The two men talked over their headsets. LeBlanc started giving minute course adjustment orders to his man who controlled pitch and yaw. Max could feel the s.h.i.+p being "wiggled around" to try to find the point in s.p.a.ce where the c.u.mberland's optical scanners were perfectly aligned with the hidden s.h.i.+p and the roughly one-hundred-meter-square drive exhaust array of the ore carrier.

"Skipper," Kasparov spoke up. "We're close enough now to get a posident on Hotels One through Three from their drive signatures. One is a fast ore carrier, Oriole cla.s.s. Two and three are both corvettes, Corpuscle cla.s.s."

"Very well." This was looking better and better. Corpuscles were an older cla.s.s dating back to before the beginning of the war. Two such vessels were hardly a match for the state-of-the-art, practically fresh-out-of-the-yards c.u.mberland. h.e.l.l, four or five wouldn't be much trouble. This might prove to be an easy kill.

Several minutes pa.s.sed, with LeBlanc continuing to "wiggle" the s.h.i.+p based on suggestions from Kasparov.

"Captain, we just got a clear silhouette shot of the trailing s.h.i.+p, now designated as Hotel Four," Kasparov said, finally. There was a definite "oh, s.h.i.+t" tone to his voice. Well, maybe it wouldn't prove to be an easy kill after all. "It's a battlecruiser, heavy. Barrister cla.s.s."

Max and Garcia looked at each other.

"I think we need a new plan," said the XO.

"I think you're right." Long pause. Then, in a studiously calm voice, "Maneuvering, steady as she goes. Cease closure maneuver-maintain current distance to the battlecruiser."

LeBlanc acknowledged the order.

Now, even calmer, in an almost soothing tone, Max ordered, "Stealth, I want a thorough check on all your systems, recheck all emission monitors, verify status of anything on board s.h.i.+p that radiates or could possibly radiate if it were to malfunction. Let's be absolutely positive that we aren't leaking any signal or particles or radiating anything that can cause us to be detected.

"Have the mids.h.i.+pmen visually confirm that all shutters are closed, all docking, hatch, and running lights are off, all thermal radiator fins fully retracted with the doors closed, and all waste vents deactivated and sealed. And by 'visually' I mean visually. I mean I want them to use the inspection optics and their eyeb.a.l.l.s, not the tell tales, the indicator lights, and the status monitors. And if there's anything else you or your back room thinks we should check, check that too. Twice."

Nelson at the Stealth Station acknowledged the order, and started typing commands on his keyboard and talking into his headset. He had a small back room, and they were going to be very busy for the next few minutes. A few minutes later, an older mid rushed into CIC, talked to Nelson face to face, and dashed out again.

"Bartoli, talk to me about the Barrister cla.s.s," Max prompted. "Refresh our memories as to what we are dealing with."

"Sir, the Barrister cla.s.s is the newest and one of the largest Krag battlecruiser cla.s.ses, designed both for very heavy firepower and extreme stealth, or as much stealth as you can have in something that big. Displacement estimated at between fifty-five and sixty-two thousand metric tons, length just under three hundred meters, beam roughly thirty meters.

"The only time one has been seen before is at the Battle of Sylvan B, and it didn't fire any weapons, so we don't have a clear idea of what she's packing, but based on prior designs and her size, we would expect at least sixteen missile tubes: something like six forward, two each port and starboard, two dorsal, two ventral, and two rear. She almost certainly has their newest generation of pulse cannon, which is a turret-mounted, two-hundred-gigawatt unit, usually arrayed in batteries of three. She will probably have somewhere between twelve and eighteen of those, most likely fifteen. Plus the standard array of point defense weapons, countermeasures, grappling fields, projectile guns, and so on. Intelligence estimates that she's got four-meter composite armor all around."

Max could almost hear every a.s.shole in the room puckering in fear. "Okay, Bartoli, I'm sure you have the manual of arms for the Khyber cla.s.s of destroyers practically committed to memory. So, what is the official line on what a Khyber is supposed to do when it encounters a Barrister?"

