Valiant

One of the Syndic battle cruisers, its propulsion system less badly damaged than that of its fellows, had begun accelerating away at a painfully slow rate. “Running?” Desjani wondered, her fingers dancing across controls as she checked something. “Not on that vector. He’s trying to join with the other damaged ships forming up ahead of the Casualty Flotilla.”

The Syndics were obviously still hoping for their own miracle that would keep the Alliance fleet from annihilating all of the major Syndic combatants currently within reach.

An alert pulsed on his display, drawing Geary’s attention. “The automated combat system is recommending we volley rocks at the Casualty Flotilla.”

“Kinetic projectiles at ships? Those ships are too badly damaged to maneuver much, but it wouldn’t take much to avoid rocks thrown at them from any significant distance.” Desjani made a face, checking the recommendation herself. “We’d have to throw a lot of our supply of rocks out there to form a pattern that would have a decent probability of scoring any hits.”

“Doesn’t seem worth it to me,” Geary agreed. “Hey, what about Audacious?”

“The recommended pattern would avoid hitting the hulk of Audacious, as long as Audacious didn’t maneuver. Which she could if her tugs yank her off her current course, and walk right into one of our rocks.” Desjani shook her head. “And what if the debris from some of the hits on the warships struck the repair ships that we want to loot? Only an artificial intelligence would think this was a good option. I’d give the combat system a ‘disregard option’ instead of just a ‘recommendation noted.’ Otherwise, it’ll keep trying to refine the recommendation and annoying you with updated alerts about it.”

“Good idea.” He thumbed the right commands, hoping the disregard order would work since automated systems sometimes seemed able to ignore such commands and kept insistently pushing options they had already been told to forget about. Another case of automated systems acting a little too human at times. “Any idea what made that big hole in Audacious? It looks like something blew inside.”

Desjani only glanced at her display. “That was her null-field projector self-destructing. The Syndics don’t have null-field weapons yet, so there’s a multiple-redundant self-destruct capability. Just like for Alliance hypernet keys. We don’t want them to fall into enemy hands, either.”

“Have any of them ever self-destructed when they weren’t supposed to?”

“Not that I’ve heard of. The weapons-design bureau assured us that it can’t possibly happen, so we don’t worry about it.” Desjani spoke with apparent total seriousness, but couldn’t quite keep from smiling at the actual absurdity of her statement. While declarations from the weapons design bureau were supposed to be nonfiction, sailors soon learned from experience to treat them all as fantasy until confirmed by real-world events.

Geary barely managed not to laugh. “Of course not.” His alert chimed to mark the arrival of Colonel Carabali’s plan. He skimmed through it, stealing occasional looks at the display to make sure nothing unexpected was happening.

The Marine plan was simple enough, using detachments from all four of the battleships accompanying the Alliance auxiliaries, which were heading straight for the Syndic Casualty Flotilla of which Audacious was a part. Most of the Marines would assault Audacious, using every shuttle available from the battleships and Captain Cresida’s battle cruisers. In addition, each boarding team from an Alliance auxiliary would be accompanied by a single Marine fire team to check for booby traps on the repair ships or some Syndic fanatic determined to die fighting.

He paused at the situation assessment. “I hadn’t noticed the Syndics evacuating Audacious,” he remarked to Desjani.

She checked her own display, tapping some recall commands, then nodded. “They pulled out when the other Syndics were bailing out of the repair ships. That’s why we didn’t notice it, but if you do a situation replay, you can see it clearly enough. There’s no change in the readings from Audacious, so they didn’t vent atmosphere or anything like that.”

“Let’s hope it simplifies things.” He marked the plan approved and sent it back. Even though the Marines had been told they didn’t need positive approval, a clean paper trail on orders usually made people happy.