Insurrection s-4

by David Weber

  She put the thought aside and leaned back in her chair, considering her new staff. Aside from Reznick, now a lieutenant senior grade, whom she'd been determined to have, she hardly knew any of them, but Bob was right: they looked good.

  Her new ops officer, Commander Stravos Kollentai was small, slight, and arrogant-the perfect fighter jock-but his efficiency reports were excellent and he radiated an aura of almost oppressive energy and competence. Her astrogator, Lieutenant Commander Richard Heuss, was a quiet fellow with fair hair and eyes like gray shutters. He said little, but his navigation was beautiful to see.

  And finally there was the new staff slot filled by Lieutenant Irene Jorgensen: battlegroup intelligence officer. Fleet had decided to once again remove the intelligence function from the ops officer's jurisdiction. That had happened before, during ISW 4, but the traditionalists in the service had never been happy about it. They'd returned intelligence to its subordination to ops with indecent haste following Raymond Prescott's retirement. Han had never understood exactly why, but there were always internal factions and cliques within the Navy, ready to engage in "turf wars" at the drop of a hat, and the spooks had lost that round.

  Unfortunately, the type of war they were fighting had resurrected the overwhelming logic in favor of intelligence's independence. And, Han thought with a small mental smile, the Republican Navy hadn't had as long for its factions and cliques to become set in ceramacrete. Still, even to Han, it felt strange to have the spooks speaking for themselves on the staff again after so long. On the other hand, the tall, scrawny lieutenant who filled the slot on her staff hid a lurking humor behind her muddy brown eyes and appeared to have a computer memory bank concealed somewhere about her unprepossessing anatomy.

  "Have the official orders come through yet, Admiral?" Tomanaga asked, breaking her train of thought.

  "Yes. Admiral Iskan will relieve me tomorrow and we'll move out to da Silva."

  Thank God. She'd been half-afraid the Admiralty would leave her here now that Cimmaron had been upgraded into what was clearly an admiral's billet even for the admiral-starved Republic.

  "I see." Tomanaga frowned. "Any word on our destination, sir?"

  "Not officially. But Fleet Ops whispered something about Rigel."

  "Rigel, sir?" Tomanaga blinked.

  "I think Fleet wants to keep an eye on Admiral Trevayne," Han said slowly, swinging her chair gently. "We're still not sure what happened, you know. I think someone's running a little scared over Zephrain RDS."

  "Stupid of them, sir, if you'll forgive me," Tomanaga said.

  "Oh? And on what do you base that pronouncement, Commander?"

  "I don't think any 'mystery weapon' did in Admiral Ashigara, sir. The ops plan relied too much on surprise and ECM, and they screwed up when they tried a pincer. All it gave them was lousy coordination. That's why the diversion got chewed up when the main attack went wrong."

  "And how did it go wrong?"

  "I'm not certain," Tomanaga admitted, "but the survivors all agree BG 32 wasn't involved in the Gateway fighting till close to the end-so Trevayne must've been busy destroying the carriers. But carriers are faster than monitors, and Admiral Ashigara's fighters had at least as much effective firepower as BG 32. Of course, she didn't expect to see him there any more than he could have been expecting her, but if she'd had time to launch her birds, she should have been able to stand off and hammer him. The fact that she didn't means that somehow or other he spotted her despite her ECM-probably when he was already in SBM range, at least, of her carriers-and clobbered them before she got the fighters off. It's the only answer I can think of, sir."

  "So it was bad luck?"

  "Maybe," Tomanaga said, "but it was compounded by bad planning. They should've concentrated in Bonaparte and taken everything in through the new warp point to pin the defenders against the Gateway. Then we'd've had tactical command exercised in one place over only one force that could've withdrawn down a single warp line. As it was, both COs were out of contact and neither could cut and run as long as that might leave the other unsupported-a classic example of defeat in detail, triggered by bad luck, but not caused by it."

  "You could be right," Han admitted, for she'd pondered much the same thoughts herself. "But why not new weapons, as well?"

  "The time factor, sir. I don't care if Trevayne is a special emissary from God Himself, it takes time to turn research into hardware. That's why we should hit them again now-immediately. Forget the border. We've got the Rump on the run; keep them there with feints and go for Zephrain now, before they really do get new hardware on line."

