by John F. Carr
“Fleet First Rank Galen Diettinger, Second Rank Althene Adame,” Mara Emory introduced her companion, “Allow me to present Captain Ian Hawksley, commander of the Burgess battlecruiser Falkenberg.”
Hawksley bowed to Diettinger, clicking his heels softly. “Fleet First Rank Diettinger; your reputation precedes you, sir. It is an honor to serve under your command.” Hawksley’s voice was a smooth baritone, low, softened even more by an indistinguishable accent which softened consonants and graciously lengthened vowels. He turned to Althene, bowed again, and lifting her hand, raised his eyes to hers and actually kissed the space a fraction of a millimeter above the back of it. “Second Rank Adame; First Rank Emory was kind enough to share with me your thesis on the Peloponnesian War. A brilliant piece of work, if I may say so. Thucydides should look to his laurels.”
Althene shot Diettinger a look. “Thank you very much indeed, Captain Hawksley. It does seem to be enjoying something of a vogue, of late.”
Emory introduced Hawksley to the two New Ireland captains, both of whom, upon learning that the English-derivative sound of his name was only coincidental, accepted him without further reservation.
Diettinger was surprised. From anyone else, and especially in these circumstances, the outworlder’s performance would have been ludicrous, the most pathetic sort of comic opera. Yet Hawksley was making even the excruciatingly correct Saurons look like bumpkins. Then it hit him, and the words were out before he knew it, “You were trained at the Imperial Court.”
Hawksley nodded, the ghost of a smile moving across his features. “I was, sir, as a child. The Court and I did not agree. We had something of a falling out.”
“Would you care to elaborate on just what sort of a falling out that might be?” Shannon asked with a gleam in his eye. “Make this already delightful evening perfect and tell me that you killed one of the Emperor’s nephews in a duel.”
The smile flashed again, fainter than ever, as Hawksley looked down and said, “First Corinthians, 13:11.”
“Beg pardon?” Emory asked.
“The Christian Bible,” Althene explained, “‘When I was a child, I spake as a child… when I became a man, I put away childish things’.”
Connolly and Shannon both nodded sagely. Connolly raised his drink. “And good for you, too, Captain; here’s to the rest of known space followin’ suit.”
“Captain Hawksley,” Diettinger said after the toast, “Please contact my staff to arrange an appointment to meet with me sometime within the next two days. There are some points I wish to discuss with you regarding the disposition of the Falkenberg.”
Hawksley inclined his head, making the casual nod look like a formal bow, “Your servant, sir.”
The orchestra began a waltz, and sharing a smile with Althene, Emory led her guest away to join in.
“Whoof.” Shannon shook his head and tossed down the remainder of his drink, deftly snatching another from the tray of a passing steward.
“Aye,” Connolly agreed. “The temperature just went up fifteen degrees.” Since settling their world, New Irelanders had rejected and steadfastly refused to readopt metric measurements.
Shannon nodded and said, in a conspiratorial tone, “We’ve neither need nor inclination to tell you your work, Your Grace. But don’t put that man on your flank. Fine fella and all that, but fey as they come, and that’s the truth.”
“Aye,” Connolly said, “’Tis a damn shame, too.”
Diettinger frowned, puzzled. Connolly explained, “Fey, Your Grace, is what we Scots call a man who’s made up his mind to die. Doomed to death. When that happens, nothing and nobody can stop him. Captain Hawksley seems a grand lad, but he’s only with us on loan—and that’s a fact.”
Althene was chilled. Fey. That was the word she’d been trying to recall earlier, but she couldn’t remember why. It had to do with someone she knew, but whom?
Diettinger was talking.
“I’m sorry, First Rank; what was that again?” she asked.
“I was saying that Captain Hawksley reminds me of Vessel First Rank Lucan of the Wallenstein.”
Althene nodded, pretending a shudder. “Ah, yes. The Phantom.”
It was Connolly’s and Shannon’s turn to be puzzled.
