“Besides,” added VanVean, “we weren’t going to let you go off and have all the fun.”
“Fun! We’re headed into a battle, you maniacs!”
“Yes, we are,” said Sheila, all the mischief leaving her face. “And if you think we are going to stay behind while you are getting shot at, you have another think coming, Mister Crawford!”
“Wouldn’t be proper,” agreed VanVean, nodding his head. “Anyway, someone needs to be around to keep you out of trouble.”
Crawford’s annoyance melted away and he found that he was deeply touched. He reached out two large hands and grasped his friends’ shoulders. “All right. And thanks, you two. Thanks a lot.”
“Aw, I think he actually means it,” said VanVean.
“I do. And did I hear correctly? Are you responsible for this get—I mean my new uniform, Sheila?”
“Yes, you like it?”
“It… it’s wonderful. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. And be sure to wear it for your new lady-friend. Us girls just can’t resist a man in uniform.”
His mouth dropped open and a number of strange sounds came out as he turned red. “I… uh… I mean… that is…”
Shelia stepped forward and took his chin in her hand and pushed his mouth closed. “It’s okay, Chuck. Really. I had my chances and just didn’t grab them. I’m happy for you. But you let her know that if she doesn’t treat you right, she’ll have to answer to me.”
Crawford stared at her for a moment and then wrapped his thick arms around her and hugged her tight. She hugged him back and they held each other for a few moments. Over her shoulder he noticed VanVean staring at them. “What? No snide comments, ya big lunk?”
“Hell no. I’m glad for you, too. Even gladder for me, though. Once she stopped mooning after you, Sheila actually started paying some attention to me.”
Crawford held Sheila away from him and quirked an eyebrow. “Oh really?”
Sheila blushed. “Well, once you get past his coarse, crude, nasty exterior there’s a coarse, crude, but actually kind of nice interior.”
“You’re kidding.” Now VanVean was blushing a bit.
“No, I’m not. But you better be going, Sir Charles. Ol’ Cap’n Ironbritches there looks to be getting annoyed.” She motioned down the corridor to where Speirs and the rest of the party were waiting.
“Yeah, I guess I better. But you guys take care of yourselves, you hear? And try not to tick off the captain any more than you have to.”
“No more than we have to, we promise,” said VanVean.
They all nodded to each other and then Crawford turned and walked away. As he resumed the inspection he reflected that by comparison, the coming battle didn’t seem nearly as complicated as it had a while earlier.
* * * * *
The Venanci are decelerating now and appear to be coming straight in. That’s a real good thing for us. Just hope they don’t have any tricks up their sleeves. We should be engaging in a couple of hour, so this will be my last message until it’s over. I miss you, girl, but try not to worry about what’s going on. I’ll send another message when I can. Take care of yourself. Charles.
“Try not to worry!” snorted Regina Nassau as she shut off the com-terminal. “Yeah, fat chance!” She leaned back in her chair and tugged at her braid until it hurt. Don’t worry! Right. A Venanci squadron is bearing down to kill a man I’m falling in love with and turn the rest of us into virtual slaves if they win. Nothing to worry about! She’d be worried enough even if Charles had been out of harm’s way, but with him in the thick of things it was far worse. She wished she was there with him.
“Enough self-pity, damn it!” she snarled. “You’ve got a job to do.”
In spite of everything else that was happening, the terraforming project was going ahead. The Frecendi ruling council had agreed to evacuate the three mining outposts, which would allow tapping two of the magma pockets, and they were considering her suggestions about the others. The TEP had been revised and checked and approved, both by the Frecendi and by Governor Shiffeld. They were to begin deployment of the nuclear devices into their orbits just six hours from now. That would take three days and then, even though the battle would have been fought and this whole operation might be under new management, the devices would be sent down to start the process. Regina felt that they were rushing things a bit, but on some visceral level she actually had to agree with Shiffeld’s defiant statement that they would get something started that the Venanci could not stop even if they won.
She pulled out her computer and went over the TEP once again, but she found that she was too nervous to really concentrate. It was pointless anyway: the plan wasn’t going to be changed now. She got up and wandered through her quarters, resisting the urge to go to the main control room. She’d be spending many, many hours there as it was and it wouldn’t do any good to have her looking over peoples’ shoulders any sooner than necessary. She was tempted to find Jeanine, just to have someone to talk to, but her assistant had been acting strangely of late. She was afraid it was the stories about her relationship with Charles that had been circulating. She wasn’t sure how the young woman was taking that news.
Finally, she couldn’t stand being cooped up any longer and left her quarters to prowl through the ship. She did glance in the main control room, but Ramsey was in there and he glared at her so darkly when he spotted her that she just kept going. She would have enough contact with him when things got rolling, and he had been even more irritable lately than she had. Her feet led her aft, past the labs and microbe storage. With the addition of the two magma pockets to the plan, the microbe wranglers were getting the sulfur-eaters ready to go, although the low temperatures were going to reduce their effectiveness. She exchanged a few words with the lab manager but then continued her tour. Further aft she came to a heavy door with a guard standing next to it. She had to show him her ID before he would let her past, and he seemed reluctant even then. He handed her a radiation exposure tag and let her through.
