Hellhole: Awakening (15 page)

Though Goler was not an ambitious man, he did have a strong sense of rightness. Over the years Tasmine had grown to trust him, eventually shocking him by revealing the truth of the Ridgetop massacre, which had long been covered up by the Diadem. Even before knowing the General’s secret plans, Goler had begun to turn against the corrupt government. He allowed Ian Walfor to continue his black-market shipping runs, which were strictly forbidden by Constellation law; he doctored or inflated shipments to ease the tribute burden; and he tricked the Diadem into sending him Adolphus’s old warships for peacekeeping efforts—the ships that now comprised the core of the fleet defending Hellhole.

When he learned of the new stringline network, Goler immediately realized the implications, saw which way the wind was blowing, and decided to throw in his lot with the rebels. He slept well at night, knowing that he had finally given his support to something he could believe in.…

For now, he had to get this grim duty out of the way. He realized the importance of preserving history, making sure everyone knew the atrocities Diadem Michella had committed. If Tasmine hadn’t survived that day, no one would ever have known.

“I watched three children run into the goldenwoods,” Tasmine continued, “but the soldiers had thermal trackers. They found the children and shot them down.” Her eyes glistened with tears. “And then there was a teenage boy who had helped fix my fence—he climbed a high goldenwood tree to get away. The soldiers set a fire around the base of the tree, laughing as the flames rose up. The boy had no place to go, and finally the smoke and heat made him fall to his death.”

Goler looked at the old woman. “How did you get away? If they were so thorough, how did they miss you?”

“While gathering herbs, I found a large burrow made by a Ridgetop badger. When I saw the soldiers searching the hills to finish the job, I crawled as deep inside the burrow as I could go, worming my way out of sight. I had seen administrative officers using record tablets in the settlement, keeping a tally of the people they killed, so I knew they would be thorough.” Her voice hitched.

“But covered with mud, tangled in among the roots under the tree, their thermal scanners didn’t detect me. I could barely stand the smell. Ridgetop badgers stink, and the burrow was full of old filth … but it saved me. I emerged when I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

The old woman shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Missing only one person out of a colony of hundreds—they must have assumed it was a counting mistake, either among the bodies or of their initial records. They gathered up the corpses, counted them again, and threw them here in a mass grave. Afterward, I lived in that burrow for days, eating the seedcones and mushrooms I found, drinking rainwater. The Constellation soldiers razed the whole town, covered up the mass grave, and cleared the area so a fresh group of colonists could start over, with no hint of our colony.”

“All clean and tidy, so the Diadem could pretend it never happened.” Goler lifted his chin, raised his voice for all the excavators to hear. “But we won’t forget, and we won’t let the rest of the Constellation forget. You have changed history, Tasmine.”

The old woman looked embarrassed. “All I did was survive. But you, Governor”—her lips curved upward in a smile—“you might not think you’re a hero, and I know you never intended to be, but you’re changing history as well.”

“I’m just doing what’s right.”

“Sad, isn’t it, that choosing to do what’s right is enough to make you a hero.”

The decayed bodies were falling apart, the bones held together by the remnants of tendons and scraps of muscle tissue. As the drizzle increased, the workers laid each corpse on a canvas rectangle, spreading them out with as much respect as possible. Each skeleton had approximately the right number of parts, and each had a prominent skull, though Goler wasn’t sure that the individual pieces belonged together.

The rain stopped, and the clouds parted to show a patch of blue sky. The sunlight warmed the damp hills, and mist began to rise through the goldenwood trees. Tasmine’s face remained wet. “I don’t know that we’re going to survive this rebellion,” she said in a quiet voice, “but we can finally be honest. There’s no point in keeping secrets. It’s time to honor the dead … our friends, neighbors, and relatives who died at the Diadem’s hand.”

Goler called for the lumberjacks to stop their work. “We’ll make this place a memorial to all those who died here. We’ll erect a tall goldenwood plaque and inscribe the names of those who died so that these victims are never forgotten.”

