“Aye, Admiral,” the communications officer said.
Kat sighed. It wasn’t enough, and she knew it. But it was all she could do until she got reinforcements.
And if the last report from home is any indication, she thought, I’ll be lucky if I don’t get half my ships taken away.
Millicent Barbara had always admired the sheer resilience of the planet’s population. Judd hadn’t been an easy world to tame, back when the colony ship had first landed, and then they’d spent a decade under the Theocracy’s iron heel. They’d bounced back after the liberation; they’d repaired their cities, settled new farms, and even started a long-term plan to develop the remainder of their star system. She’d thought nothing could keep them down.
But now, looking at the men and women in the makeshift refugee camp, she wondered if the Theocracy had finally broken the planet’s population. A handful of refugees had volunteered to assist the militia and aid workers, but the remainder were just sitting there as if they expected to be fed and watered like animals. They didn’t even have the entitlement she’d come to hate on Ahura Mazda, the belief that they had a right to be given food and drink without payment. She shuddered as she saw the listless eyes and unmoving bodies. They didn’t even have the drive to pick up the pieces and start again.
She shook her head, morbidly, as she saw a pair of shuttles come in to land. The Royal Marines had been helpful, but there was little they could do. There just weren’t enough supplies to feed the refugees. And even if they had enough, now, soon they would run out completely. She had no idea what would happen then, but she didn’t think it would be pretty. The local farmers were already grumbling about supplying food to the refugee camps. It wouldn’t be long before they either ran out or refused to supply any more.
And it’s only been seven days, she thought. What will happen when winter comes?
“Millie,” Dave called. “There’s someone here you need to see.”
Millicent followed his gaze . . . and froze. The young woman walking towards her, surrounded by a trio of marines, was one of the most famous people in the Commonwealth. Kat Falcone looked even younger than Millicent had realized, going by the newscasts; she would have taken the woman for someone in her early twenties if she hadn’t known that Kat Falcone was a decade older. Blonde hair, cropped closer to her scalp; a dazzling white uniform . . . she looked good, but there was something haunted in her eyes.
Millicent understood, better than she cared to admit. The Commonwealth had failed Judd.
“Admiral Falcone,” she said, suddenly unsure how to address their visitor. “I’m Millicent Barbara. Welcome to the camp.”
“Thank you,” Kat Falcone said. “What’s the situation?”
“Grim,” Millicent said as they walked around the edge of the camp. “Most of the refugees have lost the will to do anything, even to live. They’re just sitting around and waiting to die.”
Kat shot her a sharp look. “You can’t find them work? Something to do with their time?”
Millicent snorted. “There’s no shortage of work,” she assured her. “But the will to actually do it is lacking.”
She waved a hand towards the nearest tent. “Everyone here went to the city to build new lives for themselves, lives that were just snatched away a week ago. They’ve lost partners and children, friends and coworkers . . . they’ve simply given up. They might go back to work if they were starved, which is what may happen in the next week or so, or they might simply lie down and die. They’ve been broken.”
“Shit,” Kat Falcone said.
“This world needs help, Admiral,” Millicent told her. She waved towards the marines, who were digging a well. “We need help, not . . . not penny-pinching.”
“That may be difficult,” Kat Falcone told her. Her voice was flat, emotionless. “This may just be the beginning.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
* * *
ASHER DALES
“The station isn’t on the verge of falling apart,” Commander Patti Ludwig commented after the engineering crews had spent two days inspecting every last inch of the orbiting station. “I don’t believe it.”
William nodded in agreement. The station was clearly marked by signs of slapdash construction and maintenance—there was no point in trying to pretend that someone other than the Theocracy had built it—but was surprisingly intact. Whoever had been in command must have been smarter, or simply more knowledgeable, than the average Theocratic commander. Maybe they’d been exiled for daring to know more than they should about engineering, he speculated silently. Or perhaps they’d simply forced themselves to learn when they realized that their life depended on everything working right.
“I checked the computer core,” Lieutenant Jennifer Flowers said. “It’s primitive, by our standards, but it can handle everything. We probably don’t even have to replace it.”
“Not at once anyway,” William said. “But we will have to replace it eventually.”
“Agreed,” Patti said. “Who knows what they might have done to it.”
William winced. There were literally billions of lines of code inside a modern computer core. The Theocrats could easily put a backdoor into the system that would allow them to take over, or simply turn off the life support, at a moment’s notice. He doubted that any of the crewmen would be able to remove it, even if they’d realized that the backdoor was there. The Theocrats probably believed computers to be magic. And even if there wasn’t a backdoor or hidden virus planted within the system, there was a good chance the system would fail anyway, sooner or later. He didn’t think they’d have bothered to keep up with the latest system patches.
He scowled as he surveyed the command center. The station was large, but most of it consisted of storage compartments and a lone fusion core that was nearly thirty years out of date. There wasn’t much room left for everything else. He was used to living on starships and space stations, but he couldn’t help thinking that the crew would have been on the verge of going insane before they’d been killed. Tiny compartments were one thing; a complete lack of entertainment was quite another. They’d worked, prayed, and slept . . . without even a hint of anything else. It made him wonder precisely how the locals had managed to take the station. Getting up to orbit alone should be impossible without clearance.
