Star Force 12 Demon Star (3 page)

The main Whale fleet orbited on the opposite side of the planet, and though I saw drives flaring as those ships got underway, it seemed clear that it would be quite a while, perhaps even hours, before they could intervene. Circling a gas giant takes time from a standing start.

It also seemed clear that whatever was hitting the Whales had taken them by surprise.

“Valiant, get Hansen up here,” I said.

“Executive Officer informed. He’s on his way.”

“Send Kreel a feed of what we’re seeing then give me some active sensors.”

“Active sensors are still degraded to thirty-six percent.”

“Do what you can,” I replied. “I want to make damn sure nobody’s sneaking up on us.” I doubted they could be, we were so far out, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

A moment later, ship’s AI reported. “No anomalous objects detected.”

“Ping with actives every hour or so from now on.”

“Protocol set.”

I didn’t like using active sensors as they announced to everyone we were here. At this point, however, I felt I had no choice. We couldn’t afford to be taken by surprise.

Hansen hustled onto the bridge, smoothing his smart-cloth uniform before stepping to my side. “What’s up, Skipper?”

“Something’s hitting the Whales.”

“Any danger to us?”

I shook my head. “This is five hours old, we’re far enough away, but I had Valiant do an active sensor sweep. We came up with nothing, so I’m pretty sure we’re fine for the moment.”

“Then why am I here?”

My eyes narrowed. “Because you’re my XO. Would you rather I left you out of the loop until the situation is critical? You’re not just a warrant officer anymore, Lieutenant Commander. Being a commissioned officer means you work harder than anybody below you.”

He turned to look deliberately at the holotank.

“Keep me in the loop, Captain.”

After a moment, my gaze followed his, easing the tension. Maybe I was getting too jumpy.

“You can see the tactical plots,” I said. “The Whale main fleet is out of position.”

“They’re standing still in the middle of a fight?”

“They’re underway now. They were hit by surprise by these guys here,” I pointed at the cluster of red icons. “The Demons have launched a missile strike on a bunch of Whale installations.”

In the holotank, over a hundred missile tracks curved toward as many targets.

“That’s gonna hurt,” Hansen said. “Most of those seem to be nonmilitary vessels and installations, and if the missiles are nukes…”

“Yeah.” Distance and shielding were the only good counters to nuclear weapons. No material I knew short of stardust could resist direct hits. “I hope they have good defenses. We just got a message from the Whales that warned us the system was in a state of war, so it’s not like they’re unprepared.”

“Message?”

I gestured toward a side screen where the translated text was still displayed.

Hansen read it. “What’s this about nineteen days seven hours?”

“No idea. You know, those missiles sure are going fast.”

“Yeah. Way faster than something launched from the ground should be.”

I zoomed in. “I’m running the plot on one of them, back to the origin. Let’s see…” After rewinding the record, I ran it forward again in slow motion until the missile’s engine flare appeared, but I couldn’t see a ship. It must be stealthed for a surprise attack. “Valiant, what’s this missile’s speed at launch?”

“Approximately two thousand miles per second.”

“Whoa. Pretty fast.” I rubbed my eyes. “Extrapolate its back-vector and plot.”

“Plotted.”

I zoomed out farther and farther, until the red line pointing opposite to the missile’s launch vector reached 300 AU in length—very near to the brown dwarf. “A stealthed Demon ship, cruising fast. Valiant, at that speed, about how long would it take to travel from Tartarus to Trinity-9?”

“Disregarding acceleration time, roughly two hundred days, plus or minus ten percent.”

I chewed my lip. “And how long until a ship, moving that fast, reaches Ellada?”

“Approximately five days.”

“We have to warn them,” Hansen said. “If the Demons hit the Whales, they’ll probably hit the humans too.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Why the hell not! They have five days.”

“Two reasons. Figure them out.”

Hansen scowled. “Why are you playing Academy games with me in the middle of a battle?”

