Yolanda stepped out of the washroom, a towel wrapped around her body. “You’d better go,” she said. She’d never been good at dealing with partings. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
“And I will,” Martin said, although he knew he could be wrong. It wasn’t as if he was going to the shops for a carton of milk. “You’d better be here when I come back.”
Yolanda smiled, wanly. “I’ll be here,” she said. “Goodbye.”
Martin turned, feeling like a heel as he walked out. He’d be back ... he promised himself he’d be back. His father had walked out on his mother shortly after she’d become pregnant, if she’d been telling the truth. He didn’t know. He would have liked to have known his father, even though cold logic told him his father hadn’t been a man to admire. What sort of bastard walked out on a pregnant woman? He shook his head, firmly. If he had kids, he was damned if he was leaving them to grow up alone. They’d have a father in their lives whether they liked it or not.
He reached the teleport compartment and spoke briefly to the operator, clearing a teleport path to Hoyden. The alien freighter was far too close to Defiant for comfort, even if her presence was masked by sensor decoys and ECM fields. He would have preferred to launch the operation from N-Gann itself, or even build up a data trail before altering course and heading for the Twins, but time was short. Besides, he admitted sourly, the more systems they passed through, the greater the chance someone would ask awkward questions. And if they did ...
“Captain,” Sergeant Butler said. He was a thickly-built man with a strong accent Martin had never been able to place. It was unusually thick, for someone who’d been born and raised in the Solar Union. “Welcome onboard.”
Martin nodded, shortly. “Are we ready to depart on schedule?”
“We’re just waiting for two men,” Butler said. “Simmons is on his way. Haw-Haw has been a little delayed.”
“We have time,” Martin said. Haw-Haw - his real name was in the files, but Martin had never bothered to check - had a partner who’d been deployed to N-Gann. “If he isn’t here in a couple of hours, though ...”
He shrugged as he stepped off the pad. Hoyden had been designed by a committee for multispecies accommodation and it showed. The interior felt oddly out of proportion, as if a child had put the ship together out of plastic bricks. The hatches were alternatively too wide and too short. He shook his head, reminding himself that they could hardly use a human-designed freighter for the mission. That would definitely draw unwanted attention. There’d even been reports of human-designed ships being unceremoniously blown out of space when they tried to pass through the gravity points.
And if they realise what we’re carrying, he thought glumly, we’re screwed.
“Piece and his companions are in their cabins,” Butler informed him. “They’ve been quite cooperative.”
Martin nodded, although he did have his concerns. He had nothing against aliens, but he had a great deal against untrained amateurs interfering with his operations. Rumour had it that the Solar Marines had a very quiet ongoing operation on Earth, arming and training men who fought back against the madness engulfing the planet. Martin would have hated that role, as much as he hated the men who’d thrown Earth into the gutter. You just couldn’t trust amateurs to play their part. They had hopes and dreams of their own. They were always a two-edged sword.
And we have to rely on them, he thought. There’s no other way to do it.
“Once the stragglers are onboard, take us to our planned position,” he ordered, putting the thought aside. “The flag will tell us when to move.”
“Yes, sir,” Butler said. “We’ll be ready.”
“And hope that we don’t draw fire from the wrong side,” Martin said. Accidents happened - he knew accidents happened, despite their best efforts - but it would still be embarrassing to be killed by his own side. A lone freighter, in a place where no freighter had any business being ... it was all too likely that someone would draw the wrong conclusions and throw a missile at him. “That would be bad.”
“Yes, sir,” Butler said, with studied indifference. “That would be very bad.”
***
“Can’t sleep?”
Hoshiko looked up, sharply. Her grandfather was standing in the hatchway, his expression unreadable in the half-light. She beckoned him into the room with a single motion, then returned her attention to the holographic display. The fleet revolved around her, each and every ship ready for war. They were as ready as they’d ever be. They had to go soon or they’d start to degrade. No military force could remain at readiness indefinitely, no matter what politicians or armchair admirals claimed. And merely ramping up some of their sensors would hasten their demise.
“No.” She tapped a switch, bringing the cabin lights up. “I keep thinking about the operation.”
“And about how much relies on you?” Steve smiled at her, his young face oddly contrasting with his old eyes. “You wouldn’t be the first person to worry.”
“No.” Hoshiko turned away from the display, trying not to think about the hundreds of ships under her command. “I feel like Jellicoe.”
“The one man who could lose the war in a day, at Jutland,” Steve said. He’d taught her military history. “What about him?”
“I was happier playing Beatty,” Hoshiko admitted. “Beatty could have lost every ship under his command and it wouldn’t have materially altered the balance of power. Not enough to allow Germany to win, anyway. Beatty could take chances Jellicoe couldn’t afford to risk.”
