Trial by Fire - eARC (53 page)

“Mylar or tin? Why that?” asked Gavin.

Trevor supplied the answer. “Tricks the Arat Kur PDF systems. Only works for a second or two, but with this many rockets launched from relatively close ranges, they can’t spare the time to sort things out in detail. Any rocket they miss could hit one of their arrays, particularly if it’s one of those smart ones with a chip. Some of those are programmed to act like a brainless, free-flight rocket until it approaches within a few hundred meters of its target. Then it goes active and swerves into a direct engagement vector.”

Impossibly, that’s when the overhead thunder redoubled. The sound of heavier impacts in and around the enemy compound only four hundred meters to the west started rippling against the outer walls, and their eardrums, like one long explosion.

“And that,” added Witkowski, snugging the chinstrap of his helmet, “sounds like the ships inside the fifty-klick limit have joined in.”

Trevor shook his head. “No, that’s only the
little
ships launching. For now.”

Wholenest flagship
Greatvein
, Earth orbit

Senior Sensor Operator and Assistant Shipmaster Tuxae Skhaas snapped his mandibles together, signaling an urgent correction to his last report. “I refine the data. The new wave of human rockets is being launched only from the small ships at the edge of the fifty-kilometer no-sail zone.”

“From the freighters?” His superior’s arrhythmic staccato cluckings were those of stunned incredulity.

“No, Fleetmaster R’sudkaat. There is no sign of any attacks being launched from the grain ships.”

The older Arat Kur acted with the decisiveness typical of—but today, welcome from—the Hur caste. He turned to Tuxae Skhaas’ closest companion. “H’toor Qooiiz, transfer your station to the terminal adjoining Sensor Operator Skhaas’. Speak all his subsequent findings immediately to me and to First Delegate Hu’urs Khraam’s personal Communications Operator. Tuxae Skhaas, you are to stop operating the sensors of this command ship.”

“But Fleetmaster—” began Tuxae.

“Harmonize now. I will pass orders that all other Sensor Operators are to link their feeds into your panel. You will analyze, assess, report. Your operator duties will be passed to the next senior operator.”

“As you instruct, Fleetmaster.”

H’toor signaled his matching acquiescence with a short bob as he squirmed down into the couch next to Tuxae’s. When the Fleetmaster had scraped off to give other orders, H’toor angled his frontal antennae toward his friend. “R’sudkaat must be desperate indeed, putting two unharmonious Ee’ar such as ourselves next to each other on the bridge.”

“Sing no caste-parodies this day,” Tuxae rattled sourly. “I forebode too many deaths among all our rock-siblings. See this.” He pointed into the holotank, brought the oblique bird’s eye view of Java closer. “The humans in and around the two greatest cities we occupy, Jakarta and Surabaja, have suddenly gone sun-time. Our other cantonments are also beset, but it is worst in these two places. The humans launch rockets from the jungles, the fields, the rice paddies, the roofs, and now small ships. Hundreds of rockets every minute.”

“And we destroy their launchers.”

Tuxae scratched his mandibles, fretting. “Which means we are digging tunnels in sand. Unless it is a salvo launcher, the humans rarely launch more than four rockets from a single location, but never less than two.”

“Odd.”

“Perhaps not.”

H’toor trilled uncertainty. “I do not understand.”

Tuxae forced himself to be patient with his tactically unsophisticated friend, whose comic songs made him an even more popular crewmember than he was an expert communications operator. “When the humans launch one missile, our automated intercept systems have been reprogrammed to temporarily ignore the source. We would be constantly interdicting bare ground if we counterfired at every rocket’s point of origin. But two missiles arising from the same place? That could signify the location of a more sophisticated and capacitous launcher, a target that our intercept system
cannot
afford to ignore.”

“So, by launching at least two rockets per location, the humans are forcing our systems to spend time acquiring coordinates for every site.”

“Exactly. They are making us waste time, effort, and ammunition.” Tuxae felt the multiple lenses of his eyes slide and tighten against each other in hyperfocused consternation. “This sudden, large attack is not merely unprecedented. It has been carefully planned. The humans have watched us, timed us, have measured what we can and cannot do in response, and how long it takes us. I fear…”

H’toor shifted slightly to look over at his suddenly still friend. “What do you fear, Tuxae? The accuracy of their calculations?”

