Admiral's War Part One Page 9

  While I’d do that if I had to, as I had said—and meant—before, I was in this to win. Knuckling under to either Rear Admiral Janeski or Governor Isaak didn’t appeal to me.

  I didn’t need or want any consolation prizes. A philosopher once said ‘second sucks,’ and I agree with him. I’d much rather divide this enemy fleet and conquer it but, in the end, I’d do what I had to just like I always did—and just like it seemed I was going to have to keep on doing.

  Chapter Ten: Wessex in Command

  “Two more muster points before this fleet reaches the enemy world targeted for reclamation, Admiral Wessex,” the ship’s captain reminded his commander.

  “Quite, Captain,” Wessex said with absentminded satisfaction. It was gratifying to show the line command officers just what he could do—and even more gratifying to watch them jump at his orders. However, despite his current satisfaction, he couldn’t rest for a minute—not if he was going to segue this temporary command into a permanent transfer out of second-rate support commands.

  “Your orders, Admiral?” Jenner prompted.

  “Are there any signs of a renewed local presence?” Wessex asked, referring to the pair of local spy ships that had been shadowing his fleet.

  “No, Sir,” Jenner said promptly, “however, I would still advise that we change our original route and divert to attack the locals from another angle. The chance, however slight, exists that an officer or com-encryption was compromised. This would eliminate any such concerns now that we’re in transit and operating under communication silence with the long-range array shut down.”

  Wessex pondered for a moment and then shook his head. “We can’t afford to add an extra week to our schedule. High Admiral Janeski has made his intentions clear, and I for one don’t want to be the only task force commander to achieve his objectives late,” he said firmly.

  Jenner winced but did his best to hide it.

  Wessex frowned before turning away. Then he hesitated. If things went wrong he didn’t want to give the review board enough rope to hang him with…and completely ignoring a flag captain’s recommendations could be one of those ropes.

  He grudgingly nodded.

  “In consideration of your concerns, we’ll make the following modification: after we reach what would have been the final muster point before attacking the local world, I will divert the fleet so that we are coming in from a different world than they expect,” he said finally.

  “Sir,” Jenner said looking physically pained, “I’m not sure it matters which final jumping-off point we use. In fact, just jumping around from world to world within a single jump range of the enemy star system would only increase our risk of encountering an ambush. The whole point is to move through an unexpected route so they can’t ambush us—”

  “I’ve done my best to allay your concerns, Captain,” Wessex said irritably. “By your own logic, if the last waypoint is too close then the second is no doubt too close as well. We will continue as planned.”

  “We could turn the fleet now, Sir; issue new movement orders while our ships are all gathered together,” Jenner pointed out.

  “And wait hours because of this phantom menace, while we plotted out a new route around it and then confirmed receipt of the new nav-plot by all of our ships? I think not, Captain,” Wessex scoffed, finally having had enough of all this delay and second guessing. “Issue the new movement order to the fleet. They are to proceed at alert level two and monitor for shadowing forces of enemy ships along our route of advance, but they are not to delay any further and are to jump toward our next way point upon receipt of these orders.”

  “You’re the Admiral, Sir,” Jenner said turning away to issue the orders.

  “I am indeed,” Wessex said shortly. Jenner might be right and he might be wrong, but this constant second-guessing of his orders was starting to get under Wessex’s skin. Just who was the Admiral here?

  They were going to go now, and they were going to hit these provincials so hard that no one—least of all his fellow task force commanders—could say Wessex had done anything other than earn his place in the battle fleet!

  Chapter Eleven: The Furball

  I was sitting on my throne with my fist glumly propping up my chin as I spent yet another interminable shift waiting for an enemy to arrive. It might go without saying, but unfortunately for my increasing sense of boredom, no enemy seemed ready to actually show up.

  Maybe, I wondered for the umpteenth time, they popped in on the other side of the star system and transited onward to Hart’s World without my fleet catching so much as a whiff of their presence? Even while I sat here waiting for them, light-lagged images of their point transfers in and out of this system could be winging their way across the star system.

  All this while I wasn’t even aware they’d been here until after they were gone!

  Of course, that meant they would have had to have avoided the mobile sensor net of ships I’d posted in pairs to ring around the star system. Wherever the enemy fleet arrived, supposedly I’d have enough time for one of my ships to spot them, jump to our ready reaction force, and then jump back with the reaction force in tow to rain some pain down on their heads.

  Bored out of my skull—to the point that I had already caught up on the electronic paperwork and was even now going through supply reports—I suppressed a sigh. This waiting around for the action to start was for the dogs. I was used to long periods of inactivity, sure, but that was when I was jumping my way through long stretches of dead space. When I jumped into a star system that was when the action usually started. Sneaking, fighting and running—or even hiding—was all to be expected, depending on the circumstances. But sitting and waiting for the enemy to show up in a star system that wasn’t Gambit or Tracto was starting to wear on me.

  I stared at the screen half-numb from the ears up, at a list describing the supply of stan-bolts—broken down by ship, naturally—for several minutes without really absorbing anything that I was seeing.

