by David Weber
She watched the plot as Kongo led the squadron system. Revenge and Oslabya fell in astern, followed by Naomi's own ship and then the two DD'S. It all looked harmlessly normal, but Poramern's battle board glowed a steady scarlet. All but the shields. They still blinked green and amber, for to raise them would raise questions, as well.
The hours dragged endlessly past, Galloway's World looming slowly before them, and Naomi considered the bitter irony which brought Pommern back to the yards which had birthed her in a terrible act of matricide.
No one down there would spare a thought for the holocaust lurking in the belly of her ship, she thought bitterly. Fleet missiles were to protect them, not kill them.
And then, finally, Skywatch Three loomed close aboard of them, and she gritted her teeth, watching her board, waiting for what she knew must come.
It came. Command codes flashed over the data net from Kongo. The squadron's shields slammed up. Hetlasers swiveled in their bays. As one ship, drives and engines slaved to the flagship, they charged the orbiting fortress, minnows against its bulk. The external ordnance racks belched their deadly loads, joined by the internal launchers, and Naomi Hezikiah was a spectator as the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, TFN, blew Skywatch Three to half-vaporized rubble in less than thirty seconds.
The corn channels went wild as incredulous loyalists realized what was happening. Naomi's battlephone hummed and whined as hastily-tuned jammers came on line, fighting to shatter the squadron's datalink, but the cruisers drove onward, drives howling at max as they arrowed towards the planet.
The first defensive missiles lanced out to meet them, and Naomi Watched her display as point defense stations spewed counter missiles against them and space burned with detonating warheads. They were fast on their feet, those gunners, but where were the beams?
"Communications seizure attempt!" her eom ocer shouted, and her battlephone shrieked into her mastoid for a fraction of a second before the filters damped the sound.
"Data net jammed," the ensign snapped. "Independent targeting," Naomi ordered, feeling her shock frame tighten about her. You should be ,ny husband, her brain screamed at the gunnery officer, but she strangled the thought as she scanned the battle plot. "Take those destroyers ahead of us. We have to hold them off the flag." "Aye, aye, sir!" Naomi fgg@ddund it easier to cling to her sanity as her ship's weapons moved independently at last, reaching out to rake the oncoming ships with hetlasers and missiles. Kongo's own ECM must be jamming the tineans' data net, for their point defense was late, and Pommern's fire tore the lead ship apart.
"Shields one through three down," Gunnery reported. "Incoming missiles tracking Kongo from astern, sir. There's somebody on our ass. Somebody bstg. Those are capital missiles." "Understood," Naomi said coldly, and under her crisp surface, a little girl recited ancient words. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..." She shook free of the thoughts.
She'd wanted a ship-to-ship action; perhaps she had one.
"New course!" she snapped. "Bring us around on a reciprocal. Let the commodore deal with those cans--we've got bigger fish to fry!"
Pommern snarled around in a tight turn. Even through the drive field, she felt the lateral motion as her ship fought inertia and momentum.
"Communications!" she barked. "Advise the commodore of our heading and intent." They steadied on course, and the author of the capital missile fire was before her.
"Battle-cruiser at eleven light seconds!" Gunnery yelped. "Computer reads her as the Krsts." Naomi knew her well. She'd served on her as a lieutenant -coman eternity ago.
Homeported on the Yard, and no doubt as fanatically Corporate World as her own madmen were Fringer.
"Gunnery," she said softly, "there's your target. Maneuvering, I want a random evasion course and I want it now. We're up against some heavy metal; let's be where it isn't!" The acknowledgments came, and she watched her missiles going out as the range closed. More capital missiles scorched in, but they were no longer targeted on Kongo. Krsts had accepted Pommern's frail challenge.
"Kongo's opened fire on the planet, sir!
Track looks good for the Taliaferro Yard!" Naomi shut it out. She no longer wanted to think of the two cities clustered tight against the Taliaferro Yard, of the civilians with seconds to live. She no longer wanted to think of the mark of Cain sho wore. She pressed one palm over the Bible in her vac suit and sealed her helmet as they entered laser range, and Pommern shook and quivered to the fury of missiles and counter-missiles bursting around her hull.
