The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (39 page)

“Difficult to estimate, Sir, as there are a lot of variables. But I would estimate the probabilities at about 90 percent that any one ship would survive—which works out to about 73 percent probability that all three ships will make it. But you are correct that we have no way of knowing where the ships will be when they complete the jump. With the amount of uncharted matter you’re likely to find in a star system, mass deflection could put you almost anywhere. There is a remote possibility that they could end up outside this star system altogether.”

“But with a 90 percent chance of ending up alive,” Spencer said. “I do not wish to lose any more of my ships, let alone
all
of them. What chance of at least one ship arriving within a 100,000 kilometers of target?”

The tactics officer shrugged. “Sir, there are simply too many unknowns. But just based on experience, and gut-level hunches—maybe fifty-fifty. Maybe an 80 percent shot that one of them will arrive within 200,000.”

“I would be a bit more pessimistic,” Dostchem announced peremptorily. Spencer had even forgotten the Capuchin was on the bridge. “But not by much. Subtract eight to 12 percent from his odds.”

The tactics officer nodded. “I could go along with that.”

“How about the odds of at least one ship within a million klicks of target?” Spencer asked.

“Bet the farm on it, Sir. I’d estimate 90-plus probability that you get
two
ships inside a million.”

“At least that high,” Dostchem agreed. “Assuming all ships survive the jump, of course. And you have nearly three out of four odds on that.”

“Thank you, Dostchem. In any event, that is the plan. Draw the enemy forces as for off from their base as possible, get them to use up their fuel, get them traveling as fast as possible in the wrong direction—and then get behind them. With its mobile forces out of the way, we should have a fighting chance to hit the command asteroid. If we can get in there, and destroy the helmet-creature, then we’ve effectively lobotomized the parasites that are controlling the freighters. It’s a crazy enough risk that I don’t think our mechanical friend would even think of it.”

“And if we fail, then the hornets will all come home to their hive,” Suss said quietly. “Still, if they do, we’re no worse off than before. After all, they can only kill us once.”

“Any further discussion?” Spencer asked. Again, there was silence, but at least this time the quiet seemed calmer.
It must be at least slightly reassuring to know your captain wasn’t completely off his rocker,
Spencer thought. “You have your orders,” Spencer said. “Let’s get it underway.”

###

Banquo
and her sister ships were flying in freefall at the horrific velocity of over 250,000 kilometers an hour. It took six Gs for twenty minutes to achieve that incredible speed, and it would take just as much power for just as long to slow the destroyers down again.

Riding the engines was going to be just as punishing the second time, but at least this time they were not in immediate danger of attack by the enemy—both freighter fleets were still far away.

The ships came about to direct their sterns forward, the massive engines surged smoothly to life, and once again everything aboard the
Banquo
was flattened under six times its normal weight. If anything, the maneuver seemed to take even longer this time, but the bridge chronometer would only admit to a twenty-minute duration.

At last, the little fleet lay dead in space relative to its goal. After a horrendous expenditure of fuel, and tremendous stress on the crew, they were still millions of kilometers away from the command asteroid.

Spencer thought about the fuel cost as he watched for the enemy’s reaction. He knew he might regret the profligate use of his hydrogen fuel later, but for now he felt it had been well spent. Perhaps he had not traveled far using it, but it had bought him other things beside movement. He had bought useful intelligence with it, caused the enemy to reveal something like its true numbers. And he had stampeded the enemy into leaving its home base at least partly defenseless.

Spencer ordered the destroyers into a “hedgehog” formation, wherein each ship could provide covering fire for the others, effectively putting the entire sky in the field of fire. If he had meant to actually use the formation in a fight, he would have deployed the auxiliary vehicles as well, so their fighting power could be brought to bear. But he ordered the formation only for the benefit of the enemy’s detectors, and it was highly doubtful their gear was good enough to spot the auxiliaries at these sorts of ranges.

