Jack Campbell - Dreadnaught

“Averaging four thousand kilometers per hour will still require four days’ travel time,” Geary objected. “Can your scout suits keep someone alive that long, plus the time needed to go over the asteroid and plant those charges and jammers?”

Carabali nodded. “We can hang on some extended-duty life-support packs, and use meds to slow down the metabolism of the scouts during the trip to the asteroid. That will both reduce the demands on their life support and the amount of heat and power usage that the stealth equipment has to conceal.”

“Can the jammers work against anything the aliens have?” Badaya questioned. “We don’t even know how their faster-than-light comms work.”

“The jammers have been upgraded using some ideas gleaned from the Syndic device for preventing gate collapses,” Carabali explained. “Just like our system security can eliminate the quantum probability–based alien worms without knowing how they work, we have a high degree of confidence that the jammers can halt the alien comms.”

A long silence this time, as everyone studied Carabali’s work, finally broken by Duellos as he pointed to part of the depiction of the star system. “There’s an enigma installation on the second largest moon orbiting that planet. If we head toward it at the right time, we’ll have that as an apparent goal, apparently repeating our attempt to examine a single isolated installation as at Limbo, but we can pass part of the fleet within four hundred thousand kilometers of the asteroid’s orbit while seeming to head for that moon.”

“It’s doable,” Badaya declared, and a hundred voices joined him in agreement.

“If you use the battle cruisers,” Desjani added, giving Geary a hard look. “ All of the battle cruisers. We’re going to have to move as fast as possible.”

Geary kept his eyes on the display for a moment longer, thinking of the lives riding on this decision. He didn’t want to make this decision. But Carabali had proven her competence, and his fleet officers felt they could do their part, and those humans needed to be rescued if it could possibly be done. Ironically, one of the things making the operation feasible was the lessons learned from the Syndic device he had bargained with Iceni for. “All right. We’ll do it.”

This time, everyone cheered.

It had the same strange feeling as when walking past a police officer even when you had done nothing. Look calm, look innocent, look non-threatening. That was quite a bit harder to do when you were a fleet carrying enough firepower to devastate entire planets, and you were trespassing in a star system where you were definitely not wanted, and the police officers were in fact aliens with a demonstrated eagerness to kill you and a willingness to suicide in defense of their privacy, and when you were in fact plotting to do something of which the local “police” would not approve at all.

Geary waited until the right moment to swing the fleet onto a course to intercept the moon that was to be their apparent target. There wasn’t anything unusual about shuttles winging between warships, carrying parts, supplies, and skilled personnel, but over the last several hours many of those routine shuttle flights had in fact transferred Marine scouts and their equipment to the battleships making up the Fourth Battleship Division. Warspite , Vengeance , Revenge , and Guardian would be the closest major warships to the asteroid’s orbit when the human fleet went past, and that was when each would spit out seven or eight Marines aimed at where the asteroid would be four days later, the launches further obscured by some repositioning of the cruisers and destroyers near the battleships as well as some shuttle activity.

“This is Admiral Geary. At time one five, all units come port zero four one degrees, up zero six degrees, maintain velocity at point one light speed.” It felt a little strange using the human conventions for maneuvering in a star system when this star system had probably never seen a human spacecraft. But the old conventions had been developed to ensure that every ship understood what other ships were doing and what was meant, no matter how they might be pointed or aligned relative to each other. Port meant turning away from the star, starboard turning toward the star, while up and down were designated as either side of the plane of the star system. It was totally arbitrary, but had worked well enough to remain unchanged for centuries.

He wondered how the aliens handled that problem. Was it a problem to them at all? Why the hell won’t they talk to us? Imagine the things we could learn just from understanding how another intelligent species sees the universe. What a waste.

“Getting moody again, Admiral?” Desjani asked as she signed off on some administrative task. “Have you heard from Jane Geary yet?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“She volunteered her battleship division to launch the Marines, right?”

“Correct again. I told her the decision was based entirely on which battleships could be closest to the asteroid’s orbit with the least maneuvering within the formation. We want to do as little as possible to tip off the aliens.” Geary gave Desjani a curious look. “Have you figured out what’s motivating Jane?”

“No. I don’t think it’s what was bothering Kattnig”—she paused to make a religious gesture invoking mercy—“but it might be related.”

“Proving herself?”

“She is a Geary, Admiral. You know what they’re like.”

“I wish I did.” Geary sat back, watching on the display as his fleet swung smoothly around and settled out on the course toward the alien moon. “The hardest part is going to be waiting for a few days after the launch, then turning this fleet around to go past the asteroid’s orbit again, all the while not knowing if the Marine scouts made it and are accomplishing their mission. They can’t send any status reports, no updates, nothing. They’ll activate the jammers and disabling charges at a set time, and we need to already be charging for that asteroid when that happens. And those thirty-five alien warships will surely charge us at that point.”

Desjani grinned. “Finally, we get to have some fun.”

“ Warspite reports one crew member injured in an arcing mishap,” the comm watch announced.

“Very well.” Geary glanced at Desjani, who gave him a thumbs-up. With the quantum-probability worms scrubbed from systems on the human warships, the aliens shouldn’t have any means of accessing the fleet data net or comm systems. But “shouldn’t” didn’t mean “couldn’t,” so that message had been agreed upon as a signal that all the launches had gone down without any problems.

A very long two days later, with the alien moon still more than a light hour distant, Geary brought the fleet back around as if heading back to the jump point. A freighter had already left the alien installation, repeating the pattern at Limbo. “When they see this, they should decide that we’re giving up this time rather than waste more effort chasing things that are going to be blown into tiny pieces.”

Desjani nodded absentmindedly, her eyes on her own display. “You know, Admiral, even if the jamming works, and even if all the alien sensors and comm gear on the surface of that asteroid are taken out, we’re still going to have the alien warships coming at that asteroid as soon as they realize we’re heading that way. We have no idea how many people we’ll need to get off that asteroid, or how hard it will be to get inside it without triggering any booby traps. It’s going to be tight.”

“I know,” Geary said. “That’s why you’re going to be calling the maneuvers when the battle cruisers brake to match orbit with the asteroid.” She gave him a startled look that transitioned to a grin as Geary continued. “I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but you’re better when it comes to maneuvering battle cruisers. You’re better than anyone else in the fleet.”