The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  “Spies!” the forger was yelling. “Disguised enemies! Alarm! Alarm!”

  “I should have blown them to atoms and claimed insulted honor,” muttered Minerva. “But it’s too late now to be of use.”

  It was; the reply from the home world’s surface was crackling out even as she spoke, in a choral chant of many voices from whatever group ran traffic control down there. “Kill the spies! Kill the spies! None must escape! Glory to their slayers! Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  A single stern-tube torp spat from the XR-14376, and the still-squawking forger erupted in an incandescing flare of slag and splinters. Roj drummed his fingers near the activated weapons-system master board and smiled ever so slightly at nothing in particular. “Never mind use, or even honor; general principles is a good enough reason for me. And I don’t think they mentioned what ship we actually were, did they?” He looked at the tactical screens, each of them going berserk with readouts and schematics. “What sort of chance do we have ... ?”

  “Not much. I still don’t know if the pulse-transceiver is going to work or not.”

  “Then we’d better try it. Where to, ma’am?”

  “Toward the planet. Let’s see which of us the orbital platforms like best, shall we?”

  “Sure. But first rig for an all-tubes salvo and ... and launch the message torps along with it. Just in case.”

  “Just in case. Yes. Torpedoes away.” The deck jolted at the soles of his boots again, once, twice, three times ... and then kicked hard enough to knock him off his feet.

  “That wasn’t a standard volley, was it?”

  “No, that was our old friend the destroyer. And he wasn’t firing on us, not directly ...”

  “So then what ...?” Roj pushed himself upright, flopped into his chair and secured the harness tight, wondering at the amusement in Minerva’s voice.

  “This.” The big main screen lit up, and despite their hazardous position Roj began to laugh, grimly, but with real humor for all that. Space around the home world had gone mad in the few seconds since he had taken out the Forger, and all the ships that had been queued up for entry to parking orbits or to the landing fields had broken out of their never-very-orderly line and were all over the sky. Even as he watched, the biggest ship in sight—their “old friend,” in very truth—raked a delta-class corvette with cannon fire and then trisected it with a pair of torpedoes.

  “They’re looking for us, Roj. They’re trying to find us, and they don’t know what to look for! The frigate’s crew must have been so excited about finding us that they forgot to get off an ID fix before you—Oh, well done! Our chances have just more than doubled!”

  “Minerva, twice not much is still very small indeed.”

  “It’s going to get better. Don’t forget the ships planet side. They’ll want some glory, too, if there’s any to be had right on their own doorstep, so it’s going to get crowded up here.”

  “And if we—you—can reprogram the defense satellites ...”

  “We, Roj, we. Both of us together. The way we started or not at all. Let’s try, uh, this ...”

  Minerva ran a jinking gauntlet course through the swirl of Khalians, screaming insults at all, launching an occasional torpedo from her recharged tubes, and generally behaving like every other ship in local space just then. Even when she wasn’t being shot at, there was so much wild energy sleeting against her shields that keeping the viewscreens functional was sometimes as much as Roj could do from one minute to the next. The flight-deck gravity grids had shut down prior to combat maneuvers, and dull red emergency lighting was the sole illumination other than the coruscation of color glowing from the repeater screens.

  “We’ve been spotted!” he yelled above the racket of engines and torp-tubes and cannon and Khalian squalling. “Zero niner seven, two delta-class cor— Wowee!! They just ran into each other! Will you look at that!”

  The pair of corvettes, which might at a less frantic time have tried working in concert, had spotted the one vessel of all the milling throng that was trying to get closer to home world rather than farther away from it, and their captains had jumped to the same conclusion. Unfortunately for them, the scramble for a good attack position took both ships at high-g acceleration into a space that was really only big enough for one ...

  “We’re in trouble, Roj. This piece of lab-tested junk refuses to cooperate. I think that last jolt did it no good at all.” Minerva managed somehow to sound no more than irritated, an unlikely and restrained attitude under the circumstances.