He watched the screens eagerly now, struggling to divine how the helmet-creature was reacting. Was it buying his display of a defensive formation? Would it even recognize it as such? Would it think, as it was meant to, that Spencer had decided to make his stand here, force the enemy to come to him?

Time passed, seeming to slow and expand as it often did in combat. Minutes, then tens of minutes, then half-hours and full hours—and the enemy freighters kept coming, kept boosting toward the Pact ships.

Spencer rejoiced silently. Every second the ships of the large freighter fleet kept those engines on was a victory for Spencer. It meant they were traveling another few meters per second faster
away
from the command asteroid. It was another little bit of velocity they would have to shed before they could reverse course and chase the Pact ships.

Tallen Deyi joined him, watched the tactical display with him. “They’re still coming,” he said in wonder. “When they fall for a stunt, they fall for it. Keep on, my boys,” he said to the tactical display. “Keep on and pay for it all four to one,”

“Four to one?” Spencer asked.

Tallen looked puzzled, and then his face cleared. “You’re so good at this, I keep forgetting you never went to a naval officer’s training academy. That’s one thing they pounded into our heads over and over again. Any false move in powered flight costs you four times as much fuel as the original burn. You spend the original burn, then a burn to brake your speed, then a burn to get you moving back toward where you started out, and then a
fourth
burn to brake your speed after the return burn. You end up where you started, moving at zero speed, after four power burns. That’s exactly what the freighters will have to do if they want to chase us back to their base after we make our jump.”

“Might I add another point to consider?” Dostchem asked as she made her way across the bridge. “These are freighters, which normally boost at only very low acceleration, perhaps a tenth of G, or a half-G in extreme cases. These craft are accelerating at just about one full G, and keeping it up for a very long time, presumably with holds full of armament and strap-on fuel tanks, all adding mass, requiring the engines to burn hotter to achieve such a high boost. There is no doubt a lot of stress on their equipment.”

“Yes, we’ve spotted two or three craft dropping out of formation already,” Spencer agreed.

“Engine lights going out in the larger fleet!” the tactics officer called. “They have completed their burn and are shutting down. Smaller fleet still coming up behind us, boosting for us, current velocity relative to us over 100,000 kilometers per hour.”

“Take a look at their current disposition,” Spencer ordered. “Give me a tactical projection for the enemy fleet.”

“Hammer and anvil,” the tactics officer replied instantly. “They want to catch us between a small, fast, fleet and a larger, slower-moving fleet. The idea is that any countertactics that might be effective against one force will leave us exposed to the other. If we boost and run from the smaller fleet, we run right into the big guys. If we hunker down and make a stationary defense, then we have to defend simultaneous threats from both sides. If we run from the slower fleet, we’re headed away from our objective and run into the smaller fleet. If we—”

“Thank you, I get the idea,” Spencer said.

“Sir, the thing I don’t understand is that they don’t seem to be making any sort of disposition in case we do make an intrasystem jump. It’s a rare move, but not unknown.”

“First, remember their ships don’t have jump gear,” Spencer said. “That might keep them from concentrating on it. And you might try thinking like a robot, Lieutenant,” Spencer said. “The jump is unpredictable. It will put us in a more or less random location, and is somewhat dangerous. Robots don’t approve of random events, or of endangering themselves.”

Now, Spencer thought.
Now
was the moment, when the enemy had committed itself as far as it was going to. Spencer leaned forward eagerly, and felt the blood racing in his veins.

Doing the unexpected, the unthinkable was what made the risks worthwhile. “All hands, all ships to jump stations,” Spencer ordered.

Klaxons hooted. Throughout the fleet, monitor cameras caught crew members rushing to their stations. The fusion generators were powered up, their energy rerouted from the main engines to the power-draining jump generators. The navigation crews took a last scan of the mass distributions of their ships, and of the space surrounding them.

Their target point was still twenty million miles away, making it flatly impossible to do even the crudest mass survey there. It barely mattered. If the local mass survey missed anything larger than a fist-sized sky rock within five thousand kilometers of the fleet, that would be enough to throw them ten thousand klicks off-target at the other end. And with all the small, random clumps of mass to be found in an asteroid belt, the odds were they were missing plenty of fist-sized rocks. It wasn’t likely they’d get anywhere near the target.

