But the crew was completely different. Her flight controllers had died with Elysium and Admiral Roberts.
“Emergence in sixty seconds,” someone reported aloud. “Combat Space Patrol ready to go.”
Via Somnia should be safe. They still had links to the systems there via q-com—and the crew had been briefed on Operation Medusa this morning.
Their sacrifices had held Walkingstick’s attention for long enough for the Alliance to sucker-punch the Commonwealth. It was worth it; Michelle knew that.
Didn’t make the empty bunks in flight country hurt less. Didn’t make the fact that she’d lost a carrier hurt less.
It sure as Void didn’t make losing the Admiral hurt less.
“Emergence!”
Avalon’s acting CAG had no business on the CSP. Neither did the fleet CAG. That left Michelle in the flight control center, watching sixty of her people go into space without her.
In theory, Via Somnia was safe. In practice, they’d stripped it as bare as they could without it being obvious, but there still, thankfully, didn’t appear to be any Commonwealth ships here.
Hopefully, there was enough equipment left for Forty-First Fleet’s desperately needed repairs.
FOR THE SECOND time in barely more than a week, the starships of Forty-First Fleet tucked themselves into the repair yards at Via Somnia. There were no yard workers to help them out this time, though. The repairs would have to be done by the crews themselves.
Gathering aboard Avalon with the other CAGs and Captains, Michelle wondered what the news was going to be. No one was even sure who was supposed to be in command of Forty-First Fleet at the moment. Everything was in question.
Elijah Hammond, Avalon’s Captain, was standing at the head of the room with Lord Captain the Elector Maria von Kita of the Righteous Sword, however, so that was somewhat suggestive.
“Everyone have a seat,” Hammond ordered. “I believe now is as good a time as any to pull us all together in person and go over what our plans for the next four weeks are.
Four weeks? That sounded quite specific.
“Lord Captain von Kita and I, as the senior Captains, have been in discussion with Alliance Joint Command as to what we are going to do from here on out,” he continued. “Lord Captain von Kita is senior to myself, so I have officially yielded command to her.”
“Avalon remains our largest and most powerful unit, however,” von Kita continued as Hammond stepped aside, “so Captain Hammond will continue to act as my second-in-command until I am relieved.
“And we have confirmed with Joint Command that I will be relieved,” she noted. “What we were briefed on today that has not yet been made public knowledge, even in the fleet, is that the Medusa fleets will be falling back on Via Somnia.
“All four of the Federation’s Myth and Truth-class mobile shipyards are on their way here, as well as an unspecified—but likely large!—number of freighters and transports carrying supplies, parts, starfighters and replacement personnel.
“The first fleets will be returning in about nineteen days. Seventh Fleet under Admiral Rothenberg is expected on November tenth. At that point”—von Kita smiled predatorily—“we expect to have consolidated approximately one hundred capital ships in the Via Somnia System to be repaired and rearmed.
“We hope to have our own vessels fully functional by the time Admiral Rothenberg arrives,” she noted. “My understanding is that Seventh Fleet took severe damage and may not have a significant number of combat-capable units.
“Other fleets will be following, however, and while the exact execution date is going to be left to Admiral Rothenberg’s discretion, the information Captain Hammond and I have received from Joint Command is that, barring a Commonwealth surrender, the Niagara System will fall before December.
“One way or another, people, Command intends to make sure that James Walkingstick does not threaten our worlds again!”
46
Niagara System
18:00 November 8, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Ontario Orbit
“WHAT IN VOID IS THAT?”
James Calvin Walkingstick chuckled at the disconcerted tone of his flag staff sensor tech’s voice.
“That, Specialist, is an Alcubierre-Stetson drive courier ship,” he explained, studying the strange, bulging ship on the display. His neural feed was time-stamping the data, informing him that the Cherenkov radiation pulse of the ship’s emergence was over two minutes old.
The courier’s commander had taken no risks with his emergence. Given that he must have left Sol within two days of the destruction of the q-com network and come directly here, that made sense to James. If the message was important enough for that rush, it was important enough to spend the extra hour or so of sublight transit time to not risk having the courier vaporized.
To an eye used to the massive, kilometer-plus lengths and solid hulls of modern A-S drive warships and freighters, the courier was strange. The four Class One mass manipulators that powered her Alcubierre drive made up roughly eighty percent of her volume, massive bulging spheres attached to a central hull barely large enough to keep the Class Ones from just being welded together.
The only part of the ship that remotely rivaled the mass manipulators for size was the engine pods at the rear of the ship. Antimatter engines were already blazing to life, accelerating toward Ontario and the Niagara Fleet Base at five hundred gravities.
Tier Three acceleration on a starship. The strange ship had been built to get where it needed to go in a hurry—and had, until a month before, been utterly obsolete.
“We have courier ships?” MacGinnis asked, leaning over her tech’s shoulder. “I figured we were going to be using freighters for messages for the foreseeable future.”
“That’s going to be most of it,” James agreed. “We have four. They’re intended for delivering physical delegations in speed and comfort, not carrying all of the dictates and messages of an interstellar government.”
