Staci cocked her head. “Did she dump you?”
“Nothing like that,” Mitch said, wryly. “Did we receive our final orders?”
“They’re in the datacore, waiting for you,” Staci said. “And they’ve settled our final departure time. We’ll be leaving in four hours.”
Mitch nodded, cursing the politicians and diplomats and armchair admirals under his breath. They hadn’t needed him in London, damn it. Nothing he’d done over the last two days had really needed him, except making love to Charlotte. He smiled, remembering her final kisses, the way she’d given herself to him with complete abandon. The thought warmed him, even though he knew he shouldn’t have been there. He should have been on his ship, readying her for departure. It wasn’t fair to leave everything to his XO. Staci was an experienced officer, and they were as close to friends as their respective positions would allow, but it was easy to miss something important in the rush to prepare the ship. He’d have to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb, yet he’d never be sure he hadn’t missed something. He was surprised Admiral Onarina had gone along with it. She was no armchair admiral.
He put the thought out of his head as they strolled through the corridors and up to the bridge. Unicorn was tiny, compared to a battleship; he had no problems greeting his crew by name in a manner that would never have passed muster on a larger ship. The handful of newcomers would have to be greeted personally, once they were underway. There was no room for slackers on Unicorn. Everyone had to pull their weight. He made a mental note to make sure they had enough cross-trained personnel onboard. His engineering and weapons departments didn’t have the manpower to cope with serious losses.
Not that it matters, he thought. Anything that hits us hard enough to do real damage is likely to blow up the whole ship.
He felt his smile grow wider as he walked onto the bridge. It was as tiny as the rest of the ship, a cramped compartment that felt smaller when all the consoles were manned, but it was his. He didn’t really want a battleship or a fleet carrier, a capital ship that was rarely allowed to travel without a squadron of escorts. They weren’t independent commands, not in the truest sense. Unicorn could go places - alone - that larger ships could not. He hoped, as he took his seat, that the mission would provide plenty of room for independent operations. Someone would have to do the scouting.
“Signal from the flag, sir,” Lieutenant Hannah Avis said. “They’re ordering the fleet to prepare for departure as planned.”
Finally, Mitch thought. He’d never had any real doubts the operation was going to take place, but ... there’d been so many stops and starts that he hadn’t been entirely sure. It was all too easy to let a window of opportunity slip by, just through an excess of caution. It was bad enough, he reflected crossly, when they passed up on a chance to give the enemy a well-deserved thrashing. It was a great deal worse when they ran the risk of letting the enemy get into position to put a knife in one’s back. Once we’re underway, the real work begins.
He smiled at the display. “Inform the flag that we will be ready to depart as planned,” he ordered. “And update them on our current status.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Mitch nodded as he keyed his console, bringing up the starchart. The timing was awkward, to say the least. The first phase of the mission would’ve been a great deal easier if the Royal Navy had twenty catapults of its own. Hell, he’d settle for just three or four. The boffins claimed the transit shock could be mitigated, now they knew it existed. Mitch wasn’t so sure. Jump shock itself wasn’t very well understood. He’d met doctors who insisted it was real, an effect of jumping through the tramlines, and others who swore blind it was all in their heads. The truth might be beyond human comprehension. All that mattered, from his point of view, was that the effect was real.
It’ll take us nearly a month to reach the target star, he mused. For a moment, he thought he understood the government’s reluctance to embrace the operation. The largest fleet humanity had deployed for years, sent so far into deep space that it couldn’t be recalled in a hurry ... he could see their point. And yet, we have no choice.
Staci looked up from her console. “Do you think we’ll go all the way?”
“Yes,” Mitch said, with more confidence than he felt. Admiral Onarina had done something similar, back when she’d been a battleship captain. Her experience had probably given her the idea. She might even have pushed for building additional human catapults before she’d realised there was a chance to steal a set of alien catapults. “I think this could win us the war.”
He sat back in his chair and forced himself to wait. The flagship would send the order soon enough, then they’d be on their way. He’d be master of his own ship once again, scouting out alien systems and locating targets for the bigger ships. And then ... he smiled. If the mission lived up to its promise, the end of the war could be at hand. If nothing else, hitting every infected world with a cluster of BioBombs would have to force the virus to sit up and take notice. Who knew what it would think when its own nature started working against it?
We have to take it out or be taken out, he thought, curtly. There are no alternatives. Not any longer.
***
Thomas barely noticed the midshipwoman until she held out a datapad for his inspection. He glanced at it, scanned the lines of text and pressed his finger against the scanner, authorising the request. A minor matter, one not normally deserving of his attention. He would normally have left it to Commander Donker, but the XO was in his cabin catching up with his sleep. Thomas didn’t blame him. The entire crew had been working like demons to prepare for the mission.
