The Sphinx understood this. His lies about his origin were likely spurred by his hunger for power as well as his comprehension of what threat existed outside of the pocket realm of the Great Sphere. He could never be forgiven for his utter weirdness and depravity, but his drive for empire was at least comprehensible, and motivated to some extent by genuine knowledge. The Halifaxians were content to remain blind to what was coming, a vast army of creatures known by the designation. . .
“Targets locked!” announced his weapons officer happily. “All missiles nominal!”
Ronner yanked his attention back to the forward vidscreen. The icons glowed angrily in brilliant orange as they closed. Little pulses of light preceded their disappearance as each warhead detonated. These were the x-ray laser weapons. Their nuclear detonations produced energies that were focused into ultra-powerful x-ray pulses. These lashed the fleeing destroyer without mercy, battering the vessels’ shield.
“Shield holding,” reported the weapons officer. His voice was still full of confidence. Still twelve missiles left.
These latter weapons carried ordinary fusion warheads. Such things did their damage through the sheer force unleashed against the hyperspatial shields, or if especially fortunate, the unshielded hulls, of enemy ships. Shields of the strength found on light warships were usually proof against one or two close-range explosions, but twelve? The RHN destroyer wasn’t long for this universe.
“Detonations!” the weapons officer declared proudly.
Give me a straight visual,” ordered Ronner. “I want to see this.”
The forward screen transformed from a full-color tracking overview of the unfolding saturation strike, and was replaced by a field of stars. It was at first impossible to distinguish anything amid the background points of light, but then bright flares erupted, here, there and there. It was glorious! Each explosion was a megaton-level thermonuclear warhead going off, hurling its energies ahead in a directed blast. Though lacking in the range seen on one of the x-ray warheads, it delivered a much more powerful punch when it struck.
The target was still so far away that the fireworks on the screen were scarcely more than small flashes seen from a distance. The technical readouts told Ronner all he needed to know. The missiles were hitting home.
Then came the great flash that he had been waiting for. It was an eruption of light that temporarily outshone all of the stars on the screen. It could have only one cause.
Jubilation filled his weapons officer’s voice. “Target destroyed! Target destroyed!”
A cheer rose from among the other crew on Cawnpore’s bridge. The hunt had been a success.
“Well done!” Ronner bellowed. “Recall our fighters. We’ll be heading on to Arles as soon as they are back aboard.”
“Admiral Ronner, I’m picking up a distress signal. Several pods from the target ship must have been jettisoned. They are surrendering and requesting rescue from the void.”
Ronner guffawed. Prisoners! Halifaxian prisoners! Oh what a joyous day! “We will collect them before we jump.”
The old admiral allowed himself a satisfied smile. Halifaxian prisoners could be used as bargaining chips, and perhaps even force the RHN’s evacuation of the Aquitaine system. Even if that should not come to pass, the enemy presence here would soon be eliminated, and then he could devote his complete attention to ending the resistance on Pessac. Soon all of Aquitaine would be his. He decided he would look good wearing the insignia of a vice admiral.
*****
The fighter recovery took the better part of the next half hour. The search for the Halifaxian survivors was taking even longer, some two hours, and oddly, the Cawnpore’s search shuttles and pinnaces were still coming up emptyhanded. Perhaps the Halies had recovered some of their courage and hid, not wanting to be rescued by the enemy.
Ronner busied himself by going over the latest transmissions from Stahl at Arles. The fight was going slowly, but they were winning, the younger officer assured. Damage to the station was being kept to a bare minimum, and the three RHN warships, fewer in number than had been anticipated, were about ready to run for safety now that the evacuation of the civilians on the station had been accomplished.
