by John F. Carr
This told him that the Imperial economy was collapsing. With the Imperial Navy engaged throughout known space and ravaged by decades of war, the great Merchant Houses could no longer be guaranteed safe lanes of travel for their cargo vessels. They would be entrenching, withdrawing funds from interstellar interests, consolidating their operations within single systems, or among Jump-close systems which could provide strong mutual support. Either way, they would be riding out this storm with no room in their lifeboats for politicians.
It has ever been thus, he thought. First merchants and guildsmen, later corporations, then interstellar traders, all reached the point where their wealth became so great they were convinced it was indispensable to the very governments which had provided them with the security to attain it. Throughout history these entities, in their varied forms, ultimately attempted to manipulate those governments, always with mixed results and always doomed to failure. Because the Empire will deal with them no differently than we did, Diettinger mused, when the Unified Trade Bloc, which we created as a counter to the Imperial-backed Merchant Houses, turned on us.
The Sauron High Command had not even bothered to nationalize the operations of the Bloc. It had simply replaced each governing panel of each mercantile board of directors with a Sauron governor. The act was authorized not by shareholder votes but by edict of the High Command Council, and the Unified Trade Bloc, already Sauron in everything but name, ceased to exist as an even remotely independent entity.
But Diettinger knew that the Saurons had societal conditioning on their side. Generations of doing business under Sauron influence or outright authority had more or less prepared the members of the Trade Bloc for such actions. The Empire, on the other hand, had let its merchants run wild on too slack a leash for too long. They would not take kindly to being reined in, away from their illicit trade with the Outworlds—even, through middlemen, with Sauron itself. And many of the Empire’s great merchant houses maintained very large “security forces” of their own which were, in fact, nothing less than very well equipped private armies.
“Messy.” Diettinger said aloud, imagining the possibilities. But not something we can count on to be of any help to us, at the moment.
“Dictator?”
His Second Rank was looking at him with a puzzled expression, and he realized he had spoken aloud. He ignored the question. “Signal Task Force Falkenberg to proceed to Phase Two.”
Alderson’s development of a drive which could exploit stellar tramlines had made travel between stars not just possible, but effectively instantaneous. But besides jump lag, another side effect was the limiting of interstellar communication to the speed of physical travel. Once in-system, however, communication was still restricted to the slow crawl of message lasers traveling at lightspeed. That made the ships that waged wars to control those tramlines, for all their sophistication and weaponry, no more than scaled-up replicas of the flag-reliant square riggers of a past millennium. Given the firepower of the current millennium, however, requiring commanders to wait for engagement authorization under such circumstances would have been their death warrants.
Diettinger’s command station aboard the Fomoria was in near-Sauron orbit, two billion kilometers from Task Force Damaris. Because all communications were carried by message laser, the combat intelligence he was receiving and acting upon was already an hour old when it reached him. Aboard the Damaris, Emory would have moved to engage the Imperials immediately, according to plan. Her ships had probably been in combat for forty-five minutes already. It would be at least fifteen minutes more before Diettinger could expect to receive any data on the size and composition of the initial invasion force, or how well TF Damaris was faring in its engagement with it.
II
All things considered, Damaris was doing pretty well. The namesake of her task force had beaten off three direct attacks by Imperial vessels while maintaining a steady pressure against the known exit zones of the St. Ekaterina Alderson Point. Vessel First Rank Emory rotated her acceleration couch clockwise, raising and lowering her gaze as she did so, seeing everything of the battle around her. As in the command rooms on the Homeworld, Sauron warships used “immersion displays” in their bridges, full-surround projectors which replaced the walls, floor and ceiling of the combat command center with super-high resolution projections of the area of space that surrounded the vessel.
With such a display, Emory could see that she was still in control of the battle. The Imperials had failed to secure the area of space surrounding the St. Ekaterina Alderson Point; they were, in fact, being gradually contained and ground down by the ships of TF Damaris. The encircling maneuvers of Emory’s subordinate commanders on both wings of the formation were closing in around the first Imperial fleet to enter Sauron space.
