Gregor had a feeling of inward hollowness, of unreality. And so it seems we are at war, just like that. But at war with whom?
The flagship was perhaps ten light minutes from the battle when the serious shooting started. Precisely who had fired next, after that first exchange, was more than the diplomat could have said. Radigast now had the Morholt darting closer at the highest subluminal velocity her captain would allow, accepting some element of danger from microcollisions in normal space.
Gregor, hurriedly revisiting his cabin to find and put on the spacesuit that was now required, found Luon looking overwhelmed. Her expression might have been appropriate if they had been ordered to abandon ship. Warning messages on intercom had reached this room and all the others. Raising her haunted eyes to her grandfather as he entered, she said quietly: “The war has started.” It was not a question.
Gregor was brisk but calm. “I’d like to be able to contradict you, but I can’t. Where’s your spacesuit, girl? Come on, there’ll be at least one stowed in your cabin somewhere. One size fits all. Find a suit and put it on.”
Even as he spoke, he was moving to his room’s closet and getting out the suit he had already noted there. Dragging the bulky sections with him, he sank down wearily on his comfortable berth, thinking how the smooth artificial gravity worked to make the whole business feel deceptively normal. Normal, and unreal at the same time.
Luon was still sitting where she had been, looking at him as if she expected to be told that everything was going to be fine.
Gregor said: “You’re right. Fighting has broken out, though it doesn’t seem to be the war we were all expecting. But cheer up! We haven’t lost yet. And we’re not going to lose, unless a lot of enemy reinforcements suddenly show up. Now, do you mean to ask me again about the hostages?”
Her eyes accused him. “Of course, that’s what I want to know about. What’s happened to them?”
“Nothing at all that I know of.” Once he got started putting on the suit, the proper method came back to him. “My dear, the Citadel must have gone on full alert. So, they are sitting inside the double or triple walls of a state-of-the-art shelter, dug down into the bedrock of what may well be the most strongly defended planet in the Galaxy. And this intruder, whatever it is, is not even moving toward Timber.” Gregor paused. “I get the impression that you have some special interest in them.”
Her voice was suddenly so soft that it was hard to hear. There was water in her eyes, threatening to overflow. “In one of them I do.”
“Aha. How is that possible?” But even as Gregor spoke, he thought he knew. He ought to have realized it sooner, but his mind had been on other matters.
She had just opened her mouth, as if to continue with her revelation, when an abrupt twitch shook the hull and the cabin walls around them, like the first half-second of a severe earthquake. Then everything was steady once more. Luon jumped up, startled. “What was that?”
“That was only routine. But it means we’re starting to move more quickly.” Gregor could easily identify the slight shifting sensation as the dreadnought’s artificial gravity went into high gear, maintaining stasis, milliseconds before the first burst of combat acceleration grabbed hold. The system worked, it virtually always did, or there would be few live travelers in space. Even in the midst of intense maneuvers, human bodies rode the ship in armchair comfort, instead of being mangled by g-forces. Should the AG cushion fail entirely, no padded couch would have been of the slightest use against the acceleration that a battleship’s drive could pull. It was the occasional partial stutters, often measured only in microseconds, that the couches were meant to guard against.
She had got as far as the doorway between rooms, where she paused momentarily, looking back over her shoulder, holding on to the frame. “What’s going to happen, Gramp?”
Gregor was suited though not yet helmeted, sitting relaxed, which took some conscious effort. He kept his voice calm and reasonable. “We’ll be all right. I’ll tell you about it. But while we talk, get your spacesuit out, it’s probably in the back of your closet. Then put it on, over your regular clothes, it’s pretty much self-explanatory.”
When his granddaughter began to move again, he went on. “You ask what’s going to happen. I expect that in another few minutes, maybe half an hour, the admiral and his fleet are going to kill that thing, whatever it is, turn it into a cloud of vapor. That’s the consensus among the experts, and they generally know what they’re doing. Then we’ll try to find some little pieces of it still intact, and analyze them in an effort to figure out where it came from. Now get into that spacesuit.”
Luon had the suit, and was carrying it back to the doorway between rooms, while it murmured recorded instructions at her. She said: “But it’s so big.”
He didn’t think she meant the suit. “It is. But we have a whole battle fleet deployed against it. Our ships may be comparatively small, but I assure you they are very powerful. I’ve been aboard during some of the maneuvers.” Glancing through the open door between rooms, Gregor observed with approval that already his granddaughter had almost completely wrestled herself into the spacesuit. Suiting up was, he thought, almost certainly an unnecessary precaution, but aboard ship you obeyed orders. Gregor caught her looking extremely solemn for once, and gave the girl what he hoped was a reassuring nod.
The admiral had not ordered him to stay away from the bridge, so of course he was soon making his way back. Reaching the command center, fully and properly suited and helmeted, he found the couch he had used still waiting for him.
Settling in, he soon observed that, as was the norm in simulators and live ship maneuvers, such verbal exchanges as took place between crew members were lagging notably behind the action. The real command and control decisions were being made in helmets and consoles, organic brains and optelectronic, at a speed that left mere speech a long way behind.
