by John F. Carr
Diettinger glared at the Signals Rank. “Confirm TF Keegan engaged only in delaying tactics; no full-on ship-to-ship engagements.”
The Signals Ranker’s hands flew back and forth across his console; a moment later he looked back at Diettinger. “Vessel First Rank Dannevar signals: Tell them, Dictator.”
Diettinger’s gaze lost its fire. Second Rank Adame watched the Dictator’s face smooth into the old familiar grin she had come to know so well. The tension on Fomoria’s bridge was broken, at least for the moment.
“Signals, send Task Force Damaris: Standby to re-engage.”
Vessel First Rank Emory acknowledged the command and signaled the rest of her forces. TF Damaris lay two hundred thousand kilometers above the asteroid belt, just on the Sauron side of the Freas/Barlowe line. The ships of Emory’s command now began gentle, one-fifth-G vectors down and back toward the asteroids in the direction of Sauron.
Emory thought of how the maneuver must look to the Imperials. We’re drawing back for our desperate last defense of Homeworld, she thought. It is the only option left to us. The Imperials will see the time has now come to run us into the ground, and crush us for good.
The thought made Emory smile, just as her own Second Rank happened to turn and look back at her. He snapped his head back round so quickly she heard his neck crack. She doubted that he’d seen a look of such gleeful predation since his Ascension Day hunt. And the face that wore it that day hadn’t been human.
Either, she couldn’t help thinking.
III
Diettinger watched the immersion display chronometer’s waterfall of green digits flow to and past the next hour, and then the next. The display showed Intruder Two, having crossed the Freas/Barlowe line, bearing down on Ostia, with Task Force Keegan vainly trying to stem the tide. Elements of Intruder Two kept trying to move out to encircle TF Keegan, but Dannevar’s ships continued savaging each Imperial ship that left the safety of the main group.
Switching viewpoints, Diettinger saw that TF Damaris had almost disappeared within the asteroids, while Intruder One bore down on the Sauron Homeworld like—Well, like a judgment, he thought. Which, of course, was exactly what it was.
Intruder Three remained at its station off the Franklin Alderson Point, but it no longer worried him. From now on, the longer the Imperials waited to commit Intruder Three, the better the chances his own plans would succeed. Several things had to happen at once, and though most of them would not happen at the same time, the laws of relativity applied to combat at this scale dictated that they could at least appear to be simultaneous to the various subjective observers on all points of the lightspeed-information curve. If all my commanders carry out their orders with the timing which is so crucial to the defense plan.
He felt he could ignore the Imperial reserve force for the time being.
Of greatest interest to Diettinger were the smaller sets of figures suspended over the icons of Intruders One and Two, figures that reported the estimated average fuel consumption of both Imperial elements. Intruder One had consumed considerable amounts of fuel in its initial engagement with TF Damaris, and was continuing to merrily burn it away as it closed with Sauron. Still, it would require several more days of constant six-G burns before Intruder One’s tanks ran dry.
Intruder Two, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so well-off. The ships of TF Keegan might be taking a beating, but they were forcing Intruder Two to consume prodigious amounts of maneuvering fuel to inflict it.
Diettinger rechecked the telemetry from TF Keegan’s vessels: as he expected, the Sauron ships were burning fuel just as fast, even faster than their Imperial opponents. But the higher-G tolerance of Sauron crews meant that Sauron vessels were designed to carry enough fuel to make such an ability worth having. Sauron also designed her spacecraft for deep penetration missions and long-term operations in enemy territory, far from friendly refueling areas. Thus, while the Sauron ships were also burning a great deal of liquid hydrogen, they had a great deal more to burn.
Meanwhile, the Sauron tankers that had been shuttling between the Homeworld and Ostia had finally stopped running, at least in one direction. No more of the ungainly vessels were headed for the Homeworld. Perhaps forty were strung out between Sauron and Ostia, all bound for the gas giant, to join their hundred and twenty sister ships in various orbits there.
