Post by Lorpius Prime on Aug 30, 2023 22:00:50 GMT -5
The doctrine was called Force Diffusion.
It originated in the American Navy in the aftermath of the Straits War when that force was decimated by Chinese missile barrages. The doctrine emphasized dispersing offensive weapons as much as possible in proportion to the physical limits of opposing weapons' engagement diameter. The goal was to make it impossible for any single opposing strike or countermeasure to meaningfully reduce the diffused forces' offensive capabilities.
Rather than fighter-bombers carrying dozens of missiles in bays, theorists wanted each missile to operate as an independent unit. They imagined clouds of missiles loitering at the boundary of a combat zone with low-power motors, only engaging rocket engines and converging at high speed once final targets were identified. If piloted aircraft were necessary at all, they ought to have enough range to stage from many disparate bases or small ships rather than single supercarriers.
Detractors of theory suggested that, rather than concentrating in landing craft, every Marine ought to cross the ocean in individual kayaks.
It was an expensive way to conduct warfare, even by American standards, and the catastrophic finances of the post-war United States doomed the entire school of thought from birth. By the 2040s, America had rebuilt its traditional surface fleet of supercarriers launching enormous multirole planes overloaded with ordnance.
After first contact with the Bats, Diffusion's theorists found their ideas gaining new life inside the rapidly expanding Earth Fleet. Space was even friendlier territory to Diffusion tactics than atmospheric combat. Without friction, deploying, station keeping, and recovering unused force was much less costly. Missiles could be accelerated to desired speeds from a central unit, and then dispersed with only tiny motors. The spaceborne equivalent of a fighter-bomber did not actually need to keep its loadout of weapons bolted to hardpoints until the moment of engagement. It could deploy the entire magazine over a huge volume but still engage with only selected munitions, and finally recover any leftovers at the end of mission simply by maneuvering to their positions.
The approach was still tremendously costly. But for Earth Fleet to exist as an effective force at all, every approach was tremendously costly. And few of its superbly well educated and trained Admirals thought the old-navy approach of giant cruisers packing as many guns as possible made much sense when those cruisers would not survive single shots from alien weapons better than any smaller craft.
So Force Diffusion had been the guiding philosophy of Earth Fleet since before the EFS Uruguay even completed construction. Unfortunately for its believers, it had proved much more difficult to implement in practice than it was to lay out in theory. Diffused space forces still needed some kind of controllers, which meant command ships that could track and direct dozens, preferably hundreds of independent deployed weapons platforms at once. Those command ships and independent platforms needed communications equipment that could handle rapid, complex communication reliably over the vast distances of space battlefields, and do so securely and stealthily. The independent platforms needed computers and tactical software that could operate acceptably even if communication was lost due to equipment failure or the death of its commanders. And of course these hypothetical clouds of death would really be more reliable and capable if each platform could act as a relay to other platforms so that control links could be expanded further in distance and across more platforms.
Ambitious technical demands, feature creep, and Earth Fleet's often tenuous budget had delayed the creation of Diffused-Force platforms for over a decade. When Russia acceded to the OES and re-joined Earth Fleet, it was their military commanders who gave the program a vital push by demanding that prototype designs be finalized and constructed now. Yet even with that fire lit, actually completing working spacecraft and weapons platforms required the effort of still more years.
Now some of that work, at last, had finished.
The EFS Moscow's bridge was a bare-bones affair. Four stations with chairs and monitors designed for second-generation Uruguay cruisers or Luzon destroyers were bolted to the deck around the perimeter of the compartment. This was not because the bridge had been completed in a hurry. She had been completed in 2071 with its own new-design stations and equipment. All of that had been ripped out five months ago, and the spare parts hastily installed in their place. That was necessary because the center of the bridge was now given over to an even newer but extremely ad-hoc piece of technology.
