Off Armageddon Reef

  Off Armageddon Reef

  David Weber

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  OFF ARMAGEDDON REEF: Copyright © 2007 by David Weber

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  Book design by Ellen Cipriano

  Maps by Ellisa Mitchell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weber, David, 1952–

  Off Armageddon Reef / David Weber.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-765-31500-7

  ISBN-10: 0-765-31500-9

  1. Space warfare—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.E217O35 2007

  813'.54—dc22

  2006025838

  First Edition: January 2007

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Fred Saberhagen, whose work has brought me—and so many others—so much pleasure. It's always nice when someone whose work you like so much turns out to be even more likable as a person.

  And—

  For Sharon, who loves me, puts up with my insaneschedule, helpsme remember which day of the month itis, knows just about everything there is about swimming, and has been known to suggest a three-hanky scene or two to me along the way.

  Not that I'm saying she did it this time.

  Oh, my, no!

  I love you.

  SAFEHOLD

  July 2, 2378

  Crestwell's Star, HD 63077A

  Terran Federation

  "Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!"

  Captain Mateus Fofão rolled out of bed as the urgent voice of the officer of the watch blared over the intercom, counterpointed by the high-pitched wail of the emergency General Quarters signal. The captain's bare feet were on the decksole and he was already reaching for the bedside com before his eyes were fully open, and he jabbed the red priority key purely by feel.

  "Bridge." The response came almost instantly, in a voice flat with the panic-resisting armor of training.

  "It's the Captain, Chief Kuznetzov," Fofão said crisply. "Give me Lieutenant Henderson."

  "Aye, Sir."

  There was a brief instant of silence, then another voice.

  "Officer of the deck," it said.

  "Talk to me, Gabby," Fofão said crisply.

  "Skipper," Lieutenant Gabriela Henderson, the heavy cruiser's tactical officer, had the watch, and her normally calm contralto was strained and harsh, "we've got bogies. Lots of bogies. They just dropped out of hyper twelve light-minutes out, and they're headed in-system at over four hundred gravities."

  Fofão's jaw clenched. Four hundred gravities was twenty percent higher than the best Federation compensators could manage. Which pretty conclusively demonstrated that whoever these people were, they weren't Federation units.

  "Strength estimate?" he asked.

  "Still coming in, Sir," Henderson replied flatly. "So far, we've confirmed over seventy."

  Fofão winced.

  "All right." He was astounded by how calm his own voice sounded. "Implement first-contact protocols, and also Spyglass and Watchman. Then take us to Condition Four. Make sure the Governor's fully informed, and tell her I'm declaring a Code Alpha."

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "I'll be on the bridge in five minutes," Fofão continued as his sleeping cabin's door opened and his steward loped through it with his uniform. "Let's get some additional recon drones launched and headed for these people."

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "I'll see you in five," Fofão said. He keyed the com off and turned to accept his uniform from the white-faced steward.

  * * *

  In actual fact, Mateus Fofão reached the command deck of TFNS Swiftsure in just under five minutes.

  He managed to restrain himself to a quick, brisk stride as he stepped out of the bridge elevator, but his eyes were already on the master plot, and his mouth tightened. The unknown vessels were a scatter of ominous ruby chips bearing down on the binary system's GO primary component and the blue-and-white marble of its fourth planet.

  "Captain on the bridge!" Chief Kuznetzov announced, but Fofão waved everyone back into his or her bridge chair.

  "As you were," he said, and almost everyone settled back into place. Lieutenant Henderson did not. She rose from the captain's chair at the center of the bridge, her relief as Fofão's arrival relieved her of command obvious.

  He nodded to her, stepped past her, and settled himself in the same chair.

  "The Captain has the ship," he announced formally, then looked back up at Henderson, still standing beside him. "Any incoming transmissions from them?"

  "No, Sir. If they'd begun transmitting the instant they dropped out of hyper, we'd have heard something from them about"—the lieutenant glanced at the digital time display—"two minutes ago. We haven't."

  Fofão nodded. Somehow, looking at the spreading cloud of red icons on the display, he wasn't surprised.

  "Strength update?" he asked.

  "Tracking estimates a minimum of eighty-five starships," Henderson said. "We don't have any indications of fighter launches yet."

  Fofão nodded again, and a strange, singing sort of tension that was almost its own form of calm seemed to fill him. The calm of a man face-to-face with a disaster for which he has planned and trained for years but never really expected to confront.

  "Watchman?" he asked.

  "Implemented, Sir," Henderson replied. "Antelope got under way for the hyper limit two minutes ago."

  "Spyglass?"

  "Activated, Sir."

  That's something, a detached corner of Fofão's brain said.

