CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TFNS Somaskanda
Bellerophon System
Free Worlds Alliance
January 15, 2553
Admiral Jorgensen had just picked up his iced tea glass when the dining cabin’s comm panel pinged. He paused, then turned his head, glass still raised, to glower at the interruption.
His glower eased—a bit—and he nodded approvingly as Lieutenant Constantinescu popped up from his own chair. The flag lieutenant crossed to the smart wall and tapped the bulkhead touchscreen.
“Admiral Jorgensen’s quarters, Lieutenant Constantinescu,” he said, and Commander Zalewska appeared on the smart wall.
“Hi, Dan,” she said. “I know it’s lunchtime, but I’m afraid I need to speak to the Admiral, if he’s available.”
“I’m here, Linda.” Jorgensen raised his voice, pushed back his chair, and walked into the comm’s visual field, still carrying his glass of tea.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at lunch, Sir,” the red-haired ops officer said. “But we’ve just picked up an incoming Fasset footprint. A big one.”
“Really?” Jorgensen managed to keep his voice a bit calmer than he actually felt, and he sipped from his tea glass to buy a little time while his mind raced. Then he lowered the glass. “I’m assuming Tracking’s had time to establish their approach vector?”
“Yes, Sir.” Zalewska nodded. “It’s on the right bearing for a least-time approach from Jalal.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s actually coming from Jalal, though,” Jorgensen mused. He thought for another moment, then cocked his head. “Is Captain Romero with you?”
“I’m here, Sir,” another voice said, and Zalewska’s image split to share the smart wall with the chief of staff.
“Thoughts?” Jorgensen prompted.
“I think it almost has to be good news,” Romero said promptly. Jorgensen cocked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “Like Linda says, this is a big-assed footprint. Gotta be at least twenty carriers, maybe twenty-five, and it sure looks like it’s coming from Jalal.”
“So you think it’s Vice Admiral Thakore?”
“Seems like the most reasonable hypothesis.” Romero shrugged again. “It’s sure as hell too many hulls for Murphy, anyway, even if it wasn’t on the wrong bearing!”
Jorgensen frowned down into his glass, but he had to admit Romero had a point. Less than sixty FTLCs had been assigned to the entire Fringe when all the madness began, and fourteen of them were assigned to the Northern Lobe, the Fringe Systems close enough to the Beta Cygni Line for fear of the Terran League to keep them honest…and for Tenth Fleet to respond in force if they were needed. The Southern Lobe was a far vaster area, which meant the forty-three carriers assigned to its picket stations were far more thinly—and widely—spread, and eight of them had already been accounted for right here in Bellerophon. That set an absolute ceiling on how many of them might have mutinied to join Murphy. For that matter, there were limits to how fast information could spread over interstellar gaps. The marshals sent to arrest him couldn’t have reached New Dublin until August, which was less than five months ago, and that limited how many of those other carriers could even have heard about his defiance of orders across such enormous distances, much less actually reached New Dublin to join him.
They’d finally confirmed what Jorgensen had suspected from the moment the defending task force Admiral Hathaway, yet despite Alaimo’s…rigorous efforts—efforts that turned Jorgensen’s stomach, even from the public reports—they still hadn’t found out just how Bellerophon had learned that the entire Concordia Sector had gone out of compliance so damned quickly. That information had clearly been tightly compartmentalized, and until they got their hands on someone deep inside the Xeneas government, they were unlikely to unravel it. But it possessed a certain burning relevance, under the circumstances, since no one in Ninth Fleet had known a thing about the “Free Worlds Alliance”—except for Xeneas’s announcement on the day of the coup that Bellerophon intended to seek membership in whatever the hell it was—until they reached Bellerophon. Admiral Hathaway’s officers had known how worried the federal government had been over Murphy’s…outré behavior, but they’d had no idea that his behavior might have spilled over into outright rebellion. That news certainly hadn’t reached the Sol System until after they’d departed. For that matter, it might still not have reached Earth!
So how the hell had a star system seventy-three light-years from New Dublin found out so quickly? And acted so promptly? One possibility Jorgensen really didn’t like to consider—but one he knew Alaimo had chosen to embrace—was that Bellerophon’s rebellion hadn’t been isolated from Concordia’s at all. That they’d been closely coordinated as the result of some long-standing, traitorous conspiracy among the Fringe Worlds. That even though Murphy’s defiance of his standing orders might have been the spark that touched it off, the kindling had been laid long ago.
