CHAPTER TWENTY
Ithaca House
City of Kórinthos
Planet Odysseus
Bellerophon System
Terran Federation
December 14, 2552
Konstantinos Xeneas looked up from his quiet conversation with Justine Von Undingen as Menelaos Tolallis and the trio of Navy officers followed Erasmia Samarili into the secure bunker buried deep under Ithaca House. The other civilians seated around the long, polished table in the palatial, subterranean conference room turned their heads, following his gaze, and all conversation came to a halt—and the tension level ratcheted upward—as he rose in greeting.
“Mr. President,” Tolallis said in his best formal tone as Xeneas extended a hand.
“General,” Xeneas replied, then turned to the Navy officers.
“Commodore Carson.” He held out his hand to the dark-skinned, blond-haired FWA officer, then looked past her at Captain Mariaxuri Errezola and Achilleas Rodoulis. “Captain Errezola, Captain Rodoulis.”
“Mr. President,” Lauren Carson replied for all of them, and he waved at the empty chairs awaiting them.
He settled back into his own seat as they found their places, then circled the table with his gaze before he returned his attention to Tolallis and Carson.
“Obviously, we’re glad all of you could make it down from your ships,” he said then. “I know you won’t be able to do that once we get closer to Naxos—” he saw Carson’s lips quirk; he’d been surprised she’d already known the name of the island where the invading Persian army had landed on its way to the Battle of Thermopylae in 492 BC “—and I certainly don’t want to take you away from training time between then and now. But face-to-face discussions and briefings are still better than even the best comm conference.”
“That’s certainly true from a morale perspective, Mr. President,” Carson said with a small smile. “And—” her smile grew broader “—anything that boosts morale is a decided plus just now.”
Several of those present chuckled, and if those chuckles were just a bit strained, Xeneas couldn’t blame them. On the other hand, they were far less strained than they’d been before Aikaterini Karalaki’s return from New Dublin aboard Errezola’s FTLC.
The Cyclops Sector’s other star systems’ response to Bellerophon’s defiance had been more favorable than Xeneas had dared to hope. There still hadn’t been time to bring the sector’s smaller, more distant systems up to speed, because they simply had too few FTL hulls for that, but they’d contacted the major systems: Cyclops, Achilles, Cerberus, Dordogne, Espeadas, Loire, Minotaur, and Mulhacén.
Xeneas had scarcely been surprised when Cyclops rejected any possibility of joining Bellerophon. Sector Governor Utada was a Heart Worlder who’d been chosen for his position on the basis of his unswerving loyalty, and Steropes, the system’s habitable planet, had a far higher concentration of federal enforcement agencies and their armed personnel than any of the sector’s other systems. The fact that System President Hastings had married into the Five Hundred had probably played at least a small part in the system’s decision, as well.
Espeadas had declined to send a delegate to Bellerophon. Xeneas suspected System President Borobia would have signed on with the secessionists if not for his lively fear of what the Heart would do to Bellerophon, and he expected Espeadas to be along shortly… if the secession stood up.
All of the others had at least sent plenipotentiary delegations to Bellerophon’s Secession Convention, although so far only Minotaur, Mulhacén, and Loire had actually signed the Declaration of Secession. Assuming they all survived the next month or so, he anticipated that the other delegations would sign on, especially once their system governments discovered that the Free Worlds Alliance had offered the entire sector both admission to the Alliance and military assistance.
Of course, first they had to do that surviving, he thought grimly.
“If everyone’s agreeable, I thought we’d ask General Tolallis and Commodore Carson to bring us up to speed on their side of the shop,” he said. “There are a lot of civil and political issues we still need to iron out, but those will be relevant only if our military personnel can keep us alive.”
He bestowed a wintry smile upon his fellows, then nodded to Tolallis.
“General?”
“With your permission, Mr. President,” the general said, “I’d prefer to let Commodore Carson and Captain Rodoulis lay out the Navy side of our position before we get into the planetary side.”
“That sounds more than reasonable,” Xeneas said, and cocked his head at Carson. “Commodore?”
“Actually, Mr. President, I think it would be best to let Captain Rodoulis cover the basic naval position before I offer my credit’s worth. As we say back home on Adenauer, he’s from around these parts, and I’m not.”
Several people surprised themselves with another round of chuckles, and Carson smiled tightly, green eyes touched with what looked like genuine amusement of her own. But then the smile faded.
