Opening Moves

by James Traynor

  “Director Campbell isn't like us, Miss Smith. He's too cautious. We, however, understand that sometimes you gotta take a risk, right?”

  This had better be worth it, Susan thought before she nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “So, an expedition,” Randolph nodded. “I'll get you one within the week.”

  “Uhh, excuse me, sir, what?” Smith blinked in astonishment.

  “The director is a powerful man, but he answers to the President who answers in turn to the Congress. If the necessary Congress committees demand more information on the Dominion the President will have to make Director Campbell do something about it. You already said he looks to you for facts on the Ashani. So he trusts your input.” He smiled. “The way I see it he'll ask you what the best way is, and you just tell him what you told me here.”

  “To send a ship,” understanding dawned on Susan's slightly pudgy face.

  “To send a ship,” Randolph confirmed. “I think you and I are on the same page, Miss Smith. We understand what's best for the Union. Oh, Director Campbell wants to keep Earth and the Union strong, just like we do, he just doesn't understand things the way we do,” the SECSTATE gave her a broad smile. Intellectually, she understood that she was being suckered in by an experienced snake oil salesman. But the idea of being a crucial part in events that could shape the course of history – and boost her career beyond her wildest dreams, if it all went smoothly – had her in its grip. “But you can help him to see things our way. Do you understand me, Miss Smith?”

  Susan slowly leaned back in her creaking office chair. This was the 28th century; office chairs should no longer be creaking. “Yes, sir, I believe I do.” She felt deeply nervous and hoped it didn't show. She was setting foot in a much bigger world than she could have predicted when Randolph had entered her tiny office. Now, all of a sudden, she was playing a part in the highest levels of Union policy! The risks were there, personally and professionally, but so was the chance for great rewards. “I agree that we need to formulate a response to the Dominion, and for that we need all the information we can get, and as soon as we can get it.”

  “Very well, Miss Smith. I'll set up the Congress and the President. Director Campbell won't want to do it but he'll be undecided. It's up to you to finally convince him. Are you up for the job?” he questioningly tilted his head to the side.

  Inaudibly Susan took a deep breath and steeled herself, trying her best to keep her anxiety from her voice. She was surprised at how steady she sounded when she finally spoke up. “Yes, Mr. Secretary, I am.”

  “Two years from now there is an election coming,” Randolph leaned back in his own creaky chair and crossed his legs. He lowered his voice. “If we get this whole situation right, if I publicly, as Secretary of State, predict an important change in the strategic balance of known space, it'll give me a very strong position from which to run for office. Are you following me?”

  Susan raised an eyebrow and nodded cautiously.

  Randolph continued. “And when I do become President of the Union, I'll remember those who helped me get there, Miss Smith.” He grinned widely. “Stick with me, and I'll make sure your efforts and dedication are recognized and earn you the appropriate reward.”

  “You can count on me,” Susan enthusiastically.

  The Secretary of State stood and headed for the door. “Now, you keep me informed,” he said as he opened the door. “And watch the next debate in the Congress. It'll be a good one.”

  Smith settled back with a wide smile as Randolph left. Maybe that promotion was closer than she had guessed.

  Foldspace, Dunnan Gal Star System, Tuathaan Clanholds.

  Like hundreds of amber pearls dancing in a sea of whirling grays, fiery streaks and blue-white flashes crackling along ranges of space light hours in size or greater, Corr'tane's ships lay silent and motionless at the edge of the spacial pocket that connected Dunnan Gal with the Báine star system almost fifteen light-years away. All six hundred and twenty-two of his vessels had powered down all their systems, including their warpfield generators. Doing so had been a more than reckless move. Gravity currents inside foldspace were like lashing tentacles, largely unpredictable and irrevocably lethal to any starship in their path. Even close to the comparably calm center of any foldspace corridor they appeared and disappeared at seemingly random locations and intervals, making any prolonged stay outside the bubble projected by a starships's warpfield generator a game of Russian Roulette. Even the toughest and heaviest vessel had little in the way of resistance to offer against a gravity current or shear running wild. If you were lucky, an encounter with such an errant current ripped through your ship and exploded its reactors within the second. The less lucky variants were the material of nightmares and campfire stories.

