Guardsmen of Tomorrow (5 page)

“Captain!” Ishiwara’s voice said. “We’re dragging upper atmosphere. Contact with the surface in five seconds… four…”

“All hands!” Pardoe called. “Brace for impact!”

Even empty space has substance, on the quantum level, the eleven-dimensional structure of emptiness sometimes called the fabric of space-time, the stuff a starship’s drive fields grab hold of during maneuvers and acceleration. Now, though, the interface surface of
Indeterminacy^
drive field was intersecting solid rock as the frigate hurtled low across the Kadenese surface. At low velocity, space would bend, gravity-like, with no noticeable effect. At several percent of the speed of light,
Indy’s
current velocity, the fringe effects of a drive field dragging through unyielding rock…

There were… effects.

Indeterminacy
slowed, first of all, decelerating sharply and for free at tens of thousands of gravities, though the drive field kept the velocity change uniform and unfelt aboard… fortunately for the men and women belowdecks.

On the surface, solid rock flexed… warped… then snapped as stress points were reached and surpassed.

The interface shock wave dragged along the Dalacradak Peninsula well astern of the hurtling starship, visible from space as a frothy white V arrowing across land and sea alike. The south face of Gadeddej Mountain shuddered, shouldering slightly skyward, then collapsed, a thundering, booming detonation of rock avalanching into the Drudep Valley below, carrying with it the bristling array of deep-space sensor antenna and wave guide towers mounted there.

The shock wave boomed across Egezhur Bay, slammed into the Drugid Cliffs, and hit the Razurig defense facility like an oncoming storm wall straight from the depths of hell. The main gun turret, its muzzle cocked at a point in the sky above the eastern horizon, tipped crazily, spun, then shredded under the impact of fast-moving discontinuous space. The military garrison town of Krebur vanished as buildings shook themselves to pieces in the seismic quake rolling along behind the storm front.

Mount Gadez, long dormant, awakened as its lava plug shattered and long-pent energies deep within the crust were catastrophically released.

The close passage, as
Indeterminacy‘
’s wake lightly brushed the planet’s surface, lasted less than three seconds. As the frigate arrowed now back into the interplanetary‘ depths of the Kaden system, the planet receding astern showed evidence of the ferocity of that encounter. The shock wave continued to ripple east across the Zurkeded Ocean, though with fast-fading force. Storm clouds were gathering in white-swirling fury above the peninsula, and Mount Gadez glowed in the depths of its fast-expanding cloud of dark gray volcanic ash.

And every one of the planetary defense batteries on the Dalacradak Peninsula, from Razurig to Cape Zhadurg, was silent now, lost in the pall of the gathering storm.

Aboard the
Indeterminacy
, all was darkness, chaos, and confusion. Despite the insulating effects of the drive fields, the shock of the planetary close encounter had wracked and twisted the frigate, knocking vital systems off-line, including the shipnet itself. Hazzard blinked into a smoky darkness filled with screams and yells and the intermittent flare of small electrical fires. Circuit breakers had tripped, knocking whole ship sections off the power grid; in some places, power feeds had arced, melting circuits and fuses and setting fires. Damage control robots swarmed like spidery hands, weird shadows against the flames, and Hazzard caught the acrid stink of burning insulation and fire-smothering kaon gas.

Terror clawed at the back of his brain, but he fought down both the panic and the urge to unstrap from his jack-rack. Either full power would be restored in a moment… or the
Indeterminacy
, blind and helpless, would drift into the squadron melee, a crippled target. Either way, there was nothing he could do at the moment to change things, nothing to do but wait and pray that automated DC systems would bring the ship back to life.

It was always the waiting that was the worst.

At least he had awakened. In ship-to-ship combat, between vessels crewed by the disembodied uploads of men and women into the machines that handled the sails and fired the guns, the danger was not so much outright death, though that possibility was real enough, as it was the possibility that the data linkages between your mind within a machine and your comatose body might be abruptly broken. In one sense, your mind did not actually leave your body; the remote spider or rigging rat crawler was no more than an extension of your sensory organs, not of your brain.

Still, too many minds were destroyed when the machinery failed, in the crippling trauma of dissociation. When the shipnet had gone off-line, most of the officers and crew had reawakened on their jackracks.
Most
…

Hazzard, like most c-men, dreaded insanity more than outright death.

