Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (26 page)

When the picture emerged, Absen started, and his heart pounded with sudden adrenaline before he remembered the massive image he saw was expected. “In place behind Titan, exactly as planned,” Okuda reported.

“Well done, Helm.”

“Time to impact is one hour, twenty-nine minutes,” the helmsman continued. “We’re falling already.”

“Then let’s not dawdle. Deploy the drones,” Absen ordered.

“Drones away,” Scoggins grinned. “No worries, sir. We’ll have a good picture of what’s going on long before we crash.”

Conquest
had arrived at near relative rest as the combined gravitation of Saturn and Titan leached the kinetic energy out of the boat under TacDrive, as expected. With no orbital velocity, and without using fusion drive, the dreadnought immediately began to fall toward the large moon. Lighting engines would advertise their presence to everyone, so the massive reactors remained in generator mode only.

Over the next few minutes, tiny stealth drones used cold gas thrusters to maneuver outward, giving
Conquest
views of the entire solar system with the exception of the space directly behind Titan. Absen kept the crew at battle stations for now. He relaxed slightly when Ekara reported the boat’s energy stores topped off to full again.

On the holotank he could see the two Guardian ships, more than twice the diameter and ten times the mass of Destroyers, floating inward of Earth’s orbit. One lurked near Earth itself, an enormous spheroid, while the other had flattened itself into a great disc near Mercury, a pancake to soak up the sun’s radiation.

“Looks like we’ll have to deal with both,” Absen said. “And that fleet of eight Destroyers is still in orbit around Jupiter.”

“We’re being pinged, sir,” Scoggins announced. “A sentry just went active.”

“So soon? Damn. Put us in a slingshot orbit of Titan and line us up for our first TacDrive pulse. How close are those Destroyers together?”

“They’re spread out around Jupiter, sir.”

“Fine. We leave them for now. Our best shot will be the first one. Prep an Exploder and hold it in the forward launch tube, and have another one ready in the magazine.”

“We’re using two of them?” Ford asked in surprise.

“I hope so.”

“Only leaves six,” the weapons officer nagged.

“Understood, Mister Ford. Just make sure you don’t miss.”

“Miss what, sir?”

“The Weapon, Ford. The Weapon. Remember, that’s the Sword of Damocles. Attack this system, and the Meme can deny us the prize of Earth.”

“Earth’s no prize now, sir,” Fletcher said. “Even after fifty years of planetary engineering and repair, it’s pretty messed up.”

“Two Destroyers slamming into it at half lightspeed will do that,” Ford muttered. “We’re not going to let them keep it, though.”

Titan loomed uncomfortably close as Conquest dove toward its edge. “Rounding the moon in seventy seconds,” Okuda reported.

“Once we’re past, line us up for a pulse run at that moon laser. Remember how that thing works: it will go into wide-beam mode and fry anything coming near it, so Ford, you have to punch that Exploder missile into it before it can react. The rest of you, do it just how we practiced. I want a sequential strike on the Weapon – lasers, particle beams, railguns, fusion missiles, and then the Exploder missile. That way if they react faster than we think, maybe the smaller weapons will shake them up enough to get the antimatter warhead in close.”

“I have the run locked in, sir,” Okuda reported after a moment. “Distributing it to all boards. Sir, what’s our course for the second pulse? Or do you just want to jump onward and out of the way?”

“Can you set it up so we can turn and pulse straight into an attack on the nearby Guardian?”

Okuda closed his eyes and played his board like a concert pianist. “No, sir. It’s too close. We can pulse out, then turn and reverse pulse back in to strike the Guardian.”

“But that’s all five actions. If we fail to vaporize the Guardian with the second Exploder, we’re screwed,” Fletcher objected.

“Not necessarily, Mister Fletcher,” Absen said, thinking out loud. “Pulse in, one. Weapons fire makes two, plus the Exploder missile, which needs no power. Pulse away, three. Pulse backward on our run at the Guardian. Deploy the second Exploder, then pulse away. Five.”

“Looks like Ekara was right,” Johnstone said with a hint of amusement.

“I’m happy to admit it, Commander,” Absen replied. “Assuming Murphy doesn’t show up.”

“Sir,” Scoggins spoke. “This first shot is the most important. May I suggest we try to gain ourselves a full second by leaving half the targeting sensors unmasked? If we lose them, we can replace them from spares, but if even a few survive, they will give us a quicker lock-on.”

