by Peter Nealen
“You mean they were there ninety minutes ago,” Cobb pointed out. “Have any of the enemy ships started to move toward them?”
Mor motioned toward the holo-tank. “You can see the display as well as I can, Squad Sergeant. So far, it looks like the Boanerges is still undetected.”
“Can our four ships fit in the tail with the Boanerges?” Scalas asked.
Mor squinted at the holo-tank, bringing up a sensor readout of the comet. It was on its downward fall toward Goran 54, its tail billowing out at an angle to its orbit, pushed out by the solar wind. It still had a very long way to fall before it reached perihelion, so the tail was only about a third as large as it was going to get. Mor’s lips moved slightly as he ran numbers in his head.
“I think we can, provided the clods driving the Sword and Vindicator don’t collide with one of us in the murk,” he said at last. “I suggest you get to your acceleration couches, gentlemen, and strap in. We’ll be maneuvering shortly. Provided that is your chosen course of action, Centurion?” he added, as if just remembering that Scalas was the acting legate.
Scalas only nodded. “We will be below,” he said, gesturing to the squad sergeants and starting toward the lift hatch.
After a brief exchange of tight-beam burst communications, the four starships went inertialess, lit their drives, and moved out of orbit, pushing to the far side of the gas giant. There, in deep space, with the gas giant and all its radiation between them and the enemy forces surrounding Valdek, the four ships made their vector changes, matching the trajectory and velocity of the comet, before once again activating their Bergenholm fields and pushing deeper into the system at just below the speed of light.
When the Dauntless’s Bergenholm field cut out completely, she was a very precise two hundred meters from the Boanerges, just inside the comet’s tail, velocities matched to the point that neither starship appeared to be moving at all.
Mor nodded in satisfaction, especially when he checked the holo-tank and saw the Vindicator and the Sword of the Brotherhood still maneuvering to close the distance and match velocities more carefully. The Challenger, on the other hand, was holding station on the other side of the Boanerges, completely relatively motionless, which softened his triumphant smirk.
A small portion of the holo-tank lit with Brother Legate Kranjick’s heavy, immobile face. “Welcome to the Valdek system, gentlemen,” he said. “Full remote conference, all centurions and ship captains.”
In moments, one side of the holo-tank filled with the images of the task group’s commanders. Mor thumb-clicked an icon, and his own face appeared, not only in his holo-tank and the holo-tanks on the other ships, but also below, where Centurion Scalas was strapped in.
“We are uploading the last forty-eight hours of the Boanerges’s sensor logs to each of you,” Kranjick began, “but I will sum up what we have seen. The planet is under near-continual bombardment. We have observed no enemy ships in orbit—it appears that the planetary defenses are still formidable enough to prevent that—but instead appear to be staging in the Lagrange points and making high-velocity runs past the planet to launch dropships, transatmospheric fighters, and kinetic kill munitions. They are being answered with powerguns, heavy particle beams, heavy railguns, and high-energy lasers.”
That made sense. Defensive missiles would be too vulnerable during the early stages of launch, as they struggled to build their velocity from low in the gravity well. Though Mor questioned how precisely a railgun heavy enough to be effective from the surface could be aimed at starships moving at or over escape velocity.
“There is a significant amount of debris in high orbit,” Kranjick continued, “and some of it is highly radioactive. Captain Horvaset informs me that the density and pattern of the debris is consistent with nearly seventy-five percent of Valdek’s fleet having been wiped out in space.”
“Rehenek’s message said he was sending similar pleas to every ally they had within a hundred parsecs,” Soon put in. “Is there any indication that any allied fleets have arrived to lend their assistance?”
It was Captain Trakse, the Boanerges’s commander, who answered. “Over the last few hours, we have detected neutrino signatures consistent with small squadrons of starships on the fringes of the system. But they seem reluctant to come deeper in. Either they’re waiting for more of a critical mass of ships…”
“Or they’re simply too afraid to face that swarm down there,” Scalas said coldly.
“No one has seen a fleet this size since the Qinglong Wars, if then,” Kranjick pointed out. “There are at least five hundred ships per Lagrange point down there. That would make any starship commander with sense have second thoughts.”
“Except for us,” Dunstan put in, a bitter note in his voice.
Kranjick’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes turned several degrees colder. “Indeed,” he said. “Suggestions, gentlemen?”
“If we’re going to attack, we have very little time to act,” Mor said. “The emissions from our passage in-system will reach their sensors in less than ten minutes. At that point, surprise will be impossible.”
“Surprise, yes, but misdirection might still be possible,” Hwung-Tsi, the Challenger’s captain, pointed out. “A series of short, tachyonic dashes could place multiple false neutrino signatures along multiple vectors around the planet in only a few minutes. They won’t know where the real attack is coming from until we’re right on top of them.”
“Which raises the question,” Costigan said, “what is the attack plan? We don’t have the firepower to take on five hundred ships at once.”
“If I may make a suggestion,” said Trakse, “look at the take from the probe on the far side of the comet. A strike force just launched from L2, heading down toward the planet. I suggest that would be an appropriate first target.”
