Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (14 page)

That was no surprise. The Traders would have destroyed those
links as fast as possible to make sure our intelligence was dated.

Taas sent in a thought. What about orbital defense systems?

He sounded calm, but I felt his tension. Zabo responded to
my thought by showing me Taas in his cockpit. Data flashed under the image:
pulse, blood pressure, temperature, breathing rate, brain activity.

Hey, Taas thought. I’m fine.

There will be hordes of sat-bangs in orbit,
I
thought. Those low value decoy satellites, usually good for one missile or an
old style laser, had electronic signatures that made them appear as high value
targets to incoming craft or missiles.
Robot drones too. Possibly a robot
crewed Sentinel.

Why a Sentinel? Helda asked. Putting a platform in orbit
makes it vulnerable.

Zabo swapped to Rex, drawing on his expertise. They have no
reason to expect an attack, he thought. There are no moons to put a base on, so
the Sentinel’s vulnerability may be outweighed by the fact that the rebels
control the ground defenses.

How about manned Solos? Taas asked.

Only a few, Rex thought. Normally ground based. But they may
be in orbit here.

Especially given the EIs they carry,
I thought. All
the rebels needed to do was capture one Solo and they had an EI to adapt for
their own ships.

The possibility of a Sentinel worried me. That platform
would make the orbital defense system even more deadly. In theory, a Jag
squadron coming out of inversion could take on an orbital platform and survive;
realistically, if we didn’t knock it out immediately, when we had the advantage
of surprise, our chances plummeted.

Our best bet was to reinvert as close to Tams as possible,
launching a cloud of smart missiles. The immense kinetic energy of our near
light speed velocity would make our missiles into bullets with the power of
megaton explosives. Well-settled planets had defenses against relativistic
attack, but Tams was a small station in a backwater region of space. Also, the
Traders knew it was in our best interest to make no overt moves against them.
Right now they were probably concentrating on the rebels.

But all that meant was that we had a chance of success.
Whether or not it was more than vanishingly small was another story. I had seen
stats on the Tams ODS, its orbital defense system. It wasn’t trivial. And since
Tams had been knocked out of the Skol-Net, our intelligence on it was
incomplete.

What about tau missiles? Helda asked.

They’ve got them,
I thought.
Just hope it’s not
too many.
Taus were equipped with inversion drives. Given that the problem
the Traders faced was on the planet, though, I hoped they had put the expensive
and bulky tau missiles low on their list of priorities.

Of course, they could have made short work of the rebellion
by smashing a tau into Tams at relativistic speed. The rebels had made the same
assumption as had the rest of the same universe, that Ur Qox wouldn’t destroy a
desirable territory.

We had been wrong, all of us. The Tams resistance was a symbol
of defiance, one far more potent in Qox’s obsessed mind than any of us had
realized, powerful enough that he wanted them destroyed in the most dramatic
way possible as a warning to any others who thought to defy his rule.

I input my conclusions into the link. When we reach Tams,
our advantages will be surprise, speed, and our Jag link. Disadvantages: we’re
four Jags against a full ODS and we can’t communicate with Tams until we come
out of inversion. Strategy: We reinvert close to the planet, only twenty
million kilometers out, coming in with a spread of a hundred thousand
kilometers between ships. We transmit our warning to the rebels using neutrino
communicators and exhaust modulation. The Traders would be hard pressed to stop
either; the gamma source produced by our exhaust would be a spectacular beacon,
and neutrinos went through almost anything.

Immediately upon reinversion we release a cloud of .89c
MIRVs.
The multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles would travel at
89 percent of light speed, giving them the energy equivalent of megaton bombs.
After
we knock out the ODS, we deliver the EIs.

Understood.
The response echoed from all four ships.

Ready to reinvert, Zabo thought.

I fired the photon thrusters—and went into stasis. The only
way I knew I hadn’t been conscious while we decelerated was by the
discontinuous change in speed registered on my displays. I fired the thrusters
again and the Jag decelerated more, slowing down in a series of jumps I
perceived as a continuous process.

