Shadow of Victory - eARC (75 page)

“But you did erase that tac data, didn’t you?” Terekhov’s question was even softer than Tourville’s voice had been, and his blue eyes were strangely gentle.

“If I hadn’t, Shannon Foraker would have,” the Havenite said after a handful of seconds. “I couldn’t let her do that. It wasn’t her responsibility; it was mine. And don’t mistake me, Commodore Terekhov. I didn’t do it because I’m such a noble, heroic fellow. For that matter, I didn’t do it simply because it was the right thing to do. I did it because I was ashamed.” His strong, confident voice wavered at last, turned husky, and he shook his head sharply. “I was ashamed of my star nation, ashamed of my superiors, ashamed of what was about to happen—what I knew had already happened on the way to Cerberus—to an honorable, innocent woman, and ashamed of the way the Navy—my Navy—had been turned into Cordelia Ransom’s executioners. We were better than that. We had to be. And so, just that once, I was.”

The treecat on the back of Tourville’s chair moved at last. One long-fingered true-hand reached out and laid itself ever so gently against the admiral’s cheek and those grass-green eyes met Sir Aivars Terekhov’s. And then, slowly, Lurks in Branches nodded.

But Terekhov hadn’t needed that confirmation—not about that man—and he pushed up out of his chair and stood facing Tourville.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not ‘just that once,’ Admiral Tourville. You did it because you were always better than that. I doubt I’ll ever be free of that anger you think I should go on feeling, but if I’m going to be honest, a lot of that anger’s strength is probably guilt. Survivor’s guilt, because my people didn’t just die while I survived. They died fighting under my orders, fighting for me, and it’s a lot safer to focus on the people who killed them than it is on the man who commanded them when they died in Hiacynth and couldn’t even be with them in Seaburg.

“But Sinead was right. No matter what the People’s Republic of Haven may have been like, and no matter what some of the people who served it may have been, some of them were truly extraordinary human beings, even then. And”—he extended his hand once more, his expression very different than the one he’d worn the first time—“I’m honored to have met one of them this afternoon.”

Chapter Sixty-Seven

“Oh, shit,” Sensor Tech 2/c Paige Thuvaradran said very, very quietly. Thuvaradran had the duty on SLNS Harpist’s bridge, and as it happened, Lieutenant Commander Franz Stedman, the tactical officer and her direct boss, was the current officer of the watch. Now Stedman, who did not approve of…informality on the bridge, turned his command chair to face the tactical section, and his expression was not incredibly happy.

“I don’t believe I quite heard that, Thuvaradran,” he said frostily, and she looked up from her display quickly.

“Sorry, Sir,” she said.

“Perhaps you’d care to share whatever inspired that comment with the rest of us?” Stedman suggested.

“Yes, Sir.” Thuvaradran cleared her throat. “Sir, we’ve just picked up a thirteen-unit hyper footprint at twelve light-minutes, right on the limit.”

“Thirteen?” Stedman’s eyes widened, and he sounded very much like someone who hoped his normally efficient, highly competent sensor tech was wrong.

“Yes, Sir. Hard to tell anything at this range from just the footprints, but it looks like at least a couple of them are probably in the battlecruiser range.”

“I see,” Stedman said. “Put it up on the main plot.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The icons of the incoming starships appeared on the main display, not even crawling, on such an enormous scale, at their low initial velocity. Their hyper footprints had long since dissipated, but the signatures of their impeller wedges burned clear and sharp. Obviously, whoever they were they weren’t even trying to hide. That could be a good thing, since this was a Solarian-administered system…or it could be—and more probably was—a very bad thing, indeed.

Just our luck to be passing through, the TAC officer thought glumly. Three more days and we’d’ve been out of here. But, no!

Harpist and the destroyer Reaper had only stopped off en route to the Lucas System to pick up their new missiles because Captain Astrid Caspari, the senior officer permanently assigned to the Kumang System, had gone to the Academy with Bretton Ibañez, Harpist’s CO. They were an entire week ahead on their scheduled movement orders, so Ibañez had seen no reason not to stop off for a two or three-day visit with his old classmate. But now…

Stedman inhaled deeply and pressed the stud on the arm of his chair.

“Abbott,” a voice growled in his earbug.

“Sir,” Stedman told Harpist’s executive officer, “I think you’d better come to the bridge.”

* * *

“So what do you make of it, Chiara?” Captain Aldus O’Brien asked. He and Commander Chiara Marciano, his tactical officer, stood gazing at the master display in HMS Trebuchet’s CIC.

“Well, if I had to guess from the station-keeping emissions, I’d say this—” she indicated the slightly larger, brighter icon in orbit around the system’s inhabited planet “—is a cruiser. Probably a heavy cruiser; we’ll know more when the optical platforms and active sensors get a better look at her. This other one, though—she’s definitely a War Harvest.”

“Think they have anything else trying to imitate holes in space?”