  “Keep working on it.” As they slithered sideways, impossibly eel-like for a rigid cylindrical ship, Roj sent a spread of torpedoes into the thick of the swirling Khalian ships. Two flared with the brilliance of direct hits, and the rest scattered wildly, which was not a good move at all. “Ouch! Five-ship collision at two-one-seven, three totalled and two drifting. Are you close enough to the platforms yet?”

  “Too close, if this IFF/ID crashes. And it’s getting busy in the atmosphere; the ships that were scrambled are on their way up. Any who get there. Where did they learn to mistreat ships like that?”

  “’Never mind that. More trouble. Big trouble. That destroyer’s taking too much of an interest!”

  “Weapons onto full manual ... You deal with it. I can’t take time away from this blasted transceiver to do anything myself.”

  “No! Firing would only confirm—”

  “And just what have we—and everyone else up here—been doing to each other these past few minutes, that destroyer included? Behave like a Khalian, man: shoot at it. But leave me in peace right now!”

  As Roj watched on the rearward screen, the destroyer blasted two more of its erstwhile companions into drifting junk, then turned with unpleasant slow deliberation toward Minerva. Probably its captain was still no more than mildly suspicious, but that hadn’t helped the Khalian ships whose remains were now searing across the outer edge of their home world’s atmosphere.

  “Minerva—here it comes ... !” Silence. His fingers tightened on the fire selector, and a targeting display glowed into life over the image of the destroyer. “Range thirty-two hundred. Thirty-one hundred. Range three thousand miles, closing. Target-acquisition engaged, locked and standing by.”

  “Going to full evasive,” she snapped, impatient with the recital of what her tactical systems knew already. “Heading for a close pass of the nearest defense platform now.” The destroyer slid sideways off the screen as she accelerated down and away from it, then drifted back as Roj corrected.

  Minerva said something in perfect quad stereo that she must have learned from her roughest brawn. “Give them some cannon fire,” she snapped, “and keep them off my back!”

  Roj let go with the turrets that he could bring to bear, two of them, and saw energy splash uselessly against the destroyer’s shields. It was, as he had guessed it would be, no more than a gnat stinging a crocodile, and the crocodile had had enough. The big ship was surging after them, and the readout along one side of his screen was warning that the destroyer’s target lock was actively hunting them, defeated so far only by Minerva’s scanner suppression and the ECM jammers. But it would be only a matter of time before it came close enough for blind firing or visually backed approximation to be worthwhile, and then ...

  Then Minerva said, “’It works,” like someone passing a death sentence, and the destroyer blew up in a pure white pyrophoric flash that dimmed all the screens to black.

  The background keening of her main drive slid up the scale to a banshee howl as it began the long, hard push to take them clear of the Khalians and their base and this entire blasted sector of space. Blasted was close to the truth; when the viewscreens’ phototropic shielding ran back down to normal, they revealed a scene of devastation that shocked even Roj, who had seen the aftermath of Stone’s miscalculation at Freeborn. Not merely the orbital platforms but both inner and outer per
imeters had taken Minerva’s reprogramming squirt without so much as a hiccup, and they had done what their designers had intended them to do. Except that they had done it according to the wishes of the Fleet. Fifty percent of the Khalian vessels in flight when their defensive net went rogue now tumbled or flared or hung most dreadfully dark and silent, while those who remained fled to the empty places within the orbits of the world’s moons, until someone far wiser than they could make the deadly platforms safe again.

  * * *

  “... paid, and laid, and then get drunk. Roj Malin, I’d have expected higher ambitions from a man like you!”

  “Give me time to think of them, will you! I’ve lived through something I wouldn’t have given a snowball’s chance in hell, so at least give me peace to celebrate survival in my own way.” He sniggered, the last trace of what might have been a sort of mild hysteria. “What about you? What do brain ships do when they survive the impossible?”

  “Sometimes they sing,” said Minerva, very softly. “We can, if we want to. Any voice you please. And sometimes they just smile, down in here where nobody can see.”

  “I can see.”

  “Where nobody can see, except very special people.”

