Von Schönkopf stripped off his armored suit, washed off his sweat in the shower, and returned to the command room.
“Well, we managed to beat them back. I mentioned this earlier, but how about we send engineers and ground troops over there now?”
“No, it turns out we can’t do that after all,” said Chief of Staff Murai.
“Why not?”
“You’ve taken a number of their engineers prisoner. What would happen if the opposite happened over there? If they were to use truth serum or torture on our captured troops and someone told them that Admiral Yang wasn’t here …;”
“I see,” von Schönkopf said, nodding. “That would be dangerous.” Suddenly, the light in his eyes grew harder. His side had taken prisoners, but what about the enemy? Fighting in space, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between KIA and MIA. Since it was quite common for no body to remain at all, the best you could do in some cases was lump them all together as “Unreturned.”
Caselnes tilted his head slightly. “Our side didn’t give up any captives, did it, Admiral von Schönkopf?”
“I pray we didn’t. But even so …;”
“What?”
“What should we do going forward? We can’t order the troops to kill themselves if it looks like they’re going to be captured. Whenever we fight, one or two are bound to get taken alive. It’s impossible to prevent that.”
“And?”
“It’s going to slip out eventually. When it does, our best option will be to use that against them. So how about we try to use that and set a trap for them?”
“No, I’d like to observe the enemy’s movements a little longer. If we start with the dirty tricks, the blowback could be a lot scarier than we expect.”
There was plenty of reason for Caselnes to be circumspect. Von Schönkopf acknowledged that; when he looked at the image of the enemy fortress on the screen, his own shoulders cringed just slightly.
“Still,” said von Schönkopf, “their first attack was big and bold, and their second attack small and crafty. So what form will their third attack take …;?”
Nobody gave an answer, but he had not been expecting one. He looked around the room, walked over to his sharpshooting student, and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Julian, get some sleep now, while you can. Soon enough, there won’t be any time for sleeping.”
In the central command room at Gaiesburg Fortress, Commander in Chief Karl Gustav Kempf and Vice Commander in Chief Neidhart Müller conversed while staring at the image of Iserlohn Fortress on their main screen, six hundred thousand kilometers away.
“So the engineers failed? Well, can’t be helped. If everything went the way we liked, this job would be easy.”
“And in any case, we’re up against Yang Wen-li. Even Duke von Lohengramm respects his skill.”
“Yang Wen-li, eh? He’s skilled, at least when it comes to running away. The year before last, in the fighting leading up to Amritsar, he ran away from me in the middle of a fight. Just took off, even though he was winning. He’s a strange one.”
“‘A strange one.’ That alone means we can’t easily guess what kind of tricks he’s going to pull.”
“But we can’t afford to wait around to see. We’ve got the initiative, so let’s press it. Preparations for what we spoke about earlier are complete now, aren’t they, Müller?”
“They are. Shall we begin?”
Kempf nodded, and as he stared with a spirited gaze at the image of Iserlohn Fortress, a confident smile spread out across his firm jaw.
III
While tension and unease ate their way into the hearts of the people, events were moving forward. A long lull in the imperial forces’ attacks had persisted for eighty hours now, ever since the failure of the engineers’ operation. Like lions that had eaten to excess, the enemy was now moving sluggishly.
“They aren’t coming out to try anything new. What are they up to?”
Some of those aboard were expressing panic and irritation as well, but since the policy of Iserlohn’s leadership was to buy time, any lag between enemy attacks was something to be welcomed.
“With each passing second, Admiral Yang is getting closer to Iserlohn. And the closer he is, the closer we are to victory.”
Commodore Patrichev had spoken those words to his soldiers. The rightness of that statement’s first half was acknowledged by all, but the second half wasn’t necessarily drawing universal support. Some feared that Iserlohn would already be fallen by the time Admiral Yang arrived. Frontline soldiers, however, tended to be geared more toward optimism than pessimism, and even though enemy forces had landed on the outer wall, the fact that they had been repelled played a positive role in improving their morale.
When the next attack came, it came suddenly. There were no obvious warning signs. It was like film skipping a frame: things switched from “stop” to “go” in the blink of an eye. By the time the operators managed to believe what their eyes were telling them, the shaft of light unleashed from Gaiesburg was already piercing the void.
“Energy waves approaching rapidly!”
Before the operator had finished speaking, the outer wall of Iserlohn was ripped asunder by powerful beams of hard X-rays. The fortress shuddered as a series of small explosions went off inside. Those who were in the central command room heard a sound like distant thunder, and their hearts started pounding at a furious pace.
“Turret 79, completely destroyed. No survivors—”
“Block LB29 damaged! Many dead and injured—”
On the verge of screaming, operators shouted out reports in quick succession.
“Abandon the 79th turret! Rescue the wounded in Block LB29 ASAP.”
