by Ian Douglas
Bev was right. In ship-to-ship combat there were basically two alternatives: sweep past the enemy at high speed, doing as much damage to him on the way as possible; or match course and speed with him, in effect moving in close and coming to a relative halt, pounding away with beam weapons, plasma guns, and missiles until he was dead or surrendered. The Imperial squadron commander had evidently chosen the latter.
According to Tokitukaze's warbook, a Kumano-class frigate had a crew of 130, plus twenty marines. Those marines were intended as armed shore parties and for shipboard security rather than for ship-to-ship boarding actions, but the rebels' unconventional capture of the Tokitukaze would have alerted them to other possibilities, like crippling the captured destroyer and retaking her hand-to-hand. They'd probably been in touch with HEMILCOM and would know by now that there weren't many rebels manning her. They might even have guessed that some of their compatriots were still aboard.
In any case, it would make a hell of a lot more sense from the Imperial point of view to try to recapture the destroyer than to transform her into radioactive gas. Dead, Dev and the others would be rebel martyrs; alive, they would be rebel prisoners . . . and their mission a clear failure.
Even more than that, perhaps, was the question of kao, of face. The Imperial Navy had lost face when the Tokitukaze had been captured so easily. Some of that face would be restored if she were destroyed; far more would be won if she were recaptured.
That, at least, appeared to be the frigates' goal as they backed down at three Gs on columns of starcore-hot plasma. With the damage she had already suffered, and with only four men jacking her thrusters, the Tokitukaze was simply not a maneuverable vessel at the moment. A toe-to-toe slugging match was the best tactical approach Dev could hope for . . . and pray they weren't using nukes and pray the destroyer could stand up to a hell of a pounding, because otherwise those frigates were going to get off without a scratch.
Dev ordered the Tokitukaze spun end-for-end, and, after warning those of his people not jacked in, he engaged the ship's main thrusters. For long minutes, they decelerated at three Gs, slowing . . . slowing . . . and finally Tokitukaze began to accelerate again, heading back toward Eridu. He'd just made it a lot easier for them to match course and speed, an invitation saying "Come and get us."
Which was exactly what they were doing. They still had far more speed than the destroyer and were closing rapidly.
"Orders, Captain?" Torolf sounded nervous.
"Let 'em come. We're not going to outmaneuver them, that's certain."
"I've got an IFF decryption on them now, Captain," Simone said. "Definitely Kumano-class frigates, the Shusui and the Gekko."
"The Sword Stroke and the Moonlight, eh?" Koenig said. "Pretty."
"And dangerous." Dev pointed out. "If they decide to bombard our people from orbit, Sinclair won't have any defense."
Then there was no more time for analysis. The missiles, twenty-seven of them, converged on the Tokitukaze, and Dev ordered the point defense lasers linked over to the ship's AI. The Artificial Intelligence directing the ship's systems could act and react faster than any human, and with far greater precision.
The first phase of the battle was on them and past almost before they realized it. Eight missiles were vaporized as soon as they entered the Tokitukaze's point defense envelope. Eight more were vaporized half a second later . . . and then seven more as one PDL short-circuited and failed.
Four missiles remained, on radar-active homing, closing on the ship too quickly to perceive. Tokitukaze's AI was jamming on all combat frequencies and one missed, but the other three all had locked on to the highly reflective returns of the tangled ruin portside and amidships, where the ascraft was still embedded in the ruin of Tokitukaze's flank.
Three missiles slammed home and detonated, one after the other in the space of two seconds; fragments of hull and ascraft shuttle spun into darkness. Buried in his cocoon, Dev didn't feel the shock, but the cascade of systems failures and alarms flashing in his consciousness told him quickly enough that they'd been hit, and hit hard.
More missiles were coming, but Dev ignored them. It was the frigates he was concentrating on now, for both were reaching gigawatt laser range, but even as they slid inside the destroyer's targeting envelope, a pinpoint of light flashed between Tokitukaze and the frigates, then expanded into a shimmering sphere of reflected light, growing and drifting toward the destroyer at several kilometers per second.
