by B. V. Larson
They didn’t look happy, but they turned back to their control systems without further complaints.
Abruptly, the Nest Ship turned from red to yellow in the holotank.
“She’s broadcast their surrender,” Vic said. “We confess surprise.”
Straker refrained from another comment about organics and AIs. Instead, he used a different metaphor. “There’s chess, and there’s poker, Vic. Carla plays chess. I play poker.”
“So you raised and they folded. But what can we do with a Nest Ship?” Loco asked.
“Do?” Engels looked back and forth from Loco to Straker. “We took it out of the fight. Now we attack Atlantis.”
Straker pointed at Loco. “No, I get what he means—and Loco’s a poker player too.”
“Better one than you, Derek,” Loco said.
“Sometimes,” Straker admitted. “A human commander who surrendered wouldn’t ever switch sides. Even if he did, his crew wouldn’t defect en masse. I mean, look what happened with Braga, right? But maybe an Opter Queen will, especially with a gun to her head.”
“Yeah, but who’ll put that gun to her head?” Loco said. Then he saw Straker’s grin, he began grinning himself. “Oh… no way! I’m not going aboard that ship unless I’m in a mechsuit and armed to the teeth.”
“I think we can arrange that.”
Zaxby interrupted. “We have a better idea. The com-bot can operate Loco’s mechsuit. We can install a dead-switch bomb and an FTL transceiver, and send it over. It can be our gun to her head.”
“Fine by me,” Loco said.
“Do it,” Straker said.
The Queen immediately agreed to the coerced defection, as Straker suspected she would. These Queens seemed to have little loyalty except to themselves. They were essentially petty monarchs of their own domains.
This lack of loyalty among Queens would be extended to himself, Straker realized. She’d no doubt turn on him instantly if she thought she could regain her freedom.
When Loco’s bot-occupied mechsuit reached the Nest Ship’s bridge, the Opter vessel fell into formation with the Republic fleet. The drones, the Nest Ship’s only real military force, were kept at some distance off to the flank, out of their own short weapons range but within that of the warships.
* * *
Admiral Niedern swore vehemently on the bridge of his flagship, the monitor Poseidon. He’d been ecstatic when his new Opter allies had taken out Indomitable, removing his biggest worry from the upcoming battle, but now his fury rose.
“That bug bitch,” he muttered. “She’s switched sides!”
Karst, standing next to him, shrugged with equanimity. “Still a net gain, don’t you think?”
“Of course, but this is becoming an ugly theme, don’t you think? First Victory defects, and now this Queen. It’s bound to hurt morale, and my dreadnoughts won’t do well against these small craft. We have 400 local attack ships, but they’re no match for 3500 drones and fighters.”
“You have ample missile stores. Use them up. I don’t have to remind you what happens if they win, do I?”
Niedern turned to stare into Karst’s eyes. Damn him, the man didn’t even flinch. “My career will be over. You? They’ll probably execute you, hmm? So don’t try to threaten me with consequences.” Niedern turned deliberately away from his watchdog and put him out of his mind.
Karst wouldn’t be ignored, however. “You’re sure your ships are secure against Victory’s control?”
Niedern grunted. “I saw the reports on what happened at Sparta. We intercepted a lot of intel from the spy drones, so we know what kind of hacks they used. We’ve upgraded our ICE and taken every possible measure. Now shut up and let me think.”
“About what?”
“About how to buy time for our reinforcements to arrive.”
Karst, at long last, shut up and retreated.
* * *
“The score is one to one at the end of the first period,” Loco said from where he stood next to Straker in his battlesuit on Victory’s bridge.
“I’d call it two to one their favor,” Straker replied. “Indomitable was more valuable than the Nest Ship.”
“Maybe. On the other hand, their loss was our gain, and those drones are expendable. Maybe Carla and Vic can take that into account.”
“Already am,” Engels said, not looking at Loco as she stared hard at her holotanks. “I’m thinking they’re the perfect thing to ensure your moon op succeeds.”