“Good riddance,” Ronner thought. He was only interested in the nuclear reactors there. Each would become the heart of another DN warship. It was upsetting that it had come to this, that the fleet had been reduced to scrounging civilian powerplants for its vessels, but that was how things stood. It was better to have many hulls with cheap plants aboard than fewer ships with military grade ones, and Arles was a veritable gold mine of commercial fusion reactors. It would not always be like this, Ronner consoled himself. Ajax would be back one day, and stronger than ever. The relentless march toward empire would resume.
His reverie ended abruptly. “Anomalous readings, admiral,” an ensign overseeing the Cawnpore’s extensive sensor suite reported. There was more concern on the young man’s voice than Ronner would have expected. “Report, ensign.”
“Our sensors have been fogged by the radiation residue created by the explosion,” the ensign began. “Intense radiation, that’s normal after the detonation of our Firebirds, but there’s something strange about these current readings. We’ve found some debris that must have come from the enemy ship, but I’m picking up strong gravimetric disturbances. These aren’t what one would expect to find after a detonation. It’s what would be seen after a hyperspatial displacement. The radiation is only just now dissipating to the extent that we can look deeply at the region of space where the enemy destroyer was, uh, destroyed.”
Ronner’s mind worked over these new facts. “Displacement? Was the enemy ship forming a DP envelope before we hit it?”
“Not that my readings indicate,” the ensign apologized. “The readings do strongly suggest that a massive object displaced at the same time as the explosion, however.”
“Let me guess,” Ronner snarled. “The mass that departed normal space was roughly equivalent to that of the destroyer we were chasing?”
The ensign huddled closely over his station’s screen, and then looked up. “Gravimetrics suggest that is correct, admiral.”
“Then what the hell did we annihilate?”
“I can’t tell, admiral. I’m doing a scan now. There’s debris that can be linked to an RHN warship.”
“And the distress calls?”
“My sensors are too clouded by the radiation to tell, but I believe they were faked, given our failure to locate any survivors, as was the destruction of the destroyer.”
“Damn it!” roared Ronner. “For all we know he dumped some old mess trays out the back before he jumped.” Cunning. You’ve had at least two hours to reach your friends. He slammed the console on his command chair, opening up a direct link to engineering. “Make ready for an immediate displacement! We’re going to Arles!”
Chapter Fourteen
RHS Albacore, Arles Station vicinity, Aquitaine system
Captain Ariana Kim gazed worriedly at the forward screen. Albacore had materialized off Arles, but not nearly as close as they had aimed. The station was at least ninety minutes away. It was a horrible jump that had to have something to do with the parlous condition of the DP drive. There was no sign that Cawnpore had followed them with a displacement of its own. Not yet, at the least. “You think they bought it?”
“We won’t know for a while,” replied More. “I think we just gained ourselves a little breather. She’ll figure it out.”
“Blowing up our starboard maneuver drive with a good chunk of our nukes before jumping must have made for quite a show back there,” Kim said. “Made it look like we had been hit. The distress beacons were a nice touch too. ”
“I told you I had a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“Any left.”
“Maybe. Stay tuned.”
More summoned Howell, whose holoimage materialized beside him on the Alabacore’s bridge. “Good news first,” he demanded of the chief engineer.
<
br /> Howell smiled. “We’re not dead.”
There was a polite chuckle from the others on the bridge.
“Noted. Now the bad news.”
Howell’s shoulders slumped. “Albacore will never jump again. Not with this DP drive, which is finished” - sparks flaring behind him emphasized this point - “and not with this reactor, either. It will generate, at most, only twenty percent of its rated maximum output. That wouldn’t be enough for a jump even if the DP drive were in perfect condition.”
More nodded. He’d expected nothing sunnier. “The port maneuver drive?”
“Holding steady, We can limp along.”
“The Cawnpore will catch us if we don’t head straight for Arles Station,” Kim observed.
“Yes, it will.” More sat back in his chair. “Good work, Julius. We’ve got a fighting chance. Do what you can.”
Howell nodded, and his image dematerialized.
“We haven’t got much left,” Kim said. “We let loose with most of the rest of our missiles and fusion shells to cover our displacement.”
