The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  The men sat without relaxing. “Are you prepared to go straight to business, Lieutenant?” Borisovna snapped.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Laing hesitated. “Except, well, I haven’t been briefed, just rushed directly through.”

  “And you wonder why a flag officer takes you in charge. This is an extraordinary mission, Lieutenant. Nothing quite like it has ever been done before. The investment in it is enormous, the cost of failure larger yet. Although the danger of information leaking to the Khalia is small, still, the fewer individuals who know, the better. I want to be on top of the operation from start to finish. Giving you a few minutes gives me a chance to estimate your fitness. Your record suggests certain ambiguities.”

  Laing flushed. “Ma’am, nobody has ever questioned my loyalty.”

  “There has been no cause to. Your tours of duty were routine and non-combat. Most of your time you spent on Planet Three studying its wildlife.” The clipped voice softened slightly. “I know that that has had its dangers and that you acquitted yourself well in emergencies. No slur on your character is intended. In fact, your psychoprofile shows a sense of duty well above average. It is only that we have to know the limits of your ability. This undertaking must succeed. We won’t get a second try.”

  “If I may speak, ma’am,” Maclaurin offered. At her nod: “Your ability is what we need, Laing, your capacity for quick perception, comprehension, decision, and action. In one sense, this is a suicide mission. Yet you’ll be perfectly safe . . . yourself. So dismiss any worries and concentrate on the technical problems.”

  Insight sent a chill up Laing’s spine and out to his fingertips. “You’re planning a mind transfer?”

  Maclaurin raised a hand. “That’s sensationalism. Actually—”

  “In due course,” Derabina interrupted. “We’ll take things in order. What do you know of the military situation here, Lieutenant?”

  Laing forced his consciousness to it. “Well, ma’am, We—you—have the Khalia bottled up on Christina—on Planet Three.”

  “Is that all you have heard?” she asked with scorn. “I should think you would be more interested in the scene of your dedication.”

  Laing swallowed his anger. “Ma’am,” he said, “the Khalian invasion came without warning, out of nowhere. The evacuation of Three was helter-skelter. My wife and I were swept onto different ships and taken to different systems. In the confusion, we had trouble finding each other’s locations, let alone getting back together. Then we had to make frantic arrangements, housing, jobs, necessities. Meanwhile the campaign around Target completely dominated the news. We couldn’t get anything but rumors from Third Grigorian’s. When I was contacted and put on active status and immediately shipped here, the crew were under strict orders regarding secrecy, They didn’t know why, so they didn’t want to risk violation, and clamped shut whenever talk turned to operations.”

  He felt surprise that Derabina heard him out and responded quite patiently. “I see,” she said. “Not your negligence.

  “The basic facts are simple. The Khalia arrived well prepared, with more supplies and equipment for construction than for combat: What warships they did bring sufficed to stand off our initial counterattacks, for we did not appreciate the threat at once. We assumed they only meant to carry out nuisance raids for a while. The Alliance has consistently underestimated the Khalia, thought of them as mere pirates. We’re gradually having our noses rubbed in the, fact that they are far more.

  “Barely in time, a scoutcraft managed to get sightings on Planet Three—and escape. Thus the Fleet learned that the Khalians had brought into being a complete, fully dug-in, fully outfitted stronghold. With such a base, plus ample ships, they could interdict this entire stellar vicinity, a catastrophe for the Alliance.

  “An armada was on its way. Now alerted, the Fleet detected it. A task force of ours intercepted it and turned it back. The force went on to regain Planet Three. However, that attempt failed, with heavy losses. The Khalian defenses were, and are, too strong. The best we could do was erect our own base here on Four. From it, we do control ambient space. Thus far, the Khalia have not taken their remaining vessels out of shelter. We have them under siege. But we can’t starve them out or wear them down. Given the resources of a terrestroid world, they can supply themselves indefinitely, now that they have the robots and other gear to exploit those resources.

