Shadow of Freedom-eARC

by David Weber

  “There is a little something to be said for the superiority of a superdreadnought’s—what was it you called them?—‘Flag deck accommodations.’” Michelle shrugged. “But that’s mainly a comfort factor and a matter of having more room to pack the admiral and her staff into. The actual command facilities aren’t that much superior to what we’ve got right here aboard Artie, and our CIC’s receiving the input from every sensor in the entire fleet.

  “The decisive factor, though, is that I’m comfortable aboard your ship, Captain Armstrong.” She smiled. “You and your senior officers are an extension of my staff, and you and I have been thinking together long enough for me to be sure you understand the intent as well as the wording of any order I may give. And while I hesitate to mention it in front of all these awestruck junior officers,” her smile became a grin as she glanced at the other officers seated around the table, “there have been occasions—rare, perhaps, but nonetheless real—upon which you have…respectfully raised considerations which have tempered my own perhaps overly enthusiastic notions. Frankly, I’d just as soon not have to break in another flag captain who’s willing to do that.”

  Her whimsical tone became rather more serious with the last sentence, and Armstrong looked down the length of the table at her for a second or two. Then the flag captain nodded, and Michelle nodded back.

  I wonder if someone else has been complaining about Vicki’s relative lack of seniority? she thought. Funny how people can piss and moan over something like that at a time like this. And it’d be like Vicki to offer me a way to make the move without looking like I’m conceding anything to the complainer. Or like a lack of confidence in her, for that matter.

  She made a mental note to have Cynthia Lecter look into the matter quietly. She didn’t expect to discover anything like a serious problem, but it never hurt to be proactive about things like that. Shrinking violets, by and large, didn’t make it to flag rank. Overall, that was a good thing, but ego involvement was one of the most pernicious producers of friction, and one with which Michelle had never sympathized.

  And I’m not about to discombobulate my command arrangements at a time like this, especially if it’s just somebody with a nose bent out of shape because she’s senior to Vicki and thinks she ought to be Tenth Fleet’s flag captain!

  She snorted mentally at the thought. In less than one T-day, Tenth Fleet would be dropping out of hyper in the Meyers System. Not a good time to be tinkering with its command structure.

  “All right, people,” she said out loud. “Now that that particular pressing question has been dealt with, I think it’s time all of us got some sleep.” She smiled again, this time without any humor at all. “After all, we’re likely to be just a bit busy tomorrow.”

  * * *

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What was that?” CPO Sylvia Chu, chief of the watch in Meyers Astro Control, looked up from the endless stream of memos and directives on her own display with a stab of irritation as she heard the soft, fervent mutter. Commodore Thurgood’s upcoming exercise loomed large in Chu’s thoughts at the moment, and she needed to get her paperwork at least under control (she was never going to get it finished; that was a given in the Navy) to clear the decks for it. As Lieutenant Bristow had pointed out to her only that morning, screwing up the exercise because they’d missed dotting some “i” or crossing some “t” would constitute a Bad Thing.

  And so would a last-minute sensor snafu, which was why the comment from Petty Officer 2/C Alan Coker, who was currently manning the outer system surveillance platforms, had set off Chu’s internal alarms. The outer platforms were even more urgently in need of upgrade and replacement than the inner platforms, and the last thing she needed with the exercise looming on the horizon was for one of her primary sensor nodes to report a malfunction. That would not look good on her next efficiency report…which was due in less than two T-months.

  There was no immediate response to her question, and she frowned as Coker leaned closer to his own console. Coker could be a royal pain in the ass, but although she would have gone far out of her way to avoid admitting it, Chu regarded him as one of the three best sensor techs assigned to the Meyers System. His defects—and the reason someone of his ability was still only a second-class petty officer—stemmed from a certain lack of patience with officers in general coupled with what Chu thought of as the “old Frontier Fleet hand” syndrome. Coker had seen more incompetent officers with family connections than he could have counted come and go during his career, and he’d spent more than his fair share of time cleaning up after them. It gave him an edge of something entirely too much like insolence towards the commissioned nitwits who came his way, but his decades of service had also made him very good at his job. He was, quite literally, too valuable to be canned.