On the other side of the door was bomb storage. That wasn’t its official designation, of course, but everyone—even her—called it that. It was a series of large compartments containing over two thousand thermo-nuclear devices—enough to devastate an entire planet if misused, which was the reason for the security. As she expected, there was a great deal of activity here and technicians were everywhere. All the bombs to be used in the TEP were being checked out and serviced. The bombs themselves, their re-entry vehicles, and guidance systems all had to be working perfectly.
She wandered through the compartments, chatting with the technicians. They all seemed excited and eager to proceed, but the bomb jockeys were all a little nuts anyway. The bomb servicing areas required special protective suits, so she stayed out of them, but she did take a look into the sections with the penetrator vehicles. These would be used for tapping the magma pockets. Each one was about ten meters long and a little over a meter thick. Their noses were sharply pointed, constructed of the hardest and most durable alloys that could be devised. About halfway down the length was the compartment for the actual bomb, and then the rest of vehicle was taken up by fuel tanks and a powerful thruster. After the de-orbit burn, the penetrators would come screaming down and then be boosted up to an impact velocity of about thirty kilometers per second. The special nose would punch through a couple of kilometers of rock before the nuke detonated. Hopefully this would excavate a crater four or five kilometers deep. Before the first explosion even subsided, another penetrator would flash through the fireball, punch another few kilometers, and then blow an even deeper crater. By carefully timing the impacts and throwing out a few flanking bombs to keep the crater from collapsing too soon, they could blast clear through to the magma pocket. The enormous pressure in the pocket would do the rest. Once the crust above it had been sufficiently fractured, the gas and molten rock would find its own way out.
The blast resulting from that would make the nukes look like fi
recrackers. She was very glad she would be observing from a high orbit.
They were planning to use twenty of the penetrators on each of the two magma pockets to be tapped, so she was somewhat surprised to see that the technicians had a regular assembly line servicing the vehicles. At least a hundred had their access panels off and it was evident that many more had either already been serviced or were waiting their turn. Regina searched out the chief technician.
“What’s going on here, Jake?” she asked. “Looks like you are servicing all of the penetrators.”
The man smiled and shrugged. “Doctor Ramsey’s orders, ma’am. He said that these have all been sitting here for ten years and that we should service all of them.”
“Which ones are going to be used for the upcoming operation?”
“Not sure. Doctor Ramsey said he’d be sending people to get the ones he wanted.”
“Uh huh,” she nodded abstractly. There was nothing really unusual in what Ramsey had ordered, but it did seem an odd allocation of their limited personnel, considering the circumstances. She’d have to ask him about it later. She finished her tour and headed back toward her quarters. On the way, she encountered Jeanine.
“Hey, kiddo, how’s it going?” The younger woman seemed startled to see her.
“Uh, okay, Reggie. How are you?”
“Worried. Damn worried. What about you?”
“Worried.”
“Yeah, I guess everyone is. But how is everything going from your end?”
“All the reports are green. We are good to go on schedule.”
“Great. Well, I’m going to try and catch a nap. I have a feeling we’ll all be pretty short on sleep for the next few days. You ought to try to get one, too. You look tired.”
“I’m okay, Reggie, but I need to get this report to Doctor Ramsey. See you later.” She turned and walked away. Regina looked after her for a moment, shrugged, and then headed for her quarters.
* * * * *
Tad Farsvar tried to remember what it had been like to just be a simple asteroid prospector. Had it only been three months ago that the Newcomers had dropped into his lap and changed everything? It seemed like years. And here, once again, he was sitting on the bridge of a powerful warship heading into battle. The other two times it had been a matter of chance, but this time he’d been specifically invited by Lord Frichette. He’d said that Tad was a good luck charm and he wanted him along. He had laughed and smiled as he said it, so Tad wasn’t sure how serious he had been; but serious or not, here he was.
Agamemnon’s bridge—flag bridge, rather—was five times as large as Felicity’s bridge, and the range of instrumentation and displays available was simply breathtaking. Tad had sat quietly for several hours just taking it all in. But his two previous battles—Life, he felt like some hardened warrior now—had allowed him to learn how the Newcomers’ tactical displays worked and he was able to follow what was going on pretty well.
And the displays were telling him that the battle was about to begin.
A wedge of red icons was slowly approaching a somewhat larger group of blue icons. In between the two groups was a vast cloud of green specks—the clan strike ships. The predicted vector of the Venanci squadron would take it right through the center of the cloud. There were only ten red icons instead of twelve, two of the Venanci ships had lagged far behind. Lord Frichette had said that they were probably troop transports. There were twenty-four blue icons and that was somewhat comforting—except nearly all of the blue ones were crippled to some degree.
“Range is down to sixty-eight thousand kilometers, My Lord,” said Frichette’s flag lieutenant, a man named Jones. “They seem to have completed their deceleration, closing velocity is now at eighteen point four kilometers per second. They’re coming right at us.”
