Winterhome

by Blaze Ward

  And Judit was something like a Ritter right now, empowered to speak for the Senate and the Premier back home. In legally-binding ways.

  So Vo always made sure to ask politely when dealing with Iskra. Sure, they went back more than a decade, having served together on the old Strike Carrier Auberon, even before Jessica, but that just meant she would take his calls when he wanted something.

  Not that he could make her do anything, even when he had everybody else on his side.

  He glanced over at her now, seated two down from him in the room that Torsten Wald usually used when he had a major group of people to talk to.

  Like today.

  The Emperor would not be joining them for this meeting. At least he hoped. In the last two weeks, he had kept a very polite distance from the woman.

  She had asked a question. He hadn’t been able to answer.

  Vo wasn’t sure he would have an answer for her, anytime soon, if ever.

  They had gone beyond Emperor and General. Beyond comrades on Star Controller Auberon, or even back on Kali-ma.

  Someplace Vo wasn’t sure he was prepared to go. Even for a beautiful woman who asked.

  He wasn’t sure what that said about where his head was.

  Primus Pilus Alan Katche sat next to Vo on the other side today, leaving an empty chair between Vo and Iskra. Nobody wanted to touch that chair, probably afraid it was poisonous, or maybe they’d get caught in some bizarre crossfire.

  None of these people knew Iskra Vlahovic. If she wanted to do you in, it would be in the middle of her flight deck, probably with a wrench, rather than verbally in a meeting.

  Wald was at the high end of the table. Former Premier Chavarría was across from Alan, and newly-promoted Grand Marshal Arald Rohm sat across from Vo. A few others were scattered around, some at the conference table, some in chairs along the outer wall, behind everybody where they could run errands or look things up, as somebody needed, but they were functionally nobodies, here for whatever technical expertise Wald might call on.

  They were just waiting on the last two players, come down from orbit and about to join them: the Grand Admiral and his lethal right fist Tom Provst.

  This, then, was the group that would really decide Vo’s future, not that he was going to let them derail things. Heads would have to roll first. But they deserved a chance to have an opinion, however wrong it might be.

  The door opened to one of Vo’s troopers in field armor with his face shield down, checking everything, and then allowing the two sailors into the room, pulling it shut afterwards with a hard thump.

  With the Emperor not attending, Vo’s folks were in charge of security around here. At least until he managed to get everyone aboard a transport and headed towards the frontier. Then it wouldn’t be his problem, anymore. Rohm or someone would have the headaches.

  Vo found it amusing that zu Wachturm, in black, sat opposite Wald, at the long end of the battered, old conference table, while Tom Provst, in white, dropped in between he and Iskra.

  But Provst was pretty much immune to anything.

  Chief Deputy Torsten Wald rose and scanned the table, nodding to Vo as he took the temperature of the room.

  “Everything has been signed and made official,” Wald announced. “Her Majesty’s Government will lease the two RAN Assault Carriers Archangel and Akatsuki, for a period of one year, with an exercisable option for a second year, under the authority of Grand Admiral zu Wachturm, Admiral Provst, or General zu Arlo. Fleet Centurion Vlahovic will delay her departure for a time, so that the 189th Legion can be organized and packed for transport, along with supplies. After that time, the first stop for the Task Force is Osynth B’Udan, to deploy the 189th for training, while a forward strike is organized. Have I missed anything?”

  “Do we know who the first target is?” Grand Marshal Rohm asked, eyeing Vo specifically, before turning his gaze to include the two admirals.

  “I have a list,” Vo offered. “Depending on what naval forces accompany the RAN squadron, we have options, but Samara is the only target on this side of M’Hanii definitely off limits, just as Ninagirsu on the other.”

  “How soon will you need resupply?” Rohm pressed. “Or more troops?”

  “Ours will be a smash and grab, Grand Marshal,” Vo repeated, mostly for the others who hadn’t been in on their private meetings. “Having more Assault Carriers first will be a long-term necessity to actually holding a planet.”

