by David Weber
“And at an n-space accel of six hundred gravities?” Santini demanded. He and his staff had decided to assume that base acceleration for their calculations.
“Another eighteen minutes, Sir.”
“All right. Spin the generators up for translation ten seconds after that.” Santini smiled thinly. “I don’t think he’s going to want to bring cruisers into energy range of battlecruisers even if he can manage to hit his alpha translation that close. So, he’s going to come back out somewhere in missile range, but if he can get missiles into space and hit us with them in ten frigging seconds, we better draw up the articles of surrender now!”
The chief of staff’s expression showed he wasn’t delighted by his admiral’s turn of phrase, but he nodded.
“Yes, Sir. I’ll see to it.”
* * *
Sixteen minutes later, an immaculately skinsuited Vice Admiral Santini strode onto his flag bridge. Officers and ratings came to attention, but he waved them back to their consoles, crossed to his command chair, and seated himself.
“Status, Admiral Vasiliou?”
“Ready to hyper in…ninety-five seconds,” Vasiliou replied. “All ships closed up at Battle Stations.”
“Good.” Santini smiled thinly. “I’m looking forward to letting them waste some missiles this time!”
“Yes, Sir, and—”
“Hyper footprint!” Commodore O’Reilly called out from tactical. “Multiple hyper footprints at two-point-one million kilometers!”
“Already?” Santini looked down at the repeater deployed from his command chair and frowned. The Manties had botched their translation badly, if they’d been trying to get into range to hit him before he hypered out. In fact, they were well over a million kilometers short of his position. That was still deep inside their missiles’ range basket, but at that range, flight time would be over sixty-eight seconds, twelve seconds longer than his Nevadas required to translate out from Standby readiness.
“Abort translation, but stand by to reinitiate!” he said sharply.
“Aborting translation, yes, Sir,” O’Reilly acknowledged, and Santini gave Vasiliou a lopsided smile.
“It would appear even the vaunted Manties can screw up,” he observed. “Do you think they’ll go ahead and launch?”
“Don’t know, Sir,” the chief of staff replied with an answering smile. “Kind of embarrassing for them, I suppose.”
Santini chuckled, although neither of them really thought the situation was especially humorous. Yes, the Manties had screwed up, but that didn’t undo anything that had happened to Admiral Isotalo—whatever had happened to her. Still, at least it gave Santini’s task group an opportunity to get a little of their own back. It might be only a moral victory, but the proof to his own people that even Manties could make mistakes wasn’t anything to sneer at after what looked like being yet another debacle after all.
“Well, keep an eye on them,” Santini told O’Reilly. “The instant they launch a missile or translate out again, start the generator clock.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“In the meantime, I think—”
SLNS Kilkis blew up with all hands.
* * *
David K. Brown’s LACs came out of the dark like demons.
They’d begun accelerating at a leisurely—for Shrikes—317.75 gravities the moment they received the codeword. At that rate, less than half their maximum accel, and given their stealth systems, they’d been effectively undetectable at any range much above a million kilometers, but they’d shut their wedges back down after only forty-five minutes. By that time, they’d attained a velocity of 8,143 KPS and traveled 11,358,050 kilometers, to a point almost exactly six million kilometers from Santini’s battlecruisers. It had taken them twelve more minutes to enter attack range, and every bit of TG 1027.3’s attention had been riveted to the maneuvers of the Manticoran heavy cruisers. No one had been looking in exactly the opposite direction for ships they didn’t know existed and couldn’t have seen if they had been looking.
There were only forty-four of them, but they streaked in on the non-evading targets they’d tracked continuously from the moment Brownie deployed them, thanks to the Ghost Rider platforms still monitoring the terminus. They knew exactly where their targets were, and they went for the kill without a shred of mercy.
Sir Martin Lessem watched the FTL plot as his piranhas swarmed their far more massive foes in a feeding frenzy of destruction. The tonnage imbalance was preposterous: 891,000 tons of LACs against 17.3 million tons of Solarian warships, not to mention another thirty million tons of support ships. But tonnage didn’t matter. What mattered was surprise, ferocity, and firepower, and the imbalance in those qualities did not favor the Solarian Navy this bloody day.
Eight thousand kilometers per second was not an enormous closing velocity by the standards of deep-space combat, but it was enough for the LACs to pass completely through their energy weapons envelope in under two minutes. They opened fire at five hundred thousand kilometers; sixty-one seconds later they passed directly through the heart of what had been Helmut Santini’s formation, and those sixty-one seconds were a minute of unmitigated butchery.
In the end, seven of TG 1027.3 and TG 127.4’s fifty starships—all destroyers—managed to cycle their hyper generators and escape before the LACs got around to such insignificant fare. A handful of their less fortunate consorts actually survived, albeit with brutal damage, but only because the LAC skippers had been tasked to immobilize rather than destroy as many Solarians as they could. They tried hard and did their job well, those skippers, but grasers with that kind of power were not precision weapons. Or, rather, they were precision weapons, but it was the precision of a chainsaw, not a scalpel, and their targets were only battlecruisers.
A certain amount of…breakage was unavoidable.
