by Moshe Ben-Or
The Grapple
Moshe Ben-Or
Copyright © 2017 by Moshe Ben-Or
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
...
“Ever go up on the Wall?” interrupted Maria.
“Once,” shuddered the blond girl, involuntarily hugging herself. “Early on.
“They ran out of ammo up in Sector Three, right next to us. The Looters had assault bridges and polymer bundles. They were organized already by then, more or less. They were about to bridge the moat. If they took the battlement, the campus would fall.
“We grabbed shot and powder off the line, and ran up there. Measured it out on the spot, best we could, gave it to the gunners...
“I saw the cannon volley at the Looters, point-blank. I saw the one at the end burst. Regina’s cannon. She’d mismeasured the powder, and it killed her. Or maybe the barrel simply failed, who knows. And I saw the bayonet charge, after. Remarque’s Charge.
“The moat was bridged. The Looters were rallying. I saw the reserve running toward us, Coach Alvarez out in front, yelling, waving a piece of rebar. But they were too far. They’d be too late.
“I heard Remarque give the order. I saw the CA Battalion line up.
“There was this one boy, right next to me…
“Not a professor, not a TA, not a grad student, just a simple freshman boy. He’d been hit in the head by a piece of cannon. He was sitting on the ground, bleeding. A nurse was bandaging him. When he heard the order, he shrugged her off. Levered himself up with his musket. Got in the ranks. He was swaying...
“Their tabs weren’t white anymore. They were gray and black, from the smoke and the soot, and the dust. Their faces were gray and black, too. Streaked with blood, sweat... Set hard. Cold, like steel.
“They knew they were going to their deaths, but they were going anyway. They were all going together.”
...
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, whether living or dead, and to real events, whether past or present, is entirely coincidental. Any errors or omissions are entirely the fault of the author.
“Leo is dead,” tolled the silent bell in Reginald Freeman's head. He reached down for another piece of sausage.
“Leo is dead,” clinked fork against plate.
“Leo is dead,” sliced the knife.
The sausage tasted like cardboard.
Whom would he hand Duchy Freeman over to now? Nikolai, the son who would take gleeful pleasure in demolishing everything his father had built over the past fifty-odd years? The Conservatives would like that. For the first time in a century and a half, an out-and-out Separatist in the House of Lords. And in a Core Duchy seat, at that!
But with Leo dead, the only legal alternative to Nikolai was his sister's younger son, Mark. It would be a stretch, at the very limit of the possible, but he could get the King to approve. The necessary precedents existed.
At least Mark would do no political damage. He'd be too busy gambling away the castle's art collection, when he wasn't drinking himself into a stupor. And who knew, maybe the sudden weight of responsibility dropped into his lap would straighten the boy out. Mark wasn't stupid. Just lazy and irresponsible, and entirely too fond of stiff drink.
He had no special right to wallow in self-pity, thought the duke. A billion Leos were dead. Half the noble families of Sparta had lost a scion in the past seven months. Three generations of Levssons had died in the bombing of San Cristobal. Some third cousin was now running the duchy. He couldn’t even remember the man’s name.
The thought did not comfort.
He had wanted a field command. A field command would have meant revenge. Tangible and personal revenge. Orders given and accepted in the heat of battle. The splash of multi-megaton charges exploding in the vacuum. Battle damage assessments blossoming with tallies of wrecked enemy ships and ticking counts of enemy casualties… The pure joy of Zin blood flowing in rivers and streams, spilled in real time.
He hadn't cared if it would mean a demotion. He'd been there, done that. He'd been retired for nigh-on three years. There was nothing left to prove to anyone.
But they wouldn't let him have a field command.
He had screamed and yelled and cursed fit to curdle milk and pounded on the King’s mahogany table and demanded to be listened to. If they didn't want to give him a fleet, fine. He didn't care. He'd take a raiding flotilla, or a fleet task force. Heck, he'd take a corvette detachment, dammit! Anything to get his hands on the filthy bastards who'd murdered his sole hope for the future of the clan!
