Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  “If we pull out, we leave Brecon wide open,” Dempster objected, jerking one thumb at the avenue they’d been ordered to hold “at all costs.” There’d been a lot of those sorts of orders over the last couple of weeks.

  “And if we don’t, we’re all dead, and the frigging street’s open anyway,” MacCuffie pointed out acidly.

  She had a point, Dempster conceded. On the other hand, Brecon Avenue was one of Elgin’s central corridors. The rebels had learned the hard way not to advance in the air, since not even their captured UPS tac vans could stand up to the Army’s shoulder fired SAMs. Of course, what the rebels probably didn’t know was that the Army had exhausted virtually its entire supply of them.

  Should’ve had more SAMs of our own, Dempster thought bitterly. Unfortunately, no one in Public Safety’s upper echelons had ever visualized a situation like this. He wondered if that same upper echelon leadership had spent the last month or so regretting the Army’s systematic emasculation as bitterly as one Dugald Dempster did. Personally, he’d have loved to leave this streetfighting shit to someone—anyone—else!

  There wasn’t anyone else, however, and the UPS had lost too much of its light armor in the first week or so to parcel out any of its remaining Solarian-built Scorpion light tanks or Panther armored personnel carriers. The survivors were being held as a central reserve—that’s what he’d been told, anyway—and even the locally built Soighnean GEV command vehicles were in short supply. Which meant the only way to keep the bastards from infiltrating their merry way all the way to SEIU Tower was to hold the critical intersections with infantry.

  And if they didn’t hold the critical intersections…

  “Raise somebody at Dunwoody’s CP,” he said, hoping he sounded calmer and more confident than he felt. “Tell the Major that if we don’t get some support up here in the next five—”

  The Liberation League had very few Hydra IIIs left. They did have a few, though. It had taken three hours for the missile crews to work their way to a suitable firing spot, but they’d found one on the tenth floor of a building that overlooked Brecon Avenue. Now two of the missiles impacted directly on Captain Dempster’s position.

  Unlike Sakue Yampolski, Dugald Dempster and Morag MacCuffie had no time to recognize the agents of their destruction.

  * * *

  “Excuse me, Ma’am, but I have a burst transmission for you from a Mr. Osborne,” Lieutenant Hughes said respectfully, and Captain Francine Venelli, commanding officer, SLNS Hoplite, looked up from her hamburger with a resigned expression. Her ship had crossed the Alpha wall little more than half an hour ago. In fact, she was still thirty-three light-minutes from the Loomis System’s twin habitable planets, which meant the message must have been banged off pretty much the instant Loomis Astro Control picked up her command’s translation. God, she hated officious, self-important bureaucrats who seemed totally unaware of the limitations of light-speed transmissions.

  “Of course you do, Aaron,” she sighed. “He couldn’t possibly wait for us to get close enough to have an actual conversation, now could he?” Hughes looked a little uncomfortable, and she waved one hand at him. “That was what’s known as a rhetorical question,” she explained.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Venelli suppressed a strong desire to roll her eyes. For a communications specialist, Aaron Hughes had an unfortunately literal turn of mind and a…less than lively intellect. There were times when Venelli thought—uncharitably, she knew—that he might have made a perfectly acceptable Battle Fleet officer.

  Now, Frannie, she told herself. Be nice. You wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even Aaron.

  The reflection had more point than usual, given Venelli’s most recent experience with Battle Fleet. Hoplite had been homeported in the McIntosh System for the last four and a half T-years, and for the most part, it had been a relatively pleasant—or at least painless—tour. Until Sandra Crandall and her damned task force arrived and made itself even more insufferable than Battle Fleet usually did. Had the fact that Crandall knew substantially less than squat about Frontier Fleet’s job of keeping a lid on the pot out here in the Verge kept her from assuming command of every damned ship in the sector, whether they were part of her task force or not? It had not. And had she had a single frigging clue what to do with that command once she had it? She had not.

