True enough, Kris thought, wondering if Min had a double meaning in mind.
“Trafalgar.” Min added it to her desktop. “Now that’s a tremendous action for ya. Smash it all up and trust in your people’s superior determination and skill. Then there’s Samar. Of course.”
“Of course,” Kris echoed. Samar was a favorite at the Academy too, where the instructors extolled it as the classic example of what proper concealment tactics could achieve, along with the criticality of situational awareness, flexible decision-making, maintaining the initiative at all costs, and how tight sensor-shooter loops could offset greatly superior firepower. “Play it for me?”
Min abolished the cloud and brought Samar up over the desktop. In silence, they watched the battle run through its holographic paces.
“I suppose there’s something to be said for not caring if you get out alive, too,” Min remarked.
Kris was also looking at the highlighted box score. “Yeah. There’s that.”
“What’s on your mind?”
Taking out her xel, Kris displayed a schematic she’d prepared. “Tell me what you think of this.”
The heart of the matter was the severe nonlinearity of the Ionian transit with respect to mass. Once they sent the raiding force through, a small force could follow in a matter of hours; a large one in a matter of days. If they successfully sent the Prince Vorland Fleet to AG-XI, the raiding force could jump in ahead of them at AG-I and clear the junction through AG-V before Caneris arrived. That also allowed them deploy the shipbreakers—Corhaine had three teams available—who’d have only a short hop to Deep Six. If things went tits up, the raiding force could retreat via AG-IV.
With Yanazuka’s four stealth frigates sent ahead as sensor pickets, and Kite acting as a tripwire, that part was straightforward enough. But the second force should follow within 14 hours, eighteen at the outside. According to Kris’s estimates, that window would only admit a force the size of Corhaine’s fleet plus several additional ships, such as Polidor, Ariel, Osiris (if she could be made ready in time) and perhaps one other destroyer-class combatant. A relief force, consisting of the rest of the ships they’d nominated, would then be able to follow in another 42 hours, give or take a few.
If this last had a virtue, it was that the relief force would appear from behind Caneris, potentially catching him in an envelopment and threatening his retreat. As long as Caneris could be kept in the dark about the precise nature of the forces attacking him, and as long as the shipbreakers had enough time to deal with the Morus harbors, he’d have little incentive to keep up the fight, and ought to retreat to Andaman through AG-XI.
That should and ought were weak reeds on which to prop an op-plan was not lost on either Min or Kris. Nonetheless, Kris thought a strategy of using short jumps between different regions of the Gates to attack from various directions and keep Caneris confused and off balance might work.
Giving her ear a contemplative scratch, Min displayed Quinn’s report on the order of battle of the force she assessed Caneris had available and made a show of squinting at it.
“Lessee . . . a dreadnought, a brace of battleships, four battlecruisers, a dozen or so heavy cruisers, half as many light cruisers, a couple dozen tin cans . . . That adds up to what? Forty-odd?”
“Forty-nine.”
“Against . . . say, twenty-one?”
“Close enough.”
“And you realize one salvo from Bolimov outweighs the total gun power of those twenty-one?”
“Uh huh.” Kris could also sum up the total of Bolimov’s double banks of long 18-inchers against the guns of her proposed force, none which could boast more than a single bank of 5-ring eights.
Min essayed a roguish smile. “Just putting things in perspective here.”
Feeling obscurely needled, Kris scowled. “Fine. Now that we have some perspective, how do we proceed to the making-this-shit-play part?”
Smile intact, Min folded her hands. “What say we go have a chat with the General?”
* * *
General Corhaine listened without comment, expression betraying nothing, as Kris outlined her ideas. They’d covered a lot of this ground during the first assessment, though not at anything like these odds. Finally, when Kris was feeling her explanation had flamed out badly, the general spoke.
“You attacked at odds of thirty to one at Wogan’s Reef. How did that work?”
Caught off guard, Kris found herself at a loss for an answer. It was Huron’s idea and his tactics won the dogfight. She’d pretty much followed his lead and done what she was told (for once). With the general’s cool dissecting gaze upon her, she scrambled to get her thoughts in order.
“We smashed it up. Hit ’em as fast and hard as we could. Broke their formation, got inside, kept hitting, kept ’em stirred up. Tried to make them worry as much about fratricide as killing us.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Min interjected.
Kris gave the major a sidelong glance. “Except for the part this isn’t a fighter engagement, sure.”
“I don’t see why the same principle shouldn’t apply,” Corhaine said. “As you point out, we aren’t faster—actually, we aren’t as fast—but we are more agile. Our ability to jump allows us to control the engagement. But these formations here”—she highlighted what Kris had proposed—“inhibit our agility. They constrain where we can jump and increase the time to jump. If we’re going to rely on your tactics, it has to be all or nothing.”
“I thought you were supposed to try to maintain defense net integrity at all costs?”
Corhaine raised an eyebrow. “Against these odds? What’s the point?”
Min laughed. “Give us a little bit longer to kiss our ass goodbye?”
Now Corhaine shot over a glance and then ignored her. “Better to disrupt theirs—and hope they try to maintain it. If they’re struggling to maintain formation, it will be a lot harder to for them get a good bead on us.”
