Death Match, page 22
part #3 of Sten Omnibus Series
“Good. This problem will not repeat itself. Now. Shall we go out there and start keeping the peace?”
Mason’s salute sonic-snapped; he about-faced and stalked back out onto the bridge.
Sten allowed himself a grin. Hell, all those absurd clichés that had been snarled at him as he rose through the ranks still worked, given that the person on the receiving end really believed all that drakh.
Oh, well.
He followed Mason — promising himself that when this was all over he would decoy the bastard into a dark alley and blackjack him for a week and a half.
Sten’s next action was to “request” that Admiral Mason assemble his top four staffers and the Victory’s XO in a conference chamber and link, on secure screen, the skippers of the escort ships.
“Gentlebeings,” Sten said without preamble, “the situation is pretty obvious.” There were nods from the officers.
The Victory was plunging through a rift between two rich open clusters. On a screen corrected for human eyes, human spatial prejudices, and human conditioning, the tiny fleet was flashing into darkest night, with high-banked lightclouds on either side. A more detailed screen would show tiny subsidiary splotches of light to the left and right of the Victory’s projected orbit. These were, respectively, the Bogazi hastily assembled fleet(s?) ready to defend their capital world and cluster on the left; and, to the right, in the middle of the darkness that was the rift, the attacking Suzdal fleets. The battlechamber, of course, would show each and every world and ship, to the limits of its preset range.
The Victory would go hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle between the two fleets, in —
“Contact timetick,” Sten requested.
“Rough estimate, two ship-days, sir. Exact —”
“Not necessary. Thank you, Commander. Is there any data suggesting they know we’re inbound?”
“Negative, sir.”
That was unsurprising — one continuing advantage Imperial ships had was vastly superior sensory systems. And one very secret gimmick: before any AM2 was released to non-Imperial sources it was given a “coating” made from a derivative of Imperium X. Any non-Empire ship on stardrive would produce a slight purple flare on Imperial screens, a flare that could be picked up at a far greater range than the unaltered Imperial drive signature. It wasn’t much — just enough of an edge to win a war every now and then.
“The object of our little game,” Sten began, “is obviously to keep our Suzdal and Bogazi allies from slaughtering each other. And, incidentally, to keep either or both of them from deciding that anybody who breaks up a bar brawl between friends deserves a good one upside the head.”
There were suppressed smiles. Admiral Mason did not give briefings like this.
“Right,” Sten continued. “Obviously the only way that we can accomplish this is with pure guano. Fortunately, Admiral Mason is, as you all know, one of the most skilled Imperial leaders in deception.”
Sten really wanted to phrase it differently and say that Mason was fuller of drakh and therefore more guano-qualified than almost any admiral he knew, but he refrained.
“He and I discussed our problem, and he had some interesting plans. I had a couple of ideas that might be worth considering. There will be five stages to our plan. Stage One is appropriately evil; Stage Two is honorable; and Stage Four might give someone here a medal or two. Stage Five will be pure naked dishonesty, which I shall implement.”
“Stage Three, sir?” The question came from the captain of the destroyer Princeton.
“That’s my own cheap idea,” Sten said. “All hands aboard the Victory have been spending their off-shifts working on it.”
Sten flexed his fingers unconsciously. “All hands” was no exaggeration — his own itched from metal fragments and real wood splinters embedded in fingers and palms.
“We’ll get to that in time. Stage One we will begin immediately, while the briefing continues. Order all weapons officers and all Kali crews to action stations.”
The Kali missiles, now on their fifth generation, were monster ship-killers. The Kali V class were nearly thirty meters long by now, having grown not only in expense but in size as each generation was given newer and more sophisticated tracking, homing, ECM, and “perception” suites. Power was from AM2 — the Kalis were, in fact, miniature starships. All that had not been necessary to improve from generation to generation was the pay-load. Sixty megatons was still enough to shatter any ship on any military register. Even the Forez, the Tahn battleship that remained the mightiest warship ever “launched,” had been rendered hors d’ combat by Kalis.
