“You’ve got two hours,” MacDowell said and signaled to comm to cut the connection.
* * *
MacDowell knew that Orlov wasn’t happy about his decision. Off the bridge, in the tiny galley just aft, the commodore got an earful while he was refilling his coffee; Orlov was nowhere near subtle enough for it to seem anything like a chance encounter.
Orlov waited for MacDowell to finish preparing his coffee, leaning casually against the counter opposite the urn—as with most naval vessels, the place of coffee preparation was accorded its own place of honor—and then said, “You know, sir, giving them two hours isn’t likely to change the tactical situation. It probably won’t change their minds about anything.”
“You’d rather I rushed in there, guns blazing.”
“I didn’t say that. But you’ve given Captain Andreotti an opportunity to plan his strategy.”
“If he didn’t already have one, two hours won’t give him one. I’m trying to avoid casualties here—ours, theirs, and the loyal officers and crew he’s using as hostages. Don’t you think that’s a viable approach?”
“The idea that he’s using hostages doesn’t make your blood boil, Commodore?”
“No one ever won a war, or even conducted a successful campaign, with their blood boiling, Commander. Am I angry about it? Sure am. But that’s not what bothers me.”
“Oh?”
“Andreotti seemed pretty confident when he spoke with me, don’t you think? He’s got a declaration of independence, a representative at the UN, and some military hostages. He’s betting that I haven’t already given them up for dead, which I haven’t—and am willing to deal on that basis, which I’m not.
“But it’s not a high hand.” MacDowell drank his coffee and grimaced; it was admirably strong. “It’s not enough. There’s something missing and I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Can you figure it out in two hours, sir?”
“Not sure.” He sipped the coffee again and sat the mug down next to the urn. “I’ve got scan section working to identify hot spots in the system, places where Andreotti may have tucked these guys away. There are two dozen likely ones. If we could discover at which one they were being held we’d have an enormous tactical advantage.”
“That’s true,” Orlov agreed. His face held the trace of a smile.
MacDowell thought a moment, then added, “The problem is that Andreotti must know that as well. If we get the hostages, he’s lost the biggest card he has showing. If we attack, and he kills them, it accomplishes nothing—if that’s all he’s got. There’s something else.”
“Perhaps we should start with locating the hostages.”
“I don’t know whether that’ll yield any results in time.”
“It might,” Orlov said.
“You have something to offer?”
“I think I know where they are,” Orlov said. He gestured at his comp. A holo of Sherrard System appeared over the small galley table: Zeta Herculis A, a star as Sol-like as almost any in human space, surrounded by six orbitals: two tiny planets orbiting close to the primary; in the third orbital a crowded, dusty asteroid belt about half an AU out; the fourth, an Earthlike planet, Sherrard Prime, almost exactly one AU out but a bit colder overall; then a medium-sized gas giant; and finally the large, rocky asteroid belt that loosely defined the area between A and B, eight and a half AUs away from star A.
Icons marked the positions of the four rebel ships and the six EU vessels at the edge of the system. He touched the comp again and three green points appeared: one in the asteroid belt, one in the ring that surrounded the tiny second planet, and one more on the surface of the largest of the gas giant’s dozen moons.
“I’ve narrowed scan section’s choices to three, as you see. Based on what intel I’ve obtained, I believe that the ring station is most likely.”
“Intel?”
“We have an asset,” Orlov added, which was about as much answer as MacDowell was going to get: there was someone from ONI in among the rebels.
“You received a comm squirt?”
“On a private frequency, yes. We should have the location shortly.”
MacDowell clenched his fists, then slowly relaxed them. “That’s a violation of protocol at the least, Commander. Don’t you think you should have informed me—”
“I’ve given you options, Commodore MacDowell. You’ve given the rebels two hours to plan, and in the meanwhile I’ve found the key to your problem. They can’t use hostages that they don’t have.”
