“I wish I’d stayed in my bunk,” Tobias commented. He’d managed to get some rest during the voyage, but he still felt as if he were being pushed to the limit. “There are four carriers out there.”
“Keep an eye on the sensors,” Marigold warned. “There might be something else out there too.”
Tobias nodded, curtly. The enemy starfighters had largely ignored them, preferring to target the capital ships, but that was likely to change. There was probably a CSP waiting for them too. The enemy would have learnt from the human tactic, if they hadn’t come up with it on their own. They certainly wouldn’t want a cluster of gunboats blowing hell out of their carriers.
His eyes narrowed as he studied the sensor records. Bagehot had pointed out how unlikely it was the enemy carriers would just sit in the fleet’s path, without even bringing up their drives and preparing to move. Tobias couldn’t disagree with his logic. The virus had lost two heavily-industrialised worlds in quick succession. It had to be leery of taking heavy losses. And yet, it seemed to be putting four carriers at risk. Tobias wasn’t sure how long it would take the virus to replace them, but ... it couldn’t be less than a year. Could it?
The display bleeped an alert. “They’re launching starfighters,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it was still disconcerting. “I’m sending the missile targeting data to Lion now.”
“Understood,” Marigold said. “The formation is closing up ...”
She broke off. Tobias glanced at the display as another alert sounded and swore. The sensors had just burned through the enemy cloaking field. There were ships out there ... lots of ships. He had the nasty feeling he’d just flown right into a trap. His heart pounded as more and more ships were located and identified. Battleships, carriers, cruisers ... and, beyond them, a brainship. The enemy trap hadn’t snared the fleet, thankfully, but it had come pretty close to snaring their ship.
His fingers danced over the console, forwarding improved targeting data to the missiles. It was just possible they’d get a clear shot at the brainship, although the odds were poor and growing worse by the second. The enemy were launching more starfighters, an endless tidal wave of death and destruction flying towards them. Tobias felt like an egg thrown at a brick wall. They were about to be smashed for nothing.
The gunboat squadron reversed course. Tobias worked his systems, steering the rest of the missiles towards their targets. The enemy fleet was shedding its cloaks now - there was no longer any point in trying to hide - and bringing up its drives. The carriers seemed torn between recalling the CSP to cover their hulls and relying on the point defence to protect them. Tobias hoped they’d make their mind up quickly. The remainder of the missiles were going live, lancing towards their targets ...
“Four direct hits,” he said. An enemy carrier staggered out of position, bleeding plasma from its drive section; another blew up so violently he was tempted to wonder if it had been crammed with antimatter. No one had produced antimatter outside the lab, from what he’d heard, but it was the Holy Grail of weapons technology. “Their point defence is getting better.”
“Yeah.” Marigold yanked the gunboat back, just in time to dodge a starfighter that had been intent on ramming them. “I think they know what we can do now.”
Tobias’s console bleeped. “Lion is launching more missiles,” he said. “We have to guide them in.”
“I’ll keep us as steady as possible,” Marigold said. Another starfighter shot towards them, only to be blown to dust. “Just see if you can hit that brainship.”
“I’ll try,” Tobias said. His heart sank. The brainship was surrounded by so many escorts, each one pulsing with sensor emissions, that he doubted they could slip a single missile into attack range. “But I don’t think we can.”
“Do or do not,” Marigold quoted. “There is no try.”
“There is now,” Tobias retorted. “We can do everything right and still get fucked.”
***
Susan had braced herself for bad news, as the gunboats and drones swooped towards the alien carriers, and she’d expected to discover more ships lurking in cloak, but even she hadn’t expected quite so many ships. The virus had assembled nine battleships, five carriers and at least fifty-nine smaller ships, then laid a trap that had come far too close to succeeding. She knew she was damn lucky and yet ...
There was no time to waste. “Bring the fleet about,” she ordered, tracing out a new line on the display. They had one thing in their favour. The virus had had to power down its drives, just to ensure it remained undetected. It was powering up now, of course, but her ships would have some room to manoeuvre. “We have to put some distance between us and them before we run out of time.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Richardson said.
Susan nodded as she studied the in-system display. There was a flicker station somewhere ... she’d bet her paycheck on it. Where? As long as it remained intact, the enemy fleet could keep signalling ahead. It would only be a matter of time before they were driven into another ambush, with one fleet ahead of them and another behind. The first wave of alien starfighters were breaking off and streaking back to their carriers, but the second wave was flashing past the gunboats and heading straight for her. She had too many problems she couldn’t solve before she ran out of time ...
“Detach two destroyers and order them to find the flicker station,” she ordered. It meant weakening her point defence, but two destroyers wouldn’t make that much difference. Not in the grand scheme of things. “We’ll continue to evade here until the station has been taken out.”
