Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Two Fasset drive signatures leaving Crann Bethadh orbit, Sir!” Su Zhihao announced tensely.

“Two?” Third Admiral Than’s eyebrows arched.

“Yes, Sir. Pulling nine hundred gravities. No way to tell yet what class ships, but they almost have to—”

The chief of staff broke off, cupping one hand over his earbud as if to help himself hear better, then looked at his CO.

“We’re picking up something from the New Dublin comm net, Sir,” he said.

“A challenge?” Than asked.

It seemed unlikely. New Dublin had to know approximately where Dragon Fleet had gone sublight, and if it had wanted to challenge them, it could have transmitted the challenge even before Dragon Fleet dropped out of wormhole space. Assuming they’d been detected thirty minutes before they returned to normal space, a challenge sent the instant they were spotted would have reached their arrival coordinates roughly four hours after they went sublight. Four hours by the standards of the rest of the universe, at least; at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, it would have taken barely twenty-five minutes as far as the RLH was concerned.

Dragon Fleet had coasted ballistically at 297,000 KPS for just over two hours—eighteen minutes, by its clocks—during which it had traveled 124.27 light-minutes toward New Dublin, which had shortened the transmission time for any challenge by two hours. Since then, its ships had decelerated at 1,800 gravities for another three hours and nine minutes, which had reduced its velocity to a mere 91,130 KPS, where time dilation was a negligible factor. In the process, they had traveled another 125.8 LM, just 3.5 LM short of the stellar Powell Limit, 49.9 LM from New Dublin, 32.7 LMs from Crann Bethadh, and still over two hours’ flight from their planned attack point.

“No, Sir. Not a challenge,” Su said. “In fact, it wasn’t transmitted to us, at all. It was omnidirectional, broadcast thirty-nine minutes ago, about the time those Fasset drives broke orbit. Murphy is withdrawing, Sir! He just confirmed it to everyone in the star system.”

Than frowned. Thirty-nine minutes would be about right, he thought. It would mean the defenders had spent perhaps ten minutes dithering between receiving their first light-speed sensor data on Dragon Fleet and the time they cut and ran for it. The departing Fasset drives certainly seemed to bear that out, and Than had always suspected Murphy had to have at least one other FTLC. He’d never believed the Federation governor would have left New Dublin completely uncovered while he ventured off to Alramal. Especially not after Inverness.

“Do we have a vector projection on his carriers?”

“Yes, Sir. They’re breaking for the Powell Limit. CIC is updating the plot now.”

Than turned to the display and frowned some more. The data was over half an hour old, but the broken line of the fugitives’ projected vector streaked directly away from Crann Bethadh on a line perpendicular to Dragon Fleet’s vector.

“Odd,” Than said thoughtfully, clasping his hands behind him.

“Sir?”

“From what we’ve seen and heard about this Murphy I’d have expected him to play it smarter than this.”

Su looked puzzled, and Than shrugged.

“This is a stupid deployment.” The third admiral unclasped his hands to point at the plot. “If he was planning on running from the outset, Crann Bethadh orbit is the worst starting point he could have picked—the one spot in the entire star system he could be certain we’d be headed for. And running now, when we still have so much overtake velocity…”

Than shook his head and Su’s puzzled expression turned into a thoughtful one.

By now, the fleeing FTLCs could have built their velocity to 17,000 KPS or so and traveled about 0.9 LM, but the third admiral was right. That was 73,000 KPS slower than Dragon Fleet’s current velocity toward the planet, and the two forces’ acceleration rates were virtually identical. Which meant—

“They can’t get away, Sir.” The chief of staff’s eyes lit.

“No, they can’t,” Than agreed.

If Dragon Fleet altered course to intercept Murphy’s departure inside the Powell Limit, its vector would become the longest side of a scalene triangle, but that triangle’s base would be very short. The attack force would have much farther to travel than he would, but he couldn’t build the velocity to avoid them before they ran him down. It was still his best shot at evading them—any other course would only have taken him deeper into the limit and given him even less time to build velocity—but “best shot” and “good shot” weren’t the same thing at all. All he could hope for was to make it a passing engagement, because Dragon Fleet couldn’t reduce its overtake velocity and still catch him in its engagement envelope. It would cut across his wake at a relative velocity of well over 120,000 KPS, which would limit it to a very short firing pass, but if it dropped its parasites as it crossed, its massed fire would tear any two FTLCs ever built into very tiny pieces.

If Murphy had been as smart about it as Than had expected him to be, none of that would be true. If he’d placed his FTLCs outside the Powell Limit on the same side of New Dublin as Crann Bethadh, he would have been positioned to intercept any threat short of the planet, and his ships would have had twice the acceleration rate they had now. And from that position, if he’d wanted to avoid action against a stronger enemy, all he’d really have needed to do was to lie low, go to complete EMCON and let Dragon Fleet charge past him toward the planet. Once they were past him, inside the Powell Limit and headed away from him, he could have evaded them effortlessly by simply accelerating in the opposite direction.

