Leviathan

Two

“Admiral Geary, what’s going on?”

Admiral Timbale sounded as if he was torn between confusion and rage. His expression reflected the same tangle of emotions. “I received a fragmentary message from you, which then disappeared from the comm system. My comm techs were trying to find it and discovered that several messages had gone out under my name countermanding something you had sent even though I had no record of whatever that was. I don’t know why you’re heading for the hypernet gate so fast, or why comms between me and most of the ships in this star system are as messed up as if we had a corps of Syndic meegees at work here. I am requesting that you detach one of your destroyers to physically courier your latest messages to me, so I can be sure I have them and know what they say. Timbale, out.”

“He hasn’t even picked up on the threat, yet,” Geary said, appalled. “He thinks it might be the Syndics.” The term “meegee” was an ancient one, derived from an old acronym for electronic warfare techniques like intrusion, jamming, and interference. The equipment employed had changed considerably since the term was first introduced, but the basic concepts for sabotaging and confusing enemy comms and sensors still applied.

“How could he understand the threat if the software is deleting anything that might clue him in?” Desjani asked.

“Could there be Syndic meegees at work here? Or is this all the work of our own meegees?”

She laughed. “The lines blurred on that so long ago that no one knows. Our people weaponize some code, their people find it and mess with it a little and shoot it back at us, then we rework what they did and fire it at them, and who the hell knows where most of it came from anymore? There are more viruses on our systems than there are viruses in our bodies, and the ones in our computer systems keep evolving a lot faster.”

“All right,” Geary said. “But Timbale had the right idea. I’ll detach Hammer to carry my information to him.”

Her eyes were on her display. “She won’t get there in time.”

The dark ships were only ten hours’ travel time away from the hypernet gate as they held their velocity at point two light speed. Two light-hours’ distance. Roughly two billion kilometers. It was a very, very large distance. But in this case, it wasn’t nearly large enough. From where Geary’s ships were, the destroyer Hammer would take nearly seven hours to reach Admiral Timbale at the vast orbiting complex named Ambaru Station. A message sent from Ambaru to the two destroyers guarding the hypernet gate would take four hours to reach them. Even if Timbale sent that order immediately, it would get there an hour too late.

Geary sat morosely on the bridge of Dauntless as he watched the inevitable taking place, the dark ships getting closer and closer to the oblivious destroyers at the hypernet gate. The only good thing was the number of his own ships here, battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers, who were calling in to acknowledge having downloaded the software fix, usually accompanied by startled questions as to what the dark ships were and what were they doing at Varandal.

But with the dark ships only five hours’ travel time from the hypernet gate, Geary frowned as a sudden thought came to him. “Tanya.”

She was still on the bridge as well, of course, looking totally unruffled by the hours spent up here. “Yes, Admiral?”

“Suppose I were commanding those dark ships—”

“As best we know, the artificial-intelligence routines running them are based on what you’ve done,” she pointed out.

“Exactly.” Geary pointed at his display. “I know I’m being pursued. I know that if I flee through the hypernet gate, I will reveal the place where my base is located, allowing the enemy to attack it and cut off my entire fleet at the knees. What do I do?”

Desjani frowned as well. “You? You sure as hell don’t use the gate. Not you.”

“No.” Geary sat up straighter, glaring at his display. “I realize that I can’t get away without betraying the rest of my fleet, so I have to stay here, and since that means being destroyed, I have to do whatever damage I can here before all of my ships are lost.”

She stared at him, then focused on her display, hands flying as she tested courses and actions. “Ancestors preserve us. They’re going to go for Ambaru, aren’t they?”

“Yes. If we keep charging after them, and they turn aside from the hypernet gate at the last moment and head for Ambaru, we won’t even see the maneuver for nearly three hours. My battle cruisers won’t be positioned to be able to intercept them before they reach the station and blow apart the central command-and-control node for this star system.”

