Bauer nodded. “I think I can guess the rest. Where is she now?”
Mirsky shrugged. “Outside the ship, with the dockyard contractor. Missing, probably suited up, don’t know where they are, don’t know what in hell they thought they were doing—the Procurator’s missing too, sir, and there’s an embarrassing hole in our side where there used to be a cabin.”
Slowly, the Commodore began to smile. “I don’t think you need waste any time searching for them, Captain. If we found them, we’d only have to throw them overboard again, what? I suppose the Procurator had a hand in this kangaroo court, didn’t he?”
“Ah, I suppose so, sir.”
“Well, this way we don’t have to worry about the civilians. And if they get a little sunburned during the engagement, no matter. I’m sure you’ll take care of everything that needs doing.”
“Yes, sir!” Mirsky nodded.
“So,” Bauer said crisply, “that’s tied down. Now, in your analysis, we should be entering the enemy’s proximity defense sphere when?”
Mirsky paused for thought. “About two hours, sir. That’s assuming that our emcon was sufficient and the lack of active probes is a genuine indication that they don’t know we’re out here.”
“I’m glad you added that qualifier. What’s your schedule for working up to stations?”
“We’re ready right now, sir. That is, there are some inessential posts that won’t lock down for another hour or so, but the ops crew and black gang are already on combat watch, and gunnery is standing by the weapons. The mess is due to send around some hot food, but in principle, we’re ready for action at a moment’s notice.”
“Very good.” Bauer paused and glanced down at his desk. Rubbed the side of his nose with one long, bony finger. Then he glanced up. “I don’t like this silence, Captain. It stinks of a trap.”
martin and rachel glanced up in reflexive terror, seeking the source of the noise.
Aboard a spacecraft, any noise from outside spells trouble—big trouble. Their lifeboat was drifting toward Rochard’s World at well over solar escape velocity; a BB pellet stationary in their path would rip through them with the force of an antishipping missile. And while warships like the Lord Vanek could carry centimeters of foamed diamond armor and shock bumpers to absorb spallation fragments, the lifeboat’s skin was thin enough to puncture with a penknife.
“Masks,” snapped Rachel. A mess of interconnected transparent bags with complex seals and some sort of gas tank inside coiled from the console opposite Martin and bounced into his lap; for her part, she reached behind her seat and pulled out a helmet. Yanking it on over her head, she let its rim melt into her leotard, dripping sealant down her neck. Crude icons blinked inside the visor. She breathed out, relieved, hearing the fan whine behind her right ear. Beside her, Martin was still stuffing himself into the transparent cocoon. She looked up. “Pilot. Topside sensor view, optical, center screen.”
“Oh shit,” Martin said indistinctly.
The screen showed an indistinct blur that moved against a backdrop of pinprick stars. As they watched, the blur receded, dizzyingly fast, and sharpened into a recognizable shape. Moving.
She turned and stared at Martin. “Whoever he is, we can’t leave him out there,” he said.
“Not with a rescue beacon,” she agreed grimly. “Pilot. Oxygen supply. Recalculate on basis of fifty percent increase in consumption. How does it affect our existing survival margin?”
An amber GANT chart flickered across the screen. “Bags of room,” Martin commented. “What about landfall? Hmm.” He prodded at his PA. “I think we can make it,” he added. “Mass ratio isn’t so much worse.”
“Think or know?” she replied pointedly. “If we get halfway down and run out of go-juice, it could put a real damper on this day-trip.”
“I’m aware of that. Let me see . . . yeah. We’ll be okay, Rachel. Whoever designed this boat must have thought you’d be carrying one hell of a diplomatic bag with you. More like a wardrobe.”
“Don’t say that.” She licked her lips. “Question two. We take him on board. How are we going to stop him if he decides to get in the way?”
“I think you get to use your feminine wiles on him,” Martin deadpanned.
“I should have known you’d come up with something like that.” Wearily, she groped for the stun gun. “This won’t work in vacuum, you know? And it’s not a good idea to use the sucker in a confined space either.”
“Talking of confined spaces.” Martin pointed to the rather basic mass detector display. “Twelve kilometers and drifting. We don’t want to be this close when they spin up for combat.”
