by Chris Bunch
"They just needed some clean-cut types to stand in front of a demonstration to wave signs at a livie crew. We all stood there in the sun for five hours or so, and then Lady Atago came out to make general nice and urged us to commit suicide. We all thought this over for a bit and said that was okay, but can we go home now?
"No such luck. Atago said stick around there's gonna be a show. And we were treated to eleven more hours of traitors confessing their sins on the big screen and then getting themselves geeked for our pleasure."
"Any traitors in particular? L'n asked.
"The ones we made up. Toward the end there, I almost felt sorry for them."
"Thae'll no be blame in pity, young Sten,” Alex said, “so long a’ y’ dinnae make a habit ae it."
Sten did not comment. Instead he did a little gentle whining for food, and while he ate, he filled them in on his mission to Koldyeze.
"What do we do next?” St. Clair asked.
"Right now there's not much more we can do. We keep our agent network nit and tiddy. Feed the corruption meter whenever the flag pops up. And make general low-profile pains of ourselves."
"Clottin’ borrring,” L'n said. “Where's all the romance and pulse throbbing you promised? Intrigue! Danger! Clandestine action! I didn't sign on to be bored, cheena!"
Everybody laughed.
"I'm afraid that's what's in the cards for a little while,” Sten said. “We've done all we can to this point. Now we have to wait for events to catch up to us. Big events. That we have no control over. Like in the Fringe Worlds. And Cavite."
He got up and refilled everyone's glass with brew.
"Although I hate to confess this, it's sorta like Alex's story,” he went on. “We've got the Tahn by the scrotum in the jaws of a big steel trap. But they still don't know they're hurting yet.
"So we gotta wait until they reach the end of the chain."
[Back to Table of Contents]
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
THE EMPIRE HAD learned—at least slightly—from the slaughter in the Pel/e systems.
Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney looked at the preinvasion bombardment plans for the Fringe Worlds and snarled, “Double it."'
"Double what, sir?"
"Everything."
His staff looked at the overheads and followed orders. Twice the conceivable amount of ordnance was scheduled for delivery on the Fringe Worlds, and then, once more, Mahoney told them to double that.
He doubted it would work—but then, Mahoney had never been convinced that putting a man where a bomb or a bullet might go necessarily worked.
But he would do the best he could.
He would have liked to have leveled the worlds as he had done to the Erebus System—but there were civilians resident. Mahoney wondered how many of them had survived not just the Tahn conquest but the subsequent occupation.
Had he his druthers—but he did not.
Finally there came a day when there was no return fire taken on any of the Fringe Worlds selected for invasion.
Mahoney ordered the assault.
He acted knowing that the Tahn defenders would come out of the rubble as if all the firepower expended had been so many fireworks.
He was quite correct—which was why Mahoney chose to disobey orders.
* * * *
According to the Eternal Emperor and his psych staff, Mahoney's return to the Fringe Worlds was what the Emperor insisted on calling, using jargon unknown to anyone around him, a “photo opportunity.” Whatever the clot a photo was did not matter—his propagandists went into motion.
Before Mahoney's battlewagon lifted with the fleets toward the Fringe Worlds, several chaingun galleries had been stripped of weaponry and converted into press suites. As many livie crews and journalists as could fit were packed in.
The battleship was supposed to land on Cavite, center of the Fringe Worlds, in the fourth wave. Assumption: First wave gets slaughtered, second wave takes casualties but holds, third wave consolidates, and we can land some camerabeings in the fourth wave. Bangs will still be banging, but nobody's going to get killed.
Least of all Ian Mahoney as he strode nobly down the ramps of his battleship and made a noble statement that he had returned or declared this world open or whatever noble statement he chose. Noble statement-type propagandists were assigned to his staff.
Unfortunately, on L-Day, H-hour, Mahoney was nowhere near his command ship.