“Why not just throw some rocks at it?” Desjani demanded, using the fleet nickname for kinetic bombardment projectiles, which really were little more than smoothed hunks of metal. “No one could—They’ve run out, haven’t they?”

“Yeah,” Geary said. “I think so. They used up their rocks beating the hell out of every possible target at Indras and Atalia. So they get us out of position chasing them, then charge at Ambaru and take it out at short range with their hell lances. They’ll know exactly what to target on the station.”

Her expression hardened into anger. “Because they’ll have blueprints for every ship and station. Because the Alliance government was so worried about internal threats, it assumed its own military installations might have to be potential targets.”

“That’s what I think,” Geary agreed, studying his display. “But if I’m right, we’ve still got time to mess up their plans. It won’t be easy, though. I can move battleships to blocking orbits, but against something as maneuverable as the dark ships, that may not be enough.”

“Focus on countering what you would do,” she reminded him.

That required thinking a bit backwards. First, using the simulator on his display to figure out how to best position the battleships that could reach blocking orbits in time. Then, shifting perspective to look at those battleships and try to figure out the best way past them to reach Ambaru. It was as difficult, and as unsatisfying, as playing chess against himself. “Tanya, there’s something wrong with this.”

“What?” She leaned over, eyeing his display.

“Those dark ships are programmed to do what the programmers thought I would do, not what I would actually do,” Geary explained.

“Not entirely. They based a lot of it on the battles you’ve actually fought. But I get your point,” Desjani admitted. “You have to think like Black Jack the hero of legend as they think he is, because that’s also who the dark ships will be thinking like. So what does the great hero do here?”

He took another look at the dark ships. Two battle cruisers, one heavy cruiser, and five destroyers. Then at his plans to defend Ambaru. There were twenty-one battleships left in his First Fleet. Several of those were laid up undergoing major repairs. Several more were not in orbits that would allow them to move to block the dark ships in time. That left seven battleships he could get into blocking orbits in time to meet the dark ships if they headed for Ambaru—Warspite, Vengeance, Resolution, Redoubtable, Colossus, Amazon, and Spartan. There would also be several divisions of light cruisers and destroyers, but the battleships would form the armored shield for the defense.

“Admiral Geary,” he said slowly to Desjani, “me, that is, would swing wide and either up or down, outmaneuvering the blocking force and getting to Ambaru before the battleships could have any hope of lumbering into new positions.”

“What would Black Jack do?” Desjani asked.

“Imagine that you knew what I’d done in past engagements, but still saw me as you once saw Black Jack.”

She thought, eyes hooded, then looked at him. “That guy, Black Jack, would have gone out in a blaze of glory. Again. Seven battleships form the core of the defensive screen. And Black Jack would have five destroyers that were already running low on fuel cells.”

“Yeah. Five destroyers without crews.”

“The programming running the dark ships has to care about losses,” Desjani pointed out, “or those ships would have fought to the end at Atalia rather than taking off. They’ll try to save their battle cruisers even if they’re willing to sacrifice the destroyers.”

He ran one finger through his display, tracing a possible path. “They could do it. A firing run on Ambaru, then bend their vector toward this jump point. All right. I think I know what they think I would do. Let’s get this done.”

Just looking at it from the godlike perspective of the display before his seat, the necessary maneuvers appeared simple. Move this ship here, move that one there, and so on. In practice, changing orbits was pretty complex. Fortunately, it was a complex math problem, and computers were very good at math. All Geary had to do was designate a ship, tell Dauntless’s maneuvering systems where he wanted that ship to go, and the necessary commands and vectors appeared so quickly that it seemed instantaneous.

He sent the commands to the individual battleships affected, as well as to the commanders of the light cruiser and destroyer divisions that would back up the battleships. Space was huge, so even the many ships he was sending out would form a very sparse screen indeed, but the point wasn’t to build a wall. It was to position mobile units so that they could move to intercept anything trying to get past them.

“What are we going to do?” Desjani asked.

“Hold course for now until we see the dark ships head for Ambaru,” Geary said.

