Mathias System
October 1, 1906 PD
“alpha translation . . . now.”
Lieutenant Saldaña’s announcement wasn’t actually necessary, Earl White Haven thought, given the ripple of nausea which always accompanied even the most gentle translation into normal-space. Despite which, SOP required his astrogator to announce it, anyway. Just in case anyone managed to not notice, he assumed.
“System primary bearing zero-zero-niner, zero-zero-seven.” More than a trace of satisfaction colored Saldaña’s professional tone as she made the follow-on announcement. “Range to hyper limit seven-zero light-minutes. Present n-space velocity one-four-four-five KPS.”
“Very good!” White Haven said. “Begin acceleration.”
“Aye, aye, Milord,” Saldaña replied as her fingers flew across her panel. “Beginning acceleration . . . now.”
“Lot calmer than Samson or Welladay, Milord,” Captain Hunter observed with a crooked smile, standing at White Haven’s shoulder.
“That’s sort of the idea,” the earl replied. “Well, that and keeping the bastards guessing.”
Hunter nodded, and the two of them watched the plot as Sixth Fleet began its steady acceleration toward the Mathias System’s G4 primary. From this range, it was only a tiny, barely brighter speck of light, and that, too, was part of the plan.
Mathias would be the third target Sixth Fleet had hit in less than three months since the Royal Manticoran Navy’s resumption of offensive operations. Admiral Kuzak’s Fourth Fleet had been almost equally busy on the far side of Trevor’s Star, and White Haven hoped the Peeps were paying attention. Unlike Samson, which had been little more than a forward logistics base, or Welladay, which had provided basing facilities for only a pair of light-cruiser squadrons, Mathias was a significant fleet base. Still far smaller than the massive Havenite base guarding Trevor’s Star, but big enough to support major task forces. According to Commander O’Hanlon’s latest intelligence summaries and scouting reports from ONI, there shouldn’t have been any of those major task forces in-system at the moment, however, although he couldn’t be certain of that. But it still represented a major node in Trevor’s Star’s outworks. One whose loss, hopefully, they’d be unable to ignore.
And if White Haven was especially lucky, those intelligence summaries and scouting reports were wrong. He’d love to catch two or three squadrons of Peep wallers in Mathias!
Actually, I’d love to catch them just about anywhere, damn it! he thought. It was sheer luck we caught Costa in Sampson, and taking out four superdreadnoughts was a hell of a bonus prize, when all we expected was battleships. But I really don’t like how damned coy their wall-of-battle’s being. Especially not given the way their people are standing and fighting even when anybody must know they’re completely screwed. We know they’ve got one hell of a wall hiding somewhere, but where?
No one knew, and that bothered him.. It bothered him a lot, because what he wanted more than anything else in the universe was to whittle that wall down before it—and especially its officers—got any closer to properly trained. But where the hell was it? He frowned ferociously at his plot as his own ships-of-the-wall and their screening elements slowly built their vector toward Mathias, but the plot returned no answer to his burning question. Nor would it, until Sixth Fleet got a lot closer.
This time, he’d made his alpha translation much farther out than in his previous attacks. As Saldaña had announced, Sixth Fleet was seventy light-minutes from the system’s hyper limit and over eighty-three from Smaragdenio, the system’s only inhabited planet, which put it over ninety light-minutes from the system primary. In fact, only Pagovoyno, the system’s outermost ice planet, lay astern of it.
It would have taken far more sensitive arrays than ONI’s assessments gave the Mathias fleet base to detect such a gradual translation at such an enormous distance from Smaragdenio. Detecting impeller wedges covered by Manticoran stealth systems would be even harder—at least at this sort of range—so, if all went according to plan, no one would see him coming until it was much too late.
If all went according to plan.
“Deploy the drones,” he said.
“Deploying drones, aye, aye, Milord,” Commander Eccles replied, and the light codes of a half-dozen recon drones accelerated away from their motherships, spreading out before they settled down on a heading toward Mathias. Their acceleration rate was almost fifteen thousand gravities, sixty times that of Sixth Fleet’s starships, but their impeller signatures were both tiny and enormously stealthy, and they’d accelerate for only fifteen minutes. At that point, their velocity relative to their destination would be 133,830 KPS, forty-five percent of lightspeed. They’d still be well over a light-hour from the hyper limit when their drives went dark, so they’d need another two and a half hours to reach it, but they’d also be effectively invisible to any waiting passive sensors.
He watched the plot for another few minutes, then straightened.
“I see it’s about lunchtime,” he said, “and I’m feeling peckish. Join me for lunch, Byron?”
“Of course, Milord,” Captain Hunter replied in an equally casual tone, and White Haven looked at the slightly built, brown-haired young woman standing patiently and attentively at his elbow.
“Ping Captain Goldstein, Lori,” he said. “Ask him, with my compliments, to join me and the chief of staff in my dining cabin.”
“Of course, Milord,” his flag lieutenant acknowledged.
“Thank you.” White Haven nodded, then smiled slightly. “And you’re invited, too,” he told her. “I’m sure we’ll be able to find something onerous for you to do.”
“I don’t doubt that for a moment, Milord,” Lieutenant Barrera told him solemnly, and he snorted a chuckle before he and Hunter headed for the flag bridge hatch.
* * *
“The Flag’s reporting the first take from the RDs, Skipper,” Lieutenant Commander Chen said. “Just got a relay from Circe.”
“Ah?” Alistair McKeon swiveled his command chair toward the tac officer’s station. “And what do we appear to have found?”
Slowed by the missile pods on tow behind all of its units—including CruRon 33, this time, but not the destroyers of DesFlot 17, which had been added to White Haven’s order of battle only the month before—it had taken Sixth Fleet almost three and a half hours to build its velocity to 34,542 KPS. In that time, it had traveled only 242,915,000 kilometers, so range to the Mathias hyper limit was still over fifty-six light-minutes, but the speedier recon drones had crossed that limit over an hour earlier. Their superb passive sensors had examined the Mathias Fleet Base’s platforms, orbiting Smaragdenio, in minute detail, then used tightly focused, directional com lasers to transmit their findings home to Queen Caitrin, whose equally tightly focused, and far shorter-ranged whisker lasers had shared that information with her subordinate flagships, like HMS Circe.
It had taken that light-speed data fifty-six minutes to reach Sixth Fleet, which was a little frustrating, given that the RMN, unlike any other navy, actually had an FTL com ability. Its drones could have transmitted that data in under fifty-two seconds if they’d been allowed to use it, but the FTL system was still in its infancy. Bandwidth remained very limited, so while transmission speed was faster than light, message generation speed was quite low. More to the point, the grav pulses the system used were impossible to conceal. So far as ONI knew, the Peeps didn’t even suspect—yet—that the system existed, but eventually, if they kept picking up “random” grav pulses and started putting two and two together, they would. That being the case, standing orders were to deploy them only when it was absolutely essential. Which it wasn’t here.
“Not as much as we’d hoped, I’m afraid,” Chen said, studying his display as the results relayed from CruRon 33’s flagship came up on it. He tapped in a command and threw the same data into the master plot. “Looks like they’ve reinforced with another squadron of battleships since our last flyby,” he continued, “but no sign of any wallers.”
“Damn it, Skipper!” Lev Carson muttered. “Where the hell are they?”
“So now we’re back to the ‘Your skipper knows everything,’ are we?” McKeon shot back just a bit testily, then grimaced. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know. But I have to agree with Admiral White Haven. The longer it takes us to find them, the more painful it’ll be when we finally do.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Carson growled. “Damned inconsiderate Peep bastards just have to be difficult, don’t they?”
McKeon snorted in sour amusement as he studied the neat columns of data.
According to the drones, the fleet base orbiting Smaragdenio was accompanied by eighteen battleships and a couple of dozen light cruisers and destroyers, but—as Chen had said—not a single ship-of-the-wall. That was unfortunate. Depriving the Peeps of eighteen more battleships would be eminently worthwhile, but they had almost four hundred of the damned things. In fact, they were the only first-line navy that was still building them, and not even they built them to use in fleet actions. They were area defense ships, cheap enough to build in significant numbers, then parcel out to cover the People’s Republic’s rear areas.
And to suppress any local temptation toward independence, he reminded himself sourly.
They’d be well worth removing from the Peep order of battle, but each of them were barely half the size of a superdreadnought and had maybe a quarter of the combat power. And he didn’t like the fact that they were reinforcing a base like Mathias—scarcely vital to their survival, but significantly more important than someplace like Samson—with battleships, not wallers. If it was worth reinforcing at all, then they should have reinforced with something that might actually have made a difference. Clearly, they were saving those ships-of-the-wall for something more important. Like the defense of Trevor’s Star itself.
Well, he consoled himself, if we keep gnawing away at their perimeter long enough, they’ll have to start peeling off some of the heavy mob, putting the damned wallers out where we can get at them. That’s the plan, anyway.
“Wonder about their impeller nodes,” he said out loud, and Chen shrugged.
“Impossible to say till the birds get even closer, Sir. If I were a betting man, I’d say their drive-room capacitors are probably carrying a charge. Mine damned sure would be.”
“There is that old saying about burned hands, isn’t there?” McKeon observed.
“They did kind of get singed at Samson and Welladay, didn’t they, Sir?” Chen replied with a grin.
“And they’re going to get singed again in about”—Commander Carson looked at the time display—“six hours. In fact”—he looked back at McKeon with a grim smile—“they’re gonna get scorched right down to the bone, Skipper.”
* * *
“Crossing the limit in thirty seconds, Milord,” Lieutenant Saldaña announced, and White Haven nodded.
Sixth Fleet had stopped accelerating fifty-two minutes ago. Their velocity was up to 70,640 KPS, a tad under twenty-five percent of lightspeed, but there was no longer an active impeller signature to give them away, every active sensor system was shut down, and their stealth fields were active. They couldn’t avoid some electronic emissions, and the odds of detection increased steadily from this point, despite their cautious approach, but ideally, no one would see them for another forty minutes . . . the point at which he intended to demand their surrender.
From a purely cold-blooded tactical perspective, it would have been even better to continue all the way into powered missile range before giving away his presence. Unfortunately, if the Havenite battleships did have hot nodes—which they damned well should, after Samson and Welladay—they could raise their wedges in no more than fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on the proficiency of their engineering personnel. Worse, he would pass through his entire missile envelope in less than five minutes at his present velocity. That was time for only eight salvos from his internal launchers before they moved out of range. After that, it would take hours to decelerate to zero, then approach the planet once more, even using the Long Maneuver. And that, in turn, meant any mobile unit that hadn’t been too cataclysmically damaged to move in that five-minute window would escape long before Sixth Fleet could do anything about it.
