“Gerald, it’s not our people,” Akers said quietly. He could have counted the number of times he’d used Ortega’s first name on his fingers and toes without taking both boots off, but now he reached across the table to lay one hand on the commander’s arm. “I don’t know where this is going to end any more than you do. I know it’s not going to be a good place, though. And when we end up there, our star system will need us. So it’s our job to be there when it does. That’s what we need to be concentrating on right now, not things down there in Mendel that we can’t control or influence.”
“I know, Sir. I know.” Ortega nodded, then smiled crookedly. “That offer of a cup of coffee still open?” he asked.
“It just so happens it is,” Akers agreed, reaching for the carafe. “And there’s even cream and—”
His com sounded suddenly. Not with its normal musical chime, but with the strident, ugly buzz of a priority signal guaranteed to awaken even the soundest sleeper. And then, a fraction of a second later, the high-pitched howl of the general quarters alarm sounded over every speaker on the ship.
Akers froze, then slapped the acceptance key.
“Captain!” he said sharply. “Talk to me!”
“MacKelvey, Sir,” a strained soprano answered. “Tracking’s just picked up a hyper-footprint. A big one.”
“How big?” Akers snapped when the attack officer paused.
“Sir, so far we make it close to sixty—I repeat, Sir, sixty—units in the superdreadnought range. Tracking’s still trying to sort out the total number of point sources, but it looks like it’s got to be close to three hundred.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
“Well, they know we’re here now,” Michelle Henke said. “I imagine there’s a certain amount of…consternation at the moment.”
“I believe that might be an appropriate noun, Milady,” Captain Cynthia Lecter agreed, yet something about her tone drew Michelle’s attention from the icons of the flag deck plot.
At the moment, her chief of staff was bent over her own display, and Michelle frowned. At Aivars Terekhov’s suggestion, she’d sent HMS Xiahou Dun ahead of the massively reinforced Tenth Fleet. If all had gone according to plan, Commander Keith Lodwick, Xiahou Dun’s CO, had arrived in-system four days ago, but Mesa was unaware that he’d dropped by. His orders had been to make an excruciatingly slow alpha translation at least ten light-hours from the primary, then approach through normal-space under stealth. Given just how stealthy a Roland-class destroyer could be, the odds of anyone noticing Xiahou Dun’s presence—unless they got dead lucky and caught a flash of her hyper-footprint as the made her downward translation, despite the enormous distance from the inner system—ranged from slim to none.
Michelle’s immediate reaction had been to wave off the suggestion as an unnecessary complication. She was a firm believer in the KISS principle, and offering another possible opening to Murphy had struck her as a bad idea. But then she’d thought about it. Terekhov was right about how unlikely the Mesans were to detect Xiahou Dun’s arrival. Very few star systems made the sort of investment Manticore had made in its long-range sensor platforms, and even Manticore’s would’ve had trouble picking up a Roland’s low-speed transit at that range. She sincerely doubted Mesa’s corporate masters had “wasted” the credits on a system which, in all fairness, they really didn’t need under normal circumstances. And once Xiahou Dun was back in normal-space, there was no way Mesan or Solarian sensors could hope to defeat her stealth and ECM.
And Terekhov had been right in at least one respect. There was no such thing as too much information on an objective. It was vanishingly unlikely that Commander Lodwick would discover some lethal ambush waiting for them—although, once Michelle had thought about it a little, that might not have been as outlandish a proposition as it seemed, given the Yawata Strike. But anything that increased her “situational awareness” was a good thing.
Besides, she was working conscientiously at overcoming her “cowgirl” reputation.
“Cynthia?” she said after a moment, and Lecter twitched, then looked up from the display with the closest thing to a stunned expression Michelle had ever seen on her face. “Cynthia?” she repeated in a rather different tone, and Lecter shook herself.
“Ma’am, you’re not—” She inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring. “Lodwick sent a couple of Ghost Rider drones in-system and tapped into the planetary datanet broadcasts, Milady,” she said, “and you’re not going to believe what he found.”
* * *
“Are you serious, Admiral?” the distinguished looking man on Admiral Josephine Siminetti’s display said.
“Mister Chief Executive, I’m not exactly in the habit of joking about things like this,” Siminetti said bitingly.
As the senior uniformed officer of the Mesa System Navy actually in space and the commander of Task Force One, the equivalent of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Home Fleet, Siminetti had to spend entirely too much of her time dancing with politicians. She resented it at the best of times. At the moment, what she wanted more than anything else in the world was to reach through the display, grab Brandon Ward by the throat, and then rip out his tonsils for a bowtie.
And I don’t see how it could hurt a thing if I did it, either, she thought. It’s not exactly like I need to be worrying about “political repercussions” at a moment like this!
“Perimeter Tracking has definitely confirmed a minimum of sixty-two superdreadnought-range impeller wedges,” she continued flatly. “There could be at least two or three more.” She bared her teeth in something no one would ever have mistaken for a smile. “Tracking’s losing some in the clutter, Mister Chief Executive. That sort of thing happens when a half-million tons of capital ships start churning up the EM spectrum.”
