The Champlain was a wreck. Two cannon
blasts had torn through vital parts of the ship simultaneously. The
anti-personnel rounds had done some structural damage, but the energy
levels of the radiation had been precisely tuned to slaughter the
crew. Because the ship was far from destroyed, the remaining crew,
with luck, could patch the holes, make the ship spaceworthy again,
and perhaps survive long enough to be rescued.
It had been the fleet’s flagship;
the captain had hosted the Commodore of the fleet, as well as the
military commander for the cluster. Once, it had a full complement of
crew and marines, plus hand-picked staff for intelligence and
communications. Now, it was a sarcophagus. Flight engineers would
describe it as a ship slowly filling with vacuum. The falling
pressure would kill those that had not been slaughtered by the
high-temperature radiation.
Two of the supporting frigates had
been damaged in the initial attack, and subsequently collided with
each other. The collision had made a very bad situation much worse.
After losing a connecting gallery in the initial attack, one frigate
then lost a crew compartment in the collision; the bulkheads had
sealed, isolating parts of the ship. The other frigate has lost all
of its gravity foils, and was falling into the nearby star,
completely out of control. Scouts scrambled to rescue the crew.
The third frigate attending the
Champlain tried to move in to a position to rescue the top
commanders. The initial damage had put the Champlain into a tumble,
but incapacitated crew was occupied trying to stop the leaks. The
frigate, with some care, had computed a course that would match the
tumble, allowing a hard dock and the transfer of survivors. As they
closed with the Champlain, the Henry Base Gun Two spotted them as a
working ship. The gun slowly traversed to match course.
The frigate, in following the
tumbling destroyer, could not bring its guns to bear effectively on
the cannon. The frigate sensor crew marked the traversal of the gun;
it was the second-hand of the clock that counted down to their
execution. They fired wildly, hoping that they might intimidate or
distract the crew of the gun.
The gun’s ionized plasma tore
through the frigate’s shielding, causing catastrophic metal fatigue
and killing everyone in the path of the blast immediately. Parts of
the stream continued through the frigate and into the destroyer,
causing even more damage to the already injured ship.
From the shadow of the cannon, a
number of Core Planet scout ships erupted. They pounced on the
damaged frigate, strafing it with even more damaging fire. After two
more passes, the scouts planned to force entry into the ship and
finish its destruction.
❖
Major General William Johnson had
left the Lyman base staff with a bewildering list of stores,
equipment and materiel required by the Henry base. All of it had to
be ordered from other planets, shipped to the Lyman base, stored
temporarily until it could be organized for transport to the Henry
base.
The bridge crew on Lyman base was
completely focused on managing the freighter traffic to and from the
base. Their current standing orders required careful examination of
incoming ships for Cephalopod contact. The intelligence community was
trying to understand the nature of Cephalopod alliances and enemies.
Captain Racinowski was the deck
officer of the day. He was known as “Rat Man” even though was
large and slow-moving. Racinowski liked to correlate the previous
shift’s arrival and departure counts with the number of docking
piers actually in use. It was a half hour of low-value busy work that
eased him into the routine on the bridge. Also, when he found
discrepancies, he felt that his attention to detail reinforced his
fitness to be the senior officer.
The chatter of the traffic control
was a quiet contrapuntal chant that was the background of their
working life. The arrival and departure counts looked like they would
balance properly when the Rat Man noticed a small trace of dissonance
in the background chatter. He looked up from his clipboard to see the
source.
One of the sensor operators was
looking around at the adjacent displays in obvious confusion. Rat Man
set aside the counts and walked over to see what was interrupting the
orderly chorus of the bridge.
“Captain,” the crewmember
reported, leaning back in his seat, “I think I see shooting at
Henry base.”
Rat Man looked at the other displays
for a moment. Mentally, he ticked off the reasons why this was
unlikely: Henry base was a tremendous distance away; there was an
intervening star system; it was a dust and debris system, making all
sensor readings very obscure; it was incoherent propagation, not the
coherent wave function of a ship in transit or transmission of
signals; the biggest reason of all was that Lyman base had their
freighter full of critical cannon parts parked nearby, waiting for
orders to send them to Henry base.
“Shooting?” Rat Man asked.
The crewmember leaned over his
display, and made some adjustments to sharpen up the image.
“I think it’s our plasma
cannons,” the crewmember said. “Five or six, firing
simultaneously.”
Rat Man looked down at the sensor,
and saw the shimmering echoes of a vast, coherent ionic discharge
coming from the right piece of the sky. The crewmember dialed in the
cannon filters; as soon as they were in place, the signal dropped
away to nothing.
