The Halls of Montezuma

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  She frowned as she studied the sensor readings. The incoming fleet appeared to be goose-stepping around the system, feinting at asteroid settlements and cloudscoops before withdrawing back into the inky darkness of interstellar space. Her console was steadily filling with distress calls, each one pleading for starships that simply didn’t exist. The planetary defence squadron was under strict orders not to leave orbit, let alone plunge into interplanetary space. Reading between the lines, Rachel was sure General Gilbert had already written most of the deep-space facilities off. She doubted that would do wonders for interplanetary relationships.

  And yet ... her eyes narrowed. The fleet should have closed with the planet by now. It knew it had been detected. Hell, it had made no attempt to avoid detection. Rachel had worked closely with marine and naval personnel. They were very far from incompetent. They had to know they’d been detected ... a thrill shot through her as realisation dawned. They wanted to be detected! They wanted the enemy keeping their eyes on them. They wanted ...

  She smiled, despite herself. The diversion didn’t have to be smaller than the main attack. It just had to be noticeable. And it was noticeable. Everyone, right across the system, was keeping a wary eye on the enemy fleet. They simply didn’t have time for anything else.

  “What are they doing?” Commander Archer demanded. His voice sounded as though he was on the verge of breaking. “Why are they just ... staring at us?”

  General Gilbert shot him a sharp look. The general looked as if he was on the edge of exhaustion. A handful of his staff had already taken stims, despite the risks. Rachel was surprised they hadn’t gone to bed. As far as they knew, the threat was still several hours away. They could snatch a few hours of sleep before returning, revitalised, to face the incoming hordes. Instead, they were almost mesmerised by the enemy fleet. She accessed the orbital sensors and studied them carefully, half-expecting to see a cloaked fleet sneaking up on the planet. If the ships on the display were a division, they had to be running cover for something ...

  Red icons materialised on the display. Alarms howled. But it was already too late.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The builder takes the planks and works them into a house. The total value of the house is now one thousand credits ... yes, a gross understatement, but easy enough to follow. Our ten-credit tree trunk has become a hundred-credit pile of planks and now a thousand-credit house. With each stage in the process, the total value of the wood has increased until it offers the promise of a vast potential profit.

  - Professor Leo Caesius, The Rise and Fall of Interstellar Capitalism

  Commander Norman Halibut knew, without false modesty, that he’d probably never have another chance to command a starship in combat. He was a trained engineer, a profession that ensured he would never be out of work ... but also one that guaranteed he wouldn’t be allowed to venture into danger very often. It was easy enough to remove a malfunctioning node and slap a replacement into position - anyone could do it - yet it was a great deal harder to repair a damaged node on the fly, rewire the datanet on short notice and jury-rig a life-support system to keep a crew alive long enough to be rescued. Norman had come to realise, long ago, that his career had been the victim of his own success. He was simply too valuable to be risked.

  He tried to suppress a thrill of excitement as Hammerblow glided closer to the planet. He and his crew were sitting in a shuttlecraft, effectively commanding the giant battlecruiser through remote control, but it was the closest he’d ever been to starship command. The jury-rigged command and control network was working better than he’d feared, allowing him to steer the ship towards her target. It would start to fail the moment the enemy defences returned fire, despite the multiple redundancies he’d worked into the system, but it didn’t matter. The battlecruiser wasn’t expected to survive the coming engagement. Norman would have resented that, under other circumstances. The battlecruiser could have been repaired and returned to service, given time. But they just didn’t have the time.

  Sweat ran down his back as the range steadily closed. How long did they have before they were detected? Their emissions were dialled down as low as possible - the cloaking device should have muffled what little they hadn’t been able to reduce to nothing - but the enemy sensor arrays were very good. Norman had even made a small bet with himself that they wouldn’t get anywhere near the high orbitals before they were detected. He touched his console, making a tiny adjustment in the starship’s course. She was heading directly towards a giant orbital battlestation. Sooner or later, she would be detected ...

  His finger rested on top of the firing key. The passive sensors were picking up all sorts of targets, ranging from the remote sensor units to orbital defence platforms. The anchor station and the asteroid habitats were off-limits - no one wanted to knock one of the asteroids out of orbit and cause a full-scale disaster - but everything else was a legitimate target. There were so many that his engineer’s soul was almost offended by the targeting data, as if they couldn’t concentrate on a single target. It didn’t matter, he reminded himself. The idea was to disrupt and degrade the enemy network, not smash it to a pulp.

  The display flashed red. Norman didn’t hesitate. He pushed the firing key, unleashing a full-scale salvo towards the enemy positions. The missile pods they’d bolted to the hull spat fire and fury a second later, unleashing everything they had in a single burst. The design was hugely inefficient, but it wasn’t a problem. They needed to put as many missiles into space as possible before the enemy recovered from their shock and opened fire. Norman had calculated it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds before the enemy started shooting. A salvo of missiles would concentrate a few minds.

  “Drones deployed,” Ensign Harper said. He’d volunteered for the mission, which made him a brave man, a fool, or some combination of the two. “ECM going online now.”

