The Grapple

by Moshe Ben-Or

  There were three men in that flitter. Two had looked at the light and died, for the meme was wholly new in class and in type, and their helmets couldn’t save them. The third had shut his eyes just in time. Shut his eyes, and triggered his helmet manually, and yanked the panic lever that pulled the plug on the onboard computers and dumped the air, to terminate what had moments ago been his comrades but were now simply murderous dispensers of a deadly mind plague. And then his surveyor had triggered the emergency cable reel-in, and fled, just ahead of the dead treasure ship’s automated defensive barrage.

  From the moment he’d awakened in sickbay, he had wondered if it had been worth it. Today, he had his answer.

  Seven decades of tremors and seizures, of night terrors and premature arthritis, of strange cancers and obscure immune disorders, and endless hospitalizations, and slow, progressive organ failure. For seven decades he had lived with a withered right arm and a crippled right leg, with a central nervous system that would never regain its proper equilibrium and a body ravaged by radiation, and a face that twisted irregularly into a ticking grimace that made small children cry. He had played tag with the Angel of Death, and the angel had indeed tagged him. But it was all worth it at last.

  Seven decades it had taken the scientists to digest what he had brought back. Even now they weren’t fully done with it. At the Technion, at Crown University, at the Centre Polytechnique and in countless places far less famous, they were still working on his data. Even in the holdfasts beneath the ice of Bretogne’s Cold Side and in the tunnels under ruined Kiryas Yoel small groups of brilliant men still crouched around whiteboards and holographic displays, trying to ignore the battles raging outside as they immersed themselves in mindbogglingly complex mathematics.

  In his youth, Shlomo Bar-Illan had sacrificed everything to bring back a treasure of treasures whose value he himself did not know. Today, with one foot in an early grave, Shlomo Bar-Illan had his reward. For the priceless thing that he had brought from the frozen darkness would save the nation in its most desperate hour. And it would be his men, above all others, who would do the saving.

  Solution Smoothing, they called it. To the Ancients, a useless dead end. But not to the modern world.

  To the average layman’s mind, mused Shlomo Bar-Illan, the Ancients were superior in all things. The reality stood quite different. Catastrophe did not make Man’s collective wits less sharp, or his mind less inquisitive. Catastrophe merely raised new problems. It took away, yet it also gave. Science had not stood still over the past six centuries. Neither did it merely retread old ground, especially over the past three.

  The Ancient pilot of the Golden Age did not navigate his jumps. He injected a cocktail of complex drugs, like a modern cruise line passenger, and pressed a button. He was no active agent of his fate, but mere passive cargo. He trusted not his skill, but the magic of complex pharmacopoeia; not his mind, but the serried ranks of processors that formed his ship’s mighty neural net; not his own ability, but the brute force of an enormous snarkyon cascade, to see his vessel safely through to the other side.

  Not so, the modern pilot. Equipped with a complex, multi-chambered drive primed for hundreds of tiny test shots; conscious, thanks to the modern physician’s gift of the jump trance, until the very last possible moment; armed with the modern physicist’s superior understanding of subspace and the modern mathematician’s elegant methods, he manipulated a mind-machine interface far more advanced than any his Ancient counterpart had possessed, to harness the enormous, distributed computing capacity of the subconscious human mind, and perform feats the Ancient could not dream of.

  The modern pilot went twice as far, on a sixth of the fuel. He took passages that would tear the Ancient to shreds. He adjusted his solutions on the fly, even as the primary capacitor bank charged up and the lasers primed to start the cascade in the main chamber. He made the impossible, possible.

  Like the art of guessing where, in a sphere of several light seconds’ diameter, a target might next appear based on a record of its prior movements, the art of threading the needle was a black one. No AI could practice it. No monkey-see-monkey-do neural net could be trained to perform it. No two pilots, faced with the same exact passage, would adjust the solution in exactly the same way. No one pilot, faced with the same exact passage again, would solve the problem the same exact way, the second time over.

  Navigating the jump was a dark art, akin to magic. None practiced said art better than the men under Shlomo Bar-Illan’s command. Which is why now, for the first time in the storied history of their four United Services, the Wildcatters were going to war.