Diettinger called for an ETA on the last of these, and was told it would arrive less than half-a-day before Intruder Two reached Ostia. “Signal tanker control to initiate Phase Three. Secure signal to Hawksley aboard the Falkenberg: Snowflake. Advise when confirmed.”
Diettinger’s Signals Ranker performed the first task, then repeated the code word so there could be no mistake as to the Dictator’s command. “Estimate one hour to confirmation, Dictator.”
One hour was cutting it close, but close-cutting was what the bulk of his defense plan was all about. Diettinger nodded. “Very good.”
IV
Aboard the Falkenberg, First Officer Willoughby picked up the secure line to tell Captain Hawksley of the secure message just lasered in from the Fomoria. “It’s in your code, skipper. I’ll have Lee bring it to you directly.”
“No need, Exec. My code key is Lilliput, seven-niner-seven. Decode it for me and I’ll read it when I reach the bridge.”
Hawksley hung up, and a moment later Executive Officer Willoughby did the same. He looked at the commo officer. “Captain says we’re to decode the message for him.” Willoughby keyed in Hawksley’s personal decipher key, sharing a look with the young communications officer seated before him. Neither considered it a good sign that their commander felt there was no longer any need for security aboard the Falkenberg.
When Hawksley arrived, he read the one word signal and sent a confirmation to the Fomoria. “Helm, take us down another ten klicks;” he ordered, “bring us to planetary coordinates longitude eight degrees north, latitude twenty-three degrees west and hold.”
Hawksley looked across the bridge to where Willoughby now stood waiting by the Gunnery Station.
“Time to dance,” Hawksley said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I
“Dannevar signals TF Keegan’s position untenable, Dictator,” the Communications Ranker reported.
Diettinger looked at the master mission chronometer suspended within the immersion display. Each Sauron Fleet element bore a duplicate of this figure, representing the Homeworld’s mean time. Beside each of the element’s mean times had been added a second set of numbers, the “local time” for the element, calculated from the task force’s distance from Sauron. The engaged Imperial elements bore their own figures, with the cumulative data allowing Diettinger to see the distance between combat units in light-hours, minutes and seconds, all of it calibrated to compensate for his own subjective position within a battle spread out across twenty-seven cubic light hours. He watched as the master mission chronometer flashed away three more minutes.
“Signal TF Keegan to break off and regroup at mission station two-two-nine. Send to Barlowe and Freas—Standby.”
Diettinger had not taken his eye off the display; now he swung the command console into his lap and addressed it: “Enhance and identify small force detaching from Intruder Two/Ostia.”
A glimmer of light within the display bloomed into a cubic meter enhancement containing dozens of points of light, so densely packed as to resemble luminous clouds to merely human vision. But Saurons had nearly twice as many rods and half again as many cones packed into the tissue behind their retinas as did any human norm. Diettinger’s vision provided all the clarity he needed—if perhaps less depth perception than he might have wished.
Less than a tenth of the lights were red, labeled “Fighter Escort,” the rest were pale green, the color for non-combatants, and were marked “Fuel Skimmers.”
“Projected percentage of Intruder Two’s available total refueling craft based on known complement being the same in original enemy element. Do not modif
y figure for battle casualties.” He’d had enough of Sauron theorists’ propensity for wish fulfillment in their thinking—or, for that matter, their computer programming.
The figure that appeared stopped his breath: “Ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent.”
Diettinger saw that Fomoria’s bridge staff was, for Saurons, nearly euphoric. Second Rank was watching the display with an open smile; even Köln had half-risen from his acceleration couch.
“Cut it in half before you believe it,” Diettinger told them, but he could not keep from his voice the one element he most needed to hold in check. Hope.
“Send again to Keegan: All speed.”
II
“That’s it for Task Force Keegan,” Willoughby announced. “All contacts now reading as standard Imperial Navy transponders. Ostia has fallen, skipper.”
Hawksley brought his acceleration couch closer to his command console and checked the system readouts; Falkenberg was hidden, silent and unmoving, within the gas giant’s soupy interface between pure gases and not-quite-liquids. Station-keeping at this altitude was impossible; only Falkenberg’s extremely high orbital speed had kept her aloft this long.
