Chapter Seven
Drake shot Tolvern a glance as she entered the war room of HMS Vigilant. A raised eyebrow, a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. There were others in the room, and the look was guarded by necessity, but it told her plenty.
As soon as we get rid of these bums, I’m taking you back to my quarters and ravishing your body.
That was Tolvern’s interpretation, and she was sticking to it. They’d had precious little time together after his burn recovery, and already he was on a different ship, thanks to that incompetent dolt, Lucy Pearson. Pearson was lucky the court-martial hadn’t tossed her from the nearest airlock.
But some of the fault rested with the Admiralty. The Royal Navy had suffered heavy losses in the officer corps during several years of warfare even while pumping out a steady stream of new warships. The naval board continued handing out commands while the leading officers were scattered and isolated. In Pearson’s case, they had obviously acted with faulty information. Since the court-martial, the woman had been reduced to Drake’s first mate.
Tolvern had assumed that Drake was holding the war council on Vigilant to make a point to his new crew. Bring experienced officers on board, ones with a heroic reputation like Catarina Vargus or those with hard-edged reputations like McGowan and Wang, and they’d realize this was no game.
But as she took her seat and stared at the glittery new viewscreen, which incorporated an Albion display with fully integrated Singaporean sensor tech, she thought there might be another reason. The screen showed a trio of battle cruisers as if they were on the other side of the window. Blackbeard, forward and menacing. Void Queen, a gleaming, armored specimen of naval power. Citadel, the newest battle cruiser, with its clean lines and a plasma ejector array on the underside of its hull.
Together, the battle cruisers formed a ferocious display of firepower, and they were augmented by several dozen other ships drawn from across the Alliance: light cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, missile frigates, and torpedo boats from Albion. Scandian star wolves. Singaporean war junks. Hroom sloops of war. Even Ladino and New Dutch ships, smaller schooners and pirate frigates—better call them privateers in the current environment—that had escorted supplies to forward bases.
Tolvern was fully aware that what she was seeing was an illusion. In reality, miles of empty space—sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles—separated the warships. The sensors scanned and displayed each ship while eliminating the distances between them to show their relative, not absolute position.
But she was still impressed. Such a fleet had not been assembled since the final battle against the Apex harvesters, and maybe not even then. She glanced around the room to take in her companions at the war council.
Drake sat at the head of the table where he’d greeted her with that raised eyebrow. He looked calm, nearly whole again with only some pink flesh on his face giving evidence of his burns. McGowan sat next to him, stiff and formal.
Algernon Fox sat across from them. The young captain had performed so well in the last war while commanding HMS Nineveh, a destroyer, that he’d been promoted to the Admiralty and given his own battle cruiser. Citadel hadn’t been battle-proven like her two companions, but Tolvern felt that she and Fox had a lot in common. They were both young officers who’d been slowly working their way up the chain of command, only to be tested by fire and rewarded for their actions with ever increasing responsibility.
The final Royal Navy officer was Catarina Vargus. She sat at the far end of the table, as far from Edward McGowan as possible. That was no accident; the woman had once been engaged to be married to the man before he learned of her pirate father and threw her over for classist reasons. That she was now one of the leading officers in the fleet was a testament to her skill.
Tolvern and Vargus had started off icily—both Catarina and her sister, Isabel, had seemed to have designs on James Drake back when he was single—but they’d bonded over a shared dislike of McGowan. In any conflict with the man, Tolvern could count on Catarina Vargus to back her openly and fully.
The other three had a different look to them. First was Anna Wang, who sat at the head of the table next to Drake, resplendent in her trim uniform with its tiger and dragon emblems. The Singaporean commander wore a perpetually icy expression, and had a reputation for being hard-edged and demanding.
Presenting a complete contrast was Ulfgar Svensen of the Fourth Wolves. He looked like an Old Earth sea captain, wearing a rough vest, sporting a thick, curly beard, and carrying a tattoo of a Viking longboat on his left forearm, just above the stump of his missing hand. Both the tattoo and the beard had appeared shortly after Lieutenant Kelly received her promotion to commander of Fort Mathilde. The romantic relationship between the two had been an open secret, as was Svensen’s irritation that circumstances—and McGowan’s insistence—had forced a separation.
