A Call to Arms

by David Weber

  Unless Hardasty wanted to head in from the Belt later to Gryphon and ask Admiral Jacobson for help. Given that Aries had been pulled out of Jacobson’s Red Force before being handed over to MPARS, Lisa doubted that such help would be cheerfully given.

  “Well, do remind her that we’re scheduled to leave in three hours to rendezvous with the rest of Green One,” she said. “If she needs assistance after that, she’ll have to get it elsewhere.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Lisa checked her chrono. Captain Marcello would be arriving for his watch in about half an hour. Lisa would want to make sure the shuttle was properly squared away and that Damocles was ready for her departure to join the rest of Admiral Locatelli’s force.

  And then it would be a trip to the officers’ mess for a quick dinner. Alone, probably. Certainly not with anyone who understood her and could make her laugh.

  It really was amazing, she decided, how much she missed Travis.

  * * *

  “Well?” Gensonne asked, drumming his fingers impatiently.

  “We’re ready, Sir,” Imbar said. He listened a moment longer, then keyed off the com. “All ships are in position; all synch timers are zeroed. We await your order, Admiral.”

  Gensonne nodded. Which was as it should be. All ships, all crewmen, all awaiting his order.

  All ships, of course, except for Llyn’s courier. Gensonne had invited him to come along and watch the show, but he’d made his excuses and taken off, no doubt to report to his Axelrod masters. Perish forbid that someone from such a genteel, dress-suited establishment should soil his hands with something as disagreeable as actual combat.

  But that was fine. Gensonne could have found something useful for Llyn and his ship to do, but he hardly needed them. All he needed was Llyn’s money, and he had the first portion of that safely in hand.

  He would also make sure he had all the rest before he and his ships left Manticore. Maybe he would make a little ritual of handing over the keys to King Edward’s palace in exchange for the last set of bank chits. That would probably appeal to the little man’s sense of humor.

  In the meantime, the Volsung Mercenaries had a job to do.

  “Signal all ships,” he ordered Imbar. “Translate on my mark.”

  And they would carry out that job with skill and precision, he promised himself. The skill and precision that Gustav Anderman had always prized, and which the old lunatic had claimed Gensonne didn’t have.

  Well, the Volsungs would show him. They would show everyone.

  And when this was all over, maybe Gensonne would take the new ships and crews he could buy with the money Llyn was paying and go back to Potsdam. And he would show his former chief just how skillful and precise an attack could be.

  It was something worth thinking about.

  In the meantime…

  “Ready all ships,” he called. “Ready: mark.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The midwatch was technically the first watch of the ship’s day, though whether it felt like the earliest or the latest was largely a function of how a given crewmember’s biological clock operated. Some of Casey’s officers and crew actively hated it, while others were less passionate on the subject but not any happier with the duty.

  Travis had no such animosities toward midwatch assignments. On the contrary, he rather enjoyed them. Midwatch was the quietest period of ship’s day, with the bulk of the crew asleep back in the hab module, only essential operations running, and minimal routine maintenance scheduled.

  It was the best time of day, in short, to just be quiet and think.

  He certainly had plenty to think about. For the past six weeks most of his waking hours had been devoted to learning everything he could about Casey, her armaments, her capabilities, and her crew. Lieutenant Commander Woodburn, whose personality could best be described as prickly, had ridden him hard, pretty much the entire time. But unlike some of the officers back on Phoenix, Woodburn was eminently fair and always seemed more interested in teaching Travis the ropes than in making himself look superior or his student look stupid.

  So had everyone else aboard. In fact, as near as Travis could tell, everyone treated him exactly like they did all the other officers. Either Casey’s men and women didn’t follow politics or they didn’t know Travis was related to Baron Winterfall.

  Or else they knew and simply didn’t care.

  Travis hoped it was the latter. If it was one of the other reasons, sooner or later the word would get out, and it would be Phoenix all over again.

