Cripple squadron the 1st.., p.9
Cripple Squadron (The 1st Solar War), page 9
Doris leaned back in her chair and thought about the situation. Her two squadrons of SF-40 Spacehawk space fighters were a generation behind the newest SF-51 Mustang. The problem was that her carrier couldn’t handle the larger and newer space fighters. It was one of the many reasons fleet command had retired the aged warship. The attack on the missile cruiser Mobile Bay and the convoy she’d escorted had changed all of that.
Ten years ago, Midway had led the first force out into the asteroid belt to combat the pirate activity, which had suddenly appeared and attacked the hydrogen tankers bound for Earth from the Saturn mining facilities. The carrier and her assigned escorts had lived up to the ship’s nickname and spent two years hunting down pirates. But it was like playing the old game Whac-A-Mole. As soon as you got rid of one, another one popped up.
US Space Force couldn’t afford to have its only carrier at the time tied down that far from Earth. Different strategies had to be implemented. The US Space Force grouped the hydrogen tankers into convoys of twenty ships and assigned a dedicated escort force to guard them at the Titan facility. Initially, these were destroyers and corvettes which acted as a deterrent to the pirate space fighters. Three years ago, Space Force commissioned a new class of missile cruisers that allowed the escort force to engage the space fighters at longer distances. After losing several dozen space fighters, the pirates had pulled their fangs in and retreated deeper into the asteroid belt.
For two and a half years, there had been no pirate attacks on any convoys. Someone occasionally sighted pirate scouts, likely checking if a convoy had an escort. That was until four months ago, when twelve pirate space fighters attacked a convoy guarded by the missile cruiser Mobile Bay. The space fighters attacked the convoy with stand-off, anti-ship missiles. They launched the missiles from forty miles out, then turned and ran. The incompetence of the cruiser’s captain made a dangerous situation worse. Instead of launching his cruiser’s missiles at maximum range, which might have forced the space fighters to break off, the captain waited until it was too late. The captain allowed the space fighters to destroy four tankers and a corvette, and the Mobile Bay and the other corvette in the escort force were both badly damaged. Still, the allies lucked out. The losses could’ve been significantly worse. The captains of the corvettes knew their duty and didn’t hesitate. They placed their ships between the missiles and the tankers. Both of the small escorts ignored their own defense and engaged the missiles that targeted the tankers. Their actions saved six additional tankers from destruction.
The revelation that the pirate space fighters were now carrying modern ship-killer missiles forced Space Force to reevaluate their strategy. The fleet would return to the strategy of space fighters fighting space fighters, and the only way to do that was with a carrier. With China’s continued buildup of warships in both Earth and lunar orbit, the fleet couldn’t spare the three Essex carriers. That’s why I get to take the old girl out again.
“Sorry I’m late,” Commander Walter Lowe, Midway’s XO said as he floated into the bridge. “We were having a bit of a problem getting all the space fighters stowed. They have already stripped most of our fighter-handling gear out of the ship. We had to do it the old-fashioned way and manhandle the birds into their launching bays.”
“Dammit, that’s going to impact fighter operations a lot,” Doris said aloud to no one in particular.
“It’s not as bad as that,” Walter said. “The CAG messaged me. He found the gear stuffed in a storeroom. The yard dogs had pulled it out and put it there but hadn’t gotten around to shipping it to the dockyard. He’s putting all of his flight crews, including the pilots, to work reinstalling them.”
Part of Midway’s decommissioning process was to strip out usable equipment and send it to the fleet dockyard to be used in new construction. Doris wondered what else they might have already stripped off her ship.
“XO, I want you to work with all the department heads to go through their equipment. I don’t want to be surprised we’re missing something we need when we get on station,” Doris ordered.
“I’ll get them all on it as soon as we get done with the boost, Skipper,” the XO acknowledged the order.
“Speaking of the boost,” Doris said with a somewhat evil grin.
