Chapter 9: Assault on Sol System

We finally got underway from Brak with just over 200 starships. I doubt if the Confederacy had ever seen that many starships all moving at the same time in the same direction before. I don’t think they had ever seen a member species take their home back from an invader, either.

It was a huge fleet. Sure, we’ve got some even bigger now, but back then it was the biggest one we’d ever put together. And it had the biggest ships we’d built, too.

Start with 13 dreadnaught battleships, a new ship type some dickheads had met the prototypes for but none had lived to talk about. Those 13 all came from Beerat, although most of the crews were from other colonies. Add 23 attack carriers, which the dickheads had some experience with, each with 36 fighters and 60 bombers. Most of them came from Jutland. Back then those guys seemed to have no purpose other than building carriers and the fighters and bombers they would carry. Most of the senior officer corps for the heavy artillery came from Beerat, of course, just like most of the carriers had command staffs from Jutland.

Throw in 47 heavy cruisers from various colonies and fleets, 36 of which were married to our capital ships with clear orders to eat any shipkillers intended for her mate; the other 11 were, with the our six remaining Kongos, the center of the expedition’s “Flying Squadron”. Stir in 28 light cruisers and an even 90 destroyers as screen, they were lumped together as TF 2.4. We weren’t trying to hide so we didn’t take anything smaller.

Task Force 2.3, the 3rd Fleet detachment, wouldn’t be leaving for another two days, and when they got to Sol they were going to stop a light-week out and wait for the all-clear from us. We wanted to make sure everything was secure before we allowed them to enter the system. The brainpower held in those ships was one of our greatest resources and we didn’t want to take a chance on losing any of our erratic geniuses to a roving Sa’arm patrol ship. With their escorts and odd assemblies of spare parts, they had about 25 ships in their detachment.

Actually, the total fleet size was over 250 ships, if you count the composite squadron of I-Shiros and the supporting squadron of PBYs we sent ahead of us as scouts and to warn the remaining defenders that we were on their side. We hoped. Sol had a partial shell of automated missile platforms in the outer system. We knew that the shell worked; it had destroyed the first Sa’arm fleet to reach Sol.

We didn’t want that shell to do the same thing to us, so we worked the problem three different ways: We had gotten the IFF codes that the platforms were supposed to be using, we sent the scouts ahead of us to warn them we were coming, and we were entering the system from a direction that was not yet protected by the incomplete shell. Don’t ever give Murphy an even break. That bastard will fuck you up, down and sideways.

By this time we were on our second generation of both bombers and barges. The PBY-2’s were still kept as small as possible to allow them to sneak, but they were a little larger so that they could carry two missiles each. The barges were a good deal larger than the original “Mark I” barge had been. They had to be a bit larger to support the larger PBY-2s, they had increased storage for missiles and fuel, and they carried two miniaturized tenders that were combinations of a tug, a miner, and a habitat/repair boat. By the time we had shoved in all the improvements that the scouts wanted, the newer barges were almost twice the mass of the originals.

Those two tenders weren’t anywhere near as efficient as the ‘standard’ Confederacy equipment, but if left alone they could muddle through retrieving a broken bomber, or mining materials, or even keeping a couple of bomber crews alive while things like environmental systems were repaired. Just having them along allowed a squadron to remain on station as long as needed. Their deployment length could be ‘indefinite’ if required.

Oh, yeah. The “Mk II” barges also had an engineering replicator, one of the jobs with force-field sides instead of solid walls. As long as the tenders kept it fed it could build complete missiles, or even a new bomber if needed.

About the only thing that our second generation of PBY squadrons couldn’t do was create new crewmen. The crew could do that themselves, but the 14-years-plus-nine-months lead time with no guarantee of success at the end made it awkward. Besides, the crew had orders to not get their conks pregnant while deployed. They were too often stuck out in the middle of nowhere for too long, and the barges didn’t have the facilities to properly take care of either pregnant women or small children.

