IronStar (3 page)

Their immediate tactical problem
was that their active Tubedrive was showing up like a beacon on any Kruss
vessel’s sensors. While the Kruss stayed sub-c, they could track the
Arvida-Yee
in Tubedrive, and until the enemy warship lit its own drive, it was as good as
invisible on whatever ballistic trajectory it was following, even if the Regnum
vessel unTubed to look for it. No modern warship was so foolishly designed as
to reflect active radar pulses.

Run and show or see and slow
,
those were the rules of Tubespace engagements… and ‘see’ meant not ‘what’s
happening now’, but whatever laggard light and grav waves finally told, minutes
or hours late, of the enemy’s distant actions. The Academy’s Tactical
instructor had called it ‘Hobson’s Rules of Naval Engagement’. At the moment,
Kirrah called it unfair.

“Course, Sir?” Damn
the dry throat.
And how did Captain Leitch sound so calm? And why did everything look so clear
and sharp?

“Eh? Yes, Lieutenant Roehl, a very
good question. I would seriously like to know what’s happened to our
attackers.” Captain Leitch’s fingers drummed on the armrest. She could see his
jaw clenching, unclenching, in sync with the fingers. When he did that in a
chess game, it usually meant he was considering a gambit.

“How many Spoofs left?”

“Four, Sir, and eight more
mailtubes.” The ‘Spoofs’ were small missiles similar to the mailtubes, but
carried sophisticated ECM warheads capable of imitating the grav-wave signature
of most vessels, including scoutships like
Arvida-Yee
.

“Very good, Helm. Maintain course
six minutes, then bring us back on course to, ahhh, S22041, plus 3 degrees
pitch.” Captain Leitch noticed Master Chief Sammy Lee trade an uneasy glance
with Lieutenant Sykes in the hatchway, where he had materialized some time in
the last few minutes. “Yes, gentlemen, we don’t know where the bogie is, so
running one way is just as good as running another. This way we’ll pass close
enough to our objective to at least check for hablets.”

More minutes crawled past.

“Helm, at the course correction,
hold us sub-cee and run out a sensor pod. I want to know what they’re up to,”
said Captain Leitch. “And prepare another Spoof to launch on our present
heading. Maybe we can decoy them if they’re still chasing. Guns, set up four
more Spits. Let’s see how those new Mark Fives perform in ambush mode.”

“Sir”.

“Aye, Sir”.

With fingers steadier than she
felt, Kirrah dialed the Tubefield down, and with it the
Arvida-Yee
’s
virtual velocity. Their second-last sensor pod spooled out on its cable,
extending beyond the Tubefield and greedily gathering photons and gravitons
from the Siderial universe. The soft whirring of the air ventilator suddenly
sounded very loud. In a moment the main display showed the sun ahead of them,
and no gravtrace at all.

“Helm, launch our Spoof, then give
me that course change. Make our speed point two cees ballistic, then down
drive. It’s his turn to wonder where
we
are. Guns, drop those four
Spits, silent launch, minimal spread. Eyes, I need to know what happened back
there, soonest.”

“Aye, Sir, it’ll be… two hundred
ten minutes,” responded Doris. Their brief FTL sprint had put the
Arvida-Yee
that far ahead of any possible lightspeed sensor readings of their first brief
engagement.

Kirrah played over her console. The
Freefall
alarm buzzed briefly; the small ship lurched, steadied; the
Tubedrive died with a whisper and they fell, now weightless and silent, toward
the distant sun. Kirrah felt her limbs lose their weight, lap and shoulder
restraints snug automatically to cradle her body against the contoured seat.

On the main display tank, their
Spoof missile raced off along their original course, its grav track looking for
all the world like a Survey Scoutship resuming course after a quick stop to
check sensor readings. Behind it, four lethal Spit-5 seeker missiles drifted
stealthed and silent, their AI’s patiently watching for the gravitics signature
that would indicate a hostile vessel’s Tubedrive.

“Captain to all hands: if you’re
not on the bridge, you can stand down to Condition Alpha Two. Ladies and
gentlemen, this may be a long day. Would someone please bring sandwiches and
caffi to the Bridge crew, ahhh, Angie or Harrah, if you can?”

