The Battle of Sauron

by John F. Carr

  Instead, the velocity of the skimmers, on hitting the relatively immobile ice chunks, allowed the artificial hailstones to plow through scoops, condensers, compressors, storage tanks and engines and keep right on not going anywhere.

  Also by design, skimmers lack any impressive ability for lateral maneuver, but they maneuvered very impressively indeed in the vertical, and after the first four ranks of skimmers were obliterated in front of them, the next four decided to try climbing out of the trap. Only to find that the tankers had been slowly climbing during their weaving dances and that now the web of ice was above them as well as in front. Though more vulnerable through the intakes mounted on their bows, the fuel skimmers fared no better when taking the impact of the ice strands on their upper hulls. The few skimmers sturdy enough to not shatter ricocheted off the resisting filaments of ice and either tumbled out of control or skipped back downward into the lower, more vertical strands.

  Of eighty skimmers in the Imperial’s first refueling attempt, only six escaped immediate destruction or the slow death of entrapment in powerless, rapidly decaying orbits. Many of the disabled vessels’ crews could be heard for hours on emergency frequencies, calling for rescues which would never come.

  Willoughby checked Plunkett’s telemetry board and informed Hawksley: “These eight tankers are about dry, skipper.”

  “Take ’em out, Mister Willoughby,” Hawksley ordered.

  Willoughby so ordered and missiles were fired. Moments later the eight tankers had ignited the remainder of their internal fuel, adding eight million-plus cubic tonnes of debris to the ice strands that now polluted Ostia’s ionosphere.

  Lacking much cohesive mass, the ice would eventually break up and sublimate into gas or sink deeper into the gas giant’s clouds. But the pieces of tanker were large, dense and orbiting at extreme velocities. Better still, they were deep enough in the ionosphere to be beyond visual contact; sensors would have little success in fixing the positions of such irregular shapes at their speeds.

  “We’re getting telemetry from the other tankers, skipper,” Willoughby reported. “Comparable results, mostly, with just over twenty percent of the tankers activated.”

  Hawksley nodded, satisfied. Now activated, the tankers all around Ostia would begin to dump their liquid oxygen automatically on sensor contact with any group of skimmers, but they would not self-destruct without direct signals from Falkenberg. To do so might lose the opportunity to further damage enemy vessels; worse, it would reveal to Imperial sensor teams “holes” in the impromptu minefield created by the tankers’ continued presence. That meant the privateer would have to do a great deal of maneuvering within Ostia’s cloud cover, but it would also keep the Imperial vessels from fixing her exact position. More importantly, it would create doubt as to just how many Sauron ships were hiding out in Ostia’s soupy atmosphere.

  “Very good,” Hawksley addressed Willoughby in a low tone, almost reflective. “Begin evasive maneuvers. Coordinate sensor telemetry on the positions of those other skimmer elements, and keep us in position to intercept the next reasonably close group of enemy craft refueling. When the sheep come to drink again, I want to be the first cougar at the water hole.”

  Willoughby grinned. “Aye, Captain,” Then, nimbly crossing back through that invisible wall of Burgess society which separated acceptable behavior toward aristocrats from that more suited to the lower classes, he added: “Time to go piss in some more wells.”

  III

  Diettinger reviewed the reports from Falkenberg’s initial contact at Ostia. He was unaware that by the end of the report, he had risen out of his chair. He looked around, abruptly aware that his bridge crew were staring at him. “Splendid,” was all he said.

  Now, as they usually did, matters hinged on the Imperials’ reaction to the events at Ostia. Deprived, at least temporarily, of their in-system fuel source, they were vulnerable to a counterattack by Sauron fleets which could be refueled by the oceans of the still-secure Homeworld.

  Will they now pour reinforcements into a sweep of Ostia to eradicate the unknown number of Sauron ships there? Or press their attack on Sauron itself?

