by Chris Bunch
"Thank you, sir. How is Brijit doing?"
"She is still healthy. Still working with her new ... friend.” His next words were nearly inaudible. “Another thing I shall never understand."
Sten, with nothing to say, saluted the old man's back and got out.
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CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
THE FOUR SHIPS that were now the 23rd Fleet had gone underground along with the troops and the civilians. The two destroyers were hidden about two kilometers apart in a widened subway tunnel. The picket ship was camouflaged in a ruined hangar. But the ponderous Swampscott had been more difficult to hide.
Sten wondered if the engineer who had come up with the Swampscott's eventual hiding place was still alive. He would like to have bought the man a beer or six—if there was still any beer in Cavite City.
Two of the massive bomb craters from the Tahn attack on Empire Day had been widened, deepened, concrete-floored, and connected. Under cover of night, electronic masking, and a probe by a Guards battalion, the Swampscott was moved into those craters. The hole was then roofed with lightweight beams, and a skin was sprayed over them. Plas was then poured and configured to exactly resemble the craters. None of the Tahn surveillance satellites or overflights by their spy ships spotted the change.
Sten figured that he would probably have carte blanche when he reported to the Swampscott. He was right. His immediate superiors, van Doorman's appointees, surmised that Sten was the new man and, true benders and scrapers, believed that his every thought was a general order.
Sten carefully scattered the survivors of his own command through every department of the Swampscott. If the drakh came down—and Sten agreed with van Doorman that it would—at least there would be one or two reliable beings he could depend on in every section.
He moved the combat information center, which was also the secondary command location and his duty station, from its location in the second, rearmost “pagoda.” He buried it deep in the guts of the ship, finding a certain amount of satisfaction in taking over what had previously been the Swampscott's officers’ dining room.
He also suggested—which became an order—to van Doorman's executive officer that perhaps the ship might be stripped for combat. Somehow, the Swampscott still had its beautiful wooden paneling, ruminant-hide upholstery, and fine and flammable dining gear in officers’ country.
The loudest objections, of course, came not from the officers but from their flunkies. Sten gleefully reassigned the waiters, bartenders, and batmen from their lead-swinging positions to the undermanned gun sites.
This was a great deal of fun for Sten—until he remembered that sooner or later this hulk would have to go into combat. He estimated that the Swampscott would last for four seconds in battle against a Tahn cruiser. Half that, if they were unfortunate enough to face the Forez or Kiso.
But he had to take his satisfactions where he could get them.
* * * *
At General Mahoney's request, Sten had detached Kilgour and put him as coordinator of civilian movement.
When—and if—the liners showed up, they would have only moments on the ground to load the refugees. And both Mahoney and van Doorman agreed that in this area, there was no room for either ego or proper precedent.
Therefore, Kilgour was ordered into civilian clothes and officially given the rank of deputy mayor of Cavite City. Whoever had held that post previously had either died or disappeared, as had the mayor himself.
Kilgour wondered why he had so much support—certain officers and noncoms of the First Guards had been put under his command. Neither he nor anyone else in the Guards—beyond Mahoney's own chief of staff and the heads of his G-sections—knew that Mahoney was systematically stripping his best out of the division to be sent to safety as cadres for the new unit.
And no one except Ian Mahoney knew that their command general was about to violate orders from the Emperor and stay behind on Cavite to die with the remnants of his division.
At first Kilgour thought it would be a hoot to have vastly higher-ranked officers under his command. The hoot was there, but a very minor part of his job.
Alex Kilgour got very little sleep as the civilians were winkled out of their shelters, broken down into hundred-person loading elements, and assigned cargo orders. Each of them was permitted what he, she, or it wore. No more—including toilet articles.
Kilgour stood in one of the assembly areas. There were two scared children hanging onto either leg and a very adorable baby in his arms—a baby, Kilgour realized, that was piddling on his carefully looted expensive tweeds. And he was trying to listen to, regulate, and order from several conversations.
"...my Deirdre hasn't shown up, and I'm very..."
"...Mr. Kilgour, we need to discuss which city records should be removed with..."
"...I wan’ my mommie..."
"...your behavior is simply incomprehensible, and I want to know the name of your superior, immediately..."
"...since y’ be't th’ boss, is there anything me an’ some of my mates can do to help with..."
"...since you're our representative, I would like to protest the heartless way that those soldiers..."
"...when we reach safety, my lawyers will be most interested in the fact that..."
"Where's Mommie?"
Kilgour rather desperately wanted to be somewhere safe, like on the front lines facing a Tahn human wave assault.
* * * *
The blurt transmission came through—the rescue force was twelve hours away from Cavite.
* * * *
Sten was in the engine room of the Swampscott, trying to figure out why the ship's second drive unit was not delivering full power.
He was crouched under one of the drive tubes, listening to the monotonous swearing of the second engineer—who was not a van Doorman appointee and who was competent—trying to meter unmetered feed lines when he realized that he had been due at a command conference five minutes before.
He slithered out and ran for a port. There would be no time to change out of his grease-soaked coveralls.