As soon as he saw the grin, Commander Lowe knew what was coming. “You wouldn’t do that to us, ma’am? Would you?”
“Headquarters needs us at Saturn as soon as we can get there, Walt. So we’ll max boost for one hour,” Doris announced to the entire bridge. The comment elicited a loud groan, and the captain could see grimaces on the watch stander’s faces. Five gravities of acceleration for an extended time got real old, real fast. It was like having an entire basketball team sitting on your chest.
Midway’s maximum boost was five gravities. It was another of the reasons she was outdated. Modern warships could boost at ten gravities. But Midway’s main drive configuration was far different from the current generation of warships. She had two drive reactors and two torch engines. They designed each set for 2.5 gravities of acceleration. The captain intended to use both sets of engines to get the old girl up to speed.
The crew will just have to suck it up, Doris thought. “XO, we have procedures and protocols for doing this. We’ll send everyone to their bunks except for a minimal watch. I’ve already had the navigator lay out the course and calculate our acceleration. We’ll max boost for one hour to get the old girl moving and then we’ll do a ten-hour burn at 2.5 gravities. That will get us to Saturn in twenty-two days. Of course, we’ll have to decel at the end, but that’s the way Isaac Newton says it works.”
“The extended time at normal boost won’t be bad, and most of the crew could handle an hour at max,” the XO responded, earning him a sharp look from his CO. “I wasn’t going to bring it up till the department head meeting, but we’ve got a lot of green kids on board. I guess it was all BuPers had to finish manning us.”
“Ouch,” was all Midway’s captain could say. The mission was going to be tough enough and I have to do it with a crew filled with inexperienced spacers.
“All docking hatches show closed and secure, Captain,” the navigator reported. “Status board shows all yard connections detached. The ship is ready to get underway.”
“Thank you, Nav. Helm, lay in a course to get us out of the Lagrange Point perimeter.”
“Course laid in, Captain,” the petty officer driving the ship reported almost instantly, since the course had been ready for several hours.
“Boatswain Mate of the watch, sound the acceleration alarm,” Doris ordered.
A series of loud gongs erupted from the ship’s speakers. It was a set of three gongs followed by a pause and then three more gongs. Then the boatswain announced over the ship’s 1MC, the shipboard-wide public address system, “Standby for acceleration.”
Doris pushed the call button on the arm of her chair and, within a moment, Midway’s chief engineer, or cheng, answered. “Dan, is your team ready to go?”
“They are, Captain,” Commander Dan Lowery responded. “All reactors are online. Main engines are ready to answer all bells.”
“Thank you, Cheng,” Doris responded, and closed the channel. “Helm, five-second burst of max acceleration. Let’s get us moving.”
“Five seconds of max acceleration, aye, ma’am,” the helm acknowledged, and simultaneously flipped both switches to engage the two torch engines.
The five gravities of acceleration slammed Captain Pearce and every other bridge watch stand back into their seat. And then the burn was over, the engines cut off, and the ship was moving on a course for Saturn. The five-second burn was only enough to get the ship moving away from the US facilities at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 4.
“XO, we won’t be starting our high-speed acceleration for two hours. Let’s get the crew fed and into their bunks. I also want to have a department head call in an hour to discuss updates to our mission orders and get their reports.”
“Your stateroom, ma’am?” the XO asked.
Doris shook her head. “We’ll do it in the wardroom. We can all eat and go over what needs to be discussed.”
The XO looked at the wall-mounted chronometer. In the age of spaceflight, it was an anachronism. “Thirteen hundred then, ma’am,” the XO announced.
Doris nodded and unstrapped from her command chair. “You have the bridge, XO,” the captain announced as she he floated toward the rear of the compartment and her space cabin. “Set the underway watch. I’ll see you in one hour.”
***
Doris took a swig from the sippy cup that held her coffee. She placed the cup back on the wardroom’s table, and carefully affixed its Velcro bottom to a spot on the table. After thirty years in space such things had become habit. She chuckled to herself that she was drinking from a cup that wasn’t much different from the ones her sister’s children had used when they’d been infants.
