by David Weber
“I have to admit,” he said after several moments, whether to himself or Julian it would have been hard to say, “that Roger—or whoever put this together—isn’t a complete idiot. At least he’s grasped the importance of the KISS principle and applied it as far as anyone could in an operation this fundamentally insane. I think, however, that we might be able to improve on it just a bit.”
“Sir?” Julian’s tone was so cautious Helmut grinned tightly at him.
“Don’t worry, Sergeant. We’ll do exactly what His Highness wants. I simply think it may be possible to do it a bit more effectively than he envisioned. Or do you think he’d object to the exercise of a little initiative?”
“Master Rog generally thinks initiative is a good thing,” Julian said. “Within limits.”
“Oh, certainly, Sergeant. Certainly.” The admiral’s grin turned decidedly nasty.
“The key to his current plan,” he continued, “is that we’re to arrive four hours before the attack on the Palace kicks off, correct? We’ll be almost ten hours flight time out from the planet at that point, but the system recon platforms will pick us up, and that should draw Home Fleet out to meet us. At the very least, given the dispositions in the intelligence packet, it will almost require them to concentrate well away from Old Earth, between us and the planet and out of range to interfere with the attack on the Palace when it kicks off, or risk letting us run over individual squadrons and mop them up in detail. Right?”
“As I understand it, Sir,” Julian agreed, still cautiously, watching in fascination as the diminutive admiral began to pace faster and faster.
“Well, that’s sound planning, given how many imponderables your Prince—or his advisers—had to juggle to come up with it. We’ll pose a threat the other side must honor. But suppose we could find a way to simultaneously pose a threat they don’t realize they need to honor?”
“Sir?” Julian was confused, and it showed.
“Roger intends to assassinate Greenberg,” Helmut said. “Good start. Wallenstein’s his XO, but everyone knows he’s only there because Adoula owns him as completely as he does Greenberg. And unlike Greenberg, he’s a chip-shuffler, never had a serious field command in his entire useless life. So he’s not going to have a support base with Greenberg gone, and that ought to put Kjerulf in as temporary CO, at least until one of the other squadron commanders can get to Moonbase. Even then, the odds are that Kjerulf isn’t going to just cede that command. So! There are—how many squadrons in Home Fleet, Sergeant Julian?” he barked, spinning on one heel to glare at the Marine.
“Six, Sir!” Julian replied.
“Very good.” Helmut spun back to his pacing. “Always remember that fleets and squadrons are not just machines, Sergeant; they’re human beings! A regiment is only as good as its officers. Who said that Sergeant Julian?” he asked, spinning again to glower at the noncom.
“I don’t . . .” Julian began, then frowned. “Napoleon?”
“You’ve been learning, Sergeant,” Helmut said, and nodded and resumed his pacing.
“The Prince told me that, I think.”
“Then he had good tutors.” The admiral frowned thoughtfully. “So, six carrier squadrons, effectively without a head. In that situation, they devolve to local command, whatever The Book says. Which means we must read the minds of those local commanders if we want to predict their actions and reactions. Pro-Adoula? Pro-Roger? Sit it out? Neutrality? Informed neutrality? Nervous breakdown?”
His sentences came out in a staccato. Despite the relentless, machine-gun pace of his questions, it was clear they were rhetorical—that his thoughts were already racing far ahead of even his rapidfire questions.
“I don’t even know, off the top of my head, who the squadron commanders are, Sir,” Julian said, “much less anything about their personalities.”
“Eleventh Carrier Squadron, Admiral Brettle,” Helmut told him. “Recent promotion via Adoula. Impetuous, but not particularly bright. Two hundred and fifteenth out of a class of two hundred and forty at the Academy. Classroom brilliance doesn’t necessarily equate to brilliance in the field, of course, but he’s done no better since. Unlikely to have made much advancement, for both personality and ability reasons, without pull from higher up. He had such pull, having long ago given his allegiance to Adoula. Owes one of the Prince’s banks a bit more than five years’ earnings for an admiral. No indications that he’s behind on payments, but I’m sure he is. He spends too much not to be.”
