Sertian Princess (3 page)

He resumed the briefing.  "The other group will be a team of two: a dealer in semi-precious stones and his wife travelling from Floreat to Quental.  After we drop the Phoenix off near Andes we will double back to Floreat.  We can make it in two jumps and use one of the two-man penetrators to land as close to Floreat spaceport as possible.  I will take the role of the dealer: it's a cover I've used before.  Julia, you will provide me with a suitable wife.  Any questions so far?"

"How do we recover the penetrator?"  Mtebe was always concerned about the loss of valuable equipment.

"We can either send it straight back up on automatic or you can pull it up yourselves after the Aldebaran has left Floreat.  Either way, if it gets picked up leaving the planet's surface, it is unlikely to be tied in to events on the Aldebaran."

"What about the navy?  You said something about a corvette."

"Elida can calculate a rendezvous near the midpoint of the route from Andes to Quental but at the extreme limit of detection.  You can wait for the Aldebaran there.  Suzanne, I would like you personally to go on board the corvette to establish a communications point.  Assuming, that is, that Centre is successful in organising a corvette for us in the first place.

"Now, if there are no other questions, you all have some preparations to make."

Zara remained seated as the others left the Briefing Room.  She got up and walked round behind him and putting her hands on his shoulders at the base of his neck, began gently to rub.

"You were very hard on them, David: you are also very tense.  It's not just the operation is it?  We've had more difficult assignments than this one in the past."

He grunted and reached up to cover her hands with his and stop the massage.  He loved the feel of her hands on his skin and hated having his neck rubbed: both facts of which she was very well aware.

"You read me too well," he said and paused for a long time before continuing.

"One time, before I met you, an operation I was involved in went wrong.  My cover was blown and I was marked as a target.  I was hit, badly, and barely got out with my life.  King Harald and Queen Serena took me in and cared for me.  They flew in the best surgeons they could get hold of and Queen Serena nursed me personally.  I remember she was so beautiful and so gentle that at times in my drugged, semiconscious state, I was convinced that she was an angel out of the Christian Heaven or a houri from some Mohammedan Paradise. And little Neri: she must only have been 3 or 4 years old.  She used to bring her toys to show me and sit on the end of my bed to sing me a nursery rhyme which her nanny had just taught her.

"Now my ministering angel is dead and little Neri has grown up and is testing her wings.  I wonder if she has her mother's beauty.  I wonder also just what mixture of common sense and stubborn pride we will have to cope with when we find her."

He stopped and looked up.  "I'm sorry, Zara, I've been rambling again.  I have some good memories of that time...  once the surgeons had finished stitching me back together but this is not the time for reminiscences.  There is a job to be done and it is too dangerous to let oneself become emotionally involved in an operation.  I'm going to take a hot shower and then grab some breakfast.  Are you coming?"

"No, you carry on."  Zara suppressed a shudder as she watched him walk through the door.  She knew with what ruthless efficiency he could suppress his emotions if he had to.

"Sam, I want you to do some research for me.  First compile a file of everything we have on Queen Serena's death then cross-correlate it with known Vostovian activity around that time; movements of principal agents, that sort of thing; and particularly concentrate on Wolfram.  Finally, I want you to run through the file of assassins specialising in mechanical accidents of that type and list out all those whose movements cannot be reliably accounted for."

"Yes, my lady.  What priority do you wish to give this research?"

"Second only to direct preparations for the operation.  Can you give me an estimate to complete the correlations?"

"51.6 hours plus or minus 9.2 hours."

So the research would not be complete before they reached Andes.  Sam's core consisted of an array of 1024 x1024 superfast computer processors.  Each processor had a cycle time of 2.5 picoseconds, access to a common addressable memory space of 100K gigabytes and was connected to the other processors by a network the topology of which was equivalent to the edges of a hypercube.  The high connectivity of this network meant that a large number of operations could be processed in parallel: very necessary for the vector calculations involved in the continuous monitoring of position and velocity.