Jorgensen didn’t know about that. On the other hand, those missile pods Bellerophon’s defenders had used on Admiral Hathaway hadn’t been manufactured in-system. They had to have come from Concordia, and Murphy had to have whipped them up well before his engagement with Admiral Xing. And that, unfortunately, seemed to indicate that there’d been something going on between New Dublin and Bellerophon well before Bellerophon’s secession.
All of that raised ominous questions about what else what was left of Ninth Fleet might not know, but what mattered most right this moment was that without more information about events in Concordia, they couldn’t possibly know what Murphy had done after the sector decided to rebel. Obviously, he hadn’t successfully used his authority as system governor to prevent Concordia’s action. Indeed, Jorgensen strongly suspected that he hadn’t even tried—which probably confirmed ONI’s estimate of the extent of his ambitions—but Jorgensen would dearly love to know what he’d done with the seven carriers under his command at the time. The eight that had gone “out of compliance” here in Cyclops had done more than enough damage to make anyone nervous about that. The important point just now, though, was that he’d had only seven, which, with the eight destroyed here, left only twenty-eight of the Southern Lobe FTLCs unaccounted for, and they were scattered to hell and gone. No, if this really was at least twenty carriers, they couldn’t be Murphy.
On the other hand, it shouldn’t be Vice Admiral Thakore, either. Jorgensen knew the Oval had sent an urgent courier after TF 804 the moment word of Bellerophon’s secession reached Olympia, but it wouldn’t even reach Jalal Station for another five days. Which meant it would be over another month before any response from Jalal—assuming Thakore hadn’t moved on to New Dublin and the courier had found TF 804 there when it arrived—could reach Bellerophon.
“If this is Vice Admiral Thakore, how did he know to come calling so quickly?” he asked aloud, looking up from his glass.
“I don’t know, Sir,” Romero admitted. “But it’s too big and it’s coming in on the wrong bearing for anything out of Concordia.”
“I know. I know! But…”
Jorgensen rubbed the tip of his nose for a moment, then nodded decisively.
“All right. Have Girish pass the word to General Alaimo. Tell him we anticipate their arrival in—what? Four hours?”
“A bit longer than that, Sir,” Commander Zalewska replied. “It’s a big footprint.”
“All right, we anticipate their arrival in a little over four hours. Emphasize that we don’t know who these people are yet. And emphasize to Girish that he’s to decline to speculate on that point. If General Alaimo wants to do any speculating, connect him directly to me.”
He couldn’t quite keep an edge of distaste out of his final sentence, and Romero grimaced as he nodded in acknowledgment.
“Then pass the word to all units and recall all small craft. I want the task group underway to Point Lookout within thirty minutes.”
“Yes, Sir!” Romero said crisply, and Jorgensen grimaced.
He’d held his task group, minus the three battleships he’d detached to provide Alaimo with the kinetic interdiction platforms he’d insisted he needed, twenty-one light-minutes from Odysseus. He hadn’t done that to insulate himself from events on the planet. Dearly as he would have loved to be able to do that, mere distance couldn’t keep him from knowing what Alaimo was doing…or make him feel less soiled by it. No, he’d done it because his carriers’ acceleration inside the Powell Limit was only 900 gravities, and he’d wanted to position himself to reach the limit at a relative velocity of zero within less than four hours. There was, unfortunately, no way he could get there in time to prevent whoever the incoming ships might be from detecting his Fasset drives, but he intended to hang on to the most flexible menu of maneuver options he could. The last thing he wanted to do was find himself committed to the kind of death ride Bellerophon’s defenders had embraced, especially against a force as large as this one…and without any damned missile pods of his own.
And, he acknowledged in a corner of his own mind, if it turned out somehow that this was Murphy, if whatever evil spirit had birthed him in the first place had brought him here with this many ships, Elijah Jorgensen had no intention of engaging at one-to-seven odds.
He knew what would happen to his career if he cut and ran for it. But if that was Murphy, or Leaguies, or crazed gerbils from Andromeda and they’d come to kill any more of his people, he’d see them in hell first.