The Lost Command (Lost Starship Series Book 2) (2 page)

“It’s time to get back to your ships and get your people ready,” Fletcher said. “The great battle is only a few more days away.”

-2-

Three days and sixteen hours after Commander Guderian had informed the fleet about the New Men, Admiral Fletcher settled back into his command chair. He sipped a steaming mug of coffee, watching his officers at their consoles. The regular buzz of noise told him everything was in order.

An officer informed him there were still no signals from the picket ships watching the Tannish System.

Fletcher nodded.

The Tannish System was closer in terms of distance than Lamia, less than a light-year away. Since no wormholes linked Tannish directly with Caria 323, a journey from one to the other would take at least six months at sub-light speeds.

In anticipation of an enemy trick, Fletcher had put pickets on watch. They searched for any enemy-launched missiles from the Tannish System. For such drones to reach here at this time, the New Men would have needed to send the missiles months ago.

As Blake had said, the New Men were clever, impossibly so. Fletcher recognized that. It’s why he left nothing to chance.

“There’s a message for you from the
Schlieffen
, Admiral,” his comm officer said. “It’s from Commodore Garcia.”

“Put her on holoimage,” Fletcher said.

Seconds later, a hologram face appeared before Fletcher.

“Admiral,” Garcia said. “My people are receiving strange transmissions from Star Base Alpha.”

“Alpha?” Fletcher asked. The base protected the Ember-Caria Tramline in the inner system. A cold worm of fear wriggled in his heart. Could Rear Admiral Blake have been right? Fletcher asked quietly, “Are you informing me the New Men are coming through there?”

“No, Admiral. I’m saying Star Base Alpha has transmitted strange patterns—” Garcia put a hand to her right ear. “Excuse me, Admiral. I need to take this call.”

Fletcher frowned, waiting, wondering what the other person said to the Commodore.

“Sir,” Garcia said in a weak voice.

“What’s wrong?” Fletcher asked.

“I can’t believe this, sir. It—it doesn’t make any sense. I’m transmitting you a visual. I think you should see this for yourself.”

Garcia’s holoimage vanished. In its place appeared Star Base Alpha.

To Fletcher’s horror, what must have been an interior eruption occurred within the star base. In a funnel shape of intense white light, collapsium plating blew off the hull. A second eruption blew another section into the void. Then several explosions blew more away. Finally, a titanic blast of nova white light shredded debris in all directions, some of it down onto the Mercury-like planet below the star base.

Garcia’s face reappeared. “Sir, my people are verifying the authenticity of the image. We’re seeing what happened. Since the star base is five billion kilometers from us, this already happened over four and a half hours ago.”

Fletcher could only stare at her.

“It must be sabotage, sir,” Garcia said.

Fletcher forced himself to think. Yes, sabotage was the most obvious reason. Yet that would imply the New Men had agents in the star system. There was another problem, though. Why would the enemy destroy Star Base Alpha?

“Commodore,” Fletcher said, “what’s happening at Laumer-Point Alpha?”

“Sir, I’m—I’m transmitting the images to you.”

Fletcher sat rigidly in his chair, watching.

Garcia’s face disappeared. In its place appeared a holoimage of Laumer-Point Alpha. The jump point near the star shimmered. An enemy cruiser slid into existence.

“No,” Fletcher whispered.

He recognized the triangular shape. It was like a thick slice of pie, with turrets and nods studded everywhere and big engine nozzles in back. Another star cruiser slid into existence, and then a third and a fourth.

“It looks as if their main battle fleet is coming through the Ember-Caria Tramline,” Garcia said.

Fletcher rubbed his tired eyes. They felt gritty. Worse, a hollow feeling grew in his gut. How could the enemy have swung around to enter there? That would imply weeks of traveling in a detour of jump routes. It would mean the New Men had anticipated Fifth Fleet just as Rear Admiral Blake had suggested.

