Singularity Sky (27 page)

“Commander Murametz, proceed.” The Captain stood back, hands clasped behind his back. “Commodore, by your leave?”

Bauer nodded. “Proceed on your initiative.”

‘Transition in progress … we’re clear. Reference frame locked.“

“No obstructions,” called Radar One. “Um, looks like we’re on the nail.”

“One-zero gees, straight in on the primary,” said Ilya. He looked almost bored; they’d rehearsed this a dozen times in the past three days alone.

“Confirm positional fix, then give me a passive scan. Standard profile.”

“Aye aye, sir. Nav confirmation; we have a star fix. Yes, we’re a good bit closer to the bucket than last time. I see a waste heat dump from Chancellor Romanoff; they’re through.” That cheered them up; even at ten gees constant acceleration, a miss of a couple of astronomical units could take hours or days to make up. “Nothing else in view.”

“Give me a lidar shout, then. Chirped, if you please, frontal nine-zero degrees.”

“Emission starting—now. Profile steady.” The main screen of the simulation showed megawatts of laser light pouring out into the depths of space, mostly hard ultraviolet tagged with the sawtooth timing pulses of the ship’s clock. “Scan closure. Lidar shutdown.”

Radar Two: “I’ve got backscatter! Range—Holy father! Sir, we’re right on top of them! Range six-zero K-kilometers, looks like metal!”

Bauer smiled like a shark.

“Helm: take us to full military power in one-zero seconds. Course plus one-zero, minus four-zero.”

“Aye aye, sir, bringing course to plus one-zero minus four-zero. Two-one one gees coming up in five … three … now.” Like most regional powers, the New Republican Navy had adopted the Terran standard gee—ten meters per second squared. At full military power, Lord Vanek could go from a standing start to planetary escape velocity in less than sixty seconds; without a delicate balancing act, trading off the drive kernel’s spin against the curvature of space around the ship, the crew would be squashed flat and broken on the floor. But carrying a drive kernel had its price—a non-

FTL, fission-powered missile could, at short range, outrun or out-turn a warship hobbled by the mass of a mountain.

“Radar, get me some details on that bounce.” Mirsky leaned forward.

“Aye aye, sir.” A plot came up on the forward display. Rachel focused on the readouts, looking over the razor-scarred rolls at the base of Petty Officer Borisovitch’s skull. “Confirming …”

Radar Two: “More contacts! Repeat, I have multiple contacts!”

“How far?” demanded the captain.

“They’re—too close! Sir, they’re very faint. Took a few seconds for the analysis grid to resolve them, in fact. They’ve got to be black body emitters with stealth characteristics. Range nine-zero K, one-point-three M, seven M, another at two-five-zero K … we’re in the middle of it!”

Rachel closed her eyes. A chill ran up her spine as she thought about small robot factories, replicators, the swarm of self-replicating weapons breeding in low orbit around a distant gas giant moon. She breathed deeply and opened her eyes.

Radar Two interrupted her reverie: ‘Target! Range six-point-nine M-klicks, big emission profile. Course minus five-five, plus two-zero.“

Mirsky turned to his executive officer: “Ilya, your call.”

“Yes, sir. Designate the new contact as target alpha. Adopt convergent course for alpha, closest pass at three-zero K, full military power.”

“Aye aye, targeting alpha.”

“You expect something, sir,” Ilya said quietly. Rachel tilted her head slightly, to let her boosted hearing focus on the two senior officers at the back of the room.

“Damn right I do. Something wiped out the system defense flotilla,” Mirsky murmured. “Something that was sitting there, waiting for them. I don’t expect anything except hostile contacts as soon as we come out of jump.”

“I didn’t expect them to be this close, though.” Murametz looked troubled.

“I had to do some digging, but thanks to Inspector Mansour”—the Captain nodded in her direction—“we know a bit about their capabilities, which are somewhat alarming. It’s not in the standard intelligence digest because the fools didn’t think it worth mentioning. We’re up against cornucopiae, you see, and nobody back at Naval Intel bothered asking what a robot factory can do tactically.”

Commander Murametz shook his head. “I don’t know. Sir? Does it have any military bearing?”

“Yes. You see, robots can breed. And spawn starwisps.”

“Starwisps—” Enlightenment dawned. Ilya looked shocked. “How big would they be?” he asked the captain.