“Twelfth Carrier Squadron,” Helmut continued. “Admiral Prokourov. Good deceptive tactician. Only middling at the Academy, but much better standing at Command and Staff College, and excellent in exercises. One command in a brief skirmish with the Saints—Saints came off a distant last. I know him—as well as anyone does. Hard to say exactly where his loyalty lies, or what contact he had with Adoula pre-coup. I’d’ve thought he was loyal to the Empire, but he’s still in command, so maybe I was as wrong about him as I was about Gianetto. Operationally, he started as a fighter pilot and likes fighters. Always look for his fighter wings to be where you don’t want them to be. . . .”
“Sir, are you consulting your toot?” Julian asked quietly.
“If you have to consult records for this sort of thing, you don’t deserve a command,” Helmut snapped, and his eyes narrowed as he paced faster.
“Larry Gianetto, Larry Gianetto, Larry Gianetto,” he half-sang, and did a slight skip in his pacing. “Ground force commander. Never particularly liked him, but that’s neither here nor there. Good commander, well-liked in the Marines, considered a really honest man. Clearly a bad reading on many people’s parts. But he’s a ground commander, no experience running a space battle. Leaves the work of Home Fleet to Greenberg, by and large. Still a bit of a micromanager, though. Probably passes some orders, to known Adoula squadrons, directly—undoubtedly pissing Greenberg off. Last report has Fourteenth Squadron as the most solidly Adoula, so . . .”
He hummed the tune he’d been singing to himself for a moment, then nodded.
“Admiral Gajelis has the Fourteenth, and it’s been reinforced by a third carrier division. Makes it fifty percent stronger than any of the other squadrons, and four of his six carriers have had their COs switched out since the coup. Very heavy-handed fighter. A cruiser officer—uses them for his primary punch. Thinks fighters are purely for defense.
“Gianetto,” he sang again. “Gianetto’s going to . . . put Fourteenth in somewhere near Mercury orbit. He’ll figure they can react from there in any direction. A ‘central reserve’ to watch the inner system while he deploys the rest of his forces where they can close in behind any attacker. Very much in keeping with ground force tactics—ground-pounders don’t think in terms of light-speed lag the way spacers do. He’s overlooking the fact that his outer maneuver units won’t know to start maneuvering until he tells them to. And if the intel’s right, he’s using Twelfth to sandwich Old Earth from the outside, same distance towards the periphery as Fourteenth to sunward. Which says things we may not like about Prokorouv’s loyalties.”
The admiral went back to his humming, eyes unfocused, then shrugged.
“On the other hand, it probably also means Gianetto doesn’t trust Prokorouv quite as much as he does Brettle or La Paz, with the Thirteenth. Sure, he’s got him in close to cover Old Earth, but by the same token, he’s got Fourteenth close enough to cover him. So he’s got his ‘central reserve’ either side of the planet and uses Gajelis to keep an eye on Prokorouv at the same time. Then he scatters the rest of Home Fleet out to watch the approaches.
“Greenberg may’ve squawked about that—he damned well should have!—but probably not. He knows about me, but he doesn’t know about the Prince. So he also ‘knows’ that I know I don’t have a hope in hell of accomplishing anything while Adoula controls the Palace and the Empress. I’m not going to hit Imperial City with KEWs—not when the Empress is the only person who could possibly rally resistance to him—and I don’t have
enough Marines to take the Palace against its fixed defenses before the entire Home Fleet closes in on me, signal-lag or no. So he’s probably content to let Gianetto put Gajelis and Prokorouv wherever makes Gianetto—and Adoula—happy, while he covers the outer arc of the system with Eleventh and Thirteenth, which he can be confident will fight for Adoula if he needs them.”
“What about Fifteenth and Sixteenth, Sir?” Julian asked.
“Out on the periphery with Eleventh and Thirteenth,” Helmut said positively. “I’m not certain about Admiral Mahmut, with the Fifteenth. He’s going to be an Adoula loyalist, but his carrier skippers may have other ideas. Hard to say. Admiral Wu, on the other hand, is not going to be one of Adoula’s strong supporters.”
