So It Begins (30 page)

  How could anyone think in battle?

  All of the gun-cruisers were gone but us. All of the ships that had been training together an hour ago. And it was still a victory. We had bloodied them.

  And now they were coming. Their main fleet, attacking via a back door. It hadn’t occurred to me they would ever engage us directly. Our dreadnoughts were too powerful. But with a force this size and our fleet stretched thin across so many systems . . .

  I felt ashamed of the boasts I’d once made on my dreadnought-posting about my gun skills. I had been as green as an ensign and hadn’t even known it. There is no gun-skill. You fire until they get you, and on the virtual ship you don’t feel your own death.

  I slumped over Annie’s console and reached back to find my sleeping body in the stasis canister. My heart beat fast. That was real.

Grendel

A Lost Fleet Campaign

Jack Campbell

Grendel. A star system where nothing is happening, nothing ever has happened, and nothing ever will happen.”

  Lieutenant Commander Cara Decala, the executive officer of the Alliance heavy cruiser
Merlon
, turned a wry smile on Commander John Geary, the commanding officer. “Be careful you don’t jinx us, Captain.”

  “Advice noted and logged.” Geary leaned back in his command seat on the bridge of
Merlon
, his eyes on the display floating before him. Six hours ago they had arrived at Grendel, using the jump point from the star, Beowulf. From Grendel they would jump to T’shima, where the fleet’s main base for this region of space was located. The drives which allowed faster-than-light travel could only jump between points in space created by the mass of stars, and then only if the destination star was close enough. That made Grendel a necessary waypoint, and that’s all it had ever been. No one went to Grendel because they wanted to go to Grendel.

  At the moment,
Merlon
was the flagship for a convoy, with Geary also controlling the light cruiser,
Pommel
, and three destroyers as well as an even dozen massive cargo transports hauling military supplies. Against the vast reaches of the Grendel star system, the convoy he commanded formed a very tiny human presence indeed. Still, in the human scheme of things it was both significant and something of which to be proud. The Alliance had been at least technically at peace for several decades, and the limited number of warships in the fleet reflected the casual attitude of a people who had not had much active need of defenses. Nonetheless, Geary had managed after long years of service to not only achieve the rank of commander with his pride and his self-respect mostly intact, but also gain the command of a heavy cruiser.

  Measured against that accomplishment was the reality that no one expected the Alliance would anytime soon require its heavy cruisers, or its few battleships and battle cruisers, to protect its people and its planets. Nor, as far as anyone knew did the convoy actually need an escort to protect it. Regulations called for practicing convoy escort duties, and for convoys transiting border star systems to have escorts, so a few ships were temporarily assigned to that task and required to run various drills so that they would be prepared if someday, somehow, convoys really did need escorts.

   Decala squinted at her own display. “We are lucky, though. We could be stationed on the emergency facility here and have to stay for years. At least it’s only three days to the jump point for T’shima and then we get to leave.”

  “That is indeed a blessing.” The orbital base at Grendel had a minimal crew, and only existed because every now and then ships passing through this star system enroute to other stars needed repair assistance for their equipment or medical assistance for somebody aboard. If not for that requirement, the several barren planets, which were either too hot or too cold, and the mass of asteroids in the star system would have held no reason for any humans to linger at Grendel. The star system wasn’t as bad as the gray nothingness of jump space, but that wasn’t saying much.

  Geary pulled out the scale on his display so that it showed the entire neighborhood of stars in this region. Grendel rested next to the border between the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds, an imaginary wall with many a curve and bulge drawn through nothingness by the two greatest political powers in human space. In the dozen centuries since humanity had left the Sol star system and the Earth of its oldest ancestors, most inhabited worlds had become part of either the Alliance or the Syndicate Worlds, though much smaller groupings such as the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation also existed on the Alliance side of the border.

  The nearest star to Grendel on the Syndic side of the border was Shannin, but the two stars might as well have been a million light years apart since ships never jumped between them. On this side of the border, most of the stars belonged to the Alliance by the choice of the inhabitants of their planets. On the other side of the border, every star system belonged to the Syndicate Worlds, whether the people living on the planets liked it or not. The leaders of the Syndics liked to proclaim their avowed love of freedom, but the outcomes of allegedly free votes in the Syndicate World either were never in doubt or made little difference since local authorities were given little real power compared to the corporate-dominated power structure.

  Decala must have noticed what Geary was looking at. “What do you suppose the Syndics are doing? It’s been almost six months since they announced that no more Alliance merchant shipping would be allowed in Syndic space.”

  He shrugged in reply. “You’ve seen the intelligence assessments. No one on this side of the border seems to know, and our embassies and other diplomatic posts inside the Syndicate Worlds haven’t been able to find out what’s going on. The best guess is that it was a protectionist trade measure, to seal out competition from the Alliance.”

  “It’s not like we ever had that much trade with them. They never encouraged it.”

  “No. Not much tourism, either. But whatever the Syndics are thinking, it hasn’t ramped up tensions beyond the usual level. They seem to be behaving themselves and respecting the border agreements.” Geary checked his daily agenda. “Only two drills scheduled over the next twelve hours, and those are just simulated maneuvers.”

