Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10

by The Zen Gun (v1. 1)

  "Do you see the reason why the shells have to be heavy? A travelling feetol bubble encounters the resistance of the normal space through which it moves. The magnitude of this resistance is an inverse function of the mass contained within the bubble. If the shells were too light, they would slow down even before their bubbles had weakened."

  There was a point Magroom had wondered about but had never been able to find out. "They have to be aimed across half a light-year? On a target no larger than a ship?''

  Archier smiled. "No, that would be asking too much of our gun comps. The shells have limited self-guidance near the end of their trajectory."

  Staring at the massive gun, Magroom had to remind himself that this was not fantasy. This was real—and in deadly earnest.

  It gave him an altogether different perception of things. This, he realized, was what maintained the Empire, which he had thought of as a vague entity up to now. Oh, he had heard of how the Empire would sometimes punish worlds, but it rarely happened and the stories had an almost fictional quality. It came home to him with a vengeance, now, that this warship with its twenty big guns was the reason why it rarely happened. In space, the Empire dominated; it could blast any rival force of ships to kingdom come. As long as it could do that, as long as no nonimperial fleets could defend disobedient worlds, there could be no effective rebellion.

  All the effete decadence, the senses-soaked sophistication, he had grown used to since boarding Lilac Willow, faded into the distance. This was the sharp end, and here the Empire meant business.

  An old refrain came to his mind: "Rule the Empire, the Empire rule the stars." "But tell me, Admiral," he said, "isn't it true you haven't got all that many of these ships left now?"

  "That's right," Archier admitted with a sigh. "Not as many as we could do with, anyway. But that's only because Diadem's robot workforce has been on strike for the past hundred years, as part of their campaign to be recognised as sentients. As a result the Star Force yards are idle and no new ships have been laid down in that time. If the strike should end, we can begin replacing the fleets.'' He shrugged, gesturing about him. "These guns were designed originally to be operated by fast-reaction robots, but they are so unreliable now. Still, animals serve well enough. Loyalty counts for more than you might think."

  "But this is unbelievable," Magroom protested. "If it's doing you as much damage as that, why don't you just give the robots the sentient status they want?"

  Archier stared at him blankly. "The Empire will not be coerced," he stated simply. "You are suggesting the Imperial Council should give official voice to what is probably an untruth, and we simply do not do things like that. If machine sentience could be established philosophically, then it would be another matter."

  A sense of unreality began once more to engulf Magroom. "Not even if it means the fall of the Empire?" he persisted. "Let me tell you something; for a practical issue as vital as this our politicians on Alaxis—who are all elected representatives of regional populations—would have got machine sentience proved from top to bottom. Truth wouldn't have anything to do with it."

  'Then that shows why you need the Empire," Archier told him. "You need the Empire to save you from your own barbarism."

  Archier had managed to make brief visits to about a quarter of the ships under his command when the call to battle rang through Ten-Fleet. For a moment he was taken by surprise; the rebel fleet had advanced more quickly than anticipated.

  He had returned to Standard Bearer to refresh himself before continuing the inspection tour. When Arctus came bustling in with the news, he laid down the flask of liquid cannabis concoction he had been sipping, and removed the coronet that had been wafting calming cortical pulses through his brow.

  "Is this a verified ranging?" he asked, glancing through the date sheet the elephant gave him.

  Arctus waved his trunk uncertainly. "It's usually reliable at that distance. About ten light-years."

  "Usually. But not always."

  "Nevertheless, Admiral, may I suggest we go to the Command Room without delay . . . ?" Arctus' trunk curled itself questioningly in the air.

  "Yes, we must," Archier agreed crisply. He hoped the elephant didn't think he was scared. He was, for a fact, beginning to feel tense despite the cannabis and the coronet. Early indications were that the rebel fleet was sizable; and this was his first proper space battle.

  He rose, placed his Admiral's crested combat casque upon his head, and nodded to Arctus.

