The old guard, p.25
The Old Guard, page 25
“So, sneak past a security sphere the most powerful navy in the galaxy believes is secure, avoid the survey craft making sure nothing goes wrong with the reserve ships, board a ship with a computer system smart enough to call for help if we turn it on wrong, and then turn said system on,” Jarret summarized with an amused snort. “No big deal, right?”
“We can do it,” Lorraine assured them. “We’ve known that from the beginning or we wouldn’t be here. It’s already too late to turn back.
“We make the run, we blind the drones and we take control of the Valkyries. Then we leave Goldenrod on autopilot and get out of here.”
“One question, I suppose,” Paris noted. “Sooner or later, the UWN is going to realize what we’re doing. They’ll try to stop us. What do we do then?”
“We lie, we dodge, we run,” she told her people. “Goldenrod doesn’t have the guns or armor to go up against even one UWN destroyer, and once we’re aboard the Valkyries, we almost certainly won’t have enough active weapons or munitions to make a fight of anything.
“Plus, the last thing we want to do is get into a firefight. If we can get out of here without being identified, that buys us time.”
“Not as much as you might think,” Devine warned. “We have to make the run through the Tavastar–Bright Dream wormhole. If we get there ahead of any news of the theft at Calypso, I think we can baffle our way through and into the Cluster, but they’ll put the pieces together after that.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Lorraine said grimly. There wasn’t going to be much hiding the battlecruisers showing up at Adamantine, no matter what. Sooner or later, she’d deal with the consequences of this.
“No matter what happens, we do not fire on the United Worlds Navy,” she ordered. “Robbing them is going to be enough of a headache. Killing any of them is going to sink us forever.”
FORTY-FOUR
Valkyrie slept.
A thousand systems throughout the battlecruiser’s hull worked away, managing the atmosphere at levels without enough oxygen to damage anything. Nitrogen filled her passageways, but there was oxygen stored in tanks for the next repair or survey crew.
Once, those thousand systems would have reported to the main computer center. Everything about the ship would have been available to the Command Intelligence Routine and her Captain at the touch of a key, collated, coordinated and organized automatically before the main computer ever touched it.
Those connections had been severed. In some places, links remained to the auxiliary computer systems—key systems the maintenance crew needed to access in one place—but even many of those links were gone now.
Most were fed in to interlocks that could be deactivated. Others had been physically cut, the failsafes linked in to those systems judged too likely to trigger a wake-up.
Close-range passive scanners registered an approaching shuttle, flagging it as a potential concern, but the warning went nowhere. That link had been fully cut, as the system that would have assessed the maintenance craft’s identity beacon was part of the CIR.
The shuttle stopped five hundred kilometers away from the ship, equidistant from Valkyrie and her two sisters, and pulsed those auxiliary computers. Data uploads commenced, but there was nothing to see in them.
The humans on the shuttle would never even look at them. Why would they?
Nothing changed in Calypso. Except for the occasional “weather damage,” nothing had changed aboard Valkyrie in ten years.
And so the ship slept on.
FORTY-FIVE
“And there she is. UWNS Valkyrie herself, nameship of the class, lead ship of Reserve Battlecruiser Division Calypso-Three-Alpha,” Savege announced. “And her inspection shuttle just flicked her engines online and started away.”
“Then I think that makes Division Alpha our target,” Lorraine said, studying the maps projected around the bridge.
The bridge crew were cycling to let people take catnaps. She’d stepped away from the bridge a few times but never for more than an hour. She hoped she’d squeezed enough sleep into those short breaks to keep going, because she doubted that she was going to sleep until they were done now.
“Division Bravo got a check two hours ago, so if they’re on the twenty-four-hour cycle it looks like, we’d only have nineteen hours left by the time we got there,” Stephson agreed. “Yildiz, set the course.”
The change was imperceptible aboard the ship, though Lorraine could see the line marking their deceleration vector shift on the map. Division Alpha and Division Bravo were over two hundred thousand kilometers apart—but Goldenrod was still over three hours away from either of them.
“We will breach the security perimeter in ten minutes,” Paris warned. “Em Devine?”
“Major Vinci and I have pinged every drone on this side of the sphere,” the UW spy replied. “We’ve got an automatic program continuing to ping them as they orbit the planet, but we’ve downloaded the worm into over twenty thousand probes.”
Lorraine swallowed a soft whistle. That wasn’t even half of the sphere surrounding Calypso-Three, which drove home just how vast the security at the Reserve Station was.
It wasn’t necessarily being carefully managed, and there were things missing that were supposed to be there, but the scale of the Calypso Station’s defenses was still mind-blowing. The Reserve itself held more capital ships than the entire Royal Kingdom of Adamant Navy, and the defenses’ designers clearly had resources to burn.
“The drones are a bit out of date,” Devine noted. “I don’t know if we’d have been able to automate the process as effectively if they’d had the last round of software patches. The codes buried in the worm are valid, but even valid codes used like this should trigger alerts. Except the software’s out of date and I know the alert mechanisms in this version.
“And the new one,” he admitted, “but the new one is just that much harder to work around.”
