by Timothy Zahn
"Why wouldn't it? You could put a handful of Drymnu bodies aboard something the size of a fighter, and as long as they didn't get too far from the mother ship, they'd still be connected to the hive mind."
And at that moment Waskin sealed his fate. Everyone else that I'd had this talk with had needed to be reminded that hivies couldn't function at all in groups of less than a few thousand... and then had needed to be reminded that the thirty-thousand-klick range meant that small scouts or fighters could, indeed, have limited use for them. "You're right," I nodded to Waskin. "Absolutely right. So why won't the Drymnu expect us to use small fighters?"
He made a face. "You're enjoying this, aren't you? This is your revenge for all the poker games you've lost, right?"
God knew there wasn't a lot about this situation that was even remotely enjoyable... but in a perverse way I did rather like being ahead of Waskin for a
change. The fact that my years in the Services gave me a slight advantage was totally irrelevant. "Never mind me," I told him shortly. "You just concentrate on you. Why won't he expect fighters?"
He snorted, then shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe a single ship-sized mind can't handle that many disparate viewpoints. No, that doesn't make sense."
"It's actually pretty close," I had to admit. "It's loosely tied into the reason for that thirty-thousand-klick range. That number suggest anything?"
"It's the distance light travels in a tenth of a second," he said promptly.
"I'm not that ignorant, you know."
He was right; that part of the hivies' limitation was pretty common knowledge.
"Okay, then, that leads us immediately to the fact that the common telepathic link behaves the same way light does, with all the same limitations. So what do you get when you have, say, a dozen high-speed fighters swarming out from the mother ship vectoring in on your target?" "What do you—? Oh. Oh, sure. High relative speeds mean you'll be getting into relativistic effects."
"Including time dilation," I nodded. "A pretty minor effect, admittedly. But if a section of mind can't handle even a tenth of a second time lag, it seems reasonable that even a small difference in the temporal rate would foul it up even worse."
He nodded slowly and gave me a long, speculative look. "Makes sense. Doesn't mean it's true."
"It is," I told him. "Or it's at least official theory. We've observed Sirrachat and Karmahsh ships occasionally using small advance scouts when feeling their way through a particularly dense ring system or asteroid belt. The scouts behave exactly as expected: they stay practically within hugging range of the mother ship and keep their speeds strictly matched with it."
"Uh-huh. I take it this is supposed to make me feel better about going up against Goliath? Because if it is, it isn't working." He held up some fingers and began ticking them off. "One: if we can think like hivies, it's just possible he's been able to think like humans and will be all ready for us to come blazing in on him. Two: even if he isn't ready for us right at the start, a
hive mind learns pretty damn quickly. How many passes is it going to take us to hit a vital spot and put his ship out of commission—twenty? Fifty? And three: even if by some miracle he doesn't catch on to the basics of space warfare through all of that, what makes you think we're going to be able to take advantage of it? None of us are soldiers, either."
"What do you think I am?" I asked.
"A former Services engine room officer who got everything he knows about tactics by pure osmosis," he shot back.
I forced down my irritation with an effort. The fact that he was right didn't make it any easier. "Okay," I growled. "But by osmosis or otherwise, I've still got it. And as far as that goes, you and Fromm have both had more than your share of experience using the meteor laser. Haven't you."
I had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. He and Fromm had had a private duel of LaserWar going on down in the game room for the past six months, and I knew for a fact that they both occasionally brought the competition into duty hours, using the Volga's lasers for live practice. Strictly against regulations, naturally. "A little, maybe," he muttered. "But mostly that's just a game."
"So? Hivies don't get even that much practice—they don't play LaserWar or any other games. Which brings me to our second advantage over them; a hive mind may learn fast, but all eighteen thousand bodies on that ship are going to start exactly even. It's not as though there's going to be anyone there who has even a
smattering of practical experience with tactics, for instance, or anyone who excels at hitting small, fast-moving targets. We do, and I intend to use that advantage to the fullest."
