Ground Control, page 9
He cut the line and saw the first four orbits in his head. Saw the fools over there try to hold back. Then try to engage.
That carrier was dead meat that simply hadn’t started rotting yet.
Yet.
Alber’ watched as the lights on his board turned green.
“Ilves, come about and roll. Prepare to open fire broadside,” he said simply.
Chapter 25
Date of the Republic March 10, 417 EM Shanhai Pass, Zerzan Forward Logistics Base 4-A
“What is he doing?” Heather heard Saltanat mutter under her breath, not seeing it.
Heather did, but she supposed that only a handful of others would have made that leap. Herself. d’Maine. Bedrov. Morninghawk.
“Baiting them,” Heather said loud enough that other heads tilted inwards from around the room.
She’d spent the last couple of years before Shanhai Pass teaching advanced students. Senior Centurions qualifying for that third stripe, as often as ones getting ready for their first.
As Phil had always said, every moment can be educational, if you pay attention.
“Baiting?” Saltanat asked.
“They can sit back and take what we’re about to give them,” Heather nodded. “Or try to gang up on one part of that loop and engage us, in which case we turn in or away. Or send out a couple hundred aeromechia to try to engage us and set up the other five hundred to do something. Minus however many we’ve damaged so far.”
“Operational stats suggest around six hundred at the moment,” Saltanat replied.
“Enough to hurt us,” Heather told everyone. “If they could get in range, which they cannot with what d’Maine is going to do.”
On her plot, Ilves had moved into the front slot and started firing inwards, clear out at the range where even the Type-4 had trouble hitting, but well beyond anything you could do to answer with an aeromechia torpedo. Even a bunch of them, because they would fade out before they got that far.
Soon enough, someone would figure that out.
Then they would run. Except that the carrier was still tumbling. Still dead in space, from the scans at this range.
Dead meat.
Heather heard the quiet sounds as Erle’s team opened up with a pair of Fours. Watched one of them slam into metal over there. Saw gases sublime, too hot to even have color until a few seconds of expansion had passed.
Chunks blown off. Big ones. Probably people.
Invaders who would not take no for an answer.
The swarms hesitated. Felt like they had lost communications with their Air Boss.
She turned to Donatien and interrupted him getting the Wing landed. With Saša gone, he was wearing two hats, and handling both adroitly.
He looked up.
“What happens when the wing loses contact with the ship?” she asked.
He sat back and she watched surprise on his face turn to a moment of pure terror that he overcame a moment later.
“It has never happened in battle, I believe,” he answered quietly. “Some local commander might try to rally them, but what order does he give? Charge us or sit back and defend a dead hulk?”
“Logistics, as you reminded me, Donatien,” Heather said. “Do we do more damage leaving the hulk and crew in place? Or kill their ship so dead that they have to leave everything behind to save the pilots?”
“I think you have already done that,” he replied. “Convoie is coming apart at the welds from what you are doing to them, Heather. Does the ship’s crew survive?”
She watched another volley slam into the Overlord. Flashed back to Meerut, when Iveta had sawed a station in half so surgically that the rest had surrendered.
“Yaumgan Squadron, this is Lau. I have the flag. Cease fire and prepare to come about. I think we’ve made our point today. Ilves, stand by to line up on Point Roderick for forward rendezvous. Any ships with concerns about JumpSpace, speak now.”
CS-405 hadn’t warned her or anyone else that it was about to burn out the JumpSails, causing her to be left behind with Phil and the Pirates.
But she wasn’t about to leave any friendlies behind.
Zerzan could deal with the aftermath themselves.
And start asking if the price of empire was worth it.
Chapter 26
Date of the Republic March 10, 417 EM Shanhai Pass, JumpSpace
Donatien had come to focus after all of his various flight crews got home safe, both here on Shanhai Pass as well as the others who answered to his role as Admiral of the White and overall Air Boss.
Deep in his soul, he found a knot of emotion that took a moment to unravel, leaned back and listening to Heather get the final updates from the sensor teams. Ships hit and damaged. Enemy aeromechia hit and possibly destroyed in the fray.
Enemy? Enemy.
Convoie, shattered like a vase dropped on pavement.
Donatien felt the kiss of terror. Fear. Rage. Enlightenment.
At The Passage, he had stood down instead of challenging Phil and Heather to carry through on their threats to annihilate his force.
Until this moment, he had never really believed that they could have, even with the Junkyard Bitch in command of the force.
Now he had seen these people angry.
It wouldn’t have even been a fight. Chickens, resisting the farmer selecting Sunday dinner with an ax in one hand.
Nothing he had ever imagined in his former life.
Zerzan could not appreciate what was coming.
And he wasn’t about to warn them.
“Donatien.”
He looked up and realized that someone had been speaking to him.
Heather.
Concern on her face.
How long had he been ignoring her?
“Sorry.”
