CHAPTER 2
MS Sojourner
Kuiper Belt
Zuko's eyes opened wide as the emergency action message flitted across his monocle. Most officers in the Martian Navy preferred wraparounds, but Zuko liked the asymmetry of the monocle, which helped hide – if only just – the burn scar over his left eye.
He shook his head, got out of his sleeping bag, and floated down the spine of the frigate to the control room, where the captain was sipping coffee through a bulb. The captain eyed him distastefully. "What is it, commissar?"
Zuko gritted his teeth. Commander Jee and his crew heavily resented being used as what amounted to being a flying status symbol for the spoiled brats of Martian high society, and never failed to remind him of it.
"Commander, we have new orders."
"I've received no new orders from Fleet Command."
"These orders come straight from Military Intelligence." He tossed an orbital plot onto the main display. "These are our targets. I want to be ready to execute in fifteen minutes."
Jee exhaled sharply as he read the orders.
The Nomads were back.
And if Martian Intelligence had picked up on it, so had every other signals intelligence agency in the system.
=O=
Across the heavens, three, then four, then six groups of ships puffed thrusters, flipped around, and burned towards the Kuiper Belt, spewing hundreds of gigawatts of fusion energy across the heavens, bright enough for any mook with a backyard telescope to see and track.
=O=
Zuko leapt up the ship's spine without using the handrail, heedless of the several hundredths of a gravity that could (slowly) drag him to his doom. The ship thrummed with power as the fusion engine spat thermonuclear flame into the void. Already, less than one minute after the start of the burn, Sojourner had already gained a stunning forty kilometers an hour.
A man could cycle faster than that.
Zuko groaned at the snail-like acceleration of the burn. But fusion torches had limitations, and this was the best that could be done if he hoped to have enough fuel in his tanks to stop at his destination.
"Patience, Zuko." His uncle gently drifted up the spine, a bulb of tea in his hand. "There are many minutes in a day, and by the end of it, we will have gained twenty kilometers per second. We will handily beat every ship but one to the nomad's position."
"Which ship is going to beat us?"
=O=
The EUS Toulon, like most warships, was shaped like a big flashlight, with a fusion torch hidden behind a big, flared heatshield on the bottom (where the bulb of a flashlight would be), sensors, lasers, and electromagnetic missile tubes on the top, and tanks full of water propellant wrapped around miscellaneous vital spaceship parts in between. Four sail-like radiators, glowing white-hot, jutted from between the propellant tanks, removing enough waste heat to boil a medium-sized river before it could cook the crew.
From five thousand kilometers away, it looked like a star.
If Zuko had anything to do with it, it wouldn't be shining much longer. For two days, the ships had closed the distance, their commanders evidently having made the same decision vis-as-vis the other.
"Commander. You may fire when ready."
Commander Jee tapped his controls. "Let's get the drop the guy. Aim."
The helmsman worked his joystick, and Zuko strapped himself in as Sojourner spun gently around, bringing its missile tubes to bear on the European warship. He eyed the lifejackets on the walls – little boxed-up polymer rescue balls, no bigger than a briefcase when packed.
If the war had taught anyone anything, it was that lifejackets were pretty useless where nuclear-tipped antiship missiles were concerned.
"Salvo Alpha away." Commander Jee barked.
The deck shuddered as twelve huge missiles, each the size of a terrestrial container truck, were flung one after another down launch tubes into the deep black.
Far below them, autoloaders whirred as fresh missiles slid into launch tubes.
The system finished cycling, and the deck shuddered again. "Salvo Bravo away."
Radiation alarms blared to life as the missiles ignited, spewing bits of uranium from cheaply-made rocket motors.
"Ready countermeasures. Prepare for maneuvering thrust." Zuko barked. Jee rolled his eyes.
Behind them, Iroh rubbed his chin as the ship lurched ahead ever so slightly, burning precious water for thrust.
EUS Toulon's drive flare flickered out, and the ship spun on its end as it readied itself to face the enemy – literally. Antimissiles, decoy balloons, and the shrieks of jammers filled the black sky, even as eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then forty Euro missiles hurtled towards them.
"Vampire! Vampire! Enemy first stage ignition." The weapons officer shuddered. "Forty missiles! The bastards launched everything."
Iroh sipped his tea as the missiles closed the distance. Abruptly, Salvo Alpha changed course and dipped precipitously, falling upon the outbound missiles. Some of the outbound missiles, in response, dived away, while others streaked towards Salvo Alpha, hoping to save their brethren. Other European missiles powered towards Salvo Bravo, hoping to knock them out of the sky.
Half of Salvo Alpha's missiles changed course again, slaloming across the sky towards the enemy ship, spreading out so the defenses couldn't kill more than one missile with a single shot and approaching the enemy from all sides.
