The Frigates

ADVENTURER: T-MINUS 21 HOURS
  While Ty reveled in the having the ship back up and running. He began to take stock of the situation and to see just how badly the Adventurer was hurt by that first blast. He pushed thoughts of Commander Roper out of his mind. The damage indicated the weapon that had hit them was a high energy laser with power comparable to the main battery of an Aatrix.
  It would have still done some damage with the shields up, but as it was it had ripped open the Adventurer like it was made of foil rather than ceramic armor.
  As Ty examined and analyzed this, an alert sounded from his console.
  "Alert. Multiple translation events detected. Six Fresco class frigates and an Aatrixx class battle cruiser has emerged at solar three-twenty-seven blue two. Point seven AU's from solar center."
  "What?" asked Anderson. She stepped over to the console and punched up the solar system display. A cluster of flashing red triangles just inside the orbit of Venus indicated the other ships.
  "Ty," she looked at him with a concerned face. "What are we up against here?"
  Ty didn't need to look anything up. “If a battle lasts just a few seconds, we can go toe to toe with one, but they’ve got much deeper energy reserves than we do and they have feet of armor to our millimeters or armor. Fortunately for us, they maneuver like barges compared to what we can do, or could do with a healthy outer hull. But, can we take them in a fight? I did it all the time in simulators. The frigates are going to make it tough. If they act as a cordon around the Aatrixx, we’re in for a really long afternoon.”
  She nodded. “What are they up to?”
  “I need to get a trajectory, which won’t take the controller long to figure out. That Aatrixx is here just to finish us off. It’ll never catch the convoy. Those frigates on the other hand have the speed to intercept the convoy and destroy it.”
  As he spoke the controller spoke again. It was another Aatrixx transitioning into the system.
  "They're serious aren't they?” Anderson commented. "How well did you do against two Aatrixx in the sim? Did you ever fight so many frigates?”
  “When it comes to Aatrix, I always got one, it was fifty-fifty on the second one. Depends on what they do. For the frigates? I don’t know. I’m not a miracle worker.” He let out a heavy sigh.
  “Why do you think they sent so many? Can Mars station help us?"
  "Not a chance, it's just a science station. No weapons to speak of."
  As he watched the display of the two groups of ships, their trajectory quickly became apparent. They both emerged near Venus and had executed a tactical split. The frigates were burning hard for the jump point to Beta Hydri. The two Aatrixx were coming straight to Jupiter after the Adventurer.
  Ty watched the formations split. The Aatrixx stayed in a tight trail formation with one ship following after the other. The frigates formed a sphere where each ship was completely protected on one side by other ships.
  “They’re forcing me to go after each formation individually,” said Ty out loud.
  Anderson came over to him thinking he’d called out to her.
  “You rang?” she asked.
  Ty looked up at her, “Sorry no. Just thinking out loud. It’s something I do.”
  She turned to go back to her station when Ty, holding one hand up stroking his chin called back to her.
  “Change that. Can you come and talk?”
  “Sure,” she said as she walked back over to him.
  “I need to bounce some ideas off of someone. Stuff doesn’t add up.”
  “Like what?” she asked.
  “Like the timing on the arrival of the Longbows. That was right after we jumped into the system. And then there’s the Longbows when they came after us when we jumped away. They were moving towards us before the light of our jump reached them.”
  “You know what you’re saying right?” asked Anderson. He looked at her, cocked his head to one side as the awareness set in.
  “They know where we jump? That’s the only thing that makes sense!”
  He grabbed her by the shoulders and with both arms shook her with great intensity.
  “Whoa there,” she shot back.
  He released his grip and began pacing back and fourth as he spoke.
  “They know where we jump? How do they know where we jump? How in the world does the Alliance know something we don’t?” he asked.
  “The rules governing jumping while complex are very consistent,” answered Anderson. She ticked off the following points with her fingers as she spoke: “If you know jumping object’s vector at time of jump, the gravitational gradient at the point of jump and the time of jump, then you can make a pretty precise guess where the landing point of the jump will be.”
  Ty continued to pace back and forth as he talked. “However they do it, they do it well enough to predict, accurately enough for a firing solution for that matter, where we’re going to exit a jump, when we jump. The question is how? Since they know where we’re going to jump, their defensive solution is pretty easy to set up. Hence the blatant lack of any kind of defensive attitude in their tactical choices.”
