by David Weber
From his present position, he might well be promoted to command of an entire carrier squadron's fighter wing, which would be nice—in its way—but far more of an administrative post. He'd get much less cockpit time as a wing CAG, although it would look good on his resume. From there, he might claw his way into command of a carrier, or squadron, or even a fleet. But from his point of view, and right now it was damned panoramic, CAG was as good as a job got. A part of him wished he was with the rest of the squadron's fighter wing, preparing to jump Adoula's main body. But most of him was perfectly content to be exactly where he was.
And it was interesting to watch Admiral Niedermayer at his work. Obviously, the Old Man had learned a lot from Admiral Helmut... although McBain had never realized before that clairvoyance could be taught. But it must be possible. If it wasn't, how could Niedermayer have predicted where HMS Trujillo would be accurately enough to deploy the 643rd ten full hours before Gajelis and Adoula ever arrived?
"Start warming up the plasma conduits," Mahmut said. "Any cruisers that make it through are to be recovered by any available carrier."
"Yes, Sir," his flag captain acknowledged crisply, even though both of them knew how unlikely any of their units were to survive the next few minutes.
* * *
"Open fire," Admiral Niedermayer said, almost conversationally, and the next best thing to eleven thousand missile launchers spat fire. Four hundred fighters armed with antifighter missiles salvoed their ordnance at Mahmut's fighters, and another three hundred and fifty sent over seventeen hundred Leviathans at his cruisers. None of the ship-launched missiles bothered with the sublight parasites, however. Ultimately, the cruisers and fighters had no escape if the tunnel drive ships were crippled or destroyed, and Niedermayer's fire control concentrated on the carriers with merciless professionalism. He'd waited until the range was down to just over ten million kilometers. At that range, and at their current closing velocity, that gave him just under four minutes to engage with missiles before they entered energy range. In that four minutes, each of his cruisers fired a hundred and fifty missiles, and each of his carriers fired over four thousand. The next best thing to eighty thousand missiles slammed into the defenses protecting Minerou Mahmut's carriers.
At such short range, countermissiles were far less effective than usual. They simply didn't have the tracking time as the offensive fire slashed across their engagement envelope, and they stopped perhaps thirty percent of the incoming birds. Point defense clusters fired desperately, and there were thousands of them. But they, too, were fatally short of engagement time. They stopped another forty percent... which meant that "only" twenty-four thousand got through.
Maximum effective standoff range for even a capital shipkiller laser head against a starship was little more than seven thousand kilometers. At that range, however, they could blast through even ChromSten armor, and they did. Carriers were tough, the toughest mobile structures ever designed and built by human beings, but there were limits in all things. Armor yielded only stubbornly, even under that incredible pounding, but it did yield. Atmosphere streamed from ruptured compartments. Weapon mounts were blotted away. Power runs arced and exploded as energy blew back through them. Their own fire ripped back at their enemies, but Niedermayer's sheer wealth of point defense blunted the far lighter salvoes Mahmut's outnumbered ships could throw, and his carriers' armor shook off the relative handful of hits which got through to it.
By the time CarRon 15 and what was left of CarRon 14 reached energy range, three of its seven carriers and forty-one of its seventy-two cruisers had been destroyed outright.
By the time the traitorous carrier squadrons crossed the track of Niedermayer's task force, exactly eleven badly damaged cruisers and one totally crippled carrier survived.
"Admiral," Lieutenant Commander Clinton said with a gulp. "We just got swept by lidar! Point source, Delta quadrant four-one-five."
"What does that mean?" Adoula demanded sharply. He was sitting in a hastily rigged command chair next to the admiral's.
"It means someone's out there," Gajelis snapped. He'd left his handful of cruisers and fighters behind to assist Mahmut. His flagship was going to be fighting whoever it was with only onboard weapons.
"Captain Devarnachan is sweeping," Tactical said. "Emissions! Raid designated Sierra Five. One hundred twenty-five fighters, closing from Delta Four-One-Five."
"Damn Helmut!" Gajelis snarled. "Damn him!"
"Leviathans! Six hundred twenty-five vampires!"
