Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest)
Page 21
Then came the Exploder.
A fraction of a second before it detonated, the armored covers on the sensors slammed shut, and the entire bridge crew barked and yelled in frustration.
Michelle Conquest spoke quickly. “One thousand kilometers is outside the effective radius of the antimatter warhead, but the hard radiation from it would have fried all the exposed equipment, and we don’t have time to replace it before our next attack.”
“Speaking of that…” Absen said.
“Mark,” Okuda spat, and the dreadnought leaped ahead again. “Pulse ended.” It was over almost before it began. “Reorienting for reverse pulse.”
“Any idea what the Guardian is doing?” Absen asked.
“It hadn’t reacted before we lost the sensors. Loading rear feeds…”
“Ready for reverse pulse,” Okuda warned.
“Stand by and hold at one second,” Absen said, waiting for Scoggins’ report. Eleven seconds had gone by within the boat since they fired, but the realtime clock, showing passage of time in the outside universe, had jumped forward more than twenty as Conquest traveled.
“They’re accelerating toward the Weapon. Or toward our former firing position.”
“They have no idea what’s going on!” Ford exulted. “Come on, let’s hit them.”
“Three actions used, Ford. Four when we pulse. Just the exploder this time. Set it up.”
“Ready, sir, ready!”
Absen hoped so. For all of Ford’s emotion, he was still the best gunner in EarthFleet. “Pulse.”
All screens flickered as Scoggins closed the rear ports and opened the fronts, which would be safe from harm traveling in reverse.
“Mark.”
Conquest leaped backward as if stung, the forward viewscreens showing only the blackness of redshifted light “behind” them for just a moment before they came to life again. They had passed in front of the Guardian at lightspeed and dropped out of pulse with their weapons pointed across the path of the great Meme ship, a space ambush.
Ford’s finger hovered over the firing key for a moment before Michelle Conquest suddenly bolted across the bridge, moving faster than any human or even cyborg could have to wrap her hand around his wrist. “What the –” he cried as she gently but inexorably moved it away a few centimeters and then stabbed precisely at the control with her other fingertip. “Let me go, bitch!”
“Exploder away,” she said, ignoring Ford, and then let go, walking back to her station at a normal pace while the rest of the crew sat there stunned. “Commander Scoggins, shut the sensors please.”
“Sensors shut,” Scoggins said, her movements automatic, while still staring at the AI avatar.
Absen tore his eyes from the tableau and looked at the holotank. It showed the interpolation lines of the Exploder missile and the Guardian intersecting in a pulsing sphere, but he knew that this was just the system’s best guess. “Rear sensors open. Helm, pick a safe direction and pulse forward as fast as you can.”
As soon as the final pulse had finished, the captain turned to Michelle with a voice of steel. “What the hell was that about?”
For once, Ford said nothing, just massaged his wrist and glared.
The avatar snapped to attention and stared straight ahead. “Sir. The Guardian’s acceleration and curving course created an angle of deflection too high for any organic to successfully engage using the slow-moving Exploder missile. A millisecond’s variance might have caused the weapon to miss, which would have wasted a warhead and possibly endangered the boat. We were within the Meme firing envelopes of both fusors and hypers. I take full responsibility for my actions, sir.”
“Damn right you will,” Absen said mildly. “All my officers do, or they’re not my officers. Sit down, Warrant Officer Conquest. Well done. Now would someone show me what happened to the Guardian?”
Scoggins threw a view from the rear of the tail end of an enormous blast. “Passive radar, using the blast itself as an emitter, shows nothing left of the Guardian larger than a hundred meters in diameter. Not a direct hit, but good enough.”
“I…I…” Ford said, his face whitening and crestfallen. “I’d never have made that shot.”
“Snap out of it, Ford,” Absen barked. “You don’t whine because you can’t pick up as much as a forklift, or play chess as well as a computer. There’s a lot of things you can’t do, but you’re still my weapons officer and the best in the fleet. I’m glad we have a human AI to back us up, but she’s just one part of a team.”
