CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Deploy the drones,” Than said.
The RLH was less copiously provided with reconnaissance platforms than the Federation. It was a weakness he’d raised several times with the Admiralty’s operational analysts, but they preferred to concentrate on attack and missile defense platforms. A Sun Tzu-class FTLC like Cai Shen carried ten drones (Hauptman coil drones tended to be big, so no one could carry a lot of them), only one of them a Wàngyuǎnjìng “spyglass” platform, optimized for the recon mission. Sublight battleships carried two Wàngyuǎnjìngs apiece, but that was mostly because their fusion drives lacked both the acceleration and the endurance of a Fasset-drive starship. Because they were so much slower and shorter-legged, they were provided with more spies they could send out ahead, so his embarked capital ships would give him over seventy-two more of them…eventually.
At the moment, however, all of his parasites were still on their racks. They lacked the fuel to brake from the sorts of velocities Fasset-drive ships handled with ease, and he had no intention of launching them until his FTLCs had decelerated to rest relative to Crann Bethadh. Nor did he plan on sending them in until he knew exactly what they were looking at in the inner system. That was why the ops plan he’d finally gotten Xing to accept called for staying ten light-minutes out until they’d swept the area around Crann Bethadh thoroughly, which brought him back to his dearth of Wàngyuǎnjìngs. Until the parasites did launch, their drones were inoperable. which restricted him to only the three of his own Cai Shen and her sisters Sun Bin and Li Shiji.
The Wàngyuǎnjìng, unfortunately, had a shorter operational radius than the Heimdallar, its TFN equivalent. The big Federation drone was a more modern—and expensive—design, good for almost twelve hours of acceleration, while the Wàngyuǎnjìng could manage only seven. That made RLH commanders wary of spending any more of that endurance than they had to, but in this case Than could be as tightfisted with it as he liked, because his target wasn’t going anywhere.
The drones separated from their motherships and continued ballistically toward Crann Bethadh at just over 22,850 KPS while the carriers continued to decelerate at 900 gravities. Deceleration to rest relative to their objective would cost the drones forty-nine minutes of their endurance, and Dragon Gamma was 11.56 LM from the planet, so they would coast ballistic for just over two hours before they began braking.
“The Second Admiral’s caught them by now, Sir,” Su Zhihao observed quietly from beside him. Than looked at him, and the chief of staff scowled. His eyes were on the time display. They wouldn’t know the final results for at least another thirty or forty minutes, but Xing must have crossed Murphy’s wake five minutes ago.
“It ought to’ve been us, Sir,” Su said with low-voiced bitterness. “It should’ve been you. You’re the one who created Dragon Fleet. And instead of letting you lead it in battle, she’s turned you into her butcher. She’ll get all the credit for the campaign, and you’ll be the one who gets blamed for all the blood.”
“That’s enough, Zhihao.” Than kept his own voice low, but his tone was sharp. The chief of staff looked at him rebelliously, and Than shrugged. “We can’t change it. We can only do our duty. And after almost sixty years there’s been plenty of butchery to go around, hasn’t there? What’s one more slaughtered planet?”
Su started to reply quickly, then clenched his jaw and nodded.
“Of course, Sir. I should know by now that justice is an abstract concept.”
* * *
“Signal from Admiral Murphy, Sir,” PO 1/c Santolaria announced, and Lieutenant Commander Danielsen looked up from the plot the Crann Bethadh shipyard techs had installed aboard Goibniu Alpha.
“It’s Agincourt!” Santolaria said.
“Well, then.” Danielsen set down his coffee cup with deliberate calm. Then he looked at Ronin. “Are we queued up, Chief?”
“Yes, Sir. The geometry’s not perfect, but it’s gonna be pretty damned good,” the CPO replied in a tone of profound satisfaction. “We’re looking at a…four-point-five-minute burn on the pods, so they’ll see them coming. Don’t know how much good it’ll do them, though.” She flashed a sharklike smile. “They’re still decelerating, and their parasites are still on the racks. Not much missile defense there!”
