CHAPTER NINE
“Well,” Commander Ariella Kupner said quietly, floating comfortably beside Captain Muneer Jamshidi’s command chair, “so far at least there’s no sign anything’s gone spectacularly wrong.”
“Your optimism is always so comforting,” Jamshidi replied in an equally quiet voice. He and Kupner had known one another a long time. He’d been a mere lieutenant—and a fairly junior one—when he joined the Quintessence, and she’d been the teenaged daughter of an officer serving under Erich and Juliana Quint, the parents of their current commodore. When Jamshidi had been given command of the Iskra-class battlecruiser Spark, he’d known exactly who he wanted for his XO.
“Hey, I am being optimistic,” she protested mildly as she watched the tactical display. “If those people had any idea what’s going on—or supposed to be going on, anyway—they wouldn’t still be ambling along that way.” She shook her head. “You know, I think this is one I’m going to feel a little guilty over.”
“War isn’t about glamour,” Jamshidi reminded her, watching the same display. “As Commander Juliana Quint once said, war is about shooting the other guy first. In the back, if necessary.”
“I know,” Kupner sighed. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“No,” Jamshidi acknowledged soberly. “It just means that sometimes we have to do it.”
* * *
IANS Rotte bored steadily through space.
A very appropriate verb, Fregattenkapitän Cheng Dassler decided. Bored.
Still, it was his duty to set an example of attentiveness on the heavy cruiser’s bridge, and he was working very hard to do so. Kapitän der Sterne Xuefeng Radnitz, Rotte’s CO, was a methodical man who believed in doing things by The Book.
At the same time, though, Radnitz also understood the dangers of complacency and boredom which could result from being too methodical. At times that philosophical tension created a certain quandary for the officers under his command.
This was one of those times.
Rotte had drawn the inside position for the system patrol formation that Flotillenadmiral Jachmann had established. The heavy cruiser, the second most powerful unit of the Tomlinson garrison, had been assigned to patrol the outer limits of The Cloud, roughly 2.1 light-minutes outside the system primary. The methodical Radnitz had set things up so that it took Rotte eight hours—not roughly eight hours, not approximately eight hours, but precisely eight hours—to complete a single circuit.
Given her position over seventeen light-minutes inside the hyper-limit, she’d have plenty of time to react to anything detected incoming. Even an intruder pulling two hundred gravities would need a minimum of five hours to cover that distance, and if he wanted to decelerate for a stop at Tomlinson it would take even longer.
Radnitz would probably have preferred to leave Rotte’s wedge down while they patrolled in order to save strain on the nodes. But physics dictated that an unpowered orbit at this distance from the primary would take forty-nine days, a completely unacceptable number. Radnitz had compromised by dropping the sidewalls and occasionally shifting the wedge to standby until their speed took the ship too far off its designated patrol path and the crew had to relight the wedge in order to bring them back to position.
For a while that maneuver had relieved the boredom somewhat. Now, it had merely settled into another part of the ship’s routine.
Meanwhile, while Rotte scurried along in the inner position, Fregattenkapitänin Zhelan Deutschmann’s destroyer München had the outer one, sweeping the outer edge of the system’s outermost asteroid belt, 4.1 LM from the primary. München had a tiny bit more acceleration, but, more to the point, she was more lightly armed. So it made sense to use her as the outer picket with Rotte in the intermediate position and Preussen covering Tomlinson itself.
The patrol pattern had been planned to position Rotte and München at a ninety-degree offset, giving them a broad sensor arc without putting the primary directly between them where it would prevent direct communication if something went sideways. Since München’s path was 25.76 LM in circumference, that meant she had to maintain a velocity of 16,100 KPS in order to hold position relative to the heavy cruiser. It was her job, hopefully, to spot an incoming threat in time to vector her heavier consorts into position to intercept it.
That was the theory, at any rate, and given the transit times, it was highly unlikely that anyone could make it past them undetected. An intruder certainly couldn’t manage it while under power without being spotted, and even trying to slip past them on ballistic paths would be extraordinarily difficult. At the very least, the intruder would need to know the exact patrol pattern, because at some point he would need to decelerate if he intended to accomplish anything, and his window for that would be extremely narrow.
Of course, highly unlikely wasn’t the same as impossible, and Dassler would have felt happier if there’d been more platforms in the outer picket. A single additional destroyer would have let them establish an equilateral triangle around the inner system, with every aspect of the approach under constant observation and all of the platforms in position to hit one another with com lasers at need. Flotillenadmiral Jachmann didn’t happen to have a third escort, unfortunately, but at the least the flotillenadmiral had put the ones he did have into the right roles.
Dassler liked and respected his own CO, and he’d learned a lot about out-of-the-box tactical thinking under Radnitz’s tutelage. Still, he’d always considered Deutschmann to be the more mentally agile of the two commanders.
