Command Decisions (Book 3 of The Empire of Bones Saga) (30 page)

“I have them isolated,” Owlet said. “I can add them to the network at any time.”

“Please, do so.”

The computer specialist manipulated the icons on his console.

The image of the AI leaned forward slightly. “I see the drives. I have incorporated the operating files from the battlecruiser
Scott Pond
. If you will grant me access to the ship’s systems, I can make an assessment on my ability to control this vessel without making any changes to the way this vessel is being operated.”

Jared nodded. “Restore the connection, Mister Owlet.”

“Connection restored,” the AI said. “Assessing systems. I believe I can operate all systems on board this ship, though some of them may require a bit of practice. The passive scanners show a number of vessels that may be hostile already inside missile range.”

“And a lot of derelicts plus one big assed space station,” Jared said. “Our problem is that they captured one of our ships and docked it to that station. Thousands of our people are somewhere over there. We cannot allow the AI in control of this system to learn that the Terran Empire still exists.”

The image of the young man took a deep breath. “Then I regret to inform you that your greatest chance of success lies in opening fire with every weapon on this vessel, as well as your own, and destroying that station and the nearby ships. Yet I sense that is not your preferred course of action.”

“No, it is not. I want to save our people. We intend to board that station.”

“I suspected as much. The station is armed, of course. Significantly better than this vessel, I would wager. Your first action must be to disable it. Are plans of the station available?”

Kelsey nodded. “I loaded them on my implants this morning. Sending them now.”

The young man on the screen seemed to be looking down at something in front of him. “These plans are quite detailed. The station has redundant power sources and many isolated weapons pods. They would be difficult to disable in general combat. That said, I have a possible plan that has a better than even chance of critically degrading the station’s offensive capabilities. I’d estimate a better than seventy percent chance, in fact.”

“I’m interested in hearing it,” Jared said. “We’ve gone over the plans and not found anything that useful. My plan is to send the
Scott Pond
out toward the flip point to draw their attention, then to have our marines slip in to board the station. Extraction is going to be chancy.”

“Chancy is not the right word. Suicidal, perhaps? The scope of the enemy capabilities makes the chances of that plan succeeding less than five percent. My plan should increase those odds significantly. The use of the other ship to draw off some of the supporting ships increases the chances of success in the initial phases to over eighty percent.”

The schematic of the station appeared on the screen. Dozens of areas were highlighted in red and blinking. Nine other areas spread around the hull of the station were highlighted in yellow and blinking. “The red areas are missile clusters. Four tubes linked together. There are thirty-six of these clusters giving the station a commanding number of missile tubes. The station also has a dozen beam weapon clusters. There is no way that you can eliminate all of them at once.

“The yellow areas are the stations scanner arrays. Nine of them give the station eyes in every direction. Eliminating them will not stop the station from firing, but it will blind it. The lack of targeting ability will hamper its response to the attack. Its missiles will be useless.”

“What about the beam weapons?” Kelsey asked.

“Those remain a threat, as targeting data from the nearby vessels might allow them to hit their targets at this range. If the attack takes place after the attackers board the station, those teams should not be in danger from space attack.”

The young man looked up toward Jared. “A number of the destroyers are departing the general area and heading deeper into the system. Several more vessels are undocking from the station. My passive scanners didn’t detect them until they moved.”

“Is one of them very large?” Jared asked urgently. “That’s a capture ship with our heavy cruiser.”

“Negative. They all appear to be destroyers. Three from the station and four from the outlying forces. At least eight remain on patrol.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

Kelsey shook her head. “What are the odds of that? Of course it has something to do with us. We have to assume that those ships have some or all of our people on board.”

He rubbed his forehead tiredly. “Dammit. We can’t split our forces.”

“We also can’t kick off the attack right now.
Courageous
is still low on missiles.
New York
and
Ginnie Dare
aren’t up to taking on even one of these ships. We need both capital ships to take out the station.”

Jared nodded. “AI, what is the ETA for those ships to reach the Harrison’s World?”

“Assuming that is the planet, three hours.”

“The probes we sent to scout the planet will be in position to tell us what’s going on. If they start ferrying people down, we track them. We don’t have the forces to go after them, but we can make certain that the enemy doesn’t get any intelligence off them.”

His communicator beeped. “Mertz.”

“Baxter here. I still can’t tell you what these things are, but I can say with certainty that they have a number of small flip generators.”

“Those things can flip?”

“No, sir. Not a chance. There are emitters all over the surface. That’s those flat panels. It looks like the drives send almost enough energy to trigger a flip, but not quite. I could tear one apart, but I’ll still be in the dark about what they do, I’d imagine.”

Jared shook his head. “We have more important fish to fry. Leave those for later. Head back to engineering and make sure this ship is ready to fight.”

“Aye, sir. Baxter out.”

He stepped closer to Kelsey. “I just don’t get it. We’ve never seen anything like those things. Just about everything we’ve encountered has been understandable. Where did those things come from? Harrison’s World? What are they and why would these people be doing anything so different from all of the other Rebel Empire worlds?”

She shrugged. “I’ve found several mentions of Harrison’s World in a number of records. Most speak to it being a Fleet support world, but one also mentions it was home to something called the Grant Research Facility. It was one of the Empire’s premier advanced military research facilities. They were beyond bleeding edge. Maybe that is where this high tech stuff came from.”

“Did the database list what they were working on?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Well, we don’t need to know right now. Kelsey, I think it’s time for you to head back to
Courageous
. The marines need to rest and the feed from the probes will be coming in soon. I want an update on that as soon as possible. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

She nodded. “You’ll be staying here.” She didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Only you and I have command authority over this AI. I have to be here. Graves will command
Courageous
during the action. He’s more than capable. Now, get moving. When this thing breaks, everything is going to happen all at once.”

