Hegemony (16 page)

She stepped forward to look at the retracted panels of the bow-shields, ran a hand along the sensors masts that would extend to look past the shield, then stepped aft to inspect the reflector array that, once opened to its full twelve meter span, would help focus laser energy onto the interceptor's drive. The drive section was retracted for now; in space it would extend from the rear of the interceptor, almost doubling the craft's length,  placing the reaction mass nozzle right at the focus point of the reflectors. When the laser energy from one of the
Conquering Sun
's PLAs focused on it, the drive would be able to accelerate the interceptor at almost ninety gees.

Zandy looked over the glossy half spheres of the interceptor's laser arrays. The  little lasers lacked the power to burn though heavy armor, but they would be able to blind an enemy interceptor's sensors. Aside for the bow-shields, the little lasers and the radical evasions made possible by the interceptor's huge acceleration were her only defense. She ran a hand along the cluster of recessed launch tubes for her sensor drones. Those would be her eyes when the main sensors of the interceptor were blinded by the glare of enemy lasers. Everything looked perfect.

It was odd, she thought, to be touching one of her bodies with the hand of the other... Now there was a thought only a daemon could have, Zandy mused. She could see the distorted reflection of her biosim face in the smooth metal of the interceptor, and for a moment it was as if the interceptor wore the same face. She wondered briefly which one was actually "her."

But there was no time for that sort of thing now. She focused her mind and turned away from the interceptor. It was time to head to the avatar storage compartment, where her current body would be safely stored while she inhabited the interceptor. There was just enough time left to walk to her assigned storage compartment before the
Conquering Sun
dispensed with the charade that she was a freight super-liner and went to a full three gees acceleration; a few minutes after that, the enemy would be in range and the assault-ship would open fire, with Zandy, in her interceptor body, as one of the projectiles.

The avatar storage room was a familiar sight; rows and rows of storage capsules for biosims and the occasional bioavatar. In an emergency, she could have transferred into her interceptor from her quarters, or from a dozen other places in the ship, but if the
Conquering Sun
accelerated hard, that would risk damage to her biosim avatar, left behind while she was in the interceptor.

Zandy jostled past other crewmembers as they climbed into the capsules. Jessa was already in the command neural net, flying the ship. Her biosim avatar was already stored in one of the ship's other avatar storage rooms. Zandy climbed into a storage capsule, plugged a data line into the back of her neck, and strapped herself in. The link to her interceptor lit up inside her mind and she transferred herself: A moment of disorientation...

And she was in the interceptor; she
was
the interceptor. A systems check ran almost subconsciously as she tested her body: reflectors, maneuver systems, small laser arrays, sensors; all came up green, stretched and limber, ready to fly. She was used enough to the interceptor that she didn't feel a psychological need to take a deep breath. A query came into her mind and she answered it, "CS-1-4 ready to go."

She could feel the her interceptor body riding forward into the loading chamber. Status data poured into her mind. First Wave was ready.

"OK, pilots," came the "voice" of Wave Leader Handric, "we have two enemy targets, but they are lasing to blind, so you'll have to make your attacks based on the target data you have at the intercept point.

"We can expect as many as twelve defensive interceptors, but we should have the chance to see them coming and deploy anti-interceptor weaponry accordingly. Remember, though, the real target is the lance-ships; kill those and their interceptors go with them.

"Keep your bow-shields deployed and aimed at the lance-ships; no repeats of the mess-up from the last simulation.

"Zandy and I will take the edge positions; if you're starved for sensors data, put a comm-laser on us and we'll do our best to feed you data from the edge of the wave.

"Keep in mind the high closure rate on this shot; it should help us a bit; we're only going to be inside their most effective laser range for a short time. On the other hand, make sure of your aim when you launch warheads; there is way less room for error than usual.

"OK, people; God bless, good hunting, and stand by for launch."

There was a vibration that she could feel through her accelerometers as she was loaded into the launch tube.
Conquering Sun
would fire in a bit more than one more minute. The count-down was running as a subroutine, half-subconscious.

Someone had sent a communication to her, and she took a fraction of a second to "read" it.

"Luck," it said, with a icon of a smiling pixie attached as a signature. Zandy smiled in her own mind.

She was still "smiling" when the magnetic catapult shot her out of the
Conquering Sun
at fifty gees.

There were a few seconds of silent drifting as she aligned her bow-shields and flooded them with ablative polymer, then extended the drive and spread her smart-metal reflectors wide. And then, with a sudden impact of acceleration, one of the
Conquering Sun
's PLAs locked on and concentrated its power into her interceptor, shooting her forward at seventy gees.

The target, which she could see with a sensor mast aimed around her bow-shield, was just a spot of thermal energy, five million kilometers away, but it was closing in at more than five thousand kilometers a second. 

Seen from a distant vantage point, an engagement of space warships was a visually striking sight, Freya thought. From three million kilometers away, the ships themselves were not visible, but their multi-hundred kilometer long exhaust plumes were bright spikes of violet fire.

Two of those spikes of fire were close together, only a few thousand kilometers apart: the two hostile lance-ships. Just now the two lance-ships' exhaust plumes were pointed at the much more distant third spike of fire, the
Conquering Sun
. The two smaller ships had built up a large overtake velocity, and now were decelerating to reduce the overtake rate; too fast a rate of closure and weapons would not be able to reliably track fleeting targets.

Both swift-ships,
Ice Knife
and
Skyrunner
, shadowed the attacking lance-ships, hanging back by a few million kilometers, well out of range.

