Ruler of Naught, page 15
part #2 of Exordium Series
Ng nodded. That had been her conclusion as well.
“I want the optical portion of the action piped into General Access,” she said.
The viewscreen wavered as the array came on-line; a small targeting cross blinked near the center, marking the position of the navigational beacon.
“I have a ship trace, battlecruiser signature, plus 34.6 light-hours. No ID.” Another positioning cross appeared near the first; the trace was nearly between them and the beacon, normal to its position from the ecliptic as was standard naval practice.
“That’d be the Prabhu Shiva,” Rom-Sanchez stated, showing his usual eagerness. “Watching the destruction of the beacon from a light-hour down.”
“Harimoto ran a taut ship.” Commander Krajno’s voice rumbled in his chest. “Fast and by the book.”
The unspoken question occupied them all: so how had a Rifter destroyer annihilated a battlecruiser conned by a competent, experienced captain?
For several minutes after that, nothing happened. The tension on the bridge grew. Ng distracted herself by reviewing SigInt’s report on the skipmissile attack at Wolakota, but through no fault of Ensign Wychyrski it was basically an expansion of the term “insufficient data” and didn’t hold her attention for long.
Finally a small red pulse of light bloomed near the beacon. Rom-Sanchez’ hand twitched, overlaying it with another cross. The Tenno rippled as data began to build up.
“Signature indicates an Alpha-class. No ID,” Wychyrski reported, scowling at her console as if she could bring the mystery ship in by will.
Nothing more happened for another several minutes, then another emergence pulse blossomed some distance from the destroyer.
“Frigate, possibly a Scorpion. No ID.”
A fierce spark of light bloomed near the destroyer and faded. The faint background chirping of the beacon ceased. Seconds later the destroyer skipped again, moments before the frigate also skipped, emerging in the nearest sunward k-zone about twelve light-minutes in from the beacon’s position.
“No emergence detected for the destroyer.”
The Tenno glyphs flickered uncertainly, blinking through a series of impossible configurations, then settling into a simpler readout that no longer tactically connected the two ships. Ng rubbed her eyes.
“Confirm that, Tactical. Non-coincident light cones?”
“The frigate emerged twenty-two-point-five light-seconds from the beacon. The destroyer skipped eleven-point-two seconds after that.” Rom-Sanchez looked up at her in consternation. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
At that distance, and in that brief time, no communication could have passed between the ships.
“Coincidence,” said Krajno, looking up from his fierce concentration on his console. “They rendezvoused outside the system.”
But why did the destroyer wait, then?
“That may be, but their actions still make no sense,” insisted Rom-Sanchez. “Where’d that destroyer go? Why’d they leave the frigate to watch, rather than the Alpha?” Rom-Sanchez sounded querulous, as if he resented the apparent irrationality of what they had witnessed so far.
They had little time to consider the questions. The Prabu Shiva skipped again less than a minute after seeing the frigate emerge.
“Looks like Harimoto was asking the same questions,” said Krajno. “He waited for the destroyer emergence that didn’t come.” Krajno’s eyes widened, his teeth showing. “Now we wait to see what really happened.”
Her XO’s idea of waiting was a rather active one from the perspective of the bridge crew. Ng tuned out the flurry of reports and consultations. It would be an hour or so, so she turned inward.
What would Nelson have made of this situation? She thought of his long pursuit of Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean, and the later search for Villeneuve before Trafalgar. Amusement flickered briefly at the irony: that an admiral from the age of wooden ships would probably understand her frustration much better than later surface navies, accustomed as they had been to real-time communications.
Still, what would he have made of relativistic tactics, where the order of events depends on where you watch them from? Of being able to watch an action a day and a half after it happened? Or of being able to skip out of a battle, watch your enemy’s tactics again from a different angle, free of battle pressure, then return to the fray with a new plan? Or using the fiveskip to attack the same ship from three different positions simultaneously?
Reluctantly, she abandoned the pleasant fantasy of a conversation with the admiral, showing him her ship, and windowed up her reports queue. End of tour still loomed... battles have an end, good or bad, but paperwork is forever.