“No, we don’t,” Rachel agreed. “Okay. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. You got confirmation on suit integrity? Once we vent, you won’t be able to move much.” Martin nodded, held up a balloon-bloated glove. Rachel cranked open her oxygen regulator and yawned, deliberately, hunting the roof of the cabin for an attachment point for her survival tether. “Okay. Pilot, EVA cycle. Prepare to depressurize cabin.”
an alarm pinged in the operations room.
“Contact.” Lieutenant Kokesova leaned over his subordinate’s shoulder and stared at the gauges on his console. Lights blinked violet and green. “I say again, contact.”
“Accepted.” Lieutenant Marek swallowed. “Comms, please signal captain to the ops room and condition red.”
“Aye aye, sir.” A red light began to strobe by the doorway. “Any specifics?” asked Marek.
“Tracking. I have a definite fusion source, came up about two-zero seconds ago. I thought at first it was a sensor malfunction but it’s showing blue-shifted Balmer lines, and it’s bright as hell—black body temperature would be in the five-zero-zero M-degree range. Traveling at well above local stellar escape velocity.”
“Very good.” Marek tried to lean back in the command chair but failed, unable to force himself to relax that much. “Time to get a solution on it?”
“Any minute.” Lieutenant Kokesova, tech specialist, demonstrating his proficiency once again. “I’ll see if I can pickle some neutrinos for you.”
The door opened, and the guard beside it came to attention. Lieutenant Marek spun around and saluted stiffly. “Sir!”
“What’s the situation?”
“Humbly report we have a provisional fix on one incoming, sir,” said Marek. “We’re still waiting for a solution, but we have a blue-shifted fusion torch. Looks like we’re looking straight up their endplate mirror.”
Mirsky nodded. “Very good, Lieutenant. Is there anything else?”
“Anything else?” Marek was flustered. “Not unless something’s come up—”
“Contact!” It was the same sensor op. He looked up apologetically. “Begging your pardon, sir.”
“Describe.” It was the Captain’s turn.
“Second fusion source, about two M-kilometers above and south of the first. It’s tracking on a parallel course. I have a preliminary solution, looks like they’re vectoring to pass us at about one-zero-zero K-klicks, decelerating from eight-zero-zero k.p.s. Time to intercept, two K-seconds.”
“Any other activity?” asked Mirsky.
“Activity, sir?”
“You know. Anomalous lateral acceleration. Jamming, comms traffic, luminous pink tentacles, whatever. Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, then.” Mirsky stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Something doesn’t add up.”
The door to the bridge opened again; Lieutenant Helsingus came in. “Permission to take fire control, sir?”
“Do it.” Mirsky waved his hand. “But first, riddle me this: Why by the Emperor’s beard can we see two drive torches, but nothing else?”
“Ah—” Marek shut up.
“Because,” Commander Vulpis said over Mirsky’s shoulder, “it’s an entrapment, Captain.”
“I don’t know how you could possibly imagine such a thing; they’re obviously inviting us to a dinner dance.” Mirsky grinne
d nastily. “Hmm. You think they ditched a bunch of mines before they fired up the torches?”
“Quite possibly.” Vulpis nodded. “In which case, we’re going to get hit in about”—he punched at his board—“two-five-zero seconds, sir. We won’t be in range of anything you can cram on a mine for very long, but at this speed, even a cloud of sand would make a mess of us.”
Mirsky leaned forward. “Guns. Point defense to automatic! Comms, please request an ack from the commodore’s staff, and from Kamchatka and Regina. Make sure they’re watching for mines.” He smiled grimly. “Time to see what they’re made of, I think. Comms, my compliments to the Commodore, and please say that I am requesting permission to terminate emission control for defensive reasons.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Emission controls were desperately important to a warship. Active sensors like radar and lidar required an echo from a foreign body to confirm its presence; but a sufficiently distant (or stealthed) body wouldn’t return an echo loud enough to pick up. Sending out the initial pulse gave away a ship’s position with great accuracy to any enemy who happened to be stooging around outside the return range but within passive detection range. By approaching Rochard’s World under emission control, the battle squadron had attempted to conceal themselves. The first ship to start actively radiating would make its presence glaringly obvious—painting a target on itself in the process of lighting up the enemy.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Marek?”
