The Memnon Incident: Part 1 of 4 (A Serial Novel) Read online

  The

  Memnon

  Incident

  Part One of Four

  Marc DeSantis

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Marc DeSantis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Chapter One

  Edge of the Memnon System

  Hundreds of tons of overstressed metal screeched in agony and buckled, hurling glowing gobbets of titanium away from the hull of the heavy cruiser RHS Steadfast in swirling cascades. Captain Andrew More smacked his console, bringing up a three-dimensional holographic image of his ships and their predicament. The combat holo presented an onmidirectional view of the volume of space surrounding the Steadfast over a diameter of one thousand kilometers. The picture it presented was terrible. The strike group that Steadfast led was deep inside a minecloud of hundreds of thousands of activated nuclear weapons. Within just seconds of emerging at the edge of the Memnon star system the mines had come to life, orienting themselves to fire single-use beam cannons or maneuvering closer to detonate within lethal range of their onboard nukes. The Steadfast had just been hit by one such atomic-powered detonation, and a chunk of her armored hull had been torn away as if it were made of paper.

  "Ahhh!" Seated before her console, Lieutenant Cassandra Feeney cried out in pain as a sparking electromagnetic surge shocked her fingertips. She swayed inside her blast couch, and directed her attention back to her vidscreen. "We're in the middle of a field of a million-plus mines stretching out sixty kilometers in all directions!"

  The rest of the bridge crew stole glances at each other, and then looked to More. There was no question that this had been an ambush. The odds of running into a minecloud of this density only 120 kilometers in diameter were infinitesimally low. More's 34th Strike Squadron had displaced out of hyperspace and approached the system from an oblique angle, far away from the common intra-system routes used by merchant shipping. Someone had known they were coming, and had set the minecloud in the exact spot where they would emerge.

  There was a blossom of red-orange light on the main vidscreen to the fore of the bridge, with a smaller, holographic version of the same replicated on More's console. "The Rose is gone, Captain," Feeney reported. There was a second explosion on the screen, larger than the first. 'That was Amethyst," she added.

  Two ships destroyed within seconds of arrival in-system. "Ensign Tan," More fumed, "what about those damn shields?"

  Ensign Theodore "Teddy" Tan tapped his keyboard furiously, bringing up a miniature, three-dimensional image of the Steadfast. "Shields cycling up to full strength . . . now, Captain," he said. There was always a lag due to the need for the shield generators to recover from the time dilation effects of displacement. Usually it was under thirty seconds. That was a lethally long time when sitting helpless amid a million nukes.

  "Spoofing active?"

  "Yes, captain," Tan replied.

  More threw the scan out to five thousand kilometers diameter. There were no mines beyond those in the smallish volume they had smashed into. It had been a trap, and devastatingly effective.

  Mines required a long lead time to be placed with such precision, and in such numbers. There must have been a leak. Who was behind this? More worked through the possibilities. Ally or not, King Maurice IX of Memnon had no love for the Republic or its ideals. His own ships could have done the work, or more likely, he could have allowed one of the Republic’s adversaries to emplace the weapons, but Maurice had no compelling reason to betray his ally. He had much to gain from his trade links to the Republic, and was being supplied with better arms by it, despite his recent flirtations with the Monarchonate. An attack on a Republican squadron, within the borders of his own territory, would also bring uncomfortable questions. If he had decided to start a war, the complete destruction of the Steadfast's small squadron would not materially alter the balance of power in the region, while inviting the most devastating retaliation.

  "Garand, what about communications with the other ships? Kongo, Kestrel, Starfire, Golden Lion?"

  Before communications officer Ensign Philip Garand could reply, there was another blossom of red-orange light on the vidscreen.

  "That was Starfire, sir," Feeney interjected. Her face was ashen. Six hundred Republic of Halifax Navy crew had perished within the last sixty seconds. The Rose, Amethyst, and Starfire were all destroyers, swift and lethal, like sharks, but they had been defenseless with their shields down. Everyone on the bridge had a friend or two on one of them. The Rose, an aging Flower class vessel, had belonged to Captain Terrence Carrera, a laughing rogue who concealed his hunger for battle behind a facade of humor and rakish charm. The Amethyst had been Cynthia Todd's ship. She was a brilliant, no-nonsense leader who had been a superb executive officer on the light cruiser Chalcedon. The Amethyst was her first command, and her last. Starfire had been Brian Copp's vessel, Sapphire class, like the Amethyst, and its loss hurt More most of all. It had been his old ship, back when he had been a newly-promoted captain sent to hunt pirates in the dark corners of the Halifax system. He knew many of the crew aboard. All gone in under a minute.

  There wasn't much protection against a close-range atomic detonation or focused x-ray laser blast without shields. Modern ships were built to withstand nuclear explosions from reasonable, standoff distances, but these mines had exploded at ranges of under a hundred meters. Laser hits would be dissipated by functional nullspace vent shielding, but unprotected destroyers, with shields down, could not withstand that kind of hammering. Capital ships could, but even they had their limits, especially when unshielded. Around the bridge the warning lights blinked as the shipbrain assessed every object within a ten-thousand kilometer radius for its potential threat to the Steadfast. It's disembodied voice, female, and business-like, carried through the bridge.