“Just between you and me, Chief, I’m glad we didn’t have to fire before the Admiral was ready. Let’s send the update and enable the birds.”
“Aye, aye, Sir!” Ronin said with a huge and hungry smile.
* * *
“We’ve just picked up something…odd, Sir.”
“Odd?” Than turned from the plot. “What do you mean, Zhihao?”
Dragon Gamma had deployed the Wàngyuǎnjìngs eight minutes earlier, and the chief of staff was frowning again. This time with a puzzled expression.
“It was a burst transmission, Sir. Murphy must’ve sent it eight or nine minutes before the Second Admiral engaged him, and he sent it in the clear.”
“In the clear?” Something twanged deep inside Than. A signal from Murphy in the final minutes before he was attacked by an overwhelming force? What could have been so important…?
“Yes, Sir. We’re not sure who it was addressed to—at that range, there’s so much signal spread it could’ve been almost anybody—and there wasn’t any header or address. In fact, it was just one word. Or, I assume it’s a word, anyway.”
“You assume it’s a word?”
“Well, if it is, it’s not in any language I’ve ever heard of.”
“What is it?” Than asked a bit impatiently.
“It’s nine characters, Sir—Roman alphabet: A-G-I-N-C-O-U-R-T.”
Than blinked.
“That’s gibberish,” he said. “Could it be some sort of letter substitution code?”
“I don’t know. Lieutenant Hu is running it through the computers, but so far, nothing.”
Than rubbed his chin, frowning intently, then jerked upright and turned to Lieutenant Commander Yuan, Dragon Gamma’s ops officer.
“Stop decelerating,” he said. “I want an alpha launch on the parasites right now.”
“Now, Sir?”
Yuan sounded surprised. Dragon Gamma was still almost two million kilometers short of its planned attack point, with 5,636 KPS of velocity yet to kill.
“Now.” Than’s tone was sharper than it had been. “Murphy wasn’t sending anyone love letters just before Xing blew his ships out of space! One word—or whatever the hell that was—isn’t a message, anyway. It’s an execute code.”
Yuan looked at him for a moment, then started barking orders over his comm. Status lights flashed and changed on the readiness boards as Cai Shen, Sun Bin, and Li Shiji abruptly killed their Fasset drives and the parasites rocketed from their racks eleven minutes earlier than planned. They exploded into space, accelerating away from the suddenly ballistic carriers at ten gravities. An alpha launch was an emergency maneuver Than’s people had drilled upon exhaustively, and the plot was abruptly speckled with diamond dust as they deployed their defensive drones.
Su watched the boards, then looked at Than.
“What kind of an execution code, Sir?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Than scowled.
“A trap of some kind?” Su rubbed his beard, eyes worried.
“I don’t know,” Than repeated. “And if there is one, I can’t think of any sane reason for someone to try to coordinate it—tie it to an execute order—from half a light-hour away!”
“Maybe they’ve scraped up another clutch of missiles, like the one they used against our last attack?” Su rubbed his beard harder. “No. That doesn’t make any sense. We’re still way too far out—their birds would take over twenty minutes to reach us!”
Than nodded. That was exactly what New Dublin had done to the last League attack, but they’d only gotten away with it because Commodore Yao had been an idiot who’d charged straight in on a least-time course and run directly into the missile swarm’s path. But Su was right about their flight time, and they’d be ballistic from the moment their Hauptman coils burned out, sixty seconds after launch, until their fusion drives cut in, three minutes from target. That would give Dragon Gamma seventeen minutes to evade at 900 gravities, which meant they could dodge any missile strike from Crann Bethadh with ludicrous ease.
