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CHAPTER THIRTY

“All of this will be in my report, Admiral,” Captain Lipshen’s tight-lipped holo said at Murphy’s command station.

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that several times.” Murphy smiled ever so slightly. “Of course, my latitude as system governor goes a long way during a declared state of emergency. That will go into your report, as well. No doubt.”

“Your authority doesn’t extend to military equipment and personnel not assigned to New Dublin.” Lipshen’s voice was icy. “You may—may—be covered where BatRon Seven-Oh-Two is concerned, given that they haven’t been formally reassigned to another station since Scotia was abandoned. But neither Commodore Granger nor Commodore Tremblay can be remotely construed as falling under your orders!”

“I don’t think we’re too likely to agree on that one,” Murphy replied. “And Commodore Tremblay accepts my authority.” And it had been nice to get at least one set of dispatches that contained nothing but routine shipping movement information, too, he thought. “He doesn’t seem to have any problem with it.”

“Whether or not he does is beside the point!” Lipshen snapped. “His opinion doesn’t change the law. Nor does it change the fact that you have zero authority over Commodore Granger or the draftees! They—”

“Bit of a gray area, there, Andy,” O’Hanraghty said in a chatty tone. He stood beside the seated Murphy and smiled broadly when the IG captain glared at him. “See, the recruits were under the command of the New Dublin Militia at the time of their training. Once they’re deemed fit for federal service, then they’re officially transferred to a separate command. They haven’t been yet, so they aren’t a federal asset at the moment. And while Commodore Tremblay protested the Governor’s orders, as Admiral Murphy says, he had to concede that Section Four gives us the authority to take his ships under command for the duration of the emergency. As for the other ships you’re worried about, if you read the repair yard’s standing orders, any units which are docked here for overhaul or repair, are assigned to New Dublin. That means any ship detailed to New Dublin for repairs is officially part of our command until such time as she’s completed her trials and the dockmaster certifies her repairs. Um, that would include Commodore Granger’s ships,” he added helpfully.

“You’re grasping at straws!” Lipshen snarled.

“Have you contacted the dockmaster?” Murphy asked. “I don’t believe there’s been time for the Commodore to run trials on her Fasset drive.”

“Oh, yes. I spoke with him at some length.” Lipshen’s jaw clenched. “He was most liberal with his expletives at my inquiry, and Commodore Granger declined to overrule him and ‘endanger her command’ with uncertified repairs. Which, I observe, hasn’t prevented her from participating in your ‘system defense’ exercises. That, too, will be in my report.” The captain raised his chin slightly. “The Federation has systems in place to prevent governors from seizing too much power for themselves, Admiral. There’s a reason for that. And what you’re doing sets a dangerous precedent.”

“Perhaps. But at the moment, the League poses an unprecedented threat,” Murphy said. “Better safe than sorry, don’t you agree?”

“My personal opinions are not relevant. Only the Federation’s law matters here.” Lipshen looked to one side, then tapped at a screen in front of him. “My shuttle will be departing for Ishtar in two hours. Some other matters which have come to my attention require a personal conver—”

An alarm howled, and Murphy jerked upright in his command chair and killed Lipshen’s holo with a swipe of his hand.

“Talk to me, Harry!”

“Fasset signature at twenty-seven light-weeks, Sir,” the chief of staff replied tautly. “It’s a big one, and coming fast. Really fast. Whoever it is, he’s running his fans mighty hot. ETA…four-point-seven hours.”

“Any estimate on point sources?”

“No, Sir. Not possible yet,” O’Hanraghty said, his expression grim. “Looks like this force is at least twice Tremblay’s size, though. And—” he turned his head to look over his shoulder at Murphy “—they’re coming in on almost exactly the projected heading. So I don’t think they’re more Federation ships we can ‘borrow.’”

“It does seem unlikely,” Murphy agreed dryly.

