The battle of Devastation reef hw-3 Page 13

  Jaruzelska broke his concentration. “Right, Michael. I need a few more minutes of your time, and I’ll be gone. Your cabin will be fine.”

  “Sir.”

  Jaruzelska looked Michael right in the face. “Right. What I’m about to tell you is classified Top Secret Mersin.”

  “Mersin?”

  “Restricted distribution, top secret matters specific to dreadnoughts. You’ll be pleased to know that you are the most junior member on the Mersin access list. I think the next most junior is a commodore, and there’s only one of those.”

  “Oh,” Michael said, wondering just how much more responsibility Fleet could load on a mere lieutenant’s shoulders. “Right.”

  “Let me just tell you something about dreadnoughts. A bit of history. What we’re doing is not the first time Fleet has experimented with unmanned warships.”

  Michael’s mouth sagged open. “Wha … you’re kidding me, sir.”

  Jaruzelska shook her head. “No, I’m not. Tufayl is not the first. Fleet trialed the concept during the Third Hammer war. By late ‘80, things were not going well for us; casualty recovery rates stayed well below what the war planners hoped for, and we struggled to crew the ships we had available. Nothing like as bad as after Comdur but still difficult. So we tried unmanned ships. Just the one to start with, the heavy cruiser Pericles. They didn’t gut the ship the way we have dreadnoughts; they only took the crew off. To cut a long story short, it turned out a complete disaster. The ship’s primary AI decided that it did not like being pushed around by someone in another ship, threw a fit, and went off on its own. It was last seen heading in the general direction of the Kalifati system-nobody knows why-before it jumped, never to be seen again. To this day, Fleet has no idea where the ship is or what it’s been up to. We had a few ship sightings early on which may have been Pericles, and some unexplained attacks on ships, but nothing conclusive.”

  “Oh!” Michael said softly, eyes widening in shock. “An unmanned warship with unrestricted command authority. Tell me she wasn’t carrying full missile magazines”-Jaruzelska nodded-“oh, that’s not good.”

  “No, not good at all,” Jaruzelska agreed, her face grim. “It gets worse. The Pericles experiment violated the Dakota System Treaty. An egregious violation was how the lawyers described it. If word leaks out, the Federated Worlds will be in a great deal of trouble given how sensitive people are about self-replicating machines. Understandably, they would see the Pericles as a step way too far down that road.”

  “I think I would, too, sir. There are a lot of smart AIs onboard a cruiser, not to mention the fabrication machines and knowledge bases to make pretty much anything they want. So that’s one reason …” Michael’s voice trailed off.

  Jaruzelska finished the sentence for him: “… why certain senior officers are so implacably opposed to the whole idea, yes.”

  “Ah … so Admiral Perkins is cleared for Mersin material?”

  “He is.”

  “Seems he has reason to oppose dreadnoughts, good reason.”

  “I hate to say it, but he does.”

  Michael said nothing for a while. The Pericles fiasco might explain Perkins’s behavior, but it sure as hell did not excuse it. Orders were orders, goddamn it. “Hang on, sir,” he said. “We’re going to have unmanned ships with command authority. Nine of them.”

  “Yes, we are. Which brings me to the real point. The dreadnoughts will have command authority only while they hold biometric tokens issued by you and your executive officer, or your coxswain if either one of you is disabled. It’s a fine legal point, I know, but the lawyers tell us that using time-limited tokens makes the dreadnoughts compliant with the Dakota System Treaty. The AI engineers have sworn blind that dreadnoughts can’t and won’t do a Pericles on us. So tokens it is. I’ll com you and Ferreira the subroutine for your neuronics; it’ll generate the tokens the dreadnoughts will need to keep operating.”

  “And if they don’t get them?”

  “Their weapons systems and fabrication machines are disabled, and they come home if they can. If they can’t, they self-destruct. Right, stand by … Okay, you should have the subroutine. Let me see … Yes, you have an hour to enable your new squadron, so I suggest you get on with it. I’ll be pretty pissed if I see those ships slinking back home with their weapons systems disabled. Righto, that’s it. I’m off.”

  “Sir.”

