“Yes,” Trent confirmed after a moment’s thought.
“Break off, Vice Commodore,” Kyle ordered as he made a decision. “Move to hold position at Starfire range. Have Williams prep the bomber wing for a second wave, but keep them aboard.
“I owe Mister Tecumseh one get-out-of-surrender-free card,” he told his bridge crew with a grin. “Let’s see what he has to say—he’s not getting two chances.”
#
Chapter 41
Istanbul System
12:00 December 1, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-052 Kodiak
Kyle hadn’t expected to see a Commonwealth shuttle land on Kodiak’s deck in peace before he gave up command of her. He suspected his own tour of duty aboard the carrier would be short, under a year, and it would be years before the war was resolved.
The war continued with no sign of peace breaking out anytime soon…but an unarmed Commonwealth transfer shuttle, escorted the last several million kilometers by two of Vice Commodore Song’s starfighters, coasted in to a soft landing on the deck regardless.
A full sixty-strong platoon of Marines in power armor, recalled from the aborted boarding action, stood ready around the exits from the flight deck. Kyle was prepared to meet with Tecumseh, but he was not putting his ship in danger to do so.
“Radiological scans are clean,” the deck officer murmured over his implant. “No nukes, no antimatter bombs. Zero-point cell shut down on schedule. She’s clean.”
Kyle might have starfighters in position to destroy Chariot the instant something went wrong, but that was no reason not to be careful. He retained the upper hand, but he also planned on living through this meeting.
He stepped forward as the ramp descended, two Marines flanking him as he approached the spacecraft. Commodore Tecumseh emerged alone, his hands spread wide.
The Terran flag officer was tall and dark-skinned, his hair tied back in a single black braid that hung down his red-sashed black uniform as he politely ignored the Marines scanning him and offered Kyle a textbook salute.
He’d been badly injured recently, with obvious cybernetics replacing most of his limbs, but he held the salute without a tremor.
Despite their difference in titles, they were equals in rank, both O7s in their own nation’s structure. The Federation had dropped the rank of Commodore and moved Captain up one to recognize the overwhelming authority of the commander of an interstellar capital ship, inserting the Senior Fleet Commander rank to fill the gap.
“Commodore Tecumseh.” Kyle returned the salute. “I’ll admit I didn’t expect to actually meet the man commanding the Commonwealth’s commerce raiding operations out this far. Nor did I expect to find you, in particular, in charge of such a mission.”
“Duty is not always pleasant,” the Terran replied stiffly. “We need to speak in private and in detail, Captain Roberts. I presume you have a space prepared?”
“You presume correctly,” Kyle told him. “Captain von Lambert will meet with us via virtual conferencing. You’ll understand, I hope, that I wasn’t going to have us both on the same ship to meet you.”
“I understand completely,” Tecumseh said. “But I promise you, Captain, there is no deception here. We share an enemy now, and only together can we save this region from what he will unleash.”
“The consequences of what the Commonwealth has unleashed,” Kyle said softly, wondering just what the Terrans had done.
“Yes,” the other man accepted levelly. “I would prefer to only explain this once, Captain.”
“Very well. This way.”
#
Kodiak’s designers had considered many scenarios when they were laying the carrier out, and one of those scenarios was the need to have conferences with people you were willing to let aboard your ship but not willing to let see very much of it.
One of the carrier’s several midsized conference rooms was just off the main corridor leading away from the flight deck. Three Marines escorted the two officers down the corridor, splitting off to stand guard outside the conference room as Kyle led the Terran officer in.
Von Lambert was already waiting, the holoprojector providing a reasonable facsimile of having the Imperial Captain sitting at the table, tapping his fingers on the cheap plastic.
“Commodore Tecumseh,” von Lambert greeted the Terran. “I will note for the record that I feel this conversation should be taking place with you in cuffs as an official prisoner of war.”