“Yes, sir. Aye aye, sir.” Ford turned back to his board and tapped at the controls, clearly discomfited.
“Five actions completed,” Absen said as he stood and paced around the bridge, the adrenaline of the last few minutes suddenly crying for movement. “Recharge time?”
Lieutenant Fletcher replied, “Twelve minutes remaining to one pulse. Sixty-four minutes and change to full, sir.”
“Make sure it’s the TacDrive capacitors that get the juice first. I don’t like to be sitting dead here.”
“We could still maneuver and fight conventionally if we have to, sir,” Okuda said.
“Thank you, Helm. Scoggins, what’s the other Guardian doing?”
“It seems to be reforming itself from a disc back into a ball, and moving in our direction. ETA is about forty minutes.”
“Can we get some distance with fusion drive?”
“Yes, sir,” Okuda replied, “but that will…”
Suddenly the screens flared and fuzzed, and Conquest shuddered slightly. “What was that?” Absen snapped.
“Weak particle beam strike, looks like,” Scoggins said.
“From where?”
“The Earth orbitals, sir,” she replied. “We’re at extreme range and I didn’t even consider them a threat, but it looks like they fired all at once and enough energy reached us to burn out all the sensors on one side. I’ve closed the other clamshells.”
“Helm, move us away. COB –”
“On it, sir. Damage control parties notified. Good thing we got all those spares.”
Absen grasped the rail that shielded Okuda’s sunken cockpit from a misstep and stared at the holotank. “Move us behind Luna. They can’t fire through that.”
“Aye, sir,” Okuda said. Conquest already rumbled with the subsonic vibration of the massive fusion drives. “Eight minutes until we’re shielded, and gaining distance. I doubt they’ll hit us again; I’m evading enough to make most of their beam strikes miss.”
Suddenly a noise like a gunshot exploded on the bridge. Absen turned to see the Sekoi Bogrin had slammed his massive fist on his console, shattering its surface. While the captain was not well versed in alien emotional cues, he couldn’t miss the anger in this one.
“Mister Bogrin?” Absen waited for the being to speak.
“Why are we running?” The alien turned to look at the captain and roared, “We have weapons that outrange theirs. We have time enough to destroy the orbitals. Yet you hold back!”
Tobias moved up beside the Chair, hand on his sidearm.
Keeping his irritation in check, Absen folded his hands and stared back at the Hippo. “We are recharging our capacitors, and I do not want to slow that process by diverting power to weapons. And you are correct. We have time. The other Guardian will not be in range for a while, and I want to reserve all our effort for it. Moving away is simply the most efficient strategy. It is a submariner’s strategy, as I explained before. I have been fighting the Meme for almost a century, Mister Bogrin. I am your commanding officer. If you cannot accept that, you are free to leave the bridge and perform some other useful function.”
Breathing heavily, the Sekoi slowly turned back and hunched his shoulders. “No. I will stay.”
“Then please refrain from damaging the equipment,” the captain said. Klis the Ryss leaned over to murmur something to Bogrin, too low for him to hear. Absen found it interesting that the carnivore was talking to the mostly herbivorous omnivore.
Tense silence reigned on the bridge, broken only by terse orders and phrases from the officers, speaking to each other and the rest of the boat.
“We’re rounding the moon, sir,” Okuda said.
“Bogey at eight o’clock –” yelled Scoggins, and the bridge exploded into action. A flashing red icon and a wailing alarm showed in the holotank, close off Conquest’s port quarter, just abaft the beam. Very close.
“Targeting –” Ford barked, but by the time his hand came down on the firing control, it had been inactivated by the automated TacDrive cutoff. Absen felt the inertial field fling them forward for just a moment, a whiplash sensation unlike any he’d ever experienced, and then dump them back into normal space. If he had to guess, it might be a partial or very short pulse, with insufficient energy.
