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CHAPTER FIVE

TFNS Ishtar

Wormhole Space

October 13, 2552


“Two more ship days to Jalal,” a voice observed quietly, and Terrence Murphy glanced up at the auburn-haired Navy captain floating beside his command chair. Harrison O’Hanraghty looked back expressionlessly, and Murphy snorted silently.

It was quiet on TFNS Ishtar’s flag bridge as the four-kilometer-long carrier tore through wormhole space, but he could feel the tension hovering about him, and he understood it perfectly.

Ishtar wasn’t alone. Eleven other faster-than-light carriers shared her pocket of subspace, and that was the reason for the flag bridge’s tension. Technically, every single crewman and crewwoman aboard those ships, and aboard all of the sublight warships riding their parasite racks, was a mutineer. Or, at least, they were there obedient to the orders of someone they knew would be declared a mutineer—if he hadn’t been already—as soon as the Federation learned about what they were about to do.

Two more ship days. Fourteen days, by the rest of the universe’s clocks. That was how long they had before the Federation officially pinned the traitor’s label upon them all.

Twelve carriers and almost a hundred and fifty sublight capital ships represented a massive concentration of fighting power, far greater than anyone had seen in one place in the Fringe in generations. There were, however, two hundred and ninety FTLCs—and enough sublight warships to fill their racks thrice over—on the Federation’s order of battle. At any given moment, a quarter of those carriers were in yard hands for repairs or scheduled maintenance. Another forty-five percent were deployed to the battle line systems of the Beta Cygni Line, the 470-light-year “front” along which the Federation and League had been locked in combat for decades, and ten percent were retained to cover the Heart World systems and serve as the Federation’s strategic reserve. The remaining fifty-odd FTLCs were deployed as picket forces covering positions in the Fringe, mostly in the enormous hemisphere on the far side of the Federation from Beta Cygni.

Ostensibly, they were there to protect the Fringe Worlds from the ships of the Rénzú Liánméng Hǎijūn, more commonly known by its foes as the Terran League Navy. In fact, that was a purely secondary function in the eyes of the Federation government and the Five Hundred, the Heart Worlds’ political and economic elite who controlled that government. The pickets’ true mission, from the Five Hundred’s perspective, was control. To ensure that the numerous but sparsely populated Fringe Worlds who possessed precious little economic and even less political power yet provided the bulk of the Federation’s military manpower—and had done most of the dying in the Federation’s six-decade war against the League—stayed “in compliance.” Oh, those pickets had been expected to fight, even die, in defense of some Fringe systems. The beta and gamma-tier systems that housed nodes of industrial power, orbital refineries, shipyards owned by absentee Heart World landlords. The ones that were important. But the other Fringe systems? The ones that housed not valuable properties but only the odd million, or even fewer, Federation citizens?

The enormous carriers were strategic assets, and those assets were worth far more than those systems. Their standing orders were to withdraw in the face of any powerful attack. Just as Captain Yance Drebin had, when he’d left three quarters of a million men, women, and children to die on a blasted, wintry world in the Inverness System. A world whose infrastructure had been reduced to rubble by a League raiding squadron he’d refused to face, even though his own ships had actually outmassed it. Indeed, Drebin hadn’t used that standing order to justify his cowardice in the face of the actual attack. He’d used it again, even after Admiral Xing Xuefeng’s withdrawal, when he’d abandoned the system entirely.

And left the survivors of Xing’s bombardment to watch their children freeze to death in front of them.

Ninety-six percent of them had done precisely that.

If not for Terrence Murphy, all of them would have died. Murphy would never—ever—forgive himself for the fact that he’d been able to rescue fewer than fifty thousand people, but at least he’d managed that much after Drebin abandoned them to slow, lingering death. And, again if not for Terrence Murphy, none of Drebin’s superiors would have faulted his actions. Especially not if condemning those actions might have drawn his carefully never discussed standing orders into the public’s view. Besides, it wasn’t as if a marginal system like Inverness had mattered.

Murphy knew how that worked, knew how the Five Hundred thought. He was a member of the Five Hundred, and he had no illusions about the system into which he’d been born. And because he had none, he knew exactly what the Five Hundred most feared. They feared an exhausted, embittered, enraged Fringe, gaunt with starvation and abuse, crushed by the grief of unending casualty lists, fully aware that they and the people they loved were supremely unimportant to a Five Hundred concerned with bottom lines, their own wealth and power and comfort. They feared what that Fringe might do to those who had exploited and abused it for so very long.

And they feared, above all things, the emergence of some warlord who would draw the sword of all that rage from the stone of the Fringe’s loyalty and tear the Federation asunder. They told themselves it was because such a rebellion would lead to defeat at the League’s hands, but deep in the secret part of their hearts, what they truly feared was the long-deferred, righteous retribution the Fringe would visit upon them.

That was what made Murphy’s dozen FTLCs so dangerous to the Five Hundred. They represented barely five percent of the TFN’s total carrier strength. But they constituted almost forty percent of the FTLCs deployed to the Southern Lobe, and every single one of them was “out of compliance.”