“First Rank.” One of the Bridge Sensor Ranks called out to Emory, whose gaze continued to flicker across the image of the battle spread before her. “Speak.”
“Multiple precedents detonating at Dropshot Alderson Point.”
For the briefest moment, Emory clenched her teeth in frustration. Then Sauron discipline and her own intellect asserted themselves. “Communications.”
“Ready.”
“Signal all elements of the task force to disengage and fall back to Sector Nine, position one-one-eight-eight.”
“Affirmative.”
In perhaps ten minutes, Emory thought to herself, these Imperials we’ve been mauling will realize we’re breaking off and think their reinforcements have saved them. She reviewed Diettinger’s briefing to the task force commanders, for the hundredth time seeing its logic, for the thousandth time dreading that it would fail in spite of it.
I hope to God this works.
III
Diettinger’s staff was nearly overwhelmed by the Dictator’s demands for minute-by-minute updates on every sensor report of the battle. Within two minutes of the first Imperial entry at the Dropshot Alderson Point, three full Imperial fleets had emerged from as many different Alderson routes. Two Sauron task forces attached to the Keegan and the Soult had been nearly overwhelmed before breaking off and regrouping a scant eight hundred million kilometers from the orbit of the Homeworld.
As the Sauron defensive perimeter contracted, the laser-borne message updates had less space to cover, making the information they carried progressively more current, while the sheer volume of data was increasing as well. Diettinger’s Communications Rankers were transmitting data on the composition of the enemy intruders as fast as humanly possible—which for Sauron humans was very fast, indeed.
Diettinger drank it all in through the vast immersion display on the bridge of the Fomoria. Switching perspectives from time to time, enhancing some images and deleting others, he began to subtly adjust the display as the battle progressed. Over seven hundred Imperial warships had entered the Sauron System in the last three hours! Where the Empire had found that many ships, he could not even begin to guess—although one of his aides pointed out that at least one Imperial fleet element of over twenty ships had been positively identified as being from Aquitaine.
Diettinger had nodded and spoken for the first time in forty minutes. “The Imperials will not trust them; the Aquitaine fleet will be sacrificed to engage our larger vessels. Signal the task force commanders that they are not to oblige the Imperial planners if this occurs. The priority remains the Imperial fleet elements.”
All the while, he watched. As the sphere of the engagement contracted, Diettinger compensated by adjusting Fomoria’s Tactical Display downward in detail.
Looking up briefly from his station, Communications Fifth Rank Boyle noticed that the Tactical Display looked odd; it was too—tidy was the only word that came to his mind before his attention was demanded by another rush of signals from ships now only light minutes away.
Watching, concentrating, unaware of the gesture, Diettinger half-raised his hand, and when he saw what he’d been looking for, slapped it against the armrest of his acceleration couc
h.
“Communications.”
“Ready.” Fomoria’s Senior Communications Ranker answered, simultaneously rerouting all his own monitoring duties to Boyle’s station.
“Signal all fuel tankers on the Ostia run to initiate Plan Green. Signal Hourglass North and Hourglass South to go to Phase Two.”
“Affirm.”
Communications’ own gaze swept the Tactical Display as he sent the orders back to the System Defense Boats arrayed over the poles of Sauron. He noticed the same patterns as Boyle, but to him—born of a higher-caste crèche, better educated, more carefully groomed—they meant something else entirely.
The Dictator’s plan might work, he thought; we might live through this, after all…
Hourglasses North and South mirrored one another in their maneuvers: maximum thrust directly away from Sauron, above and below the Homeworld at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic of the Sauron System. On reaching their pre-arranged positions, together with Diettinger’s other task forces, they now comprised a flattened sphere of Sauron fleet elements surrounding the Homeworld. Evenly distributed over the several trillion cubic kilometers of the Homeworld system, the Sauron fleet was in perfect position to mount attacks in strength on any major concentration of Imperial vessels, most of which had yet to fully regroup themselves.