"Main thrusters, full power, now!"
Tokitukaze lurched forward, accelerating slowly. Dev was watching the ever-shifting angles between the three ships and the cloudscreen, using the cloud's own movement to best position the destroyer for a shot. He suspected that the frigates had fired too soon.
They had, and they were lagging too far behind their cover. As Tokitukaze lumbered forward. Dev glimpsed the frigates in the cloud's shadow. Two of the ship's three gigawatt laser turrets could bear.
"Fire!"
There was no beam visible in the vacuum of space, no sound or other indicator of the torrent of energy unleashed across the void, but for a fraction of a second the Shusui shone more brightly than the local sun. "Hit!" DeVreis shouted . . . and then the Gekko was accelerating, pulling out from behind the drifting laser shield and loosing a salvo of laser bolts at the crippled destroyer.
Under the AI's guidance, all of Tokitukaze's turrets that could bear swung and fired at the Gekko, but not before several tons of duralloy armor had boiled away and a cryo-H reaction mass tank had been holed and the destroyer's main thrusters had been cored by a beam that had sliced through the ship's vitals like a sword through a man's belly. For a moment, laser light shone from the Gekko as Tokitukaze's beams raked her, but then the Tokitukaze was tumbling, nose-over-tail, completely out of control as the cryo-H superheated and blew out through the hull like a tremendous blast from a maneuvering thruster.
"Status!" Dev yelled. The stars were wheeling past his head, a complete rotation every few seconds.
"Main thrusters are dead, and I don't think we're gonna get 'em back." Langley reported. "We've got maneuvering still, and enough cryo-H. Gomez and Tewari are working on stopping our spin. They might manage it. We're losing air aft of frame ninety; that won't matter except to our Imperial passengers aft. We still have full power and all the weapons we started with.
"The bad news is we don't have our main thrusters. We can maneuver, but not accelerate with a delta V of more than a few meters per second. We're drifting in the general direction of Eridu. I'm starting a pool, folks. Will we miss the planet, skip off the atmosphere, or dig ourselves a nice hole?"
"What about the bandits?" Dev was searching the sky. They should be somewhere right about . . . there they were.
"I think we got them, Captain." Bev Schneider said. "No sign of life from either one."
"They're not necessarily kills," Nicholson added. "We hit them hard with a lot of juice. Probably vaporized every radio mast and antenna on their hulls, and most of their weapons mounts, too."
"As long as they're off our backs," Dev said, "and unable to help their friends on Eridu. Lara! What can you do about attitude control?"
"I'm slowing the spin gradually, Captain." Anders said. "We've taken a lot of stress amidships, and I don't want to snap her spine."
"Good thinking."
"Congratulations, Captain," Simone said. He could hear her smile over the link. "A successful ship-to-ship action, even if we don't get out of this in one piece!"
"Let's save the party until after we get this spin stopped," Dev said. Already, though, the wheeling of the stars had slowed. Eridu drifted gently across the heavens, then came to an unsteady rest. Indicators on the image confirmed what Langley had said. The Tokitukaze was dropping toward Eridu now in free-fall, though it did appear that they would miss the planet by a good margin.
Except for the maneuvering necessary to make certain they didn't slam into the space elevator, it appeared that the Tokitukaze was now
out of the fight.
On the ground, though, things must be going hot and furious.
Dev wished he could be there with Katya and Hagan and the rest of them, wished at least that they were close enough to take a tactical feed from the ground and find out what was happening. The rebels must be fighting the fight of their lives right about now.
"Hey, listen up, people," he said suddenly. "Engineering! I need some numbers from you!"
"What?" DeVreis said. "You got an idea?"
"Maybe," Dev said. "How does this sound? . . ."
Three times now, the line of Hegemony warstriders had advanced from the woods, walking across the hellfire-blasted slope toward the rebel line. Three times they'd made it halfway up or a little farther before the sheer deadly volume of fire from the crest of the hill, the realization that if they kept pressing forward every one of them would be destroyed, forced them to back down. The slope was littered now with the smoking wreckage of warstriders from both sides. Katya did a quick count: Sinclair's forces numbered twelve warstriders now . . . fifteen if you counted three that couldn't move but still had at least one functional weapon.
