"Impervious, her fighters, and the frigates will meet the enemy fleet."
"But, sir—"
"But me no buts, Lieutenant. The Guardians are here to smash the finest fleet in the British Empire. Pearl Harbor started twenty minutes ago. This is a raid, not an attempt to land and conquer the planet. They wouldn't try that with Britannica. New Finland was a lot more weakly defended, and she was too much for them to swallow. No, they want to knock out our ships before we can go hunting for them. My job is to defend this fleet. So I mean you to go out of harm's way. If they move against the planet— and they won't—we can jump on them. But right now let's keep them away from their targets. Execute your orders."
"Aye, aye, sir. Mountbatten out."
Sir George stared at the microphone for a moment. It was the strange sort of moment commanders faced—the orders had gone out, were being acted on, all that could be done was being done—and the person at the center, calling all the shots, could do no more but wait. A younger officer might have worried, bothered his men, nagged at them, told them to do what they were doing already, but if Sir George had been taught one thing by his long and not-very-illustrious career, it was patience.
Sir George's ship was half-wrecked, all his superior officers were dead, a fleet of unknown power was undoubtedly bearing down upon him, and disaster was the most likely outcome. Yet he felt more alive and confident than he had in twenty years. Still holding the mike, he pulled a headset out of its niche and put it on. He shooed the communications rating out of his seat and sat down in front of the console, thought for a long moment and then spoke into the mike again, very quietly. "Commander Larson. Are you still on the line?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then cut your relay for the moment. I'd like a private word."
"We're private at this end, sir."
"And at this end." Oh, there might be a half dozen radio-detection technicians listening in, or the battle recorders might be putting it all on tape for posterity, but that didn't matter. No one around could hear, the techs and historians would be discreet, and the moment felt private. "Joslyn, my dear, we should both be dead with the rest of them," Sir George said, in barely more than a whisper.
"I know, Uncle George. But we're not. Call it the fortunes of war or dumb luck."
"All I know is my being alive is a direct result of your taking me to one side and bawling me out for being a drunken fool."
"Uncle George—"
"It's true, and you know it. Half an hour ago I was being kicked upstairs as an old incompetent, and now I've got greatness thrust most unwillingly upon me. And I wonder how I've done with it. You heard my reasoning and how I've chosen to deploy my forces. Have I done it properly, or gone quite mad? I would value your opinion.'
“ Sir. I believe you were absolutely correct in your analysis. I believe you are thinking clearly and well. I think you have responded to the situation in the best possible way."
"You've changed your tune in thirty minutes."
"And so have you, Uncle George. I didn't think you had it in you."
"To tell you a dreadful secret, my dear, I'm fairly certain I didn't have it in me, up until that rock hit us. Maybe I still don't have it, and I'm fooling us all with a grand old show. Time will tell. Now I've got to go breathe down Damage Control's neck and get this ship ticking along. Patch through all your radar information to us, and whatever you can get from the frigates' detectors."
"Good luck, Uncle!"
"And good luck to you, Commander! Captain out."
Joslyn smiled to herself and got down to it. He was an old dear. But that to one side, the main thing to do at the moment was watch her radar. There were eight flights of Wombats deployed about Impervious—Albert to the bow, Bertram to the aft, Cuthbert and Dagmar to port and starboard, Elton above, Farnsworth below, Gordon and Harold hovering well to the rear as reserves. Good formations, good deployment. But from what Sir George had said, it seemed likely that there would be nothing but rocks to shoot at for quite some time. Joslyn worked it out in her head. Even given a fairly close-in detection of the enemy fleet, and even assuming that the enemy, once detected, would move and maneuver fester than any ships ever had, the Britannic fleet would still have several hours warning. And they had just proven they could launch on fifteen minute's warning.
Joslyn decided to make sure at least some of her crews were fresh when the Guards showed up. "This is Albert Leader to Hangar Two Boss. Lou, I think we might as well get half my flights back aboard and into the sack. We'll start an eight-hour-on, eight-hour-off rotation right now."
"Right-o, Albert Leader. Stand by just a moment. According to what I've got, the E, F, G, and H Flights were just coming off duty when the fun began. Let's cycle them back in and get them tucked in while the rest of you lot patrol the dark reaches of space."
"You've been reading too many cheap novels, Lou, but that sounds good. We'll do radial recovery."
"There's a candle in the window for you."
The recovery went quickly and smoothly, all the off-duty fighters landed in under twenty minutes. Joslyn felt quite pleased with her lads. Good pilots all.
Flights Albert through Dagmar went rock shooting, with Joslyn picking the targets. Her radar was substantially more accurate than a standard Wombat's. Her problem was mainly one of spotting targets that would actually hit something: If they shot at all the rocks, they would have run out of power and ammo in two hours. But ninety-five percent of the rocks didn't even come close to a ship.
But that didn't stop Joslyn from respecting the rock-throwing tactic: It forced the Britannic forces to stay at alert a long time, always a wearing experience. It soaked up ammo, and did some real damage to ships.
