Rogue Powers (37 page)

The two of them headed toward the mess wagons, the stars in their hearts.

Of all the Refiners, only L'awdasi, the lifemaker, was a stargazer. L'awdasi was in charge of caring for all the workbeasts of the Group, and she had campaigned hard before the Guidance allowed her to care for M'Calder as well. It gave her access to the halfwalker, and gave her the chance to talk with Lucy for hours about the sky. L'awdasi had a fine telescope, a rugged reflector of about thirty centimeters apeture, built by the craftworkers of a distant city. It had been well worth the journey there, and even worth enduring the company of the eccentric city dwellers, to obtain such a fine instrument. Recently, L'awdasi had a new goal to seek for among the stars. This halfwalker had spoken of a "barycenter," a place between the twin suns where matter would accrete. It was even possible that there was a small planet at the bary center. The idea fired her imagination. A new world! L'awdasi searched each night, joyously engaged in the hopeless task of detecting a hypothetical dim and tiny dot of light, as distant from her as Neptune is from Earth.

And so only L'awdasi saw the faint, flickering lights, all but lost in the glare from Nova Sol A, that sparked and shone for a time about the bary center. A strange phenomena. Tomorrow she would ask the halfwalker about it. After all, the halfwalker knew about barycenters.

The skies flamed and flickered in the viewscreen, and the Republic of Kennedy Starship
Eagle's
external radiation meters quivered, crawled a bit closer to the high end of the scale. All hell was breaking loose out there, exactly on schedule.

The
Eagle
and the rest of the League fleet stood well off from the barycenter of the Guardian/Outpost star system, and let the Snipe do their work.

All that wooing of the Bandwidthers had paid off. Admiral Thomas had sent them little more than a sketch on the back of a envelope, and they had responded a month later with five thousand custom-designed decoy drones. No other planet could have responded that quickly or effectively. Sir George was just glad the Bandwidthers were on the same side he was on.

The drones had gotten christened Snipe somewhere along the line (someone claimed the name stood for Special Nonexplosive Intrusive Probe Experiment, but obviously they had backed that acronym into the name). By any name, they were out there doing their job right now.

A Snipe was the size and shape of a standard torpedo, the smallest thing ever to get a C
²
generator crammed inside—and the Bandwidthers managed that mainly because the generators didn't have to be very precise, and because there was very little
else
that needed to go inside a Snipe. The big advantage to torpedo-size was that Snipe could be fired by practically any ship in the League fleet. At the moment, practically every ship in the fleet
was
firing them.

The League fleet stood off from the barycenter by about a twentieth of a light year, surrounding it in a vast ring, facing the center from every point of the compass. The ships themselves stayed well out of range of the defensive missiles, and the Snipe went in. Once fired from a torpedo tube, a Snipe would burst in and out of C
²
space in a millisecond or so, jumping from the fleet's encircling position to the vicinity of the barycenter, making as much radio noise and calling as much attention to itself as possible.

The Guards' automatic anti-ship missiles, designed to sense and home in on ships arriving from C, were drawn to the Snipe like lambs to the slaughter. A Guard missile would home on a Snipe and blow itself up—taking out the cheap, mass-produced drone instead of a warship, and there was suddenly one less Guard anti-ship missile to worry about. The real warships, the fleet, would wait until the anti-ship missiles stopped coming, until the skies about the barycenter were no longer lit by the fire of nuclear explosions.

Salvo after salvo of Snipe blipped into the barycenter and died, saturating the Guardian defenses before the main attack ever began. The Snipe were a rich man's weapon, a brute force solution to the problem of getting through the Guards' missiles.

But Admiral Sir George Thomas, watching from the battle information center of his flagship, the
Eagle,
had never much cared about subtlety for subtlety's sake. He would settle for the irony of bombing the hell out of the enemy's defenses with their own bombs.

Computer-controlled sensors, quite unconcerned by such things, counted and mapped the explosions, and monitored the "I'm-still-here" telemetry from the thousands of Snipe.

After long hours, the number of flashes in the darkness began to decline, and more and more Snipe survived longer and longer. Admiral Thomas, a guest on
Eagle's
bridge, turned to
Eagle's
master, Captain Josiah Robinson. "Well, Captain, either our friends have run out of missiles or they're shutting down the missile system until we run out of drones."

"Either way, Sir George, that leaves a nice hole in their defenses."

"My thoughts, exactly. What's say we keep sending in the Snipe and start slipping in some fighters among them? It's time that trigger-happy younger generation of ours had a chance."

Captain Robinson nodded to the comm officer, and the order was relayed to the appropriate units. This moment was planned for. Robinson, a short, middle-aged, dark-skinned black man with a peppery temper, rubbed his bald spot with the palm of his hand, noticed what he was doing, and stopped. Occasionally he wondered what he had done for a nervous gesture when he still had a full head of hair.

And there was plenty to be nervous about.
Eagle
was half the size of the
Imp,
but she still made a nice juicy target, not just for the worms and/or whatever other horrors the Guards had cooked up, but for a plain old-fashioned nuke. One of those pretty flashes of light would be enough to knock
Eagle
out of the game for good.

