"I can imagine," Kendric said. He wondered if they would have to abandon ship, and whether the enemy would let them. "How bad is it?"
"Damage control has things in hand," Morganen replied. He gestured forward, to where technicians and bridge officers were working at damaged consoles. They were discussing something, judging from the gestures, but because he wasn't tuned to their channel, he couldn't hear them. "Our viewers are out and we're blind for the moment, but we'll have them back on line in a minute. We've lost pressure on the bridge.. .everything above 02 deck, in fact. Gravity went out a few moments ago, but Logan'II have that on in ten minutes, he says. Flicker shields are all down."
Good God! The ship was crippled... helpless... What about T.C.?
he thought frantically, but forced his mind to an even more immediate
danger.
"We've got to find out what the enemy is doing." He could blast us any time he wanted to. Why doesn't he?
"Ah! There!"
Now clear of smoke and deathly silent in the vacuum, the bridge was dimly lit by emergency fluoros after the overhead lights had failed. It brightened now as the main viewscreen flashed once or twice, lit up with a steady glow, then resolved into a view of stars against blackness. Part of the picture was blocked by what looked like a tangled forest, a crumpled metal framework of struts, girders, and plates.
"Good Lord... what happened to him?"
"We lost maneuvering power for a moment when we took that hit to our bridge," Morganen said. "But we already had a sizeable vector toward the bastard. Hit him broadside on."
"We rammed him!"
"More like sideswiping. He's stopped firing, though, and his shields are down. Like us...he's too banged up to fight, I imagine."
Kendric had to get the ship moving again... and fighting, but he also had to find out what had happened to T.C.! Forgetting that he was weightless, he began a slow tumble above the deck. When Morganen reached up to steady him, Kendric clasped hold on his Exec's suited arm.
Other figures were entering the bridge, some carrying emergency lines to rig from bulkhead to bulkhead so that the bridge crew could continue to move among the consoles of the Well. An emergency pressure lock had been mounted aft of the bridge, permitting damage control personnel to enter the bridge from pressurized areas of the ship. Despite the damage, the business of running the ship went on.
Another figure joined Morganen, reaching "up" to pull himself to the deck. He spun slightly and felt his legs bump into the newcomer.
"Sorry," he said.
"Are you hurt. Ken? Are you O.K.?" The voice in his helmet phones was T.C.'s.
"My God," Davidian said.
The Legion's flagship Victor was slowing to orbital speed now, the planet swelling on the battleship's forward screens. A small flotilla of Renegade fighters probed out ahead. There were Guardians, lean, swift Cheetahs, and a pair of heavy Avengers.
The TOG fleet had been smashed, leaving the tumbling masses of wreckage and the debris of shattered hulks. His own fleet was battered, too, but the TOG defense had fallen apart with the attack on their flag VLCA ship back in Vathlin orbit. Elements of the Renegade fleet were still tracking down TOG ships across the system. Many had already jumped for T-space and departed. Some TOG ships, too badly mauled to fight, were displaying white beacons flashing from their outer hulls. Their flicker screens were shut down, in token of surrender.
It had taken some time for Davidian to decide that all this wreckage was actually the debris of two battleships locked together. At first, he thought two TOG ships must have tried a tight maneuver and failed. Drawing closer, he realized that the smaller of the two battleships was the provincial renegade he had been sent here to find. His Operations people had detected the four ships when they first appeared on the battle screens near the planet, but they had to be TOG reinforcements. It appeared that the renegade squadron Davidian was to contact had arrived after all. It also looked as though they had not been part of an elaborate plot to trap him, and that they had fought the flagship of the common TOG foe to a bloody, mangled pile of wreckage.
Something flashed along the underside of one of the wrecks, and Davidian raised his hand to order the Victor's weapons to fire. He stayed the order, however, when he realized the flash had been the high-speed launch of a small craft one of the battleships carried. Its mass and power readings showed it to be a small patrol boat, possibly a Cingulum. It had either been carried aboard the big Regnum Class ship as a lifeboat, or it had docked with the TOG flagship earlier, and had only now released and fled.
