The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (32 page)

She looked directly at the officer. “For now, I want you to keep going. Work with Gregory and Sensors to get together a list of a few ships which you think likely to be cyber-ops ships, and then move them up the board by two degrees of importance. Don’t overcommit us. We want to work on hard data, not guesses.”

The officer nodded her understanding. “Aye, Admiral.”

A voice came over the com. “Admiral, we’re getting the first damage assessments from the tech weapons, sir.”

Brennen dismissed the officer in front of her with a wave of her hand and then keyed her com. “Go ahead.”

“We have significant heating on four capital ships, and moderate heating on twenty-four others. The AI is wanting to know what percentage of resources we want to commit to follow-up attacks.”

Brennen didn’t hesitate in her answer. “Don’t commit much at all! Reduce the standard follow-up by thirty percent.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

For a moment, a kind of quiet returned to Brennen’s world. She turned back to the three-dimensional display behind her, staring at it, growing concern evident to Jonas through her visor.

She spoke absently, “We’ve got to get more data before the fighters go through. We can’t start committing our manned forces until we have information on what ships they should target.”

A voice came at the Admiral from the com system. “Admiral, I have a follow-up on that damage report.”

“Go ahead.”

“The recon officer says that communications from the capital ships to the rest of the fleet seem to be degraded significantly. They’re having trouble talking to each other. It looks as if the AI didn’t use a standard attack pattern on the capital ships but instead targeted their communications systems and sensor arrays.”

Gregory’s voice followed. “Cyber-Ops concurs. We’ve seen a significant decline in traffic between the Korpi fleet. It looks like our AI didn’t quite revert to type, after all.”

“Thank you. That’s good news. We’ll follow up hard, then, with the bombers.”

Gregory interrupted again, “Admiral, we have a ‘fish on’. Someone came looking for our chum. I need to sign off, but I thought you’d like to know. I will be back in touch shortly.”

The com line abruptly went dead.

Brennen allowed herself a little grin. Jonas guessed she didn’t feel like her attack plan was wholly off track.

“Admiral?” The voice in his ear sounded agitated. “We have a read on what’s in Sector Four!”

Brennen clicked in, intentionally keeping her voice deadpan. “Go ahead.”

“It’s a series of gate defense asteroids, Sir. They have some pretty high-powered cutting torches and some serious missile launchers in there, as well. They’re chewing through our resources in that sector pretty handily. They’re taking out sensors almost as fast as we can bring them in.”

“Are they on the charts?”

“No, sir. They must have towed them in since we’ve been in system. There was nothing in the intel about these at all, but until they’re gone, we don’t want to try to send anything big through the gate. Either that, or we’re going to have to send our capital ships through at a high rate of speed.”

“That won’t do. This isn’t a get in-system, fight-tomorrow plan. We intend to fight today.”

“Understood, but if that’s the plan, then we’re going to have trouble at the gate.”

“How many of these do they have in place?”

“At last count, we have found sixty-eight of them, sir.”

“Say again?”

“Sixty-eight, and they’re damn hard to take out, too. They’re pillboxes and the like. Mostly buried in the asteroids. Very little on the surface.”

Brennen looked at the three-dimensional display, highlighting these new targets. “Damn!” She instantly brought up fighter command on her heads-up. “Fighter command, this is Admiral Brennen.”

The calm female voice on the other end made Jonas smile.

“Yes, Admiral.”

“We have a new set of priority targets for you. You will have to re-vector through the gate.” Brennen gestured to the display in front of her, highlighting the asteroids and sending the information to fighter command.”

“Do you have the targets?”

“I have them.”

“We need to take them out before the first destroyers get through, or we’re going to have a problem. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir. I am re-vectoring the bombers from the Thor, the Mark Antony, and the Shiva, as well as their fighter escorts. We’ll take them out, Admiral.”

“Thank you, Fighter Control.”

Brennen clicked back to the original sensor officer who had informed her of the threat. “Sensors, we have bombers on the way to take care of the pillboxes in Sector Four. Please keep up your efforts to get us information from that sector. You have permission to open your reserves. Launch them now, and work with gate command to get them scheduled for transit. Brennen out.”