Like all modern spaceships, Falkenberg used hydrogen to power her engines. Unlike most, which carried small craft for the job, she was equipped with her own integral skimming scoops which allowed her to personally extract such hydrogen directly from planetary atmospheres or oceans. Falkenberg had been designed from the keel up as a privateer; her designers had reasoned that space aboard her, normally taken up by fuel skimmers, could be more profitably occupied by small attack craft.
That had not been enough to protect Falkenberg during her refueling runs, and all of them had been lost years ago.
Now, the raider was obliged to make her fuel runs as quickly as possible for her own safety. But in this case, speed was not simply important to her survival; speed was life itself. The faster she went, the more hydrogen she gathered, the more hydrogen she could burn and the more stable an orbit she could maintain, hidden in one of Ostia’s thousand-kilometer wide bands of gaseous color. At her current speed, Falkenberg was burning fuel as fast as it sluiced into her condensers.
“We are now in Imperial space.” Willoughby announced dryly, then snapped back to the display: “Multiple signals, Imperial heavy fighters, the new Kakuyoku-class. They’re maneuvering to avoid the tankers,” he observed, watching the Imperial fighters penetrating Ostia’s lower ionosphere. “No surprises there.”
Hawksley was leaning into the cowl over his viewscreen. The Sauron techs had fitted Falkenberg with an immersion display. While the rest of his bridge crew were delighted with it, Hawksley found it of no interest whatsoever. He was from Burgess, settled centuries before by disaffected expatriates from the southern regions of North America, a broad mixture ranging from social trash to self-styled aristocrats, all of whom were by turns arrogant, honorable, bellicose or genteel, but all were in agreement that the old ways were best. Which, no doubt, was why I killed the Duke of Gotham’s son—who also happened to be the Emperor’s nephew—in a duel with sabers and not pistols, he reflected.
Hawksley saw two flights of heavy fighters come about one hundred and sixty degrees and fire their lasers on an abandoned tanker; his bridge crew made a collective noise that translated roughly as nothing good. “Steady,” Hawksley told them.
The beams passed through the tanker’s dispersed structure and out the other side without hitting very much. The ionized trail they left in Ostia’s vapors made them visible to the naked eye, a rare treat that only Hawksley enjoyed since only he was still using the archaic viewscreen.
“What’s the story with that tanker, XO?”
“Minor damage to a support strut and one maneuvering package, sir,” the young crewman at the sensors station informed Willoughby; Burgess naval etiquette did not permit direct address to the Captain during battle stations when a senior officer had been addressed first. “They’ve moved on now.”
“What do you make of that, skipper?” Willoughby asked.
Hawksley shook his head slightly, never rising from the cowl. “Might have guessed something, but they didn’t press the attack. I suspect they were either calibrating weapons or hoping to flush any crew that might have been hiding on board. Most likely the latter.” He blinked and sat up. “Could Fomoria have seen that?”
Willoughby looked to the commo officer, who shook his head and said, “Ah don’t think so, skippuh. Flag is on the fahr side of the gas jahnt, and this eye-ahh-no-sfeah’s been playin’ hob with ah’own display; I wun’t think it’d be much bettuh thayuh.”
“Skipper?” Willoughby brought his acceleration couch across the room to Hawksley’s station, as much for privacy as to escape the commo officer’s wretched lower-class drawl. “Something else?”
Hawksley nodded, leaning back into his viewscreen cowl. “Might be they’re thinking of trying to capture some of these ‘abandoned’ tankers. Which of course would mean they’d have to bring in one of their big ships for a towing link-up.” He flashed Willoughby a quick grin before returning to his scrutiny of the display before him.
Willoughby chuckled, before replying. “Oh, that would be just too sweet, Skipper.” He looked back to the display; their high-speed orbit was quickly leaving behind the tankers and the fighters which had used them for target practice. A new contact abruptly appeared in the display, milliseconds after Hawksley had noted it in his own viewscreen.
