Fleet of the Damned

by Chris Bunch

  Van Doorman was proud that he had managed to attend several Empire Days and had once been presented to the Emperor himself as part of a mass awards ceremony.

  "I'm sure, Commander,” Doorman said, “that you'll be able to bring us up to speed on the new social niceties. The Fringe Worlds are somewhat behind the times."

  "Sir, I'll try ... but I didn't spend much time at ceremonial functions."

  "Ah, well. I'm sure my wife and daughter will help you realize you know more than you think."

  Clotting great. I am going to have to be polite to the whole family.

  "You'll find that duty out here is most interesting, Commander. Because of the climate, and the fact that all of us are so desperately far from home, we make allowances in the duty schedule."

  "Sir?"

  "You will also find that most of your duties can be accomplished in the first watches. Since I don't want my officers finding this station boring—and boredom does create work for idle hands—I make sure that qualified officers are available for those necessary diplomatic functions."

  "I'm not sure I understand."

  "Oh, there are balls ... appearances on some of the minor worlds ... we have our own sports teams that compete most successfully against the best our settlers can field. I also believe that all duty makes Jack a very dull officer. I approve of my officers taking long leaves—some of the native creatures are excellent for the hunt. We provide local support for anyone interested in these pursuits."

  "Uh ... sir, since I've got brand-new ships, where am I going to find the time for those kinds of things?"

  "I've received a request to provide as complete cooperation as possible to you. That goes without saying.

  I'll ensure that you have a few competent chiefs who'll keep everything Bristol fashion."

  Sten, at this point, should have expressed gratitude and agreement. But as always, his mouth followed its own discipline.

  "Thank you, sir. But I'll still have to pass. I'm afraid I'll be too busy with the boats."

  Seeing van Doorman's expression ice up, Sten cursed himself.

  Doorman picked up a fiche and dropped it into a viewer. “Yes. The boats. I'll be quite frank, Commander. I have always been opposed to the theory of tactical ships."

  "Sir?"

  "For a number of reasons. First, they are very costly to run. Second, it requires a very skilled officer and crew to operate them. These two conditions mean that men who should be serving on larger ships volunteer for these speed-craft. This is unfair to commanders of possibly less romantic craft, because men who should become mates and chiefs remain as ordinaries. It is also unfair to these volunteers, since they will not receive proper attention or promotion. Also, there is the issue of safety. There is no way I can be convinced that service on one of your, umm, mosquito boats could be as safe as a tour on the Swampscott."

  "I didn't know we joined the service to be safe and comfortable, sir.” Sten was angry.

  And so, even though it showed only as a slight reddening around his distinguished temples, was van Doorman. “We differ, Commander.” He stood. “Thank you for taking the time to see me, Commander Sten. I've found this conversation most interesting."

  Interesting? Conversation? Sten got up and came to attention. “A question, sir?"

  "Certainly, young man.” Doorman's tone was solid ice.

  "How will I go about crewing my ships, sir? I assume you have some SOP I should follow?"

  "Thank you. All too many of you younger men lack an understanding of the social lubrication.

  "You'll be permitted to advertise your needs in the fleet bulletin. Any officer or enlisted man who chooses to volunteer will be permitted—after concurrence from his division head and commanding officer, of course."

  Clot. Clot. Clot.

  Sten saluted, did a perfect about-face, and went out.

  Van Doorman's last, when translated, meant that Sten could recruit his little heart out. But what officer in his right mind would allow a competent underling to volunteer for the boats?

  Sten knew he'd get the unfit, the troublemakers, and the square pegs. He desperately hoped that the 23rd Fleet had a whole lot of them.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SPACE IS NOT black. Nor can spaceships creep along. Nevertheless, that was what Commander Lavonne visualized his ship, the Imperial Destroyer San Jacinto, doing as it moved into the Erebus System.