The stars moved forward, converging on a point directly in
front of the ship. Their colors shifted toward blue until they went ultraviolet
and disappeared from my screens. Zabo overlaid a grid on the holomaps showing
the position of the stars as they collapsed into the point—

—
and we roared out of inversion in perfect
formation, at the same instant, blasting our warning to Tams as we hurtled
toward the planet, preceded by a swarm of MIRVs.

Zabo flooded my mind with data; the Tams ODS was meeting us
with what looked like an entire fleet of Sentinels. But I recognized those
energy signatures. Most came from decoys, I was sure of it.

Taus sighted—disappeared, Zabo thought.

Evade!

—
and I came out of stasis. Zabo had thrown the Jag
into such an abrupt course change that the stasis coil had kicked in,
protecting me from the lethal accelerations.

Taus detonated to port, Zabo thought. Stats poured in,
giving me the analysis far faster than my unboosted brain could ever have
absorbed it. Tau antimissiles equipped with inversion drives were catching our
MIRVs and inverting. They targeted our positions and reinverted, exploding both
themselves and their MIRV captives in violent bursts of radiation.

At these speeds the taus had to invert to catch us. But their
foray through relativistic and superluminal regimes threw them off. Had they
been able to track us while they were traveling in inversion, our evasive
tactics might have failed. As it was, they came out seconds too late. We had
shot past the point where they expected us.

We were far beyond the planet’s orbit now, headed toward the
Tams sun. We accelerated again, going in and out of stasis as we pushed closer
to light speed.

Invert,
I thought.

My stomach wrenched with the familiar twisting sensation. We
entered superluminal space and kept accelerating, hurtling at millions of times
light speed. Time went faster here for us than for Tams, so that we could come
around and re-enter the system with only seconds passing since we left it.

Reinversion brought us out a few million kilometers from
Tams, flying toward the planet from the sun, spraying the last of our MIRVs in
a cloud ahead of us.

ODS sterilized, Zabo thought.

Verify.
The thought came from all four of us at once.

Verified. Zabo gave us the stats. We had eliminated the
entire system: taus, decoys, drones, and a Sentinel orbiting platform.

I heard an indrawn breath over the com channel connected to
Taas’s Jag. Helda whooped and Rex sent me an image of his face with a wickedly
exultant grin. I was grinning myself. We had done it!

Taas’s laugh rumbled in my mind. The ODS were against us,
but we beat them.

I smiled. Continue dumping velocity on approach to Tams.

We “braked” down, flicking into stasis during deceleration,
again, again, we were nearing Tams now, slowed down almost enough for
atmospheric entry, again—

I came out of stasis to the scream of alarms. Stats reeled
through my mindscape: Solos and cybernetic drones were boiling up from the
planet.

Damn! Engage shrouds!

Three voices answered me in a lightspeed pulse of thought.
Engaged.

We disappeared. Blackbody shielding turned the alabaster
sheen of our hulls into surfaces that reflected no light. At best, it was
minimal stealth; the Traders knew we were here, and every time we accelerated
our exhaust gave us away.

Helda, get down as far as you can, I thought. We’ll cover
you. Drop the EIs in a drone. Whether or not the rebels could recover it was
another story. But we had no choices now. We had lost our advantages of speed
and surprise, and our MIRVs were gone. Nor could we use any more inversion
tricks; to invert we had to accelerate to near light speed, which would mean
leaving Helda undefended while she tried to make the drop.

The Solos and drones were coming from an underground base.
Analysis said we were seeing the beleaguered remains of the ground defense.
Scan said most of the ground defenses had been destroyed. Zabo calculated an 84
percent probability that the rebels had been overcome, and had blown up the
installations rather than let them be recaptured by the Traders.

Prime Annihilators,
I thought. Like Jumblers and
photon thrusters, these guns worked on pair annihilation. Inversion technology
had opened the way for efficient antimatter weapons. Annihilators used
antiprotons, with energies two hundred times greater than positrons, millions
of times greater than the wimpy bitons in Jumblers. After being accelerated,
the beam was neutralized and focused by running it through foils where it
picked up positrons.

