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Chapter Eight


Spin One


“I’m going to need your help,” Bowden said to the collection of people he’d slowly accumulated, and genuinely come to think of, as his staff: SpinDog Burg Hrensku, RockHound Malanye Raptis, and Captain Dave Fiezel, a former USAF F-105F pilot. “I have to brief the Families, potentially as early as the day after tomorrow, on how we’re going to stop the Kulsian force that is headed our way.”

“Do we know what we’re facing?” Fiezel asked. “We kind of need to know that in order to develop an answer to it, don’t we?”

“We don’t know exactly yet, as it’s still a long way out, but based on the message traffic and comm hits we’ve intercepted, it appears they’re already on their way here, and they’re coming in heavier and sooner than expected.”

Burg narrowed his eyes. “How soon are they expected and what size force?”

“I just spoke to Murphy, and he’s estimating that they’ll be here in about a hundred and ten days, plus or minus a couple.”

“That soon?” Fiezel asked. “I thought we were going to have almost double that.”

“I thought so, too,” Bowden said. “Unfortunately, we both thought wrong. All of the trouble we’ve caused to far has obviously raised some hackles and has them worried about what’s going on here.”

“How worried?” Raptis asked. “How many ships are they sending?”

“Intel is guessing somewhere between sixty and seventy, probably led by a strong force of corvettes with a bunch of smaller outrider vessels to screen them and a number of cargo ships to bring back the harvest.”

“But we don’t know how many of each yet?” Fiezel asked.

Bowden shook his head. “It’ll be a while before we get any sort of visual confirmation on what’s coming.” He shrugged. “We’ll have to set up our plan based on seventy ships, probably about eighty percent of which are combatants. Call it thirty corvettes and thirty smaller ships with enough weapons to join a fight.”

“That’s a lot of ships,” Burg said. “Even with all the Families pulling together—that’s SpinDogs and RockHounds both—we’ll be lucky to have”—his face scrunched up as he did some calculations—“twenty-five or so corvettes to meet them.”

“With a hundred and ten days?” Bowden asked. “The Otlethes have already started replicating them, along with their allied Families. If we get everyone going—”

“We don’t have a hundred and ten days,” Raptis said. “We probably have less than a hundred.”

Burg nodded.

“Why’s that?” Fiezel asked.

“If Bowden is right, that we must surprise them to succeed, then our ships must be in position before the Kulsians arrive. If all our vessels are still running around when they approach, they will not only foresee our attack, but might have clues to the shape it will take.”

“Right,” Fiezel said. “So how long do we really have, then? At what point will they be able to see us?”

Burg shook his head. “It’s not that easy. Yes, they are probably pointed at us right now. They’re actually driving toward where we’ll be when they arrive, but that’s beside the point. In any event, the bows of their ships are generally pointed in our direction as they boost toward us at whatever the best acceleration is for the slowest ship in the group. They will do that for a while, then they may coast for a while, but as they reach the local area, they will have to turn around and conduct a long braking burn.” He smiled. “That will be the time during which we may be able to move our ships to wherever we need them.”

May be the time?”

Burg shrugged. “Just because their bows are faced away from us, it does not follow that all their sensors are. And although their own exhaust will significantly degrade their ability to see our thermal signatures, they have other means at their disposal. To say nothing of the possibility that, when they are approaching, they may deploy independent sensor platforms that could maneuver away from their exhaust cone and get a clearer picture of what we’re doing.” He frowned. “We will have some time to maneuver to where we need to be, but not more than a few days, maybe a week.”

“Depending on if and when they deploy those sensor drones, we will have a little longer than that,” Raptis said. “The SpinDogs don’t operate at the far reaches of the system like we RockHounds do, and Burg has forgotten one point: there is a lot of debris out there. And as the two stars come closer together, the junk from each system bangs together more frequently, creating an area that is dangerous to fly through, especially for a fleet the size of the one the Kulsians are sending.”