He wondered if he should dispatch fighters to destroy it, then decided against it. As long as he was still uncertain how many TOG ships continued to fight throughout the system, it was best to keep the Renegade forces together as powerful fighting units.
"No communications from either vessel," the Communications Officer informed him.
"I'm not surprised. Look at the bridge towers of both of those ships! Blasted! Nothing much left but wreckage on the small one."
Still wary of a trap, Davidian gave orders for the Victor to move in closer.
As happens so often in space combat, the end of the battle was more a gradual dwindling away than a sharp and decisive ending. The officers and crew of the Gael Warrior were not even aware that the end had come, so busy were they with herculean efforts to bring fires under control and to jury-rig repairs on the most threatening damage control problems.
Chief Engineering Officer Logan had managed to restore power to the auxiliary maneuvering gravs, as Kendric wanted to put some distance between the two battered ships. Directing the ship from the vacuum-silenced and battle-damaged bridge, he feared a rush by a boarding party off the Caesar Regnus.
There were no further signs of resistance from the enemy flagship, however. When scanner power was restored, it was discovered that the TOG vessel's power sources were down, save for emergency battery power. That meant their weapons were out, no matter what other damage the ship might have taken. The real surprise revealed by the restored scanners was standing a few hundred meters off to port: the flagship of the Renegade Legion strike force, the Victor.
Caesar Regnum'% silence was explained when the Victor sent boarding parties across later and found the several hundred survivors of the TOG flagship's crew fighting the fires devouring her engineering decks. All her power systems were smashed except for emergency batteries, while the main bridge was also a blood-splattered ruin. The Warrior's last, repeated volleys of DFM clusters had shredded armor already torn and cratered, broken power lines, and opened large sections of the battleship's interior to space. Admiral Octavianus was dead on his Flag Bridge. Overlord Gracchi had last been seen with a small party of his personal guard, heading for one of the battleship's ventral boarding locks, where his personal corvette was docked. With all of the bridge officers dead and the auxiliary bridge functioning but cut off from the rest of the ship by fire, the crew had had no time to spare for such gestures as continuing to fight their ship.
They were too busy surviving. There was a distinct danger that the intensely hot fires would melt through to the conduits that fed the Caesar Regnus's main gravitic fusors, release her fusion bottles, and turn the ship into a small but intensely brilliant sun. The arrival of the Victor's boarding parties added fresh forces to the fight against the fires. Working together, the crews successfully opened large sections of the ship still under pressure to space and killed the fires.
TOG and Renegade forces did not often cooperate, but in this instance, cooperation had been essential. The explosion of the battleship's power plant would easily have destroyed both the Gael Warrior and the Victor as well.
Pressure had been restored to the Gael Warrior's bridge at last. His helmet removed now, Kendric worked with a party of technicians to bring the auxiliary communications panel back on line. Gravity had been restored some time since, which made it all the more difficult to wrestle with the huge fragments of debris littering the bridge. At least "up" and "down" h
ad been restored, bringing with it a sense of slowly emerging order.
Kendric exchanged glances with T.C., who was standing nearby. They grinned at one another, delighted at the good prospects for making it after all.
"Admiral on the bridge!"
At those words, Kendric turned and looked up toward the balcony. The sentry had snapped to attention as a small party of officers in unfamiliar uniforms walked out onto the balcony. One of them wore the broad, gold stripes that identified his uniform as an Admiral's.
Kendric wasn't sure how the man had picked him out as the ship's Captain. He still wore his emergency suit, and his face was as soot-blackened and blood-crusted as that of any man working at his side.
When the Admiral saw him, the man snapped a salute, touching fingers to forehead, instead of giving the stiff-armed ave of Imperial usage. "Fleet Captain Fraser?" the newcomer asked. "Permission to come aboard, sir. I'm Admiral Davidian. Your communications were out and I couldn't request permission to board formally. I.. .uh.. .took the liberty."
