"Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter."
- Winston Spencer Churchill
Recommended Listening:
Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 4
Z-1240 Series Destroyer Z-1261
Engaging Target Three
July 5, 3400
Flottenkapitän Oskar von Reuental of the
Kaiserliche Marine stood expressionless on his bridge as the debris field erupted in a hive of activity. As expected, some of the asteroids concealed small clusters of fighters, as at Hawk's Nest. Unlike the warlord styled as Keldrog, though, the Zebesians had been clever and well-supplied enough to seed the rocks with antiship missiles- big ones, too, and numerous.
"All ships, continue fire on enemy installations with main battery. Prepare secondaries. Comms, do we have acknowledgement?"
"Yes sir, we have a handshake."
"Good." The admiral had chosen Target Three for a reason- the target was very close to the system hyper limit indeed...
Boskonian Type 17 Core Ship, Serial Number 98734872
Squadron Flagship, A4F18
On Station at Zebesian Mining Facility Two
Higobi Trakenza watched as the assets flushed their ordnance and fighters against the Prussian destroyers. The Enemy kept up fire with their long range railguns, but compared to the storm of fire coming at them it was as nothing- many of their rounds crashed into or through useless rocks or drifting clouds of mine tailings, without damaging the assets at all.
Granted, the fighters were not in good order, and he suspected that the armament that happened to be aboard at the time wasn't ideally suited for antiship strike. But he doubted it would matter; he had plenty of small-craft assets, a swarm of missiles, and opponents ill suited to defend against him
Trakenza warbled softly in laughter. He'd had time to check up on the files. The Prussian destroyers' artillery had alarmed him unduly; these ships were designed to use their heavy projectile guns to cripple lighter enemy ships from extreme range. In a beam duel they would no doubt remain formidable... but the small-caliber, hypervelocity projectiles made for relatively ineffective flak rounds. The Enemy raiders had virtually no ability to use their main batteries for antimissile work. To be sure, they had secondary weapons that could engage the missiles, but they weren't especially good at it; for their tonnage, the destroyers were lacking in that department. Fleet defense against small craft and ordnance was a task the Prussians preferred to leave to their missile frigates. And today, there were none in sight.
The long range missile strike would take minutes to arrive. But when it did, sheer arithmetic guaranteed that it would overwhelm the Prussian point defense, damaging their ships badly enough to make easy kills for the follow-up attacks from the fighters.
They shouldn't have sent you out with so few ships, Enemy...
"Sir! I'm picking up additional hyperspace tracks, twelve light-hours out and closing fast!"
F-2515 Series Missile Frigate F-2522
Flagship 23rd Frigate Flotilla
Approaching Target Three
Flotilla-Captain Wolfgang Mittermeyer rode out the transition to normal space on his feet in confident posture. By
God his navigator was good; they were practically on top of Oskar's destroyers. Thanks to the preliminary data Oskar had fed his squadron via hyperwave, they already had a rough idea of where to look for the incoming long range strike.
This had been the first unorthodox aspect of
Konteradmiral von Musel's plan: instead of leading with a concentrated heavy force escorted by his light ships, he led with the light ships to draw the defenders out where they could be killed. Had their discussions on the third gone slightly differently, it would have been him trying to draw out the enemy starships for Oskar's destroyers to break up.
Given the standards of the Prussian fleet, it was an honor for a light-ship commander to be trusted to operate independently like this. Even though Wolfgang was convinced that this wasn't the way things ought to be, he recognized the respect and trust von Musel had placed in him on such short acquaintance.
He felt especially honored that von Musel had detached one of his battlecruisers to the 23rd Flotilla- and, in violation of all Prussian tradition, had chosen SMS
Regenlief, commanded by his most junior captain. This gave Mittermeyer seniority, placing a light-ship officer in command of a capital ship. Training and the famous 'common sense' of the Prussian Navy told him to think of
Regenlief as the flagship and organize around her; tactical insight told him that, strange as it might seem, the battlecruiser was here purely to support a light-ship mission.
Tactical insight won, and he'd kept
Regenlief in the back of his formation to use her powerful EW suite to conceal the Twenty-Third's approach through hyper, and to keep her out of the way while the frigates did their work.
Where Prussian destroyers were meant to engage smaller starships from a safe distance with hypervelocity rail guns, like skirmishers spread out before a line of musketeers, Prussian missile frigates were the shield of the fleet. Generally deemed too light to engage anything of consequence on their own, they were ideally suited for the missile and small craft defense role.
As always, his handpicked captains reacted well. They knew their job, and there was no need to urge them to greater speed than they'd already accomplished. Wolfgang concentrated on his own ship: the sensor picture that was coming together nicely, but there were only a few minutes to lay countermissile fire on the target before they got too close. It would hardly do for him
not to be first to start shooting down the enemy ordnance...
there! Nice dense cloud, few or no jammers... a good opening target.
