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“Inbound! Inbound! Three vamps! Closing at 314, speed Mach 9.2!”
Lieutenant Mary “Rogue” Strasser pulled up at full burn, the HUD being projected on the inside of her faceplate flashing red warning messages. The entire cockpit of her F/A-72 Raven strike fighter moved back in it’s carriage within the fighter’s fuselage, cutting the gee strain on the pilot’s body by over 30 percent. Her hands on the joysticks, and her eyes keyed to laser sensors that let her change various subsystems just by blinking, gave her complete control of the high-performance aircraft as she raced to intercept the incoming missiles.
“Fox One three,” she stated over her neural comms link, the firing of her synapses being translated into simple, short-burst radio messages. Three hypersonic missiles dropped from the fighter’s weapons bays and burst into flight. She pulled up and above the missiles’ altitude, directing the fighter’s sophisticated laser and radar-based sensors get a positive lock on the three incoming enemy missiles. She suppressed a mental sigh at the huge numbers of missiles doubtless following the first three, closing in. The sensor feeds from various recon drones the US Navy had circling the opposing fleet showed that the Chinese Red Fleet outnumbered their force outside of the Hawaii defensive zone by four to one. Even with the (considerably ironic) assistance of the Japanese Defense Forces, the United States was facing nearly overwhelming firepower. And this fleet of the Chinese People’s ‘Liberation’ Navy was just the first wave.
This is not what I had in mind when I got out of bunk this morning…
The USS James Lovell was the only US carrier left, and the Chinese knew it. Their Operation Red Dawn had only been discovered by Allied intelligence operatives a few days ago, and it’s true purpose only visible after it had come to fruition.
A terrorist attack on the Japanese Diet infrastructure, one week ago, had been the first thrust. The Red Fleet had employed members of the New Jihad, an Islamic terrorist group made up mostly of poor kids duped into dying for old fanatics, to mount the attack. At the same time, they had set their fleets on a course for the Khangard Alliance in the South China Sea.
The Khangard Alliance had started out as a few oceanic mining and trading posts, built on the ocean floor in pressure domes and on the surface on huge, anchored floating islands. A handful of colonies began to unite together, as more and more workers from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other Asian nations hostile to personal freedoms were sent to make their mother regimes prosperous. However, as the colonies grew in wealth and financial power, they began to wonder why they bothered calling China, Vietnam, and Cambodia home. And why they bothered to follow unprofitable, freedom-sapping business practices for Communism. Eventually, in 2025, enough members of the South China Sea colonies banded together and declared their independence, forming a democratic republic they later christened the Khangard Alliance. Khangard being the old Mongolian word for “king’s home”.
China and Vietnam, understandably, did not take this well, and tried to reconquer the artificial island nation. But, with help from the West and a little ingenuity, the Alliance fought off both nation’s navies, air forces and armies, and became legally recognized by numerous countries worldwide. China and Vietnam tried, again and again, over the past twelve years to retake the Alliance, but time and again failed against superior Western military technology and better-trained and motivated Khangard troops, pilots and sailors.
The United States, believing that the terrorist action was just a distraction for China to try it’s luck at taking Khangard again, deployed most of it’s Pacific naval and air forces to ‘dissuade’ China from trying anything so monumentally stupid. After all, the USA had its satellite laser defenses to shoot down ICBMs, twelve carrier battlegroups (most of them with smaller, trimaran carriers that employed a mix of air and submarine craft), and superior intelligence with said satellites. The Chinese had to be completely insane.
Operation Red Dawn, however, was intended to give the Chinese the needed edge to overcome all of this. Thanks to a few unscrupulous US politicians and businessmen, the Chinese had gained access to the US military satellite networks. And anything and everything connected to said network.
In an attack the media called “reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica”, the Chinese sent out a mass of computer viruses and jamming signals, all designed for the expressed purpose of causing every computer in the US inventory to lobotomize itself. Carrier battlegroups, sub and aircraft squadrons, defense and communications satellites, sea and ground-based installations-All fell dead to the electronic attack, leaving them easy prey for Chinese air and sea strikes. Only ships, craft, and bases whose satellite communications were down or under repair were spared-Rendering a fleet of over 300 warships and 1,800 air and sea craft to less than 40 ships and 200 operational craft.
Rear-Admiral June Kei Wan, a middle-aged carrier group commander, had had the Lovell’s battlegroup shut down their satellite links to allow them to get closer to the Chinese main force before the attacks, in order to be less detectable while the big carriers like George H. W. Bush and John F. Kennedy drew the Chinese’s attention. This had made them forced to rely on communications drones, but the admiral felt it would let them get in a critical strike to soften up the Chinese main body for the bigger carriers’ air and sea wings to finish them off if they were given the order to engage. But it hadn’t quite worked out that way.
And now, after five US supercarriers being sunk or heavily damaged, and six more dead in the water and under repair, it was up to Admiral Kei-wan’s lone carrier, Jame Lovell, and the only combat ships not sunk or simply dead and needing complete computer system replacement, to hold off over 200 Chinese warships in their drive to wipe out the remaining US military power in the Pacific and become the dominant nation on the planet. The lives of millions of Americans, on the mainland, on various oceanic colonies and states, and the freedom of those millions, rested in the hands of Rear Admiral June Kei Wan and her fleet.
Needless to say, in the CIC of the high-speed carrier, she didn’t exactly feel destined to triumph. As a matter of fact, she felt like throwing up.
But she knew they could win. And that they had to. And that if they won the day, a couple politicians who had felt that ‘giving China a fair shot at the world market’ was a good idea were at the very least not going to be in office much longer…