Debt of Honor (The Embers of War)

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  “As long as they are careful, they can avoid contact with superior forces indefinitely,” she said slowly. She’d done it herself, although she had to admit that the enemy had baited a trap for her. It was a shame Admiral Junayd was dead. He might have had some useful insights. “But we’re going to have to find a way to track them back to their base.”

  “Unless they’ve set up a fleet train in deep space,” Janice said.

  “I doubt it,” Fran said. “Even we had problems transshipping supplies and making repairs in interstellar space. I wouldn’t bet a single rusty crown on the Theocrats being able to do it without risking a major disaster. No, they’ll have a base somewhere in unexplored space.”

  Kat nodded stiffly. Fran was right. But finding the base was going to be an absolute nightmare. Even something as large as the giant fleet bases that had supported the Royal Navy was little more than a speck of dust against the immensity of interstellar space. There was no way she could search all the prospective star systems thoroughly enough to be certain there was no base there. Trying to do so would force her to pull ships off guard duty and convoy escort, leaving her weak elsewhere.

  “I want to detach destroyers and place one or two in each possible system,” she said after a moment. “Their orders are not to engage, but to attempt to shadow the enemy fleet as it returns to its base. Once they get a solid lock on its position, they can report back here, and we’ll send a squadron of superdreadnoughts to smash the base into atoms.”

  “It really needs to be taken intact,” Janice said. “We have to find out who’s supplying them.”

  “If, indeed, someone is supplying them,” Fran pointed out. “You could be wrong.”

  Kat rose. “I’ll discuss the matter with the king,” she added. She’d been due for a holoconference with King Hadrian anyway. It would just have to be brought forward. “And then I’ll move my flag to the Beta Squadron.”

  She looked at Winters. “You’ll assume command here, upon my departure. Dismissed.”

  “Aye, Admiral.”

  Kat strode out of the conference room and down to her office. Kitty must have heard that Kat had returned early, because there was a mug of steaming coffee and a plate of sandwiches sitting on the desk. Kat sat down, keyed the terminal to open a StarCom link to Tyre, and started to eat. Nearly twenty minutes passed before the communications link solidified and the king’s face materialized in front of her. Kat allowed herself a tired smile as she pushed the remains of her snack to one side. She liked the king. He’d always struck her as someone willing to go the extra mile for his people.

  “Your Majesty,” she said. Technically, as a privy councilor, she could call the king by his first name, but she’d always felt weird doing so. They weren’t social equals and never would be. “Thank you for taking my call.”

  “You said it was urgent,” the king said. His voice was calm. “And it got me out of a boring meeting.”

  Kat frowned. “I’m afraid things are about to become a great deal less boring,” she said, and outlined what had happened at Judd. “The Theocracy may not be dead after all.”

  The king’s eyes narrowed. “I warned them,” he snapped. “Just because we won the battles doesn’t mean we’d won the war.”

  “No, Your Majesty,” Kat said. “We need more ships out here, as quickly as possible.”

  “Parliament isn’t going to like that,” the king told her. He sounded bitterly amused. “They’re already talking about drawing the military down still further.”

  “Then millions of people are going to die,” Kat said. She made a mental note to write a letter to her brother, although she suspected it would be useless. Peter had been a stiff-necked, colorless man practically from birth, if the nurses were to be believed. He’d certainly never had time to play with the young Kat. But then, Peter had practically been an adult when Kat had been a little girl. “You have to make that clear to them.”

  “I will,” the king said. “But politics . . .”

  Father would never have allowed matters to get so far out of hand, Kat thought. Her father had been a great man, even if he too hadn’t had much time for her as a child. But Peter doesn’t have the experience to lead the family.

  She told herself, firmly, that she was being unfair. There was no way to get such experience, save by doing it. And Peter couldn’t have taken over a family leadership role until their father’s death. Any plans for a smooth transition of power had been wrecked when Duke Falcone had been assassinated. The Theocracy had probably never known it, but they’d done a great deal of damage to the Commonwealth. She dreaded to think where it might end.