The distant but fast approaching third spike of fire was the
Conquering Sun
, still "fleeing" at half a gee of acceleration, still hiding her actual identity behind the flare of her drive.

A more cautious attack by the lance-ships might have involved the two ships passing on either side of the target, well outside of weapons range. That would have defeated any attempt by the target to hide behind her drive plume, since a ship could only aim her drive in one direction at a time. Once the identity of the target was known, then the attackers could reform and generate a vector to intercept and engage. But these lance-ships were forgoing a careful approach. They would engage on the first pass, coming to within three hundred thousand kilometers at the point of closest approach unless they changed their current vector.

Range between the lance-ships and the assault ship was falling fast; closure rate was a startling five thousand kilometers per second, more than one percent of light speed. The two sides would be firing well before they actually came within range, aiming far "ahead" of each other to intercept the point where the enemy would be at the moment of closest approach. The lance-ships were less than ten million kilometers from the assault-ship, but at this closure rate, they would be firing at almost five million kilometers, in less than seventeen minutes, in order to have their interceptors reach the target in time to actually engage.

Freya watched with
Ice Knife's
sensors as the lance-ships' drive plumes suddenly went dark. The two ships still were plainly visible as distant beacons of infra-red energy. They had attained their desired vectors and were streaking in towards the
Conquering Sun
on a ballistic course. The
Conquering Sun
kept her drive lit, denying the two lance-ships a look at her actual hull.

All three ships would be deploying their bow-shields now, unfolding the alloy mesh panels and filling them with ablative fluid polymer. The shields would absorb energy from enemy lasers, ablating the polymer and saving the ship behind them. The shield-polymer was also a fantastically good neutron absorber, just in case some enemy still mounted neutron particle beams, even though the old-fashioned weapons couldn't come close to matching the power-to-mass ratio of modern lasers.

The closest approach was going to be too far for the ships' lasers to focus killing energy densities, but at the actual moment of engagement the bow-shields would be pointed at the enemy, hoping to intercept and absorb the energy of interceptor-launched detonation laser warheads. It would take more than one hit from the x-ray lasers of an anti-ship warhead to get through a capital ship's bow-shields. Of course if the enemy's interceptors managed to launch warheads to attack from the sides of a ship, the bow-shields would be of no use, and there was no practical way of mounting liquid polymer shields along the sides of a ship.

The combatant ships would be extending their laser arrays and sensor masts, peeking the emitters and receivers over the edges of their bow-shields. Interceptors would be ready in their launch bays, pilots transferred into their command neural nets. The battle was about to start.

Ice Knife
and
Skyrunner
would have no part in the upcoming battle, except to observe and, possibly, to pursue, if one of the lance-ships survived. Freya could have ordered her ships to ride into the fight, hovering just barely out of range, but the firepower that her two swift-ships could add would be negligible and at that close a range the swift-ships would have had to deal with high intensity blinding laser fire from the enemy. At this point, her mission was mostly to observe and maybe to stand by to act as a rescue platform for any Hegemonic Fleet interceptors that might not be able to manage a link up with the
Conquering Sun
once the battle was over, a task better performed outside of the glare and chaos of the actual engagement.

To Freya it seemed clear that raiders had guessed that the "freight super-liner" was actually a warship, but their reckless attack also made it clear that they did not know it was an assault-ship; maybe they
did
think that it was an armed transport-cruiser... In any case, they would not have much time to be surprised. In a few minutes, they would be too close to pull out of effective range in time, even if they wanted to. At that moment, the
Conquering Sun
would drop her pretense.

There! The
Conquering Sun
had shut down her drive. She would be rotating bow-on to the enemy now. Range between the ships was down to about six million kilometers; still far outside of normal effective range, but with the two sides hurtling towards each other so rapidly, interceptors launched far out of range would be
in
range at the moment the two sides passed each other.

The launch of
Conquering Sun
's interceptors was undetectable without massive magnification, but the sudden flare of her PLAs increased the intensity of her thermal signature. The enemy ships had to see her now, and would be realizing that they were facing an assault-ship. They would also realize that even with their maximum acceleration, they could not change their vector enough to bring the point of closest approach outside of the range of the interceptors
Conquering Sun
had just launched.

Freya watched the two enemy ships, waiting for a reaction, but they kept their course. Then suddenly, her visual sensors degraded as one of the lance-ships put a blinding laser on the
Ice Knife
. Sensor drones deployed at her command and the ship's own sensors tried to see past the glare. Range was too long for really effective blinding. Still, Freya was reluctantly impressed; the enemy had not bothered with a futile evasion  or a desperate launch. They were holding back their interceptors till the range was close enough that their PLAs could power one interceptor each; that should give two lance-ships a combined salvo of twelve interceptors, the same number as the
Conquering Sun
had just launched while holding back half of her own PLAs to power the second stage of her long range attack.

On the other hand, stopping an interceptor with an interceptor was harder to manage than attacking a larger ship; the little parasite fighters were elusive targets, and firing times in interceptor-versus-interceptor combat were vanishingly brief. Still, it was the correct response from the lance-ships, maximizing their defensive firepower now that they saw what they were up against, and it might even let the lance-ships, or one of them, survive.

If that happened,
Ice Knife
and
Skyrunner
might need to make an attack run. Against an undamaged pair of lance-ships, two swift-ships were almost useless, but against a single damaged survivor, they might well be able to deliver the finishing blow.