Virtues of War (39 page)

All he could come up with was that he’d forgotten to shave this morning.

Doctrine demanded eight bearing lines. But doctrine also said he was owed eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. He input the command to name his near-crossfix of bearings as a datum.

“Longboat, Viking-Two,” he said. “New datum one-six, request permission to investigate.”

There was a pause, then Lieutenant Makatiani’s voice.

“Viking-Two, Longboat—affirmative.”

Jack turned his Hawk to point right at his crossfix—now upgraded to a datum—and pushed the throttles forward, thankful that
Kristiansand
shared his loose interpretation of doctrine. If the ASW team was feeling anything like Jack, they were anxious to score a kill.

This was only his first war, but Jack was pretty sure things weren’t going well. In this morning’s pre-mission brief he’d learned that the ships guarding the jump gate back to Terra had been surprised by a Centauri attack through the gate itself, and had been destroyed.

EF 15 was completely cut off and being harried at every step. One of their priceless stealth ships had been hunted down and destroyed, and
King Alfred
had taken serious damage fighting off an orbital attack. Every day, attacks were getting through and causing trouble.

Kristiansand
herself was showing scars from her engagement with a lone Centauri frigate. The two ships had exchanged missile volleys at long range before the enemy finally retreated. The indecisiveness of the outcome had only added to the frustration among the crew.

His high-speed run lasted seven minutes and took him to within a thousand kilometers of the datum. If his analysis was right, the stealth ship should be close enough for him to spit at. Getting close to a stealth ship was generally considered suicide, but Jack figured he was pretty safe in his Hawk. His ship was so small it was almost impossible to detect, and no stealth captain would want to waste a gravi-torpedo or give away his position. No, the enemy would prefer to sneak past in order to reach the invasion ships and the carrier.

Well
, he thought as he slowed up and waited for his hunt controls to clear,
that isn’t going to happen today
.

“Longboat, Viking-Two,” he said. “Deploying big dipper.”

“Longboat, roger.”

With practiced ease he deployed his dipper into the Bulk, and set his initial search depth at twelve peets, below the weakbrane. Within seconds he was studying the gravimetric picture.

Against the background curvature of Sirius and its white dwarf companion, the EF capital ships stood out like beacons in the darkness as their artificial gravity dug holes in spacetime like a cluster of planetoids. Jack shook his head and sighed in frustration.

From his briefing he knew that the EF main body was over ten million kilometers away—no spaceship should be detectable at that range. Were they trying to draw the attention of every enemy stealth ship in the system? Or was keeping their AG activated some clever ruse to lure in the Centauris?

Cynicism wouldn’t help him find stealth ships, he reminded himself. Ignoring the EF’s spacetime curvature, he looked for other disturbances.

Jack noticed the distinct bending of space to starboard, just as the warning light began to flash. He held the reading for a moment, then it faded. He frowned.

Gravimetric curvature wasn’t supposed to fade away.

Weakbrane! In a flash of insight he saw the picture from the enemy point of view. The stealth ship suspected it was being prosecuted, and was moving in the Bulk, coming up to put the weakbrane and its distorting qualities between itself and Jack’s sensors.

Sure enough, as the sensor passed through the weakbrane, the curvature to starboard returned.

“Longboat, Viking-Two,” he reported. “Fishing true, two-seven mark one-six. Request active!” He had the bastard by bearing, but he needed a range before he could fire.

“This is Longboat—affirmative. Go active and take when ready.”

With the big dipper steady at five peets, Jack released an active graviton pulse. In a microsecond burst, a wave of gravitons projected forth from his big dipper, in effect making the sensor appear as a massive object in the Bulk. If there were no other nearby objects, the gravitons would disperse without incident. But if their path was bent by a nearby mass… all Jack needed was the time differential to get a range to target.

His hunt controls and 3-D display flashed to light. Gravitons were bending heavily to starboard at ninety kilometers. New symbology automatically designated the disturbance as a hostile stealth ship, number one.

He hauled to starboard and released the safeties on his weapons.

