The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (38 page)

###

A ragged cheer erupted in
Banquo’s
bridge, but Spencer did not allow himself to join in.

The civilians aboard the
Bear
were safe, and that was something. Allison Spencer felt some strong pangs of guilt for being concerned with other matters. Once he had made his decision to leave them behind, he had almost forgotten about the freighter and the gig, trapped in the center of the blockade sphere. He had been concerned only with neutralizing the freighter fleet, relegated the trapped human ships to the status of pawns he was forced to leave in a vulnerable position.

Think like a robot,
Spencer told himself again.
Which
way does a robot jump when none of the choices are good?
Answer: a robot doesn’t jump at all.
The sort of optimism, or desperation, or stubborn pride that would have made a human captain battle on when it was pointless—the parasites didn’t work that way. Once the odds on benefiting from combat were significantly lower than the odds of failure, or of being destroyed, the freighters simply gave up.

Or at least
appeared
to give up. Their velocities varied enough that some would arrive at the command asteroid days, and others weeks, after
Banquo
and her sisters got there. But the freighters would be behind the Pact ships the whole way. And they could relight their engines, play catch up, whenever they liked . . .

Maybe, from their point of view, we’re being herded,
Spencer thought.
Herded straight toward their main base.
He would have to do something about that. But not yet. Not quite yet.

“Coming up on main engine shutdown,” the navigation officer announced. “Commencing throttle-down. Zero thrust in ten seconds.”

Spencer allowed himself a sigh of relief as the fearsome pressure of six-G boost eased off to nothing.

“Secure from boost stations,” Deyi ordered, and then undid the straps that held him to his acceleration chair. He guided himself along by handholds until he was right next to Spencer. “And now what, Captain?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Now we do what we’re all best at,” Spencer replied. “We wait. It’s still their move. It might take a minute, or an hour, or a week for them to make it, but we wait until then. Wait and let our speed carry us closer to the command asteroid.”
And then we find out who is playing a trick on whom,
he thought.

###

Silent as ghosts, the images of the last of the freighters passed out of range of
Fleance’s
detectors. “We’re alone,” Bothu announced. “They don’t care about us. Not even enough to waste a missile on us as they pass.”

“I’m willing to live with the insult,” Peever muttered, but no one paid him any attention.

Chief Wellingham was already getting into his pressure suit. He sealed himself in and gathered up his parasite-detection gear. He headed into the air lock that led to the
Dancing Bear.
Destin made a move as if to join him, but the chief shook his head. Wellingham simply wanted to do this thing alone—either that or he didn’t want Destin to foul up the gig’s cabin again by pulling his stinking suit back in from the spaceward air lock.

No one spoke as Wellingham stepped into the lock and closed the hatch behind himself.

Twenty minutes more passed in silence, each person alone in thought, before anything else happened. Then, the environment gauges on the air lock began to twitch upward. Captain Destin scrambled over to the lock and peered at the instruments eagerly. “Power’s back, air temp and pressure goin’ up, carbon d’oxide falling! The man did it. My ship’s alive!”

The others aboard congratulated Destin, but there was something muted, half-hearted about it. After all, the chief was over there interfering with the one thing that still might bring the enemy fleet wheeling about to attack them. Suppose the freighter fleet felt one parasite was worth a pitched battle?

The hatch clanked open and the chief returned, the visor of his suit open, a transparent plastic cube in his hand. “There it is, Captain Destin,” he said. “This is what shut down your ship. I found it inside the environmental circuits.”

Destin took the cube warily, and examined its contents carefully. Peever found himself drawn to it as well—he had never actually seen a parasite.

A silver blob oozed and ambled over the interior surface of the cube. A small thing, a dollop of mercury. A nothing, a tiny, trifling, pretty thing.

And two or three just like it had destroyed a cruiser.

Peever suddenly felt cold, as if a freezing wind were blowing against him. Whether it was his imagination or a true empathic reaction, he felt a malevolent
hatred
throbbing out from the parasite. This thing was death.

