The Apocalypse Troll

335 Pages·2016·1.18 MB·English

by  Weber David

The Apocalypse Troll
David Weber

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by David M. Weber

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

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57782-4

Cover art by Charles Keegan

First printing, January 1999
First printing, January 1999

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weber, David, 1952-
The Apocalypse Troll / David Weber.
p. cm.
“USN vs UFOs”
ISBN 0-671-57782-4 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3573.E217A8 1999
813’.54-dc21 98-41615
CIP

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America

For Ed Wells & Richard Maxwell
For Ed Wells & Richard Maxwell
two of the good ones it hurts to lose.
Watch each other’s backs, guys.
CHAPTER ONE
troll n. 1. Obsolete. A creature of Scandinavian myth, sometimes portrayed as a
mischievous or friendly dwarf, sometimes as a destructive giant, living in caves
in the hills. 2. A cyborg fighting machine of the Shirmaksu Empire. [Norwegian,
from Old Norse tröll, monster.]
-Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos,
Publishers
2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

TNS Defender, flagship of BatDiv Ninety-Two, was forty light-months from
anywhere in particular, loafing along under half drive and no more than four or
five translations into alpha-space, when the atonal shriek of General Quarters
howled through her iron bones.
Her crew froze for one incredulous moment. Ridiculous! They were headed for
the barn, and the Kangas were penned up in a miserable three star systems, the
nearest of them almost exactly one hundred light-years away. What kind of nit-
picking silliness could have possessed the Old Lady to call a drill now?
Then wonder was forgotten as they thundered to their stations.

Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna, commander of BatDiv Ninety-Two’s strike group,
was immersed in the new history text on her book-viewer when the alarm’s
high-pitched shriek jerked her away. She was into the passageway outside her
quarters before she realized she’d moved, and halfway to the hangar deck before
she remembered she’d left the viewer on.
She made a sliding turn around the final bend, ricocheted from a bulkhead in an
experienced rebound trajectory, and emerged into the cavernous hangar to find
her flight crews already assembling.
“Make a hole!”
“Make a hole!”
Personnel scattered as they recognized her voice, and she went through the
sudden opening and into the ready room like a more-or-less guided projectile,
then came to a rocking halt beside the duty intelligence officer bent over the
battle plot repeater. His face was intent, and her own lips pursed in a silent
whistle as her eyes joined his on the crawling light dots on the screen. Her left
hand rose to touch the ribbons on her tunic as if in memory, but she caught
herself and lowered it deliberately, concentrating on the plot.
There was something odd about this, she thought. Very odd… .

