Admiral's Fall

by Luke Sky Wachter

  “There goes another one,” reported Lieutenant Hart as the main body of the Reclamation Fleet bypassed a damaged New Confederation Destroyer actively signaling its surrender, only to tear into a slow-moving Light Cruiser.

  As each Reclamation Fleet warship passed, each ship fired a full broadside into the Light Cruiser and they continued firing long after it was dead in space. Even after the Cruiser broke in two with each half wracked by multiple internal explosions, they continued to pound it into space scrap.

  “Any escape pods manage to clear that one?” I asked.

  “Two of them,” Sensors reported in a dull voice.

  “Still no response to our hails?” I asked stonily.

  “We’re continuing to hail them every five minutes, Sir. No response,” reported the Com-Tech assigned that duty.

  Off to the side, my Chief of Staff nodded in agreement. She’d personally checked over his work to ensure there were no mistakes.

  “I do believe Rear Admiral Bluetooth’s reports back home left something significant out,” I remarked coolly. I was already determined to do what I could to launch a full investigation into the matter.

  “We’re receiving a hail, Admiral,” reported the com-tech manning the Ex-Comm. console as the New Confederation Ships attempted an erratic slingshot maneuver to temporarily break contact with the Imperial partisans.

  “Is it the good Rear Admiral?” I asked with forced lightness.

  “No, Sir,” the Tech shook his head sharply, “a Reclamation Officer who says his name is Rear Admiral Norfolk is demanding to speak with you.”

  The hand holding my tea cup stilled. “If you would please take this, yeoman,” I said, reaching out with my tea cup.

  “Of course, Sir,” the yeoman hurried over from his post at the wall to relieve me of the small bit of porcelain.

  For a moment I contemplated not replying, and then I considered telling Norfolk to go howl, but more than anything I wanted to get to the bottom of this nasty business. In the mood I was in, I was more than ready to return the favor.

  “Put him through,” I abruptly decided, turning to peer at the screen, more than ready to see the face of our enemy. We were close enough now for only a small barely noticeable lag in communications.

  “Jason Montagne. Why am I not surprised?” asked the craggy-faced Admiral on the other end.

  “I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” I asked, curiosity momentarily getting the better of my anger.

  I took the moment to silently take in the other man’s tanned white skin, grey streaked hair, iron blue eyes and in a uniform very similar in cut and color but not quite the same as a standard Imperial officer’s standard outfit.

  In short, he was clearly one of the senior surviving Imperial officers of the Reclamation Fleet.

  My eyes narrowed.

  “You can’t win. You have to know that,” Norfolk said frankly, “we’re well aware of what that beast you’re in can do and we’ve taken appropriate countermeasures. So why not make this easy on everyone and just leave? I promise not to pursue the matter.”

  “I like my odds,” I pursed my lips. “I think I’ll stay,” I said, meeting his iron blue eyes and refusing to look away.

  “We’re not here for you, Admiral. All we want are those war criminals in Confederation uniforms who decided it was a sweet idea to attack a transport freighter carrying wounded spacers and their families. Stand aside and let us do this; you know it’s the right thing to do,” Norfolk said sternly.

  “I ‘know’ nothing of the sort. All I can see right now is an Imperial fleet that seems bent on refusing surrenders and blowing certain ships to space dust before they have a chance to launch any escape pods. But if it’s any consolation I promise if you start accepting surrenders I’ll look into the matter,” I said replied, splaying my hands.

  Norfolk’s mouth twisted. “Forgive me if I find that promise hard to believe, especially coming from a man wearing the same uniform as those butchers we’re currently pursuing,” Norfolk said dismissing my offer.

  “Just so you know, I am no longer a New Confederation officer—and if it helps I’ll further point out we never actually wore the same uniform assigned to the fleet stationed here in Sector 26. I know it’s hard to see here because we kept the same basic uniform, which is based off an older Confederation cut, but the insignia and shoulder flashes have all been modified to reflect our new reality as a Confederation allied power,” I pointed out.

