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CHAPTER THREE

The DM -27 14659 system, 3894 C.E.

"Approaching Chen Limit, sir."

"Thank you, Mister Castellan," Commander Vladek acknowledged. Then she turned toward the helmsman. "Prepare to disengage the drive, Mister Imamura."

"Aye aye, sir," Lieutenant Commander Imamura replied with a crispness reflected by the rest of the bridge crew. HIMS Lancer's brain was conducting the approach under the human supervision tradition demanded, and everyone on the bridge took traditions like that seriously—especially with Vladek watching. The Fleet had long ago learned the dangers of overdependence on artificial intelligence, and all ship captains were procedural sticklers, even in the course of a relatively routine maneuver like this.

Lieutenant (j. g.) Basil Castellan let his eyes stray to the main viewscreen. The orange light of the K0v star DM -27 14659 was, as expected, waxing at a seemingly impossible rate. Then, dead ahead, a tiny reddish dot appeared out of the surrounding blackness and the starfields, growing into a ball that hurtled directly toward them as though released from a star god's sling.

All at once, with no physical sensation save a tone shift in the background sounds, Lancer resumed experiencing time at the same rate as the rest of the universe. In the viewscreen, the onrushing sphere seemed to come to an instantaneous halt . . . but not really a halt, for it continued to grow into a rusty planet as Lancer approached, her impellers worked to kill her not-inconsiderable intrinsic velocity.

Damned show-off, Basil thought venomously in the direction of Imamura's back.

The helmsman showed no ill effects, confirming what Basil already knew about his own lack of active psi talents. Indeed, as the neurohelmet rose from Imamura's head with a faint hum and settled into its niche in the overhead—no need for the direct neural linkage that made the ship an extension of the helmsman's own body, not for a mere orbital insertion—the facial expression it revealed was one of pure self-satisfaction. "Drive disengaged, sir," he reported unnecessarily.

A smile flickered across Vladek's lips. "Very good, Mister Imamura. But I believe you overlooked the customary practice of deactivating the inner field at the time approach to the Chen Limit is announced, thereby avoiding disconcerting optical effects and also effectively enhancing your own reaction times."

"Sorry, sir. Won't happen again." Imamura's deadpan contrition fooled no one. Had the crew spaces been subject to the same accelerated time as everything else inside the drive field with which the ship surrounded itself, the approach would have been too easy. More to the point, looked too easy. The inner field had to stay on, slowing time down for the crew as the drive speeded it up for the ship as a whole, if everyone was to appreciate his virtuosity. He and Vladek understood each other. In combat or any other real emergency, he would instantly kill the inner field without waiting for orders. She knew this, just as he knew that if he didn't he'd spend the remainder of his Fleet career on some disagreeable planet, cleaning up the nano-constructors' residue with a whisk broom.

Still, Basil thought, the skipper was being more than usually tolerant of the helmsman's grandstanding. Perhaps it had something to do with the current state of the ship's morale. They'd been abruptly ordered to this system, with a lack of explanation which would ordinarily have left a vacuum for Rumor Central to fill. But there had been a strange lack of rumors, for they'd all known what must lie behind their change of orders, with a knowledge that had made rumor superfluous. So the transit had passed in an odd kind of embarrassed depression, with eye contact avoided and conversation shunned. Faced with this state of mind, Vladek had probably decided they could use all of the usual banter they could get.

Seeking refuge from the thought, Basil looked again at the viewscreen. The ruddy and obviously-lifeless planet was filling more and more of it, and an irregular cluster of orbiting objects had emerged off to the side. As Lancer drew nearer, the cluster resolved itself into two main components: the irregular junk-sculpture that was Krasna Prime Station, and the vast silvery parasol shape that was the real source of this system's importance. The real reason we're here, Basil amended in his mind.

And not just us, his thought continued, for as the distance closed a swarm of smaller objects grew from iron filings into warships, glinting in the star's orange light. And he felt a curious gloomy satisfaction at the final confirmation of his most pessimistic assumptions. He turned back to his sensor station, for those ships and Lancer were already swapping recognition codes. He didn't need to formally report this exchange, for it was being automatically downloaded to the command chair just as it was to his terminal—comm was the primary recipient. But he had his curiosity, and he ran down the list of ships. A couple of old Impregnable-class battleships, no longer fit for front-line service. Five of the new Indomitable-class battlecruisers, with no more defensive strength than an ordinary cruiser except the greater punishment-absorbing capacity that sheer size conferred, but far more heavily armed. And then the roster of cruisers of Lancer's class or essentially identical ones: Hussar, Dragoon, Hoplite, Ghazi, Sepoy, Chasseur . . . and Basil's heart thudded, for Sonja was holding down a weapon station aboard Chasseur. Torval, he already knew, was here with Krasna Prime's Marine detachment.

Sonja had been right: for once, drunken talk hadn't been cheap. The three of them had stayed in touch since graduation, as much as that was possible across the light-years. They'd all been promoted inside a year—not unusual, given the Fleet's accelerating buildup. And now fate, or whatever, had brought them back together.

Lieutenant Perrin, the comm officer, broke in on his thoughts. "Captain, we're being hailed by Krasna Prime."

Vladek frowned with a puzzlement the entire bridge crew shared. They'd received and responded to the routine challenge some distance out, as per doctrine. What was the problem, now that they were in visual range of the station? "Put them on, Lieutenant."

