The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan

by Jack Campbell

  Task Force Dancer. So named because it had hastily escorted back toward their home space ships carrying representatives of the alien species that humans had nicknamed Dancers. “What would the Dancers think of all of this?”

  “They said they’d be back soon,” Desjani said. “How much do you think the Dancers knew about the dark ships, and how did they discover things we didn’t know?”

  “I think the Dancers may have pulled a few strings,” Geary said. “I’d like to know why, but I can’t shake my belief that ugly as they are to our eyes, the Dancers are allies to humanity.”

  “I hope you’re right. The living stars know that humanity already has enough enemies, most of them homegrown.”

  —

  GEARY kept hoping his display would show new information, but Mortar and Serpentine stayed near the hypernet gate. He could easily put himself in the place of the crews of those two ships, imagine them watching the odd movements of Geary’s ships and listening to whatever fragmentary and contradictory messages had reached them. They had brought their shields to maximum strength, had their weapons powered up, and were doubtless scanning space, watching for any threat, unaware that the software in their own communications, sensor, and weapons systems had been secretly directed in hidden subprograms to hide or delete anything related to the dark ships. But even if they had seen the oncoming dark ships, Geary did not know if the two warships of the Alliance would have fled. As he had learned after being awakened, in a century of war with the Syndicate Worlds the Alliance fleet had forgotten how to win but had become uncompromising in its willingness to die trying. The two destroyers did not maneuver in the last minutes before the dark ships reached firing range, and they did not fire as the dark ships closed on them.

  The dark ships tore past Mortar and Serpentine, hurling out a barrage of fire at the Alliance destroyers. To the destroyers, the attacks would have seemed to have come out of nowhere, not that they had any time to be shocked by that. Shields collapsed under hammerblows of hell-lance particle beams, after which the weak armor of the destroyers offered little obstacle to the enemy fire. Mortar exploded, vanishing into a ball of dust as her power core overloaded. Serpentine shattered, breaking into several pieces that spun away helplessly, a pitiful few escape pods breaking free from the wreckage to seek safety for the small number of surviving crew.

  It had happened nearly three hours ago, only now the light revealing the deaths of the two destroyers reaching Dauntless. Few humans could watch such images and not feel as if they were seeing something as it happened.

  “At least everyone will have to believe us now,” Desjani said, her voice low and furious. “Everyone saw that.”

  “I wish we hadn’t lost two ships providing that evidence,” Geary said, feeling the same emotions. “Look. We guessed right.”

  “You guessed right,” she corrected him.

  The dark ships had suddenly changed their vectors, whipping through turns that, while immense by the standards of distances on a planet, were comparatively tight when measured in terms of spacecraft traveling at twenty percent of the speed of light, or about sixty thousand kilometers a second. Without human crews, the dark ships could manage more intense maneuvers than Geary’s ships, but even the dark ships were limited by the amount of stress their hulls could endure.

  “Enemy formation is steadying out on a vector toward Ambaru Station,” Lieutenant Castries announced. “Estimated time to intercept of Ambaru’s orbit is twenty hours, ten minutes. Maneuvering system recommends we adjust our vector to bring about an earliest-possible intercept with the dark ships in twenty-one hours, six minutes.”

  “Do it,” Geary said. His display showed the dark ships diving toward the star, and toward the thin screen of warships that was slowly assembling in their path. Behind that screen of battleships, light cruisers, and destroyers, sixteen additional heavy cruisers were converging into two box formations on orbits that would bring them close to the path of the oncoming dark ships.

  “If I were in command of the dark ships,” Geary commented, “I’d see all of this, realize that my plan had been compromised, and come up with another plan.”

  “Never turn aside,” Desjani said. “That’s another Black Jack quote. Did you ever actually say that?”

  “No. Why the hell would I have said something that stupid?”

  “Well, Black Jack supposedly did,” she reminded him. “Your battles show you maneuvering, but also staying focused on hitting the enemy. It will be interesting to see how the artificial intelligence guiding the dark ships interprets that.”

  “Interesting?” he asked.

  Her answer was cut short by an incoming message.

  “What kind of supernova did you set off?” Admiral Timbale’s image asked. “I’ve read the material you sent aboard Hammer, but when I tried to copy it to my own comm system it kept disappearing. So I downloaded that software patch you sent and ordered my systems people to run it. Before it could complete installing, I got calls from security people I didn’t even know were on Ambaru Station who informed me I was in possession of illegal software and was in violation of Alliance rules and regulations that I also didn’t know existed.”

  Timbale had a stubborn look in his eyes and a firm set to his mouth as he spoke. “You say there’s an active threat in this star system, and based on the vid you provided of what happened at Indras and Atalia, it’s an extremely dangerous threat. I’ve sent orders to the destroyers on guard at the hypernet gate to reposition, but—” He paused as if having trouble speaking. “But those orders may not arrive in time based on what information you’ve given me. If the worst happens, it will be the direct result of whatever and whoever messed up our comms and other systems. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the enemy inside, and I never cared much for it. But here we are, deliberately blinded as we deal with a threat to life and property.”

