Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jalal System

Terran Federation

December 7, 2552


“Can we turn off that alarm, please?”

Terrence Murphy’s tone was a bit testy as he strode into Jalal Station’s Command Central. The strident alarm—admittedly, it hadn’t been all that loud, but it was carefully engineered to be impossible to ignore—died suddenly, and he nodded.

“Better.”

He still sounded less than delighted, and Harrison O’Hanraghty hid a smile as Murphy walked across the command deck to him. Both of them knew Jalal Station was the last place Terrence Murphy wanted to be just now. The fact that both of them also knew it was the one place he had to be didn’t make Murphy one bit happier, however.

Murphy crossed to the enormous holo display. It was configured in astrography mode, and he gazed for several seconds at the lurid crimson icon pulsing in its depths. That icon marked a projected wormhole emergence, ninety light-minutes beyond Jalal Zeta, the system’s outermost ice planet, and he pursed his lips thoughtfully.

“I suppose that pretty much has to be the Oval’s reinforcements,” he observed after a moment.

“On that bearing?” O’Hanraghty nodded. “And from the size of the signature, it looks like they’ve done us proud.”

Someone chuckled, albeit a bit nervously, at the chief of staff’s dry tone, but Murphy only nodded back.

The gravitic signature of the incoming task force—and that was what it had to be—was exactly where he’d expected to see it. Where it almost had to be on a least-time trip from Sol to Jalal, which was undoubtedly what its commander had been ordered to make. There was every reason for the Oval to get its reaction force to Jalal as quickly as possible, and no reason it should try for any sort of stealthiness when it arrived. Personally, he would have sent something—anything—a hell of a lot sooner than this, on the assumption that even half a dozen additional FTLCs at Jalal would have cramped his own style when he arrived. But now that Sol finally had gotten the reaction force here, there was no point in subtlety, given that it was impossible for a starship in wormhole space to “sneak up” on a normal-space target with decent gravitic arrays. Knowing exactly where to point Jalal Station’s arrays had increased detection range by about ten percent, though, and they’d picked up the incoming visitors at just over twenty-six light-weeks, which gave him about five hours’ warning before they could drop sublight.

Of course, that wasn’t the only thing his accurate prediction had allowed him to do, either.

“I’m assuming you would have told me if Dormouse has sprung a leak?” he said now, cocking his head at O’Hanraghty.

“As of this moment, nobody outside Command Central and Gravitic One knows a thing about this,” the captain said, twitching his head at the icon. “The Station is solid, and Galanatos has his carriers’ gravitic arrays completely offline.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” Murphy shook his head, his expression showing more worry than he would have displayed under other circumstances…or to other people. “There are still too many potential loose ends flopping around the system to make me happy, Harry.”

“You think?” O’Hanraghty shook his head. “All we can do is all we can do, Terry.”

“I know. Just humor me.” Murphy flashed a brief, tight smile. “Even the unflappable Admiral Murphy gets to worry about stuff sometimes.”

“And I get to help you worry,” O’Hanraghty said. “Part of the job description. But, as far as I know, Bryant and I are on top of this.”

“Good,” Murphy repeated, and touched O’Hanraghty lightly on the shoulder.

O’Hanraghty had doubled as Task Force 1705’s intelligence officer from the outset—inevitably, given that he was essentially a “spook” at heart…and the only spook Terrence Murphy had fully trusted. Since taking Jalal Station, however, his primary job as Murphy’s XO had eaten up too much of his time for him to continue as Murphy’s SO2. That was why he’d recruited Commander Bryant MacTavish to replace him. He and MacTavish had known one another for years, and the commander was as smart as they came. In fact, he’d been smart enough to keep anyone from suspecting he was a member in good standing of the tinfoil-hat brigade.

Between them, he, O’Hanraghty, the rest of Murphy’s staff, Esteban Tremblay, and Joseph Lowe, Ishtar’s CO, had labored like Trojans to prepare Jalal Station against this moment. They’d had a bit over a month to work with, and they’d accomplished more, frankly, than Murphy had expected.

Which wasn’t to say that they’d accomplished remotely enough for his peace of mind.

Operation Dormouse had put Jalal’s gravitic arrays under complete lockdown, manned only by personnel who’d accompanied Murphy from New Dublin, and the same draconian staffing restrictions had been applied to Command Central. No one outside that trusted coterie had any access at all to Gravitic One’s output, and as O’Hanraghty had just observed, the only off-station arrays in the inner system, the ones aboard Emilios Galanatos’s carriers, were completely shut down. That, hopefully, meant that no one outside Murphy’s immediate circle was aware of the impending arrival of Olympia’s long-awaited response.

They intended to keep it that way as long as they possibly could, because it was impossible to guarantee that no Federation loyalist had access to a long-range transmitter. The last thing they needed was someone alerting the incoming Federation commander to Jalal’s change in management one moment sooner than they could help, but if they didn’t know there was anyone to alert…

In addition to Dormouse, they’d also done their best to clean up the debris from the thankfully brief but bitter fighting among the system’s sublight parasites. The bigger pieces of wreckage, including over a dozen complete but brutally damaged hulls, had been accelerated along a vector that had dumped them into the system primary. The smaller pieces—of which there had been many—had simply been deorbited on trajectories that took them down over Jalal Beta’s Cronkite Ocean. That left gaps in the ships that should have been there, and they had to assume any incoming TFN force would have been provided with a complete order of battle for Jalal. So they’d deployed matching units from Murphy’s parasite strength, with suitably modified transponders, to fill the holes.

Things were a little trickier where Admiral Maddox’s FTLCs were concerned.

Maddox had been a Heart Worlder and a member in good standing of the Five Hundred. In fact, he’d been Madison Dawson’s third cousin. He’d also been absolutely furious with Murphy for launching a “Fringe rebellion” that was likely to tear the Federation apart, and as a complete Rish-denier, he’d regarded Murphy’s claims as no more than a pretext to justify his rebellion and raw ambition.

It was perhaps fortunate Maddox hadn’t survived the mutiny aboard TFNS Selene, but before he went down, he and the other loyalists in TF 1712 had fought back hard. In fact, Selene’s company had suffered over three hundred casualties. It had been equally bad aboard the other carriers, and the loyalists aboard one of them—Hylonome—had secured control of her bridge and primary engineering spaces. They’d done their damnedest to carry out Admiral Portier’s orders to head home with news of Murphy’s arrival…until, at least, their FTLC consorts’ point-defense lasers, firing with pinpoint accuracy at less than two hundred kilometers’ range, had crippled the control runs to her Fasset drive.

The control runs themselves, fortunately, had been repairable by Jalal’s Engineering staff, but she’d taken other damage that would be obvious in any close visual examination. It didn’t render the Marduk-class carrier combat ineffective, but the hull breaches would tell any observer she’d been in a fight. So Murphy had pulled her out of the provisional squadron he’d put together under Captain Galanatos and replaced her with her sister ship, Ereshkigal, from TF 1705’s original strength. The two ships had swapped transponder codes, as well, so—hopefully—even a terminally suspicious TFN CO wouldn’t suspect the switch.

And that wasn’t all they’d done, either, Murphy reflected, gazing at the icons of the pair of freighters that had arrived from New Dublin only days before.

“I suppose we’d better warm-up Admiral Portier, then,” he said now.

“She’s already stirring,” O’Hanraghty told him with a small, tight smile.

* * *

“Confirmed, Sir,” Captain Rashida Kerbouche said from the comm display in Commodore Esteban Tremblay’s sleeping cabin aboard RHLNS Kishar. “ETA one hundred and forty-seven minutes. Right on Admiral Murphy’s prediction.”

“The Admiral,” Tremblay observed with a cheerfulness he would once never have believed he might feel, “has a remarkable habit of making accurate predictions.”

“He does that, Sir,” Kerbouche agreed.

“Very well.” Tremblay ran a hand over his close-cropped brown hair. “I’m confident you’ve already notified Commander Beaudouin, efficient soul that you are. Tell Commander Soria to send the alert to Jalal Station—I’m sure the Admiral will be glad to know we’re on our toes out here—then get the entire task force moving ASAP. I’ll get back to you as soon as I throw some clothes on and make it to Flag Bridge.”

“Yes, Sir. I’ve already passed the word to prep the fans.”

“I knew there was a reason you make such a good flag captain. Let me go get dressed.”

* * *

“Incoming message,” Callum Murphy said, and his father turned from a three-way conversation with O’Hanraghty and Captain Galanatos.

Like his father, Callum would have vastly preferred to be on one of the FTLCs holding station with Esteban Tremblay, a light-hour and a half from the system primary. But, also like his father, he couldn’t be. And not just because a one-legged, one-eyed lieutenant might be a dubious tactical asset.

“From Tremblay, I assume?” Murphy said.

“One word, Sir: ‘Inbound.’”

“Steve’s come a long way,” O’Hanraghty observed, and Murphy nodded.

“Yes,” he said in a tone of intense satisfaction. “Yes, he has.”

“Do you really think this is going to work, Sir?” Galanatos asked from Murphy’s comm.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s going to work at least partially. I’d love for it to come off without a hitch, but this, unfortunately, is the real world, Captain. What I can say is that I’m totally confident of Commodore Tremblay’s ability to play his part. Whether or not we manage to pull Spider off completely is another matter.”

“Well, I’m not going to bet against you at this point,” Galanatos said, and Murphy snorted.

“Sooner or later, I am going to stub a toe, you know, Captain.”

“But not today, Sir.” Galanatos smiled from the comm screen. “And, with your permission, I’ll just go and get ready for my own bit of Spider.”

“Of course.” Murphy nodded and walked across to stand beside Callum.

“I have to agree with Harry, Dad,” Callum said very quietly, voice pitched solely for his father’s ears. “I never would’ve seen Tremblay as a ‘Murphy partisan’ that first day when you stole his task group.”

“There’s nothing at all wrong with Esteban Tremblay’s brain,” Murphy returned, equally quietly. “And there’s nothing wrong with his moral compass, either. It just needed a tap or two to get unlocked from the Heart World perspective. And I wouldn’t say he was a ‘Murphy partisan,’ either. What he is, is a patriot. The kind of patriot who understands that the people running a star nation may not always be worthy of that trust.”

Callum nodded, although he suspected Murphy might be underestimating the degree of Tremblay’s “partisanship.” Much as he’d come to respect his father, and especially his father’s judgment, he’d also realized Terrence Murphy did have his own blind spots. Including the one that prevented him from recognizing the degree of personal devotion he’d won from his personnel.

Or the one that kept him from admitting to himself how broken the Federation and its Constitution truly were. It was odd, really. He’d opened his son’s eyes to that unhappy awareness, but he refused to acknowledge it himself. Or to confront—really confront—the true depth of what that might require of him in the end.

Callum put that thought carefully away. It wasn’t one his father would be happy to entertain, he suspected. Besides, there were other things to think about, including Operation Spider.

He’d thought it was an odd name for an ops plan, until O’Hanraghty quoted an ancient poem about a spider and a fly. Then he’d understood it perfectly, and he hoped like hell it was going to work.

