Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“Radar,” he said, “give me a second lidar pulse, three-zero seconds. Then plot a vector intersect on those bogies, offset one-zero kiloklicks at closest pass, acceleration one-zero gees, salvo of two SEM-20s one-zero-zero kiloklicks out.”

“Aye aye, skipper.”

“Missiles armed, launch holding at minus one-zero seconds.” Commander Helsingus, stationed at Gunnery One.

“I want them to get a good look at our attack profile,” murmured the Captain. “Nice and close.” Ilya Murametz glanced at him sidelong. “Keep the boys on their toes,” Mirsky added, meeting his eye. Ilya nodded.

“Gamma burst!” called Radar Two. “Burst at one-four-seven-one. Range one-one point-two M-klicks, bearing one by seven-five by three-three-two. Looks like shooting, sir!”

“Understood.” Mirsky clasped his hands together: Murametz winced as he cracked his knuckles. “Hurry up and wait. Helm: How’s the attack course?”

“We’re prepping it now, sir.”

“Forward lidar. Looks like we are in a shooting war. And they know we’re here by now. So let’s get a good look at them.”

Comms: “Sir, new message purportedly from the Kamchatka . Message from the Aurora , too.”

“Read them.”

Mirsky nodded at the comms station, where the petty officer responsible read from a punched paper tape unreeling from the brass mouth of a dog’s head. “ Kamchatka says, quote, engaged by enemy missile boats break we are shooting back break enemy warships astern painting us with target designation radar break situation desperate where are you. Ends. Aurora says, quote, no contact with enemies break Kamchatka off course stand by for orbital elements correction break what is all the shooting about. Ends.”

“Oh bloody hell.” Murametz turned red.

“Indeed,” Mirsky said drily. “The question is, whose? TacOps: what’s our status?”

‘Target acquired, sir. Range down to four-point-eight M-klicks, speed passing one-zero-zero k.p.s.

Engagement projected within two-point-four kiloseconds.“

“We have a … three-zero-zero-second margin,” said Mirsky, checking the clock display. “That should be plenty. We can get a look at the closest one without getting so close their launch base can shoot at us if it’s a missile bus. Everyone clear? Guns: I want real-time logging of those birds. Let’s see how they perform. Radar: Can you lock a spectroscope on the target?”

“At three K-klicks per second, from one-zero K-klicks away? I think so, sir, but we’ll need a big fat beacon to spot against.”

“You’ll have one.” Murametz smiled widely. “Guns: dial those birds down to point-one of a kiloton before you fire them. Standard MP-3 warheads?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Keep ‘em.”

Standing at the back of the bridge, Rachel tried not to wince. Wearing her arms inspectorate hat, she was all too familiar with the effects of americium bombs: nuclear weapons made with an isotope denser and more fissile than plutonium, more stable than californium. Just good old-fashioned fission bombs, jacketed with a high-explosive shaped charge and a lens of pre-fragmented copper needles — shrapnel that, in a vacuum engagement, would come spalling off the nuclear fireball in a highly directional cone, traveling at a high fraction of lightspeed.

The next thirty minutes passed in tense silence, broken only by terse observations from Radar One and Two. No more targets burst from hiding; there might well be others in the Kuiper belt, but none were close enough to see or be seen by the intense lidar pulses of the warship. In that time, passive sensors logged two nuclear detonations within a range of half a light-hour; someone was definitely shooting. And behind them, the telltale disturbances of six big ships emerged from jump, then powered up their combat lidar and moved out.

“Launch point in six-zero seconds,” called Helsingus. “Two hot SEM-20s on the rail.”

“Fire on schedule,” said Mirsky, straightening his back and looking directly ahead at the screen. The green arrow showing the Lord Vanek’s vector had grown until it was beginning to show the purple of relativistic distortion around its sensitive extrapolative tip: the ship was already nearing half a percent of lightspeed, a dangerous velocity. Too high a speed and it might not be able to track targets effectively: worse, it wouldn’t be able to dodge or change its vector fast, or jump safely.

“Three-zero seconds. Arming birds. Birds show green, sir.”

“I’m getting emissions from the target,” called Radar Two. “Lots of — looks like jamming, sir!”

“Laser grid. Illuminate the target,” said Mirsky. “Guns, set to passive.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Under passive homing mode, the missiles would lock onto the target, illuminated by the Lord Vanek’s laser battery, and home in on its reflection.

‘Target still accelerating slowly,“ said Radar One. ”Looks like a missile boat.“

“One-zero seconds. Launch rails energized.”

“You have permission to fire at will, Commander,” said the Captain.

“Yes, sir. Eight seconds. Navigation updated. Inertial platforms locked. Birds charged, warheads … green. Five seconds. Launch commencing, bird one. Gone.” The deck shuddered briefly: ten tons of missile hurtled the length of the ship in the grip of a coilgun, ejected ahead of the starship at better than a kilometer per second. “Lidar lock. Drive energized. Bird one main engine ignition confirmed. Bird two loaded and green … launch. Gone. Drive energized.”

“Bingo,” Ilya said quietly.

Red arrows indicating the progress of the missiles appeared on the forward screen. They weren’t self-powered; nobody in his right mind would dare load a quantum black hole and its drive support mechanism into a robot suicide machine. Rather, the ship’s phased-array lasers bathed them in a sea of energy, boiling and then superheating the reaction mass they carried until they surged forward far faster than the starship. Strictly a close-range low-delta-vee weapon, missiles were mostly obsolescent; their sole job was to get a nuclear device onto the right interception vector, like the “bus” on an ancient twentieth-century MIRV. They’d burn out after only thirty seconds, but by then the warheads would be closing the gap between the Lord Vanek’s projected course and the enemy ship itself. Shortly after the starship ran the gauntlet, its missiles would arrive — and deliver the killing blow.

“Radar One. Where are they?” Mirsky asked softly.

‘Tracking as before,“ called the officer. ”Still maintaining course and vector. And emitting loads of spam.“

“Bird one MECO in one-zero seconds,” said Helsingus. “They’re trying to jam, sir. Nothing doing.” He said it with heavy satisfaction, as if the knowledge that the anonymous victims of the attack were offering some token resistance reassured him that he was not, in fact, about to butcher them without justification.

Even committed officers found the applied methods of three centuries of nuclear warfare hard to stomach at times.

Comms Two, voice ragged with tension: “Jamming stopped, sir! I’m receiving a distress beacon.

Two — no, three! I say again, three distress beacons. It’s like they’re bailing out before we hit them.”

“Too late,” said Helsingus. ”We’ll have ’em in three-two seconds. They’ll be inside the burst radius.” Rachel shuddered. Suddenly a horrible possibility began to rise to the surface of her mind.

Mirsky cracked his knuckles again, kneading his hands together. “Guns. I want a last-ditch evasion program loaded, activate at closest approach minus one-zero seconds if we’re still here.”