He’d give those Peep skippers one chance to save their people’s lives. Experience in Samson and Welladay suggested their “people’s commissioners” wouldn’t allow them to accept it, despite the fact that there was no way under God’s heaven those battleships could survive even a passing engagement against his wall-of-battle. He hated that, but not as much as he would have hated letting all those ships escape to kill other Manticorans in some future battle. He never doubted that the Peep propagandists would play up his “cold-blooded, cynical, impossible to meet” demands and ignore the fact that their commissioners had chosen to reject them, and he didn’t like that, either. But his Star Kingdom hadn’t started this war; the People’s Republic of Haven had. So, yes, he would give those skippers a chance to at least try to save their people.
And if that chance was rejected, he would kill every single one of those ships without a moment’s hesitation.
* * *
“Shut that damned noise off!” Citizen Major General Jonathan Garrido barked.
The harsh, atonal howl which had summoned him to Mathias Alpha’s command deck died, and he turned his glare to Citizen Colonel Spencer Blair, his operations officer, who’d beaten him to the command deck by perhaps fifteen seconds.
“How bad is it?”
“About as bad as it gets, Citizen Major General,” Blair replied. “If we’d detected them sooner, maybe we could have done something about it, but at this point?” He shrugged, his expression bitter. “All we can do now is wait for the hammer.”
“And why didn’t we detect them sooner?” People’s Commissioner Teymoori demanded.
“An excellent question,” Garrido agreed. “Perhaps you’d care to answer it, Citizen Commander?” he added in a venomous tone, as he and Teymoori both turned to glare at the only naval officer on Garrido’s staff.
Because the Manties know what the hell they’re doing and you idiots don’t, Citizen Commander Eligio Samper very carefully didn’t say aloud. That sort of honesty could be fatal.
Citizen Rear Admiral Chelsea Simmons, who’d commanded the People’s Navy base in Mathias until five months ago, had been relieved and called home for suspected “unreliability.” Virtually her entire staff had been recalled along with her, “escorted” home to Nouveau Paris by a heavily armed detachment of State Security troopers.
No one in Mathias had heard a word from them—or about them—since, and Samper knew no one would.
That would have been bad enough, but the primary reason the Committee of Public Safety had doubted Simmons’ reliability had been reports from Citizen Major General Garrido, who commanded the occupation and security forces making certain the Smaragdenio Republic remembered its place, and his people’s commissioner. And since the Committee had no doubts at all about Garrido’s devotion, it had seen no reason it shouldn’t adopt his own modest suggestion and put him in direct command of the Mathias System’s naval forces, as well. The fact that he knew exactly nothing about naval warfare hadn’t dissuaded them for a moment when they gave him the slot.
And, in the process, put one Citizen Commander Samper into a job he wished to hell he’d been able to decline.
Now he turned to face Garrido and Teymoori squarely, his expression respectful.
“Citizen Major General, I’m sorry, but they must have made their alpha translation well beyond detection range.”
“Really?” Teymoori asked in a biting tone. “And why are you so confident of that . . . convenient reason for System Tracking to have missed them, Citizen Commander?”
“I have to assume they’re towing pods, Sir,” Samper replied. “That would be in keeping with everything we’ve seen out of their tactics so far. Assuming they are, their maximum acceleration can’t be much more than two hundred fifty gravities, but they’re still coming in at almost seventy-one thousand kilometers per second. That suggests they must have accelerated for at least eight hours after making translation before they cut their impellers and went dark. There’s no way to tell how long they’ve been coasting in ballistically, but I’d guess they probably arrived at least eighty or ninety light-minutes from Smaragdenio orbit. Our passive arrays simply aren’t up to detecting a relatively gradual translation at that sort of range. We’d be hard put to hold and track even an active impeller wedge at anything much over forty-five light-minutes, even without Manticoran stealth systems to cover it. And once they went to silent running, even that disappeared, which left our passive sensors nothing to work with.”
He kept his tone level, factual, and forbore to mention that even though this was the first they’d seen of the Manty starships, only a drooling idiot—which manifestly no Manty flag officer was—would have failed to send in an advanced screen of recon drones . . . which the passive arrays had also missed.
Garrido’s jaw worked from side to side as he digested Samper’s response. From his expression, he wanted to hold the citizen commander personally responsible for not somehow spotting the approaching Manticorans sooner.
“What about your active sensor systems?” Teymoori demanded, and Samper’s own jaw clenched. “Why didn’t they detect these . . . people sooner?”
“Because, People’s Commissioner,” the citizen commander said as soon as he was confident he had control of his tone, “they’re still too far away for any active system to get a return off of them. This”—he waved his hand at the plot—“is driven solely by our passive sensors at the moment. And to be honest,” he continued a bit daringly, “the fact that we’ve detected them at all was a lot more due to luck than anything else. Their wedges are down and their stealth systems are damping any electronic emissions, which gives even our passive arrays damn all to work with. We only found them because one of our optical platforms was looking in exactly the right direction when they occluded Pagovoyno, and that was what I can only call a very low-probability event.”
Teymoori opened his mouth again, but Garrido raised his hand.
“I agree with you, Arnold, that it would have been much better to spot them sooner,” he said, “but I think the Citizen Commander probably has a valid point.”
Teymoori glowered at the citizen major general, but only for a moment. Very few of the People’s Republic’s current military officers would have dared to correct, far less contradict, their political watchdogs. Garrido had enough friends in sufficiently high places that Teymoori—who, to be fair, was generally on the same page with him, anyway—recognized the unwisdom of excessive zeal in his case.
“The important thing now is what we do about it,” Garrido continued. “Spencer?”
“We’ve already alerted Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz and Citizen Rear Admiral Linton,” the citizen colonel replied, “and the armed platforms are clearing for action. Offensive weapons systems should be online within the next ten minutes. On Citizen Commander Samper’s recommendation, we’re not bringing up our missile defense systems yet.”
“Why not?” Teymoori pounced.
A flicker of irritation danced in Blair’s eyes, Samper noted. Well, the citizen colonel might not be a naval officer, but even Marine officers understood the importance of emissions control.
It was a pity people’s commissioners didn’t.
The citizen commander started to open his mouth, but Blair spoke before he could.
“Because, Sir,” the citizen colonel said, rather more frostily than he normally allowed himself to address Teymoori, “the instant we bring our defensive systems fully online, they’ll activate their tracking and fire-control systems. Those are predominantly active systems, and the moment they start emitting, the Manties will know we’ve detected them. The longer we can keep them guessing, the better.”
Teymoori flushed, but at least he had the good sense not to bite back at the citizen colonel. For the moment, anyway.
“What about the battleships, Citizen Commander?” Garrido’s voice was at least marginally less belligerent, and Samper grimaced unhappily.
“The good news is that the Manties are sixteen minutes from attack range at their present velocity, and most of our ships should have time to get their wedges and sidewalls up before that, Citizen Major General.” Best not to mention that fully proficient engineering personnel could have gotten all the battleships’ wedges up from standby readiness with sixteen minutes’ warning. “If they can, they’ll be as combat ready as they could hope to be. But I’m afraid the truth is that it’s not going to make a lot of difference. Not against this much firepower. There’s always a certain degree of uncertainty relying on passive sensors, but if CIC’s type estimates are accurate, we’re looking at least twenty-four ships-of-the-wall, plus a screen of cruisers and battlecruisers and at least a dozen destroyers. Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz and Citizen Rear Admiral Linton only have eighteen battleships and nine light cruisers between them.”
“Then they’ll just have to do the best they can,” Teymoori said sharply.
“Of course they will, Sir,” Samper agreed. “And I’m sure they’ll do the absolute best they can under the circumstances. I think it’s probable these people will take losses of their own”—in fact, he doubted there was much chance in hell they would—“and as the Octagon’s stressed, attrition works in our favor. But I’d be less than honest if I said there was any hope of our successfully defending the system.”
Teymoori looked like a man who’d just tasted something rotten, but even he had to recognize the obvious truth of that statement.
* * *
“We’re coming up on the mark, Milord,” Lieutenant Commander Groener said, and Hamish Alexander nodded at the com officer’s reminder.
“Then I suppose we should go ahead and send it, Sean,” he said.
“Aye, aye, Milord. Transmitting in . . . twenty seconds.”
White Haven nodded again and tipped back in his command chair. He’d prerecorded the message Groener was about to transmit. In fact, he’d recorded it a second time, after reviewing the initial take, because he’d wanted to see it himself, be sure it said exactly what he wanted it to say, before he sent it on its way.
Sixth Fleet had been back in normal-space for just over nine and a half hours, now, and the system hyper limit lay 167,416,000 kilometers astern. The range to Smaragdenio orbit was still 3.9 light-minutes, but at his ships’ current velocity, powered missile range was well over 19,600,000 kilometers, and they’d reach that range in only twelve more minutes. If the Peeps truly hadn’t detected them yet, that would have been too little time for even Manticoran engineering crews to raise wedges.
“Transmitting now,” Groener said, and White Haven’s recorded message appeared on the repeater display deployed from his command chair.
“I am Admiral White Haven, Royal Manticoran Navy,” his image said flatly, “and this message is to the commander of all Havenite forces in the Mathias System. The ships under my command will launch against your starships in twelve minutes from now. Your vessels cannot survive the missile exchange. I have no more desire to kill people than any other sane human being, however, so I offer you one opportunity to preserve your own people’s lives. My recon drones have your ships and bases under continuous observation. You have five minutes from the receipt of this message to disable your starships by destroying their impeller rooms. Any ship which executes an emergency impeller room plasma dump and does not fire upon my command, will not be fired upon as we pass. Any ship which does not dump its plasma by the time my command has closed to within one hundred and sixty-seven thousand kilometers will be taken under fire and destroyed.
“The decision is yours . . . and the clock is ticking.”
He gazed bleakly out of the display for four more seconds, and then it blanked.
“Here’s hoping they’re smart enough to do it, Milord,” Byron Hunter said quietly, and White Haven shrugged.
“I know, and I’d like to think I’d be sane enough to do it, if the position was reversed. But truth to tell, I’m not sure I could swallow it, either. And I don’t have these frigging ‘people’s commissioners’ Abdur’s been telling us about breathing down the back of my neck. Like you say, we can hope, but I honestly don’t expect them to take the out.”
Hunter nodded, and White Haven smiled grimly.