I don’t know when people started calling them the “Lawrence” class. Someone in Central Command assigned code names to all the Sa’arm classes we encountered. All the names assigned to the Sa’arm hyperspace-capable vessels started with “V”, and all their local-space vessels started with “L”. They went far out of their way to use Latin words. Officially, they were all minor Roman deities, but they’d have to be pretty minor for some of those words. Anyway, the quasi-carrier that the dickheads used to house all their small craft the way we used our carriers appeared to be a local-space-only job, and it somehow got labeled the “Lares” class.

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen, our own people started calling our PBY barges the “Larry” class, and when we finalized the design and sent the data out as a useful ship that anyone could build, it was referred to in the official documentation as the “Lawrence” class of patrol bomber base ship. If you ever hear a PBY guy refer to Larry, he’s talking about his home base, the place his crew-conk sleeps.

The PBYs, both marks, weren’t anywhere near as maneuverable as the smaller fighters and bombers that the fleet carriers launched, but then they didn’t need to be. The missiles they carried were true fire & forget stand-off weapons that could be fired from immense distances and completely forgotten about. Their missiles had two stages of propulsion, with the second stage only firing up to actively home on the target for their final approach. The dickheads knew about our missiles, and could often dodge them after they stopped boosting. Dodging didn’t work, for our PBYs’ two-stage missiles.

The small craft the fleet carriers launched had to close to insanely close ranges to land any damaging hits, and expected crew lifetime in a serious fight was far less than “a complete battle”. Our PBY crews considered the Jutland pilots to be ... less than stable.

Did I mention that we also had seven members of Senegal’s crew aboard Vesuvius, in a secure holding cell? LtCol Jenkins, his XO, and everyone else that we had determined was guilty of cowardice in the face of the enemy had been sentenced to death, and the manner of death we had decided upon was “Marooned on a Sa’arm-held planet”. Specifically, somewhere on Earth, wherever we could land them that was inside the dickhead advance. Fuck every one of them.

We had access to Senegal’s logs and her AI’s records, but we didn’t really know what had started it until we reported what we were doing to Brak, they passed it on to CC, and CC got their base AI to forward the DECO side of the story.

DECO used to have offices in all of the Moonbases, to organize and manage all the extraction teams and supervise the conversion of all the extractees into useful Confederacy citizens. However, all of the upper-management types were on a ship. That had been a whole flotilla of ships, a converted carrier for the bigwigs, a dedicated Kilo for general housing, and a couple of smaller ships for general purposes. When the new Valhalla-class of transports came out, though, the ones that everyone calls ‘cube ships’, DECO hijacked one of the first batch for their own. They renamed it ‘Unity’ and it had enough room for everyone. The colony transport fleet lost a cubeship, but they got back a Kilo and a couple of Auroras so it was probably a pretty even trade since the cubes were simply too big for most colonies.

Anyway, when that last dickhead fleet came in and just blew by the remnants of our defending fleet, CC told everyone near Earth to clear out until it was safe. None of the transports were armed at all, and they were just sitting ducks. Of course Unity and all of the DECO transports followed that order!

Then, when they saw Unity with all the upper-management DECO bastards got underway from Earth orbit to avoid the impending battle, the people in one of DECO’s Moonbase offices panicked when they realized they had been left behind.

Well, there was probably a lot of that going around, but in this particular case the guy in charge of the office had a brother who just happened to be in command of one of the ships that survived the battle and was near enough to respond to his brother’s plea for evacuation.

Central Command was not happy about Senegal evacuating the office people and running for safety, but until we reported in there wasn’t much they could do. They didn’t even know where Senegal had gone. CC was pleased to tell us that the Sa’arm had completely ignored the Moon, and with all their ships either destroyed in space or landed on Earth they had no way to bother the moonbases. No one in any of the moonbases had been disturbed at all.