Julian looked at him, and the admiral shrugged.
“Look, Sergeant, a lot of the officers who aren’t actively opposing Adoula right now are sitting it out because they simply don’t see a viable alternative. The Prince is dead, as far as they know, and even if they knew differently, his reputation isn’t one to engender confidence in him. So they may hate Adoula’s guts and still see him as the only alternative to chaos the Empire simply cannot afford. I’ve taken pains for years—with, I might add, the Empress’ explicit private approval—to build a cadre of ship commanders and senior officers here in Sixth Fleet which is prepared to blow hell out of Adoula and his lackeys anyway. Which is why Sixth Fleet ‘just happened’ to be stationed way the hell out on the frontier when the ball went up back at Sol. And also the reason Adoula’s cronies at Defense HQ finagled ways for years to whittle Sixth down to the smallest carrier strength of the numbered fleets.
“But the point is, Wu’s as apolitical as a flag officer can be these days. She’s loyal to the Empire, but she’s also cold-blooded enough to put the good of the Empire ahead of the good of the Empress. But she’s also too good, and too popular with her officers and spacers—most of whom are going to follow her lead if the shit hits the fan—to fire without a really good reason. So Gianetto—and Greenberg—are making what they consider to be the best use of her. They figure they can count on her to resist outside attacks on the system, but maybe not to stay out of it if there’s some sort of trouble planet-side. So they stick her out with Eleventh and Thirteenth, but covering a less critical section of the Tsukayama Limit.”
“That . . . seems like a good idea,” Julian said bemusedly.
“The target is Old Earth, Sergeant,” Helmut snapped. “Yes, our fleet can come in from anywhere on the TD sphere. But if we come in from the other side of the system, or off-ecliptic, we’ve got a long drive across the system. That gives Gianetto all the time in the world to maneuver inside of us. If the squadrons are near Old Earth. But if they’re still distributed the way they were when our last data packet was dropped, everything except Fourteenth and Twelfth is far too widely dispersed, trying to cover too much of the system’s volume. Not concentrated. They’re going to have to be assembled from all over the system from a cold start to defend the planet when we turn up. Figure four hours actual transit time to Old Earth orbit for Fourteenth and Twelfth, but over twelve for the farthest out. We’ll be to Old Earth in less than ten, and they won’t even know to begin moving to intercept us till they get light-speed confirmation of our arrival. So we’ll have had a lot of time to start building velocity for Old Earth before they do. That’s precisely the weakness the Prince—or whoever thought this up—picked up on. They’ll have to begin reshuffling their dispositions when we turn up, because they’re so badly out of position to begin with.
“What Gianetto should be doing is worrying about covering the planet, and the hell with the outer system. And he should be putting only forces he knows he can trust in close. But Gianetto will go the other way, and Greenberg will let him. Instead of parking Fourteenth directly in Old Earth orbit, where it would already be in position, he’s got it stationed way the hell in-system. And instead of allowing only forces he knows he can trust in-system, he’s got Fourteenth double-tasked to keep an eye on Twelfth. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, where you can keep an eye on them—that’s what he’s thinking . . . when he should be concentrating on the fact that he’s got the rest of his units so scattered that they’ll find it harder than hell to concentrate before we get to Old Earth ourselves.”
“What about Moonbase?” Julian asked.
“A point,” Helmut conceded. “And to be fair—which I don’t much want to be—probably the real reason Greenberg didn’t bitch when Gianetto started spreading Home Fleet all over the backside of hell. Moonbase has the firepower of at least two carrier squadrons’ ship-to-ship weapons all by itself, so in a way, he does have a task group—without cruisers, of course—in position to cover the planet at all times. But if Kjerulf can take over when Greenberg goes down, that gives him control of the Moonbase launchers and emplacements. Assuming he has the current release codes for them, at any rate. Best-case is for him to come in on our side and have the codes, but we can live with it if he only manages to deny Adoula’s people access to them.”
“That’s fixed weapons, Sir. What about the Moonbase fighters?”