He was strapped into a troop capsule on an assault transport next to the First Guards’ command sergeant major, a noncom whose body, guardsmen thought, had been replaced sixteen times, bit by bit over the decades, but whose brain had never been modified after the CSM had been declared clinically dead a century or so before.
Mahoney had forgotten how much it hurt when the transport, just in-atmosphere, blew its twenty assault capsules down toward the surface below. He had also forgotten just how many times “down” changed places as the capsule dived toward the robot homer below.
Just before impact, he and the sergeant major forced grins at each other: See, we're used to this drakh. Neither of them realized how much his own smile resembled the rictus of a corpse or thought about it as the capsule slammed down in the usual semicontrolled crash. Semicontrolled was defined as less than fifteen percent incapacitating injuries on landing.
The minicharges exploded and the capsule's walls blew off. The straps came free, and Mahoney grabbed his willygun and stumbled out into the rubble of Cavite.
There were various reports as to what noble pronunciations on the order of “I have returned” or “Lafayette nous arrivons" Mahoney made as his boots crashed down. They were all tissues of lies.
His first observation: “I forgot how much this clottin’ armpit world smells like an open—incoming!"
And Mahoney chewed gravel as the missile smashed down bare meters away.
* * * *
The First Guards had been singled out for the “honor” of being the first to land on Cavite by Mahoney. Years before, the division had been wiped out holding Cavite in the opening of the Tahn War. Only a handful of noncoms, officers, and technicians had been evacked during the retreat at the Eternal Emperor's personal orders. They had been used as a cadre to reform the unit with fresh blood and then sent back into combat.
Mahoney thought they deserved the “privilege” of revenge. He might have been a little battle-happy in his thinking. There were no more than a dozen guardsmen who had been on Cavite—the grinding down of the Tahn had ground the division, as well. In addition, they still had not finished training the replacements after the Naha.
The “honor” that all the combat-experienced troops would have liked was a return to Prime, a nice parade, and the next half century spent garrisoning some R&R world. Two beats after the first Wheep-Crack past his or her ear, even the most gung-ho replacement agreed with that idea.
But the Guards pushed on, day by bloody day, across the planet and into Cavite City. The battle was a reversal of their bitter defeat—now they had complete air and space superiority and an unlimited amount of weaponry and ammunition.
Not that the Tahn defenders surrendered. K'akomit'r, in their language, meant both “I give up” and “I do not exist."
Most of them chose just that—fighting to the last round, then suiciding with a grenade or charging armor with an improvised spear. Mahoney saw one stubby Tahn private, surrounded, tap-arm a grenade on the ground and then tuck it under his combat helmet. By that time he and the other battered guardsmen around him thought the subsequent explosion the best joke of the day.
Less than an hour later, one of Mahoney's aides, one who had landed on the battleship, found the fleet marshal and handed him a message.
EYES ONLY, from the Eternal Emperor. The message was in an old Mantis code that Mahoney could decipher blindfolded and in a typhoon. It read:
QUIT PLAYING GAMES AND GET BACK TO WORK.
Mahoney growled, stripped his combat vest of grenades and magazines, threw them to a nea
rby guardsman, and headed back to maps, computers, and projections.
* * * *
Lady Atago fulfilled her vow.
Every Tahn fleet that was combatworthy was grouped and launched at the Fringe Worlds. She ruthlessly stripped reserve and home defense squadrons of all warships and sent them into battle.
The slogans were chanted, and the livies were ominous with takeoff after takeoff.
The Empire's defeat was certain.
It was very uncertain to a nameless Tahn supply officer who sat in the cramped cubicle of his obsolete battle cruiser. Finally he shut off the com that was still broadcasting inspirational messages from the council and stared at his screens.
He keyed to the bottom line of all of them.
* * * *
CREW: 50% of mandated personnel. 11% rated “Trained.” 4% “Station-trained."
SUPPLIES: 71% required for mission accomplishment including return to base.
