by David Weber
Well, we've got a quarter LS lead on them now, and we'll go on opening it at forty-three KPS squared till we hit Soissons's Powell limit and I can really start opening up. They'll be point-seven-oh-three LS back when we hit the curb, which gives us ten minutes at thirteen hundred gravities-call it an edge of twelve-point-five KPS squared-while they're still poking along at thirty-one-point-seven Gs, and we'll still better than double their acceleration even after they cross the curb. That means we'll open the range to eight-point-two light-seconds before they get up to half our acceleration and draw entirely out of beam range in another thirteen-point-three minutes. They'll lose energy torpedo range three-point-nine minutes after that. Call the beam envelope twenty-two minutes from now and the torpedo envelope twenty-six, but their missiles'll have the range for two more hours.
What about the fixed defenses? They've got SLAMs, and we've got to get past both rings on this course.
Phooey on the fixed defenses! the AI snorted, and Alicia winced.
I hope you're not being over-confident, she suggested in her most tactful mental tone, tracing their projected course through the ship's sensors. The AI wasn't even trying to avoid the orbital forts-it was headed straight towards them, directly across the system's ecliptic. The inner ring, the true core of Soisson's defenses, orbited the planet at three hundred thousand kilometers, right on the edge of Soissons's Powell limit. The far sparser ring of outer forts were placed halfway to the star's Powell limit, forty-two light-minutes from the primary-and SLAMs had a maximum effective range of thirty-seven light-minutes. At their projected rate of acceleration, they'd reach the outer works in two and a half hours, and both fortress rings could engage them the whole way. Even after they passed the outermost fort, it could hold them under fire for several hours. That was a lot of engagement time, and Alicia would vastly have preferred to boost perpendicular to Franconia's ecliptic and open the range as quickly as possible.
You just think that's a better idea, Alley, the AI informed her, following her thoughts with almost frightening ease. If I try that, I expose our stern to the fire of every unit in the inner ring while we're still moving slowly, and the drive mass is out in front, remember? It doesn't offer any protection to fire from astern. This course uses the planet to block a good chunk of the inner defenses and interposes the drive against fire from the outer ring while we close. Besides, I'd have to decelerate, reorient, and accelerate all over again to put us on the right wormhole vector for our destination, and Admiral Gomez is out here somewhere on maneuvers. I don't know where, but I'd rather not spend fourteen additional hours mucking around sublight and give her time to work out an interception.
Are you sure about that? She's got less firepower than the forts.
Sure, but her dreadnoughts all have cyber-synths and the legs to stay in range of us for a long time-maybe as long as ten or twelve hours if they hit their interception solution just right. I don't have enough data on her fire control to guarantee I could outsmart that many AIs long enough to pull away from her, but I've got all the specs on the forts' fire control. They're overdue to refit with new generation cyber-synths, too, which means their present AIs are a lot dumber than a dreadnought's. They won't even see us.
And even if they hit us, Tisiphone observed, they will find us most difficult to injure, will they not, Machine?
I'm getting kinda tired of that "Machine" business, but, yeah. They don't have anything smaller than a SLAM that could stop me, Alley. Trust me.
I don't have much choice. But-
Whups! Pardon me, people-and I use the term lightly for one of you-but I'm going to be a little busy for the next few minutes.
The pursuing cruisers had spread out to bring their batteries to bear past the blind spots created by their own Fasset drives, and the first fire spat after the fleeing alpha-synth. The percentage of hits should have been high at such absurdly low range, but the attackers were hopelessly outclassed. Nothing smaller than a battlecruiser mounted a cyber-synth, and even a cyber-synth AI would have been out of its league against an alpha-synth. Alicia's other half could play evasion games a mere synth-link couldn't even imagine, far less emulate, and its battle screen was incomparably more powerful than anything else its size.
Its other defenses were on the same scale, and it deployed decoys while jammers hashed the cruisers' fire control sensors. Lasers and particle beams splattered all about them, but less than two percent scored hits, and the ship's screen shrugged them aside contemptuously.
Energy torpedoes followed the beams, packets of plasma scorching in at near light-speed, and the range was low enough the attackers could overload the normal parameters of their torpedoes' electro-magnetic "envelopes," more than doubling their nominal effect. Not even the AI had time to track weapons moving at that speed, but it could detect the peaking power emissions just before they launched, and unlike missiles, they were direct fire weapons, with no ability to home or evade. The alpha-synth's defenses were designed to handle such attacks from capital ships; cruisers simply didn't mount the generators for more than a very few launchers each, and stern-mounted autocannon spat out brief, precise bursts as each torpedo blossomed. It didn't take much of a solid object to rupture the skin of an energy torpedo traveling at ninety-eight percent of light-speed, and the alpha-synth's ever mounting velocity left the resultant explosions harmlessly astern.
Missiles were another story.
