by Rick Shelley
Doug stared at the prince for a moment before he spoke. “We have little of value to offer.”
“That never enters the equation,” William said. “As a member world, you would have access to those who can help you develop your world as you see fit. The Commonwealth imposes no special burdens.
It doesn’t demand tribute or taxes. By the strictures of our constitution, the Commonwealth can levy no more than onetenth of one percent tariff based on the difference between cost of production and the sale price of goods and services transported between member worlds. But if you’re looking for additional settlers, there is a moderately large pool of colonists available— at your discretion. You would have easy access to markets for whatever products or services you have to offer. Somewhere, there is a market for virtually anything, and there are merchant specialists who can come in to help you develop your trade potential. Not all worlds are as ideally furnished for human residents as Buchanan.”
“You realize, of course, that I’m but one member of our planetary commission.” Doug said. “And for a step of this size, we would certainly defer to a referendum of the entire population. The commission is rarely called upon to make any decisions more important than the dates of our public festivals.”
“The method is entirely your choice,” William said, “and I neither expect, nor particularly desire, any reply now. If the commission prefers, you can even put off any consideration until after this fleet has gone home—or decide not to formally consider the offer at all.”
“You can believe him, mate,” one of the marines said, his interruption catching everyone by surprise. Ian thought it was the same man who had made the earlier sotto voce comment, but he wasn’t positive. “I’d have never enlisted in the RM if they was using us to make slaves the way the Feddies do.”
Like the others, William turned to stare at the man. “Sorry, sir,” the Marine said.
“No need to be sorry, Marine,” the prince told him. “I feel as strongly about it as you do. What’s your name, lad?”
“Edwards, sir, Private Alfie Edwards, H&S Company, First Battalion, Second Regiment. I didn’t mean to interrupt, sir, really I didn’t.”
“Maybe you should have made the speech instead of me, Edwards,” William said. “You sound more sincere.”
” Speech, sir? Me, sir?” Alfie sounded nearly hysterical at the thought.
“Not to worry, lad. You did fine. You’re a credit to the Royal Marines, and to all of us.”
“Tthank you, sir.” Alfie’s face was red. He looked ready to dive under his blankets for cover.
“You marked that man’s name and unit?” the prince asked Ian when they were back in the shuttle for the return to Sheffield. “Private Alfie Edwards, H&S, First of the Second?”
Ian nodded cautiously, waiting to hear what the prince had to say.
“Do you suppose the admiral would think I was far out of line if I wrote a personal letter of commendation for that man?”
“I don’t think he would object at all,” Ian said. “That man’s the best advertisement for the CSF I’ve seen in ages.”
28
Eleven Spacehawks of Sheffield & fourth squadron, the six fighters of white flight, and the remaining five from red flight, nosed back into their slots after an uneventful fourhour mission. Ground operations had ended in the greenbelt between the two communities on Buchanan. There had been no call for fighter support on that, and the perimeter surrounding the settlements had remained quiet.
The pilots trudged back to their ready room following short aftermission discussions with their crew chiefs. The Spacehawks had seen considerable use during the past days, with little time for routine maintenance, and small problems were beginning to surface with some of the fighters. So far, the only problem Josef had encountered was in one of his radio frequencies, a light static that seemed to reduce the volume, but only on the single channel.
“If I boost the gain to compensate,” he told Andy Mynott, “then the other frequencies threaten to blast me clean out of the cockpit.”
“Leave your helmet with me, sir,” Andy said. “Problem’s most likely in that. I’ll get Meckli to run the diagnostics and fix it up if it is the helmet. If it’s not that, I’ll start looking for gremlins in the bird.”
On his way to the ready room, Josef reached up to touch the spot behind his left ear where the helmet plugged into his neural enhancer. The permanently depilated circle around the plug felt cold. Josef had thought of another possible explanation for the radio difficulty. The glitch might be in his implant. If it were, it would almost certainly mean getting a replacement—three hours in surgery, and twelve hours or more of tuning afterward. Josef had gone through two replacements in the years since he received his first implant at the beginning of flight training. It wasn’t a pleasant procedure. A new implant meant hours of disorientation and malaise during the tuning process, as if the brain itself were being retrained.
“Something wrong?” Kate asked as they neared the ready room. That it took her so long to broach the subject reflected her own growing exhaustion and concerns with her fighter.
“Nothing major, I think.” Josef mentioned the communications problem, but not his suspicion as to where the problem might lie.
“At least it’s not your hydraulics again,” she said— dully, not as a joke the way it would have been before Seb Inowi had his Spacehawk blown out of the sky.
The debriefing was short. Olive Bosworth seemed as lifeless as everyone else, stepping through the formalities. “Let’s try to catch up on sleep,” she said before she dismissed her pilots. “We’re all getting too ragged to be very efficient.”
The dull atmosphere continued into the squadron mess. It wasn’t just the hours of flying. Morale had been deteriorating since Seb’s loss.
