Empire at Gloran, page 10
“Or intentionally?” Kerenski growled.
“My exposure to the Gloran fleet is largely limited to Cruiser-Captain Adham Khan, who has done an exceptional job as part of the force,” Phil replied. “But somebody attacked this world. Tried to destroy it. Planted evidence suggesting Hamath Syndicate did it. That is not a task I would personally undertake without first gaining significant useful intelligence on the target. In layman’s terms, I would suspect a leak, at the very minimum.”
“Or a traitor?” Kerenski pressed.
“There is a new Cluster being born, Your Majesty,” Phil reminded the man. “Many of the people it has been my pleasure to meet have embraced that potential with both arms. A few have resisted, violently twice at Meerut. I do not know your culture or your Imperium well enough to accurately judge if the attackers might have had inside help. Nor do I discount it. We intend to follow the clues and find the pirates. They might tell us even more.”
Another lull in conversation. Kerenski watching. Ambassador Gavraba watching. Phil watching.
“Urumchi is a Survey Dreadnought, correct?” the Emperor finally asked. “The one with the best sensors to find whatever it is you expect?”
“That is correct,” Phil agreed. “We might list it as a training exercise. Or merely me pulling all of my ships out of orbit of Two so that you are free to focus your efforts on the ground and orbit. What would be of the most assistance to the Gloran Empire?”
“Find me the truth, First Centurion,” Kerenski ordered.
“I will do what I can,” Phil offered.
TWENTY
GLORAN EMPIRE HEAVY BATTLECRUISER JUVAYNI, CARINAE II
Adham found himself in his personal quarters, still reeling from the events of the evening. He’d known going into the event that Kira Zaman commanded Arteshbo, though that had been a surprise when he’d first arrived with the Aquitaine force and took a quick poll of the defending forces.
That the woman had met with Lau was to be expected. Women at the command rank were rare enough for her to find Command Centurion Lau fascinating. Worse, he did as well, having spent a year serving under her command.
Previously, Adham Khan would have been appalled at the thought of serving under a woman. It was unnatural.
And yet…
Yaumgan and Aditi had sent such commanders when Kosnett had asked. Ewin had none. Dalou so few as to be functionally unicorns.
That left Gloran.
Didn’t that describe so many things? “And then there was Gloran.”
He was in his quarters. Lau had ordered him to do a thing. Two things, really, but only one of those was difficult. He could remain far and away from Zaman and her consorts, as the frigates were a local force. Kosnett would remain aloof from the Emperor, and Khan’s place was guarding and guiding Urumchi.
But he dithered.
Adham recognized it for what it was.
Fear.
Artak Khan had been reinstated to his previous glory, but the gap between father and son had never been closed. And Kira Zaman had been the reason.
She might have been transferred to the main fleet as a result of Artak’s word, but for Adham’s denunciations. Might have moved on to command a ship as powerful as Glanthua’s Stand.
Might be Gloran’s answer to Heather Lau.
But for him.
Adham looked at the piece of paper he had drawn from a drawer. At the pen in one hand. He set the latter down and crumbled the former into a ball that was dumped blank into the incinerator chute with a quick puff of light.
He could not say the words. Mostly because he had no idea what they should be.
Artak Khan had been a widower then, so there would have been no dishonor suggesting adultery had there been any physical relationship. At the same time, Kira Zaman was an outcast in every sense of the word, and Adham had objected to sharing the glory of the Khan name with her in even the slightest manner.
And he had been wrong. Nobody but Heather Lau could have shown him that.
Bizarre, really.
He moved from his desk to the comm panel next to the door, pressing a button.
“First Officer Stasny,” he said, identifying the man for the computers to locate.
“Stasny here,” Wolf replied a moment later. “What can I do for you, Captain?”
“Join me in my quarters, Wolf,” Adham said. “I need to brief you on a few things and get briefed in turn. Much has happened tonight. None of it appears bad, but we will be in motion again shortly.”
