12
A Mixture of Madness
There is no great genius without a mixture of
madness.
—Aristotle
Arduan SDH Shem’pter’ai, Expeditionary Fleet of the Anaht’doh Kainat, Ajax System
Narrok closed his eyes. But he could still see what the holoplot and the viewscreens had shown him when his flagship, the Shem’pter’ai, had emerged from the warp point just ten minutes ago. He saw it as clearly as if all three of his eyes were still staring at it.
The plot was choked with the ochre-colored icons of his dead ships. Here and there, the sigil denoting a vanquished human hull broke the harrowing monotony of the otherwise uniform mass of devastation. The devastation of his fleet. Again. When the day had begun, he’d hoped it would end differently—
* * *
Having gone over the order of the coming battle with his entire staff, Narrok had narrowed his selnarm link to share the final strategic assessment and intelligence exclusively with Sarhan and Fleet Second Esh’hid. “This time we know who our adversary is: a human female named Krishmahnta. She is not a legendary leader among the ranks of the human admirals, merely the most senior among those who have been cut off from their main bases when we arrived at Bellerophon. However, for a middle-ranked admiral whose name does not figure prominently in the humans’ pre-war dispatches, she has acquitted herself quite well. Questions?”
There were none. So Narrok gave the order to commence the preparatory operations: clearing the human minefields with Urret-fah’ah minesweepers. But it seemed less effective, this time: evidently, the humans had not had enough mines to thickly seed the area immediately surrounding the warp point. Or so Narrok’s staff insisted.
Narrok was not convinced, and did not race through with the van of his fleet. Instead, he stuck to the attack plan—and thus allowed the humans to, predictably, decimate wave after alternating wave of recon drones, ever followed by SBMHAWKs. Happily, the latter systems did find and savage several large targets—or so it seemed. Certainly, there were more dead human hulls being detected by each successive wave of RDs.
Consequently, when Narrok felt a strident excitement and urgency underlying Esh’hid’s next selnarm send, he knew what she was going to request before she pulsed it across the light-seconds to him: immediate attack. Narrok resisted, but chose not to expressly prohibit, that initiative.
Esh’hid, evidently sensing the significance of her admiral’s indefinite response, pressed further. “Admiral, this could be the opportunity we have been waiting for—an opportunity to push through a warp point before the humans are fully prepared for us.”
“Yes, but it could also be a trap.”
“My instincts tell me it is not, Admiral.”
Narrok elected not to point out that he had more years and experience with which to refine his instincts. Instead, he eventually consented to Fleet Second Esh’hid’s almost piteous pleadings to be given the signal honor of leading an unplanned fast attack against the apparently incomplete human defenses in the Ajax system. With little delay, Esh’hid transferred to the bridge of the largest SDH of the advance assault group and promptly led them through the warp point into Ajax.
Where, drones reported, they were promptly and handily destroyed. The apparent human losses to the SBMHAWKs had been a canny deception: the victims were large, empty bulk-freighters, stripped of everything but their outdated drives and a few electronic suites—just enough to fool the SBMHAWKs into believing them to be valid targets. The RDs had been unable to distinguish the decoys from genuine capital ships: doing so would have required a much closer scanning pass—and the RDs had been unable to get close enough to retrieve that level of detail and still survive to report. Indeed, the few RDs that had returned from each wave spent less than ten seconds on the Ajax side of the warp point.
Esh’hid and her attack force also discovered that a second tier of mines was waiting for them, farther back than the first, and that a surprising number of forts were waiting on the far side of those minefields.
All of which meant that Esh’hid and her advance assault group materialized in the center of a veritable cauldron of lethal human fire. Missile salvos and force beams turned that volume of space into a scintillant collage of overlapping explosions and savagely disruptive energies.
Not that she lived to report it. Narrok and Sarhan got the battle reports from the only two zhed’bidr—terminal drones—that survived to limp back through the warp point, seared and semifunctional. And Narrok could not help reflecting that this tragedy did have an upside: he was now freed from Esh’hid’s ever-prying eyes, although he had—earnestly, at the last—hoped to convince her to reconsider her impulse to lead an attack that ultimately consumed her and two dozen of the last original-construction SDs like zifrik pupae caught in a flame.
So Narrok simply resumed the original attack plan, knowing as he unfolded it that the costs and outcomes were almost as predetermined as the life and death of a star: there might be momentary variations, but the general course of events was unalterable.
With the humans well back from the warp point, Narrok knew that entering the system was not his major problem. Rather, survival of his units, once there, would be a thorny challenge: the forts were predominantly missile-armed, and the data from the terminal drones indicated that they had hammered out densities of heavy ballistic missiles at Esh’hid’s SDHs that neither she nor he could hope to match or deflect. So the first hulls Narrok sent through would have to survive the relentless bombardment long enough to not only close on the forts but to cut through the minefields shielding them.
Unfortunately, once away from the warp point, the Urret-fah’ah mine-clearers were not only useless, they were too dangerous to employ safely. Their efficacy against the minefields proximal to the warp points was a function of their speed of action: using protoselnarmic dead-man switches that were enabled by purpose-bred Hre’selna biots, each Urret-fah’ah did not have to wait for the post-transit electronic disruption to subside. The unicellular Hre’selna biots reoriented almost immediately, and, detecting that they were no longer in range of the selnarmic links of their controllers (who remained safely on the other side of the warp point) they collapsed, enabling a piezoelectric actuator to launch the minesweeper’s missiles almost immediately upon completing transit. But the purpose-built Urret-fah’ah minesweeper had modest engines, few defenses, primitive sensors, and no shields or ECM. In short, when crossing open space, it was little more than a thin-skinned chain-bomb, ready to vaporize any ships that were so unfortunate as to be within two light-seconds of it with it when it was destroyed by enemy fire.