“Sir,” Garcia said. “This, this, this— I don’t understand, sir. Up until now, the New Men have always kept their fleet together. They’ve done that for the last seven months. Guderian was explicit.
Osprey
counted at least twenty star cruisers in the Lamia System.”

“The New Men have divided their fleet in the face of the enemy,” Fletcher said. “Militarily, that’s a bad idea. Here’s an example of their overconfidence.”

“Unless…”

“What?” Fletcher asked. “Talk to me, Commodore.”

“Maybe Guderian only
thought
she saw their starships in the Lamia System. Maybe those were all decoys.”

Fletcher thought about the troop transports he intended to use as decoys. Perhaps the enemy was using the same tactic.

This was bad, but he still had the Fifth Fleet under his command. What was the right answer? Had Guderian seen decoys in the Lamia System? It would be foolish for the New Men to come into the outer system with a mere twenty star cruisers. One thing everyone knew: the New Men didn’t make stupid mistakes. Yet, if they were going to come in at Laumer-Point Beta and he left the gas giant…

What should I do?

“Sir,” Garcia said. “The New Men in the inner system will likely head for Caria Prime.”

Fletcher nodded. Caria Prime was much closer to the enemy fleet than the Fifth Fleet was out here. The planet’s star base might hold out for a little while. Afterward, the enemy might begin a planetary bombardment. He had to defend Caria Prime.

“Commodore,” Fletcher said, speaking crisply. “You will get your taskforce in order. We’re moving out at 0300 hours.”

“Sir?”

“We’re going to head in-system and destroy the enemy. We have many more vessels than he does, and we have our new wave harmonic shields. Look at their numbers: I’m counting thirty-one star cruisers. We’re far more than double that. We can destroy them. We’re going to have to.”

Garcia took several seconds. Then, she straightened and nodded. “Yes, sir, I agree.”

Fletcher approved of her confidence. The New Men had snookered him. He wasn’t too proud to see the obvious. Using treachery and speed, the New Men had managed to enter the star system intact. He wouldn’t get to play his trick on them out here at the gas giant. So be it.

A half-hour later, the Fifth Fleet began acceleration. The blue gas giant with its rainbow-colored rings slowly dwindled in size. Seventy-four capital ships with accompanying destroyers, escorts and troop transports continued an intense burn for an entire day as they continued to head in-system against the enemy.

Rear Admiral Blake’s massive monitors dropped farther and farther behind. The nine monster defenders simply didn’t have the engine power to keep up with the rest of the fleet.

Fletcher sat in his ready room, hunched over his tactical display. He didn’t like leaving the monitors behind. But if he was going to reach Caria Prime in time to save the planet, he couldn’t afford to travel at the slower monitor speed. The planet’s star base could only hold out for so long.

“Sir!” an aide shouted, pounding on the door of his ready room. “Sir, there’s an emergency!”

Open,” Fletcher said.

The door slid open, and a wild-eyed major staggered inside the office.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Fletcher demanded.

“Sir, it’s a ruse, a trick.”

“What is?” Fletcher said, his stomach knotting up.

“The enemy fleet approaching Caria Prime, sir, it’s false, fake, a decoy.”

“Make sense, man,” Fletcher demanded.

The major’s eyes bulged outward and sweat slicked his face. “The fleet we saw coming through the Ember-Caria Tramline is nothing but decoy images. They’re not real, sir.”

“What?” Fletcher said. “That’s impossible. Why would the New Men have sabotaged Star Base Alpha then?”

The admiral knew the answer before the major told him. The New Men had snookered him twice. They had played their military jiu jitsu on him, and he had fallen for it just as everyone else had.

“I have reports of thermonuclear explosions outside Laumer-Point Beta, sir,” the major said.

“Where we just were twenty-four hours ago,” Fletcher whispered.

“Yes, sir. The enemy fleet is coming through by the gas giant, sir.”