  “I’ll push the matter as hard as I can,” the king said. “I take the issue seriously.”

  “I’ll make sure you have plenty of footage from Judd,” Kat said. She allowed herself a moment of warmth towards him. The king was trying to do something, which was more than could be said for the bottom-warmers in Parliament. “And from the next attacks.”

  “Please,” the king said. He raised one hand in salute. “Take care of yourself, Kat.”

  “And you, Your Majesty,” she told him. The king was young, barely two years older than Kat, but he was carrying the weight of an entire sector on his shoulders. “Take care of yourself too.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  ASHER DALES

  “That was a boring flight,” Patti complained crossly as Dandelion entered the Asher Dales system. “We didn’t encounter a single pirate.”

  “They probably saw us coming and ran the other way,” William said dryly. It would be a rare pirate who decided to pick a fight with two destroyers, particularly when they weren’t escorting any freighters. They might decide that the destroyers had to be transporting something small yet valuable, like datachips, but the odds were against it. “There’ll be plenty of pirates in our future.”

  He raised his voice. “Helm, take us out of hyperspace near the planet.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Lieutenant Tim Arthur said. “Vortex opening in twenty seconds.”

  William smiled to himself, doing his best to project calm across the bridge. Asher Dales hadn’t been surveyed very thoroughly, neither by the original settlers nor the Theocracy, and there was always a chance, a very slight chance, of running into a gravity shear and being blown out of hyperspace. Thankfully, despite its proximity to the Gap, Asher Dales didn’t seem to attract many energy storms. He still wanted to survey the system himself as quickly as possible.

  He tensed as the vortex opened, allowing the two destroyers to slip back into realspace. There was no way to be sure what they would encounter at their destination, despite Tanya’s assurances. The latest news from the Theocratic Sector had not been encouraging. Too many provisional governments were proving unstable, now that the common foe had been removed. Tanya’s father and his government might already have been kicked out of power.

  “Local space is clear, sir,” the sensor officer reported. “I’m picking up one artificial construction in orbit. Warbook calls it a Class-III Orbit Station.”

  “Transmit our IFFs,” William ordered. The orbiting station had once belonged to the Theocracy, but the resistance had captured it when the Commonwealth had liberated the system. An impressive feat, even though the locals hadn’t said much about how it had actually been done. “And then take us into high orbit.”

  He settled back in his command chair as the holographic display began to fill with icons. Asher Dales had almost no spacefaring presence, save for the orbiting station, but that didn’t mean that the system was useless. Four gas giants, two rocky worlds, and a giant asteroid field . . . Asher Dales was poised to become an industrial powerhouse, if it ever had the chance to develop properly. William rather suspected that it would take decades. The Theocracy hadn’t even bothered to set up a cloudscoop!

  But the inhabitants do have a chance, he thought. Assuming, of course, they manage to lure more outside investment.

  “Captain,” the c
ommunications officer said. “We’ve been formally welcomed to their system, sir, and you have an invitation to dinner.”

  He paused. “They also want to speak directly to Miss Barrington.”

  “Then patch a link through to her cabin,” William ordered. It had been easy to tell that Tanya hadn’t enjoyed the trip, but she hadn’t complained. “And then inform them that I will be happy to accept the invitation.”

  He kept a wary eye on the sensors as they approached the planet and entered orbit, but nothing materialized to trouble him. They’d have to inspect the orbiting station with a fine-toothed comb, he told himself firmly; the design was relatively common, dating all the way back to the UN, but the Theocracy had been the ones to turn the design into reality. It didn’t look as though they’d made a mess of it . . . He shook his head. He’d seen enough of what passed for engineering in the Theocracy to not take anything for granted.

  “Prepare a shuttle,” he ordered once they were safely in orbit. “Miss Barrington and I will head down to the surface.”

