3
Warring in an Unhabitual Way
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way
—William James
RFNS Gallipoli, Main Body, Further Rim Fleet, Suwa System
Lieutenant Ossian Wethermere had been on the bridge of the RFNS Gallipoli for all of thirty seconds when he was handed the flimsy announcing his promotion. It was done without any ceremony; in fact, Wethermere didn’t know what the letter contained until he opened it.
Looking after Captain Velasquez, who had handed it to him, Wethermere queried, “Uh, sir?”
“Congratulations.” The monotone of Velasquez’s response was somewhat muffled: the captain’s head and shoulders were already buried inside a console’s access panel, which reeked of battle-fried command circuits.
“No—I mean, thanks, but—why? It doesn’t say.”
“Oh, nothing you’ve done.” Velasquez reemerged from the console. “The admiral apparently got your dossier along with the rest of the data your courier downloaded to us when we popped in-system from Raiden. She noticed you were past review date. We’ve got casualties, you haven’t screwed up, so—congratulations. War is hell. Now I’ve gotta fix this. Scram.” Velasquez wriggled back up into the service niche.
Wethermere stepped away, stared down at the flimsy again—and heard a voice behind him. “I believe congratulations are in order, Lieutenant.”
Wethermere turned: Captain Yoshi Watanabe, and he was almost smiling. “Thank you, sir.”
“Thank me after you’ve worn it a while, Lieutenant. Wartime promotions come quickly for a reason—lots of officers die.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, we’ve been keeping you pretty busy, eh?”
“Yes, sir.” This guy is the admiral’s chief of staff, and technically CO of this ship. What the hell is he doing spending jaw time with me?
“A pretty pitched battle in Beaumont, from what I’ve seen of the reports. Is that how it felt to you, Lieutenant?”
How it felt? He wants to know how I feel? I thought CMOs were responsible for psych evaluations—“Pretty much so, sir. But I was just a bystander. The real heavy action was out in the first screen—and with the local fighters. We had it pretty easy back where we were, I think.”
“So did we.” Watanabe looked around at the mostly superficial bridge damage.
“Sir, I haven’t heard yet. What did happen back in Raiden?”
The captain shrugged. “Not many losses for us, a fair amount for them—but nothing like the last time they tried to visit us there. I think their new admiral is suitably cautious. We lost an MT and, unfortunately, most of our cruisers.”
“Cruisers? How, sir? Why were they even in the line of battle?”
Watanabe looked Ossian in the eye and spoke with slow precision. “Hear this, Lieutenant. I know that the experts say that nothing under the rating of an SD even qualifies as a ship of the line anymore, but out here we use whatever we’ve got. Yesterday we used cruisers. But not in the line. They’re fast, so the admiral kept them back outside the Desai limit. As we met the Baldies just inside our edge of the limit, the cruisers went around on a flanking maneuver, running under stealth all the time.”
“But I thought the Baldies can—well, pull stealth apart, sir.”
“They can—at close range. And they’re getting pretty fair at long-range detection, as well. But yesterday, just before the Baldies were going to close in, we had our cruisers nose into detection range. The Baldies knew something was out there but couldn’t tell how big it was. However, they did know it was on their rear flank, so they split into two task forces, one to face us, one to chase the cruisers.” Now Watanabe smiled.
“I see, sir—then what did you do?”
His smile broadened. “You tell me.”
A test? Watanabe was testing him? Well, okay, that was his prerogative. So, what had they done? Krishmahnta rushes forward, engages the reduced main van of the enemy fleet? No: that would still be too costly. However…“Admiral Krishmahnta held position. The Baldy main van didn’t have the odds it wanted anymore, so they slowed. Meanwhile, the cruisers reversed bearing, got back over the Desai line, but slow enough to entice the Baldies to come after them. The enemy gave chase long enough to pull them so far out of position that the admiral was able to back up, get over the Desai line, use that doubled speed to engage the overextended and much smaller Baldy chasing force, and then withdraw to the warp point—just ahead of the main enemy task force. But because you had to use the cruisers both as bait and flypaper, you had disproportionate losses there. Sir.”
Captain Watanabe’s smile disappeared for a moment. When it came back, it was fainter, but it also seemed very—well, pleased. “Correct, Lieutenant. Now come along.”
“Yes, sir.” A beat as they walked toward the chart room’s hatchway. “Sir, exactly where are we going?”
“The admiral’s briefing. She’s been working the details with Commanders Mackintosh and La Mar on the withdrawal into Achilles. It’s going to be tricky.” The hatchway irised open: Watanabe went through.
