Border Wars, page 16
part #8 of On Silver Wings Series
"Cynical," Adam said dryly.
"Politics," Sorilla shrugged.
Personally, she didn't have much of an issue with most of the Alliance, despite having spent a decent chunk of time trying to kill them while they tried to kill her. Mostly it wasn't personal, and she knew that. She'd do her job, people like Kris would do theirs, and whoever did it best would presumably come out on top.
Ideally, she'd rather talk and trade, but she wouldn't have chosen the career she had if she didn't... deep down... want to do that sort of work.
There were other outlets for those desires, however, ones that involved far less death and pointless destruction.
"I must ask," Adam said, "What are your intentions toward our operations?"
"Me?" Sorilla shrugged, "I don't have any. The Alliance will, of course, try to suppress them. They'll mostly use the Lucians, though, so I'd be careful if I were you."
"Lucians?" Ioseph demanded sharply from behind her.
Sorilla glanced at him, "Thick, stocky, grey aliens. Sharp teeth."
Ioseph spat on the floor, "Beasts they are!"
"Warriors," Sorilla said, "And they love it. Give em a good fight, and they'll keep coming back for more."
"Fantastic," Adam muttered. "They are, I must admit, impressive commandos."
Sorilla nodded but didn't bother saying anything about it. Honestly, there was nothing much she could say. They were, and she wouldn't want to be facing them without some serious cards in her hand.
"The good news is," She said, "they don't take it personally. For them, your whole insurrection is just fun training."
Both men grimaced in a rather amusing fashion at that, Sorilla noted.
"However, they are a little miffed by the use of chemical weapons?" She said with a shake of her head, "Unsporting, is... I believe, the gist of their reaction."
Adam shot Ioseph a sharp look, but quickly covered it up. Sorilla filed it away, recognizing that they at least knew something about it.
"Personally, I'm not overly bothered by any of it," She said casually, lying just a bit. She was no fan of chemical warfare, though that was mostly an academic dislike. Chemical weapons of mass destruction were generally considered far too clumsy for use by SOLCOM, or USSOCOM, troops. The damn things had a bad habit of getting out of control and coming back on the people who deployed them.
She'd rather just use flat out nukes than chemical or biological agents, as at least a nuke was completely predictable. It was going to destroy a crap ton of the area you deployed it in, and that was where it would end. Nukes didn't mutate, get into the ground water unexpectedly, or any of a thousand other nasties that could happen with chemical and biowarfare.
Not that she'd ideally want to deploy any WMD, since she was far more inclined to operate on a more surgical, local operations, as a general rule.
"However, the Lucians aren't really your problem," She went on casually, getting their attention again. "They're just the ground troops, they don't really care what you're doing. For them, it's just fun training, as I said. It's the upper level thinkers you need to worry about."
"And they are?" Adam asked in a steady voice, obviously masking his interest.
"Well, strictly speaking, they're the politicians," She shrugged, "Though we haven't fully penetrated the Alliance structure yet so I can't say without any question. There are certain Alliance species that seem to have more swing at the upper levels, though. The Sturm seem to almost be a shadow government. We haven't met any of them yet, nor faced them in combat, but the Alliance members we've encountered seem to almost hold them in a form of near veneration."
"That... is mildly disturbing."
"The Sturm and the Ross are opposite sides of the Alliance coin," Sorilla said pensively, "One venerated, the other... not. Angels and Demons."
"They are all demons," Ioseph muttered behind her.
Sorilla tipped her head to him but said nothing to agree or disagree with the statement.
"Aside from those two, obviously powerful groups," She instead went on, "The Parithalians have a great deal of influence within the military and merchant groups, if only because they're considered the Alliance's pre-eminent ship handlers. They're born to fly, and they know it. In general, though, the influence isn't along species line, but rather party lines as best we can tell."
"And the party lines are not divided by species?" Adam asked skeptically.
Sorilla frowned, "Not as best we can tell, and yes I know that seems... odd, to say the least."
Adam snorted.
"The Alliance is, in many ways established very close to how the United States was," She said, "Individual states, or star polities, banded together under a single constitution. They have the right to bear arms, free travel, and so forth. Basically, they hit all the marks we'd expect when it comes to individual rights. I believe you've benefited from several of those rules?"
She nodded knowingly to the ship that took up the center of the room, and then to the Alliance weapons she could see on benches along the wall, earning a flushed reaction from the pair she was speaking with.
She smirked, knowing that it often irked at the self-proclaimed resistance to have it pointed out how much of their position was owed to the forbearance of the system they were resisting. Sorilla had very little patience with these sorts, if she were honest. She understood them, she could even slip herself into their mentality if she needed.
Empathy, the ability to truly comprehend the mind of your students... and your enemy... was a requirement of the career she had trained for.