It was hard not to feel a little unsure of himself as he studied the updates from the admiral. He understood the logic - they’d gone over it again and again until he could make the arguments in his sleep - but it still nagged at him. The cluster of green icons on the display marked the largest fleet humanity had ever dispatched into enemy territory, easily the most powerful force ever assembled. Admiral Onarina’s fleet could crush the Royal Navy of twenty years ago and never know it had been in a fight. It represented a force that could win a war - or lose it, if the fleet itself was lost. Thomas understood that, sometimes, one had to gamble. He just didn’t like the idea of gambling everything on one throw of the dice.
You said that to the admiral and she overruled you, he thought, curtly. And now you have to carry out your orders.
He felt cold. Charlotte was back on Earth, as were their daughters. He knew, like everyone else who’d joined the navy, that there was a very real chance he wouldn’t come home. Lion was tough, and the battleships were tougher, but their weapons and armour were no longer a surprise. The virus had had months to devise countermeasures, as well as an industrial base that wasn’t limited by economic necessity. Thomas had insisted on going through simulation after simulation, trying to deduce what the virus would deploy against them. It could easily deploy missiles and gunboats of its own ... hell, it already had both concepts. Marrying them together wouldn’t be hard. Or it might come up with something new. The virus was hardly ingenious, but it had a lot of processing power. It was quite possible it would plod its way to victory.
Dismissing the thought, he turned his attention to the final reports. The Royal Marines were settling in nicely, along with their alien ... comrade. Thomas wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He understood the importance of trying to ensure the Vesy knew they’d earned their place in the galaxy, to try to avoid damaging their pride, but there was a time and a place and that was not on a starship that was going into harm’s way. Combined deployments were always a pain, even when everyone was human. Thomas was sure there would be problems, as the fleet shook itself down. He feared there was a very real chance some of the squadrons would head to the wrong star ...
Everyone knows what is at stake, he told himself. There may be problems, but they won’t be deliberate problems.
He frowned as he scanned the next set of reports. The
gunboat crews had spent the last few days in the simulators. The CAG believed they’d be ready to take their gunboats into open space in a couple of days, unless an alien fleet arrived with blood in its eye. Thomas would have preferred more time, but ... it wasn’t going to happen. The entire operation had been thrown together at terrifying speed. They were lucky to secure as many experienced officers and crew as they had. And he knew it, too.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Nathaniel Cook said. “Signal from the flag. We are to ready ourselves to depart as planned.”
“Power up the drives,” Thomas ordered, putting his doubts aside. “And inform the crew that this is their last chance to write home before we jump out.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Thomas glanced at his console. He’d somehow found the time to record messages for Charlotte and his daughters, although he hadn’t said much. His girls were still at school ... his heart clenched at the thought of one of them being called out of class to hear about their father’s death. It had happened before, to countless children. Why couldn’t it happen to his girls? He tried to tell himself that they were young women now, but it was hard to believe. They were still, in his heart, the girls he’d dandled on his knee.
And there’s no point in recording another message, he thought. It would be an abuse of authority to send a final message, not when a goodly percentage of the crew couldn’t do anything of the sort. It would send entirely the wrong message to the men and women under his command. All I can do is hope for the best.
A dull quiver ran through Lion as her drives powered up. Thomas forced himself to sit back in his chair, watching as the fleet carefully organised itself into formation. They were going to alter course sharply, once they’d passed through Terra Nova and started flying towards the front. A careful deception operation had already been planned, in hopes of deceiving any watching eyes, but it was impossible to be certain of escaping detection. There weren’t many targets along their projected path. The virus would be foolish not to at least consider the possibility the fleet was heading for the catapults.
And it might speed up its plans, Thomas mused. Long-range recon flights had revealed major enemy formations keeping up the pressure on the human defences. It was just a matter of time, everyone thought, before they punched through. The delay had puzzled the analysts, once upon a time. It didn’t now. If it uses the catapults first, it might win the war.
His gaze wandered to the halo of green and blue icons surrounding Earth. There’d always been a remarkable amount of firepower dedicated to protecting the homeworld, even before the true nature of the threat had been realized. It was hard to believe that anything, even the fleet shifting into departure formation, could punch through the defences and lay waste to the planet. Even the Tadpoles would have problems. And yet, the virus wasn’t a conventional foe. If it started to deploy biobombs of its own ...
And if we’re caught short, weeks from Earth, he thought grimly, we might return to a devastated homeworld.
***
“I hope you haven’t lost your touch,” Admiral Paul Mason said. His holographic image stood in the centre of Susan’s cabin. “Remember, port is starboard and left is right.”
Susan had to laugh. “As long as I can do better than that,” she said, “I will be happy.”
“Yeah.” Paul sobered. “Just remember you have to keep a hundred and one other things straight in your mind.”