Outside, on the concrete, he looked around for the gravsled that was supposedly assigned just to him. The driver had taken a break and was grabbing a quick meal. It took Sten another ten minutes to hunt the woman down.
Sten was very late by the time the sled lifted and hissed down a communications trench toward Mahoney's TOC. Very late—but still alive.
* * * *
The Tahn missile was a blind launch.
The Tahn knew, of course, that the Imperial Forces inside Cavite City had gone underground. But they had little hard intelligence on exactly where the vital centers were.
Since they had a plethora and a half of available weaponry, they fired into the perimeter at random. The Imperial stronghold was narrow enough so that almost anything would do some damage.
Assembled under the ruined emporium were the top-ranking Imperial officers. Mahoney knew the dangers of having most command elements in one place—but it was necessary for him to give a final face-to-face briefing.
The Tahn missile was sent in, nap of the earth, across the front lines. It was not detected by any of the Guards’ countermissile batteries. Two kilometers inside the lines, following its programming, it lifted and looked for a target.
There wasn't much. The missile might have gone random, reverting to its basic instructions, and smashed in somewhere close to the perimeter's center if its receivers hadn't picked up a broadcast fragment.
The broadcast came from one of Mahoney's brigade officers, who had sent a “Received-Acknowledged” signal on his belt transponder before entering the TOC.
But that was enough for the missile to target.
Mahoney was beginning. “Six hours from now, most of you will be on your way out. Here's what's going to happen—"
And then the hardened rocket smashed through the upper floors of the emporium, through the shielding atop the basement, and exploded, centi
meters above the basement itself.
Sten arrived to a charnel house.
The emporium was a smoking disaster. One of Mahoney's bodyguards stumbled toward him, leaking blood and muttering incoherently. Sten burst past him, down into the basement.
He found death and dying. Major General Ian Mahoney lay on his side, his jaw smashed, his face covered in gore, slowly strangling.
Sten's fingers curled, and his knife slid out of his arm and into his hand, as he rolled Mahoney onto his back. Very carefully, his knife V-incisioned into Mahoney's throat, cutting through the windpipe about three centimeters. He made another cut, Vd to meet the first, then thumbed the tissue out of the tracheotomy.
Mahoney was breathing again, with a gargle and bubble of blood.
Sten grabbed a power cord, cut it through, and ripped the center wires out of the cover. That hollow cover was forced into Mahoney's windpipe, and then Sten covered the incision with the outer foil cover, a dressing sealant from Mahoney's own aidpak. Mahoney would live—if his other wounds were treated. He would live. Ironically, since Mahoney had planned to stay and die with his Guardsmen. Instead, he would be evacuated as a casualty on the liners.
Sten stood as med people ran into the building.
He took stock.
Fleet Admiral Xavier Rijn van Doorman grinned down at him.
Sten thought that the admiral really didn't have that much to smile about, since the top of his brain case was missing, and gray tissue—almost matching the late admiral's hair color—was leaking out. Also, van Doorman was missing certain components, such as his right arm, his left hand, and, more importantly, his body from the rib cage downward. What little was left of his body was strung on a ruptured pipe.
I suppose I have a ship, Sten thought to himself. Now let's see if van Doorman's flunkies follow their orders.
He didn't have to worry about that—the XO, nav officer, and chief engineer were also dead in the ruins.
Commander Sten was now in charge of the 23rd Fleet.
Two hours later, the rescue liners signaled that they were approaching Cavite.
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CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
FOR THREE DAYS the air around Cavite City somewhat resembled gray noodle soup. It was part of the deception plan for the evacuation. Not only did the liners have to slip through the Tahn patrols beyond the Fringe Worlds—which they had successfully done—but then they had to land and remain undetected long enough to load the evacuees.
The Tahn total air superiority helped slightly. Since there were seldom any Imperial ships in the air, the Tahn aerial monitors and scanners were only cursorily checked.
The boil of smoke and haze over the Empire's perimeter radically reduced visual observation, and the “noodle soup” blanked almost all other detectors.
The “soup” was chaff, an invention that even predated the Emperor himself. Chaff originally had been thin strips of aluminum, designed to block radar screens. It was cut in lengths one-half that of the wavelength it was intended to interfere with and was dropped from aircraft. On a detector screen the chaff showed up as a solid, impermeable cloud.
This chaff was far more sophisticated, capable of blocking not only radar but infrared and laser sensors. And it was nearly invisible—many thousands of the strips could be fed through the eye of a needle.
Blasted into the upper atmosphere, the canisters exploded, and the strands drifted slowly down toward Cavite City. They may have been almost invisible, but they did not make breathing any more of a pleasure.
The Tahn had gone to full alert when their sensors suddenly became inactive, but as time passed, they decided that this latest tactic was merely a ploy to slow down the inevitable final assault on the city. They certainly did not need sensors—they knew where the Empire's troops were. And so the chaff clouds became nothing more than an annoyance.
And then other alarms went off.
Offplanet patrols suddenly reported enemy forces. The screens showed, unbelievably, that two full Imperial fleets were heading toward Cavite, fleets that Tahn strategic intelligence said could not exist.