Captain Casey Rukavina was crucified in the middle of his own bridge. The structure he was nailed to resembled a table more than a cross, but it was difficult to discern its shape through the tangle of cables and tubes which ran from various points on Casey's body into the stacks of machinery surrounding him. The table had been elevated slightly from its previous position. Casey was still lying on his stomach, but at least he could look a standing spacer in the belly instead of the ankles.
There was only one other spacer on the Moscow now. Lieutenant Sofie Mondes sat at one of the tactical stations to Casey's left. Six of Moscow's junior officers had been put into cold comas similar to Casey's but supposedly safer as they did not need to maintain consciousness. The others had died when Casey activated the systems to wake them. Neither he nor Lieutenant Mondes had the medical training to diagnose the cause of their deaths. Their bodies were back on ice for Earth Fleet doctors to examine later. The Moscow class cruisers were designed to operate with a much-reduced crew compared to older ships, but she was currently without even her minimal complement of enlisted spacers to perform ordinary maintenance and watch functions.
Moscow's exterior was even more mangled than her bridge. Only one of her primary plasma engines was still intact and operational. The others had been bolted over with steel plates that were now heavily irradiated, discarded, and in decaying orbits around the Sun. Her fission reactor was also missing, cut whole from the center of the ship and replaced with an array of lithium batteries still mostly charged. The propellant tanks were still in place, but only one carried any Xenon. The gas was precious, and Moscow did not need much for this mission.
"Any developments?" Casey asked.
"No sir," Lieutenant Mondes reported.
Casey nodded. Or rather, he pressed his chin a little more firmly into the table beneath him.
The semi-hibernation had changed him in ways he had not yet fully grasped, and which he was not eager to contemplate. Six months ago he would have been joking, or at least conversing easily, with the Lieutenant. Perhaps circumstances were simply putting him in a more reserved mood, but that was not actually a mood Casey had ever been in before. He was easygoing and friendly, and he always had been.
When he was inundated with the drugs suppressing his metabolism, he had not felt like it soured his attitude. His attention had weakened and his thoughts wandered wild, but he'd never felt unhappy or lonely despite the physical comfort and actual isolation.
Now Casey felt anxious and irritable. His command training and experience were enough to stop him taking it out on the Lieutenant, at least so far. But he no longer felt as confident in his station and his mission. He had reviewed the operation plan, a significant portion of which he had designed himself, more times in the last three days than in the preceding three months. He wanted it to work, but even more he wanted it to be over. And he still had minutes to wait before then.
"The ship is visible on telescopes now, sir," Mondes said. "If you'd like to see."
"Oh yes, thank you Mondes," Casey said genuinely. With nothing useful to do but wait, the distraction was greatly appreciated.
Casey called up the external visual displays and focused on one point. At maximum magnification and with enhanced color, a dim star grew to a small gray disc. The telescopes on the Moscow were nothing special. His last ship, the Orinoco, as a specialized surveillance vessel, had superior ones. But visual monitoring was not an essential tool for any Earth Fleet ship. Even empowered, the human eye was simply not a very useful sensor when it came to navigating and fighting in space. Having telescopes at all was simply a concession to Human curiosity, thinly justified as an emergency backup system.
Casey could see the disc growing larger on his monitor. That movement was perceptible at all meant that Moscow's range had closed to almost the critical point.
"Ten seconds to program start," Mondes announced.
Casey did not even have a command he needed to give or a button he needed to push. He had already performed his tasks days and weeks ago. Now he was simply an observer.
A cloud of 217 objects in a rough cylinder with a 1,000 kilometer diameter intersected a volume of space above Uranus' moon Titania.
50 of those objects were empty metal shells. 20 had come from the EFS Moscow's original complement. The remaining 30 had been scavenged from the incomplete EFS Bangkok and EFS New Delhi, fixed awkwardly to every available free surface of the ship, and carried to Uranus with their fellows.
200 objects were missiles ejected from the empty pods a month previously with cold, compressed nitrogen rather than their usual rocket motors. Each one mounted a thermonuclear warhead that could yield just under a megaton of energy at detonation.
