With no more than a glance at his aide-de-camp, he snapped, “Message to Admiral Shima: Compliments and he is to maintain better station.”
“Yes, sir.” Captain Alexander complied and after a moment, laid a finger on Adenauer’s elbow. The admiral looked down at him with a nod. “The Bannermans are signaling, sir. The admiral believes he sees an opportunity to drive through PrenTalien’s position and seize the Outbound jump sectors. He—respectfully—requests we move up that he may exploit it.”
Adenauer tightened his lips in a look of grim amusement at his aide’s emendation to Admiral Voorhees’ message: to his certain knowledge, Voorhees had never done anything respectful in his life. “Compliments to the admiral”—whenever possible he, like his aide, avoided using the name of a man he detested—“and he will oblige me by—” Attending to his duty was too insulting, Adenauer decided. “By holding his position. You may assure him from me that his chance will yet come. When the time is ripe.”
With a curt nod, his aide relayed the message while Adenauer returned his attention to the plot to see how the times were ripening.
* * *
Minerva Lewis, rooted to the deck in Bellerophon’s CIC, with nothing to do, watched the displays refresh with even greater intensity. Adenauer was accepting Belvoir’s attack by allowing his center to bend inward slowly and the Bannermans hadn’t taken the bait. Belvoir was starting to lose steam. The assault’s covering force was maintaining their deadly, delicate dance but the shuttles were coming under more intense fire, and green icons in the omnisynth’s volume were turning red with growing frequency.
Beside her, Kerr was also watching, his jaw champing and his face increasingly pale. “What’s happening there?” he demanded of no one in particular. “What are they doing?”
The leading edge of the assault was beginning to fray, gaps appearing not just as shuttles were being lost, but where some accelerated while others slowed down in an effort to evade the incoming fire. More shots were telling against the covering force as well, disrupting their dance so that their salvos, once delivered with precise timing and pinpoint accuracy, slackened.
But things weren’t bad yet. If they maintained their pace and intervals, they’d be past the worst of monitor’s fire in a couple of minutes. Even now, they were approaching the critical point where they’d have to boost hard through their own suppressing fire to get inside the monitor’s engagement envelope. Surely Kerr could see that—
“Raise Major Bradshaw!” Kerr’s voice was husky with strain. “Have him dress that leading edge!”
Min turned to look at the colonel, shocked. Did he seriously think they should slow down to dress their formation?
“Sir, I can’t raise him,” answered the comms officer, intent on his console.
“Open a direct channel then! General order: advance units are to close up!”
Min felt the blood begin to leave her face. How could Kerr believe he could micromanage the assault directly from here?
“Sir—”
Kerr swung his head around abruptly, as if he’d forgotten her existence. “Not now, Captain!”
She ground her teeth. The assault was in danger of fragmenting, but if they could hold together a minute longer . . .
Hit it. Hit it now! Don’t listen to this asshole—
The leading edge of the formation accelerated. It was ragged. Sloppy coordination—Bradshaw must be down—but not hopelessly so—
Stick with it. Stick with it.
More icons turning red as the casualties mounted. They were well into the crossfire zone now. The trailing edge was showing signs of faltering—not pressing through the barrage hard enough.
Kerr was licking his lips repeatedly. Min, hands clenching impotently behind her back, stood rigid and silent. Her mind—her whole being—was fully identified with those dots, seeing the railgun shells ripping through the thin-skinned shuttles, the splinters exploding through the interior, mists of blood and atomized flesh and fluids boiling from rent armor; hearing the screams there was no air to carry . . .
For gawd’s sake, don’t let up now—
“No. No good.”
Min felt Kerr’s words like a kick. Her throat spasmed, blocking her speech for a moment. They’d break through in seconds—
“This isn’t working. Get them outta there!” His eyes were wild and staring. She could see the naked panic rioting across his face. The man was coming apart at the seams.
Instinctively her hand shot out to grab his shoulder. “Colonel! What the fuck—”
He lurched away. “You’re relieved!”—his voice pitched up high, ending in a shattered note. Then, as she stood there transfixed, Kerr yelled, “Fall back! General order! All units fall back!”
The red-hot churning in her gut started to boil over—a sharp indrawn breath hissed between her teeth.