He hadn’t told Kyle that beforehand. On the other hand, he hadn’t really needed to. Kyle knew just how long of a limb he was going out on here—and the only reason he was willing to do it was because without starfighters, Chariot couldn’t fight his task group and win…and the moment she tried to launch starfighters, Vice Commodore Song would blast the strike cruiser to hell.
Tecumseh wasn’t a prisoner of war, but everyone in the room knew that was almost a formality.
“I can understand that,” the flag officer replied calmly. “Our nations are at war, gentlemen, and I am out this far on a mission to make that war more difficult for yours.”
“A process that has so far resulted in the capture or destruction of over a dozen neutral warships and civilian freighters,” Kyle pointed out. “You have committed acts of war against at least six neutral nations and committed at least one serious war crime that I am aware of with the massacre aboard the ships in the Antioch system in September.”
After Barsoom, he owed the Terran flag officer, but the mission the Terran had taken in this sector was the dirtiest of dirty ops, blacker in many ways than his own operation into Tau Ceti.
“I can’t argue the acts of war,” Tecumseh conceded. “My orders were clear and they were carried out. I did not have to like them. The Antioch massacre, however, we tried to prevent. We didn’t realize just how far Coati would go.
“A pattern,” he noted, “that we clearly did not break.”
“You allied with and armed a psychopath,” Kyle said flatly. “The last time I checked, enabling war crimes wasn’t much better regarded than committing them directly.”
“I don’t believe that my superiors realized how far gone Coati was,” Tecumseh replied. “Certainly, I was not briefed that the man was a mass murderer in waiting.”
“Perhaps you should have done research of your own?” von Lambert snapped. “Asked Sultan Seleucus about the man when you met him? Coati’s history in this region is rife with blood, and you blithely handed over a modern arsenal to the man.”
The Commodore appeared taken aback that the Alliance officers knew of his meeting with the Sultan, but he sighed and nodded.
“We did,” he admitted. “From a strategic perspective, it made sense. There are many who would say that Dictator Periklos was no better than Coati, but I doubt that will stop your Alliance courting and arming him, will it?”
Tecumseh had a point, though the fact that Periklos—correctly—blamed the Alliance for starting the war between the League and the Commonwealth had proven an effective barrier to working together so far.
“You asked for this meeting,” Kyle noted. “I don’t imagine it was to try and convince us that you and the Commonwealth were innocent in all of this. You said we had matters of mutual interest. Start talking, or those cuffs Captain von Lambert mentioned might still be an option.”
“I did not come here to convince you we were innocent,” Tecumseh agreed. “I came here to convince you that we share a common enemy: Commodore Coati.”
“Who is your ally.”
“Who was my ally,” the Terran countered. “Until he ran his fleet into the meat grinder you so neatly trailed in front of him. After which he proceeded to blame us, on the basis of what he believed to be Commonwealth fighters in your formation.”
Kyle considered that and concealed a truly evil smile. The Vulture was basically a straight copy of the Terran Longbow—and Williams’s Vultures had gutted Coati’s fleet. He could see the pirate assuming the Vultures wer
e Terran starfighters.
“When I refused to join him on a more permanent basis, he revealed he’d bought the XO of my flagship,” Tecumseh admitted. “Coati murdered the vast majority of the crew of Poseidon and stole the ship. My government’s ‘controlled’ psychopath now commands a Hercules-class battlecruiser.”
“That is…a problem,” Kyle confessed. “Though, from my perspective, also a bonus: I know your crew would have been better than his people. What I don’t see, Commodore, is why you are here.”
“He co-opted the executive officer, Captain Roberts,” the Terran told him. “That means he has the ship fully functional and has her tech files.
“You’ve seen his corsairs. He stole the Class Ones, but everything in them, he built from scratch and spare parts. I don’t know where,” Tecumseh admitted, “but he has a real shipyard, with a level of resources I find disturbing.