I sighed. “This battle is five light-hours old is why, and we’re days away from the gas giant even if we left now at maximum speed. We’re spectators.” I lowered my voice. “I know it bugs you that a guy twenty years younger is lecturing you, but you’re going to have to start thinking like a captain if you’re ever going to be one. Part of that is soaking up the theory as well as the practice.”

“Me? A captain?” He laughed.

“Why not? If Star Force confirms your rank, and if I have anything to say about it, you’ll get a shot at your own ship when we get back.”

Hansen’s face smoothed. “I never thought of that.”

“Well, I have. You’ve got the guts and you certainly have the experience, if you want it bad enough. Now, play along. Have you figured out the reasons I’m not bothering to warn the Elladans?”

Turning back to the holotank, Hansen’s brow furrowed. “I guess if the Whales are really their allies, they’ll have sent a message immediately. Either that, or the Elladans will simply see what’s happening, no doubt better than we can, as they’re closer.”

“Hmm, okay. That’s one reason. What else?”

After a moment of thought, Hansen shook his head. “No idea.”

“Ellada is about two light-hours farther away from us than Trinity-9. In about,” I checked my chrono, “one hour and fifty minutes, give or take, I’m pretty sure we’ll detect the same sort of surprise attack aimed at them. So you see, no matter what we do, either these two races got it covered, or it’s too late for us to do anything.”

“Sending the message might show our good will, though,” Hansen said.

I thought about that. “Good point and good thinking, but I’d rather wait. We’re taking things at face value here. We don’t know that the bad guys are the Demon critters from Tartarus, or that the good guys are the ones that look like us, or like friendly sea creatures. You can’t judge an alien by his form. We don’t want to end up on the wrong side of things. I do not want to risk upsetting the wrong alien. The last thing we need in our current state of repair is another enemy.”

Hansen looked skeptical and whispered, “Not taking sides might be easy for officers at the top like us, but the common crew will always have a strong opinion one way or the other—especially regarding a race that looks as human as we do. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of that, either.”

“You’re probably right, and that’s an excellent observation.” My words weren’t empty praise. I was very happy my XO was starting to distinguish himself from the crew and think like an officer instead of merely a pilot. Sure, that was elitist, but if a leader doesn’t believe he is the best man for the job, why should he be in command?

Of course, it didn’t pay to say that too loudly in front of subordinates.

We turned back to the displays. “Let’s see how this goes. It’s going to tell us a lot about what we may be facing.”

“Okay.” Hansen leaned forward to rest his hands on the holotank platform and put his nose against the smart glass that held the magnetized, glowing nanites inside. “The acceleration on their missiles is no better than ours, once you discount the speed of launch. I also don’t see any direct fire. If I were conducting a surprise attack like this, I’d have mounted some railguns and fired them at fixed targets before I ever launched the missiles.”

“Maybe the Whales have defenses against railgun salvos. They do have active detection systems going all the time. Perhaps they’re good enough to spot incoming clusters.”

“But not the launching ships?” he said with a hint of disbelief.

“The ships must be heavily stealthed. They might even have some kind of cloaking technology.”

Hansen snorted. “That’s a pipe dream. No one’s ever come up with anything like that.”

“Marvin’s working on it. I wouldn’t bet against him. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year, it’s that high technology makes the impossible possible. Look at the Ancients’ teleportation abilities.” I reached a finger up to point at the display. “The first missiles are about to impact.”

In the holotank, tracks began winking out as they reached their targets. I zoomed in on one and looked at the associated readings of the energy yield, spectroscopy and so on. “Big nukes, as I suspected. Very dirty, too. Massive radiation, maybe specially enhanced, like the old neutron bombs.”

“Valiant,” Hansen said, “can you project damage to targets?”

“At this moment the battle has already occurred,” Valiant said. “There’s a ninety-nine percent probability that all of the nonmilitary ships have been destroyed. Military vessels will have received light to heavy damage. Ground installations vary from no damage to being completely destroyed. I’m still collating my analysis of the variables. Do you wish to prioritize processing power for this purpose?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Repairs are still your top priority. Let me know when your analysis is complete.”

“That was a nasty surprise attack,” Hansen said. “The Whales’ active sensors failed to detect their attackers. We need to find out why and configure our systems to give us warning within the next nineteen days.”

