The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible (17 page)

“About a third the mass and length,” Desjani agreed. “Lieutenant Castries, get me an estimate of how many Kicks could be on that escape ship.

The reply took a moment. “Our systems estimate the escape craft was designed to carry a maximum of one hundred creatures the size of the Kicks,” Castries reported. “That’s if they were crammed in, and if their equipment took about the same amount of internal space as standard human layouts. At the lower end, it might service as few as twenty Kicks.”

“One hundred at most.” Desjani made a face. “That superbattleship could easily have a crew of thousands.”

“Maybe a lot of automation,” Geary speculated. “No. Some of the videos we’ve seen take place on ships, and those showed many bear-cows crowding them. But only a hundred at the very most had a means of escape.” The answer came to him then. “The officers. The commanding officer, his or her staff, maybe family if they do that. The leaders of this part of the herd, leaving that herd behind while they head for safety.”

“I prefer the term ‘herd-leaders,’” Desjani said sharply. “Officers should never abandon their crews, and there are no signs that huge warship has any other escape craft.”

“Some bear-cows are more equal than others,” Geary said. “That shouldn’t be a surprise. We knew they had leaders, and leaders can easily become an elite caste.”

“Like the Syndics.”

“Maybe. In some ways.” Though even the Syndics had put escape pods on their warships. But then the Syndics didn’t have at least thirty billion spare worker bear-cows packed cheek to jowl. “These herd-leaders may be running, but they won’t get away.”

Desjani smiled, letting out a small laugh. “Too many spiders blocking their way.”

Indeed, right now the spider-wolf ships bearing down on the escape craft amid a welter of curving intercept vectors resembled a web rapidly ensnaring the fleeing bear-cow commander.

For its size, the escape craft had impressive shields. But it couldn’t carry much armor, not and stay swift and agile, and it had few weapons, which fired desperately at the converging spider-wolf warships as they closed in for firing runs.

A score of spider-wolf ships slashed at the escape craft in attacks that collapsed its shields, penetrated its hull, then must have triggered a core overload. As the spider-wolf attackers curved away after their strikes, only a blossoming field of debris remained of the escape ship.

“I guess the spiders weren’t interested in prisoners,” Desjani remarked. “Why did the commander run? They’d have been safer staying on the superbattleship.”

“That ship is doomed,” Geary said. “Perhaps the commander panicked, perhaps we’re going to see it self-destruct now, and the commander didn’t want to go out that way.”

“The commander went out that way anyway,” Desjani said dryly, pointing toward the remnants of the escape ship. “Hmmm. They would have been well clear of that crippled ship by now. Even a worst-case estimate of the blast radius shows they would have been out of danger from that. Why hasn’t it blown?”

“A booby trap? Like Captain Smythe suggested with
Invincible
? The bear-cows have rigged their superbattleship to blow up when we try to board?”

“Or something went wrong,” Desjani suggested. “Or the Kicks left aboard aren’t interested in being blown to pieces. Or they never intended doing an overload. I checked the records of the engagement. None of the crippled Kick ships self-destructed. The spider-wolves blew apart any that were crippled but still intact.”

“When did you have a chance to go over the records of the engagement?” Geary wondered, thinking of everything that he had been doing since the battle ended.

“I used my copious free time. One second here, one second there . . . it adds up.”

Geary clenched his fists. “There’s still a chance we can capture that thing.”

“Yes,” Desjani agreed. “But whoever goes aboard will face the possibility of the superbattleship blowing up once they’re inside, as well as fighting thousands of Kicks who will probably fight to the death to avoid getting eaten alive, which they would expect us awful predators to do. Have I ever told you why I didn’t become a Marine?”

“I know you’ve led boarding parties,” Geary said, recalling the Alliance Fleet Cross medal that Desjani never spoke about except in vague terms.

“When I was young and foolish.” She shook her head. “Still no self-destruct. Hey, I thought of something. The spider-wolf tactics and weapons alone wouldn’t have taken down that armada, even though the spider-wolves must have some way of stopping the Kicks.”

“You already mentioned that.”

“Did I? This part I just thought of. Maybe the Kicks haven’t lost ships in hostile systems. Their battles have been at home or they’ve been able to get everyone who wasn’t blown apart home. They wouldn’t have procedures or plans for scuttling ships because it never happened. I mean, look at that thing.” She waved toward the image of the superbattleship. “Would you expect to have that thing trapped and helpless?”

“It’s not exactly helpless. Weapons and shields are still operational. And what about that escape ship?”

“Good point. The leaders aboard that thing must have had reasons to expect to need to be able to leave. Could that have been the armada flagship?”

“It could have been.” A fleet commander would need some means of leaving a crippled ship during a fight so they could continue the battle from another flagship. “But even if you’re right, that doesn’t mean it would be impossible for the crew left on that battleship to rig up a means of self-destruct. We just don’t know.”

Desjani nodded toward her display. “The survivors of the armada are still running for the jump point. Forty-one ships. I’m glad the spider-wolves are chasing them because even I don’t feel like that right now. But if the last Kick ship leaves this star system, and the superbattleship is still intact, we’re going to have to decide whether to run the risks of trying to take it.”

“I’m going to have to decide,” Geary corrected.

THE
image of General Carabali gestured toward the display in Geary’s stateroom. “This is about that ship?”

“Yes, General.” Geary zoomed the display in on the crippled superbattleship. “Can your Marines take it?”

“Can we? Yes, Admiral, I am confident of that. What I can’t be confident about is how much it might cost.”

That was the big question. “I understand. In light of that, I need your best assessment on whether we
should
try to take it,” Geary said.

