Lacuna: Demons of the Void (18 page)

“...Anyway, based on technology recovered from the Toralii wreck from the
Battle of Jupiter
, the Task Force’s top scientists – along with some brought in from the EU – have supplied us with our own strike craft based on modified prototypes the Iranians were building. They call it the SSF-01
Wasp
, and they’re supplying the fleet of twenty four during our next resupply run. That’s eight for each ship.”

Alex chimed in. “The eight strike craft assigned to the
Beijing
are piloted by the best sticks in the Israeli Air Force. Of course, that’s only for the
Beijing
and the
Sydney
– for obvious reasons, the Islamic Republic of Iran felt that stationing Israeli pilots aboard the ship named after their capitol would be...
unwise
, so they’re providing their own – ahem, inferior – pilots.”

Liao felt mildly annoyed that the Iranians were being so stubborn about this and equally annoyed at Alex’s quip regarding their skill.

Saara, obviously confused about the situation, spoke up. All eyes fell upon her – for most of them, this was the first time they had heard the Toralii language and none but Liao and Yu understood it.

“
Awesome,
” whispered Summer, enthralled.

Liao translated. “Saara was just asking why the animosity exists between those two nations.” She turned to the Toralii woman. “Well, it’s a conflict going back almost a hundred years without a real resolution in sight. The two nations have been to war several times-”

“-which started with Israel responding to Arabic aggression...” Alex opined, drawing a dark frown from Doctor Saeed.

“... who
themselves
were responding to the forced seizure and colonization of their lands,” countered Saeed, the Iranian man leaning forward in his chair. “And the creation of an artificial state in already settled territory backed by the combined might of the world’s superpowers... superpowers who simply
displaced
those already living there-”

“-living in territory promised to the Jewish people, as their sovereign territory, by God himself! Israel is a sovereign nation and it has a right to exist!”

Saeed’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well, when
God’s
handing out the real estate contracts, who are we mortals to quarrel with His dictions?”

Alex looked to be about to continue, but Liao held up her hands for calm.

“
Enough.
”

She gave each of the two men a long, determined stare. “I know there’s a lot of animosity between your two peoples, but right now, we are all
human beings
in this crisis...” a nod to Saara, “...more or less... So I want you two to put aside your differences and
behave
yourselves
while you serve on this ship. I know it’s not enough to say that you’ll simply abandon nigh-on a century of anger, but for the moment, I need you two
working together
against a common enemy, not squabbling amongst yourselves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Good.”

Liao stepped back again, giving James a nod and letting him speak once more.

“Now... to the other part of the
Sydney’s
treat. At 0500 tomorrow we’re equipping all of the three Pillars of the Earth with close-range auto-cannons for point defence. The
Sydney
had her chassis modifications this morning and she’s looking sexy in her new skirt. Taskforce command was concerned that, during the
Battle of Jupiter
, if the Toralii strike craft had gotten close to the ship, we wouldn’t have had any means of hitting them aside from nuking
ourselves
... The auto-cannons are designed to counteract this deficiency. Originally we weren’t anticipating strike craft, but now that we know the Toralii use them, we’ll adjust our tactics accordingly.”

“Yeah, we were totally ‘point defenceless’ before, huh,” offered Summer, laughing at her own joke. Nobody else except Alex laughed.

When the two person ‘mirth’ had died down, Liao gestured again to the screen.

“So, we have new weapons, new tactics, new crew members... and we have a goal. The Forerunner in our system could be hiding anywhere, but there are only so many Lagrangian points in the system, so we’ll find it eventually. But, of course, it’s not just a matter of finding the ship. We know that the Forerunners will simply jump to another point if threatened. Obviously, our ships can only be in one place at a time, so the plan is this.”

She pointed to the Martian L1 Lagrangian point, the space between Mars and the Sun. “Tomorrow the
Tehran
, the
Beijing
and the
Sydney
will take up position here. All three ships will be within weapons range of the Lagrangian point, but none so close that their mass would interfere with a potential jump-in… a few thousand kilometres or so. All the crews will be sitting at general quarters for some time, so make sure you all get a good night’s rest beforehand.”

James motioned with the laser pointer, drawing green trails out from Mars to each of the planets in the solar system.

“All three ships will use their railguns to fire nukes at each of the Lagrangian points in the solar system. Given the distances between those points, some nukes will be travelling faster than others; the idea is to time their arrival so that all nukes arrive roughly together... within a minute or two, give or take. The whole process will take about three days for the first nukes, travelling at one-tenth the speed of light, to reach the Neptunian Lagrange points.”

James paused a moment to let the information sink in then continued. “For the empty jump points, the shock wave, heat, radiation, and EM disturbance should prevent a jump-in at that location for a few hours; if the Forerunner IS there, we anticipate it’ll jump away long before the nuke hits.”

Alex spoke up. “...So, I’m guessing the plan is to force the Forerunner to jump to another point, right as that point – no matter what point that is – is about to be nuked. So that no matter where it goes, we kill it after it jumps.”

Summer raised her hand, looking to James. “Sorry Captain, but that sounds
pretty
risky. The mathematics of hitting every Lagrangian point in the whole solar system is fairly simple and we can be precise about that, but what’s to say that the Forerunner can’t detect that there’s no safe point in the system and jump away to another system? I’m
guessing
you want to force the Forerunner into the sole un-nuked jump point, so we can capture it... but what’s to stop it simply jumping away to another system and returning with a whole Toralii fleet?”