Maybe the enemy sensor network failed at a crucial moment, he thought. Or maybe they were distracted.
“We can proceed, I believe,” he said. “We’ll leave a small crew on the station, for the moment, but we can’t go any further until the freighter arrives.”
He nodded to his subordinates, then strode off the command deck and down the corridor to the airlock. The station was easily large enough to allow the destroyers to dock comfortably—it had been designed to handle much larger freighters—but he hadn’t been inclined to take the risk until the station had been checked thoroughly. Even though it was safe, or as a safe as a piece of Theocratic technology ever got, he wasn’t keen on docking his ships. The station was a sitting duck. A single nuclear missile would take it out, along with any vessels that happened to be docked at the time. Losing a sizeable chunk of his squadron like that would be extremely embarrassing.
Tanya was waiting for him when he returned to Dandelion, looking edgy. She’d been in charge of giving his crewmen a couple of days of shore leave, something he thought she’d embrace, but she didn’t seem to be enjoying her homecoming. It made William wonder if she’d try to book a flight back to Tyre the next time a freighter passed through the system. It would take months—there were no regular services flying through the Gap yet—but she could do it. Hell, she could probably trade free legal advice for passage. Freighter captains were permanently fretting about winding up on the wrong side of the law.
“William,” she said, “is the station usable?”
“For the moment,” William told her. “That was a bit of a surprise.”
Tanya had to smile as they headed down the corridor to his office. �
��They told me that the station was in good condition,” she said. “And besides, beggars can’t be choosers.”
“True,” William agreed. Richard Barrington was a rich man, richer than William had appreciated at first, but there were limits. He wasn’t nearly as rich as Kat’s family. “I’m sure the station will survive long enough for us to replace it with a modern installation.”
“Or even one that works perfectly,” Tanya said. The hatch hissed open as they approached, allowing them to walk into the office. “Father wanted to know when you’d be ready to start exercises.”
“Today, I think,” William said as he sat down. He keyed his console, bringing up the in-system display. The system looked empty, although he knew that could be completely meaningless. The entire Royal Navy could be hidden within the system and he’d be none the wiser, as long as the starships kept their drives and sensors stepped down. “I’ve sent Primrose to survey the outer edge of the system, but she should be back today.”
Tanya lifted her eyebrows. “You think it needs to be done?”
“Our navigation charts are badly out of date,” William said. “And if we fly into a gravitational eddy we didn’t know was there, we’ll be lucky if we only get kicked back into realspace.”
He shrugged. An encounter with an eddy wasn’t too likely to happen, but an ounce of prevention was better than a pound of cure. Besides, Barrington presumably didn’t want to make life difficult for anyone visiting his system. An independent freighter captain might think twice about flying to Asher Dales if there was even the slightest prospect of running into trouble. It was dangerous enough flying through the liberated sector without making it worse.
“We’ll start once Primrose returns,” he added. “And once the rest of the ships arrive, we can . . .”
He stopped as the alert bleeped. “Captain,” Lieutenant Yang said, “a courier boat has just dropped out of hyperspace. She’s transmitting a priority-one signal to us and the planet.”
William sucked in his breath. A priority-one signal meant . . . what? An imminent threat to the planet? They’d only just gotten to Asher Dales! He forced himself to think, fast. Who’d be attacking them? There was nothing that might draw an interstellar power to attack Asher Dales . . . was there?
“Have the signal copied to my terminal,” he said. “And then request the courier boat to hold position.”
“Aye, sir,” Yang said.
Tanya cleared her throat. “What is it?”
“Bad news,” William guessed. The message blinked up on his terminal. “You may have to call your father.”
He read the message with a growing sense of disbelief. An enemy force, a Theocratic force, had attacked Judd, leaving the planet in ruins. The recording made disturbing viewing, even though the analysts had noted that most of the enemy superdreadnoughts were no more than sensor ghosts. A lone superdreadnought would have no difficulty turning his squadron into atoms, then trashing the orbiting space station and the planet below. Three, or four, or five were overkill. But the enemy had already shown a disturbing fondness for overkill.
“. . . Shit,” he said slowly. He swung the terminal round so Tanya could see the message. “You definitely have to call your father.”
“I will,” she said. “But it may take some time for everyone on the surface to stop panicking.”
They’ll have a point, William thought. He had no idea how Barrington had financed the purchase of four destroyers, but he had to have pushed his resources to the limit. Losing them would be utterly disastrous. Asher Dales is practically defenseless against anything larger than a light cruiser.
He forced himself to think as Tanya watched the message again and again. The enemy ships would have reached Asher Dales by now if they’d flown directly from Judd. Looking at the time stamps on the reports, he could see that the attack had actually taken place seven days before the alert had been dispatched. There was no reason to assume, he told himself firmly, that Asher Dales was about to be attacked. But that might change. Anyone intent on causing problems, both for the Commonwealth and the liberated worlds, would want to destroy Barrington’s investment in nuclear fire.
