Hegemony (14 page)

The oversight officer was a political watchdog, placed aboard the ship on behalf of the Council of the Sovereign People of the Coalition. Every Coalition ship had an oversight officer aboard. To the commander, the interference of politics into the running of the warship was like bad weather on a planet-side camping trip; one simply coped.

This
oversight officer, however, was very bad weather indeed. Segan Steven was an energetic, self-confident fool.

"To this point," the oversight officer was saying, "the plan has gone quite well. Quite well. And now this. Which of you cares to explain how we find ourselves in this... situation?" 

Grantsen spared a look at the command pod next to his; it was a massive structure, shaped like half of a huge metal egg laid on its side. A command pod acted as an acceleration tank, filling with acceleration gel and connecting life-support systems to its occupant when the ship accelerated hard, allowing the man within it to endure sustained high gees while controlling the ship's systems through a direct neural interface.

The command pod he was looking at was open just now, showing his second in command, Deputy-Commander Wannel Henry, sitting back in his slate blue duty uniform, looking quite at ease, and somewhat amused. Inappropriate demeanor, thought Grantsen, half amused himself. Wannel was a man of good humor, maybe more so than was advisable or safe in the presence of an oversight officer of the Coalition Space Forces. He was also very good at his job.

"This situation, Oversight Officer Segan, is unpredicted," said Grantsen. "Please note, we have operated strictly under the guidance of the mission planners. They did not set forth a contingency for this sort of thing." There; let the fool criticize Central Command and get
that
on record.

But the fool did not.

"What are we to do now, then?" Segan asked.

"We have two choices, Oversight Officer. We can retreat or press in with our attack."

"And what do you make of the enemy's latest actions?"

"I think that they have already proved that this
is
the expected response to our earlier attack. The problem is that we expected a lance-ship, and have found ourselves facing an assault-ship."

That had come as a very disagreeable surprise to Grantsen; the enemy tactics had been quite effective. Of course the enemy was operating with incomplete knowledge, but then, that was rather the point. The Hegemony ships had reacted quickly and creatively to the appearance of his lance-ships,
Swift Liberty
and
Righteous Justice
. The large ship had turned tail and "fled" at an acceleration that was on par with those of the freight-liners that the squadron had previously engaged and, for the most part, destroyed. The power output the new ship was using attain that acceleration was much higher, showing that this ship was much larger than those ships. But there
were
super-liners of that size, and Grantsen supposed that, had he truly been a pirate, he might even have fallen for the bait.

The use of the two swift-ships to blind the
Righteous Justice
, preventing her from seeing the assault-ship for what it was... that was clever too. Not perfect, though; it showed that the enemy were seeking some sort of concealment. That would have made a pirate very suspicious.

But it had almost worked against his little squadron. The obvious assumption was that the "super-liner" was a fake, a warship pretending to be a civilian ship to act as bait. Any warship would have scared off any normal pirates. Of course, with two lance-ships having been reported, the Hegemony already knew that these were no normal pirates.

The question was, how much did the Hegemony bastards know? Their plan almost certainly had more than one layer to it. The "fake" warship was easy enough to figure out, from the actions of the swift-ships. Obviously they were hiding something. But until seven hours ago, Grantsen was sure what they were hiding was a Hegemony transport-cruiser; a very large armed military transport. Such a ship would be a deadly trap for most pirates, if they were unlucky enough to get within range; a big transport-cruiser had as much firepower as a lance-ship. But it would have been easy meat for his squadron. An assault-ship on the other hand...

Did the Hegemony somehow know the nature of the plan? Is that why they had sent an assault-ship, and then executed a precise double-blind to lure him into its range? Or was it only that an assault-ship happened to have been in position to respond? That was possible; a certain number of the giant battleships were used for patrols by the Hegemony, arriving in one system after another to awe and intimidate the oppressed human population.

Which one was it? The Hegemony plan had almost worked, failing only due to  his own preparation, and a bit of luck. If the two Coalition lance-ships had not deployed sensor drones when they first entered the system, and if the course of the assault-ship had not come close enough to one of those drones, then his ships would still not know what they were about to engage. That would have been a disaster. The firepower of an assault-ship was devastating.

"I suppose we intimidated them a little too well," said Wannel Henry. That earned a sharp look from Oversight Officer Segan, but Wannel's expression was now neutral and fixed. It was likely that Segan's personal data unit was showing him the faces of the two command officers.

"The intimidation of the enemy is part of the plan, Deputy-Commander Wannel. I hope you are not questioning it," said the oversight officer. "Or are you suggesting that your difficulties in executing the plan are somehow not your fault?"

"Of course not, Oversight Officer," said Wannel, in a respectful voice. "The arrival of the enemy assault-ship could not have been expected, but we will adapt and succeed."

Grantsen felt a fresh rush of contempt, though he schooled his face to show nothing. It was galling to be spied on in so blunt a fashion, to have to answer to this fool. A competent oversight officer at least took pains to let the ship's officers do their jobs. This one was bad enough, and clumsy enough, that the junior officers aboard were taking secret wagers about how many of the oversight officer's "covert" surveillance units would be found. The crew never
did
anything once such a unit was found; it would have been an act of rebellion to disable them. But a competent oversight officer did not make surveillance obvious; that did no good at all, except to remind the crew that they were not trusted, which was bad for morale.

On the other hand, thought Grantsen, the fact that the junior officers still had the jocular mood to make such bets showed that morale was still good, in spite of the danger bearing down on them in the form of the Hegemony assault-ship. It also showed that whatever agents the oversight officer had among the crew, those agents were smart enough to know what to report as dangerous behavior and what to let slide to allow the ship its smooth operation. That was a distinction that this red-coat boot-licker would probably never learn.

