Democracy's Light

Chapter Twenty

“Deploy the outermost pods,” Admiral Wilhelm ordered. There hadn’t been any more time to delay. The voice of the rebel fleet’s commander had convinced him of that. It would have been nice to close the range a little more, but she wouldn’t allow him to lead her by the nose any further. “Fire at will.”

The display flickered and updated rapidly as the pods fired their missiles. The idea of missile pods hadn’t been a new one, but they simply hadn’t been a workable concept, until now. The Nerds had invented the concept and, for reasons that made little sense to Admiral Wilhelm, had kept them back rather than introducing them to the rebels. He didn’t understand that — and he didn’t understand why they had come to him and offered their support — but he needed them. They had provided his fleet with something an Imperial Navy fleet had lacked after First Harmony; technological equality. Maybe even, they’d hinted, superiority.

He smiled as the missiles raced towards their targets. The Nerds had solved a problem that had bedevilled missile techs throughout the ages. A missile was too small to carry a power-generating unit — and in any case they were destroyed when they struck their targets — and so they had limited range and speed. A missile in sprint mode would burn out quickly, quickly enough to be useless except at close range, while a longer-ranged missile would be easier for the defender’s point defence to target and destroyed. It was why the rebels had developed the arsenal ships in the first place. They overwhelmed their targets by sheer weight of numbers. The Nerds, however, had managed to extend a missile’s range in sprint mode.

“Keep tracking their point defence and analyse it,” he ordered, calmly. His heart was beating rapidly, as it always did when all of his theories and plans collapsed into a battle, but his voice was calm. “Security, what did you make of that transmission?”

His Security Officer, an old friend, frowned. Imperial Intelligence — and, for that matter, the Hohenzollern Clan, would have been horrified to learn how close Wilhelm and his Security Officer had become over the years. It had been another of Carola’s ideas; she had introduced Jake Russell to the woman who would become his wife and encouraged the relationship. It had turned Jake from a sworn enemy — all Security Officers were the enemy until proven otherwise — into a friend and an ally. Wilhelm didn’t know for sure, but he would bet his last credit that Colin Harper had had a similar arrangement. How else would he have gotten away with it for so long?

“It was odd, wasn’t it?” Jake agreed, calmly. He never sounded emotional over anything, but his wife. “It wasn’t a precise warning, just… a standard warning. I’ll start working on tracking down the person who sent the signal, but if it was programmed into the system, it could have been done weeks ago.”

Wilhelm nodded, stroking his chin thoughtfully. A standard warning was, by its nature, imprecise. It warned anyone approaching to use extreme care, on the assumption that there was danger ahead, but it was rarely used because there were more specific warning signals for almost any emergency. Any infiltrator on the shipyard could have sent a proper warning, if they knew about the plans for the ambush, but instead… they had been maddeningly imprecise. The rebel commander had to be completely puzzled.

“It’s possible that Imperial Intelligence had a sleeper on the shipyard they never told me about,” Jake hazarded, after a long moment. “They could have programmed him to remain out of the way until he was needed… and the rebels might have recovered the proper command codes to make use of his services.”

“Leave it for the moment,” Wilhelm said, watching the display. If they lost the battle, the activity of one or a thousand infiltration agents wouldn’t change their fate. “I suggest that you concentrate your efforts on supervising the evacuation and track down the spies later.”

He’d planned for that as well. A shipyard wasn’t just the facilities, although they were important and cost time and money to build, but also the workforce. The thousands of trained men and women who worked on the shipyard — and now far more motivated after he’d had incompetents who’d gained their positions through connections weeded out ruthlessly — had to be preserved. If the war went well, they’d be needed to expand the shipyards… and if it went badly, they became a bargaining chip. He could even follow the Nerds suggestion and send them to hidden facilities along the Rim.

“Understood,” Jake said. “Good luck.”

Wilhelm snorted and turned back to the display. The rebel fleet might have been surprised — although he doubted it — but they’d reacted well. He’d taken care to have the missile pods aimed at the superdreadnaughts, although striking the smaller ships would have guaranteed several kills, and the rebels were taking ruthless advantage of that ‘mistake.’ Their smaller craft, bristling with point defence weapons and tactical sensors, were wiping missiles out of space by the hundreds, despite their speed. They’d improved their targeting, he saw, just as the Nerds had predicted. It made him wonder what else they’d improved.

Gunboats, bristling with point defence weapons themselves, sped ahead of the main fleet, hunting for the semi-stealthed pods. He had to admire the bravery of the crews, even if they were on the opposite side; a popular Imperial Navy joke had it that most gunboats couldn’t even fart loudly in their own defence. They wouldn’t be any match for a destroyer, let alone anything bigger, but they made useful additional point defence platforms and scouts, if only because they were so completely expendable.

“The gunboats are engaging some of the missile pods,” the tactical officer reported. “Do you want me to flush the remaining pods?”