She had spent many thousands of hours learning to properly weaponize education, making her one of the deadliest weapons in the arsenal of her nation... and that empathy was arguably the most lethal weapon in her own personal arsenal.
However, just because she understood them, just because she could place herself fully in their position... did not mean she agreed with them in the slightest.
Both the colonists of Arkhana and Alluha Akbar, those involved in the resistance at least, were fools of the highest order in her mind.
The Alliance was her enemy, and that meant she'd fight them with everything she had, but that didn't make them the bad guys. The two colonies had the opportunity to reap the full benefits of membership in a space polity that actually provided them with all the rights to their own religions, free travel, self-defense...
And they, in all the wisdom of their myopic minds, elected to declare war on it instead, without even seeing the irony involved in that they were using the Alliance's own laws that protected their individual rights as a weapon against the very polity that was protecting them.
It was all so very stupid.
And so very human.
She'd seen it before, in both Europe and the Americas.
People fighting against the system that protected their right to... fight against it.
Sorilla had signed up to free the oppressed, not to babysit whiny brats who wouldn't know the meaning of the word if it actually bit them on the ass, but all too often that was exactly what she was relegated to.
If they were smart, they'd properly infiltrate the Alliance and build up their own influence... but then, if they were smart, they probably wouldn't be out here in the first place, she supposed wearily.
None of that was her job at the moment, however, and wishes were worthless. The situation at hand was going to be what she had to deal with, and that was clearly getting more complicated than she thought it was originally.
Now she had to determine just how to best turn this to the advantage of SOLCOM, because that was her ultimate job, distasteful as that could sometimes be.
******
Chapter 16
Sol
The SOL was almost, though not quite, drifting through space. They were leading the planetary orbit of Akbar, roughly three local days ahead of the planet, and a few lightseconds positive of the system elliptic.
That put them safely out of the way of the more common approach angles, with vast swaths of space for them to hide in. It was an effective strategy to avoid detection, but unfortunately it seemed like their foe had managed an equitable strategy of their own. For Nero and the crew, the tension was rising in a way that was almost worse than a flat-out fight would cause. At least if they were actually being shot at, the waiting would be over, and they wouldn't have so much time to think.
"Cracked another part of their network, Captain."
"Show me."
Nero nodded slowly as the information was settled over the display he was examining, overlaying the map of space around them and adding at least some details to the emptiness.
The enemy drones were repurposed from Alliance tech but were not being used according to any Alliance protocol he was aware of. In fact, he was betting that whoever was behind their deployment, they were human as he was.
That wasn't something he was willing to voice just yet, and not only because he wasn't quite certain but also because Nero didn't want to have a hit to morale before the situation was dealt with. He couldn't be sure it would, of course, but there was sometimes no telling how people might react, and his crew were all fresh and trained to fight a very different enemy.
The remotes they'd found showed a deployment web that was distinctly not alliance, however.
No member of the Alliance would be quite so two dimensional, for one thing.
The drones so far had been laid out along a flat plane, something that a true space tactician would never do. They were well 'under' the Sol's position and, thus far, had shown no threat to actually discovering her.
No, his money was solidly on a human crew with limited space time under their belts. No way to tell which colony they were from, but they were certainly dangerous no matter which. The fact that the Lifting Wind had fallen was almost certainly due to bad luck, surprise, and many other mitigating factors... but that didn't change the fact that they'd eliminated an Alliance battle cruiser.
However they did it, if they could pull that on the wind, they could pull the same bullshit on the SOL.
"Keep tracking the drones back, I want a target."
"Aye, aye, skipper."
*****
Allah's Word
Ishal twisted his neck and head slightly, feeling the tendons crackle slightly under the shifting pressure. He had not felt like this since just before he'd launched the Word the first time, the pressure was almost palpable.
"Captain," His communications officer said softly, walking over to him, "We've intercepted a broadcast from the planet."
Ishal turned sharply, regretting it as his neck muscles protested the quick movement. "From?"
"Control, Sir. Responding to your message."
"Show me," He got up, walking with the man back to the communication station.
"It's on the screen, Sir."
Ishal nodded absently as he leaned over the console and read the message quickly through, before going back and re-reading it carefully. He was unsurprised by the contents, but not particularly pleased.
"What is it, Captain?"
Ishal half glanced over his shoulder, nodding politely to the Imam who had come up behind him to see what caught his attention.
"Your holiness," Ishal said respectfully. "Control demands that we make delivery as soon as possible."
"Our cargo is of vital importance to the holy war," The Imam nodded gravely.
"Which is precisely why we should abort," Ishal growled. "I cannot guarantee our survival, and should we die, the cargo will never be delivered."
"That must not happen, Captain. Do your duty!"
Ishal scowled as the Imam walked away, leaving him to stew over the combination of the orders he could not refute, and the religious leader who had just cut off any thought he might have of finding a way to do the job by a more sane method.
He straightened up, nodding to the comms man, gesturing to the console. The young officer slipped into the seat.
