by John F. Carr
This immense cloud of propagating mesons spread out in every direction from the area of the beams’ intersection. Mesons, as the technical rankers knew and as they had told Diettinger, did not interact with normal matter, they only interacted with energy composed of other mesons and their rate of decay was in the realm of the near instantaneous. As with the aiming problem, Diettinger had understood that what the technical rankers were telling him was that Langston Fields were transparent to mesons and that mesons didn’t last very long at all. All well and good, he had replied, but if they do not interact with matter, and they decay almost immediately, what harm can they do?
At which point, the only technical ranker Diettinger had ever met who had a sense of humor asked him what he thought happened to all that accelerated energy when the meson decayed inside the Langston Fields—or, better still, inside a ship inside a Langston Field.
Which was what they were doing now.
II
Aboard the Imperial heavy cruiser Westphalia, the fusion engines were rent by mesons which destroyed their shielding. Half-a-meter of super-dense dampening alloys was instantly converted to waste heat, releasing millions of rads into the ship’s compartments. Every crewman in the starboard section of the Westphalia suffered massive internal hemorrhaging, soft tissue liquefaction, brain embolisms, internal bone ruptures and all the other effects of being trapped in a high-energy microwave field. Cooked alive, they fell dead at their stations. Five hundred ninety-seven men perished in thirteen seconds.
The Imperial destroyer Phaeton was cut in half. Crewmen in the forward amidships section turned to see four meters of open space separating them from the after portion of the vessel. The ends of metal struts and cables, the cross-section of a mess table, all were polished to a mirror finish, severed perfectly at the subatomic level. Men standing partly within the space destroyed by the particles had been cut apart with a precision beyond any surgical procedure. Of the crew members not immediately killed by the meson strike or the resulting loss of atmosphere, those in vacuum suits watched as the after portion of the Phaeton, still under thrust, closed the distance and rejoined its forward portion with an impact that destroyed both halves.
The battle-class Imperial cruiser Manassas suffered internal meson propagation that breached three interior bulkheads and the forward portions of her inboard fuel tanks. Compressed liquid hydrogen roiled out of the tanks and into the unprotected interior of the warship before igniting. The Manassas exploded inside her own Field, which shot up through the spectrum to violet before disappearing with the loss of its generators, releasing the absorbed blast energy in a flare that caused burn-throughs in the Fields of two adjacent craft and swept half a dozen escorting fighters out of space and into oblivion.
The bridge crew on the Imperial cruiser Monserrat abruptly found themselves in pitch blackness. When the battery-powered emergency lights activated to reveal that the Monserrat had lost all power, the first officer left his acceleration couch and, taking a flashlight, headed for the gangway off the bridge to reach the engine room. Upon releasing the hatch clamps, he was instantly sucked out into the vacuum which had formerly been occupied by a quarter million cubic tons of Imperial spaceship. His flashlight spun end over end out into the darkness, illuminating nothing.
Imperial Flight Officer Lieutenant Tidwell was wingman in a three-craft victory, or “vic” formation of Imperial Legionnaire-class heavy fighters, on combat patrol in the ventral portion of the formation. He found himself suddenly alone, watching as the fighters operated by his commander and the second wingman disappeared, erased before his eyes by a swath of nothingness. He suddenly realized that his own craft was banking to port and would not respond to his correction. Lieutenant Tidwell looked down to see that the control grip had been sheared off and was gone, together with his right arm up to the elbow. A red mist expanded rapidly throughout the zero-gravity environment of the fighter cabin and Tidwell blacked-out before he could apply a tourniquet, bleeding to death soon after.