Tremblay’s shorter-ranged shipboard gravitic arrays had detected the incoming wormhole signature a good two hours after Jalal Station had. That had been a given, as had the fact that if Tremblay had waited for light-speed orders from the station to begin executing his part of the ops plan, it would have been far too late. For that matter, it had taken an hour and a half for his own message to reach Jalal Station.

Fortunately, professional spacers were used to allowing for that sort of communications lag. And what mattered was that “Incoming” meant the twelve FTLCs of Tremblay’s “Hammer Force” were currently accelerating toward Jalal Station—or, rather, toward the point in space Jalal Station would occupy in about nine hours—at 1,900 gravities. They’d actually started as soon as they’d detected the incoming wormhole signature, and they’d be shutting down their fans once more within the next fifteen or twenty minutes. That meant they would have gone ballistic and disappeared into silent running, under strict emissions control, by the time the incoming TFN task force dropped sublight. They should be within about four light-minutes of the newcomers’ emergence point, but they’d be the next best thing to completely undetectable. Of course, their velocity would be little better than half that of the new arrivals when they went sublight at 297,000 KPS, which meant those newcomers would be running away from Hammer Force at very nearly twice Tremblay’s base velocity. But they’d also be decelerating hard toward an eventual rendezvous with Jalal Station. So, eventually, if all went according to plan, their velocities would equalize and Hammer Force’s overtake velocity would begin to increase steadily.

If everything went perfectly according to plan, Hammer Force would bring up its Fasset drives and begin decelerating just about the time the incoming task force crossed the stellar Powell Limit and its maximum acceleration rate dropped to 900 gravities. At which point, it would become impossible for the newcomers to avoid Hammer Force if Tremblay wanted to force action upon them.

And that, he reminded himself, was supposed to convince the newcomers to adopt a peaceable attitude. He hoped it would.

And he wished he was as confident of that as Captain Galanatos appeared to be.

* * *

“Sublight in one minute, Sir,” Lieutenant Massengale, RHLNS Lelantos’s astrogator, announced. That announcement was directed to Captain Ozbey, but Rajenda Thakore was tied into the big carrier’s command deck from Flag Bridge, and he nodded in approval.

“Thirty… fifteen…ten,” Massengale droned. Then, “Sublight!”

Task Force 804 dropped back into sync with the rest of the universe, and the visual displays were suddenly speckled with pinprick stars and not the eye-bewildering blur of wormhole space. An instant later, the master tactical plot came online, the icons of standard navigation beacons and scores of ship transponder codes glowed to life in its depths, and the routine, looped “information to shipping” transmissions began to spool up.

Obviously no one in Jalal Beta orbit was worried about keeping a low profile.

“Well, that’s reassuring,” Christina Zebić observed at Rajenda’s elbow, and he nodded. It was not only reassuring, it was—probably—a vast relief. Of course, it remained to be seen if—

“Incoming message, Admiral!” Commander Ntombikayise Abercrombie, TF 804’s communications officer called out, and Rajenda glanced at her. Whoever had sent the message in question had predicted their emergence time almost perfectly when he decided to send it. Not that there was really much rush at these sorts of distances.

“It’s addressed to ‘Commanding Officer, Relief Force,’” Abercrombie added.

“Really?” Rajenda shook his head with a dry chuckle. “Portier must be feeling even more nervous than I expected, if she decided to hang that ID on us.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Zebić said. “If I’d been holding the fort out here this long, I’d be feeling a bit ‘relieved’ right now, myself.”

“Fair enough, I suppose.” Rajenda shrugged. “With that much firepower, though”—he waved at the hundreds of sublight parasite transponders—“I’d have felt pretty confident about handling a half dozen or so FTLCs if I had to.”

His cousin nodded, and he turned his attention back to Abercrombie.

“Put it up on the main display, please, Ntombikayise.”

“Yes, Sir.”

An instant later, the tactical data disappeared and a woman’s image replaced it. Rajenda recognized her immediately. He scarcely knew Geraldine Portier well, but they’d met more than once…and as Zebić had predicted, she looked distinctly relieved at the moment.

“Welcome to Jalal,” she said. “I won’t pretend for a minute we’re not hugely relieved to see you people. Whoever you are.” Her lips quirked a smile. “We were starting to feel a little lonely out here. From the size of your footprint, my people are guessing you are at somewhere around twenty to twenty-five carriers. I believe we can probably find a place to put you. If you have any special requirements, go ahead and transmit them, and I’ll start putting arrangements in train. Portier, clear.”

“Do we have any ‘special requirements’?” Zebić asked with a smile.

“No, not really. But go ahead and thank her for her welcome, Ntombikayise.” He smiled rather more broadly than Zebić had. “Inform her I intend to make my best speed to Jalal Orbit and that I’ll contact her again when the time dilation’s equalized a bit and the comm lag’s shorter. I’m sure it will make her feel more appreciated.”

* * *

“Well, so far, it’s looking pretty good,” Commander Nathanaël Beaudouin observed. He floated beside Commodore Tremblay’s command chair, one toe hooked through a floor loop to keep him there, and looked thoughtfully at the plot.

“If you persist in tempting Murphy—the demon, not the Admiral—that way, you and I are going to have words, Nate,” Tremblay said.

“Sorry about that, Sir.” Beaudouin smiled crookedly. “I really have to work on how I pass along these little operational reports and observations to you.”

Tremblay snorted. He was still a bit surprised by how well he and Beaudouin got along and worked with one another. The commander, a native of Gregor II, was as much a Fringer as Tremblay himself was a Heart Worlder, and there’d been a certain tension between him and the rest of Tremblay’s staff when he stepped in to replace Linda Harrison, the task group’s original XO. Tremblay deeply regretted that he’d had to replace Harrison, but the Free Worlds Alliance had been one step too far for Linda. She’d been more than willing to defend New Dublin, and what they’d discovered at Diyu had convinced her Murphy was no lunatic. She didn’t even think he was a warlord seeking personal power. But she was horrified by the threatened dissolution of the Federation, no matter what the justification, and she’d drawn the line at “treason.”

She’d also been right up front about that, though. She’d requested relief, and Tremblay’s already deep respect for her had grown only deeper. She might not have been able to support the FWA, but she hadn’t pretended she could, either. He wished he could be certain none of his other officers and spacers had pretended they could until they got the opportunity to betray the “traitors” at a critical moment. In fact, he wished he wasn’t certain at least some of them had done just that.

He’d approved her request for relief—regretfully—and he was delighted by how well Cormag Dewar’s recommendation of Beaudouin as her replacement had worked out. The fact that Dewar had become President of New Dublin after Alan Tolmach’s murder had made him President of the Free Worlds Alliance, as well, and no one could doubt his fiery commitment to the Fringe’s revolt. But however deep his anger at the Heart Worlds might run, he’d also been a Marine, and a damned good one, in his time, and it showed. That was another advantage the FWA had in its confrontation with the Federation. It might not have remotely the same industrial muscle, but its leadership included an enormous percentage of veterans, most of whom knew their asses from their elbows when military decisions had to be made. And its citizens included an equally huge percentage of veterans. In fact, given how inequitably the burden of actual combat had been spread, it was probable the Fringe, despite its far smaller total population, had at least half again as many trained, experienced combat personnel as the entire Heart.

One of whom was named Nathanaël Beaudouin. And the number of Fringers with matching experience—and the sheer competence people like him carried around in their spacebags—should make the Oval and Olympia very, very nervous, Tremblay thought.

In the eight months since the Concordia Sector had announced its secession, Beaudouin had fitted smoothly into Tremblay’s team. He’d been well aware that its other members had to regard him as an intruder, at least initially, and he’d avoided stepping on any toes, but he’d also made it clear that he was now the chief of staff and that if they were wise, they would accept that and move on. Which all of them had done.

Of course, I have to wonder if one reason Dewar recommended Nate was to be sure there was someone he trusted inside my staff to keep an eye on all of us, Tremblay thought now. He’d wondered that at the time, and he still didn’t know. Neither did he care. If he was going to be party to treason—and it was hard to think of a better word for his current activities, however he might justify them—he preferred for the leaders of that treason to be smart and to take precautions.

Besides, even if Nate is—or was—Dewar’s spy, he’s also a damned good officer. I trust his judgment, and I trust him. And even if he is tempting fate, he’s right about how good things are looking, too.

So far, at least.

At the moment, Hammer Force was coasting ballistically in-system toward the stellar Powell Limit, following along behind the incoming Task Force 804—they’d been able to read the intruders’ omnidirectional light-speed transponders for the last eleven minutes—at 155,690 KPS. They’d been 3.52 LM behind the newcomers when the relief task force dropped sublight. Now, fifteen minutes later, the interval was up to over 13.6 LM, and continuing to widen at 125,423 KPS, and he was delighted it was. There’d been a distinct possibility Hammer Force might have been picked up by visual observation if the Feds had looked behind them immediately after they’d arrived. Tremblay’s ships had dialed up their “smart” hull surfaces to maximum light and EM absorption, but that wouldn’t have helped if they’d occluded a star and anyone had noticed. By now, however, the chance of detection was effectively nil. And it would stay that way until Hammer Force had to bring up its own Fasset drives.

Perhaps even more to the point, there was nothing TF 804 could have done about Hammer Force even if it had detected it, since they couldn’t possibly have engaged one another, given their relative velocities. None of Hammer Force’s weapons—not even the Casúr Cogaidhs—had the acceleration rate and endurance to overtake the task force, and none of TF 804’s weapons had the acceleration rate and endurance to overcome their current velocity to engage a target anywhere astern of it. Which was good, since Hammer Force was outnumbered by two-to-one. He doubted even the Casúr Cogaidhs riding his parasite racks could have equalized those odds in a standup fight.

Which was why he was just delighted Terrence Murphy had no intention of engaging in any standup fights.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “in about three and a half hours they’ll know we’re here, won’t they?”

“Oh, I think we can take that pretty much for granted, Sir,” Beaudouin agreed, and Tremblay could have shaved with his smile.

* * *

A musical tone sounded, and Callum looked up from his command station as Commander Mirwani tapped a screen to shut down the timer.

“Systems check!” he announced.

“Initiating systems check,” Lieutenant Tyler O’Gormley acknowledged.

O’Gormley was a Crann Bethadhan who’d been home on leave when the Battle of New Dublin rolled through his home star system. He was also an excellent tactical officer, who’d been a welcome addition to Murphy’s command crew.

Now he tapped a series of commands and watched his displays carefully.

“Confirm green board on the Kavachas, Sir,” he said. “And…green board on the Casúrs.”

“Good.” Mirwani nodded and looked over his shoulder at Murphy and O’Hanraghty.

“Green boards, Admiral,” he said formally.

“Thank you, Riley,” Murphy said just as gravely as if he hadn’t already heard O’Gormley’s report, and Callum smiled down at his own displays.