“What just happened?” Absen snapped, but he didn’t get an immediate answer. Okuda poured with sweat and twitched, his fingers tapping at his console like a demented spider even as he worked in VR linkspace, and the captain could feel the gravplates compensate for Conquest’s violent maneuvering. Helmets had snapped shut and the peculiar automated alarm whooped, recommending they seal into their seats using the crash cocoon function.
“No power,” Ford snarled as he fired brief bursts at something. Absen knew that the enormously upgraded weapons aboard needed the massive slugs of stored capacitor energy to fully operate; even with the many extra reactors, the combat systems could easily use all the available juice. “Launching missiles.”
Missiles took little power, Absen knew. He hated to expend the ammunition, but the manufactories could eventually replenish them with time and materials. Ford must be using what he had, to fight off a threat that had surprised them.
“Report!” Absen said as the evasive maneuvering continued. “What just happened?”
The main screen shifted as Scoggins changed views, showing the back side of the moon jiggling with a long optical shot. Red light blazed and flickered through billows of moon-dust that was slowly falling to the surface, unsupported by atmosphere.
“That’s another Weapon!” Absen leaped to his feet and strode over to stare at the screen.
“Sir, get back in the Chair, now!” Chief Steward Tobias dragged the protesting captain back and shoved him forcibly into the seat to click the restraint harness, then did the same for himself. “We need to seal up.”
“I would also advise sealing into crash cocoons, sir,” Michelle said. “If that laser hits us, the organics will need the protection.”
“Hit us? Where –” Absen throttled his questions and forced himself to think. “Ford, do what you can and keep them busy. Helm, keep evading. Scoggins, how far away are we?”
“Over three million klicks, sir. Okuda must have initiated a TacDrive pulse using whatever was in the capacitors, throwing us forward and out of the way, but we’re still well within that thing’s range. Only the fact that even its light takes more than ten seconds to reach us has allowed us to evade the beam, but it’s out there.” She adjusted her board, and a red line reached out from the moon toward the holographic teardrop that represented Conquest. It waved around like a drunken searchlight.
“Looks like it’s only a matter of time before it gets lucky and clips us,” Absen said.
“Yes, sir,” Michelle said from her station. “We are evading away from the emitter, but I calculate the likelihood of damage at better than fifty percent before we leave its envelope.”
Ford said, “I’ve got our available missiles launching in staggered waves, sir, attacking them from widely differing angles. That should keep them occupied.”
“Good job, Ford. Remind me to crucify an intelligence officer when we have time.”
“Will do, sir.” Ford chuckled grimly. “How did we miss it?”
“Probably well hidden for just such a purpose. Transmissions from the Meme sentries must have passed information on our conquest of the Gliese 370 system. The reports would have reached here more than ten years ago, more than enough time to build another moon laser.”
“Tricky bastards,” he muttered.
“Cocoons,” reminded Michelle.
“Agreed. Everyone cocoon up.” Absen leaned back and allowed the Chair to reform itself into a crash couch, surrounding and enclosing him in biogel. Automated systems allowed his suit to deflate and his helmet to retract. Then came the part he really detested, when the living mask pressed over his face, extended tubes down his throat and filled his lungs with dense liquid that would cushion him from G forces in the event of gravplate failure.
His seldom-used brainlink came up as the plug snicked into the slot in his skull, another thing he disliked. But, he could see the need for it in extreme situations. A moment later he felt as if his eyes opened as his optic nerves were fed a VR view of the bridge. It seemed as if he now sat back in the Chair as usual, suitless and comfortable, and the crew the same.
“Is the crew cocooned as well?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Timmons said from behind. “Everyone reports sealed up and controlling their functions through VR.”
Absen knew this was a less efficient method of operating a boat in some ways, but the addition of telefactors and robots compensated. That reminded him… “Conquest. If we take damage, you are hereby authorized to take whatever steps you deem necessary for survival of the boat and crew. Don’t ask, just do it.” He knew she could handle dozens of telefactors and direct the army of robots to make repairs far more efficiently than any one crewmember could.