  The level indicator pinged arrival. At the end of the short corridor, an officer barked a command. Heels clicked together like castanets as Shock Corps guards snapped in unison to Present Arms. As Director of Survey Shlomo Bar-Illan limped laboriously forward, leaning on his trademark silver-tipped mahogany cane, the conference room doors slid open and Admiral of the Fleet Shimon Bar-El strode out to greet him as the equal that he was.

  * * *

  Commodore Baron Anastasios Papadakis drummed his fingers on the edge of his control console. There was, he reminded himself, a very good reason why this task force was so small. The enemy had to believe that the Fleet was going to Hadassah. Everything depended on it. A larger task force might make them suspicious. The Zin picket at Loki had already been passed, after all. Attacking it was supposed to be an afterthought. A forceful raid, nothing more. Unexpectedly successful, but just a forceful raid.

  The cats had detected Task Force 324 on its way to Hadassah, just like they were supposed to. They’d reacted the way Big Boss had said they would react, too. The moment he got word that every single Zin picket further up the gradient had been destroyed or forced to run for cover, Sayf al-Masrikh had grabbed three quarters of his force and rushed toward Hadassah. Now that he’d passed through Loki, he was out in the black, deaf and blind but for his own organic scouts.

  But now came the tricky part. Head Cat couldn’t be permitted to learn that Haven was the real target. Zin scouts couldn’t be permitted to detect the lion’s share of the Fleet turning right around and going back the other way. The Zin Admiral of the Fleet had to believe that TF324 was still on its way to Hadassah.

  And that meant that the Zin picket at Loki had to die. Suddenly, completely and totally, to the last ansible-equipped ship. The scouts based on it had to be left stranded, with no fuel, no fusion centers and no communications. This way, most would be forced to withdraw at once to Haven without checking their probes. Even if a stray somehow found the main Fleet, it would have nowhere but Haven to run with the data. And by the time it got to Haven, it would be too late.

  The size of the Task Force was all for the better, anyway. More honor this way. They would still outgun the cats. The Hector ensured that all by herself.

  And the rest of the roster impressed, if you knew what was what. Arizal, Ramak, Etz Hayim, Safed, Lubavich, Novomorsk, Patras, Gat, Tel Aviv… The thing read like the who’s who of the Best Warship Competition.

  Still, he felt unsettled, somehow. Maybe it was the lack of truly heavy big-gun ships, except for the Hector. Arizal, Ramak and Etz Hayim were battleships, technically. But they were fast battleships. A strange Havenite hybrid of battleship and battlecruiser, neither fish nor fowl. Shields too weak and armor too light for true close-range wall-of-battle service, but not quite agile enough to dodge fire and trade potshots at long range like a battlecruiser.

  There was a reason why the Arizal class had ended up in the reserves in its entirety, and why neither Sparta nor New Israel had built any.

  Still, the Arizals had their advantages. Their unique engine design made them remarkably agile and fuel-efficient for a ship of their size. Of all the battleships in the Fleet, only they could keep up with the Hector for any serious length of time. Their customized half-ton guns had always been eerily accurate. With the computing systems overhaul the entire class had gone through right before
the war, those guns were now almost as accurate as the Hector’s, for all that she was two generations newer than them. And the crews were good shots. In fact, they were damned good shots. Best shots in the Fleet, to be honest. It had been uncanny enough at gunnery competitions before the War, to watch those reservists wipe the decks with the active-duty crews every time. Now, with nine months of non-stop combat behind them, what they could do with those guns was downright spooky. With the Hector’s fire direction center at the heart of the task force gunnery network, and Hector’s guns giving them splash to go by, their volleys would be almost as brutal as hers.

  Lack of staying power couldn’t be helped, anyway. This whole mission depended on speed and surprise. The Zin had to be convinced that the Task Force would catch up with the main body of the Fleet as it sped toward Hadassah. Therefore, Task Force Eighteen had to be composed of ships theoretically capable of doing just that.