"By making Fromm and me your chief gunners?" Waskin snorted.
"By making Fromm my chief gunner," I corrected. "You I'm making my second-in-command."
His eyes bulged. "You're—what? Oh, now wait a minute, sir—"
"Sorry, Waskin, the job's yours." I glanced at my watch. "All right. We'll be having a meeting to set up practice sessions in the lounge in exactly one hour.
Be there."
For a moment I thought he was going to argue with me. But he just took a deep breath and nodded. "Yes, sir. Under protest, though."
"I wouldn't have expected it any other way."
He left, and I took a deep breath of my own. There was nothing like a willing team, I reflected, letting my eyes defocus with tiredness. None of the six I'd chosen had any real enthusiasm for what they saw as a stupid decision on the captain's part, but at least only Waskin was even verbally hostile about it.
That would probably change, of course, at the meeting an hour away, when I told them about the rest of my plan. It wasn't something I was especially looking forward to.
But in the meantime... Stretching hard, I cracked the tension out of my back and settled more comfortably into my seat. One: hivies won't be able to think in terms of small-group efficiency. Two: a given hivey mind-segment won't have the same range of abilities and talents that a human force will have. Three:...
No good. Whatever that third hivey weakness was, it was still managing to elude me. But that was okay; I still had a couple of days until breakout, and surely that would be enough time for my subconscious to dig it out of wherever it was I'd tucked it away. They didn't like the plan. Didn't like it at all.
And I couldn't really blame them. The landing boat assault was bad enough, relying as strongly as it did on Hive Mind Weaknesses One and Two—weaknesses they had only my unsupported word for. But the full plan was even worse, and none of them were particularly reticent about voicing their displeasure.
It could have come to mass mutiny right there, I suppose, with the crew going to the captain en masse and demanding either a decent plan of action or else that he scrap this whole thing. And I suppose that there was a part of me that hoped they would do so. It had been rather pleasant, for a change, to be treated with a little respect aboard the ship—to be Tactician Travis, the man who was guiding the Volga into battle, instead of just plain Third Officer Travis, who always lost at poker. But none of that could quite erase the knowledge that I could very well be on the brink of getting some of us killed, me included. I'd already burned my own spaceport behind me, but if the captain decided to quit now, I for one wasn't going to argue too strenuously with him.
But he didn't. Perhaps he felt he'd also come too far to back down; perhaps he really believed that he was obligated to Colonel Halveston's dying order. But whatever the reason, he came out in solid support of both me and my plan, and in the end everyone fell grudgingly into line behind him. Perhaps, with so much uncertainty still remaining as to whether we'd even catch the Drymnu ship, no one wanted to stick his or her neck too far out.
A fair portion of that uncertainty, though, was illusory. True, we had only the Drymnu's departure vector to guide us, and it was true that he could theoretically break out and change his direction anywhere along a path a hundred light-years long. But in actuality, his choices were far more limited: by physics, which governed how long
a ship could generate heat in hyperspace before it had to break out and dump it; and by common sense, which said that in case of breakout problems you wanted your ship reasonably close to raw materials and energy, which meant somewhere inside a solar system.
There was, it turned out, exactly one system along the Drymnu's vector that fit both those constraints.
So even while my team complained and muttered to one another about the chances this would all be a waste of time, I made sure they worked their butts off.
Somewhere in that system, I was pretty sure, we would find the Drymnu.
Four days later, we broke out into our target system, a totally unremarkable conglomeration of nondescript planets, minor chunks of rock, a dull red sun...
and one Drymnu ship.
He wasn't visible to the naked eye, of course, but by solar system standards we arrived practically on his landing ramp. He was barely three million klicks away, radiating so much infrared that Waskin had a lock on him two minutes after breakout. Captain Garrett gave the order, and we turned and drove hell for leather straight for him.
