by B. V. Larson
“Follow me.” They returned to the lift and rose toward the roof.
“Besides,” said Straker, “if I haven’t been lied to, in nine months or so I’ll be a father. I can’t leave my kid here to be raised and slaughtered like a farm animal.” He rubbed his jaw. “Carla’s gonna be royally pissed. You know women.”
“Not really.”
“What, you don’t like girls?”
“We agents have genetically reduced sex drive. We can perform if we must, but we feel no particular need to. I do, however, understand jealousy in the context of the biological imperative. Females in particular are driven to protect their own offspring and to regard those of others, especially of other females connected with their own mates, with hostility. If you have a child by another, Carla will always worry that your loyalties are divided—that you might favor another woman and those children.” The two men exited the lift and got into the aircar.
“I won’t. I don’t even like Roslyn, though I have to respect her. She tricked me, drugged me. But it’s gonna take a lot of explaining for Carla to understand.”
“You don’t have much confidence in Carla.” Don lifted off and sent the aircar streaking toward a ring tether.
“People are what they are. Carla was jealous and threatened by Tachina—but if I didn’t give in to pheromones on a sex-trained concubine, I obviously didn’t give in to a two-meter-tall scaly-skinned crested purple-and-yellow mammaloid like Roslyn.”
“Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?”
Straker sighed. “Both, I guess.”
The speeding aircar soon set down on a high-altitude transfer platform where a small railcar waited. Unlike the large trains that reached the end of the tether and curved smoothly down to stop horizontally at the ground stations, this one stood vertically, clinging to one of the many tracks on the hundred-meter-wide tether. When they stepped in and sat, gravplating adjusted smoothly and their seats rotated until they seemed to be once again on a horizontal train, with the planet of Terra Nova forming a wall behind and the ring rising ahead of them.
The car shot forward rapidly. As soon as it did, Don unbuckled and doffed his coat and hat, revealing a spacer’s coverall beneath. He placed the hat in an overhead compartment, and spread the coat on the deck. He then took a tool set from one cargo pocket and opened up a panel next to the controls.
“What’s up?” Straker asked.
“Tradecraft. Precautions. I talked my way out of the situation back there, but I’m sure the controllers are still watching us. My immunity extends only so far, and they might be giving me enough rope to hang myself. I don’t intend to be hanged.”
“Better hung for a sheep as a lamb?”
“Exactly.”
Straker grinned. “I’d rather be a ram than either.”
“I’d rather be a fox and slip away quietly, if I have to.” Don finished his work behind the panel and then, a knife and needle-nose pliers in hand, said, “Lift up your tunic. I need to take out your tracker.”
“Absolutely.” He lifted his tunic and arms.
Don picked up his coat from the deck and folded it into a pad that he placed beneath Straker’s ribs on his left side. “This is going to hurt.” He probed with his fingers for the right spot.
“I’m ready.”
“One, two, three.” Don cut deeply with the first movement. Despite the warning, Straker grunted in agony, but forced himself not to move. Don reached into the hole with his pliers and drew out a lozenge the size of his fingertip. “There. Clamp this under your arm.” He pressed the folded coat against the wound until Straker was holding it firmly in place.
Next, Don tapped on the control plate. The private railcar slowed suddenly and stopped with a jerk at a platform. He gathered his tools. “Out, quick.”
The two men exited into bitter cold and the railcar bolted upward. Straker felt woozy and realized they were at tremendous altitude. He looked out over the blue-green planet as if from a high tower, and the gusts tore at their clothes, freezing their skin. Don tossed the tracker over the side and the wind carried it down and away.
“Okay, now what?” Straker yelled.
Don wordlessly pushed Straker along the outside of the tether, around the circular platform until they reached another track. Another railcar, this one larger, battered and utilitarian, stood waiting. They entered and Don palmed the door shut, enveloping them in welcome warmth.
Straker sat, holding his wounded side while Don worked on the controls. Soon, they were traveling upward again, though this time without the benefit of gravplating. Instead, Straker felt as if he rode an elevator upward and at a slant.