The lumberjacks were covered with mud, but they were smiling. Leaning on brooms and rakes, they looked at him with something he had not seen much of before—admiration. “Cheers for the governor!” one called, and others took up the cry, adding to it, “Cheers for Tasmine and the governor!”

Goler was deeply moved, but he could not help but wonder how many similar memorials would have to be made before this war was finally over.

20

They finished the entire bottle of brandy. Turlo and Sunitha played games, enjoyed a slow meal, made love … and waited.

They knew with a high degree of certainty when the five military haulers were due to pass these coordinates. With the stringline cut and the iperion dissipated around the blown substation, the haulers would careen off the path. Moving at hyperluminal speeds, they would cover an immense distance and stray far from where they expected to be. It all depended on how swiftly the hauler pilots reacted to being off-stringline and brought their great framework vessels to a halt.

The Urvanciks needed to find them, so that General Adolphus had his verification.

“This is going to be a good day,” Sunitha said. She noted the coordinates where they had left the silent marker buoys to anchor the last segment of stringline back to Hellhole.

“Keep running quiet, no sensor signature,” Turlo said, “but leave our own detectors open. When those haulers get disconnected, they’ll squall like a baby with diaper rash.”

The Constellation fleet—one hundred fully armed ships with fifteen thousand crewmembers—were gung ho and intent on fighting their sworn enemy. But they would fall flat on their faces.

After the time had passed, they combed over their own sensor records and found a tiny blip that indicated when the fleet had flashed by, traveling much too fast for any normal detection. “They’ve run off the rails and gone off into the void,” Turlo said. He considered opening their second bottle of expensive brandy, the one he had hidden well enough that even his wife didn’t know about it, but they needed to be at their peak alertness.

Still, it was a damned long time to wait.

Five hours after they detected the first flicker in the sensor traces, panicked transmissions began to come over the comm. “Looks like they overshot by several light hours,” Sunitha said. “A few billion kilometers past Substation Four.”

“Do you think they’ll ever find their way back to the right point?” Turlo asked.

“Not likely. Why would they carry the precise coordinates for a substation that they could easily detect … until it was blown up?” She grinned. “They’ll have an approximate location, and we know they’ll try to find it, but I’m thinking of finding a needle in a haystack the size of a solar system.”

Turlo locked in the coordinates of the fleet’s frantic transmissions, and Sunitha accelerated the
Kerris
toward the position. In sensor silence they approached the stranded ships, drifting in without any engine noise or thermal output, coming just close enough so that their long-range imagers could spot the huge ships drifting aimlessly.

Exactly as expected: five military stringline haulers loaded with numerous battleships. Sunitha took plenty of images. “The General might want these for his scrapbook. Now let’s go deliver them.”

*   *   *

Most of the buildings in Michella Town were eyesores, and this factory was no exception. Initially constructed as a cavernous warehouse for rare export minerals for the Diadem’s tribute payment, Sophie Vence had converted the facility into a manufacturing plant for rugged vehicles. Now the General joined her on an inspection to see how the machine lines had been retooled to create military equipment.

To defend Hellhole, he had ordered twenty unmanned weapons platforms to be assembled as an orbiting picket line against the Diadem’s warships; so far, twelve had been deployed as sentries over the planet. The remote-operated launchers would be much smaller targets than the large guardian battleships, but could strike unsuspecting Constellation vessels.

In addition, by sending blueprints and advice via stringline drones, Sophie had coordinated the conversion of ten additional factories on other DZ planets, so those worlds could take a hand in defending themselves.

Sophie had installed a supervisory station in the warehouse rafters, and the window-encircled enclosure doubled as her office. From the high perch, Adolphus scanned the main-floor assembly lines and two levels of storage mezzanines. He heard the whir and click of the machines, watched as conveyors carried components to the eight weapons platforms being assembled.

At the moment, though, he was far more interested in the Urvanciks’ report. Turlo and Sunitha looked pleased as they presented themselves, and Adolphus reviewed the grainy extreme-range images.

“Marooned, just as you planned, sir,” Turlo said.

Sophie smiled. “You’ve bought us a reprieve, Tiber.”

“More than a reprieve—victory.” He looked at the two linerunners. “You’re certain Substation Three blew as well?”

