Imperative - eARC

by Steve White

  “Skipper,” Schendler said cautiously, “that’s not what the current directives indi—”

  “Mr. Schendler, those directives are for civvies who won’t know what to do if a hammer comes down. I do. Mr. Lubell, lay in that course; I want to have as many withdrawal options as possible, so I want to be able to reach either warp point.” He turned to Wethermere. “Anything to add, sir?”

  Wethermere thought, then nodded. “Mr. Lubell, come alongside the Fet’merah as we go. We’re going to tuck inside her.”

  Sam Lubell blinked. “Sir, there isn’t enough room.”

  “There will be. Mr. Schendler, raise the Fet’merah. I need her to release three of her fighters. They are to enter our bay, then we enter hers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Knight’s brow was furrowed, more in perplexity than concern. “Captain, so I can know what you’re planning—what gives?”

  “Commander, right now, the Fet’merah is running a Rim Federation transponder. But what if the source of all the commotion is an Arduan threat, and we are overrun. In that scenario, if we turned the transponder off—”

  Knight nodded, came as close as he ever did to smiling. “Sure. Then the OpFor’s scans will just read it as an Arduan hull. At longer range, that gives us a chance to blend in or scoot later on. Of course, the Viggen is still out of luck.”

  “True, but she’s got the best legs of any of us. If one of our ships is going to be able to run fast and far enough to elude pursuit, then get beyond detection range, and ultimately make herself small enough to hide on a splinter of cometary junk or asteroid, Viggen’s the one.”

  “Got it.”

  Schendler turned to the dual con. “Captain Wethermere, Fet’merah has acknowledged and is deploying fighters as instructed.”

  “Very good. Ready our bay to receive them—smartly, now.”

  “Yes, sir. And sir, Councilor Ankaht wishes to speak to you.”

  “Patch her through.”

  “Aye, sir. Link is active.”

  Ankaht’s usually smooth alto was thready with an edge of excitement. “Ossian, I believe we have just now had a breakthrough in discovering the concealed data that the selnarmic couriers were carrying.”

  Now? “Ankaht, that is excellent news, but I think we’re going to have to wait to—”

  “Captains, bogeys—a wave of them!”

  Wethermere stared and saw that Engan had not exaggerated. Coming up from “beneath” the ecliptic and between the placement of the Zarzuela and Barricade warp points on the clock-face of the larger plot were a blizzard of small but incredibly swift bogeys.

  “Any comm chatter on whose ships those are? Or how they appeared so suddenly?” demanded Knight. Then he paused, his eyes narrowing. “How the hell are we getting those sensor returns, anyhow? The far edge of that plot is better than fifteen light-minutes from here.”

  Wethermere muttered. “Arduans.”

  “What?” chorused several crewpersons, most of whom added,” Sir?” after the first stunned moment.

  “As part of a broader test program, the Rim Federation recruited a number of Arduans to man key sensor and comm relay positions within its line fleets, particularly in potentially hot salients. Using their selnarm as a transfer medium, we can now get an almost instantaneous snapshot of sensor readings in any part of a system where they are operating.”

  Knight nodded—a bit sourly, Wethermere thought. “And that, too, is probably need-to-know info. More compartmentalization.”

  Wethermere only shrugged. “I’m afraid so. Commander, see if you can confirm whether those are ships or not.”

  Knight’s left eyebrow elevated slightly, but he half turned to call over his shoulder, “Lieutenant Engan, you heard the captain: whistle up a confirmation that those bogeys are ships. Get type and class, if you can.” He turned back to Wethermere, his voice lowered. “What are you thinking, Captain?”

  Wethermere gestured toward the holoplot with his nose. “Look at their vectors. All straight as a ruler, no sign of velocity change in any of them. And nothing but deep space behind them.”

  “Well, it’s possible that there’s a warp point somewhere in the outer system that no one’s charted.”