  Either decision required the concentration of Imperial forces in areas where they could be attacked by superior numbers of Sauron ships on such forces’ perimeter. Only commitment of the heretofore inactive Intruder Three elements would offset Sauron maneuverability in either battle. And Diettinger was beginning to heartily wish he knew the purpose of those silent, motionless Imperial ships.

  “Signals, Dictator.”

  “Speak.”

  “Task Force Keegan, standing by. Task Force Damaris, standing by. Hourglass North, standing by. Hourglass South, standing by.”

  “Status, Barlowe/Freas stations.”

  “Full readiness, Dictator.” Whatever that means, Communications Fifth Rank Boyle thought. The Barlowe/Freas stations were under such tight security that it was rumored not even High Command knew their function. As long as it helps to smash the Imperials.

  Diettinger looked across the Fomoria’s bridge to the advancing line of Imperial ships that comprised Intruder One. The immersion display readouts showed the Imperials to be ten hours, forty-one minutes from the Homeworld; fifty-two minutes from the section of the asteroid belt to which TF Damaris had fled and was now hiding, waiting for them. Diettinger’s signal from the Fomoria to TF Damaris would take twelve minutes to arrive, the one to the Barlowe/Freas stations five and nine, respectively.

  He activated the immersion display controls, and a new data display appeared, connecting the outlying planets of Barlowe and Freas. What had been up to now only a navigational referent—the “Barlowe/Freas Line”—was now represented by a pale blue line. That line passed across the asteroid field only a few thousand kilometers from TF Damaris’ position, almost exactly on the forward ships of the advancing Imperial force Intruder One. In seventeen minutes, at their current rate of speed, the line would bisect the Imperial fleet element.

  Better to put it just forward of center, Diettinger thought. Their ships’ speed will allow few of them to maneuver out of the way.

  “Send Intruder One’s position, velocity and vector to Barlowe/Freas. Signal Barlowe/Freas to go active for an intercept two minutes forward of Intruder One main body.”

  Communications carried out the order while Diettinger turned to Second Rank. “Signal Asteroid Defense Rank Pell to stand by for his firing signal. Activate Hourglass North and move it into position at point one-three-four, plus one million seven hundred thousand zed. Signal TF Damaris to commence maneuvers.”

  IV

  Second Rank turned from viewing the immersion display and began detailing the information in Diettinger’s orders to her own communications rankers and staff elsewhere on the Fomoria.

  The Dictator’s plan was unfolding. What is about to happen was, she knew, the crux of his design—its masterstroke, so to speak. It also contained the one and only trick he had up his sleeve, the one aspect of his defense of the Homeworld whose value could not be reliably calculated beforehand.

  Because it relies on untested technology, she thought, and felt her throat tighten.

  Oh Galen!, she thought, surprising herself at the intensity of her anxiety. Do not be wrong. I fear more for you than for the Homeworld. And that thought shocked her into temporary immobility, for it was nothing less than high treason.

  With her excellent Sauron peripheral vision, Second Rank Adame watched Cyborg Rank Köln seated, immobile, his own gaze fixed on the status screens before him, showing his two thousand, seven hundred and forty EVA Commando Cyborgs at their duty stations throughout the fleet.

  If it does not work, Köln will surely move against you. The other Cyborgs must have instructed him to do so if your defense of Sauron fails. Whether they can save the Homeworld, if you cannot, will be irrelevant; the Race will at least die with Cyborgs leading them.

  She did not turn, for she could assure herself with utter certainty that Fomoria’s bridg
e security officers were at their stations. She also knew that such officers would kill anyone who attempted to harm the Dictator.

  What she could not be sure of was that any Sauron could overcome the years of societal training which put them in such awe of the Cyborgs, to the point where they could even believe themselves capable of harming one of the Super Soldiers, let alone actually attempt it.

  Which was why she had warned the bridge security guards herself to watch Cyborg Rank Köln with special care; he was to be killed the instant he made any threatening move against the Dictator.

