1455 hours CST, June 24th, 2673; outside the cloaked area of Sigma Delta Four

The Mark 15 torpedo separated from the Skate and fired its manoeuvring thrusters to push it away from the black hull of the ship. When it was clear, the fifty-metre-long torpedo fired its engines and shot forward at 150 G. That brought the torpedo to the edge of the cloaked area within seconds.

At the very tip of the six-metre-wide torpedo was one of the features that made it so effective and so feared: a shield-bore laser. Before the commissioning of the Mark 15, torpedo boats carried a laser that would bore a circular hole through the shield of a capital ship to allow a torpedo to strike through unimpeded. It was a choice of making a hole with the laser or wearing down the shields before a torpedo could strike the hull of a vessel. Many torpedo boats before the Rake class were lost before they launched their torpedoes, making them ineffective in combat. The Mark 15 changed all that by mounting the laser on its tip.

The laser started by firing a massive beam of coherent light at the cloak, forcing the ships generating the shield to take up the energy. As the torpedo moved closer, it moved the aiming point in a fast circle, causing disruptions in the shield generator’s output. The generator could not keep up with it, and a hole formed for the Mark 15 to travel through. The hole in the shield did not last long, but accelerating at 150 G ensured that the torpedo got through in time.

The hole boring did not go unnoticed by the ship generating that part of the cloak, and in seconds it had signalled the rest of the fleet that something was happening. Not that the signal was needed by the rest of the fleet; as soon as the Mark 15 passed the cloak, it turned on its powerful radar and started to survey the fleet for a suitable target.

* * *

1505 hours CST, June 24th, 2673; Inside the NTF Carrier

Combat alarms sounded all throughout the carrier, jolting the ready fighter pilots awake in their cockpits. Being a quiet time of the day, they were catching up on their sleep, as they had nothing else to do while in the cockpits of the Javelin fighters.

“Control, what’s the alarm?” Major Huey, the senior pilot that was ready to launch called to the flight operations centre.

“Be prepared to launch. Torpedo attack on the fleet is in progress.”

“Roger,” he said as he checked the switches in his cockpit and flipped the last one needed to complete the launch checklist; the last switch started the draw of auxiliary power from the carrier directly into the starter for the engine. He was ready to launch within seconds.

“Alpha-Echo One is ready for launch.” The other three members of his flight reported that they were prepared to launch.

“Alpha-Echo Flight launch. Bearing zero by neg one-one-zero. Maximum acceleration, target one torpedo.”

The Javelin fighter was out of the tube by the time the final words were spoken. Major Huey pushed the throttle up to eight G and aimed his fighter toward the torpedo. It took a few seconds for his radar to pick it up, but he knew he was too far away for an intercept.

* * *

1510 hours CST, June 24th, 2673; inside the cloaked area of Sigma Delta Four

The Mark 15 torpedo was programmed with its mission. It was also programmed with the database loaded in from the Skate. Part of that was the survey of the system up to that point, and official mission orders for why the torpedo boat was in SD-Four. It knew that its mother ship needed to get inside the cloaked area to complete its mission.

The primary mission of the torpedo was to “eliminate the source of the cloak.” It was a vaguely worded mission, which unlocked some of the code paths and processing power of the Mark 15 that did not usually get executed. It started its mission by scanning the area with its radar and its passive sensors. When the sensors reported their data, the torpedo used the information to match the targets against its database. It took some time, but it eventually found what it was looking for. Two of the ships it scanned matched the profiles of the NTF shield ships that were first commissioned eighteen years ago and decommissioned as part of the armistice. The two ships were close together, with one operating its shield and the other dormant.

The shield ships were basically keels mounted with engines, large fuel tanks, even larger power generators, and massive shield generators. Several ships of that type could interlock their shields and protect an entire fleet. The fleet was protected, but the two ships were not enough to shield and cloak the entire area. There had to be more.

The torpedo was not programmed to care about there being more shield ships. Eliminating those two ships would eliminate enough of the cloak to allow its mother ship to enter the area and complete its mission. The unlocked code paths of the Mark 15’s programming gave it an almost distinct personality. That personality rejected its initial assessment of the mission profile. The shield ships were fragile vessels and not worth the effort. The torpedo was six metres wide and fifty metres long, carrying just over one hundred tons of explosives. Those hundred tons would be enough to vapourize one of those ships. The ships were so fragile that the torpedo could not rely on its contact fuse and would have to be detonated by computer control.

