Twilight of the clans III: the hunters

by Thomas S. Gressman

  I've got a year to work on that, Morgan told himself as he stepped onto the battle cruiser's control deck. In the meantime other matters were even more pressing. Matters like the departure of his huge task force from the Defiance system, as they began their long trek through the stars.

  The Invisible Truth's bridge was like none Morgan had seen before. Having been a soldier most of his adult life, he had been on the bridge of every type of transport-type JumpShip. He'd even been privileged to tour the prototype Fox Class corvette while she was still under construction at the Galax shipyards.

  The Truth was different from all those. Where a transport ship might have four or five bridge stations, and a corvette as many as ten, the Truth boasted fifteen consoles for bridge personnel. The center of her spacious control deck was dominated by a high-resolution holotank. Morgan had seen such devices before, but always on a smaller scale. The three-dimensional laser-generated image of the task force, its ships hanging motionless in space above Defiance's GV sun, was easily six meters across. Surrounding the tank's raised platform were a series of smaller flatscreen and tri-D monitors displaying everything from the current tactical situation to the status of the jump sail. A second battery of instrument panels ran around the outside of the bridge deck. These were occupied by still more ComStar techs going about their routine tasks, from monitoring radio traffic to guiding a Com Guard DropShip into her berth.

  Standing in the center of the holotank was a rather unimpressive figure of a man. His slight build and height and thinning mouse-brown hair made Morgan think of a low-level tax clerk instead of the commander of one of the most powerful fighting ships ever built.

  At the petty officer's shout, the man turned away from the image of a Lyran Monolith and descended the short flight of steps leading into the tank.

  "Marshal, welcome aboard the ISS Invisible Truth." A silver star gleamed on the right shoulder strap of the man's khaki and white jumpsuit, balanced by a Cameron Star on the left. "I'm sorry I didn't meet you myself, but I was somewhat busy here."

  "That's all right, Commodore Beresick. I..." Morgan never got to finish his statement.

  "Precentor, ahm, Commodore," a Com Guard commtech stumbled over the rank change. "The Cabot is calling again."

  Beresick immediately forgot all about Morgan as he turned to reply. "You tell Marshal Bryan I don't want any more excuses." Beresick snapped at the equally frustrated technician. "No, better yet, I'll tell her myself."

  Morgan left Commodore Beresick to deal with the problems of organizing so large a fleet into a coherent body in preparation for jumping outsystem. Crossing to the holotank, he mounted the stairs to the platform. From up close, the holographic model of the Defiance system was equally as confusing as it looked from across the room. Tiny JumpShips hung nose-down above Defiance's single star. Smaller points of light, representing Drop-Ships, shuttles, and aerospace fighters, drifted between the miniature starships. Each laser-generated blip was tagged with a short alphanumeric code that identified the vessel. It had taken several days following the close of the final pre-mission briefing to get the task force's 'Mechs, vehicles, and soldiers, not to mention technical and support personnel, billeted aboard the transports they'd occupy during the long march to Huntress. Each JumpShip and DropShip was laid out before him in faintly glowing miniature. One of these images, labeled LC0057 - CBT, was highlighted with a faint scarlet glow. The Cabot.

  Morgan glanced around the control stations until he located one bearing an engraved brass plaque reading "Holotank Control." The tech seated at that station had a green-cornered white square sewn to his shoulder and a nametape that read "Daum."

  "Mister Daum." The tech looked up in response to the commanding officer's call. "Can I please see a map of the coreward half of the Inner Sphere, including the Clan occupation zones?"

  The technician punched a few buttons before looking up. "Display vertical or horizontal?"

  "Vertical, please, and put Terra at the bottom."

  "Yessir."

  A few more taps sounded from the tank controller's station, and the image of the Defiance system winked out, to be replaced by a flat image of the coreward Inner Sphere.

  "Pull back a bit, so I can see Defiance."

  The tech acknowledged his command, and the image shrank. Unasked, Seaman Daum had highlighted Defiance in red against the gold field of the Federated Commonwealth.

