Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  “‘Fatted Calf?’” Julian repeated with a puzzled frown.

  “It’s t’e pocking Bible,” Poertena said excitedly. “You roast t’e pocking patted calp when t’e prodigal son returns.”

  “Indeed,” Helmut agreed with a smile. “Sergeant Julian, you really need to brush up on your general reading.” He studied the icons on his repeater plot. “Three ships in one squadron, noted only as Fatted Calf. And all of Twelfth Squadron, which is broadcasting as Fatted Calf Two.”

  “Intel update complete,” Tactical said.

  “Admiral La Paz reports a tunnel drive footprint, Sir. A bunch of them. It looks like another fleet.” Silence hovered for a handful of seconds, and then Lieutenant Commander Clinton cleared her throat. “Confirmed, Sir. Admiral La Paz’s count puts it at eighteen ships.”

  Gajelis looked at his own display as the central computers updated it, then shook his head.

  “It’s not going to be one of Prince Jackson’s forces,” he muttered. “Not that big and coming in from there.”

  “Helmut,” Commander Talbert said.

  “Helmut,” Gajelis agreed bitterly. “Dark Lord of the Sixth. Damn that traitorous bastard!”

  Commander Talbert wisely avoided pointing out that “traitorous” was, perhaps, a double-edged concept at this particular moment.

  “We’ll have to withdraw,” the admiral continued.

  “Withdraw to where?” Talbert demanded, unable to keep his anger totally out of his voice.

  “Arrangements have been made,” Gajelis said flatly. “Signal the squadron to break off and head for the TD limit. Flight Plan Leonidas. I need to make a call.”

  “So much for time,” Helmut sighed, and punched a command into his repeater. A much larger hologram came up, covered with icons which were so much gibberish to Julian. “Ah, there’s what we’re after!” the admiral said, reaching into the hologram and “tapping” a finger through some of the symbols. The hologram’s scale was so small that they scarcely seemed to be moving at all, but the vector codes beside them said otherwise.

  “What is it?” Julian asked.

  “Fourteenth Squadron,” Helmut replied. “Well . . .”

  He frowned and brought up a sidebar list and studied it briefly.

  “It was Fourteenth Squadron,” he continued. “Now, it’s Fourteenth missing two carriers. Took a bit of a beating, apparently, but still the ones we want.”

  “Why them?” Julian asked.

  “People, Sergeant. People,” Helmut sighed. “It’s not the ships, it’s the minds within them. Fourteenth is Adoula’s most loyal squadron. Where else would the Prince run to? The one squadron that would beat feet the instant my fleet turned up and Adoula got on board, which is why I had Admiral Niedermayer come in where he did.”

  “Is it going to work?”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?” Helmut shrugged. “The bad guys aren’t precisely where they should be—thanks to the fact that your Prince had to start early. Remind me to discuss the importance of maintaining operational schedules with him.” The admiral bared his teeth in a tight smile. “As it is, we’ll just have to wait and see. It’ll be some time, either way.” He banished the plotting hologram and brought up a 3-D chessboard, instead. “Do you play, Sergeant?”

  “I wish I could have welcomed you aboard under better circumstances, Your Highness,” Victor Gajelis said in a harsh, grating voice as Prince Jackson was shown into his day cabin. The admiral bent his head in a bow, and Adoula forced himself not to swear at him. It had become painfully obvious that Gajelis was not the best flag officer in the Imperial Navy. Unfortunately, all of the ones better than him seemed to be working for the other side, which meant the prince was just going to have to make do.

  “You had no way of knowing Prokourov was going to turn traitor,” he said as Gajelis straightened. “Neither did General Gianetto and I. And I still don’t see how they coordinated this closely with Helmut. I know you could still have turned it around, if it hadn’t been for his arrival, Victor.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness,” Gajelis said. “My people gave as good as they got. But with Prokourov going over to the other side and bringing Helmut’s numbers up even more—”

  “Not just Prokourov, I’m afraid,” Adoula said more heavily. “Admiral Wu turned her coat, too. She didn’t have it all her own way. Captain Ramsey refused to obey the orders to go over to the other side, but all three of her other carriers supported her. Hippogriff is gone, but Ramsey hammered Chimera and Halkett pretty severely before she went. But that leaves only Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth to support you—thirteen carriers for us, against twenty-six for them, counting the Home Fleet defections. No, Admiral, you were right to break off when you did. Time to get out with what we can and reassemble for a counterattack. General Gianetto and I have already transmitted the order to our other squadrons. Admiral Mahmut will rendezvous with you on your way to the Tsukayama Limit. Admiral La Paz and Admiral Brettle will proceed independently to the rendezvous.”

  “CarRon 14’s changed course, Sir,” Tactical said twenty-seven minutes later. “It’s broken off.”

  “Has it?” Helmut replied without looking up from the chessboard as he considered Julian’s last move. He moved one of his own rooks in response, then glanced at the Tactical officer. “He’s headed for system north, yes?”

  “Yes, Sir.” The Taco seemed completely unsurprised by Helmut’s apparent clairvoyance.

