Off Armageddon Reef
Read Off Armageddon Reef Online
Authors: David Weber
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For Fred Saberhagen, whose work has brought meâand so many othersâso much pleasure. It's always nice when someone whose work you like so much turns out to be even more likable as a person.
Andâ
For Sharon, who loves me, puts up with my insane schedule, helps me remember which day of the month it is, knows just about everything there is about swimming, and has been known to suggest a three-hanky scene or two to me along the way.
Not that I'm saying she did it this time.
Oh, my, no!
I love you.
Â
JULY 2, 2378
CRESTWELL'S STAR, HD 63077A
TERRAN FEDERATION
“Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!”
Captain Mateus Fofão rolled out of bed as the urgent voice of the officer of the watch blared over the intercom, counterpointed by the high-pitched wail of the emergency General Quarters signal. The captain's bare feet were on the deck-sole and he was already reaching for the bedside com before his eyes were fully open, and he jabbed the red priority key purely by feel.
“Bridge.” The response came almost instantly, in a voice flat with the panic-resisting armor of training.
“It's the Captain, Chief Kuznetzov,” Fofão said crisply. “Give me Lieutenant Henderson.”
“Aye, Sir.”
There was a brief instant of silence, then another voice.
“Officer of the deck,” it said.
“Talk to me, Gabby,” Fofão said crisply.
“Skipper,” Lieutenant Gabriela Henderson, the heavy cruiser's tactical officer, had the watch, and her normally calm contralto was strained and harsh, “we've got bogies.
Lots
of bogies. They just dropped out of hyper twelve light-minutes out, and they're headed in-system at over four hundred gravities.”
Fofão's jaw clenched. Four hundred gravities was twenty percent higher than the best Federation compensators could manage. Which pretty conclusively demonstrated that whoever these people were, they
weren't
Federation units.
“Strength estimate?” he asked.
“Still coming in, Sir,” Henderson replied flatly. “So far, we've confirmed over seventy.”
Fofão winced.
“All right.” He was astounded by how calm his own voice sounded. “Implement first-contact protocols, and also Spyglass and Watchman. Then take us to Condition Four. Make sure the Governor's fully informed, and tell her I'm declaring a Code Alpha.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
“I'll be on the bridge in five minutes,” Fofão continued as his sleeping cabin's door opened and his steward loped through it with his uniform. “Let's get some additional recon drones launched and headed for these people.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
“I'll see you in five,” Fofão said. He keyed the com off and turned to accept his uniform from the white-faced steward.
In actual fact, Mateus Fofão reached the command deck of TFNS
Swiftsure
in just under five minutes.
He managed to restrain himself to a quick, brisk stride as he stepped out of the bridge elevator, but his eyes were already on the master plot, and his mouth tightened. The unknown vessels were a scatter of ominous ruby chips bearing down on the binary system's GO primary component and the blue-and-white marble of its fourth planet.
“Captain on the bridge!” Chief Kuznetzov announced, but Fofão waved everyone back into his or her bridge chair.
“As you were,” he said, and almost everyone settled back into place. Lieutenant Henderson did not. She rose from the captain's chair at the center of the bridge, her relief as Fofão's arrival relieved her of command obvious.
He nodded to her, stepped past her, and settled himself in the same chair.
“The Captain has the ship,” he announced formally, then looked back up at Henderson, still standing beside him. “Any incoming transmissions from them?”
“No, Sir. If they'd begun transmitting the instant they dropped out of hyper, we'd have heard something from them about”âthe lieutenant glanced at the digital time displayâ“two minutes ago. We haven't.”
Fofão nodded. Somehow, looking at the spreading cloud of red icons on the display, he wasn't surprised.
“Strength update?” he asked.
“Tracking estimates a minimum of eighty-five starships,” Henderson said. “We don't have any indications of fighter launches yet.”
Fofão nodded again, and a strange, singing sort of tension that was almost its own form of calm seemed to fill him. The calm of a man face-to-face with a disaster for which he has planned and trained for years but never really expected to confront.
“Watchman?” he asked.
“Implemented, Sir,” Henderson replied. “
Antelope
got under way for the hyper limit two minutes ago.”
“Spyglass?”
“Activated, Sir.”
That's something
, a detached corner of Fofão's brain said.
TFNS
Antelope
was a tiny, completely unarmed, and very fast courier vessel. Crestwell's World was the Federation's most advanced colonial outpost, fifty light-years from Sol, too new, too sparsely settled, to have its own hypercom yet. That left only courier ships, and at this moment
Antelope
's sole function was to flee Solward at her maximum possible velocity with the word that Code Alpha had come to pass.
Spyglass was the net of surveillance satellites stretched around the periphery of the star system's hyper limit. They were completely passive, hopefully all but impossible to detect, and they weren't there for
Swiftsure
's benefit. Their takeâall of itâwas being beamed after
Antelope
, to make certain she had full and complete tactical records as of the moment she hypered out. And that same information was being transmitted to
Antelope
's sister ship, TFNS
Gazelle
, as she lay totally covert in orbit around the system's outermost gas giant.
Her
task was to remain hidden until the end, if she could, and then to report back to Old Earth.
And it's a good thing she's out there,
Fofão thought grimly,
because
we
certainly aren't going to be making any reports
.
“Ship's status?” he asked.