This hypercube then provided the main computing power of the Salamander but it was also linked to a network of satellite processors which provided specialist functions. One of these specialised processors was a search engine designed for the ultra-rapid retrieval of data from the archive Databanks.  Zara knew, however, that the cross-correlations she had called for would require the power of the main processing array and would, therefore, have to be scheduled in around those operational jobs which also made demands on the main processors.

"Very well, when you have the results of the search, hold them under my personal key and contact me aboard the Phoenix."

"As you command, my lady."

CHAPTER 3

The planet Runnymede IV in the Plantagenet System was an earth-type planet circling a yellow, Class G star.  It had been selected as the site of a major star base principally for those reasons: with a gravity of 0.98 earth normal, an atmospheric composition of 24% oxygen and 75% nitrogen and no totally inimical flora, fauna or bacteria it was an ideal location to provide rest and recreational facilities for the deep space crew of the Imperial Navy's Third Fleet.

The Star Base itself was actually an artificial moon, circling the planet at a distance of 200,000 kilometres and resembling nothing so much as a giant squid.  It was not quite a complete sphere with the missing portion of the surface presenting instead a cavernous entrance to the inner dock, through which entrance flitted numerous small craft: shuttles carrying crew to and from the surface of the planet, supply tenders restocking the warships currently at the base and a multitude of launches, gigs and jolly boats belonging to the warships.  But the feature which gave the Star Base its squid-like appearance was the ring of twenty four flexible docking arms which were spaced around the entrance to the inner dock and which trailed behind the Star Base.  To these flexible arms the smaller warships, corvettes, frigates and the like, could dock directly.  The larger vessels, cruisers and the capital ships could not approach close enough to dock directly and so had to rely on the attentions of the shoal of supply craft for all of their needs.

Situated immediately above the entrance to the inner dock and with its outer wall completely replaced by a "Clear-C" viewing screen from floor to ceiling, was the Wardroom.  It was here that Lieutenant Commander Mikael Boronin was enjoying a leisurely breakfast with his long standing friend Surgeon Commander Anton Barasny.  They had roomed together at Space Academy when he had been a 21 year old graduate fresh from the Science University at Neilstrom and Anton had been seven years his elder, having already been through Medical School and graduated as a surgeon of some considerable distinction.  It had been Anton's older head which had rescued them from some of the more serious scrapes into which Space Cadets inevitably get drawn and they had forged a friendship which had lasted over the years, surviving lengthy periods of separation and renewing itself with a vigour whenever their paths chanced to cross. 

It was just such a chance which caused them this morning to be sitting at a table right by the "window" watching the bustle of activity outside.  It should not have been a particularly frantic scene with only four of the docking berths occupied: there was the frigate Aurora, the corvettes Circe and Cleopatra and the sloop Solar Wind.  However, the reason for all the excitement and the reason he was breakfasting with his old friend, was the arrival less than 12 hours earlier of the cruiser Pushkin straight from the war zone at Rigel.

The Pushkin was too large to manoeuvre onto one of the docking arms but the two friends could see her floating just beyond the reach of the tentacles and surrounded by tenders and other small craft.  Even with an entire tail fin missing she still looked fast and powerful; an implacable enforcer of the will of His Imperial Majesty.  The loss of the tail fin, however, had drastically reduced her manoeuvrability and so she had been packed with as many of the wounded from the other ships in the fleet as she could carry and sent home for repair.

The last of the wounded were still being ferried across to the Star Base but already some of the more serious cases were being transhipped to shuttles bound for the planet's surface where the Navy maintained a complete Medical Complex with extensive facilities for the treatment of deep space injuries.  Already they both knew that repair crews from the Armourer would be crawling over the hull, deciding the best and the quickest way to get the Pushkin operational again.

"So tell me Tony, what's the situation at Rigel really like?  We only see the newscasts here and you never know how much of them you can believe.  You've brought a hell of a lot of casualties back: are we being hit that badly?"

