An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire

by David : Thomas, T Thomas Drake

  “Yes, Sir.” Samwels nodded grimly.

  A rustle of shifting bodies and suppressed comment moved around the table.

  “Ahh, Sir?” Hildred ventured. “What about the base complement? You don’t intend a suicide—?”

  “Of course not, Captain!” the admiral snapped. “We’ll load all personnel aboard the remaining hyper-capable destroyers and cruisers. They’ll have strap-down space, won’t they?”

  The assembled captains did some quick mental calculations and agreed.

  “Right. Then, thirty seconds before detonation, we jump straight from the docking bay to the far side of Castor and Pollux. Don’t tip our hand to anybody. And after the base is—gone—we come back and pick off as many of the survivors as we can. Acceptable, gentlemen?”

  Most of the group nodded or murmured assent. Not Samwels.

  “Is that the best we can do, Sir? Blow the base and hope to rupture—how many, Carnot? A dozen? Twenty of Spile’s ships?”

  “More than that, certainly,” the captain said.

  “All right, but not all of them. Not even most of them. We’ll fight the remainder until we begin losing badly. Then we’ll withdraw, for the sake of the civilians aboard our own crowded ships. You know we will.”

  “Come now, Hildred,” the admiral said softly. “It’s an honorable—a barely honorable—defense.”

  “But it leaves nothing—nothing!—behind Spile. No Pact-loyal forces that he need fear. Governor Spider’ll be free to drive straight on to Central Center and the High Secretariat.”

  “Given the circumstances,” Koskiusko said. “It’s all we have left to us.”

  Chapter 23

  Taddeuz Bertingas: DROP KICK

  His null moment passed, like the blankness after a sneeze. Bertingas rose into consciousness with a violent sideways twist. The light webbing of the jump couch tightened along his right side, then slapped his left hip and elbow into the steel subframe. His head snapped over and cracked against his own shoulder. Tingles of pain ran down his arm. His neck muscles screamed. He thought he could feel blood run out of his ear.

  The air on the Charlotten Broch’s operations deck pulsed red. It hooted and warbled with three different lands of alarms.

  “What happened?” he asked aloud. Was it Follard to his left, or Thwaite? Was Mora all right?

  “Collision! Several of them.” Thwaite answered him, speaking low. He clearly was able to read the ship’s warning and alert systems.

  “How could that happen? We’re in freespace, aren’t we? We didn’t—did we clear Gemini?”

  “Pipe down, Tad,” the captain growled. “Neither one of us can do anything from here. Let the bridge crew handle it.”

  Bertingas freed his right arm and felt his ear. It was hot but dry—and would probably swell up like a blooming rose. Sensation was coming back along his left side.

  “Well, that was exciting.” The voice was Deirdre Sallee’s, cutting across the questions, calls, alarms, and groans in the red darkness. “Would someone turn off those braying sirens, please? And start giving me some reports.”

  The compartment went silent.

  “Ah—bridge here, Your Excellency,” General Pollonius Dindyma answered over the intercom. He clearly was unused to deferring, from his own bridge, to a higher authority aboard. “We seem to have jumped to a point that was, um, previously occupied by two, possibly three, inert bodies.”

  “You mean asteroids, General? Or gas clouds?”

  “No, Ma’am. Ships.”

  “Not our own!”

  “No, of course not. They apparently were holding in some kind of orbital pattern, Your Excellency. We deduce they were part of the force blockading Gemini Base.”

  “What is their current disposition?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “What happened to them? What happened to us?”

  “We seem to have sustained no structural damage at all. The enemy ships have . . . Well, with the difference in our masses being so great, the Broch’s sudden displacement seems to have rolled them into their own Schwartschild traps.”

  “In plain language?”

  “We’ve sent them through hyperspace. An unprepared and unlogged jump. They may not return.”

  “Thank you, General. Where are we in relation to the base?”

  “Coming up in your navigational tanks now, Your Excellency.”

  By this time, everyone on the ops deck had unstrapped and was standing. They were covertly exploring pulled muscles and bruises.