  Tanya met him outside her cabin, looking more cheerful than she’d seemed for the last two weeks. William understood how she felt, even though it wasn’t something he shared. There was never any shortage of tasks on a starship, from the lowliest midshipman to the commanding officer himself. Boredom was rarely a problem. Tanya, on the other hand, had been confined to a tiny cabin. She hadn’t even been able to see the stars outside.

  “We made it,” she said as they entered the shuttle. “Thank you.”

  William lifted his eyebrows. “Did you doubt it?”

  Tanya said nothing. William smiled as he motioned for her to strap herself in, then took the pilot’s chair for himself. It had been a long time since he’d flown such a shuttle, but he’d managed to keep up with his flying certifications over the last year. Besides, it wasn’t easy to forget how to fly a shuttle.

  He disengaged from the destroyer then steered the craft down towards the planet below. Asher Dales looked like any other blue-and-green world, although he thought there was more green than blue. A glance at the shuttle computers told him that there was definitely more land surface relative to water than the average human-compatible world. It was unlikely that Asher Dales would have a problem with living space anytime soon.

  “I’ve locked onto the beacon,” he said, as the shuttle flew into the atmosphere and headed north. “Is that the capital city?”

  “Yep,” Tanya said. “We don’t have a particularly big spaceport. The original one was smashed during the occupation, and the bastards weren’t interested in repairing or replacing it.”

  “We’ll manage,” William assured her.

  He had to smile as Landing came into view. The city was relatively small for its importance; it was centered around a single colony ship and a handful of orbital dumpsters that had been dropped to the surface. The spaceport itself was nothing more than a large field covered in concrete. William thought he would have missed it if there hadn’t been a couple of other shuttles sitting in the open. There was only one hangar, which didn’t look to be large enough to take more than one full-sized shuttle.

  “Most of the population lives outside of Landing,” Tanya commented as William carefully landed the shuttle on the concrete pad. “That made resistance easier, apparently. The Theocrats couldn’t pen most of the inhabitants into the cities.”

  William glanced at her. “How many people live on Asher Dales?”

  Tanya bit her lip. “The last census claimed three million,” she said. “But that was before the war.”

  And it might have dropped since then, William thought. Barely a tenth of Hebrides’s population remained alive, thanks to the war. Asher Dales had been luckier, in some respects, but unluckier in others. It will be a long time before any of the inhabitants will trust the skies again.

  He shut down the shuttle, then stood. The local gravity felt a little stronger than the gravity on Tyre—he made a mental note to adjust the gravity on the destroyers to match—but wasn’t enough to slow him down. Tanya seemed to be having more trouble, for all that she’d been born on Asher Dales . . . William puzzled over that for a moment, then reminded himself that she’d left her homeworld when she’d been a child. She probably remembered almost nothing. He wondered, as he opened the hatch and stepped outside, if that was a good thing or not. He’d take the memories of Hebrides, as it had been before the war, to his grave.

  A small welcoming committee was waiting at the edge of the field. Three men, two of them carrying rifles slung over their shoulders. William waited for Tanya to step out of the shuttle, then allowed her to lead the way towards the committee. Up close, he could see that their clothes were homemade, perhaps on Asher Dales itself.

  “Captain McElney,” the first man said. He held out a hand. “Richard Barrington, Planetary President.”

  William studied him for a long moment. Richard Barrington reminded William of his brother, something that wasn’t entirely a good thing. They had the same roguish scoundrel look, the same devil-may-care attitude towards life, the same smile . . . He reminded himself, sharply, that Richard Barrington had done a lot more for his homeworld than Scott McElney had ever done for his. Richard Barrington had worked tirelessly to free Asher Dales from foreign occupation. He deserved credit for that, if nothing else.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, shaking Barrington’s hand. “And your friends?”