Conversely, he could have stayed exactly where he was, hiding under tight EMCON, until Dragon Fleet had decelerated to rest relative to Crann Bethadh and then run for it. His acceleration rate would have been identical to his pursuers, they both would have started at a relative velocity of zero, and he’d have had a ten light-minute head start. True, Dragon Fleet’s reconnaissance drones were headed in-system. They might have spotted his carriers. But if he’d kept the FTLCs under tight emissions control, let Dragon Fleet see his parasites, but not their carriers, he could have used the parasites’ defenses to kill the drones without giving away their motherships’ presence.

But he hadn’t done any of those things. Instead…

“Signal from the Second Admiral, Sir,” his comm officer said, and Than shook himself.

“Thank you, Raksmei,” he said, and turned to face the comm display as Second Admiral Xing’s face appeared on it.

“I told you they’d run!” she said exultantly.

“Yes, Ma’am. You were right,” he said. “But I think it’s a bit odd that they left it this late. I’d have expected—”

“They left it this late because it took them so long to see what’s actually coming at them,” Xing interrupted. “Check the timing, Than. They panicked and ran for it the instant they saw how strong we are!”

“I agree about the timing, but—”

“Their own message traffic confirms it. And not just Murphy’s gutless ‘covered by my orders running for my ass’ announcement, either,” Xing said triumphantly. “We picked up the local Fed potentate’s reply to it.” She smiled nastily. “He wasn’t very happy with his federal governor.”

“I don’t imagine he was, Ma’am. I wouldn’t be either, in his place. It’s just that I would have expected a smarter deployment than this.”

“That’s because you give the Feds too much credit,” Xing told him. “I told you Murphy wouldn’t be out here if he wasn’t a second-rater.”

“It would appear you were correct,” Than said. “Shall we go in pursuit and show him the error of his ways?”

“I’ll take Alpha and Beta to deal with him. You continue on profile and deal with Crann Bethadh.”

Than’s jaw tightened.

“May I suggest keeping the fleet concentrated until we’re positive Murphy’s been taken care of, Ma’am?”

“Whatever for?” Xing sounded just short of incredulous. “You’ve got three FTLCs and their parasites in Gamma. That’s more than enough to handle Crann Bethadh.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the planet, Ma’am. It’s not going anywhere, so we can always come back and deal with it later. I was thinking about keeping our combat strength concentrated until Murphy’s carriers have been destroyed. The engagement window’s going to be—”

“There are two of them, Than,” Xing said in the tone of someone speaking to a particularly dull child. “I’ll have nine carriers. I know you don’t think we’ve had enough time to drill adequately, and you may well be right. But I feel fairly confident even our people can win at five-to-one odds. And, of course,” there was more than a little contempt in her smile on the comm display, “you’ll have our best trained and most experienced ships to deal with the planet.”

Than started to reply, then stopped himself as her eyes mocked him. He wondered if she thought he was as shallow as she was. It was so like her to cut him out of the command net for Dragon Fleet’s first ship-to-ship engagement. To ensure that the only person credited for the crushing victory she anticipated was her.

But that wasn’t all, of course. Oh no, not all. Leaving him behind to carry out exactly the kind of attack he’d argued so strenuously against gratified her sick-sadistic side, as well. She’d be off commanding in a decisive fleet battle while he was the one the Federation—and history—would remember as the “Butcher of Crann Bethadh.”

And there was absolutely no point arguing further. It would only amuse her.

“Whatever you think best, Ma’am,” he said instead.

“Excellent!” On the master plot, Dragon Alpha and Dragon Beta had already begun to separate from Than’s task group as they resumed acceleration at their full 1,800 gravities while Beta continued to decelerate and the velocity differential built by 35.3 KPS every second. All of them would have to reduce to 900 gravities when they hit the Powell Limit, but that gave Xing ten and a half minutes to build additional overtake on Murphy at twice his own acceleration rate. “This shouldn’t take too long, and then we can move on to our next target. Xing, clear.”

* * *

“I sure hope to hell your dad knows what he’s doing, Callum,” Dadyar Pêşrew said from Reactor Two’s main comm display. “It’s going to get kind of lonely around here if he doesn’t.”

“He knows what he’s doing,” Callum said—just a bit more confidently than he actually felt, if the truth be known. “Of course, there is that old saying about plans surviving contact with the enemy.”

“You just had to add that, didn’t you?”

“Well, it seemed best to lay out what Captain O’Hanraghty calls a ‘sheet anchor.’ After all, if we get blown up, I wouldn’t want your last thought to be that I’d been wrong.”

The comm circuit was open at Callum’s end, and several people laughed out loud at that.