"ELEVES, sir, the standard tactic for a detached destroyer encountering an enemy of superior force." ELEVES was p.r.o.nounced "elves." It stood for ELude, EVade, and EScape. No s.h.i.+t.

"Or more plainly, run away. Well, I don't plan to run away," Max declared. "Not today, at any rate."

"But sir," Bartoli countered, almost pleadingly, "given that s.h.i.+p's size, and with what we know about Krag s.h.i.+elding, structural integrity fields, and active blast dampers, we would have to hit it with four Ravens, and the safest bet would be to hit it with four Ravens simultaneously."

"Then we'll just have to hit it with four Ravens simultaneously."

Bartoli looked at his captain as though he had proposed attacking the battlecruiser with a thong slingshot and a water pistol. "But we've got only two forward missile tubes. And you can't launch two missiles cold and have them just sitting there in s.p.a.ce while we reload two more and then fire all four. The drives on the first two missiles won't get them going fast enough to penetrate the Krag point defense batteries. If they aren't launched with the starting velocity imparted by the accelerator coils in the launch tubes, the Krag will just shoot them down."

"Then, that's not what we're going to do." He hit the comm switch. "Engineering."

"Engineering. Brown here."

"Wernher, this is the skipper. Do you happen to know how many regulations there are about proper use of the hardware issued to this vessel?"

"Not precisely. I should think that there would something on the order of two or three hundred."

"Well, get up here then. I need your help breaking about fifty of them."

CHAPTER 14.

12:10 Z Hours, 26 January 2315 The c.u.mberland had very slowly and very carefully closed within twelve hundred kilometers of the immense battlecruiser, which continued to lumber on, seemingly oblivious to the comparatively tiny destroyer in her wake. Max supposed that she was straining to spot a destroyer slipping in where it was expected, so intent on looking forward that she hadn't a thought that she was, herself, being stalked from behind.

Twenty minutes before, the destroyer's hangar deck had opened and her cutter, a small, nimble, multipurpose auxiliary vessel, capable of carrying ten men plus a flight crew of two, slid out on maneuvering thrusters only, then slowly eased in its sublight drive, taking up station thirty-five hundred kilometers behind its mother s.h.i.+p. Ensign Mori, the best small-craft pilot on the s.h.i.+p, settled the tiny vessel into its designated place, experiencing unaccustomed difficulty handling the cutter because of the awkwardly placed additional ma.s.s.

Max counted down the seconds to the first step of the minutely calculated timetable that he, Bartoli, Garcia, and Brown had quickly put together. "Maneuvering, EXECUTE."

LeBlanc brought his hand down on the right shoulder of his drives man, Able s.p.a.cer First Fleishman. Two sharp pats. "Go. All ahead Emergency."

Fleishman pushed his main drive controller all the way forward to the stop, bringing the main sublight drive to 125 percent of its rated power. Like an eager cavalry mount spurred by its rider, the c.u.mberland leaped forward. The range to the battlecruiser fell rapidly as the s.h.i.+p accelerated: 11,000... 10,500... 10,000... 9,500... 9,000. At that rate of acceleration, stealth went out the window, so at 8,800 kilometers, apparently having gotten a general detection of the destroyer, the Krag vessel began to sweep the area with her powerful active sensors, instantly pinpointing the s.h.i.+p on her tail.

"Battlecruiser has increased her sublight drive to Emergency," said Bartoli. The larger s.h.i.+p's top speed was slower than the destroyer's, and she accelerated more slowly; still, the increased acceleration substantially slowed the closure rate between the two s.h.i.+ps. "Battlecruiser is sweeping us with targeting scanners... she's initiating a lock sequence."

"Fire the Egg Scrambler" Max ordered. The communications jammer shot from tube three and immediately detonated, making interstellar communications impossible. Unless their enemy survived the battle, any news the Krag pa.s.sed on about this attack could travel no faster than the speed of light. It would be years before anyone heard it.

