In the partial pressure of the airlock, Samwels heard a muffled thump. He felt it through his boot soles. The crash-launch. Fourteen destroyers, five cruisers, and the Dawnlight with her disabled mass inverter were now thrusting outward from Gemini’s lower bay. The whistling from his helmet shell seemed louder.
Once out of the lock, Samwels took an extra half-second to slap a medipad on his calf and jumped into the nearest drop tube, headed for the base’s combined command center and situation room, called simply “the Plot.”
Admiral Koskiusko was bent over the TAC—the Tactical Analysis Computer—display, which was subordinate to the real-time, holographic images of the Central Zone Repeater. The admiral’s brow was furrowed. He straightened when he caught sight of Samwels entering the compartment.
“There you are, Captain. We’ve got something strange here. Damned strange.”
Samwels hurried over, doing his best not to show a limp.
“The CZR shows an attack by upwards of one hundred large ships,” the admiral rumbled. “They dropped out of hyperspace in the classic globing formation. Damned tight, too. They were on us in a span of twenty-three seconds.” He turned to a nearby watchstander. “Twenty-three sound right, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, Sir. One-oh-four ships in two-two-point-eight-niner, to be exact.”
“All right, so we’re dead. Total wipeout. No defense for that kind of engagement. Even a crash-launch, at an attack:defend ratio of five-to-one, is a hopeless gesture. And after they deal with our fleet, their combined firepower can overload our own deflector system. Then the base vaporizes. Dead . . .
“So, Captain. Why aren’t we dead?”
“They aren’t attacking?”
“Sure they’re attacking. Giving our destroyers and cruisers hell. But not enough hell. In the time you took to get up here, we’ve already licked our own weight in bogies. We shouldn’t, but we have.”
“How many have we lost, Sir?”
“Fortinbras is half-blind, and the old Dawnlight’s taken a major pressure loss. Everyone else is still flying and fighting.”
Samwels bent to peer into the TAC. He toggled two keys to switch it from radar image to universal transponder. The analysis held: their attackers coded out as large, both heavily armed and heavily shielded, destroyers, cruisers, and even three planetary monitors. The admiral was right. Gemini should be dead.
“Perhaps their intention is not total victory. Could they be trying to scare us?”
“Hrrumphh,” the admiral said. “Central Fleet will not be cowed.”
“Yes, Sir. Do they know that?”
“They ought to—unless they’re bandits from far outside the Pact Perimeter.”
“What do they call themselves?”
“They’ve made no formal challenge.”
“And their transponders don’t identify. Whom do we suspect? What does the Intelligence say?”
“It’s read my logs. It says we’re being attacked by Arachnid Cluster Command. Ninety-percent probability on intention. But—”
“But Spile doesn’t have any hundred heavy fighters, even if he’s managed to co-opt Scorpio Base.”
“Never. Admiral Pozzolan is as loyal as I am.”
“Of course, Sir. I only raise the point to dismiss it.”
“Look!” Koskiusko pointed into the holographic repeater. “Double burst. Two more gone . . . A third!”
“They don’t seem to fight very well,” Samwels observed. “Their maneuvers seem—well—sluggish.”
“Hit on the Gloriosus, Sir,” a talker reported. “Starboard polar deflectors are—secondary concussion! Guns down. Nav down. Drive down. Pressure felling . . . Sir, the Gloriosus has ceased transmitting.”
Almost as an afterthought, the zone repeater showed a small winking star. Gemini had lost the first of her children to war.
“Damn!” from the admiral.
As if encouraged by this initial kill, the attackers suddenly rallied. For the first time in the battle, four and five ships were engaging each of the base’s defenders. The Arachnids—if that was what they were—seemed to be teaching themselves coordinated tactics as they fought. Talker chatter from the panels behind Samwels and the admiral suddenly doubled and tripled. In the span of five minutes, they lost three more ships.
“Sir?” Samwels ventured. “Perhaps we should summarize this development and send a hyperwave signal to CORECINC.”