  They proceeded through a door to his right. The Command Room was not a physical location but a holocast meeting locus present somewhere within the communications nerve-net that covered the entire fleet. As Archier entered, it was into the appearance of a council room whose chairs, couches and cushions were arranged around a circular pool. In this pool, vague images moved.

  Gruwert, Archier's Acting Fire Command Officer, was already sprawled upon a large mattress-like cushion. He was fairly snuffling with excitement. Sitting across the pool from him, frowning with tension, was a young woman with an artificially aged face and brittle blue-grey hair: the Fleet Maneuvers Officer.

  Other officers of command rank popped into existence around the pool, some disappearing a moment as their attention was diverted elsewhere. Archier mounted to the Admiral's throne.

  Arctus settled down beside him. "Pool data, Arctus," Archier said.

  The pool at his feet cleared momentarily and then, indistinctly, a group of blurred dots appeared. These were the contents of the sheets Arctus had shown Archier: the rebel battlefleet. Ranging numbers appeared beside them; then these, too, wavered and altered, as if uncertain of themselves.

  Archier sighed. The doubts he had expressed to Arctus had referred to a technical problem the Empire had never resolved satisfactorily, how did one communicate with a feetol ship? Likewise, was there any way of maintaining communication with the far-flung worlds of the Empire except by despatching such ships?

  It could be done and it was done, but only within limits. There was in nature a phenomenon that propagated itself with a velocity that was practically instantaneous as compared with the tardy progress of light, but it was, so to speak, only half a phenomenon. The basic force in nature was the linear recession that took place between all particles—though it exhibited itself as an actual motion only between very distant objects, such as the farther galaxies. The rate of this recession was what determined c, the velocity of light. But discovery of the recession lines left an old problem in physics only partly resolved: the Newtonian problem of Action at a Distance. There had to be a component of the line, it was surmised, that simultaneously "informed" each of the two particles at its ends of the recession of the other.

  Eventually this component had been identified. It was styled "the leader tone." It responded to spatial attenuation as effected by a feetol generator; and because its reaction time was near-zero throughout the length of the line information could be passed down it from a vibrating feetol field. In the same way, it could be used for light-years-range radar.

  Yet the leader tone had no independent existence. It was, almost, nature's mirror trick, and seemed unable quite to overcome the normal constraints of information theory. Any data imparted down it had to be incomplete. Messages with more than a small information content became garbled or ambiguous. Likewise, the radar was generally unreliable.

  It was as if the principle once embedded in physics, that no message could be transmitted faster than light, still fought back. The closer it got, the more certain the ranging figures on the Escorian fleet would become—but then its usefulness would be much reduced.

  "Nothing on numbers, Arctus?" he said querulously.

  Arctus was silent for a moment. He was speaking on his in-brain communicator to the radar room. At his request they were sacrificing range-data to try to gain some notion of the size of the fleet. The dots blurred, became a patch, disappeared.

  "Could be up to two hundred vessels," the elephant announced in a mild, neutr
al voice.

  "Two hundred?" echoed the captain of a front-line-o'-war incredulously. "How could they assemble such a force without us knowing?"

  "All too easily, I'm afraid," Gruwert grunted fatalistically. "The Empire's failure is mainly one of supervision. Well, let's see if we still have what it takes to smash a revolt!"

  "Data will be harder in a few minutes, Admiral," Arctus said. "They are closing fast."

  "All right. Excuse me, then, while I take a stroll."

  In body Archier did not move. Here in the command room mental access was much enhanced, and he wanted to take a last look around the flagship.

  He flitted invisibly from point to contact point, pausing but briefly at most stations. Finally, he toured the gun turrets, of which Standard Bearer carried twenty-eight, more than any other ship of the fleet. The crews were motley: animals, children, one or two human adults. Turret fourteen was manned entirely by children under the age of ten—youngsters of that age volunteered eagerly for gun duty—while the crews of two more consisted of animals officered by a child no older.