Anton slowly shook his head.  "265 officers and men: 51 of them basket cases and 214 walking wounded.  They've given us a couple of bloody noses, Mikky but then we've given them as good as we've got.  We've blockaded all of their major bases but most of their fighting ships had got out before we closed them down.  They're still getting supplies through from somewhere and they generally fight as independent units, appearing out of nowhere and vanishing again before we can catch them.  The biggest blow we've suffered was when they took out the Invincible with all hands.  There were no survivors at all from that action: 817 officers and men vaporised."

The loss of the heavy cruiser Invincible had been a severe blow, not just to the fighting power of the Fleet but also to its morale.  The trouble was that it was just not possible to track a ship through sub-space but fairly easy to detect a ship in normal space.  Using this as a basis the Rebels had developed their own variant of guerilla warfare and raised it to a high level of effectiveness.  Without any warning, a warship would suddenly materialise alongside its intended target, rake it with the full power of its pulse lasers and vanish again before its victim could react.  Sometimes they would even leave behind a Neutron Bomb on a short delay fuse if they thought the target was particularly sleepy and slow to react.

In the case of the Invincible they had used a three-pronged attack.  A frigate had come in first, moving at full attack speed and swinging in a tight spiral around the cruiser.  Its lasers had been programmed with the expected position of the Invincible relative to the point of materialisation so that it opened fire almost before the detector alarms had sounded.  A second frigate had come in two seconds later moving on a spiral 180 degrees opposed to the first.  While the Invincible was busy corkscrewing around after the frigates a heavy destroyer had come in close from a direction at right angles to their spiral path and concentrated all its fire on one small area of the Invincible's hull, breaking down the shields and inflicting massive damage on the power cells.  The destroyer planted its Neutron Bomb and all three attackers vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.  The whole attack had lasted 58 seconds from start to finish.  It was never discovered why the Invincible had not used her sub-space drive to warp out of there: possibly the damage to the power cells had been so severe that there was insufficient power left for a jump or maybe the sub-space system itself had been damaged.  What was certain was that there were no survivors of the blast.

The Combat Manual had been revised following that incident.  Now it was laid down explicitly that any ship caught in a surprise attack of that type, if it was either outgunned or outnumbered by the attacking craft, had to warp out immediately.  The Captain's discretion in that type of engagement was effectively removed as the Chiefs of Naval Staff were not prepared to risk another loss of that magnitude.  Or not at least without inflicting some corresponding damage to the enemy.

If the new rules of engagement had applied at the time of the Invincible incident, she would not have been particularly alarmed by the appearance of the first frigate since a cruiser outguns a frigate quite comfortably.  However, as soon as the second frigate materialised the Invincible would have gone straight into sub-space before any further support could arrive.

They sat in silence for a minute, watching as another shuttle left the dock bearing some more of the wounded down to the hospital on Runnymede.  They had both lost friends on the Invincible.

Anton reached over and helped himself to another cup of coffee. "And you Mikky, how is the Cleopatra coming along?"

Mikael's face lit up with pleasure as he thought of his new command.  "She's a good little ship.  She would have been ready to go in two days time if the Pushkin hadn't come in.  All of the Armourer's resources have been snaffled by your Captain and I have to wait in line.  She only needs some final mods to the forward laser firing controls and then I can take her out for trials."

The Cleopatra was in fact his first proper command for he did not really count the Southern Adventurer.  He had been First Officer on the frigate Arcturus when they had come across the armed freighter Southern Adventurer running the blockade into the Rigellian base on Naxos.  They had given chase and the pursuit which followed was rapidly resembling a marathon game of hide and seek before the blockade runner had finally been cornered with the help of the Aurora and the Ariadne.  Even then she had put up some very spirited resistance before a boarding party led by the then Lieutenant Mikael Boronin had finally broken through.  As a reward he had been put in charge of the captured freighter which had suffered some fairly substantial damage during the chase and subsequent boarding action, and with a prize crew aboard had eventually limped back to the Star Base on New London.  His Captain's report of the action had been very well received by the Admiral of the Fleet who had asked him to dine on several occasions since and who had evidently put in a good word for him.