The warhead would be good to take out one of those shield ships, but the torpedo would have to take out both to complete its mission. It decided that using its warhead would be a waste, and a new course of action was needed to make its destruction more meaningful. The shield ships were old and used extensively throughout the war with NTF. The database the torpedo carried had a list of all the weak points. The still accelerating torpedo still had plenty of fuel left. It had been designed to accelerate over the distance of several light minutes, and its short run had barely tapped into its fusion fuel supply.

The decision process on the torpedo took only a second before it determined its course of action. It aimed toward the two shield ships. The enemy fleet was not sitting around idly. Point defense fighters had started to launch interceptor missiles at the Mark 15. The torpedo kept accelerating at 150 G; the interceptor missiles were accelerating at three times that amount at 450 G.

It was turning into a race between the Mark 15 and the twenty missiles that had been sent after it. The missiles had been shot in panic and not at the best vectors to catch the torpedo quickly. The torpedo was fitted with a powerful electronic countermeasures system, which it turned on to divert the missiles away from it and toward sensor ghosts. It was able to divert most of them away with its ECM. The torpedo accessed the situation and determined that while the ships it was facing were eighteen years old, the enemy electronics and tactics were only at most five years younger.

With the knowledge of the enemy’s capabilities, the torpedo accessed its database again and pulled up the older records. With those records metaphorically in hand, the torpedo adjusted its ECM program and diverted the rest of the missiles away. More interceptors were fired at it as the torpedo continued its acceleration toward the shield ships. In a flash of electronic inspiration, the torpedo came up with a course of action that would allow it to save some fuel and complete its mission.

The torpedo flipped end for end and decelerated as it moved closer to its targets. The ECM sensor ghosts were narrowed down and projected to lay over the two shield ships as it was passing between them, still going at high speed.

The interceptor missiles sped on; with the targets on their radar, they spread themselves out equally between the targets. The IFF radios were jammed so they did not know that the torpedo sensor ghost they saw on their radar was actually a shield ship. Some of the missiles detected the IFF signals as the jamming faded in the last seconds, but most did not.

The last third of the missiles still sped toward the Mark 15. The torpedo was able to lure most of them away with its full spectrum of ECM, now that the shield ships were disabled, but the second salvo of interceptor missiles was much greater than the first. The missiles were too close for it to try any more tricks with its ECM.

The torpedo used a new manoeuvre that had been programmed into it in the last half decade to deal with interceptor missiles. The torpedo fired its shield-bore laser at the missiles tracking it. The laser burned up more of the torpedo’s fuel, but it had plenty to spare. The eight remaining missiles were unshielded and fell to the powerful laser.

With that threat dealt with, the torpedo flipped again and accelerated away from the two disabled ships. Point defense ships were closing in, and lasers were being shot toward its wildly manoeuvring form. While it was impossible to dodge a laser, the torpedo’s manoeuvring moved it out of the way before most of the lasers were even fired. Any laser that did hit was refracted away by the shields the torpedo carried.

The torpedo analysed the pattern of incoming fire and found a match from twelve years ago. It changed its manoeuvring pattern, and suddenly no lasers fired at it landed on its shields as the torpedo picked the optimal pattern of evasions. It also did not help the enemy’s cause that the torpedo was fitted with cameras that were tracking the point defense turrets of the closest ship, knowing where they were pointed and when to move out of the way.

Another part of the torpedo’s computer was analysing what was being detected by the radar and other sensors. It knew where the mother ship was going to enter into the cloaked area, and it knew what would be the biggest threat. It fired its manoeuvring thrusters and guided itself toward one of the point defense cruisers that was in a prime location to take out the torpedo’s mother ship. While the cruiser was not worth the effort of a capital ship, the primary mission of the torpedo was complete; its secondary mission was to protect its mother ship.

The shield-bore laser fired one last time as the torpedo came within range of the cruiser’s shields. Its course was going to take it into the side of the cruiser. As the shields opened up, the computer sent the last message to the torpedo body. Explosive bolts fired, and the front ten metres of the torpedo separated.

The rest of the torpedo arched into its death vector. With the relatively soft forward section gone, the hard penetrator of the torpedo was revealed. The ultra-dense cone of the penetrator wouldn’t be enough to push the torpedo through the cruiser, but it would allow enough of the torpedo to penetrate the ship’s hull for the delayed-fuse explosive to tear it apart.

Unshielded and dumb, the torpedo body was vulnerable to the energy unleashed by the lasers of the cruiser. The torpedo was still armoured and too close for the turrets to traverse fast enough to track the torpedo as it moved in for the kill.

The hundred tons of high explosive were pushed deep into the point defense cruiser. The explosive was designed to break the keel of a dreadnought, a carrier, and other large capital ships. The cruiser did not have a chance of surviving when the explosives detonated in its core. The Mark 15 knew exactly where to hit the old cruiser to cause the most damage, and pieces of the ship flew everywhere in the resulting explosion.