"Three minutes to Tsukayama Limit," Astrogation announced tautly.
"They'll only get one shot," Gajelis said, breathing hard. "Hang on, Your Highness..."
"Damn and blast," McBain snarled as the distinctive signature of a TD drive formed. At such short range and with such short flight times, Trujillo's countermissiles had been effectively useless, and over fifty of the Leviathans had managed to get through the carrier's desperately firing point defense lasers. They'd ripped hell out of her, and he'd hoped that would be enough to cripple her, but carriers were pretty damned tough.
"We got a piece of her, Cobalt," his XO replied. "A big one. And Admiral Niedermayer kicked hell out of the rest of them. Doesn't look like any of them got away."
"I know, Allison," McBain said angrily, though his anger certainly wasn't directed at her. "But a piece wasn't enough." He sighed, then shook himself. "Oh, well, we did our best. And you're right, we did get a piece of her. Let's turn 'em around and head back to the barn. Beer's on me."
"Damn straight it is!" Commander Stanley agreed with a laugh. Then, as their fighters swept around through a graceful turn and began decelerating back towards their carriers, her tone turned more thoughtful. "Wonder how things went at the Palace?"
"Your Highness, your mother's been through... a terrible ordeal," the psychiatrist said. He was a specialist in pharmacological damage. "Normally, we'd stabilize her with targeted medications. But given the... vile concoctions they used on her, not to mention the damage to her implant—"
"Which is very severe," the implant specialist interrupted. "It's shutting down and resetting itself frequently, almost randomly, because of general system failures. And it's dumping data at random, as well. It has to be hell inside her head, Your Highness."
"And nothing can be done about it?" Roger asked.
"These damned paranoid ones you people have, they're designed to be unremovable, Your Highness," the specialist said, with a shrug which expressed his helpless frustration. "I know why, but seeing what happens when something like this goes wrong—"
"It didn't 'go wrong,'" Roger said flatly. "It was made to fail. And when I get my hands on the people who did that, I intend to... discuss it with them in some detail. But for right now, answer my question. Is there anything at all we can do to get this... this thing out of my mother's head?"
"No," the specialist said heavily. "The only thing we could do would be to attempt surgical removal, Your Highness, and I'd give her a less than even chance of surviving the procedure. Which doesn't even consider the probability of additional, serious neurological damage."
"And the implant, of course, responds to brain action, Your Highness," the psychiatrist noted. "And since the brain action is highly confused at the moment—"
"Doc?" Roger said impatiently, looking at Dobrescu.
"Roger, I don't even have a degree," Dobrescu protested. "I'm a shuttle pilot."
"Doc, damn it, do not give me that old song and dance," Roger snapped.
"All right." Dobrescu threw his hands into the air almost angrily. "You want my interpretation of what they're telling you? She's totally pocked in the head, all right? Wackers. Maybe the big brains—the people who do have the degrees—can do something for her eventually. But right now, she's in one minute, out the next. I don't even know when you can see her, Roger. She's still asking for New Madrid, whether she's... in or out. In reality, or out in la-la land. When she's in, she wants his head. She knows she's the Empress, she kn
ows she's in bad shape, she knows who did it to her, and she wants him dead. I've tried to point out that you're back, but she's still mixing it up with New Madrid. With all the drugs and physical duress, on top of the way they butchered her toot, they've got her half convinced even when she's got some contact with reality that you were in on the plot. And when she's in la-la land..."
"I was there to see enough of that." Roger's face tightened, and he looked at Catrone. "Tomcat?"
"Christ, Your Highness," Catrone said. "Don't put this on me!"
"That was the deal," Roger told him. "As you asked me, not so long ago, are you going back on your word?"
Catrone stared at him for several seconds, then shrugged.
"When she's in, she's in," he said. "All the way in. She's still got a few problems," he conceded, raising a hand at Dobrescu, "but she knows she's Empress. And she's not willing to step aside." He looked at Roger, his face hard. "I'm sorry, Roger. It's not because I don't trust you, but she's my Empress. I'm not going against her, not when she still knows who she is. Not when it's too early to know whether or not she can get better."
