The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  “Yet you did not elect to mention that approach.” Kerr was probably thinking of her being forward enough to suggest breaking the hatch open, which might have left them a way out.

  “You ordered an immediate withdrawal, sir. Am I to understand I have the liberty to countermand your orders in combat?”

  The young colonel’s lips tightened beneath his moustache, and he scratched out a note he’d begun to write. “Well, Captain, I must say it’s been an . . . edifying exercise. Dismiss.”

  Damn straight. “Yessir.” Lewis tossed a crisp salute and left him to contemplate that edification.

  Chapter Three: The Commanders

  Z-Day minus 28

  IHS Marshall Nedelin, docked;

  Janin Station, Tau Verde, Vulpecula Region

  “My Amelia,

  “At breakfast this AM, it was pointed out to me that we had just passed our thousandth hour in port. A wearisome number, and I cannot but admit that for many of those hours I could have wished this waiting over. A long port stay is the death of discipline. The people require serious work, and yet I fear—”

  Admiral Jakob Adenauer, commanding Halith’s Kerberos Fleet, raised his stylus from the coded private entry of the diary he kept in the form of a serial letter to his wife—a document that in the normal course of events would never be read, most certainly not by the wife he held dear—and considered how far he wanted to follow these thoughts into the murky realm of potentially treasonous comment.

  Lifting his long lantern-jawed face, he automatically checked the large situation displays that alone ornamented the bulkheads of his day cabin, which served as his office, dining room, or alternate CIC as occasion demanded. An admiral’s stateroom was luxurious in the article of space, if little else, but this was of real consequence to a man as tall as Jakob Adenauer, one of the loftiest officers in the Halith Imperial Navy. To be sure, the luxury was sensibly diminished by the amount of equipment that cluttered the space, nor was there much that was personal about what comfort there was. Admirals did not form the deep attachments to the ships they served on that captains did—an admiral was in the position of an honored guest in another’s house, as it were—and most observed this distinction by keeping their quarters spare and relatively unmarked by any individual character (though by no means all: one admiral, of whom Adenauer strongly disapproved, habitually turned his quarters into a space-going bordello). Adenauer himself was not adverse to comfort, but he was no sybarite, and moreover his prime comforts were of the less material variety: his library, the regular dinners he held for his officers, and his diary.

  Currently, the cabin had assumed its peaceful, administrative character, with the tactical consoles and the big battle management computer against the starboard bulkhead in their stowed positions, and his highly professional eye scanned the screens with a mind mostly detached. Nothing required his immediate attention, so with a frown, he applied his stylus: “—these new plans are insufficiently tested. On charts, it all looks well enough, of course (these things always do), but I wish I could be more easy about them. Altogether too much depends upon the Bannermans, and they are a doubtful quality. Already they have missed one favorable conjunction, and I greatly fear their missing another. The Bannermans can be bold to the point of rashness (a dubious point in their favor, I might add) but they cannot seem to be made to understand the critical nature of timing in strategy. They are opportunists, first and foremost, always ready to rely on a providential tomorrow, where before this we might have commenced the business at great advantage. Coming after the setback at Miranda—”

  Here, he lifted his stylus again. What had Vansant been thinking, leaving his transports undefended? His mission was to support the invasion, not fight a fleet action. That, of course, was the heart of the matter. The CO of the Duke Albrecht Fleet had never before fought a major fleet action. His fleet held Kepler and had participated in the conquest of Deneb, but there was little glory to be had there. Adenauer, far down the list, had the battle honors he craved. Employing him that way had been asking for trouble. Deciding this dangerous digression did not merit recording, he erased his last incomplete sentence and continued.

  “And yet from the Bannermans I get nothing but affable delay and tolerably vague excuses.”

  Pausing again, he recalled the last few dispatches from his troublesome allies: stores not all in, system and weapons upgrades yet to be completed, units delayed, units that must be exchanged to cope with situations elsewhere, real or potential (or simply more immediately profitable, Adenauer thought unkindly); all to be rectified within days or perhaps a week, but almost certainly not much longer. This sort of thing was part and parcel of an admiral’s vexations—Adenauer had known them his whole career—and they did not explain his chief and most vexing concern. Twirling the stylus as he considered his words, he took the plunge.