  “Good.” The admiral looked back at the chessboard. “Your move, I believe, Sergeant?”

  “How did you know, Sir?” Julian asked quietly. Helmut glanced up at him, one eyebrow quirked, and Julian gestured at the tactical officer. “How did you know he’d go north?”

  “Gajelis is from Auroria Province on Old Earth,” Helmut replied. “He’s a swimmer. What does a swimmer do when he’s been down too long?”

  “He goes for the surface,” Julian said.

  “And that’s what he’s doing—trying to break for the surface.” Helmut nodded at the tactical display. “When he breaks vertically for the TD sphere, four times out of five he has his ships go up.” He shrugged. “Never forget, Sergeant. Predictability is one of the few truly unforgivable tactical sins. As Admiral Niedermayer will demonstrate in about eight hours.”

  “Excuse me, Admiral, but we have a problem,” a tight-faced Commander Talbert said as he entered the briefing room where Adoula and Gajelis had been conferring electronically with Admiral Minerou Mahmut. The three carriers of Mahmut’s CarRon 15 had rendezvoused with CarRon 14 less than ten minutes earlier. Now both squadrons were proceeding in company for the Tsukayama Limit, less than four light-minutes ahead of them.

  “What sort of problem?” Gajelis demanded testily. On their current flight profile, they were less than twenty-five minutes from the limit.

  “Seven phase drive signatures just lit off ahead of us, Sir,” Talbert said flatly. “Range two-point-five light-minutes.”

  “Damn it!” Adoula snarled. “Who?”

  “Unknown at this time, Sir,” Talbert said. “They’re not squawking IFF, but phase signature strengths indicate that they’re carriers.”

  “Seven,” Gajelis said anxiously. “And fresh, presumably.” He looked at the prince and grimaced. “We’re . . . not in good shape.”

  “Avoid them!” Adoula said. “Just get to the nearest TD point and jump.”

  “It’s not that easy, Your Highness,” Talbert said with a sigh. “We can jump out from anywhere on the TD sphere, but they’re sitting almost bang center of where we were going to jump, and they were obviously prepositioned. They just fired up their drives—the best em-con in the galaxy couldn’t have hidden carrier phase drives from us at this range if they’d been on-line. It’s like they read our minds, or something.”

  “Helmut,” Gajelis snarled. “The son of a bitch must’ve dropped them off at least four or five light-days out, outside our sensor shell. Then he sent them in sublight on a profile
that brought them in under such low power the perimeter platforms never saw them coming! But how in hell did he know where to deploy them, damn it?!”

  “I don’t know, Sir,” Talbert said. “But however he did it, they’re inside any vector change we can manage. We’ve got velocity directly towards their position—forty-six thousand KPS of it. We can jink round a little bit, try to feint them off, but we’re already nine million kilometers inside their missile range. The geometry gives even their cruisers over thirty million kilometers’ range against our closing velocity, and we’re only forty-five million out. By now they’ve already launched cruisers—probably their fighters, too—and they’re only holding their missile fire till they can generate better firing solutions and get their cruiser missiles into range. And at our velocity, we’re going to end up in energy range of them in another sixteen minutes.”

  “Launch decoy drones,” Gajelis said. “Launch fighters for cover, and launch the cruisers, those that are spaceworthy. You, too, Minerou,” he added to the admiral on his com display.

  “Agreed,” Mahmut said. “On my way to CIC. I’ll check back in when I get there.”

  The display blanked, and Gajelis looked back up at Talbert.

  “Go,” he said sharply. “I’ll join you in CIC in a minute.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Talbert nodded and left quickly.

  “You’re going to fight?” Adoula asked incredulously.

  “We’ll have to,” Gajelis replied. “You heard Talbert, Your Highness. We’ll have to engage them.”

  “No, as a matter of fact, you won’t,” the Prince replied. “Have the rest of your forces engage, but getting me to Kellerman is the priority. This ship will avoid action and get out of the system. Have the others cover you.”

  “That’s a bit—” Gajelis began angrily.

  “Those are your orders, Admiral,” Adoula replied. “Follow them!”

  “This is going to be interesting,” Admiral Niedermayer remarked. “Observe Trujillo,” he continued. “Breaking off as predicted.”

  “Sometimes the Admiral scares me, Sir,” Senior Captain Erhardt replied. “How did he know Gajelis was going to head here?”

  “Magic, Marge. Magic,” Niedermayer told the commander of his flagship. “Unfortunately, it would appear he was also correct about Adoula.”

  Niedermayer’s flagship had been tapped back into the system recon net ever since Captain Kjerulf had reconfigured his lockout to allow Sixth Fleet access. He’d used that advantage to adjust his ships’ position slightly, but it really hadn’t been necessary. As Erhardt’s last remark indicated, Admiral Helmut had called Adoula’s and Gajelis’ response almost perfectly. Only the timing had changed . . . and Helmut had gotten them here early enough for the timing not to be a problem.

  “I can’t believe the rest of them are just going to come right on in to cover him.” Erhardt shook her head, staring at the plot where six of the seven enemy carriers had altered heading to accelerate directly towards them even as the seventh accelerated directly away from them. “The bastard is running out on them, and they’re still going to fight for him?”

