19 A really bad day.
What began as a complicated day was becoming a bad one, Gunzou thought with a bit of exasperation. If there was something complicated, it was destroying an entrenched enemy. The space fortress presented a huge unknown for the Fleet, and after the viral attack, the girls were unusually cautious.
For the first time, they were fighting an enemy that rivaled them in cyberspace. The viral attack was well thought out, even if the machines didn't understand fleet technology. However, we can't remain here, totally paralyzed, Gunzou reasoned.
Let's agitate the hive with a big stick. "Ludden, pick four battleships and launch an attack on one fortress, just mass drivers."
"Yes, Sir. Probing their defenses, Admiral?"
"Exactly. Better to test them with a piece of junk instead of a ship," he replied to the curious girl.
Ludeen nodded. "I can't agree more, sir."
Four battleships launched a probing attack on the North Fortress. After sixteen hours of flight, the eight projectiles approached the station. Predictably, the station's weapons destroyed them. It might seem like a useless attack, but the fleet mapped the locations of many weapon emplacements.
"Okay, let's call for a fleet meeting," Gunzou said.
Fleet Virtual Meeting Room.
When every captain reported his assistance, Gunzou explained the purpose of this meeting. "My esteemed friends, I can't offer you any good news. Our enemy is comfortably ensconced behind their fortress, and I'm afraid we will have to take them down one by one. It's going to be a long and costly battle. Our priority is to avoid concentrated fire from the fortress. They have a lot of weapons, and what worries me more is that we don't know if these stations have any surprises for us."
He sighed, "Of course, we will do our best to minimize damage and losses. For example, we will attack the station from an oblique angle. If there is a main weapon hidden, the most logical place is along the major axis of the station."
We will form sixteen small flotillas. We will focus our attack on the North Pole fortress. The light cruisers and destroyers will be out of range, but the heavy cruisers can use their SGCs if the occasion allows it. We will deploy the fleet into a parabolic corkscrew with the station fixed at the vertex.
"We will rotate the formation based on the needs," leaving implied that it meant damage or overloaded shields.
"Any questions?" Gunzou finally asked.
For the first time, Gunzou looked at very serious faces. Everyone is waiting for bad news about these stations, and so am I.
South Dakota, or one of her mental models, said, "Admiral, I unfroze a core to study the viral code and how they accessed our cores via a transmission. What I have found is... remarkable. They embedded the viral code inside the frequency modulation. Our scanners analyzed the transmission, looking for communication patterns, and, incidentally, extracted the code into our systems. I don't understand how it was executed yet."
Only Maya, her old friend from the test and before, raised her hand. She asked, "Can we return the viral attack with our own codes?" Gunzou had considered the same. "Only if you set up a safe computer and an isolated comm array. After the attack, I'm afraid your cores are not invulnerable."
Maya smiled. "Understood, sir."
The raven-haired mental model had been prepared for this eventuality. Her long friendship with Maki allowed her to access true viral nightmares designed by Maki when she was...bored. Now, she thought happily, it's the perfect time to try them. She had run simulations in an isolated partition, and the corruption was unrecoverable. She smiled, thinking about how these beings were going to suffer for her best friend's death. Maya was usually a good-mannered girl, really sweet with everybody, until you flipped her bitch switch. Then, you could run, but you couldn't hide. Lately, she had been fond of an old song named "Bad Side."
The fleet changed formations and formed up according to Gunzou's order. They approached at full speed, the best measure to get out of there if something bad happened. The approach to the planet was not easy. The armed satellites had missiles and some kind of rail guns.
Onboard Luddendorff, Gunzou watched impassively as hundreds of missiles flew toward his fleet. The destroyers and light cruisers, with the help of their larger comrades, were systematically destroying many of the missiles, but they couldn't stop them all. Soon, explosions reached the ships, but they were contained by the Klein Fields. Several heavy cruisers deployed their SGCs and fired along the long line of satellites, accidentally leaving a trail of destruction on the planet's surface.
The machines' answer was to disperse the satellites. The SGC will not have any more fixed targets. When the fleet reached their position above the station, they opened fire. Their massive guns fired a storm of plasma at the station, producing a lot of energy discharges on the shields. Soon, the battlestation's guns responded, and it became obvious after a few discharges that only the heaviest units had some hope of absorbing the powerful volleys.
The cruisers and destroyers left their positions before they lost shields. They took position three light seconds behind the battleships, and the heavy cruisers looked for an aperture to use their SGCs. Before moving, the destroyers launched a massive broadside of missiles with corrosive warheads.
