The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  So as the bosuns roused out their frowsty and crapulous crews at 0600 to begin the long process of making themselves and their ships presentable again (for one thing, the heads were a horror few could face), there was much murmured commentary and many a discreet weather eye trained on officers’ country to see when they would start to appear and what their aspect would be. The later it was, they figured, the better their chances.

  The port was already crowded with small craft at this early hour, almost all of them bumboats that were conveying the mariners’ pleasurable company of the night before back to Qeshan’s many brothels. The bosuns had bundled these beauties out early, in most cases even before the crews were awake, because centuries of experience showed that mariners were most easily detached from their harlots while both parties were unconscious. Thus, by 0400, a good two hours before reveille, the bosuns’ mates, assisted by the sergeant-at-arms, were herding long lines of blinking, yawning, muttering whores, indifferently dressed if dressed at all, into the waiting boats where orderlies scanned their venereals, rechecked their licenses, updated their health records and endorsed their pay chits as they embarked.

  The officer’s companions presented a much different case. Not only did they include wives and sweethearts, but none came from the low port houses, many were professionals of distinction, and the more exalted they were, the longer they stayed aboard. And the mariners knew that nothing was guaranteed to put a hungover officer in a good frame of mind better than a couple of extra hours’ sack time with one of these delightful artisans.

  But it was the fleet’s commanding officer who set the tone on these occasions, and Admiral Jakob Adenauer was well known as an abstemious man devoted to his wife. He was no kind of tyrant, but the same could not be said for all of his subordinates. The possibility that he would appear and, worse yet, deliver some sort of address at his normal hour of 0800 thus preyed on many a fretful mind.

  That such an address was due was confidently predicted by most. The banquet of two nights ago was proof of that. Fleet commanders did not hold such events for their entertainment value, and doing so immediately before such an important holiday meant something big was at the event horizon, perhaps something unprecedented. It could only mean a new deployment, and while the crews readied themselves for a light breakfast (sutlëchĵ, made of golden rice boiled in malt beer and liberally spiked with detoxicants), this topic occupied them almost as much as the likely state of their officers, for it conceivably offered as much potential for concern as excitement.

  Concern because an astute professional eye that could have encompassed the entire scene that AM would have noticed that although the Kerberos Fleet embodied an enormous accumulation of naval firepower, which presented a stirring sight in port, it was not a fleet in prime condition—far from it.

  Painfully evident everywhere were the scars of last month’s battle at Miranda. Most obviously, neither of the big carriers of Carrier Division II (CARDIV II), which represented half their long-range strike power, were ready to sortie. Count Ivanov was still in airdock undergoing repairs, and Prince Valens had recently received a new fighter group to replace the one decimated in the encounter and was still training it.

  Although the light carriers Danton and Mazarin had been added, they each had less than half the fighter complement of a fleet carrier and they were inexperienced; the level of coordination required by fighter ops took much time and effort to attain, and as yet, no one knew how well these two little sisters would be able to cooperate with King Constantine and Prince Gregor, the heart of CARDIV I.

  Joining Count Ivanov in airdock were the fleet’s two fastest battleships, Condorcet and Desailles, which comprised BATDIV I. Condorcet was having her damaged drive nodes replaced and would not be ready for a month. Desailles was in worse shape, and her wounds would keep her in port even longer. In compensation, IHS Orlan had been attached, and although Orlan was the newest of the powerful Marengo-class battleships and came from the elite Prince Vorland Fleet, she had yet to see action, which made her a much less welcome addition than IHS Jena, the battle-hardened veteran from the VanNeimen Fleet for which Adenauer had lobbied tirelessly, eventually prevailing only through the intercession of his friend, Admiral Joaquin Caneris, the Prince Vorland Fleet’s commander.

