Adapt and Overcome (The Maxwell Saga) (36 page)

Abha
tried to remember what she’d learned about that problem during training. “It’ll take several minutes for the interference to clear. What happened on the other end of the line? I saw a flash of light there, but it wasn’t an explosion like the shuttle next to us. I’m afraid that one’s gone.” She saw the flicker of sorrow on Dan’s face, and put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Dan. They were your people. It hurts to lose them. I know.”

“Yeah,
it does.” He took a deep breath and shook his head angrily. “OK, we can’t talk to anyone for a while. We definitely hit Bravo, but we don’t know how much damage we did, and we can’t follow her. All we can do right now is go to the far end of the line, to see what happened to the shuttle there and render assistance if they need it.”

“Good idea. I hope the shuttle to port does the same thing – we can’t pass orders to them until the spectrum clears.”

“Let’s hope so. Pilot, head for the last known position of Shuttle Four. We don’t have radar, so we’ll have to start a visual search.”

“
Yessir!”

The shuttle’s
gravitic drive whined to full power as the craft turned, rising higher to clear its neighbor in case they hadn’t seen the maneuver. They needn’t have worried. Five kilometers ahead of them, they saw the flashing lights of Shuttle Three wink into life in the blackness of space as it also turned towards its stricken sister ship.

As they reached the tumbling, spinning, lurching
Shuttle Four, Dan tried the circuits again and breathed a sigh of relief. “The spectrum’s clearing.” He tried to call them, but got no response.

“If they took severe damage, their internal systems may have shut down,”
Abha pointed out. “We’ll have to stabilize them with our tractor and pressor beams to stop them spinning like that, then send a boarding and rescue party over to see how they are. It doesn’t look like the hull was penetrated.”

“I’ll get right on to that. While I’m
coordinating it, will you please draft a signal to the mining ship, telling them what’s been happening here?”

“I’m on it.
Let’s hope we did enough damage to Bravo to stop her hitting them, otherwise we won’t have anywhere to go back to.”

“Amen to that!”

Abha reached for her microphone and set her console to recording mode. “Lieutenant Sashna to Mining Control. Target Bravo was hit by our attack, but we have no indication of what happened after that due to disruption of the electromagnetic spectrum. Recommend you urgently transmit Bravo’s last known track to SysCon, including the slight course change to starboard that she appeared to make in the seconds before our weapons struck her. One of our shuttles was destroyed by pirate fire and a second disabled. Known casualties are ten dead aboard Shuttle One, from which there were can’t have been any survivors. Lieutenant Labuschagne is coordinating rescue operations for Shuttle Four right now.

“Be advised that at least some of the crew appeared to escape from the patrol craft before Bravo destroyed her.
We suggest that the second patrol craft should rendezvous with the lifeboat from her sister ship to recover survivors. After we’ve recovered those from Shuttle Four, we’ll return to you for rearming. Please have base personnel break out more missiles, and new sets of barrels for our plasma cannon. We’ve burned out the old ones. Finally, please advise Senior Lieutenant Maxwell at SysCon that his wife is uninjured. Over.”

She waited until Dan had a free moment,
then played back the recording to him. “Is that OK with you? Anything you’d like to add?” she asked.

“Sounds fine to me.
I’m pleased you asked them to tell your husband you’re OK – he’ll be worrying about you. Send it.”

While they
waited for a response, their pilots stabilized Shuttle Four with tractor beams and sent over troops in battle armor to investigate. They were overjoyed to learn that everyone inside was safe, although extremely nauseated by the shuttle’s violent tumbling motion after it was hit. Dan ordered the rescue party to rig lines between the surviving shuttles and the damaged ship, and the survivors began to make their way across to the intact vessels.

As the first of them arrived, the
receiver warning light lit up, and Dan and Abha scanned the display eagerly.

‘
Mining Control to Lieutenant Sashna. Well done to all of you. You hit Bravo hard – all her systems shut down as she passed your line. We’ve already advised SysCon. Sorry to hear of your losses. Come home to mother. The beers are on us as soon as we can arrange the party. Advise ETA. Over.’

Dan
shook his head. “Do my eyes deceive me? Are Spacers really offering to buy beer for ground-pounders?”

“It looks that way to me. They must be really grateful!”

“That’s something to look forward to. As soon as all the survivors are off Shuttle Four, we’ll take her in tow with our tractor beams and head for home.”

Abha
at last had time to think about Target Alpha.
What’s happening out there? Steve, are you OK?

~ ~ ~

The atmosphere in Syscon was every bit as electric as that aboard the shuttles had been. The operators waited, watching their displays, knowing that whatever they were about to see had already happened, and was being shown to them only after light-speed delay. There was nothing they could do to affect the outcome. Senior operators had taken over the consoles, but their former occupants had not left the room. Instead, they lined the walls, watching intently, sometimes conversing in low voices. Steve’s trainees still sat at their consoles, monitoring the action avidly.

Steve stood with Colonel Houmayoun, the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister. They watched as a pinpoint of light, well ahead of Lieutenant-Commander Le Roux’s patrol craft, headed straight up the course line of the approaching Target Alpha. A second pinpoint followed it, halfway between it and the ships. The Prime Minister touched Steve’s sleeve and murmured, “What are those?”

“Their drones,” Steve replied equally quietly, so as not to break the concentration of those at the consoles. “They’ve launched them towards where the enemy’s expected to appear. They’ll tell the first one to begin radar transmissions as soon as Alpha’s likely to be almost within range, so they can get an early look at her and give their missiles more accurate targeting instructions. The second is there to backstop it. If Alpha shoots the first one out of space, the second will take over; and if Alpha maneuvers to avoid the first, the second will change course to keep track of her and make sure our missiles have up-to-date target information. That also makes the patrol craft harder for Alpha to target. If she can’t track them by their drive or radar emissions, she can’t aim her own missiles at them.”

