The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  “Still no battleship,” Iceni muttered.

  “They may not have one,” Marphissa said.

  “Then why do they want to keep us away from that gas giant?”

  The warning went out, but still no reply. Iceni sat watching the distance close, her irritation rising with every second that passed without any communication from the other flotilla. Even if they say they want to join us now, I think I’ll still order them to be blown away.

  “Incoming message.” The comms specialist paused. “It’s not from the flotilla.”

  “Show me,” Iceni ordered.

  A window opened to show a junior officer standing on what was clearly the bridge of a battleship. If the sub-CEO on the mobile forces facility had shown only normal levels of stress, this executive was clearly in far worse straits. His uniform showed signs of having been worn for days or weeks, his face was lean in a way that evoked thoughts of very limited rations, and his eyes held an almost feverish intensity. “This is Sub-Executive Kontos, acting commander of the mobile forces unit B-78, to . . . to . . . President Iceni.” Kontos paused to lick his lips and clear his throat as if speaking distinctly was an effort.

  “A subexecutive commanding a battleship?” Marphissa commented. “Has that ever happened?”

  “During battles, when a crew was almost wiped out,” Iceni replied.

  Kontos started speaking again. “We are barricaded within the primary citadels. We are the . . . survivors of the outfitting crew. Myself and . . . a number of line workers. We control the bridge, engineering, and the primary fire-control center.” Kontos was clearly doing his best to recite a correct report but occasionally stumbled over the words. “We . . . have been able to hold out because of the internal armor and the . . . antimutiny defenses.”

  “Who are you holding out against?” Iceni mumbled angrily.

  “The ISS,” Kontos said, as if answering her question. “We . . . don’t know how many. They overran some locations . . . My last order received was to . . . seal ourselves inside critical control areas and . . . wait for relief. We have not heard anything since . . . except demands . . . from the ISS . . . that we surrender. External comms have . . . been . . . blocked, but we managed a work-around in time to . . . hear your message.”

  “The snakes have taken over here,” Marphissa said, her voice hardening.

  “That explains it all, doesn’t it?” Iceni said. “The snakes wiped out the officers and who knows how much of the crews on those warships. The only thing I don’t understand is why they didn’t order CEO Janusa to assist them.”

  “Perhaps they actually knew who you were despite the avatar and have known you were playing them. If you’d gone to the second planet and docked our warships at one of their facilities for resupply, we might have been overwhelmed by boarding parties before we could get away.”

  “Oh, damn. You’re likely right. That’s where they’d have access to enough personnel to do that.”

  “We request assistance,” Sub-Executive Kontos asked. His voice cracked on the last word, and Kontos sagged a moment before straightening to attention again. “We know they’re bringing . . . breaching gear strong enough to get into the citadels. Request . . . assistance.”

  The message began to repeat, then abruptly cut off.

  “The snakes found their work-around and blocked it,” Marphissa commented.

  “Sub-CEO—” The operations specialist caught herself. “Kommodor, we’ve been tracking a freighter moving at a good clip toward that gas giant. It fit the profile of a rush resupply mission, so we haven’t paid much attention to it, but it might be bringing the breaching gear for the snakes.”

  “As well as more snakes, no doubt. Can we get there before it does?” Marphissa asked.

  “It will beat us by about ten minutes if we hold our vector.”

  Iceni nodded slowly. We charge in at best speed, brake hard, blow away that freighter, and get our ground forces on that battleship. Simple. As well as incredibly complicated to carry out.

  “It could be a trap,” Marphissa cautioned. “To get us in there close to the battleship. If its armament is operational, we could sustain enough damage that the flotilla here could finish us off.”

  “It could be,” Iceni agreed. “But if so, that subexecutive is the best actor I’ve ever seen. Certainly a lot better than ‘CEO Reynard’ or ‘Sub-CEO Petrov.’ Are you bringing up a possibility, or do you believe this is a trap?”

  Marphissa sat watching her display for a moment before answering. “Only a possibility. If it were a trap, they could have sent us a message from Sub-Executive Kontos a long time ago to see what we would do. I think the snakes had been willing to starve out the survivors from the outfitting crew. That would cause less damage to the battleship than breaking into the antimutiny citadels. When we showed up, the snakes knew they had to get the breaching equipment there and crack open the bridge. But because we came in this quickly and straight for the gas giant, they haven’t had enough time.”

  “Then let’s go save Sub-Executive Kontos and his brave line workers, Kommodor.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “SUB-EXECUTIVE Kontos, this is President Iceni. We are on our way to relieve you. Hold out as long as you can. We wiped out the snakes at Midway, and we will do the same here. If you manage to get comms working again, keep us apprised of your status.” Odds were that Kontos wouldn’t be able to receive her message, let alone reply, but if they could hear any of it that might inspire the surviving crew to hold out long enough.

  Marphissa raised one finger toward her display. “How do we take down the other flotilla quickly enough to get our ground forces to that battleship? We don’t have enough of a firepower advantage to knock out all of those other warships in a single pass.”