“So. Where’s the trap?” Lorraine asked. “Because while I need this to go smoothly…”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Stephson replied. “We make one misstep as we cross the security perimeter, and there will be destroyers on us inside of twenty minutes.”
If Alastair Devine wanted to sell them out, this would be the moment. Not that Lorraine could see any value whatsoever to her boyfriend in doing so, but this was their most vulnerable window.
“Range is sixty thousand kilometers to the nearest drone and dropping,” Paris reported. “Once we enter their active radar zone, the odds of the heat shield getting picked up start rising. And we are entering that zone… now.”
A pin dropping would have echoed endlessly on the suddenly silent bridge. Seconds ticked away, each of them seeing hundreds of kilometers vanish as the frigate and her shield plunged toward their destination.
“We have been pinged with radar multiple times. None have crossed the detection threshold on the heat shield yet,” the Tactical Officer finally reported. “At this point, we’re going to be getting pulsed with radar regularly until we are well inside the sphere.”
Lorraine forced herself to breathe. Silence wasn’t necessary—it wasn’t like sound transmitted across the vacuum of space. Everyone aboard Goldenrod could scream at the top of their lungs and the sensor probes tacked on to their heat shield wouldn’t hear it.
The sensor drones guarding Calypso-Three were looking for heat and electromagnetic radiation. The shield between Goldenrod and the perimeter was capturing everything they were generating, but every fifteen seconds or so, one drone in every twenty fired off a pulse of radar.
Those pulses swept over Lorraine’s ship like the hunters they were, crisscrossing space.
“So far, your radar-absorbing material is holding,” Devine said. “The real problem will be when we interpenetrate.”
Then their umbrella would become a shell and, for a few hours, would contain all of the heat they produced.
The bridge was still quiet, though far from silent, as they reached the invisible sphere in space that marked the moment of truth.
“We are reshaping the shield,” Savege reported. “Maintaining a full barrier between us and the sensor sphere.”
A ten-kilometer-wide hemisphere slowly reshaped into a smaller sphere that fully encompassed the ship. Goldenrod moved farther back in the shape, giving her engines more room to expel gas while keeping the whole assembly moving.
The reaction mass had to escape the sphere for the engines to work, and that was the biggest danger to the entire affair. Enemy sensor scans or not, Goldenrod had to slow down to match her target. They were on secondary thrusters now, not the main drives, but those still had to put reaction mass into space and that fuel was warmer than the void.
The sphere could conceal the ship but not her exhaust, not once she was surrounded on all sides. Now their safety depended half on Devine’s software worms… and half on the fact that no one would expect there to be a contact inside the security perimeter.
“We’re through. Radar exceeded detection levels at least three times,” Paris reported grimly. “No activity on the part of the patrols.”
Lorraine sighed in relief. She had believed Alastair’s assurances, but too much had ridden on this moment.
“It looks like most if not all of the passive scanners are pointed outward,” Savege said. “Visual on the drones suggests they don’t have much pointed inside the sphere at all.”
“Why would you?” Lorriane asked. “After all, you have to get past the sensor screen to be inside it. Our sensor drones have blind spots too, and if I was building a sphere like this… yeah, the blind spots would all be on the inside.
“Especially when there’s shuttles and ships and stations in here, in case something very strange happens,” she continued. “And those sensor packages have people behind them, folks. So, let’s be very, very careful.”
“Course is locked in,” Yildiz said calmly. “Two hours, forty-five minutes. Please try to keep the stressing out to a minimum.
“I have faith in our Tactical Team,” the Navigator continued, with a pointed look over at Paris. “Doesn’t everyone else?”
FORTY-SIX
Lorraine couldn’t shake the itchy feeling between her shoulder blades, like an entire battle fleet—as powerful as any of those her nation had fielded in their last war a decade earlier—was aiming right at her.
There had been decisive battles in the war between the Kingdom of Adamant and the Richelieu Directorate that had involved fewer than six capital ships total. For the United Worlds Navy, the six active ships guarding the Calypso Station were an afterthought.
And for all the I’m being watched feeling she was suffering from, the six full squadrons of capital ships scattered around the planet had stayed quiescent so far. There was no sign that Devine’s worm in the security perimeter had been discovered, and Goldenrod was shedding the last of her velocity as she headed toward her rendezvous with Valkyrie.
Dozens of people were swarming all around her as the final prep for the boarding operation carried on, but her feet followed a long-familiar path across the shuttle-bay deck. The scent of metal, grease and fuel filled the air as she stepped up to a standard-mode Midas.
“Hey, old girl,” she murmured to the spacecraft, resting her hand on the metal.
“We made sure your old bird was free,” Chevrolet said behind her. She turned to meet her old boss’s gaze.
Commander Olavi Chevrolet was Goldenrod’s Commanding Officer, Shuttles, and when she’d been Bravo Flight Commander, the fragile-looking redheaded man had been her direct boss. He’d handled having a Pentarch under his command well—and had handled his subordinate suddenly becoming the mission commander with astonishing grace.
“I appreciate it, COSH,” she told him. “I feel like I’ve neglected her, but I can still fly.”
