A Rising Thunder-ARC (7 page)

“What the hell
are
those?” he demanded as the absurdly low ranges registered. Those things were less than ten thousand kilometers clear of his flagship!

“We don’t know, Sir,” Steinberg’ admitted. “All we
do
know is that they seem to’ve been there all along. They just popped up a second ago when they cut their stealth.”

“Cut their
stealth
?” Captain Gilmore repeated. “You mean the Manties got recon platforms that close to us without our ever even
seeing
them?”

“That’s what it looks like,” Steinberg grated harshly. “And I doubt they just dropped their stealth for no reason at all. They
want
us to know they’re there.”

“Ma’am,” one of her assistants said, “we’re picking up grav pulses all over the place. Dozens of point sources.”

“Are these”—Pyun used a light pointer to jab at the new icons in the master plot—“some of those point sources, Chief Elliott?”

“Uh, yes, Sir. I think they are,” the chief petty officer acknowledged.

“Oh,
shit
,” Gilmore muttered.

We are
so
going to get hammered
, a quiet little voice said in the back of Pyun’s mind.

“How the
hell
did they fit FTL emitters into something that
small?
” Steinberg demanded almost plaintively.

The question was obviously rhetorical, which was probably just as well, since no answer suggested itself to Pyun. Not that it would have made any difference at the moment. What mattered was that the Manties had managed to do it. Unless he was badly mistaken, those had to be recon platforms—dozens of them, as Chief Elliott had just pointed out—and if they were capable of what the wilder theorists had proposed, they were feeding those Manty cruisers detailed tracking information at FTL speeds. Which meant their missile control loop had just been cut in half, and the implications of that…

Belle Poule
vibrated as counter-missiles began to launch, but it was already evident to Pyun that his ships mounted far too few counter-missile tubes and point defense clusters to deal with
this
salvo.

* * *

“Coming up on Point Alpha,” Brockhurst announced.

“Execute as specified,” Ivanov said formally.

“Aye, aye, Sir. Executing…now.”

* * *

There was little panic aboard SLNS
Belle Poule
, but only because her crew was too busy for that. There was no time for those who could actually see the displays, recognize what the readouts meant, to really consider what was happening, the stunning realization that they truly were as out-classed as the “preposterous” reports from Spindle had indicated.

And they
were
out-classed.

The Manticoran missiles came flashing in, still at that incredible—impossible—acceleration rate, and just before they entered the counter-missile zone, the electronic warfare platforms seeded among the attack birds spun up. Of the two hundred and forty missiles launched by Hiram Ivanov’s three cruisers, fifty carried nothing but penetration aids, and they’d been carefully saved for this moment. Now “Dazzler” platforms blinded Solarian sensors even as their accompanying “Dragons Teeth” suddenly proliferated, producing scores of false targets to confuse and saturate their targets’ defenses. The Solarian battlecruiser crews had never seen, never imagined, anything like it. Ignorant of the energy budgets the RMN’s mini-fusion plants allowed, they simply couldn’t conceive of how such powerful jammers could be crammed into such tiny platforms. The threat totally surpassed the parameters their doctrine and their systems had been designed to cope with.

Pyun’s battlecruisers managed to stop exactly seventeen of the incoming shipkillers in the outer zone. The other hundred and seventy-three streaked past every counter-missile the Solarians could throw with almost contemptuous ease.

* * *

Liam Pyun watched his command’s destruction ripping through his defenses. He’d always been more willing than most of his fellow officers to consider the possible accuracy of the outlandish reports coming back from the endless Manticore-Haven war. He’d had to be careful about admitting he was, given the contempt with which virtually all of those other officers greeted such “alarmist” rumors, but now he knew even the most bizarre of those reports had understated the true magnitude of the threat. No wonder the Manties had managed to punch out Byng’s flagship so cleanly at New Tuscany!

His people were doing their best, fighting with frantic professionalism to overcome the fatal shortcomings of their doctrine and training in the fleeting minutes they had. They weren’t going to succeed, and he knew it, but they weren’t going to simply sit there, paralyzed by terror, either, and he felt bittersweet pride in them even as he cursed himself for having walked straight into this disaster.

