“I’ve often wondered why I never really warmed to brainships, Minerva,” said Cully, He was smiling, but it wasn’t the sort of smile meant to take the sting from words. “Now I think I know. You’re all schoolteachers at heart. Yes, I’m satisfied. But not very. It sounds far too pat for my liking. What about flexible response?”
Minerva might have been waiting for the question; certainly she gave no indication of concern at Cully’s attitude. Rather the reverse. “I have a further advantage: despite the number of bandits in orbit, this place has nothing like the defensive intersystem of Bull’s-Eye: No drones, no seeker remotes, and above all no orbital platforms. Just ships. Ships whose crews have been recently defeated and forced to flee, whose crews are tired and demoralized—and since we’ve knocked out their principal repair facility, ships whose systems are probably starting to fail. We’ve taken enough Khalian vessels apart to know how they work: modular replacement of entire units. No source for those anymore, Colonel. Nowhere to set down—because I doubt those scrappy little fields we’re reading planetside are capable of handling warships.”
“They’re capable of rearming orbital-defense fighters,” said Cully. “Unlike you I’ve had the advantage of seeing what non-interdicted air support can do to a drop. Among the other reasons that I’m sure you’ve got tucked away in one chip or another, that’s why we’re here—to take them out.”
“I thought CASE WHITE was designated to that tasking.”
“As a follow-up. Cutting-edge operations, Minerva. During the landings, not before. If you lectured less and got back to checking the main briefing, you’d know more than you seem to now.”
Minerva was about to say something further, but then she faltered, a minute hesitation while she gave something her absolute attention. And when she spoke again her voice had become ice-cold and angry. “I know, Colonel. I know more than you think. I know, for instance, that there are no provisions for NBC countermeasures on that planet. None at all.”
”What . . . ?”
“Unlike brawns, I’m not limited to how many functions I can control simultaneously. I’ve been maintaining RM-14376’s onboard systems, I’ve been monitoring the Weasels, I’ve been having this pleasant little chat with you—and I’ve been running surveillance cameras over Khalia for one full orbit. Colonel, the place is primitive. Look for yourself. Both of you.”
The camera images had been computer-enhanced somewhere along their route from lens to screen, and they were running by at two or three times normal speed. Minerva bled in spectrographic, thermographic, doppler-shift, and simple IR readouts as and when she felt them necessary. None of the enhanced scans had much to show: they were designed for the detection of advanced-technology power sources, and except for the spacefields and a few hot-spots that looked like reactors tacked as afterthoughts onto medieval castles, they detected nothing.
“Only the indigenous population that Fleet Strategic Planning is so certain will resist us tooth and nail,” observed Minerva venomously. “Well, they’re right enough there because the ‘indigenous population’ has very little else!”
Roj had seldom heard Minerva so angry. He knew she had a stack of years’ service seniority on him, and the accumulated calm acceptance that went with it. Except for now. The mission had been dirty enough when they “volunteered” for it, even when smoothed over by tactical and strategic necessity and the awareness that they were going to save millions of lives on both sides by forcing this war to a conclusion. But to learn that it meant genocide—accidentally through a lack of information, or deliberately through disinformation and a process of thought that Roj was grateful he didn’t share—put a new complexion on the matter.
“How much did you know about this, Colonel Cully?’” he said, wanting the man in the other chair to admit everything so that he could have a reason to cross the bridge and smash him to the floor. Roj wanted to smash everyone connected with FIREFROST, but Cully would do for starters.
Except that when the colonel got to his feet, he said the one thing that Roj didn’t want to hear. “I knew as much as you,” said Cully. There was no swearing on his honor as a colonel of Marines, no great demonstration of outrage; just a quiet loathing in his voice that if it was faked, gave him more right to be on the stage than on a brainship’s bridge in hostile space.
Roj stood for several moments with the blood burning in his face, opening and closing his fists, feeling foolish, and stupid, and used. “So what do we do?” he said at last, and was surprised when the words came out without a tremor.
Cully looked at the screens and the readouts. Khalia was less than half of one AU away. “We’ve come this far . . . “ he said carefully, but seemed unwilling to complete the thought. Roj watched him, and needed no special skill to read the colonel’s face. In six days from now the men and women of the Marine Reaction Force would be in their drop positions, waiting to go, wondering as he had wondered in the past whether all the advance planning had worked or whether it was going to be only the suppression dusters on the belly of the lander that would buy them enough time to hit cover. Now he was in the position of the advance planners—and hating it. Whether they had known the truth about Khalia was immaterial. FIREFROST would work. Once the MARVs had gone in on an unprotected target-and there were thirty maneuverable re-entry vehicles to each drone—the GK-2 that they contained would blanket the planet and leave it incapable of offering resistance.
Incapable, too, of supporting any life-form higher than a vegetable. Even they, with no insects left to pollinate them, would eventually die and leave Khalia scoured clean, ready for evolution to try again from the oceans where it had all begun before. Or for the first entrepreneur with a starship and a flair for eugenics.