Wethermere followed—and found himself in a room crowded with both live and holographic people. Most of the CO’s in Krishmahnta’s fleet were present, along with a few specialists and section chiefs. Yoshikuni wasn’t present: she couldn’t be, since she was still light-hours away, guarding the warp point back into Beaumont. But it was a certainty that the proceedings were already being beamed to her.
Krishmahnta rose to her feet. The room quieted. “We’re here to get every hull of both fleets back to Achilles safely. That is not our optimal outcome. That is our minimum definition of success. Is that clear?”
Murmurs and nods.
“Then let’s get down to business. Here are the key facts of this system: the warp-point locations.” She waved a stylus at the main plot—an immense circular holotank.
“The warp point to Raiden—”
At about the seven o’clock position on the circle, a purple hoop appeared—
“—the warp point to Achilles—”
Another purple hoop. This one was at about eleven o’clock and, like the first, was about halfway between the center of the table and its outer edge.
“—and the warp point to Beaumont.”
Which blinked into existence at the two-o’clock position, a little farther out than the other two.
“The key to this operation is making the enemy from Beaumont believe that the warp point to Achilles”—she indicated the one at eleven o’clock—“is actually out here.”
With a wave of her stylus, a fourth, almost fuchsia, hoop flashed into existence at the one-o’clock position, but all the way out at the edge of the table. Restless, seat-shifting noises surrounding the mainplot suggested surprise, perhaps confusion.
“Here’s why we want the enemy to think that the warp point to Achilles is all the way out here”—and she indicated the far, fuschia hoop at one o’clock again. “In simplest terms, we have some pretty slow hulls in our formation—particularly the damaged MTs. And the ones coming from our fleet, here at the Raiden warp point, have an awful long journey to make for their exit at Achilles.” She drew a line between the seven o’clock warp point and the eleven o’clock warp point. It was a respectable stretch of space. “Bottom line: our ships will not complete that journey in time if they’re racing against an enemy that comes through the Beaumont warp point and that knows to head directly to the Achilles exit point.” She drew a line from the two o’clock warp point to the eleven o’clock warp point: most decidedly shorter.
“And don’t forget that the enemy may elect to only put undamaged ships through from Beaumont. If that’s the case, not even the Desai drive is going to help our slowest ships. So we’ve got to send our opponent on a wild-goose chase that we can set up relatively quickly and will pull them far enough out of position that they won’t have enough time to backtrack, once they realize they’ve been duped.
“So, first things first: how to set up a fake warp point. Three cruisers from Admiral Yoshikuni’s fleet will make best speed for the coordinates we’ve designated as the false warp point. There they will deposit some telltale rubbish consistent with a real warp point—two unexploded mines and a powered-down buoy ostensibly silenced by us to keep our enemies from finding the warp point. One of the cruisers—the Kris—will play the part of the door guard. She will be abandoned in place, drives running low. Her stealth will be up but faltering in a manner consistent with modest combat damage. When the Baldies start sweeping for warp points, they should spot these clues pretty quickly, and, we believe, will come sniffing around that area of space. Considering how long a full system sweep takes, and how very close you have to be to an inert warp point to actually detect it, the odds are pretty good that they’ll not only take this bait but think themselves extremely lucky.”
The hologram of Captain Cicescu stirred. Krishmahnta noticed. “Jaroslav?”
“Admiral, I know we’ve observed this operational quirk of theirs before—but can we really trust that the enemy will, once again, ignore our system charts, which they must surely have taken from various data sources?”
Krishmahnta nodded slowly. “That’s an excellent question. I wish I had an excellent answer. All I can say is that it’s been their unexceptioned modus operandi thus far to ignore our star charts. I think we can be relatively sure that this has not been an attempt to mislead us so that they can surprise us now—they’ve taken too many severe beatings already because of this stubborn refusal to believe our maps.” Krishmahnta poised her stylus. “At any rate, we have little choice. And if they do make straight for the actual Achilles warp point, then it’s a running fight and withdrawal.”
“Won’t we hold the Beaumont warp point until the last minute?”
Krishmahnta shook her head. “We can’t. Firstly, they still have enough weight of metal to push past us. Secondly, Admiral Yoshikuni’s fleet is almost entirely out of missiles. That means defending the warp point would have to be a close-range fight—which she’d be sure to lose. Thirdly, we’ve got a lot of ships to sequence through the Achilles warp point, so they can’t arrive there all at once. But finally, Admiral Yoshikuni’s fleet is already committed to performing a far more important task.”
Captain Everson of the Actium raised his patrician chin. “What task is that, Admiral?”