“How long until they’re on target?” Kranjick asked.
“They do not appear to have engaged their Bergenholms,” Trakse said, looking off camera for a moment, apparently gathering data. “At their current rate of acceleration… they will pass perigee with the planet in approximately ten hours.”
Mor frowned. Engaging the enemy ships when at their lowest point in the gravity well—and also when they were most likely to be target-fixated on the planet—made sense tactically. But it would also be almost ten hours after the Caractacan ships’ presence in the system had been detected.
But Hwung-Tsi was smiling. “I think we can kill two birds with one arrow here, gentlemen.”
He explained the broad strokes of his idea, and soon the ship captains were nodding in agreement. Most of the centurions were somewhat more blasé about the plan; any Caractacan commander had to be somewhat versed in all spheres of conflict, be they space, air, or ground, but there were still areas where each had their specialization, and the centurions were ground fighters. The finer points of the plan didn’t appeal to their sense of aesthetics the same way they did to the starship captains.
It took only a short time to hammer out the plan’s details. There was still a great deal of hard work and calculation ahead, but the general plan of attack had been determined. It would now be up to the starship captains and their crews to execute it.
“We have only a matter of minutes before our emissions reach the enemy, gentlemen,” Kranjick said. “Let us be away from this comet before that happens.”
The faces vanished from the holo-tank, and Mor got to work.
A few minutes later, the Dauntless, Vindicator, and Challenger went inert barely thirty light-seconds from L3. They immediately lit their drives and began their vector changes. After waiting just long enough for the nearest ship hanging in the Lagrange point to have detected them, all three ships went tachyonic again and flashed away.
It was a short hop, only lasting about ten milliseconds. In that time, they found themselves out past the system’s Oort cloud. Goran 54 was a speck of light behind them, lost in the vast starfield. Beyond lay the Rim and the myriad points of
light that were distant galaxies and globular clusters.
It took a few moments for the navigators to pinpoint their coordinates and relative vector. Then they turned the Bergenholms to negative mass once more and plunged back inward toward Valdek.
Again and again, for hours, they continued their maneuvers. The two elements of starships would go tachyonic, suddenly go inert within a light-minute of one or another of the Lagrange points the so-called “Galactic Unity” was using as staging points, conduct a delta-v burn, then go tachyonic again, outrunning sluggish light and skipping to the edge of the system before doing it all over again at a different place. They could sometimes time their dashes to present the enemy scanners with neutrino signatures close enough together that it appeared that a single, large element had appeared and fled all at once, rather than a smaller element coming and going several times. Such was the advantage of short, superluminal hops.
Every time they cut their Bergenholms, they adjusted their inert vectors to come closer and closer to the attack vector they would need to finally intercept the strike force that was accelerating toward the planet. And after just over nine hours, all five ships had, by way of numerous carefully calculated burns, reached their calculated inert attack vectors.
It was time.
The Dauntless was once again skimming through deep space, out past the distant gas giant they had first approached when entering the system. That enormous failed star was invisible in the black, too far away to be seen without a telescope, even if one of the Brothers had looked out a viewport.
“Stand by all gunnery stations,” Mor snapped. He was still strapped into his acceleration couch, his helmet and armor sealed, as he had been the entire past ten hours. Fortunately, the armor had been designed with such unpleasant possibilities in mind, so he had not had to forgo bodily functions for that long. “Gentlemen,” he said, his voice echoing through the ship, “when we go inert again, we will be on final attack vector. Stand by for combat maneuvers.” He looked at the holo-tank, tapping controls built into his couch’s armrest. “Bergenholm engaging in five… four… three… two… one.”
The Dauntless’s substantial mass was, for a fraction of a second, measured in negative numbers. She crossed half the system in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a photon to make the journey.
The Bergenholm cut out too quickly for human reflexes. Mor prided himself on his consummate skill as a pilot, but tachyonic trajectories had to be precisely programmed into the flight computer. Any human pilot would never be able to manually control the ship with the precision necessary; in the time it would take to tap a button, the starship could travel light-hours.
The crowded circle of light that was all an unaided observer could see ahead of a tachyonic starship suddenly exploded into the full starfield, and the planet Valdek leapt out at them until it resolved into a variegated sphere no more than a light-second away.
It was an unremarkable planet as inhabited worlds went—at least from what the scans and the Brotherhood’s records said. Seas covered only about fifty percent of the planet, and were almost entirely landlocked. Though tectonically inert, the planet was still volcanically active. A string of shield volcanoes stretched across the southern hemisphere. The massive volcano in the northern hemisphere—Gorakovati—dwarfed all of them. It was so tall its peak almost reached beyond the atmosphere.
Little of the surface was visible at the moment. Massive storms had been kicked up by the orbital bombardment, and the near side of the planet was wreathed in flickering clouds, swirling with wildly conflicting eddies as the atmosphere was cooked and hammered relentlessly by high-energy weapons. Mor took the image in at a glance. The planet was not presently his chief concern.
