by David Weber
"Enemy has locked on," Tracking announced, and Mugabi's jaw clenched. "Entering enemy missile range in seven minutes," the Tracking officer continued in the clipped tones of despair held at bay by professionalism. "Entering our own range in sixteen minutes."
Mugabi didn't even look away from the plot. There was no more point in acknowledging the report than there would have been in pretending that his fleet could survive nine minutes of Galactic fire from three dozen Ogres.
He watched the time to engagement readout spin downward on the main plot, and to his own surprise, he realized his muscles were relaxing, not tensing, as the timer whirled towards zero. Perhaps it was relief, a corner of his mind thought almost calmly. Relief that he and all of his crews were about to die and so would not have to witness the destruction of the planet they were sworn to defend.
"Entering enemy missile range in two min—"
Tracking's report chopped off in mid-syllable as the plot changed abruptly.
Mugabi's eyes flared wide as the impossible icons flashed into existence. The Galactics' stealth technology was enormously superior to anything humanity had ever possessed. ONI knew that it was, that the existence of that technology helped to explain how the Federation had been able to smother the Solar System with listening posts and automated spies for at least seventy years before the human race became even peripherally aware of its existence. But Lach'heranu hadn't bothered with stealth. Not against something as primitive and unsophisticated as the scanner systems of the Solarian Navy. There'd been no reason to.
But it had just become evident that someone in the universe had a stealth technology which was superior even to that of the Federation. That was the only possible explanation for how nine unknown warships could possibly have made their way into attack range of Lach'heranu's squadron completely undetected.
And they had been undetected. That was obvious the instant they opened fire, for the Federation's superdreadnoughts were taken totally by surprise. All of their defensive and sensor systems had been directed towards their contemptible human victims, and their point defense fire was late, thin, and ineffectual as the unknowns' first missile broadsides went smashing home.
They were fast, those missiles, Mugabi thought numbly. The Solarian Navy's missiles had a maximum velocity of sixty percent of light-speed, and that was possible only because ONI had managed to steal the design for their drives from the Federation's dead archives. The Galactics' own current design, a mere twelve hundred years old, had a maximum velocity of seventy-five percent of light-speed. But the missiles slamming into the shields of Lach'heranu's superdreadnoughts were moving at over ninety percent of light-speed, and even from here, Mugabi could tell that the incoming birds were equipped with ECM systems at least two or three generations ahead of anything in the Federation's arsenal.
"Who the Hell—?"
Discipline cut off the incredulous exclamation, but Mugabi never even noticed as he watched the bright, terrible suns of antimatter warheads rip and tear at Lach'heranu's shields. The yield figures on those explosions were much higher than they ought to have been—higher than the Galactics' own weapons could have produced—and their victims' shields burned like tinder under their fury. Even if he'd noticed the highly unprofessional outburst, though, he could scarcely have complained about it, since it summed up his own feelings so perfectly. Who the Hell were they? And where the Hell had they come from? And—
"Attention, Admiral Mugabi!"
Mugabi's eyes were already as wide as they could get, but they tried to glaze over as the unknown voice, speaking English with an accent he'd never heard before, sounded in his earbug. The only way it could have gotten there was for the unknowns to have invaded Terra's communications net through at least a dozen levels of encryption and security firewalls that should have held up even a Galactic AI for a minimum of fifteen minutes.
"Break off, Admiral Mugabi!" the unknown voice snapped in his ear. "Leave them to us!"
Even as the voice spoke, another salvo of those terrible missiles crashed into Lach'heranu's ships, and the Solarian Navy watched in disbelief as it saw something no mortal eye had seen in over sixty-two thousand years.
A Federation superdreadnought blew up.
One moment it was there, well over a billion tons of warship, with a crew of over three thousand. The next instant, it was an expanding ball of plasma, and a jubilant bellow of savage satisfaction went up from the officers on Terra's flag deck. Mugabi's voice was a part of that bellow, but then he shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter and wrenched himself back out of the exultation raging about him. His command was only minutes short of the Federation warships' engagement envelope, and if there was one thing in the universe he knew, it was that his ships had no business at all between those warring leviathans.
