Waking Huron from the first decent sleep he’d had since he arrived, she shoved a handwritten note she’d made during the ninety-minute shuttle flight, heart still pounding from her sprint through the ship’s passageways.
Hunched on the edge of his rack and rubbing his eyes in an attempt to decipher the scribbles, he pointed to an underlined word. “Invasion?”
“Through the Rip”—breathing harder and with a face more flushed than he’d ever seen her.
“The Rip . . .” He searched the note for further clues. “How the hell—”
Trin snatched the plaspaper and pointed. “Morus harbors. They’re using Morus harbors sent through in sections. Unmanned.” Morus harbors were repair and refurbishment stations, complete with limited airdock facilities, that were designed to transported. The Rip would bust the hell out of their ships, especially the gravitics, and they’d need the harbors to put things back together. “Caneris has been ordered to secure the jump zone until the invasion fleet arrives. Once it does—and they revive the fleet’s crews and get their ships back on-line—”
“Revive?”
“They’re sending them through in cryo—most of them—maybe not all. That’s not clear. But once they get operational, they’ll invade Eltanin.”
“When?”
“The harbors are due to arrive in two weeks, according to that. With all the delays, Caneris is going to have a hard time making it with all his fleet—”
“He’ll make it with enough,” Huron interrupted, pulling the note from her clenched fingers. “What’s this say here?”
“VanNeimen.”
“They committed the VanNeimen Fleet to this?”
“So it would appear.” Trin was getting her breath and her temper back.
“Then they know about Overlight.” There was no way the Halith Imperial Staff would pull the VanNeimen Fleet out of the Core Systems for this unless they knew Eltanin was undefended. They might still lose Tau Ceti—even Illyria—but the trade for taking Eltanin without a fight would be worth it. And with Eltanin in their possession, they wouldn’t lose those territories for long.
“So it would appear,” Trin repeated. “But they don’t know the new schedule or the new route. Or they would’ve tried this weeks earlier.”
“If they could,” Huron answered, and then realizing he was just being reflexively contrary in the heat of the moment, he shook his head and handed the sheet back. This whole trip had set him back on his heels.
Time to get a fuckin’ grip . . .
He cleared his throat. “They’ll have to refuel, retune—they’ll lose some grav plants—get enough of their people back on-line . . . That’ll take some time.”
“Do you think we can pull something together before it’s too late?”
“Damfino. Maybe from Nedaema? But that would mean—”
“We can’t send this by drone.”
“I know”—ignoring the interruption. Trin knew what pulling a fleet from Nedaema meant, anyway. Gesturing at Trin’s note, he returned to the real point. “Is there any more where that came from?”
“Quite possibly. But we won’t know for a day or so.”
They didn’t have a day or so. He stood up and opened the locker for his uniform. “I’ll leave when the clipper is ready. Get what you learn to us the best way you can. Now that we’re alerted, we have other options to communicate. Ma’am.” With an off-hand wink that made Trin drop her eyes for a split second. She’d seen Rafe naked countless times, but those times hadn’t involved winking.
“Yes. Here. Keep this.” She offered the crumpled sheet. “I should get back. I’m sure they’re getting restless.”
“What?”—accepting it. “You locked them in?”
“How’d you guess.”
* * *
As soon as the entrance cycled closed behind Trin, Huron paged Kris. Her pale cheeks, tangled hair and paler lips told him she’d been sleeping, but not well. Memories of the mornings she woken up that way—and even more, the ones when she hadn’t—lurched uncomfortably in his chest.
“Whazzup?”—mumbled as she blinked and swiped the back of a forearm across her mouth—another habit she’d never lost.
“New agenda.” He crammed the heart of Trin’s news into a couple of terse sentences. He didn’t mean to come out as brusque as it sounded, but Kris didn’t seem to notice.
“Fuck.” She hissed the syllable. “You leavin’ then?”
“As soon as the clipper’s hot.” He hesitated over what he had to say next. “Trin’s gonna hold down the fort here—see what else they find. Maybe something we can exploit. I think we oughta go back together. We’ll be more use there.”
