Event Horizon (Hellgate) (27 page)

“There are at least eight transports and gunships in the air across the blockade, ma’am,” Haugen warned. “It’ll take time to dock them.”

“I realize that, Patricia.” Rusch smiled thinly. “We’re not tied to the clock, but – have them commence now. Major
Frezza
, the AI is your ‘puppy,’ as you’ve always been fond of saying. Keep it sweet.”

The color had drained from
Frezza’s
face. “It’s going to know this isn’t a simulation – not when every ship in the battle group is moving.”

“I realize that, too.” Rusch was watching the tank, where Vidal had dragged the display and zoomed on Bahrain and its environs. “All the AI needs to know is, this is an authorized operation. Give it any clearance code you like … keep it sweet for an hour. We won’t need longer.”

“Problem?” Shapiro asked sharply.

But
Frezza’s
dark head was shaking. “Not so long as I’m authorized to break just about every rule in the book. The stuff I’m going to do would get me busted right out of the service, with one bastard of a flogging before they threw me back into civvy street, carrying a criminal record as long as your arm.”

“You’re authorized, Major,” Shapiro told him. “You’ve been serving with the Nine Worlds Commonwealth Fleet for the last hour or so.”

“And this ship is the
Sark
,”
Frezza
muttered, “she just doesn’t know it yet.”

“She will soon,” Vidal said with grim satisfaction. “Come on, Chuck, let’s just get this show on the road.”

The man pulled a chair up to a workstation several meters from Hubler and Rodman and splayed his hands over a keypad. Sweat broke from every pore, leaving his face shining as his fingers began to patter. Marin watched him until he gave Haugen a nod, and without a word the XO transmitted the order for every warship to pick up its small craft and assemble at Bahrain.

Predictably, the comm began to chatter within seconds. Haugen was primed. Head of the Communications department Brett Morrison fielded as many calls for confirmation as Haugen took; the message was always the same.
Operation
Weigong
. Standby
.”

“They know the code,” Travers whispered to no one in particular.

Haugen’s eyes were weird, filled with the witchfires of reflections off the tank and flatscreens. “It was ‘leaked’ in unofficial dispatches, as Colonel Rusch specified. Every commander on the blockade knows the code – they also believe it’s so classified, they
shouldn’t
know it.”

“Sneaky.” Marin favored Shapiro with a smile.

“You think Dendra Shemiji invented the fine art of triple-think?” Shapiro tapped his own temple with one forefinger. “
Weigong
. Back in the homeworlds they still use the term ‘checkmate,’ but the Slingo
weigong
you hear out in the Deep Sky has many more layers of meaning: a siege, an endplay, a termination … an invitation to roll over and surrender.” He nodded, obviously calculating the odds for the final time. “Every commander on the blockade is thinking, right now, we’re about to launch some ‘final solution’ strike against Omaru. It’ll never enter their minds that it’s themselves who’re about to be checkmated.” He made dismissive noises. “Fleet arrogance can be a potent weapon.”

“And you planned this – how long ago?” Travers wondered. “Or is that classified too?”

“It was loosely planned months ago,” Shapiro told him. “The details were tightened up ten days ago. Suffice to say, Colonel Rusch and I have been … somewhat busy.”

“Somewhat,” Marin echoed. “And – here we go.”

Heat blooms were showing across the battle group, energy and engine signatures ramping up as flocks of smaller vessels scudded back to their hangars like so many wasps returning to the nest. The
Kiev
itself was maneuvering, with constant crosstalk between the flightdeck and the engine deck, while the Ops room fell oddly quiet.

In the navigation tank the plot of the Omaru system wheeled about, and Marin watched the big moon centralize in the threedee display. Bahrain was larger than moons of Borushek and Jagreth, and just a little smaller than Velcastra’s big moon. It was heavy with metals, and the mass gave it enough gravity to consolidate into a sphere. It orbited at more than a half million kilometers from Omaru, in captured rotation. For more than a century, mines had been hollowing it out into honeycomb, and the dark side was bright with the lights of industrial towns.

Between the moon and the planet, space was busy with the civilian traffic that played tag with the Fleet patrols. On any normal day skimmers, gunships and sometimes the flights of Rapiers from the
Kiev
would disrupt civilian business, harass even legal traffic which had an excuse, and authorization, to ply between Omaru and the moons. Today the patrols were recalled, and since the militia was standby, on Tarrant’s order, space was uncharacteristically quiet.

The blockade ships formed up like a pod of orcas in the shadow of the super-carrier, and the
Kiev
was the last element of the battle group to slide into place in the deep shadow of Bahrain. Marin’s eyes were on the chrono as the engines switched onto station keeping, and he murmured a grudging appreciation of Fleet efficiency. It was just 50 minutes since the command had been given, and the code
Operation
Weigong
.

“We’re ahead of time,” Travers observed. “Mick you need the wiggle room?”

“Nope.” Vidal looked up through the blue-mauve haze of the navtank at Hubler and Rodman. “Roark?”

“Aragos are pre-programmed and on standby,” Hubler reported in the level tone of the consummate professional. “I can’t load the firing solution till we own the AI, but it’s also on standby.”

“Asako?” Vidal prompted as he came around the tank and pulled a chair up to Tactical.

“Their AI traffic is all routine,” she told him. “They’ve got nothing … but there’s a bunch of chit-chat on the encrypted highband. A lot of commanders are comparing notes.”