  For a long moment, Morgan stood back, surveying the holographic map, his chin cupped in his right hand. With his eyes, he traced the task force's projected route. From Defiance, they were to jump into the Weldon system. From there, they would hop to Vicente, Tsamma, and then Palmyra. The dog-leg series of jumps, forced upon them by the thirty light-year maximum a JumpShip could leap from star to star, would eventually carry the task force across the Federated Commonwealth's and into the Outworlds Alliance of the Periphery. The Task Force would then jump out of the Periphery, heading into virtually uncharted space, by the end of June. Owing to the time necessary to recharge jump drives, they would barely make it.

  As he surveyed the task force's planned route out of the Inner Sphere, Morgan began to feel the weight of his responsibilities settling heavily on his shoulders. Until that moment, all the training, integration exercises, meetings, strategy sessions, all of it, had been something of a blue-sky project, something that would be undertaken sometime. Now, it was sometime. In all too few moments, Morgan would be asked to give the command to launch the most important military operation since the Exodus.

  My god, the Exodus. The thought rang in his mind like a cathedral bell. Somehow it had never truly hit him till now. The Exodus Road was what the Clans had named Kerensky's route away from the Inner Sphere, and Task Force Serpent would be following a slight variation on that road through space. He and these thousands of warriors, support personnel, and ship crews would retrace the route that Kerensky took almost three hundred years ago.

  Morgan shivered as he imagined what it must have been like, centuries ago, in the control center of the McKenna's Pride, the battleship that had carried General Aleksandr Kerensky into the mists of time and myth. What had Keren-sky felt as he looked out through the viewscreen into the black void beyond? Did he fear for the men and women under his command? Did he ever expect to return? Did he mourn the loss of the only home he had ever known? The questions had been asked thousands of times by historians, writers, political commentators, and common people, but there had never been a satisfactory answer, until now.

  As Morgan Hasek-Davion stood in the center of the Invisible Truth's holotank, a flash of revelation shook him. He was experiencing exactly what must have gripped Kerensky so long ago. Fear and excitement, sorrow and pride, loss and honor; these were surely the emotions that had swept through the General as he stood on the brink of the unknown, without even the sketchy maps programmed into the Truth's navigational systems. A sense of fear and wonder gripped Morgan as he considered the past. Kerensky had left everything behind to save mankind from itself. Now, Morgan was about to follow in the legendary Kerensky's footsteps trying to save mankind from the General's own descendants.

  "Like our little toy?"

  Morgan jumped, his heart in his throat, as his thoughts snapped back to the present. For a brief moment, he wasn't quite sure where he was.

  "What?"

  "I asked if you liked our new toy." Commodore Beresick had joined Morgan in the holotank.

  "Very much." Shaking his head to clear it of the lingering images of the long-ago journey, Morgan turned his attention away from the map and faced Beresick. "I wasn't aware that the Com Guards had any ships of this class."

  Beresick chuckled, looking like a proud father. "As far as we know, and we know a lot, the Invisible Truth is the last of her kind. At one time, we had two Camerons: the Lady Shandra and the Electa. An early Explorer Corps mission found them lying 'in mothballs' in a deep Periphery system. We aren't really sure why the Exodus fleet abandoned two perfectly good battle cruisers, b
ut there they were."

  Morgan gave the Commodore a quizzical look, but said nothing. Beresick either failed to see the "you're-not-telling-the-whole-story" arch of the Marshal's eyebrows, or else he didn't care if Morgan believed him or not. The man just kept right on talking.

  "Once the ships were in our hands, we gave them an overhaul and rechristened them Invisible Truth and StarSword Over the years, age, decay, wear and tear, just got to be a bit too much for the old girls. ComStar made the decision to cannibalize the StarSword in order to maintain the Truth."