But he’d gotten naught but a sore throat and a bruised fist for his trouble. His Majesty wasn't calling him out of retirement so he could gallivant out there seeking glory and vengeance, and that was that. Shimon Bar-El wanted him for Ops. Had asked, personally, specifically, for Flag Admiral Duke Reginald Freeman. By name. As part of his Emergency Procurements and Immediate Warfighting Requirements List. As item one.
The Dream Team that had fought the Empire to a standstill at Nalus was going to ride again. Period, end of story.
He could understand Shimon, too. In this godawful mess he needed battle-proven men whom he could rely on implicitly. People he’d known forever. Guys who could finish his sentences.
And, really, Shimon was right when he said that he'd kill more aliens here, on the General Staff, than he could ever possibly kill out on the front lines. But that thought didn’t comfort, either. At the rarefied heights of this topmost echelon of command, the killing wasn't personal enough. All he ultimately did was shuffle data. Other men did the actual shooting.
The war wasn't going well, thought Admiral Freeman as he chewed on another piece of ersatz sausage-like substance. In fact, to be completely honest, the war was going straight to hell in a handbasket. And it was all his damned fault.
Not his entirely, to be sure. But he was squarely in the category of Idiots Responsible when it came to the present disaster.
The real problem, thought Duke Freeman, was that, try as you might, you always ended up fighting the last damned war.
When the balloon had gone up at Paradise, the ready squadrons of the Sixth and Seventh Fleets had retreated to their respective rally points under Zin pressure. The fleet commands had by then gathered most everything that was immediately available to them, and when the enemy had attempted to exploit his initial success, they promptly gave him a well-deserved bloody nose. Right about the same time, the General Staff had decided upon total mobilization. Shimon hadn’t even bothered to wait for the full datasets from the initial battle to be couriered in from the regional data fusion centers. He’d pulled the lever on the Big Shebang based on the initial ansible messages alone, even as the battle admiral on duty in the command center was still demanding clarification and refusing to believe the numbers.
General Plan Red, the contingency for surprise, simultaneous war with both the Empire and the Archduchy, was the most comprehensive and the best-rehearsed of all the Big Shebang plans. The whole thing had been drilled in simulation, down to Fleet and Planetary Staff level and with inclusion of key civilian reps, just the previous year. Call out that codeword, and everyone who mattered would go on autopilot, with maximum snap-and-pop. So this was the mob packet that Shimon had ordered pulled. A sensible decision.
The way the astrography worked, any enemy who sought to subdue the League had to control either Paradise or Miranda, and preferably both. Those were the two big hills on the map, and the section of the Great Stellar Highway between them was the dominant ridge. Whether at Miranda, or at Paradise, or anywhere else on the well-surveyed, optima
l travel route that formed the main trade artery of human civilization, your warships sat at the top of the local subspace potential energy gradient. From Miranda, in a single jump, your fleet could appear in any system halfway to Volantis, or a quarter of the way to New Israel. From Paradise, in one jump, you could get halfway to Hadassah or a quarter of the way to Bretogne. Control both systems, and you credibly threatened almost every major trade route between the Members.
If your ships sat on the Highway, anyone coming back at you from any direction would be climbing the gradient. Regardless of any other factor, he would have to take more jumps going up than you would going down, and he would burn more fuel while doing so. Light, small vessels might be able to climb the gradient quickly enough regardless, and still have the legs to do their jobs when they got there. But the efficiency of jump drives dropped with the square of the ship’s mass, and with decreased efficiency came exponentially increased fuel burn, and jump sickness and mechanical breakdowns. What was easy for a scoutship, a frigate could only do with clenched teeth, and a battleship could not do at all.