  Which was why his present expression sent another, sharper tremor of unease through Chu’s professional instincts.

  Coker’s hands moved across his console for several seconds, obviously double checking and refining whatever had drawn his attention. Then he straightened and looked at Chu.

  “We are so screwed,” he said flatly.

  “I realize you have a reputation to maintain as a character,” Chu replied tartly. “But unless you want to be ripped a new one, I’d appreciate a report one hell of a lot more detailed than ‘We are so screwed.’”

  “Sorry about that, Chief.” His smile was a grimace, but there was also genuine apology in it. “It’s just—” He gestured at his display. “The outer platforms are calling it twenty-eight superdreadnoughts, Chief.” He shook his head. “And whoever they are, they sure as hell aren’t ours!”

  * * *

  “It’s confirmed, Commodore,” Captain Thora Macpherson said flatly. “Definitely twenty-eight in the superdreadnought range, judging from their impeller signatures. Not only that, but their accel inbound is over five hundred and thirty KPS squared.” A smile as grim as her tone flitted across her face. “They haven’t said anything to us yet, but given that number and that accel, there’s not much question who they are.”

  Commodore Thurgood nodded, not that he’d really needed his operations officer’s last sentence. For that matter, he hadn’t needed the acceleration rate. There was no way in hell anybody he wanted to see would be sending that many ships-of-the-wall to a miserable, back-of-beyond system like Meyers, and that left only one candidate.

  “Well, that’s a pisser,” Captain Hideoshi Wayne, Thurgood’s chief of staff, observed.

  “You do have a way with words, don’t you, Hideoshi?”

  “Sorry, Sir.” Wayne grimaced.

  “You didn’t say anything I’m not thinking,” Thurgood confessed with a sigh. He shook his head. “I’ve warned Verrocchio and Hongbo something like this could happen, but I have to admit I didn’t really expect it. And I’d never have expected them to arrive in this kind of strength!”

  He twitched his head in the direction of the master display. It was currently set to astrographic mode, showing the entire star system. The G0 star’s twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit was represented by a green sphere, and a glowing rash of red icons was just about to cross into it, headed for the inner system.

  There were a lot of them.

  “It does seem like using a sledgehammer to swat flies,” Howell Chavez, CO of SLNS Edgehill, Thurgood’s battlecruiser flagship, agreed. Thurgood glanced at the com display which linked his flag bridge to Chavez’ command deck, and the flag captain chuckled humorlessly. “I mean, I’m flattered and everything, Sir, but it is a little excessive, don’t you think?”

  “It’s possible they think we’ve been reinforced,” Wayne said, but Thurgood shook his head.

  “Possible, but not too damned likely. Not way the hell and gone out here.”

  “Then why do you think they brought along so much heavy metal, Sir?” the chief of staff asked.

  “Aside from the obvious, you mean?” Thurgood smiled thinly. “Your guess is as good as mine, Howell.”

>   “Actually, Sir, I might have an idea,” Captain Merriman said quietly, and all eyes turned to the petite, fine-boned intelligence officer. It was an open secret, at least among Thurgood’s staff officers, that he and Sadako Merriman were lovers. That was too common in the Solarian League Navy to merit comment, except that in this case Merriman had become Thurgood’s intelligence specialist on the basis of raw ability well before she’d become his lover.

  “Fire away, Sadako,” he invited now. “We’ve got better than three hours before they get here, after all.”

  “It’s just a theory, of course, Sir,” Merriman said, “but I’ve been thinking a lot about Gold Peak’s character ever since Admiral Byng ran into her in New Tuscany. She’s perfectly willing to kill anybody she has to—what happened in Spindle’s proof enough of that, too, I suppose. But I think she’d prefer not to kill anyone she doesn’t have to, as well. In fact, Spindle’s part of the reason I think that. She could’ve gone right on shooting without allowing Admiral O’Cleary to surrender, just like she could have taken out Admiral Byng’s entire task force. She chose not to.”

