Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  “S’pose not,” Floyd said quietly. He sat back in his chair and looked around the conference table, then returned his gaze to Frugoni. “So why aren’t you sure this is bad news, seein’s how we haven’t heard squat out of the Manties?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Frugoni replied. “They’ve been in normal-space for the better part of thirty minutes, and they haven’t said a word. I’ve got to wonder why a Frontier Fleet commander wouldn’t be blistering our ears already.”

  “Might just want us t’ have time t’ work up a good sweat ’fore they get around t’ tellin’ us why they’re here,” MacGruder suggested. Floyd and Frugoni looked at him, and he shrugged. “Think they call that ‘psychological warfare,’” he elaborated.

  “That could be it,” Rodriguez agreed. “And it could be that they want to wait until we know they’re in missile range before they start issuing any demands. They might figure we’d be less likely to do anything stupid—like, oh, I don’t know…threatening to blow up Tallulah’s infrastructure if they don’t go home and leave us alone—if we know they’re in position to blow the crap out of all the rest of our infrastructure.”

  “Could be you’re both right,” Floyd said after a moment, “but damned if I’m gonna get on the com t’ them any sooner’n I have to.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Might be pointless as all hell, but I’m not goin’ t’ give the bastards as much as the time of day till I have to.”

  * * *

  “Something strange about this, Ma’am,” Commander Frieda Mawhinney said.

  She and Commander Lawrence Hillshot, Madelyn Hoffman’s XO, stood on either side of Captain Belloc’s command chair, watching the main plot. At the moment, it was configured to show the entire inner system, fed by the Ghost Rider drones which had been sent speeding ahead.

  “Enlighten me, Frieda,” Belloc said, and her tactical officer shrugged.

  “We’ve been in-system over an hour now, and that’s long enough for even Sollies to get around to challenging us, Ma’am,” she pointed out. “The fact that they haven’t is odd enough, but what’s really strange is how little traffic there is. We’re only tracking three impeller signatures bigger than small craft in the entire inner system, and there’s no sign of collector ships moving along the asteroid belt, either. According to our intel, Tallulah has at least a hundred asteroid extraction ships, and they’re supposed to do a lot of gas mining from Bigsby, the system’s gas giant, too. But we don’t see any sign of that, and it’s not like they all went scurrying for home the instant we turned up, either. For that matter, they couldn’t even all have shut down and gone doggo without our having picked up at least some impeller signatures first.”

  “Guns is right, Ma’am,” Hillshot said. “Especially about the challenge side. For that matter, Astro Control should’ve contacted us a good twenty minutes ago even if they were stupid enough to think we’re just a convoy of merchies.”

  “Agreed.”

  Belloc tipped back in her chair, fingers of her right hand drumming lightly on the armrest while she considered the situation.

  There was no legitimate reason for an entire star system to decide to turn off its com net, yet that appeared to be exactly what these people had done. Which suggested a reason that was less than legitimate, and an unpleasant possibility suggested itself to her. If this was another Saltash, with a Solarian squadron or task force hiding in stealth somewhere, prepared to pounce from ambush, that ambush’s commander might have decided to go to com silence. The only reason she wasn’t certain that was what was happening was that a Solly naval commander with a clue would have ordered Astro Control to hail them in a normal, routine welcome. She would not have opted for a silence which was likely to make her intended victims suspicious.

  The only flaw in that analysis, Amanda, is that you’re thinking about a Solly naval commander with a clue, and so far no one’s ever met one.

  She smiled sourly at the thought, then let her chair come back upright.

  “All right. I think you’re onto something. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what ‘something’ is. Frieda, I want a second shell of Ghost Rider drones, and I want the first shell to sweep all the way to the hyper limit on the far side of the system. If this is another Saltash and there’s someone hidden out there, I want her found.”

  “Aye, aye, Ma’am.” Mawhinney started back to her own console, but Belloc’s raised hand stopped her. “Ma’am?”