The Imperial strike cruiser Bec de Corbin was a dedicated bombardment platform, designed for the sole purpose of delivering ten million megatons of nuclear weapons to the surface of an enemy planet. Bec de Corbin’s weapons officer blinked and stared as the telemetry readouts for twenty of his warheads went blank. His workstation was one deck above the bomb bay, and—rather imprudently even without knowing what was happening elsewhere among the ships of Intruder One—he reached down and opened the floor hatch for a quick visual inspection. The bomb racks glittered in the dimly lit bay, twenty of his “apples” sliced neatly down their centers, opened like inert training display models. The bombs’ inner workings were clearly visible, right down to the spherical warhead packages which were sliced in half like melons, their fissionable material exposed in neat cross sections, silently, invisibly, and fatally irradiating the only man of the Bec de Corbin’s ten man crew left alive to see them.
The Imperial battleship Tiger lost its Langston Field generator. Of the seven operators, the two who were not also claimed by the mesons were looking at it one moment, and in the next, it had imploded. With her Field generator gone, Tiger’s Field, of course, went as well. And without a Field, random meson bursts were no longer necessary to destroy her. Suddenly exposed to the hurricane of subatomic particles surrounding her, the Tiger was stripped of her outer hull and flayed to bits in minutes.
The cruiser Endymion suffered the least damage; her cook was badly scalded when the bottom third of the coffee pot he was standing next to disappeared and the upper volume of coffee sloshed out into the acceleration-generated gravity of the galley.
Throughout Intruder One, ships of the Imperial task force suffered similar fates. Most escaped the meson bursts entirely, but with rare exceptions like the Endymion, those that did not were crippled or destroyed outright.
III
Aboard the Fomoria, Diettinger nodded in satisfaction.
“Intruder One changing course to vector out of the particle beams, Dictator,” Second Rank informed him. “Rising above system plane of ecliptic at six-gravities acceleration.”
“Signal Barlowe and Freas,” he told his Communications Ranker. “Compensate for Imperial evasive maneuvers. Maintain fire as long as effective.”
The technical rankers on Barlowe and Freas were creating convergent cones of particles, which produced a meson propagation field in the area where their “bases” met. They could move that area back and forth between the projecting planets with relative ease—one array simply reduced the projection velocity of its particle stream while the other accelerated or maintained the speed of its own. They could even broaden the field by simultaneously decelerating the beams or intensify such propagation over a smaller area by coordinated acceleration. An oscillation of the arrays could even propagate mesons in a “curtain” between Barlowe and Freas which, though not so dense as the current effect, would still make the path extremely dangerous for vessels operating less than two million kilometers above or below the Sauron System’s plane of the ecliptic.
What they could not do—Diettinger knew—was move that curtain to any other part of the system. The Barlowe-Freas line might be deadly, but it was in the end only that; a line. And the battle for Sauron was being waged in three dimensions; what the Imperials could not safely penetrate, they could ultimately go around…or, in this case, “over.”
And that was exactly what Intruder One was doing now, as it climbed “above” the meson field to renew its drive on the Sauron Homeworld. This portion of the Imperial invasion fleet had lost sixty percent of her remaining vessels to the meson bursts, but though battered, she was not yet beaten.
So Diettinger unleashed the Damaris.
“Send Damaris,” he ordered his Communications Rank, “Hourglass North at your disposal. TF Damaris to engage elements Intruder One at will.” There were, perhaps, three Vessel First Ranks in the whole Sauron navy to whom Diettinger would have granted such discretion; Mara Emory of the Damaris was one of
them, and the other two—Lucan of the Wallenstein and Vonnerbek of the Leviathan—were both dead.
There is, he reflected, one other; but he is not a Sauron. And that, Diettinger suspected, was only an accident of birth. Diettinger shifted the immersion display to examine events at Ostia.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I
“Getting a bit warm here, Mister Willoughby,” Hawksley informed his XO. The Falkenberg was engaged on three sides, and dipping into Ostia’s atmosphere wasn’t discommoding her attackers overmuch. The severe attenuation of the Imperial lasers by Ostia’s thick upper atmosphere was helping to keep the Falkenberg’s Langston Field a dull brick red, but that would change as soon as more Imperials joined the engagement, which was bound to happen very soon. It also prevented the Falkenberg from returning fire with any effectiveness.