  Give Saurons a task, she knew, and we think of nothing else. Give us enough time to prepare for that task, all the while thinking of nothing else, and it soon becomes the only thing we are capable of doing. Societal training is only what we do; being soldiers is what we are.

  Even so, she could not be sure they would be fast enough to stop Köln. There were only eight of them. She lifted her knee, brushed it once more against the grip of the pistol she had taped to the underside of her console. But if they only slowed Köln down a little, the Cyborg would be dead immediately after Diettinger.

  That much, she could be sure of.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I

  Nine minutes and three seconds later, hundreds of millions of kilometers away, thirty kilometers beneath the surface of Freas, eighty-four Sauron technical rankers set about justifying an investment of twenty-three years of research and expenditures which reached comfortably into the trillions.

  Along with their colleagues on Barlowe, they had been engaged in the development of particle weapon technology for the Sauron war machine. Their expertise had led to advances in weaponry which made the Sauron ground soldier as superior to his Imperial counterpart in armament as he was in physiognomy.

  And that was Sauron society’s military blind spot. Convinced that ultimate victory would be an inevitable by-product of individual genetic supremacy, all the best efforts and intellectual brilliance of these men and women had been funneled into ever-more-powerful systems for the Sauron ground trooper. Ultimately this had led to personal weapons of such potency that they were feasible only for the Cyborgs. Weapon systems whose development might have resulted in naval superiority languished in favor of those with obvious application to planetside conflicts.

  But research on such systems had proceeded nevertheless and now the developers, who had kept them alive, hoped to prove that their commitment to them had not been misplaced.

  The positional data on Intruder One was downloaded into computers on Barlowe and Freas. Power generation systems on both worlds were producing enough energy for ten cities. Time differentials were calculated for the limitations imposed by the speed of light over the distances which would be traversed and, with very little fuss, systems on both Barlowe and Freas were activated. And on both Barlowe and Freas nothing very much seemed to happen.

  Minutes later, in the immersion display of the flagship Fomoria, the pale blue beam representing the Barlowe/Freas line brightened at each end and that brightness began to extend outward from each of the two worlds, toward a convergence point slightly closer to Freas than to Barlowe. The size of the immersion display and the scale of its representation of events meant that the extending brightness, which was moving at not quite the speed of light, was advancing at about the same rate as the minute hand of an antique watch. Even so, after perhaps thirty seconds everyone could see that the brightening segments would meet at a point just above the plane of the ecliptic, over the asteroid belt, just ahead of dead center of Intruder One.

  Fifth Rank Boyle wanted so badly to know what was going to happen he actually had to clench his teeth. Instead, he turned slightly to look at the Dictator’s face, hoping to discern some clue from his expression.

  The left side of Diettinger’s face was in shadow, his one eye gleaming from within it and seeming never to blink, the thin lines of cheekbone and jaw partially illuminated. The right side was sharply lit, the black eye patch looking like an empty socket, heavy shadows accentuating the bones on that side of his face. With his lips parted and his teeth gleaming across both dark and light, he looked, Boyle thought, like death coming out of the darkness, a single living eye regarding the dawn.

  Boyle decided immediately that the Dictator did not look as though he would appreciate any idle questions from curious fifth rankers.

  In the immersion display, the bright, airless grey spheres of Barlowe and Freas continued to extend their respective blue lines toward one another.

  Aboard the ships of Intruder One, on the bridges and at the sensor stations of the Imperial craft, no one was aware of the activities occurring between the system’s outer planets of Barlowe and Freas. The events were transpiring at the speed of light; they could likewise only be apprehended at that speed. No one could know these events even existed until they could perceive them and they would not perceive them until they were, literally, on top of them.

  By then—if the Sauron technical rankers were correct in their theories—it would be too late.

