“Yes, sir,” Schneider said. “Can I discuss it with the Wing Commanders?”
“His, perhaps,” James said. “No one else. No one else at all.”
Chapter Ten
“The new bombers seem to be working well,” Ted observed. On the display, they were launching their torpedoes a safe distance from the enemy starships. “But they’re still threatened by enemy weapons.”
“Yes, sir,” Lopez said. She glanced down at her terminal. “They do give us some additional striking power.”
Ted nodded. The missiles the bombers had once carried had been replaced by EMP-pulsars and bomb-pumped laser warheads. Humanity had produced hundreds of nukes a year even before the war, using them to push asteroids towards their destinations or heating up a pair of very cold worlds. Now, they were used — once again — as weapons of war. But Ted had a feeling that they were going to need many more nukes than humanity could produce before the war came to an end.
He sucked in his breath as the simulated aliens realised they were under attack and returned fire, spilling out tens of thousands of plasma bolts in the hope of wiping out the missiles before they made contact. Most of them missed completely, but the aliens were pumping out so much sheer firepower that it hardly mattered. One by one, the missiles winked out of existence, leaving only a couple to detonate and send laser bursts burning into the alien hull.
“We may need to launch pulsars first,” he said. “EMP screws up their plasma weapons, we know.”
He sighed. Humanity had adapted, reacted and overcome… but what were the aliens doing, only a handful of jumps away? The absence of any major attack since Ark Royal had returned home suggested they were planning something, even though some peaceniks dared to hope that the aliens had decided to sue for peace, now they’d taken a bloody nose. But the two attempts to make contact had ended in tragedy when the aliens had blown both of the peace ships out of space. Either they’d seen the transmissions as a challenge to do battle or they’d simply not been interested in talking.
Shaking his head, he turned to look at his Flag Lieutenant. “Draw up a plan for more overall exercises,” he ordered. “We need to prepare to adapt to new realities.”
He looked back at the display, just in time to see a flight of alien starfighters materialise from nowhere and fall on one of the American carriers like wolves on a flock of sheep. The Americans fought back savagely — this time, their armour could soak up alien fire — but it wasn’t enough. As soon as parts of the armour failed, the aliens concentrated their fire and blew their way right into the hull. Moments later, it was all over; the aliens scattered as the American carrier blew apart into flaming debris.
“We’ll also need to keep half our starfighters back for defence,” Ted observed. The Americans had weakened their fighter cover and paid the price. “Pity we can’t simply reconfigure the interior too.”
“Yes, sir,” Lopez agreed.
Ted looked down at the live feed from the umpires, who were monitoring the exercise from afar. The various national units had learned to work together, even though they were still a little shaky in places, but it hadn’t really mattered. No matter what they did, there was no evading the fact that five out of six carriers — seven out of eight, if the smaller carriers were included — were hellishly vulnerable. They’d just have to pray the aliens didn’t mount a serious attack. If there had been time to build more heavily armoured ships…
“The armour did hold up longer than expected,” Lopez said. “It’s a promising sign.”
“And what happens,” Ted asked reasonably, “when the aliens start producing better weapons? We already know they have a mid-range plasma gun. They might just improve the weapons their starfighters carry and then we’d be in real trouble.”
He sighed. “But we don’t have any other cards to play,” he added. “All we can do is keep working on the simulations and hope that the aliens don’t come up with any other surprises.”
“Yes, sir,” Lopez said.
Ted was still mulling over the problems when he summoned his senior officers to a conference, two hours later. This time, most of them attended via hologram, reluctant to leave their ships for even a few short hours. Ted didn’t really blame them. The aliens might launch an attack on Sol at any time, whereupon the fleet would be expected to go into battle as part of Earth’s defence force. There was no way to know if the aliens had the Sol System under observation, but Ted wouldn’t have bet against it. Humanity did it’s best to keep an eye on the New Russia system too.
“Our carriers are still strikingly vulnerable,” he said, once they had reviewed the results of the previous set of exercises. “We’re going to have to hold back nearly two-thirds of our starfighters to provide cover — and use drones to create false targets for the aliens. Even so, it’s going to be a major headache for us.”
It would be worse than that, he knew. If the aliens just came at them, without any regard for losses, the lightly-armoured carriers would be wiped out in one single pass. After that, the aliens would just concentrate their attacks on Ark Royal until the Old Lady was battered into scrap. It would happen, sooner or later, despite her armour. Or the aliens would come up with something new. He gritted his teeth at the thought.
“Then we have to keep them focused on their own defence,” Captain Bellerose said. “If we remain hidden, we might manage to get a striking force into attack range without being detected.”
“Perhaps,” Ted said, “but we don’t know just how capable the alien sensors actually are.”
“Then maybe we should reconsider the operation,” Captain Atsuko said. The Japanese officer looked uncomfortable as all eyes swung to him. “We agreed to take risks to win the war, or at least knock the aliens back on their heels, but not outright suicide.”
Ted concealed his private amusement. Japanese tactics in their wars had often been alarmingly close to suicide. Maybe they’d learnt something from two bloody defeats… or maybe they were merely concerned about losing one of their carriers. Edo might well be targeted by the aliens if they decided that Earth was too heavily defended to be worth attacking, at least until humanity had been weakened considerably. The Japanese couldn’t afford to lose a carrier for nothing.
“The operation is not suicide,” the Rhino boomed. “It is merely very dangerous. I don’t think any of us believed otherwise.”
Ted tapped on the table before the others could start taking sides. “We will continue to review our tactics,” he said. “In particular, we will work on forcing our pilots to work together…”
“It could have been worse,” Kurt said. “And we learned a great deal from our failures.”
He sighed, knowing that none of his superiors would be impressed. The rooks had learned the basics, true, but they hadn’t mastered the tricks experienced pilots had learned through actual combat. Most of the rooks had been killed, either through poor flight discipline or alien stealth. Fortunately, it had all been simulated. But he hadn’t hesitated to make it clear to the pilots that they couldn’t afford such losses in a real battle.
“It could have been worse,” Admiral Smith repeated. “What did you learn from your failures?”
“The rooks learnt that they needed more practice,” Kurt said. “We put them up against the American Black Knights, sir; the Americans wiped the deck with them, even though they were badly outnumbered. I think there won’t be so much grumbling in future about endless exercises.”
He sighed, again. It had been five days since the rooks had arrived and he’d spent far too much of his time monitoring their exercises, lecturing them on their flaws and waiting grimly for the first actual fatality. Somehow, he doubted the aliens would be the first to kill one of the rooks. It was much more likely that their inexperience would get one of them killed first, no matter what precautions he took.