Krishmahnta reactivated her stylus. “They’re going to be our stalking horse. They are going to take up positions here”—she indicated the twelve-o’clock position on main plot, half way to the periphery—“and, if the enemy enters, they will commence traveling on a direct heading to the false warp point at best speed. In short, it will look like they’re running for home.” She drew a line from that spot at twelve o’clock to the faux warp point, which was at the extreme edge of the one-o’clock position. “With the evidence we’ve planted at the false warp point, and with this fleet making best speed directly toward that same warp point, this maximizes the odds that the Baldies will fall for our ruse. At the same time, our ships withdrawing from the Raiden warp point”—she put her stylus on the seven-o’clock hoop—“will also be moving directly for that same point.” She drew a line of light reaching from the seven-o’clock point all the way to the fuschia hoop at the opposite edge of the table.
Everson nodded. “And so, as far as the enemy can tell, all the roads lead to the warp point—which is not there.”
“Exactly. Their sensors and all our vectors will tell them the same thing: we are headed to this point.” Again she indicated the false warp point at one o’clock. “When they’ve taken the bait, and our computations show that we can do so safely, all our ships will then turn toward the actual warp point to Achilles. We will have the advantage of position—and of speed. All our vessels will be in Desai space. Conversely, not all of theirs even have that drive—at this point, probably less than forty percent.”
Captain Cicescu frowned. “Why wouldn’t they try to cut us off this way?” He drew a very short line, that ran directly from the Beaumont warp point at two o’clock to the false line of withdrawal, intercepting it at the twelve-thirty position.
Krishmahnta nodded. “Baldy might try that, and then the race would be very close, and the last of our hulls will be exiting under fire—if they get out at all. But I’m pretty sure our adversary is not going to risk that fast-intercept vector.”
“No? Why?”
“Because if the Baldies do that, they’d be horribly vulnerable to any force of ours that might come through from what they will now believe is the Achilles warp point.” Krishmahnta tapped it yet again. “No, for Baldy to both intercept us and adequately protect his own rear, he’s got to mount a proximal defense of the warp point that he believes leads to Achilles. So instead of coming out to get us, he’ll sit and wait for us there. And he’ll have no reason not to do so, because he knows we’re too weak to push through his forces guarding the supposed warp point. He also knows that the other Baldy fleet is due in from Raiden. So in the mind of the Baldy admiral coming in from Beaumont, it’s just a matter of time before we’re caught between his anvil and the hammer swinging in from Raiden.”
Everson stared at the seven o’clock warp point. “Yes—and what about the Raiden warp point? What if the enemy fleet there comes through while we’re in the middle of this dance of deception?”
Krishmahnta nodded. “That is the wild card in the deck. Did we give them a bloody enough nose in Raiden to make them pause and lick their wounds? We don’t know. They’ve sent a few probes after us just in the last hour, and we’ve vaporized them all. So they have no precise intel on what’s here, but they have to consider that we may be holding this warp point in force. And that means they’ll want to bring up almost all of their own forces before they come through. Or they may feel the need to launch a manned recon sortie, if we keep burning off all their recon drones. So for a little while longer, we’ll keep a number of our faster SDs here to make this point look as hot and uninviting as possible. But there’s going to be about a two-hour period where we’ve got to have those SDs under way, during which the Baldies could still come through from Raiden and catch us.”
“So what’s the answer to that problem?”
Krishmahnta looked down. “We will leave two extremely fast ships back there to cover us during that critical interval, ships that can still catch up with us just before the last of our big hulls are projected to make transit to Achilles.”
“That sounds like a lousy job.”
“No doubt about it, it’s the short straw. And the folks who draw it will either have the best or worst day of us all. Either the Baldies in Raiden have decided to take time to regroup and consolidate—in which case our folks watching the warp point will just twiddle their thumbs until it’s time to rejoin us. Or the enemy will decide to move swiftly—and our covering force will catch a faceful of Baldies. No middle ground, I’m afraid.”
“And who gets this delightful job?”
“Our two fastest ships. One is our speediest mix of muscle and stealth, with enough defensive batteries to burn down up to a dozen RDs all at once. That’s the cruiser Balu Bay. The other, smaller hull is there for its sensors, enhanced ECM and shielding suites, and a disproportionately large defensive battery: the DD-courier Bucky Sherman.”
Wethermere was not startled by the choice: he had heard it coming. But he had not considered the onerous detail that Captain Watanabe then whispered as an aside: “Given your promotion, I believe you’re now the XO of that courier.” Watanabe started scribbling on his data tablet as the briefing began breaking up. “So, how are you liking your first field assignment in a shooting war, Lieutenant Wethermere?”