“Aye aye, sir.” In VR, the robotic appearance of her avatar had fled, replaced by a virtual body no different from the rest.
Abruptly the simulation froze, skipped and fuzzed out for a moment, and then slowly came back online. Absen’s head hurt, though the link should have overridden any pain. “Report!”
“The exawatt-power beam struck us briefly, sir,” Conquest answered. “We lost two fusion engines, two of the missile box launchers, and twenty-seven rear lasers. Main armor held; all damage came from embrasure locations. Fifteen likely casualties so far.”
“How long until we’re out of range?”
“Eighty more seconds.”
“That was bad, but as long as –” and then the simulation shook and shattered around him.
This time Absen floated in VR space for what seemed like minutes, trying to get some kind of response from the cocoon or the link. He couldn’t even feel his own body, so the system must be still blocking him in. It was supposed to dump him out of VR if it went down entirely, allowing him to access the internal manual controls.
Finally the rebooting sequence began again, and when he could “see” again, Absen saw his people’s VR avatars awakening intermittently. “Helm, report!”
Grimly, Okuda answered. “The second strike caught us before I had damped out all of our tumble from the first. When we lost number two and three engines, the other four threw us into a spin. As it happened, the next beam swept across our bow.”
“The forward armor held!” Absen exulted, joyfully shocked that Desolator’s upgrades had stopped even a glancing blow from the ravening enemy beam. In the battle for Gliese 370, that Weapon had punched through battleships like paper.
“Yes, sir. Between the superconducting layers and the collapsium, it only penetrated about a hundred meters. Unfortunately…”
Ford broke in. “We’ve lost the entire forward weapons array, and another thirty-one lasers. And a couple more hundred-round missile boxes, though those are easy to replace.”
“Do we have TacDrive?”
“Theoretically,” Okuda replied. “The system checks out nominal, but I don’t know about the capacitors.”
“Scoggins! What’s our threat status?”
Screens and
the holotank swirled and pictures coalesced. Even the flatscreen images were three-dimensional in linkspace. “We’re out of range of the laser now, sir. I see several hundred installations and drones awake, many maneuvering for a better view or to attack us. The nearest asteroid fortress that poses a serious threat is about two and a half hours away from weapons range.”
“At least we’re not under immediate attack,” Absen said. “COB, what’s our damage control status?”
“I’ve got everyone working, sir, but…” Timmons pursed his lips and took a breath.
“Spit it out, Chief.”
“Sir, we could make repairs a lot faster if you took the cuffs off the AI.”
Absen grunted. “You too, huh, COB? Get in a tough spot and we hand over the keys?”
Timmons stood up and walked over to speak quietly into Absen’s ear. Even though this was a VR simulation, its exquisite reality made the captain forget everyone was inside their cocoons. “Boss, we’re crippled. Putting the AI in the loop will more than triple the speed of repairs.”
“That much?”
“Yes, sir. She can handle multiple bots so much faster than any one human, even linked, that it’s like magic. I’m just as worried as you are, but we have Marines with EMP and we have fail-safes. We can always fry her brain.”
“Okay, COB. You got it.” Absen raised his voice. “Conquest, you are authorized full access to all damage control, repair and maintenance systems throughout the boat in order to bring her up to full capability again. Keep the COB informed.”
“Aye aye, sir!” Michelle replied with enthusiasm.
“Engineering, report.”
Fletcher was still unconscious, and Klis, like all Ryss, had refused a link implant, so Absen did not expect an answer, but he hoped the VR system would route his request somewhere. Instead, he heard Klis’ hissing voice, though he did not see her in VR space. “Rebooting and testing the grid, Captain. Fifty percent and climbing. All power not necessary for repairs is going to the TacDrive capacitors, as ordered.”