The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  Peever was all over every aspect of the work, eagerly reaching over other people’s shoulders to push the buttons, shoving senior officers to one side to check a read-out.

  So it was with a distinct note of relief in her voice that the G-wave sensor technician reported a series of incoming optical traces. Optical and radar search were on the main bridge. Thirty second later, so was Peever.

  For the first time in days, Dostchem felt she could let her tail hang down without it being stepped on. The humans in Search felt a similar relief over toes that had been quite literally trodden upon. Peever was not a graceful young man.

  ###

  Dalliance or no dalliance, it did not escape Tallen Deyi’s notice that Spencer was on the bridge, well-groomed and in proper uniform, every bit as quickly as the unkempt Peever. Suss showed up as well, arriving a few minutes later via a different corridor.

  Deyi determinedly ignored the delicate entrances. “We’ve got a strange one, Captain,” he said. “Optical tracking processed the situation just now. We’ve spotted a lot of engine lights, all over the sky. All of them outside the search radius.”

  “There are always lots of engine lights,” Peever objected.

  “Mind how you address the CO,” the senior optical tracker snapped.

  “Thank you, Tzu, but I think I can cope,” Deyi said mildly, though he did briefly fantasize the pleasures of clapping Peever in irons. “The point is, Ensign Peever, that we have watched all those normal engine lights right along. They are all accounted for, regular traffic or private craft that are following flight plans, sending ID beacons and responding to our challenges. The optical tracking display system masks them out. Now we have at least twenty tracks suddenly popping up—all of them a bit hard to read, because they are all virtually nose-on to us. In other words, headed straight for us, down to three decimal places. Coming from every quadrant of the sky.”

  If Tallen Deyi was expecting some reaction of upset or fear from Spencer he didn’t get it. Instead, the captain smiled and laughed out loud. “We’ve just been told we’re on the right track. The enemy has analyzed our flight pattern, realized we’re in a search pattern, and come in to interfere. And they wouldn’t have any reason to do that if we weren’t getting warm, if we wouldn’t learn something worthwhile from the Dancing Bear. They’re coming to scare us off. Optics—what sort of specs can you give me on those tracks? Are there parasites aboard?”

  “Sir, reading their fusion temperatures, accelerations, and so on, they match the profile of intrasystem freighters. The range is still too great for us to spot any parasites on the G-wave detector.”

  “Are the freighters robotic or manned?”

  “Ah, practically all the freighters in the belt are robots.”

  “And our friends like to use robots—we’ve learned that much about them,” Spencer said. “Suss’ inside agent at StarMetal uncovered some strong evidence that StarMetal was arming freighters with heavy weapons. They’re either trying to scare us off, or engage us and distract us from the search—during which diversion one of them could head for the Bear and finish her off. They must know where she is.”

  “Why don’t they dive straight for the Bear and ignore us?” Peever asked.

  “Because then we could predict their flight path, track forward along it, and know precisely where to look for the Bear,” Deyi replied. “Which would not be good from their point of view, when you consider a destroyer is a lot faster than a robot freighter. And more heavily armored.”

  Suss looked over the tactical plot. “This isn’t right,” she said. “They’ve enveloped our fleet too far out—ten times too far out. Too much space between us and their perimeter, too much space between ships. We can escape easily. How could they get it that wrong?”

  “They haven’t,” Spencer said. “They’re not trying for an envelopment. They’re trying to draw us off the Dancing Bear. But they can’t let us know where they’ve come from. They must be deployed from the command asteroid. All of those freighters must have been modified—and a shipyard that big would need an asteroid-sized base. But if they had launched their fleet direct from the command asteroid, they would have given us a backtrack and revealed the asteroids location. Coming at us from all over the sky hides their origin point.”

  “But getting to those dispersal locations must have taken weeks, especially boost at a thrust low enough for us not to track,” Peever protested. “Their start-points are scattered all over the inner system.”

