In Conquest Born, page 22
A warship? The warship!
Inside the transport they were courteous, and she refrained from explaining that no, she didn’t require instructions in ground-star safety precautions. She smiled politely as they explained the workings of the stabilizer attached to her couch—granted, all warships generated their own gravity, but how ignorant did they think she was—and she even allowed the pilot to personally see that it was set correctly. Not until he left did she reset it.
There was no further waiting to endure; she was no sooner lying on the couch than the tiny transport lifted from the planet’s surface. She closed her eyes and reveled in the multi-gee sensation as they pulled free from the planet, a feeling the couch lessened but no longer nullified. It made her feel as though she had truly left the planet’s surface, and she could feel the phobia settle within her, ready for its next excuse to surface.
Now, at last, she had time to think. Perhaps it was the first time in two Standard Years she’d had time to do so; perhaps instead she hadn’t dared. Now the memories came, and with them the anger. Images: Subcommander ti Vasha demanding reassignment. “I will not serve an alien in War!” he had cried, and that was that. There were other confrontations, not as dramatic but equally frustrating. She had commanded the Destroyer for two years and had never won over its crew. Did that matter? She tried to convince herself that only the actual combat was of any importance, but she failed. Battles were few and far between, and in the interim Anzha lyu Mitethe was a human being. The fact that she had grown accustomed to being alone did not ease the pain of hearing those half-whispered conversations, or of knowing that they were intended for her ears. She was an alien. That was that.
She could have lost herself in the joy of battle, but circumstances had been unobliging. She lacked seniority, hence she lacked tactical authority. She was bound to obey the orders of men and women who, though they had served far longer than she and wore more decorations on their sleeves, were decidedly her inferiors. They were so conservative in their strategy that the War she had longed to fight had practically passed her by.
Until now.
When the transport was outatmosphere, the generators kicked in and supplied a minimum of artificial gravity, for safety purposes. Anzha arose from the couch and took out the files Torzha had sent her. Here was detailed information on the nature of her new command, from the ship’s specifications to its crew. She put the former aside. The Conqueror was not something that could be captured on paper; she knew it already from legend. It had no equal in the Azean fleet and it would have none among the Braxins until the Sentira was back in active service. From the day it was built it was capable of greater maneuverability, more extensive sensor range, and more precise firepower than had been thought possible for a warship, and since then it had been improved. It was a command assignment one dreamed of getting.
Why me? she asked for the thousandth time.
She questioned more than the advisability of putting someone of alien appearance on such a ship. At thirty she was a mere child; the officers of the Conqueror had been serving on their ship since the time of her birth, if not longer. And they had gone through commanding officers with a speed and regularity that was unnerving.
She pulled those files and reread them. Li Dashte had resigned his commission after one year. Ver Buell had filed charges against his prime subcommander for disobedience, then had left when the man was acquitted. Er Pirjare was in a rest home on Ikn. Five more commanders now served on other ships; one had resigned from the fleet entirely.
The problem was the crew. Insubordination or eccentricity, or both—from the brief reports it was hard to tell. StarControl had issued reprimands on numerous occasions, but it had no real power to correct the problem; the Conqueror’s officers were apparently careful to obey rules to the letter, if not to the spirit. The ship’s battle record was outstanding, which was amazing considering the discord in its command center. But the Conqueror’s crew lacked one important thing: a Starcommander who could handle them. Was that why Torzha had assigned her to this ship?
One by one, Anzha reviewed the personnel files. The men and women who had served under her on the Destroyer had been professional soldiers: officers who had made war their avocation because they were good at it, fighters who had chosen military service because it was the most intense flight training they could obtain, technicians in search of the perfect resumé. The officers of the Conqueror were a different breed entirely. It wasn’t obvious at first. One had to look long and hard to discover the connection, but when she realized what she had found Anzha nodded her understanding.
Every man and woman in a position of authority was a child of war, as she was. Raised by military officers, spoonfed armaments and tactics along with their more solid nourishment—as she was, for the first six years of her life. They lived and breathed war as no civilian could; it ran in their veins alongside the blood, sometimes perhaps supplanting it entirely. In addition, most of them had known loss as a direct result of the Great Conflict. Fathers, mothers, lovers, friends, colleagues . . . Braxi had robbed them of what they valued most, and they were seeking vengeance. Under those circumstances, she thought, their behavior made sense.
She read the records over again, and began to comprehend the pattern. Starcommanders had run into trouble every time they had tried to get between this crew and the enemy. Commanding officers bogged down in red tape, giving precedence to protocol . . . these were the men and women the crew of the Conqueror rejected outright. And they knew how to get rid of them. Not a move was accidental, not a single act was careless. They could drive a man insane if they had to, without even actually defying regulations. In one case they had actually done so.
A smile, the first in years, transformed her face into something a little less harsh, a bit less unyielding.
I understand, she thought.
In her half-jacket was a letter from Torzha. She didn’t open it; she didn’t have to. She knew its brief text by heart and could recite it from memory, especially the closing line: “Succeed, and I will ask no questions.”
It was a promise she needed if she was to win these people over.
