The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  But there had to be something there. Spencer knew that, deep in his bones. And he was waiting to flush it out.

  It started eight hours after the Dancing Bear and Fleance shaped orbit for Mittelstadt. A sprinkling of tiny dots suddenly appeared in the long-range screen, surrounding the image of the command asteroid. Engine lights, lots of them. Either they had just launched, or the Banquo had just come within sensor range. It didn’t matter. They had shown themselves.

  “Tactics! How many of them!” Spencer demanded eagerly.

  “One hundred twenty, at least, Sir. More becoming visible.”

  “Excellent!” Spencer said.

  “ ‘Excellent?’ ” Suss asked. “A hundred twenty enemy ships is good?” She came over and stood beside him.

  “It is if we can get them to someplace beside where we’re going,” Spencer said, staring at the screen. He snapped on an auxiliary screen and began calling up an overview display.

  “I knew they had to have more than just twenty converted freighters in their fleet,” Spencer said. “We got that from Sisley’s reports. They were buying up ships all over the system. And the odds against their entire fleet being in range to intercept our search for the Bear—well, it just seemed pretty unlikely. I’ll bet there are another forty or fifty converted freighters dispersed all around this system. But think for a second. This fleet we’re up against has got to be under the tightest central control possible. The parasites controlling the ships are wired directly into the helmet creature. You yourself said they were in essence the hands attached to the brain. We can kill the hands, the parasites, and it won’t matter. But if we can get in close enough to destroy the helmet, the parasites are dead too.

  “I started to wonder—if I were the commander of a force like that, where would I put the bulk of my forces in a defensive situation? What would you do?”

  “I’d put my fleet on direct, close guard of headquarters,” Suss said.

  “Which left us with the job of trying to flush them out, try and draw them away from that asteroid long enough for us to make a strike. That’s why I decided on a direct, arrow-straight trajectory on the asteroid once we knew where it was. No feinting, no attempt at misdirection. It’s also why I tried a head-on bust out from the blockade. In both cases, I wanted to seem as aggressive, violent, and threatening as I could, so the helmet creature would get scared of us. Scared enough to invest a lot of resources in keeping us away. Now we’ve gotten the thing to strip its defenses. And so far we’ve done it at very low risk to ourselves.”

  Suss looked at the overall tactical plot. At one end of the screen lay the command asteroid, at the other two small winking lights representing the Bear and Fleance. The mining ship and the gig were just about to move off the edge of the plot, moving out of harm’s way toward the safety of Mittelstadt. In the dead center of the screen were the three destroyers—Banquo, Lennox and Macduff, coasting at very high speed toward the command asteroid.

  Between the destroyers and the Dancing Bear lay the seventeen freighters that had comprised the blockade fleet. Even as Suss watched, they relit their engines and started to accelerate toward their home base—and the Pact ships.

  And the new element. A hundred and twenty enemy craft boosting straight for the Pact ships. Both enemy fleets were forming up into a huge pincer formation, seeing to it that the Pact ships could not cut and run. And there didn’t seem to be any escape.

  “Well, Captain, if you wanted the hornets to come up out of their nests, you’ve succeeded.”

  Spencer nodded, not seeming to notice the sarcasm in Suss’ voice. “Now all we have to do is convince them to commit all the way to their attack. Get them for enough from their base, and moving fast enough that they’ll never make it back in time. Communications, put me through to the commanders of the Lennox and Macduff.”

  “Commlink open, Sir.”

  “This is Spencer, commanding task force, to all commanders. Prepare and execute synchronized braking maneuver at full power. Bring all three ships to zero relative velocity with command asteroid and assume a defensive deployment.”

  “Sir, this is Matambu commanding Lennox. We’re still at least twenty million kilometers from the asteroid.”

