Authors: Mark Kalina
They were long gone, Freya thought, but the squadron had to be sure. Leaving the raiders in-system, unmolested, meant that no civilian traffic would dare use this system as a navigational waypoint. And that would add many hundreds of hours of travel time to almost all traffic between the core of the Hegemony of Suns and several star systems on the periphery. It was the sort of costly, dangerous situation that the Fleet was intended to deal with.
That meant using the swift-ships for one of their primary roles: scouting. There were dozens of minor planetoids and substantial rocks that a ship could be hiding behind, keeping out of sight from the
Conquering Sun
's enormous sensor arrays. Worse yet, there were two large gas giants, and of course the red dwarf star itself. All of those could easily mask the thermal signature of a hiding ship.
And so the two swift-ships had darted this way and that, angling to see behind every obvious hiding place, pushing their drives and burning through their reaction mass reserves.
The problem was that, even if they found the enemy still in the system, there was little that could be done about it.
That point had been discussed, at a high bandwidth, high-resolution VR wardroom dinner, "held aboard" the assault-ship, a dozen hours before the little squadron initiated its FTL transit. Once through the transit, there might be no time for detailed communication between the ships; there was no way to look ahead into a destination system, to see what lay in store.
The virtual Dining Hall had been rendered with exacting detail; a non-trivial fraction of the assault-ship's processing power was being tasked to the dinner. The chamber was spacious, almost cavernous, with a high, multi-domed ceiling of translucent mosaic crystal. The table, a long curve of gleaming black alloy, was set amongst a garden of flowering plants and burbling fountains. Virtual "gravity" was at a comfortable one gee. Lights played on the table, illuminating the diners and the remains of their enormously computer-processor-intensive virtual food, while leaving the rest of the hall's volume in twilight.
Captain Kai Ari-Kani sat at the head of the table, where the curvature was deepest. This let him see everyone he had invited to the dinner. His own senior officers were here, of course. His executive officer, Lyn Psan, sat like a regal statue, white skin contrasting with hair as black as her uniform, blending into the dark of the table. Under her gaze, his other officers were arranged by department and seniority.
Then there were the captains and executive officers of the two swift-ships attached to Captain Ari-Kani's command. The two demi-captains' daemons were aboard the
Conquering Sun
, housed in command-system neural nets; the bandwidth that would have been needed for them to attend this VR remotely would have taken up too much of the little swift-ships' computing power. The swift-ships massed a bare seven kilotons each: 160 meters of lean, fast warship, with little room aboard for anything but weapons and drives. The kilometer and a quarter long, three megaton vastness of the
Conquering Sun
was intimidating enough to see, but what could be done within that size, without in the least impairing the combat efficiency of the ship, was perhaps even more shocking. In this case, it was just a matter of using a level of computing power that could have simultaneously run every system on both swift-ships, and then some, to improve the look and feel of a virtual meeting.
Captain Kai Ari-Kani had occasionally invited his junior captains "aboard," sometimes even going to the trouble of bringing them aboard physically, to take advantage of the actual crew space facilities that the giant ship held. He liked to have a personal sense of the people he commanded, he said, and to involve them in the daily life of his command.
Freya had to admit that she was impressed. Virtual food was one of the hardest aspects of VR to get right. This... it still wasn't
right
, but it actually "tasted" good; better than any other virtual meal she had ever tried. The ambience and feel of the VR, on the other hand, was so close to perfect that it was a bit scary. Not counting the food, she figured that it would have taken her a long time to figure out this was VR, if she hadn't known.
Her executive officer,
acro-hetairos
Muir Zanados, seemed well enough at ease. He might have seen a super-high-grade VR like this before. Maybe often, before he joined the Fleet. There were not many officers in the Fleet who came from an
equetai
lineage. That was a very high social rank indeed, among the higher ranks of the
aristokratai
, and as far above her own social rank of
telestos
as she herself was above a commoner.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," the captain began, speaking quietly, "
telai
," he added, with redundant formality. His voice seemed to fill the room, softly but surely. "I'm pleased, as always, to have your company at my table, even if only virtually. But I'm afraid that work must intrude. You all know our operational instructions, of course, and I've read your readiness reports, but now I'd like to hear from you in person: observations, ideas, and so forth..."
The captain was watching the faces of the assembled officers. The officers sat in two curving rows, each "dressed" in the space-black uniform jumpsuit of the Hegemonic Fleet. Each uniform was marked with gold rank-and-merit glyphs. No two officers in Hegemonic service would have quite the same glyphs, and reading the glyphs told each officer's formal proficiency and authority for any given task. Of course, thought Freya, a sense of their real capability was a bit more elusive. Captain Ari-Kani smiled slightly as his Executive Officer spoke first.
"Sir. It just seems odd that they chose to send us. Pirate hunting is really not our forte." Her voice was smooth and clear, a good match for her looks. Freya wondered briefly, idly, if either voice or looks were anything like the woman had been born with.
"True enough, but not really relevant," answered the captain. "We were sent, and what I'd like is all of your ideas, all of your imaginations, to be focused on how to make pirate hunting our forte, best we can." There was a moment of silence at this, and captain Ari-Kani let it stretch.
Freya watched closely, trying to understand what Captain Ari-Kani was doing. He was the best commander she had personally met, and she didn't want to miss a chance to learn from him. He was watching his people perform, she concluded, like musicians under the subtle guidance of a conductor.
Executive Officer Lyn Psan spoke again. "I think we need to consider, and maybe even run a medium-resolution VR simulation, of the sort of engagement we'll be seeing if we force those two ships into battle. I'm not sure," she said, looking at Captain Ari-Kani, "if an all-out attack is going to be wise."
