Deep breath. Tactical Officer. Captain just asked for a recommendation. Done that before. “Yes, Your Majesty, this is Max Robichaux. If the Emir is in league with the Krag, and if he knew that you were planning to enter the war on our side, then I think we may safely assume that the Krag know that too. Now, I’m just a Destroyer Captain, sir. I operate on the tactical, not the strategic level, but if I’m the Krag Horde Master for this Theater of Operations, I’ve got to be thinking about making a pre-emptive attack the minute I suspect that the Kingdom is going to enter the war. Strike now to eliminate the Kingdom’s forces before they can be made ready for combat and integrated into the larger force structure of the Union. I don’t know the readiness state and disposition of your forces, but if I were you I would get as much of my fleet as possible, and preferably all of it, fueled, loaded for bear, and deployed. And I would not waste any time doing it, either. I’d want my forces in an operational deployment no more than two hours from now. That’s the earliest an attack force of fast Destroyers could get here if the Krag launched it immediately upon finding out from the Emir you were going to join forces with us.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. “One moment.” Whereas at the beginning of the conversation, King’s voice sounded determined and confident, there was now a definite note of concern. Max could hear the click followed by deadness that meant the audio pickup on the other end of the comm had been muted. About a minute and a half passed. Another click. “I have given the orders to dispatch Admiral Taniq and activate our liaison on Earth, and to notify Admiral Hornmeyer and the Union President of what has taken place today. Now, Captain, to your suggestion. We gave the activation order hours ago. My brother will fill you in on our forces’ status. Once you understand the complete situation, if you have any further advice, please convey it to him. Be assured that he has my ear at all times and that, in light of your most interesting combat record, any insights you may have will be welcome. Good day to you both, Captain, Ambassador. My brother, we will speak soon. Khalil out.”
Max could not help but notice that he closed the comm link more in the manner of a warship Captain than a civilian political leader. A warship Captain with a problem.
Max wanted to get to the bottom of this. Quick. “Minister, I may not know squat about Kings, but I’ve been taking orders from warship Captains since I was eight years old, and I know when one of them is worried. That was one worried warship Captain. Why?”
The Minister retook his seat. He glanced down at his watch, still on the table. The machine gun and assault rifle fire outside were rising to a crescendo, punctuated by the occasional burst of a grenade or mortar round. He turned back to Max and took a deep breath in the manner of a man charged with the delivery of unpleasant news. “Unlike the Texians and many of the other Independent Powers, our Navy does not have institutional roots in your Navy. Accordingly, our ships are not an extension or branch of the same design lineage as yours. There is no ‘family resemblance’ between the vessels of the two navies as there is between those the Union and so many other human powers. We have always gone our own way. That is why our ships look so different from yours and possess radically different strengths and weaknesses. What many people do not understand is that the difference is, as we say, ‘more than skin deep.’ Indeed, it goes to the very core.
“Your fusion reactors are of the Svavarsdottir or ‘S-Dot’ design in which plasma containment is achieved purely by means of two spherical and concentric reciprocally polarized graviton fields. S-Dot reactors can achieve a cold start in less than five minutes, but at the expense of a comparatively low power to weight ratio and less than optimal fuel efficiency.”
Oh, shit.
The Minister continued. “It is little known outside of the Kingdom’s naval circles that our warships are not powered by S-Dot reactors.” Double shit.
“Don’t tell me you are still using tokomaks,” Max said anxiously.
“Nothing even remotely so primitive. In fact, our reactors are of an extremely advanced design. As you are probably aware, almost ninety percent of the energy expended in an S-Dot reactor to achieve complete containment is directed to bottling up the most energetic ten percent of the plasma. So, we employ a hybrid design in which the plasma is ninety percent graviton contained and remaining ten percent contained by a more energy-efficient technology--conventional Bussard-Polywell polyhedral electromagnetic coils. This design approach is, as far as we know, used only by us and by the Romanovans, with whom we jointly developed it. It has advantages of a more than twenty percent increase in efficiency and accompanying savings in fuel consumption as well as an almost thirty percent improvement in power to weight ratio. The reactors are also smaller per unit of power and have less demanding cooling requirements, resulting in additional savings in power, size, and weight.”
“But you have to granny start them, don’t you?” said Max.
“Granny start?” It seemed that there was no bit of spacer slang of which the doctor was not ignorant.
As usual, Max filled in the gaps in his knowledge. “Slang for ‘Incremental Volumetric Ignition.’ The way you typically start an S-Dot reactor is you flood the containment vessel with gaseous deuterium up to its rated pressure, then kick in the graviton generators and rapidly compress the gas almost to the point at which it would begin fusing, then kill the field, and in the milliseconds before the compressed gas has enough time to expand much—that’s what they call inertial confinement--you squirt in another volume of gas, compress that amount to a slightly larger volume again almost to the point at which it would begin fusing, and so on until the whole vessel is full of deuterium just on the cusp of fusing, then you kick in the field for good, and use it to compress the gas that last little bit necessary to initiate the fusion reaction. Once you power up the field it takes only a few minutes to start the reactor, but you have to run the graviton field at very high levels to be able to snap in on and off and on again like that and stabilize rapidly enough to keep compression-heated deuterium confined.