The Five Hundred didn’t know it yet. So far as they knew, he had only the seven FTLCs he’d commandeered for the Battle of New Dublin. He’d dutifully reported that battle and everything leading up to it. But the Five Hundred couldn’t know about the others. Just as they couldn’t know what else had happened in New Dublin after his return from the Diyu System.

He was grimly certain how they would react when they did find out, because those twelve ships, and the sublight battleships and battlecruisers riding their parasite racks, were the Five Hundred’s worst nightmare. Not because of their raw combat power, but, because of the reason they were there. Because Rear Admiral Terrence Murphy had disobeyed a direct order to withdraw from the New Dublin System and abandon the hundred million citizens of Crann Bethadh, New Dublin’s inhabited planet. Because he’d not simply stood and fought but used his authority as system governor to commandeer four more FTLCs to bolster his own three-carrier task force. Because, worse, he’d used that same authority to authorize the shipyards in New Dublin to manufacture thousands of missiles to be used in the system’s defense. Worse yet, he’d evolved a new, deadly tactical doctrine to use those thousands of missiles.

For the first time in at least two generations, a Heart World admiral had put his duty to the Federation’s citizens above his duty to the Five Hundred. And in the process, he’d laid bare a fact the Five Hundred had overlooked, an unintended consequence of allowing the Fringe to do the dying while their own sons and daughters evaded that grim toll. More than two thirds of the men and women who crewed all of its ships were also Fringers. Fringers whose abused loyalty might prove the whetted edge of that warlord’s blade.

No wonder the government had ordered his arrest as soon as it learned about the Battle of New Dublin, ordered that he be returned to the Sol System in chains to face trial on trumped-up charges for his manifold “crimes.” That decision hadn’t surprised Murphy. Not really. He’d long since learned how stupid otherwise intelligent people could be if their prejudices, their beliefs, their bigotries—or, far worse, their view of themselves as masters of creation—were threatened. Anyone who’d accomplished what he had, who’d given a face and a voice to the Fringe’s abuse and anger—who threatened their own power and control—had to be discredited.

So they’d sent the orders, only to discover that the Federation—or the Five Hundred, at least—had finally pushed the Crann Bethadhans too far.

The Five Hundred couldn’t know that yet. The travel time for any news from New Dublin to reach Earth was just over eleven weeks, by the clocks of the galaxy at large. For the actual traveler, moving at .99 c, the subjective time was just under one week, of course. But that meant the Five Hundred had known it would take almost five and a half months for Captain Andrew Lipshen and the Capital Division troopers they’d sent to New Dublin to return to Sol with their prisoner. Until they did, no one in the Heart Worlds could know how their mission had fared.

It had taken far less time for New Dublin’s neighbors to find out, however, and their reaction had justified every one of the Five Hundred’s fears.

Murphy had tried to stop the tsunami of secession declarations, but he’d known even then that he’d have fared better ordering the tide not to come in. He might have refused to acknowledge the Free Worlds Alliance as an independent star nation, yet he had no choice but to admit the legitimacy of its demands. And so he’d become the “Governor” of a breakaway batch of secessionists who were at least willing—for now—to follow his lead. To let him speak for them.

The best he could hope was that he might be able to ride the wave front of the Fringe’s totally justified fury, be a voice of moderation that might somehow broker a rapprochement between it and its hated victimizers. But he was afraid, terribly afraid, that even that hope was doomed. And one thing he did know for certain: the creation of the Free Worlds Alliance, including all of what had been the Concordia Sector and a half dozen systems from the neighboring Acera and Tremont sectors, would not play well on Earth.

The question—or one of the questions, at any rate—burning in Murphy’s mind was what other measures might have been put in train at the same time Lipshen was dispatched to arrest him. For all their shortsighted arrogance, the members of Prime Minister Schleibaum’s government in Olympia weren’t truly stupid. Or, rather, they were stupid, but it was the monumentally self-destructive stupidity only otherwise intelligent people could achieve. The sort of stupidity that could almost always make a catastrophe worse by convincing itself of its own cunning and cleverness. Considering the stakes for which they were playing—or thought they were playing, anyway—there was no way Lipshen’s mission could have been the only string to their bow. They must have instructed Admiral Fokaides and the Oval to take additional “precautionary” measures, and at the moment, Murphy had no idea what those measures might have been.

On the other hand, they couldn’t know—yet—what measures he’d taken.

But that was about to change. Probably for both sides.

Jalal Station, just over halfway from Sol to New Dublin, was one of the five, widely spaced major bases built to support the naval pickets of the Fringe. In particular, Jalal was designed to support operations in the Southern Lobe: Concordia, Acera, Tremont, and the Claremont Sector. That meant Lipshen had staged through Jalal on his way to New Dublin and that the Five Hundred would have assumed he—or any news of his mission, at least—would follow the same path back to Sol.

And that, in turn, meant any naval forces sent to backstop Lipshen would also flow through Jalal.

Murphy glanced at the digital time display.

One more day, and then we’ll know, he thought. Then we’ll know.



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