Buthelezi took an appraising look around the room. “Very well. You now have a full TAC upload available. We are at T-6 hours on this op and I expect a plan within the hour. Kennakris, as points leader, you have command of this op. Basmartin, you’re her second. If there are no other questions, then good hunting, Cadets.”
Basmartin whistled as Commander Buthelezi left the room and looked sideways at Kris. “What the hell?” Kris shook her head, but Minx, who had been squirming through the last part of the briefing, burst out, “Christ! We don’t know how to do this! Jump, fly four hours through hostile space, engage Jesus knows what at the other end? Destroyers! Frigates! It’s ridiculous—”
“Clamp it, Minx,” Kris snapped. Minx got on Kris’s nerves in the best of times, but she was okay as long as things were straightforward and by the book. Give her too much leeway, though, and she tended to get flighty—like now. Still, Kris had to admit, if only inwardly, that they were being asked to undertake a mission far beyond what they, as first-term cadets, could be expected to accomplish.
“You think we’re being boggarted?” Basmartin asked. Boggart was cadet slang for a no-win scenario. They were especially popular near the end of War Week and as far as any one of them knew, no one had been boggarted yet, so there was a general feeling they were overdue.
“Maybe.” Kris sighed. Their mission scenarios had always been precise up until now; any variations well defined, not probably this and latest intel indicates that and we estimate only six . . . or eight . . . or . . .
She went to the omnisynth and leaned her elbows on the edge, watching the planets and the jump fields and the little moon with its orbital base, along with their objective and its unknown covering force, move serenely through their simulated paces. Would they really cut loose capital ships against her little force of eight fighters and two corvettes?
They might. Academy exercises were not about fairness or even odds, but there were limits. Red Team/Blue Team meant there was another squad of cadets who’d been given the task of intercepting her forces and defeating them. So she wasn’t up against a battle simulation computer or exercise refs. Whatever authority those other cadets—the Red Team—had, it could not be that much greater than what she’d been given. That meant they would not have the authority to sortie all their major combatants—that was an NCA decision. At best, they should be able to request support from no more than one frigate or maybe the destroyer—assuming the info on how many combatants they kept hot was accurate. As for fighters, a full squadron wouldn’t surprise her, but if their specs could be trusted, they wouldn’t be as capable as her team’s.
However, there was something else—perhaps even more critical—and it had nothing directly to do with the details of this exercise: their instructor’s attitude. How Commander Buthelezi felt about her, Kris wasn’t sure: she treated all cadets strictly according to their merits. But today, she felt that the commander was paying particular attention to her, and furthermore, Kris had detected a tiny sparkle in her instructor’s eye, a sparkle she could only describe as devilish. Her instincts in this regard were well honed, and she was almost positive something unusual was up.
She glanced over at Basmartin, who was poking his xel and talking with Tanner, who was often Minx’s wingman, although Kris personally thought he was the better pilot. Minx herself was towards the back of the room, alternately reiterating her point, helped out by agitated gestures, and listening to the other cadets with pursed lips.
“Got anything, Baz?”
Basmartin came over and started to stroke through the TAC upload for her. “Pretty much what she said. We can expect small craft on orbit, and if they aren’t totally asleep they’ll put fighters in geo-polar and wait for the corvettes to engage. Then the real fun will begin.”
“So where do we set up overwatch?”
“Well”—Basmartin zoomed the omnisynth display in on Lacaille—“the way we’re coming in, the L5 point looks good. The corvettes bang in and whichever way the fighters come down, we bounce ‘em.”
“What if they have a frigate out there?”
Basmartin looked sour, and Minx, who’d come over to stand behind him, said, “If they do that, we’re so screwed.” Kris had never met anyone before who said screwed—the first time she’d heard it, she hadn’t known what it meant—and it still made her eyes roll. But she suppressed it now, and as Minx seemed about to enlarge on her opinion for the third or fourth time, she said to Basmartin, “Look at it their way.”