There’d been a time when he would have found that entire exchange silly, but that had been before the Battle of New Dublin. Now he understood that the reason for it was anything but silly. It was Mirwani’s responsibility to be certain his CO had all the critical information, and it was Murphy’s responsibility to confirm that he did.

Especially now.

Callum shook his head as he admitted that his father had been three steps ahead of him yet again when he deployed the station’s Kavacha platforms a full month ago. From where Callum had sat, there’d still been plenty of time to set their defenses, and keeping the anti-KEW platforms active and on station for extended periods put time on their clocks that increased the possibility of systems failures at the critical moment. And, given the accuracy with which Murphy had been able to predict their visitors’ probable approach vector, there’d been more than enough time to get them into position before any intruder got close enough to detect their Hauptman signatures.

But then Callum had realized the real reason his father had deployed them early. Because he’d pre-positioned them and set up a regular schedule for checking their systems, he didn’t have to move them now. Nor did he have to initiate any unscheduled systems checks now that the moment had arrived. Either of those things might have alerted some loyalist aboard Jalal Station that the long-awaited relief force was finally incoming. And if the loyalist in question didn’t know it was here, then he wouldn’t be trying to find a way to warn it about the true state of affairs.

Callum glanced back at the master plot. An icon blinked there, tracking the newcomers’ projected position, but they’d been in-system for only about an hour and a half. There hadn’t been time for the station’s light-speed sensors to detect them, so that position was only a projection. So far, at least.

Be interesting to see how they respond to “Admiral Portier,” though, he thought, with a broader smile. I always thought I was pretty good with computers, but Bryant takes it to a wholenother level!

They’d found literally months’ worth of comm traffic and electronic memos from Vice Admiral Portier in the station’s databanks. Armed with that, Bryant MacTavish had created a computer-generated Portier avatar. He’d done the same thing for Captain Tibor and half a dozen other senior officers, as well as all six of Jalal Station’s senior communications watchstanders, but they had far more data on Portier, and McTavish and O’Hanraghty had strongly recommended putting “her” on point for any communications with the relief force. Not only was her avatar the best developed and most convincing, but the real Portier almost certainly would have done exactly that, anyway.

Of course, good as we all think we are, it’s still possible—

“Status change!” Mirwani announced, and the single strobing icon of the newcomers’ projected position suddenly resolved into an entire cluster of icons. Icons tagged with transponder ship IDs.

A lot of ship IDs, Callum thought with a certain undeniable dryness of mouth.

“CIC makes it twenty-five FTLCs, Admiral,” Mirwani continued, studying his own display. “Transponder codes identify them as Task Force Eight-Oh-Four.”

Eight-oh-four?” O’Hanraghty repeated.

“Yes, Sir.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the chief of staff said. “Sounds like they did slice these people off the Reserve.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think even Fokaides was that stupid.”

Callum frowned, trying to follow O’Hanraghty’s logic. Part of it was clear enough. If this task force had been diverted from First Fleet, the primary formation assigned to the Beta Cygni Line, then the first digit of its designation would have been a “1.” The fact that it was TF 804 indicated that, as O’Hanraghty had said, its units had been taken from Eighth Fleet, the Federation’s strategic reserve, instead.

That made total sense to Callum, since the Reserve’s units were all stationed within thirty light-years of the Sol System, which meant they could be called in and dispatched to Jalal far more rapidly than anything could be diverted from the Beta Cygni front. So why—?

“Now, now, Harry,” his father said. “There’s still Home Fleet. They haven’t left Sol completely uncovered.”

“This is at least at least ninety percent—probably more like all—of Eighth Fleet’s available carrier strength,” O’Hanraghty replied. “And Home Fleet is—what? Two squadrons?”

“Three, actually,” Commander MacTavish offered. “Three squadrons of FTLCs, that is. They’ve also got something like—I don’t know. Fifteen hundred or so parasite capital ships? Not to mention the fixed defenses.”

“All of which would be dead meat against a properly executed attack in force, even without the Casúrs,” O’Hanraghty retorted. “Without a decent carrier force as a maneuver element, any system would be.”

“And if I had any intention of attacking Sol, that would probably get me all excited,” Murphy said dryly. “As it is, though—”

“Excuse me, Admiral,” the comm officer of the watch said, “but we have an incoming message from the task force.”

“Put it up, then, please, Lieutenant Thurman,” Murphy told her, turning toward the master display. “I’m curious to see just who they picked to come visit us.”

A very dark-skinned commander appeared in the display. A data tag identified her as Abercrombie, Ntombikayise.

“Jalal Station, this is Task Force Eight-Oh-Four,” she said. “We’ve received your initial message. Vice Admiral Thakore has asked me to inform you that we have no immediately pressing requirements, and he will open personal communications with you when the time dilation factor and range permit. Abercrombie, clear.”

Callum suddenly discovered he’d come to his feet, and he darted a look at his father.

“Well, there’s a thing,” Terrence Murphy said mildly.

* * *

“Velocities equalizing…now,” Commander Dai Zheng, Kishar’s astrogator, announced.

“Thank you, Zheng,” Captain Kerbouche acknowledged, and glanced at the time display. After just over two hours of deceleration, TF 804’s—by now, the task force CO had probably identified herself to Jalal Station, but Kerbouche had no idea who it might be yet—velocity had finally decreased to match Hammer Force’s. The gap between them had opened to over thirty-three light-minutes first, but from this point on, Hammer Force’s overtake velocity would climb steadily.

She looked down into the screen tied to Tremblay’s flag bridge and raised an eyebrow, and Tremblay shrugged.

“To quote my sometimes overly optimistic chief of staff, looking good so far,” the commodore said.

“I admire a good, sneaky ops plan as much as the next woman, Sir,” Kerbouche said. “This feels a little like mugging a baby for candy, though.”

“Oh, indeed it does!” Tremblay agreed with a smile. “I wish I could remember who it was that first told me if you aren’t cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” He shook his head. “Admiral Murphy definitely is, though. Trying hard enough, I mean.”

“And a damned good thing, too,” Kerbouche said in a rather more serious tone. “Two-to-one odds would suck in a fair fight.”

“Well, hopefully there won’t be a fight. But if there is one,” Tremblay smiled coldly, “I want it to be as unfair as possible.”

* * *

“You’re sure?” Adan Zamorano’s voice was as nervous as his eyes. “I haven’t heard a damned thing!”

“Keep your voice down!” Lieutenant Albert Vítek hissed. He glared at his fellow lieutenant for a moment, then glanced around the big, almost deserted mess compartment. There were only two other occupants, both engrossed in a chessboard mag-sealed to a corner table to keep it anchored in the microgravity. Neither of them was paying any attention to him and Zamorano, and he made himself inhale deeply.

“Sorry—sorry, Adan!” He shook his head. “Didn’t mean to jump down your throat. It’s just…I guess I’m just a little antsy.”

“Antsy,” Zamorano repeated, and despite his own obvious nervousness, his lips twitched on the edge of a smile. “Can’t imagine why that might be!”

“Just a natural worrier, I guess,” Vítek said. “But, yeah, I’m sure. Deng passed the word to Bourcier eight minutes ago.”

“Shit.”

Zamorano felt his stomach clench in a reaction that owed nothing at all to the lack of gravity.

Like most crewmen serving in a sublight warship, he was accustomed to spending time in microgravity. They were too small for the spin sections FTLCs incorporated, so whenever possible, their personnel spent all the time they could aboard their carriers, luxuriating in the sense of gravity nature had evolved them to expect. But when they were independently deployed in defense of point targets like Jalal Station, they had no handy mothership. Most parasite skippers were pretty good about allowing off-watch personnel to spend time on one of the rotating habitat rings of the station they guarded, but even that had been in short supply since Murphy’s arrival in Jalal, because—little though anyone was prepared to admit it—no one could be absolutely positive about where any given spacer’s true loyalties lay. Under the circumstances, it only made sense to restrict their freedom of movement, he supposed.

He would have preferred to hold this conversation somewhere else, though. Somewhere they wouldn’t have to worry about who might overhear. But at least they had an established cover for it. Although he was an engineer while Vítek was in TFNS Champlain’s Communications Department, they’d been friends since the Academy. They’d frequently gone on liberty together, back when they’d been allowed off the ship, so no one was surprised when they met here to share a cup of coffee when they were both off watch. They’d been careful to maintain that routine ever since that lunatic Murphy and his murderous butchers arrived. Just as they’d been careful to keep their heads down once they realized their sublight battlecruiser was going over to the mutiny, whatever they did.

That had been Vítek’s idea. Left to his own devices, Zamorano probably would’ve gotten himself killed right along with Captain Stano. Not because he was so brave, but because he wouldn’t have realized until too late how futile resistance was. Especially with Commander Moghadam, Champlain’s executive officer, actually leading the mutiny. It was fortunate Vítek had gotten to him before he’d done something stupid, and since the mutiny, the two of them had very quietly reached out to a handful of others in preparation for this very moment.

And now we’re all probably going to get killed, anyway, he thought. But at least we may actually accomplish a little something first. I’d like that.

“How do we play it?” he asked now.

“I wish we knew more,” Vítek said. He picked up his bulb of coffee, made himself sip, then lowered it to the magnetic plate in the mess table with a smile that looked almost natural. “All Deng was able to tell Jasmin was that the relief force is inbound. She couldn’t push her hack deep enough to get more than that.”

He cocked an eyebrow, and Zamorano nodded in understanding. Senior Chief Petty Officer Jasmin Bourcier was Vítek’s senior noncom in Communications, but Deng Yazhu was only a third-class petty officer, an electronics tech assigned to the tactical department. Her official reach into the systems was restricted, especially since the mutiny, but she’d managed to create a few backdoors.

“She’s not sure how long they’ve been decelerating, but she estimates it’s been at least a couple of hours. Which means they’re walking right into whatever the hell Murphy plans to do to them.”

“They’ve got to be at least a little suspicious,” Zamorano objected, but he heard the self-convincing edge in his own voice, and Vítek shook his head.

“Why?” he asked. He kept his expression bland, but his lowered voice was bitter. “I’ll guarantee you the bastards are saying exactly the right things to them. That’s what I do for a living, right? They know all the SOP comm procedures as well as I do, and trust me, they got total access to the Station’s data files when they took it over. They got all the authentication codes, all the background info. Hell, they’ve probably built CGI versions of Admiral Portier and her entire fricking staff! How is somebody hearing all the right things from all the right people supposed to figure out something’s wrong before Murphy opens fire and blows his ass right out of space?”

“We don’t know Murphy’s going to do that,” Zamorano pointed out.

“The hell we don’t!” Vítek leaned a bit closer. “You think he just happened to have those goddamned missiles of his parked close enough to start killing ships when he first got here? If the traitorous sons-of-bitches like Moghadam hadn’t just handed him the keys, he would’ve killed however many of us he had to before we surrendered to him. Look what he did to those marshals and Hoplons in New Dublin!”