Remember how I started this story, in the hot tub? Your grandmother Sally was with us too, on one of the cruisers. She’d come with us as one of our senior Cadets and reached her 14th birthday while we were getting organized at Brak. She passed her first CAP test and went Navy. Ensign Williams had been assigned as the assistant Damage Control Officer on one of our cruisers. In Condition 3 she was based out of a DC locker just forward of “B” turret and was responsible for “rapid restoration of equipment and services” on everything from #3 Power Room forward. Her boss, the real DCO, worked out of DC Central and had the back half of the ship.

That made me feel real good. Hector had joined the Marines on his 14th birthday like we’d always known he would, and I was glad that our second child had gone Navy. Your grandmother has much more sense than her brother!

Hector was smart about some things, but about others he was a typical Marine. He’d taken in two blonde friends, the kind that were ‘beautiful but stupid’, and they were pumping out grandchildren for Tina as fast as they could process them.

Sally had picked one of her male age-group friends who didn’t pass the test to come with her and keep her warm at night, saying that since she could only take one conk with her there wasn’t any point in selecting a second one until we got back to Beerat. She also had to put off having children until we got back, since we didn’t want our crews pregnant. Joannie was going to have to wait a couple more years for her first grandchildren.

I was glad of that, since Sally had insisted on spending her first night as an adult with me. I wasn’t so sure that this was a good idea, but everyone else was telling me to stop whining and give my daughter her birthday present so I tried to be good to her.

She may have been technically a virgin as in no one had ever put their Tab A into her Slot B before, but growing up in the Confederacy meant that she’d seen everything, and done everything else as much as she’d wanted and there really wasn’t much I could teach her. She just wanted to spend a night with her Daddy before moving into her own quarters. I tried to be good to her, and I certainly had a good time.

She was quite a bit younger than I preferred, but she was a beautiful young woman and I didn’t have any trouble giving her everything she wanted. My oldest daughter had a smile on her face when we woke up in the morning, so I had done my assigned task.

Oh, and she certainly had enough of her mother in her that I had a good time, too. I did make a ‘note to self’ for the future, though. Yeah, that was really asking the AIs to remind me do do something. Having the AIs always listening meant that if we really wanted to remember something they would help us.

Joannie didn’t deal well with abandonment. She went off the rails every time I had to take off in a ship to go somewhere, leaving her behind on some base with all our children. We’d had to sedate her more than once.

She REALLY didn’t deal well with betrayal, with her man sleeping with another woman. I’ve mentioned before that she was the sort of woman who would enforce marital fidelity with a .38 revolver. If she ever caught her man in bed with another woman, she would shoot them both and leave them for the police to find while she moved to another state. Out in the colonies, she’d accepted that she was one-of-four in our family, but it had better be just those four.

Her daughter Sally may well find happiness with just a pair of male companions. I hoped she did. If they were old enough to be Conks, then they’d know to not stray. Their dicks belonged to HER, and they wouldn’t go anywhere else without her permission. I figured that they would get enough exercise, just keeping her happy.

If Sally ever decided to combine households with a male Sponsor, though, I needed to track him down and have a talk with him. If he threw his lot in with Sally Williams, then he needed to keep his dick in his pants any time he was away from home. Sure, any of his conks were fine, as well as any of Sally’s female conks, but anyone else, any women not in the family, would be ‘cheating’.

Sally had enough of her mother in her that whoever she took up with should be warned. Sure, the words would come from an Admiral, a Colonial Governor, and an acting System Governor, but the warning would come from the man who had stayed alive for a decade with Sally’s mother. My dick didn’t get stuck in strange without permission. Granted, for me that permission came from Hannah, and Joanne accepted that, but if he’d combined households with Sally then for him that permission had better come from Sally or he didn’t have permission.

“Sir, I acknowledge your rank. You are a full Admiral. I’m just a Colonel. Your rank is superior to mine no matter how we look at it. However, that’s not relevant in this case. You are not in my chain of command and I have clear orders to not submit to any authority based in Sol local space. I am to cooperate as much as possible while performing my assigned duties, but submitting to your authority will prevent me from carrying out my assigned duties.”