“If we do that, we won’t be in a position to intercept them before they reach Ambaru!”

“I know. Even if we turned now, we couldn’t catch them in time. Every minute they spend heading toward the hypernet gate draws them farther away from a straight shot at Ambaru and allows us to try for an earlier intercept. We’ll wait until less than three hours before the dark ships would likely maneuver. That way they won’t see us changing our vector before their own planned maneuver. If they saw that, the dark ships would probably turn sooner and accelerate faster, and make our intercept impossible. Even if everything works right, it will be close. If the worst happens, I’ve got sixteen heavy cruisers that I can move to stop them after the dark ships clear the battleship screen.”

“Sixteen heavy cruisers?” Desjani shook her head. “Against two battle cruisers like that?” She paused in thought. “Maybe. If they at least make the battle cruisers divert their courses and mess up their firing runs—”

“It will be insurance that we’ll have time to catch those dark ships,” Geary finished.

At two and a half hours before the dark ships should reach the hypernet gate, Geary sent more orders, secure in the knowledge that the dark ships would not see his maneuver before they had very probably planned to change their vectors. “All ships in Task Force Dancer, immediate execute, turn starboard zero six four degrees, down zero five degrees.” Dauntless swung in response to the command, her maneuvering thrusters pitching her bow toward the star and slightly below it, the other battle cruisers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers with her matching Dauntless’s vector change.

Task Force Dancer. So named because it had hastily escorted back toward their home space ships carrying representatives of the alien species that humans had nicknamed Dancers. “What would the Dancers think of all of this?”

“They said they’d be back soon,” Desjani said. “How much do you think the Dancers knew about the dark ships, and how did they discover things we didn’t know?”

“I think the Dancers may have pulled a few strings,” Geary said. “I’d like to know why, but I can’t shake my belief that ugly as they are to our eyes, the Dancers are allies to humanity.”

“I hope you’re right. The living stars know that humanity already has enough enemies, most of them homegrown.”

Geary kept hoping his display would show new information, but Mortar and Serpentine stayed near the hypernet gate. He could easily put himself in the place of the crews of those two ships, imagine them watching the odd movements of Geary’s ships and listening to whatever fragmentary and contradictory messages had reached them. They had brought their shields to maximum strength, had their weapons powered up, and were doubtless scanning space, watching for any threat, unaware that the software in their own communications, sensor, and weapons systems had been secretly directed in hidden subprograms to hide or delete anything related to the dark ships. But even if they had seen the oncoming dark ships, Geary did not know if the two warships of the Alliance would have fled. As he had learned after being awakened, in a century of war with the Syndicate Worlds the Alliance fleet had forgotten how to win but had become uncompromising in its willingness to die trying. The two destroyers did not maneuver in the last minutes before the dark ships reached firing range, and they did not fire as the dark ships closed on them.

The dark ships tore past Mortar and Serpentine, hurling out a barrage of fire at the Alliance destroyers. To the destroyers, the attacks would have seemed to have come out of nowhere, not that they had any time to be shocked by that. Shields collapsed under hammerblows of hell-lance particle beams, after which the weak armor of the destroyers offered little obstacle to the enemy fire. Mortar exploded, vanishing into a ball of dust as her power core overloaded. Serpentine shattered, breaking into several pieces that spun away helplessly, a pitiful few escape pods breaking free from the wreckage to seek safety for the small number of surviving crew.

It had happened nearly three hours ago, only now the light revealing the deaths of the two destroyers reaching Dauntless. Few humans could watch such images and not feel as if they were seeing something as it happened.

“At least everyone will have to believe us now,” Desjani said, her voice low and furious. “Everyone saw that.”

“I wish we hadn’t lost two ships providing that evidence,” Geary said, feeling the same emotions. “Look. We guessed right.”

“You guessed right,” she corrected him.