  “But where I am truly ill at ease is on the question of how they will stand strain in a really serious action. This slash-and-grab business is well enough for commerce raiding, but how will they take the kind of pounding PrenTalien can deal out? I cannot but worry that the business could end badly if they are hard put to it. And to think”—here he paused again, but he was already in deep, so went on—“that before Miranda, we might have conducted this operation without the Bannermans, leaving them to distract and harass the League”—instead of me, he might have written, but did write: “which they excel at.”

  * * *

  The uncomfortable fact that lay behind Adenauer’s vexation was that Halith’s string of uninterrupted victories had put the Supreme Staff on the horns of a dilemma. Having achieved great things in what seemed a remarkably short span of time, they had found themselves unprepared for what came next. For the past few months, a large amount of hot air had been stirred about and a great flood of bytes had been expended in wrangling over various options, but when all was said and done, it really boiled down to just two choices. Predictably, the Supreme Staff had split over them.

  The first choice, favored by Grand Admiral Andros Osterman with vigorous support from Chief of Strategic Operations Admiral Bucharin and Chief of Ground Operations Marshal Halder, who together led what was known as the “Staff Faction,” was the Karelia option. Firmly in control of the Kepler Junction, and thus Deneb, and with the new forward base at Asylum becoming operational, these men had felt the time was ripe to strike at Karelia. Adding the republic’s conquest to their current achievements would accomplish the Dominion’s longstanding strategic objectives—their position would be essentially unassailable. There were limits, they cogently argued, to the amount of blood and treasure the League would pour into defending regions not their own.

  These arguments were well taken, but strike was not quite the right word for what they had in mind. Whittle might be more appropriate, as the strike actually contemplated was against Miranda. By controlling Miranda, the CEF base at Epona would be rendered untenable. The Imperial Navy could then threaten the lines of communication between Karelia and the League. Without League support, the former would eventually be unable to resist invasion and might well see it to be in its best interest to capitulate rather than undergo another long and bloody conflict. (Personally, Adenauer felt those who believed this were ingesting something illegal, likely of Maxor origin.)

  The glaring problem, of course, was with the words threaten and eventually, as the so-called “Fleet Faction” (who often set themselves in opposition to the Staff Faction) pointed out, again and again. Halith could not cut off all aid to Karelia from the League without taking Regulus, and—at this point certainly, and for the foreseeable future—that was out of the question. What they could do from Miranda was raid, and raiding would hinder, but not halt, the support Karelia needed to survive.

  Indeed, the Fleet Faction had brought this up well over a year ago and advanced a plan involving a surprise attack on Regulus, aimed at crippling the CEF Fifth Fleet there. Combined with the political turmoil their agents had been assiduously
stirring up, that would incapacitate the League long enough for an offensive to overrun Karelia. Presented with a fait accompli, a new and more pliant Speaker (as had been confidently—and correctly—predicted) would acquiesce without a fight.

  They lost that debate when Jerome Paul Augustus, the more powerful of the two ruling Proconsuls, vetoed the plan. To strike at Regulus was not just to strike at the heart of the League, he’d reminded them, but to strike directly at Sol, under whose authority Fifth Fleet was. Sol—and the Belt most especially—would never suffer such an attack without a maximum response, and all their investment in undermining Speaker Huron’s majority to force his retirement would have been lost. Nothing would have solidified his faltering grip on power more than a sneak attack on SOLCOM’s largest base.

  Instead, the Proconsul directed them to adopt the Rho Ceti plan, which offered the swift and easy conquest of a weak adversary with the prospect of seizing the vital Kepler junction, if circumstances appeared propitious. They did indeed so appear, and there followed an unprecedented string of victories. Ironically perhaps, those victories considerably strengthened the Fleet Faction’s hand in the debate over strategy. While the Fleet Faction used as its spokesman Admiral Vansant, its leader was in fact Admiral Christian Heydrich, the Chief of Halith Military Intelligence, and the prime architect of the Rho Ceti operation. Heydrich was also of an old and noble family: he held the title Lord Meremont, which gave him a seat on the Council of Ministers; and to this formidable combination, he now added the cachet of victory.