16 were unmanned weapons platforms with small maneuvering engines and a railgun with a magazine of 3 thermonuclear weapons with 100-kiloton yield. The Moscow's entire standard complement.
1 was the EFS Moscow itself. Designated a cruiser, Earth Fleet's tacticians and leaders more frequently referred to it as a "cloud ship". The first and only operational ship in its class, and the testbed for a new tactical approach to space warfare. Shorn of her cloud of weapons platforms, she still mounted four railguns fed from a magazine of 20 high-yield bombs.
"Blast!" came the cry from Uruguay's tactical station. "Nuke blasts! Multiple points." Lieutenant Cheyo's energy dimmed just a shade as he continued, "All on targets. Tracking multiple debris clouds."
"No hazards," Lieutenant Lahiri reported from navigation.
"Signal Task Force," said Commodore Lee, "start maneuvers."
Pascual grunted as he was jerked against the straps of his seat. He had been through a few of these drills before. But this time two of Barn Swallow's crew had forced him to don a full spacesuit and bubble helmet before he could strap down. They had fitted him for the suit back at Quito station before departing, but Pascual thought they must have done a terrible job of it. The suit felt loose around his chest but painfully tight around his thighs and upper arms.
Across the conference room, Hyong Yaheed appeared to be having a much easier time. The spacers had simply shrugged after telling the Bat everyone on the ship was ordered to suit up. Earth Fleet had no protection to give their alien "guest".
Hyong, however, had simply stepped into his tiny suite, and emerged fully covered in some kind of silvery material that seemed halfway between fabric and liquid. It bulged around his snout and face, and he seemed to have no trouble breathing or talking through the material. Pascual wondered how large a fortune that single item could sell for on Earth.
Barn Swallow thrusted again, drawing another grunt from Pascual. Hyong seemed to suffer the acceleration less. Either that suit had some fancy shock absorbing systems, or he was simply strapped down tighter than Pascual. Probably both.
"How much longer?" Pascual asked the ceiling. He really wanted to call Captain Sykes on a monitor of his PDA. But between the sudden motions and the awkward rubber fingers of his suit, he could not hope to touch the proper controls.
"I had thought your fleet needed to conserve propellant mass given our distance from Earth," Hyong said. He sounded quite calm. "This seems like a waste of supply."
"Exercises are important for military readiness," Pascual replied like he was quoting an instruction manual. He was thrown against his restraints again. "Even if I do find them inconvenient at times."
Hyong tapped silver-colored claws against the side of his chair. He was thinking, but Pascual could not guess about what.
The Moscow's cloud of bombs and empty pods detonated or impacted against most of the known, stable targets and points of interest that Task Force One had spent two months identifying. Every visible protrusion of more than a half meter from the sunward surface of the Tadpole arkship was slagged, leaving craters of rent and melted ferrous metal.
A dozen artificial satellites that Commodore Lee's staff thought were likely communications relays each received their own bombs followed up by kinetic impact from a missile pod to finish off any surviving equipment or simply scatter the debris.
The cloud crossed beyond the faint solar terminator on the arkship less than five seconds after the first impact. And once on the other side, the Moscow's railguns and gun platforms fired upon the targets that had been hidden in shadow. That strike came in volleys as the guns cycled and fired again, and the projectiles had to close with relative velocity. Another ten seconds passed before the Moscow's bombardment had finished. And then the cruiser and its handful of spent gun pods continued on their ballistic trajectory past the orbit of Uranus.
Task Force one began to accelerate less than ten seconds after the first blast, apparently responding with practiced military reflexes.
The Tadpoles' first visible reaction came more than a full thirty seconds later.
Uruguay's communications officer did not report the signal from one of the Tadpole transports near the Discovery. Xi Feng saw the alert on one of her secondary monitors. But her only answer was the one to which she was already committed.
"All ships, primary fire."