  “Which only means they were planning to attack us sooner or later,” Spencer said grimly. “I wonder how much longer we would have had to wait before the destroyers were attacked in orbit of Daltgeld? We’ve forced their hand, that’s all, made them show their cards early. Nice to be ahead of the curve, isn’t it?”

  “So what do we do?” Tallen Deyi asked.

  Spencer thought for a long moment. “I’m tempted to say ignore them. Even the closest of them won’t be at extreme range for attack for days. Unless they know we’re using long-range G-wave trackers, they have to be assuming it will be weeks before we complete the search. If we were going to be hanging around that long, the freighters might be a threat. Given a weeks-long search time, they’ve used a good tactic. As it is, we’ll have the Bear in a day or two, less time with any luck. So we could just let them be.”

  Spencer was silent for a moment. “Instead, why we don’t we unnerve them a bit? Fire up the targeting lasers. Illuminate each of the targets in rapid sequence, bright enough to overload their tracking optics. Repeat that at random intervals. Show them we know where they are, and that we don’t care.”

  Tallen Deyi chuckled. “That ought to rearrange their little metallic brains. Let’s do it.”

  It was a good move, Suss decided, both in terms of tactics and morale. It would tweak the opposition while telling the Navy crews that their commanders weren’t running away. They were shooting at the enemies, even if it was only a few photons’ worth of targeting laser.

  ###

  Once the freighter-spotting was dealt with, Spencer, Suss, and Peever all headed toward the Search Control compartment. This was where the word would come, and everyone had the feeling that something was going to happen soon.

  Exactly when they found Destin’s ship was coming to have some importance. The later they found the Dancing Bear, the less time they would have to discover and evaluate whatever information was aboard before the freighters got too close and it was time to run.

  Peever wasn’t willing to admit it, but he was starting to wonder if they would find the Bear. He had secretly held to a belief that the projections were pessimistic, that luck rode with Banquo, that they would find the missing ship almost at once. That wasn’t happening.

  It was also starting to sink in that finding the Bear might not be a pleasant thing. The consensus aboard the Banquo was that the Bear’s crew was almost certainly dead by now. What data was aboard would be contained in the ship’s logs, in its black-box type recorders.

  Peever, as ranking intelligence officer aboard the flag ship of the task force, would have to be part of the boarding party. The only other intel-trains persons were Nanabhuc and Captain Spencer. Suss wasn’t Navy, and they couldn’t send the captain. Peever had a vivid imagination, and he didn’t really relish poking around in a cold, dark ship, with corpses floating their grisly way past him as he struggled with a bollixed recording device. Especially with an enemy fleet driving in toward them.

  It was enough to give him the creeps in advance, and he suddenly lost a lot of his enthusiasm for the search. Instead of bouncing all over the cramped compartment, he settled down and sat in front of his own monitor station, for which the rest of the G-wave search team was eternally grateful.

  ***

  Spencer was likewise beginning to have doubts about the whole idea of mean-time-to-search. They were long hours past the time when they should have spotted the Bear, and the first of the freighters was getting uncomfortably close. Spencer had n
o fear that the Banquo could easily defeat one or two of the freighters—but suppose the opposition decided to bring eight or ten craft to bear at once, or charged in on a suicide run?

  And still the search computers cheerfully assured them all that they had found the Bear already, statistically speaking.

  It was an effort of will for Spencer to tear himself away from Search Control long enough for a quick bite to eat and a brief nap. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if he were exhausted and hungry if and when they did spot their quarry. He ordered a sandwich brought to his cabin and tried to sleep.

  Spencer had just dozed off into a most unrestful doze when his AID started squawking loudly.

  “What! What!” he shouted in alarm, sitting bolt upright in bed. He woke a bit more thoroughly. “Shut down that alarm noise and tell me what’s going on.”

  The alarm shut down. “Sorry,” his AID said. “But they’ve spotted the Bear. Commander Deyi is preparing the ship to maneuver over to her.”

