by Chris Bunch
He was wrong on both counts. For once in her life St. Clair was not being selfish. She knew what the news of Sten's escape would do to L'n. Without the crutch of her ideal, L'n was doomed. Second, although St. Clair could not know it, L'n's presence would save both their lives.
* * * *
Sten curled his fingers, and the knife leapt into his hand. He smoothly cut through the dirt, carefully easing it away at first and then clawing at it with growing impatience. Then the night air bit through, chilling them all to the bone, drying the sweat, and clearing the smoke-laden air.
Sten found himself tumbling through. He came to his feet—numb and a little in shock. Below Koldyeze he could see the dim outline of the city with the blackout lights gleaming here and mere. And then he felt Alex come out from behind him, grabbing him around the shoulders and pushing him on.
They were free.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
DURER WAS A major victory.
The general history fiche, to which all Imperial worlds subscribing to the Imperial education scheme subjected their secondary-level students, portrayed the battle in a few, sweeping arrow strokes.
At this time, the attack was made ... here. A red arrow, moving across systems. It was backed by a secondary attack ... here. It was met ... here. A blue arrow.
The results were ... this.
The more curious might acquire a specialty fiche and, given access to a battle chamber, project more details of the battle.
At that point, the bewilderment would begin.
First, Durer was variously called the Durer-Al-Sufi Battles, the First Imperial Counterattack, the Second Tahn Offensive, Fleet Encounters of the Midstages of the Tahn War, and so forth, into degenerative and confusing accounts of the ships involved.
Still more confusing for the eager student were the accounts of anyone and everyone involved in that battle.
The battle(s) became a favorite study of both amateurs and professionals, all of them seeking a perspective that would enable them to understand what had happened during those weeks and, possibly more important to historians, to see some grandness in what otherwise appeared to be a bloody, blindfolded brawl in which several million people had died.
They would look for that understanding and perspective in vain.
Because that perspective never existed.
* * * *
A Mantis Section captain named Bet sat in a spacesuit, watching what looked like the entire Tahn Navy float toward her, and wished that Vulcan had given her a god or six to pray for.
The Emperor had coppered his bets. Yes, he believed that the real attack would be made on Durer. Al-Sufi would be nothing more than a feint. He had so allocated his forces under Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney.
But still...
Light-years beyond Durer drifted what appeared to be the ruined hulks of some Tahn destroyers. A complete flotilla thereof.
They were just exactly that.
What the Tahn did not know was that the flotilla had been ambushed many, many months earlier in an entirely different galaxy by an Imperial battlefleet. Their screams for help had been blanketed and had never been received on any Tahn world. To the Tahn, the flotilla had simply disappeared, probably doing something or other terribly heroic.
The hulks had been recovered, and strong-stomached salvors had cleaned out the ship interiors. Then those destroyers had been given shielded power sources, sophisticated sensors, and shielded com beams and positioned in place, beyond Durer.
They had been crewed with Mantis teams and given orders to sit and wait.
Bet and her team, and other teams, had done just that, fighting against boredom and the feeling that they were being stuck in nowhere for a meaningless mission.
All the teams viewed the assignment as a glory run and swore at the head of Mantis Section for the medal- and obituary-winning idea. Why hadn't far more sophisticated and unmanned sensors been used?
The head of Mantis was not to blame. The idea was completely that of the Eternal Emperor and Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney. Certainly those zoot capri sensors could have been scattered in front of where they felt the Tahn forces would make their real attack. But suppose one of those sensors was found? Would the Tahn not conceivably guess that the Imperial Forces were waiting?
Instead, it appeared far less logical for the Empire to have some dumb troops inhabiting hulks. Plus, cynically, Mahoney pointed out that it would be very unlikely for any Mantis troopie to surrender and be deprogrammable, unlike the average machine.
Cursing, smelling, and sweating, the teams waited.
And then the sensors lit.
More Tahn fleets than even Bet's high-level briefing had suggested swam through space toward her hulks.
Bet burst-transmitted the information, then shut down. Her view of the battle—if there was going to be one—was complete. All she had to do was hope that none of the Tahn battleships or destroyers passing—almost within visual range—bothered to investigate her wreck for survivors.
* * * *
The Eternal Emperor sat aboard the Normandie, his personal yacht/command ship. The ship was as far forward—and three more light-years—as he could logically go without potentially becoming involved in his own battle. His battle chamber was set to give full and complete reports of any and all intelligence forthcoming.
The Emperor figured that Mahoney would very rapidly become involved in the grind of the battle. The Emperor hoped to be able to stand off and help if Mahoney lost track of the grand strategy.
He was earnestly lying to himself when he said that he had no intention of stepping in. He had done everything possible.
The Tahn were moving into his trap quite nicely, the preliminary intelligence reports said—although he was astonished that somehow, somewhere, the anticipated twelve attacking fleets had become more than twenty. He had them cold. On toast. This, he thought to himself, is the beginning of the end. Or, his nonlinear alter ego whispered, the end of the beginning at least.
