Hegemony (49 page)

"Let's see which one of us he goes for, Muir," Freya said. "Fact is, I don't actually want to get into a shooting exchange with that ship. She's an SDF ship; part of the Hegemonic Fleet, if only barely. Her crew aren't traitors, and I don't want to kill them. For that matter, I don't want to risk damage to
Ice Knife
.

"Not much choice, is there?"

"Well, if they go for the
Whisperknife
, we might be able to coordinate our maneuvers and get them exactly between us. That would make their tactical situation more or less hopeless."

"Hard to manage," Muir said. "Lag time is already up to about a second, send-and-receive, between us and
Whisperknife
. I don't see how we can coordinate that closely. Besides, if we do manage, that means making simultaneous attack runs against the SDF ship... and like you said, Captain, we don't actually want to kill anyone."

"Captain," came a call from Sensors, "
Whisperknife
has changed her acceleration. She's now vectoring directly reciprocal to our base vector."

"Confirm that," Freya said sharply, but the data was clear.

"What is he doing?" Muir asked.

"Not sure," Freya said. "Giving up?"

"Shit," Muir vocalized.

"No!" Freya exclaimed, as the vector lines became clear in her mind. "Son of a bitch! That's... clever."

"Captain?"

"Look at this," Freya said, showing Muir the vector model she had just run. "He's reducing his vector, increasing the time to intercept with the SDF ship. The two ships behind us will catch him sooner this way, but not nearly soon enough. With this new vector,
Whisperknife
is going to reach the safe FTL threshold about twenty minutes before the inbound SDF ship can intercept. That's enough time for an FTL transit, if his crew is fast."

"Damn. Damn that's sharp," Muir said. "This Captain Killick is..."

"Very clever, Muir," Freya said. "Not perfectly clever, though. If the SDF ship launches warheads early,
Whisperknife
will be forced to maneuver to evade, and that will keep him from initiating an FTL transit, at which point the intercept happens anyway and he's dead. But I bet the SDF swift-ship won't think to fire early. It's seriously non-obvious."

"Are we going to match his maneuver?" Muir asked.

"Negative," Freya said. "I'd like to, but if both ships do it, that inbound SDF ship might figure out what we're doing and fire early. He doesn't have to be able to hit us. All he has to do is launch a few warheads and make us maneuver to evade so we can't go FTL.

"No, we're going to have to do this the hard way. We're going to go to maximum sustained thrust at 90 degrees to our base vector, on a reciprocal vector from the one
Whisperknife
was on, and hope our inbound SDF ship either follows us and can't keep up with our acceleration, or that he lets us go and goes after the
Whisperknife...
and that Captain Killick's plan works, at which point we can manage a safe FTL transit easily enough."

"It looks like he's decided to chase us," said Muir, some time later.

The vector lines of the tactical display illustrated his point. The inbound SDF swift-ship was burning hard to maintain the intercept with the
Ice Knife
. The Central Throne Fleet swift-ship had a small emergency acceleration advantage over the System Defense Fleet ship, but the SFD ship seemed to be willing to burn hard to match the
Ice Knife'
s sustained acceleration, ignoring the discomfort it imposed on the SDF ship's human crew. 

"Just as well," mused Freya. "We can win an engagement with an SDF swift-ship; the void-runner probably couldn't."

"Are we actually going to have to fire on them? On a Hegemonic SDF ship?" Muir asked.

"We have to," Freya answered. "If we don't launch warheads, he can maneuver to optimize his own launch vector, hold off his launch till the last moment... that would make our defensive situation pretty bad. On the other hand, if he has to evade our launch to give his point defense lasers a decent engagement window, he'll have to launch his warheads on a suboptimal vector, and they'll be a lot easier for us to defend against.

"Remember," she went on,  "we don't need to kill him. We just need to get past him. I don't care if he can avoid our attack, as long as we can avoid his."