An emergency plasma dump wouldn’t actually destroy any of the Peep battleships, but it would cripple their impeller rooms’ plasma conduits. They’d be repairable—they were designed for emergency dumps in case of a catastrophic engineering failure—but those repairs would take months, even for a fully equipped repair yard, far less anything available in Mathias. And without impeller rooms, he wouldn’t have to worry about their escaping before he could return to deal with them.
It was, as he’d told Hunter, the only sane option he’d left them, and as he watched the display, he found himself praying that they’d take it after all.
* * *
“. . . will be taken under fire and destroyed.”
Citizen Major General Garrido’s jaw ached from the pressure of his gritted teeth as he glared at the arrogant Manty aristocrat on his display. Then he turned his head and stabbed that same fiery glare at the split screen showing Citizen Rear Admiral Marika Dietz, Battle Squadron 71’s commanding officer, and Citizen Rear Admiral Camila Linton, who commanded BatRon 113. The flag officers were flanked by their people’s commissioners, of course.
“Well?” he snapped.
“He’s right that our ships can’t survive that much fire, Citizen Major General,” Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz said from her flag deck aboard PNS Martin Pelzer. She was senior to Linton, which made her the tactical officer in command, and she met Garrido’s glare levelly. “I’m not being defeatist. I’m just looking at the numbers. From past experience, they probably have at least three to four thousand missiles in their pods alone. Split the difference and call it thirty-six hundred for easy division. If they concentrate all of that on our battleships and distribute it evenly, that’s two hundred laserheads per ship, and that doesn’t even count their shipboard launchers.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Citizen Major General, but that’s the math, and no battleship ever built could survive that weight of fire.”
“So you think we should accept his ‘generous offer’?” Garrido demanded.
“I didn’t say that,” Dietz replied without even glancing at her own people’s commissioner. “What I said is that we can’t survive his fire. That doesn’t mean we can’t inflict damage in return.”
From Citizen Rear Admiral Linton’s expression, she wasn’t in full agreement with her fellow citizen rear admiral, but she kept her mouth closed.
Garrido gave Dietz a choppy nod, but People’s Commissioner Teymoori’s eyes narrowed suddenly as a blizzard of icons appeared in the master plot, spreading away from the orbiting battleships. While he watched, the transponder beacons of escape pods began to flash.
“What are you doing, Citizen Rear Admiral?!” he snapped, and Dietz shrugged.
“I’ve given orders to evacuate all nonessential personnel, Sir,” she said flatly. “They won’t be needed to fight our ships, and I’d like to at least preserve them for the People’s Republic’s future service. Unless the Manties plan on permanently occupying Mathias, there are too many of our people in-system to haul all of them off as POWs, and there’s ample life support aboard the platforms—or the planet, for that matter—to keep them alive until someone gets here to recover them.”
“Who authorized that?!” Teymoori demanded.
“I did,” Nicholas Riccardi, BatRon 71’s people’s commissioner said.
“What?!” Teymoori glared at Riccardi “I never—!”
It was clear Dietz’s “defeatism” had infuriated him. Riccardi’s endorsement of her decision only made it worse, but Garrido cut him off with another of those choppy nods.
“Makes sense, Citizen Rear Admiral,” he acknowledged, and Teymoori closed his mouth with a snap, although his eyes blazed furiously.
“Thank you, Citizen Major General,” Dietz said, and there was genuine gratitude in that unflinching tone.
“According to our readouts over here,” Teymoori said sharply, “at least some of your ships’ impellers are ready right now.”
Dietz’s nostrils flared. Unwisely, perhaps, but not surprisingly, Citizen Commander Samper thought. He’d often wondered what kind of mind it took to make a people’s commissioner. Obviously, that included a steady diet of paranoia and suspicion, and Dietz’s eyes glittered as she gazed out of the display at him.
“They are.” She nodded. “But I’m not raising my wedges any sooner than I have to. And, no, Citizen Commissioner, it’s not so I can vent the plasma at the last minute.”
Teymoori’s face twisted with fury, but Marika Dietz clearly didn’t care about that any longer, and she moved those glittering eyes to Garrido.
“They can’t know how long ago we detected them, Citizen Major General, so they can’t know how far along our activation sequence is. At the moment, only four of our units are at full readiness to engage impellers, but several more are close enough they can probably raise wedges and sidewalls before any Manty missiles get here. I intend to wait until this White Haven launches. Hopefully, he won’t know which of us can do that when he allocates his fire, and I want to give him as little time as possible to adjust that distribution once he does know which of us will be hardest to kill.”
“Understood,” Garrido said before Teymoori could respond. Then he turned to look at his people’s commissioner himself.
“And now, Citizen Rear Admiral,” he continued over his shoulder, gaze still locked with Teymoori’s, “I’ll get—we’ll all get—out of your hair.”
* * *
“It looks like they’re abandoning ship, Milord!” Commander Eccles announced. “We’re picking up life-pod transponders, and the close-in drones show dozens of small-craft impeller wedges!”
She tapped a command into her console, using a corner of the main plot to zoom in on the orbiting battleships as the diamond dust icons spread outward from them. White Haven felt the hope rising from his staff, but he shook his own head regretfully.
“They’re not abandoning ship,” he said flatly.
“Maybe they didn’t have hot nodes after all, Milord,” Captain Hunter pointed out. “In that case, they couldn’t vent the capacitors. So maybe they’re just getting everyone they can out of harm’s way and hoping we’ll figure out they’re abandoning ship and not blow them out of space anyway.”
“Then they should have told us that’s what they’re doing.” White Haven’s voice was harsh, now, not flat. “Oh, I’m sure you’re right in at least one respect, Byron—they are getting everyone they can out of harm’s way. But it’s the same thing we saw in Samson. Those”—he jabbed an index finger at the plot—“are their nonessential personnel.”
“But if they can’t vent the plasma,” Hunter said, “then—”
“Then they should have told us that,” White Haven repeated in a voice of cold iron. “We can’t—and won’t—take the chance that this is a bluff.”
* * *
“Evacuation complete, Citizen Rear Admiral,” Citizen Captain Arias said in Marika Dietz’s earbud, and she nodded to herself. It wasn’t much, but at least she’d saved some of her people. Almost twenty percent of them, really.
“At least we got some of them out, Marika,” People’s Commissioner Riccardi said in her ear, too softly for anyone else to overhear. It was as if he’d read her mind, and she gave him a wan smile.
“As people’s commissioners go, you’re not too shabby, Nick,” she said, equally softly, then cleared her throat.
“Good work, Cristóbal,” she said in a louder voice. “Stand by to raise the wedge.”
“Standing by, Citizen Rear Admiral,” Arias acknowledged.
Dietz looked around her flag deck at some of the people she hadn’t saved.
“Thank you all,” she said simply.
* * *
“Firing point in fifteen seconds.”
Commander Eccles’ quiet announcement seemed almost raucous against the hushed background of Queen Caitrin’s flag bridge. Tension had ratcheted steadily higher as the range dropped with no sign of venting plasma. Indeed, with no response of any sort to White Haven’s demand . . . aside from those life pods and small craft.
He hadn’t really expected there to be one.
“Proceed with launch,” he replied.
“Launching in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . launch!”
* * *
“Enemy launch!”
Citizen Commander Samper’s head snapped up at the announcement, and his eyes darted to the plot. Unlike electronic emissions, gravitic signatures—or, rather, the “ripple effect” impellers generated along the Alpha bands—propagated at more than lightspeed. The incoming Manticorans were still almost twenty million kilometers, the better part of two light-minutes, from Smaragdenio, but the signatures of their incoming missiles appeared almost instantly on the display.
“Tracking estimates two-thousand-plus,” Mathias Alpha’s tactical officer said harshly, and Samper closed his eyes for a moment. That was a smaller number than he’d expected, but not enough smaller.
Be with them now, God, he thought.
* * *
“Return fire!” Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz grated.
* * *
“The enemy has returned fire, Milord,” Laura Eccles announced as the angry fireflies of Havenite missiles speckled Queen Caitrin’s plot.
“Oh, those poor damned bastards,” Byron Hunter said quietly at White Haven’s shoulder.
“Sometimes I hate my job,” the earl replied. “This is like clubbing baby chicks.”
“Not quite, Milord,” Hunter replied. “These ‘baby chicks’ get to club back.”
“I know.”
White Haven’s eyes never strayed from the plot as a second salvo spat from the doomed battleships’ tubes. Then a third. The quiet background chatter increased in tempo and volume as Sixth Fleet’s missile defenses began tracking the incoming fire.
“I know,” he repeated harshly. “And that’s why we’ve got no choice but to kill them, anyway. God damn the people who started this fucking catastrophe!”
* * *
“Raise wedges now!” Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz barked, and impeller wedges snapped up almost instantly for twelve of the eighteen battleships under her command.
But only twelve. Six of them still weren’t ready to engage . . . and now, she knew, they never would be.
* * *
“Wedges coming up! One . . . five . . . nine—twelve, Milord!”
Whoever that was over there, he had battle-steel balls, White Haven thought ungrudgingly. Despite the tsunami of destruction rumbling down upon him, he’d timed it almost perfectly. Sixth Fleet’s initial two-thousand-missile salvo was over two minutes downrange, barely forty seconds from impact. One of the downsides of the RMN’s new missile pods was that they produced salvo densities which could all too easily overwhelm the firing ships’ telemetry links. In many ways, that was a good problem to have, since those sorts of densities overwhelmed the defenders’ ability to track and engage the threats, as well. But it also meant the attacker’s fire control was too often less accurate than it might have been, because he simply lacked the links to update his missiles’ penetration ECM or targeting queues. With truly massive salvos, it was a matter of assigning targets to the attack birds’ relatively simpleminded onboard AIs, then sending them on their way without further communication. In this case, he’d deliberately limited his initial launch to something his wall-of-battle’s fire control redundancy could handle, precisely because he’d wanted to retain a finer degree of control. Unfortunately, the Peeps’ timing meant that first salvo was far enough downrange the control links had already been cut, so he couldn’t retarget it to concentrate on the ships which had suddenly grown wedges and sidewalls after all.
But he’d taken advantage of those same control links to launch a second salvo from his remaining pods, eleven seconds after the first and made up to the same strength with his internal tubes. Those missiles were still under shipboard command.
“Tactical, redistribute the second wave. Assume the targets without wedges won’t be there anymore.”
“Aye, Milord. Retargeting now.”
Sixth Fleet fired a total of four salvos, although the third and fourth, launched solely from shipboard tubes, were only half as heavy as the first two. There was no point firing more. Not unless White Haven wanted to target the orbital bases, as well, and he would vastly prefer to take those intact, if he could.
If he could.
* * *
“Here it comes.”