  Proud of what he had achieved in such a short time, Michael watched the ships of Dreadnought Squadron One accelerate out of Comdur orbit, their first deployment as an operational unit. Jaruzelska had given him two days to prove he was able to manage ten dreadnoughts. Michael knew he had every reason to be confident; after all those hours in the sims, why wouldn’t he be? The big unknown was what came next; Dreadnought Squadron One was still to receive any operational tasking.

  Michael shook his head. Getting the First operational had been an enormous job, and it struck him as strange that he still had no idea what the squadron would be doing.

  Not that there was a lack of potential missions. The Hammers, taking advantage of their superior numbers, were running Fleet ragged. They were hitting Fed trade hard, to the point where Fleet was considering the introduction of convoys despite the enormous costs and delays that would impose on merchant shipping. And if the Hammers were not interdicting Fed merships, they were carrying out hit-and-run attacks on forward sensor stations, pinchcomm relay facilities, deepspace support bases, and, just in the last few days, helium-3 processing plants in orbit around the gas giants Balendra-3 and Corparien-6.

  Like every officer in the Fleet, Michael studied the daily summary of Fleet operations with obsessive interest, and one thing was abundantly clear to him. With the bulk of the Fleet tied up with planetary protection-thanks to the threat posed by Hammer antimatter missiles-and trade protection, there was no shortage of soft targets for the Hammers to go after. That left the Feds one step behind the Hammers, staggering around like a punch-drunk boxer trying to work out where the next blow might come from. And things would stay that way until something changed; for Michael’s money, that something was the arrival of Dreadnought Squadron One. Thus, why they had yet to receive any tasking remained a mystery, though he would wager good money that Fleet politics had a lot to do with it.

  “Command, Warfare. Squadron is in station, on vector. Request permission to jump.”

  “Command approved.”

  “All ships, immediate execute Kilo-2. I say again immediate execute Kilo-2. Stand by … execute!”

  In an instant, the ten ships of the First jumped into pinchspace, leaving only brief ultraviolet flares to mark their departure.

  “What?”

  Brain clouded by sleep, Michael struggled to wake up, the insistent chiming of his neuronics impossible to ignore. Forcing his mind into gear, he accepted the com from the combat information center.

  Sedova had the watch. “Captain, sir, officer in command, sir. Flash pinchcomm from Fleet. We’ve been ordered to drop into normalspace to receive new tasking.”

  “Ah, right,” Michael replied, still groggy. “Get things moving. I’ll be in the CIC in a moment. Anything to tell us what Fleet has in mind?”

  “No, sir. Just that we need to drop soonest.”

  “Okay. On my way.”

  “Okay, folks. Sorry to drag everyone out of bed, but we have a mission. Operation Blue Tango.” A scowl crossed Michael’s face; where did Fleet get mission names from? He paused while a frisson of excitement ran through the Tufayl’s, crew. “Right, we’re going to go virtual for this so that the rest of the squadron can join in, so patch your neuronics into my conference channel.”

  Michael waited patiently until his crew and the avatars representing the warfare AIs of the nine other ships of the First together with those of Warfare, Kenny, and Kal came online. The virtual conference room was crowded, an air of anticipation obvious. Even the AIs-normally imperturbable-appeared interested.

  “Lets go,” Michael
said, cutting through the rising chatter. “I’ll give a quick overview before we split up to finalize the details of the ops plan. Fleet intelligence has reported the imminent departure of a major Hammer deployment out of the Fortitude system. Large task group size, mission unknown. This has left Fortitude’s defenses depleted and open to attack. Clearly, the Hammers don’t believe we have the assets to exploit the opportunity this deployment has given us. We also believe that they will rely on their antimatter capability to make up for any shortfall in warships left to protect Fortitude. Since dealing with antimatter threats is what dreadnoughts are for, our task is to show them the error of their ways.”

  There was a soft murmur, the shock obvious. The moment of truth for the dreadnoughts was at hand, and everyone knew it.

  “Our mission comes in two parts,” Michael said “First, an assault on this”-his hand stabbed out to identify a point in Fortitude nearspace marked in red on the holovid-“space battle station here, HSBS-372. Our aim is to draw the Hammer defenders out and force them to commit their antimatter missiles to the station’s defense before closing in to destroy it. You’ll understand, of course,” Michael said, his face grim, “that every antimatter missile the Hammers waste on us is one less they can use on the home planets.”

