by David Weber
“From someone in the legitimate government?” he asked, striding back towards his command chair.
“No, Sir,” she replied.
“So it’s one of the frigging outlaws,” he growled as he reached the command chair and swung himself back into it.
“No, Sir, it’s not.” There was something very peculiar in her tone, he thought. “It’s from—” Kantor paused and drew a deep breath. “Sir,” she said quietly, “it’s from someone who claims to be a Manty officer.”
Hagan’s nostrils flared, and it was suddenly very quiet on Ratnik’s bridge. He felt all eyes snapping to him and commanded his expression to remain calm.
He rather doubted that it had obeyed him.
“Well,” he heard his own voice say, “I suppose I’d better view it.”
“Sir,” Kantor said even more quietly, “it’s not a recording. It’s a live transmission from a com relay about eighty thousand kilometers from us.”
Hagan just looked at her for a moment. Then his eyes whipped back to the tactical display, which showed absolutely no one and nothing within twenty-five million kilometers of his ship.
“Very well,” he said after a long, taut moment. “Put it through.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Kantor touched her panel, and the image of a tallish woman with blue-green eyes and long auburn hair, pulled back in a thick braid, appeared on his display. She was quite attractive, in a stern-faced sort of way, a corner of his mind thought. More immediately, however, she wore the black and gold uniform of the Manticoran Navy with the single-planet collar insignia of a senior grade captain.
“Who are you and what can I do for you?” he asked tersely, and composed himself to wait out the transmission lag with as confident an air as he could manage. Whoever this was, she had to be at least eighty-four light-seconds away from Ratnik, given that blank tactical display. That meant a two-way delay of the next best thing to three minutes, so—
“I’m Captain Amanda Belloc, Royal Manticoran Navy, commanding Her Majesty’s Ship Madelyn Hoffman. And what you can do for me is to cut your drives, stand down, and prepare to surrender your ship, Captain Hagan,” she replied flatly…and barely three seconds later.
Hagan twitched upright in astonishment at the nearly instant response. Then the words registered and his face darkened.
“I beg your pardon?” he grated. “How dare you issue that sort of demand to the Solarian League Navy?! And what in God’s name makes you think I’d do anything of the sort?!”
“Issuing it is no problem at all, Captain. You may not have heard this, given the slowness with which word seems to percolate through Solarian space—and brains—but the Star Empire of Manticore and the Solarian League have been formally at war for over two T-months. Something to do with an unprovoked, undeclared attack on our capital system, I believe. I realize the Solarian League, as the guardian of all proper behavior and moral authority, sees no reason to bother with little things like formal declarations of war before attacking other star nations. We’re a bit less sophisticated than that in Manticore and Haven, though. After Duchess Harrington finished blowing half of Admiral Filareta’s wallers out of space, it seemed appropriate to my Empress and her allies to go ahead and make it official. So trust me—I’m not especially worried about Solarian sensitivities at this particular moment.
“As to what makes me think you’ll comply with my requirements, I continue to hope that eventually we’ll find a senior Solarian officer with at least the IQ of a gnat. I don’t much like Sollies, but I don’t take a lot of pleasure out of slaughtering them in job lots, either.”
Belloc’s flat, confidently contemptuous tone sent an icy chill through Gerald Hagan.
“That’s very generous of you,” he replied after a moment, his voice harsh. “And it’s also bold talk from a woman who’s not even in range of my ships.”
“Who says I’m not?”
He frowned, then—
“Sir!”
The half-strangled exclamation came from Lieutenant Commander Gennadi Hudson, his tactical officer, and Hagan’s eyes whipped back to the tactical display. A display which was suddenly spangled with dozens of tiny impeller signatures—the signatures of recon drones, he realized sickly, some of them less than ten thousand kilometers clear of Ratnik, and—
“Impellers lighting off,” Hudson announced. His voice was clearer, but no less tense. “We have five ships, range one-one-point-four light-minutes. Sir,” he turned to look at Hagan, “CIC makes it four light cruisers and one possible battlecruiser.”