Uruguay shuddered with force Xi Feng had never felt outside of simulators. The railguns saw frequent use in exercises. And every few months a practice missile was fired from the bays. But the Uruguay carried a full complement of 100 missiles, and those were far too scarce and valuable to fire in full volleys simply for training.
Even now, Uruguay only launched 20 of her missiles. But that was enough to rattle the ship as if titans were beating on the hull with hammers. Those 20 missiles joined 55 more launched by the Lithuania and the Task Force's seven destroyers. And after the missiles were away, the railguns continued to thump in rhythm.
Moscow had engaged the stable, predictable targets. Task Force One's mission was to eliminate mobile targets and mop up anything that looked like it might be left over. The Tadpoles had at least five transport ships or shuttles like the one that had accompanied the task force back from Earth. Three were in space right now, at different points along their routes between the arkship and the Discovery. At least two others were currently berthed with the arkship, protected behind that ship's giant bay doors.
Each of the three exposed ships took three railgun hits. Uruguay was closest to the arkship and fired upon one, while the other two were engaged by the Lithuania and the destroyers Cyprus and Galveston. Three strikes per target might have been overkill. Each of the Tadpole transports shattered into clouds of debris.
Xi Feng spared a thought of gratitude that none of the transports had actually been docked at Discovery when the Moscow reached its targets. It would have been necessary to target the ships regardless, and the orbital station might not have survived.
She was calling them "transports" in her thoughts, and that was certainly the function for which the Tadpoles had been using them. But they were certainly armed with defensive lasers, and possibly heavier weaponry as well. Even those defense systems were too much of a threat to Earth Fleet's ships to spare from this slaughter.
Lithuania and the task force's Luzon-class destroyers poured fire onto the shadow side of the arkship which Moscow's attack had been able to engage only lightly. Uruguay followed up against sites on the sunward side that showed signs of activity or looked like they might not have been hit as directly as hoped. The Amazon-class destroyers Congo and Danube thrust away from the field to cover as large a volume as possible with their powerful active sensors, seeking to identify any potential targets or surprises that may have been missed. The Task Force's missile volleys fell against lower-priority targets that were probably just small natural satellites or garbage from before Earth Fleet's arrival, but could not be definitively ruled out as an artificial emplacements.
Xi Feng was just starting to exhale at an apparently flawless execution when Lieutenant Sarkisian at the sensor station shouted, "Unknown signal! Gravity sensors just spiked, I'm not sure—it's gone now."
"Commodore!" cried Lieutenant Cheyo at tactical. "Lithuania is hit—God she's breaking up."
There was horror in his voice, and the minds of everyone on the bridge. Later, Xi Feng would contemplate the irony of that emotion after what they had just done. Right now, she called up a telescope view of Uruguay's sister ship.
The Lithuania appeared to have been sheared in half. Forward and stern sections of the cylindrical ship were spinning separately, spewing gas and vapor from their severed ends.
"I don't know what causes that," Lieutenant Cheyo said. "Not any kind of blast or impact."
"Gravity weapon," Commander Wade said confidently. "Sensors, tactical, could we localize a source for that signal?"
"No," Lieutenant Sarkisian's shoulders twisted as she shook her head inside her suit. "It was..." she tapped her monitors a couple times, reviewing data, "it was everywhere. I'd speculate it was generated by the big ship somehow, but the reading was from the whole volume around us."
"Give the arkship another volley. Signal to destroyer group to do the same, have them cover Lithuania's targets. Any exterior position that looks even remotely suspicious takes another shot. Have Gotland and Bermuda close to cover the bay Lithuania was monitoring."
Commander Donaldson started relaying the orders to the other warships, and Uruguay shuddered as her railguns fired again. More fire and shrapnel erupted from the surface of the arkship from fresh impacts.
"Is Zhukov in position?"
"Zhukov reports ready and eager to go," the comms station responded.
"Tell the Colonel to go. Copy them the sensor feed of Lithuania. Tell them godspeed."