“More use.” Kris looked like she wanted to spit. “Is that an order? Sir?”
His mouth twisted at the jab. “Not quite.”
“How soon?”
“Not for at least a few hours.” Clippers were finicky beasts and you couldn’t rush the tuning.
Kris sat up and shoved her hair back with her good arm. “Okay. Lemme get my shit wired.”
Just over two hours later, Kris tapped on the entry pad to Huron’s berth. He opened it, setting aside his usual breakfast of coffee and orange juice.
“You got a few minutes?”
She looked harried and maybe a bit excited. “Of course.”
“I think I have something.”
The slightly tight timbre of her voice, pitched higher than normal, gave it away: definitely some excitement there. “I’m all ears.”
“What’s the latest on the slaver fleet?”
“According to this”—he tapped the report open in front him (Trin had been feeding him driblets as they were decoded)—“there is no slaver fleet yet. They’re still pulling it together. It seems they aren’t in a hurry. Personally, I’ll bet they’re stalling—waiting until Emir is actually sultan before they commit themselves. If so, I wouldn’t expect them to show up at Nicobar until CENFOR leaves Ivoria.”
“Alright . . .” Her eyes searched the compartment for a moment. Berths on Polidor lacked frills and Rafe’s wasn’t even intended for a senior officer. She also seemed to be a loss over what to do with her hands. “Um . . . you got an astrographic plotting module on that thing?”—finally pointing at his console.
“Should.” One hand stirred the interface. “Here we go.”
“Bring up the Gates, will ya?”
“Sure. By the way, you wanna sit down?” The way she appeared to be vibrating as she stood there made it seem like she was hovering—literally hovering. Pulling a seat away from the bulkhead, she sat, right on the edge. The Apollyon Gates finished loading in the plotting module. He made an open-handed gesture toward it.
“Okay . . .” Kris paused for a breath. “Navigation in the Gates favors small ships, especially near the Rip, right?” He nodded. “And these internodal jumps.” She pointed. “Anything up to a tin can is able to use ’em—maybe even a light cruiser, if she’s got the legs for it—but ships heavier than that are stuck in an RST transit.”
Huron nodded again, beginning to see where she was going with this. Jumping around within a node was a mass issue: hypercapable fighters could commonly do it, making short shallow jumps. Capital ships rarely could, but the Apollyon Gates were an exception here, as in so much else.
“So a force of small, agile ships has a real maneuver advantage over one made up of large ships.”
Clasping his hands to keep from fidgeting, he waited for Kris to cut to the chase. Reading his taut, waiting posture, she did.
“I think with the forces we got—ours and the General’s—we could take on CENFOR.”
“You’re including the ships and crews that are still officially paroled POWs?”
“ ’A course.”
“And Yanazuka’s stealth frigates?”
“Sure.”
“And what do you mean by ‘take on’?” Destroying the Prince Vorland Fleet’s Center Force, or even a major part of it, was obviously out of the qu
estion. They’d need the whole Ionian navy to do that. Aside from the fact the Ionians would never agree to it, most of their navy wasn’t hypercapable.
“I mean . . .” Kris poked the display. “We can hold off Caneris while another group wrecks these harbors as they pop outta the Rip. No harbors, no invasion. Right? Then we get the fuck out.”
“Right.” The plan had a good deal of merit, but he could tell she’d left out a crucial part. A couple of them actually, but the one that came to mind first was that with Caneris pinned in the Gates, another force could transit to Nicobar and take out the slaver fleet. Kris hadn’t brought that up (they’d need Iona’s help there) and if she was being a trifle politic in her presentation, he couldn’t blame her.
To Kris, stopping an invasion of the Homeworlds was nice corollary to stopping an invasion of the Outworlds. At the beginning of the war, the League had given up the Outworlds without a shot being fired—without a shot being attempted to be fired—and while it could be argued that was strategically necessary, sadly few Homeworlders, out of the Service or even in it, even tried to.
For the most part, they just wet their thumb and wiped the Outworlds off the board. (At the time, it barely registered with the media, most of which probably couldn’t find those systems on a map.) Using the invasion of Eltanin as a stalking horse for her real aim struck him as fair game.