  Half the government of Aurora Cluster seemed to have shipped aboard the flagship. Regis Sallee, the governor’s consort, was there—taking up space for no reason Bertingas could perceive. Selwin Praise was there—officially keeping watch on his hot-headed deputy. And Bertingas himself was there at Halan Follard’s polite suggestion to the governor.

  Mora came to stand beside him. Her hand quietly found his. They joined the general drift of the crowd forward to the ten-meter holocube that showed the Broch and her surrounding space for a distance of a thousand kilometers.

  Hanging at half that distance, scaled like a melon to the planetary monitor’s grape, was the Central Fleet base. Around it, and intersecting the Broch’s current position, was the Arachnid’s globular formation of ships. Sketched into the distant perspective, below everything, were the bulk of Castor and Pollux.

  “How extraordinary,” Bertingas said to Mora. “We broke the blockade in a single move. On the first jump.”

  The plan, as Dindyma and Thwaite had outlined it at the governor’s council of war, had been to use the planetary monitor as a psychological battering ram. (To use it as a physical ram they had thought would be beyond the realm of statistical probability—or good fortune.)

  Their plan had called for the huge ship to pop into the space near Gemini, creating confusion in the Arachnid formation with their sudden bulk and firepower. Under cover of that confusion, they would cut close to the base and, in the monitor’s field shadow, resupply whatever Gemini needed from the Broch’s huge stores and take off the civilians and wounded. Then they would get distance and pop out.

  They could repeat this maneuver any number of times, until the siege broke. Meanwhile, the remainder of the Cluster Command’s squadron, supported by the hulls captured at Batavia, would harass the Arachnids from behind the lines.

  Unfortunately, the unexpected collisions had thrown off the timing of this first run by several minutes.

  “Move!” Thwaite called out. “Start the run on Gemini!”

  “Captain!” the governor exclaimed, shocked. Then, to the bridge: “General, ignore that order. We must assess—”

  “Too late,” from Thwaite. “Here comes their countering stroke.”

  As everyone on the ops deck watched, a spherical wedge of the besieging formation dimpled and collapsed about the planetary monitor. It shaped a smaller englobement, identical to the one about Gemini. Except this one was closing, tightening, concentrating to increase the strike’s firing density.

  “General?” Sallee spoke to the air above her head. “Please send my greetings to Admiral Koskiusko, at twenty to one speed, and then raise the ship’s screens to full intensity.”

  “Done, Ma’am.”

  “Thank you. As we’ve already managed to eliminate three of Governor Spile’s war fleet, I think we can forgo the formalities of a formal challenge and open fire at your convenience.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency.”

  Within the tank, the round body of the Broch sprouted lines of violet fire, plasma streams lashing out in thirty different directions to splash against the shields of their attackers. The blips of fifty missile launches arced outward. Some wound back and forth like snakes to evade physical and electronic counter measures. Some spiraled around and through the plasma lines. All sank home in a series of shattering fusion explosions.

  At such close range, less than twenty kilometers, the separate blasts merged into a white glare. The Broch disappeared beneath it.<
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  When the radiation effects faded, the local englobement was shown to be breached in three places. Still, missiles and gouts of plasma were already streaking in from the Arachnid survivors.

  “Jump!” Deirdre Sallee commanded.

  Dindyma must have prepared for just that order. He jumped without the usual ten-minute warning horns, and without the delay of bagging equipment and strapping down personnel. He jumped standing up.

  Bertingas could actually see the image of the Broch, deep within the tank, begin to shrink. Before the simulation could collapse entirely, reality caught up with the AID controlling the tank—and with Tad’s brain function.

  Reality sneezed.

  As he came out of the null, Tad found himself still standing, but his balance was off, one knee slipping sideways. Instinctively he clutched the railing around the navigational cube and hung on. As did everyone else.

  In front of their eyes, the tank was filled again. Not with stars or ships, but with a random pattern of colored light, like candy sprinkles on a field of white ice cream.

