“Good.” Hoshiko turned to her. “And our people on the ring?”
“The stay-behinds are in place,” Yolanda said. “The remainder have returned to their ships.”
Hoshiko nodded, curtly. She didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but the provisional government needed help. She had to do whatever she could to support it, at least as long as it didn’t impede her operations. She wondered, sourly, what would happen after the war, then told herself to worry about it after they actually won. Right now, they had to hang together to hang separately. They could worry about the future when it arrived.
“Then order the squadrons to depart, as planned,” she said. “It’s time to move.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said.
Hoshiko smiled as the first squadrons dropped into FTL, heading out on vague courses that gave any watching eyes a number of potential destinations. The Tokomak would know, of course, that the ships could simply change course once they were beyond the range of any known detector, but ... they’d have to warn all the possible targets. And the number of possible targets would rise rapidly, until it was completely impossible to warn - let alone defend - them all. And then ...
Her smile grew wider as the second squadrons vanished, followed rapidly by the third. There would be a lot of potential targets, none of which would be remotely decisive. The Tokomak might be pleased she was wasting her ships and munitions on such targets, knowing she had little hope of resupply. Ships without missiles or spare parts could neither fly nor fight. She hoped they believed it for as long as possible, then forced herself to relax. She was committed. But, in truth, they’d been committed long before she’d been born.
“Admiral,” Yolanda said. “Our squadron is ready to depart.”
“My compliments to Captain Lifar,” Hoshiko said formally, “and she has full permission to depart as planned.”
She leaned back in her chair as the squadron jumped into FTL, racing away from the gravity point - and N-Gann - at many times the speed of light. It seemed impossible to believe that it would take years to return to Sol, or head to Tokomak Prime. A groundpounder would have found it impossible to comprehend the vast distances between the two stars. Even Hoshiko couldn’t comprehend them, not really. She knew the figures and what they meant, but she didn’t really believe them.
“We’ll reach the waypoint in ninety minutes,” Yolanda warned. “And the fleet should be reassembled ...”
“I know.” Hoshiko cut her off. “Don’t worry about it.”
She smiled, grimly. They’d planned it as best as they could, although there was no way to be sure they’d truly be out of detection range. The Harmonies had deployed a small fleet of pickets to track Odyssey, when she’d punched her way out of the trap and fled into interstellar space. The Tokomak could have done the same, if they’d realised she was trying to con them. There were just too many dangers ... she shook her head, irritated at herself. She’d done everything she could to minimise them. All she could do now was wait.
The display continued to update, assuring her that the fleet was alone. She knew better than to take that for granted. The warped nexus of space created by stardrive made it difficult to use sensors, even FTL sensors. A ship would have to be very close, matching the fleet’s gravity harmonics perfectly, to be detected. The upside was that it made continued pursuit almost impossible. The downside was that it made it impossible to be sure that someone wasn’t following them.
They’d have to get very lucky, she told herself. The fleet had scattered so many sensor platforms around the gravity point, back at N-Gann, that she’d been morbidly sure the enemy didn’t have a hope of sneaking a cloaked ship into attack position. But luck can favour the enemy too.
She pulled up the tactical and readiness reports and forced herself to read them, cursing the irony that she had to worry about paperwork even as she launched the greatest offensive in human history. Paperwork was important, but she knew it couldn’t become an end in itself or the Solar Union was doomed. Grandpa Steve had set up the military to ensure it avoided developing a permanent class of pen-pushers, mainly by rotating good officers in and out of staff positions so they had no chance to get lazy, yet ... she shook her head. She had to keep careful track of everything, if only so she knew what she had to play with. Her subordinates were good, but she had to make the final call. Thankfully, they had a good idea of what was and wasn’t important.
The drive hum changed, slightly. Hoshiko glanced at the status display. They were reducing speed, readying themselves for the drop back to normal space. Hoshiko braced herself for the transition, but - for once - it was surprisingly smooth. It probably helped they were light years from anywhere, floating in the middle of an interstellar wasteland. The display flickered, then picked up a handful of ships heading to the waypoint in FTL. The remainder of the fleet was still out of range.
A small cluster of icons appeared in front of her. “Admiral,” Yolanda said. “The decoy fleet is in position.”
“Order the crews to begin tethering the ships,” Hoshiko said. She wished she had another LinkShip or two, but ... she’d make do with what she had. It was just a shame they couldn’t render the entire fleet stealthy. Being able to charge towards a target without setting off alarms right across the system would have been very helpful. It would change the face of warfare. “And keep me informed. I want to depart as soon as possible.”
“Aye, Admiral.” Yolanda looked confused. “We do have time ...?”
“Not as much as we might like,” Hoshiko said. She scowled at the trackless emptiness on the display. The entire enemy fleet - their active ships and reserve fleets - could be lurking out there and she’d never know about it, not until it was too late. Hundreds of thousands of ships were little more than grains of sand on the interstellar beach. “We don’t know what might happen next.”
