They’re trapped, she thought, as the Tokomak targeted the freighters. Quick thinking on their part, but not quick enough. And now the conclusion.
She sent a simple command to the freighters. The missile pods on their hull opened, then fired as one. She smiled, grimly, as thousands of missiles roared towards the enemy ships. The enemy would normally take one look and jump into FTL, but they couldn’t do that as long as the gravity wave projectors remained operational. She was surprised the scheme had worked as well as it had. The Tokomak knew the trick. They’d not only faced it before, during the Second Battle of Earth; they’d used it themselves. And now it was going to kill their entire fleet.
With missiles that even they consider outdated, Hameeda thought. The enemy point defence was already firing, cutting hundreds of missiles out of space. But there were hundreds more. They’re not going to live long enough to regret it.
She watched, and waited. It wouldn’t be long now.
***
Pentode heard someone swear behind him as the missiles blazed towards his ships. There were hundreds - no, thousands - bearing down on him, an unstoppable mass that would smash his ships to smithereens. He couldn’t believe it. He’d flown right into a trap, a trap that would deter his distant subordinates from harassing human shipping themselves. They’d see what had happened to him and take heed, keeping their distance from the humans ...
He silently tried to calculate the odds, but he knew it was useless. The humans had caught him with overwhelming force. There was little hope of surviving the first barrage and, even if they did, no hope of surviving the second. The more he thought about it, the more he knew he was doomed. And his entire fleet with him. Honour demanded he fight to the last, spitting defiance as he died. Cold logic told him the sacrifice would be pointless.
“Drop shields,” he ordered. “And signal surrender.”
He heard the gasp as his crew hurried to obey. How many ships had surrendered since the war began? Not many. The news broadcasts claimed that none had surrendered, but Pentode knew that for a lie. Once, it would have been unthinkable. Now ... now, there was no other choice. It was death or a POW camp, and he didn’t want to die. The humans seemed to be treating their prisoners well. It was their only hope.
The missiles came closer, slipping into attack position. They were getting closer and closer ... he twisted his hands, knowing the humans might not have time to shut down the missiles before it was too late. They might not even have heard his surrender. And then ... the missiles powered down, holding position in the middle of his formation. His point defence tracked them automatically, but didn’t fire.
“Admiral, we’re picking up a message,” the communications officer said. “Audio only.”
The voice was human, speaking Galactic with a cold, almost metallic accent. “You are to switch to emergency power and wait to be boarded. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessels.”
“I understand,” Pentode said. They were going to call him a traitor. Or worse. But there was no choice. “We will comply.”
He sighed in resignation. Yes, there was no choice. Or was that what he was telling himself because he didn’t want to die? For nothing? He wondered, as he waited, if he’d ever know.
***
Hameeda frowned as she signalled for support, wishing she’d thought to request a marine company or two ... even though she couldn’t have hoped to accommodate them on the LinkShip. The prospect of surrender hadn’t been considered, not really. Given the nature of the trap, it had been deemed unlikely the enemy would surrender even if they wanted to. But they had and ... she sighed as she waited. She had no qualms about destroying hostile warships, but firing on ships that were trying to surrender - that she knew were trying to surrender - was a war crime. And it was one she had no intention of committing. If the Tokomak found out ...
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She’d have to live with whatever she did afterwards. And she knew she couldn’t live with cold-blooded slaughter.
And I won, she thought, with a cold smile. It was her victory. We’ve wasted quite enough time already. But now we can resume the advance.
Chapter Nineteen
The shipyard was not, technically, a shipyard in any real sense. It was nothing more than a cluster of maintenance and accommodation pods, positioned near a thousand battleships that had rolled off the production lines hundreds of years ago and promptly been placed into the naval reserve. The ancients hadn’t really been able to put their fears into words, according to the files; they’d built a fleet that, as far as anyone could tell, they hadn’t needed. Worse, perhaps, there was no realistic prospect of needing. And the construction work had just gone on and on ...
Neola allowed herself a tight smile of gratitude at their foresight. The reserve fleet was powered down - and it would take months of work to get this shipyard alone emptied of ships - but it was still a formidable force. Millions of technicians swarmed over the ships, cleaning compartments, replacing components that had decayed over the years and loading magazines with missiles and supplies from Tokomak Prime. Behind there, she knew that millions more were training to crew the ships, readying themselves to go into battle. Her lips twitched again as she contemplated what she’d done. The young were no longer held back by the old. It was possible to be ambitious - now - and see that ambition pay off. Her people were girding their loins for war.
And yet, it isn’t enough, she thought. We need more and more recruits.
