The Void War (Empire Rising Book 1) (31 page)

Raptor
reached her maximum speed of 0.35c after forty five minutes of acceleration. Gupta’s plan called for her to continue on their current course for one more hour until she got to the edge of the inner system. When the allotted time was up, James nodded to Gupta. She immediately began to give orders. “Navigation, bring the engines down to six percent acceleration then prepare to rig the gaseous shields. Then bring us onto a new vector towards the largest asteroid.” Moments later she had opened a COM channel to the engine room and was talking to
Raptor’s
Chief Engineer Hugo O’Neil. “Alright Chief you can power the reactors down, just leave us enough juice to run the engines up to six percent and maintain our gaseous shields. Be ready to bring the power levels back up in a hurry though in case we get into an unexpected fire fight.”

James had been impressed with Gupta’s plan, especially the final point of using the gaseous shields. The shields were simply a mixture of ionized gases pumped out of the ship and held in place by electromagnetic fields. Originally they were used to help shield a ship’s crew from harmful cosmic particles when the ship was traveling at high speeds. They had been made obsolete with the discovery of valstronium, for it provided a far better protection and gave ships much greater top speeds. The RSN hadn’t done away with the shields though. Officially they been kept so that a ship that had its valstronium armor damaged could still travel through space. Unofficially, they could also be used to increase a ship’s top speed. Combining the gaseous shields and her valstronium armor meant
Raptor
could reach speeds of 0.38c. With the engines powered down to six percent, it would take another fifteen minutes to reach her new maximum speed. Crucially though, the Chinese ships would be expecting
Raptor
to be approaching at .35c. The difference wasn’t much but it would let them have a small element of surprise. Also, with her engines producing so little acceleration and her stealth systems engaged, now that her reactors were also powered down the Chinese wouldn’t be aware of
Raptor’s
change in vector. They would no doubt guess she had entered stealth to make a course change but they wouldn’t know where to.

Gupta’s plan called for
Raptor
to remain in stealth until they reached the mining facilities. The idea had been to force the Chinese ships to make a decision between two options, either of which would be advantageous to
Raptor
and
Ghost
. Either the Chinese Commander would order the frigate back to the asteroid field, leaving it vulnerable to
Raptor
or it would flee back to meet up with the coming reinforcements, leaving
Raptor’s
target undefended. At the same time, the very fact that
Raptor
was now undetectable meant the approaching light cruiser and destroyer had to take precautions themselves. If
Raptor
managed to get close to them in stealth, they would suddenly find themselves being hunted rather than doing the hunting.

Ten minutes passed before anything happened but when it did James cursed. Of all the possibilities, he hadn’t expected the Chinese Commander to get so spooked. Yet that was the only explanation. The light cruiser had begun to decelerate hard. Meanwhile, having a higher top speed, the destroyer had begun accelerating again, intending to meet up with the frigate and then rendezvous with the asteroid field. Suddenly James was faced with the worst of both worlds. The plot updated to show the new intercept times.
Raptor
would reach the asteroid mining facilities ten minutes before the destroyer and frigate. They would be able to destroy the asteroid mining facilities but at a price. They would be well within the missile range of the Chinese warships and would have to fight their way out of a missile duel. Meanwhile, the light cruiser would get back to Wi Li in time to stop
Ghost
causing too much damage.

Suddenly another thought occurred to him. “Navigation project the likely position of
Ghost
given the last data we had on her flight plan.”

The main holo display updated, showing an estimated plot of
Ghost
. It was expected she was still another two hours out from the gas mining facility around the system’s only gas giant. That had been their original target. A second dot appeared as the navigation officer called out. “This would be her expected position, if she had altered course towards Wi Li when the light cruiser and destroyer had boosted out of orbit towards us.”

James studied the plot for a number of seconds. It looks possible he thought to himself. “Assume Lightfoot altered course again to try and intercept the light cruiser as it returns to Wi Li, where would he reach her?”

