Wen caught a glimpse of Marshal Lü’s feral grin out of the corner of her eye. If anything, the smile made him look less friendly, not more.
“It’s unknown whether they anticipate an attack or if these iceberg guns are a standard feature of their planetary defenses on core worlds. In either case, we can expect a swift response once we reach the surface. Your shields will be down—”
Someone in the front row coughed loudly. Wen immediately assumed the worst. She knew her big mistake on the Harbin mission wasn’t in official reports, but what if it got out? To her relief, the rest of the assembly didn’t react, but Nima’s smug face was unmistakable. He was too correct to do more than that, even make a face, but his eyes were smiling. Wen hated that look, the same one he gave her when she graduated at near the bottom of her Academy class.
Who’s the commodore and who’s the commander, Nima? Laugh all you want, but don’t forget to salute!
“—As I was saying, your shields will be down, so it would be best if you get your marines away and get out of there as quickly as possible. We have very little in the way of ground intelligence save what can be had by cursory passes by scouts, so keep your wits about you and expect anything and everything.
“Once the ground element is deployed we join the fight above. Stay in your sector and out of each other’s way, and above all keep fighting. If one attack doesn’t work try another. Trust your ship, push it through the paces, and let everyone do their jobs. Grab the Enemy by the bulkhead and don’t let go. We can win this people, if everyone does their duty. You’re dismissed to your ships to await the final signal. You all know your places, go now, and the hopes of the Ren and Mei go with you!”
A great cheer rose from the crowd then, and Wen felt ten meters tall.
The officers filed out of the assembly hall at once, and the press of the crowd was great. They were on their way to the great space elevator that would take them to orbit and the shuttles to their ships. Wen waited for the rush to die down a bit before she followed. Jiang put a hand on her shoulder.
“Couldn’t have done it better myself, Wen. For a minute there I thought your mother had come back.”
Wen beamed. “Thanks, Admiral. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to giving speeches, though.”
“You never get used to it, I’m afraid. Look, why don’t you have a word with the other sector leaders? I’ve got to get the dreadnought line in order. See you on Chengdu.”
“See you,” Wen said, and watched Admiral Jiang leave.
“Rat leader!” someone called from behind. Wen turned around to see Nima giving a sardonic salute, with Xinren and a junior officer from astrogation that she remembered from the Void Dragon in tow, a Li or Liu she thought.
That’s right, she was the leader for Rat Sector, but he didn’t have to say it like that.
“Well, this is a nice reunion, isn’t it?” she said. “So, what ships are you on?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Xinren asked.
“We’re the sector leaders!” Liu said. She was pretty sure it was Liu.
In that moment Liu looked incredibly young and innocent to Wen. Was that what she looked like before her first command?
“Ox Leader,” said Nima.
“Tiger Leader!” said Liu.
“Rabbit Leader,” said Xinren.
“And of course, you’re Rat Leader, Wen,” Nima said with a shit-eating grin on his face. “We’ve all got our own ships, too. They’re practically giving them away these days.”
“Everyone on the Void Dragon’s been promoted!” Liu said. She was short for a Ren and very kind looking, didn’t seem military at all. Wen didn’t know her well beyond she was Nima’s direct subordinate at astrogation for the Void Dragon’s maiden voyage. She must be good if she was handpicked for that. Appearances can be deceiving, Wen thought.
“When did you all find time to do command simulations? I’m sure they’re giving out ships but not to people without at least some training. The simulator at the Dark Facility was the only one with a frigate program while we were on the Void Dragon. Most of this new blood trained while we were stranded on Harbin. I’m pretty sure the training program wasn’t released until then.”
“They grandfathered us in, basically,” Xinren said.
“Nobody has seen more of these ships than us,” Liu added. “But they did give us each a couple of days of sim training after we got back with Montjoie. Don’t worry Cap-adore, we’re ready.”
Hope so. “Each of you will be responsible for your own grid. Even if we’re ‘leaders’ it’s going to be chaos out there. Watch your backs and stay safe, even you, Nima,” Wen said.
They went over particulars for a few minutes but Wen seriously needed to get away, just for a little while. She made for a bathroom to decompress while there was still a long line at the local space elevator. They probably weren’t used to these kind of crowds, she figured. On a typical day there just wasn’t a lot of traffic on and off Zhongxing. You had the people who lived there and you had people being summoned, which was never a huge number.
Wen knelt over the sink and splashed her face, didn’t do any good of course, her military makeup was quite thoroughly waterproof. She looked into her own eyes in the mirror. Did I just make a speech before the whole fleet? Has everything that happened this year been real? She supposed it must be real. Even in her moment of triumph there were a few indignities. Nima just couldn’t help himself getting one last shot in. Fuck him, he’s wrong about me.
She hated feeling like this but was thankful all the same. She’d always been at her best when challenged, when she’d been put on the spot and asked to prove something, especially to someone who had underestimated her. She could use this feeling as fuel. She’d have to. It was time to leave.
