Chapter 7: Year 13: Help From Friends

Tom, can you and go get some larger firewood? We’re gonna need it tonight. Now, where were we?

We decided to treat the Jutland Expedition, from our end at least, as good practice for another offensive campaign. Maybe the start of a second expeditionary force like Second Fleet. Call them 2A and 2B? 2.1 and 2.2?

We gave Jack a pair of our Kongos to stiffen Taffy Two, but that shouldn’t weaken Second Fleet at all since we were sending the two Weird Sisters out in their place to see how they did. Everyone assigned spent a couple of days getting comfortable with the organization, then they headed out in three groups.

First was the scout group, the two Larrys and a mixed squadron of I-Shiros. They would come out of hyperspace five light-hours out from Jutland’s primary and do a low-power long-range scan as if getting ready to surprise a system full of dickheads, then stand by for the rest of the fleet.

A day later, the core Task Force should arrive, and they would all go in together unless they had discovered dickheads in more than one place. If that happened, Jack would have to decide whether to stay together and take them one at a time or split up, try for maximum surprise, and take them all at once.

The detachment from Third Fleet would show up at that same rendezvous point a day after that, by which time the early arrivals should be able to tell them if it was safe to go in or not. If the fight was over, we may need resupply. If the fight was still going on, we would need more missiles, coilgun slugs, StarSparrow modules, everything. And, just as important, if the fight was still going on we almost certainly would have ships needing emergency repairs.

Meanwhile, the scout group’s commander would have either decided to sit tight and wait for the big boys, or he would have sent some of his bombers in to try and get in position for a surprise attack of their own. It was very difficult to get any value from surprising the dickheads, but we kept trying. If nothing else, we could occasionally time our attacks to take advantage of defenders being out of position. Of course, that only helped if we took advantage of our better sensors to track down exactly where they all were before we started our attack.

As it turned out, there weren’t any dickheads at Jutland. I know, big surprise. Still, it was a good exercise and it gave everyone involved a better chance of doing the right thing when it came to the real thing.

That included the people at Jutlandat. They knew we were coming, and they were also using our visit as a chance to do some safe training. They detected our scouts’ long-range scan, but that was all they detected until Jack’s people showed up the next day. When the Taffy popped out of hyperspace a light-hour or so from Jutland and started driving in, the locals came out to meet them with several converging forces. Some bigger ships -at least a dozen of their new carriers- plus some smaller ships and a LOT of small craft, their fighters and bombers. If Jack had been hostile, they had a fair chance of driving him off before he could do anything to the colony or their orbital industry.

However, to do that, they left themselves uncovered in other ways. While Jack and the local commander were talking about this and that and their dispositions and their plans, all sixteen of Jack’s patrol bombers turned on their shields, making themselves easy for Confederacy sensors to find them. He had a pair within can’t-possibly-miss range of three different outlying industrial complexes, while the remaining ten were all close enough to Jutland itself to have done a lot of damage before they ever got shot at themselves. Did I mention that the PBYs were as stealthy as we could make them?

The bombers’ skin absorbed as much normal Electromagnetic radiation as possible, so traditional radar and lidar couldn’t detect them. They also carried a little gizmo that produced a field of some sort that absorbed our FTL sensors, too. We didn’t think the Sa’arm would ever figure out how to use those sensors since they needed AI support to run, but the Sa’arm had surprised us before. It was available, so we included it.

Our patrol bombers weren’t as fast as Jutland’s smaller tactical craft, but that wasn’t their job. Their job was to avoid detection and either get in and out with information, or get into position to take advantage of the enemy’s mistakes. Or, in this case, merely to point out that it was possible to lead an enemy to screw up.

If, for some reason, Jack’s expedition really had been hostile, his ships could have kept Jutland’s defenders busy while his bombers snuck in and trashed their colony, their industry, and their forces’ support system. Then, depending upon how his fight was going, he could have gone for maximum enemy losses, knowing that they had no way to repair or replace them, or he could have withdrawn and come back with more later. We had seen the Sa’arm try both, depending upon what they saw.

That was Jack’s first lesson to the Jutlanders, the most important one. In all our fights in Beerat, we had NEVER left Beer uncovered. Anyone we sent out to meet the Sa’arm in deep space was expendable. We ALWAYS left our biggest, our best, our most heavily armed and armored ships behind, covering Beer. If the dickheads somehow got past the ships we sent out to stop them, or even worse destroyed them, when they got to Beer they would find a much more powerful force waiting for them. And, by the time that trap was sprung they would be too far into the HEZ to escape.