  “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. There’s no need to insult my intelligence, Montagne,” Norfolk said with disgust, “we all know who you are and who you aren’t.”

  “In that case I’m sure you’re more than willing to admit, in the spirit of reciprocity, that you actually are members of a covert Imperial fleet, Norfolk,” I waited a beat looking at him challengingly before continuing. “One that everyone knows receives its maneuvering orders directly from Imperial Command. You’re not trying to sell me some bill of goods about how you’re actually some kind of wishy-washy group of ‘concerned Imperial citizens’ who are only out here to help their poor benighted neighbors in the Spine, and of course have never…ever…had anything resembling direct contact with Imperial high command?” I shot back, feeling ever so slightly insulted that I, who actually had left Confederation service, the New and Old versions, was being accused of lying by a man who everyone and their brother knew were an Imperial stalking horse.

  Norfolk gave me a hard look. “The last thing this fleet is, is 'wishy-washy',” Norfolk said flatly, “but I realize I shouldn’t have expected anything more from a man like yourself, Montagne.”

  “Oh, and what kind of man is that, Admiral Norfolk, Sir? You’ll note I’ve given you the courtesy of your rank,” I retorted.

  “First, you deliberately use anti-matter against Admiral Janeski in Easy Haven and then you turned a swarm of Bugs rarely seen in human space on Praetor Cornwallis! That’s two war crimes violations right there! Despite myself, I had still hoped you had some shred of honor or even simple human decency. Instead you appear as determined as ever to cover for your fellow war criminals, Sir. Well blast you to flaming atoms, ‘Admiral’ Montagne,” Admiral Norfolk said grimly.

  “All my actions were entirely legal,” I said in immediate rejection. When accused of serious crimes, you had to get out in front of it and deny immediately whether you were innocent or guilty. Perhaps especially when you were guilty? I was just glad that neither Tracto nor the New Confederation had signed any of the galactic war conventions. “And your accusations are particularly rich coming from a man who’s landed more Imperial pacification brigades on helpless worlds than I have fingers and toes, Admiral,” I finished angrily.

  Norfolk slammed a hand on the arm of his chair. “I have nothing to prove to a man like you! What happens on the ground stays on the ground. I’m a spacer, not a grounder. My concern ends where the atmosphere begins. So long as Imperial law is not violated, I couldn't care less how the Marines carry out their duties in bringing law and order back to civilians planet side,” Norfolk said with iron in his voice.

  I openly sneered at this. “Imperial Law? This is the Spineward Sectors, Norfolk. In case you forgot, or never bothered to learn, local and Confederation laws are rule of the day. This is not the Empire and here we require a whole blasted lot more from hypocrites like yourself and Senator Cornwallis—whose fleet orbitally bombarded my home world fifty years ago,” I shot back with ire.

  “The two acts aren’t even comparable! And the very reason we’re here is because your law broke down. If you didn’t need a guiding hand we wouldn’t have been here in the first place,” snapped Norfolk.

  “I see. Your type only cries foul when the tables are turned; you don't care what happens so long as you’re the ones winning,” I scoffed loudly. “For your information, everyone over here is well aware that it was the Empire, not me, who seeded the Bugs Cornwallis encountered at Black Purgatory outside Tracto and then sat
back and waited for genocide to sweep my wife’s world clean!”

  “Outrageous!” Norfolk exclaimed angrily.

  “So you can pee and moan all you like when the truth is all we did was return to sender. The same for your results when Arnold Janeski ignored a legitimate engineering emergency, given with sufficient notice, just so he could drive home an attack but I’ll have none of it,” I ended harshly, “he took the risk and suffered accordingly.”

  Norfolk’s forehead had turned red with rage. “We have nothing else to talk about. The next time you see me I’ll be staring back at you from the other end of a broadside,” Norfolk said furiously.

