The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  Caravaggio did and grimaced, though the Commonwealth official looked in puzzlement from his advisor to Daniel, then back again. The Goldenfels was a spy ship, and as such the signals officer was a specialist from a pool of officers other than those of the ordinary Fleet. Spies were folk whose business and associations made fighting officers steer clear of them, lest some of the muck stick.

  Daniel smiled musingly. He understood how Caravaggio felt. If Adele weren't Adele, he'd feel much the same way about her.

  "All right," said Caravaggio. "I'll feed the codes into your main computer, but be careful—once you enter the minefield, you have to follow the programmed course precisely. If you deviate by more than a few percent in course or speed, you're dead. There won't be a warning. The array's like a mousetrap: it doesn't think, it just acts."

  "Thank you, Lieutenant," Daniel said calmly, as though the threat didn't concern him. "If I lose control of the ship that badly on landing, we'll auger in without needing a minefield to kill us. Follow me, if you will."

  Daniel reached back for the hatch coaming, then pulled firmly to send himself into the bridge again. He gave himself just enough spin to rotate his body so that he faced forward when he reached his console and caught himself. Caravaggio kicked off a bulkhead and followed in a similarly slow, graceful flight.

  Adele was concentrating on her own display, but Daniel smiled at the back of her head as he went past. The way spacers learned to maneuver in weightlessness was rather amazing when he thought about it, which he normally didn't, of course. Well, after all, you didn't normally think about walking on the ground either; but if you considered all the muscles that had to work just so to keep you from falling on your face, that was pretty remarkable also.

  "Here, you can couple to the command console," Daniel said. He made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. "Or if you want to use another, be my guest. We're short-handed since the trouble, as you can see."

  He gave Caravaggio a cynical smile. The Goldenfels was indeed short-handed. Daniel had thought about trying to conceal the fact by putting techs from the Power Room at the consoles. There were too many ways that could've gone wrong, though, so he'd decided to make a virtue of necessity and hint at the horrendous casualties which had also ripped open the freighter's belly.

  Caravaggio looked grimly impressed as he seated himself on the couch. "No sir, the command console will be fine," he said, taking a data syringe from the pocket strapped to the left forearm of his vacuum suit. He pointed the syringe, a short tube with a pistol grip, into the console's input port and squirted the code into the ship's system.

  When the telltale above the port winked green, Caravaggio stood and slipped the syringe back into its container. "There you go, Lieutenant Kidd," he said. "Your identification signal will change in a continuous keyed sequence which matches the interrogatories from the defense array. Just follow the program I've input and you'll be fine."

  He pushed off toward the airlock where the Commonwealth personnel continued to wait in morose silence. Over his shoulder he called, "But for God's sake, don't abort your landing and try to lift again. You'll be blown to atoms before you've risen a thousand meters!"

  "Thank you, Lieutenant," Daniel repeated, remaining where he was in the middle of the bridge.

  With luck, Adele should be able to unravel and emulate the code Caravaggio had downloaded into the command console; she'd assured him the decryption suite of the Goldenfels was just as advanced as her own unit aboard the Princess Cecile. If she succeeded, then the defense array ceased to be a matter of concern.

  If that codebreaking didn't work out, though, well . . . it wasn't going to prevent the Goldenfels from doing considerable damage to Lorenz Base. But it was very unlikely the Goldenfels and those aboard her would survive more than seconds following their initial slashing attack.

  * * *

  The Goldenfels was under weigh again. Vesey had the conn. Adele assumed that controlling the ship's descent into Lorenz Base was simpler than the chore Daniel had taken for his own: preparing to loose the full weight of their weaponry against the Alliance.

  Adele was so sunk in her own work that she was aware of acceleration in the same fashion she was aware of breathing—mostly not at all. What a wealth—what a treasure house!—of information she was finding.

  The ship's computer ground away at the code controlling the Planetary Defense Array. Starship computers had to be able to project courses through multiple bubble universes, each with varied space-time constants; no workable human encryption system could be more complex.