With their high-thrust thermal rockets, missiles could catch a fusion-drive ship easy – provided it started within a few thousand kilometers of one. In contrast, another high-thrust missile was a much harder target to chase down. Martian brilliant (i.e. super-smart) antiship missiles, with their tactical neural nets, built in jammers, short-range defensive lasers, and hive-mind networks, were particularly hard to catch.
In the developing furball between Salvo Alpha and the European missiles, dozens of submunitions were scattered across the sky.
The sky exploded in a sea of X-rays as nuclear plasma lances, nuclear shrapnel bombs, and plain old multimegaton warheads detonated like popcorn in a microwave, blinding sensors and blacking out radars on both sides and sweeping no small number of missiles from the sky.
The sky cleared, revealing thirty-odd European missiles still heading for Sojourner.
"First stage cutoff. Submunitions away."
"Enemy first stage cutoff. Submunitions in the sky."
"Burn." Zuko commanded. The ship lurched gently upward, giving the enemy submunitions – those had puny chemical thrusters – a harder target.
On both sides, dazzling lasers, confusing radio noise, and seductive microwaves whispering promises of targets, broadcast from missiles, submunitions, and the ships themselves, danced across enemy missile sensors, blinding, confusing, or cajoling brilliant submunitions into making bad decisions.
A brace of enemy submunitions succumbed to temptation and exploded against phantom targets, expending two-hundred-kilometer-long lances of boiling plasma and multimegaton spheres of x-ray flashes against an empty sky. Others veered off aimlessly into the distance, chasing ghosts to nowhere.
"Lasers on!" The tactical officer announced. At this point, the computers were doing most of the fighting. Humans just weren't fast enough for modern warfare.
Powerful lasers burned through nuclear warheads, vaporizing thin layers of armor to melt the explosives within, rendering them useless and inert.
The ship lurched a little more as the computer decided to give it all it had.
More flashes tore across the sky.
"We're hit! Plasma lances and sky scorchers, extreme range! Sensors dazzled! Radiator coolant loss 10%! Antimissile screen at sixty percent!" The operations officer was frantic.
Another barrage of flashes tore across the sky as Sojourner's own nuclear anti-missile plasma lances delivered a sharp riposte to the inbounds.
"Twenty submunitions. Eighteen. Sixteen…"
Zuko gulped as the submunitions crept towards estimated plasma lance range.
"Zero. We're clear!"
Zuko realized he had been holding his breath.
"Enemy's alive, sir! Their screen's holed, but they're alive!"
Iroh took another sip of tea. "They should have been more patient." He smiled as he savored the sharp taste of his xiangpian. "Commander Jee. Salvo Charlie, please."
Jee smiled. It wasn't every day one took orders from the hero of Jupiter. "Salvo Charlie, aye, sir!" He blushed, remembering that Iroh was technically working in the capacity of a political officer.
Twelve missiles screamed into the black. With their defensive screen badly depleted, and no big missiles to thin the herd, EUS Toulon's defenses simply collapsed under the renewed attack.
Four thousand kilometers away, one of Sojourner's submunitions finally found its mark. Its nuclear shaped charge detonated, sending a spear of fiery nuclear plasma across a hundred kilometers of space to smash upon the hapless frigate. The skin of the frigate disintegrated under the hail of superheated high energy particles, vaporizing in an instant and sending a shockwave through the ship that ripped open bulkheads, crushed propellant tanks, and snapped metal-matrix-composite structural beams like twigs.
EUS Toulon snapped in two, surrounded by a glowing sphere of gas and dust, lit from within by the softly glowing half-melted hull.
A hard kill.
Fifteen more flashes joined the first as nuclear plasma lances and not a few multimegaton thermonuclear bombs added their firepower to the orgy of plasmariffic destruction, until the EUS Toulon was little more than a glowing, slightly radioactive cloud of dust, vapor, and debris, diffusing to nothingness.
=O=
Author's note:
Elements in this chapter were inspired by Matthew Lineberger's never-published novel the Last Great War.
More than adequate uranium exists for the production of tens, even hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads per year, and such production was possible with late 1960s technology, had the need arisen. Cold War inventories maxed out at ~100,000 warheads total, US and Soviet. Well, the need has arisen, and everyone has a solar system's worth of uranium and breeder reactors to work with.
At least some Martian ships appear to be named after space probes. The Sojourner rover was NASA's first Mars Rover, a tiny solar-powered affair no bigger than a radio-controlled toy car, brought to Mars by the Pathfinder lander in 1997.
I hope everyone enjoyed this chapter of The Cosmic Balance, and found the concepts within interesting. I enjoy hearing from readers, satisfied or not.