“Right,” Bowden said. “The Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.” All three people looked at Bowden quizzically. “That’s what we called them on my planet in my time. Basically, there’s a region of icy and rocky debris that orbits on the outer edge of the system.”

“Exactly,” Raptis said. “But whereas they are slow-changing around single stars, in a close binary system like ours, they are always changing. And in the eighty-eight years since the Kulsians were last here, it is dangerously different. They will not wish to risk entering it.”

Bowden nodded. “As most of the debris is concentrated on each star’s ecliptic, that means they’d have to go either up or down to avoid it.”

“Correct. This will add distance to their travel, more course corrections, and multiple retroburns. All of which equals lower fuel reserves when they finally arrive.”

“I’ve never done a retroburn after a flight that long,” Bowden said. “How long do you think their burns will be?”

“It’s hard to know,” Raptis said, scratching her head. “It will depend on how hard they boost at the start, and their velocity when they have to dip back down into the ecliptic. If they don’t scrub off the energy they put into both those vectors, they either go flying over or past the planet. Or both.”

“And it will also depend on how efficient they want to be, right?” Bowden asked. “If you had all the fuel in the world, you could boost to halfway, flip over, and boost just as hard and long to stop yourself. I don’t suspect they will have the fuel to do that though.”

Burg shook his head. “No, they don’t. They must calculate their burns so they have some fuel reserves when they get here. Enough to land on the planet or make sure their fuel collection facilities are up and running.” Burg shrugged. “How much is ‘enough,’ though, is a matter of debate. It is impossible to know how much the Kulsians will have when they arrive, but it won’t be much, especially if they are making the transit faster than normal.”

“That’s my thought, too,” Bowden said. “We need to use that against them. Perhaps get them in a battle of maneuver, where they drain themselves dry.”

“If that is a factor,” Raptis said, “then it might be better to wait until they make orbit or—even better—until they start their descent to the planet. Climbing back out of the gravity well will be an even larger drain on their reserves.”

Bowden nodded. “Okay. That’s the answer for ‘when’ we hit them. The other question is how do we best take them under fire to maximize our strengths?”

“What strengths do we have?” Burg asked. “We’re going to have a lot fewer ships.”

“True, but we are operating close to our supply base, so unless we do something stupid, we’re not going to run out of fuel. We have the ability to mass our ships so that—even if we’re outnumbered—we achieve at least a local superiority in numbers. Our best bet will be to concentrate our fleet and strike the rear or side of their formation. We’ll have the fuel for a sharp hit-and-run attack, but if they maneuver to engage, they’ll be spending fuel that they need to conserve to reach their objectives.”

“We’re probably going to want to hide behind R’Bak or its moon,” Raptis said, “or both. Some Families will probably be more comfortable with one or the other. We could maybe hide ships in the asteroids at the Trojan points, too.”

Burg shook his head. “The SpinDogs will never go for that, since it would get the Kulsians interested in looking there. If they were to find the Spins or Outpost . . . ”

“Yeah, let’s not do that,” Bowden said. “We don’t want to give the Kulsians anything for free. We want to make them earn it.” He took a breath and let it out slowly. “Okay. That’s the basis for a plan, anyway. What else can we be doing?”

“We need the fabbers who are better at creating large structures to focus on making the corvettes’ hulls,” Burg said over steepled hands. “Shift the rest to the systems that go into them, with the best reserved for manufacturing the improved systems from your blueprints.”

“Okay, but why relegate some to just building the hulls?” Fiezel asked.

“Because if duplicating the Kulsian systems are as much as they can handle, that’s a waste of time.”

“Why?”

“Because the Kulsians have shit for equipment,” Burg said.

Bowden raised an eyebrow at the epithet.

“That’s what you would say, right?”

Bowden nodded.

“Anyway,” Burg continued, “a great deal of our equipment is better than what we’ve found in the Kulsian corvette. This is particularly true when it comes to the blueprints you brought with you; those systems are not only more advanced, but simpler to operate and maintain. So why would we want to reproduce Kulsian dung when we can outfit the ship with our own—or even better—equipment?”