Zamorano’s face tightened, but he had to nod. The story of what had happened to Captain Lipshen and the marshals sent with him had spread throughout Jalal Station, although he doubted there was a single word of truth in the version Murphy’s people had allowed to “leak” out. Even if there had been, even if Lipshen had started the shooting, that didn’t change the fact that it was all Murphy’s fault. They wouldn’t even have been there if he hadn’t stepped so far over the line.

“Well,” Vítek shrugged, “whoever the Oval sent out here has to’ve come loaded for bear. And I’ll bet there hasn’t been time for anybody to organize any goddamned mutinies in their ships companies. So what do you think Murphy’s going to do when whoever’s in command tells him to pound sand?”

“All right,” Zamorano sighed. “All right. You’re right. So what do we do about it?”

His tone said he already knew, and Vítek reached across the table to squeeze his friend’s forearm almost gently.

* * *

I wish we’d had time to set this up better, Zamorano thought, ten minutes later. Not that it’s going to matter a lot in the end.

He felt as if there were a flashing sign on his back as he and Vítek drifted as nonchalantly as possible along the passage, yet he knew no one else in the ship’s company felt the terrible, stomach-churning anxiety he did. In fact, he’d wanted to scream at the people they’d passed on the way here for being so damned calm. Not that it was their fault. Murphy couldn’t wait too much longer before he started prepping his units for battle, but he hadn’t said a word about it yet, and despite his burning hatred for the man, Zamorano had to admire his coolness. He was pretty certain that if he’d been in Murphy’s shoes he would have already begun doing just that, even if it would have told all of the other Albert Víteks and Adan Zamoranos what was happening.

Which might have at least meant Albert and I wouldn’t be ones who had to do this, he reflected grimly, feeling the heavy weight in his shipsuit pocket. Damn it, why does it have to be us? Why can’t some—

“…and then I told him I bet him fifty credits the Coheteros took the Cup this year,” Vítek said easily, for the ears of anyone they passed. “’Course, it’s gonna be—what? Six, seven months before we know who won? But when we do know, he’s gonna have to pay up, right?

“Hockey’s not my thing,” Zamorano said, trying gamely to hold up his end of the conversation. “I’m more into soccer and null-gee basketball.”

“I don’t know how you can say that,” Vítek said as they passed through the last passage blast door before the bridge. “How could anybody prefer floating around to getting out on the ice, man? It’s just—”

He caught the bulkhead rail to stop himself outside the open command deck hatch. A Marine sergeant in a master-at-arms brassard stood post just outside it—a new addition, since the mutinies—and Vítek nodded to him, still holding the bulkhead rail with his left hand while the other hand reached casually into his shipsuit. Then it came back out, and the pistol in it barked spiteful death.

The Marine flew back into the bulkhead. Crimson bubbles of blood and splinters of bone spiraled away in the microgravity, and Vítek pulled hard on the rail, sending himself through the command deck hatch.

“What the fu—?!” someone began, and Vítek fired again.

Zamorano hurled himself through the hatch behind his friend, his own handgun ready, and the two of them swept the bridge with their fire.

It was a massacre, and he wanted to vomit as he saw men and women—men and women he’d known, in some cases, for years—raising their hands in futile surrender. But Albert was right. They couldn’t risk trying to hold people at gunpoint along with everything else, and he made himself fire again and again.

No one else on the bridge was armed. Commander Moghadam had confiscated all personal weapons and locked them down in the armory after seizing control of the ship. That had applied to Vítek and Zamorano, as well, until Sergeant Gleeson, Champlain’s assistant armorer, had smuggled half a dozen sidearms back out for them.

Now Lieutenant Carmichael, the officer of the watch, flung himself desperately at Zamorano, arms spread, and the engineer shot him squarely in the face. Someone else screamed, and the scream went on and on until Vítek fired again and it stopped abruptly.

Then he and Zamorano were the only living humans in the entire compartment, surrounded by drifting bodies and ribbands of blood.

“Take the hatch!” Vítek snapped, shoving his gun into his belt, and Zamorano nodded choppily. He sent himself scooting back to the hatch and hit the button that closed it. It wouldn’t hold anybody on the other side long—not once they got hold of Moghadam or whoever had the watch in Engineering and overrode Zamorano’s locking code—but every second counted.

Behind him, Vítek shoved the body of one of his own communications ratings out of the way and started tapping commands into the dead woman’s console.

“Attention, incoming task force!” he barked into the microphone. “Attention! You are sailing into a trap! Jalal Station is in mutinous hands! I repeat, Jalal Station has been taken by mutineers! They have a total of fifteen FTLCs!”

* * *

“Eight minutes till they hit the Powell Limit, Admiral,” Commander Mirwani reported.

“Good.” Murphy nodded. “I’ll be happier when Rajenda—I mean, Vice Admiral Thakore—crosses the line.”

“Doesn’t really make much difference at this point, Sir,” O’Hanraghty pointed out. “He’s pretty much committed, no matter what.”

“I know. But there’s a psychological element to it. He’ll feel it more once his max acceleration drops. And—”

“Oh, shit,” Callum Murphy said.

His father’s head turned towards him, and Callum tapped his screen, throwing the audio from his earbug onto the command deck’s external speakers.

“—repeat, Jalal Station has been taken by mutineers!” a taut, strain-flattened voice said. “They have a total of fifteen FTLCs! All mobile units in the system are under the traitor Murphy’s command. I repeat, Jalal Station has been taken by mutineers!”

“Where’s that coming from?” Murphy asked sharply.

“I don’t know,” Callum replied, turning down the volume so his father could hear him. “There’s no identifier, and it’s omnidirectional, not a comm laser.”

“On it,” Bryant MacTavish threw in, entering rapid-fire commands at his own station. “It’s got to be one of the parasites somewhere in the outer shell. Looks like one of the battlecruisers, maybe.”

“But it’s omnidirectional?”

“Yes, Sir,” Callum confirmed.

“Makes sense,” O’Hanraghty said. “Probably, anyway. Whoever it is must’ve figured out what’s going on but doesn’t have access to the actual tracking data. He can’t know exactly where Thakore is, so he’s shotgunning.”

“Got it!” McTavish announced. “It’s coming from Champlain. Commodore Bartowski’s squadron.”

“—don’t know how much longer I’ve got,” the voice in Callum’s earbud continued. “Murphy has some kind of extended range missile system. Don’t know how it works, but he used it to—”

A sudden thunder of gunfire came through the earbud, and the voice died with its owner.

“Well, since the cat is out of the bag,” Murphy said into the ringing silence, “I suppose I should go ahead and say a few words of my own.”

* * *

“Five minutes till they cross the limit, Sir,” Commander Beaudouin said, and Tremblay nodded with an undeniable edge of satisfaction.

The range to TF 804 had fallen to under twenty-seven light-minutes as it continued to decelerate. Its velocity was now little more than half of Hammer Force’s and it was only about 20.5 LM short of Jalal Station.

“All right,” Tremblay said, and looked at the main holo display. Captain Kerbouche looked back at him from it, and he nodded to her.

“Bring the fans up, Rashida,” he said. “It’s time we started doing a little decelerating of our own.”

“Yes, Sir!” Kerbouche replied with a huge grin, and Tremblay looked back at the tactical plot.

Now that they’d reached this point, he admitted to himself that he hadn’t really expected things to go quite this perfectly, but damned if it hadn’t worked out exactly as Murphy intended. By the time TF 804’s light-speed sensors detected Hammer Force’s Fasset signatures, it would be a good seven light-minutes across the limit and into the Powell sphere, its acceleration reduced to only nine hundred gravities. And Hammer Force’s deceleration would bring Tremblay’s FTLCs to rest relative to the primary while it was still 200,000 kilometers outside the limit, capable of a full 1,800 gravities. For all intents and purposes, TF 804 would be a fish in a barrel, unable to escape the inner system without being intercepted, no matter what it did.

Of course, this particular “fish” is something of a great white shark, he reflected. But I’ll be in a hell of a position to hammer it with Casúrs, and that doesn’t even count what the Admiral will be doing!

* * *

“Admiral Thakore!”

Rajenda Thakore turned towards Commander Abercrombie. It wasn’t like her to blurt out his name that way. That was his first thought. But even as it crossed his mind, he realized he’d never before heard that note in the comm officer’s voice, either, and his eyebrows rose.

He opened his mouth, but she went on before he could speak.

“Sir, we’ve just picked up a transmission from Jalal,” she said. “It’s not from Admiral Portier. In fact—”

She broke off—which was also very unlike her—and the sheer shock and confusion in her normally composed expression sent a chill through Rajenda.

“Who is it from?” he demanded.

“It’s—Sir, I don’t know who it’s from! There’s no header, it just—”

Abercrombie paused, inhaled deeply, and shook her head.

“You’d better hear it for yourself, Sir.”

“All right, put it up,” he said, but the comm officer shook her head.

“I think you’d better hear it first, Sir,” she said.

He looked at her for another moment, then nodded impatiently. She tapped her screen, and a harsh, staccato voice came suddenly through his earbud.

“Attention, incoming task force!” it said. “Attention! You are sailing into a trap! Jalal Station is in mutinous hands! I repeat, Jalal Station has been taken by mutineers! They have a total of fifteen FTLCs! All mobile units in the system are under the traitor Murphy’s command. I repeat, Jalal Station—”

Rajenda stiffened, his own eyes suddenly wide, listening as the desperate man at the other end of that comm link blurted out his message.

“—range missile system. Don’t know how it works, but he used it to—”

A deafening crackle of gunfire cut the voice abruptly short, and Rajenda Thakore’s face was a mask of iron.

He felt Commodore Zebić staring at him, and he shook his head, like a man shaking off a punch to the jaw.

“It would appear,” he said to his cousin, and his voice was insanely calm in his own ears, “that we’ve been hoodwinked.”

“Sir?” Zebić sounded confused, and he barked a hard, harsh laugh.

“I don’t think that’s Admiral Portier we’ve been talking to,” he said. “In fact—”

“Sir,” Abercrombie interrupted in a very careful tone. “We have another incoming transmission. This one—” She cleared her throat. “This one is from Jalal Station, Sir, but—”

“Isn’t from Portier,” Rajenda interrupted. “I know.” His nostrils flared and he squared his shoulders. “Go ahead and put it up, Ntombikayise.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Abercrombie tapped her screen, and Rajenda heard someone gasp as a face he knew entirely too well appeared on the master display.

“Hello, Rajenda,” Terrence Murphy said. “I don’t imagine you expected to be hearing from me today.” He shrugged, ever so slightly. “I suppose that’s fair enough, since I didn’t expect to be speaking with you under these circumstances. But here we are, aren’t we?”

Murphy paused, and Rajenda Thakore’s eyes blazed as he glared at his brother-in-law. Somehow, he thought, Murphy should’ve changed. Should have become another man than the one who’d departed for New Dublin fifteen months ago. He should have sounded different, looked different. But he didn’t, aside from the glittering silver leaf he wore now above the ribbons on his uniform’s breast.