  Count Orloff looked calm enough, over at the Task Force Commander’s station. But then again, he always looked calm, even when things were going straight to hell in a handbasket.

  “Eighteen, prepare for jump!” commanded the admiral.

  There was a brief flurry of commo chatter as the individual ships of the commodore’s detachment confirmed their readiness. The battleship and battlecruiser icons of his group turned green in a single smooth wave.

  “First ready!” barked Baron Papadakis.

  “Sharp!” he thought. Sharper even than in the rehearsals. This was the best damned collection of big-gun ships in the Fleet. He was proud to command them.

  “Second ready!” came over the not-reality of the virtual commo network.

  “Third ready!”

  “Fourth ready!”

  Count Orloff paused for a moment.

  This was it, thought the commodore. The moment of truth. They’d practiced the maneuver as best they could, but this time around there was no way to survey the space on the other side. The practice jumps had been brutal, even with the surveys. This one was going to be hell.

  “Master Navigator, you may proceed.”

  “Brace for jump!” answered the Wildcatter with the four centimeter-wide silver stripes and star-burst on his cuffs. “Clear your minds!”

  In the domain of the men who wore Survey’s midnight blue, indicators blinked green and status bars slid upward. The assistant navigators’ fingers blurred over control panels as their chief slid forward his throttles.

  In the not-reality of the virtual bridge, Baron Papadakis could see the ships of the task force begin to glow and sparkle. In an instant, the sparkles were filling the bridge. The jump engines were spinning up. The sparkle display was the final warning from the ship’s AI.

  Virtual reality disappeared.

  In the darkness behind his eyelids, the commodore concentrated on emptiness.

  Every crewman in the task force had already been expert at attaining the jump trance before the mission train-up had started. At first, the baron himself had privately doubted that the four Wildcatter Master Trainers assigned to the Hector were truly necessary. After the first practice jump had ended with three men dead and two dozen in sickbay, the Wildcatters had gotten his undivided attention.

  The triple-gong of the jump alarm resonated through the walls of his control pod. The absolute final warning to assume the transcendental state that normally meant merely the difference between sickness and comfort, but this time around could literally mean the difference between life and death. Audible and palpable, even to a man whose pod had, for whatever reason, no connection to any of the ship’s virtual reality networks.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Thrice.

  Discontinuity.

  “Allmother be gracious!” croaked Baron Papadakis, his body convulsed by yet another dry heave. It was a good thing his stomach had been empty, he thought. Brutal was not the word. The training jumps had been brutal. This thing was death on a stick. He’d never been this jump sick in his life.

  He felt a prick in his arm. Almost in the same instant, a cannula appeared under his nose. The dry breeze of ice-cold oxygen felt like heaven. Almost as good as the cool trickle of glucose-infused saline into his vein. The pod AI was back to life, clearly. Or at least the automedic.

  Virtual reality reappeared.

  Flickered.

  Steadied.

  Everything felt gritty. Grainy, somehow. Like the AI wasn’t all there yet.

  The bridge pulsed with damage reports.

  The commodore ignored them. There were others to deal with the Hector. His job was Detachment One as a whole.

  “Status!” he coughed.

  The icons of his warships materialized before him. Mostly amber. A couple red. One gray. The Gat was off the network completely. Observations confirmed that she was still in one piece, but nothing more than that.

  Just as he was about to inquire further, the Gat turned amber. Just a slow commo boot.

  The rest of the icons were rapidly growing greener. Within moments, every one of his ships was answering calls and reporting ready for action.

  He could fight, thought the commodore, if only with laser relay to backbone his comms. Good. Now, for the damned ansibles.

  A top-priority alert popped on his notice board. Simultaneous medical and command/control attributes, of all things. And it was positioned in the Higher zone.

  The commodore felt a cold stab of terror. Before it opened at his glance, he already knew what the alert had to mean.

  Count Orloff. Fourth degree jump seizure. Stroke. Cardiac arrest.

  Damn, and thrice damn!

  The fear turned instantly to enraged resolve.

  “Eighteen, this is First-One,” growled the baron. “I am in command!”

