Yolanda cleared her throat. “Admiral, the recon units have returned. The gravity point is clear.”
“Take us through,” Hoshiko ordered.
She smiled, grimly, as the fleet advanced into another star system. Graviton had been settled thousands of years ago, although - for reasons the files didn’t make clear - it hadn’t received anything like as much attention from the Galactics until well after they’d discovered the stardrive. She stroked her chin as the display lit up, displaying a mid-sized industrial base spread over three planets and uncounted numbers of asteroids. They were already picking up radio transmissions suggesting there was trouble on the surface, revolts and strikes steadily turning to outright rebellion. Word of their advance had definitely reached the planet. The defenders would have too much else to concern them to worry about her fleet.
And it’s time to give them another surprise, she mused. She didn’t think the plan would work perfectly - it was unlikely they’d get the advantage of surprise - but it would concentrate a few minds. And see just how far we’ve managed to lead them by the nose.
“Inform the fleet,” she ordered. “We’ll light out for Crux as soon as the remainder of the fleet has crossed the gravity point.”
“Aye, Admiral.” There was a tremor in Yolanda’s voice. “We’ll be ready.”
Hoshiko nodded, watching as the display continued to update. The Tokomak would - she hoped - expect her to keep punching through the gravity points. Perhaps she would have done so, if she hadn’t had access to their files. They were still quite some distance from Tokomak Prime, but not far enough to make voyaging through FTL impractical. And they would have a clear shot at Crux along the way. Hoshiko doubted it would make much difference, in the long run, but it was worth trying to lure whatever defenders remained at Tokomak Prime out of position. She had no illusions. Tokomak Prime would be defended to the last.
And if Admiral Teller hasn’t managed to lure their fleet out of place, she mused, they’ll have enough ships to give us an even fight.
She shuddered at the thought, then turned her attention to the reports as they continued to flow into her console. Factions on Graviton were begging for help, swearing everything from alliance to outright servitude if she came to their aid, but she didn’t have time. They couldn’t win Graviton if it cost them everything. Tokomak Prime might know - now - that she was on the way. If they realised she didn’t have to use the gravity points ...
They must know, Hoshiko told herself. They invented the fucking stardrive.
“Admiral,” Yolanda said. “The remainder of the fleet has made transit.”
Hoshiko nodded. “Order the fleet to enter FTL,” she said. “And take us out on a vague course for Crux. We’ll rig up the lines once we’re out of detection range.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said. “FTL in three, two, one ...”
Defiant lurched as she jumped into FTL, the display blanking as she raced out of the system. The remainder of the fleet followed her, pulsing their drives to ensure they remained in communications range. Hoshiko smiled, appreciating the formation. Her crews had drilled together, and fought together, to the point they could fly in a formation that would have made the Tokomak balk. The enemy might be tracking them, but they’d have problems telling just how many ships were in the fleet. The thousands of drive signatures would blur together into an unreadable mass.
And then we’ll start attaching tow cables, she told herself, as she stood. The defenders won’t know for sure what’s coming their way until it’s too late.
She smiled, rather grimly. Her fleet wasn’t the fastest thing in space - courier boats were faster - but it was pretty damn close. The planetary defenders would have sent warnings in all directions, yet ... they might not have had time to see what she intended to do before they dispatched their ships. She wanted to believe they’d have the advantage of surprise, when they reached Crux. But she knew it might not work out so well. The Tokomak might just get an alert up the chain, even without courier boats, in time to organise a defence and dispatch reinforcements.
“I’ll be in my cabin,” she said. “Pass the word to all hands. Well done.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Yolanda said.
Hoshiko nodded and left the compartment. Her crews had done well. Hopefully, the alpha crews would have plenty of time to get some sleep before they reached their target. Crux wouldn’t be an easy target, not by any reasonable standard. The files insisted that it was the most heavily-defended star system short of Tokomak Prime itself.
Her wristcom bleeped as she entered her cabin. “Yes?”
“Your steward seems to think I should join you for dinner,” Steve said. “Should I?”
Hoshiko had to laugh. “I suppose,” she said. The steward was charged with ensuring her mental health, even if it meant ensuring she wouldn’t eat alone. “You’d be welcome.”
She shook her head as she removed her jacket and checked the live feed from the fleet. There’d been surprisingly little damage, thankfully. She’d assumed - feared - that they’d lose more ships, particularly as the Tokomak adjusted their tactics. But then, if she was right about them deliberately forcing her to expend her supplies ... she scowled in frustration. It was never easy to guess which way an alien mindset might jump, not when it might be working from very different assumptions of how the universe worked. The Tokomak might be humanoid, but they weren’t human. She could understand how humans made bad decisions - the decisions were often only bad in hindsight - yet alien mentalities were a closed book. The people who claimed that, one day, everyone would be united in a giant collective brain were probably wrong.