"Missiles away from Oslabya, sir!
Tracking for the Yard!" But Naomi's attention was riveted to her gunnery officer. "Laser range!" he announced, and here it came. The deadly energy sleeted from the battle-cruiser and howled around Pommern's hull.
"Oslabya: Cede Omega!" communications reported. So IN-SVSNSCORQ 105 LieutenantJolson's first command was no more.
Well, he'd soon have company.
"Oh, dear God!" Naomi's eyes jerked toward her white-faced scanner rating.
"Oslabya's missiles mst'ye been under shipboard control, sir! They're going to a standard dispersion pattern]" Naomi's heart chilled as she stabbed a quick look at Battle Two. It was true. With her computers out of the circuit, Oslabya's missiles were spreading to cover the target with maximum devastation, and what was supposed to be a precision strike had become an atrocity. They were only actical nukes, but they'd land all over the Reservation and dependent housing.
"Good hits on target." Gunnery's almost droning report jerked her eyes away from the horror unfolding on Battle Two. "She's streaming air, sir]" And then Krsts found the range.
Pommfrn screamed as the lasers raped her.
Naomi had always known ships had souls--comshe felt it now, in her own soul, as the cruiser's armor puffed to vapor and vanished under the radiant energy.
"Forward launchers gone!" Gunnery's professional calm had disappeared. "Laser One destroyed!" Naomi turned towards him, but she never completed her order. Krsts found them again, her hetlasers knifing through armor and plating and flesh. Naomi gasped involuntarily as air screamed from the holed compartment and her suit puffed tight, and Pommern lurched as a drive room died, and then another. She was toothless and naked, but Krsts was badly hurt herself, and the Jamieson Archipelago was a forest o pounds oisonous mushrooms as Toshiba blasted the shipyards and her crew's homes and families burned.
Naomi looked away from her looming executioner, her own eyes burning as Oslabya's missiles ('aid their artificiMore suns across the Navy base. How many were dying down there? How many whose husbands and wives and fathers and mothers wore the same uniform as she? Yet they were only a few more deaths against the civilians dying around the other yards. How many would there be? A million? Two million?
Three? Against that kind o pounds devastation, what could a few thousand Navy dependents matter?
Kris slid alongside at point-blank range, and Naomi watched almost incuriously in an outside screen as the battle-cruiser's surviving hetlasers swiveled across her ship. Kris poured fire into the gutted, mutinous cruiser.
Naomi had a tiny fraction of a second to see the end of her bridge explode into vaporized steel. Only a fraction of a second before the fury came for her--but long enough to feel the mark of Cain in her soul again and know that death would be sweet.
"I ask you, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Assembly," Taliaferro went on, "where is the reason in thsts?" He waved his hard copy of the report which had originated this secret session.
"Even if, as I do not for an instant believe, amalgamation is an unmeant threat to the Fringe Worlds' representation, is this the way to contest it? Where are the Fringe World delegates, ladies and gentlemen? Where are the petitions? We see none of them. Instead we see this!" He crumpled the sheet of paper contemptuously, and Dieter winced as the theatrical gesture evoked a spatter of applause.
It was sadly scattered applause, for the Chamber of Worlds was sparsely populated, the blocks of assemblymen and women
separated by the empty delegation boxes of Fringe Worlds no longer represented here.
The Fringer delegations had been small, but there were many Outworlds, and their absence cut great swathes through the larger, less numerous Innerworld delegations. And it was Simon Taliaferro and others like him who created this absence, Dieter reminded himself, staring at the heavy-set Gallowayan with a hatred it no longer shocked him to feel.
"They have made no effort to oppose amalgamation," Taliaferro went on.
"They have not even bothered to discover whether or not it has in fact been ratified! They have fastened upon it--fastened upon it as a cheat and a pretext for treason, and let us not delude ourselves, my friends] The act of the Kontravian Clustersts treason, and when Admiral Forsythe has brought these traitors to their knees, we must show them that the Federation is not prepared to brook such criminality." Here it came, Dieter thought grimly.
