William agreed. The basic equation hadn’t changed since the war had begun. The side that gambled everything on a single throw of the dice would either win a complete victory or suffer the most disastrous—and avoidable—defeat since Midway. Even the Theocracy had limits to how far it was prepared to gamble, despite being certain God was on its side. He couldn’t see Kat taking the risk unless she was desperate. And yet, the hell of it was that she would be desperate. Either she won the war quickly, or she conceded eventual defeat.
And the king will know this, he mused as the meeting finally came to an end. He’d have to find an excuse to avoid the next one. Being a few hundred light-years away should suffice. And he will be ready to gamble . . .
William shuddered. The king had gambled, and so far he’d been winning. Even when he hadn’t won outright, he hadn’t lost either. He had talent, William conceded, although it was largely untrained. He’d built enough fallback positions into his plans to save himself from certain defeat, enough redundancies to keep his enemies confused about what he’d actually done. And that meant . . .
William let out a breath as the holographic images vanished. He’d just had an idea.
CHAPTER FIVE
CALEDONIA
From a distance, the fleet looked formidable.
It was formidable, Kat told herself as she studied the holographic display. Five squadrons of superdreadnoughts surrounded by more than four hundred smaller ships—battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and gunboat carriers. It represented a force that could take on the entire Theocratic Navy and crush it effortlessly, perhaps even without so much as getting its paint scratched. The crew would have more problems with hangnails than enemy fire. She would have loved to have such a fleet under her command at Cadiz. The war would have lasted less than a day.
But the weaknesses were all too apparent to one who knew what to look for. There was no shortage of manpower—the king had recruited thousands upon thousands of merchant spacers and retired naval crewmen—but nearly everything else was in short supply. Kat knew, with a sickening certainty that could not be denied, that she couldn’t risk engaging the enemy in a long-range missile duel. She simply didn’t have enough missiles. She might win one engagement and find the enemy had smashed her to atoms the next because she could neither return fire nor close the range. And the shortage of spare parts was growing worrying. Her engineers were working overtime to modify older components sourced from god-knows-where, but they couldn’t be brought up to frontline standards. A competent Inspectorate General inspection would probably have resulted in her being relieved of her command, if she didn’t get thrown in the brig for willfully endangering her personnel. Her fleet was not ready for a full-scale engagement, not yet. She was starting to wonder if it ever would be.
She allowed her eyes to track over the holographic display, noting the hundreds of modified civilian ships that had joined the fleet. The colonials had no shortage of bravery—she’d seen that during the last war—but there were limits to what bravery could overcome. They might be able to take on a destroyer and henpeck her to death. A superdreadnought would cut most of them down in seconds and never notice it had been in a fight. She’d seen a hundred tactical sims suggesting the colonials might be able to take down a naval squadron, but she didn’t believe them. They represented a triumph of wishful thinking over cold reality.
Unless our forces get very lucky, they’ll all be killed for nothing, she thought as she watched a team of engineers bolting missile pods to a bulk freighter. Perhaps the plan was to make the enemy die laughing. The trick would be effective against pirates, who needed to close the range to take their targets intact, but a warship would simply blow any suspect freighter away from long range. And their deaths won’t even be noted in the ship’s log.
She rubbed her tired eyes as she reached out and clicked off the holographic display. It vanished, revealing a string of reports waiting for her. She glared at them, cursing once again the shortage of personnel officers and other bean counters. The irony would have made her laugh if there were an ounce of humor in it. She’d always joked, as had every other frontline officer, that the key to making the navy more efficient was to put the bureaucrats out the nearest airlock, but the truth was they needed bureaucrats. Too many bureaucrats could spoil the navy, sure, yet so could too few. And the vast majority of experienced bureaucrats had sided with the House of Lords. She simply didn’t have enough staff officers to make everything work.
We don’t have enough time to smooth things out, she mused. And they’re probably already overcoming their problems.
The doorbell chimed. She looked up. “Come.”
Lieutenant Kitty Patterson stepped into the compartment. “Admiral, I have the latest updates from the spooks.”
“Great.” Kat told herself, firmly, not to take her bad mood out on her subordinate. “Did they discover anything important? Anything we could use?”
“No, Admiral,” Kitty said. “But they seem very sure the House of Lords is planning a major offensive.”
I didn’t need them to tell me that, Kat thought crossly. She knew the score. The tactical situation might be constantly changing, but the strategic aspects of the civil war were unchanged and effectively unchangeable. If they want to win the war, they have to come here and capture or kill the king.
She keyed her terminal, bringing up the starchart. It still felt odd to be struggling with a strategic problem that, only a few short months ago, would have seemed unthinkable. The king had to recapture Tyre or lose the war; the House of Lords had to capture Caledonia or . . . or, perhaps, not lose the war. She snorted at the thought. The stalemate couldn’t continue. No, it wouldn’t continue. The House of Lords would keep bringing older ships into service and churning out new ones, readying the force they needed to crush the king’s fleet and invade every colonial world. Kat had no illusions about what would happen to her ships once they were cut off from all succor. Even if they managed to evade the enemy fleet, they’d rapidly run out of supplies and wind up choking as their life support died. She’d read the reports on the handful of captured Theocratic ships. They’d been so badly maintained that they’d been more dangerous to their crews than their enemies.
