CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jalal Station
Jalal System
Terran Federation
December 9, 2552
“So, those are the figures,” Harrison O’Hanraghty said, tipping back in his chair in Terrence Murphy’s comfortable suite, one deck up from Jalal Station’s Central Command. “I wish to hell your brother-in-law had been even a bit more reasonable, but it could’ve been worse.”
“It was plenty bad enough for me,” Murphy said grimly. “There were over a hundred and fifty thousand Federation personnel aboard his battleships and battlecruisers, Harry. And another thirty-five hundred aboard just the FTLCs we destroyed outright. We killed somewhere over a hundred thousand of them. I don’t see how it could have been a lot worse.”
“We could have lost,” O’Hanraghty said flatly. “In which case, the death toll would have been just as bad—if not worse—and your precious brother-in-law would have moved on to K-strike Crann Bethadh.”
He held Murphy’s eyes steadily, unflinchingly. Silence hovered between them for a long, tense moment, and then, unhappily, Murphy nodded.
“I know, Harry. I know!” He leaned back, his expression inexpressibly weary. “I hoped—prayed—it wouldn’t come to this. But deep inside, I was always afraid it would. I think a coward part of me had to pretend I might be able to avoid it or I could never have even started this.”
O’Hanraghty started a quick reply, then made himself stop. He suspected no one else in the entire galaxy knew Terrence Murphy as well as he did…including Terrence Murphy himself. There were things Murphy wasn’t comfortable admitting about himself to himself, like the unflinching integrity, the absolute inability to evade his duty, that was the wellspring of his personality. The one thing Harrison O’Hanraghty had never seen anywhere in Terrence Murphy’s makeup was a scrap of cowardice.
But, of course, that wasn’t something he could say. Especially not at a moment like this.
“Well,” he said instead, “it did happen, and pissed as I am at dear Rajenda, I doubt anybody else they sent would have been any more reasonable. And it does say some interesting things about the current balance of power, doesn’t it?”
Murphy snorted, but he had to nod.
He’d arrived at Jalal Station with twelve FTLCs. He’d added Clarence Maddox’s three carriers to his force, and two more carriers—all but one of the uncounted-for pickets in the Concordia and Acera sectors—had arrived to join him less than thirty-six hours after the battle.
And then there was TF 804.
Rajenda’s parasites had been virtually annihilated, and four of his carriers had been destroyed or so brutally damaged there was zero chance they might be repairable. Of the remaining twenty-one, six had surrendered virtually undamaged, seven had taken damage but remained combat effective, and eight had been at least half wrecked. All of that last group were still FTL-capable (or could be made that way out of Jalal’s resources), although their speed in wormhole space would be on the low side, but no one could conceivably consider them fit for action. They’d need the services of a fully equipped shipyard for that.
Effectively, however, Murphy now commanded thirty-three FTLCs, counting Harriet Granger’s detached command. And the Terran Federation Navy’s carrier strength—or at least the portion of it still immediately answerable to the Oval—had been reduced by thirty-seven units.
That was thirteen percent of its total carrier strength. And since twenty-five percent or so of the TFN carrier force was down for overhaul at any given moment, that meant Murphy’s FTLCs were equal to fifteen percent of the Oval’s available strength. Only it was even worse than that, because a hundred and thirty of the Oval’s remaining carriers were in First Fleet, deployed to the Beta Cygni Line. Which meant it had only fifty or so, total, that it could deploy against Murphy and the Free Worlds Alliance without gutting Beta Cygni. And that meant Murphy’s carrier force was sixty-six percent as strong as the Oval’s total currently available carriers.
No doubt the Oval was straining every sinew to get more FTLCs out of yard hands, but that was going to take time. And transferring additional strength from First Fleet to confront Murphy would risk catastrophic defeat by the Terran League Navy.
“At the moment,” O’Hanraghty said in a carefully neutral tone, “nothing the Heart has could keep you from walking straight into the Sol System, Terry. Oh, we’d have to send the newly caught carriers back to New Dublin to pick up fresh parasites from the ones we captured from Xing, and the crews would have to adjust to League designs. For that matter, we’d be light on trained personnel—especially personnel we can trust. But with that many carriers and a shitload of Casúr Cogaidhs, you could be in Earth orbit dictating terms within…five months, outside.”