The slowly growing panorama of Krasna Prime vanished from the viewscreen, to be replaced by a face that brought Vladek upright in her command chair. "Why, Admiral Tadesco, sir, I—"

The haggard-looking elderly man in the screen gestured her to silence. "Yes, I know, Commander: my presence here isn't generally known. Neither is our mobilization in this system. You were summoned in response to the latest escalation of tensions. But within the last few hours, we've received word that . . . well, actually two messages, in rapid succession . . ." The old man's voice trailed off into vagueness, and he looked all of his century-and-a-half-plus despite the government-financed anagathics to which his rank gave him access. Then something inside him seemed to firm up. "The first message informed us that the New Human-controlled worlds of the Iota Pegasi, Psi Capricorni and Beta Aquilae Sectors have seized control of the Imperial administrative apparatus in those sectors and declared the formation of the 'People's Democratic Union of New Humanity.' They have also declared the Empire dissolved and called on all members of their movement everywhere to rise in rebellion." The silence on the bridge was a palpable presence, not a mere absence of sound. But Tadesco's voice continued to gain in strength as that which he had always been forbidden to publicly discuss marched forth at last in ordered ranks of words.

"The second message came from Fleet HQ at Sol, in top-security code. It seems that, as we suspected, this rebellion has been carefully planned for a long time. In addition to the warships they've seized at the Fleet bases in their sectors, the New Humans have been clandestinely arming merchant ships, and upgrading their drives to military standards, for years. Their plan is an immediate drive on Sol, to bring the Empire down before it can organize to oppose them." Tadesco's face set into even grimmer lines. "It would be superfluous, Commander, to tell you or any of your personnel that this system will lie squarely in the path of that drive."

* * *

"Quite a difference from Peachy's," Sonja remarked, with a gesture that took in the Krasna Prime Officer's Club and the panorama beyond its clear armorplast wall.

The orbital station was built around the immense cavity that was its maintenance dock, open to space at one end, and the club was just inside one of the walls that defined that vastness. Its current occupants looked out on the comings and goings of far more ships than the station had ever been intended to accommodate, moving with ponderous majesty through the swarms of shuttles, utility tugs and other small craft in the glare of the great lights. As the three of them watched, a Norden-class frigate glided silently past the transparency that separated them from airlessness and weightlessness. Its liquid-crystal skin was currently set for the Fleet's regulation light gray, with the bronze-gold dragon emblazoned on its flanks. Odd, Basil reflected irrelevantly. The Solarian Empire, so careful in most ways to de-emphasize all resemblances to its predecessor, had kept the Draconis Empire's symbol. A symbol which, the more one looked at it, bore less resemblance to the supernatural beast of Old Earth legend than to a Luon. . . .

He shook his head free of disturbing half-memories and turned back to his companions. They were all in space service dress: comfortable jumpsuits which, with the addition of gloves and flexible transparent hoods, became light-duty vac suits at need. His and Sonja's were deep blue, white and gold; Torval's was Marine black, white and silver. Torval had gotten them a good table, offering a panoramic view from just inside the mezzanine railing.

"So," Sonja said to the massive Marine, "bring us up to date. Chasseur hasn't been here much longer than Lancer, and neither of us got much news in transit. Just a couple of mail drops."

"And what we got was pablum," Basil amplified. "But you . . . well, there's got to be some advantage to being stationed at a communications nerve center."

Torval smiled in appreciation of the gallows humor. "Right, to make up for having your butt in the center of a target! But yes, we got the news as fast as it broke. The New Humans claimed that the Fleet moved into the rebelling sectors and tried to intervene in the planetary governments to, uh, 'thwart the will of the people' or 'halt the irreversible progress of humanity toward its next stage of social evolution' or something."

"Ha!" Sonja took a quick pull on her drink. "If only the Imperial government was that decisive! It can't even decide whether to stick its head in the sand or up its ass."

"It's hard to sort out what really happened," Torval continued, giving her a cautionary frown. "Considering how long they've obviously planned this, I imagine they staged an incident or two. But one way or another they got their pretext, complete with colorful atrocity stories."

"Naturally," Basil sighed. "I gather that the Imperial authorities in those sectors were taken completely by surprise by the rising. Our Intelligence types obviously failed to predict the New Humans' timing."

"Why am I not surprised?" Sonja sneered, to a growl of agreement from Torval.

"Still, Intelligence must have done something right." Basil's companions' body language couldn't have made their feelings much more obvious. Most line officers' attitudes toward intelligence work began with revulsion and proceeded downward from there. It was an open secret that field agents were bionically enhanced, and cyborg had been as great a swear word as synthetic ever since the Unification Wars and the Draconis Empire. But Basil pressed doggedly on. "After all, we evidently knew in advance about this plan for an all-out drive on Sol."

"Then why didn't the Empire do something?" Sonja flared.

"It did," Torval said quietly. "It put us here."

They were all silent for a moment. Then Basil absently laid his left forearm on the table and spoke a command to his wristcomp. Its holographic display-projection awoke, and above the table appeared a multicolored spheroid, a little over ten inches in average diameter but with bulges, that represented the Solarian Empire.

On this scale, where inches substituted for tens of light-years, individual stars could not be displayed. Instead, sectors glowed in different colors. Basil pointed to three irregular expanses, like half-melted lozenges of green, yellow and red, that made up one flank of the representation.

"The database is slightly out of date," Sonja remarked drily. "It's still showing the rebel sectors as part of the Empire."

"Yes, but at least it makes clear why this system is crucial." Basil spoke the system's name, and a tiny pinpoint of light appeared. On one side of it, beyond a region that was empty of color because it was empty of planetary systems, lay the regions that had suddenly become the enemy. On the far side lay the only other star symbols in the display: Sigma Draconis and Sol.

"From what I hear," Sonja said, "their call for an Empire-wide revolution has gotten enough response to keep most of the Fleet's units pinned down where they are, stomping on minor uprisings before they can spread. Typical of the New Human leaders, to encourage their supporters to stage suicidal uprisings. And typical of the supporters, to go along like silly sheep!"

