09- We Lead

by Christopher Nuttall

  “We found something,” Mike Johnston said. “A faint harmonic resonance between the two systems.”

  He held out a datapad. Juliet took it, skimming the file with a practiced eye. He was right. There was a resonance. And that meant ... she worked the problem for a long moment, trying to see it from an alien point of view. What had they created? And how did it work?

  Ah, she thought.

  She was barely aware of him gently rubbing her shoulders as she fell back into the trance, studying the files in the light of her new knowledge. Quantum entanglement? She’d studied the theories, of course, but it had never led to any useful technology. At least, not yet. But surely that would operate on an interstellar level ...

  Unless they focus it on the tramline, she thought. It might just work ...

  ***

  “Captain,” Reed said. “We are approaching Tramline Two.”

  “No sign of any enemy presence,” Charlotte added. “Local space is clear.”

  Susan nodded. The passage through ES-15 had proved uneventful. She’d toured her ship, had a nap and returned to the bridge, just in time to supervise the passage through the tramline. And yet, she knew time was ticking away. ES-13 might pose a far greater challenge.

  And if they can track ships crossing the tramline, she mused, they’ll know exactly when and where we entered their system.

  “Launch the ballistic missile at the FTL station, as planned,” she ordered. There was no point in delaying any further. “And take us across the tramline.”

  She braced herself as the task force jumped. The tactical display blanked, leaving them blind for a handful of seconds. Susan held herself steady, despite the utter confidence that a major enemy force was lurking nearby, in position to catch them with their pants down. She knew it was unlikely, yet cold logic proved no barrier to fear.

  “Fleet command net re-established,” Parkinson informed her. “Tactical combat network active; no enemy ships detected. I say again, no enemy ships detected.”

  “Ah,” Charlotte said. “Captain, I think you need to take a look at this.”

  Susan shook her head in disbelief as the tactical display began to fill with icons. ES-13 was settled, heavily settled. There were no inhabitable worlds, as far as she could tell, but there were hundreds of thousands of asteroids, hundreds of them clearly inhabited. Her sensors were picking up dozens of drive fields moving between the asteroid belt and the two gas giants. There were at least two cloudscoops clearly visible through optical sensors, suggesting there might be others on the far side of the gas giants.

  Admiral Naiser’s face appeared in front of her. “Captain,” he said. “We seem to have stumbled on an unexpected surprise.”

  “Yes, sir,” Susan said. She couldn't have put it better herself. “This system is clearly important to the enemy.”

  “Yes,” Admiral Naiser said. “However, we cannot waste time wrecking the system. It would take us weeks to strike all the important targets. And the collateral damage would be colossal.”

  Susan nodded in grim agreement. There was no way to isolate the habitat asteroids from the industrial asteroids, assuming they were actually separate. The aliens might easily have combined the two, as a number of human asteroid societies had done. It was galling to realise that they could put a real crimp in the alien industrial base, at the cost of committing mass slaughter and wasting time, time they didn't have.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, reluctantly.

  “The fleet will follow an evasive path to Tramline Two, once we destroy the FTL communicator,” Admiral Naiser ordered. “And we will return to this system later, if the war goes badly.”

  “Aye, sir,” Susan said. She glanced at Granger. “Launch the missile. Take out the FTL system.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Granger said. There was a pause. “Missile launched.”

  And let’s hope they haven’t stationed a starship near the communicator to protect it, Susan thought. A seeker warhead would have no trouble blowing an undefended platform away, but a starship could easily swat the missile out of space before it reached its target. They must have realised what we’re doing by now.

  She forced herself to relax as her sensors picked up more and more details she hadn't wanted to know. The system was heavily settled, more heavily than she’d thought. And yet, there was a surprising lack of fixed defences. The problems of defending an asteroid against a determined attacker were vast, but she would have expected some effort. Was she actually looking at a dissident star system? Or something the Foxes simply didn't consider very vital.

  Which is insane, she thought. This place has to be defended.

  Her concern grew as the fleet headed deeper into the system, giving the settled portions a wide berth. Finding nothing bothered her more than she cared to admit. Only a civilian would consider the prospect of hiding an attack fleet in a bunch of asteroids, yet the sense of impending doom was almost impossible to resist. They should be too far, logically, for the aliens to get a solid lock on them, particularly after they’d cloaked. But something was nagging at the back of her mind.

  She glanced at Mason. “Is this one of their systems?”

  “Drive fields match previously-observed enemy freighters,” Mason reported. “I don’t think we’ve encountered a fifth alien race.”