“Are you throwing in the towel, Captain?”
“Not at all, Sir. We must, however, allow for all eventualities. Even for—demoralizing—possibilities.”
The admiral’s face hardened. “Send the signal.”
Samwels snagged a talker out of the line and dictated his orders. The sailor nodded once and left the Plot for the Comm Shack. When Samwels turned back to the CZR, it flickered and went black.
“Damn!”
“Interfrequency flutter, Sir!” one of the techies called. “They’re jamming us.”
That meant the base battle computers were blind. The captains out in the thick of the fight were getting no tactical projections. Or worse, they were getting invalid projections.
“Clear it!” the admiral barked.
“Can’t—Sir.”
“Use the chaff overrides,” Samwels called.
“Ineffective.”
“Hand the token over to Roselight,” the admiral ordered. “We’ll piggyback from her bridge consoles. At least we’ll get to watch.”
“If the cruiser is destroyed—Sir?” Samwels prompted.
“Then we pass down to the next ranking cruiser captain, then to destroyers—if their equipment can handle the load. By then, there might not be much of a fight left to track, anyway.” It was the first defeatist thought Koskiusko had voiced.
Seven more ships went out, harried by their attackers through the damage stages, from failed magnetic shielding, to failed gunnery coordination, to failed maneuvering, to failing pressure, and finally to death.
As he watched this ballet of the dying, Samwels began to see a pattern.
“Look, Sir! One of the attackers always holds back. Just behind the others. Still it consistently scores more hits on our ships. The others in the fight are just harriers, window dressing, essentially amateurs. But, in each case, that ship which is keeping its distance—that’s the professional.”
“Relay that to Roselight. Add coordinates where known.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And see if the base batteries can train in from the bounced perspective of the cruiser.”
“I’ll tell Lieutenant Carnot it’s never been done before. Then he’ll find a way to do it.”
The admiral grinned.
Within ten minutes, under battle control from the Roselight and aided by Samwels’ deductions, the base defenders were taking a heavier toll among the “professionals.” In fact, they had cut the enemy almost in half. The less skilled of the attackers were still taking an occasional destroyer, but more by luck than tactics. The Gemini captains were getting tired, and the battle computers on the cruiser were fearfully overloaded.
At the end of twenty minutes, the first of the patrols, including the cruiser Aurora, had popped back on emergency recall and tipped the balance.
“We’re down to three cruisers, five destroyers, Admiral,” one of the talkers reported. “You wanted to—”
“Yes, yes. Tell them to begin a staged withdrawal to the base inner circle. Pull the enemy behind them, north and south, into range of our polar batteries. Signal Carnot to prepare for full autofire in—”
“Forty seconds, Sir?” prompted Samwels.
“Forty seconds it is.”
“Aye-aye, Sir.”
The feint began, played to look as if the wounded defenders were making a gallant retreat. Thirty seconds into the maneuver three more destroyers popped out of hyperspace, behind the closing enemy, joining with the Aurora and her squadrons in a classic pincers.
“Now!” Koskiusko husked in a dry throat.
>
Inner ring of defenders and outer, supported by the base’s own guns, they all switched to a coordinated autofire under cyber control. The holofocus fit with a white glare. Samwels and the admiral had to shield their eyes. Talkers on the other side of the Plot turned away.
When the glare died down, the holographic repeater was clear. Only the Gemini ships were indicated on either side of a dead zone. The zone itself was empty.
The image was a computer’s lie, of course. In the eye of his mind, Samwels could see cubic kilometers of hanging, eddying debris. Ceramics, plastics, metal, and meat floated, charred, and broken, in the dissipating wisps of cooled plasma.
“Dispatch Aurora to rescue duty,” the admiral ordered. “Tell Captain Worley to give it two hours. If he isn’t finding survivors in that time, there are none to find. Rest of the ships and base crews to stand down . . . And tell the men, well done.”
Samwels nodded and started off.
