what could be more interesting than watching pieces of space debris drifting by?”

Richards made a sneering sound. “Picking my nose?”

John shrugged. Bluebell had been useless, prior to the war, simply because she sat on the end of a chain of tramlines. There had been no impetus to survey the system, let alone lay claim to the gas giant and its rings of debris; indeed, no one was quite sure who owned the settlement rights. It would have remained useless, if the aliens hadn't proven themselves capable of using tramlines humanity hadn't even known existed. A data-crunching astronomer had concluded that Bluebell might possess as many as three shadow tramlines, inaccessible to human starships, but all-too-accessible to the enemy. Unknown to the aliens—
hopefully
unknown to the aliens, he reminded himself—a chink had opened up in humanity’s rear.

“It could be worse,” he said. “We could be separated by light years. Or one of us could be promoted. We couldn't be so close then.”

“I suppose,” Richards said. “But I want to get out there and get stuck into the enemy.”

John smiled. Starfighter pilots relished the challenge of battle, even though they’d also borne the brunt of heavy casualties from the early stages of the war. Not that the fleet crewmen had done much better, he knew. Two heavy fleet carriers had been vaporised at New Russia and two more had died during the alien push towards Terra Nova and Earth. Humanity had learned how to counter the aliens, how to turn some of their tricks against them, but the knowledge had been dearly bought. A third of their graduation class hadn't survived the first two months of active service.

“You’ll get your chance,” he said. He glanced down at his console again, then frowned to himself. “I’m not getting anything from the Canny Man.”

There was a pause. “Me neither,” Richards said. “They should have pinged us by now.”

John felt cold ice creeping down the back of his spine. Captain Singh was no one’s ideal of the very model of a Royal Navy Captain and his insistence on proper procedure had rubbed a few of the starfighter pilots the wrong way, but he’d never let his crew slack. And no one should have allowed two starfighters to come over the horizon and advance towards the carrier without being damn sure of their identity. These days, when an alien starfighter packed weapons that could slice into a lightly-armoured fleet carrier, a moment of carelessness could be disastrous.

“Watch your scope,” he ordered. The ping was already overdue. “And cover my rear.”