Despite the drawbacks of beam weapons, that they were easier
to avoid than smart missiles, Annihilators were the best offense against ships
that used stasis “shields.” An object in stasis could survive immense
forces—including enemy fire. Although a ship in stasis was more fragile to
missile hits than to acceleration, it was still difficult to destroy.
Annihilating matter in stasis was easier than deforming it, making the beam
weapons vital in combat.

Zabo, I thought. Do any of the drones or Solos have
inversion capability?

Yes. Zabo showed me four drones and five Solos with photon
thrusters. Three of the Solos had MIRV capability.

Rex swore, and my fists clenched. Those three Solos could
try the same gambit we had used to take out the ODS. Yes, we had warning and
could use decoy dust to confuse their MIRVs, but I didn’t need an EI analysis
to see how slim our chances were. We had one advantage: the Solos had no way to
coordinate during inversion. They couldn’t invert or reinvert simultaneously,
particularly not with us harrying them, which meant the first to launch its
MIRVs would as likely destroy the other Solos as us.

The question was: were they willing to kill each other to
kill us?

I didn’t want to find out. We had to destroy them before
they had a chance to try.

As Red and Gold closed on two of the Solos, Zabo showed me a
drone on an intercept course with us. Firing, Zabo thought.

My Annihilator cut through the magnetic fields shielding the
drone. No beam was perfectly neutral and mag-shields deflected charged
particles. But most of the shot reached its target. Where it hit, annihilations
created pion showers, which started other devastatingly high energy processes,
giving birth to particles and radiation that tore through the fusion engines,
the weapons bays, the inversion engines, the generators powering the antimatter
containment fields—

—
and the drone disappeared in a silent burst of
radiation and exploding debris. Part of it vanished with the eerie
sucked
away
effect created when real matter collapsed into the complex space
within a fuel containment bottle.

Warning: Zabo thought. Greenzabo detected.

Taas fired at one of the MIRV Solos even though thousands of
kilometers still separated them. Zabo highlighted his shot on my display, red
for a tau missile. It streaked out like a miniature—and volatile—starship. Taus
were too bulky for a Jag to carry many; Taas had just used a fourth of his
supply.

Lost a fourth of his supply. The Solo caught it with an
Annihilator shot. The tau exploded close enough to destroy the Solo, but the
ship remained whole, thrown into stasis by its EI. It sped away from Taas and
toward me like a rigid body set into frictionless motion.

Then the Solo dropped out of stasis—and I gasped as fear
punctured my mind, a foreign terror, strange and eerily familiar at the same
time.

Blocking, Zabo thought. The Block psicon flashed in my mind,
and kept on flashing. Although the fear receded, it didn’t disappear; with my
boosted concentration so intimately focused on the Solo, I couldn’t shut out
the pilot’s reaction.

It hit me like a hovertrain. He was so scared, so
young,
barely
more than a boy, one who had never expected combat on this simple assignment at
Tams ...
never wanted to fly a Solo, never wanted near one. How could I ever
have believed it would make my dreams reality, lift me up into the taskmaker
caste
—
I’m going to pay for that dream now
—

Zabo, block!
Tears ran down my face, the tears of my
enemy. The block psicon flashed futilely in my mind, over and over.

Firing, Zabo thought.

My Annihilator caught the Solo point-blank and detonated it into
oblivion. I gasped as the boy’s death scream vibrated in my mind.

Zabo. I drew in a sobbing breath. Disconnect emotive
centers.

Disconnected.

Then the part of my brain that cried in protest against the
killing was locked in a glass-walled prison, seeing but with protests unheard,
unable to stop me from doing what had to be done.

Red and Gold have been detected. Zabo flashed me images of
Helda and Rex engaging two drones and a Solo with MIRV ports. It showed me
another three drones on intercept courses with us.

Switch to evasive pattern two,
I thought. Zabo fired
the maneuvering rockets, “cold” thrust from the fusion engines, changing course
every second or less. The cocoon protected me against lesser accelerations and
Zabo snapped us into stasis when the forces were lethal. My Annihilator beam
snapped out and one of the drones exploded in a violent flash of radiation.