  The algorithms necessary to attack encryption were quite different from those needed for astrogation, however. Adele had brought her software from the Princess Cecile. The system already aboard was configured specifically to the astrogation computer of the Goldenfels, however, so she was using the installed version instead of her own.

  She had nothing to add to the processing once she'd put it in hand, so she concentrated on Lorenz Base, dug into the surface of the moon which always faced Radiance. The installations were almost completely hidden, but by opening the files of the maintenance department—which weren't protected any more rigorously than the similar files of the Xenos city government were—Adele had retrieved complete schematics of the power, sewer, water, and air-handling systems of every portion of the base.

  Some of it didn't mean anything to her—the huge overhead trackways could be for any purpose from food storage to missile transfer—but she was confident that Daniel could layer usage on her armature of facts. She was transferring the files to all members of the command group as she uncovered them, slugging them as to source and adding titles when possible.

  It struck Adele almost absently that Lorenz Base was huge. It was built into the rim of an asteroid impact crater seven miles in diameter, the largest terrain feature on this side of Gehenna. On Radiance the crater was known as the Eye of Darkness, and many of the more devout inhabitants refused to do business on days when the Eye appeared to wink in the rising sun.

  It was long after sundown on the portion of Radiance that now faced the moon. Adele didn't suppose what was about to happen in the Eye was bad news for those on the primary, but it would certainly look that way to anyone here on Gehenna.

  While Mr. Pasternak was refitting the Goldenfels with High Drive motors from the wreck on Morzanga, Adele had taken the time to configure her console into the fashion she wanted it. Now she could control it directly with her wands instead of using her handheld unit as an interface.

  Her fingers twitched, ripping data from banal files and reconnecting them in shapes that the people who'd entered the bits could never have imagined. By combining information from a score of service operations, most of them run by civilian contractors, she was creating the targeting data Daniel needed.

  Lorenz Base's twenty-four hangars were dug into the crater's inner walls in groups of eight. Each hangar was 57 meters wide and 412 meters long if the power connections were flush with the walls. Two of the groupings were in the northwest and southwest quadrants; the third was to the east. There were 90 meters of rock between hangars in a group and 450 meters between the nearest members of the two western groupings.

  "Adele, can you tell which ones are occupied?" said a voice through her console. "Those hangars are big enough that any one could hold the whole destroyer flotilla. I don't want to waste time smashing empties unless I have to!"

  Adele was aware that it was Daniel speaking, though that didn't matter in her present frame of mind. Her task was simply to answer the question no matter who asked it; to retrieve the needed information in a form that the querent could use.

  Power usage wasn't conclusive, but water was another matter. Water by the kiloliters was needed for washing, for drinking, and particularly for filling the reaction mass tanks of ships that'd been months in transit and avoiding landings for fear their movements might be reported. Hangars one through five in the southwest grouping showed a vast increase in water usage
over the past fourteen days. There were frequent burps in flow to Hangar East One as well, but those were fairly consistent over the past three months.

  "Here are the active hangars, sir," she said. "Sir" was a polite response to a querent, not a junior officer addressing her commander. She transferred to Daniel a schematic of the base overlaid with color-coded gradients based on water inflow. SW1-5 were bright red, E1 was yellow; the other eighteen positions ranged from violet to dark indigo.

  "By God they are!" Daniel said. "By God they are!"

  Adele drew a deep breath and relaxed. She had a realtime visual of Lorenz Base at the top of her display, but she hadn't taken time to look at it. Now she did.

  The Goldenfels was slanting toward the crater at a steep angle from due west. Its jagged walls were ochre where sunlight touched them and sharp purple shadows where it did not: Gehenna had no atmosphere to blur the edges of light and not-light.

  A few above-ground installations glinted, elevator heads and gun positions. Near the center of the crater floor was a slim naval vessel, one of the eight destroyers whose presence Daniel had foretold when he was released from the grip of the Tree on New Delphi.

  Adele's console clucked an attention signal; she brought up the information which it thought she needed to have.

