The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

by Jack Campbell

  He knew what she meant. “The Syndics haven’t done that before,” Geary said. “They haven’t sent ships on deliberate suicide runs.”

  “The Syndic warships at Lakota were ordered to destroy the hypernet gate there—”

  “Those warships didn’t know that was a suicide mission!”

  She pointed to her display. “How large a crew does a courier ship need for a one-way mission?”

  He took a second to reply. “One.”

  “Do you think the Syndics could find twenty maniacs willing to die for their CEOs?” Desjani asked. “Or some poor saps given a chance to wipe out their family’s debt or get a relative out of a death sentence at one of the Syndic labor camps? I don’t know. I do know the Syndics have often shown the willingness to sacrifice their ‘workers’ at the drop of a hat. It’s a suicide attack. That’s how the Syndics are balancing the odds since you beat the hell out of them using conventional tactics. Is there any other possible mission those ships coming at us could be carrying out?”

  “No.” And at the rate they were coming, those ships would be plunging into his formation in about twenty minutes.

  FIVE

  ACCORDING to the terms of the peace treaty with the Syndicate Worlds, he couldn’t simply fire on unarmed ships broadcasting merchant identification. Geary didn’t bother saying that. Tanya knew it, and so did everybody else. Including the Syndic leaders who had ordered this operation. If those leaders had expected him to hesitate, to question what to do under these circumstances, they had made a mistake. “Those ships are operating in an aggressive and dangerous manner,” Geary announced for the benefit of the official record. “We have a right to act in self-defense. Broadcast a warning that any ship entering the weapons engagement zone for any of our ships will be fired upon. Repeat the broadcast eight times, on all standard safety and coordination circuits.”

  As Desjani’s comm watch-stander scrambled to get that sent, Geary tapped his fleetwide comm control again. “All units in the First Fleet. The twenty-three courier ships accelerating toward an intercept with our formation have been warned to stay clear of us. If they continue on tracks toward us, they are to be regarded as hostile. Any of them that enter your weapons engagement envelopes are to be engaged with all weapons until disabled or destroyed.”

  Another call, this time internal. “Emissary Rione and Emissary Charban, tell the Dancers that these ships are dangerous. Say they’re out of control, say they’re hostile, say whatever works to convince the Dancers that those courier ships might collide with them unless the Dancers evade for all they are worth.”

  Rione answered, her voice tinged with resignation. “We will try. Even at the best of times, with all the time in the world, the Dancers don’t always listen to us. But we will try.”

  “Thank you,” Geary said, putting feeling into the words.

  “Lock weapons on those ships and prepare to engage,” Desjani told her crew, then gave Geary a measured look. “Just like old times. Kill the Syndics before they kill us. But. The Syndics know the odds of those ships getting through our defensive fire if they’re not moving fast enough. They’ll accelerate to the maximum velocity they can in the time and distance available in order to screw with our firing solutions.”

  He grunted a vague reply as he frowned at his display. The courier ships were simply small crew, storage, and command compartments fastened to the front of outsized main propulsion units and a power core suitable for a ship twice their size. Built to move fast, they were already up to point one light speed and still accelerating.

  In jump space, human ships did not actually travel faster than light. They went around that speed limit by going somewhere else, a different dimension or different universe. The experts still didn’t know which of those jump space represented, but they did know that jump space was a place where distances were much smaller than in our own universe. A week in jump space would take a ship the same distance as years of travel in normal space. Oddly enough, it didn’t matter how fast a ship was going when it entered and exited jump space. The length of the journey depended solely on the distance to be covered.

  A hypernet avoided light-speed problems by another method, using quantum physics, which literally tossed human craft into a bubble of nothing that was nowhere, created at one gate and eventually reappearing at another linked gate without technically moving.

  Both of those things were weird.

  But what happened when human spacecraft pushed their velocities higher and higher in normal space was even weirder. Relativity had predicted the strange physical results long before humans could experience them. Objects accelerating toward light speed gained mass while time slowed inside them, all relative to the outside world. To an outside observer, the objects also got shorter as they moved faster. In theory, at the speed of light, the outside universe would see a ship with infinite mass, zero length, and no time passing inside it.

  To those inside the ship, length and mass and time all seemed the same as always, but their vision of the outside would alter. The universe outside their ship grew more distorted to them the faster they went. This relativistic distortion became a significant problem at point one light speed, though human-designed sensors and combat systems could compensate accurately for relativistic errors up to point two light speed. Beyond that, the errors grew too large for existing human technology to compensate for, and the already incredibly difficult problem of hitting an object flying past at tens of thousands of kilometers a second became what fleet engineers described using the technical term TDH, which stood for Too Damned Hard.

  Based on the projections of the fleet combat systems, those courier ships would have accelerated up past point two light speed by the time they got close enough for the weapons of Geary’s warships to fire at. Since Geary’s own ships were still moving at nearly point one light speed, that would produce a closing rate exceeding point three light speed, drastically impacting the accuracy of weapons fire.

