The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

  Meier (quite naturally not having been concerned with them when on a fact-finding mission for the quartermaster’s corp) now asked what armaments the Brownians had. He was confused, at first, by the laughter and groans that greeted his question. Finally, Dr. Skiep Neiberger, the head of the sociology mission, explained their amusement.

  “The Brownians are highly intelligent in their own way.” His voice quickly adopted lecturing tones. “They obey instructions, even innovate and adjust when forced to. Sometime in their past some spur must have driven their species to develop intelligence. But so far we cannot find any trace of a single living predator. The problem is that the elves simply have no concept of armed conflict. They are wholly noncompetitive by nature. There not only aren’t any words for ‘war’ or ‘murder’ in the Brownian language, there aren’t even any for ‘disagree’ or ‘argue.’ The closest to ‘fight’ that any Brownian phrase translates to actually means ‘to flee to safety.’”

  “A planet full of bloody pacifists,” one of the more grizzled combat engineers added, “and thousands of them are gonna get fried when the Syndicate slags that valley.

  Finding himself in command of a planet populated by the pacifists, one with no obvious means of defending itself, facing an overwhelming enemy force, and no hope of timely reinforcements, Abe Meier had an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

  “How is the planet’s stock of paint?” he asked the ranking engineer, more in an attempt to remind himself that no situation is truly hopeless, than in expectation of useful information.

  “Used the last yesterday on the resort’s orbital fliers” was the discouraging reply. “Got a requisition in for a few hundred gallons more, mostly gray and regulation blue.”

  No paint. For some reason this information seemed to make his aide, LeBaric, even more depressed. Meier wondered if their situation could really be completely hopeless. There seemed to be no alternative but hide while his ships were devastated. Surrender wasn’t even an alternative. The Syndicate ships wouldn’t risk themselves close to the planet for a few prisoners. Nor was anyone who stayed in this valley likely to survive the numerous target shots that were inevitable in any orbital bombardment. There were hundreds of civilian flyers out there. Maybe his only choice would be to order an evacuation of the civilians to a distant continent and to pray the Syndicate’s scanners didn’t pick up all the new construction in this valley. It promised to be a very long two days, followed by a very short, and completely one-sided, battle.

  The meeting adjourned with empty promises by all to keep on the problem. Abe suspected most were going to go back and pack, hoping he ordered the evacuation in time.

  * * *

  Two hours later, sweat blinded the admiral as he pulled himself up through the charred gash in the hull of what had once been a Khalian light destroyer. The front third of this ship must have been hit by a laser mounted on a dreadnought. Everything forward of engineering simply wasn’t there. A missile would have been less selective and all that remained would have been dust.

  It was the fifth ship Abe had crawled through. The nervous energy of frustration powered his actions. With each hulk he visited Abe’s determination to prevent the loss of his graveyard grew. The problem was he still had found no way to defend it, no matter how badly he wished to.

  Outside, Auro waited beside the grav car, confused but patient. He had seen his commander pull off one miracle. He didn’t know how or what it could be, but was hoping for another. As Meier dictated his findings between labored breaths, Auro wondered once more why they were there, Like three of the other wrecks, the drive or shield generators of this fifth ship were intact. Evidently the Syndicate had planned to salvage or repair these hulks at a later time. None of the hulls were anywhere near intact and there wasn’t even enough time for the engineers to cobble together even one complete ship—if they knew how. And even if they succeeded, there were no trained crewmen to fire the weapons when it faced an entire Syndicate squadron.

  One of the civilian ships buzzed overhead. Meier suspected word had leaked out and soon the sky would be filled with fleeing ships. Another orbital flyer sped straight up under emergency lift, her drive whining audibly under the strain. The quartermaster in Abe was annoyed. The maneuver was a waste of fuel since the enemy wasn’t expected for thirty-six hours. Watching it diminish to a dot and disappear in the green sky, Meier realized that the pilot of the latter ship intended to hide among Brown’s moonlets. A good plan if he stayed undetected until the relief force arrived. None of the Syndicate ships would get too close to any of the moons. Ramming even one of the smaller rocks would prevent the use of shield or strain one that was engaged.

  A few moments later Auro was amazed to see the smile that had blossomed on Meier’s face. He had seen it once before.

  * * *

  As expected, the civilians had screamed when Meier commandeered their yachts. Few accepted his assurance that most would be returned intact. Some had to be threatened with the gig’s single laser cannon before they volunteered their ships. If he lived, unless his plan worked, there would be the piper to pay. Then again, if his plan failed, there was only a very slight probability that he would survive the bombardment that would follow.

  Like most of his ideas, the entire idea was so far out that the quartermaster was reluctant to discuss it even with LeBaric. The separate parts of Abe’s plan eased into gear. Once they had been shown how, the Brownians began to flood the spaceport with Khalian drive and shield modules. A surprising number of these were still functional. As quickly as they arrived, these were loaded into a commandeered yacht and flown into space by an engineer. By the time these ships reached their destinations, the necessary wiring and modifications Meier had ordered were completed. Abe didn’t point out, and hoped no one else noticed, that even if they lost, he would have at least succeeded in preserving thousands of manhours’ worth of drive units. The last few engineers had just disembarked from the last pickup boat when Auro radioed that the gig’s instruments had registered nine ships dropping back from FTL several million klicks from Brown.