“I don’t know,” he said a third time, “but whatever it is, I’m not letting them catch us with our trousers around our ankles.” He watched the sublight ships, spreading out in a protective hemisphere between their carriers and the inner system. “Maybe I’m worrying over nothing, but we’ve got plenty of time and distance to work with, and I’m not rushing into anything, at least until we’ve heard from Admiral Xing. Which—” he looked at the time display “—ought to be in about another four minutes.”
“It just seems like such a…crazy thing for Murphy to be doing at a time like this,” Su said.
“I know,” Than said grimly. “That’s why it worries me, I—”
“Third Admiral!”
It was Yuan, and Than whirled at the raw shock—the horror—in the lieutenant commander’s voice. He opened his mouth…and froze, his own eyes flaring wide as he saw the master plot.
The green icons labeled Au Ch’in, XieZhi, Chen Qingzhi, Huánglóng, Shu, Xuánwǔ, and Báilóng had vanished. They were simply…gone. Only Nüwa, Pangu, and the deployed parasites of Dragon Alpha and Beta remained, and the FTLCs’ vectors shifted as he watched them begin accelerating desperately away from the two ships they’d pursued for the last two hours.
“What the hell did they do?” Than demanded.
“We…we don’t know,” Yuan said. “It just…happened.”
“The long-range sensors didn’t see anything?”
“We didn’t see a thing on passives, Sir.” Yuan sounded stunned. “Not a thing. Until …this.”
He tapped a replay command, and Than’s blood turned to ice as a sudden, brutal, utterly cataclysmic flash of massed nuclear detonations devoured the space around Xing’s carriers like a brief-lived sun. It was like an old-fashioned photographer’s flashgun glaring in space—that fast, and that sudden—and then only Nüwa and Pangu remained.
Missiles. It had to have been missiles. They wouldn’t have picked up Hauptman signatures at this range. But how had Xing missed them? For that matter, she’d had her parasites deployed. How the hell had the Feds gotten an alpha strike that devastating past the sublight ships without their killing a single missile? Without the parasites sucking up a single one of them before the carriers got hit? That was—
It happened half an hour ago, a small voice said in the back of his brain. Half an hour ago. You can’t let it paralyze you now, Qiang!
He was a naval officer. He’d spent his entire professional career adjusting for the delays in light-speed signals and sensor data. But it had never hit him this hard, he realized.
“I think it may be a good thing you launched the parasites,” Captain Su said beside him.
“It doesn’t look like it did Xing any good,” Than observed harshly.
“No, but you’re not her,” the chief of staff said.
“Maybe not, but—”
Than chopped himself off and shook his head to clear his brain.
“Be sure this gets passed on to all of our sublight units,” he said more crisply. “Tell them we don’t know exactly how it happened, but all of them need to be on their toes.”
“Yes, Sir!”
“And then you and I need to start looking at all our options,” Than said in a lower tone. Su looked at him for a moment, then nodded. Nüwa might have survived; that didn’t necessarily mean Xing had, and if Than was now in command of what remained of Dragon Fleet…
“Understood, Sir,” he said, equally quietly.
* * *
“Third Admiral, we have a transmission,” Commander Vang said. “It’s from Second Admiral Xing—personal to you. Your eyes only.”
Than looked up from his conversation with Su. Six minutes had passed since the light-speed sensor data of Dragon Alpha and Beta’s destruction had come in. He glanced at his chief of staff, then nodded to the comm officer.
“On my display,” he said curtly, dropping into his command chair. Su started to turn away, but Than shook his head quickly, and the chief of staff stopped.
Xing Xuefeng appeared on the small comm display at Than’s station. Her hair was thick and clotted with blood, one cheek was already bruised and swelling, and her eyes were wild.
“It was a trap!” she said without preamble. “They lured us across some kind of deployed missile field. Our idiot captains never even saw it coming! I’ve ordered Xie to finish off their carriers, but Nüwa and Pangu are severely damaged. They can’t recover the parasites, and I’ve got to get the two of them back to Diyu for repairs. I’m leaving you in command. Take out their fucking planet—burn it to the damned ground; I don’t want anything but slag down there when you’re done!—and then see what you can do about picking up as many of Xie’s people as you can. Xing, out.”