  “We’re not going to try.” Iceni settled back in her seat, feeling a surge of confidence. She had viewed the records of Black Jack’s battles over and over again in the last few months, trying to spot patterns, and suddenly one of those patterns had come clear to her. Whenever possible, Black Jack had avoided doing what his opponent wanted. It seemed so simple a thing. If the enemy wanted you to attack in such a way at such a place, then if you could you did something else. That hadn’t been how war had been fought for . . . how long? Kill the enemy, destroy the enemy’s forces, slam head-to-head until one side gave way. That’s how it had been since those who knew how to fight in other ways had died in the first decades of the war, those they had partly trained dying soon afterward. But Black Jack had come from that earlier time. And he never did what his opponents wanted.

  “Madam President?” Kommodor Marphissa waved at her display again. “We need to destroy that flotilla.”

  “No, we don’t. We need to defeat it. What do they want? To slow us down. To inflict damage on us. To keep us occupied long enough for the snakes to gain full control of that battleship. We won’t let them do any of those things.”

  Marphissa nodded in the manner of someone who wanted to acknowledge she understood what had been said but not necessarily what it meant. “What will we do instead?”

  “We will get past that oncoming flotilla without engaging it, brake our velocity far enough to release the shuttles carrying our ground forces assault team close to the battleship, then accelerate again and engage and defeat the other flotilla as it returns to fight us.”

  Another nod of partial understanding. “How will we do that, Madam President?”

  Iceni smiled. “I have established our goals and objectives, Kommodor. As you are the flotilla commander and experienced operator of mobile forces, I will leave it up to you to find the best means of accomplishing those goals and objectives.”

  “I . . . see.” Marphissa stared at her display for a little while. “Thank you for this opportunity to excel, Madam President.” Remarkably, not a bit of sarcasm came through when she said that.

  “I have every confidence in you, Kommodor.”

  Marphissa sat for long minutes, just looking at her d
isplay, saying nothing, her eyes intent. Finally, her hands moved, tracing out possible actions so that the ship’s maneuvering systems could produce predictions.

  “Kommodor?”

  Jerking out of her absorption in her planning, Marphissa turned an annoyed scowl on the operations specialist. “What is it?”

  “Kommodor,” the specialist said with a nervous swallow, “I was thinking, if the ISS is controlling the other flotilla’s mobile forces, and if they are running them on automatic controls because the officers are dead or under arrest, then those are the same automated systems as our own mobile units use.”

  “Your point?” Marphissa snapped.

  “If we run a simulation in which our automated systems are controlling the actions of the other flotilla, it will tell us what the automated systems on the other flotilla will actually do in response to anything. We can predict their reactions.”

  The annoyance dropped from Marphissa’s face. “That is an excellent observation. The limitations of simulations are always the inability to know what the other side will actually do, but in this case we could know that precisely. Set up the simulation.”

  “Yes, Kommodor!”

  Iceni leaned closer to Marphissa. “Why isn’t he a subexecutive? I mean, a ships officer or leytenant?”

  “I will look into that,” Marphissa replied.

  As the simulation went online in part of her display, Marphissa went back to work, her expression gradually going from tense to a sort of qualified satisfaction. “It can be done, Madam President. I will have to download commands to the other units in the flotilla to ensure the timing is right. The hardest part will be the braking maneuver to reach the battleship. That will stress our units the most.”

  “But we can do it? It is within the capabilities of our warships?”

  “Yeeessss.” The affirmative reply was drawn out enough, tentative enough, to inspire some worry.

  “Show me.” Iceni ran the plan through her display, watching the motions play out in accelerated time. Some of the maneuvers would push the strain on the warships very close to the red zone, where a ship would literally come apart under the stress, but none of them actually pushed into the red. In theory. In practice, the plan would create strains that might spike too high for individual units. “We’ll need to override the automated maneuvering safeties,” Iceni commented.

  “Yes, Madam President. The safeties wouldn’t let us do this.”

  Play it safe and lose, or risk it and have a chance of winning? Why was she here if she wasn’t willing to run risks? “Well done, Kommodor. I approve your plan. When do you intend downloading the plan to the rest of the flotilla?”

  “Eleven minutes prior to contact. We’re all within a light-second of each other, so that allows plenty of time for ship systems to accept the plan and be ready to execute it at ten minutes prior to contact.”

  “But not very much time for the commanders of those warships to realize what they’re going to do.” Iceni regarded the plan again. “That may be a good thing. If they have time to study this, they may start thinking and decide there’s mistakes.”

  “Even the Syndicate system couldn’t manage to get us to completely stop thinking,” Marphissa replied.

  “Some people never needed any encouragement to stop thinking, Kommodor, and some never started thinking at all. Send this to Colonel Rogero now, so he can prepare for loading his soldiers. We’ll be under some serious g-forces while his people are getting into the shuttles, and even with combat armor that will make things difficult for them.”

  * * *

  THREE light-minutes separated the two flotillas, each racing toward the other at point one light speed, for a combined closing rate of point two light speed. That meant fifteen minutes until the two forces came into very brief contact.

  Very brief, but long enough for their weapons to hurt the other.

