Starfist: FlashFire (14 page)

Haggl Kutmoi was on his feet immediately, addressing his remarks directly from his seat. “I remind everyone, this government bent over backward to find ways to keep the rebels in our Confederation and it failed. Why? Because they wanted war from the beginning! And one more thing, honorable members! The gentleman from Novo Kongor forgot to inform you that the worlds now in rebellion against this Confederation are Novo Kongor’s best trading partners! The embargo against trade with them has hurt the Kongoreans’ pocketbooks! And I have evidence, which I shall submit at the proper time, that Novo Kongor has been ignoring the trade sanctions imposed against the rebels and is now carrying on a clandestine trade with them!”

The chamber burst into an uproar. “That is a damned lie!” Ubsa Nor shouted. He and the other members of the Novo Kongor delegation got up from their seats and marched out of the chamber.

The president called for order.

“So forget all this palaver about how badly they’ve been treated,” Kutmoi continued in a whining falsetto when the noise had finally died away, “Novo Kongor’s opposition to sending troops to help the rest of us has to do with money, that’s all, money! And I say this, I say this to you now, people of Novo Kongor,” Kutmoi raised a hand over his head and thundered at the retreating backs of the Novo Kongor delegates, “If you aren’t with us, you’re against us! Novo Kongor, take your ores and shove them up —”

The president called for order.

“Preston! Preston!” the representative from Hobcaw shouted over the tumult in the Coalition’s senate chamber.

“Yes, Halbred,” President Summers, who was presiding, acknowledged Halbred Stutz, who then stood forward to speak. “The rest of you, pipe down so Stutz can say his piece!” It was Summers’s responsibility as president of the Secessionist Coalition to preside over the meetings, but he did so reluctantly and with frequent snorts of bourbon. In his view, the business of government was settled in committee and backrooms, not by full sessions of the senate, which more often than not ended in shouting matches. He was finding that getting a dozen disaffected and fiercely independent worlds to agree on even the most routine matters was difficult and that government by presidential fiat, when he could get away with it, was much more effective than the democratic process. The one thing they did agree on was their willingness to fight, often among themselves.

“Preston, we agreed to movin’ the guvmint way the hell and gone out here, so Gen’rel Lyons could wreck the capital city,” Halbred said, to the amusement of his fellow representatives, many of whom were not entirely sober themselves. “But gawdammit, sir—”

“Watch yer language, Halbred!” Summers shouted.

“Yessir! But Preston, gawdammit, all he’s done these past weeks is sit on his hindquarters back there at his headquarters,” this pun elicited a roar of approving laughter from the other delegates, “ ’n exchange pleasantries with this Gen’rel Zombie! I mean, people are callin’ Gen’rel Lyons ‘granny,’ the way he moves so damn slow! Well, I call ’im the ‘King of Spades,’ Preston, the way he’s diggin’ all those fortifications!” More roars of laughter and catcalls from the delegates. Halbred’s little pot belly shook with joy at the attention he was getting and his greasy red ringlets hung down around his collar, jiggling every time he shook his head. “Now I wanna know why you ain’t yet removed him, like the Committee on the Construct—Conduct—of the War has recommended.”

“Halbred, I haven’t removed General Lyons because I am the commander in chief and I do not wish to remove him,” Summers said, carefully pronouncing every word. Some people, when they are excited, revert to the language or the idiom of their home regions, although they otherwise use Standard English to communicate. Just the opposite was true of Preston Summers. Several of the representatives shouted “Hear! Hear!” but others booed their disagreement. “Pipe down, gawdammit!” Summers shouted. “Gen’rel Lyons has got a strategy—”

“My ass has got a strategy, which at least I can find with both hands!” Stutz shouted to the vast amusement of his cronies.

