“If this were just us and the Kanzi, you’d be right,” Harriet Tanaka agreed. “But you’re forgetting the same thing they are.”
“Captain?”
“This is Dan!Annette Bond’s system,” she said flatly. “I know the woman, Sier—and I read the classified assessment of just what she turned Tornado into.
“I don’t need to kill this kusottare. I just need to keep him distracted.”
#
“Second hyper portal,” a sensor tech grimly announced as Annette and Villeneuve watched the Kanzi attack cruiser turn back and open fire.
“Looks like our blue friend was expecting them,” Annette noted. “Weren’t we supposed to get an Imperial visitor later today?”
“We were,” Villeneuve confirmed. “A courier with data from Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, probably a warship.”
She studied the distances and sighed internally. She wanted to grab a shuttle and take command of Tornado again herself. No one else knew the modified cruiser nearly as well as she did at this point.
The whole battle was taking place less than two light-minutes from Earth orbit—which meant it was less than four minutes’ flight for the cruiser if she left now.
“Get me Captain Kurzman,” she ordered.
The crew was still learning their new tech and gear, so it took them all of five seconds to open a channel to Tornado’s bridge.
“Pat,” Annette greeted the man who now commanded her ship. “You see our Kanzi and Imperial friends out there.”
“I do. We’re almost closed up at battle stations, but we are under-crewed now,” he warned. “We got a class on our Imperial friend yet?”
Annette checked—in time to watch the Kanzi’s first salvo slam home, knocking the million-ton warship back on her heels before she even finished emerging into n-space.
“Warbook calls it a standard cruiser,” she told him. “She can’t take that attack cruiser on her own…but Tornado could.”
“Your orders, Duchess?” he asked, carefully.
They both knew the unspoken question was “Do we let the Imperial ship die before we intervene?” Annette might have sworn her allegiance to the Imperium, but even the people loyal to her hated the fact that Earth was now subservient.
“Move out ASAP,” she ordered. “If the cruiser’s captain is smart, she’ll play for time until you get there. I don’t want that Kanzi ship reporting back on Earth’s defenses, and I’d rather not watch an Imperial ship die to stop her.
“Am I clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kurzman confirmed.
The channel cut and Annette concealed another sigh, clasping her hands behind her back as she watched the tactical display. She’d never sent someone else into battle for her before, and she was realizing she did not like it.
“Admiral, Your Grace, we have an ID on the Imperial ship,” another of the techs said urgently.
“And?” Annette asked, unsure why it would matter which A!Tol or other alien she’d ordered saved.
“It’s Hunter’s Horn,” the tech explained. “Captain Harriet Tanaka of Earth commanding.”
“Ah.”
It didn’t change her orders, though Annette was honest enough to admit that if she had given in to the temptation she knew Kurzman was feeling, the knowledge that there was a human out there would have made a difference.
In fact…
“Make sure Captain Kurzman gets that information,” she ordered. “He knows Tanaka; it’ll help him guess which way she’ll jump.”
Villeneuve’s approving grunt next to her suggested the Admiral was thinking the same thing she was. It was true that knowing the Captain of the ship he was charging to the rescue of might help Kurzman make the right call.
It was also true that it would make him less likely to drag his feet along the way.
#
“Pull us around him,” Harriet ordered, watching the Kanzi ship with a sharp eye. “I want us between him and the closest point he can enter hyperspace.”
They didn’t have a lot of space to play with, though the Kanzi cruiser had allowed herself into a zone she couldn’t open a portal from to set up her attack. Hunter’s Horn couldn’t truly stop the enemy ship from running—but she could force the Kanzi ship into beam range.
A!Tol proton beams were better. Not much, but enough that Harriet was pretty sure the attack cruiser wouldn’t survive to break past her. Horn probably wouldn’t survive stopping the other ship, but that was sometimes the price they paid.
