by John Carr
Fifth Rank Boyle wanted so badly to know what was going to happen he actually had to clench his teeth. Instead, he turned slightly to look at the Dictator’s face, hoping to discern some clue from the C-in-C’s expression.
The left side of Diettinger’s face was in shadow, his one eye gleaming from within it and seeming never to blink, the thin lines of cheekbone and jaw partially illuminated; the right side was sharply lit, the black eyepatch looking like an empty socket, heavy shadows accentuating the bones on that side of his face. With his lips parted and his teeth gleaming across both dark and light, he looked, Boyle thought, like death coming out of the darkness, a single living eye regarding the dawn.
Boyle decided immediately that the Dictator did not look as though he would appreciate any idle questions from curious Fifth Rankers.
In the immersion display, the bright, airless grey spheres of Barlowe and Freas continued to extend their respective blue lines toward one another.
Aboard the ships of Intruder One, on the bridges and at the sensor stations of the Imperial craft, no one was aware of the activities occurring between the Sauron System’s outer planets of Barlowe and Freas. The events were transpiring at the speed of light; they could likewise only be apprehended at that speed. No one could know these events even existed until they could perceive them, and they would not perceive them until they were, literally, on top of them.
By then - if the Sauron technical Rankers were correct in their theories - it would be too late.
What was racing outward from Barlowe and Freas were subatomic particles. Millions of square kilometers of arrays generated the particles in equal portions of negative, positive and neutral charges. The neutral charge particles were wasted, and their part in the process ended there. The positive and negative charges, however, were focused through several miles of electromagnetic acceleration tunnels bored into the crusts of each of the planets.
These accelerator tunnels concentrated the subatomic particles into streams, raised the speed of those streams to 99.99% the speed of light, and fired them toward the surface. The charged particles would have obliterated any physical matter in their way, but they were doomed the moment they left the mouths of their accelerator tunnels. For neither Barlowe nor Freas possessed atmospheres, and the Sauron Technical Rankers knew that charged subatomic particle streams decayed almost instantly in vacuum. One step remained in the process to make the beams survivable, and it occurred one meter below the mouth of the accelerator tubes on the surfaces of Barlowe and Freas.
Screens of gas and high-powered lasers stripped the extra electron from the negative ions and bonded it to a nearby positive ion. The streams that emerged from the accelerator tubes were particles of completely neutral charges, and these propagated very well in vacuum, indeed.
The tubes on Barlowe and Freas were spread out across the facing surfaces of both worlds. They were numerous but capable of very little in the way of fine adjustment in the discretional projection of the particle streams which they generated, or so the Technical Rankers had explained to Diettinger, who finally realized that they were telling him they were almost impossible to aim. The project was, after all, still experimental.
No matter, the Dictator had assured them. What he was looking for was quantity of production, and when he had told them why, they had been delighted to realize he had read their briefings on the project much more thoroughly than High Command had.
Diettinger knew that the Imperial Langston Fields would render the particle beams useless. Langston Fields absorbed energy, radiant as in lasers or thermonuclear explosives, or kinetic as in torpedoes, even ramming ships. Using particle accelerator weapons against a Langston Field was like firing a shotgun into tar. Worse, particle beams imparted damage by the sheer number of the particles they delivered to the target; the mathematics of the Langston Field meant that small elements impacting the field were absorbed and their energy dissipated in direct proportion to the energy of the individual imparting element. Lasers, with their constant flow of energy over time, and nukes, with their tremendous release of energy in a rapid burst, could burn through or crash through a Langston Field. A particle beam, on the other hand, didn’t even make it glow.
All of which was why Sauron High Command had never embraced the project: no practical groundside application within a reasonable timeframe, no qualitatively superior naval performance to that of the high energy lasers already in use aboard the ships of the fleet. A dead end. At which point the long-term applications proposed by the Technical Rankers had been consigned to oblivion.
Until today.
