Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (10 page)

They knew something was there, even knew where they were to a reasonably high degree of certainty, but they were still waiting on the long-range scopes to gather enough light to determine a high-resolution scan of the targeted objects. Their passive scopes were the highest resolution devices in the squadron, but since they were limited to EM frequency, radiation either emitted or reflected by the target they were scanning, it could take considerable time to build good quality images.

“Launch the Electronic Warfare Drones,” Patrick ordered, sounding rather bored with the whole affair as his hand danced over the controls in front of him.

“Drones launching, sir.”

He didn’t expect them to be much good, unfortunately, but they were there to be used and he didn’t see any downside to putting the drones into space. The Fleet records from Hayden, however, strongly indicated that the aliens didn’t pay a lot of attention to the more common electromagnetic spectrum that the drones were designed to imitate. It was the prevailing opinion of the Fleet officers who’d studied the battle that they most likely had extremely advanced gravity detection systems, likely enough to plot and track even items that massed as little as a Los Angeles destroyer. If that were the case, then they wouldn’t be fooled by the likes of the EW Drones, but if they provided even a few moments’ distraction, he’d consider it money well wasted.

“Visuals on the enemy, sir. Three ships turning away from the planet and toward us.”

Patrick raised an eyebrow. They’d been cutting it close, then. All accounts said that the planet was still intact, though it was under some sort of EM jamming field, so either the aliens were just entering their terminal attack run now or they’d been studying Atlantis for some reason.

He pushed it aside, deciding that it hardly mattered. 
Makes for a better story over drinks if the squadron cut it close anyway.

“They’re reversing acceleration, coming our way. 150 gravities.”

And there’s that damned speed advantage of theirs,
he mentally growled. 
Bad enough they’ve got a weapon we can’t do anything but pray they miss with, but they’ve got to be able to run circles around us, too.

He glanced down at his status board, a much-simplified version of the boards his subordinates were dealing with. Where they had numbers and countdowns and all kinds of detail, all Patrick had to deal with were status bars. Green meant a system was above eighty percent, yellow went as low as forty, and red was everything below that. As long as it was all green, he was happy.

Everything was, at the moment, not only green but full bars, and so Patrick Roberts was about as happy as a man about to go into battle could get.

A full stomach and a loaded gun, can’t ask for more than that.

“Five light-minutes now and closing, Captain.”

“Standby the torpedoes.”

“Aye, sir, torpedoes standing by!”

With the extreme accelerations of the enemy ships, Patrick was aware that he’d have to get closer than he’d like to ensure decent strikes. That meant that they had to dodge the gravitational attacks for at least five minutes before the squadron could launch, despite the fact that their torpedoes could track and home in on targets. The lessons learned from Hayden, both times, had been hard won, but hopefully he could make the most of what those before him had purchased in blood.

“Signal the squadron, assume combat stance,” he ordered. “Evasive action is to be taken on individual initiative. However, ships should remain with their cohort.”

“Aye, sir. Signaling the squadron.”

As the signal propagated through the squadron, the ships broke from their “best detection” formation, used to maximize the value of the accelerometers and the squadron’s scopes, and shifted to attack formation. Since the last battle at Hayden, Patrick knew that the admiral had spent most of her available time attempting to devise a workable strategy for fighting the aliens with conventional weapons. He wasn’t certain it was really possible, at least insofar as truly leveling the playing field, but he had to admit that she had gotten creative with her tactics.

Taking a book from other services, she’d divided her squadron into cohorts, assigning two ships to operate together in combat, much the way fighter jets operated with a wingman, or a sniper with a spotter. Most often, since the first interplanetary ships were commissioned, ships had operated alone. This was due as much to availability as anything else, but it became something of a habit, possibly a bad one, he supposed.

Now, Taskforce Five aligned itself in its cohorts and continued to close with the enemy.

The Cheyenne and the Hood formed the first cohort, with the HMS Hood leading the initial strike while the Cheyenne provided cover, command and control, and additional electronic warfare capabilities.

The theory was sound, but Patrick believed it would work a hell of a lot better if the enemy capabilities weren’t effectively overwhelming. That said, at the very least, they were doubling up their throw weight at any given point, and being able to send twice the torpedoes down range wasn’t going to be a detriment to the mission.

“Four light-minutes, closing fast now, sir.”

“Signal the Hood,” he ordered, his tone practically apathetic, as though he honestly couldn’t care about any of what was transpiring. “We engage on their mark.”

“Aye, sir. Hood signaled.”

*****

Captain Jane MacKay of the HMS Hood watched the numbers fall with ever increasing speed, the distance between the squadron and the enemy formation dropping faster than any sane person would like.

“Signal from the Cheyenne, ma’am.” Her comms specialist looked over in her direction. “They say we’re to initiate the run; they’ll follow on us.”

“Signal to the Cheyenne: message understood, Wilco,” she responded, wishing she could lean forward in her seat, but the straps prevented such an affectation.

“Aye, ma’am. Signal sent.”

“Enemy at three light-minutes and closing, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Raymond.”

Raymond Siri was the Hood’s resident sensor specialist and the man who rode herd on the positive army of people maintaining and running the various long-range systems on the ship. He’d come over with her from the Socrates when MacKay had been promoted, and she was as glad to have him now as she was then. Siri had one of the fastest analytical minds she’d ever known, able to spot things at a glance that most needed hours on a computer to prove. It was almost criminal to waste him on something as dangerous yet straightforward as the detection and ranging station of a warship.

“Watch for gravity events, Raymond,” she ordered softly. “They’ll open fire any moment now.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

Not that she was going to complain about having his mind at her disposal, of course. As they said, waste not, want not…and right now, boy oh boy, did MacKay
want
.