The final representative was Colonel Bailyna Tyn. With the general still trapped in Persia, she was the ranking officer of the Hroom forces, now twenty sloops and counting. Another dozen had recently departed the rejuvenated yards of the Hroom Empire and were on their way to the frontier. She was tall and regal with her skin so deeply purple it was almost indigo, and her large, liquid eyes that seemed to carry the mysteries of five thousand years of Hroom civilization in their depths.
Tolvern settled next to Vargus, which earned a warm smile. Svensen sat to their left, which made a nice little formation of anti-McGowan forces on one end of the table. Maybe Fox, too. She’d have to suss out his opinions vis-a-vis the navy’s ranking piss nozzle when the meeting ended.
“There’s no need for introductions,” Drake said. He nodded toward the far end of the table. “Captain Vargus will start us off.”
Catarina Vargus rose easily to her feet without a hint of nerves at speaking before the admiral or her former fiancé, not to mention Wang, with her sharp expression, or the Hroom representative of an empire of tens of billions of people.
“First the bad news,” Vargus began. “We’ve identified eight enemy star fortresses, each with a slightly different engine signature, size, or weapon array to identify it. That doesn’t count the two we’ve destroyed in battle.”
Eight. Nobody needed to say what that meant, as everyone at the table had fought Adjudicator carriers in skirmishes or outright battles. A single star fortress was powerful enough to tackle a battle cruiser head-on, all things being equal. Which they never were.
Vargus brought up a small display over the table, which showed a map of their near stellar neighborhood. Red lights blinked in the middle of various systems. “These are their last known positions.”
The red lights indicated star fortresses in Castillo, Nebuchadnezzar, Hillerød, and Odense.
“The carriers that attacked us in Castillo are long gone,” Tolvern said. “Three months gone, in fact.”
“Nebuchadnezzar is not currently under threat either,” McGowan said. “Obviously. Unless one counts the missing dragoons that Pearson let slip through her fingers.”
“We have no reason to believe the fortresses are in any of these systems,” Vargus said.
McGowan made a scoffing noise. “So what is the point of this chart?”
“I’ll leave that to Wang, when it’s her turn.”
Vargus’s tone was smooth, dismissive without sounding rude. Tolvern wished she could deal with McGowan as easily. She always felt brittle and flustered, even when she felt she’d handled him well. Maybe Vargus was disguising it, too.
“The worst part is not the eight we’ve identified,” Vargus continued, “it’s that we suspect that at least three others have crossed from the inner frontier during the last five months. Possibly a fourth, which would make twelve in all. And why stop there? Why assume that they’ve brought their entire force to bear? There might be fifteen, there might be twenty. We’ve got a nice fleet here, but it couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with twenty enemy carriers and their dragoons.”
“Dreadnought and her
forces would even the odds,” McGowan said. “When are we going to find that blasted jump point and disable the baffling device?”
“One thing at a time,” Drake said.
Vargus continued. “My tech officers have perfected a method for identifying carriers by their engine signatures alone. Even better, Wang took a look at the data and thinks she can develop a system to better triangulate on cloaked enemy carriers.”
“I don’t think, I know,” Wang said. McGowan gave her a look, and she added, “My apologies. The implant gives me mastery of your language, but it doesn’t teach me the subtleties of polite conversation.”
She didn’t sound particularly sorry; she sounded like she was giving an excuse for her blunt language.
“So you can strip back their cloaking?” McGowan pressed. “That would be a coup.”
“I never claimed that,” Wang said. “We’d need an error, a hiccup, a lucky scan, or something else that gives them away first. But once we’ve got hold of them, they won’t be able to cloak and disappear like those four dragoons did.”
