War Core 3, Chapter 38.

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Chapter 38.

Hugh watched his command post upgrade percentage tick up another point. It was a slow process, but the enemy fleet would take some time to reach Jupiter. Despite powerful engines pushing them forward, the distance was vast, and the fleet was limited by the slowest vessels in the group, the large battleships, which had a lot more mass to push around. The longer the invasion force took to reach him, the better as far as Hugh was concerned.

Hours passed, with Hugh and his commanders making plans and organizing the forces that continued to be produced by the command post. Enough infantry mechs had been produced allowing them to place a full platoon of mechs at each victory point. His light mechs were assembled into four reaction teams, one covering each compass point where they would respond to any threats. One of Captain Cartwright's NCOs commanded each of the four groups and Hugh started sending infantry to support them.

“Hugh, have you decided what to do with your consumables yet?” Captain Tran asked.

“Not yet, but I was thinking of deploying the automated turrets around the command post. At first, I wanted to save them to respond to immediate threats, but everything the enemy throws at us will end up heading toward the command post eventually,” Hugh said.

“I agree that we should deploy them near the command post, maybe we can work out a way to maximize their coverage of the main streets leading toward us,” Cartwright added. Hugh agreed, they had ten of the turrets to deploy and with the area around the command post leveled to create better fields of fire, the heavy 75mm guns the turrets mounted should get some work done.

“There’s one other thing to deploy, the automated factory. I suppose there’s no reason to keep it in reserve, the longer it’s active the more it might be able to produce. Any recommendations on where to deploy it?” Hugh asked.

“What is an automated factory? I might be able to help if you can give me more details,” Langerson asked. Hugh was able to send over the specs on the device the GCA had awarded him, the other commanders already had a pretty good idea of what it could do.

“It might be perfect near the police station. We’re just a stone’s throw from the command post and centrally located so they can spread out toward any threats when they land,” Langerson said.

“That might work, the AI-generated units will be far enough from the troops we’ll have at the command post and won’t get underfoot, but close enough to respond when we’re attacked. Given that your police station is like a mini fortress, the two forces can help cover each other if the enemy makes it that far,” Hugh said. The police station and the automated factory couldn’t be rebuilt, so having them support each other might keep them both in the fight longer.

They spent some time fine-tuning the location of the turrets. When they finally locked in their deployment, a small pile of parts appeared at the designated locations, they needed to be constructed by Hugh’s drones. With ten of the turrets, it might take a while to get them all done, given he was only willing to give up a single drone to work on the project, wanting the others to continue with their other important tasks.

His automated factory was placed and began to build itself. The place started with just a skeletal framework of girders, but zooming in, Hugh could see that nanobots were hard at work on the structure. Given the pace that the nanobots were working, it would be many hours before the building was ready to start production. The mechs that the factory was going to produce matched the same tier as his infantry, but Hugh wasn’t sure how the exiting mechs would upgrade themselves in the field when his command post reached the next tier.

Given they were fighting in the confines of the city, even AI-controlled units should do well enough. Their performance really stunk out in the open where the AI would just walk them slowly toward the enemy without any thought of taking cover. Here, the terrain would mean shorter ranged fights, where even the limited targeting ability of the AI units should score a high percentage of hits. He was sure there was going to be some cap on the number of mechs the factory produced, but the item description gave him no clue what that limit might be.

With everything under control on the ground, Hugh checked in on the space battle. The Ssath fleet was no longer in sight, which meant that none of the human ships were within sensor range. That also meant the Ssath couldn’t see the human forces, but they did have an idea where the stations were placed, given that they constituted victory point locations. The battle parameters had mentioned these stations didn’t have to survive the battle for their points to be awarded to the humans. They just had to beat some kind of countdown before being destroyed. None of them had any idea how long they needed to hold, and comms with the stations weren’t up, so Hugh couldn’t ask if the commanders of any of the stations knew what they needed to accomplish for victory.

The one thing they all knew was that the humans needed to kill as many Ssath as possible before they landed on the conflict world. So far, the enemy had taken limited damage, mostly to their escort units and fighter craft. Even now the flotilla of light carriers was nearing the estimated location of the Ssath fleet. Hugh, having been granted vision of all the human units in space, noticed that the fleet carriers had been moved far from the station. They didn’t seem to be moving all that fast, and they only had a handful of gunboats as escort vessels.

Seeing the gunboats reminded Hugh to check on the minelayers that had left the fight earlier. It turned out they were still slowly making their way to Earth and didn’t seem to have been discovered by the Ssath. A few fast cruisers or lighter warships could have caught up to the slower gunboat minelayers easily enough, but it looked like they were in the clear. Hugh wasn’t sure what their final plans were, but maybe the stations orbiting the conflict world and the moon could resupply them with mines. A strong minefield surrounding the planet would buy Hugh more time to prepare, and the longer it took, the more powerful his army would become.

“It looks like we found the Ssath,” Cartwright announced. All of Hugh’s commanders seemed to be checking in on the space battle whenever they had a moment. He could see the pickets of the light carrier taskforce detect Ssath fighters at the extreme end of their sensor range. The human carriers wasted no time in launching all their fighter squadrons to counter the enemy.