  Desjani bit her lip and shook her head. “We could slow down to reduce the relative velocity, but that would make it harder for our ships to evade any attempts at ramming.”

  He nodded. “We’d have to go to a dead stop to get the relative speed of engagement down to point two light, and there’s not enough time to slow the fleet that much even if we wanted to do that. If we keep our velocity up, it will make scoring hits a lot harder, but make dodging attacks easier, and the courier ships will have more difficulty hitting their own targets. I’m going to accelerate at the last minute. The extra velocity won’t cause more accuracy problems than we’re already going to face, and might throw off the ramming courses of the courier ships.”

  Those small courier ships were still coming, still accelerating, and the projected paths for the Syndic “merchant” craft were now, without doubt, aimed straight into the heart of the Alliance formation, where Invincible made perhaps the largest sitting duck in history. Are they aiming for Invincible? Or for the Dancers who, for their own reasons, have been clustered near Invincible lately? Or for the assault transports and auxiliaries, which are also in that part of the formation? There are enough of those couriers to target almost all of them. “All units in First Fleet, the ships heading for us are assessed to be on suicide runs. Vary vectors at random intervals to confuse their attack runs, and make wider individual vector changes when it’s too late for the attacker to compensate. All units, screen the assault transports, auxiliaries, and Invincible.”

  “You’ve done all you can,” Desjani murmured, her gaze riveted on her display.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “That depends how you define ‘enough.’” Her eyes moved to meet his. “We used to lose half of our ships when we won. We may lose some now. That’s up to the living stars and the skill of each ship’s commanding officer.”

  Geary didn’t answer, wanting to deny that reality but unable to muster any arguments. Something nagged at him, though, one more thing that might help but remained stubbornly just
out of his mental grasp.

  Then he got it, barely in time to do anything about it. Geary’s eyes fixed on the estimated time to intercept with the courier ships, a number that was sweeping downward so fast the digital readout seemed to blur. “All units in First Fleet, execute Modified Formation Foxtrot Three at time four one.”

  “Mod Foxtrot Three?” Desjani asked, her own eyes not leaving her display. “Oh. That might help.”

  “It can’t hurt.” Geary paused, trying to time his next command, then tapped his comm controls. “All units in First Fleet, immediate execute accelerate to point one five light speed.”

  They wouldn’t make it. Even the ships capable of the fastest acceleration, Geary’s battle cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers, would barely have begun leaping forward at increasing velocities. But space was very wide, even the largest human ship was very small in that vast emptiness, and at the speeds the Alliance ships and Syndic courier craft were rushing together, even the tiniest difference in a projected track could mean the difference between a near miss and a collision.

  Dauntless shuddered slightly as her thrusters fired at time four one, kicking her onto a new vector, while her main propulsion units kept shoving her ahead faster. The entire Alliance formation was splitting into three parts, each group heading outward from the other two, the mass of ships spreading off from their original vectors like water spraying outward in a cone. With vectors for each ship changing by the moment, the oncoming attackers would have to guess where the ship they were aiming for was going, further complicating their deadly task.

  The Dancers were staying with Invincible, a threat magnet near a threat magnet, and in the last seconds before intercept, Geary could see the twenty-three courier ships bending their own tracks over and down to head where the Dancers and the lumbering mass of Invincible were moving. Even with four human battleships towing the mass of Invincible, the captured Kick superbattleship seemed to be changing its velocity and course at a snail’s pace.

  He had eight battleships there, too, moving along with Invincible, four actually tethered to Invincible and four more escorting her. A fraction of a second before the forces tore into contact, something in Geary’s mind noted something about the movement of one of the battleships that seemed slightly off. Orion’s vector had altered in an unexpected way.

  There was no time to ask Commander Shen what he was doing, no time to even understand what about Orion’s movement felt odd.

  Even when warships limited their engagement speeds to point two light, the meetings were far too fast for human senses to register. Geary saw the twenty-three courier ships almost upon the portion of the Alliance formation holding Invincible, the assault transports, the auxiliaries, and the Dancer ships, then he saw four courier ships that had missed their targets and been missed by the avalanche of fire which the Alliance warships had pumped out under the control of automated systems able to react much faster than any living creature.

  “What the hell happened?” Geary demanded. Something looked very wrong now. Something was missing in the Alliance formation.

  The answer appeared on his display.

  Orion.

  Geary barely noticed as the last four courier ships tried to claw around for another run at the Alliance formation, did not feel any elation as specter missiles pursuing those four ships caught them in their turns and blew them apart.

  His display replayed a slow-motion re-creation of the instant of contact. Some courier ships vanishing into irregular blots of dust and energy as lucky shots scored hits, others coming onward, aiming now clearly for the Dancers, who, damn them, seemed to be almost motionless as they hung near Invincible, and the rest targeting the assault transports and auxiliaries, the Dancers darting aside at the last moments to frustrate the attackers trying to hit them, Titan, Typhoon, and Mistral almost lined up relative to the attackers and twisting too slowly to evade the courier ships whose vectors aimed at them, hell-lance and grapeshot fire pouring from every Alliance ship in a last-ditch defensive effort, Orion rolling slightly in her track, coming over just a small amount, just enough that five surviving courier ships heading for Titan and the two assault transports instead struck Orion either glancing blows or direct hits.

