by B. V. Larson
He looked but spotted no agents.
At his elbow, Melgar spoke rapidly and pointed at a woman in chains who was stirring a huge pot full of boiling liquid. “My woman. Take. Run. Hide.”
“Hell,” Straker said in Earthan. “How are we supposed to get through all those guards?”
Melgar seemed to understand. Maybe he knew more Low Tongue than he let on. He rummaged in his harness pouches until pulled out a roll of bandage. He used his knife to lightly stab the heel of his hand and bleed on the gauze, and then made motions until Straker understood.
Straker helped wind the bloody bandage around Melgar’s whole head, neck and face, concealing the fact that he was a furred man. Now, a casual onlooker would see only a wounded guard in a fur coat. Once that was done, Melgar moved purposefully for the stairs down from the gallery.
“Here goes nothing,” Straker muttered as he followed.
Chapter 23
Engels, Sparta System
The magnificent Hundred Worlds Home Fleet approached Sparta-3, confident of victory. They should believe they faced only Indomitable and a collection of about one hundred ships, proportionally distributed from SDNs down to corvettes.
But Engels had used the time to equip many of her ships with the Trinity-designed deception emitters, which could make corvettes seem like a dreadnoughts or vice versa. They wouldn’t fool optical sensors, but other measures could. For example, each of her non-hiding ships aimed wide-beam laser flashes directly at the enemy fleet and any known scout ships. These would act as spotlights in the enemy’s eyes, making it hard for them to get clear readings.
Many of her ships were also concealed behind asteroids, moons and the planet itself. Some had even set down on the surface of planetoids and gone entirely EMCON. All the while, small craft with even more emitters had scurried this way and that in order to confuse the enemy.
But Engels worried about the flagship Victory. Its actions and configuration showed it to be an AI-controlled ship, according to Trinity. That meant the Huns had somehow cracked the AI-madness problem—at least temporarily. It was still possible that the Victory-AI would eventually lose its mind, but even if it had to be rebooted before every battle, it would do its job.
If it were an AI, it might be able to analyze its way through her deception measures. Yet, she had to act as if her plan would work.
On the other hand, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, she reminded herself.
The Home Fleet came on in perfect spherical array, utterly confident. Each ship had perfect lines of sight, and was optimally placed with mathematical precision. No doubt they could be reconfigured with exceptional efficiency.
But Engels remembered a quote from Professor Pournelle’s classes on tactics at Academy. The retired admiral had said, “Don’t mistake efficiency for effectiveness. They aren’t the same. The most efficient commander may still lose a battle to one who knows how to be effective. The effective commander must be willing to be profligate with his or her forces, if that is the price of victory.” She wondered whether this AI would understand that—and whether it was running the battle itself, or only managing it under orders from Admiral Niedern.
She decided, from what she knew of Niedern, that the admiral wouldn’t give the Victory AI total control. It wasn’t in his nature. Therefore, her deception plans, her mind games aimed at this man, should still work.
“Trinity, is the FTL-datalink bubble shrinking as you expected?” Engels asked.
“It is.”
“Then their new system does use sidespace for transmission, even within curved space.”
“Correct. But the deeper into curved space they come, the shorter its range appears to be. By the time battle is joined, it should be less than one hundred thousand kilometers in radius.”
Engels grunted in satisfaction. “That helps. Anyone outside that will have conventional command and control.”
Tixban spoke. “They are approaching Indomitable’s firing range.”
“All right. Here we go with our opening gambit. Helm, unmask.”
“Aye aye, ma’am.”
The battleship slipped sideways on impellers, coming out of hiding behind Sparta’s moon, Leonidas.
“Fire,” said Engels.
From over ten million kilometers distance, Indomitable’s massive particle beam projector fired a bolt of near-lightspeed destruction. Her intended target was Victory. If she got lucky, she might eliminate the flagship with one shot. If not, Engels’ fleet would gain valuable intelligence on how the enemy would handle the bombardment.
The shot took over thirty seconds to reach the Hun fleet, and an equal amount of time for sensor pulses to return to show the results.
When they did, the entire bridge crew let out a low groan.
The holo-plot of the enormous beam knifed through the enemy fleet, but seconds before the shot had struck, the ships had begun complex evasive maneuvers. Each Hun vessel dodged obliquely, to the limits of their individual capabilities, and all had moved away from the flagship. The beam vaporized one drone, it appeared, but nothing else.
“They spotted us unmasking and anticipated our shot,” Engels growled.
“So it appears,” said Tixban. “The likelihood of hitting anything at this range is very small.”
“When can we expect hits?”
“Hit probability against conventional targets approaches fifty percent at under one million kilometers.”
“And against these ships?”
“I can only guess how much advantage the AI’s ability to evade gives them.”
“Trinity?”
The AI-meld replied, “I will refine my analyses as we go, but I suggest planning for half that range.”
Engels examined her fleet deployment in the hologram. One hundred ships, all heavy cruisers or battlecruisers, stood off near Leonidas, arrayed as if to fight head-on. Their emitters should make them look like a whole fleet of various ships. Hopefully, the enemy would believe this was her core force, and assess it to be no match.