So the approach to, and path through, the second belt of minefields would have to be blazed by fighters and SDHs. And once again, Narrok had reason to curse Torhok’s strategic myopia. Narrok had wanted smaller and more diverse hulls laid down for just this contingency: he needed purpose-built minesweepers and small, fast escorts that could draw some of the murderous fire off the fragile fighters and the SDHs—which were too precious to spend forging an approach through multiply overlapping fields of fire. But no, Torhok and his logisticians had insisted that initiating the design and construction of new ship types would only be an effort-diluting distraction. So the Arduan naval inventory remained limited to SDSs, SDHs, fighters, shuttles, multipurpose tender/transports, and a few of the Urret-fah’ah minesweepers. That, Narrok was told, would have to do.
His SDHs went in by the dozens, trying to survive long enough to launch their fighters. And every time one of the heavy superdreadnoughts lasted that long, the fighters were almost immediately consumed by the overlapping white-star eruptions of a constantly churning blast furnace of human antimatter warheads.
But eventually, as Narrok had known it would, the sheer weight of his numbers began to prevail. Presently, messenger drones from Narrok’s breaching force carried the story and the pictures of what was clearly a change in the tide of the battle: not all of his hulls were vaporized instantly, and they lasted long enough to divert fire from the next rank of incoming SDHs. The fighters started surviving, closing on the minefields, and clearing them—a tactic that was very nearly indistinguishable from suicide. In time, the human fire fell off—simply because their tenders could not resupply the forts’ missile tubes fast enough to maintain their initial salvo volume.
Only then did Admiral Krishmahnta’s fleet show up—fully repaired and in superb readiness. Every human hull that had survived the battles at Raiden and Beaumont now confronted Narrok’s commanders again, but the humans were evidently better armed and better supplied than before. Their firepower, both missile and beam, changed the balance of the battle back against the Arduans, and, for a few moments, there was even some question as to whether or not the Children of Illudor would keep their tenuous toehold in the Ajax system.…
Narrok held his next stroke until the reports were unequivocal—that the human fleet had genuinely committed itself—for that was the moment he had been waiting for. He ordered one last torrent of SBMHAWKs to go streaming through the warp point. They inflicted no damage upon the human ships or forts, but both had to devote the majority of their firepower and attention to counteract that new threat. And hard on the heels of the SBMHAWKs came almost half of the Arduan fleet, led by Second Admiral Sarhan himself.
Over a dozen SDHs were lost, simply to the misfortunes of simultaneous transit, the immense hulls rematerializing in overlapping volumes of space, obliterating each other with blinding glares that made antimatter missiles look like firecrackers by comparison. But most of the dozens that survived quickly swept out of the cauldron, their data nets multiply integrated and cross-patched against any possibility of failure, their defensive batteries cloaking them in an almost unbroken sphere of counterfire. Inside that brief, turtlelike shell of protective energies, Admiral Sarhan pressed through the partial gaps the fighters had cut in the second minefield and closed to effective range with the forts.
The carnage as they did so was unspeakable. At one point, Sarhan lost no fewer than eight SDHs in the space of twenty seconds. But finally attaining close range, several of his SDHs—having been retrofitted with tractor beams—exploited the rigidity of the forts’ structures by literally pulling them apart; the beams, once locked on, began to swiftly alter their polarization. It was a desperate tactic, useful only at just such close ranges, but the forts, being immobile, had no means of dancing away from this unanticipated threat. The same reinforced and inflexible structures that gave them such wonderful resistance against missiles and the other destructive energies of most attacks now became their Achilles’ heels: unable to run or bend, they broke.
But Sarhan paid the price. In order to keep his ships in place long enough to do this strange execution, they were compelled to endure the full, desperate fire of the forts—and most of them died in the attempt. And when Krishmahnta’s fleet came charging forward to intervene, Sarhan’s uncommitted SDHs—although terribly outnumbered—screened the others that were still working on the forts. They did not survive—but they lasted long enough to seal the fate of the forts: three were shattered, two more disabled, the remaining three isolated on one flank and unable to bring their fires to bear on the more distant areas of engagement.
Which was when, ten minutes ago, Narrok had transited the warp point with the bulk of his fleet. He moved it quickly out of the last forts’ fields of fire and began swinging it through an arc that would ultimately bring it into direct engagement with Krishmahnta’s main body, which was still trying to annihilate the last of Sarhan’s ships.
But just as Sarhan had expended SDHs to give his ships enough time to tear apart the forts, so Krishmahnta sent a fast screening force of carriers and cruisers to delay Narrok. The human ships were vulnerable but nimble, and although they did more to distract and delay than to inflict damage, their form fit their function: not to close and destroy, but harry and hamper.
As they did, Krishmahnta pulled her main body away sharply, losing three superdreadnoughts and two older, slower monitors in so doing. But her newer supermonitors remained mostly unscathed, and, leaving her last three forts behind to carry out whatever assignment she had given them in the event of her withdrawal, the human admiral made for the warp point to Agamemnon.
Which was what Narrok had anticipated. For Krishmahnta to have fled “north” along this arm of the Rim—to Aphrodite—would have been pointless: she would have been abandoning Odysseus and Tilghman, the two industrial worlds that sustained her forces. To defend them, she had to fall back on Agamemnon.