She adjusted the display and pulled up a window from the point of view of Lacaille’s orbital base. “Look,” she repeated, “the transit they gave us is the best transit.”
“So?”
“So, if we can see it’s the best transit, they can see it’s the best transit. And they must have some idea of the timing, and they know where their surveillance holes are better than we do. So if they put a squadron here—or a frigate—and another in geo-polar, and we come in like we’re supposed to, look what happens.” She tapped the data into the omnisynth and ran it.
“Christ,” said Tanner as the brutal scenario unfolded.
“What we need to do”—Kris entered some new data—“is get here, by L3. That will at least allow us to pick off that outer group, and if the corvettes can stay out of the way of the inner group for a bit, I think we can come down in time to make it work.”
Basmartin shook his head. “But we can’t get to L3. We’d have to go through this”—he added a red line—“and forces from their base can cut us off anywhere along here.” He highlighted the danger zone—at least thirty minutes with no way out and no hope of support.
“Not if we come from this jump point.” Kris highlighted the complement to their assigned jump field. “It’s only about forty minutes farther out. If we could jump in there, and if we jump in say half an hour early, they’d miss us completely, wouldn’t they?”
“But we can’t.” Basmartin insisted, running his hand across the short bright-gold curls that covered the top of his richly bronzed scalp. “Buthelezi isn’t going to change the scenario—we can’t just ask for a new convolution.”
“What are you thinking, Kris?” Minx asked suspiciously. “No upperclassman’s going to run a new convolution for us—that’s cheating.”
“It wouldn’t work anyway,” Tanner added. “Even if someone did, those convolutions are only good for a few minutes—you know that.”
“No,” Kris said slowly and with a most particular look. “But the corvettes have all the nav data. That’s how we’re going to get the convolution settings to get home. They’ll have to link it over with the new settings for the exit jump. So we have access to the nav data if we want it.”
“Want it for what? Our fighters don’t even have a convolution module. Even if you knew how to operate one—”
“The refs supply the convolutions, Kris,” Minx broke in, talking over Tanner with slow emphasis to make Kris grasp the depths of her imbecility. “They won’t run a new set for us! It’s not in the scenario!”
Now Kris did roll her eyes and turn away from Minx with exaggerated disdain. “Look, Baz. If I can get us these convolution settings—legally—will you follow me on this?”
“No problem—if you can do it in a way that won’t get us kicked out.”
“Tanner?”
“Sure.” Tanner grinned. “I’m not sure I care if you get kicked out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kris,” said Minx, “but I—”
“Minx, stow it for a second, okay? Nobody’s gonna get you into trouble. All you have to do is follow the plan they gave us—same jump field, same timing, same trajectory, same everything.” She skewered Minx with a direct challenge. “Will you do that? If we get this right, we all get out early, and then you can spend the whole weekend with your girlfriend.”
Minx folded her arms under her ample bosom and shot a hip. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
“Fine. You get the big piece then.” Kris tu
rned back to the omnisynth, took her previous data set and started to manipulate it. “This is what I got in mind . . .”
* * *
Commander Buthelezi was relaxing in the Instructor’s Lounge, lavishing whipped cream over a generous wedge of seven-layer cake—she had a notorious sweet tooth and maintained her sinuous, tight-sprung physique by dint of rigorous daily exercise—and waiting for a fresh pot of coffee to finish synthesizing when Lieutenant Innis poked her head in, a look of consternation on her round pink face.
“What is it, Kath? Haven’t given up already, have they?”
“No ma’am.” The lieutenant hurried over and laid her xel on the table. “I linked it to you, but I’m afraid there was no response.”
“Oh.” Naomi Buthelezi smiled. “My fault—left it in my office. What’s up?”
Innis pointed at her xel. “They submitted it, ma’am. Cadet Kennakris, I mean. She’s submitted her op-plan.”
Buthelezi checked the time—barely three-quarters of an hour. “That was fast. Problem?”