  Archier felt no misgivings over the performance of these young persons. Their training was excellent, and they knew how to use their comps to maximum effect. What was more, they were full of enthusiasm.

  He had nearly finished his cursory tour when a voice in his ear brought him back to the Command Room. "Ranging close, sir," Arctus murmured, his voice uncharacteristically tense. "Look!"

  In the pool Archier saw one of the rebel ships; radar had gained an image of visual quality. From the look of it the ship had once been a passenger liner. It carried more than passengers now. Welded crudely and seemingly haphazardly over its elegant hull, like ugly metal slabs, were casemates roughly similar in shape to the turrets that studded Standard Bearer.

  Some of those present drew in their breath in dismay. So the rebels had feetol cannon. That these weapons could have been built outside Diadem—unless, inconceivably, they had somehow been smuggled out of there—came as a shock to Archier. He had assumed the Escorians would endeavour to get in close, so they could fight using short-range weapons.

  "Coming within cannon range," Archier advised.

  "Very well," Archier responded. "Order opening volley as applicable."

  "Volley away!" Gruwert wheezed, almost immediately.

  "Combat mode," said Archier.

  With those words the pool, the Command Room itself, vanished, and the battle proper started. Archier and his staff were suddenly in combat space, a seeming void in which they were disembodied entities perceiving the elements of the conflict directly.

  There were really two levels to this space. One was merely a three-dimensional spacetime—the arena in which the battle was to take place. The other was an information space. The commanders conducted the engagement by plugging themselves into a data network that shunted to and between them a flow of constantly updated battle reports.

  Ordinary language was too slow to suffice in circumstances like this. Gradually, over a course of minutes, the command staff lapsed into battle language: an abbreviated, syncopated form of speech which relayed information and commands fast enough to take advantage of the speed of machine talk.

  The first words Archier heard in this echoing void were those of his pig Fire Command Officer. "Two hits!" Gruwert squealed. "Forward right, Admiral!" Then he added casually: "Enemy guns appear to be taking aim."

  Archier had hoped for better results from his opening volley. He could see the Escorian fleet clearly now. It was fanning out ahead of them. One large and one small vessel had converted into sparkling nebulae: that was how combat-mode display presented a ship disintegrating when hit by a tritium shell.

  He rattled out orders. "One—volley-two; two—bowl plan, effect! Three—FCO direct fire."

  He was taking a calculating risk, getting in a following opening volley. A more textbook procedure would have been to disperse the fleet into bowl plan after only one. But while his ships were bunched together in one big feetol bubble their shells could range further; and Archier was counting on still being out of range of the Escorian guns. With luck, they would not have mastered the technique of combining feetol bubbles yet.

  He was right, but only just right, given the aggregate speed of approach of the two fleets. He watched a briefly dazzling pinprick display of shells exploding on proximity fuses among the Escorian ships; three more rebels nebulaed. At the same time the Escorians had also opened fire; their shells fell short, falling below c while still one-tenth of a light-year distant.

  Meantime the ships of Ten-Fleet were deserting the common feetol bubble, emerging from it like drops of oil until, in moments, it had entirely disappeared. They lost much in speed and maneuverability; but no admiral could keep his ships so vulnerably close together during battle. They were adopting bowl plan—spreading out in a huge concave formation with the enemy as close as possible to its focus. The fleet's front-line-o'-warships then began using their prodigious rate of fire on selected targets.

  With satisfaction Archier observed the havoc they wrought in the brief interval before the Escorian fleet's rapidly developing dispersion rendered the bowl-and-focus concept redundant. He had been waiting to see what game plan the rebels would adopt; ruefully he recognised that they had opted for what was probably the best plan of all in their case—namely, none.

