The Grapple

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Typical Zin evasive station-keeping patterns. Leisurely stuff that would get them precisely nowhere against the League’s best bomber pilots. Escorts positioned mostly in and around the system’s sole almanac jump zone, watching for the most dangerous threat. A small combat patrol hanging around the carriers. Exactly what you’d expect. Two by two flights, fighters and bombers. Probably the same sitting ready on catapults. A reasonable quick reaction force for the usual contingencies.

  The light cruisers, a few gunboats and a decent-sized pack of missile corvettes sitting about two light-hours out from the main force, screening various outer system bodies. A sensible precaution against the most likely threat, drone and mine attack.

  It was all standard, sensible, reasonable and exactly as per standing operating procedure. Precisely what anyone and everyone would do. Which meant that there was absolutely nothing between the enemy’s precious capital ships and a two-carrier double-alpha strike. A hundred and fifty-two bombers, barreling down four times faster than light from an empty spot almost ninety degrees to the ecliptic, where no enemy whatsoever had any reasonable right to be. The best two torpedo squadrons in the Fleet, uninterrupted gold and silver gunnery medalists for two decades running. This was going to be a slaughter.

  “Case of cognac says we outshoot you today!” continued Maurice.

  “Two cases,” answered Jean. “I’ll enjoy drinking it to your health!

  “Eighteen Alpha, Torch, advance on vector!” he continued, switching to the general push.

  The bombers surged ahead, skipping in and out of reality every two hundred and fifty milliseconds as they rushed down the gravity well.

  * * *

  Jean Leroy stared at the common operational picture display. The two Zin corvettes had never stood a chance against Paul Bonnet’s fighters. The Hell’s Angels’ squadron commander had had a whole wing sitting forward of his main formation, waiting for the contact. The Zin had been ambling along on a boring, routine, safe spare parts delivery mission. They didn’t even have full shield clouds built. Just the thirty-three percent demanded by their SOP.

  A split-second after they had bumped into Fighter Squadron 831, thirty-kilo shells were bursting all around them. The lead flight’s first volley of seventy-five-kilo rockets had exploded inside the corvettes’ shields before either helmsman had even begun to vary his jump pattern. It was all over in less than a minute. The enemy had never even fired back.

  But none of this did a thing to dissipate the roiling cloud of dread around the lieutenant commander’s heart.

  Head Cat was scared of Big Boss, thought Jean Leroy. Justifiably scared, given the number of times he’d gotten a bloody nose so far. He suspected some kind of trick to steal his hard-fought victory from him. Wanted his Loki picket anchored nice and hard, no matter what, to guard against surprises. That’s why he’d changed his mind, and taken out insurance. Two additional line squadrons’ worth of insurance, and then some.

  There were forty-four Zin capital ships in the inner system as of two hours fifty minutes ago. Fourteen battleships, twenty battlecruisers, ten cruisers. They had eight carriers for small craft strike power. That combat patrol? Ten by ten flights – the functional equivalent of a fleet carrier’s alpha strike. The escort screen? Two hundred and thirty units! Almost a hundred frigates, and just as many missile corvettes. They had twenty gunboats hanging around in their outer screen, and twenty destroyers in the picket’s inner core.

  How in the name of all things holy was the Task Force going to defeat all that? How?! Outnumbered four to one, outgunned almost six to one in throw weight of shell…

  The Commodore didn’t know it yet, but he was a dead man. Him and everyone else. There would be no surprise by the time the main effort arrived in the inner system. The Zin would be ready, with shield clouds built and escorts rearranged to screen the advancing task force’s vector. It would be an ordinary pitched battle. A battle that Task Force 18 couldn’t hope to win, and couldn’t hope to escape from. But if the Task Force failed, then Big Boss’ plan failed. If Big Boss’ plan failed, Haven was lost. If Haven was lost…

  The commo relay pinged a series of sign-on tones. Everyone was on the link now. All four squadron commanders, and all four XOs. In other words, everyone who mattered. There was no need to rehash the obvious. He’d sent them all the same message. They were all looking at the same COP. With the squadrons still bunched up tight in the approach formation, there would be no differences between display and display. They were all one net, and one data fusion center.