Carabali paused, thinking. “There are a lot of unknowns. We have only a general idea of current Kick individual combat capability, based on some of the videos we intercepted. But you know how much movies can vary from reality, and we don’t know if what we’ve seen are movies or documentaries. We also don’t know how many Kicks are still aboard that ship. I wouldn’t estimate less than a thousand, but it could be much more. A ship that size could hold ten thousand if they wanted to put that many aboard.”

“Ten thousand?” Geary asked in amazement. “That’s your estimate of the crew size?”

“No, sir. That’s our top end. The most plausible estimate of crew size is five or six thousand. That’s a lot of Kicks.” Carabali paused as she found her train of thought again. “We know nothing about the layout of the ship. During a normal boarding operation, my Marines would head for certain critical areas, gaining control of the power core controls, the bridge, and other vital places. We don’t know where those are in this ship or what form their controls take.”

“We don’t even know if they have compartments like that as we understand them,” Geary agreed.

“The internal layout . . .” Carabali shrugged. “The Kicks are a lot smaller than us. The size of their passageways might be very tight for a Marine in combat armor. Even if we have a firepower advantage on a Marine-to-Kick basis, employing that firepower might be difficult. It all adds up to a very challenging operation, something more like an assault on a fort than a ship-boarding operation.”

It wasn’t a pretty picture, but the Marine general hadn’t said it wasn’t doable. Indeed, she had said it could be done. The question remained whether the gains from seizing that ship justified the risks of trying to capture it. Captain Smythe and the civilian experts had already weighed in, all of them enthralled by the prospect of being able to exploit such a capture for information about the bear-cows and their technology.

Conceivably, there might be the clues aboard the ship that could lead to human discovery of how to build that defense against orbital bombardment. The value of that one thing alone would justify almost any price. Almost any sacrifice. “But you can do it.” Geary made that a statement, not a question this time.

“Yes, sir. Assuming the Kicks don’t blow the ship to hell before we can stop them. Before the landing operation can commence we’ll need to have the warship’s external defenses reduced, and we’ll need close support after that. That means significant fleet assets located near that huge ship, where they would also be endangered if it self-destructs.”

“Understood.” He would be committing a lot of his limited numbers of ships and Marines to this attack. If the bear-cows were just waiting to lure in humans, then they could destroy everything that Geary sent into or close to that superbattleship. There was a real chance that he could take hideous losses and gain nothing.

But if he didn’t take any risks, he was guaranteed to gain nothing, guaranteed to pass up the sort of opportunity that might never come again.

“Begin your planning,” Geary ordered. “Assume you have use of any available assets. I’ll be planning to use every warship necessary to take down the alien defenses before the Marines go in. It’s going to be a dirty job, but I know you can do it.”

Carabali saluted, smiling sardonically. “That’s why you have Marines along, to do the dirty jobs no one else wants or can do. When do you want my plan, Admiral?”

“As soon as possible, but take the time you need to get it right. We’re not going anywhere until a lot more repairs have been done on our damaged ships.”

“I understand, sir. Our planning in this case is going to be simplified by the lack of detailed knowledge. We’re going to have to do a lot of this op on the fly once we get inside that thing. Fortunately, Marines are good at that.”

Geary sat down after Carabali’s image had vanished, lowering his face into both hands as he thought about how many men and women had already died in this star system and how many more might die as a result of this decision.

THE
superbattleship spun slowly through space, the depression where the escape craft had rested occasionally coming into sight as the warship rolled. It showed few signs of damage except at the stern, where the main propulsion units had been mangled by at least one powerful blow, which had apparently set off sympathetic explosions. “Their main engineering spaces may be destroyed,” Captain Smythe had suggested. “If that’s the case, they would have had to shut down the power core, or whatever they use.”

“Why do they still have shields up and weapons working?” Geary asked.

“A secondary power source for those purposes. Both shields and weapons require less power than main propulsion at full drain. They could conceivably have several secondary power sources, each supplying different functions. Inefficient by our standards, but the backup that kind of redundancy provides would be a very nice thing to have.”

The Alliance fleet hung stationary relative to the superbattleship, most of the ships thirty light-seconds distant in a cluster that minimized distances between units as shuttles flew between them bearing spare parts and repair teams. Much closer to the superbattleship, all of the human battleships along with half of the battle cruisers were arrayed around the enemy ship. Even though all of the ships were traveling through space, they appeared motionless to each other.

The fleet’s combat systems and Captain Smythe’s engineers had estimated what the worst-case damage radius might be if one or more power cores on the superbattleship overloaded. Geary had added half again that distance to the total and placed his battleships outside of that, the battle cruisers a little farther off still.

Much more distant, a good ten light-minutes away, the spider-wolf ships had re-formed into a beautifully patterned formation as the aliens watched the human action from a very safe distance. The spider-wolves were certainly respecting their previous agreement that the superbattleship was the property of the humans to dispose of. None of the humans who were “talking” to the spider-wolves had been able to tell what the aliens thought of the human decision to try to capture the bear-cow warship, but the fact that the spider-wolves were watching from so far off was a pretty clear sign that the aliens weren’t interested in taking part or even getting caught in whatever mess the humans had decided to stir up.

“Maybe they are smarter than we are,” Charban had commented.

Rione had been more direct, speaking privately to Geary. “I know you’re aware of what can happen if you send thousands of Marines into that ship.”

“I am painfully aware of the possibilities,” he had answered. “What price would you pay for that planetary defense against space bombardment?”

She had read the anger behind his statement. “There’s something else. What?”

Geary had fixed her eyes with his. “You pretty much confirmed for me that the governments of the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation didn’t want their warships coming home.”