by David Weber
“At their present rate of deceleration, about eleven hours, five hours behind that Fleet transport. Given their drive advantage, they’ll be fifteen or twenty light-minutes out when she makes Elysium orbit.”
“Pass the word to Captain Brewster, Adela. Have him designate parking orbits for them and alert the yard in case they have any servicing needs.”
“Will do, sir,” Masterman replied, and the screen went blank.
Commander Masterman stepped from the lift outside Primary Control, her hands full of coffee cups and doughnuts, and hit the hatch button with her elbow. The panel hissed aside, and she sidled into PriCon with a grin.
“I come bearing gifts,” she announced, and a spatter of applause greeted her. She bowed grandly and glanced at the bulkhead chronometer as she set her goodies carefully out of the way. She had eight glorious minutes before she went back on watch—just long enough to exchange a few words with Lieutenant Commander Brigatta. That was nice; she had plans for the darkly handsome com officer the next time their off-duty schedules coincided.
She’d just reached Brigatta’s station when Lieutenant Orrin straightened suddenly at Plotting. The movement caught Masterman’s eye, and she turned automatically towards her assistant in surprise.
“Now that’s damned strange,” Orrin muttered. He looked up at his boss and gestured at Brigatta’s screen as he shunted his own display across to it. “Look at this, ma’am,” he said, and the screen blossomed with a view of near-planet space. “I know that transport’s skipper said he was in a hurry to unload, but he’s really pushing it. She’s a good fifty percent above normal approach speeds, and now she’s doing a turnov—Sweet Jesus!”
Adela Masterman froze as the “transport” suddenly stopped braking and spun to accelerate toward Elysium—at thirty-two gravities. Impossible! No transport could crank that much power inside a planet’s Powell limit!
But this one could, and disbelief turned to horror as the “transport” dropped her ECM and stood revealed for what she truly was: a battle-cruiser. A Fleet battle-cruiser—one of their own ships!—battle screen springing up even as Masterman stared . . . and she was launching SLAMs!
The GQ alarm began to scream, and she charged towards her station, but it was purely automatic. Deep inside, she knew it was already far too late.
Starcoms are never emplaced on planets. They are enormous structures—not so much massive as big, full of empty space—and it would be far more expensive to build them to survive a planet’s gravity, but the real reason they are always found in space is much simpler. No one wants multiple black holes, however small, generated on the surface of his world, despite everything gravity shields can do and all the failsafes in the galaxy. And so they are placed in orbit, usually at least four hundred thousand Kilometers out, which also gets them beyond the planetary Powell limit and doubles their efficiency as they fold space to permit supralight message transmission.
Unfortunately, this eminently sensible solution creates an Achilles heel for strategic command and control. Starships and planets without starcoms must rely on SLAM drones, many times faster than light but far slower than a starcom and woefully short-legged in comparison, so any raider’s first priority is the destruction of his target’s starcom. Without it, he has time. Time to hit his objectives, to carry out his mission . . . and to vanish once more before anyone outside the system even learns he was there.
Captain Homer Ortiz sat in his command chair, face taut, as his first SLAMs went out. Ortiz was cyber synth-capable and glad of it, for it gave him the con direct as Poltava went into the attack. His crisp, clear commands to the emotionless AI sent the first salvo slashing towards the starcom orbital base across two hundred thousand kilometers of space with an acceleration of fifteen thousand gravities; they struck fifty-one seconds later, traveling at a mere three percent of light-speed, but that would have been more than sufficient even without the black hole in front of each missile.
More weapons were already on their way—not SLAMs, this time, but Hauptman effect sublight missiles. Their initial acceleration was much higher, and they had barely half as far to go. The first thousand-megaton warhead detonated twenty-seven seconds after launch.
Commander Masterman had just donned her headset when she and nine thousand other people died. Then the other missiles began to strike home.