“It sure will be nice when the scientists finally figure out artificial gravity,” Dan Lowery, Midway’s chief engineer, said with a laugh as he pointed at the cup.
“I’ll just settle for rotating gravity sections on ships like they have on the space stations,” Walter Lowe said. Most of the large space stations built in Earth orbit had rotating rings. The rings rotated around a central shaft, using centrifugal force to generate a slight gravity field. It was nowhere near Earth standard, but at least you could sit down and eat normal food. Instead, spacers had to drink out of sippy cups and eat nutrient paste out of tubes.
“Last I heard, the scientists at GE claimed they were near a breakthrough,” Doris said. “I mean about artificial gravity.”
Dan Lowery laughed out loud. “They said the same thing ten years ago and I’ll wager they said it ten years before that.”
Doris looked around the wardroom table as the department heads slowly filed in. Like most warships, at least American ones, there was a hierarchy in the seating. A hierarchy built on importance, not rank. Doris sat at the head of the table and, by tradition, the most junior officer sat at its foot. For today’s meeting, that was a Lieutenant JG who was Midway’s supply officer.
The XO of a ship always sat on the captain’s left. If there was an important dignitary or visitor aboard, they sat to the captain’s right. With no special visitors aboard, Midway’s engineer sat in that spot. Moving left and right down the table were Midway’s tactical officer, Lieutenant Commander Christopher Brading, and Commander Joe Spargo, the CAG. These were Doris’s key officers. The writer George Orwell had it correct. All the departments and their department heads were important for the smooth operation of the ship. It’s just that some departments, like pigs, were more equal than others.
After the CAG sat the ship’s doctor, the ship’s navigator, and the Marine major in command of Midway’s Marine detachment. Then came the two noncommissioned officers who were invited to the meeting, the ship’s bos’n, a warrant officer responsible for maintenance and operation of the flight deck, and the command master chief, the senior enlisted man aboard ship.
“Before we do anything else,” Doris addressed the group, “I want to go-no-go for boosting to Saturn.”
The reports came in from around the table, either “ayes” or “gos” or “readys” as each department reported their readiness. Doris smiled inwardly that everyone claimed they were ready to go. They all know how important this is, and it would’ve taken a stout heart to say no to that question. Especially since they should’ve brought it up before now if they weren’t ready.
“With that formality out of the way, I need to hear about major concerns,” Doris informed the group.
“I’ll start it off,” the XO said. He glanced down the table at the command master chief. “The chief and I both are concerned about how green the crew is. At least 25 percent have never been on a deep space run before. And they’re not centered on any department but spread across the whole ship. I warn everyone right now. There’ll be a lot of drills between here and Titan Base.”
“Same thing goes for flight ops,” Joe Spargo added. “Boats has a lot of green people in his flight deck team, and that’s going to impact turnaround for flight ops. As for my pilots”—the CAG shrugged—“I won’t call them green as much as they’re inexperienced. Hell, I actually have three reserve pilots BuPers called back to active duty because they know how to fly Phantoms.” Midway currently had two squadrons of Spacehawk space fighters, and two squadrons of the antiquated Space Phantom’s configured for anti-ship and bombing missions.
“We’ll start flying combat space patrols as soon as we’re done boosting,” the CAG continued. “All the pilots will spend at least eight hours every day in the simulators, even during the boost. I have all of them in simulators right now so that we can run simulations during the 5G max boost. It will be good training.”
Doris listened as the other department heads discussed weaknesses and how they’d deal with them. She realized she was lucky to have experienced officers leading most of her departments. Those officers she considered her senior staff were all old Midway sailors.
“Seems like everyone has a handle on things. I expected nothing less. But I warn you, fleet command will throw us right into convoy duty as soon as we reach Saturn,” Doris informed the group. “That means the air group and tactical need to be ready. If anything will prevent that, the XO and I need to know right away. If there’s nothing else”—Doris stared around the table—“that’s all I’ve got. Enjoy the rest of your lunch. We’ll max boost in thirty minutes.”