  Also, an objective observer would have faulted the force structure. There were not enough destroyers for the screening, picket duty and rescue operations these nimble little ships excelled at—they should have had a dozen squadrons, not a mere eight, and a third of those below strength—and there were rather too many light cruisers of that unhappy breed which could neither keep up with fast battleships nor offer much support to the big carriers and dreadnoughts they could accompany. In terms of long-range reconnaissance assets, there were too few, and they were of the wrong type. The fleet’s stealth frigates had suffered heavily; only a paltry number remained, and compensating with additional corvettes was a weak stopgap measure, at best.

  Finally, all too many of the ships were simply old. Indeed, the light cruisers Neva and Taranis were ancient Amur-class ships that should never have been employed in a modern fleet. Elchingen and VanScheer, two of the Fleet’s original battleships, were among the oldest in service, and barely a match for the newest League battlecruisers. Most of the destroyers were old as well, and short-winded compared to their newer sisters, putting an undue strain on the fleet’s logistics.

  In short, the Kerberos fleet was wearing out. By rights, it should have passed the baton to one of the other main Halith fleets, the VanNeimen or perhaps the Ilion, and been given a long, well-deserved period of R&R. Even Admiral Adenauer’s flagship, the big dreadnought Marshall Nedelin, was in need of a thorough refit.

  But an objective observer would not have gotten a very sympathetic hearing for his views from the men and women of the Kerberos fleet, assuming he had the audacity to bring them up. From highest to lowest, they were full of pride in their fleet, which before the war was looked on as the bastard stepchild of the Halith navy: an assemblage of the antiquated and the cast off, good for nothing but patrolling the disorderly backwater of the Hydra region between Halith’s eastern frontier and the Bannerman Confederacy.

  Selected for the war’s opening thrust and grudgingly reinforced because they were (most of all) expendable, they’d succeeded brilliantly at Rho Ceti, then grown and continued to succeed, defeating a combined fleet comprised of units from the Nereidian League’s Colonial Expeditionary Forces, the New UK’s Royal Navy, and the Terebellum Empire’s Navy to take the vital Kepler Junction. After that, they subdued Deneb sector, where Alesia put up a gallant but doomed resistance, and the Aventine Grand Duchy concluded that survival was the better part of valor.

  Now they were the most powerful fleet in the Halith Imperial Navy. The Prince Vorland Fleet had more cachet and the Haslar Fleet had the blue blood and prestige, but they had the battle honors. They felt they had carried the conflict for the past year—fourteen months by the Terran calendar—and they were jealous of the distinction. They might not have all the best and the brightest, their deployments might not always follow the book, they might look a bit patchy and act a trifle weary, but they had beaten all comers to this point, and they had every confidence they would do it again whenever the need arose.

  Indeed, Miranda, which they knew to have been a defeat (whatever government propaganda might say), confirmed their opinions. For all that it rankled and for all they looked forward eagerly to getting some of their own back, they knew they had fought well—the respective losses proved it—but there had been poor management and inefficient leadership. They’d been attached to the Duke Albrecht Fleet as mere auxiliaries there—let those pricks wear the shame. Had the operation been entrusted to them, had they been under their own admiral, how different the outcome would have been. At Kepler, they’d beaten the vaunted CEF Seventh Fleet—the Pogues, as they derisively referred to them. It was sheer idiocy they’d been denied the chance to do it again. Now, happily,
that chance was certainly at hand.

  So on the mess decks, and in the gunrooms and berthing spaces, as 0800 came and went and no officers appeared to savage them, the mood began to lift. As the mariners bent to their tasks, their thoughts turned to what orders the yacht might have brought them, and the theories ran as hot and strong as the coffee.

  Would they finally break out through the Kepler Junction and complete the conquest of Cygnus sector? Or, since the Terebellum Empire was rumored to be wavering, would they perhaps get a crack at finishing off the New United Kingdom of Friesia and New Caledonia? They might even be sent to carry out the reconquest of the Karelian Republic, although a tiny handful silently hoped not: the Karelian navy was small, expert and savage, and the planets of the republic were more so. Or maybe the Supreme Staff had resolved to take another shot at securing Novaya Zemlya, where they’d trapped and annihilated a League fleet at the end of the last war.

