the two fleets were coming to occupy the same volume. At present they were scattered across cubic light-years, but with every jump, the Group Captain’s Aniara fleet was more finely tuned to the stutter of their quarries’ drives. Some ships were actually within a few hundred million kilometers of the enemy—or where the enemy had been or would be. Targeting tactics were set. First fire was only a few hundred seconds away.
“With the Aprahanti gone, we have numerical superiority. A normal enemy would back off now—”
“But of course, that is one thing the Blight fleet is not.” It was the red-haired guy who was doing the talking now. It was a good thing Glimfrelle hadn’t relayed his face to the rest of Svensndot’s fleet. The guy acted edgy and alien most of the time. Just now, he seemed intent on bashing every idea Svensndot advanced. “The Blight doesn’t care what its losses are as long as it arrives with the upper hand.”
Svensndot shrugged. “Look, we’ll do our best. First fire is seventy seconds off. If they don’t have any secret advantage, we may win this one.” He looked sharply at the other. “Or is that your point? Could the Blight -” Stories were still coming down about the Blight’s progress across the Top of the Beyond. Without a doubt, it was a transhuman intelligence. An unarmed man might be outnumbered by a pack of dogs, yet still defeat them. So might the Blight…?
Pham Nuwen shook his head. “No, no, no. The Blight’s tactics down here will probably be inferior to yours. Its great advantage is at the Top, where it can control its slaves like fingers on a hand. Its creatures down here are like badly-synched waldoes.” Nuwen frowned at something off camera. “No, what we have to fear is its strategic cleverness.” His voice suddenly had a detached quality that was more unsettling than the earlier impatience. It wasn’t the calm of someone facing up to a threat; it was more the calm of the demented. “One hundred seconds to contact… Group Captain, we have a chance, if you concentrate your forces on the right points.” Ravna floated down from the top of the picture, put one hand on the red-head’s shoulder. Godshatter, she said he was, their secret edge against the enemy. Godshatter, a Power’s dying message; garbage or treasure, who really knew?
Damn. If the other guys are badly-synched waldoes, what does following Pham Nuwen make us? But he motioned Tirolle to mark the targets Nuwen was saying. Ninety seconds. Decision time. Kjet pointed at the red marks Tirolle had scattered through the enemy fleet. “Anything special about those targets, ’Rolle?”
The Dirokime whistled for a moment. Correlations popped up agonizingly slowly on the windows before him. “The ships he’s targeting aren’t the biggest or the fastest. It’s gonna take extra time to position on them.” Command vessels? “One other thing. Some of ’em show high real velocities, not natural residuals at all.” Ships with ram drives? Planet busters?
“Hm.” Svensndot looked at the display just a second more. Thirty seconds and Jo Haugen’s ship Lynsnar would be in contact, but not with one of Nuwen’s targets. “Get on the comm, Glimfrelle. Tell Lynsnar to back off, retarget.” Retarget everything.
The lights that were Aniara fleet slid slowly around the core of the Blighter fleet, searching for their new targets. Twenty minutes passed, and not a few arguments with the other captains. Commercial Security was not built for military combat. What had made Kjet Svensndot’s appeal successful was also the cause of constant questioning and countersuggestions. And then there were the threats that came from Owner Limmende’s channel: kill the mutineers, death to all those disloyal to the company. The encryption was valid but the tone was totally alien to the mild, profit-oriented Giske Limmende. Everyone could now see that disbelieving Limmende was one correct decision, anyway.
Johanna Haugen was the first to achieve synch with the new targets. Glimfrelle opened the main window on the Lynsnar’s data stream: The view was almost natural, a night sky of slowly shifting stars. The target was less than thirty million kilometers from Lynsnar, but about a millisecond out of synch. Haugen was arriving just before or just after the other had jumped.
“Drones away,” Haugen’s voice said. Now they had a true view of Lynsnar from a few meters away, from a camera aboard one of the first weapons drones launched. The ship was barely visible, a darkness obscuring the stars beyond—a great fish in the depths of an endless sea. A fish that was now giving spawn. The picture flickered, Lynsnar disappearing, reappearing, as the drone lost synch momentarily. A swarm of blue lights spilled from the ship’s hold. Weapon drones. The swarm hung by Lynsnar, calibrating itself, orienting on the enemy.