The admiral stood and crossed the flag bridge to stand beside O’Hanraghty in front of the master plot. The glaring red icon of an unidentified Fasset signature blinked at him from its depths, moving swiftly closer, and he felt as if he’d just swallowed a frozen bowling ball. This wasn’t Steelman’s Star. Then he’d had so little time to think, to anticipate…to feel afraid. Battle had been joined long before command fell to him. But not this time, he thought.

Oh, no. Not this time.

“I’m glad we had a couple of weeks to get Tremblay worked into the ops plan,” he said. He put every gram of confidence he could muster into his tone and wondered if it was enough. “And they do seem to be coming in where we’d anticipated.”

“Should I notify Goibniu to begin launching?” Commander Mirwani asked.

That question was a sign of the ops officer’s own nerves, Murphy thought, because Mirwani already knew the answer.

“Not yet, Raleigh,” he replied. “We don’t have an unlimited ammunition supply, and until we actually see these people, we don’t know for certain what they’re doing, do we?”

“No, Sir,” Mirwani acknowledged in a chastened tone. “Sorry. I—”

“You were just checking,” Murphy interrupted. “That’s what good subordinates do. They make sure their lordly superiors aren’t about to drop a ball because they just didn’t happen to think about it.”

He patted the commander on the shoulder, and Mirwani smiled.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Tanaka said in a reminding sort of tone, “Captain Lipshen is still on the comm.”

“Ah, yes! Captain Lipshen.”

Murphy strolled back to his command station and un-muted the holo.

“—and another thing,” Lipshen was saying. “I’ve been hearing some disturbing reports about certain of your…administrative and procurement policies here in New Dublin. We need to discuss those, as well. The expenditures you’ve authorized are, frankly, beyond merely ‘excessive.’ They’re well into the realm of astronomically unsanctioned, and—”

“I’m afraid that’s going to have to wait,” Murphy interrupted.

“I’m the Inspector General’s representative here in this system, Admiral,” Lipshen said coldly. “When and where we discuss my concerns is my decision.”

“Under normal circumstances, perhaps,” Murphy conceded. “At the moment, however, we’ve just detected a Fasset signature headed our way in wormhole space. Sublight ETA is about—” he glanced at the time display “—two-hundred-eighty minutes, now. I think it would be best if you stayed safely on the planet until we sort out exactly what’s happening up here.”

“What?!” Lipshen snapped bolt upright in his chair. “The League is attacking now?!”

“That would be a worst-case assumption, yes,” Murphy agreed. “But it could also very well be a simple merchantman. Or another force like Commodore Tremblay’s, just passing through. I can’t say anything more definite until they’ve gone sublight and I have light-speed confirmation.”

Murphy heard something surprisingly like a chuckle run around the flag bridge despite his staff’s tension, but Lipshen looked like a man whose brain was about to explode.

“Your orders in the event of an overwhelming attack are very clear, Governor!” he said.

“I don’t know that this is an attack at all yet, Captain,” Murphy pointed out. “Far less one in ‘overwhelming’ strength. I won’t know what it is until I have that light-speed confirmation. At which point, I will, of course, bear my standing orders in mind.”

Lipshen’s face went a most unbecoming shade of red, and his eyes bulged.

“Admiral—!”

“I’ll be back in contact as soon as we know more,” Murphy said soothingly. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep you fully informed. Murphy, clear.”

He killed the link and tipped back in his chair with a smile.

“My, that was fun,” he said. “The opportunity almost makes a desperate battle to the death seem worthwhile, doesn’t it?”

It wasn’t a chuckle this time.

* * *

“That was better,” Xing Xuefeng said.

She stood on RLHS Nüwa’s flag bridge, her expression fierce as she glared into the visual at the tiny pinprick of the star she’d come so far to find. Dragon Fleet’s other eleven FTLCs had gone sublight in almost perfect formation with her flagship, and readiness reports murmured and flowed in the background.

“Well, they know we’re here now, Ma’am,” Captain Rang said.

“Within five or six light-minutes, at best,” she said impatiently. “Not that it matters at this range.”

“No, of course not, Ma’am.”

Xing spared her chief of staff a brief grin, then turned to the displays showing the faces of her carrier division commanders.