  As each of these ideas was propounded and its merits debated, the hard-bitten veterans of the fleet would cap the discussion by clapping a knowing eye on the first-voyagers and announcing: “Don’t you worry, ya pollywogs. Those Pogue bastards will be under our guns again soon enough. And when they are, we’ll stamp every round ‘Remember Miranda.’”

  Part I: A Lull in The Tempest

  “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

  Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

  “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

  Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

  Chapter One: The Echoes of Battle

  Z-Day minus 42

  LSS Trafalgar, deployed;

  Cygnus Sector

  The fighter ghosted up on the carrier, dark and quiet, showing only a faint ultraviolet nimbus from the leaky power plant. All around, the wreckage of battle orbited, mostly cooled by now to invisibility, but here and there floated brilliant, star-like objects: the stasis bottles that contained the antimatter fuel for hypercapable warships. These beacons for the dead would shine for decades, or if they were massive enough—like those of the fleet carrier LSS Camperdown and the light carrier IHS Revanche, both of which had exploded, with the loss of all hands—for centuries, casting their piercing blue-white light through the battlespace. Elsewhere, wounded leviathans wallowed in clouds of their own debris and crystallizing atmosphere: a thousand kilometers away to port, LSS Blenheim drifted, a swarm of consorts giving what aid they could while damage-control teams fought desperately to save the battleship’s life. Five hundred klicks below, the heavy cruiser LSS Jellicoe tumbled helplessly, awaiting the coup de grâce that would blow her fusion bottles and add her star to the rest. Much nearer, LSS Ramillies, mauled but alive, worked frantically to clear her fouled deck and recover the last of her pilots.

  In the cockpit of her fighter, Ensign Loralynn Kennakris could perceive none of this. Her forward screen was a scorched ruin, most of her instruments were hash. All she had left was the beacon indicator on her T-Synth. She kept an iron hand locked on the controls, waiting until she got close enough for her maser to be heard with what was left of her battery power. The range rings ran off the edge of the T-Synth’s display, one by one, much too slowly for her taste. As the last ring grew outwards, she keyed the mic.

  “Trafalgar, this is Viper Echo 2-4. I’ve got a problem here.”

  The reply was a dim crackle over her headset. “Copy, Viper Echo 2-4. What’s your status?”

  “My status is fucked.” Kris blinked at the sweat that the armored flight suit should have been taking care of. “I’m on manual. Battery’s in the red. Atmo down to twenty-seven percent.”

  “Copy that, Viper Echo 2-4,” the voice replied. “Declare an emergency.”

  She desperately wanted to pop the faceplate to get the sweat out of her eyes, but there wasn’t enough air left for that. “Emergency declared. Look, I need you guys to uplink a BOLO approach. I’ll fly the pip. Clear the deck for a hot landing.”

  “Acknowledged. Wait one.” There was a brief pause on the other end. “Negative, Viper Echo 2-4. You’re too badly damaged. Standby for tractor tow.”

  “No way!” Kris barked. “If one of your ham-fisted operators gets a beam on this crate, he’ll crack it wide open. Gimme the pip.”

  “Repeat negative, Viper Echo 2-4. We’ll scramble a pick-up. Prepare to eject.”

  “No can do,” Kris said wearily. “Just link me the data. I think I’ve got enough reserve to make it in.” Another excruciating pause.

  “Kennakris,” said a new voice on the line, “do you have suit perforations?”

  “Goddammit, I’ve got me perforations,” Kris snapped. “Now link me that goddamned pip before I park this thing in the bridge. Sir.”

  “Roger that. Uplink commencing.”

  The pip appeared on her T-Synth, blinking bright orange. She was too wide and still too fast. She ground her teeth hard as she pulled back on the stick. Flying the pip was always tricky—with one hand and a crippled bird it might prove impossible. A hull splinter had gone right through her left shoulder, another had broken some ribs, and while the vasoconstrictors were controlling the bleeding and the suit pharmacopeia was helping with the pain, they couldn’t give her left arm back its strength or help much with her breathing, which was short, shallow, difficult, wheezing.