  She shrugged.

  “And?” Wayne prompted.

  “And I think she deliberately brought along enough firepower to make it obvious to anyone we wouldn’t stand a chance against her,” Merriman said.

  “Her way of giving us an out, unless we’re as pigheaded as Byng, you mean?” Chavez said thoughtfully.

  “I doubt she thinks the Commodore’d be pigheaded enough to get all our people killed for nothing, anyway, Sir,” Wayne pointed out. “We’re Frontier Fleet, after all. That means we have working brains.”

  One or two of the officers on Edgehill’s flag bridge actually chuckled at the comment, despite the situation, and even Thurgood’s lips twitched in an almost-smile.

  “Probably not,” he said after a moment. “But Sadako could have a point. With this kind of odds, it’s a hell of a lot less likely some idiot—uniformed or civilian—is going to try to overrule any outbreak of sanity on my part. For that matter, I could be just as stupid as Byng or Crandall, for all she knows, in which case I’d need something pretty damned obvious to make the point.”

  It was the first time he’d allowed himself to attach that particular adjective to those two paragons of tactical and strategic genius in front of anyone else. Under the circumstances, however, he doubted it was going to have any detrimental impact on the career which was about to come to a screeching halt. Sadako might very well be right about Gold Peak’s reasons for appearing in such strength, and no reasonable board of inquiry would expect him to oppose his single understrength battlecruiser squadron and its screen to that kind of armada. Despite which, he was about to go down in history as the first Solarian League naval officer ever to surrender a Solarian-claimed star system to an enemy.

  Well, not to surrender one, precisely, perhaps. But what he was actually going to do would be even worse, in some ways.

  Assuming we can get away with it in the first place. Which doesn’t seem all that damned likely, really, he reminded himself, looking at those acceleration numbers again. At least the exercise schedule means we’re starting with hot nodes, though, thank God.

  “I suppose we’d better get Commissioner Verrochio on the com,” he said out loud.

  * * *

  “What the hell do we do now?!” Lorcan Verrochio demanded harshly.

  “Assuming Thurgood’s sensor reports are accurate, I don’t see that we have a lot of choice, Lorcan,” Junyan Hongbo replied tartly from the com on the sector governor’s desk after a brief delay.

  “The bastard could at least try to fight instead of just running away!”

  “Why? What possible good could it do?” Hongbo asked bluntly. “We’re talking about twenty-eight ships-of-the-wall, Lorcan. Manty ships-of-the-wall!” He shook his head. “Thurgood’s ships would be toast against anybody’s wallers, but against Manties—?”

  “But he’s just running for it!” Verrocchio half-wailed. “He’s abandoning the entire star system!”

  “Which is the smartest thing he could possibly do, under the circumstances,” Hongbo shot back after another of those delays. “At least this way the Navy doesn’t lose his ships, too.”

  Verrocchio started to say something else, then stopped, and his eyes narrowed suddenly. Unlike the sector governor, Hongbo wasn’t in the capital city of Pine Mountain. For that matter, he wasn’t even on the planet of Meyers. No, he was aboard Meyers One, the primary freight handling platform orbiting the planet. Or that was where he was supposed to be, anyway. But if he were on Meyers One, the com delay should be scarcely noticeable.

  “Where are you, Junyan?” Verrocchio demanded.

  “Why do you ask?” Hongbo responded.

  “Just answer the damned question!”

  “Well, as it happens,” Hongbo replied after that same brief but discernible delay, “I was aboard Wanderlust discussing those shipping arrangements of yours when Commodore Thurgood gave the alarm. I’m afraid Captain Herschel was adamant about getting underway immediately, and since her impellers happened to be hot at the moment—”

  Hongbo shrugged, and Verrocchio’s jaw muscles clenched as his teeth ground together. Captain Martina Herschel of the merchant vessel Wanderlust had been the sector governor’s primary conduit for the clandestine movement of personal property acquired under…questionable circumstances for T-years. Hongbo had had some business of his own aboard Meyers One this afternoon, so Verrocchio had asked him to drop certain items off with Herschel before her scheduled departure.