  Susan frowned. The Tadpoles had had multiple factions, some of which had been more hostile than others. It had proven possible to negotiate with some of the less aggressive factions. But the Foxes were a single nation, if the POWs were to be believed. They simply couldn't accept the idea of separate, but equal. Two nations were a war waiting to happen, as far as they were concerned. Perhaps this was just a relatively minor system, compared to others further towards their homeworld. Or maybe they’d just decided that it was pointless to attempt to defend the system and simply given up.

  Which we did, once or twice, she thought. She’d studied history, back in school. Her tutors had drummed more of Britain’s greatness into her head than she cared to admit. Our plans to cope with a full-scale nuclear attack floundered on the simple fact that there was no way to cope with a full-scale nuclear attack.

  “Launch a spread of stealth probes,” she ordered, grimly. “See what they can pick out from a closer vantage point.”

  She forced herself to relax, somehow, as the minutes became hours. The aliens showed no sign they even knew the fleet was there, something she was sure was absurd. Even if the techs were wrong, completely wrong, about the aliens being able to monitor the tramlines, they certainly should have picked up the fleet before it cloaked. And something had to have taken out the FTL communications nodes.

  Maybe they sent their defence force forward and we killed it, she mused. Or maybe it was withdrawn to ES-12.

  It was a pleasant thought, too pleasant. She cautioned herself, sternly, against believing it without more evidence. The aliens were alien. They might have decided the system wasn't worth trying to defend, they might be gathering their forces to defend the system, they might be ... they might be doing something completely incomprehensible. All she could do was wait, as patiently as she could, for the hammer to fall.

  And hope we can cope when it does, she thought.

  ***

  “You’re saying they’ve found a way to fake a gravity line?”

  Commodore Juliet Watson-Stewart, John Naiser had often thought, had no sense of timing at all. If anything, she'd only gotten worse since she’d been relieved of her post on HMS Warspite. Hell, it said something about her tendency to fall into her own head that her backers hadn't made much of a fuss about her relief, even though it could have been used to score political points during the next catfight over budgetary appropriations. They’d probably been relieved, he suspected, that disaster had been averted.

  And yet, in some ways, he was relieved she’d come to talk to him. It was a distraction.

  “I believe they do manage to form a fake-gravity line,” she said, slowly. “In essence, it’s a shadow of a gra
vity line linking their ships to the FTL communicator. They ... they effectively set up a wired connection between the ships and the communicator.”

  “Rather than broadcasting in all directions,” John mused. It sounded rather cumbersome, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Given time, the system could probably be improved. Hell, Warspite had been an improvement on technology stolen from the Tadpoles. “If they lost the communicator, they’d also lose the ability to coordinate their fleets.”

  “On an interplanetary scale,” Juliet agreed. “But there might be more than one communicator in a given star system. We still don’t understand exactly how they’re constructed.”

  Or how big a chunk of their economy each one absorbs, John thought. The catfight over funding the Royal Navy’s proposed twelve battleships had been savage. Parliament had been reluctant to fund eight, let alone twelve. The Navy League had had to fight tooth and nail to secure the funding. If those things are relatively cheap, they could replace them easily.

  He studied her for a long moment. “How much would it cost to build one?”

  “Impossible to calculate,” Juliet said, flatly. “There are aspects to the device we don’t yet understand.”

  “Guess,” John ordered.

  Juliet gave him a resentful look that made her look strikingly young, a teenager whose father doesn't understand. “To duplicate the systems we understand would be relatively straightforward, using off-the-shelf components,” she said. “The total cost would be little more than a hundred thousand pounds. However, you would not have a working FTL communicator. You’d have a fancy communications relay station and nothing else.”

  “I see,” John said. It had taken him time to learn that Juliet hated to be pulled back into the real world. She was so single-minded that he sometimes wondered how she managed to get dressed in the morning. Her husband probably spent half his time playing nursemaid. “Can you not take a wild guess?”

  “A million billion trillion pounds,” Juliet said.

  It was a joke, John hoped. It had to be a joke. Asking the politicians for that amount of money ... he had to smile, even though it would probably have ended badly. Britain - and the rest of the Human Sphere - couldn't have funded such a program, not realistically. The Gross World Product was only two hundred trillion pounds or thereabouts.

  “Let me know when you have a more accurate impression,” he said. He doubted they could get even a small percentage of Britain’s GNP, let alone the GWP. “I’ll try to use what you’ve given me.”

  “Thank you,” Juliet said. She looked vague, again. “I could move faster if I had access to the alien tech directly ...”

  “Definitely not,” John said. Silently, he made a note to have a few words with Mike Johnston. He’d thought this particular matter was settled. “You’re too valuable to risk.”

  Juliet gave him another resentful look. “Captain, I ...”

  The klaxons started to howl. John held up a hand as he checked his displays.

  “It will have to be discussed later,” he said. Red icons were appearing on the display. “We're under attack.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Incoming craft,” Charlotte snapped.