“I don’t care about your assigned duties! You will...”

“Sir, that’s the whole problem in a nutshell. Out in the colonies we’ve never understood what you people are doing here at home. However, we do understand that you don’t care about anyone except yourselves. If you review my orders and read between the lines, it’s pretty clear that my superiors don’t care much about you, either. There’s a fleet coming that’s big enough to end this mess, and that will go a lot easier if you don’t get in their way. It would go easier still if you helped them, but I don’t think my superiors actually expect that.”

“Now, sir, my people are competent in their jobs and they can continue on without me if you need to continue this conversation, but I would prefer to go back to my job, which is to ensure that no accidents befall the 7th District Combined Fleet when it shows up in a couple of days. When they get here I will make sure that my superiors know that you want to talk to them. Good day, sir!”

That was, I think, the fourth such conversation that Colonel Everett, the scout squadron’s skipper, had gone through. The first one, with the captain of the frigate that Sol’s Outer Patrol Force had sent to investigate them, hadn’t been too acrimonious. The man had known that this wasn’t military, it was politics, and far over his head. Our man had noted in his commentary that the frigate’s CO would probably be a reliable officer, if he was ever given orders that made sense.

Colonel Everett had refused the OPF frigate’s suggestion that he wait outside of the system until things were worked out, and had moved in as required to perform his assigned duties. He had gone through much the same conversation with the watch supervisor for Sol’s Outer System Traffic Control Center, the Admiral commanding the Inner System Defense Force, and last Grand Admiral Franken, the officer commanding all of Sol’s defenses.

Franken had only had that job for about two months now. He had commanded one of the regional defense zones when the 4th Sa’arm force had popped in and blown away the remaining defenders. As the senior surviving operational commander he had assumed overall command of the system immediately, and after the smoke had cleared CC had confirmed him in overall command rather than shuffle people around even more.

Franken had done a good job with the shit-sandwich he’d been handed. He, at least, hadn’t gotten all of his people killed. He’d even gotten them organized enough to take out one of the hive ships hovering over Earth before it was done unloading and that may have made all the difference for Russia. Still, he was a ‘local’ and could be depended upon to enforce the “important people first” mindset of CC and DECO. Colonel Everett wasn’t about to drop his assigned duties just because Franken had ‘better ideas’.

When we popped out of hyperspace a couple of light-hours out from Sol, we had found one of our patrol bombers waiting for us with an updated briefing on local conditions. We still called it an AAR even though there hadn’t been any ‘action’ yet.

Jack had immediately passed the entire briefing on to each of the task force commanders. The division commanders, too, which included me, the guy who only commanded the 3rd Battleship Division. Reviewing it, it was clear that I was probably going to have to stop playing sailor and put my ‘Governor’ cap back on pretty soon.

However, we still didn’t have clear policy about what authority a colony, planetary, or system governor had outside the jurisdiction of that colony, planet, or system. Was I important here, or was I just another dime-a-dozen Rear Admiral? Or, was I guilty of crimes against the Confederacy if I gave any orders? Cracky had been unwilling, either that or unable, to give me meaningful answers.

Existing policy was inappropriate and the AIs were still developing a revision. About the only ‘policy’ they could give me was a pair of general rules or principles; no System Governor could have authority over more than one system at a time, and there was not -and never would be- any position of authority -in the Human part of the Confederacy- higher than a System Governor.

All systems would remain independent politically, other than being equal members of the Confederacy. The AIs did NOT want us to build the kind of unified empire that we humans tended to build if left to our own devices. Our Military District system had originally been developed to counter Central Command’s attempts at creating a centralized fleet, but in some cases the individual Districts were also trying to become empires in their own right.

I got the strong impression that they regarded 7th District’s Combined Fleet as a case of excessive cooperation that would have been strongly discouraged if we didn’t have such a clear mandate to recover Earth. When we were done here, they wanted us to disband what we had built, instead of keeping it going and building more.