  “Ideas?” asked Jean Leroy.

  “We must win,” said Paul Bonnet. “You’ve all had letters from back home. You know what it’s like in the habitats now. It can’t go on for long like that. They’d put everyone under thirteen into coldsleep, but there aren’t enough pods.”

  “The Corporation has prepared Spirit Pills,” answered Robert Leblanc. “For the children, and for everyone else non-essential. If things keep their orbit for another quarter, they will give the order. We aren’t supposed to know, but Marie put it in her letter anyway. We have a secret code, from when we were dating in high school…”

  Jean shuddered. Spirit Pills for the children… Sometimes he was glad he’d never married. He couldn’t even imagine it. It belonged in historical immersies, not in real life.

  Spirit Pills…

  Robert had two daughters. Six and eleven. His Marie would be on the list, too. The Corporate Health Service could do without a habitat director’s secretary, in a pinch. They’d put her in charge of processing the list, but the AI would place her name on that list all the same.

  There was no living planet outside the walls. No magical place where air was free and clean water fell from the sky, where toxic waste poured willy-nilly into the ocean would return as food and oxygen, courtesy of mighty microbial swarms and the mind-boggling enormity of an uncontrolled, natural ecosystem spanning an entire world in a seamless, life-giving web.

  Outside the walls there was only the cold vacuum, only the merciless blackness.

  Rate of manufacture plus rate of external input had to equal or exceed rate of usage plus rate of loss, or else the blackness would come in, and stay. When inputs dropped and reserves ran out, extra load would shed, one way or another. The only choices were between the planned and the unplanned, between the orderly and the catastrophic. That’s why they called it the Cold Equation.

  The planned load-shedding algorithm didn’t care. Rank was no shield. Wealth didn’t matter. Connections availed not. Exclusive place with million-credit cabins or run-down tenement, it was all the same to the recyclers. Load was load. Consumables were consumables. There would be Preferred Shareholders’ children on that list. The CEO’s nieces and nephews would be on it.

  Margot would be on that list, also. And Mother… Mother would be near the top. There was no need for schoolteachers, if there were no children to teach.

  Spirit Pills and drawing lots and not enough coldsleep pods. The Time of Wandering, all over again. It would come to that, if they lost. It already had. The pills were sitting in storage right now, waiting for the order. Millions of them. Hundreds of millions.

  Maurice was being quiet, noticed the commander of the Jeanne D’Arc Squadron. Too damned quiet, knowing him. He always spoke first when the senior officer asked for ideas. But this time he was keeping his big mouth shut.

  The link crackled with despondent silence.

  “Maurice,” said Jean Leroy “spit it out.”

  A data package pinged its way onto the conference display. It was a squadron targeting overlay and ships-to-targets matrix, with a piratical grinning-skull-and-flaming-sword patch in the upper left corner to identify the author.

  “So that’s why he was being silent,” thought Jean Leroy. “Hoping that his only workable idea wouldn’t be the only workable idea. That somebody would have something better than this...”

  His eyes focused on the motto upon that black patch. Victoire malgré tout
.

  How many times had the St. Michael Squadron carried out those words’ implication to the letter? AS1090 and Midpoint, Hunter’s Star and Tròido, Volantis and the ill-fated raid on Xing… To the last pilot and to the last bomber. He knew their squadron history as well as he knew his own.

  The squadron number started with a 9, not with a 2. Before the Second Imperial War they’d rated no medals, no honors and no mention in dispatches. If it were otherwise, there’d be far more than two Légions D’Honneur and two Silver Circles upon their banner.

  For two hundred and eighty years, they’d been the first pawn off the board. For two hundred and eighty years, their corpses had plugged the holes in the admirals’ plans. For two hundred and eighty years, there’d been many ways into the St. Michael Squadron, but only two ways out. Yet the men who wore that black patch had carried a grim pride all their own, from the very beginning. Victory despite all.