She watched and waited as the remainder of the fleet assembled, hoping and praying that they’d escaped enemy scrutiny. The Tokomak disliked interstellar space, although she wasn’t sure why. She certainly wasn’t prepared to gamble her entire fleet on them not bothering to sow the entire region with pickets and sensor platforms. But the sheer size of interstellar space worked in their favour. Logically, the Tokomak couldn’t be watching everywhere.
“The fleet is in position, Admiral,” Yolanda said. “And the decoy ships are live.”
“Then order the fleet to depart, as planned,” Hoshiko ordered. “The recon ships are to go directly to the target, as planned. The remainder of the fleet will head to the second waypoint.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said.
Hoshiko nodded as the fleet slid back into FTL. She’d planned their course carefully, ensuring they kept their distance from enemy systems. It would add another week to their journey, but it would minimise the chances of detection ... she told herself, firmly, that it would suffice. There was no point in worrying about things she couldn’t change. And hoping for an ambush to give her something else to focus on was just stupid.
She stood. “Inform me if there are any changes,” she ordered. “I’ll be in my cabin.”
Yolanda nodded. “Aye, Admiral.”
Hoshiko headed for the hatch and stepped through, schooling her face into impassivity. It was just possible that the Tokomak could mount an ambush, although ... if they did, it would be a fairly clear sign that the plan had gone spectacularly wrong. The Tokomak would have to have known the details right from the start. She had no idea how they could have guessed the truth - she’d gone to considerable trouble to avoid sharing more than the bare minimum with her officers - but stranger things had happened. The Tokomak were the only known race to fight wars on such a large scale, at least until now. They’d spent longer thinking about them than humans had been experimenting with fire.
But they can’t cover everywhere, she told herself, as she opened the hatch and walked into her cabin. The hatch hissed closed behind her. They cannot be strong everywhere.
She sighe
d as she undressed. It wasn’t true. Given time, the Tokomak could be strong everywhere. They commanded such vast resources that only their own weaknesses kept them from winning the war overnight. They could deploy vast fleets to every possible target, build impregnable defences around every gravity point, even design and put new weapons into production on a scale humanity couldn’t hope to match. Their entire empire was a monster suffocating the life out of the galaxy. It had to be stopped.
And if it can’t be stopped now, she thought as she climbed into bed for the first time in weeks, it will never be stopped at all.
Chapter Thirteen
Hameeda braced herself as the LinkShip glided through the gravity point, her drives carefully - very carefully - baffling her gravity signature. The files stated that the enemy hadn’t had time to fortify the gravity point, but the files hadn’t been updated since the first Battle of Earth. Hameeda’s briefers had made it very clear that they expected everything from a giant minefield to an entire fleet of enemy battleships, the former possibly positioned right on top of the gravity point. Sweat trickled down her back as the last of the gravity waves faded away. The LinkShip was very capable, but a single mine would be more than enough to blow her into atoms.
The display filled up rapidly as her passive sensors came online. A handful of mines were floating around the point, rather than actually emplaced on top of it. Hameeda wondered if the enemy expected to see more friendly ships jumping through the point, or - more likely - if they thought the human ships could clear the minefield simply by dumping a handful of antimatter pods into the enemy defences. There might be no point in laying a minefield that could be cleared instantly ... she smiled as she inched away from the gravity point, watching carefully for stealthed mines. Thankfully, there were enough sensor pulses filling the area to spare her from having to activate her own sensors. That would have made detection certain.
Although they might have managed to miss me, she thought. Their ships aren’t in position to draw a bead on me without getting closer.
She frowned, reminding herself that the previous enemy force had mounted an ambush and inflicted a considerable amount of damage despite their technological inferiority. The handful of battleships holding position near the defences might be just the tip of the iceberg, sacrificial lambs being deployed to lure the attackers into a false sense of security. She told herself that no navy could make such ploys indefinitely, that even the Tokomak themselves would be unable to cope with having their lives thrown away to bait a trap, but ... it was hard to believe. Aliens were alien, not humans in funny clothes and funnier makeup. The Galactics didn’t share a common biology, let alone a common culture. And it was easy, very easy, for them to do something that would leave a human scratching her head in bemusement. Why the fuck would they do something like ... well, whatever?
Because it made perfect sense to them, Hameeda thought. There were a lot of alien races out there, from egg-layers and hermaphrodites to races that only had one intelligent gender and races that had a dozen different genders. Laws that made perfect sense to one race might be another race’s belly laugh. And they don’t think remotely like us.
She put the thought out of her mind as she slowly prowled around the gravity point, carefully watching for any traces of cloaked or powered-down ships. The system looked surprisingly empty, almost deserted. Her neural net pointed out the locations of a dozen asteroid settlements, all of which had gone dark. She guessed they’d been powered down in the hopes of avoiding detection, their populations either placed in stasis or surviving on reduced resources. She doubted it would make any difference. The asteroids simply weren’t important in the short term. The planet itself wasn’t that important either. It was a rocky wasteland that made pre-terraforming Mars or Venus look hospitable. Really, she was surprised the Tokomak had bothered to plant a colony. Perhaps they’d seen it as a convenient place to dump people they didn’t like.