Commodore Josephine Santander’s stern, composed face appeared on Captain
Steven Onslow’s com screen almost before the echoes of the alarm had died,
though he knew she’d been in her quarters when it sounded.
“Talk to me, Steve,” she said without preamble.
“Scan reports a Kanga force closing slowly from about sixty light-hours, Ma’am.
Azimuth one-four-niner, elevation two-niner-three. I don’t have a firm track yet,
but it looks like they’ll cross our wake about twenty light-hours behind us.
Preliminary IDs look like an Ogre with escorts.”
“An Ogre?” Commodore Santander allowed herself a raised eyebrow.
“Yes, Ma’am. It-Just a moment, Ma’am.” He glanced at a side screen connecting
him directly to Central Scanning, and his black face tightened.
“We’re getting better data now, Ma’am. Scan confirms the Ogre. It’s a full battle
squadron-so far we’ve picked up three Trollheims siding her.”
“I see. Put it on Battle One, please.”
Onslow touched a button, and the big holo tank on the flag bridge lit with a
three-dee duplicate of his own display. Commodore Santander studied it for a
moment.
“We’ve got their course, Ma’am,” Onslow said, and a thin red line appeared on
the plot, predicting the hostile force’s movements. “They’re pulling about four
lights relative and translating steadily.”
lights relative and translating steadily.”
“Gradient?” the commodore asked sharply.
“Steep, Ma’am. They’re eight or nine translations out already. The computer
estimates they’ll break the beta wall in-” he glanced at his readouts “-about five
hours.”
Commodore Santander frowned and swung her command chair slowly from side
to side. It was unlike the Kangas to pile on that sort of gradient. They must be in
one hell of a hurry to run that big a risk of acoherency.
She wished there were someone she could turn this over to, but Admiral
Wierhaus had detached only half of Battle Squadron Ninety for a badly needed
overhaul, and she-for her sins-was the senior officer present. They were just over
three light-years out of 36 Ophiuchi, and no one closer than the fleet base there
could have taken the responsibility for her. She sighed silently. What she wished
didn’t change what she had.
“All right, Steve. Get Commander Tho to work on a pursuit course. Maximum
drive and optimum translation curve.”
“Optimum, Ma’am?” Onslow asked carefully.
“You heard me. Toss out the safety interlocks. They wouldn’t be translating that
fast if they weren’t in a hurry, and there wouldn’t be three Trollheims riding
herd on them if it wasn’t important. So get that course worked out soonest, then
put the squadron on it.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am,” Captain Onslow said just a bit too expressionlessly, and
Santander turned back to her plot, forcing herself to project an aura of
confidence. She understood his unhappiness at pushing the multi-dimensional
drive that hard and only wished she had another choice.
Unfortunately, she didn’t. The multi-dee could be dangerous, but the old
Einsteinian limit held true, more or less, in normal-space. As it happened, the
most recent hypotheses suggested that there were ways around that after all-in
theory, at least-but the relativity aspects still turned theoretical physicists’ hair
white. Until they worked the bugs out (if they worked the bugs out) practical
spacers would stick with something which at least let them predict the decade of
their arrival.
their arrival.
Theoretically, the multi-dee was an elegant solution. If light-speed was
inescapable, simply find yourself another dimension in which space was
“folded” more tightly, bringing equivalent points “closer” together. That was a
horribly crude description, but the commodore had yet to meet anyone who
could describe it any better without resorting to pure math models. For her
purposes, it worked well enough to visualize the galaxy of the FTL-traveler as
consisting of concentric rings of dimensions; by moving “higher” in multi-
dimensional space, a ship translated itself into rings with shorter and shorter
radii, which meant that the same absolute velocity seemed higher in relation to
normal-space. The physicists assured her she wasn’t really moving at more than
light-speed, but the practical result was FTL travel.
Still, there were limitations. The multi-dee was unusable inside the “Frankel
Limit,” a flexible point in stellar gravity wells which varied widely depending on
spectral class and vessel mass, and though one theoretically could simply
translate directly from normal-space into whatever other dimension one chose to
use and vice versa, it was far wiser to translate gradually from one to another.
Dimensional energy flux could be vicious, and many things could happen to
people who took liberties with the multi-dee. Few were pleasant. The alpha
band-the “lowest” of all-was only about twenty dimensions across. At its upper
limit, the maximum effective velocity of a ship (relative to normal-space) was
about five times light-speed. Higher bands offered greater effective speeds, but
at the cost of increasingly unstable energy states and consequently increasing
risk to the ship. And there were barriers, still imperfectly understood, between
the bands that meant cracking the wall was always risky. If a ship hit the wall
just wrong or with the slightest harmonic in her translation field, she simply
disappeared. She went acoherent, spread over a multitude of dimensions and
forever unable to reconstitute herself, a thought which broke a cold sweat on the
most hardened spacehound, for no one knew what happened inside the ship. Did
the crew die? Did they go into some sort of stasis? Or did they gradually
discover what had happened … and that they had become a galactic Flying
Dutchman for all eternity?
Not that there was too much danger in the lower bands. Humans routinely used
the beta band, or even the gamma and delta bands, though Kanga vessels
ventured as high as the delta band only when speed was of over-riding
importance. But no one in his right mind hit the wall as fast and as hard as
BatDiv Ninety-Two would have to in order to overhaul these Kangas. Not if they
BatDiv Ninety-Two would have to in order to overhaul these Kangas. Not if they
had a choice.
“Course laid in, Ma’am,” Captain Onslow said tonelessly.
“Then execute, Captain,” she said.
“Aye, aye, Ma’am.”
Defender shuddered as her normal-space drive went suddenly to full power. It
felt smooth enough, but Santander knew how dreadfully overdue for overhaul
Defender was, and she spared the time for a silent prayer against drive flutter as
Defender’s three million tons wrapped themselves in the n-drive’s space-
twisting web and swung in a radical course change.
The drive surge was disorienting despite the grav compensators, and the light
dots of Defender’s two sister ships and their escorts followed her on the plot as
the understrength battle division swerved to pursue humanity’s mortal enemies
across the trackless depths of more than a single space. Mangled ions streamed
astern as their massive drives wailed up to max, and the high-pitched whine of
the multi-dee generators sang in their bones.
“Time to the wall?” Santander let no awareness of the state of Defender’s drive
color her question, and Onslow hid a wry, mental grimace of appreciation for her
projected sangfroid.
“Fourteen hours, Ma’am,” he replied.
“Rate of closure?”
“We should make up the absolute speed differential in about ten hours, Ma’am.
If they were to maintain their present gradient, we’d need over eighty standard
hours to match bands. I can’t give you a realistic estimate without knowing when
they’re going to level out.”
“I don’t think they’re going to,” Santander said softly.
“But they’ll break the gamma wall in fifty hours at this rate!”
“That’s a heavy force, Captain, a long way from home and in a hell of a hurry. I
think they’re headed for the delta band-maybe even higher.”
“But, Ma’am-they’re Kangas!” Onslow protested.
“True. But they know they’re losing, too. They wouldn’t pull this big a force off
the Line unless its mission was critical, and their current gradient is a pretty
good indication of the risks they’re willing to run.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Onslow said finally, clearly taken aback by the whole idea.
“Run a track projection,” Santander said abruptly. “I know you can’t nail it
down, but define a general volume for me. As soon as you can, please join
Commander Miyagi, Colonel Leonovna and me in the flag briefing room. I’ve
got a bad feeling about this.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am,” Captain Onslow said. He watched his gray-haired
commodore’s screen blank, and his heart was cold as the vacuum beyond
Defender’s hull. He had served with Commodore Santander off and on for ten
subjective years. He’d seen her in the screaming heart of battle and listened to
her voice snapping orders while her ship bucked and jerked under the enemy’s
pounding, and this was the first time she had ever admitted the least
uncertainty… .