  “We cannot go away and leave them. Simply using the small craft they have on hand, they could make hit-and-run assaults for parsecs around. And, of course, their headquarters would be quick to send in much more force, as was originally planned.

  “Maintaining the blockade is costly. It takes more ships than you, with your background, might think, Lieutenant. We must keep constant watch, in sufficient strength to repel any sortie. Additionally, we must patrol all space around the sun, out to more than a light-year, lest the enemy send reinforcements streaking in. Let those get past us and onto Three, or into low Three orbit, and they’ll be invulnerable, remember; and so the Khalia could build up their reserves piecemeal until they were ready to come out and challenge us. Supporting this effort of ours takes more personnel and equipment, by an order of magnitude, than the effort itself.

  “At the same time, the war is intensifying overall. For example, we would make a large difference in the Target campaign. Third Grigorian’s has become an intolerable drain on Fleet and Alliance resources.” Did the admiral barely, grimly, smile? “You might well say that the Khalia have us bottled up.”

  She leaned forward. “Do you understand, Lieutenant?”

  “Well, uh, well, ma’am,” Laing floundered. He mustered resolution. “No, ma’am, not really. Why can’t you bombard from space? Saturate those defenses and blast a hole where the base was.”

  “That wouldn’t be so good for the planet, “Maclaurin observed.”

  Laing tautened. “No. Firestorms, fallout.” The Mozart country become slag and ash. “But I knew from the first that it was likely.”

  “And Three doesn’t have intelligent life.”

  “Well—the amadei, but they aren’t sapient. Smart, but still just animals. And their species has spread over more than half the world. It will survive. Life will come back to Mozart. The Khalia—probably the Khalia hunt the amadei for sport. No. Anyway, I was thinking of rays and plasma as well as missiles. Energy weapons are . . . comparatively clean.”

  “What academy did you attend, Lieutenant?” Derabina demanded.

  “Why, uh, Xiang on Celestia, ma’am. Where I happened to be when—”

  “Their school of weapons must be deplorable. Even though you were not slated to become a line officer, you should have been better taught. Or have you forgotten your instruction?”

  “No, ma’am, I—”

  Derabina touched computer controls. She was doubtless putting in a reminder to herself to urge that the High Command order an investigation of Xiang, with possible courts-martial to follow. “You may try to explain, Commander,” she-said.

  Laing was glad to turn his eyes on Maclaurin. The other man cleared his throat and began: “It’s a quantitative matter. These Khalians possess an extraordinary concentration of defensive weapons. They’ve demolished every missile we’ve launched at them—and we’ve sent some barrages, huge by any standard—in the stratosphere or higher. You’re aware total destruction isn’t necessary. A strong energy beam that touches an incoming warhead, however briefly, or a nuclear burst some distance off, either of those will scramble the electronics and make the missile a dud. No shielding, backup system, or evasive action has worked against the kind of firepower the Khalia have. Remember, they’ve got robotic mines and factories producing arms underground.

  “We’ve tried kinetic kill, large meteoroids sent in at high velocities. Radiation doesn’t affect them. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of energy to move one capable of doing significant damage onto the right traj
ectory, and course corrections are slow. Khalian detectors pick the rocks up in plenty of time for small nukes to intercept and blast them into chunks of harmless size. Yes, we tried mounting automatic energy weapons in them, but between the defense missiles and the decoys, those proved inadequate.”

  “What would ‘harmless size’ be?” Laing wondered.

  “We’ve seen up to twenty tons of fragment strike in the area at velocities up to fifty KPS. They’ve made craters, they may have taken out an emplacement or two, but the Khalia are dug into bedrock, deeper than that, obviously with perfect crystal reinforcing materials. By the same token, toxins or radioactive dust would harm nothing but the surroundings, not bother them in their dens in the least.

  “As for burning them out with rays and plasma beams, surely you can see for yourself what an intensity and what a time that would take. As close in as our force would have to keep station, it’d be a sitting duck for the Khaliatheir ground-based energy generators are more powerful than anything ships can carry. No, the attempt would be a disaster for us.”