"Hell of a situation, Captain," Muir said. "What if we engage with only anti-interceptor warheads? We'll be tasking most of our warheads to go after his inbound anti-ship warheads in any event... leave just enough inbound at him to make him evade... And if we do score a hit past his defenses, he has a better chance of surviving."

"We'll go one better than that, Muir. We'll set the warheads aimed at the swift-ship not to detonate. He'll still have to evade, and maybe even use up some of his own warhead salvo for anti-warhead intercept. And by the time he notices we're firing blanks, we'll be past him and out of the engagement envelope."

"That's a good plan, Captain," Muir said. "I just wish the crew of that SDF ship was going to extend the same courtesy to us."

From her borrowed acceleration pod aboard the
Whisperknife
, Zandy could see the bright spark of the
Ice Knife'
s plasma drive, boosting the other swift-ship away. Far more distant was the spark of the inbound SDF ship's drive. The
Whisperknife
's captain had allowed Zandy to access the sensor feeds, so she could see the raw data. Even without access to the tactical data feed, Zandy could calculate the vector lines in her mind. The two Hegemonic swift-ships, the
Ice Knife
and the SDF ship, were closing towards each other at more than 1000 kilometers per second.

We're hitting the edge of the safe FTL threshold in 380 seconds," came the void-runner captain's vocalization. "Stand by for FTL initiation and get everything ready if it's not there already."

The cadence of commands, spoken aloud, wasn't much like a Hegemonic Fleet ship, Zandy thought. But the crew seemed to get their job done even so. She wondered if the crew was as informal when they had to communicate through their data links, when they were locked into their acceleration pods for high accelerations.

Her data feed showed the two swift-ships,
Ice Knife
and the SDF ship, closing fast. Abruptly, there was a sparkle of tiny fission drive flares as both ships launched warheads. Zandy couldn't track the spray of inbound and outbound warheads with only the raw sensors data, but she could imagine what was happening. Both swift-ships had launched at least a dozen warheads, each of which had lit its small, short duration fission pulse drive to give a final addition or modification to the vector the launching ship had imparted to it.

Meanwhile, both swift-ships,
Ice Knife
and the SDF ship, lit up with brief intense flares of thrust as they pushed their drive to maximum emergency power. For a few hundred seconds the swift-ships could push almost 20 gees, and would be. For the human crew of the SDF ship, it would be crushing and disorienting, even in their acceleration pods. For the daemons aboard the
Ice Knife
, there would be no discomfort, though the force of the emergency acceleration would make the hull of the ship shriek with the stresses and forces imposed on it.

Zandy watched as the sprays of warheads streaked across the space between the two ships. In just seconds the firefly flashes of nuclear detonation laser warheads would flicker across the vacuum...

The sudden, disorienting flash of FTL initiation swallowed Zandy's sensor feed; in an instant the
Whisperknife
was gone from the Yuro system, instantly transited to the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system instead. For an instant, the sensor feeds showed nothing except the flare of interplanetary dust and hydrogen atoms, suddenly bombarded by the energies of the already collapsing wormhole till they glowed with a flash of multi-spectrum energy.

The emergence flare faded, and Zandy could see the empty, cold space of the Waypoint system.

"Good emergence," said the Captain. "Now let's see if our new Hegemonic friends make it."

Whisperknife
drifted silently
through the cold, empty space of the waypoint system. The sullen light of the dwarf star was just a distant red spark in the darkness of the outer system. The search zone was still more than fifty hours away, but Captain Killick seemed to be worried about reaction-mass; it would have been somewhat faster to keep the drive burning, accelerating at a comfortable one gee, and then decelerating hard and fast when the ship reached the volume of space where the search would commence. It would have used a lot more reaction mass, but Zandy had been told that the
Whisperknife
had filled her tanks in the Yuro system. Even so, Captain Killick was being economical, letting the ship drift on its vector, content to take more time and conserve his ship's delta-vee.  

