The silver fleet the com.., p.117
The Silver Fleet: The Complete Series, page 117
It took Winterson a few seconds to realise what he was alluding to. Suddenly, the biggest threat to Winterson’s plans seemed to be Faulkner himself. In a way, Winterson had preferred Meyer’s style of leadership to this more bullish approach favoured by Faulkner. Meyer was a convenient place holder as far as following orders was concerned. You gave him a job to do and he did it. There was no personal flair, no sense that he was bringing anything extra to the table, he just got on with things.
But Faulkner was different. He had his own way and that wasn’t going to work with what Winterson had in mind.
“You’re talking about Professor Singh’s work,” Winterson said. “Cutting edge quantum theory. I’ve watched some of his lectures, though I’m not sure how much of it I understand.”
“He specialises in theoretical quantum mathematics. According to him, if the captain of the Loki could find a way of over-riding the safety settings on his engines and if he could calculate the optimum timings it is possible that he could set up a chain reaction capable of triggering a mini black hole. That would be more than enough to destroy the Gate all by itself.”
“Theoretically. But Singh says himself that the processing power required to calculate that would be enormous.”
“But you’re assuming that the Da’al work the same way that we do, which we know for a fact isn’t true. In our brief contact with them we strongly suspect that their navigational calculations aren’t performed by a computer but are factored in by their captain or schieff who is capable of calculating it manually.”
Winterson couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“But that’s absurd. That simply can’t be done.”
“We already know that the Yakutians have experimented with an AI based system on their ships. It’d be incredibly arrogant of us to believe that just because we can’t do it, that it can’t be done.”
Winterson’s sense of disquiet only intensified at that. While he had a great deal of respect for Faulkner – it was he, after all, who had realised the significance of employing EMP technology against the Da’al – he had also exposed large sections of his crew to dangerously high radiation levels.
The man was reckless, bordering on dangerous. You only had to look at what had happened to his former ship to realise that. If Winterson let him have his head he might well be capable of destroying not one capital ship, but two.
No, the sooner this current situation was resolved and he could get a more suitable captain established on the Renheim, the better.
“That’s a very interesting theory, captain.”
“Then do you give me permission to target the Loki? Destroy her, if necessary.”
“Theories help shape our thinking, captain, but they don’t make our policy. No, I’m afraid I can’t sanction such an action. Not yet, at least. Stay with the Loki, keep an eye on her, but under no circumstances are you to engage with her directly. Do you understand?”
“Yes, admiral. I understand perfectly.”
Winterson experienced a momentary pang of guilt as he ended their meeting but it soon passed. There was no way that he could share the details of the Confederation’s new technological breakthroughs even if he wanted to. Such information was too sensitive to disclose over such vast distances when there were a thousand and one ways they might be compromised. Though he was thinking less about the threat posed by the Da’al and more about that posed by the Yakutians. Besides, even if he did choose to share it with Faulkner, there was precious little he could do to utilise it.
The engineers on The Naked Spur had been struggling with this particular problem for the past two weeks and still weren’t in a position for a test firing.
No, best to keep Faulkner in his placeholder position. Simply apply pressure to the opposition in the hope that they’ll be the ones to crack first. And then, by the time reinforcements arrived from Earth Prime, all of this would be old news.
*
Noah Kaminsky was sitting in the cockpit of the Motar watching the sun slowly start to sink behind the mountains. Beneath him, a long train of people led back to the main camp. They had a certain capacity for carrying passengers on the Motar and their commander down there had requested that the Marines be allowed to come along. Noah didn’t have a problem with that so long as they stayed out of their way but he hadn’t counted on how much equipment they’d want to bring with them.
Not his main concern now, though. Looking up from the ship’s controls, he had been surprised to see that, after a day of heavy cloud obscuring the sun, finally the clouds had cleared and they were enjoying some late evening sunshine, the light briefly washing the normally harsh terrain in bright golden hues.
Yet, even as he watched this, he was aware of how quickly the light was fading, the soft purple bands on the horizon thickening and darkening in colour.
This time tomorrow, it’ll all be over.
The thought surprised him. The biggest job of their career.
If they did manage to pull this off they’d certainly have something to crow about when they finally saw their old man again. Not that he’d have anything to complain about. As the company’s major shareholder he, more than anyone, would have a great deal to celebrate.
If they could pull it off.
His thoughts were interrupted by the radio suddenly bursting into life. He’d spent the last hour trying to contact his brother but hadn’t been having much luck.
“Noah, this is Tomas, are you reading me. Over?”
“Yeah, Tomas. Reading you loud and clear. Lost you for a while back there.”
“No surprises there. We’ve been trying to get this Heimdall ship out of position but so far, no luck.”
“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourselves? I thought we had another eight hours or so.”
“And that’s why I’m contacting you. Whoever’s in charge of that ship isn’t stupid. They’re obviously expecting us to make our move during daylight hours but we’re going to surprise him.”
