by Kalina, Mark
It had not taken long to find the expanding, cooling debris of the three destroyed freight-liners. But there was no sign of the raiders who had destroyed them.
They were long gone, Freya thought, but the squadron had to be sure. Leaving the raiders in-system, unmolested, meant that no civilian traffic would dare use this system as a navigational waypoint. And that would add many hundreds of hours of travel time to almost all traffic between the core of the Hegemony of Suns and several star systems on the periphery. It was the sort of costly, dangerous situation that the Fleet was intended to deal with.
That meant using the swift-ships for one of their primary roles: scouting. There were dozens of minor planetoids and substantial rocks that a ship could be hiding behind, keeping out of sight from the Conquering Sun's enormous sensor arrays. Worse yet, there were two large gas giants, and of course the red dwarf star itself. All of those could easily mask the thermal signature of a hiding ship.
And so the two swift-ships had darted this way and that, angling to see behind every obvious hiding place, pushing their drives and burning through their reaction mass reserves.
The problem was that, even if they found the enemy still in the system, there was little that could be done about it.
That point had been discussed, at a high bandwidth, high-resolution VR wardroom dinner, "held aboard" the assault-ship, a dozen hours before the little squadron initiated its FTL transit. Once through the transit, there might be no time for detailed communication between the ships; there was no way to look ahead into a destination system, to see what lay in store.
The virtual Dining Hall had been rendered with exacting detail; a non-trivial fraction of the assault-ship's processing power was being tasked to the dinner. The chamber was spacious, almost cavernous, with a high, multi-domed ceiling of translucent mosaic crystal. The table, a long curve of gleaming black alloy, was set amongst a garden of flowering plants and burbling fountains. Virtual "gravity" was at a comfortable one gee. Lights played on the table, illuminating the diners and the remains of their enormously computer-processor-intensive virtual food, while leaving the rest of the hall's volume in twilight.
Captain Kai Ari-Kani sat at the head of the table, where the curvature was deepest. This let him see everyone he had invited to the dinner. His own senior officers were here, of course. His executive officer, Lyn Psan, sat like a regal statue, white skin contrasting with hair as black as her uniform, blending into the dark of the table. Under her gaze, his other officers were arranged by department and seniority.
Then there were the captains and executive officers of the two swift-ships attached to Captain Ari-Kani's command. The two demi-captains' daemons were aboard the Conquering Sun, housed in command-system neural nets; the bandwidth that would have been needed for them to attend this VR remotely would have taken up too much of the little swift-ships' computing power. The swift-ships massed a bare seven kilotons each: 160 meters of lean, fast warship, with little room aboard for anything but weapons and drives. The kilometer and a quarter long, three megaton vastness of the Conquering Sun was intimidating enough to see, but what could be done within that size, without in the least impairing the combat efficiency of the ship, was perhaps even more shocking. In this case, it was just a matter of using a level of computing power that could have simultaneously run every system on both swift-ships, and then some, to improve the look and feel of a virtual meeting.
Captain Kai Ari-Kani had occasionally invited his junior captains "aboard," sometimes even going to the trouble of bringing them aboard physically, to take advantage of the actual crew space facilities that the giant ship held. He liked to have a personal sense of the people he commanded, he said, and to involve them in the daily life of his command.
Freya had to admit that she was impressed. Virtual food was one of the hardest aspects of VR to get right. This... it still wasn't right, but it actually "tasted" good; better than any other virtual meal she had ever tried. The ambience and feel of the VR, on the other hand, was so close to perfect that it was a bit scary. Not counting the food, she figured that it would have taken her a long time to figure out this was VR, if she hadn't known.