"But while those uprisings last," Torval rumbled, "they'll keep us spread thin, instead of concentrating here against the main offensive."

Sonja looked uncharacteristically hesitant. "I suppose the offensive doesn't absolutely have to come this way."

"Oh, yes it does," Torval said flatly. He turned his head to look out through the transparency toward the open end of the docking area, and his companions' gazes followed his. There, against the starfields, the silvery parasol of the tachyon beam array was visible.

Theoretical physicists continued to stoutly deny that tachyon communications were really instantaneous. But no one had ever succeeded in measuring any time lapse between transmission and reception, whatever the distance. In theory, the device's range should have been effectively infinite like its speed of propagation. In practice, problems which non-specialists found it easiest to visualize as "focusing" imposed certain limitations. For one thing, the location of the receiver had to be known precisely; ships in transit could receive messages as long as their occupants' time rate was synchronized to that of the outside universe, but in order to do so they had to arrive at certain prearranged coordinates at prearranged times—"mail drops." More importantly, interstellar-range transmission required a physical array of such size that it could only be constructed in orbit, a kilometers-wide prairie of costly exotic alloys. And the requisite surface area of the array went up exponentially as the range increased. As a practical matter, no transmitter of more than ten light-years' range had ever been built. So messages had to be relayed, and the great orbital arrays were strategic pearls beyond price.

Which explained why one of them was in this economically unimportant young system. Located on the edge of the gulf of nothingness between the centers of civilization and several outlying sectors, it enabled Fleet HQ to exercise command-and-control throughout the regions which had risen in rebellion.

"You're right," Sonja acknowledged, nodding slowly. "This has to be their first target. And if they're as well-prepared as they seem to be, what we've got here can't possibly hold them."

"We shouldn't have to," Torval reassured her. "Word is that everything that could be spared has been organized into a fairly serious task force at Sigma Draconis, and that it's on the way now."

"Right," Sonja muttered skeptically.

"Who's in command of it?" Basil inquired of Torval.

"Vice Admiral Medina."

"Well!" Sonja perked up. "That's the first good news I've heard yet."

"I suppose so," Torval said in his deliberate way. "Of course, Medina's not everybody's cup of tea—"

"Snobs!" Sonja snorted. "Just because his grandfather was a Beyonder! I tell you, we can't let ourselves worry about things like that. Not now, when the Empire is collapsing around our ears."

"It's not just his ancestry," Torval insisted. "I've heard some disturbing things about him from people who've served in headquarters outfits directly under him."

"All right, admittedly he's ambitious. But, again, can we really afford to worry about that just now? He's the one real man in a high command full of ineffectual dodderers like Tadesco." Both of her male companions shot her warning glances this time. But she'd kept her voice low, and now it dropped even further, even as it took on a challenging note. "Well, am I wrong? Maybe the Empire can't live with Medina's ambitions in the long run. But we can't live with the New Humans in the short run!"

Basil spoke up, quietly and almost diffidently—and the other two fell silent to listen, as they'd been more and more inclined to do over the years. "I think Sonja may be right. There's an old saying: 'Beggars can't be choosers.' And if Medina really is the man who can salvage this situation. . . ." His voice trailed off into an embarrassed laugh, and a white grin split his dark face. "Will you listen to us? Anyone would think we were settling the fate of the Empire!"

They all chuckled ruefully, but those chuckles held an odd nervous brittleness . . . which the PA system shattered.

"Attention! General quarters! All personnel report to your duty stations! All ships' companies report to your ships! Repeat, general quarters! All personnel . . ."

"They weren't supposed to be here this soon, were they?" Sonja's voice and features were just a little too composed, in the way of those who have never seen combat and are determined not to show it.

"No, they weren't," Torval remarked with the kind of calm fatalism she was striving for. He got to his feet, then paused and lifted his glass. "Sin to waste this; the damned serving robots will just dump it."

"Soulless bastards," Basil agreed. "Here's to our next drink, when we all meet here again."

"I'll tell 'em to hold the table," Torval grinned.

They tossed off their drinks, then joined the maelstrom of running figures that the club had become.

* * *

Lancer accelerated outward until Krasna Prime and the tachyon beam array shrank to metallic toys against the backdrop of Krasna's Planet and then vanished, and the planet itself was only a little dirty-orange ball. Then they crossed the invisible line called the Chen Limit, where the world-lines were flat enough to allow the warping of time. Vladek nodded, Imamura engaged the drive, and Krasna's Planet seemed to drop away behind them at the same impossible relative velocity with which it had hurtled toward them when they'd arrived.

But Basil had no eyes for the view aft, even had his duties permitted his attention to stray to it. The real spectacle was spread out before him, here at his scanner station.

Starships disobeyed no physical laws inside the bubbles of accelerated time with which they surrounded themselves, and therefore could interact with the outside universe from which standpoint they seemed to be flouting those laws. Which meant that they could be detected by normal sensors. This wasn't particularly helpful if the sensor was limited to lightspeed, for the starship would arrive long before the signal of its detection. But the treated antineutrinos of modern sensors could, by various tricks, be given transluminar acceleration. They weren't instantaneous like the tachyon beams that were useless for sensing purposes, but within their not-inconsiderable range they effectively provided realtime detection. Thus it was that the pickets out in DM -27 14659's Oort Cloud had given them enough warning to scramble outsystem to meet the oncoming rebel fleet. And thus it was that that fleet now lay revealed by the ship's sensors on Basil's displays.