But how could I have known? How could I
really
have known? And even if I had
—

And then the Manticoran missles burst past the inner edge of the counter-missile zone. They came driving in through the desperate, last-ditch, last-minute fire of the battlecruisers’ point defense clusters, and the laser clusters were almost as useless in the face of the Manty EW as the counter-missiles had been. They managed to pick off another twelve missiles, but that still left a hundred and sixty-three shipkillers, and Pyun felt his belly knotting solid as his ships’ executioners came boring in on the throats of their wedges. They were going to—

One hundred and sixty-three Mark 16 missiles, each with the better part of thirty seconds’ time left on its drive, swerved suddenly, in a perfectly synchronized maneuver, and detonated as one.

* * *

“Nicely done, BB,” Hiram Ivanov said approvingly as the FTL reports came in from the Ghost Rider drones and
Sloan Tompkins
’ CIC updated the master tactical plot. “Very nicely. In fact, I think that rates a ‘well done’ for your entire department.”

* * *

“They hit our wedges!” Steinberg blurted. “My God, they hit our
wedges!
”

Her tone was so disbelieving—and so affronted—that despite himself, Pyun actually felt his mouth twitch on the edge of a smile. The ops officer was staring incredulously at her displays as CIC’s dispassionate computers updated them.

It was true. It had happened so quickly, the X-ray lasers had cascaded in in such a massive tide, that it had taken Steinberg (and Pyun, for that matter) several endless seconds to grasp what had actually happened—to realize they were still alive—yet it was true.

The rear admiral would dearly have loved to believe Halo had succeeded in its decoy function. That the Manty missiles had been lured astray by his battlecruisers’ sophisticated electronic warfare systems. But much as he would have preferred that, he knew differently. No defensive system in the galaxy could have caused
every single missile
in an attacking salvo to waste its fury on the roofs and floors of his ships’ impeller wedges. No. The only way
that
could have happened was for the people who’d fired those missiles to have
arranged
for it to happen.

“
Christ!
” Captain Gilmore shook his head like a man who’d been hit one time too many. “How the hell—?” He stopped and gave his head another shake, then grimaced. “Sorry, Admiral.”

Pyun only looked at him, then wheeled back towards Steinberg at the ops officer’s inarticulate sound of disbelief. She looked up and saw the admiral’s eyes on her.

“I—” It was her turn to shake her head. “Sir, according to CIC,
Retaliate
took one hit and
Impudent
took two. That’s it. That’s
all!
”

“Casualties?” Pyun heard his own voice asking.

“None reported so far, Sir.”

“But that’s ridic—” Gilmore began, then made himself stop.

“Ridiculous,” Pyun agreed grimly. “Except for the minor fact that it happened. Which suggests it was what the Manties intended to happen all along. In fact, the hits on
Retaliate
and
Impudent
must’ve been unintentional.” He smiled very, very thinly. “I suppose it’s nice to know not even Manty fire control is
perfect
.”

Steinberg looked back up at him, and Gilmore inhaleddeeply.

“Sir, are you suggesting they deliberately
targeted
our wedges?” the chief of staff asked very carefully. “That it was some kind of…of
demonstration?
”

“I don’t have any better explanation for it, Steve. Do you?”

“I—”

“Excuse me, Captain,” Lieutenant Turner interrupted respectfully, “but we’re receiving a transmission I think the Admiral had better hear.”

“What kind of transmission?” Pyun asked.

“It’s from the Manties, Sir. But it’s not a direct transmission from any of their ships. It’s coming from…somewhere else.”

“‘Somewhere else’?”

“Yes, Sir.” The communications officer seemed torn between relief at his continued existence and unhappiness at something else. “Sir, I think it’s being relayed from another platform. From
several
other platforms, actually.” Pyun only looked at him, and Turner sighed. “Sir, it looks to me as if they must have at least ten or fifteen relay platforms out there, and they’re jumping the transmission between them to keep us from locking them up. And, Sir, I think they’re transmitting to us in real time.”

Pyun started to protest. They were still over a light-minute and a half from the Manties. There ought to be a ninety second-plus transmission lag. But then he remembered all those grav pulses, and his protest died.

“Very well,” he said. “Put it on the main display.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The same brown-haired, green-eyed man appeared, and Pyun felt his jaw muscles tighten.