“Yes, sir, I’ll see what I can do. Helm, fifteen degrees hard right, up forty.”
“Hard right fifteen, up forty, aye.”
Falkenberg’s overpowered frame bucked like a thoroughbred and groaned in protest, but the Field operator was relieved to report they had shaken the Imperial above them. That left only the two to port and starboard.
“Helm,” Hawksley addressed the man directly, and Willoughby moved his acceleration chair aside reflexively; Hawksley was “on deck,” and, when he was, it was best to stay out of his way and find something to hold on to. “On my mark, cut Falkenberg’s forward thrust and rotate her ninety degrees.”
“Forward thrust to zero, starboard ninety, aye sir; awaiting your command.”
Hawksley turned to the Weapons Control Officer. “Mr. Plunkett, arm the starboard array.”
Plunkett’s hands flew over his console. “Starboard array armed, sir.”
“Standby to fire on my mark.”
“Stranding by; awaiting your command.”
“Field status, Mr. Pettigrew.”
“Field level red/two and holding, sir.”
“Brace for violent maneuvering, Mister Willoughby.”
Willoughby keyed the all-stations address system from the console of his acceleration chair: “Now hear this, all hands brace for violent maneuvers. All hands, brace for violent maneuvers.”
“Helm,” Hawksley was counting something down in his head, then “Mark.”
Nothing much appeared to happen. Falkenberg’s internal gravity disappeared along with the rumble of thrusters carried through her deck plates. There was a vague sense of disorientation as she rotated on her axis, the crew sensing their own centers of mass shift with adjustments in personal momentum.
“Stand by, Mr. Plunkett. Helm, six-G thrust on my mark.” Hawksley alternated between his tactical display and the Sauron-built immersion display. In the latter, the Imperial ships had stopped firing on Falkenberg; the privateer now presented a much smaller target, and they obviously feared firing past her and into each other. All three ships continued their forward motion through Ostia’s atmosphere, except that the Falkenberg’s right angle orientation made her appear to be skidding. Both Imperial craft were vectoring to close-in on the Burgess ship. “Helm, mark.”
“Six-Gs. aye.”
Falkenberg’s engines roared back to life, and Willoughby would have sworn the ship was screaming until he realized that the sound he heard was coming from his own throat; going to six-Gs acceleration at a right angle from zero-G drift was, he’d heard, a pretty good way to die from heart failure.
“Dis-tance to star-burd targ’t,” Hawksley choked out the query against the punishing acceleration.
Plunkett’s head turned a centimeter, a heroic effort, “Eight… hundred thou-sand.”
“Shoot!”
Plunkett’s thumb depressed the firing key and Falkenberg, already closing fast on an intercept course with the starboard Imperial, loosed her full starboard weapons array from seven hundred and fifty thousand kilometers.
The Imperial’s Field shot up three levels from red to brilliant green, moving her captain to vector away in an evasive maneuver. The emerald sphere of the enemy’s Field drew back, fading into the murk of the Ostian atmosphere.
“Where’s the other one?” Hawksley’s question was too low to be for anyone but the XO.
“Climbing and closing, skipper…barely in sensor range with all this atmospheric interference. Looks like he’s trying to stay with his buddy and keep a line on us, too.”
“Mistake,” Hawksley’s assessment was barely audible. “Helm, minus one hundred kilometers at ninety degrees and maintain burn for seventy seconds, then cut our thrust to two gravities, come about thirty degrees to starboard and give us a ninety second burn at six-Gs.”
At the battle console, Plunkett and Pettigrew shared looks of relief tinged with misery; all helmsman loved to drive their ships like maniacs, and no doubt the skipper’s orders would result in their escape from this latest in an endless stream of Imperial pursuers. But the other junior officers in the bridge crew expected to turn as green as that last target’s Field before it was done.