The particle streams racing outward from Barlowe and Freas were now only seconds apart. From opposite sides of the Imperial fleet element designated Intruder One, they approached one another, subatomic torrents of neutral-charge particles in bundles of beams hundreds of miles in diameter. They began to impact the Langston Fields of the perimeter vessels of Intruder One; Field operators aboard the ships noticed minute surges in their capacitor monitors, calculated what they must be, and ignored them. A few took cold pleasure from what they felt must be eleventh-hour desperation on the part of the Saurons to be fielding such pathetically impotent weapons against the judgment that was about to be visited upon them. Even fewer of those operators bothered to inform their captains of the particle beams; none of those captains deigned to do anything about them.
The streams met.
Timing, Diettinger was to think when recalling the event later, is everything.
Particle beams were hopelessly ineffective against Langston Fields. But what the Technical Rankers had been trying to convince High Command they could create, and what Diettinger had authorized them to provide, were almost literally a quantum leap beyond such weapons.
At this time in their respective years, Barlowe and Freas lay on opposite sides of the Sauron System, a distance of over five hundred million kilometers. Within that huge volume of space, a large quantity of the high velocity neutral atomic particles in the streams projected by the Sauron research stations on each moon simply passed by one another and on into space. Many more were intercepted by the Langston Fields of Intruder One’s constituent ships. But the vast majority met somewhere in between, colliding, and producing yet a third type of particle - a meson.
This immense cloud of propagating mesons spread out in every direction from the area of the beams’ intersection. Mesons, as the Technical Rankers knew and as they had told Diettinger, did not interact with normal matter, they only interacted with energy composed of other mesons, and their rate of decay was in the realm of the near instantaneous. As with the aiming problem, Diettinger had understood that what the Technical Rankers were telling him was that Langston Fields were transparent to mesons, and that mesons didn’t last very long at all. All well and good, he had replied, but if they do not interact with matter, and they decay almost immediately, what harm can they do?
At which point, the only Technical Ranker Diettinger had ever met who had a sense of humor asked him what he thought happened to all that accelerated energy when the meson decayed inside the Langston Fields - or, better still, inside a ship inside a Langston Field.
Which was what they were doing now.
II
Aboard the Imperial heavy cruiser Westphalia, the fusion engines were rent by mesons which destroyed their shielding. Half-a-meter of super-dense dampening alloys was instantly converted to waste heat, releasing millions of rads into the ship’s compartments. Every crewman in the starboard section of the Westphalia suffered massive internal hemorrhaging, soft tissue liquefaction, brain embolisms, internal bone ruptures and all the other effects of being trapped in a high-energy microwave field. Cooked alive, they fell dead at their stations. Two hundred ninety-seven men perished in thirteen seconds.
The Imperial destroyer Phaeton was cut in half. Crewmen in the forward amidships section turned to see four meters of open space separating them from the aft portion of the vessel. The ends of metal struts and cabl
es, the cross-section of a mess table, all were polished to a mirror finish, severed perfectly at the subatomic level. Men standing partly within the space destroyed by the particles had been cut apart with a precision beyond any surgical procedure. Of the crew members not immediately killed by the meson strike or the resulting loss of atmosphere, those in vacuum suits watched as the aft portion of the Phaeton, still under thrust, closed the distance and rejoined its forward portion with an impact that destroyed both halves.
The Battle-class Imperial cruiser Manassas suffered internal meson propagation that breached three interior bulkheads and the forward portions of her inboard fuel tanks. Compressed liquid hydrogen roiled out of the tanks and into the unprotected interior of the warship before igniting. The Manassas exploded inside her own Field, which shot up through the spectrum to violet before disappearing with the loss of its generators, releasing the absorbed blast energy in a flare that caused burn-throughs in the Fields of two adjacent craft and swept half a dozen escorting fighters out of space and into oblivion.