“Doubt it, Skip.” Marciano shook her head. “I think we caught them flat-footed. In fact, I’m willing to bet they didn’t even have their impellers at standby. We sure don’t see any—”

She broke off for a moment, pressing her earbug with an index finger while she listened, then turned and grinned—positively grinned—up at her much taller captain.

“The closest Ghost Rider bird just picked up first-stage initiation. They were sitting there with cold nodes.”

“Well, wasn’t that considerate of them,” O’Brien murmured.

He stood gazing at the display, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, for several seconds. Then he looked back at Marciano.

“Let’s take this to the bridge,” he said.

The two of them headed for the intra-ship car, which delivered them less than a minute later to the Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser’s bridge.

“Captain is on the bridge!” the quartermaster of the watch announced as the doors slid open, and people popped to their feet.

“As you were,” O’Brien said, striding briskly towards the command chair which was currently occupied by Commander Darren Boyd, his executive officer. Boyd rose as O’Brien approached, and the captain settled into the chair.

“I have the ship,” he said.

“Aye, Sir. You have the ship,” Boyd acknowledged, and O’Brien gave him a brief nod, then looked at Lieutenant Commander Yaeko Yoshihara.

“Run me some numbers, Yaeko. Assume this fellow spotted us the instant we crossed the alpha wall. He’s got cold nodes, he’s, say, a Kutuzov-class heavy cruiser, and his engineers get his nodes online in Book time. Where do we run him down and when do we bring him into missile range?”

“Just a sec, Skipper,” the astrogator replied.

She punched in numbers, then looked over her shoulder at her captain.

“Assuming he gets them up forty minutes after we crossed the wall, we’ll be up to approximately one-eight-point-seven thousand KPS and one-one-point-six light-minutes from the planet when he does. If we maintain pursuit at our present acceleration for another hundred and thirty-five minutes, we’ll have a zero-range intercept. Of course, at that point we’d be traveling at damned near twice his velocity: seven-six-point-six thousand KPS compared to four-three-point-eight. We’d have the range for the Mark 23s in roughly twenty minutes before that, given the velocity differential at launch. And at that point, they’d still be over twenty light-minutes short of the hyper limit.”

* * *

One good thing about starting with cold nodes, Bretton Ibañez reflected grimly. It gave me time to get back aboard before we started running. Not that running’s going to do one damned bit of good in the end.

In truth, he knew the extra forty-one minutes it had taken to bring up Harpist’s impellers wouldn’t have made any difference, either. Even if she’d been sitting there at full readiness and started accelerating at maximum military power the instant she’d detected the intruders, they’d still have run her down short of the hyper limit. The delay had only shortened the agony.

By the time she’d started accelerating, six of the newcomers had already attained a closing velocity of over 18,000 KPS; the other seven had been up to only 12,000 KPS, and from the accel curves, it looked like at least one of the potential “battlecruisers” was actually a merchant ship. That was the good news. The bad news was that although they hadn’t identified themselves, they were obviously Manties, since the six chasing him were pulling an acceleration of over seven hundred and twenty gravities in a ship that had to mass a half million tons. No one else in the galaxy could do that. And that acceleration gave them an advantage of almost two KPS
²
, so even after Harpist got underway, her enemies’ velocity advantage had actually increased steadily.

So it was only a matter of—

“Captain.”

The voice belonged to Lieutenant Addison Faust, his communications officer, and Ibañez felt something tighten inside. Odd. He wouldn’t have believed he could get any more tense.

“Yes, Addison?”

Another surprise. His voice actually sounded calm.

“Sir, I have a transmission for you. It’s from a Captain O’Brien of the Royal Manticoran Navy.”

“What a surprise,” Ibañez said dryly. Then he squared his shoulders. “Put it on my display.”

“Yes, Sir.”

A face appeared on Ibañez’ com display. It belonged to a tall, chunky fellow with sandy-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a luxuriant mustache who wore the black and gold of the Star Empire of Manticore.

“I am Captain Aldus O’Brien, Royal Manticoran Navy, commanding Her Majesty’s Ship Trebuchet,” he said coldly. “I’m also the senior officer of Task Group Ten-Two-Eight, and my orders are to take or destroy any Solarian naval units in this star system. Be advised that you are now in range of my missiles.”

Despite himself, Ibañez felt his face tighten. It had almost certainly turned pale, as well, he thought. If O’Brien was telling the truth, his missiles had a range of over thirty-six million kilometers! It was true the Manties had built their overtake velocity advantage to over 30,000 KPS, which would boost their effective range significantly, but even so—!

“I realize you may doubt whether or not you are, indeed, in my range envelope. Accordingly—”

“Missile launch!” Lieutenant Commander Stedman said suddenly. “One missile closing at an overtake of one-three-six KPS squared!”