They'd all heard about the windfall of warships that the rebels had gathered in with the shockingly sudden collapse of Imperial authority in their sectors. But the consensus had been that they wouldn't be able to employ those ships anytime soon, for lack of politically reliable, trained personnel. But now, looking at the phalanxes of former Fleet ships that formed a hard forward carapace for the mass of armed merchantmen that followed, Basil came to the sick realization that the New Humans' preparations must have included clandestine training of crews. Of course, he told himself, those crews couldn't possibly be up to Fleet standards in either quality or numbers. They had to be running on skeleton crews and relying heavily on automated systems.

All of which was undoubtedly true. And yet . . . those were a lot of ships coming at them. Such an armada, launched at the heart of the Empire so soon after the rebellion had been declared, spoke of planning that had begun long before that declaration, and made nonsense of the New Humans' talk of Fleet provocation. He found he was clenching his teeth, and made himself relax. With a force of overwhelming size bearing down on them, political mendacity was probably the last thing he should be getting upset about.

He turned his attention to the disposition of the loyalist forces. Tadesco had organized his resources into three divisions, now approaching the invaders from as many different directions in an effort—thus far completely unsuccessful—to distract them from their objective. Looking at the display, Basil frowned at the icons of the Indomitable-class battlecruisers, scattered among all three divisions. Concentrated in a squadron of their own, they could have been used as they were intended to be used, employing their speed and maneuverability to stay out of range of anything that exceeded them in defensive strength while overwhelming ordinary cruisers with superior firepower. But Tadesco had felt he had no choice but to use them as command ships for his divisions, for he had nothing else that could match their command-and-control capabilities. Basil wasn't sure he was right . . . but, for some odd reason, nobody had asked him.

At least the Impregnable-class battlewagons were together, in the First Division under Tadesco's personal command, directly in the path of the invaders. They couldn't match the newer ships' sophisticated combat systems, but they were big enough to carry the weapons that now appeared in Basil's display.

To function at all in faster-than-light combat, missiles had to carry their own drives and sensor suites, to say nothing of sentience-level computers—in short, they had to be starships in their own right, crewless to be sure but too expensive for lavish deployment and too large for any but the largest warships to carry. Now Tadesco was expending them prodigally, as desperation overcame his conservative instincts. They sped ahead of their mother ships as overloaded impellers pushed them to tremendous accelerations within their drive fields. Basil watched, fascinated, and spat out periodic reports as the robot suicide ships entered the range of the rebels' weapons and began to die. But some got through, and the enemy ranks began to waver as ships initiated evasive action.

Then, as though in response to a central will, the rebels' formation began to firm up again, into a rigidity which held even as a certain number of ships began to fail under the intolerable energies of the bomb-pumped lasers the missiles died to create. Basil caught himself nodding slowly as his supposition was confirmed: the rebels, with hastily thrown-together crews of inexperienced personnel, could not trust individual ship captains to take independent action. They had to treat their fleet as a single, massive unit whose defensive strength and sheer momentum could bull its way through any obstacle. And for that approach to work, their formation's integrity must be maintained at all costs. Besides which, the very notion of individual initiative was ideologically unacceptable to them.

But then the Second Division to which Lancer belonged, and the Third which included Chasseur, swept in from the flanks, Imamura cut the inner field, the viewscreen switched to tactical display, and they were engaged.

The formations slid together, and energy pulses (the ancient term laser was still common, although these weapons used the X-ray wavelengths rather than visible light) began to cross the intervening space at what seemed to the bridge crew—existing as they were in the state of vastly accelerated time induced by the drive, without the compensating inner field—to be a snail's pace. The initial exchange was indecisive, for the rebels were holding formation and both sides' drives were, of course, speeding up time to the highest factor permitted by current technology. Both sides lost a few ships, but the rebel formation continued on. Second and Third Divisions curved around to keep pace with that formation's flanks as it drew into energy weapon range of First Division. Tadesco immediately ordered the obsolescent Indomitables away from the scene of action, where they would be helpless against the newer ships . . . but he should have done it sooner. The rebel command must have recognized that those ships would be formidable defensive platforms once the battle moved inside the Chen Limit of Krasna's World where no one's drives could function, for lances of energy fire impaled the two great old ships.

The basic, brutal fact of deep space warfare was that for ship-to-ship combat to take place both ships' drives must be able to accelerate time by the same factor. Otherwise it wasn't combat—it was an execution Thus it was that all warships were designed for the same drive strength: the maximum possible one. Any speed differentials among them were a function of the thrust of the impellers that actually moved them. The Indomitables, products of an earlier era and never upgraded by the parsimonious peacetime Fleet, shouldn't have been here at all, and wouldn't have been save for the fact that their missile capability couldn't be spared in the Empire's present extremity. Now they became death traps for their crews as energy beams struck them with an intensity enhanced far beyond their own drives' ability to spread that energy out. Their answering beams might as well have been searchlights for all their potency against the rebels' up-to-date drive fields. Basil was glad he couldn't view the holocaust that lay behind the tactical display's dry symbology, the boiling clouds of volatilized matter that were the funeral pyres of those gallant old ships.

The rebels began to interpenetrate with First Division, whose elements scattered and came around to join the running battle, pouring fire into the ships on the periphery of the rebel formation which they didn't dare enter lest they be demolished by the converging fire of several opponents. But that formation continued inexorably on insystem, toward Krasna Prime, to whose watching occupants the entire battle so far had occupied less than a second of incomprehensible violence.

Tactical analysis so far was confirming Basil's suppositions about the relative fighting quality of the two sides' units. The Imperials' fire was a good deal more effective, ship for ship. But the rebel numbers began to tell more and more, with several ships concentrating their firepower on a single target, as the battle approached the Chen Limit.

A lurch brought Basil abruptly out of the deep concentration with which he had been regarding his readouts. Deep in the ship, alarm klaxons were whooping.

"Damage control, report!" Vladek snapped.

