The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  “You know, Moggs,” the pilot said. “Does the pope—”

  “Shut up, Rostislav!” Chalfond snapped. “Moggs, are your—”

  “Captain,” said Rostislav. “The console is ready to start sequence.”

  “Action Stations,” said Chalfond. “Pilot, start sequence.”

  “Sequence started.” Rostislav tapped a key and waited for the shift. It always felt like being turned inside out. Captain Chalfond never reacted. She claimed that she had become used to it. Rostislav believed that the captain was lying.

  “Moggs, are your guns ready?” Chalfond repeated in a calm voice. Rostislav could hear the tap of keys from by her side console, but his screen was loaded with flight data and didn’t echo whatever Chalfond was setting up.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “C-captain Chalfond,” said Rostislav. “What if it really is a Weasel armada we’re jumping into the middle of? I mean, I know there won’t really be anything there, but if there was ... ?”

  “Don’t worry, kid,” said the legless warrant officer in what she must have thought was reassurance. “They’re scrambling everything in the system! All we gotta do is take the Weasels’ minds off Tombaugh Station for a couple minutes.”

  It was a very short transit. The Sabot made a blurring lurch back into normal space-time. This time, Rostislav had too much on his plate to notice the momentary nausea.

  “I have a target,” said Moggs.

  “Magnetics up,” said Rostislav. The magnetic shielding that dispersed the effect of plasma bolts was one of his responsibilities at Action Stations, though he was only vocalizing what the green sidebar on the captain’s screen told her.

  “Unidentified vessel,” Chalfond ordered over the tight-beam laser communicator. “Drop your screens and prepare to be boarded.”

  The Sabot gave a triple shudder. Its load of ship-to-ship missiles had toggled off in accordance with the engagement sequence that Chalfond programmed while they were still in sponge space.

  “Chalfond!” Rostislav shouted. “We can’t shoot before we know—”

  Six screens, the outside views, flashed green and were blank. The data displays were unchanged, except that the ship’s skin temperature was rising fast. High flux on that laser. A merchant ship would be boiling away. Rostislav recognized that shade of green from days ago and said, “Never mind.”

  “Stay alert,” Chalfond said. “That green light can’t hurt us much, but—” The Sabot shuddered again. A transient of orange light sparkled within the depths of Rostislav’s screen, fogging the data there momentarily. Magnetic fields, Sabot’s shielding, twisted in the flow of plasma bolts.

  “Taking evasive action,” said Rostislav in a steady voice pitched an octave above his normal speech. Khalians. Weasels.

  “Gunnery officer, open fire,” Chalfond said.

  Six-round bursts from the ball turret in the nose hammered the hull sharply. Training programs didn’t duplicate the effect on the Sabot of miniature thermonuclear explosions, contained and directed by laser arrays in the breaches of the twin turret.

  The outside cameras came back on.

  Rostislav had brought the courier vessel out of sponge space at the rim of Pluto’s gravity well, on a reciprocal course to that computed for the intruder by the Canaris’s Battle Center. Sabot’s real-space velocity was low, but somebody on the command and control ship had really been on his toes: the Sabot was headed right down the intruder’s throat, and the Weasels’ own significant fraction of light speed gave Chalfond’s missiles a mere thirteen-second trajectory.

  Another plasma bolt snapped close enough to set a relay in the Sabot’s guts singing, but that was chance. Rostislav had cranked in lateral accelerations that took the courier out of its ballistic path. The side-thrusters pulsed with computer-generated randomness. That was unpleasant to the crew, but not nearly as unpleasant as taking a direct hit that would flatten the magnetics and vaporize the Sabot’s forequarters ...

  The green light flashed and was gone; and was back, and held. Not much of a weapon, that, not to today’s mirror-surfaced warships.

  The red pip of the Weasel in the center of Rostislav’s screen calved a trio of additional pips: missiles. They winked out instantly. Moggs couldn’t have reacted to the actual target so quickly, so he must be firing at where and when he expected the Weasels to launch.

