The last parren ship to jump in brought with it the most recent feed of the deepynines’ position… which caused commotion on Phoenix coms as Draper himself told the parren to get a move on. If the deepynines arrived in this system while a single parren (or human) ship was still present, those deepynines could just follow them directly. If they arrived after their quarry had left, the deepynines would have to do some serious re-calculation to figure where they could have gone. With any luck they wouldn’t figure it out… only Erik didn’t think there was that much luck in the universe.
Ahead of Lieutenant De Marchi’s last calculated trajectory, beyond the gravitational lensing of the oblique corner of Lusakia System they’d need to traverse on the way, lay an empty expanse of space. Their target was not on any map, and could not be seen by any amount of long-range, high focus telescopic vision. Styx assured them it was there, but a moon without a sun, lightyears from any prominent source of light, would be nearly impossible to see with any level of technology. Or would it?
“Styx,” Erik formulated now that he had a moment to question her on it, and Lieutenant Lassa berated the parren to kick it harder and risk breaking things. “What chance that the deepynines can follow us, even if they arrive late in this system?”
“Nearly one hundred percent,” Styx said with certainty. “There are several navigation buoys in this system that we are not in a position to disable first. The deepynines will access their data and discover our last seen heading. They will then scan precisely that region of space, and their visual acuity is high enough to detect the moon, although barely.”
Phoenix could jump to another destination, Erik thought… but that would risk the deepynines passing them in jump, even with the delay to interrogate the nav buoys. This might be the only clear break on the deepynines they were likely to get, and there were no systems with large concentration of parren space forces within another one-jump to which they might lead their pursuers. Interrogating nav buoys to reveal known jump destinations might not take any time at all. Discovering a destination that vanished into empty space might take a lot more time, as they puzzled things out, and trained their telescopic vision on that tiny patch of space, to discover what it might possibly be. They’d not make that jump quickly, gaining more time for their quarry. The alternative jump, they might follow too fast for safety.
“And Styx, what are your recommendations upon arrival at the moon?”
“Captain, the moon has sophisticated defence systems. Reactivation of these systems should be our priority, as they could potentially destroy much of the deepynine fleet. We will have no time to reconnoiter the moon first to see if those systems are still in operation, so our reconnaissance and our reactivation mission will need to be one and the same. I calculate that our best chance of success is to lure the deepynines into attacking the moon directly, as that will create cover for our ships, and force them into a ground attack where their advantages decrease. In space combat we have little chance, but Phoenix marines have already demonstrated one-to-one superiority against deepynine drones.” And none had been more surprised by that calculation than her, Erik thought. But Trace’s own replays of their few engagements so far indicated the same thing, and further tactical analysis since, with Styx’s input, should have advanced that advantage further.
“Agreed,” Erik formulated, wishing he could muster the sense to call up a visual of the moon. “The deepynines are chasing you and the data-core primarily, so we’ll send you both down to the surface with the reconnaissance team. That will be their bait, plus it will take direct attention off Phoenix. Without that, we won’t last very long.”
“Captain, that is an excellent suggestion.”
Erik could not help but feel a little pleased that Styx liked his idea… even though he was certain that Styx would have said it herself, if he hadn’t beaten her to it. Course corrected, Draper now hit the jump engines to cycle them up one whole magnitude of V. Behind them, the parren gradually did the same. Twenty seconds to jump.
“Major, did you hear that?” he asked Trace. He’d left the command channel open, so she should have heard.
“Yes Captain. Lieutenant Dale will lead the reconnaissance, I’ll be needed on the surface to counter any ground attack. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see what the situation is.”
Five seconds. Only then, at the point of no return, did Erik allow himself to think of the fact that they were jumping toward a non-verified jump point, on the sayso of an alien AI, and that if her coordinates were off by even a fraction, at these ranges, they’d miss it completely and drop from hyperspace god-knew-where in the vast, empty void…
25
Five minutes past jump arrival, and Phoenix bridge decided that if deepynine ships were coming straight in behind them, it would have happened by now. PH-1 got the all-clear, and Trace’s marines waited for Erik to go first, then followed their Captain through the dorsal airlock into Phoenix Midships.
Bridge kept the crew cylinder fixed as they disembarked, so that passage from Midships was not a longer haul up to the central spine, but a much faster drift through the rim-level connecting passage, inaccessible while the crew cylinder was rotating. Once inside, everyone found a wall to brace against, while spacers secured the connector with locked and sealing doors. Warning klaxons blared, red light flashing through the corridors, then with a thump and rumble everything lurched sideways as the big Phoenix cylinder began to rotate once more. Sideways force translated to downward, steadily increasing until full gravity pressed down, but most of the crew were moving well before that, whatever the regulations that said they shouldn’t. They were on combat approach, and saved time was worth cutting a few corners.
Trace spent the whole time checking ETAs and consulting with Lieutenant Dale. Bridge told her they had ninety-three minutes until arrival, and that the system was completely unoccupied. Except, of course, that a single moon in orbit about a high-mass irregularity, alone in the dark of space, could not really be called a ‘system’.
