by David Weber
Israel had never been intended to face such firepower single-handed, but her defenses had been redesigned and refined by Dahak and BuShips to incorporate features gleaned from the Achuultani and new ideas all their own. Her shields covered more hyper bands, her inner shield was far closer to her hull than the Fourth Empire’s technology had allowed, and she had an outer shield, which no earlier generation of Imperial ship had ever boasted.
It was as well she did.
Only a fraction of those missiles were on target, but Israel bucked like a mad thing, and Sean almost ripped the arms from his couch as warheads smashed at her and she heaved about him. Damn it! Damn it! He’d forgotten to activate his tractor net! The gravity wells of a dozen stars sought to splinter his ship’s insignificant mass, and shield generators screamed in her belly.
* * *
The familiar musical note of Fire Test rang in his ears, and Vroxhan stared up from his knees, eyes desperate, waiting for the demon lights to vanish, praying that they would. He didn’t know how long he would have to wait; he never did, even during Fire Test, for no one had ever taught him to read the range notations within the targeting circles.
Then, suddenly, all but one of the demon lights did vanish. A great sigh went up from the massed bishops, and Vroxhan joined it. The demons might have spawned, but God had smitten all but one of them! Yet that one remained, and that, too, had never happened during Fire Test.
His terrible fear ebbed just a bit, but only a bit, for yet again the Voice spoke words no high priest had ever heard.
“Decoys destroyed. Engagement proceeding.”
* * *
A ship of the Fourth Empire would have died. Five of those mighty missiles had popped the hyper bands covered by Israel’s outer shield, but they erupted outside her inner shield … and it held. Somehow, it held.
“Jesus!” Sean shook his head and activated his couch tractor net as soon as the universe stopped heaving. They couldn’t take many more like that!
“Shift to evasion pattern Alpha Mike. Launch fresh decoy salvo.”
This time there were no verbal acknowledgments, but they flowed back to him through his feed. He felt his friends’ fear, but they were doing their jobs. And they were still alive. He didn’t understand that. With this much fire coming at them, they should be dead. But there wasn’t time to wonder why they weren’t—and no longer any reason not to fight back.
“Engage the enemy!” he snapped.
The first salvo spat from Israel’s launchers, and it was odd, but his own fear had disappeared.
* * *
“Incoming fire,” the Voice said. “Request defense mode.”
Vroxhan covered his face, trying to understand while faith, terror, and confusion warred within him. He knew what “request” meant, but he had no idea what a “defense mode” was.
“Urgent,” the Voice said. “Defense mode input required.”
* * *
Israel twisted in agony as the second salvo erupted into normal space about her, and a damage warning snarled. One of those missiles had gotten too close, and armor that would have sneered at a nuclear warhead tore like tissue under the fraction of power that leaked through the inner shield.
But Sean had more time to watch this attack’s pattern, and it told him something. Whatever was on the other end of those missiles was fighting dumb, spreading its fire evenly between Israel and her decoys, and that was crazy. Any defensive system ought to be able to refine its data enough to eliminate at least a few false images.
He felt Tamman activate his damage control systems, yet a quick check told him nothing vital had gone, and he looked back at the display just as Sandy’s first salvo went home.
* * *
Sweat stung Vroxhan’s eyes as a dozen of God’s emerald Shields vanished from the stars. The demons! The demons had done that!
“Urgent,” the Voice repeated. “Defense mode input required.”
The high priest racked his brain. Thought had never been required during any of the high ceremonies, only the liturgy. His mind ran desperately over every ritual, seeking the words “defense mode,” but he couldn’t think of any canticle that used them. Wait! He couldn’t think of any that used both words, but the Canticle of Maintenance Test used “mode”!
He trembled, wondering if he dared use another canticle’s words. What if they were the wrong words? What if they turned God’s wrath against him?
* * *
Sean bit down on a yell of triumph. The ground source might be hiding, but the weapon platforms were stark naked! Not even a shield!
“Hit them, Sandy!” he snapped, and Israel’s next salvo went out even as the third hostile salvo came in.
* * *
Vroxhan groaned as another dozen emeralds vanished. That was almost a tenth of them all, and the Demons still lived! If they destroyed all of God’s Shields, nothing would stand between them and the world’s death!
“Warning.” The Voice was as beautiful as ever, yet it seemed to shriek in his brain. “Offensive capability reduced nine-point-six percent. Defense mode input required.”
Blood ran into Vroxhan’s beard as his teeth broke his lip, but even as he watched the demons were spawning yet again. He had no choice, and he spoke the words from the Canticle of Maintenance Test.
“Cycle autonomous mode selection!” he cried.
He felt the others stare at him in horror, but he made himself stand upright, awaiting the stroke of God’s wrath. Silence stretched to the breaking point, and then—
“Autonomous defense mode selection engaged,” the Voice said.
* * *
“Shit!”
