Fleet of the Damned

by Chris Bunch

  The Emperor waited outside the semicircle of seats while the prime minister ceremoniously welcomed him, assured him of the undying support of his subjects, and then invited him to enlighten them with his wisdom.

  Undying support, the Emperor thought as he walked down the aisle. Less than half of the legislators were present. Entire galaxies that had been loud in their prewar support had now declared their neutrality and withdrawn from the government or announced for the Tahn.

  The Emperor wore a plain white uniform with the five stars and a wreath on each epaulette that designated him commander in chief/naval forces. He could have worn a thousand different uniforms of the various Imperial forces he was CIC of but chose, again, simplicity.

  There was a single decoration on his left chest—the emblem of a qualified ship's engineer. Of all the awards that had been made, this, he once told Mahoney, was the one he was proudest of. It was, he continued, the only one that he had earned instead of being bribed with.

  The Emperor spoke, looking straight at the audience—not at the Parliament but at the red light on the livie camera mounted above and beyond the legislators. That was the real audience. His speech would be transmitted within minutes Empire wide, sim-translated into half a million different languages.

  "One cycle ago,” he began without preamble, “our Empire was knifed in the back by those whom we treated honorably as equals. The Tahn struck without cause, without warning, and without mercy. These are beings who worship their own gods with bloody hands—gods of disease, destruction, and chaos.

  "I will not lie to you, my fellow citizens. They struck for our vitals. Not without success. They should welcome this brief candle. Because their success will be brief, indeed.

  "War is the ultimate evil. But sometimes it must be fought. And even those wars fought for the most selfish of goals are given noble reasons. The most brutal tyrant will find, somewhere, a spark of decency in his heart, a spark that justifies his slaughter.

  "But not the Tahn. Some of you may have seen their pirate propaganda ‘casts. What do they want?

  "They want the overthrow of our Empire.

  "They want my destruction.

  "But what do they offer? What do they promise?

  "According to the Tahn, their victory will allow all beings an equal share in glory. What is this glory they promise? It is not more food. It is not greater security. It is not the knowledge that generations yet unborn will not be subject to the perils of this time. No. None of that is spoken of.

  "Just this glory. Sometimes they call it the destiny of civilization. They mean their civilization.

  "Those worlds and those peoples that have fallen to the Tahn and groan without hope or witness under their lash could tell us what this destiny brings.

  "Despair. Degradation. And finally death. Death that is the only boon that the Tahn really grant, because only death will grant freedom from their tyranny.

  "I said before that the Tahn have had their victories. I also said that these victories should be savored by them in haste. Because now the tide is on the turn.

  "I speak now to those peoples subjugated by the Tahn. Be of good heart. You are not forgotten. The Tahn will be driven out. Peace will return.

  "Now I wish to turn my attention to those who have listened to the blandishments of the Tahn, like dogs drawn to the sweetness of putrefaction. Consider the Tahn and their ways. Before this war, any alliances they made were shattered as soon as it became convenient. The only alliance the Tahn recognize is that between master and slave.

  "Study their past. And think of an ancient saying: ‘He who wishes to sup with the Devil should bring a very long spoon.'

  "Next, I wish to speak directly to the enemy.

  "You are very loud in your boasts of your strength. You blazon your winnings. You babble of the closeness of victory.

  "Boast as you wish. But you shall find, as you reach out for this final conquest, that it shall recede and recede again from your grasp.

  "Your soldiers and sailors will find nothing but death in all its unpleasantries. They will face not just an enemy armed and terrible in his armor in the battle lines, but the deadly anger of those they have outraged in their arrogance. The plight of your noncombatants will be great. They shall never see their young return. And, in time, their own skies will be flames.

  "The Empire will return, with fire and sword.

  "And finally, I am speaking to the warlords of the Tahn, whose ears are probably sealed in disdain from my words. You sowed this wind. Now you shall reap the whirlwind.

  "Those who know me know I do not promise what I cannot fulfill. Therefore, today, I make but one promise. One generation from now, the word ‘Tahn’ shall be meaningless, except for historians walking the dark corridors of the past.

