The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught (49 page)

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Authors: Jack Campbell

BOOK: The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught
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“Son of a bitch!” Desjani gasped, having centered her attention a fraction of a second earlier than Geary had managed.
He still took another moment to grasp what he was seeing. “What the hell is that?”
Across the path the fleet would have taken straight out the jump point and only one light minute distant, a massive object orbited. The fleet’s combat systems had already covered what seemed like every square meter of the object’s surface with threat symbols, which continued to multiply as new threats were identified. Geary blinked, rereading the assessment of shield strength on the orbiting leviathan in disbelief.
One of the watch-standers answered Geary’s question, her own voice filled with incredulity. “It’s the size and mass of a minor planet, Admiral, and its orbit is slaved to the jump point. Either they completely turned a minor planet into a fortress and moved it here, or they built something that huge.”
Desjani shook her head. “If we hadn’t executed that preplanned evasion the fleet would have gotten far too close to that thing before we could turn it. Good thing—”
She stopped speaking as more alarms shrieked from the combat systems.
Geary stared as part of the surface of the planet-fort seemed to leap into space, then saw that it was actually a dense swarm of small ships so numerous they momentarily blocked a clean view of the fortress. “How many of those things are there?”
No answer came, and Desjani spun in her seat to glare at her combat systems watch-stander. Lieutenant Castries shook her head helplessly. “System is still evaluating. Estimate greater than two hundred. Greater than four hundred. Greater than eight hundred.” Castries took a sudden breath. “Working estimate stabilizing at nine hundred, plus or minus ten percent.”
Desjani also inhaled slowly, then looked at Geary. “Nine hundred,” she repeated in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Plus or minus ten percent,” he added, wondering that he could make a joke of such a thing. “Any idea what they are?”
“If they’re missiles, they’re very big missiles.” Desjani tapped her display. “They have very good acceleration. I wonder if they’re crewed or automated.”
“They’re about twice as large in mass and dimensions than standard human fast attack craft,” the combat systems watch reported. “That’s plenty big enough for crews”
“Or really big warheads.” Desjani pointed at her display again. “They could be mostly warhead and propulsion. If they maintain that acceleration—”
“We won’t be able to outrun them,” Geary agreed, running another estimate on the maneuvering systems. The same answer came up, though. “Not when they’re this close and coming on that fast.”
The rest of the fleet had cleared the jump point by then, and all of the ships were bending onto the new course upward and to the side. “All units, this is Admiral Geary. At time four one, come port zero eight zero degrees and accelerate at maximum.” That would at least line up the fleet’s subformations in a column leading away from the alien force and give him as much time as possible to think of a solution to this mess that didn’t involve massive losses to his fleet. His eyes came to rest on a detailed image of one of the alien craft that the fleet’s sensors had compiled and his display had helpfully parked to one side. Unlike the tortoise-shaped ships they had encountered so far, these alien craft were simply cylinders with rounded bows, some kind of propulsion unit making up the entire back end, and a few low, small spines that must hold sensors sticking out from the sides. And that orbiting fort . . . “This is ugly,” he said to Desjani. “But none of this looks anything like the enigmas.”
“No, it doesn’t. At least there’s no hypernet gate here.”
“One small blessing.” They could race away from the jump exit without worrying about the threat of a gate. But if these weren’t the enigmas . . . “Could we have found a star system colonized by humans ? Some group who found themselves in enigma space and had to keep running until they found a star system on the other side of the enigmas?”
Desjani glanced back to her engineering watch. “What do you think, Master Chief?”
Gioninni shook his head. “No, Captain. None of the stuff we’ve seen resembles human designs. And the industrial base needed to build and maintain something like that fortress would be huge. Not something that could be thrown up overnight or in a few decades. They would have had to have been isolated out here for several centuries at least. How could they have gotten this far out that long ago? Maybe these aren’t those enigmas, but I’m not seeing anything that makes me think human.”
“Have we heard anything from these aliens or humans or whatever?” Geary asked. “There’s been time for at least a challenge to reach us from that fortress.”
The comm watch answered him. “No, Admiral. Not a word that we can tell was directed at us. And nothing that gives any clue to who they are. We’re picking up lots of their comms, but it’s all heavily encrypted.”
“Everything?” Desjani demanded.
“Yes, Captain. There’s no civilian comm traffic that we can find. It’s all military-grade encryption. At least, that’s what we’d call it if they were human.”
“Humans with that kind of discipline? No one taking shortcuts or ignoring comm requirements?”
“That doesn’t seem too likely, does it?” Geary agreed. “We don’t have time to consult the experts, and as long as whoever is directing those small craft keeps charging at us, we also don’t have any option but to defend ourselves.” He turned to look back and saw Rione in the observer’s seat, sitting silently, her eyes watching her own display. “Try to establish communications with them. Tell them we’ll be happy to leave and didn’t intend staying anyway and have no hostile intent. We don’t have much time to get those messages across,” he added, not sure if Rione understood just how bad the situation was.
Rione sounded resigned as she replied. “They have made no attempts to communicate, not even demands that we leave or surrender. I don’t think they wish to talk, Admiral Geary. They appear to have enough hostile intent for both of us, and they don’t seem to care about our own intentions.”
“Do your best, Madam Emissary.” He eyed his display again. “If we can’t get them to break off their attack,” Geary commented to Desjani, “we’re going to have one hell of a fight on our hands.”
“Target-rich environment,” Desjani remarked in a cheerful voice that carried across the bridge. Her watch-standers, tense gazes alternating between their superiors and the huge number of attackers, relaxed slightly at that display of their captain’s confidence.