Commodore Santander’s eyes narrowed as Captain Onslow stepped through the
briefing room hatch. He looked shaken, and she braced herself for bad news as
she waved him to a chair between the two officers already at the table.
Plump, fair Commander Nicolas Miyagi was physically unprepossessing, but his
deadly quick mind and a flood of nervous energy poorly suited to his appearance
made him an excellent planning officer. Colonel Leonovna, however, was much
more than that. Indeed, she was something of a legend in the fleet, and, at a
moment like this, Santander was profoundly grateful for her presence.
Commodore Santander had never resented the colonel, but she understood why
some did. Leonovna was twenty bio-years older than the commodore, but she
looked a quarter of her age in her impeccable Marine uniform. The colonel
would never be accused of classic beauty, but her wedge-shaped, high-
cheekboned face was striking, and her bright chestnut hair and blue eyes might
have been designed expressly to contrast with her space-black tunic.
Yet for all her undeniable attractiveness, Santander reminded herself, Leonovna
Yet for all her undeniable attractiveness, Santander reminded herself, Leonovna
was lethal. Her golden pilot’s wings bore three tiny stars, each representing ten
fighter kills, but the ribbons under those wings told the true story. They were
headed by one the commodore had seen on precisely three officers during her
entire career: the Solarian Grand Cross. Among other things, it entitled Colonel
Leonovna to a salute from any officer who hadn’t won it, regardless of rank-and,
as far as Josephine Santander was concerned, that was an honor to which she
was more than welcome.
But that wasn’t why so many people resented-and feared-the colonel. Oh, no.
Those reactions stemmed from something else entirely, for Ludmilla Leonovna
was descended from the Sigma Draconis First Wave.
The commodore shook herself free of her thoughts and cocked an eyebrow at
Onslow. “May I assume you have more information now, Steve?”
“Yes, Ma’am. There’s still room for error, but the computers make it an Ogre,
three Trollheims, and one Grendel, plus escorts. There may be a Harpy out there,
too.”
She nodded calmly, but her mind was anything but calm. A single Ogre was bad-
almost five million tons, with the firepower to sterilize a planet-but the
Trollheims were worse. Far less massive (they were actually slightly smaller
than Defender), they were even more heavily armed, for they were “crewed” by
servomechanisms slaved to the cyborgs humans called “Trolls.” A Grendel
assault transport was bad news for any planet, for it carried an entire planetary
assault force of Trolls and their combat mechs, but it meant little in a deep space
battle. By the same token, the possibility of a Harpy-class interceptor carrier
made a bad situation very little worse, for she could be only a spectator until and
unless the action translated down into the alpha or lower beta band.
But any way Santander looked at it, BatDiv Ninety-Two was out-gunned and
out-massed-badly-and she was far from certain the traditional human technical
advantage could balance these odds. Yet suspicion stuck in her mind like a sliver
of glass. The Kangas would never have wandered this far from the desperate
defense of their three remaining systems unless they were engaged in something
of supreme importance to their ultracautious race.
“That’s a heavy weight of metal,” was all she said softly.
“Agreed,” Onslow said grimly, “but there’s more. Commander Tho ran that