“Vessel First Rank Lucan, ‘The Phantom’ as we like to call him, commands the Sauron battleship Wallenstein,” Diettinger explained.
Connolly frowned, then brightened. “Ah, right; Wallenstein! Bright light of the Thirty Years War.” He shrugged to Shannon. “Well, for our side, at least. Go on.”
“Under The Phantom’s command,” Althene embellished, “the Wallenstein has participated in over two dozen major engagements. She’s been directly or solely responsible for the destruction of seven enemy capital ships, and her actions against merchant shipping would be unbelievable if fiction.
“Now, The Phantom hasn’t always won every engagement he’s taken the Wallenstein into; that distinction goes to our esteemed Fleet First Rank, of the Fomoria,” Althene nodded to Diettinger with a smile, “But Lucan can claim an accomplishment unique among all Sauron commanders, land or space. In all her actions, in all of space, Wallenstein has never lost a crewman.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, then Shannon said, “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but surely you’re joking?”
“It’s true,” Diettinger confirmed. “In fact, Vessel First Rank Lucan’s name has been brought up a great deal lately,” he looked at Althene who was inspecting her drink.
In secret High Command Council sessions, that is; was Althene their operative? Perhaps reporting his activities to the High Command? Then Diettinger stiffened. She’s always displayed nothing but complete loyalty to me and the ship: what’s wrong with me? Too much politics, he decided. Composing himself, he turned back to the New Ireland captains. “Lucan’s always brought his crew home. His casualty record is perfect, yet I’ve never seen a more grim looking man, not even Captain Hawksley.”
Shannon shook his head. “Lucan, eh? God forbid, I’m about the day that man’s luck runs out.”
“Then you need have no fear as long as you serve under Fleet First Rank Diettinger, Captain Shannon,” Althene assured him. “Saurons don’t believe in luck. Only probabilities.”
Connolly shrugged, and went on talking to Diettinger. “’Tisn’t merely the look of a man, Your Grace. ‘Tis the bearing. Something in… something in the eyes.” Connolly’s voice faded out, and he suddenly found himself looking away from Diettinger. “Ah. Yes, well. Woolgathering. Forgive me.”
Diettinger caught the man’s tone, and smiled. “Oh, come now, Captain Connolly. You don’t seriously expect me to—”
There was a murmur at the far side of the floor, gathering strength as word spread and more and more of the guests looked upward, craning their necks to see. The enhanced starfield projected on the inside of the dome of Orbital Station Four was a perfect reproduction of the view outside, only greatly enlarged. Diettinger realized that the people were looking at a ship which had appeared at a Jump Point some 13 AUs away.
Instantly, he keyed the communications link in the occipital lobe of his skull, connecting him to the Commo officer aboard the Fomoria.
“Fomoria here.”
Boyle again, Diettinger recognized the voice. Doesn’t that young man ever get off duty? “Diettinger here, Fifth Rank Boyle. Identify the ship which just arrived in-system.”
“Have been and still trying, First Rank. No transponder codes from target vessel.”
“What about Traffic Control?”
“Traffic Control is in communications blackout, First Rank.”
“What?”
“Confirmed, First Rank. Blackout initiated twenty-three seconds after an unidentified vessel emerged from Jump Point.”
“Long range visuals from Fomoria?”
“Inconclusive, First Rank. Sensor and Navigation both having difficulty determining vessel’s true size. Vessel’s albedo is very high and appears to be fluctuat
ing.”
“Is that a function of its Field?”
“Negative, First Rank; vessel does not appear to be running with Field activated.”
“Get a crew with lens optics into one of the hangar bays. Make direct visual observations and—”
Someone dropped a glass; the sound of its shatter was a gunshot. Now the dance floor had gone from a symphony of hushed and wondering whispers to stony silence.
“Fomoria, standby,” Diettinger said. He went to the environmental controls and began accessing the various menu commands for the overhead display.