  He sent his gaze slowly around the bridge, at the men and women strapped into their stations, casually alert even in the quiet of absolutely nothing happening. Casey wasn’t exactly home—Travis wasn’t sure if any place would ever truly be home for him—but the ship and her crew had all the little quirks that he’d always imagined would exist in a home. Granted, Woodburn wasn’t the only occasionally irritating personality aboard, and Travis had had his share of small clashes with some of them. But for the most part, the crew seemed eminently compatible with each other.

  The commissioned complement had even more of that same pseudo-family feeling. On the bridge, Commodore Heissman typically dispensed with the formalities that Captain Castillo had always maintained aboard Phoenix, addressing his senior officers by their first names or even nicknames, some of which Travis still hadn’t puzzled out. There was an air of easy camaraderie, the kind that Travis had read about in military-themed books and had experienced to some degree back when he was a mere gravitics tech aboard Guardian.

  At the same time, that familiarity and camaraderie went only so far. Heissman and the other senior officers still addressed Travis formally as Lieutenant or Mr. Long, and he was of course expected to reciprocate with that same formality. Hopefully, it was just a matter of Travis being on informal probation, and that somewhere along the line he would be accepted as a full-fledged member of Casey’s family.

  Unless there was some of Phoenix’s same political-appointee underpinnings roiling quietly beneath the surface. If so, he might as well get used to being Casey’s ugly duckling. Especially once they figured out who his half-brother was.

  “XO on the bridge,” Lieutenant Rusk called from the tracking station behind him.

  Travis swiveled around to see Commander Belokas float onto the bridge. “Ma’am,” he greeted her, reflexively reaching for his restraints before he could stop himself. Regulations said that when a senior officer entered the bridge all crew members were to immediately come to full attention, a standing order Captain Castillo had enforced aboard Phoenix. Commodore Heissman and Commander Belokas dispensed with that particular formality, and Travis was still getting used to that difference.

  Briefly, he wondered if the officers and crew of the battlecruiser Invincible similarly had to float upright in zero-gee every time the great Admiral Carlton Locatelli came into any compartment, not just the bridge. From what he’d seen of Locatelli’s nephew’s attitude, he suspected they probably did.

  “What can we do for you, Ma’am?” he asked as Belokas drifted across the bridge, her gaze moving back and forth between the various monitors.

  “I was wondering if there was anything new on that flicker we picked up during Lieutenant Dahl’s watch,” she said.

  “I don’t believe so, Ma’am,” Travis said, frowning as he pulled up the log. There hadn’t been any mention of activity on the watch report he’d read when he’d arrived on duty an hour ago.

  No wonder. The flicker Belokas was referring to was the barest bloop, something that would never even have been noticed if the rest of the universe hadn’t been so quiet and Casey’s crew so bored. Dahl, the Forward Weapons division head, had put it down to a sensor echo; the CIC supervisor, after a thorough examination of the gravitic equipment, had suggested it could also be a hyper ghost, a phenomenon that shipboard instrumentation was unfortunately not well-equipped to pinpoint or identify. For that, a large-scale orbiting sensor array was necessary, and
Manticore wasn’t likely to be buying one of those monstrosities anytime soon. Furthermore, the bloop had occurred a full sixteen hours ago, with nothing since then, which again argued for an echo or hyper ghost.

  But if the frown on Belokas’s face was any indication, she wasn’t happy with either explanation. An odd reaction, really, given that such ghosts weren’t exactly unheard of out here.

  Especially not in that particular sector, which was notorious for iffy sensor resolution and rough downward Alpha transitions. Travis had looked into the phenomenon once, and as far as he’d been able to learn no one knew what it was, though it had been tentatively ascribed to an interaction between Manticore’s twin suns and some as-yet unmapped set of grav waves.

  “There’s been nothing new, Ma’am,” Travis told her. “Do you want us to run another sensor diagnostic?”

  For a few seconds Belokas didn’t answer, but merely continued her drift toward Travis’s station. He watched her approach, his heartbeat picking up a bit. He was still somewhat new to this whole officer-in-charge thing, and he already knew how bad he was at reading Belokas’s expression and body language. Should he have run such a diagnostic already? Was she holding her peace merely because she wanted to be close enough to chew him out quietly, without the rest of the bridge crew listening in?

