Synchronicity War Part 1, The (20 page)

Howard didn’t respond right away. He continued to look at
Shiloh with a thoughtful expression. “If we go with your recommendation to make
Bradley the line in the sand, then I’ll keep your suggestion for a CFP
commander in mind. What I’d like you to do now is spend the next 24 hours
writing a detailed proposal on how we can make the best use of our limited
quantity of CFPs in defending Bradley. When you’re finished that, you’re free
to go on two weeks leave. Just make sure that we know where to reach you. Any
questions?”

“No, Sir. I’ll have that report submitted by this time tomorrow.”

“Very good, Commander. You’re dismissed.”

Shiloh left and made his way to the Officer’s Mess for a
late breakfast followed by a leisurely coffee during which he made notes on the
back of some napkins. When he returned to his quarters, he settled down in
front of a computer terminal and started working on the report. When he had the
first draft finished, he looked up and realized that it was now dark outside,
and he was hungry. By the time the final draft was finished it was daylight
again. He sent the report electronically, and then stumbled over to the bed
where he fell face down and slept for ten hours.

When he woke up, it was evening in Geneva, but it felt like
morning to him. He decided to start his leave by shifting to a time zone that
matched his biological clock. After sending several personal messages to
Johansen, Chenko, and a couple of others, as well as letting Howard’s staff
know where he was going, Shiloh packed his gear and hitched a ride on a Space
Force sub-orbital transport to the opposite side of the world. Six hours later
he was once again sunbathing on a white beach, with a cold tropical drink in
his hand.

To his surprise, Shiloh wasn’t called back early from his
leave. When he checked into the Temporary Officers quarters again, he found a
message from Admiral Howard.

[Your recommendation to make Bradley Base the Line in the
Sand has been accepted. You’ll be in command of all CFPs assigned there.
Overall command of ALL mobile defenses will rest with Vanguard CO. Report to Vanguard
within 48 hours. Good hunting!]

Shiloh knew that Vanguard was one of the Sentinel class
combat frigates, but he didn’t know who its CO was. A quick check made his jaw
drop. It was Angela Johansen! Both of them were now Commanders, but she was also
Squadron Leader and Acting Task Force Leader. His title was Commander,
Autonomous Group or CAG for short. He wondered if their previous comfortable
working relationship would work as well with positions reversed. He was a
little disappointed that he would be reporting to her because if neither one
was taking orders from the other, that made the possibility of a
non-professional relationship much more attractive. But no one claimed that a
Space Force career was good for developing personal relationships. Besides,
Humanity was at War, and that had to be his priority.

Shiloh reported aboard Vanguard six hours later. Angela met
him at the docking hatch. Even though she was his superior officer, protocol
did not require him to salute her because they were technically the same rank.
She smiled and offered her hand, which he shook.

“Welcome aboard Vanguard, Victor. It’ll be good working
together again,” she said.

“Glad to be here, Angela and yes, it IS good to be working
together again. Congratulations on your new command. I can’t wait to take the
tour!”

Johansen laughed as she let go of his hand. Was it his
imagination, or had she held on to his hand just a bit longer than normal?

“I’ll be glad to show you around, but why don’t you get
settled into your quarters first. It’s not much, but at least you’ll have a
cabin to yourself. When you’re settled, you can find me in the Officers’ Mess,
okay?”

Shiloh nodded. “That’s fine, and my quarters are where?”

Johansen turned to nod at a young man standing off to one
side that Shiloh hadn’t even noticed was there.

“Yeoman Hanson here will lead the way. I’ll see you shortly
then.” She gave him a friendly smile as she turned and walked down the
corridor.

Shiloh turned to the young Space Force Yeoman and said,
“Alright, Hanson. Lead the way.”

It didn’t take long to get settled in his small but
comfortable cabin, and Johansen was soon showing him her new ship with obvious
pride. Shiloh was impressed. The Sentinel class of combat frigates was quite
different from the exploration class frigate that he was used to. Exploration
frigates were designed for long missions where crew comfort was a high
priority. In Combat Frigates, crew comfort was clearly a lesser priority.

Each major system had multiple backups. The laser turrets
could be completely retracted to streamline the ship for gas giant skimming.
That itself was something new. Tankers carried fuel shuttles that could skim a
gas giant’s atmosphere, scoop up hydrogen, and  filter out the heavy hydrogen.
Those same fuel shuttles could then transfer the heavy hydrogen to other ships.
Combat Frigates would not rely on smaller craft to refuel. They would dip down
into the gas giant’s atmosphere themselves, and while the technique had been
successfully tested with ships this large, it’d be a new experience for
everyone aboard. Johansen told Shiloh that practicing refueling was a major
part of the ship’s shakedown cruise, scheduled to commence in less than 48
hours.

