Revenge of the Damned (43 page)

But it was still coming in, still under full drive—and still firing.

The weapons officer was slightly pleased.

Recognizing the incompetence of his weapons crews, he had come up with a plan. The Nach'kal missiles were aimed for the incoming Imperial ships, but with little expectation of success. Also, they were set on rapid fire.

More effective were the close-range weapons: the ballistically aimed Don rockets and the volley-fired Mirkas. Even the chainguns were yammering at the Kalis when they got in range. The explosions were wreaking havoc with his electronics and sensors—but his ship was still alive.

The three hits were acceptable. One had taken out a combat information center near the stern—but there was a secondary center. Another had blasted the Nach'kal's main computer. No loss there. The third shattered the crew living spaces. No one should have been in them, anyway. The fires would soon be brought under control, he assumed. Besides, that was a task for damage control.

The fourth Kali, from the Imperial second launch, smashed into the Forez at that moment. A quarter of the Leviathan died in seconds as the nuclear blast ravened.

The bridge's lights died. Atago heard a suppressed shriek in the blackness. Then the secondary lights went on. She scanned faces. Who was the weakling?

There was no clue.

"Admiral," she snapped to the
Forez's
CO. "Damage?"

It took a long moment. Half the bridge's screens were out or blinking nonsense. But eventually she had her information:

Engine Room: Capable of fifty percent drive. Yukawa drive units defunct.

Weapons: Percentages… percentages… Atago scanned on. Not good. The long-range missile system was dead. But she still had most of the shipkillers and even some of the Nach'kai systems left. The close-range systems had about twenty percent capability.

Casualties… Atago turned away. That was meaningless. She could still fight.

Another screen showed that the
Forez
would be within the heart of the Imperial fleet in minutes.

Atago's honor would be redeemed.

One of the more pointless and trivial pastimes military historians always had was trying to discover the specific person who got credit/blame for killing a great warrior/tyrant. Arguments as to whether von Richtofen was shot down by a fellow in-atmosphere pilot named Brown or potted out of the sky by a nameless Australian grunt were endlessly boring. Another Earth example: Which atmo-pilot had actually assassinated an admiral named Yamamoto—Lanphier or Barber?

More recently: Was Mordechi, battle leader of the Mueller, really killed in hand-to-hand combat by the mortally wounded Colonel Meinertzhagen, or did he in fact stumble on top of an antipersonnel mine?

So it was with Lady Atago and the
Forez
.

There were two main claimants.

One was a destroyer weapons officer named Bryennius. She had launched her Kali and then let it go "dead" in space, directly in the orbital trajectory she had calculated for the oncoming
Forez
. At the right second she brought the missile alive and aimed it at the heart of the Tahn battleship.

The other was a particularly skilled tacship commander named Alexis. He had decided to fight his mosquito battle at the same time as the big boys and had tracked the
Forez
. When he assumed that the Tahn had other things on their minds, such as the recent three hits, he had launched his own Kali. He had screened it against the close-range rocket and chaingun fire by punting all eight of his Goblin XII missiles in front of the shipkiller.

Neither one of them was the hero, even though both Kalis were hits.

The historians, not for the first time, were wrong.

Lady Atago and the
Forez
were killed by Ensign Gilmer.

Or maybe the
Forez
killed herself.

The tiny hit on the
Forez
, hours before the battle had begun, had come from the tiny missile launched from Gilmer's picket ship.

It had, as the damage control computer said, only punctured the ship's outer skin. But it had not just lodged in the baffling. A small rip was made in the inner skin.

The compartment having been evacuated, no one noticed.

It was also not noticed that:

The fire retardant system between the ship's skins failed to operate.

The storage compartment's retardant system had never been filled.

The fire alarm itself was out of circuit, as was the alarm system for that entire subsector.

And there was a fire.

It was quite a small one, glowing, barely a spark. If the hole in the center skin had been larger, the fire would have gone out in the resultant vacuum. But the ship's atmosphere system kept pumping air into the compartment.

