“And when would I have done all this, Mr Minister? I was pulled into a meeting right off the tarmac.”
“Then you shouldn’t have said those things at all. You should have brought your idea up later, in the usual way. It would have been more useful.”
“We don’t have time, Mr Minister. I listen to you, and I wonder how the Federation has managed to survive twenty years of fighting such a dangerous enemy with such an approach. You’re Fleet Admiral, Mr Minister, I don’t believe you don’t understand what would happen if we let the quargs build their battleships…”
“Captain Lavroff,” Bronstein abruptly interrupted me, “You’re not listening to me at all, and you’re not drawing the right conclusions from what I’m saying. The only thing that makes me still talk to you is your genuine desire to defeat the quargs, which you have demonstrated many times to all of us, and which you constantly put above any personal interests. Right now, as you drive me mad with your boorishness, you’re risking your career, and I think you understand that perfectly well. Why are you doing this, Captain?”
“I need this operation, Mr Minister,” said I with the utmost patience,“We’ve already spent too much time preparing it. If we allow the quargs to strike our planets with their new weapons, the Federation will not stand. I know that for a fact, I’ve seen a ship like that in battle on both sides of the sight. You’re right, now I don’t care what happens to my career, but I don’t want 200 billion people going into nonexistence because of my inaction. I’ve already died once, Mr Minister, but that guy looking down on us gave me a second chance, and now I owe him, because he didn’t do it for nothing, and I’m used to paying my debts in full.”
“Asteroid fever?” asked Bronstein thoughtfully, “I remember, I was told.”
“Mr Minister, I took the liberty of drafting your order to test new torpedoes. It says you authorize them, but you leave it up to me to select the targets in the enemy’s rear. If I don’t come back from there, it’ll be my fault, because it’ll be my decision, and your headaches will go away without me. Well, if this works out, it’ll be obvious to everyone whose orders I acted on,” said I sending the appropriate file to the Minister’s tablet.
Bronstein looked me in the eye for 15 seconds and kept silent, and then he looked down at the screen and went into the reading. The Minister frowned and tweaked the text, then he put the tablet down and looked back at me.
“I’ve signed the order, Captain. The Fifth Strike Fleet will provide you with ships to support the operation. Agree on the number and types of ships with Fleet Admiral Nelson.”
“Thank you, Mr Minister,” I replied getting up.
I was coming out of Bronstein’s office when he stopped me by saying.
“I think I’m going to put up with a headache somehow, Captain. I like the alternative scenarios much less.”
Chapter 3
We entered the quarg space in five separate groups. The ships of Admiral Nelson that accompanied our transports were far behind, because they weren’t equipped with our latest versions of the EW stations. Taking these ships with us to the enemy’s rear meant only exposing them to an unjustified risk and putting the entire operation on the verge of breakdown.
The autonomous space docks, where the quargs were building their giant ships, were located in five enemy-controlled star systems located quite far apart. We were therefore forced to take our ships to the assault line independently of each other, having agreed only on the exact time of the operation. The simultaneous onset of the attack was required to provide the surprise upon which my plan relied heavily.
Admiral Bronstein was right to call our operation an adventure. It could not have been anything else, given the terrible lack of time and resources we experienced in preparing this operation. RWC and GWI barely made the torpedoes and command planes we needed, and the conversion of the transports into half-recon ships, half-aircraft carriers was so difficult that sometimes I had to stay on the docks 24 hours a day. The result was still something that should have been called sub-recon-sub-aircraft-carriers. The medium-size troop transport is a pretty good carcass. It’s not a cruiser, of course, but it’s much larger than a destroyer, just try to camouflage it… We didn’t have enough time to make processors for EW stations, let alone set them up and adjust the settings. The outcome was much sadder than I had imagined, but now it was too late to regret it, we were flying into the jaws of the toads, ugh, of the quargs.
Each of our groups included one medium-size recon ship, which had been upgraded in the same way that the ship Yoon Gao and I flew on the reconnaissance raid. The task of these ships was to observe the tests. Whatever happened, they had to come back and report the results of the attack. Two groups consisted of only one transport and a recon ship. Their task was to destroy single autonomous space docks with unfinished battleships. Two other groups consisted of a recon ship and two transports and went to the systems where the quarg shipyards were located in pairs.
I was in the largest group that has been moving toward the most densely populated system we’ve discovered in the last raid. The four autonomous space docks in it were located in orbit of the sixth planet, which was a gas giant, as was customary.
Our four transports and a recon ship emerged from hyper-space beyond the borders of the system. For two days, we were slowly and cautiously navigating through the asteroid outer belt, probing the space with the best scanners that Engineer Jeff and Professor Stein were able to assemble on the basis of the new processors. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go deeper into the central areas of the system where terrestrial planets revolved around the local sun here. It was much easier to run into a quarg patrol or a network of fixed scanners there than on the outskirts of the system, although we had no doubt that the docks would be heavily guarded. We were just counting on the patrol force to relax and grow lazy over the years of quiet service, and their vigilance has faded, albeit a little.
Whether it was true, or whether the new generation of EW stations was successful, but we have gone undetected to the assault line and even with some time left. The transports gently extinguished speed and hovered in emptiness, and the recon ship moved a little closer to the target and launched a compact probe. A few hours later, the probe returned, and we received three-dimensional images of our targets.
I didn’t trick the Minister of Defense, we were really almost late. From the looks of the battleships, their preparedness was approaching 80%. Almost all of the outer hull had been installed on the two ships, and now the main-caliber towers were being mounted.
Well, our waiting time has come to an end, and the transports have begun to accelerate toward the targets. An hour later, the doors of the holds went sideways and the catapults pushed the command machines and our new torpedoes from the inside of the ships. We planned to fire 50 torpedoes at each dock. The command planes scattered in different directions, taking ten torpedoes with them, to provide for a simultaneous attack on the dock from multiple directions, and the ships turned aft ahead and proceeded to smooth braking.
“Detected by the enemy!” reported Bridgetown Transport Commander, Lieutenant Commander Bosworth.
“Accelerate immediately and jump out of here!” ordered I, watching as the quargs’ guarding forces regroup and gain speed to attack the detected ship, “The machines you’ve released, we’ll pick them up ourselves.”
“Permission to raise pursuit planes from Bridgetown, Captain, Sir?” Commander Matveev asked me. Nelson assigned him to me as commander of the pursuit planes transferred to us from aircraft carrier Windhoek. Eight planes were based on each of the transports. Just in case, as Nelson explained to me, and I didn’t mind, anyway, we didn’t have time to make enough torpedoes to fill the ships, and there was still room.
“I think it’s time,” I nodded, “Let them attempt to bind the enemy’s corvettes by battle and lead them away.”
The