Instead the Sauron fleet kept station, and waited.
IV
It had been three days since Hawksley had received Diettinger’s Phase Two implementation order, breaking off and relinquishing command to the apparent relief of the Banshee’s Captain Connolly.
Aboard the Falkenberg, Hawksley’s aide had brought him coffee. He had slept briefly and not at all well; thus the first alarms of battle had been welcome. The corridors of the Falkenberg were dimly lit, her crew spoke in hushed tones, moved carefully; all for no good reason whatsoever. Where the raider now kept station, subterfuge was unnecessary. But her crew was comprised mostly of men and gentlemen from Burgess. On their planet hunting was still revered as sport and wherever the hunt, whatever the quarry, habits and traditions carry over and die hard. The hunter’s blind was both, and a Burgess favorite.
Hawksley took the four short steps from his bunk to his desk and sat down with his coffee. He glanced up at his porthole, a Burgess shipwright’s twenty-five centimeter-diameter concession to the romance of space travel; but there was, as usual, nothing to see.
There was a soft chime at his door. “Come in,” Hawksley answered, and his Executive Officer, Commander Willoughby entered with a crooked grin.
“Good morning, sir. Skipper. We have inbound signals, bearing two-nine-two degrees mark three-one-five. The readings look like couriers,” he added, smiling.
Hawksley took the datapad from his XO and sipped his coffee. It was Jamaican Blue Mountain, seized—and, he reflected proudly, the word was indeed “seized,” not “liberated,” but “seized”—from an Imperial Phidippides-class courier. Incredible that, with the Empire collapsing around their ears, those idiots at Court could still find such nonsense to waste men and ships on, such as maintaining their exclusive claim to one particular type of coffee bean. Obviously, he’d run his dueling sabre through the right Duke.
“Closing?” Hawksley asked.
The Exec nodded. “Speed consistent with couriers too, sir. It’s difficult to get clean readings with all this interference, but we managed to track them enough to put it at seven-Gs.”
Hawksley frowned, shook his head. “Look at the course. Two wide curves to the left, one to the right.”
“Could be evasive maneuvering?”
“Oh, it’s evasive, all right, Exec; but it’s not evasive enough to prevent a lock-on—these sensor logs prove that—and it’s too erratic for couriers, they fly straight and fast and pick a clear lane before they start. Remember where we are and what’s out there. No, my friend; I’m afraid those are Imperial heavy fighters—I’d say Legionnaire-class, from the looks of the exhaust spectrograph figures.”
Willoughby grimaced, realizing that Hawksley was right. “And here we wallow in the muck and mire.” Willoughby caught his CO’s look and stopped himself. He had already lodged a bitter complaint over the special weapons packages Diettinger had ordered installed aboard Falkenberg—bitter, and futile. Despite the fact that the agile and graceful Burgess commerce raider now maneuvered like a crippled barge, Hawksley did not seem to share his XO’s outrage. Truth be told, Falkenberg still had most of her speed—which was one of the reasons she’d drawn the short end of this particular duty stick.
Willoughby managed to keep the “I-told-you-so” tone out of his voice, and finished, “If they spot us, we could be in deep shit, skipper.”
Hawksley looked out once more through the tiny porthole above his desk, at the sickly green-brown swirl beyond.
“We’re already deep in shit, Commander Willoughby.”
On the Sauron Homeworld the battle was also being monitored in SDD sector, the vast System Defense Display complex which had been built centuries before. Upgraded yearly, no one on Sauron had ever seriously considered that it would be necessary. Until now.
The members of High Command watched and wondered, and all of them, Sauron norm and Cyborg alike shared the same thought: What was Diettinger up to?
They watched as the Sauron Home System Defense Forces withdrew from the Alderson Jump Points and even more twinkling lights appeared, signaling the arrival of Imperial ships.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I
“Imperial elements at station-keeping in the Alderson Jump zones,” one of the Sensor Ranks reported. “Task Force Damaris reports no concentrated pursuit, harassing fighter activity only.”