“Yeah,” Susan echoed. She wished her old friend was accompanying her. She’d gone to some trouble to try to get him as her second, but the Director of the Alpha Black project could not be risked. He knew too much. She had strict orders to ensure she - and the other senior commanders - didn’t fall into enemy hands, but her superiors understood the orders might be impossible to carry out. “It hasn’t been that long since I stood on a flag deck and commanded a fleet.”
“And you’ve remained at the cutting edge of naval technology ever since,” Paul Mason said, calmly. “Just remember not to lose your cool if things go wrong.”
“I won’t,” Susan assured him. “Try and come up with a silver bullet, while I’m gone.”
“I’ve got people working on teleporters, force shields and time travel,” Paul Mason said, with a grin. “And we might just come up with something brilliant if we put our minds together.”
Susan laughed. She’d always liked Paul Mason’s sense of humour. “I’ll see you on the far side.”
She raised a hand in farewell, then closed the channel. The holographic image vanished. Susan stared at where it had been, trying to keep her rolling emotions under control. It would be nice to think the boffins would come up with a war-winning weapon, then put it into mass production and start churning it out overnight. It would be nice ... but the real world didn’t work that way. New technology always had bugs, little flaws that had to be worked out to keep them from becoming a major problem. For every good idea that became a piece of new technology, there were a hundred concepts that proved impractical. She smiled, rather wanly. The boffins had been promising force shields for decades. So far, they’d produced precisely nothing in the form of usable hardware.
The intercom bleeped. “Admiral, the fleet is ready to depart.”
Susan stepped back, pasting a calm and composed expression on her face. She’d barely gotten any sleep over the last two days, as she’d sorted out everything from minor disputes to disagreements that could have convinced the foreign governments to take their ships and go home. If there were so many problems when humanity was staring at total destruction, she dreaded to think what would happen when they weren’t. God knew there were no shortage of people who hated foreigners or aliens or ...
She put the thought out of her head as she stepped through the hatch and onto the flag bridge. Her staff kept their eyes on their consoles, as she’d taught them; she’d been very insistent she didn’t want or need the excessive respect offered to other senior officers. She needed them to go the extra mile for her, not become bitter and resentful; she needed them to feel they could speak freely. It was all too easy, when one was in command, to decide that one didn’t need to listen to one’s subordinates. She’d served under officers like that. Never again.
“Elliot,” she said. Her aide straightened to attention. “Is everything in readiness?”
“Yes, Admiral,” Commander Elliot Richardson said. He’d wrangled the post through family connections, something that puzzled his superior. It had looked as if his family had thought Susan was based on Earth, instead of taking a fleet into danger. “The fleet is ready to depart.”
Susan nodded as she took her chair. The battleship’s drives were thrumming as she prepared to depart. Susan felt a moment of déjà vu, mingled with a faint bitterness. She really shouldn’t have let them promote her out of Vanguard, even though she’d known it was just a matter of time before she was told to accept promotion or retire. Thunderous was the same class as Vanguard, so akin to her first command that she brought back memories ...
“Signal the fleet,” she ordered. The drives were getting louder. She didn’t have to ask to know the battleship was ready to depart. “All ships are to commence departure proceedings on my mark.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
The die is cast, Susan thought. Once they were through the tramlines, and beyond the flicker network, there would be no chance of a recall until they completed their mission and returned home. She studied the display for a long moment, all too aware just how much trust had been vested in her. The sheer enormity of what she’d done swept over her. She understood, now, just how Admiral Jellicoe had thought at Jutland. He could have won or lost the war in an afternoon. So could she. It’s time to go.
“Mark,” she said, quietly. “Take us out of here.”
Chapter Eleven
“Incoming,” Marigold snapped. “Form defensive formation!”
Tobias cursed under his breath as the gunboats formed up, too late. The enemy starfighters had appeared out of nowhere, lying doggo bet
ween the enemy fleet and the gunboats until the gunboats were too close to avoid engagement. Tobias watched grimly as the space between the two formations started to sparkle with plasma fire, the starfighters showing a terrifying lack of concern for their own survival as they closed the range. He could understand their logic - the starfighters were doomed, if their motherships were destroyed by the missile strike - but it still bothered him. It was a grim reminder that the virus considered each and every one of its hosts to be expendable.
The gunboats linked up, their point defence weapons merging into a single entity to force the enemy craft to fight their way through a hail of fire. Tobias allowed himself a cold smile as a handful of enemy icons vanished from the display, only to sober again as the remainder of the starfighters just kept coming. It looked as if someone had tinkered with the simulation, setting the enemy numbers to infinite. He gritted his teeth as plasma bolts started to zero in on their targets. The gunboats carried more armour than the average starfighter, but not enough to give them a realistic chance of surviving a single hit. He’d been warned, time and time again, that the best they could hope for was bailing out before the gunboat exploded.
Fighting For The Crown (Ark Royal Book 16) Page 10