Just under an hour later Wychyrski reported the emergence of the Prabhu Shiva a light-minute out from the position of the frigate hiding in the k-zone.
“Long-ranging.” Rom-Sanchez’ voice had roughened with gathering stress. “And the target’s making it easy—it isn’t even drunk-walking.”
The big ship skipped again in seconds. A minute later the reddish spark of an emergence glowed near the position of the frigate.
“He’s less than a light-second from the target,” Rom-Sanchez reported.
“Ruptor signature, modulating to steady-state gravitational activity,” Wychyrski sang out.
“Tractors. He’s got them.”
Less than ten seconds later, another emergence pulse bloomed near the battlecruiser and its victim.
“Emergence, eight light-seconds out. Alpha-class.”
A thin thread of light, visible only as a computer artifact, speared from the destroyer to the battlecruiser. A flare of light grew slowly from the position of the Prabhu Shiva, faded, was gone.
“Give me a close-in replay of that last,” snapped Ng.
The stars fled outward as the image zoomed in. The familiar egg-shape of a battlecruiser appeared, grainy and shimmering with processing artifacts as the computers struggled to create an image across a 38-billion-kilometer gulf. From off screen the chain-of-pearls wake of a skipmissile smote the ship, converting its stern almost instantly to a flaring inferno. Slowly, now turning end over end, the hulk passed out of their field of view.
“SigInt.” Ng’s throat ached. “Can you extract shield status?”
At SigInt, Wychyrski rubbed her eyes, then pulled her hands down with a fierce movement. “No, sir. We’re too far out. But the spectrum of that skipmissile impact is similar to the one we recorded at Wolakota.” She looked back at her console. “Destroyer skipped,” she reported. “Frigate’s still there.”
Rom-Sanchez turned to Ng. “Impossible light cone again.” He gestured at the Tenno glyphs overlaid on the screen, which were pulsing wildly again, cycling through impossible configurations. “The Alpha seemed to know exactly where Prabhu Shiva was.” He hesitated. “As though the frigate summoned it.”
His hands froze above his console, his gaze distant. Then he resumed tapping at his console, more slowly now.
“I’m going to have to purge the tactical computers and sandbox the recent action,” he continued. “They can’t deal with it.” The Tenno lapsed into quiescence. Ng supposed that as a tactician, Rom-Sanchez was having more trouble than most dealing with the apparent relativistic violations they’d witnessed.
Interesting that Wychyrski and Ammant seemed aware of Rom-Sanchez’s abstraction. Then both glanced her way, and snapped back into concentration on their consoles. What was that about?
Never mind. Time to move on.
“Commander, refocus the array on Treymontaigne. We’ll watch what they did next.” That took only moments, across very little more than a degree given their distance from the inner system.
When Treymontaigne swung into view, the planetary Shield was already up, and cis-lunar space was marred with ship-to-ship actions. As they watched, Ng ordered the dispatch of cutters with centrifugal-foil arrays at four-light hour intervals inwards to build up the tactical picture.
The Rifters easily overcame the local defenses, and it was less than an hour later that a destroyer in cis-lunar space fired on the Shield, aiming at the planet’s south polar magnetic pole, where the tesla effect was weakest. Then again, and again, in slow, metronymic rhythm.
Even through the processing artifacts of great distance, Ng could see the auroral excitation flaring with each impact, something that should not have been visible for days.
“SigInt, what’s going on with Treymontaigne’s Shield?”
Wychyrski tapped at her console. “Cross-sensor correlation indicates those impacts are an order of magnitude beyond Alpha specs.” She shook her head, her face a mix of wonder and horror. “Beyond our specs. At that energy level, the Shield would have held out about eight hours, maybe less.”
Ng drummed her fingers on one of the pod arms, staring at the screen. She felt Krajno’s gaze on her, and wondered if he was feeling the same sort of relief that she did. Given skipmissiles that powerful, there was no reason to think Harimoto had failed to raise his shields. The pieces of the puzzle began to assemble themselves in her mind even as she issued her next orders.