The ejected forward section of the torpedo continued past the cruiser; it had no acceleration section, and it no longer had to worry about the shield at the aft end of the cruiser. It still had some manoeuvring jets and tried to dump its information to the Skate when the torpedo sped into the decloaked and unshielded area, but it never had a chance as pieces from the cruiser rammed into it at high speed.

* * *

The Skate was waiting. Murphy had it pointed directly at the cloaked area, and Hart had her hand on the throttle. Everyone was strapped into her seat and waiting for the 5-G acceleration to hit them. Unlike other times, they did not have a countdown.

“The cloak is fluctuating,” Nigella Miller reported from her station—not that she knew what to look for, but she was able to detect the shield. The gravity anomaly detector was out, and Nigella’s eyes were glued to the readings. “Shields coming do—”

“Helm, maximum acceleration. OWO, secure the GAD,” Murphy ordered before Nigella had finished. He had turned on the intercom to give the crew some warning.

Lead Hart pushed the throttle all the way forward, and the Skate accelerated toward the opening cloak. Murphy closed the intercom as eyes all over the ship started to scan their instruments. The boat was quickly past the edge of the shield into the unknown area.

“Drop us back…to one and three-quarters G.”

“Aye sir, dropping acceleration.” The pressure on all the crewmen lessened as the acceleration lowered.

“Activate the radar, and give us a sweep.”

“Two ships right in front of us, closing fast!”

“Starboard fifteen degrees, avoid those ships.”

The boat shifted course to avoid the two disabled shield ships, even though they were still a fair distance away. Contacts started to flow into Yosufzai’s and Miller’s console, almost too fast for them to keep up; they confirmed the readings and transferred the contact to the tactical plot. Yosufzai had almost a third of the crew helping her with the cameras, so she had an easier time keeping on top of things. Miller had only herself and the computer to support her.

“I got some telemetry from the Mark Fifteen,” Lieutenant Ridgard reported from beside Petty Officer Yosufzai.

“What?” Murphy asked.

“The torpedo just destroyed a point defense cruiser, sir.”

“Repeat that, Lieutenant.”

“The Mark Fifteen attacked and destroyed a point defense cruiser, sir.”

“That wasn’t its mission. It was to destroy the shield-generating ship.”

“The two ships we just evaded were shield generators; it disabled them somehow, from the looks of it,” Yosufzai added to Ridgard’s report.

“Get me identification on all contacts as soon as possible.” Murphy relaxed in his chair as he was pushed into it by the heavy acceleration. He had to think on the past events. The actions of the Mark 15 concerned him. He never expected it to do something so unexpected; that rattled him, but he had to find a way to turn it to his advantage. He suddenly realized why the tactical officers on the dreadnoughts were always so specific in defining the orders to the Mark 15. Echoes of kamikaze, suicidal sentient beings sacrificing themselves, shook him.

Lead Hart worked the course that Bell had given her. The enemy had not started to fire at them yet, but she was still moving the Skate in a wild evasive pattern, treating the boat much like a bomber on a final run through a heavily defended area.

“Fighters are starting to engage us,” the VSO reported. “Looks to be four groups, and they are angling in toward us from all over the area. Defensive ships are not engaging us, but moving to defensive positions to fill the hole in the shield.”

“All hands, prepare for anti-fighter action.” The point defense turrets were exposed, the barrels of the lasers pushed out into the vacuum of space. The hatches over the RSG’s barrels were opened, and the mount was raised and then rotated toward the nearest group of fighters. The Skate was prepared to defend herself.

* * *

Major Huey could only curse as he watched the radar plot. The Mark 15 was too fast for him or the rest of his flight to catch up to. He watched as it tricked their interceptors into disabling two of the shield ships, and then changed course and took out the Reliant. It had been years since he had seen the effect of a surprise torpedo attack. He knew immediately it had to be something like the infamous Mark 15 that had been so effective against their forces during the war.

The defense officers must have been asleep, he thought to himself, or it’s something new that Terrace has come up with. The Mark 15s of the war were not that effective; multiple torpedoes were needed to get through the defenses of a point defense cruiser like the Reliant, yet this torpedo was able to singlehandedly eliminate three ships before they had completed their call to battle stations.

“Control, I’m detecting sierra band radar,” he reported in when he detected the radar emissions coming from the attacking torpedo boat.

“Confirmed. Contact is a probable Rake class torpedo boat. Destroy it.”

So it was a Mark Fifteen. Those torpedo boats aren’t supposed to be able to fire anything else.