  “Andrew Gellman and Jackson Ford, both members of my cabinet,” Barrington said, with a hint of a smile. “Their roles keep changing, for better or worse. Things are still a little unsettled here.”

  “I see,” William said.

  “If you’ll come with us, we have a meal prepared,” Barrington said after a moment. “And we have much to discuss.”

  William wasn’t sure if he should be charmed by what he saw as he walked through the streets, such as they were, or deeply worried. Asher Dales looked more like a new colony than one with a population of three million people, although he had to admit that spreading three million people over an entire planet would leave them pretty scattered. Barrington and his subordinates kept up a constant running chatter, telling William about their small industrial base and their long-term plans for the future. They had big plans.

  “We always intended to move into space,” Barrington told him as they reached a small cottage. It took William a moment to realize that the building was Barrington’s home. “The Theocracy got there first.”

  William smiled. “And now you plan to make sure you can never be conquered again?”

  “Essentially,” Barrington said. “As I believe Tanya told you, our long-term goal is to develop our own space-based industry.”

  “That will take some time,” William said.

  “There are shortcuts,” Barrington said. He jabbed a finger upwards. “The real problem is getting to orbit. Once we’re there, we’re halfway to anywhere.”

  That wasn’t particularly accurate, William thought as they sat down at the table, but he understood the man’s point. Getting heavy payloads out of a planet’s atmosphere had been a problem that had bedeviled mankind until antigravity drive fields had been invented. Asher Dales could put together the technology to build a lunar base without many problems and, once they solved the problem of getting the base to the moon, they’d have no trouble turning it into a mining center. William had no idea if they really could build something to rival Tyre, one day, but he admired them for trying.

  “You’ll notice that much of our food is very simple,” Barrington told him. “But feel free to eat as much as you like.”

  William felt an odd burst of nostalgia. He’d taken part in enough barn raisings as a young man to remember how the men would do the outdoor work while the women would lay out a fantastic spread. The meal in front of him was very similar. There was bread and cheese, cold meats and eggs and salad . . . The men tucked in without hesitation. Tanya seemed a little more reluctant to eat. William rather suspected she’d fo
rgotten what people ate on Asher Dales.

  “So far, things have been relatively safe out here,” Barrington said, once he’d satisfied his hunger. “But we’re expecting that to change. The Commonwealth is doing what it can, but there simply aren’t enough ships on patrol to make a difference. We’ve already heard of a couple of worlds that were forced to supply food and drink”—he nodded at the jugs of water and juice—“to pirate ships. It won’t be long before more pirates start making their way into the sector.”

  “Assuming you have anything they want to take,” William pointed out.

  “Our industrial base is small, but quite flexible,” Barrington told him. “We could supply a pirate with quite a few components, if he demanded our compliance at gunpoint.”

  William lifted his eyebrows. “And the Theocracy didn’t?”

  Gellman smirked. “Most of our engineers went underground as soon as we realized what was coming our way,” he said. “And they took quite a few things with them.”

  Barrington dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief. “Your role, Captain, as Tanya told you, is threefold. First, we want you to protect this system against pirates and . . . die-hard fanatics. Second, to eventually link up with other worlds in the sector and provide protection for convoys and suchlike. And third, to create a training school for our young men and women. Do you foresee any difficulties?”

  William took a moment to consider his answer. “A great deal, Mr. President, depends on factors beyond our control . . .”

  “Please, call me Richard,” Barrington said. “I’ve been assured that my head is already too swollen for my own good.”

  “Yes . . . Richard,” William said. He couldn’t recall ever having such an informal dinner with a planetary president. He’d joined Kat and her late father for dinner, once, but even that had been absurdly formal. “There are several issues that need to be addressed. The first, put simply, is that we only have four destroyers. We can be reasonably sure of handling any pirate ship, should it decide to press the issue, but diehards might be harder to handle. And if we lose one of the destroyers, our ability to meet our commitments will be greatly reduced.”