"Nothing critical, sir," came a voice after a moment. "Life support functions on delta deck, radians seven through twelve have had to go to standby. But nothing affecting propulsion or weapon systems—"

Something caught Basil's eye from the corner, and all at once hellfire awoke on his readouts. "Incoming . . . multiple!" he blurted—unnecessarily, for the tactical display had already processed the automatic download and the main screen showed the converging energy bolts, crawling toward Lancer at lightspeed.

"Stand by," Vladek called out calmly.

With no more warning than that, the universe turned to noise and chaos, as the ship shuddered and a secondary explosion ripped through the bridge's port bulkhead. Basil, existing in a state of protracted time that had nothing to do with the drive field, saw Lieutenant Perrin hurled from the comm station with such force that her securing straps practically cut her in two. Blood bubbled forth as the artificial gravity momentarily lost its hold, only to fall to the deck in a grisly spatter as weight returned. Imamura's neurohelmet seemed to explode in a pyrotechnic shower of electric-blue sparks, and he came bolt upright with arched back before collapsing. A stench of burnt meat told Basil that he wouldn't want to see what remained of the helmsman's head. Then consciousness wavered . . .

"Bridge! Come in, bridge! Anybody!"

The executive officer's voice brought Basil back to intolerable reality. He staggered to his feet and looked around the darkened, smoke-swirling ruin that had been the bridge. Amazing, he thought with a strange calmness, how much still works. Like the main screen, and the communicator in the arm of the captain's chair, from which Commander Kronen's scratchy requests for acknowledgment continued to come. But Vladek was lying back, motionless. Basil heaved himself upright and staggered over to the skipper's side . . . and once again the black wings of unconsciousness beat around the periphery of his vision, and his gorge rose.

The roughly triangular segment of torn metal had sliced into Vladek's body at God-knew-what velocity, pinning her to the command chair and cutting open heart and viscera. The chair, tilted backwards by the force of the impact, was like a bowl of blood and other fluids in which Vladek reclined, staring sightlessly at the viewscreen.

"Bridge! This is the executive officer. Damage Control is on the way. Is anybody alive up there? Please respond!"

Basil shook horror from his head and looked around. He could hear low moans and see feebly stirring bodies, but he was clearly the only member of the bridge crew fit for duty. And the XO needed to know that, so he could assume command and fight the ship from his auxiliary command center in Engineering. Basil licked his lips and opened his mouth to respond . . . but then something caught his eye in the erratically flickering tactical display.

The maelstrom of battling ships was approaching the Chen Limit of Krasna's World. Lancer, without a human command to do otherwise, was still on course, dogging the left flank of the rebel formation, part of which was slightly ahead of her. And a rebel ship was altering course to intercept her.

Suddenly, standing in that scene out of hell, he knew what must be done.

It was as though he heard a stranger speak, using his voice at the deepest pitch he could manage. "This is the bridge. On command, disengage the drive."

"What?" Kronen's voice almost broke into a squeak. "Who is this? Let me speak to the captain!"

"No time!" Basil snapped. Later, he reflected calmly in some inner storm center, there would be time to let the enormity of what he was doing register. "This is a direct order from the captain. I'll give you a three-count. One!"

"Damn it, I want that order authenticated! Who in—"

"Two!" Basil's universe had narrowed to that segment of the main screen where the battle's leading edge was creeping up to the Chen Limit, almost touching it. He didn't even notice the bolt of death that was crawling from the approaching rebel ship toward Lancer at mere lightspeed.

"All right! But after this is over I'm going to get to the bottom of—"

"Three! Disengage!"

Things happened quickly.

Lancer's time scale crashed back into synchronicity with that of the normal universe. Perhaps a femtosecond later, on that time scale, the rest of the warring ships did the same as they crossed the Chen Limit. At essentially the same instant the enemy beam, computer-directed to intersect the point in space that Lancer would have reached at her previous effective velocity of incredible multiples of c, stabbed through emptiness far ahead of the cruiser. Still further ahead, the battle raged on, moving toward Krasna Prime at the combatants' intrinsic Einsteinian-space velocity.

"Commander Kronen, sir," Basil almost whispered into the communicator, "the captain is out of action. You have the conn." He slumped to his knees, almost too weary to breathe. But he managed to do two things. First he scanned the computer's roster of friendly units . . . yes, Chasseur still lived. And he reached past that which had been Imamura and switched the screen from tactical to visual.

Kronen didn't even acknowledge, for he had instantly understood.

Another fundamental fact of deep-space warfare was that ships moving far more swiftly than light—as far as outside observers were concerned, at any rate—could outrun the beams of directed-energy weapons. Therefore, a ship under drive could not be attacked from astern. Tactics and ship designs alike reflected this. And now, practically dead ahead, lay the rebel ship that had sought to intercept Lancer, presenting to its erstwhile prey a stern unprotected even by the deflector screens that were the ships' only passive defense inside the Chen Limit where their drive fields could not form.

Basil could feel the thrumming through the deck under him as Kronen ordered the impellers up to full thrust. Basil gazed at the screen, not really expecting to be able to see the enemy ship before . . .

The screen's automatic glare-reduction function saved him from blindness as a brief sun erupted. Kronen had taken the rebel ship "up the kilt" with every beam weapon that could be brought to bear.

Basil found he was on his feet again, no longer drained, screaming a wild war cry that welled up from he knew not where. As he stood bathed in the light of fusionfire, some impulse made him remember the woman who lay dead in the command chair beside him. And he switched the screen back to tactical so that any part of Vladek that had not yet departed this place might watch as Kronen drove Lancer on, seeking another target, and another, and another, knifing through the rebel formation like some elemental principle of destruction.

But there were still a lot of rebels between them and Krasna Prime. And he saw that assault shuttles had begun to converge on the station.