The Kali was “flown” into its target under direct control by weapons officers. The control system was helmet-mounted and used direct induction to the brain. Actual control had progressed from the old manual joystick and tiny throttle to involuntary or voluntary neural reaction from the “pilot.” The Kali could also be set to use other, automatic homing systems. But those were only used under special circumstances — weapons officers were chosen for their killer instincts, second only to potential tacship pilots, and they preferred playing cheater kamikaze.
Stage One was a launch of all available Kalis.
They burst out from their launch tubes on the Victory and its destroyers at full drive for thirty seconds, and then power was shut down. The missiles lanced ahead of the Imperial squadron.
Right behind them came the Victory’s tacships, under the same full power/cut power/run silent orders.
This was Stage One — Sten’s hole cards.
Stage Two waited for some time, until watch officers reported alarums from the Bogazi fleet. They had “seen” the oncoming unidentified ship that was the Victory. Since they were waiting for the Suzdal, their sensors were slightly more efficient, not masked by their own drive emissions. Sten waited a couple of ship-hours, having ordered that no response be made to any challenges from either Suzdal or Bogazi, then assembled his human actors for the next part of the plan.
All Bogazi and Suzdal com channels were blanketed by the Victory’s powerful transmitters.
All receiving vid screens showed:
The well-known Imperial Ambassador Sten. Standing on the bridge of a warship, in full and formal garb. He was flanked by two equally grim-faced officers, Mason and his XO, also in full dress uniform.
The broadcast was very short and to the point. Sten informed both sides they were in violation of Imperial and Altaic treaties of long standing, as well as civilization’s common agreements of interplanetary rights. They were ordered to return immediately to their home worlds and make no further aggressive moves.
Failure to respond would be met with the severest measures.
The broadcast was not meant to convince, or even to threaten. It was merely a pin in the map to legitimize the real bludgeon Sten had prepared.
The one he hoped nobody figured out was made of metal foil and lathes — quite literally.
The response was as expected.
The Suzdal did not answer the cast, either from their fleets or from their home worlds. The Bogazi, slightly more sophisticated, broadcast a warning that all neutral ships should stand clear of given coordinates. Any intrusion into this area would be met with armed response. Any errors might be regretted but would be considered within the acceptable parameters of self-defense.
There was no response from the Victory. Sten hoped this would worry both sides.
Another timetick. It would be four ship-hours until the Victory would be directly “between” the two enemies.
And they, in turn, would be in range of the Victory in five hours, and each other in twelve.
The situation was developing in an interesting manner.
“Three hours, sir. And the Bogazi fleet is now under drive.”
Sten rose from the weapons couch he had asked to borrow for a nap. This was calculated bravado, intended to prove to all the young troopies that Sten was so confident that he could doze before action.
Of course, he had not slept.
What bothered him was that in the old days he actually had nodded off every three or four times he tried the ploy.
Mason came out of his day cabin. “We’re ready, sir.”
“Very well.”
Mason came quite close to Sten. “You didn’t sleep, either, did you?”
Sten’s eyes widened. Was Mason actually trying to be friendly? Had that absurd reaming-out caused the admiral to make an attitude check?
Naah. Mason was just setting Sten up so, come another time, he would be the one waiting in that dark alley with the sap.
“Perhaps we might begin Stage Three,” he said.
“I shall give the orders.”
Stage Three was a truly monstrous bluff.
Back on Jochi, Sten had run a fast list of ways to make people unhappy. He dimly remembered one, told as a joke but also as a mind-jog, back in Mantis training. The story went that aeons earlier, a young guerrilla officer was trying to delay a military convoy. It must’ve been in the dark ages, because the vehicles were evidently ground-bound, and there was no mention of air cover. The convoy had armor and heavy weapons. The guerrilla officer had twenty men, only half of them armed.