Fifty percent casualties. The rebel line had already endured more than most warriors were ever asked to endure, and they'd held. She felt a furious, burning pride in their behavior, in the way they'd stood their ground, a pride that much sharper because she knew that the training she and the Thorhammers had passed on to raw rebel recruits was at least partly responsible for their good showing today.
But she wondered if pride was what she should be feeling, when the likeliest outcome was going to be death or capture for all of them.
What had happened to Dev? Laser fire had not dropped from the sky, scouring the rebels off the hilltop, so perhaps his mission to take the Tokitukaze out of the fight had succeeded. Earlier, there'd been a garbled report from Babel, something about the Tokitukaze leaving Shippurport . . . and something else about incoming Imperial frigates. Then nothing.
It was enough to wait and see what actually hit them without worrying about who-was . . . ghosts about which they could do nothing.
She thought again about the Xenophobes, about what might happen if they surfaced in the middle of a battlefield, then shuddered as she turned her mind away from the thought. Xenophobes, here. . . . No, she didn't want to face that. It was as though those subterranean horrors had replaced her old dread of closed-in spaces. At least they hadn't simply popped up when the battle had begun hours before, which meant that the Self was waiting for some specific and easily recognizable signal.
Would it be disappointed? Did it even understand such a concept?
"Lieutenant!" That was Darcy, off to the right. "I got movement!"
"What do you see?"
"Aircraft, incoming fast! I have five . . . six . . . no, eight aircraft, bearing one-eight-nine, range two-five. . . ."
"On your toes, people!" Sinclair rasped. "They're trying something different for a change!"
Somebody laughed over the circuit, but it sounded brittle, and Katya knew just how close to crumbling the rebel line was. Another good push, another few striders lost . . .
Then the ascraft were banking low overhead, the light of Marduk glinting from their wings. Chung's RLN-90 staggered as a bolt from the sky struck him, knocking his machine to the side.
"Fire!" Sinclair yelled. "Everybody fire!"
But there were too many of them, and too few rebel striders. The Hegemony warstriders were advancing for a fourth time from the woods, charging now with an almost joyful enthusiasm as the reinforcements from the south arrived over the battlefield. Katya could see a half dozen ascraft settling to the ground well out on the right flank, west of the monorail, and the death gleam of jet-black Imperial warstriders dropping from their riderslots and advancing on the rebel flank.
"On the right!" Katya yelled. "Imperial Marine striders on the right!" The trap yawned before her understanding now like an open pit. The rebels were trapped, trapped between Hegemony, marines, the city, and the sea cliffs. Darcy's Fastrider was moving toward the right, blazing away with its laser, and then it was savaged by a pair of plasma bolts from the great, lumbering Katana that was pushing beneath the elevated monorail and advancing toward Katya faster than a man could run. She pivoted her Ghostrider and fired her laser, and that black armor seemed to drink the beam, absorbing it, dissipating it, and still the monster was thundering toward her.
The jaws of the trap were closing.
Chapter 33
In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.
—The Art of War
Sun Tzu
Third century B.C.E.
The Tokitukaze had made several course changes in the past half hour, as Eridu loomed larger and larger in the perceptions of her crew. On their original course, they would have missed the world by nearly fifty thousand kilometers—farther, even, than Babylon was from Towerdown—then looped into a wide, extended orbit.
They would be shaving the planet much more closely now, thanks to the course corrections they'd been able to make despite the damaged main engines. Tokitukaze's AI had painted a concise and holographic picture of their encounter. By killing their speed and allowing the planet to turn a bit more, they could—with one course correction more—shift their perigee to a point just south of the space elevator and lower it to an altitude of somewhere between one hundred and five hundred kilometers. They would come in from the southwest, miss the Tower of Babel by between thirty and eighty kilometers, cross the equator over the Dawnthunder Sea, and loop on past the planet, entering a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of about sixty thousand kilometers.
