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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Fleet Admiral Fokaides sat motionless as Yang narrated the final moments of the Battle of New Dublin playing out in a holo before the Federation’s senior leaders. Most were aboard the Oval in person, including the assembled joint chiefs of staff. Several, including Prime Minister Schleibaum, attended via hologram.

“…and then, shortly after taking the final League parasite units’ surrender, Rear Admiral Murphy exited the system on a course into League space,” she said.

“League units’ surrender,” Schleibaum said. “You’re implying he took their ships intact?”

“Yes, Prime Minister.” For someone describing a crushing victory, Yang’s voice was remarkably flat.

“How many?”

“Ninety-eight, Ma’am,” Yang sighed. “Forty-eight battleships and fifty battlecruisers.”

“My God,” someone murmured. It was virtually unheard of for warships to be taken intact rather than scuttled before the crews attempted to surrender. No one had ever captured more than a dozen or so intact in a single instance.

“How?” Schleibaum demanded. “How did this happen?”

“Madame Prime Minister,” Yang raised her chin slightly, “Admiral Murphy seized an unsanctioned merchant vessel out beyond the blue line. He insisted that the cargo was intended for the League and that it implied the existence of a significant League force unknown to us. Evidently…the Admiral was correct.”

“The League built and manned this without us knowing?” Schleibaum’s holo stood up as she glared at the admiral. “Do you know what would’ve happened to the Federation if Murphy had lost? Fokaides! What’re you even here for? Answer me.”

“The League would have ripped straight through the Concordia Sector.” Fokaides tapped the panel and a map of the Federation came up. “They would have taken out Jalal—” the Jalal System’s icon pulsed blood red as he spoke “—then punched up the Acera Corridor.” More icons turned to blood, tracing a line inward from the frontier. “Our best estimate, based on the force Murphy actually engaged, is that this Xing could have advanced through another nine Beta and Gamma tier systems before we even began deploying the strategic reserve. By the time we could actually have intercepted her, she could have been as deep as Truscott, in the Gouden Sector. Military and civilian losses would have been catastrophic. And if she was willing to risk a fleet engagement, she might have made it all the way through to Hempstead.”

The trail of blood ended at HR 5209, still over 356 LY from Beta Cygni…and barely sixty-five from the Sol System.

“She could have torn out the economic center of the Heart Worlds,” Amedeo Boyle’s hologram said. “This would’ve been a disaster worse than Callao—worse than First Telemark!”

“Yet Murphy managed a victory, instead.” Kanada Thakore, attending as a holo opposite Boyle, raised both hands. “Why aren’t we celebrating instead of panicking?”

“A moment, please, Kanada,” Schleibaum said, and looked intently at Fokaides. “What did you mean ‘the force Murphy actually engaged’?”

“Admiral Murphy identified twelve League FTLCs,” Fokaides replied. “Eight of them were Fúxī-class—six hundred meters longer than our Titans, and only a bit smaller than our brand-new Cormoran-class. We’ve only identified four of them on the entire Beta Cygni front. If Murphy’s projections from the merchant cargo he intercepted are to be believed,” the fleet admiral looked like a man facing amputation, “they may have been building as many as forty additional carriers.”

Stunned silence enveloped the conference room.

“Forty,” the Prime Minister repeated after a long, still moment. “Forty. You mean they could have hit us with as many as fifty of these new monsters of theirs?”

If Murphy’s projections were valid,” Fokaides said. “But none of my analysts believe they could be. We couldn’t build fifty Cormorans—not without tripling our construction budgets and capacity—and our industrial capacity is half again that of the League. My people concede that the evidence suggests he was correct that the League has a secret construction yard somewhere near Concordia, but it’s simply not possible for them to have built that many ships.”

“The Admiral’s right about that, Prime Minister,” Thakore said. “I think it’s obvious he overestimated the final size of the League’s intended fleet. What’s happened clearly suggests he was right that they’ve been building a fleet, though. So, I repeat—why are we panicking instead of celebrating?”

“Yang. Continue,” Fokaides said.

“On his authority as System Governor, Admiral Murphy authorized the expenditure of federal funds—and the activation of Navy support installations in New Dublin—to construct large numbers of missiles,” Yang said. A very different silence greeted that sentence. “Very large numbers. And he apparently mated them with some sort of modified cargo drone body to allow him to lay down extraordinarily heavy missile strikes at previously unknown ranges.” The silence around her grew still deeper. “And concurrent with the report of the battle at New Dublin, we received word from several depot commanders that worlds in the Concordia Sector have not delivered their draftees for further training and assignment. Taxes have also…not arrived.”

“We’ve got a warlord on our hands, don’t we?” the Prime Minister said into the ringing silence.