"Very well," Roger said, his voice cold. "But if she's in charge, she needs to get back into the saddle. Things are in very bad shape, and we need her up," he continued, looking at the doctors. "There are people she has to meet."
"That would be... unwise," the psychiatrist said. "The strain could—"
"Either she can take it, or she can't," Roger said flatly. "Ask her. I'm out of this decision loop, starting right now."
"Like hell," Catrone said angrily. "Are you going to go off into one of your Roger sulks? You can't just throw the weight of the entire Empire onto her shoulders, damn it! She's sick. She just needs some recovery time, goddamn it!"
"Tomcat, I can't just make the galaxy stop while she gets better!" Roger snapped. "Okay. This was your decision—that was the deal. And for all I know, you've made exactly the right one. But if she's Empress, she has got to be Empress, and that means she needs to determine what I do."
"But—"
"No 'buts,' damn it! You know as well as I do how unsettled the situation is right now. Sure, we've got Helmut in orbit, and Prokourov and Kjerulf supporting us, but you've seen the coverage, just like me. Some of the newsies are doing their best to be dispassionate and impartial, but only a handful, and the rest of the rumors—"
He broke off with a frustrated snarl, then shook himself.
"Adoula did a damned good job of painting me as the one behind the first coup for public opinion," he said flatly. "Hell, you heard Doc—they've got her half-convinced! It's going to take time for everybody—anybody—to begin to understand what really happened. I know that. And I also know that's actually a pocking good argument in favor of Mother remaining in charge. If she's on the Throne, then obviously I'm not trying to take it away from her, right? So I agree with you about that, damn it! And I don't care if she makes me her one hundred percent alternate, which as Heir Primus should be my job right now, or just hands me the shit details to reduce her load while she tries to do the job. Hell, I don't care if she tells me to get off-planet and go back to Marduk! But for me to work for her, to help her, I have to at least be able to talk to her, Sergeant Major. And right now, I can't even do that!"
"Okay, okay!" Catrone held up his hands, as if he were physically fending Roger off. "Point taken, Your Highness—point!" He paused and drew a deep breath. "I'll see about a meeting. Not in private—that would probably be bad. A group meeting. You're right, there are people she has to see. The new Navy Minister. The Prime Minister. Helmut. I'll set up a meeting—an easy one," he added, looking at the doctors.
"A short meeting with people she knows," the psychiatrist said. "That may help her stabilize. It's an environment she understands. But short. Nonstressful."
"Agreed," Roger said curtly.
"And you'll be in it," Catrone said.
"I can't wait."
"Your clothes survived," Despreaux said from the bed.
"Sixty million credits worth of damage." Roger sighed, tossing his cane onto the foot of the bed and flopping down next to her. They'd gotten their old bodies back. Sort of. Despreaux had opted for... a bit of upper body enhancement, and she'd kept the hair. She'd decided that she liked being blonde, even if it didn't set off Roger's coloring as well as her earlier dark brown had.
Roger, on the other hand, was back to plain old Roger. Well, plain old Roger just starting to regenerate the calf of his leg. Two meters, long blond hair, green eyes. Deep frown...
"Sixty million," he repeated. "And that's just to the Palace."
"And then there's the rumor that there are dozens of secret ways in." Despreaux shuddered. "We need to get those blocked—and make damned sure everyone knows they're blocked."
"Working on it." Roger sighed again. "And we need a new Empress' Own. Replacement equipment. Work on the damage we did to the com facilities... Christ."
"If it were an easy job, it wouldn't take us," Despreaux told him with a crooked smile.
"And we need something else." Roger's tone was serious enough that her half-smile faded.
"What?"
"An heir," he said quietly.
The replicator had been found, turned over, the fetus poured out onto the floor and crushed. Roger had felt strange looking down at the pathetic, ruined body of the brother he would never know. They'd found the culprit among the surviving mercenaries—the DNA on his trousers had been a dead giveaway—and he was awaiting trial for regicide.
"Whooo," Despreaux said, letting out her breath. "That's a big thing to spring on a poor old farm girl! I'd hoped to have kids someday, your kids as a matter of fact, but..."