“But, in an S-Dot reactor, if your graviton generators are damaged and can’t be run at peak output, you do a granny start. You start the reaction gradually. The first step is the same as a normal start—you fill the vessel to the highest safe pressure and then compress that gas almost to the fusion threshold but, once you get there, things go a lot more slowly. Then you slowly add more gas while gradually increasing the volume of the containment field. The gas has to be kept right on the edge of fusing without starting the reaction because it’s only at the edges of the containment vessel, close to the emitters, that the field is strong enough to contain fusion plasma. When you finally have the vessel full of deuterium just at the fusion cusp, then you compress it across the fusion threshold and initiate the reaction. It takes anywhere from four hours to something like eighteen hours depending on how much power the generators will take and how big the reaction chamber is. So, Minister, what’s the startup time on your reactor design?”
“Twenty-three hours on most of our ships. They got orders to start their reactors seven hours and . . . .” he looked at his wrist chrono, “nineteen minutes ago when we first had indications that the Emir was going to cause trouble. We also have three older destroyers and two frigates that use more conventional reactor designs. They have already powered up and put to space.”
“Twenty. Three. Hours.” Max slowly came to his feet and paced deliberately to the window, a deadly coldness coalescing in his chest. His percom gave a brief, quiet buzzing sound, the sound it made when its beep had been muted. Max looked at the alphanumeric display, flipped the device open to its main screen, and entered a few commands on the soft screen. The doctor surmised that he had programmed some sort of time alarm into the system.
“We accepted that design limitation,” the Minister continued, “because our enormous investment in the best early warning system in Known Space gives us sufficient lead time. We can detect any attacking force at least twenty seven hours away, givin
g us an adequate safety margin.”
That cold feeling got colder. “And, Minister, is any essential part of this early warning system accessible to the Emir or individuals who might be loyal to him?
“I am not really familiar with the infrastructure associated with the system. It has never been within my sphere of responsibility. Allow me to check.” He walked over to a side table that held a coffee service, a water carafe and water glasses, an ice bucket, a stack of coasters and a stack of napkins, all on a tray. He removed the tray, setting it on the conference room table. He then pressed a hidden lever which caused a keyboard on a sliding tray to deploy from the table. He pulled a chair out from the meeting table and positioned it in front of what was now a portable work station, adjusted the position of the work station so that it faced a nearby wall, and keyed a sequence on the keyboard. A portion of the wall changed into a black rectangle which, in turn displayed a logon screen. The Minister logged on to the system, supplied what was undoubtedly a very high level password, and navigated through a series of menus to display a diagram of the infrastructure for the early warning system which was apparently code named al Qasr. “Here are the sensor arrays.” A sphere of red dots appeared, enclosing Rashidian space. There had to be at least a hundred and fifty of them. “And here are the command posts where the signals are aggregated and turned into warning and tracking data.” Ten blue dots appeared, arranged in a sphere the surface of which was about half-way between Rashid and the arrays. “And here are the limits of the space controlled by the Emir. A yellow area, shaped roughly like a lopsided egg, appeared. It enclosed none of the arrays or command posts.
“It does not appear that any of the facilities lies within his territory,” said the Minister.
“I’m not so sure,” said Max. “How do the arrays get their data to the command posts?”
“I would assume by standard high-bandwidth metaspacial tunneling transmission,” the Minister replied.
“Which means that, unless those emitters have planetary class power generating capabilities, there have got to be some relay stations along the way, probably every couple of a light years or so, right?” Max was standing near the screen, a little off to one side.
“Let us see.” He entered some more commands on the keyboard. A smattering of green dots appeared, about thirty of them, in two concentric spheres, roughly twenty in the outer and ten in the inner. Each dot bore the label, “RLY STN” and then a number. Number 9, one of the outer group, was in the yellow egg.
“Can we see the lines of communication? Which arrays communicate with relay station nine?” More keystrokes. The station in question sprouted fifteen orange lines leading back to sensor arrays.
“I know what you are thinking, Captain,” said the Minister, “but the Emir has not sabotaged this relay station. Had he done so, the system would have notified its operators and the computer would have automatically rerouted the data transmissions from the affected arrays to unaffected relay stations which can handle the additional signals by reducing bandwidth and, as a result, providing the data albeit at a lower level of resolution. There has been no such notification.” He clicked some keys, and the al Qasr diagram was replaced by a status table. “As you can see from this status report, every aspect of the system is functioning nominally.” A few more keystrokes, and the status display was replaced by a series of panels, each apparently representing a section of space surrounding the Kingdom. There were several contacts indicated, but all bore labels showing them to be innocent.
“Can we see the section of space that is scanned by the arrays that use Relay Station Nine?” Max was squinting at one of the panels.