Raptis frowned. “Not that I am eager to praise the Kulsians, but I do not know if it is fair to say that their systems are ‘crap.’ However, their designs are overengineered without providing any additional redundancy or reliability. So they take up more of a ship’s volume and energy. However, their performance is comparable to our systems, and they are more experienced at building ship-to-ship weapons.”

Fiezel nodded. “And despite all the talk about how lousy all the local computers are—both Kulsian and SpinDog—Makarov has a different take on it. Being Murphy’s one-man staff, he gets to look at a lot of technical briefs in detail. And, not too surprising, it turns out he’s something of a computer whiz. According to him, the local software is not only well-designed but, to use his words, ‘surprisingly elegant.’”

“So why does it suck?”

“Because it’s got to run on analog systems, which really limits what it can do.”

“You just won the understatement-of-the-year award, Dave.”

“Makarov would agree with you. He kind of sympathizes with the SpinDog programmers, says the code feels like it was written by ‘drones wearing straitjackets on their brains.’ Has the same impression of their technical folks, from engineers all the way down to maintenance: competent or better, but shackled to IT and electronics that we’d consider three generations behind their hardware.”

“All good points,” Bowden said. “I think Burg’s suggestion to introduce a level of specialization into the autofabbing tasks is a good one, but we’ll need to bear in mind that it does increase the chance that we could run into interoperability issues. It’s going to be tricky enough to make our machinery fit and work together with what we keep of the Kulsians, but now we’re adding the need to ensure that our different autofabbers are all pulling in the same direction.”

“Which brings us to the greatest challenge in this entire process: making sure the Families do not hold back advantages for their own ships.” Burg’s chuckle was dark. “None of them have ever willingly shared their best equipment with another. Or are likely to now.”

“Even if it’s to defend their habitats?”

“Even then.”

Bowden rubbed his chin. “Do you think you could talk them into letting us have it?”

“Probably not.” Burg held up a hand, stopping Bowden’s next question. “Nor will you be able to get them to do it, nor will Malanye, nor will even your Murphy.”

“What about . . . ?” Bowden thought for a moment. “We’re going to want them built all the same, so if we tell the Families that everyone has to build them the same, they’ll give us their best, right?”

Burg and Raptis looked dubious. “I suppose it is possible,” Burg said, “but I find it highly unlikely.”

“Well, we have to start somewhere, right?”

Burg nodded but remained doubtful.

“So we put together a baseline and I talk to all the Families and see what I can get them to pony up.”

Raptis tilted her head. “‘Pony up’?”

“See what they’ll bring to the table, since their offspring will be flying them.”

Raptis shrugged. “If you say so.”

“I do.” Bowden nodded. “And, while I’m talking to them about the template we’re building for the corvettes, I can also pre-brief them on the plan we have for fighting the Kulsians and get their buy-in.”

“Did you hit your head while you were stealing the corvette, Boss?” Fiezel asked.

“I don’t remember doing so. Why?”

“Because either your brain got bruised or you’ve been away from here for so long that you’ve forgotten how things work. You seem to think that if you can get someone to agree, eventually everyone will agree. And then live up to their words.”

“I know how things work,” Bowden said, “but we’re not just talking about their safety: this is about survival. Don’t you think that’s enough to bring everyone together?”

“Nope.”

Burg shook his head. “No.”

Raptis chuckled.

“So you think there’s a chance?” Bowden asked.

“No. I don’t think you have a—how do you say it, ‘a hope in hell’?—of getting agreement. I just found it amusing that you thought it possible. There are Families that say no to ideas simply because other Families said yes. And what makes it even funnier, and sadder, is that you’re only considering relations among the SpinDogs. Getting consensus among the Families of my own RockHounds is going to be even harder.”

“So you’re telling me I shouldn’t bother?” Bowden asked. “That it’s impossible?”

“No, I agree you should ask. A miracle may happen. However, I think you need to temper your expectations. I suppose that it is not beyond the bounds of reality that everyone will agree with you . . . but I have never yet known it to occur.”


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