Leviathan

by Jack Campbell

  Those aboard Mistral, Geary reflected, were probably feeling extremely nervous at the mass of human, automated, and alien warships swiftly bearing down on them.

  “Badaya is cutting it close,” Desjani warned. “The dark ships are going to be almost in range of Mistral when he engages them.”

  “He wants the dark ships to hold their vectors,” Geary said, “and maybe he’s hoping they’ll be holding their fire as well, waiting to engage Mistral.”

  “We did that to them at Bhavan,” Desjani said. “They won’t fall for it again.”

  “We’ll know in less than two minutes.” He had no doubt that the dark battle cruisers would be stopped. He could only hope that his own battle cruisers would not pay too high a price.

  The dark battle cruisers pivoted at the last possible moment, bringing their bows forward to face the Alliance force. They came within range of Badaya’s battle cruisers seconds before the Dancers caught the dark ships from behind. Even at the comparatively slow relative velocity at which the ships engaged this time, the exchange of fire happened too quickly for human senses to follow.

  But Geary had no trouble spotting the explosion which, from its intensity, could only mark the destruction of a battle cruiser, as well as lesser detonations that heralded the deaths of heavy cruisers and destroyers. The fleet’s sensors were still trying to evaluate the outcome, who had lost what, when the Dancers ripped through the remains of destroyed ships to hammer the dark ships again.

  The formations diverged, finally giving Geary a clear look.

  “Mistral is all right,” Desjani said. The assault transport was still braking, now being overtaken by the fast-moving fields of wreckage from the shattered warships that had been pursuing her.

  “We lost Motte,” Geary said as the report of the heavy cruisers’ loss came in. “As well as Moulinet, Remise, Mause, Spitfire, and Skyraider.” Two light cruisers and three destroyers. “Lots of damage to Dragon, Incredible, and Implacable.” Those three battle cruisers seemed to attract a lot of hits in every battle.

  One blessing was that in a bow-on engagement, there had been few hits on propulsion and maneuvering systems. None of the damaged Alliance warships would be unable to keep up with their fellows.

  Unfortunately, that was also true of the dark ships.

  On the positive side, one of the dark battle cruisers was gone and the other three had been damaged enough to break off their attack. The dark ships had also lost two more heavy cruisers, another light cruiser, and four more destroyers.

  “If they hadn’t veered off their attack vector, they would have been wiped out,” Desjani said, her right hand forming a fist that she rapped against her seat in frustration. “It looks like they tried to shift targets at the last instant to the ships in Delta One, then to the Dancers.”

  “I bet they did,” Geary said, studying the results of the engagement replayed in very slow motion. “That was their fix to what we did at Bhavan, to allow last-moment retargeting outside normal parameters. But that meant in this engagement they ended up losing their chances at a lot of shots by shifting targets too often and too easily.”

  He grimaced as he looked over the results, and the sharp curve of the path the remaining dark ships in that group were following as they swung out to one side and down relative to Geary’s formation. “We didn’t hit them hard enough.” He had always tried to avoid battles of attrition in which each side wore down the other, taking and inflicting losses at terrible rates. But he was beginning to believe that this battle would offer no alternatives to that strategy that weren’t even worse.

  “Delta One,” Geary sent, “maintain your position relative to this formation until we clear the enemy support facility region.”

  The government facility, a vast structure orbiting in solitary splendor, gleamed as Geary’s fleet swept past it. Hazard lights were visible on the outside of the structure, and on Geary’s display the exterior view of the facility was overlain with sensor readings of heat leakage and power use that showed which portions of the facility were in use. The intended home for an Alliance government in exile radiated a sense of great strength as well as great size, which struck Geary as ironic given its intended function. The only way this facility would ever have been occupied by the Alliance government was if Unity had fallen and most if not all of the Alliance had been occupied by the Syndics. Its use for its intended functions would have marked last-ditch desperation and defeat, not strength.

  “We might have had to use this,” Desjani said. “If you hadn’t shown up.”

  “And now it’s my job to neutralize it,” Geary said. “Are the living stars laughing?”

  Mistral was partly out of sight around the curve of the facility as she backed in to the dock, her main propulsion flaring at full power as the assault transport slowed rapidly over the last few thousand meters before exactly matching the orbital vector of the facility. Geary saw Mistral’s propulsion stutter once as Commander Young fine-tuned the braking slightly, maneuvering thrusters also adjusting the transport’s angle of approach. Seconds later, the transport glided into the dock, comm relays dropped in Mistral’s wake still providing a solid link to the assault ship for the rest of the fleet even though she was now completely within the hangar.

  As far as Geary could see, no other dark ships were maneuvering to attack Mistral. Now that she was inside the dock, the dark ships appeared to have completely lost interest in her. “Good work, Commander,” Geary sent. “The dark ships are not continuing to target Mistral. But don’t forget that the dark ships may well be trying to work around whatever prevents them firing on that facility and on you. We don’t know how much time you have.”