The dark ships had suddenly changed their vectors, whipping through turns that, while immense by the standards of distances on a planet, were comparatively tight when measured in terms of spacecraft traveling at twenty percent of the speed of light, or about sixty thousand kilometers a second. Without human crews, the dark ships could manage more intense maneuvers than Geary’s ships, but even the dark ships were limited by the amount of stress their hulls could endure.

“Enemy formation is steadying out on a vector toward Ambaru Station,” Lieutenant Castries announced. “Estimated time to intercept of Ambaru’s orbit is twenty hours, ten minutes. Maneuvering system recommends we adjust our vector to bring about an earliest-possible intercept with the dark ships in twenty-one hours, six minutes.”

“Do it,” Geary said. His display showed the dark ships diving toward the star, and toward the thin screen of warships that was slowly assembling in their path. Behind that screen of battleships, light cruisers, and destroyers, sixteen additional heavy cruisers were converging into two box formations on orbits that would bring them close to the path of the oncoming dark ships.

“If I were in command of the dark ships,” Geary commented, “I’d see all of this, realize that my plan had been compromised, and come up with another plan.”

“Never turn aside,” Desjani said. “That’s another Black Jack quote. Did you ever actually say that?”

“No. Why the hell would I have said something that stupid?”

“Well, Black Jack supposedly did,” she reminded him. “Your battles show you maneuvering, but also staying focused on hitting the enemy. It will be interesting to see how the artificial intelligence guiding the dark ships interprets that.”

“Interesting?” he asked.

Her answer was cut short by an incoming message.

“What kind of supernova did you set off?” Admiral Timbale’s image asked. “I’ve read the material you sent aboard Hammer, but when I tried to copy it to my own comm system it kept disappearing. So I downloaded that software patch you sent and ordered my systems people to run it. Before it could complete installing, I got calls from security people I didn’t even know were on Ambaru Station who informed me I was in possession of illegal software and was in violation of Alliance rules and regulations that I also didn’t know existed.”

Timbale had a stubborn look in his eyes and a firm set to his mouth as he spoke. “You say there’s an active threat in this star system, and based on the vid you provided of what happened at Indras and Atalia, it’s an extremely dangerous threat. I’ve sent orders to the destroyers on guard at the hypernet gate to reposition, but—” He paused as if having trouble speaking. “But those orders may not arrive in time based on what information you’ve given me. If the worst happens, it will be the direct result of whatever and whoever messed up our comms and other systems. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the enemy inside, and I never cared much for it. But here we are, deliberately blinded as we deal with a threat to life and property.”

He took a deep breath. “I am insisting on confirmation of the authority of those security personnel even though everything they have checks out. I’ve told them I won’t follow any instructions from them unless and until higher authority directs me to comply. And I have informed them that if anything happens to any ship in this star system, I will be sending military police to arrest them on charges of conspiracy and sabotage. Timbale, out.”

A momentary silence after the Admiral’s image vanished was broken by Desjani’s comment. “Somebody pushed him too far.”

“I noticed,” Geary said, thinking of how Timbale would react when the light from the destruction of Mortar and Serpentine reached him.

“Could this push the Alliance too far as well?”

“Not if I can help it.”

She nodded, then stretched with slightly exaggerated motions. “It will be fifteen hours before the dark ships reach weapons range of the first screen. I’m going to get some rest while I can,” she added pointedly.

Geary sighed, rubbing his eyes. “You’re right. I will, too. I need to be at the top of my game when we encounter those dark ships again.”

“They’re on a clean track inbound,” she pointed out, gesturing toward the curving trajectory of the dark ships. “Unless they alter vectors, the next thing they encounter will be our defensive screen.”

“A defensive screen that I’ll start converging on their tracks when they’re a lot closer.” Any move he made now would be too easily countered by the dark ships.