  “So I should take it you have no intention of allowing surrendering warships the time they need to get their crews to the escape pods?” I asked, my face hardening.

  “I’ll see you in Hades,” snapped Norfolk, reaching for the disconnect button on his console, causing the screen to blank out.

  Staring at a blank screen, and realizing I was breathing hard enough you would have thought I’d just ran an endurance lap around the ship’s main gym, I took a moment to gather myself.

  “That went well,” I said.

  First Officer Manblaster gave me an appalled look.

  “What? It did,” I said defensively.

  I could tell no one on the bridge believed me, or at least no one in my line of sight. I couldn’t speak for anyone I could see behind me.

  Deciding it didn’t really matter what they thought, even if they were right, I put my attention back on the battle plot where it rightfully belonged.

  It appeared while I had been bandying words around with Norfolk the Imperials had caught up with and destroyed another six new Confederation warships.

  “I think it’s past time we taught the Imperial Navy a little respect,” I said flatly.

  “What are your orders, Sir?” First Officer Manblaster asked quickly.

  “We’ll proceed as planned,” I said, because really there was nothing to be done until we were closer. When we were, though…. “But once we close into range it’s going to be a different story. As they appear to have no interest in concerning themselves with taking surrenders….well.”

  I allowed myself to be deliberately vague, mainly because I was already on the hook for two potential war crimes violations myself. There was need to just hand any future prosecutors more ammunition.

  “Sir?” Steiner asked with concern.

  “Nothing doing, LC,” I said confidently, “I just meant I doubt they’ll be very interested in surrender themselves, considering their actions here today as well as how they think of me.”

  “Of course, Sir,” Lisa said still looking concerned.

  “You think the odds of that are very likely?” asked First Officer Manblaster.

  I looked at him and then it came to me: he was uncertain if we would be ever be in a position to request a surrender. The enemy did outnumber us pretty heavily. In heavy units alone they had an edge of 21 to 8 or 9, if you counted the Lucky Clover, or 11 when the Jumbles were added.

  For a moment, I considered whether a rational person would count the gunboat carriers, and then decided against it. No. They wouldn’t.

  I gave a silent, toothy smile. There was more than one reason I’d encouraged…well, alright, ordered Bluetooth to move toward that planetary body and its asteroid moon—and it wasn’t because it would help his little fleet survive.

  I paused. Well, alright, it wasn’t ‘just’ because it would help him because it would. More importantly for us right now was that it gave my fleet the best chance to even the odds.

  But, speaking of evening the odds, it was time to speak with my secret weapon. We really were moving too fast for a proper engagement, after all.

  Activating my com-system, I called Spalding.

  “What’s the good word, Sir?” asked the Chief Engineer.

  “Things are heating up around the planet just ahead, and while we may be late I would hate to miss the party entirely, Commander,” I said.

  Spalding nodded seriously.

  “Going a mite fast for that, aren’t we, Admiral?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  I was about to speak when I discovered that unobserved by either of the two of us my wife had entered the bridge and snuck up behind me.

  I paused to give her a questioning look but she motioned for me to continue speaking and ignore her.

  I shrugged and turned back to the commander.

  “That was exactly what I was thinking, Commander. You wouldn’t happen to have any way of slowing us down would you?” I said, returning to my conversation with the old engineer without missing a beat now that I knew it wasn’t some kind of emergency situation that had brought my wife up onto the bridge.

  More than once I’d broken out into a cold sweat thinking someone had stepped into a meeting to report another mutiny in the works. It was nice that I wasn’t expected to deal with something like that at the same time I was juggling fleets.

  “You thinking about using the maneuver, Sir?” asked Spalding.

  “The cat’s already out of the bag, Chief Engineer,” I shrugged, “I don’t see the point of holding back and it’s not like it’s a vanishing act. I say we use it while we can.”