“Until about thirty seconds ago, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it might be. Now, well, I’ll just be happy when it’s over, sir.”
Fleet Captain Yoshi Watanabe’s smile widened. “That’s two pieces of basic wisdom learned in one day. Not bad, Lieutenant. We might make a real officer of you yet. Here are the orders for your CO. Carry on.”
Ossian Wethermere snapped a salute, started back for the Bucky Sherman, and wondered if he’d still be alive come supper time.
* * *
The fourteenth time the warp point began to flux after a precise eleven-minute interval, it had become almost a dull routine—except this time it was not a single recon drone. Instead, eight Baldy RDs came through all at once, two of which destroyed each other as they tried to reform in the same volume of space.
Ossian Wethermere watched the tacplot as the Balu Bay burned the last six down with lasers and force beams—just as she had thirteen times before.
Zhou, who flew the bridge Engineering console and was a decided wiseass, sneered, “Gee, that time the Bay’s gunners actually had to work a bit.”
Wethermere felt, as much as saw, the ship’s CO—First Lieutenant (senior) Lisette Zuniga—turn slowly: it was the pace at which she did most things. She impaled Zhou with her deep-set, deep brown eyes. Her face—lined despite antigerone treatments—was a wordless reproach: to Ossian, no matter the lighting or her mood, Zuniga always looked like a grieving mother who had wandered out of a Goya canvas. She had been CO of the Bucky Sherman for an unprecedented seven years and showed no inclination or ambition to pursue any higher position. She did not seem to enjoy command—indeed, she did not seem to enjoy people—and now she was having to veer into both of these unwelcome domains at the same time. “Mr. Zhou,” she began, “if you cannot constrain your remarks to matters—”
“Transit!” shouted Sensor Officer Lubell.
In the tacplot, a single—and very large—red blip had emerged from the warp point.
Lehman at Tactical shouted louder. “Holy shit—it’s an SD! Balu Bay flushing her racks!”
Wethermere slammed the shock harness down over his shoulders as Zuniga, eyes wide and staring, started to give an order, then seemed to change her mind—
She’s not going to send in time, Wethermere realized in one terrified blink. He shouted over the others. “Communications, send alert to the Fleet, all sys—”
And then the world turned upside down and wrenched violently sideways. He had a brief impression of Zuniga flung from her chair and straight against the portside bulkhead, then propelled headfirst into what momentarily looked and felt like the ceiling-become-the-deck as the gravitic polarizers flip-flopped. A few other bodies tumbled past, glass sleeting straight through one of them as a flatscreen burst outward and the acrid pall of burning wires and insulation seemed to rush into the bridge from all directions.
Wethermere almost failed to realize that the world had come to a stop again. He looked around.
Zuniga, Lehman, and Masharraf at Ops were all dead. Zhou had only got his harness half on and was clutching his left arm. Nandita Vikrit, at the combined Communications and Computer Management console, looked almost bemused as she dabbed at the red wash of blood pouring down from her sliced forehead. The other three—Lubell, Anapa at Helm, and Tepple at Weapons—seemed unhurt.
“Anapa, best speed. Heading—uh, directly away from that SD.” An inelegant but effective first order as commander, thought Wethermere. “Ops, status of the Balu Bay—” And then he realized he had made a request of a dead man. Time to recrew empty stations. “Nandita, run Ops through your board. Tepple, shift over to Tactical—transfer Weapons there. Zhou, can you still man your post?” Zhou groaned something that Wethermere decided to interpret as an affirmative. “Nandita, send to all ship’s sections: report damage and casualties. Lubell, keep one eye on the SD and give me its approximate status—but keep the other eye on the warp point. If there’s any change—”
“Got it, sir. Our sensors are in good shape—”
—Zhou tried to agree by saying “yes,” but it became “yaaughh” as he winced against the pain in his arm—
“—but Balu Bay is—sir, she’s gone. Not even flotsam.”
“The Baldy SD?”
“She’s coming about now, sir. Sluggish. Evidence of internal fires, explosions. A hell of a debris cloud around her.”
“Zhou, how are our shields?”
“Fifty percent,” the engineer gritted out between clenched teeth. “We’ve lost our offensive weapon—”
Damn: scratch one force beam…
“—and our commo is gone.”
“All of it?”
“Take a look, sir.” Zhou transferred an external image to the monitor that served the XO’s seat: where the complex arrays of the communication mast had been, there were only stars. At the bottom of the screen, a thin protrusion of tortured, twisted metal marked the site of the mast’s amputation.
