"Indeed, Lord Khiniak-as soon as we can locate enough asteroids that meet his somewhat exacting requirements," she agreeed, and Koraaza favored her with a tooth-hidden smile.
"I, too, am not altogether unacquainted with the foibles of engineers. But we have an entire asteroid belt to choose from. Shall we proceed?"
The case for abandoning the outer system to the Enemy had been an unexceptionable one. If the speed differential between gunboats and shuttles made it impossible to coordinate a single overwhelming attack as planned, the obvious solution was to draw all available resources of both sorts back around the Worlds Which Must Be Defended, where the Enemy must come to them and would surely be swamped by sheer numbers. Viewed in that light, there was no need for undue concern over the fact that the Enemy's carriers for their small attack craft had vanished into cloak in the outer system.
However, the Enemy's subsequent behavior had continued to refuse to conform to expectations. It was extremely difficult for the Fleet's scout craft to penetrate the dense shells of small attack craft the Enemy was maintaining about his starships. And, lacking a foothold in the asteroid belt itself, the Fleet possessed no sensor stations in position to substitute for that lack of reconnaissance with direct observation.
Still, the essential facts seemed clear enough, judging from the handful of fragmentary reports from the few gunboats which had gotten through and lived long enough to send back any data at all. In contrast to the usual pattern of events, the Enemy was preparing for a protracted campaign by constructing bases on three of the largest asteroids and six smaller ones. The defensive installations being emplaced on those asteroids were certainly consistent with the hypothesis.
"Coming up on Sledgehammer Three, Commodore."
Paul Taliaferro, sitting in the position from which he'd unceremoniously displaced the copilot, grunted something unintelligible. The pilot expected no better in the way of a response, accustomed as she'd become to the commodore's preoccupied taciturnity, so she went on piloting.
Taliaferro wasn't quite the surly misanthrope his reputation suggested. Indeed, he occasionally wished he possessed more of the social graces whose lack-in the opinion of many, including and especially his former wife-helped account for his failure to rise above the rank of commodore. He just didn't have the time for them . . . nor, to be honest, the motivation. When manipulating and reshaping the inanimate physical universe through engineering, there was generally one best way to do a thing, and that was that. It was so straightforward! None of the irritating ambiguities and irrationalities with which humans insisted on complicating their lives. Often they actually seemed to resent having the path of maximum efficiency pointed out to them as succinctly as possible. He wondered why.
It was different, though, with Admiral Murakuma. She understood!Or at least she listened with appropriate attentiveness, and with none of the unreasonable resentments that he'd always found so hard to understand. True, she sometimes smiled in a way that left him vaguely puzzled on the rare occasions when he noticed it. But she'd presented him with such an interesting problem. Even better, she'd provided him with the authority and the tools he needed to do his job, and then left him alone to do it. Bliss!
Now the asteroid they'd dubbed Sledgehammer Three was visible in the shuttle's lights, waxing to fill the viewport whose presence was the reason Taliaferro had appropriated the copilot's seat. He studied the asteroid with care, for this was his last stop on his last inspection tour of it and its two mates, and of the lesser asteroids designated Hammer One through Six.
Sledgehammer Three was a rugged sphere almost four hundred kilometers in diameter. As far back as the twentieth century, it had been recognized that above a certain minimum mass an astronomical body's own gravity would prevent it from retaining a grossly irregular shape. Only four of Sol's asteroids were above that minimum. Here in Home Hive Two's fifth orbital position, though, it was pretty clear that the unborn planet would have been a true whopper if it had succeeded in clumping together. In spite of a vastly greater radius, this asteroid belt was as dense as Sol's, and held far more giant members. The three Sledgehammers had been easy to find, the six smaller rocks for the mere Hammers effortless.
Then had come the toil of constructing the installations which Taliaferro now observed. Over a hundred robotic point-defense emplacements dotted Sledgehammer Three's wild and barren surface. Also, buried deep under the crevasses and craters, were the command datalink facilities that would enable Taliaferro's eleven Guerriere-C-class command ships to coordinate the three Sledgehammers' defensive fire. The six Hammers mounted proportionately lighter defensive works.
All of that, however, was secondary, meant only to keep these asteroids in existence long enough to fulfill their destiny. Only one engineering work on Sledgehammer Three really mattered-the one that couldn't be given a trial run.
"Get me Commander Lin," Taliaferro muttered. The pilot had barely complied before he leaned forward and snapped into the grille. "What's the word on that flaw in the pusher plate?"
"We're not certain there is one, Sir," Lin Yu-hsiang replied from his temporary command post on the surface of Sledgehammer Three. "When it comes to constructing Orion drives, we don't exactly have much experience-and having to stop what we're doing to answer questions about it doesn't exactly help!"
The pilot blanched, expecting thunderbolts. But Taliaferro actually chuckled-partly in recognition of a kindred spirit, and partly at what had become a standing joke in TG 64.1. When the name for what the task group was constructing had reached the Tabbies, they'd thought they were being honored. No one had had the heart to tell them that the name dated back to a time centuries before humanity had dreamed their race existed.
Nuclear pulse propulsion-"Project Orion"-had been a product of the twentieth century, one of many notions for liberating the infant Space Age from the dismal mathematics of chemical rocketry. Conceptually, it set some kind of record for brute-force crudity: detonate a series of nuclear explosions behind you and let them kick you forward! Naturally, it required a massive shock-absorbing plate for your vehicle's rear end. Worse, however, it had faced insurmountable political obstacles in a world understandably jittery about allowing anyone to send up spaceships packed full of what were in effect hundreds of small nuclear weapons. But for a time it had seemed to offer the best hope for reaching the outer planets and-especially after the Bussard ramscoop had come to grief on the hard facts about the interstellar medium in Sol's vicinity-the stars.
Then had come the unanticipated breakthrough into reactionless drives, and the Orion concept had gone the way of Jules Verne's giant cannon. At the same time, the idea of "dinosaur killers"-asteroids used as kinetic-energy weapons against planets-had joined reaction drives in the dustbin. It just wasn't practical to enclose an entire asteroid in a drive field. And tractoring such an object would have no effect except to rip the tractor-beam projectors out of ships that instantaneously took on velocities measured in percentages of c.
No, it couldn't be done with reactionless drives . . . but Vanessa Murakuma had wanted it done anyway. When she'd put the problem to Taliaferro, he'd automatically snorted that it was preposterous. Then he'd gone off and thought about it, to the near-exclusion of eating and sleeping. And when he'd put his solution before her, she'd backed him to the hilt, selling the idea to a skeptical Joint Chiefs of Staff.