The Volga was capable of making nearly two gravs of acceleration, but even at that, the Drymnu was a good seven hours away. There was, therefore, no question of sneaking up on him, especially since half that time we would be decelerating with our main drive blasting directly toward him. There was little chance he would escape into hyperspace—not with the amount of heat he clearly had yet to get rid of—but I'd expected that he would at least make us chase him through normal, gain himself some extra time to study us.
We were less than half an hour away from him when we all were finally forced to the conclusion that he really did intend to simply stand there and hold his ground.
"Damn," Waskin muttered under his breath at the scanners. "He knows we're here—he has to have seen us by now. He's waiting for us, like a—a giant spider in his web—"
"That'll do, Waskin," the captain told him, his own voice icy calm. "There's no need to create wild pictures; I think we're all adequately nervous. Just remember that chances are at least as good that he's waiting because he figures we're a warship and that running would be a waste of time."
"Running doesn't sound like a waste of time to me," Kittredge said tensely.
The captain turned a brief stare on her, then looked at me. "Well, Travis, looks like this is it. Any last-minute changes you want to make in the plan?"
I shook my head. One: hivies don't form small groups. Two: all members of a hive mind have the same experience level. Three:... Three, where the hell are you, damn it? "No, sir," I told him with a quiet sigh. Half an hour to battle. No way around it; we were just going to have to make do without Hive Mind Weakness Number Three, whatever it was. "I'd better get the team into the boat."
He nodded and motioned someone else to take Waskin's place at the scanners.
"We'll signal just before we drop you," he told me. "And we'll let you know if there's any change in the situation out there. Good luck."
"Thank you, sir."
Waskin beside me, I headed out the bridge door and did a fast float down the cramped corridor toward the landing boat bay. "So this is it, isn't it?"
Waskin murmured. "Your big chance to be a hero."
"I'm not doing this for the heroics of it," I growled back.
"No? Come on, Travis, I'm not that stupid. You and the captain dreamed up this whole landing boat assault just so that he can pretend he's obeying Halveston's damned order while still keeping the Volga itself from getting blasted to dust."
"The captain has nothing to do with it," I snapped. "It's—it just happens to make the most sense this way."
"Aha," he nodded, an entirely too knowing look on his face. "So you're trying to con the captain along with the rest of us, are you? I should have guessed that.
He wouldn't have been able to send us out to get fried on his behalf. Not with a
straight face, anyway."
I gritted my teeth. Somehow, I'd thought I'd covered my intentions better than that. "You're hallucinating," I snarled. "There's not a scrap of truth to it—and you'd sure as hell better not go blabbing nonsense like that to the rest of the team."
"Don't get so mad—it's working, isn't it? The Volga's going to come out okay, and you're going to get to go out in a blaze of glory. Along with six more of us lucky souls."
I gritted my teeth some more and ignored him, and we covered another half corridor in silence. "There wasn't really any Services list of hive mind weaknesses, was there?" he said as we maneuvered through a tight hatchway.
"You made all that up to justify this plan."
I exhaled in defeat. "No, it was—it is—an actual list," I told him. "It's just that—look, it was a long time ago. The two I gave you are real enough. And there's one more—an important one, I'm pretty sure—but I can't for the life of me remember what it was."
"Uh-huh. Sure."
Or in other words, he didn't believe me. "Waskin—"
"Oh, it's all right," he interrupted. "If it helps any, I actually happen to agree with the basic idea. I just wouldn't have picked myself to be one of the sacrificial goats."
"I'm hoping we'll come out of it a bit better than that," I told him.
"Uh-huh. Sure."
We finished the rest of the trip to the bay in silence, to find that the captain had already had the other five members of the team assemble there.
I tried giving them a short pep talk, but I wasn't particularly good at it and they weren't much in the mood to be pepped up, anyway. So instead we spent a few minutes checking one last time on our equipment and making as sure as we could that our specially equipped suits and weapons were going to function as desired.