  "I'm inclined to agree, Bob. Unhappily, grand strategy is the First Space Lord's job. And whether you're right or not, it makes sense to picket the old Rigelian and Arachnid systems, whatever the Rim is or isn't up to."

  "Agreed, sir, but a monitor battlegroup with carrier support is hardly a 'picket.' It's a vest-pocket task force, and one cut for a mighty big vest. We'd be better employed striking directly at Zephrain rather than worrying about what they may do to us." Tomanaga sounded unwontedly serious, even worried. "If we don't hit them pretty quick, we may find ourselves up against exactly what we're afraid of right now. Give Trevayne time to get the new systems on line, and . . ."

  He shrugged eloquently.

  "Consider your point made," Han said softly. "Write up a staff appreciation and we'll sit on it long enough to see where they send us. If we wind up out near Rigel and we still agree you know what you're talking about, we'll update it and fire it off. Fair enough?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good. Meanwhile, tidy up here and we'll transfer out to Bernardo da Silva."

  "Yes, sir."

  Tomanaga left, and Han frowned pensively down at the desk she would delightedly turn over to Jack Iskan in two days, wishing she disagreed with her chief of staff.

  "Another day with nothing to report, sir." Tomanaga sounded disgusted. "I don't see why they're so damned mesmerized by the need to picket the Rim. Go in now and smash 'em up fast-take some casualties if we have to, but get it over with-and we won't need to scatter a quarter of our available strength out over the damned approaches."

  Han tried and failed to imagine Tsing Chang unburdening himself with equal frankness. It was strange how well she got along with someone so different from Tsing. Just as strange as to remember that she'd once distrusted Tomanaga's enthusiasm.

  "Well, Bob, we've sent off your appreciation," she said calmly. "In fact, we've done everything we can short of taking it upon ourselves to attack single-handedly."

  "I suppose so, sir," Tomanaga agreed sourly, "but the crews are beginning to go stale."

  "I know."

  Battlegroup 19 had maintained its long, slow patrol of the old Rigelian warp lines, with an occasional foray into dead Arachnid space, for almost five months without a sign of the enemy. They'd encountered a single Tangri battlecruiser, but the horseheads had shown admirable restraint and declined to match themselves against four monitors, two fleet carriers, two light carriers, and four escort destroyers.

  Yet that very boredom had been a godsend for Han, and she would have been the first to admit it. Patrol duty wasn't glamorous, but at least it let someone a bit skittish over reassuming a space command ease back into it. Her worries had faded as she grappled with her new responsibilities, and she could look in her mirror now and recognize herself again.

  "Well," she said finally, "let's find something to occupy them, then." She swiveled her chair down and frowned-her equivalent of raging consternation-and tapped her terminal. "You've seen this from Shokaku?"

  "That freighter, sir?"

  The light carrier's recon fighters had found the remains of a freighter drifting erratically around the primary of the Orpheus One System.

  "Yes. Does anything about it strike you as odd?"

  "You mean aside from what she was doing there to begin with?"

  "Exactly. There are no inhabited planets in Orpheus One System. In fact, aside
from Shanak and Franos and Telik-both of which belong to the Star Union-there aren't any inhabited worlds within four transits of Orpheus, and haven't been since the Alliance dusted the Arachnids out eighty years ago. I suppose her skipper might've been taking a short cut between Shanak and Rehfrak by way of Zephrain, since it was a Rump registry vessel, not a Tabby. But it's hard to believe anyone would try that, even assuming he could talk the Tabbies into letting him, and I doubt he could. Not when he had a sub-charter from Admiral Trevayne in Zephrain. That made her an official belligerent, and the Tabbies would never have let her pass through their space. But I can't think of anything else he'd be doing unescorted on this side of Zephrain, either, especially this close to Tangri space. Surely everyone knows they've been using that closed warp point in AP Five! They were doing that occasionally even before the Civil War distracted us from the area, and Trevayne's not stupid enough to route a ship through here. Even assuming she'd have anywhere to go out this way."

  "But she's here, sir, and she was looted."

  "True," Han nodded. "But did you examine the passenger list Shokaku pulled out of her computers?"