“That’s too far!” Thakore slammed a hand on his desktop, but there was no impact noise from his hologram. “Terrence Murphy is my son-in-law! I’ll grant that he’s a bit of a romantic fool sometimes. But that doesn’t mean he’s ambitious enough—or dumb enough—to think he could pull something like that just because his family name carries a bit of weight! Anything he did, he did because he had to if he was going to stop that!”

He jabbed a finger at the trail of bloody icons on Fokaides’s map.

“You said he headed into League territory after the battle,” Schleibaum said. “Why? And are you sure of that?”

“According to his report, he believes he may have identified the star system from which the attack originated,” Yang replied. “His intention is to attack it and destroy any as yet incomplete vessels. In answer to your second question, we have no independent confirmation of his destination, but there seems no reason to doubt it.”

“I think it’s time we started questioning everything about our friend Murphy,” Schleibaum said grimly. “For all we know, he could actually be headed right here.”

Thakore made an inarticulate sound of protest, but Boyle shook his head.

“Verena has a point, Kanada,” he growled. “Intercepted a League shipment beyond the blue line. Beat a league fleet that could have ripped all the way to Earth’s doorstep. And now he’s chasing them down to finish them off?” He shook his head again. “I say it’s time to stop underestimating him.”

“We cannot let this happen,” Schleibaum said. “The Fringe has been on edge since word of Inverness spread. Now this. It looks like we’re losing control, and we can’t afford that.”

“The Fringe is most of our military manpower,” Boyle pointed out. “Systems start flocking to Murphy, and the entire war is at risk. And think of what this will do to our economic interests!”

“You’re all worrying about the bottom line,” Fokaides said. “But how did the League manage to build this fleet? Murphy’s projections may be grossly exaggerated, but just the Fúxīs he actually identified prove the League’s been able to build a hell of a lot more heavy metal than we even began to suspect. I hate to give oxygen to conspiracy theories, but—”

“That’s enough, Admiral,” Schleibaum said. “We need to regain and maintain control of the Fringe. We cannot have Terrence Murphy become a hero. He cannot become a rallying cry for the Fringe…or in the Heart Worlds.”

“He’s scored a victory, but he’s still two hundred light-years from Sol,” Boyle said. “That means we can control the message around that victory.”

“There is a report from the Inspector General.” Yang’s tone was void of any expression. “Allegations of kickbacks to Murphy. Then there’s his violation of the Fokaides Directive. Victory or not, his orders were clear.”

“Suggestions?” Schleibaum crossed her arms.

“Change the message.” Boyle raised his hands. “The size of the League fleet at New Dublin defies belief, so change it. Announce an official count in line with expectations. The actual number’s bound to leak eventually, so we add a footnote that the count may change after we…conduct a further investigation. Then we bring Murphy in for these kickbacks and take him down a peg or two in the public’s perception. War hero or not, there’s no place for corruption in the Federation Navy.”

“No!” Thakore slammed a fist down. “You can’t railroad him like this!”

“What’s the contract status on the Cormorans?” Schleibaum asked. “I don’t believe the final purchase order’s been signed yet.” She stared at Thakore, eyes like ice. “Astro Engineering still has a viable bid, I understand.”

“Verena.” Thakore shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”

“You’re part of the Five Hundred,” Schleibaum said coldly. “That means there are four hundred and forty-nine others who can step up.”

Thakore looked at her for a long, still moment. Then he forced a smile.

“The charges…do sound serious,” he said.

“We’re so worried about Murphy becoming a hero that we’re willing to turn him into a martyr, instead,” Fokaides said. “We’re going to destroy the man who just saved the Heart Worlds, won the most one-sided victory in the Navy’s history, and may well have turned the entire tide of the war in our favor. That’s what you all want?”

“That a problem, Fleet Admiral?” Boyle asked. “You are due to retire in a few more weeks.”

Fokaides exchanged glances with Yang. Boyle’s message was clear. Fokaides would sign the orders against Murphy. He’d shoulder the blame for any fallout…and he’d have to bear that burden in the very well compensated position Boyle had already arranged for him. Yang would be blameless when she took the fleet admiral’s stars. It would all be neat and tidy…unless Fokaides was foolish enough to upset the apple cart.

“The Federation has a chain of command,” he said after a handful of seconds, his eyes circling the faces of the joint chiefs. “One that’s necessary to maintain order and the stability to sustain the war effort. One that can’t be upset at such a crucial moment. The Beta Cygni front is stabilizing in our favor, and the League’s losses at New Dublin might actually force them to the peace table. We owe Murphy a vote of thanks for that, but his ambition and grandstanding can’t be allowed to jeopardize that possibility, and these Inspector General reports are…disturbing. Any objections to reining him in?”

The rest of the joint chiefs shook their heads. Yang paused for a moment, her expression like stone, then shook hers.