  “Just in case there are any unfriendly individuals thinking homicidal thoughts out there, I think it would be a good idea to bring the task group to Condition One. I don’t want to deploy any Mark 23s yet, but inform Captain Piekarski that we may be looking at a Mark 16 engagement. And inform Captain Lewis that I want his destroyers to hold here, close to the hyper limit, with Veerle Vosburgh. If there’s any shooting, I want that freighter over the wall into hyper before any bad guys even think of getting close to her. The last thing we need is to lose the pods in her holds. Then I want a launch of decoys prepped.”

  “Aye, aye, Ma’am.”

  “And as for you, Aquilino,” Belloc continued, turning to Madelyn Hoffman’s communications officer, “I’d like you to warm up your little com. I’m sure I’ll feel a need to talk to these people…eventually.”

  “Not now, Ma’am?” Lieutenant Aquilino Demeter asked, and Belloc shook her head.

  “No. If they’re not friendly enough to talk to us, I don’t see any reason we should be in a rush to talk to them.” Belloc smiled unpleasantly. “We’ll wait until we hit turnover and they know for sure—Sollies can be a little slow on the uptake, I’ve heard—that we’re headed for a zero-zero with the planet. That’ll give the TO time to get all her ducks in a row, anyway.”

  * * *

  Another ninety minutes dragged slowly past. Then Lieutenant Demeter cleared his throat without ever—quite—glancing at his captain.

  “I haven’t forgotten, Aquilino,” Belloc said dryly, and the lieutenant nodded.

  “Never thought you had, Ma’am.”

  “Liars come to bad ends.” Belloc smiled briefly, then squared her shoulders. “All right, put me on.”

  “Live mic, Ma’am,” Demeter said promptly, and the captain looked directly into the pickup.

  “Astro Control, this is Captain Amanda Belloc, Royal Manticoran Navy, commanding officer, HMS Madelyn Hoffman. I request approach instructions.”

  TG 10.27’s units—minus Zachariah Lewis’ five Culverins and the Mark 23-packed Veerle Vosburgh—had maintained a leisurely 2.9 KPS2 since crossing the alpha wall. Madelyn Hoffman was still almost seven light-minutes short of planetary orbit and the improbably named Donald Ulysses and Rosa Aileen Shuman Space Station where this system’s astro control kept its headquarters, and she sat back to await a response. Fifteen minutes crept by, and then—

  “I have a response, Captain,” Demeter announced. “It’s not from Astro Control, though.”

  “No?” Belloc raised her eyebrows. “What a surprise. Who is it from?”

  “It’s coming from the planet, Ma’am.”

  “Not the space station at all?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  Belloc nodded while she toyed absently with a lock of hair. According to the limited intelligence packet Admiral Culbertson had been able to put together for her, the real power in this system was supposed to be the system manager for a transstellar called the Tallulah Corporation. Tallulah couldn’t be a major player by Solarian standards, given that Belloc had never heard of it, but the system manager in question was supposed to have his headquarters aboard the space station. There was no official Solarian presence on the planet, either, so she’d assumed any response would come from someone pretending to be Astro Control or else from whatever force the Sollies had dispatched to ambush her here. In either case, the transmission should be coming from someplace in space, not on the planet.

  “Well, I suppose you’d better put them through, Aquilino,” she said mildly.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”
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  An instant later, a face appeared on Belloc’s com display. The stranger was brown-haired and brown-eyed, with a close-cropped beard and an eagle’s beak of a nose. His image was motionless until she tapped the key to play the transmission.

  “Afternoon, Captain Belloc. My name’s Allenby—Floyd Allenby. And I b’lieve what you’re looking for is ‘Davy Crockett.’”

  Davycrockett? Well, that was certainly unexpected, Amanda Belloc thought. What the hell is a “davycrockett”?

  * * *

  Floyd Allenby sat tautly, watching the com display with Frugoni at one shoulder and Jason MacGruder at the other.

  The long, agonizing wait as the silent warships crept closer and closer had almost—almost—overcome his determination to wait them out. If they’d been Manties, they should already have contacted him…or the current commander of the Cripple Mountain Movement, assuming something unpleasant had happened to him. But no one had been able to think of a reason for Frontier Fleet to approach so slowly and wait so long before opening communication, either.