Drake seemed satisfied with the report and nodded in Tolvern’s direction. “Captain Tolvern, give a report about the corvettes and war junks.”
Tolvern cleared her throat. “The enemy fleet is powerful, and of unknown strength. The star fortresses aren’t as intimidating as an Apex Harvester, but there are more of them, and fighting off a swarm of dragoons is like facing down star wolves. Or at least destroyers,” she added in response to Svensen’s skeptical grunt.
“Put enough dragoons together and they can put even our capital ships into desperate situations,” Tolvern continued. “A dragoon charge can slug it out with destroyers, tear up a formation of sloops, and maul any number of torpedo boats. They are maneuverable enough to get at poorly screened missile frigates.
“What they can’t handle are corvettes. A corvette is stronger both in arms and armor. It’s faster out of the blocks, and its antigrav can handle more violent maneuvers. Pit a dragoon against a corvette, and it’s in trouble. It can’t catch her, can’t avoid her guns, and can’t win a direct fight, either.”
“If only we had ninety corvettes, we’d be in excellent position,” Bailyna Tyn said. “Instead of roughly one corvette per enemy carrier.”
Had the observation come from anyone but the Hroom, Tolvern would have taken it as sarcasm.
“The carriers are another matter,” Tolvern said. “They’re big, they’re powerful, and they outnumber our capital ships.”
“Not if you count regular cruisers,” McGowan said. “Don’t discount Peerless’s guns. Or Vigilant’s, or the arms of a dozen other Punisher- and Aggressor-class cruisers.”
“They don’t count,” Vargus said, “because they can’t stand toe-to-toe with a carrier. That means they are support vessels for the sake of this conversation. I’ve read the battle report—Triumph and Peerless together were overwhelmed by a single star fortress. Triumph paid with her destruction.” Vargus turned her gaze to Svensen, who was smiling. “And before you look too smug, a single, unsupported carrier would make short work of the Fourth Wolves.”
He sat up straight and glared. “Except it didn’t. We fought and won that exact battle. We hit Delta and left it a wreck.”
“A tactic that is unlikely to work a second time,” Vargus said. “You lost two wolves just ramming the enemy carrier. Had they known what you intended, you’d have lost them all. Anyway, the carrier survived, didn’t it?”
Drake sighed. “All right, Vargus. Don’t aggravate our Vikings, please.”
“I’m not attacking their abilities,” Vargus said. “Only being realistic. Boghammer and the rest won a great victory, but it was tactics that won, not superior arms.”
Tolvern moved on before the conversation could degenerate further. So many strong personalities in this room.
“We don’t have enough corvettes to win an engagement, but they can cause chaos and break up just the sort of dragoon formations that threaten our support craft.
“Our second advantage is the war junks. The ghouls can’t find them, don’t have a defense for their armor-weakening abilities. We have enough junks to position around the battlefield, targeting as many star fortresses as we choose. With any luck, that turns them cautious, even paranoid. Even when we don’t have war junks on hand, they’ll have to assume we do.”
“I like this plan,” Bailyna Tyn said. “Their carriers are timid, their dragoons can’t form ranks to concentrate firepower, and the rest of our ships will be able to operate as a coherent unit, striking hard on one target after another.”
“In theory,” Tolvern said. “The best plans fall apart at first contact with the enemy.”
“Aye, and there’s the rub,” McGowan said. “We’ll suffer a nasty surprise somewhere down the line—you can count on it.”
“We’re in better shape than we were,” she said.
“Granted.” McGowan pulled out a pipe and a tin from his jacket pocket and filled the bowl. “Assuming we can haul Mose Dryz, Dreadnought, and the lot of them out of Persia. Is now the time when we get back to that little detail?” He lit the pipe and gave it a puff. “Pearson never did find the blasted jump point, only stumbled into a dragoon ambush.”
“The jump has been missing for a long time,” Wang said. “The range of possibilities includes a vast swath of the Nebuchadnezzar System. It might take a while to find it.”