Marika Dietz didn’t know which of her flag bridge officers had said that.
She never found out.
Battle Squadron 71 and Battle Squadron 113 had three minutes in which to fire. Their launchers’ cycle time was twenty seconds, and there were forty-six tubes in each ship’s broadside, so the defenders managed to launch nine salvos of their own, each over eight hundred strong, before the first Manticoran attack birds arrived.
The storm fronts of destruction crossed each other, but there was a vast difference between them. The Manticorans were firing capital ship missiles, with better targeting systems, much more capable EW and penetration systems, and far heavier laserheads with five percent more standoff range. Nor did it end there, because Sixth Fleet’s antimissile defenses were both far deeper and far more capable than its Havenite counterparts’, as well.
Marika Dietz’s tactical officers were neither as experienced nor as well trained as the Royal Manticoran Navy’s, but they fully understood the bleak menu of options available to them. That was why, at Dietz’s direction, they’d targeted all their fire on just two of the Manticoran wallers.
* * *
“Oh, shit!” Brian Chen snarled, even as his hands danced across his console. “They’re concentrating everything—and I mean everything—on Admiral Triplett, Skipper!”
“All we can do is the best we can do,” Alistair McKeon said, and Chen nodded.
CruRon 33 and BatCruRon 5 had the outer defense zone again, and the twenty tin cans of Commodore Tyler Whitworth’s Destroyer Flotilla 97 were a welcome addition to the missile screen. None of them offered that much individual firepower, but they provided a lot more platforms and telemetry links for counter-missile. Now the entire screen opened fire and incoming missiles vanished as intercepts blotted them away. More counter-missiles flashed past the advanced screen as the main wall brought its own defensive batteries to bear, and tension wrapped jagged jaws around McKeon’s command deck.
“Standby to roll ship,” he said in a taut voice.
Prince Adrian’s starboard point defense lasers began to fire as the range dropped. The incoming missiles’ base velocity from launch was far lower than that of Sixth Fleet’s birds, but the Manticoran’s approach speed meant their closing velocity was identical, and they screamed in at forty-nine percent of lightspeed. The good news was that virtually none of them had been deliberately aimed at anything as insignificant as a heavy cruiser, far less a lowly destroyer. The bad news was that missiles that lost lock on their initial targets took whatever alternatives they could find.
“Roll ship now!” McKeon barked at the last possible moment.
Prince Adrian snapped up onto her side relative to the incoming missiles. McKeon had cut it too close for her to complete the maneuver before the laserheads reached attack range, but she didn’t need a complete ninety-degree roll. Forty-five degrees was more than enough to bring the perimeter of her wedge up to block the Peeps’ firing bearing. It also blocked her defensive fire, but McKeon had allowed for that. Given an inertial compensator and internal grav plates, impeller-drive ships were capable of incredible rotation rates in a snap roll. A superdreadnought would have taken at least two minutes to complete a ninety-degree roll; with less than a third the mass and seventy percent less beam, Prince Adrian could roll a full hundred and eighty degrees in only twelve seconds. That meant she could roll ship completely in the interval between Peep salvos, and the recon drones she’d deployed on tractors to beyond the perimeter of her wedge kept her plot fully updated while she rolled.
As she completed the one-hundred-eighty-degree roll to come fully inverted to her original position, her port defensive batteries knew exactly where to find the next wave of missiles and opened fire the instant they came on target.
The other ships of CruRon 33 spun with her, blotting away Havenite missiles with deadly precision. Whitworth’s destroyers were even faster on the helm, and if Rear Admiral Moreno’s battlecruisers were slower, they were still far nimbler than dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts. Rather than complete rolls, they had to settle for thirty-degree arcs up and then back again. It wasn’t as effective, but their close-in defenses were more powerful and their armor was far thicker.
Besides, none of those missiles had been aimed at them, either.
* * *
“Impact in seven seconds!” Battle Squadron 17’s ops officer announced harshly.
It wouldn’t be an actual impact, of course. No one had relied on contact hits in a long time. But the term still served, and Dame Callie Chijimatsu, Baroness Triplett, braced in her command chair aboard HMS Cyncnus for what she knew was coming.
How the hell did we draw the lucky number? a corner of her brain wondered bitterly. There are three entire battle squadrons out here—why the hell pick on us?
The screen had taken a huge bite out of the lead Havenite salvo. Sixth Fleet’s carefully stacked wall had taken another, and the other squadrons’ CM launchers continued to blaze away in BatRon 17’s defense. But over three hundred missiles survived every counter-missile Sixth Fleet could throw at them, broke through to the inner defense zones, and hurled themselves against Admiral Triplett’s dreadnoughts.
Their own point defense stabbed out under the calm, uncaring control of their tactical computers, and still more missiles died just short of the attack point. But then two hundred and seventeen laserheads detonated in a brimstone kaleidoscope, hurling bomb-pumped lasers like Ahab’s harpoons, and Cyncnus’ seven-million-ton hull quivered as transfer energy blasted into her.
The dreadnought’s sidewalls bent and twisted the incoming lasers and the anti-radiation fields inside the sidewalls degraded them. Besides, none of the incoming fire had originally been targeted upon her. Only a handful of the laserheads that reached attack range took her for their prey after losing their initial target locks, and her armor was up to the challenge. Despite the searing corona wrapped around BatRon 17 as the nuclear detonations pumping those lasers detonated, Triplett’s flagship took only superficial damage.
Her division mate, HMS Hippogryph was less fortunate. Unlike Cyncnus, she’d been singled out as one of Citizen Rear Admiral Dietz’s priority targets. Less than twenty laserheads had targeted BatRon 17’s flagship; over a hundred targeted Hippogryph, and half of them got through.
Cyncnus’ sister ship bucked as that torrent of destruction hammered her. Her sidewalls blunted it—some. But nothing could have stopped it, and plating shattered under the merciless onslaught. Only her massive armor, and the fact that the battleships’ laserheads were so much lighter than her own, saved her.
Not even that was enough to prevent brutal damage, and her defensive fire faltered as fire control arrays were blotted away and counter-missile tubes were reduced to twisted ruin. She staggered under the onslaught, and then the second salvo slammed home, ripping her wounded side like bomb-pumped chainsaws.
“Heavy damage to Hippogryph, Milady!” Triplett’s ops officer said harshly. “They’re concentrating on her and Polyphemus.”
“Gutsy bastards,” Triplett muttered. Whoever had ordered that fire plan must have known how unlikely she’d be to see how well it worked out, but Triplett had to admire the cold-blooded calculation behind it.
“Roll Hippogryph and Polyphemus!” she snapped. “Get them up on their sides and keep them there! And pull Prince Edward and Thunderer in tighter!”
“Aye, aye, Milady!”
* * *
Admiral White Haven nodded in tight, bitter-eyed agreement as Hippogryph and Polyphemus rolled their broken, debris-shedding broadsides away from the enemy while their squadron mates pulled in close, interposing their own wedges against the incoming fire. Like Triplett, he recognized the icy logic behind the Peeps’ targeting. But by the time the third incoming salvo reached the end of its run, there were no surviving Peep battleships to retarget its missiles . . . or any of those in the salvos behind it. That meant all of them continued to hurtle in on the two wounded dreadnoughts at the heart of Baroness Triplett’s defensive formation, pounding remorselessly away at them. But it also meant the defenders knew exactly who they were targeting, which at least doubled the effectiveness of their missile-defense firing solutions.
It was all over in three minutes. Three minutes in which HMS Hippogryph was knocked out of action for a minimum of seven months. Polyphemus was less badly damaged, but she’d be in yard hands for at least a couple of months herself . . . assuming anyone could find the yard space into which she could be put.
But in that same three minutes, eighteen Havenite battleships had been smashed into impotent, broken wreckage. Three of them had simply blown up; the other fifteen were in little better condition, and Hamish Alexander’s mind flinched away from the scenes aboard those laser-threshed wrecks, where he knew men and women fought desperately to find and rescue trapped, wounded crewmates.
A handful of missiles—no more than a couple of hundred—had come from the Mathias fleet base’s armed platforms, but they’d added very little to the carnage. Under the circumstances, White Haven hadn’t taken them under fire in reply. There were far more human beings aboard those platforms, including several thousand civilian workers from Smaragdenio, who’d never asked to be part of this war. He had no desire to kill them if he didn’t have to.
Two hundred and eighty-seven seconds after firing its first salvo, Sixth Fleet streaked across Smaragdenio orbit at 70,640 KPS, and the launchers fell silent on both sides. At that relative velocity, missiles simply couldn’t overtake their targets, and White Haven inhaled deeply as he studied the plot.
Aside from a handful of light, inconsequential hits on three more of Vice Admiral Triplett’s dreadnoughts, Hippogryph and Polyphemus were his only damaged units. Casualty reports hadn’t yet come in, but he already knew they’d be bad enough to keep him awake for the next few nights. They were only a pinprick against the Peeps’ losses, yet each of those pinpricks had had a name, people who loved that man or that woman.
People who would never see far too many of them again.
He stood looking into the plot for several seconds, then turned to Captain Hunter and Lieutenant Saldaña.
“Detach Hippogryph and Polyphemus, Byron. Have Whitworth peel off one of his divisions to ride herd on them. We’ll send them back to rendezvous with the fleet train.” He snorted harshly. “It’s not like we’ll need their firepower.”
“Yes, Milord.”
“While Byron sees to that, Wanda,” White Haven continued, looking at Saldaña, “go ahead and prep for Sprinter.”
“Of course, Milord.”
* * *
Citizen Commander Samper stood quietly to one side, watching Citizen Major General Garrido and People’s Commissioner Teymoori with dark, bitter eyes.
Mathias Alpha’s command deck seethed with frantic activity as it tried to coordinate search and rescue. Every yard craft and tug Mathias could muster swarmed about the tangled wreckage which had been eighteen battleships and nine light cruisers only minutes before, looking frantically for survivors. It looked like there’d be more than Samper would have predicted, given the weight of fire they’d taken. Which wasn’t to say there’d be a lot of them. At full complements, there’d been well over sixty-four thousand men and women aboard those sixteen battleships. The light cruisers which had died with them added “only” another twenty-seven hundred to the total.
Even with the “nonessential personnel” Dietz and Riccardi had managed to save, Samper doubted that more than a quarter of those sixty-six thousand human beings had survived, and what had all those deaths purchased?
Two damaged Manty dreadnoughts. Even if they’d killed every crewman and crewwoman aboard both of those ships—which they hadn’t come close to accomplishing—Manticoran losses would have been less than fourteen percent of the People’s Navy’s.