He had always hated this part of space combat, just like every other fleet sailor. The enemy was in sight for days, with attack runs sometimes lasting for several hours or more before contact occurred. Human instincts formed on the surface of a single planet could never be comfortable with the idea that an enemy you could see charging you was not an immediate threat. It would never feel right to set up your own attack run, then go to the mess decks to eat before catching several hours of sleep, knowing the enemy would not be in range until long after that. Half the trick of handling space combat was learning how to deal with the many ways in which humans had trouble handling space.

This time was particularly bad because physics made it unlikely that he could intercept the dark ships until just slightly too late. He could accelerate his ships to cover the distance faster, but then would have to decelerate them to ensure he could actually hit the dark ships when he caught them. The time saved just wasn’t enough, the distances just too large. But he would have to watch, hour by hour, as his ships could not quite get where they needed to be in time.

We’ll never really be at home in space, Geary thought as he lay down on the bunk in his stateroom, gazing up at the slight imperfections in the overhead that had grown comfortingly familiar in the months since he had been awakened from survival sleep to discover that a century had passed in what for him was the blink of an eye. He had spent a career in the Alliance fleet at peace, only to reawaken to a fleet and an Alliance staggering from a century of war. Since then, he had fought battle after battle, some against alien species unknown to humanity a short time before, but it seemed like most of his battles had been against his fellow humans. Not always combat, but battles over who was in charge and what to do and whom to trust and what to believe.

But now the fight was against something that didn’t care about any of that. Artificial intelligences who just did what their programming told them to do even if that programming was compromised or glitched or riddled with bugs.

No, that wasn’t right. The fight wasn’t just against the AIs running the dark ships. It was against the people who were more willing to trust artificial-intelligence routines than they were their fellow humans, who thought the right solutions could only be found through keeping secrets and making decisions that no one else was told about. The Alliance could survive the dark ships. But the Alliance could not survive if people stopped believing in the ideas that made the Alliance what it was.

He had beaten the dark ships once. Could he also beat the mind-sets of the people who had ordered those ships built?

“They’re still coming in on a direct trajectory,” Desjani told him as Geary took his seat again on the bridge of Dauntless. “Very Black Jack in their tactics.”

“Should I be flattered?” He studied the flat curve of the projected track for the dark ships, running through the center of his loose defensive screen and on toward an intercept with Ambaru. With the dark ships diving in toward the star that Ambaru Station orbited at a distance of about eight light-minutes, Geary’s battle cruisers coming in on an intercept from the side had managed to close the distance a great deal. Relative to Geary, the dark ship formation was to port and slightly behind, almost exactly thirty light-minutes distant. The defensive screen ahead of them was formed into a flattened oval facing the dark ships and orbiting to maintain a steady position relative to them. That screen was only twenty-two light-minutes away. If none of the ships changed their trajectories, the dark ships would go through the screen at nearly right angles, while Geary’s battle cruisers would meet the screen at an angle as they continued to close the distance on the dark ships. Five light-minutes closer to the star and Ambaru Station than the defensive screen was the secondary blocking force, sixteen of Geary’s heavy cruisers formed into two blocks of eight each. “I’ve punched through enemy formations before, so that’s consistent if they’re programmed to follow my examples.”

“You can’t tighten the screen down much,” Desjani commented. “The dark ships are so much more maneuverable that they could just swing around an edge if you do.” She gestured at her display. “They’re going to try for Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution.”

“You think they’re just going to target three of the battleships?” Geary asked. “Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution are closest to the center of the defensive screen, where the dark ships are aiming for. But the dark ships have enough maneuverability to aim for other battleships as well.”

“They do,” she agreed. “Now, think like a computer. Calculate probabilities. The dark ships could have run a hundred thousand simulations of their upcoming encounter with that screen by now without overheating a single circuit. The dark destroyers have to be low on fuel. The heavy cruiser will be better off, so they’ll save it for their encounter with our heavy cruisers. But they’ll burn off all five of their destroyers. A single destroyer targeting a single battleship will have a certain chance of getting through to its objective, especially if it accelerates to a velocity fast enough to produce a serious problem for our fire control. But it won’t be a hundred percent chance of a kill. Even if all of our shots miss, if the destroyers are going fast enough to mess up our fire control, they’ll also be going fast enough to complicate attempts to ram. Even a battleship is pretty tiny compared to the space around it.”