  "Fires on Decks 4 and 5," it said, unruffled by the chaos that had engulfed the ship since hyperspace emergence. "Fire suppression engaged; blast doors deployed shipwide; three hull breaches on starboard side, self-repair engaged."

  It could have been worse, More thought. The sublight drives were still functional, and weapons remained active. "Thank you, Amy," he replied. "Fatalities?" He scarcely wanted to know the answer.

  The shipbrain, officially named Amelia, but called Amy by everyone aboard, seemed to hesitate for several seconds, which felt like an eternity to More and his bridge crew. "None reported," she said in a flat voice, "but my scan has detected five injured servicemen and eleven more missing from their stations in the damaged sections aft and starboard."

  More grimaced. "Can I get a visual on the hull, Amy?"

  "Responding now, Captain." An image of a bulky, rectangular ship flickered to life on the forward vidscreen. It was heavily damaged, but not as badly as More had feared. The starboard side of the blue and gold hull of Steadfast had been torn open in three places, long ugly gashes made in titanium armor plate. More guessed that a handful of weapons bays would have been lost.

  "Let's get out of this field, then we will effect repairs," More ordered. "Ensign Tan, I want magnesand and CIWS to blast any mine that comes within a kilometer of the ship. Understood?"

  The dark-haired defensive systems officer nodded readily. "Already on it, Captain."

  "Good," More muttered. "We go dark
immediately. Once we are out of the field, we will need to do a proper damage assessment. Most important though, is making sure whomever did this is not waiting out there for us."

  At his side, Lieutenant Commander Vincent Vokey, executive officer of Steadfast, rose from the deck. The shock of the first detonation had thrown him across the bridge, and had knocked him unconscious. "Good to see you back, Vin," More said.

  "Good to be back, Captain." Vokey rubbed his sore head. "You can bet there is someone waiting for survivors. They are circling now, like vultures. We will have to go dark for quite a while. They won't get bored, but they may get careless trying to pick over the debris to see how many of us they got, and what they can salvage."

  "Encrypted tightbeam transmission incoming," announced Garand. "Captain Carey of the Kestrel."

  "Let it through, put it on the main screen."

  The bloodied face of a youngish-looking blonde-haired woman appeared on the screen at the front of the Steadfast's bridge. Tommasina Carey blinked as the video transmission resolved. "It is good to see you still with us, Captain More. We were not sure if you had survived."

  "I had feared the same for you, Tommasina," More replied. "We have lost three ships. Have you heard from Kongo or Golden Lion?"

  "Heyward is with me already, I will piggyback his transmission to link him with us. Let's keep this as discreet as possible." The screen separated into halves, and another face appeared to the right of Carey. It was Matt Heyward of Kongo.

  "We were hit really hard, Captain," Carey said. The explosions came almost as soon as we transited. No time for shields. We're hurt, but we have 90% power and drives, shields and weapons are operational. Spoofers look like they are working too. No more attacks since we got them up and running."

  "How about you, Matt?"

  "Kongo is much the same. We have power, maybe down to 80-85%, and all systems are functional, including spoofing gear. We will have the reactor back to full within the hour. It's the Golden Lion that I am worried about."

  "You know where it is?" More asked.

  "It is drifting through the edge of the minecloud,' Heyward said. "It survived the assault, but only just. The hull looks to be mostly in one piece, but scans say it has gone cold."

  "Do you think it is dead?" Carey inquired.

  "I don't know," said Heyward. "Passive can't tell us if there is anyone left alive, though the damage would suggest that someone might be, especially in the drive spaces aft. The forward sections took a beating. No emissions. I think that Conroy may have ordered the ship to go dark to hide before taking a big hit that busted open the bow. The bridge looks like it is gone completely. I am sending stillpics now."

  The Golden Lion had been battered. Two, maybe three, directed-explosion fusion warheads had detonated within several hundred meters of the hull. It was a miracle that it was still in one piece.

  More's stomach turned as he examined the Golden Lion. There was no sign that there was anyone home on the destroyer. "Did you see any lifepods, Matt?"

  Heyward frowned. "Not one. We have been passive scanning for them only, and maybe they look just like a mine at this distance, but we don't see anything moving like it is trying to get away." He paused, and then shook his head angrily. "I don't think they would have had enough time."

  More nodded. Over half his command had either been destroyed or knocked out of action. Predators had been lying in ambush. They were probably still out there, somewhere, waiting to mop up any survivors. More was not going to let them do that. He looked back up at the two faces of Carey and Heyward on the vidscreen. "We are all going to go dark, and keep our tightbeam comms to a minimum. We have to assume that they think that we are in here, not outside of, the minecloud. Maybe they think that we were destroyed, so we have to continue to let them believe that. We go silent, and drift our way through. The spoofing gear will keep us safe."

  "What about Golden Lion," Carey asked. "There may be survivors aboard her."

  "I think you are right, but we can't go to her directly. We don't know how many enemy ships are hunting us, so we will have to collect ourselves and then go back for her."