Fletcher thought he understood. It was much easier slipping a commando force, as it were, in the long detour route to reach Laumer-Point Alpha. Then, the New Men would have used their advanced electronic decoys. Combined with the sabotage of Star Base Alpha, the enemy must have been certain he would rush to save Caria Prime. Now, the real fleet was coming through Laumer-Point Beta just as Commander Guderian had said they would. The
Osprey
had seen real star cruisers after all.

Fletcher lurched to his feet. With an oath, he rushed past the dazed major. The New Men had stolen a march on him. With these maneuvers, the enemy had separated the Fifth Fleet before a laser cannon had been fired. It was unbelievably clever.

Gritting his teeth, the admiral determined to fight his way out of this. What other choice did he have?

-3-

Fletcher’s stomach seethed, and the skin on his face was stretched with worry. He sat in his command chair, clutching a cold mug of coffee.

The nine monitors accelerated. The rest of the Fifth Fleet braked hard, slowing the velocity they had gained in the past twenty-four hours. It would take time for the two unequal bodies to converge with each other.

As Fletcher tried to reunite his fleet, the New Men accelerated impossibly fast. They had already left the gas giant far behind. Did they have superior gravity-dampeners or could they simply take greater G-forces for a longer amount of time than regular humans could?

The enemy had forty-eight starships. As they accelerated, they moved together, merging into a cone formation. It was impressive. The perfectly positioned star cruisers acted as one.

Fletcher envied them that. What’s more, every enemy ship was alike. He had to take into account the different capabilities of his various classes of vessels: battleships, heavy cruisers, motherships, monitors, destroyers and missile boats. Look at them. The star cruisers were packed much more closely together than Star Watch vessels would ever dare. They acted like an elite wing of strikefighters.

Why, they must have aligned themselves screen to screen. It’s uncanny
.

Shaking his head, Fletcher handed the coffee mug to an aide. He stood and walked toward the main viewing screen.

The enemy had forty-eight capital ships. He had seventy-four, plus a host of lesser craft. Space combat was relatively easy to comprehend. The goal was to hammer a single enemy ship with three or four of your own vessels. Concentration of effort won the day. With a deadlier and longer-ranged beam, and in their cone formation, the New Men would be able to strike his vessels one right after another. Such concentration of force would knock down a ship’s screen in minutes, burn through the hull armor and chew the insides to nothing.

I have to get my battlewagons close to them. The question is how do I do that in time?

Fletcher closed his eyes. A lot of good men and women were going to die. Many excellent vessels would vanish. Why had he fallen for the enemy’s tricks so easily? Maybe he should have listened more closely to Blake.

You need ice in your veins, Fletcher. You have to make the hard decisions and live with them for the rest of your life. Are you ready?

The admiral exhaled, and it felt as if his strength deflated with his breath.

You can’t bail out, Admiral. Are you a coward?

Silently, with his eyes still closed, Fletcher shook his head.

Then start acting like a commander. Give clear orders, and set your face like flint. This is it. Humanity’s fate rests on your puny shoulders. Don’t let them down, Admiral.

Fletcher’s eyes snapped open. They were shiny with moisture. Even so, an iron resolve began to mold his features.

“Comm,” he said, in a rough voice.

“Here, Admiral,” a man said.

“Patch me through to Rear Admiral Blake.”

“I have him online, sir.”

“Good,” Fletcher said. “Put him on the screen.”

The comm officer did so.

Admiral Fletcher raised his head and began to issues orders.

***

Behind the monitors, the rest of the fleet began to spread out like a net. The troop transports anchored the left. The decoy equipment transmitted electronic impulses, sending out signals as if they were battleships.

Fletcher had to get his ships close to the enemy to do heavy damage. Would the New Men take the bait, the twelve troop transport decoys? Even if the enemy’s electronic warfare pods failed to pierce the decoys’ disguise, there was a fifty percent chance of failure. The New Men might go after the real battleships, leaving the decoys for later.

It’s like flipping a coin. Heads I win, tails I lose
.