“They’re up on their toes, expecting a fight – pound Hydralis to rubble once and for all.” Marin glanced sidelong at Travers. “They’re just waiting for the order.”

“Doesn’t make any difference.” Vidal laced his thin fingers and flexed them with the crackle of knuckles. He gave Shapiro and Rusch a speculative look. “Any time.”

For the space of a heartbeat Harrison Shapiro seemed to hesitate; his eyes skimmed every display, and after more than three decades in Fleet ships, he could have slid in at any workstation and taken over. For him there were no mysteries on any vessel from a troop transport to the super-carrier itself, and Marin was recalling the days of his own youth, when he had watched such senior officers and been envious.

Then Shapiro gave a sharp nod and said one word. “Proceed.”

With a heavy, thrumming drone the blastdoors closed over, sealing the Ops room. Clockwork, the man had said. In the last hour, Marin and Travers had reviewed the entire plan, and the term Marin would have used was
elegant
. Mark Sherratt himself could not have been any more thorough – or more devious. Dendra Shemiji had a reputation for triple-think, but Shapiro had studied strategy, tactics, at the feet of the masters, and the colonies underestimated Fleet at their cost.

Without a word spoken the
Kiev
’s AI scrammed and the comm went down, shipwide. The AI would reboot in five seconds, which gave Rodman ample time to drop a cube into the data socket and run the startup routine which would bring the core computer back up as a loyal servant of the Nine Worlds Commonwealth. The comm blackout continued but the instant the AI came back online, Vidal pounced.

Every ship in the battle group had already been pinpointed by routine navigation sensors. Now, in less than a second, each was lidar-painted with target acquisition, and without pausing to offer so much as a syllable of negotiation, Vidal stroked the trigger. One trigger, multiple guns, multiple targets.

Chain guns and railguns opened up along the port side of the
Kiev
in a blinding broadside, sheeting out the vidfeeds with iris-
shriveling
tracer. Ten targets were battered simultaneously, and Marin held his breath. He and Travers watched sensor data flash up in the flatscreens beyond the tank. Every ship had been struck in the engine deck, and the risk was calculated to the most minute degree.

An engineer – Tully Ingersol himself – would have groaned in sympathetic pain. The engine deck of any ship was the most heavily armoured part of the vessel because the Weimann drive was the most delicately balanced and prickly piece of hardware, safer than the Auriga technology it had superseded if only because it was ready to scram itself at the merest suggestion of hazard.

Without warning to ramp up and interlace Arago fields for their protection, the blockade ships relied on the tonnage of armor sheathing the engine decks, and the
Kiev
’s guns slammed into them brutally hard. Plates warped and tore; gasses gushed away into space, some burning, some venting in great purple and green streamers which froze into micro-meteorites of crystalline ice and burst like fireworks against the
Kiev
’s own Arago fields.

The data racing through the flatscreens looked good. Marin’s heart beat a tattoo on his ribs, but the numbers were sound. Travers’s eyes were unblinking as he watched the same displays, and his fingers drummed on the side of the tank. In the shadows beyond the workstations the command corps had gathered as spectators. Coffee had been passed around and was ignored as the stratagem played out.

“Watch it, Mick,” Hubler barked, “you’ve lost line of sight on the
Horme
.”

“Tell me about it.” Vidal switched to missiles and launched three, a brace of Shrikes. The rudimentary AI of each was loaded with its target – the frigate that had just slipped behind the cruiser
Bilbao
, which was drifting, venting gas, great gouts of pink and blue combustion erupting from the ruin of its engine deck.

“Missiles,” Rodman said doubtfully.

“I know that, too.” Vidal smothered a curse. “I’d hoped not to need the damn’ things.”

Missiles had the potential to do a lot more damage than the railguns, as Marin and Travers were keenly aware, but as the
Horme
slithered into the cover of the crippled cruiser her techs would be scrambling to get sublight engines online. Seconds more, and she would be underway.

Across the battle group, most ships were slow to maneuver and some looked completely disabled. The
Bilbao
itself was in such a critical state, the sublight engines would be as dormant as the Weimann drive. According to sensors, both her reactors had
autoscrammed
. The engine deck was flooded with toxic gas; the armordoors would have sealed it off the instant personnel were out, and the ship was not going anywhere.

The frigates
Phaeton
and
Elpis
and the cruiser
Livorno
were in similar shape, but five other vessels were lumbering on sublight engines, making slow time as if they were operating on storage cells with scrammed reactors and engine decks so toxic, techs could only work there in armor.

Again the port railguns opened up, raking three of the five viable ships, and Marin watched the data flow through the displays like multicoloured liquid. Distress signals issued from the cruiser
Durban
, and escape pods began to punch out of the lower decks and rear compartments. The pods were caught swiftly in tractors and reeled in to hatches in the upper decks, but the
Durban
’s engine deck was a poisonous wasteland of leaking coolants and high pressure fuel vapor. Only drones would work there for the next month. Her blast doors were closed, Weimanns and sublight offline, reactors shut down while the AI bleated for help.

From the far side of the cruiser
Bilbao
, the
Horme
erupted in a storm of chemical fire which briefly enveloped the hull. Sensors whited out into nonsense for several moments, and when data restabilized Vidal swore bitterly. “Two Shrikes in the sterntubes,” he rasped. “She’s open to space on most decks. I’m seeing bugout pods – Asako, track them. You’re trying to account for about 200 crew, give or take.”