  * * *

  After hours of waiting alone in the gig, Auro was almost glad to see the enemy arrive. He waited another few minutes for the ships to approach and then opened the awkward ship’s throttle wide and drove straight at them. Auro almost wished he could see the faces of the officers commanding the Syndicate force when they realized he was diving on them. They would have to assume he was insane. Slaving the gig’s small laser cannon to the combat computer, he forced it to open fire while still out of range. It didn’t really matter if he hit anything.

  For a few moments the young officer hoped that the entire squadron would take the bait, even considering he was it. But their commander was either cautious or very smart. Two of the lighter ships peeled off and turned to meet the smaller ship. Auro spun away from the oncoming destroyers and dived among Brown’s shell of moonlets. The Fleet beacons that were hidden on all of the larger rocks allowed him to maneuver through the clutter much more quickly than his pursuers. So Auro slowed down and waited for them to catch up.

  The three ships had orbited a quarter of the way around the planet when the first destroyer passed close enough to a fifty-yard-thick chunk of rock. The destroyer’s shield instantly interacted with the shield module hidden on the moonlet as it was activated by a yacht’s proximity alarm. Part of the irony of the situation was that because both units were Syndicate made, they were attuned much more closely to each other than any Fleet and Syndicate shield unit pair would have been. The result was even more impressive than Auro expected. Destroyer and moon both disappeared in a burst of raw energy that darkened his screens for several seconds.

  The second ship, possibly damaged by the explosion, fired a few half-aimed laser bolts through the spreading debris in Auro’s general direction and broke off pursuit. The young captain didn’t bother to fire back. He did allow himself the luxur
y of a victory roll, but only after he had cleared the belt of moons and was entering Brown’s atmosphere.

  Auro was in the command dome two hours later when the Syndicate commander risked a second ship. This made a lone attempt to penetrate what had suddenly become a threatening cloud of moons that kept him away from his target. This ship made it halfway through the belt before its shield interacted with one hidden on an asteroid barely larger than itself. There were just too many pieces of rock, and until the yachts powered up on a signal from Meier, no way to determine which were traps. The result was another spectacular, if brief, burst of violet light in the Brownian night sky.

  After nearly a day passed with no action by the orbiting Syndicate squadron, Auro almost allowed himself to believe they had won. Meier, he noticed, seemed more worried than ever. Abe had snatched only a few hours sleep, and that in a chair that sat in front of the main command console. The youngest captain in the Fleet felt his hopes that it was over die when the Syndicate ships began blasting away at Brown’s moons.

  Auro realized that the Syndicate commander had not been discouraged. He had done what Auro might have in his place. If the moons were a problem, get rid of the problem. It had taken time to plot the courses of all of those moons that would pass at a set time through a corridor leading to the sky over the valley containing the graveyard. The number of missiles needed to destroy them all would be extravagant, but not prohibitive. Lasers from a low orbit would be enough to destroy everything in the graveyard in less than an hour.

  As the first shielded ship crept through the artificial void the Syndicate fire had taken three hours to create, Meier launched four of the closest speedsters that had survived the Syndicate missiles. Their autopilots and anticollision systems had been reversed and all four streaked toward the lead Syndicate ship. Even assuming it would take a human response to reprogram the combat computers to accept civilian ships as threats, the Syndicate response was unforgivably slow. Only two of the overpowered civilian ships were destroyed by antimissile fire and the third failed to energize its shield unit and passed harmlessly a few meters behind the dodging destroyer. The distraction this provided allowed the fourth ship to get close enough that when its FTL drive unit kicked in, another burst of light was visible low in Brown’s dawn sky.

  An hour passed, then a day. The seven remaining Syndicate ships hung unmoving a dozen planetary diameters overhead. It was only three days until help would arrive. Maybe they would make it. Auro found that warm breezes and soft Brownian sunlight encouraged his optimism. He was beginning to believe that Meier had pulled it off again. The warning scream of the engineer who had volunteered to watch the scanners brought both Auro and Abe Meier into the command center at a run.

  The entire Syndicate force was descending, slowly, almost insolently, in a tight mass. Only after a careful review of the sensor readings did Auro realize why. Though many new moons had orbited into the gap they had blown, the commander of the Syndicate ships had realized the key to their vulnerability was not the moons, but their own shields. The planet’s only defense had been to cause their own shields and drives to interact destructively. So they simply shut them off.

  All seven remaining Syndicate ships were carefully picking their way through the crowded belt of moons with their shields down. They were much more vulnerable to collision damage, but their corridor was still comparatively open. Any more civilian ships would be easily destroyed by the antimissile defenses, as could be the limited number of moonlets that stood in their path.