  Roj sat quiet for a few seconds, looking beyond the casing of proof armor. Looking at her. “They confirm that last IFF/ID squirt. The escort’s on its way. ETA less than five minutes.” More quiet, for a second or two, and another hard look. “When we get back to Port and debrief, what’ll you do first? Rest? Relax?”

  “Undress. I want this stuff outside me off in jig time. I want to be me again, not whatever fake the Fleet thinks I have to be.”

  “And afterward?”

  “I want a brawn of my own. Someone I can work with and rely on. Someone I can trust.” Silence. “Someone like you.”

  “Me? After everything that happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’d never allow it.”

  “Do you want to?”

  Roj stared at the viewscreen, and at the eerily ponderous grace of the four-dreadnought escort that was closing in to take them safely home. “They’ll never allow it,” he said again.

  “Listen to him.” The smile in Minerva’s voice was stretching into a grin. He glanced at her, smiled in his turn, and then began to laugh at what he knew was coming, at the one statement that he would never question or deny. There were those who later claimed that both ship and crewman laughed all the way back to Port.

  “Roj—try it again. Trust me.”

  A CIRCUIT TRACER from Toledo was just about to spin the Nebula wheel to determine her prize for successfully naming Tau Ceti as the location of Port when Galaxy Guess was interrupted for a special announcement.

  As the Fleet eagle began to fill the screen, millions of viewers, recalling their last announcement three months earlier, braced themselves. Most relaxed when the now-smiling face of Admiral of the Blue, Tor Doherty appeared. The Fleet brass only ’casted in person when there was good news.

  “I am happy to announce,” the big officer began, “a smashing Fleet victory over superior Khalian forces.” The former star slugball player paused as if awaiting applause.

  “Alerted by settlers, the Fleet was able to act decisively to crush this latest Khalian incursion before it could strike a single planet. Facing enemy ships of unprecedented size, we have won a complete victory. Experts view this as a true turning point . . . ”

  ... PROLOGUE ...

  “ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS ... ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS.”

  The voice was loud but as emotionless as the insistent pe-beep, pe-beep, pe-beep coming from the computer system of the big ship. For all I knew it, might have been the computer ordering all hands. It really didn’t make any difference one way or the other.

  “General?” It was Major Brady sounding uncertain.

  “Just like the drills, Doug,” I said with a little smile to bolster him a bit. “Get your crews into the hangar lock and stand by. You’ll probably have to wait, but hurry up now!”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “And, Major, I wish I were going out with you. Good luck!”

  Brady grinned at me then. “Me too, sir. I’ll nail a Weasel for you.” He snapped a salute and left.

  The silly bastard meant it. I guess I did too. He and his men were going to be putting their lives on the line in minutes. Most of them wouldn’t return. Yet he was proud and happy to do it, and I wished I could too. Anything was better than sitting helplessly inside this lumbering tub ... Anything? No, not considering the last few months ...

  * * *

  “The latest intelligence from Verge, sir.”

  I looked up from the hooded omni on my desk, with a scowl.

  The new lieutenant took that to mean I was angry at his interruption. “The orders were to bring them to the general—”

  I didn’t let him get any further. “Thank you, Lieutenant Haake. That will be all.” He came to attention with a snap, uncertain, for my face was a mask. It wouldn’t do to have everyone know what was really troubling me, even at the expense of causing personal unnecessary anxiety in a fine young officer. Haake turned smartly and left. Soon the outer offices would be buzzing with the latest word. Stay away from the Old Man; he’s as irritable as a rogue griscat today. Well, let them all think that. I’d have to let them in on what was happening soon enough. Until it was absolutely necessary, though, their attributing things to my well-known irritability and bad temper was fine.