Wilhelm nodded once. The pods would be easy targets for any prowling gunboat. “If they’re targeted, yes,” he ordered. “Try and pick off a handful of the gunboats with the energy buoys if they can take them out. If not, leave them to their work. They’re just wasting energy if they shoot up empty pods.”

He smiled. A missile pod that had expended all its missiles was useless, at least until it could be recovered and reloaded. They were such simple creations that the orbiting industrial facilities would be able to produce thousands more within a week, if he ordered them; the real bottleneck would be the missiles. The fleet had an insatiable demand that would only grow larger as the war progressed.

“And keep scanning their fleet and locating every ship,” he added. “The information will come in handy when we spring the trap.”

Katy frowned as she studied the display, trying to understand what she was seeing. For someone who was regarded as competent, if not dangerously competent, there was a certain degree of incompetence around Admiral Wilhelm’s defences. On one side, he had introduced a new and terrifying range of missiles, capable of entering sprint mode for longer… and on the other side, he hadn’t even used them properly. A mass attack on her superdreadnaughts, targeting one or two for preference, might have inflicted damage, but instead he’d fired them off in fits and starts. She’d wondered if the first attack had been a mistake, as insane as it seemed, but the pattern was only continuing.

The Jefferson lunched as it launched another spread of probes down towards the planet. Whatever was going on with the missile pods — if that was what they were — wasn’t affecting Admiral Wilhelm’s point defence. They’d picked off several probes already and the ECM surrounding the shipyard and the orbital fortresses was massive, almost as good as their own. That wasn’t something she’d expected and it worried her. If Admiral Wilhelm had made one major advance and duplicated one of the Geeks advances, what else had his people managed to duplicate?

They couldn’t have had Carola copy them from Earth, she thought, slowly. Even if she managed to gain access, they wouldn’t have had time to put them all into production, which suggests that they either developed them on their own or someone else boosted their technology. Who?

She pushed the line of thought aside as unproductive, and distracting in a combat zone, and turned back to the display. The fleet was still battering its way through the missile pods, but the gunboats were wiping them out, often before they could fire. A handful of gunboats had been lost, one of them to a missile pod that had fired on the tiny starships, but the remainder were still active. She’d half-expected Admiral Wilhelm to detach a squadron of destroyers to deal with the gunboats, but he had resisted the bait and allowed her craft to continue clearing the defences out of their way.

The superdreadnaught shivered as a single missile struck home against the shield, it’s comrades wiped out by the point defence network. Alone, it couldn’t hope to do anything beyond making the ship shake, but she checked the readouts anyway, wondering if Admiral Wilhelm had breeched the taboo on antimatter. The sensors reported that it was a standard nuclear warhead, perhaps designed to weaken her shields without damaging the starship significantly, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was waiting for her to make a mistake.

“Admiral, the gunboats have reported that they have cleared all of the threatening missile pods,” the tactical officer said, breaking into her thoughts. “The Squadron Commander is requesting permission to clear the unthreatening pods out of the way before they can become a threat.”

An hour ago, Katy would have dismissed the possibility, but now there was little choice, but to clear all of the possible threats. “Order them to engage at will, but be prepared to return to the fleet at any moment,” she ordered, calmly. It wasn’t as if the gunboats would be any help if there were a major clash of starships, although their contribution to the point defence would be severely missed. “Bring up the targeting pattern and prepare to engage the fortresses.”

The tactical officer blinked. “The fortresses, Admiral?”

“The fortresses,” Katy said. The superdreadnaughts were a serious threat under other circumstances, but the fortresses were actually more dangerous within a gravity shadow… and she had no intention of entering the gravity shadow until the fortresses had been disabled or destroyed. Besides, if she were reading Admiral Wilhelm rightly, he would be commanding from one of the fortresses. It was just possible that they would decapitate the enemy command structure. “Analysis Team, have you located the enemy command and control centre?”

“Negative,” the analysis officer reported, through the intercom. “The enemy units are using heavily and randomly encrypted communications. Their command centre cannot be located.”

So they’ve learned that trick, Katy thought, sourly. Back during the early days of the rebellion, the Empire had kept the standard fleet control networks in operation, despite the fact they pointed the flagship out clearly to anyone with the right technology. The analysts didn’t have to know what the ships were saying to one another to locate the one that was giving the orders… and decapitate the squadron permanently. The standard Imperial Navy squadron was a hornet’s nest of rivalries, jealousies and worse. In the time it would take for the Captains to sort out who was in command of the remainder of the squadron it would have been reduced by several more ships. Sometimes, according to surviving records, it had been the destruction of additional ships that had terminated the infighting. No good deed went unpunished.

“Never mind,” she said. They were coming right along the edge of the gravity shadow now, poised to dive down towards the planet and the web of orbital industries. “Confirm firing patterns?”

“Confirmed,” the tactical officer said. “Missiles locked on targets…”

“Fire,” Katy ordered.

The arsenal ships rolled and fired the first salvo of multi-missiles down towards the planet… and the fortresses orbiting the blue-green globe.