“About half a kilogram mass. You can cram a lot of guidance circuitry into a gram of diamond-substrate nanomachinery. The launchers that fire them probably mass a quarter of a tonne each—but a large chunk of that is stored antimatter to power the neutral particle beam generators. At a guess, there could be a couple of thousand out here; that’s probably what those low aspect contacts are. If you trip-wire one of them, and it launches on you, expect the starwisp riding the beam to come out at upward of ten thousand gees. But of course, you probably won’t even see it unless it gets lock-on and you get some side-scattered radiation from the beam. Basically, we’re in the middle of a minefield, and the mines can shoot relativistic missiles at us.”

“But—” Ilya looked horrified. “I thought this was a standard firing setup!”

“It is, Commander,” Bauer said drily.

“Ah.” Ilya looked slightly green at the edges.

“Backscatter!” It was Radar Three. “I have backscatter! Something is launching from target alpha, acceleration one-point-three—no, one-point-five gees. Cooking off gammas at one-point-four MeV.”

“Log as candidate one,” said Ilya. Urgently: “Sir, humbly request permission to resume immediate control?”

“Granted,” snapped the Captain.

Rachel glanced around at the ops room stations. Officers hunched over their workstations, quietly talking into headset microphones and adjusting brass-handled dials and switches. Mirsky walked over to the command station and stood at Ilya’s shoulder. “Get radar looking for energy spikes,”

he commented. “This is going to be difficult. If I’m right, we’re in the middle of a minefield controlled by a central command platform; if we leak again, we’re not getting out of here.” Rachel leaned forward too, focusing on the main screen. It was, she thought, remarkable: if this was typical of their teamwork, then with a bit of luck they might even make it into low orbit around Rochard’s World.

The tension rose over the next ten minutes, as the Lord Vanek accelerated toward the target. Its singularity drive was virtually undetectable, even at close range (spotting the mass of a mountain at a million kilometers defied even the most sensitive gravity-wave detectors), but all the enemy strongpoint had to do was switch on a pulse-doppler radar sweep and the battlecruiser would show up like a sore thumb. The first rule of space warfare—and the ancient submarine warfare that preceded it—was, “If they can see you, they can kill you.”

On the other hand, the enemy base couldn’t be sure exactly where the ship was right now; it had changed course immediately after shutting down its search lidar. Four more brief lidar pulses had swept across the ship’s hull, as other members of the squadron dropped in and took their bearings: since then, nothing but silence.

“Second trace!” called Radar One. “Another live bird moving out. Range on this one is four-seven M-klicks, vector toward lidar source three, the Suvaroffi.”

“Confirm course and acceleration,” ordered Ilya. “Log it as candidate two.”

“Confirm three more,” said Radar Two. “Another source, um, range nine-zero M-klicks. Designation beta. They’re thick around here, aren’t they?”

“Watch out for a—”

“Third echo from local target alpha,” called Radar Two. “Scattering relative to candidates one and two. Looks like a third missile. This one’s heading our way.”

“Give me a time to contact,” Mirsky said grimly. Rachel studied him: Mirsky was a wily old bird, but even though he’d figured out what was going on, she couldn’t see how he planned to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. At any moment she expected to hear the shriek of alarms as one or another observer picked up the telltale roar of a relativistic particle stream, with a beam-riding starwisp hurtling toward them on top of it, armed with a cargo of antimatter.

Of course, it was too much to expect the New Republic’s government to realize just how thoroughly they were outclassed; their cultural bias was such that they couldn’t perceive the dangers of something like the Festival.

Even their best naval tacticians, the ones who understood forbidden technologies like self-replicating robot factories and starwisps, didn’t comprehend quite what the Festival might do with them.

The Lord Vanek’s chances of surviving this engagement were thin. In fact, the entire expedition was predicated on the assumption that what they were fighting was sufficiently human in outlook to understand the concept of warfare and to use the sort of weapons overeducated apes might throw at one another. Rachel had a hopeless, unpleasant gut feeling that acting without such preconceptions, the Festival would be far deadlier to the New Republican expeditionary force than they could imagine. Unfortunately, it appeared she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.

“More backscatter. Target gamma! We have another target—range two-seven-zero M-klicks. Ah, another missile launching.”

“That’s—” Ilya paused. “One base per cubic AU? One M bases, if they’re evenly distributed through the outer system.” He looked stunned.