  Wethermere shook his head. “Not in Amadeus. Or any of the other systems that maintain the blockade on Zarzuela. There aren’t many systems which have been as extensively surveyed as these have been, over the last six years. Fleet HQ was insistent on eliminating any possibility that some undiscovered warp point might open up, let a horde of hostiles into our blockade formations through a surprise backdoor.”

  “Then what—?”

  “Captains,” Engan said in a puzzled tone, “even though we’re reading sensor feeds through the selnarm link being tapped by the Arduans on the Fet’merah, I cannot get confirmation on type or class or whether the bogeys are even ships. Only velocity confirmation: all bogeys are moving between 0.65 and 0.66 cee.”

  “Are you getting mass estimates?”

  “Not from the fleets, Captain Wethermere, but there’s been some open broadcast chatter from the holding tank of nonmilitary hulls over near the Barricade warp point. Some of the auxiliaries there are reporting objects massing less than ten metric tons. There’s speculation of objects smaller than that.”

  Wethermere nodded. “Meaning that a lot of these bogeys are much smaller than any ship capable of mounting a Desai drive.”

  Knight’s eyes opened wide. “So, they can’t be using a space-warping engine to achieve that speed. That’s their space-normal velocity. And the last people who demonstrated that kind of real-space velocity were the Arduans. Which means that this is an attack.”

  “Yes,” muttered Wethermere, “but not the kind you mean. Those bogeys aren’t ships; they’re chunks of debris. That’s why they’re not maneuvering. That’s why no one is detecting any drive fields in operation.”

  “But how—?”

  “Commander, the ‘how’—and more importantly, the ‘why’—of this situation is something we can wonder about later. Assuming we survive.”

  Knight looked at the rapidly approaching wave of bogeys: there was now a dim yellowish cloud moving with them. “There’s the confirmation of your scenario, Captain: a navigational hazard field moving right along with the main debris. The flotsam and jetsam. All of which, no matter how small, is still absolutely lethal at those velocities.” He squinted at the approaching cloud, then at the readouts. “I’d say we have about eight minutes before it grazes past us. But it’s going to pass very close to the Zarzuela warp point first.”

  “Of course it is,” Wethermere said quietly. “That’s its aimpoint, more or less.”

  “It’s aimpoint? You mean—the forts?”

  “Exactly.” Wethermere looked up. “Schendler, have we got those fighters on board from the Fet’merah, yet?”

  “Just now, sir.”

  “Then make best speed for her, and tell Cluster Leader Temret we’re coming into his main bay pretty hot.” He turned to Knight. “No reason to waste time out here, eh?”

  Knight agreed. “As you say, sir. Are we heading back into M’vaarmv’t, then?”

  Wethermere looked at the holoplot, at the approaching yellow haze and the uncountable red signatures of larger debris within it. “Yes, Skipper. Mvaarmv’t. If we make it in time.”

  *

  By the time they reached the warp point into M’vaarmv’t several minutes later, the confusion in the Amadeus system had spun up into outright chaos. Attempts to coordinate action among the civilian craft that supplied and supported the blockade had utterly broken down: the plot was filled with neutral bogeys fleeing out of the path of the approaching debris cloud the way starlings fly before a storm. The 9th Fleet was moving up out of the ecliptic to avoid the onslaught of the subrelativistic junk, but not without apparent protests and hot debates: the coded channels used by that fleet were punctuated by swift back-and-forth exchanges that were completely out of character for the sharp, curt tra
nsmissions that were characteristic of orders being given, confirmed as received or clarified.

  And the cause of the implicit rolling debate was obvious: left to their own devices, the forts blocking the egress from the Zarzuela warp point were expending their considerable firepower to blast lanes through the oncoming debris. With help, they might have been able to clear an even wider cone. But even as the individual red bogeys—objects large enough for the sensors to tentatively identify as ship-sized objects—were ground away by the relentless firepower housed in those titanic composites of armor and weaponry, the yellow haze kept approaching. Following tactics that Wethermere himself had innovated at the Battle of BR-02, the forts next unleashed a steady stream of antimatter missiles in an attempt to vaporize the smaller detritus, which had been unavoidably increased by the destruction of the larger objects which had been on collision courses. The strategy was to sweep a pristine lane through the debris, so that the oncoming cloud would pass around the various forts, there being nothing left along the actual vectors approaching them.