  Even a battleship couldn’t withstand that number of impacts by that much mass at those kinds of velocities. The energy liberated by the collisions was vast enough to reduce Orion and all five courier ships to gas and dust.

  Orion was gone, along with Commander Shen and his entire crew.

  “All attackers destroyed,” Lieutenant Castries reported, her tone not jubilant but rather stunned. “Orion has been destroyed. No other damage to fleet ships.”

  “Damn them,” Geary whispered. He could understand the hate Desjani still felt for the Syndics, understand why the Alliance fleet had retaliated and retaliated for such acts, losing track of its own honor and morality along the way, understand why the need to do the right thing had been forgotten in the desire for revenge.

  “They’re going to claim they didn’t know anything about this,” Desjani said in a low, savage voice. “The Syndics in charge here. They’ll say they had no idea whose ships those were. You know they will.”

  “Yes.” And there was no proof to the contrary. He was certain of that. The courier ships and their one-man crews had been blown to pieces. Dead men and women tell no tales.

  He wanted to hurt the Syndics in this star system, hurt all of them, not just those who gave the orders but also those who stood by and let such things happen, whose own actions and passivity supported their leaders.

  Don’t. Don’t do anything that will make this worse.

  But Orion was gone, victim of an attack that could not possibly have accomplished anything but destruction.

  “Admiral.” Rione’s voice broke through his rage. She sounded odd, too, as if emotions were boiling just beneath the rigid mask of her face. “I wanted to ask, Admiral, if the hypernet gate had been damaged during the fight so close to it. It would be a great loss to this star system if their hypernet gate was damaged so badly during this unnecessary and brutal attack that the gate collapsed.”

  It took him several seconds to get it, then Geary felt a cold resolve warring with the heat of his anger. He touched a control. “Captain Smythe.”

  Tanuki was only a few light-seconds distant, so the reply came quickly. “Yes, Admiral?” Smythe asked in a subdued voice.

  “I am worried that the hypernet gate may have sustained damage from stray shots or from debris from some of those courier ships. I want it inspected at close range to make sure it has not sustained the level of damage that would cause it to collapse. Even though the safe collapse mechanism will prevent a devastating pulse of energy from being emitted by the collapse, such an event would still cripple commerce through this star system for the foreseeable future.”

  Smythe pursed his lips. “Admiral, the fight wasn’t that close—” He hesitated, a light of understanding dawning in his eyes, then nodded. “But the gate still might have sustained damage. Damage we can’t see, except up close. Catastrophic damage. It would be . . . so unfortunate for this star system if the gate were to collapse.”

  “Yes, Captain Smythe, it would be. Will you see to it?”

  “I will, Admiral. Perhaps some of the debris from Orion will prove to have impacted on some of the gate tethers. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, Captain Smythe. Ironic. I’m going to slow the fleet to give your engineers time to do a thorough job.”

  “Oh, we will do a thorough job, Admiral. Have no fear of that.” Smythe’s grin as he saluted bared his teeth but held no humor.

  Rione’s image was still visible, showing no reaction to Geary’s orders. “Admiral,” she said when he closed the call to Smythe, “we should contact the Syndic authorities in this star system, both to formally report our presence and to register a formal protest over the attack on us.”

  He kept his gaze focused on nothing as he pondered a
reply. “I take it accusing them of complicity in murder wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

  “No. If you don’t think you can speak to them without spitting blood in their faces, and believe me I would sympathize if that is the case, I can send the message on behalf of the Alliance government.”

  Geary looked over at Rione’s image. “I would be grateful if you would. I don’t know what I might say to those . . . individuals, given the way I feel right now.”

  “I understand, Admiral.” Rione closed her eyes briefly before opening them to gaze at him. “Part of being a politician is being able to speak in a civil fashion to people whom you really want to strangle with their own intestines.”

  “Thank you, Madam Emissary.”

  “And may I also extend my official condolences at the loss the fleet suffered this day.” Rione’s voice almost cracked on the last few words. She hurriedly broke the connection before he could comment on it.

  Geary touched his comm controls with a carefully gentle gesture, fearing that if he lost control, he would pound the controls into uselessness. “All units in the First Fleet. Immediate execute, re-form in Formation Delta and reduce velocity to point zero two light.” Smythe’s engineers would need time to do their work.

  The bridge of Dauntless was very quiet.

  “Commander Shen,” Desjani said in a dull voice, “has a daughter in the fleet. I’ll let her know what happened.”

  “I’m . . . sorry, Tanya. I know Shen was your friend.”

  “I’ve lost a lot of friends, Admiral.” Desjani bent her head, breathing deeply. “You saw what he did, right?”

  “Yes. That last-moment maneuver. I don’t know how, but he figured out what he needed to do to swing Orion into the path of the suicide attackers aiming at Titan, Typhoon, and Mistral.”