“As certain as we can be, General,” Turlo said. “As soon as the haulers rushed past, it should have automatically detonated. The fleet is trapped in the segment between the substations, cut loose. They have no stringline, and they’ll never find the unmarked end of a molecule-thin path in all the volume of interstellar space.”

Adolphus tried to maintain his professional demeanor, although he wanted to sweep Sophie into an ecstatic hug. “A job well done—and that takes care of our immediate worries. With weeks of breathing room, we can put much more significant DZ defenses in place.” He smiled. “The Diadem is already defeated, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

“But what do we do about those ships?” Sophie asked. “I’d love to add them to our DZ Defense Forces, but they won’t surrender without putting up a hell of a fight.”

“Maybe not right now.” Adolphus turned away from the factory line below. “We’ll let time and fear do our work for us. The fleet can’t reach Hellhole, and they can’t get back to Sonjeera. According to the intel, they have over fifteen thousand crewmembers, including a great many nobles and midlevel officers. Their warships were loaded in a rush for a mission they expected to last ten days, and they can’t possibly have enough supplies and life support to last for more than a few weeks.”

Realization dawned on Sophie’s face. When her eyes sparkled, she looked ten years younger. The constant strain and uncertainty had made her appear careworn and tired, but now she was again the fresh-faced woman who had brought her young son to Hellhole, ready for a new start.

Adolphus went on. “Even if they had the fuel aboard—very unlikely—it would take them three months, by my guess, to crawl to Hellhole, and at least five months to go back to Sonjeera. So we wait, while they sit alone and isolated in space, let them start to feel hungry and desperate. I don’t want to give them hope too soon—they need to feel completely defeated before we round them up.”

He looked at the Urvanciks, who seemed to relish the prospect, and continued, “After a few weeks their supplies will be mostly gone, life support failing. Thousands of crewmen will have lost hope. That’s when I’ll come in with all my ships and accept their surrender. They will know it’s their only chance. We won’t have to fire a shot.”

Sophie laughed. “We’ll add another hundred fully armed warships to our own fleet.”

“Exactly—
and
remove them from the Army of the Constellation. We weaken them and strengthen ourselves at the same time. The tables have already turned.”

21

The mood aboard the Constellation fleet rapidly devolved from exuberance to confusion, then disappointment. They had set out to crush General Adolphus—strike fast, strike hard!—but now that the path had vanished from beneath them, the soldiers were bewildered. After a vague announcement of the delay, military music played over the intercom.

On the bridge of the
Diadem’s Glory,
Escobar rested his elbow on the padded arm of the command chair, chin in hand, and stared at the starry view. A hundred warships, an intimidating force … but going nowhere.

Gail Carrington stood next to his command chair—much too close, as far as he was concerned. When she spoke, her tone conveyed criticism rather than useful advice. “You must find a way forward, Redcom. Sitting here accomplishes nothing.” She was always watching him, breathing down his neck, reacting to his every movement with disapproval. He couldn’t recall her ever relaxing.

“I’m not
sitting
here, Ms. Carrington. I am planning our next move. In order to ‘find our way forward,’ we must follow the stringline, one end or the other. Until then, we can’t proceed.” Escobar shifted in his seat, feeling like a failure. “Lieutenant Cristaine, it’s been six hours. Any word from the scouts yet?”

“They’ve crisscrossed the vicinity of Substation Four, sir, but they have not yet reacquired the iperion path. Sensor logs give us the exact coordinates of where we went off the line, so we anticipate they’ll stumble on the severed terminus, given enough time. We are still searching for the substation itself.”

Escobar shook his head in dismay. “Given enough time…” Once they found the substation, they could anchor themselves and reassess. But he didn’t want to
reassess.
He was a leader. He should be decisive. The son of Commodore Percival Hallholme couldn’t dither and bite his nails.

Gail Carrington was watching.

Bolton Crais stepped through the sliding metal doors, preoccupied and shaking his head. “I used my authorization to request that the ship-wide intercoms silence that patriotic music. It seems awkward to play a cheerful anthem when we’re just hanging here in space.”