  “I am aware of that, Sir. Which is why I am also ordering all ships to compute and prepare for a synchronized intrasystem jump from our stop-point to a point 100,000 kilometers away from the command asteroid. We’re going to feint, pretend that we mean to stand and fight here. Once we’ve convinced the enemy of that, we use the jump gear and get behind him.”

  There was dead silence, both on the bridge of the Banquo and the commlink to the other ships.

  Finally, someone worked up the nerve to speak. “Sir, this is Heinrich commanding Macduff. Sir, you might not be aware of it, but there is a large margin of error even between two well-calibrated jump points. Most of the error is caused by mass deflection. A small amount of matter, either near the jump-off point or the arrival point, small enough so that it can’t be easily detected, is enough to throw everything off. The gravity field produced by even a few grams of matter is enough to warp space enough to send a ship thousands of kilometers off course. You are ordering us to jump in an asteroid belt. We’d be lucky if even one ship gets within a million klicks of the target.”

  “I am aware of all that you point out, Heinrich, and I thank you for your thoughts. Tactical Officer—what is the most likely outcome of a direct approach to the command asteroid? Take into account the enemy force we have detected so far.”

  “Loss of the fleet,” the young tactics man said quietly. “We can outgun those freighters one to one, and even with some fairly heavy odds. But we can’t fight off 137 of them. Especially if they know exactly where we are going and why. Our speed and acceleration advantage won’t count for anything.”

  “What are the odds on losing a ship in an intrasystem jump under these circumstances?” Heinrich asked over the commlink.

  “Difficult to estimate, Sir, as there are a lot of variables. But I would estimate the probabilities at about 90 percent that any one ship would survive—which works out to about 73 percent probability that all three ships will make it. But you are correct that we have no way of knowing where the ships will be when they complete the jump. With the amount of uncharted matter you’re likely to find in a star system, mass deflection could put you almost anywhere. There is a remote possibility that they could end up outside this star system altogether.”

  “But with a 90 percent chance of ending up alive,” Spencer said. “I do not wish to lose any more of my ships, let alone all of them. What chance of at least one ship arriving within a 100,000 kilometers of target?”

  The tactics officer shrugged. “Sir, there are simply too many unknowns. But just based on experience, and gut-level hunches—maybe fifty-fifty. Maybe an 80 percent shot that one of them will arrive within 200,000.”

  “I would be a bit more pessimistic,” Dostchem announced peremptorily. Spencer had even forgotten the Capuchin was on the bridge. “But not by much. Subtract eight to 12 percent from his odds.”

  The tactics officer nodded. “I could go along with that.”

  “How about the odds of at least one ship within a million klicks of target?” Spencer asked.

  “Bet the farm on it, Sir. I’d estimate 90-plus probability that you get two ships inside a million.”

  “At least that high,” Dostchem agreed. “Assuming all ships survive the jump, of course. And you have nearly three out of four odds on that.”

  “Thank you, Dostchem. In any event, that is the plan. Draw the enemy forces as for off from their base as possible, get them to use up their fuel, get them traveling as fast as possible in the wrong direction—and then get behind them. With its mobile forces out of the way, we should have a fighting chance to hit the command asteroid. If we can get in there, and destroy the helmet-creature, then we’ve effectively lobotomized the parasites that are controlling the freighters. It’s a crazy enough risk
that I don’t think our mechanical friend would even think of it.”

  “And if we fail, then the hornets will all come home to their hive,” Suss said quietly. “Still, if they do, we’re no worse off than before. After all, they can only kill us once.”

  “Any further discussion?” Spencer asked. Again, there was silence, but at least this time the quiet seemed calmer. It must be at least slightly reassuring to know your captain wasn’t completely off his rocker, Spencer thought. “You have your orders,” Spencer said. “Let’s get it underway.”

  ###

  Banquo and her sister ships were flying in freefall at the horrific velocity of over 250,000 kilometers an hour. It took six Gs for twenty minutes to achieve that incredible speed, and it would take just as much power for just as long to slow the destroyers down again.