  He took a deep breath. “I am insisting on confirmation of the authority of those security personnel even though everything they have checks out. I’ve told them I won’t follow any instructions from them unless and until higher authority directs me to comply. And I have informed them that if anything happens to any ship in this star system, I will be sending military police to arrest them on charges of conspiracy and sabotage. Timbale, out.”

  A momentary silence after the Admiral’s image vanished was broken by Desjani’s comment. “Somebody pushed him too far.”

  “I noticed,” Geary said, thinking of how Timbale would react when the light from the destruction of Mortar and Serpentine reached him.

  “Could this push the Alliance too far as well?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  She nodded, then stretched with slightly exaggerated motions. “It will be fifteen hours before the dark ships reach weapons range of the first screen. I’m going to get some rest while I can,” she added pointedly.

  Geary sighed, rubbing his eyes. “You’re right. I will, too. I need to be at the top of my game when we encounter those dark ships again.”

  “They’re on a clean track inbound,” she pointed out, gesturing toward the curving trajectory of the dark ships. “Unless they alter vectors, the next thing they encounter will be our defensive screen.”

  “A defensive screen that I’ll start converging on their tracks when they’re a lot closer.” Any move he made now would be too easily countered by the dark ships.

  He had always hated this part of space combat, just like every other fleet sailor. The enemy was in sight for days, with attack runs sometimes lasting for several hours or more before contact occurred. Human instincts formed on the surface of a single planet could never be comfortable with the idea that an enemy you could see charging you was not an immediate threat. It would never feel right to set up your own attack run, then go to the mess decks to eat before catching several hours of sleep, knowing the enemy would not be in range
until long after that. Half the trick of handling space combat was learning how to deal with the many ways in which humans had trouble handling space.

  This time was particularly bad because physics made it unlikely that he could intercept the dark ships until just slightly too late. He could accelerate his ships to cover the distance faster, but then would have to decelerate them to ensure he could actually hit the dark ships when he caught them. The time saved just wasn’t enough, the distances just too large. But he would have to watch, hour by hour, as his ships could not quite get where they needed to be in time.

  We’ll never really be at home in space, Geary thought as he lay down on the bunk in his stateroom, gazing up at the slight imperfections in the overhead that had grown comfortingly familiar in the months since he had been awakened from survival sleep to discover that a century had passed in what for him was the blink of an eye. He had spent a career in the Alliance fleet at peace, only to reawaken to a fleet and an Alliance staggering from a century of war. Since then, he had fought battle after battle, some against alien species unknown to humanity a short time before, but it seemed like most of his battles had been against his fellow humans. Not always combat, but battles over who was in charge and what to do and whom to trust and what to believe.

  But now the fight was against something that didn’t care about any of that. Artificial intelligences who just did what their programming told them to do even if that programming was compromised or glitched or riddled with bugs.

  No, that wasn’t right. The fight wasn’t just against the AIs running the dark ships. It was against the people who were more willing to trust artificial-intelligence routines than they were their fellow humans, who thought the right solutions could only be found through keeping secrets and making decisions that no one else was told about. The Alliance could survive the dark ships. But the Alliance could not survive if people stopped believing in the ideas that made the Alliance what it was.

  He had beaten the dark ships once. Could he also beat the mind-sets of the people who had ordered those ships built?

  —

  “THEY’RE still coming in on a direct trajectory,” Desjani told him as Geary took his seat again on the bridge of Dauntless. “Very Black Jack in their tactics.”

  “Should I be flattered?” He studied the flat curve of the projected track for the dark ships, running through the center of his loose defensive screen and on toward an intercept with Ambaru. With the dark ships diving in toward the star that Ambaru Station orbited at a distance of about eight light-minutes, Geary’s battle cruisers coming in on an intercept from the side had managed to close the distance a great deal. Relative to Geary, the dark ship formation was to port and slightly behind, almost exactly thirty light-minutes distant. The defensive screen ahead of them was formed into a flattened oval facing the dark ships and orbiting to maintain a steady position relative to them. That screen was only twenty-two light-minutes away. If none of the ships changed their trajectories, the dark ships would go through the screen at nearly right angles, while Geary’s battle cruisers would meet the screen at an angle as they continued to close the distance on the dark ships. Five light-minutes closer to the star and Ambaru Station than the defensive screen was the secondary blocking force, sixteen of Geary’s heavy cruisers formed into two blocks of eight each. “I’ve punched through enemy formations before, so that’s consistent if they’re programmed to follow my examples.”

