They shouldn’t be able to do that, Adrienne Robbins thought. Not to just disappear that way. We should have detected the hyper field charging up on something that size, even for an itty-bitty micro-jump. But we didn’t. Well, that’s worth knowing. Won’t help the bastards much when they get too far in-system to micro-jump, but it’s going to be a bitch out here.
And the buggers can fight, she thought grimly, shaken by her read-outs. Task Force One had gone in with forty-eight ships; it came out with twenty-one. The enemy had lost ten times that many, possibly more … but the enemy had more than ten times as many starships as Earth had battleships.
Admiral Hawter turned in-system. Magazines were down to sixty percent, thirty percent for hyper missiles, and half his survivors were damaged. If the enemy was willing to run, then so was he. He’d gotten the information Earth needed for analysis; now it was time to get his surviving people home.
The first clash was over, and humanity had won—if fifty-six percent losses could be called a victory. And both sides knew it could. The Aku’Ultan had lost a vastly lower percentage of their total force, but there came a point at which terms like “favorable rate of exchange” were meaningless.
Yet it was only the first clash, and both sides had learned much. It remained to be seen which would profit most from the lessons they had purchased with so much blood.
Chapter Fifteen
The great ringed planet of this accursed system floated far below him, but Lord of Order Chirdan had no eyes for its beauty as he watched his engineers prepare their final system tests.
The asteroids they had already hurled against the nest-killers’ planetary shield had shown Battle Comp that small weapons would not penetrate, while those of sufficient mass were destroyed by the nest-killers’ weapons before impact. They would continue to hurl asteroids against it, but only to force it back so that they might smite the fortresses with other thunders.
But this, Chirdan thought, was another matter. It would move slowly, at first, but only at first, and it was large enough to mount shields which could stop even the nest-killers’ weapons. His nestlings would protect it with their lives, and it would end these demon-spawned nest-killers for all time. Battle Comp had promised him that, and Battle Comp never lied.
“I don’t like it,” Horus said. “I don’t like it, and I want a way around it. Do any of you have one?”
His chiefs of staff looked back from his com screen, weary faces strained. Gerald Hatcher’s temples were almost completely white, but Isaiah Hawter’s eyes were haunted, for he’d seen seventy percent of his warships blown out of existence in the last four months.
One face was missing. General Singhman had been aboard ODC Seven when the Achuultani warhead broke through her shield.
There were other gaps in Earth’s defenses, and the enemy ruled the outer system. They were slow and clumsy in normal space, but their ability to dart into hyper with absolutely no warning more than compensated as long as they stayed at least twenty light-minutes out.
Earth had learned enough in the last few months to know her technology was better, but it was beginning to appear her advantage might not be great enough, for the Achuultani had surprises of their own.
Like those damned hyper drives. Achuultani ships were slow even in hyper, but their hyper drives did things Horus had always thought were impossible. They could operate twice as deep into a stellar gravity well as an Imperial hypership, and their missile launchers were incredible. Achuultani sublight missiles, though fast, weren’t too dangerous—Earth’s defenders had better computers, better counter-missiles, and more efficient shield generators—but their hyper missiles were another story. Somehow, and Horus would have given an arm to know how, the Achuultani generated external hyper fields around their missiles, without the massive on-board hyper drives human missiles required.
Their launchers’ rate of fire was lower, but they were small enough the Achuultani could pack them in in unbelievable numbers, and they tended to fire their salvos in shoals, scattered over the hyper bands. A shield could cover only so many bands at once, and with luck, they could pop a missile through one the shield wasn’t guarding—a trick which had cost Earth’s warships dearly.
Their energy weapons, on the other hand, relied upon quaint, short-ranged developments of laser technology, which left a gap in their defenses. It wasn’t very wide, but if Earth’s defenders could get into it, they were too close for really accurate Achuultani hyper missile-fire and beyond their effective energy weapon range. The trick was surviving to get there.
And they really did like kinetic weapons. So far, they’d managed to hit the planetary shield with scores of projectiles, the largest something over a billion tons, and virtually wiped out Earth’s orbital industry. They’d nailed two ODCs, as well, picking them off with missiles when the main shield was slammed back into atmosphere behind them by kinetic assault.
To date, Vassily had managed to hold that shield against everything they threw at him, but the big, blond Russian was growing increasingly grim-faced. The PDC shield generators had been designed to provide a fifty percent reserve—but that was before they knew about Achuultani hyper missiles. Covering the wide-band attacks coming at him took every generator he had, and at ruinous overload. Without the core tap, not even the PDCs could have held them.
Which was largely what this conference was about.
“I don’t see an option, Horus,” Hatcher said finally. “We’ve got to have that tap. If we shut down and they hit us before we power back up—”
“Gerald,” Chernikov said, “we never meant this tap to carry such loads so long. The control systems are collapsing. I am into the secondary governor ring in places; if it goes, there are only the tertiaries to hold it.”
“But even if we shut down, will it be any safer to power back up?”
“No,” Chernikov conceded unhappily. “Not without repairs.”
“Then, Vassily, it is a choice between a possibility of losing control and the probability of losing the planet,” Tsien said quietly.
“I know that. But it will do us no good to blow up Antarctica and lose the tap—permanently—into the bargain.”
“Agreed.” Horus’s quiet voice snapped all eyes back to him. “Are your replacement components ready for installation, Vassily?”
“They are. We will require two-point-six hours to change over, but I must shut down to do it.”
“Very well.” Horus felt responsibility crushing down upon him. “When the first secondary system goes down, we’ll shut down long enough for complete control replacement.”
Tsien and Hatcher looked as if they wanted to argue, but they were soldiers. They recognized an order when they heard it.
“Now.” Horus turned his attention to Admiral Hawter. “What can you tell us about your own situation, Isaiah?”
“It’s not good,” Hawter said heavily. “The biggest problem is the difference in our shield technologies. We generate a single bubble around a unit; they generate a series of plate-like shields, each covering one aspect of the target, with about a twenty percent overlap at the edges. They pay for it with a much less efficient power ratio, but it gives them redundancy we don’t have and lets them bring them in closer to the hull. That’s our problem.”
Heads nodded. Hyper missiles weren’t seeking weapons; they went straight to their pre-programmed coordinates, and the distance between shield and hull effectively made Earth’s ships bigger targets. All too often, a hyper missile close enough to penetrate a human warship’s shield detonated outside an Achuultani ship’s shields—which, coupled with the Achuultani’s greater ability to saturate the hyper bands, left Hawter’s ships at a grievous disadvantage.