  The gunnery training programs, were worth something after all.

  So was Moggs, despite his room-temperature IQ.

  One of Chalfond’s missiles vanished from the screen. The Weasels had switched their guns onto the missiles homing on them, but there wasn’t time to—

  The red pip blurred.

  “She’s trying to enter sponge—,” Rostislav warned.

  The pip sharpened, then expanded into a fuzzy cloud quite different from the blurring of a moment before.

  “—space.”

  Ships had to lower their magnetic shields before entering sponge space.

  “Game’s over,” said Moggs simply.

  The two remaining missiles plunged toward the heart of the cloud. Chalfond detonated them with an abort command. There might be debris worth, examining. “Gunnery officer,” she ordered, “secure your weapons. Pilot, bring us around.”

  Pilot Trainee Rostislav found that his hands were shaking so badly that it was several seconds before he dared touch his controls.

  * * *

  Twenty years before, Commander Antonio Soler, a brilliant young officer, made a brilliant marriage and resigned his commission to follow a brilliant academic career. The marriage hadn’t lasted, though friends argued about whether Antonio’s drinking was the cause or an effect of the failure. The academic career went by the boards at about the same time as the marriage; and, though he dried out, the brilliance remained in eclipse,

  Antonio Soler came back to the Fleet, to serve out the seven years remaining before he was eligible for a full pension. Few military positions require brilliance. The Fleet was glad to give the ex-commander warrant rank and command of Mine Warfare Vessel 774T.

  “Region Twelve cleared, sir,” reported Yeoman Second Class Teddley as she began to furl the gossamer static lines with which MWV 774T had cleared another assigned sweep area of debris from the Khalian vessel. There were a dozen ships involved in the hasty search, but only the 774T and her sister ship MWV 301A were really designed for the work. “Shall I proceed to Region thirteen?”

  Warrant Officer Soler was standing with his hands on hips, jaw out-thrust. Slightly tilted on Velcro slippers he was facing but not really viewing the main navigational screen. He didn’t respond to his subordinate’s question.

  “Ah,” Teddley said, “Sir? Shall we proceed to Region Thirteen while we process the drag-load from Region Twelve?”

  “What?” said Soler, turning with the confused embarrassment of a man caught viewing himself in the mirror of his mind. “What? Yes, yes, of course.”

  Teddley chimed a warning of the coming course correction. It was a moment—as Teddley expected—before Soler himself realized he needed to get into his own acceleration couch.

  “Have you been considering the enigma of why the Weasels would attack Halley’s comet, Teddley?” Soler demanded.

  “Yessir,” said Teddley. She programmed the burn. It was a rhetorical question; it wouldn’t make the slightest difference whether she responded yes, no, or maybe.

  “Let me postulate a plan,” said Soler, “a plan for Weasels. I’m a brilliant Weasel, yes? I know I can’t invade Sol system. It crosses my mind that I barely have the power to destroy an ice ball ten miles across. That shows no immediate personal profit, so as a Weasel I may well stop thinking at this point.”

  “But let me attempt to think like a human politician. We Weasels know that they’re a cowardly lot.” Soler smiled at Teddley; Teddley smiled back. Burn in twenty sec
onds.

  Soler said, “If something as prominent as history’s most famous comet is suddenly blasted into a vivid cloud of ice crystals, won’t the human government panic? The results must be to our favor. Ships from the Fleet will be withdrawn to Earth for defense there, instead of patrolling regions we Weasels can raid.”

  “Yessir.” The vessel’s thrusters fired under orders of the navigational computer. The acceleration was mild, less than a tenth-G, as MWV 774T eased through black sky, sifting vacuum.

  “Well, but you see, the threat, has to be credible,” Soler continued. “The death of Halley’s should look like the first move in an invasion. So my next move is to get my tiny ship out of the solar system, quick, before Earth’s defenses can get to me. Otherwise—”

  Teddley was intrigued despite herself. “Otherwise Earth’s navy will find themselves looking at the blasted remains of one little ship—”

  “Too small to invade a decent hotel!”