  "You began this war. I shall finish it. The Tahn, with all your might and circumstance, shall lie forgotten in the dust!"

  The Eternal Emperor pivoted and stalked from the podium.

  He knew it was a good speech when he had written it.

  He had upgraded it—the entire legislature was up and applauding. They'd clottin’ better, he thought. And then he noticed that even the livie techs, the most jaded of observers, were shouting, their recorders abandoned.

  Now all the Eternal Emperor had to do was find a way to keep his promise.

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  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  THE GAMBLE'S DAMAGE-control computer found a semi-damaged redundant circuit, and Sten felt the ship's controls come vaguely back to life.

  The tacship was less than 1,500 meters above the ground, ground quite invisible through the hanging fog that the ship was plummeting through. Sten's hands blurred over the control board. Nose thrusters—full emergency. Main Yukawa drive—full emergency.

  Various blaring alarms and flashing indicators suggested to Sten that the controls’ life span would be mayfly brief. He had time to kick the McLean generators to full power before the Gamble's board went dead again. The problem to be pondered was: If the Gamble's plummet was halted before it crashed, the ship would blast straight back up, into the probably waiting sights of the Tahn interceptors. If not, the possibilities were various in their unpleasantries. Sten slammed the impact lock on his control chair's safety harness and braced.

  The Gamble was almost vertical when it struck.

  Ship luck had returned for one final moment. Given the probabilities of hitting a mountainous crag, a glacier, or a scree field, the Gamble slid, tail first, into a high-piled snowfield. The snow compressed and melted, braking the Gamble's speed.

  Another panel clanged into red life, drive tubes blocking was the central catastrophe. Sten's hand was poised over the emergency power cutoff breaker when the ship's computer decided that it might be dying but preferred something less Wagnerian than what would happen, and beat Sten to it.

  Ail power cut, and the Gamble shuddered to a halt.

  There was very complete silence, except for the dim hissing as the hot shipskin was cooled by the melting snow around it.

  In blackness, Sten fumbled toward a cupboard and found a batterypak light. Pearly light illuminated the battered control deck.

  "All compartments—report.” That was another virtue of a ship as small as the Gamble—Sten's shout could be heard in most compartments and was quickly passed to even the stern drive station. Sten unsnapped his harness and started to his feet. Suddenly there was a rumble, and Sten staggered. The rumble grew louder, and then the Gamble shuddered and pitched a few more degrees to the side.

  There was alarm from crew members, then silence again.

  "What the hell was that?” Sten asked.

  "Ah dinnae ken,” Alex said. “Prog some'at nae good, though."

  Sten waited for something else to happen.

  It did not. The Gamble was evidently in its final resting place.

  Sten took stock.

  Things were not good. One of the wounded sailors from the Richards had been killed in
the crash. Of Sten's own crew, McCoy, the engine master's mate, had been electrocuted when one of his engine monitor boards short-circuited. Two other sailors were dead, and Sten had two sailors with major injuries. Everyone else had bangs, bruises, or minor breaks.

  The ship was dead. The only transceivers functional were the shipsuits and the tiny individual rescue units, and Sten was not about to use them. First of all, he assumed that whatever was left of the Imperial Forces would be somewhat busy at the moment, and he also would rather not have any Tahn units homing on any broadcast.

  They would have to rescue themselves.

  Sten told Kilgour to break out the emergency gear while he and Tapia, who was now semifunctional, attempted to figure out how much rescuing they would need.

  It looked to be considerable. The main lock was crushed history. Sten managed to muscle the emergency lock open slightly, then swore as icy water jetted into the ship.

  They weren't trapped, at least. They could put on space-suits, put the casualties in bubblepaks, and get out of the Gamble. Which would leave them in very cold water—not a problem in spacesuits—but the water must be refreezing rapidly.

  "So we swim out,” Sten said.

  "Looks like it, sir."

  "And we better full-drive it. I don't think any of us except for Kilgour can bash through an ice cube."