As the two groups of fighters closed, missiles began to launch. Hugh was a bit confused, it looked like the human fighters were now carrying eight defensive missiles each, which was quite an improvement over their previous attacks. A quick check of the fighters revealed that they were all tier seven now, matching the Ssath mechs. During the time it had taken for the Ssath to approach Jupiter, the human stations had finally upgraded. The light carriers and supporting ships were still tier six, not unexpected given that they needed to dock with the station to have their upgrades installed, but the fighters, housed inside the carriers, could be upgraded in the field.

Back at the stations, capital ships began to dock, and construction drones swarmed over them, upgrading the vessels at a rapid pace. With the light carrier task force delaying the Ssath advance, they just might have time to upgrade the other vessels before the enemy drew near enough to attack. A tier upgrade was just what the human forces needed to help them stem the tide of the Ssath advance.

Already outclassing the Ssath in combat skill, the human pilots in their combat pods that controlled the newly upgrade tier seven fighters began to tear into the Ssath units, improving on their previous kill ratio. Surprisingly, the Ssath only sent a small force of fighters against the humans, their number only half that of the human fighters they were opposing. With both the numerical and skill advantage, the humans were winning the fight. When the last Ssath fighter was wiped from space, the human spacecraft returned to their carriers to rearm, reappearing later with a different loadout. Instead of eight defensive missiles, the fighters now carried only carried four of the weapons, freeing up room to mount two of the larger anti-ship missiles.

As the new strike force moved toward where they expected the Ssath to be located, the light carrier taskforce began to decelerate, bleeding off speed and then changing course to return to the Jupiter stations. Once the Ssath spotted the human flotilla, their lighter ships could probably catch them, but that would mean dividing their forces and leaving the heavier cruisers and battleships behind. It was likely what the human commanders were hoping for, peeling off the enemy escorts and whittling them down. Each of the lighter vessels that were taken out reduced the point defense protecting the Ssath heavy hitters.

Another group of Ssath fighters appeared, only around three hundred. The human taskforce had set out with thirty-eight light carriers, each carrying fifty fighter mechs. With the losses they had sustained in the earlier fight, the humans were still fielding over 1300 fighters, and each of those fired a defensive missile at the oncoming Ssath mechs. The Ssath returned fire, inflicting another two hundred casualties among the human ships before being wiped out.

“What is going on out there?” Hugh asked as the human fighters started picking up the Ssath fleet on their sensors. Instead of the orderly formations he expected, the Ssath fleet had broken up, and incredibly, many of the ships were firing on each other.

“Looks like they aren’t getting along too well, which is totally fine with me. I just hope that whoever is controlling our fighters is smart enough to stay out of it. Never interrupt an enemy when he’s doing something stupid,” Cartwright said.

Hugh kept quiet, watching the spectacle. It took time for his core to sort out the fighting and it appeared a smaller group of vessels was forming up together to take on the majority of the fleet. It was an uneven fight that would be over soon, given that every ship was in range of each other. The smaller Ssath fleet was comprised of a hundred each of their destroyer and frigates, forty or so cruisers, and thirty battleships. It was a powerful group, but they were coming apart quickly under the pounding the rest of the fleet was giving them.

Several debris clouds were floating around, showing that losses on both sides had already occurred. Between the two groups, Ssath fighters skirmished, getting cut down by the score from the close-range fire of the two factions’ point defense weapons. Twenty minutes later, the last of the smaller fleet was destroyed, and before the victors could rebuild their formation, the human fighters launched their attack. Anti-ship missiles streamed toward the enemy who wasn’t configured well to fend off the attack. Given the volume of point defense fire they could pour out, the Ssath didn’t need an optimal formation to pick off most of the missiles.

Despite their losses, a few hundred of the missiles slammed home, destroying the group of frigates and destroyers trying to cover the heavier ships. Two dozen Ssath warships were destroyed, and with the enemy point defense focused on the incoming missiles, the fighters were able to pull back out of range and return to the carriers for rearming. Before they left sensor range, Hugh made a quick estimate of the Ssath numbers.

Ssath order of battle.

Frigates: 1428.

Destroyers: 1569.

Cruisers: 748.

Battleships: 744.

Starfighters: 451.

The enemy fleet still outnumbered the humans by a huge margin, especially in heavy vessels like the battleships, but they had been almost completely stripped of their fighter complements. Hugh could see the human plan coming together. The Ssath fleet was going to be picked apart by fighter attacks as they closed in on the station. Sure, the humans were going to take heavy losses to their fighters from the Ssath point defense, but they would be losing fighters while the enemy was losing capital ships.

Hugh didn’t think the Ssath would be defeated before they reached the stations, there were too many of them for the fighters and the small fleet of human ships to stop, but there was a really good chance that they would buy time and inflict enough losses to give humanity the victory points for the Jupiter stations. Already, Hugh could see the results of the Ssath losses as more and more of the potential enemy drop locations disappeared over his battlefield. There were still far too many, and more would need to be done by the fleet if they hoped to hold off the ground invasion.

The Ssath had helped them with their little bit of infighting, and while Hugh was curious as to what had caused it, he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anytime the Ssath wanted to kill each other, Hugh was glad to let them do it.