“Beatty also stabbed his commanding officer in the back, metaphorically speaking,” Steve pointed out. He’d studied war for longer than she’d been alive. “He claimed he could have delivered a decisive victory, if he’d been in command of the Grand Fleet.”
“It’s a lot easier to carp and criticise when you’re not the one with ultimate responsibility,” Hoshiko countered. “Or the one who will be made a scapegoat if the battle is lost and the war lost with it.”
“And you are happy to criticise your superiors?” Steve cocked an eyebrow. “Do you think that’s good for morale?”
“It’s never been easy to give feedback without criticism,” Hoshiko said. “Or of coming across as an armchair critic, even if one isn’t intending to put someone down.”
She smiled. “And no commanding officer wants to hear his subordinates criticising her, even when she knows she needs it.”
“One should always bow down to tyrants,” Steve said. It sounded like a quote. “I speak as a tyrant, of course.”
Hoshiko lifted her eyebrows. “Pardon?”
“Old joke,” Steve said. “A king once asked his bards to explain the nature of courage to him. One of them dared suggest that courage lay in resisting tyrannical demands from one’s monarch ... or something along those lines. The king didn’t see the funny side. Resistance is commendable as long as they’re not resisting you.”
“Oh.” Hoshiko had to smile. “I can see his point.”
She waved a hand at the display. “How did you cope? I mean ... when you realised that everything was resting on you?”
“It took me a long time to really grasp it,” Steve said. He sounded pensive. “You see, when I was a little boy ...”
“Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth,” Hoshiko put in.
“That joke’s older than me,” Steve said. “Back when I was a little boy, which was a long time after the dinosaurs died out, there were no aliens. We were limited to a single world, which was both very small - thanks to the magic of radio and the internet - and very big. It could take literally hours to fly around the globe. There were no aliens. There was no sense, in our collective mindset, that there was anything beyond the sky. You really can’t grasp just how ignorant most people were, back then. On one hand, our society depended on orbital satellites. On the other, there were idiots who called the space program a waste of money and wanted to keep pouring cash into black holes instead. We were very lucky it wa
s the Horde that rediscovered Earth first, back then. Someone more competent could have fucked us up with both hands tied behind their backs.
“I didn’t realise just how big our world had become, not at first. I didn’t grasp the towering interstellar civilisation, not until ... not until I started trading myself. I didn’t realise the scale of the challenge facing us until it was too late. If I had, I might never have started. I might have given up without even trying to face the challenge.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Hoshiko said.
“You grew up in the Solar Union,” Steve reminded her. “All of this” - he waved a hand at the bulkhead - “is normal to you. To us, it was an outside context problem. A lot of people on Old Earth never really recovered from discovering that we weren’t alone in the universe. They just couldn’t take it.”
Hoshiko frowned. “Is there a point, Grandpa?”
“You’re not Jellicoe or Beatty,” Steve said. “You’re not in the same position. Yes, a great deal does rest on you. But you have a good staff, good crewmen and good ships. You can’t guarantee anything, of course, but you’ve done everything in your power to make sure you come out ahead.”
“If Jellicoe had lost, Britain would have been invaded,” Hoshiko said. “Germany would have won the war. It would have been a disaster. But it wouldn’t have been the end of the human race.”
“No,” Steve agreed. “But you never know. Maybe things will change. The Tokomak might change. Or their servants might rise up against them. Sometimes, all that is needed is proof that one’s tormentors are not invincible. And you stopped a mighty fleet in its tracks.”
“Sure,” Hoshiko said, sardonically. “And maybe the horse will learn to sing.”
“It might,” Steve said. “You never know.”
Hoshiko had to smile. “Thanks for the distraction, Grandpa.”
Steve bowed. “You’re welcome.”
“And I really should kick you off the ship,” Hoshiko pointed out. “If you die here ...”
“I’m old enough to make that decision for myself,” Steve countered. “And I started all this, a long time ago. I should be there to see it end. I sometimes wonder, you know, what would have happened if I’d turned the ship over to the government.”
He shook his head. “But you know what? It doesn’t matter. We play the cards we’re dealt and do our best to rig the odds in our favour.”
“Very profound, Grandpa,” Hoshiko said. “Maybe I’ll have it engraved on my tombstone.”
“I want someone to write something sarcastic,” Steve said. “But I fear they’ll go for something polite instead.”
He laughed, then sobered. “Go get some sleep, young lady. Mornings always come too soon.”
Chapter Nine
Commodore Piling was surprised, deep inside, that she’d been left in command of the system defences. She was old - incredibly old, by human standards - and she really should have been removed, if only because she was too old to impress the new empress. Piling had no combat experience, little diplomatic experience ... indeed, the simple fact she hadn’t been promoted earlier, before the coup, spoke volumes. Perhaps the empress had too much to do to sack her personally, Piling thought, or perhaps she was simply rated as expendable. It was what she would have done.