Commodore Lessem watched the carnage, watched the half-dozen Solarian escapees disappear into hyper-space, and heard his flag bridge’s cheers. They rang in his ears, and he made himself smile in acknowledgment, but it was hard.
“Descabello,” he’d called it, and he’d been right.
It was the perfect battle, from his perspective, actually. Not a single Manticoran loss—on this side of the terminus, at least—in return for total victory.
So why did he feel so much more like a butcher than a Queen’s officer?
Maybe Sara Kate could help him answer that question…someday. But someday wasn’t this day, and he raised his voice.
“All right, Randy. That was a beautiful micro-jump, but if it’s all the same to you, I think we’ll just mosey over to the terminus through n-space.” He showed his teeth and chuckled. “I believe we have a few POWs to collect.”
Office of the Director of Research
Gregor Mendel Tower
City of Leonard
Darius System
“Sir, Mister Chernyshev is here,” the office AI announced.
“Good, Socrates! Send him in,” Daniel Detweiler responded.
Most of his brothers—Everett was the exception—preferred a human receptionist. Partly that was because a human staffer was a prestige symbol, even on Mesa, but Daniel was willing to admit it wasn’t just social snobbishness on their part. Like their father, Albrecht, they valued the intuitive and emotional feedback of a human interface while interacting with the other humans with whom they dealt on a day-to-day basis. Even the best AI wasn’t as good a…focusing lens as a highly intelligent, trained, experienced, genuinely self-aware human being. The “highly intelligent” bit was the most important, of course, and Daniel had to agree that it worked for them. But he strongly suspected that the real reason it did was that most of them liked people. They were comfortable dealing with them. In fact, they actually enjoyed it. But he and Everett were the technology wonks of the family team, and neither of them was as good with human interrelationships as their siblings.
Daniel often thought that was a bit odd, since he and his brothers—and Albrecht, for tha
t matter—shared exactly the same genes. Despite that, they’d developed different character traits—often strikingly different—as a gift from their parents. Albrecht and Evelina had taken pains to differentiate them from one another as children, and while Daniel hadn’t exactly been groomed from the outset for his present duties, his interests in that direction had been encouraged from a very early age.
He’d personally designed the “brilliant software” which allowed Socrates, his office AI, to simulate self-awareness almost seamlessly. He might have been able to come even closer if he’d been a little better at inter-human interaction himself, but it was still an impressive accomplishment. It was that “almost” bit which dissuaded people like Collin and Benjamin, who had to work so intimately with their human colleagues, from ordering a Socrates of their own, however. Collin had toyed with the notion, since his role as the Mesan Alignment’s chief of intelligence meant he had even more secrets to keep than his other brothers. The notion of telling his “staff” to forget something and knowing it was actually erased from memory was attractive to Collin. By the same token, though, Collin was the Detweiler who most needed to be aware of the human frailties of his subordinates.
The office door opened, and he stood, banishing the familiar train of thought and holding out his hand as Rufino Chernyshev, who had inherited Isabella Bardasano’s duties as Collin’s director of operations walked through it.
“Good morning, Rufino,” he said.
“Good morning, Daniel,” Chernyshev replied. The higher echelons of the Mesan Alignment didn’t go in for a lot of formality. Not that there was any question of who stood where in the hierarchy. In fact, Daniel rather thought it was the clarity with which that was understood which allowed the informality to work so well. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“You indicated a certain urgency,” Daniel responded, pointing at the chairs in one corner of his spacious, high-ceilinged office.
Chernyshev obeyed the silent invitation, and the two of them settled into the almost sinfully comfortable chairs. The entire outer wall of Daniel’s suite was one-way crystoplast, and the view out over the city of Leonard and its ten million inhabitants was breathtaking on a brilliant spring morning.
“Coffee?”
“Please.” Chernyshev nodded. “Black, one sugar.”
“You heard, Socrates?”
“Yes, Sir. It will arrive in one hundred twenty-three seconds.”
“Thank you,” Daniel said. Then arched an eyebrow at Chernyshev as the agent chuckled. “What?”
“Just thinking that your cybernetic friend might have just a bit too much precisionist in his code.”
“Trust me, there’s no such thing as ‘too much precisionist’ in my line of work. I imagine that, like Collin, you need a bit more…looseness. A little more freedom to encourage the synergistic association of thought processes I suppose. Brainstorming’s important for R&D, too, but I think it’s even more essential on that side that information be communicated as precisely and with as little ambiguity as possible.”
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it exactly that way,” Chernyshev said. “Clarity’s important in my line of work, too, but you’re right in at least one sense. Too much clarity means the people I’m talking to or whose reports I’m reading are trying to force the data into a neat—or at least clearly and concisely explainable—model, even if they don’t consciously realize it themselves. And when that happens, the entire data set’s contaminated.”
“That’s because you’re dealing with human beings, and human beings are a naturally chaotic system,” Daniel pointed out. “If you try to control for the chaos, you’re automatically discarding data bits, and the ones you’re discarding may be the ones you most need in the end.”