“I’ve seen the simulator records, Lorraine,” Chevrolet said dryly. “Plus, you have Jarret as your copilot. The two of you on the flight deck? They’d need a destroyer at least to stop you!”
“I hope so,” she said. “But really, we aren’t going far. This is just a short cargo run.”
“Yeah. Just a short cargo run,” he echoed back to her, gesturing at the fully armored Adamant Guard squad boarding the shuttle. “We’re putting thirty of the Guard and twenty of Cortez’s best engineering people—including the Cheng!—onto that ship.
“If this goes wrong…”
“It won’t matter if you’re on Valkyrie or Goldenrod, COSH,” Lorraine warned. “There’s too much firepower out here. Either we can run translight with the battlecruisers or…”
“Word of advice, from your old boss?” he said. “Don’t point that out to too many people. Hope is what’s getting us through this: hope that you can pull off the impossible and save our Kingdom from the Black Regent.”
“I can. I will,” Lorraine said, surprised at the certainty behind the words. “The hard part’s done, Olavi. We got here.
“Now we just have to deal with the computer.”
“Just,” he echoed again. “I’m leading the second wave, Your Highness, heading for Herakles. Fly clean, shoot straight. We’ll see you on the other side.”
“Same to you, Commander. When this is over and we’re all home, beer is on me.”
“Be careful who you say that to as well! You could end up in a very deep hole.”
Lorraine laughed.
“Spread it as wide as you want, COSH,” she instructed. “When we get home, I’m buying beer for anyone who was on this ship until the end of time!”
While Lorraine had kept up her simulator hours, it had been through a VR interface with her neural link that any pilot would admit was inferior to a proper simulator, let alone live flight time.
Taking the Midas out of Goldenrod’s shuttle bay for the boarding run was the first time she’d put her hands and link on the controls of a live shuttle since the day her parents had died. That day, of course, she’d been carrying nukes rigged to explode and the shuttle had been wired with remote-detonated explosives to finish the job.
Thanks to Vigo Jarret, none of those traps had been allowed to go off. Now her bodyguard sat in her copilot’s seat as they slid quietly into the void.
“Some of it, you never forget,” he murmured, watching her work. “You good?”
“In more ways than one,” she confirmed. “It’s good to be back in the pilot’s seat. I knew it wasn’t going to be my career… but I definitely missed it.”
The gap between Goldenrod and the heat shield concealing her was only a few kilometers, but they weren’t pushing the shuttle’s engines. Less than one tenth of a gravity took time to cross that enclosed space—but added less heat than higher acceleration would.
And there was already plenty of heat. Goldenrod had vented extra atmosphere into the shield to act as an additional heat sink, but Lorraine wasn’t used to there being a background temperature in space.
“I have eyes on our exit; pinging to you,” Jarret told her.
His icon matched the icon she’d been following—if they hadn’t matched, she’d have been extremely worried. In its current spherical form, the shield had four points that could open to allow the Midas through, and each shuttle had a designated exit.
The gap wasn’t much bigger than the shuttle itself, a gap five meters wide and ten high, but that was more than enough for any competent pilot at the relative velocities in play. If Lorraine had blinked, she could have missed the instant of passage.
The change in view from being inside the sphere and being in orbit above Calypso-Three couldn’t have been missed. The sphere itself was the most immediately visible thing, but it swiftly shrank into insignificance as Lorraine processed the space around her.
The second most visible thing was Valkyrie herself. Like Goldenrod, the battlecruiser resembled a sword in space, with dorsal and ventral sensor towers at the rear forming the “crossbar hilt.”
Unlike Goldenrod, Valkyrie was eight hundred meters long from bow to stern, smooth lines expanding from her nearly pointed forward prow to the engines behind the sensor towers. Those lines were clear despite being interrupted by everything from the rows of single-shot external missile racks to the massive, hundred-meter-long cells of her habitat pods nestled inactively into their pockets.
Past her, Lorraine could see the identical lines of Herakles. The second wave of shuttles would wait until they’d made it to Valkyrie’s central computer, hopefully allowing them to identify any traps or problems before they moved on to the second and third ships.
Past Herakles was the rest of the Reserve Station. Closest was a division of battleships, the oldest ships in the Calypso Station and only half a million tons or so larger than their RKAN counterparts, but there were dozens upon dozens of starships organized into neat lines, forming false constellations in Calypso’s skies.
“All shuttles are clear of the sphere,” Jarret told her. “Major Watanabe is making the first approach, right?”
Lorraine chuckled at the pointed tone of the question.
“Yes,” she confirmed. Isabella Watanabe had taken over her old Bravo Flight and had invoked the privilege of rank to lead the way—especially since there was no way Lorraine could invoke the same thing to lead the way herself.
“Bravo-One, this is Actual,” she said into the squadron net. “Check in all birds?”
“We have four in the air, all on course and synchronized, Actual,” Watanabe replied. “Going over the schematics, I mark Shuttle Bay Three as our best entry.”
“Closest to Engineering and the computer center,” Lorraine agreed. They’d gone over this in advance, but there was always a chance something would change when they saw the destination in person.