  “You’re the Captain…I mean, Admiral,” Spalding colored with embarrassment before shrugging helplessly. He cleared his throat and immediately got a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked, really and seriously hoping there wasn’t. Its not that I placed all my eggs in one basket. We could do a high speed pass and then slow down to return to the battle but I didn’t want the Reclamation Fleet to have all that time to get ready for us. Not only would it give them more time to whittle Bluetooth down even further, but I wanted to get right in there and brawl.

  Fancy footwork was for lighter warships, and even more so than a standard Battleship a Super Battleship was built to slug it out.

  “Well I retrofitted those Battleships as best I could, but not every ship in the Spine was built to Caprian standards,” Spalding said, scorn in his voice as he compared the ship building standards of our home against its competitors.

  “I’m aware of that,” I said.

  “I just want to be clear. Without an experienced hand at the till and using sub-standard Battleships, there’s always going to be a risk. In this case, though, if the grav-plates overload and fail you could splat an entire crew against the front wall of every room that has a man or woman in it,” Spalding warned like he was the trumpet of doom.

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve had a non-Caprian Battleship carry out the maneuver,” I reminded him.

  “And we were lucky!” Spalding immediately groused. “And despite doing everything we could beforehand we still had things go wrong!”

  “You’re starting to sound cautious in your old age, Chief Engineer,” I said with a challenging expression, “first about using the Spindles and now the Maneuver. Is there something you’re not telling the rest of us?”

  Spalding’s brows beetled as he glared at me from under bushy brows. “Don’t you start that with me! You want a job done and done right, you come to old Spalding. There’s not a man in this fleet who can call this old cyborg a coward and I stand by what I’ve said,” Spalding said in a snappish voice, “is there anything I’m not telling you about the maneuver you don’t already know? No,” he added sourly, “to be clear: I’m not saying 'do it' and I’m not saying 'don’t.' What I’m saying is to go into this with your eyes wide open because if you crash and burn here there might not be a next time to learn from your mistake, and thousands of spacers will die.”

  “I get that,” I said dropping all levity, “and I don’t like playing roulette with the lives of my people any more than you do, but it’s a choice between risking losing some to an overstressed ship or losing even more to a prepared enemy. This is just a numbers game.”

  “That’s fine but if something goes wrong with this, I guarantee it’s
not going to be a pretty sight!” Spalding said angrily. “Your ship will be ready to go before we reach the moon, I can’t promise that an incompetent Chief Engineer on another ship will be able to say the same,” he added and then cut the channel.

  I released a sigh, pausing a moment to consider if I’d just made a mistake. Normally I wouldn’t be as concerned as I suddenly was, but if anyone could change my calculations with nothing more than dire warnings and a decided lack of facts it had to be my Chief Engineer.

  On the one hand, this was Spalding warning me. On the other hand, there was nothing definitive in what he had said, and from the outside it looked a lot like my Chief Engineer had come back from his latest Spindles misadventure uncharacteristically gun shy.

  No, I couldn’t afford to think like that. I either trusted my officers, especially Spalding, or I didn’t. With that decided, I took a moment to seriously consider what I would do if we lost a Battleship or even two to this Maneuver and if losing those ships would make me abort the order and come in slower if I knew about it beforehand.

  I took a few long moments to work it through, and though it pained me to admit it, so long as we wouldn’t lose our Super Battleship, I would still give the order. Did that make me an uncaring despot? I wasn’t sure.

  “Is this really a risk worth taking?” I muttered.

  “Why would you ask that?” Akantha said, startling me at just how close she’d snuck up on me while I was ruminating.

  “I’m just wondering if I’m playing too fast and loose with people’s lives,” I said in a quiet voice.

  “Will you win the battle if you don’t do this?” she asked.

  I hesitated. Nine against twenty one was rough odds, no matter how you sliced it. We needed to get in fast and hit hard before they could compensate for it.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Then you already have your answer. Unless you think this battle is lost no matter what actions you take? If so, I advise you to turn around now,” said Akantha.