She didn’t need to look at her staff to sense their sudden alarm. The obvious tactic was to make a beeline for the tramline. Susan understood, yet ... there was no better way to run straight into another trap. No one had tried a tramline assault in real life - no one had ever been stupid enough to try, when it was so blatantly unnecessary - but she’d seen simulations that suggested any attempt would turn into a bloody slaughter. They were just too close to the front for the virus not to be tempted to redeploy an entire fleet to block them, using the flicker network to coordinate. She had to take the network out before she showed her hand.
The display updated, again, as the aliens protected their brainship. Susan cursed under her breath. She could reverse course - again - and close the range, but whoever won the engagement would be so badly weakened they’d be wiped out effortlessly in the next engagement. She couldn’t take the risk, not now. The fleet had to be preserved intact, as much as possible. There was no hope of inflicting enough damage, here and now, to ensure total victory.
And there’s no way to take out the brainship otherwise, she thought. The marines had boarded brainships before ... this time, the virus would know what to expect. The boarding party wouldn’t get far enough into the hull to plant a nuke, set the timer and run. We’ll just have to stay alive long enough to take out the flicker station and break contact.
She winced, inwardly, as the enemy starfighters closed once again. Her pilots were waiting, but they were already reaching the limits of their endurance. They needed to rearm under fire, something that was never easy. And yet, they had no choice. She couldn’t afford to draw down the CSP, not now. They were already far too exposed.
We can get out of this, she told herself. She didn’t have to beat the enemy fleet to win. We just have to stay alive.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Staci looked pale, in the half-light of the bridge. “Do you think this is the virus’s homeworld?”
Mitch shrugged. They’d passed through three star systems after they’d lost the enemy fleet, flying deeper and deeper into unexplored space. He’d made sure to keep the ship under cloak, determined not to give the virus any hint of their course and speed. It made it harder to gather data, but he considered it a small price to pay. The longer the virus remained in the dark, the better. And then they’d flown into yet another system and discovered ...
He sucked in his breath. The system was immense,
an order of magnitude bigger than Sol or Tadpole Prime or even the last infected system they’d seen. Every planet within sensor range was pulsing with emissions, while hundreds of ships made their way from the gas giants to the asteroid belts and the facilities orbiting the rocky planets. All four of them looked to have been terraformed, to the point the system practically pulsed with malevolent life. The sheer scale of the infection was beyond his comprehension. It was impossible to look at the figures and grasp what they really meant. They were nothing more than statistics.
“If it isn’t, I don’t want to see their homeworld,” he said, shortly. There were a surprising number of starships and installations orbiting one of the gas giants. Could the virus have been born on a gas giant, instead of a rocky world? It seemed unlikely and yet ... the virus itself was pretty damn unlikely. “How do we attack a system like this?”
His eyes narrowed as he studied the live feed from the sensor drones. He’d seen no choice but to launch them despite the risks. And yet, as they revealed more and more about the system, he wished he hadn’t. The planets were surrounded with so many sensor nodes that it was all too likely the drones would be detected, even though they were designed to be practically invisible. There were just too many watching eyes. Mitch had spent enough time working with cloaking devices, as both the hunter and the hunted, to be certain there was no way to get a cloaked ship into striking range. No cloaking device ever built could compensate for so many sensor pulses. Someone would notice and all hell would break loose.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enemy starfighters cut through the orbital space above the planet, ducking and weaving in a manner that suggested the system was already under attack. The virus was taking nothing for granted, Mitch decided: it clearly hadn’t assumed the invading fleet really had gone in the other direction. Mitch wished, just for a moment, that the rest of the fleet was with him, then told himself not to be stupid. The fleet would bleed itself white trying to break through the planetary defences and lay waste to the surface. There were so many facilities that even the BioBombs wouldn’t be decisive.
“We need a supernova bomb,” he muttered. “Or some other way to blow up the whole system.”
He gritted his teeth as more and more data flowed into the display. There was a small armada of ships holding position near the planet, including something that looked strikingly like Lion. A missile-heavy battlecruiser? Mitch cursed under his breath. If the virus had managed to duplicate the design after it had first seen Lion, a mere nine months ago, it suggested frightening things about its ability to see a design, reverse-engineer it and put its own version into production. Even if this battlecruiser was a one-off, a test model rushed into service ... Mitch hoped, deep inside, that the virus’s R&D efforts had been on the brink of producing battlecruisers before Lion had entered service. The alternative was worse.
I could be wrong, he told himself. The ship looked like a battlecruiser, but there was no way to know until she opened fire. She might be something else altogether.
He put the thought out of his mind as the display continued to update. The world - he hoped it was the enemy homeworld - was surrounded by so many icons, some hazy to suggest a level of sensor distortion, that it was hard to believe the surface got any sunlight. He’d seen proposals to put a shell around a planet, but ... he couldn’t believe anyone would actually do it. And yet, the virus seemed to be trying. Perhaps it just didn’t care. Or maybe he was wrong. The sheer volume of orbital industry was terrifying.
“We could sneak a ballistic missile down to the surface,” Staci suggested. “If we struck the world with the BioBomb ...”