“Starcommander?”
She gathered her things and rose to follow the attendant. Her thoughtful demeanor seemed to inspire him to silence. Good. Otherwise he might have explained to her how the airlock of a transport functioned.
Outside, protective fields wavered and dispersed. The transport eased into dock and the Conqueror’s field was reestablished, containing both ships. Anzha braced herself as the portal slid open and a ramp drew itself into place.
And then she stepped out.
In theory, the reception dock of the Conqueror was supposed to be kept free of debris, so that a visiting dignitary might be properly impressed by its gleaming emptiness. But her own transport was flanked by four fighters, ready and waiting to be sent off into battle. It was a flagrant violation of StarControl custom, but not of regulations. No, the rules said nothing about what might be kept here, only that the place must be spotless and impressive. And it certainly was that.
The presence of the fighters could be read as an insult: you are not important enough to justify extra work for us. But she thought it meant just the opposite; the crew had probably moved the fighters here just for her arrival. Was it a challenge? She smiled to herself. From what she understood of the nature of the officers here, that would be typical.
With a slight nod to indicate her approval of the gesture, she strode down the ramp to meet her crew.
One of the subcommanders, probably her prime, came up to greet her. “Welcome, Starcommander.” Guarded, wary thoughts accompanied his ritual bow: I think there’s no danger of this one being like all the others, “Zeine li Tenore, Prime Subcommander.” This was her counterpart then, the man who would be responsible for fulfilling her duties when she was offshift or—Hasha forbid—incapacitated. A warship was a world in miniature, and the Starcommander was its governor. Other subcommanders might limit themselves to one or two aspects of war, but she and li Tenore were responsible for everything, from the deployment of troops in battle to the thousand and one little details of shipboard life that kept humans occupied when they weren’t fighting. Dark, violent thoughts clouded his foremind, but his hostility was not directed at her. It was like a reflection of her own hatred, directed toward Braxi.
We share a purpose, she thought.
He took her down the line of officers and introduced each one. Subcommanders of Security, Armaments, Astrogation, Engineering . . . their thoughts were all the same. Dark people, violent in outlook, with dreams that tasted of death; they must have appalled her predecessors. Now she could understand why the other Starcommanders had clung to the rulebook. It promised control in a world they didn’t understand, on a ship peopled by aliens. The Azean mind was even-tempered, rational, congenial. These men and women, cast in a different mold, were warriors in the Braxin sense. One by, one they had found their way to the Conqueror, had discovered others who shared their priorities, who were ruled by similar hatreds. No Starcommander would be allowed to threaten that.
At the end of the line a man stood apart, civilian in dress but for a band of rank-markings fastened about his arm: Tau en Shir, civilian medic. Torzha had rescued him from the soon-to-be-dead, when he planned to consummate his misery by opting for legal suicide. He had watched his bonded mate killed in a Braxin raid, not quickly and not pleasantly; the memory—and the hatred—was more than he could bear. But Torzha had talked him out of it. This is my weapon, she told him, indicating Anzha. This woman will bring the enemy to its knees. He was her private physician, whose only duty was to learn the alien intricacies of her body and mind and keep them sound, that she might attain her maximum potential. Those eyes met hers, and the emotion that poured forth was like a blow across the face. Grief intermingled with hope, and a strange new sensation: loyalty. She savored that a moment before greeting him; it was something she had never experienced before, and she was not entirely comfortable with it. “My pleasure to serve you,” he told her quietly. And he meant it.
“Your orders, Starcommander?” The thoughts of her second-in-command reeked of challenge. Shall we sit here for days of pointless ceremony, as custom would demand? Is that your will?
“Let’s get underway,” she said brusquely. “We have a War to fight.” Approval rose from the minds surrounding her. “There’s time enough for ceremony on the way.”
They were hers—or they would be, soon enough.
She had come home at last.
Harkur: War is the fire that tempers men’s souls.
FOURTEEN
When the bulk of the fighting was done and the only vessels within sight were marked with the Holding’s identicodes, First Sword Sezal allowed himself a moment in which to scan the surrounding Void directly. From his brain, in which the special implants rested, his senses rode outward—first to the band of contacts which nestled snugly about his head, then to the computer and its myriad scanners, and lastly, magnificently, into the Void itself.
He saw no stars; he was moving too fast, had left the tardionic universe with its finite visual display behind him. Yet the Void was not empty. Photons crossed the dark expanse, and though their patterns could not be interpreted by the human eye, the computer noted their existence and translated them into fleeting sensory images. Thus it was that he saw light where light could not exist, and tasted with his other senses all that the Void contained, rendered in familiar sensations. Gases and dusts, the residue of a swordship’s passage . . . he tasted them, smelled them, reveled in their familiarity. Then he focused his attention on the composition of the residue and had his computer run an analysis. Yes, it was a trail—the trail he wanted, the one which he must follow to make his triumph complete.