“The truth is, Mr. President, that even though I may be the senior Free Worlds Alliance officer present, and even though you’ve placed your defensive units under Alliance command, this is your fight. Aside from Aurora and Captain Errezola’s people, everyone involved in this situation is from Bellerophon or one of the other Cyclops systems, or at least a Fringer who made her own decision to support you before we came along. That means there’s a lot more at stake here for your people than for the Alliance at large. So I’d really prefer for you to hear an Odyssian’s evaluation before I start flinging around opinions or projections.”
“I appreciate that, Commodore,” Xeneas said, and he meant it. He looked at Rodoulis. “Captain?”
“Of course, Mr. President,” Rodoulis replied. He paused for a sip of ice water, then looked around the table.
“In general terms, we’re far better off than we were afraid we might be,” he said then. “Largely, that’s because of President Dewar’s response. None of us anticipated that he’d have another carrier in-system or that he could—and would—send it to help us out. And no one in Cyclops had any clue about the…‘Casúr Cogaidhs’—” he pronounced the Gaelic words a bit carefully “—or what that might mean for our defenses.
“I’m not trying to suggest we don’t still face a very, very serious threat, but I’m completely positive that no one in the Oval can have the least idea just how dangerous those defenses of ours have become. I wish we’d been able to bring Saga over to our side as well, but Aurora and the Casúr Cogaidhs are one hell of a replacement!”
Heads nodded soberly.
The truth was that they’d done extraordinarily well where the Cyclops Sector picket forces were concerned. All four of the carriers stationed in Bellerophon itself had come over to the mutiny, along with virtually their entire sublight parasite complements. Half a dozen of the parasites—including two battleships—had been destroyed or gutted in the process, but they represented only a relatively minor loss in combat power. TFNS Hermes, the single carrier in the Achilles picket, had joined the mutiny the instant Ninurta dropped out of wormhole space and Captain Rudnicka received the burst-transmitted personal message from her old Academy friend, Khairi al-Massoud.
The situation in Minotaur had been a bit more ticklish, since Captain Gyatso, TFNS Bienor’s CO, had been a Heart Worlder to the core. Unfortunately for him, seventy-plus percent of his crew hadn’t. Once they found out why Commander Marchant and Khandoba had come calling, the situation aboard Bienor had turned nasty very, very quickly. Gyatso had survived, although not without a certain amount of damage, and been replaced by Captain Jakab Dorottya, the senior squadron CO from Bienor’s parasite group.
And then there’d been Cyclops.
Rodoulis and his fellows had known Rear Admiral Källström would never join them willingly. That was why they’d called on Cyclops first—and taken all four of the Bellerophon FTLCs with them—before they’d dispatched envoys to the other systems. They’d arrived with twice Källström’s combat power, hoping he’d see reason, but they hadn’t really expected him to, and their expectations had proved only too well grounded when fierce fighting broke out aboard both FTLCs.
No one would ever know what had actually happened aboard TFNS Saga, Källström’s flagship, but the scraps of comm traffic they’d picked up suggested that most of the big ship’s senior officers had backed the rebellion. They did know Källström himself had been killed in the fighting that took his flag bridge, but that hadn’t been enough. From the sensor data, Rodoulis suspected that a Heart loyalist in Saga’s engineering department had gotten to one of the carrier’s fusion plants. That was certainly one explanation for the explosion that had destroyed her with all hands.
Her consort Enlil had been more fortunate. Rafal Makowski, her captain, had been badly wounded, but his XO had carried the ship for the mutiny, which had given Bellerophon seven of the sector’s eight FTLCs, and they’d been concentrated in Bellerophon by the time Aurora arrived from New Dublin with the FWA’s response.
“If I were Fokaides,” Rodoulis continued, “I’d plan my deployments based on a worst-case assumption, which would be that we’d taken all eight of the sector’s carriers. It would be nice if we had, in which case Aurora would constitute an even nastier surprise for the Hearts, but that would still be his worst-case estimate for the numbers he might face. Unfortunately for his calculations, there’s no way he or any of his planners can have allowed for the existence of the Casúr Cogaidhs. In addition, it’s unlikely as hell that anyone in the Sol System has any inkling of the buzz saw waiting for them at Jalal Station. We know from Commodore Carson that Governor Murphy hoped to resolve any confrontation at Jalal without violence, but we’ve had several days now to look at just what the Casúr Cogaidhs mean tactically.” He shook his head. “If there was any violence, I’ll guarantee it didn’t end the way the Heart expected it to.”
