Chapter 5
“Hit ’em where they ain’t.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Location: Fort 1, Canova System to Ferguson Route
Standard Date: 05 01 632
Communications Chief Lucille Robbins called the station commander as soon as the message reached them. That was seventeen standard hours after the Parthian fleet entered the Canova system. Fort 1 was seven jumps and ten light hours from Canova Station, and Canova Station was four light hours from the Parthian jump into Canova outsystem. What happened to the other three hours, Lu didn’t know. Probably took that long for system admin to pull their heads out of their asses and stop shitting themselves.
Not that Lu didn’t have a certain amount of sympathy for the shitting themselves part. Fort 1 was in the wrong spot to fight someone jumping in from the Canova side of the chain. Less than fifty thousand klicks from the jump point, just far enough away so as not to block the jump.
The crew of Fort 1 spent every hour since the pirate fleet bypassed them on its way to Parthia arguing over what to do. Forts weren’t entirely immobile. Nothing with wings was. But a fort’s wings were designed to move sand, round shot, and missiles, not the fort itself. It was like trying to move a sailing ship with row boat oars.
Fifteen minutes after they got the word that the pirates were back from Parthia, the fort commander finally made up his mind, and Lu felt the shift in apparent gravity as the huge chunk of asteroid slowly began to move. Its acceleration was only five percent of a standard g. Less than the change when an elevator started up. But if the bugs gave them enough time, they might be far enough away to see them before they got hit.
Location: Arachne, approaching Fort 1, jump point out of Canova.
Standard Date: 05 04 632
Jenny Starchild sat belted into the shock chair on the bridge of the Arachne, in her skin suit and with helmet on. But she wasn’t really there. She was in her other body, flapping her wings madly to accelerate at a full 3.5324 Gs. The detail was from Arachne’s brain. But it fit seamlessly into Jenny’s awareness, as did the shape of space and the jets of plasma that she was spraying out to charge each wing and add to the thrust. The Pandora and the Warchief were keeping up, but barely, and if it wasn’t for keeping in formation with the other ships, she would be accelerating at almost six Gs.
She felt the space and shifted her potentials. They were through the jump and she saw the fort, still using its wings to fling anything it could reach to get more space room between them and the jump.
Automatically, Arachne focused a comm laser on the fort, sending a digital surrender demand. Their wings shifted pattern to vector toward it. The fort was almost a half second away and, sure enough, a very long half second later the fort’s wings shifted into a random fluctuating pattern designed to make it hard to get sand or round shot through. That much was the response to the three ships popping into local space.
They’re good, the thought came through the ship from Tanya Cordoba-Davis and Petey Li at the same time, blending in the shipnet to a single thought, immediately endorsed by the rest of her crew. Even John Gabriel, her foster father, who wasn’t a combat spacer. At the same time, that was just the automatics. The next question was how would they respond to the surrender demand?
The answer wasn’t long in coming. Arachne’s sensors picked up the gas cloud as the hunter-nukes came out of their launch tubes. Then the jerks as the massive focused electromagnetic wings catapulted them into space. Even accelerating the three hunters to a noticeable fraction of the speed of light barely nudged the massive fort. But Arachne saw it and her counter launch was preprogrammed into the launchers and the wings. She was full microseconds faster than the Pandora or the Warchief. Together they sent three shield missiles to meet the three nukes.
Location: Fort 1, Canova System to Ferguson Route
Tony felt the thumps as the hunter-nukes went out before his hand reached the alarm. It didn’t matter. Action stations was bleating out of the speaker before his hand got there. All hitting the button did was tell the computer that he was at his station and ready to rumble.
Everyone was at action stations. It was midmorning, fort time, and the pirates had to know that.
Communications Chief Lucille Robbins shouted, “We have a surrender demand from the ships, Commander, but no shots fired. It’s a comm laser.”
“They’ve fired now,” Tony corrected. “A missile for each of ours, and they’re big suckers from the recoil. Ranging now. Laser tracking and scopes coming up.
“Sabots free,” he added as the faraday cage sheaths around the hunter-nukes came loose and offered their own radar reflections. “Their sabots are free too, and they’re following up with roundshot.”
Location: Arachne, approaching Fort 1, jump point out of Canova.