  Which simply reconfirmed Francine Venelli’s opinion that Battle Fleet was about as useful for the Navy’s real job as a screen door on an airlock. It wasn’t that she begrudged them their useless, shiny superdreadnoughts and all the other toys the Navy kept buying them instead of the battlecruisers and light cruisers Frontier Fleet really needed. She did, but that was the way it had always been and the way it would always be—Frontier Fleet would suck hind teat and then be expected to do the Navy’s real work with half the hulls it needed.

  Like most of Frontier Fleet, Venelli actually took a backhanded pride in her people’s ability to get the job done with entirely old, worn-out equipment. It was Battle Fleet’s attitude that pissed her off, and she’d wanted to dance a jig when Crandall decided to pull out so abruptly for the Madras Sector. The one thing she’d been afraid of was that Crandall might have ordered the McIntosh detachment to join her flag, but her worry had been needless. After all, what would a Battle Fleet admiral need with mere Frontier Fleet units, even if the commanders of the Frontier Fleet units in question had some actual first-hand familiarity with the region in which she was about to operate?

  But Venelli had barely had time to crack a good bottle of wine to celebrate her restored freedom before the message from Frinkelo Osborne arrived and Governor Annetje Slidell—who was not, in Captain Venelli’s carefully considered opinion, the sharpest stylus in the OFS box—had dispatched Hoplite, along with the light cruiser Yenta MacIlvenna and the destroyers Abatis and Lunette, to see what the hell was going on in the Loomis System.

  Whatever it was, it hadn’t sounded good, but Venelli hadn’t seen Osborne’s actual message. Of course she hadn’t! What possible reason could have induced Governor Slidell to share a dispatch from the senior OFS officer with the Frontier Fleet officer ordered to assist him? Obviously, Francine Venelli didn’t need that sort of information, anyway, and her orders had been short and succinct: “Go to Loomis. Report to Frinkelo Osborne. Do whatever he needs you to do.”

  At least they had the advantage of brevity and simplicity, she thought. But she didn’t expect “whatever he needs you to do” to be one of her more enjoyable experiences. Those sorts of orders seldom were. Which brought her back to her lunch and Osborne’s damned burst transmission.

  “Well,” she said, looking back down as her cabin steward set the bowl of potato salad at her elbow, “we’re still seven hours out from Halkirk orbit, and I’m still hungry. Copy the message to my com queue. I’ll take a look at it after lunch.” She allowed herself a modest grimace. “The galaxy will still be here in twenty minutes, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this Osborne kill my appetite before I eat!”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Hi, Damien!” Rufino Chernyshev met Damien Harahap at the door and extended his hand. “Good trip?”

  “Fast, anyway,” Harahap said, shaking his hand and smiling. “I’ve decided I like the streak drive.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Chernyshev chuckled and pointed Harahap at the small conference table in the corner of his spacious office. “It’s working for us in a lot of places right now, even if we do have to be careful about not arriving somewhere ‘impossibly’ early.”

  “Yeah, but Captain Yong could pull out the stops on the way back to Mesa. All the way from Włocławek in less than a month.” Harahap shook his head. “If you guys ever decide to go public with it, you’ll make a fortune from the passenger and high-speed freight operators!”

  “Afraid that won’t be happening any time soon,” Chernyshev said as they settled into the comfortable chairs at the conference table. He lifted the coffee pot on the table and quir
ked an eyebrow at Harahap.

  “Thanks,” Harahap agreed, and held out one of the cups while Chernyshev poured. Then he sat back, sipping the excellent coffee.

  “You seem to have settled in nicely,” he said after a moment, waving the cup in a gentle circle that indicated Chernyshev’s office.

  “I suppose so.” Chernyshev’s smile was a bit sour. “Can’t complain about the pay, and I’m seeing a lot of interesting stuff I wouldn’t have seen before, but I do miss being in the field.”

  “I was going to say that at least bureaucratic chair warmers don’t have to worry about getting themselves shot like field agents do, but given how you came by this promotion, I suppose that’s not as humorous as it might have been.”

