CHAPTER ONE
RHLNS Cai Shen
Wormhole Space
August 10, 2552
“We’re as ready as we are going to be, Sir,” Captain Su Zhihao said somberly.
Third Admiral Than Qiang looked up from his cup of tea and nodded to his chief of staff. His expression was remarkably tranquil, Su thought. Far more tranquil than the man behind it could possibly feel, at least.
They were twenty-four hours by the universe’s clock—only three and a half by the clocks aboard RHLNS Cai Shen, as the enormous faster-than-light carrier tore through wormhole space at ninety-nine percent of light speed—out of the Tè Lā Lián Méng system of Shanhaiguan.
“The communication protocols are all in place,” Su continued. “But you know there are going to be questions about the lockdown from Shanhaiguan HQ.”
“You mean there will be a great deal of curiosity about it,” Than responded. Su raised his eyebrows, and the third admiral chuckled. There was very little humor in the sound.
“The last time we were in Shanhaiguan, we were still Liu’s anointed secret weapon,” he pointed out. “No one here knows differently. And Duan does know he was deliberately cut out of the chain for Bastion. That he was never even briefed on what it was, only that he was to give me whatever support I required and never say a word about it. Do you really think he’s going to question any ‘security protocol’ I want to impose?”
Su began to reply, then paused, stroking his goatee.
Fourth Admiral Duan Bao, the Shanhaiguan System’s military commander, was junior to Than. Technically, he couldn’t countermand any order Than gave to the units of his own command; practically speaking, his authority as Shanhaiguan’s “port admiral” gave him more than enough authority to question them, however. But Than was correct. Duan was a thoroughly political animal, and Liu Gengxin wasn’t simply a senior member of the Accord. He was also the Minister of War and almost certainly the next president of the Tè Lā Lián Méng—the Terran League, to its baakgwai adversaries. As long as Duan thought Than was one of Liu’s favorites, he would never dream of crossing the third admiral.
“There is that,” the chief of staff acknowledged. “No, put that way, I don’t see him rocking the boat. But what about Xiong?”
Than grimaced. Unlike Duan, Xiong Luoyang, the civilian governor of Shanhaiguan, was a member in good standing of the Accord that ruled the League. That meant that, unlike Duan, he did have authority to press Than on any decision he might make. And while he had no authority—legally—to override the third admiral in purely military matters, he was one of Minister of War Liu’s toadies. On the other hand…
“Xiong is a xīxuèguǐ,” Than said. It was a mark of his utter trust in Su that he allowed himself to use the derogatory term. Although, he thought, calling the career bureaucrats and self-seekers who’d sold their souls to the Accord bloodsuckers did a profound disservice to leeches, fleas, ticks, and vampires.
“He’s not going to risk putting his oar into anything to do with Dragon Fleet,” Than continued, just a bit more confidently than he felt. “Especially if he even thinks whatever’s going on has the potential to piss off Liu. If something serious has gone wrong, all he’ll be thinking about is how to prove it wasn’t his fault and that he didn’t know a thing about it at the time.”
“Umm.” Su stroked his goatee some more, then nodded with a slow and nasty smile. But then the smile faded, and he shook his head.
“Whether Duan or Xiong or any of their people ask those questions officially, they’re still going to exist,” he pointed out. “And some of our people will be really unhappy if they can’t even speak to their families.”
“I know.” Than nodded unhappily. “In fact, I’ve decided you’re right. Pass the word that all of our people will be allowed to leave messages for their families before we depart the system. The lockdown on all comm transmissions stands, so there won’t be any face-to-face conversations, and I can’t allow any messages to be distributed until we’re back into wormhole space. But any of them who have loved ones in Shanhaiguan deserve the right to tell them at least something, and how can I deny them that? Especially now.”
Their eyes met, and Su nodded in understanding. How could he not understand, when he was the one who’d made the quiet arrangements to see to it that Than’s family was aboard one of his ships when they left the system? There were arguments against taking them into the range of the Guójiā Ānquán Jú, the Bureau of State Security. There were even more arguments against leaving them behind, under the circumstances.
“I want you to personally tweak the censorship protocols, though,” Than continued. “There’s no way we can keep this quiet forever, especially when we start staging the evacuees through Shanhaiguan, but the longer we keep a lid on it, the better. And we absolutely need to keep it quiet until we’ve cleared the system for Uromachi.”