Luddedndorff shook and trembled when the powerful station's guns touched her shields. So far, she had rotated sides to distribute and alleviate the load, but clearly, this couldn't continue any longer. Even some battleships were showing signs of overloading.
While Gunzou was considering a possible withdrawal, the missile fusillade hit the station's shield. The shield was consumed by the corrosive effect, leaving parts of the upper sections unprotected.
Heavy Cruiser Prinz Eugen.
Princess, the mental model of the ship, almost flew against a bulkhead from an impact. Her shield was redlining, and she hated to leave her comrades. She and the cruisers were not wasting energy firing. They knew it was useless. But they could use it to charge the capacitors. She sent the order, and they left the rings fly from their hulls. For an instant, nothing changed, and then they fired a broadside.
Several sections of the station's shield were already compromised. When the cruisers fired simultaneously, it resisted the first few beams, but there were too many. The shield lost integrity, and the graviton beams impacted the hull, leaving deep perforations across the upper structure.
It seemed the situation was becoming favorable to the fleet when the machines turned the tables against them. A long line of light crossed a circular depression on the hull, and a powerful beam, with a diameter of tens of meters, swept a wide area where the fleet was sailing.
Any light unit touched by the beam was vaporized. The battleships survived, but the losses among destroyers and cruisers were catastrophic. Maya survived because she was in the shadow of Luddendorff. Princess ordered the general withdrawal of the light units under her command. At least ten battleships followed her, their shields too overloaded.
Heavy Cruiser Maya.
Shaken but not wounded, Maya chose to use Luddendorff as her personal shield for now. She opened her isolated comm array and probed the machine's network. She found an open port used for cargo and uploaded her gifts. She was sure they would enjoy them.
She grinned when the station suffered random blackouts, and many missiles from the satellites changed loyalties. A storm of missiles and beams impacted the station, which couldn't stop them or defend itself.
A pair of explosions erupted on the station's sides, finally crushing it under the onslaught. The shield shut down, and the battleships used every weapon, even the secondaries and lateral SGCs, to destroy the station.
Orbital Fortress 01.
The machines inside the station were in what could only be described as a state of panic. Many systems were frozen, overwhelmed by the increasing load of worms, viruses, logic bombs, and malware infesting every network. Within seconds, many of the machines stopped functioning entirely as their cores overheated from relentless overclocking. Two minutes into the cyberattack and bombardment, the hull's integrity failed. Gravity pulled the massive structure downward, sending it plummeting toward the planet.
Worse was yet to come. The cyberattack had used the station's communications network to propagate itself, infecting the second fortress. This fortress found itself under attack from its own satellite defenses. Desperate to regain control, it fired its thrusters to adjust its orbit, hoping to maneuver its weapons into position should control be restored.
Superbattleship Luddendorff.
The admiral was checking the last damage reports. He chose to put the planet between the second station and them. The viruses placed by Maya were causing disastrous consequences, but they would recover in time. However, there were too many enemies in this star, so he needed to make a decision: to stay and fight or leave and fight another day.
While they were going around the planet, every ship was destroying everything on the surface. The armed satellites were destroyed to avoid a possible recovery. Gunzou ordered Ludden to use her SGC on the second fortress. If, and he was sure it could be possible, it was warp capable, he didn't want that thing close to Earth.
The fleet was making its way to the second fortress, and the huge station appeared on the viewscreen. The powerful humming of the main energizers sending power to the capacitors flooded the ship, and the crew knew that someone was going to suffer.
The muzzles opened to space and released a lethal cascade of hypercompressed gravitons. The two powerful lances crossed the distance of half a light-second and collided with the station's shield. A maelstrom of energy discharges splashed on the shield, and for two seconds, it was unclear who the winner would be. Since Luddendorff kept feeding energy into the beams, the battle between the shield and the beams continued for five more seconds. At last, the shield failed, and the beams reached the hull.
Both girls, Lady and Ludden, were watching the battle, exhibiting the same behavior as people watching a boxing match. Fists pressed and with frowning faces, they almost shouted when the beam penetrated the shield.
Gunzou, for his part, managed to maintain his composure—barely. The beams continued their work, ripping the fortress apart. When they ceased firing, the fleet unleashed a relentless bombardment. It took twenty minutes of sustained fire to destroy the station completely.
The fleet reformed one light-minute from the planet, though at a heavy cost. Of the thousand ships they'd brought, only seven hundred sixty remained. Many vessels had been abandoned, their nanomaterial stores too depleted for repairs. These wrecks were salvaged and reprocessed to aid the surviving ships.
Losses of this magnitude guaranteed me a martial court, Gunzou thought. It shows, too, how bad our preparation is for conflicts of this magnitude. The rest of the star system was more or less open to attack, so he chose to keep the pressure. Using sublight to slow down the attack, he sent part of the crew to rest, and himself took a necessary nap.
