Chapter 14

Ensign Chandler walked into the conn. “Hey, Pappy, I just got some bad news.”

“Something wrong with the engines?” The ship seemed to be running perfectly fine. The XO quickly looked over at his displays to see what the problem might be.

“No, nothing like that. We just got in range of Truman and I got a message from the ordnance people. There’s going to be a delay in the production of the anti-ship ARMs and the mines.”

“How much of a delay?” This was bad news. Those two new weapons were going to be huge for us.

“Pretty much indefinite unless you can scrounge up a couple hundred kilograms of plutonium.”

“Can’t the replicators just make it?” They can make everything else.”

“Replicators don’t work that way. When we load stores for a cruise, I lay in an inventory of raw materials of different types that the replicators can use as inputs to make things like drones or tools and such. The closer the raw materials are in composition to the materials needed for the output, the more efficient it is. But it can’t turn lead into gold, for example. The Confederacy doesn’t have alchemy, yet.”

I mused “and I suppose there’s no sleep training module that might help there?”

“Not that I’ve been able to see, but we’ve hardly put a dent in that list. I’m not expecting to find it.”

“And there’s no stockpile of strategic materials out there they can draw from?”

“Nope. They’re not even trying to mine for fissile materials, since the only use for them is weapons production. Don’t need it for power generation, don’t need it for medicine, and it’s not fun to have it around, anyway. Everybody is busy working on food and shelter for new colonists and sourcing basic raw materials for that.”

“So am I right in thinking that the only source of stuff like uranium and plutonium is earth?”

Chris sighed. “Pretty much. I think the Confederacy made a deal a while back to use some obsolete warheads from the US inventory, but I don’t expect they can keep going back to ask for more. There are unexploited deposits of uranium on earth that could be picked up by the Confederacy and brought back, but that would be a huge effort and take, I would guess, a month or more. That’s if they decided this was so important that they’d stop whatever else they were doing and put us at the top of their priority list.”

“As far as other sources, the ship’s AI isn’t aware of any. Maybe there’s a little out in some asteroid fields, but nobody is looking for it specifically, and any they’ve been able to find would have been by sheer luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are actually disposing of any nuclear materials they find.”

I shook my head. “So, options?”

“We can wait until the supply situation sorts itself out. I don’t think we’re the only ones asking for this.”

“That’s a big no,” I answered.

“We can go back to the drawing board and design alternatives that use conventional warheads.”

“I don’t suppose we can avoid doing that.”

“I agree,” Chris said. “Or lastly we could find some other way to make a big bang and invent something new that doesn’t require materials that are unavailable. Possibilities would be antimatter, singularity generation, charge-parity symmetry exploitation, maybe even dark matter.”

“Which puts us in a holding pattern until we solve Einstein’s Unified Field. Maybe those sleep training modules will spark some brilliant idea from one of us like Hendricks did. We’re not going to sit around waiting for that to happen.”

“So here’s what we’re going to do. As soon as we get back, how about you, Todd and Will start working on some conventional alternatives that ordnance will be able to produce quickly. That mission bay isn’t going to be of much use if we don’t have things to load in there.”

“Sounds like a plan, Pappy.”

When we got to the dock I headed right out to see Colonel Decker.

“Lieutenant, have a good cruise?” he asked.

“It went pretty well. The space-to-ground ARM seemed to work well, our stealth seemed to hold up, and dropping off the gift box for the Sa’arm near their usual FTL entry point into the system went without a hitch. We did get some bad news, though.”

“What’s that?” Colonel Decker asked with concern.

“No nukes. Ordnance can’t get them made. Any chance you have some plutonium stashed somewhere we could use?”

A few months ago, the idea of walking up to my commanding officer and asking if he had any spare plutonium laying around that I could use would have seemed beyond ridiculous. Here I was doing just that. My, how the times have changed.

He chuckled. “I wish I did. AI, what is the nearest source of plutonium to Truman?”

<I am aware of no mineralogical surveys to locate sources of plutonium. Earth has limited quantities.”>

“How about uranium?”

<Uranium has been located on several colonies and on three asteroids. The closest source is 92 light years away.>

“Can that source be exploited?”

<Unlikely. The closest source is an asteroid which appears to have only trace quantities of uranium.>

“How far away is the closest potentially exploitable source?”