Zhou detailed the consequences. “Long-range lascom and main antennae are history. And internal shorts have burned out the main and backup transmitters.”
“Chance of repair?”
“A week—at a Fleet Base.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s that bad. Maybe worse.”
“I have the ship’s status, sir,” murmured Vikrit.
Wethermere nodded at her as he started scanning the other engineering data that Zhou had thrown up in the margins of his screen.
“Overall, about thirty percent crew casualties, sir. Two fusion plants off-line. Away boat and bay are wrecked. Engineering deck sections 12 to 16 are flooded with coolants and wastewater.”
“Seal the leaks and seal those sections. Evacuate all toxics to vacuum.”
“Trying, sir. Not all bulkheads are responding to command circuits.”
“Contain as possible.” He stared hard at the engine data in the margin of his screen, then turned to face Zhou. “I’m no expert, Mr. Zhou, but do those three red indicators mean what I think they mean?”
“Sir, if you think they mean that we are at about forty percent speed—and losing pseudo-velocity envelope coherence, then yes, sir, your understanding of our situation is quite accurate.”
“Time to failure?”
“If we run at half output, maybe a day. At max? She’ll shake apart in an hour. And sir—I do mean that she’ll shake apart.”
“Warning duly noted, Mr. Zhou. How about our escape pods?”
Zhou brightened. “Fifty-five percent show green, twenty-five percent yellow, twenty percent red. So about fifteen percent of us are going to be rolling the dice, sir.”
Vikrit leaned in. “Sir, should I instruct the crew to report to evac—?”
“I’ll tell you if and when we get to that point, Ensign. And should we find ourselves taking that step, bear this in mind; officers will take compromised pods, starting with the most senior and working on down.” Lucky me. “No exceptions. Is that understood?”
The noises of assent around the bridge were clear but not enthusiastic.
“Mr. Zhou, about those engines—”
Lubell interrupted. “Sir—missile launch. Closing rapidly.”
“Tepple?”
“Range twelve light-seconds and closing. Engaging defense batteries.”
Wethermere glanced down in the tacplot; the missile didn’t appear there, but the SD did, lumbering after the crippled green speck that was his first command. He waited. Seconds passed. “Mr. Tepple?”
“Sir, I—” Then: “Missile destroyed, sir.”
“About time.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“But what, Mr. Tepple?”
“Sir, that missile would never have hit us. It wouldn’t have even come close. I had to boost the coverage envelope of the defense battery just to get it to engage.”
Wethermere frowned. “Did they ever get a targeting lock on us?”
“Not that I could detect, sir.”
Wethermere thought that through for three seconds. Then: “Mr. Tepple, on no condition are you to activate our own targeting arrays.”
“Very well, sir—not that we have any reason to. With our force beam out—”
“Never mind that. Take no chances. Take your arrays off-line.” He turned to Lubell. “Same goes for sensors—particularly for sensors. We run passive arrays only.”
“Passive? Sir, we won’t get very precise—”
“Mr. Lubell, would you rather have precise data—or would you rather live to tell your grandchildren that you didn’t have precise data?”
“Sir, active-array circuitry is off and routed for command override only.”
“Very good, Mr. Lubell.”
Zhou straightened up. “Skipper—”
“Skipper?” Well, that came fast—but maybe things do, in combat. Or maybe that’s just Zhou…
“With respect sir, what the hell is going on? What’s with the nix on the active arrays? And—an SD? The Baldies sent an SD? On a recon run? What the hell were they thinking?”
“They were thinking they might surprise us—which they did pretty well, Mr. Zhou. And I’ve been inspecting the first few seconds of detailed sensor data we got on the enemy SD. Look at the damage. I’m guessing the Baldies were ready to write her off anyhow, and then figured if she could make transit, last just a few seconds, and get back through the warp point, they’d finally get a look at what was killing all their RDs over here. Or if she didn’t get back, they’d reason that we were holding the point in force.”
“Okay—seems logical. But then why hasn’t she gone back, or at least sent a message?”
“Mr. Lubell, do our sensors give us any answers to that?”
“I think they might, sir.” Lubell threw up an old-fashioned 2-D cad-cam approximation of the debris field around the SD, about five seconds after her exchange with the Balu Bay. Using a light pencil, Lubell pointed out the remains of half a dozen externally mounted pinnaces. “She may have been equipped to send back messengers—but she lost that in the shootout with Balu Bay.”