It originated in the American Navy in the aftermath of the Straits War when that force was decimated by Chinese missile barrages. The doctrine emphasized dispersing offensive weapons as much as possible in proportion to the physical limits of opposing weapons' engagement diameter. The goal was to make it impossible for any single opposing strike or countermeasure to meaningfully reduce the diffused forces' offensive capabilities.
Rather than fighter-bombers carrying dozens of missiles in bays, theorists wanted each missile to operate as an independent unit. They imagined clouds of missiles loitering at the boundary of a combat zone with low-power motors, only engaging rocket engines and converging at high speed once final targets were identified. If piloted aircraft were necessary at all, they ought to have enough range to stage from many disparate bases or small ships rather than single supercarriers.
Detractors of theory suggested that, rather than concentrating in landing craft, every Marine ought to cross the ocean in individual kayaks.
It was an expensive way to conduct warfare, even by American standards, and the catastrophic finances of the post-war United States doomed the entire school of thought from birth. By the 2040s, America had rebuilt its traditional surface fleet of supercarriers launching enormous multirole planes overloaded with ordnance.
After first contact with the Bats, Diffusion's theorists found their ideas gaining new life inside the rapidly expanding Earth Fleet. Space was even friendlier territory to Diffusion tactics than atmospheric combat. Without friction, deploying, station keeping, and recovering unused force was much less costly. Missiles could be accelerated to desired speeds from a central unit, and then dispersed with only tiny motors. The spaceborne equivalent of a fighter-bomber did not actually need to keep its loadout of weapons bolted to hardpoints until the moment of engagement. It could deploy the entire magazine over a huge volume but still engage with only selected munitions, and finally recover any leftovers at the end of mission simply by maneuvering to their positions.
The approach was still tremendously costly. But for Earth Fleet to exist as an effective force at all, every approach was tremendously costly. And few of its superbly well educated and trained Admirals thought the old-navy approach of giant cruisers packing as many guns as possible made much sense when those cruisers would not survive single shots from alien weapons better than any smaller craft.
So Force Diffusion had been the guiding philosophy of Earth Fleet since before the EFS Uruguay even completed construction. Unfortunately for its believers, it had proved much more difficult to implement in practice than it was to lay out in theory. Diffused space forces still needed some kind of controllers, which meant command ships that could track and direct dozens, preferably hundreds of independent deployed weapons platforms at once. Those command ships and independent platforms needed communications equipment that could handle rapid, complex communication reliably over the vast distances of space battlefields, and do so securely and stealthily. The independent platforms needed computers and tactical software that could operate acceptably even if communication was lost due to equipment failure or the death of its commanders. And of course these hypothetical clouds of death would really be more reliable and capable if each platform could act as a relay to other platforms so that control links could be expanded further in distance and across more platforms.
Ambitious technical demands, feature creep, and Earth Fleet's often tenuous budget had delayed the creation of Diffused-Force platforms for over a decade. When Russia acceded to the OES and re-joined Earth Fleet, it was their military commanders who gave the program a vital push by demanding that prototype designs be finalized and constructed now. Yet even with that fire lit, actually completing working spacecraft and weapons platforms required the effort of still more years.
Now some of that work, at last, had finished.
* * *
The EFS Moscow's bridge was a bare-bones affair. Four stations with chairs and monitors designed for second-generation Uruguay cruisers or Luzon destroyers were bolted to the deck around the perimeter of the compartment. This was not because the bridge had been completed in a hurry. She had been completed in 2071 with its own new-design stations and equipment. All of that had been ripped out five months ago, and the spare parts hastily installed in their place. That was necessary because the center of the bridge was now given over to an even newer but extremely ad-hoc piece of technology.
Captain Casey Rukavina was crucified in the middle of his own bridge. The structure he was nailed to resembled a table more than a cross, but it was difficult to discern its shape through the tangle of cables and tubes which ran from various points on Casey's body into the stacks of machinery surrounding him. The table had been elevated slightly from its previous position. Casey was still lying on his stomach, but at least he could look a standing spacer in the belly instead of the ankles.
