Star Force 12 Demon Star (13 page)

Staring at him, I got a sick feeling.

“What are you…?” I asked, then I got it. “Marvin, I’m not allowing you to turn Dr. Hoon or his children into specimens for your death-sprays. You can just forget about that right now. It’s bad enough that I accused him of trying to kill me, but to then suggest that we test the bug spray on his children? He would probably try to kill me for real this time.”

“An inconvenient possibility.”

“Marvin, just see what you can come up with using the Demon that we have and I’ll check with Kalu and Bensen.”

I made my way back to
Valiant,
but I had the feeling I was missing something. I finally made it back to the bridge and found myself in front of the holotank. I just stared into the display. My gut was twisted in knots. What was I missing?  The Demon fleet was three days out from Trinity-9, and I was pretty confident we had good tracking on all of them, because the Whales were hammering the incoming enemy fleet and its area of space with a blizzard of electromagnetic waves.

This allowed us to pick up the reflections on our passive sensors without adding to the active pings, in the same way that the human eye sees in the glare of floodlights. The Demons’ stealth technology we’d found on the captured corvette could be overcome by the application of enough illumination, and everything in the holotank and on the screen was labeled with a high confidence factor.

So what was bugging me? I began to pace around the holotank.

I slammed my fist onto a console. “Yes!
Valiant
, calculate a prediction for the Demon fleet’s turnover and deceleration, assuming they intend to slow enough to take up orbit around Trinity-9 without overshooting.”

“What’s the maximum G-force parameter?”

I racked my brain for a moment then decided I didn’t need to come up with the number myself. “Reference Marvin’s exploitation report on the corvette and the Demon corpse to estimate.”

Valiant thought for a moment. “Combined ship and biotic G force parameters estimated at twenty-two.”

“Ouch. Twenty-two Gs is heavy duty, even with gravplates to counter the forces inside the ship. Let’s assume that’s the most they can do. When will they need to begin deceleration?”

“Negative two days, twenty-one hours.”

“Negative? You mean it’s too late?”

“Yes. As you specified ‘without overshooting,’ sufficient deceleration is now impossible using the parameters given.”

I leaned my forehead against the smart glass of the holotank and tapped my knuckles gently on it, thinking, looking at our allies’ deployments.

The Whales had set up a gauntlet for the Demons to run. A cone of battle with its narrow end pointing directly at the enemy. The tip consisted of automated fortress-asteroids bristling with beam weapons, some railguns and missiles. As the attacking fleet destroyed these sacrificial installations and advanced, they would encounter continuously thickening defenses until they ran into the main Whale force of about two hundred heavy warships.

The simulations showed that the Demons would beat the Whales, but only barely. The hundred fifty or so Elladan ships that formed the reserve would tip the scales in our allies favor, and I hoped my little squadron could do its part as well without getting ourselves killed.

But now, the Demons had passed the point at which they could slow down enough to actually conquer the planet and its system of moons, unless they were to overshoot and come back. Would that be an effective tactic? I put myself in their place.

Overshooting would make the gauntlet far less bloody on both sides. At high speeds, hit probabilities would be low. Then, they could reverse course and come back.

But I didn’t need a machine to calculate that in the time it took the Demons to come back to the fight, the Whales and Elladans could easily shift forces to meet them. Unless I assumed our enemies were idiots, there had to be something I was missing.

Though I hated to ask for help in matters of tactics, I decided to call Hansen and Bradley to the bridge. Once they’d arrived, I explained the situation to them.

“The force with speed has the advantage in combat,” Hansen said in a tone that implied I should know this already. “Their missiles and projectiles will come in faster and hit harder, and once they get close, they’ll be tough to target—at least from the side.”

I nodded. “Sure, but in this case, it also limits their ability to maneuver. They’re in a pipeline and even if they blast sideways starting now, they can’t avoid our allies’ defenses. The Whales might be pacifists at heart, but they’re doing a decent job at setting up a kill zone.”

“Maybe the enemy has some kind of secret weapon,” Bradley said.

“Like what?” I made a come-on motion with my hand. “Go ahead, speculate. What if you were them?”