  They had no way to stop this attack. Auro turned away from the monitors. He wondered if it might be more spectacular to watch their destruction from outside the dome. Then reminding himself that he was a captain of the Fleet, he forced himself to concentrate on the readouts scrolling across the bottom of the command console. Auro calculated their rate of approach with clinical detachment. In eleven minutes the first Syndicate ship would be below the moons. The bombardment should begin in less than twenty minutes. Determined to go down fighting, and unwilling to simply wait to be blown apart by plasma torpedoes or fried with laser fire, Auro prepared to ask for permission to take the admiral’s gig for one final, futile attack.

  Six minutes later Meier had refused Auro’s request. Keyed up as he was, the youth would have been uncontrollably annoyed except that his boss was wearing that same relaxed, lopsided smile again. Then he noticed that Meier was humming contentedly under his breath, glancing occasionally at the chronometer behind them.

  When the Syndicate ships were exactly halfway through the moonlets, a pair of ships on each of the four of the largest nearby moons received the signal to activate the FTL drives crammed into their living compartments. Each had only enough power to create a Cooper field for only a few seconds. Each pair also sat only centimeters apart. The drives of all the pairs interacted as expected.

  Even though the blasts were close in stellar terms they were far too distant to harm any of the Syndicate vessels directly. By the time the wave front of the explosions reached the descending ship’s sensors, they had weakened so much they produced only slight blips on the radiation detectors. But the Syndicate ships’ collision alarms sounded in time for most of the Syndicate fleet to reverse directions, but not soon enough to escape. The tens of thousands of fragments that followed close behind them had a much more dramatic, and destructive, effect.

  It was a tribute to the solid construction of the Syndicate ships that four still managed to climb away and drop up to FTL space only a few hours later. An intelligence report months later told Meier that all had been riddled by the debris and had lost credible percentages of their crews. Of the forty Kosantzu accompanying the mission, none survived the unexpected, rapid decompression. Nor did the commanding officer, which, considering he had lost most of his command to an unarmed foe, was probably just as well.

  Back in the command dome Meier looked both exultant and relieved. He had switched into an even more than usually grubby fatigue, but was striding around taking congratulations like a king. Abe gleefully commented that “this time I did it without paint.” The comment confused everyone else, but Auro was almost prostrated by uncontrollable laughter that was also part sheer relief.

  When the Fleet squadron arrived it discovered that Abe Meier had bettered his record of destroying thirty-seven enemy ships using only twenty-four lightly armed freighters by this time destroying three destroyers and three light cruisers using only a lightly armed admiral’s gig and unarmed civilian yachts. It was possible that Abe was the highest rated Ace in the Fleet. They predicted galactic clusters and seats on the Senate for both the admiral and Auro. The civilians who had complained the most vehemently a few days earlier could not have been more profuse in their thanks. Auro quickly found himself the recipient of passes for free services at two dozen brothels and casinos, all of which were now delighted to have to open two weeks early. Thanks to the Syndicate attack there now was a full squadron of spacemen due there in less than a day.

  It was just after the incredulous commander of the relief force had left clutching a detailed report of the entire defense that Abraham Meier made what Auro realized was his first direct order to his aide since they had landed on Brown.

  “Let’s go paint the town red,” the admiral said with a grin.

  Auro figured anything involving paint would make for a very interesting evening.

  He was right.

  COUSIN ARKHAM of the Rogger family was dangerously close to losing his renowned control. For weeks he had badgered Jou Ronica, combat manager of the combined families’ fleet, to act. To Arkham, at least, it was apparent that Duane was not yet ready to take the offensive, even if his spies had confirmed the Fleet’s gaining knowledge of location of their worlds. That wasn’t a reason to hesitate. It necessitated immediate action. They had to bring the war to the Alliance before it came to them instead.

  “We are nearly ready to begin,” the gray-haired man
ager assured the Rogger family fleet liaison. His expression was one of feigned confidence, or maybe it was just boredom, Arkham realized. He had been saying this same thing for weeks. “I am just waiting for a few more ships to arrive and confirmation that Duane is not ready to move.” The combat manager repeated the same explanation for inaction he had given each time he was urged to risk the largest fleet ever assembled in the cluster.

  Arkham took a sip of chilled water, as an alternative to smashing his fist down on the table and screaming in frustration. Half the warships in the cluster were already gathered here. Piracy was on the rise along the fringes. They would not win this war by doing nothing. Didn’t the manager see that?

  The older man had been a compromise. No family had wanted to turn command of their ships over to the combat managers of another. Ronica had a reputation for independence, too much so for the comfort of his own family. His choice had engendered enough discomfort among his relatives to justify the decision at the time. Now Arkham Rogger was regretting it.

  “We could begin sending preliminary probes into the Khalian system,” a Fleish manager suggested from several seats farther down the table. The Fleish were always ready to interject their opinion. By the end of the war they would either be a great house or extinct. Arkham wasn’t sure which he preferred.