  He was a spy, slithering slowly through the night. The DesRon commander had detailed the San Jacinto for this mission. The navy prided itself on never volunteering for, but never rejecting, a mission, no matter how absurd or suicidal.

  Officially, the assignment was not that out of the ordinary. Imperial destroyers were designed for scouting capabilities.

  But only under wartime conditions. And not when, according to every bit of club poop that Lavonne had heard, every single specially designed spy ship that had entered the Tahn sectors disappeared without a trace.

  Orders, however, are orders.

  Lavonne had spent some time planning his tactics before he plotted a course. This included shutting down every possible machine that could possibly be picked up by an enemy sensor—from air conditioning to the caffmachines in the mess. He theorized that the spy ships had been discovered because their course had originated from Imperial or Fringe worlds. So he'd selected a course that first sent the San Jacinto toward an arm of the Tahn Empire. The course then moved from the second point of origin farther into solidly Tahn-controlled clusters. His third course sent the destroyer back “out,” closing with the Erebus System he had been directed to recon.

  On a galactic and null-time scope, the San Jacinto's course could be plotted as a hesitation forward.

  For short periods of time the ship would enter AM2 drive. Then it would drop out and hold in place. During that holding, every normal sensor, plus the specially installed systems provided, was used to see if the San Jacinto might have been detected.

  Lavonne knew that Imperial sensors were superior to anything the Tahn had. Since no Tahn ship had been detected by his screens, he felt he was still hidden in the shadows.

  The San Jacinto hesitated toward the dying sun of Erebus.

  And he found what he was looking for.

  Input flooded. The system was a huge building yard and harbor. There were more Tahn ships in this one sector than intelligence estimates provided for the entire Tahn Empire.

  Lavonne, at this point, should have closed down the sensors and scooted. He had far more data than any other infiltrating Imperial ship had gotten. Possibly, if he had fled, his ship could have survived.

  Instead, Lavonne, hypnotized by what he was seeing, crept onward. After all, Imperial forces had a secret—AM2, the single power source for stardrive, provided only by the Empire, was modified before being sold to other systems. On the San Jacinto's screens, Lavonne knew, any Tahn ship's drive would show purple.

  Lavonne did not know that certain Tahn ships had their drive baffled. The power loss was more than compensated for by their indetectability.

  So when the screens went red and every alarm went off, the San Jacinto was far too close.

  Lavonne slammed into the control room as the GQ siren howled and read the situation instantly: To their “right” flank, a minefield had been detected; ahead lay the central Erebus worlds; and coming in from the “left,” at full drive, was a Tahn battleship, schooled by cruisers and destroyers.

  At full power, Lavonne spun the San Jacinto into a new orbit. Their only chance was flight—and Lavonne's canniness. The emergency escape pattern led not out of the Erebus System toward the Fringe Worlds but rather toward the center of the Tahn Empire. Once he lost his pursuers, he could reset his course toward home.

  Lavonne had a few minutes of hope—a new Imperial destroyer such as the San Jacinto should be able to outdistance any battleship or cruiser. The worst that Lavonne should face would be the Tahn destroyers.

&n
bsp; Those few minutes ended as an analyst reported in properly flat tones that the battleship was outdistancing its own escorts and closing on the San Jacinto. Within five hours and some minutes, he continued, the battleship, of a previously unknown type, would be within combat range of the San Jacinto.

  The battleship was the Forez. Admiral Deska paced the control room as his huge ship closed on the destroyer. He, too, was computing a time sequence.

  Could the Forez come within range of the Imperial destroyer before it could conceivably escape? If the Imperial spy ship survived, all of the elaborate Tahn plans, from improved ship design to construction to obvious strategy, would be blown.

  He considered the ticking clock. There would be no problems. The Imperial ship was doomed.

  At four hours and forty minutes, Commander Lavonne realized the inevitable.

  There was one possible chance.

