by John Carr
“Second Rank here, Dictator.”
“Initiate Phase One computer security throughout the Fleet.”
“Acknowledged, Dictator. Phase One lock activated.”
Even by laser, it would take almost two hours to pass on the order and receive confirmation from all the task forces in the fleet, but the Fomoria went into security protocol at that moment. From now until Diettinger released them, no ship’s computer could access another without the codes issued by Diettinger himself two days before, now locked within the safe of every captain. The Fomoria’s computer itself could not be accessed at all by anyone off-ship, at any level of security.
Upon confirmation of this lockout, Diettinger called up the navigational database, inserted his datachip, and downloaded the last third of the special program he had written. He sealed it within a file labeled “Diettinger,” and when the computer requested a password, he smiled briefly and gave it the best one he could think of.
He looked out the viewport, but he could not see Sauron from here.
Just as well, he thought, and went to sleep.
Twenty-One
I
The invasion from space of an inhabited, defended world is the single most complex undertaking in all of human experience. The mapping of the human genotype was a moderately difficult crossword puzzle by comparison. Given that analogy, it was fitting that the Saurons were the first humans to master the techniques arising from both; given the uses to which they had put those achievements, it was likewise fitting that they should suffer the one as a result of their abuse of the other.
The Fleet ran on Sauron planetary time, its activities synchronized with the chronometers of Sauron’s capital city of Utumno. At 0400 hours on the morning of December 1 - a Saturday on the Homeworld - aboard the reconnaissance destroyer Reno of Task Force Damaris, Sensors Third Rank Munoz’ screen abruptly flashed red.
“Multiple signals at St. Ekaterina Alderson Point,” Munoz declared; “Minefield telemetry shows seventeen initial detonations and counting.”
The duty officer confirmed that the Reno’s computer had automatically relayed the alert first to the Damaris, then on to the Fomoria and the Homeworld, and every station in between. That done, she began to record the number and composition of the initial intruder forces.
No warning from Sauron Traffic Control would be forthcoming; every remaining Sauron and Coalition vessel that could be accounted for was already in-system. If these were indeed friendly stragglers, that would just be too bad.
Crawling along at only the speed of light, it would take over fifty-three minutes for the message lasers to reach the command units of the fleet, another hour for word to reach those ships on the far side of the Sauron System. By the time the first Sauron vessel began to respond, the intruders would already be recovered from Jump Lag and underway. Had Task Force Damaris been on-station at the Alderson points, a further billion kilometers distant, this response time would have been doubled.
Lacking the necessary superiority of vessels to engage the intruders on arrival, Diettinger had ordered all Jump Zones to be seeded with the highest-yield nuclear weapons ever developed; hundreds of each scattered along the arc of each Alderson Point. Many of these would detonate immediately, others would stagger their ignition to maintain high levels of energy flowing into the Langston Fields of the intruding ships. Still more would lie in wait for succeeding waves of Imperial vessels.
Mining such points was standard practice - though the density employed by the Saurons here was far beyond doctrine. Even so, it was usually dealt with by turnabout; an attacking force would first send through unmanned drones, comprised of an Alderson Drive package strapped to a high-yield nuclear weapon of its own. Such bombs were armed and detonated by a simple mechanical timer and chemical explosives, less sophisticated than the machinery used on the first atomic devices almost seven hundred years earlier. The madness had method, however; while Jump Lag might disrupt computers horribly, it had no effect whatsoever on the physical components of a wind-up clock. Such weapons, arriving as they did immediately prior to the fleet which sent them, were generally referred to as “precedents.”
This time, however, there seemed to be no such precedents. The only telemetry received by detonating thermonuclear weapons showed wavelengths consistent with the Sauron versions of such devices.
Diettinger was not surprised to learn this, less than an hour later. He read the initial reports, and only nodded.”They’ll be saving their nuclear weapons” he said quietly, almost to himself. Though his Second Rank had heard. The report concluded with Fleet First Rank Emory’s signal that Task Force Damaris was changing station according to its mission orders.