He took a moment to transmit a victory message to the Sentira. Enemy offensive neutralized, he informed Commander Herek. Ten Azean swordships destroyed, three remaining. Pursuing. He brought the signal insync with the mothership’s course vector and sent it off to the nearest relay. Now he needed to be well on his way before a response could reach him. Because Herek would respond, he knew that, and would order him back to the safety of the talon. Therefore they needed to be out of sync with the Sentira’s contact network before Herek had time to transmit his orders.
One last glance at his pilots: impatient but disciplined, their attack formation steady, they knew the rules of the game as well as he did and were anxious to be underway. Sezal nodded approvingly as he called up his computer’s speculative matrix and had it run an array of possible courses for the fleeing Azeans. There, that one . . . he set up an intercept course and locked it into his ship’s computer. One, two, five pilots acknowledged locksync with him—they’d fly this one on automatic linkage—then the last of them and it was GO and they were accelerating—
—out of sync with the relay system; was that Herek’s signal coming in?
Sorry, Commander, but I received no orders.
FREE.
He breathed a sigh of relief as the slender swordships passed through the Sentira’s contact periphery, into the freedom of the superluminal night. Riding point on their formation, Sezal’s ship gobbled up the residue of the enemy’s passage, digested it for content. Speed, course, defense . . . the pattern of exfuel discharge became a wealth of information, and Sezal adjusted his flight vector accordingly.
It appeared that the Azeans were not expecting prolonged pursuit. That was good; it would make them easier to catch. To be sure, only a fool would commit himself to a chase like this when his prey was in full retreat. There was too much danger of running into the Azeans’ contact net, of coming suddenly within the range of a mothership’s fire. That was a nightmare which plagued the best of pilots, and a reality which all too often claimed the lives of the unwary; it was with good reason that the Azeans expected a safe ride home. But their very certainty made them vulnerable, and Sezal was not one to let such an opportunity slip by.
“Estimated time to scanner contact, three six oh and counting.” That was if he had figured the intercept properly, if the Azeans had kept to their course, if they did not reach their home ship first—don’t think of that!—a blessed lot of ifs, but Sezal was reasonably confident. The computer called time for him, relayed the countdown to his pilots. Acceleration, just so; a strain on his compensatory systems, but not too much to handle. Then slow, to the speed of the enemy ships (anticipated speed, he corrected) which should be in range now—
“Got them!” His pilots peeled out of formation with the competence born of endless practice; twelve against three should mean a quick clean-up, if luck didn’t turn against them. There is always that factor, he reminded himself, as he locked onto the nearest target. Three Azeans had come within range of his scanners—no more. Sezal breathed a sigh of relief. No reinforcements yet, and if they moved quickly enough, none would come. The faster they worked, then, the safer they would be.
His men were dividing into assault teams, one for each of the Azean fugitives. Sezal took his position among the nearest swordships, making it five against one. Good odds. They began to lay down a pattern of random fire; computer-synchronized, it defied analysis, hence could not be anticipated. Since a swordship was vulnerable in the moment it fired, such randomness assured their safety. The first Azean must outrun its opponents or die—and it could not do the former, their containment formation saw to that.
With grim satisfaction Sezal watched as the other swordships in his group fired upon their prey, and he added his own energy to the barrage. The enemy’s outer forcefield deflected what it could, began to absorb the rest . . . and exploded at last in a star of brilliance as its defense generator, overloaded, succumbed to the sheer force of the attack.
One down. No damages. Time elapsed . . . not good. Sezal tapped up his speculative matrix, assigned it to the problem of the enemy mothership. Where is it likely to be—what is our chance of contact? It answered with an array of probable courses, based on previous scout reports, fleshed out by mechanical reasoning, and a gross estimate of the odds of immediate interception.
Twelve percent.
Not good. Not good at all. Sezal considered turning back, decided against it. They hadn’t come this far to give it up now . . . but a two-digit risk factor was bad news. Quickly, he reviewed his pilots’ positions and was startled to find that the third group had lost control of its prey. Apparently the Azean’s point ship had also proven more dangerous than anticipated; two of Sezal’s swordships had been damaged and a third had withdrawn, its defense field disabled. But how—?
Then the warrior’s answer: it doesn’t matter. Anyone who dares an attack risks a moment’s vulnerability; that was part of the game of war, whose rules they all understood. Good strategy would help make you safe, good timing was invaluable, but there was always luck—and the third Azean seemed to be turning theirs against them.
Fourteen percent. He tried not to think about it. Across past the second team—their victim was weakening, would not last much longer—on to the third group and its elusive prey. The Azean seemed to be turning back. Was that possible? Yes, to help its remaining companion. Hopeless!
Or was it? Sezal tapped up the Azean’s course figures, frowned, tried again. This couldn’t be right. Physics was physics; there were simple limits to how fast a swordship could decelerate, how tight a turn it could manage . . . and the Azean was defying them all.
With a growing chill in the pit of his stomach Sezal sent a warning to his second team. Too late; the Azean fired, hit one of his men even as the swordship’s outer field dropped. Bless it! Clean shot across the fireports, disabling the pilot’s offense. Sezal ordered him out of the way; too many swordships in that small an area was asking for trouble with crossfire. Ten against two was still good enough to guarantee Braxin victory—wasn’t it?