<Two hundred and thirty-two light years. The source was found on a planet that was considered unsuitable for colonization.>

“In other words, a hell-hole.”

<Yes. That was precisely one of the descriptions used.>

“What would your best estimate be of the time it would take to start mining operations there, perform whatever processes are required to process and enrich the ore and have it arrive at Truman?”

<If no resource limitations are considered, the earliest arrival of an enriched uranium product at Truman would be in four years and eighty-seven days.>

I piped in “How about getting some from Earth? That would be quicker.”

<All nuclear materials on Earth are being dedicated to the defense of Earth by order of CENTCOM.>

I suppose someone else has asked that question before.

Colonel Decker looked resigned. “I know how important those nukes were to you. I’ll send a tasking up the chain of command for them to start actually looking for this stuff if they aren’t already and to start mining known resources. I just don’t know how long it’s going to take before we solve this.”

“I understand, sir, and thanks for trying. In the meantime we’re redesigning those payloads to use conventional warheads and are looking for other opportunities to get a better bang for the buck that won’t rely on nuclear materials. I’ll let you know what we come up with.”

“Good luck there. And sorry we didn’t catch the issue with resource availability on your original designs earlier. I was so excited by the prospect of the fleet being able to employ stand-off nuclear weapons against the Sa’arm that I never thought about whether there might be an issue producing them.”

“That was our mistake as well. And heck, if all this was easy, they wouldn’t be paying you the big bucks.”

“Lieutenant, they aren’t paying me at all,” Colonel Decker observed with a smirk.

“See how great this all is? We get to do the impossible with nothing, and don’t even have to worry about whether our next paycheck is going to arrive on time! Confederacy life is just swell!”

We shared a bit of a laugh at that.

“I’m sure you have real work to do, so how about you get out there and earn your keep you lazy bastard!” Colonel Decker joked.

“Right away, sir. I’ll get you an update as soon as I can.”

After I left Colonel Decker’s office I ran into Colonel Barlow, who was probably there to see headquarters staff. This sort of encounter was exactly the reason I didn’t like being near headquarters.

“Lieutenant, any news?”

I put on a smile and shook his hand. “News about what, sir?”

“The Trojan horse thing. Any news about that?”

“We just deployed our first one a few days ago. We’re waiting to see what happens.”

“Please keep me in the loop. I want to start painting little icons of the kills we’ve made on my office door. I’m hoping we fill the whole thing up!”

“That sounds like a great idea, sir, and you’d definitely deserve the recognition,” I lied. “Hey, when that happens we should have a little ceremony in front of your office, and I’ve even got someone who is a really good graphic artist who can do the icons. Is there someone on your staff that I can coordinate with when the time comes?”

Colonel Barlow’s eyes lit up. “Sure, I’ll have you work all that out with Sergeant Gorman. I’m really looking forward to this! Well, I have a meeting to get to, so I’ll see you later, right?”

“I’m sure it won’t be long before we get some good news, sir!”

With that the Colonel happily strode away.

“Hey there, Sergeant White!” I exclaimed when I entered the Sheep Pen. “If I could give you a sure bet to make, do you think you could get a REMF to give you some good booze or something else you might need around here?”

“Yeah, I’m sure those guys hoard all the good stuff. It always works that way. Whatcha got, Pappy?”

“I’d like you to make friends with Ensign Gordon over at Port Ops. Bet him that a penis could get painted on Colonel Barlow’s office door within the next thirty days, and that the Colonel will be happy about it.”

Sergeant White howled in laughter. “Pappy, how the hell are we going to pull that off?”

“Colonel Barlow wants to have icons put on his door for all the kills his Trojan gift box makes. The voiceover seems to have given him a sense of ownership of the project. I told him we could handle all the details.”

“We’re going to paint a dick on his door! Oh, man, that is so appropriate! Say, what am I going to offer him as stakes?”

“Tell him you have a piece of Sa’arm wreckage that we recovered after that last battle. Those guys always love war trophies.”

“But Pappy, we don’t have any Sa’arm wreckage.”

“Go have the replicator make you a piece of scrap metal and bang on it a few times with a hammer, then hit it with a cutting torch. Make it look like shit. He won’t know the difference, especially if he can’t inspect it too closely. If you offer to sell it to him and he doesn’t have anything valuable enough to trade for this very rare, one-of-a-kind, absolutely unique artifact, you can probably turn it all into a bet pretty easily.”