“The Whales’ warning deadline?” I glanced at my XO’s thoughtful face. “You think they expect an attack at that time?”

“Yes. I think they saw something coming toward them, nineteen days away. Maybe we need to look for it.” Hansen tentatively manipulated the holotank, moving its view outward and along the back-plot I’d calculated.

“Somewhere in here would be my guess.” Hansen said, marking a stretched sphere that delineated a pretty large chunk of space. The area represented about one percent of the two-hundred-day distance out to Tartarus, or two days’ travel.

I nodded. “Work on that manually to spare Valiant’s processing power. Get a sensor tech to help you if you want. Let me know when you come up with anything important. I’ll be in engineering or logistics. You have the bridge.”

“Right,” he said absently, fiddling with the holotank controls.

I left him there and strolled down to engineering, one of the ship’s two central spaces. Logistics, which held our busy factory, was the other. Sakura was standing in front of her bank of consoles with her arms crossed, looking unhappy.

“How’s it going, Lieutenant?”

“Never as well as I hope, sir, but not too bad,” she replied, without looking at me. “I hear there’s some action at the Whale planet?”

“Word gets around fast. Yes, a surprise attack by the Demons—that’s what we’re calling the insectoids that live near the brown dwarf I’ve designated Tartarus. The battle is too far away to affect us, though.”

Sakura grunted, still staring at her consoles and readouts. “It would be optimal if we didn’t see any action for at least a week, preferably a month. Right now we have ample materials and a lot of repairs to perform. Even Marvin seems to be keeping out of trouble. He’s consistently creating system improvements from onboard
Greyhound,
so at least I never have to meet with him in person.”

She said this with real irritation in her voice. I knew she didn’t like the robot messing with her systems without her direct oversight, but I wanted Marvin to dig me up some evidence on who had tried to kill me several times, under cover of repair efficiency.

“And you don’t want to disrupt things before we’re back to full strength,” I said. “I get that.”

Sakura was definitely the classic engineer, the type who liked to keep organized and on schedule rather than wing it. In this instance, I was in wholehearted agreement. I hated the fact that my little force was less than one hundred percent ready.

“My mark on the wall is when the Nano ships finish their first two replications,” I told her. “It may be a couple of weeks from now. Then we’ll decide to either have all four working on reproducing again, or to do something else.”

Finally she turned to look at me with only a slight change of expression, perhaps a look of worry. “It would help me a lot if we could put a small factory aboard one of the Nano ships to use in making parts for
Valiant
and
Stalker
rather than reproducing more outdated frigates.”

I almost told her that was impossible, and then I thought of something. “Nano ships will usually only accept one commander. If you think it’s important enough, you can give up an engineering tech to become a biotic component for the Nanos. That way, they’ll be able to directly access and script the factories the way you want them.”

Sakura’s eyes narrowed. “The Nanos took heavy casualties in the last battle. Engineering techs won’t make good command personnel, and I’ll need them back here.”

I shrugged. “Once they’re installed in a Nano, they’re difficult to remove without them dying. You think about it and let me know what you want to do, based on your needs as my chief engineer.” I forced myself to clap her on the shoulder just as I would any other officer, though something about the woman made that an uncomfortable gesture for me. Maybe it was because she never seemed to loosen up in my presence the way the others would.

Sakura nodded, ignoring my hand. “I’ll think about it, sir. Will there be anything else?”

That seemed to be a hint for me to go away.

“Good job so far,” I said. “I’ll do my best to give you all the time you need to put our ships back in order. Thanks for your hard work.” With those platitudes delivered, I took my leave.

Next stop was our logistics chamber and the factory, Adrienne’s territory. I hoped I could keep from saying something stupid again and just play captain…

I stepped through the smart metal doors that were in place to dampen sound and provide a vacuum seal when creating more delicate equipment. Adrienne was seated at her console facing the chugging, clunking manufacturing device, her furrowed brow showing me she was hard at work keeping the parts flowing from the production end. I did my best not to think of smart towels and long showers.