"Evasive India Three. Countermeasures." Immediately LeBlanc started giving a series of intricate orders to his men, jinking the highly maneuverable destroyer erratically to slow the ability of the enemy to get a targeting lock while still continuing to close the range to the battlecruiser. Meanwhile, one Countermeasures officer in CIC and seven of his back room colleagues activated and managed various scrambling pulses, confusing echoes, jamming signals, infrared drones, chaff dispensing missiles, and other kinds of subterfuge designed to confuse, deceive, distract, divert, or otherwise dis...o...b..bulate the Krag targeting systems so that the battlecruiser's deadly pulse cannon could not get a killing shot.

Max stabbed the comm switch. "CIC to Mori."

"Mori here."

"You ready?"

"I've got my eye on the sun and my paddle in the water." Mori was born on a tiny island in the Micronesia chain on Earth. His people, in an almost inconceivable feat of seamans.h.i.+p and navigation, had paddled dugout canoes across thousands of miles of the open Pacific without chart or compa.s.s to make precise landfall on tiny islands smaller than the average farm in the American Midwest. Mori himself had spent much of his childhood in such craft before deciding at age nine to venture into an infinitely vaster ocean.

"Go at the designated mark."

"Affirmative. Three. Two. One. Now." Mori engaged the powerful sublight drive on the cutter, which, even with the extra weight, quickly began to overtake the destroyer. The accelerating battlecruiser had not spotted him yet, having a more immediate threat to deal with.

The c.u.mberland's evasive maneuvers combined with an excellent countermeasures deployment helped confuse the Krag targeting systems, for now. Determining that they could not get a positive lock, the Krag decided to fire by bearing rather than firing by lock, meaning that they pointed their cannon along the measured bearing of the destroyer rather than having a coaxial lock between the targeting scanner and the weapon bore.

Brilliant pulse cannon bolts streaked past the c.u.mberland, some pa.s.sing within meters of her hull. s.p.a.ce was big, but it wasn't that big. It was only a matter of time before the Krag got a hit by this method, or before the decreasing range allowed the targeting scanners to get a lock.

The c.u.mberland began firing its own, somewhat less powerful pulse cannon, on the off chance of doing some damage or at least helping confuse the enemy targeting systems. It was impossible to miss a nonevading target of that size at that range, so every shot scored a hit on the battlecruiser, but her deflectors and immensely thick, armored hull prevented any major damage. The fifth shot did, however, actually manage to destroy one of the battlecruiser's two aft targeting scanners. With only one targeting scanner operating, the chances of getting a lock decreased significantly.

Concealed by the c.u.mberland's attack, the accelerating cutter came up behind her mother s.h.i.+p, matching its speed at .60 c. The two s.h.i.+ps exchanged quick digital signals verifying that each was prepared for the next step, starting a five-second countdown clock on each vessel. When his clock reached zero, Mori nudged his drive controller forward and pulled around the c.u.mberland on its port side. Just as the cutter drew even with the c.u.mberland's missile tubes and reached a speed of .61c, the c.u.mberland fired a Raven heavy antis.h.i.+p missile from each of its two forward missile tubes.

At that same moment, four explosive bolts on the port side of the cutter and four on the starboard detonated, each set releasing a hastily fas.h.i.+oned bracket that had held a Raven to the hull of the Cutter. Following their recently altered flight software, these two Ravens yawed away from the cutter for two seconds at low power before their drives went to full stage and rapidly accelerated the missiles to attack speed, matching that of their two brethren just fired from the c.u.mberland.

"Maneuvering, break away," Max nearly shouted. "Missile rooms, reload with Talons."

LeBlanc gave the preplanned orders to his men, veering the destroyer ninety degrees away from its previous course while continuing to accelerate at Emergency so that the Krag gunners would have to try to follow the fastest possible change in bearing. As the range opened up and the c.u.mberland continued to accelerate, the pulse cannon bolts trailed hopelessly behind.

The four Raven missiles streaked toward their target. Communicating with one another in microsecond-long coded bursts, their sophisticated onboard computers coordinated their attack second by second, working together like a pack of wolves to confuse and destroy their prey.