Tanya Cordoba-Davis made her first decision of the battle. Until now everything was pre-programmed reflex. Mostly Arachne’s reflex. She half nodded as she confirmed the Arachne’s recommendation. The Arachne expelled round shot and flung it at the fort that was almost half a light second away. The shot went out and half a second later, as the light of their shot reached the fort, its flap pattern shifted again, this time to a pattern that would sweep the round shot away from the sensitive sensor arrays and even from the asteroid that was the fort. The round shot would reach the fort before the missiles reached each other.
“Well, we didn’t really expect it to work,” Tanya said. “Ready another salvo of shield missiles.”
“Just one, Tanya,” Jenny sent. “Let’s give them every chance to surrender.”
Jenny saw Tanya turn her head and look at her, but she didn’t see it through her own eyes. She saw it through Arachne’s internal sensors. Jenny’s human eyes were closed as though she were asleep. For Jenny was the Arachne, weaving reality out of sensory input and even the thoughts of her crew.
Location: Shield Missile Able
Shield Missile Able flung out its superconducting cable as it sailed through space. The superconducting cable would let it form a magnetic shield to block attacks on the ships it was protecting. Like Fort 1, Shield Missile Able could see that the hunter-nukes had shed their sabots. They were naked now, and there was a fort behind them. A fort that might send more of the bad hunter-nukes at its ship. Like a bee, Able was perfectly willing to die for its ship.
But Able was smarter than a bee. And it knew this game from “years” of training in the sims. It felt the space through the magnetic field of its wing and adjusted potentials, chatting with its fellow missiles as it sailed through the void.
✽✽✽
The Fort’s hunter-nukes didn’t think. They ran programs, complex programs that did a fair job of imitating thought within their limited scope. But they didn’t learn and had nothing remotely like creativity.
The hunter that was approaching Able had no programing to deal with a shield missile. All it “knew” was that the wing sailing toward it didn’t fit the parameters of any of the wings it was programed to take down. Safety protocols were invoked and it stood down ignition.
It didn’t know that going through the magnetic field of the approaching wing would destroy it. Its programmers knew, in general, about that effect, but its programmers knew nothing of shield missiles or how they worked. So far as the programmers knew, the wrong wing configuration meant a miss. So the unnamed hunter-nuke didn’t go off when it reached the massive alternating magnetic field of Able’s wing.
Location: Shield Missile Able
Able felt the tug as the nuke sailed through it and adjusted the alternating magnetic field to do the greatest possible damage to the circuitry of the nuke. Able also lowered the strength of its wing so that less of the force of the nuke’s momentum would be transferred to it. It worked, but Able still felt the jerk on its superconducting cable as the nuke sailed through and died.
Moments later, Baker and Charlie did the same with their nukes. It was three inert chunks of metal that flew past the ships a bit later.
Able, Baker and Charlie sailed on.
Location: Fort 1, Canova System to Ferguson Route
Fifteen Seconds Later
The wings caught all the round shot, and most of it never even hit the fort. The five beebee-sized magnets that did hit the asteroid did nothing more than make craters in the iron surface of the fort. Tony didn’t even notice. He was focused on the missiles.
“They gotta be those new missiles Canova Station One warned us about,” Senior Weapons Tech Tony Adduci said. The information on the new missiles was sketchy and until he saw those monsters, Tony hadn’t believed they were real. He did now. He knew that he was no longer getting any signal from the three nukes the fort launched and the missiles coming the fort’s way were still coming.
What he saw through the station telescope were a good two meters longer than a standard hunter-nuke and were spinning with something around them. Maybe sand, maybe a wire of some sort. And they had reflective umbrellas, protection against laser fire. Tony tried the lasers anyway.
The beams went out, and at a hundred thousand klicks did little more than light up the missiles. Yes, it was a wire . . . and suddenly Tony realized . . . It’s wings!
He realized it, but didn’t say anything, because on the heels of the realization came the sure and certain knowledge that it couldn’t be wings. That’s impossible.
Then it was too late.
Location: Shield Missile Charlie
Shield Missile Charlie watched the fort’s wings and talked to Able, Baker, Arachne, Pandora, and Warchief, who were sharing data and helping it form a clear image of the flap patterns of the fort’s wing.
Charlie waited until just the right moment. As the fort’s wings touched its superconducting cable, Charlie sent a surge of magnetic field into its wing and connected the fort’s wings with its own.