“And the bloodbath on Old Terra would make the casualties out here look like a flea bite.” Murphy shook his head. “If there’s any hope of settling this without a body count that makes historians sick for the next two hundred years, we can’t get it at the point of a gun, Harry. I’ve never had any intention of attacking the Heart, and you know it. Hell, we told Fokaides and Schleibaum that when we sent in our original report on Diyu! I can’t change tack on that, for a lot of reasons. Including the way it would up the stakes where the Free Worlds Alliance is concerned. The minute I use force majeure to compel the federal government to accept some sort of surrender terms, I shoot any hope for the Federation’s survival right in the head.”
O’Hanraghty nodded, although in the quiet space behind his eyes, he wondered how long it would take Murphy to realize they’d already done that. That the Federation as it had originally been constituted was already dead…and had been, ever since the Five Hundred and the Heart Worlds turned the Fringers into serfs and cannon fodder. He couldn’t begin to predict—yet—what would inevitably replace the moribund, shuffling zombie Terrence Murphy was determined to save, but he’d begun to suspect it would require an even greater sacrifice from Murphy than his friend had yet imagined.
“All right,” he said out loud. “I knew that was a nonstarter before I brought it up, but it needed to be said. Because whether you’re planning on doing it or not, you know damned well that as soon as Fokaides finds out what happened to Task Force Eight-Oh-Four, that’s going to become the Heart’s worst-case scenario. It’s what they’d do in your place, so I guarantee they’ll assume it’s what you’ll do. And that means they’ll pull out all the stops to crush us and the entire Free Worlds Alliance as far away from Sol as they can do it.”
“Of course they will.”
Murphy closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He sat that way for a moment, then inhaled sharply and lowered his hand.
“We have to try talking to them—again, Harry. Maybe they’ll finally be scared enough, thinking about that worst-case scenario of yours, to actually listen for a change. More probably, they won’t. But if there’s any hope at all of a negotiated conclusion to this mess, I need to stay as far away from the Heart as I can. So, Jalal has to remain our contact point. We’ll send dispatches to Sol, repeating our demands—including that they frigging well talk to us!—and reemphasizing that we are not taking advantage of our temporary ascendancy in combat strength to move against the Heart.”
“And if they still won’t talk to us?”
“In that case, I turn warlord,” Murphy said harshly. O’Hanraghty’s eyes popped wide, and Murphy chuckled. “Oh, I don’t mean it the way the Five Hundred is throwing the accusation around! But if the Heart won’t listen, then we start using some of this naval strength of ours to go calling on other Fringe sectors to extend an invitation on behalf of the Free Worlds Alliance. I’ve tried like hell to avoid encouraging this revolt to spread into a genuine revolution, but if they won’t talk to us, I don’t see any other choice.”
“Terry, the Heart has seventy-five percent of the Federation’s industry and two thirds of its total population. And it would have the interior position.” O’Hanraghty shook his head, his expression somber. “Those are pretty heavy odds.”
“Agreed.” Murphy nodded. “And that’s one reason I want, more than almost anything else in the universe, to avoid it. But, first, you know as well as I do that there are a lot of other Navy units whose crews would mutiny to come over to the Fringe at the drop of a hat if they only had the chance. What we’ve already seen is proof enough of that! And there’s not a hell of a lot the Heart can do in the short term about replacing the Fringers in their crews, because there aren’t nearly enough Heart Worlders in uniform. So the immediate, current military balance would shift steadily in our favor, at least until the Oval decides to uncover Beta Cygni, and you know how unlikely that is.
“But, secondly, and more importantly, a genuinely Fringe-wide rebellion would terrify the Five Hundred, and not just because of the Fringe.” He shook his head. “Not every Heart Worlder belongs to the Five Hundred, you know. In fact, it represents at the outside two or three—certainly less than four at the absolute outside—percent of the total Heart World population. The wealthiest, most powerful less-than-four percent, true. The ones who effectively control all the federal levers of power, as well as the Federation’s economy…at the moment. The thing is, though, Harry, that quite a lot of the Federation’s citizens resent the hell out of the Five Hundred, whenever they think about it. And that sort of distribution is always subject to change if the other ninety-six-plus percent of the population is sufficiently motivated.”