Sean smashed a clenched fist against the arm of his couch. They’d gotten in a third salvo, but the quarantine system had finally noticed they were killing its weapons. Shields popped into existence around the scores of surviving orbital bases, and decoys of their own blinked into life. They were only Fourth Empire technology, nowhere near as good as the improved systems Dahak and BuShips had provided Israel, but they were good enough. It would take every missile they could throw to take out even one of them now, yet they had no other target. They still hadn’t localized the ground base controlling them and the range was now too great to try.
He started to order Sandy to reprioritize her fire, massing it on single targets, but she was already doing it.
The battleship writhed again, yet the ferocity was less and he felt a surge of hope. Sandy had nailed almost forty bases; maybe she’d thinned them enough they could survive yet!
They’d been engaged for four minutes, and they’d started running a full minute before the enemy opened fire. The range was up to over thirty-one light-minutes, and that would help, too. If they got to at least thirty-five and managed to break lock, they might be able to go into stealth and—
Israel heaved yet again, and another damage signal snarled. Crap! That one had taken out two of Sandy’s launchers.
* * *
Vroxhan stared at the stars, and hope rose within him. Only one of the Shields had vanished that time. Perhaps none of them might have perished if he’d known what God and the Voice truly demanded, but at least he was still alive and the rate of destruction had slowed. Did that mean God smiled upon him after all? The Writ said man could but do his best—had God granted him the mercy of recognizing his best when he gave it?
* * *
Israel sped outward, bobbing and weaving as Sean, Brashan, and the maneuvering computers squirmed through every evasion they could produce, and Harriet abandoned Plotting and plugged into the damage control sub-net to help Tamman fight the battleship’s damage. Two more near-misses had savaged her, and her speed was down to .6 c from the loss of a drive node, but the incoming fire was less and less accurate. Sandy had picked off thirteen more launch stations, ripping huge holes in the original defensive net, but Sean could see the surviving weapon platforms redeploying, with more coming around from the far side of the planet. Still, Sandy’s fire might just hav
e whittled them down enough to make the difference in the face of Israel’s ECM.
Even as he thought that, he knew he didn’t really believe it.
He rechecked the range. Thirty-four light-minutes. Another seven minutes to the edge of the missile envelope at their reduced speed. Could they last that long?
Another salvo shook the ship. And another. Another. A fresh damage signal burned in his feed. They weren’t going to make it out of range before something got through, but they were coming up on thirty-five light-minutes, and each salvo was still spreading its fire to engage their decoys. They hadn’t managed to break lock, but if the bad guys’ targeting was so bad it couldn’t differentiate them from the decoys, they might be able to get into—
* * *
Vroxhan watched the demons spawn yet again. They must have an inexhaustible store of eggs, but God smote every one they hatched. A fresh cloud of crimson dots profaned the stars—and then they vanished.
They all vanished, and the ring of God’s wrath was empty. Empty!
Silence hovered about him and his pulse thundered as the assembled priests held their breath.
“Target destroyed,” the Voice said. “Engagement terminated. Repair and replacement procedures initiated. Combat systems standing down.”
* * *
“They’ve lost lock,” Sandy reported in a soft, shaky voice as Israel vanished into stealth mode, and Sean MacIntyre exhaled a huge breath.
He was soaked in sweat, but they were alive. They shouldn’t have been. No ship their size could survive that much firepower, however clumsily applied. Yet Israel had. Somehow.
His hands began to tremble. Their stealth mode ECM was better than anything the Fourth Empire had ever had, but to make it work they’d had to cut off all detectable emissions. Which meant Sandy had been forced to cut her own active sensors and shut down both her false-imaging ECM and the outer shield, for it extended well beyond the stealth field. He’d hoped synchronizing with the decoys’ destruction would convince the bad guys they’d gotten Israel, as well, but if their tracking systems hadn’t lost lock, they would have been a sitting duck. They wouldn’t even have been covered by decoys against the next salvo.
His hands’ shakiness spread up his arms as he truly realized what a terrible chance he’d just taken, and not with his own life alone. It had worked, but he hadn’t even thought about it. Not really. He’d reacted on gut instinct, and the others had obeyed him, trusting him to get it right.
He made himself breathe slowly and deeply, using his implants to dampen his runaway adrenaline levels, and thought about what he’d done. He made himself stand back and look at the logic of it, and now that he had time to think, maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea. It had worked, hadn’t it? But, Jesus, the risk he’d taken!
Maybe, he told himself silently, Aunt Adrienne’s homilies on overly audacious tactics contained a kernel of truth after all.
Chapter Sixteen
Stardrift glittered overhead, and a smaller, fiercer star crawled along the battle steel beneath his feet as the robotic welder lit a hellish balefire in Sean MacIntyre’s eyes while Israel drifted in sepulchral gloom almost a light-hour from the system primary.
His wounded ship lay hidden in an asteroid’s ink-black lee while he coaxed the welder through his neural feed. Other robotic henchmen had already cut away the jagged edges of the breach, rebuilt sheared frame members, and tacked down replacement plates of battle steel. Now the massive welding unit crept along, fusing the plates in place. Under other circumstances, damage control could have been left to such a routine task unsupervised, but one of Israel’s hits had taken out a third of her Engineering peripherals. Until Tamman and Brashan finished putting them back on-line—if they finished—the damage control sub-net remained far from reliable.
