So that’s what P’Dann had decided! Sam did the tactical math in his head: about eighteen hours to rendezvous, at that distance and closing speed. Too close. Damn!
“You did right, Norquist. Start the log and battle clock from the time of jump emergence. I’ll be on the bridge to relieve you in one minute. Prep the ship to undock with the spin habitat.”
He’d grabbed his boots and, still barefoot, was already out in the passageway leading forward, which had become “up” since the Bay had been under continuous low acceleration. He grabbed the hand conveyor which ran forward along the starboard side of the passage. He thought through the problem as he let the hand conveyor take him past the partial bulkheads at the three frames between his day cabin and the bridge. About two hundred thousand kilometers wasn’t enough distance for the plan they’d had the most success with, which was to raise their velocity at low gee over a day or two. They’d have to do it quicker, which they could, but it meant burning a lot more HRM. This might still work but it was going to be close.
Two ships, though. Well, they’d run the drill against two ships and won . . . usually. It was an added complication, though. It wasn’t just more firepower; a second ship let the enemy cover a broader field of fire with their two meson guns, and let them take out twice as many incoming targets. And it meant the Bay had to kill twice as many ships to win. To survive, they’d need to do some fancy evasive maneuvers. More reaction mass.
He heard the subdued but excited chatter of crew behind him, coming up the passageway to their battle stations on the bridge. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone carried that same mix of excitement, anticipation and anxiety as he felt himself.
Lieutenant Ka’Deem Brook’s voice rose in pitch inside Sam’s head, the emotion clear even through the mechanical filter of the commlink: This isn’t going to work!
“Main hull is clear of the docking collar,” Lieutenant Barr-Sanchez reported from Maneuvering One as she punched the acceleration warning klaxon twice. “Ready for ventral thrust.”
“Make full ventral thrust,” Sam ordered. He felt the vibration immediately as the ventral attitude control thrusters fired fore, aft, and amidships, pushing him down in his acceleration chair and sliding Cam Ranh Bay “up.” The view forward showed on the main bridge display and he saw the big habitat wheel, now separated from the main hull of the Bay and moving “down.”
“Nose is clear of the habitat wheel,” Barr-Sanchez reported. “Securing ACT burn. Radiators are clear of the habitat wheel.”
“Full thrust,” Sam ordered, “all drives.”
Barr-Sanchez hit the acceleration klaxon again, one long wavering blast, and then fired the thrusters. The acceleration pushed Sam back into his chair, made him feel all of his weight and then some. Without the mass of the habitat wheel, the Bay could manage a little over one and a tenth gees. It would be close, very close.
This isn’t going to work, Ka’deem Brook repeated. Run the numbers, Captain! There’s not enough time, not enough distance between us and the long ships. If we follow your course projection, we enter their effective range in one hour and forty minutes, but our missiles won’t be in range to kill them for another ten minutes after that.
“I know the numbers, Mister Brook.”
If we launch our ordnance at the forty-minute mark and then start decelerating, we can stay completely out of their range.
“Yes, and our missiles will have to spend nineteen minutes in the kill zone. Our missiles don’t live nineteen minutes in the kill zone, XO. You know that from the simulations. They can probably live thirteen minutes, and that’s what that extra twenty minutes of straight-ahead acceleration gets us.”
Maybe! Brook shot back. We don’t even know that much for sure. It’s all based on assumptions. And it still doesn’t do us any good. Even if every assumption is right, they kill us ten minutes before our missiles kill them.
“Fortunately, XO, we’ve got an hour and a half to figure out how to avoid dying. Plenty of time. COMM, get me all-ship, captain to crew.”
“Hot mic, sir,” Bohannon said.
“All hands, this is the captain speaking. We are about to engage two Guardian long ships which just popped out of jump space. We have separated from the spin habitat, which is a trick they haven’t seen from us before, and we are about to show them how fast this lady can run when she ditches her skirt. We’ve drilled and drilled and drilled, practicing how to kill these bastards, until we can do it in our sleep. Now it’s time to just do it. Captain out.”
“Sir,” Lieutenant Alexander said from the TAC One chair to Sam’s right, “you might want to look at this. We’re getting unusual readings from one of the long ships, the one we’ve tagged Bandit Two.”
Sam touched his workstation and brought up the TAC sensor feeds.
“See, sir? Its heat signature is declining, as if it’s gradually turning on some sort of thermal cloak. And look at the HRVS image. The stern of the ship seems like it’s shimmering, wavering. Do they have some kind of force field covering it?”
Sam looked at the imagery, the closest and best look they’d had so far of long ships, two of them in tight formation: massive, blocky structures at the stern, an almost impossibly long, slender latticework frame reaching forward, and a smaller but still considerable structure at the bow. One of the long ships was cooling, and Sam also saw a slight shimmer around the aft section of the ship. Then he smiled.
“TAC, that’s a very original interpretation of the data you have there, but leaving aside alien cloaking devices and force fields, use Occam’s Razor and try again. Limit yourself to phenomena we’ve actually experienced.”
Alexander stared at his workstation and shook his head.