The Jutlanders didn’t take that tactical lesson too well, no one likes getting their face rubbed in the dirt, but what could they say? “The Sa’arm don’t fight that way”? Sure, to the best of our knowledge, they didn’t. But, we did, us humans, and sooner or later they would recognize the tactic and start using it themselves. Or, surely the Sa’arm had met other armed species -where did they get their warship designs from?- and they could have learned it from someone else. Best to be ready for it when it happens.

Besides, we weren’t just making up shit. The Sa’arm actually had done this sort of thing at least once, even though it may have been accidental. The last big battle at Beerat had involved two completely separate Sa’arm forces. If we hadn’t been so anal about covering Beer, and they had been just a little more coordinated, they could have used one force to lure our covering ‘Sumo Line’ out of position, then used the other force to capture Beer.

Once their contribution to the expedition was understood, all our PBYs turned their shields off again and faded away into the dark. The Jutlanders didn’t see them again until the two Larrys came in with the engineers and their escorts, another day later. Both Larrys had a full complement of PBYs attached, and who was to say whether those were the same ones as they had already met, or another two squadrons? Sure, since we were all on the same side they could ask the AIs, but what if they had been a hostile force? The Jutlanders had nothing that could run those bombers down if they got a decent head start. Their ships weren’t fast enough and their small craft didn’t have the range.

Jack tried to not be a jerk about it. We wanted Jutland’s carriers, bombers, and most especially their fighters. We really needed those fighters. At the same time, though, we didn’t need them to be flown by idiots who thought that they were the last word in manhood.

What we needed, and what Jutland needed too, was what the US Army used to call “Combined Arms”. If all your army had was infantry, or armor, or artillery, you were easy to stop. But, a defensive line that could stop infantry or armor was helpless before artillery, and a counter-artillery system that could defeat your own artillery was helpless before armor and so on. What you needed was all of the above, plus air support.

For us, we had heavy armor and we had artillery, but we didn’t have close air support and we needed it. For Jutland, they had infantry and air support but not armor or artillery. If we could learn to get along, we could really help each other.

Jack got to play “expert” at some conferences and planning sessions. He had to walk some of their leadership, as well as some of his contemporaries who had come out from Brak for the show and tell, through several of our AARs, showing what we did, how we did it, and why we did it that way. In every case, the ‘right’ tactic was whichever one eliminated all incoming dickheads with an absolute minimum of human casualties. Often, that meant letting them come in to close range before we started firing, because that was the only way to ensure that none of them got away.

On the other hand, doing that meant that you absolutely HAD to have a “Sumo Line” of ships, or fortresses, or something that you could trust to take everything that the Sa’arm could dish out, because if they failed then the Sa’arm got to land and we lost another system. Our first version of a Sumo Line while we were learning this lesson wasn’t that strong, just one semi-mobile experimental ship with a single experimental weapon left someplace where it might be useful, but after our mobile forces had stripped the invading hive ship of all escorts that one experimental gunboat had turned out to be enough.

I remember watching Big Mama blow up completely unexpectedly after she had gotten away from us. We weren’t panicking, we knew we’d catch up with her; she had to slow down to land on the planet and, well, we weren’t planning to land so we had no reason to slow down. Still, she left all her escorts behind to keep us busy and there she was then suddenly there she wasn’t. And, I was sure that Jack would show the part where I was surprised, since I’d forgotten that we’d left Paul Bunyan exactly where she needed to be to do her assigned job of road-block.

Nowadays it was more of a ‘Sumo Ball’; we had Beer completely englobed by Orbital Fortresses armed with just about every weapon we could think of. They weren’t very mobile at all, but they weren’t supposed to be. They were supposed to sit there and look harmless until the Sa’arm were too far into the HEZ to escape, and then pound them apart.

Jack also stressed the ‘information warfare’ part of this; if the dickheads got it stuck in too far to pull out before we hit them, their home system wouldn’t ever learn anything about our new tactics. That allowed us to do the same thing over and over and over again. If we tried that tactic outside the planet’s HEZ, then some of the dickheads would get away. Then, the next time we tried it, they would have come up with some kind of answer to it and life wouldn’t be very much fun after that.