And Than, of course.

“Very well,” she said. “We’ll proceed as planned. Captain Ding,” she looked at her flag captain, “begin deceleration in two hours and ten minutes.”

* * *

“I’m pretty sure Captain Ding already knew what ‘proceed as planned’ meant, Sir,” Su Zhihao said very quietly in Admiral Than’s ear.

“It never hurts to be certain.” Than’s tone was rather more serene than he felt.

“Want to place a tiny wager on whether or not her flag bridge video gets leaked to the feeds?” Su asked. “Steely-eyed warrior, fiery with impatience for battle against the ungodly?”

“Wars are also won through propaganda,” Than pointed out a bit severely. “Although,” his expression relented, “I certainly wouldn’t bet against it.”

Su snorted, but he also let it drop and moved away toward the comm tied into Cai Shen’s bridge. Than listened as he spoke to Captain Sun Luoyang, the FTLC’s CO, but his mind was on the display as the massive RLH force bore down upon New Dublin.

He knew he’d irritated Xing immensely by arguing against her initial attack plan, but FTLCs were valuable units, especially with the destruction of the rest of Dragon Fleet’s singularity manifolds. And, unlike Xing, he’d reviewed the last attack on the star system. He’d pointed out that they couldn’t afford to expose her carriers to a similar ambush, especially not given that Ishtar and Murphy had to have gotten back to New Dublin weeks ago, at the very latest. Xing was obviously right that Murphy was hopelessly outgunned, but Than was less confident that this Federation governor planned to cut and run like the last one Xing had faced. If he didn’t, then he’d had ample time, weeks of it, to make—and implement—whatever plans he could. And if he had, the one thing they weren’t going to be facing was the rushed, desperately improvised defense the last attack had encountered.

Its losses had hardly been crippling, but they’d been nothing to sneer at, either. He had no desire to give New Dublin the opportunity to improve its score and, as he’d pointed out to the Second Admiral, every FTLC down for damage repair was twelve fewer battleships for the next system on her list.

Xing had been livid when he brought up the last attack. He was pretty sure she hadn’t bothered to research it herself. Why should she, when she had such an overwhelming force advantage? But at least he’d gotten her to back off her original plan to take the carriers into bombardment range of Crann Bethadh.

He wasn’t sure why she’d wanted to do that in the first place. The Fúxīs were big, powerful ships, a full thirteen hundred meters longer than his own Cai Shen—and Cai Shen was bigger than anything the Feds had, except their Titans—but they still mounted only twenty-four missile launchers in each broadside. They weren’t going to be needed to turn Crann Bethadh into a blasted, lifeless wasteland, and adding their limited firepower to the holocaust certainly wasn’t worth risking them in the inner system. Maybe Su was right. Maybe she’d just wanted to personally drive missiles into her prey and watch the fireballs spawn.

Than Qiang would have been delighted to leave that pleasure to her. The thought that his people’s hands were about to be stained with so much blood filled him with both shame and despair. But they couldn’t risk the carriers in that close. Not until they were certain New Dublin hadn’t come up with another unexpected clutch of missiles.

And so the carriers would decelerate to a zero velocity relative to New Dublin ten light-minutes from Crann Bethadh. That would be more than close enough to bombard the planet with missiles—even K-guns. It wasn’t like it could dodge, after all.

And if slowing the approach gave the people of Crann Bethadh longer to retreat into their shelters and their bunkers and seal the doors behind them, Than Qiang was just fine with that.

* * *

Sirens wailed throughout Tara City and every other city and town of Crann Bethadh. This wasn’t Inverness, where there’d been virtually no warning. From three hundred light-minutes, an enemy could reach attack range of the planet in little more than five hours, if they didn’t decelerate at all and settled for a single, devastating firing pass. But this was a disaster for which New Dubliners had prepared—and rehearsed—for decades. The target time for complete evacuation to shelters was only three hours, and militiamen and designated Civil Defense wardens activated their comm nets, marshaled their volunteers, and sprang into action with the smoothness all those years of rehearsal made possible. Yet the fact that they were as prepared as was humanly possible was the coldest of comfort, and the citizens of Crann Bethadh waited for more information while fear and uncertainty gnawed at their nerves.

