If it was a bluff, it had worked. A flare of light spread across the still-darkened field, and the Invidious'DropShip rose on a flickering pillar of white fire, moving slowly at first, then accelerating at what must have been a bone-cracking three Gs into the pearly sky.
If Tor's assault had failed somehow, there was not a thing in the universe that could be done about it now.
Grayson switched frequencies, and found the battle channel he'd assigned the Lancers.
"Lancer One, this is Grayson." They'd not arranged radio codes, because Grayson hadn't expected to be coming out of the Castle in a BattleMech.
There was a pause. "Grayson? This is Lori."
"Lori! I've liberated us a Shadow Hawk.I'm on my way down the slope toward you. Any opposition?"
"Heavy fire from the ships, as expected. Their ‘Mechs are not manned, and so far they've not been able to scramble any against us. They'll be on us soon, though. Ground troops are moving to set up heavy static weapons on the field."
"Right. Stick with the plan. I'll see you at the rendezvous!"
Fire and shattered earth rose around him as missiles from the Castle sought across the rocky ground for the lumbering Shadow Hawk.Twice Grayson turned, dropped the autocannon down across the 'Mech's left shoulder, and opened a rolling barrage of explosive shells against the launchers that were tracking him, but with no noticeable result. The range was already too great for accurate placement of shells or rockets.
On the plain below, he could make out the specks of three BattleMechs retiring north toward the mountains, shielded from the grounded DropShips by the ruin of a liquid hydrogen tank. And in the sky above, a brilliant star moved rapidly toward the lightening east, trailing a white contrail plume. Success or failure?
He would learn soon enough. For now, the plan required radio silence with the spacecraft, and the pretense that Tor's part of the plan had worked perfectly.
If it had not, success would turn to failure in two short days.
* * * *
JumpShips were ungainly beasts, restricted by their design and by physics to slow and extremely gentle maneuvers about that invisible abstraction in space known as a jump point. Jump points were areas spanning several tens of thousands of kilometers, depending on the mass of the star that generated them. Every star had two, the zenith point at the star's north pole, the nadir point at the south. These distances varied, of course, depending on the size of the star. With their Kearny-Fuchida drive, JumpShips could maneuver into the point, energize their drive systems, and reappear at the jump point of a star up to 30 light years away.
Energy for the jump came from the vessel's jump sail, a disk of metal fabric less than a millimeter thick and up to a kilometer wide that captured and transmitted the light and particulate radiation from a star to shipboard storage cells. Designed to absorb every photon of every wavelength that fell upon it, jump sails were black — a black so profound that an old pilots' joke told of space appearing white in comparison.
Though complex in the details of operation, the basic simplicity of jump point transitions had given men the stars. Even though the war-torn civilization of the Successor States could no longer build new vessels in any quantity, ships continued to ply the lanes between stellar jump points. The Invidiouswas at least three centuries old, her drive guide laid in during the years just before the Succession Wars.
No one knew how long the power core of a starship would remain charged and vital. It was a question that troubled the philosophers and warlords of every world in the Human sphere.
A JumpShip's reliance on the jump points and on the huge yet delicate black jump sails meant that no ship could travel far from the point at which it entered a planetary system. The sails had to be unfurled for considerable periods of time to soak up the energy necessary for a jump, and the dust and meteoric debris that littered the orbital plane of every star could shred a sail within a few passages. Though some ships had secondary drive systems that allowed them to maneuver through a system with their sails furled, most JumpShips remained at the jump point, using their DropShips as shuttles between starship and world.
This posed another problem, however. At the jump points of any star, that star's gravity is still very much in evidence. A ship in orbit around a star would not fall, of course, but it would not remain near the jump point either. Rather, it would follow its orbital path around the star and eventually through the dust-laden plane of the system. For this reason, JumpShips mount ion or plasma/fusion stationkeeping thrusters. These provide a steady, gentle thrust carefully calculated to precisely counter the pull of the star, and to maintain the spread of the jump sail at the same time. A starship parked at a star's jump point is positioned with its prow aimed outsystem and the sail spread perhaps ten kilometers aft, between the star and the ship. The stationkeeping thrusters are angled aft and outboard, so that their streams of charged particles will not damage the fragile sail.
Needless to say, starships parked at a jump point could scarcely maneuver at all, for any lateral acceleration would distort, then shred the sail fabric. There were several starship-to-starship battles on record, ponderous affairs that had taken weeks of maneuvering to complete. Generally, when ship-to-ship combat was called for, heavily armed and maneuverable DropShips, or lighter, faster, and more maneuverable aerospace fighters were used. JumpShips are armed as a matter of course (including radar-directed lasers to defend against meteors), but a single DropShip provides enough threat against any unsupported ship that a ship captain would usually surrender immediately rather than risk damage to his precious, irreplaceable vessel.
It was a fascinating problem in space combat tactics, Tor decided. He had never paid much attention to space tactics, though any freighter captain knew enough to enable him to counter the maneuvers of a possibly hostile starship at an unfamiliar jump point. His problem here was to approach the Invidiouswithout giving away the fact that the DropShip was no longer under the control of the same people. There might be passwords or approach codes that he knew nothing about, though a search of the DropShip's operations programs revealed no new computer codes in the docking sequence. It lookedas though the pirates had left everything as they'd found it. Tor could only hope that that was the case.
The tactical complication for this mission was the Draconis Combine JumpShip parked 12,000 kilometers from the Invidious.While this distance was great enough to keep either vessel's stationkeeping thrusters from damaging the other's sail, twelve thousand kilometers was practically next door, by space navigation standards.
Tor could feel that other ship out there. It was too distant to show optically, but he could visualize it. He was certain that the warship was the same one that had stopped him en route from Sigurd to Trellwan in the first place. If it picked up even a hint that something was wrong aboard the freighter, a pair of UnionClass DropShips — or worse, a flight of aerospace fighters — could be positioned off the Invidious'sail within 30 minutes.
This particular hijacking had to be carried out with complete secrecy, or it would end almost before it had begun. Grayson and Tor had worked out the details in their walk on the shores of Thunder Rift's lake. The key to the plan was the knowledge that each JumpShip would have its directional antenna centered on Trellwan, but they almost certainly would not have them aimed at one another. Two ships at stationkeeping by a jump point, particularly a military vessel and a warship, would have little to say to one another, though the warship would keep the freighter under observation as a matter of course. An attacker like Tor would be able to tell if the Invidiouswere talking with the warship, but not if her crew were in communication with the port — and through them, with the Combine ship.