Liao gave a wide, savage grin that surprised the red-headed woman. “Actually, that’s plan B and, in a strange way, we’re counting on it.”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“Hang on, just a few months ago you were fucking spazzing out because one of their scout ships nearly got away – and now you want to
deliberately
lure their whole fleet to you?”

Liao folded her arms in front of her, giving a firm nod.

“That’s correct. If it comes to that, we’ll make our stand at Mars. Because of the nuke strike, we’ll have disabled all the jump points in the system for a time... enough to effectively make a choke point to get into the system. This choke point will be our kill zone. We’ll have all three ships, along with our strike fighters, to blast anything that comes through that point straight to hell. There’s even talk of establishing terrestrial missile batteries on the surface of Mars and its moons to help out.”

Rowe tilted her head to one side. “The report Saara wrote says that the Toralii have ‘huge fleets’. That sounds... well,
bad
for us. What if they keep coming?”

“Then we keep shooting,” offered James. “Although if we begin to get overwhelmed, we nuke the points to temporarily prevent reinforcements from coming in. Fleet command doesn’t anticipate more than one ship coming through at once, so our control over the flow of battle will be very good. Additionally the ships that jump through have no way of warning the ships that have yet to come through. So if we start to get overwhelmed, we nuke the point and finish off what’s left.”

“Okay, okay... um.”

Summer held up her hand, taking a moment to compose her thoughts, then continued.

“...So we’re going to nuke the hell out of the points, that’s fine... fairly sure it’ll work, but that seems like a temporary solution; what happens when the radiation dissipates, mmm? How long’s that going to take? A couple of days, tops? Then the Toralii will have any number of jump points to come in through and we’ll be utterly
fucked
. Seems like we’re just delaying the inevitable...”

Saara spoke again and Liao translated.

“Saara reminds us that the Toralii will be expecting a no-contest victory. A pronounced defeat will send them reeling and they will be far more cautious in the future. Their navies are powerful, but they as a society are still quite fractured despite their proclaimed unity.”

Liao gave a low chuckle. “That, and they haven’t been beaten in a while. If we bloody their noses there’s a good chance that they’ll want to send in another Forerunner before committing more warships to the fight... once they see that we’re kicking back there’s a good chance they might back off entirely. Still, even if they don’t, we have an ace up our sleeves.”

Summer tossed her hair. “Right, right.” She gestured down at her handout. “I’m guessing that is this part here, that says something about gravity mines?”

Liao pointed directly to Summer. “That’s right. One more thing I’m going to throw on your plate. In order to secure a long-term lockdown of this whole system, we’re going to lay mines in each and every point we think they can use. The mines will take the form of modified Reactionless drives designed to mess up the jump points when they’re active, by emitting a randomly fluctuating gravimetric pulse. Then we’ll have full control over this whole system. If someone wants to jump in, they’d have to do it through a point we control or spend decades cruising in from deep space. If they do that, we’ll have plenty of warning due to our long range optical telescopes.”

Summer nodded her head thoughtfully and didn’t have an answer right away. James clicked off the laser pointer and handed it back to Liao who tucked it in her pocket, took a breath, and addressed the assembled staff.

“Now, tasks. We have a lot to do before we move on the Forerunner so we all need to be putting in long days until we’re good to go. Major Aharoni, I want you to coordinate with Lieutenant Jiang to work out how to best integrate our strike craft into our tactical environment. Organize drills and training; I want the whole strike wing functioning at top efficiency when this party picks up.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Very good. Summer, I want you continuing to work with the Engineering teams and see what useful intelligence or – in particular – hardware we can get out of the wreckage we have on board. I want you to work with Saara on this; have Lieutenant Yu work with you and translate.”

“Sure.”

Saara gave her acknowledgement.

Liao gave a nod to Lieutenant Dao and the rest of the Operations room crews for the
Tehran
and the
Sydney
. “Have the navigation teams plot out courses for the nukes and for all three ships. Double and triple check everything; we have to get this right the first time. The ship’s computer cores should be able to provide sufficient processing power for any simulation you need. Work with Summer to make sure you’ve got it right, but don’t take away from her work on the Toralii wreckage.”

Summer snorted with laughter. “A Commodore 64 was enough to put man on the moon, Captain. The hundreds of gigahertz of processing power we have here will be
more
than enough.”

Liao let the slightest grin play on her lips. “Good... Then I expect no mistakes.”

She indicated to Warrant Officer Cheung, whom she had appointed to be head of the ship’s marines since the incident with Sheng and the mutiny.

“Warrant Officer, I want you to run daily drills: counter-insurgency and boarding actions. According to Saara the Toralii quite favour boarding enemy ships and destroying them from the inside out – I want double guards on our power plants and missile tubes. On the day, if there are any intruders, I want you to be quick and brutal; trap them behind bulkheads if they’re deep in the ship’s belly or activate the fire-suppression protocols and vent them straight to space if they’re near the outer hull. Fire fights are a last resort.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

More tasks were given out and every section of the crew had something to do. There was a moment of silence as Liao let everyone digest their orders.

“If there are no more questions, then we’re dismissed.”

Liao watched as the combined senior staff of the
Beijing
and the
Tehran
got up and filed out of the room, leaving her alone. She spent some time in the empty room, mentally revising the plan over and over in her head, trying to work out any complications or problems with it.