That made sense. In a desperate kind of way. So what else is new? “Okay, I buy that. We can make a hell of a lot of noise, ice things up, make a mess generally.” With a little luck, they might survive long enough for the relief force to arrive. “But if we just prick ’im with these harrying attacks, how do we slow him down? He can leave his cripples behind and push right through.”
This was a problem she couldn’t solve: how to concentrate their forces enough to slow Caneris down while keeping them dispersed enough to survive. The imperatives seemed mutually exclusive.
“Look at it from his point of view,” Corhaine answered. “What’s his biggest worry?”
“Massed torpedo attack?” Caneris didn’t have carriers with him, so his big ships were vulnerable there. Especially since the Ionians had the best pentaids going, and even though he couldn’t know if they’d supplied torps with state-of-the-art pentaids to her fleet, he’d have to respect that.
As she watched for Corhaine’s reaction, Kris reflected on her thinking of their force as “her fleet”.
“I agree. And he has AG-I behind his left to worry him. Without supporting carriers, facing attack from two axes, he’ll have to stretch his destroyer screen. That compels him to keep an open formation, to spread the attack and defeat it in depth?”
“Right.”
“Which opens him to precisely the tactics you propose.”
Kris wasn’t seeing it.
“Keeping his destroyer screen intact is vital to him. To protect his destroyer screen, he needs to pull it in tight. If this degenerates into a chaotic close engagement, he’s in difficulties there.”
“Okay . . .” Now she was catching on. “By varying the threat, we keep him shifting formation.”
“Which slows him down. The more often he has to regroup, the more concerned he is about the threat to his flank and rear, the more deliberate his progress has to be.”
“Yeah.” The picture was crystalizing for Kris. “I think I got it now.”
“It’s not an easy thing to acc
omplish,” the general cautioned. “You have to apply just enough strain to keep him guessing. If he figures it out and breaks loose, we’ll never stop him.”
“Porridge too hot, porridge too cold. Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” Min recited.
“What?” Kris shook her head at the major.
“Never mind”—with a grin.
* * *
They woke Huron. He sat up, blinking and yawning and combing his fingers through his unkempt hair where the gray touched it lightly at the temple.
“Lemme guess: you spent all night with Major Lewis and I’m about to be roped into something.” He said it with a particular look in his dark brown eyes.
Kris knew that look. “You’re not guessing.”
“Tell me about it.” Five sentences in, he realized his mistake and shook his head. “On second thought, try sending it.”
Kris took out her xel and flicked a stack of files over to his. Reclining again, he began to scroll through them. Presently, he set the device down and stood up.
“Let’s meet in twenty minutes.” To Kris’s impatient frown, he explained he wanted breakfast first. “I hate to contemplate suicide on an empty stomach.”
~ ~ ~
Day 220 (AM)
LMR Penthesileia, in orbit
Iona, Cygnus Mariner
Fortified with boiled eggs and steak (newly laid in from Ionian victualers only too happy to turn a tidy profit), above and beyond his usual coffee and orange juice, Huron met them in Penthesileia’s CIC, where they’d foregathered to wargame their concepts. The omnisynth, unsympathetic to a fault, mulled over the inputs, accounted for a large range of uncertainties, accepted their attempts to test the borders of reality, and spit out the same brutal result, over and over—variations on a theme of devastation.
Sound in theory, their practice was hamstrung by the difficulty of computing jumps in the Apollyon Gates, especially to the areas they hoped to use both to stage their hit-and-run attacks and take refuge from Caneris’ retaliation. Even shaving the safety margins on the convolution calcs to the reckless minimum and exploiting the lithomorph’s ability to decrypt the Halith fleet codes couldn’t do more than delay the inevitable.
“It comes down to the arithmetic,” Corhaine summed it up for the glum gathering. “Even at the most optimistic attrition rates, he still has a powerful force left over when we have none. That’ll become obvious to him within a day-cycle, and then it becomes a race we always lose.”
“What about this rock?” asked Kris, ‘stung by the splendor of a sudden thought’, largely out of long-simmering frustration. “Why can’t it do the jump calcs? Wouldn’t that be faster?”
On that novel point, they consulted with Lieutenant Ramses and Major Johan Neper of Chthonic Branch. After conferring, and by way of slow, deeply technical and often abstruse explanations, the two men delivered their dismal conclusion.
“I’m afraid it’s going to buy very little, if anything” Neper finished. “In a nutshell, the steps required to code the data into what the lithomorph understands takes as long or longer than a standard jump calculation. And, so far, we haven’t been able to get a response each and every time.”
“We can’t do this in real-time,” Ramses added, “and that’s what we need. What it comes down to, basically, is we need someone who’s fluent in lithomorph and we ain’t got one.” He obviously meant the comment to lighten the mood.
It didn’t work.
Trin reached out and touched Huron’s sleeve. At her confidential nod, he said, “I suggest we take thirty here. Drinks are on me.” As everyone stood, he caught General Corhaine’s attention. “General, mind if we takeover this space for a few minutes?”
Corhaine hadn’t missed the interchange between him and Trin. “Be my guest.”
