Chapter 9

Subject: Admiral Nilson

The God of War smiled on Nilson. He’d set up the upcoming battle under the impression that he had three functional ships and one day to prepare the field, however a lucky break changed everything. Estevez had managed to coordinate with personnel left on the station to fire up the e-war systems aboard the Kydoimos. The massive array of jamming dishes turned like cannons on their turrets towards the path of the oncoming Adversary ships and loosed a barrage of energy. Electromagnetic radiation across every spectrum and wavelength the machines were capable of producing. A brute force assault of noise meant to confuse whatever sensors the alien ships used. 

And it worked. It better than worked. The Adversary ships decelerated and stopped in their tracks as soon as the waves of energy traveled through space and met the enemy. They stopped for so long that Nilson’s battered squadron of the Bastion and two ancient destroyers came within three hours of contact. Close enough that Nilson called general quarters and started making plans for an early engagement. A ranging laser fired by the Bastion spooked the Adversary into forging onward into the noise, but the delay bought the defenders around Oasis III an extra day and a half. 

Even better, it meant when the engagement happened, the light delay between Nilson and the defenders would be seconds instead of minutes. He could command the battle in near real time, and if the defenders could hold their ground long enough, Nilson’s ships could theoretically join the battle. The prospect of all of his forces joining battle at the same time would be a huge break. It was inspiring and gave him hope. 

Nilson watched the battle display from the bridge of the Bastion as the Adversary slid into range of Oasis III’s L2 Lagrange point, close enough to the planet’s largest moon that a traditional defending naval force would move to engage. Nilson’s force was anything but traditional. The Adversary was moving fast, and their heading put them on a collision course with the station above the planet, but Nilson knew from past engagements that they could change course and speed at will, apparently without any regard to physics. By happy accident, that course would force the two alien ships into a near encounter with two of Oasis III’s four moons. And, as far as Nilson knew, the ships were still blinded by jamming. 

“Comms, send the fire order to Battlegroup Boxer,” Nilson ordered. Boxer was the callsign he’d given the mishmash of broken ships and light frigates. 

“Aye admiral!” The comms officer declared. Estevez looked at Nilson and smiled reassuringly. At the range the ships were at, the firing was destined to be entirely ineffective, but the point wasn’t to hit the Adversary, it was to draw their attention and try to pull them in the direction Nilson wanted. 

“Admiral, do you have a minute?” A voice behind him asked quietly. Nilson turned to look, and to his astonishment it was Davis. At his post. Wearing a crisp, black officer’s uniform, perfectly decorated and straightened. 

Nilson looked at his display, there wasn’t anything he could do right now that would make a difference, and it would be some time before ships got close enough to need commanding. “Sure, XO Davis. Estevez, you have command until I get back, let me know if anything changes.” 

“Aye sir,” Estevez responded. Nilson and Davis walked off the bridge into a small briefing office meant for command staff to gather. The compartment had been unused for so long, the crew started to use it as a break area and a place to store broken equipment. 

“Admiral, I know our relationship has been horrible and I want to say a few things, so you understand. I want to say this before we go into battle in case something happens.” Davis started. His expression was of genuine humility and concern. Nilson had never seen this before. 

“Speak freely, XO,” Nilson responded, intensely curious as to what was on Davis’s mind.

“Do you know who I am, Admiral?” Davis asked. 

“I know you’re the cousin of a politician or some god damned thing like that,” Nilson regretted the annoyance, but nepotism was destroying fleet flag officer culture. It seemed like every graduation class had fewer warriors and more politicians. Eventually, it would be all politicians. 

“My dad actually, he’s on the Colonial Affairs board of directors as an advisor. He was a fleet officer, too.” That’s how it was, politicians weren’t considered qualified unless they had some patriotic hero story to campaign on. Warship captain, or fleet admiral, or even sector commandant was a guaranteed majority vote if your opponent didn’t have the same chops. Hell, he’d seen political jockeying that came down to arguments over rank and time-in-grade. Because of that, nearly every politician across Dominion space pulled strings and lined pockets to make sure their kids, or allies, got the best fleet positions that matched their budget. 

The problem had gotten so bad that second fleet’s admiral made it a point to make the fleet’s command track progression so grueling, that being called ‘captain’ was only achievable if you were willing to spend half your career mastering the inner workings of whatever ship you were assigned to from the ground up. You had to be signed off on every primary bridge station before you could be considered qualified to command the thing. And it worked. Every captain in that fleet could sit down behind any station and operate it like a pro. Nav, helm, tactical, e-war, whatever. Second fleet was proud, and it was earned. The shiny point on humanity’s spear. Terror of any bastard alien that wanted to make trouble. Nilson wished he had a force like that now.

“Listen Admiral, I’m not trying to make excuses I just want to explain,” Davis said. Nilson relaxed and nodded, gesturing Davis to go on. 