“Right,” Straker said. “You just get us there. We’ll do the job.”
“Trinity is ready,” Zaxby said. “Shall we proceed?”
A few minutes later, Zaxby, in full Ruxin battlesuit, joined Straker, Loco and the Breakers on Trinity’s flight deck. Straker was already in his mechsuit.
Loco stared up at him from a mere battlesuit. “Dammit boss, this sucks.”
“Sorry, Loco. The only way to be sure the Queen cooperated was to put your suit in there right next to her. No conceivable attack could take it out before its deadman switch activates.”
“Detaching from Victory now,” Zaxby said.
Straker linked his HUD to Trinity’s tactical holotank and watched as Trinity raced for the outer moon of Atlantis, called Thera. The cloud of three thousand Opter drones joined and surrounded them, along with ten Victory fighters.
No doubt the enemy were wondering what one destroyer was doing among the many drones. Was it a real attack, or a ruse to draw the smaller, slower, but heavier defending fleet out of position?
The heavy beams of the moon batteries opened up at long range and began destroying a few drones, which evaded wildly. When the range got closer and the beams shifted to targeting Trinity, the ten fighters, per Engels’ plan equipped as Archers with underspace generators, dropped into that cold dimension and began crossing and re-crossing the vicinity of Trinity, which also inserted. The insertion should be a surprise to the Huns, and now they had eleven targets to track.
The Hun fleet moved closer to this threat, trying to split the difference between holding position and helping to cover the moon bases.
Engels had chosen carefully, however, placing her own fleet so that the Huns had two bad choices. They chose the lesser of their evils, of course, and didn’t reinforce the defenses against the strange drone-underspace attack.
As the range fell, the moon batteries had to split their fire among all their targets. They couldn’t ignore the congruence points, or the drones would land and eat them alive. Ignoring the underspace attack though, float mines would appear above their installations and detonate in fusion fire.
At the last minute, Trinity and the fighters dove directly into the moon. Just before crossing under the surface, Trinity released a float mine that wiped out the central of the five heavy batteries on Thera.
Aboard, Straker felt some shuddering and shaking, but nothing worse. “One down, four to go,” he said to the Breakers. They cheered.
Now three underspace-capable fighters, each with a suicide warhead aboard, turned within the moon and sprinted for three of the four remaining batteries—from underneath. As soon as they surfaced, they exploded, wiping out those three. This would never have worked against ships, or even fortresses, but moons couldn’t maneuver, and their mass shielded the Archers from detection.
The drones hovered in the vicinity, just outside the final battery’s arc of fire, along with the seven surviving fighters.
Still inside Thera, Trinity rose up carefully, precisely, beneath the last live defense complex and chose a point of emergence impossible to target. Her hull appeared less than one meter off the ground and immediately landed among the guns and wave guides. Trinity’s weaponry instantly eliminated any threats to the ship or the Breakers—hardpoints, pillboxes and autocannon.
“Initiating the assault,” Zaxby said as the flight deck door, now at ground level, flew open. He followed his own order and locomoted out onto the dusty surface, two weapons at the ready.
Straker f
ollowed. Across from him was a blown-open small-craft hangar, his entry point. Loco and the Breakers followed.
Once the hangar was secure, Straker sent the battlesuiters into the tunnels beneath the surface. There was no way he was fitting inside. This time he and Trinity were the stay-behind security, though he was able to follow via his HUD.
The battle for the battery was anticlimactic. The handful of duty marines were no match for two platoons of Breakers, and the technicians manning the weapons quickly surrendered. They were tranked and locked in the infirmary.
“There are five DNs moving our direction,” Zaxby said as he plugged a hacking module into the complex’s main fire control SAI. “Although the Huns have done well to secure their cybernetics against external attack, by accessing here we can bypass most of the safeguards and—yes, we’re in. Trinity now has control of the battery.”
