In an attempt to give the Emry some relief Brand ordered a complete withdrawal. He had hoped the Ichtons would follow his ships outward, as they had during the earlier parts of the month-long battle. Instead they used the pause to redouble their attack on Emry. It was apparent that the Ichtons were continuing their new policy of destroying all opposition at any cost. He would have to recommit quickly or lose the planet.
Six hours after the withdrawal a squadron of the largest of the Fleet ships made a near light-speed run through the Emry system. Streaking past the Ichton screen they managed to destroy two more of the ten remaining mother ships. But the Ichtons responded quickly by throwing up a barrage ahead of the fast-moving ships. Moving too rapidly to avoid the missiles and mines, the Fleet force lost three of their eight heavy cruisers. This was too high a price and Commander Brand forbade any repeat of the maneuver.
Two days after the loss of the cruisers the battle had degenerated into a series of strikes on the Ichtons who had formed a widespread globe around their mother ships. This globe then settled into a distant orbit around Emry and when they were not directly engaged by the Fleet ships the Ichtons returned to the merciless bombardment of the planet. Anton Brand had not left the battle bridge since ordering the withdrawal four days earlier. He had slept only in short naps, unable to pull himself away from the battle. Finally Dr. Althea Morgan appeared and threatened to declare him medically incompetent unless he slept.
As it turned out, Commander Brand only got three hours rest before the dramatic conclusion of the battle.
BATTLE OFFERING
by Katherine Kurtz
The catastrophic fate of the Gerson world left scant reason to suppose that the enemy was anything other than pitiless and brutal. More than an hour of visual recording brought along by the last of the Gersons to escape told of planetary devastation almost beyond imagining, and on a scale hitherto unknown in Alliance memory except as a result of natural disaster.
For the gentle, bearlike Gersons had resisted invasion all too well. Before the coming of the Ichtons, the Gerson planet had been blanketed by rich farmlands and lush forests almost primeval by most worlds’ standards, its land masses girdled by wide seas teeming with life. Modest technological achievement had given the Gersons reasonable commerce with their nearest neighbors in the galactic core, but had also made their world ripe for exploitation by a race whose imperative was to expand, whatever the cost to other life-forms.
Now the Gerson world was a smoldering cinder. The Ichtons destroyed what would not submit. Impersonal and efficient, the Ichtons simply overwhelmed whatever stood in their path, no matter the level of indigenous civilization. This was not mere policy; it was a fact of existence. They had been hurt too much to sacrifice any warriors or ships to preserving resources while subduing a new planet. Any resistance by cities or military installations provoked immediate neutralization by antimatter and other bombing, followed by occupation of egg colony sites and the beginning of the stripping and exploitation of all the planet’s resources.
The unvarying pattern of Ichton expansion then became a cold, methodical extermination of all higher life-forms. The dead were eaten, whatever their species; all plant life likewise became fodder for the expanding Ichton colonies. Like the legendary Terran locusts they somewhat resembled, the Ichtons left nothing living where their swarms had passed. Forbearance and compassion were not terms within the Ichton comprehension.
Shaking his head, Commander Anton Brand punched the Cancel button on the arm of his recliner and laid his head back, though he did not close his eyes. He had seen the recording too many times already, and the scenes he had cut short already haunted what little sleep he managed to steal between bouts of battle. The slagged Gerson cities and barren, windswept plains were bad enough. But the worst was the final scene—an aerial glimpse of a cowering Gerson female trying desperately to shield her cub from the notice of half a dozen Ichton soldiers advancing through a burning village. The first time Brand had watched the Ichtons dismember the pair and begin devouring them alive, he had been all but physically ill.
The twittering sound of his intercom broke the intensity of unwanted memory and recalled him to the present, where the Ichtons were threatening to add another world to the string of stripped and lifeless husks already left in their wake. The little ready room adjacent to the command bridge was his personal hideaway for snatching a few minutes’ respite from the tension of command, but it was also conveniently close enough that he could never really escape.