The last part of Jack’s presentation was what we’d been doing with the four Sa’arm systems that were our special project. That, too, hadn’t always gone well. We appeared to have the upper hand in each system, but we had taken devastating losses more than once, and we needed help. We were in a chess match of sorts, where we had a counter to this, but they had a counter to that, and the best answer we knew to our current problem needed manpower we didn’t have.

The Sa’arm had a weapon in their bomber-launched Plasma Torpedos that made getting too close to their planet very expensive. If there were only a few bombers, we could deal with them with missiles and our short-range self-defense systems. If they came at us en masse, we could either run or deal with them with our sun-wall nuclear arrays since their bombers didn’t have shields like their ships did. And our own Patrol Bombers, by the way.

If they came at us in large numbers but didn’t mass up in a bunch, we didn’t have any way to deal with them short of retreat. And, we’d sacrificed a lot of good men and women stripping System Alpha of all their ships and orbital construction. Right now, those dickheads were stuck in that system where they couldn’t tell anyone about their problems. We didn’t want to leave them alone long enough to build starships again. But, with the numbers of bombers they had it was going to get expensive, raiding their orbitals to destroy any half-finished ships and then running again while we could.

In summary, Jack promised to stay at Jutland and cover the colony with his force while they lent us a couple of carriers full of fighters that could work over the dickhead bombers while they were still out of range. We weren’t asking for a complete task force with escorts, we would cover the carriers with our own ships if necessary. All we needed were the fighters and whatever support they needed to get there, kill dickhead bombers for a few days, and get back home again.

It took them a couple of days to make up their minds, but they had already agreed in principle or Jack wouldn’t be there in the first place. What they finally decided to send us was four carriers -they called it ‘two divisions’- of their big new “Illustrious” design, a cruiser, and four small corvettes or frigates -basically just homebuilt Castles or Ainsworths- for close-in defense.

Only nine ships, in return for the what? forty-some-odd? ships we sent them but just as our two Larrys carried eight small craft that made them far more effective than they would appear from just looking at them, their four carriers each held ninety six small craft, one third more than Sol’s Presidential class, divided into eight twelve-ship squadrons.

For this mission, they loaded their carriers with two squadrons of attack craft and six of fighters so the bottom line for us was 288 fighters with some spares carried against losses. They had been planning on sending us two and five, plus a squadron of scouts, but in the face of what our own patrol bombers had done during our entrance they had agreed that we probably didn’t need any scouts. Still, I’d bet good money that some of their ‘spares’ were their scout ships, just in case they needed them.

What designs were their fighters? I don’t remember. Ask the AIs if you want to know. I remember that they were their own design. The Jutlanders thought that they were better than what Earth was sending out, but I didn’t know enough to say. Whatever they were, they are all obsolete now.

Just as important, their experiences at Jutland with their own Sa’arm attacks had taught them to arm and armor their ships far better than the Presidents were. It was not possible to ensure that the carriers wouldn’t be attacked -certainly not without a heavy battle line to hide behind- and the Presidents were too flimsy to survive.

I understood that they had adopted our own honeycomb armor and all of their newer ships used that instead of, or maybe even on top of, their original solid armor. It hadn’t actually been tested yet, but they were pretty sure that their carriers could survive one or two hits by the Sa’arm PTs. Maybe not keep fighting, but survive.

So, about a week after Jack took our beefed-up Taffy Two out to Jutland, we at Beerat got a ‘carrier group’ in return. It was commanded by Jutland’s Vice-Admiral “Junior” Podalski.

Junior was an American with USN experience like me, but instead of being a normal American kid with normal American parents, he was born just a year or so after his parents came to the US from Poland. His real first name was Wrawdiclacz-something, something completely unpronounceable with more silent consonants than vowels, and when he got to school his teachers latched onto the fact that his name was the same as his father’s. He’s been “Junior” ever since, except in official documentation, and to this day I’ll look it up with the AIs before I try to write it out.

Junior checked in with Kevin and Bill, our Ministers of Offense and Defense respectively, then I got to know him at one of those working dinners that can be miserable if the guy in charge is stuffy. I don’t think I’m stuffy. We all agreed that his orders were close enough to what we needed that we would be able to work together, and I tried to stay out of the micro-management after that. I got to watch all the exercises, but I didn’t try to jog their elbows any.

The big problem integrating them into our operations was doctrine. The Jutlanders had bought into the ‘air power’ mindset where any enemy could be overwhelmed with enough bombers, fighters, and other light craft. Since that was what they built, that was what they had when the Sa’arm came to visit, and that was what they used to stop the invaders. Their heroes were all pilots who had been killed making suicide attacks on dickhead starships.