At least this time, he’d come through okay. But next time-Light, life, motion, sensation flooded his brain, replacing the fire-shot blackness of the jackrack deck as the ship-net came back on-line. The damage… the damage was bad, though arguably not as bad as it could have been.
Indeterminacy
was in a slow tumble, falling away from Kaden’s orange-and-white disk at 29,000 kph-a slow-drifting crawl by interplanetary standards. Her dorsal fore and mainmasts, her port mizzen, her starboard mizzen, main, and foremasts were gone, snapped off by the violence of their close passage. Wreckage-the shards and tangle of splintered masts and shredded rigging-trailed alongside, threatening to fur-ther cripple the vessel as her spin fouled the remaining masts and spars.

“Get that wreckage cut away!” he yelled into the confusion of the net. “Helm! Get this tumble under control!”

Ahead, less than a hundred thousand kilometers distant now, four ornately decorated P’aaseni warships were moving into line-ahead for an intercept, the lead vessel the
Gilaadessera
, a seventy-five-gun ship of the line. Her sails spread slowly, catching the outwind of the local sun, their lead surfaces adazzle in shifting, light show display. It was a race now, between those oncoming warships and
Indeterminacy‘
’s damage control parties, ship handlers, and machines.

Hazzard glanced astern, at the slowly receding, slowly tumbling disk of the planet.

“Make a signal to Kaden,” he told cy-Tomlin. “Put it in all of their major dialects.

Tell them… tell them, ‘Sorry for the miscalculation. I guess we cut that one too close!’”

“Do you think they’ll believe our brushing them that way was an
accident
?” Pardoe asked.

Hazzard gave a mental shrug. “It gives both sides a bit of something to save face with,” he replied. “And at least we stopped those damned guns!”

“I hope the Admiralty sees it that way, sir.”

“Skek the Admiralty!” The curse was more bitter than he’d intended. “They’re not here!”

Bursts of plasma from
Indy’s
maneuvering thrusters slowed, then arrested the ship’s spin. A large tangle of wreckage-remnants of the entire starboard mast array-broke free a moment later, imparting a slight yaw to port.

“Helm! Don’t correct that!” Hazzard snapped. “Let them think we’re still helpless!”

The port yaw was turning the
Indy
relative to the oncoming enemy line, bringing her dorsal gun deck around.

Naval tactics were dictated by the physics of ship handling and the nature of ship design. Vast arrays of sails and rigging forward and astern meant that a warship’s guns- all but her relatively small bow and stern chasers-faced outward, abeam. The wooden warships that had sailed the oceans of ancient Earth four thousand years before had adopted tactics quite similar to these, shaped by the cold hand of physics.

“Port roll,” Hazzard ordered. “Dorsal guns, run out! Fire as you bear!”

In those long-vanished sailing vessels at the dawn of history, shipboard guns had used charges of exploding chemical powder to impel spherical lumps of inert metal across hundreds of meters of open sea. Aboard
Indeterminacy
, guns used magnetic fields to launch artificially generated micro-singularities across far greater gulfs of empty space.
Indy’s
largest guns were 32s, each accelerating a thirty-two-kilogram mass, compressed to a volume rivaling that of a single proton, to a velocity of nearly twenty percent of
c
.

Along the checkered surface of
Indeterminacy‘$
dorsal gun deck, hatches swung open and the blunt, black muzzles of the singularity launchers snubbed forth. They fired, the massive, rippling broadside slamming the frigate sideways in hammering recoil, the dead hand of Isaac Newton rocking them back in all the fury of his Third Law.
Indy’s
drive fields absorbed much of the recoil, and the massive shock absorbers housing each of her guns dissipated much of the rest. Still, the effect of a broadside on those aboard the vessel was one of jolting, thundering power barely contained by the drive fields.

Hazzard felt the lurch and rumble, driven to the core of his being.

Indy’s
first broadside struck home.

“Maintain port roll!” he called. “Starboard deck, roll out! Fire as you bear!”