A bright green square appeared on the star field above them; Diettinger pressed a few buttons, and the square glided across the field to surround the glint in space that was the intruder. He activated the image enlargement controls and the sliver of light grew large enough so that its flickering could be clearly seen; the fluctuating albedo Boyle had mentioned.
The mutterings of the crowd were taking on a tone of impatience; everyone wanted to know what was going on. Just what was that ship out there? Another Imperial raid?
Diettinger continued enhancing the image until the borders of the green square suddenly flared out past the edges of the display over their heads and the ship filled the sky.
“Oh, God!”
“Christ Jesus!”
One of the Alliance staff officers vomited. A Sauron stepped quickly to a chair and fell into it.
The ship was flaring with arcs of electrical discharge. Fires gouted from within, fed by its internal atmosphere. Together with random, almost constant explosions along its length, these gave the ship its “fluctuating albedo,” which was not an albedo at all. The ship was not reflecting light, but generating it. Aft, holes over a hundred meters in diameter were punched through the hull; the engines were mostly gutted, blackened, burning hulks. The view into the wounds showed stars on the other side. Amidships, through great rents in the hull, four and five decks deep, the spine of the vessel could be seen, barely holding the fore and aft sections together. Bulkheads and struts floated alongside held in place by cables, shreds of outer hull and the ship’s own microgravity. Shielding, three meters thick, lay shredded, crumpled, or trailed in tatters to end in vaporous smears. It was a wonder the ship had survived the Jump in one piece.
The forward section was the worst. A direct hit to a forward weapons bay had opened the entire fore port quarter to space; more than a third of the vessel’s forward area was simply gone, decks sheared through, seen end on, dark but for fires and more sparking and the dull, lifeless glow of metal inflamed by radioactive explosions, heated in the vacuum of space which would let none of that heat bleed away. The wreck would glow for weeks.
And in that glow would be visible the bodies that floated within, alongside, and behind it. Many had been flattened, insect-like, to the bulkheads. Still more were nothing but great smears of rust-brown or livid red, where dozens of crew members had been crushed or burned or irradiated or exposed to vacuum and died; but not quickly. Humans were tough, and Sauron humans tougher still.
Diettinger stared at the hulk, dimly aware of the movement around him as people began making for exits, heading for anywhere in the station but the room where he now stood, looking up at the wreckage of a Sauron battleship.
Someone was standing beside him—Althene. Beside her, Captain Connolly’s gaze was riveted to the scene above.
“Christ! And I thought the spectre had come to the feast when I met Hawksley.”
Diettinger was running his gaze back and forth over the ruin, trying to find some identifying mark, some distinctive feature; a blade of grass in a bomb crater.
It was as if Connolly read his mind. “Your Grace?” he asked, and his tone said he knew.
“First Rank?” Althene asked, wanting very badly at that moment to call him “Galen.”
Diettinger nodded, slowly. “It’s the Wallenstein.”
Lucan had brought his crew home.
Chapter Eighteen
I
Beyond the condition of the wrecked battleship or her slaughtered crew, the true horror of the Wallenstein was learned only after Pathfinder Cyborg teams had examined the irradiated derelict, to find that she was no derelict at all.
“The first clue,” Diettinger told the High Command Council, “was that no vessel in Wallenstein’s condition could have made the trip from Tanith to Sauron. For that reason, I instructed the Pathfinders to pay careful attention to conditions in the drives and engineering sections of the wreck. Their report is presented in detail in the briefings before you.
“To summarize: The Wallenstein arrived in the Sauron System with an Imperial Alderson Drive installed, and jury-rigged to make a single Jump from one of the nearby star systems to Sauron.”
The First Citizen looked up from his briefing. “But the Wallenstein was at Tanith…”
“Yes, First Citizen. After capturing the Wallenstein,”—Diettinger ignored the half-dozen sharp intakes of breath at his near-blasphemy; no Sauron ship had ever been captured—“the Imperials must have installed several such packages in various systems along one of the routes from Tanith to Sauron and literally ‘pushed’ the Wallenstein wreckage through the intervening Alderson Points until it arrived here.”