Taliaferro had spent forty years maneuvering for exactly this slash at the Fringe's jugular.
"My friends," Taliaferro said soberly, "we must face unpleasant facts. The Kontravian rebels are not the only treasonously inclined members of the Fringe.. If we falter, ff we show weakness or hesitation, the Federation will vanish into the ash heap of history. Only strength impresses the immature political mind. Only strength and the proven will to use itl We must demonstrate our will power, whatever it may cost us in anguish and grief.
We must punish ruthlessly, so that a few salutary lessons will prevent the wholesale bloodshed which must assuredly follow weakness. I therefore move, ladies and gentlemen, that we draft special instructions to Fleet Admiral For-sythe and all other commanders, instructing them to declare martial law and empowering them to convene military courts to try and punish the authors of this treason. And, ladies and gentlemen, I move that we inform our eom-manders that the sentences of their courts martial stand approved in advance!" Dieter was on his feet in a heartbeat, fists clenched in shocked outrage. He'd known Taliaferro was ruthless, prepared tO provoke civil war to gain his own ends-but this was simple judicial murder!
Dieter forced himself to use his anger, burning the fury. from his system and replacing it with frozen calm. He must speak out, must inject an element of opposition and carry at least a minority with him, so that when the fit passedeathere would be someone free of Taliaferro's blood guilt.
He drew a deep breath and touched his attention button as David Haley opened debate on Taliaferro's motion.
"The Chair recognizes the Honorable Assemblyman for New Zurich," Haley said, and Dieter heard the relief in his voice.
"Thank you, Mister Speaker." Dieter's huge face stared out over the delegates, showing no sign of his inner turmoil. How should he address them? With fu, denouncing Taliaferro as a madman? Or would that merely brand him another hothead? Sbouffd he, then, try cold lcgic? Or would that stand a chance against the hysteria Taliaferro had been fanning for so many months? Derision, perhaps? Would mockery achieve what head-on opposition could not? He shook his thoughts aside, knowing he must play it by feel.
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Assembly," he heard his own stiffness and prayed no one else did.
"Mister Taliaferro proposes to recognize the depth of this crisis by enacting extraordinary legislation. He argues--and rightly so--comt this is a moment to show strength. The Federation has withstood many external threats, yet today we face an internal threat to our very existence. Indeed, Mister Taliaferro may well be too optimistic, for he overlooks the composition of our militar.v. As chairman of the Military Oversight Committee, I can assure you there are enough Fringe Worlders in the military to make the ultimate loyalty of our own armed forces far from assured." He felt the surprise as he admitted even a part of the Gallowayan's arguments. The Dieter-Taliaferro enmity had been a lively topic of Assembly gossip for months, and he knew the wagers in the ante-rooms were heavily against him. But they'd reckoned without the years of favors he'd desperately called in among the hierarchy of his homewodd. And without the recorder his briefcase had concealed during his final, parting-of-the-ways meeting with the Taliaferro Machine's leadership. He'd hung on, emerging as Taliaferro's only real opposition, and though his Assembly membership still hung by a thread, that thread grew steadily stronger as his warning penetrated deeper into the fundamentally conservative minds of the bankers who owned New Zurich.
His secretly made recording had helped immensely, for he knew some of the New Zurich syndics shared his private opinion that Taliaferro was no longer sane. They were willing to keep him on as a counterweight--at least until they knew whether the Gllowayan would succeed. And ff Taliaferro did, Dieter knew, he would be the sacrificial lamb offered by the New Zurich leaders as they sought rapprochement with Galloway's World.
He shook such thoughts aside and forced his mind back to the present. His increasingly frequent woolgathering mental side-trips worried him. "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Mister Taliaferro is quite correct--and he is also entirely wrong. He would have you believe the only strong reaction is to crush the rebels, that the only strength is the iron fist of repression. Ladies and gentleman, there are more strengths than the whip hand!