  As the AID struggled to regain its mechanical senses, the first image to appear was the most massive—the bulk of Gemini Base. Except now it was on the far left side of the tank, instead of the right. Dindyma had jumped clear across the formation. As the rest of the field came in, they could see that the Broch was inside the blockading globe of ships.

  “Raise shields and—urk!” Governor Sallee’s order was cut short.

  Bertingas looked up, looked across the navigational tank to where Deirdre Sallee was standing.

  It was comical. Selwin Praise was standing behind her in a clumsy embrace. His left arm was thrown around her gaunt midsection, just below the governor’s bony ribcage and superannuated breasts. The right hand was raised along the side of her face, in a stiff caress. What made it so funny was that Deirdre was a head taller than the D.ofC., so his arms were at strange angles.

  The governor was not struggling, not even protesting. Her eyes were wide with shock and fear.

  Then Tad saw the glint of metal next to her left eye and understood why. Praise held a fingerknife pressed to her temple.

  “All right!” Praise shouted, looking out around her shoulder. “I’m in charge now and . . .”

  The side of his head went soft. It dimpled in, partly collapsed, and blossomed in blood. Praise’s right hand twitched, leaving the barest scratch by the governor’s eye. His arms slipped, and he slumped to the deck.

  An instant of awful silence passed into a welter of voices.

  “Open fire! Fire at will!” from Thwaite, to the bridge crew.

  “Get that blade! Analyze for poisons!” from Follard, to one of his aides.

  “Teach him to touch my wife . . . in public,” from Regis Sallee, to anyone at all, as he put a tiny coil gun back in his pocket. Bertingas recognized it as the kind of short-range self-defense weapon that fired exploding pellets.

  “Close screens and jump!” again from Thwaite, whose eyes had never left the strategic picture unfolding in the tank.

  The null moment caught them all in motion.

  When the instant of disorientation passed, half the personnel in the ops chamber were sitting, lying, or sprawling on the deck. That mental sneeze had thrown them all off balance.

  All except the governor, who was still standing—tall and imperious—against the railing around the tank. She touched the line of blood along her temple and glanced at her fingertips. The she looked around for Regis Sallee, who was also on his feet. When the ship jumped, he’d had nowhere to go.

  “Thank you, my dear,” she said clearly, smiling. “You always have my interests at heart, don’t you?”

  “You mean more to me than anyone will know,” he replied, and returned the smile.

  Deirdre Sallee’s face turned serious and she stared into the tank.

  Up on the bridge, General Dindyma was clearly following a pattern with his jumps. Against all the vagaries of hyperspace navigation, he was trying to quarter the blockade: first from east side to west, now to the north pole of the englobement. Once again, the Arachnid ships of the local quadrant were collapsing around them.

  “Screens up!” the governor ordered. “Full power. Rotate 120 degrees and fire main engines. Drive through them to the base. Batteries, pick targets and shoot at will.”

  Within the tank, the miniature, stylized Broch spun on its own center of gravity and dove down toward Gemini. The monitor blazed with missile launches and plasma streams. Their course intersected head on with one of the blockaders, a small frigate.

  At the moment of simulated impact, Bertingas felt a shudder go through the fabric of the ship. The huge Broch was barely affected by the collision. The frigate, even with her e-mag screens at peak power, could not survive. Fractured keelsons and beams, ruptured hull plates, bashed equipment, and broken bones would take their toll. The tank showed a drifting oblong whose screens, coded green in the strat key, quickly faded to black.

  As the Broch bulled her way through the blockade, Gemini opened up with its own defenses: long-range nuclear missiles, flare jammers, sun dogs, and the most powerful plasma weapons in the Pact arsenal. The surge of the Broch and response from the base pulled in the Arachnids. Their orderly englobement fell apart in a swirling, dodging fight as they tried to intercept the planetary monitor. Confusion deepened as the rest of the Auroran fleet—the fully capable warships of Aurora’s Cluster Command and the converted hulls from Batavia—dropped into realspace outside the globe and attacked the Arachnids’ rear.

  As Tad and the rest of the governor’s party watched in the tank, the fight rippled back and forth. Knots of color—the green of e-mag screens, the purple of spouting plasma, the red and gold of missiles, the white of overload when a ship occasionally flared into vapor—blazed against the black of intrasystem space.