“Breakers, return to the ship,” Straker said.
“Firing,” Trinity said on Straker’s comlink. “The DNs are staying outside the battery’s central arc. Our drones will intercept any missiles, but it’s only a matter of minutes before their railguns will fire from along the horizon, where the beams can’t target, and shatter this complex.”
“Did you have enough time?”
“Easily. My malware has piggybacked on the ground defense network and is already installing itself inside Kreta’s batteries.”
“Then get us the hell out of here.”
Chapter 40
Atlantis System
Engels breathed a sigh of relief as she got the word that Straker had accomplished his mission and was on his way back. She was holding the fleet beyond long range even for the enemy fortresses, cruising laterally and constantly evading, forcing them to guess at what angle she’d turn to attack.
In war as in life, it was all about position and timing. She had to initiate her run less than a minute after Trinity slipped back into her berth within Victory. The drones and fighters that had covered Straker’s mission hid behind Thera’s bulk, daring the enemy to come after them. Niedern was a clever opponent, though, and refused to be drawn out of position.
Position and timing, position and timing. Engels stared at the holotanks. Vic had created clear graphics that made the plan seem obvious and inevitable. Still her mind scrabbled for some flaw. Nothing ever worked completely as planned. Witness the hulk of Indomitable drifting near Gadeiros.
The motion of moons and fortresses, however, could be predicted with certainty. At the angle she’d chosen, the outer moon, Thera, was out of the way, nearly around to the other side of the planet and irrelevant now that its batteries had been destroyed. The inner moon, Kreta, backstopped the Hun fleet as it passed across the face of Atlantis. Five orbital fortresses were also in line-of-sight of the battle, something that couldn’t be helped.
Position and timing.
Vic now took control of her ships’ maneuvers. He could analyze incoming fire and evade better than any human or SAI. He’d also issue timed firing orders in accordance with her plan.
Her plan—and Straker’s of course. She had to keep reminding herself it was an organic plan, a human plan. In this role, Vic could have been nothing more than a perfect fleet chain of command, executing her will.
“Fleet launch commencing,” Vic said. The displays reflected the order, as all of her ships cycled their missiles in a complete soft-dump of their ready loads. Their overworked crews would be frantically shuttling ammo from their cargo bays, an unorthodox practice not often performed under battle conditions.
The missiles formed up ahead of the fleet into a series of massive waves. This would keep the Huns guessing as to which contained the decoys and in what proportion.
In response, the enemy fortresses began firing clouds of submunitions, millions of tiny tetrahedrons that would tear missiles apart. Space was vast, and so these only destroyed a small percentage of the weapons every volley, but the fortresses were well stocked with ammunition—and dumb ammo was cheap.
Victory’s fighters spread out behind the missile waves, followed by the warships. The formation gave the credible impression of a do-or-die frontal assault, an all-out attack designed to overwhelm the defenses with a surprising number of missiles.
Engels watched as Niedern did the conventional thing—the only thing he could, really, given the situation—and lined up his mobile forces in front of her. He couldn’t afford to maneuver too much, as he had no assurances some of the missiles wouldn’t be targeted on cities or installations on the planet. The fact that the two empires had never engaged on wholesale slaughter of civilians didn’t mean it would never happen, especially with the stakes this high.
She wanted him to keep that ugly possibility in his mind.
Position and timing.
“Now,” she said as the chrono hit the next phase point.
“Initiating,” Vic said. The Republic missiles and ships accelerated, staying together in excellent formation except for the AI-directed evasive patterns.
“Screening bursts,” Engels said.
“On schedule.” Selected missiles with loads of specialized particulates exploded. In the vacuum of space, even dust continued ballistically, creating a smokescreen that degraded the enemy targeting. The missiles soon outran the cloud, but occasional bursts kept it effective for the ships following.
The enemy fleet continued to fire energetically, degrading the Republic missile screen. As the missiles approached, the Huns launched countermissiles in profligate numbers.
