The silver fleet the com.., p.119
The Silver Fleet: The Complete Series, page 119
“Okay, Noah, you up for this?”
His brother’s voice boomed in his ear. He’d turned off Tomas’ screen. He already had too much to think about.
“How do you want to play this?”
“Same as if dad was here.”
In other words: play it safe. His father’s favourite story was about an earlier version of the Montezuma but still a Perseus class model crashing on Topeka. In those days there’d been a full crew of thirty on board, unlike the dozen they employed nowadays, and all of them had been killed. The ship had crashed into a river, creating a crater so big that it had diverted a nearby river which had itself helped to form a new lake.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got Coach here working the angles. I’m sure he’ll let me know if I’m getting it wrong.”
“What about wind speed and direction? You happy to work off your instruments?”
Normally, they’d have a couple of smoke grenades on the ground to work as a visual guide but there was nothing normal about what they were about to attempt.
“Looks like I haven’t got much choice.”
“Okay,” Noah made a small adjustment to his headset. “I’ll get in as close as I can, try and get you lined up on that first spire.”
“You do that. Just, don’t get too close. We don’t want you getting caught in my downdraft.”
Noah nodded for his own benefit. At such a low altitude that would be catastrophic. “Yeah, thanks for the reminder.”
There was still a lot that could go wrong.
Then, another thought popped into his head.
“What about Elina? You heard from her?”
“Don’t worry about Elina. She’s off somewhere blowing smoke up that guy’s ass - buying us some time. So, let’s not waste it.”
“How long’ve we got?”
“Thirty minutes to do the job, ten minutes to get clear.”
“Okay. Let’s start the clock.”
*
Once he’d made his way into the ship, Webster had been drawn to the central walkway. Most of it was still in darkness but further forwards he could see that a section of it was now brightly illuminated. As he moved towards it he became aware of movement up ahead.
A figure, dressed in a slim red and grey pressure suit was moving away from him and he began to follow, making every effort not to give himself away. As he drew closer, he became aware of two things. Firstly, the figure was carrying something and secondly, they didn’t appear to be wearing their helmet.
After a couple of minutes walking the figure turned left through a doorway and Webster hurried to catch up. The door led into a large, circular room with amber lights set into the walls which gave the place a warm, comforting feel even though the temperature was no different to the rest of the ship.
“What’s going on?” Webster wanted to know.
“Commander Webster,” Nash said without turning round. He was deciding where to put his box of what appeared to be MRE rations. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Webster cast his eye over the rest of the room. Over in the corner was a pile of supplies, on top of which stood Nash’s missing helmet.
In the centre, on a raised dais was a large chair shaped like a hollowed-out conch shell. It was clearly meant to be the equivalent of a command chair and drew him forward like he was being pulled into some miniature gravity well.
Blues, greens, bright yellows.
Without knowing exactly why, he extended a hand, bringing up bright columns of dancing lights of more blue, green, red and yellow. He stood there marvelling at the ingenuity of it, slowly drawing his arm first one way and then the other.
“How long have you known about this?”
“This command area?” Nash placed the case on top of two others and stepped back, rubbing his hands together. “Oh, long enough.”
“But you had no intention of telling anyone.”
“You were all going to find out eventually. I wanted to keep it back as a sort of surprise.”
Webster took in the chair, the supplies, the pressure suit, slowly putting two and two together. “You’re serious about this.”
“Oh, very serious.”
He watched as Nash covered the three boxes with a dynamic net before lashing it to the floor. They were used mostly in small craft which didn’t have the means of generating their own gravity. Helped to secure cargo in a weightless environment.
“I’m sorry to say that you’re getting ahead of yourself. Salvage is off. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“I don’t mean to contradict you, commander, but the salvage is very much on. Take a look.”
He tossed his tablet over to Webster who struggled to catch it. Not that it would have mattered. It was a heavy-duty combat model. You could probably drive a tank over it and it’d still work.
“What am I looking at?”
“I don’t know. Try the Night-Vision. Failing that there’s always Ultraviolet.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Oh, keep looking, commander. It’s there alright.”
Webster strained to see anything in the murky green and black screen but then he noticed something. Little vortices of air pulling millions of pieces of grit into shape. He counted three of them, then on the other side of the screen three more. Then three more.
“Are those repeller engines?” he asked.
“I would imagine so, otherwise they’re going to make a very big hole when they hit the deck.”
Military shuttles could operate just fine with one repeller engine. Webster continued to watch as he realised what he was looking at.
The Montezuma.
“This guy’s got to be crazy trying to nail this with a Da’al warship overhead. I imagine they’re getting quite adept at nailing low atmosphere aircraft by now.”
“That might be the case if he wasn’t currently being distracted by the crazy lady upstairs.”
“She still around? I thought they nailed her earlier?”
“It’s what she does. Calls it the dying swan. Must be very aggravating if you’ve got a whole bunch of people to kill.”
“You’ve worked with her before?”