“Plus surface guns, sir,” said
the crewmember sitting next to him.
Rat Man sighed. He was too old for a
shooting war. He was just a traffic controller. He reached over and
switched on the communications to the base senior commander.
“Colonel, post a code yellow alert.
The Outer Rim appears to be attacking Henry base.” There would be a
long pause while this was sent through the network to the personal
communicator of the senior officer in charge. Rat Man used the time
to start reassigning the crew. He set one member to counting shots,
getting accurate measurements; he set another to pulling the
recordings to see when the first shot was fired. He set a third to
trying to locate any communication signals buried in the background
noise of space. He told the rest to stop traffic completely until
further notice.
The call came back from Sims, the
senior officer, with the expected requests for some kind of positive,
independent confirmation. Rat Man asked for an hour to gather data.
Sims gave him twenty minutes; Rat Man only needed ten. He hated the
game, but played it well.
❖
Eyre had reduced his rate of fire to
avoid damaging his gun. The discharge was a tremendous strain, as was
the charging cycle. He was fortunate that it didn’t take too many
shots to put the Outer Rim fleet into confusion. There was a general
retreat and regrouping of the Outer Rim ships. Then the remaining
Core ships began forming up near the Henry Base. The battle would
change from bombardment to ship-to-ship action, requiring
considerably more care in target selection.
While the Core fleet formed up, Eyre
kept the cannons firing at any Outer Rim ship that slipped into
range. The Outer Rim fleet may have retreated, but it remained
active, and very dangerous. Eyre knew that they would start to work
around the guns, looking for vulnerabilities in the gun placements.
With care, they could, eventually, wear down the guns.
❖
Larry Drover had shaped several
alternative courses back to Henry base. He was sure, however, that he
couldn’t get the damaged Outer Rim scout onto any of those courses.
The ship was too heavily loaded and badly damaged to make the trip.
He was not sure of the state of the life support systems, either.
There were too many unknowns, too many things that were certain to go
wrong.
“Come on baby,” he said to the
ship. “Just a little more.”
Whiting was still sitting at the
weapons console. The guns no longer worked on the scout. Either they
were out of ammunition, or some critical component had failed. It was
hard to be sure without a thorough examination. Some parts of the
ship had been damaged, and the bulkheads had sealed automatically.
They weren’t sure that they could even leave the bridge.
Whiting leaned over and put her arm
around Larry’s shoulders. She could feel his tension. He was
hunched over his console, his hands shaking as he tried to get the
ship to respond.
“You’re doing great,” she said.
It was not a cheap motivational tribute; she had seen marine pilots
unable to fly a ship with so much damage. “What do we have for
fuel?”
Larry glanced around for a moment, he
brought up a display that was not encouraging. In order to do the
basic math, he had to stop his search for Outer Rim ships pursuing
him. It was hard to switch his focus to anything other than the
enemy.
“Has our vent rate increased?” Mo
asked.
That stopped Larry cold. He was
having trouble doing a straight line calculation. If the vent rate
was increasing, the hole was being torn open, the distance they could
cover on the remaining fuel was falling. That reduced their effective
range, and put even more pressure on him to get the ship to safety.
Larry could see where Mo was headed;
they really couldn’t get anywhere further than the desolate rock in
the dust and debris cloud. This would expose them to a ground battle
between Outer Rim and Core forces.
“I don’t know,” Larry muttered.
“We don’t really have a lot of choice, do we?”
Natalie leaned
closer, putting her head against his shoulder.
“Half the fleet’s down there.
We’ll rendezvous with them and join the surface defense.” It was,
to Natalie, the only choice. It put her back in contact with the
Marines, their only salvation. To Larry, it put them in harm’s way;
when it was time to evacuate, he was only a civilian and would be
abandoned.
“I don’t want to get shot at,”
he said, empty of any sound, logical reasons for staying in space.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have come
back to this rock,” she said quietly.
She sighed, looking for a resolve she
barely felt. She wasn’t sure what she’d accomplished. Her
scouting mission had failed when she believed Dieskau’s assertion
that he would attack Lyman. She couldn’t see how Dieskau could have
been so absolutely convincing while having a secret plan to attack
Henry, and she couldn’t imagine anyone who could change Dieskau’s
attack from Lyman to Henry at the last minute. Her attempt to turn
the ambush into an orderly retreat seemed to have worked, but she
didn’t know if Henry base had responded. She would never know,
trapped here on this desolate rock. Even if she got back to General
Johnson, her role in this horrifying mess would be ambiguous.