  What was racing outward from Barlowe and Freas were subatomic particles. Millions of square kilometers of arrays generated the particles in equal portions of negative, positive and neutral charges. The neutral charge particles were wasted and their part in the process ended there. The positive and negative charges, however, were focused through several kilometers of electromagnetic acceleration tunnels bored into the crusts of each of the planets.

  These accelerator tunnels concentrated the subatomic particles into streams, raised the speed of those streams to ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent the speed of light and fired them toward the surface. The charged particles would have obliterated any physical matter in their way, but they were doomed the moment they left the mouths of their accelerator tunnels. Neither Barlowe nor Freas possessed atmospheres and the Sauron technical rankers knew that charged subatomic particle streams decayed almost instantly in vacuum. One step remained in the process to make the beams survivable and it occurred one meter below the mouth of the accelerator tubes on the surfaces of Barlowe and Freas.

  Screens of gas and high-powered lasers stripped the extra electron from the negative ions and bonded it to a nearby positive ion. The streams that emerged from the accelerator tubes were particles of completely neutral charges and these propagated very well in vacuum, indeed.

  The tubes on Barlowe and Freas were spread out across the facing surfaces of both worlds. They were numerous but capable of very little in the way of fine adjustment in the discretional projection of the particle streams which they generated, or so the technical rankers had explained to Diettinger, who finally realized that they were telling him they were almost impossible to aim. The project was, after all, still experimental.

  No matter, the Dictator had assured them. What he was looking for was quantity of production, and when he had told them why, they had been delighted to realize he had read their briefings on the project much more thoroughly than High Command had.

  Diettinger knew that the Imperial Langston Fields would render the particle beams useless. Langston Fields absorbed energy, radiant as in lasers or thermonuclear explosives, or kinetic as in torpedoes—even ramming ships. Using particle accelerator weapons against a Langston Field was like firing a shotgun into tar. Worse, particle beams imparted damage by the sheer number of the particles they delivered to the target; the mathematics of the Langston Field meant that small elements impacting the field were absorbed and their energy dissipated in direct proportion to the energy of the individual imparting element. Lasers, with their constant flow of energy over time, and nukes, with their tremendous release of energy in a rapid burst, could burn through or crash through a Langston Field. A particle beam, on the other hand, wouldn’t even make it glow.

  All of which was why Sauron High Command had never embraced the project: No practical groundside application within a reasonable timeframe. No qualitatively superior naval performance to that of the high energy l
asers already in use aboard the ships of the fleet. A dead end. At which point the long-term applications proposed by the technical rankers had been consigned to oblivion.

  Until today.

  The particle streams racing outward from Barlowe and Freas were now only seconds apart. From opposite sides of the Imperial fleet element designated Intruder One, they approached one another, subatomic torrents of neutral-charge particles in bundles of beams hundreds of kilometers in diameter. They began to impact the Langston Fields of the perimeter vessels of Intruder One; Field operators aboard the ships noticed minute surges in their capacitor monitors, calculated what they must be, and ignored them. A few took cold pleasure from what they felt must be eleventh-hour desperation on the part of the Saurons to be fielding such pathetically impotent weapons against the judgment that was about to be visited upon them. Even fewer of those operators bothered to inform their captains of the particle beams; none of those captains deigned to do anything about them.

  The streams met.

  Timing, Diettinger was to think when recalling the event later, is everything.

  Particle beams were hopelessly ineffective against Langston Fields. But what the technical rankers had been trying to convince High Command they could create—and what Diettinger had authorized them to provide—were almost literally a quantum leap beyond such weapons.

  At this time in their respective years, Barlowe and Freas lay on opposite sides of the Sauron System, a distance of over five hundred million kilometers. Within that huge volume of space, a large quantity of the high velocity neutral atomic particles in the streams projected by the Sauron research stations on each moon simply passed by one another and on into space. Many more were intercepted by the Langston Fields of Intruder One’s constituent ships. But the vast majority met somewhere in between, colliding, and producing yet a third type of particle—a meson.