Since they were approaching the scene of fighting at high speed, the tempo of the action that people on board observed was notably compressed.
Gregor soon discovered that without interfering with business he could talk on intercom to Luon in her cabin. He tried to keep on being reassuring. “We may not want to destroy it utterly. The more that’s left of it, the easier it should be to find out where, and who”
The interruption felt and sounded like some god of superb strength, swinging a house-sized sledgehammer against the Morholt’s outer hull. It was as if the enemy had waited until the battleship got in nice and close before it really opened up.
Nearby, Radigast seemed for a moment completely paralyzed. Then he burst out on helmet intercom: “Great motherless gods of the Galaxy. What was that?”
In the background, some defensive systems officer was intoning, like a litany: “Shields up. Shields up!”
“Trying to get them back up, sir. The generators’ve overloaded”
Slam, and slam again
The images on the central holostage were dancing, scrambled
Slam and crunch
When the heavy ships began to fire at the intruder it had replied at once, with devastating effect and shocking power, Gregor was drifting, half dazed, he had the impression that the giant who swung the hammer had dropped the weapon and made a fist, and was rhythmically squeezing his acceleration couch, trying to knead the padding and its contents, his body, into a paste
For a moment Gregor had totally blacked out. But for a moment only.
The dreadnought rocked under yet another impact, after the hits that had already flattened its full shields almost to nothingness. This one hit metal, and Gregor thought that he was dead. Alarms were chanting, shrilling, bellowing. The gravity stuttered, horribly, setting up a bad vibration, and for a long moment all the lights went out. All except for the glowing holostage, where symbols jittered in a manic dance. In the darkness a deep male voice was calling out on intercom, hoarse sounds already gone over the edge and into panic.
Alarms had settled into an endless chorus. L
ight flared intensely, died away. The gravity twitched with real violence, barely fending off a killing shock, and something that flew past Gregor in the darkness spattered drops across the faceplate of his helmet. When the emergency lights came on, a moment later, he could see that it was blood
CHAPTER SEVEN
For the next minute or two, the communications beams flickering among the various surviving elements of the Twin Worlds fleet carried little from ship to ship but reports of disaster and appeals for help.
Everyone was ignoring Gregor for the moment. Captain Charlie was concentrating on giving orders for damage control inside the flagship, while the admiral was trying to get his communications net restored.
Wreaking havoc on the fleet in general, the enemy had broken through the gauntlet of heavy warships waiting to intercept it, so that it was between the surviving ships and the planet Prairie. An attempted blockade by the bulk of the Twin Worlds fleet had hardly slowed it.
A medirobot had come out of the bulkhead somewhere, like a huge benevolent spider springing from ambush-the more seriously wounded had been taken to sick bay. A couple of regular maintenance robots pressed into service on the job reported calmly that they were having trouble distinguishing the wounded from the dead.
Gregor had the feeling that time was moving around him in jerks and starts. Astonishment and outrage were quickly succeeded by a disconnected and useless babble that sounded dangerously like panic.
A few people, including the admiral despite his wound, were managing to keep relatively cool.
Turning his helmeted head as far as he could inside the constraints of the acceleration couch, taking in the scene around him, then staring at the bridge’s central holostage, Gregor had to remind himself that he was watching reality and not a nightmare. The ordered dance of symbols there had been restored, and seemed to show that the stranger’s beams and projectiles were knocking the small interceptors out of its way as if it were brushing off mosquitoes.
These things could not happen, but they were happening. In the next minute, the monster was treating several destroyers with scarcely greater courtesy.
Reports kept coming in, numbers adding up. Perhaps a third of the main battle fleet of the Twin Worlds, from dreadnoughts to scoutships, had been destroyed. Another third had sustained serious damage, and the whole fleet had been driven back.
The reports from damage control got still worse before they got better. A few more minutes passed before Gregor could be certain that the Morholt was going to survive its first brush with the casual, methodical stranger’s heavy armament. The dreadnought’s shields had only partially withstood the impact of the enemy’s first counterpunch, and not without allowing serious damage to the armored hull.
Slowly, with Radigast as the leading example, the people still functioning managed to get control of themselves and their equipment. Jockeying the Morholt and his other surviving battleships to what he hoped would be their optimal range against this opponent, the admiral ordered a new formation, in preparation for an all-out attack.
Two other dreadnoughts were sliding into position, one on either side of the flagship, only about a thousand kilometers between them.
First one of their captains and then the other, the images of helmeted heads labeled with the wearers’ names, appeared briefly on the holostage of the dreadnought’s bridge, acknowledging the admiral’s orders.
One captain sounded on the verge of weeping. He began to recount his version of what had just happened.
“I can see what’s happening, damn it!” Radigast seemed to be trying to spit, but he had nothing in his mouth. “You’ve still got weapons on that motherless tub of yours, get ready to use ‘em!”
The answer was lost in a burst of noise.
Radigast studied the holostage, flipping it through a series of different presentations, taking time to consider his strategic position. He hesitated only a moment longer, then gave up trying to guard the empty space on the far side of the sun. Tersely he ordered the dispatch of couriers to begin the process of calling in all but the thinnest skeleton force of early warning scout-ships from the outer reaches. The most distant of them would need more than a standard day to reach the neighborhood of the inner planets.