That was enough to feed the spark.

The spark grew. Flickered.

The compartment walls should have been treated with retardant. They were not. They were also made of a relatively low-temp synthetic. The compartment itself had nonmanifested crates of waste rags.

The compartment walls melted—but not into the other corridor, where the fire could have been seen. Instead, it spread down the ship's side, toward the stern.

The damage-control computer still reported that nothing was wrong.

Finally the fire ravened, gutting through compartments. Crew members died before they could scream. Maybe, at that point, one of the computers made a report. If so, it went unnoticed in the heat of battle.

Eventually the blaze hit a firebreak. Two huge chambers ringed the ship, one above and one below the AM2 fuel storage. The chambers not only were filled with a completely inert and nonflammable material but were given multiple antiblast, antiradiation, antianything drop shields.

They did not drop when the outer wall went down.

Nor was the nonflammable substance perfection.

The
Forez
exploded microseconds before the two Kali's struck what had once been matter and now was energy.

Lady Atago might not have been that disappointed with her death. She had not reached the heart of the enemy, but she was firmly in command of her ship and about to issue an order—still in complete control.

But nearly instantaneously, she ceased to exist.

Along with more than 5,000 other crew members.

There were worse ways to die in a war.

Lady Atago had been responsible for many millions of people discovering almost all of them.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

L
ady Atago died with her honor intact. The living paid with their own. Her symbolic act of heroism backblasted all down the line, exploding every joint in the pipe of authority. Leadership collapsed in shame and despair, and the mob took to the streets, looking for someone to blame. The mob declared the season open on anyone wearing a uniform or even the lowliest badge of officialdom.

Sailors were dragged out of port bars and beaten to death. Thousands upon thousands gathered outside military posts to wail and grieve and tear their hair and then hurl themselves against the wire until they broke through. The soldiers fired on them, but only halfheartedly. Hundreds died, but still the crowds kept attacking. Many soldiers stripped off their uniforms and joined the mobs, leading the hunt for their officers. Police stations were set on fire, and the fleeing cops were pursued and hammered into gel with fists and feet. Postal workers were stoned to death on their rounds. Conductors were hauled out of their trains and hanged from light stanchions, then their bodies set ablaze to scream and struggle as living effigies. Many members of the Tahn High Council hid in their homes, beating their breasts in self-blame and remorse, not lifting a finger or even considering calling for help as their furious fellow citizens killed first their guards, then their servants, then their families, and finally them.

When the mob could find no one in authority left to slaughter, they turned on the merchants—most of whom had used their capitalist good sense to flee—looting the stores and shops, smashing open warehouses, and destroying everything they could not carry away. Huge columns of smoke and angry flames erupted across Heath, as if the planet had been thrown back in time to the volcanic age.

Only Chaboya—and the K'ton Klub—was left strangely alone. Sten and Alex had planned well. Each time a mob was tempted to invade the sin district, their agents steered the crowd away with shouted promises of softer and more deserving victims. Backed up by St. Clair and L'n, the two of them monitored the rioting from the rooftop nightclub. The big com unit they had smuggled into the club was alive with the back-and-forth chatter of their agents as first one target and then another fell. Heath was being prepped for invasion.

The rioting had raged for two weeks before Mahoney finally breached the last of the Tahn defenses. Sten and Alex got the word at midday. Suddenly all the radio chatter was swept away under the weight of Mahoney's wide-banded broadcast. He and Sten had decided before that there would be no time for a series of scrambled hide-and-seek broadcasts.

Mahoney figured that a big planetwide bellow was sufficient cover.

"At that point," he had said, "I couldn't give a clot who knows I'm coming. And if I yell loud enough, the Tahn should have enough drakh in their shorts that they won't have the foggiest idea who I'm talking to. So. Soon as I say the word, you trigger the operation."

"What'll we call it?" Sten asked.

"Oh, I dunno. How about Operation Black Cat?"

"Isn't that supposed to be bad luck?"