  Tall and good-looking in a severe and distinguished fashion, impeccably mannered, deeply incisive and utterly ruthless, he heaped gracious scorn on the ideas of those who dared oppose him. Careful not to directly indict his own immediate superior, Grand Marshal Van Diemens, Chief of the Supreme Staff, or the politically powerful Grand Admiral Osterman, he instead picked off their wingman, the Chief of Strategic Operations. Beginning with the obvious, he made the point that time was not on their side: the economy of Sol alone dwarfed the combined economies for the Halith Core Systems. The League would grow stronger, not weaker, as the war progressed: if the war was allowed to go on too long, its industrial might would make good its losses and the balance would inevitably swing back in their favor.

  Admiral Bucharin and Marshal Halder had anticipated all this, of course. They’d directed their staffs to craft unimpeachable rebuttals, especially on the question of what constituted too long, but they were unprepared when Heydrich blindsided them. Bucharin erred, he averred, in focusing on Karelia. The true strategic center of gravity was the Sultanate of Andaman and Nicobar. If the Porte (as the Sultan’s government was called) could be made to flip, it would deprive the League of a critical resource: the rich antimatter fields of the Antares Region, especially the Shaula Traps. Turning the Sultanate into an ally would present the League with a two-front war, without adequate fuel reserves to fight it.

  Better yet, Halith owned a bargaining chip that could be turned into a wedge: Crucis Sector. Crucis was rich, but not in resources, and it would take many years to see a net economic gain from it. Objectively, Deneb was worth much more to the Dominion at that moment. The Pleiades sought the recovery of Crucis above all else, and that made the sector an excellent point to start a negotiation from a position of strength. With the Sultanate on their side, they could offer the League the choice of a bloody protracted war, or a treaty that would recognize Halith’s other gains and new relationship with the Porte (he’d smiled as he said it) in exchange for Crucis.

  Not only was this likely to get strong support from the Pleiades (especially given their pacifist tendencies), but the Meridies might go along as well. Of all the League’s Homeworlds, the Meridies alone had significant fuel fields in their sphere. Indeed, loss of the resources the Sultanate controlled would fall most heavily on Sol, with whom the Meridies were often at odds. He foresaw great things eventuating if this wedge could be inserted in the League’s already turbulent political environment.

  It was all quite well-thought-out and masterfully delivered—except for the one essential. The Sultanate had not flipped and there were no firm signs it was about to. The Porte’s relationship with the League was a source of great profit, and everyone knew that the Sultanate derived its power from following a strategy of aggressive neutrality, playing one side off against the other. To abandon that policy risked reducing Andaman and Nicobar to separate vassal states.

  Having baited his trap, Heydrich sprung it. Their conquests to date, properly understood, were not aimed at the League, but at convincing the Sultan that the League had not the strength to defend him. True, he was not convinced of that yet, but he could see the League’s internal turmoil and the ineffectiveness of the current Speaker as well as anyone. If Hazen Gauthier had not induced a total paralysis of will into the Plenary Council, she’d come close enough. If they could lure a significant portion of the CEF into battle and crush it, the combination would make clear to the Porte the dire position they were in. The Sultanate and the League were not natural allies—they shared neither culture nor ideology. Handled well, the Porte could be made to see that a relationship (he used the word pointedly again) with the Dominion was a happier match.

  That was all well and good, Admiral Bucharin had retorted, his hackles raised, but the League was not foolish enough to accept such a battle right now. They would sit tight in their bastions while valuable time was lost—time that might be spent weakening both them and Karelia, without the risks attendant on Heydrich’s plan. Had he not considered what might happen if they lost his big battle?

