Fleet Action wc-3

by William R. Forstchen

  We need the Emperor to hold us together, yet in the needing of him we are destroying ourselves as well, that is the paradox of it all, as Jukaga would say.

  "You're wondering who?" the Emperor said with a cold laugh.

  "Of course I would wonder such a thing."

  "And of course I will not tell you. In fact, you've already thought I might be lying; I'll leave that for you to meditate on."

  "Don't you trust me?" Vak asked, his voice and demeanor showing a genuine concern.

  "Don't be a fool, of course I don't trust you. Remember that, Vak, anyone who wears the Imperial crown must learn that lesson first. I did not trust even my own son and in the end I ordered his death. There are times I am not even sure of my grandson, the heir."

  He paused for a moment as if the memory did in fact still pain him in spite of his apparent lack of remorse in the years since the execution.

  He lowered his head again, growling softly.

  "You know that when I go," the Emperor finally said, "if my grandson is not supported, civil war will be the result. My hrai has ruled the Empire for centuries, that must continue, for no family will support the rise of another to rule over them."

  Vak said nothing.

  "But tell me," the Emperor chuckled, "why have you betrayed Jukaga's intentions to me?"

  "Because I am loyal sire."

  The Emperor leaned back and barked out a laugh.

  "Do not play the fool, the real reason. I know you hate my grandson and me, blaming us for the death of your first born."

  Vak was taken aback. His first answer had actually been the truth. If loyalty to a sworn oath was viewed as nothing more than a political toy, to be abandoned without thought, then they were indeed truly lost.

  The Emperor looked at him closely and finally nodded.

  "I believe you actually are loyal."

  Vak, feeling insulted that such an issue had even been questioned, remained silent.

  The Emperor looked away from Vak. Jukaga, as head of intelligence, had placed his spies not only beyond the borders but within even the palace itself. There was nothing he did not know. Poisoning him would be the easiest answer, but that might very well make the loyalty of Vak and the other family heads waver. The tacit agreement between hrai leaders and Emperors had stood for generations: both sides will support the other, neither will attempt to kill the other.

  He thought of Thrakhath. He was tempted to recall him from his assignment with the new fleet but then thought better of it. The new fleet was not only the tool for the final offensive against the Confederation, but also a replacement for the home fleet lost in the last two years of campaigns. Three carriers were ready, at the very least six more had to be completed if the next campaign was to be a guaranteed success. He could not afford one more lost opportunity, for it would shake whatever power they had left to the very core and perhaps trigger open rebellion. Yet if they waited, Jukaga in his slyness might very well gain even more power.

  It was an amusing question to ponder and he knew if he pondered long enough he would find the answer.

  "You know just how munificent my reward might be if you provide me with information valuable enough, including perhaps even the marriage to one of my great nieces. It could very well mean that your family might even thus be in line for the Imperial succession," the Emperor said softly. And Vak smiled.

  "Jump transition on automatic sequencing and counting at ten, nine, eight . . ."

  Jason settled back into his chair and waited. A cold rush of excitement tingled down his spine. No matter how many times he had jumped he always felt the same, especially when going into hostile space. One of the key tactical points with jumping was the simple fact that you never knew what was on the other side. Inside secured shipping lanes behind the lines there were beacons placed at both points, monitoring traffic, sent up to avoid the possibility of a ship materializing in the same point of space occupied by someone else, an event that always had spectacular results. But beyond that was the question of just who was waiting. Paladin, piloting his new ship which he had named Bannockburn, with Ian aboard as his co-pilot, had already gone ahead to scout. The fifteen minutes' wait had passed and now it was time to follow through and the potential for an unpleasant surprise was always there.

  He felt Tarawa drop away, and there was a momentary queasiness then the flash of rematerialization. He looked over at his navigation officer who was peering intently at her holo display.

  "Correct jump alignment confirmed," she announced. "Bannockburn reporting in on laser lock."

  Paladin's image appeared on the screen.

  "This Stealth works like a charm. We found a remote sensor and took it out, it never even put out a signal. Optical scan shows the entire system's clear right up to the next jump point."

  Jason looked over at Tolwyn and grinned.

  "It looks like we got through. We've crossed from the frontier into the heart of the Empire."

  He looked up at his aft visual and less than a minute later his escort CVE-6 Normandy came through.

  "All ships through," communications announced, "all systems running nominal, Bannockburn reports successful take-out of remote drone without detect signal being activated."

  Geoff Tolwyn, standing behind Jason, nodded, letting out an audible sigh of relief. Jason found that alone to be surprising; he was used to his old chief being absolutely unflappable.

  They were now four jumps into the Kilrathi Empire, tracking down one of the hundreds of transition points leading from neutral territory into the Empire in the one direction and Confederation space on the other. Surveillance drones of course monitored these points, but "accidents" like the one Paladin had just arranged for the drone covering this jump point were easy enough to set up. It could be days or even weeks before a picket ship came out to replace the drone with a new one.