“On my way.”
The line went silent. Adham keyed the switch to unlock his cabin door and moved to sit on the bed.
The immense sleeping space on Urumchi had always left him a little sour. Adham had been raised in compact quarters. Even now, he had a single room five meters long, four wide, and ceilings high enough that most crew members could fit.
It was all a captain needed, to say nothing of his crew. Urumchi had entire suites dedicated to hosting people in luxury unknown to most of Gloran. Space for a small athletic event to be held, if you took out the furniture.
Adham had a bed, a dresser, a desk, and a footlocker.
What more did a warrior need?
He sat at the foot of the bed, meditating on the vast span of his sins. The man he had been a year ago would have been shocked to even have these thoughts, let alone contemplate acting on them.
Thus, must all of Gloran change. Morninghawk showed us that, but most people were too blinkered to understand. Most would fail.
I cannot fail, because Gloran fails with me.
The hatch slid open and Wolf Stasny entered.
Tall. Just barely short enough to serve on starships, where there was an absolute height limit. Wolf even wore custom boots with almost no heel, out of the reverse of vanity.
Perhaps merely the need to serve. As all of them did.
Lean and rangy. Lighter complexion more like Aquitaine, though not as reddish. Possibly the scion of some merchant who had come to the Cluster in the semi-distant past.
First Officer on a Heavy Battlecruiser. A noble position, and one that would see him promoted to Frigate-Captain, or possibly even Cruiser-Captain, assuming Adham didn’t manage to piss Heather Lau off.
Then, they might all be doomed to a service segment aboard a ship like Arteshbo.
“Sit,” Adham gestured to the desk.
Wolf didn’t sit so much as turn the chair around and conquer it in straddling the thing. But he was like that.
“Did all go well with the Imperial reception?” Wolf asked.
They’d had this conversation an hour ago when he’d returned, but in front of many of their officers, all hopeful that the glory of Juvayni would reflect well on their future careers.
If their captain didn’t fuck it all up in the next few days.
Adham had never been subject to doubt before now, either.
“It did,” Adham reassured his First Officer, thinking about Iveta Beridze and what role that woman played in all this as well.
She had held the flag for the entire Aquitaine force while the First Centurion and Lau had been away.
Was Wolf Stasny ready for that sort of thing? And when he wasn’t, whose fault was that?
“I expect movement orders shortly,” Adham said. “Kosnett spoke with the powers that be and something is up, but in a good way. The squadron will shift, but not depart the system. Now might be a good time to put in for a resupply from stores intended for the Imperial squadron, if there was anything you wanted to sneak in that we couldn’t get before.”
“Understood, Captain,” Wolf nodded. “What did you need to know?”
“The two other squadrons,” Adham said. “The Imperial force was expecting to meet Kosnett here. What kinds of pods are they carrying?”
“I noted an odd discrepancy, Captain,” Wolf said with a hard smile. “All of them were deployed with combat pods, just as we were. Extra Point Guns for the flanks and the one Main Gun aft, in addition to a slew of extra generators. Nobody brought missile pods or a carrier with fighters.”
“You saw how effective such things might be at Ewinhome, Wolf,” Adham grimaced. “Not even the Princes could threaten Kosnett, though really it was Beridze. And the Type Five Heavy?”
“The two Type Fives do not handle mission pods, as you know,” Wolf confirmed. “Arteshbo has a defense pod in place for this mission. Two Point Guns forward and a whole series of short-range defensive missile launchers. What I would have equipped them with, were I ordering that squadron to investigate the rumors we heard. Sufficient to thwart any mass missile launch by a Raider or even an Enforcer, while letting the squadron maneuver in close for a kill.”
Adham nodded. Warrior thinking. Make sure your shield arm is stable and solid so you can lean in with the sword hacking. Ewin would just launch missiles and laugh.