“I went to law school, and when I graduated, my father pulled me aside and explained that I was not going to the Navy JAG. He’d bought me an officer route and I’d be following in his footsteps. It didn’t matter what I said. I wrote ‘Judge Advocate’ on every piece of career selection paperwork I was given, but it didn’t matter. I went from basic, to OCS, to Fleet Academy. I even tried to fail out,” Davis’s eyes were pleading, like he’d never told anyone his story. Like he’d had no one to tell. “If I failed an assignment, even on purpose, I’d get smoked alongside everyone else but my record would always show ‘resolved through remediation’. Always. I could not fail. I was pushed through Fleet Academy and did one orientation tour on a supply barge that lasted three months. I followed around the operations officer for one supply run and was immediately promoted to executive officer of the Bastion.”

Nilson let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He had no idea it was this bad. 

“When Captain Morcos lost his mind, I was terrified I’d be put in command of the ship. I had no fucking idea what to do. So, I did what I could do lay low and avoid being fingered for promotion. It would be insane to put me in command. I filled the spot for a few weeks, sure. But I just had Estevez take us back to the Oasis system. I thought I was going to have an ulcer. It was an incredible relief when you decided to take over Bastion as your flagship.”

Something clicked in Nilson’s mind. The young man was trying to fail on purpose. He was out of his depth, and he knew it. 

“I really appreciate your leadership,” Davis was near tears. “Thank you for stepping up, I couldn’t do it. I can’t do it.”

Nilson was at a complete loss of what to say. He knew Davis was incapable, but he didn’t expect the man to start crying and admit to it. 

“After seeing what happened to the Rahvan, I’m worried that could happened to us. It’s been eating away at me and I know how to fix it. Make Estevez the XO. Assign me wherever, I don’t care. Just get me out of the command succession.”

As if summoned by Davis’s words, the ships PA bellowed, “Admiral to the bridge, Admiral to the bridge.” 

“Davis, you’re right and I’m sorry this is the state of things. I don’t think you’re a bad kid, you’ve just been fucked over in a way that hurts all of us. I’ll find a way to make the transfer seem like a good thing for you so it doesn’t ruin your chances of holding office and get me on the Colonial Affairs chopping block. Give me time, I’ve got to go kill aliens.” Nilson put a reassuring hand on Davis’s shoulder, “take some time but don’t wait too long, you’re not going to want to miss this.”

Nilson speed walked to the bridge. Partially out of anxiety about the upcoming battle, but mostly to get away from the crying man that had just confided in him. Estevez greeted him on the bridge. 

“Admiral, phase two is underway and it’s starting to heat up,” Estevez told him. 

Nilson took up his post in front of the battle display. Someone had left a fresh cup of coffee on the flat surface by his backup command terminal; that someone deserves a medal. 

On the display, the situation was unfolding just as Nilson and Estevez had planned. The coilgun slugs the three frigates were firing were loaded with flak munitions, similar to the grapeshot munitions in the point defense missiles, but packed with fewer, and much larger, impactors. The clouds of tungsten were hard for the Adversary to dodge while moving at full speed, and so they shifted course to put the big moon between the station and themselves, effectively using the moon as cover. The maneuver didn’t cost them speed, but it did delay them slightly. Nilson’s squadron was two hours out of kill zone on the Adversary’s current position and burning at full speed. Every delay brought them closer to contributing in the current fight. 

The Adversary ships split up on the back side of the moon, one moving spinward, and the other moving counterspinward. Their intent seemed to be to emerge simultaneously on the planet facing side in order to trip up the defenders. That was fine. The less their point defenses overlapped, the better. 

The thing about mines, in space, is that they only really work if the enemy doesn’t know they’re there. Space is so big that you can generally see what’s going to happen well before it actually happens. And point defenses being what they are, mines are generally a niche tool for niche application. Nilson believed this to be that application. He had directed the three frigates to drop bundles of missiles in orbit around all four moons and had accelerated several hundred individual missiles up to the speed of the station and left them at differing intervals between the moons and the planet. They were dropped randomly. He didn’t know they’d wind up having time to arm the three-hundred missile hulls with the excess munitions, so three hundred unarmed missiles existed in the battle space as decoys. Clusters of armed missile munitions without hulls were dropped as well. The battle space was absolutely littered with little surprises for the enemy. 

“Five minutes until the station is in the enemy kill zone,” Estevez announced just as the Adversary rounded the big moon, and dozens of missiles waiting on the other side started burning towards them. 

Nilson wondered what kind of thoughts went through the alien’s disgusting freak brains when they realized they’d flown into a mine field. He wondered if they even had brains, or if the ships were fully automated. One of the frigates targeted a cluster of munitions that had wandered a few hundred kilometers from one of the ships, and hit it with a coilgun strike. The exploding ordinance wouldn’t harm the alien ship, but it would send out a mess of shrapnel and light, hopefully enough to confuse and distract. An EM bomb was part of the cluster, and a wave of energy meant to disable alien energy shields raced outwards, engulfing the Adversary ship.