“Yes, and thank God for that,” replied Frichette. “I’ve been chewing my fingernails for the last five hours worrying they’d veer off and come at us from another angle.”
“Yes, sir, but there’s no way they can avoid the clan ships now. And they’ll be in extreme range for our main battery in about ten minutes.”
“Very well.” Tad saw Lord Frichette take a deep breath, hold it, and then let it slowly out. “Mr. Jones, signal to fleet: ‘Prepare to engage’.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And add a ‘good luck’ and…” Frichette paused. “And tell them that the Protector and Andera expects every man to do his duty.”
“Yes, sir!”
Jones went to send the message and Frichette got up from his chair and took a turn around his bridge. As he came past where Tad was sitting, he smiled and nodded. “How are you doing, Tad?”
“I’m fine, sir. Well, kind of scared, actually. It is about to begin?”
“Yes, very shortly. And I’ll tell you a secret: I’m pretty scared, too.”
“You don’t look it.”
“No? Oh, good. I wasn’t sure. All the manuals say that a commander has to look confident and fearless. Easier said than done! But I wanted to apologize to you.”
“To me? For what?”
“For dragging you along. It didn’t seem all that important at the time, but I’m realizing now that I may end up getting you killed. Sorry about that.”
“I chose to come, sir. And a lot of my people are out there, too,” said Tad, gesturing at the display. “I’m not taking any more risk than they are.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. Well, good luck to you. At least I don’t have to warn you to keep your helmet close by. Unlike our first two battles, we could definitely end up with a few holes knocked in us.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll be careful.”
“Lord Frichette,” called Lieutenant Jones, “we’re getting some tight-beam communications from clan ships. They are asking permission to close in around the enemy’s projected course more rapidly.”
Frichette went back to his command chair and studied the display for a moment. The cloud of clan ships had started out nearly ten thousand kilometers across, but as the enemy’s course became more and more certain, the cloud had slowly contracted in around the most likely point of intersection. It was less than three thousand kilometers across now and would be even more compact by the time the enemy came into range. Finally, Frichette shook his head. “No, too much risk that they would be spotted if they used their thrusters. We can’t chance that now. We’ll just have to hope enough of them get a shot when the time comes. Send the coded response to ‘hold course’.”
“Yes, sir.”
The compartment fell silent except for one sensor operator giving periodic—and completely unnecessary—updates on the enemy’s course and velocity. Every eye that wasn’t already occupied was staring at the display and watching the red icons approaching the blue line that designated Agamemnon’s maximum rage. The minutes dragged by, but eventually the red touched the blue.
“We are in range, sir,” said Lieutenant Jones.
“Very well, tell Captain Sowell that he may commence firing.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Squadronlord Dardas clutched the arms of his command chair when his flagship, the battlecruiser Prince Ardagan, suddenly shuddered from the enemy laser’s impact.
“Incoming fire!” exclaimed one of the sensor technicians. “The enemy battleship has fired on us.”
“Damage?” demanded Dardas.
“Armor hit only, Lord. No penetration.”
“It would appear that your tech-chief was in error,” said Purifier Kolstar from beside his elbow.
“Not necessarily. If the enemy put all his efforts into getting just a few ships ready for action, they might have been able to accomplish this. And surely they would have concentrated on their capital ships. Sensors, are any other enemy vessels firing?”
“No, Lord, only the battleship, and that is at extreme range.”
“Just letting us know they aren’t completely toothless,” smiled Dardas. The ship twitched again from another hit. “But then neither ar
e we. Weapons, how long until we can return fire?”
“Eight minutes for the battlecruisers to reach effective range, Lord.”
“The enemy will continue to pound us all that time?” demanded Kolstar. “Is there nothing you can do?”
“Do not worry, Purifier. Despite the jolt, these hits they are inflicting are still trifles. At this range, the laser beams have spread to the point that all they can do is chew off a few centimeters of armor where they hit. It would take them hours to do significant damage, and our own weapons will be in range soon enough.”
“I see. So the battle will become an extended pounding match? Slowly eroding each others’ armor?”
“A normal battle often amounts to exactly that if the commanders are cautious. As the range drops, however, the beams’ spread decreases and the power increases correspondingly. After a while, the lasers can begin to punch right through the armor and inflict real damage. I would prefer not to have a protracted duel with the enemy battleship; it is far better suited to that sort of thing than our ships.”
“So we will close with them?”
“Probably.” Dardas said nothing more to see if he could draw Kolstar out. After a moment he succeeded.
“Probably, Squadronlord?”
“In a few minutes we will be in range for the battlecruisers to open fire, both ours and theirs,” he said with secret satisfaction. “The enemy has four battlecruisers, and if my tech-chief is correct, theirs will not open fire. Or if they do, it will only be with a few weapons. In that case, yes, we will close with the enemy. We will close so that we can bring all of our ships’ weapons to bear and finish these scum.” He gritted out these last words through clenched teeth as the ship lurched again.
“And if your tech-chief is not correct?”
“Then we still have time to break off and avoid a close engagement with a superior enemy.”
Across the Great Rift Page 40