  Sten and Tapia found Kilgour in a bashing mood. He had just finished going through the ship's emergency supplies. For some reason, sailors never believe they may actually have to abandon ship. And so their emergency kits tend to be maintained perfunctorily and sometimes raided for necessities. The sailors of the Gamble were no different.

  "We'll worry about that when we get to the surface,” Sten said, “Move them out."

  With everyone in the shipsuits and the casualties bubble-pakked, the emergency port was opened fully. Water flooded the compartment. Sten and the others had death grips on anything sturdy. The current boiled around them, and then the water rose over the sailors’ heads into the next level.

  Kilgour was the first to exit the ship. He held one of the two cutting torches from the Gamble's tiny machine shop. He set it at full power, aimed it up, and cut in his suit's rockets. He started slowly upward through the solidifying sludge of the rapidly freezing lake around the Gamble. A line was snap-linked from his suit to the other crew members.

  Sten was the last man out. He hung in the black water outside the port for a moment. This was the end of his first command. At least, he told himself, we went out fighting, didn't we, lady?

  Then the line went taut, and Sten started upward. There was something wrong with his suit's cycler. His vision was a bit blurred. That was the explanation. No rational being becomes sentimental over inanimate metal, of course. Definitely something had gone wonky with the environmental controls.

  Kilgour's suit rockets, intended for use offworld, gave him just enough power to overcome the spacesuit's neutral buoyancy and drift him toward the surface.

  "Be a mo,” his voice suddenly crackled in Sten's headphones. “The situation's clottin’ strange. Ah seem't to've hit air. But ... Skipper, Ah'd like a wee consultation."

  Sten undipped from the line and put more power on his suit rockets. He broke through a few centimeters of ice, surfaced beside Alex, and shone his suit light around.

  The scene was strange. They floated in a small, rapidly freezing lake created from the water melted by the Gamble's drive and skin heat. Next to them was the battered nose of the Gamble, protruding about half a meter above the ice scum.

  That alone was not too strange—but just a couple of meters overhead arced a low, icy ceiling.

  "This makes no sense at all,” Sten thought out loud.

  Tapia surfaced beside him. “Maybe it does,” she said. “Do you know anything about snow, sir?"

  That wasn't one of Sten's specialties—most of his experience with the stuff came from the snowscape mural that his mother had hocked six months of her life for, back on Vulcan. There had been a couple of Mantis assignments on frozen worlds, but the weather had been just another obstacle, not worth analyzing.

  "Not a clottin’ lot,” he admitted. “As far as I'm concerned, it's just retarded rain."

  "That rumble we heard? Maybe that was an avalanche."

  "So now we're really buried?"

  "Looks like it."

  Tapia was exactly right. What had happened was that the Gamble had buried itself in the deep, perpetual snowfield. Its nose was within a few meters of the surface. But 500 meters above the valley, the ship's driveshock had weakened a snowy cornice. It broke free, and a thousand cubic meters of snow and rock avalanched down and across the valley.

  The wreckage of the Gamble was buried more than forty meters below the snowfield. When they had opened the emergency port, the water pouring into the ship had lowered the level of the minilake around the Gamble. The ice that had formed at the base of the snow slide now formed the roof of the dome above them.

  "Th’ problem then,” Alex said, “is how we melt on up. Th’ suits dinnae hae power enow to gie us airborne. An’ tha’ snow up there dinnae be load-bearin't."

  There was a solution—one that had all the neatness of a melee.

  They paddled clumsily, towing the bubblepaks toward the edges of the under-snow lake. Paddling became crawling atop the ice, breaking through, crawling on again, until eventually the surface was solid enough to hold them.

  From there, all they had to do was tunnel.

  Being in spacesuits, they fortunately didn't have to worry about smothering. Kilgour half forced, half melted his way, curving upward. “Y’ dinnae ken Ah wae a miner in m’ youth,” he said, burning a particularly artistic hairpin bend in the snow.

  "Are you sure we're headed up?” Sten asked.