“Sorry, Captain, but I’ve never seen anything like that shimmer over the stern of the starship except maybe an electrostatic armor field. You think that’s what it is?”
“I think it’s simpler than that. We like to avoid in-system jumps near the plane of the ecliptic because there’s junk floating around there, and you come out in the same space as junk, you experience an annihilation event. That shimmer is from atmosphere escaping. It’s outgassing, and its thermal signature is decreasing because it’s cooling down. He doesn’t have power and pretty soon he’s not going to have atmo’. I bet he suffered an annihilation event upon exiting jump space. That evens the odds a bit.”
“You mean he came out in the same space as a rock?”
“I’d guess more like a few grains of sand. This had to have been a pretty small event. Of course, small is relative. The only annihilation events I saw in the war didn’t leave anything identifiable as a ship. That’s the problem with in-system jumps, especially if you jump into the plane of the ecliptic, where all the debris gathers. I’ll tell you, TAC, I’m amazed they risked it. I really am. It’s one thing for us mortals to roll those dice. I guess in one sense we and the Guardians are risking the same thing: all that’s left of our lives. But for us that’s a few decades. For them, it’s potentially millennia. What’s worth that risk for them? I really never thought they’d take it.”
“Well, sir, who says there are Guardians on those two ships?” Alexander said.
Huh! Sam thought. That made a lot of sense. Those two ships were two hours’ communication time away from P’Daan, same as the Bay was. If there were no Guardians actually over there, calling the tactical shots, that might make a difference.
“Captain Bitka,” Bohannon said from COMM One to his left, “P’Daan’s back on the horn.”
“Christ! Take a message. And get me a tight beam back to the habitat wheel. I need to talk to our prisoner, Te’Anna.”
“Sir, we rigged her stateroom up as a holosuite, just in case,” Bohannon said. “You want to use that?”
After disengaging from the habitat wheel, the small stay-behind crew had used the attitude thrusters on the wheel to get it spinning again, so Te’Anna sat in normal gravity and looked at him through her unusual unblinking eyes.
“Yes,” Sam answered, “my engineering department tells me your holocomm technology is superior to ours. Maybe you can give us some pointers later. I don’t have much time right now, but I would like to ask a couple quick questions. Have you personally ever done an in-system jump in the plane of the ecliptic?”
She looked at him and tilted her head to the side.
“If I did that sort of thing, I would not be here speaking to you. I would have died long ago.”
“That’s what I figured. Next question: the human female named Choice has a theory about your technology and its diffusion through your society.”
“She is not your subordinate,” Te’Anna interrupted. “Do you find her alluring?”
“She’s a lovely lady. She believes you keep some technology segregated from your servant races. Bioengineering, for example, and star travel. Is that so?”
“Of course,” she said as if it were obvious. Maybe it should have been.
“You’re saying no Guardian in their right mind would risk an in-system jump, but that star travel is reserved for Guardians. That doesn’t—”
“Only the technology is reserved,” she interrupted, “not the simple ability to operate it. Why is this a puzzle? Your own civilization does the same.”
Yes, they did, he thought, but that wasn’t the point here. The point was there were no Guardians on those two ships which had made the jump.
“Thank you. This has been helpful.” Sam reached for his visor to cut the connection.
“Stop!” she said. “Do not end our conversation yet. You are not treating me well.”
He now noticed she sat more slumped than usual. He didn’t know what her body language really meant, but something about her posture and attitude was different. The stateroom lights were dim and yet her aura, or halo, was hardly visible.
“I’m pressed for time, but I’ll listen to your complaint later, if we’re still alive.”
“It is a critique,” she said, “not a complaint, and it is brief and simple.”
Sam squinted up the helmet chronometer.
“Two minutes,” he said. “I’ll give you two minutes.”
“I will not use half of that. I willingly became your prisoner out of boredom. I came to you because I believed you would excite my curiosity, and so renew my waning interest in life. Instead I am confined in this small room, with only occasional visitors and a very limited allowed reading list.
“I have no particular loyalty to P’Daan and some sympathy for you. Not an abundance, but some. You should be courting my loyalty by allowing me wider access to your ship, crew, and passengers. The two guards—who are with me at all times in any case—would be adequate to insure I cause no trouble. Without more mental stimulation, I will lapse into depression and eventually die.
“That is all I have to say.”
She said it calmly, dispassionately, but Sam saw a suggestion of desperate appeal in her large, unblinking gray eyes. She must be terribly alone there, cut off not only from her own people but also from most of the ship’s company.
“Let me think about it,” Sam said, “but I believe we can work something out, assuming we survive the next several hours.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Moments later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay,
outbound to Destie-Seven
16 June 2134 (one hundred twenty days after Incident Seventeen)
Sam removed his helmet and scanned the large display at the front of the bridge.
“No change in enemy course, sir,” Alexander reported. “The live enemy ship, Bandit One, has docked with the crippled Bandit Two. They may be taking off survivors.”
“Or assisting with repairs,” Sam said. “How long till we’re at our firing point?”
“Coming up on thirty minutes.”
