“No, sir,” Hendry said. “But we’re quite some distance from the colony. If they sent a message at the same moment we teleported, sir, it would still be on the way.”
Edward nodded, shortly. He wasn’t used to factoring the speed of light delay into his planning. Marines either had near-instant communications or no communications. The planet might have already realised what had happened ... no, the planet probably didn’t have the slightest idea - yet - what had happened. The speed of light delay cut both ways. The planet wouldn’t have picked up any signals yet.
“Order the operational crew to take command as soon as possible,” he said. His marines were good, but they weren’t trained to operate the station for more than a few short hours. Besides, he needed them elsewhere. “And send a drone back to the fleet. They can start making transit now.”
He allowed himself a feeling a satisfaction, although he knew he was going to get his ass chewed - and not in a fun way - when the commandant heard he’d led the mission in person. The commandant would understand, but ... Edward shrugged. It wasn’t as if he was essential. The marines would go on with or without him. They wouldn’t even have time to mourn until the war was over.
The command core was a hive of activity when he arrived, men in and out of suits hurrying around and fixing datacores to the alien systems. Hendry was talking to a young woman in naval uniform, either explaining what he’d done to the core or bragging about his bravery during the invasion. It was hard to tell. Edward smiled, reminded himself that he’d been young once, too, and perched on the alien command chair. The Tokomak commander had clearly been a plus-size individual. Edward was big and bulky, for a human, and his suit was bigger and bulkier, but he still felt like a child on the chair. It was big enough for three marines ...
He allowed himself to relax as the fleet made transit. The mission had worked better than he’d dared hope. They’d taken the station, they’d made sure no one knew they’d taken the station ... if they were very lucky, they’d made sure the enemy would have to guess how and where Admiral Stuart’s fleet had entered the gravity point chain. Even if they worked out the truth, they wouldn’t know unless they sent a mission to investigate. The occupation crew would keep telling the enemy comforting lies until the deception could no longer be sustained.
“General,” Hendry said. He left the pretty young officer and walked over to the command chair. “Admiral Stuart’s compliments, sir, and she would like to see you on Defiant.”
And that means she isn’t on Defiant, Edward thought, remembering the punchline of a particularly sarcastic joke. But she’s too professional for that, isn’t she?
He stood. “Inform her that I’ll be there in a moment,” he said. There was no point in delaying things. The mission was complete. It was time to move on. “And inform Colonel Despard that he has command.”
“Aye, sir,” Hendry said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“There’s no hint the planet saw us,” Steve said, reassuringly. “Or should I be worried?”
Hoshiko smiled as she played with her fork. She hadn’t felt like eating. Only the fact she’d agreed to dine with her grandfather had kept her from skipping dinner and going straight to bed. The food was good, if composed of rearranged biological matter rather than grown on a farm and cooked by a professional, but ... she just hadn’t felt like eating. And she found it hard to put her fears into words.
“They might have played dumb while dispatching a ship to warn the nearest star,” she said, quietly. The planet hadn’t, as far as her sensors had been able to tell, but that might well be meaningless. The LinkShip could travel in FTL without being detected. Given time, the Tokomak might be able to deduce how it worked and start churning out their own. “We cannot be sure.”
“You could have invaded the planet,” Steve pointed out. “Why didn’t you?”
“Pointless,” Hoshiko said, dryly. Steve had attended the meetings where they’d hashed out the broad strokes of the plan, then passed it to the tactical staff to be converted into something workable. “They don’t have any deep space capability. We’d just be making their lives miserable for nothing.”
“As opposed to making their lives miserable for something,” Steve said. His face, his oddly old-young face, darkened in memory. “I’ve always wondered if the victims appreciated the difference.”
“Probably not.” Hoshiko shrugged. “The end result is the same, whatever the reasoning.”
She forced herself to take a bite. The food tasted good, though nowhere near as good as her mother and grandmother’s cooking. Mariko Stuart had blended American and Japanese traditional foods into a fusion that either worked very well or turned out to be largely inedible. Hoshiko remembered asking why her grandmother kept trying, which had earned her younger self a lecture on why it was important to push the limits and see what they could do. She’d also been told something about defiance, but the explanation hadn’t made sense to her. It wasn’t as if her grandfather and great-uncles had ever refused to eat Mariko’s food.
Probably an Earther concept, she mused. Her stomach growled, reminding her that it had been a long time since she’d eaten. And something we left in the mud when we climbed to the stars.
“You can’t control it,” Steve pointed out. “All you can do is hope for the best.”
“And prepare for the worst,” Hoshiko countered. “Which we have done. I suppose.”