“Commander, if you received a comm message from a mole at that base, don’t you think Andreotti might have picked it up as well?”
“It was on an ONI frequency,” Orlov answered blandly.
“Suppose an ONI officer is part of their little cabal,” MacDowell answered at once.
“That possibility exists,” Orlov said. “It’s a calculated risk. Intel operatives know that their lives are in danger—”
“It’s not just his life. If he’s discovered, I have no way of knowing what Andreotti will do. Maybe he blows the whole station and all of our people with it. My point—”
“You said he was unlikely to do that,” the intel officer interrupted. “You suggested that it was hardly in his interest to kill the hostages. Why would he do it now?”
“My point is,” MacDowell continued, trying to check his anger, “that if I’m trying to defuse this situation with as little damage as possible, it would be helpful if this sort of intrigue wasn’t happening behind my back. It’s not your risk to take, Commander, and I resent not having been consulted.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“When will you know for sure that this—” he gestured at the display “—is where the hostages are being held?”
“Within the hour.”
“Within forty-five minutes?” They both looked at the chrono above the coffee urn, which indicated that the two-hour deadline was forty-seven minutes from expiring.
“I suppose so, yes.”
“I want that information in my hands in thirty minutes, Commander. And don’t doubt that this little … breach of protocol will be in my report.”
Orlov didn’t say anything; he didn’t even look affected by the implied threat. After a moment, he offered MacDowell a salute and the commodore waved him out of the room.
MacDowell turned to the display, with its three points of possibility. If Orlov’s intel was at all accurate, one of them marked the place where Wallace MacEwan and the rest of the navy personnel were being held … along with one spy.
Above the display, the chrono continued to tick down the seconds.
* * *
Orlov looked worried.
MacDowell ordered comm contact with Trent, but Andreotti beat him to it. Instead of the rebel “admiral’s” image, a scene appeared near his pilot’s board.
It was gruesome: a decompressed chamber, part of a station of some sort. There were five or six bodies there, already coated in reddish-brown ice crystals. Most of them looked as though they’d been trying to cover a hole half a meter across that gave out on black space. One other was lying sprawled nearby; part of his head and one shoulder looked as if it had been burned away by laser fire.
“We caught your spy,” Andreotti’s voice said. “Wouldn’t want him to go off to the next world alone, so we gave him some company. Those deaths are on your head, Commodore. This is your last warning—withdraw from Sherrard System and no one else has to die.”
The comm message ended, but the image remained. MacDowell didn’t say anything for several seconds.
“Chess players give away pieces if it gives them an advantage,” the commodore finally said, not looking directly at Orlov. “Not for no reason at all.
“System display,” he said to comp, and the grisly scene disappeared to be replaced with the solar system, with its planets and moons, friendly and enemy ships, and six points of green light.
“You still don’t know where they are,” he said.
“And we don’t know what Andreotti will do now.”
Orlov didn’t answer: he seemed to be taken aback, almost stunned. MacDowell’s anger was obvious but he looked composed.
“Your little pawn sacrifice has taught us one thing, though,” he added to Orlov. “We know just how ruthless Andreotti is.”
“Orders, sir?” Linus Soren, his XO, said.
“Still not blinking,” MacDowell answered. “I don’t know if he thought that little demonstration would scare me. Beat to Quarters, Commander. Course as indicated. Warren sends.” He named a heading that took them into the gravity well. “All right, everyone,” he added, looking back at Orlov once more. “Let’s get this done.”
* * *
Even at maximum accel, the inner system was a few hours away. Warren, best-armed and equipped, was at the head of a formation that was flanked by Guienne and Edward VII to its port and Calais and Corvus to its starboard; one ship was zulu-positive relative to Warren’s plane of travel, one ship zulu-negative. Lacerta, the sixth ship in formation, was coplanar with Warren and a dozen ship-lengths aft in case something emerged from the asteroid belt or appeared at the saddle jump points.