  And then this Captain Belloc had finally contacted them…without asking for him, without asking for anyone from the CMM, without the code phrase announcing why she was here, and contacting Astro Control, instead.

  Clearly, something was very wrong, yet he’d seen no option but to transmit the peculiar code phrase Eldbrand had given Frugoni and hope for the best.

  ’Sides, if this here’s a fleet of Sollies, ain’t gonna make a whole heap o’ difference what I say to ’em, now is it?

  * * *

  “Excuse me, Mr.…Allenby, was it?” Belloc said. “I was expecting to contact Astro Control. Could I ask why I’m speaking to you, instead? And exactly what a ‘davycrockett’ is?”

  * * *

  “Y’know, this here’s getting’ stranger by th’ minute, Floyd,” MacGruder observed. “You reckon Manties could be as just plain dumb as Sollies?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” Allenby replied, scratching his beard. “Mean, I hear they can count t’ ten with their boots on an’ everything.” He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Might’s well be hung for a snow bear as a house cat,” he said, and touched the transmit key again.

  * * *

  “Don’t rightly know what—or who—a ‘Davy Crockett’ is, Captain,” the bearded man on Belloc’s display said twelve minutes later. “Wasn’t my idea. But your man Eldbrand said you’d recognize th’ code phrase when you got here. Course, we expected you ’bout a T-month ago.”

  Both of Amanda Belloc’s eyebrows rose, and then she shook her head wryly.

  Well, assuming this isn’t some sort of elaborate deception plan after all, it looks like Admiral Culbertson was onto something, doesn’t it, Amanda? And you’re not going to have to go around looking for them after all!

  “I’m sorry we’re late, Mr. Allenby,” she said aloud, “but I believe there may have been a slight…misunderstanding. You see—”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  “Any last thoughts?” Captain Gerald Hagan, Solarian League Navy, asked, as he looked around SLNS Ratnik’s briefing room.

  “Sounds pretty straightforward,” Captain Hiram Albani, CO of SLNS Kriger and CruDiv 423.1’s second-in-command, said from his quadrant of the master com display. “We go in, we…explain things to these people, and we kick ass, if that’s what it takes to make them see reason.”

  He shrugged, and Hagan suppressed a desire to scowl at him.

  It wasn’t easy, given how much he’d always disliked the other captain. Albani was abrasive, arrogant, and hotheaded, with major family connections in OFS. He wasn’t simply a blunt instrument; he was someone who enjoyed being a blunt instrument, and sometimes that tended to be…counterproductive.

  Hagan himself had no qualms about breaking heads, if that was what it took to convince these neobarbs to mind their manners. That never had bothered him, to be honest. It was what Frontier Fleet was for, when it came down to it. And these days, with the lunatic Manties trying to set the entire galaxy on its ear, he had even less patience than usual with anyone willing to help out by planting daggers in the League’s back. Not only that, but Admiral Torricelli had made it abundantly clear to all his senior officers that the government absolutely couldn’t afford to lose any more revenue-producing systems now that the Manties had thrown such a monumental spanner into the League’s interstellar economy.

  So, yes, he was more than prepared to explain, however forcefully was required, to the citizens of Swallow that it would be wise of them to return the Tallulah Corporation’s property. Unfortunately, aside from a single Gendarmerie intervention battalion and two companies of Solarian Marines, he was a little short on the means to convince them of the error of their way if they weren’t prepared to be overawed by his four Warrior-class light cruisers. It was unlikely the situation on-planet was as dire as Captain Romero Shwang, the skipper of Tallulah Dawn 7, which had fled the system to seek help, insisted it was. Shwang had been more than a little hysterical in his interviews with Admiral Torricelli. Nonetheless, it seemed likely the rebels against the Shuman Administration really were equipped with modern, military-grade weapons, and even a small planetary population was counted in billions. If any significant portion of those billions supported the insurrectionists, pacifying it would be a bitch with so few warm bodies. Unless he was prepared to resort to KEWs, and he wasn’t. Whatever Shwang might’ve said—and whatever Torricelli might have to say, for that matter—Gerald Hagan had no intention of using KEWs against civilian targets…and not just because he objected to killing golden geese.

