Hegemony (12 page)

The only good that came from the war was that severe losses of ships had forced the Coalition to stop its extensive raiding among the border systems. The Hegemony had been obliged to return the favor, abandoning annexation of an
anomic
system that had, supposedly, been the flash point for the whole conflict.

Now it looked as if there would be another war. She was not sure what she thought of that. As a Fleet officer, a war would give her a great deal of opportunity. On the other hand, the thought of dozens of systems living under full alert, never knowing when a Coalition raiding force would emerge from FTL, was appalling; the speed and power of FTL warships made entire planets vulnerable.

Of course, it might not come to an all-out shooting war. Freya thought it likely that, if they managed to force an engagement and destroy or capture those ships, there would be "solid" evidence that the ships were not part of the Coalition Space Forces; perhaps ships sold to a client system, or even "stolen" by pirates.

Not that it really mattered, here and now. 

The second raider had made its appearance a few dozen hours later, in the worst possible place. The second ship had been drifting more than seven hundred million kilometers apart from its partner, most of the way across the inner system. The intention was obvious: to increase the chances that one of the raiders would be in range of a victim, should one emerge from FTL into the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system.

To a degree, it had worked. The two ships had found the
Conquering Sun
emerging from FTL between them. Now both ships were boosting to intercept the assault-ship.

That was good, Freya thought. We want to get them close. The problem was, it would not last. The wide separation of the two enemy ships meant that the assault-ship could not aim its drives at both of them at once, and as soon as one of the raiders came close enough for optical sensors to see what they were chasing, they would be accelerating hard in the other direction, assuming they didn't just go FTL. Most likely they would have to lose some time to decelerate before they went FTL; initiating FTL with a very high vector made the transit more difficult. But even so, that wouldn't be enough margin for the
Conquering Sun
to catch them.

One ship could be fooled by the
Conquering Sun
's thrust. The assault-ship was accelerating at a "panicked" half gee, running its drive at deliberately reduced efficiency to make it look civilian. The other ship, though, had to be kept from seeing a close visual of the
Conquering Sun
. That left the two swift-ships;
Ice Knife
and
Skyrunner
were the only other pieces on the board.

It was simple enough in principle: The two swift-ships would have to intercept the second raider and then match vectors with it, staying just out of combat range. Then they could use their lasers to blind the raider, hiding the truth about the
Conquering Sun
in the glare of their own lasers and the flare of their own drives.

Of course, if they got too close, failed to keep their distance, they might fall within engagement range of the lance-ship. And if that happened, getting back out of range would be a desperate battle.

Ice Knife
and
Skyrunner
had made the intercept well enough. The swift-ships could sustain seven gees for hundreds of hours. The tricky part was in keeping close enough to the enemy to effectively blind his sensors' ability to visually resolve the hull shape of the
Conquering Sun
, but not to get close enough to tempt the enemy to launch a wave of interceptors to destroy the swift-ships.

"It's sort of a dance, is it not?" Freya's Executive Officer had said.

He would see it that way, Freya thought. Executive Officer Muir Zanados was a scion of a family high among the
aristokratai
. The first Zanados had been among the first humans to upload his mind, becoming one of the first daemons. That put him among the founders of the Hegemony of Suns, more than two and a half million hours, two hundred and fifty tenkays, ago. So his descendant was very blue blood indeed, though Muir wore a custom biosim avatar when he inhabited a humanoid form, so his actual "blood" was synthetic circulatory fluid just like hers, thought Freya.

It really
was
a sort of dance, though, and the lance-ship was leading. It would cut acceleration, and force the two swift-ships to cut their acceleration, or else risk moving out of effective blinding range. The two swift-ships had to stay at about three hundred fifty thousand kilometers, a bit over one light-second, to be able to degrade the lance-ship's optical sensors. They had to stay together as well; a single swift-ship lacked the laser power to do the job at this range.

Alternately, the lance-ship would boost to its emergency acceleration, pushing six gees, and the swift-ships would have to match it instantly. If they fell within two hundred fifty thousand kilometers, they would be within range of a full salvo of the lance-ship's laser-boosted interceptors. At three hundred thousand fifty kilometers, the enemy would have to task two lasers for each interceptor it launched and the two swift-ships would have more time to evade and prepare; to get back out of range, increasing the flight time of the enemy interceptors, giving themselves more time to deploy anti-interceptor stand-off warheads into the path of the inbound attack.

On the whole, the two swift-ships had a good chance of dealing with a three-interceptor salvo at long range. Or a decent chance, anyway, thought Freya; it would depend on the quality of the crews, hers and theirs. But an attack by six interceptors, the likely full salvo from a lance-ship, would be far more dangerous; the swift-ships' defenses would be spread far too thin for effective defense. And it would only take one hit from a ship-killer warhead to kill or cripple her small ship.

At any rate, the lance-ship wasn't launching a long range attack, preferring to try to get them into closer, decisive range. But, meanwhile, the lance-ship
was
flooding them with laser energy, blinding their sensors, making it harder to notice when the lance-ship made an acceleration change.

Sooner or later, they would stray just too close, missing an enemy acceleration change because their own laser-blinded sensors did not detect it. Then they would have to deal with a powerful interceptor attack: half-a-dozen high speed suicide fighters coming in at close to ninety gees of acceleration.