  Two, three and four warships came together in duels and dogfights. Up on the bridge, Dindyma’s nav and tac teams flew and fought the Broch. Sallee and Thwaite told him where and when. But as the pace of battle intensified, and the lights of clashing duels spread like a stain across the failed englobement, the strategists on the ops deck had less and less to say.

  It was every ship for itself in the melee.

  “Move in on the base,” Deirdre Sallee called. “Get the lower docks ready to pass them some containers. See what they need.”

  “Aye, Ma’am.”

  Like a fat lady at the ballet, the Broch slipped and dodged through fight and dropped into the shadow of Gemini. When she was within one-ship’s diameter of the huge base—a distance that was geometrically shielded from attack—Dindyma dilated the screens on her lower quadrant. The Gemini defense techs opened a matching space. Handlers down at the ship’s receiving tubes strapped brainless thrusters onto prepared cargo containers and kicked them toward the Gemini’s wide-open docking bay.

  What was in the containers?

  Bertingas could guess: ordnance, flasks of deuterium and tritium, highly compressed breathable gases, packets of protein and fiber that only a sailor would eat, blocks of silicon and the tailored bacteria to work it into cybers, prefab missile components. The most difficult substance to send them—and the one they would probably need most—was water. It was virtually incompressible at the temperatures and pressures any available container materials could withstand. And it was heavy. The handlers had orders to kick over two or three megaliter bladders of water, but that was barely a drop for a full Central Fleet installation.

  In return, Gemini offloaded her civilian personnel. They came drifting over, in issue suits, moving heel to helmet along spider lines rigged by the handlers. Forty-seven people came aboard on that first pass.

  When the exchange was completed, the Broch raised her screens and spun away.

  Immediately she was in two short-range duels, one spawned on either side of her bulk. Like a master swordsman, Dindyma fought off both attackers at once and still kept moving along the line he wanted to follow. His ship edge
d out, to the extremities of the battlespace, ready to jump for a neutral star system.

  Tad watched the parallel fights unfold: cut and thrust with streams of fire, double and treble the screen layers to repel counter blows, sneak in a fast missile when the battle AIDs thought they detected a soft spot in one of the opponents’ defenses.

  The portside duel suddenly flared up, and it seemed the Arachnid frigate there was expending everything: hose-piping her plasma and spewing missiles in a single reckless display. The Broch had to redouble her screens, which almost closed off her own offensive fire. That side of the hull warmed slightly under the glare of splashed fire and thermonuclear detonations held harmlessly at bay by the fields of the e-mag screen. Of course, no mere frigate could do much to damage a planetary monitor—even if she hurled herself bodily into the Broch’s electromagnetic barrier and then fused her engines.

  In the tank, the monitor looked like a fuddled badger beset by a maddened rat. Not retreating, but hunkered down and waiting for the fury of tiny teeth and claws to end.

  It did. As if cut with a knife, the barrage ended. The last missile, fired at perilously close range, wobbled off course and exploded a hundred kilometers to galactic north.

  Then the frigate dropped her screens.

  With a swiftness beyond Human calculation, Broch’s battle AIDs conferred and fired. One fusion flare and the frigate’s hull metal vaporized. Armored plating, titanium substructure, bulkheads, and engine hulks, all went to gas in a nanosecond.

  “Relay that!” Thwaite shouted.

  Somewhere on the bridge a hand closed over a relay and dropped the AIDs into an electronic catatonia.

  What Thwaite had seen, what Bertingas in his concentration had missed, was the strange stillness all across the battlespace. Half the ships had gone dead, hung nose down, unscreened, unpowered. The destroyer on the Broch’s starboard side floated at the same odd angle,

  The navigational tank showed only a flare here and there as the Auroran forces, or the batteries of Gemini, picked off a belated target. Most of their captains had paused, undecided. Their own screens were still bright, of course, and their AIDs cried out to take on the helpless targets. Yet still the Aurorans, outnumbered as they were in this fight, withheld their fire.