“This is Viking-Two. Hook shadow zero-one. Taking with torpedo!”

Jack toggled the firing key. There was a bang against the hull as the weapon rocketed clear. He saw the fire of its propulsion system kick in. Then it shrank to nothingness as it phased into the fourth dimension.

“Torpedo in the Bulk!”

On his hunt display he saw the knuckle in spacetime deepen as the stealth ship increased speed. It was so close that the bearing began to change visibly, even as he watched. The torpedo was firing graviton waves every microsecond to update its target’s position, making so much spacetime noise that even the EF capital ships faded on his screen. But its data was automatically relayed back to the Hawk, and Jack watched as the stealth ship retreated at full speed, descending into the Bulk as it did.

Huge troughs in spacetime clouded the chase as the stealth ship dropped gravimetric decoys, known colloquially as “bowling balls,” to distract the torpedo. Jack rapidly designated the real target in his display, sending updates to the weapon. But it was all too fast. He couldn’t tell one trough from another.

Hopefully the torpedo could.

Sixty seconds went by without a detonation.

“Dammit!” He slammed his fist down on the controls. He swung his eyes through the visual, flight controls, hunt controls. The brane his Hawk sat in looked quiet. The Bulk was a gravimetric mountain range.

The stealth ship was gone.

“Viking-Two, Longboat—assess shadow zero-one below the weakbrane.”

Then an updated bearing line from
Kristiansand
showed the knuckle of the stealth ship deep in the Bulk. He stabbed at his controls to send the big dipper in pursuit. At fourteen peets he paused the sensor and conducted an immediate active graviton pulse.

There she was. Nearly one thousand kilometers away and thirteen peets in.

Stick and throttle moved together as he started another attack run. Torpedo Two locked onto the target. He fired. Another weapon flashed forward into space and into the fourth dimension.

The torpedo started pulsing as soon as it dropped below the weakbrane, but only every ten microseconds. This far into the Bulk, gravity was much stronger, and throwing gravitons around like confetti was extremely dangerous. The stealth ship seemed to grow larger as it accelerated away again, but the torpedo was just too fast. A pair of bowling balls rolled into the Bulk to cloud the picture, but Jack easily kept tracking on the real target and guided his weapon past the decoys.

He prepared his third torpedo for a shallow firing solution in case the stealth ship tried to escape through the weakbrane again. The Hawk was chasing at full speed, and closed half the distance to the target before the torpedo struck. The hunt controls gave evidence of the impact, the gravimetric strike tearing a hole so massive that it showed as the deepest purple.

In visual, Jack saw the stars ripple before him.

Then he gasped as some unseen force yanked him forward. For a second it felt like the g-forces in a hard turn, and he instinctively switched to heavy-gee breathing. His vision went red at the edges and he grabbed to hang onto his seat.

The pressure eased, and Jack did a quick check of the visual, the flight controls, and hunt controls. The star field had returned to normal. There were no contacts on the brane. The spacetime disturbance that had once been a Centauri stealth ship was flattening out. He activated a routine sensor sweep, checking for matter on the brane just in case the stealth ship had released message buoys or escape pods. Nothing.

“Longboat, Viking-Two—shadow zero-one destroyed.”

He was sure he could hear cheering in the background when Makatiani responded.
“Viking-Two, Longboat, roger. Bravo-zulu.”

He sat back in his seat and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Ahh, the coveted bravo-zulu. A traditional phrase from days of flag communication between sailing ships—perhaps the highest form of congratulations a line officer was capable of uttering. Jack had seen the other subbies blush with pleasure upon receiving one. And, he had to admit, it felt pretty good.

His eyes came to rest on the hunt controls again. The curvature of spacetime was still bent from the torpedo detonation. Doctrine stated that it was safe to fire gravi-torpedoes all the way to sixteen peets before the singularity became permanent, but for a few moments that last blast had looked pretty close to becoming a black hole.

He began retrieving the big dipper and wondered idly what was supposed to happen next. In an exercise, the successful prosecution of the contact was followed by a debrief, a landing, and a shower. But as this was his first actual kill…

Things suddenly seemed kind of anticlimactic.