“Given that data and those resources, my staff believes that Coati can duplicate the Hercules class in two to three years. You don’t want that,” he said dryly. “This entire sector would fall; you wouldn’t be able to defend your allies here against a fleet of a dozen or more Herculeses.
“If we succeeded in bringing the Marches into Unity, then that would become our problem,” he continued. “Even if we don’t, having a two-bit pirate psychopath in possession of one of our most powerful battlecruisers and the schematics for the same represents a major strategic danger to the Commonwealth.
“And an immediate and present danger to your allies here,” he concluded. “Coati must be stopped. Poseidon must be destroyed. All of us can agree on this, I think.”
“Yes,” von Lambert said before Kyle could speak. “But if you don’t know where his shipyard is, why does your warning give us any advantage that would be worth working with you, Commodore?”
“Firstly”—Tecumseh held up a finger—“one relatively straightforward set of repairs and Chariot is fully functional, the equal to your Rameses-class cruiser. I can’t find Poseidon alone, but our three ships combined are more than a match for her.
“Secondly”—he held up another finger—“I know Coati. I know the way he thinks, twisted as it is. More, I know Petrovsky, who is almost certainly commanding Poseidon. I have a far better idea of which way either of them is going to jump then you do.
“Thirdly”—he held up a third finger—“I may not know where his shipyard is, but I know where one of his main refueling stations is, and I have a battalion of Marines with a serious axe to grind. If we punch through l’Estación de Muerte’s defense, my people will find someone who knows where that yard is.
“Fourthly”—the last finger on his right hand went up—“I and my people want Coati’s head. On a fucking pike. So long as you’re helping us with that goal, we are no threat to you.”
Kyle looked at the hologram of von Lambert, who shrugged.
“I will need to discuss with my staff and Sultan Osman,” he told the Commodore. “I, after all, cannot allow you to mine asteroids for repairs in his system myself.
“Wait here.”
#
The rest of the senior officers had taken over the flight briefing room and were waiting for Kyle. Taggart was linking in via screen from the bridge where he held down command, and von Lambert’s XO and CAG were virtually conferenced in as well.
Full as the room seemed, only Kyle, Sterling and Song were actually physically present. The other four members of the meeting were present by holographic or video avatar, and just about no one in the room looked happy.
“We can’t seriously be considering this,” Taggart snapped. “Snap cuffs on the bastard and either board Chariot or force her to surrender. He can give us the location of Coati’s base in a proper interrogation and then we can deal with him ourselves.”
“We could do that,” Kyle agreed. “In fact, let’s call that plan A. It’s definitely the cleanest option, the one that raises the fewest dilemmas. I have a counterargument, but I want to hear everyone else’s comments.”
“I can’t say I mind putting sixty Katanas between me and the pirates,” Song pointed out. “That’s a lot of extra firepower on our side if we trust them.”
“We can’t trust them,” Taggart replied. “They’re Terrans. They gave Coati his missiles, his tech—so he turned on them; excuse me while I weep.”
“Oh, I don’t think any of us have a great deal of sympathy for the Commonwealth here,” Kyle told him. “I have some sympathy for Commodore Tecumseh’s position, having apparently tried to carry out a clean commerce raiding mission while saddled with a lunatic, but this mess is entirely of their making.”
“But we have to clean it up,” von Lambert concluded. “And, frankly, I’m not sure we can afford to turn down an extra capital ship while going against a Hercules. The odds without Chariot are…”
“The odds are even without the bombers, in our favor including them,” Kyle agreed. “We’d take her, especially manned by whatever crew Coati could pull together from his pirates, but we’d get hurt in the process. Add Chariot to our ranks, and it’s far more of a sure thing.”
“We also know there are at least six of those corsairs,” Horaček pointed out. Thoth’s CAG looked uncomfortable with what he was saying, but he plowed on regardless. “And if Coati has kept his main base secret for this long, he almost certainly has more defenses and ships waiting there for whoever wanders in.