  “Jackson Adoula is a physical coward, Marge,” Niedermayer said. “Oh, I’m sure he’s found some other way to justify it, even to himself. After all, he’s the ‘indispensable man,’ isn’t he? Without his stronghold in the Sagittarius Sector, it’d all the over but the shouting once the Prince retakes the Palace. So, much as I may despise him, there really is a certain logic in getting him away.”

  “Logic, Sir?!” Erhardt looked at him in something very like disbelief, and it was his turn to shake his head.

  Marjorie Erhardt was very good at her job. She was also fairly young for her rank, and she had a falcon’s fierce directness, coupled with an even fiercer loyalty to the Empress and the Empire. All of that made her an extremely dangerous weapon, but it also gave her a certain degree of tunnel vision. Henry Niedermayer remembered another young, fiery captain who’d suffered from the same sort of narrowness of focus. Then-Vice Admiral Angus Helmut had taken that young captain in hand and expanded his perspective without ever compromising his integrity, which left Niedermayer with an obligation to repay the debt by doing the same thing for Erhardt. And he still had a few minutes to do it in.

  “The fact that they’re fighting for a bad cause doesn’t make them cowards, Marge,” he said, just a trifle coldly. She looked at him, and he grimaced.

  “One of the worst things any military commander can do is to allow contempt for his adversaries to lead him into underestimating them or their determination,” he told her. “And Adoula didn’t seduce them all by dangling money in front of them. At least some of them signed on because they agreed with him that the Empire was in trouble and didn’t understand what the Empress was doing about it.

  “And however they got into his camp in the first place, they all recognize the stakes they agreed to play for. They’re guilty of High Treason, Marge. The penalty for that is death. They may realize perfectly well that their so-called ‘leader’ is about to bug out on them, but that doesn’t change their options. And even without Trujillo they’ve got only one less carrier than we do. You think they are just going to surrender and face the firing squads when at least some of them may be able to fight their way past us?”

  “Put that way, no, Sir,” Erhardt replied after a moment. “But they’re not going to get past us, are they?”

  “No, Captain Erhardt, they’re not,” Niedermayer agreed. “And it’s time to show them why they’re not.”

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Admiral Minerou Mahmut breathed as his tactical plot abruptly updated. The icons of the seven carriers waiting for him were suddenly joined by an incredible rash of smaller crimson icons.

  “Bogeys,” his flagship’s Tactical Officer announced in the flat, hard voice of a professional rigidly suppressing panic through training and raw discipline. “Multiple cruiser-range phase drive signatures. BattleComp makes it three hundred-plus.” More light codes blinked to sudden baleful life. “Update! Fighter-range phase drive detection. Minimum seven-fifty.”

  Mahmut swallowed hard. Helmut. That incredible bastard couldn’t have more than a single cruiser flotilla with the force which would be settling into Old Earth orbit within the next twenty-five minutes. He’d dropped the others—all the others—off with the carrier squadrons he’d detached for his damned ambush!

  Even now, with the proof staring him in the face, Mahmut could scarcely believe that even Helmut would try something that insane. If it hadn’t worked out—if he’d been forced into combat against a concentrated Home Fleet—the absence of his cruiser strength, especially with the carrier squadrons diverted as well, would have been decisive.

  Which didn’t change the fact that Mahmut’s six carriers, seventy-two cruisers, and five hundred remaining fighters were about to get brutally hammered.

  He spared a moment to glance at the secondary plot where Trujillo was still generating delta V at her maximum acceleration. The distance between her and the rest of the formation was up to almost a million kilometers, and to get at her, Helmut’s ships would have to get through Mahmut’s. A part of the admiral was tempted to order his ships to stand down, to surrender them and let the Sixth Fleet task group have clean shots at Trujillo. But if he’d been in command on the other side, he wouldn’t have been accepting any surrenders under the circumstances. His own small task group’s crossing velocity was so great that it would have been impossible for anyone from the other side to match vectors and put boarding parties onto his ships before they crossed the Tsukayama Limit and disappeared into tunnel-space.

  Besides, some of them might actually make it.

  Commander Roger “Cobalt” McBain was a contented man. To his way of thinking, he was at the pinnacle of his career. CAG of a Navy fighter group was all he’d ever wanted to be.

  Technically, his actual position was that of “Commander 643rd Fighter Group,” the hundred and twenty-five fighters assigned to HMS Ce
ntaur. CAG was an older term, which had stood for the title of “Commander Attack Group” until three or four Navy reorganizations ago. There were those who claimed that the acronym’s actual origin was to be found in the title of “Commander Air Group,” which went clear back to the days when ships had battled on oceans, and the fighters had been air-intake jet-powered machines. McBain wasn’t sure about that—his interest in ancient history was strictly minimal—but he didn’t really care. Over the years, the position had had many names, but none of them had stuck in the tradition-minded Navy the way “CAG” had. If one fighter pilot said to another, “Oh, he’s the CAG,” whether the ships were old jets or stingships or space fighters, everyone knew what he meant.

  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.”