  “Targeting,” Derabina said.

  “Och, aye. Yes, ma’am. That’s another problem we face. The Khalians chose their site on Three very well. They must have sent scouts and collected intelligence about the planet for years beforehand. You know how ruggedly mountainous that particular region is, how changeable and often cloudy the weather. Nobody foresaw a military need. It turns out that accurate maps never were put in the Fleet databases. Whatever such information existed was on Three itself, and left behind at the evacuation. Yes, incompetence, lack of foresight, and heads have already rolled—but my God, Laing, the Fleet’s composed of mortal beings. Mistakes and oversights are bound to occur.

  “The upshot is that without a precise grid tied to proper benchmarks, we can’t pinpoint our fire except optically, at those short times when seeing through the atmosphere is close to perfect. Radar lacks adequate bandwidth, and the enemy jams it anyway. We can’t do a real mapping job ourselves, because no surveyor could fly low enough long enough before the Khalians shot it down. Oh, we can always aim within a probable few kilometers. But that error is one reason why kinetic kill has been such a fiasco for us.

  “If we had better maps, we’d still he handicapped by not knowing exactly where the enemy base is. We spy the above ground stuff, but it’s spotted across half the continent. Of the central installation, the heart and brain, we know only that it’s below one of several deep valleys sheltered by surrounding mountains. The Khalia did a clever job of camouflage—forced regrowth of vegetation—and as for emitted radiation, it’s diffused and most of it must be from dummies. None of us are familiar with that country. We can’t tell what is ‘natural’ and what artificial.

  “Now you, Laing, you’ve spent years in it. You’ve tramped over it, flown over it, pored over the maps again and again. You must know it like the palm of your hand.”

  Laing dared a smile. ”To tell the truth, I never studied the palm of my hand especially.”

  “You know what l mean. You don’t have a geodetic survey in your head, no. But you could recognize landmarks instantly. I’m sure, though you glimpsed them through cloud or rain; and then you’d instantly know where any other given place was, and you could see which had been heavily tampered with. Correct?”

  Laing remembered Vesper Peak soaring out of a thunderstorm beneath which lay the River Argent and the camp where Tess waited for him. “Well, yes. Within limits. Yes, I did get pretty good at finding my way around, also from the air.”

  “That is what we require,” Derabina said. He looked back at the admiral. The fierceness of her gaze was like a whip-slash. “One way or another we must end this stalemate, and soon. The Fleet cannot afford it much longer. We had resigned ourselves to ground assault. Under cover of as heavy a bombardment as we could possibly manage, we’d land an expeditionary force on a different continent. From that beachhead we’d expand and move. Surface-to-surface missiles should soften the Khalia somewhat, but air, armor, and infantry would have to finish the job. The cost is appalling. A million casualties, with corresponding losses in matériel, is a low estimate. Nevertheless, it seemed we must bear it.

  “Then this new proposal was made. Commander Maclaurin was in the group that devised it. If it succeeds, he can share credit for saving a million Allied dead and wounded, plus the added casualties that their absence elsewhere would cause.”

  Maclaurin’s eyes brightened, his cheeks reddened, and Laing suddenly understood the full meaning of that old word “accolade.”

  “You can bring the same honor on yourself, Lieutenant,” Derabina said, and Laing understood why, in spite of everything, her people went bravely into battle.

  “What . . . shall I do . . . ma’am?” he whispered.

  Derabina’s words were again dry, but her voice rang. “You, or rather your duplicated mind, will pilot the weapon that all by itself can end this standoff.

  “It exists, ready except for the programming. In outward appearance it is an ordinary chondritic meteoroid adrift in space, a lump of fragile rock, its largest dimension about four meters, which indicates a mass of perhaps ten tons. Actually the mass is lower. We will maneuver it into such an orbit that it will strike the atmosphere of Three not far from the zenith above the enemy base. The Khalia should take that for a natural occurrence, especially since it will fragment high in the air as chondrites usually do.