“I realize you’re probably not going to believe this any more than Admiral Portier did,” Murphy resumed, “but I truly don’t want a fight. There’s already been one here—one I never wanted, and that I did my best to terminate as quickly as possible. I was willing to allow Admiral Maddox’s carriers to leave for Sol, but some of the Fringers in his ships companies—and aboard the system defense parasites—didn’t know that. They mutinied before they received my comm message telling Portier I had no objection to their departure.” His expression turned grim. “A lot of people died who didn’t have to. People wearing the same uniform you and I are wearing. I never wanted that. I don’t want any more of it. But somehow, I have to get Olympia and Prime Minister Schleibaum to listen to me, and you and I both know the Five Hundred won’t let that happen unless I find a way to make them listen. That’s the only reason I’m here.”

Rajenda felt the frozen, stunned silence of Lelantos’s flag bridge all around him, but he couldn’t look away from the display.

“This situation has gone a lot of places I never intended for it to go,” Murphy continued, “and we’ve got to get a handle on it before it goes even further. In fact, it’s gone further than you could know yet. The Concordia Sector has gone ‘out of compliance’ and declared its independence as the Free Worlds Alliance.”

Rajenda flinched, and someone else on the flag bridge gasped audibly.

“I didn’t want that to happen,” Murphy continued. “It was never what I wanted, and I truly think I could have prevented it—convinced them to give me a chance to speak for them, at least—if Andy Lipshen hadn’t managed to murder the New Dublin system president in front of hundreds of witnesses. That was too much for them, Rajenda, and the only way I could have stopped it was by going to Standing Order Fifteen, and there was no way in hell I was doing that. Not when they were right to be so enraged.”

His lips tightened and he paused, his eyes grim.

“You may not want to admit it, Rajenda, but you know as well as I do why the Fringe is as angry as it is. The FWA trusts me enough to be willing—for now, at least—to let me try to speak for them, try to find a way to put the Federation back together on some sort of equitable basis. And I hope to hell we can, because if those issues aren’t dealt with, the situation is unsustainable. There’s only so much the iron fist can achieve, even if the Five Hundred doesn’t want to hear that. The fact that there were ‘mutineers’ aboard every single ship deployed to Jalal—that they were the majority on almost all of them—should demonstrate that to anybody with a working brain.

“But that’s a separate issue, really. The main issue is that, whether or not you—or the Five Hundred—want to admit it, I have proof the Rish have been supporting the League. Helping them build warships. I can’t think the Sphere would be doing that unless it had an endgame planned, and I very much doubt that anyone in the Federation or the League would like whatever that endgame is.

“I don’t have answers to way too many questions about their intentions, how long they’ve been helping the League, what they plan to do when they find out we know they have been, or a lot of other things. But I do know the Federation has to find those answers, and the first step in finding them is listening to me and looking at my evidence. And that means I have no choice but to make people listen. That’s why I’m here at Jalal, and I will happily stay here at Jalal, far, far away from Sol, if Schleibaum and the Oval are willing to send someone out here to look at the evidence.”

He paused again, then grimaced.

“I don’t expect you to be happy to hear any of that, and I don’t expect you to be happy about what I’m going to say next, but I’m afraid I’ll have to insist you listen anyway. One thing’s been made abundantly clear to me, starting with the decision to send Andy Lipshen to New Dublin to drag me home in chains, and that is that no one’s going to listen to a word I say unless I make them. And, unfortunately, that means I need the firepower to force them to at least negotiate. It also means I can’t let you drag me home the way Lipshen was supposed to.

“So in order to avoid any further…unpleasantness, you are instructed to divert from Jalal Station. You will assume a stellar orbit, three light-minutes inside the Powell Limit, and all but one of your FTLCs will stay there. Your flagship may approach within one light-minute of Jalal Station, so that you and I can talk to each other without an enormous comm lag. And after we’ve talked, you and your flagship will depart for Sol to report what I’ve told you to Olympia.

“I’ll be honest, Rajenda. I wish they’d sent almost anyone besides you, for a lot of reasons. Including, whether you believe it or not, the fact that this is about to put you, your father, Simmy—all of us—in one hell of a deep hole where the Five Hundred are concerned. I regret that, but I don’t have much choice.”

His recorded image looked out of the display for a handful of seconds in silence, then he shrugged.

“Your informant was correct, by the way. I do control all of the ships in Jalal orbit, and I do command fifteen FTLCs. I realize that still gives you the edge in firepower—or that you think it does, at any rate. Unfortunately, you’re wrong. Admiral Xing thought she had the edge in New Dublin, and she was wrong, too. Please—please, Rajenda—don’t force me to prove that to you. Too many Federation personnel have already died. Let’s not make the casualty list even longer.

“Murphy, clear.”

The display blanked, and Rajenda turned away from it to face his staff.

They stared back at him, expressions shocked, and he wondered what they saw in his own face.

Nothing good, he suspected.

“That was…unexpected,” he said finally.

“Do you believe him?” Zebić asked, and Rajenda coughed out a laugh.

“What part of it?” he demanded. “All that bullshit about his noble intent? Or all about the ‘proof’ that his tinfoil-hat lunatic friends have been right all along? Or that he has fifteen carriers?” He shook himself. “I don’t have a single goddamned idea how much of it I should believe, except that there’s no way in hell we’re going to just roll over and let a single rogue admiral rip the guts out of the Federation!”

“So what do you want to do, Sir?” she asked.

“First—” He looked at Abercrombie. “Record for transmission,” he said.

“Recording.”

“Admiral Murphy,” he said, and his liquid-helium tone was warmer than his eyes, “I don’t care about anything you’ve said. What I care about is that you are in a state of mutiny. That, by your own admission, you’ve violated your standing orders, refused to return to Old Terra when so ordered, and are now in the position of a traitor waging rebellious warfare against the Constitution and the duly constituted government of the Terran Federation. You’ve betrayed every oath you ever swore as an officer of the Terran Federation Navy, and so have any other personnel who have followed you into this damnable treason.

“You will stand down, Admiral. You will surrender yourself and every vessel under your control to me, and you will return to the Sol System as my prisoner, there to stand trial for your crimes. Should you refuse to do so, I will compel you to, and I have the firepower to do just that. I advise you to take what I’ve just said very, very seriously. The consequences for those you’ve seduced into supporting you will already be extraordinarily grave. Do not make it worse.

“Thakore, clear.”

He stood for a moment longer, then nodded to himself, once.

“Send it,” he said. “And then set up the conference circuit. I want all squadron commanders on the line immediately.”

“Yes, Sir!”

* * *

“If he’s got all those damned carriers, where the hell are they?” Rear Admiral Jonas Baumgartner demanded from his quadrant of the flag bridge display.

“I don’t know,” Rajenda replied a bit testily. “No doubt he’ll tell us—in about another twenty-five or thirty minutes. Of course, whether or not we believe him will be something else.”

“So you don’t think he really has that many, Sir?” Rear Admiral Nakanishi asked. His tone was very careful, Rajenda noted with bitter amusement.

“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We can’t know. From the sensor data we’ve got, it certainly looks like he got Maddox’s carriers, but they’re in orbit with the Station, so assuming he’s telling the truth, he must have another dozen of them tucked away somewhere. But that would mean he had virtually every picket on Concordia’s side of the Fringe. Every single one of them.” He shook his head. “As ‘worst-case’ scenarios go, that one would take some beating. I don’t think all of them could have successfully mutinied against their legal orders and commanders and gone over to him. If they have, then the situation’s gotten a lot worse than anyone back home was prepared to believe it could. Which makes it even more imperative that we deal with this now.”

Several heads nodded, and Rajenda showed his teeth in a tight smile.

Every one of his squadron commanders had been chosen for loyalty. For having amply demonstrated that loyalty in the past. Of course, that should be true of any flag officer, which was the main reason so few Fringers ever broke into the rarefied heights of senior flag rank. But until Murphy went so completely off the rails, no one—not even Rajenda Thakore—would ever have questioned his fundamental loyalty to the Federation. In the light of his treason, the loyalty of every other flag officer had to be looked at very, very carefully, because the Federation Navy couldn’t afford to discover another Murphy hiding in its senior echelons. That was why Rear Admiral Kashyap had been transferred in to command FTLC Squadron 15 when Rear Admiral Stimson was quietly promoted out of that slot because of his Fringer daughter-in-law.

Overall, Rajenda was confident of their loyalty, but some of them—Nakanishi was one—looked more than a little uneasy about the thought of a pitched battle.

“I’ve given him his options,” he said now. “Once upon a time, I would have expected him to be smart enough to accept the inevitable. Now…?” He shrugged. “Now, I’m not so sure. But if it comes down to it, we still have twenty-five carriers. Even if he has fifteen, that’s still a sixty percent edge, as long as we stay far enough out from Jalal. Hell, if Maddox’s carriers really are still in orbit with the Station, then the odds out here are two-to-one in our favor, even assuming he’s got twelve more stashed away. And then—”

“Status change,” Commander Alioto interrupted, and Rajenda wheeled from the comm with an irritated expression.

An expression that smoothed into blankness almost instantly when he saw the twelve Fasset signatures that had suddenly appeared on the master plot, decelerating steadily towards Jalal…and Task Force 804.

* * *

“They should be picking up Tremblay about now,” O’Hanraghty said.

“What do you think Uncle Rajenda’s going to do?” Callum asked softly. His father stood beside him now, hands clasped behind him as he gazed calmly at the master plot.

“I wish I knew,” he said, turning his head to look at Callum. “We should have some clue in the next couple of minutes, given the message turnaround time. But I don’t expect it to be good.” He shook his head, his eyes shadowed. “I was always afraid they might send Rajenda. I hoped they wouldn’t, but from the Five Hundred’s perspective, he was the perfect choice, really, if he was available.”

Callum looked back at him, and in that moment, he wished he could see inside his father’s head. Not because he thought Murphy would lie to him. That had never been his father’s style. But that wasn’t the same as saying that he’d share his darker thoughts with the son who, aside from his far greater height, had always been a dead ringer for the man commanding Task Force 804.

“He never liked you, did he?” Callum said now, and Murphy frowned ever so slightly.

“Picked up on that early, didn’t you?” he said after a moment.

“Honestly, Dad. He never really tried all that hard to hide it.”

“No. To tell the truth, that’s one of the things I’ve always rather admired about him. Whatever else he may be, he’s no dissembler. Although, to be fair, he did try to avoid rows over the family dinner table.”

“Why?” Callum asked. His father raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “Why did he always dislike you so much? It’s not like you don’t brush or mouthwash.”

“Son, your uncle—and your grandfather—are perfect examples of both the good and the bad sides of the Five Hundred.” There was an edge of sorrow in Murphy’s voice. “They’re both highly intelligent, hardworking, gifted in their own fields, and determined to succeed. They’re both very good at their jobs, and both of them have made tremendous contributions to the things they believe in. Your grandfather’s always treated his employees decently, pays fair wages, and respects their value. Neither of them ever just ‘coasted’ on their status in the Five Hundred the way far too many of its other members have, and your grandfather did his damnedest to make sure you and Vyom didn’t grow up to do that, either. Because the truth is that they’re good, decent fathers and sons who do their damnedest to take care of the important people in their lives. There’s a tremendous amount to respect in that.

