Haraken (The Silver Ships Book 4)
Page 22
Z sent.
Z’s response threw Sheila off her step. How or why a SADE should have her in his thoughts was a little disconcerting.
Word circulated among the crew that the SADEs were entirely absorbed. Both were seen sitting and staring off into bulkheads. Few considered it a good sign that two SADEs were required to tackle an issue to the degree that both of them were ignoring their human behavior programs. Fortunately, Sheila communicated her dilemma to Alex and Tatia and that she requested the SADEs’ help.
Alex was tempted to tell her that she was probably in Z’s dreams, but he knew Sheila and other New Terrans were struggling with the concept of SADEs mixing with them. Alex finally replied.
* * *
The Last Stand’s controller received a comm, and because the sender was identified as a priority contact for the wing commander, it was transferred immediately to her even as she reviewed her craft’s flight preparations.
Ellie’s heart lurched. She was guilty as charged, and she knew it.
The silence on the comm told Étienne volumes, and he decided not to add to the pressure Ellie was under.
Ellie had expected anger and recrimination from her partner, which she believed she deserved, but Étienne was as always the man she had come to depend on. He was her rock. Ellie’s world was turned upside down when she was accused of fostering unsafe competition and exiled to Libre. Her years as an Independent passed by in a dream state with little recognition of time until the admiral arrived.
Joining House Alexander was an easy choice for Ellie. She yearned to sit in a cockpit again and fly, and, if truth be told, she wanted an opportunity to be rid of the anger that simmered inside her for years. The giant Nua’ll sphere and the silver ships were the perfect outlet for her anger. But with time, her anger faded, replaced by duty, and joy returned to her life when she met the quiet-spoken Étienne.
On one occasion, Ellie mentioned to Étienne that she was untrained in hand-to-hand defense techniques, and he volunteered to train her. As she moved up the ranks of Haraken’s naval forces, the training served her well. Her techniques outclassed her compatriots, and her confidence rose.
“Lead with strength” was a phrase Étienne used during training. It meant she should attack first, immobilizing the opponents before they could strike. Lead with strength, Ellie thought. Étienne’s words fueled her confidence and powered her steps as she crossed the bay to meet her flight chief.
* * *
Despite the early morning hours, Z alerted Alex, who requested Tatia, Julien, and Z gather in Alex’s cabin. Renée made thé for the humans, who were called from their beds, disheveled and valiantly trying to clear their minds, while the SADEs appeared as presentable as ever.
Tatia groused to Julien and Z, who arrived before her, “The least you two could do is have an early morning persona so you would look like the rest of us.” At which point, Julien walked into Alex’s sleeping quarters and stripped off his Haraken attire. He searched for the appropriate image and settled on that of an elderly, penniless miser in late-evening attire — scruffy slippers and threadbare robe and pajamas. He projected the clothes over his body and returned to the salon.
Julien’s presentation produced the desired result. The humans burst into laughter and applauded his new attire. His gambit worked to clear and sharpen minds as the thé never could. His friends would need their wits; the news required their complete focus.
“An anomaly has been detected, Ser President,” Z said.
“Explain, Z,” Alex ordered, sipping on his cup of thé, his mind flashing back to the sound of Tara’s artificial voice onboard the Outward Bound, saying the same thing eleven years ago.
“We have remained behind the Earther ships as you instructed Captain Cordova, Ser President,” Z said. “The two ships made for a rendezvous point on the inward side of Delacroix, and the Reunion took a position off the far bow quarter of the Hand of Justice just as they disappeared behind the planet. When the ships emerged into our view on the far side of Delacroix, that’s when I noticed the anomaly.”
“That’s it?” said Tatia, a little irked at being woken from a sound sleep for such a nebulous announcement.
“Admiral, be patient,” Alex directed. “What else, Z?”
“The Reunion’s telemetry has altered, and that has given us reason for concern, Sers” replied Z, and Alex smiled into his cup. Mathematics was Z’s language, and it was a pure language. Anomalies were unacceptable and were to be questioned, and then followed to the aberration’s source. “I analyzed the path of the two Earther ships before and after they passed Delacroix. There are the expected subtle deviations and corrections of flight paths of each ship before Delacroix, but none afterward.”
