Jack Campbell - Leviathan

Desjani nodded at him. “Listen to that. You don’t know who or what is sending you that feeling.”

“Yes, Captain.” Geary gestured toward her this time. “What are you feeling?”

“Me?” She paused, looking away, then back at him. “I’ve got this odd sense that the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet.”

“Something else is about to happen?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that feeling.”

“Let’s hope it’s a good shoe,” Geary said.

“And that it drops on the dark ships,” Desjani agreed.

In a few more hours, they would know.

Everything looked great. Geary kept scanning his display with growing irritation, wondering what was bothering him. And why did he keep thinking about Jane Geary? Something she had said…

But she had gotten those reports to Unity. People would be acting on them. Hopefully, the people involved in the dark ship program would be getting some tough questions, told to fix the problems, shown what the dark ships had done—“Damn.”

“What?” Tanya instantly glanced over, ready to respond to an order.

“I think—” Geary took a deep breath and started again. “Please have one of your officers run a time line for me. Start with when Captain Jane Geary delivered my reports to Unity. Factor in the time she was delayed there and the time required for her to get back to Varandal. Compare that to the days required for a courier ship to hypernet from Unity to some star system in this region of space and how long ago the dark ships appeared at Bhavan, and see how many days that leaves.”

“Why assume the dark ship base is in this region?” Desjani asked.

“Because on the hypernet, longer trips take less time.” Physicists with the right specialties claimed to understand why that was, but everyone else just chalked it up to the weirdness of the quantum mechanics on which the hypernet was based. “I want to see how it works out using a longer trip time.”

Desjani gestured with one hand toward Lieutenant Castries, who bent to the task. “How serious is this?” Desjani asked.

“It could be very serious.”

“Captain,” Castries said, “there’s about a week and a half difference. Eleven days. That other courier ship could have reached this region well before Captain Geary made it back.”

“But why—?” Desjani began, then her eyes widened. “Long enough to enter more data into the dark ships and for them to jump to Bhavan.”

“Right,” Geary said. “We’re basing our attack on the assumption that the dark ships learned nothing from what I did at Atalia because that information died with the dark ships we fought there and at Varandal. But that same information, from our own ships’ data, has surely been given to the authorities at fleet headquarters and spread through the Alliance government. If anyone at those places, anyone like those two mystery agents who messed things up on Ambaru, sent that data to the dark ships, then they know everything. They may have planned this attack based on that information.”

“And we only have five minutes left until contact.” Desjani took a deep breath. “All right, Admiral. Your opponent received a report of what you did in your last battle. Do you repeat the last successful tactic because everyone knows you don’t repeat yourself, or do you mix it up because you assume the enemy will be prepared for what you did last time?”

“I mix it up,” Geary said immediately. “I don’t assume the enemy will do what I want them to do.”

“Will an AI based on your tactics do the same?”

With so little time remaining until contact with the enemy, he considered the question for several seconds that felt like minutes. “An AI is going to be calculating percentages. Determining the most likely outcome and planning for that. And the most likely outcome is that I will vary my tactics because that is what I have done most frequently.”

“Then we need to shift to stupid—” Desjani began.

“No. The dark ships have enough forces to cover that option,” Geary said. “All of my instincts say that we should continue the attack as planned.”

“Two minutes to contact,” Lieutenant Castries reported.

Geary touched his comm controls. “Formation Tango One, at time five two, come up zero point five degrees, come port zero one degrees, accelerate to point one five light speed. Formation Tango Two, at time five two point five come up zero one degrees, come port zero two degrees. Formation Tango Three, at time five two point seven come up one point five degrees, come port two degrees.”

“One minute to contact.”

One minute. Geary’s ships were traveling at point one light speed, as were the dark ships, for a combined closing rate of point two light speed. That translated into more than three and a half million kilometers every minute. At one second from contact, the enemy would still be sixty thousand kilometers away.

He had already pivoted his formations in space, the diamonds which had formerly been arranged vertically along their path through space swinging their ends around so that all three diamonds were now almost flat along that path, each with their leading point aimed for the place in space where Geary’s force and the dark ship formations would come into contact.

Geary felt Dauntless altering vector slightly in response to his commands, saw the other ships in the three subformations of the First Fleet also begin shifting their paths a tiny amount in those last few seconds before contact. The dark ships would be doing the same, trying to second-guess Geary’s maneuvers. The one who did a better job of guessing what the other would do would end up able to hit a small portion of the enemy force with all of their power. If both guessed wrong, the two forces might tear past each other too far away for any hits to be scored. Or the two forces might run headlong into each other, in which case both sides would hit and be hit with everything available, creating a split-second-long bloodbath.

But, if he guessed right, all three flat diamonds would pass in rapid succession close above one segment of the main dark ship formation.

Human reflexes could never have reacted quickly enough. In the tiny fraction of a second in which the ships were in range of each other, automated fire-control systems fired. Missiles volleyed out first, then hell lances ripped through space, and microseconds later grapeshot volleyed into the path of opposing ships.

Geary felt Dauntless lurch from a couple of hits as his ships tore away from the firing run. His display lit with damage reports as the fleet net consolidated reports from every ship. Immediately after that, the fleet’s sensors began reporting the damage they could detect on the dark ships.

Dauntless and the other battle cruisers in the Tango One formation had inflicted little damage, because their last-minute burst of acceleration had pushed their relative speed up past point two light and into a region where human fire-control systems could not adequately compensate for distortion caused by relativity. But as Geary had guessed might happen, every dark ship close enough to the path of the Alliance ships had targeted Dauntless , and their own shots had also gone wide. When tearing past each other at more than sixty thousand kilometers per second, even the tiniest error in the fire-control solutions meant a large miss.

“We wasted our shots,” Desjani grumbled.

“And you didn’t get your own butt shot off,” Geary said, studying the reports flooding into his display.

The following two Alliance formations had sliced just above the same corner of the dark ship main body, all the Alliance battleships training their fire on the two dark battleships anchoring that part of the enemy formation. The first nine battleships had done terrible damage to one of the dark battleships, which despite its massive shields, armor, and firepower could not withstand the fire of nine Alliance battleships. The enemy ship was still moving, but its forward portion had been battered into ruin, most of its weapons knocked out.