Fleet Action wc-3

by William R. Forstchen

  Tolwyn looked over at him and smiled.

  "Come on, I think it's safe for us to have a short drink, help us unwind. It's going to be a boring float out here until something comes up."

  Jason was awakened by a gentle, but insistent shaking.

  Damn, what was it now, and then he was instantly awake. The room was dark, there was no klaxon, no attack. He suffered a moment of disorientation, the old dream had come back, the explosions silently bursting across the surface of the moon orbiting Kilrah. Svetlana . . .

  "Jason, it's Tolwyn, something's up."

  He stood up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and snapped on the light.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, but I want you in on this."

  Jason reached into his closet, pulled on a fresh jumpsuit, slipped into a pair of shoes and followed Tolwyn out the door.

  It was the midnight to four watch, one officer and four enlisted personnel manning the controls. Actually, the time was an artificial creation, complete to the dimming of all lights aboard ship except in work areas. He looked over at the chronometer, 0308 Confederation standard time and it certainly felt like it. He realized it had to be important if Tolwyn was pulling him out of the sack now. Well, at least it was some excitement for a change. They'd been on station eight jump points inside the Empire for twenty days, the three ships of their fleet rigged down for complete silent running, tucked into an asteroid field in a small system that didn't even rate a name on the charts, only a numbered designation.

  Jason followed Tolwyn on to the flight deck and saw a small crowd gathered around a monitor. They quietly approached. Vance looked up and nodded a greeting.

  "We've just had a break on cracking their latest A code and we've caught a burst signal from Kilrah but again it was garbled, emanating from the far side of the planet aimed towards Hari. They're only sending this particular burst when this one station is facing towards the Hari system and thus turned directly away from us. We get bounce reflections off of their moon, but the signal is degraded to near gibberish as a result. It's a pattern which seems to be adding up to something. We've also had a couple of partial locks on a burst coming out of the Hari system but it's still beyond our range to get a clear read and fix on it."

  "So?" Jason asked, wondering why he had been pulled out of bed to hear what was not any of his business to know anyhow.

  "I want to take us closer in," Vance replied casually, as if asking to do a little jaunt from Earth to the moon and back as a Sunday afternoon pleasure ride.

  Vance motioned for the two to go into an empty cubicle. He punched up a holo display and then a two dimensional screen on one wall.

  "This is why I wanted to get in closer," Vance said quietly, pointing at the holo map which floated in the corner of the cubicle and then to the flat screen where a long string of what appeared to be gibberish, marked by occasional intelligible words scrolled by.

  "It's definitely fleet code, their highest grade. We had a twenty-three percent decipher on the last one, then this new code came on line but is being used only by this one station aimed at Hari. It has all the markings of a highest priority fleet code. We got really lucky when one of my people saw a similarity to a code they used nearly eight years ago and pulled it for comparison. We immediately broke a string of words and can do a six percent translation and it's less than twelve hours old. In five or six days I can bring that up to thirty percent and from there comparisons of word groupings, even knowing the writing styles of certain operators and officials, can help us break the rest.

  "So why go deeper in now?"

  "Because in five or six days I might have enough of the code broken so that we can get some hard core information. When we do, I want to be in position to scoop those signals from Hari and also the signals going out from Kilrah."

  "That means getting some place between Kilrah and Hari," Jason said quietly.

  Vance smiled again and nodded

  "Do you know what you're asking? Only one ship's ever gone to Kilrah and back and that's this baby. I don't know how many Confed spy or recon ships have gotten into the area and back, but I bet it's precious few."

  "Enough to prove it's possible," Tolwyn interjected. "But you are not going in to Kilrah, you're going to circle the edge of the Empire out to the far side and head into Hari territory."

  "You didn't say we, you said you," Jason replied, looking over at Tolwyn.

  "I'm taking the jump-capable Sabre on this ship back to Landreich in an hour," Tolwyn said

  "Hell, that's at least a seven day run, it'll be a nightmare in a ship that small. It doesn't even have ahead on board."

  "Well, if you don't mind, I'm taking Kevin along to keep me company. It'll be a chance for us to catch up on family matters. We'll just have to make do and rough it a bit. One of us can sleep in the tail gunner's slot while the other flies."

  Jason smiled, glad at least for once that Tolwyn was dropping the stiff upper lip routine and allowing himself to show some open attachment to his nephew.

  "I'm putting you in command of this fleet Paladin is being sent out in Bannockburn within the hour, doing forward recon and moving ahead of you. His orders are to go straight into Hari territory, to track down their burst signal, monitor it, and if possible close in for a visual check on its location.

  "I'm ordering you to go cautiously, feel your way out around the edge of the Empire but don't go beyond extreme burst signal range to a relay drone that I'll make sure is deployed here," and he pointed to a map, which he quickly pulled up on a screen, showing a position four jump points inside of the Empire. "If something should come up, either with you or back home, we don't want you out of touch. I need to go back, some things have come up I've got to attend to and Vance has a little assignment for me."

  Vance nodded and pointed back to the screen.