Her executive officer, acro-hetairos Muir Zanados, seemed well enough at ease. He might have seen a super-high-grade VR like this before. Maybe often, before he joined the Fleet. There were not many officers in the Fleet who came from an equetai lineage. That was a very high social rank indeed, among the higher ranks of the aristokratai, and as far above her own social rank of telestos as she herself was above a commoner.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," the captain began, speaking quietly, "telai," he added, with redundant formality. His voice seemed to fill the room, softly but surely. "I'm pleased, as always, to have your company at my table, even if only virtually. But I'm afraid that work must intrude. You all know our operational instructions, of course, and I've read your readiness reports, but now I'd like to hear from you in person: observations, ideas, and so forth..."
The captain was watching the faces of the assembled officers. The officers sat in two curving rows, each "dressed" in the space-black uniform jumpsuit of the Hegemonic Fleet. Each uniform was marked with gold rank-and-merit glyphs. No two officers in Hegemonic service would have quite the same glyphs, and reading the glyphs told each officer's formal proficiency and authority for any given task. Of course, thought Freya, a sense of their real capability was a bit more elusive. Captain Ari-Kani smiled slightly as his Executive Officer spoke first.
"Sir. It just seems odd that they chose to send us. Pirate hunting is really not our forte." Her voice was smooth and clear, a good match for her looks. Freya wondered briefly, idly, if either voice or looks were anything like the woman had been born with.
"True enough, but not really relevant," answered the captain. "We were sent, and what I'd like is all of your ideas, all of your imaginations, to be focused on how to make pirate hunting our forte, best we can." There was a moment of silence at this, and captain Ari-Kani let it stretch.
Freya watched closely, trying to understand what Captain Ari-Kani was doing. He was the best commander she had personally met, and she didn't want to miss a chance to learn from him. He was watching his people perform, she concluded, like musicians under the subtle guidance of a conductor.
Executive Officer Lyn Psan spoke again. "I think we need to consider, and maybe even run a medium-resolution VR simulation, of the sort of engagement we'll be seeing if we force those two ships into battle. I'm not sure," she said, looking at Captain Ari-Kani, "if an all-out attack is going to be wise."
"Elaborate your thoughts, Lyn," said Ari-Kani. "Anyone else, if you have something to add, raise a hand and interject. This is a free-form discussion. One at a time, though..."
Psan went on. "If we force those ships to fight, they will be in one of two modes: either desperate to escape, and thus focused entirely on defending themselves from our attack, or beyond hope of escaping, and therefore seeking to do as much harm to us as possible. They will have an acceleration advantage, unless their reaction mass reserves are very, very low. Granted, from the freight-liner's report, their re-mass should be low...
"But this system has plenty of carbon-bearing rocks in it, and lance-ships are large enough to have reaction mass processing gear. So they may well have refueled, at least partially. And that means that we'll need to do something tricky to engage them in the first place. Realistically, I can't think of anything except for a tactical FTL maneuver."
Freya frowned. Executive Officer Psan was correct in theory, but, she thought, wrong in practical terms. A very precise in-system FTL transit might be able to drop the assault-ship close enough to engage. It would be very hard to manage, and would stress the singularity reactor of the Conquering Sun severely, but it was, in theory, possible.
"Demi-Captain Tralk," said Captain Ari-Kani suddenly, "you have something?"
"Uhm, sir... ah, I was just considering the possibility of an FTL interception. Assuming the transit ca
n be made, Captain, I still don't think we can count on that tactic."
There was a tiny pause, and Freya went on. "We'll be about one hundred hours minus, for FTL. If the raiders have been in the system since the attack on the freight-liners, probably since before the attack, they will be ready to go FTL at just a few hours' notice. I just can't see them waiting for a hundred hours, knowing we might be able to engage them if they do... "
"Do you have any suggestions, then?"
"Captain, I'm not sure. Maybe use the swift-ships to push them into an engagement?"
"I'm not certain they would try to evade an attack by two swift-ships," said Ari-Kani.