"Seriously," he said, sitting up on the bed. "We need an heir of the body, out of the replicator, viable to take the Throne. Hell, we need duplicates. Things are bad right now. I hope like hell that—"
"I understand," Despreaux said, reaching up to touch his cheek. "I'll stop in at the clinic tomorrow. I'm sure they'll take me in without an appointment."
"You know," Roger said, sliding down to hold her in his arms, "there's another way to get things started..."
"God, I thought once I got you in bed, it would be easy." She hit him with a pillow. "Little did I realize what a crazed sex maniac hid under that just plain crazed exterior!"
"I've got years of catching up," Roger replied, laughing. "And there's no time like the present."
* * *
"Sergeant Major Catrone," Alexandra VII sighed as Tomcat entered the sitting room.
She wore a high-necked gown, and her hair was simply but exquisitely styled. She looked every centimeter the Empress, but there were still shadowy bruises around her wrists. They had almost—almost—vanished, and he knew the medics had almost completely healed the... other marks on her body, as well. But they were still there, and something stirred and bared its fangs deep at the heart of him as she touched a control to raise the back of her float chair into a sitting position, and held out a hand.
"I'm so glad to see you," she said.
"All you need to do is call, Your Majesty." Catrone dropped to one knee instead of taking the proffered hand. "I am, and always have been, your servant."
"Oh, get up, Tomcat." Alexandra laughed, and laughed harder at his expression. "What? You thought I didn't know your nickname?" She grinned. "You were a bachelor for many years when you served me; I learned all about your nickname." She held out her hand again, fiercely. "Take my hand, Tomcat."
"Majesty," he said, and took it, dropping back to one knee again beside her chair and holding it.
"I haven't been... well enough to tell you," Alexandra said, staring at him, "what a relief it was to see your face. My one true paladin, there by my side once again. It was like a light in the darkness—and it was such an awful darkness," she ended angrily.
"Majesty," Catrone said, embarrassed. "I'm sorry it took us so long. We wanted—we all wanted—to move sooner, but until Roger—"
"Rog
er!" the Empress shouted, snatching back her hand and crossing her arms. "Everyone wants to talk about Roger!The prodigal son returned—ha! Fatted calf! I'd like to roast him!"
"Majesty, control yourself," Catrone said, gently but firmly. "Whatever you knew, or thought you knew, about Roger, you must take him as he is now. Fatted Calf would have been impossible without him. Not just because of the hidden protocols in his mind, either. Because of his leadership, his vision, his determination. His planning. He handled a dozen different actions as if they were one. Perfect combat gestalt, the best I've ever seen. And all he thought of was you, Your Majesty, from the first moment I told him what they were doing to you. His anger..."
The sergeant major shook his head.
"Only one thing kept him from killing New Madrid out of hand. I truly believe only one thing could have kept him from doing it, and it wasn't the Empire, Your Majesty. It was his fiancée. He loves you, Your Majesty. He loves his mother. He isn't his father's son; he's yours."
Alexandra looked at him for a moment, then looked away and shrugged, the movement angry, frustrated, possibly even a bit uncertain.
"I hear you, Tomcat. Maybe you really believe that. Maybe it's even true. But when I see him, I see his father's face. Why, of all my children, did he have to be the only one to survive?"
"Luck," Catrone said with a shrug of his own. "Excellent bodyguards. And perhaps most of all the fact that, I'm sorry, he's one of the hardest, coldest bastards House MacClintock has ever coughed up."
"Certainly a bastard," Alexandra agreed astringently. "But how I wish John were still alive! I knew I could trust him. Trust his good judgment, trust his reasoning."
"With all due respect, Your Majesty," Catrone said with a swallow, "John was a good man. A smart one, and as honest as he could be, working in this snake pit. A... decent fighter, and someone I would have been proud to serve one day as Emperor. But... Adoula got away. He's calling in all the fleets he controls, and proclaiming that we're the ones using drugs and torture to control you now that we've gotten you into our hands. We're in the midst of a civil war, and if there's one MacClintock, besides you, who I'd trust at the helm in a civil war, it's Roger. More than John. More even then Alex."