Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (16 page)

Absen’s voice took on a rueful tone. “How come it’s never as easy as in the movies? Warp nine, engage!” He ran his hands though his short blond hair. “All right, we’ll take baby steps. Helm, increase the pulses by one-tenth of a light-year each time, and take as long as we need in between to assess the effects.”

Hallucination.

“One point two lights,” he gasped. “I’d say that was about my safe limit, even with the drugs. Bogrin, report.”

“Moment, please.” The Sekoi carefully tapped on the keyboard made for hands his size, reading from several screens. “Sixteen percent of crew report serious impairment. Five percent have been sedated by comrades.” He looked over at Absen. “I would not recommend extending the pulse beyond one point one light-year. Better only one point zero.”

Keeping his head still, Absen replied, “I agree. We had to find out what would happen, and we have, but until further notice, let’s keep our pulses to one light-year or less.”

“Aye, sir,” Okuda said. “Point six seems to be where the curve takes off. Below that, the drugs and adjustments to the field will be enough.”

“What if we have to pulse again, right away?” Absen asked Bogrin.

“Second pulse immediately afterward is almost same as not stopping. Need fourteen minutes to recharge capacitors anyway. Better to wait one hour, let biology recover.”

Absen took a deep breath and moved his head slightly, testing. “COB, you are in charge of fabrication, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Timmons replied.

“Good. We need a new helmet design. Something that is integrated with the suits and will stay out of the way when someone needs to vomit, but will snap shut in case of a breach. Think you can come up with a design?”

“Well, sir, if our newest warrant officer isn’t overtasked, I think between her and her minders we can make something that the manufactory can mass-produce.”

“Do it.” Absen rubbed his neck. “Scoggins, let’s see a strategic plot. Flat display is fine.”

On the main screen the sensors officer put up a top-down view of
Conquest
’s progress from Gliese 370 to Earth’s system, originally 36 light-years away. The grid scale showed they had come about one quarter of the way, approximately eight light-years, in ten jumps of increasing distance. It had taken them three careful boat weeks of adjusting systems, testing new drugs, and learning to cope with pulse anomalies.

“Hard to believe eight years have actually passed outside while we’ve been traveling,” Ford mused wistfully. He looked over at Melissa Scoggins, his wife. “Our kids are all grown up now.”

She glared at him from her station and then turned away and hunched her shoulders.

“Save your awkward personal observations for your off time, Mister Ford,” Absen said, more to spare Scoggins than anything.
Somebody’s asking for the doghouse.
Deliberately changing the subject, he said,
“Yes, it’s now the year 2133, sometime in March, as far as we can tell.” The captain pointed at the displays that showed boat time and outside time. As every pulse changed their relationship with the temporal universe, synchronizing with it was not a priority. The computers would eventually come up with the exact date as stellar observations came in.

“Sensors, what are we seeing from Earth?”

Scoggins cleared her throat twice, then said without turning around, “As we’re 28 light-years away, we are peering that same time into the past, so to speak. The laser and radio we are receiving are all from the year 2107…August, in fact.” Finally, she turned around with puffy eyes. “The Meme fleet arrives in about two years and eight months. I mean, that’s how it appears to us, even though it’s already happened.”

Absen said, “Understood. Notify Intel I want a briefing at 0800 hours every day from now on. Helm, I want you to schedule a pulse of four light-months each day at 1600 for six days, then plan for three more of one light-month, once per day. That will allow us to get snapshots of what’s happening in the run-up to the battle as we get closer and closer. When the time comes, we’ll stop here in interstellar space and watch in realtime.”

Delayed realtime
, Absen thought,
but that’s how it will seem as we meet the laser and radio comm reports of what’s happening.

Fortunately EarthFleet still stuck to the protocols he had established when Task Force
Conquest
had left, to keep beaming a full suite of encrypted operational and intelligence data to Gliese 370. Even though EarthFleet had heard nothing from Absen – the beamed report of his victory was only halfway back, after all – as long as the new
Conquest
stayed within the laser and radio comms corridor from Earth to Afrana, they were able to keep abreast of the situation.