On the balance, Larry had done
everything he could to keep her alive. He’d saved her from the
ambush; he’d flown the Core Scout until it was disabled. He’d
flown the unfamiliar Outer Rim scout until that ship was almost
wrecked out from under them. He had a huge reserve of skills. Even if
he was annoying, he was successful and competent; she didn’t dare
ask for anything more. She realized that should have offered him some
support, instead of threats and intimidation. She had secured the
ship for him. He had flown it for her. As a team, they might be able
to work through this and survive long enough to get rescued.
“We’re here,” she said, sitting
up straight at her console. “We’ll get through this, too.” She
glanced over at him; he was looking at her closely. “I’m sorry
about the gun business,” she added quietly.
Larry leaned over and put his head on
her shoulder. He sighed, relaxing visibly. His hands dropped off the
console and fell onto his lap. He massaged his face for a moment.
“You must have been desperate,”
he said quietly.
Natalie sighed. It felt good to
relax, even for just a moment. He was warm, alive and real. He wasn’t
a threat, or a concealed threat, or a possible problem. He was a
pilot who had done everything she wanted.
“No. I was scared. Johnson had me
in his sights. I panicked and took it out on you. It was a mistake;
we’re better as a team.”
The ship shifted slightly. Larry
glanced up at a display to be sure it was just gravity increasing as
they closed with the planet.
“Could we,” Larry started and
paused. He had doubts about asking anything from her. But with her
leaning on his shoulder, her arm draped across the back of his seat,
he decided to ask anyway. “You know, could we see each other
socially? You know, when I have a delivery out here again. Or
something.”
Natalie laughed. Larry had never
heard her laugh before.
“After this? Dating seems a little
too low-key. We should just get married.” She said it with her
usual matter-of-fact determination. To Larry, it sounded like and
order, and it was up to him to work out the details. He sat up in his
seat to he could turn around and look at her.
“I mean,” she stammered, “if
you want to.” She might have been blushing. “Did that sound like
I was giving orders?”
“No ma’am,” Larry said.
He glanced over at Mo; it had slumped
down on its table and faded to an odd color, probably from
exhaustion. It looked like a kind of cowering posture. Larry sighed
and stretched up straight. He changed the angle of the console seat
to force him to sit back a bit.
“You still with us, Mo?”
Mo stirred around a bit. “Are we
not great fighters?” Mo replied. The listless stirring revealed the
truth underpinning the synthesized voice booming through the ship’s
intercom.
“Okay, chief, can you rig this for
gravity?”
“Do we know Outer Rim scout ships?”
Mo asked. “Are we rated crew only Core Planets medium freight?”
“Great,” Larry said. “Do what
you can; keep looking for the ground tackle.”
Whiting reached over
and touched his hand. Her fingers were warm and dry. His hands were
still cold and wet from sweat. Her touch was calm and confident. He
found relief; knowing she would make the right decisions about where
to land and what to do once they landed. He could relax and focus on
flying, leaving the surface details to her. It was a comfort to know
that they were able to share the burden of survival.
❖
The force defending the Lyman base
was only a frigate, two small brigs and an odd collection of scouts.
It was enough to secure a base against an isolated Cephalopod raid;
it was barely enough to show the Outer Rim that this was Core Planets
territory.
Colonel Sims had done well under
William Johnson. He had purchased the rank of lieutenant, but had
been promoted to colonel. He was eligible to be a general by
seniority, but the Lyman base just wasn’t big enough to justify the
rank of general. Sims, however, was planning on the expansion of
Lyman base, and his eventual elevation to general.
When Captain “Rat Man” Racinowski
laid out the data, Colonel Sims had to admit that the probabilities
of a battle were very high. Rat Man had used just about every tool at
his disposal in the brief time allotted to him to gather data. Unlike
many officers, Racinowski was intimate with the men and equipment
under his command. He’d personally adjusted filter settings and
stared at displays to be sure that it was Core Planets cannon fire.
Sims had not worked closely with
Racinowski before this. He knew him well enough, but had never seen
him in action. When Sims had asked for more information, Rat Man
didn’t call in one of his crew. He knew the readings, ranges and
bearings off the top of his head. Sims was impressed by Rat Man’s
performance.
“How large a force?” Sims asked.
Racinowski peered at Sims for a
moment, his expression falling to one of sudden doubt and confusion.
“I’m not sure how big our force
was at Henry base,” Rat Man stammered.
Sims wondered what had wrecked Rat
Man’s confidence. Sims could see that he had strayed into an area
where Rat Man was not prepared.
“Their force. Make a bet; how many
of them are we shooting at?”