  “We have to conserve fuel cells,” Decala reminded Geary dryly. “Remember what Admiral Kindera said. Fleet budgets won’t support racing around star systems.”

  “Or support carrying out necessary training,” Geary agreed. “Keep the ship on a routine schedule today, but make sure the junior officers most in need of training are on hand for those simulated maneuvers this afternoon. I’ll be there to supervise and make sure the other ships are taking the drill seriously.”

  He stood up. “Let me know if anything changes,” Geary informed the bridge watch standers, then headed toward his stateroom to get some paperwork done.

  “Captain to the bridge!” Halfway through his regular walk-through of the ship, Geary’s feet were moving toward the bridge before his mind fully absorbed the urgent summons. Rather than pause to call the bridge on the nearest comm panel he simply kept up a quick pace, any crew members in the passageways of
Merlon
jumping aside when they saw him coming so he would have a clear path. He was sliding into his command seat on the bridge when Lieutenant Commander Decala arrived on his heels. “What’s going on?” Geary asked.

  “A Syndic flotilla has arrived via the jump point from Shannin, sir,” the operations watch reported.

  “What?” The news was not only unexpected but also inexplicable. Geary activated his own display, seeing the data which
Merlon
’s sensors had already collected. Coming in-system from the jump point were not just a few Syndic warships, but a substantial flotilla.

  “Four heavy cruisers?” Decala asked.

  “Plus four light cruisers, six Hunter-Killers, and ten corvettes,” the operations watch confirmed.

  Geary frowned at his display. Military attachés and other sources within the Syndicate Worlds had a pretty good handle on Syndic military capabilities, and he was certain that the Syndics had the same sort of knowledge of Alliance warships. The Syndic heavy cruisers each pretty much matched
Merlon
in maneuverability and protection, but the Syndic armament was slightly better, even though the Syndic missiles weren’t quite as good as the Alliance’s wraith missiles. The light cruisers were significantly smaller, both more lightly armed and armored than heavy cruisers, but faster because of greater propulsion capability relative to their mass. In a one-on-one match up,
Pommel
would have had a slim advantage against any one of them. The Hunter-Killers were smaller and less capable than the Alliance destroyers, but the HuKs were a little faster. The Syndic corvettes were smaller yet, singly not a match for any Alliance warship, and could just keep up with their heavy cruisers. Still, it was a very strong force relative to
Merlon
and the other Alliance warships at Grendel.

  The Syndics had come in from a jump point to one side of the current track of the Alliance convoy, barely two light hours distant. Which meant the Syndic warships had already been in this star system for two hours before the light from their arrival reached the Alliance convoy. He wondered what they had been doing in those two hours. “I need an assessment of their track as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, sir. The Syndics have accelerated and come around to port.” Space had no directions as humans understood them, of course, so humans imposed their own, arbitrarily designating an exact plane for any star system and defining one side of that plane as up, the other side as down, any direction away from the star as port and directions toward the star as starboard or starward. It wasn’t the only possible means by which ships could orient themselves to each other in space, but it was the one which humans had adopted. Without an external reference and such conventions, no human ship could possibly understand what any other ship meant when it gave directions.

  Rubbing his neck, Geary tapped a request into the maneuvering system and saw the result pop up. “I don’t like this. They seem to be moving onto an intercept with this convoy.”

  “They could just be heading onto a converging vector,” Decala noted, “if they were also aiming for the jump point for T’shima.”

  “Why the hell would a Syndic flotilla of that size be going to T’shima? For that matter, what the hell are they doing in Alliance space at all?” Protocol dictated that a foreign ship arriving in a star system announce its intentions, but any such message from the Syndics should have shown up right about the same time as the light revealing their appearance at Grendel. “There’s nothing from the Syndics on any channel?”

  “No, sir,” the communications watch confirmed.

  Geary pulled up the current version of the rules of engagement. This wasn’t the first time that he had read them, of course, but he hadn’t seriously expected to need the ROE on this trip. “We are supposed to defend Alliance space, Alliance citizens, and Alliance property, we are required to be firm and resolute, but we are not allowed to explicitly threaten military action or open fire unless first fired upon. I wish the idiots who wrote these instructions were here now.” He pounded one fist softly on the arm of his seat. “I’ll send a challenge, but it’ll be two hours before they get it, and even if they reply immediately, that will take almost another two hours.”

  “They’re still a long ways off,” Decala said. “We have time to figure out how to deal with this.”

  “Do we?” Geary’s display updated, showing the Syndic flotilla had steadied out on a course and speed two hours ago, the now-converging paths of the Syndic flotilla and the Alliance convoy arcing across the expanse of Grendel star system. “They are heading for the jump point for T’shima, and they’re going to get to it before we do.” The jump point was only about two and half light hours distant now, but with the convoy loafing along at point zero four light speed that translated to about sixty hours of travel time. The Syndics, at about three light hours distance from the jump point for T’shima, were traveling at point zero eight light speed and would get there in a less than thirty-eight hours.

  “We can accelerate,” Decala suggested. “Fleet will raise hell with us for using extra fuel cells, but it’s justified.”