“Enemy activity level Ostia?” Diettinger asked.
“Three under-strength squadrons of heavy fighters; reconnaissance sweep patterns.”
Diettinger’s eye’s narrowed, the patch over his empty left socket rasping against his brow. Hawksley, he thought, do not disappoint me.
The tactical display showed all six of Sauron’s Alderson Jump Points firmly in Imperial control. Their supply lines thus secured, the Imperials could now mount their offensive against the Sauron Homeworld almost at their leisure. Shifting perspective, Diettinger watched as the pace of the tankers traveling between Sauron and Ostia slowed, then stopped. After a time, roughly half the displays indicating tanker ships began to come about to opposite headings, and soon the entire line of tankers—two hundred and seventeen in all—were on the same course, away from Sauron, toward Ostia, all to enter near orbit around the gas giant.
This was not immediately obvious, however. Tankers which carried liquefied hydrogen were dispersed structures, a dozen spherical containers held together by massive lattice frameworks, with drive and attitude thrusters arrayed along their surface in patterns that looked random to anyone but the engineers who had designed them. Efficient they might be; lovely, they were not.
But their ungainly shape concealed an elegant capacity for vector maneuvering, while incidentally making it difficult to tell their fores from their afts when they were moving slowly; and impossible to do so when they were still, as now. In fact, the tankers had no such dimensions, being capable of moving along any axis drawn through their centers of mass and connected by any two of the eight monstrous thrusting engines which they bore.
Only Diettinger, and one other, knew which way the motionless tankers would go next—or, at least, which way they were supposed to go.
II
Sauron’s six Alderson Points had all been secured by the enemy. At each, Imperial warships consolidated their control of the space surrounding them while the flood of reinforcing vessels slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Scarcely seven days after the first Imperial nuclear precedents had emerged from the Alderson Points, the Empire of Man had closed the loop around the neck of its most hated enemy. The battle to come would break the might of Sauron forever and, if the Empire was to fall to that cause, few in its ranks felt the sacrifice a vain
one.
Every Imperial sailor, marine, officer and midshipman in the armada had lost someone, somewhere to the Saurons or their allies. Every one of them was eager for the final drive against the Homeworld of the self-styled “super soldiers.” None of them wanted to die, but few expected to survive; and all of them, from Fleet Grand Admiral Ede down to Able-Spacer Murphy, were asking themselves the same question: “What are they waiting for?”
Cyborg Rank Manche had allowed a hint of annoyance in his voice when he asked the question, “What are they waiting for?”
Cyborg Rank Ulm ignored him out of spite. Ulm had been watching the tactical display in the High Command bunker on Homeworld for twelve hours, since taking over for Saentz who had been there for thirty-six hours previously—eventually, even Cyborgs needed sleep, Imperial invasions or not. Cyborgs were not loquacious and never asked rhetorical questions. It was therefore part of their peculiar social structure that to presume such about another Cyborg’s inquiries was considered insulting.
Manche perceived Ulm’s disrespect, making a mental note to remember the slight and deal with it later. He walked slowly around the massive holographic immersion display, reviewing the suspended readouts of enemy ship numbers and wondering if there would be a later. In a week, neither the Imperial nor Sauron fleets had moved to engage one another. The Imperial bridgeheads in Sauron space had crawled forward from the Alderson Points, linking up and forming three vast task forces of more or less equal size. The term “bridgehead” had no rational basis whatsoever in terms of a space battle, nor did “beachhead” as applied to planetary positions secured after orbital invasions, but after two millennia in space, humanity had yet to come up with any better ones.
Even without data displays, Manche could see that the Sauron home fleet was outnumbered by at least five to one. Still, Diettinger is operating on interior lines, he considered. The enemy can only observe, communicate and react as fast as the speed of light will allow him; Diettinger is on the inside of that sphere of activity.