When the three humans stared at Z, waiting for more details, Julien added, “There has been absolutely no variance in distance between the Earther ships as they have navigated from Delacroix toward their final position inward of Bevroren.”
“None? You mean minor?” Tatia said.
“None, Admiral,” Z repeated.
“That’s impossible, isn’t it?” Tatia asked the SADEs.
“We believe so, Admiral,” Julien answered.
“So why would the telemetry on these ships indicate they were navigating in absolute lockstep?” Alex mused.
Z turned to regard Julien. It was an indication of one SADE deferring to another who possessed subtler reasoning algorithms enabling “operation outside accepted parameters” as Z would say.
“Ancient Terran war tactics, provided by the colonists’ records, indicate that it was a favored technique of fleet commanders to spoof the number of their warships,” Julien said. “They did so by many ingenious innovations, one of which was projection … what we might think of as a holo-vid display that fooled the enemy into thinking there were more ships in the fleet than in reality. I would surmise we are looking at a device tethered
to the Hand of Justice that contains a laser, and the battleship is firing a second laser at the tethered device. The interference of the two lasers would create a coherent perfect absorber, or anti-laser, which would absorb the coherent light and convert it into a signature that would imitate the telemetric signature of the Reunion.”
The humans stared at Julien and Z so long that Z felt compelled to add, “It’s a perfectly reasonable deduction, Sers.”
“So your concern is that the too-perfect telemetry indicates the Reunion is a ghost ship, and the real ship has been left at our rear in the moons of Delacroix,” Alex surmised.
“According to my calculations, Ser President,” Z said, “I have an 87.4 percent certainty that this is so.”
“Couldn’t we confirm this suspicion by checking telemetry from ships or stations that might have a view of the far moons of Delacroix?” Renée asked.
“No need,” Alex replied. “Z’s level of certainty is proof enough. Julien, get a message to Captain Manet and Commodore Reynard of your suspicions.”
“Well, we expected treachery,” Tatia said, and then added under her breadth, “And I thought I could be devious.”
“Makes one wonder what other tricks the Earthers possess,” added Renée.
“UE has developed their war craft over centuries, and this concerns me,” Julien said. That a SADE uttered these words was chilling, but that it came from one appearing as an elderly miser made it seem comical.
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“Are you ready, Admiral?” Bunaldi asked Theostin as they monitored the Rêveur’s approach to within 150K kilometers of their position.
“Ready to launch, Judge,” Theostin replied. “After our three pilots reach an engagement window with the Méridiens, a wave of twenty-four more fighters will launch. Even if we lose our first three fighters, the Méridiens shouldn’t have time to escape before we swamp their craft and capture the Rêveur.”
“Excellent, Admiral. An example must be made.”
“Some things still mystify me,” Theostin said. “The Rêveur appears to be a passenger ship. Why would a passenger ship carry fighters? If it did, it couldn’t carry more than three or four fighters with its two small bay doors.”
Bunaldi stared at the bridge officers and their stations without seeing them. The questions also occurred to him, and the answers weren’t forthcoming. It can’t be this easy, Bunaldi thought. The Méridiens can’t be this poorly schooled in the defense of their Confederation.
* * *
The Last Stand sailed in from the deep dark toward Bevroren. All pilots in the first sub-wing were ready to launch.
The SADEs came through with an answer for Sheila’s and Ellie’s dilemma, sending a set of engine maneuvers for the carrier’s controller to execute. The launch of the contestants and the trailing sub-wing would take place as one, from a single side of the carrier. On the commodore’s command, the controller would swing the carrier’s bow severely to starboard while releasing the beams anchoring the port travelers. It would allow the carrier’s bow to clear the path of the fighters. After correcting the ship’s vector, the next sub-wing would be positioned outside their bays, and the controller would reverse the procedure. The timing of each maneuver was critical, but it was nothing a SADE-built controller couldn’t execute with ease.