A few more keystrokes, and one of the panels, by apparent coincidence the one that Max was looking at, expanded to fill the screen. There were about forty targets, all friendly freighters and civilian craft. “There do not seem to be any threats in that region of space,” said the Minister.
“Minister, you mentioned that if this relay station went out, the signals would be routed through other stations. Is there a way you can do that, without alerting the station in question?”
“Yes, the command goes to the arrays, not the relay station. The arrays can be commanded to double up on their download cycle and to send the second download to their alternate station. The primary would never know anything.”
“Would you humor me by doing so, and then display this section of space as viewed by means of the alternately routed scan data?”
“Of course. Give me a moment.” Rather than entering commands that reconfigured the system, the Minister sent a text message to the system controller who managed such things. A few minutes later, a message appeared on the screen. “It will take about five minutes for the command to propagate through the system, and for the alternately routed signals to reach us, be processed, and then be displayed.”
“While we’re waiting, could you tell me more about the disposition of your forces right now?”
“We have one carrier and an escort of two Frigates deployed in the outer system, and the other ships I mentioned earlier that have gotten their reactors going, as well as two Destroyers and a few Corvettes on system patrol. The remainder of our fleet is moored.”
“Moored? How? Where?”
A flurry of keystrokes. “Here. At the Fleet Harbor Facility in orbit around Rashid V B.” He pointed to a schematic of the system. “Here’s the gas giant, Rashid V. There’s its first moon, Rashid V A, which is inhabited and is a significant mining and industrial world. And here is Rashid V B, a moon with an ocean of largely comet originated water covered by a layer of ice. The fleet moors here to be close to its fuel source. And here is the mooring facility.” A few more clicks. A schematic showed row after row of ships held in place by automated tugs only a few dozens of meters apart from one another, in synchronous orbit around Rashid V B. There did not appear to be any defensive batteries protecting the approaches to the facility.
“What protects these ships?”
“Time, distance, the early warning system, and a few patrol craft to keep saboteurs and unauthorized civilian craft away.”
The icy feeling was becoming a dagger-like icicle of certainty stabbing into his heart. He knew what was coming next.
An alert began to flash on the screen. “Our signal reroute is nearly complete.” The Minister entered the commands to return the display to the area of space in which Max was interested. The screen continued to show ordinary civilian traffic. Then, the data source indicator changed from “VIA RLY STN 09” to “VIA RLY STN 04.” A second later, amidst the innocent civilian traffic, appeared twenty-five red dots, neatly arranged in five rows of five. A few seconds later, the computer supplied labels for each: “KRAG DSTR DERVISH CLS” along with range, bearing, and speed.
The Minister grew pale. “No. How?”
Max dropped into a nearby chair. “Twenty-five Krag Dervish Class Destroyers,” he said, almost to himself. “They must have left Krag space three or four days ago, making the trip on compression drive only.” Then, to the Minister. “It’s a trick we’ve theorized about for years but we’ve never seen in practice. The Emir hacked the relay station and inserted a signal processing routine that blocked display of the enemy ships, probably by adding characteristics to the target detections that would cause the computer to classify them as noise or natural phenomena or your own side’s covert military traffic that you don’t want tracked. Anything that the system would not report to its operators.” He turned to the doctor, knowing that further explanation would be required for him to understand. “What you see on the screen is never a real, unprocessed, sensor return like they used to get on the old fashioned radar scopes where they relied on the operator to distinguish between airplanes, icebergs, sea return, ships, clouds, rain, flocks of birds, atmospheric turbulence, and submarine periscopes. Now, what the operator sees is a computer interpretation of the sensor returns in which, not only does the computer identify the targets, but it scrubs out anything it jud
ges that the operator doesn’t need to see. As you can see, sometimes, the computer can be fooled.” Short pause. “Minister, this projection doesn’t show the distance from the array—how long until they reach the fleet?”
He tilted his head slightly and looked up and to the left the way people sometimes do when they are performing mathematical calculations in their head. “Approximately six hours. More than ten hours before the fleet is able to defend itself. Horrible. Just horrible. Of what historical event does this remind me? Some other naval disaster. A salt water fleet, attacked by surprise, bombed at its moorings. It was a terrible defeat. I can’t remember the name.”
“None of your ancestors came from the United States, did they?”
“No, Captain, I don’t think that any of them did. Why do you ask?”
“Because, if they had, I don’t think you would have any problem with being able to remember ‘Pearl Harbor.’”
Chapter 5
00:44Z Hours, 20 March 2315: The Battle of Rashid V B
“Your text message from the Clover was a huge surprise,” DeCosta said, finding that he liked having a name to hang on the microfreighter. “But, when the CO says he needs his ship in the Rashid system ASAP, it’s the XO’s job to find a way. We were ready to undock and part company from the tender within fifteen minutes. But, we ran into a problem with her skipper. Apparently, he believed that Admiral Hornmeyer’s replenishment and refit orders took precedence over a CO summoning his own vessel. The man was actually concerned about incurring the Admiral’s wrath, if you can imagine. I was very happy, at that point, to have Major Kraft’s help.”
For Honor We Stand Page 12