“We need a way to take the offensive ourselves,” she mused. “And that isn’t going to be easy.”
She brought up the intelligence reports from Tyre. The planet had always been heavily defended but now was practically impregnable. Planetary Defense had belonged to the House of Lords, which hadn’t stinted on building up the strongest defenses known to man. The planet was ringed with everything from orbital battlestations to automated weapons platforms and even minefields, backed up by a sizable fleet. Kat knew it was just a matter of time before the House of Lords worked up the nerve to cut the fleet loose, confident their fixed defenses could handle any reasonable threat. And they might be right. The king could do immense damage to Tyre, if he risked an attack, but he couldn’t reoccupy his homeworld without taking massive losses. He could win the battle and yet lose the war.
And destroying the planet’s industrial infrastructure would make it worthless, she thought grimly. The colonial officers had suggested as much, pointing out that weakening Tyre would help them in the long run. Kat could see their point, but she hated the thought of killing trained people and destroying installations her family, among others, had worked so hard to build. And the engagement would weaken us if one of the outside powers comes calling.
“We could try to pinch off a section of their fleet,” Kitty suggested. “If we could weaken them, they might come to the table.”
Kat scowled. On paper, the ploy might have worked. In practice, it would be a little harder. Grand Admiral Rudbek was known for being about as imaginative as a barmy bureaucrat—competent at bureaucratic power games, incompetent at actual strategy and naval combat—while William was hardly a fool. Her heart twisted in bitter pain. William should have sided with her, not the House of Lords! He wasn’t a
client who had no choice but to follow where his patron led. He should have stayed on her ship, stayed with her . . . She would have given her right arm for someone who could be relied upon to do a good job.
“They wouldn’t let us lure them out of place that easily, not if we demonstrated in front of Tyre itself,” Kat said. “They’d stay near the planetary defenses and force us to engage them there.”
Or devastate the asteroid settlements, she mused. And that would cost us missiles we cannot afford to lose.
She shook her head. “Do we have an update on missile resupply?”
Kitty switched subjects without missing a beat. “The first-rank supplies are practically tapped out,” she said. “The various industrial nodes are churning out more as we speak, but supplies will be very limited for the next few months. The second- and third-rank supplies are on the way, but they’re not frontline missiles. And sooner or later they’ll be tapped out too.”
“Of course,” Kat said. “They’re not in production any longer.”
And they’d be worthless if they were, her thoughts added. The Royal Navy had improved its missiles remarkably over the last few years, always looking for another edge over its enemies. The missiles they’d stockpiled before the war were little more than glorified fireworks now, at least when deployed against frontline forces. She supposed the technological gap was why the House of Lords had left the stockpiles in place. The colonies couldn’t use them against the Royal Navy.
She eyed the reports with a sense of growing dread. The king might have a point, when he said they needed to seek help from outside. They needed modern missiles or . . . they’d lose. The local industries simply couldn’t meet the demand for missiles, not when they were being expended almost as soon as they were produced. And Hadrian’s forces were putting immense strain on their productive nodes. It wouldn’t be long before they started to have serious problems.
And once production starts breaking down completely, she reminded herself, we’ll be within shouting distance of losing the war.
She looked up at her subordinate. “How’s morale holding up?”
Kitty’s face went blank, suggesting she was trying to decide how best to present bad news. Kat winced inwardly. She wasn’t one of the officers who had a reputation for shooting the messenger, but . . . it was never easy to predict how an admiral would respond to bad news. They tended to develop a certain level of insulation from reality, which often led to a belief that their will alone was enough to reshape reality into a more agreeable form. And the longer they stayed off the command deck, the harder it was to remember that shit happened. One could do everything right and still lose the battle.
“Mixed, Admiral,” Kitty reported, finally. “There’s still faith we’ll win the war, but . . . it’s starting to sink in that the war isn’t going to be over by Christmas.”
“If it was, that would probably not be good news,” Kat commented dryly. “The House of Lords would have won.”
“Yes, Admiral.” Kitty gathered herself. “There have also been some clefts opening up between the colonials and . . . well, us. The Tyrians. The former think we should be pressing the war against Tyre, the latter think we should continue to fight a limited war . . .”
Just as I thought, Kat reminded herself.
“. . . And what happened on Tarleton didn’t do wonders for morale,” Kitty said. “On one hand, Admiral, they know we won a battle we couldn’t possibly have lost. On the other, they see the justiciar as a villain and think the king massively overstepped. But . . . it’s hard to be sure how many people believe that. They don’t always talk to staff officers.”
Because staff officers are regarded as sneaks, Kat thought. She’d done a mercifully short stint as a staff officer, something that, in hindsight, had been clear preparation for a later promotion. They think Kitty will take anything she hears to me.