Which meant there was a possibility—if Narrok kept the pressure on her, stayed hard enough on her heels—that the terrible price he had now paid at Ajax might buy him another system as well. And if he was lucky, as the humans fled before him, using carrier squadrons to delay and harry his pursuers, he might also find the opportunity to cull one of the humans’ less speedy fighters from its flock, by damaging it selectively, moderately—and so have a relatively intact model for his technical intelligence specialists to analyze. Maybe some good would come of this day yet.…
* * *
Willing the recent memories into oblivion, Narrok opened his eyes and saw the viewscreens that ringed the multi-tiered oval of his bridge as if they were the inward-facing facets of a gem turned inside out. More than half of the screens showed wrecks floating in space. These were the proud smooth-shaped hulls favored by his people, the ones he had led into battle: rent, outgassing, some still convulsed with internal explosions that flared from jagged wounds in their sides, sending flame and fragments and his writhing brothers and sisters into the merciless vacuum of space.
Narrok looked away. Half a year ago, when he witnessed such scenes of agony and devastation, he had routinely envisioned a fur-topped human face as the architect of that misery. It was a face he had imagined ripping and tearing and sundering until it could no longer have been recognized even by its own murdering breed.
Now, he did not see a human face.
Now, he saw Torhok’s.
RFNS Gallipoli, Further Rim Fleet, Ajax System
Erica Krishmahnta rubbed her eyes and leaned away from the tacplot. “We’ve hardly started fighting, and we’re already running. And leaving the forts to fend for themselves.”
Captain Watanabe shrugged. “They’ll be able to use escape pods when the time comes. That’s a better chance than the crews of the other forts had.”
“Gods, Yoshi, I just didn’t see that coming. I mean, you can find it in the fine print of the training and doctrine manuals: alternating-polarity tractor beams used against the fortresses. And sure, it works—too damned well. But the expense in ships to get that close—I couldn’t believe that even the Baldies would stand for losses that bad.”
Watanabe shrugged. “Given what they’ve been losing up to now, it was probably a pretty good trade for them. Which is probably why almost none of us anticipated it.”
Erica looked up. “Almost none of us?”
Watanabe looked away uncomfortably. “Uh…a lieutenant pointed it out in a memo recently. He cited the Baldy willingness to absorb casualties and that the alternating-polarity tractor-beam concept might be the only reasonable way they had to break through our defenses here, since they didn’t have the monitors and supermonitors that could stand up to our massed fires long enough to survive.”
“And why didn’t you tell me about this memo?”
“Because it wouldn’t have made any difference. You might be surprised that the lieutenant didn’t advise against the placement or design of the forts. Quite the contrary, he thought it was our best option. If we handled it correctly.”
“Oh? And did I handle it correctly, according to the lieutenant’s expectations?”
“Uh—actually, you followed his recommendations to the letter. Let the Baldies come in, commit to the assault, and use their need for an extended close engagement with the forts as a way of pinning them in place. Their sacrifice of free maneuver is what gave us the opportunity to inflict murderous casualties on them—as long as we remembered to stay light on our feet to avoid the predictable Baldy follow-up strike from the warp point.”
“Which of course means we were following a plan which necessarily ends with us running like hell and giving up the system. Again. Damn it, Yoshi, I’m awfully tired of showing the Baldies our heels.”
“Me, too, Admiral. But we blew apart almost ninety SDHs back there.”
“Yes, but there are almost twice as many again coming after us. And they’re close, Captain. Too close.”
Watanabe nodded. “Yes, it’s going to be tight getting through the warp point, getting turned around, and getting in formation to defend in time.”
Krishmahnta looked at the plot, watching the lead edge of the pursuing Baldies pushing at the remaining carriers and cruisers of her covering screens. Those fragile ships were falling back, tucking in behind the main van of her fleet, feinting, striking, harrying in an attempt to delay the attackers. Their success was moderate; their losses were mounting. “Captain, you’re going to need to draw up an alternative plan for our arrival in the Agamemnon system.”
“Sir?”
Erica closed her eyes and spoke each word slowly, distinctly, hating each one as she uttered it. “I need a contingency plan for making an immediate and orderly withdrawal to Penelope. I need all the fallback points preplanned, all detachments for delaying actions rostered and assigned, so that as we cross the Agamemnon system, we can attenuate our van and get it into a sequence that allows us to get everyone through the warp point to Penelope without breaking stride—and then turned right around into a defensive line on the other side.”
Watanabe looked as if he had swallowed a live stun baton. Sideways. “But Admiral, we can still keep them from pushing through the warp point into Agamemnon. It will cost us a bit to keep them from following us through the warp point in force, but once we do, we’ll have the time to get our line sorted out and—”
“All that presumes that we can turn and hold them when they’re this close on our tails.” She raised her voice. “Ops?”
Samantha Mackintosh looked up from her screens. “Yes, sir?”
“I need a hypothetical-evolution timeline for our formation: specifically, our ability to get through the warp point to Agamemnon and reform to meet the Baldies in good order on the other side.”
“Already calculated, sir.”
Which means the news is worse than I expected. “Let’s hear it, Commander.”
“Admiral, the Baldy SDHs actually have better speed than we do now. Not much—only about two percent—but better. And their whole formation has the Desai drive. We’ve still got old-style monitors, sir, and half of our auxiliaries were pulled from mothballs. Most of those were slated for redesignation as target-practice hulls when the Baldies arrived.”
