Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“I’ll check my schedule,” Brown answered carefully. “Meanwhile, with your permission, I’ll recheck the status of fleet maneuvers.”

“Later,” Tamra suggested. “I prefer your attention to be more tightly focused.” Which was true, for she did value Brown’s tactical opinion. He was without doubt her second or perhaps third choice for the job. And anyway the “fleet” right now consisted of just Malu’i and a pair of lightly armed and largely inconsequential grappleships. There were other assets en route, but the closest of them was still six light-minutes downsystem of here. A really high-powered nasen beam could of course strike from that range, but not with precision. Not without absurdly high risk to the two hundred million human beings onboard Perdition . So for the moment, Malu’i was effectively alone in the conflict, and must act carefully indeed, or else wait two days for backup.

To Xmary the queen said, “Have you formulated a plan of attack, Captain?”

Xmary looked up from the console in her armrest. “Working on it, Majesty.” Then, to Brown’s Information officer, “Where’s that blueprint, Lieutenant? I need to know exactly how much antimatter is in there, and exactly where.”

“That’s difficult, ma’am. I can show you mass concentrations and annihilation signatures, but anything else is guesswork.”

“Deductive guesswork,” said Xmary. “But if you lack the necessary skills, then forward me your data.”

“Aye, Captain,” Information replied, suitably chastened. “My preliminary analysis is also appended.”

“Thank you. Ah. This is good. Your Highness, I propose a three-pronged attack. We can litter the space in front of Perdition with radar-bright proximity mines. We’ll dial them to minimum yield—they shouldn’t even penetrate the aft nav armor—but Doxar won’t know that. He’ll have to assume the worst, and that will tie up his propulsion. He’s flying backwards, right? Decelerating toward the planet he covets. He’ll be juking laterally, and holding the gamma-drive exhaust out in front of him to clear the path. And even so, he’s likely to suffer a near miss or two. Give him something to worry about.”

“Hmm,” Tamra said, considering that. “And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, we launch a salvo of ertially shielded grapplets, minus the warheads. At maximum acceleration, they should reach Perdition in under thirty minutes. Targeting the drive section, one hit could slice the magnetic choke clean off, with almost no collateral damage.”

A grapplet was a munition whose only propulsion was a gravity laser. It fell to the target under its own artificial pull, and if the grapplet was ertially shielded then it fell very quickly indeed. Malu’i only had five such weapons in its inventory, though, and could produce no more, for their shields were of collapsium and could not be faxed.

“Those are unstealthed munitions,” protested Admiral Brown. “Their release will give away our position.”

“Briefly,” Xmary conceded. “But we’ll maintain evasive maneuvers throughout the deployment, under full invisibility. The last time I did this I was inside the chromosphere of a star, where heat dissipation and signature management were nearly impossible. This’ll be a lot easier, for Perdition , on her pillar of flame, cannot hide from us at all.”

“Hmm.”

“The third prong is right out of the navy textbook: a nasen beam to the external engine assemblies. We have to be very careful not to destabilize the aye-ma’am plumbing, or the whole ship will go up. But again, it should be possible to take a scalpel to their magnetic choke, after which the failsafes will simply shut down the drive. Uncontrolled reactions should be limited to a few kilotons—hardly noticeable.”

This all sounded plausible enough to Tamra, but just to be safe she turned to Brown and said, “Opinion?”

“Standard doctrine calls for a breaching of the enemy’s hull, Majesty,” Brown replied at once. “However, given the refugee status of this opponent, Perdition ’s crew is unlikely to be backed up on any sort of durable medium. Any deaths we inflict will therefore be permanent. Under these assumptions, then, Captain Li Weng’s plan strikes me as both humane and effective.”

Xmary added, “We’d need to launch the first two waves now , Majesty. There isn’t time for debate—not unless you’re willing to erode our positional advantage.”

“Hmm.” If there was one thing in the universe Tamra hated, it was snap decisions. Still, sometimes they were necessary, and delaying them was itself a snap decision. “Very well. You may proceed, Captain.”

The appropriate orders were given, and within the minute both salvos were away.

“There is one additional danger,” Xmary noted. “There could be spies aboard Malu’i who are capable of revealing our position. This information is of limited value to Doxar, given ten minutes of round-trip signal lag”—She checked a reading, and then amended—“sorry, nine minutes’ lag. But it would give him a fighting chance. With all that aye-ma’am onboard, he’s got a lot of energy to throw around.”

Admiral Brown coughed out a chuckle at that. He was a good man, and a kindly one, but Tamra had the distinct impression he enjoyed catching out his replacement in a statement like that. “You hardly need worry, madam. This crew—this exact crew, save for yourself—has served together for centuries. We’re as much a family as we are a military unit. If there were criminals or Fatalists, turncoats or sympathizers among us, we should know it before now.”

“Of course, sir,” Xmary said.

More was said and done after that, but there was an air of busywork about it, until finally the fifteen-minute mark drew near.

“Do you suppose they’ll go quietly?” Tamra asked Brett Brown.

“They’re overmatched,” Brown said, as though that answered the question.

“They’re desperate,” Xmary countered. “They’re prepared to die, to kill, to cripple our networks. You can’t imagine the conditions they’re leaving behind.”

And as if in agreement, Doxar’s face reappeared in the hollie. “Y’all seem not to comprehend. Possibly we’m explained it badly. You’re thinking, ‘We can survive without Nescog.’ Maybe so. But we can break it and send the pieces tumbling. Very dangerous.”

“Just divert your course,” Tamra said to him, firmly and reasonably.

But was there time for that message to travel back and forth? She’d given a deadline, and could not now retract it. She killed the hollie and asked Xmary, “Time to nasen beam firing?”

“Ten minutes, Highness. That’s all the grace period they get.”

There was no point wishing it otherwise; the great-grandchildren of Sol had returned, broken and furious, blaming Tamra for all that had befallen them. And shouldn’t they? Who, if not she, had crafted their fate? Who else could possibly have changed it? And now here she was, preparing to punish them—perhaps to kill them—for her own failures.

Her anger vanished in a sudden wash of guilt. Her sense of duty remained as strong as ever, but her sense of what her duty was had come unglued. How did it come to this? What was she to do?

Of Brown and Li Weng she asked, “What are the odds we’ll blow up that ship?”

“Unknown,” Brown said without delay. “The number of variables—”

“Make an estimate,” Tamra instructed. Then wondered: did her people even know how?

“Thirty percent,” said the governor-captain, who was herself a refugee from the stars. A victim of Tamra’s failed policies, of imperfect data and shortsighted advisors. Of simple hubris.