Ronica looked unhappy. He was used to unquestioned obedience. Even more so from a combat manager placed almost seven seats from the head of the table. Perhaps though he should agree. It would place the burden of error on the Fleish family and he could still garner the credit for any success on himself.
“The plan calls for near complete surprise,” corrected another combat manager before their leader could reply.
Damn, Ronica muttered to himself. It was the representative of his own family . . . trying to be helpful of course. Now he had to disagree with the Fleish suggestion or appear to be correcting his own cousin. Standing to increase the impact of his refusal, the fleet’s manager was interrupted by the entry of the flagship’s tech and comm manager. Everyone watched silently as the technician placed a single sheet of printout in front of Ronica. Not being even a cousin he was forbidden to speak in the council chamber and withdrew nervously.
The families’ fleet had been cruising at sub-light speeds just outside the cluster that contained their home worlds. While moving in the general direction of Khalia, their speed, when compared to FTL travel, was negligible. Lost in the vastness of space, they had felt safe from discovery. Now one of the Khalian raiders that had remained loyal to them had dropped out of FTL and was imploring their aid. It was being pursued by a Fleet ship with seemingly magical abilities. Ignorant savages.
Turning from the table Ronica muttered an order that would send a dozen smaller ships to intercept the Fleet vessel when it dropped out. They had to destroy the intruder before it escaped with the knowledge of their fleet that even a quick scan would bring it.
Then the gray-haired combat manager reached under the table and activated the command holo. If by some miracle the Fleet ship did escape, the decision would have been made for him. They would have no choice but to begin the offensive.
Arkham studied the screen as the input of a hundred sensors labeled the suddenly appearing Fleet ship as being an overpowered cargo vessel. Sitting to the combat manager’s left, the Rogger liaison watched as the green blip appeared among the hundreds of points of white light that represented their fleet and wondered if he was hoping for the impudent freighter to escape or be destroyed. . . .
INCOMING FIRE bracketed the target, and for a brief instant it became a star whose light seemed to rival the other ancient fires of heaven; then it choked on its own destruction and all became darkness again.
“Impressive,” said Roj softly, and meant it. “This thing may be a barge that even the Weasels wouldn’t want, but the specs on its weapon installations don’t really do them justice.” Senior Captain Roj Malin of the Fleet and the brainship Minerva had between them seen most of the forms of destruction modern technology could presently hand out, and this was right up there with the best of them.
“I thought the Olympus-class was just fine, thank you very much.” Minerva managed to convey boredom, irritation, and a sense of being imposed on, all in the one short sentence. Granted, she’d had almost three weeks since launch to perfect that tone of voice, but Roj felt pretty sure she wasn’t quite done with refining it further.
It was unusual for brainships to be any bigger than a Juno-class corvette, tops—Minerva had been an Olympus long-range scout in her last incarnation—but somebody at Fleet Ops had decided to experiment a little with the control capabilities of a brainship command core. The refit had been fast: Minerva and her brawn had come back to Orbital Facility Two-Twelve for nothing more than debriefing and a standard overhaul. Instead of which they had removed her brain-core like someone seeding an avocado, and with as little ceremony, to plug it into a brand-new Valhalla-class hull shell that after the responsive Olympus scout, apparently felt as cumbersome as lead waders.
“Without so much as asking,” she grumbled for the wearisome thousandth time.
“It looks to me as if you’re getting used to the feel of it,” said Roj soothingly, and as if to prove his point punched up all the data for the past six test firings. Minerva scanned them and uttered a grunt like the metallic crunch of a bad gear-change. She wasn’t impressed. Roj couldn’t really blame her, even though with his new rank-tabs still glittering at the collar of his uniform, he seemed to feel it his responsibility to get something besides records out of this particular shakedown—though so far there was little enough apart from paperwork in the whole damned voyage.