At that, the dashboard in front of him came to life, flooded with new co-ordinates and calculations. Noah lifted his hands away, feeling strangely powerless.
“You can’t be serious. There’s a whole heap of stuff these guys haven’t finished loading yet. They’re getting ready to settle down for the night.”
“Then you’d better tell them that things have moved up a gear. Elina’s getting ready to make a pass at this guy, see if she can’t get a reaction out of him.”
“Bro, what are you doing to me. These guys are going to go insane when I tell ‘em.”
“Listen, I don’t care what they think. This isn’t a cruise ship. We’ve been contracted for one thing and one thing only: to get that ship off the deck. That’s where the money’s at. You need to know about the new timeline and then it’s up to them.”
“Okay,” Noah didn’t like it but he could live with it. “What was all that with the controls earlier? What was all that about?”
Tomas liked playing dumb. He was good at it.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. Sent you a few new co-ordinates, that’s all. Thought you might like that.”
“Oh, okay,” Noah was suddenly wary. “And that had nothing to do with you re-programming the autopilot, did it?”
Essentially the Motar, for all its size was slaved to the Montezuma, which meant that at any time the pilot of the main ship could over-ride the controls of the smaller one. This was an option which was only ever used in space, as soon as you were flying planetside there were too many other variables for a remote operator to factor in. But that didn’t mean that in extreme situations such a thing wasn’t possible.
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that to anyone, let alone my own brother. That would show a major lack of faith in your ability.”
“Yeah, and don’t forget, you chose me for this part of the operation. You’ve got enough to think about as it is. If you want things to run smoothly you need to let me do my thing.”
There was a hesitation on the other end, then. “I’m sorry, Little Bro. I apologise. Just getting a little freaky up here, is all. But I’d appreciate it if you could get everyone to move it along. If Elina’s plan works then we’re only going to have a small window of operation. Tell ‘em to shake it and bake it.”
“Okay, I’ll get onto it. Noah, out.”
He then spent the next ten minutes trying to track down Commander Webster, though without much luck. He was starting to get panicky, worried that he’d have to pull on his furs and go out and get the man himself when he got through to one of the main guy’s down on the ice, a Sergeant Markham, who said he knew where Webster was and would be sure to get back to him. Not that he believed that for a second, but it gave him an excuse to try and contact Elina.
He couldn’t lie, he’d been thinking a lot about Elina of late. He wasn’t used to women being quite so together about things. The fact that she appeared to be the owner of her own ship was impressive enough in its own right. It had taken their father all of his life to be able to get himself into a position where he could run something the size of the Montezuma and, while they still had some debts, he imagined that after this, everything would be paid off and Noah could start thinking about setting himself up in business.
In his little fantasy world, he imagined himself as being independently wealthy – and this within a few short months – approaching Elina in a bar somewhere and asking her if she’d consider being his partner. She would, of course, find it impossible to refuse his offer and the pair of them would set up in business together before taking in a series of wild adventures all across the galaxy.
They’d call themselves Kaminsky and Saratova. It had a certain ring to it.
When she didn’t get back to him straight away he started flicking through the various feeds Tomas had set up in order to monitor the whereabouts of Heimdall at any one time. It wasn’t a precise art but monitoring the space above their camp they’d have a reasonable chance of working out where the enemy ship was at any one time.
He came across one which at first appeared to show little other than the black field of space but once he’d managed to filter out the pointillistic flares of light, something else began to present itself. Noah went cold, his hands, numbed by what he was seeing, struggled to close in on the two images.
In the foreground, he could see the bulk of Heimdall and streaking away from it, the unmistakeable contrails of a pair of missiles. Following the missiles’ predicted vector he was able to expand the image until he was able to pick out the vague blob which represented the Peter the Great.
Shit! She’s in pursuit. That wasn’t part of the plan.
He tried repeatedly to open a direct line to the Peter the Great until eventually his persistence paid off. He was rewarded with a downward shot of the ship’s controls. Every now and then a hand would appear before disappearing again.
“What is it Noah? I am kind of busy.”
The picture was obscured for a moment as she adjusted the camera until when she took her hand away, he had a decent view of the left side of her face. She was hunched over the controls making a series of tiny incremental adjustments. Her hair was pulled back into tight bunches and in the middle of her forehead, a vein throbbed.
“What’s gone on. You weren’t supposed to engage with them.”
“Did not have much choice. She was just squatting there at first. I couldn’t get her attention. So I fire one of my missiles. Now this.”
He looked at the data coming in on another screen. “He’s looking really pissed. I’m tracking two, no make that four missiles now in your immediate proximity. Please tell me you know what you’re doing.”
“I think I caught him napping,” her grin was forced but it had real vigor in it. “I thought his shields would work better than this. Shields must have been down. First shot was a direct hit.”
“Must have come as one hell of a big surprise.”
“For both of us. But now I think: he’s mad.”