  "Well, no, sir. Why?"

  "They recovered the bodies of all twenty-five crewmen," Han said.

  "So? The horseheads don't take prisoners, sir."

  "True. But the passenger and crew sections were undamaged. Whoever attacked raked the drive and command sections with primaries and needle beams, then looted the holds and finished off the crew in the process."

  "Yes, sir. Typical Tangri work."

  Tomanaga was puzzled. Clearly his admiral had noticed something he had missed.

  "Except this, Bob. According to the passenger manifest, there were fourteen young women aboard that ship. So where are their bodies?"

  "What?" Tomanaga rose and moved to her desk. "May I, sir?" he asked, laying his hand on the swiveled terminal.

  "Certainly."

  He turned the screen and peered at it thoughtfully, mind racing.

  "It doesn't make sense," he muttered. "Only the women are missing."

  "Exactly. And the Tangri have never shown any particular interest in kidnapping young, female Terrans."

  "Yes, sir. So it had to be someone with a use for them. . . . What about ransom? Were any of them wealthy?"

  "On a tramp freighter?" Han shook her head. "Navy nurses and doctors from Zephrain."

  "So whoever hit her didn't hail from the Rim, either." Tomanaga frowned. "I don't like it."

  "Neither do I. Nor, I suppose, did those passengers and crewmen."

  "Sorry, sir. I meant I don't like the implications. Whoever did it isn't based at Orpheus-we swept the place with a fine-toothed comb. That means some bunch of Terrans is involved in inter-system raiding. And that, sir, means there's a joker in the deck. If we spot anyone, we can't know whether it's the Rim or these pirates."

  "Perhaps." Han cleared her screen and a warp chart flickered to life. She tapped it with a stylus. "Here's our patrol area. Here's Orpheus One." She touched a light dot to one side of their patrol area. "Now, everything Rimward of Orpheus Two belongs to the Rim, and whoever it is can't operate from there, because both sides watch those warp points like hawks. And he can't operate from here-" her arcing stylus indicated their patrol area "-or we'd've spotted him. But that leaves this warp network over here, see?" She tapped the screen. "It connects with Orpheus from the back, through the closed warp point in Bug Eight . . . and it also extends all the way to here. . . ."

  "My God! Right into our rear areas!"

  "Precisely. I don't know who they are or where they came from, but someone is raiding civilian traffic from a base somewhere along this warp network. There's nothing much out here but outposts and mining colonies-no heavy traffic, sparse populations, slow communications. Most of the 'colonies'-such as they are, and what there is of them-are less than fifty or sixty years old, emplaced since ISW Four. They could be almost anywhere. Take over a mining colony and the nav beacons and you control all communications with the system. Who's to know you've done it?"

  "Then we'd better get a drone off immediately, sir."

  "Agreed. But what then? It'll take two months just to reach Cimmaron. Then two more months for Admiral Iskan to reply or relay it-four months, minimum, for whoever it is to go on doing whatever they're doing. No, we have to deal with it ourselves."

  "But, sir, this area-" he indicated the suspect warp lines "-is outside our patrol area. It'd take us-what, five weeks?-just to get there, and it'd mean abandoning the picket. I don't think the Admiralty would like that."

  "The Admiralty isn't out here, Bob: we are. We won't take the entire battlegroup, anyway. We'll take one other monitor, Shokaku, and two of the cans and leave the rest here under Commodore Cruett. I suppose I could detach Cruett, but it's my responsibility if decisions have to be made."

  "Yes, sir. But-"

  "Bob, we're going. We're supposed to prevent things like this, war or no war. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good. Then get together with Stravos and rough out a set of orders for Cruett. And ask Dick to lay out the best search pattern for us. I don't want to be gone any longer than we have to be."

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  He left and Han cocked her chair back once more, studying the star map and disliking her thoughts.

  TRNS Bernardo da Silva plowed slowly through space, accompanied by her sister monitor Franklin P. Eisenhower and the light carrier Shokaku. Two escort destroyers watched the rear while Shokaku's recon fighters swept the detachment's projected track and flanks, and Rear Admiral Li Han sat on her palatial flag bridge, fingers steepled under her clean jaw line, contemplating her empty plot.