Part of her mind wondered if she’d have been willing to make that sacrifice for any other world. She thought so. The fact that her entirely nonhuman bridge crew clearly understood exactly what she was doing and was willing to go along with it was heart-warming, too.
“Shields are badly depleted,” Sier reported. “We’re knocking down five percent of her missiles with just the proton beams.” The Yin shook his head, a gesture his species and Harriet’s shared. “I was briefed on the laser defenses this system’s space forces were equipped with. Crude as they were, I want one right now.”
“Shields failing in sector three!”
“Rotating!”
The ship lurched, a spastic shiver running through her hull, and silence descended on Horn’s bridge.
“Report,” Harriet finally said.
“We turned the ship in time,” Sier told her after a moment of studying his own console. “Sector four’s shields moved into four Kanzi missiles, resulting in a close-range energy release that battered the hull and temporarily collapsed sector four’s shields.”
The energy in a multi-ton projectile traveling at seventy-five percent of the speed of light was…significant, even if they’d avoided impact.
“Do we have those sectors back?” she demanded.
“All sectors back online,” her XO confirmed, “but we’re spread thin; I don’t think we could take another full salvo.”
“Blood tide,” Vaza suddenly swore, the translator apparently working just fine on Indiri curses.
Harriet looked to see what had shocked her tactical officer and almost swore herself as she spotted Tornado blazing across the system at fifty-five percent of the speed of light, spewing missiles as she came.
The Terran-built, Laian-upgraded cruiser was much the same size as Hunter’s Horn but significantly denser with the compressed-matter armor. She was also fully ten percent faster, and there was no way the Kanzi ship could evade her.
“Kanzi are turning,” Vaza reported, the damp-furred Indiri brushing his fur as he focused. “Focusing their shields and missile fire on Tornado.”
“Don’t let them,” Harriet ordered. “Everything you’ve got, Vaza. Shove it right down their throats.”
Hunter’s Horn closed on the Kanzi ship, cutting off any attempt to run as the Terran warship bore down on her. Missiles blazed between them, but plasma cannons lit up the sky as Tornado’s defenses activated, shredding the incoming fire.
The attack cruiser had no such defenses. With her shields depleted by the running engagement with Hunter’s Horn, she didn’t have the power to stand up to incoming fire from two sides. The energy bubble collapsed in half a dozen places, and the incoming fire ripped her to pieces.
“Remind me not to anger your Duchess,” Sier said, studying the tactical parameters. “That is a dangerous ship.”
“Nothing like her in the Imperium,” Harriet agreed quietly. “Though I’m told a Core Power ship would be even deadlier. The Laian tech built into her is centuries old.”
“Receiving a transmission.”
“Open a channel.”
The familiar broad face of Pat Kurzman appeared on the screen, the odd mix of Terran and alien technology that formed Tornado’s bridge behind him.
“This is Captain Pat Kurzman of the Duchy of Terra Militia starship Tornado,” he announced. “Captain Tanaka. Please pass a warm welcome to the Sol system on to your crew.”
He paused, and Harriet felt her heart begin to tremble. She’d known comi
ng home would be hard, but she’d hoped—prayed—that the Duchy’s leaders, at least, would understand her decision.
“As for you, Captain Tanaka,” Kurzman said slowly, his tone warmer than her fears had expected, “welcome home.”
#
Chapter 20
“Ah, Jess, thank you,” Annette told her press secretary as the perfectly turned-out woman dropped the datapad with the summations of the news reports on the previous day’s battle. “Any of the networks saying anything in particular I should be aware of?”
Jess Robin dropped into the chair facing Annette’s desk with a thoughtful look. Despite her change in role, she remained as perfectly coiffed as ever—Annette hadn’t checked the budgets, but she suspected her press secretary had a bigger makeup and personal-care team than she did.
Which wasn’t hard, given that she didn’t have such a team.
“The news networks and sites are mostly taking our line as written,” Robin said. “Some of them have enough access to space telescopes and sensor data to confirm it as true, as well.