“Tactical, prepare a digest of the action with Prabhu Shiva. SigInt, Communications, keep the array on Treymontaigne and feed Tactical whatever correlates you can add. Get it to us in the plot room.” She tapped at her com tabs.
“Engineering, GPT Addison,” came the response.
“Have Commander Totokili report to the plot room.”
“AyKay, Captain.”
Another tap.
“Armory. Navaz here.”
“Lieutenant Commander Navaz, please report to the plot room.”
“AyKay, Captain.”
Another tap. The tab flared blue: boswell access. “Lieutenant Commander Nilotis,” came the response, with the flatness of neural induction.
“Please report to the plot room.”
“AyKay, Captain.”
She stood up.
“Commander, please join me in the plot room. Navigation, you have the deck.”
o0o
Rom-Sanchez barely noticed as the captain and XO left the bridge. He’d already run the anomalous data through the Tenno again, with the same results. The coordinated action of the two Rifter vessels was impossible.
But so was the destruction of Shiva by a single shot from an obsolete destroyer, not to mention the impossible battering they were watching Treymontaigne endure.
“…sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Nausea twinged as he remembered that awful story from Lost Earth, whose surreal plot had greatly disturbed him as a child. Even then he’d known a story had to make sense, and for him that’s what Tactical was all about: making sense of a story whose plot was coming at you way too fast. Like now.
Well, I’m only being asked to believe two impossible things, and I’ve already had breakfast. His mood veered wildly between laughter and excitement and... terror.
Three impossible things. The third was that a game would be the making or breaking of his career, and possibly of everyone else who’d defiantly adopted the derisive sobriquet of “L-5 Loonies” bestowed on those who’d found Nefalani Warrigal’s strange version of Phalanx so compelling.
He looked up. Wychyrski and Ammant—the only other members of the Loonies on the bridge, who stared back at him with what he suspected was a mirror image of his own excitement and terror. He tapped his console to bozlink the three of them together, a necessary preliminary in any case, to prepare the digest ordered by the captain. But what he said launched them into uncharted territory.
(You could parse those ship actions in some of Warrigal’s scenarios.)
(We have,) came Ammant’s boswelled voice on top of Wychyrski’s (Too bad Warrigal isn’t here.)
The excitement hardened to resolution. They’d seen it, too.
(She will be,) said Rom-Sanchez. Before either could reply, he turned towards the navigator and spoke in formal cadence. “Lieutenant Mzinga. Request permission to bring Ensign Warrigal to the bridge for consultation on the digest ordered by the captain.”
The quiet background murmur of the other crewmembers at their consoles ceased abruptly.
The older officer regarded him gravely. Mzinga had never joined in the joking about L-5, and had even quietly watched a game several months back, before declining to participate.
“You sure about that, Lieutenant?”
Rom-Sanchez took a deep breath. Would his bars have time to tarnish, or was he about to terminate his career? He glanced again at the subscreen replaying the fatal attack on Prabhu Shiva. It didn’t matter. Duty left him no choice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Permission granted.” One corner of Mzinga’s mouth twitched slightly. “When you and she are finished, best you two take the report to the captain in person. Petty Officer Dimones can take your console.”
“AyKay, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Well, now he was committed. Rom-Sanchez tapped up a comlink to Warrigal, wondering if she’d thank him for this.
NINE
“...the frigate obviously had its fiveskip shut down,” shouted Krajno. “You said yourself that’s the only way they could have managed to show up back at Treymontaigne just seventeen minutes after a ruptor attack! They were ready for it! They were bait!”
“Enough!” Ng snapped.
The single word cut through the angry voices in the plot room. Even the orderly paused in the act of pouring coffee as Commanders Krajno and Totokili sat back, radiating tension.
Middle-aged, grandmotherly Lieutenant Commander Navaz, the armorer of the Grozniy, exchanged a pained glance with Nilotis.