  “There was a military theorist back on old Earth, once upon a time,” he said now, looking at Albani. “Well, there were probably a lot of them, actually. But the one I’m thinking about said something along the lines of ‘in war everything is very simple, but doing even simple things is very hard.’ I’ll agree our objective’s straightforward, Hiram. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it’ll be easy to ‘kick ass’ if the local yokels aren’t prepared to see reason.”

  Albani’s mouth tightened ever so slightly as Hagan reiterated what he’d probably said no more than four or five hundred times since Admiral Torricelli sent them off. He also nodded, however, and Hagan decided to settle for that and turned his attention to Commander Trudi Vercesi and Commander Antonia Valakis, who commanded SLNS Harcos and SLNS Guerriera, respectively.

  “Any new thoughts occur to either of you since our last conference?”

  Heads shook, and Hagan nodded. That was pretty much what he’d expected.

  “All right, then,” he said more briskly. “We go in as planned.”

  * * *

  “Still no response, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Shahrizad Kantor, Ratnik’s communications officer, said, and Gerald Hagan frowned.

  He’d transmitted his “request” for approach instructions to Swallow Astro Control as soon as his light cruisers and the chartered transport Priscilla Lane crossed the alpha wall into normal-space. But that had been thirty minutes ago, and the range to the local space station had been only fourteen light-minutes. There’d been plenty of time for Astro Control to respond.

  So the idiots plan to be stubborn, he thought sourly. Big surprise. Anybody who’d try something like this in the first place isn’t blessed with an overabundance of smarts. But they’re not going to make things any easier on themselves.

  He glanced at the astrogation display. CruDiv 423.1 was up to an approach velocity of 7,431 KPS and had covered just over 6,672,000 kilometers since crossing the wall. At their current 420 gravities of acceleration they were still over an hour and a half from turnover for a zero-zero rendezvous with the planet. There was plenty of time, he supposed, but it would be best to get a few things clear from the beginning.

  “Record for transmission, Shahrizad,” he said.

  “Live mic, Sir.”

  “Astro Control,” he said into the pickup, “This is Captain Gerald Hagan, Solarian League Navy, commanding
officer of the light cruiser Ratnik and senior officer of Cruiser Division Four-Two-Three-One. You have not responded to my previous transmission. Be advised that I am in your star system in response to claims that Solarian citizens’ lives and property have been threatened by violent extremists. As such, if you do not respond to this message, I will have no choice but to assume criminal elements are in control of your com facilities and to construe your continued silence as a hostile act. Under those circumstances, I will feel free to use whatever level of force is necessary to compel you to respond, and I will take whatever measures seem appropriate to safeguard Solarian lives and property in the Swallow System. I intend to maintain my present flight profile, which will bring my vessels to a zero-zero orbital insertion around Swallow in approximately—” he glanced at the maneuvering display “—three hours and fifty minutes. If you fail to respond within the next three hours, I will consider Swallow a hostile world, and adopt the appropriate stance—and tactics—for a force entering contested space. I would advise you, most strenuously, to avoid circumstances liable to result in loss of life and destruction of property. Hagan, clear.”

  He nodded to the pickup, then look back to Kantor.

  “Play that back, Shahrizad,” he said.

  She did, and he watched it through, then nodded again.

  “Send it,” he said, and leaned back in his command chair once again.

  * * *

  “Captain, I have an incoming transmission!”

  Hagan looked up sharply from his discussion with Commander Brenda Travada, his executive officer. They’d just passed the turnover point and begun decelerating to kill their 32,000 KPS velocity relative to the planet, which put them better than an hour and a half outside missile range of Swallow orbit, but Hagan believed in thinking ahead and he wanted his attack options nailed down well before time. But now something about Shahrizad Kantor’s urgent voice raised his mental hackles.