“Halbred,” Summers replied carefully, “I don’t have my cane with me today, but if you will permit, I’ll go home ’n fetch ’im and do a job on your thick skull that you won’t soon fergit!” The reference to the caning Summers had given to the Confederation representative from St. Brendan’s World elicited roars of laughter, applause, and ribald comments throughout the chamber. On the verge of a desperate war, the outcome of which was severely in doubt, the representatives were enjoying the lively debate. It was a pleasant distraction from the deadly boring business of running a vast enterprise such as their Coalition. In the early stages of their rebellion, the senate had resounded with flowery speeches and the delegates threw themselves body and soul into creating a new, unified, government to conduct their mutual affairs. But that spirit of cooperation and enterprise had soon cooled amid the minutiae of running a government and the vicissitudes of war.

“You sumbitch!” Stutz roared, “yew manage to hobble yer old bones outta that comfortable chair of yers ’n I’ll oblige by puttin’ another hole in yer head!” and to emphasize the remark, he drew a pistol from his pocket, which he waved triumphantly over his head, grinning lopsidedly up at Summers.

“Fire a round!” someone shouted.

Stutz, grinning broadly now, turned to the chamber, bowed slightly, and pocketed the weapon. He turned back to Summers. “Mr. President, I believe we would dearly love to hear what that ‘strategy’ might be.”

“Gentlemen, it’s very simple, as are all good plans,” Summers began in a tired voice, because it had all been explained in detail before. “Admiral de Gauss maintains his fleet in orbit around Ravenette. General Lyons, who now has an army of over a million men at his disposal, draws the Confederation reinforcements in to Fort Seymour—if they can get through the blockade, which will be costly to do— where he defeats them with his superior firepower. The Confederation’s military forces are stretched very thin, gentlemen, and it will have to rely on levies, not the very best front-line troops. You know who those levies will be, city boys mostly, part-time soldiers, well-fed, well-bred boys who have no real stake in this war. They’ll be up against our men, who know how to carry a gun. When the people of the Confederation start to see those long casualty lists, this war is over, gentlemen.”

The chamber erupted again into shouting and applause.

“So that, Halbred, is why good ol’ Gen’rel Lyons has laid siege to Fort Seymour and is in no hurry to take it, which he could do in five minutes flat. It’s a magnet, it’ll draw ’em in and he’ll squash ’em.”

“Well, that sounds mighty fine, Preston,” Stutz shouted, “but ain’t you forgot somethin’? Ain’t you forgot them hard-assed Marines the Confederation’s got jist waitin’ to get in here, to kick our doors wide open? They done it before in plenty o’ other wars.”

“I have not forgotten, Halbred.” Summers took another surreptitious sip of whiskey. The question of Lyons’s relief had been settled, for now, and it was time to move on to another matter. “Halbred, kindly yield to the Minister of Public Health, who is going to give us an update on the war on disease.”

Summers leaned back and closed his eyes as the Minister of Public Health took the floor. No, neither Summers nor General Lyons had “forgotten” about the Confederation Marines. Preston Summers did not know which he feared worse, Marines or the plague. But the Old Snort he was sipping had left a very pleasant aftertaste in his mouth and as it warmed its way through his vitals, the sharp edge of the affairs of state dulled and he started to see things more clearly. “Yep,” he whispered, “all things considered, I’d rather fight the plague.”

“Mr. President, I have the most important news! I had to bring it in person,” General Davis Lyons stood in Preston Summers’s study, breathing heavily.

“Relax, Gen’rel, have a seat. I have news for you too,” Summers said from where he’d been sitting. He had been drinking this evening, as he’d been doing almost every evening since the war began.

“Sir, this cannot wait—”

“Lemme tell you my news first,” Summers smiled, “and then you tell me yours.” He gestured at an empty chair but Lyons remained standing.

“Preston, this cannot wait!”

“It’ll have to. Gen’rel, the Committee on the Conduct of the War has formally asked me to dismiss you as the commander in chief of our armed forces. And the senate is forming a resolution to that effect.”