“That’s true,” O’Hanraghty said slowly. “But given the inequities you’re talking about, and given how infuriated the Fringe is, a full-scale rebellion or civil war of the kind you’re talking about would be an incredible bloodbath. Worse than anything in Old Terra’s history, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions! Any of the Chinese revolutions.”
“If it comes to that, yes.” Murphy nodded. “But the thing is, the Five Hundred is driven by its desire for wealth and power and keeping that wealth and power for itself. By its vision of itself as the keepers of the keys for the entire Federation. And if the entire Federation goes up in flames, the Five Hundred goes up in flames right with it. So if I can’t make them listen to reason, then I’ll by God terrify them into listening to self-interest and self-preservation.”
“All right,” O’Hanraghty said again. “I think that strategy would be risky as hell, but as an ultimate, it’s-all-gone-to-hell fallback, I could see it. In the meantime, though, I think we need to operate on the theory that it’s at least possible they will be willing to talk to you. And the more likely corollary that we’ll have to kick their asses again at least a time or two before they will.”
“As soon as we send someone home, the Oval will know about our ‘secret weapon,’” Murphy pointed out. “And as you just mentioned, the Heart has seventy-five percent of the Federation’s industry. I have the strangest suspicion that they can outproduce us in Casúr Cogaidhs if they put their minds to it.”
“Of course they can. But they won’t come as a surprise to us, and you and I have been working on tactics to reflect that capability from the get-go. Yes, they’ll have a significant impact on how battles are fought, but if both sides have them, it still comes down to concentration of force and competence of command, and at the moment, we have the edge in both of those.”
“That’s true.” Murphy grimaced. “I wish we didn’t have to think in those terms, but it is true.”
“Then let me throw this out,” O’Hanraghty said. “Diyu.”
Murphy frowned.
“What about Diyu?” he asked after a moment.
“There’s been plenty of time for the League to organize the withdrawal of its personnel from Diyu,” O’Hanraghty said, and Murphy’s frown deepened at the apparent side excursion.
“And?” he said.
“And I haven’t seen Harriet Granger dropping sublight, have you?”
“No,” Murphy said slowly.
“Well, if the Leaguies had turned up to collect their personnel, she would have blown the yard to keep them from putting it back online, and then hauled ass to New Dublin—or to here—to join us. The only reason we didn’t already blow it was that we wanted it to rub in the Five Hundred’s faces, so she damned well would have gotten it done before she pulled out. And we both know she’s too smart and too competent to have let them mousetrap her division, which is the only way the League could have prevented that from happening. So, it would appear that, for reasons best known to the League, it isn’t going to collect its personnel.”
“What?” Murphy cocked his head. “Why wouldn’t they? That’s a lot of trained yard workers, Harry! And they’re going to need working shipyards worse than ever after what we took away from them.”
“Sure it is, but what happened to Diyu was a disaster, not just militarily, but politically. As a general rule, Terry, you do a pretty fair job as a political analyst, so think about this. The Eternal Forward Party was the driving force behind Diyu. We know that from the records we captured there, and, frankly, because they’re the only ones who could have arranged it. And if we—you—hadn’t come along and screwed their plans completely, those carriers would have cut loose in the Federation’s rear areas, and the League would almost certainly have won the war. Huge kudos for Eternal Forward, new lock on power, and everybody’s happy.
“But now what was supposed to be Eternal Forward’s overwhelming, culminating triumph has turned into the greatest military disaster in League history. The physical plant in Diyu’s lost to the League, no matter what, because Than knows perfectly well that, at the very least, you’ll have left a caretaker force to destroy the yard the instant the League turns up to retake possession. So the only resource they could really recover would be the workers. And as an intel weenie who’s studied the League for the several decades—I wasn’t solely a Rish nutcase, you know—I think it’s entirely possible Eternal Forward would choose to let them rot rather than bring that kind of proof of failure home again.”
“You really think they’d believe they could hide it?” Murphy asked skeptically.
“Wouldn’t be all that hard, actually.” O’Hanraghty shrugged. “They built the place under security that was so good nobody ever got even a sniff of it. The records we’ve already examined make it clear that once someone transferred into Diyu they didn’t transfer back out again. And we just happen to have eliminated virtually every mobile unit, aside from Than’s carriers, that ever based out of Diyu. So where, exactly, would the leak to the League news media—assuming there was any League news media that wasn’t completely controlled by Eternal Forward—come from?
