“Aye, sir,” Lightbridge said. “We can reach our destination in two jumps.”
“Then take us to the jump point, best possible speed,” Ted ordered. “But do not activate the Puller Drive without my specific authorisation.”
He settled back in his command chair and watched the updates from engineering as the crew scurried around, fixing the problems that had become apparent. If there was a real problem, he knew, they would have to hold position in the Sol System so that it could be fixed… but, thankfully, it didn't look as though there was any need to wait. The engineering crew had the tools and spare parts to replace the useless or burned out components. Anderson and his staff had spent the last two weeks scrounging up everything they could and stuffing every last compartment in the ship with spare parts. Ark Royal could, in theory, operate for several years without needing outside supplies.
“The computer cores are holding together, thankfully,” Anderson said. “I was worried they would object when we actually started to move.”
“I know,” Ted said. “Keep monitoring their progress.”
He scowled, knowing how tricky that was likely to be. The different generations of computer systems had never been designed to work together, let alone the ones that came from outside the Commonwealth. In hindsight, he suspected, the human race might have good reason to regret not establishing a few common standards for technology. Right now, a British carrier couldn't be repaired with spare parts from a Chinese carrier. If the human race managed to remain united — and without unity, they were surely going to lose the war — that was going to have to be fixed.
Assuming we trusted them not to play games, he thought. The Admiralty hadn't objected to Ark Royal’s crew using begged or scrounged Chinese components, but he'd always assumed that his superiors hadn't bothered to read his reports. His crew had always checked the systems carefully, yet it was quite possible that they’d missed something dangerous, something the Chinese could use to manipulate the carrier to their advantage. Would they try anything like that when the human race needed to remain united?
The starship quivered again as the main drives came to life, pushing her forward towards the jump point. Ark Royal handled badly, compared to a frigate or a starfighters, but there was a reassuring firmness around her actions that more modern carriers lacked. Or was that just his imagination, after seeing so many powerful ships torn apart with terrifying speed? No wonder the civilians were panicking — along with quite a few politicians. The Battle of New Russia had lasted barely ten minutes, most of which had been spent getting into position.
“Power curves remain nominal,” Anderson said. “The main drive system is functional, sir.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ted said, dryly. If the drive had failed, they'd know about it already. “Repeat the standard tests on the Puller Drive, if you please.”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said.
Ted tapped his console, accessing the data package as Ark Royal continued to move towards the jump point. Every analyst in space had been working over the recordings from New Russia, drawing what conclusions they could. Much of the data wasn't new, not entirely to Ted’s surprise, but there were some interesting suggestions. One of them suggested that the alien ships could be tracked with a little careful effort. Another insisted that the alien starfighters weren't really effective dogfighters at all.
Not that it matters, Ted thought. They’re designed to break through to our carriers and rip them apart.
There was relatively little data on the alien capital ships, he noted, mostly consisting of uninformed speculation. No one was even sure where the carriers launched their fighters; unlike human craft, the fighter launch tubes appeared to be worked solidly into their hulls. It was an interesting design, he had to admit, suggesting that they weren't too worried about having their carriers targeted. Did they have a good reason to be confident?
They have energy weapons on their starfighters, he thought, sourly. Their hulls might be bristling with energy weapons too.
“Sir,” Lightbridge said, breaking into his thoughts, “we have reached the jump point.”
“Power up the Puller Drive,” Ted ordered. He couldn't help feeling the old thrill of jumping out of the Sol System, even though it had been years since he’d been on an interstellar starship. “And then sound the alert.”
Another quiver ran through the ship, followed by a low hooting that warned all non-essential crew to brace themselves for the jump. Most spacers grew used to it fairly quickly, but there were always a handful who couldn't take the jump without throwing up or even being rendered comatose. Over a hundred years of FTL travel hadn't yielded any way to identify such people before they took their first jump, although it manifested very quickly. Back at the Academy, British spacers were taken through a jump within the first six months of their training. If they reacted badly, they were assigned to in-system positions only.
Like Ark Royal, he thought, grimly. His crew included a few people who couldn't take the jump, but were desperately needed to keep the starship functional. It was something the Admiralty had overlooked at the time. Ted and Commander Fitzwilliam had dealt with the problem by ordering all such personnel to sickbay before the jump, but they knew it was only a temporary solution. The crewmen would have to be relieved of duty sooner rather than later.
“Puller drive online,” Lightbridge said.
“All systems check out properly,” Anderson added. “The drive is in full working order.”
And thank god for that, Ted thought. The Puller Drive had never seemed very important, not compared to all the other systems that had to be kept operational for Ark Royal to remain on the books. And it couldn't really be replaced without chopping open the hull, which would take months. He keyed his console, checking the power curves for himself. For something that was surprisingly simple, the Puller Drive was a colossal power hog.
“Good,” Ted said. He looked around the bridge, feeling a hint of pride in his crew. They’d practiced endlessly over the last two weeks, but this was real. “Jump!”