  Riding the engines was going to be just as punishing the second time, but at least this time they were not in immediate danger of attack by the enemy—both freighter fleets were still far away.

  The ships came about to direct their sterns forward, the massive engines surged smoothly to life, and once again everything aboard the Banquo was flattened under six times its normal weight. If anything, the maneuver seemed to take even longer this time, but the bridge chronometer would only admit to a twenty-minute duration.

  At last, the little fleet lay dead in space relative to its goal. After a horrendous expenditure of fuel, and tremendous stress on the crew, they were still millions of kilometers away from the command asteroid.

  Spencer thought about the fuel cost as he watched for the enemy’s reaction. He knew he might regret the profligate use of his hydrogen fuel later, but for now he felt it had been well spent. Perhaps he had not traveled far using it, but it had bought him other things beside movement. He had bought useful intelligence with it, caused the enemy to reveal something like its true numbers. And he had stampeded the enemy into leaving its home base at least partly defenseless.

  Spencer ordered the destroyers into a “hedgehog” formation, wherein each ship could provide covering fire for the others, effectively putting the entire sky in the field of fire. If he had meant to actually use the formation in a fight, he would have deployed the auxiliary vehicles as well, so their fighting power could be brought to bear. But he ordered the formation only for the benefit of the enemy’s detectors, and it was highly doubtful their gear was good enough to spot the auxiliaries at these sorts of ranges.

  He watched the screens eagerly now, struggling to divine how the helmet-creature was reacting. Was it buying his display of a defensive formation? Would it even recognize it as such? Would it think, as it was meant to, that Spencer had decided to make his stand here, force the enemy to come to him?

  Time passed, seeming to slow and expand as it often did in combat. Minutes, then tens of minutes, then half-hours and full hours—and the enemy freighters kept coming, kept boosting toward the Pact ships.

  Spencer rejoiced silently. Every second the ships of the large freighter fleet kept those engines on was a victory for Spencer. It meant they were traveling another few meters per second faster away from the command asteroid. It was another little bit of velocity they would have to shed before they could reverse course and chase the Pact ships.

  Tallen Deyi joined him, watched the tactical display with him. “They’re still coming,” he said in wonder. “When they fall for a stunt, they fall for it. Keep on, my boys,” he said to the tactical display. “Keep on and pay for it all four to one,”

  “Four to one?” Spencer asked.

  Tallen looked puzzled, and then his face cleared. “You’re so good at this, I keep forgetting you never went to a naval officer’s training academy. That’s one thing they pounded into our heads over and over again. Any false move in powered flight costs you four times as much fuel as the original burn. You spend the original burn, then a burn to brake your speed, then a burn to get you moving back toward where you started out, and then a fourth burn to brake your speed after the return burn. You end up where you started, moving at zero speed, after four power burns. That’s exactly what the freighters will have to do if they want to chase us back to their base after we make our jump.”

  “Might I add another point to consider?” Dostchem asked as she made her way across the bridge. “These are freighters, which normally boost at only very low acceleration, perhaps a tenth of G, or a half-G in extreme cases. These craft are accelerating at just about one full G, and keeping it up for a very long time, presumably with holds full of armament and strap-on fuel tanks, all adding mass, requiring the engines to burn hotter to achieve such a high boost. There is no doubt a lot of stress on their equipment.”

  “Yes, we’ve spotted two or three craft dropping out of formation already,” Spencer agreed.

  “Engine lights going out in the larger fleet!” the tactics officer called. “They have completed their burn and are shutting down. Smaller fleet still coming up behind us, boosting for us, current velocity relative to us over 100,000 kilometers per hour.”

  “Take a look at their current disposition,” Spencer ordered. “Give me a tactical projection for the enemy fleet.”