  “What?”
  “They know where we’re going to be, whenever we jump. It’s not a surprise to them. They feel pretty confident that it’s not a tactical advantage to us any more. And…,” he tapped his finger on the console in front of him as he spoke, “they’re certain we don’t know nor that we can do anything about it.”
  “So far, they’ve been right.”
  “Yeah, tell me about it.” He thought of the gaping hole in the ship a couple decks above them that had been the command center. “I’d like to know what else they know besides exit and entry points.”
  Anderson picked up the conversation, “You familiar with the jump process?”
  “Superficially, I know the physics behind it and the general physics involved, but not much more than that.”
  “Well, the hole in your theory is that we don’t even know where the exit point of a jump is going to be. We know the physics governing where it must be, but beyond that we can only approximate where the exit point is.” Where upon she went into a quick summary of the process.
  Ty listened intently. “So, the only thing that really matters is the gravitational flux, right?”
  “Yes, they have to be identical.”
  “And energy is conserved. We have the same motion vector exiting that we had when jumping. Right?”
  “Yes.”
  “So, if the Alliance doesn’t know, because we don’t know where our exit point is. How do they know where it is close enough to hit us?”
  “Well, if they knew our jump point and vector when we jump, it wouldn’t be hard to extrapolate our trajectory to a region of space with a matching flux density.”
  Anderson’s face went ghost white. “We broadcast the jump every time we jump.”
  “What?”
  “The jump engine has an integral comm routine in it. As part of the firing sequence, every jump engine sends its position to the fleet via secure high-link a millisecond before onset of transition for fleet tracking purposes. We give spatial coordinates, gravity flux reading of the jump point and our energy vector along with ship ID and overall status. It takes, just the tiniest fraction of a second to send.”
  “You’re saying if they had that transmission, they could anticipate our exit point?”
  “Easily, but there are several good reasons why they can’t, that code is so highly encrypted, no human knows the cypher. Even Fleet-Prime, the fleet’s computing center, would need several hours to crack one cypher, let alone a normal day’s worth of them. And… they’d need to be able to match the ship code to the one they’re tracking. Those codes change often too. Additionally, even if they could match the cypher sequencing, they’d still need a high-link communication system to receive the message.”
  “Yeah, two of our most highly guarded technologies. How else could they do it?”
  Anderson looked at him and shook her head slowly, “No other way fits the evidence.”
  Ty glanced at the tactical plot and considered what had happened in light of Anderson’s conclusion. “I’m assuming there’s no way to disable that is there?”
  A smile appeared on his face, “Junior doesn’t phone home.”
  The realization struck Anderson too. “You’re right he doesn’t. But don’t think about ripping code out of the controllers. We did our work in an environment where we could start over if we screwed something up.”
  “Yeah, and we did that a lot,” Ty answered.
  “Then compromise. We use both. Telegraph our jump with the controller and do the real jump, somewhere else, with Junior.”
  “Now, that’s a tactician speaking,” said Ty.
  They spent an hour programming the new instructions into the controller. When they were done, the two Alliance groups were wide apart. When they finished, Tye said, “We’re going after the frigates first. Here’s how we’re going to do it,” he said.
  An hour later, the Adventurer burned hard to match trajectories with the frigates. After letting the power cells recharge after the course change, the Adventurer jumped into the center of the sphere using the jump commanded by Junior. She pivoted, aimed and fired her main projector in a rapid sequence of pulses at one of the trailing frigates. Immediately after, she fired a volley of railgun slugs at the ship. As soon as the rail guns fired, she jumped out using the controller’s jump system to a position a light minute away from the formation. Their total time inside the formation was less than a second.
  From their vantage point, Ty and Anderson watched the minute old light of the encounter. They saw the Adventurer appear in the center of the formation and pivot. The first couple of pulses hammered down the ship’s shield. They saw the shield generators’ energy dissipation busses explode in a ball of sparks and electric fire as they absorbed more energy than they could handle in such a short amount of time. A few seconds later, the volley of slugs ripped through the ship. A corona of sparks and flashes marked the entry points of the slugs where they slammed into the thin armor of the frigate. Several other larger, less energetic puffs on the far end of the ship showed where the slugs exited the ship. It’s drive flare winked out immediately. Clouds of vapor and mist began expanding away from it. The ship quickly fell out of formation and began to tumble end over end due to the thrust effect of the venting atmosphere.