  As Beresick described the dismantling of a proud old fighting vessel to keep her sister-ship in fighting trim, a misty, faraway look crossed his face. Morgan had never really thought about how painful a lost ship might be to a naval man. He suddenly realized that their journey through unknown space to Huntress was going to be a no man's land for him in more ways than one. On the ground, Morgan was in his element. His slightest order could set great armies in motion, could tip the balance between defeat and victory. But he was no spacer. Commander of Task Force Serpent or not, aboard the Invisible Truth, he was often going to be no better than a mere passenger.

  "I heard you talking to Bryan a moment ago," Morgan said. "What's her problem?"

  "Aah," Beresick's tone revealed his frustrated disgust with the Lyran Marshal. "She's still griping about having St. Ives DropShips docked with her JumpShips."

  Morgan snorted. Sharon Bryan was a fanatical member of the Katrina Steiner faction. During the planning stages of the operation, she had more than once voiced her opinion that no units other than loyal Steiner troops should be transported aboard Lyran vessels. Since the St. Ives Compact had been established primarily through the efforts of Prince Hanse Davion, Morgan's late uncle, Bryan viewed the St. Ives troops as pawns of the FedCom. To her mind, they were little better than spies.

  Morgan, Beresick, and others had tried to make her see the light, but to no avail. Eventually, Morgan had to exercise his command authority, ordering Bryan to accept the Second St. Ives Lancers as passengers aboard her ships. Bryan gave in grudgingly. Arguments of that type had slowed the boarding process, which had already consumed most of the three days since the final pre-mission staff meeting.

  "Any other problems?"

  "Lots. You want them in alphabetical or chronological order?" Beresick waved down Morgan's surprise. "Listen, sir, any operation of this size is going to have problems, lots of them, but nothing that can't be handled. I wouldn't worry too much. We'll jump outsystem on time."

  Morgan knew he might still worry, even though it was useless. He'd be the one to give the order to jump, but the rest of it was out of his hands. From now until they reached Huntress, his life was going to be very, very different.

  * * *

  Commodore Beresick was true to his word. Just over three hours later, the last DropShip, a Leopard assigned to the Rasalhague Republic contingent, the Fourth Drakøns, docked with the ComStar JumpShip Asturias, the last carrier to do so.

  At Beresick's command, a ship's tech opened a communications channel.

  "All commands, this is Spanner. Report status."

  One by one, beginning with the Eridani Light Horse's command ship, the Gettysburg, the ships of the fleet reported their state of readiness. Each account was a variation on the same theme; "All commands squared away and ready for jump."

  When the last vessel had checked in, Beresick turned to face Morgan. Responding to the enormity of the moment, the Precentor-turned-Commodore drew himself to full attention, saluted, and said, "All stations report manned and ready, sir."

  Morgan drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, let it out again in a long sigh, and gave a single nod.

  "All right, let's be on our way."

  Morgan's command was almost a suggestion. Beresick was far more dramatic.

  He snapped another salute, executed a crisp about-face, and began barking out commands in a fashion befitting the captain of a sail-powered frigate of an age gone by. With his left hand clenched tightly around the brass rail surrounding the raised holotank platform, Beresick rapped out his orders.

  "To all commands: initiate jump procedures. Mr. Hivlan, lock course into the navputer, Mr. Ng, engage the K-F drive."

  Tension was thick in the air. Grim-faced men and women sat rigidly at their consoles. Morgan saw that a faint sheen of perspiration had broken out on Beresick's high forehead. As surreptitiously as he could, he reached up to wipe his own brow. His hand came away slick with sweat, which he wiped off against the leg of his jumpsuit uniform.

  Sharp commands were given and repeated as various systems were brought on line. Some of the tight-voiced acknowledgments stepped on each other, as anxious crewmen readied the ship for jump, making it necessary to repeat the messages.

  "Course plotted and laid in."

  "K-F drives charged and on line, sir."

  At last, the Truth's executive officer turned from his control board, faced Beresick, and saluted crisply.

  "Sir, all systems are on line. The ship is ready to jump."