“How’s it coming?”
He turned his head in the force field globe of his “helmet” as Sandy walked down the curve of the hull towards him.
“Not too bad.”
Fatigue harshened his voice, and she studied him as she came closer. A massive, broken pylon towered behind him, shattered by the hit that had demolished the heavily armored drive node it had supported. He stood between stygian blackness and the welder’s fire, half his suited body lost in shadow, the other glowing demon-bright, and his face was drawn. It was his turn to wake from nightmares these nights, but he met her eyes squarely.
“You’re doing better than I expected,” she said after a moment.
“Yeah. We’ll have this breach finished by the end of the watch.”
“The end of which watch, dummy?” she teased gently. “You’re supposed to be in the sack right now.”
“Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at his tired, bemused expression as he checked the time.
“I’ll be damned. Is that why you came out here? To get me?”
“Yep. A MacMahan always gets her man—and in this instance, my man better get his ass inside before he goes to sleep on his big, flat feet.”
“I do believe,” he stretched, “you have a point, Midshipwoman MacMahan. But what about junior?” He waved at the welder.
“It’s only got fifty meters to go, Sean. You can trust it that far on its internal programming. And if you come along and let her tuck you in, Aunt Sandy promises she’ll come back out and check on it in about an hour. Deal?”
“Deal,” he sighed. The two of them turned away, disappearing over the rise of the battleship’s flank, and the lonely star of the welder crawled on behind them, blazing like a lost soul in the depths of endless night.
* * *
Even Brashan looked drawn, and the humans were downright haggard, but three weeks of exhausting labor had repaired everything they could repair.
“Okay, people,” Sean called the meeting to order. “It doesn’t seem to me that going on to our next stop is a real good idea. Anybody disagree?”
Wry, weary grins and headshakes answered him. The G6 star of their second-choice destination was twelve and a half light-years away from their present position. At barely half the speed of light—the best Israel could sustain with a primary drive node shot away—the voyage would take seventy-five months, even if it would be “only” five and a half years long for them.
“Good. I’d hate to make a trip that long and then not find anything at the other end. Especially since we know there’s an active shipyard here.”
“Cogently put,” Brashan agreed with one of his curled-lip grins. “Of course, there remains the small problem of gaining control of that shipyard.”
“True,” Sean lay back in his couch and stared up into the display, “but maybe that’s not as tough as it looks. For instance, we know the power for the platform stasis fields is beamed up from that ground source, so that’s probably the HQ site. If so, taking it over should give us control of the platforms, too. Failing that, taking it out should shut them down, right?”
“I agree that seems a logical conclusion, but how do you intend to penetrate its orbital defenses to get at it?”
“Sleight of hand, Brashan. We’ll fool the suckers.”
“Oh, dear. This sounds like something I’m not going to like.”
Sean smiled and the others chuckled as Brashan fanned his crest in a Narhani expression of abject misery.
“It won’t be that bad—I hope.” Sean turned to Sandy and his sister. “Did your analysis reach the same conclusion I did?”
“Pretty much,” Sandy said after a glance at Harriet. “We agree they detected us on passive, at least. We didn’t pick up any active systems till their launcher fire control came up.”
“And their tactics?”
“That’s a lot more speculative, Sean, and one point still worries us,” Harriet replied. “Your theory sounds logical, but it’s only a theory.”
“I know, but look at it. Much as it pains me to admit it, that much firepower should have swatted us like a fly, however brilliant my tactics were.
Whatever runs those defenses was slow, Harry. Slow and clumsy.”
“Okay, but how do you explain its defensive tactics? Slow’s one thing, but it let us take out thirty-six platforms before the others even began to defend themselves.”
“So it’s slow, clumsy, and dumb,” Tamman said with a shrug.
“You’re missing the point, Tam.” Sandy came to Harriet’s aid. “Properly designed automated defenses shouldn’t have let us take any of them out unopposed, but anything dumb enough to let us zap any of them that way should have let us take them all out. Besides, how many other intact quarantine systems have we seen? None. That means this thing’s original programming wasn’t just good enough to control its weapons—it’s run enough deep-space industry to keep the whole system functional for forty-five thousand years, as well.”
She paused to let that sink in, and Tamman nodded. Harriet’s stealthed sensor remotes, operating from a circumspect forty light-minutes, had given them proof of that. The Radona-class yard was no longer on standby; it was rebuilding the weapon platforms Sandy had destroyed.
“Another thing,” she continued. “Those platforms’ passive defenses are mighty efficient by Empire standards, and that razzle-dazzle trick by the ground source is pretty cute, too. It’s not standard military hardware, but it works. Maybe its designer was a civilian, but if so he was a sneaky one—not exactly the sort to give anything away to an enemy. And if a sharp cookie like whoever set this all up built in defensive systems at all, why arrange things so they didn’t come on-line until after our third salvo?”