  Though in the real world the ships of Task Force Eighteen would need telescopes to see one another as anything more than tiny specks, in the virtual universe of the battle command network the baron could see every vessel in perfect detail, as clearly as if it sat in the palm of his hand. The light combatants; pawns and horses who would commence the battle with their long-range missile volleys. The capital ships; rooks and bishops who would decide it in the brutal toe-to-toe slugfest of close gun combat. The massive squat cylinders of his two carriers, Glorie and Victoire, menacingly pregnant with ready fighters and torpedo bombers. The queen on his chessboard. All the advantages and all the disadvantages of ancient black powder siege cannon from the Time of Isolation. Devastating when fired, but vulnerable, and damnably slow to reload.

  As he watched, wing-like hull radiators unreeled outward. Attitude thrusters sparked and latticework torch masts extended. Hydrogen plasma flared blinding blue in the darkness as his warships normalized relativistic velocity.

  This scene in itself was a measure of how rough the jump had been, thought Commodore Papadakis. Normally, the exit velocities of individual ships in a task force would bear at least some resemblance to one another. The exit formation of a task force would bear at least a distant relationship to the formation it had held at its entrance. This time, the torches pointed all over the bloody place and the units were intermixed at random. But no matter. He wouldn’t care to repeat the experience, but every ship was in one piece, and the casualties had been minimal, considering. Everyone’s torches had lit fine. Post-jump damage was being repaired quickly. Status indicators were green across the board. Microjump drives were on line, shield clouds were building and the light combatants were already shaking themselves out into a screen around the core of capital ships. He had a functional task force, and he had one where the enemy would never expect it.

  “Detachments, report!”

  “Deuxiéme, prêt pour l’action.”

  “Shlishit, moknah lekrav.”

  “Reviit, moknoh lekroiv.”

  Maurice sounded even worse than Moshe and Ephraim, thought the commodore. He probably didn’t sound too good himself. And where was the Translator? Why was he hearing everyone in his native tongue?


  No matter. The Translator would come up in a bit. That’s what Engineering was for. In the meantime, he knew enough French and Hebrew to get by, and his counterparts knew enough Zemelsky. For a good hundred and twenty years, no one on the command career track had been permitted to make Ensign, never mind Commodore, without working proficiency in all three languages.

  A contact report pinged its way onto the status board.

  “Allfather’s balls!” cursed the baron silently. Was nothing going to go right today? What in the fuck was a Zin corvette doing this far away from the inner system, and out of the ecliptic to boot? What, were the motherfuckers prescient or something?

  If they could see him, he could see them. In fact, he’d seen the task force first. They were still booting after that monster of a jump when the wavefront had crossed his position.

  Son-of-a-bitch was running for all he was worth. Four corvettes from Detachment Three were already giving chase.

  Not good enough. They would never catch him. He had too much lead. Even their best possible missile shot would be an extreme-range forlorn hope.

  Corvettes didn’t have ansibles. But where there were corvettes, there were cruisers.

  The battle command display updated. Sensor fusion was finally back on line in full.

  They weren’t prescient, thought the commodore. Just his stupid luck, that’s all. Sensor corvettes, not missile corvettes. This was no enemy picket.

  The Zin were out here sweeping for drones and mines. They’d been staring down from out of the ecliptic for the past three hours at least, imaging outer system bodies. Trying to find breeding nests before a new swarm was ready. They’d finally eliminated all of the older models, but the newest ones still remained.

  The Havenites had always been renowned masters when it came to robotics. Their latest generation of self-replicating area denial nasties was once again proving their reputation well-deserved.

  The Mark 18 mine was only second to the Mark 37 swarming drone as a menace to Zin navigation. Both had been seeded here in record numbers. Both replicated with unprecedented stealth and speed. Both had a habit of aggressively defending their breeding sites from any would-be close searchers. A swarm of Mark 37’s, erupting suddenly from a hidden nest, could endanger a big-gun ship, never mind a light combatant or some auxiliary vessel. The Mark 18’s spray of a dozen ten-megaton warheads was the near equivalent of a Hector-class battleship firing a volley at point-blank range.