The Adversary that was hit with the EM blast took evasive action, trying to escape the unknown wave of energy while the other unleashed a mighty wave of seekers. Missiles, guided by the targeting lasers aboard the docked e-war cruiser came closer and closer as the seekers struggled to keep up with missiles activating and flying in from every angle. To Nilson’s delight, the seekers couldn’t tell an armed missile from the husks, and dozens of seekers chased down and sacrificed themselves in mass to stop unarmed missiles that were near completely harmless. The e-war cruiser dialed up its jamming, activating a battle-short mode that would overload any warship’s sensors completely- and burn out the e-war systems within hours if sustained. All three frigates alternated coilgun fire between the Adversary and strikes on packets of ordinance floating in the gap. The chaos was unbelievable. 

Both Adversary ships fired their beams wildly into the bedlam. The beams missed hitting human warships by thousands of kilometers, instead lancing into the planet behind them. The beams of hellish energy burned bright swirling auroras into the planet’s atmosphere as they plunged to the surface. 

“Now!” Nilson ordered, commanding the rag-tag fleet to deploy their secret weapon. From the far side of the second moon, a navy corvette emerged, burning at full emergency speed. The little kamikaze warship had barely been put into position in time. It’s fusion reactor was already a sketchy thing to behold, but now, here it was turned up to eleven. Engineers and maintenance technicians had worked around the clock welding, lashing, and bolting missiles to the hull as makeshift chemical rocket boosters. They fired in series, propelling the ship at G forces well beyond the survivable limit for any human crew. Estevez controlled the suicide bomber from the Bastion, using the e-war cruiser as a relay. Nilson gripped the railing on his command podium as he watched the battle display. 

The Adversary, blinded, fired on, harried by missiles, terrorized by a minefield, and now pursued by a post-apocalyptic warlord’s kamikaze wet dream, must have sensed their imminent demise. Both ships did something entirely new at exactly the same time. The cylinders between their outriggers opened and fired long, barbed spikes. All of the spikes, fourteen in total, were aimed at the planet and propelled themselves into a circular formation, with New Carthage in the center. 

And that’s when everything fell apart. 

“Tactical, Estevez, coordinate PD fire on those projectiles! Comms! Send a message to the planet admin warning they are under attack!” Admiral Nilson shouted. 

Both the fleet officers shouted back, “Aye!” Their voices gaining energy as Nilson ramped up. 

“Sirs! Power junction on the dock attaching the Kydoimos to the station has just overloaded and caught fire! Damage control teams have been dispatched!” The situation officer announced to the bridge. 

“Fuck!” Estevez shouted, turning red either out of anger, or shame for losing her composure in battle. “The Kydoimos lost power, e-war, missile targeting, and suicide ship control are offline.”

Nilson’s stomach flipped as he realized the magnitude of what just happened. 

Both Adversary ships, suddenly free from the oppressive jamming, dialed in on their targets; beam weapons suddenly found purchase. One of the defensing frigates was cut in half, as the other took a direct hit to the reactor and went critical, a blaze of nuclear fire expanded at light speed into a sphere of absolute destruction.  

“Optical sensors offline!” The sensor operator shouted.

“The Morana and Tana are destroyed!” The situation officer shouted.

The Bastion and her destroyers were just close enough to watch, but not close enough to help. Nilson’s knuckles turned white and his hands ached. His jaw clenched hard as he watched the battle turn without any control or means to intervene. 

The Adversary, apparently having fulfilled their mission of launching weapons at the human settlement, slowed and changed course, unintentionally allowing time for the little suicide ship to get closer towards its target. Despite having lost guidance when the e-war cruiser lost power, the ship dutifully carried out it’s last commands. Rockets fired, and the ships main engine burned well past any measure of safety. The Adversary, apparently either confusing the ship for a missile, or wanting to avoid repeating the reactor overload of their last kill, launched a barrage of seekers to intercept the corvette. Fatal choice. The beam is light speed, the seekers are slow in comparison. The Adversary wasn’t aware of it’s mistake. 

The suicide corvette got far closer to the nearest ship than Nilson had hoped. As if guided by the hand of the God of War, the ship rocketed closer and closer to the closest Adversary ship. The Adversary moved at a leisurely pace to avoid direct contact and loosed another wave of seekers. The seekers pelted the hull, desperately attempting to stop it’s relentless advance. The final remaining frigate, with it’s one coilgun, seized the initiative and sent a tungsten slug directly into the corvette’s reactor. It went critical, spilling a cone of nuclear light that twisted and burned into a roiling sphere. 

“Confirmed kill,” Estevez announced. 

The remaining Adversary, the last of it’s kind in this system, having accomplished whatever mission it set out for on its gauntlet run, turned and accelerated away from the battle and down towards the gravity well of the system.