Alarm of War (24 page)

“Chaff!” he ordered. Chaff rockets spit out the back of the ship, blossoming into a large oval of millions of strips of sensor-reflective tape. On the hologram, it looked like an ink squirt from a very large octopus, which is where the idea had originally come from, he supposed.

“Eject the first three anti-matter bottles!”

“They are out and armed, Captain,” Pyne reported.

Zizka glanced again at the holo display. “Set detonation for twenty five minutes.” This was their best guess for when the DUC ships would come through the chaff cloud. If they didn’t change speed. If they didn’t go above or below the plane of advance. If, if, if…

Twenty five minutes ten seconds later, the three Dominion destroyers cleared the chaff cloud and pushed onward in pursuit of the
Bawdy Bertha
, then frantically scattered sideways and up as the anti-matter bottles blew up right in front of them
.

Zizka chuckled. “Take that, you little pricks. Now you know this old girl has teeth.” He smiled wolfishly to his bridge crew. “Okay, people! Shoot some more chaff and drop another anti-matter bottle. And let’s shoot off three decoys, each at ten degrees off our present course. I want them flinching every time they see chaff and scratching their heads when they see the decoys.”

They did two more repetitions of the chaff cloud, followed by anti-matter bottles and decoys. The DUC destroyers were pursuing more cautiously now, placing themselves further apart and going above and below the plane of pursuit to avoid the mines. Zizka motioned to the Sensors Officer. “Lieutenant Fletcher?”

“Three minutes to the wormhole, Captain, and the Dominion ships won’t have us in missile range for two minutes and fifty five seconds.”

Zizka beamed. “Thank you, Helen.” He spoke to the rest of the bridge crew. “Okay, people, we’ve got the lead time we need to reach the wormhole. Continuous chaff and decoys from here on in. Let’s not give their missiles anything to lock onto.”

The three Dominion destroyers fired two volleys of missiles at
Bertha
just as it reached the wormhole entrance. The space between
Bertha
and the enemy ships was so thick with chaff, decoys, ECM and exploding anti-matter bottles that none of the missiles even came close. A moment later the
Bertha
entered the wormhole and all of its sensors showed nothing but static. The bridge crew cheered wildly.

Zizka motioned to his XO, who leaned close to keep the conversation private.

“Francis, make sure all of the drones are ready. All of them, mind you. Even the ones in the storage. As soon as we come out of the wormhole into Gilead, fire them.”

“I’ll be ready, Captain.”

“Don’t wait for my order, Francis. Just shoot them! We
must
get them off, no matter what.”

“I’ve already loaded them on the racks, Captain. We’ll launch one hundred in the first volley, then one hundred more every four seconds after that.”

“They’ll be waiting for us, Francis, damn them. Don’t wait for my order, just launch!”

“Ten seconds to emergence,” Merlin announced.

The bridge crew were still celebrating their escape. Zizka didn’t interrupt. He took the cigar out of his pocket, then realized ruefully he didn’t have any way to light it. No matter. He stuck it in mouth.

“Stand tall!” Captain Zizka called out to his crew. “You’ve earned it.” Helen Fletcher looked at him, relief giving way to a timorous smile. He nodded, thinking, ‘
Forgive me.’

When the
Bawdy Bertha
emerged from the wormhole, two Dominion missile cruisers hovered before them. The slow, fat freighter managed to launch five hundred message drones before the avalanche of missiles finished her.

The drones swarmed like fireflies around the Dominion cruisers. At first their flight seemed lazy, almost languorous, but then their chemical afterburners kicked in and they accelerated at a rate no space ship could match. Almost two hundred died in the fusillade of anti-missile fire, but the rest surged past unscathed, accelerated and headed across Gilead to the wormhole that would take them to Victoria…and home.

T
he Dominion freighter
Blue Heron
anchored near one of the custom stations not far from the space station Atlas. They would have to wait a day or two for the custom inspection of their cargo, then they would offload it for shipment to the planet’s surface.

The Captain requested permission for his crew and passengers to take a shuttle to Atlas so they could stretch their legs and explore the shops and bars. He explained he had more than two hundred men aboard, replacement workers for a mining base in Gilead. Atlas Port Authority made a note and logged in the authorization. It was all very routine.