“That, too. But mostly, I fear their prior silence.”

“Again, I do not understand.”

Tuxae clacked his claws “The humans were capable of waiting many weeks to commence this attack—of waiting, watching, measuring while many of them died, and all of them feared. But now they are striking back with weapons we did not detect, at terribly close ranges, and at a time of their choosing. And so I fear.”

“That they are ready?”

“No. That we are not.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Spooky Hollow”restricted area, north of Perth, Earth

Downing studied the scattered reports trickling in from Java’s cities. General revolts were underway in all of them, initially targeted at the most hated and vulnerable adversaries: Optigene’s clone-soldier regiments. The attacks had been extremely successful, spearheaded by cadre-led insurgent groups that had been waiting for the rocket barrage as their jumpoff signal. The barrage had, in turn, been unleashed only upon the arrival of the fleet codenamed Rescue Task Force One: the material fulfillment of Case Leo Gap, Nolan Corcoran’s carefully orchestrated matrix of strategic deceptions and sacrifices. However, the day’s greatest challenge and uncertainty remained: effectively coordinating the myriad and disparate elements of this day’s fateful attack.
But, so far, so good
.

Downing, ever wary of operational optimism, shook off that thought. “Mr. Rinehart?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Give me an update on our tactical picture. Are we good to go to the next step?”

“Reports indicate that, as predicted, the invader’s combat air patrols on the maritime approaches to Jakarta and Surabaja have been pulled off that duty and redeployed to engage the new ground threats around those cities. All approaching cargo ships have been ordered to hold position. They report clear skies.

“Also, our covert observers on Java are Morse-signaling that the Arat Kur PDF sensors seem unable to operationally discriminate more than a fraction of the targets, probably because their tracking arrays are overwhelmed. We are getting scattered reports that their antimissile counterfire is becoming increasingly autonomous and decentralized. Their individual PDF systems are falling out of the integrated defense grid at the same pace that their cooling and reload intervals are becoming problems. We are good to go, sir.”

“Very good, Mr. Rinehart. Remember, when the Arat Kur see what we do next, their orbital interdiction assets will shift back to our larger ships—and to the aerial threats they’ll be seeing momentarily. When that targeting shift occurs, let me know. Immediately. Timing is everything—
everything
—if this plan is to work.”

“Very good, sir. Awaiting your order to take the next step.”

Downing drew a deep breath. “Mr. Rinehart, send the following signal to our assault-enabled cargo ships: ‘salvo all’ in one minute, on my mark—
mark
.”

Standing off Jakarta Bay, Java Sea, Earth

Cesar Pinero, master of the twenty-thousand-ton freighter
Maldive Reckoner
, watched the last of the two-stage rockets lance away from the deck of the heavily barnacled schooner that was just two hundred meters off his starboard bow. The weapons’ launch exhausts washed in through the already shattered windows of the pilot house, setting its interior on fire. The boat’s captain and first mate were already speeding away in a much-patched Zodiac, slaloming around the canvas covers under which the rockets had been hidden until three minutes earlier. Pinero checked his watch: fifty-seven seconds to his own launch. And in the meantime, it would be instructive to learn how long it took for the Arat Kur to respond to the schooner’s actions. Pinero started a silent countdown:
one-one-thousand; two-one-thousand; three-one-thousand
—

Looking port and starboard, bow and stern, the rest of the ponderous grain freighters seemed to loom larger in their immobility, having been signaled by the Arat Kur to stop and hold position. So they had done—and watched as the invaders blew every offending smaller ship to kindling.

Four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand…

Pinero checked his watch, looked down from the conning tower at his new second mate, on loan from the Japanese Navy, and nodded. The mate waved to the deck hands, who rose up from among the long crates arrayed on the
Reckoner
’s deck in a neat single-layer, row-and-column grid. They hastily inserted crowbars into the broadly gapped seams of the crates.

Six-one-thousand, seven-one-thousand…

The sides and ends fell away as deckhands flung clear the crates’ lids. In seconds, the four-by-six checkerboard of overlong wooden cargo boxes had been snatched away to reveal twenty-four missiles of diverse types and capabilities. Pinero blew the whistle he held in his teeth; all but the second mate and two of the deckhands raced toward the gunwales. The engineering section, already there, started the lemminglike rush over the side, hurtling feet-first toward the water over twenty feet below.