Their response was a far cry from the guarded attitude which had greeted him when he and Eira first reported aboard, and he wondered how much of that was because they, too, had figured out what Commander Seydel had called his father’s “promise.” And he wondered, sometimes, how he felt about the fact that she was probably at least partly right.

The notion that his own father had cold-bloodedly calculated that exposing him to death would be good for morale was…chilling. But in another way, a way Callum was pretty sure wouldn’t have occurred to him a few months ago, it was even more reassuring. Reassuring both as proof that Terrence Murphy the admiral would do whatever he had to do to win this battle and protect the people of Crann Bethadh, and as proof that Terrence Murphy the father believed his son had experienced and learned and grown enough to understand why that was. And to understand, if Callum did realize that was indeed the reason he’d been assigned to Kolyma, that his father the admiral had made the right call.

The crews of Drebin’s purloined ships had arrived in New Dublin sullen and resentful. Angry because everyone condemned their squadrons’ actions—or inactions—in Scotia. Resentful because their collective noses had been robbed in their “cowardice,” when the decision to run the hell away hadn’t even been theirs to make. And angry and resentful, most of all, because their actions had, in fact, been shameful. Because whoever had given the order, their honor had been fouled beyond recovery.

And Terrence Murphy was the one who’d demonstrated that.

It was Murphy who’d done the right thing in Scotia. The one who’d dragooned their ships and their personnel into doing their pitiful best to mitigate at least some of the damage and forced them to face the people whose families, whose children, they’d left to die. And it was Murphy who’d assumed command of their ships, dragged them off to Crann Bethadh, where the New Dubliners had made their own scorn and contempt for the cowards of Scotia abundantly clear. And so it was Murphy who was the avatar of all those tangled emotions—shame, humiliation, anger, resentment…

The list went on forever, and so it was little wonder they’d had reservations about Terrence Murphy’s son.

But even before Callum had reported aboard Kolyma, the men and women of BatRon 702 and CruRon 960 had begun to find themselves once more. They’d realized—reluctantly, almost against their will—that Terrence Murphy was everything as a system governor that Yance Drebin had never been. And, they’d realized, he was giving them the chance to be everything they had never been—never been allowed to be—under Drebin’s command.

If everything went exactly according to Murphy’s plan, there was a very high chance some or all of them were about to die. They didn’t like that, but they’d discovered there were things they liked even less. Like running away. Like abandoning civilians they were sworn to defend.

Like living with the shame of being the crews who had done that yet again.

“What the hell is a ‘sheet anchor’?” Pêşrew demanded suspiciously.

“I dunno,” Callum admitted.

“Pretty clear from context, Sir,” Chief Pallares said. The Chief was in Reactor One, standing in for the extra commissioned engineering officer Kolyma was supposed to have, and tied into the same comm channel.

“Yeah?” Pêşrew growled.

“I’m pretty sure it means an ass cover, as in covering the Lieutenant’s,” Pallares said, and it was Callum’s turn to laugh.

“But ‘sheet anchor’ sounds so much more cultured, Chief!” he protested.

“Hey, Sir, I’m just an ignorant Fringer,” Pallares replied. “I don’t know from cultured.”

Callum laughed again, this time with a hidden edge of gratitude. Since Scotia and Inverness, he’d learned just how bitterly Fringers in general despised Heart Worlders. What was worse, he’d learned that their contempt for Heart Worlders—Heart Worlders just like Callum Jagadis Murphy had been before his father dragged him off to the Fringe—was totally, one hundred percent justified.

It burned, that lesson. It burned deep. He only had to look at Eira to see the cold, horrible proof of the consequences of Heart World…disengagement. And he knew he would never be able to make that up to her, however hard he tried. Nobody could. All they could do was learn from it and, as his father had always said, “drive on.”

He didn’t want to die any more than the crews of BatRon 702 and CruRon 960 did. He didn’t want to do that to his mother, or to Reagan, and there were still a hell of a lot of things he wanted to do with his own life. But in an odd sort of way, if he did have to die here, he was…okay with that. At least he’d die doing what the damned, callous, cowardly, fucking ignorant Heart Worlders like Drebin ought to have been doing.

And maybe, just maybe, the fact that Fringers like Pallares were willing to jab him about the differences between them said they’d come to the conclusion that there was a difference between Callum Murphy and the Heart Worlders they had so much cause to hate.

He hoped so.

“Hell, Chief,” he said now, “I figured that was probably the case, but then you went and used a word like ‘context.’ What kind of ignorant Fringer knows what that means?”

More chuckles rolled around the comm link, and Callum glanced over his shoulder.