“Elina? Oh, hell, yes!” Nash grinned to himself, enjoying some private joke. “You get to meet all kinds of interesting people when you’re in my line of work.”
“Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to ask you: what is your line of work, Mr Nash?”
Nash stopped what he was doing and slowly turned to look at Webster. His eyes were coldly critical.
“Currently, imports and exports although up until six months ago I was an officer of the Confederation.”
Hearing him finally admit it, Webster found very reassuring.
“So what happened to make them kick you out ?”
“I’d like to say that it was a mutual decision, but that’d be lying. Suffice to say that I did something that they disapproved of so they sent some people to kill me.”
“They clearly didn’t succeed.”
“Oh, they gave it a good go. One of them was a buddy of mine, so that was – unfortunate. I’ve got a piece of shrapnel in my spine that’ll be difficult to shift but, heay, I’m not complaining.”
Webster was still carrying his side-arm but for some reason that didn’t bring him much comfort.
“So what are you doing all the way out here?”
“Pretty much what I told you.”
“Well if you’re not working for the Confederation who are you working for?”
Nash pulled a face. “That’s the bit you’re not going to like.”
Webster’s hand went to his holster and flicked off the restraining strap.
“Why don’t you tell me anyway?”
Nash looked at his sidearm and pointed. “What are you planning to do with that?”
“I’m planning on getting some answers.”
“Which I’m quite prepared to give you. But if you start firing that thing in here you’re liable to do yourself some damage.”
He turned his head to take in the walls.
“If you’d read the reports you’d know that this place is built from some really tough polymers. On a human ship you fire one of those things you’re liable to put a hole in the outer hull. Not in here. The bullet’s liable to ricochet off the walls and keep going until it finds something soft and pliant to wedge itself against.”
“You seem to have done your homework,” Webster drew his side arm holding it level with Nash’s stomach. “So what’s the plan?”
Nash grinned, then threw out his arms as if he was about to hug him.
“What was it Napoleon said? He was returning to France after escaping from Elba. The government were so frightened that they sent a whole battalion of French hussars to capture him. Big mistake. They surrounded the dock area so that when he stepped off the ferry he had nowhere to go.”
“Okay, so what happened?”
“A group of twenty men stepped forward to arrest him but Napoleon refused to stop. He simply opened his coat and pointed to his heart. “Who will be the first to kill the emperor?” Of course, none of them could bring themselves to do it. Napoleon walked straight past them en-route to Paris. The troops fell in behind him and Paris fell twenty-eight days later.”
“And the moral of the story is?”
“If you’re going to draw your gun, you’d better use it.”
Suddenly all the lights went out, plunging them into darkness.
Discomfited by this, Webster lurched to one side, hoping to brace himself against one of the walls, his pistol held straight out in front of him.
Three bright blue blaster bolts cut through the air where he’d just been standing and Webster knew he was in trouble. Partially blinded by the glare, he managed to stumble back towards the door before a fourth shot seared the side of his face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Winterson watched as the fleet ships moved into position leaving him with plenty of time to reflect on what had just happened. From what he could tell, Molly Maguire was already where she should be, on his port side, while Charles W. Morgan was still jockeying into position on the starboard side.
The way things were looking, it would be another fifteen minutes before the Santiago could move up onto his starboard side but the Hudson was already sliding smoothly into place. He had no information about what Jacobs was up to in the Blackbeard but hopefully Captain Hoyt was already dealing with it.
How could he have got this so completely wrong?
Either the Da’al had no concept of strategy, which he found almost impossible to believe or the Confederation risked sailing into a trap. It was true that Winterson had assumed that the Da’al would have established themselves in a flanking line while they attempted to discern where the strengths and weaknesses lay in their opponent’s defences. Sailing straight ahead into the guns of an untried force seemed like an incredibly reckless thing to do. Plus, by refusing to get into formation they starved the Confederation forces of any understanding about what the capabilities of these other ships might be.
Either the Da’al didn’t understand what was expected of them in an engagement of this nature or they were simply too powerful to care. Neither scenario filled Winterson with anything other than a sense of dread.
In an attempt to distract himself, Winterson divided his time between reading summaries from the PWOs on the various ships alongside the increasingly confusing analysis of the Da’al ships’ movements. They didn’t appear to stay in any fixed formation, constantly rearranging themselves with no clear idea as to which, if any, of the ships might be the command vessel.
If there’d been four of them, he might have expected them to split into two sections and try and take him on both fronts but as it was it seemed as if their intention was to fly straight at them and see who blinked first.
Well, there was no time like the present.
“Captain Hoyt, are we ready with the Sloth Gun?”
“Aye, sir. Sloth gun is in position and will be ready to fire in ninety seconds.”
“Very good. When Odin comes within range you know what to do?”
They been practising little else for the past three days but now they’d see whether their preparations would bear fruit.
“PWO, contact Mary Maguire and Charles W. Morgan. Once we open fire they are to open up on the Odin and not a second before. Is that clear?”