Attrition, he thought bleakly, fighting the need to shout his fury at his superiors. Attrition, hell! There’s a point where “favorable rate of exchange” is frigging meaningless! And those bastards thought it was just fine. At least—he smiled coldly—they did as long as someone else did the dying on our side.
From their expressions, they weren’t so sold on the concept now.
In fairness, although “fair” was the last thing he wanted to be just at the moment, neither Garrido nor Teymoori had ever seen actual combat. Not naval combat, anyway. They’d only thought they understood what was coming. Now they’d seen it, witnessed the actual carnage, and they knew that same destruction could come even more easily to their unarmored orbital platforms.
“How much longer for search and rescue?” Garrido asked Citizen Colonel Blair, and Blair shrugged.
“It could take days, Citizen Major General. In fact, it will take days to be sure we’ve gotten everyone out of the wreckage.”
Unlike Garrido, Blair had seen combat as an enlisted man, during the conquest of Trevor’s Star and San Martin. He seemed less shaken than his commanding officer, and Samper thought he saw at least some of his own disgust in the Marine’s eyes.
“How long to conclude immediate recovery operations?” Teymoori demanded. From his tone, Samper suspected the people’s commissioner had seen the same thing in Blair’s eyes.
“We can probably clear the life pods within four to six hours,” the citizen colonel replied. “They’re designed to make atmospheric entry on habitable planets, so they can set down on Smaragdenio independently if they have to. The small craft can dock with the bases and off-load anyone they’ve picked up. Collecting individual spacers who got out without pods will take considerably longer, and, frankly, they’ve got less time. Their vac suits don’t have as much air as a life pod.”
“So you’re saying we’ll be able to at least clear our fields of fire within, say, eight hours?” Garrido pressed.
“For certain values of ‘clear,’ at least, Citizen Major General,” Samper offered. Garrido and Teymoori looked at him, and he shrugged. “Whatever we do about the life pods and small craft, the ship wreckage will still be there whenever the Manties come back. And, frankly, if they come back with blood in their eyes, they won’t worry about not hitting ships they’ve already effectively destroyed. If they decide to treat our orbital bases to the same sort of bombardment, anything that gets in their way will be toast.”
Teymoori gave him a dangerous glare, but Garrido nodded brusquely.
“Agreed,” he said harshly. “But the best we can do is the best we can do.” He inhaled deeply. “And at least it’ll take them hours to get back here. Even without their pods, it’ll take them—what, at least six, maybe seven hours?—just to kill that much velocity. Then they’ll have to turn around and come all the way back, and they’ll have to burn even more time decelerating if they want a zero/zero intercept with the planet!”
There were times, Samper reflected, when a little knowledge was a dangerous thing.
“I think your time estimate’s likely to be a bit off, Citizen Major General,” he said in his most tactful tone, watching the Manty fleet’s vector in the master plot.
They weren’t decelerating; they were accelerating.
Of course.
* * *
“Sprinter executed, Milord,” Lieutenant Saldaña reported, and White Haven nodded in acknowledgment.
Had he been able to eavesdrop upon Citizen Major General Garrido, the earl would have smiled broadly. And if he’d been privy to Citizen Commander Samper’s thoughts, he would have smiled even more broadly.
Garrido was entirely correct about how long it would have taken Sixth Fleet to decelerate to zero. Killing its current velocity relative to Smaragdenio would, indeed, have taken the better part of six hours, during which it would have traveled over thirty-three light-minutes beyond its target.
What he’d overlooked was that it was only twenty-nine light-minutes to the hyper limit on the far side of the system.
Assuming Sixth Fleet simply continued at its current velocity, it would cross that limit in only two hours, and if it accelerated at the three hundred thirty-seven gravities it could attain now that it had jettisoned its pods, it would reach the farther limit in just over one hundred and four minutes.
That was exactly what Sprinter was designed to do . . . for reasons which would shortly become painfully obvious to Citizen Major General Garrido.
* * *
“Are you sure about this, Citizen Commander?”
Under other circumstances, Eligio Samper would have taken considerable pleasure from the tentative note in Citizen Major General Garrido’s voice. The system CO’s arrogance was conspicuously absent at the moment. Under the circumstances which actually obtained, however, that was remarkably cold comfort.
“I’m afraid I am, Citizen Major General,” he said. “And we’ll know either way in about two or three more minutes.”
Garrido looked at him, glanced at an ashen-faced Teymoori, then nodded and turned back to the plot.
The Manties were no longer concerned with stealthiness. Their impeller signatures blazed sharp and clear on Mathias Alpha’s gravitic arrays, and those signatures were FTL. At twenty-nine light-minutes, even FTL signatures took just over twenty-seven seconds to reach them, but that still allowed the base to track them in close to real-time. And in about two more minutes—
* * *
“Hyper limit in two minutes, Milord,” Wanda Saldaña said.
“Very good,” White Haven acknowledged, sitting back in his command chair with a coffee cup clasped in both hands. He raised it and sipped as the time display ticked downward. Then—
“Hyper limit,” Saldaña announced.
“Then I suppose it’s time,” White Haven replied. “Execute when ready.”
“Executing now.”
Saldaña tapped her console, and Sixth Fleet vanished into hyper.
The Royal Manticoran Navy called the maneuver White Haven had selected the “Long Maneuver,” in honor of the long-ago tactical officer who had first devised it for the Royal Manticoran Navy. His brainchild wasn’t unique to him. Most experienced navies were familiar with the concept, at least in theory. It simply wasn’t something one could use very often, given that most naval combat occurred well inside a hyper limit. Outside a hyper limit, the weaker combatant normally disappeared into hyper space, avoiding battle as soon as it recognized the odds against it, which made any sort of combat that far from a system primary rare. Indeed, it practically never occurred unless someone had placed an especially valuable target—one valuable enough it had to be defended—in a distant asteroid belt or orbiting a gas giant outside its system hyper limit.
Under the proper circumstances, however, the Long Maneuver was extraordinarily useful.
Sixth Fleet translated upward into the lowest Alpha bands, carrying its prodigious velocity with it. And then, twenty seconds later, it translated straight back into normal-space.
Even that short a hop through hyper put it 113,250,000 kilometers beyond the limit when it translated back down again. But thanks to the translation’s velocity bleed, its normal-space velocity was only 7,306 KPS, and at three hundred thirty-seven gravities of deceleration, that would reduce to zero relative to Smaragdenio in about thirty-six minutes. That would give its hyper generators ample time to recycle from standby to readiness, which would allow it to pop back up into hyper and micro-jump to the closest point to Smaragdenio outside the hyper limit in another twelve minutes. It would arrive with a normal-space velocity of approximately zero . . . 235,800,000 kilometers and barely four and a half hours flight time from a zero/zero intercept with the planet.
* * *
“Well, at least we were close enough to detect this hyper footprint,” Citizen Commander Samper said sourly to Citizen Colonel Blair.
The two of them stood side-by-side at the master tactical plot, watching the final stage of the debacle which had enveloped the Mathias System unfold before them as the Manties reappeared right on schedule, forty-nine minutes after they’d crossed the limit. They blinked back into normal-space, radiating the blue, forest-fire brilliance of a mass hyper transit, barely thirteen light-minutes from Smaragdenio. At the moment, they were headed away from their objective, but they were already decelerating, just as Samper—and, to be fair, Blair—had predicted. Neither of them was pleased by the confirmation of their prediction, and by this time, it would have been hard to determine which of them was more disgusted with their joint superiors.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” Blair asked.
“Well, at the moment, they’re decelerating to kill the last of their velocity away from us,” Samper replied dryly. “After that, I’m pretty sure they’ll head our way.”
“I wasn’t talking about the Manties,” Blair said very quietly, and flicked his head minutely toward Garrido and Teymoori.
The citizen major general and his people’s commissioner stood inside the crystoplast-walled booth around the secure communications terminal. It was specifically designed so that one outside it could hear anything said inside it—which was undoubtedly why they were there—but from their body language, they were not enjoying their current conversation.
Garrido’s face was bleak, worried, clearly that of a man who felt the walls closing in. Teymoori’s expression was harder to read. He always looked surly and two-thirds angry, as far as Samper could tell. Today, there was what looked an awful lot like an edge of terror in his eyes, as well, but fear only seemed to be making him even angrier. As the citizen commander watched, the people’s commissioner’s angry index finger jabbed the taller, stockier citizen major general in the chest.
“You want my honest opinion?” Samper asked, still gazing at their superiors, and his tone communicated far more than his words. Blair hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“Honestly, I hope that between the two of them they have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot, but I wouldn’t bet anything on it. Especially in Teymoori’s case,” Samper said then, his eyes bitter but his expression carefully controlled. “You and I both know we’re completely and totally screwed, Spencer. Those people have at least—at least—two or three hundred times our combat power. We’ve got eighty-six missile tubes spread across all our platforms. They’ve still got twenty-two wallers; each of them has a minimum of thirty-five launchers in each broadside; and there’s no way in hell we could get a laserhead through the kind of point defense they’ve got. Hell! You saw what happened to Dietz’s and Linton’s salvos! They took out two of their wallers. Only two—and it’s pretty damn clear they were only damaged. They sure as hell weren’t destroyed! Now imagine what their defenses would do against salvos a tenth that heavy.”
He turned away from Garrido and Teymoori, gazing bleakly at the lurid icons of the Manticoran fleet, instead, then shrugged ever so slightly.
“Mathias, Samson—almost all our prewar bases out here—were designed to support offensive operations. They were logistics nodes and staging points for us to use when we went after the Manty Alliance. They were never intended to stand off heavy Manticoran attacks—certainly not the way someplace like Duquesne Base or Trevor’s Star is! The only reason this White Haven bothered with such a stealthy approach was to catch any mobile units in-system before they could hyper out. Which is exactly what he did. And he came loaded for bear because he couldn’t know there wouldn’t be wallers of our own here waiting for him. There’s no way he needed that much firepower”—he flicked a finger at the plot—“to take out the base itself.”
“And your point?” Blair’s tone said he already knew the answer to his question, and Samper snorted.
“And my point is that the only sane option is to surrender before we get thousands of more people killed. Maybe—maybe—there was some point in not simply scuttling the battleships. They obviously got to at least a couple of his wallers, and people keep telling me how ‘attrition’ is supposed to work in our favor.”
His eyes were even darker, more bitter, then before, and he inhaled deeply.
“It’s funny, the people who keep telling me that aren’t the ones who have to do the attritting. Not usually, anyway. This time, though, it’d be harder than hell for anyone to argue we could hope to inflict any worthwhile damage before the Manties blew us the hell out of space. And the citizen major general and the people’s commissioner have had over two hours to think about that, let it settle in.”