He nodded, understanding where she was going with this. “If I had to make a wild guess based on my experience, I’d say maybe a fifty percent chance of a big enough piece of the destroyer getting through the defensive fire and striking the battleship.”

“And if it’s two destroyers targeting each battleship?”

“Pretty near certain, I’d guess.” He hunched forward, studying the situation again. “We need to start hitting them as far from the battleships as possible, but the farther ahead of the battleships our destroyers are, the more likely that they’ll get chopped up by the dark battle cruisers.”

“What would Admiral Geary do?” she asked.

He moved one hand to trace the movements of ships. “Send out several formations of destroyers and light cruisers to hit the flanks of the dark ships as they approach the defensive screen. I’d try to take out as many of the dark destroyers as possible before they reached the screen, and maybe cripple or destroy the heavy cruiser. So the dark ships will expect me to do that.” An idea came to him, causing his lips to form a cold smile. “But if those dark destroyers are going to accelerate to hit our battleships…”

Desjani smiled back. “Yeah.”

“Let’s set this up, Captain.”

There was an undeniable sense of satisfaction in using the computer systems aboard Dauntless to swiftly come up with plans that would hopefully trip up the plans developed by the computer systems on the dark ships. Looking over the plan carefully, Geary nodded. “Captain Desjani, I need to talk to the battleship captains in the screen as well as the commanders of the destroyer and light-cruiser divisions.”

Desjani gestured to the comm watch-stander, who hastily put together the conference message. “Ready, Captain. Circuit three.”

“Thank you,” Geary said, touching the necessary comm control. A real-time conference was out of the question with the ships separated by at least twenty light-minutes. Any message sent to them on wings of light would still take twenty minutes to get there, and the replies would require another twenty minutes to cross back. There were few things more annoying than a conversation in which at least forty minutes separated everything said and each reply.

“All units in the screening task force,” he began, “this is Admiral Geary. Your status updates indicate all of you have installed the software patch on all of your systems. It is critical that you keep those patches intact because otherwise all of your combat systems, sensor systems, and comm systems will be blinded to the dark ships and open to false messages.

“You will have all seen the reports from Atalia. These ships are not as maneuverable as those of the enigmas, but they are better than our ships. They are also individually much more heavily armed than our ships. Do not underestimate them.

“Captain Armus,” he addressed the commanding officer of the battleship Colossus, “it is likely that the dark ships will attempt to employ their five destroyers in suicide attacks on our battleships.” Was suicide attack the right term when it was an artificial intelligence that would “die”? “If the dark ships hold their current trajectory, I expect Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution to be targeted, with two destroyers each going after two of the battleships and the remaining destroyer going after the third. We will attempt to hit those destroyers before they reach your screen.

“I am transmitting maneuvering orders to you now. The screen will contract toward the contact point with the dark ships, but not by much because of the ability of the dark ships to outmaneuver us. Captain Armus, if we succeed in taking out the destroyers prior to contact, do what you can to cripple or damage the dark battle cruisers and the last heavy cruiser remaining with them.”

He paused, his thoughts somber, then spoke again. “Even though the AIs controlling the dark ships appear to have been programmed using my tactics, these opponents are otherwise more alien than anything else we have encountered. They will fight without mercy or reason. They must be destroyed before they can inflict on Alliance star systems the kind of damage they did at Atalia. To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”

Desjani, her chin resting on one hand, glanced over at him. “I used to think that about the Syndics.”

“What?”

“That they fought without mercy or reason. But you’re right. Compared to the dark ships, the Syndics are models of compassion and rationality. Even Syndics were capable of questioning their orders.”

He sighed and sat back, knowing that it would be three-quarters of an hour before he would see any reaction to his message. “Too many of them never did. The dark ships are still holding at point two light speed.”