But there was that other crucial part. Rotating the display, he zoomed it. “I see your point, but Caneris is going to jump in here, at AG-V. That puts him a short run from Deep Six.” Deep Six was the common name for the jump zone identified as AG-VI, the Rip’s terminus in the Gates. The jump zone could also be called Deep Six for other reasons. That wasn’t neither here nor there right now. “We have to jump in at AG-I. Even we if could get ahead of him, we can’t stop him. There’s no time.”
At nominal acceleration, an RST transit from AG-V to Deep Six was only about seven hours: far too short to do much damage and not nearly long enough for the Morus harbors to arrive. AG-I was at the opposite side of the Gates, about three times the RST distance. Kris knew that as well as he did. She also knew that AG-V was that only jump zone in the Gates that linked to Nicobar. They could hardly plan to send a raiding force to Nicobar through the same zone CENFOR would hop in from.
He sat back, expecting an outside-the-box explanation. Kris did not disappoint him.
“I know. But there’s AG-XI. If he comes in there, he’s looking at a 34-hour RST run to Deep Six. We can hit him all along the way. We can jump—he can’t. Not without breaking up his force, anyway. Even if we can’t stop him entirely, we can slow him down a lot, bleed his small fry, go for mobility kills. And while we’re doing that, shipbreakers can go to town in Deep Six. A jump window for the mass of those harbors they’re sending is around 72 hours. We keep him outta there that long and he might as well go home.”
Seventy-two hours was also enough time to get a force through AG-V to Nicobar, and then out again to Iona via the Acheron. He had to admit she had all this timed out to a fare-thee-well. He also detected the thinking behind it. At the Academy, Kris had beaten the boggart the same way: by going around it. She’d used a jump zone that wasn’t intended to be part of the scenario to position her fighters in the one place they could ambush the opposition. Her ability to mentally calculate jumps had allowed Baz, Tanner and herself to access that zone (a fact the CEF deemed highly classified when they learned about it) and take down a lurking destroyer and a frigate with torpedoes.
In that case, however, Kris had sent herself to the jump zone that made her plan work. Here, she wanted to send Caneris to it. And Caneris would certainly object. Carefully (for that was also obvious and Kris had limited patience in that regard), he pointed this out.
“We hack his nav system,” was the pointblank response. “We’ve got his codes.” True. Also it was also true that in Halith fleets, nav data was linked directly from the flagship to all other ships in company, so hacking the flagship’s nav system would affect the whole force. But in terms of doing what Kris proposed, having access to Caneris’ fleet codes was only half the battle. Maybe less.
“How do we accomplish that?” He knew she’d hacked the environmental systems on Harlot’s Ruse, and she’d once sheepishly admitted to doing the same thing on Deimos, but the nav system of a Halith dreadnought had to be in a whole different league. Didn’t it?
Kris got quiet. Eyes fixed on the desktop now, she twitched her head and a curtain of auburn hair fell across her eyes. Swiping it back with a pinched look, she hesitated another second.
“On Harlot, I cracked the jump convolver. Next time we ran the Traps, I was gonna . . . well, tweak it.” And destroy the ship. He recalled now that Trin had once told him Kris had been close to hacking the jump convolver—not that she’s actually done it. “But, anyhow . . .” She waved her good hand, physically shoving the memory away. “Here’s the deal. You can do this—I think ya can—on normal transit to shift the destination zone. Not a lot—it’s gotta be legit or the system’ll flag. But if they put in AG-V and the system computes for AG-XI instead, that’s all jake. No foul, no flag. See?”
He saw. The only way to see you were going to a different zone was to run a laborious manual check. And they could test it with a simulator. Still . . .
“How do we show this is feasible on Bolimov?”
One shoulder lifted with an escaping breath, the rigidity in her neck muscles giving him a glimpse of what it cost to look those memories in the eye again.
“Harlot’s nav system was Halith-built. Same vintage as Bolimov. Probably has the same holes. They ain’t—aren’t—in the top-layer modules. Way down in the hard core. Unless they’ve done a full core swap, they’d still be there.”