“It will be a hike to Arles.” More swiped his hand in the air, and a three-dimensional image of the Arles battlespace emerged before him and Kim. “I can’t complain though, considering the DP was about to conk out. We got here. Matt is holding steady in front of the station. The last of the civilian craft have gotten away. And see here?” More pointed to a cluster of red icons. “The Ajaxians are standing off, lobbing missiles and shells at the commercial craft. They’re avoiding wrecking the orbital since it’s got what they want on it.”
“Draining our resources, giving us the choice between standing and dying for an empty station or leaving it to them, largely intact.” Kim exhaled slowly. “Can’t Arles overload the reactors? Destroy them? Those are what they want, right?”
More was silent for several seconds, lost in thought. “That will take too much time for them to arrange,” he said finally. “So we are going to have to wreck them ourselves.”
“Can we achieve this if the Jaxers attempt to intervene? They’ll be making their move soon. Cawnpore won’t be far behind either.”
“Then we’d better act fast.”
*****
Aboard DNS Arrogant, Arles Station, Aquitaine system
“Sensor contact! Sensor contact!” Adler announced.
Stahl spun his chair to face the sensor officer’s station. “Put it on screen!”
The ensign complied, hurriedly casting the information on his personal station’s screen to the large one at the fore of the bridge. A red icon denoting a Halifaxian destroyer was approaching rapidly from the direction of the inner system.
Stahl examined the data that his ship listed beside the icon on the small-scale holo that floated beside his chair. “This newcomer, we’ve encountered her before,” he observed. He expanded the holo with a flick of his wrist. The RHN warship grew several times in size. “A Sapphire-class. I recognize her. She participated in the strike on the Pessac anchorage. She’s been stuck in hyperspace all this time.”
Dozens of befuddled queries had come flooding in from Cawnpore over the last twelve hours. It had taken too much time to convince that fool, Admiral Ronner, that he had been lost in the other realm for three days. Stahl had repeatedly assured him that every chronometer on all of his ships displayed the same time. It had still been a chore. Finally, Ronner had accepted the obvious and left him alone to carry out the long-range contest with the Halifaxian defenders. Ronner had promised that Cawnpore would make short work of the destroyer he was pursuing. He’d failed to make good on his promise, and Cawnpore herself was nowhere to be found.
It wouldn’t do to call the supreme commander of DN forces in Aquitaine a blithering idiot in front of the Arrogant’s bridge crew. No matter how loyal they were to him personally, and he was fairly sure of all of them, such talk had a habit of seeping out. It would all come back to bite Stahl if he allowed himself the luxury of an outburst of the string of expletives that was ready and waiting on the launch tube that was his tongue. It was painful holding them back. They burned in his mouth, demanding release. He was about to give way to his disgust.
Then Stahl caught himself. He had not patiently weathered the idiocy of Captain Giselher Heddrik as long as he had to succumb in this moment to the temptation to unload a stream of invective against an admiral. He had ambitions to rise higher. Much higher. Ronner might still be of use to him. So he held his tongue, and allowed the urge to pass.
Once he had regained his composure, Stahl decided that he would have to devote a portion of his force to deal with the new threat. The Sapphire was not much of a danger. She had been badly damaged in her encounter with the DN three days ago, and was wheezing along, missing one maneuver drive. The Arrogant and three Gremlin-class sloops, detached from the main body of ships, would be enough to see her put out of her misery. It would be a fine thing also to take her out personally before Cawnpore arrived. All the glory would belong to him!
Arrogant was running low on expendables, however, and Stahl decided that it would be prudent to husband what missiles and fusion shells he had left and smash the crippled RHN ship with the limited suite of particle guns his destroyer had. These would be enough, despite their small size, he estimated.
“Hold position here,” he ordered via an encrypted comm to the other ships in his flotilla. “Kobold, Salamander, and Mephit! Follow me!”