“Forums and social media accounts…ugh,” she concluded bluntly. “The vast majority of people believe that we’re telling the truth, though there’s always some crazies. The bigger problematic group are the ones that feel we should have left Hunter’s Horn to swing and then picked up the pieces.”
“Would releasing that it was Tanaka in command change that?” Annette asked.
“Unlikely,” Robin replied. “We have a slim but significant majority of the population that backs you, personally, and once you add in the ‘give her enough rope and see’ crowd, we don’t have any particularly large groups actively opposed to the Duchy and your rule at this point.”
“That’s a surprise,” the Duchess admitted.
“Don’t get the impression they like you,” the younger woman warned. “Even the folk who hate you and want to see the Imperium thrown off the planet seem to trust you, however. Which is important.”
“More than I think you realize,” Annette said. “But I’m guessing that the Imperium is less popular than the Duchy?”
“There’s only a minority that’s truly negative on the Duchy,” Robin confirmed “The Imperium, though…yeah. We’ve edged into a plurality that has a positive opinion of the A!Tol, but a majority of the people of Earth would not have cared if we’d left Hunter’s Horn to swing.
“And while we didn’t ask the question, I suspect that same majority still thinks Tanaka is a traitor,” she finished harshly.
“We need to work on that,” Annette said. “It’s not a priority, but that woman is blazing a trail that will make all of humanity’s lives easier going forward.”
“I’ll add it to my list,” Robin told her. “It’ll probably go in the ‘well, that’s impossible, let’s see if we can make it happen’ category.”
“I have faith,” the Duchess replied. “Speaking of your list, did you get a chance to make that call for me?”
“I did. Went better than I expected, too. I talked to Villeneuve before I came in; there’s a shuttle on its way.”
“Really? You’re more persuasive than I am,” Annette said.
“That’s why you had me call,” Robin observed with a smile.
A buzzer went off on Annette’s communicator.
“Bond,” she answered.
“Captain Tanaka’s shuttle has landed,” Wellesley told her. “She’s on her way to your office now. Imperial Marine bodyguards,” he noted. “And I mean Imperial. Tosumi.”
That was interesting. There were three species the A!Tol had, in their own opinions at least, utterly failed at properly uplifting. Their original cultures had been destroyed, absorbed into the A!Tol culture.
Outside of family and sexual relationships, there was very little cultural difference between the first three species of the A!Tol Imperium, the so-called “Imperial Races,” and the A!Tol themselves. Their original cultures were long gone, but in trade those three races held a privileged place in the Imperium’s hierarchy at the right hand of the A!Tol, who were explicitly at the top of the hierarchy.
The Tosumi, four-armed flightless avians, were the first of the Imperial Races. If the Imperial Navy had assigned Tosumi Marines to Captain Tanaka, they were making a specific point.
With a smile, Annette wondered if Captain Tanaka had recognized it.
#
Harriet tried to adjust her uniform as delicately as possible, hoping her four looming Imperial Marine bodyguards didn’t notice. The tight-fitting black-and-gold uniform had innumerable variations to adjust for various biped body shapes, but the version they’d put together for humans had been based on the one for the Yin.
The long tunic and high collar looked amazing on the tall, gangly aliens with their blue fur and black beaks. She was quite certain that on a short frail-boned Japanese woman, it looked ridiculous.
She got it into about as comfortable an order as the uniform could manage as they reached the door they’d been directed to, where a pair of looming humans in power armor waited. Standing in front of them in a pair of black fatigues with a fresh set of Colonel’s gold stars insignia was a man she recognized.
“Colonel Wellesley,” Harriet greeted him. “I see there are rewards for the Duchess’s service.”
“Whether one wants them or not,” the Ducal Guard’s commander agreed. “She is waiting for you, Captain. Your guards will need to remain out here, and I need to ask you to surrender your sidearm.”