Brennen then turned her attention to the Big Board in the front of the room. Using her hands, she scrolled through the list of enemy targets until she found the asteroids. It didn’t take long. Once the threat had been realized, the AI had already placed them high on the list, not high enough for Brennen’s liking, however. “Computer, tick up Unity point defense systems in Sector Four by one notch.”

The computer chirped its compliance.

Brennen had just finished when the ship-wide com system pipped. The voice was General Gregory’s. “Medical emergency in Cyber-Ops. Med team to Cyber-Ops!”

Brennen wrinkled her forehead, thought for a moment, checked the time left before the first waves of manned fighters started transiting the gate, and then sprinted out of the room down the corridor toward the cyber-ops bay.

Jonas followed close behind.

When they entered, they found the room in chaos. Three young sailors lay on the floor, all of them with gunshot wounds. Several others attended to them, including the General.

The Admiral entered just after the medical team. “Gregory, what happened?”

“We’re not sure, yet. Parker,” he nodded to one of the sailors, “she just stood up and started shooting. I took her down myself.”

Brennen’s face reddened with anger.

Jonas could imagine the seeds of fear an incident like that would sow with the crew.

Gregory continued. “It has to be a mind-jack, Admiral. Parker was one of our best. I had her working backwards on one of the fish picked up by the chum.”

Brennen slowly nodded. “What ship?”

“I’m not sure we know. We knew the direction the signal originated from. They entered with a laser pulse through one of the optical sensors.”

“How many potential targets?”

“Three.”

“Give them to me in order of rank, most likely first.” Even while she spoke, Brennen brought up the Big Board on her heads-up.

“The
Idaho
,
Des Plains
, and the
Geneva
, in that order, Sir.”

Hearing the names, Brennen lost her cool a little. “Damn it! We have got to reprogram that AI. We didn’t even touch those three in our first salvo. Get on them. I want to be on them like glue. They hurt us. We will make them pay. If they survive, I want their captains to think twice before they do a thing like this again. I want it to terrify them.”

Brennen quickly put those three ships at the very top of the Big Board. Checking the clock and seeing she had two minutes until the first manned fighters started to transit the gate, she headed back to the bridge.

On her way out, she turned and looked back at Gregory. This time she spoke with her normally even keel. “Get yourself a contingent of Marines in here with neural stunners. Have them put the weapons on stun. Remove all other side arms from the room. We should have known better than to allow weapons in here. If anyone so much as twitches, stun them. You understand?”

Gregory had already been nodding his agreement as they spoke. “Aye, sir.”

Jonas and Admiral Brennen reached the bridge with only a few seconds to spare before gate transit of the first fighters was due to take place.

Brennen took a breath, calming her emotions and focusing on the mission at hand. She reached for her com. “Fighter Command, this is the CINC.”

“Yes, sir.” The calm voice answered.

“I want a significant portion of our bombers to take on the three targets at the top of the board. Right now. These are known cyber threats. I want you to put every nuke you can spare right up their ass and prioritize their communications systems.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, looking at their position in the fleet, they are well behind the enemy front lines in a protected position. It will be costly. If we do this, we will have to pull from our efforts against the asteroids.”

Brennen thought for only a microsecond. “Do it, but do it with as many drones as you can. Accelerate them at high Gs so they have a better chance of getting through. I don’t care if we lose the equipment because they can’t decelerate later. If we lose them, so be it. I just want to make sure we take out those ships. The whole point of this mission is to try out our new strategy of going ‘cyber forward and cyber first’. If we get cold feet now and chicken out, it won’t do us any good.”

The next few minutes offered Jonas and Admiral Brennen an unusual bit of calm. Jonas watched as the fighters and bombers transited the gate, right at the eight-minute mark.

