“Laser grid. Illuminate the target,” said Mirsky. “Guns, set to passive.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Under passive homing mode, the missiles would lock onto the target, illuminated by the Lord Vanek’s laser battery, and home in on its reflection.
‘Target still accelerating slowly,“ said Radar One. ”Looks like a missile boat.“
“One-zero seconds. Launch rails energized.”
“You have permission to fire at will, Commander,” said the Captain.
“Yes, sir. Eight seconds. Navigation updated. Inertial platforms locked. Birds charged, warheads … green. Five seconds. Launch commencing, bird one. Gone.” The deck shuddered briefly: ten tons of missile hurtled the length of the ship in the grip of a coilgun, ejected ahead of the starship at better than a kilometer per second. “Lidar lock. Drive energized. Bird one main engine ignition confirmed. Bird two loaded and green … launch. Gone. Drive energized.”
“Bingo,” Ilya said quietly.
Red arrows indicating the progress of the missiles appeared on the forward screen. They weren’t self-powered; nobody in his right mind would dare load a quantum black hole and its drive support mechanism into a robot suicide machine. Rather, the ship’s phased-array lasers bathed them in a sea of energy, boiling and then superheating the reaction mass they carried until they surged forward far faster than the starship. Strictly a close-range low-delta-vee weapon, missiles were mostly obsolescent; their sole job was to get a nuclear device onto the right interception vector, like the “bus” on an ancient twentieth-century MIRV. They’d burn out after only thirty seconds, but by then the warheads would be closing the gap between the Lord Vanek’s projected course and the enemy ship itself. Shortly after the starship ran the gauntlet, its missiles would arrive — and deliver the killing blow.
“Radar One. Where are they?” Mirsky asked softly.
‘Tracking as before,“ called the officer. ”Still maintaining course and vector. And emitting loads of spam.“
“Bird one MECO in one-zero seconds,” said Helsingus. “They’re trying to jam, sir. Nothing doing.” He said it with heavy satisfaction, as if the knowledge that the anonymous victims of the attack were offering some token resistance reassured him that he was not, in fact, about to butcher them without justification.
Even committed officers found the applied methods of three centuries of nuclear warfare hard to stomach at times.
Comms Two, voice ragged with tension: “Jamming stopped, sir! I’m receiving a distress beacon.
Two — no, three! I say again, three distress beacons. It’s like they’re bailing out before we hit them.”
“Too late,” said Helsingus. ”We’ll have ’em in three-two seconds. They’ll be inside the burst radius.” Rachel shuddered. Suddenly a horrible possibility began to rise to the surface of her mind.
Mirsky cracked his knuckles again, kneading his hands together. “Guns. I want a last-ditch evasion program loaded, activate at closest approach minus one-zero seconds if we’re still here.”
“Yes, sir,” Helsingus said heavily. “Laser grid support?”
“Anything you like.” Mirsky waved a hand magnanimously. “If we’re still here to enjoy the light show.” Helsingus began flipping switches like a man possessed. On the screen, the outgoing birds passed their main engine cutout points and went ballistic; more enemy missiles began hatching like sinister blue fingers reaching out from the target point.
“Captain,” Rachel said slowly.
“—One-zero seconds. They’re jamming hard, sir, but the birds are still holding.”
“What if Kamchatka is wrong? What if those are civilian mining ships?” Captain Mirsky ignored her.
“Five seconds! Bird one ready to go — range down to one-zero K. Three. EMP lockdown is go. Sensor stepdown mag six is go. Optics shielded — bang. Sir, I confirm that bird one has detonated. Bang. Bird two is gone.”
“Radar. What do you see?” asked Mirsky.
“Waiting on the fog to clear — ah, got sensors back sir. Incoming missiles still closing. Fireball remnants hashing up radar, lidar is better. Uh, the impact spectroscope has tripped, sir, we have a confirmed impact on the target alpha. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbonitrile emissions from the hull. I think we holed him, sir.”
“We holed him—” Mirsky stopped. Turned to glance at Rachel. “What did you say?” he demanded.
“What if they’re civilians? We have only Kamchatka’s word that they’re under attack; no direct evidence other than bombs going off — which could be hers.“
“Nonsense.” Mirsky snorted. “None of our ships could make a mistake like that!”
“Nobody is actually shooting live missiles at us. The pre-jump briefing warned everyone to look out for enemy missile boats. How likely is it that the Kamchatka ran down a civilian mining ship by mistake and got a bit trigger-happy? And what you’re seeing as an attack is actually just the cruiser screen shooting in the dark at anything that moves?”
Dead silence. Enlisted men and officers alike stared at Rachel disapprovingly: nobody spoke to the captain like that! Then from behind her: “Spallation debris on radar, sir. Target is breaking up. Uh, humbly reporting, Captain, we have distress beacons. Civilian ones …” The Lord Vanek was going far too fast to slow down, and as flagship and lead element of the squadron, had a duty not to do so. Nevertheless, they signaled the squadron astern; and behind them, one of the elderly battleships peeled off to pick up any survivors from the disastrous attack.
The big picture, when it finally gelled some eight hours later, was very bad indeed. The “missile carriers” were actually refinery tugs, tending the migratory robot factories that slowly trawled the Kuiper-belt bodies, extracting helium 3 from the snowballs. Their sudden burst of speed had a simple explanation; seeing alien warships, they had panicked, dumping their cargo pods so that they could clear the area under maximum acceleration. One of the distant explosions had been the Kamchatka, landing a near miss on one of the “enemy battleships”—the cruiser India. (Minor hull damage and a couple of evacuated compartments had resulted; unfortunately, the cruiser’s chaplain had been in one of the compartments at the time, and had gone to meet his maker.)
“Ser-erves ’em right for being in the way, dammit,” quavered Admiral Kurtz when Commodore Bauer delivered the news in person. “Wha-what do they think this is?” He half rose to his feet, momentarily forgetting about his glass legs: “Simply appalling stupidity!”
“Ah, I believe we still have a problem, sir,” Bauer pointed out as Robard tried to get his master settled down again. “This system is claimed by Septagon, and, ah, we have received signals as of half an hour ago indicating that they have a warship in the area, and it’s engaging us on an intercept trajectory.” The Admiral snorted. “What can one warship d-do?” Rachel, who had inveigled her way into the staff meeting on the grounds that, as a neutral observer, it was her duty to act as an intermediary in situations such as this one, watched Bauer spluttering with mordant interest. Can he really be that stupid? she wondered, glancing at the admiral, who hunched in his chair like a bald parrot, eyes gleaming with an expression of fixed mania.
“Sir, the warship that is signaling us is, ah, according to our most recent updates, one of their Apollo-class fleet attack carriers. Radar says they’ve got additional traces indicative of a full battle group.
We outnumber them, but—”
Rachel cleared her throat. “They’ll eat you for breakfast.” Bauer’s head whipped around. “What did you say?” She tapped her PA, where it lay on the table before her. “UN defense intelligence estimates suggest that Septagon’s policy of building carriers, rather than the standard laser/missile platform that your navy has adopted, gives them a considerable advantage in the ability to cover an entire system.