That made it all wiser to move the fleet. Joslyn watched in her radar as Mountbatten, Churchill, Princess of Wales, Determined, Warsprite, and the lesser ships pulled away from orbit of Britannica, toward the sun and out of the orbital plane. Hotspurs wreck stayed behind, abandoned. Joslyn hoped that at least the dead had died quickly.
Ten of the fast frigates—ships of the same class as the Joslyn Marie—remained behind. The Imp had ten frigates. It seemed very little to meet the enemy with. Then Joslyn dimpled. Mac would have cheerfully pointed out that the JM. had attacked Leviathan all by herself. The odds were a lot more even here.
The runner had made it—barely—through the wrecked corridors from aux control to Hanger Two. Sir George followed the runner's torturous route back, through improvised airlocks and wrecked corridors and burned-out compartments. There were grim sights to be seen on the way. Sir George was shocked to see dead bodies floating in the corridors, their young, ruined, lifeless faces staring back at him from the vacuum. "Fatalities" was such a tidy, hygienic term to apply to those horrors, those hideous slabs of meat that had been alive and laughing and full of promises such a brief time before. Sir George had never seen the bodies of the battle-dead before. For the first time, he began to get genuinely angry at the Guardians, and took his first lessons in hating them. Why had they done this?
War in space, battles between great fleets, had never been more than a theoretical possibility before the Guardians. Space war had been a game, a chess problem to Sir George. Neatly labeled spots of light that moved about in a display. Dead bodies floating in the corridors of the Impervious. That was real war, real death. Entirely too real. Grim-faced, the old officer struggled to keep up with his youthful guide.
Auxiliary control itself was in perfect shape, so clean and quiet and orderly that it seemed surreal. Technicians worked here and there in front of open access panels, talking in low tones, slapping in jumper cables, getting readings, pulling in control. The reserve bridge crew had finally gotten through the corridors and were at their stations, powering up the backup systems, setting things to rights, bringing the ship back to life—superbly British and phlegmatic in the face of disaster.
The main holo tank sprang into life suddenly, showed a scrambled mish-mash for a moment, then clear
ed to show a tidy, precise display of the tactical situation—neatly labeled spots of light that moved about in a display. Sir George sat down in the captain's chair, remembered himself, and shifted to the flag officer's chair. The captain's chair would have to remain vacant. Another little reminder of all the officers they had lost in the first thirty seconds. Sir George felt strangely wary, unsettled. All this studied, quiet, purposeful action, this cathedral of calm, was a fraud, a tidy lid atop the carnage of war. Dead bodies floating in corridors. He shook his head and began to take in the situation.
The Imp's radar and passive detection gear was back on line. At least two of the four laser cannon were operable. They had half the torpedo tubes, and fish enough to shoot through them—though the age-old slang term seemed a strange one to use for torpedoes that never got wet. The Imp was showing signs of life, could still fight.
The main engines were dicey. All of them were fitted and supposedly ready for action, but only the even-numbered half had been inspected, tweaked up, and approved by the Chief Engineer.
"Helmsman. Bring all main propulsion engines up to standby. Prepare to maneuver using odd-number engines. If any of them blow, abort and shift to even numbers. Let's find out the worst now instead of later."
"Aye, sir."
"Lay a course directly away from the sun, flat as can be on the orbital plane. One-gee acceleration. Communications—relay same course and acceleration of escorting craft and order them to safe distances and positions for powered flight. Relay to commander of frigate group. Detach one frigate to remain behind in present orbit and link to Impervious through secure laser comm channel."
"Aye, sir."
"Detection. Patch in communications to the stay-behind frigate and all the orbiting stations. Order them to use active radar, powerful and frequent pulses. Maximum range and coverage. Assign pulse frequencies to all of them. Use our own active radar until we start to maneuver—then shut down and listen and watch only. Passive. Pick up any radar reflections off the pulses the stay-behinds send off. Use the optical systems to watch for the lights of fusion engines.
"Helmsman, come to heading and prepare to perform maneuver in four minutes."
"Coming about. Four minutes to main engines."
"Albert Five to Albert Leader."
Joslyn pushed a button and answered. "Albert Leader. Go ahead, Madeline."
"Skipper, maybe I'm dense, but I can't figure it all out. Why did the Guards throw all those rocks at us and give us warning that they were on the way?"
"The starting point is that it takes time to move around in a star system—and you can't pop out of C2 too close to a star or else the gravity field fouls things up and you come into normal space a zillion miles off course or inside the star or moving at a hundred times the velocity you wanted. So the Guards had to arrive in Britannica's star system at least one hundred fifty million miles out from Epsilon Eridani herself. They are out there, heading for us, right now."
"And the rocks are just a diversion, to force us to keep our heads down?"
"Right. Except they must have timed the rocks to come about the same time we could detect them. But even after we detect them, we might have days before the two fleets are close enough to shoot at each other."
Madeline Madsen sighed, and spoke again. "It seems to me," she said, "that war must have been a lot simpler when you didn't have to travel so far to get to it."
"Wrong again, Maddy," another voice chimed in. "All this is just a classic version of the timing problems a mobile force has always faced."