Freya nodded. Two swift-ships were not an overwhelmingly deadly threat to a lance-ship; certainly not to two lance-ships. Swift-ships could use their superior acceleration to charge a larger ship, saturating its defenses with warheads. Four or five swift-ships could give a single lance-ship a very hard time. Two swift-ships against two lance-ships would be very hard pressed to make a successful attack, and even less likely to survive the attempt.
"However, there may be something to this idea," the captain continued.
"I believe that the tactic we will pursue will be for the two swift-ships to 'escort' a large freight super-liner. One of the really large ships, say... just about the mass of the Conquering Sun. Normally two swift-ships would be ample escort against any raiders. These raiders are, of course, far more powerful. They might expect a Fleet response, so we must ensure they do not take us to be that response. Instead, we will do our best to make them see one more possible victim."
"And when they move in..." said Executive Officer Psan.
"Just so," said Captain Ari-Kani. "When they move in, we will be able to engage. We will need to hide behind our exhaust, of course; not let them get a visual image of the Conquering Sun."
The captain was looking right at Freya. "That will involve the swift-ships, I think. You will need to either chase or draw them away from splitting up. So long as they stay together, we can thrust away from them, hide our identity behind our own plasma exhaust and pretend to be a large civilian ship. Demi-Captain Tralk, Demi-Captain Meryl, make sure your ships are ready in all respects. Once we emerge, I'll want the two of you to look hard for the enemy; we need to find them if they're hiding behind a rock. And besides, if the Fleet assigned a couple of swift-ships to escort a valuable cargo, that's still within the realm of what aggressive escorts would do. Especially if there are rumors of a prior attack. Just the same, though, you'll need to maneuver so as to be able to 'come to the aid' of the ship you're escorting. That's not going to be easy, but if the enemy is still in the system, our success will depend substantially upon you."
The raider ships had not attempted to hide for long. In a way, that made things easier, thought Freya. In another way, that made things much harder. The Conquering Sun had started her "attempted escape" as soon as the first of the raider ships had lit its drives. To Freya's consternation, despite the swift-ships' aggressive scouting, that was the first the squadron saw of it. The raider had been drifting deep in the system's interplanetary space, and given more time, they would have found it from its passive thermal signature. As it was, there was no need; the raider ships must have spotted them, most likely seeing the flash of their wormhole emergence, and then the flare of the swift-ships' drives. Once the two swift-ships were several hundred million kilometers from the Conquering Sun, the raider had lit its own drives, vectoring to intercept the assault ship.
To Freya, that meant the raiders had taken the bait. No lance-ship would willingly, knowingly, vector towards an enemy assault-ship. Spectral and thermal analysis of the raider's exhaust gave a decent estimate of the energy of the ship's drive. Observation of acceleration, a pattern of five hours at five gees, followed by one hour at one gee, allowed calculation of the ship's mass. At just under half a megaton, it was either a lance-ship, or something very similar to one.
In fact, the signature of the raider ship's drive was a 93% correlation for a Justified Vengeance class, the most common class of lance-ship used by the Coalition in the last war. To Freya, that almost certainly meant that the ship was a Coalition warship, Coalition built to an absolute certainty. Did this mean another war with the Coalition, she wondered?
The last war had ended only a little more than a hundred fifty thousand hours ago, or seventeen old-Earth years, a measure which the Coalition still clung to. It had not been the fiercest war between the Hegemony and the Coalition, but still it had cost almost a billion dead between the two sides, mostly civilians on planets unfortunate enough to have been fought over. In the end, both sides had let the conflict burn out; neither side had been able to capture a major system, and none of the minor systems the Hegemony had acquired came close to justifying the cost of the war.
The only good that came from the war was that severe losses of ships had forced the Coalition to stop its extensive raiding among the border systems. The Hegemony had been obliged to return the favor, abandoning annexation of an anomic system that had, supposedly, been the flash point for the whole conflict.
Now it looked as if there would be another war. She was not sure what she thought of that. As a Fleet officer, a war would give her a great deal of opportunity. On the other hand, the thought of dozens of systems living under full alert, never knowing when a Coalition raiding force would emerge from FTL, was appalling; the speed and power of FTL warships made entire planets vulnerable.
