A Sword Into Darkness (49 page)

She reached out an arm and stopped him with a gentle grasp.  He looked back and saw her smile slightly, tears of gratitude welling un-fallen in the corners of her eyes.  “Thank you, Calvin.  You’ll never know how much this means to me.”

He grunted.  “Ms. Russ, I’m not quite as sentimental as all that.  I said you served no purpose on this ship, and it turned out I was wrong.  It’s as simple as that.”

Lydia grinned more fully.  “Oh, really?  And what purpose is that?”

“Ma’am, you seem to have a faith and a will stronger than any single warhead, and everyone on this ship has seen that and been inspired by it.  You are not a shooter—that’s true—and your value may only be symbolic, but the strength of that symbol may prove critical in the end.  If this battle is as close a thing as I fear it may be, your spirit could be all that sustains us.  I had forgotten, and for that I am sorry.  Your place is here.”

With that, the commander of CRUDESGRU 1 turned and left, leaving Lydia alone in the
Trenton
’s wardroom, alone with her thoughts, her fears, her hopes, and with the converging icons on the tactical screen.

The battle was about to begin.

A tragically beautiful dawn came to the asteroid belt.

These inelegant remnants of the ordered solar system had never known any illumination beyond the meager sunlight of Sol, far, far beyond the orbit of Mars.  And all that cold light had ever revealed were stark shadows dappled across slate gray ore and faded brown rock.  The Belt may have held incalculable wealth as a resource, but it had never been exactly attractive.

That assessment changed with the arrival of the Patrons, though.  The drive star still sprayed its photonic thrust wide, and the convoy continued to decelerate, still normalizing and circularizing its orbit over these long months and years of thrust.  Even though they were well and truly captured by the gravity of the distant sun, they were not yet at their intended destination, wherever that might prove to be.

For both defense and maneuver, the drive star blazed on, burning and illuminating sections of rock that had never before seen light of any kind.  Crystals and pure un-oxidized metals fumed and shone brilliantly from deep crevices.  Striations of heterogeneous minerals stood out for the first time like the lines and whorls of some demented abstract canvas.

Dawn came to the asteroid belt, but vastly brighter, more revealing, and in direct opposition to the only light that had ever really touched them since the moment of creation.  Here was beauty, but a terrible beauty wrought only by destruction.

The Patrons paid this truly unique spectacle no heed, however.  They simply cruised on, either unaware or uncaring.  Their four ships—the Polyp, the Cathedral, the reconstituted Junkyard, and the slightly smaller, yet more forbidding Control Ship—all orbited serenely around the drive star, protected by its thrust and unmolested by any mines or attackers for the last few weeks.  The ships had all returned to their quasi-Lagrange positions, seemingly unworried about a different, more defensive configuration.

The convoy came upon a loose, arbitrary grouping of four asteroids separated by thousands of kilometers, seemingly no different from any other set of rocks in the Belt.  It passed blithely through the center of the group, content to allow the proven effectiveness of the drive star’s radiance to defend it from any potential attack.

But a static, single layered defense was a weak one, no matter how effective it might originally have been.

The searing cone of light swept over the asteroids’ rocky surfaces, leaving behind fields of pitted, half-melted stone which ended abruptly at the mutual horizons on all four masses.  The defensive radiance then passed on, leaving the shadow zones behind each untouched.  From those shadows, the coordinated first strike flashed out.

Twenty-two warships each unleashed initial salvoes of thirty missiles—nearly a third of the load-out for the destroyers, but just a ninth the complement of the two larger cruisers.  The 660 missiles which streaked out from the four asteroids toward their convoy targets were not the still, stealthy threats of the mines.  This wave of devastation was like the
Sword of Liberty
’s attack:  swift, directed, and erratic, but dozens of times larger and more deadly.

Missile trajectories blossomed into hundreds of disparate tracks, only converging upon one of the four possible targets at the last moment.  One fifth of the wave exploded into fusion brilliance along a direct line between the targets and the shielding asteroids in an effort to obscure direct targeting of the warships now emerging from their hiding places.  For a moment, the drive-star’s luminance was overcome by a halo of nuclear glory, and only then did the offensive wave truly take effect.

Fully half of the remaining missiles made their objective the Control Ship, with the remaining split between the other three lesser targets.  264 missiles corkscrewed in toward the lead vessel, becoming over 1500 individual warheads, each one a step in a fiery spiral ending in immolation.  The space above each target began to froth with the white globes of nuclear flame and the lobed spears of coherent x-rays as the warheads worked their way down toward the endgame.