"First barrage, center axis ten by seventeen, autonomous!"
F-2522 rumbled as the small-diameter launch tubes flushed, springing their missiles into space and waiting hungrily for more to come rolling in from the magazine feeds. Knowing what kind of action he'd be going into, Wolfgang had taken the liberty of loading all his tubes with the dual-role weapons Prussia preferred to use as countermissiles.
The Prussians' countermissile design was quite different from that used by the Umerians. The Star League saw specialist designs like the Umerian low-power shaped fission charge or the Centralist flak-burst missile as efficient but lacking versatility.
The job of engaging small, high-mobility threats was left to the high power "Acheron-designation" pure fusion devices. The nuclear warheads delivered a vastly more powerful omnidirectional burst to swat enemy missiles with proximity kills, without the need for high-precision targeting. Unlike Umerian or Centralist countermissiles, the Acherons worked reasonably well against enemy ships as well, assuming they could manage close-proximity hits. They paid for the heavy nuclear warhead in increased bulk, but the missile frigates had large magazines for their tonnage, with plenty of capacity for the job of blunting a single massive attack this way.
The range was long, and all the frigates had managed to get off two or three vollies of countermissiles before the first wave from
F-2522 struck home. Programmed to switch to autonomous guidance near the end of their runs, the Acherons picked out individual targets, preferably those still flying in close company with others from the same launcher. Flashbulb bursts of nuclear fusion spattered the Zebesian long range missiles with X-rays.
Wolfgang's display shifted, noting missiles that had gone dead and ballistic- no longer a real threat with their position known, since point defense fire could engage them even from extreme range with narrow-angle flak bursts that were guaranteed to score a kill. Unlike railgun rounds, antiship missiles were too big to avoid detection under combat conditions.
The Zebesians' attack looked to have been a one-shot launch from fixed silos; it was eroding very quickly under the Prussian fire, as the missile frigates concentrated wave after wave of their own missiles against a single enemy launch. Follow-up waves from the defenders would have been more of a problem, but aside from the swarm of fighters popping out from behind the rocks of the debris field, there wasn't any.
The fighters would come in too late; they were already forming up and on approach vector, but before they got in launch range with the smaller missiles a fighter could carry, the opening bombardment would already be dealt with.
Adrenaline surged through Wolfgang's veins. It was endlessly tiring being tied to the battleships' apron-strings, being assigned cautious probing and patrol missions, watching operations take months to plan when they should rightfully be done in weeks or days. And now, just this once,
finally, he was allowed- no,
ordered!- to cut loose and play the cavalry, striking in a split-second and turning defeat into victory in an eyeblink. It was what he'd dreamed of since the day he joined the fleet.
Z-1240 Series Destroyer Z-1261
Reuental allowed only a slight hint of satisfaction to cross his face as Mittermeyer's flotilla jumped into position. His own ships pulled back and aside slightly, allowing the battlecruiser and frigates full opportunity to do their work.
Regenlief's jamming was very effective against the relatively crude enemy missiles; a number of them were wandering off in the wrong direction entirely.
Z-1261 and the other Prussian ships began shuddering as the light ships' secondary mass drivers opened up. These were massive, stubby pieces with enormous cooling arrays, throwing relatively tiny slugs at a tremendous rate of fire; the effect was similar to a gatling-barreled design.
Regenlief chimed in with her tertiaries, weapons of the same pattern as the destroyers' secondaries, and with a few salvoes of large-caliber flak rounds from the secondary low-velocity guns. The combined point defense fire raked the Zebesian missiles almost as effectively as a continuous beam weapon.
When all was said and done, only a few missiles of that overwhelming swarm got through. One of them did make it through to
Z-1261, crashing into the port side just below A turret; the destroyer bucked under Reuental's feet as the shock mountings on her forward shield generator recoiled. Other ships took hits singly or in pairs, rocking them but not penetrating the shields... with one exception.
A tightly bunched group of eight rode through the patterns of nuclear blasts from Mittermeyer's Acherons, and even through the point defense barrage, overlooked by some quirk of auto-targeting. On their own, the group had picked out the task force's largest, most valuable target; a clever missileer or still more luck let them manage the difficult feat of a home-on-jamming against the battlecruiser
Regenlief.
Last ditch fire from the unengaged side of the frigates
F-2530 and
F-2519 killed three of the cluster, breaking them up into ineffective fragments before impact. The other five rammed into
Regenlief near the stern, flaring down her shields and punching one deep crater through the outer armor belt. But that was it; the missile attack was over.
Reuental's mismatched eyes flicked to the mid-range tactical display. The Zebesian fighters were milling about in confusion rather than jetting towards them.
So far, so good. Everyone was on their toes, making suitable evasive maneuvers in case any more pirate forces opened up on them from the asteroid field, but there was time for a quick command conference. A few words to his communication officer got him Mittermeyer on the screen.