“Dunno, ma’am. Not obviously.” She scrolled through the plan Kris had submitted. “It certainly isn’t orthodox, though.” Innis tapped the xel. “She’s proposing to split her fighters—in the presence of a superior adversary, no less, and she’s aware of that too—into a group of three and a group of five. The group of five, under Cadet Brunner, will come in with the corvettes on the assigned route and take overwatch at L5.”
“Okay.” Except for splitting the group, that was entirely expected.
“But, see here, ma’am, the other group—that’s Cadet Kennakris with Cadets Basmartin and Tanner”—the three best pilots, Buthelezi noted—“they’re going to take a covering position here. Just inside L3”
“Hmm.” Commander Buthelezi slowly consumed a forkful of cake. “How do they plan to get there?”
“Doesn’t say, ma’am. But they’ll be sitting ducks for most of the way.”
“Interesting.” The coffee pot beeped and Buthelezi clicked it off with the remote.
“And she wants to move the T-0 ahead by an hour and ten minutes—just for her group. The corvettes and Brunner go as planned. And she’s asking for torpedoes.”
“Torpedoes?”
“Yes, ma’am. Loadout of two each for Cadets Basmartin and Tanner.” Lieutenant Innis looked at her boss with a pinched expression. “You don’t think she found out somehow, do you?”
Naomi Buthelezi stood slowly, looking one last time at the xel as she reached for the coffee pot. Filling a waiting cup, she answered, “I don’t see how she could. Red Team hasn’t even submitted their plan yet. Would you like some coffee, Kath?”
“Yes, please, ma’am—thank you.” Buthelezi filled a second cup, handed it across. Innis added a healthy splash of cream—a venial sin common in the shore establishment. “What do we do, ma’am?”
Buthelezi raised her own cup—thick, rich, steaming and utterly black—and sipped. “Approve it. I really want to see what she has in mind.”
* * *
Before entering the Academy, Kris had taken eight weeks of flight lessons on Nedaema. True, those lessons had involved a harrowing and near-fatal encounter with a hypersonic stealth drone, but in retrospect that only added something to the savor. The main thing was that they—and especially the drone attack she’d barely survived—gave her a perspective on Academy flight simulators that few cadets had. The weightless aspect of the simulators was perfect because it wasn’t simulated at all: the simulators were in the zero-gee environment of Deimos’ interior. The discomforts of the armored flight suits weren’t simulated either, and on long missions these were significant, especially for female cadets who had to deal with the rather more intricate plumbing arrangements.
Where the flight simulators fell short was in the gee forces of maneuvering: the cockpit motion, augmented by neural induction, produced sensations that did not exceed 3 gees and Kris, who’d pulled a 78-gee actual, 9-gee damped maneuver at near-hypersonic velocity to evade that drone, thought this limitation was just plain silly. The cadets who made it to Basic Flight were in for a hell of a surprise if they thought the simulators prepared you in any way for high-gee maneuvering.
They would, Kris thought, be much better prepared for cramped, uncomfortable boredom. A five-hour approach looked great on the omnisynth, but now, two-hundred-eighty minutes into it with the sweat the flight suits never completely handled itching, the cramps that had been torturing her left leg for half an hour and the gathering tension in her shoulders and lower back beginning to sting, she was feeling she might have been too clever by half.
The jump had gone perfectly. She’d been worried because the only convolution she had was an optimum, and an optimum convolution was not physically possible, although you could get very close. But she was afraid the sim-software would reject it and insist on a real, fully-developed convolution. It did not, however, taking her convolution, digesting it as happily as a real input and dropping them into Lacaille space just where she wanted to be. The glow of that small victory lasted for about half an hour before it began to pall.
They were flying in on a pure ballistic to reduce their signatures to a minimum; fire-control off, no shields, and only Basmartin had sensors running and then only his passive suite. Their trajectory was intended to bring them in behind where Kris had concluded the Red Team’s frigate would be, if they had one, at a range just inside their torpedoes’ engagement envelope. The problem was this: would the frigate be there? Kris had based her whole plan on the assumption that they were being boggarted and that’s all it was—an assumption. If they weren’t—if this was a straight-up exercise—she’d split her force in the presence of a superior enemy and both her little group and Minx’s were going to end up 86’d, or as the other cadets said, deep in the hurt locker.