Of course, it might not come to an all-out shooting war. Freya thought it likely that, if they managed to force an engagement and destroy or capture those ships, there would be "solid" evidence that the ships were not part of the Coalition Space Forces; perhaps ships sold to a client system, or even "stolen" by pirates.
Not that it really mattered, here and now.
The second raider had made its appearance a few dozen hours later, in the worst possible place. The second ship had been drifting more than seven hundred million kilometers apart from its partner, most of the way across the inner system. The intention was obvious: to increase the chances that one of the raiders would be in range of a victim, should one emerge from FTL into the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system.
To a degree, it had worked. The two ships had found the Conquering Sun emerging from FTL between them. Now both ships were boosting to intercept the assault-ship.
That was good, Freya thought. We want to get them close. The problem was, it would not last. The wide separation of the two enemy ships meant that the assault-ship could not aim its drives at both of them at once, and as soon as one of the raiders came close enough for optical sensors to see what they were chasing, they would be accelerating hard in the other direction, assuming they didn't just go FTL. Most likely they would have to lose some time to decelerate before they went FTL; initiating FTL with a very high vector made the transit more difficult. But even so, that wouldn't be enough margin for the Conquering Sun to catch them.
One ship could be fooled by the Conquering Sun's thrust. The assault-ship was accelerating at a "panicked" half gee, running its drive at deliberately reduced efficiency to make it look civilian. The other ship, though, had to be kept from seeing a close visual of the Conquering Sun. That left the two swift-ships; Ice Knife and Skyrunner were the only other pieces on the board.
It was simple enough in principle: The two swift-ships would have to intercept the second raider and then match vectors with it, staying just out of combat range. Then they could use their lasers to blind the raider, hiding the truth about the Conquering Sun in the glare of their own lasers and the flare of their own drives.
Of course, if they got too close, failed to keep their distance, they might fall within engagement range of the lance-ship. And if that happened, getting back out of range would be a desperate battle.
Ice Knife and Skyrunner had made the intercept well enough. The swift-ships could sustain seven gees for hundreds of hours. The tricky part was in keeping close enough to the enemy to effec
tively blind his sensors' ability to visually resolve the hull shape of the Conquering Sun, but not to get close enough to tempt the enemy to launch a wave of interceptors to destroy the swift-ships.
"It's sort of a dance, is it not?" Freya's Executive Officer had said.
He would see it that way, Freya thought. Executive Officer Muir Zanados was a scion of a family high among the aristokratai. The first Zanados had been among the first humans to upload his mind, becoming one of the first daemons. That put him among the founders of the Hegemony of Suns, more than two and a half million hours, two hundred and fifty tenkays, ago. So his descendant was very blue blood indeed, though Muir wore a custom biosim avatar when he inhabited a humanoid form, so his actual "blood" was synthetic circulatory fluid just like hers, thought Freya.
It really was a sort of dance, though, and the lance-ship was leading. It would cut acceleration, and force the two swift-ships to cut their acceleration, or else risk moving out of effective blinding range. The two swift-ships had to stay at about three hundred fifty thousand kilometers, a bit over one light-second, to be able to degrade the lance-ship's optical sensors. They had to stay together as well; a single swift-ship lacked the laser power to do the job at this range.
Alternately, the lance-ship would boost to its emergency acceleration, pushing six gees, and the swift-ships would have to match it instantly. If they fell within two hundred fifty thousand kilometers, they would be within range of a full salvo of the lance-ship's laser-boosted interceptors. At three hundred thousand fifty kilometers, the enemy would have to task two lasers for each interceptor it launched and the two swift-ships would have more time to evade and prepare; to get back out of range, increasing the flight time of the enemy interceptors, giving themselves more time to deploy anti-interceptor stand-off warheads into the path of the inbound attack.