Her Majesty's American, page 19
But as they watched, the shamrock-green icon representing Rooke drove inexorably in, apparently heedless of damage.
“Forsythe wants to close to within fusion gun range of that Gharnakh fourth-rater,” said Logan.
“Isn’t that reckless?” asked Grey anxiously.
“It’s risky,” Logan acknowledged. “But I think I know how Forsythe’s mind is working. He’s inferred from the volume of laser fire that fourth-rater is putting out that it can’t have room for many short-range ship smashers.”
“There’s something else,” said Rogers, not taking his eyes off the display. “I think he’s counting on the fact that the Gharnakh’sha haven’t fought a war against a serious enemy for thousands of years, and betting that their plasma weapons are going to be equivalent to our older ones, and to the portable squad-support versions our Marines still use. In other words, they aren’t going to contain the plasma in the magnetic bottle quite long enough for it to reach fusion temperatures, and therefore are going to be a good deal less destructive.”
As he closely scrutinized the display, Rogers noticed something else again. Unless he was mistaken, the Gharnakh ships’ maneuvering seemed to be somewhat more sluggish than Forsythe’s. The RSN’s helmsmen were selected for their ability to use direct neural computer interfacing to make their ships extensions of their own bodies. The same was true of other human space navies, save that of the Caliphate, whose mullahs had forbidden it as contrary to the will of Allah. He doubted that the Gharnakh’sha had any such religious scruples, but he wondered if perhaps they hadn’t developed the capability before freezing their technology—or simply lacked, as a species, the talent to use it effectively, which was fairly rare even among humans.
As they watched, the large green and red icons drew so close together as to almost touch in a display of this scale—the Gharnakh commander wasn’t avoiding close-range battle, perhaps trusting in his ship’s superior size—and the readouts began to go wild with damage assessments. Rogers tried to visualize the scene. The fusion guns’ “ammunition” consisted of power cartridges which served as liners for the magnetic bottles containing the plasma. Recoil energy activated a purge cycle in which the blazing-hot spent cartridge (or what was left of it) was ejected into space. These were brutal, clumsy weapons; the firing process was deafeningly noisy and stupefyingly hot, despite all that cooling systems could do. It caused the ship to reel and shudder, and unlike the invisible X-ray lasers the discharge was blinding. For Rooke’s crew, it was an experience only to be compared to being on the gun deck of an eighteenth-century man-of-war.
He was still trying to imagine it when the red icon began to flicker, and then went out. Nobody cheered or whooped; there were only five sighs of relief. In his mind’s eye, Rogers saw the Gharnakh ship, a ship larger than Rooke, bulging outward from internal secondary explosions, with great rents tearing open in its sides to reveal hellfire, before its powerplant went critical and it vanished in a sunlike fireball around which a cloud of white-hot vapor rapidly dissipated. Space warfare differed from all other forms of armed conflict in that the killed vastly outnumbered the merely wounded, such was the almost inconceivable lethality of the forces at play. If you weren’t hale and healthy aboard a sound ship, you were probably dead.
He ran his eye over the rest of the display. The smaller ships were engaged in laser duels, and the Imperial ones were at least holding their own. They were smaller than their opponents, but appeared to be more maneuverable, and that combined with what seemed to be superior targeting meant they were scoring more hits. One of them, HMSS Charleston, had been destroyed, but so had one of the Gharnakh ones, and a second was showing crippling damage. And now Rooke began to add its laser fire, and the damaged Gharnakh ship’s icon began to flicker. The relatively undamaged one began to pull back toward the diamond-shaped formation of transports and their two small escorts. Rooke, Madras and Londonderry followed, leaving the almost certainly doomed Gharnakh cripple to its fate. Rogers didn’t know whether or not the three remaining “six-and-a-half-raters” were fast enough to leave Forsythe’s command behind in a stern chase and get outside the debris disk where they could safely form their warp fields and escape. But even if they were, they couldn’t do so without leaving the lumbering, defenseless transports behind.
“Whoever’s in command of the Gharnakh’sha now will have to either fight or strike his colors,” said Logan, using a very old naval expression.
“My thought as well, with the caveat that I doubt very much he’ll do the latter,” said Rogers with a nod. “But we’re probably not the only ones who’re thinking it.”
At that instant, as though on cue, a nerve-jarring alarm sounded.
Rogers manipulated controls, and the holo-image of the battle was replaced by one of the Gharnakh station and its vicinity. A small red icon had separated from the station and was drawing away. He didn’t need to summon up mass and energy-emission readings to know what that icon represented.
“They’ve realized that they aren’t going to be picked up according to plan,” he stated, “and that the station is next. So they’ve decided their only chance is a getaway in their Voyager, however overcrowded it may be.”
“And Forsythe still has a battle to finish,” Grey added.
“So…” Rogers hesitated. Legally, he could simply order Logan and his men to participate in what he intended to do. But they had, he decided, passed beyond legalities. So he looked around, meeting each pair of eyes in turn. “Are we all agreed?”
Everyone nodded.