"Orders, Sir?" He asked as Ishal stood above him.
"Confirm receipt," Ishal said. "Tight beam to the planet. Tell them we'll make delivery."
"Yes Captain."
Ishal made his way back to the center console, checking the numbers again. Their drones hadn't discovered the enemy ship, but they had discovered enemy drones. That was new.
The Alliance hadn't shown any signs of using drones in the way he and his fellows had.
I wonder what changed?
Honestly it didn't matter a whole lot, but it was a curious note in the whole event. Ishal supposed they might be learning from him. That idea struck him as more than a little amusing, though he didn't know if it were true. It was a nice thought that the all-powerful aliens were still fallible enough to stoop to learning tricks from a lowly human.
For the moment, however, he had a new tactic to plan.
"Prep the special munitions," He ordered, "Standby for new course orders. All hands ready yourselves for combat."
*****
Below decks, the Word was a mass of frenzied activity.
The cargo holds had been packed at their pickup point, and now the crews were scrambling to separate out the equipment the Captain was demanding, and then to transport it to a deployment point.
Unfortunately, not being a purpose-built combat ship, the Word didn't exactly have any proper launch tubes for the weapons they were carrying. It, in fact, had few enough launch points for anything at all, let alone weapons.
That left the 'weapon' crews with few options, but since they weren't deploying proper military ordnance it didn't matter so much as it might have. They cut out another of the special munitions from the supplies they had acquired from their backers, moving the weapon forward to where a disposal lock was available.
Five men wrangled the weapon into the lock, then quickly evacuated while the ship's engineer made his way in and began the procedures needed to arm the weapon. He was working from a plastic sheet of instructions and sweating more than slightly as he worked. The procedures weren't written in Arabic, or even English, or any human language for that matter, and while he had been over it many times before, even once in earnest, it made no difference to how nerve wracking the process was.
"Captain," He said into his communications gear. "The weapon is armed."
"Very good," Ishal's voice came back. "Get out of there, Kilhem, you've done your job."
"Yes, Captain. Thank you."
He didn't need to be told twice, quickly clambering out of the tight-fitting lock as the door was closed tightly behind him by those who were waiting.
Now they just had to hope the Captain got the unholy thing off the ship as quickly as possible.
Willing they might be to become martyrs, they would much prefer other options if any such existed.
*****
Ishal examined the data that was still coming in from their drone network with some satisfaction.
"They've located and eliminated three of our drones," He said softly, mostly talking to himself.
"Yes, Captain," The operator answered automatically. "Nearly certain that they have also located several more."
"Can you tell which ones?"
"Not entirely," The operator admitted, "There is no confirmation of an enemy lock on any of the drones, however we have detected signals that have spiked over the threshold of detection."
Ishal nodded in understanding.
The drones were all reasonably stealthy rigs, by most standards, but like anything out there they did return some energy signals from detection methods. If you knew your enemy systems reasonably well, you could take the energy you were reading from their system as it intersected the drone and calculate just how much would be reflected back.
If that number was higher than the enemy system's detection threshold, you could assume that the drone... or your ship for that matter... had been compromised.
It wasn't an exact science, sadly, because various factors could conspire to make a system more or less sensitive... and that was ignoring the likelihood of a human... or alien... operator simply making mistakes or, less often, being brilliant.
Still, it was a good rule of thumb, and simple numbers would indicate that at least some of the drones would have been detected.
"Show me which ones," Ishal ordered.
"Yes Captain."
The drone network was projected in three dimensions ahead of them, and in short order the ones they suspected to be compromised were lit up with glowing halos. Ishal hummed to himself as he examined them while checking the order in which they'd been spotted.
That would normally give him a decent vector to the origin, letting him pinpoint the enemy ship with some degree of precision. Unfortunately, this wasn't a normal situation.
They were engaged in a duel with a foe that was using their own tactics, which meant that he might be tracking the enemy's drones rather than the enemy ship itself.
He had to be sure.
Making an error at this junction would not end well for him or, more importantly, his mission.
"Dispatch our remaining drones along this vector," Ishal ordered, tapping out a command.
"Yes, Captain. Orders being transmitted."
Now, my sneaky little friend, let us see what you intend to do about that?
*****
SOL
Nero Ramirez had come up a submariner, only transferring to SOLCOM after the war had kicked off. He knew the ways of fighting in the dark, better than most. He'd dueled with enemy subs in three wars, off the coasts of four continents. Space combat had some similarities, even when you weren't intentionally hiding, and he had worked hard to leverage his skills into the new environment.
There was a well-defined travel lag, whether for munitions or communications, over any reasonable space combat range. It could range from seconds to minutes, all depending, even hours in some extreme examples though at those ranges combat was less about skill and more about posturing and luck.
This enemy, however, was fighting like a skilled amateur if he were reading the situation right.