“Styx is getting us a schematic,” Trace said to Dale as they walked in the wake of the Alpha and Command Squad marines who’d gone ahead. Phoenix’s corridors hustled with busy spacers securing things and checking recently damaged systems. “She can’t vouch for the accuracy, given the place was probably occupied by someone else since she was here last, but the structural basics should be the same.”
“Parren drove the drysines out of here,” said Dale, sidestepping spacers repositioning some emergency EVA suits, in case of catastrophic damage to come. “Stands to reason it might have been occupied by parren for a while, in which case they’ve probably made changes.”
Trace nodded. “In that case, you’d better take some parren with you. I understand some of those ships have marines on them… we’ve been trying to gather intel on the capabilities of parren marines, Lisbeth even helped a bit. The consensus is they’re not as good as us, and that it otherwise depends on the unit.”
“Could be like operating with army back home,” said Dale, not looking hopeful. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”
“We’ll get suited first,” said Trace. “Command meeting after that, we’ve got time, though barely. Check the schematic, organise deployment with the parren… then we’ve got the transport shit to deal with.” Because they only had four shuttles, which was usually enough for five platoons, as each shuttle held a platoon-plus-ten at a squeeze… but one shuttle was only a civilian model, unarmed and unable to provide firesupport. And that shuttle, with Lisbeth gone, was missing its co-pilot… unless Erik wanted to deploy both Lieutenant Dufresne and Lieutenant Commander Draper on AT-7 — a hell of a risk, with highly-trained starship pilots on an unarmed vehicle in what might shortly be a warzone… and leaving Phoenix, of course, with no backup.
A spacer rounded the corner ahead, and Trace was about to dodge, but recognised the young, earnest pale face and blonde hair, blue eyes looking straight at her. “Chenk!” she said, with genuine pleasure. “Lo
oking for me?”
“Hi Major, sure am,” said Spacer Chenkov… no, Trace corrected herself — Petty Officer Third Class Chenkov. That promotion had come through fast after his exploits on Kamala with Trace and Command Squad. There had been a Distinguished Service Star in there too, on Trace’s recommendation — the only time in her career she’d ever been in a position to recommend a spacer for a marine medal. “Lieutenant Dale.”
“Petty Officer,” said Dale, with more respect than he showed most spacers. “Major, I’ll go on ahead.”
Trace nodded, and he went past, up the circumference corridor toward Assembly. “What’s up, Chenk?”
“Well, um…” Chenkov looked a little uncertain, as though suddenly wondering if he’d get in trouble. Petty Officer or not, he was still just a tech geek who’d enjoyed playing with processing simulations in his parents’ basement a few years back. Trace knew that Command Squad were planning to get him laid on their next human port of call, assuming that hadn’t happened yet… and assuming they made it back alive. “Well Major, the fabricators have been working all through the recent stuff, and me and a few of the guys took the opportunity in Elsium orbit to…”
Trace held up her hand, having no time for long technical explanations. She could see from his manner that it was important, and she trusted that Chenkov would not bother her if it weren’t. “Would it be easier if you just showed me?”
Chenkov looked relieved. “Yes! Yes it would, just… it’s up in Engineering I-3. Just don’t freak out when you see it.”
Trace strode that way, Chenkov falling in beside. “You ever known me to freak out, Petty Officer?”
“No Major. Sorry Major.”
“Don’t be sorry. So how do you like being a Petty Officer, Chenk?”
“Honestly Major? Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Erik arrived to cries of ‘Captain on the bridge!’, and the rest of first-shift already beginning their changeover. He wanted to tell Draper what a good job he’d done at Lusakia through that difficult course-correction, but the tactical schematic showed he had no time.
“We’re right in the slot,” said Draper, unbuckling restraints and folding back the left-side display to get out. “The moon’s on the starboard elliptic side of the singularity from our position, orbital rotation’s maybe ten days. Captain, that gravity slope’s just a fucking sheer drop, we’re getting light readings and the degree of lensing is insane… it’s right off the charts, just as Styx said. Here, Lio can tell you more.”
As Lieutenant Lionel De Marchi reached Erik’s side, having just helped Kaspowitz into the Navigation chair. “Sir, we don’t have the data to calculate it precisely, but to me it looks like the gravitational gradient is more likely cubed, not squared. So our moon is sitting on a more moderate plane of G, and from there it just falls into a bottomless pit…”
“Can Styx confirm that?” Erik asked, sliding into Draper’s vacated spot, as Draper helped him to buckle in.
“No sir, she says she’s not a physicist, and from her knowledge she’s not sure the maths are quite that simple. But our calculations so far suggest it’s pretty close.”
The rules of gravity were fundamental to the shape of the universe. The one most relevant to starship captains was that the force of gravity declined by the square root of itself per unit of distance you travelled away from the source. It led to one of those exponential graph-lines so common in the physical universe, where singular incidences of gravitational phenomena never entirely disappeared, just weakened more and more until they became indistinguishable from all the other, infinite sources of gravity in the universe. In the other direction, the gravity slope became exponentially steeper the closer you got to the source. How steep it eventually became depended entirely on the mass at the source, but the ratio of that curving line was always the same, irrespective of the object’s mass or radius — always the square root, always exponential, in either direction.
