The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas
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at all. According to our LP, the Republic forces have been paying no attention at all to the Gate. Even if they do pick up on what’s happening before our fleet is fully in place and ready to deploy, we anticipate being able to achieve local battlespace superiority in relatively short order. Their current fleet in the system consists of twelve ships. Of those, only two could properly be considered heavies—a monitor and a fleet carrier. The flagship appears to be a fast cruiser, and the rest of the ships are destroyers, escorts, frigates, and three supply-cargo vessels.
“Because we’re trying to rescue our own personnel and because we wish to limit the scale of destruction, we intend to use Marine boarding tactics rather than ship-to-ship combat. That will give us our best chance to capturing the ships, freeing our people, and resolving the situation with relatively low casualties.”
He kept to himself the corollary … that saving the lives of naval personnel on the ships of both sides meant spending the lives of a number of Marines, possibly a large number. The tactical situation, however, demanded it.
“This is one instance where we absolutely need the Marines and their special capability in naval engagements,” he continued. He looked at Devereaux’s icon as he spoke, looking for a reaction, wishing again that he could read the emotion behind that bland, corona-haloed projection. “Modern space warfare is a notoriously all-or-nothing affair. Most missiles mount thermonuclear warheads. Beam weapons are designed to overpower shields and pick off point-defense batteries, so the nukes can get through. When a nuke gets through, usually, only a single one is necessary to obliterate the target vessel and everyone on board. That sort of thing would be very hard on the POWs we hope to rescue, and on the T.C. mutineers if they happen to be in the way. The Marines give us an alternative—the ability to burn our way onboard, capture or knock out the command centers, hijack their AI nets, and force each ship’s surrender.
“We could launch a Marine strike solely with the personnel on board the strike carrier and on the assault transport, the assets that we will be sending through in the first translation. Tactical prudence, however, suggests that we wait until we have sufficient ships in place to provide us with decent fire support.
“With that in mind, we will begin deploying our Marine strike forces immediately upon entry into the Puller system. We will not commit ourselves to the assault, however, until we have a naval force in-system that at least matches the PanEuropean fleet already present … say, a total of two to three translation runs. Are there any questions?”
There were questions … most of them small and nagging and micromanaging bits of annoyance. The council appeared for the most part to have accepted at least the broad outlines of the plan. Technically, they couldn’t dictate strategy or tactics, but technically, also, the President could, in his guise as commander in chief of the Commonwealth’s armed forces. The council sought to understand the plan well enough to give the President decent feedback. And, slowly, thanks in part to the military and ex-military personnel within their number, and to their EA links to the Net, that understanding was forthcoming.
But Alexander had tangled with politicians often enough to know that it was never that simple.
Especially, he thought, when one of those politicians was Marie Devereaux.
0112.1102
USMC Skybase
LaGrange-3/Puller 695
1750 hrs GMT
Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and unattended, now, as the last of the supply and shuttle vessels pulled back to a safe distance. Most ships, and most especially the cis-Lunar tugs and more massive cargo vessels that had been servicing Skybase, used gravitic engineering both for their drives and to maintain artificial gravity on board. Such units warped and wrinkled the fabric of space, rendering useless the Skybase’s mathematical understanding of the local metric. From a distance of 10 kilometers, though, with drives switched off, the minor warping from the argrav generators was trivial enough to ignore.
General Alexander was in his office on board Skybase, awaiting the translation to Puller 659, but he was linked in to the scene transmitted from the transport Aldebaran, the image electronically unfolded in his mind. From this vantage point, some 10 kilometers off, Skybase looked like a huge pair of dark gray dishes fastened face to face, rim to rim, with one side flattened, the other deeper and capped by a truncated dome. The structure’s surface looked smooth from this distance, but Alexander knew that up close its skin was a maze of towers, weapons mounts, sponsons, surface buildings, and trenches laid out in geometric patterns that gave it a rough and heavily textured look.
The perimeter of the double saucer was broken in one place as though a squared-off bite had been taken from its rim, at the broad opening leading into Skybase’s hangar deck, a deep and gantry-lined entryway nearly 100 meters wide jokingly referred to as the garage door. Harsh light spilled from that opening, illuminating the gantry cranes and the massive shapes of the starships nestled inside.
“Ten minutes,” an AI’s voice announced in his head. It wasn’t Cara, this time, but one of the battalion of artificial intelligences resident within the MIEF net, tasked with coordinating the entire operation.
Was there anything else that needed to be done, anything forgotten? God help them all if there was. Alexander expected no serious trouble with the PanEuropeans at Puller, but after that, when they jumped through to Nova Aquila. …
Three days earlier, a fleet of gravitic tugs had gentled the behemoth clear of Dock 27 and into open space well beyond the outer ramparts of the outermost Earthring. Hours later, Skybase had translated to the fleet rendezvous area to begin the final loading. The gravimetric picture was complicated close to Earth and to the artificial gravity-twisting engineering of the Rings themselves, but the translation was a tiny one, only about a quarter of a million miles, from geosynch out to the Moon’s orbit. There’d been the faintest of shudders, and Skybase had quietly vanished from Earth synchorbit, to reappear a heartbeat later at L-3.
L-3, the third of the five Earth-system LaGrange points, was located at the Moon’s orbit, but on the far side of Earth from the Moon’s current position, so that Luna was perpetually masked from view by the larger disk of Terra. The point was gravitationally metastable; the gravitational metric was relatively flat, here, with Earth and Moon always positioned in a straight and unchanging line, but ships or structures parked at L-3 still tended to drift away after a few-score days due to perturbations by the Sun and by other planets, especially Jupiter.
However, that metastability would not affect Skybase, which wouldn’t be there long enough to be perturbed by much. The important thing was that local space was flat enough in terms of gravitational balances, providing a good starting point for the coordinate calculations that would allow Skybase to transit through a much, much longer jump, not through but past the Void.
A jump of some 283 light-years, all the way out to Puller 659.
For that transition, local space had to be as flat as could be managed, with a metric far less complex than the scramble of interpenetrating gravity fields found in geosynch. There could be no drift of Moon relative to the Earth, no hum of nearby artificial agrav fields, no space-bending pulse of a passing ship under Alcubierre Drive. L-3 was ideal as a jump-off point, as ideal as could be found, at any rate, this deep inside the Solar System.
“There is something I do not understand,” Cara said as he watched the view of Skybase from the transport.
“What’s that?”
“The QST appears to be a highly efficient means of crossing interstellar distances,” the AI said. “I’m curious why more mobile habitats like Skybase have not been built.”
Alexander