“Then get it done,” Schleibaum said. “Full censorship on New Dublin on the feeds. I want the public believing Murphy’s a corrupt officer who got lucky against a League raid. Bring him back to Earth in chains.”

* * *

“Sublight in twenty seconds,” Commander Creuzburg announced, and Murphy turned away from his conversation with O’Hanraghty to watch the digital display click off the final seconds.

There’d been exactly nothing about their system of construction in any of the League parasites’ computers, nor had any of the captured personnel ever been told so much as the name of that star system. “Diyu” appeared on no chart of the League, so it was obviously a cover name for an actual star. All they really knew about it was that it was a red dwarf—which just happened to be the most common star type in the universe—and that it was uninhabited, aside from the RLH shipyard, and had two gas giants and at least one asteroid belt.

They had narrowed the possible candidates—assuming that Xing’s withdrawal vector really had been straight back to base—to only two, so if he was right at all, they had a fifty percent chance of coming up lucky the first time.

Or of coming up unlucky the first time, he reminded himself.

“Sublight,” Creuzburg said, and the visual displays came up, spangled with a sudden spray of stars.

Those displays were never used in wormhole space. Only someone who’d seen the inside of a wormhole knew what true nothingness looked like, and very few people who did see it ever wanted to see it again.

Murphy spared a moment to look at that starscape, take in those distant pinpricks of light. At Ishtar’s velocity, those ahead of the FTLC were very noticeably blue-shifted and those astern red-shifted, and the M3 star whose League discoverers had named Hefei was a bright pinpoint as she and her consorts raced toward it at 297,000 KPS. In point of fact, of course, Hefei was astern of them and the red-shifted stars were ahead of them as Ishtar pointed her stern at the inner system and decelerated hard.

He absorbed the visual, then turned to the flag bridge holo display.

“I suppose,” he told his subordinate commanders, “that a proper admiral ought to be demonstrating his sangfroid about now, so consider that done.”

Several of the officers looking back at him from the display’s windows chuckled. Commodore Tremblay wasn’t one of them, but even his lips twitched. He’d undergone quite an attitude adjustment after Second Admiral Xing turned up in New Dublin exactly as predicted.

“We should see something shortly, assuming this actually is Xing’s base,” Murphy continued. “As soon as we know anything here in Ishtar, we’ll pass it on to all of you.”

“Preliminary scans don’t look very hopeful, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said, looking up from where he stood at Mirwani’s shoulder, watching the data roll in. “Can’t expect a lot of detail at this sort of range, of course.”

Murphy nodded. He was also careful to keep his expression neutral. His augmented task force had gone sublight 2,633,400,000 kilometers from Hefei, 138.8 light-minutes outside its 7.5 LM Powell Limit. At that range, ninety-six percent of Neptune’s distance from Sol, “can’t expect a lot of detail” was…just a bit of an understatement. On the other hand, any construction facility capable of building the ships they’d seen at New Dublin should be radiating one hell of an energy signature. If they weren’t already seeing something—

“They would’ve beaten us back here, Sir,” Harriet Granger said from the comm. He glanced back at her, and the commodore shrugged. “They’d almost have to have gone to the tightest EMCON they possibly could. For that matter, they could be on the far side of the star.”

Murphy’s lips twitched ever so slightly. Granger’s tone reminded him of Simron trying to encourage an adolescent on final exam day.

“Agreed,” he said out loud. “There’s a limit to just how tightly they could control their emissions, of course. But you’re right that if they’re on the far side of the primary, it’s going to take us a while to get a look at them.”

“Well, we’ll be down to a low enough velocity to deploy the Heimdallars in about two hours,” O’Hanraghty said, and Murphy nodded. Once the FTLCs had decelerated to 169,500 KPS they could release the recon drones and let them coast inward independently to take a look at the farther side of the system. They could decelerate from that velocity to zero relative to Hefei in six hours, which would leave them a six-hour power reserve for maneuvers, but they wouldn’t even start decelerating until they’d come within sixty light-minutes or so of the star.

Ten minutes ticked past. Then fifteen.

Twenty.

Murphy sat in his command chair, forcing himself to project a calm demeanor he was far from actually feeling. More and more sensor data came in from the system ahead of them, and the more of it he saw, the less it looked like El Dorado. A worm of uncertainty gnawed deep within him, wondering if it was only hubris that had brought him here. Was he that convinced of his own infallibility? Had his victory at New Dublin filled him with the false confidence to fuel a wild-goose chase to nowhere?

He made himself reconsider his reasoning, testing every link in the chain yet again, and every time he did, it still came up—

“Fasset signature!” O’Hanraghty said suddenly.

Murphy twitched upright in his chair, swiveling toward the master plot as a bright, crimson icon blinked alight upon it.

