No Direction Home (19 page)

Ferreira seemed to have his own version of the thousand yard stare now; he was clearly thinking through the implications. ‘And if they do have their berserker warriors primed to cut loose, they'll use them during any attempt to board us, won't they? We'll be trying to deal with them at the same time as we're fighting off an armed assault.'

‘It looks like it, yes.'

‘Wonderful…' Ferreira said bitterly, then focused on Vinter. ‘Do you have any more good news for me, Major?'

Vinter seemed to think about this, then said, ‘No… Well, not yet, anyway.'

*****

Vinter was aware of a heightening of tension in the Briefing Room, with everyone's eyes constantly being drawn towards the wall viewscreen, then looking away again as the digital readout that was counting down, a slow second at a time, told them there were still two minutes and fifteen seconds to go…
fourteen… thirteen…

Stifling a grin at the realisation that he was just as bad as all the others, Vinter looked away, focusing instead on the empty chairs that belonged to Ferreira and Teymourian, wondering just how fine they would cut it. Would Ferreira even take his seat, as his back would be to the screen? Exactly how did a military commander behave when he was about to witness the effects of his declaration of war? And surely he wouldn't be showing it in real time, when Stalker would only be in visual range for about one hundred thousandth of a second, if they were lucky?

Anyway, they
had
to be watching a simulation; if he'd got his sums right,
Terra Nova
would have received the signals from their long distance scans and the drones they'd sent with the projectiles at least half an hour ago. They would need to process the data to slow it down to a speed that mere humans could handle, but that meant that Ferreira would know whether the initial attacks had been successful by now; it would be interesting to see the expression on his face when he arrived.

In one minute and thirty-seven seconds…
thirty-six… thirty-five…

And that was quite enough of that… He leaned forward and began to doodle on a notepad in front of him, a random series of squares and rectangles that he was shading in before it dawned on him that he was drawing flawlessly straight lines and exact right angles. He tried a circle – and, again, it was as near perfect as dammit.

Bloody hell… Never used to be able to do that. Couldn't draw to save my life, in fact…

The door opened and Ferreira came in by himself, gesturing to everyone to remain in their seats, but the only thing Vinter noticed was the expression on his face.

It didn't work.

Ferreira sat down and looked slowly around the others. ‘We're about to watch a simulation of our first attack on Stalker, compiled from data received by our monitoring devices and slowed down so that we can interpret it. However, I may as well tell you that our efforts were unsuccessful. Stalker appears to have suffered no damage.'

There was a kind of collective sigh around the table and it was only then that Vinter realised just how much hope they had invested in this – surely they hadn't expected it to succeed?

No, they hadn't
expected
it – they had
hoped
it would…

‘There is one other thing,' Ferreira said, almost hesitantly. ‘Apparently, Stalker is decelerating.'

‘Do we know how much?' Vinter said quickly.

‘It's very gradual, but… according to Teymourian, it looks as if they will come to a halt relative to us at more or less the same time as they catch us up.'

‘They're setting up a rendezvous, you mean.'

‘It would seem so.'

‘Which argues that they may well want to talk.'

‘Possibly. Alternatively, it might be that they will simply match velocities in order to facilitate an attack. In short, we still have no way of knowing for certain what their intentions are, do we? In the meantime…' Ferreira swivelled his chair round so that he was facing the screen, then raised a remote device and activated the screen.

Because it had been slowed down by such a huge factor, the display consisted of a series of still images that jumped from one frame to the next, with Stalker rapidly expanding from a tiny vague blur in the centre of the screen to a much larger circle in a series of staccato bursts as the camera drone approached it at just under three thousand kilometres a second, sending back images of the attack.

An attack that had happened over three weeks ago now – they were, in effect, looking back into the past.