“But, at the same time, they’ve been completely—and, in your uncle’s case, at least, willfully—blind to where the Five Hundred’s excesses ultimately have to lead. They see the Federation as a snapshot, an old-fashioned still photograph, not the video of a human society that—like all societies—is in a constant state of change. Changes may be excruciatingly slow, or they may be catastrophically fast, but social matrices always change, sooner or later. And for someone in the Five Hundred’s position, change is a threat. The keys to the kingdom are already in their pocket, aren’t they? It’s hard to imagine the kind of change that could improve their position, so they aren’t interested in any change.

“There’s nothing at all wrong with your uncle’s brain, Callum. And by his lights, he’s a good man. He loves his family, loves his father, and he’s completely loyal to the Federation. Or, at least, to the Federation as he understands it. And that’s the rub.”

“So it’s all about your wanting to change things?” Callum asked just a bit skeptically. “That’s why he’s always detested you?”

“Oh, that’s not how it started!” Murphy surprised Callum with a chuckle. “It started because he thought I wasn’t good enough for your mother.”

“What?” Callum blinked, and Murphy snorted.

“To be honest, I agreed with him about that,” he said. “Not for quite the same reasons, maybe, but I did agree. Your mother—” He paused, shook his head, his gray eyes suddenly softer. “Your mother is an extraordinary woman, Callum. In so many ways. She’s got a lot of the same blind spots your grandfather and your uncle do, but there’s never been a cruel or malevolent bone in her entire body, and she’s flat-out brilliant. I think she’s actually quite a lot smarter than I am, really, and—all false modesty aside—I’m not exactly a dummy, myself. And she’s just as beautiful as I am homely, and she comes from one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in human history, whereas my family was barely respectable, by the Five Hundred’s standards. Of course she was out of my league!” He twitched a grin. “So I knew when I proposed that Rajenda was going to oppose any engagement. And, to be completely honest, I knew it was a mistake when I did propose, too. I just…couldn’t help myself.”

“A mistake? Proposing to Mom was a mistake?” Callum frowned, and Murphy shook his head quickly and laid one hand on his forearm.

“Oh, it was the best mistake I ever made, trust me! But it was a mistake. I was already headed down the path that’s brought us all here.” He took his hand from Callum’s arm to point at the decksole under their feet. “I hadn’t worked it all out yet, but I did know it was likely to end badly, and I didn’t have any business dragging her into that with me. For that matter, while there might be some tactical advantages to having a toehold in the Five Hundred myself, I already had a pretty good notion as to how the rest of the Five Hundred would react if I ever truly kicked the traces over. I should’ve thought about that. I should’ve kept your mom clear of the mess. But the problem was that I loved her.”

He looked at his son, and something deep and warm welled up in Callum’s chest as he saw the softness, the glow, in his father’s eyes. The vulnerability he’d never shown so clearly before.

“I loved her so much, Callum. I still do.” Murphy blinked. “I always will. I couldn’t imagine living my life without her. Didn’t want to imagine it. And because I was too selfish to walk away, I’ve brought all of this down on her, just as much as I’ve brought it down on you and Vyom and Reagan. I can’t tell you how deeply I regret that. But somebody had to do it, and no one else was stepping up. So—”

He shrugged, and it was Callum’s turn to grip his father’s shoulder and squeeze hard. Murphy looked down, then reached up and put his own hand over Callum’s.

“Anyway,” he said more briskly, “Rajenda never thought I was good enough for your mom. For his entire family, really, but especially for his baby sister. I think a part of him realized I’d never be a good fit for the Five Hundred, no matter how much she and your grandad cleaned me up and polished me.” He smiled briefly. “I doubt he had any idea where I was really headed, but he may have…sensed something. Anyway, he was against it. Your mom, on the other hand, was all in. Can’t imagine what she saw in me, but she was pretty fierce when he opened his mouth to object! Cut him right off at the ankles in the middle of La Cuillère d’Argent one day, between the salad and the main course, with half the waitstaff watching her perform a double orchidectomy without ever raising her voice once. It was beautiful to see!” He smiled again, much more broadly. “And she is a Thakore, you know, right down to her toenails. When your grandfather seemed a bit dubious, she was the one who trotted out how valuable the connection to Henrik Murphy might be for someone doing so much business with the Navy!”

“That does sound like Mom,” Callum agreed with a chuckle.

“It does, indeed,” Murphy acknowledged, but then his smile faded and he shook his head, turning back to the plot.

“But your uncle has a lot more reasons to hate me now,” he said softly. “By his lights, I’m a traitor, and not just to the Constitution. Oh, I’m sure he thinks I’ve betrayed that, too, and I’m not trying to make light of how furious he’d be over that by itself. But I’ve also betrayed your mom, you—the entire Thakore family. And for all its collegial veneer, the Five Hundred is about as voraciously competitive as social organisms come. They’ll turn on your grandfather—and your mom—in a heartbeat if they think either of them is even remotely likely to support what we’re doing out here. And even if that weren’t the case, your grandfather’s competitors, people like Madison Dawson, have to taste the blood in the water. They’ll use me against Venus Futures and the family any way they can, and Rajenda knows that, too.

“Which is why I’m very much afraid he’s not going to do the smart thing here. I hope he does. I hope that brain of his realizes I wouldn’t have gone this far if I wasn’t prepared—and able—to make it stand up. And that making it do that has to include the military capacity to handle even his task force. I hope he’ll realize he has to talk to me…but I don’t think all those other factors will let him.”

“You don’t hate him, do you?” Callum said slowly after a moment, and Murphy looked back, cocking his head. “I mean, I know you two never liked each other. I’ve known that since I was a kid, even if I didn’t know why, but I can tell. You don’t.”

“No.” Murphy shook his head. “It took me a while to realize I don’t, but you’re right. And if he weren’t so deeply committed to the Five Hundred—and if I weren’t so completely committed to smashing what the Five Hundred stands for—I think we’d actually be friends. But he is, and I am, so we aren’t. And the Five Hundred couldn’t possibly have picked someone who’d be more motivated for more reasons to smash everything I’m trying to do, instead. I’m not just an existential threat to the Federation, or to the Five Hundred at large, I’m also an existential threat to his family. And one of the central girders of your uncle’s strength is his commitment to and his love for his family. In fact, that probably makes him even more furious with me, because he can’t understand how someone who loves his family could put you all at risk the way I have. And I have, Callum. Trust me, if anyone knows that, I do. And that’s why I understand Rajenda will do anything to protect the things he loves. Just like I would.”

“Dad,” Callum looked deep into his father’s eyes, “I love you. And I think I must have the same Murphy ‘stupid gene’ that you do, because right this minute?” He smiled crookedly. “Right this minute, I think I love you more than I ever have before.”

Murphy’s eyes widened. Then he reached across, cupped the side of Callum’s face in his hand, and shook him gently.

“From one ‘stupid-gene’ Murphy to another,” his voice was ever so slightly frayed around the edges, “that means a lot.”

“Yeah. Well, let’s not get too mushy, right?” Callum made his own voice deliberately brisk. “Kinda doubt this is the best moment for it.”

“No.” Murphy nodded in agreement. “No, probably not. And I doubt your uncle’s feeling especially ‘mushy’ just now, either.”

“Uncle Rajenda? Mushy? The mind boggles, Dad—it just…boggles.”

Terrence Murphy laughed out loud, and never noticed the way eyes turned toward him and his son from all around Command Central.

“In that case—” he began.

“Excuse me, Admiral,” Lieutenant Thurman interrupted from Communications. “We have an incoming transmission from Task Force Eight-Oh-Four.”

“Oh, joy,” O’Hanraghty said, and Murphy snorted.

“Might as well see what he has to say, Harry.”

“Just as long as you don’t get your hopes up too high,” O’Hanraghty replied dryly.

“I’ll try not to.” Murphy looked back at Thurman. “Put it up, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Sir.”

A window opened in the master plot, and a steely-eyed Rajenda Thakore looked out of it. His expression, Callum thought, was…less than promising.

“Admiral Murphy,” he began in an ice-cold voice, “I don’t care about anything you’ve said. What I care about is that you are in a state of mutiny. That by your own admission…”

* * *

Rajenda Thakore tried to throttle his rage as he glared at the plot’s proof Murphy really did have fifteen carriers… and realized what that meant for the true scale of the disaster the Federation faced. Only two carriers—two, out of all the pickets deployed to Concordia and the neighboring sectors—weren’t in Murphy’s order of battle.

But it all comes down to Terry, really, doesn’t it? he thought grimly. He’s the one who brought all this to a head! And he’s the figurehead, the focus. If he goes down, his precious Free Worlds will disintegrate into a rabble we can deal with one system at a time, if we have to. And whatever he may have done—or not done—at New Dublin, he’s a frigging Survey nerd who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow up against an experienced, competent CO.

He made himself sit on his fury. Made himself think as coldly as he could, reminded himself that only a fool let anger shape his tactical perceptions. He felt the eyes of his staff and his squadron commanders on him as he folded his arms across his chest, frowning down at the decksole while he considered all the moving parts. Then he inhaled deeply and looked up again.

“All right,” he said harshly. “I’d hoped we could settle this without killing anybody else, but it’s obvious they aren’t interesting in cooperating. Either that, or they expect us to cave in the face of their bluff.”

One or two sets of eyes cut ever so briefly away from him toward the plot and the glowing icons of those incoming FTLCs, and he smiled thinly.

“I realize all these Fringe bastards think my esteemed brother-in-law can walk on water,” he told them bitingly. “But he can’t, and he’s screwed the pooch on this one. It looks like he expected us to fold when his carriers turned up outside the Powell Sphere, but if he did, then he must have underestimated how much of the Reserve the Oval was willing to send out to swat him. He always wanted to be a Survey officer.” He snorted. “Well, from the looks of things, he should’ve stayed there.”

“Sir,” Nakanishi said, “I agree we have the edge against his carriers, but they are outside us. With that accel advantage, they can intercept us when we try to break back out across the limit, whatever we do.”

“Of course they can, but they’re also isolated. His forces are divided, and we’re between them, with the ‘interior line.’”

Rajenda looked at the plot himself for a moment, then at the comm display tied into Lelantos’s command deck.

“Lieutenant Massengale!” he said.

“Yes, Admiral?” Lelantos’s astrogator was outside the comm camera’s field of view, but his voice came through clearly.

“We’re done decelerating,” Rajenda said. “Plot a least-time course to take us past Jalal Station, range two light-seconds, and go to maximum accel.”

“Yes, Sir!”

Rajenda turned back to his senior officers.

“At our crossing velocity, we’ll be well inside missile range of the Station as we pass.” His tone was flat and iron-hard. “We’ll cut accel and deploy the parasites ten minutes before we launch. And then, if Murphy refuses to see reason, we’ll blow the hell out of these mutinous bastards as we go by. There won’t be squat their carriers can do to stop us, and if they want to intercept us at the limit on our way out, I’m totally willing to take them on at two-to-one odds.”