* * *

“We should have signal in fifteen seconds, Admiral,” Mirwani said, and Murphy turned from a low-voiced conversation with O’Hanraghty and Captain Lowe to face the master plot once more.

The red icon in its depths strobed to indicate uncertainty. The wormhole Fasset signature had disappeared almost five hours ago as the intruders dropped sublight. Assuming the emergence point plotted from their supralight signature was accurate, that had been approximately five light-hours from New Dublin, which placed them 282.7 light-minutes from Crann Bethadh and Ishtar. So, if they’d been right, they should be seeing something just about—

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered, and Murphy’s jaw tightened as the strobing icon abruptly stopped blinking and an alphanumeric data block appeared beside it.

“Sir,” O’Hanraghty said carefully, “CIC makes it twelve bogeys. We don’t have any deceleration yet, but they’re inbound at 297,000 KPS, and the outer surveillance platforms say they’re all FTLCs.”

“Thank you, XO,” Murphy said. He gazed at the plot for a minute or so, then inhaled deeply and shrugged. “Well, this should certainly make Bug Out convincing.”

“You might say that, Sir,” O’Hanraghty acknowledged.

His eyes met Murphy’s, and the admiral knew what he was thinking. Deep inside, neither of them had anticipated an attack in this much strength. They’d known it was a possibility, they’d said as much in their planning sessions, but they hadn’t really believed it. They’d taken out the components for forty FTLCs, by their estimate. Had the RLH been building a fifty-carrier fleet? Planning on unleashing something that size on Concordia? Ridiculous!

But there it was, and even with Granger and Tremblay added to the defenders, they had only seven FTLCs, little more than half of what was coming at them.

Twelve carriers, he thought. Each with six parasite racks. Assume there were a battleship and a battlecruiser on each of them. That gave the League a hundred and forty-four sublight capital ships, and he had twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven.

“We know where they are now,” he said. “Instruct Goibniu to prep for Fire Plan Agincourt.”

“What about the cargo pods, Sir?” O’Hanraghty asked quietly. “We could drop one—”

“No.” Murphy shook his head. “If Bug Out works, we’ll need all the pods to handle them.”

“And if Bug Out doesn’t work?” the chief of staff asked even more quietly.

“In that case, they wouldn’t make much of a difference to Umbrella anyway,” Murphy said grimly, and O’Hanraghty knew he wasn’t thinking about just the people of New Dublin. “Not that I’ll be able to sleep too soundly of nights if the bastards get through to the planet. And assuming we survive this thing, of course.”

He glanced at the time display.

“I think we’ve dithered about long enough to be convincing, so I guess it’s time we get started. Captain Lowe, bring up the Fasset drive. Communications, get me—”

“Excuse me, Admiral,” Lieutenant Mastroianni interrupted, “but I have an incoming priority signal. It’s Captain Lipshen.”

“Damn, that was fast—even for Andy with his panties in a wad!” O’Hanraghty said. He and Murphy looked at each other.

“Should we bother?” the admiral asked.

“Make it official,” O’Hanraghty said. “He’s gutless enough to add just the right element to it for us.”

“True,” Murphy said, and nodded for Mastroianni to put the signal through.

Lipshen appeared above the command ring. His face was pale, beaded with sweat, and he seemed on the verge of hyperventilating.

“You…you see them?” he asked.

“I’m well aware of the hostiles, yes.”

“Admiral, you have your orders from Fleet Admiral Fokaides. You’re far overmatched. Pull our mobile units out and retreat while we still have time!”

“And what about the people of Crann Bethadh? This may very well be the same monster that wiped out Inverness.”

“To hell with them! We have our orders, Murphy.”

“That we do,” Murphy agreed, and looked at O’Hanraghty. “Twelve FTLCs. Our current strength and deployment put us at a distinct disadvantage. You agree, XO?”