She tapped her terminal, calling for coffee. There was no time to sleep. There was no time to do anything that might have passed for relaxation. She’d ordered her crew and officers to rotate through the planet’s shore leave facilities, to make sure they had some rest before they had to go back to the war, but she couldn’t. Not now. Perhaps not ever. Her lips quirked as she remembered the joke about the junior officer who’d gone to a crewman’s brothel. They might have discovered that the poor bastard actually had balls, but . . . it hadn’t been good for discipline. Officers were supposed to be a cut above their crews. Their crews were certainly not supposed to see them relaxing.
Which is stupid, she told herself crossly. We don’t become robots when they pin rank badges on us.
“Try to keep an eye on the situation,” she said, looking at Kitty. “And try to reassure them that I won’t hold their opinions against them.”
“Right now, there aren’t many people who’ll talk outside their departments,” Kitty warned. “Our departments are fairly stable, Admiral, but our crews are not. We keep switching too many people around.”
“I know,” Kat said. “Do you have any better suggestions?”
“No, Admiral.” Kitty bit her lip. “I am aware of the problems facing us. But it is my duty to make you aware of the downsides . . .”
Kat nodded, once. “I don’t hold that against you either.”
She studied the display for a long moment. The hell of it was that she could have done something to upset the balance, if she was prepared to take risks. She was prepared to take the risks, but the king . . . might have other ideas. Kat understood his problem—if he lost a sizable chunk of his fleet, he would lose the war along with it—yet she also understood the overall problem. A long, drawn-out war would end with the House of Lords winning outright. Her fellow Tyrians were unimaginative—Kat knew her brother wasn’t remotely imaginative, and the others weren’t much better—but one didn’t have to be particularly smart to wield the largest hammer in the known galaxy. As long as her forces avoided basic mistakes, they’d come out ahead.
And William will make sure we don’t, she thought. Her heart twisted again. He really was on the wrong side. He’s got the imagination they lack.
She felt her sprits sink as she contemplated the problem. The colonials told themselves that what they lacked in war materials they made up in élan. They had the fire and determination the Tyrians lacked. They had the experience to see opportunities and take advantage of them, winning victories against seemingly overpowering force. And yet, Kat knew that wasn’t true. Tyre wasn’t short on manpower. It might take months or years for competent officers to rise to the top, but they would. And then the combination of superior firepower and skilled officers would spell doom. And then . . .
“Have the analysts take a look at Perfuma,” she said slowly. The twin planets weren’t that important, in the grand scheme of things, but they belonged to the Rudbek Corporation. The Grand Admiral would come under immense pressure to do something if the two worlds were seriously threatened. William would recognize the feint but wouldn’t have the political clout to override his uniformed superior. “Have them draw up an attack plan.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Kitty said. “What limits?”
Kat frowned. There was no way she could convince the king to let her take the entire fleet, not when doing so would leave Caledonia exposed to enemy attack. The fixed defenses were strong, getting stronger all the time, but they would not be strong enough to stand off an all-out attack. She considered using Caledonia as bait to lure the enemy fleet out of place, which might work, but the king would have a heart attack if she dared suggest it. Her lips quirked. They had a chance to win outright, but . . . if they lost, they’d lose everything.
“Two superdreadnought squadrons, perhaps three,” she said. “We’ll use decoys to convince any watching eyes that the main body of the fleet remains here.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Kitty said. She cocked her head as if she was about to make a suggestion she knew would be rejected. “We could cut off the StarCom.”
Kat shook her head. Kitty was quit
e right, from a tactical point of view, but there was no way anyone would go for it. The StarCom network was still up and running, right across the entire Commonwealth. She was morbidly certain enemy spies were using the StarCom to send messages to Tyre, and vice versa, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. The advantages of keeping the network online outweighed the disadvantages.
And besides, they’ll have mounted watchful eyes on ships coming and going within the system. The king’s call for smugglers and civilians, even pirates, despite her objections, had turned the system into a very open system indeed. There’s no way to keep spies from spreading the word.
“Right now it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We can use the StarCom to spread disinformation. Speaking of which”—she smiled coldly—“have the fleet alerted that we’ll be carrying out more tactical exercises in a week or so. That should give us cover for slipping a couple of squadrons right out of the system.”
Unless they’ve filled hyperspace with pickets, she added silently. Theoretically possible, if one had the ships. But even they would find that difficult.
She stood, feeling more optimistic than she had since the last engagement. “I’m going to take a walk,” she said. She felt as if she was skipping out on her duties, but there was nothing she could do until the tactical plan was ready. “Alert me if anything changes.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Kitty said. She looked ready to carry out her orders. “I’ll keep you informed.”
The intercom pinged. “Admiral, this is Gavin in Communications,” a voice said. “You’ve received an immediate summons to the surface. There’s an encoded datapacket attached for you.”
Somehow Kat wasn’t surprised. “Forward the packet to my terminal,” she ordered as she reached for her jacket. “I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER SIX
Debt of War (The Embers of War) Page 6