Zhou rubbed his swelling arm. “Okay, but if she carries any internal couriers or fighters…”
Wethermere shook his head. “If she had them, then she’d have launched them already. But look at the emission spikes Lubell got on the passive thermal scans, here—and here.”
“What do you figure they are?”
“Internal explosions.” Wethermere leaned back, rubbed his chin, felt stubble starting to sprout there. “From what I remember of the technical intelligence on this class of ship, these old SDs were built with only one flight deck. I’ll bet those thermal blooms are conventional fuel bunkers cooking off, or the Baldies are venting them to eliminate the possibility of a catastrophic chain of secondary explosions.”
Lubell nodded vigorously. “That theory matches up with this sensor reading. At first I thought she was leaking atmosphere, but the pre-dispersal density of the gas is too light. That’s pure hydrogen. And there it goes—” A brief thermal spike indicated that the vented fuel had ignited—spectacularly.
Zhou checked his engines again, made a disapproving clucking sound, and returned to his customary role as devil’s advocate. “Okay, so the SD doesn’t have any way to send a message back home. So then why doesn’t she turn tail and go back herself?”
Ossian Wethermere watched the big red blip overtaking his little green one—slowly but surely—in the tacplot. “Because of us.”
“Us? Why us?”
“Because we can report.”
“Well, yes—but he can always blow us to pieces first—and then go home.”
Wethermere smiled at Zhou. “Yes, that would seem like the best plan, wouldn’t it?” He thought a moment. Then: “Sensors: bogey’s heading?”
Lubell paused, then reported with admirable composure. “Bearing constant, range closing.”
Zhou sputtered. “Holy hell, is she—is she trying to ram us?”
Wethermere cut him off with a raised hand. “Mr. Lubell, check again. Is her bearing absolutely constant?”
“Yes sir, it—no, wait. Bearing has shifted one-thousandth of one degree ecliptic declination.”
Zhou swallowed, his eyes large but noticeably relieved. “For out here, that’s still a damned close pass.”
“Yes, it is. Close enough to bring her within a tenth of a light-second, Mr. Lubell?”
“Aye, sir. Close enough to dent our fender—literally.”
Wethermere nodded to himself—and didn’t realize that a few seconds had passed until Zhou interrupted his thoughts with, “Okay, Skipper, we’re all waiting. What’s she playing at?”
“I don’t know yet. She’s obviously having trouble getting a lock on us. Which is consistent with the rest of what we’ve seen. She hasn’t powered up her active arrays once, not even on low power. So I’m thinking they must have been knocked out by Balu Bay.”
“Okay, but her failure to attack would have to mean that her passive sensors are too imprecise to get a lock on us, also.”
“They probably are, but who can know for sure? Passive sensors are—well, passive, so we’ve got no way of knowing what they’re showing her. Hell, they might not be showing her anything. They could be fried along with her active arrays.”
“Okay—but if that were the case, why would she stay in-system and chase us? She can’t get target lock, so what’s she going to do? Space is too big, and we can alter velocity enough that she’ll never be able to try visually directed fire. And in her condition, if she encounters anything bigger than a cruiser while she’s chasing us, she’s a goner.”
Wethermere shrugged. “She might be a goner right now, but not in half an hour. She’s a big ship—she’s got options we don’t. Her damage-control parties might be swapping in a brand-new array this very minute—or booting up and calibrating a backup system. And anyhow, she’s only coming after us because she needs to silence us.”
“Okay, I still don’t get that. Why good does it do for her to silence us? Those antimatter missile salvos did a pretty good job of announcing her arrival to everyone in this system.”
“They announced an arrival—but of what? A ship? A whole fleet? A single SBMHAWK? Our own fire? And the activation of the warp-point doesn’t tell our side anything special. Their drones have been triggering warp point transits every ten minutes or so for the last few hours. No, we are the only hull left, the only ones who know that, this time, it was an actual Baldy warship—and that they’ve taken out the Balu Bay. And that, therefore, the door from Raiden into Suwa is wide open. And these Baldies are going to make sure we never get a chance to communicate any of that.”
“Too bad they don’t know our comms are out.”
“They probably do. They’ve been following right along our vector, which means they’ve passed what’s left of our commo mast. They’ve encountered our ship class before, so that wreckage tells them which part of us they just amputated. So they know we’ve got no laser comms. And if we still had a transmitter and juiced it up—”
“They’d get a strong active signal from us, and send a homing missile right up our—nostril.”
“Er…yes. So even if we had the radio left, we couldn’t use it—and they know that.”