  “More diagnostics won’t tell us anything new,” she said at last, wrapping her long fingers around his station’s handhold and bringing herself to a halt. “Let’s try something else. Run me a simulation of what a soft translation about fifteen light-minutes outside the hyper limit would look like.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Travis said as he swiveled around to his console. That possibility had already been considered, he’d seen from the report. But between the diagnostics and the hyper ghost hypothesis, that scenario had apparently been dropped. Certainly there was no record of anyone having done a simulation or even a data-curve profile.

  Fortunately, it was a fairly simple job, with most of the necessary templates already stored on the ship’s computer. A couple of minutes, and he was ready. “Here we go,” he said, starting the run. “I set it to cover the full range of thirteen to eighteen light-minutes. If that doesn’t work, I can extend it outward—”

  “Hyper footprint!” Rusk called from behind him.

  For a fraction of a second Travis thought the other was talking about the simulation. Then his brain caught up with him. “Acknowledged,” he said, swiveling again and checking the proper display. It was a translation, all right, a big, fat, noisy one.

  And it was right on the same vector where the earlier bloop had registered. “We have anything on her?” he asked.

  “She’s reasonably big,” Rusk said. The displays were coming to life as CIC collected and collated the data from Casey’s various sensors and sent the results to the bridge. “Low-power wedge, low acceleration. Probably a freighter, possibly a passenger liner. There’s something funny about her wedge, too—some sort of non-rhythmic fluctuation. Trouble with her nodes, probably.”

  Travis looked at Belokas, wondering if she would formally relieve him and take command. Ships didn’t show up at Manticore every day, and those that did seldom showed signs of serious and imminent trouble.

  But the XO was just gazing silently at the displays. Waiting, apparently, for the Officer of the Watch to respond to the situation.

  Travis squared his shoulders. Rare or not, the situation was adequately covered by standard regs. “Send a request for identification and status, and inform the rest of Janus that we have a visitor,” he ordered. “Then send an alert to System Command.” He squinted at the tactical. “What is she, about ten light-minutes out?”

  “Yes, Sir, just a shade under,” Rusk confirmed. “So about twenty minutes until we get a reply.”

  “Unless she is having problems, in which case she’s probably already screaming for help,” Belokas said. She tapped her cheek thoughtfully. “Where’s Aegis at the moment?”

  “The far side of Manticore,” Travis said. “About twenty-two light minutes away from us, maybe thirteen or fourteen from the bogey. Shall I send an alert directly to Admiral Locatelli?”

  “That would be a good idea,” Belokas confirmed. “If the bogey’s in trouble, we’re definitely closest. But depending on what’s going on, the admiral may want to reconfigure his force while we head out there.” Her lips compressed briefly. “And while you’re doing all that, may I also recommend that you call Commodore Heissman to the bridge.”

  * * *

  “—and I think the reactor’s bottle is also starting to fail,” Captain Olver’s frantic voice boomed over Odin’s com speaker. “My engineer says it could go at any time.”

  Gensonne listened closely, hoping Olver would remember his instructions to keep his voice pleading but not whiny. People hated whiny, even upstanding naval types willing to risk their lives for those in danger. Making Naglfar look stoic and sympathetic would encourage the Manticorans listening to his distress call to charge to the rescue with a minimum of delay and, hopefully, a minimum of prudence.

  “Repeating: this is the personnel transport Leviathan, heading for the Haven Sector with three thousand passengers,” Olver continued. “The same power surge that damaged our forward alpha nodes and the fusion bottle’s also compromised our life-support system—we’re trying to fix it, but it’s not looking good, and I don’t know how long before it fails completely. If you have any ships in the area, for the love of God please get them out here. We’re making as many gees as we can, but I don’t know how much longer before we’ll have to shut down the wedge completely, and we’re a hell of a long way from anywhere. Whatever ships you’ve got—freighters, liners, ore ships—anything we can pack our people into—please send them. For the love of God, please.”