A hand closed hard on her arm. “Don’t. Ain’t worth it, Captain,” Troy Anders said softly in her ear. “Nothin’ for it. Let’s get outta here.”
Shaking and nearly blind with rage, she let Anders guide her from the compartment.
* * *
“What the hell’s Kerr doing?” Admiral PrenTalien thundered in a voice that made the bulkheads vibrate. They’d just heard Kerr’s frantic fatal order—literally fatal, for almost half the assault shuttles began to withdraw immediately while the rest ignored the order and pressed on, unaware they were doing so alone. The rift this opened destroyed whatever cohesion the formation had left and all dissolved into murderous confusion.
PrenTalien groaned at the sight, a sound so deep and guttural as to seem almost subterranean, and one, thought Bolton (seeing how his CO’s powerful hands twitched), that Kerr would have been lucky to outlast, had he been in the compartment.
“Dear God,” Bolton muttered under his breath, as the survivors of the smashed assault streamed back through glowing clouds of wreckage, mechanical and human. There was Daedalus taking Fidelia under tow. Defender and Basilisk were shattered, lifeless hulks. Medea was steaming air and tumbling as Actaeon, limping badly, closed to render assistance while the light cruiser Avenger tried valiantly to cover them both. Admiral Belvoir had broken off and sent her cruiser divisions sprinting back to screen the mauled force and prevent its complete annihilation.
“Fuck this noise,” ground out Admiral PrenTalien, his face so dark with fury that his blue eyes seemed to burn with a cold, ruthless inner fire. “Get me a link to Bellerophon. I’m going to skin that ass over there myself.”
Z-Day +7 (0713)
LSS Fury, on-station, far left flank;
Wogan’s Reef, Hydra Border Zone
At the extreme left edge of Rear Admiral Wallace’s left-flank force, another group of spectators had been following the assault on the monitor, first with guarded hope, then with bewilderment and growing anger, and finally, as the full extent of the rout unfolded, furious disbelief, bordering on incomprehension. These were the crews of Destroyer Squadron 6, and to a man or woman they longed to prove to the Doms the truth of the old saying payback is a bitch—none more so than their commanding officer, Captain Ishmael Coward.
Skip Coward was anything but. (As the last person who’d mocked his given name—and spent a month regrowing most of his teeth, in consequence—could attest.) Still, his friends thought he sometimes took his efforts to demonstrate this to extremes. He was not doing so now, despite his own feelings and those of his people, because he was under orders—very strict orders—to behave himself, even if it meant just sitting there in seething frustration, which it did.
DESRON 6, comprised of the destroyers Argo, Sphinx, Circe and Hippolyte, the frigates Ixion and Ajax, and his own ship, the light cruiser Fury (a posting sometimes questioned on the grounds Coward did not need any more encouragement), was assigned to act in support of the heavy cruisers Shannon and Vanguard, which meant cuddling up and adding their not inconsiderable capability to the cruisers’ area-defense umbrella and, especially, their point-defense nets. Huddled un
der his wing was also the quartet of minesweepers, whose job it was to ward off surprises from the reef that were old, automated, and decidedly unpleasant.
Anchoring the left extremity of PrenTalien’s whole position was no small responsibility, but it also meant doing nothing except staying vigilant, because across the way, the Halith admiral in charge of that flank, having withstood one attack from Jesse Wallace, was showing no inclination to do other than hold tight to the reef protecting his position. As much as Coward admitted that was entirely prudent of him from the Doms’ point of view, he resented it bitterly—especially now.
So when his exec, Commander Norman Yoshioka, hailed him from CIC with a questioning look on his handsome and usually impassive face—he was known for being as laconic as his CO was intense—Coward replied rather more gruffly than he should have. Knowing he’d overstepped, he tried to smile but mostly succeeded in just showing teeth. “You have something for me, Norm?”
“Indeed, sir.” Yoshioka was used to his CO and took no notice of the bite. “Can you spare a tick?”
“I’ll be right down.”
Walking into the dimly lit compartment full of glowing screens a minute later, his exec made only the barest pretense of greeting and twitched his thumb at a crewman behind him: a master’s mate with the singular name of Pequot Jones, an ace deep-radar operator and his sensor section lead. “Jones here has something I think you should see.”
Coward nodded and called him over. “What have you got, Jonesy?”