“Commander Mackintosh, you have informed me why the news is going to be bad. Now I need to know how bad it is.”
“Yes, sir. All metrics remaining constant, the lead Baldy unit will reach the warp point approximately two hundred seconds after our last one goes through.” Her voice lowered. “I don’t need to tell the admiral what that means regarding our ability to repel their attempts to enter the Agamemnon system.”
“You surely do not, Samantha.” Krishmahnta turned to Watanabe. “That’s it, then. We don’t even have enough time to turn and fight. They’ll be in among us while we’re still milling about, trying to get into our defensive formation. And with all the new forts still back in Penelope, we don’t have a ready defensive line to form up on.”
“We’d have to deactivate Agamemnon’s warp-point minefields, too,” considered Watanabe. “We’d be so mixed in with the Baldies when they come through that the mines would be equally deadly to both of us.”
“Right. But if we keep moving straight through the warp point, we can leave the mines operational. That will slow the Baldies down some more, maybe inflict a few casualties. Meanwhile, we deploy a sequence of delaying forces, just enough to ensure that we get all our hulls on the other side of the warp point to Penelope in good order and moving straight into a preplanned defensive formation.”
“With forts all around us.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Admiral, I’ll get Commander Mackintosh to start working right away on a—”
“No, Yoshi. Samantha has received her last assignment on this bridge. I want you to get her on a courier to Penelope—with a warning about what we’re doing—and out of harm’s way. Right now.”
“Sir?”
“Yoshi, we’ve been putting off her full-time transfer to Tilghman for too long. She has to take charge of the shipyards and second-phase emergency industrialization throughout the cluster. And don’t look so worried, Yoshi; I’ll find someone to handle ops just as well as Samantha.”
“Oh? And who would that be?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea. How about we promote the genius lieutenant you told me about? We could brevet him to lieutenant commander and give him a crack at the big show here on the fleet flagship.” Krishmahnta had meant it as a joke—but only partially: top-shelf thinkers were always at a premium in the command ranks, and in a fleet winnowed down by the casualties of almost five months of constant engagement, such minds were either already assigned or in deep denial and hiding.
Watanabe shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “Uh, about this lieutenant…you’re not serious, Admiral?”
“Well…maybe I am.”
“Sir, the lieutenant in question—he’s in combat right now.”
“We all are.”
“No, sir. I mean the ship he’s on—a carrier—is currently taking fire. It’s part of the screen that’s covering our withdrawal.”
Krishmahnta looked at Watanabe, trying not to look startled or disbelieving. “You’re not serious. It’s not—”
Watanabe sighed and nodded. “I’m afraid so, sir. The lieutenant in question is—
PSUNS Celmithyr’theaarnouw, Delaying Detachment Charlie, Further Rim Fleet, Approaching Myrtilus, Agamemnon System
Ossian Wethermere finished his update on the Baldy pursuit elements and made his way, datapad in hand, down to where Least Claw Kiiraathra’ostakjo, master of the CV Celmithyr’theaarnouw and commander of Admiral Krishmahnta’s third and final delaying force, sat brooding over the tacplot.
As Wethermere approached the con, Lieutenant Zhou caught his eye and glanced meaningfully at the distance the Orion staff was keeping from their commander. It was clear that he was not happy, and whereas human COs often showed their mastery by adopting a measure of stoicism that a Spartan would have envied, Orion COs achieved the same result—as well as some stress relief—by, figuratively speaking, biting the heads off of injudicious subordinates. It was rumored that, in ancient times, this rather messy form of decapitation had been a literal, not figurative, punishment.
Wethermere, undeterred, came to stand by the con and hoped that the Least Claw would, as Orions often did, show more restraint when interacting with humans than they did with their own kind.
Least Claw Kiiraathra’ostakjo eventually let his eyes slip sideways toward Wethermere, who stood ready to report, his arm in a sling and his head still wrapped from the injuries he had sustained in Suwa. With surgical stores tight, and his injuries modest, Wethermere had received medical care that would have been as familiar to the wounded at Antietam as at Agamemnon and Ajax. Oddly, Kiiraathra’ostakjo seemed to approve of that. “Visible wounds are the best testimony of a warrior’s spirit,” he had pronounced by way of welcoming Wethermere, Zhou, and Lubell to his carrier shortly before the Baldy fleet started pouring into Ajax. Although an Orion hull, the Celmithyr’theaarnouw’s crew and fighter complement were now almost one-third human; her own losses had been made up by orphaned TRN craft and crew—and whatever differences existed between the races, they shared a gnawing sense of loss and a burning desire to avenge their lost comrades.
Kiiraathra’ostakjo did not acknowledge Wethermere right away. Whether that was pride, or a mighty attempt at improving his mood before attempting to address a non-Orion, was unclear. “Yes, Tactical?” he asked at last.
“I have the sitrep and recommendations, Least Claw.”
“I do not remember asking for recommendations, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. You did not. I simply prepared them in the event the captain had an unexpected and sudden need of them.”
“Prudent. Continue.” Which was also Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s way of saying, You are free to share your recommendations, human—now that you have made it clear you are not trying to suggest that I need anyone to do my tactical thinking for me.
Wethermere checked his datapad. “The two Baldy SDHs that could still jeopardize the fleet’s evolution for fast warp-point transit to Penelope remain in pursuit. However, the rearmost veered off in pursuit of the battlecruiser Kwajalein, when she maneuvered to outflank the other Baldy dreadnoughts. The SDH on point, which seems a modified semi-carrier version, is still stern-chasing us.”