  Here, Heydrich gave the admiral a polite nod and commented smoothly that he was sure, given the brilliance of their recent victories, that Bucharin and the worthy fleet commanders would not let any such thing happen. But he allowed the point and said the solution was to attack an objective that the League would have to defend, and to do so in a way that the CEF thought it might have a chance of succeeding. He had just the place. Bringing a map up on the table’s holographic display, he highlighted it: Wogan’s Reef. If they secured Wogan’s Reef, he explained unnecessarily, they could threaten the Pleiades on a new axis and also Canopus. It was not a threat that could be ignored, and they had a direct route via the Novaya Zemlya transit from their main base at Tau Verde. In addition, support could be provided by the Bannermans, who would be on the League’s flank at Wogan’s Reef.

  At this point (so Adenauer had been told), all eyes had turned to Admiral Joaquin Caneris, Lord OverHallin and commander of Halith’s elite Prince Vorland Fleet, who had yet to speak. The Proconsul asked his opinion. Caneris was the only person in the room who topped Heydrich on Halith’s social scale; indeed, he had taken precedence over the Proconsul before the latter’s elevation. His distinguished career had made him the most respected of the Imperial Navy’s active fleet commanders, and he did not much like Christian Heydrich, whose personal reputation was unsavory, even by the generous standards of the Halith aristocracy.

  He matched Heydrich in distinguished looks as well, for all that he was a short man, and if anything even more severe, without the admiral’s well-oiled charm. He made no attempt to disguise his age either, keeping his iron gray hair clipped short and eschewing the facial hair that was de rigueur for most senior naval officers, so the deep wrinkles around his mouth and eyes, set there by long habit, had nothing to compete with them.

  He was also, for all his unexpressed disapproval of Heydrich, a pragmatist, and neither hasty nor given to rash, ill-considered moves. He could well see merit and risk on both sides, and as ever, the devil was in the details. Stroking his smooth jaw, he held the room’s attention a moment longer and then stated he could express no opinion until both plans were more fully fleshed out. The verdict, delivered in his cool, slightly gravelly voice, took some of the wind out of Heydrich’s sails, as he’d known it would. That ended the meeting, but not the controversy or the bickering. Grand Marshal Van Diemens inclined towards the Karelian option, but h
e also had strong personal ties to the Heydrich family, who ranked well above him socially. Thus, he did little to quell the infighting among his staff.

  Jerome favored Heydrich’s strategy: he felt time pressing, politically as well as strategically, and earnestly wished to have a signal victory before his term of office was up. Having sown what he considered a grand crop, he did not relish the thought of it being harvested by his successor. But he respected the opinions of his commanders as well, especially Admiral Caneris. Heydrich might be quite powerful, he might be the man behind the Rho Ceti coup, and he’d done an excellent job exploiting (and enhancing) the discord in the League, but he was still a staff officer. Within the Halith military, the opinion of a line officer almost always outweighed that of a staff officer, especially an intelligence officer whose duties did not normally extend to formulating grand strategy.

  And so the matter went unresolved. Much of the opposition to Heydrich’s concept was political. Had Admiral Bucharin proposed it, it would likely have been endorsed much more freely. Halith military theory did embrace the concept of decisive battle, and the Navy fairly worshipped the offensive. Indeed, the Staff Faction’s proposal to wage what amounted to attritional warfare should have met with a great deal more resistance. Yet there was also a feeling that it was time to consolidate—that their run of good fortune might perhaps be wearing thin.

  For some weeks, the two sides exchanged shots through lower-level proxies on their respective staffs. When Admiral Bucharin, whose opinion as Chief of Strategic Operations was pivotal, asked for more details from Heydrich on his proposed operation, especially regarding the logistics, the admiral, interpreting this as an olive branch, dispatched a commander from his staff with a briefing. The supposed olive branch was anything but. Heydrich’s staff was not expert at logistics, Bucharin’s was, and the commander walked, smiling, straight into an ambush. Bucharin had, in fact, directed the Logistics Department of the Supreme Staff’s Operations Bureau to examine Heydrich’s nascent proposal from every possible angle. They roundly savaged the commander’s briefing, belittled his naiveté, impugned his intellect and sent him shell-shocked back to his boss.