“So you think they’ll surrender?” Blair asked even more quietly.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t.” Samper shook his head, speaking with more honesty—and far more openly—than he would have spoken under almost any other circumstances. “I think . . . I think Garrido might want to. Probably does, really. He’s not the sharpest stylus in the box, and I think he really thought you and I were wrong about whether or not we could hold the system. But aside from being dumber than a box of rocks tactically, he isn’t genuinely stupid, and he’s not a fanatic. either. Teymoori, though . . . I think he actually believes all those horror stories Public Information’s handing out about Manty atrocities and shooting their POWs. And I’m really afraid he is a fanatic. Or a true believer, anyway. Worse, I know damned well some of his State Sec goons are!”
* * *
“Turnover in ten minutes, Milord.”
White Haven looked up from the fresh, steaming cup of coffee the steward’s mate had just provided him and nodded his thanks for Lieutenant Saldaña’s reminder.
Sixth Fleet had accelerated toward Smaragdenio for just under two and a half hours. Its velocity was back up to 25,915, and it was coming up on the halfway point. He wondered what was going through the Peeps’ minds as they watched their incoming nemesis rumble steadily nearer.
Nothing good, he hoped, sipping coffee.
* * *
“We have an incoming transmission, Citizen Major General.”
The com rating’s voice was painfully diffident, and she flinched as Citizen Major General Garrido whipped around toward her.
“From the damned Manties, I presume?” he half-snapped.
“Uh, yes, Citizen Major General! I’m sorry. I should have been more speci—”
His waved hand cut her off in mid-word.
“Yes, you should’ve been more specific,” he said, “but it’s not like you didn’t know I’d figure it out for myself, Citizen Corporal.”
She looked at him, obviously uncertain where to go next in the wake of his half apology, and his mouth twitched in an unwilling, bitter half-smile. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Teymoori, and the people’s commissioner glowered at him.
“Waited long enough, didn’t they?” the citizen major general said.
“Obviously trying to let fear work on us,” Teymoori replied harshly.
“Obviously,” Garrido agreed.
The Manties had decelerated to rest relative to Smaragdenio, at a range of exactly 899,377 kilometers from Mathias Alpha, over twelve minutes ago. Their formation was immaculate, every targeting system was locked on the orbital platforms, yet they hadn’t said a single word to anyone since their initial firing pass, and Garrido remembered a story he’d read once about a fellow named Damocles.
“Put it on my display, Citizen Corporal,” he said.
“Yes, Citizen Major General!” the noncom replied, and Garrido’s display lit with the same dark-haired, blue-eyed Manticoran he’d seen once before.
“What do you want?” the citizen major general said flatly.
“And you are?” the Manty inquired six seconds later.
“Citizen Major General Garrido,” Garrido replied. “I repeat, what do you want?”
“Direct and to the point, I see,” the Manty observed after another six seconds. “Good. I’ll be equally direct.
“Several hours ago, I gave your battleships the opportunity to stand down. They didn’t take it. I’m sure most of their crewmen and crewwomen are dead now. I regret that, but, frankly, that was your choice, not mine. So now I’m giving you the opportunity to make a better choice, and the fact that you haven’t been stupid enough to fire on my ships—yet—gives me some hope that you may take advantage of it. This time, at least.”
Those blue eyes bored into Garrido, and he felt himself flush angrily.
“I am beyond the effective range of any energy weapon your platforms may mount,” the Manticoran continued, “and your missile batteries are too light to threaten my ships. I, on the other hand, can destroy every one of your orbital installations at any time of my choosing. I would prefer not to do that, since I have no more desire to kill people—especially civilian workers who have no voice in their employment conditions. Rather than risk my own personnel’s lives, however, I’m prepared to do just that. So your choice, ‘Citizen Major General,’ is to surrender, now, unconditionally, or to refuse. And if you refuse, my missiles will destroy your armed platforms. Casualties aboard those platforms will be heavy, and no one can guarantee that other targets won’t be hit as well, by mistake.”
He paused for a moment—no doubt to let the unspoken threat to fire on the unarmed platforms as well sink in, Garrido thought. Then he shrugged.
“You have ten minutes to decide which option you’d prefer. If you haven’t decided to surrender by the end of that time, I will open fire on your armed platforms. White Haven, clear.”
The Manty vanished from Garrido’s display, and the citizen major general glared at its blank surface angrily. Then he turned back to Teymoori.
“Well, none of that was a surprise, was it?” he growled.
Teymoori shook his head, and his eyes were barred windows in a stone wall.
“I don’t see any option,” Garrido continued. “I don’t like it, but the bastard’s right. We can’t hurt him with anything we’ve got, Arnold.”
Teymoori glared at him, and the Marine shrugged.
“This isn’t like the battleships,” he said. “They could at least hope to inflict a little damage before they went down. We can’t. All we can do is get a lot of people killed, and I’m damned if I’ll do that. I know you don’t like it, but that’s my decision.”
“Decisions have consequences, Citizen Major General,” Teymoori said coldly.
“I’m aware of that.” Garrido’s tone was even colder than his people’s commissioner’s, and he met Teymoori’s eyes levelly.
His own wife and children were here in Mathias, although they’d been evacuated to the planetary surface along with as many civilian dependents as possible when the Manties were first detected. And he’d very quietly arranged for their planetary quarters to be guarded by Marines, not StateSec. He had other family back home in the Haven System, however, and he understood Teymoori’s implication. But as Samper had observed to Blair, however blunt and unimaginative Jonathan Garrido might be, he wasn’t insane. He’d just have to take his chances when it came to convincing Nouveau Paris and the Committee of Public Safety that he’d made the right decision.
He and Teymoori looked at one another for another tense heartbeat or two, then he looked back at the citizen corporal.
“Get him back again,” he said.
“Yes, Citizen Major General!”
“You’ve made your decision?” Admiral White Haven asked when he reappeared on Garrido’s display several seconds later.
“You haven’t left me much choice,” Garrido grated.
“I don’t suppose I have,” White Haven acknowledged. “To be clear, though, you surrender your command and the entire star system unconditionally?”
“Yes.” The single word came out as if it cost Garrido physical pain, but his expression never wavered, and, six seconds later, White Haven nodded.
“Good. In that case, my heavy ships will remain exactly where they are. My cruisers will close with your platforms and their Marines will board them. Be advised that my Marines will be authorized and instructed to respond to any attack with deadly force, and that if any of your platforms should open fire on any of my units, we will destroy both that platform and any and all other armed platforms. Is all of that clearly understood, Citizen Major General? I don’t think either one of us wants there to be any misunderstandings at this point.”
“It’s understood,” Garrido got out.
“Good,” White Haven said again, and this time there might have been just the faintest edge of sympathy in the word.
Of course, there might not have been, too, Garrido thought grimly.
“Prepare to receive my boarding parties shortly,” the Manty said a moment later. “White Haven, clear.”
* * *
“Atten-hut!” Sergeant Major Babcock barked as Major Viktor Yestachenko strode into the briefing compartment just off HMS Prince Adrian’s Boat Bay One and the men and women in it popped to attention.
“As you were,” he said, crossing to the small stage at the front of the compartment, and feet rustled as his assembled platoon leaders and their senior noncoms settled back into their chairs.
“All right,” he said, turning to face them. “We’re cleared to proceed, and Captain McKeon will launch pinnaces in about thirty-five minutes. All of us know basically what we’re looking at here, but just to touch base once more—I wouldn’t want any of you to think I didn’t love you—our primary concern is Mathias Gamma. Cestus and Princess Stephanie have the other two armed platforms and Admiral Moreno’s taking the command platform with Nike and Colonel Ramirez’s people. This one is ours.”
The holographic image of a gaunt, utilitarian orbital platform appeared, floating at his right elbow. A third of its substantial volume was clearly devoted to cargo handling and transshipment, but the rest was taken up by a dozen missile launchers, six laser point defense installations, and the sensors and tracking arrays to manage that firepower.
“It should be fairly simple,” he continued, “but all of you know how I feel about relying on the verb ‘should.’ And I’m not all that much fonder of words like ‘simple,’ now that I think about it.” He glowered at them, and someone chuckled. “Bearing that in mind, I don’t want any chances taken. The Intelligence types tell us there shouldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty or—outside—two hundred warm bodies over there. They’re probably right, and the majority of those bodies are going to be Navy pukes. But the Intelligence types also tell me the Peeps have been steadily replacing their Marines with special security troops. We don’t know that they’ve gotten around to doing that clear out here, but they’d started the process back in Samson. That was a lot smaller base than Mathias, so it’s certainly possible they’ve already done it here, which could complicate things just a bit.
“Bethany”—he looked at Lieutenant Clark, Third Platoon’s fair-haired, green-eyed CO—“your people will take point. We’ll make entry at this boat bay”—the indicated boat bay flashed amber in the hologram—“and you’ll secure the bay and its access passages and maintain control of them.”
Clark nodded. She was the youngest of Yestachenko’s platoon commanders, but her last assignment had been with a Raider battalion. She understood why her people would be Yestachenko’s anchor.
“Jeremiah”—the major turned to Jeremiah Dimitrieas—“you and First Platoon will board as soon as Bethany gives us the all-clear, then pass your people through hers and proceed directly to Main Engineering to take over the power plant and Environmental.”
Lieutenant Dimitrieas—a couple of years older than Clark and nine centimeters taller, with brown hair and eyes and a very dark complexion—nodded in turn, and Yestachenko turned to Lieutenant Gillespie, Third Platoon’s CO. Gillespie, only a centimeter or so taller than Clark, was a fearsome-looking fellow who actually out-massed Dimitrieas, despite his lack of height. Although he was a native Sphinxian, he’d inherited that massive, fireplug physique—and also his blue hair and enhanced reflexes—from a genetic slave grandfather.
“Isaiah, you and Third Platoon will secure the command deck. And I want you to detach one squad to take physical control of the platform’s computer core and, especially, it’s fire control links, as well.”
It was Gillespie’s turn to nod, and Yestachenko paused to survey all three of them for a moment, then cleared his throat.
“Now, bearing in mind that we are all mere Marines, better suited by both training and inclination to breaking things or blowing them up than to anything constructive, Captain McKeon has reminded me that we’re not supposed to touch anything. We’ll simply hold the fort and provide security for the vacuumsuckers who, as the higher-minded, more intellectually capable sorts they so obviously are, will do the heavy intellectual lifting from that point.”
There were more chuckles—and they were louder—and he smiled at them.