He took another sip of water.
“We can’t know what they’re going to send our way,” he said then, his expression somber. “But I think we can all assume Fokaides will send every ship he can scrape up. For that matter, he won’t send anything unless he figures he can take down the biggest force he believes we can put up against him. The last thing any of those Heart World bastards is about to do is commit a force they think could lose, because they absolutely can’t afford any more failures in the Fringe. So we can probably assume we’ll be looking at a minimum of twelve-plus carriers and probably as many as sixteen, if they can dig up that many. Personally, I don’t think they can—not if they’re also sending a force after Murphy—but even our minimum number is one hell of a lot of firepower.”
He looked around the table, his eyes level.
“If they managed to put together a force they think is big enough and got it into wormhole space within a week or so of the Lucille Anderman’s arrival in Sol, they could be here by January eighth. Which means we’ve got about a month—worst-case—before they arrive. Assuming Murphy is in a position to send reinforcements our way from Jalal as soon as President Dewar’s courier reaches him, they could be here by the fifteenth or sixteenth. So we’re essentially looking at a one-week window between his and the Hearts’ earliest possible arrival dates. I don’t see any way Murphy could better that, but if we’re lucky, it’ll take the Oval longer than that to scrape up the naval and planetary combat forces they expect to need.”
“And if we’re not lucky, Captain?” Xeneas asked quietly, when Rodoulis paused.
“And if we’re not lucky, Mr. President,” the captain said flatly, “our task group hits them head-on and does as much damage as we possibly can, buys as much time as we can. If I were Murphy, I’d slice off maybe half a dozen of my carriers. I don’t see how he could possibly justify reducing his own strength below that level, when he only has twelve. That means we need to chop the Hearts back to something he can handle with that many ships. Given the fact that he’ll come in heavy with Casúr Cogaidhs, he could probably hack superior numbers, but we’ve still got to prune them back as hard as we can.”
“Forgive me, Captain, but may I ask a question?” Justine Von Undingen said.
The Minotaur System’s chief executive was the only elected system head of state to come sign the Declaration in person. At barely 157 centimeters, she was the smallest of the Secession Convention’s delegates, but she was also the most fiery.
“Of course, Ma’am.”
“If the object is to ‘buy time’ until Governor Murphy’s reinforcements arrive, then might this not to be the time for what I believe you Navy officers call a ‘fleet in being’ approach? Is it really necessary for you to lock yourselves into a headlong battle against superior numbers?”
Rodoulis began to answer, but Commodore Carson raised her hand before he could.
“Believe me, Ma’am, if we thought we could avoid that, we would,” she said with a bittersweet smile. “And against another opponent, under other circumstances, maneuvering in the outer system, threatening her rear, might deter her long enough for our purposes. But I’m afraid any CO the Oval sends out here will be under orders to move directly against Odysseus, even if that means completely ignoring any mobile elements we might have in-system. And that’s especially true if they have a significant numerical edge. They don’t really care about our ships as such, Ma’am. They care about the planet, the star system. And if they reach attack range of Odysseus, and if Prime Minister Schleibaum’s authorized Standing Order Fifteen, they’ll threaten to K-strike every city and town on the planet unless all of our warships surrender. And they can do that from well beyond the Powell Limit. Planets are very slow, very predictable targets. They aren’t hard to hit, and if we try to provide some sort of close-in shield, they can just stand off and hammer us with wave after wave of KEWs and missiles. Trying to keep them off the planet will weaken our own point defenses, which will tilt the tactical equation even further in their favor, but that’s not the real reason we can’t do that.”
Her dark green gaze circled the conference room.
“The real reason is that it’s a statistical certainty we can’t stop them all. No missile defense is perfect, even under ideal conditions. And if a single Bijalee gets past us at, say, a hundred and twenty thousand KPS, you’re looking at a seventy-megaton impact. That’s a fireball with a seven-kilometer radius. Blast will flatten even ceramacrete buildings over a zone eighteen kilometers in diameter. The thermal pulse will inflict third-degree burns at almost sixty kilometers. Admittedly, a planet can absorb a lot of damage. Ocean strikes will be pretty bad, but survivable, and hits in the back of beyond won’t kill a bunch of people. But they won’t target the back of beyond. They’ll target cities. And if even one hit gets though to, say, Kórinthos…”
She let her voice trail off, and silence fell. It lingered for several seconds, then—
“Do you really think they’d go that far, Commodore?” Mathis Levasseur asked. At forty-six, the Loire System’s assistant prime minister was the youngest of the Convention’s delegates, and his brown eyes were worried.