Eira was there, floating at his back, the way she always did, alert-eyed and ready, even here. Getting her into Reactor Two at Action Stations had required a little finesse, since she was totally untrained for any power room duties. But she was basically a supernumerary, as far as Kolyma’s watch bill was concerned, so Seydel had signed off on letting Callum’s guard dog follow him around. Lieutenant Commander McGhee, Seydel’s XO, had actually even issued her a master-at-arms brassard, making her an official part of Kolyma’s onboard police force. That let her carry her sidearm openly, which made her happy.

Not that she wouldn’t have figured out some way to carry it anyway, Callum thought with a hidden smile.

She sensed his gaze and looked at him, one eyebrow raised, and he shook his head with a “don’t worry about it” expression. She regarded him doubtfully for another moment, then shrugged and returned to her protective stance.

“Well,” Pêşrew said, “since the Chief has brought up the fact that we have a lot of ignorant Fringers aboard the ship, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything to conduct a few drills for their edification while we wait for the ball to open. Lieutenant Murphy?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Reactor One has just taken a direct hit from a laser head, which makes you Kolyma’s sole source of power. This is an awesome responsibility, and you are about to be hit by a power surge, courtesy of Reactor One’s damage. What do you intend to do about it?”

“Clancy, kill the circuit breakers! Isolate us from Reactor One!” Callum snapped without even consciously considering it. “Jacobson, reroute command inputs to my station. Shapiev—”

* * *

The shock of recoil rippled against the soles of Lieutenant Commander Ulf Danielsen’s space boots as yet another salvo of pods streaked out of Goibniu Alpha’s launchers.

“Well, there goes the last one, Sir,” Chief Petty Officer Ronin said at his elbow.

“Then we can begin abandoning now, Commander Danielsen?” Ian Markel asked. The mining executive’s expression was strained, and one of his eyebrows twitched ever so slightly.

“You can pull the last of your people, Mr. Markel,” Danielsen replied. “Just leave us the keys to the power rooms and the launchers.”

“But like Chief Ronin says, that was the last launch!” Markel protested.

“The last one under Agincourt,” Danielsen corrected. “We still have the reserve pods. Anyway—” he shrugged “—all the fire control links are right here on Alpha. If we have to do any corrections, this is where they’ll come from.”

“But—”

To Markel’s credit, Danielsen thought, his concern over the naval personnel aboard his space stations was genuine. Of course, his concern over what would happen to those same space stations if Agincourt didn’t work, or if the Leaguies figured out where the drones had come from, was even more genuine. Hard to blame him for that, though. The man had worked his entire life to build his corporation, and now it might all be about to go into the crapper.

On the other hand, Markel had a much better chance of all his hard work and sweat not going into the crapper with Terrence Murphy calling the shots.

Danielsen had been one of the officers of TF 1705 who’d been more than a little doubtful about serving under a Survey officer. Survey was where the incompetents or the cowards went—everybody knew that.

But “everybody” had obviously been wrong about at least one Survey officer.

“Mr. Markel, we’re shutting down all of our active emissions, so there’s no reason the Leaguies should be looking in our direction. But if we have to go active with fire control commands, that may change. So go ahead and get your people out of here. They’ve all done great. From here on, it’s up to the Navy.”

“If you’re sure, Commander?”

“I’m sure. And—” Danielsen grinned suddenly “—I solemnly promise we won’t get it dinged or dented if we can help it!”

“Gee, thanks.”

Markel actually managed a smile, but he also nodded and headed for the exit at a brisk walk, and Danielsen smiled at Ronin.

“Not such a bad old bastard, really, Sir,” Ronin replied. The chief petty officer was a Heart Worlder who’d stayed in after serving her compulsory time as a conscript, and she’d seen a lot. “Gotta say, I prefer him to how some of the Hearts I can think of would’ve reacted in his place!”

“A point, Chief. Definitely a point,” Danielsen conceded.

He crossed to the fire control station which had been spliced into Goibniu Alpha’s central traffic control computer net. He was as confident as he could be about their installation, but that wasn’t to say totally confident about it. It had performed up to specs in the trial runs, though, and the odds were that they weren’t going to need to adjust the pods’ firing orders significantly, anyway.

He rubbed one eyebrow as he looked at the tactical plot.

The last three waves of drones were clearly visible to his own sensors, building velocity at 3.9 KPS2. That was only half of their maximum acceleration, using the Hauptman coils which had been incorporated into their design, which was low enough for them to be effectively invisible to League sensors at this range. They’d be cutting acceleration very soon, however. They were only running that hot to let them catch up with the drone swarm’s initial launches.

There really wasn’t a technical reason the highly modified drones had to be launched from the space station’s launchers. The initial acceleration boost was the next best thing to infinitesimal compared to the acceleration their coils could sustain for up to ten hours before power exhaustion. But the old, repurposed launchers still had the original Navy fire control circuits and data uplinks, which had formed a critical component of Admiral Murphy’s planning.