No sooner had the operators’ words broken off than Caselnes ordered, “Get Thor’s Hammer ready for synchronized firing!” He was grinding his teeth both figuratively and literally. He had thought the imperial forces had given up on settling this with direct exchanges of cannon fire, but that observation had been too naive. If someone were to criticize him, saying that his persistently passive policy had been wrongheaded from the start, all he could do would be to sit there and take it …;
A few seconds later, the main cannons of Iserlohn Fortress belched flames of vengeance back at Gaiesburg. The fangs of white-hot energy bit into the outer shell of the fortress. Flames of a different color billowed out, but after a few seconds more, a second vengeful beam came racing back toward Iserlohn. Panic, explosions, and a deafening roar filled the air.
“They’re crazy,” Patrichev gasped as he looked from screen to screen and monitor to monitor. “Do they want us all to go down together …;?”
Biting his lip, Caselnes said nothing. A portion of his mental circuitry had started to sputter. A bizarre sense of lost equilibrium welled up inside him. Something felt off. Something was wrong.
Suddenly, the floor buckled under him. Caselnes and von Schönkopf just managed to stop from tumbling over. The roar of turbulence continued, and two or three monitors went black.
An operator was shouting hysterically, “The wall’s been blown open! It was a bomb. Not a beam. Possibly a laser-triggered H-bomb.”
“Enemy fleet right behind us!”
“What?!” Caselnes shouted out in bewilderment. “What’s going on?”
An instant later, he had his answer. It had been a feint. The exchange of fire between the two main fortress cannons had itself been a diversionary tactic to conceal a fleet mobilization and the activity of military engineers. How had he not realized? From the bottom of his heart, Caselnes cursed his carelessness.
Meanwhile, on the bridge of the battleship Lübeck, which had circled around to the rear of Iserlohn, Neidhart Müller was wearing a satisfied smile.
Laser-detonated H-bombs had gouged a gigantic hole into one section of the outer wall. It was about two ki
lometers in diameter—black depths with a sawtooth fringe—and called to mind the bloody maw of a giant carnivorous beast.
Müller ordered the launch of two thousand walküren. Once they had secured air supremacy within Iserlohn’s gravitational field, landing vehicles carrying fifty thousand armored grenadiers were launched to transport the troops to the vicinity of the gigantic hole. From there, the armored grenadiers entered the fortress. Coordinating with attacks from outside, they occupied a number of command and traffic control rooms on the inside. Even without going that far in, they probably could have taken out all communications facilities and transport systems within the fortress.
“If this works, Iserlohn—both the fortress and the corridor—will be ours.”
Amid the cacophony of wailing sirens and alarms that seemed to be competing for dominance, Julian was running down the beltway toward a spaceport used exclusively by spartanian single-seat fighter craft. Up until just now, he had been at the Caselneses’ home, having been invited to eat lunch with Mrs. Caselnes and her two daughters there. Caselnes, unable to leave the central command room, had quietly asked Julian to check up on his family while he was out. Julian figured that this degree of mixing public and private responsibilities ought to be acceptable. After all, Caselnes probably could have sent his family back to Heinessen or moved them to the safest place in the fortress any time he felt like it. Leaving his meal behind, Julian had grabbed his uniform beret and run outside through the Caselnes home’s entranceway.
“Be careful, Julian!”
The voice of Charlotte Phyllis was still in his ears. Cute little thing, he thought. Having her around must be what it was like to have a little sister. One time, Yang, teasing Julian, has said, “Ten years from now, you’ll be twenty-six, and Charlotte’ll be eighteen. You’re rather well matched, wouldn’t you say?” Julian, however, could dish it out just as well as he could take it. “Admiral, you’re thirty-one years old now, and Lieutenant Greenhill is twenty-four. I’d say you two are matched even better.” Yang had only smiled wryly and changed the subject. When is he going to make things clear? Julian wondered, trying to imagine himself at age twenty-six …;
“Hey, kid, you going out now too?” said a cheerful voice by his ear. At times like these, that voice was utterly devoid of any sense of crisis, although in spite of that, it did convey clearly the toughness and courage of the speaker. Julian stopped running, turned around, and there he was: the young ace, Lieutenant Commander Olivier Poplin. Poplin was also Julian’s instructor in spartanian space-combat techniques.
No matter what Yang might say about Julian and the military, he had provided Julian with some first-class instructors in von Schönkopf and Poplin. However, they were also the two biggest ladies’ men in Iserlohn. That was the one thing that Julian didn’t feel like learning from them.
“Lieutenant Commander, you seem to be taking it easy.”
As he spoke, Julian noticed a faint fragrance of heliotrope. He wondered: had Poplin been enjoying the tender embrace of some indeterminate lover since noon? Taking note of Julian’s expression and tone, the flying ace gave a short laugh, held up his arm in front of his nose, and breathed in the fragrance of perfume.
“Kid, this is the fragrance of life. Not just your life or mine—I mean of life itself. Any day now, you’re bound to figure that out …;”
Before Julian was able to share his thoughts on that declaration, the two of them had arrived in the port area. They boarded their spartanians in the hangar and then advanced from the air lock to the runway area. Maintenance crew clad in airtight uniforms were waving their hands. They were hoping for safe returns even moreso than the pilots themselves.
When launching from a mother ship during high-speed flight, one could use the momentum from the vessel, but launching from Iserlohn required a runway. This runway was 50 meters wide and 2,000 meters long, with a gate that was 17.5 meters tall. When a spartanian came out on the runway, it faced points of light stretching out ahead far into the distance. The pilots referred to them as “the whites of the Grim Reaper’s eyes.”