  The console was correct. "The computer's solved the minefield code," Adele said as her wands moved in tight arcs, transmitting new orders to the node which controlled the defense array. "I'm setting the command node to reject all signals to attack the Goldenfels. I'll have it . . . there, we're clear."

  "Roger that!" Daniel said. Then in an exultant voice he went on, "Ship, this is Six. Prepare to engage the enemy!"

  CHAPTER 29

  Daniel hadn't had enough time to do all the things he needed to do for an effective attack, so—thank God and Adele!—he made time now that it was safe to. He reached for the controls himself, shouting, "Ship, I'm taking the conn!"

  He regretted treating Vesey with brusque discourtesy, since she'd been performing with her usual skill. Vesey's only flaw was that she couldn't read Daniel's mind—but that was critical now, because he couldn't explain to her the things that had to be done instantly. He'd apologize to her afterwards, if there was an afterwards.

  Daniel rolled the thrusters up from the 40% power at which they were idling toward a landing to 95%, not quite normal maximum and certainly not through the gate into overload. He didn't need thrust quite that badly, and at the highest settings—even with the units properly warmed up as these were—there was always a risk of fracturing a nozzle and sending the ship into a dangerous oscillation.

  Even so the shock of doubled power rang through the Goldenfels as though Daniel had driven her into the ground. Because they were coming in at a slant, the added thrust overcame forward inertia without being instantly sufficient to lift the vessel against the moon's gravity. Their angled course became vertical; the Goldenfels dropped toward the surface short of the crater's rim instead of inside it.

  "Goldenfels to Base!" he shouted, hoping the adrenaline in his voice suggested panic instead of the blazing triumph he really felt. It was going to work, by God it was! "We have a problem! We have a problem!"

  Heaven only knew what Lorenz Control thought when the incoming spy ship lurched toward the ground in a gush of expanding plasma. Their optical pickups would've shown the damage to the Goldenfels' underside, even through the mist of exhaust as she began braking toward them. The burp of rainbow fire was so great that it'd be natural to assume that her thrusters had exploded, but the very suddenness would make it hard for the base personnel to think anything.

  The Goldenfels was configured as a spy ship and raider. Her gun armament was as powerful as that of a heavy cruiser of several times her displacement. She was intended to approach other vessels in sidereal space, posing as a merchantman. When she was close enough she'd unmask her batteries and blast away the other vessels' antennas and rigging, leaving them crippled.

  The Goldenfels wasn't, however, expected to engage other warships in a normal action at long range. She had only two missile tubes, aligned to port and starboard, and the twenty missiles in her magazines were no more than the Princess Cecile, much smaller but a true warship, carried in RCN service. The missiles were for last-ditch defense when the raider was being run to ground; there was little chance that they would destroy an enemy, but they might force a more powerful adversary to maneuver violently and by so doing allow the Goldenfels to escape into the Matrix.

  If Adele hadn't disabled the Planetary Defense Array, one of the mines would've ripped a sleet of ions into the Goldenfels as soon as she deviated from the preset course. The jet would vaporize a ten-foot hole in the ship, and if it passed through the Power Room the fusion bottle would go critical to finish the job.

  The mines didn't detonate. Given time, somebody in Lorenz Control would begin wondering why they hadn't. Daniel had no intention of giving them that much time.

  "Vesey, hold us in a hover!" he ordered, using the midshipman as though she were an extra pair of hands. "And on your life keep us below the rim of the crater! Break, Sun, clear your 15-cm guns and program them to take out the defensive installations when we rise above the rim again."

  The turrets holding the 10-cm plasma cannon were extended to provide more space in the ship's interior. That was normal operating procedure; the guns were only retracted during entry into an atmosphere. The raider's four lateral twin installations were concealed, however. Approaching a secret base with those guns ready to fire would arouse comment and very likely a volley from the base defenses.

  "Adele," Daniel continued, "send Sun a targeting template. Sun, keep the 4-inch guns—"

  They were actually 10-cm guns, Fleet standard instead of RCN, but the distinction wasn't important just now.