* * *

Another explosion shook the deck, making the voice in Torval's helmet communicator superfluous. "Prepare for visitors, Lieutenant Bogdan."

"Aye aye, sir," he responded, most of his attention on the readout of his powered armor's integral sensor unit, which formed the suit's left "hand."

"Twenty hostiles," he told his squad. He didn't need to tell them that the hostiles were encased in battlesuits comparable to their own. Nothing less well-protected had any business in the firefight that was coming. There were more sophisticated strength-enhancing technologies—flexible form-fitting suits whose machinery was molecular, for instance. But they couldn't match the sheer defensive strength of the traditional armored exoskeletons which the Marines still favored.

Torval spoke a command and the sensor unit began to change shape, its nanoplastic components flowing and writhing as it reconfigured itself into a laser weapon. With his right hand he hefted a plasma gun designed for powered armor. Then he glanced left and right at the line the Marines had formed across this vast empty storage space behind an improvised barricade. Satisfied, he settled in to await the boarders.

Krasna Prime, huge and without the need for drive machinery, mounted deflector screen generators beyond the capacity of any starship. But deflector screens' strength was in direct proportion to the kinetic energy of incoming attacks. They were most effective against energy weapons, fairly so against high-velocity material projectiles. But the small, slow assault shuttles could push their way through as though against a stiff wind. This type of attack was costly, for the station's weapons took a toll on the shuttles. But they only had to get close enough to disgorge their cargoes of power-armored troopers, who proceeded on to the bare metal walls and cut their way through with laser torches. Now, like bacteria invading an organism, they were working their way inward, eating their way through all obstacles . . . of which this chamber's walls were the latest. Torval braced for an explosion.

But none came. Instead, the bulkhead began to spout leprous patches of dissolution, and gaps began to grow as the metal sagged downward in slow gray streams of a substance that was obscenely unidentifiable as organic or inorganic.

"Lieutenant," the panic-stricken voice of Corporal Nash quavered in his helmet communicator, "they're using dis!"

"Belay that!" Torval snapped, though demons came shrieking up from the depths of his own acculturation to gibber at him. One of the weapons that had lent the Unification Wars their peculiar horror was aerosol-delivered disassembler: clouds of nanomachines which broke all matter down at the molecular level, turning it into an undifferentiated grayish goo. All matter, including living flesh. Would even the rebels flout the prohibition, so long-standing as to have attained almost religious stature, against using it on humans? "Stand fast," he continued, as much for his own benefit as for his men's. "I've read about the stuff. It's expensive as hell—too expensive to use on individual opposition. I'll bet they're expending it on the bulkhead just to make us wet our pants and run crying to momma. They must think we're Fleet Security."

A collective wolfish laugh submerged the incipient panic. The men knew that Torval was ex-enlisted, no ninety-day wonder, so "lieutenant" wasn't a term of belittlement in his case. And what happened next seemed to confirm his words. A shower of grenades came sailing through the space where the bulkhead had been, to lie in impotent sparks and sputters. This time the laughter in the comm circuit needed no prompting from Torval. The rebels must really think they were facing second- or third-drawer opposition, which would now be helplessly in the throes of hysterical fear or morbid depression or whatever emotion it was that these psi-grenades induced. Surely they knew that Marine combat helmets incorporated mind-shields as a matter of course.

Then the hostiles were through the breached bulkhead, and nothing was funny anymore. But the Marines, now facing mere bolts of superheated plasma and streams of hypervelocity metal, had steadied, and gave better than they got in the hermetically-closed segment of hell that the compartment had become.

Torval pivoted away from his part of the barricade just before it was blasted into a howling inferno of flame and showering molten metal. Then he swung back around in a practiced motion and sent a plasma discharge roaring down its guide beam in the general direction of the opposition, accompanied by a rapid-fire discharge of laser pulses from his reconfigurable integral weapon. But the laser—visible-light frequency for this work, for atmosphere absorbed X-rays—was becoming less useful in this smoke-filled environment. He spoke a command . . . and, in that instant of distraction, an enemy battlesuit crashed into his with a clang that would have deafened unprotected ears had any been present.

The two of them went over together, with faceplates in contact, but of course both were opaque and Torval couldn't see the enemy face that was mere inches away. He could, however, see the contact plasma discharger that the rebel was bringing inexorably closer to his helmet. . . . But then his integral weapon completed its reconfiguration, and a thick metal blade, humming with the current that caused it to vibrate thousands of times a second, jabbed up from under the rebel's armpit, and inward.

With their helmets in contact, Torval heard the man's scream for a split second before he arched up and flopped over sideways, the battlesuit's myoelectric "muscles" amplifying his thrashings. Torval thought he ought to put him out of his misery . . . but then he remembered dis, used against a bulkhead that might have had humans huddled against its far side, and he moved on, advancing against a pair of rebels who were just entering the compartment with anti-armor rocket launchers. He took them by surprise, for they hadn't expected opposition at such close range. He smashed one aside and sliced another's launcher across with the vibroblade before dispatching him with a point-blank plasma blast. The man he'd knocked off balance came back at him and attempted to grapple. Torval blasted one leg out from under him and, after he'd crashed to the deck, brought one battlesuited foot stamping down on his helmet, flattening it—and its contents—like a tin can. Then he paused, for the din had ceased, and saw that his men had mopped up the remaining rebels.

"Compartment Delta-26-M secure, Major," he reported over his helmet comm. Then, with a cockiness he'd thought he'd long since outgrown: "Bring on the next wave."

"Outstanding, Lieutenant Bogdan," the battalion CO commended, then paused. "Remain on alert, Lieutenant, but . . . there may not be a next wave. Word is that something's going on out there to disrupt their attack. We'll keep you advised."