He pausestt, feeling the hovering resentment like smoke. Some would hate him for opposing their carefully laid plans, and others for saying what they themselves had thought without admitting. Only a tragically small few would understand and support him.
But it had to be enough. It must be.
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Assembly, I oppose this motion. I oppose the creation of kangaroo courts whose only possible verdict can be death. I oppose the institutionalization of the fracture lines splitting our polity at this critical moment. Let us demonstrate that we are strong enough to be reasonable and wise enough to be rational.
Let us show the Fringe that we are willing to listen to grievances and, for a change, to act upon them. It is time for compromise, ladies and gentlemen, not for judicial murder." He sat clown abruptly, feeling his last two words ringing in a suddeh silence that proved some, at least, had heard. But not enough, he thought grimly.
Not enough.
Indeed, he was surprised only by the extent of his support, for as delegate after delegate rose to speak, almost a third supported him. He would have wagered on less than a quarter, and he was gratified to see so much sanity, even as he recognized his failure to stop Taliaferro. The motion passed by slightly less than a two-thirds majority, and a license to kill was dispatched to the Federation's far-flung commanders.
Dieter prayed they would have the moral courage to ignore it.
"Chieiq. Mister Dieter! Wake up sir!
Please wake up!" The grip on Dieter's shoulder wrenched him awake, and his hand darted under the pillow to the pistol butt which had become so unhappily familiar in the past fourteen months.
The weapon was out, safety catch released, before his sleep-dazed mind recognized Heinz von Rathenau, his security chief.
Rathenau stepped back quickly, and Dieter lowered the needler with a twisted grin and a shrug of apology. Since the first attempt on his life, he'd found himself uncomfortable without a weapon to hand.
"Yes, Heinz," he said. "What is it?" He glanced at the clock and winced. Four caret disM. He'd been asleep less than two hours.
"A priority message, sir." Rathenau looked desperately unhappy in the light of the bedside lamp. "From the Lictor General's office." "The Lictor General?" Dieter rose quickly, shrugging into a robe even as he headed barefooted for the door. "What priority?" "Priority One, sir." "Oh, God! Not again!" Dieter bit offfurther comment as he walked quickly down the hall beside Rathenau.
They reached the communications room, and Rathenau stopped outside as Dieter stepped through the heavy security door. His predecessor would have walked through at Dieter's elbow with a calm assurance of his right to be there, but Rathenau felt no desire to appear even remotely akin to Francois Fouchet. Fouchet had mistaken Dieter's trustfulness for weakness... and paid for it, Rathenau thought with grim satisfaction. For h
imself, he would follow Oskar Dieter back to New Zurich without a murmur when the axe fell. It wasn't often a Corporate World security man found himself serving a chief worthy of personal loyalty.
Dieter shut the door without sparing Rathenan a thought.
He had eyes only for the flashing red light on the panel, and his blood ran cold. The last time he'd seen that light had been three months ago to receive news of the Kontravian secession.
He presented his eye to the retinal scanners, automatically suppressing the blink reflex. It took thirty seconds to satisfy the brilliant lights; when he finally read the message, he wished it had taken thirty years.
He stared at the screen, his mind encased in ice. God, he thought. Please, God. Why are You letting this happen? But there was no answer. There would be none.
He rose finally, like an old, old man, switching off the communicators and wishing he could switch off his mind as easily. He opened the door and saw young Rathenau's face tighten at his own expression.
"Chief?." "Heinz--was Dieter's hands moved for a moment, as ff trying to recapture something that was irretrievably shattered.
"What is it, Chief?." Rathenau's voice was much softer, almost gentle.
"Wake the others, Heinz." Dieter drew a deep breath, but the oxygen was little help. "Get everyone assembled in conference room one in--was he glanced at his watch his--comtwenty minutes. Tell them to forget dressing." "Yes, sir. May to ask why, sir?" "I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the briefing. There'll be an emergency session at 0600 hours, and I have calls to "Yes, ir." Rathenau watched Oskar Dieter move brokenly down the corridor, and his heart was cold within him.
The Chamber of Worlds was hushed, wrapped in a silence it had not known in deeades--comff ever.