Earth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds - unless the Solarians could stop the machines! Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire. The Solarians' final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid. But the Solarians' plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life - and that of Earth's: Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.
Release date:
September 29, 2011
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
156
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IT WOULD be another uneven battle. Four to three, standard odds—in this case, in the Sylvanna system, it meant a fleet of eighty of the dead-black ships now crossing the orbit of the outermost planet in tight cone formation, base forward, flagship at the apex.
Fleet Commander Jay Palmer formed the Human Eleventh Fleet into disc formation, only three ships thick, the flagship in the third rank.
He sat in the command chair of his flagship; in front of him the Master Battle Grid, showing the Duglaari fleet as a cone of red blips, his own outnumbered ships as sixty golden blips, Sylvanna, a G-5 sun as a green globe; to his left, the Damage Control Board—sixty lights, now all green, showing all ships in fighting trim (amber meant a damaged ship that still had power, blue meant a dead hull or worse); to his right, the Computer Data Screens.
He was dressed in dull olive battle fatigues, devoid of brass, open at the collar and designed strictly for comfort. It was his job as a Fleet Commander to merge himself with his fleet, or, more properly, to make each ship an extension of his mind, a part of him. A good commander thought of his fleet as an integrated organism: the ships were the limbs, the pseudopods; the flagship, the computer-ship, was the brain; and he was the heart, the ego, the soul.
Separate earphones were plugged into each of his ears. The right earphone gave him direct contact with the chief computation officer. The left was the command circuit; the voices of the sixty individual captains.
A throatmike was secured to his Adam’s apple. In his right hand was a two-position toggle switch—forward and he was speaking to the chief computation officer, back and he could command his sixty captains. A similar switch was in his left hand, but it had three positions: forward for the computation earphone, back for the command circuit, middle for both at once.
“Computation,” Palmer grunted, “confirm numbers.”
“Eighty Doogs,” mumbled his right earphone. “Estimated contact time, one hour.”
Palmer’s gaunt face screwed into a frown. It was a face that would be handsome in repose, but now there were hard lines around the full lips, and three furrows in the high forehead.
He flicked on the command circuit. “Leave plane of ecliptic at ninety degrees Galactic North,” he ordered. “Full speed.”
He kept his large gray eyes glued to the Master Battle Grid. The disc of golden dots began to move upward, above the green median line that represented the ecliptic. A battle on the fleet level began as a contest of position. You must not let yourself be caught between the enemy and a sun, not when your fleet was the smaller one. The standard Duglaari tactic was to force a fleet back on the sun it was defending; if they were fast enough, they could box you in so that escape was impossible—superior numbers in front of you and a sun to your rear; there would be no place to go. The Fleet Resolution Field of the Duglaari was stronger—they almost always had more ships—and it would push the Human Fleet back, back into the stellar furnace, until the fleet would be forced to break formation, and fight on a ship-to-ship basis, hopelessly outnumbered….
Sweat gathered on Palmer’s upper lip. The Human Fleet was rising above the ecliptic, but now the Duglaari Commander had spotted the maneuver, and the red cone was rising too, as the fleets closed on each other at terrific speed. It was like chess; the openings were more or less standard. If the Human Fleet could rise above the Duglaari, it could descend behind them, and then it would be the Duglaari fighting with a sun at their back, and while their total Fleet Field would still be the stronger, it would be fighting the pull of Sylvanna as well as the push of the Human Fleet Field, and the battle might be more or less even.
But the Duglaari were rising as fast as the Humans; in fact, Palmer’s trained eye could see that they were rising about five percent faster. The Humans would not be able to rise above them.
Palmer snorted to himself. They were taking the bait. If they could be fooled long enough….
“Cut speed to three-quarters,” he ordered. The Human Fleet slowed its rise; now it was clear that the Duglaari would rise above them, but Palmer hoped that it would be close enough so that the Duglaari commander would still believe that the Humans were trying to go up and around. If the Doogs could be conned into maintaining their rate of rise long enough, then….