There was only one other spacer on the Moscow now. Lieutenant Sofie Mondes sat at one of the tactical stations to Casey's left. Six of Moscow's junior officers had been put into cold comas similar to Casey's but supposedly safer as they did not need to maintain consciousness. The others had died when Casey activated the systems to wake them. Neither he nor Lieutenant Mondes had the medical training to diagnose the cause of their deaths. Their bodies were back on ice for Earth Fleet doctors to examine later. The Moscow class cruisers were designed to operate with a much-reduced crew compared to older ships, but she was currently without even her minimal complement of enlisted spacers to perform ordinary maintenance and watch functions.
Moscow's exterior was even more mangled than her bridge. Only one of her primary plasma engines was still intact and operational. The others had been bolted over with steel plates that were now heavily irradiated, discarded, and in decaying orbits around the Sun. Her fission reactor was also missing, cut whole from the center of the ship and replaced with an array of lithium batteries still mostly charged. The propellant tanks were still in place, but only one carried any Xenon. The gas was precious, and Moscow did not need much for this mission.
"Any developments?" Casey asked.
"No sir," Lieutenant Mondes reported.
Casey nodded. Or rather, he pressed his chin a little more firmly into the table beneath him.
The semi-hibernation had changed him in ways he had not yet fully grasped, and which he was not eager to contemplate. Six months ago he would have been joking, or at least conversing easily, with the Lieutenant. Perhaps circumstances were simply putting him in a more reserved mood, but that was not actually a mood Casey had ever been in before. He was easygoing and friendly, and he always had been.
When he was inundated with the drugs suppressing his metabolism, he had not felt like it soured his attitude. His attention had weakened and his thoughts wandered wild, but he'd never felt unhappy or lonely despite the physical comfort and actual isolation.
Now Casey felt anxious and irritable. His command training and experience were enough to stop him taking it out on the Lieutenant, at least so far. But he no longer felt as confident in his station and his mission. He had reviewed the operation plan, a significant portion of which he had designed himself, more times in the last three days than in the preceding three months. He wanted it to work, but even more he wanted it to be over. And he still had minutes to wait before then.
"The ship is visible on telescopes now, sir," Mondes said. "If you'd like to see."
"Oh yes, thank you Mondes," Casey said genuinely. With nothing useful to do but wait, the distraction was greatly appreciated.
Casey called up the external visual displays and focused on one point. At maximum magnification and with enhanced color, a dim star grew to a small gray disc. The telescopes on the Moscow were nothing special. His last ship, the Orinoco, as a specialized surveillance vessel, had superior ones. But visual monitoring was not an essential tool for any Earth Fleet ship. Even empowered, the human eye was simply not a very useful sensor when it came to navigating and fighting in space. Having telescopes at all was simply a concession to Human curiosity, thinly justified as an emergency backup system.
Casey could see the disc growing larger on his monitor. That movement was perceptible at all meant that Moscow's range had closed to almost the critical point.
"Ten seconds to program start," Mondes announced.
Casey did not even have a command he needed to give or a button he needed to push. He had already performed his tasks days and weeks ago. Now he was simply an observer.
* * *
A cloud of 217 objects in a rough cylinder with a 1,000 kilometer diameter intersected a volume of space above Uranus' moon Titania.
50 of those objects were empty metal shells. 20 had come from the EFS Moscow's original complement. The remaining 30 had been scavenged from the incomplete EFS Bangkok and EFS New Delhi, fixed awkwardly to every available free surface of the ship, and carried to Uranus with their fellows.
200 objects were missiles ejected from the empty pods a month previously with cold, compressed nitrogen rather than their usual rocket motors. Each one mounted a thermonuclear warhead that could yield just under a megaton of energy at detonation.
16 were unmanned weapons platforms with small maneuvering engines and a railgun with a magazine of 3 thermonuclear weapons with 100-kiloton yield. The Moscow's entire standard complement.
