Imperative - eARC

by Steve White

  Wethermere swallowed at the image that colloquialism raised, but said nothing.

  Kiiraathra had leaned forward sharply. “Admiral, while I understand your reasoning, at least allow me to make the case for ensuring that our recon elements are adequately protected. On several occasions, when surprised by the appearance of a Kaituni patrol, we were able to save the recon grou—”

  Yoshikuni held up a palm topped by long, graceful fingers. “Least Fang, your advice and loyalty to your comrades is duly noted and appreciated. But this change is not open to discussion. The risk to the recon element is made greater by the possible discovery of any warships shadowing it, and besides, I need those warships back with us.”

  Wethermere cleared this throat. “Admiral, a point of order, if I may?”

  Yoshikuni’s green eyes flicked down the table at him. “I’m listening, Commodore. But don’t try my patience: this matter is settled.”

  “My point of order does not pertain to this matter.”

  “Very well. Proceed.”

  “Admiral, if, as you point out, Least Fang Kiiraathra’ostakjo is the highest remaining Orion officer currently known, and since his flotilla of almost a dozen ships has been folded into your fleet, is it not essential that he be promoted—at least for the duration of the conflict, or until a more senior Orion officer is located?”

  Surprised looks ricocheted from face to face around the conference table. Yoshikuni leaned back. “You are referring to the regulation that holds that the minimum rank for any flag officer holding command over a species-separate flotilla in a larger fleet is that of admiral?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that and a slightly more obscure regulation stipulating the minimal senior command rank for the overall commander of any PSU member state, even in the event that said member state’s organized formations are defeated and the polity presently disrupted. Again, that rank is admiral, or small fang of the Khan.”

  Kiiraathra’ostakjo looked grateful but shook his head. “The commodore forgets a detail of Orion culture. What in human formations is merely a rank, is, among Orions, a more personal liege-vassal relationship, as well. I cannot be promoted to Small Fang, for there is no liege to whom I may swear my allegiance, anymore.”

  Wethermere wasn’t done. “Understood, but you are also part of the armed forces of the PSU. You can receive sufficient rank through that affiliation, although you could not be titled small fang.”

  Yoshikuni looked both intrigued and bemused. “You could have been a JAG, Commodore, but there’s still a hole in your plan. I may be a fleet admiral, but I’m not authorized to promote individuals to just one grade under my own. And besides, I’m a member of the Rim Federation. We are affiliated with, but not in the direct TOO of, the PSU naval formations.”

  “With the admiral’s pardon, did you note the source of the authorization you agreed to as sufficient for entering Khanate space—since, not being members of the PSU, a Rim Federation fleet requires explicit travel and access permission from a PSU representative of sufficient standing?”

  Yoshikuni frowned, then her eyebrows raised. “Why, you—!”

  “Admiral, no personal invective, please. As the only individual of sufficient rank present in my flotilla—or your fleet—who is a member of the PSU, and as a representative of the Earth Federation polity component of the PSU holding a clearance and authorization level of One Bravo in diplomatic and intelligence operations, I extended authorization as a proxy for the standing PSU government.”

  Yoshikuni sputtered. “That does not confer authority sufficient to—!”

  “Actually,” mused Ankaht, “it does. Commodore Wethermere has, on several occasions, been compelled to make snap decisions on state-level intelligence and counterintelligence matters without waiting for confirmation or consultation with the PSU government on Earth. He asked me to assess his interpretation of those confidential prerogatives as they applied—or not—to this matter. Speaking for the Arduan Council of Twenty, I must say that I find absolutely no flaw in his interpretations or actions. They are consistent with both his written mandate and conditional authority as it has been exercised to date.”

  Yoshikuni blinked and then smiled crookedly. “Well, hell: I can always use another good admiral—Admiral Kiiraathra’ostakjo. Congratulations on the strangest promotion I’ve ever heard of. Well, perhaps that’s the second strangest,” she finished with a knowing glance at both the Orion and Wethermere. “Now it’s time to head home and get to work, all of you. We’re going to be laid up here, sorting ourselves out for a few days at least. That means we’ve got patrol rosters to mount, pickets to set, logistics to coordinate and old ships to start bringing up to scratch. Except you, Commodore”—and Wethermere found himself once again under the scrutiny of those two green eyes—“you are going to walk me through all the dubious legal details of this promotion. In detail. Over a working dinner.”

  Kiiraathra was exiting the room as the admiral completed issuing instructions to an orderly for dinner to be brought in thirty minutes. Where she and the commodore would be working together. Evidently alone. Hearing that, the Orion’s right ear flicked upward, interest piqued, rakishly provocative—and then tucked down again. The door closed behind him.

  Wethermere, once again returning the frank and unwavering stare of Admiral Miharu Yoshikuni, reflected that if he’d been an Orion, his ears might have flicked just the same way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The system still referred to as Home Hive Two was an unusual system indeed: a binary consisting of two type F main sequence stars of very similar mass orbiting each other in a not-very-eccentric ellipse at a mean separation of two hundred and fifty light-minutes. Still more remarkable was the fact that the twin suns, older than average for stars of their mass, had a total of five life-bearing planets, three orbiting Component A and two orbiting Component B.