“What if there are more than two ships out there? I mean, we carry probes and a shuttle. What if we’re up against some kind of larger force, and the two we can see are just a decoy?”
Captain Mirsky grinned humorlessly. “That’s not a possibility, Lieutenant, it’s a near certainty.”
“Mine intercept waypoint one, four minutes.” Vulpis read off timings from the glowing nixie tubes before him. He glanced up at the command chair; Captain Mirsky, seated there, nodded.
“Weapons, arm torpedoes, stand by on missiles. Remotes, status on red, blue, orange.” Mirsky was calm and collected, and his presence was a settling influence on the otherwise tense ops room crew.
The red telephone rang, jangling. Mirsky listened, briefly, then replaced the handset. “Radar. You have permission to radiate.”
Radar One: “Going active now, sir. One-zero-second pulse-doppler train, four octave agile spread, go to jamming sequence alpha afterward. Decoys, sir?”
“You may launch decoys.” Mirsky folded his hands in his lap and gazed straight ahead at the main screen. Beneath the calm exterior, he was seriously worried; he was gambling his life and his ship—and all those aboard her—on a hypothesis about the nature of their pursuers. He wasn’t confident, but he was sufficiently well informed to make an educated guess about what was after them. Maybe the UN woman had the right idea, he thought gloomily. He glanced around the ops room. “Commander Helsingus. Status, please?”
The bearded gunnery officer nodded. “First four rounds loaded as per order, sir. Two self-propelled torpedoes with remote ignition patches on my board, followed by six passive-powered missiles rigged for EMP in a one-zero-degree spread. Laser grid programmed for tight point-defense. Ballistic point-defense programs loaded and locked.”
“Good. Helm?”
“Holding steady on designated fleet approach pattern, sir. No evasion authorized by staff.”
“Radar?”
Lieutenant Marek stood up. He looked tense and drawn, new lines forming around his eyes. “Humbly report, sir, active is on cold clamp. Passive shows nothing yet, except on infrared trace, but that should give us a fix in”—he glanced down—“about three minutes and counting. Decoy is overboard, running out to radiation rangepoint one.” The decoy—a small unpowered drone trailing behind the warship on a ten-kilometer-long tether—was preparing to radiate an EM signature identical to that of the ship: synchronized by interferometer with the active sensors aboard the Lord Vanek, it would help confuse any enemy sensors as to the exact position of the battlecruiser.
“Good.” Mirsky looked at the clock beside the main forward display, then glanced down at the workstation before him. Time for the checklist. “At waypoint one, be prepared to commence burn schedule one on my word. That’s four-zero gees continuous until we build up to six-zero k.p.s. then shut down, full damping, course three-six-zero by zero by zero on current navigation lock. Comms, notify all elements of squadron one. Guns, at time zero plus five seconds, be prepared to drop torps one and two, on my word. Comms, signal torpedo passive drop to Squadron One. Please confirm.”
“Aye aye, sir. One and Two”—Helsingus snapped a brass switch over—“are armed for passive drop at time plus five.”
“Good.”
“Time to possible mine intercept, two minutes, sir.”
“Thank you Nav Two, I can see the clock from here.” Mirsky gritted his teeth. “Helm, status.”
“Program locked. Main engine is available for burn in five-zero seconds, sir.”
“Radar, update.”
“We should pick ’em up in about two minutes, sir. No emissions—” Lieutenant Marek stopped. “What’s that?”
Radar Two: “Contact, sir! Lidar registers ping one. Waiting for—”
An alarm shrilled. “Something just pinged us, sir,” said Marek.
Everybody except the radar techs were staring at Mirsky. He caught Helsingus’s eye and nodded. “Track beta.”