The pull of gravity declined as the altitude converted momentum into centrifugal force. Eventually the two men found themselves weightless as they arrived at the ring, which was itself in permanent geostationary orbit around the equator.
They exited the car in a maintenance area, where gravity returned with the gravplating. Don drove an old, battered electric cart rapidly through dilapidated tunnels and up scarred ramps, obviously certain of their route and destination.
Straker gritted his teeth against the bumps and hard turns, holding the coat clamped against his wound. “Are those supposed to be flashing?” he asked, pointing at strobes and spinning lights that must be signaling something.
“This section is on alert, probably because of us. Good thing I took precautions.” Don jerked the cart to a halt at a nondescript airlock and palmed it open. “Welcome aboard,” he said.
Straker hustled through the airlock and into the ship beyond—a different vessel than they’d arrived on, a little larger, with two staterooms and four bunks. “Where’s your courier?”
Don threw himself into the pilot’s chair and powered up the ship. “It should be departing at high speed right now on autopilot, with the controllers in pursuit. It may or may not make it into sidespace before being shot out of the sky by a drone. If it’s destroyed, the salvage teams will find organic matter consistent with two human bodies. It will take them some time to run DNA analysis and determine the tissue isn’t ours. If on the other hand the ship manages to transit out, they’ll assume we’re gone for good.”
“Either way, we win.”
“We escape, yes. Winning depends on you, Derek.”
Don piloted the ship outward from Terra Nova at a moderate pace. Once they were in space without pursuit, Don applied anesthetics, disinfectants, injected antibiotics, and sealed Straker’s wound shut.
They ate reheated rations like a feast. “This thing have a shower?” Straker asked.
“Yes it does, though with that wound you shouldn’t use it for a few hours.”
“Fine. I’ll clean up when I wake up.” Straker stripped off his dirty, bloodied clothes and slept the sleep of the dead for eleven long hours. He didn’t even awake when they transited into sidespace.
Chapter 27
Sparta System, near Leonidas, moon of Sparta-3
As soon as Commodore Dexon’s underspace attacks began, filling the enemy fleet with a confusing mishmash of explosions, Admiral Engels said, “Fleetcom, pass to the local division: Phase Beta.”
As one, her sniping cruisers—minus several heavily damaged ships—withdrew around the curve of Leonidas, out of sight of the enemy. In a preplanned, well-coordinated action, they joined the thousands of missiles and small craft—and the two captured fleet carriers—waiting there. Engels had ordered every local offensive weapon assembled out of sight of the enemy.
The carriers were optimized for small craft command and control, poor cousins to Victory, but with the same function. Their many missile and drone controllers sent flights of attackers ahead of the cruisers, accelerating in a wave around the back of the moon. Just behind them, the cruisers blasted ahead at flank acceleration, gaining speed for their attack run against the enemy fleet.
At the same time, on the other side of the moon, Indomitable advanced ponderously, continuing to fire at maximum rate, alternat
ing blasts of railgun shot and cluster munitions with particle beams. As the range fell, shorter and shorter, her powerful weapons finally began to find targets that even AI processing and FTL speed couldn’t anticipate or dodge.
Indomitable blew five dreadnoughts out of the sky before Victory, under pressure from underspace, crafted improvised tactics to deal with her.
A core of heavy ships formed into a swirling cylinder and charged toward the battleship. The formation flexed and stretched to avoid Indomitable’s pointing nose, and her hit probability fell. She scored several glancing blows, but now she faced more than thirty capital ships—and she’d sent her supporting cruisers around the back of the moon. Her armored, reinforced prow blossomed with a hell of enemy fire.
Behind this heavy squadron, Engels noted over two hundred of Victory’s drones following. “Trinity, you see those drones?”
“I do, but I don’t understand their purpose. They won’t add much firepower to the thirty-one capital ships attacking us directly.”
“The Huns wouldn’t have sent them if they didn’t have some vital role. Can you analyze the drones? Is there anything different about them? Anything special?”