  Doctrinally, a torpedo squadron serviced eight to nine targets, with two flights per target and a planning range of seventeen to twenty thousand kilometers. With a typical squadron, two to three of those targets would be hit at least once. Maurice was servicing twenty-two targets, including four carriers. There were ships he’d allocated to a single pair of bombers. He was personally attacking a Zin battlecruiser on the far side of the picket, barreling through the whole enemy formation with naught but his wingman for company. His planning range for torpedo release was five thousand kilometers.

  With no enemy escorts between him and the Zin, he would fall upon the targets with total surprise. The first candles would light before startled enemy gunners and helmsmen in the picket’s outer surface even had time to collect their wits. Warships in the inner core of the picket would still be going to action stations when his bombers appeared among them. With a release range of five kilo-kays or less, his ace pilots would give him hits upon hits. Hits that would set hypersonic shockwaves racing through yet-unvented compartments, past yet-unsealed blast doors, blowing whole sections of hull outward like a bursting balloon. Dead-center hits, through the reactors and the heatsinks, through the magazines and the drive chambers and the shield matter storage tanks. Critical hits. Crippling hits. Lethal hits.

  But then, even as they matched jump patterns in order to come that close, even as they copied the targets’ relativistic velocities, even as his bombers released their torpedoes…

  The Zin escort screen at the jump zone. Untouched, undisrupted, unmolested in any way. Paul’s and Robert’s fighters would be busy with the gigantic combat patrol around the enemy carriers. Not that they had enough fighters and enough rockets to get the bombers back out, anyway, even if that combat patrol hadn’t existed. The trap would snap shut even as the penetrators struck the hulls.

  Captain Barzel’s corvettes would be right behind them. They would do their best, after they were done releasing their missiles. But by then...

  “How many will return?” thought Jean. A third? A quarter?

  Their average age was twenty-three. Most were young enough to be his sons. They all were, anyway and regardless. Not even a third…

  It was the only way.

  “Ah, putain de merde!” cursed the task group commander, stabbing the audio feed to momentary mute. “Putain alors de salope de l’enfer!”

  Every time the catapult threw you into the void, the dice began to tumble. And, one day, the wall stick would come up snake-eyes. That’s what it meant to wear the torpedo on your cuff, above the fancy golden braid. That’s what it had always meant.

  It was the only way.

  “Well,” sighed Jean Leroy, “this is why we wear the wide stripes. Anybody have anything else to add?”

  The link crackled with static.

  “Yeah, I don’t either,” said the senior lieutenant commander. “So this will be the plan. Maurice’s division of the field stands. Robert, Paul, hit those Zin fighters hard as you can, and keep the bastards off of us long enough for the candles to light. Sketch out your assignments and ingress vectors, everybody. As for egress…”

  Jean shrugged. There was no real sense in planning the egress on this one in any great detail.

  “Whoever gets out of the furball sets his vector toward the launch point. Don’t bother with the details past that.

  “Final sync conference in fifteen minutes, and then we push the orders.”

  The call broke up in curt acknowledgements.

  * * *

  Khurrsayn al-Mrrlikikh carved off another hunk of steak and raised the fork toward his mouth. It was real Paradisian mutton, slathered delectably with the sheep’s own fat. The fresh-blood-and-lemongrass sauce was just perfect. His steward had served the meat on a warm plate, at precisely thirty-eight point eight degrees. You almost couldn’t tell that it had come out of the freezer and not from the carcass of a freshly-killed animal. The perks of being an admiral.

  He reached for the crystal goblet of valerian to wash down the meat. Like the mutton, the golden liquid was a gift from Prince Khharrq. The 3747 Tunb Special Blend lived up nicely to the royal estate’s fine reputation.