  Lavonne ordered the ship out of AM2 drive, hoping that the Tahn battleship would sweep past. Their response was instantaneous. Very well, then. Lavonne sent his ship directly at the Forez. Sometimes the lapdog can take on the mastiff .Lavonne ordered flares and secondary armaments fired at will. He hoped that the explosions, and whatever clutter his ECM apparatus could provide, might be some kind of smoke screen.

  Lavonne knew that the San Jacinto was doomed. All he could hope was that his ship might inflict some damage on the huge Tahn battlewagon now filling the missile station's sights.

  He was only light-seconds from coming into range when the Forez launched its main battery. Six Tahn missiles intersected with the San Jacinto's orbit as Lavonne's finger hovered over the red firing key.

  And there was nothing remaining of the San Jacinto except a widening sextuplicate bubble of gas and radioactivity.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BOOK TWO

  LET ALL DRAW

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THROUGHOUT THEIR HISTORY, the Tahn were always a bloody accident waiting to happen to anyone unfortunate enough to pass their way. It was a civilization born in disaster and nurtured by many battles.

  Even the Eternal Emperor could barely remember the feud that had started it all. The origins of the Tahn lay in a huge civil war occurring in a cluster far from their present homelands. Two mighty forces lined up on opposing sides and went at it for a century and a half. The cluster in question was so peripheral to the Emperor that it was more than convenient for him to ignore the whole thing and let them settle it themselves.

  Eventually, the people who were to become the Tahn suffered a final crushing defeat. The winners gave the survivors two choices: genocide or mass migration. The Tahn chose flight, an episode in their history that they never forgot. Cowardice, then, became their race's original sin. It was the first and last time the Tahn ever chose life over even certain death.

  Almost the entire first wave of the massive migration was composed of warriors and their families. This made the Tahn a group of people unwelcome in any settled society they approached. No one was foolish enough to invite them to share his hearth. This was another factor in the Tahn racial memory. They considered themselves permanent outcasts, and from then on they would treat any stranger in kind.

  The area they finally settled was one of the most unwanted sectors of the Empire. The Tahn put down roots in a desolate pocket surrounded by slightly richer neighbors and began to create their single-purpose society. Since it was military-based, it was no wonder that it was so sharply stratified: from the peasant class to the ruling military council was as distant as the farthest sun.

  The greatest weakness of the Tahn, however, became their greatest strength. They prospered and expanded. Their neighbors became edgy as the Tahn neared the various borders. Most of them tried to negotiate. In each case, the Tahn used negotiation only as a tool to gain time. Then they would attack with no warning. They would throw their entire effort into the fray, ignoring casualties that would have given pause to almost any other being.

  The Tahn fought continually for over three hundred years. In the end they had eliminated their neighbors and carved out an empire. It was no matter that they had lost nearly eighty percent of their population in doing so. They had rebuilt before, and they could do it again.

  The Eternal Emperor was now facing a revitalized Tahn Empire many many times its original size. The explosive growth had created a host of problems for the Tahn: there were more dissidents than ever before, and frequent and bloody ousters from the Tahn High Council were increasingly common.

  Unwittingly, the Emperor had solved this for them. The Tahn were once again united in purpose and in their bitter world view.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A FEW WEEKS later, Sten was no longer a commander without a fleet. His four Imperial tacships, the Claggett, Gamble, Kelly, and Richards, had been off-loaded and lifted into temporary fitting-out slips in the huge Cavite naval yard.

  But he remained a commander without a crew. The aftermath of the interview with Admiral van Doorman had produced exactly what Sten anticipated—zero qualified volunteers showed up.

  But the 23rd Fleet did have its share of malcontents and such. After twenty interviews, Sten thought of the punch line from a long-forgotten joke of Alex's: “Great Empire, not that shaggy."

  If Sten had been put in command of a destroyer, he might have been able to fit those applicant-losers into ship's divisions without problems. But not with four twelve man ships plus a skeleton maintenance staff.