“I can’t divert processing power to that—not and run the weapons suite.” Indomitable shuddered with heavy strikes from the enemy. “It’s critical that I prioritize point defense, as shipkillers are the biggest threat to the hull. One or two contact fusion strikes might create a breach large enough for the enemy to exploit with direct fire.”
Engels bit her lip, thinking about those drones. “Helm, increase our spin by twenty percent.”
“That will degrade our targeting,” Trinity warned.
“Then delay, but be ready to do it,” Engels replied. “We’ll want to spin up shortly before any missiles or those drones reach us.”
“You know what the drones are?”
“I have an educated guess, yes.” The bridge lights flickered, and then dimmed to emergency levels. “If conventional drones can’t hurt us, and they certainly aren’t needed for anti-drone or antimissile duty, these drones must have some special attack. I’m thinking they’re suicide craft and will act like big, heavy, smart missiles with super-high-yield warheads.”
“That makes sense,” said Trinity. “But if you’re wrong, and I prioritize them instead of other threats…”
“Just do it. I feel it in my gut.”
“Let’s hope your gut is correct.”
The enemy task force attacking Indomitable suddenly vomited forth a salvo of missiles, which raced ahead. Behind them, the drones accelerated past the capital ships to follow.
“Admiral,” Trinity said, “We must expose our broadside. Please increase our spin now.”
“Helm, broadside and spin, now.”
Indomitable began turning to the side, slowly and clumsily, her spin itself causing a twisting precession that stressed her entire structure. Yet by doing so, now she flew slantwise through space, her cylindrical shape bringing hundreds of smaller beams and railgun turrets into her forward arc of fire. She couldn’t smash ships with these weapons, but under Trinity’s control she ripped thousands of oncoming missiles out of the ether with perfectly calculated ease. In the hologram, the flow of rockets seemed to reach a wall of fire they couldn’t penetrate, adding their explosive energy as the battleship’s beams converted their flammable fuels and oxidizers into plasma.
Engels hoped this came as a surprise and shock to the enemy, but it didn’t deter the attacking ships themselves. Now, direct fire weapons crashed into Indomitable’s flanks, onto her relatively thinner armor there. Nothing penetrated, but the attacks destroyed many secondary and tertiary weapons. Engels watched as Chief Quade’s boards lit up like multicolored holiday displays, with unnerving swaths of yellow and red appearing.
But whatever Indomitable’s fate, her real gambit took shape on the other side of the moon. The hologram showed the Republic missile strike rounding Leonidas and plowing into the enemy fleet. It quickly blew through the Huns’ own missile screen and continued toward their ships, as Engels had planned.
Despite the near-instant reactions that demonstrated Victory was still controlling the enemy’s point defense, Engels thought she’d surprised Niedern. The distraction of underspace attack had broken up his perfect formation, and his ships weren’t set to receive a massive missile strike—especially not one followed up by almost one hundred hard-charging cruisers unmasking at close range. A dozen enemy ship icons blinked red, out of the battle.
Yet she watched uneasily as Victory’s close-in drones turned as one to charge at the missile strike. They slipped among the Hun ships and through the explosions to unerringly target the oncoming weapons. The drones never seemed to miss, and each time one fired, it took out a missile.
Antimissile clusters burst in response, spreading flocks of tiny weapons just big enough to destroy another missile or a drone. ECM jammers and decoys transmitted confusing pulses, and laser warheads aimed blinding beams at the enemy.
More enemies died.
But not enough.
Bomb-pumped warheads began exploding a few seconds later, each converting a nuclear explosion into dozens of millisecond-long lensed pulses of gamma rays that attempted to spear any target nearby. Finally, a few shipkillers ran the gauntlet to burst near enemy vessels. Escort-class ships vanished in fusion blasts, while capital ships staggered.
Some ships won through unscathed. Some lost orientation and began to drift, darkened and crippled. But the enemy casualties were fewer than Engels hoped.