Night turned into day on the planet of Elysium as two-thirds of its orbital defenses vanished in less than two minutes. Shocked eyes cringed away from the ring of suns blazing above them, and minds refused to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Not in four centuries had the Imperial Fleet taken such losses in return for absolutely no damage to the enemy, but never before had the Fleet been attacked by one of its own, and the carnage a cyber-synthed battle-cruiser could wreak totally unopposed was simply beyond comprehension.
The planetary governor dashed for his com in response to the first horrified warning; he arrived just as the last missile went home against the last fort in Poltava’s field of fire, and his face was white as whey. The three surviving forts were rushing to battle stations, but the marauding battle-cruiser’s speed soared, already above two hundred KPS, as she cut a chord across their protective ring. She cleared the planet and acquired the first of the survivors just before its own weapons came on line, and Ortiz’s smile was hellish as a fresh salvo of SLAMs raced outward. The fort had nothing to stop them with, and the governor groaned as they tore it apart.
The second fortress had time for one answering salvo, hastily launched with minimal time for fire control solutions, and then it, too, was gone.
The final fort had time to get its battle screen up, yet faced the cruelest dilemma of all. Its crew had SLAMs of their own . . . and dared not use them. Ortiz had cut his course recklessly tight, placing Poltava far closer to Elysium than they. They could reply only with beams and warheads, lest a near-miss with a SLAM strike the very world they wanted to protect, and their gunners were shaken to their core by the catastrophe overwhelming them. They did their best, yet it never mattered at all. Their first salvos were still on the way when Ortiz launched a fresh pattern of SLAMs and flipped his ship end-for-end yet again, aiming Poltava’s Fasset drive directly at the doomed fort to devour its fire.
Twelve-point-five minutes and seventy-three thousand deaths after the attack began, there were no orbital forts in Elysium’s skies.
“First phase successful, Commodore,” Commander Rendlemann announced. Howell nodded. Gravitic detectors, unlike other sensors, were FTL, and his flagship’s gravitics had tracked their Trojan Horse and the fires of its SLAMs. It was an eerie sensation to see the undamaged fortresses on the light-speed displays and know they and all their people had ceased to exist.
He shook off a chili and gave Alexsov a tight smile. The chief of staff had argued against trying to sneak in more than one ship, insisting Poltava could do the job alone and that trying to use more would risk losing the priceless element of surprise.
“Two small vessels leaving orbit, sir,” Rendlemann said suddenly.
“Right on schedule,” Alexsov murmured, and Howell nodded again, watching through his synth link as the two corvettes accelerated hopelessly towards their mammoth foe. No corvette had the strength to engage a battle-cruiser . . . but they were all Elysium had left.
The corvettes Hermes and Leander charged the rampaging battle-cruiser, sheltering behind their own Fasset drives as they closed. They were inside her, closer to the planet, but Ortiz spun Poltava to face them head-on. She decelerated towards them even as they rushed to meet her, and Hermes lunged aside, fighting to get outside the battle-cruiser and launch her SLAM drone before she was destroyed.
Ortiz let her go, concentrating on her sister. Close-range lasers and particle beams reduced the tiny warship to half-vaporized wreckage, but the range was too short for effective point defense, and both of Leander’s overcharged energy torpedoes erupted against Poltava’s screen. Concussion jarred her to the keel, and Ortiz winced as damage
reports flickered through his headset. His exec was on it, initiating damage control procedures, but half Poltava’s forward energy mounts had been wiped away, along with over thirty of her crew. Her injuries were far from critical—certainly not enough to slow her as she went after the sole survivor—but they hurt all the more after what he’d done to the forts, and they were enough to make him cautious.
The last corvette’s skipper watched the battle-cruiser overhaul him while his brain sought frantically for some way to stop her. Not for a way to survive, for there was none, but for a way to protect Elysium from her.