  But the strategy which had worked so well at BR-02 was far less optimal here at the gateway to Zarzuela. The debris was not only more dense, and was being constantly and unavoidably repropagated by the fragments resulting from the destruction of the larger chunks, but its speed was so great that targeting was severely degraded. Furthermore, even when hits were scored, the amount of time that the destructive energies from the forts were actually in contact with their targets was an infinitesimally small fraction of a second. The overall effect—the “maximum thermal coupling” imparted by each fort’s batteries—was so brief that the destructive energies often failed to finish the job, reducing the oncoming debris rather than vaporizing it.

  “Trouble up ahead, sirs.” Engan’s voice was tense. “Congestion at the M’vaarmv’t warp point.”

  “Civvies on the run?” Knight inquired.

  “No, sir. The 92nd Reserve is pulling out in echelon. Civvie craft are starting to collect around the edges.”

  Knight’s voice was almost as much of a growl as Kiraathra’ostakjo’s. “And it’s going to get a lot worse. Look at the plot, sir.” In the wake of the two blips that marked the Fet’merah and the Viggen, a constellation of similar-sized purple pinpricks were coalescing into a dense cluster, moving at various speeds and approaching from various vectors but all collapsing on the same point in space: the M’vaarmv’t warp point. “They got the idea a little after we did, but they’re making up for lost time.”

  “I don’t know if that’s going to matter much,” Schendler reported from his station. “I’m getting a general broadcast again, this time warning off all civilian craft. It doesn’t look like the fleet is going to let any civvies through until they’ve finished pulling out.”

  Knight nodded, looking at the long van of the 92nd Reserve. “They don’t have the time to share the warp point. Passage is one ship at a time, with a minimum safe transit interval of about three seconds, given possible velocity changes and last minute nav corrections.”

  Lubell squinted at his readouts. “They’re well off that performance standard, sir. Average interval is almost seven seconds.”

  “That’s pretty typical, Lieutenant. It’s a reserve fleet. Partly, they’re out here to keep their edge, to run the drills which will improve their performance. According to deployment reports, they’ve been on station less than a month. Too early to expect much better of crews that haven’t trained and fought together recently—if at all.”

  In the plot, one of the icons denoting a fort flared yellow and turned into an omega symbol: lost, probably with all hands. The bridge was suddenly silent.

  “Any indication or report of what hit it?” Wethermere asked.

  “No, sir,” Schendler answered quietly. “There’s a lot of panicked chatter in the clear about it. Nothing big, that’s for sure. Probably something less than a kilogram in mass.”

  “They don’t have the right sensor arrays to see or target this junk,” Knight muttered. “With barely enough motive power for long-term repositioning and station-keeping, forts don’t need sensors for detecting a bottle-sized navigational hazards at long range.”

  “Or it could have been a handful of nuts and bolts, all hitting within a five-second interval,” commented Wethermere. “Same effect, and they’d never see it coming.”

  Another fort flared yellow, seemed to list in the holoplot.

  “I have live-feed,” Engan almost whispered.

  Wethermere considered: should he show the crew scenes of irresistible doom, or keep it hidden—and thereby double their fear by allowing their imaginations to run wild? That choice was no choice. “On secondary screen, please, Ms. Engan.

  The screen brightened, showed what appeared to be a flattened octahedron, bristling with sensor masts, turrets, launch tubes. Or rather, it showed what was left of that fort: one of the octahedron’s tips had been sheared off, the rough edges of that amputation site sparking and flaring. At two points on the adjoining face of the octahedron there were deep, flame-gouting divots. A glittering ghost-trail emerged from the opposite face: whatever had gouged those holes in the fort there had, at least in part, breached the far side. Wethermere had seen forts subjected to thirty minutes of bombardment from enemy capital ships that looked better than this one—which had been hit only five seconds ago by objects so small that they failed to register on anyone’s sensors.