Any force of big-gun capital ships trying to storm the gradient in one fell swoop from its bottom somewhere in the Badlands would arrive at the Highway exhausted, sick, damaged, low on jump fuel, and vulnerable to being cut off from its supply line. And the enemy’s own big-gun ships would be there waiting for it, fresh and ready to go.
He who controlled the section of the Highway between Miranda and Paradise held the initiative, by default.
General Plan Red had been built in cognizance of this problem. And it had been built in cognizance of the astrographic position of the two potential enemies. If either the slant-eyes or the bleach-outs tried to seize Paradise before they seized Miranda, they’d get cut off from their supply lines and massacred. Whatever else happened, the big opening battles would have to be fought at Miranda and New Helena and in the Badlands between Miranda and Volantis. So the plan had called for massively reinforcing Fifth and Sixth fleets, while Seventh Fleet performed an economy of force.
At first, the plan had seemed to fit pretty well. It is true, the Zin had taken Paradise right off the bat and that was disconcerting, but then they went straight up the Highway toward Xing and Miranda. It had looked like the Empire was their primary target. As if their plan was to storm up the main branch of the Great Stellar Highway, from its terminus at Paradise all the way to its origin at Tiantiju, and beard the Son of Heaven in his Forbidden Palace.
Seventh Fleet had been forced to fight some pretty serious engagements, but they were nothing compared to what was going on on the Miranda-Paradise axis. The Zin just didn’t seem to be all that interested in going to Hadassah. Ninety percent of their heavy forces on the League Front had been committed to storming Miranda.
And that, too, had made great sense to all of them here at General Staff HQ. Why step off the Great Highway into the messy, poorly-surveyed set of jump points that meandered through the Badlands on its way to Bretogne and Hadassah before finally petering out at Haven, when open before you were the easy paths that led toward Tiantiju and into the heart of Omicronia? Why try to crack the hardest of the three nuts before you, when the other two human Powers seemed ripe for the taking? What was the League, with its nine inhabited systems, compared to the vastness of Empire and Aryan Archduchy? Surely it made sense for the Zin to strike while the iron was hot...
And it had all just snowballed from there. When Xing had fallen and the defenses of Tienchen began to crack under pressure, the Imperials started screaming desperately for help. Never mind mistrust of their primary enemy of the past two centuries, the Son of Heaven Himself was potentially threatened!
The Imperial Navy was gigantic, but it had a gigantic, far-flung Empire to police. The Imperial Navy’s combat power was enormous, in theory, but there was a wide gap indeed between theory and reality.
The cost of constant exercises, inspections and long-range training expeditions on the League model had seemed unjustifiably great to the mandarins of the Court, even more so than the cost of building additional battleships and battlecruisers beyond the two thousand-odd units they already possessed. And in their wildest dreams they would not imagine the Empire creating a League-style multi-tiered deep reserve.
Light cruisers, destroyers and frigates were far more useful than big-gun ships to a Navy whose primary mission for three centuries had consisted of chasing pirates, bandits and smugglers all over and in between the Empire’s vast sprawl of fifty-seven habitable worlds.
Sufficient heavy forces needed to be maintained to deter any potential aggression by either of the two smaller Powers, but beyond that minimum there was no need for additional expense. Only a couple-three heavy ships would be required to squash any potential incipient rebellion anywhere in the interior of the Great Celestial Demesne.
In fact, every Line Squadron of the Imperial Fleet was a threat to the Court, potentially more dangerous to the Son of Heaven than any foreign potentate or pirate-turned-brigand. Who, after all, could know with absolute certainty what went on in the head of the admiral who commanded said squadron? What absolute guarantee could exist of his loyalty?
If he was himself a noble, he could lay claim to the throne. If he was an up-jumped commoner, he could usurp it regardless. His success in itself would be proof that he possessed the Mandate of Heaven. He need but provide for their iron rice bowls, and legions of sycophants would praise him to the skies. Histories future would testify loquaciously as to his brilliance, justice, wisdom, generosity and all-around virtue, and to the black villainy of his deposed predecessor. He who sat upon the Jade Throne was the rightful Son of Heaven. Always. Just hold firm the scepter, and bestow the rice.