Scan section on each of MacDowell’s six vessels worked together to try and identify the place where the hostages were being held—but the commodore wasn’t sanguine about the loyalists’ chances.
It was a ruse, he thought to himself. It always was. Andreotti showed no hesitation in killing those he held—and at the first provocation. Maybe it was something to do with refreshing the tree of liberty; but more likely, he decided, the mutinous commander had just been trying to distract him.
Thirty-two minutes into Sherrard System space, MacDowell found out that he was right.
* * *
The pilot’s board was suddenly alive with a cloud of icons, all registering hostile, all emerging from the asteroid belt at high relative speed.
“Missiles,” said Brian Dominguez, watch navigator. Dominguez was twenty-three: this was his first deep-space exercise. He was obviously trying to keep his voice level.
“All ships, begin evade,” MacDowell said. “Comm, get me Lacerta on the double. Theo, do you read? Flag sends.”
A second, then two. “I read you five-by-five, sir,” came Hamadjiou’s voice. “We’ve got company, pouring on the delta-v.”
“We all read that. Close it up, Captain, I don’t want you hanging out there as the first strike target.”
“More fun that way, Commodore. But I’m throwing out enough flak that the enviro police will be coming after me, and I’ll be on my way soon.”
“You and Edward VII are to make for the second orbital—it’s at conjunction, on the other side of the sun. Try not to get yourself killed.”
“Aye aye, sir. No argument there.”
“Comm to all ships. Disperse and deploy anti-missile weaponry. Flag sends. Linus,” he added to his exec, who was bringing up analysis graphs on the incoming ordnance, “ID those things on the double.”
“Already on it, sir.” He didn’t look away from the displays. “They’re Big-5s from the look of them, or something built to look like them.”
“Where’d they get so damn many Big-5s?” It was the standard nickname in the EU and elsewhere: generation 5 of the Great Wall missile, called Big-5 after the Western encoding scheme for Chinese ideograms—it was a model that was difficult to jam, scuttlebutt said, because they ‘only spoke Chinese.’
Big-5s weren’t the top of the line in Greater China’s arsenal, but were damn close. Mass-radar showed dozens of them—all coming from the asteroids.
“They got them from Greater China, sir, I imagine,” Soren said. “All ships report ECM and flak deployed. We’re on primary evade course. Trent and the others are moving toward intercept now.”
“What’s the relative velocity on the Big-5s?”
Soren read him the figure. Warren and the others were piling on velocity, headed for turnover: the point at which they’d have to decelerate to avoid flying past the oncoming rebels. The Big-5s were moving considerably faster.
MacDowell looked at the pilot’s board. Lacerta and Edward VII had already changed course; the other four had spread out as ordered. Their wake was filled with flak, and comm circuits were busy with ECM trying to spoof the missiles’ hardware.
“Not very original,” MacDowell said. “We slow down to stay engaged with the rebels and we get missiles up the chute; we keep ahead of them and we don’t stay in range for enough time to do the rebel ships any damage. Meanwhile, Andreotti’s ships can speak Chinese to keep the Big-5s from hitting …”
Soren and Dominguez both turned around after a moment when MacDowell didn’t finish his sentence. Dominguez was green and unwilling to interrupt a commodore deep in thought, but Soren had been with his skipper for almost four years and recognized the facial expression.
“They speak Chinese,” Soren said quietly.
“Three possibilities,” MacDowell said. “First, the missiles are programmed to exclude Trent and the others. I doubt that: all we’d have to do is make our ID beacons show as Trent’s sig and they’d ignore us, too.
“Second, they’re actively comming the missiles to aim at us. We’re not showing any comm squirts, so they’d have to do it on normal frequencies, which means speed-of-light comm. As we got closer the delay would be lower, but it’s still a delay.”
“There could be a controller in the asteroid belt.”