“Signal to Hourglass North,” Diettinger told his Fleet Communications Ranks.”Initiate Delta/Sierra maneuver.”
“Delta/Sierra” referred to the first letters of the Dropshot and St. Ekaterina Alderson Points, each on the same side of the orbital plane occupied by Sauron itself; “Hourglass North” was the concentration of System Defense Boats and other craft arrayed over Sauron’s northern hemisphere. Diettinger’s order was relayed immediately to the cone-shaped formation of ships, initiating maneuvers designed to allow it to react most efficiently to this first Imperial threat. Twenty-five thousand kilometers above Sauron’s north pole, the ship at the point of Hourglass North fired attitude thrusters, bringing its main engines about to point toward the gravity well of the Homeworld.
At each successive level of Hourglass North with its ever greater numbers of System Defense Boats, the maneuver was repeated. Eventually each ship in the formation sat motionless on the same bearing, at a right angle to the plane of the ecliptic. Upon completion of the order, the weapon batteries of the entire formation were pointed directly away from the angle of approach that every naval commander knew must be taken in any attack on Sauron System.
Diettinger watched as the confirmation signals continued. Initial signals from the St. Ekaterina Alderson Point showed fifty-one Imperial vessels. Eight had been destroyed when their exits from the Alderson Point had placed them within meters of several of the high-yield mines. There had still been no indication that the Empire was sending any nuclear precedents of its own ahead of the invasion fleet.
Diettinger considered the implications of that: Alderson Drives are expensive; perhaps the days when the Empire could afford to literally throw them away to provide a margin of safety for her ships entering hostile space are truly gone, after all.
Which told him that the Imperial economy was collapsing. With the Imperial Navy engaged throughout known space and ravaged by decades of war, the great Merchant Houses could no longer be guaranteed safe lanes of travel for their cargo vessels. They would be entrenching, withdrawing funds from interstellar interests, consolidating their operations within single systems, or among Jump-Close systems which could provide strong mutual support. Either way, they would be riding out this storm with no room in their lifeboats for politicians.
It has ever been thus, he thought. First merchants and guildsmen, later corporations, then interstellar traders, all reached the point where their wealth became so great they were convinced it was indispensable to the very governments which had provided them with the security to attain it. Throughout history, all these entities in their varied forms ultimately attempted to manipulate those governments, always with mixed results and always doomed to failure. Because the Empire will deal with them no differently than we did, Diettinger mused, when the Unified Trade Bloc which we created as a counter to the Imperial-backed Merchant Houses turned on us.
The Sauron High Council had not even bothered to nationalize the operations of the Bloc. It had simply replaced each governing panel of each mercantile board of directors with a Sauron governor. The act was authorized not by shareholder votes but by edict of the High Council, and the Unified Trade Bloc, already Sauron in everything but name, ceased to exist as an even remotely independent entity.
But Diettinger knew that the Saur
ons had societal conditioning on their side. Generations of doing business under Sauron influence or outright authority had more or less prepared the members of the Trade Bloc for such actions. The Empire, on the other hand, had let its Merchants run wild on too slack a leash for too long. They would not take kindly to being reined in, away from their illicit trade with the Outworlds - even, through middlemen, with Sauron itself. And many of the Empire’s great Merchant Houses maintained very large “security forces” of their own which were, in fact, nothing less than very well equipped private armies.
“Messy.” Diettinger said aloud, imagining the possibilities. But not something we can count on to be of any help to us, at the moment.
“Dictator?”
His Second Rank was looking at him, and he realized he had spoken aloud. He ignored the question. “Signal Task Force Falkenberg to proceed to Phase Two.”