The space elevator wasn’t as impressive as one might imagine. There was a series of cables going all the way up to a spaceport in orbit, but they were very thin and stabilized with massive light, barely visible, like spider webs that disappeared when you tilted your head slightly.
Wen waited at the loading platform with the stragglers. When she got there they told her they’d been waiting for over an hour. In the end it’d taken three round trips to get everybody into orbit, everybody but them. They’d be number four. So unlucky.
The round disk that would ferry them to the spaceport came down pretty fast and the operator checked everything twice before raising the security rails and letting them board. Poor man is probably under a lot of pressure, Wen thought. There wouldn’t be any tolerance for screw ups today.
It was a pretty nice elevator, all things considered. The interior was divided into quarters with rows of comfortable-looking seats, almost like something you’d see on the command deck of a warship. The chairs probably were the same as on warships, now that she thought about it. She took a seat by the window and noticed her quarter was mostly empty, save for some junior officers that looked too intimidated to sit near her. Wen wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that but decided against it, wouldn’t want to ruin her image, such as it was.
The window was an interesting neosteel number, quantum treated to be transparent to the naked eye. Wen was content to just stare out and let purple Zhongxing disappear, replaced with the upper atmosphere of hot pink refracted sunlight, and finally the black. I may never see this again, she said to herself, but immediately quashed that train of thought. No negativity now. I need to be sharp today, more than I’ve ever needed before.
***
Admiral Jiang sat still in her command chair aboard the great dreadnought Liangshan. She was doing her level best to seem stoic but her whole command deck knew the truth. It was the little things, the way her eyes jerked from one line of data to another on her private screen instead of flowing smoothly, the pale coloration of her knuckles as she gripped the armrests. She was worried.
Most of the frigate crews were hastily trained and even more hastily promoted, and most importantly had never worked together before. She
knew from experience how badly a ship could suffer when the officers weren’t in sync. Breaking up the crew of the Void Dragon had been a difficult decision, but she knew it had to be done. Officers experienced in handling these ships had to be spread out, but it was a case of too little seasoning for too much stew.
Wen had been pretty raw when they first sortied together, and she’d been a rare talent, psychologically suited to commanding a fast ship. It’d taken months to iron out the wrinkles just the same. The problem was they didn’t have months to train all these new crews. They’d all studied Wen, gone over what she did wrong, and put in a few days in the simulator, but would it be enough? Knowing how to pilot a ship in theory was a hell of a lot different from taking one out for real.
There would be accidents; there would be mistakes. Admiral Jiang honestly didn’t expect half the frigates to survive the battle, and that’s if they won.
“Admiral, Zhongxing ground control reports the last of the officers are at the spaceport. Shuttling them to their individual ships should be complete within the hour,” reported her first officer.
“Good. Are all the sector leaders aboard their ships yet?” Jiang asked.
“All save Commodore Wen. She’s taking the first available shuttle to the Yellow Wind as we speak.”
So like her, to wait till the last minute. “Then relay these instructions: I want every frigate on maneuvers until the last possible minute. We’ve got four hours until the first wave and I want the crews to get used to working together as much as possible, given the circumstances. Have them spread out over the system and practice short shifts like they’ll use in combat.
“Conventional stuff too,” she added as an afterthought. “Separate by sectors into wolfpacks of twenty to thirty and orbit celestial objects in formation, simulated attack runs on the dreadnought line as well. I want every sector leader organizing this.”
“Affirmative, Admiral,” he replied evenly.
It won’t be enough. “Four hours until the first wave, people! Let’s make it count!”
***
Major Zhamisce was struggling to breathe. They were packed tight in one of the frigates, though he couldn’t be bothered to remember which.
“Remind you of anything, Captain?” he asked Ogun.
“Mines of Darinzai,” Ogun said at once.
“Yep, mines of Darinzai,” he replied stupidly. That’d been a hell of a mission, digging the Enemy out of tunnels on a world of endless night, not an experience he particularly wanted to relive, but they were pretty much out of conversation topics.
Their equipment had been calibrated for an aquatic configuration, with special boots that sort of worked like a combination between skis, flippers, and flotation devices and jump jets that could be switched to underwater propellant mode. It was the opposite of Harbin in every way but that didn’t really comfort him much. The sea had its own dangers, and the Enemy was at home there.
“What the hell are they doing out there?” Sergeant Toryn asked. They were definitely moving, but it wasn’t time to go for a few hours yet.
“You feel that? I think we just shifted,” said another trooper.
“They didn’t move up the timetable did they?” another asked nervously. Zhamsice didn’t recognize him, probably a replacement for one of the casualties from Harbin.
“No,” Zhamisce said. “Probably just getting in formation. Trust me, once we hit the gravity well, you’ll know. Stay frosty, marine.”
“Yes, sir!” The kid tried to salute but they were too closely packed. Zhamisce would’ve liked to have a word with the idiot that decided it would be two companies per frigate. They barely had enough room for one on the Void Dragon.
But the ship wasn’t just getting in formation. They kept moving and it kept agitating the already keyed-up marines. Zhamisce would’ve complained if he thought anybody would listen to him, but that wasn’t how things worked in the Gongyue Government. He’d heard Captain Wen had been promoted, and good for her, but his marines had done the real work, and here they were back again, with barely a “good work, marine,” for their trouble.