“Pat,” Rogers told Logan, “send Forsythe a message—a very brief squirt, to minimize the chance of giving away our presence—informing him of our intentions.” He then turned to the astrogation display. The little red icon was dim and fluctuating, which meant that the escapees had activated their stealth suite. He studied their course.
Grey was studying it too. “They’re not heading in the direction the Gharnakh ships came from,” she observed.
“Of course not. That would bring them too close to the battle—close enough for Forsythe to detect them. No, they’ll have to circle around the battlespace, far enough from it for their stealth to conceal them from Forsythe, who’ll have his hands full anyway. We’ll have to stay close enough for our sensors to keep a lock on them as they work their way out of the debris disk on sublight.”
“Won’t that enable their sensors to pick us up?”
“I don’t think so. This is a smaller ship, with a more capable stealth suite. That gives us a margin to work within. Besides, they have no reason to think anyone is following them. I doubt if they’ll pay much attention to the view-aft.”
“Message sent,” Logan reported.
Rogers did a mental calculation. Their separation from Rooke was not great as astronomical distances went. Still, it would take finite time for a lightspeed transmission to reach Forsythe, and for him to reply. Besides which, receiving the reply would double the chance of their being discovered.
“We won’t wait for an acknowledgment,” he decided. “Let’s go.”
They set out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was a truism that two ships traveling at translight pseudovelocities could not exchange fire. Any form of energy projected outside the warp field would be promptly left far behind. In theory, it should have been possible to fire directly astern at a pursuing ship, but for a variety of reasons—not the least of which was the attenuating effect of the negative-energy field—this had always proven completely impractical.
Much the same factors applied to detection using active sensors. Passive sensors were another matter. To them, an active warp field stood out like a blazing beacon. But a translight ship could not use them to detect a ship following it; it, and its lightspeed-limited passive sensors, were drawing away too fast. On the other hand, a ship astern could pick up the residual images left behind by a ship ahead of it.
Which was the basis of Rogers’ hopes of following Stark’s Voyager. As he had told Grey, he relied on the Rover’s stealth to keep them concealed while still sublight. Then, once in clear space below the debris disk and free of hazards, Stark formed his warp field and went transluminal. Watching intently, Rogers was able to do the same almost instantly, and the stealth became superfluous. Still, being a “suspenders and belt man” by temperament, he kept it activated and stayed as far astern as he could without losing contact with the Voyager. Maintaining that separation proved easy; both of these small vessels followed the standard commercial rule of thumb as to the percentage of their mass devoted to the Bernheim Drive, which yielded around two hundred gees of sublight acceleration and a translight pseudovelocity in the vicinity of 1900 c. If anything, the Rover was slightly the faster of the two. Rogers set the autopilot to the same speed as the Voyager, and instructed the Rover’s small but fairly capable “brain” to sound an alarm if the range between the two ships altered by more than a very small percentage. Only then was he able to relax somewhat. Logan was technically a qualified pilot, but he was rusty, and Rogers couldn’t help being nervous whenever he had to turn over the con to him. And he had to sleep sometimes.
But in fact, the removal of one worry only made room for others. For one thing, he had absolutely no idea of how long a voyage they were embarked upon.
“I don’t think it will be an extremely long one,” he assured Grey on the second “day.”
“Why? Because R’Ghal told us that their frontier systems aren’t too far outside our own sphere of exploration?”
“And therefore they know it won’t be long until we discover them,” Rogers nodded, finishing her thought. “Which is precisely why they’re worried. But while our periphery extends as much as fifty light-years from Sol in some directions, like Auriga, it isn’t really a sphere by any means. Very irregular, in fact…and it’s particularly ‘flat’ in the region of Eridanus. Only a little over thirty light-years from Sol, and we’re in unexplored territory. And, starting at Tau Ceti, we don’t even have to go that far—we already have a head start in more or less the right direction.
“Also, there’s something else. Stark’s Voyager isn’t designed for really extended operations, any more than this Rover is, and he knows it. And while it’s larger than our boat, it must be more crowded, what with his men and Malani’s.”
“Not to mention his hostages.”
“We don’t know he brought them along. I suspect not—he probably left them on the Gharnakh station.” Or killed them, Rogers carefully did not add. “He’d have no use for them among the Gharnakh’sha, and they’d just be more mouths to feed aboard ship.”
The last part reminded Rogers of yet another worry. He had been grateful to discover that Sir Ranjit Tewari’s last-minute reprovisioning of the Rover had included a major supplementation of its food supplies. Still, in his capacity as de facto captain, he had put the five of them on a strict rationing plan. If it came to a point where they had consumed half of their food, they would have no choice but to turn back regardless of whether or not they had accomplished their mission.
So they drove on into the depths of Eridanus. They left behind them various well-known stellar neighbors of Tau Ceti—Epsilon Eridani, an extremely young star whose gas-giant planets had no moons of any interest; 40 Eridani, a triple system whose worlds had long ago been seared clean of life when one of the components swelled into a red giant, leaving a white dwarf remnant; and 82 Eridani, whose three planets were too massive and too hot for habitability. A robot probe had discovered a potentially terraformable brown-dwarf moon around Zeta Reticuli B, at a distance of thirty-nine light-years from Sol, but so far nothing had been done about it, and the general uselessness of the systems in this direction had caused the thrust of human expansion to be diverted elsewhere to greener pastures. So only a few standard days went by before they passed beyond the pale of human activity and plunged on into the unknown.