We had all the expected ego problems with his pilots, but we had some of our ships pretend to be a dickhead fleet for our exercises and the hotheads eventually learned that their life expectancy if they attacked a hive ship was just what we’d told them: significantly shorter than a complete battle. They couldn’t complain about the exercises being unfair, since they could talk to the AIs just as well as anyone else and see, after it was over, that we were making this as realistic as we could.

We didn’t want any Japanese-style kamikaze attacks. Those were what you did when you were losing and desperate. Frankly, we didn’t want them to make any attacks of any kind. We had other weapon systems for that.

We weren’t desperate, and we didn’t think we were losing, so what we wanted was an American- or Russian-style methodical destruction of enemy forces with minimal loss of life. Their part of the process was the elimination of a single specific enemy weapon system. Think Chuck Yeager or Eddie Rickenbacker keeping enemy fighters off the bombers and scouts because that’s their job. Or, if you wanted, Manfred von Richthofen eliminating enemy scout and observation planes instead of going after the enemy fighters, because the enemy scouts are his assigned job. Not Mick Mannock, not Billy Bishop. Not even Douglas Bader. Certainly not that loose cannon Frank Luke!

Rickenbacker, Richthofen, and Yeager were tradesmen, not artists or heroes. They did their jobs as competently as they could while giving themselves their best chance to come back and do their jobs again tomorrow. And, when they advanced to leadership positions, all three of those pilots considered losing one of their own pilots to be a personal failure in their leadership.

We had the heavily armed and heavily armored ships we needed to take on the dickhead ships. If there were any. There shouldn’t be, but we could if we had to. And we had the ships to take on the planet itself once their ships were taken care of.

What we didn’t have was a good way to take out all of their small craft, their bombers. The dickhead bombers were the only reason we had invited Jutland to this party, and we did the exercises over and over and over again until Junior could trust his people to do their jobs instead of trying to be dead heroes.

Eventually Kevin and Junior proclaimed the combined fleet ready for offensive operations, they took off, and I went back to biting my nails while I waited for reports. Four carriers, two prototype battleships, five battlecruisers, more than two dozen heavy and assault cruisers, and more light cruisers, destroyers, and light screening units than you could shake a stick at.

It was an immense force, but I couldn’t help but worry. System Alpha still held the Confederacy’s record for the most combat losses in one battle. Uh, Navy record. The Marines had lost far more than that in ground fighting on several different planets.

Between the drive to the planet and sweeps of the rest of the system, it took seven or eight days for Kevin to declare System Alpha under control and tell the Engineers to start building OWPs. Not that they had been waiting for the order, they had been working on them since the fleet had first showed up and gotten the dickhead scout sweeps off their backs. On the plus side, that was the last local Sa’arm system, the last one that we knew had sent fleets to Beerat. Also on the plus side, we got most of our ships back.

On the negative side, most of the larger ships had been chewed up and would need time in the shop. All the armor we had plastered onto our larger ships proved its worth. Daddy survived two hits from Sa’arm bomber-launched plasma torpedos, while Mommy, one of the carriers, and several of our Kongos all survived one hit each. Of course, when we say that you have to remember that these hit numbers should all be ‘plus one or more’ since it took at least one hit to knock down our shields, often more than one, and only after that was done would we take any damage.

The dickheads had tens of thousands of their bombers, and the fleet had to deal with wave after wave of mass attacks. The Sa’arm learned quickly to not bunch up too much as that led to them losing the entire wave to sun-walls, and that meant the campaign was several day’s worth of endless smaller attacks.

Just about every ship in the expedition could point at their logs and say “Here is where we got hit and lost part of our shields, but we got our shields back up before we got hit again.” For many of them, though, it was “ ... and we took another hit before we got the shields back up again”. We lost another one of our Kongos and several of our smaller ships. As always, the smaller ships that got hit were just gone, there was nothing we could do about them except keep trying to kill the bombers at long range, but losing Lion hurt.

Enough of Lion survived that this time we had the sensor records to follow exactly what happened. It was the same thing as before: three or four plasma torpedos coming in not quite at the same time. One knocked out her after shield, and another came in before the forward shield could reconfigure for all-around protection. The second hit scoured a large section of hull clean but the armor kept it out of the core inner spaces. She lost one main turret and a host of other equipment outside the hull, but survived.