I won’t say I was surprised at this, since we’d had quite a few discussions about our goals when we started conquering the Sa’arm systems around Beerat. The AIs had pushed us pretty hard to ‘colonize’ those systems, and they had seemed happier with us when each one had ‘civilian’ workers and families living in those systems, repairing our ships and building the OWPs. That let them declare each system to be an independent colony in its own right.

Just as our Fourth Fleet with its OWPs took over monitoring the dickhead planets from Second Fleet’s warships, our “Gamma Base” and “Delta Base” became the colonies of Gammaat and Deltaat and started taking over the monitoring job from our 4th Fleet as they grew. At some point, they declared themselves capable of assuming responsibility for the entire system, and ‘our’ people either turned their equipment over and came home to Beerat, brought their equipment with them when they returned, or stayed and became members of the new colony. Alpha Base in System Alpha was almost ready to do the same thing and become known as Alphaat instead.

Here in Sol we had to walk a thin line between just helping the locals and being an occupying power. Part of that was my status. What was I, really? As a Rear Admiral, I was fine. Where I stood in respect to Sol System as a visiting Governor, though, was still under discussion and that discussion would not be complete until ‘our’ fleet AIs had consulted with ‘their’ AIs, the ones at Sol, as well as all the other AIs in the Confederacy. How long was that going to take?

Getting back to things that we did know, Everett’s orders had given him several tasks, some of which could be done in parallel. They started with the location of all Sa’arm ships, and their elimination if his force was capable. If not, then simply locating them all for us was good enough. We didn’t want any silly suicide attacks. He had backup coming and they could wait.

This part was easy; careful analysis of all data from the 4th Battle of Earthat had established that two Vacunas had re-entered hyperspace soon after the dickheads had started moving again after their pause in the middle of the fight. While those two might bring more dickheads later, they weren’t here yet. All other Sa’arm spacecraft had either been destroyed in the remaining part of the battle -some of the smaller ones by ramming our few remaining defending ships- or survived and landed on Earth. There were no Sa’arm ships in Sol space.

Actually, the bigger colony ships hadn’t landed per se. The smaller ones, the escorts, had landed, but the bigger ones had hovered over their landing area, then come apart. We’d seen parts of this before, but this was the first time we had the sensor network to really get a good look at the process. Each of their larger ships were apparently modular, with most of the outer several layers capable of splitting up into smaller landing ‘craft’ that established a beachhead while the remaining ship provided overwatch and artillery support.

Here was a tactical detail that we had never noticed before, never before having the sensor network it would take. Each of those ‘landing craft’ had, on one side, a heavy Plasma Beam turret useful for both ship-to-ship combat plus the kind of outer hull you might expect of a starship which went to possibly unfriendly systems to argue with the locals. The other side of the hull, we assumed the side that was ‘in’ when mated with the rest of the starship, wasn’t anywhere near as well-armored. Or armed, for that matter.

Both the Russians and the Americans had discovered that on their own. Huge missiles that came up from the ground and hit the lower hull had little effect. Much smaller missiles designed for air-to-air combat that hit the upper hull had far greater effect. The problem with this as a repeatable tactic was that it took many high-performance airplanes for a few of them to survive long enough to get any hits.

The Americans may have had better aircraft, but they didn’t have enough of them to make that sort of attack very many times. While the defenders were attacking the landing craft, they were getting shot at by their target, other landing craft if any were nearby, weapon systems already landed and set up, and every weapon system still mounted on the mother ship. Only the Russians had the numbers of tactical aircraft it took to repeatedly swamp the dickhead defenses and destroy a Sa’arm lander.

Well, the Chinese probably had enough, too, but they weren’t about to help their enemies. They sat behind their borders until the Russians and the Indians withdrew their men to help at home, and then advanced into the abandoned land. That didn’t make them many friends!

The colony ships above Australia, India, Canada, and Brazil were able to clear their landing zone and get the entire expedition down in good shape. That was pretty embarrassing for us Americans. We couldn’t do any better than the rest of the world?