“And they sent one to us,” his operations officer said softly. “Well, it’s nice to know we’re still important, right, boss?”
“Ask me that again in”—James checked his sensor feed—“two hours after I’ve reviewed their messages.”
This had to have been the first courier to have left Sol. That…probably wasn’t a good sign.
THE COURIER WAITED until they were within one light-minute of the fleet base to start sending the complicated electronic challenge-and-response necessary for James to be able to access the confidential messages.
With most of a minute of delay on every transmission, it took over thirty minutes to process the challenges and allow James to open up the official mail.
The very first, urgent, “Marshal’s Eyes Only” message was from the Committee on Unification. It was a recorded video and he linked it directly to his implants.
The video put him standing in front of the long table the Committee used for their meetings, and something in how they were looking at the pickup suggested the feeling like he was on trial was not unintentional.
“Admiral Walkingstick,” the man closest to the camera—not, James noted, Michael Burns, the Committee’s acknowledged unofficial leader—greeted him. The speaker was the Senator for Tau Ceti, a chubby albino man named Giorgio Mhasalkar.
“By now, we presume you have realized that the Commonwealth quantum communication network is down. We know, with certainty, that every station in the Sol System has been destroyed—including the supposedly secret continuity-of-government facility at Uranus.
“We have sufficient information prior to the destruction of facilities in other star systems to be quite certain what happened,” Mhasalkar concluded. “A series of deep strikes by the so-called Alliance of Free Stars was launched with the specific intent of destroying our communications capability.”
He paused, glancing at the other Senators and Assembly Members around him.
“They have succeeded,” he said bluntly. “The
courier carrying this message also carries a delegation empowered by the Star Chamber to negotiate with the Alliance. We intend to offer a cease-fire in place, returning control of all occupied Alliance systems and recognizing their de facto control of the Via Somnia and Presley Systems.
“That will be used as a starting point for a permanent peace treaty. Your efforts to annex the Rimward Marches, Marshal Walkingstick, are now at an end. You have failed us.”
Arguably, they were cutting any chance of victory out from under his feet. James wouldn’t exactly call this situation a failure on his part, after all. If they’d done what he’d suggested, the Alliance would have been crushed a year or more earlier.
“A similar delegation has been sent to the Stellar League,” Mhasalkar noted. “Until we have secured the unity of our own systems, we cannot afford continued external threats and conflicts. We will be forced to negotiate, to make recompense.
“We are being forced to humiliate ourselves,” the Senator said bluntly, “but the Star Chamber recognizes that we cannot save the Commonwealth from the consequences of your war with the Alliance without turning our focus inwards.”
Your war. Not our war. Roberts’s words about where the Alliance put the blame were suddenly echoing with chilling weight in the back of James’s mind.
He wondered what the delegation the Star Chamber had sent would do if the Alliance asked for one Marshal Walkingstick’s head—hopefully figuratively, but he wouldn’t put literally past the Imperator of the Coraline Imperium—as a condition of permanent peace.
“This will no longer be your concern,” Mhasalkar told him. “You are to return to Sol aboard your flagship immediately to surrender your Marshal’s mace. Since the Rimward Marches were the origin of this attack, we will need to debrief you on this enemy.
“We may need to pull back for now, but, believe me, Admiral Walkingstick, there will be consequences for this!”
The message ended and James opened his eyes to study his flag deck again. He’d need to go over what information they’d provided. If nothing else, the courier’s sensors would tell him how the Battle of Sol had gone after the Central Nexus had been destroyed.
His guess was “not well”, though the fact that the Senate was in a position to be sending delegations meant it couldn’t have gone as badly as he feared.
The Alliance, after all, was apparently not dictating surrender terms from Earth orbit. They were still well short of his worst-case scenario!
THE REAL SURPRISE came when the courier ship reached orbit, and a short-range transmission from the captain asked James to come aboard in person.
He’d been wondering why the courier ship, designed to drop into a system, launch a data pulse, and be on its way to the next as soon as it got a responding pulse, had come all the way into Ontario orbit.
Apparently, it had been to speak with him.
A shuttle delivered him to the nameless courier ship, where a pair of Marines were waiting for him to escort him deeper into its plushly appointed VIP section.
“What is this about, Sergeant?” he asked the senior Marine quietly.
“I honestly don’t know, sir,” the blonde Sergeant replied quickly, her gaze refusing to meet his. “The Ambassador wanted to speak to you in person. I don’t know why.”
James grunted. The Marine clearly knew something—and was under strict orders to say nothing. So far, no one had even told him who the Ambassador was.
Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to be escorted into a palatial sitting area and find himself facing the calmly seated form of Hope Burns. The wife of the Senator for Alpha Centauri was one of the Commonwealth’s leading diplomats.
The perfectly composed black woman might be twenty years her husband’s junior, but most people who knew them both suspected that she’d pursued and courted the older man to have a Senatorial trophy husband, rather than the other way around.
