He smiled as the missiles raced towards their targets. The Nerds had solved a problem that had bedevilled missile techs throughout the ages. A missile was too small to carry a power-generating unit — and in any case they were destroyed when they struck their targets — and so they had limited range and speed. A missile in sprint mode would burn out quickly, quickly enough to be useless except at close range, while a longer-ranged missile would be easier for the defender’s point defence to target and destroyed. It was why the rebels had developed the arsenal ships in the first place. They overwhelmed their targets by sheer weight of numbers. The Nerds, however, had managed to extend a missile’s range in sprint mode.
“Keep tracking their point defence and analyse it,” he ordered, calmly. His heart was beating rapidly, as it always did when all of his theories and plans collapsed into a battle, but his voice was calm. “Security, what did you make of that transmission?”
His Security Officer, an old friend, frowned. Imperial Intelligence — and, for that matter, the Hohenzollern Clan, would have been horrified to learn how close Wilhelm and his Security Officer had become over the years. It had been another of Carola’s ideas; she had introduced Jake Russell to the woman who would become his wife and encouraged the relationship. It had turned Jake from a sworn enemy — all Security Officers were the enemy until proven otherwise — into a friend and an ally. Wilhelm didn’t know for sure, but he would bet his last credit that Colin Harper had had a similar arrangement. How else would he have gotten away with it for so long?
“It was odd, wasn’t it?” Jake agreed, calmly. He never sounded emotional over anything, but his wife. “It wasn’t a precise warning, just… a standard warning. I’ll start working on tracking down the person who sent the signal, but if it was programmed into the system, it could have been done weeks ago.”
Wilhelm nodded, stroking his chin thoughtfully. A standard warning was, by its nature, imprecise. It warned anyone approaching to use extreme care, on the assumption that there was danger ahead, but it was rarely used because there were more specific warning signals for almost any emergency. Any infiltrator on the shipyard could have sent a proper warning, if they knew about the plans for the ambush, but instead… they had been maddeningly imprecise. The rebel commander had to be completely puzzled.
“It’s possible that Imperial Intelligence had a sleeper on the shipyard they never told me about,” Jake hazarded, after a long moment. “They could have programmed him to remain out of the way until he was needed… and the rebels might have recovered the proper command codes to make use of his services.”
“Leave it for the moment,” Wilhelm said, watching the display. If they lost the battle, the activity of one or a thousand infiltration agents wouldn’t change their fate. “I suggest that you concentrate your efforts on supervising the evacuation and track down the spies later.”
He’d planned for that as well. A shipyard wasn’t just the facilities, although they were important and cost time and money to build, but also the workforce. The thousands of trained men and women who worked on the shipyard — and now far more motivated after he’d had incompetents who’d gained their positions through connections weeded out ruthlessly — had to be preserved. If the war went well, they’d be needed to expand the shipyards… and if it went badly, they became a bargaining chip. He could even follow the Nerds suggestion and send them to hidden facilities along the Rim.
“Understood,” Jake said. “Good luck.”
Wilhelm snorted and turned back to the display. The rebel fleet might have been surprised — although he doubted it — but they’d reacted well. He’d taken care to have the missile pods aimed at the superdreadnaughts, although striking the smaller ships would have guaranteed several kills, and the rebels were taking ruthless advantage of that ‘mistake.’ Their smaller craft, bristling with point defence weapons and tactical sensors, were wiping missiles out of space by the hundreds, despite their speed. They’d improved their targeting, he saw, just as the Nerds had predicted. It made him wonder what else they’d improved.
Gunboats, bristling with point defence weapons themselves, sped ahead of the main fleet, hunting for the semi-stealthed pods. He had to admire the bravery of the crews, even if they were on the opposite side; a popular Imperial Navy joke had it that most gunboats couldn’t even fart loudly in their own defence. They wouldn’t be any match for a destroyer, let alone anything bigger, but they made useful additional point defence platforms and scouts, if only because they were so completely expendable.
“The gunboats are engaging some of the missile pods,” the tactical officer reported. “Do you want me to flush the remaining pods?”
Wilhelm nodded once. The pods would be easy targets for any prowling gunboat. “If they’re targeted, yes,” he ordered. “Try and pick off a handful of the gunboats with the energy buoys if they can take them out. If not, leave them to their work. They’re just wasting energy if they shoot up empty pods.”
He smiled. A missile pod that had expended all its missiles was useless, at least until it could be recovered and reloaded. They were such simple creations that the orbiting industrial facilities would be able to produce thousands more within a week, if he ordered them; the real bottleneck would be the missiles. The fleet had an insatiable demand that would only grow larger as the war progressed.
“And keep scanning their fleet and locating every ship,” he added. “The information will come in handy when we spring the trap.”
Katy frowned as she studied the display, trying to understand what she was seeing. For someone who was regarded as competent, if not dangerously competent, there was a certain degree of incompetence around Admiral Wilhelm’s defences. On one side, he had introduced a new and terrifying range of missiles, capable of entering sprint mode for longer… and on the other side, he hadn’t even used them properly. A mass attack on her superdreadnaughts, targeting one or two for preference, might have inflicted damage, but instead he’d fired them off in fits and starts. She’d wondered if the first attack had been a mistake, as insane as it seemed, but the pattern was only continuing.
The Jefferson lunched as it launched another spread of probes down towards the planet. Whatever was going on with the missile pods — if that was what they were — wasn’t affecting Admiral Wilhelm’s point defence. They’d picked off several probes already and the ECM surrounding the shipyard and the orbital fortresses was massive, almost as good as their own. That wasn’t something she’d expected and it worried her. If Admiral Wilhelm had made one major advance and duplicated one of the Geeks advances, what else had his people managed to duplicate?
They couldn’t have had Carola copy them from Earth, she thought, slowly. Even if she managed to gain access, they wouldn’t have had time to put them all into production, which suggests that they either developed them on their own or someone else boosted their technology. Who?
She pushed the line of thought aside as unproductive, and distracting in a combat zone, and turned back to the display. The fleet was still battering its way through the missile pods, but the gunboats were wiping them out, often before they could fire. A handful of gunboats had been lost, one of them to a missile pod that had fired on the tiny starships, but the remainder were still active. She’d half-expected Admiral Wilhelm to detach a squadron of destroyers to deal with the gunboats, but he had resisted the bait and allowed her craft to continue clearing the defences out of their way.