“Here come the fuel skimmers,” Hawksley’s tone changed from one of reflection to thunder in a clear sky. “Mr. Willoughby, signal all stations to standby.”
In the display behind him, green dots had formed into eight lines of ten abreast, all bearing down on Ostia’s lower ionosphere. The eight lines of green dots were staggered and no more than fifty kilometers apart; minimum safe distance, but designed to place each trailing skimmer directly on the wake crest of the one ahead. Ostia’s atmosphere would roll up into compressed streams with the passage of the lead skimmers. Each of those streams of light gases and precious hydrogen—three times the density encountered by the forward boats—would flow into the following skimmer’s gaping maw, filling its compressor chambers three times faster. It was a maneuver of desperation—or of a foe eager to renew the offensive and come to grips with the enemy. Either way, Hawksley shook his head in amazement. Diettinger’s guesses had so far been right on the money, down to the smallest detail.
He wondered how long that could last.
“Mister Willoughby, Snowflake is a go.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper” Willoughby turned to the starboard weapons control officer. “Weapons free, Mister Plunkett.”
“Weapons free, aye.”
“Captain?” Willoughby turned to Hawksley. Another Burgess naval tradition demanded the first shot fired be so ordered by the commanding officer.
“Mister Plunkett,” Hawksley said, never looking up from his screen, “You may indulge yourself.”
Plunkett reached forward and pressed a button nowhere near the weapons control board.
On the Falkenberg’s hull, sixteen microwave signaling turrets whirred about, tracked to find the pre-recorded codes of their receiving units, and began pouring excited radio waves into Ostia’s rarefied upper atmosphere. Transponder packages aboard the four tankers closest to Falkenberg acquired the activation signals and immediately downlinked commands to their respective shipboard computers, then relayed them to other orbiting tankers all around the planet. Stupid by any standards but their own, the mechanical brains of the tankers were geniuses at one task; fine axial maneuvering, to allow precise alignment of their refueling ports with thirsty starships.
The crews of the Imperial skimmers would normally have been very happy to know that hundreds of fuel tankers were in low orbit at Ostia, but for the unfortunate fact that the refueling ports of all those tankers had been heavily modified and none of them were now carrying fuel.
If a battle in deep space can be called beauti
ful, a battle in the roiling clouds of a Jovian-class gas giant must be the equivalent of a drunken brawl in a jungle at midnight. With knives. Eight tankers began tumbling end over end, attitude thrusters burning in apparently random bursts, while from each of their thirty refueling ports trailed steady streams of milky white vapor.
Back aboard the Falkenberg, Hawksley had at last turned from his viewscreen to regard the immersion display. The holographic image excelled in one aspect where the viewscreen simply could not do the battle justice; it gave a sense of scale. Each of the tankers displaced just over one million metric tonnes and the vapor trails they were spreading in their wakes were over two meters in diameter at the source, and already four kilometers long and growing swiftly as their source tankers accelerated. The trails were beginning to cross one another now, and the “supposedly random” pattern of the tankers’ thrusters was revealed to be a programmed maneuver to prevent their own collision while intersecting one another’s orbital flight paths.
Back at their starting points, the trails were now less white and bluer, the crystalline, blue shade of exactly what they appeared to be—water. Or, more precisely, what water created from the infusion of liquid oxygen into a nearly pure hydrogen environment at the edge of atmosphere instantly becomes, which is to say—ice.
Intent on their mission, Intruder Two’s fuel skimmers maneuvered only very slightly to avoid the tankers. The fact that their onboard sensors showed that the tankers themselves seemed to be leaving wakes of denser gases, so much the better. Skimmers gobbled up gases and could even “drink” water, after a fashion.
Slowly.
They had never been designed to fly into a hailstorm at forty times the speed of sound, and the first rank of skimmers to hit the ice-strands might as well have tried to plow through a cloud of buckshot. Most of the crystals were snowflakes, but many had coagulated into masses as much as a centimeter across. These and thousands more like them went into the front of the fuel skimmers where, according to design, they were to be compacted by scoops, liquefied by condensers and gathered into compression tanks at the rear, just forward of the engines.