She glanced at the starchart, floating in the middle of the cabin. There hadn’t been a second gravity point within the previous system, which explained - she supposed - why it really wasn’t that economically important. The Tokomak hadn’t really bothered to develop the system, even though there was a second gravity point only a few short light years away. But it was effectively unreachable without FTL. The Tokomak themselves had speculated, years ago, that there might be a lot of gravity points that were unreachable, simply because they didn’t link to a populated system. FTL had opened up the entire universe to them.
And what would have happened, she asked herself quietly, if they’d never solved the mystery?
She considered it for a moment, then shrugged. A great deal of evil would remain undone, but so would a great deal of good. And Earth would have remained uncontacted for thousands of years ... given the way the Earthers had been destroying themselves, the entire planet might have been blown to hell long before the Galactics finally arrived. If they ever did. Absent FTL, a system without gravity points was unlikely to be very interesting. Or remunerative.
And there’s no point in worrying about it, she mused. We have to deal with the world as it is.
“Your grandmother was asking when you were going to get married,” Steve said. “What should I tell her?”
Hoshiko blinked, then realised her grandfather was trying to distract her. “Tell her to mind her own business,” she said. Her people were usually very good at minding their own business. It wasn’t as if she’d grown up on one of the outer cantons. “I haven’t found a suitable partner.”
She snorted. She’d been devoted to her career ever since she was old enough to realise that starship command was a possibility. There had been a handful of lovers - girls as well as boys - but none had stayed with her. It wasn’t that she didn’t want children, one day. It was that she was devoted to her career and ... she had the time, if she wished, to build a name for herself before she took time out to have and raise kids. And find someone willing to raise them with her.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. If he could change the subject to something awkward, she could change it right back. “Why does she think she has the right to ask?”
“You can move from the planet to the stars, but you can’t really get the planet out of you,” Steve said, after a moment. “We oldsters” - he used the term without irony - “grew up in a very different world. What we had to do, back then ... we had different rules, different social guidelines, different everything. And the limits shaped our society.”
&
nbsp; “I know,” Hoshiko said. She’d studied history. Quite a few boneheaded decisions actually made perfect sense when you looked at them through their eyes. “But that doesn’t give you the right to impose your limits on us.”
“I never said it did.” Steve’s voice remained even. “I always knew the changes would be bad as well as good. And that you would take things in ways I wouldn’t expect.”
Hoshiko finished her meal and pushed the plate to one side. “You should have realised,” she said. “Everything changed for the Tokomak when they developed FTL ...”
“Yes, it did.” Steve shrugged. “Did you ever download Atlas Shrugged?”
“No,” Hoshiko said. “Why?”
“It used to be my bible, my second bible.” Steve looked oddly embarrassed. “I thought it made quite a few valid points. It did make quite a few valid points. We were heading downwards when the Horde rediscovered Earth. But ... Rand, the writer, couldn’t envisage how technology would change between her time and the future, or what it would do to human civilisation. Us oldsters couldn’t predict how things would change, but we feared the past. You, on the other hand, find newer and better ways to do things all the time ... without the connection to the past that kept us grounded.”
“I thought that was the idea of the outer cantons,” Hoshiko said. “To allow people to experiment without dragging everyone else down if the experiment fails.”
“It is,” Steve said. “But the real danger, as always, lies with the people who want to impose their views and behaviours on everyone else.”
He stood. “I’m not scared of the war, Hoshiko. I’m scared of what comes after.”
“The galaxy changes, again,” Hoshiko said. “And the human race goes on.”
She watched him go, disturbed in a manner she found almost impossible to articulate. The question - her grandmother’s question - had bothered her more than she thought it should have. Oldsters were always worrying about things like marriage, as if society hadn’t changed ... as if she couldn’t have her biological cycle frozen until she was ready to have kids. The days when women were slaves to their bodies - and men - were long gone. She could have one man or many men or one woman or many women and no one, absolutely no one, could say anything about what she did with consenting adults in private. It was her choice. She was a grown woman. She could do whatever she liked with her body.
As long as I don’t break regs, she thought. Soldiers and spacers gave up a little freedom to protect the freedoms of others. Her superiors would not be amused if she broke them without a very good reason. The rules were flexible, but not too flexible. And if I hurt myself, I’d probably get in trouble for damaging naval property. I belong to the navy until I retire or they kick me out.
She snorted at the joke, then rose to inspect the starchart. The fleet was racing to its next destination, a lone gravity point that linked directly to a chain that ran nearly all the way to Tokomak Prime. It wasn’t perfect - she’d have to make an interstellar hop near the end of the journey - but it would do. And, if she was lucky, the enemy would try to bottleneck her - when they finally realised she was coming - without realising she could make the interstellar hop.
Too much to hope for, she told herself, firmly. A plan that relied on the enemy being an idiot was proof that whoever had come up with it was an idiot. It would be nice to think the enemy would panic and do the wrong thing, but she couldn’t rely on it. She’d just have to assume they’d either move to block her earlier or make a stand at Tokomak Prime itself. And, win or lose, we’ll shake the foundations of their empire.