  A quiet growl of anger ran through the room while Michael continued. “Once we have eliminated the battle station, we will jump out-system to remass”-another stab at the holovid-“here. When we’ve remassed, we will reverse vector for the jump back into Fortitude nearspace. Fleet believes, and I agree, that the Hammers will not be expecting us to return so quickly, so hopefully we can catch them with their pants around their ankles.

  “Our target for the second run will be this orbital heavy maintenance platform, OHMP-344 here”-his finger stabbed at a red icon in Clarke orbit around Fortitude-“along with any Hammer fleet units berthed on it. Just because OHMP-344 is a maintenance platform does not mean it’s a pushover. The Hammers protect them every bit as well as we protect ours, but I think ten dreadnoughts should be more than enough for the job. When we’re done with them, we’ll adjust vector and jump for Comdur. Any questions so far?”

  The conference room was deathly quiet, and for good reason. This mission was like no mission anyone present had ever seen. Once again, Michael thought, dreadnoughts are going to tear up the Fighting Instructions before throwing them in the trash.

  “No questions?” Michael asked, scanning the room. “Okay. Before we get down to the details, there are two mission constraints you need to be aware of. One is time. To place the Hammers under maximum pressure-who knows, we might even force them to recall their task group before they attack-it is crucial we launch this operation on schedule. Second, we go in cold. No loitering out in farspace building the best threat plot known to humankind, no agonizing over every sensor intercept, no analyzing every last vector. On the way in, we will rendezvous with a relaysat to download whatever intelligence Fleet’s reconsats in Fortitude deepspace have been able to acquire. If that’s bugger all, so be it. The space battle station’s not going anywhere, nor is the maintenance platform. Okay, that’s enough from me. Detailed planning teams, you know who you are, so let’s get going. We’ll reconvene in two hours to put everything together.”

  Michael offered up a silent prayer while he watched the virtual conference dissolve. The First would need all the help it could get. For a first operation, this one was an absolute doozy, and if it went even half-right, it would be a bloody miracle. A small shiver went down his spine when something struck him.

  Was he being set up to fail?

  Sunday, December 31, 2400, UD

  Eternity deepspace

  For many months, the cluster of deepspace gravitation arrays-ugly assemblies of plasteel girders thousands of meters long hung with gravity wave detectors-monitored the tiny perturbations in pinchspace caused by the passage of ships outbound from Eternity, the fourth planet of the Hammer Worlds.

  Month by month, data accumulated, terabytes of numbers recording the infinitesimal displacement of pinchspace caused by the mass of transiting starships. Over time, the data took form, and soon the arrays were able to compute the vectors followed by the Hammer ships.

  Some vectors were already well known-the established trade routes between Eternity and Serhati, Scobie’s World, the planets of the Javitz Union, and the Pascanici League-but one was new, a route to no place shown on any Fed chart.

  A pinchcomm signal flashed across deepspace back to the Federated Worlds to report the anomaly.

  Two weeks later, deepspace survey drones were dispatched to seed the mystery vector with sensorsats, spherical satellites the size of beach balls carrying a power supply, ultraviolet sensors, and a simple laser tightbeam transmitter. Working with mindless diligence, the drones laid a line of sensorsats along the mystery vector out into deepspace, the satellites strung out like beads on a thread hundreds of light-years long.

  Patiently, the sensorsats scanned space for the unmistakable signature of ships dropping in and out of pinchspace, the intense, fleeting flares of ultraviolet the one transmission no ship in humanspace could suppress. Every few days, a survey drone dropped out of pinchspace to interrogate each sensorsat in turn. A handful reported ship activity. The drone dropped more sensorsats to triangulate the source. One week later, it had established the location of the ship activity: a small asteroid, not shown on any Fed survey, wandering alone in deepspace, 235 light-years out from the Hammer Worlds.

  To the stealthed reconsats sent in to investigate, the asteroid’s purpose was obvious: to support a small plant mining and processing the driver mass used by starships. The survey drone noted the vectors of ships leaving the planetoid after remassing. Calling for assistance, it started the process again, seeding another vector to nowhere with sensorsats.