Soon the fleets would be upon each other.
“Cut speed to two-thirds.”
Again the Human Fleet cut its rate of rise slightly.
Palmer studied the Master Battle Grid carefully. The Duglaari were not slowing down! It was working! At the present relative rates of speed, the Duglaari would hold the space above them; the base of the cone formation pressing with its field on the face of the Human Fleet’s disc, forcing it back and sunward.
But in another moment, the Duglaari would be committed to their rise; they were now travelling at nearly twice the speed of the Human Fleet, and they would never be able to turn in time….
Now!
“Kill forward speed!” Palmer barked. “Emergency power braking! Reverse direction one hundred eighty degrees! Drop! Drop! Drop!”
The Human Fleet stopped rising. It began to fall back down towards the ecliptic. Faster and faster it fell, through the ecliptic, and then down past it.
Frantically, the Duglaari slowed down, reversed direction and tried to follow the Humans down. But the Doog commander had reacted too slowly. He had actually lost the contest for position when he had failed to realize that the Human Fleet had been purposely slowing its rise.
Instead of the gap closing, it was widening.
“Ninety degree turn!” Palmer ordered.
The Human Fleet changed direction again. This time, it shot on a line parallel to the ecliptic, but below it, out away from Sylvanna, and underneath the Duglaari Fleet. It shot past the Duglaari, and now the Duglaari were between the Human Fleet and Sylvanna.
“Rise! Rise! Up! Up!”
The Human Fleet shot upward. The Duglaari Fleet braked its descent and tried to rise faster, but the Humans had the jump, and the Fleets had reversed positions.
The apex of the cone that was the Duglaari Fleet now pointed towards Sylvanna. Its base faced the face of the disc formation of the Human Fleet.
It had worked. The Duglaari were caught between the Human Fleet and Sylvanna.
Palmer switched over to the Computation circuit. “Do we have the power to force them back?” he asked, but he was pretty sure what the answer would be. The Resolution Field Drive was used to drive ships in normal space. It resolved the electron spin of all masses within it into a unidirectional vector at right angles to its lines of force. In tight formation, the individual Resolution Fields of the ships were merged into one great Fleet Resolution Field, enveloping all the ships.
In addition to propelling the fleet forward, the Fleet Field would push anything in front of it in the same direction that the Fleet was moving—in this case, that anything included the Duglaari Fleet.
But the Duglaari had a similar field, and it was pushing against the field of the Human Fleet. There were three factors which would determine in which direction the two fleets would now move: the strength of the Human Field, the strength of the Duglaari Field, and the fact that the Duglaari Field also had to fight the pull of Sylvanna.
The Duglaari Field would be stronger than the Human Field by a factor of three to four, but perhaps when the additional factor of Sylvanna’s gravity was subtracted from the Duglaari Field strength….
The computer now had the answer. “Negative,” said the voice in Palmer’s ear. “However, it could be worse. We balance them out now. We can’t push them back, and they can’t push us. Stalemate.”
Palmer sighed resignedly. It was as he had expected. The Humans had won phase one of the battle—the contest for position. They had temporarily nullified the Duglaari's numerical superiority.
Now phase two would begin: the battle of attrition.
The first phase of a battle, the positional phase, was usually over in less than an hour or so; the second phase, the attrition phase, could drag on and on and on….
In the present positions, the field strengths of the two fleets stalemated each other. There was only one way to break that stalemate and force the battle to a decision—destroy more ships than you lost, so that your Fleet Resolution Field would then become proportionally stronger than the enemy’s.
The choice of possible weapons in this phase of the battle was severely limited. Nothing with significant mass could pass from one fleet to the other—it would be caught in stasis midway between the two contending Resolution Fields. This ruled out all missile weapons. It even ruled out anti-proton busters, since the anti-protons which the busters projected had mass. Nuclear and thermonuclear explosives were out too, since it was impossible to set them off closer to the enemy than to your own ships.
That left only energy weapons operative.