1 was the EFS Moscow itself. Designated a cruiser, Earth Fleet's tacticians and leaders more frequently referred to it as a "cloud ship". The first and only operational ship in its class, and the testbed for a new tactical approach to space warfare. Shorn of her cloud of weapons platforms, she still mounted four railguns fed from a magazine of 20 high-yield bombs.
* * *
"Blast!" came the cry from Uruguay's tactical station. "Nuke blasts! Multiple points." Lieutenant Cheyo's energy dimmed just a shade as he continued, "All on targets. Tracking multiple debris clouds."
"No hazards," Lieutenant Lahiri reported from navigation.
"Signal Task Force," said Commodore Lee, "start maneuvers."
Xi Feng was pushed against the back of her chair as the Uruguay's engines throttled up as fast as possible. Her suit's life support system pressed uncomfortably against the small of her back.
* * *
Pascual grunted as he was jerked against the straps of his seat. He had been through a few of these drills before. But this time two of Barn Swallow's crew had forced him to don a full spacesuit and bubble helmet before he could strap down. They had fitted him for the suit back at Quito station before departing, but Pascual thought they must have done a terrible job of it. The suit felt loose around his chest but painfully tight around his thighs and upper arms.
Across the conference room, Hyong Yaheed appeared to be having a much easier time. The spacers had simply shrugged after telling the Bat everyone on the ship was ordered to suit up. Earth Fleet had no protection to give their alien "guest".
Hyong, however, had simply stepped into his tiny suite, and emerged fully covered in some kind of silvery material that seemed halfway between fabric and liquid. It bulged around his snout and face, and he seemed to have no trouble breathing or talking through the material. Pascual wondered how large a fortune that single item could sell for on Earth.
Barn Swallow thrusted again, drawing another grunt from Pascual. Hyong seemed to suffer the acceleration less. Either that suit had some fancy shock absorbing systems, or he was simply strapped down tighter than Pascual. Probably both.
"How much longer?" Pascual asked the ceiling. He really wanted to call Captain Sykes on a monitor of his PDA. But between the sudden motions and the awkward rubber fingers of his suit, he could not hope to touch the proper controls.
"I had thought your fleet needed to conserve propellant mass given our distance from Earth," Hyong said. He sounded quite calm. "This seems like a waste of supply."
"Exercises are important for military readiness," Pascual replied like he was quoting an instruction manual. He was thrown against his restraints again. "Even if I do find them inconvenient at times."
Hyong tapped silver-colored claws against the side of his chair. He was thinking, but Pascual could not guess about what.
* * *
The Moscow's cloud of bombs and empty pods detonated or impacted against most of the known, stable targets and points of interest that Task Force One had spent two months identifying. Every visible protrusion of more than a half meter from the sunward surface of the Tadpole arkship was slagged, leaving craters of rent and melted ferrous metal.
A dozen artificial satellites that Commodore Lee's staff thought were likely communications relays each received their own bombs followed up by kinetic impact from a missile pod to finish off any surviving equipment or simply scatter the debris.
The cloud crossed beyond the faint solar terminator on the arkship less than five seconds after the first impact. And once on the other side, the Moscow's railguns and gun platforms fired upon the targets that had been hidden in shadow. That strike came in volleys as the guns cycled and fired again, and the projectiles had to close with relative velocity. Another ten seconds passed before the Moscow's bombardment had finished. And then the cruiser and its handful of spent gun pods continued on their ballistic trajectory past the orbit of Uranus.
Task Force one began to accelerate less than ten seconds after the first blast, apparently responding with practiced military reflexes.
The Tadpoles' first visible reaction came more than a full thirty seconds later.
Uruguay's communications officer did not report the signal from one of the Tadpole transports near the Discovery. Xi Feng saw the alert on one of her secondary monitors. But her only answer was the one to which she was already committed.
"All ships, primary fire."