Mahoney had given him a wolfish grin. "I was thinkin' more of the dead kind. That you drag across a grave."

Sten did not have to ask whose grave Mahoney had in mind.

Alex and Sten had tumbled to their feet as soon as the com unit fell silent. They waited for agonizing seconds. Then the message came through. "Institute Black Cat. Repeat. Institute Operation Black Cat. Are ya listenin', lad? Repeat. Institute Black…"

Sten bleated a fast "I hear you," and the signal cutoff in midmessage. He turned to his staff of three. They stood there, gaping, not believing that after all that time the end was finally there. They were all staring at him—even Alex—waiting for him to speak. Sten searched for something historical-sounding, something that an admiral would say. And right then and there Sten decided he would not be that kind of admiral. Clot history!

"You know what to do, people" was all he said. And his staff of three jumped into motion.

St. Clair and L'n would immediately put the word out to their key agents. Alex would notify Chetwynd to get his big crook's behind to Koldyeze and stand by.

Sten would take care of Pastour himself. He dialed in the code, toggled the broadcaster timer to peep and out, peep and out, and then punched the button that would send the message to Pastour.

The chief bodyguard, Lemay, found Pastour working peacefully in his garden. The man's hands were shaking as he handed his superior the coded message. Lemay had no idea what it said, but he had been told to keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the basement com. Anything that came across was to be brought instantly to Pastour's attention. The man had failed in his duty. Lemay was the most loyal member of Pastour's personal staff and had spent the last two weeks in terror for his boss. Oddly, the mob never came to Pastour's door, so the terror was for nothing. Still, it had exhausted him, and he had fallen asleep on shift. The message came and went unnoticed, for how long, he did not know. For that slipup he firmly believed he should have died if Pastour chose it. That the message was finally brought to his attention by a new member of the guard made his crime seem even worse. For that he should have died twice. The fact that the new guard was in Lemay's professional opinion a weasel and a worm did not help the matter.

He anxiously explained all that to Pastour, making no excuses and fully expecting the ultimate punishment. Then he realized that his colonel was not paying attention. Pastour read the message for the fourth time. His face was pale, his body cold. All the mental bracing for that moment was no help. Pastour was to make his way to Koldyeze as quickly as possible. There he and the most trusted members of his staff were to hold in position. They were to make sure that no prisoner was harmed as they waited for the Imperials to land. And then Pastour was to surrender for his people. For a moment Pastour thought he would prefer death over what was to come. Then he remembered Lady Atago and what her death had brought on. The moment passed, and Pastour gave Lemay his orders.

Sergeant Major Schour had the honor of being the first member of the Imperial invasion force to address a Tahn peasant. Schour's transport was part of the rear perimeter of the First Guards landing fleet that touched down just outside Heath.

Her lieutenant had chosen a nice soft green field. Sergeant Major Schour was the first trooper off. She lumbered down the ramp on short, muscular legs, willy gun at the ready, eyes searching for some sign of enemy activity.

"Get out of my tubers!" a voice rasped out.

The sergeant major spun, fingers tightening on her trigger. Then her mouth fell open. Standing in front of her was a small, brawny figure dressed in the rough pale green and brown of a Tahn peasant. Pink tendrils wriggled angrily from what Schour imagined was the being's nose. The peasant in question was heatedly waving a hoe at the bewildered non-com. Schour noticed that the being was fur-bearing and had enormous forearms that ended in strong, stubby claws.

"What the clot did you say?" was all Schour could get out.

"Don't swear in my presence," Lay Reader Cristata said. "The Great One does not tolerate swearing!"

"I'm s-s-sorry," Schour stuttered. "But what—"

She broke off in bewilderment as more "peasants" appeared. Three of them, all wearing the same pale green and brown, were obviously Imperials. The others were Tahn. Peaceful Tahn. Sten would have been at first massively surprised and then equally massively amused that everything had gone according to plan for Cristata. The lay reader not only had successfully escaped but had converted an entire Tahn peasant village.