Hagan felt the color drain from his face. Less than twelve light-minutes? And none of his sensor crews had seen a thing? How was that possible? Then he looked back at those diamond-dust recon drones. If they could get drones with active impellers that close undetected, of course they could hide a starship without any active emissions at twenty thousand times the range! But still…
My God, a numbed corner of his brain thought. Their stealth’s that good?!
“For your information, Captain Hagan,” Belloc continued from her display, “you’re currently several million kilometers inside my engagement range. I, on the other hand, am at least four million kilometers outside your range. So I suppose it comes down to a fairly simple question, doesn’t it? Are you prepared to comply with my requirements, or do we get messy about this?”
Chapter Sixty-Four
The rooftop tribarrel belonged to either the Army or the Scags; it was hard to know which, these days.
Nor did it matter a great deal as the solid bar of shells—every tenth round a tracer, looking more like an old-fashioned, pre-space idea of a “death ray” than solid projectiles—ripped down at a steep angle. The heavy-caliber weapon was obviously there to interdict movement down the Tyrone Boulevard approach to Landing Memorial Park on the southwestern edge of The Mall, and its gunner appeared to have plenty of ammunition. He was also an unfortunately good shot, and what had once been an Army Víbora APC exploded in a blinding glare of hydrogen. Pieces of wreckage flew skyward, then came crashing down as much as a hundred and fifty meters away, and when the smoke and dust cleared—some, at least—all that remained was a shattered, broken, barely identifiable hulk.
There’d been eighteen men and women aboard that Víbora…and its glacis had been repainted with the green “liberty tree” of the Seraphim Independence Movement.
“Shit,” Ruben Broadhead said bitterly. “Now what the hell do we do?”
“Now we find a way to deal with it,” Damien Harahap replied much more calmly. The two of them stood on the roof of an apartment building on the far side of Tyrone and two blocks farther west. Now Broadhead turned his head to glare at him, but Harahap only shrugged. “I know you knew more people aboard that APC than I did, Ruben. But we still have to find a way to deal with it. And—” he bared his teeth briefly “—if we can do it in a way that sends that tribarrel crew straight to hell, so much the better.”
Broadhead glared a moment longer, but then his anger—at Harahap, at any rate—faded, and he nodded, hard.
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “Any thoughts?”
Actually, Harahap reflected, he had quite a few thoughts, most of which he had no intention of sharing with Broadhead or any other member of the SIM. However…
“I can think of a couple of approaches,” he said. “Unfortunately, my first choice would entail an orbiting starship and a kinetic energy weapon.”
“Just a little short on those,” Broadhead pointed out with a flicker of genuine amusement, and Harahap grinned back.
“Well, in that case we’ll just have to dust off one of the other options.”
He raised his electronic binoculars, gazing through the smoke-laden air at the heavily sandbagged tribarrel while distant—and not so distant—explosions and all the other sounds of combat came from what seemed like every direction. Actually, he reflected, the vast majority of that appalling racket came from the east, which was a good sign for the SIM. It meant the
y were closing in on The Mall, the Presidential Palace, and the Hall of Ministries at the heart of the Government District. Taking that would break Howard Shelton’s last redoubt here in the capital. Then all they had to do was clear the five or six square blocks Tillman O’Sullivan’s SSSP troopers still held on the southern edge of the city, and all of Cherubim would be in the Independence Movement’s hands.
He shook his head mentally, moving the binoculars as he scanned adjacent buildings. They were fortunate so much of Cherubim had been built by a planet without counter-grav. The handful of proper residential towers would have been nightmare propositions from any attackers’ viewpoint. If the SIM was forced to fight its way into one of those, its manpower would evaporate like spit on one of The Soup Spoon’s woks.