Immediately afterward, the Republic cruiser flotilla opened up at point-blank range, taking advantage of the maelstrom of fire created by the missile wave and the float mines. They had the advantage of knowing the zones where the Archers operated, and so could avoid them—another detail of Engels’ plan.
The cruisers made spectacular progress for a long moment, smashing everything in their way with coordinated fire—but that moment ended too soon. Victory again seemed to recover from surprise much too quickly, reorganizing and reorienting the Hun fleet to meet the threat.
Unfortunately, the converging, oncoming Republic flotilla was still at long range. It was gaining ground rapidly, but not fast enough. Everything Victory and the enemy fleet did, they did more quickly than Engels had thought possible, and so they minimized the impact of each of her gambits.
More importantly, they broke the synergy of her plan’s phases, each designed to capitalize on the previous one. Her fleet was doing serious damage to the Huns, but the Huns were in no danger of breaking—and her own fleet was getting savaged.
Examining the tactical hologram, Engels noticed something. “Trinity, our nose is aimed in the general direction of Victory. Can you target her?”
“Indomitable is using every available erg of power for defense and we’re still sustaining heavy damage.”
“Redline the generators and fill the capacitors. I need a shot, soon, while Victory’s fully occupied. It’s our best chance.”
“The generators are already at one-hundred eleven percent.”
“Go to one-fifteen. Engineering officer, shut down life support and all nonessentials. Pass the word to suit up.” Engels grabbed her helmet-ring from its holder on the side of the command chair and attached it to her duty coverall, creating an emergency suit. The thick ring would snap a clear flexible bubble around her head in the event of pressure loss, and provide air for long enough to reach the nearby lockers with the full-up survival suits.
Engels watched the capacitors charge, too slowly. Trinity was a wizard at point defense, and was also using the biggest of the secondaries as offensive weapons, spearing enemy capital ships at vulnerable spots, but even with Zaxby’s brainiac mind integrated, Trinity didn’t have a trained tactical sense. Every cell in Engels’ body screamed that attacking Victory was the right move. The enemy flagship was the key to the battle.
“Admiral,” Tixban said, “the enemy drones are approaching.”
&n
bsp; “I can see that.” So could Trinity, Engels figured, so there was no point in berating the tripart being.
In the hologram, the drones twisted and spun like maddened hornets. Point defense beams and sprays of railgun shot lashed out, destroying many of them, but Indomitable’s defensive fire was not nearly as thick as it once was. The loss of fully half her weaponry was taking its toll.
The primary capacitors filled just as the first drone landed on Indomitable’s hull. Yes, landed—Engels could see a close-in shot of the thing as it fired grapples and attached itself like a tick.
“Trinity, fire at Victory!”
“Firing.” The capacitors dumped their immense power through the particle beam projectors and the near-lightspeed ray lanced out—
—and struck Victory amidships.
The bridge crew whooped and cheered as pieces of the flagship’s engines spun away. Plasma flame gushed from an ugly wound in Victory’s side. Would it be enough?
Indomitable bucked beneath Engels feet and the hologram shattered. Lights flickered and power discharges started a fire at one station.
“Tixban! What happened?”
“The drone that landed on our hull used a fusion cutter to embed itself in our armor, then exploded with shipkiller force.”
Chief Quade turned to his admiral, his face grim-set. “That was a nuclear shaped charge, ma’am. There’s a hole in the hull two hundred meters wide and just as deep. We lost a lotta systems. If they hit us there again, they could gut us completely!”
“Helm, increase the spin!” Engels snapped. “Keep increasing it. I want us spinning so fast even an AI can’t target that breach!”
Trinity said, “That may solve one problem, but we have another, more conventional one. The direct fire is becoming so intense we’ve lost two-thirds of our weaponry and most of our sensors. I am having increasing difficulty targeting.”
The hologram reformed overhead, showing the two engagements—Indomitable versus more than twenty heavy enemy ships, and Victory and her fleet in a brutal melee with the Republic cruisers. Each flagship was sorely, but not mortally, wounded.