“Okay, so they’ve got to kill us. And they’re going to. And soon. But how, if they can’t get lock? Of course, we can always fight back.” Zhou’s sarcasm became a sneer. “I say we wait until they’re at point-blank range and then use our anti-missile lasers to take some paint off their hull—if we’re lucky.”
Wethermere visualized the anti-missile lasers—and suddenly stopped hearing Zhou. Instead, he slowly (so it seemed) realized how the SD was going to try to destroy them—and why it needed to get well within a light-second to do so. He turned to Ensign Vikrit. “Nandita, when we returned to Admiral Yoshikuni’s fleet in Beaumont, didn’t we relay a lot of technical intelligence on the wrecks the Baldies left behind after the First Battle of Raiden?”
“Sure, plenty.”
“And did we keep a copy of that in our data banks?”
“Yes. We were slated to escape and retransmit it back in Achilles and beyond if the fleet was defeated.”
“Okay. I need you to dig up any data on the targeting range of the Baldy PDF systems.”
“Oh, at least ten light-seconds, maybe more like—”
“No, I mean the terminal-targeting arrays.”
Vikrit, who had emerged from NOTC just in time to welcome the Baldies to human space, responded with an uncertain echo. “Terminal-targeting arrays?”
Wethermere explained as he looked over her shoulder. “When threat forces come really close to a hull, the main sensors usually hand off the target tracking to a smaller, dedicated point defense fire array. That array is specially designed to maintain lock on targets that, due to their speed and proximity, present the defense batteries with rapid changes in telemetry.”
Nandita was poring over her screens. Wethermere turned to Lubell. “Enemy range and rate of closure?”
Lubell had it immediately. “Range: eight light-seconds. Closing at just under one light-second per minute.”
Nandita leaned closer to her screens. “Just a moment, just a mo—here. Yes, their PDF batteries are supported by a ‘hull-dispersed grid of independent targeting arrays.’ Approximate hand-off range of zero point five light-seconds.”
Tepple whistled. “That’s close.”
Wethermere shrugged. “The Baldy systems were designed as much for navigational path clearance as defense, I’m guessing. The SD chasing us was one of their original, multipurpose hulls—only their newest generation of SDH are purpose-built warbirds.”
Zhou looked pale now, but tried to sound brave. “So, we have accumulated a wealth of fascinating data that tells us—with great precision—the manner in which the Baldies are going to target and destroy us at point-blank range. Now what?”
Ossian Wethermere looked up and smiled. “Now we’re going to use that data to destroy them—and save ourselves.”
* * *
Because the fumes were not as bad in Engineering’s auxiliary control room, Wethermere and Zhou entered there. The two technicians that had been waiting for them saluted. Wethermere returned the salutes. “You’re relieved. Report to your pods.”
“Yes, sir.” They needed no encouragement.
Zhou looked at Wethermere. “You sure you want to do this?”
“You sure you want to live?”
Zhou nodded. “Okay, so what sort of control do you need?”
“A timer would get the job done, but a remote controller will maximize our chances of survival.”
“So you need a remote controller. And a backup, too. Fine.” And Zhou started changing control settings on the master board. “Care to explain the plan in a little more detail? Blowing up a drive is not going to create a big enough explosion to hurt the Baldies at half a light-second, sir.”
“I’m not planning to use our drive failure as a bomb.”
“No? Then I’m really in the dark, sir.”
“Funny—you were the one who gave me the idea.”
“Me, sir?”
“Absolutely. What did you say? When the engines fail, they’re going to shake the ship apart—literally shake it apart?”
Zhou frowned. “Yes, sir, I said something like that.”
“And why does the ship shake apart instead of explode?”
Zhou actually leaned back and adopted a slightly professorial tone. “Well, you see—”
Wethermere held up his hand. “How long is this lecture going to take?”
“I dunno. About ten minutes?”
“We’ll be dead in five. Give me the short version.”
“Yes, sir. Look, it’s like this—every reactionless-drive field has a stability limit that defines the amount of energy it can handle safely. Combat damage reduces this limit, which is why running a damaged drive at full power is pretty dangerous. When the engines reach their stability limit, the drive, and everything in the ship, begins to experience something that feels and acts a lot like aerodynamic drag. What’s happening is that as the drive exceeds its safe limit, the pseudo-velocity envelope—the field that shifts the ship forward through ‘bent space’—begins to unravel.”
“And so the field’s ability to suspend the physics of normal space begins to become less than absolute.”
“Yeah—more or less. Most ship systems can’t take much of this drag—not more than a four or five gee equivalent, because at that point the phase distortion and interruption is so severe that it compromises the operation of the drive and the power plants. That leads to stresses and loss of coherence, which produces multiple, but not simultaneous, failures. The ship does not explode in a single spasm. It literally shakes apart in a cascade of smaller explosions and a shower of debris.”