“Computation,” Palmer mumbled into the throatmike, “take over. Use pattern GN-64, to start with.”
Palmer scowled. This was the part of a battle that he hated most. The only weapons that could be used with any effect now were the lasecannons, which projected heat beams of fearful intensity. But, like any other energy weapon that had ever been invented, the beams had to be kept locked on an enemy ship for long seconds for them to burn through the metal of the hull and do any real damage.
He studied the Master Battle Grid. The ships within the Duglaari cone were beginning to move within their formation in complex, seemingly random patterns. The idea, of course, was to prevent the Humans from keeping a lasecannon beam locked on a ship long enough to do any damage. The gold blips of the Human Fleet were performing a similarly complex dance of death.
The patterns looked random, but they were not. They couldn’t be, for, in addition to avoiding lasecannon beams, the ships of both fleets also had to remain tightly integrated into their respective Fleet Resolution Fields, else the field would be broken and the un-integrated fleet routed.
This was far too complex a task for any living organism, even a trained and experienced Human or Duglaari fleet commander, to perform. It was all done by the Fleet Computers, which conned both fleets during this phase of the battle.
Palmer could pick which of the literally thousands of preprogrammed patterns the computer would use at any given moment; he could switch the chosen pattern at any time, but that was the extent of his control over his fleet now.
And he didn’t like it one bit!
A Duglaari beam glanced harmlessly across one of the ships in the front rank, and detectors howled. Now a Human beam bounced off a Doog ship in the base of the cone; in a fraction of a second, the Doog was no longer there, and the lasecannon beam lanced harmlessly off into empty space.
The computers, damn ’em, were feeling each other out, trying to rationalize the enemy’s “random” movements into predictable mathematical patterns.
Palmer, like most fleet commanders, hated the computers. For one thing, they robbed him of complete control of his fleet; for another, the Command Computers, back in the Olympia system, were losing the goddamn war. The Duglaari computers were better than the Human ones, and there were more Doogs than men.
Mankind was facing extinction, and the computers had regularly announced that fact for the past three hundred years.
One of the green lights on the Damage Control Board went amber. The Duglaari were figuring out pattern GN-64.
“Switch to GP-12,” Palmer ordered.
Now the Duglaari computer would have to crack the new pattern before it could damage another ship, and….
There!
One of the red blips flared purple and went out. Its power was dead. Scratch one Doog!
Now the Duglaari would change patterns.
This could go on for a long, long time. As soon as one fleet’s computer caught on to an enemy’s pattern, the opposing commander would switch to a new pattern, and the computer would have to begin anew.
There would be no great conflagration destroying scores of ships in a few minutes of red-hot action. There would only be a slow chipping away—a Doog ship here, a Human ship there—until the stalemate in field strengths was broken.
If it was broken. Palmer remembered the story of the battle of Bowman. Fifty Humans, fifty-eight Doogs. Neither side had gained a significant advantage, the Humans destroyed one Doog ship for every Human ship lost, and the battle wore on for well over a standard day. In the end, every single ship in both Fleets had been destroyed.
It was sheer idiocy.
Jay Palmer knew very well what he wanted to do. Break formation suddenly, make an all-out, do or die attack on the Doog flagship, the computership. If you could knock out the flagship, destroy the computer, the battle was all over. Then the enemy couldn’t evade your lasecannon beams and maintain its Fleet Field at the same time.
But, he knew, even if such a tactic succeeded, he would be court-martialed afterwards. The war, and every single battle in it, was fought under the rigid control of Computation Command. Any commander who thought he could outhink computers would be busted to permanent latrine orderly. If he were lucky.
Another light on the Damage Control Board went amber, then blue. And then another!
Damn! Damn! Damn!
“Switch to GN-41.”
On and on it went, hour after hour. Space gradually became littered with the corpses of ships, with shards of metal, clouds of debris where a powerplant had been hit by a heat beam, exploding a ship.
Lasecannon beams lit up the blackness like linear novae, and the battle wore on, the ships within the formations continued their dances of death.