“You don’t think you’re fighting people, do you?” asked Mirsky. “This is a fully integrated robot defense network. And it’s big. Mind-bogglingly big.”

He looked almost pleased with his own perspicacity. “The Admiralty didn’t listen when I explained it to them the first time, you know,” he added.

“Eighteen years ago. One of the reasons I never made flag rank—”

“I listened,” Bauer said quietly. “Proceed, Captain.”

“Yes sir. Solution on target alpha?”

Fire control: “Time to range on target alpha, two-zero-zero seconds, sir.”

“Hmm.” Mirsky contemplated the display. “Commander. Your opinion.”

Ilya swallowed. “I’d get in close and use the laser grid.”

Mirsky shook his head, slightly. “You forget they may have X-ray lasers.”

Louder: “Relativity, I want you ready to give me a microjump. If I give the word, I want us out of here within five seconds. Destination can be anywhere within about one-zero AUs, I’m not fussy. Can you do that?”

“Aye aye, sir. Kernel is fully recharged; we can do that. Holding at T minus five seconds, now.”

“Guns: I want six SEM-20s in the tube, armed and ready to launch in two minutes. Warheads dialed for directional spallation, two-zero degree spread. Three of them go to alpha target; hold the other three in reserve ready for launch on five seconds’ notice. Next, load and arm two torpedoes.

I want them hot and ready when I need them.”

“Aye aye, sir. Three rounds for alpha, three in reserve, and two torpedoes.

Sir, six birds on the rail awaiting your command. The hot crew is fueling the torpedoes now; they should be ready in about four minutes.”

“That’s nice to know,” Mirsky said, a trifle too acid; the lieutenant at the gunnery console flinched visibly. “As you were,” added the Captain.

“Proximity in one-two-zero seconds, sir. Optimum launch profile in eight-zero.”

“Plot the positions of the nearest identified mines. Show vectors on command station alpha, assuming they fire projectiles holding a constant acceleration of ten kilo-gees. Can they nail us in just four-zero seconds?”

“Checking, sir.” Navigation. “Sir, they can’t nail us before we take out that command post, unless target alpha also has a speed demon or two up his sleeve. But they’ll get us one-five seconds later.”

Mirsky nodded. “Very good. Guns: we launch at four-zero seconds to target.

Helm, relativity: at contact plus five seconds, that’s five seconds after our fire on target, initiate that microjump.”

“Launch T minus five-zero seconds, sir … mark.”

Rachel watched the display, a fuzzball of red pinpricks and lengthening lines. Their own projected vector, in blue, stretched toward one of the red dots, then stopped abruptly. Any second now, she guessed, something nasty was bound to happen.

Guns: ‘T minus three-zero. Birds warm. Launch grid coming up to power now. T minus two-zero.“

Radar One interrupted: “I’m picking up some fuzz from astern.”

“One-zero seconds. Launch rails energized,” added the gunnery post.

“Fire on schedule,” said the captain.

“Yes, sir. Navigation updated. Inertial platforms locked. Birds charged, warheads green.”

“Light particles!” yelled Radar One. “Big explosion off six M-klicks, bearing six-two by five-nine! Looks like—damn, one of the cruisers bought it. I’m getting a particle stream from astern! Bearing one-seven-seven by five, sidescatter, no range yet—”

“Five seconds to launch. Launch commencing, bird one running. Lidar lock.

Drive energized. Bird one main engine ignition confirmed. Bird two loaded and green … running. Gone. Drive energized. Bird three running—”

“Radar One, I have a lidar lock! ECM engaged from directly astern!

Someone’s painting us. I have a range—five-two K—and—”

Mirsky stepped forward. “Guns. I want all three spare missiles ejected straight astern now. Passive seekers, we will illuminate the targets for them.”

“Aye aye, sir. Bird four, coming up … green. Bird four running. Five, green, running.”

“Radar Two, we have a seeker on our tail. Range four-five K, closing at—

Holy Mother of God, I don’t believe it!”

“Bird six running astern. What do you want me to lock on?”

“Radar Two, feed your plot to gunnery for birds four through six to target.

Guns, shoot as soon as you see a clear fix—buy us some time.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Lieutenant, ashen-faced, hunched over his console and pushed buttons like a man possessed.