She saved the best part of the tour for last, the ship’s
Bridge. It was impressive by itself, and it also included a small section,
partially partitioned off from the rest of the Bridge, where drones and CFPs
could be monitored and controlled with equipment designed especially for that
purpose. That would be Shiloh’s station. Its main screen wasn’t as large as the
main Bridge screen, but it was quite impressive nevertheless. He sat down in
the command chair, which immediately readjusted itself to fit his body. The
manual controls were all within easy reach to supplement voice commands if
necessary. His part of the shakedown cruise would be to test the equipment and
also command the drones and CFPs in simulated exercises, with exploration
frigates playing the role of enemy vessels. Being able to determine and
transmit commands to multiple drones quickly would take practice, but Shiloh
was determined to master that skill before the next encounter with the enemy.

With the tour complete, Johansen invited Shiloh to join her
later for dinner in the Officers Mess. Most of the crew was not yet aboard, and
they had the Officers Mess to themselves, which Shiloh was aware of but
Johansen didn’t seem to notice. The conversation was mostly about the Vanguard,
and Johansen did most of the talking. Shiloh managed to ask her if she knew why
the CAG was expected to control the autonomous units from a frigate instead of
from the base itself since that was where the drones and CFPs would be
maintained and configured for missions. Her reply was that since combat
frigates were designed from the outset to be able to control large numbers of
drones and CFPs in star systems that didn’t have a base, and since Bradley Base
didn’t yet have the same kind of command and control equipment installed, it just
made sense that the CAG would have to be on board one of the combat frigates.
Shiloh would have a deputy CAG at the base to look after the day-to-day
functions needed to keep drones and CFPs operational. It made sense but only as
the best of a series of less than desirable options.

When Vanguard was fully manned, she slipped out of lunar
orbit along with the other seven members of the first squadron of frigates
designated for a combat role, SFC 007. The squadron included the only other
Sentinel-class combat frigate, Sentry, plus six more heavily modified
exploration frigates, which would eventually be replaced by Sentinel-class
ships as they became available. The squadron headed for Jupiter so that
Vanguard and Sentry could practice refueling operations, while the other six
frigates practiced keeping a protective watch from high orbit. With no drones
of any kind to worry about during the refueling exercises, Shiloh monitored the
operation from his command station on the Bridge, and he was glad that he had enough
presence of mind to strap himself down tightly. Unlike the high speed dips that
the fuel shuttles used, which were done at supersonic speeds, the
Sentinel-class frigates had to decelerate until their speed was subsonic and
drop down into the gas giant’s atmosphere in what Johansen later described as a
controlled plunge. At the right altitude, the ship then used its maneuvering
engines to pitch the nose up at an angle with just enough forward thrust to
counteract the pull of gravity. Shiloh learned that the slow speed was
necessary to allow a moderate flow of gases into the hydrogen/heavy hydrogen
separation plant that would generate a constant flow of heavy hydrogen into
storage tanks. Too much speed would cause the faster inflow of gases to overwhelm
the separation system and contaminate the flow of heavy hydrogen, and because
the output of heavy hydrogen was measured in liters per minute, it took a
minimum of six hours to fill the fuel tanks. The obvious drawback to subsonic
speeds was the vulnerability to turbulence, which the artificial gravity wasn’t
fully able to negate. While most of the turbulence was just a nuisance, there
were moments when the ship’s motion was so severe that Shiloh would have been
thrown from his Command Station chair if he hadn’t been strapped in.

When the exercise was finished, and the ship was back in
space, Shiloh unstrapped himself and walked over to where Johansen was seated.
He could see that her uniform was soaked with sweat, and she looked exhausted
from the strain of maintaining a constant watch on the ship’s attitude and
systems. The rest of the Bridge crew looked like they had been through the
wringer too.

“How did we do?” asked Shiloh.

Johansen took a deep breath before answering. “The
simulations don’t do this maneuver justice. Not by a long shot. We got through
this okay. All systems are still functioning, and the crew is able to continue
at their posts, but I’m not sure that doing this over and over again out in the
field will generate the same results. The ship took a hell of shaking! At some
point, enough of that will break something, and if that something is our
maneuvering engines, then we might find ourselves plunging down into a gas
giant in an uncontrolled crash. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, what if enemy
ships detect us while we’re crawling along at subsonic speeds and can’t defend
ourselves? This is a bad idea. They should have given the ship enough room to
carry a fuel shuttle the way the new long range scout ships will be able to,
but the designers didn’t ask us ship jockeys for our ideas.”