  “Understood.” Norman ramped up the drive, throwing the battlecruiser towards the giant battlestation. The drives couldn’t take the acceleration for long - the designers had skimped a bit, for reasons he didn’t understand - but they wouldn’t have to. “Anders, prepare to disengage.”

  He smiled as the display sparkled with more and more red lights. The enemy defences were finally returning fire. Their targeting was a little skewed, automated systems thrown off by the drones and ECM, but they were rapidly closing on the battlecruiser. Her point defence went live, adding to the mix by firing plasma and laser pulses at the incoming missiles ... they could have made a longer stand, he acknowledged, if the point defence wasn’t forced to engage the enemy sensor platforms as well as everything else. As it was ...

  A dull rumble ran through the shuttle as four missiles ploughed into the battlecruiser. The hullmetal took the brunt of the impact, but there hadn’t been time to patch all the holes from the last engagement. The alerts flashing up in front of him suggested that half the wounds had just sprung open again. Laser beams stabbed deep into the battlecruiser’s hull. He silently thanked all the gods that he’d removed as much as possible, then depressurised the starship’s interior. It wouldn’t slow the destruction down for long, but every second counted.

  His lips quirked as another volley of bomb-pumped lasers stabbed into the hullmetal. The enemy hadn’t realised how well their first volley had worked. He guessed the ECM was doing its job. Half the incoming missiles were wasting themselves on sensor ghosts and decoys that were effectively worthless. They certainly posed no real threat to the enemy defences. Hell, normally the sensors would have no trouble isolating the decoys from the real ships. Now ... the system had taken such a battering, the command and control network so badly weakened, that it couldn’t even focus on the ships that were actually launching missiles. There was no better way to separate the real ships from the ghosts.

  Be grateful, he told himself, sharply. If they knew where to fire, they would have blown you away by now.

  Another shudder ran through the ship. He switched the systems to automatic.
They wouldn’t hold for long, but ... he glanced at Anders as the automatics took over. “Disengage from the hull,” he ordered. “And then go ballistic.”

  “Aye, sir,” Anders said. “Disengaging ... now.”

  The shuttle rocked. The gravity field seemed to twist around them, an unpleasant sensation Norman had always likened to his breath catching in his throat, as they spun away from the giant battlecruiser. He prayed, silently, that between the sensor distortions and the exploding warheads, no one was paying attention to a tiny shuttle heading away from the planet. The odds were in their favour - no one would care about a shuttle when there was a full-scale invasion going on - but he knew, better than most, the role chance played in interstellar warfare. There was a very good chance that someone would mistake them for a stealthed weapon and blow them away ... or that they’d simply be swatted in passing by one of the bigger ships, with no one on either side ever quite aware of what was happening to them.

  He gritted his teeth and turned his attention back to Hammerblow. The proud battlecruiser was gliding steadily towards her target, her weapons still firing in all directions. Damage was mounting rapidly - she was venting live plasma from a drive node, suggesting the containment tubes had been breached - but she was still moving. The battlestation was bringing its heavy weapons to bear on her, yet her forward armour was holding. Barely. Norman smiled. It looked as if the days they’d spent cannibalising armour from two of the other captured ships and welding it to the battlecruiser’s prow had not been wasted after all.

  “My God,” Anders said. “She’s going to make it.”

  “Yeah.” Norman felt his smile grow wider as the battlecruiser smashed into the battlestation and wiped it from existence in a blaze of radioactive plasma. He didn’t think - then - of the hundreds of lives that had been blotted out in a single catastrophic moment. He didn’t care about the waves of debris spinning out in all directions, including chunks of hullmetal that were likely to make it through the planet’s atmosphere and hit the surface. “She did it.”

  He felt a prickle at the corner of his eyes. Hammerblow had been his ship, if only for a few short days. He mourned her loss, even though he knew he would never have been allowed to keep her. And ...

  “She lived up to her name,” he said. “And now, we’re out of the fight.”

  He settled back in his chair. They’d keep moving until they were well clear of the engagement, then head for the RV point. If they were lucky ... they’d be picked up by friendly forces. If not ... he shook his head. The engagement might still go badly, but ... right now, the enemy had worse problems. They didn’t have time to worry about a shuttlecraft fleeing the battle. Norman and his crew should be safe.

  His lips curved into a humourless smile. Of course, if they catch us and figure out what we did, we’ll be very far from safe.

  ***

  Kerri watched, torn between awe and a very primal fear, as the enemy battlestation disintegrated. The designers had made the battlestation tougher than a battleship - they didn’t have to cram military-grade drives into the hull - but they couldn’t have prepared her for a giant battlecruiser ramming herself into the battlestation. There was no armour in existence that could stand up to that. The sheer insanity of the tactic made it hard to predict. No one, not even the Imperial Navy, would throw away a multi-billion credit starship on a whim.

  A shame we couldn’t cram her hull with explosives, she thought. The battlecruiser had expended most of her missiles before meeting her fiery doom. The blast might have been even bigger.

