Deep below the Cube on Avalon Island, kilometers below the surface and near the border of the crust and mantle of the planet, was ARES Central Command. In contrast with the usual understated elegance or futuristic decor of the Terran Empire, the command structure was very, very barebones. So barebones, in fact, that it was a simple cavern that’d been dug out of the ground and had workstations placed in it for the military high command to issue orders, make plans, and track the progress of ongoing operations.
Not that it really mattered, to be honest, as augmented reality could make even a cesspit look like a palatial garden.
Currently within the rooms carved out of the rock, a planning session was taking place between John and the rest of the human leadership of ARES.
“It’s strength against strength this round. Our defense fleets are limited, and we won’t have reinforcements. We also have to work with simulated crews, so our orders will be followed exactly to the letter, but only to the letter,” John said, his face grim. Even though he knew he was only participating in a stress test to failure for the new shield, he still wanted to put up a good showing. He was a military man through and through, but with the opponents the empire had been facing, he’d had no opportunity to show his abilities; the technological advantage had made any approach other than overwhelming force the incorrect approach.
This was his chance to earn his stripes, so to speak.
“I understand that, sir... I think we all do. So why not put on our thinking caps and figure out how we can best defend the shield if it were to be attacked in reality? The action plans we come up with for the defensive effort now can be used as our standard operating procedure in the future in the case of a last stand scenario,” Lieutenant Colonel Simbarashe Sithole, the head of the ARES think tank, suggested.
(Ed note: I googled the most common Zimbabwean names, and “Sithole” is the 7th most common Zimbabwean surname, according to forebears.io, where Agent and I source like 99% of the names you see in the novel. Once I saw that, I couldn’t *not* use that here, ahahahaha.)
“That’s the idea, colonel. So, gentlemen... suggestions?” John asked, looking around the conference table at the leaders seated there.
......
Three days later.
John was in the simulation with the rest of the ARES leadership, hunkered down in the center of Ceres Station. He had a thousand full fleets at his disposal, all of them configured for various different defensive roles. In front of him was a hard light hologram displaying the planet below him and the shield above. Beyond the shield, he had laid a minefield of deactivated missiles, which would activate and attack the nearest detected enemy ship when they came within the missiles’ terminal maneuvering range.
The shield itself was configured for one-way operations, allowing things out but not in. Even though it was weaker than the full operational configuration, which would allow nothing in or out, he had chosen to use the weaker option until his fleets were degraded or his active defenses became overwhelmed. And there were many active defenses; he had spent his three days of preparation time building layer after layer of defense fields that stretched all the way from the exterior of the kilometer-thick shield to the orbit of the moon, up to and including the base on the dark side of the moon, all of which were perpetually in random motion so the incoming enemy couldn’t simply blast a path through them.
Soon, the countdown timer hit zero and the war games began.
The war games were designed as a wave assault for this first round. The incoming enemy attack would start small, in the neighborhood of hundreds of ships, with each additional wave coming two hours after the appearance of the previous. And each wave would double in numbers.
The first assault wave was only a hundred ships and was unlucky enough to be randomly inserted into the area of operation directly in front of the moon base. Before the ships could even move, they were vaporized by the heavy guns on the moon base.
The second, third, fourth, and fifth waves were stopped by the outer defenses as well, though the time it took to kill each incoming wave was growing longer and longer, allowing John less and less time to replenish his active defense layers.
Finally, the sixth wave broke through the outermost defensive layer and entered the second. It was quickly obliterated by the laser installations in the second defensive layer, as were the seventh, eighth, and ninth waves.
But then it happened. The tenth wave arrived before the ninth wave had been completely obliterated. Almost sixty thousand attackers swarmed the second defensive layer, about fifty thousand of which were completely fresh and undamaged. Athena consolidated the two waves and made a concerted push, ramming through the second defensive layer and into the minefield of the third layer.
By sacrificing the remainder of her damaged ships, she soon penetrated the minefield and was in the last layer of active defenses: the “parked” missiles.
The makeshift maneuvering mines proved only minimally effective, despite what most science fiction novels had led John to believe. Missiles relied on initial velocity in addition to terminal maneuvering, after all, and starting from a velocity of zero allowed Athena’s point defenses to completely dominate that layer.
Having penetrated all the way to the shield, Athena chose to cordon off a safe path through the layered defenses and await the next incoming wave of attack vessels before beginning her final assault on the shield. In the meantime, the remaining vessels of the tenth attack wave were sent out in small groups to clear the defenses along a broad corridor. The eleventh wave would consist of over a hundred thousand attackers, after all, so they would require a lot of maneuvering room, even if they were to maintain a close formation.
In the end of the first round, the shield was taken down in wave fifteen, with John’s heroic defense and sacrificial tactics sufficing to take out three entire waves—the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth wave. After that, he had no more fleets and was forced to order the shield to its third configuration and hunker down until the inevitable destruction came two waves later, with almost three million attacking ships constantly degrading the shield faster than the available power could repair it.
Once Ceres Station exploded, the first round of the wargames was over, nearly 32 hours after the first wave began.