  “You can’t tighten the screen down much,” Desjani commented. “The dark ships are so much more maneuverable that they could just swing around an edge if you do.” She gestured at her display. “They’re going to try for Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution.”

  “You think they’re just going to target three of the battleships?” Geary asked. “Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution are closest to the center of the defensive screen, where the dark ships are aiming for. But the dark ships have enough maneuverability to aim for other battleships as well.”

  “They do,” she agreed. “Now, think like a computer. Calculate probabilities. The dark ships could have run a hundred thousand simulations of their upcoming encounter with that screen by now without overheating a single circuit. The dark destroyers have to be low on fuel. The heavy cruiser will be better off, so they’ll save it for their encounter with our heavy cruisers. But they’ll burn off all five of their destroyers. A single destroyer targeting a single battleship will have a certain chance of getting through to its objective, especially if it accelerates to a velocity fast enough to produce a serious problem for our fire control. But it won’t be a hundred percent chance of a kill. Even if all of our shots miss, if the destroyers are going fast enough to mess up our fire control, they’ll also be going fast enough to complicate attempts to ram. Even a battleship is pretty tiny compared to the space around it.”

  He nodded, understanding where she was going with this. “If I had to make a wild guess based on my experience, I’d say maybe a fifty percent chance of a big enough piece of the destroyer getting through the defensive fire and striking the battleship.”

  “And if it’s two destroyers targeting each battleship?”

  “Pretty near certain, I’d guess.” He hunched forward, studying the situation again. “We need to start hitting them as far from the battleships as possible, but the farther ahead of the battleships our destroyers are, the more likely that they’ll get chopped up by the dark battle cruisers.”

  “What would Admiral Geary do?” she asked.

  He moved one hand to trace the movements of ships. “Send out several formations of destroyers and light cruisers to hit the flanks of the dark ships as they approach the defensive screen. I’d try to take out as many of the dark destroyers as possible before they reached the screen, and maybe cripple or destroy the heavy cruiser. So the dark ships will expect me to do that.” An idea came to him, causing his lips to form a cold smile. “But if those dark destroyers are going to accelerate to hit our battleships . . .”

  Desjani smiled back. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s set this up, Captain.”

  There was an undeniable sense of satisfaction in using the computer systems aboard Dauntless to swiftly come up with plans that would hopefully trip up the plans developed by the computer systems on the dark ships. Looking over the plan carefully, Geary nodded. “Captain Desjani, I need to talk to the battleship captains in the screen as well as the commanders of the destroyer and light-cruiser divisions.”

  Desjani gestured to the comm watch-stander, who hastily put together the conference message. “Ready, Captain. Circuit three.”

  “Thank you,” Geary said, touching the necessary comm control. A real-time conference was out of the question with the ships separated by at least twenty light-minutes. Any message sent to them on wings of light would still take twenty minutes to get there, and the replies would require another twenty minutes to cross back. There were few things more annoying than a conversation in which at least forty minutes separated everything said and each reply.

  “All units in the screening task force,” he began, “this is Admiral Geary. Your status updates indicate all of you have installed the software patch on all of your systems. It is critical that you keep those patches intact because otherwise all of your combat systems, sensor systems, and comm systems will be blinded to the dark ships and open to false messages.

  “You will have all seen the reports from Atalia. These ships are not as maneuverable as those of the enigmas, but they are better than our ships. They are also individually much more heavily armed than our ships. Do not underestimate them.

  “Captain Armus,” he addressed the commanding officer of the battleship Colossus, “it is likely that the dark ships will attempt to employ their five destroyers in suicide attacks on our battleships.” Was suicide attack the right term when it was an artificial intelligence that would “die”? “If the dark ships hold their current trajectory, I e
xpect Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution to be targeted, with two destroyers each going after two of the battleships and the remaining destroyer going after the third. We will attempt to hit those destroyers before they reach your screen.

  “I am transmitting maneuvering orders to you now. The screen will contract toward the contact point with the dark ships, but not by much because of the ability of the dark ships to outmaneuver us. Captain Armus, if we succeed in taking out the destroyers prior to contact, do what you can to cripple or damage the dark battle cruisers and the last heavy cruiser remaining with them.”

  He paused, his thoughts somber, then spoke again. “Even though the AIs controlling the dark ships appear to have been programmed using my tactics, these opponents are otherwise more alien than anything else we have encountered. They will fight without mercy or reason. They must be destroyed before they can inflict on Alliance star systems the kind of damage they did at Atalia. To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”

  Desjani, her chin resting on one hand, glanced over at him. “I used to think that about the Syndics.”

  “What?”

  “That they fought without mercy or reason. But you’re right. Compared to the dark ships, the Syndics are models of compassion and rationality. Even Syndics were capable of questioning their orders.”

  He sighed and sat back, knowing that it would be three-quarters of an hour before he would see any reaction to his message. “Too many of them never did. The dark ships are still holding at point two light speed.”