Bradley chewed his lip. “Well, the hardest thing to stop is hardened mass going fast. If I were designing this attack, I’d have as many cheap bullets as I could in front of me, like a shotgun, to overwhelm the defenses and clear everything out.”

“But there are no cheap bullets, unless the enemy ships launch them…and according to the Whales’ intelligence reports, they have missiles and beams, side mounted, totally unsuited to these tactics.”

“Not totally,” Hansen said. “Their side-mounted beams are good for zooming past, shooting as they go.”

“But at these speeds, nobody’s going to hit much,” I replied. “That’s why we’re trying to figure out what they’re up to.

I could see my CAG was still chewing on something. “Bradley, talk to me.”

“Well, what if the Whales are wrong?” Bradley asked. “That is, what if the Demons changed-up their usual weapons mix or even the way they plan to use them?”

“Okay, so what would you do if you were the attackers? Remember, they refight this battle every Whale year or so, it seems, whenever the planets line up favorably.”

Bradley tapped at the holotank controls for a minute. “I’m setting up a crude simulation, but I think it will be explanation enough.” After a few moments more, he pressed the key to run it.

The display zoomed in to show the Demon fleet approaching Trinity-9 and its defenses. The simulation and ran at fast-forward speed to compress hours and minutes into seconds.

As the enemy neared the cone, ten big ships split apart into a hundred or so chunks each. The pieces, still coasting at two thousand miles per second, slammed unerringly into defense fortresses and ships, wiping them out.

“Of course, in the real world, not all of them will strike, but you get the idea,” Bradley said.

“Trading ten ships—big, cheap suicide ships actually—for about half the Whales’ combat power. A good deal.”

“This is a wild-ass guess, though,” Hansen objected.

Bradley wasn’t the argumentative type, so he only frowned.

“In the details, maybe,” I said, “but I think he’s correct in principle. They’ve built up all this wonderful kinetic energy. They’d be stupid not to use it for more than mere travel.”

“So that explains why they’re not slowing down, but they’re still going to be fighting an uphill battle when they stop and come back to Trinity-9.”

I walked around the holotank, looking at it from all angles. Suddenly, I saw what I would do if I were them.

“It’s because they’re not planning to go back home.”

Running my fingers over the controls, I set up a different sim. “What if they do this?”

This time, instead of coming back, the Demon fleet kept on going after their slashing attack on the Whales, curving gently but inexorably toward Trinity’s central stellar pair.

And toward Ellada.

“Shit,” Hansen rumbled. “With half their fleet helping the Whales, the Elladans are gonna get smeared.”

“What are we going to do?” Bradley said.

“You two talk strategy. I need to speak with Diogenos.” I entered the ready room and told
Valiant
to put me through to the Elladan liaison.

Diogenos’ overly handsome face soon appeared on the screen. “Greetings, Captain. What can I do for you?”

“It may be I can do something for you, Senator. I’m sending over a couple of files with simple simulations that I hope you can adapt to your computer systems, but I’ll explain anyway. The Demon fleet doesn’t seem to be slowing down for an assault on Trinity-9—the Ketans’ planet—we think they’re going to hit and run past, aiming for Ellada. Half your ships will be caught hopelessly out of position.”

Diogenos’ patrician face turned gray with realization. “That is grim news, if you are correct. Our strategy has always been to use the Ketans as faithful phalanxes and bulwarks to absorb the Demons’ firepower.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That seems like a brutally cynical attitude.”

Diogenos shrugged. “We’re the superior species. We taught them technology long ago and encouraged their evolution. Without us, they would still be like the whales of the oceans, bright animals only. Besides, their planet is enormous. With no solid surface, it’s generally immune to strategic strikes with large-scale weaponry. Their floating cities can maneuver, even submerge beneath the clouds for a time, and their people can disperse, feeding as if in the wild. We Elladans, by contrast, are vulnerable to attacks on our city-states, our agriculture, and our industry.”

So much for being the superior species!
I kept the thought to myself. “Philosophy aside, what will you do about the Demons?”