  Small specks started emerging from the other faces of the octahedron, like a cloud of fleas scattering off the hide of a stricken elephant: escape pods, hundreds of them. With any luck, they’d get clear before another—

  A fast pattern of ferocious explosions rippled along equatorial line of the fort before a titanic blue-white blast obliterated it—and blanked the screen by exceeding its safe luminosity limit.

  Wethermere saw the omega symbol appear in the holoplot, followed quickly by another two.

  Knight looked back at him, murmured. “Sir, I know this is a covert op, but if we wait around with the rest of the civvies—”

  “I appreciate your concern, Commander. I share it. But that debris field isn’t going to hit us here. It’s going to finish sweeping across the face of the Zarzuela warp point, come reasonably close to the one into Barricade, and pass out the other side of the system.”

  “So you’re suggesting that we stay here…sir?”

  “Our orders are that we stay in the exit queue like everyone else, right now. We’re pretty much at the head of the pack. Doing anything else calls attention to us. We’ll take stock of the broader situation when we get to M’vaarmv’t.”

  “The broader situation?”

  Wethermere shrugged. “This changes the situation in Zarzuela entirely. And I suspect that this is not an isolated attack. If Amunsit and her allies are somehow behind this, then I doubt this is the only surprise they’re springing on us. We need to stay in one place long enough to gather some big-picture intel and figure out our next move. Because I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to be paying a visit to Zarzuela anytime soon, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Knight nodded. “One problem, Captain. I’ve been watching the plot and listening to the chatter. I think the 92nd Reserve has become so discombobulated trying to get itself through the Mvaarmv’t warp point that they’re not really running traffic control. I don’t think there’s going to be an orderly queue, Captain. More likely to be a free-for-all.”

  Wethermere looked at the way the blips in their wake were racing to outpace the two denoting his mission force, or to work around the sides and get ahead in a desperate bid to reach the warp point first. He sighed. “Ensign Schendler, you are to raise the 92nd Reserve’s auxiliary liaison and find out what they’re doing to establish and enforce an egress rota for the system. Looks like we need to doublecheck that there’s even going to be a policeman at this intersection.”

  *

  Two minutes passed before Schendler could get anyone with the 92nd to respond. Another
two minutes passed before he had bounced down to the craft which had been assigned to act as the new navigation control hull: the actual one had transited the warp point ten minutes earlier. Audible over the background noise in the new ship were sharp impatient orders and countermands. Schendler made his inquiry about the exit rota and was told to wait.

  That had been three minutes ago. Over the course of the delay, forts had been dying, one after the other, until the approaches to the Zarzuela warp point looked like a graveyard where omega symbols stood in for headstones. The debris cloud had almost moved fully past it, a long and now somewhat ragged oblong coursing swiftly toward the Barricade warp point. Several small ships which had been further out into deep space—“behind” the Zarzuela warp point, as it were—seemed to hang there pensively, although in one case, there seemed to be a rescue operation underway, one ship moving to the assistance of another.

  Schendler listened intently to his headset, spoke into its pickup, paused, listened intently, looked up, shook his head.

  “Report, Ensign,” ordered Knight.

  Schendler sighed. “I wish there was something to report, sir. First I was told they had no orders or authorization to impose a rota, particularly since they would not be around to enforce it. Then someone else came on the channel and contradicted that, claiming they were in the process of cutting the orders and drafting the announcement. And then a third voice told me to get off the line: they’d received orders to move to the transit point themselves and were transferring the auxiliary navigation authority to another hull. And then the line went dead.”

  Knight glanced over at Wethermere. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to fly under the radar on this one, Captain. If we’re going to get through that warp point in time, I think we’re going to have to tell them who we really are.”

  Wethermere suppressed a sigh—and saw, in the plot, that the small ship that had been in need of assistance well in the lee of the warp-point’s approach envelope came to life with a startling burst of speed. It maneuvered sharply toward the warp point’s approach envelope as the tail of the debris field finished passing by.