  "It dinnae matter, lad. Ae we're goin't up, we'll hit air an’ be safe. Ae we're goin't doon, we'll hit sheol an’ be warm an’ in our rightful place."

  Sten scraped snow from where it was icing up on one of his suit's expansion sleeves and didn't answer. Then he noticed something. There was light. Not just light from their suit beams or Kilgour's cutting torch but a sourceless glow all around them.

  Seconds later, they broke free onto the surface of Cavite.

  Sten unsealed his faceplate. The air tasted strange. Then he realized that he had not breathed unfiltered, unrecycled air for ... he realized he couldn't remember.

  Helluva way to fight a war, he thought.

  And speaking of war, the next step would be finding their way down out of the mountains. And the question was, Would their suit power last long enough for them to hit the warm flatlands? An unpowered suit was as useless as the Gamble, ruined in the ice below them.

  One catastrophe at a time, he told himself. Probably his sailors, who had less than no experience at ground combat, would get jumped and massacred by a Tahn patrol first.

  It would be warm, at least. Sten turned back to his people and started organizing them for the long march.

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  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  ONE THE THIRD day after the Cavite landings began, Lady Atago transferred her flag from the Forez to a mobile command post on the planet itself. Her headquarters were in a monstrous armored combat command vehicle—dubbed Chilo class by Imperial Intelligence. The huge—almost fifty meters wide by 150 meters long—segmented ACCV traveled on forty triad-mounted three-meter-high rolligons, cleated, low-pressure pillow wheels that gave the vehicle amphibious capabilities as well. Any obstacle the rolligons couldn't pad their way over caused the triad mount to rotate, bringing another wheel into use atop that obstacle. Also, the ACCV was segmented and could twist both vertically and laterally.

  It rumbled forward, escorted by a full squadron of tanks and armored ground-to-air missile launchers only a few kilometers behind the fighting lines.

  The few Imperial ships still airworthy would never be able to penetrate the AA umbrella—but Atago chose to take no chances. The site she ha
d chosen for her next CP location had several advantages—it was very close to the most promising salient that had been punched through the Tahn lines, there were open areas for ship landings nearby, and there was no need for elaborate camouflage.

  The camouflage would be provided by a very large building. It had formerly been a university library in one of Cavite City's satellite towns. And under the new Tahn rule, neither repositories of Imperial propaganda nor education would be necessary.

  Six McLean-powered gravsleds were positioned just under the building's eaves, and then the ACCV reversed into the building. Three floors crunched and fell around the vehicle's mushroom dome, but the building held. From the air, Atago's command post was invisible. She was sure that her support ECM units would successfully spoof Imperial detectors.

  Also, the tacship division that had plagued the Tahn had been destroyed. Lady Atago was mildly sorry that the division commander, Sten, had not been captured. A show trial could have been arranged, with a suitable punishment broadcast over Imperial com channels. That might have served to discourage some of the more aggressive officers still resisting the Tahn.

  But still, Lady Atago was not particularly pleased with the course of the invasion.

  The Tahn did have the main Imperial fighting units sealed in the perimeter around Cavite City and were slowly closing the noose. The perimeter had shrunk to less than 200 square kilometers. There were scattered Imperial forces still resisting elsewhere on Cavite, but their destruction would be accomplished within a few days.

  The Imperial area now enclosed just Cavite City—and Tahn penetration patrols were already reaching the outskirts of the city—the naval base, and the heights beyond it. Tahn subaqua units had already interdicted any possible retreat by sea.

  But the cost was Pyrrhic.

  Three complete Tahn landing forces—about the equivalent of four Imperial Guard divisions—had been landed, together with their support units.

  They had been decimated. No, Lady Atago corrected herself. The casualties were far greater than one in ten. The spearhead force had driven hard toward Cavite City—and had smashed into the Guard defenses. Four assaults had been mounted and then shattered. In such an event, the Empire would have pulled the unit from combat and held it in reserve until reinforcements had brought it back to combat readiness.