Even if the admiral’s closest relatives were held in a luxurious gilded cage, feasted and feted as honored guests of the Forbidden Palace, who was to say that tomorrow he would not choose to abandon them to their fate? Absent wives could be replaced by present mistresses and concubines, themselves potentially rife with ambition. Hostage firstborn could be replaced by their brothers, or by the sons of another wife. Men of power were inevitably men of ambition. Ambition blinded. It made cruel. And the Jade Throne ever beckoned as ambition’s ultimate prize.
There were ample precedents. After all, to mention things generally left politely unmentioned by the wise, had not the illustrious great-grandfather of the present Son of Heaven arrived at Tiantiju at the head of just such a rogue battleship squadron?
At any rate, less money spent on warships meant more money available for mollifying the Son of Heaven’s teeming mass of subjects through massive social spending and ever-improving standards of living. Rebellions were cheaper prevented with the velvet glove than put down with the mailed fist.
In the minds of the Son of Heaven and his mandarins, the Empire was the greatest of all human Powers that had ever existed or would ever exist, the self-evidently superior culture obviously destined to absorb and subsume all others in its inexorable march to Universal Peace and Eternal Greatness. Their position was unassailable. Their might was immeasurable. Their triumph was inevitable. Why would they need to hurry or worry? What external enemy could possibly threaten them?
Well, now an external enemy was threatening them. And it turned out that their position was nowhere near as unassailable as they had believed. Nor was their might as immeasurable. Worse still, the very astrography that had enabled a backwater farming colony to turn into the capital of a fifty-seven-world sprawl now turned against them. All branches of the Great Stellar Highway lead to the Heavenly Abode. There were no Badlands for Tiantiju’s defenders to hide behind. And were Tiantiju to fall...
Now that the naked reality of their situation stood before them in all of its shambling horror, the mandarins of the Imperial Court would do just about anything to buy the one thing that the Empire desperately needed. That thing being time.
Time for the ponderous Imperial bureaucracy to blunder its way through a chaotic general mobilization for which
no realistic plans had ever been made and which had never been rehearsed even in simulation. Time for the Son of Heaven to mitigate the effects of nationwide panic and chaos. Time to gather far-flung task forces into coherent fleets. Time to whip yesterday’s glorified cops and customs agents into something resembling a fighting shape. Time to sort out useless noble buffoons in fancy uniforms from real naval officers. Time to conduct inventories that had not been conducted properly for three generations. Time to separate usable supplies from useless junk. Time to sort out units whose combat readiness was adequate only in official reports from units which could actually go to war, and time to assemble the logistical system needed to actually support all said units on a single front.
Time! Time! Time! Time above all things!
The Son of Heaven needed time the way he needed air. And while they had turned out to be completely unprepared for total war, the Son of Heaven and his Court were by no means a pack of fools.
When Lingjao had fallen, the Imperials didn’t just abandon Tienchen to its fate. They formally ceded it to the League. All of it. Lock, stock and barrel, complete with population, industries, merchant ships, massive stockpiles of war matériel and all locally present military units. It was the largest single bribe in Imperial history. And it had worked like a charm.
The Council of Four had gone bonkers. And the General Staff had been swept right along in the general euphoria of greed.
Fifth Fleet was immediately committed to defending Tienchen no matter what, which inevitably meant aggressive actions against the Zin forces operating on the Xing-Tiantiju axis, and all the inevitable expenditures, commitments and consequences that went along with said actions. Transport resources were mobilized to quickly haul as much as possible of the giant pile of formerly-Imperial goodies deep into the League to be put to use. And he, and Shimon, and Eli, thrice-damned idiots that they all were, had just ridden along with the spirit of General Plan Red.