Unlike Joshua Wachter, who had been caught out by the same trick at Second Morrison, Admiral Wilhelm had had the sensor records to prove that missiles with such impossible ranges actually existed, even without the warning from the Nerds. He’d deployed so much additional point defence, at least in part, to cope with just such an offensive, expecting one to materialise if it came to blows. Why, he’d asked his fellow Admirals, would the rebels fail to use such an effective weapon, particularly when they knew that there was no chance of facing it themselves?

“Deploy point defence drones and ECM,” he ordered, as the impossible missiles raged down towards two of his fortresses. The rebels had, through the luck of the draw, managed to avoid engaging both his command fortresses, much to his relief. If he allowed them to locate him, the next attack would be focused on him personally. “Contact the Avid and order it to flicker out, now.”

“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said. The Avid, a destroyer that seemed to be trying to remain away from the fighting, flickered out and vanished from the display. The rebels probably wouldn’t notice in the fury of the fighting… and even if they did, they wouldn’t understand its significance.

“Commit the remaining point defence units to the defence of Fortress #10 and Fortress #11,” Wilhelm continued, turning to the tactical officer. They were playing for time, now, and even as the missiles stormed towards the two fortresses, the rebels had their neck in his noose. “Commit everything we have, apart from the superdreadnaughts. They are to remain where they are.”

The rebel commander hadn’t done it badly, he noted, with a reluctant flicker of admiration. He had never heard of an Admiral Garland, although the name was familiar from one of the war reports he’d read, but she’d played her cards well. He might have had more point defence than anyone, but a supremely paranoid and resourceful officer would have deployed, but she’d managed to neutralise most of it just by firing from her position. He would have to alter some of the platforms to force them to engage… and that would reveal their positions ahead of time.

Interesting, he thought. The trick was impressive… and, in hindsight, rather crude. I wonder what else she has up her sleeves.

The timing seemed skewed, just because of the long-range missiles, but finally they flashed into point defence range. The timing wasn’t quite perfect this time, he noted with a flash of triumph; his point defence weapons were picking off several of the multi-missiles before they had a chance to deploy. They vanished in bright sparks of fire, dancing just at the edge of perception, before the remainder multiplied into a wave of onrushing destruction. The fortresses and their supporting point defence were firing rapidly now, using everything from pulsars to their heavy fission beams to sweep hundreds of missiles out of space, but still they came on. Several hundred missiles survived to slam against Fortress #10… and the entire structure vaporised in a blinding flash.

Fortress #11 was luckier. Only a relative handful of missiles survived to strike him, but their cumulative effect was to knock down the shields and ram into the hull. If it had been a superdreadnaught, he thought numbly, it would have been an expanding ball of plasma by now, but the monstrous armour protecting the fortress held most of the effects contained, barely. The interior of the fortress, for the crew lucky enough to survive, would reassemble hell. The fortress might not have been destroyed, but looking at it, Wilhelm suspected that they would have to scrap it and build a new one from scratch.

Jake sounded as stunned as he looked. “How many more of those missiles do they have?”

Wilhelm shrugged. The Nerds had confirmed something he’d suspected; the rebel superdreadnaughts couldn’t fire the missiles, which meant that they had to deploy them from arsenal ships. They’d fired off roughly a third of the arsenal ships in their fleet, which might allow them two more comparable attacks, unless they hadn’t expended all of the missiles in the first ships.

“I have no idea,” he said, truthfully. He looked over at the timer. There were only a few minutes left. “It won’t matter much longer anyway.”

“Target One destroyed,” the tactical officer said. The satisfaction in his voice was unmistakable. “Target Two effectively destroyed.”

Katy nodded. Judging by the confused readings spilling off the fortress, the missiles might not have destroyed it outright, but they’d left it a burned-out shell. The shipyard below might be able to repair it, but she’d be astonished if it took them less than six months. Her engineers would have a look at the remains after they’d won the battle.

“Retarget the remaining missiles on the next pair of fortresses,” she ordered, calmly. It was a wasteful exercise in missiles, but not in lives. The missiles were replaceable, while the lives were not, an argument that made perfect sense to her. She would almost hate it when they ended up budgeting properly for military supplies again. “Prepare to…”

“That’s odd,” the sensor officer said. He was peering down at his console, working frantically to see through the sensor distortions caused by the exchange of fire. “Admiral, I have something odd here.”

Katy pulled up the results on her own display, but they made little sense to her. It might have been a sensor ghost, one caused by the presence of so many starships, or it might have been something more sinister.

“Report,” she snapped. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” the sensor officer admitted. His inexperience was showing, Katy saw, but she had no time for it. A more experienced officer might have made a guess and stood by it. “It looks almost like turbulence…”

Katy felt her blood run cold. “Launch a spread of probes, full active, towards the source of that disturbance…”

“Too late,” the tactical officer said.

The display filled with angry red icons.