As a solution, it was . . . final.
And what would the Marines and the Fleet think of them after the first euphoria of victory had died away? Would they remember the lives that had been saved—or the lives that had been stolen? The end that justified the means was part of a well-turned phrase, but it failed to explain how those who employed the means slept at night, or looked other people in the face, or even met their own eyes in a mirror. Of course, they would only have been doing their duty by obeying the orders of their superior officers. But that excuse had beep discredited since Nathan Hale, and by circumstances far too similar to these.
“The drones can be reprogrammed.” Minerva’s voice cut into the silence of their thoughts, offering neither an excuse nor a reason but a way out. Both men turned to stare straight at the main receptor lens that was as close as anyone could come to looking a brainship in the eye. Cully’s face was closed, guarded, neutral; the expression of someone already too familiar with easy ways out that become harder than the original problem.
Roj . . . didn’t hide anything. Relief at even the possibility of an escape from the dilemma was already lightening the somber set of his features, and before much more time had passed he would have begun to smile—had he not remembered that more than Minerva was present, and regained some sort of control over his own muscles.
“Explain.” Cully, of course, possessed of a caution that came close to the pessimistic, the colonel wasn’t about to let any of his carefully husbanded emotions slip away without good reason.
“Breakaway takes place as normal,” said Minerva. Roj might have been hearing things born of the way he felt himself, but she sounded both excited and unconscionably pleased with herself. “After all, the charges have been placed so that they’ll simulate the destruction of a battle-damaged wreck by atmospheric friction and gravitational forces. Except that instead of the drones MIRVing at once, they move out under cover of the debris and take up pre-selected positions in geosynch orbit over Khalia. And there they stay, with the Khalian High Command, or Planetary Council, or whatever the Weasel big bosses are called, advised of what’s overhead and given the chance for”—she made a noise that corresponded to the clearing of a thr
oat she didn’t have—“an honorable cessation of hostilities.”
“You’re forgetting one thing.” Colonel Cully’s voice was as bleak as his face. “After the length of time and the number of deaths that this war has used up, what makes you think a cessation of hostilities is all that people want? Not the Marine units I’ve served with. Or the ones who’ve been watching the Omni broadcasts all these years. Try ‘unconditional surrender’ in your equation, then see if the Khalia will still agree to it. I suspect they’ll die first.” Then Cully grinned, a brief, taut skinning of lips back over teeth like a death’s-head. “Of course, with seven hundred twenty canisters of binary GK-2 hanging over their heads, we can accommodate them in that choice too.”
* * *
The discussion had been interrupted by an occasional audible warning from Minerva’s ECM suite as it responded to wideband sweeps from Khalian tracking arid surveillance systems. There had been nothing from target-illumination or fire-control sensors, because the Weasels had more to watch for in their own local space than the drifting wreckage of last month’s battles. It was no matter now whether those battles had been won or lost, they were in the past and the future was a more immediate concern.
Until the moment when all the threat-receptors went off at once.
As the bridge lights snapped to combat-crimson and all the weapon-preheat systems kicked in of their own accord, the discussion that tried to balance the morally reprehensible against the tactically sound went out of an equally metaphorical window in the same instant, because as their IDs came up on Minerva’s main screen, the sources of the new signals were all-too familiar.
There were four incoming vessels, warships all: two Delta-K corvettes and a pair of Forger-B frigates, heading in at max from out-of-system territory with their targeting sensors red-lined . . . and Minerva had long ceased to believe in coincidences.
Those four ships were the same perimeter patrol they had encountered before, returning from their sweep and finding the same chunk of combat debris they had encountered in deep space—except they were now heading for what looked suspiciously like a parking orbit over Khalia.
The Fleet and the Alliance had said many things about their Khalian opponents over the years, but “stupid” was not a word from which even the most ardent propagandist got much mileage. Even a child—or a cub—with the proper instruments could tell that the trajectory of this particular battle casualty was off its predicted track by a factor of several hundred million kilometers. The presence and consequent gravity well of a gas giant among the outer planets of the Khalian system would have served to slingshot any dead ship on that particular approach vector back out toward the void. Unless, of course, it was equipped with maneuvering thrusters and was still alive enough to use them—something which the Weasels were looking at right now . . .
“We’re in trouble.” Minerva said it in an abstracted sort of way, because most of her systems were either programming the FlREFROST drones or powering up her own defense nets, and no matter what she had boasted, it left very little over for more than the most basic voder simulation.
Cully took just one look at the screen and his brows drew together in a frown. “Explain,” he said.
When the colonel was tense, thought Roj, he was a man of few words and none of them particularly imaginative. Since Minerva was busy, her brawn took it upon himself to do what was necessary for their passenger’s—information, probably; peace of mind was somehow inappropriate right now. His fingers flickered across a standard keyboard with all the frantic speed of someone on deadline—and dead was the important element there, all right—and constructed a rough computer model of what was going on.