  As they watched, an alert sounded. “Incoming fire,” it said.
  “Anderson, decelerate the ship. Let the weapons pass in front of us,” said Ty.
  “Decelerating,” she answered. The generator thrummed as it pumped energy into the linear accelerator. “We’re pushing against Jupiter, level four deceleration.”
  One of the technicians who was manning a sensor panel, called out. “Three stilettos sir. They just fired their terminal aiming motors.”
  Without hesitation, Ty answered, “Immediate lateral acceleration on heading red two-seven-zero, four seconds at level two”.
  The generator thrummed again as it provided the energy the drive needed to push them out of the way of the warheads. They missed.
  “Which ship fired?” asked Ty.
  “Looks like lead ship sir,” answered the technician. “Sir,”
  “Yes?”
  “Detecting multiple missile launches from all of the frigates now sir.”
  Everyone in earshot of the man, stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
  “At us?” Ty voiced the question everyone was thinking.
  The technician shook his head. “No sir, at the convoy. Or at least in the general direction of it.”
  “At this range?” asked Anderson. “Seems like a ‘Hail Mary shot’ to me.”
  “It is, but those are stilettos. They’re pretty good at Hail Mary shots.” Ty stepped over to the panel the technician stood at. “Good job on detecting the launch. Show me the missile tracks.”
  The man worked the panel’s controls for a moment. A wireframe representation of the frigates, the Adventurer and the missiles appeared. The frigates were red cubes. The Adventurer was a green cube. The missiles were red dots. Every object in the display had a small arrow sticking out of it showing its motion vector on the display. At the scale of the display, the motion of the missiles and ships was not visible.
  “Zoom back out to show the convoy.”
  In response the scale of the display changed. The symbols for the frigates, missiles and the Adventurer collapsed into a single mass of lines and shapes. A string of white dots appeared. They formed a line aimed at Jupiter.
  “OK. Show the trajectory of the missiles.”
  The technician worked the controls again. A single red dashed line appeared on the display angling up at the convoy.
  “Now, show me the convoy’s trajectory.”
  A dashed white line extended down towards the planet.
  “Show me the closest approach for the two based on time. Zoom in.”
  The screen zoomed in until two lines were all that displayed.
  “Put a one-k scale on the display.”
  A solid white line with two ticks on it appeared across the bottom of the screen. Ty shook his head. He knew the missiles would see the freighters and that if they weren’t stopped, they’d destroy every ship in the convoy.
  He turned to the technician, “Tag these missiles. If they change coarse let me know. OK?”
  “Yes, sir.”
  Ty nodded and walked back to Anderson.
  “They’ll take out the convoy if we don’t stop them. But while we’re here, we’re taking out the frigates.”
  For the next hour, one by one, the Adventurer took on each frigate in the squadron. In the end, nothing remained but a formation of derelict ships headed on a one-way trajectory at ten percent of the speed of light, out of the system.
  “That was easy enough,” said Anderson. “A lot easier than I thought it would be for sure.”
  Ty nodded in agreement, “I’m not complaining. Now we need to take out those stiletto’s. That’ll be trickier. They can retarget themselves autonomously.”
  He began programming in a course change maneuver to get the Adventurer behind the missiles. After several minutes he finished and stepped back from the wall console and stretched. He went through several contortions pulling his back and arms.
  “We’re on a pursuit trajectory that’ll get us in firing range in half an hour. I’m going to sit for a few in the wardroom to figure out the safest way to destroy those missiles.”
  “Fair enough. See you in a few.”
  Ty turned and left the engineering space. After climbing two sets of ladders to get to the wardroom he found an empty lounge chair and dropped into it. He glanced at the comm-booth where he’d made the call, what seemed an eternity ago. Instead of the stilettos, he thought of his wife who was probably in the middle of her day now tending to his kids and cleaning up the house. He tried to imagine laying close to her for a minute. He recalled the fragrance of her and the softness of her skin. He yearned to be close to her.