She shook her head. She hadn’t appreciated the scale of the damage until she’d started trying to fix it. For every recruit who rushed to the recruiting department, there were ten who wanted to stay in their homes and pretend nothing had changed. They lacked the drive to succeed, the drive that had been bred out of them as their lives became a combination of far too easy and, at the same time, stagnant. What was the point of working hard, Neola asked herself, if one never got what one wanted? Or it took so long that one no longer wanted it when it arrived? She thought she understood the humans better than she wanted to admit, even to herself. Their commanders were children, by Tokomak standards. They had yet to realise what long life would do to their society.
And they can learn, if they look at us, Neola thought. She needed millions of new recruits, men and women who could man the ships and take them into battle ... she knew she’d barely get a fraction of what she needed. And we can’t even force our people to serve.
Her mouth tightened as she contemplated the manpower figures. She’d had to conscript labour from every system within two hundred light years, regardless of its political reliability. She had no illusions, not any longer. The Tokomak Empire rested on the labour of hundreds of alien races who hated it with a passion, who were only kept in line by the threat of overwhelming force. There was no way she could trust the aliens to prepare and crew her capital ships, yet she had no choice. She simply didn’t have enough technicians she could trust. She looked at the nearest starship, silently wishing she could strangle the ancients who’d allowed their people to go to seed. They’d thought their dominance was a natural law.
They’d been wrong.
She turned, remembering the reports trickling in from all over the empire. Entire planets and star systems in revolt, hundreds of starships vanishing in transit ... slow-downs, strikes, even terrorist outrages that, normally, wouldn’t merit attention from Tokomak Prime. But now ... it was impossible to believe things would go back to normal. So far, the troubles hadn’t spread corewards, but that would change. There were billions of servitor races on the core worlds. It would only take a few hundred to cause real trouble.
I could win the war and exterminate the entire human race, she thought. And I might still lose everything.
She gritted her sharp teeth as the console beeped, the sound no doubt heralding another set of extremely good excuses why the local bureaucracy couldn’t do what she wanted. The war was looming, the situation was urgent ... and bureaucrats were still deman
ding paperwork had to be in order before they did anything. It was a headache in peacetime, but in war it was disastrous. The humans would have to be invading Tokomak Prime itself before the system awoke to the peril, and by then it would be too late. The ancients had wanted a finely-tuned system they could control with minimal effort on their part. They’d got it too, at the price of the system being unable to cope with surprises. And the humans had been a surprise.
“Empress, we have received a message from the Council,” her aide said. “They request your urgent presence.”
“Do they now?” Neola scowled. The Council had picked a bad time, although most of them seemed to understand that the human threat had to be taken seriously. “Set course for the planet. We’ll come back later.”
She settled into her chair as the tiny starship altered course, dropping into FTL for the brief hop to Tokomak Prime. Getting the rules on banning FTL for interplanetary transport lifted had been a struggle, even when she’d had near-absolute power. She could have shot a thousand bureaucrats and the rest would have continued to mindlessly oppose her. And there wasn’t even any logic behind the rule. It had just hung around long enough to be accepted practice, utterly unquestionable by mere mortals.
Tokomak Prime came into view as the starship dropped out of FTL. The planet was practically encased in metal, no less than four rings hosting most of the population orbiting the world, linked to the planetary surface through giant orbital towers. And below ... she remembered, grimly, just how many aliens lived on the surface, doing the jobs the Tokomak couldn’t or wouldn’t do for themselves. And they were plotting ... Neola was sure of it. She would have been plotting, if she was in their place. The planet looked strong, the defences almost impregnable, but ... it was rotting from within. When the war was over, something would have to be done.
And it will be done, Neola promised herself. I’ll cleanse the planet even if my people have to wash their toilets for themselves.
“We have a clear teleport corridor to the surface,” her aide said. “Whenever you’re ready ...”
“Do it now,” Neola said.
She snorted as the teleport field gripped her, the starship dissolving into golden light that faded to reveal the council chamber. The ancients had never liked or trusted the teleporter, even though they’d invented it. They’d forced people to take shuttles or walk to their chambers, despite the inefficiency. Neola ... once, she’d thought her position was based on naked force. Now, she could see the value in tradition even as she detested it. The ancients had had a legitimacy to their government she’d always lacked.
“Empress,” Coordinator Hakav said. He and Admiral Kyan were alone. The remainder of the council was nowhere to be seen. “Thank you for joining us.”
“It is my pleasure,” Neola lied. When the war was over, when the pogroms were under way, she would take real pleasure in having Coordinator Hakav killed. He talked to her as if she was a naughty little child, even though there were only a few decades between them. “I trust, however, that it is important?”
Admiral Kyan rubbed his chin. “We have received a set of disturbing reports from the rim,” he said. “The humans have left N-Gann. The last reports stated that Mercado has fallen.”
