was. If the ships transiting Karovic Reef were to have any chance of avoiding a rogue crosser, they needed good vector data, and fast.
The tension rose and, as quickly, ebbed away. To Michael’s relief, the bearing of the gravitronics intercept started to move across
“Sensors, gravitronics. Track 781553 is dropping. Estimate drop datum at Green 5 Down 15, range 55,000 kilometers.”
Ouch, Michael thought, 55,000 kilometers was safe but still way, way too close. “Sensors, roger.”
Track 781553 dropped in a short-lived blaze of ultraviolet light. Michael went through the routine of reporting the new arrival’s identity, but it was a short report. Apart from confirming the ship’s vector and noting that the starship was a small, spherical high-speed courier, there was little more the sensor team could add.
The ship carried registration marks recorded in no database held by
For a moment, Michael wondered if Constanza would launch one of
The watch ground its predictable way to an end. Michael handed over to his relief; after a quiet word of thanks to the gravitronics operator, he was on his way to grab a quick lunch.
He had a lot to do, and the previous night’s fracas had added to the load.
The debate got quite heated. It was surprising, Michael thought, that two people who normally were so controlled could get so worked up, and Ichiro and Bettany were pretty worked up. Each was clinging like a limpet to the rock of a well dug-in position. Michael waited until logic started to give way to emotion before interrupting.
“Okay, guys. Enough. Can I have a go?”
“Be my guest, sir,” Ichiro replied with a wave of her hand. “I’m not getting anywhere with Petty Officer Bonehead here. Maybe you’ll have more luck.”
Michael laughed. He knew as well as Bettany did that there was no malice in Ichiro’s invective. “Yes, thanks for that, Chief.” He paused to gather his thoughts. How the debate was resolved would decide the Hammer strategy Michael and his team were putting in place for the COMEX. With a mountain of small details to be worked out before uploading the exercise parameters into the AI running the COMEX, time was getting short.
“If it were left to the Hammer’s admirals, I would agree with you. They hate nukes because in the end war is about territory, productive territory. Keeping theirs, taking ours. So what’s the good of an irradiated planet? It’s just another lump of useless, slag-encrusted dirt. God knows we have trillions of those to choose from, whereas there are precious few terra-standard planets. Left to the admirals, there’d be no nukes, but it’s not up to the Hammer’s admirals, not this time. We’ve been through all the intelligence summaries analyzing what’s changed with Polk’s takeover. Merrick was a hard man, no doubt about it. Until he went solo with that damn stupid
“So it’s Polk’s call,” Ichiro said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly! In the end, Polk will tell the military what to do.”
Ichiro sat back, hands behind her head. She took a while to think it through. Patiently, Michael and Bettany waited until Ichiro, mind apparently made up, came back to the table. She nodded her agreement. “Okay, I agree. Dirtside nukes it is. Of course, there’ll be hell to pay, sir.” Ichiro looked troubled. “You know that?”
Michael nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
Thursday, August 26, 2399, UD
Fellsworth leaned over to him. “For Christ’s sake, Michael, relax,” she whispered. “It’s an exercise.”
“Wish it was only an exercise, sir,” he whispered back. He was more nervous than he’d expected. Putting together a COMEX was a serious intellectual challenge, and he did not want the work he and his team had done to be found wanting. More than that, he wanted Constanza to do well. He wanted her to make an obvious and public success of the COMEX. Sadly, he had a sinking feeling that he was going to be very, very disappointed.
Without being too obvious about it, Fellsworth had worked hard to position things for Constanza. She had made damn sure that the flood of background information setting up the COMEX’s political and military context would give Constanza every opportunity to see that this Hammer attack would not-could not-be like every other attack. The clues had been there-lots of them-but Constanza had refused to take them despite the best efforts of the rest of her command team to make her do that. Michael shook his head in frustration. To a spacer, Constanza’s team had drawn the right conclusions from the intelligence provided, but Constanza had not.
In the end, she had rejected the possibility that nukes might be used dirtside out of hand. It was “something the Hammers would never do,” she had declared forcefully. So that had been that. From that point on, her forces were always positioned to deal with a nonnuclear planetary attack. The possibility that she might be wrong had no place in her thinking. Sadly, that meant that there was little in the way of fallback planning. Worst of all, to allow her ships to engage the attackers right down to the edge of Terranova’s atmosphere, the bulk of her long-range Merlin missiles, the backbone of any FedWorld space fleet, would not be nuclear-armed.
In the absence of any nuclear threat, Constanza had adopted what space warfare strategists called the shell. She withdrew the bulk of her forces to be close to Terranova in planetary nearspace, concentrating her ships where they could best support one another. Out deep along the most likely attack vectors were smaller groups of ships made up of heavy escorts with a scattering of light escorts to fill in the numbers. Constanza was hoping to get lucky. If she did, the escorts would get close enough to ambush the Hammers as they dropped out of pinchspace. Luck was not all she was relying on, though. Constanza would use a far-flung network of remote sensors to give her enough warning to allow her to move her ships within the shell around Terranova to meet the oncoming attacks head on. All standard stuff and fine so long as one was facing a standard attack.
Oh, well, Michael thought resignedly, Fellsworth and the warfare training department had done their best. Now it was up to Constanza.
All of a sudden, things began to happen, and fast.
“Command, sensors.”
“Command.”
“Multiple positive gravitronics intercepts, Sector 2. Grav wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vector appears nominal for grazing run past Terranova.”
“Command, roger.”
Michael watched, fascinated. Constanza and her team began the intricate game of three-dimensional chess that was space warfare. She would assume this first attack was not the major attack. Most likely, the ships would drop and unload every piece of ordnance they could, their fire control solutions based on targeting data acquired