“Conserving their fuel cells,” Desjani said. “If their destroyers are going to sprint the last distance, they’ll need everything they’ve probably got left. So, we’ve got about an hour and a half before the fireworks start, assuming we guessed right.”

“Have we heard anything more from Admiral Timbale?” Geary asked.

“Not a word. Nothing at all from Ambaru Station even though we sent them a warning as you directed. There’s a good chance those secret squirrel security goons who tried to muscle Admiral Timbale messed with the software patch.”

“Them or friends of theirs,” Geary agreed. “Following their orders. There was a word for that in a language on Old Earth. What was it… kadavergehorsam.”

“Ka-what?” Desjani demanded.

“It means ‘corpselike obedience,’” Geary explained. “The idea that subordinates should do exactly what they are told, unthinkingly, and only what they are told. One of the greatest strengths of humans is our ability to think, to adapt, but how many organizations have done their best to mold their people into unthinking drones?”

“Like the dark ships?” Desjani said. “The ultimate example of trying to create something that will only do what it’s told. But the software is so complicated, and so prone to glitches, and vulnerable to malware, that they’ve ended up acting on their own anyway. Hey, if those people on Ambaru have blocked the software patch because they are unthinkingly following their orders, it could mean they’ll die at the hands of something that is also supposed to be unthinkingly following orders.”

Geary nodded, his lips twisting at the ugly irony. “I’m sure if we could somehow question the dark ship AIs, they’d tell us they were only following orders.”

At forty-four minutes after his instructions had been sent, Geary finally saw movement among the screening forces. Some of the battleships swung about ponderously and began adjusting their positions in the screen to be closer to the place where the dark ships would penetrate. Most of the Alliance destroyers and light cruisers did the same.

But four squadrons of destroyers and two squadrons of light cruisers leaped out of the screen, accelerating toward the dark ships.

“Just what they’d expect,” Desjani murmured with satisfaction.

The two dark battle cruisers were running side by side. Trailing them was their sole heavy cruiser. Two dark destroyers ranged out slightly to one side, two were on the other side, and the fifth was slightly above. A far lesser tactician than Geary would have sent in escorts to try to shave off the dark ship escorts before contact with the screen. It was a predictable maneuver, and also in accordance with the doctrine Geary had learned a century ago. Doctrine he had reason to believe had also been programmed into the dark ship AIs.

He had set up this engagement, but could only watch it, still several light-minutes away and thus unable to communicate in time to control events. Everything he was seeing had already happened several minutes ago.

The Alliance light cruisers and destroyers charging toward the dark ships had drastically increased their rate of closure on the enemy. As they reached the right positions ahead of the dark ships, ranged above the track the dark ships were following, the Alliance warships pivoted and began both braking their velocity and swinging their trajectories downward to where the dark ships would pass.

Geary realized that the bridge of Dauntless had fallen silent as everyone waited to see who had outguessed whom.

“Yes!” Lieutenant Yuon whooped as the dark destroyers suddenly began accelerating at a rate no human-crewed warship could match, their main propulsion shoving them ahead of the dark battle cruisers and toward where the screen of battleships waited. “Sorry, Captain,” Yuon muttered as Desjani turned a withering glance his way for a second.

But Geary had felt the same exultation.

If his intercepting light cruisers and destroyers had been coming down to meet the advance of the battle cruisers, they would have completely missed the dark destroyers charging ahead, and instead found themselves tangling with the massively greater firepower of the dark battle cruisers.

But Geary’s orders had told his ships to bend their intercepts well short of the battle cruisers, to assume the dark destroyers would be out ahead and accelerating.

“Estimated relative velocity at contact will be two point three light speed,” Lieutenant Yuon reported in a painfully professional tone of voice as he tried to make up for his earlier outburst.