  “Suddenly one of the pieces, about three meters thick, will shoot straight toward the base. Probably the Khalian computers will deduce, or detect, that this piece has an engine inside. It will be too late for missile interception, but they will fire an energy beam to disable any electronics. That will be useless. The meteoroid will strike on top of them.”

  Derabina stopped. After a silence, Laing said, “Pardon me, ma’am, but I don’t follow you. Evidently the object won’t have a warhead, since you expect the Khalian defense would take any out. All you’ve got is a large boulder and ordinary cosmic speed; the motor can’t have added much velocity. From what I’ve been told about the enemy fortress, I don’t see how that would do so much as rattle their teacups.”

  The admiral had clearly invited his bemusement. She wanted to savor his reaction when she explained; she was that human. “Ah, but apart from the disguise, the engine, and auxiliary apparatus, what you will be, piloting is five tons of antimatter.”

  * * *

  Laing was allowed twelve hours to eat, sleep, adjust to Belisarian conditions, before he reported at Maclaurin’s laboratory. Yet when he arrived the psychophysicist first took him into an adjacent domicile room, made coffee, and struck up a leisured conversation. It would be best if his subject was not relaxed, which was scarcely possible without drugs, but not extremely nervous. Moreover, he reiterated, a degree of personal acquaintance would enable him to perform his task better.

  “It isn’t a simple business of gadgets scanning your nervous system, mapping it into an equivalent pattern, and putting that into a program,” he said. “Nor can we just copy off your relevant memories. Intelligence is too subtle and complex. It has a certain unity. We need your whole mind, or we get nothing. An improperly run scan could give us the semblance of a mind, but it would be . . . untrustworthy. Insane, in any of a dozen tricky ways. If I’m watching you while you’re in the circuits, knowledgeably observing your body language as well as your spoken responses to cues, that will be an important supplement to the instrumentation.”

  Laing leaned back in an uncomfortable chair and strove to make his muscles ease off. Maclaurin’s living quarters were a help, neat but with homely touches, pictures of his wife and children and sailboat, a guitar, a few well-worn codex books, a chessboard for play against a computer. “I know hardly anything about mind transfer,” Laing admitted. ”It isn’t done often, is it?”

  Maclaurin frowned. “Please, I hate that phrase ‘mind transfer.’ May its inventor spend
eternity in hell listening to every journalistic cliché of recorded history. Your mind is not a thing that we can lift out and stuff into a machine. It’s an ongoing process, a function of your entire organism. What we do is—our devices observe it, derive a set of equations describing it, too many and too complicated for any organic brain to handle, and under the guidance of those equations write a program by which a special kind of computer operates correspondingly.” He paused before adding, “You are right, it’s seldom done. Originally it was for scientific research purposes, and these days, almost always, we do best giving instructions to a robot.”

  Laing sipped his coffee. The warmth and flavor soothed him a little. “Matter of ethics too, I imagine,” he said slowly. “Shouldn’t we pity that shadow self of mine? Bad enough being trapped in a machine body, but with a kamikaze dive ahead of him—”

  “No, don’t worry about that, “ Maclaurin replied. “There are compensations. Subjects have described the wonders of direct sensory input from instruments you and I can only read, and sharing the intellectual power of a computer. Just the same, true, we don’t do this sort of thing lightly. And, true, your alter ego is to be a sacrifice. But men and women have laid down their lives countless times that others might survive, and this is for a million or more.”

  He drew breath. “Besides, the ego won’t mind self-immolation. Remember, it won’t be you, nor an identical twin of you. Same memories, same ways of thinking, but no flesh, no glands—essentially, no instinct of self-preservation. To the extent that ‘emotion’ means anything in, this case, it will be glad to serve so good a cause. We know that from earlier experience. If it were not true, our project would be out of the question. We have no way of laying compulsion on a consciousness without suppressing the capability of independent thought that is the very thing we need. The mind has to do what it does of its own will. That’s another reason you were tapped. Your psychoprofile shows a high sense of duty.”