Uruguay shuddered with force Xi Feng had never felt outside of simulators. The railguns saw frequent use in exercises. And every few months a practice missile was fired from the bays. But the Uruguay carried a full complement of 100 missiles, and those were far too scarce and valuable to fire in full volleys simply for training.
Even now, Uruguay only launched 20 of her missiles. But that was enough to rattle the ship as if titans were beating on the hull with hammers. Those 20 missiles joined 55 more launched by the Lithuania and the Task Force's seven destroyers. And after the missiles were away, the railguns continued to thump in rhythm.
Moscow had engaged the stable, predictable targets. Task Force One's mission was to eliminate mobile targets and mop up anything that looked like it might be left over. The Tadpoles had at least five transport ships or shuttles like the one that had accompanied the task force back from Earth. Three were in space right now, at different points along their routes between the arkship and the Discovery. At least two others were currently berthed with the arkship, protected behind that ship's giant bay doors.
Each of the three exposed ships took three railgun hits. Uruguay was closest to the arkship and fired upon one, while the other two were engaged by the Lithuania and the destroyers Cyprus and Galveston. Three strikes per target might have been overkill. Each of the Tadpole transports shattered into clouds of debris.
Xi Feng spared a thought of gratitude that none of the transports had actually been docked at Discovery when the Moscow reached its targets. It would have been necessary to target the ships regardless, and the orbital station might not have survived.
She was calling them "transports" in her thoughts, and that was certainly the function for which the Tadpoles had been using them. But they were certainly armed with defensive lasers, and possibly heavier weaponry as well. Even those defense systems were too much of a threat to Earth Fleet's ships to spare from this slaughter.
Lithuania and the task force's Luzon-class destroyers poured fire onto the shadow side of the arkship which Moscow's attack had been able to engage only lightly. Uruguay followed up against sites on the sunward side that showed signs of activity or looked like they might not have been hit as directly as hoped. The Amazon-class destroyers Congo and Danube thrust away from the field to cover as large a volume as possible with their powerful active sensors, seeking to identify any potential targets or surprises that may have been missed. The Task Force's missile volleys fell against lower-priority targets that were probably just small natural satellites or garbage from before Earth Fleet's arrival, but could not be definitively ruled out as an artificial emplacements.
Xi Feng was just starting to exhale at an apparently flawless execution when Lieutenant Sarkisian at the sensor station shouted, "Unknown signal! Gravity sensors just spiked, I'm not sure—it's gone now."
"Commodore!" cried Lieutenant Cheyo at tactical. "Lithuania is hit—God she's breaking up."
There was horror in his voice, and the minds of everyone on the bridge. Later, Xi Feng would contemplate the irony of that emotion after what they had just done. Right now, she called up a telescope view of Uruguay's sister ship.
The Lithuania appeared to have been sheared in half. Forward and stern sections of the cylindrical ship were spinning separately, spewing gas and vapor from their severed ends.
"I don't know what causes that," Lieutenant Cheyo said. "Not any kind of blast or impact."
"Gravity weapon," Commander Wade said confidently. "Sensors, tactical, could we localize a source for that signal?"
"No," Lieutenant Sarkisian's shoulders twisted as she shook her head inside her suit. "It was..." she tapped her monitors a couple times, reviewing data, "it was everywhere. I'd speculate it was generated by the big ship somehow, but the reading was from the whole volume around us."
"Give the arkship another volley. Signal to destroyer group to do the same, have them cover Lithuania's targets. Any exterior position that looks even remotely suspicious takes another shot. Have Gotland and Bermuda close to cover the bay Lithuania was monitoring."
Commander Donaldson started relaying the orders to the other warships, and Uruguay shuddered as her railguns fired again. More fire and shrapnel erupted from the surface of the arkship from fresh impacts.
"Is Zhukov in position?"
"Zhukov reports ready and eager to go," the comms station responded.
"Tell the Colonel to go. Copy them the sensor feed of Lithuania. Tell them godspeed."