It wasn’t that she was more energetic or more devoted to her duty. It was simply that she seemed more imaginative, with a knack for deliberately shaking things up from time to time if she thought her crew was settling back onto its heels. Radnitz expected his officers to combat that sort of attitude by example; Deutschmann understood that occasionally altering routine, especially without warning, was a more effective approach.
On the other hand, she also had an annoying sense of humor and played a fanatic game of bridge in which her officers’ participation was not optional.
Taking everything together, Dassler decided, methodical and sometimes boring beat the hell out of a commanding officer who spent half a watch explaining in excruciating detail which card her unfortunate subordinate ought to have played.
* * *
“Weapons status?” Captain Jamshidi asked quietly.
“Green board, Captain,” Commander Mattias Callewaert, Spark’s tactical officer, replied. “Sensors have a solid lock, and a firing solution is cycling. Confidence is high.”
“Understood,” Jamshidi replied.
Spark’s impeller wedge was at standby as she floated in the inky lee of the largest piece of asteroidal rubble Jamshidi had been able to find with all his active sensors shut down. His biggest concern—well, after the long, excruciatingly slow ballistic approach—had been what would happen when his ship crept out of her hiding spot in the heart of The Cloud to reach her attack position. He hadn’t been that worried about the actual maneuver; they knew exactly when each part of The Cloud would be under observation, and Spark’s wedge strength had been stepped way down.
No, at this point his concern was staying hidden long enough for his target to enter his range. Passive sensor range was fifteen light-minutes; maximum powered missile range was on the order of two light-seconds. He could shut down every active system and pretend he was a hole in space, but without her wedge Spark had to dispose of her waste heat some other way, and the thermal signature of her heat exchanger radiators would show up clearly on an alert ship’s sensors. He’d shut even them down almost an hour ago, but the ship’s internal temperature was climbing and he’d have to open them back up again soon.
“Range now two-point-five light-seconds,” Callewaert said.
* * *
“Communications check, mein Herr,” Oberleutnant der Sterne Freundel said in a tactful voice, and Fregattenkapitänn Dassler arched an eyebrow at the com officer. Young Freundel had a certain puppyish eagerness that was rather endearing, and the XO had deliberately waited to see how long the youngster would wait before reminding him about the mandatory communications check.
“Is it really time already?” Dassler asked.
“Three minutes ago, mein Herr,” the oberleutnant said respectfully.
“Very well, Oberleutnant. Proceed.”
“Ja, mein Herr. Transmitting now.”
Dassler nodded. Given the squadron’s positions, it would take about two minutes for Freundel’s transmission to reach Preussen and over twice that long for it to reach München. The communication checks were initiated on a staggered schedule, and this time it was Rotte’s turn to initiate the test. Next time it would be Preussen’s, and then it would be Rotte’s again before the responsibility passed to München.
* * *
“Range, two light-seconds,” Callewaert said.
“Engage,” Captain Jamshidi replied, and fusion-powered boosters flared viciously as a six-missile salvo erupted from the battlecruiser’s launch cells.
* * *
Bootsmann Ingrid Reitman stifled an almost overpowering urge to yawn. She wasn’t actually tired, which only made the need to yawn even more maddening, but she knew how Fregattenkapitän Dassler would react if she yielded to it. She liked the XO, but he demanded alertness, no matter how boring the watch was, and he was a past master at chewing someone’s ass off.
If only something would happen to break her boredom. Not anything bad, just something to wake everyone up. Focus them a bit. At least her watch would be ending soon, and she looked forward to finishing the novel she’d been reading. She’d always been a sucker for historical romances, and this one—
She stiffened as her earbud pinged. For a heartbeat or two, she was certain it had to be a mistake. Or at least a malfunction, but it pinged again and her eyes widened as half a dozen icons appeared on her display.
“Missiles!” she heard her own voice say. She was peripherally aware of heads snapping around, looking at her in utter disbelief. “Closing from three-zero-five, zero-two-one. Range at launch two light-seconds. Acceleration four-seven-points-four KPS squared. Time-of-flight—” she swallowed “—three minutes.”
* * *
“Good telemetry, Sir,” Callewaert announced.
“Very good,” Jamshidi said, watching the displays with bleak eyes. Two light-seconds—600,000 kilometers—was right on the edge of the Quintessence Mercenaries’ powered missile envelope. According to their information, the Andermani had a little more accel, but it didn’t matter. The range might be extreme, but Rotte’s wedge was currently in the down part of its patrol circuit, which meant they had a non-evading target.
Of course, Freikorps-class ships like Rotte had been deliberately designed as fleet escorts, with a dedicated antimissile system designed to provide area defense to high-value units. That gave them a lot of self-defense capability on the occasions when they got to use it for their own protection, and with their antimissile system online they packed in nearly as much capability as most battlecruisers. But that system wasn’t online, and Jamshidi doubted that more than one of her point-defense stations were fully manned.
“Second salvo launched,” Callewaert said, and six more missiles went howling off towards their targets, only ten seconds behind the first six. Spark’s telemetry channels allowed her to control half a dozen missiles in a single salvo, which was the heaviest throw weight of any ship Jamshidi had ever commanded.