“Outcome of pursuit?”
“They are matching our speed and course, sir. They will arrive at the main body of the fleet in three hours. The leading edge of their van will be an hour behind them.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo growled.
Wethermere elected not to take that as a warning. “Lastly, we passed the Desai limit twenty minutes ago and are now coming abreast of the outermost planet in the system, the gas giant Myrtilus.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo nodded. “It is here that we must die, then. We will launch all fighters and stand with them within the planet’s own Desai limit. Our enemies will be compelled to cease pursuit and engage, lest we take them from the rear when they pass. They will, of course, with their vast superiority in fighters, and even greater superiority in armor and armaments, destroy us—but they will lose crucial time in their pursuit of Admiral Krishmahnta’s main van. With luck, the fleet will get through in time to hold Penelope firmly against their lead units.”
Zhou, at the engineering board, swallowed hard and blinked at the epitaphic quality of Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s pronouncement.
But Kiiraathra’ostakjo seemed to be waiting for something; he turned to look at Wethermere and then a slow, tooth-concealed smile cut an upward curve into the black fur around his muzzle. “Unless, that is, the lieutenant has a different option for us to consider.”
Wethermere smiled back: it was always a test with the Orions. At first they tested you to see if you were something better than a cowardly chofak (or, literally, “dirt eater”—which they often suspected of humans), then they tested you to give yourself a chance to prove that you could be a creature of honor who understood and embraced the dictates of something at least vaguely reminiscent of their code of theernowlus, and at last they tested you because—being their friend—it would be an insult not to give you the opportunity to acquire more honor and refresh your reputation in the eyes of others. So, with the Orions—one way or the other—it was always a test. How Wethermere proposed his idea was the first, but prerequisite test; the utility of the idea itself was the second and final exam. So he’d stick to his notes and the answers he’d prepared. “Least Claw, if we were to follow a conventional concept of engagement, what outcome would you foresee?”
“They will swarm us with their two-to-one fighter superiority while using their SDH to constrain our main hull’s orbital path so that we will be unable to retrieve or refit our squadrons unless we come under their fire. Once our fighters are gone, their remaining small craft will pin us in place so that the SDH may close and bring all its weapons to bear. We will be finished. There will be no survivors. But we will at least have given a good account of ourselves.”
Zhou looked like he might faint.
Wethermere considered. “So, if some of the alternatives I have prepared for the Least Claw seem—bizarre—he would not feel I was wasting his time or making myself so foolish that I am an embarrassment to his command?”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo smiled, clearly approving of Wethermere’s deft navigation of the social challenges implicit in publicly advising a vastly superior officer. “Since convention and common sense show us no path to victory, there is no dishonor in considering alternatives which derive from different sources of inspiration. What do you have in mind, Lieutenant?”
Okay, I’ve been given a passing grade on the first test. Now Wethermere’s tone became more decisive, his syntax less ornately deferential. “Least Claw, how many energy torpedo external weapons packs do we have?
Kiiraathra’ostakjo nodded appreciatively. “The energy torpedo is a worthy weapon, possibly the best our fighters have, but not enough to make a difference. Besides, we will need something with extended firepower, given how badly outnumbered we are. The ET packs fire themselves dry after twenty launches. And this will not be a short dogfight.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be a dogfight at all, Least Claw.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo smiled. “So you suggest—how do you humans put it?—going out ‘in a blaze of glory’? You suggest using a weapon that will destroy the maximum number of the chofaki, but when empty, shows them our throats and invites them to make a quick end of it.”
“No, after a very short engagement with their fighters, I suggest showing them our tails.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo was, for the first time, startled. His tone was only half joking when he began with a chiding, “A typical human response—to run. But here, we cannot run.”
“No, Least Claw, we cannot run—not at first. And never to retreat.”
“Then why run at all? Your words are riddles, Tactical. Speak plainly.”
“Very well, Least Claw.” The Orion’s injunction to speak plainly had given Wethermere even wider latitude with his manner of address and, ultimately, would shorten the time it took to lay out his whole plan. “Least Claw, the Baldies have hit us and we’re on the run already. They know this. They expect it to continue. They probably expect us to veer toward Myrtilus, deploy our fighters, and sell ourselves as dearly as possible. I suggest a slight change in that plan. As soon as we are within the Desai limit of Myrtilus, we scramble all our fighters swiftly and leave them behind, as if we are deploying them to make a desperate run at the Baldy SDH. They will certainly be convinced of this when they intercept us with their fighters and find that our birds are firing energy torpedoes—ordnance which would usually be reserved for use against capital ships.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo frowned. “Yes—but outnumbered two to one, and with a finite number of shots, our fighters would be quickly overwhelmed.”
“Naturally—which is what the Baldies would see also. They would also see that our fighters are about to be overwhelmed, and that this carrier is too far out of reach. So they will not be surprised by our fighters’ next, desperate course of action—our birds would have to try to lose the enemy squadrons by descending into the upper reaches of the atmosphere of Myrtilus.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s surprise became horror. “Lieutenant—are you proposing that our fighters should dive into the atmosphere of a small gas giant? Are you mad?” And Wethermere could tell that, this time, the Orion inquiry was not figurative.
“Just a minute more of your indulgence, Least Claw. Firstly, where in this system do our drives have the most advantage over theirs?
