Chapter 22

Subject: Admiral Nilson

Admiral Nilson stood at his tactical display, watching as waves of missiles burned in circular arc around the planet. He’d paired the missiles up, each two being loaded with different sensor payloads. Each pair destined to fling themselves to the edge of the system at slightly different vectors. A minor deviation in thrust or angle as they broke orbit over Oasis III having an immense impact on the final resting place of each pair. 

Nilson was feeling good, finally. Jim had given him a great deal of space after taking command over the system, and Nilson had needed it. He’d ran his crew ragged running training drills and simulations for killing the last Adversary before his new XO, Lieutenant Sahr, pulled him aside and suggested Nilson take some time to grieve. And grieve Nilson did. 

Losing thousands of spacers in the battles across the system had taken one hell of a toll on Nilson’s confidence. Sending dedicated and brave people to their deaths is a horrible burden to have to bear. In the end, it was Wraith who actually brought him out of his self-loathing.

“I’ve analyzed every moment of every battle from every sensor recording across every ship, multiple times, Admiral Nilson. I have ran a variety of simulations to estimate the performance of the Adversary ships against standard formations of UHDN fleet forces. I do this as a matter of objective reasoning; to understand the threat and attempt to provide advice to fleet commanders that may face down this enemy. In this case, your performance as an admiral was such an outlier that it has substantially affected my evaluation of our readiness. Simply put, your unusual tactics and manner of thinking was so effective that I cannot adequately rate fleet readiness against this enemy, due to the ‘human factor’ involved. I can only estimate that a fleet following standard tactics would have most likely been destroyed outright in the first engagement,” the AI had explained.

Nilson watched the simulations and the recreations, and tried to think about the situation from an academy perspective. The textbook of space combat was famously flexible. Every question is answered with, ‘it depends’. To Wraith’s point, however, favored doctrine is to meet the enemy with overwhelming numbers, and where numbers fail, overwhelming firepower. Wraith estimated that the majority of admirals would have dispatched the entire force, and that most would have attempted a hammer and anvil style attack on the Adversary around Oasis V.

Nilson watched in stunned silence as simulation after simulation of generally solid tactics were met with absolute destruction. One simulation involved the fleet attacking with the frigates as a screening force for the destroyers and heavy cruiser, with the patrol cruisers launching a sweeping flank attack by using a gravity assist around the gas giant. Not a clever plan, but a plan he could have easily picked. It was met with total destruction and system domination by the enemy. The simple fact was, the Adversary beam weapon could kill a destroyer in one hit, and it couldn’t be dodged. It was a light speed weapon, and extremely dangerous.

But, the danger did somewhat simplify Nilson’s current orders. Once he found the enemy, he had to kill it without getting within range of it’s beam. There goes nearly all his weaponry, and by extension battle tactics, right out the window. He had either terrain or missiles as his main weapons. 

The unknown piece, however, was the capability the new destroyer squadron had. Jim was a weird one, he wouldn’t tell you anything you didn’t need to know, but he absolutely reveled in the disclosure once you gave him an excuse to talk. The Darkstar Experimental Stealth Destroyers were clearly something special, and Jim wouldn’t budge on the details, not even in the slightest. Nilson could see the Blazar in orbit around Oasis III, and it was certainly an impressive looking ship. Much larger than a standard destroyer, and far more angular. The Blazar had three main engines and four auxiliary boosters. Some sort of reactionless drive seemed to be responsible for stationkeeping and attitude adjustments, and Nilson could only speculate as to how the hell the things stayed invisible to his systems. 

“Anomaly on scopes; identified as track 2121,” the sensor officer announced. 

“That was quick,” Nilson replied, looking at his display to see the anomaly. It was the north pole of Oasis III’s smallest moon. “Why is this hitting as an anomaly? It’s the planet’s moon. We’ve been staring at it near constantly.”

The sensor operator cleared his throat and spoke, “Admiral this body is tidally locked to the planet. The anomaly was detected in a canyon on the pole angled as such that it would not be normally visible from the planet or by orbiting ships.”

“And what is it?” Nilson asked. 

“lR anomaly sir, within the wavelength that we had set as a signature for the heat profile of the Adversary ship,” the officer responded. 

Interesting, Nilson thought. The destroyers had gone past this area on their corkscrew path outward, but maybe the Adversary had hidden within terrain on the Moon? That would be bizarre, a fleet ship couldn’t do that. 

“Nav, this is close enough to the planet that I’m keen to check it out,” Nilson said, “plot us a course.” A thought bothered him. If he just ran his squadron up on the moon, and it actually was the Adversary, he’d be in one hell of a spot. 