If she could have handled more birds, he would damned well have launched them, though. She mounted only twenty launch cells, so those missiles represented sixty percent of her total loadout, but the Quintessence’s employers had provided plenty of reloads aboard the mercenaries’ support ships. For their primary plan to work, the ship on his display had to die, and Jamshidi was grimly determined to make certain that it did.
* * *
“Second salvo!” Reitman shouted through the raucous howl of Rotte’s battle stations alarm.
“Point defense is tracking,” Oberleutnant der Sterne Metternich, the tactical officer of the watch, said in reply.
Reitman snorted in bitter amusement. No doubt point defense was tracking, but central control was still spinning up, and with only the single duty mount fully crewed…
“Communications, send Code Omega Alpha,” Fregattenkapitän Dassler grated. “Continuous send. And append Tactical’s feed.”
* * *
“Vector merge in twelve seconds,” Callewaert said.
* * *
Under the circumstances, Rotte did well. Even caught flat-footed, her tactical crew managed to train out both point defense autocannon and even got off one antimissile salvo. That was more than Jamshidi had anticipated her bridge crew could manage with so little warning.
But the cruiser’s defense solutions were rushed, and the incoming missiles’ closing velocity gave them too little time to engage so many targets.
They stopped all six of the initial launch. They stopped only one of the follow-up.
* * *
Jamshidi watched the display as the tiny data code representing a heavy cruiser and seven hundred human beings vanished into an expanding cloud of cooling gas and glowing debris. He gazed at it for several seconds, then looked at his com officer.
“Send ‘Clean Sweep,’ Lieutenant,” he said.
“Transmitting ‘Clean Sweep,’” the lieutenant confirmed.
“Like you said,” Kupner reminded him. “Shoot them in the back.” Her tone could have been cutting, but it wasn’t. If anything, Jamshidi thought, it was sad.
“Yes,” he said. “Now we just have to find out if the others were equally effective.” He felt his lip twitch. “Effective assassins.”
* * *
Fregattenkapitänin Deutschmann’s face might have been forged from iron.
“Still nothing from the Flag?” Her voice was quiet.
“No, meine Kapitänin,” Korvettenkapitän Malachi Tolbert replied unhappily.
Deutschmann’s nostrils flared. She knew she wasn’t going to hear anything from Rotte ever again, but where the hell was Preussen? München’s communication section had receipted the heavy cruiser’s Code Omega with the Alpha suffix which indicated Destruction Imminent. More than that, Rotte’s tactical feed had been dumping into her continuous transmission right up to the instant the first missiles struck.
Deutschmann didn’t know what was out there, but if it could handle that many missiles in a single salvo, it had to be both big and nasty. And it also had to have been perfectly positioned with foreknowledge of Rotte’s patrol pattern. Xuefeng Radnitz had never struck her as a very imaginative man, but he’d been a superior tactician and he’d run a taut ship. To take him out that quickly, someone had to have gotten to knife range without ever being detected, and that meant whoever it was had been waiting for Rotte to come to her, not out stalking her prey.
That conclusion has been obvious to Deutschmann from the instant she received the cruiser’s transmission, which was why she’d altered heading at two hundred gravities acceleration ten seconds later. Unlike Rotte, München had been a good ten minutes behind schedule when Radnitz’s ship was attacked, because Deutschmann had decided to call a surprise tactical drill. It had delayed her ship by almost half an hour, but she hadn’t worried about it, given that München had more than enough acceleration to make up for lost time.
In retrospect, it was a damned good thing she had. Unlike the cruiser. München’s wedge and sidewalls had been fully up when the Code Omega transmission came in. She’d been able to respond instantly, and it was highly probable that was all that had saved her and her crew. If whoever was out there had good enough information to ambush Rotte with such devastating effect, they must also have known where München was supposed to be at the same time.
At the moment, though, whatever satisfaction Deutschmann could take in her own ship’s survival was buried in a bitter-edged corner of her mind. She knew what had happened to Rotte, but Preussen’s continued com silence was even more frightening.
Rotte was a cruiser; Preussen was a battleship. How in God’s name had anyone been able to sneak into range to attack her? And how had they done it so quickly, so devastatingly, that she’d been unable to so much as get off a transmission like Rotte’s?
Deutschmann didn’t know the answer to either of those questions. But there was one increasingly ominous thing she did know. Like the rest of Flotillenadmiral Jachmann’s captains, she’d been briefed about the Emperor’s death and the funeral cortège’s schedule. Including its upcoming appearance at Tomlinson.
She had no idea how the mystery attacker could have learned about the cortège. But the timing couldn’t be a coincidence. The enemy’s ultimate objective had to be Emperor Andrew, and that meant that somehow München had to stay alive against an adversary who’d effortlessly swatted a heavy cruiser and a battleship.
Because someone had to warn the new Emperor before he sailed straight into his own death.