“As long as they don’t bring any of those shipyard workers home, that is.”
“What about Than?” Murphy asked, but his tone said he already knew how O’Hanraghty would answer.
“Than and his people are probably just as much dead men walking, as far as Eternal Forward is concerned, as you and I are where the Five Hundred are concerned, Terry. The Five Hundred can’t let our report go public, not with any kind of official imprimatur. Than is in exactly the same position, and, frankly, I’ll be amazed if he’s not already dead.”
“Damn.” Murphy shook his head. “I’d hate that. The man’s entirely too competent for my peace of mind, but he deserves better than that.”
“Far be it from me to point out that that’s true of quite a few people I could think of,” O’Hanraghty said dryly. “Including two people sitting here in your office at the moment.”
“Point taken,” Murphy acknowledged with a chuckle. But then he cocked his head. “Where, exactly, have you been headed with all of this?”
“I’m headed to the possibility that Diyu could be the Free Worlds Alliance’s hole card from hell,” O’Hanraghty said flatly. “There’s an entire highly trained workforce sitting there, abandoned by their own government. The yard itself is bigger than any single yard in the entire Federation. Hell, its capacity’s at least as big as Venus Futures’ entire Sol System operation, and it’s even more heavily automated. It doesn’t have the capacity to fabricate Fasset drives, but it can certainly repair them, and it has the foundries and the extraction industry to have built the hulls of every single one of the FTLCs the Rish were providing drive fans for. All we have to do is figure out how to convince that highly trained workforce to come over to our side.”
“A nontrivial challenge, I would suspect.” Murphy’s tone was even drier than O’Hanraghty’s had been a moment earlier.
“If it were easy, anyone could do it,” O’Hanraghty shot back. “But I don’t think it would be quite as hard as you may be thinking. First, by now they have to realize their ride home isn’t coming. They’ve been abandoned, written off, and they’ll never see their families again. That’s got to affect their loyalty—to Eternal Forward, at least, if not to the concept of the Tè Lā Lián Méng itself.
“Second, they know you’re essentially in rebellion against the federal government. I tend to doubt they’d be willing to accept that you’re trying to save the Federation, even if we told them that. People judge other people’s motives on the basis of previous experience, and their experience with Eternal Forward isn’t likely to encourage a belief in selflessness on the part of anyone’s political leadership. But even if they were to decide that was what you were trying to do, consider this. The more powerful we become, the greater the strength the Heart will ultimately be forced to divert if it ever hopes to defeat us. And every carrier diverted from Beta Cygni is one less for their own navy to face out along the line. So from that perspective, they’d actually be doing their patriotic duty by helping support the fragmentation of the Federation. And either way, we’d be the only hope they’d ever have of going home, whether because we somehow beat the League and let them go home, or because we help the League beat the Federation and it takes them home after it kicks the TFN’s ass.”
“Damn, Harry,” Murphy said after a moment, his eyes a bit distant. “You make a fine snake oil salesman.” He shook his head, and his eyes refocused. “But the really scary thing is I think you might be right. We might actually be able to pull that off. Of course, we’ve been inviting—imploring—the Oval to send an inspection team out to Diyu, so its existence isn’t exactly a secret.”
“And we’ve also been telling them Granger’s under orders to blow the yard when the League transport force finally turns up,” O’Hanraghty countered, then shrugged. “We’ve got the most detailed photographic records imaginable. We’ve got complete clones of most of their cyber systems. We’ve got captured examples of both League and Rish hardware, along with the holo record of our removing those examples from the warships we captured in Diyu. There’s nothing an actual, physical examination of the yard could provide that that evidence doesn’t already provide, Terry. Face it, anybody who’d believe us under any circumstances would have to be convinced by that mountain of evidence.
“So, in your next message to Olympia, you tell them that, regretfully, it will no longer be possible for them to examine the actual yard, since we were forced to destroy it rather than allow it to fall back into League hands. And then we send our damaged carriers off to Diyu, and when they get there, we lay the proposition before Captain Sunwar and his senior officers and see how they react.
“The worst that can happen is that they say ‘no.’ But if it should happen that they say ‘yes’…”
He raised both hands, shoulder high, and smiled thinly.