“Excellent idea, Scoggins. Do it.”

The Sensors officer made a few adjustments to her console, then nodded her readiness.

“Initiating firing run on my mark,” Okuda reported as the dreadnought rounded Titan. In the holotank, the bridge crew could already see the flares of nearby scout craft and other unknown ships, firefly specks moving outward in a lightspeed-defined sphere as they detected
Conquest
’s presence and blasted for position.

“In a normal battle, we’d be in deep trouble,” Absen said conversationally. “We’d be shadowed by a few dozen enemy sentries and soon we’d have to slug it out or run.” He laughed, a cold thing that brought chills to his officers. “If everyone’s ready, let’s go kill these bastards. Okuda, kick her in the ass.”

“Aye aye, sir. Pulse in three…two…one…mark.”

More than ten AU, or eighty light-minutes of distance, collapsed into seconds within the relativistic cocoon of the TacDrive field. Absen barely had time to lean forward when the pulse ended.

Immediately the viewscreens updated. Apparently some of the sensors had made it. “Target locked. Firing lasers…particle beams…Dahlgrens.” At this last, Conquest shuddered with the release of kinetic energy. “Waist missiles away. Exploder away.”

Within the space of five seconds, Absen observed first a light show on the surface of the moon at the spot where Intel said the Weapon emitter lay buried under a thin sheen of lunar dust. The massive energies of hundreds of lasers and the three titanic particle beams, firing at a range of less than a thousand kilometers as the dreadnought hung above the enemy installation, vaporized so much material that the main display completely whited out.

The holotank, with its synthesized inputs and computerized interpolations, provided a representation that showed the energy weapons and then the millions of railgun shots gouging a kilometer-deep hole.

Possibly that’s all we really needed to do to put that thing out of commission, but it’s too late to recall the Exploder now,
Absen thought. He watched as sixty fusion-warhead missiles converged on the same place and arrowed into it, detonating so nearly simultaneously as did not matter.

Then came the Exploder.

A fraction of a second before it detonated, the armored covers on the sensors slammed shut, and the entire bridge crew barked and yelled in frustration.

Michelle Conquest spoke quickly. “One thousand kilometers is outside the effective radius of the antimatter warhead, but the hard radiation from it would have fried all the exposed equipment, and we don’t have time to replace it before our next attack.”

“Speaking of that…” Absen said.

“Mark,” Okuda spat, and the dreadnought leaped ahead again. “Pulse ended.” It was over almost before it began. “Reorienting for reverse pulse.”

“Any idea what the Guardian is doing?” Absen asked.

“It hadn’t reacted before we lost the sensors. Loading rear feeds…”

“Ready for reverse pulse,” Okuda warned.

“Stand by and hold at one second,” Absen said, waiting for Scoggins’ report. Eleven seconds had gone by within the boat since they fired, but the realtime clock, showing passage of time in the outside universe, had jumped forward more than twenty as
Conquest
traveled.

“They’re accelerating toward the Weapon. Or toward our former firing position.”

“They have no idea what’s going on!” Ford exulted. “Come on, let’s hit them.”

“Three actions used, Ford. Four when we pulse. Just the exploder this time. Set it up.”

“Ready, sir, ready!”

Absen hoped so. For all of Ford’s emotion, he was still the best gunner in EarthFleet. “Pulse.”

All screens flickered as Scoggins closed the rear ports and opened the fronts, which would be safe from harm traveling in reverse.

“Mark.”

Conquest
leaped backward as if stung, the forward viewscreens showing only the blackness of redshifted light “behind” them for just a moment before they came to life again. They had passed in front of the Guardian at lightspeed and dropped out of pulse with their weapons pointed across the path of the great Meme ship, a space ambush.

Ford’s finger hovered over the firing key for a moment before Michelle Conquest suddenly bolted across the bridge, moving faster than any human or even cyborg could have to wrap her hand around his wrist. “What the –” he cried as she gently but inexorably moved it away a few centimeters and then stabbed precisely at the control with her other fingertip. “Let me go, bitch!”

“Exploder away,” she said, ignoring Ford, and then let go, walking back to her station at a normal pace while the rest of the crew sat there stunned. “Commander Scoggins, shut the sensors please.”

“Sensors shut,” Scoggins said, her movements automatic, while still staring at the AI avatar.