  Time was running short. On three occasions he'd had a “friendly” visit from one of van Doorman's aides.

  The man had sympathized with Sten over his problems and had promised he would do everything possible to keep things from van Doorman's attention—just a favor from one officer to another. Sten surmised that the aide couldn't get his gravcar back to van Doorman quickly enough to report how deep in drakh this young misfit was.

  Or maybe Sten was getting paranoid. It was quite conceivable—all his time was spent on the tacships. When he remembered to eat, he opened a pack of something or other, heated it, and ate absentmindedly, his mind and fingers tracing circuitry, hydraulics, and plumbing across the ships’ blueprint fiches.

  This particular day he had climbed out of the greasy boiler suit he had been living in, pulled on a semidress uniform, and set out to do war with the 23rd Fleet's logistics division.

  Every military has a table of organizations and equipment giving exactly how many people of what rank are authorized in each command and what items of equipment, from battleships to forks, are also allowable. The organization with too many or too much can get gigged just as badly as one that's short of gear.

  Sten discovered that the 23rd Log authorized one day's basic load for ammunition and missiles—that being the amount of firepower a ship, in combat, would use up at maximum. Resupply in time of war for Sten's tacships would mean breaking off their patrol routine and returning to Cavite's enormous supply dumps.

  Sten had tried to reason with the officer, starting with the logical point that the aborting of patrols when the weapons ran dry was hardly efficient and ending with the possibly illogical point that maybe, in time of war, those supply dumps might just get themselves bombed flat.

  The officer didn't want to hear about patrol problems, shook his head in irritation at the mere mention of possible hostilities, and laughed aloud at the idea that Cavite couldn't destroy any attacker long before it had time to launch.

  It was shaping up to be one of those days.

  Sten set his sled down outside the security fence surrounding the fitting-out slips and absently returned the sentry's salute at the gate.

  "Afternoon, Commander.” The sentry liked Sten. He and his fellow guards had a private pool as to when van Doorman would relieve the commander and send him back to Prime for reassignment. It would be a pity, but on the other hand, the sentry's guess was only a couple of days away, and drink mone
y was far more important than the fate of any officer.

  "Afternoon."

  "Sir, your weapons officer is already onboard."

  Sten was in motion. “Troop, I want the guard out. Now."

  "But—"

  "Move, boy. I don't have a weapons officer!"

  The guard thumbed the silent alarm, and within moments there were five sentries around Sten, nervously fingering their loaded willyguns.

  Sten took out the miniwillygun he always carried in the small of his back and started for the Claggett, the only ship with an entry port yawning.

  A saboteur? Spy? Or just a nosy Parker? It didn't matter. Sten put his six men on either side of the port and went silently up the ladder.

  He stopped, listening, just at the mouth of the ship's tiny lock. There were clatters, thumps, and mutters sounding from forward. Sten was about to wave the guards up after him when the mutter became distinguishable: “C'mon, y’ wee clottin’ beastie. Dinnae be tellin't me Ah cannae launch twa a’ once."

  Sten stuck his head out the port. “Sorry, gentlemen. I screwed up. I guess I do have a weapons officer. I'll file a correction with the OOD."

  The puzzled sentries saluted, shrugged, and walked away.

  Sten went forward.

  "Mr. Kilgour!” he snapped at the hatch into the control room, and had the pleasure of seeing a head bang in surprise into a computer screen. “Don't you know how to report properly?"

  Warrant Officer Alex Kilgour looked aggrieved, rubbing his forehead. “Lad, Ah figured y'd be off playin't polo wi y'r admiral."

  Alex Kilgour was a stocky heavy-worlder from the planet of Edinburgh. He'd been Sten's team sergeant in Mantis Section, and then Sten had gotten him reassigned to the palace when Sten commanded the guard. Kilgour had made the mistake of falling in love and applying for a marriage certificate, and the Emperor had shipped him off to flight school months ahead of Sten, also commissioning him in warrant ranks.