Suddenly, there was a bright flash on the screen and the image switched to another viewpoint – presumably, the flash was the drone being destroyed by Stalker's defences. Now, they could see tiny flickers of light as the projectiles suffered a similar fate and, just for two or three frames, the blurred image of a second disc
– a shuttle?
– was visible before a pinpoint of light appeared in its centre and there was another bright flash as the laser blew the drone to fragments. There was barely enough time for Stalker to be shown, a huge grey disk filling the screen –
actually the ice heat shield shown from directly in front –
before it disappeared from one frame to the next and all that could be seen was a starry backdrop.

The viewpoint switched again, this time showing Stalker hurtling past from a distant side angle, from a drone that had specifically been aimed wide of the target – with Stalker evidently still intact, before a much smoother motion sequence appeared, showing the shuttle returning to its docking bay, clearly a mock-up of the aftermath provided by the computer. After several seconds of this, the screen went blank.

So that was it,
Vinter thought.
The first space battle in human history – all over in a fraction of a second, faster than any human eye could possibly have seen…

There was a long silence before Watanabe said quietly, ‘Did Stalker suffer
any
damage?'

‘Not that we can see, no,' Ferreira answered soberly. ‘Only a small proportion of the projectiles were actually destroyed but, presumably, they were only targeting those that would have hit Stalker. They just left the others – most of them, to be honest – to miss. None of the projectiles got through.'

‘
Something
did, though,' Vinter said. The others turned mystified looks on him. He sighed, suppressing his exasperation; it wasn't their fault that they couldn't process visual images as fast as he could, after all… ‘Just re-run that last sequence, please Colonel – the side-on viewpoint, and as slow as you can get it.' Ferreira did so, waiting as Stalker seemed to move across the screen in a series of convulsive jerks until Vinter said, ‘Hold it there, please. Can you zoom in at all?'

Ferreira nodded and touched a control key, enlarging the image of the starship.

‘Thank you, Colonel.' Vinter waited a second longer, then said, ‘Now do you see what I mean?'

The frozen image of Stalker made it only too obvious what Vinter had noticed that they hadn't; something had carved a large crater out of Stalker's ice shield. ‘Did we do that?' asked Yung-Sien. ‘I didn't see any impact flashes.'

‘That's because there weren't any,' Vinter said succinctly. ‘I'd guess that was done a while ago, judging by the fact that the edges of the crater aren't well defined. They've been smoothed away over time. However, Stalker has been given a hell of a whack by a chunk of space debris somewhere along the line. Not large enough for fatal damage, but enough to take out a significant fraction of the ice shield. Which means they've got a problem as well.'

Teymourian nodded suddenly. ‘They've lost propellant. A lot of it, by the look of it.'

‘Exactly. Assuming they're using the same design approach as we are, a substantial amount of their frozen deuterium has been lost. And, unless they took along a fair amount more than they needed, they're not going to be able to decelerate sufficiently at Delta Pavonis to go into any kind of orbit.'

‘They won't have done that,' Teymourian said firmly. ‘They'd have had a small contingency amount in reserve, but not enough to cope with that level of loss.'

‘You sound very certain,' Ferreira said sharply.

‘This
is
my field of expertise, sir,' Teymourian said, huffily. ‘One of the main elements in spaceship design is balancing mass against acceleration – the more of one, the less of the other, to put it crudely. Believe me, sir, they couldn't have been carrying enough deuterium to make up for that kind of loss.'

‘So they're in trouble,' Ferreira said, unable to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

‘That might not be as good for us as you think, Colonel,' said Vinter.

‘Explain.'

‘OK. I'll need to back track a bit first, though.' He paused, gathering his thoughts, then continued, ‘Let's assume Stalker belongs to EarthCorp, which is the most likely scenario. What were its mission parameters when it left Earth? Obviously, they're heading for Delta Pavonis, so they intend to start up their own colony. That ship looks to be pretty much the same size as us, so they could be carrying an equivalent number of colonists. Now, given that they're travelling faster than we are, they'll reach Delta Pavonis thirty-eight years before we do, but they'll still have to deal with us when we get there, unless they do something about it first, which is to blow us out of the sky with nukes.'