“G
ods of Our Mothers, I thought my cabin was small,” Emily remarked. “This is positively Spartan.”

Hiram Brill shrugged, intent on pouring them both coffees. “There are four hundred thousand people on Atlas. Space is at a premium and I am but a lowly Lieutenant.” His cabin was a studio unit, a small living room/kitchen/bedroom space with a wash room off to the side. It was very neat and orderly, but cramped with bookshelves and holo displays. On one shelf there was a picture of Cookie, holding a glass of wine and smiling directly into the camera. Her lips were parted, her hair was slightly mussed and she was in a black dress with thin shoulder straps; one had fallen, accentuating her naked shoulder and graceful neck. Her face was a combination of warm adoration and raw, vibrant sexuality. It was the face of a woman who had just made love…or was just about to.

Gods of Our Mothers!
Emily thought, remembering Cookie as she looked carrying a Bull Pup sonic rifle and wearing mud-caked fatigues.
Who would have guessed?

“Kid cleans up good, doesn’t she?” she said dryly.

Hiram glanced at the picture and smiled wistfully. “Yeah, she certainly does.”

“Heard from her?”

Hiram shook his head. “Not since she left to board the
London.
” He gave Emily her mug of coffee. “Feels funny to be sitting here sipping coffee while she’s off at war.”

Emily nodded agreement. “It shouldn’t take long, though. Second Fleet is packing a lot of fire power. I can’t imagine the Tilleke wanting to get into a toe-to-toe fight with them.”

Hiram frowned. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Tilleke. Far as I can tell, they never go toe-to-toe. They prefer playing the angles, coming at you when you don’t expect it. Feints, misdirection and confusion, until their opponent is off balance and vulnerable.”

“Yeah, okay,” Emily retorted, “but Second Fleet has one hundred and twenty war ships, for God’s sake. The Emperor can bob and weave all he wants, but sooner or later he’s got to have the missile throw weight or it’s all over.”

Hiram snorted. “You know better than that, Emily. You’re the bloody historian, surely you know of instances when an enemy has outsmarted a larger, stronger opponent.”

“Well…” Emily considered, sipping her coffee. “Well, okay, I guess there are lots of examples of armies using deception, but you’re talking about deception on a strategic level, not simply at a tactical level.”

Hiram waived his coffee mug in a ‘keep coming’ gesture.

Emily pursed her lips, recalling some of her military history courses. “Oddly enough, for the best examples you have to go back to Old Earth. Since mankind left Earth in the plague years, then discovered wormholes, there has been very little warfare. There just has been so much room to grow in, enough resources to keep most people happy, and on top of that the cost of building a fleet of war ships capable of projecting force across wormhole sectors is humongous.”

“I know all that,” Hiram complained mildly. “Give me a good example.”

“I know,” she said after a moment. “Old Earth, twentieth century, the Yom Kippur War. There were three warring nations in an area called the ‘Mid-East.’ Israel, Egypt and Syria. Three small countries at a time when there were two superpowers that dominated most of the politics on the planet.”

Hiram frowned. “Israel? Wait a minute, isn’t that one of the countries that eventually settled the Refuge sector?”

Emily nodded. “You’re not as dumb as you look. Yeah, Israel and another tiny country, Morocco. On Earth they were not really hostile, exactly, but hardly friends either. Different religious beliefs, so there was chronic mistrust, but no open military strife between them. Anyway, in the Third Plague, they separately departed Earth in Colony Ships and then both of them ran into problems. If I remember correctly, the engines failed on the Israeli ship and the Moroccans rescued them, but the Moroccans had plague on their ship and the Israelis rescued them in return. After they got through that, they decided to stay together and finally ended up at Refuge.”

Hiram gestured. “You were talking about strategic deception.”