Afterward, we all sat in the boat, breathed recycled air, and sweated hard.
And I tried one last time to think. One: hivies don't form small groups. Two: all members of a hive mind have the same experience level. Three:...
Still no use.
I don't know how long we sat there. The plan was for the captain to take the Volga as close in as he could before the Drymnu's inevitable attack became too much for the ship to handle, but as the minutes dragged on and nothing happened, a set of frightening possibilities began to flicker through my already overheated mind. The Volga's bridge blown so quickly that they'd had no time even to cry out... the rest of us flying blind toward a collision or to sail forever through normal space...
"The Drymnu's opened fire," the captain's voice crackled abruptly in our headsets. "Antimeteor lasers; some minor sensor damage. Get ready—"
With a stomach-jolting lurch, we were dumped out through the bay doors... and got our first real look at a Drymnu hive ship.
The thing was huge. Incredibly so. It was still several klicks away, yet it still took up a massive chunk of the sky ahead of us. Dark-hulled, oddly shaped, convoluted, threatening—it was all of those, too, but the only word that registered in that first heart-stopping second was huge. I'd seen the biggest of the Services' carriers up close, and I was stunned. God only knows how the others in the boat felt.
And then the first laser flicked out toward us, and the time for that kind of thought was thankfully over.
The shot was a clean miss. We'd been dropped along one of the Drymnu's flanks, as planned, and it was quickly clear that lasers designed for shooting oncoming meteors weren't at their best trying to fire sideways. But the Drymnu was a hive mind, and hive minds learned fast. The second and third shots missed, too, but the fourth bubbled the reflective paint on our nose. "Let's get moving," I snapped.
Kelly, our pilot, didn't need any coaxing. The words weren't even out of my mouth when she had us jammed against our restraints in a tight spiraling turn that sent us back toward the stern. Not too close; the drive that could actually move this floating mountain would fry us in nano-seconds if it occurred to the Drymnu to turn it on. But Kelly knew her job, and when we finally pulled into a
more or less inertial path again, we were no more
than two-thirds of the way back toward the stern and maybe three hundred meters from the textured hull.
This close to a true warship, we would be dead in seconds. But the Drymnu wasn't a warship... and as we flew on unvaporized, I finally knew for a fact that my gamble had paid off. We were inside the alien's defenses, and he couldn't touch us.
Now if we could only turn that advantage into something concrete.
"Fromm, get the laser going," I ordered. "The rest of you, let's find some targets for him to hit. Sensors, intakes, surface radiator equipment—anything that looks weak."
My headset crackled suddenly. "Volga to Travis," the captain's voice said.
"Neutrino emission's suddenly gone up—I think he's running up his drive."
"Acknowledged," I said. "You out of his laser range yet?"
"We will be soon. So far he seems to be ignoring us."
A small favor to be grateful for. Whatever happened to us, at least this part of my plan had worked. "Okay. We're starting our first strafing run—"
Abruptly, my headset exploded with static. I grabbed for the volume control, vaguely aware of the others scrambling with similar haste around me. "What happened?" Kelly's voice came faintly, muffled by two helmets and the thin atmosphere in the boat.
"It's occurred to him that jamming our radios is a good idea," I shouted, my voice echoing painfully inside my helmet.
"Took him long enough," Waskin put in. "What was that about the drive? He trying to get away?"
"Probably." But no matter how powerful the Drymnu's drive, with all that mass to move, he wouldn't be outrunning us for a while, anyway. "We've still got time to do plenty of damage. Get cracking."
We tried. We flew all the way around that damn ship, skimming its surface, blasting away at anything that looked remotely interesting... and in the process we discovered something I'd somehow managed not to anticipate.
None of us had the faintest idea what Drymnu sensors, intakes, or surface radiator equipment looked like.
Totally unexpected. Form follows function, or so I'd always believed. But there was clearly more room for variation than I'd ever realized.