Since the FTL transit from the Yuro system, Zandy had had nothing to do. The rest of the pirate ship's crew seemed busy enough, and though there was very little room aboard, no one had given Zandy much trouble. She supposed she was a guest, rather than a prisoner; they said as much, and they had made no moves to restrain her or confine her, though they had "requested" that she hand over her captured laser pistol.

The pirates were... not what Zandy had expected. She had never really given much thought to pirates. Void-runners, as far as she had been concerned, were anonymous savages, living on the fringes of the Hegemony. They had figured not at all into her life in the residence zones of Neomiletus, on New Ionia. At the Academy, they were seen, more than anything, as a tactical problem; a target to be engaged, if they could be caught. Zandy had never bothered to think about them as people.

Now these people surrounded her. None of the others were as odd as the cat-girl, Ylayn, but all of them were at least eccentric looking. Some had extensive tattoos, or other body-art; piercings or subdermal display implants that sent patterns of color across the skin of their faces or arms. Most wore flamboyant clothes in styles she was not familiar with. Some carried weapons, even aboard ship. Some wore emblems with unknown meanings, and badges with text written in symbols she couldn't read. They seemed confident, at ease, to Zandy. And all of them had the hard look of people who were used to violence.

They wore no sort of uniform, nothing standard at all, so that there was no way for Zandy to tell who had which rank or role aboard the ship, and she had spent some hours idly trying to figure out the command structure of the swift-ship. Captain Nas Killick was in charge, that much was easy to see, but the rest of it had proved impossible to deduce.

I suppose I should be more worried, Zandy thought. More scared. But self-preservation seemed like a distant, or perhaps an empty, concern. Everyone she had known, everyone she had cared about, on the
Conquering Sun
, was dead. So how important could it be for her to stay alive?

Intellectually, Zandy could recognize the thought as dangerous, maybe a symptom of too much time in neural net storage; psychological trauma from being out of her humanoid avatar for too long. That wasn't unheard of for a daemon who had spent as long in storage as she had. Or maybe it was just grief, from a woman who had no one left to care about. But those thoughts didn't change the fact of it.

The escape from Yuro IV had been chaotic and hectic, and even once aboard the void-runners' ship, still exciting. The unfamiliar discomfort of enduring high-gee maneuvers in an acceleration pod, inside her humanoid biosim avatar, had been novel, and also exciting in a way; not much like inhabiting an interceptor body at all.

Even just watching the maneuvers that had allowed the
Whisperknife
to escape had been fascinating, and Zandy could not help but admire the skill of Captain Killick as a pilot and tactician. Then there had been the waiting, not knowing how the engagement between the
Ice Knife
and the SDF swift-ship had unfolded. For almost two hours, Zandy had watched the raw sensor data, trying to catch any sign of an FTL emergence, wondering dully if the
Ice Knife
,
and the people she knew aboard her, were dead, or captured, or safe.

At last, the
Ice Knife
had made her FTL emergence, having succeeded in getting past the SDF swift-ship that had intercepted her.
Ice Knife
had made it through the inbound fire with only a few out-of-focus hits against her bow-shields; no real damage done. The SDF ship had made it through unharmed as well.

There had been a quick exchange of radio signals with Captain Tralk, a confirmation of the search coordinates and a quick, if time-lagged, conference dividing the enormous volume of the search zone between the two ships.

After that, there had been long hours of constant acceleration, trapped in her biosim avatar, locked into the acceleration pod. The pirates seemed well used to it, and Zandy knew better than to voice a complaint.

And now the two swift-ships,
Ice Knife
and
Whisperknife
, were drifting through the search zone, looking for the debris of the battle where the
Conquering Sun
and the Coaly lance-ship had died, seeking after an intact sensor drone, or an abandoned interceptor whose sensors might have gotten a good, close look at the deadly coalition lance-ships and thus, hopefully, captured the secret of their unprecedented firepower.