“You aren’t going to ask Duan to send the rescue ships to Diyu directly from here?” Su asked in a rather neutral tone, and Than grimaced.
“I can’t. For one thing, Duan isn’t cleared for Bastion or Dragon Fleet. I know—I know!” He waved one hand. “After what Murphy did to us, that’s just become a dead letter, but, let’s face it, Zhihao. We have enough marks against us on the Accord’s ledger without adding ‘willful dissemination of classified information’ to the charge list. Besides, there won’t be enough FTL lift in Shanhaiguan to pick up more than a handful of them, anyway. There probably won’t be enough at Uromachi, for that matter! Still, we’ll have a bigger potential shipping pool to work with there. I’ll have to look around and see what’s available. And what Governor Zheng and Fourth Admiral Deng are willing to cut loose.”
Su nodded thoughtfully.
Governor Zheng Nuan was well into her seventies, almost eighty, with a political career that had begun even before the war with the Federation. She regarded Liu and Eternal Forward in general as political thugs and they knew it, but she was too good at her job—and too firmly entrenched in the hearts of the citizens of Uromachi—for Liu to get rid of. Or, at least, to waste the political capital getting rid of her would cost. Besides, encroaching age had cost her some of her fire. It was fairly evident she and Liu had arrived at a truce under which she did her job without getting in his way and he left her alone to do it. But she certainly had both the stature and the authority to authorize the evacuation of Diyu.
On the Navy side, Fourth Admiral Deng Zan was ten or fifteen years younger than Than, but she’d had a reputation as a fighter before she got sucked into the administrative side of the Rénzú Liánméng Hǎijūn. As far as Su knew, she was a loyal supporter of the Accord, but at the end of the day, he suspected, her most fundamental loyalty was to the Tè Lā Lián Méng itself, and not to whatever corrupt political clique happened to be running it this week.
If he knew that, though, the Accord certainly knew it, too, in which case they’d be keeping her on a short leash. And the fact that Uromachi was both the Di Jun Sector’s administrative hub and one of the League’s major shipyards—major known shipyards, anyway—would only add to the shortness of that leash. In fact—
“You are going to tell Governor Zheng about what happened to Diyu, though, Sir?”
“I haven’t changed my mind about that. She and Deng both have to know, given what losing the yards there probably means for Uromachi. But the rest of it—” Than grimaced. “There ought to be a balance between what we can tell people who need information without getting ourselves shot and the complete silence you know damned well Liu will slam down as soon as he gets a hint of this. I’ll be damned if I know where the balance point is, though! Damn Xing!”
Su certainly couldn’t argue with his admiral there. Xing Xuefeng had to have been the most narcissistic, sociopathic, useless excuse for a flag officer it had ever been Su Zhihao’s misfortune to encounter. Just thinking about the disaster she’d engineered—engineered in no small part by systematically ignoring or willfully disregarding every single thing Than had suggested—was enough to turn his stomach. Years—decades!—of investment in money, resources, personnel to build what should have been the League’s decisive weapon against the Terran Federation. All of it pissed away in the space of months by an arrogant, egotistical bitch.
“At least you told Murphy she was still alive aboard Nüwa, Sir,” he pointed out. “After Inverness, and what she tried to do in New Dublin, I doubt she enjoyed making his acquaintance.”
“I didn’t much enjoy making his acquaintance,” Than admitted wryly. “That man’s dangerous, Zhihao! I know the gods themselves must have conspired to give him the intel to pull that off, but he acted on it. How many Fed admirals would’ve had the guts to go that far outside his standing orders? Or the tactical ability to kick our ass so thoroughly when he did!”
“We don’t know for sure how far outside orders he actually was,” Su pointed out.
“Oh, please!” Than rolled his eyes. “We’ve known for decades that the last thing any of the Five Hundred want is a Fringe system with the ability to go ‘out of compliance’ and stay there. Oh, don’t misunderstand me—our political elite’s done just as good a job of protecting their families as the Five Hundred has, but outside those families, the burden of combat’s much more evenly shared by our people as a whole. But their Heart Worlds have shuffled the burden of something like eighty percent of the Federation’s combat deaths off onto their Fringers, and the total Fringe population is less than a third of the Federation’s total population. Think about that. Eighty percent of their casualties out of thirty percent of their population.” Than grimaced. “That’s the real reason we’ve never had to park as many pickets amongst the Out Worlds as the Feds have to scatter across the Fringe, and you know it as well as I do. All we have to worry about is a Federation attack, not whether or not our own people will rebel.