It wasn’t just for Cully’s benefit; most of what Roj sent glowing across the screen went straight into the manual override chips on the fire-controls, because even in a brainship, now and again situations arose where the brawn had to earn his or her rations in the most basic way.
Gun-laying near enough by hand was one such way, and while the Fleet Officer’s Academy had courses on it, they couldn’t simulate the real thing—when the recycled air was thick with the reek of recycled smoke and the gravity grids were throwing ten-G fluctuations and when the supposed targets were glittering sequins flung all over the sky instead of a rock-steady glow on a repeater screen . . .
“They,” he said, indicating the four Weasel ships, “don’t like finding us here. So they’re going to blast us as they probably think they should have done last time. Minerva’s rigging the drones for breakaway to orbit, and I—I’m gonna try to nail them before they nail us. OK, Colonel? Clear enough?”
“Not by half,” snapped Cully. He dropped back into his acceleration chair and pulled its eight-point harness into place, secured the quick-release boxes, then gestured at the firing-grips still sunk into their recesses on either side of the targeting screen in front of him. “Time you two learned that I know more about what they pay me for than you’ve been giving me credit for. Fire this sucker up!”
“Colonel, you’re here as an observer . . .”
“Captain, you don’t know why I’m here, and right now you’re way wide of the mark. I’m giving you a direct inter-service order, mister. Hit it!”
“All yours, Colonel.” Roj tabbed two controls and the gunnery control yoke popped out and down to ready position. He watched Cully grab it like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver, and guessed it was his inactivity aboard a ship at General Quarters that had been fretting the Marine. It was one thing to be aboard a troopship, all strapped in and waiting to be delivered like a lethal parcel, and quite another to be capable of doing something without being given the chance.
“Attention, attention,” said Minerva in what Roj always thought of as her Red Alert voice, “mark your targets, hold your fire. Be advised that all weapons systems will remain on semi-active tracking only, until successful drone breakaway to assigned orbit has been confirmed. Mark your targets, hold your fire. Countdown of ten begins—now. Nine. Eight. Seven . . .”
In the few seconds that remained, Roj ran an analysis of the other Weasel ships, the ones in orbit around the home world. None of them had moved; they were still holding position and formation, unaware that anything was amiss. Either Minerva had taken the risk of activating a coincident-band com jammer to interrupt incoming signals without being too obvious about it—or the captains of the four approaching ships had scented a possible chance for glory and were keeping quiet so that they could have it all for themselves. Heading unawares into the free-fire zone of a class-class brainship, they would certainly have something all to themselves. Torps yes, plasma cannons yes, but glory . . . ? None at all.
“. . . Two. One. Zero. Burn!”
A rumbling vibration passed through Minerva’s hull structure as explosive bolts severed all her connections to the wrecked troop-carrier. While the charges gave a small initial backward shove, it was her own attitude-control jets that pushed the brainship clear. The FIREFROST drones followed like pilot fish in the wake of a shark, and even as the last of them slipped from the launch cradle deep within the carrier’s hull, strategically located demolition charges were beginning to blow the derelict to pieces. Minerva and all twenty-four drones soon gave the appearance of just so many more pieces of the wreckage that tumbled away in an expanding cloud of debris.
“Countdown commencing to final detonation.” Minerva kicked in the reaction thrusters again, another brief burn to move them farther and faster away from the disintegrating hulk. “What about the Weasels?”
“Reducing speed, some intership communication, but no general transmissions yet.”
“They’re confused,” said Cully. “Their target started to break up before they fired a shot. But they’re not so confused that they won’t make sure of us this time. Look at the status displays . . .” He gestured to one particular data schematic beside the image of each enemy ship; all their combat sensor
systems were fully powered and all their weapons charged. “So who takes the first strike? Us—or them?”
“What status on the drones, Minerva?” asked Roj softly, not shifting his gaze from the screen in case that might somehow prompt the Weasels into doing something dangerous.
“Guidance data is fully patched in. Go for orbital insertion?”
“Can you do it without attracting notice?”
“Once the main charges blow.”
“Can we afford to wait that long?”
“We can’t afford not to.” There was no perspiration on Colonel Cully’s brow this time, not when he controlled such firepower as he now had under his thumbs. “We wait,” he said. “Too soon, they’ll pick up anomalous motion from the drones and splash ’em. That would make this whole mission a waste of time. Besides”—he shifted the control yoke and tracked electronic crosshairs across each Khalian ship in turn—“they’re right where we want them.”
Less than a kilometer away, the troopship convulsed as its last few scuttle charges all blew simultaneously and tore its hull apart. Filaments of PDM explosive had already dismembered the old ship as neatly as a surgeon’s scalpel and with such precision that when the main blast came, Minerva’s tracking telemetry already knew to within a couple of meters where each of the main fragments would go. As they went, spinning erratically toward Khalia and the atmosphere that would burn most of them up, each piece of hull, each chunk of engine, had a drone to keep it company on the last long fall—at least until the drone shifted into parking orbit and left its shelter to burn up alone.
The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies Page 20
