Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks (15 page)

“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 turned 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.

“Baz, why are the emissions so far down? Do you have good range?”

“Not that good—but they are
about
where they’re supposed to be. Hang on a second. . .” Kris hung on, quietly seething. “Kris? I think they’re in 10-Minute Ready mode.”

“You sure? They’re not in hot-standby?”

“I don’t think so—look at those peaks: the main peak is normal but the secondaries are shifted. If they were in hot—”

“Baz! We’re not in lecture!”

“Yeah—right. Sorry.”

“Nothing on SWIR yet?” Shortwave infrared readings of the power plant’s heat blooms would definitely tell them what mode the ships were in.

“No joy—still too far out to resolve.”
Dammit
. If the ships really were in 10-Minute Ready mode, they were sitting ducks. They would need to get their drives into hot-standby before they could bring up shields. She had four torps: plenty to handle a frigate—but a frigate and a destroyer were two entirely different things. But if they
were
just sitting there. . .

“Anybody else just wanna call it a day?”

“Shut up, Tanner.” They said it almost together and Kris grinned.

“Okay, Baz—Tanner. I’m linking you new numbers. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Those tin cans there are sitting ducks until they get their drives hot. Baz, you and I are gonna take the frigate. Tanner, you get the
Kurgan
—”

“Huh? Just
me
?”

“We’re gonna go in ahead and screen you. When we get to the 14-meg ring, you lock both torps on the
Kurgan
and hold position. Baz and I boost in. You wait until we hit the 8-meg ring and then you launch and boost like hell for L3. Baz, you lock that frigate and launch
one
torp at 5 megs range—save the other for the next round. And keep your missiles for the fighters.”

“
What
next round?”

“
Any
next round, dammit!” Her tone shut them up for the moment. “I’m going to burn in and hit them with all the gun I can. With cold drives they won’t be able to get energy mounts on us, but expect a lot of missiles. So look sharp. See you at L3.”

“Oh, this sounds like fun. . .” Tanner must have thought his mike was off.