  There was a simple reason for the need to switch off their warpfield generators: the peculiar characteristics of foldspace made active warpfields the one thing easy to pick up there. They were like shining beacons in the fog, and Corr'tane's whole strategy hinged on the element of surprise. Maintaining this element had, however, predetermined the choice of location. He needed to intercept the Tuathaan relief force at a natural narrows that prevented them from bringing their speed and maneuvering advantages to bear while at the same time allowing his own forces a high chance of detection. That meant the action had to take place still within the corridor and not the comparatively safer environment of a star system's foldspace pocket. The limitations one labored under outside normspace left him no choice.

  Radar waves were distorted by the immense forces at play inside the spacial pockets, sending back imprecise readings at anything greater than a few light-seconds. IR detection was even less possible, with the immense thermal background radiation resulting from the gravitic friction on the corridors' edges blotting out any singular readings. Even tachyon sensors provided only suboptimal results –- and all of that meant you were using active sensor sweeps.

  That no sane commander would expect an ambush in foldspace was something Corr'tane's plan relied on to no small degree. 3rd Fleet had lost three vessels in the eight hours Corr'tane's units had taken up their position. Several others had been damaged by the turbulence of the passing gravity shears that had ripped their comrades apart. In the remaining ships Corr'tane's crews waited at their stations, sealed in their spacesuits. Even the ships' life support systems had been powered down to avoid detection. The only systems that were still operating were the passive sensors and tightly-focused laser comms linking CLAWBLADE and her sisters into a network of drifting passive sensor buoys. The buoys had a limited service life in the fold. Even if dumped right in the corridor's center its centrifugal gravity forces meant they would drift towards the edges and perish there rather fast. But he didn't expect to stay here long. One couldn't overcome the technical limitations of foldspace. But Corr'tane would be damned if he couldn't bypass some of them.

  He watched his breath condense on the inside of his helmet's visor. In the small tactical display on his command chair the Tuathaan fleet crossed the corridor in half a dozen columns guarded by screening elements. The picture was incomplete and subject to a time lag of four seconds but it told Corr'tane a good deal about the enemy commander. For one, he was no hotheaded idiot like the one leading the defense of Dunnan Gal. He approached his target in good order, with individual squadrons holding formation and escorts guarding the fleet's perimeter. But the very formation he had chosen also told the strategos that his opponent was a rather conventional tactician. Nothing in his force's setup indicated any sort of protection from what the Ashani fleet commander had planned.

  His sensor readings were time-delayed and imprecise, but they gave him enough information to act upon. The farthest buoy had sent a single ping back to his flagship twenty seconds ago. At that distance it'd be around twenty-five more seconds before the enemy moved into weapons' range.

  “We need to close the range, captain,” he murmured softly as if the volume of his voice could give away their prese
nce. “Give me a twenty second burn on four gravities.”

  Pryatan's beautiful eyes widened but she relayed the order without questioning.

  The sudden acceleration slammed him into his shock frame and momentarily blurred his vision. He groaned and forced himself to concentrate on his tactical readouts. Simply breathing felt like a painful act of labor, and he felt his blood pumping through throbbing veins. Corr'tane gritted his teeth as a timer on his right-hand console ticked down to zero. Then the pressure was gone and the whole bridge crew gasped for air. That was, except for those who had fallen unconscious, though their suits' medical systems were stabilizing them. They'd be up and ready once the shooting started, even though he didn't envy their headaches later on.

  The young Ashani strategos watched as the vast armada began to move into his weapons' envelope. Clan Dunnan and its vassals had managed to pry loose close to a thousand warships from the defense of Báine. Given what 3rd Fleet had destroyed at Dunnan Gal, this represented all that was left of the military strength of one of the Tuathaans' six great clans. Six long columns of red triangles, each one of them representing an enemy warship, began to cross the hiding Ashani fleet at a right angle. Had Corr'tane been familiar with the term he would have coined his strategy a case of 'reverse-crossing the T'. The readouts were almost pristine by now as 3rd Fleet coasted closer to position, their main weapons fixed forward and their missile tubes primed while a similarly configured warfleet presented him their comparably weak and vulnerable broadsides.