  Or, strictly speaking, they had been life-bearing planets.

  Ever since the apocalyptic battles of 2369, this system had been the graveyard of uncounted scores of billions of Bugs. And it was haunted by the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of humans, Orions, Ophiuchi and Gorm who had died to cleanse the universe of the all-consuming Arachnid abomination.

  Those ghosts, thought Cyrus Waldeck, were about to have company.

  The slow pace of the main Kaituni armada up the warp chain from Alowan, hampered by the sheer number of ships that had to be processed through one warp-point bottleneck after another, had allowed him to bring Second Fleet from Pesthouse through Home Hive One and the planetless red giant system of Orpheus-1 and enter this system unopposed. The Kaituni, still in the process of filtering in through the warp point connecting with Bug 06, had of course sent clouds of scout ships speeding through the system toward the Orpheus-1 warp point through which their enemies must come. There had been much skirmishing between those scouts and his own light units, but there had been no prepared warp point defenses to cope with. Waldeck was glad of that. An assault through a warp point against a strong, prepared enemy on the other side was like…well, Ian Trevayne had once compared it to the Somme, leaving most of his listeners none the wiser.

  The thought of Trevayne brought a frown to Waldeck’s face. He would have liked to have had the Terran Republic/Rim Federation fleet Trevayne had brought back from Tangri space with him, not to mention certain tardy PSU and Ophiuchi contingents that had attached themselves to him, having arrived too late to join Second Fleet before its departure from Pesthouse. That, in turn, brought his mind back to the debate among his subordinates that had still not died down.

  He turned back to the holo-pit around which they were all gathered. It displayed the system of Home Hive Two A, with the local sun at the center. Component B was for the moment unimportant, for all three of the system’s warp points were here, around A. The Orpheus-2 warp point through which they had entered was at about eleven o’clock,

  to use the imaginary clock-face conventionally superimposed on the display, at a distance fr
om Component A of twenty-four light-minutes, embedded in an asteroid belt (which had necessitated a degree of caution on emergence). The other two warp points, connecting with Bug 06 and Bug 08 respectively, were both at seven o’clock at about twenty light-minutes, only one light-minute apart—yet another peculiarity of this system. So, although they had cautiously advanced some five light-minutes since the entirety of Second Fleet had completed transit, they were still almost thirty light-minutes from the myriad of monitor-sized-and-smaller ships that made up the Kaituni main body, and positioned so that the gravity well of Component A shouldn’t be a factor in closing that distance.

  Here and there, crawling about the display, were the icons of the wide-ranging scouts he had sent to probe the system for any forces the Kaituni might have somehow managed to conceal prior to his arrival. Those scouts went in squadrons, with light carriers to provide fighter cover, for there were still running battles with the enemy’s similar light units. But he had managed to get a recon probe through the Bug 08 warp point, just in case. That binary system, with its lifeless array of gas and ice planets, had proven empty. (Not that it would have made much difference if it hadn’t, given the layout of this system’s warp points.) Nor were any crouching threats found to be lurking among the ghosts of Home Hive Two.

  Resolution hardened in Waldeck at the thought. “Well, then, are we all agreed?” he rasped.

  Most of his task force commanders’ faces registered agreement, but Chandra Konievitsky spoke up for the faction of which she was the leader. “Admiral, I still think we should consider waiting for Admiral Trevayne to link up with us here. Judging from our latest communiqués, he shouldn’t be much longer.”

  “We’ve been over all this before, Chandra,” said Waldeck—though not harshly, for he respected her for having the courage of her convictions. “In the first place, while the Kaituni fleet now in this system is certainly an extremely large one, there are indications that it isn’t all here. In fact, what we’re looking at may be simply a very heavy vanguard. If that’s the case, we have an opportunity to defeat them in detail. And then, maybe, after defeating them, go on through their warp point of ingress to Bug 06 and present their oncoming forces with a defended warp point to fight their way through.”

  “Yes!” said Least Fang Tirnyareeo’zhelak, emphatically enough to make his whiskers quiver. “Let us strike now! If their forces are divided, they will not remain so. We may not have this chance again.”

  “And secondly,” Waldeck continued before Konievitsky could try to answer Tirnyareeo, “while Admiral Trevayne has quite a large fleet—especially now, with the additional PSU and Ophiuchi elements he’s picked up along the way—the fact remains that he has relatively few devastators and superdevastators. He hasn’t really needed many of them against the light, scattered raiding forces of the Tangri. Sort of like swatting flies with a pile driver. Not to mention their deployability problems—all those undredged warp points in Tangri space. In fact, they’ve been mostly for intimidation value. I grant you, he’s got more carriers and fighters than we have—including the majority of the Ophiuchi—and I wouldn’t mind having those. But he couldn’t greatly add to our total of really heavy metal.”