  He turned his gaze on zu Wachturm.

  Emmerich fixed him with a frosty smile, but that was all for show, as well. For the foreigners, which made Vo laugh internally, to think of Iskra and the former Senator as aliens, while he was just about as Imperial as it got these days.

  At least until he figured out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

  “We have a discussion open with Yan Bedrov and a few others, to consider new designs,” Emmerich said, looking august and unflappable. “But we have also opened discussions with Aquitaine about leasing more such vessels in the short term. The completed design of the Army will impact significantly on our final decision.”

  Meaning: are you going to build more strike legions, or rely on the old structures, like Seventh Guards Army?

  All the world’s a stage, as Moirrey used to love to say. And we are all players.

  Rohm nodded, almost theatrically. Vo fought to keep a straight face.

  “Who else is coming?” Iskra asked bluntly, turning her whole head, like an owl, to face Tom Provst, seated beside her.

  The man’s color had improved in the last several months. His attitude had gone from something approximating despair to the sorts of grim, barely-chained violence Vo had seen in the likes of Alber’ d’Maine or Tomas Kigali. He had moved on from being the man Emmerich trusted to protect St. Legier and become the Grand Admiral’s great sword.

  “IFV Valiant,” Provst replied to her simply. “Plus Indianapolis and two corvettes, today. The rest of the Task Group will come later, as soon as they finish Acceptance trials and shakedowns. Probably by late fall.”

  Rather than answer, Iskra turned the other way to stare at the Grand Admiral.

  “Do I need that many escorts?” she asked.

  Score one for Iskra. Vo was hard pressed to find a better way to announce to the men in this room that she would be in charge of her force, subject only to Jessica. And not taking any shit.

  “You do not,” zu Wachturm replied diplomatically. “Doing it this way lets me reinforce Osynth B’Udan in the short term, and then adds a second strike force to Jessica’s capabilities by winter, assuming she integrates RAN Arad and your three corvettes into her force, rather than sending you raiding. A Fleet Strike carrier is yet another new design, and I don’t know if it makes more sense to combine with II Augusta and the Fast Strike Bombers. That’s Jessica’s call, especially as she will then be the Fleet Centurion. Tom Provst will be promoted to Red, but both you and he will be under her authority. Does that help?”

  Iskra turned back to Provst, as if challenging him to say anything.

  Vo wasn’t sure which of them might be more stubborn, so he called it a draw. Apparently, Tom agreed, or had orders from Emmerich to be polite. He nodded silently.

  She turned her harsh glare his way.

  “Load time?” she asked, like she was sending notes across a scrolling marquee.

  “Four to five weeks,” Vo replied. “There will be a subsequent ground force to transport, but they are only now working out equipment and recruiting, and I don’t expect that force to join me until Provst’s group comes in the fall.”

  “Who?” Iskra asked, honest curiosity breaking through for the first time.

  “Moirrey’s Avenging Angels,” Vo smiled. “Bunch of kids in combat repulsor suits that will eventually form an additional part of my Fourth Scouting Ala, but I want to move now, and not in a year when I have everything integrated. Every day Buran has before I come for him, he gets stronger and more entrenched.”

&n
bsp; “In spite of Jessica?” Judit Chavarría joined the conversation. “I thought her purpose was to weaken the beast.”

  “Her purpose is to destroy Buran’s economy,” Alan Katche spoke up, letting everyone know he had, in fact, done his homework. “Ours is to destroy their Peace of Mind. The only damage on the ground so far has been psychological. We’re going to change that.”

  Vo turned and nodded. Alan was truly his right hand. Primus Pilus. First Spear because he was closest to the enemy. Vo had picked him for that reason. Competent and aggressive, but also mean when he needed to be.

  “With all that in mind, I have a few others topics for this group to move onto,” Torsten Wald cleared his throat diplomatically. He pulled a stack of folders from where he had apparently stashed them on the floor earlier, and began to hand them out.