Wellingham dug into his equipment bag and pulled out a small radio beacon. He sprayed some adhesive on the side of the cube and slapped the beacon in place. He handed Bothu the cube. “Put that in the disposal lock,” he said. “Dump it off the ship, and get it well clear.”

“What’re ya goin’ to do?” Captain Destin asked. “Ya can’t just dump it.”

“I know that,” the chief replied coolly. “But we need to know just how hard these things are to kill. We think they can survive a lot of stress. I don’t think you could kill one with a repulsor gun. We
know
we can destroy them with a high-yield fusion bomb—but if I were Captain Spencer, I’d like to know if I could use some method that was a bit more
delicate.
Like maybe a plasma gun. Not as energetic as a fusion bomb, but I’ve got a feeling it could do the trick. Jettison it out the disposal chute, Bothu, and let’s get in some target practice.”

The marine grinned eagerly, crossed the small cabin, and tossed the cube into a small hatch set into the gig’s hull. She sealed the hatch, ran the scavenger pump, and hit the jettison button. A simple spring-loaded device kicked the cube clear into space. Bothu was already at the plasma cannon controls, while everyone else watched on an external camera monitor. The targeting computer locked onto the radio beacon. Bothu waited until the cube was a safe minimum distance away. “Let’s try it on minimum power,” she said, and fired.

A slender, sun-bright lance of light flashed from the cannon, gone almost before the eye could detect it. There was a silent red flash of light where the cube had been, and then nothing. Wellingham bent over his detection instruments, and then turned to the others with a broad grin. “No G-wave activity,” he announced. “Not even a baby black hole. It just sort of disintegrated. A single parasite isn’t massive enough to form a black hole, I guess. The thing’s dead.” He turned to Captain Destin, who stood with unashamed tears in his eyes. “You’ve got your ship back, Captain.”

“Wonderful,” Peever said. “Now can we all get the hell out of here?” The enemy freighter fleet was still too close for his comfort.

###

Spencer heard the results of the chief’s experiments a few minutes later and relayed his effusive thanks back through the comm officer. It was heroism, courage that won medals, and certainly the chief had proven that he had those things; but it was clear-headed thinking that won battles. Chief Wellingham had gotten the answer to a vital question that no one else had even thought to ask.

Spencer ordered the
Fleance
to ride shotgun on the
Dancing Bear,
escorting her into Mittelstadt. The chief and his whole team had earned a few days’ sampling of Mittelstadt’s fleshpots.

None of that, however, was solving Spencer’s more immediate problems. He was waiting for something, something from the command asteroid. He ordered a full set of sensors directed on the coordinates provided by Destin. So far they could tell him little more than that there was a lump of rock hanging in space in the right place.

They were still too far distant to be sure of much more than that. Even at this velocity, it would be another two or three days before they’d be close enough for even the longest-range G-wave detectors to see anything.

But there had to be something there. Spencer knew that, deep in his bones. And he was waiting to flush it out.

It started eight hours after the
Dancing Bear
and
Fleance
shaped orbit for Mittelstadt. A sprinkling of tiny dots suddenly appeared in the long-range screen, surrounding the image of the command asteroid. Engine lights, lots of them. Either they had just launched, or the
Banquo
had just come within sensor range. It didn’t matter. They had shown themselves.

“Tactics! How many of them!” Spencer demanded eagerly.

“One hundred twenty, at least, Sir. More becoming visible.”

“Excellent!” Spencer said.

“ ‘Excellent?’ ” Suss asked. “A hundred twenty enemy ships is good?” She came over and stood beside him.

“It is if we can get them to someplace beside where we’re going,” Spencer said, staring at the screen. He snapped on an auxiliary screen and began calling up an overview display.

“I knew they had to have more than just twenty converted freighters in their fleet,” Spencer said. “We got that from Sisley’s reports. They were buying up ships all over the system. And the odds against their entire fleet being in range to intercept our search for the
Bear
—well, it just seemed pretty unlikely. I’ll bet there are another forty or fifty converted freighters dispersed all around this system. But think for a second. This fleet we’re up against has got to be under the tightest central control possible. The parasites controlling the ships are wired directly into the helmet creature. You yourself said they were in essence the hands attached to the brain. We can kill the hands, the parasites, and it won’t matter. But if we can get in close enough to destroy the helmet, the parasites are dead too.