Ellie sat quietly at the controls of her traveler, which was tethered outboard on the bay’s beams. She was replaying images of Étienne’s training sessions to focus her mind on what was to come, but, in the end, she froze one of the sessions on an image of Étienne and was dwelling on every minute detail of her beloved.
Her traveler’s controller issued a brief warning and, with a relatively quick movement, Ellie felt the slightest change in inertia as the carrier’s maneuver propelled her craft forward.
Despite the entire sub-wing to keep her company, Ellie sat quietly in her pilot’s chair, waiting for the arrival of Bevroren’s gravity waves to power their fighters. Time slowly ticked past, and Ellie found herself lulled to sleep, suspecting other pilots were doing the same. Two hours later, a signal from her controller brought Ellie fully alert. Her traveler’s crystal energy banks were powering up.
Flight One’s controllers were updated with the final positions of the Hand of Justice, the Rêveur, and the three UE fighters that were just exiting the battleship. The Haraken pilots were warned of the strong possibility that the Reunion was a ghost image. The thought that the explorer ship was attempting to trap the Rêveur with the president and admiral aboard did much to harden Ellie’s heart toward the Earthers.
Ellie and her wings swung out of Bevroren’s orbit at max velocity making a straight line for the UE fighters, who were accelerating toward the Rêveur. The UE fighters had only covered a third of the distance toward their goal when Ellie’s flight shot past the battleship, chasing them. Soon, her flight controller signaled the enemy’s reversal of vector. The UE fighters were now accelerating toward her.
Before Ellie’s flight could enter the traveler’s beam engagement window, her controller signaled the launch of multiple missile flights.
The first wave of missiles took the Harakens by surprise. The pilots expected contact missiles, and their travelers twisted and spun to evade the first wave. But the enemy armed their missiles with proximity devices, detonating the missiles in front of the oncoming travelers. Hundreds of pieces of shrapnel glanced off their Swei Swee shells.
For subsequent waves, the pilots quickly reset their controllers to evade the missiles at greater distances, but there was a price to pay for those commands. To execute the new input, the controllers pushed the envelope of the travelers’ inertia systems, and the pilots were shaken, suffering momentary blackouts.
During the second missile wave, Sean McCrery’s shell suffered multiple hits, which compounded the previous damage to his hull. Multiple cracks destroyed the shell’s charging integrity, and Sean watched his power crystals slowly drain into his drive and operating systems. The thought struck him that even if his beam fired, it wouldn’t be at full strength.
Sean’s traveler, unable to maneuver at full power, succumbed to two near misses from the third wave of missiles, and pieces of shrapnel pierced the shell’s bow and Sean. The nanites in the captain’s environment suit and his blood dutifully attempted to patch both the suit and his body.
Ellie’s flight just evaded the final barrage of missiles when her helmet registered the adversary’s vector changes as the UE pilots spread out. Ellie assigned targets to her flight via the controllers. Moments later, the Harakens entered a perfect engagement window, and Ellie concentrated on her own target. Lead with strength echoed over and over in Ellie’s mind. The lead fighter, her adversa
ry, was continuing straight at her without any further launches. Did you run out of missiles? Ellie thought. It was all the time there was to wonder before her controller fired the fighter’s beam.
Sean felt a blackness begin to muddy his thoughts. The shrapnel damage to his body was too great to repair, and a strange mixture of sadness and anger crept over him. He was sad for the wife and child he would leave behind and angry at the Earthers who invaded his world. Sean signaled his controller, overriding the safety protocols, and directed his traveler at the enemy fighter. With his last thought, Sean sent a message to his commander, but in the fading darkness of his mind his thought was relayed in the open.
Sean’s last thought would eventually be relayed around the Confederation, to Haraken, and to New Terra, along with the vids of the events. Once again, people were dying in defense of the Confederation. However, this time, those on Méridien were adopting a completely different attitude toward the invaders.
Ellie swept past her UE fighter and switched to the traveler’s aft view in time to catch the expanding ball of gas and debris that was her target. That’s when she received Sean’s message and frantically adjusted her telemetry for a wider view. Three enemy craft were destroyed, and only Darius was still with her. She fought the sadness that threatened to overwhelm her and focused on the next stage.