Okay, maybe that was too far. They and the Xuanwu remnants had gotten Chairwoman’s Unit Citations, which wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t nearly as good as what Wen and her lot got, that was for sure.
The constant movement continued and a minute seemed like an hour.
“What they hell are they doing?” Toryn asked.
“Mugeshi,” Yimran said.
Mugeshi. Chickenshit. Zhamisce had to agree. He switched on the stiff leg settings and went limp in his suit.
“Wake me when we’re about to drop, Ogun.”
Chapter 16
“The fleet is assembled and ready to jump, Admiral.”
She’d spent the last half-hour wrangling everyone from their last minute maneuvers and was just about ready to get on with it. Jiang took a breath and prayed it would be enough. This didn’t feel like history, just another battle with more tedious prep work than usual beforehand. That was a good sign, she supposed.
“Very well, the fleet is cleared to jump,” Jiang said, sweeping her hand forward as a final signal.
Long inured to the odd feeling of the greenshift, Jiang kept her eyes on the object tracker in the corner of her private screen, the fleet commander’s best friend. The energy blinded all and consumed all for a breath and a half. Such a jump as they were making was known to leave clouds of frayed space-time for months or even years, so they had to burn well away from any inhabited space before initiating.
They shifted back into tangibility over the dark side of a moon, and strung out to all hell. Jiang was already beginning to regret her plan, the electromagnetic interference coming off the ferrous moon was already distorting her object tracker and for a single irrational moment she feared half her fleet lost to the ether.
“Hail the frigates closest to us and use them as runners,” Jiang ordered. “The dreadnought line is to assemble at the far side of the nebula and prepare to approach the Enemy fleet from the underside of the planet. We’ll burn through those dust clouds and enter Chengdu’s orbit to swing around and hit them from the opposite side. Remember, once we’re there the range is two hundred guangbai and holding until further orders.”
“And the frigates themselves?” her first officer asked, quite calm and businesslike.
It was times like this that Jiang missed having Nima around. Little as he got along with Wen he’d served under her for years and knew her mind well. Nima would already be halfway through carrying out her orders even as she issued them. Losing him to the Void Dragon and now the frigate wing had really played havoc with her bridge’s efficiency.
New people everywhere.
“They’re to form up by sectors and await the command to shift to the planet’s surface.”
Jiang considered deploying them immediately but didn’t want to give them Enemy too much advance warning of their intentions. It was going to be a hell of a balancing act to time her fleet’s movements so they’d hit them above and below at roughly the same time.
And she was savoring the last scraps of control she had. Once the shooting started coordination would go to hell and she’d have a front row seat to either victory or slow-moving disaster without much she could do to tip the scales either way.
“Shields up on the dreadnought line,” she added. They’d be plowing through clouds of particulate matter and even asteroids pretty soon, and it wouldn’t do to meet the Enemy as anything other than their best selves.
Jiang clicked through a few modes on her object tractor to try and clear up the display. If you focused too long on any one set of data things got stale with junk objects and light-noise, warping your picture of reality. Their sensors provided fairly accurate snapshots of the battle space at any given moment but refreshing constantly was a necessary habit.
The frigates were already forming into their sectors. Rat. Ox. Tiger. Rabbit. Hundreds of frigates with ten kilometer gaps on every side.
They’d have to cover a whole continent’s worth of archipelago and open ocean; they’d have to defeat the Enemy on land and sea, especially sea. They had no way of knowing what kind of numbers the Enemy had lurking below the surface. A few island cities had been spotted but Montjoie had insisted there would be more, somewhere.
“The frigates are cleared the jump when ready. Prepare to enter the nebula.”
Good luck, Marshal.
***
Major Zhamisce jolted awake, instantly alert and ready to shoot something. “What the FUCK is it?”
Captain Ogun’s black face just stared back, serenely. “Sixty seconds, Major.”
Shit. Zhamisce’s tried to shake out his body but found his suit fought him, and it wasn’t a battle flesh and blood could win. He disabled stiff mode with a blink and summoned a quick shock of neurokinetic energy to warm up his body in a hurry. The suit had a direct conduit to his nervous system via a surgical implant in his spinal column, normally used to aid control, but the connection worked both ways. He just stood there and let the tech do the work. In two blinks he was loose and alert.
By his will alone his visor came down and sealed, bringing up the combat grid on his heads up display.
Targets, I need targets.
They had one job, the iceberg guns. The damned things had to be silenced at all costs. Already a route was forming in his mind’s eye based on the intelligence report, but he wasn’t married to it. They’d have to sweep the whole grid to be sure. He wasn’t looking forward to diving below the surface to place charges, but that’s what the engineers said had to be done to put them out of commission for good.
Sudden turbulence rattled them like coins in a jar.
“Pop the hatch; we’re here!” he yelled.
He heard the sound of the sea, muffled a bit by his helmet and the hull of the frigate, and something else.
Void Dragon Page 22