She was coming up fast from directly astern, her drive aimed straight at him to interdict his fire. She was grav-riding on him, drawing further acceleration from the attraction of his own drive mass even as hers acted as a brake upon his ship. She had more than enough acceleration to overtake him without that, but her captain was playing a cautious end game, using his interposed drive to protect his ship until he chose to turn and engage. Perhaps overly cautious. Hermes’ weapons couldn’t hurt his ship much, and there were times caution became more foolhardy than recklessness—
“Sir!” His white-faced plotting officer’s voice was tight, over-controlled as he fought his own fear, but not so tight as to hide its disbelief! “Data base knows that ship!”
“What?” The captain twisted around in his command chair.
“Yes, sir. That’s HMS Poltava, Skipper!”
The captain swallowed a disbelieving curse. It couldn’t be true! It had to be some kind of ECM—there was no way a Fleet battle-cruiser could be doing this to her own people! But—
“Prep and update the drone!” he snapped.
“Prepped!” his com officer acknowledged. Then, “Update locked!”
“Launch!”
The captain turned back to his own display, teeth locked in a death’s-head grin. There was no way his ship could survive, but he’d gotten the message out. HQ would know everything he knew, for the enemy could never intercept his drone and its sensor data.
The drone snaked away, racing directly ahead of the corvette, hidden by her own and Poltava’s drives until it was beyond effective energy weapon range. But Ortiz’s scan teams picked up its gravity signature as it began to climb across the ecliptic, and they were ready.
The battle-cruisers com officer transmitted a complicated code, and Herme’s skipper gaped in horror as his drone obeyed the command—the proper, authenticated Fleet override—and self-destructed.
He knew, then. Knew who his enemies were and whence they came . . . and how utterly he had been betrayed. Something snapped deep inside him, and he barked new helm orders as the battle-cruiser’s Fasset drive loomed up close astern. His drive’s side shields dropped, and his ship began to turn.
Hermes was in her enemy’s blind zone, riding the arc where the battle-cruiser’s own drive blocked her sensors. It was a matter of seconds before she spun to clear the drive mass and bring her weapons to bear, but seconds were all the corvette’s skipper needed. All in the universe he wanted, now.
Poltava began her swing, and not even her AI had time to realize Hermes had already swung and redlined her drive on an intercept course.
Commodore Howell swore vilely as both Fasset drives vanished, and the fact that he’d seen it coming only made it worse. That idiot! To blow it all after the bravura brilliance of his initial strike! A second-year middy knew better than to get that close to an enemy’s drive mass, for God’s sake, especially when the disparity in firepower meant that enemy was doomed anyway.
But there’d been nothing Howell could do. The rest of his squadron was still fifteen light-minutes from Elysium, far too distant for any com to reach Ortiz in time. And so he’d had to sit and watch helplessly as a quarter of his battle-cruiser strength vanished before his eyes.
He sucked in a deep breath and forced himself back under control. He couldn’t pour the milk back into the bottle, and he had other things to worry about—like what the planetary governor did with his emergency SLAM drone.
That drone was the only thing in this system which still threatened Howell’s ships. It couldn’t hurt them now, but it would tell Fleet far too much if it got out with a record of Poltava’s emission signature. If Ortiz hadn’t gotten his stupid ass killed, the threat would be minimal; even if the governor realized how the corvette’s drone had been killed and locked out the self-destruct command, Poltava’s weapons would have been more than capable of killing it as it broke atmosphere. His own ships couldn’t. Just catching it with a com beam before it wormholed would be hard enough from this distance.
“Think they got a clean reading on us?” he asked Alexsov hopefully, but the chief of staffs shrug was discouraging.
“The forts certainly did. If they kept groundside advised, and we have to assume they did, the planet knows we’re Fleet units. More to the point, Control says their port has enough sensor capability to’ve gotten a good read on Poltava—certainly enough for Fleet’s data base to fingerprint her.”
“Shit.” Howell tugged unhappily at an earlobe. This was what he’d most feared about the entire Elysium operation. The actual attack hadn’t worried him, given their inside information, but if the identity of his ships got out, their true objective would be lost. He and his people would become in truth what everyone now assumed they were: plain and simple pirates.
“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve argued against two ships,” Alexsov said sourly.