"All units, execute evasion vector Echo Niner! Execute Echo Niner immediately!" he barked.
Acknowledgments streamed back as maneuvering officers fought free of their own hypnotic fascination with their tactical plots, and Mugabi's fleet broke away from the death ride it had embraced just a handful of minutes before. A part of the admiral's mind monitored the frantic breakaway maneuver, but almost absently, for he was unable to tear his eyes from the plot as the outnumbered attackers ripped into Lach'heranu's fleet like ravening demons.
He had never imagined anything like it. Those weren't warships. They were something else entirely, something that took combat power to a whole new level. As his sensors collected more and more data, his disbelief only grew. There were only nine of the newcomers against thirty-five Ogres, and everyone knew—not just the Federation, but ONI, as well—that the Ogre-class was the most powerful warship that had ever been built. They were invincible. Nothing had ever been able to stand up to one of them.
But the unknowns weren't "standing up" to them; they were tearing them apart.
CIC's estimates scrolled up the side of Mugabi's plot, and all his years of experience in naval service insisted that those estimates had to be wrong. Each of those nine ships was fifty percent larger than an Ogre-class. Fifty percent. And despite that, they were at least twenty-five percent faster and far more maneuverable. More preposterous still, their firepower and energy signatures, now that they had emerged from whatever unreasonably efficient stealth technology had hidden their approach, indicated that they were at least six times as powerful, on a ton-for-ton basis, as anything the Federation had ever built.
It was flatly impossible, but those nine ships had Lach'heranu's entire squadron outnumbered by better than two-to-one.
It was a short, vicious, ugly battle. One which lasted only a very little longer than the one Lach'heranu had planned upon... but had a very different outcome. Even in a straight, standup fight in which both sides had known what was coming, the Federation squadron would have been doomed. Taken by surprise in the deep-space equivalent of a point-blank ambush, Lach'heranu and her ships had no chance at all. Two of the unknown attackers were lightly damaged; none of Lach'heranu's superdreadnoughts survived the engagement. A handful of her cruisers tried to break away and run for it, but three of the unknowns loped off after them, overtaking them with absurd ease, and blew them out of existence long before they could get beyond Sol's phase limit and go to FTL drive. Mugabi had no idea if Lach'heranu or any of her ship commanders had attempted to surrender, but if they had, no one on the other side had been interested in allowing them to.
The Solarian Navy floated in space, stunned spectators to the carnage which dwarfed any battle it had ever imagined, and Mugabi knew that every single crewman aboard every single ship was wondering exactly the same thing.
And then the repeater plot reconfigured itself into a communications screen once more, without any input from any member of Terra's crew, and an alien, saurian face looked out of it.
Mugabi felt his jaw try to drop yet again as he recognized the face, or at least the species to which its owner belonged. So far as he knew, no human had ever managed to communicate with the
species the Federation called the Ternaui, but ONI was very familiar with them. Everyone knew that the Ternaui were the most loyal, utterly reliable bodyguards any of the Galactics could hope for. The xenologists' best guess was that the Ternaui were telepaths, and that the Federation had devised a technique which allowed it to "program" them for complete obedience and loyalty. Whether that was true or not, humanity had been given ample proof of the effectiveness of a Ternaui bodyguard, and there was no question that the species was mute.
Which made what happened next as impossible as everything else that had happened in the last half hour.
"Good afternoon, Admiral Mugabi," the Ternaui said. His—or "its," Mugabi supposed, if it happened to be one of the neuters—mouth never moved at all, but its obviously artificial voice was as melodious and expressive as any human voice the admiral had ever heard, and its strangely beautiful silver eyes with their inky-black, vertical pupils seemed to look straight into his own. "We apologize for the abrupt nature of our intervention... and for the fact that it was impossible for us to alert you to our presence earlier. We realize that what has just happened must be extremely confusing, although, we hope, not unwelcome."