  That was because of the ribs, she hoped. The holes in the flight suit were self-sealing, and at twenty-seven percent atmosphere, it should still be holding pressure. But at around fifteen percent it would start leaking again—at ten, it would fail. She had no attention to spare for the environmental readouts, however; the pip was turning from orange to yellow but she wasn’t sure she had enough decel left to get it into the green.

  “Huron”—she’d recognized his voice—“you still there?”

  “Here, Kris.”

  “Get ’em to foam the deck. This is gonna be close.”

  “Roger that.” Then: “You’re still too wide. How much you got left?”

  “Dunno.”

  “We can match velocity in three point seven minutes.”

  Sweat stung her eyes, blurring the pip. She blinked furiously. A claxon went off, startling her. The environmentals—cabin pressure was dropping towards critical.

  “No joy. Atmo down below twenty percent, falling.” Her breath was coming in sharp, painful pants. “Look”—a pause as she fought for air—“I’m gonna keep this vector and give it all the decel I got for the next forty-five seconds before I break right to make the approach. But you’re gonna have to slew that beast about a point.” She paused again, trying to get control of her breathing. “Can they do it?”

  Carriers did not normally recover craft when under acceleration. They stayed ballistic while the pilot lined up the approach and flew it all the way in. Kris was asking them to do the exact opposite: maneuver to match her vector after her engines cut out. A fleet carrier was not a nimble object and if they were off by more than the slightest amount—

  “Affirmative, Kris. Bring it home. We’ll catch.”

  I hope so.

  She jammed the decel for all it was worth. The fighter shuddered and bucked, the broken bones in her shoulder ground sickeningly into each other and the pain from her ribs stabbed hot and deep.

  By all the fucking gods, I hope so.

  * * *

  Gear buckled, nose crumpled, missing its port fins, her fighter lay over on its starboard pylons, askew in a smother of crash foam. Kris popped the canopy as the fully-suited damage crews began to swarm over the little craft with hoses, lines, and rescue gear. She got out of the fighting straps with much difficulty, shooing off a crewman who impertinently tried to assist. She managed to get down the wing ladder by herself despite extreme dizziness, a crippled arm, and darkening vision, and stood on the deck, swaying. The pain was getting the better of the drugs now and it was an agony to breathe. Waiting medics brought over a float pallet and she snarled at them.r />
  “Fuck that.”

  Shouldering past, holding her arm tight across her body, she managed five steps before pitching forward in a dead faint.

  * * *

  Rear Admiral Lo Gai Sabr, commanding Task Force 34 of CEF Third Fleet, lifted his jet-black eyes from a situation display to the big main screen of the flag bridge on the battlecruiser, LSS Athena Nike, as Trafalgar completed her maneuver to recover the heavily damaged fighter.

  “Is that the last of them?” Sabr growled—his inexpressive voice was a rough instrument that only seemed capable of either a laugh or growl—and motioned at the display.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Captain James Donovan, his chief of staff, who was used to the admiral’s ways. Sabr was famous for being short of stature (he did not reach Donovan’s shoulder), short of temper, and for having a short way with his enemies, as well as subordinates who did not live up to his exacting standards. His roundish, compactly featured, deeply figured face, bare scalp and short curling black beard invited piratical comparisons, as did his exploits, which were numerous and fed a reputation for audacity, ruthlessness, and tactical brilliance that had reached legendary proportions. Indeed, it was stated—and believed—that during the last war, the enemy had evacuated a moon based on nothing more than the rumor of his approach. Friends and enemies alike often speculated on what his given name might mean in his native tongue—some contended it was slang for “ghost man”; others insisted on “foreign devil”—while the lower decks, after their artless and insightful manner, bestowed on him the sobriquet “Demon Gin.” Neither the fear nor the adulation had evident effect on his outward demeanor, and what went on in his private mind, only his tall, beautiful and equally sanguinary Antiguan wife, Commodore Yasmin Shariati (a former privateer), knew for sure.