“We have no way of checking with those guys coming at us,” MacDowell said, pointing at the board. “I still doubt it. Easiest thing to do is to launch them—from robot or manned mining ships, I’d guess—and let ’em do their job. A Big-5 is a smart little bastard. That leaves option three, which is also the easiest thing: close-range comm signals to the missiles to keep them off any rebel ships in the area. That could be passive, but would still be a broadcast signal. We slow to engage, the missiles tackle us and avoid hitting Trent and her sisters.”
“You have an idea, sir,” Soren said.
“Warren outguns anything on their side, even Trent. We can take a few hits at long range. Normal ship-to-ship tactics are to shoot for weapons and maneuver. I think we should be shooting for comm and let the missiles do our work for us. We slow to engage, knock out whatever’s comming those missiles, and shear off as best we can.”
“They’ll do the same, sir,” Dominguez said quietly, glancing at the XO and then the commander. “I mean to say, Commodore, won’t they know enough to get out of the way?”
“They might, Lieutenant,” MacDowell said. The young man appeared relieved that the commodore hadn’t bitten his head off for speaking up. “Except that if our tactic works they’re going to be surprised as hell—and with their vector of acceleration in the opposite direction, right into the teeth of the missiles, they’ll have less time to get out of the way. Of course, if the ECM and flak does its job, there won’t be any missiles to worry about.”
Soren nodded and turned back to his console. Dominguez didn’t say anything further.
* * *
Lacerta was a light cruiser, fast and maneuverable but more lightly armed than the bigger boys in MacDowell’s squadron. But Theodore Hamadjiou, its skipper, had a score to settle. He wasn’t alone: the officers and crew of his ship—other than the ones that had been arrested or killed as a result of the attempted mutiny—wanted to erase that stain as well.
When Andreotti’s plot had been hatched, the point person aboard Lacerta had been Ed Barbieri, Theo’s chief engineer. He and Ed went way back: they’d served together as middies almost twenty years ago, fought in the little colonial skirmishes between the EU and Greater China as it expanded into the space between Sol System and Rashk-Home, and their careers had tracked pretty well. Ed had only one real fault, and he had it in abundance: a temper that went out of bounds too often. In an engineer, there was room for that; as a commanding officer, there wasn’t—and it had kept him from getting on to the captains’ list.
It was the wedge that Sam Andreotti had used to get him involved. It had worked for Giselle Rouchou of Hector as well, and evidently she’d planned better than poor old Ed had done.
“We should’ve seen this coming, Simmie,” Theo said, watching the pilot’s board, incoming missiles trailing behind and Hector changing course to try and intercept Lacerta.
“No use second-guessing now, Skip,” Simeon Ewing said. He was a tall, olive-skinned Punjabi, naturalized to the EU twenty years ago; he still retained the clipped accents of the subcontinent, though his English could have come from the cricket fields of Eton or the board-rooms of Canary Wharf. “I really don’t see the merit in it.”
“We saw and heard things. Andreotti stepped up the launching of mining ‘bots in the intrasystem belt—and they turned out to be platforms for those damn missiles.”
“We can outrun them.”
“Yeah, we and Eddie can, but Warren and Pas de Calais can’t. They’d better hope their flak and ECM works.”
“If this is the best that they can manage, Captain,” Ewing answered, “then it’s not much of a rebellion at all.”
“I don’t know that this is their best shot. But the commodore is right—it’s a weak hand, even with the missiles. Does this mean they’re now a client of Greater China?”
“Greater China doesn’t use clients, Skip,” Ewing said laconically. “It isn’t that sort of system. You either join the collective or you line yourself up to be disassembled and rebuilt in their image. Premier Xiang Che may not be Wei Kwan or Mao, but he does believe he’s got a historical mission. If it includes Sherrard …”
“What can the Sherrardi hope to gain?”
“For the naval officers, promotion at least.”
“And for the civilians?”
“Maybe they’ve decided that the EU is a sinking ship.” His accent put the emphasis on the word ‘sinking,’ making it the most important word in the sentence.