“Inside the atmosphere of the small gas giant.” Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s rumble was a grudging concession.
Zhou had started nodding, though. “Sure, yeah,” he added. “The Baldies will be deep inside the Desai limit of a very intense gravity source. Their engine efficiency is going to plummet, and they’re already running so close to the red line on their tuners that they’re going to have almost no margin for error. As it is, their power curve is going to be fluttering around like laundry in the wind.”
Wethermere nodded and turned back to Kiiraathra’ostakjo. “With all respect, Least Claw, given our advantages, why should we not send our fighters into the gas giant?”
“Because, cub of the moiety of Sanders, they will follow us in.”
“Which is just what we want, Least Claw.”
“Is it? And why is that?”
“Because I’m betting the Baldies have a disadvantage other than the finicky drives on their fighters. I’m betting that they’ve never trained for gas-giant flight operations. Given where they’ve come from—untold generations in deep space—how would they have acquired such training?”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo frowned but seemed less agitated by the unfolding plan. “I presume they have flight simulators.”
“Yes, I’m sure they do. But this assumes that they had, or kept using, simulations for flying gas-giant operations. And even if they thought maintaining that readiness would prove worthwhile, it’s still going to be rudimentary—and we know that simulator training never holds a candle to the real thing. So they’ll be at a technical and training disadvantage if they follow us down inside the atmosphere of Myrtilus. And they’ll be in the most unforgiving flying environment in all of known space. Awful gusts, down, up, and side drafts, intermittent cyclones, several different forms of precipitation, electromagnetic effects that play havoc with instruments.”
Zhou nodded his agreement. “Like flying through chowder in a spinning food processor.”
Wethermere kept his eyes on Kiiraathra’ostakjo, whose reluctance was beginning to erode—although he was clearly relenting not because the idea was brilliant but because it was ballsy. “It would be an operation that would be the sire of many long-told tales, Least Claw. The pilots would have to be the best. A moment’s mistake gauging the shifting variables of lift, weather, and thrust erosion due to the Desai effects would be catastrophic. And for the Baldies, who are less prepared for this, who have never flown inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, they would find it necessary to spend every second just struggling to stay aloft and alive. That alone represents a decisive advantage.”
But still Kiiraathra’ostakjo shook his head, his silky ruff flexing and bunching as he did. “No, the advantage is not decisive enough, Lieutenant—not when we are so outnumbered. They could surely leave a quarter of their squadrons outside the atmosphere, flying a high-guard patrol. So even if our fighters do survive the tempests of Myrtilus, they will eventually have to leave, still with many of the enemy behind them. And as our fighters rise up slowly to reattain orbit, the enemy high guard would intercept them. And so our brave pilots, while pinned from above, would be caught and rent by the claws following them from behind. And if there were survivors, we could not pick them up, for fear of their SDH.”
“But what if there were no claws behind our fighters—and what if we only lost one of two of them while they were in Myrtilus?”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo considered. “In that case, the outcome of the entire engagement would change. Without pursuit from behind, our pilots would ultimately smash through the enemy’s high guard. If enough of our fighters remain, they could even use their energy torpedoes to make a convincing feint at the SDH while we come closer to retrieve them. Then, as soon as we have come within that distance, they end their feint, come about, land, and we run. If we are done recovering our fighters before the SDH arrives, we will beat them to the warp point and so escape. And we will have bought Admiral Krishmahnta all the time she needs and more. But there is one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“How do we eliminate all the enemy fighters that would surely follow us into the upper reaches of Myrtilus? And how do we accomplish this in such away that we take negligible losses among our own formations?”
Wethermere smiled. “Well, funny you should ask that, Least Claw, because here’s what I had in mind…”
* * *
An hour later, after only three losses and ten minutes of heated, long-range dueling, the Celmithyr’theaarnouw’s entire fighter contingent broke off from the Baldy squadrons that were trying to pin them down for an in-close dogfight. As the human craft wheeled about, many of the enemy fighters fired flechette missiles in what seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to bracket their delta-shaped human and Orion adversaries with clouds of fast-moving flak. It was not an effective tactic.
The human and Orion fighters danced beyond the edge of the Baldies’ weaponry, too fast and nimble for the invaders, whose sensitive drives were severely degraded by proximity to a large planet, to catch. The Baldies’ logical solution was to launch their reserve squadrons to spread a bigger net. Seeing this, the allied fighters opened their drive tuners even wider, the multitude of pursuers giving wings to their feet as they ran.
Ran straight for the gas giant named Myrtilus.
* * *
First Lieutenant Egbert Saholiarisoa’s voice was tight and clipped: this was the closest that fighter jocks came to expressing or admitting anxiety of any kind when they were in their cockpits. “Captain, are you sure your tac guy knows what he’s doing? We’re loaded with energy torpedoes out here. They’re not cleared for use inside a gas giant. Damn few weapons are, you know.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s voice was simultaneously a growl of command and a purr of understanding, reassurance. “Your reservations are prudent and noted, Flight Leader, but I have complete confidence in my tactical officer. Who has a further instruction for you.”
Wethermere leaned forward so the general pickup would catch his voice clearly. “Lieutenant, charge the emitters on the energy torpedo packs to full.”
“What? Charge them to—?”
“Lieutenant, trust me.”
“Not like I have much choice,” grumbled Saholiarisoa. “Charging to full, aye.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s voice became even more soothing. “I repeat, Lieutenant, Mr. Wethermere has my full confidence.” Then, cutting off the speaker, he turned to face Wethermere. “You are sure of this?”
