“Aye, Commander. Tactical maneuvers on your orders, evasive at my discretion.”
It was part of the built in redundancy of this crew. Everyone had cross training in the various disciplines.
Expert in one, jack of some trades.
Similarly, Max and Flaps received ongoing instruction in varied military subject matter. If Zane found himself piloting the ship, he could move and turn it, accelerate or decelerate, but navigating in three dimensions, with a tactical intent while maintaining orientation, factoring in the movement of any potential hostile ships quickly, and compensating was beyond his skill level.
Beyond ninety percent of most Fleet personnel’s skill level.
Similar to how he or Ayres would struggle to interpret raw data at the ops station or sort through it without the computer’s help.
Information warfare was a huge part of space and ground combat in the twenty-fifth century. Counter measures and counter-counter measures constantly fought an unseen battle between missiles and electronic warfare systems.
On the ground, energy dampeners could render powered devices useless. Weapons, and logistical tools all had their own counter measures to such things, sometimes a device would resist the dampening field for some time before it was overwhelmed.
Sometimes depending on the strength of the field, and the military grade of the hardware, the equipment might be unaffected. Other times it wouldn’t work at all.
It really hurt to deploy a squad of twenty-foot mechanized soldiers only to have them shut down by electronic warfare.
It’s why modern militaries and space-navies had built in old school equipment and tactics for soldiers along with all the new fancy tech. While it might be efficient to jet pack across a battlefield, said jetpack became deadweight if it failed.
Same thing with weapons. Your kinetic rifle could suddenly be as useful as a dull battle axe. That’s where mechanical tech such as projectile firearms came in. There was no fancy tech to rely on exclusively.
Just good old-fashioned grit and will power.
Aaron pushed thoughts of the next hour from his mind. They’d been over the plan several times—even rehearsed it. It was like an exam. You knew what you knew. Obsessing over it wouldn’t do anything but give you heartburn.
Hopefully, a little blind luck would overcome any mistakes.
Still, Aaron couldn’t sit still. He was liable to pull out his hair. So the first hour he paced the deck. Vee always used to say he’d wear the deck plating. The second hour he paced the ready room, he didn’t want to unnerve poor Herman any further.
The gravity wave dispersion masked their high-warp approach to the star system. They’d transitioned well outside the system in interstellar space to avoid detection from any detection networks and eased down the gravity well. The next part of the plan called for precise timing.
The story Lee and Flaps told him about the horse thieves on Paradise flashed in his mind. An image of Flaps galloping on horseback floated in the air. He smiled to himself as he took the tactical station.
Aaron opened a comm to Hammerhead. “Saddle up boys. Fifteen minutes to destiny.”
There was a distinct sound of laughter in the background. “We’re ready, Commander.” It was Yuri’s voice.
Aaron studied the passive sensor returns. There was no such thing as true stealth in space. But there were ways to make an object harder to detect. Strict emission protocols, exotic starship materials (which admittedly was the real bottleneck in future ships of this class), and the gravity wave dispersion technology hid them from the twenty-fifth century version of twenty-first century interferometers.
Most orbital and star system military detection grids deployed these orbital interferometers, each as large as the International Space Station constructed in the twentieth century. However, once you got close enough, there just was no magical solution to avoid detection by a powerful enough sensor grid.
Unless you had a Valkyrie-class starship, like Phoenix.
That was the advantage she held. With the gravity wave dispersion and other stealth technologies, she could get within one light-hour of the best-known detection arrays. From there, the likelihood of detection depended on the power of the sensor net and any distinct capabilities it might possess.
Those sensor arrays consumed an astronomical amount of energy and weren’t cheap to maintain, even if subsidized with power from a nearby star.
For any other ship one light-hour wouldn’t have been an advantage, they couldn’t engage the ORA picket ships from that distance, but Phoenix had the micro-jump drive. She could make short instant warp-hops inside a star system.
They were two light-hours from the two picket ships on this orbit of the planet. The other two had gone beyond the planet’s curvature.
“We’re locked and loaded,” Aaron said.
“Commander?” Herman queried.
“Sorry. I’ve deployed guns. I’m going to give those ships everything on this pass. I don’t want them turning this into a chase.”
“I’m ready to initiate the jump,” Ayres said.
“Then by all means, XO. Punch it.”
“Punch? Ah! Engaging, Commander. Three-two-one. Phoenix jumping.”
Phoenix disappeared in a manner similar to being sucked into a hole in space. And almost instantly she re-appeared fifty thousand kilometers to starboard of the two-ship enemy formation.
Railgun bursts streamed down range and tore into the first ship, followed by havoc missiles obliterating its exposed stern. The ORA ship listed to port and explosions rippled along its superstructure.
A satisfying first volley. “Get on the other one, XO.”
“On it, Commander.”
The surviving ORA ship now burned away hard. It seemed its captain was caught between a moment of fight or flight. Phoenix passed its stern.
Aaron was hesitant to use any more precious havocs, but he couldn’t be sure how long they could jam the enemy comms. And he didn’t want to be engaging ORA reinforcements while his crew was planet-side.
“Full braking power, XO. Maintain our present vector, turn us into that ship’s escape vector.”
They were well within the range of the plasma turrets on these ORA ships—it fired, Ayres seemed to anticipate it and triggered a short burst from dorsal thrusters, pushing Phoenix ventral relative to the hostile. The first barrage missed.
“He’s locked in,” Aaron said, keeping them up to date on his targeting.
At this distance, and with the ORA ship content to burn away without evading, Aaron had an easy time plotting a firing solution for the weapons located in the bow of Phoenix.
A volley of fusion torpedoes left a trail as they ignited space dust and slammed into the ORA ship’s aft section. The ship limped along trailing bits and pieces of hull and organics. The doomed ship struck back with a pitiful parting shot from its plasma turrets. Phoenix shook hard.
Herman’s voice was shaky. “No damage. Polarized armor is sturdy.”
“It rattled more than anything, Lieutenant,” Ayres told him.
A hundred tungsten slugs from Phoenix’s railguns silenced the ORA ship, it spun and drifted away on its last vector, opened up to space through and through, totally void of atmosphere.
Lingering fires quickly died away and many smaller explosions were only brief flashes without oxygen to sustain the flames.
Aaron signaled the waiting Hammerhead. “Ensign, the barn is open. Launch!”
The ensign acknowledged.
Aaron had already triggered the ship’s hangar bay doors. He tracked Hammerhead on his tactical board as it emerged.