The display blanked. Than’s jaw clenched, and he heard Su inhale sharply beside him.
“Sir,” the chief of staff said, “there’s no way we can recover all those ships. Even if we had the racks or the life support for it, we—”
“Fasset signatures!” Yuan interrupted suddenly from Tracking, and Than turned sharply. “Five Fasset signatures,” the ops officer continued. “They just turned up.”
Than looked at the plot. There weren’t two Federation FTLCs on it anymore. There were seven.
“That’s not possible, Sir,” Su Zhihao said very, very softly. “Seven Fed carriers in a single Fringe system like New Dublin? It’s got to be something else, some kind of trick. Freighters pretending to be carriers, maybe?”
“And where would seven freighters have come from in New Dublin?” Than asked while his own brain fought to process the information overload.
“But if Murphy had seven of them, why leave five of them all the way the hell and gone out there?” the captain demanded.
“I don’t know where he got them, but they aren’t ‘all the way the hell and gone out there.’ They’re exactly where he ran to from the very beginning, and they’re outside the Powell Limit, where they can pull their full accel. Xing was right. It was a trap.” Than frowned intensely, watching new vectors project themselves into the plot, then nodded. “He wanted to draw us away from Crann Bethadh. And that’s what he did, with Alpha and Beta, at least. They never came into attack range of the planet, so they couldn’t even punch missiles past him at it ballistic. It didn’t work perfectly—it looks like Nüwa and Pangu can still evade them—but it was damned well good enough. And look at the math. At eighteen hundred gees, they can get outside us and intercept us before we wormhole if we don’t pull out within the next hour or so.”
“But if we hadn’t taken the bait…” Su said slowly. “He left Crann Bethadh totally undefended, if we didn’t chase him!”
“Not chase a pair of Fed carriers?” Than snorted. “When was the last time you saw a League commander who wouldn’t put catching carriers ahead of K-striking a raggedy Fringe planet he could always come back and kill later? And if I’d been in command, it would’ve worked.”
His voice was flat. Su’s eyes narrowed in protest and the chief of staff opened his mouth, but Than cut him off.
“Of course it would have!” he said bitterly. “I tried to talk Xing into keeping our carriers concentrated, and if she’d agreed, we’d have gotten hammered right along with her.”
“So the glory-hunting bitch finally did something right,” Su said.
“One way to put it, and for all the wrong reasons. But—” Than’s gaze sharpened “—you’re right. If we hadn’t taken the bait, Crann Bethadh would be totally undefended. Unless it isn’t.”
“Sir?” Su’s tone was game, but he was clearly falling astern of his admiral.
“The man who could put this together wouldn’t have left Crann Bethadh undefended,” Than said. “So what did he do inst—”
“Hauptman signatures!” Lieutenant Commander Yuan said suddenly. “Many Hauptman signatures! Zero-zero-two, zero-zero-five, range one-four-point seven million kilometers. Velocity two-two-eight thousand KPS, acceleration eight-zero-zero gravities and closing!”
* * *
Than Qiang was right: Terrence Murphy’s plan hadn’t worked perfectly.
It had only worked far better than he’d truly expected it to when he put it together with O’Hanraghty.
In a perfect universe, all of Dragon Fleet’s FTLCs would have pursued Ishtar and Gilgamesh and been mousetrapped. Whether the sudden, surprise attack would have been equally destructive, spread across all twelve of Xing’s carriers, was another question. It would still have been devastating, though, and the hidden carriers of Hammer Force would have been there to sweep up the pieces if they kept coming.
But that wasn’t the only operational alternative he’d put together. If there’d been fewer League carriers, he would have stood his ground with Ishtar and Gilgamesh, using their cargo pods of drones to thicken the fire from Goibniu. In that case, he would have tried to hit them farther out, and then brought Granger and Tremblay in from the perimeter to cut off their retreat.