“You heard your own meteorologist confirm it.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo shook his head. “This is not fighting—this is trickery.”
Wethermere had to close his eyes to recall the axiom. “ ‘No warrior ignores the natural weapons that the battleground itself places in his palm.’ The battle-wisdom of H’Zreeaokhri the Cunning, as recorded in the Annals of Jevje’vejesh—is it not?”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo turned to gaze at the human. “It is. How do you know this?”
Wethermere smiled. “My great-sort-of-uncle had a knack for recommending books that caught my interest. He had very—well, eclectic tastes.”
“And is it from him that you also learned your pronunciation of the Tongue of Tongues, cub of the moiety of Sanders?”
Wethermere smiled. “He’d be flattered at your question, Least Claw.”
“Not so much as you think, human.” But Kiiraathra’ostakjo gave a wide, closed-mouth smile after he said it. “Perhaps—if we survive your bizarre scheme—I will teach you the finer points of our language.”
* * *
The human and Orion fighters had nosed down into the atmosphere of Myrtilus five minutes before. Wethermere was talking Saholiarisoa through the final steps of the operation. “And so you’ve got to hurry upstairs as soon as you let loose your munitions: the meteorological effects might surprise you.”
“Hey, no surprises, please. What the hell is going to hap—?”
“Listen—no time for that. Just trust me, and fly the mission.”
“Yeah, sure. Trust you. Great. I’m going open channel now.” The audio feed became scratchier and multi-tracked.
“Okay, everyone, stay on course and don’t get out ahead. The Baldies are coming up behind us, and that’s just what we want. They’ll have to close to a hundred kilometers or less to get a lock on us in this crap.”
“You’re the boss, boss.”
“Damn right, Okuto. And no more chatter. We’re ninety seconds from launch, so remember what the man told us on the way in. Watch your intervals and double the pattern size—that means double the distance between all our birds.”
“How do we know when to start the party, Ell-Tee?”
“You wait for me to tell you, dumb ass. But we’re watching for their trajectory to start getting wobbly. When I see that, I’ll give the first order—for us to climb and downtune our reactionless drives.”
“Downtune? Shit! With any efficiency drop, we’ll fall behind the Baldies and down into the soup.”
“Behind the Baldies, yes. Down into the soup—no, not if you climb steeply enough.”
The voice of the squadron XO—Cleanth—observed: “Relative to them, it’s almost going to look like we’re performing a hammerhead stall.”
“Exactly,” affirmed Saholiarisoa. “With them fighting just to stay airborne, they’re going to go past us before they know the game has changed. That’s when you run your tuners up, and I’ll give the fire order. You’ll dip your noses just long enough to let the preprogrammed timer launch a torpedo, and then you pull up hard to port. Everyone to port.”
“Why?”
“So we don’t cross paths flying blind in all that crap, Ensign, and smash each other to pieces.”
“What if we don’t get a target lock, Ell-Tee?”
“You don’t need lock. You just let the system fire.”
There was profound silence. “I didn’t read that, Ell-Tee. It sounded like you said we don’t need target lock.”
“That is what I said, Tariq. You shoot blind. Don’t aim—you don’t need to. And do not stop to look at the pretty lights going downrange. Get your birds over and up as fast as you can. Got that?”
The answering chorus sounded both bellicose and baffled. “Sir, yes, sir!”
* * *
As anticipated, the Baldy fighters quickly began to feel the mounting effects of being so close to a major gravity source. Their level flight started to shiver out of alignment, then occasionally stumble, and then, after two minutes, seemed to have degraded into a dogged forward stagger.
Saholiarisoa gave the word: the human and Orion fighters dropped their tuners and raised their noses. The net effect—decreased thrust, but vectored to push them straight up—cancelled each other out for a handful of moments, leaving them in the strange posture of maintaining altitude but skimming forward, belly first, slowing as they went.
The Baldy fighters went shooting past the human craft, which then brought their noses down for one brief instant and, in computer-controlled unison, fired one plasma torpedo each before pulling up and pushing their tuners to the max.
The effect was, to put it mildly, dramatic.
The energy torpedo took its name not from its warhead—plasma superheated to the brink of fusion—but the energy sheath which maintained its brief coherence. The coherence only needed to be brief because the torpedo traveled at almost the speed of light itself.
However, this weapon—intended for use in the airless vacuum of space—reacted most violently with atmospheres, which almost instantaneously began to ablate and strip away the energy sheath. Specifically, that degradation began only five kilometers beyond the weapon’s launch point and then took only 0.0002 seconds to complete, but in that time, the torpedo would travel another ninety kilometers downrange at near light speeds.
This meant that the energy torpedoes launched by the human and Orion fighters began to break down shortly after they left each fighter’s own drive field. As the fighters’ airframes groaned under the stresses of a sudden snap into a vertical climb, riding maximum acceleration up through the roiling gusts of Myrtilus’s atmosphere, megaton-level energies were spreading out from their flurry of torpedoes, which, as they broke down and their energy began leaking out, collectively resembled the discharge of a sawed-off shotgun firing stellar-plasma buckshot. At 0.0001 seconds post-launch, the star-hot temperatures of the plasma—and the spontaneous combustion induced by its sub-relativistic velocity—blasted outward into an atmosphere comprised of churning, icy, yet extremely combustible, hydrogen. At 0.0002 seconds, the leaking energy sheaths ablated fully and the remainder of each warhead detonated. In the first second, the surrounding hydrogen flash-ignited for dozens of kilometers in every direction. The Baldy fighters spun, tumbled, came apart as the contending forces and tremendous energies turned the atmosphere around them into a seething furnace stoked by the fierce, actinic detonations of the torpedoes’ warheads. Two human fighters which had not pulled up quickly enough were buffeted sideways rather than pushed upward by the shockwaves; they swerved unsteadily out of their vertical climbs.