“Too fast,” Desjani grumbled. As objects accelerated to fractions of the speed of light, their visions of the universe outside them became increasingly warped by the effects of relativity. They no longer saw things where they were. Human ingenuity, always at its best when it came to working on ways to war with other humans, had managed to counter those effects somewhat. At velocities up to point two light speed, human-designed fire-control systems, sensor systems, and maneuvering systems could compensate enough for the distortion to allow hits on other ships as they flashed past at incredible velocities. Beyond that, accuracy fell off dramatically with every increase in velocity.

“That’s why I sent out twenty-seven destroyers and eleven light cruisers,” Geary said. “Even if most of their shots miss, there should be enough shots being fired to score some hits.”

Several minutes ago, the Alliance destroyers and light cruisers had raced downward past the dark ships at a high angle, their automated fire-control systems hurling out hell lances, ball bearings (still known as grapeshot) if the range was close enough, and specter missiles from the light cruisers. Automated systems had to be used because humans could not possibly aim and fire in the tiny fraction of a second during which the forces were within weapons range of each other.

The dark destroyers fired back with implacable and emotionless precision, but their fire-control systems were just as hindered by the velocity of the engagement as those of the human-crewed ships. Even though each dark destroyer carried as much armament as a human-crewed light cruiser, there were still only five of them against thirty-eight of Geary’s ships.

The Alliance squadrons plummeted away from the encounter, turning back upward but unable to alter course quickly enough to engage the dark battle cruisers and heavy cruiser that rocketed past above them. Geary watched red markers appear on some of the Alliance warships, indicating hits from the dark destroyers. But aside from two blows that had knocked out some of the weapons on the light cruiser Croise, Geary’s ships had taken only minor damage.

But only two of the dark destroyers had emerged from the encounter still on their trajectories toward the screening force. Two others had been knocked off course and were tumbling helplessly, maneuvering systems too badly damaged to control the ships. The fifth had tried to stagger onward after the first two, but several specter missiles fired by the Alliance light cruisers had swung through tight turns to slam into the stern of the dark ship. It vanished in a flare of light and heat, leaving an endlessly expanding ball of dust where it had been.

“Still accelerating,” Desjani commented, displaying no elation at the damage done to the hostile forces. The two surviving dark destroyers were pushing their velocity higher, which would make targeting them even harder for the Alliance warships in the screen. “What’s Armus doing?” she grumbled in a voice too low for anyone but Geary to hear.

“He’s setting them up,” Geary said. “Warspite, Vengeance, and Resolution are holding fixed orbits, so anything aiming to intercept them will have to come down a predictable path.”

“Oh.” Desjani grinned. “Sorry, sir. Battle cruiser captain here. I tend to think in terms of maneuvering.”

“Whereas Captain Armus knows battleships and thinks in term of forts and firepower,” Geary said.

If the dark ships had attempted to dodge, to simply tear through the thin screen of widely spread Alliance ships, they would almost certainly have succeeded in making it through intact. If the Alliance ships had not guessed that the dark ships intended to ram, they would have faced a difficult fire-control solution for their weapons. But the two survivors bore down on their targets, one aiming for Warspite and the second for Resolution, and the Alliance fire-control systems only needed to solve for one, simple solution. The two battleships and the remaining Alliance light cruisers and destroyers near them hurled a wall of fire down the bearings along which the dark ship destroyers had to come, and the two destroyers hit those walls and disintegrated under the blows.

Coming on behind, though, were the remaining dark ships, and those were just trying to run through the screen. The two battle cruisers and the trailing heavy cruiser tore past the still-thinly-spread Alliance ships and onward, without any hits being scored on them.

Geary’s jaw tightened as he checked the maneuvering data again. His battle cruisers were still angling in toward the dark ships, but the intercept point was far ahead, past the place where the dark ships would be able to fire upon Ambaru Station.

None of the fixed defenses near Ambaru were showing any signs of alert or alarm. They were all apparently still blind to the presence of the dark ships.

All that lay between the surviving dark ships and Ambaru Station were the sixteen heavy cruisers forming the last defensive barrier.