If they had to send in the reserve pods, they wouldn’t be using the launchers. The reserve spotted in space around Goibniu Alpha would be less accurate without the pre-launch data uplinks to its payloads, and it would undoubtedly be fired off in a single strike, using its Hauptman coils from the start, because it wouldn’t be the surprise Agincourt was going to be.

The surprise it’s supposed to be, Ulf, he reminded himself. Supposed to be.

It was interesting, he thought. If Murphy pulled this off, he’d probably just revolutionized the strategy of star system defense, and it was so damned simple. Not cheap, but simple. Which was another excellent reason to keep the Leaguies from figuring out where the attack had come from. No point giving them breadcrumbs to how to do the same thing to the Federation down the road!

“Well, Evie,” he said now. “In the words of every bad war holo ever made—‘now we wait.’”

* * *

“Point Luck in thirty seconds, Sir,” Commander Mirwani announced, and Murphy looked at O’Hanraghty. Ishtar and Gilgamesh had been “running” for over an hour and ten minutes now, and their velocity was up to 60,000 KPS. The League carriers, on the other hand, were back up to 113,200, remorselessly eating away the empty space between them.

“Any sign of Hammer?”

“No, Sir.” The chief of staff shook his head. “Well, that’s not entirely true. We’re picking up a little bit of a heat signature, but it’s going to be harder than hell for the Leaguies to see even if they’re looking for it. Which, I have to say, I don’t think they are.” He smiled nastily. “They’re on almost exactly the pursuit vector you predicted.”

We predicted, Harry. We predicted,” Murphy corrected almost absently, looking at the plot.

There hadn’t really been a lot of prescience involved in that prediction, he reflected. Not if the League commander wanted to catch Ishtar and Gilgamesh, at least. But he’d counted on a smaller attack force, and he’d hoped the League commander would be smart enough to avoid splitting his force. If New Dublin’s mobile defenders could be destroyed or driven off, Crann Bethadh could always be attacked later. So why dissipate his combat power when there was no need?

He’d planned his “escape vector” to tempt the RLH FTLCs into chasing him. After all, who could pass up taking out a pair of carriers? Of course, their vectors would intersect over 13.3 LM from Crann Bethadh, and the RLH’s velocity relative to the planet—it’s passing velocity relative to the planet—would be almost 120,000 KPS. No missile had the acceleration and endurance to kill a fraction of that much velocity, so until they could decelerate to rest and get back into effective range, Crann Bethadh and its people would be safe from them.

But that other damned force…

I should have shown him at least one more FTLC, he thought grimly. At least one. I hadn’t counted on his having so many carriers of his own that he wasn’t worried about “dissipating” combat power to deal with “just two” of ours.

“What’s the status on their other force, Harry?” he asked quietly.

“Still decelerating,” O’Hanraghty replied. “They’re shooting for a perch ten light-minutes clear of Crann Bethadh. It’s not perfect from Agincourt’s viewpoint, but it’s pretty damned good.”

“But is Agincourt enough?” Murphy’s voice was too low for anyone else to hear, and O’Hanraghty looked at him.

“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “But I do know these murderous bastards are about to get hurt one hell of a lot more than they ever anticipated. And at least we left an insurance policy behind.”

Murphy winced inwardly at the reminder. But no trace of it reached his expression. He looked at Mirwani, and his voice was calm and confident.

“Deploy as planned, Raleigh.”

* * *

“We’ll have them in range in another twelve minutes, Second Admiral,” Captain Rang said.

“Very good. Deploy the parasites.” Xing Xuefeng smiled viciously. “It’s time to show the Dragon’s teeth.”

That would play well for the video feeds, she thought, standing at the center of Nüwa’s flag bridge with her arms akimbo, right hand resting on the butt of her holstered pistol.

“At once, Ma’am.”

The big carriers stopped accelerating, and fifteen seconds later, forty-eight Huang Di-class battleships and fifty Hou Yi-class battlecruisers erupted from her carriers’ racks and accelerated outward into battle formation while the FTLCs reversed acceleration to stay clear of the combat. It was unlikely anything the two Federation carriers and their parasites had could have gotten past the ninety-eight capital ships she’d just deployed, but there was no point taking chances. No doubt the hypercautious Than would approve, she thought scornfully.

* * *

“Send ‘Agincourt,’ Lieutenant Mastroianni,” Murphy said, his eyes on the master plot as the range dropped steadily.

* * *

The gap between Nüwa and the parasites had grown swiftly as they continued ahead ballistically and the carrier force decelerated at 8.83 KPS2, and Xing split her attention between the chronometer and the plot as the minutes trickled by. The Feds would be deploying their own parasites soon. They had to if they had any hope at all of surviving her own ships’ torrent of missiles. Not that they would, whatever they did. It was all a matter of numbers, and the numbers were on her side. In about—

“Hauptman signature!” her tracking officer snapped suddenly. She wheeled toward the lieutenant commander, her expression incredulous.