  New virtual windows had popped up next to Geary’s seat, showing the views from the armor of Marines who were already charging off Mistral and storming the facility. If he wanted to, Geary could call up the view from the armor of any Marine in the assault force, but at the moment he had a job to do dealing with the dark ships. He couldn’t waste his attention riding the shoulder of a Marine lieutenant or sergeant or private.

  Still, the windows were there, visible to a glance to the side, so Geary could remain aware of what was happening with the Marines without focusing his attention on them. He saw assault teams hacking the controls on hatches to allow access to inside the facility before he was called back to the larger picture by Desjani.

  “We just got the ping back from the hypernet gate,” Desjani said. “You were right. The hypernet gate is reporting that there are no other gates accessible from it. It’s blocked.”

  “I wish I’d been wrong on that one.” Geary touched a comm control. “Victoria, the gate is blocked. We need to know how to unblock it.”

  “I was already assuming the worst, Admiral,” she replied. Rione had not yet left Mistral but was poised to follow the Marines inside the facility. “It saves time in situations like this. If that information is on this facility, I will find it.”

  “Five minutes to bombardment launch,” Lieutenant Yuon said. “Uh, combat systems are still requesting confirmation of plan and authorization to launch, Admiral.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Geary said. He called up that data again, saw that nothing had changed to alter his intentions, confirmed the bombardment plan, then authorized the launch to take place automatically as his warships reached the right points along their paths. “Do you ever think it ought to be harder to cause this much destruction, Tanya?”

  Desjani gave him a disbelieving look. “No. It’s too hard as it is. If something needs to be destroyed, let me destroy the blasted thing.”

  “Not everyone has your sense of restraint, Tanya.”

  “Excuse me, Admiral?”

  He didn’t answer as Geary’s fleet swept through the orbital region holding the docks and warehouses. The docks were huge, rectangular structures, with almost-as-large superstructures on their backs that con
tained repair and fabrication facilities, offices, living spaces for workers, life support, and a variety of other necessities for a typical shipyard. On the fleet’s sensors, all of those areas intended for human use looked dark and cold, kept just warm enough for equipment to function properly, or with all life support shut off, as frigid as empty space. The docks were lifeless by any biological definition, but power usage within provided clear signs of the mechanical “life” that ruled within them. “Like haunted houses,” someone whispered.

  The warehouses resembled enormous beehives, rounded structures with external access and loading docks located all around them on different levels. The main cargo off-loading docks were at the top and bottom of the warehouses to allow new material to be distributed throughout the structure using very large cargo elevators in the core.

  Each of the docks and warehouses also boasted a single propulsion unit whose thrust could produce a significant change in their orbits given enough time. It was an expensive addition to such facilities, but if the Alliance fleet had been able to launch a bombardment from light-hours away, the structures would have had ample time to make the relatively small alterations in their orbits that would cause the bombardment projectiles to completely miss their targets. However, with Geary’s warships planning on launching so close to their targets and the rocks moving so fast, in this case the propulsion units would be totally useless.

  The size and numbers of the structures rivaled that of a major shipbuilding region of space in a wealthy star system. If the Alliance had been forced to retreat here, these structures would have allowed the Alliance to continue to launch raids on the Syndic conquerors.

  Geary wondered what point that effort would have had. Victory would have been impossible unless the Syndicate Worlds had been so badly stressed by winning that it fell apart and left an opening for the Alliance government to reoccupy the ruins of Alliance star systems. But by the time Geary had been reawoken after a century of war, there no longer appeared to be any point to most things about the war. Neither side believed they had any chance of winning, but the Syndicate Worlds would not stop attacking, and the Alliance would not surrender, and nothing else mattered, no other courses of action were considered possible.

  He was about to destroy a symbol of that stubborn insanity.

  A hail of bombardment projectiles launched from Geary’s warships, hurtling toward the vast structures designed to support ships like them but now dedicated to the dark ships.

  The solid metal projectiles nicknamed rocks by fleet personnel had no warheads, no explosives, but were traveling at more than thirty thousand kilometers per second. Each carried an immense amount of kinetic energy, and when they struck anything, that energy was released.

  Under the impacts of dozens of hits on every target, docks shredded, flying apart into clouds of large and small pieces. Warehouses exploded, those containing weapons or fuel cells vanishing in rapid successions of gigantic explosions as their contents self-detonated, their contents and their structures becoming a mass of small particles flung outward. In the space of seconds, structures built at immense cost in time, money, and labor were turned into a huge field of debris.

  “No matter what happens to us here, it was worth it to blow away all that,” Desjani said, smiling at her display. “Someday, thousands of years in the future, that ring of debris will have spread to form a thin ring within this binary star system. That’s something to imagine, isn’t it?”

  “An asteroid belt composed of the ruin of war,” Geary mused. “We’ll name it Tanya’s Ring.”

  “A debris field big enough to form a belt in a star system, named after me? Now I can die happy.”