It was while he was kicking his heels on New London waiting for transport to rejoin the Arcturus that his promotion to Lieutenant Commander had come through and he had received orders directing him to report immediately to Star Base Runnymede and there to take command of the corvette Cleopatra. 

He hadn't even minded when he arrived at Runnymede and found that the Cleopatra was little more than a shell with repair crews crawling all over her, both inside and out.  She was still his ship: his first command and he could still feel that surge of pride as he went on board her for the first time.  That had been over two months ago and in the intervening period the Cleopatra had undergone a transformation.  Now she once again resembled a fighting ship of the Imperial Navy.  The external repair crews had all finished and there had only been two gangs still working inside before the Pushkin had come in.

"It's rotten luck, Mikky but I suppose a cruiser like the Pushkin will always take priority over a corvette."

"Yes, I know.  But it is hard to have got so close and then have to wait again.  Still, it does mean that I'm not overly busy for the next few days.  When we've finished here, how about if we wander over to Transport and see if we can cadge a lift down to the planet?  My Exec can look after things on board for a while."

"Good idea.  We could, maybe, hop down to Agrea in the islands and hire one of those 'Butterfly' yachts for a few days."

The surface of Anton's home planet had been 90% ocean and he had been able to swim almost before he could walk and could handle a sailboat before he went to school.  He had grown up surrounded by and able to handle many different types of boat and sailing was still his favourite form of relaxation.  All his friends knew that, given half a chance, he would instinctively head towards the nearest stretch of open water whenever his duties let him.

Mikael laughed.  "All right, Tony, but we change the rules this time.  The last time you got me on one of those boats you did all the sailing and I ended up doing all the cooking.  This time I'll do the sailing; those 'Butterflies' are quite simple to handle."

"They'll need to be", he retorted.  "I do the sailing because I can tell the difference between a shoal of fish and a sandbank."

There had been one notable occasion when Mikael had been at the helm and had mistaken a shoal of fish directly ahead for some more solid obstacle.  Without thinking about the trim of the sails or indeed anything other than an imminent collision he had changed course so violently that the boat had nearly capsized.  Anton had lectured him severely at the time about his lack of seamanship and even now could not resist giving him a little dig.

While they were still disputing the allocation of chores on their proposed sailing trip, one of the wardroom orderlies came over to their table.

"Excuse me sir, Lieutenant Commander Boronin?"

"Yes that's me", Mikael replied.

"Admiral Wei presents his compliments, sir, and requests that you report to his office at your earliest convenience."

"Thank you, orderly."

As the orderly moved away Mikael looked at his friend.  "Damn. I wonder what the old devil wants now."

The request may have been phrased in terms of 'earliest convenience' but they both knew that what that really meant was 'as fast as he could possibly get there'.  There was no help for it but to obey.

"There's only one way to find out, Mikky.  You'd better get your skates on.  I've a few jobs I could usefully do this morning anyway.  I'll meet you in the bar before lunch and then, maybe, we could drop planetside this afternoon."

Mikael collected his cap and left the wardroom at a brisk pace.  The Star Base was nearly five kilometres in diameter and the Space Admiral's office was most of that distance from the wardroom.  As usual when in a hurry there were none of the scooters nominally available for the use of the officers actually parked outside the wardroom.  He dropped down a level to the dock area hoping to pick one up there but the level of activity around the inner dock was such that he could not spot an unoccupied scooter anywhere.  He made his way over to the moving walkways instead.

The main horizontal thoroughfares on the Star Base were actually a series of moving walkways, three in each direction.  The outer lane moved at a walking pace of 5km/hour so that it was easy to hop on and off at the intersections.  The middle and inner lanes each increased the speed by another 5 kph so that the two inner lanes were passing each other at a combined speed of 30 kph, with a force field separating them to prevent accidental crossovers.  Mikael hurried down to the nearest intersection, swung onto the outer lane and quickly made his way across to the inside.