“They can’t be launching yet!” she snapped.

“No, Ma’am,” Commander Jiang looked up, her eyes wide. “I just caught a flicker of it. It looks more like a drone signature than a missile.”

“Drones? Out here?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Almost directly astern of us.”

Xing frowned. That was ridiculous. The only way drones could be directly in her decelerating carriers’ path was for Murphy to have launched them a good fifteen minutes earlier, and why would he have done that? Or had he simply dropped them as he ran and let her catch up to them? But that didn’t make any sense, either. It wasn’t—

“Missile launch!” Jiang screamed. “Range two-hundred-fi—”

The universe exploded.

* * *

The weapons system Terrence Murphy had cobbled together was big, ugly, and ungainly. Its descent from the old Mark 37 was plain to anyone who looked, but it was twenty-five meters longer than even the Mark 37 had been. It retained the same cross-section, but New Dublin Extractions’ engineers had wanted more capacity, so they’d significantly reengineered the forward hull. Murphy had proposed his own alterations to it, and the result was a self-propelled “cargo drone” loaded with three of the TFN’s Bijalee shipkiller missiles.

The New Dublin yards had worked round the clock, cranking out both the modified cargo drones and the missiles to go into them. Manufacturing his own ordnance without express authorization from the Oval violated at least six regulations, two of which were theoretically punishable by death—a point Captain Lipshen had been at some pains to include in his reports to the IG. Murphy understood why the Navy might be reluctant to let Fringe systems manufacture state-of-the-art weaponry. One never knew when one of them might decide it had finally had enough and go “out of compliance.” Giving it the means to shoot back when the Navy and Marines moved in to show the error of its ways would probably come under the heading of a bad thing.

That didn’t mean they didn’t have the means to manufacture them, however, and the upgraded yard facilities in New Dublin had torn into the task with a will once they realized he was serious. Their repurposed, reprogrammed automated production lines had also started building them well over four months ago, and Ishtar and Gilgamesh had each docked a pair of cargo pods on two of their parasite racks. Each pod contained one hundred and thirty-two of the modified drones, and Murphy had deployed all five hundred and twenty-eight of them at “Point Luck,” programmed to hold their fire until the range dropped to 250,000 kilometers. If the League carriers followed doctrine, they would deploy their parasites well before that point…and they had.

Which meant the pods were between the parasites—and all of their missile defense systems—and the FTLCs of Dragon Alpha and Dragon Bravo.

* * *

Fifteen hundred missiles exploded into Xing Xuefeng’s face. None of them carried electronic warfare or penaid warheads. Every one of the Bijalees mounted either a laser or a kinetic warhead, and their sensors had been uncaged and tracking on passive from the moment the pods launched.

At such short range and with such a massive rate of closure—Xing’s carriers would overrun the pods in little more than two seconds—a high degree of accuracy was unlikely. On the other hand, Xing had been right about its being a matter of numbers.

She’d simply been wrong about whose side they were on.

The FTLCs’ missile defense crews had been given no more time to train together than the rest of Dragon Fleet’s personnel. It didn’t really matter, though, because even if they’d been as superbly trained as Than Qiang’s crews, there was literally no time to react. If Xing had taken the precaution of bringing her missile defenses online, the computers might have had time to knock down at least some of the incoming fire, but she’d known she was safely outside the despised Feds’ range. Her merely human crew people were like Commander Jiang. They had time—barely, fleetingly—to realize what had come for them, and then it was upon them.

Bijalee meant “lightning bolt” in Hindi, and Terrence Murphy’s lightning bolts lived up to their name in that terrible instant.

Eight hundred and twelve laser heads detonated as one, driving their bomb-pumped lasers deep into ships’ hulls and the human beings within them. Seven hundred and eighty-four nuclear warheads attacked a tiny sliver of a second later. Sixteen of them actually achieved kinetic kills; the others detonated in fusion-fueled proximity bubbles of hell, and Dragon Fleet blazed like tinder at the heart of a furnace.

There was no time for evasion, no time for active defenses—no time to even secure combat harnesses—and the massively armored, six-kilometer-long ships heaved like wind-sick galleons in the maw of a hurricane.

Hulls shattered, atmosphere spewed through gaping rents, weapons and sensors and parasite racks were swept away, splintered, turned into shrapnel and debris, and the merely mortal human beings in destruction’s path were blotted away like moths in a blowtorch.

It happened so quickly that most of the dead died unknowing, but they were the lucky ones. The ones who didn’t find themselves trapped in shattered compartments, bleeding out with no one to help. The ones who weren’t immolated as flash fires swept through before the air could vent. Who weren’t caught in depressurizing compartments without their helmets because, like their admiral, they’d known they were out of the Feds’ reach. And the ones who weren’t hurled from their feet, thrown out of their command chairs, to break arms and legs—or shatter spines and skulls—as the brutal concussion bled through their ships’ bones.