Noah glanced back at his screen. It was difficult to get a real sense of how fast they were moving but according to his readout, the Da’al ship’s rate of acceleration was simply staggering. The plan had been simply to pull the other ship out of position and then try to avoid him by exploiting the blind spots created by the planet’s curvature to disorientate them.
“Elina, you’ve got to get out of there. If you try and maintain your present vector he’s going to come down on top of you. Elina, I’m not joking.”
She turned and looked directly at the camera.
“Oh, Noah. I like that little squeak in your voice. It is sexy. Do you worry for me? That is so nice.”
She was so infuriating but Noah had never been more attracted to anyone.
“Elina, you need to break off now. You’ve done your job. Let Tomas do his.”
“That is good advice, Noah. And I will break off. You are right. Just as soon as I do this.”
As she leaned across to adjust something on her instrument panel, he lost the connection, prompting him to check for her on the other screen but the carat which had represented her ship was missing also.
He looked blankly at the screen.
Where had she gone?
He backtracked a little and found the four missiles, all still on track so that couldn’t be it.
It was only as he sat back that he chanced to look up through the canopy. And there she was, streaking across the darkening sky like a particularly bright comet.
Incredible.
In a bid to confuse her pursuer she was willing to risk everything, pushing through the upper reaches of atmosphere in order to completely change her flight profile. Hopefully, the missiles pursuing her would mistake the super-heated gases her bow wave was creating for an actual explosion and break off their pursuit. But she was taking one hell of a risk. That kind of maneuver was going to come at a cost: she would already be decelerating and then she was going to have to burn through her fuel just to get herself back into orbit.
As distractions went, she certainly was all that.
He just hoped she knew what she was doing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Winterson was in the Operations Room fighting down the temptation to unleash his anger on someone. But he couldn’t afford to do that. Not at this most delicate of moments. He’d always despised that kind of behaviour in senior officers when he’d been climbing the ladder because, in the end, it achieved nothing. It didn’t get the job done any faster, it created resentment and all the while it was confirming everything the junior officers had long suspected: that the person in charge couldn’t cope with pressure.
But if ever there’d been a time when he’d have been justified in losing his temper then this was it.
They were already half an hour past the time he’d allotted to speak to the other captains and it looked now as though it wasn’t actually going to happen.
Everything had been perfect, they’d achieved their position three million miles out from Ares at exactly the agreed time with the entire strike force intact and that in itself was something to be proud of. While the speed had in no way taxed The Naked Spur’s engines, they had been operating at the upper levels of what some of the other ships were capable of and so to get them there without at least one of them having a mechanical breakdown was a real achievement.
The big problem now though concerned their new weapon.
The Sloth Gun was due to be unveiled in all its glory but that wasn’t going to be possible now. For one thing, this was the weapon that he’d based his entire defensive strategy around. It was the reason why he had felt that he needed to talk to all the ships’ captains in the first place. He’d gone to a lot of trouble ensuring that each ship had a designated Operations Room with one of his Principal Warfare Officers or PWOs in place. The idea was that once Winterson had given his orders, it would be up to the PWOs themselves to implement them. Because they were able to talk to one another in real time they could ensure that each ship’s actions were fully integrated with the others while also ensuring that the captain’s themselves were kept out of the loop.
Winterson didn’t want them interfering with his plans during the height of battle.
The obvious trade-off being that they’d had to beef up the armaments the civilian ships carried. To this end, he’d re-ordnanced Molly Maguire and Charles W. Morgan as destroyers with the intention of using them in the vanguard as part of his defensive V formation. Both ships were heavily armoured and would be able to soak up the punishment while they let loose with the long-range missiles they’d recently been equipped with.
He hoped that they’d be able to protect The Naked Spur until she had an opportunity to close with the enemy. Only then would he be able to open up with his new weapon. It was essential to the success of his plan that he be able to surprise the enemy. Then, if they could maintain their shape they should be able to press their advantage. He couldn’t afford for the fleet to break up because if it deteriorated into smaller skirmishes the shortcomings of his other vessels would soon be exposed.
Winterson indicated for Hoyt to come over.
“Are we any clearer on how long this might take?” he asked.
“My people are on top of it, admiral.”
“Good. Then you’ll be able to tell me when the Sloth will be fully operational.”
Hoyt’s lips formed into a hard line as he considered this. Winterson had set a trap for him and Hoyt knew it. The admiral was asking for a reasonable timeframe but Hoyt was wary of giving him one.
“The gun’s in fine shape, sir. There are no problems in that area, at all.”
“Good,” Winterson said softly. “So why is it still not in position?”
“It’s a storage issue, admiral. In order to accommodate it along the lateral line we had to take out a lot of equipment so we decided we had no option but to equip it with an extendable barrel. This worked fine when the engineers were working on it in the workshop. The problem is that we hadn’t factored in the temperature of an exterior mounting.”
“Yes. Pretty cold out in space.”