  “No!” Spencer said. “Belay that order, and order all ships to continue the search pattern. I’m on my way.”

  He swung out of bed and, acting on a new and pleasant habit, glanced at the other side of the bed. No, Suss was not there. She was no doubt still on the bridge herself.

  He stood up, pulled on fresh pants and shirt, and dove into the head just long enough to shave and comb his hair. As far as Spencer was concerned, he could give orders just as handily with a rumpled uniform and a three-day beard, but he also knew the value of captain legends. The men and women of the Banquo had never seen him look anything other than clean, rested, and tidy. He wasn’t going to risk ship’s morale by bucking that trend. Still, he still begrudged every second shaving took, and cursed that decorum forbade his running toward the bridge.

  But it turned out there was little point in his hurrying.

  By the time he arrived on the bridge, the optics team had not even spotted the Dancing Bear. Strictly speaking, there was no way to be certain it was the Bear they had found. All they had was a strong G-wave source.

  “The Malcolm was the first to spot her,” Peever volunteered, reporting from Search Control. “We’ve gotten a bearing from her, and are trying to triangulate now.”

  “Nice work, Peever. Keep at it,” Spencer said.

  “Why did you order the search pattern continued?” Deyi asked, a bit testily. No commander likes being countermanded.

  “Because the moment we break off the search and send a major ship in the right direction, the freighters will know we’ve spotted our quarry,” Spencer said. “Then they won’t have reason to hold off from attacking us. They’ll change course, head for the Bear. Assuming they are carrying long-range high-acceleration missiles, they’ll fire the first moment they can. I don’t know if we can intercept their missiles or not. So we can’t fly any of the main ships over to the Bear. We have to try it with one of the aux vehicles, and hope the freighters can’t spot a smaller craft.”

  Spencer examined the main tactical display. Luck was giving them a break for a change. The Banquo’s gig Fleance was headed back to the destroyer for refueling. She would do. “As soon as Fleance is back, I want Wellingham, Peever and Dostchem to go aboard—no, dammit, we don’t have a Capuchin pressure suit aboard.”

  Besides, Dostchem isn’t subject to my orders, he thought. “We’ll send Wellingham, Peever and a Marine pilot and co-pilot, all in full battle armor. Chief, do you copy that?”

  “Aye, Sir,” Wellingham replied from Search Control.

  “Good. Take the short-range detectors, first-aid gear and repair tools just in case they’re any use. Fly the Flea at low thrust to avoid them detecting her fusion jet. We’ll use the targeting lasers to blind their sensors again just as she boosts. The mission: Go aboard the Bear, search the ship, get the data we need, and get the hell out. We’ll use secure commlinks and stay in contact.”

  “But Captain, using an aux craft could add hours to the time it takes to get aboard the Bear,” Deyi protested.

  “But it will buy us time once we’re aboard,” Spencer replied. “The moment the freighters detect a ship on course for the Bear, we’re sunk. If we used a big ship, we might have zero time aboard the Bear before the shooting started. But tell you what—just as the Fleance launches, we’ll have all three destroyers let off a volley of long-range missiles. Fleance can use max thrust and look like a missile for the first part of the flight, then throttle back to low power just as the missiles shut down their engines. That will let her put on some speed and get to the Bear faster. So long as the Flea doesn’t aim straight for the Bear on high boost, odds are they won’t detect her—especially if we’ve just blinded their optics and fired a flock of missiles at them.”

  Tallen Deyi didn’t look happy, but he nodded his acquiescence. “Very well, Sir.”

  “Don’t worry—the second we detect them making a move on the Bear, we’ll jump in first. And we’re closer, faster, and better armed.”