The light faded from around Lynsnar as the drones moving fractionally out of synch in space and time. Tirolle opened a window on a hundred-million klick sphere centered at Lynsnar. The target vessel was a red dot that flickered around the sphere like a maddened insect. Lynsnar was stalking prey at eight thousand times the speed of light. Sometimes the target disappeared for a second, synch almost lost; other times Lynsnar and the target merged for an instant as the two craft spent a tenth of a second at less than a million kilometers remove. What could not be accurately displayed was the disposition of the drones. The spawn diffused on a myriad trajectories, their sensors extended for sign of the enemy ship.
“What about the target, is it swarming back? Do you need back up?” said Svensndot. Tirolle gave a Dirokime shrug. What they were watching was three light-years away. No way he could know.
But Jo Haugen replied, “I don’t think my bogie is swarming. I’ve lost only five drones, no more’n you’d expect from fratricide. We’ll see—” She paused, but Lynsnar’s trace and signal remained strong. Kjet looked out the other windows. Five of Aniara were already engaged and three had completed swarm deploy. Nuwen looked on silently from Out of Band. The godshatter had had its way, and now Kjet and his people were committed.
And now good news and bad came in very fast:
“Got him!” from Jo Haugen. The red dot in Lynsnar’s swarm was no more. It had passed within a few thousand kilometers of one of the drones. In the milliseconds necessary to compute a new jump, the drone had discovered its presence and detonated. Even that would not have been fatal if the target had jumped before the blast front hit it; there had been several near misses in earlier seconds. This time the jump did not reach commit in time. A mini-star was born, one whose light would be years in reaching the rest of the battle volume.
Glimfrelle gave a rasping whistle, an untranslatable curse, “We just lost Ablsndot and Holder, Boss. Their target must have counter-swarmed.”
“Send in Gliwing and Trance.” Something in the back of his head curled up in horror. These were his friends who were dying. Kjet had seen death before, but never like this. In police action, no one took lethal chances except in a rescue. And yet… he turned from the field summary to order more ships on a target that had acquired defending vessels. Tirolle was moving in others on his own. Ganging up on a few nonessential targets might lose in the long run, but in the short term… the enemy was being hurt. For the first time since the fall of Sjandra Kei, Commercial Security was hurting someone back.
Haugen: “Powers, that guy was moving! Secondary drone got EM spectrum on the kill. Target was going 15000 kps true speed.” A rocket bomb ramping up? Damn. They should be postponing those till after they controlled the battlefield.
Tirolle: “More kills, far side of battle volume. The enemy is repositioning. Somehow they’ve guessed which we’re after—”
Glimfrelle: Triumph whistle. “Get ’em, get ’em—oops. Boss, I think Limmende has figured we’re coordinating things—”
A new window had opened over Tirolle’s post. It showed the five million kilometers around Olvira. Two other ships were there now: the window identified them as Limmende’s flag and one of the vessels that had not responded to Svensndot’s recruiting.
There was an instant of stillness on Olvira’s command deck. The voices of triumph and panic coming from the rest of the fleet seemed suddenly far away. Svensndot and his crew were looking at death close up. “Tirolle! How long till swarm—”
“They’re on us already—just missed a drone by ten milliseconds.”
“Tirolle! Finish running current engagements. Glimfrelle, tell Lynsnar and Trance to chain command if we lose contact.” Those ships had already spent their drones, and Jo Haugen was known to all the other captains.
Then the thought was gone, and he was busy coordinating Olvira’s own battle swarm. The local tactics window showed the cloud dissipating, taking on colors coded by whether they were lagging or leading in time relative to Olvira.
Their two attackers had matched pseudospeeds perfectly. Ten times per second all three ships jumped a tiny fraction of a light-year. Like rocks skipping across the surface of a pond, they appeared in real space in perfectly measured hops—and the distance between them at every emergence was less that five million kilometers. The only thing that separated them now was millisecond differences in jump times, and the fact the light itself could not pass between them in the brief time they spent at each jump point.