Banquo, Macduff
and
Lennox
reported themselves ready for jump. Spencer felt something cold in his gut. There was no more dodging battle, no more room for clever maneuver. Now they had to go straight to the enemy, and fight it out until one side or the other died. If they got that far, if the jump gear didn’t deposit them a million light years away, or with a boulder trying to occupy the same space as the bridge.

“Synchronize jump gear and engage,” he said quietly.

The lights dimmed on the bridge as the jump system drew power. “Five seconds,” the navigation officer said. “Four, three, two, one, zero—”

The universe disappeared.

Chapter Twenty-Two
Shields

As abruptly as the old sky had vanished, a new one snapped into existence. For a brief, terrible moment, Spencer thought the jump had indeed vaulted the
Banquo
into uncharted space. But no, these were the stars as seen from Daltgeld’s sky. It was just that the jump had rotated the ship a bit relative to the stars, and a different piece of the sky was visible.

All right, they were still in the right star system. But where in it? Which way to the target, and how far? And where were
Lennox
and
Macduff?

The bridge crew seemed to share none of his disorientation or anxiety, but instantly went about the task of establishing the ship’s current position. Spencer’s eye turned toward the tactical display, still hopelessly scrambled by the jump, showing conflicted data and low-probability projections that were the best it could do with no information. The display was even showing three different
Banquos.

Finally, the screen began to tidy itself a bit, eliminating the bad data.
Banquo’s
ghosts vanished, leaving only the real ship represented on the screen. The astrogation gear spotted the local sun, various beacon signals and the brighter stars.

The tactical display presented a rough fix that showed them very close to their target point: 100,000 kilometers from the command asteroid. The display continued to refine itself, making minor adjustments as better data came. Finally, at long last, it drew in an image of the command asteroid itself, based not on rough coordinates, but on a direct visual fix.

The image of the asteroid appeared on an external camera, with a line of figures below displaying the range.

Spencer stared at the screen in horror, his heart suddenly pounding. They had managed to arrive near the target point all right—too damn near! They were only 95,000 klicks from the target, and a mere
five thousand
from the command asteroid! And moving
toward
it at three kilometers a minute!

“Shields up, half-power,
fast!”
Tallen ordered. Half-power was the strongest shield that would allow the sensors to see anything at all. “The enemy is bound to have some sort of defenses this close in. Get the shields on, and get ready to snap to full power. Weapons, can you pick up missile tracks through half-power shields?”

“Yes, Sir, though
not
very well.”

“How the hell did we pop in so damn
close
to them?” Suss asked.

“Not on purpose, that’s for sure,” Spencer said. “Any theories, Dostchem?”

“Only two,” the Capuchin answered. The fur on the nape of her neck was bristled up, and her tail flicked back and forth nervously. “You had to come out
somewhere,
and by simple chance it was here. Either that, or the massive gravity-wave generation in the vicinity had some sort of attractive effect during the dimensional transition of the jump.”

“Does that mean the other ships should be this close as well?” Suss asked.

“Not necessarily. Even if we were drawn here by the gravity-wave generation, it could be a highly localized effect, or one of extremely short range. I have no data and cannot predict. I will investigate.” She turned and left the bridge, using arms, legs and tail to guide her toward the hatch.

“Comm Officer,” Tallen Deyi asked. “Can you raise either of the other ships?”

“Negative, Sir. No sign of either craft. But I can report a lot of civilian traf—”

“SHIELDS ON FULL!” the weapons officer shouted.

The lights in the bridge faded under the sudden power surge. The ship shuddered and yawed over, flinging bits of loose gear around the bridge. Two or three crew who had been out of their crash couches went sailing across the compartment.

“That was close,” the weapons officer announced. “Some sort of free flyer missile lying in wait. It lit its engines two hundred klicks away. Probably hundreds more of them around.”