The one in Antarctica faced no opposition at all, but the ship itself was damaged -it was thought that it had been trying to land somewhere in southern Europe, maybe the flat lowlands of southeastern France or northwestern Italy- and the Sa’arm inside it never got their colony going. Since most of the NATO nations didn’t really have any immediate need for their navies, NATO was able to send a marine expedition down to Antarctica and destroy the colony ship where it sat in the snow and ice before the different contingents scattered to go help defend their homes.

The ship that tried to land in Russia was the only one to face serious opposition from the natives. The Russian psyche was paranoid and they were still ready to fight off Napoleon, Hitler, or whoever invaded next. The Russian Army had more main battle tanks and combat aircraft than the rest of the world combined. Okay, that wasn’t really true, China probably had even more than Russia, but they didn’t advertise the way the Russians did. Anyway, everything available was thrown at the invaders while they tried to land. It wasn’t all first-line, but every tank and airplane was armed with something, and they all tried to get close enough to shoot.

The Russians lost just about everything they threw, but the Sa’arm also lost much of that landing force. Most of the missiles didn’t have much effect on the landing craft, but the Russians also had other weapon systems. Besides their aircraft, they had tens of thousands of armored ground vehicles. A main battle tank originally built to defend the Rodina from a Chinese or Moslem invasion won’t survive a direct hit from a Sa’arm plasma beam, but Russia had thousands of MBTs updated with Confederacy tech. Some hundreds of them were close enough to the landing site to participate. They not only had lasers that could penetrate a spaceship’s hull if it wasn’t too far away, they had the fire control systems to aim them, and it didn’t take too many penetrating hits to down a Sa’arm lander.

The Sa’rm pulled landers from the other forces to reinforce the north Asian landing force, and the need to defend the landing site from converging ground forces slowed them down even more. That was one of the few bright spots in the space battle. Before that landing was complete Franken had pulled together the remnants of the scattered defending fleet and destroyed the part of the colony ship that was still up in low space over Siberia.

Actually, the analysts were thinking that the other landing forces might have been even more overwhelming in the initial fight if many of their landers and combat equipment hadn’t been thrown into the battle for Siberia. What-ifs don’t mean a lot, but the Russians chewed up the Siberian landing force badly. If that was the only colony ship, the Russians might have beaten the few survivors on the ground. Certainly, they would have if the other planetary militaries had helped them. As it was, by now we understood that all the Sa’arm anywhere on the planet were united into one mind, and every group no matter how small would have the entire planetary group-mind behind it.

And there had been several other landings. If the last Russian soldier in Siberia died killing the last dickhead in Siberia, Russia would be defenseless against the other landing forces. The African group had broken out of the Sinai by then, and the Russians had to worry about both them and the Sa’arm force down in India. By the time what was left of the mothership was destroyed up above the landing site, the remaining Russians felt forced to withdraw westward toward the Urals and try to defend their heartland, allowing the survivors in that landing group to dig in and recover.

Anyway, Sol System had an extensive sensor net and every Sa’arm ship had been tracked. Aside from the ships that landed, there were no Sa’arm ships anywhere in the system. And it appeared that all of the ships that had landed had been cannibalized for equipment and materials. They were probably designed for that, too. The bottom line was that the Sa’arm had no ships in Sol system, either in space or on the ground. Maybe they could run that process backwards, in a few years when they were ready to start building another invasion fleet, but for now there were no Sa’arm ships in the system.

They still had a bunch of their armed and armored landing craft, large boats or shuttles, but our working theory was that they were local-space only craft, hitching a ride on the core colony ships whenever they needed to go to another system. That was just a theory, though. Once we had warships over Earth we made those things a priority. Whenever we found one we killed it.

Anyway, the current answer to that question was “There are no Sa’arm starships in the system”. Still, Sol’s Home (or First) Fleet had been gutted and as much as I lusted after Sol’s sensor network they also should have patrol forces. One of our first messages back to Brak was “Have Beerat send us some more Larrys”.