“Aye, sir.”
Winterson stood his ground as if this was the most normal thing in the world to do when in fact they would be cutting this incredibly close. Normal rules of engagement dictated that they should launch their long-range missiles once the enemy closed to within seventy thousand kilometres but Faulkner’s experiences aboard the Mantis had highlighted how useless those tactics had proved to be against the Da’al’s shields.
The only thing which had worked so far had been to fire a nuclear warhead whose Electro-Magnetic Pulse would temporarily over-ride the Da’al’s shields. It was only once that had been achieved that you could follow up with conventional weapons. But with nuclear strikes frowned upon at close range because of the radioactive impact on the human crew, the technicians back at Earth Prime had been forced to get creative.
The result was the so-called Sloth Gun. The prototype had been put together in less than a week with the necessary fabrication plans being sent via a series of tight-beam communications to the bridge of The Naked Spur. From that moment on it had been a race against time for Hoyt’ crew to put it together from scratch.
The whole thing was seen as a huge gamble not least because the weapon came with two fairly major drawbacks. Firstly, the power utilised by the gun was quite considerable, so much so that it currently took some thirty minutes to re-charge. The second was that during the time of firing, the ship would be unable to fire any form of conventional weapons of its own.
Hoyt’s face when the chief engineer had told him had been a sight to behold but it was something which Winterson himself had already anticipated. Moving forward at any speed at all there was the very real danger that the ship would get caught up in the weapon’s backwash. In order to avoid sabotaging themselves unintentionally all their offensive systems would have to be de-activated.
But Winterson had a plan.
He intended to use the Sloth Gun first on Odin, then on Tyr, effectively destroying those ships’ defences. By this point the enemy would almost be drawing level. Then, using Hudson and Santiago to absorb any fire from Thor he intended to be already decelerating. By spinning The Naked Spur around through a hundred and eighty degrees he reckoned they could get off one more shot while Thor was within range. This would see all three vessels effectively disabled leaving The Spur and any surviving ships free to finish them off with conventional weapons.
The only problem with the plan was an obvious one.
The Sloth Gun could not afford to miss.
“Sir, its Odin, sir. She’s firing.”
Winterson wanted to respond but couldn’t. This was Hoyt’s command and he would have to leave him to it. Still, Winterson was nervous rubbing his fingers in front of his mouth in want of something better to do.
He had no choice but to stand and do nothing whilst the Charles W. Morgan on the starboard bow responded with a range of defensive missiles. That was good, Winterson thought. While all the ships sported their own defensive lasers and some had masers he had insisted that both the Morgan and the Molly Maguire sitting as they did in the vanguard be fitted with a combination of both offensive and defensive missiles
Pretty soon, both Tyr and Thor had also opened fire.
“Any idea of the vector they’re using? Who they’re aiming at?” Hoyt asked.
The officer said something but it was too quiet for Winterson to hear. He raised his hand expectantly at Hoyt, encouraging the man to speak up.
“Sorry, sir. It’s the Morgan, again. They’re both targeting her.”
Hoyt looked back at Winterson and pursed his lips.
Two minutes in and their plans were already in tatters.
Winterson stepped down to Hoyt’s level and called him over. They both knew that the Morgan only had enough defensive missiles for two, possibly three salvos. After that she was going to have to rely on her armour.
“What do you think we should do?”
“What can we do?”
Hoyt mulled this over for a second. They had the option of switching their point defence to task force coverage but that would leave them horribly vulnerable themselves.
“We’re relying on the Morgan for that first offensive launch, sir. If they should take her out now…”
Winterson batted the idea away. “That’s not going to happen. Let’s not get carried away.”
As he returned to his position, Winterson called out. “How soon before the Odin is within range?”
“If she maintains her current speed and heading, eight minutes and thirty seconds.”
*
Webster threw himself back so hard that, in the darkness, he cracked his head against the wall. In all the confusion he had dropped his pistol but daren’t go back for it now. All he could think of was getting out of there as quickly as he could and he scrambled along the corridor, using his hands to feel the way ahead.
He’d not gone far, perhaps twenty metres when he felt the whole ship begin to shift. Webster didn’t need to be a genius to work out what was happening. Nash had been right after all, they were going ahead with this salvage mission, regardless. At first, the movements were slight but as the cables began to take the strain, the sound of metal being placed under intense pressure turned into a piercing squeal.
“You can do what you like,” Nash called. “But you’re not leaving this ship.”
Webster hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to turn back and confront him or continue onwards. Things were starting to get out of hand. And there was no way he wanted to get trapped on this ship as it was lifted out of the atmosphere. If Nash didn’t get him then the lack of oxygen would. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Nash was wearing his pressure suit, and with all those oxygen canisters in the command room he seemed set for a long wait.
What he needed of course, was some means of defending himself and, while he desperately wanted to blame himself for dropping his pistol, he realised that would solve nothing.