Even the weapon tests were boring. Somebody somewhere had decided that until the new shell’s flight characteristics had been collated, the Valhalla-class vessels shouldn’t be put through a full-scale combat routine. Apparently that same somebody was afraid that the combined stresses of weapons and battle maneuvers would prove too much for the new hull shell, even though at three-hundred-meters-plus the Valhalla hull was bigger than an lowa-class battleship of Old Earth, and was armored in the new Alfa proof, a self-replicating ablative that had maybe six long-chain molecules in the entire cladding. To be informed that people presumably in the know were unsure about the structural integrity of such a juggernaut did not fill Roj or Minerva with confidence.
“Besides which the bugger has a sensor cross section like a small moon.”
Minerva had said so within a few seconds of her sensory inputs being reconnected, and would probably say it again before this particular duty tasking was out. They had both considered running the test routines in such a way that the notion of oversize brainships would be scrapped, but that would make this the first mission that either of them had undertaken that had proven less than successful. It would just have to be an argument between whatever the flight recorders said, set against the voices of experienced opinion.
It was just that joint experience that had earned them this relatively cushy mission in the first place: they were apparently the most successful and best integrated brain/brawn team in the Fleet. Also, between the pair of them, they represented probably the biggest single investment of active duty time, combat experience, and plain old money in any one vessel short of a first-line light cruiser.
That was why they were out here, in one of the deep-space fire-and-maneuvering ranges located just about as far from any action as it was possible to be in this sector of the galactic spiral arm. Nobody wanted to run the risk of being the officer whose orders wasted such an accumulation of knowledge. They were deodorant specks in one of the armpits of space, but an armpit that didn’t even sweat. . . .
“You want to hear something really cheerful?” said Roj.
“Kristos, boyo, surprise me if you can.”
“I know they’ll be working up a new class of brainship from what we bring back to them; but I don’t think either you or I are going to have any part in it.” Minerva made a wordless interrogative noise and Roj shrugged. “I just don’t think we’ll be going back in the line when this is over—because I think they’ve got us slated for one of the teaching academies.”
“What . . . ? Roj, you have got to be joking.” He could feel all her lenses staring at him, iris shutters wide as they ran everything from visual light through IR and thermographic over him in the hope that he was indeed making a funny. Minerva was out of luck; it wasn’t the sort of thing that even he made jokes about.
“How many times during that last refit did they try to transfer combat-experience data from your main banks?”
“Three, maybe four. I was shut down for part of it, so I don’t really . . .” Minerva’s perfectly modulated voice trailed off in a crackle of static as she realized the implications behind what Roj had just said. “And they couldn’t make it work?”
“Nothing but dates and times and facts. Same with me. No matter how long they debriefed, I couldn’t explain why we’d used this maneuver or that weapon rather than something else. Like I told them a dozen times, you had to be there, in a combat situation, under combat stresses, before all those combat instincts start to gel and produce some sort of sense. It’s not something that can be dumped down to a data c
hip. So” —he shrugged grimly—“I guess we get to teach it.”
“Roj, they are not putting me into some shitty ground-based simulator.”
“Or me behind its console, lady.” Roj smiled the slow, lazy smile that was becoming his trademark in the Fleet. It was a smile that said, “mess with me and pull back a bloody stump,” and it was one of those expressions once seen, never forgotten. He was getting almost as well known among the tightly knit community of brainship brawns and their commanders as Captain Hawk Talon, Hero of the Spaceways, had become among the Omni-watchers. Except that there was nothing fictional or special-effectsy about the violence Roj could visit on people who annoyed him. . . .
“You’re not suggesting something illegal, Captain?” said Minerva, speaking very carefully so that there was no chance of her being misunderstood. Roj listened to the absolute lack of inflection in her voice and recognized it as a tone he had heard several times before their service assocation. It meant that whatever he decided, she would support him to the hilt, and that he would be expected—no, he would be required—to back her up to the same degree.
“Oh, no, XR-14376,” said Roj with equal formality. “Nothing of the kind. We’re both far too busy right now.” To continue with “but maybe later . . .” was both tacky and superfluous—even though both of them had heard the words just as plainly as if they had been spoken aloud.