  "Sound the horn."

  In response to Beresick's order, a raucous honk rang through the WarShip. Twice more the klaxon tortured the ears of the Truth's passengers and crew.

  In the miniature world of the holotank, a scarlet flare of light bloomed and vanished in less than a second, leaving flash-bulb afterimages swimming before Morgan's eyes. More crimson flashes dotted the projection, as the Invisible Truth's powerful computers translated the electromagnetic and tachyon flares of the departing JumpShips into a visible-light display.

  "Marshal, we are ready to jump," Beresick said.

  Morgan nodded again, and with an edge in his voice for the first time since arriving aboard the Invisible Truth, spoke a single word.

  "Jump."

  "Aye, sir. Jump," Beresick repeated. Turning to the chief engineering officer, he snapped, "Mr. Ng, activate field initiator. Jump."

  "Initiator active, Captain." The small man with fine Asian features sent his fingers dancing across his control panel. "Jump in five ... four... three ... two ... one ... Jump!"

  Ng's final exclamation slurred, as though played through a recorder that had suddenly run out of power. The field initiator, a massive system of electronics and quantum mechanics buried deep within the Truth's hull, drew power from the ship's engines, and, focusing it through the Kearny-Fuchida drive, translated it into an expanding field of energy that soon enveloped the ship. In a burst of electromagnetic and tachyon radiation, the gate snapped closed, as the WarShip materialized at the nadir jump point of its destination system, nearly thirty light years away.

  Morgan's senses cleared quickly, throwing off the disorienting effects of having been hurled across the void between stars. The holotank was still flickering, with bright red flashes proclaiming the arrival of the balance of his task force.

  His task force. For the first time since the summit had picked him for this daring mission, the enormity of the job before him came crashing down upon him. There were fifty-five thousand men and women, over a thousand 'Mechs, aerospace fighters, and armored vehicles, thirty-four Drop-Ships, and thirty starships under his command. It wasn't the size of the task force that shook him; it was the mission he had undertaken. He was leading one of the largest military operations since the fall of the Star League, to launch an assault on the homeward of a foe who had rolled up half of the Draconis Combine as easily as a man might roll up a carpet.

  Out there, beyond the farthest mapped stars of the Periphery, they would be alone, cut off from home, support, and reinforcement. Succeed or fail, the responsibility would be his alone.

  * * *

  A few hundred kilometers away, aboard the Invader Class JumpShip Circe, Colonel Sandra Barclay had no need of subterfuge. She'd been on the Circe's grav deck in a meeting with her regimental command staff when the warning klaxon sounded. She'd been susceptible to the curious ailment of jumpsickness from the first time she'd traveled in space, and had never
overcome her sensitivity to the extraphysical anomaly of the experience.

  Many doctors believed that Transit Disorientation Syndrome, usually simply called jumpsickness, was some sort of psychosomatic reaction to the precipitous, and wholly unnatural, process of instantly being translated across thirty light years of space. Most people felt a momentary discomfort, like being on an elevator making a sudden and rapid descent. Even normally healthy individuals who had never suffered from motion sickness could suddenly find themselves sick to their stomachs when the star-ship they were aboard vaulted through the netherworld of hyperspace.

  Some few, Sandy Barclay among them, were subject to painful and often debilitating abdominal cramps, blinding headaches, and deep-seated, fiery aches in their joints for as long as thirty minutes after a hyperspace jump. Usually, these symptoms could be controlled, or at least lessened, with medication. The regimental surgeon had prescribed a synthetic meclizine analog that reduced the effects of Barclay's severe jumpsickness to the annoyance level experienced by most others who suffered from the condition. While grateful for the reduction of her symptoms, she hated the dry mouth and drowsiness that accompanied that relief.

  Despite the medication, when the Circe phased in at Weldon, a wave of nausea hit Barclay, her normally fair complexion now an odd waxy gray as the blood drained from her face. A strange hiccoughing catch in her breath forced her to break off in mid-sentence.