Alderson’s development of a drive which could exploit stellar tramlines had made travel between stars not just possible, but effectively instantaneous. But besides Jump Lag, another side effect was the limiting of interstellar communication to the speed of physical travel. Once in-system, however, communication was still restricted to the slow crawl of message lasers traveling at lightspeed. That made the ships that waged wars to control those tramlines, for all their sophistication and weaponry, no more than scaled-up replicas of the flag-reliant square riggers of a past millennium. Given the firepower of the current millennium, however, requiring commanders to wait for engagement authorization under such circumstances would have been their death warrants.
Diettinger’s command station aboard the Fomoria was in near-Sauron orbit, two billion kilometers from Task Force Damaris, Because all communications were carried by message laser, the combat intelligence he was receiving and acting upon was already an hour old when it reached him. Aboard the Damaris, Emory would have moved to engage the Imperials immediately, according to plan. Her ships had probably been in combat for forty-five minutes already. It would be at least fifteen minutes more before Diettinger could expect to receive any data on the size and composition of the initial invasion force, or how well TF Damaris was faring in its engagement with it.
II
All things considered, Damaris was doing pretty well. The namesake of her task force had beaten off three direct attacks by Imperial vessels while maintaining a steady pressure against the known exit zones of the St. Ekaterina Alderson Point. Vessel First Rank Emory rotated her acceleration couch clockwise, raising and lowering her gaze as she did so, seeing everything of the battle around her. As in the command rooms on the Homeworld, Sauron warships used “immersion displays” in their bridges, full-surround projectors which replaced the walls, floor and ceiling of the combat command center with super-high resolution projections of the area of space which surrounded the vessel.
With such a display, Emory could see that she was still in control of the battle. The Imperials had failed to secure the area of space surrounding the St. Ekaterina Alderson Point; they were in fact being gradually contained and ground down by the ships of TF Damaris. The encircling maneuvers of Emory’s subordinate commanders on both wings of the formation were closing in around this first Imperial fleet to enter Sauron space.
“First Rank.” One of the Bridge Sensor Ranks called out to Emory, whose gaze continued to flicker across the image of the battle spread before her. “Speak.”
“Multiple precedents detonating at Dropshot Alderson Point.”
For the briefest moment, Emory clenched her teeth in frustration. Then Sauron discipline and her own intellect asserted themselves. “Communications.”
“Ready.”
“Signal all elements of the task force to disengage and fall back to Sector Nine, position one-one-eight-eight.”
“Affirm.”
In perhaps ten minutes, Emory thought to herself, these Imperials we’ve been mauling will realize we’re breaking off and think their reinforcements have saved them. She reviewed Diettinger’s briefing to the task force commanders, for the hundredth time seeing its logic, for the thousandth time dreading that it would fail in spite of it.
I hope to God this works...
III
Diettinger’s staff was nearly overwhelmed by the Dictator’s demands for minute-by-minute updates on every sensor report of the battle. Within two minutes of the first Imperial entry at the Dropshot Alderson Point, three full Imperial fleets had emerged from as many different Alderson routes. Two Sauron task forces attached to the Keegan and the Soult had been nearly overwhelmed before breaking off and regrouping a scant 800 million kilometers from the orbit of the Homeworld.
As the Sauron defensive perimeter contracted, the laser-borne message updates had less space to cover, making the information they carried progressively more current, while the sheer volume of data was increasing as well. Diettinger’s Communications Rankers were transmitting data on the composition of the enemy intruders as fast as humanly possible - which for Sauron humans was very fast, indeed.
Diettinger drank it all in through the vast immersion display on the bridge of the Fomoria. Switching perspectives from time to time, enhancing some images, deleting others, he began to subtly adjust the display as the battle progressed. Over five hundred Imperial warships had entered Sauron System in the last three hours! Where the Empire had found that many ships, he could not even begin to guess - although one of his aides pointed out that at least one Imperial fleet element of over twenty ships had been positively identified as being from Aquitaine.