“Oh, and Hildred—thank you.”
“My duty, Sir.”
“Nonsense, Captain. Do you think we don’t monitor emergencies from up here? I saw what you did in the docking bay. I figure you headed off a Trojan horse maneuver that might have tipped the balance when we had to launch.”
“It was the Capuchin, Sir.”
The admiral shook his head. “Stupid sacrifice. Alien psychotics. He wasted himself for at most four men. You alerted us to the situation, called for reinforcements, then charged right in and cleared that freighter’s entire hold, including an operational plasma gun. Clear thinking, teamwork, and courage in the face of the enemy. That’s what saved us, and my report on this action will make certain recommendations to CORECINC. Good work, Captain.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
* * *
As a coda to the fight, Samwels sat in on the admiral’s board debriefing the Gemini ship captains. The report from Captain Worley of Cruiser Aurora made interesting reading. Although he had recovered no survivors, Worley had picked up enough residue from the final seconds of the engagement to do a computer scan and make a statistical analysis.
“Merchant ships. I’ll stake my commission on it.”
“But their transponders—” Samwels protested.
“I don’t care what their radio codes were rigged to show. I’ve got a couple of tons of hull metal, most in pieces about a meter square. It’s not as thick as a warship’s. Plus I’ve got four or five hundred cubic meters of fittings and equipment fragments. Some of it’s military, sure, but on a ratio of ten-to-one, it’s civilian stuff—cybers, cabling, thrusters, servos, hydraulics, suit packs . . . We even got serial numbers, for God’s sake.”
“You’ve traced those, have you?” the admiral drawled.
“Of course, Sir. Some of it’s Arachnid Cluster Command. Some from the Bovari Trading Group. Most, however—sixty-nine-point-eight percent—is Haiken Maru. I’d bet platinum Rands on them being the owner of registry.”
“But those ships were fighting us!” Carnot cried, from down the table.
“Sure, quick retrofits with plasma shooters and a magnetic field source,” from Worley. “Scrape your crews up from the beach. Get enough of them in the sky, and you can even take on squadrons from the Central Fleet.”
“Or try,” Carnot countered, with some pride in his voice. “We mopped them up, in the end.”
“I don’t think they expected as much fight as they got,” Samwels said.
“Oh, yes,” from Worley. “We’ve all heard about your exploit in the bay, Hils.”
“What did it prove?” Carnot insisted.
Samwels raised his eyebrows at the lieutenant. “As of 0600 today, we have four ships of the line that can jump space. The rest are all leaking atmosphere or down for repairs. Whoever is converting those freighters—”
“Haiken Maru!” someone said aloud.
“Bovari!”
“Governor Spile!”
Samwels put up a restraining hand. “Whoever it is, they’ve tapped into a cheap source of naval power.”
“Not worth much!” from Carnot.
“No, not much,” Samwels agreed. “Yet with every engagement, the value of our own ships rises. Five or six hundred percent in the last twenty-four hours, by my estimate.”
“Say a thousand percent,” the admiral grunted.
“Yes, Sir. At some point,” Samwels went on, “our ships become too valuable to put in the field. We’ll withdraw before a shot is fired. We’ll hoard them. They’ll become hangar queens, every one of them.”
“Whoever is supplying those armed freighters,” the admiral said, “has rewritten the rules of engagement in this sector as of today.”
“We’re neutralized, Sir,” Samwels agreed.
Chapter 13
Taddeuz Bertingas: WALK IN THE PARK
It hurt his feet to scrabble against the bark of the tree. His hands were still strong, the skin lean. But after running for nine hours, barefoot, his feet were swollen and cut.
Bertingas’ progress had been swift, once he got going and had spent less time hiding. In the early hours, his travel had been interrupted by the need to fade into small copses or thick stands of rhododendron or other undergrowth, holding his thudding breath and waiting for a patrol to walk past. And they always would—whacking the bushes with the butt ends of their repulsor rifles and making noise enough to drive the forest before them. (For two days afterward, Bertingas saw no animal large enough for him to eat.)