Palmer was bathed in sweat, his hair was wet and matted. It seemed to him as if he had spent his entire life in the command chair. Feeling was gone from his buttocks. His throat was raw from rasping commands.
They had gone through hundreds of patterns, and the Duglaari had done the same.
Grimly, Palmer studied the Damage Control Board. Ten of the lights were now amber, another seven were blue. Seventeen ships out of commission.
The Duglaari had only lost fourteen.
Palmer knew that he was losing the battle. The point of no return had not yet been reached; by using emergency power, the Human Fleet was still holding position, but if the Doogs got, say ten ships ahead, then phase three would begin, and….
“Chances of Duglaari victory: seventy percent,” said the voice in his ear. “Human victory, twenty-three percent. Stalemate, seven percent.”
Palmer signed. He made up his mind—when the chance of Duglaari victory reached eighty percent, he would break contact and flee. If not….
If not, the Duglaari Fleet would keep getting proportionally stronger and stronger. Since the Humans had forced the Duglaari into the sunward position, it would not be over quickly—the Doogs wouldn’t be able to simply push them into the sun. Instead, the cone of the Duglaari Fleet would hollow out into an empty hemisphere, the hemisphere would advance and envelop the Human Fleet. Then the Duglaari would form a globe, with the Human Fleet in the center.
The stronger enemy Fleet Resolution Field would surround the Human Field; the Duglaari generators would press irresistibly inward, the Human Fleet would be crushed and compacted until ships collided, until there was nothing left but a huge, tightly compacted mass of mangled metal—and dead men.
In the beginning of The War, three hundred years ago, such battles to the death had occurred, with horrid regularity. It had cost many ships and men to learn the lesson: if you can’t win, retreat. Get out with as many ships as you can. Heroics only meant that the imbalance in men and material between Human and Duglaari would grow that much worse.
Eighty percent would be the point of no return.
“Switch to GN-7.”
At least the number of patterns was virtually inexhaustible….
But two more lights went amber. Then blue.
“Switch to GN-50.”
Damnit, the Duglaari computer was learning to crack the patterns faster. Maybe, in some weird Duglaari mathematical system, the Human patterns fell into some master pattern of their own. Maybe that was one of the reasons that the Doogs were better….
No! No! Not better. Maybe more advanced, maybe a bigger, older civilization, but not better….
Another light went amber.
“By all the cowards of Sol!” Palmer swore. “Switch to GN-13.”
Almost immediately, the amber light went blue. The Duglaari computer had adjusted again, and this time almost as fast as the pattern had been changed! It’s hopeless…. Palmer thought bitterly.
“Switch to GN-69,” he muttered into the command circuit.
“Commander Palmer! Commander Palmer!” It was the voice of Twordlarkin, the chief computation officer. Palmer had a pretty good idea of what was coming….
“Commander, the latest extrapolation is eighty-three percent chance of Duglaari victory. My official recommendation at this time is immediate retreat. We can expect the beginning of an engulfing action shortly, otherwise, and we will be unable to successfully resist it.”
Palmer swore, taking care to switch Twordlarkin out of the circuit first, though. Official recommendation! An “Official Recommendation” from a chief computation officer was a command in everything but name, even to a fleet commander. The Navy runs the ships, so the saying went, but the computers run the War. Only one thing could save a fleet commander who ignored a computation “recommendation” from a court-martial—victory.
Fat chance of that. The hell of it was that Twordlarkin was right. Sylvanna was lost. Still, a combat officer should at least have the right to order his own retreat.
Palmer reactivated the computation circuit. “Very well,” he grunted. “Recommendation acknowledged and approved.” He switched over to the command circuit. The standard retreat tactic should work this time, he thought, since at least we’re not caught between the Doogs and Sylvanna….
“Fleet Commander to all ships. On my mark, reverse Resolution Field Generators one hundred eighty degrees. Five…four…three…two…one…mark!“
Suddenly, every remainin. . .
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