James was close enough friends with Michael Burns to know that wasn’t far from the truth, but also that the pair were actually sickeningly in love—in private, at least. It would never do for two of the most powerful figures in the Commonwealth’s government to hold hands where rivals might see them.
The Marines shut the door behind him and Burns rose to wrap James in a tight hug.
“It’s good to see you,” she whispered. “It’s been a hellish few weeks.”
He returned the embrace and stepped back to study her. If Hope Burns had had a bad few weeks, it didn’t show. But then, he suspected his own appearance didn’t reflect the last month either.
“I have the formal notice of my order to return to Earth,” he said quietly. “How bad is it?”
“Bad,” she said flatly. “While I have several tiers of specific offers that Foreign Affairs top people went through as a ground, my authority is functionally unlimited.”
Unlimited. That was a bad word when applied to the woman sent to negotiate peace.
“No one wanted to use the word surrender,” she noted. “But the level of plenipotentiary authority I have been given made it clear that if the Alliance will accept no less, I’m authorized to negotiate a conditional surrender.”
“Or an unconditional one,” James concluded.
“Or an unconditional one,” she agreed. “If that’s the only way to get the Alliance to stop shooting at us while we sort out the wreckage from their destruction of our communications.”
She sighed.
“Unification is inevitable,” she murmured. “But…damned if they haven’t managed to produce the one roadblock that’s going to slow it down a lot. It’ll be years before we have even a basic network back up. Decades before we return to what we had.”
“Less, surely, if we focus on it,” James replied.
“Perhaps. But we are crippled, James. Crippled. The Commonwealth may not survive the next few years—systems that secede will be able to buy q-com blocks from the League or the Alliance’s members, but no one will sell them to us.”
He winced.
“That bad?”
“Officially, everyone is happy to be Unified, so of course they’ll stick with the Commonwealth,” Burns said dryly. “In practice, well, Michael and I have always kept a solid finger on the pulse of the truth of the Commonwealth.
“By December, at least one system will have seceded. By February, at least one multi-stellar unit. We won’t even learn about the secessions until it’s too late to do anything. Coordinating forces to end these secessions will be…difficult.”
“But doable,” he pointed out. “We have enough older warships to use as couriers to move the more recent vessels around to put out fires. We can hold the Commonwealth together.”
“And who would command the forces that would do this?” she asked. “Which Admiral would you trust with the knife at the Commonwealth’s throat?”
He blinked. She was right. The civil war to come would require large forces operating with minimal command and control. They would need officers they could trust completely.
“I have several suggestions,” he said levelly. “Officers whose loyalty I would trust completely.”
Burns chuckled softly.
“You aren’t being recalled to ask for your advice, James,” she told him. “They told you, what, you’re being recalled for debriefing?”
“Exactly,” he confirmed, wondering what she was talking about.
“Michael figured they wouldn’t have the gumption to tell you the truth. He couldn’t tell me what they did say, though.”
“The truth?”
“You’re being recalled to face a trial before the Senate for grand treason,” Hope Burns told him quietly. “And the Senate has already made up their mind. If you go home, James Calvin Walkingstick, they will kill you.”
JAMES FOUND HIMSELF NOTING, vaguely, the details of how palatially the room Hope Burns had met him in was furnished. Most starships had plain metal floors and walls, maybe with a rug in people’s quarters. This room was carpeted and the walls had been ca
refully painted with a mural of one of Earth’s beaches.
The furniture, including the chair was sitting in, was luxuriously comfortable and the room was being kept noticeably warmer than the rest of the ship. The courier ship crew did their best, it seemed, to pamper the VIPs they carried.
All of that was a distraction from what she’d just told him.
“Kill me?” he finally asked. “That’s…extreme. Why?”
“Because they need to blame someone,” Burns said. “Because they can’t blame the Star Chamber for voting for this war, so they’ll blame you for ‘dragging’ the Commonwealth into it. They’ll claim that if you were actually loyal and competent, the war would have been over years ago.
“They’ll blame you for starting the war, they’ll blame you for not finishing the war, and they’ll blame you for ‘allowing’ the Alliance to launch strikes into Commonwealth space,” she concluded.
“It’s all…Voidstuff,” she noted. “But they don’t care. You’re going to be scapegoated for the Alliance’s attacks on us, found publicly guilty of treason, and executed.”
James shivered.
“Even putting aside the fact that I’d rather not be shot, that’s a really bad idea,” he said. “They’ll undermine the loyalty of every flag officer. If we face execution for losing…”
“Then the entire military structure that we need to hold the Commonwealth together will start fracturing,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you this if I agreed with them, James. Letting them execute you could destroy the Commonwealth.
“You have to run, James. Send in your mace and resignation and disappear.”
“I don’t run,” he told her. “I never have. I never will.”
“It’s the only choice you have left, James,” she said. “If you go home, they’ll execute you. There’s no escaping that. If you defy their orders and stay here in command of your fleet, you’ll end up accelerating the disintegration of the Commonwealth.
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 30