  Vo doubted that anything of substance remained, since the key elements of this year’s war had been touched. The rest was just window dressing.

  He had his approvals from Casey to go off to war in her name.

  Now he just had to figure out if he wanted to come back to her afterwards.

  Overture: Jessica

  Date of the Republic June 8, 402 IFV Vanguard, Forward Base Delta

  Jessica felt a growl, deep in her belly, as she watched the projection from her small flag bridge. Outside, all the lights on the exterior of Whughy’s Forward Base Delta came live. That thing was technically a warship, in that it was a compact starbase with engines and JumpSails, however small and slow they were.

  When they had lost CS-405, sometime after the raid on Severnaya Zemlya, Jessica had needed to pack everything up and flee, on the presumption that the ship might have been captured, and the old base location compromised. It had been easier to break the base halfway down, load it onto a cargo tug, and shift it, rather than letting it creep slowly along on its own power.

  Now they were mirrored from the old location, as far spinward from Ninagirsu, upstream relative, as they had previously been downstream. Still low, three hundred light-years below the mathematical plane of the galaxy, because the network of navigation satellites, the Pochtovyi Trakt, or Buran’s Postal Road, tended to be about two hundred light-years above that plane.

  To Jessica, it smacked badly of two-dimensional thinking, but Buran hadn’t been a warship before he became a god. Only a factory controller. The kind that probably learned his tactics by studying table-top-style war simulations from history.

  Jessica and her kind had learned to fight in space. While Buran’s commanders were just as good, they were still limited by the requirements of an inflexible god.

  But there was no way that Phil Kosnett or anyone else would find them now. That had hurt. Phil had been there from the beginning of this mission, a scholarly commander with an excellent crew. To get home now would require that he make it all the way to Osynth B’Udan, if he had escaped.

  So, it rankled as she watched the base announce to the squadron that they were back in business, for the first time in almost two months. She had been in battles where other vessels had been lost. Jessica had been at war for most of her adult life, more than twenty-four years now. She had even been aboard ships that suffered crippling damage, such as the time she rammed Brightoak into an Imperial fighter craft to keep it away from the carrier at Third Iger, or the damage to both Auberons at Ballard and Trusski.

  She had never had a ship just vanish into Jump and never come out on the far side.

  Jessica said a silent prayer to Vishnu that Kosnett had just suffered a simple breakdown that caused him to have to limp home, knowing that he wouldn’t find them at the old location. Standing Order Forty-Eight required that Kosnett and his First Officer, Heather Lau, could not allow themselves to be captured by Buran’s forces.

  At whatever price they had to pay.

  She had lost two months, but that had been built into her plans. RAN Bulldog, the so-called Junkyard Chihuahua, had been able to repair most of the damage the squadron had suffered blowing the shit out of Severnaya Zemlya. Messages had been sent to the Grand Admiral with RAN Duncan.

  From here, they would need another month or perhaps six weeks to finalize some modifications and upgrades, and then she could start raiding again, hopefully with some added firepower as the Grand Admiral was able to free up some of his own ships. Tom Provst would have taken command on board IFV Valiant, Vanguard’s younger sister.

  More ships were rolling out of yards every day, coming on-line and taking on crews as older vessels were mothballed. It would take time, but her whole purpose was to savage Buran’s interior and force the monster’s own fleets to have to reinforce more and more planetary systems, and do so with enough force to keep her from jumping in and annihilating single warships, however deep in the gravity well they thought they could hide from her.

  A chime on her screen and Denis Jež’s face appeared.

  “I would say you are cordially invited,” he began. “But we’re just going to get together aboard the station and get a little drunk. You should join us.”

  She understood why. And why they had waited. It was official now, in ways that hadn’t gotten personal up until now. She had lost one of hers, but they had all lost friends. Time to have a good drink, and then tomorrow, plan how they were going to get even with that bastard.

