Guardsmen of Tomorrow (4 page)

A fifth point transmission was closer, climbing out of the system, high above the plane of the ecliptic on a bear-ing straight for the out-system blockades, broadcasting on an emergency band. That would be little
Uriel
, accelerating clear of what obviously was a major squadron action. Four of her masts were missing, though, and her spread of sail was ragged, putting a sharp limit on her ability to hump Gs.

Time passed, achingly slow. The battle ahead was unfolding slowly, the Union ships apparently trying to maneuver clear of incoming Orthodoxate ships. Subjective time crawled, while the universe outside
Indy’s
isolated space-time reference point seemed to race along. And it would take time-another forty minutes yet-to decelerate to battle speed.

“Communication coming in from the
Uriel
, Captain,” cy-Tomlin said.

“Let’s hear it, please.”

“… attack by Orthodoxate ships. We are heavily outgunned, and planetside defense batteries on Kaden have opened fire, causing severe damage.
Indeterminacy
, please acknowledge.” There was a long pause. At this range, there could be no true conversation due to the speed of light time lag. The message would begin playing again in just a…

“
Indeterminacy
, this is
Uriel
, Lieutenant Lasely in command. The in-system squadron has been trapped and is under attack. We were lured in close to Kaden by a request for real-time communications from the Kaden Military Council. It was a trap. Six Orthodoxate ships jumped in-system and attacked, just after we were taken under heavy fire from the planetary defense batteries.”

As the message played itself through, Hazzard checked range, vector, and time lag.

Uriel
was eight light-minutes away, and sixteen had passed since their emergence from highspace. The sloop must have begun broadcasting as soon as they’d become aware of the
Indy’s
arrival.

Uriel
was clearly making for the line ships two light-days out but was still moving at only about half the speed of light. With the damage she’d suffered to her rigging, though, it would be another hour, at least, before she would be able to engage her trans-c drive and make the jump to the blockade point.

Mentally, Hazzard engaged a side communications band, one linking him not with other men and women strung together in the shipnet, but to an ordinary radio in his physical quarters, deep in the bowels of the ship. “Cadlud? This is the captain. Are you there?”

“I am here, zur.”

“Ever hear of something called the Kaden Military Council?”

“No, zur. It zounds… most un-Irdikad.”

“It does to me, too. It also sounds like they’re making decisions for your world’s government.”

“Kaden does not have a world government,” Cadlud reminded him. “Guidelines, zur, not rules.”

“Thank you, Cadlud.” He broke the link.

A cyberenhanced starlord, he thought, might have been able to tap directly into local communications and informational channels, might have accessed ocean-deep volumes of material on the current political situation on Kaden. He trusted, however, his own intuition, and the observations of his steward.

Hazzard studied the tactical display spreading out before him against the visual field of his mind. The other four Union ships were closely engaged with the P’aaseni squadron half a million kilometers past the crescent of Kaden. An hour before
Uriel
could summon help from
Tri-mirage
and her consorts… a little less, possibly, if
Indeterminacy
began accelerating to
c
and made the jump to the blockade point herself. The Union in-system squadron was in serious trouble, though. Pounded by the P’aaseni heavies and by Anarchate planetary defense batteries,
Fire Angel
was a mass of fiercely radiating wreckage drifting down the walls of Kaden’s gravity well, and
Decider
appeared to be crippled.
Ferocious
and
Swift
were both still firing, but their life span could only be measured now in minutes, unless they were able to win clear.

At the moment,
Indeterminacy
was moving at just under .9
c
, and still slowing; at that velocity, twenty-five seconds of shipboard time translated as almost a minute in the outside universe, and so the battle appeared to be evolving at breakneck speed as the Union frigate plowed through the photons revealing the conflict ahead. Add to that the fact that thanks to c-lag, he was still seeing things as they
had
been, fourteen… no, make it thirteen minutes ago. He had to decide
quickly
…

He shifted his attention to a global display of Kaden, with the locations of known planetary defense batteries plotted as gleaming yellow sparks scattered along the equator. As on most technic worlds throughout this sector of the galaxy, the locals had been beefing up their PDS against the possibility that they would be dragged into the spreading war between Union and Alliance. There. The eight or ten Planetary Defense System emplacements stretched along the Dalacradak Peninsula were likely the ones firing on the Union squadron.