  Iceni reviewed her flotilla’s readiness for at least the hundredth time in the last several minutes. Every unit at combat readiness state one, every weapon ready to fire, targeting systems locked on to the approaching flotilla. She had left her flotilla in the box formation, deciding that messing with that would be one change too many and probably more than she could handle anyway. Just because you may have figured out one thing about Black Jack doesn’t mean you’re anything close to being him.

  “Here go the automated commands,” Marphissa reported as she tapped her controls. “Beginning countdown to activation.”

  Thirty seconds later, the commanding officer of C-413 called in. “What kind of plan is this?”

  “A plan ordered by President Iceni,” Marphissa replied. “Activation in twenty-five seconds. Failure to activate will have to be explained to her.”

  “I— We’ll speak of this later!”

  “Ten seconds to activation.” Marphissa gave a sudden look of alarm to Iceni. “Are you prone to motion sickness?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Activation!” the maneuvering specialist announced.

  Heavy cruiser C-448 and every other warship in Iceni’s flotilla jerked into sudden maximum acceleration as the inertial nullifiers groaned in protest. Iceni kept her eyes on her display, trying to breathe slowly and deeply despite the pressure. It would be only a few more seconds until the other flotilla saw her flotilla altering velocity. Since any combined velocity above point two light speed complicated targeting solutions and started reducing chances of hits at an increasing rate, the automated systems on the other flotilla’s ships would respond by pivoting their units around and firing off the main drives to brake their velocity.

  The force on Iceni halted abruptly as the main drives in her flotilla cut off. Other pressures jerked at her as thrusters pivoted her flotilla’s warships up and over, then the main drives kicked in again at maximum, shedding velocity as hard as they could.

  Within seconds, the other flotilla saw the moves, kicking off its own drives, pivoting its ships again, then accelerating at maximum to once more try to compensate for the maneuvers of Iceni’s flotilla.

  “Three minutes to contact,” the maneuvering specialist gasped as the main drives in Iceni’s flotilla cut off again. Once more, thrusters fired, swinging the warships up and over again toward the other flotilla, main drives lighting off at maximum before the warships had even steadied out.

  “They are going to be hating us over there,” Marphissa got out with a strained laugh as they saw the automated systems on the other warships react again. Trained human crews would have seen the small time remaining until contact and known the need to override the attempts of the automated systems to match the maneuvers of Iceni’s flotilla.

  The snakes controlling that other flotilla were not trained crews, and right about now would be feeling very disoriented.

  The other warships cut off accelerating and started swinging again, this time down, at the same moments as the two forces rushed toward contact. The bows of the opposing flotilla, where most armaments and the strongest armor and shields were clustered, were actually swinging away from Iceni’s warships. She could imagine the curses that the humans on the other flotilla were uttering as their weaponry passed out of engagement envelopes just as Iceni’s warships flashed through that moment of close contact.

  Iceni’s own ships were better aligned to fire, but far from perfectly because of the jumble of maneuvers. She felt the cruiser under her tremble slightly as hell lances and grapeshot tore out toward the other warships, her senses not really registering any of that until her flotilla had raced past the others. Iceni’s flotilla was adjusting vectors to aim straight for the increasingly close gas giant, while the other flotilla flailed around, the two forces diverging at something close to point two light speed.

  Laughter broke out on the bridge, startling Iceni. “Can you imagine their faces right now?” she heard one of the specialists say to another.

  “Quiet on the bridge,” Marphissa called, but not harshly since she was grinning, too. “Too bad we couldn’t
score many hits ourselves.”

  “We hurt them a little,” Iceni observed, watching her display update as the sensors of her flotilla coordinated their readings and produced a single analysis of damage to the other ships. “But, mainly, we got past them without being hit ourselves.” The only hits on her own warships had been a few glancing blows, easily deflected by even the weak shields on the Hunter-Killers.

  Battles were supposed to be about inflicting as much damage as possible on the enemy. Her orders and Marphissa’s plan had turned that on its head, instead turning the engagement into avoiding damage. Since the other flotilla hadn’t expected that, and had been controlled by snakes with little experience at mobile commands, it had worked exactly as intended. So when the commanders of the other ships began calling in, expressing frustration and dismay over the odd engagement, Iceni answered them instead of letting Marphissa handle it. “Our goal in that engagement was to get through to the battleship with minimum delay. That we achieved. Review the rest of the plan. Once we drop off the shuttles carrying the ground forces, we are going back to hurt that other flotilla because by then it is going to be trying to get past us. Does anyone have any problems with my decisions?”

  Unsurprisingly, no one expressed such concerns to her. Everyone also stopped complaining to Marphissa, who nonetheless looked dissatisfied. “They should respect my decisions, too.”

  “They will. Or I’ll get rid of them and find commanders who do.” That statement, Iceni was sure, would also find its way around the flotilla by informal means.

  The gas giant loomed ever larger before them. Off to one side, the bulk of the mobile forces facility, slightly smaller than Midway’s, hung in a geostationary orbit which ensured it would always be within line of sight of the second planet except for a single brief window each year when the star blocked it as the second planet orbited Kane. Swinging in past the facility was the merchant ship they had been tracking, ponderously braking itself as it began to pass out of sight around the curve of the gas giant. Unlike the warships, the merchant ship could only change velocity slowly.