“Good.”
“Uh, yes, sir, but how does that help us?”
“Mr. Zhou, when a ship with a reactionless drive is destroyed, and its drive field is annihilated, what happens to its wreckage?”
“Well, sir, the wreckage would go from a near-relativistic velocity to a dead stop. Instantly. Pseudo-velocity doesn’t involve inertia.”
“So I thought. Meaning that, from the perspective of another ship that’s still being propelled by a reactionless drive, this wreckage would drop behind in a near-relativistic rush—so fast that you wouldn’t have the time to see or scan it. Is that about right?”
“Yes, right.” And then the light came on somewhere behind Zhou’s eyes. “Oh, I get it.”
Wethermere smiled. “Yes, I think you do. And now we’ve got”—he checked his watch—“about two minutes to get into our pods.”
“Yes, sir—and sir?”
“Yes?”
“I think you’d better rethink that business about you taking a compromised pod, sir. Because you’re carrying the remote, and if your pod goes pear-shaped—”
“You’re right, Zhou. Whoever carries the remote controller has to be in a reliable pod. But I’m not going to be the one carrying the remote.”
“No, sir?”
“No. You are.”
Zhou looked like he’d swallowed his tongue. “Me, sir?”
“Yes, you. You’re the engineer, you know the tolerances, and you’ve got a belly-feel for the ship’s drives, even when you’re at the other end of her. Or even from inside an escape pod, I’ll bet. We’ll give the backup unit to Lubell, if you think he’s the right officer for it.”
Zhou considered. “Absolutely, sir. He’d do fine. Better than me, probably—”
“That’s bullshit, Zhou. Don’t start getting heroic on me. Now get into your pod, and give me the backup controller. I’ll drop it off with Lubell on my way.”
* * *
Ossian let the escape pod’s automated system dog the outer hatch, and then the inner hatch, before he tested the seals. Seemed tight—not that he could tell.
He waited for the automatic harness to snap into place around him: it didn’t. Malfunction number one: a bumpy ride at least, hopefully not lethal. He pried a few straps out of the packaging and secured himself as best he could.
His watch chirped. Approximately twenty seconds now.
The small overhead monitor came on. Zhou had linked the screen into a graphical representation of the engine readouts. They were all deeply in the red. A tremor started behind Wethermere and then worked around to the front.
The stability of the drive’s pseudo-velocity envelope hovered just below the failure line.
Lubell’s voice—tinny and incomplete over the damaged internal comm system—announced. “Range to bogey, 0.7 light-seconds.”
Zhou juiced the engines a bit. The pervasive tremor became a violent and irregular quaking.
The envelope gauge hopped above the stability line for the briefest moment, then settled right down on the limit marker.
“Range to bogey, 0.6 light-seconds.”
A hiss from behind; Vikrit had remotely primed the pod’s thrusters and clearing charges. At least those seemed to be functional.
Zhou pushed the reactionless drives a tiny bit more—and then the shaking became wild, brutal, unpredictable, as if Ossian had fallen into a continental fault line during a tectonic shift. The red indicator hopped over the limit marker—and started flashing black and orange.
“Range to bogey, 0.5 li—”
The pod’s ejection charge slammed Ossian forward against the straps: the eight-gee push of the solid boosters double-cracked his head against the pod’s monitor even as they kicked him farther away from the Bucky Sherman.
And, as his vision blurred and objects seemed to bleed into and across the now-cracked monitor, he saw the flashing engine readouts wrench mightily—and go blank.
Somewhere behind him, in the belly of the crippled courier, a tug of war—waged between real space and folded space—broke the rope that was the containment wall of a fusion reactor, then the coils of a primary drive capacitor, then the drive itself.
The Bucky Sherman came apart in a shuddering cascade of flame, star-white fusion plasma, and ferociously tumbling shards of titanium, composites, electro-bonded superdense armors—
Which dropped from 0.11 c pseudo-velocity to the paltry speed imparted by the explosive forces of its destruction, which scattered the pieces wide across space.
The enemy superdreadnought was at 0.51 light-seconds range when the human ship went from being a near-relativistic target to a stationary debris field.
The Arduan ship’s passive arrays detected the savagely spinning wreckage 0.51 seconds later. Computers interpreted, assessed, sent a collision warning. At that same instant, the alien ship plowed into the debris field at almost 36,000 kilometers per second.
The behemoth’s destruction was instantaneous.