  How that that lowborn bastard Sayf may-Allakh-curse-his-balls al-Masrikh had found out about the special package from His Royal Highness was a mystery, thought the admiral, but it had to be the package. That swine’s jealousy knew no bounds. The Ahmirr had elevated him to stellar heights, showered him with gold and titles, and appointed him to command the entire Fleet. What did it matter if a royal prince sent a nice birthday gift to a fourth cousin? What did it matter if said royal prince happened to be good friends with said fourth cousin?

  So, all right, Khharrq Akhmatshakh was a favored prince these days. Maybe even the favored prince, at least for the past couple-three standard years, ever since Prince Akhmat and all his friends had gotten their fool heads chopped off. That’s why Khharrq had been given command of XIIth Army and placed in charge of the modular shield matter and fuel factories in the Paradise system.

  Leaving aside the vital importance of the factories themselves to the prosecution of the Great Jihad, His Majesty had certainly sent one of his most capable sons to Paradise at least in part to keep tabs on his Strong Right Arm, far away as said highly dangerous worthy was from home, royal palace and His Majesty’s ever-watchful eye.

  The Mace of Battle and the prince had never been friends, to put it mildly. Lately, their relationship had been especially, ahem, frosty. That’s probably why it was Prince Khharrq and not, say, Prince Alikh, who’d been picked to command XIIth Army in the first place.

  But still, why such punishment? Favored princes came, and favored princes went. His Majesty was still young, vigorous and quite watchful. There was no official Crown Prince, even. Not since the last bearer of that title had ended up losing his damnfool head along with his claim to the crown.

  Now that Prince Akhmat’s idiotic, half-baked plot had stirred up His Majesty’s ire, even mere private talk of some theoretical succession was liable to send a man back to his most backwater estate with strict instructions to remain indefinitely and receive no visitors, if not have him quietly poisoned.

  His Majesty’s Mace of Battle, Strong Right Arm, etc, etc, was winning great victories left and right. Costly victories, to be sure. Far costlier than had been expected, without doubt. But great victories.

  The enemies of Allakh were on the run. The Ahmirrat’s warriors snarled at the gates of Tiantiju. One more offensive, and the so-called Son of Heaven would see the Black Banner of Jihad flying above the ruins of his Forbidden Palace. With half of Omicronia prostrate under the claws of Allakh’s Faithful, the Fuhrer of the Aryans trembled in his foul lair. When Haven fell, the Jews, foremost of Allakh’s enemies from time immemorial, would surely be defeated altogether. Sayf al-Masrikh was the architect of all of it. His position couldn’t get more secure. But still!

  The League had at least three different fleet task forces rampaging up the gradient. Almost fifty squadrons’ worth of capital ships. Fleet Intelligence was still bickering abou
t exact task organization and commanders’ identities, but the signature count was rock-solid. The Leaguers had sent every picket between Loki and Hadassah running for cover, if they hadn’t destroyed it altogether. Their whole damned navy had been spotted on the way up there. A task force of over two hundred squadrons. Some twenty-six hundred capital ships. Pretty much everything they had left, outside of a few odds and ends.

  They were desperate. The final great battle was coming, and even a small kitten could figure out that the final great battle would be fought at Hadassah. There was simply no other place where it could be fought, at this point.

  The Mace of Battle was halting the advance into Omicronia. He was calling in units from the Imperial front. He had the whole fleet galloping like mad to outrace the League admiral’s main task force to Hadassah. He’d threatened to decapitate the captain of any ship that fell behind, and that was no idle threat, coming from him.

  They’d already gone two jumps past Loki, and then came the ansible message. Take two line squadrons, take a light cruiser detachment, a carrier task group and extra scouts, turn the heck around and go reinforce the Loki picket. Scout everything as far as your scouts can reach, check all the probes and sow new ones all over the bloody place. And do something about the damned drone menace, while you’re at it. A pair of imagery detachments are on the way from Haven to meet you.

  What the hell did the accursed Loki picket need reinforcing for? And with a major task force under the command of no less than a rear admiral, at that?! What the hell did the extra scouts need to watch for, with the Jews’ whole damned navy six jumps past and racing to Hadassah?