Rat Man fumbled around for a moment,
patting pockets and looking very lost. After checking his entire
uniform, he looked around and saw a folder full of printed notes and
a small computer on top of that. Sims looked at the notes, also. The
folder was crammed with scraps of paper. Rat Man picked up the
folder, opened it, and started shuffling the papers haphazardly. It
was a complete contrast from the confident Rat Man of only moments
ago.
Sims couldn’t see everything in the
folder, but he could see that the hard copies of images, and displays
had scrawled notes in margins and on the backs. It was a complete
mess of raw data. It showed an underlying undisciplined
disorganization that shook Sim’s confidence in the results.
Rat Man flipped over a report of some
kind and read a note for a while.
“We counted,” Rat Man started
then stopped, still peering at his report. “We counted the,” he
started again and looked up at Sims, lost. “What do you call it?”
Rat Man asked; then said, “Spectral signatures.”
Sims nodded. He carefully maintained
a very dour, almost sad expression when listening to briefings. He
liked to wait to the end without showing any preferences or opinions
of his own.
“We counted less than a dozen gun
spectral signatures,” Rat Man announced. Rat Man was suddenly
complete confidence again. “We’re still analyzing the recordings,
but we think we saw some ships firing before we started firing, but
haven’t seen those signatures since.”
Sims looked at the random pile of
scribbled notes. He realized he would have to make a difficult
decision based on scribbled recollections on the edges of torn scraps
of paper. It made it easy to keep his sad face on. Sims didn’t know
that some of Rat Man’s notes were scribbled on desk-tops and
consoles in the sensor bay.
“You’re saying the odds are good
that we silenced some of their ships during the first shots fired?”
Rat Man looked up at him with an odd
joy. “I should get you the recording of the first shots. We think
it was six or eight guns all firing at once! You should see the
interference noise spikes: off the scale.”
Sims sat back in his chair for a
moment. The picture was becoming clearer. The Outer Rim had attacked
Henry, and Henry had fired back, silencing the Outer Rim ships. The
force at Henry was large, the base well-defended. There were two
scenarios that Sims would put bets on: overwhelming force or bad
intelligence. If the Outer Rim had overwhelming force, they might try
to assault the base. That kind of force would have been impossible to
conceal, so it was the less likely scenario. If the Outer Rim was
mistaken about the level of readiness, they may have attacked,
thinking the base lightly defended.
While the official military doctrine
left to Sims the question of how large a force he should commit for
the relief of Henry base, his fleet was so tiny that he had no choice
except to send all of his ships. He had a number of fixed cannon, so
the base would have some defense without the ships. It appeared that
the Core Planet’s plan to push the Rim out of this cluster had gone
terribly wrong; they were now fighting to keep their position in the
cluster. It was a very safe bet that the Outer Rim had no reserves to
pounce on an undefended Lyman base.
His communicator buzzed. Racinowski
stared at it. Sims saw that it was intelligence; he put them on the
speaker so Rat Man could hear.
“Sims,” Sims said. “You’re on
speaker with Racinowkski.” “Hey Rat Man, Daddy-O here,”
intelligence said. It was Lieutenant D’Addio.
“What have you got?” Sims asked.
“Stragglers from an ambush,”
Daddy-O announced with some pride.
“Ambush?” Sims and Rat Man asked.
“Ambush,” Daddy-O said. “I’d
say that the Outer Rim caught some of our ships in the dust and
debris system, midway to Henry.”
Sims tried to take surprise off his
face and resume looking sad.
Rat Man frowned. “When?”
“A day or more,” Daddy-O replied.
“It would have been all close combat, small ship weapons. I doubt
you’d have seen it from here.”
Rat Man looked relieved. Sims
recognized that same edge of glee that Colonel Williams had when he
was right and everyone else was wrong. Sims often thought of D’Addio
as someone who would eventually replace Williams in the command
structure of the Core Planets. The association was ironic, since
D’Addio would be the first to announce officially that Williams has
been killed.
Sims said, “Thanks,” and turned
off the intercom. He turned to Rat Man. “That’s pretty much that.
I guess it’s time to mount ‘em up and move ‘em out.”
Rat Man nodded and started gathering
up his notes and scraps and jamming them into his tattered folder.
Sims stood up; he needed to give acting orders that would put Rat Man
in charge of the base while he was gone; he needed to form up his
tiny fleet for rescue and repair work; he needed to commandeer all of
the empty freighters on the base, which would mean activating all of
the MP’s necessary to arrest the freighters that objected. Sims was
excited, almost enthusiastic; but he kept a focus on moving slowly
and deliberately.
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