A long drawn-out hour passed while Tigger worked frantically. What he had done would only work once, since those aboard the hilldigger would be sure to analyse debris and find it very lacking. Now he continued to extend himself throughout the ship, using nano-technological methods to absorb material and reform it as part of himself. Slowly he reached the outer hull and began to spread out, rebuilding sensor heads, refractors and projectors into composite and much more efficient instruments. He would have done this first of all, had there been time, but hopefully he had provided time enough to do it now.
The hilldigger missile finally slammed down on the Brumallian ship it detected. Tigger detonated the missile he had fired. The two missiles and the illusion of a Brumallian ship disappeared in a sun-bright explosion. Tigger continued to work. Another hour passed and he observed the hilldigger turning, then firing a massive spread of inert rail- or coil-gun projectiles to cover possible locations of the hidden ship. They caught on fast. He tracked the course of every projectile and saw that dumb chance had put one directly on target. It came faster than the original missile, and was only seconds away. One spurt from his main drive would put the ship out of the way, but would also locate it clearly for the beam weapons the hilldigger was now close enough to use. Tigger fired up a steering thruster hidden on the other side, turning the ship to present one particular area at a particular time.
The projectile struck, and punched through, exploding fire through the ship's internal spaces, jetting fire from its exit on the other side. Still turning, the ship presented new Polity chameleonware which wiped out the same fire to the hilldigger's scanners. Then the feedback from Rosebud screamed through Tigger—the ship's agony.
Didn't these fools know their ships could suffer?
The spread of the chameleonware continued autonomously. It needed to. Tigger crashed into oblivion.
Harald
On his instructions the eight remaining hilldiggers of the Fleet began to put some distance between each other, randomising their formation since they were now close enough to Sudoria that the possibility of running into hidden defences could not be discounted.
In the Admiral's Haven, Harald gazed at all eight hilldigger Captains displayed on the screens arrayed before him. "Our plan of attack is not complicated, but then complicated plans have a tendency to go wrong. And this will not." Not much response from them to that, but he had expected none. "If you would all turn your attention now to the graphic, I will detail how it should run." On his own eye-screen he observed the graphic representation, updated realtime, of the disposition of Combine stations and ships surrounding the planet Sudoria. Using his control glove he shifted his selector to frame Defence Platforms One and Twelve.
"Once these two have been destroyed, only Platforms Eleven, Two, Three, Four and the main stations remain relevant for our purpose. The hole in planetary cover we will shortly have made will give us ready ingress to the defences of Orbital Combine. If you will observe the trajectory of our last fusillade…" He panned the view back to a rapidly approaching icon representing 1,500 projectiles, then slashed a line from them to Sudoria. "As you see the missiles will come in low and fast over Platform Eleven, through the gap created by the two destroyed platforms, and will impact on the side of Platform Two. Eventually it too will fall." Harald paused, inspecting their expressions. Most looked satisfied; a few, notably Orvram Davidson, looked grim.
"Once Platform Two is down, we move into low orbit then harrow up Platforms Three and Four in a line, until reaching Corisanthe Main."
Two Captains began speaking at once: Tlaster Cobe and Orvram Davidson. Davidson then fell silent and let Cobe speak. "But, taking that route, we'll come under fire from Corisanthe II."
"Yes," replied Harald, "which is why only four ships will be conducting that attack. When they have dealt with Platforms Two and Three, those ships will then be in danger, at which point Desert Wind, Harvester and Slate will assault Corisanthe II."
"There are over a hundred thousand people aboard Corisanthe II," reminded Davidson.
"I am aware of that fact," said Harald. "There is a similar number on Corisanthe III, which has been growing in recent years since Combine began assembly of its space liners there. We will also need to attack that station, to prevent resupply to the other stations from there. This is why I am relating this plan to you now, so you have a chance to voice any objections." He studied the faces before him. He expected no protest from those he had already chosen for the assault on Corisanthe II, but Cobe and Davidson of Stormfollower and Resilience respectively, and perhaps Schumack of Musket, might begin to show signs of rebellion now.
"I am sorry, but I cannot—" began Davidson.
The screen showing Captain Lorimar of hilldigger Slate suddenly blanked out. Almost immediately Harald received a concerted scream from the tacoms aboard all the other ships, "Minefield!" He stood up and, using his control glove, crowded the images of all the Captains into one screen, noting that Davidson, Cobe and Schumack had now cut their connections. There was no tacom connection from Slate—absolutely nothing. Before he even needed to ask for it, the tacom from Wildfire—the ship nearest to Slate's location—sent him visual feed which he now projected on one of the empty screens before him. Debris glittered across space, and tumbling through it came the rear section of a hilldigger, exposed girders glowing against darkness and its engine galleries open to vacuum.
Harald just stared, unable to make any sense of what he was seeing, until someone's gasp of Slate's gone' set his mind in motion again. Thousands had just died, and an entire hilldigger was just a spreading cloud of radioactive detritus. He felt a horrible, bone-deep guilt and, though he was accepting what he was currently seeing and hearing, he just didn't know how to react. Then he detected, amid the chatter, the words, "Stealthed mines."
"What do you have for me, Harvester tacom?" Harald managed.
"Am relaying now. They are invisible to most forms of scan, but we get a time-discrepancy on laser detection," replied the tacom officer serving on that ship.
At last feeling some control, Harald called up views fed from other ships on the large screens before him and in his eye-screen. An explosion a hundred miles out from Desert Wind blanked instruments for a short while, but it proved that they were now able to detect these near-invisible mines. Slowly, in a representative view, the minefield began to be revealed.
"They're moving," came a general tacom report.
The flare of drive flames created brief constellations out in vacuum. However, the same flames immediately located every mine for Fleet's instruments. More explosions—two mines drawing too close to Harvester. Harald realised that Combine had expected that, after one or two detonations, the mines would inevitably be detected, so had programmed them to become missiles like this, giving them the remote possibility of causing more damage.
"Remove them," Harald instructed, and multiple explosions filled space around the hilldiggers. Switching from view to view, he coldly studied the spectacle, but these camera angles also presented him with an unwelcome reality: Stormfollower, Resilience and Musket were turning. It disappointed him that all the Captains he suspected might rebel, had now done so.
"Captains Davidson, Cobe and Schumack," he broadcast. "Return to formation, or you will lose command of your ships."