A ship’s drive field could be fluttered, distorting space enough to bend laser and particle beams safely clear of the vessel… or to crumple and shred the electronics of any missile, or the fusing of an incoming explosive warhead. Microsingularities, however, smaller than an atomic nucleus and moving at velocities only slightly less than relativistic, tended to slide through a field’s fringe interference effect, and the damage they wreaked on the target came not from exploding warheads, but from the simple kinetic destruction wrought by high-velocity mass.

Like the shipboard guns of an earlier era,
Indeterminacy
‘s singularity cannon pounded away at the lead P’aaseni ship, puncturing main courses, jibs, and tops’ls, slamming home into her ornately painted prow. Where most Union warship prows were broad, flattened domes, fifty meters or more across, P’aaseni vessels bore clusters of twelve spherical water tanks, held together by gilded frames that gave them the look of bizarre baskets of fruit. Each impact blew glittering bits of hull metal, basket loads of scrap, and gushing white plumes of escaping steam, crystallizing almost at once into frost-gleaming clouds of ice-fog. Every starship carried a small lake in its prow storage tank-water for the crew’s use, for use as fuel in the fusion reactors, and reaction mass for the thrusters. Storing the water in a prow tank provided protection from particulate radiation when the ship was at near-c velocities.

Indeterminacy‘
?, broadside had holed at least half of
Gil-aadessera
’s tanks. Water exposed to hard vacuum expanded quickly, turning to steam… then condensed almost immediately into ice crystals. In another moment,
Gilaadessera
was wreathed in fog as water gushed from savage rents in the storage tanks. As
Indy’s
second broadside tore into the enemy vessel, high-speed microsingularity rounds scratched dazzling blue threads of light through the ice-fog.

More debris spilled into space, mixed with the gush of frozen atmosphere. The
Gilaadessera
was hurt, and badly.

Indeterminacy
continued her roll, bringing her port side guns to bear, loosing a third broadside with devastating accuracy. One of
Gilaadessera’s
bowsprits and foremasts collapsed in a tangle of broken spars and whiplashing, severed rigging. A moment later, the main mast on that side followed, crumpling under the deadly barrage.

But the big P’aaseni vessel was yawing now to bring her own guns to bear. Worse, the three light rates in her van were moving past her now, accelerating beyond her debris cloud, angling for a clear shot. They would pass astern of the
Indeterminacy
within another two minutes.

And the
Indy
had fired all three broadsides. It took time to reload; the power requirements for readying a singularity and launching it at the target were enormous, and a naval gun could simply not cycle faster than a shot every three or four minutes.

All guns were being reloaded, but it would be another two minutes before the dorsal gun deck was ready for another broadside.

And in that time…

“For what we are about to receive,” Tommis Pardoe said, speaking an ironic prayer from the days of wooden ships on water oceans, “may we be truly thankful…”

“Not bad, all in all,” Sotheby added. “Three broadsides, and not a shot in reply!” He sobered. “Too bad we’re half crippled, though, or we could keep the dance going!”

Hazzard ignored the byplay. “Helm! Bring us right fifteen degrees, down minus five,” he said. “Take us in closer!” If they could swing beneath the enormous
Gilaadessera’s
shattered prow, they could continue to pound the line battle-ship and perhaps find some protection from her consorts’ fire.

The ship of the line began firing as soon as the first of the guns on her port gun deck could be brought to bear. Holes, neat punctures, appeared in
Indy’s
portside forecourse and mains’l, which were still just in the process of deploying. A jarring shudder ran through the shipnet imagery as singularities slammed into the ship’s hull, smashing through her prow. Her dorsal bowsprit shattered under an impact, debris spinning back, colliding with rigging, knocking off a port main spar.

More hits, more shudders.
Indeterminacy
lurched to port, tumbling again. Sotheby was firing the maneuvering thrusters almost constantly now, fighting the ship, trying to maintain both control and way. The frigate continued drifting ahead, her straight-line course carrying her along just slightly faster than the ponderous
Gilaadessera
could turn. As
Indy’s
gun decks reported ready to fire one after the other, Hazzard ordered all decks to commence general firing.

More rounds struck home, sending deck-wrenching shudders through the Union vessel, and now some of the rounds were coming from the stem quarter, as the lead P’aaseni frigate cleared the
Gilaadessera
and brought her guns to bear. One of