Absen tore his eyes from the tableau and looked at the holotank. It showed the interpolation lines of the Exploder missile and the Guardian intersecting in a pulsing sphere, but he knew that this was just the system’s best guess. “Rear sensors open. Helm, pick a safe direction and pulse forward as fast as you can.”

As soon as the final pulse had finished, the captain turned to Michelle with a voice of steel. “What the hell was that about?”

For once, Ford said nothing, just massaged his wrist and glared.

The avatar snapped to attention and stared straight ahead. “Sir. The Guardian’s acceleration and curving course created an angle of deflection too high for any organic to successfully engage using the slow-moving Exploder missile. A millisecond’s variance might have caused the weapon to miss, which would have wasted a warhead and possibly endangered the boat. We were within the Meme firing envelopes of both fusors and hypers. I take full responsibility for my actions, sir.”

“Damn right you will,” Absen said mildly. “All my officers do, or they’re not my officers. Sit down, Warrant Officer Conquest. Well done. Now would someone show me what happened to the Guardian?”

Scoggins threw a view from the rear of the tail end of an enormous blast. “Passive radar, using the blast itself as an emitter, shows nothing left of the Guardian larger than a hundred meters in diameter. Not a direct hit, but good enough.”

“I…I…” Ford said, his face whitening and crestfallen. “I’d never have made that shot.”

“Snap out of it, Ford,” Absen barked. “You don’t whine because you can’t pick up as much as a forklift, or play chess as well as a computer. There’s a lot of things you can’t do, but you’re still my weapons officer and the best in the fleet. I’m glad we have a human AI to back us up, but she’s just one part of a team.”

“Yes, sir. Aye aye, sir.” Ford turned back to his board and tapped at the controls, clearly discomfited.

“Five actions completed,” Absen said as he stood and paced around the bridge, the adrenaline of the last few minutes suddenly crying for movement. “Recharge time?”

Lieutenant Fletcher replied, “Twelve minutes remaining to one pulse. Sixty-four minutes and change to full, sir.”

“Make sure it’s the TacDrive capacitors that get the juice first. I don’t like to be sitting dead here.”

“We could still maneuver and fight conventionally if we have to, sir,” Okuda said.

“Thank you, Helm. Scoggins, what’s the other Guardian doing?”

“It seems to be reforming itself from a disc back into a ball, and moving in our direction. ETA is about forty minutes.”

“Can we get some distance with fusion drive?”

“Yes, sir,” Okuda replied, “but that will…”

Suddenly the screens flared and fuzzed, and
Conquest
shuddered slightly. “What was that?” Absen snapped.

“Weak particle beam strike, looks like,” Scoggins said.

“From where?”

“The Earth orbitals, sir,” she replied. “We’re at extreme range and I didn’t even consider them a threat, but it looks like they fired all at once and enough energy reached us to burn out all the sensors on one side. I’ve closed the other clamshells.”

“Helm, move us away. COB –”

“On it, sir. Damage control parties notified. Good thing we got all those spares.”

Absen grasped the rail that shielded Okuda’s sunken cockpit from a misstep and stared at the holotank. “Move us behind Luna. They can’t fire through that.”

“Aye, sir,” Okuda said.
Conquest
already rumbled with the subsonic vibration of the massive fusion drives. “Eight minutes until we’re shielded, and gaining distance. I doubt they’ll hit us again; I’m evading enough to make most of their beam strikes miss.”

Suddenly a noise like a gunshot exploded on the bridge. Absen turned to see the Sekoi Bogrin had slammed his massive fist on his console, shattering its surface. While the captain was not well versed in alien emotional cues, he couldn’t miss the anger in this one.

“Mister Bogrin?” Absen waited for the being to speak.

“Why are we running?” The alien turned to look at the captain and roared, “We have weapons that outrange theirs. We have time enough to destroy the orbitals. Yet you hold back!”

Tobias moved up beside the Chair, hand on his sidearm.

Keeping his irritation in check, Absen folded his hands and stared back at the Hippo. “We are recharging our capacitors, and I do not want to slow that process by diverting power to weapons. And you are correct. We have time. The other Guardian will not be in range for a while, and I want to reserve all our effort for it. Moving away is simply the most efficient strategy. It is a submariner’s strategy, as I explained before. I have been fighting the Meme for almost a century, Mister Bogrin. I am your commanding officer. If you cannot accept that, you are free to leave the bridge and perform some other useful function.”