Kendric hesitated, then mimicked the unfamiliar salute. "It's very good to see you, sir. We've come a long way to make your acquaintance."
"And I, sir, am very glad you did."
Epilogue
"Well, young man. You seem to have created something of a stir around here." The Commonwealth's Director of COMINT looked across his desk at Kendric. The gentle light of Cathandra's moon spilled through the huge, east windows. From the spaceport outside, the whine of a frigate rising up on keening gravs penetrated the office. When the unseen vessel began to accelerate, it made a dull, muffled booming sound. The pressure wave rattled the windows.
Kendric looked down at himself and managed a smile. "I knew I should have changed before I came." His uniform was dirty and torn, but the clothes on his back were all he had after a missile blast had reduced his quarters to burning scrap.
"I think you pass inspection, son." Colby said. "Thought you'd want to know that your ship has arrived safely and our people are going over it."
"Thank you, sir."
Kendric knew that the Gael Warrior would never boost for combat again. Her armor was holed in dozens of places, most of her weapon batteries were dead or smashed, and her drives had been patched together with kilometers of wires and patchwork conduits in a jury-rigged affair that had barely made the final passage from Vathlin to Cathandra. Kendric felt a deep, almost nostalgic sadness for the battleship. She had left home port for the Deep Dark only twice, but had fought enough battles to make any vessel a proud one. And she had been the heart and soul of the Gael Squadron, having brought the Gael renegades to safety at last.
More, she was fighting still. When the Cathandran technicians had begun to check her out, they found her computer base to be intact. With great care, they were now copying and transferring those precious records.
Whatever they had won had come at a terrible cost, though. Half of the Warrior's crew had died at Vathlin. The Reannruadh had survived the battle, but the cruiser had been so badly mauled in her exchange with Caesar Regnus that she had to becompletely scuttled. Many of the jury-rigged circuits that had patched the Warrior together had come from her gutted engineering deck. One hundred fifty-one of her nearly 500-man crew had died with her. The Gaidheal's valiant Captain Neal had died on the bridge with most of his bridge officers, though the rest of the destroyer was only lightly damaged. Once the Warrior's surviving crew was safely crowded aboard three battered Renegade battleships, Captain Morganen had returned to his old command to bring the destroyer to Cathandra.
The destroyer lolaire had lived a charmed life, it seemed. Hit
several times and damaged along her bows, she had continued to fight until the last TOG attackers had turned and fled. The same lolaire had returned with Commander Burns to the rendezvous within the globular star cluster to give new coordinates to the Teachdair and the waiting transports. The news that Yanulf had fallen to TOG several weeks before had shaken all who'd heard it. Their flight across the Galaxy might have had a very different ending, for the race had been a close one.
At a chime from his desk, Colby pressed a key on his console to open the door. Kendric's heart hammered for a few beats. Though he had been on Cathandra for days now, he still hadn't gotten used to... them.
Standing a meter tall, massing something less than a man, the xeno walked on multiple, jointed legs like a spider, but the forward part of its body extended up and forward, supporting a broad, armored head and four segmented arms. It had two ribbed, down-curved horns and what passed for a face was ceaselessly in motion—tendrils, chelae, and black, razor-edged mandibles. Six pupilless eyes stretched in a row across the head. The exoskeleton was emerald green, though streaks and mottlings of iridescent red gleamed across the underside of the creature's abdomen. Colby had explained that J'kla'I'k was a female—as opposed to either a male or a mother of her species—and her exoskeleton always turned red just before she was due to molt and become interested in mating once again.
She carried a datapad in three of her hands, bringing with her an odor of cinnamon and leather. Kendric stood as she entered the room. He might not be used to the Baufrin yet, but his Gael attitude toward females was still ingrained. Besides, politeness in the face of strangeness was probably the best policy.
"Sorry I'm late, gentlemen," she said. Her speech was a rattling series of clicks, chirps, and snaps, but the Galstandard spoken by the voder strapped to the carapace that was her only adornment was clear and precise. "The Council meeting took longer than anticipated." Expressionless eyes turned on Kendric. "They're all quite interested in you over there, Captain."