"Thirty seconds early, Wolfgang."
"I thought you might be in a hurry."
Reuental chuckled softly. "Do you see me complaining, friend?"
"Do you think the rest of the plan will work out?"
"If the enemy commander is intelligent, he will try to cut his losses; we already have more force than his mobile units can handle, now that the missile attack has failed. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to call the Admiral at any time..."
Boskonian Type 17 Core Ship #98734872
Squadron Flagship, A4F18
Higobi Trakenza drummed taloned fingers against the side of his command chair. By objective measures, he had lost only a small portion of his assets, and his core ships were undamaged... but he was defeated. The asset fighters were in disarray. Their command and control had been jarred by the opening bombardment, and the jarring had become outright dislocation when the missile attack failed with the sudden arrival of the Enemy's missile frigates.
To make matters worse, he was now badly outnumbered in mobile units. Only his own flagship was even close to a match for the Prussian destroyers, let alone their battlecruiser, and the Enemy had eleven ships to his seven- they'd had two squadrons, not one.
With bitter self-reproach learned from a culture where "failure" was the closest word in the language to "sin," Trakenza realized that he had been tricked. The Enemy had drawn him into committing part of his forces against the combined strength of the enemy's two squadrons, neutralizing his missiles and degrading his fighters' effectiveness. The fighters could be rallied, but the only unshaken units under his control were the mixed asset-core ships of Squadron A4F18.
Therefore, trying to hold this position was certain death. By staying near the mining facility, with its fixed EW emitters and the automated defense platform, Trakenza might manage to cost the Enemy a few ships as they came in to dig him out, fighting a beam duel with the Prussian fleet as Keldrog had tried to fight at Hawk's Nest. But he would lose the beam duel, lose his core ships... and lose his own life. There was critical information aboard the core ships that must not be taken by the Enemy in recognizable form, and Trakenza knew that the precautions taken to keep them from falling into Enemy hands would prevent him from surviving defeat.
He could not stand, and there was nothing to be gained from trying, so he would run.
"Signal the starships to form on me and break for the limit on the far side of the star. Signal the fighters to escort us to the hyper limit, bypassing the asset command structure."
They'll achieve nothing against the Enemy now, but they might help screen us if we're pursued aggressively.
"Yes, master."
The Boskonian considered what to do with the fighter pilots. Useful assets, but not valuable enough to justify detaching a starship to retrieve. The fighters themselves were sublight and couldn't escape the system, nor did he have a suitable carrier to take them away in. With an all-core force, he'd be inclined to promise them pickup at the hyper limit, bearing in mind that he could always renege if the enemy pursued his ships. But with Urtraghan assets mixed in, he couldn't afford that; it would make the Urtraghans unmanageable... no, wait. He could salvage the fighters
and the pilots, at least in principle.
"Order the ore freighter docked at the station to make maximum speed towards our evacuation point. The fighters can fly their craft into its main hold there." The freighter's cargo handling equipment would probably damage some of the fighters, and there would most likely be accidents in the confusion, but there was enough volume inside its holds to carry the entire contingent in principle. Some of the pilots and some of the fighters would survive.
It might not work... but it marginally increased the assets he could recover from this disaster.
F-2515 Series Missile Frigate F-2522
Flagship 23rd Frigate Flotilla
Drive signatures!
"Ha! Oskar, you were right, they're moving. Hold on." He turned away from the visiplate where his friend had just finished explaining what he expected the pirates to do... and been proven right.
"All ships, I want a vertical spread, spacing fifty thousand kilometers. Get me tracking data I can use on those pirates, and we'll drop our friends on them."
Boskonian Type 17 Core Ship #98734872
Squadron Flagship, A4F18
The Enemy wasn't pursuing. The ships were spreading out into a picket formation, obviously trying to observe, but no more. A4F18 made its close pass of the system's red dwarf star uneventfully, shields angled to catch the bulk of its radiation. Soon his ships were bound for the far side of the limit, and safety; the Enemy would have trouble jumping around the limit.
He was defeated, but he could escape. The Enemy's overwhelming force would mitigate accusations of incompetence; his fortunes would dive, but he would live to fight another day.
"Sir, more hyperspace tracks, two light-days and closing!"
A single paralyzing thought ran through Trakenza's mind:
There were three Enemy squadrons...
For a few seconds, the Boskonian froze. But in the face of final, irreversible disaster, he would not surrender meekly to the Enemy- not even such a subtle surrender as allowing the Enemy to paralyze him. Trakenza was already issuing orders to A4F18 as the four remaining ships of Rear Admiral von Musel's Sixth Battlecruiser Division jumped out of hyperspace squarely across his path to safety.