  "—under your control for targets of opportunity. Especially that destroyer! Out!"

  As Daniel spoke, his fingers hammered the virtual keyboard to bring up the attack screen and to input data. This was going to be tricky, but with a little luck . . .

  The shutters concealing the paired 15-cm guns shrieked open. The Goldenfels' hull had warped when the High Drive blew the vessel over on her side. Woetjans and her riggers had straightened the trackways as best they could with jacks and sledge hammers, but they hadn't even tried to do more than a quick and dirty job.

  "Template transferred," Adele said crisply. An icon at the top of Daniel's display pulsed to call attention to itself. As it did so, he realized that it'd been waiting for his notice for the past several minutes.

  The Goldenfels porpoised as Vesey struggled to bring her under control. Daniel had dumped the thrusters back to 60% power as he handed over the ship, but it was already starting to rise. It continued to upward on momentum for several seconds; as it did so, Vesey almost inevitably overcorrected.

  In response the Goldenfels plunged toward the surface, yo-yoing a thousand feet before the midshipman caught herself and the vessel. At last Vesey damped the drop into a slow shuddering climb while she cut thrust by one-percent increments.

  "Target programming complete!" Sun reported. "Sir, we're ready to go! We're ready!"

  "Mistress Vesey," Daniel ordered, "take us over the base at a thousand feet above the crater floor—"

  The rim averaged 800 feet above the floor, but there were spikes sticking up 150 feet higher.

  "—on a heading of three-four-nine degrees true, speed over ground eighteen feet per second. Over."

  "Roger," Vesey said. The Goldenfels had retained a slight forward motion from her earlier wobbling. Now she began to accelerate and slant upward. The outer rim of the crater had been a mile ahead of them. It swelled in the realtime display at the bottom of Daniel's attack board, itself a cat's cradle of vectors on which time was indicated by color coding.

  The Goldenfels would cross the crater in a very nearly south-to-north direction. Daniel didn't have a choice because of the unusual lateral alignment of his missile tubes, but
the situation was far from ideal. The direction the missile was pointing when it left the launcher didn't matter at the multi-thousand mile ranges of a space battle, but the Goldenfels would be firing her missiles point blank. They'd hit before they were able to course correct.

  "Ship, we're crossing the rim in five seconds," Vesey warned. "Now!"

  Sun had a clear line of sight with the forward 10-cm guns momentarily before any of the other weapons bore. He sent six plasma bolts into the dorsal 13-cm turret of the Alliance destroyer on the crater floor, preparing to lift off. His cannon syncopated one another, each firing as the other cooled for an instant. Then the loading mechanism injected another pellet of deuterium in a cradle that positioned it for the surrounding laser array. When the lasers tripped, they fused the deuterium and directed the blast down the bore as a slug of ions moving at the speed of light.

  Gehenna had no atmosphere to disperse the bolts. They struck with full force, blasting holes in the steel and welding the remainder of the turret to the ring on which it turned. Blast-proof hatches aboard the destroyer would be closing automatically, preventing an explosive loss of pressure throughout the ship but also disrupting communication and traffic from one compartment to the next.

  An instant later the forward 15-cm guns cleared the crater rim and opened fire according to the program Sun had set. The blasts jolted the Goldenfels, whipping her noticeably. Bloody Hell! These guns were way too heavy for the ship!

  The Goldenfels was good sized, but her frames were those of a freighter, not a warship. Seams started at every shot, and when the rear turrets began to fire the ship rattled like a tambourine.

  But below where the bolts were hitting, flashes and volcanic secondary eruptions brought down slabs of the crater walls. Lorenz Base was defended by both plasma and kinetic weapons—hypervelocity rockets and electromagnetic guns which accelerated slugs of a kilogram and more. A starship could use its sails as one-time protection against plasma bolts, but a heavy osmium slug would pass through the molecule-thin fabric on its way to punching similar holes in and out of a hull of any conceivable thickness.