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"Sergeant Overholt," Miles added, "you will be the Emperor's personal
bodyguard and batman, until relieved."
Overholt looked anything but relieved at this abrupt field promotion. "Sir,"
he whispered aside to Miles, "I haven't had the advanced course!"
He referred to Simon Illyan's mandatory, personally-conducted ImpSec course
for the palace guard, that gave Gregor's usual crew that hard-polished edge.
"We all have a similar problem here, Sergeant, believe me," Miles murmured
back. "Do your best."
The Triumph's tactics room was alive with activity, every station chair
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occupied, every holovid display bright with the flow of ship and fleet
tactical changes. Miles stood at Tung's elbow and felt doubly redundant. He
bethought of the jape back at the
Academy. Rule 1: Only overrule the tactical computer if you know something it
doesn't. Rule 2: The tac comp always knows more than you do.
This was combat? This muffled chamber, swirl of lights, these padded chairs?
Maybe the detachment was a good thing, for commanders. His heart hammered even
now. A tac room of this caliber could cause information overload and
mind-lock, if you let it. The trick was to pick out what was important, and
never, ever to forget that the map was not the territory.
His job here, Miles reminded himself, was not to command. It was to watch Tung
command, and learn how he did it, his alternate modes of thinking to
Barrayaran Academy Standard. Miles's only legitimate point of overrule might
come if some external political/strategic need took precedence over internal
tactical logic. Miles prayed that event would not arise, because a shorter and
uglier name for it was betraying your troops.
Miles's attention sharpened as a little jumpscout winked into existence at the
throat of the wormhole. On the tactics display it was a pink point of light in
a slowly moving whirlpool of darkness. On a telescreen, it was a slim ship
against fixed and distant stars. From its own wired-in pilot's point of view,
it was some strange extension of his own body. In yet another vid display, it
was a collection of telemetry readouts, numerology, some Platonic ideal. What
is truth? All. None.
"Sharkbait One reporting to Fleet One," the pilot's voice came over Tung's
console. "You have ten minutes clearance. Stand by for tight-beam burst."
Tung spoke into his comm. "Fleet commence Jump, tight by the numbers."
The first Dendarii ship waiting by the wormhole jockeyed into place, glowed
brightly in the tac display (though it appeared to do nothing in the televid),
and vanished. A second ship followed in thirty seconds, pushing the safety
limit of time margins between jumps. Two ships trying to rematerialize in the
same place at the same time would result in no ships and a very large
explosion.
As the Sharkbait's tightbeam telemetry was digested by the tac comp, the image
rotated so that the dark vortex representing
(but in no way picturing) the wormhole was suddenly mirrored by an exit
vortex. Beyond that exit vortex an array of dots and specks and lines
represented ships in flight, maneuvering, firing, fleeing; the hardened
Homeside battle station of the Vervani, twin to the Hubside station where
Miles had left Gregor; the Cetagandan attackers. A view of their destination
at last. All lies, of course, it was minutes out of date.
"Yech," Tung commented. "What a mess. Here we go..."
The jump klaxon sounded. It was the Triumph's turn. Miles gripped the back of
Tung's chair, though intellectually he knew the feeling of motion was
illusory. A whirl of dreams seemed to cloud his mind, for a moment, for an
hour; it was unmeasurable. The wrench in his stomach and the godawful wave of
nausea that followed were anything but dreamlike. Jump over. A moment of
silence throughout the room, as others struggled to overcome their
disorientation. Then the murmur picked up where it had left off. Welcome to
Vervain. Take a wormhole jump to hell.
The tac display spun and shifted, shunting in new data, recentering its little
universe. Their wormhole was presently guarded by its beleaguered Station and
a thin and battered string of Vervani Navy and Vervani-commanded Ranger ships.
The
Cetagandans had hit it once already, been driven off, and now hovered out of
range awaiting reinforcements for the next strike.
Cetagandan re-supply was streaming across the Vervain system from the other
wormhole.
The other wormhole had fallen fast, the only way to fly from the attacker's
viewpoint. Even with complete surprise on the
Cetagandans' side for their massive first strike, the Vervani might have
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stopped them had not three Ranger ships apparently
misunderstood their orders and broken off when they should have
counterattacked. But the Cetagandans had secured their bridgehead and begun to
pour through.
The second wormhole, Miles's wormhole, had been better equipped for
defense-until the panicked Vervani had pulled everything that could be spared
back to guard the high orbitals of the homeworld. Miles could scarcely blame
them; it was a hard strategic choice either way. But now the Cetagandans
boiled across the system practically unimpeded, hopscotching the heavily
guarded planet, in a bold attempt to take the Hegen wormhole, if not by
surprise, at least at speed.
The first method of choice for attacking a wormhole was by subterfuge,
subornment, and infiltration, i.e., to cheat. The second, also preferring
subterfuge in its execution, was by an end-run, sending forces around by
another route (if there was one)
into the contested local space. The third was to open the attack with a
sacrifice ship laying down a "sun wall," a massive blanket of nuclear
missilettes deployed as a unit, creating a planar wave that cleared near-space
of everything including, frequently, the attack ship; but sun walls were
costly, rapidly dissipated, and only locally effective. The Cetagandans had
attempted to combine all three methods, as the Rangers' disarray and the
filthy radioactive fog still outgassing from the vicinity of their first
conquest testified.
The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]