Escape Pod 7022
Fleeing Missile Battery 91
Nugak Tranados winced. The chief was almost done cursing, and finished off with a choice Urtraghan epithet that would translate to a speaker of Galstandard English as "Festering dung of every imaginable herd beast!"
The good news was that he wasn't cursing at Nugak about the fish. The bad news was that he had way bigger things to worry about than Nugak's fish, because they'd just gotten their cloacas kicked. He had no idea what had happened to the eight-missile salvo his battery had tossed off, but it didn't really matter. It was pretty obvious that just about everyone's missiles had either got nuked, gone crazy and wandered away, or got shot full of bullets when they made it near the human ships. The humans were all still there... and the alien general had led his ships to bravely run away, towing the fighter jocks along behind him.
Just goes to show you can only trust Urtraghans.
They were floating now, well away from any of the defense platforms... the remaining defense platforms. Jobblod had suggested they hide behind one of the chunks of rock left of the slag piles the humans had broken up with their railguns. He figured that the humans probably wouldn't try to blow up anything they'd already blown up. The chief agreed, and steered the pod for a pile of loose-packed chondrites.
That left them with nothing to do but monitor the broadcasts from the sensor arrays; the pods didn't have high-resolution displays or much in the way of powerful sensors, but they at least had datalinks to the systems on the mining platform. So Nugak happened to be watching the plate when the
big human ships appeared out of nowhere. Right next to Admiral Not-So-Brave.
Festering dung of every imaginable herd beast.
"We're gonna be in trouble, guys..."
Valkyrie-Class Battlecruiser SMS Brunhild
Command Bridge
Konteradmiral Reinhard von Musel brushed a lock of blond hair out of his eye and checked the display. The pirates had a couple of destroyers, one close to cruiser-sized, a frigate of the familiar type that a number of other Coalition forces had clashed with- the spinal plasma gun design- and three corvettes, one of them almost laughably tiny. A match for two battlecruisers, not for four.
They reacted with commendable speed, he'd give them that much. The Zebesians focused fire on the battlecruiser
Sigrun, hammering it with the expect barrage of plasma fire and...
Interesting. I don't think anyone's seen those before. Some of the ships, including the heavy destroyer, had a very odd electronics fit. Best to check the logs afterwards, these might be a new type.
Sigrun stood up well. All Prussian ships were built tough for their tonnage, the
Valkyries unusually so. Moreover, she was using all the tricks her EW suite allowed, and had been from the moment she entered normal space. The Zebesian raiders would need time to nail down her position and target her properly with enough firepower to bring down her shields, time Reinhard had no intention of giving them.
"
Güdr, Hildr, target enemy heavy destroyer." That one was putting out a lot of fire, beam weapons of an unusual type. Better kill it first. "
Sigrun to full evasive,
Brunhild to engage enemy ships in ascending order of tonnage."
Elapsed time fifteen seconds; I should be doing better than that...
Even if Reinhard had been a fraction slow to react after the sensor picture cleared, the proper orders had been given, and the battle soon became anticlimactic. The Zebesian pirate ships simply didn't have the numbers or heavy guns to contest the outcome effectively. The lightest raider- corvette tonnage but probably a merchant conversion- suffered a back-breaking impact from a guided antiship round from
Brunhild, and Reinhard's flagship started working up the chain, engaging one of the other corvettes.
The heavy destroyer survived longer against the combined attack of
Brunhild's two sisters, but was soon forced into radical evasive maneuvers, which made it impossible for her to fire effectively against
Sigrun. That, in turn, freed up the fourth battlecruiser to begin shooting back at her attackers, after which point the battle swiftly became an anticlimax.
Within minutes, all seven pirate ships were picked apart; three had vanished in massive explosions- either contemptible fuel containment or truly excessive scuttling charges. The damage they'd done in return was fairly minor; scarred and ablated armor except for a few low-energy penetrations amidships on
Sigrun.
The pirate fighters were already scattering, having managed to contribute effectively nothing; that left only the defense platforms. There was time to reorganize his forces for the assault on the gun platform; he was far enough out from Zebes that a reinforcement group couldn't arrive quickly enough to be a major problem...
Escape Pod 7022
Awaiting Pickup
It had not been a happy six hours for Nugak. The inside of the pod was starting to smell funny, he'd forgotten to bring the fish food, and there was nothing to do but watch replays of stuff getting blown up.
Meanwhile, for the first hour or so, the humans had hovered around, blowing the hell out of everything they could find and sweeping the debris field with their sensors. The mining facility was a complete wreck; they'd shot up just about every piece large enough to matter, then shot up the smaller pieces too. They'd been well on their way to finishing off the pieces of the pieces when, as one, they ran off and vanished into hyperspace.
The rescue party from Zebes had showed up a while later, by which point there was nothing to do but gather up the survivors. They'd taken their sweet time about it too.
We're gonna be in so much trouble...