Ward winced visibly, and Siminetti felt a small flicker of sadistic pleasure as she saw reality leaking into the Mesa System’s chief executive’s awareness.
“They haven’t contacted us yet, so we don’t officially know who they are, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t Sollies, and that only leaves one real candidate. And if these are Manties, and if our reports are accurate, at least a few of those ‘superdreadnoughts’ are actually the LAC carriers they’ve developed,” she continued. “Assuming six of them are, that’s a minimum of five or six hundred LACs, and our best estimate is that a current-generation Manty light attack craft is at least equivalent in combat power to a Solly War Harvest-class destroyer. Of course, that estimate’s based on information from the Sollies. Personally, I think it’s probably closer to a light cruiser. And, speaking of cruisers, there’s a minimum of two hundred of those out there, too. Plus at least ten or fifteen of those outsized battlecruisers of theirs. And I feel it’s my duty as Task Force One’s commander to point out that we have exactly twenty-five battlecruisers in our entire inventory…and six of them are down for routine overhaul. My point, Mister Chief Executive, is that even without their missile range advantage, they could destroy our entire Navy just with their LACs.”
Ward swallowed visibly, and she saw his eyes swivel away from the pickup. She wondered who else was present. Probably that idiot Snyder, but she could always hope Pearson was also in the room. It would be nice to have one voice of sanity present when her system government decided whether or not her men and women would be ordered out to die. Not that it mattered very much one way or the other. She was willing to go through channels, but the truth was that she could have cared less about what Ward might tell her to do. Against that much firepower, there was only one thing she could do, and she had no intention of pouring out her people’s blood the way Gillian Drescher had been forced to do cleaning up after the Misties screwed the pooch.
“They haven’t contacted you yet at all, Admiral?” Ward said after a moment, and Siminetti managed not to roll her eyes.
“That is what I just said, Sir,” she pointed out. “They’re still a good ten light-minutes from Mesa orbit, so they’re probably waiting until the com lag drops a bit.
And I suppose it’s possible they’re letting us stew in our own juices worrying about them.”
“Could…could this be an operation planned to coordinate with the terrorist attacks?” Ward asked, and Siminetti surprised herself with a short, sharp bark of scornful laughter. The CEO’s eyes flashed angrily, and she shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Mister Chief Executive,” she said, and she actually meant it…sort of. It was hard to feel deeply apologetic when she knew perfectly well he was speaking for the recorders. Exactly who he thought he might impress with whatever spin they managed to put on this mess was more than she could guess, but he was the duly constituted legal commander-in-chief of her own service.
“Sir,” she continued, “if these are Manties, and if they’d intended to coordinate their arrival with the terrorist attacks on Mesa, they would’ve been here weeks or months ago. In fact, Mister Chief Executive, the fact that they’re here at all seems to me the clearest indication that our intelligence that they were behind the attacks was…ill-founded. If they’ve been able to cut loose this much firepower and send it all the way out here, then they never had any need to cripple or destabilize us with terrorist attacks.”
Ward’s jaw tightened. Obviously that hadn’t been what he’d wanted to hear, but in Josephine Siminetti’s opinion, that was just too damned bad.
“Admiral,” the CEO began more sharply, “I don’t think you—”
“Excuse me, Ma’am.”
Siminetti looked away from her com display.
“Yes, Fred?”
“We have a com request from the…intruders, Ma’am,” Commander Frederick O’Simpson said, and twitched his head at Lieutenant Avery Niranjin, Siminetti’s communications officer.
“Avery?” Siminetti switched her attention to him, and the lieutenant shrugged unhappily.
“Definitely the Manties, Ma’am,” he said. “But it’s a split-screen call.”
“Split-screen?”
“Yes, Ma’am. It’s Admiral Gold Peak…and Admiral Tourville.”
“Tourville?” Siminetti repeated sharply. “The Havenite Tourville?”
“Yes, Ma’am. And they’re talking to us over something called a Hermes buoy about twenty thousand kilometers farther out from Mesa. With a com lag of only about ten seconds, as closely as I can calculate.”
Oh, joyous day, Siminetti thought bitterly. Twice as many superdreadnoughts as I have battlecruisers, the Havenites have decided to come along to keep Gold Peak company, and they’ve just casually confirmed that they really do have FTL communications. What next?
She didn’t know the answer to that question—yet—but she damned well knew one thing that wasn’t going to happen. Whatever Brandon Ward and the clueless idiots who’d landed her star system in this mess wanted, she was not going to give Gold Peak any excuse to demonstrate the efficacy of her missiles.
“Then I suppose you’d better put our visitors onto my display,” she told Niranjin calmly.
* * *
“You may be able to control the planetary orbits, Admiral,” the man on Michelle Henke’s display said. “And Admiral Siminetti may have decided—on her own authority, I might add!—to stand down and surrender her vessels without firing a shot. But I assure you, if you attempt to land Marines on this planet, we will resist! This is an outrage—a gross violation of interstellar law!—and we will not stand by idly and see our sovereignty or our citizens trampled upon!”
