Stein rose up and walked away to the window. His shoulders were slightly shaking, the professor was laughing silently.
* * *
The Fifth Strike Fleet was stuck in the Solar system for a long time. The combat damage sustained by its ships required long-term repair under factory conditions, and the Martian shipyards were overloaded. In addition, the fleet had to re-form by two thirds. The losses in the Battle of Barnard-3 were catastrophic. The Fourth Fleet was completely lost, the Fifth Strike Fleet had to re-form, the orbital fortresses were destroyed This has seriously undermined the Federation Fleets operational capability. But these unfortunate circumstances have brought the people I needed within reach.
Good afternoon, Fleet Admiral, Sir, I greeted Nelson as soon as I made contact, Congratulations on your new rank.
Mr Chairman of the Commission of the Ministry of Defence, thank you, the Admiral smiled, You and I worked really hard that time. I see your shoulder straps have changed, too, Captain. Lets put aside ranks. What new adventure are you up to?
Ehh I knew my reputation wasnt always clear, but I havent offered anything yet, and youve already identified it as an adventure
Dont mess with my head, Igor. I didnt give you personal contact to get in touch with me for no reason. You and I both know that, so state it, state it.
I need your help, Mr Nelson, and I gave the Admiral a brief account of the meeting at the Ministry of Defence, after all, he had access to information. It was Inga whom I told something at my own risk, and in the case of the Admiral, I was quite sure.
The Admiral listened to me with a stone face.
Ten Titan class battleships steel cut through his voice, Have they lost their minds? How are they going to defend our planets?
I think theres a lot more than ten. We couldnt find all the docks.
So the General Staff wouldnt listen to your suggestions? That sounds like them, Igor. Im not surprised. Its a shame Tobolsky cant turn this around, but maybe he just believes them. They would have been in that fight themselves, on our battleships under the fire of the quargs flagship, to see what were really up against. To them, its just another enemy ship, albeit a very large one. And for those of us who have seen it in battle, it is clear that ten of these battleships is death. Quick and inevitable. How can I help you?
I need some advice first. I dont know anything about shipbuilding and the assignment of ships. I need carriers for, well, call it pursuit planes. Theyre very similar in mass, although theyre actually unmanned torpedoes with the characteristics of a pursuit plane and their own powerful EW systems. A classic aircraft carrier wouldnt suit me. Its too big to be effectively camouflaged. And I need ten of them, but each one will have only about seventy machines, placed as compact as possible. The dwelling sections are the bare minimum, and as for the weapons and armor theres no need for them. The size and mass of the ship have a profound effect on the possibility to make it invisible, were planning a surprise strike from the void.
The Admiral was pondering over it for three minutes.
Aircraft carriers and other warships really wont fit you, the Admiral finally announced his conclusion, but theres one interesting option. If youd shake out of Colonel General Knyazev ten medium troop transports, and give them a good clear-out, they can be converted relatively quickly to suit your needs. It will be a terrible makeshift thing, for sure, your torpedoes and pursuit planes will have to be released through the gates of the landing pods, but you could try to do that. Only if the Admiralty finds out weve squandered a dozen well-suited ships
Ill take responsibility, I told quickly, not letting the Admiral change his mind.
Khm well, yes. You really are the responsible person now, so if anything Come on, Igor, you know me. After Barnard-3, I could bring you a couple of aircraft carriers. But you should talk to Knyazev yourself, Nelson smiled cunningly, If I just start talking about his transports, hell slit my throat at once, and as for you, maybe hell listen to you first
Chapter 2
Mr Lavroff, what youre asking is beyond your authority, informed me gloomily the Minister of Military Production, Why on earth would I shift the ship repair schedule to reequip your transports? I have the Fleet order approved by the Minister of Defense, and I will be held accountable for failure to meet the deadline.
Zwerev pronounced all these correct phrases looking me in the eye, but I did not see the answer no in his gaze. Something kept the Minister from just telling me to fuck off. Well, Ill try to find the right words.
Mr Minister, I began carefully, You heard me speaking at the command meeting. If I may ask your opinion, do you also consider me an empty fantasizer?
Zwerev took his eyes off for a second, but quickly restored the calmness of his face.
I really thought so, the Minister confirmed, until yesterday.
So, what changed?
I visited the new shipyard where the captured battleship Titan is being repaired.