"Hey, Lieutenant," somebody called out, "could it be that the blue-backs are doing something right for once?"

Torval joined in the general chuckles. But . . . It might even be true. After all, Basil and Sonja are out there. He roughened his voice. "All right, cut the comedy. You heard the man: we're still on alert. Until further notice, stand ready to kill anything that comes through that bulkhead."

The medics insisted on giving Basil a thorough going-over where they found him. So he lay on the bridge alongside the seriously injured, within sight of the still-functioning tactical display, and felt depression wash over him as he saw that they were done for after all.

The rebel command had finally awakened to what was loose amid their over-rigid formation, and the battle had dissolved into a chaos of individually battling ships. Then a pattern had reestablished itself, with the outnumbered Imperials clustering around Krasna Prime in a defensive hedgehog that was gradually being worn down by overwhelming rebel fire. Tadesco had died with his flagship and even the divisions could no longer function as units; command-and-control was down to the individual ship level.

He caught sight of an auxiliary comm screen where, doubtless by oversight, Kronen's voice could be heard, and the features of the senior surviving officer of the nearest friendly ship were displayed over an identifier: HIMS Chasseur. The man in the screen shook his head wearily.

"No, Commander. Our orders don't give us the option of trying to break free and run, however hopeless the situation we find ourselves in. . . ." Basil heard no more, for in the background view of Chasseur's bridge he had caught sight of a lithe female figure topped by auburn hair.

"I appreciate all that," Kronen was saying. "But I call your attention to General Directive 43-22a, which gives commanding officers the latitude to decide—what in God's name?"

Basil became aware that the bridge had suddenly grown quiet, and that every pair of eyes except his were on the tactical display. Incredibly, impossibly, the rebels were disengaging as rapidly as tactical wisdom allowed—in some cases more rapidly than that—and seeking the Chen Limit at the highest acceleration their impellers could provide.

Before any voice could break the stunned silence, the display vanished, to be replaced by Kronen's sweat-soaked face. But Basil knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, for he had glimpsed the first icons of Imperial ships that had begun to appear in the viewscreen's extreme upper-left-hand corner—the system-scale display.

"Attention all personnel," Kronen rasped. "Admiral Medina's advance elements have arrived in this system—"

Whatever else he said was drowned in a storm of cheers. But Basil could hear one voice above the hubbub, from the direction of that neglected comm station. For Sonja had elbowed her way to the screen pickup, and was looking out with a grin that, for him, banished the rest of the universe.

"Hey, Basil," she yelled, "if you're there, aboard Lancer . . . what did I tell you?"

* * *

The three of them—grimy, sweat-stinking, in a manic state beyond exhaustion—met in the great entrance bay of Krasna Prime's maintenance dock, where shuttles were moving slowly through the atmosphere screen and wheezing down onto their landing jacks. Torval and Sonja had to push through a crush of others around Basil, for the stories had already begun to spread.

"Basil!" Torval roared, bulling his way through with Sonja in his wake. He was clad only in the nondescript skintight gray garment worn inside a battlesuit, and thus looked better than Basil in his ruined Fleet uniform. "What's this I hear about what you did out there?"

"Yeah," Sonja added, hugging him soundly. "Can't I let you out of my sight for even a minute? Everybody's talking about—"

"Lieutenant Castellan!"

"Yes, looks like everybody is," Basil muttered. He came to attention along with everyone else present—except those who were hastening to get out of Commander Kronen's way. Lancer's acting skipper advanced until his nose was mere inches from Basil's.

"Lieutenant Castellan," he repeated, this time in a grinding rasp rather than a bellow. "I have just concluded an impromptu investigation of precisely what happened at the time the bridge was hit and immediately thereafter. Am I, or am I not, correct in believing that Commander Vladek was already dead at the time you communicated to me what purported to be an order from her?"

Academy habit reasserted itself, and Basil picked out precisely three hairs on the back of someone's head in front of him. He kept his eyes fixed on those three hairs as he responded. "Sir, that is correct. Under the emergency circumstances that existed at the time—"

"Then your cotton-candy ass is mine, Lieutenant!" Kronen blared. "I'll see you court-martialed! I'll see you brainwiped down to the level where you can't even figure out how much saliva to drool! I'll—"

"Attention on deck!" The loudspeaker drowned out even Kronen. "Relief Task Force, arriving." At the same instant, the station's most senior officers emerged in a group to meet the shuttle that was nosing through the atmosphere screen. Under the Imperial dragon on its side were the three flaring sunbursts of a vice admiral.

"We'll continue this later, Lieutenant," Kronen told Basil. But, like everyone else, he turned to watch as the shuttle settled down and its exit ramp extruded itself. And like everyone else he broke into a cheer for the figure that came down and advanced through the steam of the landing jacks.

Vice Admiral Yoshi Medina was clad in the space-service uniform of his rank, complete with the white cape that was an optional accessory, usually reserved for formal occasions. Under these circumstances, it was a touch of flamboyance that seemed somehow right. It was also a striking contrast with his dark face, with its high cheekbones, slitted black eyes and thin slash of a mouth under an equally thin, slightly drooping black mustache. Commodore Tzin, the station CO, greeted him with a formality which promptly gave way to handshakes and renewed cheers.

Basil watched, his problems momentarily forgotten, as Tzin motioned Medina toward a hatch. But the newly arrived admiral paused. "Wait a moment, Commodore. I've heard some odd stories since arriving here, about the cruiser Lancer, which evidently broke the momentum of the rebel attack. Is her CO present?"

Tzin looked around and noticed Kronen. "Here, Admiral. Commander Kronen was her XO, and assumed command after the skipper was killed."