Or it might just be a very long time before we achieve full man-machine integration, she thought, as the hatch opened and her grandfather stepped through. Even LinkShip pilots cannot remain hooked up indefinitely.
“Congratulations on the battle,” Steve said. “You kicked ass.”
“I blew up a number of fortresses that could neither evade nor fight back,” Hoshiko said, crossly. If she’d been defending the gravity point, she would have positioned her fortresses some distance from the point itself and used minefields to seal the gap. It would have given her crews time to react, rather than plunging them into a race they couldn’t possibly win. “At some point, it starts feeling grossly unfair.”
Steve shrugged. “I never had that feeling,” he said. “The people we fought were so horrible that I never felt any sympathy for them. I preferred to mourn their victims.”
“I’m not going soft on them,” Hoshiko said, a little sharper than she’d intended. “I’m just not feeling that heroic.”
“I know.” Steve gave her a reassuring look. “And I do understand.”
Hoshiko sat, rubbing her forehead. It was a display of weakness she would never have allowed herself in front of anyone else, but her grandfather was special. He understood. And he wasn’t - technically - one of her subordinates. She wondered, morbidly, just what would happen if she ordered him off her ship. It would be within her legal rights, as supreme commander of the fleet, but ... it would be an interesting case. The military authorities might not take her side. It was probably a good thing she didn’t want to order him off her ship.
She looked up as the steward rolled a trolley into the compartment. Her stomach growled as she smelt the food, stew with mashed potatoes and peas. The steward laid the table with practiced ease, placed two plates on either side and withdrew as silently as he’d come. Hoshiko stood and motioned for Steve to take his seat. Her stomach was still growling, reminding her that it had been a long time since she’d eaten. Ration bars could only take one so far.
“You eat well,” Steve commented. “And it has all the right things too.”
He smiled. “Do you know how much of a blessing that was, when we had kids?”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Hoshiko said. She knew her grandfather must have had sex at least once, and her parents too, but ... she didn’t want to think about it. Re
ally. “It’s just a way to get people to eat.”
“Precisely,” Steve said. “Kids don’t want to eat things that are good for them. The things they want to eat are - were, in my day - often bad for them. But now, we can produce sweet-tasting things that are actually very good for them.”
“And naval crewmen,” Hoshiko muttered. She cleared her throat. “Is that your way of saying I should eat more?”
“Perish the thought.” Steve grinned at her. “I dare say you’d take it about as calmly as I did, when I was your age.”
“When dinosaurs ruled the planet, then,” Hoshiko needled. It was an old joke. “How old are you?”
“Your grasp of basic history is appalling,” Steve told her. “I’m not that old.”
“It all tends to blur together after a while,” Hoshiko said. She smiled at his expression. “Are you sure you didn’t hunt dinosaurs when you were a kid?”
“I hunted terrorists.” Steve looked into the distance, his eyes grim. “And your war, for all that will happen if we lose, is far cleaner.”
He took a bite of his food. “You should learn to cook,” he added. “It’s a useful skill.”
“I’m aware,” Hoshiko said, dryly. “Is there a point?”
“A couple of writers I used to know - they died before I could get them rejuvenated, like Keith - had a character who used cooking as a way to illustrate political thought.” Steve smiled at her. “Cooking isn’t a matter of throwing things into the pot and seeing what happens. It’s more of an art, when you put precisely the right things together and do precisely the right things to them. I took it up myself because it was a good insight.”
He smiled in happy memory. “Though there was one time I misread the instructions and added cloves - real cloves - instead of garlic cloves. It gave the food a certain ... I don’t know what.”
Hoshiko frowned. “Pardon?”
Steve shrugged. “Something we left behind, a little,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. We’ll see.”
Hoshiko frowned. Her grandfather wasn’t known for rambling, unlike some of the oldsters who’d been slipping into senility before they’d been rejuvenated. He always had a point, even though she hadn’t always been able to see it. She’d always enjoyed talking with him, when she’d been a child, but now ... she was in command of the fleet. She didn’t have time to engage in discussions ...
Or maybe I do, she thought. It isn’t as if I can do anything until we reach the first waypoint.
She met his eyes. “What do you intend to do, when we win?”
“It depends on the outcome,” Steve said, dryly. “We discussed it pretty extensively, back home, before I was dispatched to join you. There are a set of rough guidelines for what we want from any peace talks, but ... a lot depends on what happens. It would probably be a mistake to kill the people who can surrender.”
“Assuming we can force them to surrender,” Hoshiko pointed out. “They might battle us to a draw.”
“Yeah.” Steve looked pensive. “Or they might defeat us in a straight fight. The cousins across the pond used to say they lost every battle, but the last. I wonder if the Tokomak feel the same way too.”
“They told everyone they were utterly invincible,” Hoshiko reminded him. “And now, as they suffer defeat after defeat, their claims are starting to look a little hollow.”