“I’m on it, Cap!” Even over the
intercom, Lieutenant Angela Foley’s voice sounded soothing and sweet, like the
star of some 3V show. It was probably part of the reason Angie did so well in
First Contact missions, at least with those species capable of hearing sounds.
Her looks didn’t hurt either: most sapient species appreciated, at least
aesthetically, her smooth, perfect symmetry and graceful lines.
Somehow,
Angie just makes everyone around her look plain
, thought Kirrah a few
minutes later, as she gratefully accepted a sandwich and a bulb of the hot
stimulant beverage.

More minutes passed.
Plus
,
she considered wryly,
Angie’s disposition was so naturally sunny and
cheerful, no one could even resent her stunning good looks... it just wasn't
fair. Amazing
, thought a small corner of Kirrah’s mind –
we are running
for our lives in a cat and mouse game with a Kruss warship that probably
outmasses us a thousand to one, and I’m sitting here eating hamlette and cheese
and speculating about hypothetical competition for hypothetical mates.
Focus
,
Kirrah!
Focus
!

Suddenly the Display alarm pinged,
causing her to flinch sharply. A scarlet line traced across the display from
below, slightly left of their course.

“Relax, people,” said Lt. Commander
Docking from the Weapons board. “They’re shooting blind just to rattle us.”

Then it’s working
, thought
Kirrah. Even though the only tracks they could pick up on passive sensors were
from something running in Tubedrive, which meant they were seeing where it
had
been, err, (glance at the display)… nineteen seconds ago.

We’re not supposed to be
fighting
, she grumbled silently.
We’re a
Survey
ship! If I’d
wanted
fighting
I would’ve joined the
real
Navy!
With nothing
to do at the moment but worry, her mind obligingly offered up variations on a
theme of doom.

I wonder if the alarm has time
to sound, when a ship eats a missile? …or would it be more correct to say ‘when
a missile eats a ship’? I wonder if you have time to
feel
anything? I
wonder if a body’s atoms tend to stay in the same part of the plasma cloud, or
if everyone’s all mix… Lieutenant! Put a PLUG in it! Focus!

More minutes passed. Smalltalk
stuttered and died. An hour. The Display alarm pinged again, Kirrah jumped
again.
Nervous?
Who, me
? The main display showed what had already
happened, fourteen light-minutes in their past: a solid red line indicating a
hostile Tubedrive, well back and tracking their earlier course. Two thinner red
lines marked the tracks of something, probably sensor drones, diverging like
seeking arms. Kirrah felt the small hairs on her forearms prickle as
eight
more thin missile trails lit out after their Spoof, and four more after the two
mailtubes they had launched at the last course change. Lieutenant Finch flicked
a brief, wide-eyed grimace at Kirrah.
Yeah
, Kirrah agreed mentally,
they
must want us pretty bad…

All eyes followed the hostile red
line as it approached the silent green sparks of their passive missiles, waiting…
Simultaneously all four Spit-5’s lit their drives, converging faster than light
on their target. Telemetry analysis gave the details of the one-tenth second
dance: two of their missiles switched to Tubefield-attack mode, pouring their
entire generating capacity into destabilizing the target’s Tubewalls, ravening
their field intensities in a few microseconds of deadly whipsaw feedback as the
Kruss drive fought to stabilize. And stabilize it did, but not before the other
two seekers detected fleeting openings in the target’s Tubewall, and plunged
into the ragged gaps faster than any sensor could follow. Once inside, the
deadly seekers simply collapsed their Tubefields at maximum intensity,
instantly converting their 80-kilo mass into microscopic black holes moving at
near-lightspeed, and
within
the Kruss warship’s protective field.

Black holes this tiny emit all
their mass as fierce Hawking radiation in less than a microsecond, but with the
time dilation travelling at 0.99c, they cover five to ten kilometers as they
die. In effect, a fifteen hundred megaton nuclear bomb with a fireball 200
meters wide and ten kilometers long, and an appetite voracious as flame in a
dry forest, for consuming any matter in its path.

With destruction arriving scant
nanoseconds behind any possible detection, point defenses had no chance at all.
The Kruss Tubedrive snapped off like a switch thrown, its red trace ending
abruptly in the center of the four-branched green star of their converging
missile tracks.