“They could be a problem. But there are two companies of Fleet Marines on Moonbase, and I’ve been careful to ensure that all the worst rumors I’ve gotten about the Empress’ condition were dumped on the sites where Marines grouse to each other. I don’t even have to guess what the response has been, do you?”
“No, Sir,” Julian admitted.
“I’ve kept the Moonbase fighter wing in my thoughts,” Helmut told him with a thin smile. “I’m sure the Marines have, as well. And Kjerulf, I know, has access to the same intelligence.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Well, then,” Helmut folded both hands behind him and frowned as he resumed his pacing. “The point is, Sergeant, that while Home Fleet will almost certainly move to concentrate between us and Old Earth, as predicted, when we arrive, the fleet’s options are going to change rather abruptly when the planet goes up in flames behind them. What will they do then?”
“Turn around to go after the planet after all?”
“No,” the admiral said firmly. “That’s precisely why the Prince—or whoever—specified that we arrive so early. Gajelis is stationed a tad over four hours from Old Earth on a zero/zero intercept profile. That means that if he wants to stop and drop into orbit around the planet, he’ll have to go to decel roughly two hours after he begins accelerating towards the planet. But he’ll have been accelerating for three and a half hours—it’ll take about thirty-five minutes for Perimeter Security to pick up our TD footprint and get the word to him—before anything happens on Old Earth. He won’t be able to decelerate and insert himself into orbit. In fact, by the time he overran the planet, decelerated to relative zero, and then built a vector back towards it, we’d be running right up his ass.”
“So they’re screwed, Sir. Right?”
“Assuming—as I do—that Home Fleet’s loyalty to Adoula is going to come unraveled in a hurry when Greenberg buys it and the fleet’s officers realize someone’s mounting an attempt to rescue the Empress, then, yes, Sergeant. Screwed is exactly what they’ll be. But if they react quickly enough, they’ll still be able to cut their losses and run for it. They’ll be inside us, Sergeant. They can break for any point on the TD sphere, and the range will still be long enough for them to avoid us without much difficulty. Which means we could face a situation in which quite a lot of Adoula loyalists will get away from us. And if he gets away, as well—a distinct possibility, I submit; he’s the sort of man who always has a rathole handy to dash down—we’re going to be looking at a civil war whatever your Prince wants. In which case, I further submit, it would be nice if he didn’t have any more ships on his side than we can help. Yes?”
“Yes, Sir,” Julian said fervently.
“I’m so happy you agree, Sergeant,” Helmut said in a dust-dry voice, then wheeled to give him another ferret-sharp smile. “Which is why we’re leaving a little
early, Sergeant Julian. I have a small detour I need to make.”
“Who are these guys?”
“I dunno, Mr. Siminov,” the gang leader said, standing as close to attention as he could manage.
Alexi Siminov referred to himself as a “businessman,” and he had a large number of fully legitimate businesses. Admittedly, he owned only one of them—a restaurant—on paper; the rest he owned through intermediaries as a silent, and senior, partner. But the legitimate businesses of his small empire were quite secondary to its illegitimate businesses. He ran most of the organized crime in the south Imperial City district: racketeering, “protection,” illegal gambling, data theft, illegal identities, drugs—they all paid Siminov a percentage, or they didn’t operate at all.
“I thought they was just a restaurant,” the gang leader continued, “but then I had to wonder. They smelled fishy. Then I guessed they was probably your people, and I made real nice to them. Besides, they’ve got heavy muscle. Heavier than I wanted to take on.”
“If they were one of my operations, I’d have let you know,” Siminov said, angrily. “They’re laundering money. It’s not my money, and I’m not getting my share of the action. That makes me upset.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Siminov.” The gang leader swallowed. “I didn’t know.”
“No, you didn’t,” Siminov conceded. “I take it you shook them down?”
“We had to come to an agreement,” the gang leader said with a slight but audible gulp. “They were pretty . . . unhappy about an . . . arrangement.”
“And if they were one of my operations, do you think they would have come to an agreement?” Siminov’s eyes flickered dangerously.
“Uh . . .”
“I suppose that logic was a bit too much for you.” Siminov’s lips thinned. “After all, you don’t hold your position for your brains.”