Mitch considered it briefly, then shook his head. There was no way to guarantee striking the surface, while trying and failing would reveal their presence to an entire system of watchful eyes. Mitch thought they could evade contact, if they were careful, but they’d still alert the enemy. The virus would know they’d stumbled across its homeworld. If it truly was the virus’s homeworld. There was just no way to be sure.
For a moment, even Mitch’s nerves quailed. He wanted to turn and run, to flee through the tramlines to New Washington and scream for help. And yet, he feared the massed power of humanity and its allies would be insufficient to reduce the enemy system. There were just too many defensive installations ... his eyes roamed the display, jumping from a chain of orbital battlestations to hundreds, if not thousands, of automated defence platforms. He’d never seen anything like it. They could throw thousands of missiles at the orbital facilities without scoring a single hit. Compared to the infected system, Earth was practically naked.
We thought they spent everything on building fleets and offensive weapons, he thought, numbly. But they spent just as much on planetary defences.
“We wouldn’t be able to hit the surface,” Mitch said. “Even if we did, the BioBomb wouldn’t spread far enough to do real damage.”
He sighed, inwardly. The system’s installations weren’t linked together. Not physically. The counter-virus would get up the orbital towers and elevators, if the virus didn’t shut them down in time, but it wouldn’t get any further. Vast numbers of industrial nodes and defensive platforms would remain utterly untouched. And then ... who knew what would happen then? The virus might continue, largely unharmed ... he’d read, once, a paper that argued that spacefaring humans would be better off without the planet-bound masses. The virus might be the first intelligent race to actually put theory into practice.
“Helm, take us on a recon course around the gas giants,” he ordered. “And then we’ll head for the tramline back home.”
He leaned back in his chair and forced himself to think. Their discovery had to be reported to higher authority, although he wasn’t sure what they could do with it. Massing enough firepower to crack the alien system would take months, if it was doable at all. Maybe they’d get orders to go back and start harassing the virus, ensuring it didn’t have a chance to resume the offensive. The sheer scale of the enemy industry would concentrate a few minds. Mitch was no expert, but it was fairly obvious the virus could outproduce the allied races if it put its mind to it. The hell of it, he conceded ruefully, was that the allies should be grateful that the virus had devoted so much effort to defending itself. It could have won the war by now if it had invested those resources in ships.
The display kept updating, time and time again. There were thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of asteroid settlements, ranging from simple mining facilities to industrial bases. A handful of asteroids were even being moved to the planet, ready to be converted into raw materials ... Mitch was tempted to try to capture one of the asteroids and turn it into a dinosaur-killer, even though he knew it would be futile. The virus would see the asteroid coming well before it struck the planet and blow it into rubble. And yet ... he was torn between the urge to sneak away as quietly as possible and the desire to do something, anything, to hamper the aliens before he departed. He wanted - he needed - to do something, even though it was futile. The idea of bowing his head and bending his knee had never sat well with him. He’d gotten into a lot of fights because he’d never been able to back down.
His heart sank as the ship approached the nearest gas giant. There were a dozen cloudscoops within detection range, which suggested there were more on the other side of the planet. The handful of moons were thrumming with life ... his eyes lingered on an icy-rocky world, wondering if the virus had set up home under the ice. Hell, it might have been born under the ice. Humans had discovered very basic life on Jupiter’s moons ... his imagination suggested a humanoid race setting up a mining operation, only to discover - too late - that they’d dug too deep and awoken something truly nasty. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of movies with that exact plot. They didn’t seem so thrilling now.
Staci turned to look at him. “I don’t think we can get much closer, Captain,” she said. “They’re bringing more and more sensor arrays online.”
Mitch frowned. Had they caught a sni
ff of Unicorn? It didn’t seem likely - the frigate had remained well clear of any active sensor installations - and yet, it was hard to believe it was a coincidence. He stared at the near-space display, wondering what might be hidden in the trackless reaches of seemingly-empty space. Had they passed too close to a passive sensor platform. The navy had decided, long ago, that such platforms were a waste of resources, but ... Mitch could imagine the virus establishing entire networks of stealthed platforms. And, after the human fleet had materialised in their rear, the virus would have to be concerned about the rest of its industrial nodes. They wouldn’t let a sensor flicker go unchallenged.
“Helm, pull us away,” he ordered. There were no enemy starships on his sensors, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. It was vitally important they kept the virus from realising what they’d discovered, if possible. “Take us up and above the system plane, then set course for the tramline.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Mitch tried not to wince. The idea of running from a fight was alien to him. His thoughts kept insisting they hadn’t actually been detected, let alone brought to battle. The enemy couldn’t have set up an ambush unless they’d been able to see through the cloaking device from day one, in which case they would have made far better use of the technology. Mitch had served in engagements that would have gone the other way, if they hadn’t been able to rely on their cloaks. He wanted to think they hadn’t been detected, that the enemy hadn’t so much as gotten a sniff of their presence. And yet, he knew he couldn’t take the chance.
Fighting For The Crown (Ark Royal Book 16) Page 31