  TFNS Antelope was a tiny, completely unarmed, and very fast courier vessel. Crestwell's World was the Federation's most advanced colonial outpost, fifty light-years from Sol, too new, too sparsely settled, to have its own hypercom yet. That left only courier ships, and at this moment Antelope's sole function was to flee Solward at her maximum possible velocity with the word that Code Alpha had come to pass.

  Spyglass was the net of surveillance satellites stretched around the periphery of the star system's hyper limit. They were completely passive, hopefully all but impossible to detect, and they weren't there for Swiftsure's benefit. Their take—all of it—was being beamed after Antelope, to make certain she had full and complete tactical records as of the moment she hypered out. And that same information was being transmitted to Antelope's sister ship, TFNS Gazelle, as she lay totally covert in orbit around the system's outermost gas giant.

  Her task was to remain hidden until the end, if she could, and then to report back to Old Earth.

  And it's a good thing she's out there, Fofão thought grimly, because we certainly aren't going to be making any reports.

  "Ship's status?" he asked.

  "All combat systems are closed up at Condition Four, Sir. Engineering reports all stations manned and ready, and both normal-space and hyper drives are online prepared to answer maneuvering commands."

  "Very good." Fofão pointed at her normally assigned command station and watched her head for it. Then he inhaled deeply and pressed a stud on the arm of his command chair.

  "This is the Captain," he said, without the usual formalities of an all-hands announcement. "By now, you all know what's going on. At the moment, you know just as much about t
hese people as I do. I don't know if they're the Gbaba or not. If they are, it doesn't look very good. But I want all of you to know that I'm proud of you. Whatever happens, no captain could have a better ship or a better crew."

  He released the com stud and swiveled his chair to face the heavy cruiser's helmsman.

  "Bring us to zero-one-five, one-one-niner, at fifty gravities," he said quietly, and TFNS Swiftsure moved to position herself between the planet whose human colonists had named it Crestwell's World and the mammoth armada bearing down upon it.

  Mateus Fofão had always been proud of his ship. Proud of her crew, of her speed, of the massive firepower packed into her three-quarters-of-a-million-tonne hull. At the moment, what he was most aware of was her frailty.

  Until ten years earlier, there'd been no Terran Federation Navy, not really. There'd been something the Federation called a navy, but it had actually been little more than a fleet of survey vessels, backed up by a handful of light armed units whose main concerns had been search and rescue operations and the suppression of occasional, purely human predators.

  But then, ten years ago, a Federation survey ship had found evidence of the first confirmed advanced nonhuman civilization. No one knew what that civilization's citizens had called themselves, because none of them were still alive to tell anyone.

  Humanity had been shocked by the discovery that an entire species had been deliberately destroyed. That a race capable of fully developing and exploiting the resources of its home star system had been ruthlessly wiped out. The first assumption had been that the species in question had done it to itself in some sort of mad spasm of suicidal fury. Indeed, some of the scientists who'd studied the evidence continued to maintain that that was the most likely explanation.

  Those holdouts, however, were a distinct minority. Most of the human race had finally accepted the second, and far more horrifying, hypothesis. They hadn't done it to themselves; someone else had done it to them.

  Fofão didn't know who'd labeled the hypothetical killers the Gbaba, and he didn't much care. But the realization that they might exist was the reason there was a genuine and steadily growing Federation Navy these days. And the reason contingency plans like Spyglass and Watchman had been put into place.

  And the reason TFNS Swiftsure found herself between Crestwell's World and the incoming, still totally silent fleet of red icons.

  There was no way in the universe a single heavy cruiser could hope to stop, or slow down, or even inconvenience a fleet the size of the one headed for Fofão's ship. Nor was it likely he could have stayed away from hostile warships capable of the acceleration rate the unknowns had already demonstrated, but even if he could have, that wasn't Swiftsure's job.

  Even at their massive acceleration rate, it would take the bogies almost four hours to reach Crestwell's World, assuming they wanted to rendezvous with it. If all they wanted to do was overfly the planet, they could do it in less than three. But whatever their intention, it was Swiftsure's job to stand her ground. To do her damnedest, up to the very last instant, to open some sort of peaceful communication with the unknowns. To serve as a fragile shield and tripwire which might just possibly, however remote the possibility might be, deter an attack on the newly settled planet behind her.

  And, almost certainly, to become the first casualty in the war the Federation had dreaded for almost a decade.

  * * *

  "Sir, we're picking up additional drive signatures," Lieutenant Henderson announced. "They look like fighters." Her voice was crisp, professionally clipped. "Tracking makes it roughly four hundred."

  "Acknowledged. Still no response to our transmissions, Communications?"

  "None, Sir," the com officer replied tautly.

  "Tactical, begin deploying missiles."