“Of course they would!” Rajeev Sonarkar said before Carson could reply. He was barely seven years older than Levasseur, with a very pale complexion, a depilated scalp, and a neatly trimmed brown beard. He was thirty-seven centimeters taller than Justine Von Undingen, but his commitment burned almost equally hot.
“If there’s ever been a dictionary example of a system—hell, an entire sector!—going ‘out of compliance,’ we’re it,” he continued harshly. “We all know what they did to Gobelins, despite the effort to hush it up, and that was a single system. A whole sector? Added to what’s already happened in Concordia and Acera?” He shook his head, his expression grim. “They won’t give a damn how many eggs they smash here as long as they get their frigging omelette made.”
“I’m afraid Rajeev and the Commodore are right, Mathis,” Xeneas said heavily. “That’s part of what drove this whole thing from my perspective from the outset. Whatever happened in New Dublin, however it began, the entire Fringe has just been set on fire. Frankly, I don’t think it’s physically possible for the federal government and the Heart to stop it—not this time. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try, and one thing they’ve already demonstrated is that they’re perfectly willing to slaughter however many civilians it takes. So we have to assume from the outset that Gobelins will be their starting point for what happens to Odysseus and the rest of the sector…unless we stop them.”
A cold, chill silence fell over the conference room. It lingered until Carson cleared her throat.
“I think the President’s right, Mr. Levasseur,” she said then, softly. “The Heart Worlds don’t give a single solitary damn about Fringer deaths. If anyone at this table knows that, I do.” She swept the civilians with bitter green eyes. “I watched a Heart system CO refuse action against an inferior League attack force and then leave an entire planetary population to die on Inverness, and if it hadn’t been for Admiral Murphy, every single one of those people would have died. Even after everything he could do, ninety-plus percent of them did. And I have to live with that. It wasn’t my decision, wasn’t my choice, but it was my ship. My captain. And not one single politician or flag officer in the Heart would’ve said a single damned word about it…if not for Murphy. If they’re willing to stand for that, Fokaides and Schleibaum and the Five Hundred have to figure the voters will stand for whatever they do ‘to suppress rebellion and mutiny.’ And this system is where they’ll start.”
Levasseur looked at her for a long, still moment, then nodded.
“In light of that,” Carson continued, “we don’t have any option but to fight. In fact, we really need to fight and win before they even know we’re here. Before they think there’s any reason to stand off and use the threat of Standing Order Fifteen to make us lie down for them. And the nature of the engagement—the probable balance of firepower and the geometry of their approach and our defense—limits our options badly. We’ve come up with what we believe is the best available tactical plan. There’s no guarantee it will work, and even if it goes perfectly we may take heavy losses among our own units. We hope we won’t. We hope sheer surprise and the Casúrs will let us get in and gut them before they even know we’re here. We may not, in which case we’ll probably get hammered hard ourselves. But we still believe it’s our best chance of ‘pruning them back’ for Governor Murphy. And I’ll tell all of you this, too. I won’t see another, bigger Inverness. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes, that is not happening on my watch.”
She paused again, let the silence linger, and then her nostrils flared and her shoulders squared themselves.
“Understand me, please.” Those steady green eyes swept the gathered civilians yet again. “We don’t want to fight that sort of battle. No sane naval commander would. And all of us are hoping—praying—Governor Murphy’s reinforcements get here first, so we don’t have to. If those reinforcements don’t get here first, though, then this is almost certainly our best—our only—shot at plowing the road for him. But after we take it, unless our intercept plan goes perfectly, there won’t be anything else we can do from outside atmosphere. So if worse comes to worst and our ops plan falls apart, it’ll be up to General Tolallis and you ladies and gentlemen to buy the rest of the time the Governor will need.”
Silence fell again, because every individual in that conference room understood why there wouldn’t “be anything else” their defensive task force could do from outside atmosphere. It would be because the naval officers seated at that table with them would almost certainly be among those “heavy losses” Carson had just described.
“If that happens, Commodore, we’ll do our very best,” Xeneas said, and it was an oath—a promise to the woman who’d come all the way from New Dublin to die in his star system’s defense.
“I know you will, Mr. President,” she replied. “I’m counting on it.”
“In that case,” Xeneas said in a deliberately brisker tone, “where are we on the groundside planning, General Tolallis?”