The carriers Ao Ch’in, XieZhi, Huánglóng, Shu, and Xing’s old flagship Chen Qingzhi died almost instantly. Xuánwǔ seemed undamaged for a moment, but then her entire hull disintegrated in a chain fire ripple of internal explosions. Báilóng coasted ballistically on into the depths of interstellar space, her Fasset drive shattered and seventy percent of her crew dead.

Only Nüwa and Pangu actually survived. More wrecks than starships, perhaps, but they survived, with their Fasset drives online.

* * *

Xing Xuefeng dragged herself back to her feet, left arm hanging broken at her side, blood streaming from a gash in her scalp, and stared at the hideous plot with disbelieving eyes. Both task groups, shattered—not broken; shattered—in less than a heartbeat. It was impossible.

Nüwa’s displays flickered as whole quadrants went dead, and the damage control schematic was a lurid sea of crimson. There were far too many damage codes for Xing to absorb, but she didn’t have to. Even her surviving carriers were little more than shambling wrecks.

“Maximum deceleration,” she heard her voice say. No one answered. “Rang! Damn it, I said maximum de—”

She turned furiously toward her chief of staff and stopped in mid-word. Rang Yong-Gi hadn’t been strapped into his seat, either. He’d gone headfirst into his console, and his shattered skull lolled at an impossible angle.

Xing clawed her way to the command deck comm panel across a flag bridge littered with motionless bodies and others that writhed and screamed. She slammed her good hand down on the screen, and it came to life.

“Captain Ding!” she snapped.

“I’m—I’m afraid the Captain is dead, Second Admiral,” a lieutenant Xing had never met said. “I think—” The young woman paused and shook her head like a fighter who’d just been punched. “I think I have the conn, Ma’am.”

“Come to one-nine-zero, one-eight-zero and take us to maximum deceleration!” Xing said.

“But, Ma’am…the parasites…”

“The parasites are on their own,” Xing grated. “We don’t have the racks to recover them. And even if we did, we can’t risk running into another ambush trying to! Is that understood, Lieutenant?”

“Yes…yes, Ma’am.”

“Then do it. And do we have a comm officer?”

“Chief Petty Officer Xun has the duty, Ma’am. I’m afraid Comman—”

“Yes! Yes, I understand,” Xing interrupted. “Have him patch me through to Fourth Admiral Xie.”

* * *

Fourth Admiral Xie Peng stared at his tactical plot aboard the battleship Tǔdìshén in horror. One instant, that display had shown two full carrier squadrons. The next…carnage. How in the names of all the gods had the Feds done it? First they’d intercepted and destroyed the singularity manifolds for the rest of Dragon Fleet’s carriers, and now this! Who was this Murphy and what daemon had spawned him?!

He needed the answers to those questions, and he needed them badly, because Tǔdìshén was the flagship of BatRon 183, Nüwa’s senior squadron. That made Xie the parasite force’s tactical commander, and now that their carriers had been smashed—

“Sir, the Second Admiral is asking for you.” His communications officer sounded as numb with shock as Xie felt.

“Of course,” Xie said.

He was surprised Xing was still alive, given how badly Nüwa had been pounded. The FTLC’s acceleration was down, suggesting she’d taken Fasset damage, and she was haloed in venting atmosphere that indicated heavy hull breaching. But it would seem her flag bridge had been spared. He was a bit ambivalent about that, because he really wasn’t looking forward to Xing’s orders. Unfortunately, he had no choice about hearing them, and he moved to the command ring on Tǔdìshén’s flag bridge.

“Fourth Admiral,” Xing said, the instant she saw him. “It’s imperative that you continue the attack. Press it home! The Fed carriers cannot be allowed to escape. Is that clear?”

The range was over two light-seconds by now, and she wiped blood from her forehead while she waited out the transmission lag.

“Of course, Ma’am,” Xie replied. “But how are we going to recover our sublight units?”

“We can’t,” Xing said harshly, five seconds later. “Nüwa and Pangu may have three operable racks between them, but I doubt it. We have to get both of them clear and back to base for repairs.”

“But if you can’t recover us…?” Xie’s voice trailed off.

“We can’t recover you now,” Xing said. “But I have your vector. I’ll send a relief force to recover your ships—or at least your personnel—as soon as I return to Diyu. You have more than enough life support and onboard endurance to carry you over until we can find you and bring you home.”

Xie stared at her, wondering if she realized how insane she sounded. And wondering even more strongly if she was mad enough to expect him to believe a word of that. The only intact carriers Dragon Fleet had were Third Admiral Than’s, and he didn’t have a fraction of the lift capacity—or life support—to recover Xie’s ships and people.