  The plea broke off as one of Olver’s crew came up with his own anxiously delivered and almost off-mike report on the supposed fusion bottle failure, and Gensonne keyed off the speaker. They were still a good distance out from the inner system, but it looked like the nearest Manticoran force was about ten light-minutes away, which meant a twenty-minute turnaround for any conversation.

  The Manticorans’ response should be interesting. In the meantime, Gensonne had plenty of other matters with which to occupy himself. “What’s the status of the main force?” he called across the bridge.

  “We’ve temporarily lost contact, Admiral,” Imbar called back. “They’re definitely still behind us, but they’re hard to spot with their wedge strength this low.”

  Gensonne grunted, looking across the relevant display screens. Being difficult to spot was the whole idea, of course. But knowing exactly where to look should make the task a lot simpler.

  Though perhaps he was being too harsh on Imbar and the sensor team. The fourteen Volsung ships had translated into n-space together sixteen hours ago, coming in softly and quietly about forty light-minutes out from Manticore-A, where they ought to have been well out of range of RMN sensors. The enormous passive arrays typical of more populous star systems would certainly have picked them up, but shipboard gravitics’ range was always far more limited. The invaders had sorted themselves into Gensonne’s six-ship Advance Force and Thor’s eight-ship Main Force, then headed toward the inner system in two waves spaced about an hour apart. Running their acceleration low to build up speed while keeping their wedges hopefully undetectable, they’d headed in toward their targets.

  Targets that were gratifyingly right where they were supposed to be. The two destroyers of the Sidewinder Force, Umbriel and Miranda, had conducted a quiet recon during the past forty-eight hours, doing a soft translation far outside the system, drifting along as they marked the locations and vectors of the two main Naval forces, then translating out again and rejoining the two main Volsung groups. From their data Gensonne had calculated where the Manticorans should be and adjusted his forces’ insertion vector so that they would encounter the smaller Green Two force well before the larger group of Green One ships could mo
ve to support them.

  Now, after hours of tedium, things were finally about to heat up. Far ahead, Naglfar had translated right on the hyper limit—not with the same undetectable entry as the rest of the Volsung ships, but with a big, noisy translation that should have grabbed the attention of every RMN ship in the region. That sloppy entrance, along with Olver’s frantic plea for help, should get the Manticoran ships falling all over themselves scrambling to come to his aid.

  It would no doubt be highly entertaining to see how a Manticoran boarding party would react to finding out that a shipload of supposedly helpless civilians was actually five battalions of crack Volsung shock troops. Sadly, Gensonne would miss out on that picture. If all went according to plan, the Manticorans’ first encounter with those troops wouldn’t be in deep space, but at the Royal Palace in Landing City.

  By then, of course, the surprise would be long gone. Still, the purpose of this exercise was capture and occupation, not entertainment. And once the RMN had been eliminated, Volsung control of the Manticoran centers of power would be a mere formality.

  “Got a bearing on Naglfar, Admiral,” Imbar called. “We’re on a good intercept course. We should pass it in about ninety-seven minutes.”

  Gensonne checked the tac display. Ninety-seven minutes was shorter than he’d planned, but within acceptable parameters. “Have Olver increase acceleration to ninety-five gees,” he instructed Imbar. He could always have Naglfar cut back later if he needed to fine-tune the intercept. “Any movement from the Manticorans yet?”

  “No, Sir,” Imbar said. “But Green Two should just be hearing Olver’s distress call now.”

  “Keep an eye on them,” Gensonne ordered. “Once we know their jump-off time and acceleration, I want a quick plot of their zero-zero intercept. We need to make sure we’re far enough ahead of Naglfar that they won’t be able to turn tail and run once they spot us.”

  Though the Sidewinder force’s follow-up mission should help alleviate that problem. If the destroyers had translated on schedule at their own insertion point around the edge of the hyper limit, there was a good chance they could help cut off any retreat the Manticorans might attempt.