This time a red dotted line appeared in front of the second estimated dot of
Ghost’s
position curving round to intercept the plot of the decelerating light cruiser. The cruiser had been heading for the asteroid field for almost two hours so it would take it that long to return to Wi Li. 
Ghost
would intercept her an hour before she got there, long before the two frigates that had returned to Wi Li would be able to come to her aid. The question was, would Lightfoot risk it? If they could destroy the light cruiser, the threat of the Chinese defenders would be severely reduced. Alone, one of the Chinese destroyers couldn’t take on
Ghost
and
Raptor
. The remaining forces in the system would have to regroup and come at the two destroyers together. That would take time. Time the two British warships could use to cause a lot of destruction. But
Ghost
couldn’t hope to destroy the light cruiser alone, not without taking considerable damage. The new
Crusader
class destroyer’s stealth tech was good, even better than that built into survey and scout ships like
Drake
. However,
Raptor
was built to be a warship and even its more advanced stealth tech couldn’t hide all of its power hungry systems perfectly. The light cruiser would detect
Ghost
before she could sneak into plasma cannon range. It would be a missile duel to the end. If
Ghost
was severely damaged, she would have to return to British space for repairs and the mission would be over before it had hardly started.

Then it occurred to him. If he was thinking Lightfoot might be tempted by the opportunity to hit the light cruiser, maybe Lightfoot was thinking the same about him. “Navigation, plot us a new course. If we turn to pursue the light cruiser can we catch it in time to aid
Ghost
?”

“It’s possible sir,” the navigation officer replied. “It would be a close shave getting by the destroyer and frigate heading our way without being detected. Once we did, we’d have to ramp up our engines in order to arrest our current momentum enough to make the turn towards Wi Li. We could catch them but the light cruiser would know we’re coming.”

“Thank you Sub Lieutenant,” James said instinctively, his mind already working out all the possibilities. If the Chinese cruiser knew they were coming what would he do? He could turn to face
Raptor
while the destroyer and frigate behind likewise turned and trapped his ship between two forces. But it would take time for the destroyer and frigate to decelerate. The light cruiser would be alone and would take a lot of damage. The other option was that the Chinese Commander could continue on to Wi Li and meet up with the two frigates there and then turn to face
Raptor
. It was a risk though. Letting
Raptor
so close to the planet would give James the opportunity to bombard whatever he wanted. Whoever was commanding the Chinese forces didn’t know the British warship’s strict orders concerning civilian causalities.

James considered his options carefully. Going for the light cruiser was a gamble, but maybe one worth taking. If the Chinese Commander on board the light cruiser did fancy taking on
Raptor
alone then James would have to hold out for at least forty minutes before
Ghost
caught up with them. On the other hand, if he didn’t try it
Ghost
might end up taking on the light cruiser on her own.

Banking on the fact Lightfoot and he thought alike, James made his decision. “Navigation engage your new course.” Looking over to Gupta, James added for her sake, “it looks like we might have bigger fish to fry, we’ll have to come back for the asteroid mining facilities later.”

Luck, it may seem strange to find a discussion of luck in a history book but if we are to examine the rise of the Empire then Luck cannot be ignored. We all know the pivotal characters who contributed to the founding of the Empire yet, any cursory examination of their lives shows us just how fragile their contribution was. The wrong decision here, an unlucky system malfunction there and things could have been very different. 

-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD

10
th
May 2465 AD, HMS
Raptor
, Wi system

It was time to see just how good
Raptor’s
stealth tech really was, James thought. For an hour they had been slowly turning to head deeper into the inner system, towards the rendezvous point with the Chinese light cruiser that was heading back to Wi Li. They could not give away their position to the other ships in the system just yet, so
Raptor
had to change her vector by only using ten percent of her maximum thrust. Any more and the Chinese ships’ gravimetric sensors would pick her up. Now the problem was that she was getting close enough to the Chinese destroyer and frigate still heading to the asteroid mining facilities that they were likely to pick them up through other means. All ships vented electromagnetic radiation into space in the form of heat and other stray emissions from equipment on board.
Raptor
was designed with systems that allowed her to vent her heat radiation away from a certain direction so she couldn’t be detected. She also had a coating of radar absorbing material that would protect her from active scans, up to a point. Both systems worked well but they couldn’t make a ship disappear.

In order to reach the light cruiser they were targeting
Raptor
had to pass very close to the Chinese destroyer and frigate. So close that if their vented heat didn’t give them away, the radar waves being sent out by the two ships as they overloaded the radar absorbing material around
Raptor’s
hull would.

As James silently watched, the distance between his ship and the two Chinese ships got smaller and smaller. Just before they got to the point where he expected them to pick
Raptor
up he shouted. “Fire!”