“Actually, we’re doing better than I’d hoped,” Tolallis said. “Which isn’t to say we’re in any position to hold off a major assault force indefinitely, but I think we’ll represent a lot harder bite to chew than anyone in the Oval might anticipate. The System Defense Force has called up all the reserves, and we’re raising additional volunteer battalions for rear area security out of our local pool of veterans. And Commissioner Ganatos has taken over Civil Defense from the SDF, since that’s mostly a police function, anyway, which frees us up to focus on the shooters’ responsibilities.
“We’ve actually had enough time to spin up small arms and ammunition production, so we ought to have more than enough personal weapons to go around. We’re shorter on heavy and crew-served weapons, and I very much wish we had more air and drone support, but we’re better off even there than I’d really expected, and at least everyone who’s willing to stand up and fight will have something to do the fighting with. And we’re preparing dug-in positions to cover critical targets like the power grid, while teams of engineers have prepared facilities and locations we’ve identified as operationally critical to an invader for command demolition.
“We’ve also prepared several dispersed, fortified command-and-control centers, with secure landline and laser connections to remote communications nodes. Hopefully that will prevent orbital recon from pinpointing them for K-strikes or assault landings. Every one of my upper-tier HQs has been tasked with preparing multiple fallback command posts, as well. And we’ve established links to all government and commercial security systems. We won’t be able to match their ability to look down from orbit, but we’ll have a much better ground-level recon ability than they will, at least in our urban areas, and we’re in the process of creating decoy communications and command sites to help keep them guessing.
“We’ve already begun moving as many civilians as possible out of immediate threat zones, but there’s a limit to how much of that Commissioner Ganatos can do without disrupting critical industries and services. Besides, we don’t really have places to put millions of civilians. We’ve commandeered most of the civilian construction printers on the planet, and we’ve got them cranking out bare-bones prefab housing, but there are limits on how much we can produce in the time we have. Same thing with stockpiling food outside the towns and cities. We’re doing our best, and Commissioner Ganatos has prepared evacuation plans for all of the major cities. Our deep-space sensor arrays should give us a minimum of four hours warning before any attack force drops out of wormhole space, and at maximum deceleration rates, it’ll take them another six and a half or seven hours to decelerate into planetary orbit. Commissioner Ganatos’s current objective is to have everyone out of our major urban areas—or at least into the deep shelters—in six hours, and it looks to me and my staff like he’ll pull that off.
“Now, in addition to protecting our population to the best of our ability, we have to be concerned about maintaining continuity of the government.”
The general looked at the civilians at the table.
“I’ve already had to deal with some of my own officers’…unhappiness over ‘going bush’ in the face of a possible attack. They know better, but some of them still appear to feel as if that’s an act of cowardice, as if they’re running out and abandoning the civilians they’re supposed to defend. It isn’t. It’s an act of sanity, and a recognition of their responsibilities. And the same thing is true for our civilian leadership. Everyone out there who’s given his or her support to the Declaration—or who’s just keeping his or her head down and trying to survive—is your responsibility, and you can’t discharge that responsibility if you’re caught in a K-strike or taken into custody by the same sort of people who massacred every political leader they could get their hands on in Gobelins. Accordingly, I’ve prepared evacuation plans for all of you, as well as secure, concealed sites from which the government can continue to function. And I’ve taken the added precaution of compartmentalizing the site locations. Obviously, we can’t keep their coordinates completely secret if they’re going to function, but I am restricting the knowledge of those locations to the greatest extent possible.”
“Is all of that really necessary?” Xeneas asked.
“Mr. President, the one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that not everyone on Odysseus agrees with the Declaration.” Tolallis’s eyes were bleak. “Some of them because they’re ex-pat Hearts; some because despite everything the Heart’s done to the Fringe, they’re still ‘patriots,’ God help them; and others because they’re terrified of where it’s going to end for them and their families. It can’t be any other way. And that means that when the pressure comes on, any security I may’ve been able to set up will still spring leaks. I just don’t know how many leaks or where they’ll be, so humor me on this.”
He looked around the table.
“Every one of us is praying Governor Murphy gets here before the Heart. I think we’ve got a far better shot at that than I ever would’ve anticipated before the Vice President got back from New Dublin. But if it doesn’t work that way, if someone like that butcher Alaimo gets here before the Governor, it’s going to be bad. It’s going to be very bad. And if that happens, it’s my job to keep you—all of you—alive so you can keep doing your jobs while we try to survive until the Governor does get here.”