  "Aye, aye, Sir," Henderson said. "Deploying missiles now."

  Big, long-ranged missiles detached from the external ordnance rings, while others went gliding out of the cruiser's midships missile hatches. They spread out in a cloud about Swiftsure on their secondary stationkeeping drives, far enough out to put the ship and their fellow missiles safely outside the threat perimeter of their preposterously powerful primary drives.

  Looks like they want to englobe the planet, he thought, watching the bogies' formation continue to spread while his ship's unceasing communication attempts beamed towards them. That doesn't look especially peaceful-minded of them.

  He glanced at the master plot's range numbers. The intruders had been inbound for almost a hundred and sixteen minutes now. Their velocity relative to Crestwell's World was up to just over thirty-one thousand kilometers per second, and unless they reversed acceleration in the next few seconds they were going to overfly the planet after all.

  I wonder—

  "Missile launch!" Gabriela Henderson announced suddenly. "Repeat, missile launch! Many missiles inbound!"

  Mateus Fofão's heart seemed to stop.

  They can't possibly expect to actually hit an evading starship at that range. That was his first thought as the thousands of incoming missile icons suddenly speckled his plot. But they can sure as hell hit a planet, can't they? his brain told him an instant later.

  He stared at that hurricane of missiles, and knew what was going to happen. Swiftsure's defenses could never have stopped more than a tithe of that torrent of destruction, and a frozen corner of his mind wondered what they were armed with. Fusion warheads? Antimatter? Chemical or biological agents? Or perhaps they were simply kinetic weapons. With the prodigious acceleration they were showing, they'd have more than enough velocity to do the job with no warheads at all.

  "Communications," he heard his voice say flatly as he watched the executioners of Crestwell's World's half-million inhabitants accelerating towards him, "secure communication attempts. Maneuvering, bring us to maximum power, heading zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-five. Tactical"—he turned his head and met Lieutenant Henderson's eyes levelly—"prepare to engage the enemy."

  February 14, 2421

  TFNS Excalibur, TFNS Gulliver

  Task Force One

  The scout ship was too small to be a threat to anyone.

  The tiny starship was less than three percent the size of TFNS Excalibur, the task force's dreadnought flagship. True, it was faster than Excalibur, and its weapons systems and electronics were somewhat more advanced, but it could not have come within a light-minute of the task force and lived.

  Unfortunately, it didn't have to.

  * * *

  "It's confirmed, Sir." Captain Somerset's mahogany-skinned face was grim on Admiral Pei Kau-zhi's flag bridge com screen. Excalibur's commander had aged since the task force set out, Admiral Pei thought. Of course, he was hardly alone in that.

  "How far out, Martin?" the admiral asked flatly.

  "Just over two-point-six light-minutes," Somerset replied, his expression grimmer than ever. "It's too close, Admiral."

  "Maybe not," Pei said, then smiled thinly at his flag captain. "And whatever the range, we're stuck with it, aren't we?"

  "Sir, I could send the screen out, try and push him further back. I could even detach a destroyer squadron to sit on him, drive him completely out of sensor range of the fleet."

  "We don't know how close behind him something heavier may be." Pei shook his head. "Besides, we need them to see us sooner or later, don't we?"

  "Admiral," Somerset began, "I don't think we can afford to take the chance that—"

  "We can't afford not to take the chance," Pei said firmly. "Go ahead and push the screen out in his direction. See if you can get him to move at least a little further out. But either way, we execute Breakaway in the next half-hour."

  Somerset looked at him out of the com screen for another moment, then nodded heavily.

  "Very well, Sir. I'll pass the orders."

  "Thank you, Martin," Pei said in a much softer voice, and cut the circuit.

  "The Captain may have a point, Sir," a quiet contralto said from behind him, and he turned his br
idge chair to face the speaker.

  Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban was a very junior officer indeed, especially for an antigerone society, to be suggesting to a four-star admiral, however respectfully, that his judgment might be less than infallible. Pei Kau-zhi felt absolutely no temptation to point that out to her, however. First, because despite her youth she was one of the more brilliant tactical officers the Terran Federation Navy had ever produced. Second, because if anyone had earned the right to second-guess Admiral Pei, it was Lieutenant Commander Alban.

  "He does have a point," Pei conceded. "A very good one, in fact. But I've got a feeling the bad news isn't very far behind this particular raven."

  "A feeling, Sir?"

  Alban's combination of dark hair and blue eyes were the gift of her Welsh father, but her height and fair complexion had come from her Swedish mother. Admiral Pei, on the other hand, was a small, wiry man, over three times her age, and she seemed to tower over him as she raised one eyebrow. Still, he was pleased to note, in a bittersweet sort of way, it wasn't an incredulous expression.