“You okay?” she asked.
He paused and considered that.
“I think so,” he offered.
“Need to talk about it?” she pressed, obviously seeing something.
His inner turmoil? His soul?
“Maybe,” Donatien said.
“Your office,” she said, abruptly unbuckling and rising. “Saltanat, route any emergency there. Otherwise, tell Erle to handle it until I’m back.”
“Got it,” the Flag Centurion nodded.
Donatien rose slower, still catching up to the woman.
But wasn’t that the story of his life? Heather was ahead of everyone. Rightly so, but frighteningly in some ways.
He fell in on her flank and crossed over and down to his office, where she put him behind his desk and took the chair farthest from the hatch.
He had to blink a few times.
“Why here?” Donatien finally asked.
“Your space,” she replied. “I figured it would help you with whatever crisis was engulfing you.”
He nodded.
She was right. Heather was ahead of everybody.
Then she sat and watched him. Not speaking. Observing.
He watched her back for a moment as he tried to find the words.
Almost exactly five years younger than him. Fully gray hair because she didn’t care to color it back past the salt and pepper it had been when he’d first met her. Even the black tips were gone.
Wrinkles starting around the eyes and mouth, which merely added more character to a classically beautiful face he had heard someone call Korean, dating back to the Lost Homeworld.
Bright green eyes.
He swallowed past an unruly tongue and nodded.
“I didn’t truly believe,” he began.
She waited. Watched.
“Phil could had destroyed us at The Passage,” he said.
“Would have,” she nodded.
“I thought that the casualties would have been hideous,” Donatien nodded back. “And we would have lost, because that fleet was too powerful to resist.”
“The Professor chose to bring a big, fucking hammer to handle his problem,” she said.
He agreed.
“But Phil—or Iveta, at least—would have hunted down every survivor and ended them, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes,” Heather said. “Today, they get to abandon that wreck, pile pilots onto cargo ships, and start ferrying people somewhere else. Probably 4-B. I need to get a full report from everyone when we reach Point Roderick, in order to determine if we have to return to base for resupply, return home for repairs, or go after his next warehouse.”
“Somewhere, there is an entire fleet of Overlords gathered,” Donatien offered. “I cannot imagine Bellamy or his successor would only leave one here, unless he had the others ready to strike.”
“Would it still be Bellamy?” she asked. “Or does the Commission replace him with someone else?”
“They don’t have that many supreme commanders,” he shrugged. “I’m a traitor. Amable Bellamy. Perhaps five others for a force that big. I suspect that they leave him in place, because he didn’t lose a battle to you. Rather, he was forced to withdraw by circumstances beyond his control. They will rebuild, reorganize, and return.”
“And Convoie will not be joining them,” she said.
“They will not,” Donatien agreed. “But you cannot win the war by only striking at his bases.”
“Every day I force him onto the defensive is one more Escort Destroyer built, trained, and deployed,” she said. “Eventually, I have enough to force the matter. To force him back. To defeat him. To end him as a threat.”
There. That tone. That was the shiver that rung harmonically in his soul. That thing that had caused him to squirrel in.
Death. Not raging anger. Cold, like the dark space between stars.
Maybe between galaxies.
“Was that what set you off?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “I think. I don’t think I truly understood what Aquitaine meant as a people until this moment. I’d heard the stories, but discounted them. Heard Phil speak. Heard you. Never internalized what it meant that the nations of the east would launch an apocalyptic war against the west. Nor how far you would be willing to take it.”
“They could have withdrawn at any time,” she said cruelly. “Behaved like adults. But the Zerzan Unification cannot do that. You—here and now—are proof of that.”
“Me?”
“All the time you have spent around us,” she continued implacably. “Around me. And you are only now beginning to grasp.”
Donatien lowered his head in shame. She was right.
Heather Lau was completely correct, and there was nothing he could do to convey his new knowledge to the people that mattered, because they would not listen.
Could not listen.
“I’m sorry,” he offered.
Her sudden smile warmed him.
“You’re willing to learn, Donatien,” she told him. “That makes all the difference.”
He supposed so.
And he was committed. Donatien Fortier would see this through to the very—ugly—end.
Because she believed that he could be redeemed.
Chapter 27
Date of the Republic March 12, 417 EM Shanhai Pass, Point Roderick
Heather studied the anchorage out her porthole. Noted the three big ships and all the smaller ones around them in laager. A great deal of firepower, but not enough.
Not against sixteen thousand aeromechia. Fifteen thousand now. Less, with however many of those logistics bases also had at least one Overlord protecting them.
At least as well as they could, with her ranging into their rear and hurting things.
The hatch chimed and opened, revealing Ivonne standing there.
“It’s time,” the woman said.
Heather nodded. She relied on the woman to keep her on track some days. Eating and sleeping on a regular schedule. Stopping and breathing occasionally, in addition to finding things Heather needed or locating people.