  An announcement over the PA disturbed his reverie. “Attention all hands.” It was Anderson. “We’re standing down from general quarters for the next thirty minutes. Watch chief’s rotate your positions. Give your people a chance to rest. We’re not out of this yet.”
  Ty got back up. He knew he should be thinking of the missiles, but couldn’t get his head around them yet, so headed down the passageway to the fantail to get a feel of how the crew was doing. Adhering to an age old tradition, the Adventurer’s main deck was the longest deck running through the centerline of the ship. A passageway that ran from the engineering space to the fantail split the deck evenly in two, with a port and starboard side. At the aft end of the passageway, Ty could hear laughing coming from the Goat Locker. He paused at the entry way and smacked the outer wall with his palm of his hand.
  “Request permission to enter,” asked Ty.
  The laughing stopped immediately and a crewman answered, “Enter.”
  Ty poked his head in the door. “As you were gentlemen,” he said with a smile.
  One of the crewmen in the room answered almost hollering, “No gentlemen here, sir. Just a bunch of Alliance ass whippers. Sir!” He ended emphatically. Everyone in the room broke out laughing again.
  Ty smiled and backed his head out saying, “Carry on,” as he did.
  Everyone in the room cheered, then shouted, “YES SIR,” in reply.
  He shook his head and palmed the control to the hatch at the end of the passageway. As the inner hatch slid into the wall, Ty stepped through the opening into the airlock that separated the fantail from the rest of the ship. He waited in the room while the inner hatch resealed itself. Once it did, the outer hatch slid into the wall allowing him entrance into the fantail.
  It was the largest open space inside the ship. The space was large enough to hold two Dragon fighters, even though just one was assigned to the ship at the time. The fighter sat in its launch cradle. Several umbilical lines snaked from the ship to the fighter. The cockpit canopy was raised and an access ladder hung off of the canopy rail. Ty noticed a couple of technicians had taken an access panel off of one of the two large Plasma-Arc missiles that were attached to the fighter. In the other cradle was the load trainer this team had used to spoof the existence of the Dragon. It still had a full complement of missiles hung on it. The drive calibration stand and Jersey generator sat nearby.
  The room was brightly lit from overhead and wall lights so there was little if any area of the space which had any significant shadows. It made the space appear smaller than it was. Vince noticed Ty as soon as he entered. Vince had been sprawled out in a beat up old sofa that had been smuggled onto the ship long before Ty joined the crew. He hopped up off the sofa and jogged over to Ty. He had to duck under the nose of the fighter.
  “Hey, Ty, Welcome to our lair.”
  “Hi, Vince, I had a few moments to get away from engineering to stir some blood.”
  Vince nodded in understanding. “Nice work by the way handling those two LongBows and those Fresco’s.”
  “It was easier than you think. The Alliance has figured out a way to intercept and decode our jump parameters.”
  Vince blinked and shook his head at that.
  Ty could tell he was angered at the fact. He continued, “I entered a fake jump coordinate in the main controller and then made the real jump using Junior. It’s worked every time so far.”
  Vince harrumphed, “Serve’s ‘em right. Live by cheating, die by cheating. Have you gotten this intel back to Fleet?”
  Ty shook his head. “Can’t. We’re being jammed pretty hard. Hey, by the way, what’s with the Plasma-arc there?”
  “Oh, that?” Vince turned towards the technician working on the missile. “The missile’s launch initiator failed. We’ll need to pull it off and repair it before we can use it. Alvarez there is buttoning it up before him and his loaders pull the missile. We’ll be ready to go before you get back to engineering.”
  “Ok, keep me posted. FYI, we’re chasing down a bunch of stilettos that got launched at the convoy. We engage them in about twenty minutes. I don’t think we’ll need the Dragon, but have her loaded for an anti-missile mission OK.”
  “We’ll be ready. Just give the word.”
  “Thanks, good luck.”
  Ty headed back out of the room and waved behind him as he entered the airlock into the rest of the ship. As the hatch sealed, he could hear Vince giving orders to change the load out on the Dragon.
  Back at the engineering section, he felt a little more refreshed. He noticed Anderson wasn’t in the space so he walked over to the panels displaying the sensor data. The two Aatrixx were just about to Jupiter. No additional Alliance ships had entered the system.