  "Let's hit the flight deck and see what Richards is up to," Tolwyn said, motioning for Jason to follow.

  Excited, Jason came out of his seat. He had been waiting for days to get a look at what Richards was doing.

  Leaving the bridge they went down the main corridor to the forward part of the ship. At the airlock door two guards came to attention at Tolwyn's approach but did not step aside.

  Internal ship security was nothing new to Jason but this was different. The two men were not dressed in the usual Marine class B uniform, for after all this was not a Confederation ship any longer. There was something disquieting about the black khaki uniform the two guards were wearing without a single insignia or marking on them. The easy way they held their laser rifles told him that these two were highly trained professionals.

  Only seven members of the Tarawa's operating crew were allowed on to the hangar deck, Tolwyn and himself, along with Kevin, Doomsday and two Landreich pilots cleared to fly one of the four craft still left in the very forward part of the hangar, and finally Sparks as the one overworked maintenance officer permitted to work on the fighters. Everyone else aboard ship had already been told that the guards had standing orders to shoot first and then ask questions. Jason could tell this was simply not rhetoric, these two would do it without batting an eye.

  Clearing the doorway, they stepped out into the hangar deck. Equipment was spread out across almost all the floor space which once was occupied by forty-four fighters. He realized that he was, in fact, looking at perhaps the single largest concentration of computing power anywhere in the Confederation except, perhaps, for the administrative centers of Earth and the moon, and even then he wondered. Banks of storage systems were arrayed along one wall, dozens of holo display fields were already up and running, and he approached one of them, a field nearly half a dozen meters cubed. A technician was standing inside the display field, which showed a three dimensional model of what he recognized as the near space environment around Kilrah. Bright hovering points of light represented the stars, their planets, and transition jump points, with blocks of data appearing above them, the information readable fr
om any angle one looked at it. The technician standing inside the holo display looked almost godlike as she walked about inside it. He was totally mystified by what she was doing as she pulled out what looked like a laser pointer, aimed it at the orange size planet floating in the middle of the field and squeezed.

  Another holo field popped into action next to the first, this one a close up of the planet the first technician had pointed at. The entire field was occupied by what looked like a solid ball, its continents covered with hundreds of flashing lights

  "That's Kilrah," Jason whispered.

  "Using this, they can lock in on any one of millions of sources even while continuing to scan all other traffic and look for new sources at the same time," Tolwyn replied softly,

  Several white overall clad techs gathered around the globe, pointing, talking softly, arguing, and then aiming pointers at particular flashing lights. Behind them, two dimensional flat screens flared into light, streams of data flashing across some, others showing pictures, one of which caught Jason's eye, of Kilrathi wearing heavy leather armor slashing at each other with swords.

  Vance came up to the two and nodded a greeting.

  "Say, what the hell is that on the monitor?" Jason asked, pointing to the screen.

  "A Kilrathi drama from the Gakarg Period."

  "What?"

  "Their ancient history. They love holos about the ancient wars when the various clans were feuding with each other before the unification. We monitor every such station from Kilrah, their media links are translight signalled throughout the Empire. It cost them a bundle but it helps keep them unified. Watching their stations might give us clues as to internal politics. We have a lot of software tied up with analysis of their popular shows, since there might be some subtle clues as to what's going on based upon the type of entertainment the government is broadcasting. In the last three days we've noticed an increase of Gakarg Period dramas dealing with Emperor Y'taa'gu.

  "Who?"

  Vance chuckled.

  "I never heard of him either. Seems to be an evil emperor who was insane and finally killed by a virtuous warrior in order to save his people. It's worth watching. It's interesting that since the armistice we never see a single drama about the war with us, or any of their previous ones, only ancient history. Their news programs are the same, really tight on war news and only one brief announcement of the armistice and then nothing. These furballs are mighty security conscious on such things, but we still gleam occasional facts; that's why it's worth monitoring."

  Lance led them around the holo display of Kilrah raised a pointer and aimed it at a flashing blue light

  "Blue means commercial communication line," and he nodded back to a screen which was filled with what looked like shipping orders, instantly translated into standard English.

  "This D-5 is monitoring everything that's reaching the antenna arrays mounted outside this ship. If it's non-coded it immediately translates it. We have the computers programmed to look for certain things on the commercial channels. For instance, a shipping order for IFF missiles gets tagged into a higher priority slot. We can even look for orders related to just one component of an IFF missile. If certain patterns of shipping develop or if something outside of the ordinary happens, the computer will alert a human operator who then analyzes it and decides if there's something important enough that it has to be kicked upstairs. That's the key job, looking for the little nugget of gold inside the tons of gravel and mud.

  "One of the first things that started to tip us off to the fact that the Kilrathi might be building something was that certain commercial links for the ordering of military parts suddenly went into a new code system, which was changed every eight days. Significant orders for supplies, parts, and shipping became highly classified.