“Quite.” Steve chewed a piece of meat thoughtfully. “It was probably unwise of them to overpromise. Or oversell themselves, for that matter. Nothing they can reasonably accomplish, nothing at all, can live up to their grand claims. They had to have known they could have lost a battle, even a small skirmish between two tiny warships. Did they not know ...?”
“There have been plenty of humans who made the mistake of assuming they couldn’t possibly lose,” Hoshiko commented. “And the Tokomak had thousands of years of unchallenged supremacy before we came along.”
“And they could have overwhelmed Earth in an instant if they’d decided to take us seriously, back when I was a boy.” Steve laughed, humourlessly. “You know what happened when I was your age?”
“I take no interest in boring pieces of history,” Hoshiko said, deadpan.
Steve snorted, clearly realising he was being teased. “There were people who claimed that Earth was being visited regularly by flying saucers. There were stories about humans being abducted by little gray men and anally probed, then being dumped back on the planet after a whole series of humiliating sexual experiments. And ... there were people who made a living using hypnotic regression to bring back buried memories of alien abduction and suchlike, people who claimed the entire government was secretly being run by aliens ...”
“You mean it wasn’t?” Hoshiko smiled. “You’re the one who kept saying they came up with insane decisions, following logic no mere mortal could understand.”
Steve shrugged. “Point is, back then we didn’t know anything about galactic civilisation. It never occurred to us that the galaxy would know about us and simply not give a damn. Sure, there were people abducted by aliens. But they never came home and they never told their stories. It wasn’t until the Horde tried to abduct me that we realised the truth. We were tiny on an interstellar scale. Why the hell should the Galactics care about us?”
“It was a crazy time,” Hoshiko said.
“Yes, exactly.” Steve smiled. “The stories probably said more about us than any aliens who might have visited the world. Back then, it was easier to believe that we were being tricked or something rather than accept that we were responsible for ourselves. The whole world was going crazy.”
“But you survived,” Hoshiko said.
“Barely,” Steve countered. “It really was a crazy time.”
Hoshiko met his eyes. “And what’s your point?”
Steve looked back at her, evenly. “The Tokomak might not realise that the time has come to negotiate with us,” he said. “We’re nothing more than upstarts in their view, a child-like race that has somehow gained control of Galactic-level technology and improved upon it. And if that’s the case, they may keep talking down to us until it’s too late.”
“For them or for us?” Hoshiko leaned forward. “They have to realise ...”
“They don’t.” Steve sighed. “There was a time, a hundred or so years before I was born - an eyeblink, to the Galactics - when Europe viewed China as the font of all civilisation. The Chinese had a higher civilisation than Europe ... or so they thought. The Chinese thought the same. They thought they could crush the Europeans at any point. It took far too long for both sides to realise that the balance of power had shifted. And by the time it did, it was too late. The handful of Chinese who realised the truth were defeated by their own people, far more than any Europeans. China couldn’t reform and so China tore itself apart.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they would have made it, if they hadn’t been invaded and fought over,” he said. “Or maybe they would just have sunk into stagnation. Point is, the people in charge might not realise they’ve lost even if you’re pointing a gun at them. If you’re that ossified, it may take you years to realise you’re no longer in charge.”
“Like Great-Uncle Roper,” Hoshiko said. The old man in a young man’s body had been disturbingly senile. There had been times when she thought it would have been kinder to let him die. “He still thinks he’s in Vietnam.”
“Worse than that,” Steve said. “Your uncle isn’t leading an entire country into the fire.”
“Or a star system,” Hoshiko said. “Or an interstellar empire ...”
Her terminal bleeped. She keyed it. “Go ahead.”
“Admiral, we’re coming up on the first waypoint,” Yolanda said. “We’ll start attaching the tethers as soon as we drop out of FTL.”
“Very good,” Hoshiko said. “Inform me when all the tethers are attached.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
Chapter Thirty
“Duck!”
Martin hit the deck as a spray of plasma fire
shot over his head and stuck the far bulkhead, splashes of superhot light flaring wildly. He glanced at Butler, then unhooked a grenade from his belt, shouted a warning and hurled it down the corridor. An alien shape threw itself forward, landing on top of the grenade. Martin had a moment to feel a flicker of respect - and pity - for the alien, before the grenade exploded. The blast vaporised the alien’s body and tore the strongpoint apart.
He threw a second grenade down the corridor, then led the charge forward as it detonated. The defenders - Tokomak and their allies, or collaborators who dared not be taken alive - had dug in, sealing off all possible angles of attack as they waited for rescue. Martin knew they couldn’t be allowed to die on the vine, not when they were constantly screaming for help from the gravity point defences. He felt the metal vibrate under his feet as another explosion, bigger this time, detonated in the distance. It had to have been a big one. The ring was normally as solid as any planetside structure.
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