"I wonder why he doesn't launch an full interceptor wave from out of range," mused Muir. "We'd still have to evade the engagement, and that would get us out of effective blinding laser range."

"Damn," Freya said. "That's a damn good question. He
could
launch a full wave at reduced acceleration. And we
would
have to get out of the way... He couldn't chase us off for long, but he could get us to back off for a few hours at least. It would cost him some interceptors, though; he'd never have a chance to recover them. Maybe he has too few aboard. If that really is a rogue or a pirate, he might not have full interceptor bays... might only have a few of them left."

She should have seen the possibility, though, Freya thought. She was pleased Muir had seen it, but
she
should have seen it too; she was the captain. It was the hours, she knew. With no way to tell when the ship would need six plus gees of acceleration, no one dared transfer back into their humanoid avatars. The entire crew had been in the ship's combat station neural nets for too long. It was starting to cause psychological fatigue, to wear on mental acuity. It had been less than fifty hours, but the psychological stress of being in a battle, if not actually in combat, was greater than she had expected. Every little error generated more stress, and it was adding up fast.

Forty-nine hours in the neural net of the
Ice Knife,
and Freya felt like she
was
the ship. She also felt like she was forgetting how to be human, or at least as human as she still was. This was bad. She would find that she was wasting long second of time on random musings, then have an hour or two pass where she was barely aware of her own identity. Talking to the other crew helped. Actually forming words and sending them to be "heard" by another daemon was getting to be crucial to keeping a proper mental focus.

She had spent longer than this in the ship's neural net before, but never with such high stakes. Less than a hundred minutes ago, the lance-ship had flipped over and made a short five-gee burn to decelerate, then flipped again and accelerated at almost six gees for a minute. The snap maneuver had been almost lost in the constant glare of the lance-ship's blinding lasers, and
Skyrunner
had missed it, matching the lance-ship's first move and not the second.

Freya had sent a frantic comm-signal to the other swift-ship, but for a crucial few minutes,
Skyrunner
was accelerating towards the lance-ship, which was accelerating towards the swift-ship, bringing the little ship into the edge of effective interceptor range, before an emergency eight-gee burn by
Skyrunner
opened the range again.

The lance-ship had not launched interceptors, but it had concentrated all of its laser power on the swift-ship, and
Skyrunner
's bow-shields were neither deployed nor even able to be interposed with the swift-ship thrusting away from the lance-ship.
Skyrunner
had suffered thermal damage from the mistake; laser energy had overloaded some of the more delicate sensors and degraded the radiators which dumped the huge waste heat of
Skyrunner's
drive.

In a worst case, it could have cascaded into disaster; an overheated drive might shut down, or might even affect the singularity reactor, and if
Skyrunner
lost power, it would be snapped up by the lance-ship.
Skyrunner's
captain had managed to avert disaster by running laser coolant into the system and venting it into space to control the heat buildup, then getting out of the high energy laser spot projected by the lance-ship. Even so, by the time the
Skyrunner
got out of danger she was streaming wisps of vapor from her hull and had been forced to deploy backup sensors. It had been too close.

But this time disaster was averted. The problem, Freya knew, was that the sort of error that had almost cost
Skyrunner
dearly would be more and more likely to occur as the crews spent more and more time in their ships' command neural nets. For the swift-ships, it was a sort of race, between the approaching intercept with the
Conquering Sun
, and the increasing odds of a deadly mistake.

Meanwhile, the three ships, the hostile lance-ship and the two swift-ships, were getting closer and closer to the
Conquering Sun
. Freya and her crew had to hold out a little more. Maybe another twenty hours, and this would be over, one way or another. The lance-ships would fall into the trap or else would realize what their "victim" actually was, and try to escape.

"Captain, there's something... I have an aspect change in the target! He's maneuvering to change his vector!" The sensor officer's "voice" was sudden and loud in Freya's "hearing."

"Give me your data feed, Sensors," said Freya, trying to keep her own "voice" calm. She felt the new data sent to her and focused her attention on it.

"Target is vectoring at sixty degrees to his base course," said the sensors officer, needlessly; Freya could "see" it just as well as he could.

"Why?" asked Freya, before she could stop herself, sounding almost petulant in her own mind. She cursed her lapse; that wasn't the way a captain was supposed to sound. But this was an unexpected move; the lance-ship had tried to get out of their laser-blinding range, or trick them into its full-salvo interceptor range, dozens of times in the last sixty hours. But this was different; the raider looked like it was changing its base vector. "Could it be aborting its intercept? Has it gotten past our blinding?"

"I'm not sure, Captain," said Muir. "But the target is burning at four gees, at sixty two degrees off his old vector... I'm adjusting our vector accordingly."

Muir had the actual control of the ship's vector, just now, letting Freya concentrate on trying to intuit the enemy's intentions.

"Good. OK," Freya said, trying to get a grip on the situation. "Signal to
Skyrunner
and make sure they stay with us."

Whatever the purpose of this maneuver, the swift-ships would stay with the enemy, Freya thought. If the enemy had seen the assault-ship, this was not an ideal vector to escape. If not, then this was not a good vector for an intercept, either.

And then she saw what the lance-ship was vectoring for.

"He's moving to link up with the other lance-ship," Freya exclaimed.

"Captain?" said Muir.

Freya shut down the sensors data feed; she needed her mind clear to think now, not cluttered with too many streams of information. For a moment, Freya wanted nothing to impinge into her mind.