Bet me, Engineer H. E. Raschid thought. Suppose it's the end of the end?
And so he stood ready to save Mahoney's—and his own—cookies.
Unfortunately robot Tahn ships, intended only to blank off transmissions between the Al-Sufi and Durer systems, slipped through the Imperial perimeter, and the Eternal Emperor found himself sitting in the most sophisticated war analysis room ever installed on a spaceship, listening to static and watching pixels of misinformation interspersed with scattered bursts that showed either the Tahn or the Empire victorious and advancing or defeated and retreating on all fronts.
* * * *
Durer, for the handful of Imperial tacships and destroyers assigned to hold and defend the system, was a very short battle.
There would be seven survivors of the eighty-nine ships that moved against the attacking Tahn fleets. Their orders were to stop the Tahn attack, to prevent landings on Durer, and finally to exert the maximum number of casualties possible.
They were, unknowingly, a suicide force.
The ships that had been assigned to Durer had been mainline attack units—neither obsolete nor state of the art. The Empire planned to maintain as long as possible the deception that Durer was underguarded and not expecting an attack.
The Emperor had therefore made the correct assignments, knowing he was sending people to their deaths.
"The Price of Empire,” it might have been called if the Eternal Emperor had not been several centuries beyond believing such grandiose statements. Those were for the rubes, not the rulers. Besides, this was not the first time, the most murderous time, or certainly the last...
The Durer units’ tactics were well-planned. One flotilla of destroyers came in on the same plane as the incoming Tahn. Two other flotillas waited above the system ecliptic until the forward elements of the Tahn were engaged. Then they dived “down” for the heart of the enemy. Shortly afterward, six wings of tacships came up from “below,” each tacship
under independent command with orders to find targets of opportunity.
All the sailors had done a fast head count of the enemy, realized they were doomed, and—at least for the most part—determined to make their dying quite expensive.
Very noble.
Unfortunately, such noble determination worked very seldom, and mostly in livies.
When the enemy had total numerical superiority, all the tactics in the world would not let the attacker get within killing range.
So it was with the ships from Durer.
The obvious flotilla vanished in long-range missile blasts from the incoming Tahn cruisers long out of their engagement range.
The two high flotillas got in among the fold—but for only seconds. Those thirty-two destroyers barely had time to acquire targets and make first launches before they, too, vanished. Results: Destroyed, four Tahn destroyers, five Tahn logistical support craft. Damaged: two Tahn cruisers, three Tahn logships.
On a battle chamber, or from a grand fleet projection, that left the space beyond Durer cluttered with trash, which the deadly little tacships would have been able to swim through unobserved and deal death.
Battle chambers and grand projections crunched light-years into centimeters. The reality was that the destruction of the Durer ships left whirling wreckage across some twenty light-years. A destroyer's screen, particularly one that was programmed to ignore destroyed targets, showed something different.
A raider, a guerrilla, a pirate—and that was what the tacships were—could not exist on a battlefield.
Perhaps the tacship commanders were overeager. Perhaps the Tahn were expecting an attack from “below.” Perhaps they had bad luck.
No one would ever know.
There were no survivors from those ships.
The Imperial propaganda made much of their doomed attack and made several posthumous awards of the highest degree. Propaganda also said how effective they were: Two Tahn battleships had been destroyed, and one crippled. One Tahn cruiser destroyed, two crippled. Four Tahn destroyers crippled.
Postwar analysis: One destroyer smashed. One cruiser lightly damaged.
But by then no one wanted to be reminded of the war, let alone the fact that some of their dead heroes had died trying to be heroic instead of succeeding.
* * * *
Lady Atago's original strategy had been for one fleet to bombard Durer, a second to invade, and a third to be kept in reserve.
Command on Durer expected something similar.
Ready for the last grand stand, they were surprised when the Tahn fleets swept through the system, well outside engagement range.
And maybe they were a little disappointed, at least at first. After all, when someone screwed his courage to the sticking point only to find it not needed, it took awhile for the stupidity and the adrenaline to subside.
But the disappointment did not last very long as the Imperial Forces on Durer realized that they were alive, that they were likely to stay alive for a while, that the battle was being fought without them, and that they were in ringside seats for it.
That was perhaps why so many of the personal memoirs of the Durer-Al-Sufi battle(s) were done by Imperial troops on Durer.
They lived to dictate them.
* * * *
Lord Fehrle admired perfection on the bridge of his command ship as the first four fleets swept, almost unopposed, out of the Durer System. Ahead of them were rich industrial worlds and then the heart of the Empire. And thus far, the Tahn casualties had been insignificant.
Once again he pointed out to himself the necessity for an overseer. No matter how inspired, the man or woman who was in charge of a task needed someone over him or her, someone who could step back, uninvolved, and see whether that task was destined to be a success, a failure, or, Fehrle thought, able to be taken beyond its humbler goals.