The one thing Fletcher knew the New Men wouldn’t do was fly straight in at the middle of the net formation. The greatest feat any space commander could achieve was to encircle the enemy formation in a vast globe. That meant, logically, the enemy would concentrate on one of the wings. Fletcher’s plan counted on giving the New Men one flank to kill, hopefully the fake battleships, and hitting the enemy vessels later with everything once the cone formation was close enough.

“Sir,” the weapons officer said. “Our monitors are in enemy range.”

It has begun
, Fletcher thought.
I’m sorry, Blake, I should have listened to you more closely
.

Each of the nine monitors was perfectly round except for the attached warfare pods. Every inch of space was devoted to its massive engines that supplied the beam power and gave energy to the deflector shields. Those engines weren’t rigged for fast maneuvering, though. The monitors had one of the longest-ranged Star Watch beams.

The star cruisers beamed their horrid rays. Forty-eight lances of destructive energy leapt from the cone, spearing at the speed of light. From farther away than any Star Watch laser could reach, the massed beam reached the first monitor’s deflector shield.

The targeted Star Watch vessel lacked the new wave harmonics. The giant beam bypassed the shield as if it didn’t exist. With this critical technological advancement, the enemy trumped the monitor’s greatest strength: its normally heavy deflector shield.

With indescribable fury, the combined ray hit the thick hull armor. Reinforced tungsten boiled away as globules of wet metal wobbled from the stricken monitor. The massive beam chewed through armor, causing a metallic vapor to appear and burn away almost as fast. The beam struck vitals, obliterating laser coils, turning crewmembers into disembodied molecules and striking the fusion core. Interior explosions added to the mayhem. Bulkheads blew down, a food processing center melted and munitions vaporized. The entire monitor shuddered, loosening armor plates and igniting fireballs everywhere.

The giant beam smashed through the SWS monitor, beaming into space. Then the ray sliced sideways, cutting the vessel in half as the giant beam traveled to the next monitor in line.

“Sir,” the weapons officer addressed Fletcher.

“Tell the monitors to fire.”

“The New Men are still out of monitor range, sir.”

“Hit the enemy!” Fletcher said. “Blind their sensors, if nothing else. Take some of those bastards down with them.”

The weapons officer stared at the admiral.

“Give the order,” Fletcher said. “The monitors aren’t going to be alive much longer.”

The weapons officer turned pale. Facing his console, he relayed the order.

Space battle wasn’t like fighting on Earth. The extreme distances meant greater time delays. A commander set his course and awaited the outcome as his ships closed with the enemy. It could be maddening.

Watching the monitors die in rapid succession stole Fletcher’s strength. The defenders beamed back at the New Men, but to absolutely no effect. It was worse than a joke. Then the nine monitors were nothing but drifting debris in space.

It all happened so fast as the cone formation kept bearing down on the remainder of the fleet.

The admiral’s knees weakened. He staggered back to his command chair and found himself sitting in it. Rear Admiral Blake was dead. It shouldn’t have happened so easily. The man must have known he was going to die.

Fletcher swallowed as guilt filled him.

Time passed. Slowly, the cone formation bore to the left, aiming at the troop transports. The distances meant this was going to take a while.

Seeing this—the enemy going for the fake battleships—helped revive Fletcher.

“We’re going to get our chance,” he told the bridge crew. The New Men were heading for the decoys. Finally, something went his way.

A half-hour later, the weapons officer said, “Missiles, Admiral. The enemy is launching a blizzard at our right flank.”

“They want to keep us busy over here while they annihilate the left side,” Fletcher said. “Well, let’s not make this too easy on them, or the New Men might get suspicious. Launch a missile barrage.”

A minute later, Flagship
Antietam
shuddered as
Titan
-class missiles left the tubes. Other big missiles the size of destroyers burned with hard acceleration for the enemy.

During the next hour and a half, electronic countermeasures, jamming, hot flares, decoy buoys and other technological marvels attempted to protect and pierce the various missile barrages. This was a contest for computers. The New Men’s were better, but sometimes mass and numbers counted too.