“Are they velocity-committed yet?” Engels asked.
“As I already briefed you, Admiral, not for another twenty-five minutes,” said Tixban.
“Fine, fine.” At that time, the enemy would not be able to reverse and run. They would, however, be able to turn sharply away and bypass the planet if they wished. That would be a disaster for Engels, though. Her trap would only work if Niedern were overconfident enough to enter it so deeply he couldn’t extricate himself.
The minutes passed as Engels bit her nails. The murmur of clipped bridge conversation provided a familiar backdrop, but she detected nothing more than the usual nervousness before battle.
“They are soft-launching,” Tixban said, but she could see that for herself. The enemy ships dumped a wave of missiles that accelerated slowly ahead of the enemy, forming a screen. The weapons would be of various types—shipkillers, bomb-pumped beams, decoys, antimissile clusters—but all would appear the same until they activated or attacked.
“How many?”
“Two thousand four hundred, approximately.”
“Not a full fleet strike, then. Think we can handle that?”
“If we follow your plan, Admiral.”
“Then we follow the plan.” Engels lifted her eyes to the hologram. The enemy’s course took them near Leonidas, as she’d expected, the moon Indomitable peeked out from. Leonidas had no functioning weapons emplacements left—they’d either been bombarded by her ships, or had been sabotaged before surrendering—but standard doctrine would dictate Niedern would want to clear it of lurking enemy before moving on to the planet itself. In fact, she depended on that adherence to doctrine.
She glanced at the sixteen icons representing ships on the back surface of Leonidas, the inner side, facing the planet. War Male—Commodore—Dexon commanded these ships from his own, the Revenge. They were all Ruxin-crewed Archers equipped with underspace generators and appropriate weapons. All were small and unarmor
ed, fragile except for their ability to slip down into that strange cold dimension and attack from hiding.
All had their underspace generators powered down, and were also in EMCON. Republic relay drones beamed full data to them in realtime, though, ensuring their computers had the latest information on the enemy. As soon as they inserted into underspace, they would have to rely on that data and the intuition of their captains in order to fight blind.
Either that, or risk brief emergence for sensor updates.
The problem was, the time of surprising the enemy with Archers was past, especially in a fleet battle. Engels had to expect plenty of detectors, which would pinpoint the underspace points of congruence and direct fusion weapons against them. There could be enough bleed-over from the blasts to damage or destroy the fragile ships.
There was one way to mask an Archer’s signature in underspace, though, and Dexon was poised to use it. It was an integral part of Engels’ plan.
“Trinity, you’re wired in and comfortable?”
“Of course, Admiral. You already asked me that.”
“Sorry.” Engels had authorized Trinity to be taken aboard Indomitable and so be placed inside thick armor, and to run the battleship’s defensive systems. Engels had proposed turning over all targeting and firing to the group-mind, but Trinity declined.
“While we accept the need for offensive action,” Trinity said, “we would prefer not to control it.”
Engels had shrugged at this rationalization. Each person, whether organic or machine, had an individual right to decide their own moral limits. Trinity, now explicitly under her command, would most likely have taken offensive control if ordered, but constantly pushing subordinates to do things they disagreed with would eventually backfire. People had to believe in the rightness of their actions.
Or at least, in their necessity as the lesser of evils.
“Approaching velocity commitment,” Tixban said. “One minute.”
“Give it the full minute, and then pass the order,” Engels said.
One minute later, the recorded order went out to all her ships to initiate the plan.
First, her approximately two hundred ships hiding or lurking on the enemy’s flanks began to move and assemble at high speed. Perhaps fifty of these, her heaviest ships, had been in plain sight, but out of direct-fire weapons range and far enough from the Huns’ approach path they would be ignored.
Ignored, that is, because they all were disguised as escort-class ships. The Huns would have dismissed them as serious threats to their main fleet, and at the same time, seeing them had ensured the enemy didn’t feel comfortable sending scouts out too far. Now, though, they dropped their masking emitters and turned on their active sensors, revealing themselves as battlecruisers, DNs and SDNs.
Then, another hundred-fifty true escort ships, from corvettes up through light cruisers, broke cover and dropped EMCON, activating emitters that made them appear as heavier ships. As soon as the EM emissions reached their sensors and until they could get better readings and determine the truth, the enemy would be seeing about two hundred capital ships converging on them from all directions, especially from the rear.
Long seconds went by as various wavelengths crisscrossed the developing battlespace. It took time to detect new contacts, more time to make decisions, and then even more time for opponents to assess enemy actions and reactions. The admirals and captains involved had to continually keep the time-lag in mind as they gave their orders.
The Hundred Worlds fleet reacted approximately as Engels expected—and hoped. They increased acceleration moderately, but not excessively. If they traveled too fast, they wouldn’t be able to clear Leonidas of hostiles, nor remain in the vicinity of the prize, the planet of Sparta-3 itself. Speeding up too much might be a net positive for defending the fleet itself, but would force it to fly past and spend hours or days traveling a broad slingshot curve to come back—either that, or turning their sterns to Indomitable and her cruisers in a brutal bid to decelerate into orbit.