  Wellingham’s voice came over the speaker from Search Control. “Thank you, Sir. That’s very nearly comforting.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Destin

  The gig Fleance clung to the external hull of the Banquo, waiting for the moment when she would be cast loose to make her own way toward the derelict ship. “Thirty seconds,” the Marine pilot announced, and Peever briefly considered he had just that long to get off the Fleance. But it really was too late for that. Aside from the question of courts martial and so on, there were just too many seat belts, safety catches, hatches and air locks to get through in that length of time.

  “Fifteen seconds,” the pilot reported. The targeting lasers would be programmed by now, and the destroyers ready to fire their missiles. It should have been comforting to know that the fleet was going to such lengths to provide cover for the Fleance, but it would have been far more comforting still not to need such cover.

  Or, most comforting of all, not to be aboard the Flea in the first place.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Definitely too late to get off the gig, Ensign Peever thought wistfully. Ensign Wilton J. Peever was, be it confessed, a coward. Suddenly his weight dropped away to nothing and then just as quickly quadrupled.

  The viewports were covered and the external cameras stowed during the violent maneuver of drop-and-boost. That was no help, however. He could see quite clearly, in his mind’s eye, the Fleance blasting clear, the fusillade of missiles leaping toward their objectives, the laser barrels pitching and skewing as they shifted from target to target. He could visualize a whole sky full of weapons, any of which could accidentally snuff out the little gig Fleance if some computer forgot she was out there.

  And then there were the freighters, with weapons of their own, who might well seek out Fleance’s death on purpose . . .

  “All clear,” the Marine pilot declared in an excessively loud, cheerful voice. “On course to decoy objective. My repeaters from the Banquo show all missiles away and on course. We’re doing okay.”

  “Wonderful,” Peever muttered. He glanced at the mission clock over the pilot’s head. Another six hours and they’d be alongside the Dancing Bear.

  Then the scary part would begin.

  ###

  The Dancing Bear hung in the sky, a dark-grey hulking mass of metal, barely visible in the viewscreen, even with the light amplifiers powered up. Without running lights, without a working radar beacon, without a working environmental system to warm the hull and provide an infrared signature, the Bear was virtually invisible, even at this close a range.

  Lieutenant Bothu, the Marine pilot, edged the Flea in closer, slewing the gig around to the mining ship’s stern docking port. “How’re the parasites taking our visit, Sir?” she asked.

  Wellingham, bent over his sensor screen, shook his head. “Nothing, no response from the Bear or the freighter fleet. The destroyers are continuing the search pattern, and I think the opposition is falling for it. Plus, it looks like three of our missiles got
in to make hits. I can’t tell for sure, but that would be a nice bonus. At least none of the freighters are moving toward us, and the Bear is as dead as a tomb.”

  Peever felt a dull lump in his stomach, and wished Wellingham could have used a different phase. Images of frozen corpses still lurked in Peever’s mind. “May—maybe we’d better get into our suits soon?” he asked nervously, unhappy in the knowledge that his voice was cracking fearfully.

  No one seemed to notice the catch in Peever’s voice. Bothu simply nodded and said, “Might as well. This cabin’s too small for more than one at a time to suit up. I’ll go first. Clandal, take the conn and dock us up.”

  One after the other, the four of them struggled into the armored pressure suits. In theory, all Navy and Marine personnel were supposed to be rated on the suits, but Peever hadn’t worn one since Basic Training. The two marines seemed perfectly at ease in the things, but Peever’s nascent feelings of claustrophobia were instantly compounded when he slid the helmet shut.

  Sergeant Clandal docked the Flea’s belly hatch to the Bear’s aft docking port, maneuvering the gig with a flawless precision. There was a set of displays indicating the environmental state on the other side of the air lock, inside the Bear, and Bothu looked over the readings. “Looks like just a tad under standard pressure, as if she’s been doing a real slow leak for a bit without being replenished. What you’d expect on a derelict. Unbreathable, though—the carbon dioxide count is way too high. And the internal temps are just a little bit warmer than they should be, even if you factor in greenhousing from the C02. Just a few degrees, but it’s something to note.”