  "There's several standard code words imbedded in these signals that we've seen before. They're just like Kilrathi general fleet communications during the war, daily updates on the various fronts that fleet commanders had to be made aware of. I suspect this word 'Nak'tara' that keeps coming up refers to a possible target of interest to those furballs. We're going to try an old trick to see if we can smoke them out. Geoff here has to take the message back personally. It's something I would never trust to a burst signal because it could tip off this whole operation. I don't even want it in writing. It goes out in his head, and he can see to it along with his other business."

  Jason looked over at the screen. This system was literally receiving and analyzing hundreds of millions of words, millions of conversations in Kilrathi, all its various dialects, and coded talk, hundreds of hours of video, and thousands of holo images every day. It was analyzing it, and boiling it down for info, and now because of a six percent translation of a half heard signal, he was being asked to jump Tarawa to the far side of the Empire. He had wandered into a shadow world of a quasi war which was beyond his ability to really understand. Either they were on to something, or they were all definitely nuts and he tended to think it was the latter.

  Baron Jukaga smiled as he read the report. It seemed that both the Emperor and his son were to take the Imperial cruiser out to Largkza, the second moon of Kilrah to attend the yearly ritual of Pukcal, the day of atonement at the famed temple to Sivar located on that planet.

  That the two would travel together was interesting in the extreme, a rare breach of security in allowing both the Emperor and the heir to travel aboard the same ship.

  It was an opportunity he had to take though the thought chilled him. It was, after all, the greatest sin possible, one even beyond the imagining of nearly all of his race, to strike down a liege lord in secret without direct and open challenge. It was impossible, for to do so was seen as being beneath the contempt of the gods, and beyond that, would usually solve nothing for without challenge, one could not take the place of the rival destroyed.

  And yet I would succeed to the throne in the end, he realized. And as for the si
n of it, he thought, I do not believe in the gods, so it does not matter. Even as he thought that heresy, however, he still felt chilled by it. He found it interesting that some humans could believe thus, and therefore deny any ultimate reason for existence, but for one who knew the hierarchy of the hrai, the clan, and the Empire with the godlike Emperor above all, it was impossible to contemplate. For was it not evident that in the hierarchy of the living there was also a hierarchy in the universe with the gods above the Emperor so that even in death one would sit with his hrai in paradise?

  He knew that here again his study of humans had triggered this line of thinking which had taught him just how easy it was to gain power if one was willing to seize it; for after all did not a prince of ability have to reach for power for the benefit of his state?

  He would do it, he had to. He looked again at the report. He would have to find a means of placing a small device on the cruiser, no easy task. He realized now that he was committed, and the thought brought him some comfort as he spun out his plan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "You know, laddie, I think I'm getting a bit too old for this sort of thing."

  Ian shook his head and said nothing, waiting for the jump transit to hit. Space forward blurred and then snapped back into focus, his stomach dropping, flipping over, and nearly coming up his throat. Ian scanned the nav screen, waiting for the locks to set in on the various stars to confirm that they had jumped into the system they wanted. Anomalies in jumps were not uncommon even in the heavily traveled lanes in the heart of the Confederation. In the barely charted jump points beyond the outer border of the Kilrathi Empire it vas almost a guess at times where the next jump would lead

  Paladin leaned over Ian's shoulder to watch, the seconds ticking by, finally a confirm light flashed on the screen and both breathed a sigh of relief.

  "At least according to what our charts tell us, we're in the right place," Paladin said. "It's a bit hard to tell though. Hell, laddie, we're going down one narrow little road here, we might have passed hundreds of other jump points in between and not even known it. The last time I did this I had to feel my way blind through it all.

  "I can tell you this, though, I think we've definitely gone a good bit into Hari territory, and Kilrah is somewhere off there," and he waved his hand vaguely off towards the port side of his ship, "roughly three hundred odd light years away. Where we're heading towards, that signal is sort of this way," and he vaguely waved his hand straight ahead, a gesture which Ian found to be strange and somewhat amusing.

  "In the olden days they used to draw places on the map and say, here be'eth dragons," and Paladin chuckled.

  "It's a long way back home," Ian said quietly.

  "Aye," Paladin said quietly turning in his swivel chair to scan his surveillance instruments.

  "Oh, we've got a little company way out here," he announced and pointed to the screen. "Ionization wake coming through here, heading straight for what I think's the next jump point."

  "How old?"

  "Not very, hard to tell, sir, maybe ten hours."

  "Could he have spotted us on the other side and jumped out?"

  Paladin sat quietly for a minute thinking that question over yet again. One of the problems with this cat Stealth machinery was the simple fact they were not even sure if it was really working right anymore. At least when Tarawa was alongside they could get a very quick and easy read. They hadn't seen Tarawa in ten days; it was now a good eight jump points behind them, holding itself at extreme burst signal range back to the edge of the frontier in case it had to get an emergency signal out.

  He had figured out by now that the Stealth gear was to be used for only short periods of time, and the drain it made on ship's energy was tremendous. So they had finally agreed to use it only at the moment of jump, and then when the coast was clear to come out of it and recharge their power by running with full scoops open. There was the other simple question as well. The Stealth might work against Confederation ships, but no one had yet to figure out if the Cats had a simple way of detecting it themselves.