The bridge crew on the Imperial cruiser Monserrat abruptly found themselves in pitch blackness. When the battery-powered emergency lights activated to reveal that the Monserrat had lost all power, the first officer left his acceleration couch and, taking a flashlight, headed for the gangway off the bridge to reach the engine room. Upon releasing the hatch clamps, he was instantly sucked out into the vacuum which had formerly been occupied by a quarter million cubic tons of Imperial spaceship. His flashlight spun end over end out into the darkness, illuminating nothing.
Imperial Flight Officer Lieutenant Tidwell was wingman in a three-craft victory, or “vic” formation of Imperial Legionnaire-class heavy fighters, on combat patrol in the ventral portion of the formation. He found himself suddenly alone, watching as the fighters operated by his commander and the second wingman disappeared, erased before his eyes by a swath of nothingness. He suddenly realized that his own craft was banking to port and would not respond to his correction. Lieutenant Tidwell looked down to see that the control grip had been sheared off and was gone, together with his right arm up to the elbow. A red mist expanded rapidly throughout the zero-gravity environment of the fighter cabin, and Tidwell blacked out before he could apply a tourniquet, bleeding to death soon after.
The Imperial strike cruiser Bee de Corbin was a dedicated bombardment platform, designed for the sole purpose of delivering ten million megatons of nuclear weapons to the surface of an enemy planet. Bec de Corbin’s weapons officer blinked and stared as the telemetry readouts for twenty of his warheads went blank. His workstation was one deck above the bomb bay, and - rather imprudently even without knowing what was happening elsewhere among the ships of Intruder One - he reached down and opened the floor hatch for a quick visual inspection. The bomb racks glittered in the dimly lit bay, twenty of his “apples” sliced neatly down their centers, opened like inert training display models. The bombs’ inner workings were clearly visible, right down to the spherical warhead packages which were sliced in half like melons, their fissionable material exposed in neat cross sections, silently, invisibly, and fatally irradiating the only man of the Bee de Corbin’s ten man crew left alive to see them.
The Imperial battleship Tiger lost its Langston Field generator. Of the six operators, the two who were not also claimed by the mesons were looking at it one moment, and the next, it was simply gone, an irregular depression in the deck and bulkhead indicating extra matter that had gone with it. With her Field generator gone, Tiger’s Field, of course, went as well. And without a Field, random meson bursts were no longer necessary to destroy her. Suddenly exposed to the hurricane of subatomic particles surrounding her, the Tiger was stripped of her outer hull and flayed to bits in minutes.
The cruiser Endymion suffered the least damage; her cook was badly scalded when the bottom third of the coffee pot he was standing next to disappeared, and the upper volume of coffee sloshed out into the acceleration-generated gravity of the galley.
Throughout Intruder One, ships of the Imperial task force suffered similar fates. Most escaped the meson bursts entirely, but with rare exceptions like the Endymion, those that did not were crippled or destroyed outright.
III
Aboard Fomoria, Diettinger nodded in satisfaction.
“Intruder One changing course to vector out of the particle beams, Dictator,” Second Rank informed him. “Rising above system plane of ecliptic at six-Gravities acceleration.”
“Signal Barlowe and Freas,” he told his Communications Ranker. “Compensate for Imperial evasive maneuvers. Maintain fire as long as effective.”
The Technical Rankers on Barlowe and Freas were creating convergent cones of particles, which produced a meson propagation field in the area where their “bases” met. They could move that area back and forth between the projecting planets with relative ease - one array simply reduced the projection velocity of its particle stream while the other accelerated or maintained the speed of its own. They could even broaden the field by simultaneously decelerating the beams or intensify such propagation over a smaller area by coordinated acceleration. An oscillation of the arrays could even propagate mesons in a “curtain” between Barlowe and Freas which, though not so dense as the current effect, would still make the path extremely dangerous for vessels operating less than two million kilometers above or below Sauron System’s plane of the ecliptic.