“Mister Willoughby, as soon as our screens are clear of enemy vessels, let’s get to the rest of these tankers,” Hawksley ordered. “The sooner we’re finished here, the sooner we can get the hell out of Dodge.” Hawksley released a tight sigh: Where the hell were Dannevar and TF Keegan?
II
Aboard the Fomoria, the blue line connecting Barlowe and Freas in the immersion display was radiant cobalt, actinic where the projected beams met. The dividing line shifted slightly back and forth, as if each stream of projected particles were by turns gaining and losing in some subatomic pushing contest, which was exactly what was happening. Both projection stations were alternating the flow of particles from their accelerators, to spread the point of impacting neutrons back and forth across the line of intersection. The technical rankers were attempting to make up in volume what their system lacked in precision and, so far, they seemed to be doing well.
But not, Diettinger was relieved to see, as well as Task Force Damaris.
All around the mass of Imperial ships, TF Damaris, reinforced by the system defense boats of Hourglass North, ravaged the vessels of Intruder One. The System Defense Boats, unmanned, were under remote control by dozens of weapons rankers scattered about the ships of TF Damaris. Without even the high-G tolerant Saurons aboard to slow them down, the boats threw themselves into the mass of Intruder One in bursts of acceleration at double-digit gravities. Each pass trajectory incorporated slingshot maneuvers into, through and around multiple bodies of the Sauron System asteroid field or one of the other outlying planets in TF Damaris’ theatre of battle. Several elements of the heavily armed drones went too far, too fast to rejoin the attack on Intruder One, and began banking to slip into the gravity wells of Landyn’s Star. From there, they might still find work to do.
“Status on TF Keegan?”
“Regrouped, Dictator. Harassing Intruder Two’s attempts to flush the elements hiding in Ostia’s upper atmosphere.”
Even Diettinger’s Second Rank had not initially been privy to the knowledge that the Falkenberg was the only ship there, although by now Diettinger knew she had guessed the deception—as must have the Imperials. The hulk of the Wallenstein, deep in its decaying orbit within Ostia’s lower atmosphere, had been broadcasting “ghost” transmissions and dropping false transponders, creating the illusion of dozens of active ships when in fact Falkenberg alone had been manipulating the tankers which had brought such grief to the Imperial refueling attempts. The Wallenstein had been discovered days ago, and scuttled on Hawksley’s command, adding yet more debris to the navigational hazards with which Falkenberg had been sowing the Ostian skies.
Diettinger marveled that Hawksley and his ship were not yet vapor; or, at least, they hadn’t been less than half a light-hour ago when the status telemetry had been sent.
“Status, Intruder Three?”
“Unchanged.”
Diettinger watched the Imperial reserve group labeled Intruder Three; they had not changed
their position in nine days of continuous battle that had seen over one hundred Imperial vessels destroyed. Are they simply waiting for their comrades to bleed us white by their own deaths? Could they be that determined to eradicate us?
He shook his head. The question, he knew, was rhetorical, its answer being—Of course.
No matter. Intruder Three could be dealt with once Intruders One and Two were neutralized. It was time to begin doing just that.
The immersion display began deleting representative ship symbols one after another from the main body of Imperial ships designated “Intruder One.”
Immersion displays updated themselves constantly, and along with the positional representation of ships in battle, hundreds of lines of data were also displayed at various clear points in the display. One such column of figures abruptly changed color from green to amber, drawing Second Rank’s comment.
“Dictator,” she addressed Diettinger.
“Speak.”
“Imperial casualties, Intruder One, now at forty percent and still rising.”
The immersion display was set to change colors as enemy casualties had reached a level which could reasonably be expected to result in their breaking off from combat to regroup. Diettinger, who had commanded at the Second Battle of Tanith until relieved by the now destroyed First Fleet under Morgenthau, knew that in this battle such an aspect of the display was superfluous. Still, watching the display, he could almost convince himself that Intruder One was slowing in its advance.
“Enhance detail, casualties TF Damaris,” Diettinger ordered quietly.