Here, that equation, impossibly, was different. Cubed, instead of squared. Erik could see the moon now as he pulled the command visor over his eyes, and the entire space between himself and the display screens was filled with a 3D representation of the space before him, and the position of the ships behind as they emerged racing from hyperspace. The moon orbited real close to the singularity — a touch under half-a-million kilometres…
“That’s worse than cubed,” Kaspowitz growled as he observed the same thing from the navigation post. “That’s doing something impossible… Captain, the gravitational lensing of those background stars shows we’re looking at anything up to a thousand Gs on the surface, maybe more. That thing’s multi-dimensional. I know it’s fucked up, but that’s the only explanation I’ve got.”
Wormhole experiments, Romki had suggested. Speculation had always been that if you made a gravity-well deep enough, it would tear through the very fabric of space/time into something else entirely. Another dimension, perhaps. Typically that speculation was aimed at black holes, though not even the oldest spacefaring species in the Spiral had reached a definitive conclusion. But this was something far stranger than a black hole. Black holes were an extreme but natural phenomenon, explainable within the rules of basic physics. This was not.
In the meantime, the tactical applications were stunning. “Nav, I want that full gravitational map as soon as you have it,” said Erik, as Draper finished with the straps and screens, and left running with De Marchi. Erik activated ship-wide coms. “All hands, this is the Captain. If you’re moving about, make it fast, we have V-dump in two minutes.”
Already they were coming up fast on the singularity and its moon. “Captain,” said Kaspowitz, fingers flying as he sorted various displays and ran multiple calculations. “I think we’ve got a narrow corridor of jump arrival from Lusakia to here along our present axis. The deepynines could probably push up or down that slope further than we can, but they’re not familiar with the system dynamics.”
Erik looked at the red-lit corridor appearing on his display. It described an area of space no more than a thousand kilometres across, and all of the arriving parren ships had exited hyperspace within it. “Good Kaspo, get me a confirmation and I’ll tell the parren to dump V and mine that space with everything they’ve got.”
“Our munitions are better than theirs,” Karle reminded him.
“I know that Arms, but we’re running low and we do more damage firing than mining, I want to make them count.”
Any parren ship dumping V out here was going to be dead if the deepynines came out of hyperspace while they were still laying mines. But from a strategic point of view, better them than Phoenix… and even the parren could not argue with that.
“Any deviation off that lunar approach is going to get us killed,” Shahaim said unhappily, running those figures off the data Kaspowitz was pouring into the course projections. “The gravity slope’s a hell of a lot more mild from here to the moon than it ought to be, I mean… look at that, it’s positively benign. But the singularity footprint is so small and the slope gets worse so fast, it’s like falling off a cliff. If they force us to evade that way, on any kind of steep angle, we won’t have enough power to climb back out.”
“Yeah, but two can play that game,” Kaspowitz added, still running furious calculations. Erik was nearly surprised — it was the most positive thing Kaspowitz had said about this improbable situation.
“We’re not going down there,” said Erik, eyes darting across his schematic as he began to mentally sketch the outlines of shapes, forces and trajectories he could see growing in his mind. “We go down to that moon ourselves, we’ll be a sitting duck. But our shuttles won’t. And we’ll make those fuckers chase them down to the moon, where they can be sitting ducks themselves.”
The one thing Lisbeth hadn’t considered about being in the service of a parren ruler was that just like the parren, when she was ordered to do something dangerous and stupid, she had to obey withou
t question. She sat now strapped into an EVA suit she barely knew how to operate, slammed at five-Gs in the hold of a parren shuttle on an intercept to a moon orbiting on a gravity slope that violated all known physical laws. It was scary, but lately in her life, lots of things had been scary, and she was getting used to it.
Better yet, she was getting plenty of practise at distracting herself from the fear. Gesul had granted her access to the command channel, which astonished her even as it made sense. She was Gesul’s human advisor, at his side to translate for him the reckless behaviour of these strange aliens into whose hands the fate of parren security had been thrust. In order to advise him, she had to see what the humans were doing.
All four of Phoenix’s shuttles were on approach with the parren. Lisbeth did not know who was flying AT-7, given she doubted Draper or Dufresne could be spared, with serious combat on the horizon and Phoenix regulations requiring reserve starship pilots on standby. She suspected Styx might be flying it by remote, particularly given Styx would be on her way down to the moon as well, and coms range from Phoenix was not about to become a problem. With the human shuttles came another eight parren shuttles, from four parren warships that had been carrying two each, with full marine complements. Given fifty parren per shuttle, as she’d counted in the one she presently travelled in, that equalled four hundred in total… which added to Phoenix’s full company made six hundred. Not a large force compared to what some of Phoenix’s marines would have seen in the war, but to Lisbeth, it looked like a major invasion underway.
Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Page 38