Someone inhaled audibly.

“I agree that their carriers won’t be able to interfere, Sir,” Zebić said after a moment. “They’ve still got over three hundred sublight units, plus the station’s orbital batteries. That’s a lot of fire.”

“They may have a lot of fire, but we’ve got a lot of point defense,” Rajenda replied. “And we’ve got two hundred and fifty parasites of our own on the racks, including two hundred and five capital ships. That’s a lot more point defense. And between them and the carriers, we can lay down over four thousand missiles in a single launch.” He shook his head. “Their base velocity will be zero, our passing velocity will be right on a hundred thousand KPS, and none of that orbital infrastructure out there can dodge. So we’ll be able to hammer it with our K-guns, as well.” He shook his head. “If he insists on being stupid, we can turn this entire base into rubble in a single firing pass.”

Zebić opened her mouth. Then she stopped, visibly reconsidering what she’d been about to say, and closed it.

“I don’t want to kill a couple of hundred thousand people, even mutineers and traitors, any more than you do, Christina,” Rajenda said in a marginally gentler tone. “For that matter, if we are forced to fire, we’ll be killing a lot of people who probably aren’t traitors, and I like that thought even less. But if we don’t get on top of this, if we don’t stop it right here and right now, a hell of a lot more people are going to die. And if this goes on and the entire Fringe goes up in flames, we’ll probably lose the frigging war, as well! And in that case, every single person who’s ever died fighting for the Federation will have died for nothing.”

He shook his head, nostrils flared, but his eyes were level and his voice had hardened into iron once more.

“I’m not letting that happen. If Murphy forces my hand on this, I’ll just have to live with it.”

There was silence for a moment, and then his cousin nodded.

“Yes, Sir,” she said quietly.

* * *

“Incoming message, Admiral,” Lieutenant Thurston said.

“Bets on what he’s going to say?” O’Hanraghty asked quietly, and Murphy gave a grunting cough of a laugh.

“No.” He shook his head, eyes hard but also said. “I’ve known what he’s going to say since he started accelerating again. Damn, I hate this.”

“Not a lot you can do about it at this point,” O’Hanraghty said. “Only way out is through.”

“I know. I know!”

Murphy shook his head and looked at Thurston.

“Put it up, Lieutenant.”

Rajenda Thakore appeared on the master display once more, his eyes harder than flint, and the battle boards of the FTLC flag bridge visible beyond him glared a uniform crimson.

“All right, Admiral,” he said, “you’ve had your say. And, yes, I see the damned carriers coming up behind me. But they’re behind me, and you’re in front of me. So this is how it’s going to be. You’ll stand down, Jalal Station will stand down, and those carriers will cross the hyper limit and go into that stellar orbit you wanted me in, well away from the Station. I will see every one of your sublight ships accelerating away from the Station at six gravities, and they will continue to accelerate away from it until they’ve exhausted seventy-five percent of their reaction mass. My carriers will collect them later, but they will not be in support range of Jalal Station.

“Once you’ve agreed to my terms and the sublight ships are underway, I’ll decelerate to rest at a range of one hundred thousand kilometers from the Station. From there, my shuttles and the Army troops aboard my transports will take possession of Jalal Station, and be forewarned that they will employ lethal force at the first sign of resistance. You and your senior officers will surrender yourselves to me, to be transported to Old Terra, there to face court-martial and trial for treason and for mutiny under the relevant Uniform Code of Justice and the Articles of War.

“You may choose not to accept my terms. That’s your option. Be aware, however, that if you do not accept my terms, and if the mutinous units under your command do not comply with my instructions, I will have no option but to open fire on Jalal Station. I do not desire to do so. I do not desire to kill thousands of Federation personnel, nor do I desire to reduce one of the Federation’s premier naval stations to wreckage, but cancers must be cut out to save the rest of the body, and I am prepared to cut you out, whatever the cost in lives, to save the Federation and the Constitution. I will destroy Jalal Station as I pass, and then I will recover my parasites, and your twelve carriers are welcome to intercept my twenty-five at the Powell Limit.

“At my current acceleration, I will enter my attack range forty-seven minutes after you receive this transmission. If I haven’t seen your sublight units accelerating away from the Station within five minutes of your receipt of this message, I’ll consider that a declaration that you don’t intend to comply, and the blood which will be shed and the lives which will be lost will be on your head.”

He glared out of the plot for ten ice-cold seconds. Then—

“Thakore, clear.”

His image disappeared, and Callum reminded himself to breathe again. He’d never before seen his uncle that coldly, viciously furious, and he didn’t doubt for one moment that he’d meant every word he’d said.

“That’s what I was afraid he was going to say,” Murphy said sadly.

“I don’t think it really matters who they sent at this point, Terry,” O’Hanraghty said almost gently. “Anybody Schleibaum and the Five Hundred trusted enough to send out here would probably have said exactly the same thing, and you know it. That’s why you set Spider up the way you did.”

“I know.” Murphy turned from the display to look at his friend. “And it’s not like either of us didn’t see this coming. But I don’t want to kill thousands of Federation people any more than he does. And, on a personal level, if I kill Rajenda, it’ll break Simron’s heart.”

“You think it won’t break her heart if he kills you?” O’Hanraghty asked quizzically.

“Of course it will. That doesn’t mean I want to be the one to hurt her that way, though.”

Murphy touched the silver leaf on the breast of his tunic, then inhaled.

“Lieutenant Thurston, please send the Execute Alpha Seven signal to Commodore Tremblay.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“By this time,” Murphy continued, looking back at O’Hanraghty and including Commander Mirwani in his conversation, “Tremblay’s probably already gone to Alpha Seven, since there’s only one reason Rajenda would be accelerating deeper into the Powell Sphere. Never hurts to make sure, though.”

O’Hanraghty nodded, and Murphy turned directly to Mirwani.

“Our deployment looks pretty close to perfect,” he said. “I imagine he’ll drop his parasites to thicken his defenses and clear their launchers at least ten or twelve minutes before he enters his chosen attack range. I want the initial launch to target them.”

“The parasites, Sir? Not the carriers?”

“Not in the initial launch.” Murphy’s expression was grim. “Given what’s about to go down, there’s no path back from here that doesn’t include more bloodshed farther down the road. We’ll probably need all the FTLCs we can get our hands on, and I don’t want to destroy any more of his carriers than we absolutely have to. I know we’ll have to hit them anyway, probably with the second wave, to convince him we’re serious, but let’s at least give him a chance to rediscover sanity.”

“Yes, Sir.”

* * *

“No sign they’re going to be reasonable,” Christina Zebić said quietly, and Rajenda nodded grimly.

If Murphy had been inclined to accept his terms, those sublight parasites would have begun moving just under thirty minutes ago, and even with their light-speed limitations, TF 804’s sensors would have detected it ten minutes ago. Now the range to the station was down to barely seven and a half light-minutes, and TF 804’s closing velocity was back up to 89,000 KPS.

Which meant that in about twenty-five minutes, Rajenda Thakore was going to kill the better part of a hundred and fifty thousand Federation Navy personnel.

No, I’m going to kill the better part of a hundred and fifty thousand mutineers, dammit!

He told himself that, very firmly.

It didn’t help.

* * *

“Oh, those poor bastards,” Nathanaël Beaudouin said softly from beside Esteban Tremblay’s command chair.

Hammer Force had detected the change in TF 804’s acceleration rate twenty-two minutes ago, and Esteban hadn’t needed Murphy’s orders to know what he was supposed to do if the task force committed to an attack run. Personally, he’d always thought that was the most likely outcome, and he’d come to terms with it. Or he’d thought he had, at any rate. Now it was coming to pass, and he realized Beaudouin had just spoken for him, as well.

At the moment, Hammer Force had gone back to full acceleration on an adjusted vector that would just skim across the top of the Jalal System Powell Sphere. It would bring Tremblay’s carriers back down to intercept TF 804 if it continued directly across the system, and the combination of his higher starting base velocity and vastly higher acceleration rate meant the task force couldn’t evade him whatever it did.

No doubt the Federation commander thought it would be a case of a hunting hound “catching” a sabretooth, but then, the Federation CO didn’t know what Murphy had waiting for him. Tremblay knew he didn’t, because if he had, he’d never have adopted the approach he’d obviously chosen.

“It’s not like the Admiral didn’t give them a chance to back down, Nate,” he said now.

“No, but he also didn’t tell them what would happen—or how it would, anyway—if they didn’t,” Beaudouin replied. “He couldn’t, if Spider’s going to work.”

“War isn’t about giving the other side fair warning.” Tremblay’s voice was harsher than it had been, and he shook his head. “I never wanted to be a mutineer, and I never wanted to commit treason, and I still don’t. But the Admiral’s right. We have got to make these people listen, and they obviously aren’t going to until we’ve killed enough other people that they have to. And it makes me want to puke, but it’s not going to make me stop.”

He turned in his chair, facing his chief of staff squarely, and his eyes were dark.

“It won’t make me stop, and I’ll tell you something, Nate. There’s nothing in this universe that will make the Admiral stop, either. Not until they do listen.”

“And after that, Sir? After they’ve listened? What then?”

“Then we all have some hard decisions to make,” Tremblay said. “I know you and the rest of the Free Worlds Alliance want your independence, and I understand that—better than I ever did before. But there are other people—I’m one of them, and so is Admiral, I think—who want to heal the breach, somehow. Find a way to keep the Federation from tearing itself apart in the face of both the League and the Rish.”

“You really think that’s possible at this point?” Beaudouin asked very quietly, and Tremblay shrugged.

“I have to believe it’s possible,” he said. “Which is a completely different thing from ‘likely.’ But I never would have believed the Admiral could get this far, so I’m not ruling out the chance that he has another miracle or two tucked away in that spacebag of his. I don’t know what they might be, but I’m willing to back his play long enough to find out.”

Beaudouin considered that for several seconds, then nodded.

“Works for me, Sir.”

* * *

“Admiral Thakore, I’ve got something over here you should take a look at,” Saffiro Alioto said.

“What?”

Rajenda kicked off from his command chair, floating across Flag Bridge to the ops officer’s console, and Alioto tapped in a command.

“I’m trying to figure out what this is, Sir,” he said, as a diamond dust coating of icons illuminated. They represented a vast cloud of Hauptman signatures.

“Repositioning the Kavachas, most likely.” Rajenda shrugged. “He knew the most probable threat axis all along, but he couldn’t predict exactly what our vector and velocity would be until we actually arrived. Not surprised he’s doing a little adjusting.”

“That’s what I thought, too, Sir.” Alioto nodded. “But there are an awful lot of them. And, to be honest, they’re farther out from the Station than I would have expected.”

“Um.”

Rajenda rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then leaned across the ops officer’s shoulder and tapped a query of his own into the display. Numerical data scrolled up one side of the screen, and he watched it for a second, then tapped again, freezing it.