Unconsciously gnawing the inside of his lip, Huron watched the possibilities unfold. Swapping out the entire nav core wasn’t something you did lightly, and usually only when the grav plant itself was being replaced. Yanazuka would know if Bolimov’s grav plant had been replaced or not.
“I can tell ya what to look for. Give it to Kite.” The stealth frigate should have arrived a day-cycle or more ago. “She could do this. Or that lieutenant. If they can get in, won’t take a minute to find it.”
With the lithomorph’s help, one of the other should be able to get in. A transit to the Gates would require retuning their grav plants, and that meant updating the nav system. Quinn had access to stores and if any of those interfaced with the nav system . . .
“Unless they have to extract Corhaine’s operative first.” The note of caution forced itself upon him.
“Yeah . . .” Kris shifted in her seat, almost squirming. “Understand. But what’dya think? Doable? Or are we just fucked?”
Excellent question. Even if Kris’s hacking ideas panned out, they were looking at pulling off a major operation on a fuse so short you could practically clock it with an egg timer. The question of the slaver fleet hadn’t been brought up yet, but he had a good gauge on what that would involve. The Ionians would have to be convinced to relent on the issue of those ships, and there was the question of crews. Yanazuka and Corhaine would have to put their people on the line. How the command was going to be structured and who was going to lead it needed to solved . . .
“No. I wouldn’t say we’re just fucked.”
“You think we can do this?”—like she wasn’t sure what she’d really heard.
He shot her that cockeyed smile “If we don’t try, we won’t know. Besides, we got two weeks.”
~ ~ ~
Day 218 (Late PM)
LSS Kestrel, in orbit
Iona, Cygnus Mariner
Going to seek out Commander Yanazuka, who’d be asked to play a starring role in Kris’s scheme, Huron found her in Kestrel’s CIC, huddled with Lieutenant Commander Caprelli, Kestrel’s TAO, and Senior Lieutenant Ramses, her lead cryptanalyst, both acquaintances from a former cruise. Working with Trin, they’d been exploring how best to preprocess Kestrel’s extensive datastore to
accelerate the decryption efforts.
As he entered, all three looked up; Ramses with an easy-going smile, Caprelli with a somewhat sour one (the last time he’d seen Huron, an incautious bet had cost him a lot of money), and Yanazuka with a typically unreadable expression on her smooth features.
“Glad tidings, Commander?”—Yanazuka’s dark eyes assessing him.
“Remains to be seen. How many minutes can you spare?”
“How many do you need?”
“Start the bidding at quarter of an hour?”
“Good enough.” She turned to Caprelli. “Vince, go ahead and finish this batch and send it when you’re satisfied. Let the bridge know I’m in my quarters and the ‘do not disturb’ lamp is lit. Then get some rest, both of you. No more standing watch-on-watch until further notice.”
“Yes, ma’am” and “aye, ma’am” answered her, according to rank, as she rose to her feet.
“As you please, Commander”—with a nod to Huron, and as he turned, she followed him out of the compartment.
* * *
“Do you mind if I trim while we talk?” Commander Yanazuka asked when they entered what was optimistically termed her “day cabin”.
“Be my guest,” Huron replied, wondering what there might be in this inadequate space to trim. Enlightenment followed when the commander went into her sleeping quarters and returned with an venerable-looking Japanese white pine, about a half-mater tall, and put it on her desk. Taking a pair of small shears in her right hand, she began to studiously clip the limbs. It had never occurred to Huron that Constance Yanazuka might keep bonsai, but on reflection, it did not surprise him either.
“I’ve been neglecting this, I’m afraid,” she added. “What are your tidings?”
“An opportunity I’d like your opinion on.”
“Go ahead.”
To the precise, measured snick of the shears, Rafe unfolded Kris’s scheme. It took thirteen minutes.
Yanazuka touched the razor-edged tips to her lower lip. “She’s right about Bolimov. The grav plant’s original. I can have them go through our database. We might have the exploitation reports.” Bolimov had been captured at Anson’s Deep and returned under the peace terms worked out after Novaya Zemlya. “Not sure how useful they would be, but it can’t hurt to look.”
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 49