***
Admiral Arnold Buckner had flown over to Armstrong Station to meet with his boss, the commander of US Space Force. The Chinese had launched another space carrier, giving them four compared to the allies’ three, and decisions had to be made on how to deploy forces. He sat in Admiral McNair’s office along with the head of Space Force Intelligence, Commodore Nancy O’Shaughnessy.
“Dammit, Nancy, I’m tired of these surprises,” McNair said angrily.
The intelligence officer threw her hands up. “We’ve talked about this before, boss. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has assets inside the Chinese yard facility on the far side of the moon. We all thought it was stupid when they built that base on the far side of the moon, but damn if it isn’t extremely hard to get any intelligence with it being out there.”
“Every spy satellite we’ve tried to sneak over there suddenly malfunctions, and getting human assets onto that base or onto their moon mining facility supporting it has been futile,” O’Shaughnessy continued.
McNair turned to the commander of the Space Fleet. “Thoughts, Arnie?”
“The Chinese now have parity with us in the number of fighters we can deploy from our carriers.” Arnold Buckner began ticking off points. “Before the launch of the fourth carrier, we had a little flexibility in the deployment of our forces. I could deploy a single carrier forward to conduct offensive operations if needed, but now I need to keep all our carriers positioned between Earth and the moon.”
“Even with the additional fighters we now have based on Armstrong Station?” McNair asked.
“I’m thinking more of a surprise first strike,” Arnold elaborated. “This station is a sitting duck in space. Oh sure, we have the equivalent of a space carrier’s worth of fighters aboard, and she has missile defenses. But if the Chinese commit all of their carriers and their missile cruisers, they could launch a first strike against this station that we wouldn’t be able to intercept.”
Silence permeated the room for several moments. Finally, McNair spoke. “What if—” he began.
Buckner cut him off. “We can’t station any more fighters on the station. Oh sure, there are spaces where we could cram ’em, but we’re limited in how many we can launch and recover. This shifted the balance of power in their favor. Until we get another carrier, or two or three more missile cruisers, we’re stuck in this position.”
“And Yorktown is at least a year away from being ready.” McNair’s comment emphasized how desperate the situation was.
“Midway could ease the situation, but we need her out at Saturn,” Buckner said.
“Did she leave on schedule?” McNair asked.
Arnold Buckner laughed. “You asked that, knowing who her captain is? She’d have left on time if Doris Pearce had to get out and push.”
“How long before she gets to Saturn?” O’Shaughnessy asked. “Fuel is getting a little tight. We are supplementing by bringing up fuel from the national reserves, but we all know how inefficient that is. Last count I saw was that there are forty tankers waiting to be escorted.”
“I received Captain Pearce’s underway report just before I shuttled over,” Arnold informed the other two. “She’s pushing the old girl as hard as she can, but it will be a twenty-two-day trip out there. As it is, she’ll need every one of those days to work up her crew and her space fighter squadrons.”
“I know this is a question I should really ask Scott Murphy, but can we speed up Yorktown’s construction?” McNair asked. Rear Admiral Scott Murphy was the head of engineering and construction.
O’Shaughnessy shook her head, and Arnold Buckner sighed. “I can think of a few things that might shave some time off delivery, but to be sure I’d have to go out there,” Buckner said.
“I want you to grab Scott and go out there and see what you can do,” McNair ordered. “The problem with engineers is they want to do everything perfectly. Scott’s good about thinking outside the box, but I think solutions you might come up with, Arnie, are beyond him.”
“I’ll get with him as soon as we’re done and head out there,” Buckner responded.
“How is this going to affect our lunar bases?” O’Shaughnessy asked.
“I hate to say it,” Arnold began, “but if the shooting starts, or, I really should say, when the shooting starts, they’re going to be on their own. The fleet can’t cover those bases and ensure coverage over Earth.”