ARMAMENT: 11% bunker capacity chainguns; 34% tube capacity missiles.
SYSTEMS: 61% functional.
As he watched, the “sixty-one percent” hesitated, then changed to “fifty-eight percent” as, somewhere in the guts of the ship, another weapons system succumbed to cumulative wear.
* * * *
The livies that showed the Tahn going off into the final battle were supposedly broadcast live. Atago, no fool, was not about to allow that.
Accidents, after all, could happen. And accidents were most demoralizing even to the thoroughly conditioned Tahn populace—which was why the livies showing the takeoff of those three brand new superbattleships that had chilled Sten were never seen.
One of them—the replacement for Atago's obsolescent and battered Forez—was not scheduled for the assault.
But the other two were.
One, the Panipat, lifted up to twenty meters away from its massive docking cradle before losing two Yukawa drive units and almost crashing. Only skillful pilotage brought it back down, seemingly undamaged. Immediate system analysis showed, however, that not only were the two drive units out, but all other units would be failure-prone. Also, the AM2 drive would produce no more than fifty percent capacity.
There were no explanations—except that all three ships had been slammed together, even more hastily built than were the usual Tahn warships. Plus, in a time when all strategic materials were in critical shortage, compromises had been made.
The new Forez-class ships might have looked awesome. But there was not a lot of them there.
The third ship, the Gogra, lifted successfully. Out-atmosphere from Heath, the ship's commander ordered the ship and its four escorting cruisers into AM2 drive.
Someone blundered.
The Gogra and one cruiser managed to collide. Collisions, in the macrodistances of space, never happened.
This one did.
There were no survivors from either ship, so no explanations as to exactly what had gone wrong were ever available.
* * * *
Just beyond detection range of the Fringe Worlds, the Tahn fleets three-pronged for the assault, becoming the first, second, and third attack forces. The formations, timing, and deployment would have produced, from any prewar Tahn admiral, relief of at least half of the ships’ captains and probably a tenth reminded of their “honor” and given one projectile round.
But there were not very many prewar Tahn admirals, let alone ship captains, left. Their bodies were desiccated in space, filmed across the bulkheads of shattered ships, or were simply a no-longer-visible contribution to entropy.
But war was the fine art of making do with what one had.
Plus the Tahn knew that destiny was on their side.
Destiny, of course, was generally on the same side as God.
And so the Tahn fleets attacked the big battalions.
The Tahn second attack force never made it to the Fringe Worlds.
Admiral Mason, commanding six destroyer squadrons from the bridge of a brand-new cruiser, was waiting. His ships were lying doggo, barely within detector range of each other, as the Tahn came in. The first DD making contact linked up, and Mason sent all in ships in carefully and endlessly rehearsed attack formations.
They broke the Tahn on the first sweep, then went independent. Mason's skippers might have been drilled to the point of brainburn, but secretly each of them was proud to serve under a killer like Mason—even if he was a complete clot, he still put them “in harm's way."
The Tahn battleship that was flagship for the second force center was killed by at least three launches from three separate ships, and all command of the ragtag fleets was gone.
At that point Mason grudgingly reported to his superior—and nine full Imperial fleets came in to finish the job.
One Tahn cruiser, eleven destroyers, and a handful of auxiliaries, all damaged, survived to break off and limp back to Heath.
Admiral Mason had to admit that his ships had performed adequately.
A full sector away, Fleet Admiral Ferrari fought his battle almost perfectly.
He had had more than enough time, since Intelligence had alerted him that the Tahn fleets had launched, to prepare himself.
He had run endless progs on several screens as to what exactly the oncoming first attack force would do. He even had an Imperial Intelligence strategic/tactical bio-fiche on the Tahn admiral in command. Some clot named Hsi, Ferrari thought, who's been piloting a bureaucracy for most of the war. Now, what did he do to get himself beached? He consulted another bio-fiche—one that, although Ferrari never knew it, had come from Sten and St. Clair's intelligence.