She walked into her bedroom, undressed rapidly and sank into bed. She didn’t have much time to rest before the fleet reached its destination. It was a shame they couldn’t keep boarding fortresses as they passed, but ... there were just too many fortresses in the next system for them to have a hope of repeating their early success. She ran through the calculations again, telling herself that Admiral Teller would be in position to lure their fleet away from Tokomak Prime. And if she was wrong ...
The intercom shrilled. Hoshiko started, only dully aware she’d fallen asleep. She sat upright, one hand feeling for a weapon that wasn’t there. She rubbed her forehead, forcing sleep out of her eyes. She’d been dreaming, but the dream hadn’t followed her into the waking world. There was just a faint sense of foreboding that refused to clear, no matter what she told herself. Too much was riding on her for her to sleep comfortably.
She touched her terminal. Her voice, when it came, was hard. “Report.”
“Admiral,” Yolanda said. “You asked to be woken when we reached the final waypoint.”
“Yes.” Hoshiko couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice, even though she knew Yolanda was just following orders. For once, it was a perfectly valid excuse. She forced herself to speak calmly, making a mental promise she’d apologise when she had a moment. She’d known too many admirals who saw apologising as a weakness, something to be avoided where possible. “Have the ships tethered, then readied for departure. I’ll join you before we depart.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said. “The fleet will be ready.”
Hoshiko closed the channel, then stood and walked into the washroom. The shower was large enough for three or four people, if they were prepared to be friendly. Her lips quirked. She’d heard of captains and admirals who pulled strings to ensure their lovers were assigned to their staff, so they would have their company on deployment, but she’d never seen it. There would be advantages - she’d enjoyed being able to talk to her grandfather on deployment - but disadvantages too. She had the feeling it would be a major scandal, at least in the military. A deep-space survey ship might operate by different rules.
She showered herself thoroughly, then dried and dressed herself in a clean tunic. The sense of foreboding faded, although it refused to vanish completely. She glanced at the terminal as she left the washroom, but saw nothing to alarm her. The fleet was hovering on the edge of detection range, steadily tethering the first squadron of warships to freighters. It was the same trick they’d used before, repeated on a far greater scale. This gravity point was used to seeing dozens of freighters every week.
And warships to escort them, in these troubled times, Hoshiko thought. She wished there was a way to get around the limits of her technology. She thought she understood, now, the human advantage ... and the limitations it brought with it. What was the point of imagining uses for newer and better technologies if they didn’t exist? She put the thought aside and considered her options. If we could sneak everything up on the gravity point ...
She shook her head. The odds of being detected were too high. And that would mean an alert rushing down the chain ... she knew it would happen, sooner rather than later, but she wanted to delay it as long as possible. It was a shame the next system was heavily developed, with a considerable space-based presence. The odds of them getting a message out were dangerously high.
And they might already know we’re coming, she reminded herself, as she stepped through the hatch and headed for the CIC. She would sooner have known than remain unsure, even if knowing meant being certain the enemy knew she was coming. And if they know, they might have time to react.
The CIC looked strikingly calm. Hoshiko nodded to the marine on duty by the hatch, then inspected the display as the compartment came to attention. The lead squadron was tethered to a cluster of freighters, ready to be towed - again - into the enemy system. A handful of captured warships sat next to them, crewed by volunteers. They knew the danger of plunging blind into a gravity point. She would have preferred to carry out a proper recon mission, but she just didn’t have time. The entire system might be on the alert.
“Admiral.” Yolanda’s voice was crisp, professional. “Force One is ready to depart. Force Two is holding steady on the edge of detection range.”
“As planned,” Hoshiko said. She took her chair, taking a moment to compose herself. “Are we ready to move?”
“Yes, Admir
al,” Yolanda said. “Your fleet is at your command.”
Hoshiko studied the display for a long moment. It was important to remember that the enemy might have picketed the system. If there was a lone starship lurking in the night halfway between the waypoint and the gravity point, they might already be within detection range. The display showed a number of freighters making their way in or out of the system. It would be very difficult to tell they’d been detected until they ran straight into enemy fire.
“Force One is to depart in five minutes,” Hoshiko ordered. There was no point in wasting time. “Force Two is to follow us, whatever happens, in twenty.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said.
Hoshiko took her chair. The fleet wouldn’t take long to reach its destination, but ... what would happen then? A dozen suggestions crossed her mind, few of them good. If the aliens knew they weren’t expecting a convoy, they might sound the alarm. If the aliens realised the convoy’s drive signatures were too large and powerful, they might ... she shook her head, firmly. They’d covered all the bases. They’d done all they could. And some things had to be left to chance.
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