Second Lieutenant Romanov was waiting for the order and immediately six missiles erupted from
Raptor’s
starboard missile tubes. Starting so close to their target, the missiles only had a flight time of eight minutes. Initially, there was no reaction from the Chinese ships. Then, after almost thirty seconds, both ships brought up their main search radar and began frantically trying to lock onto the missiles. It took another minute for them to begin to turn to face the new threat but when they had completed the maneuver they both fired their own salvo towards
Raptor
. Their response had been slow though, too slow. By the time they had fired,
Raptor
had already passed them and the distance was rapidly opening up as both sets of ships rushed away from each other at their maximum speeds. While
Raptor’s
missiles were heading at a right angle towards the Chinese ships, the Chinese missiles left their tubes heading away from
Raptor
. They had to use their engines to overcome the momentum of their parent ship before they actually began to gain on
Raptor
.

As a result,
Raptor’s
missiles crashed into the two Chinese ships long before their missiles caught up with
Raptor
. Crucially, they also struck before the Chinese ships could fire another salvo. James had decided it was unlikely they could take out the destroyer with one attack so he had targeted most of his missiles at the smaller frigate. Four homed in on the frigate while two targeted the destroyer in order to force it to focus on its own protection rather than helping its smaller consort.

Raptor
carried two of the new penetrator ECM missiles that had proved so effective since the outbreak of war but James had kept them for the showdown with the light cruiser. That meant the destroyer had no problem swatting the two missiles aimed at it out of existence. It took too long though for when her point defense switched to tackle the four aimed at the frigate they only took out one. The frigate had already managed to destroy two more but that still left one missile to enter terminal attack range. Despite the frigate’s ECM it managed to get a firm lock on its target. The missile hit the frigate’s midsection and penetrated through the thin valstronium armor before exploding. It must have hit one of the frigate’s fission reactions for two explosions spewed from the interior of the frigate and when they cleared there was no sign of the ship.

As if in anger, the destroyer barked out with another salvo of missiles at
Raptor
. Then it began to turn again, pointing its nose at
Raptor
so it could bring its main engines back to full power and begin to decelerate along its original vector, reversing course to follow
Raptor
as she dove into the system after the light cruiser.

As James expected, the light cruiser showed no sign of changing course yet. The Chinese Commander was wisely waiting to see if the two missile salvos heading towards
Raptor
would do any damage before he decided whether or not to take
Raptor
on alone. That meant James could focus fully on the two missile salvos coming his way.

The first salvo contained five missiles from the Chinese destroyer and two from the frigate, the second only five more from the destroyer. James nodded at Romanov, giving him permission to reveal
Raptor’s
final surprise. With a flick of a switch at his tactical console, a forward section of
Raptor’s
hull began to part and a weapon emplacement began to rise up. Along with the penetrator ECM missiles the British fleet’s biggest surprise for the Chinese had been their flak frigates. Construction on them had begun five years ago but they had been kept away from Earth and the prying eyes of Chinese spies. The older classes of British destroyers all had three twin plasma cannon turrets. The
Crusader
class had only been fitted with two. Officially, the story was that the destroyers needed the extra energy for their stealth systems. In reality, a flak cannon had replaced the third turret. Kept in a concealed compartment, James was confident that the Chinese intelligence services hadn’t figured out the secret even though they now knew about the flak cannons themselves.

As soon as the first salvo came into range the turret reoriented itself and began to throw out a screen of explosive rounds into the path of the approaching missiles. The quadruple electromagnetic cannons each fired ten explosive cartridges a second. Each cartridge in turn exploded at a set range, releasing a thousand small explosive ball bearings. The ball bearings themselves spread out in a uniform sphere before they too exploded, creating a sphere with a diameter of roughly a kilometer, full of shrapnel traveling at high velocities. The valstronium tips of the incoming missiles brushed the shrapnel aside but the weaker titanium alloys used to armor the rest of the missiles couldn’t cope with the combined relativistic forces of the shrapnel fragments and the momentum of the missiles themselves. Any time a piece of shrapnel hit a missile where its armor was weaker it easily ripped through and sent the missile spiraling off harmlessly into space.