  He glanced at her and confirmed the impression he had from Tanya’s tone of voice.

  She wasn’t joking.

  And with all five dark ship formations coming back at the Alliance ships again, and the hypernet gate still blocked, there seemed to be all too great a chance that it might happen before this day was out.

  FOURTEEN

  “ADMIRAL,” Lieutenant Castries reported in amazement, “the fleet has detected a jump point for Hardinga.”

  Geary checked his display. The jump point had popped into existence over five light-hours away, leading to a moderately-well-populated star system near this binary. Near as interstellar distances went, anyway. “How long—”

  “It’s unstable,” Castries continued, then realized she had interrupted Geary. “I’m sorry, Admiral. Our sensors assess that the jump point is unstable. I’ve never seen that before.”

  “You’ve never been in a close binary star system before,” Desjani said. “Look at that. Our sensors are estimating the jump point has an eighty percent chance of collapsing within seven hours of coming into existence.”

  “And it came into existence five hours ago,” Geary said. “How can our systems estimate that sort of thing? The life span of an unstable jump point?”

  “Somebody must have studied unstable jump points,” Desjani said. “Maybe remote observations from surrounding star systems that gave them some astronomical data to work with. Or maybe someone just ran the math for interactions of gravity fields for two stars, and that ended up in our ship systems as part of the baseline data for jump point analysis.”

  “We couldn’t go anywhere anyway until we recovered Mistral,” Geary said, “even if there was any chance of that jump point still being there by the time we got there.”

  With the dark ships still about an hour from any possible intercepts, Geary checked the status of the Marines. The sooner they got their job done, the sooner he could focus exclusively on battling the dark ships.

  The stacked tiles of virtual windows showing views from the Marine armor revealed what were now slightly time-delayed images, over a minute old due to the distance between the fleet and the government facility. The Marines were inside, some progressing without resistance down corridors and into rooms that mostly had a feeling of having never seen human presence since being constructed.

  But other Marines were traveling into areas of the facility that had actually been used. There were signs of wear on walls and floors, occasional bits of trash that had so far evaded the small housekeeping robots, and here and there rooms bearing signs of hasty departure. Scattered clothing littered floors and furniture, abandoned snacks and meals rested on desks and tables, and unmade beds bore in the shape of the sheets traces of the people who had once used them.

  “What happened to them?” Geary heard a Marine ask her platoon leader.

  “Best guess is they ran for it, and their ship got nailed,” the officer replied. “Everybody look for signs any of this stuff has been disturbed since it was abandoned in place. We need to know if there is anyone left here.”

  The lieutenant’s question was rudely answered seconds later as nearby Marines finally encountered opposition. Geary switched his view to one of those Marine officers, seeing a wide corridor ahead that was sealed by blast doors at the far end. “It’s automated defenses or someone directing fire,” a captain was reporting to his superior. “We can’t tell which yet.”

  “Hold your positions. We’ve got units working around the flanks of this passage, and two platoons from Second Company on the next level down.”

  Geary involuntarily jerked as bursts of fire came from the vicinity of the blast doors to lash the area where these Marines were hunkered down. “Can we return fire?”

  “Not unless you see a target. Hold position.”

  Switching his attention back to the big picture, Geary saw that Delta One’s battle cruisers were maintaining their position near the main Alliance formation, which was proceeding along a shallow curve that would eventually form an orbital path around Star Alpha if they stayed on it. The Dancers were nearly a light-minute away and above the Alliance warships, gathered into a group but not engaging in any of the playful maneuvering that they were famous for.

/>   The five dark ship formations were all lined up to hit Geary’s formation, aiming for near-simultaneous intercepts along the path ahead. The earliest of those intercepts was forty-two minutes away.

  “Ideas?” he asked Desjani.

  “We need to know if there’s anything on the facility that will unblock that gate,” she replied. “If there is, we need to stall and wear out the dark ships like last time, which will be a lot harder this time. If there isn’t, we need to figure out how to close with them and kill more of them than they kill of us.”

  “You’re recommending I avoid action until we know which tactics we need to follow?”

  “Yes, sir,” Desjani said, nodding, her eyes on her display. “We’ve got at least fifteen minutes before we should maneuver to mess with their plans. Why don’t you see how the Marines and that woman are doing while I watch the overall situation?”

  “Good idea.” He refocused on the Marine action.

  Spotting some Marines proceeding cautiously up a set of emergency access stairs, Geary linked his view to the armor of their platoon leader. An enlisted Marine was kneeling at an access hatch, working on the lock, then gave his lieutenant a thumbs-up.

  “We’re ready to go,” the lieutenant reported, her breathing deep and regular as she prepared for action.

  “Hit ’em,” the order came back. “Through the hatch and left. You’ll take them in the rear.”

  “Got it. Through hatch, left. Are we weapons free?”

  “If they fire, you are cleared to engage. The brass wants live prisoners, though. See if they’ll surrender when they realize they’ve been flanked.”