The uncertainties in the figures were due to the fact that the Tokitukaze was not an entirely predictable spacecraft. Large pieces were missing, and her Al was having difficulty assessing her exact current mass. Worse, once they hit atmosphere, it was impossible to predict exactly what she would do. The AI was vectoring them to skim Eridu's upper atmosphere, perhaps two hundred kilometers above the surface, but they could easily skip higher . . . or plunge deeper.
In any case, they would have a few precious seconds when they were in the sky above the fighting at the Babel Towerdown. If the fight was still going on at all, they might be able to throw a little of Tokitukaze's considerable firepower on the side of the rebels.
"Captain?"
"What is it, Simone?"
"We're picking up the IFF and automatic call-sign IDs of the various units around Towerdown," she said. "It's all going through the ship's AI and, well, I could give you a direct feed on the tactical situation."
Dev considered. They would have only a few seconds above the enemy forces. No human could react, aim, and fire with any kind of accuracy in such a brief space of time, not even with cephlink-boosted reflexes. Only the superfast optical circuits and electronics of an AI could juggle so much data in so little time.
"Hang on a sec," Dev said. He was watching the dwindling handful of seconds left until the final course change. Three . . . two . . . one . . . there!
Silently, invisible plasmas stabbed into space at precisely calculated angles, slowing the Tokitukaze slightly, nudging her a bit closer to her target, and incidentally orienting her so that two of her three gigawatt lasers were facing the planet.
Maneuver completed. . . .
Twelve minutes now to perigee.
Eridu filled most of Dev's forward view, a vast globe of red and gold. He could make out the coastline of the Dawnthunder Sea now, and the convoluted twist of the Babel promontory. There were a lot of clouds. He'd not thought of that. Would they even be able to see the battleground? Jack that feed when we reach it. Was that the monofilament-thin gleam of the space elevator? Yes . . . he could just make it out where it caught the light of Marduk astern.
The falling ship shuddered, skipping on the first tenuous fringes of atmosphere. The erratic and unpredictable bouncing their weapons platform was about to suffer woul
d not make this any easier, might well make it impossible.
"Simone? Go ahead. Give me a full tactical feed. And link all weapons through the AI."
Dev was braced, but the waterfall of data flowing through his cephlink was more than he'd ever tried to handle before. His view of Eridu was wiped away by the torrent. Shapes, lines, and mathematical formulas flickered and glowed in the complex depths of his virtual world. Eridu was there . . . its gravitational field so. . . .
In his mind, he could see each unit, Imperial, Hegemony, and rebel, as colored masses, could see each individual warstrider as a tiny figure highlighted against that war-blasted terrain. God of battles, were they too late? It looked as though a heavy Imperial Marine assault unit had just touched down on the rebel flank and was closing in for the kill. Dev could see only about a dozen rebel machines on their feet . . . no, fewer than that. And with the forces that closely involved, it would be damned hard to kill Imperials without hitting rebels.
Tokitukaze's path past the battlefield, her speed, altitude, and the reach of each of her weapons, were sensed rather than seen, a shifting interplay of mathematical calculations.
He could sense, too, the lightspeed flickerings of the AI's thought processes somewhere just behind his own reasoning. In a way, the direct cephlinkage with the computer had made that computer a part of Dev's own brain. He did not have to explain or calculate. He merely conveyed impressions . . . We need to hit here . . . here . . . here . . . but don't get too close there . . .
. . . and the ship's Artificial Intelligence calculated the best way to give Dev what he needed.
Seven minutes.
"We should tell them we're coming," Torolf suggested over the link. They could all see at least part of what Dev saw, picking up the feed from him, though they didn't have the godlike sense of having the ship's AI as a kind of extra hindbrain.
"Who?" Bev asked. "Our guys?"
"The Heggers and the Impies. Maybe take some of the heat off our people."
"And maybe get shot out of the sky," Tewari said.