The two vast armadas of robotic suicide weapons—for that’s what missiles were—merged in an orgy of nuclear destruction. The space between the two fleets, one waiting, one closing for the kill, filled with an overload of electromagnetic pulse energy that blinded every sensor turned its way.
Position and timing.
“Release the mines,” Engels ordered.
“As planned.” Victory’s fighters, each fitted with a cluster of stealth mines culled from all the warships’ stores, accelerated to the edge of the destruction zone, and then abruptly reversed course on impellers. The mines flew free.
Over two thousand hard-to-see weapons, completely reflective or absorptive and with no EM signature, coming out of the glare, nearly reached the dreadnoughts before they were spotted.
Ready point-defense weapons lashed out, but even automated systems have a finite reaction time. Over two hundred of the warheads made it through to detonate among the enemy fleet, a few actually striking the ships.
“Yes!” Engels tried to leap from her chair but bucked against the restraints as enemy icons turned yellow and red. “Half their mobile strength!”
“More like a quarter, as most of the damaged ships are still combat-effective,” Vic said. “And the monitors are untouched.”
“I see my brilliant contribution has had its effect,” Zaxby said as he swept onto the bridge, still in his enormous eight-limbed battlesuit. “Did I ever tell you I first thought of the concept of a stealth mine attack at Corinth? Admiral Braga almost won the battle with it, you know.”
“Yes, you’ve told that story more than once, and I’m glad you did,” Engels replied patiently.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, Admiral,” Vic said. “I still need a decision on where to apply our final surprise.”
Engels chewed her inner cheek. “Is all of Trinity there?” she asked.
“We’re all here,” Vic and Zaxby said simultaneously.
“What do the numbers say? Dreadnoughts or monitors?”
Straker broke in on his comlink. He must have been listening from within his mechsuit. “Take out Niedern’s flagship.”
“Chop off the head?” Engels asked.
“More than that. He’s not well liked. They’ve already been hurt by the stealth mine trick. I know troops. If they lose the flagship, they’ll feel like it was his fault and they’ll be more likely to lose heart.”
“This isn’t a battle of heart, Derek. It’s tactics and weapons.”
Engels voice rose to match. “You’re overriding me?”
Straker paused. “I don’t want to.”
He’s trying to say yes and no at the same time, Engels thought. What was her own gut telling her? To go for the monitors. Straker’s order was just a refinement of that impulse.
“Okay,” she said. “Trinity, pick the best moment and smoke Niedern’s flagship if you can. We may only have one shot.”
“Understood.”
Position and timing.
The Republic fleet closed to medium range, exchanging fire with their weakened enemy. Missiles, beams and railgun projectiles crisscrossed in the void.
At first, the Huns had it all their way. Their remaining ships and fortresses mounted bigger weapons with more reach and power. Thirty Republic vessels were crippled as the distance fell to short range, to only three Huns.
Engels felt each icon that turned red as a physical pain in her nerves, aches in her limbs and agony behind her eyes. People were dying, good people, her people, all to set the enemy up for—
“Firing,” Vic said. The right holotank zoomed in on the Poseidon, Niedern’s flagship.
Metal plasma boiled from the lightly armored stern of the monitor. Her engines blew with a gout of fusing isotopes as five whole moon batteries from Kreta, twenty-five heavy particle beams at close range, crawled right up Poseidon’s back end and gutted her from the inside.
“The malware worked!” Engels exulted. “Think we’ll get another shot?”
The chrono counted down the recharge time and hijacked batteries fired again. They struck a second monitor, but the alert ship’s captain had turned and so the beams struck her heavily armored flak. Even so, the vessel took severe damage, turning yellow in Victory’s holotank.
Before the beam projectors could recharge and release their gargantuan energies a third time, the Hun fortresses smashed the moon bases with a storm of belated fire. Still, two monitors taken out of the fight—and the moon bases destroyed—was a big win.