“I’m afraid I do, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said.

“Then Captain Lipshen is correct and we have no choice. Captain Lowe, take us out of orbit. I’m issuing Fall Back Plan Bravo.”

“Yes, Sir. Breaking orbit now.”

Ishtar and Gilgamesh, the only two FTLCs in Crann Bethadh orbit, turned and began to accelerate away from the planet toward the stellar Powell Limit. A least-time course to the limit that didn’t take them directly into the League attack force’s teeth put them on a heading perpendicular to the attack force’s approach vector, and this far inside the limit, their maximum acceleration was only about nine hundred gravities. They could almost certainly be intercepted by an alert attacker, but it would generate the shortest possible engagement before they could escape into wormhole space. And while their acceleration might be vastly reduced this far in-system, it remained enormously higher than any reaction drive craft—like a passenger shuttle, for example—could possibly match.

“Murphy!” Lipshen shouted from the comm. “Murphy, where the hell are you going?”

“I’m executing Fleet Admiral Fokaides’s instructions to give ground and preserve my carriers at all costs,” Murphy said.

“You get me—I mean, you get our personnel off this damned planet, first!”

“I’m sorry, Captain, but I can’t do that, given that they’ll probably be picking up our Fasset drives in another forty minutes or so. If you work the math, I’ll need every minute of that. And you’re right that my orders are nondiscretionary. So I’m afraid you’re just going to have to take refuge in the governor’s mansion bunker and ride it out. Good luck.”

He cut the circuit and flashed a quick, evil smile at O’Hanraghty. Then he nodded to Mastroianni.

“All-system override, please, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, aye,” she replied. “And…you’re…live.”

The master display flashed to indicate that the communications officer had just patched Murphy through to New Dublin’s system-wide communications net.

“People of New Dublin, this system is under attack by an overwhelming enemy force. Under nondiscretionary Admiralty orders, I am executing a strategic withdrawal of all forces under my command. May the Lord bless thee and keep thee. Brighter mornings bring rising fortunes.”

He nodded to Mastroianni again. She cut the channel, and he stepped back beside O’Hanraghty.

“Here goes nothing,” his chief of staff said.

“Indeed. Drive on, Mr. O’Hanraghty. Drive on.”

* * *

“How goddamned dare you!?” Tolmach shouted into the microphone. The command bunker beneath the capital was full of militiamen and women, huddled around workstations. “You coward! You absolute coward, Murphy! You’re the same useless, dickless, spineless Heart World bag of shit I knew you were the moment you showed up in-system! I just hope the League kills me quick enough my ghost can latch onto your ship and haunt you for the rest of your useless fucking days! Bastard!

He glanced up at Dewar, who gave him a thumbs-up.

Tolmach nodded back, flipped a switch, and leaned back against his desk.

“He’s really leaving?” the President asked.

Ishtar and Gilgamesh are underway,” Dewar said. “‘Leaving’ might be putting it a tad strongly. Doesn’t seem to be a very good astrogator, either. No way he can outrun ’em, and they’ll catch him way outside what little support the system defenses might give him. Foolish of him. Must’ve panicked.”

“All a trick.” Tolmach sank into a chair and kicked his bad leg out. “Murphy’s played it oh so well, hasn’t he? But, you know, even now there’s a part of me that wonders. Is the trick on the League…or on us?”

“I expect we’ll find out in a few hours,” Dewar replied with a shrug. “Against what’s coming at us, we’d’ve been dead meat without him, anyway. So the way I see it, at least we’re not any worse off.”

“And aren’t you just a little ray of sunshine.” Tolmach glared at him. Then his expression sobered.

“Evacuation status?”

“Fifty percent of shelters reporting sealed already,” Dewar said. “Bit ahead of projections—we’ll hit a hundred percent in plenty of time, for whatever it’s worth. Murphy’s canceling the recruits’ deployment gave everyone a hint something was up, I guess.”

“Bring in Chaplain Gibson. A prayer’s in order,” Tolmach said. “And maybe a drink to go with it.”


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