The Puller Drive wasn’t — technically — a drive at all. Over a century ago, Professor Wang had discovered the existence of gravitational tramlines running between stars and planets — and then worked out a system for exploiting them. If the Puller Drive was triggered at the right place along the tramline, the ship would jump instantly from one star system to the next… providing the tramline was strong enough to allow it. There were stars it was possible to jump to, but not possible to jump back along the same tramline. A black hole, Wang had warned, might be impossible to escape. Its sheer mass would bend the tramlines out of shape. Fortunately, there were none within human space.
For a long moment, the universe seemed to darken… and then snap back to normal. Ted let out a breath he hadn't realised he was holding, then glanced down at his console. The Puller Drive was cycling down, all power curves still nominal. Ted allowed himself a tight smile. His ship might be old, but she was still fully functional and ready for action.
“Jump completed, sir,” Lightbridge reported. “No problems detected.”
“Take us to the next tramline,” Ted ordered.
Jumping along a tramline was instantaneous — or close enough to instant to make it impossible to provide a precise estimate of how long it took. Moving from tramline to tramline, on the other hand, could take hours. Ted wasn't blind to the implications of the aliens having a Puller Drive that allowed longer jumps; they might easily outflank humanity’s defenders and then attack Earth, just as the First Space Lord had predicted. They might need to spend a few years mopping up afterwards, but the loss of Earth would cost humanity the war.
“Picking up a signal from Terra Nova,” Annie said. “They’re requesting our IFF. And they sound a little jumpy.”
“I’m not surprised,” Ted said. Ark Royal looked different enough from a modern carrier to be alarmingly unfamiliar to long-range sensors. They might well mistake her for an alien ship. “Shoot them
a copy of our IFF, then inform them that we are proceeding to the next tramline.”
He sighed. Terra Nova had been the first planet humanity had settled, with each and every ethnic, racial or religious group being offered an enclave. It hadn't worked out very well; none of the interstellar powers felt inclined to invest in it, while the smaller powers didn't have the resources to turn the planet into a success. Ironically, it turned out that human groups were perfectly capable of getting along provided there was some distance between them. Several light years seemed about perfect.
And Terra Nova is practically defenceless, he thought, grimly. None of the bigger powers would risk political unrest by devoting starships to defending a world many civilians regarded as a barbarous backwater. There were only a handful of starships in the system, none of which were modern and several of which were older than Ark Royal. It wouldn't take the aliens long to overwhelm them and take the system. If, of course, they were inclined to bother.
Just how much did the aliens know about humanity? There was no way to know what they might have recovered from Vera Cruz — an intact navigational database would have told them the location of each and every settled planet in human space — but there could be no doubt about what they could have recovered from New Russia. It was unlikely in the extreme that the Russians would have managed to destroy all of their files before the aliens landed… no, they had to assume the worst. The aliens knew where to find their targets.
But what else did they know? If they had time to go through everything on New Russia, they probably knew just how vital Earth was to the unified defence force. And then…
“Captain,” Lightbridge said, “we are approaching the second tramline.”
Ted pushed his morbid thoughts aside. “Understood,” he said. “Power up the Puller Drive, then jump us to our next destination.”
He forced himself to remain calm as the universe darkened once again, before snapping back to normal. This time, there were no major settlements in the system. The early survey parties had found nothing of interest, beyond a handful of comets, and nothing had turned up since to make the system more interesting. But that didn't stop it being useful. Four different tramlines ran through the system, allowing it to serve as a transfer point for interstellar shipping. The corporation that had laid claim to the system did a roaring trade in supplies, including some that were technically illegal elsewhere. None of the major interstellar powers wanted to intervene, not when it might have provoked a major confrontation.
“Transit completed, sir,” Lightbridge said.
“Very good,” Ted agreed. “Take us to the next tramline.”
He looked back down at his console, reading the updates from the departmental heads. There didn't seem to be any major problems, thankfully, which meant that they were as close to being ready for action as they were ever likely to get. But if the First Space Lord was wrong… Ark Royal might miss out on the war entirely, then find herself forced to flee. Rumour had it that some ships were already taking colonists — and a small industrial base — well away from the aliens. But rumour was unreliable at the best of times.
They’d have real problems maintaining that technological base, he thought. Or of choosing the colonists, when the time came to leave.
Tapping a switch, he brought up the First Space Lord’s modified chart, showing the tramlines he believed the aliens could use. Ted saw his logic, but the whole conclusion rested on a dangerous gamble. What if the aliens had tricked the human observers? Or what if their tech was vastly more advanced than anyone had realised? Hell, what if they’d managed to escape the tramlines entirely?
We'd be dead, he thought. Escaping the tramlines was the holy grail of human gravitational research. If that happens, the war will be lost completely…
Shaking his head, he brought up another piece of analysis, but rapidly realised that it was worse than useless. There was no hard data on the aliens, so speculations on their psychology and motivation were pointless.