“The Commonwealth took my arm and my leg,” the CAG continued. “I hate them for that, but this Tecumseh…if nothing else, he seems very angry.”
“I’m guessing Coati had something to do with the Commodore’s new collection of cyberware,” von Lambert agreed. “And Poseidon was under his command. Tecumseh has one hell of a grudge; I’m willing to trust that, if not necessarily him.”
“All we need from Tecumseh is the location of Coati’s fueling base,” Kyle admitted, “but that extra cruiser is worth the delay to repair her…and I owe Tecumseh some faith. He’s the reason the Butcher of Kematian was brought to justice. They gave him a shit job, but the man has honor.”
“I don’t like it,” Taggart replied, the XO glancing around at the rest. His gaze, however, lingered on Song. His girlfriend would be at the heart of any attack on Poseidon, and Chariot’s involvement could make the difference between her living or dying.
“I don’t like it,” he repeated, “but I see your point. I’m keeping a program in the banks to drop every weapon we have on his piece of crap and blow him to hell, though.”
“Do it,” Kyle ordered. “And Song?”
“Sir?”
“Williams and her wing are grounded,” he ordered. “So far as I can tell, Tecumseh doesn’t realize the bombers exist. Unless we absolutely need them, we do not deploy the Vultures where the Terrans can see. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell Williams.”
“Send her to me,” Kyle told her. “No point in you taking that flak. I’ll talk to her.”
He glanced around the room.
“We all have our issues with this,” he admitted, “but we need that ship if we’re going to take out Coati. We play nice until Antonio Coati is dead.”
“And then?” Taggart asked.
“Then we can reconsider the situation.”
#
Tecumseh was doing a familiar set of physical rehabilitation exercises with his cybernetics when Kyle reentered the room, pausing in mid-motion to turn his attention to the Federation Captain.
“Those are new,” Kyle observed.
“Coati decided he wanted to kill me slowly,” the Terran told him. “He failed, but he took a few limbs with him in the attempt.”
“Fucker,” Kyle said calmly. “Your shuttle is waiting, Commodore Tecumseh. Sultan Osman has agreed to provide you with the parts and raw materials to repair your ship; an in-system clipper will be arriving in a few hours.”
“What happened to Seleucus?” Tecumseh asked.
“He was replaced after his treason came to light,”
Kyle told him, his voice still calm. “As I said, your shuttle is waiting. The deck informs me she’s been refueled and should be good to go.”
“So, you are accepting my offer, then?”
“Until Poseidon is destroyed and Coati is dead, you have an agreement,” Kyle confirmed. “Betray me or harm my people and I will burn you and yours to ash.
“Are we clear?”
“Perfectly, Captain Roberts.”
#
Chapter 42
Istanbul System
16:00 December 3, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-052 Kodiak
“The refueling station known as l’Estación de Muerte is located in the KDX-6657 system,” the image of Commodore Tecumseh on the screen informed Kyle’s gathered officers. “It’s an uninhabited system of basically no worth to anyone, even for mining.
“L’Estación de Muerte orbits the second planet, a lava-soaked ball of death that would kill an unprotected human seven ways in under ten seconds, starting with heat and toxic atmosphere,” he continued. “It’s an unpleasant rock, and the only decent gravitational anchorage in the system.”
“What about defenses?” von Lambert asked.
“The station itself is quite heavily armed, with an assortment of missile launchers and heavy positron lances, but the main defense is her fighter wings,” the Terran explained. “She has six fighter bays. My people have only been in two of them, but both of those bays contained thirty of your Cobra starfighters.
“If, as I expect, the others are the same, we’ll be facing roughly one hundred and eighty Cobras. They’ll be backed by about twenty missile launchers and a dozen megaton-range positron lances on the station.”
“That is one tough nut to crack,” Song noted. “Would be easier with…well, it would be easier with a battlecruiser, or at least something with better than six-hundred-kiloton guns.”
Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5) Page 30