“Unit 28, into the course!” said the control officer through his headphones. “Launch as soon as you see the signal. Be careful when you get outside.”
That was how the space traffic control officer showed affection toward a new recruit.
“Go!”
About a minute later, Julian’s fighter flew clear of the “whites of the Grim Reaper’s eyes” and out into the void.
“Whiskey, Vodka, Rum, Applejack, Sherry, Cognac: all of your squadrons are assembled, right?”
From his pilot seat, Poplin called out to his subordinates.
“All right, everybody, I want your heads cleared of any pointless distractions like wanting to save the country! That’s not your style. I don’t want you thinking about anything except that pretty young gal you still haven’t told you’re crazy about, and how much you want to live so you can see her smiling face again. If you can do that, a friendly devil’ll be sure to have your back, even if some jealous old god hates your guts. You copy?”
“Roger!” his subordinates answered in unison. Behind his faceplate, the young ace was grinning from ear to ear. “All right, then, follow me!”
Caselnes couldn’t make up his mind whether to mobilize the fleet or not. Reports of “ready to mobilize” had come in from admirals Fischer, Nguyen, and Attenborough. It had to be almost unbearable for the crews of space warships to stay cooped up inside the fortress at a time like this, with nothing to do but watch the battle unfold from the sidelines. On the other hand, if the battle became chaotic, it would become impossible for the imperial military to fire their main cannons, at least not without destroying some of their own in the process. Which meant there was the possibility of this coming down to a fleet battle in the end. Intellectually, Caselnes knew that. However, he just couldn’t decide on the mobilization’s timing.
“Enemy battleships at 0930!”
“Turret 29, open fire!”
Reports and orders cycled back and forth through the comm circuitry until the crews’ sense of hearing reach the point of saturation. It was hard to believe that the world outside, just a single wall away, was one where there was no such thing as sound. It was also a strange thing to break out in a sweat that dampened the collars and sleeves in a room that maintained a suitable temperature of 16.5 degrees centigrade.
Rear Admiral von Schönkopf, who was issuing new intercept orders at intervals of seconds rather than minutes now, motioned for an on-duty soldier to come near. The soldier, whose nerves looked ready to snap, ran over to him, and the commander of fortress defenses spoke:
“Get me a cup of coffee. Half a spoonful of sugar, and no milk. Make it a little on the weak side.”
Von Schönkopf unconsciously opened his mouth and shot the soldier, who was still in his teens, an unflustered smile.
“This might be the last cup of coffee I ever drink. Make it a good one, will you?”
The soldier hurried from the central command room. All the gloss had faded from Caselnes’s exhausted face, but he still had energy left for sarcasm:
“If you’ve got time to waste telling him how you want your coffee, things must still be all right.”
“Pretty much. When it comes to women and coffee, I don’t like to make compromises—not even if it kills me.”
They both smirked at one another, and then a third voice broke in.
“Acting Commander!”
Caselnes turned around at the sound of the voice and found Guest Admiral Merkatz standing there. The middle-aged defector-slash-guest admiral had a quiet look of determination on his face. Von Schönkopf turned to look at this former lion of the Imperial Navy with unfeigned interest.
“I’d like you to temporarily lend me command of the fleet. I think I know how to make things a little easier for us.”
Though Caselnes didn
’t answer right away, he realized intuitively that this was the moment he’d been waiting for.
“They’re in your hands,” he said after a pause. “Do it.”
IV
Swarthy skin, stiff black hair, medium height with a powerful build, and a mustache along with whiskers on his cheeks—that was a portrait of Commander Asadora Chartian, captain of Yang’s flagship, Hyperion. How well he could command a fleet of ships was unexplored territory, but at the very least, his leadership and management skills when commanding a single vessel left nothing to be desired, and it was because Yang had been able to confidently entrust Chartian with the operation of the flagship itself that he had been able to focus all his attention on commanding the fleet as a whole during many a difficult battle.
When Admiral Wiliabard Joachim Merkatz and Lieutenant von Schneider headed over to Hyperion, this strong and courageous spacer met them with a sharp gleam in his eyes and declared: “I never thought I would ever welcome anyone except Admiral Yang on board this flagship as commander. I do, however, understand my duty, of course. I await your command.” His tone, while not exactly rude, showed no restraint either.
That frankness didn’t bother Merkatz in the slightest. Chartian had merely expressed what he thought to a high-ranking officer of the fleet.
Merkatz agreed with Acting Commander Caselnes’s fundamental policy of assuming a defensive posture and waiting for Yang to come to the rescue. It followed, then, that his duty was to effectively implement that policy at the tactical level. For the time being, that meant having to eliminate the imperial forces trying to land on the fortress. And for that, he was going to need some help.
“I support Admiral Merkatz,” Rear Admiral Fischer said.
“I support Admiral Yang. Therefore I support Admiral Merkatz, who supports Admiral Yang,” Rear Admiral Attenborough said.
“We have no choice but to support Admiral Merkatz,” Rear Admiral Nguyen said.
Endurance Page 21