We know they want to kill us, he thought, dryly. That's the important detail. Everything else is immaterial.
Chapter Nine
No one had bothered to give the system a name, not even the miners who had flocked to the asteroid cluster when a survey party had discovered that the asteroids were rich in raw materials. The brief wave of interest in the system hadn't lasted past the discovery of other sources in more habitable systems, leaving a handful of miners and settlers making a living from selling what they mined at low cost. According to the database, most of the settlers really wanted to isolate themselves from the rest of the human race.
It was hard to escape the feeling, James decided, that they had succeeded. If Ark Royal hadn't known the settlements were there, it was quite possible that they would have been overlooked. They were really nothing more than a handful of mined-out asteroids, closed ecosystems powered by solar collectors. There wasn't much room for expansion, he knew, but they could maintain their position for hundreds of years before they had to make some hard choices. By then, human space would have changed so radically that who knew what sort of society would greet them, if they chose to return home?
Ark Royal hung near the tramline to Earth — or where the tramline would be, if the Old Lady’s drive had been able to use it. Predicting where the aliens might go was easy enough, assuming that the First Space Lord’s calculations had been correct. There was certainly nothing else to interest the aliens; the settlements weren't worth the effort of destroying them, assuming that the aliens weren’t bent on total genocide. But if they were wrong…
He looked up at the display, seeing a handful of fast-attack frigates hanging close to the massive carrier. They’d arrived the day after Ark Royal, bringing updates from Earth, including records from a Russian starship that had remained concealed and watched as the aliens landed on New Russia. Apparently, the aliens had bombarded the planetary defence centres, but otherwise ignored the human population. James couldn't decide if that was a good or bad thing. It was good, because it suggested that the aliens weren't bent on genocide after all, yet it was also bad because it prevented contact between humans and aliens. There was no hope of opening a dialogue that might result in peace talks.
Not that they have to worry, he thought, grimly. As long as they’re winning, they can dictate terms to us and we will have to bend over and take them.
“Captain on the deck,” the duty officer said.
James turned to see Captain Smith entering the CIC. The Captain looked galvanised, but — like the rest of his crew — he was clearly worried about what they were doing in the unnamed system. If they were wrong about the alien plans, they were quite likely to discover it the hard way, when they finally returned to Earth and found it under alien occupation. James was merely relieved that the Captain hadn't started to drink again. If he did, James would have to relieve him of command… which would almost certainly doom James’s career too.
“Captain,” he said. “We have finished deploying the decoys.”
The Captain nodded. They’d hashed out the possibilities endlessly, but one thing had been clear from the start. They would have to lure the aliens to their position, not gamble on the aliens appearing right next to them. Any planetary system, even one orbiting an insignificant red dwarf, was so vast that the odds against them being in the right place were staggeringly high. But if the aliens thought they had a valid set of targets…
“Activate them,” the Captain ordered. “And hope that they fool the aliens.”
James nodded. The drones were the most advanced decoys produced by human technology, but no one knew what the aliens would make of them. If their sensor technology was advanced enough, they would probably realise that the decoys weren't real carriers and give them a wide berth. Or maybe they would assume that the decoys were nothing more than a bluff.
He keyed a switch, activating the drones. Sensor ghosts appeared briefly on the display, showing the location of five modern carriers. Even knowing that th
e images weren't real, Ark Royal’s sensor crews had difficulty separating the illusions from reality. Hopefully, the aliens wouldn’t question what they saw.
“They won’t see any starfighters,” he warned. “Or, rather, they won’t see enough starfighters.”
The Captain shrugged. Ark Royal carried four wings of starfighters; a modern carrier could carry ten, along with a small armada of smaller craft. There was no way their four wings could pretend to be the fighters attached to five modern carriers, but if they were lucky the aliens would assume that the remaining fighters hadn't been launched. Or maybe they would think that the human carriers were trying to retreat…
James made a face. There were too many flaws in the plan for him to be entirely comfortable with it.
Idiot, he told himself. If you’d taken command, you would have to grapple with the same problems yourself.
An alarm sounded, making him jump. “Sir,” Farley said, “we just picked up a warning signal from the sensor drones. Seven enemy carriers and forty smaller ships have just jumped into the system.”
“Show me,” the Captain ordered. Red icons appeared on the display, surrounded by lines projecting their course and speed. They were heading towards the predicted tramline. “It appears we have company.”
“Yes, sir,” James said, feeling cold ice running down the back of his spine. The aliens had chopped through twelve modern carriers… what if they were wrong about Ark Royal’s armour? Or what if they were right… and they were still overwhelmed anyway. “I think they saw the drones.”
On the display, the alien craft altered course. “No fighters,” the Captain noted. “Or are they there and we can’t see them?”
James shrugged. A human CO might keep his pilots in the launch tubes as long as possible, giving them what protection he could, but who knew how the aliens thought?
The Captain keyed his terminal. “Red alert,” he said, “I say again, red alert. All hands to battlestations.”
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