“I trust,” Captain Ivanov said, “that you realize we just deliberately
didn’t
destroy your ships. As I’ve already said, my Empress would prefer to resolve the differences between the Star Empire and the League without further bloodshed. That doesn’t mean more blood won’t be shed anyway, but I’d really prefer not to have it happen here, today. If you persist in approaching this terminus, however, I will have no choice but to continue this engagement, and the next salvo won’t be targeted on your wedges. You have ten minutes to reverse acceleration or translate into hyper. If you’ve done neither at the end of those ten minutes, I
will
open fire once more, and this time we’ll be firing for effect. Ivanov, clear.”

It was very quiet on
Belle Poule
’s flag bridge. No one said a word. In fact, for several seconds, no one even breathed. All eyes were on Liam Pyun as he stood continuing to gaze at the blank display from which Hiram Ivanov had disappeared. Then the admiral squared his shoulders, drew a deep breath, and turned his back on the display.

“Captain Gilmore, instruct Captain Zyndram to reverse acceleration immediately. And tell him to get our hyper generators online.”

Chapter Four

“This,” Yana Tretiakovna announced, “is booooooring.”

The tall, attractive, and very dangerous blonde flung herself backward into the threadbare armchair. She leaned back, crossed her arms, and glowered out the huge crystoplast wall at what any unbiased person would have to call the magnificent vista of Yamato’s Nebula.

At the moment, she was less than impressed. On the other hand, she had a lot to not be impressed about. And she’d had a lot of time in which to be unimpressed, too.

“I’m sure you could find something to amuse yourself if you really wanted to,” Anton Zilwicki said mildly, looking up from the chess problem on his minicomp. “This
is
one of the galaxy’s biggest and most elaborate amusement parks, you know.”

“This
was
one of the galaxy’s biggest amusement parks,” Yana shot back. “These days, it’s one of the galaxy’s biggest deathtraps. Not to mention being stuffed unnaturally full of Ballroom terrorists and Beowulfan commandos, not one of whom has a functioning sense of humor!”

“Well, if you hadn’t dislocated that nice Beowulfan lieutenant’s elbow arm wrestling with him, maybe you’d find out they had better senses of humor than you think they do.”

“Yada, yada, yada.” Yana scowled. “It’s not even fun to tease
Victor
anymore!”

A deep basso chuckle rumbled around inside Zilwicki’s massive chest. When Yana had first signed on to assist in his and Victor Cachat’s high-risk mission to Mesa, she’d been at least half-frightened (whether she would have admitted it to a living soul or not) of the Havenite secret agent. She’d agreed to come along—mostly out of a desire to avenge her friend Lara’s death—and she was a hardy soul, was Yana. Still, the notion of playing the girlfriend (although the ancient term “moll” might actually have been a better one) of someone many people would have described as a stone-cold, crazed sociopathic killer had obviously worried her more than she’d cared to admit. In fact, Zilwicki thought, Cachat had never struck him as either stone cold or crazed, but he could see where other people might form that impression, given his Havenite colleague’s body count. As for sociopathy, well, Zilwicki’s internal jury was still out on that one in some ways.

Not that he hadn’t known some perfectly nice sociopaths. Besides, Zilwicki had observed that who was the sociopath and who was the defender of all that was right and decent often seemed to depend a great deal on the perspective of the observer.

And sometimes the cigar really
is
a cigar, of course
, he reflected.
That’s one of the things that make life so interesting when Victor’s around
.

Over the course of their lengthy mission on Mesa, Yana had gotten past most of her own uneasiness with the Havenite. And the four-month voyage from Mesa back to the Hainuwele System had finished it off. Of course, the trip shouldn’t have taken anywhere near that long. The old, battered, and dilapidated freighter
Hali Sowle
their Erewhonese contacts had provided had been a smuggler in her time, and she’d been equipped with a military grade hyper generator. It wasn’t obvious, because her original owners had gone to considerable lengths to disguise it, and they hadn’t tinkered with her commercial grade impeller nodes and particle screening, but that had allowed her to climb as high as the Theta Bands, which made her far faster than the vast majority of merchant vessels. Unfortunately, the hyper generator in question had been less than perfectly maintained by the various owners through whose hands the ship had passed since it was first installed, and it had promptly failed after they managed to escape Mesa into hyper. They’d survived the experience, but it had taken Andrew Artlet what had seemed like an eternity to jury-rig the replacement component they’d required.