The HMS Hood led its cohort as the squadron bore down on the alien ships, the ships sharing all available data across the squadron battle network. The water world of Atlantis was just becoming a bluish disc in the distance when the first gravity event was signaled and the captains of fourth cohort were forced to take evasive action. The two ships, the Shilo Warrior and the Chippewa, rolled to port, peeling out of the assault formation long enough to avoid the dimensional collapse at the focal point of the gravity valve, then reversed acceleration to come back to formation.

At still more than two light-minutes, MacKay knew that she didn’t have much to worry about. It would take more than four minutes for the enemy to adjust to any evasive action the squadron would take, and four minutes was far too long a time to accurately track a ship across these ranges. As the numbers fell below one light-minute, however, the game space would change. The enemy weapon was something akin to an energy projector in that it seemed to propagate at the speed of light, so as tracking gear began to approach reasonably real time reactions, dodging would become more and more difficult until, at less than ten light seconds or so, it became entirely impossible.

If the enemy cruisers survived to within that range of the squadron, then the odds favoring any survivors of Taskforce Five dropped very nearly to zero. Almost all of TF5’s effective engagements would occur between one light-minute and thirty light-seconds, at least by the revised engagement doctrine developed since the Hayden battles.

Any more distance and the enemy would dodge; any less…and the USF vessels would be destroyed, or at least the squadron would be crippled beyond effective readiness in the ensuring bout of annihilation.

Unfortunately, at the closing velocities involved, a window of thirty light-seconds translated into an abysmally short period of time to make or break the engagement. Particularly when you calculated the travel times of any weapons used in the exchange. While they could have between a minute and ninety seconds technically available to them, their missiles would take at least thirty to forty seconds to travel between launcher and target, which really limited them to two distinct volleys, at most, while they were in their golden window.

“Enemy ships entering extreme engagement range.”

Jane MacKay returned her full attention to the distant ships shown on her displays. “Plot me a targeting solution for the lead ship.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

Now it was just down to the last interminable seconds of eternity before the shooting began. She examined the plot carefully, watching as the computers worked to firm up the lock as best they could without access to real time location data. They wouldn’t have a solid lock by the time they had to engage, but it was important to get it as hard as possible before the missiles launched, otherwise the odds of clean misses increased markedly.

It was a challenge to develop a solid lock across distances of more than a couple light-seconds. In fact, it quickly became a game of intelligent divination more than traditional targeting. You took what you knew about the enemy, his motion, and his motivations, and from that starting point you made your best guess as to where he would be when the missiles landed.

You didn’t need to be perfect, the weapons were guided, after all. And even in space, when you were talking about nuclear weapons…close counted.

“Gravity event detected, ma’am. Centered on the Hood.”

“Evasion!” she snapped, calmly but probably a little louder than she strictly had to. “Pattern Beta.”

“Evasion Beta, aye!”

Even as the answer was being spoken, the ship was already beginning to nose up, relative to the system elliptic, and the HMS Hood shook as the gravity collapse warped space-time nearby.

“Put the nose down,” she growled as the gravity event faded. “Get our tubes back on target.”

“Aye, ma’am. Coming back down, engagement range in twenty seconds.”

“Torpedoes, standby to engage,” she ordered automatically.

“All tubes standing by.”

MacKay examined the approach, noting the closest lock with a critical eye. She’d never expected to be sitting here with her thumb resting on the stud that would end lives, whether they were alien lives or not. It just wasn’t somewhere she’d ever thought to be, not really. There had always been the possibility, given the increasing push into space by varying nations of Earth, but honestly, she and most of her peers expected it would be another generation or three, at least, before space war was even possible.

None of them had seriously considered the intervention of aliens, of course.

“Engagement range in T-minus four seconds…three…two…one…”

“Weapons free,” she ordered, giving the command to have the nuclear warheads brought online.

“Aye, ma’am. Weapons free.”

“Fire.”

*****

At the head of first cohort, Taskforce Five, the HMS Hood was tasked with the right to open the engagement, and it did with its tubes rapid firing from one light-minute out. On their signal, the other cohort heads opened fire as well, guided weapons launching from eight ships at a rate of one every two seconds. Twenty seconds after the first shot was fired, there were eighty high-yield nuclear warheads accelerating downrange at better than 150 gravities.

The new weapons designed and built for the Cheyenne and Longbow class of ships had been designed with higher acceleration of the Mark I-guided munitions, considerably higher yield warheads and, possibly most importantly, vastly more sophisticated countermeasure suites implemented in the hopes of decreasing attrition rates during the terminal moments of weapon guidance. In short, they were bigger, badder, and hopefully smarter than anything ever deployed by man.

For all those sophistications, however, those weren’t what Jane MacKay and the other Captains of TF5 were counting on most in this fight. If not for the straps holding them tightly in place, all of them would be literally on the edge of their seats as the weapons approached terminal guidance and got close enough to their targets to be engaged by the aliens’ point defense systems.

Buried in each of the torpedoes fired was a miniature version of the accelerometer network that provided the squadron with an early warning system against the alien gravity attacks. When the enemy point defense opened up on the incoming missiles, they tripped this cruder system and the weapons’ onboard computers automatically initiated terminal guidance by detonating before the enemy weapon could do the job for them.

Each of the warheads exploded away from the main weapons, some hitting accelerations in excess of 200 gravities as the warheads split into eight micromunitions apiece, scattering ahead of the enemy point defense like so many pellets from a shotgun.

Taken by surprise, the alien ships failed to react in time as the smaller, yet still nuclear, munitions slammed into them at a relative rate better than half the speed of light and with enough force to tear through the ships’ armor like icepicks through cardboard.

Gouts of nuclear fire exploded from the apparently small holes, signifying the successful strikes across the three enemy ships with flares visible across half the star system.