Jones approached, knuckling his forehead, and pointed at the omnisynth. “If you’ll allow me, sir.” Coward stepped up and motioned Jones to a place beside him. Jones fiddled with the console, linking up several layers of sensor data, merging them, applying some filters and then magnifying a sector of the reef between them and the left extremity of Admiral Shima’s position.
“Sir, you know how we get these aperiodic inhomogeneities from the movement of those gas giants, especially the innermost one?” Whether he did or not, Jones pressed on. “Well, there’s also a modulating effect from the orbits of its two largest moons, sort of a third-order perturbation, if you follow me, but while first and second-order effects have a time scale of—well—on the order of a month or so, especially the second order and when the companion is in peristellian with the primary, these effects—the moons I mean—have a time constant of maybe forty-eight hours or so.”
Jones glanced at his CO, who gave just the barest nod at the pause in the deluge. “So—um—anyway, sir, these third-order effects don’t make them—the inhomogeneities, y’see—come and go and they don’t move them much either. Not strong enough for that, you understand—and the time constant being so short—”
“You’re losing me here, Jonesy.”
“Oh.” Jones had his finger poised to make his next point. Concentrating visibly, he skipped to the end. “Sorry, sir. What they do is change the shape.”
“The shape?” And now Coward noticed Yoshioka smiling—a rare expression for him.
“Yessir.” Jones fiddled with the display again. “Look here, sir. This inhomogeneity here.” He highlighted the zoomed-in section of the reef and rotated it. “It’s a tunnel, sir.”
Coward’s eyes moved in rapid succession from the plot to Jones to Yoshioka’s smile and back. “A tunnel. A tunnel through the reef.”
“Well, it’s not like it’s empty of course, just less dense—”
“Jonesy!”
“Sir!” Jones snapped up straight, almost treading on Commander Yoshioka.
“How much less dense?”
“About an order of magnitude, sir. Roughly.”
Coward locked eyes with Yoshioka. “We can get through it.” Yoshioka nodded, almost grinning. He looked back at Jones. “What are the chances the Doms know about this?”
Jones frowned and waved in the direction of his data. “If they aren’t looking, sir . . . well, you can see how it’s not like a rift, surrounded like that. You have to take all these aspect scans and layer them with the passive data from the alpha-line emissions and apply a couple of Swirling filters—”
“Jonesy, is that a no?”
“Ah—yessir. I mean, it is a no—that is, I’d say damn unlikely. Uh—sorry, sir.”
Coward smiled. “Relax, Jonesy. Fine work here. Carry on.”
As Jones saluted and left, his step noticeably buoyant, Coward motioned Yoshioka over. “Work me up a plot getting us and the cruisers through this hole. Get the minesweepers working—it’s time they earned their keep. Ping Vanguard and shoot a maser burst to Admiral Wallace—this, we gotta call in.”
* * *
Rear Admiral Wallace was exiting his quarters on the battleship LSS Cannae, on his way back to CIC, when a lieutenant sprinting around a corner almost collided with him. As Wallace steadied the young woman, he asked, “What all the rush, Silva?”
Lieutenant-JG Erin Silva held out a flimsy to him. “Maser burst message from DESRON 6, sir. Captain Coward. Captain Wallace, Vanguard, endorsed it, sir.”
Wallace reached for the flimsy, wondering what Coward could possibly have to say that could only be trusted a maser flash and would need Colleen Wallace—the captain was no relation—to sign off on. The still breathless lieutenant told him even as he read it. “He says he’s found a hole in the reef, sir! He wants to know if we can support him with—”
“Very good. Thank you, Lieutenant. ” Wallace held up his hand against her enthusiasm as he read:
HAVE FOUND PRACTICABLE PASSAGE THROUGH REEF, EXTREME LEFT FLANK. CAN TAKE DESRON 6 W/ SHANNON AND VANGUARD THROUGH TO ENGAGE HALITH FLEET FROM INSIDE POSITION IF YOU CAN SUPPORT WITH DD screen AND BCGS.
IF YOU APPROVE, WILL SUBMIT OP-PLAN IN 15 MINUTES.