Once he got elbow room and a nose for his general direction of travel, however, Bertingas moved swiftly down the game trails. He would still cut at odd moments—or when his instincts told him—crosscountry through the brush. The instinct to part with the trails was damped by his situation: trails were easy underfoot, packed dirt and young grasses; the brush was thorny with stems and sticks and sharp rocks.
His feet were strong, as he was accustomed to hiking, but they were soft, being more used to the insides of boots or shoes. The white flesh of his soles was scored pretty badly by that first night, so that he was leaving blood marks on the grass and working dust deep into the open cuts, where it would tattoo the skin in time.
The scramble to climb a tree, where he could wedge himself into a forking limb and doze the night in relative safety, added crumbles of black bark and a smear of pitch to his feet’s dirt coating.
Wedged there finally, without dinner and with no water except what he had scooped from a stream or standing pool while on the run, Bertingas took stock.
Hungry and cold and still thirsty, yes. His feet would either get better and toughen up, so that he could begin again in the morning; or they would stiffen so that he could barely hobble. Then his pursuers would surely find him.
Now, was that such a terrible prospect?
Yes. The people who were looking for him played rough. The attack on his apartment—what? Only two days ago? Three? That attack had been no attempted detention or kidnapping. They meant to kill him, rub him out, bury the pieces.
Perhaps by tomorrow or the day after, some of the trackers afoot in these woods might also be friends. Searchers from the base, out looking for him along the line of flight that Patty Firkin would certainly be able to describe. If Patty and Mora had escaped unobserved and unharmed.
Without his AID to analyze and link signals with them, however, Bertingas would have to trust his instincts and fade back into the undergrowth. Glide silently away at right angles. Not show the pale skin of his face toward them.
If his feet did cripple up, so that he could not go on for another day or two, would he be able to stay in this tree? No. The soldiers or bully boys or whatever they were who chased him would sooner or later notice that they were driving the large animals out of this area. Then they would bring in their infrared equipment again—and begin to believe it. Then they would find him up a tree where no Wampit could climb.
So, the first order of business was his feet, care and feeding of same.
Bracing with his right heel against the
bole, he crooked his left knee—it grated like a rusty hinge—and brought his foot up into his lap. The fingers went to work, flexing, massaging, rubbing around the cuts. He had no water to clean them, but he could drip spittle upon his fingers and rub that into the gashes. It stung a little, and the moisture cooled the heat in his flesh.
Pain, of one kind or another, was going to be his companion for a long time.
* * *
The garment he wore—aside from the slippers Bertingas had fashioned out of stiff bark that first morning he had climbed down out of a tree—was a single weave of monofilament. It could not be cut with any tool he could make of stone or wood, but it could be unraveled.
In the fading light, with a cold wind rising from the northeast, off the mountains, he swore to make a fire. It would be small and smokeless, no more than a glow of embers from dried twigs, he promised himself. Still, it would give some heat to bear him through the night.
To make his fire, Bertingas needed a notched block, a bearing pad for his palm, a drill, and a bow to drive it. He had the various pieces of wood at hand, cut and shaped with a sharp sliver of flint he had picked up for a knife. He also had a pile of dried leaves and shavings for tinder, a supply of sticks for burning. Everything was ready except a string for the bow.
A twist of green grasses had no strength to it—he’d tried that.
If he had killed an animal, even a small one, then it would yield skin and sinews for a string. So far, having just his hands to hunt with, he had taken only grubs.
They were soft and dry, and squirmed in his mouth until his teeth had come down a dozen times. The taste wasn’t bad, like sweet resin and powder, but they gave him nothing to make a bow drill with.
So he attacked the edge of his underwear just above the ankle. The rough edge of the flint abraded the material enough to get a ravel going. In a few minutes, as the dark closed down, he had pulled a thread around and around his leg, taking the hem up his calf. Then he snapped it with his teeth.
An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Page 16