“I started to wonder—if I were the commander of a force like that, where would I put the bulk of my forces in a defensive situation? What would you do?”

“I’d put my fleet on direct, close guard of headquarters,” Suss said.

“Which left us with the job of trying to flush them out, try and draw them away from that asteroid long enough for us to make a strike. That’s why I decided on a direct, arrow-straight trajectory on the asteroid once we knew where it was. No feinting, no attempt at misdirection. It’s also why I tried a head-on bust out from the blockade. In both cases, I wanted to seem as aggressive, violent, and threatening as I could, so the helmet creature would get scared of us. Scared enough to invest a lot of resources in keeping us away. Now we’ve gotten the thing to strip its defenses. And so far we’ve done it at very low risk to ourselves.”

Suss looked at the overall tactical plot. At one end of the screen lay the command asteroid, at the other two small winking lights representing the
Bear
and
Fleance.
The mining ship and the gig were just about to move off the edge of the plot, moving out of harm’s way toward the safety of Mittelstadt. In the dead center of the screen were the three destroyers—
Banquo, Lennox
and
Macduff,
coasting at very high speed toward the command asteroid.

Between the destroyers and the
Dancing Bear
lay the seventeen freighters that had comprised the blockade fleet. Even as Suss watched, they relit their engines and started to accelerate toward their home base—and the Pact ships.

And the new element. A hundred and twenty enemy craft boosting straight for the Pact ships. Both enemy fleets were forming up into a huge pincer formation, seeing to it that the Pact ships could not cut and run. And there didn’t seem to be any escape.

“Well, Captain, if you wanted the hornets to come up out of their nests, you’ve succeeded.”

Spencer nodded, not seeming to notice the sarcasm in Suss’ voice. “Now all we have to do is convince them to commit all the way to their attack. Get them for enough from their base, and moving fast enough that they’ll never make it back in time. Communications, put me through to the commanders of the
Lennox
and
Macduff.”

“Commlink open, Sir.”

“This is Spencer, commanding task force, to all commanders. Prepare and execute synchronized braking maneuver at full power. Bring all three ships to zero relative velocity with command asteroid and assume a defensive deployment.”

“Sir, this is Matambu commanding
Lennox.
We’re still at least twenty million kilometers from the asteroid.”

“I am aware of that, Sir. Which is why I am also ordering all ships to compute and prepare for a synchronized intrasystem jump from our stop-point to a point 100,000 kilometers away from the command asteroid. We’re going to feint, pretend that we mean to stand and fight here. Once we’ve convinced the enemy of that, we use the jump gear and get behind him.”

There was dead silence, both on the bridge of the
Banquo
and the commlink to the other ships.

Finally, someone worked up the nerve to speak. “Sir, this is Heinrich commanding
Macduff.
Sir, you might not be aware of it, but there is a large margin of error even between two well-calibrated jump points. Most of the error is caused by mass deflection. A small amount of matter, either near the jump-off point or the arrival point, small enough so that it can’t be easily detected, is enough to throw everything off. The gravity field produced by even a few grams of matter is enough to warp space enough to send a ship thousands of kilometers off course. You are ordering us to jump in an
asteroid belt.
We’d be lucky if even one ship gets within a million klicks of the target.”

“I am aware of all that you point out, Heinrich, and I thank you for your thoughts. Tactical Officer—what is the most likely outcome of a direct approach to the command asteroid? Take into account the enemy force we have detected so far.”

“Loss of the fleet,” the young tactics man said quietly. “We can outgun those freighters one to one, and even with some fairly heavy odds. But we can’t fight off 137 of them. Especially if they know exactly where we are going and why. Our speed and acceleration advantage won’t count for anything.”

“What are the odds on losing a ship in an intrasystem jump under these circumstances?” Heinrich asked over the commlink.