After flying together in a rough box formation for a few seconds, the missiles separated from one another, each approaching the huge vessel from amids.h.i.+ps as though each were approaching from a different cardinal point of the compa.s.s. Within its designated target zone, each missile scanned its quarry, selecting a particularly vulnerable point-a hatch, a junction between two hull plates, a cl.u.s.ter of waste gas vents. Three missiles slowed slightly and one speeded up so that they would impact and detonate at exactly the same microsecond, placing the maximum stress on the structure, s.h.i.+elding, integrity fields, and blast suppression systems of the Krag vessel. Finally, at 99.28 percent of the speed of light, all four streaked past the Krag defenses and detonated as one.

Four 1.5-megaton fusion warheads exploded-four suns born around the Krag's hull, growing and merging into a gigantic four-lobed fireball consuming the battlecruiser in less than a second. The orb of destruction a.s.similated metal and plastic, bone and flesh alike, taking atoms forged by nucleosynthesis billions of years ago in the cores of now long-dead supernovae and hurling them back into the void.

Max watched the expanding globe of light as it filled his screen. He had never seen four of the big warheads used on a target all at once, and he was awed by the enormous destruction that could be unleashed at his order. And by how powerful the bombs were in comparison to the puny men who made them.

The fireball faded. There was still work to do. "Tactical, what are our remaining friends doing?

"The ore carrier's course and speed are unchanged-he's still headed for the jump point, ETA six hours, thirty-seven minutes. A reasonable hypothesis is that the vessel is automated. And the corvettes are running for it-drives are redlined. Heading is two-two-five mark zero-one-five. That's a course for the nearest edge of the zone messed up by the Egg Scrambler"

"Can we get within pulse cannon range before they get there?"

Someone in Tactical's back room who was paying close enough attention, either watching the overall situation or listening to the conversation in CIC or both, decided that just such a calculation would be needed and had put it up on one of Tactical's screens. "Affirmative, sir. With the main sublight at 'Full,' we can still catch them with about six minutes to spare. And even if they get there, sir, Corpuscles have a top speed on compression of only about twelve hundred c. We could overtake them pretty quickly."

"That's good to know, Tactical, but I prefer not to engage a superluminal target if I can help it. Maneuvering, reduce to full and shape course to intercept the corvettes."

"Ahead full, course to intercept corvettes, aye." LeBlanc implemented the drive setting change, spent a few moments with his console, calculating the new course, and then gave the course change orders.

The c.u.mberland overtook the two smaller s.h.i.+ps, rapidly drawing within pulse cannon range of the fleeing vessels.

"Weapons, bring pulse cannon one and pulse cannon three to Prefire. Target cannon one on Hotel Two and cannon three on Hotel Three. Hold pulse cannon two on Standby."

"Aye, sir, pulse one and three to Prefire, two remaining on Standby." Weapons acknowledged. Eleven seconds pa.s.sed as the systems that diverted plasma from the s.h.i.+p's main reactor and routed it through s.h.i.+elded conduits into the cannons' firing chambers were energized, their cooling systems powered up and engaged, and the cannon aiming systems enabled. Two green lights on the Weapons console came on.

"Pulse one and pulse three at Prefire. Targeting now." The huge magnetic coils that guided the pulse blasts came to life, drew aiming data from the targeting computer, and synched with the targeting scanner, which had already locked onto the targets. Two more green lights came on. Each cannon's target appeared on one of Tactical's screens, along with the target's ID, course, speed, and range.

"Pulse one locked on Hotel Two. Pulse three locked on Hotel Three."

"Pulse one and pulse three to ready."

Weapons stabbed two orange b.u.t.tons, one for each cannon to be fired, which caused plasma to flow from the reactor into the firing chambers, building up sufficient quant.i.ty to fire the weapons. This took four seconds, after which two more green lights at Tactical winked on. "Pulse one and pulse three ready."

"Set for maximum power, synchronized firing."

"Max power, synch firing, aye."

"Range to targets?"

"We are 9,355 kills to Hotel Two, 9,357 kills to Hotel Three." Maximum effective range was 10,500 kilometers.

"Confirm targets."