In time, counter-missile-lasers flashed from the ships. Mines exploded, surges burned out targeting warheads. Then, thermonuclear explosions from each side’s missiles threatened to create a permanent sensor whiteout between the fleets. Fortunately, the warheads had ignited too far away. Still, over one hundred shields turned red as they protected the crews from the thermonuclear warheads’ gamma and X-rays that finally reached the fleet.

Afterward, as the shields lost their color, the whiteouts faded back into normal space.

More time passed.

Fletcher accepted a steaming mug of coffee. He slurped it absentmindedly, hardly noticing that it burned his lower lip.

“The other flank is in star cruiser range, sir,” the weapon’s officer said grimly.

Two hundred thousand kilometers separated the two fleets. That meant the New Men could fire. Deadly enemy beams began to slice into the first troop transport, the first decoy vessel.

Fletcher stood, striding toward the crew. He yearned to hit back at the New Men with an almost physical need.

“This is a day to remember, gentlemen,” the admiral said. “Yes, the enemy has hurt us, but we’re going to hit back very soon now.”

The New Men’s ultra-beams chewed through the transports in short order. Twelve big troop ships died, leaving a field of expanding debris. The enemy must have recognized something was wrong. Big Star Watch battleships didn’t go down as easily as that.

“Look, sir,” the weapons officer said.

The cone began to come apart. Individual star cruisers became more apparent. Enemy vessels rotated. Seconds passed, minutes. Beams fired from the turrets, hitting SWS heavy cruisers in the center of the Fifth Fleet.

Soon, five heavy cruisers no longer existed. More died all the time.

Relentlessly, the New Men moved toward the Star Watch fleet. Fletcher’s ships had finally halted the velocity taking them in-system. The Fifth Fleet headed out-system now, beginning to build up momentum as it headed toward the faster-moving enemy ships coming at them.

Fortunately, the laws of motion meant the enemy ships finally came within Star Watch range. The New Men had built up their velocity high enough that they couldn’t turn away that easily.

“Now!” shouted Fletcher. “Let’s start pounding their ships!”

A loud
thrum
vibrated the deck plates under Fletcher’s feet. Battleship
Antietam’s
engines revved at full power, giving the laser coils the needed wattage. The main cannons targeted a star cruiser. A new whiny sound indicated the first shot.

On the viewing screen, heavy lasers speared into space. More joined in from other Star Watch vessels.

The Fifth Fleet still possessed all seventeen
Bismarck
and
Gettysburg
-class battleships. They were substantially bigger than the enemy’s star cruisers. They used powerful heavy-mount lasers.

As the two fleets closed, it quickly became apparent that the New Men’s shields were fantastically better than Star Watch’s wave harmonics deflectors.

Fletcher watched with growing despair. He made a fist with his right hand, his fingernails digging into the meat of his palm.

Antietam’s
heavy lasers struck an enemy shield. They turned it red as the shield attempted to dissipate the incredible energy. The enemy shield darkened and then became black. Finally, the enemy shield went down.

“Yes!” Fletcher said.

Antietam’s
lasers burned into the star cruiser’s hull armor. The battleship’s interior engine
thrum
aboard the flagship made the deck plates shiver. The hot lasers burned through layer after armored layer.

“We’re going to kill it, sir,” the weapons officer said.

Then the New Men practiced a hateful and deceitful maneuver. Fletcher could hardly believe it. The hit star cruiser shifted its position within the enemy fleet. It pulled nearer another star cruiser. As they advanced on the Fifth Fleet, an unhurt star cruiser interposed itself between the
Antietam’s
lasers and the hurt star cruiser.

It was incredible piloting. Worse, it meant the battleship failed to annihilate the stricken enemy vessel.

Dully, Fletcher realized the New Men did the same thing up and down their semi-loose formation. The enemy was killing Star Watch vessels and only taking wounds in return.

The two fleets had almost merged. In minutes, they would be at their closest point. Then the two fleets would pass and move away from each other, the New Men heading in-system and what remained of the Fifth Fleet going outward.