What they could not do, Diettinger knew, was move that curtain to any other part of Sauron System. The Barlowe-Freas line might be deadly, but it was in the end only that; a line. And the battle for Sauron was being waged in three dimensions; what the Imperials could not safely penetrate, they could ultimately go around . . or, in this case, “over.”
And that was exactly what Intruder One was doing now, as it climbed “above” the meson field to renew its drive on the Sauron Homeworld. This portion of the Imperial invasion fleet had lost sixty-percent of her remaining vessels to the meson bursts, but though battered, she was not yet beaten.
So Diettinger unleashed the Damaris.
“Send Damaris” he told his Communications Rank, ”Hourglass North at your disposal. TF Damaris to engage elements Intruder One at will.” There were, perhaps, three Vessel First Ranks in the whole Sauron navy to whom Diettinger would have granted such discretion; Mara Emory of the Damaris was one of them, and the other two - Lucan of the Wallenstein and Vonnerbek of the Leviathan - were both dead.
There is, he reflected, one other; but he is not a Sauron. And that, Diettinger suspected, was only an accident of birth. Diettinger shifted the immersion display to examine events at Ostia.
Twenty-Six
I
“Getting a bit warm here, Mister Willoughby,” Hawksley informed his XO. Falkenberg was engaged on three sides, and dipping into Ostia’s atmosphere wasn’t discommoding her attackers overmuch. The severe attenuation of the Imperial lasers by Ostia’s thick upper atmosphere was helping to keep the Falkenberg’s Langston Field a dull brick red, but that would change as soon as more Imperials joined the engagement, which was bound to happen very soon. It also prevented the Falkenberg from returning fire with any effectiveness.
“Yes, sir, I’ll see what I can do. Helm, fifteen degrees hard right, up forty.”
“Hard right fifteen, up forty, aye.”
Falkenberg’s overpowered frame bucked like a thoroughbred and groaned in protest, but the Field operator was relieved to report they had shaken the Imperial above them. That left only the two to port and starboard.
“Helm,” Hawksley addressed the man directly, and Willoughby moved his acceleration chair aside reflexively; Hawksley was “on deck,” and, when he was, it was best to stay out of his way and find something to hold onto. “On my mark, cut Falkenberg’s forward thrust and rotate her ninety degrees.”
“Forward thrust to zero, starboard ninety, aye sir; awaiting your command.”
Hawksley turned to the weapons control officer. “Mr. Plunkett, arm the starboar
d array.”
Plunkett’s hands flew over his console. “Starboard array armed, sir.”
“Stand by to fire on my mark.”
“Stranding by; awaiting your command.”
“Field status, Mr. Pettigrew.”
“Field level red/two and holding, sir.”
“Brace for violent maneuvering, Mister Willoughby.”
Willoughby keyed the all-stations address system from the console of his acceleration chair: “Now hear this, all hands brace for violent maneuvers, all hands, brace for violent maneuvers.”
“Helm,” Hawksley was counting something down in his head, then “Mark.”
Nothing much appeared to happen. Falkenberg’s internal gravity disappeared along with the rumble of thrusters carried through her deck plates. There was a vague sense of disorientation as she rotated on her axis, the crew sensing their own centers of mass shift with adjustments in personal momentum.
“Stand by, Mr. Plunkett. Helm, six-G thrust on my mark.” Hawksley alternated between his tactical display and the Sauron-built immersion display. In the latter, the Imperial ships had stopped firing on the Falkenberg; the privateer now presented a much smaller target, and they obviously feared firing past her and into each other. All three ships continued their forward motion through Ostia’s atmosphere, except that the Falkenberg’s right angle orientation made her appear to be skidding. Both Imperial craft were vectoring to close-in on the Burgess ship.”Helm, mark.”
“Six-Gs. aye.”
Falkenberg’s engines roared back to life, and Willoughby would have sworn the ship was screaming until he realized that the sound he heard was coming from his own throat; going to six-Gs acceleration at a right angle from zero-G drift was, he’d heard, a pretty good way to die from heart failure.