  “Sir?” Captain Pryatan looked back over her shoulder, the unspoken question hanging between the two of them.

  “Not yet. Just a little more...,” he said with a subtle nod. The center of the enemy's six columns now passed 3rd Fleet's own center. It was a tempting target, but Corr'tane chose to wait just a little longer. It wouldn't do if he split the fleet and let one part of it get away to fall on him another day. On the other hand, the window of opportunity was beginning to close. He could see the urgency and the pleas in Pryatan's eyes, and finally, reluctantly, he nodded a second time. “Now!”

  Like floodlights, the sensor icons of more than six hundred warships blinked to life in Corr'tane's plot as power rushed back into the vessels' essential systems. While the Tuathaan fleet consisted of six individual columns advancing along the corridor, suddenly a solid, three-tiered block of enemy vessels popped into existence on their left flank, barely eighty thousand kilometers away. The Tuathaan bridge crews had barely even the time to let their eyes widen in sudden terror before the first hits struck home.

  Thousands of sickly green plasma laser beams reached out from the Dominion's ships in a devastating opening volley. The concentrated energy burnt through hulls like a flame through oily paper, the mounts of dreadnoughts, battle cruisers and cruisers almost ignoring the Tuathaan ships' armor as they zeroed in on their prey. Ships evaporated into clouds of spreading plasma and debris as battleship-grade energy weapons burnt through their reactor containment or ignited stored missiles and fuel tanks, ripping their ships apart in a hailstorm of secondary explosions. Others belched atmosphere and debris and spun out of control. Again, others suffered catastrophic casualties as Ashani laser hits took out their compensators, instantly subjecting their hapless crews to hundreds of gees of acceleration. A handful of ships tumbled out of formation, their warpfield generators and engines destroyed, their fates set to drift through the void until the harsh forces at play showed mercy and sent a gravity shear to annihilate them. The 3rd Fleet's five thousand missiles needed a bit longer to reach their targets, but not much. While the Tuathaan relief force was still reeling under the continuing onslaught of the plasma lasers lashing out from the sudden attacker, the massive missile salvo entered its terminal approach vectors. Two hundred megaton shipkiller warheads raced headlong into unsuspecting Clanhold vessels. Others broke up into multiple kill vehicles, dancing through the stunted defenses to hit the smaller Tuathaan ships with just as lethal one hundred megaton warheads. Automated laser clusters fought back while their ships' living crews scrambled to action stations.

  The Tuathaan fleet was built mainly around the ubiquitous Tóraí or Hunter-class attack ship. It was a small vessel compared to most star nation's core fleet vessel, fitting somewhere between a light cruiser and a destroyer, tonnage-wise. Individually it didn't hold a candle to an operational Dominion cruiser, but it was a fast and agile class of ship, easy to mass-produce and an embodiment of the Tuathaan warrior spirit. Ideal for raids or for individual starship to starship combat between rivaling clans out to settle feuds, its designers had seen to it that the majority of its weapons were loaded into its bulbous bow. That left only token weapons' mounts and defenses to the sides and rear. However, since most of the ship's energy was directed towards its bow the Tuathaan had come up with a simple and cost-effective way to give their small ships the capability to launch fighters. Each Tóraí carried an assortment of parasite craft piggy-backing on its hull, or rather, in niches along its outer hull. Each niche was connected to an airlock and a fuel pump so, depending on clanhold and preference, a Tóraí could carry between six and sixteen fighters.

  These parasite pockets now proved structural weaknesses as lasers licked at the fully fueled small craft, with the Dominion ships' even smaller mounts powerful enough to burn through them. Fighters exploded in their mounts, tearing holes in the attack ships' hulls through which howling hurricanes of pressurized air and screaming people were sucked into the vacuum, never to be seen again.