“That’s what I was thinking, and—”
Chernyshev broke off as the office door opened again and a silent counter-grav tray floated over to the conversational nook with a carafe of coffee, two cups, and all the condiments any caffeine addict might require. It settled neatly at Daniel’s elbow, and he poured for both of them.
“Now,” he said, sitting back with his own cup as his visitor added sugar, “what was it you needed to see me about?”
“Actually, I probably should have gotten this to you sooner,” Chernyshev responded to his politely brisker tone. “With Isabella’s death, Operation Janus, the Green Pines nuke, and now Houdini, I’ve had a lot on my plate. I haven’t been reading all of those human-generated reports as promptly as I should have, I’m afraid, and this one just floated to the top of my stack.”
“No need to apologize for that.” Daniel shook his head, his expression momentarily bleak.
There were times he was even happier than usual to leave intelligence and covert operations to Collin, and this was definitely one of them. He couldn’t argue with the need to expedite the evacuation of the inner onion—the leadership elements of the Alignment who knew the truth about the covert organization hidden within the larger covert organization—from the Mesa System. The annoyingly persistent survival of Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki had gone from the status of Severe Irritant to Oh Shit the instant they got home to Manticore and Haven with even anecdotal evidence of the Alignment’s existence. With the military situation swinging in favor of Manticore and its allies so much more strongly, and sooner, than allowed for in their original projections, Cachat and Zilwicki’s report meant it was only a matter of time—and probably not a lot of it—before the “Grand Alliance” got around to invading Mesa to drag the Alignment out of the shadows. It was fortunate Albrecht, Collin, and Benjamin had planned for exactly that contingency for so long, but executing Operation Houdini in such a compressed timeframe meant the “collateral damage” was going to run to hundreds of thousands—possibly even millions—of additional deaths.
Who was it back before the Diaspora who said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”? Intellectually, I can’t argue the point. But emotionally? No. Collin and Dad can carry that part of it. I’ll wimp out and just design the weapons to turn as many as possible of the other side into a statistic.
“May be no need to apologize,” Chernyshev said, “but that doesn’t mean we can afford to go around dropping stitches, either. Which is what brings me to this.”
He extracted a data chip from the inside pocket of his tunic and handed it across.
“I could’ve emailed that to you, I know. I wanted to make sure it didn’t get stuck somewhere in in the bowels of your Deal With Me Immediately queue the way it did with me. And I figured if you had any questions off the top of your head I should be here to answer them.”
“And what’s on it?”
“That—” Chernyshev nodded in the direction of the chip on Daniel’s palm “—is a report from one of our agents in place in the Beowulf System Defense Force. He’s not senior enough to have access to the technical specifications of what he’s talking about, but his description of what it does is probably enough to go on with. And what he’s talking about is something called ‘Mycroft.’”
“Mycroft?” Daniel repeated.
“Yes.” Chernyshev’s expression turned deadly serious. “Mycroft is the reason the Manties and their friends will be able to pull their battle fleets entirely out of Manticore, Beowulf, Haven, and Grayson sometime very soon now.”
“Excuse me?”
Daniel sat upright, both eyebrows rising. The majority of the Grand Alliance’s formidable striking power was gathered in its Grand Fleet, currently stationed in Manticore with one powerful task force advanced into Beowulf. Or, rather, covering the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and staying well clear of Beowulf orbit to avoid any appearance of coercion in the star system’s approaching plebiscite. Despite that, somewhere close to a third of the Allies’ total wall of battle was dispersed covering their home star systems against a repeat of the Alignment’s Oyster Bay attack or a more successful iteration of Massimo Filareta’s attempt
on the Manticoran Binary System. If they could call in and concentrate all those additional ships-of-the-wall…
“Essentially, Mycroft’s an updated version of the Havenites’ Moriarty system of pre-deployed missile pods and a dispersed constellation of control stations,” Chernyshev replied. “But it looks like they’ve mated that concept with the Manties’ Apollo and those damned Ghost Rider platforms of theirs. I’m sure you can figure out for yourself what that kind of fire control and, say, eighty or ninety thousand system-defense missile pods could do to any attacking force.”
Daniel’s jaw tightened. He could, indeed, figure that out. Words like “annihilation” came most readily to mind.
“Now, I know we’re not planning on poking our noses back into Manticore or Haven anytime soon, even with the spider drive ships, but the Sollies are going to have to do just that. Kingsford’s commerce-raiding notion was a good one, although I think our modest contributions to Buccaneer’s operational thinking will bite him on the ass before very much longer. Eventually, though, they’ll have to go into defended space again, and if they suffer another Eleventh Fleet debacle, the war may be over a lot sooner than we’d like. So when I mentioned this to Collin, he suggested I get on my two little feet and come over here and share it with you.”
“He’s thinking we need to combine what we know—and the Sollies don’t—about Manty technology with this new information and come up with some counter, then pass it on to Technodyne?”
“Exactly. And there’s also some information on that chip that I got Benjamin’s people to pull up for me—a fairly detailed description of something the Manties came up with against Moriarty. They called it ‘Mistletoe,’ and Benjamin thinks that might be a good starting point for some of that brainstorming you mentioned a few minutes ago.”
Tarducci Tower
City of Approdo
Genovese System