Grantsen didn't usually resent the presence of an oversight officer. He had worked well with them before, which was a mandatory ability for a commander of the Coalition Space Forces. The Grantsen family had been a Space-Force family for generations, and Grantsen John could well understand the need to put a check on the power of a starship commander. With the power at his command and the distances involved, the scope of discretion he had to hold to be effective was vast. The danger of a commander grasping power away from the distant Sovereign Council was all too real.

Bad luck that this flight had saddled his ship with a moron of a red-coat, though. It was distracting him from the task at hand. He needed to know what the enemy knew. Was this just luck, or a counter-trap? Perhaps it did not matter. Now that he knew what he was about to engage, he could still gain the advantage.

Again he reviewed the last few hundred hours: the pursuit and destruction of the Hegemony transports; the painstaking calculations of navigation and perfectly managed gunnery that had allowed the last ship to plausibly "barely escape." That task had been made harder by the resourcefulness of the last ship, Grantsen mused, remembering the sheen of nervous determination on the faces of his gunnery crew as they operated the lance-ship's laser arrays.

He had some admiration for the captain of that ship; the improvised tactic might have worked against the sort of weapons that a pirate might have used. It was useless against the firepower of a Coalition lance-ship. Instead, the freight-liner's improvised countermeasures had come all too close to ruining the perfect targeting that was needed to merely damage the ship. A small mistake from his gunners and they would have killed the last freight-liner as well, despite every effort not to. And that would have ruined the plan.

But the plan had held together, and now it was time for the ambush against the inevitable Hegemony reply. Still, Grantsen could not shake the feeling that they had laid a lure for a hundred kilo fangpouncer and caught a thousand kilo deathstalker in their trap.

The carefully coordinated efforts of the two  Coalition ships' navigation officers had done a good job in keeping the little swift-ship gnats far enough away that there was no realistic chance of them discovering the secret of the two lance-ships. And the Hegemony ship was making no attempts at escape. Why should it? After all, the enemy was sure that they outgunned both lance-ship together.

Grantsen smiled.
Swift Liberty
and her sister ship
Righteous Justice
had been conceived from the start as test-beds for the new weapons systems. The systems were delicate, and could only be used once. A failure of any sort, of engineering on their part, or excess caution or luck on the enemy's part, and the only consolation would be that Grantsen would be unlikely to survive to face the disapproval of his superiors.

A standard lance-ship was built around a battery of half a dozen seven-meter-diameter Primary Laser Arrays. The huge capital ship weapons were capable of delivering shattering, pin-point focused laser energy out as far as twenty thousand kilometers and causing severe thermal damage at twice that range. That was impressive, especially given the thermal shock of a well-focused hit would shatter hull metal like glass. But the real use of the PLAs was to boost interceptor-missiles. Boosted by one of the PLAs, the little laser-drive missiles could reach out to almost two light-seconds, well over five hundred thousand kilometers. Each missile carried multiple stand-off warheads, anti-ship and anti-interceptor, giving it substantial tactical flexibility. These laser-driven missiles were the real primary weapon of a lance-ship.

Grantsen suppressed a tiny spurt of unease at the thought of the interceptor-missiles. The missiles needed guidance; at the ranges they were propelled to, light-speed lag meant that they could not be guided from the firing ship. Computer guidance was not much better; any non-sapient program would only be able to deal with what the programmers had predicted it would encounter. It could not improvise and use intuition to figure out an enemy response. That left using an IGU, an Intelligent Guidance Unit.

He did not like IGUs. The idea was repellant; a human being's mind uploaded into a neural net, at the cost of killing the human. IGUs were ghosts, dead men not allowed to rest in peace. To Grantsen John, the fact that the entire Hegemony was run by such ghosts, ruling over the living, was hideous and appalling.

But we have to use them too, he thought. IGUs were created from "volunteers" who had been give one last chance to serve the Coalition with their sacrifice. It was a sad fact of life that there were always enough people who had flirted with disloyalty. For them, becoming an IGU was a last chance to redeem themselves and their families. For the Space Forces, it was a bitter but inflexible requirement.

The worst of it, Grantsen knew, was that the IGUs still thought they were humans. Some of the IGUs were "veterans" of dozens of launches. Trained IGUs were valuable, and recovery from an interceptor was just a matter of establishing a hyper-bandwidth communications link.

Eventually they all became non-functional. They were stored in ultra-slow neural nets to conserve their utility between launches. Officially they were just equipment, guidance programs with a limited operating time. It was not officially encouraged to think of them as disembodied minds. But Grantsen was sure that, given enough time, even in their ultra-slow holding environment, the disembodied minds went mad.

He put aside the whole train of thought. The assault-ship about to engage them had four times a standard lance-ship's firepower; even two-to-one, standard lance-ships would be woefully outgunned. But then, his two ships were far from standard.

Unlike other lance-ships, his two ships carried only three primary laser arrays, mounted in semi-spherical turrets on the ship's dorsal aspect. A PLA was a large weapon, massive and complex. In particular, it was a hot weapon. Grantsen remembered an academy joke, that a combat laser was really a device for generating waste-heat, with a quirky side-effect of emitting a laser beam. Cooling systems and allowances for heat tolerance made up much of the mass of a laser array.

In place of the ships' three ventral PLAs, each of these lance-ships carried twenty-one modular pods, mounted in clusters of seven on each of the three ventral turret hardpoints. Each pod held a single-use disposable laser, briefly able to equal the power of a capital ship's PLA. The result was that, for one salvo, before the pods burned out, each of his lance-ships would have as much firepower as an assault-ship. Of course, after one prolonged use, each of his lance-ships would have only three working PLAs left.