  Corr'tane had left his fighters back in normspace, in Dunnan Gal. Fighters had no warpfield generators, and their small size and mass made it extremely hard to track them in the fold. His squadrons would have been wasted here, and where they were now they had important orders of their own.

  In the fold, Corr'tane's surprise attack had wreaked havoc on an unprecedented scale. More than a hundred and forty of the enemy's ships had been destroyed, their remains floating through space as fields of debris of slowly expanding clouds of plasma. Easily the same number of ships had taken heavy damage, their sensor profiles fluctuating in CLAWBLADE's central plot. The Tuathaan column closest to his fleet had simply ceased to exist as a fighting unit, its vessels and screens reduced to heaps of slag and floating corpses. The two columns next to it, 'above' and 'below' 3rd Fleet's relative position, had taken damage, but by now the initial shock was beginning to wear off, even though the Ashani vessels continued their relentless barrage.

  Barely five seconds had passed since them opening fire, and already a second missile salvo was underway, but reduced in size this time as his frigates and light screening elements had depleted their magazines in that ferocious alpha strike. Due to Corr'tane's waiting, it wasn't the center that was hit the hardest, but the rearmost third of Clan Dunnan's forces that were withering away under his fleet's attack. In the blink of an eye his forces had closed the numbers gap to the Tuathaan, and now they had the advantage in tonnage.

  The missile salvo found its targets in the second and third Tuathaan echelons, but less than fifty percent of the birds got through this time as the clanholds' ships' defenses and electronic countermeasures frantically fought back and the Tóraís and other ships struggled to fly evasive maneuvers. Nuclear flowers blossomed in the void of foldspace, radiation and heat engulfing ships and sailors alike. But the initial terror began to fade.

  “Enemy units are reforming, sir!” Pryatan warned him. “The survivors of the second and third column are changing course to attack us. Ships from the other echelons are joining them!”

  “What about the rest?!” Corr'tane demanded as his eyes tried to sift through the haze of information in the holotank.

  “We've got about four hundred ships accelerating toward the corridor's entrance. Distance now a quarter million kilometers, growing rapidly, sir!”

  Corr'tane's expression tightened. They were going in the right direction, but his plan's success hinged on his forces being the hammer to the anvil he had left back in the
star system. The Tuathaan ships were faster than his and had a higher rate of acceleration, and his own force had started at a standstill relative to them. Compared to the clanholds' ships, their engines roaring, 3rd Fleet was moving anemically. Slowly, Corr'tane's six hundred ships moved to face the rearguard force the Tuathaan commander had chosen to sacrifice to allow his remaining ships to make the journey to Dunnan Gal. Once there he still had a chance to defeat the Ashani en detail if he played his cards right.

  “Full power to the engines. Have our right flank swing towards the enemy. All ships, advance and keep up your fire!”

  Hurricanes of focused plasma and salvos of nuclear-tipped missiles streaked toward the Tuathaan, cutting holes in their attack formations. Making the turn to face the Dominion ships had opened the distance between the two forces to a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers. That distance was now rapidly closing again, despite the firestorm 3rd Fleet threw into their path.

  The Tuathaan came on, regardless. Their massed attacks had beaten Tear'al and in the past had even managed to drive off Rasenni incursions, too. And now the red of Tuathaan lasers mixed with the green of the Ashani fleet, and a new stream of status and damage reports began to flood into CLAWBLADE's combat information center as Dominion ships were damaged or destroyed.

  But Corr'tane was ready for them. He found himself strangely calm and detached. The excitement and doubts leading up to the battle had been replaced by a calm confidence, like a mechanism which simply churned out orders and analyzed tactics two or three steps ahead of the battle's events. He knew exactly where he needed his ships ten minutes from now and exactly how to get them there. He could see where the Tuathaan would go and what would happen when they got there. The attack on Dunnan Gal had been 3rd Fleet's baptism by fire, but it had been lopsided. This was the real thing, and his ships performed as perfectly as he had hoped. After years of training and exercises the Dominion's navy was reaping the fruits of their hard labor.