"The gentleman,” Ferrari thought aloud, “appears to have managed to lurk up on four Imperial fleets way back when and make them unhappy. That should not mean that ... mmh. Perhaps he has well-connected friends? No. Ah. Here is the tiny malfeasance. Appears to have lost control of his units during the midpoint of the battle. Incurred casualties. Mercy."
Ferrari smiled to himself. So the clot did not know his midgame.
Ferrari blanked all the progs. They were all incorrect. He knew where Hsi would attack.
Admiral Hsi had planned to use the “clutter” of the Sulu systems to mask his approach on the Caltor System and Cavite itself. There was no way that even the sophisticated Imperial detectors could pick up his fleets before they attacked.
Hsi had not calculated that the reverse was also true—the Tahn detectors showed the Sulu systems as a blur of asteroids.
They did not pick out Ferrari's waiting fleets until the last few seconds. Ferrari was slightly disappointed; he had hoped that the Tahn would come in even closer before he began the battle.
But it was enough—and he ordered action.
Looked at from “above,” two-dimensionally, Ferrari's fleets came laterally across the spearhead of the Tahn force—what had been known as “crossing the tee.” All Imperial weapons could acquire targets, but the Tahn weapons systems were “masked” by their own formation.
Ferrari hammered in on them. The battle, at that point, went from chess to the greater subtlety of battle-axes at one meter as the Imperial fleets slaughtered Hsi.
Hsi ordered his force to break off battle, retire, and regroup.
Ferrari sent his units after them, and the battle continued, a blind melee in the emptiness between systems.
Ferrari won, quite handily. Again, only a few Tahn ships survived.
But he had made one mistake.
When he had decided to go after Hsi, he had neglected to inform Mahoney, who was trying to coordinate the battle from Cavite, of his decision. He had left a large, undefended hole in the perimeter around the Fringe Worlds. And through that hole, three E-days later, poured the Tahn's third attack force.
There were no Imperial combat fleets between it and Cavite.
* * * *
Someone once said that most heroes could be explained simply as sane people deciding to do something that was completely insane.
William Bishop the Forty-third would have d
efined the action that won him the Galactic Cross and his second star as something that only a nut who had managed to convince himself he was not a nut would have even begun.
So far, Bishop had not had that bad a war.
He had originally been a guardsman, an infantry sergeant who had gotten his share of gongs for ducking at the appropriate moment in the appropriate place. Realizing that if he went into places where people were shooting at him, eventually they were going to connect, he had volunteered for flight training.
His intentions were to graduate and then push big ugly clot transports around the sky until his time came up, then work quietly on his own abstruse mathematical figures. The only other medal he wanted was some kind of long service without getting caught doing anything too terrible award.
He was a natural pilot.
When he had graduated as part of Sten's flight training class, he had gotten the assignment he had wanted.
But things had caught up with him.
Perhaps it was that no one could believe that a man with that many medals, who looked like that much of a commando, had no interest in seeing any more combat. Or perhaps someone with a sense of history had looked up who William Bishop the First was.
But in any event, Bishop not only had been forcibly transferred from his REMF supply wagon to an assault transport but had been given more and more promotions.
Currently he was a one-star admiral in charge of two divisions of assault craft. Worse yet, he had been hand selected to be in charge of the Cavite landings.
A man could get dead doing things like that, he had thought. Going in.
But so far, not much had happened—not much, at least to Bishop's mind. The air-to-space missiles, the Tahn tacships, and the occasional suicide attack had been discounted.
Bishop was determined that it was not that bad a war. Survive this, he thought, and all I have to make it through is the final landing on Heath.
That produced a wince and another train of thought. It was more important to wonder whether Fermat was not right, after all. In the meantime, his assault ships went in on Cavite, their support transports cross-loaded, and the handful of combat craft kept the Tahn mosquitoes away.