First, it was big: a thousand ships or more, unless there was something outlandishly clever going on with dummy drive signatures. Second, it was staying ninety-five per cent together, with only a few dozen smaller ships venturing ahead of the main fleet. This might imply a significant straight-through, braking-beyond force still hidden, though from the rest of the profile this didn’t look so likely. The size, definition and shifted-frequency signatures of the drives themselves revealed a relatively slow, old-tech vessel-capability envelope. Basically all but the lightest craft in the Summed Fleet force would be able to take on all but the heaviest of the invaders’ ships with a better than average chance of prevailing, and anything that couldn’t be outfought could be outrun (for whatever that was worth when there was nowhere to run to).
And there was one behemoth in there, a giant ship, probably a command-and-control lander- and troop-carrier plus facili-ties-and-repair vessel. At least a billion tonnes, klicks across, doubtless very heavily armoured and armed and escorted, but a classic grade-A high-value target, a possible king-piece, a back-breaker, if it could be successfully engaged and destroyed or taken out of action or even captured. Just posting a powerful-enough guard-ship screen to try and keep it safe in the event of a serious attack threat would significantly sap the invading\ occupying force’s abilities, cut down their dispositional options and drastically curtail their split-regroup capacity.
The Fleet tacticians had been positively cruel about this dinosaur of a ship. A vanity piece, they called it, an Idiot Aboard! sign hung round the neck of the enemy fleet. Every space-faring species that built warcraft quickly found out one way or another — often the hard way — that big ships just didn’t work except as a hideously expensive way of impressing the more credulous type of native. Flexibility, manoeuvrability, low unit risk-cost, distributed inherent damage resistance, fully parsed battle-space side-blind denotation control grammar… these and other even more arcane concepts were what really mattered in modern space warfare, apparently, and a Really Big Ship just didn’t sit too comfortably with any of them.
The tacticians pretty much spoke their own language, were mostly very intense, and blinked a lot.
“So a strong point that’s really a weak point,” Taince had suggested at one of their briefings.
“That would be a viable alternative definition,” one of them said, after a moment or two’s thought.
Since just a week ago, though, relatively little evidence of further activity.
Well, the Discon invaders had arrived later than anticipated, and the Summed Fleet forces were arriving earlier. Deliberate, on their part, of course. The invaders would have quickly found out when Ulubis had been told to expect the Summed Fleet’s arrival, and it was always prudent to keep the enemy off balance, to upset their assumptions. Let them think they had so much time and then arrive early before they’d got everything prepared.
Smiting. It was all about smiting. That was one of Admiral Kisipt’s favourite words. The Voehn Fleet Commander knew it in several hundred different languages, including Earth Anglish. Be ready at all times to smite the enemy. Strike with speed, decisiveness and weight.
Taince found herself lightly smitten with one of the junior male officers, discovered it was mutual and took part in some invasive tussling of her own.
The time displays ticked down steadily towards the point where they’d have to get back into their lonely little individual pods again for the deceleration burn that would bring them down from near-light speed to something close to Ulubis-zero, for the start of the attack.
* * *
The Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz spun very slowly beneath the Velpin, still gently accelerating for its distant target system and its unburied cargo of the long-dead. The Velpin was tracking round the outer rim of the giant craft, senses primed. Fassin and Y’sul were back aboard. They had been shown to the lifeless body of Leisicrofe, ice-welded to the side of the great dark corridor in the company of a half-dozen other dead Dwellers.
· Very well preserved, as you see, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian had pointed out. — I hope you feel this setting is appropriate. The Ythyn officer had still been upset at the earlier misunderstanding.
· So he just died, then? Y’sul had asked.
· Very suddenly, apparently. We found him drifting — rolling along in his esuit, actually — a few days after he arrived. He had expressed an interest in mapping the distribution of bodies of different species and species-types while he was here. We saw no reason not to allow him to do so.
They weren’t permitted to use reaction motors inside the Sepulcraft. Y’sul had used his esuited spine-arms to push himself over to the side of the tunnel. He’d landed awkwardly by the Dweller’s body, which was naked save for a small hub-cloth.
— I have no idea whether this is this Leisicrofe guy or not, frankly, Y’sul had said. — But it is a Dweller, probably from Nasqueron and he is most certainly dead.
— Any sign of… anything? Fassin asked.
Y’sul had inspected the body, using lights and radar-sense, finding nothing. He’d unclipped the corpse’s hub-cloth and shaken it. Fassin had sensed their Ythyn host preparing to object, but a moment later Y’sul had replaced the hub-cloth and was looking round the back of the body where ice attached it to the tunnel wall.
— Nothing, he’d sent back.
“There,” one half of Quercer Janath said.
On one of the Velpin’s screens, a flickering outline appeared around one of the abandoned ships littering the carbuncularly irregular outer hull of the Sepulcraft.
Fassin looked at the craft. It was a simple black ellipsoid, maybe sixty metres long. Deep-space cold, lifeless.
“That it?” Y’sul asked. “You sure?”
“It’s a Dweller Ail-Purpose, Single-Occupancy Standard Pattern SoloShip,” the truetwin told them. “And it pings recent.”
“Can you wake its systems?” Fassin asked. “Find out where it was last, where it came from?”
The travelcaptain looked at him. “Doesn’t work like that.”
“Pay attention.”
They got permission from the Ythyn to lift the SoloShip and join it to the Velpin. They warmed it up and introduced a standard gas-giant atmosphere. There was just about enough room for Y’sul and Fassin to board together. Quercer Janath had already laser-synched the little ship’s closed-down computer matrix to that of the Velpin. The screens, tanks, surfaces and other displays flickered, steadied and shone. The craft beeped and clicked around them. It still felt cold.
Y’sul knocked and tapped a few of the more obviously delicate-looking bits of machinery with his hub-arms.
“You getting anything?” he asked. The truetwin was staying on board the larger craft.
“There’s stuff in the log,” one half told them. “That’s sailor-talk for diary.”
“No saying!” Y’sul said.
“Truly. But it’s not accessible from here. You’ll have to input from there.”
“How, exactly?” Fassin asked.
“How should we know?”
“Not our ship.”
“Experiment.”
They experimented. The correct technique involved Y’sul pressing in to a Dweller-shaped double-alcove sensory nook and pressing four glyphboard icons on four different glyph-boards at once. The main screen stopped showing stars and the darkly glittering hull of the Sepulcraft and started showing what looked like the interior of a small library instead. Y’sul reached out into the virtual space and pulled down a book whose spine said Log. He opened it.