“Deploy the weapons array,” he ordered. They were hurtling toward the planet at hundreds of kilometers per second, and closing with the enemy ships at a decent fraction of that. Time was of the essence.
Her drive flaming white-hot before her, the Dauntless deployed her weapons constellation. X-ray laser pods drifted outward, held in their relative positions by inertia and careful thruster burns. Missiles shot out of their cells, their seeker heads already looking for targets according to the instructions programmed by the gunnery chief. Decoy bots rushed out to fill the space between ships with thermal, radioactive, and neutrino signatures similar to the starships’ reactors. Local space was quickly getting crowded. The Caractacan ships were spaced tens of thousands of kilometers apart, yet that was hardly enough space to keep their weapons constellations from interfering with each other.
The enemy ships were much deeper in the gravity well than the Caractacan starships that were gaining on them, but scanners and remote telescopes showed an enhanced, magnified view in Mor’s holo-tank. The enemy ships were sharp-edged, angular, elongated pyramids, painted white with blue markings. There appeared to be about ten of them, though appearances could be deceiving. While it was impossible to hide a ship in open space, there were ways to fill space with so much noise that it could cost a gunner the vital few seconds needed to sort out the junk from the targets. And at these ranges and velocities, with the power of the weapons involved, life and death hung on a margin of milliseconds.
“Powergun batteries and HELs open fire as soon as solutions are reached,” Mor commanded. “Missiles as well. X-ray lasers, fire upon minimum safe arming distance.” That was not “minimum safe distance” from the target, but from the Dauntless.
The powergun batteries and high-energy laser emitters were just reaching the ends of their deployment booms, and soon invisible lines of intense collimated light and lightning-colored bolts of copper plasma were stabbing toward the enemy ships.
The holo-tank flashed red, and an alarm whooped as the ship shuddered and rang like a bell. “Grazing hit, HEL, Quadrant Four,” the damage control officer reported. “Hull breach.” He paused, listening and scanning his screen. “Contained. No major damage.”
The impact had more than likely been from a snap shot that had just barely managed to burn through the hull. The Caractacan ships had one major advantage over the enemy starcraft: though the enemy had to have known they were coming, after the last ten hours of ghost echoes, they would not have known exactly when or where. The attacking Caractacan starships had outrun the lightspeed signals that would have warned their targets they were coming, right up until they had cut the Bergenholms. That gave them a few seconds’ head start, and that might be all it would take.
In the holo-tank, the bright, flashing lines of laser pulses and powergun bolts rained down on the enemy craft. One took a powergun bolt to the drive bay and detonated silently, hypervelocity packets of copper ions destroying the drives’ magnetic plasma containment fields. Another ship caught half a dozen laser pulses that punched through hull metal and anything on the other side. A gout of vapor puffed from the ship’s flank, but other than that it was apparently unhurt. But many of the shots were misses, either because of poorly predicted target vectors, or because they had been aimed at decoys. There was no time to worry about distinguishing the real ships from the fake; when fractions of a second count, every target that can be engaged, must be.
Two more starships flared white and vanished, turning into miniature suns under the impact of X-ray lasers, which transferred as much energy to their target as a direct hit from a thermonuclear weapon.
Meanwhile, the distance between the two forces was shrinking rapidly. The Caractacan ships were braking at less than a half gee—in part to present their drive plumes as additional defensive measures—but they were still moving several times faster than the ships they were pursuing, the ones that had moments ago been focused on attacking the planet.
As the enemy ships neared the planet, locked into their approach vectors, a storm of fire erupted from the surface below. The lead enemy ship was suddenly connected to the cloud tops by a bright, gossamer line of greenish light… and was abruptly cut in half lengthwise. A moment later its reactor, breached by the particle beam, det
onated in a brilliant, silent flash.
Caught between groundside defensive fire and an unexpected attack from above, the remaining ships suddenly went inertialess and flashed away, rapidly accelerating to near lightspeed, making for the L4 point, between Valdek and its second moon. The only ship that continued on its previous vector was the one that had been holed by multiple HEL pulses. It was apparently dead.
Mor was about to issue the order to follow suit. Staying inert above the planet would only invite a counterattack from one of the Lagrange points, and the Caractacans would then find themselves in a similar position to their latest adversaries. And he had no concern about retrieving the X-ray laser pods, as they’d deployed few enough to be expendable.
But before Mor could say a word, Kranjick’s face appeared in the holo-tank again. “All Caractacan ships, stand by for high-gee braking maneuvers. We have been contacted by the General-Regent, and he has requested that we descend to the surface.”
“Brother Legate,” Hwung-Tsi protested, “that will put us at a disadvantage. We would be at the bottom of the gravity well.”
“He has assured me that the situation is far more dire on the surface than in orbit. We may require the starships for close support.” Kranjick paused. “It is true that we will not have the velocity or mobility advantage that we might have in space… but if the planet is lost under us, we will have accomplished nothing. Prepare to descend.”
Mor clenched his jaw, as much in anticipation of the upcoming maneuver as in dissatisfaction with the prospect of descending to a planetary surface while there was still a space battle going on. But he was a Caractacan Brother, and he followed orders.