“Don’t blame yourself. Ortiz blew it, and you were right. Control’s cover story only allowed for one ‘legitimate’ ship. We couldn’t know he’d—“
The commodore broke off with a curse. His light-speed sensors hadn’t been able to see the SLAM drone rise from the planet on counter-grav, but the blue spark of its lighting Fasset drive was glaringly obvious.
“Send the code,” he rasped, and the ops officer nodded.
“Sending now,” Commander Rendlemann replied, and Howell sat back in his command chair to wait. His light-speed destruct command would require thirty-one minutes to overtake the drone; by the time he knew whether or not it had succeeded, his ships would be within assault range of the planet.
Chapter Ten
Sirens continued to wail as the raiders decelerated towards Elysium. There had been no communication from the “Fleet” ships, and that, in light of what had just occurred, was more than sufficient proof of their purpose.
The governor sat in his communications center and watched his staff coordinate Elysium’s mobilization. His militia were marshaling with gratifying speed, but he’d created them purely as a morale-booster to prove he was Doing Something; he’d never anticipated they might actually be called upon, and the rest of his careful plans were a shambles. The evacuation centers were already madhouses, and the background crackle of reports from their managers grew more frantic with every second.
A dedicated screen lit, and Major von Hamel, Elysium’s senior Marine, looked out of it and saluted. His eyes were level despite the strain in them, and he already wore his combat armor.
“Governor. My people are heading for their initial positions. We should be at full readiness well before the bandits launch their shuttles.”
“Good.” The governor tried to put some enthusiasm into his voice, but he knew as well as von Hamel just how little chance the Marines had.
“Militia Colonel Ivanov tells me his people are running a bit behind schedule, but I anticipate they’ll be ready by the time anyone hits their local perimeters.” This time the governor simply nodded. Even von Hamel, who had supported the militia concept strongly from the beginning, had trouble sounding confident over that, and he leaned closer to his pickup.
“Sir, I’ve heard some strange reports on that battle-cruiser, and—“
“They’re true.” The governor cut him off grimly and von Hamel’s face went even tighter. “Orbit Command confirmed she was Fleet-built, and we caught a last-minute transmission from Hermes just before she rammed. They definitely identified h
er as HMS Poltava. According to the records, she went to the breakers twenty-two months ago; apparently the records are wrong.”
“Shit.” The governor, normally a stickler for decorum, didn’t even frown at von Hamel’s expletive. “That means these other bastards are probably real Fleet designs . . . with a real ground element.” The major was thinking aloud, his eyes darker than ever. “We can’t hold the capital against that kind of attack, and they’ve got the orbital firepower to take out any fixed position. I’m afraid Thermopylae’s our only option, sir.”
“Agreed. We’re trying to evacuate now, but we expected at least six hours of lead time. We’re not going to get many of them out.”
“I’ll buy you all the time I can, sir, but it won’t be much,” von Hamel warned, and the governor nodded his thanks.
“Understood, Major. God bless.”
“And you, sir. We’re both going to need it.”
Commodore Howell watched his plot, eyes glued to the fleeing SLAM drone, as his ships slid into assault orbit, their energy batteries busy systematically eliminating every orbital installation to eradicate any record of their identity. A backwash of assault shuttle readiness reports murmured in the back of his brain, relayed from Rendlemann’s cyber synth link, but Howell wasn’t concerned about this phase of the operation. He knew all about Elysium’s militia, and he and Alexsov had anticipated from the start that the defenders would be forced back on Thermopylae. It was the only one of their contingency plans that made any sense.
He caught a hand creeping towards his mouth and lowered it before he could nibble its fingernails. The drone was up to ninety percent of light-speed now; their signal had barely three minutes to catch it before it wormholed, and it was going to be close. Assuming, of course, that catching it did any good. If they’d been locked out. . . . God, he hated this kind of waiting! But he couldn’t cut it any shorter, and he turned resolutely to the holo image of the planet in an effort to think of something—anything—else.