The first few hundred beams flayed into the Control Ship and the museum vessels without opposition and very nearly ended things there.  The critical weakness of the Patrons was also one of their greatest tools:  stasis.  The game-changing nature of the alien technology meant that the Patrons and their equipment could survive any shock, thermal load, or duration that the stasis machinery itself could survive.  Short of a direct hit or the indiscriminate battering ram of transfer energy, the invading force would survive even this onslaught—provided they could stop the attack before those direct and indirect assaults pulverized or vaporized even the hardened areas of the fleet.

And that was the Achilles Heel of the device that enabled the Patrons to survive the vast distances between stars.  Stasis made them slow.  It introduced an unavoidable pause in whatever reaction they might take, and as mankind had exploited it twice before, they did so again.

The Control Ship erupted in apocalyptic fissures of light as beam after beam flayed it or stabbed deep, rending deck after deck, layer after layer of alien technology.  Entire sections of the vessel were cut free to spin wildly away from the pseudogravity around the drive star.  Patrons died by the dozens as the warheads worked their way ever closer.

Rear Admiral Calvin Henson smiled slightly, deeply satisfied but cautiously optimistic.  He keyed his mike to the flag battle net, his link to his group’s commanding officers, as well as CRUDESGRU Two and the two allied destroyer squadrons.  “All stations, CRUDESGRU One will remain on a southern approach, centered on the Control Ship.  Group Two, detach and proceed at best speed to the opposite side of the drive star, make your approach out of the magnetic knot to the north.  Your objective remains the Control Ship.  Recommend detaching
Sword of Industry
as command and control relay to coordinate additional salvoes after you pass the limn of the star.  DESRON Alpha, break east and engage the Polyp and the Junkyard.  DESRON Bravo, make for the Cathedral and continue.”

Commodore Dan Torrance, his old XO from their mutually stolen bid for command of the
Sword of Liberty
, responded first.  “Roger, Admiral.  We’re headed for the backside and we’ll meet you again up front, hopefully with nothing but a debris field between us.”

“DESRON Alpha, aye.”  A clipped British voice—Commodore Lawrence aboard
HMS Conqueror
.

“DESRON Bravo, will comply.”  And this, a slight German accent—Flotillenadmiral Krueger of
NAE Bismarck
.

From within the confines of his acceleration coffin, Henson nodded as best he could.  Almost all the first wave’s missiles were committed, with outstandingly destructive results and virtually no reaction from the enemy vessels.  Yes, optimistic, but cautiously so.  “Tactical teams, release second wave per the op plan and prepare for direct fire when within range, at ships’ discretion.”

All his subordinates’ voices together.  “Aye aye, sir!”

Uncomfortably cocooned within her own “coffin” inside her stateroom aboard the
Trenton
, Lydia Russ fretted with the wealth of information she’d been offered by Calvin Henson.  Despite her lack of a place within his tactical organization, he had seen fit to provide her with a direct view of the action, just as his tactical watchstanders saw it.  The veering icons, lines, and splashes of color proved to be a three-dimensional mess, however.  She silently complimented whatever training program enabled the tacticians and technicians of the aerospace navy to make any sense of the gobbledygook she had become privy to.

After a short while, though, she began to get the gist despite herself.  All the available information appeared overwhelmingly lopsided toward man’s victory.  And as she felt her body vibrate with the multiple ejections of the second wave of missiles, it only seemed as if it would shift even more in humanity’s favor.

She could not help thinking, however, that were she in gravity, she’d be listening for the other shoe to drop.

preparations undone

shift and jostle, whirl about

back where we started

are secrets revealed

Stasis vanished abruptly once more, and every remaining crewmember of the
Sword of Liberty
comically whirled their arms about as they adjusted to their new locations.  Where before they had been armed and arrayed in defensive positions throughout the remains of the ship, now they were all back in the wardroom, in a circle, surrounding the broken pieces of their small arm weapons.

Nathan looked at his crew, silently checking their names off an internal truncated list, ensuring they were all there.  His eyes lingered on Kris, across from him in the circle, until she locked gazes with him and he could see and feel that she was all right.  He looked at the pile of guns and then turned to Dave Edwards.  “They took the low-hanging fruit.  Did they wreck all our preps though?”

Edwards shrugged, then pushed off from the bodies next to him and flew over to the ops console there in the wardroom.  “Dunno, Boss.  Let me check.”