“I know this isn’t what we expected,” Xing went on, “but I’m depending on you, Peng. The entire League is depending on you. I know you won’t let us down.”

“Of course not, Ma’am,” Xie said. It was all he could say.

“Good man! And now, I’m afraid I have to go. We’re all a little…busy over here.”

The comm display blanked.

* * *

The whoops and cheers aboard TFNS Ishtar pummeled Terrence Murphy with hammers of sound as the tactical displays filled with the sheer devastation of the drones’ Alpha strike. He stared at the master plot while Harrison O’Hanraghty pounded him on the back.

Seven of them!” the chief of staff shouted in his ear. “Seven of the bastards—total kills! My God, Terry! Seven!”

Murphy nodded, still trying to process it himself, and a part of him cringed as he thought of the nine or ten thousand men and women he’d just killed.

“And it looks like the survivors got hammered, too. Look at those accel numbers! The Leaguies haven’t had their ass kicked like this in decades!” O’Hanraghty exulted. “This was a war-changer! We just turned their entire grand strategy on its head! This was their Sunday punch, their decisive surprise, the knife that was going to stab us in the back, and you just ripped the guts right out of it! They’ll never recover from this!”

“Maybe,” Murphy said, watching the two badly damaged survivors change vector as they clawed away from New Dublin. They’d stay just outside Hammer Force’s envelope, despite their damages, he saw. Pity about that. And in the meantime…

“You may be right about all that, Harry,” he said. “However, we still have a minor problem.”

He flicked a finger at the forest of icons still sweeping toward them across the plot. No sublight unit could match an FTLC’s acceleration, but they didn’t have to. They had so much overtake velocity they couldn’t have not cut across Ishtar’s wake if they’d wanted to. And between them, those ninety-eight ships had enough missile launchers to do to Murphy’s carriers what he’d just done to theirs. That had always been a possibility.

“Then I think you’d better speak to them,” O’Hanraghty said. “And they ought to be seeing Granger and Tremblay about now.”

“Yes, I imagine they are.” Murphy smiled thinly. “Lieutenant Mastroianni, please raise the League senior officer for me.”

* * *

“Where did they come from?” Xie Peng’s chief of staff demanded. “They can’t be here!”

Xie looked at him sideways. Commander Ye was a good man, under most circumstances.

“I don’t imagine we’d like the answer to that question if we knew what it was,” the fourth admiral said after a moment. “It’s hard to see how it makes our situation a lot worse, though.”

He looked at the plot, where five new, undamaged Federation FTLCs had just lit off their Fasset drives. They were well outside any range at which they could have fired upon him, but they also had unlimited acceleration two thousand times higher than anything his crews could survive. And he very much doubted that their parasite racks were empty.

There’s no way we can outrun them, but Xing certainly can, he thought bitterly, watching Nüwa’s receding icon in the plot. And unless

“Excuse me, Fourth Admiral,” Tǔdìshén’s communications officer said.

“Yes, Sun?” Xie Peng managed to not rip the man’s head off.

“Sir, I have a message for you. It’s…it’s from the Fed admiral. From Admiral Murphy.”

Xie looked at the lieutenant for a long, still moment. Then his nostrils flared.

“Put it on my display. Audio to my earbud only.”

“Yes, Sir!”

A strong-jawed, sandy-haired gwáilóu appeared on Xie’s display. The gray eyes were remarkably hard and steady.

“I am Admiral Terrence Murphy,” the recorded message said. “I have just destroyed or crippled your entire FTLC element. You have no way home, and I doubt very much that there are sufficient carriers at your secret building facility to come and collect you even if your commanders cared enough about you to do it. I imagine that by now you’re picking up the Fasset signatures of my other carriers, however. We do have the capacity to rescue all of your personnel. Or to hunt you down and destroy you to the last ship. And given what I’m sure you were planning to do to New Dublin, that is very tempting at the moment.

“So here’s my offer. You will not fire on my ships as you pass. Instead, you will jettison every missile and drone aboard your ships. After that, you will decelerate, by squadrons, so that each squadron is separated by a minimum of one light-second. And then you will surrender your ships to my boarding parties without resistance, as we close with each squadron in turn.

“You don’t have to do any of those things, and you can undoubtedly inflict severe damage on the two carriers in front of you, if that’s what you choose to do. If you do, however, I promise you, not a man or woman under your command will survive.”

Those agate-hard gray eyes bored into him, and there was no question in Xie’s mind. This was the man who’d rescued the tattered survivors of Xing’s butchery in Scotia. The man who’d somehow found and destroyed the last critical component of Dragon Fleet’s construction. And the man who had—somehow—just orchestrated an impossible massacre of Dragon Fleet’s completed carriers.

He meant every word, and his voice was chilled steel as he finished.

“The choice is yours.”


Back | Next
Framed