  A month after the initial report from the gravitation arrays, the survey drone found what the Federated Worlds had been searching for so desperately. Judging by the gigantic infrared signature radiated into space from massed banks of heat dumps, a substantial industrial-scale facility lay buried inside a small carbonaceous asteroid-identified on Fed charts as Mathuli-4451-deep in the heart of the confused tangle of rips in space-time marked on Fed space charts as Devastation Reef.

  When analysts examined the survey drone’s reports, their conclusion was emphatic. The Devastation Reef complex was the Hammer antimatter manufacturing facility, the linchpin of the Hammer fleet’s strategic advantage.

  Thursday, January 11, 2401, UD

  FWSS

  Tufayl,

  Fortitude planetary farspace

  Junior Lieutenant Kat Sedova’s face popped onto the command holovid. The Ghost’s command pilot appeared nervous, her tongue flicking out across dry lips. For a moment, he wondered if he had been right to send Tufayl’s lander across to the Iron Duke. Michael pushed the concern away. Either Sedova coped or she did not. Either way, he could not worry about it. He had done his bit; it was up to her.

  “All set?”

  “We are, sir. This is one big ship. Kind of spooky being here on our own.” She stopped. “But we’ll be fine. We’ve simmed the mission, and we’re just setting it up to run it again with a few problems thrown in. But I’m confident.”

  “Good. Follow the plan and you’ll be fine.”

  “Roger that, sir. Ghost, out.”

  “Sensors. Where are we up to with the threat plot?”

  “We’re downloading data from the reconsats,” Leading Spacer Carmellini said from the sensor management workstation. “I’ll have the threat plot updated shortly.”

  “Roger.” Michael was relieved. For some reason, the relay satellite collating data from the far-flung web of reconnaissance satellites thrown around Fortitude was not where it was supposed to be. With time running out, it had been a frantic business trying to locate it without using any active sensors; the fact that the dreadnoughts’ heat dumps were radiating the prodigious amounts of waste heat accumulated in their
pinchspace jump was all the advertising he was prepared to tolerate.

  Michael watched the threat plot while it updated. Some update. It was time-stamped hours earlier. “Shit,” he muttered. Tactical intelligence that old was worthless. It made no difference; his dreadnoughts would be going into this attack cold. The Hammers might have deployed their entire fleet across their path when the time came to attack, and he would not know it.

  “Warfare. Weapons free. You have command authority.”

  “Roger, I have command authority,” the battle management AI replied, its voice, as always, calm and measured. “All ships, Warfare. Weapons free. Execute to follow, Foxtrot-1. I say again execute to follow, Foxtrot-1. Acknowledge.”

  Michael listened with half an ear while the acknowledgments flowed in. It was an impressive roll call: Orion, the oldest ship in the squadron, proudly bearing a list of battle honors longer than that of any other ship in the Fed order of battle; Iron Knight, blooded in the Fourth Hammer war and sister ship to the Iron Duke; Sina, Qurrah, Khaldun, and Al-Khayyam, all sister ships to the Tufayl; Rebuke and Rebut, the youngest ships in the squadron.

  One thing all those ships had in common was the Battle of Comdur. Far too many spacers and marines had been killed or injured in those ships, and more than ever before, the awful pressure to avenge those casualties weighed heavily on him.

  Warfare gave the order. “All ships, command. Foxtrot-1, stand by … execute!”

  In a blaze of ultraviolet, the squadron jumped, and Operation Blue Tango was under way in earnest.

  A tiny fraction of a second later, the squadron erupted into Hammer space, proximity alarms screeching to let Michael know his threat plot was seriously out of line with reality. Michael ignored them while he watched the threat plot firm up, the blazing red icon of the Hammer space battle station dead ahead of them, surrounded by a gaggle of Hammer ships. Iron bands squeezed his chest hard, making breathing difficult; he counted five heavy cruisers, supported by many times that number of smaller ships, ranging from light cruisers to heavy scouts. “Goddamnit,” he murmured. That was a lot of firepower; even though his dreadnoughts were tough, this was going to be one hell of a fight.