‘We've been through this–', Ferreira interjected, but Vinter cut him off.

‘I know we have, but I need to make sure that we're all fully aware of the implications. Now, it's remotely possible that they intend to share Terra Nova with us, so they might have simply overtaken us and then negotiated with us once we arrived. However, I know that none of you will believe that and I don't either, because, unless they can really get themselves organised defensively, they are going to be at a tactical disadvantage when we arrive at Delta Pavonis.'

‘How?' asked Ferreira, not bothering to hide his exasperation.

‘They're on the ground, we're in orbit. All we have to do is to use our shuttles to collect or re-direct a few asteroids or comets on the way in and we can bombard their settlements from space. They'd have to have a lot of very manoeuvrable spacecraft in orbit armed with much more powerful lasers than anything they're likely to have on board to have any chance of preventing that happening, and they'll have to build the spacecraft and the lasers from a non-existent industrial base in under four decades.'

Ferreira stared at him. ‘You've obviously thought this all out, Vinter.'

‘I'm a military genius, remember? I'm supposed to be evaluating possible scenarios, aren't I? The point is that they will think of that as well, so their best bet will be not to wait until then, but simply deal with us along the way.'

‘Which is what I've been saying,' said Ferreira.

‘I know,' Vinter retorted, but then gestured at Stalker's image. ‘The thing is, this changes everything. They can't actually slow down enough at PlanetFall – they're marooned, effectively. They are all going to die in interstellar space somewhere beyond Delta Pavonis and their only chance to avoid that is to get aboard
Terra Nova
, one way or another.'

Ferreira nodded slowly in realisation. ‘You're right, Vinter. So they'll try to capture us?'

‘They might want to negotiate. It depends on how much propellant they've lost. If they actually still have a reasonable amount left, we might be able to come up with an engineering solution that would enable at least some of their colonists to reach Delta Pavonis along with ours, one way or another.'

‘Negotiate? With EarthCorp? That is not an option, Vinter.'

Vinter shook his head. ‘Colonel, there are almost certainly civilian colonists aboard that ship that will include women and possibly children, for God's sake. Shouldn't we be thinking of how at least some of them might be saved if it's at all possible?'

‘But
will
it be possible? You seemed to think that they had lost a substantial amount of their deuterium, didn't you? If they have, and the stark reality is that only one ship and its passengers can go on to PlanetFall, then our duty is to those aboard
this
ship, Vinter. In any case, negotiations require both parties to take part and we have yet to see any sign that Stalker is willing to talk to us at all. Instead, they choose to send signals to their agents aboard this ship, which indicates to me that they have already decided on their strategy, which will be to carry this ship by boarding – I believe that is the correct naval term, is it not?' Abruptly, he turned towards Teymourian. ‘Captain, you're the astrogation expert. You've seen the damage to their ice-shield. Is there any way that, even if we help them, Stalker will be able to decelerate to orbital velocity at Delta Pavonis, given that we have only the barest minimum of deuterium reserves ourselves to give them?'

Teymourian steepled his fingers in front of his face, clearly unwilling to commit himself, but eventually said, ‘I would very much doubt it, Colonel.'

‘And do we have sufficient excess space aboard
Terra Nova
to take on extra cryochambers from Stalker?'

This time, the response was more rapid. ‘Possibly a dozen. No more than that. It isn't just the available space in the vaults, it's the life support systems that each chamber would need.'

‘So any rescue operation would be extremely limited at best. Thank you, Captain.' He turned back to Vinter. ‘I can see where you're coming from, Major, believe me. But… isn't there a parallel in World War Two when German U-boats in the Atlantic could not pick up survivors of ships they had sunk because there was nowhere to put them aboard the submarines?'

Vinter nodded reluctantly. ‘It was still regarded as being pretty callous, though. Even a war crime, according to some.'