She sat in her command chair and surveyed the tactical display with a grim feeling of bitter dissatisfaction. There was nothing particularly important about the Hellene System, save for the simple fact that it was part of a chain of gravity points leading from N-Gann to the Twins and through them to Tokomak Prime itself. The handful of inhabited planets had been denied the investment that had been given to N-Gann, ensuring that they were poorly developed and their defences were minimal. The planners had always assumed that N-Gann would cover the system, if they’d had the imagination to think that the system might ever be threatened at all. It had probably never crossed their mind that N-Gann would fall to an outside force.
The gravity point pulsed in the centre of the display, mocking her. Piling had done everything she could, from deploying thousands upon thousands of cheap mines to arming her freighters with missile pods in the hopes they might score a handful of hits before they were blown out of space, but she was grimly aware that her defences were flimsy. N-Gann had been heavily defended and the fleet base had fallen ... intact, if some of the reports were to be believed. Her eyes shifted to the handful of planets within the system, almost entirely inhabited by servitors and outright slaves, their contracts owned by the big combines. She’d heard the rumblings of discontent, the growing awareness that their masters could be beaten. It was only a matter of time before the system exploded ...
And the empress isn’t rushing support up the chain either, Piling thought. She knew, intellectually, that the fleet had taken a beating, that thousands of ships had been lost, but she found it hard to believe. She’d watched hundreds of thousands of ships making their way down the chain, a force so vast it seemed impossible to believe it could lose. But it had lost and now ... she hated to admit it, but the empress was right. She was expendable. And it’s only a matter of time before we lose.
She turned her attention to the reports, but she couldn’t force herself to read them. She’d risen in the ranks through a pathological obsession with bureaucracy, yet ...something was wrong. Half the reports were so optimistic that it was clear the writers were either lying or delusional, the remainder were so pessimistic that it was difficult to tell just who was writing them. The paperwork that has sustained the empire was starting to collapse, more and more people writing lies into the official record ... Piling wasn’t naive. She knew the empire lied to its subjects. But it couldn’t afford to start lying to itself ...
An alarm rang. She jerked her head up, just in time to see a red icon materialise in the gravity point. The mines started gliding towards it, too late. The icon flashed, transforming into an expanding sphere as the antimatter warhead detonated. More and more flooded the gravity point, each explosion wiping out hundreds of mines. The humans were clearing the gravity point by brute force, not even bothering to send recon probes or actual starships through the gap as they worked. She cursed savagely as her crews rushed to battle stations, bringing their weapons and sensors online. They just didn’t have the time to do more than make a brief stand.
The surging energies seemed to still, just for a moment. Piling allowed herself a second of hope, even though she knew it was futile. Hundreds of thousands of mines had been wiped out, along with a pair of freighters that had been too close to the gravity point. She didn’t have time to mourn their loss. More red icons were already appearing, human-made assault pods. She wondered, savagely, why her people had never thought of building jump-capable missile pods. The humans were insane! Their fantasists seemed to have spent years dreaming up ideas and tactics for weapons they hadn’t possessed, weapons they would never have been able to build without help. And it had given them an edge.
“Order Force One to fire at will,” she said. “Force Two is to remain in place ...”
She felt her stomach churn as the assault pods opened fire, launching a wave of missiles in all directions. They were quick, damn it. Their targeting data had to be almost non-existent, yet - even as they moved - they were picking up targets and moving to attack. She traced the vectors as some of her freighters opened fire, trying to get their missiles off before they were blown out of space. It was unlikely they’d hit anything important. The humans were fighting smart, wearing down her defences before committing their warships to the engagement. She thought dark thoughts about the industrial might of N-Gann, a system that might as well be on the other side of the galaxy for all the good it would do her. The humans had probably put the giant fabricators to work, churning out hundreds of missiles and antimatter pods. They could just keep firing blind until her defences had been reduced to dust.
A new red icon appeared in the display. She ground her teeth in frustration as her sensors picked out the human destroy
er. It was targeted instantly, a wave of missiles roaring towards it ... her crews had done everything right, but it was still too late. The destroyer vanished, jumping back through the gravity point. Piling snapped orders, directing her uncloaked ships to alter position as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t be long before the next wave of assault pods materialised ... she didn’t even have time to finish the thought. The assault pods jumped through the gravity point, a handful intersecting and wiping themselves out of existence. The remainder opened fire as one.
That was quick, she thought. She’d heard rumours that the humans had made breakthroughs in computer technology, perhaps even produced a working AI, but she hadn’t believed it. AIs were dangerous. Everyone knew it. But if the humans had made a breakthrough ... she swallowed, hard. They had to have found some way of collecting data and turning it into targeting information at terrifying speed. AIs or no AIs, they’d done it. Somehow. We might be in some trouble.
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