"So I've been given to understand," Medina acknowledged, as he stepped forward and received Kronen's salute. "Outstanding work, Commander. If it hadn't been for Lancer, this station probably would have fallen before my arrival."

"Thank you, Admiral," Kronen stammered. But Medina went on in his deep voice.

"I've also heard that a very junior officer who was the only one alive and conscious on the bridge took some . . . shall we say, unorthodox steps. In fact, if the reports are to be believed, he gave the order to disengage the drive at that precise moment."

"Yes, Admiral. In fact, this is the man right here." Kronen gave Basil a sideways smile of vindictive glee. "I was just dealing with him when you arrived."

Medina stepped slowly in front of Basil, who tried to weld his spine into an even stiffer position of attention. The admiral's thin mouth was a slightly downturned line of grimness, and his eyelids drooped slightly as he studied Basil's name tag. "Is that true, Lieutenant . . . Castellan?"

"Yes, sir," Basil got out through a constricted throat. Visions of his probable future came crowding back, and he thought he was going to be sick.

"Well, Lieutenant," Medina said, in a voice like the deep purr of a large cat, "this is serious business. You usurped command for a brief period—arguably mutiny."

"Yes, sir," Basil croaked. His vision began to tunnel, and he wasn't sure how long he was going to be able to stay on his feet.

"Bad business indeed, Lieutenant," Medina went on. "In fact, you're putting me to a great deal of trouble. After actions such as yours, it's going to take some doing to justify the decoration and accelerated promotion I'm going to recommend for you."

"Yes, sir," Basil repeated automatically. Then the admiral's words began to penetrate his private universe of despair . . . and he stole a look at Medina's swarthy face, which was split in a sharklike grin.

It was too much. Basil would have collapsed had Medina not slapped him on the shoulder, the kind of sensation that was needed to bring him back into awareness of the physical world. Everyone else looked as stunned as he felt, and Kronen seemed to be experiencing difficulty breathing.

Medina turned his predatory smile on Lancer's acting CO. "Oh, don't worry, Commander. You're also to be commended. You displayed initiative and flexibility in taking advantage of an opportunity—the opportunity that Mister Castellan created."

"But . . . but . . . Admiral . . ."

"Yes, I know. Not exactly according to The Book, was it?" All at once, Medina's face was set back into the harsh lines that seemed natural to it. "Well, Commander, it's time you—and everyone else here—adjusted to the fact that things aren't going to be the same. Not ever again in our lifetimes." He raised his voice until it filled the cavernous space. "We've won this battle, we've thwarted the rebels' plan to bring the Empire down with a single stroke. But that just means we're entering into a time of protracted war. A time when nothing will matter but survival. A time when the people with the brain and the stomach to do it will have to take whatever actions are necessary to preserve the Empire. Whatever actions . . . regardless of what traditionalists and legalists may say. The Fleet—the entire Empire—will have to accept this or go under!"

In a heartbeat or two of silence, an odd disquiet ran through the crowd, for Medina was speaking of the dissolution of familiar things, things that had formed the backdrop of their lives. But his voice seemed to hold the metallic clang of destiny as it reverberated around the great entrance bay, and the order of things they had known seemed to recede into the past, beyond the boundaries of present reality, leaving them stranded in a strange new world where nothing could be taken for granted and the only way to cope with change was to embrace it wholeheartedly. And they cheered again, but the cheers held a subtle new note that Basil could not define, even though he heard it in his own voice as well: an odd blend of reckless excitement, unacknowledged fear, unrecognized sorrow, and need for a leader to follow into this uncharted new country of the future.

Medina turned back to him. "I don't imagine you'll want to stay aboard Lancer, Lieutenant. I'll arrange a transfer. I want you under my own command anyway. You see . . . I think I recognize a man who's like me in many ways." He smiled wolfishly. "So I'll want to be able to keep an eye on you." Then he was gone, leaving Basil gaping after him, unaware even of Sonja's embrace and Torval's back-pounding.

* * *

They were at the same table in the just-reopened officers' club, although like the rest of the clientele they were a good deal less spiffy than before. They were, Basil thought, probably running on pure adrenaline, and he wasn't sure what the result of an alcohol admixture would be.

Torval didn't seem to be letting it worry him. He tossed back half his drink, settled back and loosened the collar of the service dress he'd gotten back into. "Well, Sonja," he said, "I'm surprised you haven't already started telling us you told us so. About Medina, that is."

Sonja drank too, but her face wore a subdued expression Basil had never seen on it. "Yeah, I suppose so. It's just . . ." She took another drink. "There's just something a little . . . disturbing about him."

"What's the matter? Isn't he what you expected?"

"Yes. Maybe that's the problem. Now I'm not sure that what I expected is what I really want."

"I don't think we have much choice," Basil said. They both gave him sharp glances, for his grimness was as out of character as Sonja's hesitancy. "Oh, I know what you mean. When he spoke, it was like an axe blade cutting us off from our past and leaving us in a future that I'm not sure I'm going to like. But, you see, he's right. Most of the rebels got away, and what we've won is—let's face it—a defensive victory that we're in no position to follow up on. Not with rebellions breaking out all over the Empire like a rash." He held their eyes. "We're heading into what may be the worst period since the Unification Wars. We have to support Medina."

Torval gave him the thoughtful look that few besides himself and Sonja were ever allowed to see. "So you think he's the man who can impose order?"

"Yes . . . even if it's only the order of his own will. But the alternative is chaos." Basil studied the amber depths of his drink. "He worries me too . . . he even frightens me. But the oath we swore to each other implies a commitment to whatever or whoever it takes to hold the Empire together."

"You're right . . . I think," Sonja said. And they all raised their glasses and drank. They refilled in haste, as though to banish their own doubts.

 

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