Sergeant White nodded in understanding. “Man, I’m glad you’re on our side.”

“So now that we have that project out of the way for a bit, how are we doing on our ordnance plans?”

Sergeant White switched gears quickly. “We have a couple of different mine warfare options, and really none of them look super great for us. Nukes can be pretty small, but we can’t fit enough explosives in a package that we can get into the mission bay to do the original idea. We can’t just do a big bang and expect nearby ships will get killed.”

“We gotta have some sort of terminal guidance and boost on ‘em to have them make contact to work. I think we’re going to go with a bunch of pretty small rockets like RPGs. When they wake up because a ship got close, they would shoot towards the ship and hit it.”

“So you’re thinking of something like a shaped charge here? Not a bad idea. They can be small and still do a lot of damage. How far can these things fly?”

“The AI says they’ll work pretty well within five hundred meters. The idea is to have a lot of them going for a ship at the same time to make it hard for them to react.”

“Any chance for them to wait until a ship is inside the field and have them all activate at the same time? It would make it harder for them.”

“That would be adding a lot of processing and they’d have to communicate with each other, like with a mesh network. I’ll check with the AI and see if that would work.”

I went over to the XO and Chandler, who had been working on the tougher problem of the anti-ship ARMs.

“Come up with anything, guys?”

“We enhanced the terminal guidance package and maneuvering for the missile to have it make a contact hit, and it’s going to deliver something like a thirty kilogram armor-piercing bomb. The concern is that we might be aiming at an antenna instead of the center of mass on the target, so we changed the late terminal guidance to switch over to active radar homing when it gets within two hundred meters. We would have liked to make the warhead bigger, but we’re limited by mass and cube, and we wanted to maintain the original capacity of three weapons in the bay, since the Sa’arm always seem to operate in threes.”

“It won’t be nearly as effective as our original idea, but it’ll do some damage. Maybe not enough to knock out a target, but having one of these shoved into your guts will hurt a lot. They key here is to have penetration before it detonates, so all the energy gets contained in the target. If they’re compartmentalized like we are, whatever compartment we hit is toast at minimum. If they’re open it’ll wreck a whole section of the ship.”

“Not bad at all,” I complimented. That’s good work. Get it over to ordnance and have them start working on them. I think we’re going to need four as soon as they can possibly make them, as I’d like to see if we can test one before we go into combat.”

Sergeant White came over to me. “Pappy, the AI said this would be no problem and would only be a software change and then adding some really small, low-power radios. We worked it up so the mines would all keep count of how many of them had a target. As long as the number goes up, they sit and wait. As soon as the count drops by one they all go off. That means at least two have to have a target in order for anything to happen. It’s pretty simple.”

“No, I call that elegant. Good work, Will.”

Chris piped up. “How many can we fit?”

“They’re pretty small. Seventy two fit in a deployment case and we can fit three cases. The deployment case is what ejects them instead of the mission bay system.”

“Two hundred and sixteen isn’t that bad a payload. I’d love more, but we’re not designed to be a minelayer,” Chris noted.

“I like this,” I responded. “Go ahead and work this up and get it to ordnance. Let them know the ARMs are a higher priority, but that we’ll want a full load made as soon as we get the initial batch of ARMs done.”

“Roger that, Pappy,” Chandler replied.

It took about two more days for ordnance to get our initial production run squeezed into their schedule and ready for us. I had them load one ARM into the bay and we had a target buoy with a transponder put far out from Trumanat so we could have a clear gunnery range. If this thing deviated from the expected, there would be hell to pay if it picked out a target we didn’t intend.

We fired from about a hundred and fifty kilometers away from the target. The missile worked just fine and hit the buoy dead-center before it blew it all to hell. Of course a buoy is a lot smaller than a ship, but at least we had confirmed that it was accurate and did, in fact, go ‘bang.’

As soon as we got the test report to Colonel Decker he had us load up with three more and sent us out to Tulak to join the blockade fleet.

We had been sitting out by ourselves between Tulak and where the Sa’arm usually drop out of FTL for more than a week now, sitting still quietly and waiting, endlessly waiting for something to happen. We had two of the crew monitoring the sensors on rotations and everyone else resting, or hanging out in the wardroom. Todd and I rotated between the two of us at standing watches in the conn.