The wings merged and became one, and Charlie blew itself to bits. Able and Baker followed, adding their momentum to the twisted energy fields. They ripped the fort’s wing right out of the rock.
Location: Fort 1, Canova System to Ferguson Route
“Wing 1 is down,” Tony shouted.
“I can see that, dammit,” the fort commander shouted back. “Why the fuck is it down? Those weren’t nukes.”
“It’s wings,” Tony said. “Some crazy ass genius has figured out how to put a wing in a missile.”
“What the fuck for?”
Tony was deep in his interfaces, replaying the encounter in slow motion, examining field strengths. He knew that hunter-nukes used EMP’s to take out wings, and if you took the wings down the nuke would come on in and trash the ship anyway. The fort was hardened against both those outcomes, the EMP by massive circuit breakers, and the close-in nuke by almost a quarter kilometer of iron shielding. It was better to stop the nuke with the wing because while the blast wouldn’t get through the shield, it would melt anything on the surface, including the wing spars, which had to stick out.
But as he watched what just happened, he realized that wasn’t the case here. The wired wing missiles used the fort’s own wing. The more power they sent to the wing, the more force acted on it. He called up a camera on the fort’s surface and saw the fifty meter wing spar. It was ripped and twisted like the toy of some demented giant. And it was our own power that did it. “Sir, we have to shut down the wings before that last missile gets here.”
“Are you crazy, Tony?”
“No, sir. I’m sending—”
They were interrupted by Lucille Robbins. “Commander, we have the Parthian ship Arachne on the comm. They are demanding our surrender.”
“Oh, they are, are they. Give me a link, Lu.”
Lucille gave him a thumbs up, and the commander said, “Arachne, this is Jackson-Cordoba Fort 1. You are in the process of committing an act of piracy and we will not allow it. As a practical matter, we have over two hundred meters of asteroid iron between us and anything you can possibly throw at us. So what do you think you can do about it?”
Half a second later a voice came over the comm. “Well, first we can take down your wings, then pepper you with enough sand to turn a section of the surface of that rock into glass. Then we can land shuttles, blow open tunnels, and send in Parthian exspatios to dig you out.”
And they could. Everyone here, on both sides, knew how a deep space fort was taken.
“Alternatively, we can get a really big ass rock and fling it into the fort, which will crack it like an egg. But both those options take time and cause unnecessary loss of life. Better for everyone if you honorably surrender the fort and spend the next few months on Canova Station.”
“Better for you, certainly,” the commander said. “You must know that the Jackson-Cordobas will not let this act of piracy stand. So you must want this fort in good shape fairly badly. That limits your options rather a lot.”
Location: Shield Missile Delta
Delta had language centers. They weren’t great language centers, but highly specialized, and this fell right in its specialty. It knew precisely what that bad person on the station was saying. They were going to send more nasty hunter-nukes at its ships.
It fired a jet of compressed gas. It was a weak rocket and relative to the speed Delta was moving barely shifted it at all.
But it was enough.
As the fort’s center 4 wing flapped, it picked up the charged superconducting cable and tried to throw it back at the Arachne.
But that wire was connected to Delta, which weighed eighteen metric tons and was moving at just over a thousand kilometers a second. All that force was transferred to the spar and the spar moved.
Not far. It, after all, weighed in at over five hundred tons. Only about fifteen meters. Until it hit an upthrust of iron.
But by the time it got there it was already wreckage, useful only to be mined for shieldgold.
Location: Fort 1, Canova System to Ferguson Route
“Shutting down the wings,” Tony said. He was through waiting for permission. “C is blown.”
“I see it, Tony,” the commander said. “But they don’t have anything else coming at us, so get those wings back up, in case they send sand or shot at us.”
Tony hesitated a moment, but did as he was bid.
Location: Arachne
As the forts wings came back up, Tanya looked over at Jenny. The commander’s response was no surprise to Tanya or any of them. “We’re going to have to show them, Jenny.”
“Yes, we will,” Jenny said sadly through the fleetnet. “We will act on Captain Cordoba-Davis’ command.”
“Agreed,” came back from Captain Gold on the Pan and Captain Tecumseh on the Warchief.
Three seconds later, three missiles launched, one from each of the three ships.