"Pulse one is targeted on Krag corvette designated Hotel Two off our bow, range 9,355 kills. Pulse two is targeted on Krag corvette designated Hotel Three off our bow, range 9,357 kills."

"Captain, I think we are missing something important here," Garcia interjected.

"Like what?" Max was not entirely successful in concealing his irritation at being interrupted just as he was about to kill these two targets.

"Why aren't they evading? Corvettes are very maneuverable. I mean, as soon as we got in range these guys should have started jinking all over the place, right?"

Good question. Why the h.e.l.l not? What could they possibly have to gain by not zigzagging? Max could think of only one thing: if the corvettes maintained a constant course, then the c.u.mberland was more likely to maintain a constant course as well. Therefore, the Krag must want his s.h.i.+p to stay in a constant position relative to theirs. Why would they want that? Oh. c.r.a.p.

"Forward deflectors to maximum-tune for metallic object about two meters in diameter with extremely low relative velocity. Point defense batteries, zone firing. Blanket thirty-degree cone forward. s.p.a.ceframe reinforcement to maximum. All hands brace for impact."

CIC held its breath for two and a half seconds, at which point the console screens showing output from the forward optical scanners flared white and then went dark, their receptors burned out. A split second later, the s.h.i.+p trembled mildly as the shock wave from the explosion, almost vanis.h.i.+ngly tenuous in the vacuum of outer s.p.a.ce, struck the hull.

"All right, now that we've got that settled, let's fry the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Weapons, fire pulse one and two."

Weapons pressed both fire controls and two glowing b.a.l.l.s of compressed plasma about two meters in diameter streaked through s.p.a.ce, each striking its target dead center and exploding as its containment field-generated by a tiny liquid heliumcooled emitter inserted in the plasma pulse as it left the gun tube-shattered with the explosive force of about half a kiloton.

It wasn't much compared to a missile, but the blast equivalent of five hundred tons of TNT, not to mention the thermal and structural stress of being struck at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed by a ball of compressed, ionized gas as hot as the interior of the sun, was enough to spell the end of two superannuated corvettes. Both s.h.i.+ps tore themselves apart in twin orgies of glaring explosions and shredding metal.

A few moments later, as normalcy returned to CIC and the destroyer shaped course to intercept the now defenseless ore carrier, the XO turned to his skipper.

"Sir, do you mind telling me what the h.e.l.l just happened."

"Oh, that." Max managed to sound almost nonchalant. "New weapon. One of our spy s.h.i.+ps witnessed a test of it inside Krag s.p.a.ce a few months ago, but we didn't know that it was deployed yet: code name 'Remora' or something like that. Nasty little f.u.c.ker. It's a stealthed, remote-controlled fusion bomb designed to kill an overtaking s.h.i.+p. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds launch it cold, and it comes at you slowly and undetectably just as you think you are boring in at them on their six. The stealth is so good that the point defense grid doesn't pick it up, and the speed relative to the chasing s.h.i.+p is so low that the deflectors don't even budge it. They just let it crawl back until they've got it snuggled right up against the hull and then BLAM. You never see it coming."

He turned toward Tactical. "That looked like-what?-a one-fifty or one-sixty kiloton burst?"

"Our reading is one-five-two kilo tango, Skipper," Bartoli answered.

"Okay, a hundred-and-fifty-two kt thermonuclear burst. Inside the deflectors. Right up against the hull. That's a 100 percent kill for anything from a medium cruiser on down. Who knows how many times they've used it without us being the wiser? No warning. No survivors. Just another s.h.i.+p 'missing, presumed lost.' If it hadn't been for your question, XO, they would have gotten us too."

Max shook his head ruefully. Already he could think of five lost Union s.h.i.+ps that had left debris patterns perfectly explained by what he had observed about this weapon.

"Anyway, tuning the deflector for an object of the right size and relative velocity pushed it away from the s.h.i.+p where the point defense batteries were able to get a lock once the deflectors had it. The computer on board the weapon determined that it was going to be destroyed, so it detonated before we could hit it. We lived. They died." This time. "That's the name of the game.

"Chin, raise the cutter." Chin clicked a few keys.

"Cutter, Mori here."