“And there’s no way he hauled all of those missile pods—or whatever they were—out from the Heart with him, either. If they’d had that kind of weapon, they wouldn’t have shipped it someplace like the Fringe. They’d have shipped it to Beta Cygni and ripped the front wide open. So whatever it was, he cobbled it up in New Dublin, and he built it there. That means the New Dubliners can build as many more of it as they want, and you and I both know what he was supposed to do was sit on New Dublin and keep it ‘in compliance,’ not give it the means to go out of it!” The third admiral shook his head. “No, he was so far out of official Fed policy he couldn’t have found it with a gravitic sensor.”
Su saw something very much like admiration, or possibly even envy, in Than’s eyes, and he understood it. The number of times Than Qiang had wanted to emulate Murphy’s defiance of policies he knew were wrong had to be enormous. And, in fairness, for all his lethality in combat, Terrence Murphy was a man of honor, as well. That, too, was something Than Qiang understood.
“The truth is,” Than went on now, “that Murphy is probably the only admiral more likely than me to get shot for being the bearer of bad news. Sure, he’s got a little better ‘job security’ than we do, given the fact that he’s from the Five Hundred. But if the rest of the Five Hundred decide he’s a threat—and anybody who can motivate Fringers to do what the New Dubliners obviously did for him is a threat—they’ll throw him to the wolves even faster than Liu would throw me to the wolves.”
“That’s too bad,” Su said soberly. “I think he was sincere. I think he wants the war to end. And I don’t think he’s one of those Feds who think the only acceptable peace treaty has to be signed in the rubble of Anyang.”
“Maybe not, but he is a Fed,” Than pointed out. “If he can convince the Oval and the Five Hundred to really look at his evidence—and, gods know, he’s got plenty of it from Diyu—they’ll have to realize how badly we’ve been hurt. And now that Murphy’s uncovered our little agreement with the Rish, they’ll have to wonder if the Sphere might be willing to come into the war openly to support us. If the matriarchs were willing to secretly help us build ships to fight the Feds, will they be willing to send in their own navy to offset our losses in Diyu?”
“You don’t really think they will, though, do you?”
“I think anyone who thinks he truly understands how the Rish think is delusional.” Than shrugged. “The one thing I do know is that I never believed for a moment that the Rishathan Sphere was helping us out of any sense of altruism. For that matter, they never made any pretense that they were. It was a matter of their finding us less threatening to their long-term interests than the Feds. They weren’t helping us so much as they were breaking the Feds’ kneecaps and using us to do it.”
He shrugged again, and Su nodded. As Than had just suggested, the Rishathan matriarchs didn’t think remotely like humans did. But they clearly understood galactic realpolitik, and the Federation’s frontiers weren’t simply closer to the Rishathan Sphere’s borders than the Tè Lā Lián Méng’s, they were also expanding more rapidly.
“Unfortunately,” Than continued, “the Feds can’t rely on the Sphere’s deciding to take its toys and go home, and they have to know that if it should decide to double down on its investment in us and commit its own navy, it would tilt the balance of power a lot further in our favor than even the Dragon Fleet could have. That’s not something that could happen overnight, though, so even if the Rish are prepared to do it—which I doubt they are—the Federation still has a window in which it will hold a significant—decisive, really—advantage. So I’m afraid it’s only too likely that if they believe him, they will push for a new offensive, while they have the edge, and equip it with those new pods of his. And if we’re totally unlucky, they’ll put him in command of it, when they do!”
“Then we’d just better hope the Five Hundred won’t look at it, Sir,” Su said hopefully. “As you said, they’ve got plenty of reason to decide he’s a threat. There’s a damned good chance they’ll act on that instead of listening to anything he has to say!”
“I know there is. And, little though he deserves it, I can’t help hoping that’s exactly what they do. But the truth is,” Than shook his head, “I’m afraid it’s wishful thinking. Given what he’s discovered, and what he did to us, I can’t really believe even the Five Hundred would be stupid enough not to believe him. And if they do, we—in that so-charming Fed turn of phrase—are toast.”