Every attempt to adapt the Hauptman effect to manned vessels had come up against two insurmountable difficulties: an active Hauptman coil poured out a torrent of radiation instantly fatal to all known forms of life, and unlike the Fasset drive, it played fair with Newton. Despite their prodigious rates of acceleration, Fasset drive ships were, in effect, in a perpetual state of free-fall "into" their black holes, and while artificial gravity could produce a comfortable sense of up and down aboard a normal starship, no counter-grav system yet had been able to cope with the thirty-thousand-plus gravities' acceleration of the Hauptman effect.
But warheads cared little for radiation or acceleration, and now Hauptman-effect weapons came tearing in pursuit. They needed six seconds to burn out their coils and reach maximum velocity, but that took almost two light-seconds, and the present range was far less than that. Which meant they came in much more slowly... but that their drives were still capable of evasive and homing maneuvers as they attacked.
Proximity-fused counter missiles sped to meet them, and Alicia watched in awe as space burned behind her. The counter missiles were far smaller than their attackers, and the alpha-synth carried an enormous number of them, but its magazines were far from unlimited. Yet not a single warhead got through, for no one aboard it-with the possible exception of Tisiphone-had any interest in counter-attacking. That meant all of its energy weapons were available for point defense, and no missile had the onboard ECM to evade an alpha-synth AI in full cry. There were far too few of them to saturate its defenses, and nothing short of a saturation attack could break them.
***
Captain Morales glared at his display as his cruiser led the pursuit. HMS Implacable and her sisters were losing ground steadily, but their target was in ideal range... and they were accomplishing exactly nothing.
The entire operation was insane. No one could steal an alpha-synth-only a trained alpha-synth pilot could even get aboard one! But someone had stolen this one, and precisely how Admiral Marat expected a cruiser flotilla to stop it passed Morales's understanding. The forts might have a chance, but his ships didn't. The damned thing was laughing at them!
Another useless missile salvo vanished far short of target, and the captain swore under his breath.
"Somebody get my bloody darts!" he snarled. "Maybe they can stop it!"
***
"You're kidding me!" Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen.
"The hell I am." There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less hum
orous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. "We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha-synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell."
"Jesus," Horth muttered, and looked up as Governor General Treadwell hurried into PriCon. Given the governor's lifelong dislike for planets, he preferred to make his home aboard the HQ fortress. Now he leaned forward into the field of Horth's pickup and stabbed Marat with a glower that boded ill for the port admiral's future.
"And just what," he asked coldly, "is going on here?"
***
I knew this was a formidable vessel, Little One, but it surpasses even my expectations. What might Odysseus have accomplished with its like?
With me in his corner, he'd've owned the damned planet, the AI put in during an interval between salvos, and the Fury laughed silently.
Indeed, Little One, I believe the machine speaks truth. It would seem we chose well.
Yeah? Well, next time let's discuss things before you come all over larcenous, okay?
Very well. Tisiphone's mental voice was uncharacteristically chastened, though Alicia had little hope it would last. But-
Hang on, Alley, the AI interrupted. The forts just came on-line.
***
"Very well, Admiral Marat. I believe I now understand the situation." Governor Treadwell turned to Horth and frowned as the alpha-synth crossed the inner fortress ring and continued to accelerate. "Do you have firing lock?"
"I'm afraid not, Sir." Horth looked as unhappy as she felt. "We seem to be even more affected by its jammers than the cruisers are."
"Indeed?" Treadwell's frown was distinctly displeased, but Marat came to his colleague's defense via the com link.
"I'm afraid it won't get any better, Governor. The alpha-synth has full specs on your fire control in its files, and it's designed to defeat any sensor system it can read. It's only going to get worse as the range opens."
"I see." Treadwell tapped his fingers gently together. "We'll have to have a little talk about just what goes into such units' memories in future, Admiral Marat. In the meantime, we can't simply let it go-certainly not with an insane woman at its controls. Admiral Horth, engage with SLAMs."
"It'll be blind fire, Sir," Horth protested, wincing at the thought of the expense. Without lock, she'd have to fire virtually at random, and SLAMs required direct hits. Trying to smother a half-seen target as small as the alpha-synth would use up prodigious numbers of multi-million-credit weapons.
"Understood. I'll authorize the expense."
"Very well, Sir." Horth nodded to her fire control officer.
"Engage," she said.
***
Alicia bit her lip as the fixed fortifications opened fire at last and hordes of red-ringed, malignant blue sparks shrieked after them. The forts were designed to stop ten million-tonne superdreadnoughts, and the volume of fire was inconceivable.
The Supra-Light Accelerated Missile, or SLAM, was the Empire's ultimate long-range weapon. Close in concept to the drones starships used for FTL messages by starships, a SLAM consisted solely of a small Fasset drive and its power source. The weapon had to be half the size of an assault shuttle to squeeze them in, but they made it, in effect, a targeted black hole, and very little known to man had a hope of stopping one. A starship's interposed Fasset drive mass would take one out, though stories about what happened when the ship's drive was even minimally out of tune were enough to curl one's hair, and not even a SLAM could get through the final defense of a capital ship's Orchovski-Kurushu-Milne shield. Unfortunately, a Fasset drive wouldn't work inside an OKM shield, and no weapon could shoot out past one, either. Both of which points were moot in this case, since nothing smaller than a battleship could spare the mass for shield generators.