"Ooh, Artie, don't we sound grand. Someone's been reading the cram notes on space strategy again, someone has."
"Oh, ease off, Maddy. At least some of us do read."
Joslyn let the good-natured bickering go on. It would let some of the tension bleed off, keep them from getting bored—or scared.
There was another rock, headed straight for the Imp. Joslyn fired her main laser, vaporized it, and wished the battle would hurry up and get started.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Aboard Impervious
The Impervious shut off her odd-number engines. The damn things had held out. Sir George called for tea and stared at the screen. The Imp had taken up a stable orbit about seven hundred thousand miles starward from Britannica—the frigates, their auxiliary craft and the Wombats hovering about her in space.
The rest of the fleet was lost in the flare of the sun, barely detectable even at this range, no more than a few million miles.
There was a job to do, still, for which Sir George had not provided. "Get me a secure channel to Mountbatten," he ordered. It took a little time. Finally the comm laser was locked on Mountbatten, and the answering beam had found the Imp.
"Pembroke here. Standing by for your response." They were far enough away that normal conversation was impossible. The laser light bearing Pembroke's words took about ten seconds to travel to the Imp, and it would take just as long to send a return answer.
"Thomas here. You're hard to find, which means you've deployed well. Retain this link to receive your detection information. I want a small, fast corvette detached from your fleet. She is to backtrack the course of the thrown rocks, move along that course to their launch point, and attempt to locate and destroy that accelerator. That accelerator could be a stay-behind weapon that will be harassing us until we put it out of business. It is vital that the corvette locate it, but I don't want them taking fool chances trying to destroy it. Obviously, it might have moved since it fired on us, but it still might be possible to spot it. Once we find it, we can smash it whenever we wish.
"A final point. If the Impervious is lost, or I am killed, the flag duty, the command of the fleet, reverts to you. I would strongly advise you start considering tactics to meet that contingency. Thomas out."
Four hours had passed since the first attack. The enemy fleet should have been spotted long ago. Either the Guardians hadn't timed it well, or they had overestimated the Britannic's skill in ship detection. At least the fleet was clear of the bloody rocks. The units still in orbit around Britannic reported the rocks were still coming, but the stay-behind frigates and the stations were getting to be increasingly good shots. None of the rocks had scored a hit in more than an hour.
"Captain, sir, we have an unidentified radar return," the ensign serving as detection officer announced calmly. Instantly aux control's constant low murmur of voices was silenced.
"Communications. Patch everything said and done in this compartment to Mountbatten over a secure laser channel—and send everything from the detection console as well. Detection, full report."
"Sir. Very faint return on last pulse—there it is again, a bit stronger. Epsilon Eridani Centered Coordinates: negative zero point nine EECC latitude, one hundred seventy-three point four EECC longitude. Request passive systems aboard Mountbatten and other ships center their search on that point and report to Impervious to provide parallax. Now have third and fourth pulse returns. Target is moving rapidly—toward Britannica. Velocity very high to show in so few pulses, but not yet determinable."
"Optical? Spectral?" Thomas asked.
"Sir, no optical detection, therefore no spectral readings."
"Then they haven't lit their engines yet. The fusion plumes would show, that's for sure. Communications. Order Mountbatten to commence maneuver at low power. Get the fleet in the sun's disk as seen from radar return. Helmsman. Bring us about to present our bow to the target. We're a lot smaller side-to-side than we are end-to-end. Keep our smallest cross section pointed through them. Communications. Use secure laser comm to repeat orders for radio silence to escort vehicles. Keep it quiet. Laser communications only. And keep laser to a minimum, too. In theory, laser comm can't be detected, but let's not test theory too far. Detection. Ensign McCrae, isn't it? What more have you got?"
"Sir. Awaiting data from Mountbatten. No significant changes in target. Range decreasing, and we'll have enough data for a Doppler check soon. Not yet."
"Sir," The comm of
ficer called. "Secure laser signal from Mountbatten. They are executing maneuver, and report it a minor correction. They were almost in correct position already."
Sir George allowed himself a brief smile at that. He had done some good guessing to place the main fleet there. He punched up the flag commander's strategic display in the holo tank. Very roughly, they were all strung out in a line: Mountbatten and the rest of the fleet about a million miles towards the sun from Britannica's orbit, then Britannica herself, then starward a bit from the planet, the Imp and her escorts, and then, far off" starward at some unknown distance, a radar return, presumably the Guardian fleet. That's where he would have come in, straight from starward, the shortest distance from an arrival point to the planet. And that's where they had come in. Good.
"Sir,' McCrae called. "Request that the high-power radar units around Britannica sending radar pulses shift from spherical search mode to a narrow beam centered on unidentified return."
"Denied. That would give us some detail we don't need yet, and tell them we've spotted 'em. Spherical search to continue. Work with what you've got a while longer, lad."
"Aye, sir. Sir, we have received parallax data from Mountbatten. Approximate range, awaiting refinement, thirty million miles. Velocity determination difficult because the target is moving straight for us."
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