“The Gunny here”—he twitched his head in Babcock’s direction—“has put together the best information/estimates we have on the platform’s probable internal layout. The good news is that the Peeps build their frontier platforms, and especially their small-craft docking points, to standardized designs, and we’ve learned enough at places like Samson and Seaford to have a pretty good feel for them. The bad news is that this is the first time we’ve seen them graft weapon stations onto a logistics platform. So be aware that the layout you’ve loaded to your skinnies is more speculative than we’d like.”
He paused until he got another set of nods, then shrugged.
“That’s about it, except to remind all of you that at least some of these people are downright fanatical. Like I say, it looks like they’re trying to replace their Marines with troopers from this new ‘State Security’ monster of theirs wherever they can. And according to some of our info from Samson and Welladay, State Security’s been actively recruiting from pre-coup terrorist organizations, like the Citizens Rights Union. We haven’t definitively confirmed that, but the intel types say the indications are strong, and if they are recruiting terrorist crazies, they won’t think like Marines—even Peep Marines—would. That means watching your sixes every minute aboard that platform. Everybody got that, too?”
This time, the acknowledgments came back in a ripple of “Yes, Sirs,” and he nodded in satisfaction.
“The Gunny will ride along with you, Bethany,” he told Lieutenant Clark. “I’ll be riding herd on you, Jeremiah.” He grinned. “Won’t that be fun?”
“Nothing my boys and girls could look forward to more, Sir,” Lieutenant Dimitrieas assured him with enormous affability.
“In that case,” Yestachenko said through the surf of chuckles, “why don’t we get saddled up?”
* * *
Iris Babcock stood in Prince Adrian’s forward boat bay, watching critically as Third Platoon boarded Marine Two. Lieutenant Clark might be young, but she knew her job, this wasn’t her first boarding op, and Conrad Masters, her platoon sergeant, was a solid vet. Babcock wasn’t worried about Third Platoon’s people. Or not any more than she always worried about “her” Marines when they were about to go—potentially, at least—into harm’s way.
It came with the job.
“Don’t you go busting my bird, Gunny,” a deep voice rumbled, and she looked over her shoulder at Horace Harkness. He stood in his Navy skinsuit, hands on hips, watching the Marines file aboard the pinnace.
“Your bird?” She raised an eyebrow. “Last time I looked, it belonged to the Corps. At least for this deployment.”
“Nah, the Navy just lets you jarheads borrow ’em because you’re too cheap to buy your own rides.” Harkness grinned at her, and she shook her head.
“The thought that the Navy trusts someone of your limited attainments to look after my pinnace keeps me up at night, Harkness. You know that, don’t you? I mean, every time I think about the fact that you can barely even read . . . !”
“Why they put so many pictures into the manuals,” he told her with an even broader grin. Then his expression sobered a bit. “Seriously, Gunny. I’ve got a bad feeling. Kinda like an itch I can’t scratch. And not about the bird.”
“You getting paranoid in your decrepitude?” Babcock quipped, and he shook his head.
“Maybe. But something ain’t right. These bastards got too reasonable too quick. I know—I know!” He waved one hand almost irritably. “They saw what happened to the battleships. What could happen to them. I got that. But—” He shook his head again. “Just an itch. Could be nothing. But you people watch your asses over there.”
Babcock looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
“I’ll have you know Marines always watch our asses,” she said. “But I promise to be extra careful, just to make you happy.”
“Good. And if I’m jumping at shadows, I’ll stand you to a beer next time we’re both off-duty together.”
“I’ll hold out for Old Tillman Premium!”
“Hell, I wouldn’t expect anything cheap outta a jarhead drinking on the Navy’s dime!”
* * *
“Marine Two, you are cleared to dock.”
The Marine coxswain looked over her shoulder at Lieutenant Clark, and Clark nodded.
“Flight Control, Marine Two acknowledges cleared to dock,” the coxswain replied over her headset boom. “Docking now.”
The pinnace drifted forward on reaction thrusters, nosing into the orbital platform’s docking bay, and the boarding tube extended to greet it. The Havenite bay was smaller than its Manticoran counterpart would have been, and its boarding tubes used different pressure collars, but Marine Two’s boarding hatches were designed to accept a wide range of collars. The flight engineer spent an extra handful of seconds assuring himself of a solid seal before he tapped a control and the green light blinked alive above the hatch.
“Good seal,” he announced aloud, and Clark nodded to him, and then to Staff Sergeant Masters.
“Let’s do this, Conrad,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am.” Masters turned to the troop compartment. “All right, you people! Off your asses and on your feet!”
The waiting Marines came to their feet in their armored skinsuits, checking their gear one last time, and Sergeant Yolanda Higgins’ Second Squad formed up at the hatch.
“Safeties off,” Higgins said over her squad’s com net, and green lights flickered to read on her heads-up display as her people’s weapons went live.
“Second Squad, ready, LT,” Higgins announced, and Clark nodded, then looked at the flight engineer.
“Crack the hatch, Chief.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am. Cracking the hatch.”
The Navy petty officer tapped another command and the hatch snapped open. Higgins looked down the boarding tube’s empty, well-lit bore, then nodded.
“Let’s go, people,” she said, and launched herself into the tube’s microgravity.
She and the other twelve members of her squad soared down the tube like heavily armed birds. Higgins led the way out at the far end, catching the grab bar with her left hand while her right cradled her pulse rifle’s pistol grip. She crossed the interface into the boat bay gallery’s standard single gravity, landing with practiced ease, and stepped aside to clear the way for the rest of Second Squad.
“Fletcher, O’Toole, you’ve got the exit hatch,” she said as the rest of the squad emerged behind her.
“On it, Sarge,” Chet Fletcher acknowledged.
He and Jasmine O’Toole crossed to the hatch between the boat bay and the rest of the platform, and Higgins turned her attention to the half-dozen Havenite naval ratings manning the boat bay control center. The senior Peep—a second-class petty officer, from his insignia—turned to face her. His expression was unhappy, to say the least, but Higgins hadn’t expected warm smiles and welcoming hugs.
“Higgins,” she introduced herself.
“Rossignol,” the petty officer responded with equal brevity.
Higgins nodded to him, then keyed her com.
“Skipper, Higgins,” she said. “On the deck, and so far everything’s green. You can send along the vacuumsuckers. I mean”—despite the gravity of the moment, she grinned—“the Navy control team.”
“I knew exactly who you meant, Sergeant.” Lieutenant Clark’s tone was just a tad repressive, but Higgins’ grin only grew broader. “On their way,” Clark added, and Higgins turned back to the Peep.
“Our people are on their way to take over your stations—Rossignol, was it?” The PO nodded curtly. “Ask your people to step away from their controls, but don’t go anywhere. In fact, I think you’d all better wait over there.” She indicated an unoccupied corner of the spacious bay gallery. “Our people may have a few questions about your control setup.”
“Got it.” Rossignol waved his own work party away from their stations. “Into the corner, everybody. Leave your controls set where they are,” he said, and the other five Peeps stepped back.
Higgins watched them go, then turned her attention back to the boarding tube as Ruben Mulder’s squad emerged from it. Lieutenant Clark and Gunny Babcock were on Mulder’s heels, and the lieutenant surveyed the boat bay thoughtfully while the quartet of naval ratings who’d accompanied her trotted across to the Peep control station.
The naval types studied the consoles carefully for a moment, and then the first-class petty officer in charge raised one hand, thumb extended.
“Marine One, Marine Three-One,” Clark said over the com. “Boat bay secure, and our landing party has the controls.”
“Three-One, Marine One copies,” Yestachenko came back. “Proceed.”
“Roger that, Marine One,” she said, and waved at Masters.
“Move ’em out, Conrad.”
“You heard the LT,” the staff sergeant said. “Move it, people!”
One of the enlisted spacers tapped a command and the gallery hatch slid open. Higgins stepped through it with the rest of her squad, weapons ready. The passage beyond ran almost fifty meters before it reached a bank of lift shafts. It was well lit, with a facing pair of airlock doors at its midpoint. A dozen armorplast viewpoints in the left-hand bulkhead showed the platform’s hull stretching away into the distant blackness of space, and Higgins nodded. According to her schematic, the hatch in that bulkhead was an emergency small-craft docking point, while the one on the right gave lateral access to the orbital platform’s second boat bay.
“Clear,” she announced over the com and waved for Fletcher and O’Toole to take point.
The privates stepped around her and started down the passage, and she turned to look over her shoulder at the rest of her squad.
“Carver, I want you and Watson on our six,” she said to the fire team with the light tribarrels. “I don’t see any—”
The explosion took all of them by surprise.
Ten meters of the outboard bulkhead disappeared into a spray of shrapnel that blasted across the passage in a flat, lethal fan. Chet Fletcher and Jasmine O’Toole were in its direct path. Neither of them had an instant’s warning . . . or a chance of surviving. Their icons turned instantly blood red on Higgins’ HUD, and two more of her Marines blinked suddenly alternating red and amber as fragments of bulkhead slammed into their skinsuits. Unlike Navy skinsuits, Marine skinnies were armored, and only those armor appliqués saved Private McTavish and Private Guccione. McTavish was uninjured, and her skinny automatically sealed the two smallish, air-leaking rents shrapnel had torn. Guccione went down hard, both hands clutching at his right leg as his skinny’s built-in tourniquets locked down on his deeply lacerated thigh.
Behind Higgins, the hatch through which the rest of her squad had just passed snapped shut, reacting automatically to the catastrophic hull breach, and the passage’s air roared through the opening in a brief, violent gale.
“Bandit!” Clark barked over the all-hands net. “Marine-Three-One is Bandit! I say again, Bandit!”
Higgins heard her, but the sergeant was on one knee, pulse rifle up and covering the passage as the last of the air disappeared and McTavish dragged Guccione back behind her.
“All Marines this net,” Yestachenko’s voice came over the com. “Marine One. Marine-Three-One is Code Bandit. I repeat, Code Bandit. Rules of engagement Alpha are now in effect.”
ROE Alpha was basically shoot first and worry about the details later. All of Yestachenko’s Marines knew Admiral White Haven wanted to avoid unnecessary Peep casualties, but he’d made it abundantly clear where his priorities lay.
“Talk to me, Yolanda,” Clark said over a private link, and Higgins grimaced.
“I’ve got nothing, Ma’am,” she replied harshly. “Fletcher and O’Toole are gone, and Guccione’s down. Looks like it was a shaped charge on the outboard side of the passage. No follow-up and no sign of other hostiles. We’re zero-pressure on this side of the hatch.”
“Figured. Hold one.”