“Mr. Ward, let me make a few things clear to you,” she said after a moment. “First, I’m not remotely interested in your posturing.
“Second, I have a very clear notion of the selfless devotion with which you and your kleptocratic colleagues have served the interests of your citizens for so long.
“Third, we’ve been following your newscasts about recent events on Mesa. I don’t suppose I should be too surprised that a gleaming paragon of veracity like Mesa should somehow assign responsibility for the attacks on your population to my star nation. In fact, I imagine the only thing that should surprise me would be for you to stumble into accidentally telling the truth about something. If the reports of General Palane’s involvement in the defense of Neue Rostock are correct, then certainly there is a Torch presence on your planet. Precisely how General Palane is supposed to have smuggled so many nuclear devices through your security in her personal carryon and then scattered them broadcast across the surface of your planet eludes me somehow, though. On the other hand, I can think of several legitimate reasons for my Empress to authorize covert information gathering activities in Mesa, given recent events. So I find it quite plausible that the General is, in fact, the one who’s systematically kicked your Peaceforce’s ass in Neue Rostock. And having met the General, I would expect nothing less out of her than to stand—and die, if necessary—in defense of those ‘citizens’ of yours when you unleashed your butchers on the population of your own capital.”
Her normally warm brown eyes burned into Brandon Ward’s taut face like a pair of augers, and he felt something inside him whimpering under their pitiless hardness.
“Fortunately for you, my forces arrived in the system before your forces finally overcame Neue Rostock’s defenders. I say fortunately for you, because if we’d arrived too late, to find that you’d added the wholesale massacre of those defenders to what you’ve already done to your own people, the consequences for you and your colleagues might have been even more…unpleasant. As it is, General Drescher’s demonstrated that she’s as intelligent—and reasonable—as Admiral Siminetti. I am now in contact with someone I believe is, in fact, General Palane, and she confirms that General Drescher’s forces are in the process of withdrawing from Neue Rostock. Which, Mr. Ward, is the only reason that you don’t already have a hundred thousand or so Manticoran assault troops on your planet, with orbital fire on call as needed. That situation, needless to say, is subject to change if I should decide at any time that conditions warrant it. I trust I am making myself sufficiently clear here?”
“A…a hundred thousand?” Ward repeated. Then he shook himself. “Preposterous!” he snorted. “I doubt the entire Manticoran Marine Corps has a hundred thousand assault troops!”
“I don’t believe I mentioned Marines,” Michelle said coldly. “I invite you to contact Mesa Astro Control. I realize they have only civilian-grade sensors, but I’m reasonably confident that they can tell you how many transports I’ve brought with me. And if there’s anyone left at their desks in your equivalent of Admiralty House, I’m sure they could crunch the numbers for you given the hull sizes of our ships. In round numbers, though, I have approximately one and a quarter million members of the Talbott Quadrant Guard. They may not be quite up to the caliber of the Manticoran Marines, but judging from what a few thousand seccies did to what passes for your military establishment, the phrase that comes to my mind when I think about landing them on your sorry-assed excuse for a planet is ‘like shit through a goose.’
“So, tell me, Mr. Ward,” her voice could have frozen helium, “do you really want to play the part of the goose?”
* * *
“Is it confirmed, Albrecht?” she asked as he crossed the sandy beach towards her.
“I’m afraid so.”
He sighed and settled into the lounger beside hers. They sat silently for the better part of a minute, gazing out across the endless expanse of blue towards the crimson western horizon. It was strange, she thought. She’d never really considered it before, but now, at this moment, for some reason she desperately wanted to know how many times they’d sat in this exact same place, looking out at that same infinite horizon. Two thousand times? Five? More than that?
She took her eyes from the ocean sunset and looked across at the man she’d loved for over sixty years.
“How often do you think we’ve sat here, Albrecht?” she asked whimsically, her soft voice almost lost in the background murmur of the surf.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “A lot. I remember the first time w
e had Benjamin out here, and that was—what? Forty T-years ago? And you and I had been picnicking out here for at least ten or twelve T-years before we even built the house!”
“I know.” She reached across to his lounger and patted his forearm gently. “I’m glad we got to sit here together one more time though, dear.”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was even softer than hers had been, but she heard the sorrow hovering in it like unshed tears. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I told everyone we were running on a short count, but I truly thought there’d be more time. Long enough to at least get you out.”
“And what makes you think you could have sent me anywhere without you?” She shook her head. “I’m trying to remember a single time you ever made me to a single thing I didn’t choose to do. Right off the top of my head, I can’t remember one.”
“Neither can I,” he acknowledged with a small laugh. It was a sad laugh, but genuine, and he reached out and gathered up her hand. “But this time, I’d’ve had them drag you aboard ship if I’d realized how the window was closing.”
“Then I’m just as glad you didn’t realize,” she said gently, turning to let him see the truth in her eyes. “This has been my cause just as much as it’s ever been yours, but however important it’s been to me as a cause, you’re the one who’s been my life, Albrecht. If it’s time for that life to end here, with you, then so be it. I’m not complaining—look at me, and see that I’m telling you the truth.”