The Tahn ships went to general quarters and lifted for space.
Intelligence was quite correct—the only Imperial squadron in that sector of space was being held in reserve. The Tahn were being “attacked” by the four destroyers that had escorted the liners into the Fringe Worlds. Four destroyers and nearly a thousand small, unmanned drones.
The drones were Spoof missiles packed with electronics that gave them the signature in every range except visual of full-size warships.
And for once the Empire was lucky.
Atago brought her ships into battle formation and moved in for the attack.
And the liners roared down toward Cavite City.
They were, of course, immediately seen and reported by Tahn infantrymen, but by the time the reports reached Atago, she was six hours off Cavite. And she had worries far more serious than what she thought were transports reinforcing the Empire's ground forces.
She would not discover what the Imperial attack fleets actually were for another hour.
Seven hours to evacuate a world...
The blunt torpedoes that were Sullamora's commandeered liners settled down onto Cavite Base, their bulk crushing the debris under them.
Then Kilgour's evac scheme went into motion. He had organized the civilians into fifty-person groups, each group salted with guardsmen and women that would be part of the new, to-be-formed division. Civilians—Kilgour had dubbed them evaks—brought only what they could carry in small daypaks, which were no more than sandbags equipped with slings. In the last few hours, the civilians had been staged forward to any shelter close to Cavite City's field. The shelters were mostly improvised—and many noncombatants died under the periodic Tahn bombardments.
Sten paced on the bridge of the Swampscott. All screens were active, showing the scurry toward the liners and the sky above that might lead them to safety.
Sten felt naked on that bridge—it was one of the two pagodas on the Swampscott that stood outside the ship's armor. It felt more like a stage set for a livie than a command center. It stretched two stories tall, with huge screens on all sides. Foss, whom Sten had field-commissioned and put in charge of the ship's C3 section, was more than twenty meters away from him.
Sten watched the swarm and prayed to a god still unknown to him that somehow everyone would board before the Tahn came in. He also found space in his prayers that Alex would be one of those on board as he watched the inexorable tickdown on a chronometer that told him when the Swampscott, and the liners, must lift.
And while he was at it, he made another request to the heavens—that Brijit would be among the civilians. He had seen General Mahoney, unconscious in his bubble pakked stretcher, loaded onto a liner.
The timer moved down through final seconds.
The screens showed Cavite Field, bare and empty, gray under drifting smoke clouds, with flashes of fire from incoming Tahn rockets.
Warrant officer Alex Kilgour stood beside him. “Ah hae them, lad. Thae's all ‘board't."
Sten touched the com switch on his chest. “All ships. This is the Swampscott. Lift!"
Dust boiled across the shattered concrete as the liners took off on Yukawa drive.
"On command ... main drive ... three ... two ... one ... Mark!"
And the liners and the four ships remaining of the 23rd Fleet vanished.
Below them, the Tahn final assault began.
Fewer than 2,000 soldiers of the First Guards held the thin perimeter. Their best had, under orders, been evacuated on the liners. They were commanded by Mahoney's chief of staff, who, violating the same orders that Mahoney had planned to break, had remained behind with his soldiers.
The Tahn assaulted in wave attacks.
And were slaughtered.
The First Guards died on Cavite.
But they fulfilled the prophecy that Sten's first training sergeant had mad
e years earlier: “I've fought for the Empire on a hundred different worlds, and I'll fight on a hundred more before some skeek burns me down ... But I'll be the most expensive piece of meat he ever butchered."
Three Tahn landing forces had invaded Cavite. One had already been shattered. The other two made the final assault on Cavite City.
They won.
But they also ceased to exist as fighting units.
* * * *
Brijit van Doorman was not among the evacuees.
Supreme triage had been done with the casualties, and those who were dying or, more cruelly, could never be restructured enough to be fit for combat were left behind.
And someone had to stay behind to keep them alive. Dr. Morrison volunteered.
As did Brijit.
The first Tahn shock grenade shattered two orderlies who were posted near the entry to the underground hospital. Then the door exploded inward, and a Tahn combat squad burst into the ward.
Dr. Morrison, her empty hands spread, stood in front of them. “These are wounded people,” she said slowly and calmly. “They need help. They are not soldiers."
"Stand aside,” ordered the Tahn captain commanding the squad. He lifted his weapon.
"These are not combat soldiers,” Morrison started. “There are no resistants or arms—"
The burst from the Tahn officer's gun blew Morrison nearly in half.
Brijit screamed and hurtled at the captain.
He hip-swiveled and fired again.
Three rounds cut Brijit to shreds.
The officer lowered his weapon and turned to a noncom. “The Imperial whore said there is no one here capable of bearing arms. They are not necessary for us."
The sergeant saluted and raised his flamer.
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CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
LADY ATAGO, ALTHOUGH not a believer in ceremony, had positioned things very nicely. She was not able to take the surrender from General Mahoney as planned. That really did not matter. She thought that her livie ‘cast to Heath would be equally dramatic.
Atago stood in front of the Forez, grounded in the center of Cavite Field. To one side, guards chivvied endless lines of surrendered Imperial soldiers.