The guerrilla could have thermopylaed nobly and slowed the convoy for five minutes at the cost of his entire band. Instead, he looted a nearby farmhouse. He took all of the dinnerware in the house and carefully positioned each plate, facedown, in the roadway.
Land mines.
Sten had objected — the armor’s commander must have been a complete clot, since it was unlikely that land mines never looked like dinner plates, even in those medieval times.
After Sten had finished doing the push-ups that every military school seemed to award its trainees at regular intervals for sins ranging from breathing to buggery, the instructor had pointed out that of course the track commander would not have mistaken them for any land mines he was familiar with.
They could be something new. They could be booby traps. And if they were real, and he drove over them, and started losing vehicles, it would be his butt in front of the firing squad.
So slowly, laboriously, he had to send forward clearing teams to lift each plate, determine it was a plate, and move on to the next. The guerrilla leader further slowed progress down by regular sniping, in spite of the convoy’s counterfire.
“The convoy was delayed by two full E-hours, so the story goes, with no loss to the guerrilla force. Think on that, troops. Mr. Sten, you can stop doing push-ups now.”
Land mines . . . space mines. Yes, that was it. Mines — those lethal devices that just sat waiting for a target and then blew it up or, worse, lurked until the target came within range and then went hunting — were never popular weapons. In spite of the fact they were the most efficient, least expensive killers of expensive machinery and beings known. They seemed somehow slimy to “honest” soldiers. Or, anyway, not especially glamorous.
Sten had never imagined that killing one’s fellow beings was glamorous. And if he’d had one iota, Mantis Section would have burned it out of him. He had also seen how effective the Tahn use of mines had been. The Tahn operated under the valid if uncivilized principle that killing was killing and needed no particular moral justification.
The Empire’s conventional military, being “honorable,” knew little and cared naught about mines — therefore, anyone they armed and equipped, such as the Altaic Cluster, would be unlikely to be expert, either.
So, during the flight out from Jochi, the hangar deck of the Victory had become a carpentry shop. The lathing Sten had ordered up was wire-tied into rough hedgehog-looking configurations and wrapped with metal foil.
There were several hundred of these blivets stacked on the hangar deck.
On command, these were dumped, a few at a time, into space. They formed a stream, a divider of sorts, between the two fleets. Of course, they were still traveling at the same velocity as the Victory, but Sten planned to wreak his next move before his “mines” cleared the field of operations.
They had the immediate and desired effect.
The oncoming fleets went into modified panic mode as the Suzdal and Bogazi sensors picked up the “mines,” and their commanders tried to figure out what these strange objects were that were emerging from the Imperial ship like so many bits of candy tossed to the crowds in a parade. On their screens they would have seen the Victory, its accompanying destroyer screen, possibly some tacships, and then the mines streaming across their screens.
Very good, very good, Sten thought. They’re worried. Now we wait . . . Shortly both fleets ordered destroyer squadrons forward to investigate. Now we show them our dinner plates have bangs in them. “Admiral Mason?”
“Yessir. All ships . . . all weapons stations,” Mason ordered. “Targets . . . the destroyers. Mind your discriminators. One target per weapon. Any young officer disobeying that order will be relieved, court-martialed, and cashiered.”
Mason, the gentle father figure.
Kalis homed at half speed, or else were told by their discriminators that another missile was swifter on the pickup. Close in, just before the Suzdal and Bogazi destroyers picked them up on their screens, the missiles went to full drive.
Screens on the Victory’s bridge flared as the Kalis hit, then cleared to show open space where a destroyer had once been.
Three destroyers from the Suzdal and two from the Bogazi survived to return to their parent fleets.
Any analysis would have shown that these missiles were being launched by those strange-appearing “mines.”
Sten nodded to Mason once more — and the tacships smashed in from the high elliptic they had held. Get in, launch, and get back out were their orders.
Two cruisers and five destroyers were killed.