The only good thing was that SLAMs weren't seeking weapons-mostly. No homing systems could see around their black holes, and despite the fact that their acceleration was little more than half that of the Hauptman effect, their speed and range quickly took them out of guidance range of their firers. A very near near-miss could still "suck" its way into a hit by gravitational attraction, which was why they weren't used when enemies were intermingled, but what the AI's jammers were doing to the forts' targeting systems meant the chance of any one of them scoring a hit was infinitestimal.
Only they were firing a lot of them. Alicia's thought was a tiny mental whisper as the outer works began to range upon her, and she squirmed down in her couch. It was like driving a skimmer into a snowstorm-surely not all of them could miss.
On the contrary, AI told her. They're just throwing good money after bad, Alley. Watch.
The AI changed its generator settings, swinging the drive's black hole through a cone-shaped volume ahead of them and dropping its side shields, trading a bit of its speed advantage over the cruisers to turn the drive field into a huge broom that swept space clear before them. Nor did it refocus the field in any predictable fashion. The drive's gravity well fluctuated-its strength shifting in abrupt, impossible to predict increments sufficient to deprive any tracking station of a constant acceleration value-and its corkscrewing mass "wagged" the ship astern like a dog's tail, turning it into an even more impossible target. A cyber-synth might have been able to duplicate that maneuver and still hold to its desired base course, though it would have been far less efficient; nothing else could.
The drive was no shield against SLAMs coming in from astern or the side, but the ship's unpredictable "swerves" gave the coup de grace to the forts' fire control. SLAM after SLAM slashed harmlessly past or vanished against the drive field, and Alicia felt herself relaxing despite the nerve-racking tension of the continuous attack.
Bets on how many they're willing to waste? the AI asked brightly.
***
"Governor, we're wasting our time."
Treadwell shot Admiral Horth a venemous glance, and she shrugged.
"If you wish, I will of course continue," she told them, "but we've already fired twenty percent of our total SLAM armament. That's four months' production, and there's no sign we've even come close to a hit."
Treadwell's jaw clenched and he started to reply sharply, then shook himself and relaxed with a sigh.
"You're right," he admitted, and glared at the fleeing dot. He didn't have a single ship, not even a corvette, in position to intercept it, and nothing he had could kill it. He turned away from the plot with forced calm.
"Lord Jurawski will be displeased enough when I inform him we've... mislaid an alpha-synth without my adding that I've stripped Franconia of its defenses. Abort engagement, Admiral Horth."
"Yes, Sir." Horth managed to keep the relief out of her voice, but Treadwell heard its absence, and his eyes glittered with bitter amusement.
"And after that, Admiral, you and I and Admiral Marat-and, of course, my dear friend Sir Arthur-will sit down to discuss precisely how this fiasco came to occur. I'm sure-" the governor showed his teeth in what might charitably have been called a smile "-the final report will be fascinating."
***
Sir Arthur Keita slumped in his chair, watching a repeater of Jefferson Field's gravitic plot on his com screen. His eyes ached, and he hadn't moved in almost seven hours, yet he couldn't look away.
The stolen ship had passed the outer forts four and a half hours ago. Freed of the star's inhibition, it had gone to full power at last; now it was just under three light-hours from the system primary, traveling at over.98 C. He watched in real-time as the alpha-synth ship raced ahead under stupendous acceleration, increasing its already enormous velocity by more than twenty-two kilometers per second with every second.
Eight and a half seconds later, the ship hit the critical threshold of ninety-nine percent of light-speed and vanished in the kaleidoscope flash of wormhole transition. It disappeared into its own private universe, no longer part of Einstein's orderly existence as it sprang to an effective velocity of over five hundred times light-speed... and continued to accelerate
.
The gravitic scanners could still track it, but not on a display as small as the one he was watching, and he moved at last, reaching out to switch off the screen. Just for a moment, he looked like the old, old man he was as he rubbed his eyes, wondering anew what he might have done differently to avert this insanity and the catastrophe certain to follow in its wake.
Tannis Cateau stood beside him, face drawn and eyes bright with unshed tears, and neither of them looked over their shoulders to see Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem throw an ironic salute to the blank-faced screen... and smile.
Chapter Forty-Six
My remotes could do that a lot faster.
"I know they could, Megaira." Alicia had developed the habit of speaking aloud to her electronic half-and Tisiphone-more often than not. Not because she had to, but because the sound of even her own voice, was a welcome anodyne against the silence. She wasn't precisely lonely with two other people to "talk" to, yet too much quiet left an eerie, empty sensation in her bones. "But I prefer to do this myself, if I'm going to be wearing it."