  Not even Konievitsky demurred on this point. They all knew that even the near-legendary armadas that had battled the Bugs here in this very system would have stood no chance whatsoever against the almost unimaginable—even in this century—destructive power quiveringly leashed inside the Brobdingnagian hulls of Second Fleet’s array of devastators and superdevastators. The Kaituni fleet might outnumber them severely in hulls, but it certainly did not outweigh them in total tonnage or exceed them in firepower. Quite the contrary.

  “In any event,” Waldeck finished firmly, “my decision to implement the plan is final. We will proceed on course and attack on schedule.” He manipulated controls, and in the tank the system display was replaced by a three-dimensional array of multitudinous lights, colored to represent various ship types.

  “You’re all familiar with our formation,” Waldeck continued. They were. At its core were the massed devastators and superdevastators, with a fringe of supermonitors—the only smaller class of ship that mounted gee-beams and salvo-capable heavy bombardment missile batteries. Behind that inconceivable phalanx were the bulk of second fleet’s carriers—a not inconsiderable total even without Trevayne. Streaming back from its edges were successively lighter capital ships—or at least the monitors and superdreadnoughts and battleships that had once been classed as capital ships. Ranging far afield were the swift cruisers that would have vanished like moths in a flame at the touch of the firepower put out by today’s first-line ships. “You also know this formation’s rationale. But to recapitulate, the carriers will launch before we get close to the Kaituni, providing a fighter cover for the battleline, which will push ahead toward their warp point of ingress while out lighter stuff sweeps ahead in an enveloping movement. Are there any questions?”

  There were none. Nor were there any worried looks, even from Konievitsky. That display reminded them all of the central fact: nothing that the Kaituni had could come within range of that prodigious, unprecedented battleline and live. Waldeck was satisfied at what he saw in their faces.

  Only, he thought wryly, I hope none of you think my planning was influenced by the fact that if Ian Trevayne was here I’d have to turn overall command over to him—that I don’t want to share the pleasure of giving the orders that send our battleline smashing into these Kaituni vermin like the hammer of God.

  And, came the unbidden and unwelcome thought, I also hope it isn’t true.

  *

  Destoshaz’at Zum’ref turned away, disgusted, from the limp, quivering captive between the two guards, and gave his attention back to the display screen that showed the course of the enemy fleet: a flat hyperbola across the Home Hive Two system, coming closer and closer to what must seem to them to be a highly irrational formation: a cloud of ships giving no particular evidence of having been distributed to counter that which was approaching them…except that the monitors were positioned along the course of the oncoming battleline. It must, he thought, seem to the humans an exercise in futile desperation, for they didn’t know that a monitor was the smallest ship that could mount the weapon to which they were about to be introduced. Anticipation quivered within him like a living being long held in check.

  “All right, Inzrep’fel,” he said over his shoulder to his Intendant as an afterthought. “Take the human away and dispose of him.”

  They had been fortunate to get this human zhettek. In the course of their operations in Orion space, Zum’ref had commanded them to try to capture an officer with experience aboard superdevastators, for although he already possessed the relevant statistics he had wanted certain performance parameters and navigational characteristics clarified. Unfortunately, such officers were relatively rare among the Orions, with their bias toward smaller ships. However, the close association of the two principal races of the pretentiously named Pan-Sentient Union meant that there were a certain number of human personnel on detached duty among them. So they had bagged this—what was his name, now?—Commander James Monetti. Squeezing the desired information out of him had been easy, for all his attempted heroics: a certain drug rendered him incapable of withholding it. The accompanying physical torture had been, strictly speaking, unnecessary, but it had expedited the process by preventing him from concentrating on mental resistance. Zum’ref had thought him to be wrung dry, but then had had certain afterthoughts. So he’d ordered the nauseating griarfeksh to be brought here to the control center to answer a few more questions. But now he was done with him and dismissed him from his mind.

  Then he heard a commotion behind him. Turning, he saw Monetti, with a sudden surge of what must be hysterical strength, twist momentarily out of the guards’ grip. He recalled that the drug wore off quickly…and also that he himself was still wearing the vocoder he had used for the questioning.

  For a
moment, Monetti stood in the bloodstained black-and-silver tatters of his uniform, glaring with eyes that were like burning pits of hatred in his gaunt, battered face. Then the guards grasped him and forced him to the deck. But the human’s eyes were still on Zum’ref and he actually managed to smile. “You put yourself at a disadvantage when you let a man know you’re going to kill him,” he rasped. “He’s got nothing much to lose.”

  “No—although a zhettek like yourself has far more to lose than one of the children of Illudor,” said Zum’ref in a tone whose mildness the Intendant and the nearby staffers knew to be deceptive.

  “So,” Monetti went on, eyes wild, “I’m going to tell you that all the information you’ve gotten from me isn’t going to do you a damned bit of good! You see, from all the questions you’ve been asking me about superdevastators, it’s obvious that you’re going to be engaging them shortly—probably a lot of them, because surely the PSU has been able to identify you as the main threat and concentrate against you. And once you come into gee-beam range of them, you’re dead, you insane, genocidal piece of filth! You have no conception of what they can do. But you’re going to find out.” Monetti paused for breath. “I just wish I was going to live long enough to see you realize what a mistake you’ve made—what a disaster you’ve brought down upon yourself!”