As they did, they ascertained Stark’s destination. This was easy; faster-than-light astrogation was largely a matter of point-and-shoot. So all they needed to do was project the Voyager’s course out until it intersected with a star system. It did so only fifty-eight light-years from Sol—less than that from Tau Ceti—which made it obvious why the Gharnakh’sha expected the wave-front of human expansion to reach them in the near future.
Otherwise, it just added a new dimension of mystery.
“Chi Eridani,” said Logan with a frown, looking over Rogers’ shoulder. “Commander, this doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” asked Grey. “I know this is even closer to the periphery of human space than we expected, but—”
“That’s not it,” said Rogers. “Look at these readouts.” He pointed at the data for Chi Eridani. It was a binary star system consisting of a G8iv star and an M-type red dwarf companion at a mean separation of 128 astronomical units.
“So…?” she asked, puzzled. “Seems pretty normal. The companion star is too far away to be a complicating factor. And while I’m no astrophysicist, I know that the sun I grew up under is also a type G8.”
“Specifically, a G8v,” corrected Rogers. “The ‘v’ means Tau Ceti is a main-sequence star, with a steady energy output over the very long periods of time needed for its planets to become life-bearing or even potentially so. The ‘iv’ means Chi Eridani A is an evolving G-type subgiant.” He studied the readouts. “You see: it’s the same spectral type as Tau Ceti, but it’s one point six times Sol’s mass, four times its diameter, and puts out three hundred ninety-two times its luminosity, which is why it’s a naked-eye object on Earth across fifty-eight light-years. And that luminosity has been variable over time—a fairly short time, as stellar lifespans go.”
“Which means,” Logan amplified, “that any moons of the one gas-giant planet that it’s believed to have can’t possibly be habitable.”
“I see.” Grey looked thoughtful. “What you’re saying is that there can’t be anything there to attract humans…or Gharnakh’sha.”
“Maybe they’ve established a military outpost there, since they discovered us,” suggested Villa, who had been listening. “An asteroid base, or a modular space station like the one in the Tau Ceti system.”
“Maybe,” said Rogers moodily. He glared at the tiny yellow dot of Chi Eridani in the holographic star chart as though its presence offended him. “But as I recall, Stark characterized the place he was going as a Gharnakh world. How can there be anything describable as a ‘world’ there?”
No one had an answer.
* * *
On they drove, day after day, as Tau Ceti and Sol and all the stars of human space receded astern and the yellow gleam of Chi Eridani gradually waxed in the virtual view-forward. Rogers divided their time into five watches so someone would always be watching the sensors, and could summon him if anything involving piloting should arise. The Rover’s computer held a standard repertoire of entertainment and gaming, which helped to hold boredom at bay. But as time passed, crowding and tension began to take its toll on all of them.
The strain was worst for Rogers, because he was face to face with the need to decide whether or not they should continue.
Arguably, they had accomplished their minimum objective by learning where Stark and Malani were going—and, in the process, discovering the location of the nearest Gharnakh presence. And, just as arguably, their duty now was to get back safely and put that information at the disposal of the Empire’s political and military leaders, who would decide how to act on it.
But Rogers’ instincts argued otherwise.
Adding to his agony of indecision was the fact that he had no clear idea of what more he could accomplish with his unarmed little ship, other than perhaps finding out just exactly what it was that lurked at Chi Eridani. He fastened on the last consideration, convincing himself that the possibility of resolving that mystery justified him in continuing on. Thus he sought to rationalize his visceral unwillingness to break off the chase.
He revealed none of his inner conflict to the others. And if the same thoughts had entered their minds, no one spoke of it. This suited Rogers, who had no wish to infect his small crew with indecision. And yet…he would have liked to talk it over with Grey.
Increasingly, he found there were any number of things he wanted to talk over with Grey.
It was out of the question, of course, given the total lack of privacy aboard the Rover. All their conversational exchanges had to be impersonal, and largely limited to futile speculation about what awaited them at Chi Eridani and equally futile attempts to lay a plan of action once they got there.
As they drew nearer to Chi Eridani, they were able to confirm the existence of a gas-giant planet. In fact, it was a superjovian, roughly ten times the mass of Jupiter though less than twice its diameter due to gravitational compression. Like most such monster planets, it had precluded the formation of any other gas giants. And, of course, any terrestrial planets farther in would have long since been baked by their swelling sun.
On the tenth standard day, they reached Chi Eridani A’s Secondary Limit—a very distant one, given the star’s mass—and emulated the Voyager in going sublight. They were then able to determine more about that giant planet. Its atmosphere, powered by a searingly hot core, was turbulent. It glowed brightly in the infrared, while great auroral collars were visible across interplanetary distances. It had an array of moons, but—unusually for a gas giant of its class—no large ones. It orbited slightly outside what was, in the present era, Chi Eridani A’s liquid-water zone. None of which suggested any answer to the question of what sort of Gharnakh “world” could possibly exist in this system.