  She put the thought aside as the remaining automated ships advanced towards the planet. They were tearing a hole in the enemy defences, shooting missiles and projectiles towards the orbital platforms and the PDCs below. The latter were only just starting to shoot, even though they had enough plasma weapons to make one hell of a difference. Kerri suspected they were reluctant to risk blowing holes in the orbital industries. They needed to keep those facilities intact.

  “Continue firing,” she ordered. They’d cleared a gap in the enemy defences. “And deploy the second wave of drones.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Kerri settled back into her chair and watched. The automated ships were soaking up one hell of a lot of fire. Good. Their crews were already on their shuttles, heading away as fast as they could. The ships were doomed, but it didn’t matter. She’d never intended for any of them to survive the battle. The more fire they drew, the less that would be aimed at the real threat. The ships inching into high orbit had to be protected as long as possible.

  And as long as they’re confused about what we’re trying to protect, she told herself, the harder it will be for them to tackle the real threat.

  She smiled, coldly. “Contact Captain Summand,” she ordered. “Inform him he may begin Phase Two when ready.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  ***

  Rachel was all too aware that the Terran Marine Corps based its doctrine on speed, surprise and hitting the enemy where it hurt. The corps had always been outnumbered on the battlefield, forcing it to rely on maintaining a high operation tempo to keep the enemy from recovering its balance and striking back. But now ... Major-General Anderson and his staff had outdone themselves. The battlecruiser had wiped an entire battlestation out of existence and that, combined with the damaged or destroyed orbital sensor platforms, had thrown everything into confusion.

  “Link the command and control networks through the anchor station,” General Gilbert snapped. There was no hint of panic in his voice. Rachel was morbidly impressed. “We’ll take control of the defences.”

  Good thinking, Rachel thought, as Commander Archer echoed the command. She tapped her console, doing her level best to look like she was handling the job while moving as slowly as possible. The anchor station was designed to serve as an emergency command and control centre, but the system had never been tested. You might have saved the day if I’d allowed you the chance.

  She watched as the operators struggled to bring their systems back online. The orbital network was continuing to fragment. It looked as if a bunch of sensor nodes had gone down, then come back up again and started targeting friendly units. Rachel guessed that one of her comrades had engaged in a little sabotage before the shit hit the fan. It had probably been Bonkowski. He’d always had an evil sense of humour.

  And their system isn’t making it easy for us to replace the dead controllers, she thought, with a flicker of amusement. We don’t have the permissions we need to take control.

  “Unlock the system,” General Gilbert ordered. His thoughts had clearly been moving in the same direction. “Hurry!”

  “But ...” Commander Archer started. “Sir ...”

  “Do it!” General Gilbert rounded on him. “We don’t have time to argue!”

  Rachel kept her face carefully impassive as more and more options appeared in front of her. The staff were working hard, their minds concentrated by incoming fire and the grim certainty they could no longer be blamed for anything. The system might be designed to log each and every keystroke, and assign them to an operator, but not once it had been unlocked. Rachel knew it would work for them. The fear of being blamed for making an entirely understandable mistake was gone. Thankfully, it also let her get on with a little sabotage.

  She worked hard, assigning platforms to target ships that looked like drones and fiddling with their systems to ensure the odds of actually hitting anything were very low. General Gilbert was handling things well, she conceded; he’d even managed to silence Commander Archer and a handful of other timeservers. She caught herself glancing at his back, wondering if she could kill him and get the hell out before they riddled her body with bullets. Only the grim certainty she couldn’t hope to escape kept her in her seat. If they saw her kill him, they’d wonder what else she’d been doing.

  Alarms howled through the command core. “Incoming shuttles! I say again, incoming shuttles!”

  “Target them,” General Gil
bert ordered. “Quickly!”

  Rachel smiled. Between her fiddling and the badly-degraded sensor network, it wasn’t likely they’d be able to hit more than one or two shuttles before they clamped onto the hull and boarded the anchor station. The internal security systems were designed to deal with dissidents, not marines in powered combat armour. She wondered what they’d do once the station fell into enemy hands. Fire on the anchor and risk disaster? Or simply disconnect and hope the marines wheeled up the cable before it was too late?

  General Gilbert’s voice rose. “Command staff, switch command to the ground-based systems and then head for the elevator cable. Now.”

  Rachel stared. He wanted them to ride the cable to the ground now? It was insane! Nuclear warheads were detonating outside the station, each sending out more and more waves of electromagnetic disruption. And yet ... she could see his logic. The cable hadn’t drawn fire. It wouldn’t. It might give him a chance to get the knowledgeable command staff off the station before it was captured. She thought, fast, as the rest of the staff scrambled to their feet and headed to the emergency tubes. She could still do a lot of damage if she remained on the station, but the chance to follow the commanding officers was not to be missed.

  She hoped the others were safe as she joined the exodus. The three other Pathfinders had found menial positions. It was unlikely they were on any evacuation lists. Hell, she wasn’t entirely sure she was on any lists. She’d inserted herself into the records, and tightened up the references over the last few days, but the longer she remained in place the greater the chance of something going wrong. The slightest slip-up could result in disaster.

  But the entire system is already a ruin, she thought. They’ll be lucky if they don’t lose track of everyone after this.