At least, the situation that obtained when the information was transmitted.

What a strange way to think, and travel. Everywhere we look, we see the past. When we see a star system one hundred light-years away, we see it not as it is, but as it was then. Ditto with the solar system. We look backward to Afrana and see reports that seem to be only weeks old, as the light from the past slowly overtakes us.

The human ratings eagerly took the front rows facing the enormous bank of screens set high on the wall, while the Ryss and Sekoi hung around the back edges looking at smaller sets adjusted for their eyes’ wavelengths, mounted on the side and rear walls . They were interested, of course, but not with the desperate attention of the humans. It wasn’t their home system, after all.

Captain Absen and the senior officers watched from the glass-faced aerospace control room, now turned into a sort of media fusion center, which also allowed them some extra feeds to the screens there. All the StormCrows, grabships, pinnaces and assault sleds had been moved into their launch tubes or bolted to the walls by maintenance bots, well out of the way.

Commanders Johnstone and Scoggins had worked with their sections to orchestrate all the data flowing in from EarthFleet, and also the feeds from the news services’ broadcasts and anything else that could be picked up, rather like the crew of a major sporting event. Only, this contest would decide the fate of the solar system.

Absen had ordered a bar set up on the flight deck and a platoon of Marines in MP uniform but with no firearms, led by Sergeant Major Repeth, who had started out long ago as a military police specialist. Their cybernetic physical enhancements outclassed anyone’s but the Stewards, and those stayed near their captain as usual. They could handle a few brawls.

I’m terrified
, Absen realized within the sanctity of his own mind.
I’ll see the battle but have no influence over it whatsoever. Forty-three percent chance of successful defense, the first intel assessment had said, and that has not changed. Less than fifty-fifty chance Earth system fights them off.

Nodding at the audiovisual team, Absen watched as the screens flickered and changed views, one by one stabilizing on various aspects of the battle. The main display provided a gamer’s overhead view, at the captain’s insistence. His interest lay in the strategy and tactics, and he also had no desire to make a bloody engagement even more gut-wrenching by showing too much close-in death. There were advantages to getting the whole crew together this way, such as a sense of unity and
esprit de corps
, but morale could also take a big hit if things went wrong.

Absen had thought of delaying the immediate display of the feeds for a few hours, to allow him to edit and shape the production, but discarded that idea after the ferocious opposition his closest officers gave him. Even COB Timmons had locked the door and given the boss a piece of his mind about the common sailor’s viewpoint, and the captain conceded to his crusty chief.

So, he had no more idea of what would happen than anyone else.

The overview showed the solar system from a point to the north of Earth’s star, the traditional vantage point, and as friendly blue icons populated the screen from the center outward, some of the humans cheered. Densely packed by the thousands, soon the computers running the map had to group them together or be overwhelmed with dots and markers.

The inner planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – swarmed with asteroid fortresses, each holding one primary weapons system. Particle beams, lasers, grasers, missile arrays and railguns showed, along with rings representing their effective ranges.

Unfortunately those circles seemed small compared to the area they needed to defend. Even lightspeed weapons were limited by time. Beyond a few light-seconds, hitting a target became more a matter of luck than anything, as speeding ships could continuously alter course enough to dodge even light at those distances.

In the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, other icons showed. Absen had Scoggins punch one up for him and between them they figured out it was just an asteroid with an engine package on it, not so different from what the Meme had tried to use against Earth when the first Destroyer showed up. He realized it was a ram or decoy, something that had been in the works when he left. Once they had a surfeit of engines, putting a rocket and a guidance package on an asteroid turned it into a cheap kinetic missile.