And hearing rumors that could be relayed up the command chain without names attached sometimes.
Rarer in this force than some she’d known, but occasional.
She wasn’t Markus Dunklin, but did a damned good job competing with Heather’s memory of that redneck.
They exited Heather’s quarters and headed aft to the big conference room closest to the flight deck. The one flight commanders usually used, but only Iron Spear would be here.
Instead, all of her Command Centurions. Or Captains. Or whatever title they had felt most comfortable with, drawn from their own culture into a thing as yet being built. Including a handful of Destroyer-Captains from Gloran, a new rank between frigate and cruiser for those folks.
Heather moved to the lectern and took her place, looking out over the mob. In addition to Bedrov, both d’Maine and Barrett had come.
Donatien was out there, looking better than he had. Another emotional breakthrough.
And everyone else. Fleet Carrier Transport Wei Ying, with Yong Hao off raiding forward. Nearly two dozen Escort Destroyers.
Not enough.
“We cannot defeat them today,” Heather began simply. “Nor tomorrow, but there is a bigger fleet being built and our job is to hold the wall long enough for them to do the job.”
The quiet groans and grimaces were background noise.
“We have just delivered a crushing blow to one of their Row Four bases,” Heather continued. “Logic dictates we hit the other one along the line, called 4-B. I’m hoping that they snap back and reinforce the crap out of that one when they hear about us. Slow them down. Make them nervous.”
She paused and caught the nods around the room. All of these men and women had been chosen for aggressive competence. No slouches or cowards here. Killers.
“And while we are occupying minds here, Task Force Crimson is forward doing things that will further distract,” Heather reminded them. “Griever and her team. That will really impact on Zerzan’s peace of mind, when those implications become clear. But that’s not why I called you together today, rather than doing this over the comm.”
Faces perked up. Bodies leaned in. She had their attention.
Phil had taught her some of these oratorical tricks. Others, she had gotten from Keller.
“We are going to slip quietly back to our forward base outside Zerzan’s line of advance,” she said. “Then handle some of the harder maintenance that you’ve put off, in order to move a big force up and sideways so we can go after one of their third-row bases. The goal here is chaos and confusion. Panic and misdirection, over and above what we’ve done so far. So I wanted all of you over for dinner, like we used to do in the old days of First Expeditionary Fleet. Come together as friends and equals, especially those of you who might have been enemies five years ago and still harbor any lingering resentments. We are all Yaumgan today. All Balhee, and what it will turn into, including those folks from the mythical East who so badly disrupted your lives in the name of trade and exploration.”
Laughter. A few cheers. Some dirty jokes, from the barks of mirth. It was good.
“I’m going to ask the impossible of you several times,” she reminded them. “Because you are capable of it. With that, let me start laying out what I have planned for the next phase of operations…”
Chapter 28
Date of the Republic March 29, 417 Mejico, Strike Location Crimson
Veronika studied the plot. The data.
Mejico sat in deep silence, as far out as they could get from Asouri and still listen to radio traffic from that world. Yukon Antares was slightly ahead of her, also silent, but drinking in a massive amount of signals intelligence that left Veronika appalled.
Did these people not know they were in a war?
Even the military traffic was transmitted in the clear. Everything. Civilian music up to Overlord ships moving around and training.
Yukon Antares had locked a communications laser on her forward sensor array, so Veronika was reading things with about a two-second lag.
Asouri had two Overlords parked in orbit. In addition, about four thousand additional aeromechia given the data from several orbital platforms and patrol signals.
She was pretty sure that she could drop out of JumpSpace at high speed and hit one of those Overlords before those fools woke up enough to even raise shields, as languidly as they seemed to do everything.
This was what Unification looked like. Overwhelming firepower ready to hammer any nail back into the wood, but entirely reactive until they decided to act. Passive.
Waiting for someone below them to challenge the Unification by speaking up about having been invaded and oppressed. Living on a world where more than ten percent of the population was wiped out a generation ago, because this system happened to be next on some asshole’s checklist of conquest.
Veronika kept her snarl to herself, happy that her new station in the extended gooseneck of Mejico kept anyone from watching.
She was Fribourg, not Aquitaine. She’d grown up hearing Father and Grandfather talk about how close Buran had come to defeating the Empire, slowly pushing back frontiers on one side, even as the Empire slowly ground down the Republic and stole worlds from them in turn.
Until Kasum came along. And only Uncle Emmerich had been good enough to hold that line against Nils Kasum.
Nobody was Jessica Keller’s equal. And somehow, Casey’s father, Karl VII, had managed to convince her to save the Empire. And then the rest of the galaxy.
Veronika had an understanding of what it meant to be on the losing side of an implacable war. Of knowing it was only a matter of time until you lost and became subsumed into some other culture, losing everything that had previously made yours special.