“We need an excuse to cut loose and let everything out,” Kate said after she and Josef had their food and were sitting at their usual table. ‘ ‘A chance to let go and get the energy levels back up.”
“The only way you’d get a party organized now would be at gunpoint,” Josef said.
“That’s the problem. We’re turning into a flock of zombies.”
They ate in silence for several minutes before Josef said, ‘ ‘I wonder where Khyber was going in such a panic. They tore outsystem as fast as that Cutter class did.”
“They certainly weren’t running from anything, so they must have been running to something,” Kate said.
“Back to Buckingham?” Josef answered his own question with another. “It could hardly have been anywhere else, could it?”
“Something’s up we don’t know about,” Kate said. “The admiral certainly can’t be sending a ‘mission accomplished’ message yet. Not just a progress report either with Khyber zapping out that soon. But we haven’t seen any Feddie ships coming insystem.”
“Doesn’t leave many real possibilities, does it?” Josef asked. Any distraction was welcome. This one seemed tailormade. “Did an MR come in before Khyber left?”
“Not that I know of. I heard that a couple went out just before Khyber left.”
“Can’t be certain there wasn’t one though,” Josef decided. “Maybe Khyber picked one up out near its station.”
“Truscott must have called for reinforcements.” Kate dropped her fork onto her tray. It clattered noisily.
“That’s the only thing it could be. He wants more ships.”
“To take care of the few Feddies on Buchanan?” Josef asked skeptically.
“No, to take care of the Feddies that Cutter class fetches back,” Kate said. There was utter certainty in her voice. “There’s no other possible explanation. The admiral figures we’ve got more grief coming and he wants to get help as quickly as possible.”
29
Siasys Truscott found himself doing something he almost never did, whistling while he worked. He had been broken of that habit as an eighteenyearold cadet in his first term at the Naval Academy. His surprise was so great th
at he stopped working for a moment. Then he chuckled and shook his head.
“I must be losing my mind,” he whispered. Talking to himself was more habitual. He had spent a lifetime doing that. “You’d think we’d just won the whole bleeding war.”
The news from the surface of Buchanan was good, but only in a limited, tactical fashion. The greenbelt between the towns had been secured. There were no Federation soldiers remaining within the Park or the two towns. From east of the river out past the spaceport on the west, Commonwealth Marines had a secure perimeter with dugin fire points and remote sensors that would make it impossible for anything larger than a mouse to enter without being detected—and intercepted, if necessary.
But there was disquieting news as well. The actions that had taken place so far accounted for no more than ninety Federation soldiers, which left perhaps six hundred or more at liberty, somewhere on the world below.
“I suppose we can narrow that down considerably,” Truscott mumbled. He zoomed the map of Buchanan on his chart table out to show the entire planet.
“It’s inconceivable that they moved to either of the other continents, or to any of the large islands.” He zoomed the map in to cover just the one continent, eliminating twothirds of Buchanan’s land area and 90 percent of its total surface area.
“Since they didn’t use aircraft or motorized ground vehicles to disperse after we arrived, we can narrow the possibilities even more. Four days, no more than forty miles a day, even if they pushed themselves.”
That provided, Truscott thought, a healthy margin of error. Under the conditions of terrain and exposure, twenty five miles a day would have been extraordinary. He made more adjustments on the map. A circle centered on the Park and with a radius of 150 miles appeared. To the west, much of that area was ocean.
“Little cover to the west,” Truscott said, examining the topological features more closely. ‘ ‘We’d have spotted organized movement of any large groups. Perhaps even individuals.” He shrugged and shook his head. “No good making assumptions that iffy.” But the ocean could be eliminated. He made more adjustments. The circle became an ellipse, and the scale improved a little more.
“Today, we start looking for the rest of them.” He brought up a notepad window at the corner of the map to start outlining orders.
Search patterns: shuttles and Spacehawks. The shuttles could conduct more refined detection operations because they could hover and operate at minimal speed. But they needed fighter protection.
They would be sitting ducks otherwise. “Like that Spacehawk we lost,” Truscott muttered. Finding enemy troops who were operating without electronics was a classic training problem—many of the colonial affairs that the Navy had been involved in were against irregulars who didn’t possess advanced helmet technology.
But even the best solutions to that problem were less than satisfactory.
Ground sufficient shuttles to carry Marine response teams to engage any Federation soldiers located. The admiral hesitated over that. When, if, the recon shuttles found Federation troops, someone would have to go in and neutralize them before they had a chance to escape and find new cover. But Truscott was uncertain how many troops to assign to that, so he added a secondlevel note to confer with Colonel Laplace before finalizing that order.
“Might as well get it done now,” he said. He looked around, but Ian hadn’t returned from his trip to Victoria. Truscott was unused to his aide’s absence. “Do me good to do for myself once in a while,” he said. He keyed the call to Colonel Laplace. Their conversation lasted less than three minutes and ended with an agreement to assign two line companies to the response duty.