One of her Marines shifted slightly, but Harriet held up her hand.
“Please, Initiate,” she told the junior officer—equivalent to an Ensign in the old UESF. “Colonel Wellesley is correct. I am far more of a potential threat to the Duchess than the other way around. Please wait here with him,” she instructed.
Turning back to Wellesley, she unhooked her plasma pistol from her belt and passed it to him.
“You’ll get it back when you leave, I promise,” he assured her. “We have rooms in the hotel for you and your guards if you want to get some rest planetside before returning to Hunter’s Horn. I get the impression it won’t be a short meeting.”
Harriet suspected she should probably decline, but the same Initiate who’d been about to protest letting her enter the office unarmed clacked his beak sharply. The gesture was equivalent to an intentional cough, a “Think about it, boss” heads-up from a junior officer commissioned from the ranks.
Senior noncommissioned officers and the mustangs they sometimes became were the same the galaxy over, it seemed.
“I may take advantage of that,” she told Wellesley. “We’ll see how long this meeting goes.”
If nothing else, it would be nice to sleep under the skies of her homeworld again, even if only for one night.
Bowing slightly, Wellesley stepped back and out of her way to let her enter the office.
#
Bond had changed a lot, Harriet reflected as she stepped through the door.
The blonde Duchess of Terra rose from her chair to offer her hand, allowing the Imperial Captain to study her old comrade.
Harriet had been one of the more junior battleship captains in the UESF, though she hadn’t made the rank of Captain at a particularly young age. With the various detours Bond’s career had taken, however, the Duchess was almost a decade older than she.
The last time she’d seen Bond, it had been at Tornado’s formal commissioning. She hadn’t shown her age much then, but the last year had changed her. New lines crossed her face, and a thin, faded scar ran from her forehead all the way down through her jawbone.
Even pre-conquest Terran technology rarely left scars, suggesting a truly severe injury. One that hadn’t been mentioned in even the classified briefings on Tornado’s sojourn through Imperial space.
“Have a seat, Captain,” the Duchess instructed. “While I’m not going to pretend you’re universally beloved on Earth, you are more than welcome here. The trail you are blazing is probably as important as the battle w
e fight here on Earth.”
Harriet frowned.
“We have our own struggles,” she said noncommittally. “My choice was personal, Your Grace. My struggles are my own; I do not expect to be remembered.”
“Your struggles, Captain, pave the way for every human who follows you into Imperial uniform,” Bond told her. “You aren’t alone in the Navy even now, but the numbers will grow exponentially over time. Each officer and enlisted eases the way for the next—but the harshest challenge is for the first.
“If humanity is to find a place for ourselves in the Imperium, then the path you are blazing will be essential.”
“I don’t pretend my choices were for a higher calling,” Harriet pointed out.
“No. You enlisted to save your son’s life,” Bond agreed. “Which, frankly, I think is more understandable than my own choice. Sadly, most of the planet disagrees.”
“You fought.”
“And I got a whole bunch of people killed who didn’t need to die,” the Duchess said calmly. Her eyes told the truth to that calm, though, a haunted emptiness to them that Harriet hadn’t seen before.
“On a happier note, I took the liberty of checking in with your son’s doctors,” Bond continued. “The treatment was a complete success and he is making a textbook recovery. From what they told me, with him being so young, he’s likely to have minimal side effects, even by Imperial standards.”
Harriet was glad she was sitting. She’d trusted the Imperium to save her son—sacrificed her honor, her marriage and her family to get the care he’d needed—but to hear it confirmed that he was all right and going to get a normal life left her sagging with relief.
“You’ll also be pleased to know,” the Duchess noted, “that the first wave of two thousand doctors will be leaving Earth to receive modern medical training in the next few weeks. Also, we’ve begun setting up a ‘clinic of last resort’ here on Earth with nonhuman doctors.
“That will be online in the next few days, capable of providing every treatment available, including the one given to your son.
Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Page 14