“Aye aye, sir. Guns Two, track beta.” An almost imperceptible thump shuddered through the structure of the battlecruiser as the main axial launch coil spat twenty tonnes of intricately machined heavy metal and fuel out through the nose of the ship. A second bump signaled the release of the second torpedo. Drifting unpowered, cold but for their avionics packages, they would wait behind when the Lord Vanek began to accelerate.
“Minus three-zero seconds,” called Nav Two.
“Beg to report on the contact, sir,” said Marek.
“Speak, Nav.”
“We managed to get a look at the pulse train on the contact, and it looks, um, strange. Noisy, if you follow my meaning; they’ve done a good job of concealing their recognition signature.”
“One-zero seconds.”
“All posts switch to plan two,” said Captain Mirsky. “Nav, pass that contact info on to Kamchatka and Ekaterina. Get anything you can off them.” He picked up the phone to notify his squadron captains of the impending change of plan.
“Aye aye, sir. Plan two burn commencing in five . . . two, one, now.” There was no change evident in the ops room, no shaking or shuddering or sudden leaden-limbed feeling of acceleration, but inside the guts of the starship, the extremal black hole twisted in sudden torment; the Lord Vanek fell forward at full military acceleration, four hundred meters per second squared, more than forty gees.
Another alarm trilled. Nav: “Full scan running.” Twenty gigawatts of laser light beamed out in all directions, a merciless glare bright enough to melt steel at a range of kilometers. Down in the bowels of the ship, heat exchanges glowed red-hot, flashing water into saturated high-pressure steam and venting it astern; this close to combat, running out the huge, vulnerable heat exchangers would be suicidal.
Guns: “Track beta launch commencing.” This time a real bump-and-grind made the ship shudder; the two missiles Helsingus had preloaded back when they’d been on the track alpha heading. As they hurtled ahead of the ship, a tenth of its total laser output focused up their tails, energizing their reaction mass.
This was the time of maximum danger, and Mirsky did his best to maintain a confident demeanor for the benefit of his crew. As the Commodore had put it in the privacy of his staff briefing room: “If they’re smart, they’ll send out just enough assets to make us reveal ourselves, then use whatever they’ve got in orbit to dump a snowstorm of mines in our path. They know where we’re going; that’s half the problem of pinpointing us. When we start radiating they’ll get their solution—and it’ll be a q
uestion of how much pounding they can hand out, and how much we can take.”
Attacking a fixed point—in this case, the low-orbit installations around a planet—was traditionally reputed to be the hardest task in deep-space warfare. The defenders could concentrate forces around it and rapidly bring defensive missile and laser screens to bear on anyone approaching; and if the attackers wanted to know just what they were attacking, they’d have to hang out high-energy signposts for the defenders to take aim on.
Seconds later, Mirsky breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “Point defense reports all quiet, sir. We’re inside their envelope, but they don’t seem to have dropped a minefield.” Drifting mines wouldn’t follow the deceleration curve of the enemy ships; they’d come slamming in way ahead of the warships that had dropped them overboard at peak velocity.
“That’s good,” Mirsky murmured. His eyes focused on the two red points on the main plotting screen. They were still decelerating, painfully fast; almost as if they were aiming for a zero-relative-velocity slugging match. The Lord Vanek’s two missiles crawled toward them—in reality, boosting at a savage thousand gees, already over 1000 k.p.s. Presently, they shut down and coasted, retaining only enough reaction mass for terminal maneuvering when they got within ten seconds of the enemy. Ahead of the Lord Vanek, the glinting purple crosses of the unpowered torpedoes fell forward toward the enemy.
A minute later, Gunnery Two spoke up. “I’ve lost missile one, sir. I can ping it, but it doesn’t respond.”
“Odd—” Mirsky’s brow furrowed; he glanced at the doomsday clock. The battlecruiser was closing on the destination at a crawl, just 40 k.p.s. The enemy was heading toward them at better than 200 k.p.s., decelerating, but their thrust was dropping off—if this continued, closing unpowered at 250 k.p.s., their paths would intersect in about 500 seconds, and they’d be within missile-powered flight range 200 seconds before that. These long, ballistic shots weren’t expected to cause real damage, but if they came close, they would force the enemy to respond. But missile one had been more than 50,000 kilometers from the target—
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