If they did so, they would present their open engine exhausts to their enemies. The unarmored and relatively delicate fusion plenums would be subject to attack by every weapon imaginable, even the tiniest railgun submunitions. This would be like trying to walk ass-backward into a gunfight, and just as self-defeating.
With so much velocity and so many enemies behind them, and Indomitable in front of them—a ship they very much wanted to destroy—the Huns would take the obvious, best course: beat the ships in front of them, battleship and all, secure the planet and its residual defenses, protect the mechsuit factory, and then fight the Republic’s pursuit wave.
Therefore, they came on, at optimal—and predictable—speed.
All of Engels maneuvering was designed to tempt the enemy into fighting on her terms, while making it appear as if they were fighting on their own terms. “The tactics of mistake,” another of her Academy professors had called it.
“They have to know our converging ships aren’t all capital ships, even if only by simple logic,” said Tixban. “They have likely detected the emitters even if they cannot break the deception measures.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Engels. “Now that they’re committed to this course, turning hard will present their sterns to too much fire. As far as they know, they have at least a two-to-one advantage against what’s in front of them—so that’s where they’ll go. Their advantage is speed and concentrated firepower, so they’ll try to punch through, seize orbital space and reactivate the fortresses, all the while slingshotting around Sparta as an irresistible unitary fleet.”
Tixban turned back to his board while Engels watched minute by minute as the enemy approached standard beam firing range. Would they send in their missiles as a separate strike, or would they keep them as an extended skirmish line? If she had to bet, she’d bet on the latter.
“Let’s take another crack at them, shall we?” said Engels. “Weapons, pick your own target for the particle beam.”
“Aye aye, ma’am,” said the senior weapons officer. He murmured into his headset and his team adjusted their aim to an enemy superdreadnought, an easier target than Victory. “Ready.”
“Fire at your convenience, maximum rate.”
“Fire.”
Indomitable hummed with the power surge as petawatts of power surged forth from capacitors and into particle beam projectors. The beam was so powerful that it pushed the battleship measurably backward in recoil, and had to be offset by impellers.
The beam took three seconds to reach its target. Two seconds before it struck, the enemy SDN blasted violently sideways, just enough to slip the strike.
“How did they know?” barked Engels, standing from her chair.
“Their AI must have analyzed our orientation and instantly activated the target’s maneuvering engines,” said Trinity. “I calculate this was accomplished in less than one second. No captains and crews—especially considering the time it takes to pass orders—could react that fast.”
“How can we counter this?”
Trinity replied, “Reduced range will reduce Victory’s ability to react. Also, if Indomitable sweeps the aimpoint of her primary weapons array across multiple targets, it will force them all to evade, or to guess when the firing will occur. However, I calculate that this new capability will reduce Indomitable’s effective firepower by a factor of more than eighty percent.”
“Gods of war, I can see why they put this thing in charge,” Engels growled. “Trinity—”
“I will take full control of Indomitable’s targeting and weapons if you wish it, Admiral,” Trinity said. “I believe I can counteract the reduction by approximately half, restoring our firepower to roughly sixty percent of normal.”
Engels asked an unpleasant question, but one she had to have answered. “So Victory thinks faster than you do? Is it a smarter AI?”
“I deduce it has more brute-force processing power. I couldn’t control as many ships as it does. However,
its speed of thought isn’t faster than my own, and may be slower. I also strongly suspect it lacks creativity and flexibility outside of battle-control tasks.”
“Battle-control tasks are what will kill us today,” Engels said.
“It also has the advantage of the FTL datalink system. It may be that our surprises will disrupt that system.”
“I hope so, but by that time we’ll have lost all the long-range shots I counted on to thin them out. They’re going to arrive in one solid, disciplined mass, like a fresh formation of Hok armor in a frontal assault. I was depending on Indomitable to be the rock on which they broke, but now I don’t think we have enough ships here.”
A disembodied head formed in the corner of the hologram, its face a strange composite of Nolan’s, Zaxby’s, and a smooth, robotic mask of plastic features. Trinity. “Is there an alternative to your plan, then?”
“I don’t know. Is there?”
The head moved side to side. “Not a viable one. You’ve trapped them—but now they may have trapped you.”
“Me?” said Engels with a lift of her eyebrows. “Not ‘us’?”
“I can insert into underspace and get away if necessary. I suggest it would be wise to move yourself and your senior staff aboard me and command from my bridge. If worse comes to worst, the fleet leadership will be preserved.”
“No. That would be abandoning almost ten thousand personnel aboard Indomitable.”
Trinity sighed. “We expected you would say that, but hoped otherwise.”
Engels began to pace, raising her voice so all could hear. “Dammit, how’d we go from winning to fear of losing within minutes? Screw that. We’re going to win, people. It’s just gonna be hard, but all we have to do is hold them and hurt them enough for the rest of the fleet to close in and crush them. To do that, we need to take Victory out of the fight.”
“That was always the intention,” said Trinity, “but it’s looking more and more difficult.”