“It’s not the motherless outer system defenses we’ve got to worry about, Charlie. Not anymore.”
He began to order all the assets that he had to close on the vicinity of Prairie at top speed.
Gregor could hear the crackling answer from some other ship. “All the scoutships, sir? What about”
“Leave skeleton patrols only. Get everything else in here, close to the inner planets, quick.”
At last the monstrous trespasser made a serious adjustment in the pace of its advance. It was as if it had finally been compelled to acknowledge the presence of the battleships and cruisers that were deploying at the best speed they could manage, to englobe the foe.
Three battleships, including the flagship, were trying to overtake the monster, get themselves once again directly between it and Prairie.
Charlie was in conference with armaments and armor people, designing a drastic readjustment of the flagship’s defensive force-fields.
As the spaceborne gun platforms eased within optimum range, the hordes of missiles already unleashed closed on their target. A minute of suspense dragged past, and then another, as people braced themselves for another exchange of fire.
In the previous clash, the enemy seemed to have accurately taken the measure of the fleet opposing, and to have made its own adjustments accordingly. Because only now did the full storm break.
The result of the next exchange of blows was a stunning disaster for the human side. More ships were totally destroyed than in the first clash. It still seemed incredible to Gregor, but Radigast’s flagship was again hit, and hit hard, almost at once. Again the defensive forcefields, even in their new configuration, could only partially protect the hull. This enemy had to be stronger, incredibly stronger, than any Twin Worlds or Huvean battlewagon ever imagined, let alone designed.
The bright glow of the holostage, flashing out in many colors, painted the admiral’s rigid and lined countenance, behind the statglass faceplate of his helmet, into the likeness of some ghastly clown.
A separate holostage was doing its best to bring in true video of what was happening within a kilometer outside the hull. Beam weapons flared against forcefield shielding, evoking a rainbow of bright colors.
To the horror and amazement of the people surrounding Gregor on the bridge, the thing’s defenses seemed all but impervious to everything that an entire human fleet had been able to throw at it.
Gregor, with as good a view as anyone of the holostage from his position near the admiral’s side, shared their astonishment and shock. For a long moment the fear of death, that he thought he had put behind him years ago, came ravening up out of old concealment.
The flagship was hit again, enemy beams heterodyning to pry apart the woven layers of space within her shields.
Radigast’s voice had settled into a dry, emotionless rasping. “What’s holding you up, Arms? Fire!”
“Sir, we need to keep full power on what’s left of our shields”
“Fire! Fire again, damn it!”
Discovering that by some quirk the intercom to his granddaughter’s cabin was still functioning, Gregor did what he could without leaving the bridge to see that Luon was all right. She reported being physically comfortable in her suit and helmet, and said her bunk had told her how to use it as a kind of acceleration couch. Gravity in the cabin was still holding; the AG system actually captured and stored energy from intrusive g-forces, converting the energy to an even firmer hold. But there were limits. Metal somewhere in the ship’s enormous hull screamed in torture and gave way, and each moment seemed like the last of life.
Gregor found that he was clenching his eyes shut, while the fingers of both hands dug into the arms of the acceleration couch. Desperate to know what was happening
, he forced his lids open.
And then, for a while, the worst seemed to be over aboard the Morholt. In much less than a standard minute of time, a spherical volume of space perhaps a million kilometers in diameter, with the stranger at its center and the Twin Worlds fleet scattered about in its outer volume, had turned very nearly opaque with glare and smoke, sleets of glowing particles and radiation. The unaided eye could no longer find the shapes of the individual machines inside.
Like some invulnerable monster out of a bad dream, the stranger was coming on. In Gregor’s first glance at the new image, he was able to detect no sign at all of damage from the pounding the enemy must have absorbed, as the target of a whole fleet’s beams and missiles. Readings showed that it had hardly deviated from its original course toward Prairie, though that progress had been substantially slowed.
“I can’t believe this.”
The armaments officer was on the horn again. “Sir, look.”
The fight dragged on for an hour, and then for a little more, most of it sheer nightmare for the human crews and their helpless passengers. The fog of battle expanded to fill cubic light minutes of space, and at the same time began to be frayed at the edges by solar wind. But at the end of that time, the majority of the Twin Worlds battle fleet, ships large and small taking part in the attack, had been destroyed. A few had been abandoned, reduced to drifting hulks while their crews in escape boats tried to decide which way to go.
Additional ships had blown up. The two or three dreadnoughts not yet blown up or abandoned, the flagship included, were heavily damaged, at least one orbiting out of control. On all of them, damage control parties were fighting to save what was left.
Again the wounded, in the hard-hit compartments of the ship, were being carried off to medirobots.
Someone else, just down on the next lowest level of the bridge, was loudly being sick.
What harm might have been done to the enemy was difficult to see. It was still going where it wanted to go, doing what it wanted to do, with only small distractions and delays, when necessary, chewing its way through the Twin Worlds fleet like a saw through wood.
Berserker Prime Page 8