Thumbing the response plate, he said, “Brand here.”
“Tashi here, Commander,” said his second-in-command. “Ah—we have an incident developing down on Yellow Two, in one of the destroyer bays. It seems a couple of dozen Gersons, all armed, are asking for one of the destroyers. I’ve already got a security team on the scene, and so far it hasn’t gotten ugly, yet. Now the Gersons are demanding to speak to you specifically. The leader’s name is Hooth. He was the commander of that last ship that came in with the Gerson survivors. Shall I have security gas the lot and then clear the bay, or do you want to talk to them?”
“Let me talk to them,” Brand said, sitting upright and swinging his feet to the floor. “The Gersons have been through enough, without their own allies turning on them. Who’s the security officer in charge?”
“Tucker, sir. He’s a level head, and he likes the Gersons, as you know, but it’s getting really touchy.”
“On my way,” Brand said.
Shaking his head, he buckled on his side arm and headed out the door. This move by the Gersons did not really surprise him. He supposed it was only natural to want to strike back at least one small blow for Gerson pride. Out of a onetime population of close to three billion, something less than one hundred Gersons remained. The sheer scale of the genocide carried out by the Ichtons was simply beyond the comprehension of most sentient beings. The Gersons were a noble race, and had seemed to accept their situation with more stoic resignation than one might have expected, but Brand knew how easily anger and helplessness could shift into heroic but futile gesture.
The grav-lift doors were just closing as he approached, and he jogged a few steps to touch the call plate before the lift could leave. The doors immediately retracted to the turning form of a medical officer, who grinned and nodded as she saw him. Anton Brand was, had been, one of the Fleet’s rising stars. Tall, and always thin, he had crossed into the painfully thin category months earlier. He had retained the sparkle in his bright blue eyes, but it was surrounded with the wrinkles and dark spots you can only gain from too much responsibility and too little sleep.
“ ’Lo, Anton,” she said. “That bad?”
“I hope not,” he muttered as he ducked in beside her and added, in the direction of the lift’s computer, “Deck Yellow Two, command override.”
“Right,” she said, she and Brand both steadying themselves on grab handles as the lift began to drop with stomach-wrenching speed. “Forget I asked.”
Brand gave her a sidelong look and a mirthless smile. Before the war, Maggie Conroy had been a medical planning specialist—no minor function on a ship the size of the Stephen Hawking. Of late, however, emergency trauma management had become the specialty of no choice for nearly all Fleet medical personnel. She was wearing a tan lab coat over blue surgical scrubs, with a medical field kit slung over one shoulder.
“Sorry, Maggie. Busy in your section?”
“When is it anything else, these days?” she replied. “I’ve just been up to the command bridge to make certain everybody’s still alert. How’re you doing?”
“Ask me in about an hour,” he said. “Sheer adrenaline cancels out a lot of ordinary fatigue.”
She cocked her head at him. “Sounds serious. Can I help?”
“Depends on how much you know about Gersons. They’re asking for a destroyer. What do you want to bet they’re considering a suicide run?”
The lift came to a halt with another queasing of stomachs,
and the doors sighed open on an impatient-looking security lieutenant and a sergeant at arms.
“Too late, Commander,” the lieutenant said, gesturing down a right-angle corridor and already heading out. “Tucker just gave the order to flood the bay with knockout gas. They were trying to take the ship.”
“Tell him to belay that order, now!” Brand retorted, breaking into a run.
He could hear the lieutenant relaying the message, was aware of the sergeant at arms and Maggie following close behind him as he ran. There were several more security officers in the little control module outside the series of airlocks that led into the docking bay in question, and Brand could hear the whine of large turbo fans starting up as he reached the module.
“Sorry, Commander, but everybody’s down,” one of the men said. “They started throwing riggers off the boarding ramp. They’d also captured a couple of access keys. If they’d gotten aboard, there wouldn’t have been anything we could do to stop them taking the ship.”