“Actually, I’m changing my mind. Let’s run this like a training exercise. Attack run drill. Let’s run the drill on the two moons between us and this one. On our third run on the target moon, have us run the attack towards the southern pole, then we burn along the polar axis in formation to come around the top of the planet. I want the whole squadron in formation with railguns pointed down on this thing as we come over the top. Let’s get close, but have some plausible deniability. Buy some cover and use terrain. If the anomaly is the Adversary, they’ve watched us drill nearly constantly and maybe they’ll mistake it as another training exercise.” 

“Aye sir!” The navigator said, and set to work.

Exercises around the first two moons were as textbook typical as it got. Nilson’s five ship squadron lined up in a standard formation and burned hard towards the moon, lining up an imaginary point on the backside as a target. The exercise practiced using the celestial body as a feature of the system’s so-call terrain. Every system had terrain, be it moons, planets, or asteroids, and being able to use them for cover, concealment, and momentum was critical to successful squadron level tactics. 

Getting caught in open space is generally considered a bad idea, unless you have some sort of major advantage. Having superior weapons so you can shoot the enemy and they can’t shoot you is, for instance, a major advantage. The Adversary had that advantage with it’s beam weapon. It’s kill zone is larger, and therefore the human ships would have to get close by using cover if they wanted any chance of success.

They’d practiced the maneuver over and over again and had gotten quite good at it. It’s a tricky one to pull off as a group, as each ship in his squadron had different performance. Every ship had to time their burns just right so that they could change vectors at the last second and rocket around the moon, each gaining speed, and the formation breaking up into smaller elements; splitting their fire across multiple sides of the moon at the same time. 

The maneuver on the third moon started like all of the others. Nilson’s squadron burned hard until the last possible second, cutting thrust, rotating ships, and burning at flank speed to change the course of their ships just enough to bank around the side of the planet and carry their momentum through. Except on this approach, every ship burned towards the southern pole of the moon, arcing around the bottom and up the other side. As soon as the polar arc’s burn was finished, the ships rotated again to pull off a deceleration burn, and fired engines at full speed to kill momentum. 

Nilson watched as the projected path of his squadron changed from a long orbit around Oasis III, to a huge and very elliptical polar gravity assist around the moon. Every ship would have about a five minute window to stare down into the suspect canyon, with railguns primed and at the ready. Not a single one of ships were out of formation. All that practice had paid off.

Nilson ground his fingernails into the podium at the head of the battle display. “Wraith, you ready?” He asked. He’d invited Wraith into all things in his squadron. He’d never served on a ship important enough to get a fleet AI and he was taking maximum advantage of it. 

“I am standing by, Admiral,” Wraith responded.

Nilson wanted to say more, but it would’ve been empty; just there to kill time. He watched the countdown to visual contact as the lead ship’s angle took it over the canyon. And then, there it was. 

“The fuck?” Nilson muttered. It was the Adversary ship alright, or at least parts of it. It was scattered throughout the canyon, each spiny tentacle embedded into the rock and ice below. Long black tubes ran between each spine connecting them to a central cylinder. One spike sat up on the edge of the canyon, just barely peaking over the top and down to the planet. 

“Did it crash or something?” Sahr asked, also befuddled by the sight. 

“I don’t know what it’s doing or why. Sahr, nuke it. Program a missile strike squadron wide,” Nilson stated, venom in his voice. 

Nilson’s battle display flickered, and a holographic Agent Jim Crawford appeared, smiling and chewing on a toothpick. “Well, hang on just a dang minute,” he said, as a parent might say to an overly excited child. 

“What’s the problem?” Nilson asked, ready to crack the moon in half to kill this thing. 

“It’s doing something weird and I want to come take a look at it before we kill it, know what I mean?” Jim said, smiling. 

Nilson ground his teeth. First, they had the jump on the thing and could end it right here. Second, Jim is a civilian. Nilson is the squadron commander. “You ordered me to kill the Adversary ship, remember? I found it and I created the perfect opportunity to do just that.” Nilson’s voice was strong and angry. 

“I ordered you to kill a ship, Sven,” Jim said, using Nilson’s first name. “That ain’t a ship. It’s a facility.” Jim’s hologram smiled and pulled the toothpick out of it’s mouth and started rolling it between it’s fingers. Simultaneously, Jim’s voice spoke from the speaker on Nilson’s podium, quietly enough that only Nilson could hear it. “Do not test me Sven. I need to know what that thing is doing so I can protect humanity from it. I will kill it when I am ready to.”

Nilson snarled, “It’s Rear Admiral Nilson, Jim. We’ll hold station until you say otherwise.”

“Smart move,” Podium Jim said. Big Jim on the display simply raised his hand and a diagram shaped like the moon appeared, with his five ships separated into an interval orbit, ensuring a ship was always directly observing the canyon, or was about to. 

“Wraith worked this up,” Hologram Jim said, “it’ll keep you in a good spot to shoot the thing if it starts moving.”

“If it moves so much as a meter I’ll crack this fucking moon in half,” Nilson growled, pushing the anger back down. 

“You and me both,” Jim smiled.