✽✽✽
“Three incoming,” Tony said. “Commander, we need to take down the wings. We’ve already lost wings 3 and 4. If we leave them up, we will lose wing 2 or 5, and we’ll be open on that side of the fort.”
Fort 1 had eight big, powerful, narrow wings that primarily functioned as catapults. It was heavily shielded, so didn’t need wings to protect it from the background radiation of space. The wings it did have were adequate to protect it from missile attack and to protect the sensor arrays and guns that they sheltered, but the rest of the fort was protected by the hundreds of meters of iron that the fort was made from. With Wings 3 and 4 gone, the loss of 2 or 5 would produce a gap in their defenses that a shuttle could fly safely through to land troops.
The commander looked at him and nodded. Tony shutdown wings 2 and 5, but used 1 and 8 to fling sand back at the small fleet attacking them.
“Commander,” Lucille Robbins said, “they can take out the wings and we can’t even hurt them. You saw what happened to the nukes.”
“No. We know they can stop nukes, but that doesn’t mean they can stop sand. Maybe not even round shot.”
“They’re shifting, Skipper,” Tony interrupted. But the sand wasn’t targeted on the ships. Tony sent the sand at those God-cursed wing missiles.
Location: Arachne
Jenny realized it first. The sand they were ducking to avoid wasn’t aimed at them. It was aimed at the shield missiles. She sent the information to Tanya, who acknowledged and sent a warning to the missiles.
There wasn’t much the missiles could do. The small guidance rockets they carried were way too weak to get them out of the way of the sand. All they could do was shut the magnetic fields down and let the sand through.
Seconds later, as they watched, millions of grains of sand swept through the shield missile wings and the missiles let it pass.
But even a grain of quartz less than a hair’s breadth across carries quite a wallop if it’s going fast enough.
And these were going quite fast indeed.
Most of them went through with no effect.
But one grain hit Shield Missile Foxtrot in the umbrella. That small, reflective mirror sheet designed to protect the missile from laser defenses was shredded and the side of Foxtrot was scored from nose to tail. The flash of the self-immolating micro meteorite was visible on the ships and on the fort.
Location: Fort 1, Canova System to Ferguson Route
Tony saw the flash and refocused two of his telescopes for a stereoscopic view. The missile was much easier to see. It was closer. It was uncovered because of the shredded umbrella, and the scoring heated the body so that it glowed in infrared. He could see the lines of fire that were—had to be—superconducting cable.
“We got a piece of one of the missiles, but it’s still coming. Firing lasers.”
The lasers went right through the shredded umbrella and rained fire on the missile, and seconds later, still well out of attack range, it ripped itself apart.
“Got it.” Tony looked up, then jerked back to his console. Two more wing missiles were coming in, followed by what looked to be an ordinary nuke.
“Commander?” Tony asked using his implants to copy his sensors to the fort commander.
Then a new voice came over Tony’s interface and the fort’s speakers. “I am Jenny Starchild, owner of the Arachne and senior breeder of the Parthian clan Star. I have no desire to kill anyone, but I have an obligation to my clan and to all the clans of Parthia. So far only equipment has been destroyed. If you don’t surrender the fort and soon, that is going to change.”
Lu shook her head. “They got a worm into the comm system. I don’t know how.”
Tony jerked into action, using keyboard and implants to run a diagnostic on the weapons systems. Weapons were isolated from comm with no wired connection at all. They should be safe, but at this point Tony was taking nothing for granted. As he linked to the system using his implants, a worm tried to jump from his implant to the defense system, but it was caught. Unfortunately, the fort’s cyber defense protocols responded by locking Tony’s implants out of the defense system. Operating the defenses of the fort using a keyboard was suicidally inefficient. It meant a choice between slowness of response or a lack of intuition.
The worm did its damage even as it was caught and removed.
“Commander, I’m locked out.”
The missiles came on.
Tony watched as the station commander looked around the control room. Tony wasn’t the only one locked out of the system by the worm.
“Stand down,” said the commander, in perhaps the smartest decision Tony had ever seen from him. And, in a way, the bravest. The fort commander was a Jackson. Proxy Holder Randall Cooper Jackson. He didn’t own Cordoba stock. Instead, he was assigned a proxy by the Jackson-Cordoba family. His wealth and status were entirely dependent on the Jackson-Cordoba family. And the Jackson-Cordoba family was not forgiving of failure.