  “Red alert,” Susan ordered. The penny had finally dropped. “All hands to battlestations!”

  “Battlestations, aye,” Mason said.

  Susan watched, grimly, as updates came in from all over the ship. Vanguard was ready to fight, when the enemy finally got a solid lock on the task force. It was clear that the enemy did have a rough idea of where they were, but from the way they were sweeping space it looked as though they didn't have a precise lock. They would, she knew, even if the task force remained cloaked. Their tiny craft would get close enough to spot the task force within minutes.

  “Signal from the flag,” Charlotte said. “Black Hunter is to withdraw to the edge of our formation.”

  Smart, Susan thought. If they don’t know we captured one of their ships, there’s nothing to be gained by letting them know now.

  “The analysts can't determine just what we’re facing,” Mason said, quietly. The red icons on the display were sweeping closer, probing the edge of the task force’s formation. “They read out as shuttles, rather than starfighters.”

  Susan leaned forward. Mason was right. The enemy craft couldn't be much larger than the average shuttle, although they were being handled as though they were starfighters. She puzzled over it for a long moment, wondering if they were facing shuttlecraft. The enemy could have improvised a defence, if they wished. But the average shuttlecraft - even a swarm of shuttlecraft - didn't have a hope of cracking her point defence and the aliens had to know it.

  Unless they have something new up their sleeves, she thought. We can’t be the only ones to have advanced over the last year.

  “Continue to monitor their operations,” she ordered, slowly. There was nothing else they could do, at least until the enemy zeroed in on them. “And stand by to engage the enemy.”

  She studied her displays for a long moment. Her ship was ready to fight, but how long would that last? Her crew couldn't stay at battlestations indefinitely. A few hours of tension would dull their edge, leaving them unable to man their positions effectively. She might have to send the secondary crews back to rest in an hour, if the shit hadn't hit the fan by then. It was clear there was no hope of evading the enemy any longer.

  Those craft can easily keep a lock on us, she thought. Outrunning them isn't an option.

  “Signal from the flag,” Charlotte reported. “The task force is to drop the cloak and launch fighters in five minutes.”

  “Understood,” Susan said. If the enemy craft, whatever they were, couldn't be outrun, they’d have to be driven away. She felt her eyes narrow as she contemplated the prospects. A shuttlecraft might be slower and less agile than a starfighter, but it had far greater operational range. “Ready the point defence, then prepare to engage.”

  She counted down the seconds until the cloak was dropped, wondering just how the aliens would react. Without the cloak, they could easily track the task force from a safe distance ... they’d just need to fall back far enough to evade the starfighters. She silently saluted the enemy commander, even though she suspected the aliens had had a stroke of good luck. If the task force launched starfighters to drive the shuttles away, there was no way they could hide anyway. Starfighters were too small to carry cloaking devices.

  “Signal from the flag,” Charlotte said. Susan could hear the tension in her voice. “All units are to decloak.”

  “Do it,” Susan ordered. On the display, the enemy ships were altering formation. “And bring up our active sensors.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Parkinson said.

  He sucked in his breath. “Those are either massively-overpowered shuttles or something we haven't seen before,” he said. “Captain, those things are a specialised design.”

  Mason worked his console for a long moment. “A marine-class shuttle? They’re planning to board us?”

  “They’re far too overpowered, even for the marines,” Parkinson said. “I’d honestly say they were oversized starfighters.”

  Susan frowned as the alien craft altered course, settling into an attack formation. She’d seen patterns like that before, during training exercises when the pilots hadn't yet learnt that predictable formations meant certain death. There was no randomness, not yet. But the aliens had to be insane. Targeting starfighters was easy enough, even though they were tiny. Their bigger shuttlecraft would be picked off long before they became a threat.

  And even if they’re planning to ram us, she thought, it's unlikely they can do any real damage.

  “Formidable and Vikramaditya are launching starfighters,” Parkinson reported. “They’re attempting to intercept.”

  Susan had to smile. It felt odd to know that her hull was being protected by Indian starfighters, even though the Indians had at least as much to lose as Britain, if the Foxes won the war. The Indian pilots were go
od, according to Admiral Naiser. Right now, that was all that mattered. If they could take the alien craft out before they could even begin to pose a threat, she would forgive them anything.

  “The enemy craft are moving,” Parkinson said. “I ... Jesus Christ!”

  Just for a second, Susan’s mind refused to accept what she was seeing. The alien craft were moving fast, impossibly fast. Their acceleration curves were ludicrously good, better than starfighters or any human-designed shuttlecraft. Part of her mind insisted, frantically, that she was looking at an ECM-produced illusion, even though that would have horrific implications of its own. And the alien craft were blazing towards the starfighters ...