  “Right. But they raided Pluto.”

  “Why?” Soler demanded. “They could have launched and disappeared. They could have been gone while the laser light was still in transit, and the message to their spy, too. Gone before the comet was even touched.”

  “Um. Well,” Teddley said, “they thought they could get away with it. Immediate profit. The captain couldn’t make himself go home without something for his trouble. Weasels are like that.”

  “And now we know there’s no invasion fleet.”

  Teddley shrugged. “They got caught. Willy C’s crew was on the ball. But they didn’t expect to get caught.”

  “But Tombaugh Station is a trivial target,” Soler protested, treating Teddley as one of his erstwhile graduate students rather than a military subordinate. “Pointless compared to the propaganda effect that was the object of the exercise!”

  “Sir,” Teddley said, “somebody who’s embezzled millions doesn’t pass up a wallet he finds on the sidewalk. A crook is a crook. A Weasel’s a Weasel.”

  Soler’s console pinged three times, indicating that Karelly, in the vessel’s net bay, thought he had an emergency. Recalled to his duties, Soler grimaced and said, “Karelly? Go.”

  “Sir! We got something this load that I think you gotta see. I think the sector commander’s gotta see it!”

  “Calm down, man. You’re carrying a camera? Show me.”

  Soler peered at the blurred, off-color image. “It’s frozen,” Karelly babbled, “and the blast has chewed it, but look—”

  “Right. Thank you, Karelly. Teddley, do you see what I meant? No Khalian would have thought of any such plan. The rewards can’t be eaten or worn or spent. Phone the Canaris for me, will you? Sector commander.”

  * * *

  From the surface of Mars, from most of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, from any worldlet with a black sky, a good eye might see the murder of Halley’s comet. One would have to know where one was looking, and then the expanding cloud of ice crystals was a tiny pale smudge quite different from the sharp point that would be a star or planet

  But beneath the murky atmospheres of Venus and Earth, or within the rock of Ceres and Vesta and hundreds of other asteroids, the pale cloud filled a billion omni screens. A million individual shards flowed twinkling toward the eyes of two billion voting citizens.

  Noel Li spoke offstage in an edgy voice with precisely chiseled consonants. “The Fleet reports no sign of the invaders. But fourteen years ago, the Khalian invasion of Rand looked like this—”

  Ten thousand individual ships flowed twinkling toward the viewer’s eye. The fourteen-year-old omnitape of the Invasion of Rand looked dauntingly similar to Halley’s comet exploding.

  Krasnowski of Civil Affairs was professionally calm, almost sleepy-looking, as he met Noel Li’s huge dark eyes in the omni. He waited at the edge of the sector commander’s office, out of sight of the cameras which would send Eriksen—as a hologram—into the Meeting Hall of the Alliance Senate, as soon as the sector commander has something to say.

  Krasnowski’s aide had less experience than his chief in the terrors of political brinksmanship. The lieutenant commander wrung his hands as he scurried in and whispered in Krasnowski’s ear.

  Krasnowski listened, then waved his subordinate back to the commo center where he would be ready to relay the next frantic message from groundside.

  Eriksen cocked an eyebrow. Civil Affairs made another negligent gesture and said, “The natives are restless, Admiral. Perhaps you might throw them a few well-turned phrases while we wait for the—”

  “Not until—,” Eriksen said, turning toward Captain Crocker, who sat beside Krasnowski and Commander Mown.

  Military Affairs met his superior’s glance with a look of icy indifference. The expression was as false as a papier mache cannon, but it was perfect in its artistry.

  “Not until, Captain Crocker reports,” Eriksen continued. “We have one chance to retrieve this situation, and we aren’t going to lose it by being—” Crocker’s aide ducked in through the door, handed him a brief sheet of hard copy, and disappeared at once, “—overanxious.”

  “Thank God,” Crocker muttered. “We’re all right,” he added, rising from his seat to hand the flimsy to Eriksen. “There was only one small ship, as we conjectured, and it’s been destroyed.”