  “Hammer and anvil,” the tactics officer replied instantly. “They want to catch us between a small, fast, fleet and a larger, slower-moving fleet. The idea is that any countertactics that might be effective against one force will leave us exposed to the other. If we boost and run from the smaller fleet, we run right into the big guys. If we hunker down and make a stationary defense, then we have to defend simultaneous threats from both sides. If we run from the slower fleet, we’re headed away from our objective and run into the smaller fleet. If we—”

  “Thank you, I get the idea,” Spencer said.

  “Sir, the thing I don’t understand is that they don’t seem to be making any sort of disposition in case we do make an intrasystem jump. It’s a rare move, but not unknown.”

  “First, remember their ships don’t have jump gear,” Spencer said. “That might keep them from concentrating on it. And you might try thinking like a robot, Lieutenant,” Spencer said. “The jump is unpredictable. It will put us in a more or less random location, and is somewhat dangerous. Robots don’t approve of random events, or of endangering themselves.”

  Now, Spencer thought. Now was the moment, when the enemy had committed itself as far as it was going to. Spencer leaned forward eagerly, and felt the blood racing in his veins.

  Doing the unexpected, the unthinkable was what made the risks worthwhile. “All hands, all ships to jump stations,” Spencer ordered.

  Klaxons hooted. Throughout the fleet, monitor cameras caught crew members rushing to their stations. The fusion generators were powered up, their energy rerouted from the main engines to the power-draining jump generators. The navigation crews took a last scan of the mass distributions of their ships, and of the space surrounding them.

  Their target point was still twenty million miles away, making it flatly impossible to do even the crudest mass survey there. It barely mattered. If the local mass survey missed anything larger than a fist-sized sky rock within five thousand kilometers of the fleet, that would be enough to throw them ten thousand klicks off-target at the other end. And with all the small, random clumps of mass to be found in an asteroid belt, the odds were they were missing plenty of fist-sized rocks. It wasn’t likely they’d get anywhere near the target.

  Banquo, Macduff and Lennox reported themselves ready for jump. Spencer felt something cold in his gut. There was no more dodging battle, no more room for clever maneuver. Now they had to go straight to the enemy, and fight it out until one side or the other died. If they got that far, if the jump gear didn’t deposit them a million light years away, or with a boulder trying to occupy the same space as the bridge.

  “Synchronize jump gear and engage,” he said quietly.

  The lights dimmed on the bridge as the jump system drew power. “Five seconds,” the navigation officer said. “Four, three, two, one, zero—
”

  The universe disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Shields

  As abruptly as the old sky had vanished, a new one snapped into existence. For a brief, terrible moment, Spencer thought the jump had indeed vaulted the Banquo into uncharted space. But no, these were the stars as seen from Daltgeld’s sky. It was just that the jump had rotated the ship a bit relative to the stars, and a different piece of the sky was visible.

  All right, they were still in the right star system. But where in it? Which way to the target, and how far? And where were Lennox and Macduff?

  The bridge crew seemed to share none of his disorientation or anxiety, but instantly went about the task of establishing the ship’s current position. Spencer’s eye turned toward the tactical display, still hopelessly scrambled by the jump, showing conflicted data and low-probability projections that were the best it could do with no information. The display was even showing three different Banquos.

  Finally, the screen began to tidy itself a bit, eliminating the bad data. Banquo’s ghosts vanished, leaving only the real ship represented on the screen. The astrogation gear spotted the local sun, various beacon signals and the brighter stars.

  The tactical display presented a rough fix that showed them very close to their target point: 100,000 kilometers from the command asteroid. The display continued to refine itself, making minor adjustments as better data came. Finally, at long last, it drew in an image of the command asteroid itself, based not on rough coordinates, but on a direct visual fix.

  The image of the asteroid appeared on an external camera, with a line of figures below displaying the range.

  Spencer stared at the screen in horror, his heart suddenly pounding. They had managed to arrive near the target point all right—too damn near! They were only 95,000 klicks from the target, and a mere five thousand from the command asteroid! And moving toward it at three kilometers a minute!