For a species which was supposed to be incapable of speech, the Ternaui turned out to have a remarkable gift for understatement, Mugabi thought.
"I speak to you as High Chancellor of the Avalon Empire," the scale-hided alien continued. "And as High Chancellor, I formally invite you to come aboard our flagship in order to meet with the Emperor so that he might explain to you what brings us here today."
-XII-
Quentin Mugabi had never imagined such a warship. Unlike the flattened ovoid shape of the Federation's Ogres, this vessel was an almost perfect sphere, fourteen miles in diameter, more like a moon than anything Mugabi would have called a ship. As his cutter approached it, he'd watched domes, engine pods, and weapons housings swell across its surface, but the sheer size of the ship had prevented his emotions from truly recognizing and accepting their mountain-range height and ruggedness. It was only now, as the cutter passed along the flank of a drive housing larger than a Solarian Navy heavy cruiser at a range of barely a quarter-mile, that the true enormity of the ship came home to him.
Yet the size of the vessel was the least of the impossibilities his battered brain found itself compelled to deal with. He was honest enough with himself to admit that he was still in a state of semi-shock from the incredible violence and speed with which Lach'heranu's entire squadron had been destroyed. Not to mention his sheer astonishment that any of the ships under his command were still alive! No doubt that had a great deal to do with his sense that the entire universe was just slightly out of focus. But the appearance of a Ternaui as the spokesman for this "Avalon Empire," was just as stunning in its own way. Mugabi had requested a records search while his cutter prepared for this voyage, and the search had confirmed his own memory. The Galactic archives which had been penetrated by the human intelligence services contained any number of accounts of Ternaui bodyguards dying in defense of Galactic owners. So far as any information available to ONI was concerned, however, there was not a single record of any Ternaui turning upon the Galactics. Not one, in over twelve centuries of servitude.
So how had the most utterly reliable race of bodyguards in Galactic history wound up somehow managing to build what had to be an astonishingly powerful empire, judging by the size and power of its warships, without the Federation ever suspecting a thing? The fact that the Galactics hadn't had a clue as to that empire's existence was abundantly clear to him. If a primitive bunch like the human race had provoked such a... definitive response, then surely something like this "Avalon Empire" would have had the Council in a state of outright panic if the Federation had even dreamed that it existed, and the attack on Lach'heranu would never have come as such a complete and total surprise to her.
That was the most burning question, he reflected, although he had a few thousand others to go with it. For one, why should the Ternaui call themselves the "Avalon Empire"? For another, why should they be willing to risk revealing their existence, which they had obviously taken great and successful pains to keep the secret from the Federation, to come to the aid of the human race?
And why in Hell, he thought, with a sort of detached calm that resulted from far too many shocks in far too short a time, as his cutter approached the huge ship's main boat bay and he finally saw the name etched across the hull in letters two hundred feet tall, should a bunch of aliens name their flagship "Excalibur"?
* * *
The cutter drifted through the boat bay hatch into the gleaming, brilliantly illuminated cavern of the bay's interior and settled towards the designated landing circle. There were no docking tubes or umbilicals, only a beacon and a visual target for the cutter's pilot.
There was also no boat bay hatch, despite the fact that this bay, unlike that of his own flagship, was obviously pressurized, Mugabi noted enviously. The human race had made enormous technological strides over the past century, partly out of its own resources and partly by adapting any fragment of Galactic technology it could steal. In fact, as Mugabi was well aware, that very inventiveness was one of the things the Galactics had found most frightening about humanity. Yet rapid as their advances had been, humans had started so far behind the technology the Federation took for granted that the gulf between them had seemed completely insurmountable. One galling example of that gulf had been the ease with which the Federation generated force fields at the drop of a hat. The Solarian Navy had developed some ability to generate them—their warships' shields were based on the same technology, after all—but the energy and mass requirements of any force field generator human technology was yet capable of building prohibited human naval architects from using them for anything less vital than shields. Certainly no human engineer was yet capable of building the selectively permeable sort of force fields which obviously held in this boat bay's atmosphere!