  Eriksen waved the document away. Nothing would mar the serene polish of his desk when the cameras went on in a few moments. “There’s no possibility of a garbled transmission?” he demanded.

  Crocker shook his head with a satisfied smile. “None whatever,” he said. “The ship that made the kill was a courier, the Sabot. They brought the news back themselves while later arrivals continued to check the area.”

  “All right,” Eriksen said, composing his features into stern, fatherly lines. He stood; simultaneously, his desk sank until its top formed a flush surface with the decking. “I’ll see them now.”

  The outlines of the sector commander’s office vanished from his vision. He stood instead in an illusory hall large enough to hold the three hundred Senators and more than a thousand accredited Observers who deliberated on the course and finances of the Alliance of Planets. President Ssrounish faced him from her central dais, while rank after rank of seats mounted in curves to either side.

  A surprising number of the seats were empty. Or not surprising, given the widely publicized belief that this room would be the first target when the Khalians’ ravening armada reached Earth.

  “His Excellency Lars Eriksen,” boomed the hall’s Enunciator. “Admiral of the Red and Commander of Sol Sector!”

  Eriksen waited a three-beat pause. “Madame President,” he began. “Honorable Senators and Observers of the Alliance of Planets . . .”

  Pause.

  “Today I come before you to admit error and apologize on behalf of the Fleet.”

  There were as many gasps as there were filled seats in the Meeting Hall. Several members rose and scuttled toward the exits, certain that they had just received confirmation of their blackest fears.

  “For many years,” Eriksen continued in rotund tones, as though he were unaware of the commotion he had caused, “the Fleet has maintained a secret testing facility on Halley’s comet. I must now admit to you that an inexcusable lapse in safety precautions occurred, causing an experiment to go disastrously wrong.”

  Pause.

  The hall gasped and burbled like a catfish pond at feeding time.

  “Through that error,” Eriksen said, “Fleet scientists have destroyed Halley’s comet.”

  Shouts of amazement.

  “We must be thankful,” Eriksen went on, knowing that the Enunciator would raise the volume of his voice to compensate for the ambient noise, “that no lives were lost in the occurrence ... but I realize that this is small comfort to those inhabitants of Earth, and to their unborn descendants, who will lack forever one of
the crowning glories of the solar system.”

  Several of those listening in the Meeting Hall were literally dancing in the aisles ... A portly Observer attempted a cartwheel and wound up crashing into a desk three ranks below her own. No one seemed to care.

  “There is only one recompense adequate to the scale of the error,” Eriksen said. “I have contacted Fleet headquarters—” There hadn’t been anything like enough time to inform Port Tau Ceti of the situation, but that lie would be lost in the greater one—“and have received the full approval of my superiors for the following arrangement.”

  He paused again, letting the room quiet to increase the impact of what he was about to say.

  “We of the Fleet,” the sector commander boomed, “at our sole effort and expense, will rebuild Halley’s comet, using material from the Oort Cloud. The project is expected to take three years”—Eriksen could imagine, Mown nodding approval at the fact his superior had remembered the correct figure—“but at the end of that time you will have a comet identical in orbit and composition, not to the Halley’s of two days ago, but to a younger Halley’s comet as it was seen four thousand years ago by the Chinese. A young Halley’s comet with thousands of years of life ahead of it.”

  It was almost ten minutes before the cheers and clapping died down enough for Eriksen to signal an end to his transmission.

  “God!” he said, flopping backward before he checked to be sure that his chair had risen high enough to catch him. It had.

  “Brilliant, sir!” Krasnowski was saying. “Absolutely brilliant!”

  “Monitor the omni,” Eriksen muttered with his eyes closed against the memory of over a thousand politicians with their mouths open. Cheering now; but it could have been his blood for which they shouted.

  When the admiral looked up again he saw to his surprise that Captain Crocker was frowning, and even Commander Mown looked concerned as he read the sheet of hard copy Crocker had passed to him. “’Yes?” Eriksen demanded, waiting for the worst, waiting to learn there really was a Khalian invasion force ...