Diettinger had nodded and spoken for the first time in forty minutes. “The Imperials will not trust them; the Aquitaine fleet will be sacrificed to engage our larger vessels. Signal the task force commanders that they are not to oblige the Imperial planners if this occurs. The priority remains the Imperial fleet elements.”
All the while, he watched. As the sphere of the engagement contracted, Diettinger compensated by adjusting Fomoria’s Tactical Display downward in detail.
Looking up briefly from his station, Communications Fifth Rank Boyle noticed that the Tactical Display looked odd; it was too - tidy was the only word that came to his mind before his attention was demanded by another rush of signals from ships now only light minutes away.
Watching, concentrating, unaware of the gesture, Diettinger half-raised his hand, and when he saw what he’d been looking for, slapped it against the armrest of his acceleration couch.
“Communications.”
“Ready.” Fomoria’s senior Communications rank answered, simultaneously rerouting all his own monitoring duties to Boyle’s station.
“Signal all fuel tankers on the Ostia run to initiate Plan Green. Signal Hourglass North and Hourglass South to go to Phase Two.”
“Affirm.”
Communications’ own gaze swept the Tactical Display as he sent the orders back to the System Defense Boats arrayed over the poles of Sauron. He noticed the same patterns as Boyle, but to him - born of a higher-caste crèche, better educated, more carefully groomed - they meant something else entirely.
The Dictator’s plan might work, he thought; we might live through this, after all...
Hourglasses North and South mirrored one another in their maneuvers: Maximum thrust directly away from Sauron, above and below the Homeworld at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic of Sauron System. On reaching their prearranged positions, together with Diettinger’s other task forces, they now comprised a flattened sphere of Sauron fleet elements surrounding the Homeworld. Evenly distributed over the several trillion cubic kilometers of the Homeworld System, the Sauron fleet was in perfect position to mount attacks in strength on any major concentration of Imperial vessels, most of which had yet to fully regroup themselves.
Instead the Sauron fleet kept station, and waited.
IV
It had been three days since Hawksley had received Diettinger’s Phase Two implementation order, breaking off and relinquishing command to the apparent relief of the Banshee
’s Captain Connolly.
Aboard the Falkenberg, Hawksley’s aide had brought him coffee. He had slept briefly and not at all well, and the first alarms of battle had been welcome. The corridors of the Falkenberg were dimly lit, her crew spoke in hushed tones, moved carefully; all for no good reason whatsoever. Where the raider now kept station, subterfuge was unnecessary. But her crew was made-up mostly of men and gentlemen from Burgess. There, hunting was still revered as sport, and wherever the hunt, whatever the quarry, habits and traditions carry over and die hard. The hunter’s blind was both, and a Burgess favorite.
Hawksley moved the body length from his bunk to his desk and sat down with his coffee. He glanced up to his porthole, a Burgess shipwright’s eight-inch diameter concession to the romance of space travel; but there was, as usual, nothing to see.
There was a soft chime from his door. “Come in,” Hawksley answered, and his Executive Officer Commander Willoughby entered with a crooked grin.
“Good morning, sir. Skipper, we have inbound signals, bearing 292 degrees mark 315. The readings look like couriers,” he added, smiling.
Hawksley took the datapad from his XO and sipped his coffee. It was Jamaica Blue Mountain, seized - and, he reflected proudly, the word was indeed “seized,” not “liberated,” but “seized” - from an Imperial Phidippides-class courier. Incredible that, with the Empire collapsing around their ears, those idiots at Court could still find such nonsense to waste men and ships on, such as maintaining their exclusive claim to one particular type of coffee bean. Obviously, he’d run his dueling sabre through the right Duke.
“Closing?” Hawksley asked.
The Exec nodded. “Speed consistent with couriers too, sir. It’s difficult to get clean readings with all this interference, but we managed to track them enough to put it at seven-Gs.”
Hawksley frowned, shook his head. “Look at the course. Two wide curves to the left, one to the right.”