Emily gave him a stern look. “So, there were two wars between the three countries, about eight years apart. This is in the twentieth century, Old Calendar. In the first war, Egypt and Syria built up their armies along the Israeli border, but before they could launch their attack, the Israelis launched a spoiler attack, mostly using their air force. Fighters and bombers that actually flew in the atmosphere rather than in space. They caught the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the ground and wiped them out in the first day. That gave the Israelis air superiority, which they used to crush the Egyptian and Syrian tank forces. This was an area with a lot of open desert, so not too many places to hide from attacking airplanes.”

“This doesn’t sound like a lot of strategic surprise to me,” Hiram said.

“Be patient, I’m getting there. A real drink would probably help, by the way.” Hiram dutifully poured her something amber into a glass and gave it to her.

“So two things happened as the result of this early war. The Israelis adopted the image of the Arab soldier as a buffoon, and pretty much believed that the Egyptians and Syrians could never defeat them in a heads-on battle.”

“Create the stereotype that your opponent is a bad soldier, and it colors everything you learn from then on,” Hiram said.

“Exactly. What the psychologists call ‘priming.’ You assume that something is a hard fact and from that point onward you interpret all new data in relationship to that ‘fact.’ But the other thing is even more important: the Egyptians and Syrians
knew
the Israelis believed this, and they took advantage of it. They planned a great deception, what one of the old superpowers used to call a
maskirovka
. What Egypt did was gradually build up its army, while at the same time leaking information that although they
wanted
to attack Israel, they couldn’t until one of the superpowers – the Soviets – gave Egypt a certain type of long range missile and enough bombers to threaten Israel’s major cities. Meanwhile, the Syrians said that
they
wanted to attack Israel, too, but couldn’t unless Egypt would join them.” Emily grinned. “The best part is that the Soviets agreed to play along. They leaked some information that they wouldn’t give the Egyptians long range missiles or bombers because they didn’t think the Egyptians were good enough to handle them. The Soviets played to Israel’s belief that the Egyptian army couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag.”

“So what happened?” Hiram asked.

“Egypt and Syria scheduled military exercises along Israel’s border to coincide with Israel’s high religious holiday, Yom Kippur. They knew that a lot of troops would be away from their units, attending religious services with their families. At the same time they pretended to have a dispute with the Soviets and ordered them to leave the country. It was almost perfect. Although some of Israel’s army generals warned that an attack was imminent, the Israeli intelligence service kept telling the political leadership that the Egyptians would not attack, that the buildup was just their annual military maneuvers. Israel didn’t begin to mobilize until less than twenty four hours before the attack. The Egyptians stormed across the Suez Canal on the western side of Israel’s territory and the Syrians attacked the eastern border with troop numbers sixteen to one in their favor, and in some places even thirty to one.”

Now Hiram was interested. “So, what happened?”

Emily shrugged. “For the first two days, Israel was pushed back on both fronts, then managed to hold on by the skin of their teeth. It was very close. At one point in the second day Israel got within minutes of launching a nuclear attack on the capital cities of Egypt and Syria.”

Hiram stared at her. “You mean they had nuclear weapons and didn’t use them even after a surprise attack?” he asked incredulously.

Emily shrugged again. “Politics. If they’d used them, they risked having the Soviets retaliate with nukes of their own. But it’s a classic example of
maskirovka
. The Egyptians coordinated the deception and the Israelis, who were no dummies, were completely taken in.”

Hiram sat back and sipped his drink, his eyes going unfocused as he thought. “So the critical part of all of this is that Israel
believed
the Egyptians were not a serious adversary.”

“Yup,” Emily nodded. “Israel’s intelligence service filtered everything they learned through the accepted concept that the Egyptians were screw-ups and could not effectively project force.”

Now Hiram looked troubled. “At the briefing today, Admiral Giunta told the other admirals a joke: ‘What does DUC stand for?’”

Emily shrugged.

“DUC stands for “Defective Universal Coil.” Hiram said. It was a reference to the many equipment breakdowns that had plagued the Dominion ships patrolling Tilleke space.

Emily began to smirk, then caught herself. “So we are applying a demeaning stereotype to the Dominion, making them look …” She groped for a word.

“Ineffectual?” he suggested.

“Yes, that’s it. You’re telling me that the highest Admirals in the Fleet think the Dominion forces are ineffectual buffoons.”