  In truth, I was irritable and bad tempered. Who wouldn’t be, planted behind a desk as I was. That came from being General instead of Lieutenant Hohenstein. I didn’t want to be commander of the Freeborn Marine Division, but after twenty years of service, the commandant, and the navy too for that matter, thought otherwise. I became General Franz Hohenstein, and that was that. No sympathy from Downing either. Colonel General Downing had been a field officer, too, my immediate superior in many an action against the Khalia, before being kicked upstairs himself. He probably wanted to be back aboard a ship as badly as I. Feeling small satisfaction at that thought, I gritted my teeth and went back to work. The Independent Confederation of Planets had been formed only fourteen years back. That was seven years after Freeborn had withdrawn from the Alliance. Despite that, and its attendant hardships, we had more than managed. Besides Freeborn and the Brigit system with its various colonies of miners on the outer moons, there was Liberated, six light-years distant in the Teelmon system, and Verge, nine light-years off in the direction of deep space, where our little arm of the Milky Way petered out toward the intergalactic reaches.

  You probably don’t know much about us. Alliance history barely mentions Freeborn, and so far ignores the Confederation entirely. Possibly it’s due to the bureaucracy. No matter. Freeborn withdrew because we believe in the right to do as we choose. That includes building and maintaining our own spacecraft and warcraft to ensure our safety against pirates and raiders. Those are mainly Khalian vessels, but sometimes there are non-Weasel enemies out there too. Liberated is a newly settled planet with a thriving population of some five million already. Quite a few of them come from Freeborn, in fact, because it’s getting pretty crowded here. With just over one hundred million square kilometers of habitable land and nearly forty million people, quite a few folks felt it was time to move to a less congested planet. The same is true of Verge. The Freeborn frontiersmen simply don’t like having neighbors too near, so when things opened up on Ito IV, they moved in and renamed it Verge. They have about three million rugged individualists roaming around on three hundred million square kilometers of virgin land, and they think that’s just about enough breathing space.

  The Khalia and the Fleet’s demands for punishment—because Freeborn dared to build its own warship—were the real causes of our secession from the Alliance. We blasted and took a Weasel raider-class vessel by boarding. That was
considered contravention of law by the star admirals. So we declared our independence and they were too busy to care. Ever since, we’ve been careful to avoid confrontation with Fleet squadrons even as we cruise the spacelanes to keep off Khalia pirates and other hostile vessels.

  The Confederation now boasts a fair little navy. The single liner is somewhere between a Fleet battleship and a Khalian armored cruiser. The six big frigates which are the real heart of our navy stack up about on a par with the cruisers of the Fleet and are better than the Weasel’s raider-class ships by far, just as our corvettes aren’t as big as Fleet destroyers but more than a match for Khalian probes or Fleet scouts. For patrol we use cutter-class vessels. They’re tough and fast. Good enough to take an armed merchant pirate, but probably in trouble in a duel with even the smallest frigates sent out by the Khalia. The liner Retaliation stays in Freeborn’s space, but the rest of our navy is spread about evenly among the confederacy. That’s because the Weasels don’t discriminate when they decide to raid. Even the presence of Retaliation, in Brigit’s system, isn’t due to selfishness on Freeborn’s part. It guards the spaceyard on Oghma, the fifth planet out. There’s a very special new spaceship being built there.

  Under the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising that the Confederation was liberal in its issuance of Letters of Marque. Privateers commissioned to attack the attackers, as it were. Thus, the unofficial navy amounted to another twenty vessels of all sorts, from fast little yachts to corroded old freighters, buckets once used to haul ore. Such ships, along with the merchant craft which plied the routes to a score of neighboring systems and beyond, provided us with a good intelligence gathering network. Information, computers, and native intelligence put the Confederation in a very good position vis-à-vis the Khalia, Fleet maneuvers, and just about everything else happening within fifty or so light-years of Brigit. You see, the only way to get data from one place to another is by courier vessel using FTL drive. Our navy could manage speeds in FTL at least as fast as the Weasels could; we stole the technology from them. Fleet scientists had the same information, but there were too many departments to clear things through, too many committees, and too much cost. I’d heard that the new hulls laid down were now sporting ungraded engines, but the Fleet was still slow. We had the designs weeks before they did. We acted on it months sooner.