Bethany Clark inhaled deeply and turned her head to look at Iris Babcock. The sergeant major looked as bitter as Clark felt, but at that moment, the Gunny’s decades of solid experience were a vast comfort to the lieutenant. There was no question who was in command, but Babcock would probably keep her from making any—any more, she corrected herself bitterly—mistakes.
“Porter,” she said.
“Yo, LT,” Sergeant Ludovico Porter replied.
“Take your squad EVA,” Clark said. “I want a sweep of the rest of that passage’s outboard side. We know there was at least one booby trap. Make sure there aren’t any more, and watch your asses. I wouldn’t put it past whoever this was to have covered her booby traps with direct fire.”
“You got it, Ma’am,” Porter acknowledged, and began waving his squad toward one of the gallery’s auxiliary airlocks.
“You—Rossignol!” Clark snapped, and pointed at the deck one meter in front of her. “Get your sorry ass over here!”
Rossignol looked unhappier than ever, but he obeyed the command quickly, and she glared at him.
“What the fuck was that?” she demanded, jerking a thumb in the direction of the explosion.
“I don’t have a clue,” Rossignol told her. Sweat dotted the man’s forehead, and he shook his head sharply as hard eyes bored into him like emerald augers. “Honest, I don’t! The order was to stand down, and we did! That’s all I know.”
“Well, someone obviously didn’t get the word.” Bethany Clark’s voice was icy. “So you just give me your best guess about who that ‘someone’ was and what else she may have arranged for us.”
“Look, I didn’t even know about that.” Rossignol waved at the sealed hatch, and his tone was almost pleading. “How am I supposed to know what else someone crazy enough to pull that kind of shit might have done? If I had to guess, it was probably one of the StateSec types, and I’ll be honest, God only knows what they’re likely to try. And that’s all I can tell you, I swear!”
Clark glared at him, but he only shook his head harder, his eyes desperate with his need for her to believe him, and she made herself step back from the white-hot edge of her rage when she realized why he was so desperate. Any sane human being would be frightened in his position, but this wasn’t fear—this was terror. And the reason it was was that he knew exactly what StateSec would have done to him in Clark’s place.
Probably have just shot the poor bastard, then asked the next one in line if she had anything to say, the Marine thought grimly.
A part of her wanted to do exactly that, herself. But it was a part she had no intention of listening to, and she jerked her head in a curt nod back toward the corner where the other Peeps huddled.
He half stumbled, clumsy in his haste to obey her, and she turned back to Babcock, then paused as Porter came up over the squad net.
“Mark One Eyeball doesn’t see anything out here, LT,” the sergeant said. “Except the hole where the first one went off, anyway. Electronic sniffers aren’t picking anything up, either.”
“What can you see about the explosion site itself?”
“Not a lot, Ma’am.” Clark could imagine Porter’s shrug. “Might be some blast residue, but from what I can see, Yolanda was right about the shaped charge. Looks like it was maybe a couple of meters long and half a meter wide. Got no idea how they could’ve gotten it into place, but I guess they did have plenty of time before we got back to them. If I had to guess, it was probably command detonated. Wouldn’t want tripwires or infrared beams in a passage your own people might be using before the nasty Manties came along. Don’t have a clue how they knew when to detonate, though. Lots of places they could’ve watched the outside of the passage from, but the inside—?”
“Surveillance systems,” Babcock said grimly. She was tapped into the same conversation, and now she waved one hand at the visual pickups mounted at thirty-meter intervals across the compartment overhead. “If they’ve got this many in the gallery, there are damned sure more of them covering the passage, too. Somebody was tapped into them. Surprised whoever it was didn’t wait until the rest of Higgins’ people were farther into the blast zone, really.”
From her expression, she didn’t feel one bit better over those dead Marines than Bethany Clark did.
“Can you seal the hole, Ludovico?” the lieutenant asked.
“Negative, Ma’am,” Porter replied “Not with anything we’ve got, anyway. The vacuumsuckers probably could. I mean, I’m sure they could, with the right gear, but I don’t think we can with anything we’ve got.”
“Okay.” Clark nodded, then drew a deep breath. It was still her job to secure the platoon’s entry and exit point, and she keyed her com again.
“Marine One, Marine Three-One.”
“Go, Three-One,” Yestachenko replied.
“Sir, I think we’d better shift laterally to Boat Bay Three. One of my squad leaders has eyeballs on the blast site, and he doesn’t think we can seal it to repressurize this access way.”
“Wait one,” Yestachenko said, and Clark looked across at Babcock.
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other, Ma’am,” Babcock said, answering the unasked question. “If we stick with this bay, we probably won’t run into any more booby traps, but we’ll have to lock everybody through to get to the lift shafts. Pretty nasty bottleneck, there. But if we shift axes, we may run our noses into another little surprise. In fact”—the sergeant major grimaced bitterly—“if I were doing this, that’s exactly what would happen.”
“Yeah, but now we know it’s already happened once,” Clark pointed out. “I’m thinking we take it slow and easy. And we put Porter on the outside of the tube to Bay Three to watch our flank going that way. And”—she looked back at the Peeps huddled in the corner—“I just had another thought. Rossignol!”
The Havenite PO’s head popped up like a frightened Sphinxian chipmunk’s, and she waved him back over with an impatient hand.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” he said cautiously.
“Surveillance system?” she asked, pointing at the overhead pickups Babcock had spotted and Rossignol nodded. In fact, he nodded so hard his uniform headgear almost fell off.
“Do your controls over there have access to it?”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
“Can you shut them down?”
“Uh, no, Ma’am. I can’t,” he said unhappily. “But I do know how to access the schematics for the entire bay,” he added quickly. “We could probably isolate the camera systems that way!”
Clark considered him for a moment, then looked back to Babcock.
“Gunny, take him over to the Navy pukes. Have him show one of them how to access the schematics, then start looking for a way to kill the cameras. Hell, find a way to shut down their entire wired com net, if you can!”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Babcock smiled thinly, then nodded to Rossignol. “This way,” she said crisply.
* * *
“Pretty bad, was it?”
Babcock looked around the boat bay gallery and discovered Horace Harkness standing beside her, gazing through the armorplast at Marine Two. The pinnace rested in the forward bay’s docking arms, once again, the boarding tube run out and sealed to its hatch while members of Prince Adrian’s engineering staff conducted routine post-flight maintenance. It had returned to the cruiser, along with the rest of Prince Adrian’s Marines—living and dead—almost four hours earlier. But Baker Company’s hot-wash debrief had ended less than twenty minutes ago, and somehow, Babcock had found herself here, when where she really should have been was in her own berthing compartment, looking for a hot shower.
“Seen worse,” she said. “Coulda lost a lot more people. And we got the job done. I don’t know how much good it’ll do, but we got the data dumps from all their computers and more samples of their hardware. And we blew the damned place up, after we evacced everybody. That’s gotta count. And”—she shrugged—“like I say. I’ve seen worse.”
“Yeah, and you’ve seen a hell of a lot better, too,” Harkness replied. “Any idea who did it?”
“Oh, sure!” Babcock’s crooked smile was bitter. “We’ve got all kinds of ideas who might’ve done it, but damn all evidence to pin it on anyone. My best guess? Some of the StateSec bastards on Gamma. There were more of ’em than anyone expected, and some of ’em are real pieces of work. I didn’t really believe the Intelligence types when they said the Peeps were recruiting terrorists to be political cops, but I do now. It’s crazy! And since they were the primary security force, they were the ones who should’ve stopped anyone from doing something like this. Which, you might have noticed, didn’t happen.”
“’Bout what I figured.” Harkness shook his head. “That kinda crap always leaves a bad taste, but not a lot we can do about it, I guess. Unless we want to just shoot every one of the bastards on suspicion.”
“Right about now, that would work for me.”
“Not a good thought, Gunny.” Harkness shook his head again. “Trust me, been there. Hell, done that, at least once. Didn’t make me feel any better after.”
“Maybe not,” Babcock allowed. “But what really pisses me off is what Lieutenant Clark’s doing to herself. She’s kicking the shit out of herself for letting it happen.”
Harkness opened his mouth, but she waved him brusquely to silence and continued.
“Oh, she knows it wasn’t really her fault. Doesn’t matter. Still blames herself. Hell, I told her it wasn’t her fault—that it was nobody’s fault—and that doesn’t matter, either. She lost two of her people, Harkness. Two of our people. And Guccione’s gonna be in the body shop for at least three weeks, even with quick-heal. So it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t her fault. She’s not ready to hear that yet—not from anyone.”
“Course she isn’t,” Harkness rumbled. “That’s because she’s one of the good ones. Learning how to let something like that go, that’s not ever something you can really do. Not down inside, where it really matters. I remember the old Fearless in Basilisk. Hell, Troubadour and Madrigal in Yeltsin! You were there for those. You know what I’m talking about. Leaving all those people behind . . . that hurts, Gunny. And knowing it wasn’t ‘our fault’ doesn’t make it easier. Not for the good ones.”
“Then she’s just gonna have to get over it,” Babcock said harshly. “This is gonna be a long war, Harkness. She’s gonna lose more people before it’s over. So she just damned well needs to learn to deal with it.”
“Sounds like you’re talking about more than just her,” Harkness replied, and his voice was softer somehow. Babcock darted a look at him, and he shrugged.
“Sounds to me like Lieutenant Clark’s not the only person who’s not ready to hear it wasn’t her fault.”
Babcock stiffened as a bolt of pure fury went through her. She opened her mouth, ready to tell him where he could shove his amateur psychiatry, but then she stopped, because he only stood there. Stood there, gazing into her eyes, and she felt that gaze pin her. Felt it force her to face her own feelings . . . and to realize he was right.
“Yeah,” she said after a a long, endless moment. “Yeah, you’re right . . . damn you. It is always that way.” She shook her head, gray eyes dark and suddenly sheened with a suspicious brightness. “Damn it, they’re all so frigging young, Harkness! I’m supposed to look out for them.”
“Sure you are. And you do. And sometimes, you can’t. It happens, Gunny. You know that.”
“Yeah, I do. And I’ll get past it. I always do that, too.”
“And a part of you never gets past it, Gunny,” Harkness said quietly. “You know that, too.”
They looked at each other for another minute or two, and then Babcock grinned crookedly.
“You know, for a worn-out old excuse for a vacuumsucker, you’re not nearly so bad as people say, Harkness.”
“Gee, spare my blushes! Dunno if I can handle all this effusive praise!”
“Hey, I didn’t say you were worth a fart in a vac suit, Harkness! I just said you’re not as bad as people say you are.”