“Politics!” Lyons sneered. He sat down heavily in the chair Summers had offered. “If these asses on the committee don’t stop interfering with me we’ll lose any chance we ever had of winning this war. Who’d you replace me with?”

“Admiral de Gauss.”

Lyons laughed outright. “Politicians,” he shook his head. “Those surrender terms they forced me to offer Cazombi, and you endorsed them, would’ve insulted a guttersnipe.”

“Yep. Politicians,” Summers shrugged. “You know I support you, one hundred percent, but even I gotta bow to the reality of political life.” He leaned forward and offered some bourbon to Lyons, who summarily waved the whiskey away. Summers shrugged and splashed a finger of the rich brown fluid into his own glass.

“Preston, you’ve got to cut down on that stuff.”

“Gen’rel, yer sittin’ there, complaining about politicians messing in your business, kindly refrain from telling me how to cope with my own problems.” He held up his whiskey glass and regarded it in the light. “Down the hatch!” He threw the whiskey back and shuddered.

“I’ve never understood how some men can regard alcohol so reverently. If it makes you shudder like that, Preston, why drink the stuff?”

“Ahhhh,” Preston wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, “it does taste like lubricant outta one of yer tanks, but good, but good! Now, Gen’rel, we are a democracy, this Coalition of ours. We have a constitution that establishes powers and responsibilities and tells us who’s got ’em and who don’t.”

“I know all that.”

“Well, jist bear with me. I am bound by that constitution to consider the advice of the senate committees when rendered and that applies to the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Sure, what they say don’t make a lot of sense to a military man like yourself. But it’s a quid pro quo situation, Gen’rel. They ‘advise’ me, Do This or You Don’t Get That, ’n that’s the reality. Two senators sittin’ on that committee, Halbred Stutz from Hobcaw and Jenks Moody, from Mylex, flat tole me, issue the rewritten surrender terms or no more military support from their home worlds. And I don’t need to tell you how much we’re relyin’ on the support Mylex has given us. They think yer too slow to reduce that fort and they think you’re mollycoddlin’ our enemies. They want me to replace you with de Gauss or someone else.”

“I serve at your pleasure,” Lyons answered stiffly.

Summers snorted. “Dammit, man, I ain’t gonna replace you! I understand what you’re doin’! You just gotta bear with these asses. Look, the longer we can draw this out the better it is because we got allies in the Confederation who don’t want no part of a fight with us. That’s why ol’ Chang-Sturdevant ain’t gone to the Confederation Congress and asked for a formal declaration of war! She don’t have the votes and if she put it to a vote and lost, her whole administration would look bad. So you pin ’em down out there on Pohick Bay, chew up them replacements as they’re fed in, and sooner or later the Confederation’s gonna ask to negotiate and then we’ve got what we want.”

“You must support me, Preston.”

“I have, I am, and I will. But you have just gotta give a little. Why the hell raise sand over these surrender terms? You don’t even want no prisoners.”

“Because it is not right to offer dishonorable terms to a valiant enemy. Preston, I knew Cazombi would not accept the original terms, but there’s a protocol that should be followed.”

“Gen’rel,” Summers held up a hand, “I will never understand you military men. You kill each other one minute and then worry about ‘honor’ and ‘protocol’ the next.”

“And I will never understand you politicians, Preston,” Lyons responded softly. “You scream for war, but you want to wage it through compromise and negotiation.”

“Wall,” Summers laughed, “so long as we both don’t understand each other—” He offered the whiskey bottle again and this time Lyons accepted. They sipped in silence and then Summers said, “Gen’rel, I like these talks with you. They’re good for the both of us. You know what yer doin’, so you keep doin’ it ’n I’ll watch yer back for you in the senate. Agreed?”

Lyons smiled, “Yessir. Say, Preston, may I trouble you for one of your cigars?”

Summers took a cigar from the humidor, clipped one end, and handed it to Lyons. “Gen’rel,” he offered a light, “I got some other news for you, off the subject, but somethin’ you should know.”