“Captain to the conn.” the 1MC announced.

I walked aft to the conn to see Todd all excited and talking to sensors. He turned to me.

“Captain, we have three bogeys dropping out of FTL pretty close to where we expected them.”

“Conn, Sensors. We have identified Sierra One, Two and Three as Vacuna scout ships. They are starting a burn. Intercept in three hours.”

“AI, plot a burn for intercept and a firing solution for us to hit them five minutes after they would stop at Trojan One, assuming they will do that. If they do not stop to at Trojan One I want the plot to still successfully engage them.”

Since they were coming straight at us and our gift box was pretty much directly in-line, there wasn’t any angular problem involved. That’s why we picked this spot, gambling on their predictability.

I wanted to give the ARMs a little velocity boost, so if we did a burn ourselves the increase in closing speed of the missiles to their targets would give the Sa’arm less time to react. I was looking for every advantage we could get here.

<Course and launch plotted. Recommend burn in three minutes.>

“OK, Todd, let’s get this show on the road.”

“AI, you have the helm. Commence burn at your discretion.”

<I have the helm.>

“1MC.” Beep. “General Quarters, Set condition Zebra throughout the ship.”

Crewmen rushed past us in the conn to get to their stations. After a moment Todd declared that all stations were manned and ready.

“All stations, report.”

“Conn, Sensors. Sierra One, Two and Three remain on previous course. Shrewsbury Castle and Cancun are maneuvering to intercept.”

“Conn, Engineering. All green across the board.”

“Burn initiating in 45 seconds. XO, stand by for weapons release by AI countdown.”

The burn started and we accelerated towards the enemy at one-quarter power in order to maintain some degree of stealth. We watched the AI count down for five minutes before the counter hit zero.

“Fox Six, Fox Six, Fox Six. All missiles away and tracking normally, captain,” the XO said.

The AI immediately cut the burn and I watched the missiles streak away on their initial burn in my VR headset. We were going to continue coasting until missile impact so we wouldn’t spook the targets and potentially have them change course.

We waited patiently for another half hour before Sensors noticed any changes in the behavior of the Sa’arm.

“Conn, Sensors. Targets Sierra One, Two and Three are decelerating. It appears they are investigating Trojan One.”

“Sensors, conn. I’m going to flip us around a bit so you can get optimal sensor coverage on the targets. Keep a close eye on them for me.”

“Conn, Sensors. Understood.”

“AI, I have the helm.”

<You have the helm.>

I turned the ship ninety degrees and pointed our topside towards the targets.

“AI, plot a course for us to open maximum range against the targets.”

<Course plotted.>

Fifteen minutes later Sensors announced that the three targets were stationary at Trojan One. They had taken the bait. Now would they bring the box inside?

<Impact in five minutes.>

Please, please put that stupid thing inside your ship!

“Conn, Sensors. We have detected a short radio pulse in the HF band from Sierra Three.”

I pumped my arm in celebration. The buggers had done it. Well, it sure looked like they did. That radio pulse could have been caused by electrical equipment arcing as a result of physical damage, and being so uncharacteristic of the signals we usually saw from the Sa’arm it looked like pretty solid evidence. Colonel Barlow was going to be thrilled!

<Impact in twenty seconds.>

Oh, the timing here was working out perfectly.

The AI counted down the seconds until it announced impact.

“Conn, Sensors. Sierra One and Sierra Three are now radio silent. Sierra Two remains stationary.”

“AI, execute.”

<Executing.>

The AI started us on a burn ninety degrees from our previous trajectory, and towards the direction the Patrician Class corvette Cancun was burning towards the targets.

“Conn, Sensors. Sierra One appears to be rotating on two axes and is a probable kill. Sierra Two is starting a burn. Sierra Three remains stationary and is a possible kill.”

“Sensors, conn. Getting anything on optical?”

“Negative, conn. Range is too great.”

I put on the VR headset and saw the icon for Sierra Two start to move.

“Conn, Sensors. Sierra Two is attempting an intercept. Closing at 230 meters per second. I’m not sure if they’ll have the geometry to be successful.”

“Understood, Sensors. Spin up the EW gear and start jamming their active sensors.”

“Conn, Sensors. Executing.”

A moment later Sensors came back with an update.