Chapter Thirty

Kelsey spent a lot of time thinking on the trip back to
Courageous
. This rescue attempt had disaster written all over it. If any one of the major elements failed, they wouldn’t save any of the prisoners and they’d most likely die in this system. It was hard to be optimistic.

The battlecruiser sat far enough out that the enemy wouldn’t detect its, so the trip took almost an hour. The cutter docked and she walked to marine country lost in thought.

Talbot stood in the assembly area waiting. “Welcome back.” He gave her a spectacularly unprofessional hug, but she wasn’t about to complain. Neither one of them had any guarantee of living out the day. Which was why they’d gotten very little sleep last night. She had to admit that even she was feeling run down. He had to be exhausted.

“What’s this I hear about you finding a big honking ship just ready to drive off the lot?”

She laughed. “I didn’t find it. I didn’t even get it working. This time, I wasn’t in the middle of everything. Are the marines ready?”

“Mostly. Everyone who can is taking some down time sleeping, playing cards, or reading. Anything to get their minds off the attack. We’ll start boarding the pinnaces in about five hours. Figure another couple to get into position and we’ll be launching the raid in seven.”

“As much as I wish I had time to unwind, I still have work to do. The probes should be reaching Harrison’s World shortly. Let’s go over the intelligence together. Then we need to catch some shuteye.”

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind, but sure.”

She shook her head. “I’d have thought you got that out of your system last night.”

“Never. Come on. The smaller conference room is available.”

She queried
Courageous
on the location of the probes heading toward Harrison’s World and determined that they were almost in range. The destroyers heading in from Boxer Station were about an hour behind them.

The only way they could be relatively certain that the enemy wouldn’t detect their transmissions, even though they were tight beamed, was to stage them. Two probes would bracket the planet and beam the information out at a right angle to a third probe. That probe could get the data to
Courageous
without risking the station or any of the ships orbiting around it seeing anything unusual.

The first thing she looked at was the planet’s orbitals. Like Erorsi, there were three large ones spaced out equally around the equator. Hopefully none of them were shipyards.

As the probes ghosted closer, they could see that the three stations were large, solid installations, though of a somewhat unusual design. Kelsey had never seen anything like them.

A normal orbital looked like a globe. These looked more like spinning tops with large upper areas and a much narrower section facing the planet.

“What do you make of them?” she asked Talbot.

“I’m not sure. Maybe the probes can pull off more data when they get closer. I’m more interested in what I don’t see. As in no ships in orbit.”

That did seem unusual. Most occupied worlds had a lot of orbital traffic. Trade, construction, and travel meant ships and small craft darting around in an almost chaotic fashion. Not Harrison’s World, though. There were no ships in evidence. She couldn’t rule out small craft until they got closer.

The stealthed probes coasted in to their observation locations and eased to a halt. Kelsey tasked one of the probes get a good look at one of the orbitals.

It looked new. Micrometeorite impacts and solar radiation had a way of dulling metal over time and this station didn’t have that appearance. There were docking arms capable of mating with larger ships, as well as bays for small craft, but no such craft were in evidence.

The narrow part of the orbital looked like a large tube. One that was somewhat familiar.

“That’s a flechette gun,” she said. “It’s an orbital weapons system.”

Talbot eyed the holo image. “That makes no sense. It’s huge and it’s not much use aimed away from the threats.”

“Then it isn’t. Whoever built those stations saw the planet as a threat. We need to know more about it. Let’s see if the probes can pick up any details from the planet.”

The optical scanners on the probes had just enough resolution to pick up large areas, such as cities, on the surface. They couldn’t see anything except for the big picture, but that was enough to note anomalies.

She pointed out a discolored area. “What’s this?”

Talbot’s voice was grim. “That’s an impact zone. I’ve seen something similar when a lot of weapons chew up the ground. Never anything that large, though. That has to be a thirty kilometers across. Maybe twice that.”

“Holy God.” Kelsey checked over the surface they could see and found a dozen areas that someone had obliterated from orbit. She also saw many more intact urban areas. The AIs hadn’t sterilized the planet, but they had a sword over their heads.

“I suppose this is why those people on the superdreadnaught couldn’t finish their mission.” She filled him in on what they’d found.

Talbot rubbed his chin. “They might have been looking to stage a coup. Look at what we have. Destroyers empty of crew. A planet literally under the gun. For whatever reason, the AIs decided that they couldn’t leave this system under human control. They were trying to gain control of the station and all those ships.”

She didn’t want to sound too skeptical, but they had very little information to be basing those guesses on, even though that’s what she thought, too. “Maybe. Probably. If we can sweep the table, we might even be able to figure that out before we make a run for it.”

“How were they going to keep the next ship that came along from getting the word back to the AIs? Hell, the system AI would warn the first ship that showed up as soon as it made it through the flip point. Then their Fleet would come and sterilize the place. Could the things in the hold on that ship have been something to stop them?”

“Maybe. We have no idea what they do, other than they have flip drives and probably aren’t made to flip.”

Almost an hour later, the data from the probes updated to show the destroyers moving into orbit. They flew in a tight formation and ended up near one of the weapons platforms, but didn’t dock with it. The three that had undocked from the station launched small craft. Those promptly descended into the atmosphere toward a large island in the southern hemisphere, set some distance away from the nearest major landmass.

Kelsey checked the map of the planet. “That looks like it used to be a Fleet base of some kind. It’s listed here as an auxiliary spaceport.”

Talbot sagged a little. “Those ships have our people on them. Maybe not all of them, but some. How the hell are we going to rescue them?”