Rifters with FTL communications? Nilotis felt a headache building: he’d gone through the anomalous actions in the tac-holo in the center of the plot room repeatedly while the XO and the Head of Energetics quarreled. It was the only explanation, and it made the Tenno impossible to use. Worse yet were the strategic implications. With FTL comms, Rifter reinforcements might even now be on the way to Treymontaigne. If so, they had only four days to act before the first such might arrive.
Ng released the invisible hold by making an apologetic gesture at the orderly that didn’t hide how exasperated she had to be feeling. Nilotis was certainly feeling that, and half a dozen other emotions. The orderly finally reached him, but even the smell of real coffee—ground while the senior officers were still staring at that impossible holo—did not provide its customary comfort.
“Commander Totokili, your objections are noted,” Ng said, her tone conveying the calm of habitual self-discipline. Nilotis was willing to wager that not one of the five thousand aboard was calm right now. “Unless you can explain the action we witnessed without reference to superluminal communication, that is the assumption we will be working on.”
Commander Krajno nodded in agreement. Now Nilotis was certain that Ng had let the argument go on as long as she had in part just to give Krajno an outlet for his emotions. There would be no time for authentic grief over the death of his spouse, no time for the grief all of them felt at the loss of the Prabhu Shiva, until the killers had been dealt with.
“AyKay, Captain.” Totokili stared at the tac-holo with a sour look, ignoring the viewscreens on the walls that were displaying various excerpts from the action. His jaw worked as if he were chewing on something unpalatable, making the stiff brush of hair above each ear ripple like caterpillars.
Accepting that their Rifter foe was armed with some unprecedented ability to communicate faster than light without a fiveskip—some sort of superluminal EM analog—was difficult for all of them, but especially for one whose entire education and experience was grounded in the science of Energetics.
The glances that semaphored around the room had altered: everyone was waiting for the tactical digest that Ng had ordered. Usually Rom-Sanchez was first on the mark, if not before, eager to anticipate the next order. Where was he? He had to know that being late was not going to please anyone.
Once again, apparently, the captain’s thoughts paralleled his, as Ng addressed Nilotis. “It may be that Tactical is trying for more detail than we need to get started. Have him send what he’s put together so far.”
She shifted her attention to the other three officers, giving Nilotis tacit permission to boz Rom-Sanchez.
(Rom-Sanchez, Tactical.)
Nilotis relayed the Captain’s request...
... and listened in disbelief to the Lieutenant’s reply.
o0o
From the periphery of her vision, Margot Ng observed the stiffening of her chief tactical officer; already a very tall man, he seemed to grow several centimeters. She couldn’t see his face, since he’d politely turned away for the boswell communication with his subordinate. When Nilotis turned back, his high brow was wrinkled with concern.
“Captain, the Officer of the Deck has given the Tactical Officer permission to report in person, accompanied by Ensign Warrigal. ETA ten minutes.” Nilotis gave them a painful smile. “Lieutenant Rom-Sanchez also requests the presence of Commander Hurli for the briefing.”
Ng watched understanding widen Krajno’s and Navaz’s eyes, but Totokili glanced around, clearly puzzled and irritated. So far as she knew, no one in the Energetics Department played L-5, which was what this had to be about.
The situation was spinning away into surrealism. As if to torment her, the single-shot destruction of Prabhu Shiva replayed itself in memory.
She blinked away the image. “See to it, please,” she replied to Nilotis.
“Warrigal?” Totokili repeated, glancing from one to another. “The ensign from Narbon?”
“Bright ensign,” said Krajno. “Difficult to read, doesn’t have much facility at small talk.” He smiled. “Bit of an enthusiast for Tactical Semiotics.”
Once again memory obtruded—easier than trying to grasp the inconceivable now. Never had she seen Krajno’s essential gentleness more clearly displayed than during Nefalani Warrigal’s earnest, and largely incomprehensible, explication of her graduate thesis, during a Captain’s Dinner early in the tour. That dinner could have been one of those painful occasions, but Krajno had found a way to open the talk from the thesis to everyone’s background in games.