"Elaborate your thoughts, Lyn," said Ari-Kani. "Anyone else, if you have something to add, raise a hand and interject. This is a free-form discussion. One at a time, though..."
Psan went on. "If we force those ships to fight, they will be in one of two modes: either desperate to escape, and thus focused entirely on defending themselves from our attack, or beyond hope of escaping, and therefore seeking to do as much harm to us as possible. They will have an acceleration advantage, unless their reaction mass reserves are very, very low. Granted, from the freight-liner's report, their re-mass should be low...
"But this system has plenty of carbon-bearing rocks in it, and lance-ships are large enough to have reaction mass processing gear. So they may well have refueled, at least partially. And that means that we'll need to do something tricky to engage them in the first place. Realistically, I can't think of anything except for a tactical FTL maneuver."
Freya frowned. Executive Officer Psan was correct in theory, but, she thought, wrong in practical terms. A very precise in-system FTL transit might be able to drop the assault-ship close enough to engage. It would be very hard to manage, and would stress the singularity reactor of the
Conquering Sun
severely, but it was, in theory, possible.
"Demi-Captain Tralk," said Captain Ari-Kani suddenly, "you have something?"
"Uhm, sir... ah, I was just considering the possibility of an FTL interception. Assuming the transit can be made, Captain, I still don't think we can count on that tactic."
There was a tiny pause, and Freya went on. "We'll be about one hundred hours minus, for FTL. If the raiders have been in the system since the attack on the freight-liners, probably since
before
the attack, they will be ready to go FTL at just a few hours' notice. I just can't see them waiting for a hundred hours, knowing we might be able to engage them if they do... "
"Do you have any suggestions, then?"
"Captain, I'm not sure. Maybe use the swift-ships to push them into an engagement?"
"I'm not certain they would try to evade an attack by two swift-ships," said Ari-Kani.
Freya nodded. Two swift-ships were not an overwhelmingly deadly threat to a lance-ship; certainly not to two lance-ships. Swift-ships could use their superior acceleration to charge a larger ship, saturating its defenses with warheads. Four or five swift-ships could give a single lance-ship a very hard time. Two swift-ships against two lance-ships would be very hard pressed to make a successful attack, and even less likely to survive the attempt.
"However, there may be something to this idea," the captain continued.
"I believe that the tactic we will pursue will be for the two swift-ships to 'escort' a large freight super-liner. One of the
really
large ships, say... just about the mass of the
Conquering Sun
. Normally two swift-ships would be ample escort against any raiders. These raiders are, of course, far more powerful. They might expect a Fleet response, so we must ensure they do not take us to be that response. Instead, we will do our best to make them see one more possible victim."
"And when they move in..." said Executive Officer Psan.
"Just so," said Captain Ari-Kani. "When they move in, we will be able to engage. We will need to hide behind our exhaust, of course; not let them get a visual image of the
Conquering Sun
."
The captain was looking right at Freya. "
That
will involve the swift-ships, I think. You will need to either chase or draw them away from splitting up. So long as they stay together, we can thrust away from them, hide our identity behind our own plasma exhaust and pretend to be a large civilian ship. Demi-Captain Tralk, Demi-Captain Meryl, make sure your ships are ready in all respects. Once we emerge, I'll want the two of you to look hard for the enemy; we need to find them if they're hiding behind a rock. And besides, if the Fleet assigned a couple of swift-ships to escort a valuable cargo, that's still within the realm of what aggressive escorts would do. Especially if there are rumors of a prior attack. Just the same, though, you'll need to maneuver so as to be able to 'come to the aid' of the ship you're escorting. That's not going to be easy, but if the enemy
is
still in the system, our success will depend substantially upon you."
The raider ships had not attempted to hide for long. In a way, that made things easier, thought Freya. In another way, that made things much harder. The
Conquering Sun
had started her "attempted escape" as soon as the first of the raider ships had lit its drives. To Freya's consternation, despite the swift-ships' aggressive scouting, that was the first the squadron saw of it. The raider had been drifting deep in the system's interplanetary space, and given more time, they
would
have found it from its passive thermal signature. As it was, there was no need; the raider ships must have spotted them, most likely seeing the flash of their wormhole emergence, and then the flare of the swift-ships' drives. Once the two swift-ships were several hundred million kilometers from the
Conquering Sun
, the raider had lit its own drives, vectoring to intercept the assault ship.
To Freya, that meant the raiders had taken the bait. No lance-ship would willingly, knowingly, vector towards an enemy assault-ship. Spectral and thermal analysis of the raider's exhaust gave a decent estimate of the energy of the ship's drive. Observation of acceleration, a pattern of five hours at five gees, followed by one hour at one gee, allowed calculation of the ship's mass. At just under half a megaton, it was either a lance-ship, or something very similar to one.
In fact, the signature of the raider ship's drive was a 93% correlation for a
Justified Vengeance
class, the most common class of lance-ship used by the Coalition in the last war. To Freya, that almost certainly meant that the ship was a Coalition warship, Coalition built to an absolute certainty. Did this mean another war with the Coalition, she wondered?
The last war had ended only a little more than a hundred fifty thousand hours ago, or seventeen old-Earth years, a measure which the Coalition still clung to. It had not been the fiercest war between the Hegemony and the Coalition, but still it had cost almost a billion dead between the two sides, mostly civilians on planets unfortunate enough to have been fought over. In the end, both sides had let the conflict burn out; neither side had been able to capture a major system, and none of the minor systems the Hegemony had acquired came close to justifying the cost of the war.