  Overture: Pops

  In the Ninth Year of Jessica Keller, Queen of the Pirates: March the Ninth at Petron

  He had never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so Iorwerth Nakamura didn’t raise a fuss when the woman announced that she was going to travel with him. It would be a long trip, possibly three years before he returned to Petron, and it would be nice to have someone to talk to and maybe fool around with occasionally.

  She looked over at him with a questioning smile as the shuttle entered the landing bay with a small lurch. The interior of the little ship was compact and industrial gray, but the lines were sleek and smooth. He had designed the original for Jessica, and then licensed the design to Galen to build himself a copy.

  It wasn’t a Royal Transport Yacht, like Baxter. Galen had wanted to build the other one, the Royal Combat Yacht Zorillo. And since that one was named for a skunk, he or course had to call this one Badger. Galen could be a dork.

  “Lev for your thoughts?” Summer asked.

  “Wondering how crazy I am, to go after one last job,” he replied with a wry smile. “I could probably just retire and be done with all this.”

  “You’d get bored in less than a week, Pops,” she laughed. “I know your kind. Always have to be doing something. Retirement would kill you in six months.”

  “You think so?” he fired back.

  Just for the hell of it, he reached out a hand and she took it. It wasn’t love, what they had. More of a comfortable place they could both just be, and be together. Pops knew he was too old for the woman, but she had sought him out, apparently traveling from well interior, possibly somewhere up in Aquitaine, although she had been a little vague and he hadn’t inquired too closely. Didn’t want to know about her yesterdays.

  She looked a very active forty, acted twenty, and occasionally sounded as though she was two hundred years old. Tall blond hardbody with slightly-graying hair and bright blue eyes. What she wanted with a guy like him still left Pops occasionally confused.

  “Yes,” she laughed throatily. “And you could never let Bedrov show you up, either.”

  That brought a smile to his face. And a shrug. Nope, never let that kid outdo him, even if he knew Jessica would appoint Yan in his spot, but not until he finally did retire.

  The Queen was like that, matching loyalty for loyalty.

  Pops smiled. His only daughter had gone off to war with Jessica back in the days of Auberon, although that vessel had been broken in the war with Buran, and his queen was riding in one of Bedrov’s crazier designs now, a Heavy Dreadnaught named Vanguard. Cho would probably come home soon.

  The shuttle’s deck magnets engaged and the ship shut down, ha
lting conversation for a bit as he unbuckled and stood partway. The ceiling was too low in here, but he had designed it that way originally. Most of the time, anyone back here would be in one of the four jumpseats. Forward, two pilots had a small cockpit. Aft, Jessica’s version had a small stateroom, while Badger had a small cargo bay for priority stuff.

  They weren’t hauling much cargo on Badger this flight. Well, none beyond the humans and all the accumulated knowledge of several lifetimes at war.

  Fast as he was though, Summer was still to the hatch first, undogging it and dropping the boarding steps. But she was also up with the sun and running twenty kilometers every morning.

  Pops preferred to at least sleep until the sun was visible, generally, before wandering into the kitchen for his coffee, and then settling into his design studio to commit naval architecture and other silliness.

  Like this ship, as he followed Summer out, ogling her hard bottom as she stepped down onto the deck, laughing. Sixty-four-year-old men were not objects of lust to forty-year-old women, so he had no idea why she was here, but he appreciated her, even if she encouraged him to do most of the talking. At least she was older than his daughter, Cho Ayaka. RAN callsign Furious.

  Galen Estevan met them as they emerged from the interior airlock. Summer got her hand shaken politely. Pops got a hug. He had known the kid pretty much Galen’s whole life, having been a competitor, rival, and then friend of Uly Larionov for decades, the two weird kids among all the other pirate captains. Pops was tall and lean, rather than fast or muscled. Uly was shorter than most of the women in Corynthe, at least physically.

  Both of them had carved their own grand destiny into the pirate kingdom.

  “Welcome aboard, Uncle,” Galen smiled. “You ready for an adventure?”