But that didn't happen. The fighters went in, and some of them died. The Guardian ships that deployed the anti-ship missiles were blown. Sir George sent in frigates and corvettes and resupply ships, gradually establishing coherent force around the tiny worldlet that sat right where the astrophysicists said it would, exactly at the barycenter. A few minor Guard warships fought hard, killed and were killed. Slowly, methodically, Sir George peeled back the barycenter's defenses. Finally the League fleet moved in, and found itself astride the centerpoint of the whole star system. No Guard ship could move between Outpost and Capital in normal space without battling its way through the League fleet. The League forces could also intercept and/or jam most radio and laser communications between the two worlds. Most important, they were in under the range of the anti-ship missile systems around Capital and Outpost. The missiles spotted ships coming out of C
²
. As long as the League ships stayed in normal space, they could move against the two worlds without tear of the robot missiles. Of course, the Guards would see them coming, and the anti-ship missiles could probably be fired by remote control to go for ships in normal space. The fight wasn't over.

The planning for this attack had been hideously complex— the timing and communications problems mind-boggling. But it all paid off, with a clean, careful, methodical, smoothly run—and almost dull—operation. Captain Robinson liked it that way. So for,
Eagle
hadn't even had her paint job scratched.

Sir George was equally pleased, at the end of it. He had been in the task force control center seemingly every minute, always fresh and calm looking. It was time to put Bannister into operation. The specialists went down to the baryworld, and Thomas kept himself carefully appraised of their progress. Now it was time for him to wait again. Thomas didn't want to hack through the defenses of the two worlds. He wanted the Guards to come to him, force them to fight on his turf.

He intended to keep building up his power at the barycenter, bringing in an endless stream of supplies and ships. Sooner or later, the Guards would have to try and put a stop to it, or face the prospect of a huge and impregnable enemy fleet in their own back yard. He had to wait. But waiting was slow torture to Sir George—and he had spent a lifetime in that torture already.

One evening, Sir George invited Robinson to dinner in the admiral's cabin. It wasn't until the mess steward had cleared the last of the dishes and left them to their port and cigars that Thomas really spoke. "We've managed to outflank ourselves, Captain Robinson," he said cheerfully. "We've hopped smack into the middle of it, and now the enemy has us surrounded without moving at all." He paused for a moment. "Things look good. We outgun them, we have more ships, we have the resources of every world in space to draw on. There are only two things to be afraid of. The unknown is the first.
Something
could happen; God knows what. And the second is the more dangerous, the more likely. If they have a genius for a commander. A genius, a truly great admiral and not a tired-out old man like me, he could wipe us out more certainly than a planetload of worms and ten thousand nuclear weapons.' He was silent for a long moment, and then slapped his hands together and spoke again, in a louder, more cheerful voice. "So—we prepare to defend ourselves once the Guards arrive, plan our next attack, and give praise for the rarity of genius."

Sir George reached for the port decanter again, a bit too eagerly, and filled his glass to the brim for the third time, while Robinson stared hard past him at nothing at all. How the hell do you keep an admiral dried out?

Schiller had waited twelve long hours before he had a chance to talk with Wu in private. Work schedules and sleep shifts had conspired to slow him down. Finally, he caught her as she was heading back on shift. He cornered her in a bend of the corridor and set her heart racing with two words.

"They're here."

Wu looked up at him sharply, her eyes opened wide. There was no point in asking who "they" were. That was in his tone of voice, the gjeam in his eye. "Oh, Sam! Thank God." She grabbed his arm and looked up at him.

"When? How long ago? What are they doing? How do you know?"

"Quiet, calm. Take it easy. We're talking about how bad the coffee is here. Okay? Good. Now, I've been tracking the construction of the anti-ship missile system at the barycenter—and all of a sudden the center is full of flashes of light, fusion engine lights, the x-ray and gamma detectors start doing a dance—don't ask me who's winning, but there's a pitched battle going on out there. No other possible explanation."

"Who else knows?"

"I haven't told anyone, and I haven't made any records. We've got to let this out slowly, carefully, or else this crowd is going to mutiny and get itself killed to no purpose. You and I need to talk, figure out a plan of action. Once we decide what to do, then, when we spread the word, we're doing more than starting a riot."

"So why pick me to tell?"

"I need help with this from somebody. You've kept your lip zipped over that Lucy-and-the-lander bit, never mentioned it again. And besides this dull-witted Iowa farmboy, the lady from the inscrutable East seemed the most levelheaded type left in the crowd."

Wu gave him the ghost of a smile, started to speak, but then he shushed her. "Meet me for a nice cup of bad coffee at your lunch break. Think on it all between now and then. So will I. Then we make a plan."

Cynthia Wu wasn't capable of much thought for a while. After so long, the League—their rescuers! She could dare to think of home again—family, friends. . . .

She went through the motions of powering up her console on automatic, not really thinking about the dull housekeeping chores that went with running the system. Check the power source, check the comm links, test antennae control, test beacon—

Beacon! It had almost ceased to have meaning for her, the hidden beacon she bade the computer check every morning. At first, the signal had sat tight in one spot for a long time, and Cynthia had assumed that Lucy was in the lander, staying safe. At least Cynthia had been able to mark the lander's location. But then the beacon had started moving, and Cynthia couldn't make sense of what the beacon signal told her. Lucy was supposed to be on the other end of that link, and if she was, she was moving endlessly about the surface of Outpost, why and toward what Cynthia didn't know. It was perfectly possible that Lucy was dead, and the beacon was transmitting its signal from inside the belly of the beast that had eaten her. There was no way to know.

But if the League was here—then Lucy would be damned important. She knew more about the 'Posters than anyone. Cynthia would have to get a message to her somehow.

Cynthia called up the computer's tracking report of the beacon's movements, and got the second biggest shock of the day.

Lucy, or at least whoever had the beacon, had been moving at high speed straight for the lander for the last twelve hours.