Very good, Sten thought. I am sorry beings are dying, but they are not Imperial beings. And fewer are being killed than if battle were joined between the two fleets. Let alone if the Suzdal fleet was allowed to complete its attack on the Bogazi home world.
Now for the coup de, Sten thought. Again, we start by setting the stage.
Ambassador Sten made another broadcast, once more ordering both fleets to break action and return to their home worlds.
But evidently his ‘cast was poorly shielded from other com links. These were being made by the Victory, and tight-beamed “back” in the direction the Victory had come from.
They were coded, of course. But both computer and staff analysis determined that the Victory was linked to other ships, ships out of detector range. And it appeared as if it were an entire Imperial fleet, and the Victory was but the scout — a monstrously large and well-armed scout, but still a scout — for the real heavies. Minutes later their prog must have worsened, as the Victory changed frequencies and code and began broadcasting to another, equally “unseen” war fleet.
The Bogazi and Suzdal may have been less than sane in their approach to civil rights, but in military matters they were quite capable.
Without acknowledging Sten’s orders, both fleets broke contact and, at full power, fled home.
Sten whoofed air and plumped down into a chair. “Damn,” he said honestly, probably blowing his command-cool facade, “I really didn’t think that would work.”
“It will only work once,” Mason said softly, so that his officers could not hear.
“Once is more than enough. We’ll blanket their butts with every straight-fact ‘cast we can come up with and hope they come to what passes in the Altaics for senses. And if they try again, we’ll come up with something stinkier and whomp them again! Hell, Admiral, a clot like you should always be able to think of something.
“Now. Return course. For once we’re ahead of their clottin’ schemes. Let’s see if we can stay that way.”
Gatchin Fortress had been built to be both impregnable and terrifying. It had never been intended for use as a real fortress, but as a final prison for anyone opposing the Khaqan. It sat, solitary, on a tiny islet nearly a kilometer out at sea. Great stone walls rose straight up from the tiny island’s cliffs. There were no beaches, no flat ground outside those walls. And there was no ground access to the island.
Alex and Cind sprawled near the cliff face on the mainland, watching.
They had prepped for their mission far more thoroughly than just throwing a set of warm undies into a ditty bag. They lay under a carefully positioned phototropic camouflage sheet that now shone a white that matched the snowbanks and dirty rocks around them. Each of them had a tripod-mounted high-power set of amplified-light binocs, plus passive heat sensors and motion detectors focused on Gatchin’s ramparts and the causeway.
“Damn, but I’m cold,” Cind swore.
“Woman, dinnae be complainin’t. Ah been on y’ world, an’ thae’s a summer place compared fit.”
“No kidding,” Cind said. “And now you know why so many of us live off-world. Besides, didn’t you tell me your home world was ice, snow, and such?”
“Aye, but th’ ice’s gentler, somehow. An’ th’ snoo comi’t driftin’ doon like flower petals.”
“You see anything?”
“Negative. Which is beginnin’t t’ make me think you’re right.”
“We’ll know for sure before nightfall. I hope.”
“Aye. An’ while y’re waitin’, AMI narrate a wee story, thae’s got an obvious bearin’t ae our present, froze-arsed predic’ment.
“Hae Ah e’er told y’ ae th’ time Ah entered a limerick contest? Y’ ken whae lim’ricks are, aye?”
“We’re not totally uncivilized.”
“Thae’s bonnie. Twas whae Ah was a wee striplin’t, assigned t’ a honor guard on Earth. Th’ tabs announc’d thae contest. Large credits f r th’ prize. Who c’d come up wi’ thae dirtiest, filthiest, lim’rick?
“Well, Ah hae braw experience when it com ft’ dirty, filthy lim’ricks.”
“I’ve never questioned that.”
“Ah’m payin’t nae heed nor reck f thae cheap one, Major. So Ah ship’t m’ filthy poem away, an aye, ‘twas so filthy e’en a striplin’t like m’self blushed a bit, thinkin’t m’ name wae attach’t.