Tweep!
Roj twitched slightly, and maybe Minerva did as well, deep down behind the armor of her core. Even though the sound was no more than her com circuitry acknowledging an incoming signal, after what they had been carefully not saying during the past few seconds, any contact with the outside world was less than immediately welcome.
“Nothing on the screens,” said Minerva an instant later. “We’re clear, out to extreme range.”
The com system ran a high-speed analysis, then flipped its findings up onto the main viewer. Roj glanced at it, then looked again and swore under his breath. The war with the Khalia might have come to an official end, but it was still recent enough for distress code prefixes to send that familiar ugly little shiver down his spine. “Somebody’s in trouble,” he said softly. “And I don’t think it’s just a cat caught up a tree.”
“Enhancement and decryption systems coming on line, signal source tracking engaged,” Minerva began briskly. Then she hesitated, and when she spoke again there was suddenly suspicion in her voice. “Do you know if Rear Admiral Agato has any connection with this shakedown exercise?”
Roj stared quizzically at her main lens array, as close as he could get to looking her right in the eye. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said at last, but even so, there was a lot less concern than at first in the way he studied the newly decoded signal. “According to this, a Fleet tender has come under attack by”—he cleared his throat significantly, but failed to shift the disbelief that hung heavy in his voice—“by a Khalian raider. Now that’s strange. I thought the Weasels were on our side now. You think maybe this is just another drill?”
“Im not sure what to think where Agato’s concerned.”
For as long as they had known him, Rear Admiral Julius Agato had maintained a connection with Fleet Intelligence and at the same time with R&D (Weapons). It made for an interesting combination, with “interesting” having the same value as in the old Chinese curse. Agato was eminently suited to his post—whatever its official title might be—because the man’s brain, undoubtedly powerful and imaginative, was also sufficiently convoluted to pull corks all by itself. It was not beyond him to have arranged a sector-wide alert just as some sort of test for the brainship-brawn team that were his favorite guinea pigs.
The only drawback was that they didn’t know yet what the right response was supposed to be. Was it a test of readiness, so that they should drop everything and go scorching off to answer the distress call? Or was it meant to check how determined—or otherwise—they were to complete the butt-and-brain-numbing shakedown duties without letting every little thing distract them? Not that a sector-band alert could ever be regarded as little. And there was always the possibility that it wasn’t a drill at all. . . .
“Any enhancement on that, Minerva?”
“On the screen. It checks out: coordinates, ID codings, the lot. Either it’s a bloody good simulation, or it’s the real thing. Treat it as real?”
“Close enough for jazz.”
“Und jetzt fur Schrage Musik auch, Junge.” Roj looked blank, and Minerva chuckled. “Military historian’s pun. Check the new dorsal weapon installations sometime.” The monitors flipped from comms to navigation and a little promissory vibration went through the Valhalla’s structure as Minerva brought the main drives back on line. “They’ve given us a last-spotted escape vector,” she said, all business now that they were doing something more than just another drill. “I’m laying in an intercept course. Get a message squirt off to Command, let them know what’s going on.”
“What is going on?”
“Call it, uh—call it a live-firing exercise. Under combat conditions. They can work the rest out for themselves. Now let’s see what this thing can really do. . . .”
* * *
One of the things that the Valhalla could do was to accelerate to maximum pursuit velocity far faster than the old Olympus could ever have done. So that they didn’t have to discuss it—the revelation looked likely to put Minerva out of sorts if she dwelt on it too long—she and Roj sifted all the other information out of the damaged tender’s data squirt. There was a lot more information coded into it than just a yell for help. During the war with the Khalia it had become standard Fleet procedure that a distress transmission should include as much detail as possible on the cause of that distress. In this case it was data on the attacking ship: speed, projected weapon capabilities, and last-known estimated escape course.