Hazzard was uncomfortably aware of his orders, specific to the point of anality, forbidding him from opening fire on any Kaden military facilities even in self-defense.

Planetary defense batteries tended to be immense fortresses, buried, for the most part, under kilometers of bedrock, with only the surface turrets mounting the massive singularity cannon visible on the surface. A return bombardment from space, with the throw-mass possible for a frigate like
Indeterminacy
, might damage some of those batteries, but it wouldn’t knock them out… not before the
Indy
herself was smashed into blue-hot fragments.

But there might be another way…

Range to the battle was now eleven light-minutes. The light announcing
Indy’s
arrival in-system still hadn’t reached Kaden but would in another… make it ninety-five seconds. He reached out through the ship’s senses, trying to feel the accelerated flow of the situation, to guess what was actually happening
now
.

“Captain?” Pardoe said, perhaps wondering if Hazzard had his mind on the situation at hand. “Shall I order more sail and a shift to acceleration, Captain?” Clearly, fleeing for the safety of the out-system station-and giving warning to the heavies-was where duty lay.

Or…

“Affirmative,” Hazzard snapped. “Have all hands prepare for hopskip.”

“A microjump?… We’re not going to warn the squadron, sir?”

“If we do, Bellemew and the inshore squadron are dead.
Uriel
can warn the fleet.

And maybe we can make a difference down there.” Speaking quickly and with a calm he could not feel, Hazzard described what he was planning.

Pardoe hesitated only a moment before giving a sharp-edged “Aye, sir.”

“Let’s go to battle stations, if you please, Mr. Pardoe. We will be engaging within a few minutes.”

Under the frantic urgings of rigging rats and spiders tele-operated by
Indy’s
c-men, jacked in from their racks deep within the ship’s hull, the frigate’s sails transfigured, top and’t‘gallant sails unfolding, sail surfaces turning from silver to black forward, and swinging on the yards to set the ship accelerating toward the battle, instead of slowing down.

Minutes crawled as she built back her velocity, reaching toward the speed of light as her primary drive compounded the minute accelerations of photon flux and magnetic field into near-c jamming. Ahead, a fuzzy, hard-to-look-at sphere the color of the back of one’s eyelids began condensing out of empty space, the singularity created and focused by
Indeterminacy‘^
fast-increasing relativistic mass. At velocities above

.99 c, the singularity became a doorway for the ship into trans-c.

“
Indeterminacy
ready for microtransition,” Ishiwara, the drive engineer, reported.

“Strike the sails,” Hazzard ordered. “Stand by for transit!”

The crescent of Kaden swelled rapidly ahead as the frigate’s sails collapsed and furled. By now, even with light’s snail-pace crawl, the P’aaseni squadron had noted the frigate’s initial arrival, and their ships were redeploying to intercept this new threat. They wouldn’t know yet, however, that the
Indy
was coming to meet them.

“Helm, we’re feeding you transit course corrections.”

“Aye, sir. Got ‘em.”

“Sails furled,” Pardoe said. “Vessel ready in all respects for transit.”

“Punch it!”

Indeterminacy
dropped into the singularity, in a sense swallowing herself whole. At the last moment, the helm used the singularity’s intense gravity to bend the frigate’s course slightly, adjusting her heading as she dropped into utter strangeness…

… and reemerged, a fractional blink of an eye later.

A scant light-minute ahead, huge in the magnified display, Kaden hung in orange, ice-capped splendor. Hazzard’s commands crackled through the shipnet. “Deploy full sail! All back! Ishi, dump V into the drive fields!…”

Like the
Victor
at Tribaltren Station, the
Indeterminacy
was now barreling into the fray with far too much velocity. Much could be dumped as energy fed directly into the drive fields, expanding them across well over a hundred kilometers of empty space where it could actually be applied to braking the ship’s headlong plunge forward. Still, V could be translated into energy only so quickly. By the time they neared Kaden, they would still be moving too quickly to engage the enemy vessels.