He hadn’t quite dared to risk that against twelve FTLCs. The odds were too good that at least some of them—or their parasites—would survive to launch a devastating ballistic strike against Crann Bethadh. And he’d been as confident as Than that no RLH admiral worth his stars would pass up the chance to use all his own FTLCs to run down and destroy two of the Federation’s.
Second Admiral Xing’s ambition—and pettiness—had prevented that, which meant the “insurance policy” Murphy had hoped never to use had become Crann Bethadh’s last hope. The Goibniu space stations hadn’t launched as many drones as Ishtar and Gilgamesh had dropped in Dragon Alpha and Beta’s path. Partly because they didn’t have all that many launchers, but also because for all of New Dublin’s enthusiasm and tireless labor, Murphy simply didn’t have as many of them as he would have liked.
So the space stations had deployed “only” three hundred and twenty of them, but they’d been launched in staggered waves. The leading wave had accelerated at two hundred gravities after launch; the final wave had accelerated at eight, then decelerated once they caught up with the leaders. All three hundred had matched velocity just over eight light-minutes from launch, one light-minute outside Crann Bethadh’s orbit, at a final velocity of 47,533 KPS.
They’d reached that point thirty-nine minutes before Xing encountered their brothers and sisters, then continued coasting outward. If everything had gone perfectly, Danielsen would have launched on his own as the drones came into the powered range of their Bijalees just before Than had decelerated almost to rest and been almost ready to deploy his parasites, at which point his carriers would have been as exposed as Xing’s had been.
But Murphy had known Than’s passive sensors would detect what happened to Xing at almost the same instant Danielsen’s did…and it would take at least sixteen minutes for Lieutenant Commander Danielsen’s launch order to catch up to the drones. Unless he was an idiot, the League admiral would have deployed his parasites as soon as he was alerted to the danger, and so Murphy had sent the execute code six minutes before Xing’s debacle. That should have put Danielsen inside the attackers’ decision loop.
Unfortunately for the Terran Federation that day, Than Qiang’s instincts were too good for that.
* * *
Three hundred and twenty modified drones went to eight hundred gravities as they lunged at Dragon Gamma. That acceleration rate was lower than a Fasset-drive ship’s, even here, deep inside New Dublin’s Powell Limit. But their base closing velocity was already almost 48,000 kilometers per second, and it climbed by 7.84 KPS every second as they streaked toward Than’s ships like homicidal meteors, pregnant with destruction.
But Dragon Gamma wasn’t Alpha or Beta…and Than Qiang wasn’t Xing Xuefeng. Most of his personnel had served under his command for years. They knew him, they trusted him. Unlike the green units Xing had thrown into battle, he had honed their skills like a master swordsmith, and—
“This is Admiral Than.” The calm voice they knew and depended upon came over the all-ships channel. “You’ve all seen what happened to Admiral Xing. We don’t know how they did it, but these must be some sort of missile carrier. It’s possible what we’re seeing are the missiles, but they look more like drone signatures. So they’re probably going to launch standard Fed antiship missiles once we’re inside the missiles’ powered envelope. We’re calling that three hundred and seventeen thousand kilometers from this closing velocity, so expect to see the actual attack birds in one hundred and eighty seconds from…mark.” Digital time displays started ticking down aboard every one of his ships. “We’ll go with Missile Defense Six. I say again, Missile Defense Six. Good luck, and may the gods be with us all. Than, clear.”
* * *
“About three minutes, Sir,” Evie Ronin said, watching the time display.
“Yeah, and we won’t know what happened for fourteen minutes,” Danielsen said sourly.
“Can’t help but be better than it would’ve been without us,” Ronin pointed out.