She locked on to Basmartin, one minute up ahead, with her tight-beam maser. “Got anything, Baz?”
“Negative.”
“Not even shield glow?” It was an unnecessary question, even an unfair one—Basmartin was running sensors because he was far better at it than anyone else in their group. He certainly didn’t need to be told to check for the radiation that bled from active shields, and if she hadn’t been so nervous and irritated, she never would have asked it. Basmartin knew all that and made no attempt to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he repeated, “Negative.”
“You think they’re really there, Kris?” This was Tanner on the link. “If they aren’t, or if Minx doesn’t come in on time or—”
“Tanner, cut the yak,” Kris snapped. But in truth, Tanner’s question was only slightly more gratuitous than hers to Basmartin. There were, in fact, a hundred things that could go wrong with her plan. She’d blocked the time window out for Minx, but if she didn’t get there before Red Team recovered from the surprise of Kris’s attack, they were ions. If Minx didn’t keep the formation she’d been given—jammed tight around the corvettes so Red Team couldn’t get a decent read on her numbers—they were ions. If that goddamned frigate was not where she thought it was—if they were busy sneaking up on empty space—they were ions. And the last thing she needed right now was someone reminding her about it. She beamed Basmartin. “Still nothing?”
“Not in the last ninety seconds, Kris.”
Damn.
“Kris?” Basmartin again, in a different tone. “You think they could be running shields down?”
Irritated, Kris scowled. “Shields down? That wouldn’t make any . . .” Oh, yes, it would. If they wanted to lie dark and cold to ambush her, it would make sense. If she smoked them early, coming in on the expected trajectory, according to the scenario, she could still get out. She’d lose, but they wouldn’t get any kills, either. If they had the frigate lie up dark and then come down on a cold ballistic while she was engaged with the fighters, they could bag the lot—she wouldn’t detect the frigate until it was almost in weapons range, far too late to disengage.
She checked her numbers again on the
fighter’s T-Synth. If Minx and the corvettes were on schedule, they would be in sensor range in about fifteen minutes; if the fighters were where she’d estimated them to be, they’d engage in twenty-five minutes. If the frigate was where she thought it would be, it would move to engage in about fifteen minutes and she’d be in torpedo range in about eleven minutes. If—if—if. Damn—damn—damn . . .
A fretful silent minute went by—and another. Why hadn’t Baz detected something by now? At this range, he should be getting a drive signature off the frigate, even if its shields were down. Could they be shielding their drive emissions somehow? That shouldn’t be possible, especially on this approach, unless they were stealth ships, in which case . . . I’m gonna kick somebody in the crotch. They wouldn’t—wouldn’t—sneak stealth ships into the scenario. Would they?
“Kris?” Basmartin interrupted her agitated thoughts. “Got something here. Emission signature—it’s a frigate.” About fuckin’ time! “Almost 6-dB down, though—wait one . . . Shit!” Very strong language from Ferhat Basmartin. Kris’s heart fluttered. “Not a frigate. What the hell? That’s a destroyer signature. But I could’ve sworn . . .”
“Link it,” Kris said. The data flowed across into her T-Synth, which ran it against the library and spat out its conclusion: an old Halith Kurgan-class destroyer. Well goddammit. They cut loose the destroyer anyway. “Baz . . .”
“Hold on”—she could hear him muttering to himself—“Oh Christ. I did see a frigate, Kris. I got two signatures now. A frigate and that Kurgan out there.”
“Oh, we are so boggarted,” Tanner interjected.
Kris did not bother to shut him up this time. A destroyer and a frigate? That was almost as bad as turning loose a sheath ship on them. She put the new data into the T-Synth as her blood started to come to a slow boil. Somebody was gonna pay for this shit and it was not just going to be her. The T-Synth popped up with its new results.
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 15