He checked the results of the routine matter sweep, wondering if Centauri secrets had been ejected from the stealth ship at the last second, to sneak their way back to the brane and await retrieval. The sweep revealed no obvious objects in space, but what it did reveal froze Jack in his seat.

A thin, perfectly straight line of slowly diffusing particles passed within two thousand kilometers of the Hawk and extended away in both directions, stretching to infinity. It was the old exhaust trail of a ship.

Jack pulled out the data crystal Katja Emmes had given him, and transferred the data to the Hawk’s computer. He’d been studying her findings in his off time, and his current mission placed him more or less in the same part of space that should have been traversed by the mystery ship—the one that had delivered Centauri weapons to
Astrid
.

He overlaid Katja’s extrapolation of the mystery ship’s trajectory on his own 3-D display. The two lines formed nearly an exact match.

A signal from his console indicated that the big dipper had been retrieved. He glanced at his hunt controls and saw that the scope was clear. Without hesitation he turned the Hawk to follow the trail as it led down toward the ecliptic.

“Longboat, Viking-Two. I am patrolling my sector down a bearing of two-six mark one-niner.”

With no other ASW activity, he figured he was free to choose whatever direction he wanted to patrol, so long as he remained within his search sector. And now that he’d dispatched the bad guy, he had an even bigger mystery to solve.

J
ack’s fuel lights flashed red as he approached the dark shape of
Kristiansand
.

Like all Terran warships,
Kristiansand
was a dim, charcoal color. Her navigation lights were extinguished and no interior lighting was visible. She was running as silent and as invisible as possible, and if not for her ultra-tight homing beacon Jack would never have found her in the abyss. From a distance her compact form was defined more by the stars she eclipsed than by any distinguishing features Jack could see.

On final approach, however, he spotted the dim red lights of the hangar door, four fifths of the way back on the starboard side. He took station one kilometer off
Kristiansand
’s starboard quarter, matching velocities at this safe distance and locking the vectors into his computer.

Following the trail of exhaust particles had taken him right to the edge of his sector, and nearly out of range for a safe return. It was standard for his patrol time to overlap with the next Hawk in the rotation to ensure that the EF was never without proper ASW coverage, but he hadn’t even started back for
Kristiansand
until the Hawk from
Cape Town
had launched. What was normally a fifteen-minute handover had become forty-five minutes.

In fact, Jack had technically been relieved of ASW responsibility for nearly half an hour before he finally saw his mother ship emerge from the darkness. No doubt he’d get a lecture for unnecessarily straining EF assets, but he figured that today of all days—what with him having destroyed a stealth ship and all—he might be shown leniency.

He pushed his little ship forward with thrusters and watched the red outline of the open hangar airlock grow larger. He wasn’t aimed directly at it, but just to the side. He trimmed slightly to starboard to ensure a safe separation as he passed
Kristiansand
’s stern, then fired reverse thrusters to kill his relative forward momentum. He eased to a stop directly abeam of the open hangar door, then slowly rotated his craft so that he was facing into the airlock. One more thrust and he floated through into the waiting maw. Magnetic arrestors gently gripped the Hawk and pulled it down to the deck.

As the outer airlock door closed and the space pressurized, he took the time to start shutting down his non-essential systems. He did a quick upload of his new findings to his personal account in
Kristiansand
, then backed up the data on the crystal. As he did so, the inner airlock doors opened and the Hawk was towed into the hangar. He continued to shut down systems and finally unstrapped from his seat.

The aft cargo door began to open, activated by the ground crew outside. He pushed off from his seat and floated back into the main cargo area, expecting to be greeted by his crew chief.

Instead, he was greeted by the smiling face of the XO, Lieutenant Duncan. Behind him was what looked like the entire ground crew. As soon as Jack came into view, the crew started applauding.

He felt a stupid grin spread across his face.

The XO steadied himself against the doorframe and extended his hand. “Nicely done, Jack.”