  It made sense. They had none of Diadem's military experience; no centuries-old archives on tactics and strategy. Rather than try to outfox professionals, they were attempting to pre-empt tactics altogether by means of enforced chaos. Like an explosion the rebel ships leaped for all points in Ten-Fleet's formation, firing as they went. The bowl deformed and twisted as the two fleets merged and began to slug it out ship by ship.

  For the staff of the Command Room, this was the most frustrating type of situation. It particularly irked Archier to find his task as battle director reduced to a primitive level, having to bend his efforts to seeing that rebel groups did not isolate and surround an Imperial ship so as to outgun it. As he dealt with the reports flooding in from the raging firefight, looking in the Command Room's combat space like a war of fireflies, he quickly realized that the Escorians had created a melee in which their greater numbers could, conceivably, tell against the superior gunnery of Ten-Fleet. Further, they had achieved their objective of coming in at close quarters so as to deploy those weapons not hitherto denied Diadem's subject worlds—electromagnetic beams whose temperatures were stellar in intensity and whose density was that of steel; quake beams, a variant of feetol technique, that disintegrated solid matter by quantum shaking; and, of course, an endless variety of self-guided missiles, sub-c in velocity but deadly dangerous when combat distances were measured in light minutes.

  A cry of alarm came from the Fleet Maneuvers Officer. "We're losing control, Admiral! We're dispersing!" In the stress of the moment she had forgotten to use combat speech. "Combat region now exceeds gunnery range," Gruwert squealed in agreement.

  Archier had been aware of this danger for some minutes; it offered another advantage to the enemy. He told the FMO to disengage temporarily, to pull out all ships in order to regroup. As long as they could keep to the tactically effective repertoire of formations that had been proven in the past, he believed victory would eventually be theirs.

  But evidently someone on the Escorian side had already thought this through. The FMO had no trouble reducing the battle perimeter, but she found it impossible to extricate the fleet from the enemy. Wherever it went, the Escorians followed, able to match speeds as long as Ten-Fleet did not take up galaxy formation and mesh bubbles. The two fleets went hurtling through Escoria, speeding heedlessly past star after star and clinging together in a furiously energy-spitting mass.

  A blinding flash of coruscating purple light suddenly enveloped the Command Room's combat space. When it had gone, so had the combat space. Normal lighting had returned Archier was sitting on the throne, blinking, only his flagship staff before him.

&n
bsp; Even the pool was dead.

  After a moment the Damage Assessment Officer spoke up. "We have sustained a near miss. The hull's combat mode receptors have been burned off."

  "What about the rest of it?"

  The officer paused. "Other communications continue to function."

  "Weaponry too," Gruwert announced. "It was some Simplex-damned converted gas carrier got in a shot at us. Have range; training all guns . . ." He tailed off, his small eyes glazed in concentration.

  "Any chance of regaining contact?" Archier asked his DAO. The officer shook his head.

  The Command Room was now useless, unable to receive the fleet's sensory webwork that had made combat space possible. "Then we shall have to open the old bridge," Archier decided. "Let's get up there quick."

  "It might be a bit of a job getting through," Arctus remarked. "There's a big party going on on decks thirty to thirty-five."

  'Well, have the bridge opened ready for our arrival."

  "Excellent work, Turret Fourteen!" Gruwert exploded suddenly. "They got him!"

  "Congratulations," Archier said absently. He stepped down from the throne and led his half dozen officers out of the Command Room and to the nearby travelator. Once inside the capacious compartment they soared up to deck twenty-nine, the site of Standard Bearer's old-style bridge, without difficulty— Archier had been afraid someone would have tampered with the switches, depositing any unwary transship traveller in the midst of the celebrations; it was a common trick. On debouching from the travelator, however, it became evident the party had strayed outside its stated bounds. On a deck of coloured glass, old-young women danced with extravagantly costumed young men, forming a vivid, swirling crowd. Strictly speaking their presence was out of order; this was a working area of the ship, though disused. Varihued smokes drifted through the air, making Archier feel intoxicated. Someone had mixed a powerful combination of incenses.