“Range eleven light-minutes!” O’Hanraghty continued, then wheeled toward Murphy. “Sir, they’re outside us!”

“Of course they are.” Murphy thrust himself up out of his command chair and strode toward the command ring at the heart of the flag bridge as the icons of his task group and the squadron commanders came back to life. “It would appear Admiral Than is just as good as his press releases, Harry.”

O’Hanraghty looked at him, and Murphy shrugged. Prisoner interrogation had also revealed that Than had been “Dragon Fleet’s” CO, not its second-in-command, until Xing superseded him…and that his people hadn’t been very happy about that. Murphy didn’t blame them one bit, and he’d found himself wondering just how well his strategy would’ve worked against someone as wily and experienced as Than.

“If it’s not Hefei, then ‘Diyu’ has to be Yuxi,” the admiral said. “And if he really pushed his fans in wormhole space, he could have gotten back to Yuxi in time to get a picket out to Hefei before we got here. He’d have had to come pretty close to redlining them the entire way, especially with his diversionary vector to kill first, but he could’ve done it, given the time we spent picking up Xing’s orphans.”

“But why—” O’Hanraghty began, then closed his mouth and shook his head—at himself, not Murphy—as he realized where the admiral was headed.

“You’re right, he is good,” the chief of staff said.

“I haven’t quite caught up with you, Sir,” Granger said from the comm display, and Murphy turned to face her.

“Than couldn’t know how much information we had even before their attack,” he said. “I imagine the fact that we intercepted the singularity manifolds must have left them with a lot of questions about how much we know and how long we’ve known it. But he’s probably pretty confident we didn’t know where his ghost yard is, or else we’d have attacked it instead of trying to interdict its supply chain or leaving Xing the initiative to attack New Dublin.

“But he also knows Xing headed straight in this direction when she ran for it, and he obviously figured out that we’d be following her pointer. He doesn’t know what we might have gotten out of prisoner interrogations or picking through computers that might not have been as thoroughly scrubbed as they were supposed to be, either, but that—” he pointed at the accelerating icon in the plot “—says he was able to predict our probable choices. So he rushed one of his surviving carriers, or possibly some other FTL-capable ship, out to sit on Hefei and warn him if we turned up.”

“Why are you so sure it’s Than and not Xing, Sir?” Tremblay asked. The question was genuinely curious, and Murphy shrugged.

“Everything we’ve seen on Xing—or gotten out of the prisoners—indicates that she’s as arrogant as she is vicious,” he said. “She doesn’t waste time trying to put herself inside an opponent’s head, because as she sees it, there’s no reason she should. What matters is what she’s going to do to him, not what he might plan on doing to her. This—” he waved at the plot again “—isn’t her kind of thinking. Besides, we got a big piece of the fans on both of her surviving FTLCs. I doubt they could pull much more than four or five hundred lights in wormhole space. Even on a direct vector home, Than would’ve beaten her back to base. She couldn’t have gotten there fast enough to get a picket to Hefei before we got here…assuming that one or both of her carriers’ drives didn’t simply pack it in on the way home.”

Tremblay nodded slowly, and Murphy saw the shadows in the commodore’s holographic eyes. A dead Fasset drive would never—could never—drop out of wormhole space. It was one of an interstellar spacer’s darkest nightmares, because no one could possibly rescue, or even find, another ship inside the wormhole. And so they would drift through those nerve-crawling, simply wrong depths until power and air and food ran out and their ship became their coffin for all eternity.

“But why light off their drive so quickly?” Granger asked, rubbing one eyebrow with an index finger. “They must have brought their fan up almost the instant they picked us up. Why not just lie doggo until we gave up and left rather than alert us to the fact that he’d picketed the system?”

“Because he’s just as good as his reputation,” Murphy replied. “If we got far enough along the logic chain to be here, in Hefei, then we’re obviously eliminating possibilities. And he knows what we would have been looking for: a deserted system with lots of asteroids for resources and no civilians to realize what was going on. So I’d say it’s pretty clear he’s operating on the assumption that we’ve figured out it has to be either Hefei or Yuxi. And if we have, then we’ll be leaving for Yuxi just as soon as we’ve determined he isn’t here. So his picket couldn’t afford to wait until we leave, or it would get there behind us.”

“But this way, it’s got the lead time while we decelerate and reorient to the right exit vector,” Granger said, nodding.

“Exactly.” Murphy shrugged. “We can’t decelerate to rest any faster than we’re already decelerating, so this way they get effectively at least a six- or seven-hour jump on us. They only waited until they could get a good unit count.”

Both Granger and Tremblay were nodding now, and Murphy turned to Captain Lowe’s hologram.

“Get us down to zero, then lay in a course for Yuxi, Captain,” he said.


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