  A month of cruising the suspect warp lines, and nothing. Was she on the wrong track? Had she made a major error-one that validated her earlier fears over her judgment? Her face was calm as she silently reviewed her discussions with Tomanaga, her endless perusal of dry facts with Irene Jorgensen. The data was there, she decided once more; only her response to it was suspect.

  A bell chimed, and she roused, cocking an eyebrow at the com section as David Reznick bent over the battle code printer. He tore off the message flimsy and turned to her.

  "Signal from Shokaku, sir. One of the fighters is onto something."

  "I see." Han scanned the message. "Doesn't say much, does she?"

  "No, sir. But her fighter's going in for a closer look. Shall I sound action stations, sir?"

  "Not yet, Lieutenant. We're a good three hours behind those fighters-we'll have time. Excuse me a moment."

  Han summoned up the com image of Samuel Schwerin, her flag captain.

  "Good morning, Sam," she greeted him. "Shokaku's fighters have picked up something-no telling what yet-on our line of advance. They're going in for a closer look, but it'll take us about three hours to catch up with them, so I thought we might advance lunch to get it out of the way if we have to go to action stations."

  "Certainly, sir. I'll see to it immediately."

  "Thank you, Sam."

  Reznick's printer chimed again as Han signed off, and she waited patiently. If using coded whisker lasers delayed communications, it also eliminated the chance of message interception and greatly reduced the likelihood of long-range detection. Then Reznick handed her the message, and her face tightened almost imperceptibly as she read it. She turned to Lieutenant Jorgensen.

  "Irene," she said quietly, "punch up your shipping logs and double-check for me, please. According to Shokaku, this is what's left of a Polaris-class liner. I'm afraid it may be Argosy Polaris."

  "Yes, sir," the lieutenant was punching keys, watching the data come up. "Argosy Polaris, sir. Two hundred passengers and a priority medical cargo. Reported overdue at Kariphos ten months ago."

  "Damn," Han said softly.

  "It's the Polaris, sir," Commander Tomanaga confirmed grimly, studying the drifting hulk on his screen. "Somebody ripped hell out of her, too. Must've been quick and dirty to keep her from even g
etting a drone away. Look at that."

  His finger indicated the relatively small punctures riddling the command section of the big liner.

  "Primaries and needles," Han said flatly. "They knew she was armed-not that her popguns would've helped much. So they closed in, tractored her, and blew her command and com sections before she could yell for help."

  "But how did they get close enough? And what's she doing way out here? We're six transits off the Stendahl-Kariphos route."

  "I don't know how they fooled her master," Han said, "but getting her here wouldn't be hard. There's no damage to her drive pods. They just blasted the command deck and then gave whoever was left his options: surrender or see two hundred passengers vaporized. After that, they used the engine room controls to bring her out here so they could loot her at leisure. Not the approved technique, but workable as long as they were in company with someone with intact nav capabilities."

  "Sounds reasonable." Tomanaga's words were calm; his face and tone weren't. "But it was sloppy to leave her intact. They should've blown her fusion plants or dropped her into the primary to hide the evidence."

  "No, Bob. This is a lonely spot, and that's a hundred thousand tonnes of ship. Lots of spares and replacements to be scavenged out of her."

  "Of course." Tomanaga shook his head. "Shall I send in the examination teams, sir?"

  "Yes. And call away my cutter. I'm going too."

  Han swam down the passage of the dead liner, her powerful lamp illuminating the splendid furnishing of first class-marred in spots by laser burns and occasional scars of pure vandalism. The raiders must have damped the power before they depressurized the hull, for the blast doors stood open. She'd seen one grisly corpse-a crewman dead of explosive decompression-and she was coldly certain they'd dumped atmosphere intentionally to kill any fugitives.

  She turned a corner and spun gracefully, landing on her magnetized boot soles beside the Marine search party which had summoned her. Two troopers were busy sealing a transparent bubble to the bulkhead around a closed hatch.

  "Afternoon, Admiral."

  Major Bryce saluted her, and she returned his salute, then shifted her magsoles to the deckhead, hanging like a weightless bat to watch over the shoulders of the work detail.