“Mr. Ishiwara,” Hazzard said. “I want you to stand by on the drive controls. We’re going to pop our fields out full as we round the planet.”

“The fields are already extended all the way, Captain.” The larger the volume of
Indeterminacy’s
space-warping wake, the more velocity could be safely dumped.

“I know. We’re going to pull an anchor drag.”

He heard the pause, as loud as a shout, as the engineer digested this. “Sir…”

“Do it. Planetary encounter in… twenty-eight seconds, now.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Hazzard took a last look at the
Indy’s
alignment with the fast-growing planet and the squadron battle ahead. This was going to be
damned
tight…

“Strike all sails,” he ordered. “
Smartly
now! Helm… you’re on thrusters, now. Hang on to her! She’s going to buck!”

Swiftly, as rats and spiders swarmed through the rigging,
Indeterminacy’s
spread of sails collapsed, folded, and vanished, furling into their storage lockers on mast and spar.

“All hands below!” Hazzard ordered. He didn’t want to lose anyone with this maneuver… though that was a fairly forlorn hope. What he was trying to do was not exactly recommended in
Yardley’s Book of C-Manship
. “Set ship for close passage!”

Constellations of points of light flowed down the rigging and masts, vanishing into
Indy’s
below-deck spaces. Slowly, now, the yards were folding, the masts telescoping down their own lengths, truncating themselves to reduce the possibility of crippling damage from tidal effects or-don’t think about the possibility!-drive field failure.

There wasn’t time for a full close-passage deployment. They were going to take some damage here, in another few seconds. The question was… how much?

As
Indeterminacy
had approached Kaden over the course of the past few minutes, the ship’s display computers had been steadily recalculating magnification factors and redisplaying the view forward. Hazzard noted with a small kick of surprise that the magnification factor was down to one, that the planet now filling his mental view ahead was as it really was outside the all-too-thin walls of
Indeterminacy’s
hull. They were crossing the terminator now, swinging low across the white and orange curve of the world into day-side. He could sense the growing tug of gravity… though far, far too weak to capture the frigate at her current velocity of over ten percent of the speed of light itself.

Ahead, close along the equator, just south of the mo-tionlessly sprawled swirl of a tropical storm, lay the ragged, mountainous thrust of the Dalacradak Peninsula, thrusting out from the eastern coast of Alekred and into the violet-blue, cloud-dappled reaches of the Zurkeded Ocean like a Valosian scimitar, straight at the hilt, wickedly curved at the tip, Cape Zhadurg. Goddess! He could
see
the big guns of the PDS firing up ahead, each discharge like a straight-line bolt of lightning stabbing into space from the wrinkled, snow-capped barrenness of the mountains as they smoothly rolled over the horizon and into view.

“Captain?” It was cy-Tomlin, the bridge team’s Starlord-in-training. “We’re not supposed to fire on the Irdikads!” He sounded outraged. “
Especially
not their planet!”

“As you were, Mid,” Pardoe said.

“I’m not about to fire on them,” Hazzard explained gently. “I’m about to make a mistake…”

“Sir?”

Hazzard smiled to himself. Starlords might have all the advantages with their hardwired personal technology, but they were hampered, sometimes, by an almost desperate need to play by the rules.

Rules that, sometimes, could be bent…

“Altitude three hundred two kilometers,” the helmsman reported. “Now two fifty-five kilometers. One hundred eighty-one… One hundred seven…”

“I can read the altitude data, Mr. Sotheby, thank you. Bring us up just a bit, plus zero-two.”

Maneuvering thrusters, fueled by water from the ship’s forward tank, imparted a scant few kilos of thrust, amplified by the drives. Hazzard was completely focused now on the dance of numbers-
Indeterminacy‘&
heading, altitude, dwindling velocity…

Ahead, almost below now, the big guns kept firing, hurling pinpoints of dazzling sunlight into the tangle of star-sailing vessels ahead.
Decider
had just taken several more hits, as microsingularities from both the planet and the P’aaseni smashed through drive barriers, sails, and hull with equal ease, savaging armor plate, splintering bulwarks, slashing through the deep-buried vitals of a dying ship.