They wouldn’t laugh long. Dalou would have firebirds, when a frigate squadron with a Five Heavy Leader could hold the line against them.
“Is everything okay, Captain?” Wolf asked.
“I need to brief you on a few topics that you will never repeat outside these quarters, Wolf,” Adham said. “If something happens to me, this space will become yours, so you might have to repeat them to your new First Officer later. Our careers might hinge on mistakes I made years ago and am trying to salvage now. I might not be able to, and thus may have to fall on my sword, metaphorically if not literally. I will shield the rest of you as much as I can, but the dishonor might be too much for one man to claim.”
“Arteshbo,” Wolf said.
“Kira Zaman,” Adham nodded. “You must take this to your grave, unless the Emperor himself commands. Am I clear?”
“On my honor, Captain.”
“Let us start at the beginning, Wolf…”
TWENTY-ONE
IMPERIAL FLAGSHIP GLANTHUA’S STAND, CARINAE II
Adric, Emperor of Gloran, sat in his personal quarters and stewed.
When he’d been a mere Cruiser-Captain, he’d had a space like all officers, but Emperors were busier men, so he’d taken a triple suite instead. Five meters long, twelve wide, and ceilings higher than most ships allowed.
Decadence, but he understood that most leaders of nations might have a bedroom this large, plus several more rooms for various entertainment and business functions.
The outer hatch pinged with a visitor, though Adric had left all his bodyguards outside. Such was his prerogative, to rise now and answer his own door. Six men stood in the hallway, escorting A.Q. Tanel.
“Come,” Adric nodded, motioning the man inside. He turned to the guard in charge. “Unless Aquitaine opens fire on one of our vessels, I am not to be disturbed.”
The man saluted and Adric pushed the button to shut the hatch. A lock was not necessary, as those six men would hold it at any and all costs in the face of such an order.
“Sit,” Adric motioned Tanel to a worktable near the door.
One square meter of light wood, with four chairs. Sufficient for tea and not much more.
Adric Kerenski didn’t need much more.
“Was there a problem?” Adric asked Tanel as he joined the man.
Tanel might be a candidate to be the next Gloran Emperor, except that Adric was still going strong and Tanel was only three years younger at fifty-five.
Adric suspected that the Empire might need a younger man next. Perhaps forty and full of the fire and fury to accomplish the sorts of radical changes that Aquitaine threatened.
Tanel’s mouth moved like he’d sucked on a lemon.
“Zaman sought out Lau and spoke extensively with the woman,” A.Q. replied. “At one point, Khan almost blundered into the conversation, but Zaman fled immediately. Lau proceeded to dress Khan down harshly, but quietly. If I could not read lips, I would have missed it all, as did everyone else. As it was, I only got parts, but even those parts were somewhat damning.”
“Dressed him down?” Adric asked, feeling a twinge of rage niggle at his belly that a foreigner might have the audacity.
But it was Command Centurion Lau. Ground Control. Perhaps the most dangerous starship commander in the entire Balhee Cluster, though Adric wouldn’t say that out loud around his own men. They would be offended, however wrong they were.
“I got the impression that Khan gave Lau a good deal of the history of himself and Kira Zaman, Adric,” A.Q. said.
He could use the Emperor’s given name in private. They’d been friends for decades, after decades previous as rivals.
“Did he now?” Adric was surprised. Not many outsiders were privy to those secrets.
But he supposed that Lau would need to know.
“How angry was she?” he asked now.
“Chewing nails and spitting iron, Your Majesty,” A.Q. laughed. “I thought Khan might wet himself by the time she was done.”
Adric nodded. Considered his options. As Emperor of Gloran, he could order just about anything and have it done. Such was the executive authority vested in each emperor.
However, his predecessor had shared one of the most important tidbits Adric had ever heard, there at the end.
Never issue an order that might make people question the wisdom of following you. Often, you will have to lead them, rather than shoving them to a place, which can be dangerous if you guess wrong. That is why the Imperial Robes are so heavy.
