The battle of Devastation reef

Saturday, December 30, 2400, UD

FWSS

Tufayl,

in orbit around Comdur Fleet Base

The eyes of all in Tufayl’s combat information center locked on the command holovid, the only sound the soft hiss of air-conditioning.

“Command, sensors. Positive gravitronics intercept. Estimated drop bearing Green 90 Up 1. Nine vessels. Gravity wave pattern suggests pinchspace transition imminent. Vectors nominal for inbound dreadnoughts.”

“Command, roger.”

Flanked by Vice Admiral Jaruzelska, Michael watched flashes of ultraviolet announce the arrival of the nine ships that made up Dreadnought Squadron One.

“Command, sensors, ships dropping. Nine dreadnoughts, drop datum confirmed Green 90 Up 1 at 30,000 kilometers.”

“Command, roger.”

After a flurry of laser tightbeam messages confirmed that the new arrivals really were the rest of Michael’s command, Michael stood the Tufayl down from general quarters, leaving Ferreira to coordinate the down-shuttling of the ferry crews to Comdur.

He turned to Jaruzelska. “Big day, Admiral.”

“It is, Michael,” Jaruzelska said, her face grim. “And you know what? There’ve been times when I didn’t think we’d ever get this far.”

Michael nodded sympathetically. He would have to be stone deaf not to hear the growing opposition to dreadnoughts from within Fleet, opposition he suspected was encouraged-even orchestrated-by Rear Admiral Perkins, opposition that now verged on the dishonest. The Faith operation-Tufayl’s successful attack on the Hammer battle station HSBS-261-was portrayed by some in Fleet as a fluke, a lucky one-off never to be repeated. Sons of bitches! I’ll give them a fucking fluke, Michael swore savagely. If that was not bad enough, his decision to press on with the attack without a casualty recovery ship had been turned against him. Dangerously reckless, they said, an officer willing to hazard anything and anyone to advance his own career, even if that risked the future of the Federated Worlds themselves. Worse still, the trashpress had decided that he was their next soft target, a strategy Michael had no doubt had Perkins’s full support. He wondered how much longer the Hero of Hell’s Moons-the trashpress’s phrase, not his-would survive their growing attacks.

It was all gut-wrenchingly unfair, but he was a serving officer, and there was nothing he could do about it.

No, that was wrong. There was something. He could make dreadnoughts work. He had to, and he would. He pushed the problem away to watch the command holovid as it tracked the shuttles picking up the ferry crews.

Jaruzelska broke his concentration. “Right, Michael. I need a few more minutes of your time, and I’ll be gone. Your cabin will be fine.”

“Sir.”

Jaruzelska looked Michael right in the face. “Right. What I’m about to tell you is classified Top Secret Mersin.”

“Mersin?”

“Restricted distribution, top secret matters specific to dreadnoughts. You’ll be pleased to know that you are the most junior member on the Mersin access list. I think the next most junior is a commodore, and there’s only one of those.”

“Oh,” Michael said, wondering just how much more responsibility Fleet could load on a mere lieutenant’s shoulders. “Right.”

“Let me just tell you something about dreadnoughts. A bit of history. What we’re doing is not the first time Fleet has experimented with unmanned warships.”

Michael’s mouth sagged open. “Wha … you’re kidding me, sir.”

Jaruzelska shook her head. “No, I’m not. Tufayl is not the first. Fleet trialed the concept during the Third Hammer war. By late ‘80, things were not going well for us; casualty recovery rates stayed well below what the war planners hoped for, and we struggled to crew the ships we had available. Nothing like as bad as after Comdur but still difficult. So we tried unmanned ships. Just the one to start with, the heavy cruiser Pericles. They didn’t gut the ship the way we have dreadnoughts; they only took the crew off. To cut a long story short, it turned out a complete disaster. The ship’s primary AI decided that it did not like being pushed around by someone in another ship, threw a fit, and went off on its own. It was last seen heading in the general direction of the Kalifati system-nobody knows why-before it jumped, never to be seen again. To this day, Fleet has no idea where the ship is or what it’s been up to. We had a few ship sightings early on which may have been Pericles, and some unexplained attacks on ships, but nothing conclusive.”

“Oh!” Michael said softly, eyes widening in shock. “An unmanned warship with unrestricted command authority. Tell me she wasn’t carrying full missile magazines”-Jaruzelska nodded-“oh, that’s not good.”

“No, not good at all,” Jaruzelska agreed, her face grim. “It gets worse. The Pericles experiment violated the Dakota System Treaty. An egregious violation was how the lawyers described it. If word leaks out, the Federated Worlds will be in a great deal of trouble given how sensitive people are about self- replicating machines. Understandably, they would see the Pericles as a step way too far down that road.”

“I think I would, too, sir. There are a lot of smart AIs onboard a cruiser, not to mention the fabrication machines and knowledge bases to make pretty much anything they want. So that’s one reason …” Michael’s voice trailed off.

Jaruzelska finished the sentence for him: “… why certain senior officers are so implacably opposed to the whole idea, yes.”

“Ah … so Admiral Perkins is cleared for Mersin material?”

“He is.”

“Seems he has reason to oppose dreadnoughts, good reason.”

“I hate to say it, but he does.”

Michael said nothing for a while. The Pericles fiasco might explain Perkins’s behavior, but it sure as hell did not excuse it. Orders were orders, goddamn it. “Hang on, sir,” he said. “We’re going to have unmanned ships with command authority. Nine of them.”

“Yes, we are. Which brings me to the real point. The dreadnoughts will have command authority only while they hold biometric tokens issued by you and your executive officer, or your coxswain if either one of you is disabled. It’s a fine legal point, I know, but the lawyers tell us that using time-limited tokens makes the dreadnoughts compliant with the Dakota System Treaty. The AI engineers have sworn blind that dreadnoughts can’t and won’t do a Pericles on us. So tokens it is. I’ll com you and Ferreira the subroutine for your neuronics; it’ll generate the tokens the dreadnoughts will need to keep operating.”

“And if they don’t get them?”

“Their weapons systems and fabrication machines are disabled, and they come home if they can. If they can’t, they self-destruct. Right, stand by … Okay, you should have the subroutine. Let me see … Yes, you have an hour to enable your new squadron, so I suggest you get on with it. I’ll be pretty pissed if I see those ships slinking back home with their weapons systems disabled. Righto, that’s it. I’m off.”

“Sir.”

Proud of what he had achieved in such a short time, Michael watched the ships of Dreadnought Squadron One accelerate out of Comdur orbit, their first deployment as an operational unit. Jaruzelska had given him two days to prove he was able to manage ten dreadnoughts. Michael knew he had every reason to be confident; after all those hours in the sims, why wouldn’t he be? The big unknown was what came next; Dreadnought Squadron One was still to receive any operational tasking.

Michael shook his head. Getting the First operational had been an enormous job, and it struck him as strange that he still had no idea what the squadron would be doing.