“You got that right, Chief.” Danielsen puffed out his cheeks, then shrugged. “Start prepping the reserve drones in case we need them.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
Ronin nodded, although neither of them said what both of them feared. If the reserve drones were needed, the surviving Leaguies would have over an hour and a half to wreck Crann Bethadh before they arrived.
* * *
“Here they come,” Captain Su murmured.
Than very much doubted that his chief of staff even realized he’d spoken aloud. Every eye on Cai Shen’s flag bridge was locked to the tactical display as the Federation drones swept toward them. It was difficult to get a precise count on the Hauptman signatures, partly because drones were designed to be stealthy, but mostly because they were so damned many of them the leaders kept blocking the sensors’ look at the ones behind.
“Estimate missile launch…now,” Lieutenant Commander Yuan said.
He was off by less than three seconds, and the display was suddenly a solid haze of the far brighter, stronger signatures of Bijalee missiles accelerating at three thousand gravities. They came at Dragon Gamma in a solid wall, like a blizzard driving into a ground car’s headlights, but every one of these “snowflakes” was tipped with a laserhead of thermonuclear death.
Nine hundred and sixty missiles roared in—sixty-four percent of the missile storm which had greeted Second Admiral Xing, blazing in at the sort of closing speed even missile defense crews never saw and targeted on only three FTLCs and their brood of parasites, rather than Xing’s eight.
Yet that was the difference, because these ships were Than’s ships. And unlike Xing’s, his battleships and battlecruisers were between his carriers and the threat. They’d seen it coming with over five minutes to prepare, not less than two seconds, and unlike Fourth Admiral Xie’s crews, they were superbly trained and battle hardened, under an admiral who’d won their iron trust. There was plenty of fear aboard the ships, but no panic, and counter-missiles raced to meet the threat.
Contact kills spalled the incoming missile wall with shattered wreckage, laserhead counter-missiles flared like bubbles of brimstone, and proximity-fused nuclear warheads flashed like chinks in the gates of hell, killing Federation missiles in dozens and scores. But they came on in their hundreds, and many broke past the counter-missiles. Missile defense drones leapt to meet them, stabbing hedgehogs of lasers into the swarm. Shipboard point defense lasers—more powerful, more accurate, longer-ranged, but far less numerous—stabbed at the survivors with stilettos of coherent radiation, shattering missile fuselages, burning out targeting systems. And then the League warships quivered as the last-ditch autocannon tracked and went to continuous rapid fire.
It took only a minute for the missiles to complete their flight. Only sixty seconds. But those were sixty seconds of mad, whirling destruction, burning its way through the swarm of death like some vast blowtorch, and the eye-searing brilliance flashing and flaring in the visual displays was all the more terrifying for its total silence.
And then they struck, in a cacophony of rending, tearing destruction that shattered ships’ hulls—and crews—like the toys of a petulant child.
* * *
Cai Shen shuddered and bucked as bomb-pumped lasers seared deep into her. Modern armor was tough, with photon and heat-shedding layers of ceramic sandwiched in layers of the same super-collapsed material from which K-gun slugs were forged. But even the toughest armor had its limits. Alarms wailed, hull plating splintered, lurid icons blazed on Damage Control’s displays, and the brutal concussion as air-filled compartments deep inside her core hull superheated and exploded shook her to the keel.
Admiral Than clung to his command chair’s armrests, his expression tight, as the damage ripped into his flagship and she surged as she shot the rapids of destruction. He’d been in battle before, aboard ships which had taken enemy fire. This was worse than anything he’d ever endured, but at least it was mercifully quick. Before he had time to feel the true terror, it was over, and he heard the crackle of the damage control teams’ terse chatter on the central circuits.
“Talk to me, Zhihao!” he snapped.