“Even when we do, there’s the small matter of luring the Adjudicators here to fight a decisive engagement,” Tolvern said.
“We’re not going to do that,” Drake said.
McGowan scowled between puffs. “Why the devil not?”
“Much as it pains me to admit it,” Vargus said, “I agree with the man.” She didn’t speak McGowan’s name. “The inner frontier is a sieve. We either pull them here, or to some other single system, or we’re back where we were—our forces divided into patrolling squadrons, none of which are strong enough by themselves to win a battle.”
“We’re not going to lure them here,” Drake said. “We’re going to go fight them on their own turf.”
Everyone looked skeptical at that, Tolvern included. She was the first to voice the doubts.
“We don’t know where they are, Admiral, and if we send our fleet to find them, every planet from here to Singapore will be left undefended.”
Drake looked undaunted. “We don’t know precisely where they are, no, but we have a general idea. And there’s a ship and crew that already knows the neighborhood well enough to go out and take a kick at the hornet’s nest to see what turns up.”
Tolvern could practically hear Capp’s rough York Town accent.
Here we go again, Cap’n. Going back out to get our ship all bloodied up again, yeah?
Chapter Eight
An hour later, Tolvern and Drake sat across from each other in his quarters. He reached out and dragged the stack of blue plastic ships onto his side of the table.
“Rule number one: you get no corvettes.”
Tolvern stared in dismay. “None of them? That’s the one ship we know can perform.”
“Which is why we’ll hold that tactic close to our vest. I’m gathering every last corvette from across the fleet and bringing them here, and I want them unified, undamaged, and as hidden as I can until we’re ready for a full confrontation.”
He nodded. “Your turn.”
“First, show me the map again.”
He touched the screen on the wall next to him, which brought up a small, stylized map of systems from Persia leading toward Old Earth. It was a lattice of jump points, some of which were speculative, based on long-range scans made as Blackbeard and other ships had passed through the systems. Others showed systems beyond the farthest reaches of Blackbeard’s exploration—the system they were now calling Moscow, which had been its name to the Sevastopol and Novosibirsk settlers. The site of Blackbeard’s ambush and near destruction.
Beyond that lay the Lenin System. Who had come
up with that name, and what was next? Stalin?
Several dark, unexplored systems made a carrot-shaped hole—fat at the top and thinning to a point—in the middle of the old trade lanes. Early explorers had discovered no planets to settle in that swath of systems, and no useful transit points either. Two were actively dangerous—a system with a star that had been threatening to go nova for half a millennium, and another whose departing jump point seemed to jump onto the event horizon of a black hole.
A couple of others were inaccessible altogether. There was no law of physics that required every system to have a jump point.
Using his hand computer, Drake activated several bright lights on the map. These were the star fortresses that Catarina had identified, as well as the ones Tolvern had fought in Moscow, Fortaleza, and Castillo. He pushed those ships back into the systems from which they might have come.
He continued to back them up until he had formed a ring of red that cut across the inner frontier. They perched on the edge of the carrot-shaped hole of systems.
“This analysis is mostly Wang’s work,” he said, “but Smythe had a hand in it, too. It was his theory that set her on the path. Put him up for another medal, I suppose.”
“He’ll be knighted by the crown at this rate,” Tolvern said. Yet she wasn’t entirely convinced. “It took a lot of guessing to get the ships in those positions, didn’t it?”
Drake shrugged. “Wang says it’s a simple statistical analysis. Any one ship could have come from several directions, but when you take them in total, it reduces the noise. The math says—this is her claim, anyway—that there’s a greater than ninety-two percent chance that the enemy fleets have originated within this zone of systems.”
Drake tapped his computer again. The colors diffused, and the carrot-shaped hole turned red.
“Which means we were really close to their home territory when we hit Moscow,” he added.
“Not home. A base.” Tolvern had information that she hadn’t yet shared. “Brockett has been studying the Adjudicator tissue in the lab. He has several samples now. There’s the one we dragged up from Castillo, and several others collected in the aftermath of battle.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 33