Lyons, head wreathed in cigar smoke, nodded.

“That galloping form of TB that carried off your Tommy—Gen’rel, it’s showed up in some other kids. We might jist have an epidemic on our hands.”

Lyons went cold. Their children were dying on the battlefield and in the nursery. And the killing had only just begun. “Preston, I guess in view of what you’ve just told me my news isn’t all that important after all. I just thought you should know that Admiral de Gauss reports his ships have detected the Confederation fleet.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The bridge of the heavy cruiser CNSS
Kiowa
was quiet, with only the soft
pings
of monitors, the metallic
tings
of settling metal, and the muted voices of officers giving commands and crew responding. Just the normal sounds of a navy ship approaching hostile forces. The tension, though high, wasn’t palpable; what could be felt was more along the lines of violent-action-in-waiting.

The tensest, though outwardly one of the calmest, person on the bridge was Commander Inap Solwara, the ship’s captain. The main reason for Captain Solwara’s tension was in the command chair mounted next to his; Rear Admiral Hoi Yueng, commander of Task Force 79, then only a few hours away from engaging the Coalition navy cordon around Ravenette, to clear the way for the Amphibious Battle Group following TF79. Admiral Hoi had selected the
Kiowa
as his flagship for the hastily thrown together task force. While Solwara had been in battle before as skipper of a destroyer, it would be his first time on the bridge of a flagship going into battle. Sitting next to the admiral, he found, was quite different from being the senior man on his own ship.

“Relax, Captain,” Admiral Hoi said softly. Solwara was pleased that he didn’t jerk at the unexpected words. “I’ll be heading for my CIC shortly, you won’t have me looking over your shoulder during action.”

“Sir, I . . .”

“Nonsense, Inap. A captain is always nervous the first time his ship is the flagship. I wouldn’t have planted my flag on the
Kiowa
if I didn’t have full confidence in you. When the battle begins, fight your ship the same as you would if I was on another ship.”

“Yessir.” That shouldn’t be difficult. Once the admiral was in his Combat Information Center, directing the entire task force, Solwara should have no more awareness of him than he would if the admiral weren’t on the
Kiowa
at all.

Should. But the captain knew that some things were more difficult than they should be, and forgetting the presence of an admiral was one of the more difficult ones.

Hoi studied the trid schematic displayed on the big screen on the bulkhead in front of the helmsman and found it odd. The same three destroyers orbited Ravenette in equatorial orbits just below geosync. The same three medium and two heavy cruisers circled the planets in lower orbits, only two of them in circumpolar orbits. The four fast frigates moved constantly among the other warships.

Why were they concentrating on equatorial?

Starships reentering Space-3 from Beamspace almost always made the transition several days’ inertial flight above or below the plane of the ecliptic in order to reduce the odds of occupying the same space as a piece of space debris, with possibly catastrophic results. Task Force 79 had entered Space-3 along the plane, less than half the normal distance from the objective planet, and used its transition momentum and simple gravity to move its starships toward Ravenette. That admittedly risky tactic, combined with the stealth capabilities of the task force’s starships, should have allowed TF79 to approach within a standard day of orbit before it was spotted by the planetary defense system, which would normally be oriented to approaches from above and below the ecliptic.

Task Force 79 was now only a few hours from orbit, yet Ravenette’s guardian fleet was in the same defensive formation it had held when the
Kiowa
’s sensors first detected them—they weren’t responding to the task force’s presence.

Rear Admiral Hoi felt there was something very, very wrong. At a simple glance, it appeared that Task Force 79 had the advantage of surprise. Even though the Confederation task force’s seven starships were outnumbered by the defenders, they were stronger in both weaponry and defensive measures; on the face of it, TF79 should have relatively little trouble knocking a large enough hole in the defensive cordon to allow the follow-on amphibious task force carrying the army’s 27th Division to make planetfall relatively unmolested.