It surprised Kendric at how beautiful were the colors of the entymoid's exoskeleton as they gleamed in the light from the Director's window. It would take considerable getting used to, he decided. From the little he'd seen so far, the Commonwealth's xenos seemed neither to dominate the Human-xeno alliance (as TOG propagandists declared) nor to occupy subservient positions (as TOG social theory demanded). The Commonwealth's current Regent was Human, but earlier ones had been Baufrin and Naram, and there had once been a KessRith, too.
Jakla was liaison between Sector COMINT and Cathandra's Parliamentary Council, an important and prestigious position.
"I would say, Captain," the Baufrin added, "that you have stirred up those do-nothings more than anything that's happened in a good couple of centuries. And long overdue, too! Congratulations!"
"Uh...thank you."
"Don't mention it. Captain," the Baufrin said. "And do sit down. You make me nervous, towering over me like that."
Was that laughter Kendric heard in the voder's translation? Was it possible that this was the alien horror of the insect-dominated Commonwealth he had heard about all his life? No, not possible...He shook his head and sat back in his chair. Kendric was going to have to unlearn a very great deal, indeed.
Colby turned to Jakla. "I was just about to discuss our future plans with Captain Fraser."
"Excellent. This place could use some shaking up."
Now what did that mean? Kendric wondered.
Colby glanced at him and grinned. "The Baufrin are well-known for their.. .ah.. .independent outlook. Their culture is strongly family-oriented, and they have little use for the notion of central government. . .or bureaucracy!"
A sound very like a sniff came from the entymoid's voder.
"At any rate," the Director continued, "you and your people have a number of options. I'll say first off that you are all most welcome here, whatever you decide to do."
That was the question that had dominated Kendric's thoughts ever since the final victory at Caracalla. "I've been thinking a lot about that, sir," he said.
Colby nodded slowly. "There's plenty you could do. We could find a place for you here with the Commonwealth forces... or you could join the Renegade Legion. After what Davidian saw of your work at Vathlin, I'm sure he'd be glad to have you. If you've seen enough fighting, there are places for you here,
at this base, or others."
What to say? On the one hand. Kendric felt as though he and his people were coming to the Commonwealth almost as beggars. They had brought the Imperial database, true, but they didn't even have their three surviving ships anymore. The vessels had been pressed into service with Davidian's fleet almost at once. In the Commonwealth's unending war against an enemy with an unending supply of arms and armaments, they were always desperate for ships and equipment.
Kendric had assumed that he, at least, would find a place within the Commonwealth, continuing the fight against TOG. The handful of men left in the squadron would not add up to a very large or very powerful fighting force, however, and could end up scattered among an alien fleet, dying to defend alien stars. What he had seen of Cathandra was a beautiful green and thickly wooded planet, with rolling seas, and high mountains. It had all the glory and variety of any Albalike world, silvered to loveliness by the moon that stretched forty-five degrees across the sky. Cathandra was a sector capital not far from where men were fighting and dying over numberless worlds scattered along the Commonwealth Frontier. It could well be a place worth fighting for, but it wasn't home.
Now that he was an exile, it was astonishing how vivid were his dreams of Alba. Since leaving the Gael Confederation, he had heard no news of that far-off, TOG-dominated corner of the Galaxy. Kathy MacDonald had been COMINT's last link to the Gael worlds. Kendric realized that Colby was waiting for an answer. "Uh...thank you, sir. That's...kind of you." Dammit, what do I say now? I don't want to sound ungrateful.
He had had a long talk with T.C. just last night. They had walked for hours through violet grass atop a cliff overlooking Silversea, talking of the past, of themselves, and of the future. In that time, they had made their decision. It was not a command decision that would also bind the other survivors of the Gael Squadron, but only what they two felt they must do. Kendric nevertheless dreaded that the leaders of the Commonwealth would interpret the decision as a rejection of their hospitality.
The Baufrin stirred with a rustling of its legs. "We wanted to let you know what options might be available to you here."
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