Fortunately, three quarters of the Cherubim Police Department had come over to the rebels’ side once open fighting broke out between Shelton’s Army troops and O’Sullivan’s scags, and the local cops had known all about those towers. They’d been the ones with all the detailed floor plans and schematics…not to mention the people who’d been responsible for planning—and rehearsing—ways to deal with potential hostage and terrorist threats inside them. They’d known exactly how to secure them before it occurred to the Army or the SSSP that they should take them over as forts. That struck Harahap as a serious oversight on Shelton’s and O’Sullivan’s parts, but he was probably being unfair. They’d never seen anything like this coming, and it was clear O’Sullivan, in particular, had never anticipated the CPD’s defection to an entirely new player.
He’d obviously known the regular, uniformed police had never been that fond of the SSSP, but, in fairness to him, they’d started deserting to the rebels only when he’d proved he was no better than Shelton by launching his own coup attempt. Of course, what the cops still didn’t know was that neither Shelton nor O’Sullivan had intended to launch anything of the sort. Not until one of them had been far more confident of succeeding, at any rate.
His lips quirked as he remembered his initial reaction to Indiana’s strategy. Mackenzie had staunchly maintained that the plan was a product of their joint endeavors, not simply a crazed notion of her lunatic brother, and Harahap was prepared to believe she’d spent a lot of time hammering down rough spots. But whatever she might say, the inspiration had to have come from Indy. It was exactly the sort of thing that would occur to him, and Harahap had decided that if Indiana Graham had been a bit less inhibited by his unwavering moral compass, he would have made an outstanding covert operator in his own right.
The Independence Movement hadn’t been able to acquire as many Army and SSSP uniforms as Indy had really wanted, but it had found enough of them, and Indy’s opening strikes had convinced Shelton that O’Sullivan was attacking him at the same instant O’Sullivan concluded Shelton was attacking him. The sudden violence had taken both of them by surprise, each had reacted by declaring all-out war against the other, and the attacks on the Army’s main arsenals had deprived Shelton of sixty percent of his armored units.
At a cost. Ning Saowaluk was far from the only SIM member to die in those initial strikes, and Harahap knew Indy and Mackenzie found that hard to live with. He’d suspected they might, once the casualties became real—dead and maimed friends, no longer theoretical, faceless strangers. But they were tough, the Grahams. Their grief wasn’t about to shake their resolve, although Indy had aged at least ten years in the past three weeks.
Yet the hard, tough core of steel which had driven him to organize the Seraphim Independence Movement out of nothing had been tempered and refined, not broken, and the attack on Terrabore Prison had been a masterstroke.
Indiana and Mackenzie had never tried to pretend the need to break Bruce Graham out of Terrabore hadn’t been a major reason they’d created the SIM, and Harahap suspected the opening moves of every single one of their planning options had included an attack on Terrabore. The fact that their hearts had been at least as engaged as their heads hadn’t made them wrong, however. Terrabore was more than “just” a prison; it had also been the SSSP’s primary HQ and communications node. The attack using “Army” vehicles and the heavy weapons smuggled in from off-world—heavy weapons which only the Army would have possessed, here on Swallow—had convinced O’Sullivan that Shelton was attempting to decapitate his own organization outside the capital, even as the “scags’” attack on Shelton’s arsenals convinced him that O’Sullivan was trying to destroy the heavy combat equipment which might have given the Army the edge.
Harahap was pretty sure both had begun to suspect, probably within the first few hours, that they’d been duped by yet a third player. But they’d had no idea who that third party might be—or any proof it even existed—and by then their forces had been fully engaged.