Minerva was now locked onto an intercept vector. If the raiding ship was to have any chance of avoiding her long-range scanner sweep, it would need at the very least a ninety-by-ninety degree change in its recorded course, and if its sub-light speed as recorded by the tender was accurate, there wasn’t any Weasel ship yet built that could take such a strain without shredding itself. Even though the pursuit might take thirty hours or more, once they locked onto its energy-residual track they stood a better than even chance of catching the ship they were looking or. And if necessary, blowing it to scrap.
* * *
The interception came close to being a one-pass, one-shot knockdown. Close, but no cigar. The raider was there all right, one small ship that was a bright blip on the outer rim of the scan globe—but not where it should have been, right under their guns.
“Whose fault was that?” Roj muttered, not pleased.
“Don’t look at me, honeybunch,” snapped Minerva. “I just followed the coordinates. It’s a pity the Weasels weren’t so obliging as to leave the Scene of the Crime at their top speed after all.”
They were Weasels, that much was certain: the track comparator had picked up enough of its energy residue to run an analysis and venture an opinion of the probable source. The Delta-class corvette was a vessel they had met before—distinctly short on creature comforts, even so far as the Khalia reckoned such things, but very well suited to its basic function of blowing things up and running away afterward. It had been one of the fastest ships in the Khalian fleet, and that it was now being operated on a freelance basis didn’t make it any slower. The problem had two solutions: either they could give up right now, or settle back for the long sub-light pursuit that would eventually, very eventually, enable them to bring the Khalians to bay, because while they weren’t close enough to open fire even with the Valhalla’s enhanced weaponry, they were still too close to warp up and catch the raiders that way. At least, not unless they wanted to overshoot by a factor of several billion. . . .
“They’re heading out of Khalian space, Roj,” said Minerva, spea
king much more calmly than she had done at first. “It confirms a suspicion.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“That they’re nothing to do with the Khalian government, such as it is. Honorable defeat in honorable battle permits an honorable alliance with the honorable victors . . . .” Minerva rattled the litany off like a slug thrower, then made a sound of harsh amusement that was more like a cat with a hairball. “Most likely this lad’s one of those ship captains who saw profit in a bit of freelance looting before this sector of space becomes too quiet and orderly. He’ll probably roll in and surrender with a claim that he was out on the frontier or something, and there’ll be no questions asked, and God knows how many people he’ll have killed before he decides the pirate life is getting too hot for him. . . .”
“I think not,” said Roj. He settled into his acceleration chair and fastened the eight-point harness comfortably. “If we’re the sole representatives of the Fleet in this sector of space, then we also represent, uh” —he hunted through his memory for a particular old-fashioned phrase that had been eluding him— “the powers of high, middle, and low justice.”
“The powers of judge, jury, and executioner.” Minerva’s voice was soft, betraying nothing.
“If they surrender, well and good—if not, they get smoked. Seems fair to me.”
“Maybe I should have a new paint job on this hull shell when we get back to Facility Two-Twelve, Something sharp in, say, black and white, with maybe a few red and blue strobes above the flight deck. If we’re going to play at being the Galactic Patrol I might as well look the part. Pity a siren isn’t any use in vacuum.”
Roj took note of the fact that Minerva wasn’t laughing much at her own joke, and shut up about justice and anything connected with it, turning his attention instead to a good firing solution on the fleeing Khalian. Just in case. There was always the possibility that the Weasels would surrender; and then again, there was always the possibility that they’d do nothing of the sort. Let Minerva say what she pleased: he didn’t have a brainship’s ability to compartmentalize things logically, and he’d regarded the Khalia as The Enemy for a lot longer than he considered them as semiformal allies. Roj was glad enough the war was over, but with the memories inside his skull that could still keep him from his sleep, he wasn’t able to join in the round of “kiss and make up and forget it ever happened” that seemed to his jaundiced eye to have overtaken the politicos. It wasn’t as easy to turn off years of propaganda—never mind the painful experiences of reality—as they seemed to think.
The Fleet05 Total War Page 28