Sam checked their relative positions. The angle on the bow had dropped from fourteen degrees to twelve, which made sense because they weren’t on exactly the same course. The long ships were coming in from their port side and would cross their course to starboard in about three hours at their current velocity, less than that once they finished their acceleration. But that meant the Bay’s true course was not toward them but offset slightly. All of the simulations had assumed head-to-head closing situations.
“Huh,” he said to himself. He ran the course projection again on his workstation and then sat back in his acceleration couch.
“Helm, recalculate your turnaround maneuver for reversing course. Once we unload our missiles, I want you to pivot the ship through an axis inverse to the hostile bearing. I make it one-one-seven degrees relative.”
“Recalculating for turnabout through one-one-seven degrees, sir,” Barr-Sanchez answered.
“One more thing, Helm: we won’t wait for the turnaround maneuver to be complete before thrusting. Once we reach the halfway point, punch it. You’re going to have to redo our math on the new course.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she answered, as if this were the most routine order she had ever received.
“Sir?” Alexander asked quietly.
Sam smiled at his tactical officer. “TAC, whoever is running the show over there is going to have a tough decision to make in about forty minutes. Once we fire our missiles and decoys, we start decelerating as hard as we can to slow our approach to his meson gun. But we know we’ll be within their range well before our missiles get to their detonation distance. Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here’s the thing. We assumed a straight-line closing problem, but our courses are oblique. Think about the firing solution from their point of view. Once we fire our missiles, the more we decelerate, the more distance between us and our attack swarm of decoys and missiles, and given oblique courses . . . ”
“Arc of fire!” Alexander exclaimed. “We won’t both be in their arc of fire. They’ll have to pick which target to engage. Acho was right.”
Yes, the enemy would have to pick between protecting itself and killing the Bay. Those long ships weren’t designed as solitary killers; they were made to act in concert, so different ships could engage targets on multiple axes. Hopefully they wouldn’t patch up the other long ship soon. With two shooters, life would get a lot more complicated. So, what would he do in that case? He squinted up the duty roster and pinged Lieutenant Sylvia Norquist in the launch bay.
Yes, sir, she answered, excitement apparent in her voice.
“Ms. Norquist, I’m only going to have you launch two of those Mark Fours you have down there when we fire the main attack swarm. Move the other two to the launch cradles and keep them ready.”
Two missiles with the main swarm, two on the launch cradles. Aye, aye, sir.
“Once we start our deceleration burn, keep your crew ready. After ten minutes, I’m going to cut the burn for two minutes, to give you zero gee to get those other two missiles out the door. Can you get them deployed in two minutes?”
Yes, sir. Can do.
Lieutenant Homer Alexander felt the perspiration trickle down the center of his spine inside his shipsuit. He turned up the cooling control on his life support and checked the battle clock: one hour and fifteen minutes since the two long ships had emerged from jump. His broad spectrum electromagnetic passive feed lit up and Chief Josephine Bermudez in the Tac Two seat to Homer’s right called out, “Energy discharge. Bandit One just fired something.”
“He’s way out of range,” the captain said. “What’s he firing at?”
“It’s not the firing signature of a meson gun, sir,” she answered. “At least not like the one we recorded back on Destie Four.”
Homer could see that on his own display. “Something smaller,” he said. “It might be a missile launch, except our priso
ner said they didn’t use missiles. Maybe a sensor remote. Active radar has something . . . looks really small. Might be a missile, sir.”
“Track it,” the captain ordered, “and try to build up some imaging.”
“Evasive action, sir?” Barr-Sanchez asked from the helm station.
“No, not yet. Let’s find out if there’s anything to evade.”
Another light flashed on Homer’s display, this one a reminder he had programmed himself.
“Range coming up on ninety-four thousand to target, sir,” he said.
“Closing velocity?” the captain asked.
“Forty-three kilometers per second.”
“Good enough. Helm, secure from acceleration. TAC, deliver your ordnance.”
Homer suddenly became weightless as the thrusters fell silent, and then he felt a shudder as the coil gun delivered its first payload.
“First decoy packet launched,” he said. He checked the close-in optics. “Getting a good dispersion on the decoys.”
After about forty seconds the Bay shuddered again, this time launching the first of their Mark Five missiles. They would launch, in staggered sequence, four decoy clusters and three Mark Five missiles, all followed by a passive sensor drone. The Mark Fives and the drone left the coil gun cold and should be virtually indistinguishable from the hundreds of decoys in the swarm, and so were coded Cold Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. At the same time, Homer knew Lieutenant Norquist’s small craft subdivision was ejecting two big Mark Four missiles from the docking bay. Those had their own booster rockets but for the moment, those were simply ejected into space. Once all the other ordnance was delivered the Bay would begin its deceleration burn, to stay out of the range of the enemy meson guns for as long as possible. That’s when they would remotely fire the big solid fuel rockets on the two Mark Fours—coded Hot Alpha and Hot Bravo. The rocket exhaust would show up as hot targets on the enemy sensors, and hopefully draw fire away from the deadlier Mark Fives.
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