They—and those few Baldy craft that fickle fate somehow spared—were ripped asunder in the next two seconds: with the gases in the target area utterly and instantaneously vaporized, nature once again demonstrated the axiom that she did indeed abhor a vacuum. The inrushing atmosphere roared back with the force of a dozen converging cyclones, smashing into each other to spawn a clutch of ferocious tornadoes, all capped by the most titanic lightning storm that human instruments had ever recorded.
The climbing human and Orion fighters—their numbers reduced by five since commencing this operation—pulled speedily up and away from the flaming maelstrom behind them and headed toward the now vastly outnumbered Baldy high-guard patrol.
* * *
As the last fighter angled gingerly into the portside recovery bay, Kiiraathra’ostakjo gave orders to the Celmithyr’theaarnouw’s helmsman. “Best speed to the warp point. Sensors: the enemy superdreadnought?”
“Following—but at a very respectful distance, Least Claw.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo nodded at that report. Then he stared at the red Baldy icon lagging behind their green one in the tacplot and smiled: this time his teeth showed, and Wethermere noticed how numerous, and alarmingly sharp, they were. “Chofaki scum,” he sneered at the red icon, “now that you’ve lost your fighters, you seem much less brave. Perhaps we should turn and teach you a lesson…”
Then he saw Zhou’s panicked expression and Wethermere’s carefully neutral one and laughed the snorting, tooth-masked guffaw of his race. “Fear not, humans, we will run as you wish.” Then he nodded more somberly. “As is wise.” He turned to Wethermere. “Well, you may have some of your distant sire-brother’s qualities after all, Lieutenant.” The Orion smiled. “Perhaps you would even consent to joint me for a celebratory dish of zeget once we have made the warp point.”
Wethermere merely nodded; the Orion noted that he was looking intently at the flight-deck relays.
“I offer you a great honor, Ossian Wethermere,” added Kiiraathra’ostakjo. His tone was gentler, but had also ceased to be jocular.
Wethermere looked up, as if waking from a trance. “Apologies, Least Claw. I was—thinking.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo sighed—a gesture that was startlingly similar to its human analog—and looked askance. “When you begin to think deeply, I begin to worry greatly. What madness are you conceiving now, human?”
“Not madness. At least I don’t think so. Look at this.” Wethermere pointed to the relays that were showing the after-action reports being compiled as each retrieved fighter downloaded its mission data.
“Yes? We were uncommonly fortunate. According to those flight records, the Baldy fighters maneuvered less well than usual.”
“Yes, there’s that. And there’s this, also. Look.”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo leaned closer. “Odd. They used that many flechette missiles? And always with gaps in their firing pattern? What do you make of this, Lieutenant?” Kiiraathra’ostakjo, although he was made uncomfortable by the unorthodox nature of Wethermere’s mind, had also acquired a keen appreciation of its polymathic scope—a trait that was also ascribed to the human’s distant sire-brother, the legendary Kevin Sanders.
Wethermere was still staring at the data intently. “I’d say they were trying to cull off one or more of our fighters—like they were working to split up the formation more than they were trying to destroy our craft. That’s why they were using the flechette missiles—they were using them as area-denial munitions.”
“You mean, to create volumes of space in which our fighters could not fly.”
“Yes—but the gaps in their patterns always gave the fighters they isolated an opportunity for evasion.”
“Yes,” growled Kiiraathra’ostakjo, leaning closer and seeing the patterns in the data, “just as a hunter chooses and culls his victim from a herd ahead of time, separating it from the rest of its fellows. Ossian Wethermere, what does this mean?”
Wethermere looked away from the data and stared into the viewscreen that showed Myrtilus dwindling behind them. “I think they wanted to capture one of our fighters.”
“So it seems, but why?”
“Maybe for the same reasons we exploited today—their fighters have too many weaknesses to meet ours on an equal footing.”
“So they wish to capture one for the purposes of technical intelligence. Hermph. Most interesting.”
“Yes. Interesting…at the very least.”
From the corner of his eye, Kiiraathra’ostakjo saw that the human was distracted again, thinking his unpredictable thoughts. He seemed to be watching the violently strobing lightning that had been triggered by their fighters’ energy torpedoes. The ferocious storm had churned outward from its point of origin to engulf that entire quadrant of Myrtilus’ sunward face. Wethermere leaned his left elbow on the console, set his chin into his palm. “Look at all that lightning. The energy torpedoes must have kicked off a chain reaction. There’s got to be hundreds of terawatts of electrical energy discharging between those clouds right now.” He thought hard. “You know, if there was a way to harness that—”
“Enough!” Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s roar contained an undertone of actual fear. “Cease your speculations, Lieutenant Wethermere!”
“But I just—”
“Enough I say, and enough I mean. I know that look, human. You are scheming. And when you scheme in that way, you are always thinking of how to break things. Stop, before you break this, too.”
“Break what? The planet?”
“Or maybe the universe. Return to your station at once! Helm, execute course change Feaarnowt-three. Take us away from here before Lieutenant Wethermere can break anything else.”