Ibañez watched the display as the single missile icon streaked after his ship. It accelerated fiercely, but it also had thirty-six million kilometers to go. The impellers on a Javelin, the SLN’s latest missile, would burn out three minutes after launch, which would have given an effective envelope of just under eight million kilometers from that geometry. It could still have caught Harpist, assuming no radical course changes on her part, but its overtake velocity when it did would have been down to a mere 5,000 KPS and it would have long since gone ballistic. That would have made it dead meat for point defense, nor would it have been able to execute any terminal attack maneuver to bring its laserhead to bear, which would have made the chance of actually hitting the ship nonexistent. But this wasn’t a Solarian missile, and his stomach turned into a hollow, singing void as it went on accelerating at 46,000 KPS
²
.

The Javelin’s acceleration was actually seven percent higher than that…but this missile accelerated effortlessly past the hundred eighty second-mark where a Javelin’s drive would have failed. Four minutes. Five minutes. Six minutes. Seven minutes.

He felt his jaw clamping harder and harder in something very like horror. He felt the tension—the fear—of his bridge crew as that incredible missile just kept coming for them. And then, nine impossible minutes after launch, it streaked directly past Harpist—still under power, still able to execute its final attack maneuvers—and detonated harmlessly a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers ahead of her.

“You have ten minutes to reverse acceleration at four hundred gravities and prepare to surrender,” Aldous O’Brien said from his com. “In eleven minutes, we begin firing for effect.”

* * *

“—and I most strongly protest this naked aggression against the innocent people of the Kumang System!” System Administrator Luis Verner said firmly. “Whatever your quarrel with the Solarian League, there can be no justification for the invasion and subjugation of a neutral star nation.”

“Odd,” Aldus O’Brien mused, gazing at the man on his com display. “That never seems to bother Frontier Security when it invades and subjugates neutral star systems. Of course, we’re only interested in liberating them—although, I will admit that swatting any Solarian Navy ships we come across is a worthwhile accomplishment in its own right—whereas OFS specializes in handing them over to one Solly transstellar or another.” He pursed his lips and arched an eyebrow. “I’m only an ignorant neobarb, of course, but could you please go back and explain the bit that makes Solarian invasions legitimate, highly principled exercises in beneficent nation-building and our invasions unjust, imperialistic conquests? Something seems to have gotten lost in transmission.”

Trebuchet was 6,723,000 kilometers from Chotěboř, decelerating steadily towards the planet while the ex-SLN prizes Harpist and Reaper followed at their own best acceleration with four Roland-class destroyers to keep them company. Now O’Brien waited out the twenty-second transmission delay and then watched Verner’s face darken. The Solarian’s jaw tightened visibly, and O’Brien wondered if the man was going to spontaneously combust, explode, or just melt.

“Obviously,” the system administrator grated finally, “I’m not going to dignify that farcical, self-serving mischaracterization with a response. But while it’s painfully evident you have sufficient brute force to do whatever you wish in this star system, I am serving formal notice that the people of Kumang are under the protection of the Solarian League. I caution you that any outrages, any assaults on person or property in this star system, will lead to the most serious repercussions for you personally and the entire Star Empire of Manticore!”

“I stand cautioned,” O’Brien said sardonically. “And I have no intention of assaulting any person or property in Kumang, unless it happens to belong to the Solarian League. In which case, of course, it becomes a legitimate military target, and I suppose it’s unbecoming to admit it, but in that case I will take intense personal satisfaction in blowing it into very tiny pieces.”

He leaned back to let that settle in for several seconds, then continued.

“I’ll enter Chotěboř orbit in approximately twenty-three minutes. If I were you, I’d start packing, Mister System Administrator. I think you’re likely to be out of a job very shortly.” He smiled brightly. “Have a nice day.”

* * *

“Mister Sabatino is here, Mister President,” Květa Tonová said, opening the door to the magnificently furnished
Růžová
Office in the Presidential Mansion. She stood aside, and Karl-Heinz Sabatino walked past her into the office which had once been Jan Cabrnoch’s, his expression tense.

“Karl-Heinz.” Adam Šiml rose and stepped around his desk to offer his hand. “Thank you for coming so promptly.”

“It seems like a good day for doing things promptly,” Sabatino replied with a strained smile as Vice President Vilušínský shook his hand as well.

“I know,” Šiml said. “Please, sit down.” He glanced at the longtime secretary who’d followed him into the Presidential Mansion.” Květa, please have coffee sent in. We may be here a while.”

“Of course, Mister President,” she murmured, and withdrew.

Sabatino settled into the indicated chair, and Šiml and Vilušínský sat facing him across a stone-topped coffee table.

“I asked you to come to the Mansion today, Karl-Heinz,” the President said after a moment, “because of what’s happening to the Frontier Security presence here in the system. System Administrator Verner hasn’t kept me informed as to his communications with the Manticorans. He probably has a lot on his mind at the moment. They haven’t communicated directly with me yet, either, but I’m sure they will, and I’ll be very surprised if they permit any official Solarian presence in Kumang going forward.”