Panades, one of the other Sauron norms on the High Command Council and charged with civilian oversight on naval matters, was shaking his head. “To what possible purpose?”
“I should have thought that would be obvious, Councilman Panades: To let us know they were victorious at Tanith. To let us know they have crushed the last line of defense between Sauron and the fleets of the Empire. To let us know they are coming, and soon. The gesture is not without precedent.”
“I know of no such action since the beginning of the war,” Panades dismissed the idea, but Diettinger was ready for him.
“Ancient Earth, First Citizen,” Diettinger ignored Panades. “Theocratic Egyptian society regarded domesticated Earth cats as semi-divine. Hittite invaders slaughtered hundreds of the animals and threw them over the walls of besieged Egyptian cities to drive defenders from their posts and generally panic the superstitious populace. The ploy later evolved into the ‘Dead Horse’ tactic, wherein siege engines were used to launch rotting corpses of draft animals into besieged cities to spread disease and panic.”
“Are you suggesting that Sauron should consider itself under siege, Fleet First Rank?” One of the other Council members interrupted, his tone full of cold malice at so treasonous a notion.
Panades frowned. “No, that can’t be right, Fleet First Rank. Obviously, the Wallenstein’s captain lost his nerve at Tanith, fled the battle there and was ambushed along the way. Critically wounded, her commander—Lucan, was it?—this Lucan must have fought his way through to a Jump Point to get here. He must therefore have been ambushed only one system away, at Dropshot, perhaps, or Wayforth, or one of half a dozen others.”
Diettinger’s gaze hardened. “Leaving aside for the moment Vessel First Rank Lucan’s impeccable record, and assuming that—despite all logic—you are correct: What difference does it make?”
Councilman Panades looked up, surprised by the near-insolence of Diettinger’s question. “What do you mean?”
Diettinger maintained a respectful tone by sheer act of will. “First Citizen, Council members: Either way, a powerful force of enemy vessels is only one Jump away from Sauron. Either way, this is the only warning we will receive. Either Lucan got his ship here to tell us they’re coming, or the Imperials sent it to tell us they’re coming. Either way, the Imperial Fleet is on its way here. Now.” Diettinger had risen to his feet as he spoke; he sat back down. “What is to be done?”
The First Citizen glared down at Diettinger. “I find your tone disrespectful, Fleet First Rank. I remind you that you are still under High Command authority.”
“Which is why I now repeat the question, First Citizen.” Diettinger’s hand clenched. “What is to be done?”
“The invasion of Sparta sh
ould go on as planned,” Panades told the First Citizen, ignoring Diettinger. “Such an imminent threat to the Imperial capital will dictate a redirection of their forces to defend Sparta.”
“May I ask with what vessels I am to mount such an operation?” Diettinger asked.
Panades shrugged, continued to speak to the First Citizen and ignored Diettinger. “From the extent of the damage suffered by the Wallenstein, and the damage which such a vessel, by design, can statistically be expected to inflict before it is lost, we can extrapolate by the number of like vessels committed to Tanith that the Imperial fleet must surely have been destroyed there.” He glanced briefly at Diettinger, secure in his logic, saying, “Just as we projected. If the price was the loss of the majority of our combined Fleet, it is a grave one, but acceptable. Therefore, the forces currently assembled by the Fleet First Rank should be more than sufficient to overwhelm any defense remaining at Sparta.”
Diettinger felt a wrenching sensation of vertigo. “You propose to leave the Homeworld defenseless?”
“Defenseless against what threat, Fleet First Rank?” Panades asked.
With real horror Diettinger saw the man sincerely believed what he said
“The on-site system defense network,” Panades continued, “is more than capable of dealing with what meager remnants of the Imperial Fleet might come through our Jump Points.”
“Fleet First Rank Galen Diettinger,” the First Citizen pronounced, “You are hereby charged to activate the forces currently assembled here in Sauron System, and with them mount an assault on the Imperial capital system of Sparta, and once there to—”