“Radar, get me some details on that bounce.” Mirsky leaned forward.
“Aye aye, sir.” A plot came up on the forward display. Rachel focused on the readouts, looking over the razor-scarred rolls at the base of Petty Officer Borisovitch’s skull. “Confirming …” Radar Two: “More contacts! Repeat, I have multiple contacts!”
“How far?” demanded the captain.
“They’re — too close! Sir, they’re very faint. Took a few seconds for the analysis grid to resolve them, in fact. They’ve got to be black body emitters with stealth characteristics. Range nine-zero K, one-point-three M, seven M, another at two-five-zero K … we’re in the middle of it!” Rachel closed her eyes. A chill ran up her spine as she thought about small robot factories, replicators, the swarm of self-replicating weapons breeding in low orbit around a distant gas giant moon. She breathed deeply and opened her eyes.
Radar Two interrupted her reverie: ‘Target! Range six-point-nine M-klicks, big emission profile. Course minus five-five, plus two-zero.“
Mirsky turned to his executive officer: “Ilya, your call.”
“Yes, sir. Designate the new contact as target alpha. Adopt convergent course for alpha, closest pass at three-zero K, full military power.”
“Aye aye, targeting alpha.”
“You expect something, sir,” Ilya said quietly. Rachel tilted her head slightly, to let her boosted hearing focus on the two senior officers at the back of the room.
“Damn right I do. Something wiped out the system defense flotilla,” Mirsky murmured. “Something that was sitting there, waiting for them. I don’t expect anything except hostile contacts as soon as we come out of jump.”
“I didn’t expect them to be this close, though.” Murametz looked troubled.
“I had to do some digging, but thanks to Inspector Mansour”—the Captain nodded in her direction—“we know a bit about their capabilities, which are somewhat alarming. It’s not in the standard intelligence digest because the fools didn’t think it worth mentioning. We’re up against cornucopiae, you see, and nobody back at Naval Intel bothered asking what a robot factory can do tactically.” Commander Murametz shook his head. “I don’t know. Sir? Does it have any military bearing?”
“Yes. You see, robots can breed. And spawn starwisps.”
“Starwisps—” Enlightenment dawned. Ilya looked shocked. “How big would they be?” he asked the captain.
“About half a kilogram mass. You can cram a lot of guidance circuitry into a gram of diamond-substrate nanomachinery. The launchers that fire them probably mass a quarter of a tonne each — but a large chunk of that is stored antimatter to power the neutral particle beam generators. At a guess, there could be a couple of thousand out here; that’s probably what those low aspect contacts are. If you trip-wire one of them, and it launches on you, expect the starwisp riding the beam to come out at upward of ten thousand gees. But of course, you probably won’t even see it unless it gets lock-on and you get some sidescattered radiation from the beam. Basically, we’re in the middle of a minefield, and the mines can shoot relativistic missiles at us.”
“But—” Ilya looked horrified. “I thought this was a standard firing setup!”
“It is, Commander,” Bauer said drily.
“Ah.” Ilya looked slightly green at the edges.
“Backscatter!” It was Radar Three. “I have backscatter! Something is launching from target alpha, acceleration one-point-three — no, one-point-five gees. Cooking off gammas at one-point-four MeV.”
“Log as candidate one,” said Ilya. Urgently: “Sir, humbly request permission to resume immediate control?”
“Granted,” snapped the Captain.
Rachel glanced around at the ops room stations. Officers hunched over their workstations, quietly talking into headset microphones and adjusting brass-handled dials and switches. Mirsky walked over to the command station and stood at Ilya’s shoulder. “Get radar looking for energy spikes,” he commented.
“This is going to be difficult. If I’m right, we’re in the middle of a minefield controlled by a central command platform; if we leak again, we’re not getting out of here.” Rachel leaned forward too, focusing on the main screen. It was, she thought, remarkable: if this was typical of their teamwork, then with a bit of luck they might even make it into low orbit around Rochard’s World.
The tension rose over the next ten minutes, as the Lord Vanek accelerated toward the target. Its singularity drive was virtually undetectable, even at close range (spotting the mass of a mountain at a million kilometers defied even the most sensitive gravity-wave detectors), but all the enemy strongpoint had to do was switch on a pulse-doppler radar sweep and the battlecruiser would show up like a sore thumb. The first rule of space warfare — and the ancient submarine warfare that preceded it — was, “If they can see you, they can kill you.”
On the other hand, the enemy base couldn’t be sure exactly where the ship was right now; it had changed course immediately after shutting down its search lidar. Four more brief lidar pulses had swept across the ship’s hull, as other members of the squadron dropped in and took their bearings: since then, nothing but silence.
“Second trace!” called Radar One. “Another live bird moving out. Range on this one is four-seven M-klicks, vector toward lidar source three, the Suvaroffi. ”
“Confirm course and acceleration,” ordered Ilya. “Log it as candidate two.”
“Confirm three more,” said Radar Two. “Another source, um, range nine-zero M-klicks. Designation beta. They’re thick around here, aren’t they?”
“Watch out for a—”
“Third echo from local target alpha,” called Radar Two. “Scattering relative to candidates one and two.
Looks like a third missile. This one’s heading our way.”
“Give me a time to contact,” Mirsky said grimly. Rachel studied him: Mirsky was a wily old bird, but even though he’d figured out what was going on, she couldn’t see how he planned to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. At any moment she expected to hear the shriek of alarms as one or another observer picked up the telltale roar of a relativistic particle stream, with a beamriding starwisp hurtling toward them on top of it, armed with a cargo of antimatter.
Of course, it was too much to expect the New Republic’s government to realize just how thoroughly they were outclassed; their cultural bias was such that they couldn’t perceive the dangers of something like the Festival. Even their best naval tacticians, the ones who understood forbidden technologies like self-replicating robot factories and starwisps, didn’t comprehend quite what the Festival might do with them.
The Lord Vanek’s chances of surviving this engagement were thin. In fact, the entire expedition was predicated on the assumption that what they were fighting was sufficiently human in outlook to understand the concept of warfare and to use the sort of weapons overeducated apes might throw at one another.
Rachel had a hopeless, unpleasant gut feeling that acting without such preconceptions, the Festival would be far deadlier to the New Republican expeditionary force than they could imagine. Unfortunately, it appeared she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.
“More backscatter. Target gamma! We have another target — range two-seven-zero M-klicks. Ah, another missile launching.”
“That’s—” Ilya paused. “One base per cubic AU? One M bases, if they’re evenly distributed through the outer system.” He looked stunned.