And what made you change your mind?
This ship We wont be able to build something like this in the next few years. Im not even sure were gonna be able to convert Titan, so that it could be controlled by a human crew. How could you handle it, Mr Lavroff? And you did it in combat, neutralizing the enemys resistance, and then you destroyed several enemy battleships. How?
The same way, Mr Zwerev, as Im going to destroy enemy ships under construction: with the help of the latest developments of the Lavroff Weapons Company, now renamed the FAWC, the Federal Advanced Weapons Corporation. But at that time I was able to do myself everything I needed, and now I need your help. Our company has no shipbuilding facilities and all public and private shipyards are full of Fleet orders, and they wont take my order for any money.
Are you so sure you can do what youre saying? Destroy ten docks behind enemy lines in quarg-occupied systems loaded with their ships?
But once I was there and I could come back
Military transport is not a medium-size recon ship, Mr Lavroff. You cant camouflage it that easily.
Well get through it. Review the information on Luyten-5 and Barnard-3, which also seemed hopeless. And also try to imagine for a second ten Titan-class battleships coming out of the hyper inside Neptunes orbit
Thats what I was thinking yesterday, looking at your trophy. Thats why Im still talking to you, Mr Lavroff, although I should have denied your request outright and write a memo to your immediate superior. And I know about your fights for Luyten and Barnard, as well as about Kapteyn and Gliese, in fact, I was curious about your biography after the meeting at the Ministry of Defence.
Will you give me the shipyard, Mr Minister? I asked a direct question, knowing that all arguments had already been exhausted.
Yes, I will. But I have a condition.
What is it?
You will personally lead the attack on the docks of the enemy. Otherwise, I do not believe in success.
Where should I take the ships, Mr Minister?
* * *
Jeff and Stein didnt make it in two weeks, but I didnt blame them, although I showed how unhappy I was that they didnt meet the deadline. I myself have been working on perfecting the structure of the medium-size transport, making infinite modifications in order to convert the troop transport into a kind of aircraft carrier. It took up most of my time, including part of my time at the Academy and my time at the Ministry of Defense. They also needed to be provided by EW stations and powerful computers that could make the stations work in coordination. To do that, I had to take two engineers from Jeff, which also affected his schedule. However, three weeks later, a prototype drone torpedo stood in front of me in the hangar of the aircraft carrier Wellington near the command pursuit plane, designed to control ten such items.
With the permission of the ships commander, Captain Clark, Ive invited representatives of the Russian Weapons Concern and Global Weapon Industries right here, on board the aircraft carrier to be present at the internal tests of the new equipment. The chief engineer and commercial director arrived from RWC, and GWI sent Enrique Cruz whom I knew from the last negotiations, and their chief Fleet technician.
Mr Lavroff, told me Cruz after mutual gretings, The management of our company highly appreciates your invitation and hopes for mutual understanding in the future. I would also like to add that I am very sorry for our conflict and hope that it is now a thing of the past.
I dont know about you, Mr Cruz, but Im not in the mood for internal conflict right now. I know your company as a powerful enterprise of the military-industrial complex with experience in large-scale production of many types of weapons. Thats what I need you for. If you dont let me down, Im willing to put all the past controversy behind me.
GWI will do its best to do so, you can rest assured, Mr Chairman of the Commission of the Ministry of Defense, Cruz told me with a solemn official voice.
Thats great. Well, gentlemen, told I the invited persons, What youre about to see is a demonstration of our new torpedo, which is fundamentally different from what our fleet is equipped with. At the moment we have only one torpedo, but Im sure you have the imagination to imagine that there could be dozens, and in order for that to become a reality, I brought you here. Come to the ships command post, gentlemen, Captain Clark has graciously allowed us to observe the tests from there.
We chose as our target the shipyard where the badly damaged battleship New York was being repaired. We have, of course, informed the Dock management and the Metropolitan Fleet Patrol Force in advance that a training attack was planned on the facility under their supervision, and now corvette commanders and shipyard anti-aircraft operators, who have long been bored with no real business, enthusiastically probed space with scanners, waiting for a hypothetical adversary to appear.
We did not yet have a carrier for the command plane and torpedo, so we asked Captain Clark to make the aircraft carrier accelerate in the direction of the shipyard, release our experimental products and change course, gradually slowing down.