Of the first salvo, four missiles disappeared in the field of shrapnel created by the flak cannon. The point defense plasma cannons took out another two, leaving one still homing in on
Raptor
. Her last line of defense was her short-range AM missiles. Ten of them shot out and two managed to get hits, exploding the last missile before it got close enough for even a proximity detonation. After the last missile disappeared, James released a deep breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. The first salvo had been the most dangerous. With two less in the second
Raptor
should be able to handle it.

Sure enough the flak cannon again proved its worth as the second salvo failed to hit
Raptor
. No doubt the destroyer’s Captain was furious. He now knew his destroyer was simply outclassed. Alone it couldn’t hope to penetrate
Raptor’s
defenses, while
Raptor’s
own broadside of six missiles would likely reduce his ship to atoms given enough time. Looking back to the plot, James could see that the Commander of the Chinese light cruiser obviously thought the same for he hadn’t deviated from his original course. The two frigates that had entered orbit around Wi Li an hour ago had now began to boost out of orbit again to meet up with the light cruiser. Once they had joined forces James had no doubt they would turn and try to take him out. Combined they could throw out salvos of twelve missiles.

*

Two hours later and James was beginning to sweat. In moments
Raptor
would enter extreme missile range of the light cruiser. She would be able to get off one salvo before the cruiser could fire back. After that, it was likely the light cruiser would begin to pummel
Raptor
badly. A Chinese light cruiser had almost thirty centimeters more valstronium armor that
Raptor
. It wouldn’t give a great deal of protection from the large British anti-ship missiles fired by battlecruisers and heavy cruisers but against
Raptor’s
smaller missiles it might even be able to brush off a direct hit or two.

James had expected
Ghost
to make an appearance by now and have already begun to engage the cruiser. That she had not had James worried. Maybe he had misjudged how Lightfoot would react? The dice had already been cast though and James could do nothing but push his fears to the back of his mind. If he tried to maneuver
Raptor
out of the approaching engagement with the cruiser, it would only give the destroyer he had already engaged time to join the cruiser. Together they would make quick work of
Raptor
. If
Ghost
was somewhere else his only hope was to fight his way past the cruiser and make for the system’s mass shadow. 

When they got into range
Raptor
fired off her first salvo of six missiles. This time he had included one of the penetrator missiles. It would take twenty minutes for the missiles to cover the distance so, before the cruiser had even begun to fire off its point defense weapons,
Raptor
had fired one more salvo while the cruiser had fired off one of its own.

When the penetrator missile sensed the cruiser’s point defense weapons powering up it went active. Immediately, the Chinese sensors shifted from detecting six missiles to seeing eleven. The sensors tried to burn through the fake missiles but the ECM on each real missile added to the confusion. In the end the point defense cannons and AM missiles took out five real missiles, including the penetrator, and four of the fake missiles. The remaining fake missiles disappeared with the penetrator but not before the final missile scored a proximity hit.

When the visual images reached
Raptor
for several seconds James watched the detonation. It looked like the explosion had been close enough to cause some damage to one of the cruiser’s missile tubes. His suspicion was confirmed when the next salvo poured out of the cruiser only contained seven missiles.

When James’s second salvo was ten minutes out from the light cruiser the gravimetric sensors began to beep wildly. The sensors officer called out excitedly. “New contacts, new contacts, I’m picking up six new missiles, they’re heading towards the cruiser from sector four zero five point two four. It must be
Ghost
!”

James had already come to the same conclusion; no one else would be shooting at the Chinese warship. Lightfoot must have stayed in stealth, waiting for the opportune time to fire. Lady Luck was with them, now the cruiser had twelve missiles heading for it from two converging directions. It would have to spit its point defense. No doubt Lightfoot has used one of his penetrator missiles in that salvo too! A smile finally broke through the look of concern that had been growing on his face over the last half an hour. James had used his second penetrator in his second salvo so the Chinese point defense network was going struggle to cope. But, before he could watch the results of the missile salvos homing on the Chinese ship, he had one heading for his own ship to concentrate on.

Again the flak gun opened up at maximum range and began to whittle down the incoming missiles. Eight became six and then five. The flak cannon then went silent as the more accurate closer range point defense systems came online. Plasma cannon fire took out two more missiles and AM missiles another one. At the last second, Romanov dialed up
Raptor’s
ECM to full and dove the ship into a tight evasive maneuver. One of the two remaining missiles was fooled but the second closed in and detonated off the ship’s starboard bow. The shockwave threw the bridge crew about at their consoles.