Lady Atago is most brilliant, he thought. But thanks to our system, there will always be someone beyond those brilliant leaders in the field, those who can think, those who can say: Here. Here is the grandness you have overlooked.
Fehrle was basking in that grandness when the Kali missile blew his command ship in half.
* * * *
Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney was not at all surprised when the robot Tahn ships sent his big picture communications into la-la land. He had sort of expected something like that to happen.
In spite of the frownings and suggestions from his highly trained and educated specialists, Mahoney had insisted on setting up a series of links—locked and tight—with specific ships in each of the fleets under his command. Each broadcast came into a separate receiver, manned by an individual tech who was trained to report, not to interpret.
Probably, Mahoney thought, he was being an imbecile and trying to maintain the illusion that he was still a hands-on field officer. Probably all this drakh was going to confuse the hell out of him, make him get obsessed with trivia and lose whatever half-assed strategy he had to fight their battle.
On first contact, that was exactly what was going on.
And then the battle chamber became a kaleidoscope, all his computers started recycling previous information, and his interpreters found themselves with nothing to interpret.
Mahoney told them to keep interpreting, shut off the com links, and started listening to the field reports.
It was a stupid way to try to win.
* * * *
The Tahn had opened the battle believing that they were masters of deception, without allowing themselves much of a margin for error. That was the single biggest error.
But there were many other mistakes that they made.
One of the largest—uncredited by historians because there were no visible heroes—was the failure of the Tahn automatic mine fields.
The Tahn, unlike the Empire, had spent many, many man-centuries developing those unglamorous objects that just sat and lurked until something made them explode. But once they had developed mines that could not only be rapidly deployed but had the sophistication to distinguish friendly from enemy targets and maneuver en masse by command, they had relaxed.
Some years earlier, a young tacship commander named Sten had discovered a fairly nasty way to subvert those mines. The Tahn, who were in the middle of other worries, never realized that. Sten had routinely sent a report through on his discovery.
That discovery, made by someone who was slowly crawling down the intermittently floodlit slope of a Tahn prison camp, was critical.
The Tahn had liberally sowed their mines between Al-Sun and Durer, expecting them to serve not only as a block against the inevitable counterattack but as an early warning system.
Imperial destroyers, part of the fleets lurking in emptiness between and beyond the Al-Sufi and Durer systems, had long ago seen the minelayers seeding their deadliness, registered the mine fields, and then rendered them completely harmless, one by one. The effort was massive and successful. Any specialists who had made a small mistake defusing the devices would not be recognized until after the battle.
* * * *
To the Tahn, the Imperial fleets lanced out of nowhere. Their battle computers, however, quickly analyzed the attack. Conventional. Tacships were screening the attack, with cruiser antiship killers in the forward screen. Behind them came destroyers and then a conventional structure—destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and tacship carriers.
The computers provided the proper response, and the Tahn admirals complied.
The Imperial Forces, however, were not what they had expected.
Mahoney knew good and well that he was a little untrained for grand strategy. Maybe he could have come up with some kind of superplan. He had done a little private research before leaving Prime on what kinds of things grand strategists did to make their living.
The record was kind of grim.
The one-roll-of-the-dice generals had as great a failure rate as success, from Darius to Phillip to von Schlieffen to Giap to M'Khee to P'ra T'ong. Mahoney, figuring he wa
s not even in their class, decided to run war the way he knew how—which was to keep it simple and keep it unexpected.
The tacships were what they appeared onscreen. Mahoney figured that with the confusion he planned behind them, they would have a good chance not only of survival but of wreaking some damage.
Those cruisers were in fact lumbering, unmanned transports with false electronic signatures. Their missiles were set up on a launch-and-forget basis—and were so primitive that they had best be forgotten unless some complete incompetent stumbled into their trajectory.
The destroyers were also false. They were phony-signatured Kali missiles, modified for long range.
After them came the real warriors.
The battle opened.
The tacships swarmed.
The “cruisers” were quickly converted into gas clouds, and the Tahn felt reinforced as to their superiority. Their acquisition gear turned to the destroyers just as those “destroyers” went to full drive and homed on capital ships.
Warriors generally made an assumption: Someone who was attacking behaved in a certain manner. When a dangerous swordsman turned into a berserker, or a bomber into a kamikaze, it took a while to readjust.
The readjustment cost the Tahn most of their cover destroyers and threw the lead three fleets’ battle array into disorder.
That was not a disaster. Admiral P'riser, who had automatically assumed overall command of the battle when Lord Fehrle's ship fell out of communication, ordered the three stalled fleets to engage and the banked fleets behind them to attack through.
The arrow sped onward.
* * * *
Lord Fehrle glummed inside his suit helmet as technicians swarmed around the control chamber of the crippled command ship.
Go here and do this, he thought. He could order, he realized, any of the people around him to breathe space on general principles. Or he could program commands for the fleets he commanded.
Neither of those options would change his situation—the battle was out of his hands, he was getting absolutely no information as to what was going on, and his ship was spinning in emptiness far behind the lines of battle.