“We…got hit hard, Sir,” Su said. He’d already unstrapped from his chair and stood at Yuan’s shoulder, peering intently at Tracking’s detailed plot, and his tone was grim. “I think we’ve lost over half the parasites. Looks like at least a dozen others are total write-offs, too. And Sun Bin’s Fasset drive is down. It looks bad. I don’t think their damage control parties will be able to put it back online. But—” he looked over his shoulder at Than “—both Cai Shen and Li Shiji are still operational!”
Than felt some of the iron tension leach out of his muscles, along with a spasm of guilt. Hundreds—thousands—of his personnel had just died. He had no right to feel relief because his carriers had survived. Well, two of them anyway; if Sun Bin’s Fasset drive was down for good, she wouldn’t be coming home with her sisters. Yet he did feel grateful. Because in the end, those two surviving carriers were the only way home for any of his people who hadn’t died.
“We’ve lost two racks on Li Shiji, and Cai Shen’s Number Two Rack’s too badly damaged to recover, as well. It looks like we’ve probably got enough room for everyone who’s left, though. And we should have enough enviro for all our survivors. Search and rescue is underway. I don’t have any estimate on how long that’s going to take. Not yet.”
From Su’s tone, he felt exactly what Than felt, and the third admiral smiled grimly at him.
“Shall I prep for planetary bombardment in the meantime, Sir?” Yuan asked diffidently, and Than met his chief of staff’s gaze across the flag bridge.
Xing’s orders had been clear enough, he thought as an inner tide of despair washed through him. And this time, after what had just happened to them, not even his people were likely to balk at killing a world.
But I will, he thought. Oh, yes. I will—and I’m the one who still has to give the order.
“I think we need to sort out the damage a bit further before we get into that,” he said out loud, aware of his desperate need to delay that order as long as he could. “And—”
“Excuse me, Sir,” Commander Vang interrupted. His tone was diffident but determined, and the Than looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“We’ve just received another transmission, Admiral.”
“From Second Admiral Xing?”
“No, Sir. From the Feds. They transmitted in the clear. They say it’s Admiral Murphy.”
Than’s jaw tightened and he glanced at Su yet again. Then he nodded to the comm officer.
“Put it through,” he said.
A sandy-haired, gray-eyed man in a TFN vac suit appeared on Than’s display.
“My name is Terrence Murphy,” he said in a clear, calm Heart World accent’s clipped final consonants. “I presume I’m speaking to the senior surviving League officer. If so, I have a message for you. By now you know what happened to your other carriers. What you don’t know yet is that Fourth Admiral Xie has surrendered his entire command to me.”
The face on the display gave a thin smile, and Than inhaled sharply. Surrendered? Xie had surrendered?
“I trust you won’t think too harshly of him,” Murphy continued. “He was out of good options. I don’t want to speak ill of anyone’s officer corps, but if pressed, I’d have to say he doesn’t seem very fond of your Second Admiral Xing.” The thin smile morphed into something much more like bared fangs and the gray eyes turned cold. “I see she’s come up in the world since our last intelligence report on her, and I’m looking forward to the day I meet the Second Admiral in person. I have a few things to discuss with her about her heroic actions and a planet called Inverness.”
The searing contempt in that cultured voice bit deep.
“At the moment, however, she appears to be running for her life. Obviously, at this range I can’t yet know how badly you’ve been damaged by the inner system’s defenses, but I’d be rather surprised if the answer isn’t pretty damned bad. Given Xing’s track record, I don’t doubt her last order to you was to burn Crann Bethadh to the ground. Obviously, I can’t stop you from doing that, if you’re a sick enough bastard to emulate her. But know this before you do anything. I’m about to rescue something on the order of sixty-three thousand of your personnel, not counting whoever may still be alive aboard the hulk of the single one of your carriers which is still more or less intact, and I expect what’s already happened here today to have…significant repercussions on the war in general. Ask yourself how you want your people treated. And how you want to be remembered when this is all over, because one way or another, whoever you are, you will be remembered. So think about that.”
Those gray eyes bored into Than from the display for five more seconds. Then—
“Murphy, clear…for now.”