“We can always put more men on it if we have to,” Laplace reminded the admiral. “Ground more shuttles if you think that will help. Or use companies from Fourth Battalion and we can dispatch them directly from Victoria. Give them something to do besides rust.”
Truscott nodded to himself while he finished polishing the orders. Then he signed and dispatched them.
“That’s the immediate business,” Truscott said softly. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling then got up and paced around the table several times.
It’s not enough, he thought. We’re doing everything we possibly can here, and it’s still not enough.
He knew why he wasn’t satisfied. He was still doing nothing more than reacting to the original Federation invasion. And that was little better than maintaining a defensive holding pattern.
“How do we get ready for the next wave?” He stopped pacing at the tea cart and fixed himself a cup of tea, then took it back to the chart table. He clicked off the surface map and replaced it with a chart of the entire system, with markers for each of his ships.
Limited resources. Truscott’s thinking was never “If the Federation returns,” but always “When the Federation returns.” And they would certainly return, in larger numbers, prepared for a fight. They would have the report of the troopship on the size of the Commonwealth fleet. From that, their command would be able to deduce, very closely, the opposition they would have to face.
Truscott sipped at his tea but kept his eyes on the system chart. When the Federation returned, they would have an element of tactical surprise. Truscott had no way to know exactly when and where they would emerge from Qspace, flaring in at high speed, ready to launch an attack before his ships could react.
They know our size, and they can make good guesses at where we are, especially Sheffield and Victoria. They’re certain to assign forces they think will be sufficient to do the job. Truscott was too good a commander to ignore reality just because it might prove unpleasant.
There has to be a way to maximize what we have. Options flowed through his mind, scenarios from texts and past fleet maneuvers. There were also alternatives he had dreamed up himself over the years but had never had the opportunity to test. Most of the possibilities could be disregarded without much thought.
“I know what I’d like.” He set his cup down. “I’d like a way to hide my ships.” If only there were some way I could hold part of the fleet in Qspace and bring them out at precisely the right time to catch the Federation with its pants down. But there was no way to communicate between Qspace and normalspace except by coming out, and if the fleet was hiding in Qspace, they would have no way to know when the Federation forces arrived.
Truscott leaned forward and stared at the map. After a moment, he narrowed the scope of the chart, centering the image on Buchanan and extending it only as far as the next planetary orbits, in and out. Then he narrowed the image even farther, three million miles to a side, still centered on Buchanan.
A way to hide my ships. This time he narrowed the portion of the system shown on the chart to a 700,000mile diameter. The admiral smiled as he spotted the one possibility the system offered. He hit two keys and put the chart into a highspeed simulation of the orbits of the planet and its two moons. He watched the display for five minutes, hardly blinking as the screen showed him the equivalent of three full days of motion.
He kept his eyes on the display while he initiated another complink call. A holographic image of Captain Harris Murphy of Repulse formed across the table from the admiral.
“Link to my chart table, Captain,” Truscott said, bringing the display back to the present and real time.
“I’ve got it, sir,” Murphy said after just a few seconds more than the speedoflight delay for twoway communications between the ships.
“Bear with me on this,” Truscott said. “I’ve been looking for a way to come up with a few surprises for the Federation when their navy returns. They’re certain to know… “
“I think we’ve all been doing that, sir,” Murphy said, interrupting. The start of Truscott’s last sentence hadn’t had time to reach Repulse. The admiral waited to be sure that Murphy had finished before he resumed.
“They’re certain to know how many ships we have. At least, they’ll know how many we had when their ship scrambled out o
f the system. They can make decent guesses as to where we’ll be deployed. An imbecile could judge where Sheffield and Victoria need to be to support ground action. On that basis, they’ll have the same sort of tactical advantage over us that we had over their single ship before. You follow so far?”
“Yes, sir. My staff and I have been going through these same points, at some length. We haven’t come up with any brilliant schemes to offset those advantages though. I take it you have?”
“Only time will tell how brilliant they are, but I may have a way to give us a little tactical surprise of our own.” He paused and leaned back, giving Murphy a chance to respond.
“We’re ready for anything, sir,” Murphy said.
“This is going to require considerable maneuvering,” Truscott said. “Let me direct your attention specifically to Buchanan’s smaller moon, the one nearer the planet. What do they call it, the Pebble?”
“Yes, sir. And the other is the Boulder,” Murphy volunteered.
“Yes. In any case, the Pebble has an orbital period of just over fifteen hours.” Truscott paused, but Murphy had no additional comments.
“I want you to conceal Repulse on the side of Pebble facing Buchanan. Hold position as close to the surface as you can without actually landing.” Truscott made an impatient gesture with one hand. “I want you to maintain station there from the time Pebble is 120 degrees east of the settlements until it’s 120 degrees west, on every orbit from now until the main battle is joined and I call for you. When Pebble gets 120 degrees west of the settlements, you will reverse course and accelerate to rendezvous with the moon again when it gets back to the starting point in the east. I’d leave you in position all the way around, but your response time from the far third of the orbit would be unacceptable.”