Our supposed adversary tracked the aircraft carriers maneuver. Of course theyd notice a carcass like Wellington, but as I hoped, the start of our machines went unnoticed. By the terms of the test, the shipyards defenders should not have paid attention to the aircraft carrier, since it played a purely auxiliary role, and they didnt.
And that was where it got interesting. The command pursuit plane, controlled by one of the pilots, who had already had experience with this machine, has carefully diverted its course to the enemys unexpected attack vector. The torpedo he controlled was moving just behind the command plane, like a dog on a leash, carefully repeating his maneuvers. The distance to the autonomous space dock was still quite large, and our machines began a cautious acceleration to reach the target at maximum speed. Shipyard scanners and patrol ships still didnt notice the danger, and the command plane pilot saw the ships, which were larger and more detectable, quite clearly, he was maneuvering, trying to get his machines to the target as far away from them as possible.
10,000 kilometers from the dock, the pursuit plane made a circumspect maneuver, set a course that diverged from its target, and the torpedo turned off the engine and went to the target by inertia, using EW systems to conceal itself from detection.
Now the pursuit plane pilot wasnt supposed to go unnoticed. He put the torpedo on target, and then it had to operate automatically. Therefore, the pilot of the command plane decided to help his ward by diverting the attention of the defense forces. Having switched the engines into overdrive mode, he drastically changed course and attacked one of the patrol ships. The pursuit plane, virtually, fell out of the void and slightly shocked the commander of the corvette. The distance at which his scanners detected the enemy was completely out of line with his understanding of the capabilities of modern EW means. As a result of the brazen attack, the corvette was hit by a rocket, and the computer displayed a list of conditional damage to the projection screen. The pursuit plane that ran at maximum speed past the corvette went unpunished, despite the fairly heavy fire from the patrols anti-aircraft guns. Two more corvettes tried to intercept a single pursuit plane, but their guidance systems were hard-pressed to capture a quick-moving target, and consistently missed it.
Meanwhile, the torpedo continued to approach the autonomous space dock. The idea of a torpedo capable of reaching the enemy ship on its own after leaving an aircraft carrier came to my mind when I watched our torpedo bombers being destroyed, because they were very vulnerable to enemy pursuit planes.
Of course, this ammo turned out to be very expensive. In fact, it was an unmanned pursuit plane, equipped with electronic warfare systems, powerful engines, which provided for high speed and maneuverability, and instead of rockets and cannons it was armed with an internal binary charge of considerable power. But the main advantage of this weapon was its ability to effectively counter the enemy scanners and aim-capturing systems.
Shipyard scanners spotted the threat at the moment when it was already impossible for the anti-aircraft systems to respond to it, furthermore, the high intensity of radiation from the scanners made the torpedo start chaotic maneuvering, that made it difficult for the enemy to point the guns.
The torpedo didnt hit the dock, after all, it was a combat drill, and no one wanted to lose the only experimental product yet, at the risk of crippling the shipyard. During the next maneuver, the torpedo passed close to the dock structures, signalled by a bright flash the conditional detonation of the warhead and headed back towards the aircraft carrier.
Target hit, aircrafts computer stated, Industrial object of the hypothetical enemy critically damaged.
It was spectacular, Mr Lavroff, Captain Clark noted with satisfaction, Congratulations on your success. When can the Fleet expect to see these weapons on our ships?
Sooner than you think, Captain, Sir, I responded smiling, and thank you for congratulations. Gentlemen, I turned to the representatives of the weaponry companies, In a month and a half, I need 500 of these torpedoes and 50 command pursuit planes to control them in battle. The technical documentation for the products is ready and will be handed to you by representatives of the FAWC. You will have unrestricted access to the designs of our engineers required for the serial production of the torpedoes. Im not gonna do a competition, I just dont have time for it. The decision to enter into direct contracts with you will be made by me under my own responsibility, based on the prices and schedules you will give us. I expect your offers tomorrow, gentlemen. I cant give you more time.
* * *
What is this, Captain? The Minister of Defense looked at me in surprise, taking his eyes off his tablet, Are you doing this again?
This is a plan of battle tests for a new type of torpedo, Fleet Admiral, Sir. Since its primary purpose is a covert surprise attack on the enemys major ships and space infrastructure, the quarg shipyards where they are currently building their superbattleships have been selected as targets.