Eight-one-thousand, Nine-one-thousand…

Strange how calm it all seemed, how orderly. Half of the small boats had already been reduced to flotsam and jetsam by kinetic kill warheads fired from orbit. Hundreds of long plumes marked the path of the missiles they had launched, which—in their fiery, scalded-cat leaps into the air—had destroyed the decks and ruined the pilot houses of the ships that had carried them to this place. Some of those missiles were exploding in the air: orbital laser or long-range, ground-based PDF interdiction. More dwindled and down-Dopplered into the gray horizon haze that marked the periphery of Jakarta. From behind, dozens of other missiles converged on that target zone. The ships still clustered beyond the fifty-kilometer limit had started unloading, also. Pinero had worried that he would be paralyzed by fear when this moment came, but instead he felt strangely detached, as if he were simply a spectator, even to his own actions.

Ten-one-thous—

The blinding white-hot downstroke looked like an impossibly straight bolt of lightning, yet was almost perfectly silent, because the sound generated by the super-heated hyper-velocity kinetic kill warhead was still struggling to catch up through the soupy atmosphere. The sound and shock of the schooner exploding—flying instantly into an angry, roiling cloud of debris—hit his ears the same moment as the up-dopplering sonic boom of the warhead’s shrieking descent.

Small metal fragments—hissing hot and spinning viciously—spattered the starboard hull, a few spanging off the chest-high rail encircling the
Maldive Reckoner’
s pilot deck. Pinero shrugged out of his windbreaker, checked the straps on his life jacket, popped the cap on the shark-repellent, and calculated. It had taken the schooner five seconds to launch her four missiles, and ten seconds for the Arat Kur to identify and successfully interdict her. So, all told, it was about a fifteen-second response time, from first launch to arrival of counterfire munitions. Of course, the little boats had fewer missiles to launch, and that gave their masters and lately-added weapons-specialists more time to escape. The crews were sent over the side before firing commenced, with orders to stay far away from any other hulls. But on the bigger ships like the
Maldive Reckoner
, it would take at least twice the time to see all the munitions off the deck. It would be a narrow thing, indeed.

Pinero checked his watch, waved to the second mate, who waved back. All weapons checked and cleared. He pressed the remote signals operation button on his palmtop. Twenty feet overhead, the radio mast of the
Maldive Reckoner
was sending out a single coded string that announced that she would be deploying her payload in precisely twenty seconds. He checked his watch again, waved to the one remaining deckhand, who had joined the second mate at the bow, crouched low. The deckhand jumped up, hefted a tightly bound canvas package over the port bow. Pinero saw its line tighten and then loosen. Good. The self-inflating raft had pulled free of its canvas sleeve and was now in the water. In ten seconds it would be ready for passengers. He moved to the portside elbow of the weather-walk, estimated the jump to the water at just above ten meters. He didn’t like heights, so he didn’t look for more than a moment.

He checked his watch: twenty seconds.

It had been a strange five weeks, the busiest, most terrifying, and yet strangely rewarding of his life. The
Reckoner
had made three trips from Shanghai to Jakarta, carrying rice: just rice. On the second trip, there must have been a sub sneaking in beneath them. Pinero had been instructed to hold a dead-straight heading from one hundred kilometers beyond the blockade line to within fifteen kilometers of the Tangjun Pasir headland. That, and the close crowding of ships around him during that voyage made him wonder if it was all part of an attempt to block, confuse, overtax the Roaches’ overhead sensors. But today, it was all over. The grand mission of mercy was, in its last moments, transmogrifying into a grand ambush. The ships that had carried food to Indonesia were now carrying death to it instead.

Twelve seconds.

The small ships had launched first so that the self-teaching Arat Kur computers and their operators would initially identify the little, indigenous boats as being more dangerous, both because they were the only observed source of launches and were harder to hit. Once the computers had finished that recategorization of their targets, it would likely take several precious seconds, and possibly a direct operator override, to shift the firing priority to the freighters, once those larger hulls started unleashing their massive payloads. By the time that shift occurred, there would be too many large, lethal rockets on the way in for the overworked invaders’ PDF systems to handle. At least, that had been the theory. Time to see how
Reckoner
would fare as one of the first big hulls to unload.