  “No, I guess it’s not,” Chernyshev agreed. He sipped coffee himself, then shrugged. “Still, the Manty Navy has a saying that probably applies.” Harahap tilted his head inquiringly, and Chernyshev snorted. “If I can’t take a joke, I shouldn’t have joined,” he said, and Harahap snorted in amusement.

  “I’ve scanned your report,” Chernyshev continued in a down-to-business tone, “but I haven’t had time to actually read it. I did go through your conclusions section, though. I was particularly struck by your assessment of Włocławek.”

  “I’m pretty confident I still haven’t met the fellow who’s really in charge,” Harahap replied, “but ‘Grot’ impressed me. And whoever is in charge doesn’t dillydally. Grot got back to me in less than twenty-four hours to accept our offer. And he came up with some ingenious suggestions for how to get our shipments through Włocławekan Customs, too.”

  “Are you really as confident as you suggested that Grot and his buddies might actually pull this off?”

  “That’s always the question, isn’t it?” Harahap shrugged. “My gut feeling is that they’d have a damned good chance, especially if we can get two or three loads of weapons through to them. May I ask why you’re curious about their chances? I mean, are you asking because we want them to fail to make sure the Manties get splattered with sufficient opprobrium?”

  “Frankly, we probably don’t care too much either way,” Chernyshev said. “Not yet, at least. We do need at least some of these people to crash and burn fairly spectacularly, if we’re going to discredit the Manties in the Verge. But I think your suggestion that having some of them succeed will contribute more to accomplishing Janus’ objectives in the League. If we did want to put the blocks to Grot and his friends in Włocławek, though, how would you go about it?”

  “Burn one of the weapon shipments,” Harahap replied promptly. “We’d have to make sure that whoever runs them in genuinely believes he’s working for the Manties, but that would be the quickest way to blow the wheels off and make sure Manticore gets the blame. The downside would be that the Manties wouldn’t get blamed for throwing Grot’s people to the wolves. It would just be one of those operational fubars that happen once in a while, not a deliberate abandonment.”

  “I know.” Chernyshev nodded. “That’s one of the considerations the original Janus planners sort of overlooked. We can’t pull the carpet out from under any of them before they actually pull the trigger without undoing a lot of the anti-Manty aspects.”

  “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunities for things to go totally off the rails without any involvement on our part,” Harahap said.

  “Truer words were never spoken,” Chernyshev told him, and snorted harshly when Harahap looked a question at him.

  “MacLean’s people are currently kicking the shit out of the Prosperity Party in Loomis,” he said.

  “So soon?” Harahap sounded surprised, and Chernyshev waved his coffee cup.

  “Apparently MacCrimmon was stupid enough to try to kill off the MacRorys. Personally, I suspect that was another Zagorski brainstorm. Anyway, the Uppies botched it but still managed to kill enough of them to push the Liberation League over the edge.”

  “Damn.” Harahap shook his head. “I didn’t expect that to happen!”

  “Neither did anybody else. The good news for MacLean and MacFadzean is that at least we got the first couple of weapon shipments through to them first. But we were still in the seduction stage, in a lot of ways. Henrique Chagas—you don’t know him, but he’s a good man—took over when you were reassigned, and we knew tensions were still climbing, but MacLean obviously didn’t want to take to the streets any sooner than she could help. Obviously, that changed.”

  “Have they used their hotline to ‘Manticore’ to ask for naval support?”

  “Not that we know of. For that matter, MacFadzean and MacPhee were still working on bringing MacLean along when Henrique was last on-planet. We don’t know for sure that MacFadzean even told her about the offer of naval support. Of course, our latest info’s almost four T-weeks old, so there’s no telling how the situation may’ve changed. Based on what we’ve heard so far, though, it looks an awful lot like they’re going to take the planet away from MacCrimmon—and maybe even SEIU—pretty handily all by themselves.”

  His eyes met Harahap’s, and they both smiled. Neither of them would lose any sleep over what happened to someone like Tyler MacCrimmon or Nyatui Zagorski.