Neola kept her face expressionless, although she was planning a quite unpleasant posting for the communications officers who hadn’t alerted her first. They didn’t have time for political games. Perhaps a century or two assigned to a polluted rock in the middle of nowhere would teach them a lesson, or at least keep them from causing any more trouble. She put that aside for later and schooled her face into calm. Losing Mercado was embarrassing - she couldn’t deny it - but hardly fatal. The enemy was still hundreds of light years from Tokomak Prime.
“That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected,” she said, evenly. “We knew the system couldn’t be held forever when the humans decided to take it.”
“The humans are sending their entire fleet, and those of their allies, to Tokomak Prime,” Coordinator Hakav said. “To here.”
“Yes,” Neola agreed. “And they will still have to force their way through a dozen bottlenecks, each one stronger than the last, to reach the homeworld itself. And, when they do, they will face layers of defences like they have never seen before, as well as the majority of our fleet. They will be stopped. They will be crushed.”
“Perhaps.” Coordinator Hakav didn’t sound convinced. “However, you appear to have ignored the impression created by losing so many important worlds, however briefly.”
“The humans may take the worlds, if only for a short period.” Neola allowed herself a confident smile. “They will find it a great deal harder to hold the worlds. We will recover them after the human fleet is destroyed.”
“We may lose many more,” Coordinator Hakav said. “There have already been riots on two of the inner worlds. What happens when the next riot gains control of an entire planet? Or a star system? Or even a sector?”
“Coordinating operations across hundreds of light years isn’t easy,” Neola said, coolly. “One world exploding into anarchy doesn’t mean that others will follow.”
“It might,” Admiral Kyan said. “We have already intercepted shiploads of subversive literature coming here, to the very heart of our power. How much did we miss?”
Neola gave him a sharp look. It was a question no one could answer, and he knew it. There were literally millions of warships, freighters, interplanetary transports, tramps and worker craft moving in, out and around the system at any given moment. The war had only made it worse, with so many workers being shipped in and put to work. Internal Security was doing a good job, but it could only search a tiny percentage of the ships moving around the system. If they’d found one load of subversive claptrap, it had been through sheer luck ...
And we have no way to know how much passed unnoticed, Neola thought. The various rebel cells were fond of using primitive methods to communicate, assuming - often correctly - that they’d be overlooked when their ships were searched. There could be a brewing explosion right under our feet and we wouldn’t know anything about it until it was too late.
“And the lack of a communications network only makes it worse,” Coordinator Hakav insisted. “If there’s no network, we cannot break it down and wipe out the individual cells. Instead, we are forced to either locate each cell individually or wait for them to come into the open. And ... even a rumour of a successful uprising might trigger a whole string of uprisings.”
“Then we crush them,” Neola said. She sat down, projecting an air of calm confidence. “We still hold most of the cards.”
Coordinator Hakav snorted. “Assuming we lose a third of our industrialised worlds, we will face the humans and their allies on even terms. And that would be disastrous.”
“The key word there is assuming,” Neola countered. “The worlds you mention are vital indeed, true, but they’re also the ones that are heavily garrisoned and fortified. I have already given orders for the local garrisons to isolate themselves as much as possible from the locals, even servitor troops. They will act with as much force as necessary to crush any riots and revolutions before they become disastrous. A couple of salutary examples will deter any further rebels from raising their heads.”
“The reports suggest the humans managed to get N-Gann back into full production within a week,” Coordinator Hakav insisted. “They don’t have to capture a full third of our industrial worlds to make an impact. They just need to take them off us.”
“Then we destroy the industry before they can be turned against us,” Neola said.
Coordinator Hakav started. “The combines would be appalled.”
Neola put rigid controls on her temper. There was no point in losing it, not now. The empire wouldn’t be in so much trouble if the combines hadn’t been so determined to exploit their servitors in every way possible. They’d gone well beyond cold-hearted efficiency and into open malice, as if they felt driven to torment their slaves. Neola was a fir
m believer in her race’s right to rule the galaxy - only a few dissidents thought otherwise and they were normally sent into exile if they dared question the way of things - but tormenting people, even lesser races, for the hell of it was stupid. No wonder the lesser races were plotting revolution. She would be doing the same if she was in their place ...
The thought gnawed at her mind. Was there another way? Could they discuss peace?
She knew it was impossible. The humans alone were pushing the limits of technology far further than any of her people had ever dreamed possible. Even if the war ended without further ado, even if peace could be maintained without mass slaughter, her people would rapidly be outclassed and relegated to the dustbin of history. And there wouldn’t be peace, not really. The Tokomak had too many enemies. They were locked in a war that they had to win, or face total destruction. In hindsight ...
Coordinator Hakav was speaking. She dragged her attention back to him with an effort.
“It is our belief the human offensive must be stopped before it reaches the core,” he said. “And we are resolved to stop it.”
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