  There was stir in the sensor pit. It gave me no small amount of pleasure to be back in a Dreadnaught class battleship—one with a familiar layout, as opposed to the Strike Cruiser I’d used for my last big battle.

  “Contact!” reported the Sensor Officer causing me to jerk in my seat.

  “Report,” barked Captain Hammer.

  “I’m reading a small contact roughly corvette siz—” the Officer said rapidly.

  “IFF identification, Admiral,” cut in Lieutenant Lisa Steiner, “it’s the Hog March, a corvette of the New Sector Guard that was assigned to the rapid reaction patrol!”

  Immediately, a new tension filled the bridge. We had been worried that an enemy ship had just arrived in our proverbial lap, but now the situation was reversed and—with a little bit of luck—we were about to become the hunters.

  Janeski, I thought darkly, I’m coming for you.

  Steiner still had her hand up against her ear, listening to something only she could hear through her earbud.

  “Well? Spit it out, woman,” Hammer said after a pause that seemed to drag on a touch too long.

  As she looked up, a grin spread across the Comm. Officer’s face.

  “Target arrival confirmed, Sir,” she said, looking between myself and the ship’s Captain, “six squadrons of Destroyers have been spotted just transferring into this Star System.”

  I leaned forward in my chair—finally, a chance for some action! It’s not so much that I wanted the people in my fleet to fight and die against these invaders, but I was relieved that the wait was finally over and done with.

  “Send in the rapid reaction force. I want the Guard, Promethean, and Sundered Contingents, and our own MSP Destroyers and Corvettes to ride in there and cut that Destroyer force to pieces before they know what hit them—more importantly, I want them taken down before they can cycle their jump engines. Send half the Cutters with them as well but instruct them to hang back so that they can play relay for as long I need them there. I’ll also
want at least four Cutters with the Battleship squadron at all times,” I ordered. The MSP was the only force that had brought Cutters along, but where a Corvette might take a half hour to cycle their jump engines, a Cutter could do it in fifteen minutes. There was an accordingly sharp decline in how many light years a Cutter could jump, making them slower than a Corvette even, but for short-jumping around the edges of a star system there wasn’t anything faster in our fleet. They were going to be critical if I was to be able to maintain communication with the various elements of this fleet after they jumped to the site of the battle.

  “Relaying now, Admiral,” Steiner replied.

  If four cruisers—three of them heavies—17 destroyers, and 24 corvettes—the total number of our vessels scattered around the edges of the star system—were gathered back together, and weren’t enough to deal with this destroyer force…we could always send in more ships.

  “Add an amendment stating that Commodore Kling has command, with Force Commander Glue to take over if anything happens to him,” I added.

  There was a chime as my private communicator signaled an incoming call. There were only a handful of people who had access to my personal com, and the ID showed it was the Captain. Pulling out an ear bud and inserting it, I took the call.

  “Are you sure it’s wise to send in so many different contingents to deal with the Destroyer force, Admiral Montagne?” Captain Hammer asked over the com-link. “And will the Sector Guard contingent simply accept the chain of command you’ve designated?”

  “I think we need to do our best to overwhelm the enemy before they can jump out and warn their friends,” I said forcefully. “As for the Guard, they’d better blasted well do what I tell them.” I finished with a growl. “We went over all of this with them days ago. The time to object was then, not now.”

  “And if there’s trouble?” she asked.

  “I have four battleships and thousands of Lancers who are eager to convey my disdain for mutineers. Better we find out now, before the enemy has time to bring in their heavy hitters, than later when they can do us real damage,” I said flatly. My mind filled with images of just exactly what I would do to the ‘New Sector Guard’ if they tried to stab me in the back, “Satisfied, Captain?”

  She nodded, “We do what we can.”

  Minutes later, the first of the Corvettes began to jump. The Destroyers followed them as fast as they could power their hyper drives for a short jump.

  A Cutter jumped into communication range and was quickly identified as one of ours. “We’re receiving an update, Sir,” Lieutenant Steiner reported, flashing the information to my console.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said, opening the vid file and playing it forward at a speed of twenty to one. So far, it was only the opening maneuvers of the engagement and our forces were coming in piecemeal, but the enemy Destroyers were currently scattered. It was nice to see that precision point transferring from one star system to another while staying in formation was something that escaped even the these Imperials as much as it did my own forces.

  Oh, they had arrived in the same general area as each other. But that had meant that when my own forces arrived, it had led to a rolling series of dog fights as first my corvettes, and then my destroyers began arriving in much closer formation.

  On my screen, Corvettes swooped and Destroyers scrambled as Coalition Fleet Forces started hammering the enemy formation.

  I gave Hammer a penetrating look. Initial estimates had placed enemy forces at least at double the current number of destroyers. That meant either they were due to arrive any time now, or they were already here and scrambling to get into formation for a short jump of their own.

  “Tell the Droids and the Wolf-9 Reservists to send in everything smaller than a Cruiser,” I instructed. Either way, it looked as if our boys and girls out there in the now swirling dogfight—a battle which was starting to spiral out of Commodore Kling’s control—were going to be needing some reinforcements.