Geary had trouble showing the same enthusiasm for the situation, though. “That’s one way of looking at it. There are so damn many of them.” He ran yet another maneuvering check despite knowing that he would get the same awful answer. After an awesome surge of acceleration at launch, the alien craft seemed to have steadied out at a still-impressive rate of increasing velocity. His own warships had come around to point almost directly away from the oncoming aliens and were all pushing their propulsion systems to the limit, but the maneuvering systems confirmed that the best that most of Geary’s combatants could manage wouldn’t be good enough to avoid interception, though the battle cruisers should be able to just pull out of contact. The cruisers and destroyers could almost match the battle cruisers, but that “almost” meant the aliens would almost certainly manage to catch many of the escorts. The four assault transports would be doomed, along with the Marines and liberated prisoners on them, and the battleships and auxiliaries also had no chance at all. Even dumping all of the mass the auxiliaries held in their raw materials bunkers wouldn’t allow the auxiliaries to accelerate fast enough to give them any chance, and while the battleships could gather speed more quickly than the auxiliaries, with this little time to accelerate, the massive warships weren’t all that much more agile.
Geary focused intently, trying to close out normal fear, trying to find some room to maneuver against these opponents. But there didn’t seem to be any, not when the opponent had nine hundred ships too close and coming on too fast, and he usually had a lot more time to think things through, to evaluate the situation before making plans. In this situation, he knew too little and had too little time. “Advantages,” he muttered.
“We’ve got a lot more firepower,” Desjani pointed out. “And with our ships moving away at maximum acceleration, and the aliens caught in a stern chase, that reduces the closing rate. That means we’ll be within firing range of those things for minutes instead of milliseconds, giving us a lot more time to pound them. On the other hand, one shot from a hell lance probably isn’t going to take out one of those. We’ll likely need multiple hits, and there are so many of those things that we’d have to fire repeatedly as fast as possible. The weapon systems aren’t designed for that.”
“I know all that!” Why was she telling him things he already knew when what he needed was answers? All right, maybe he hadn’t thought all of that through yet, but he would have. His reply came out sharp and abrupt, fed by an awful sense of futility, and he saw her answering frown.
Glowering at her display, Desjani sat back, pointedly ignoring him as she prepared her ship for action.
Damn. I don’t need this kind of personal distraction. Why the hell does she have to be so sensitive now, of all of times? She’s the best damned ship driver I’ve got, and if anyone could maneuver us through this, it would be her, though
she’d
probably prefer just charging at those—
Geary’s mind froze, trying to retrack and find the idea that had almost been lost as it had raced past at the speed of thought multiplied by irritation and dismay.
Charging.
“Tanya.”
“What? Sir.”
“We don’t know how maneuverable they are. But we can judge how fast they can move since they must be coming at us at their maximum sustained capability. We have a very narrow chance to control when we come into contact with these attackers, but we’ll have to time our own maneuvers just right.”
Her glower didn’t subside, but Desjani’s expression took on a calculating measure. “They could be holding their velocity down to ensure their own targeting systems are effective and preserve their fuel reserves for what might be a long chase, but more likely we’re seeing the best they can do.” Desjani’s eyes were narrowed as she looked at her display, as if she were aiming a weapon. Raising her voice, she addressed her watch-standers without taking her eyes from the display. “I want human eyes on the fleet sensor readings. The sensors are telling me they haven’t identified any weapons on the alien craft yet. Tell me what
you
see.”
There was a pause as the officers and senior enlisted personnel called up and focused intently on the depictions of the alien craft created by the sensors, then a lieutenant spoke slowly. “Captain, maybe they do things really differently from us, but I can’t see anything that looks like firing ports or hard points. No external weapons are visible, and there’s nothing that could blow out or open to allow internal missiles to fire. They’re just tubes.”
“Bullets,” Lieutenant Castries said. “Really big bullets.”
Desjani swung her head to look at the others, and all of them nodded; then she finally looked at Geary again. “We have to assume that those things don’t carry weapons, they
are
weapons. Since those craft don’t have stand-off weapons, we do have some chance to decide when we engage. That’s the bright side of it. I’m not still boring you with things you already know, am I?”
“I’m sorry. I’m under a bit of pressure right now—”
“If
Dauntless
is destroyed, Admiral, then you and I
both
die. What’s your idea?”
Geary kept his reply short. “Concentrate the fleet by reducing acceleration sequentially by unit type.”
“Produce an easier target for the aliens that they’ll catch sooner? That’s counterintuitive, at least. Concentrating the force . . . sequentially?” She paused, thinking, then Desjani’s hands were moving, tracing maneuvers on her display. “I see what you’re thinking. It won’t be pretty, but it might work, and it beats any option I’ve come up with.”
“Link me to your display so we can do this fast.” The next few minutes passed in a blur as Geary worked on his maneuvering display, planning out hundreds of ship movements in conjunction with Desjani as the maneuvering systems automatically generated orders for the necessary turns, accelerations, and decelerations for each individual ship while also figuring out how to avoid collisions as all of those ships darted through the same region of space. It was the sort of problem that would have taken humans weeks to work out, but the fleet systems produced answers instantly in response to the commands that Geary and Desjani were entering.
Of course, every system, no matter how good, still generated a few flaws, a few errors. Ideally, people would have time to discover those using the intuitive ability of the human mind to scan over a big picture and spot tiny inconsistencies. But there was no time for that now. He could only hope that those inevitable errors wouldn’t be critical ones. Two ships crossing the same point at the same moment in time would produce one cloud of debris and zero survivors.
“You’ll need to let individual ships maneuver independently when the attackers get close enough,” Desjani cautioned. “That will seriously stress the ability of the maneuvering systems to predict movements of other warships and avoid collisions.”

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