To Jonas, it felt like it had been hours. At this point, he had no feel for how the battle was going. The transit of the first fighters into enemy space marked a turning point. Once human fighters entered the arena, much of the battle slowed tremendously, all the way down to the achingly slow speeds of human comprehension. It also meant that human beings now had a much greater influence over the course of the battle.

Jonas recognized that Brennen faced a hard choice by diverting resources away from the asteroid defense systems. The point defense systems were an integral part of any system defense strategy. The ‘enemy’ could only enter the system through the gate. That made them an easy target as they entered.

The simple answer would have been to enter at speeds which would make defense difficult. However, even with mass-bending technologies, such speeds led to deceleration curves that weren’t workable if you wanted to have a battle for control of the gate in the near future. By the time you got a ship traveling near C slowed, turned around, and back to the area near the gate, much would have changed. The enemy would certainly be prepared, and often reinforcements would have arrived, making success almost impossible.

Instead, modern Navies sent in high-speed weapons ahead of their manned vessels. The hope was that these weapons would soften up the enemy and make them react before the manned crews came behind at slower speeds. In this war, it hadn’t worked out that way, but that was because the high speed AI-controlled weapons had been a major target for Korpi hacking. Cyber vulnerabilities had already been put in place. All the Korpi AI had to do was to activate the vulnerability using intraspace. Now that the Seventh Fleet was cyber-dark, such vulnerabilities couldn’t be activated in their weapons.

The hope was that their initial attacks would have been much more successful than in previous battles. With the entrance of the fighters and the bombers, they were about to find out.

Admiral Brennen changed communications frequencies, bringing the fighter commanders to the fore.

The first voice came from Fighter Command.

“Alpha Squadron, we have hostile AI inbound from Sector Eight.”

“Copy, Command. We see them. Defensive bots have been launched in response. We are staying on the primary target. Request course correction to avoid intense flak fields at one hundred thousand klicks.

“Roger that, Alpha Squadron. Computers are aware of the flak, and are recalibrating.”

“This is Lambda Wing. We are approaching the first target.”

Brennen gestured, and next to the three-dimensional display, she created a screen in the air with her hand.

“Lambda is with the Shiva. Those bombers will be hitting the first asteroids.”

Jonas realized that the display she created had to be from the heads-up of a pilot in the Lambda squadron. It showed the inside of a bomber cockpit and gave the pilot’s relative position inside the gate, as well as other vital information on the bomber, such as speed, G-forces, and whether the computer or the pilot was in control of the craft.

Ahead, out the window of the craft, the surface of a peanut-shaped asteroid loomed. In the view, the asteroid tumbled slowly, rotating like a propeller. Bright flashes appeared on the surface of the asteroid.

Suddenly, the ship started jinking wildly, and the display flipped over to computer control as the on-board AI avoided a slew of incoming missiles and cutting lasers.

The pilot’s voice came over the com. “Weapons, retargeting to take care of defensive targets. Lambda Six assigned to cover primary. Launching, now, now, now.”

Each time a guided missile launched from the bomber, it shuddered a bit. Once the last missile had launched, the craft twisted away from the rotating space peanut and started to change its vector by accelerating away.

Brennen changed the view, this time bringing up two cameras. The first appeared to be the nose camera from one of the missiles. The second looked like a camera from a sensor package, focused again on the peanut.

The view from the missile counted down the time to impact even as it shimmied and jived using side jets to avoid incoming flak and railgun fire. It didn’t get through. As it came near, the railguns honed in on its position. It took fire and started to tumble. The on-board computer determined that it wasn’t close enough to do any good if it detonated, so it allowed itself to tumble out of control.

A computerized voice chirped as they continued to watch the remaining camera. “Weapons, Lambda One A and Lambda One B disabled.”

“Damn,” Brennen muttered under her breath.

She barely got the word out of her mouth when the third missile stuck home, erupting into a huge ball of flame on the surface of the asteroid. It was only then that Jonas recognized just how small the asteroid really had been. It was only perhaps ten miles across. The nuke’s pulse of bright destruction heated and engulfed its surface. It was hard to tell through the polarized view of the camera, but Jonas thought the asteroid might have split in two.