“He’s buying more depth,” he said. “Look here. He’s basically sending out three waves of platforms.” He shook his head. “God only knows how much that deployment of his is costing the taxpayer, but he’s not paying for them. He probably wants to be able to attrit our K-gun fire as much as possible, and it’ll make problems for the missiles, too, if he can get it wide enough we can’t maneuver around it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s pushing some more Heimdallars out right along with them. He’ll want the best look he can get at us. For all the good it’ll do him.”

“Makes sense,” Alioto said thoughtfully, after a moment. “I guess I’m just surprised Jalal had that many Kavachas in stores!”

“Well,” Rajenda shrugged, “it is one of our primary bases out this way. We always knew that if the Leaguies got this deep, they’d do their damnedest to take it out. I don’t see any reason to be surprised our good friend Murphy is pulling out all the stops, too.”

“With that many platforms, Sir, he probably is going to knock back the effectiveness of our fire pretty significantly. More significantly than I anticipated, anyway.”

“Best-case scenario, from his perspective, he’s only stretching out the agony,” Rajenda replied. “At our attack range, his K-guns will be completely ineffective against evading targets. That only leaves missiles, and he can’t fire enough of them to hurt us all that badly in the time he’ll have and at the crossing velocity we’re generating. So even if he survives one firing run, we’ll have plenty of time to decelerate—still inside the Powell Sphere—and come back to do it all over again. And the only way his carriers could do anything about it would be to come into the sphere after us.” He showed his teeth. “I don’t think they’d like that very much.”

* * *

“Coming up on Snapcount, Admiral,” Commander Mirwani said quietly. “And they are deploying parasites.”

“Proceed,” Terrence Murphy replied. “And may God forgive us all.”

“Proceeding. Snapcount in thirty seconds from…now.”

* * *

“Parasite deployment complete, Sir,” Zebić said. “Target designations accepted and locked. Tactical says the Kavachas are so thick the K-guns’ effectiveness is ‘doubtful.’”

“Doubtful.” Rajenda snorted. “I’ll say this for Terry, I’ve never seen a Kavacha deployment that heavy even in a simulation! Of course, it’s got to play hell with his own targeting and return fire, don’t you think?”

“Probably.” Zebić nodded. “And you’re right. We can come back and do it over again, if we have to. It’s not like he’s got an unlimited supply of the things!”

“No, he doesn’t. But—”

“Admiral Thakore!”

Rajenda whirled toward Alioto, eyes narrow as the ops officer’s tone registered.

“What?” he demanded.

“The Kavachas!”

Alioto pointed at the plot, and Rajenda’s narrowed eyes flared wide. What the hell did Terry think he was doing? It made absolutely no—

* * *

Four thousand Casúr Cogaidhs, delivered from New Dublin aboard the freighters Murphy had commandeered and left behind to collect them from the Crann Bethadh industrial platforms, went to 800 gravities of acceleration and lunged directly at TF 804.

The task force was still one hundred and seventy light-seconds—and ten minutes’ flight time—short of its launch point. The Casúr Cogaidhs were 400,000 kilometers out from Jalal Station, which put them roughly 168 LS short of TF 804, and they accelerated towards it at 800 gravities for sixty seconds. TF 804 had gone ballistic, but the Casúrs acceleration still increased the closing velocity to 97,900 KPS…and reduced their range to target to only 45,342,000 kilometers.

And then they released twelve thousand Bijalees straight into TF 804’s teeth.

* * *

Rajenda Thakore stared at the plot in horror as the missiles blossomed upon it. They had to be missiles, although there was no sign of any Hauptman signatures. Not from the missiles, at any rate.

Not yet.

That’s what he did to the Leaguies in New Dublin, an icy corner of Rajenda’s brain said. Those weren’t Kavachas. Or most of them weren’t, anyway. They’re some kind of fucking missile pod, and I walked straight into them.

Their closing velocity at launch would carry those missiles all the way to TF 804, which meant they’d have every second of their Hauptman coils’ endurance to burn on terminal evasive maneuvers when they hit his missile defense perimeter. That never happened in ship-to-ship missile combat, and even his highly disciplined brain quailed as he thought about what that meant for intercept probabilities. A horrendous percentage of those birds were getting through, whatever he did.

He heard the urgent, disciplined chatter of reports around him as his tactical officers reacted to the sudden, totally unanticipated threat. Despite the massive closing velocity, they had six or seven minutes to respond, he thought, but even as he thought that, a second, equally large wave of Casúr Cogaidhs accelerated out of the concealing clutter of the Kavacha platforms.

And there was no way in the universe TF 804 could avoid that oncoming missile storm. The FTLCs were anchored to their sublight parasites, and the reaction-drive parasites lacked the acceleration to maneuver effectively against missiles coming in at that velocity.

“Launch now,” he heard himself say.

“But, Sir—”

“I know our birds will be ballistic by the time they enter the bastards’ defense zone,” Rajenda grated. “But some of them may get through anyway. Launch!”

“Yes, Sir. Launching now.”

Missiles roared out from TF 804, but less than a third of the number coming at it. And unlike the Bijalees streaking toward it, TF 804’s missiles couldn’t reach their targets purely ballistically. The Casúr Cogaidhs had accelerated their cargo onto an intercept vector before they released it; Jalal Station would be beyond the cone of TF 804’s fire for another ten minutes. That meant its birds needed their drives to reach the point in space Jalal Station would occupy when they arrived. And that meant they’d be coming in inert, which would make them easy meat for the station’s missile defenses.

The outgoing waves of TF 804’s missiles stippled the plot, but the glaring red icons of Terrence Murphy’s missiles charged onward, coasting for 6.7 minutes. And then, at 5,926,950 kilometers, they engaged their own drives and came shrieking in at a final closing velocity of 100,000 KPS.

Counter-missiles streamed to meet them, but the solutions were late and hurried, because no one had anticipated the threat, and the attack wave was liberally seeded with Fallax EW missiles and Phalanx escort missiles. They cut through the froth of counter-missiles, drove into the teeth of the point defense lasers and autocannon. At that closing velocity, with the full endurance of their Hauptman coils for terminal attack maneuvers, the close-in defenses had time for only a single shot each, and well over eight thousand Bijalees broke through everything the task force could throw at it.

A shroud of nuclear detonations wrapped itself around TF 804 as 8,265 laser heads spawned 49,590 bomb-pumped lasers.

Not one of them targeted an FTLC. All of them targeted Rajenda Thakore’s two hundred sublight battleships and battlecruisers. It was like some huge, obscene pre-space flash gun, glaring in space, hurling lances of coherent radiation like demented harpoons that ripped deep, deep into hulls that simply could not be armored on the same scale as an FTLC. Plating shattered, atmosphere belched into space, and eleven seconds after the first laser head detonated, only nine of TF 804’s battleships survived.

Rajenda watched sickly, his face like iron, as his parasites died. And then, on the heels of their deaths, a second wave of Casúr Cogaidh-launched Bijalees came roaring in. He clung to the armrests of his command chair, watching them come, and TF 804’s defensive fire was only a pale shadow of what it had been.

The missiles streaked closer, reached attack range, and fresh clusters of lasers ripped out from them.

But this time their targets were FTLCs, with vastly heavier armor. Unlike any sublight ship, Fasset-drive starships didn’t care about things like mass. They carried up to ten meters of SCM armor, half again as dense as osmium, over their most critical systems, and their outer hulls were intricately subdivided into damage-absorbing compartments. They shot the rapids of the second laser-head holocaust, shuddering and bucking as transfer energy blasted into them, ripped holes in that massive armor.

Despite their armor, despite every protective system incorporated into them, RHLNS Eurynome and RHLNS Poseidon were unequal to the storm. Eurynome survived as a recognizable hull, but her drive fan was a shattered ruin, her hull threshed and broken. Intact though she might nominally be, her catastrophic damage was far beyond anything any navy might consider repairable.

Poseidon simply broke up.

Her consorts Aphrodite and Freya were almost as battered as Eurynome, although at least their drive fans survived, which meant they were—probably—repairable, but TF 804 emerged from the missile storm a broken force. Rajenda Thakore had gone into the attack with twenty-five FTLCs. He came out of it with twenty-one, all of them damaged. Aphrodite and Freya were the worst, but Braggi, Artemis, Heimdallar, Saga, and Styx were almost as badly hurt. All of the others were at least nominally still combat-capable, but their parasite groups had been gutted, and without their parasites…

Flag Bridge was awash with damage reports, casualty reports, requests for orders, and Rajenda shook himself as he realized there was no third wave of missile drones. Maybe—

“Incoming message, Admiral.”

Ntombikayise Abercrombie’s voice was raised enough to cut through the background of reports and orders, but he heard the shock—the horror—in it as he turned towards her.

“It’s…Admiral Murphy, Sir.”

Of course it is, Rajenda thought almost numbly.

“Put it up,” someone said with his voice.

“Yes, Sir.”

Terrence Murphy appeared on the master display. His expression was somber, his eyes dark, as he looked out of it at the brother-in-law he couldn’t see from his end.

“I’m sorry, Rajenda,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that, but I had no choice. You and your people did your duty, I understand that, but—God, I wish you’d taken my offer to talk first. We’ve just killed way too many people between us, and it has to stop. Olympia, the Oval—the Five Hundred—they have to listen to me. You’ve known me for almost forty years. Do you really think I’m some kind of warlord out for personal power who doesn’t give a single solitary damn how many people he kills to get it?! Use your brain, Rajenda! We don’t need to—”

He broke off, drew a deep, visible breath, and shook his head.

“You and your people are screwed,” he said then, flatly. “It’s not twenty-five carriers versus twelve anymore. It’s maybe nineteen carriers, with no parasites, against fifteen, with full parasite loadouts, because there’s no way you’re getting out of the Powell Sphere with Tremblay out there waiting for you, and there’s no way you can survive against the missile fire Jalal can hand out if you try to attack the Station again. You can stooge around the inner system for a while, but sooner or later we can bring you to action and destroy every one of your units, and you know it.

“So this time, you’re going to listen to me. You and I are going to sit down, face-to-face, and talk. And then you’re going to do exactly what I was willing to let Clarence Maddox do—what I would have let him do, if the Fringers here in Jalal hadn’t taken the decision out of my hands—and take my message and my data back to Sol.

“I have no intention of attacking the Sol System or any other Heart World system. I never did. But I do intend to do whatever I have to do to make you people listen to me. And, yes, there’s going to have to be some redress of the Fringe’s grievances. That has to be on the table, too. But that can be dealt with later. What matters now is the fact that the war we’ve been fighting against the League for sixty damned years isn’t what we thought it was.

“You may think I’m a lunatic, and that’s fine with me. But I need you to take my message back home, and we need to get this settled, one way or another, before even more of the Navy’s ships and people kill each other. And if you’re not willing to do that, then I will, by God, hunt down and kill every one of your remaining ships.” His face was stone. “I don’t want to, but if that’s the only way to get through to you people, then as God is my witness, I’ll do it.

“So you make up your mind, Rajenda. You decide what it’s going to be. I’ll be waiting for your call.”



Back | Next
Framed