The first few days of pitched combat between the Army and the Scags had eliminated much of the remaining heavy equipment on both sides, and Indy and Mackenzie had spent those same days integrating the liberated prisoners from Terrabore into their existing structure. Bruce Graham hadn’t been the only reason they’d targeted the prison. McCready and O’Sullivan had collected all of their most visible and potentially dangerous opponents—those they hadn’t simply murdered, at any rate—in one place, and Indiana’s audacious plan had snatched all of them. Journalists, political opponents, religious clergy, college professors, business people who’d been driven into opposition by the jackals who scavenged in the transstellars’ wakes…
The SIM had liberated all of them in a single stroke, and in return, they’d provided the public face of the secretly organized group which had made their liberation possible. That had given the Independence Movement a degree of instant legitimacy nothing else could have, which was a huge part of the reason so many municipal and county police forces had come over to the SIM when Indy and Mackenzie finally launched their own offensive against both Shelton and O’Sullivan. Just as importantly, thousands of regular civilian volunteers had flocked to join them, as well. The arms provided by Harahap and the Alignment had run out quickly, but by then they’d begun capturing sizable stockpiles of Army and SSSP weapons. By the time Shelton and O’Sullivan recognized what was happening and attempted to unite against the common threat, it was too late. The SIM was riding the crest of a huge wave of popular support. If they succeeded in taking Cherubim, the rest of the planet—and the star system—would fall into place quickly.
At least until Krestor, or Mendoza, or the Oginski Group, or OFS got around to smashing the rebellion. And before that happened, Dennis Harahap was going to requisition one of the dispatch boats in orbit around Seraphim and head out “to tell the Manties the SIM needed fleet support.”
His mouth tightened at that thought. Not that he had any other option, of course. But the fact that this part of Operation Janus was about to succeed brilliantly left an undeniably bad taste in his mouth.
You’ll get over it, he told himself cynically. Once you’ve gotten back into the groove, forgotten how much you wound up liking these people, you’ll get over it. And you’d better. Because if you don’t, the Alignment will make damned sure your conscience doesn’t bother you for long.
“I think we can flank out that position if we swing south, up Shimanouchi Street,” he told Broadhead. “See that water tower on the roof at Shimanouchi and Vine? If we get one of our own tribarrels up there, we’ll have the angle down on these bastards.”
“Assuming they don’t already have someone up there waiting for us, of course.”
“Well, of course!” Harahap smiled. “That’s what makes life interesting, Ruben!”
Broadhead chuckled, and Harahap slung his binoculars and picked up his pulse rifle.
“Let’s get over there before anybody else gets hurt over here,” he said, and led off into the smoke.
* * *
“Got a call from Talisman, Firebrand,” Joyce Albertson said, and Harahap looked up from his thirty-centimeter sub and potato chips.
The vast majority of Seraphim’s l
ocal business community had come over to the Independence Movement—in many cases, he was sure, from cynical calculation, since the premises of businesses that didn’t endorse SIM tended to end up especially heavily damaged in the fighting. In a lot of cases, though—probably the majority—those businesspeople had genuinely endorsed the rebellion, and the owners and operators of the Three Hills Sandwiches chain were among those for whom that was true. Despite the disruptions of the fighting, the dozens of Three Hills restaurants managed to feed hundreds SIM fighters every day. It was unlikely they’d be able to keep it up much longer, given the dislocations in their supply chain. On the other hand, now that the Government District was firmly in rebel hands, the fighting here in the capital would probably wrap up in the next couple of days and let something like normalcy reassert itself.
Now Harahap waved one hand at the woman who’d interrupted his lunch as he chewed the current bite of sandwich—astonishingly good; Three Hills was actually still managing to bake fresh bread every day—and swallowed it. Albertson handed him the encrypted com, and he held it to his ear.
“Firebrand,” he said.
“Talisman,” Indiana replied. “Are you at a point where you could hand over to somebody else for an hour or two?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Magpie and I are over at Tobolinski and we’ve just found something I think will interest you.”
Harahap’s eyebrows arched. Tobolinski Field was Cherubim’s primary spaceport. There’d been quite a bit of fighting out that way, but it had ended late yesterday. Which was good. As soon as he tied up the loose ends on his side of town and could hand over to Broadhead or one of the others without looking like he was running out on them, he intended to be aboard one of those captured shuttles and headed for a dispatch boat just as quickly as he could.
“What kind of ‘something’?” he asked.
“It’s a surprise,” Indy replied, and chuckled. “In fact, it surprised us! I think you’ll get a laugh out of it, though, and God knows we can all use as many of those as we can get!”