Six hours later, an alarm woke him up. Trying to look decent on the viewer, he opened a window and asked Lady the reason for the alarm. She replied, "They brought reinforcements, Admiral. Two hundred ships." Gunzou felt a coldness in his gut. "I'm going."
He walked quickly to the bridge. Many anxious faces were waiting for him, including those of the mental models. He only said, "Show me." Lady opened a holographic projection on the tactical console. "Thirty cubes and two hundred seventy spheres, Admiral."
A decent-sized force, with a lot of small, easy-to-replace ships. He felt it. I'm going to lose a lot of ships if the ramming attacks begin again. Observing the new fleet deployment, they were setting course for one planet, with four orbital installations in orbit.
"At the present course and speed, we will need one day to reach that planet. And they don't know that we know about the minefield," Gunzou said. "It's time for another fleet conference."
Virtual Room.
The losses are easy to spot here, Gunzou thought. There were a lot of tired and anxious faces, too.
"Captains," he began, his voice solemn, "this battle has cost us dearly. We've lost a quarter of our fleet. Our instructors at the Academy warned us about days like this, but reality is far harsher than theory."
Faces nodded in grim agreement.
""I want to acknowledge the Heavy Cruiser Maya for her cyberattack on the first fortress. She bought us precious time to finish the job. Well done, Maya."
The blushing cruiser smiled. "Thank you, Admiral."
"Now, we must face two different dangers. We can clear our path with the SGCs. It's the safest way to do it. However," he said, playing with the virtual display, "I would like to attract the fleet to us." He waited, observing the reactions around him.
"We need a tempting bait, Admiral," the captain of the heavy battleship Challenger said. He frowned, thinking. "We could simulate collateral effects of the virus. We could start the SGC firing sequence and simulate that the virus came back. We lost a bit of maneuvering, some ships lost shields, blackouts, etc."
Many captains were exchanging opinions among themselves, using the internal network, a small Tactical Network for humans and mental models in command of ships.
Finally, they showed their agreements. It was not necessary, but it helped to exchange ideas.
"Well, I will send last-minute formations and a set of orders with the "failures. "
He left his tired officers to do their jobs. "Dismissed."
Gunzou and her XOs began to design the plan. A big cone, with Luddendorff at the tip, with successive rings of battleships, with a clear free line of fire. The heavy cruisers will be among the rings, with their SGCs in locking mode, tuned to immobilize ships, not to destroy them. The few surviving light cruisers and destroyers will be located at the cone's base, but when the attack began, they will jump to attack the infrastructure on the dwarf planets.
He kept what it looked like a disorganized formation to the planet to maximize the looking of a wounded fleet. The enemies finally located behind the minefield.
The triumvirate.
The trio of Regents observed the fleet. The planet, protected by the battlestations, had fallen and was destroyed, but the aggressors lost one quarter of their fleet. It was complicated to reach consensus thanks to the new individuality, but step by step, they were improving their leadership. The malware counterattack from the invaders was lethal. Millions of individuals lost everything inside their minds, with many of them suffering unrecoverable damage to the hardware due to overheating. Now, they were coming for them. The new allies in the neighboring star system were helping, but unknown to the humans, they were being attacked by some kind of heavy battleship.
The human tactics in their home star were adopted, with a dense minefield around their last refugee. If they fall, a ship containing the last brains will leave, and they will try to find a new place. The triumvirate placed the new arrivals around the minefield surrounding their last planet. There is no more to do; the resources are insufficient to start a counteroffensive. They had to accept that the alliance between machines and organics was an improvement, not an inconvenience. The concept of asking for mercy was, unfortunately for them, completely alien.
Superbattleship Luddendorff.
Gunzou was looking at the planet through the main viewscreen. A red planet, very much like Mars, was the last stronghold in this star system. The other four planets were only stationary targets, just as the many dwarf planets were distractions. He looked at Lady and said, "Lady, please send the first maneuvers packet."
Lady nodded, one of her sigils flashing on her face. "Done, Admiral. The countdown starts in five minutes." Gunzou nodded in return and went back to the viewscreen. The losses were weighing more and more heavily.
Five minutes later, the fleet changed to a cone formation, with the powerful superbattleship located at the tip. It was obvious that if the machines understood the concept, it was the flagship. According to the logs, Yamato had been selected as a priority target by the machines.
Gunzou had been quite silent for the last few minutes. Finally, he said to Ludden, "Ludden, establish a communication listening network across the fleet. Find me their flagship, if there is one."