“All combat systems are closed up at Condition Four, Sir. Engineering reports all stations manned and ready, and both normal-space and hyper drives are online prepared to answer maneuvering commands.”
“Very good.” Fofão pointed at her normally assigned command station and watched her head for it. Then he inhaled deeply and pressed a stud on the arm of his command chair.
“This is the Captain,” he said, without the usual formalities of an all-hands announcement. “By now, you all know what's going on. At the moment, you know just as much about these people as I do. I don't know if they're the Gbaba or not. If they are, it doesn't look very good. But I want all of you to know that I'm proud of you. Whatever happens, no captain could have a better ship or a better crew.”
He released the com stud and swiveled his chair to face the heavy cruiser's helmsman.
“Bring us to zero-one-five, one-one-niner, at fifty gravities,” he said quietly, and TFNS
Swiftsure
moved to position herself between the planet whose human colonists had named it Crestwell's World and the mammoth armada bearing down upon it.
Mateus Fofão had always been proud of his ship. Proud of her crew, of her speed, of the massive firepower packed into her three-quarters-of-a-million-tonne hull. At the moment, what he was most aware of was her frailty.
Until ten years earlier, there'd been no Terran Federation Navy, not really. There'd been something the Federation
called
a navy, but it had actually been little more than a fleet of survey vessels, backed up by a handful of light armed units whose main concerns had been search and rescue operations and the suppression of occasional, purely human predators.
But then, ten years ago, a Federation survey ship had found evidence of the first confirmed advanced nonhuman civilization. No one knew what that civilization's citizens had called themselves, because none of them were still alive to tell anyone.
Humanity had been shocked by the discovery that an entire species had been deliberately destroyed. That a race capable of fully developing and exploiting the resources of its home star system had been ruthlessly wiped out. The first assumption had been that the species in question had done it to itself in some sort of mad spasm of suicidal fury. Indeed, some of the scientists who'd studied the evidence continued to maintain that that was the most likely explanation.
Those holdouts, however, were a distinct minority. Most of the human race had finally accepted the second, and far more horrifying, hypothesis. They hadn't done it to themselves; someone else had done it to them.
Fofão didn't know who'd labeled the hypothetical killers the Gbaba, and he didn't much care. But the realization that they might exist was the reason there was a genuine and steadily growing Federation Navy these days. And the reason contingency plans like Spyglass and Watchman had been put into place.
And the reason TFNS
Swiftsure
found herself between Crestwell's World and the incoming, still totally silent fleet of red icons.
There was no way in the universe a single heavy cruiser could hope to stop, or slow down, or even inconvenience a fleet the size of the one headed for Fofão's ship. Nor was it likely he could have stayed away from hostile warships capable of the acceleration rate the unknowns had already demonstrated, but even if he could have, that wasn't
Swiftsure
's job.
Even at their massive acceleration rate, it would take the bogies almost four hours to reach Crestwell's World, assuming they wanted to rendezvous with it. If all they wanted to do was overfly the planet, they could do it in less than three. But whatever their intention, it was
Swiftsure
's job to stand her ground. To do her damnedest, up to the very last instant, to open some sort of peaceful communication with the unknowns. To serve as a fragile shield and tripwire which might just possibly, however remote the possibility might be, deter an attack on the newly settled planet behind her.
And, almost certainly, to become the first casualty in the war the Federation had dreaded for almost a decade.
“Sir, we're picking up additional drive signatures,” Lieutenant Henderson announced. “They look like fighters.” Her voice was crisp, professionally clipped. “Tracking makes it roughly four hundred.”
“Acknowledged. Still no response to our transmissions, Communications?”
“None, Sir,” the com officer replied tautly.
“Tactical, begin deploying missiles.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Henderson said. “Deploying missiles now.”
Big, long-ranged missiles detached from the external ordnance rings, while others went gliding out of the cruiser's midships missile hatches. They spread out in a cloud about
Swiftsure
on their secondary stationkeeping drives, far enough out to put the ship and their fellow missiles safely outside the threat perimeter of their preposterously powerful primary drives.
Looks like they want to englobe the planet,
he thought, watching the bogies' formation continue to spread while his ship's unceasing communication attempts beamed towards them.
That doesn't look especially peaceful-minded of them
.
He glanced at the master plot's range numbers. The intruders had been inbound for almost a hundred and sixteen minutes now. Their velocity relative to Crestwell's World was up to just over thirty-one thousand kilometers per second, and unless they reversed acceleration in the next few seconds they were going to overfly the planet after all.
I wonder
â
“Missile launch!” Gabriela Henderson announced suddenly. “Repeat, missile launch! Many missiles inbound!”
Mateus Fofão's heart seemed to stop.
They can't possibly expect to actually hit an evading starship at that range
. That was his first thought as the thousands of incoming missile icons suddenly speckled his plot.
But they can sure as hell hit a
planet,
can't they?
his brain told him an instant later.
He stared at that hurricane of missiles, and knew what was going to happen.
Swiftsure
's defenses could never have stopped more than a tithe of that torrent of destruction, and a frozen corner of his mind wondered what they were armed with. Fusion warheads? Antimatter? Chemical or biological agents? Or perhaps they were simply kinetic weapons. With the prodigious acceleration they were showing, they'd have more than enough velocity to do the job with no warheads at all.