Ships with C-plus capability had no incentive to hang around in enemy space waiting for these seeker missiles, and the Church-sponsored restriction on AI’s in warheads made the effectiveness of these weapons problematic at best. So the shape of space battles over the centuries of the Hegemony had been simple—fleets translating into space and finding other translating fleets or more static in-system defenses, a quick closing to more lethal distances, a brief but terrible exchange of energies, and the inevitable retreat of the more savaged forces—or total destruction if the defending forces had nowhere to retreat—followed by consolidation of gains by the winning fleet.
Technically, the slower ships de Soya had served in previously had a powerful tactical advantage over the instantaneous-drive archangel cruisers. Revival from cryogenic fugue state took only hours at worst, minutes at best, so the captain and crew of a Hawking-drive ship could be ready to fight shortly after translating from C-plus. With the archangels, and even with papal dispensation for the accelerated and risky two-day resurrection cycles, it was fifty standard hours or more before the human elements of the ships were ready to do battle.
Theoretically, this gave a great advantage to the defenders. Theoretically, the Pax could have optimized the use of Gideon-drive ships by having uncrewed craft piloted by AI’s flick into enemy space, wreak havoc, and flick out again before the defenders knew that they were under attack.
But such theory did not apply here.
Autonomous intelligences capable of such advanced fuzzy logic would never be allowed by the Church. More importantly, Pax Fleet had designed attack strategies to meet the requirements of resurrection so that no advantage would be surrendered to defenders.
Simply put, no battles were to be fought by mutual agreement. The seven archangels had been designed to descend upon the enemy like the mailed fist of God, and that was precisely what they were doing now.
In the first three Task Force GIDEON incursions into Ouster space, Mother Captain Stone’s ship, the Gabriel, translated first and decelerated hard in-system, drawing all long-range electromagnetic, neutrino, and other sensor probes. The restricted AI’s aboard Gabriel were sufficient to catalogue the position and identity of all defensive positions and population centers in the system, while simultaneously monitoring the sluggish in-system movement of all Ouster attack and merchant vehicles.
Thirty minutes later, the Uriel, Raphael, Remiel, Sariel, Michael, and Raguel would translate in-system. Dropping to only three-quarters light-speed, the task force would be moving like bullets compared to the tortoise velocities of the accelerating Ouster torchships. Receiving Gabriel’s intelligence and targeting data via tight beam burst, the task force would open fire with weaponry that held no respect for the limitations of light-speed. The improved Hawking-drive hyper-k missiles would wink into existence among enemy ships and above population centers, some using velocity and precise aiming to destroy targets, others detonating in carefully shaped but promiscuous plasma or thermonuclear blasts. At the same instant, recoverable Hawking-drive high-velocity probes would jump to target points and translate into real space, radiating conventional lance beams and CPB’s like so many lethal sea urchins, destroying anything and everything within a hundred-thousand-klick radius.
Most terribly, the ship borne deathbeams would slice outward from the task force archangels like invisible scythes, propagating along the Hawking-drive wakes of probes and missiles and translating into real space as surely as the terrible swift sword of God.
Countless trillions of synapses were fried and scrambled in an instant. Tens of thousands of Ousters died without knowing that they were under attack.
And then the GIDEON Task Force would come back in-system on thousand-kilometer tails of flame, closing in for the final kill.
Each of the seven star systems to be attacked had been probed by instantaneous-drive drones, the presence of Ousters confirmed, preliminary targets assigned. Each of the seven star systems had a name—usually just a New Revised General Catalogue alpha-numerical designation—but the command team aboard H.H.S. Uriel had given the seven systems target names coded after the seven archdemons mentioned in the Old Testament.
Father Captain de Soya thought it a bit much, all this cabalistic numerology—seven archangels, seven target systems, seven archdemons, seven deadly sins. But he soon fell into the habit of talking about the targets in this shorthand.
The target systems were—Belphegor (sloth), Leviathan (envy), Beelzebub (gluttony), Satan (anger), Asmodeus (lechery), Mammon (avarice), and Lucifer (pride).
Belphegor had been a red-dwarf system that reminded de Soya of Barnard’s Star system, but instead of the lovely, fully terraformed Barnard’s World floating close to the sun, Belphegor’s only planet was a gas giant resembling Barnard’s Star’s forgotten child, Whirl. There were true military targets around this unnamed gas giant: refueling stations for the Ouster Swarm torchships en route to attack the Pax’s Great Wall, gigantic dipships that shuttled the gases from the world to orbit, repair docks and orbital shipyards by the dozen. De Soya had Raphael attack these without hesitation, slagging them to orbital lava.
GIDEON found most of the true Ouster population centers floating in the Trojan points beyond the gas giant, scores of small orbital forests filled with tens of thousands of space-adapted “angels,” most opening their forcefield wings to the weak, red sunlight in panic at the task force’s approach. The seven archangels laid waste to these delicate ecostructures, destroying all of the forests and shepherd asteroids and watering comets, burning the fleeing space-adapted Ouster angels like putting so many moths to a flame, and all without slowing significantly between entrance and exit translation points.
The second system, Leviathan, despite its impressive name, had been a Sirius B-type white dwarf with only a dozen or so Ouster asteroids huddled close to its pale fire. Here there were none of the obvious military targets that de Soya had attacked so willingly in the Belphegor System: the asteroids were undefended, probably birthing rocks and hollowed-out pressurized environments for Ousters who had not chosen to adapt to vacuum and hard radiation. Task Force GIDEON swept them with deathbeams and passed on.
The third system, Beelzebub, was an Alpha Centauri C-like red dwarf, devoid of worlds or colonies, with only a single Ouster military base swinging in the darkness some thirty AU’s out and fifty-seven Swarm ships caught in the act of refueling or refitting. Thirty-nine of these warships, ranging in size and armament from tiny ramscouts to an Orion-class attack carrier, were fit to fight and flung themselves at Task Force GIDEON. The battle lasted two minutes and eighteen seconds. All fifty-seven Ouster ships and the base complex were turned to gas molecules or lifeless sarcophagi. No archangels were damaged in the exchange. The task force moved on.
The fourth system, Satan, held no ships, only breeding colonies scattered as far out as the Oört cloud. GIDEON spent eleven days in this system, putting Lucifer’s angels to the torch.
The fifth system, Asmodeus, centered by a pleasant little K-type orange dwarf not unlike Epsilon Eridani, sent waves of in-system torchships to the defense of its populated asteroid belt. The waves were burned and blasted away with an economy born of practice. The Gabriel reported eighty-two inhabited rocks in the belt, harboring a population estimated at a million and a half adapted and unadapted Ousters.
Eighty-one of the asteroids were destroyed or deathbeamed from a great distance. Then Admiral Aldikacti ordered prisoners taken. Task Force GIDEON decelerated in a long, four-day ellipse that brought them back to the belt and its sole remaining inhabited rock—a potato-shaped asteroid less than four klicks long and a klick across at its widest, cratered point. Doppler radar showed that it was orbiting and tumbling in random patterns understood only by the gods of chaos, but that it was turning on its axis in a carefully orchestrated one-tenth-g rotisserie mode. Deep radar showed that it was hollow. Probes told that it was inhabited by as many as ten thousand Ousters.