On one of the viewscreens of the bay’s interior, Brand could see dozens of green clothed Gersons sprawled across the decks just outside the ship, security men in gas filter masks moving among them to remove weapons. The boarding ramp was choked with unconscious tech personnel, and security men were beginning to carry them off and lay them out in neat rows.
Brand took it all in and sighed. Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, things just didn’t work out the way they should. The knockout gas would leave no permanent effects, but it was hardly conducive to leaving the Gersons in any positive frame of mind, when they came around.
“How much of a dose did they get?” Brand asked. “Has Med been called?”
“Yes to the last, sir, and I’d say everybody will be down for half an hour or so,” the man said. “For the Gersons, it might be a little more or less. The gas is safe for a broad band of species, but I’m not sure exactly how the dosage works for them.”
Brand glanced at Maggie. “What about it, Mags?”
She shook her head. “No problem. Larger body mass, smaller proportional dose. If anything, they’ll recover more quickly than the humans, barring unusual reactions of individuals. Do you want me to start checking them, while we wait for the Meds?”
“Let’s do that,” he said. They headed for the set of airlocks that led into the docking bay in question. Because the bays were routinely opened to hard space, inside entrance and egress to them was protected by not one but two airlocks set in serial. As they entered the first lock and its safety doors sighed closed behind them, the doors ahead parted on a tall, sandy-haired security captain with a gas filter mask pushed up on top of his head.
“Tuck, I’m disappointed,” Brand said, already moving forward. “Didn’t they tell you I was on my way down?”
“Aye, sir, they did,” Tucker replied, turning to accompany them back into the intermediate lock he had just left. “Unfortunately, the Gersons had already decided to take matters into their own hands by then. I stopped the gas as soon as I got your counter-order, but it was too late. Everybody should be up and about in a little while, though.”
“Were they really trying to take the ship?” Maggie asked as they came through the last of the doors and into the bay, heading for the downed Gersons sprawled all around the ship.
“Sure looks that way,” Tucker said. As Maggie knelt to check the nearest Gerson, he returned his attention to Brand. “Apparently they came in just as the tech crew had finished rearming it, and wanted to know how to rig the warp engines to overload.”
Maggie glanced up sharply at that, but Brand only shook his head.
“Can’t say I blame them,” he said. “But I haven’t got destroyers to spare. You think they were serious?”
“Sure sounds that way,” Tucker replied. “They talked most with one of the tech crew, before we got called in. He’s over there.” He gestured toward the sprawled figure of a balding little man whose sleeve patches proclaimed him a Spec-5 armorer. “Name’s Max Faber. His argument was actually making a lot of sense, before we had to gas everybody.”
Brand cast his eyes over the clutter of sleeping humans and Gersons and shook his head.
“All right. I’ve got to get back up to the command bridge. Tuck, when they’re awake again, I want to see the ringleaders in the ward room. Give me Hooth and a couple or three of his head honchos. Include Mr. Faber, too. I’d like to hear his arguments to justify a suicide run by the last of a race. And, Maggie, can you bird-dog this for me, make certain everybody’s recovered before I start chewing ass?”
“I’ll take care of everything,” she said. “Give us a couple of hours, though. You’ve heard of people who wake up as grumpy as a bear that’s been woken out of hibernation? Well, the Gersons bear more than a physical resemblance to their ursine forbears—if you’ll pardon the multiple plays on words.”
Brand grimaced and made a gesture of dismissal, then headed back out of the docking bay.
Captain Tashi did not glance back as Brand stepped out of the darkened passage that was the transition from the bright-lit outside corridor to the dim lighting of the command bridge, but Brand knew his arrival had been noted. Command staff wore personal coders that not only admitted them to the bridge but broadcast a short sequence of pips in the earphones of duty personnel, so that visual attention need not be diverted from what could be vital continuity in a battle situation.