Adric had never forgotten that. Most of his important decisions had come through that lens.
“What of my cousin?” he asked. “How is she?”
“Well, from what I can gather,” A.Q. nodded. “Her squadron continues to earn top marks, though looking at the careers of the other Frigate-Captains that cycle through, it is obvious that the glory is hers. Little though she can bask in it.”
“She serves, regardless of the rest of us,” Adric said sternly. “Remember that. She is tougher than you are, because you never had those headwinds. Nor did I. I would move her to a cruiser if I thought the old farts in charge of the Penal Fleet would not piss and moan over such a thing. My only current issue is that I never imagined that Kosnett would come here first instead of Derragon. Else I would never have sent my cousin’s squadron to Carinae.”
“Dare we order her home?” A.Q. asked.
“No more than I dare dishonor Khan by ordering him elsewhere,” Adric said. “However, Kosnett offers me a solution that, while it is not my first choice, handles the situation with Khan and Zaman well enough.”
“Oh?”
“His people posit that the raiders who hit Carinae might have approached via Four, hiding in the sensor shadow,” Adric said. “And that they have the scanner power to perhaps locate signs of the ship that attacked the colony.”
“After so long?” A.Q. recoiled.
“Remember the thing that Urumchi’s First Officer did at Ewinhome,” Adric reminded the man.
“Beridze,” A.Q. nodded. “Blinded everyone. Well, there is a so-called Survey Dreadnought and an Expeditionary Survey Cruiser there. Send them all to Four for now, keeping Arteshbo’s squadron here?”
“Indeed,” Adric said. “That should keep my two problem children apart.”
“Is there a way to reconcile them?” A.Q. asked. “Ever?”
“That would solve many other problems, my friend,” Adric said. “But you and I both know what a stiff-necked man Adham Khan can be.”
TWENTY-TWO
DATE OF THE REPUBLIC MARCH 21, 412 RAN URUMCHI, CARINAE IV ORBIT
Phil studied the projection as the squadron settled. All the ships in a ring facing outward, rather than the usual defensive formation. All the command centurions as small faces, projected from their own bridges.
Below them, metaphorically, the north pole of Carinae IV, a green and red gas giant with a massive collection of moons. In many ways, it reminded him of the great planet Jupiter, part of Earth’s system and the largest planet of the many there.
The records didn’t indicate any significant destruction in the Jupiter region, but he supposed that any number of small stations and colonies on various moons might have been attacked when the Sentient Fleets destroyed Earth itself.
Or not. They might have been ignored and allowed to wither, without supplies. That had been the whole point of the war those machines had fought. Without factories making parts, or ships carrying food, many places had been too inhospitable for people to survive.
And the machines had slammed asteroids into planets elsewhere, though even then Earth had gotten the special treatment of being rendered entirely uninhabitable, even today. That took a massive amount of rocks. And infinite patience.
Phil shook off the image and returned to the work at hand. He opened the squadron line and drew a breath.
“This is Kosnett, aboard Urumchi,” he said solemnly, still caught up in the edges of those emotions. “Markus, you have the flag.”
He turned to the man sitting ninety degrees off from himself and Harinder. Markus had even gone to the barber and gotten his hair trimmed short. And put on a nice uniform, rather than one of the ones that might have stains from something.
But Markus had long-since proven that his technical redneckery went far beyond making grenade launchers.
“All hands, this is Dunklin, I have the flag,” the man said. “You’ve got your zones of observation calculated, which is why I have you all spread out in a flat ring for this. Urumchi will ping. Viking and CM-507 will sit on their corners and listen. Everybody else will do the same, cataloging anything that comes up with any sort of reflection, regardless of size. Nobody will move until ordered by me or Heather, because we need to triangulate anything that looks interesting, and will probably deploy administrative shuttles with EVA teams, depending on the size for recovery. Are there any questions?”