  A departure whose schedule had obviously been moved up substantially.

  “Of course there wasn’t time for you to get back aboard the station,” he grated after a moment, and Hongbo shrugged again.

  “The Captain was very insistent, Lorcan.”

  “I see.”

  Verrocchio glared at the vice commissioner, yet even as he did, he knew he would have done precisely the same thing in Hongbo’s place. Of course, Hongbo was abandoning a sizable chunk of personal wealth and possessions, but like every other Frontier Security commissioner or vice commissioner—including Lorcan Verrochio—he’d squirreled away the majority of his assets elsewhere. And it was unlikely any of his colleagues or superiors were going to fault his conduct in running for it if the opportunity presented itself. It wasn’t as if there were anything he could have accomplished by staying, especially if the system’s naval defenders had already decided to hightail it. And the final responsibility for what happened here in the Meyers System and in the Madras Sector generally was Lorcan Verrocchio’s, not his.

  “Have a nice voyage,” the sector governor said sarcastically, and cut the connection.

  Bastard, he thought, burying his face in his hands. Wonder how much he promised Herschel for his passage?

  He sat that way for several seconds, then straightened. Unlike Hongbo, he was expected to ride the ship down in flames in a situation like this. Or that was what the rulebook said, anyway. But no Solarian sector governor had ever actually found himself in “a situation like this” before, so when it came down to it…

  Verrocchio’s eyes narrowed. There hadn’t been very much hyper-capable shipping in Meyers when the sensor platforms picked up the Manties’ arrival, and Thurgood had ordered all of it to get underway and scatter towards the hyper limit as soon as possible. That was exactly what Wanderlust had done, but two other freighters had been in parking orbit at the same time, and he wondered suddenly if they’d be been able to get their impellers online quickly enough to run for it. According to Thurgood, the Manties were still three hours out. Assuming they opted for a zero-zero rendezvous with the planet, that was. Which they had to be planning on, didn’t they? But if either of those other two freighters could get their impellers up and running, it would be his duty as the Madras Sector’s governor to see to the protection and orderly governance of the rest of the sector, wouldn’t it? From one of the uncaptured and still-defiant star syste
ms like, say…McIntosh. Which just happened to be fifty-plus light-years away from Meyers.

  Of course it would!

  He reached for his com again.

  * * *

  “Sort of reminds you of cockroaches, doesn’t it, Ma’am?” Captain Armstrong remarked, and Michelle Henke chuckled. Cockroaches were one of the Old Terran species which had become as ubiquitous as mankind itself, and she had to admit Armstrong’s simile fitted.

  Tenth Fleet—or most of it, at any rate—had made its alpha translation seventy-three minutes ago, a half-million kilometers outside the hyper limit and just over eleven light-minutes from the planet of Meyers. Since then, her command’s closing velocity relative to the planet had risen to 23,576 KPS, and she’d traveled over fifty-three million kilometers. In just over twenty-seven more minutes, her superdreadnoughts would be making turnover and beginning their deceleration towards the planet.

  In the meantime, every hyper-capable ship that could get underway, had. She wasn’t especially surprised to see the Frontier Fleet detachment running hard for the hyper limit, and she didn’t blame Commodore Francis Thurgood one bit. In fact, she’d expected no less out of him. She and Cynthia Lecter had made it their business to study every scrap of information they could dig up on him, and it was obvious he was no Byng or Crandall. She’d been confident he’d recognize his responsibility to rescue whatever he could from the wreck for future service, and given that they’d obviously caught him with hot impeller nodes for some reason—an exercise, perhaps?—he was doing precisely what she would have anticipated.