Diogenos’ eyes stared past the vid pickup, as if into the distance over my shoulder. “I have relayed your insight to our military. They will decide such matters. Now I must speak with the Senate. Thank you for the warning, Captain. We welcome any further aid from our faithful allies.”

“No problem, Senator. Riggs out.”

Allies, eh? I guess we’d been upgraded from “children.” But I wasn’t sure what other aid we could lend.

Then I remembered that we were also in the Demons’ path, although we still had time to move out of it.

-11-

“Valiant, connect me to Farswimmer.” I didn’t want to rely on the Elladans to explain to the Whales our predictions about the Demon attack.

When Farswimmer appeared on the screen, I told him about our conjectures.

His tentacle motions conveyed dismay. “Our ship commanders wondered about the lack of deceleration but believed that the Elladans would come up with an explanation and a course of action.”

“The Elladans? You’re relying on them to do your thinking and run the battle for you?” I wasn’t sure if my incredulous tone translated.

“Of course. They’re much more adept at the conduct of hostilities.”

“And who takes the brunt of the casualties?”

“In terms of ship losses, we do—as is fair. It’s our own planet we defend, after all. But in terms of lives lost, the Elladans suffer more than we do.”

“I’m surprised the Elladans take any losses. As I understand it, the Demons have always attacked your planet rather than Ellada.”

“Creatures such as yourselves and the Elladans are small and require large crews of individuals to serve your warships, correct?”

“Sure, mostly, though we do have some small ships with only one person aboard and even unmanned ships. But we find that there are advantages to having more people aboard—redundancy and flexibility, for example.”

“Exactly. Each of our ships contains only one body. Therefore, fewer lives are lost.”

I sat back thoughtfully. “Of course. That makes sense. Each of you takes a lot more life support than a human.”

“We’re also much more adept at multitasking, given our physiology.”

“Physiology?” I wasn’t at all sure what he meant.

“Of course. One of us is like a crew of humans.”

“Huh?” Clearly, I had missed something somewhere.

“Did you not peruse the files we sent?”

“Uh,” I said cautiously, “I skimmed over some parts. What are you referring to?”

Patiently, it seemed to me, Farswimmer said, “Each of us has several brains, adding more as we grow. When too many occupy one body, we divide into two beings.”

“Multiple brains…yeah, I saw that, but I thought the extra ones were to help control a very large creature. Are you trying to say that you actually have more than one mind living in each body?”

“Of course.”

“Then who am I speaking to now?”

Farswimmer laughed. “All of us, as we’re all interested in newcomers. If you were an Elladan, for example, probably half of our minds would be preoccupied with their own peculiar interests.”

I force my slackened jaw to close. “Well, it’s going to take some time to get used to that idea, so for now I’m going to treat each of your bodies as one being, okay?”

“That will not offend us, Captain.”

“Good,” I muttered, still thrown off. Well, the best I could do was follow my own advice, so I decided to simply go on as I had been. “In any case, you might want to start reorganizing your defenses.”

“We will consult with the Elladans. Thank you again, Captain Riggs. We depart.” The screen blanked.

What a bunch of happy-go-lucky creatures. Didn’t they feel the urgency in all this?

I knew that they’d fought similar battles with the Demons on many previous occasions, but I didn’t think the Whales should be so complacent. I wanted to grab Farswimmer by the tentacles and shake some sense into him—or her, or them…whatever. It especially bugged me that they seemed to defer to the Elladans in everything. I wasn’t even sure why it bothered me. After all, it was better than if they tried to lord it over us humans.

I left the ready room and joined Hansen and Bradley in running tactical sims in the holotank.

It was all well and good to ponder multi-brained whales and oddball humanoids with delusions of grandeur, but we’d never get where we were going if we didn’t live through the next few days.

* * *

The Elladans and Whales took our warning seriously in the end.

I watched in grudging admiration as the Elladan commander, whoever he was, immediately turned his fleet around and blasted back toward the inner planets on the most efficient course possible.

Projecting the Elladan and Demon fleets’ paths, it became clear that the defenders would get to Ellada late, but only by a little. This presumed the Demons would decelerate to assault the planet.