I. COWARD, CAPT FURY——C. WALLACE, CAPT VANGUARD—END / END
Wallace looked up, crushing the flimsy in his hand, now almost as animated as the lieutenant who was about the same age as his granddaughter. “Respond with: Hell yes! At once. Immediately—and you may quote me exactly. Copy Admiral PrenTalien and get me Sambre and Falklands”—his two fastest and most powerful battlecruisers—“and the CO of DESRON 5. You may run, Lieutenant.”
She did.
Not quite fifteen minutes later, Wallace had Coward’s plan on his display:
WILL ENGAGE IN THREE GROUPS: ARGO AND AJAX WILL TAKE HIGH SPOT—DEFIANT AND IXION LOW SPOT. FURY WILL LEAD W/ VANGUARD FOLLOWED BY SHANNON. DESRON 6 WILL ENGAGE WITH TORPS AT 4000 MM, THEN FURY WILL CLEAR HIGH TO ALLOW VANGUARD AND SHANNON TO CLOSE AND ENGAGE WITH missiles and GUNS.
DESRON 6 WILL HOLD HI-LO SPOT AND ENGAGE W/ MISSILES. WILL ENGAGE W/ GUNS ONLY IF OPPORTUNITY presents.
IF YOU APPROVE, WILL MOVE AS SOON CAN COORDINATE W/ BCGS YOUR SIDE. NAV PLOTS ATTACHED
I. COWARD, CAPT FURY——END / END
Wallace sent back:
APPROVED. SAMBRE AND FALKLANDS MOVING immediately TO YOUR SUPPORT W/ DESRON 5. WILL DETACH DESRON 8 IF POSSIBLE.
He finished with:
GO!—GO NOW!
L. WALLACE, rADM——END / END
Z-Day +7 (0717)
LSS Bellerophon, deployed center;
Wogan’s Reef, Hydra Border Zone
Minerva Lewis stood in the middle of Bellerophon’s crowded hanger deck amidst chaos. They had been busy recovering the assault’s survivors, and when she arrived from CIC, she’d found a mixed lot of marines milling about to no evident purpose while angry, sweating deck crews labored to re-spot their own shuttles so they could wrestle the damaged ones into bays where they could be worked on. Coming on top of the losses they just sustained, the obvious disorganization enraged her further.
Kerr had departed to the Ready Ops room, forward, ostensibly to try to make some sense of the debacle and plan their next move, but mostly to get out from under and try to salvage what wits he had left. Min, the executive officer now that Major Bradshaw was fighting for his life in Bellerophon’s sickbay (no one had taken Kerr relieving her seriously—not even Kerr, once he’d b
een able to think again), had been hectoring and coaxing the new people into some semblance of order (most of them young, many bewildered and even stupefied by what had just happened to them), getting them to take up the slack and help where they could, or if they couldn’t, to get out of the way.
She’d just consigned a platoon’s worth of the worst cases to Troy Anders to walk down to the mess and get some hot chow into them—afterward she’d assign them something trivial to keep their minds off the last hour until exhaustion could dull the raw edge—when her xel shrieked above the tumult. Snapping the screen open brought up a perfunctory message, ordering her to report to the Ready Ops room at the double. Somewhat to her surprise, the order referenced a request from Harry Bolton, Captain of the Fleet, not Kerr.
Figuring that, at this point, she could stand next to Kerr for five minutes without throttling him, she acknowledged the order and shot a ping to Anders, passing the baton to him for the time being. Then, with a powerful rolling stride, she breezed out of the press toward the main ladder junction and the spaces forward.
* * *
As she entered Ready Ops, Minerva Lewis at once caught the expectant, anxious air among Kerr and his staff, who were grouped around the central console, about which there was dense cloud of open windows, displaying a plethora of status reports. Everyone was on tenterhooks, and her suspicions as to why were confirmed a moment later when the signal lieutenant sounded a call over the address system that brought them all to attention before the big main view screen.
The screen flashed to life as the video link connected, revealing a vignetted image of Ardennes’ flag bridge. Admiral PrenTalien, who’d been speaking to someone off screen, turned towards the pickup. His attention immediately fixed on the lieutenant colonel.
Kerr, seeing the admiral staring down at him in a truly majestic rage, went pale. Since the assault, he’d regained a degree of composure but now, he was barely able to manage a salute as he struggled to meet PrenTalien’s eye.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 99