  "Hard to tell, he could even be hiding somewhere in this blasted system and we don't have time to check it all."

  Ian looked over at the chart which showed a dozen planets in orbit around the red giant star of this sector. Information beyond that was nonexistent, nothing on any of the planets, resources, whether they were even inhabited or not Paladin pursed his lips for a moment and then sighed.

  "Well, laddie, let's power her up, get our tanks full, then close scoops and run to the next jump somewhat straight ahead. It'll take some time, we'll have to sniff it down."

  Ian nodded, taking the helm, turning Bannockburn and headed towards where they hoped the next jump point was located. It was tedious work, jumping through, snooping on passive listening, and then hunting up the next jump point and moving forward again.

  The engines of Bannockburn powered up and hours later it was far across the system, zeroing in on the next jump point. Long after their passage, what appeared to be nothing more than a small boulder, floating through the darkness a million kilometers from the jump point, shed its exterior. The Kilrathi light picket ship turned and accelerated away towards another jump point.

  "I think he is planning to assassinate me," the Emperor said

  Prince Thrakhath was surprised by just how casual his grandfather was, as if discussing plans for yet another boring court ritual.

  His choice of the word assassinate was interesting as well. In the language of Kilrah there was no such term, the word having filtered into the language from the Hari during the war of three eight-of-eights years past. For the Hari such disgusting practices appeared to have been their means of selecting who would rule, a chaotic and degrading system that left them ripe for conquest

  "What purpose would it serve?" Thrakhath asked. "After all, I would then rise to power," and even as he spoke the words he felt foolish, realizing that if Jukaga were planning to kill his grandfather, he would be killed as well.

  He fell silent for a moment, lowering his head to lap up a gulp of wine.

  "We can't simply denounce him," the Emperor said. "The evidence is far too flimsy, a mere hint, an inquiry as to who would be on the security detail guarding our cruiser the night before we leave for the Pukcal, but it fits him and what he has become."

  Prince Thrakhath nodded in agreement. There was no denying that Jukaga was far too right in many of his criticisms of how the war had been run. He alone, out of nearly all the Kilrathi, had taken the time and effort to truly study the humans. It was, after all, his assignment as head of spying to learn the secrets of the enemy and how they thought.

  That fact in and of itself had been troubling. In the past victory had come so quickly and with such assurance that there was little or no need to study the enemy; they were merely prey to be hunted down and exterminated. The Mantu did not count; their onslaught had come suddenly and with near overwhelming power, and then they had simply disappeared back into the void, apparently threatened by another unknown race. The human war, however, had dragged on for years. The exposure to them had been constant, even to the point of having a city's worth of human slaves right here in Kilrah, some of them even laboring in the subterranean caverns below the palace. Such contact had to, in the end, bring about changes. Jukaga had embraced them in order to understand and thus defeat them. It had thus introduced to him other ways of thinking as well.

  But to assassinate? The mere thought of the alien word was repulsive, it was killing without any honor, without challenge. It was done in the dark, without any hope of then picking up the fallen sword of the slain in order to take his mantle of power and honor.

  "If we both were killed," Thrakhath said, "there is no direct heir. In the chaos that followed, as head of his hrai, he would be in position to take the throne himself by playing off one faction against the other, something which he is a master at."

  He said the words softly. The shame of even thinking it was hard to
bear. There was no denying the horrifying fact that the seed of his family was weakening. His grandfather had sired many litters, most of them born dead, with but two sons surviving. His father had actually been executed by direct order of the Emperor, his uncle killed in the first days of the war.

  He was now the only heir, and not one son had been born to him, a sickly daughter his only surviving offspring from a single litter, and that from a lowly concubine of the second order. It was a humiliation almost beyond bearing. He should have sired dozens of offspring by now. He felt a deep and lasting shame. War was the only outlet left to him to vent his rage over his failure on the mating couch.

  There were a number of cousins descending from his grandfather's sister, so many that the chance of blood feud and civil war was the most likely result. Is that what Jukaga wanted, a civil war? He thought of his cousins. It would be easy enough to trigger a dynastic struggle with them, and Jukaga could weave his way through the alliances, weakening the family until finally it would be his own hrai that would be the strongest and could then finish them off. It would be a civil war unlike any fought since they had first ventured off their home world over eight eight-of-eights ago.

  It was a dreadful thought. He had always assumed that in the passage of years he would either sire a son to succeed him, or, when he was old, he would choose a cousin to sit upon the golden throne. His choice would then ritually kill him and thus take the sword and throne by right of blood.

  "We cannot kill him," the Emperor said, "not now. There is first of all the simple fact that his plan for the war has so far indeed worked, degrading as it is. The humans have been placed off guard, our shortage of transports is being rectified, and the new fleet is moving towards completion. If we ordered his death it would upset that plan, and beyond that, appear to be an act of jealousy. The other hrai leaders forced his return and the killing of him out of hand would bring their wrath down upon us. There is no denying the fact that, like it or not, his plan pulled us out of a difficult impasse."