  "That started some real questions being asked. The problem was that they shifted this classified work to the part of the Empire out beyond Kilrah, as far from our listening posts as possible The question of why really put the pressure on us to get this D-5 on line and also caused the loss of a lot of good intel people behind the lines. The jump we just completed is the deepest in we've ever been able to take equipment like this. You can see already the streams of data pouring in.

  Richards led them over to his command booth and offered a couple of cups of coffee to his guests. Jason noticed that these people seemed to live on caffeine, and a fair number of them were addicted to Ian's habit of tobacco, a practice he found totally mystifying and somewhat disgusting.

  "The D-5 can monitor any signal within its six hundred light year range and pinpoint its origin. The hard part is programming it to figure out what is worth looking at out of the billions of messages it picks up every day and then passing it to a human analyst for evaluation.

  "The analyst's job is the toughest. It takes someone with a sixth sense to decipher what appear to be unrelated facts but actually are part of a pattern.

  "We do the same thing for the media channels, the public communication lines, and of course the military and government lines," and he pointed to the flashing red and yellow lights back on the holo display of Kilrah.

  "Those are the tough buggers, a lot of it is burst signalled and highly encoded."

  "Damn, there's hundreds of them," Jason said. "Something must be up."

  Vance laughed softly.

  "Over ninety percent are dummy channels, broadcasting complete gibberish, total nonsense words that actually tie up most of our decoding equipment since we're not sure if its garbage or the real thing. Sometimes you might have a burst signal with a million words in it, all encoded, and the real message is twenty words in the middle, each word separated from the next by say six thousand four hundred words.

  "Why that number?"

  "Remember they have eight fingers and we have ten, so their numerical system is base eight. We tend to look a bit more intensely at base eight numerical lines as a result. What gets frustrating is that they are using at least a dozen different codes at any given time, with the highest level material going on what we call Fleet Code A, which tends to change every twenty-four to forty days. The real messages are hidden in a lot of garbage and we have to wade through each message and might spend weeks tracking down promising stuff only to discover its a decoy."

  "Some of their people even have a sense of humor about it. One message, when finally translated, was a simple 'Hey, stupid, we fooled you,' and another was a long excerpt from what I guess was a Kilrathi dirty book. Decoding and translating each of those things took up time and equipment. We can't ignore a single message because we never know if we might hit paydirt or not. So we wade through all of this, figure out the real signals from the fake, then spend a hell of a lot of time cracking the code, and just when we think we've got it, they go and change the code and we're back to square one. Then to top it off they might have a station that's quiet for weeks or months, and it pops off a lone burst signal then shuts down. Trying to even figure out where it came from out of a billion cubic light years of space was nuts until the D4 model, which could do a Doppler analysis and at least do a probable trace."

  "I'd go mad," Tolwyn said.

  "Some of us do," Vance replied. "It takes a special kind of person to do this. You fighter jockeys, your battle is one of skill and wits, but it gets played out in seconds. Some of our battles last years.

  Vance smiled.

  "I've been in this game for twenty-nine years. I've dreamed all those years of having something like this D-5. With the new antenna array we can pick up bursts from up to six hundred light years out; only a couple of generations back in the system we were lucky to get consistent reads from ten light years away. We used to spend billions on recon drones which would go in, store up data for a week, then send out a burst signal. Once it signalled the Kilrathi would be onto it and take it out. Now this one system can cover an area that would have required thousands of drones.

  "The big problem now is that counter intel believes they knew of the D-4 and maybe suspec
ted our D-5. We've noticed a decrease in signal traffic and suspect they're shifting more to courier. So far we've yet to figure out how to read a dispatch pouch six hundred light years behind the lines."

  As they continued to talk, Vance led them around the flight deck. Small cubicles had been set up in the center of the room, and hunched over in each was an operator, going through data that the computer felt was of sufficient importance to bring to the attention of a human operator.

  "I've got a hundred and three analysts with me on this mission, each of them a specialist and the best in his field with eight or more years of training behind him. There are another forty programmers who feed in the requests and another twenty just to troubleshoot any glitches in the machine."

  Jason looked around the room, wondering just who indeed was paying for all of this. He had his suspicions but knew it was best not to ask. What was equally troubling was the matter-antimatter mine that was almost casually brought aboard with the rest of the equipment. It was placed in the center of the room and would be activated if it appeared as if Tarawa might be captured. In this case there was definitely no surrender although, technically, they were not even at war.

  A technician came up to Vance's side, looked over at Jason and Tolwyn and said nothing. Vance smiled and nodded.

  "I think Jenkins here has something to tell me that he'd rather not say in front of the two of you," Vance said quietly.

  Tolwyn, smiling, nodded and turned and walked away.

  "Hey, we're on the same team," Jason finally said as they went back down the corridor to the bridge.

  "Just remember, Jason, if there's no need to really know, then you definitely better not know. Believe me, son, there's a hell of a lot I wish I didn't know at this moment."