And whoever had designed this ship hadn't stopped with simply pressurizing the bay. The admiral felt yet another flicker of envy as he saw the islands of greenery scattered artistically about between the landing circles. No one in his experience, not even the Galactics, had ever landscaped a warship's boat bay, but these people had. It was readily apparent that they'd taken pains to avoid compromising the efficiency of the bay's layout, but that hadn't prevented them from sprinkling it with towering banks of blossom-bedecked shrubbery, flower beds, fountains, and even a few groves of what looked for all the world like Bartlett pear trees.
The additional proof of this Avalon Empire's capabilities flickered through Mugabi's mind, but then it was abruptly displaced by fresh astonishment as the cutter touched down and he caught his first glimpse of the welcoming committee through a viewport. There were four people in it... and not one of them was a Ternaui.
Admiral Quentin Mugabi sat very still, gazing through the port at the last thing his brain had been prepared to see, then rose as the cutter's hatch cycled open.
"Admiral Mugabi," the tall, red-haired, blue-eyed, and very human man at the head of the welcoming party greeted Mugabi as the Solarian admiral stepped through the hatch. The redhead wore a black-and-gold uniform which managed to combine sharp military tailoring with obvious comfort. It was unlike any Solarian uniform Mugabi had ever seen, but its rank badges were completely familiar. His eyes narrowed as he saw the cluster of five five-pointed stars pinned to either side of the collar and the four broad bands of gold braid encircling the cuffs of the sleeves, and the stranger's eyes twinkled as he extended his right hand.
"Welcome aboard Excalibur," he continued in the same oddly accented English the Ternaui had used as Mugabi automatically reached out to return the handclasp. "I'm Fleet Admiral Maynton. I apologize for the absence of the regular military courtesies, but we thought that it might be a little less confusing to greet you without all of the fuss and nonsense of side boys and bosun's pipes."
"Less confusing... Sir?" Mugabi repeated, an
d Maynton smiled crookedly.
"Not, perhaps, the best possible choice of words," he conceded. "Still, I hope that our arrival was at least a welcome surprise."
"Oh, I think you can rely on that!" Mugabi assured him.
"Good! It was also a surprise we've been looking forward to delivering, not without some trepidation, for a very long time. And one which I'm happy to say appears to have come as just as great a surprise for the Federation."
"You have a gift for understatement, Admiral," Mugabi said dryly.
"I suspect that most people would, under the circumstances," Maynton replied with another small smile, then gestured at his companions. "I realize that you must have several thousand questions, Admiral, and I promise we'll answer them as quickly as we can. In the meantime, however, allow me to introduce Captain Veronica Stanhope, Baroness of Shallot, Excalibur's commanding officer." The slightly built, fair-skinned brunette to his right nodded to Mugabi and extended her own hand in turn.
"And this," Maynton continued, "is Captain Sir Anthony Moore, my chief of staff." Moore was almost as tall as Maynton, a good two inches taller than Mugabi's own six feet-two, a platinum blond with steady gray eyes, and his handclasp was as firm as his admiral's had been.
"And this," Maynton finished, "is Admiral Her Imperial Highness Princess Evelynn Wincaster, the commander of Third Fleet."
Something about the tone of his voice, even more than the title, made Mugabi look very closely at Admiral Wincaster. She was extremely tall for a woman, standing somewhere between Maynton and Moore and literally towering over Mugabi. Like Maynton himself—and all of his companions, for that matter—she seemed absurdly young for her rank, for not one of them could be much over thirty, yet she possessed a perceptible aura of command and authority that owed very little to her imposing height. Golden hair spilled over her shoulders, in direct contrast to the short hairstyles the Solarian Navy favored for men and women alike, and her eyes were a strikingly dark cobalt blue.