Or they just wanted to stake a claim to the system, she mused. We’re not that far from their core worlds, if one jumps through the gravity points.
Her lips thinned as she completed her search pattern. There didn’t seem to be any hidden defences, as far as she could tell. The ships were powered down so completely it would be impossible to flash-wake their systems in time, when Admiral Teller assaulted the system. And they had to know it. The ships probably didn’t exist, unless ... she assigned her subroutines to work out a handful of scenarios, but she already knew the answer. The Tokomak were choosing not to make a fight for the system.
Which is going to cost them, she thought, as she uploaded her sensor records onto a stealth drone and launched it towards the gravity point. They’re still going to look like losers even if they haven’t lost anything worth fighting for.
She held position near the gravity point, watching the drone as it followed a ballistic trajectory towards the twist in time and space. Admiral Webster’s NGW program hadn’t produced anything really new, if the last set of updates were accurate, but they had improved the basic gravity jump drive. It was a one-shot device, and expensive enough to give even the Solar Union pause, yet ... if it worked, it would change the face of war. Again. She tensed, watching the drone slip out of her ken and vanish. If the enemy picked up the slightest hint of gravity emissions, they’d assume she was trying to sneak through the gravity point. And they’d start looking for her in earnest.
They’d be right, but for the wrong reasons, she thought, sourly. It wouldn’t make them any less right.
She waited, silently counting the seconds. It was possible the enemy ships would simply ignore the gravity surge - the surge wouldn’t have looked big enough for even a relatively small capital ship - but they knew humans had some way of transiting a gravity point without being detected. They did emit fluctuations from time to time - the boffins claimed that was how they’d been discovered in the first place - and normally they were simply ignored ... now? Now, she didn’t know. They might be paying attention to a lot of things they would normally ignore.
It was nearly an hour before she decided the enemy weren’t going to react and pulled the LinkShip away from the gravity point, gliding towards the only inhabited planet. The briefing notes hadn’t made it look very appealing and the reality was worse, a poisonous atmosphere that would be unpleasantly lethal to almost all known races. Either the world was extremely unusual, she decided, or it had been heavily polluted at some point. The planet’s natural atmosphere contained a lot of trace elements that suggested heavy industry and a complete lack of regard for the planet’s biosphere. She considered it as the LinkShip drew closer, wondering if the Tokomak had turned the world into an experimental laboratory. They’d normally install dangerous and polluting machinery on an asteroid, which could be thrown into a star if they had to get rid of it, but perhaps they thought they needed a gravity well. She puzzled over it, the LinkShip carefully orbiting the planet at a safe distance. It would probably be worth taking a look at the planetary installations once they secured the system itself.
Assuming they leave them intact, Hameeda thought. If there was something deadly secret on the surface, the Tokomak wouldn’t let it fall into human hands. They’ve had plenty of time to start rigging self-destruct systems by now.
She ordered the LinkShip to glide back into interplanetary space, then performed one final passive scan before disconnecting herself from the neural net and standing up. Her legs felt uncomfortably stiff, as if she’d been sitting there for hours. She smiled. She had been. A status display followed her as she limped down the corridor and into the galley. The automated systems had already produced a cup of coffee and a hot bacon sandwich, dripping with butter. She stared at it blearily. It was funny how her parents and grandparents had never eaten pork, even though it wasn’t real pork. They’d thrown away so much, when they’d fled to space, but not that ...
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. She took a bite, savouring the taste. Warm butter dripped to the deck. Right now, all that m
atters is winning the war.
She chewed her way through the sandwich and ordered another, knowing the processor would have crammed all the vitamins and nutritional support she needed into the food. In some ways, the taste didn’t matter. Her distant ancestors wouldn’t have known if they should condemn her for eating the sandwich or approve, on the grounds the bacon had never been anywhere near a real pig. But that was the true value of the Solar Union, she told herself. A citizen could pick and choose what she wanted to do, knowing that no one else could stop her. And she alone was accountable for her behaviour.
“I should have asked Sam to stay on the ship,” she said. “It would have been nice.”
She shivered. Her voice sounded odd in her ears, as if it wasn’t quite hers. It was odd enough having her words played back to her, but now ... she wondered, sourly, if she should ask for a permanent companion. There were people already talking about brain and brawn teams ... she snorted. It would have to be someone she actually liked. She had no idea how she’d put up with someone she didn’t like. Ask him to leave, probably. It wasn’t as if she could leave. Even now, delinked from the net, she still felt as if she was rattling around inside her own body. She was mildly surprised she hadn’t been permanently wired into the system. But then, there wouldn’t have been much point.
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