“Can the other two patrol craft fire from where they are?” He pointed to the two
vessels that had departed from the depot ship, still hundreds of millions of kilometers behind the first two.

“In theory they could, Sir, but they’re far outside powered missile range. Their missiles would have to coast on a ballistic trajectory until they were much closer to the enemy,
then restart their drives for final attack maneuvers. Meanwhile, the enemy would have detected their launch and maneuvered to avoid them. Instead, the second two patrol craft will stand by to backstop Lieutenant-Commander Le Roux in case anything goes wrong and he misses.”

“And you think Target Alpha still doesn’t know it’s about to be intercepted?” the Defense Minister interjected.

“Based on their actions, Sir, I don’t think so. Syscon puts out an update on traffic in the system every five minutes. We’ve continued to do that, using a computer-generated composite plot showing our ships where they were, or on their previous courses. If the pirates are relying on that update to track other ships, the way most merchant vessels do, they’ll see everyone behaving as usual and nothing for them to worry about. If they have more sophisticated sensors and are tracking ship movements themselves, they’ll know something’s wrong, because all our ships went under stealth as soon as we ordered them to move, so they would have dropped off their system plot. If the pirates had seen them vanish, they’d probably have restarted their gravitic drive and commenced evasive maneuvers to prevent our ships intercepting them. The fact they haven’t done that is pretty strong evidence they don’t know we’re coming.”

“But they’ll know as soon as that drone starts transmitting radar signals?”

“Yes, Minister.”

“And once all the ships are emitting signals we can track – radar, gravitic drive, whatever - we’ll see their actual movements in the Plot rather than predicted ones?”

“Yes, Sir, but long after they’ve taken place. Light speed delay is a real bitch in situations like this. In fact, what you’re seeing in the Plot is old news. The initial engagement’s already over. We’re just waiting to see what happened.”

Holloway grimaced. “I suppose there’s no hope of developing sensors that can work faster than that?”

Steve shook his head, grinning despite his tension. “No, Sir. Trillions of credits have been spent trying, but since electronics radiate at the speed of light, no-one’s found a way to track them any faster than that. There have been some very esoteric experiments claiming to have done so, but they’ve never produced anything usable in the real world.”

The Prime Minister interjected, “But we travel faster than light all the time! Isn’t that what a hyper-jump’s all about?”

“No, Sir. That’s basically an artificial wormhole, a bending of space and time. Imagine two points on a sheet of paper, one at the top, one at the bottom. The shortest distance between them appears to be a straight line along the paper from one to the other: but if you fold the paper over to put one point physically on top of the other, so that they touch, that’s a much shorter distance between them than the straight line. That’s what a hyper-jump does, Sir. It’s not faster-than-light travel at all – just a way of moving between two points without covering the linear distance separating them. Some people call it ‘folding space’. I guess that’s not a bad description.”

An operator’s voice cut across their conversation. “Plot to Command. Primary drone has commenced radar transmission.” His warning was superfluous. In the Plot, they could all see the pulsing icon that indicated an active target. It was now within one million kilometers of the onrushing Target Alpha – less than fifteen seconds away at their combined closing speed.

There was a momentary pause, then the display changed. Instead of one icon representing Target Alpha, there were now two, so close to each other they were touching. The operator announced, “Drone has detected two, I say again,
two
ships at Target Alpha’s position!”

There was an upsurge of incredulous murmuring, instantly quelled by Commander Foster. “Silence in the OpCen!”

The onrushing drone and Target Alpha passed each other at a combined closing speed of almost one-third of the speed of light. As they did so, the plot display changed again. Now Target Alpha’s icon was coupled with three others, each representing a smaller, unidentified, unclassified target. The plot instantly labeled each with a new designator, so that they became Targets Gamma, Delta and Epsilon.

Steve hurried over to the Watch Commander’s console. Commander Foster looked up as he approached.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Sir, remember that small craft activity by Target Alpha just after it separated from Target Bravo yesterday? They must have been unloading something from their cargo holds. Whatever it is must be the new targets the drone’s detected.”

“You may be right, but what the hell can they be? I’ve never heard of anything like this!”

“I see two possibilities, Sir. One is that they’re carrying smaller ships, something like our patrol craft. Having seen ours offloaded from the transport that brought them, I guess Constandt could have done something like that.” He took a deep breath. “The other possibility is worse from our point of view, Sir. Remember what happened at Ariadne two centuries ago?”

The Commander and Commodore O’Fallon gasped simultaneously, shock appearing on their faces. Steve could hear muffled exclamations and intakes of breath from those within earshot.

“You don’t mean asteroids?”

“Yes, Sir, I do.” There was an instant growl of outrage and fury all around Syscon as Steve continued, “At Ariadne four asteroids were captured in flight, loaded aboard a freighter, taken to the outer reaches of the system, then brought back in on an interception course for the planet’s capital. The enemy forces made sure the ship’s trajectory and velocity were correct, then unloaded the asteroids from the freighter’s holds. The ship turned away, and the asteroids smashed into Ariadne’s capital city and killed almost everyone in it. What if these bastards have decided to do something similar? They could have picked up asteroids from any deserted star system – they wouldn’t have to load them here.”

From behind him Steve heard the Prime Minister exclaim, “But that would violate the Ariadne Accords!”

Colonel Houmayoun replied at once, “Constandt de Bouff’s a pirate, Sir. He doesn’t give a damn about treaties – to him they’re just pieces of paper. The penalties prescribed in the Accords have prevented other
planets
doing the same thing ever since they were adopted, but we’re not dealing with a planetary government. I’m beginning to think all the de Bouffs are psychopaths, or the nearest thing to it.”