  "Think it was Memnon behind it?" Carey questioned. "What about Ajax? Could they lay a trap this far from home?"

  More considered this. The Ajax Domain - what about that violent regime? He snorted. They had the means and the motive, just not the intellect to pull such a thing off. He thought again. Perhaps he was being too dismissive of the Ajaxians. They had a big and pushy military, and were hungry for conquests to a degree not seen since the glory days of the Fourth Empire. But that ignored several realities. Ajax had been badly thumped by the Monarchonate of Tartarus in the last decade. The ugly, poorly-finished warships of Ajax had been no match for the elegant and efficient Tartarean warcraft that faced them. The Eleven Minutes Battle at Nakajima had been a stunning revelation to all in the Greater Sphere. Half of the Ajaxian fleet was vaporized in under a quarter of an hour.

  Ajax had been the bully of the region for generations, longer than anyone could remember. Halifax had had many clashes with it, but Ajax avoided antagonizing the Republic too much, knowing that the latent power of Halifax was far greater than its own. It was also still smarting from the rough handling given to it by the Armada of Tartarus. Why would they change their behavior now? He would not put it past them to try something in another system to hurt Halifax while keeping their own hand hidden. Memnon's patrols were not always thorough or regular, and the Ajaxians could have had the time to breach the system's Oort cloud - it was at a distance of close to one light year from the system primary - lay the mines, then scoot and hide.

  A ghastly thought once more coalesced in More's mind. Even if Ajax had pulled off such an operation, difficult yes, but within the realm of possibility, the perfect location of the cloud had to mean inside knowledge. Only the Halifaxian Admiralty knew of their in-system route. Someone had leaked the information.

  As if reading his mind, Carey snorted. "There had to be a security breach somewhere. Only the Admiralty knew our exact displacement exit coordinates. Someone gave them away."

  Heyward nodded. "We should be careful as to what we transmit back to Command. Given the circumstances, we can't know where that information may wind up."

  More cleared his throat. "We have been doing this long enough. Let's not risk detection anymore. I want you both to go dark and meet me outside the field in six hours. They will probably presume us dead. In the meanwhile, I will consider our next move. Steadfast out."

  "Aye, Captain," both faces on the screen said before they winked out.

  Chapter Two

  Cardiff Yard, High Orbit, Halifax

  In a dockyard that had seen countless hulls emerge from within its dark steel womb, Silas Gates began to shake with frustration.

  “You must calm yourself, boss,” Julius Howell advised. “The project has barely begun, and you are already bright red.”

  Julius was good - no, the best - at his job, which was principal draftsman in the shipyard, but Gates did not want the younger man's advice right now. His annoyance was heightened only by the knowledge that Julius was right.

  “The veins in your neck are bulging too, as they always do,” Julius added, a hint of dry humor wisping at the edge of his voice.

  “I’m worried,” Gates said.

  “I know that, boss. But it’s been this way ever since old man Cormac has been in charge. The big ships never go according to plan. Too many parts, too many problems.”

  Gates sat down in his chair, letting out a huff as he did so. The kid was right. Julius' first job had been as an apprentice draftsman for the Halifaxian battleship Black Eagle, ten years before. It was the first of its class, and had been a complete nightmare to build from the start. Golden Eagle had been awful too. The second ship of the class, it had been scarcely less difficult to construct. Star Eagle, now just beginning to take shape, was proving to be even more of a burden.

  “You know it’s not your fault,”
Julius offered. “The Navy brass is always making changes here and there to their designs. No capital ship is ever really identical to the preceding vessel.”

  Gates coughed, and drank some tea. It was bitter, too strong, grown in one of the underground hydroponic gardens where no one cared about quality. He’d trade his gauss pistol for a barrel of proper Balassian Empire tea.

  Gates had his dreams for how things should be, how his yard ought to run, but he could never get his yard running as he would like. He was coming to the conclusion that things would never get better. Not for a long time, despite the many promises from the government. Too much money for the military, too much demand for materials. Though he was building ships for the fleet he still had to compete with many different yards and industrial concerns for the materials he required. He could never get his hands on enough titanium, for example. Just extracting it from its ore was nearly impossible. And he needed hundreds of thousands of tons of it.

  This was supposed to be a budding golden age. The scholars claimed they were in the middle of the Fourth Illumination, which inconsistently followed the Second Regression, a polite term for a planetwide dark age that the Powers that Be would prefer to have everyone forget. Or maybe it was the ice age that had intervened to ruin whatever progress had been made, centuries ago, and turned the world into a frozen husk. Not much different, except for the weather, as it had been at the end of the Third Illumination, or the Seventh Rebirth, or the Fifth Noble Undertaking, or whatever the scholars decided sounded nice to their ears.

  It didn’t matter at all to the people. They were busy living small lives of semi-squalor in whatever dingy housing they could find. Some habunits were better than others, but none were very good. Julius had come from one of them. Or rather, he had escaped. A fine drawing hand had made him an apprentice at the yard, one of the few places outside of the military that could guarantee steady work and a good, if not great, income. Wars happened often. The Navy needed ships. Business at the yard was good. Always.