Jupiter and its moons were surrounded by icons, representations of the enormous shipyards and bases teeming there. The gas giant was a system in itself, and its atmosphere provided ample hydrogen and isotopes as fuel, while its many moons were mined for materials from water to metals. The planetoid Ceres had apparently been moved there, Absen saw, at some time after he had left, bringing it closer to the industrial heart of EarthFleet, the Jovian system.

The only icons farther outside the solar orbit of Jupiter were pickets and sensor drones, and small bases on some moons of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Strategically, Earth was the prize, and there was no reason to place anything too far away. In fact, if the giant planet wasn’t itself an orbiting gas station, Absen would have put everything in the Earth-Moon system. Space was too big to defend anything except certain valuable locations.

Finally, a dense group of symbols floated about one-sixth of the way spinward of Earth: that is, in a counterclockwise direction along its orbital path. “Zoom in on those,” Absen ordered, and the cluster expanded to show details.

“Seven
Conquest
-class dreadnoughts,” Absen breathed. “Twenty-two battleships, sixty-one beam cruisers, over two hundred missile frigates, and forty-five aerospace carriers. That’s the Home Fleet.” A lump crawled into his throat as he contemplated the awesome power the icons represented, and then his blood chilled as he compared them to sixty-four Destroyers.

They can’t win, fleet to fleet
, he said within the privacy of his own mind.
Unless there is something I don’t see, some new technology they haven’t told us about, the enemy has about a three to one advantage in firepower.

Absen found himself wishing
Conquest
and the rest of the task force had stayed, to add their weight to this battle. Then he reminded himself that the EarthFleet Intelligence assessment had put the chance of successful defense at forty-three percent; better than it looked at first glance. That meant there was something he wasn’t seeing, something Admiral Huen had up his sleeve.

“Zoom back out. Do we have a plot of the enemy inbounds?”

Scoggins nodded and signaled one of her linked techs. A moment later the scale enlarged to show space out past Pluto’s orbit. A group of red icons showed at the edge of the screen, too many to count at that scale. Their projected track ended at Earth, bypassing any other orbital obstacle, such as Mars or Jupiter.

“Give me some Z-axis roll, Scoggins. I want to see how high above the plane of the ecliptic they are coming in.”

Obediently, the view swooped to a position off to the side but still “above” the solar system’s plane that defined most of the planetary orbits. The enemy fleet’s path now showed how it remained about half an AU, some seventy million kilometers, above that imaginary disc until it passed over Earth.

Scoggins remarked, “They’ll have to alter course sometime, but this path keeps them out of the asteroid belt, gives them a good angle on our defenses, and complicates our targeting a bit.”

“Sir,” Rick Johnstone asked, turning in his chair but keeping his link plugged in, “I don’t understand why they come in anywhere near the ecliptic. I mean, why not just loop up and over to come in from solar north or south?”

“I’ll show you, Rick,” Absen replied, and the rest of the control room turned to listen to their captain. Out of the corner of his eye he saw several of the secondary screens scattered around the flight deck now showed his face, as if he was being interviewed, and he glanced at Scoggins.

“By your leave, sir. I thought the crew might like to hear your play-by-play.”

“Good thinking.” Absen straightened. “Give me that plate there, please.”

One of the techs grabbed a round food dish and wiped it clean of scraps, and then handed it to the captain. He held it up flat, with his fingers beneath it. “Imagine this is the plane of the solar system. The sun and inner planets are near the middle, so close in spacegoing terms that it hardly matters to the attackers as they decide their course. Their orbits would be the size of a small coin.”

Holding the plate with one hand, with his other index finger he indicated a point about thirty centimeters above it. “Let’s say they come in from solar north, aiming for the center. This has the advantage that none of the planetary, orbital or asteroid belt defensive stations are in its way. But,” he turned the plate sideways, moving his finger to keep relative position, “now everyone on the surface of the plate has a straight view and line of attack. Any defensive station that can, will move to intercept. In a sense, it allows us to only defend one side of the possible sphere. The closer the enemy and friendly fleets get, the more we can throw at them.”