  “In the meantime, however,” Chernyshev went on a more briskly, “we’re going to assign you responsibility for Seraphim, too. I did the initial spadework there myself, but with me stuck in this damned office, I have to hand it off to someone. Given the personalities, I think your touch would be well suited to bringing them along. They’re not what I’d call close enough to Włocławek and Loomis to be exactly convenient but that would be true of just about anyone else I could assign them to, and with the streak drive, it shouldn’t be too bad.”

  “Whatever you say. I hope you remember that bit about it’s not being ‘convenient’ if I end up dropping a ball because of transit times, though.”

  “If it happens, it happens,” Chernyshev said philosophically. Harahap looked mildly skeptical, and Chernyshev chuckled. “I can put that in writing for you, if you’d like.”

  Harahap’s lip twitched, but he shook his head.

  “Thanks awfully, Rufino, but somehow I doubt that would save my ass if it goes south and someone farther up the food chain wants someone to hang for it.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t, but think how much better you’d feel knowing I’d at least tried to save your neck!”

  They traded the smiles of field agents who understood how bureaucrats played the game. Then Chernyshev set his coffee cup down and leaned forward, folding his hands on the conference table in front of him.

  “One of the reasons I wanted to see you this morning was to personally brief you on Seraphim, Damien. The background’s a little tricky, but it’s certainly one we can work with. The first thing I think you need to bear in mind is—”

  * * *

  “What do you mean there are no Marines?!”

  Acting President Tyler MacCrimmon stared at Frinkelo Osborne in disbelief. Or perhaps a better term would have been “shock,” Osborne thought.

  “Mister President, when I sent Governor Slidell my request, no one had any way of knowing the situation with the Manties was going to go as completely off the rails as it has,” he replied. “From the Governor’s covering dispatch, Admiral Crandall pulled in every Marine detachment she could find before she headed off for Spindle. The Governor tried to pry loose at least some ground troops, but she’s got fires of her own to stay on top of in McIntosh. She spent several days looking for troops—that’s most of the reason for the delay in responding, in fact—then decided she needed to get the requested naval support off to us as soon as she could. She says she should have at least a battalion or so of Gendarmes she can loan you in another couple of weeks.”

  “Another couple of weeks?!” MacCrimmon stared at him. “In ‘another couple of weeks’ MacLean and those lunatics will own the frigging planet! At which point, a division of Gendarmes wouldn’t do us any good!”

  “Mister President, once they know
we have orbital support, I’m sure MacLean and the others will realize they have no choice but to pull back. At that point—”

  “What have you seen out of them so far to suggest they’re that close to rational?” MacCrimmon demanded. “And even if MacLean and MacGill were willing to do anything of the sort, all our intelligence suggests the rest of the bastards would refuse to lay down their weapons! That’s why we need ground troops—Solarian ground troops, that’ll prove the League is backing us! The ground troops you promised us.”

  Osborne clamped down on an angry temptation to point out that he hadn’t promised MacCrimmon anything. It wouldn’t have done any good. Besides, he admitted a moment later, he’d certainly used the possibility of sending in the Marines to damp down the acting president’s panic. And now that those Marines had failed to arrive, that tamped down panic was flaming up once more, all the worse because of how hard MacCrimmon had clung to the promised lifeline. Osborne could see literally see the fear driving anything remotely like reason out of the acting president’s eyes.

  “Governor Slidell will be sending a ground force,” he said as reassuringly as he could. “I regret that she didn’t have it available when my dispatch arrived. It never occurred to me that a Battle Fleet admiral would requisition the entire Marine force assigned to McIntosh.” Which, he carefully didn’t point out, was never more than a single understrength battalion to begin with. “I’m sure the Gendarmes, at the very least, are in the pipeline right now.”

  “And I’m telling you this has to be stopped now,” MacCrimmon grated.

  “Mister President—”

  “If we don’t have ground troops, we’ll have to do it another way,” MacCrimmon interrupted. “From orbit.”