And smash the planet-side industries too, William thought. He’d been brought up to think that industrial nodes should be in space, where there was limitless energy and no need to worry about pollution, but he could see why Asher Dales didn’t have any choice. They could bomb Asher Dales back to bedrock in an afternoon.
“I have to call my father,” Tanya said. “Do you mind if I use your terminal?”
“Not at all,” William said. “Do you want me to stay?”
“He’ll probably want to speak to you,” Tanya said. She smiled weakly. “I’ll call him now.”
William brought up the starchart and studied it quickly. The worst-case assumption, according to ONI, was that the enemy had five superdreadnoughts. William privately doubted that figure—he doubted the rogue Theocrats could keep five superdreadnoughts operational without shipyards and supplies—but the scenario still had to be taken seriously. The enemy could ravage the sector and . . . there was very little the Commonwealth could do to stop them.
Too few potential targets too, William thought. Ahura Mazda and Maxwell’s Haven were probably the bigger ones, the targets the enemy would love to hit, but they were both heavily defended. The Theocrats would be blown to atoms if they faced the Royal Navy in open battle. We might be quite high up their list of realistic targets.
“That’s the long and short of it, Father,” Tanya said. She raised her voice, drawing William’s attention. “We may be attacked at any moment.”
“I see,” Barrington said. “William? Do you concur with this assessment?”
“I don’t see any reason to panic,” William said after a moment. “The situation is grim, let us not think otherwise, but it’s not a complete disaster. There is a good chance we will be targeted . . .”
“As I said,” Tanya commented.
“. . . But we have no way to know when, or even if, we will be hit,” William finished. “I don’t think anyone knows that you’ve assembled a small fleet, at least not yet. They might not consider Asher Dales to be a particularly important target.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Barrington’s voice was very cold. “What happens then?”
“We lose,” William said flatly. “There is no way that four destroyers can stand off five superdreadnoughts. But there are ways we can make them pay . . .”
Or possibly even deter them from attacking, he thought. It wouldn’t be that hard to rig up a pair of drones to pose as superdreadnoughts. The illusion wouldn’t last for long, but it might just convince the enemy that Asher Dales was too big a target to be hit safely. They wouldn’t want to tangle with superdreadnoughts even if they had numerical superiority. As long as we don’t have to open fire, we should be able to fool them.
“There’s no way they can be made to pay enough,” Barrington said savagely. “What are they thinking?”
William shrugged. It was possible the rogue ships were reaching the end of their lifespan. It wouldn’t surprise him. A superdreadnought needed one day in a shipyard for every ten days on active duty, and the Theocrats had lost all their shipyards. Their commanders might have decided to go out in a blaze of glory, or, perhaps worse, think they could wear the defenders down with atrocity after atrocity until the Commonwealth withdrew from the sector, leaving them to pick up the pieces and rebuild the Theocracy. They might manage it too. They had more firepower than most of the liberated worlds put together.
We need support from the Royal Navy, he thought grimly. But the navy can’t hope to cover every potential target.
“Right,” Barrington said. “Captain, you are to do everything within your power to prepare to defend our world. And . . . if they do attack in force, I expect you to make them pay as high a price as possible before you withdraw.”
Tanya gasped. “Withdraw?”
“A pair of light cruisers were destroyed at Ju
dd,” Barrington said sharply. “And what do we have? Two destroyers.”
William scowled. He didn’t like the thought of abandoning Asher Dales to the Theocrats, not when it was all too clear that everything Barrington and his people had built would be destroyed from orbit. Asher Dales didn’t have a refugee problem, thankfully. There were no POW camps for the enemy to raid. But Barrington was right. The two destroyers, four if the remainder of the squadron arrived before the enemy, wouldn’t stand a chance if the Theocracy attacked. The vessels of Asher Dales might be able to land a blow or two—William was already starting to turn his vague ideas into something usable—but the outcome was inevitable.
“We will do what we can,” he promised. “And I already have a couple of ideas.”
“Good luck,” Barrington said. “I’ll be dispersing the population down here. Hopefully, they’ll blast empty cities rather than crowded farms.”
William winced. Hebrides had followed a similar strategy, back when the pirate attacks had begun. It had worked, to some extent, but hadn’t kept the pirates from extorting food, drink, and women from the planetary population. And Asher Dales was facing the Theocracy. A pirate ship might give up and go away. The Theocracy wouldn’t leave unless they encountered superior force.
They’d be fools to allow themselves to be pinned down so easily, he told himself. They might just make one pass through the system, blast anything that looks important, then retreat at once.
“Perhaps we should set up decoys on the surface,” he said. “A handful of ECM pods, perhaps. If we configure them to look like they’re industrial nodes, they might bomb them and miss the real targets.”
Barrington smiled, wanly. “And rig explosives underneath them to make it look like they went up with a bang,” he added. “Let them think they hurt us.”
William’s lips twitched humorlessly as he recalled an old joke. One side of a war had set up a dummy airfield, complete with dummy hangars and dummy aircraft. The enemy had promptly bombed it, with dummy bombs. It might work, he told himself. If the explosions were spectacular enough, the Theocrats wouldn’t want to look any closer. They wouldn’t want to think that they’d been tricked.
Debt of Honor (The Embers of War) Page 13