It was always far quieter than Brand expected it to be, for the virtual nerve center of the Hawking. The bridge was mostly dark, lit primarily by the several dozen numbered status screens ranged to either side of the central command plinth and the enormous holotank set close to the far wall. Command staff manned five workstations in the pit between the tank and the command plinth. Two of them were battle tacticians when the Hawking was on alert, each provided with computer links to the ship’s battle bridge and her gun decks; the other three were technicians who oversaw nondefense aspects of the ship’s operation.
Alert status also meant that the command bridge duplicated many of the functions of fire control, over on the battle bridge, necessary for overall coordination when the Hawking was under periodic attack. Colored dots floated in the tank to mark the location of the ships engaged in the battle: white for Fleet ships, blue for allies, and red for the Ichton forces. The images in the tank kept changing as Tashi shifted first one screen and then another into the tank to get a fresh perspective, occasionally speaking softly into a tiny microphone attached to an earpiece in one ear.
Not speaking, Brand mounted the three steps of the command plinth and crouched beside the command chair, glancing at the information display screen embedded in the left chair arm and then letting his gaze range quickly over the large status screens and then on to the huge three-dimensional tank that showed the battle under active consideration. Near the center of the tank, not to scale, floated a small, semitransparent greenish sphere meant to represent the besieged Emry planet, closely surrounded by moving red dots, some of them far larger than others and pulsing. The latter were Ichton mother ships, most desirous of all targets because they carried the precious Ichton eggs, whose protection was the sole focus of the Ichton support fleet.
Once the mother ships landed on a planet and began setting up egg colonies, and especially once they became entrenched, they were much more difficult to destroy. Most desirable was to destroy such ships while still in space, since this also eliminated thousands of future Ichton soldiers. But even heavy damage to one would draw off Ichton escort vessels in an attempt to save the eggs—which lessened the number of ships available to resist Alliance forces as they swept in on desultory raids.
Such a raid was in progress now. From far on the right of the tank, a cluster of perhaps eight small blue dots was crawling toward one of the Ichton mother ships, small red dots beginning to swarm outward from it toward the blue ones.
“Emry?” Brand asked quietly.
“Yes,” Tashi murmured, not taking his eyes from the tank. “They aren
’t going to make it, though.” He hit a switch in his right armrest. “Abort. Break off.”
At first nothing seemed to happen, but then the last four blue dots veered off in an oblique line, away from the advancing red dots. But the other four continued on.
“Call them off, damn it! They aren’t going to get through,” Tashi said into his mike.
But the blue dots kept going, now engaging with the Ichton ships. Where red and blue dots touched, a tiny flash always left only one dot lit. The blue dots lost three, but the red dots lost five. The remaining blue dot continued on, now heading directly toward the closest mother ship, its former escort blue dots now swarming in behind it to weave erratically among the defending red dots—and far more of the red dots went out than blue ones.
“God, they’re brave little suckers, but it isn’t going to work,” Tashi whispered, now clenching his left fist to his mouth, trying to will the blue dots to hold on. The blue dot heading for the Ichton mother ship was still on course, two more red dots flicking out as Brand and Tashi watched. But when the blue dot finally touched the mother ship, it was the blue dot that disappeared.
“Damn!” Tashi whispered.
But even as he shook his head in denial, Brand was touching his sleeve and gesturing toward the tank, where one of the tacticians had changed the scene to a closer perspective of the Ichton mother ship. Actual visual contact was not possible at this distance, but from the movements of the many red dots now converging on the mother ship, it soon became clear that the last Emry ship had not been the only casualty of the ultimate engagement.
“I think they may just have holed her,” Brand said, calling up a display on the chair-arm screen and scanning the readout. “By God, they did. And that’s almost better than a kill, because they have to swarm in and try to save as many eggs as possible. Dirty fighting, but it may be all we’ve got.”
Battlestations Page 52