Shiloh said nothing but nodded in sympathy. He would not
want to be conning a ship for six hours during this kind of refueling maneuver.
He wondered if there was a better way. He decided to access the engineering
schematics of the refueling system during his off duty shift to see if he could
come up with any ideas.

With Vanguard now refueled, Sentry took her turn, and
Vanguard practiced docking with the exploration frigates to simulate the
transfer of heavy hydrogen. In essence, Vanguard became a very heavily armored
and armed tanker, since the exploration frigates didn’t have the same
capability to skim gas giants.

After reviewing the engineering data for hours, Shiloh
decided to get some sleep. As he started to drift off, he suddenly had an idea
that made him wide awake again. Quickly calling up the data, he asked the
ship’s computer to simulate a specific sequence of actions, then leaned back in
satisfaction as he scanned the results. There WAS a better way. It wasn’t
perfect, and it had its own drawbacks, but it would be much easier on both the
ship and the crew. He checked Johansen’s duty schedule and saw that she was in
the middle of her sleep shift. He left her a message asking to meet over breakfast
to discuss an alternative refueling process.

Johansen looked skeptical when she sat down beside him later
in the Officers Mess. He waited until she finished ordering breakfast before
sliding a data tablet in front of her. As she looked at it, he started
explaining.

“The key to this alternative process is the outflow of heavy
hydrogen. I’m guessing the designers wanted to have a continuous flow of heavy
hydrogen, which requires a continuous supply of atmospheric gases. My approach
dispenses with the continuous outflow criteria. Here’s how it works. The ship
basically takes the same supersonic dip that a smaller fuel shuttle takes. At
those speeds, the intake scoops only have to be open for a few seconds for the
holding tanks to be filled with gases. Then the scoops are closed. The ship
continues to push its way through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds while the
contents of the holding tank are processed. When the holding tank is empty, the
scoops reopen and fill it up again, and the whole cycle repeats. Now the
drawback to all this is that a complete refueling will take a minimum of 12
hours, but on the plus side, the ship won’t have to put up with all that
turbulence, and since the hull is armored, the hull should be able to stand up
to that long supersonic passage quite well. With far less turbulence, wear and
tear on the equipment will be much reduced.”

He waited while Johansen finished absorbing his verbal
explanation and the data displayed on the tablet. When she looked up at him,
she said, “Have you run simulations?”

“Yes, and they confirm that it should work.”

“I’d like to see another simulation myself,” she said
quietly.

She handed the tablet back to Shiloh, who accessed the
engineering program and reran the simulation. Johansen watched it, and when it
was finished, she nodded.

“It looks good, but as we both know, the real thing is quite
often different from the simulations. I’m also not that happy with the extra
six hours of being vulnerable to enemy fire. At these speeds, our laser turrets
would have to be retracted to keep the ship as streamlined as possible.”

“Yes but even under the shorter, subsonic profile, you know
that any gas giant’s atmosphere will cut your lasers’ effective range down to
just a few kilometers. How likely is it that enemy ships will get that close?”

She thought about that for a few seconds and said, “You have
a point there. Okay, I’m tempted to try it, but only if my Engineering Officer
has no serious objection to the idea. What made you think of this idea, Victor?”

Shiloh grinned and shrugged. For once he could tell the
truth.

“I was on the verge of drifting off to sleep and the idea
just popped into my head.”

Johansen laughed and shook her head. “Honestly, sometimes I
think angels or somebody, are sending you messages telepathically!”

Shiloh laughed with her, but the comment alarmed him even
though he knew it was meant in jest.

“If somebody IS sending me messages, I hope they keep it
up,” he said.

“Amen to that!” said Johansen.

The refueling idea dealt with, they switched their attention
to breakfast and light chitchat. Half an hour later both were back on the
Bridge, Johansen at her CO station and Shiloh at his CAG station. Vanguard had
finished transferring some fuel to each of the six exploration frigates in the
squadron quite a while ago, and those frigates had then left Jupiter orbit to
prepare for the upcoming wargame exercise. Sentry had finished its subsonic
refueling exercise. Sentry’s CO had left an emphatic message conveying his
dislike of what he referred to as the ‘six hours of sheer terror’ refueling
procedure. There was also a message waiting for the squadron CAG. The five
prototype CFPs that Shiloh had helped test at the Alpha base were now back in
the Sol system. They were headed for Jupiter to rendezvous with the 007
squadron for the simulated exercise, using unarmed attack drones and the
modules equipped with the new jump detection gear. Rendezvous eta was in just
over three hours time. With their vector from the Moon known, Shiloh was able
to figure out their current position, and he used Vanguard’s communications
equipment to send them instructions to take up a standard High Guard overwatch
patrol of Vanguard when they arrived, scan for any ships emerging from Jumpspace,
and await further instructions.