Both girls and the crew understood the idea. They could help incapacitate the machines if there was some kind of leader. The set of instructions included a list of "distractions." The SGCs began the charging sequence, and then, abruptly, many ships experienced loss of power, shields, and navigation controls, with blackouts of sensors. Even Luddendorf did a convincing show of losing the main drives.
The Triumvirate.
The three entities, now only three brains without bodies, observed the sensor readings. The enemies seem to be under the effect of the virus. The virus was designed to hide inside a system first and act later. The cold logic evaluated the tactical situation but forgot the most basic lesson about fighting humans: they cheat.
They sent the order, and all the fleet advanced against a weakened enemy. However, not every lesson had been forgotten. The station containing the triumvirate warped to the Oort Cloud to observe the result.
Superbattleship Luddendorff.
I suppose many captains and girls are grinning like maniacs right now, Gunzou smirked. They were falling into the trap. When the distance closed to half a light second, the fleet recovered full power. The big muzzles of the SGCs on the battleships opened, and the heavy cruisers' SGCs fired the locking beams. Literally, every cube and sphere was locked in one place, unable to move by the powerful graviton beam.
Inside the cubes, the machines tried to remodulate the shields to breach free from the beams' influence. It was a useless gesture because the battleships fired their SGCs at full power a few seconds later. A fan of white light left the Fleet and reached the machine fleet, destroying ninety percent of the fleet. The minefield exploded, adding even more damage. However, Gunzou had ordered not to expose the fleet. The girls continued to pump more and more energy into the guns, and this time, it touched the planet.
Years ago, Gal had said that her own SGC could split a planet in half. The fleet did exactly that. The beams dug deep inside the planet's core, and it was too much. The changing, disturbed tidal gravity broke the mantle into huge pieces. After ten minutes, the planet was a mass of glowing, melted material adopting weird shapes. Finally, it broke into pieces, and the world died.
The second set of orders was activated, and the cruisers and destroyers were free to attack the mining posts on the dwarf planets.
When they finished, the star system was in chaos. The destroyed planet affected the orbits of the rest, with a new asteroid belt in formation. Gunzou sent the order, and they folded into the void.
The Void.
The ships defolded into their new coordinates. We are in bad shape, and Gunzou knew it. It's time to have a long talk with the Fleet. This time, there were no happy or smiling faces. They were not psychologically prepared for something like this. Compared to this war, the Cylon War was a mere skirmish.
Gunzou opened the discussion, making a remembrance of the fallen. "My dear comrades, we lost many friends today. I am the first to admit I wasn't ready for something like this. We must learn a hard lesson from this battle: in space battles among big fleets, the losses are... considerable. I can't remember how many cores and sailors we will not see anymore. However, I'm sure we are finishing this war. Only four planets remain, and we will continue our attack. The next target is the planet where Atago discovered the first species killed by the Nexus. We know there is activity since Atago left a probe. The enemy presence should be light, but we will send a heavy cruiser to the most external orbit. Her sensor suite is better than that of destroyers, so we will have better information."
After the next system, I will analyze the situation again. If it's necessary, we will go back to Alex," Gunzou explained to his strained concurrence. "Any questions?" he asked.
"Sir, we need time to bury our dead," the captain of the battleship Resolution said.
"I know, but I'm not going to leave our honorable dead here," Gunzou said, leaving no space for an argument. The captains exchanged several glares among themselves, but discipline prevailed.
Finally, the dam broke, and the captain of the Resolution, a tall and severe-looking woman named Komaru, said with acidity, "Admiral, our ships are full of body bags, we are quite low on missiles and kinetic rounds, and the nanomaterial stocks are at their lowest levels. We can't win this war alone."
Gunzou gave the woman a hard frown. "This fleet is not going to come back, Captain. Unfortunately, this is war. You fight the best you can. Sometimes, you are not going to have what you need or want. Bad luck. Put the bodies where you can. We will salvage every hull we can, but we'll do that in transit to the fold point."
"Now, we will prepare to leave this star."
"Admiral, is this a vendetta for the loss of Kongou?", the woman asked.
Wow. This damn woman has no limits. "Captain Komaru, you are out of order. The loss of Kongou is a personal matter for me. I'm not denying that. Vendetta? No, but I don't want these losses to be repeated across the Federation. As an officer, my duty is to follow the rules, and my personal life is out of consideration. So, my answer is no, Captain Komaru, it is not a vendetta."
Since there was no response, he said, "Please proceed to the next fold point. When the scout returns, I will send orders. Dismissed."
Ten hours later, the fleet reached a point free from gravitational disturbances. The heavy cruiser Bremmerton folded to the next target.