Into the stunned silence, Lt. Finch
touched another key and spoke softly: “Optical…” and the display filled with
the replay in visible light: a sudden blue-white flare and fading yellow cloud,
as Kruss hullmetal and once-organic residue cycled up to half a million degrees
Kelvin and began to cool, on the long slow fall to cosmic background
temperature. Loud cheers echoed faintly down the open manlift from the offshift
crew, watching on the rec-room display five levels forward. The
Arvida-Yee
fell onward toward the sun S22041.

“Very good, Commander Docking. That
was well done, everyone,” said Captain Leitch. “Maintain gravitics silence. I
want to know at least one mailtube made it away. ‘Eyes’, let me know when we
get that data. And what’s our particle influx?”

“At current rate we’re good for
another ten hours, Sir. That’s allowing for a denser solar wind as we pass
periastron, assuming no Tubewall.” The Captain nodded, balancing the beating
they’d take from running onto stray atoms at one-fifth lightspeed, with the
risk of lighting their Tubedrive again, which would both shield them and make
them visible to any other grav sensors in the system.

Over an hour later, the light and
gravity waves from their
first
hostile contact finally caught up to the
Arvida-Yee
’s
sensors. Lieutenant Finch bent intently over her board, analyzing the data.

“Inconclusive, Sir,” she said.
“Here’s all we got…” On the display tank, one corner showed a playback of the
sensor data from their first missile salvo. “Our first Spoof was intercepted
here
,”
her cursor touched a short green line connected to a thin red one. “The first
two Spitballs failed to penetrate,” …another two green lines, ending on the
thicker red one, “…and the Kruss launched
here
and
here
, you can
see their seekers’ve acquired our mailtubes, but they’ll all be well out of
scan range before any possible intercept.”

In the computer-versus-computer
shell game that would follow, each missile would try to outguess the other, the
targets trying their best to zig and zag without revealing their destination’s
true bearing, and trying to be
somewhere else
when the pursuers caught
up. The odds slightly favored a speedy escape, but a bit of bad luck or a
malfunction could easily doom either messenger missile, leaving NavInt ignorant
of their encounter and the unexpected Kruss presence.

“Damn!” said Master Chief Sammy
Lee, who had taken over the Weapons board during their prolonged wait. “That
means we’ve still got the ball…”

“Just so, Sammy,” said the Captain.
Kirrah noticed herself relaxing a little at the informality – if Captain Leitch
was back on a first-name basis, then his instincts were that the immediate
danger was over.

“We’ll maintain battle stations and
wear survival suits, until we’ve made a pass through the system.” Several
groans wafted back from the forward compartments. “I know the suits are
uncomfortable for so long, you sailors can thank me later. Doris, I want you to
send a sensor drone ahead on a ballistic trajectory, close pass over the star’s
north pole. No Tubedrives, y’hear? Totally grav-passive, railgun launch,
tightbeam the data back to us. Set it up with Kirrah. Oh, and deadman it back
to NavInt”.

“Aye, Sir”. Hmm, no ‘on it, Cap’,
apparently Doris was not yet back to first-name comfort levels. Captain
Leitch’s ‘deadman’ order, to send the drone home automatically if they failed
to recall it, was simple prudence. Kirrah thoughtfully rotated the ship
side-on, presenting optimal angle for the railgun launch. She watched Doris’
fingers flying over her board, setting up the drone’s mission parameters. A
tiny worry line furrowed Lieutenant Finch’s smooth brow as she flicked an
imaginary wisp of dark hair from her face. Then the characteristic pause as she
double-checked her work. No Fleet sailor wanted to make the mistake that could
bring her ship and crew to grief, and you could never tell how trivial that
mistake would look as it was being made. Doris was very good at her job, Kirrah
thought – that drone would do
exactly
what they wanted it to.

“Railgun launch in five… three,
two, one…”
Krangggg!
The whole ship rang like a struck gong, as the
intense and intricate magnetic fields of her main railgun accelerated the
hundred-kilo reconnaissance drone to 15 kilometers per second in the length of
its six-meter launchtube.

“Drone’s away, Cap!” said
Lieutenant Finch, a little redundantly.

“Thank you, Eyes,” replied Captain
Leitch. “Report as available.”

“Aye, Sir: we’re already in the
Oort belt, nothing special, just a few rocks… looks like two gas giants and two
iceballs, nothing in the water zone, yet.” The ‘water zone’: that not-too-hot,
not-too-cold magic ring around a sun, where life could gather like hunters
around a campfire, backs to the endless dark.