  “Once we do that, all of our lighter forces—the majority of this fleet—will be committed,” Leonora Hammer pointed out in a neutral voice.

  “We won’t win by waiting to see what the enemy does and reacting to it,” I dismissed after a moment of hard consideration. I might have been wrong, but my gut was telling me it was time to go all in, “We have to keep him reacting to us; the best way to do that is to overwhelm everything he has in the area before he has the chance to consolidate.”

  “Aye, Admiral,” Hammer replied turning to pass the order onto one of Steiner’s assistant com-operators.

  A moment later, it hit me: the realization that after this latest series of orders were carried out, I’d have sent nearly a hundred warships into one of the biggest fleet engagements I’d seen to date…and I still had yet to join the battle? Somehow that just didn’t seem right.

  “Admiral, I’m receiving request for confirmation from every contingent Commander—and what seems like half the cruiser and battleship captains—all wanting to know what you want them to do, Sir,” Steiner said.

  I hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Instruct the Prometheus Fire and the Sector Guard cruisers that they are jump at their earliest convenience to reinforce their various contingents. But tell the droids I want them to synchronize their jumps so they arrive together as one squadron,” I said.

  When the next Cutter arrived, it showed that the United Sentient Assembly and Wolf-9 reinforcements had arrived just in time to intercept another six newly arrived squadrons of enemy destroyers.

  So far, the battle was going as well as I could have hoped. I didn’t trust such a fortuitous turn of events.

  With more than half of the original force of enemy destroyers destroyed and only minimal losses among our own ships, even with these newly-arrived enemy reinforcement squadrons, our combined Corvette and Destroyer squadrons outnumbered the enemy almost three-to-one. It felt too good to last, and I immediately started looking around to see what else I could throw into the mix. But there wasn’t anything. Two Light Cruisers from the Wolf-9 contingent could get into the action before anything else, and that was it.

  So other than what I’d already done, there wasn’t much left to do but wait for the hyper drives in our larger ships to build up a charge. Oh, I could panic of course and try to send out some of our auxiliaries and collier ships into the fray only to watch them be destroyed…or I could blind myself to the growing battle by ordering the Cutters into the fray prematurely. But, tempting as it was at times, acting the fool had never really appealed to me.

  So, with a sigh, I cut the orders for the pair of Light Cruisers and then sat back to bite my nails. Everything now rested on whether our Cruisers and Battleships, or the enemy’s heavy hitters, would arrive first.

  All this sitting and doing nothing while the majority of the fleet was out fighting and dying was twisting and turning my stomach. I had grown used to being in the thick of the action or at least a part of the action. It was hard to feel like I wasn’t contributing, even if I wasn’t personally present, so long as I was fighting for my life in some way.

  For a brief second, I wished that everyone could just get along and stop with all the fighting. Then I shook that particular lunacy off with a wry grin. Life would be pretty boring if there was no more fighting. I mean, if the historical record of AI rule was to be any guide to go by, instead of constant conflict we’d instead be crushed under an ever-increasing electronic bureaucracy until we were being taxed for the rain water we collected and drank, as well as the carbon dioxide emissions we breathed out. Not to mention the notarized pre-coital contracts for one-night-stands, and filling out forms for every use of the public rest room facilities.

  Yeah, sure, conflict could be almost eliminated, but I had no interest in requesting a permit to relieve myself or notify the city administration if I was thinking about taking a girl home. Not that I was interested in other girls, of course! I had more than enough trouble with the one I currently had. I couldn’t
imagine what would happen if I had more than one of the creatures in my life; I could only tip my hat and shake my head at those men who attempted to live with and satisfy more than one at a time.

  That seemed to me like a surefire way to cut your life span drastically short, but then what did I know? After all, it seemed like everyone was out to kill me all the time but then I could just be biased on the death-by-outraged-woman front. Still, I wasn’t about to take any chances. I’d leave that for more foolhardy to men to pursue…and then watch with muted interest.

  “New arrival,” remarked the Sensor Officer, who was easy to spot as a former or rather long serving Confederation officer due to the slightly different pattern Confederation uniform the majority of the sleepers used, “profile matches that of the scheduled Cutter.”

  My shoulders relaxed and then promptly tensed again as I immediately dived into the latest review, again at ten times regular speed.

  I clenched my fist as I watched first a pair, and then a third Reclamation Fleet Destroyer flee the battle scene while a fourth ship on the edge of the combat zone stayed still just long enough to charge and engage hyper drive and point transfer away. But other than those four, the confusing interplay of the icons representing the battle seemed to be trending in our favor.

  Even so, each and every icon indicating one of my ships had been destroyed or knocked out of the fight felt like a kick directly in the gut. Sure, faint hearts never won fair ladies…although considering the fair ladies I knew….

  Yeah, best not to consider that. The point was that I was here to win, and one couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

  Several more Destroyers fled the battle and slipped away, leaving their remaining fellows to be ground up between my Corvette and Destroyer forces until finally the first of our Cruisers started to arrive on the scene.