* * *
“You’re saying the lithomorph likes of this guy?” Huron straightened abruptly from lounging against the deep-radar console.
“I said that’s what it looks like,” Trin said, having told him what she’d seen during that first visit to VelSilinjes’ lab. “I wouldn’t want to put too fine a point on it. Call it transference or imprinting or adaptation, it’s there.”
“And you think we can use this? Even though—if I understood correctly—it’s not real-time and even in this case, the lithomorph didn’t reply every time.”
“The lithomorph might not be replying consistently because it’s not real-time. The lithomorph might be looking . . .” Trin passed the side of her index finger across her incisors. “Looking for more. For lack of a better term.”
“What makes you think that?” His question was not rhetorical. Trin didn’t say things like this without hard data.
“There’s a documented instance of a lithomorph forming a . . . bond . . . with a human being.”
“Documented by whom?”
“Me.”
“And this—bond . . .” Huron pursed his lips, staring towards the hatch. “Involved communicating?”
“Correct.”
“So who’re we gonna get to communicate?”—although he knew the answer.
“Rafe, they present problems to the lithomorph by having someone attempt to solve them, recording the neural activity, applying some filtering, encoding and transmitting it. But the researchers can’t do more than set up the problem. They aren’t having a conversation. Basically, they send a message—a query—because that’s all they can do. And those messages are frequently ignored.”
“Understand”—waiting for the other boot to drop.
“Kris has a unique ability to solve jump convolutions mentally. She can do more than present a problem. In essence she does what the lithomorph does. The lithomorph shows distinct signs of . . . temperament. Maybe it would like to have a conversation with her?”
“Optimum transits are all she can do in her head,” Huron replied, thinking out loud while he grappled with the idea of talking to a rock. “Calculating optimum transits in the Gates buys you next to nothing.”
“But if she’s doing that and thinking of a practical transit, perhaps the lithomorph would help?”
“And feed her back the answer—in real-time.”
“That would be the hope. The hardware should not be a problem. They already use a neural scanner. It just a question of connecting it to the interface.”
Huron wasn’t thinking of hardware problems. “So how do you wanna proceed?”
“I’ll explain my findings to Dr. VelSilinjes. I think she’ll be quite intrigued. This could be ground-breaking. “
“And you want me to talk to Kris.”
“I think that would be best.”
“Y’know what she’ll say.”
“That’s why I think it would be best.”
“This is fuckin’ insane!” is what Kris said when Huron laid the position before her.
“The whole scheme is insane, Kris. It needs a crazy solution.”
Arms folded, Kris snorted as she shook her head. “Yeah well, this just totally busted the envelope on batshit crazy.”
~ ~ ~
Day 221
Isabelle Downs, Llanberis District
South Continent, Iona, Cygnus Mariner
It’s a rock, Kris thought as she stood in the twilit interior of Dr. VelSilinjes lab. A somewhat pampered rock, luxuriating in its bath, with the spray of fine gold contacts making it look a wee bit overdressed. From all the buildup, she’d been expecting a crystal or maybe a geode—a mineral with some flash or depth or fire to it. Not this dull hunk of stone.
Turning to the doctor, and acutely aware that she, Trin and Rafe were all studying her, she forced herself to look pleasant. Her experiences with neural technology, up to and including the therapy for her arm, had been anything but, and showing off her mathematical skills in public still made her feel like a performing dog. She’d never gotten over that and—despite what everyone said—she had trouble accepting how remarkable it was. People’s real problem was that they just didn’t try hard enough.
It was as simple as that.
Nor had she relaxed her conviction this was all beyond batshit crazy. When they’d proven that, they’d have to go back and think of something else. They would think of something else. A message from Kite had come in just that AM confirming Kris’s guess about the vulnerabilities in Bolimov’s nav system. With that piece now in place, they could start getting real about the possibilities.
For right now, she had the performing-dog thing to do.
Dr. VelSilinjes invited her over the console. Sitting, Kris reflected that at least this time, her public consisted only of the doctor. Rafe certainly didn’t count, and Trin only counted a small bit. Much better than a roomful of curious eyes. Still not great, but much better.
The doctor explained the procedure and showed Kris some previous examples and Kris nodded.
“. . . in this instance, we’ll be sending unfiltered data to the lithomorph in order to—”
“Huh?” Kris betrayed her wandering attention.
“Unfiltered,” VelSilinjes repeated. “No intermediate processing.”
At Kris’s failed attempt to replace her blank expression with another feigning comprehension, Trin added: “Your tactical problem requires a direct interchange with the lithomorph to achieve the time advantage needed over calculating jumps by the traditional method.”
Oh shit . . . That’s what she missed. Kris exhaled and swiped her hand across her mouth. “Right. Got it.”
“Maybe it’s best if we just begin,” VelSilinjes suggested, gauging Kris’s attitude.
“Sure.”
The doctor fitted a light, open helmet over Kris’s hair. “This is just used for recording and no one has reported any adverse effects. But we’ve never attempted bidirectional linkage before. The signals we’ve recorded don’t show any characteristics that would be problematic.”
And that’s supposed to reassure me? Kris thought with a twinge in her solar plexus.
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 51