The trio slid away from their positions in the battleline that held station off Arles. Like a brood of ducklings obediently following their mother, the sloops trailed after Arrogant.
Stahl began to think. The Sapphire had to have been in contact with the ships already at Arles, but the destroyer had not emerged close to the orbital, to join its comrades, but had come out nearer to his own flotilla, which was some distance away. Any competent captain with a functional DP drive would have been able to place his ship wherever he pleased. That he had not displaced closer to Arles indicated that he was surely up to something.
This caused Stahl to hesitate. Had he underestimated the threat posed by the lone destroyer? Surely the Halifaxian captain was crafty enough to have some card to play? But what was it?
Stahl was unwilling to draw off any more of his ships from the battle with the RHN squadron, lest his fleet become too weakened to fend off a determined charge. Most of his ships were diminutive things, and though he well outnumbered the enemy, a desperation attack could see many of them wrecked, a prospect he wanted to avoid. It wasn’t like the Halifaxians to spend their lives and vessels in suicidal attacks, but at this juncture, who could guess what they might do?
Stahl brooded a bit longer. It would also be embarrassing to draw off another ship or two now, as if he had gotten cold feet after sizing up a sputtering enemy destroyer. His captains would be left wondering if their commanding officer had lost his nerve. A loss of face would never do. Stahl decided to hold steady and wait to see what the Sapphire captain did.
“Stay on this course,” he said.
“Aye, captain.”
A jolt of nervous excitement surged through Stahl. Instinctively wary, for reasons he could not quite explain, he summoned a holo with a swipe of his hand. Then, with both, he expanded the range of the holo to engulf the entirety of the volume of space surrounding Arles out to a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers. The ball of holographic light spread to a real-world diameter of more than a meter. With quick taps on the holo he inaugurated a search of the volume for objects larger than two meters. He found several objects, of varying sizes, floating at speed away from the station, on a general heading for the flotilla. Due to the electromagnetic interference coursing through space as a result of so many nearby atomic detonations, sensor resolution was very limited. What were they?
He cast them to the forward screen. “Ensign Adler! Identify those objects!”
After a moment’s pause, the ensign answered.
*****
Off Arles Station, Aquitaine system
Lieutenant Percy's ordinarily calm voice now betrayed his anxiety. "I thought doing this once before was crazy. Now I think it's flat-out. super-duper insane."
"Not quite time yet, Hammer," Imagawa said over tightbeam. "Three more minutes."
"Might as well be three hundred years," Percy groaned softly.
Imagawa sympathized with her wingman. They were tumbling through space, powered down, and heading straight for a destroyer bristling with defensive guns.
"Is there anything you wouldn't do for Admiral More?" Percy asked.
"I'll never swab the deck, no matter how sweetly he asked, now that I think of it."
Percy sighed. "Witch, I believe our life expectancies are too closely related to your willingness to tell the admiral to get lost."
"Orders are orders," she replied with a light laugh.
"This Navy stuff is going to get me killed," Percy observed sourly.
"Not until we smoke some Jaxers first. Then you can die."
"Even my death comes with conditions. Damned Navy."
"No finer job in all the galaxy, Hammer," reminded Imagawa. "We fly the coolest fighters and get free grub."
Percy snorted in derision. "I can think of lots of other places I could be right now. Most don't involve either fighters or the Aquitaine system.” He paused, then resumed his complaint. “Shouldn’t it give you pause that Captain Heyward, aggressive Captain Heyward, doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear’ Captain Heyward, thought this was a bad idea? Or that Captain Carey, who would gut a Jaxer with a smile on her face and not bat an eyelash as his intestines spilled out onto the deck, said it was nuts?”
“Oh, I noticed all of that, and processed it very carefully.” Imagawa wouldn’t have said no to any order given by More. Years of service with the old man on Steadfast had won her trust in his judgment.
The Ajax Incursion Page 22
