Retreat Hell

by Christopher Nuttall

  “This war will last for far longer than a few days,” she added. “We cannot afford heavy losses, not when the prize isn't worth the cost. Do you understand me?”

  There were nods, some enthusiastic, some reluctant. She made careful note of who did what.

  “Good,” Rani said. She rose to her feet. “Dismissed.”

  Chapter Thirty

  But, on Morningstar, the social scientists took a bad situation and made it a great deal worse. It is notable that none of the scientists proposing solutions had ever visited Morningstar, let alone spoken to any of the military officers involved in the actual operation. The only locals they spoke to were refugees and representatives from the various factions who had come to Earth to find backers amongst the Grand Senate.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. War in a time of ‘Peace:’ The Empire’s Forgotten Military History.

  The first star system Sword had entered, as covertly as possible, had yielded nothing apart from the discovery of a previously unknown asteroid-mining complex that seemed to be supplying the planet with more ore that it could possibly need. Mandy had spent longer than she should have done watching the planet and trying to determine what it was doing, before finally deciding that they were attempting to bootstrap themselves into space. If they had received any help, it was more likely to have come from the RockRats rather than Wolfbane; the technology they were using, while serviceable, was primitive.

  They hadn't found anything more interesting in the second system they’d examined, either, apart from traces of a brief battle and a large orbital weapons platform in position to bombard the planet if necessary. Mandy’s intelligence officers suggested that the locals were resisting Wolfbane’s occupation forces, but there was little else they could determine apart from attempting to capture someone who might have answers and there was no way they could do that without risking exposure. Reluctantly, Mandy ordered the ship to sneak out past the Phase Limit and return to Phase Space.

  She’d had a hunch after that, one that had nagged at her mind until she'd finally given into the impulse to act on it. The Imperial Navy had always used inhabited star systems as forward bases, simply because even a stage-one colony was capable of feeding itself and a whole fleet of unexpected guests. But would Wolfbane feel the same way? There was enough cross-border trade, no matter how illicit, for a forward deployment to run the risk of being noticed by a trading ship ... and for the ship to have a chance to escape, before it was too late. No, logically, if Wolfbane was planning to cause trouble they would have based themselves on a star that was less likely to receive visitors.

  Titlark seemed perfect. According to the somewhat outdated files from the Imperial Navy, Titlark had been visited once, briefly surveyed and then simply abandoned. There was nothing there, apart from a handful of asteroids and a couple of comets the red star had captured thousands of years ago. It might attract pirates or survivalists, but not the Imperial Navy ... and not the Commonwealth Navy either. But, if one ignored the absence of anything usable, it was within a handful of light years of Thule.

  “The Phase Limit is unusually close to the star,” the helmsman commented, as they dropped out of Phase Space a light year from Titlark. “It actually seems to be constantly fluctuating, which is odd.”

  Mandy frowned. A star’s gravity well should remain stable at all times, but they tended to be slightly distorted by the presence of large planets. The Phase Limit was, therefore, a slightly flattened sphere surrounding a star. But she’d never seen one that seemed to be constantly fluctuating. A glance at the files told her that the survey team had noted it in passing and then ... as far as the files suggested, no one had shown any interest, even if it was a very odd system. But the Empire had long lost interest in pure science.

  She leaned forward. “Does it pose any danger?”

  “I don’t think so,” the helmsman said. “The only real danger would be using the Phase Drive inside the system and ... well, if we tried I think the drive would simply fail. But it is odd.”

  Mandy nodded. “Take us towards the system, but drop out a safe distance from the limit,” she ordered. “And keep one eye on it at all times.”

  She waited, impatiently, until Sword returned to normal space once again. There was still nothing special about Titlark, nothing that suggested the presence of a sizable enemy fleet. But her instincts kept nagging at her as the crew deployed the passive sensor arrays, ready to pick up even the slightest hint of intelligent life within the system. Something was deeply wrong.

  There was a chime from the console. “We’re picking up snatches of low-level radio communications,” one of the officer reported. “It looks like ship-to-ship communication protocols, but garbled.”

  Mandy nodded. They were some distance from the source, but it looked as though there were a number of starships within the system. Or had been, she warned herself. They were still light hours from the signal source. Something could easily have changed between the time the signal was sent and it being picked up by her ship. But there was a constant stream of radio transmissions now, suggesting at least a dozen ships lurking deeper within the system.

  “They’re close to the asteroid field,” the sensor officer noted. “They must have turned them into a base.”

  “Or simply set up a fleet train,” Mandy commented. It was how the Commonwealth Navy had trained to operate, rather than remaining dependent on a network of naval bases like the Empire. The loss of a single naval base could cripple the Empire’s ability to respond to a sudden emergency. “Are we likely to discover more at this distance?”

  “No,” the sensor officer said, after a brief consultation with her fellows in their compartment. “I think we need to slip closer.”

  “Yeah,” Mandy commented. She sat back in her chair. “Me too.”

  Slowly, Sword slipped further into the system, passive sensors alert for any trace of an enemy presence. The signals seemed to grow stronger as they moved closer, several of them becoming clear enough for the crew to identify them as station-keeping signals. Mandy felt sweat trickling down her back and forced herself to remain calm, to appear to be in control at all times. She couldn't afford to allow her crew to see her weak.

  How, she asked herself, does Jasmine make it look so easy?

  “I think we can launch a drone here,” the sensor officer said. “It would slip past the enemy ships on a ballistic course, letting us have a good look at them without risking the ship itself.”

  Mandy nodded. The enemy didn't seem to be taking many precautions, but if they were feeling paranoid they would have scattered passive sensor beacons all around their anchorage, watching for the merest trace of an incoming ship. If they detected a hint of Sword’s presence, they wouldn't lock onto her with active sensors, but track the ship passively until she flew right into a trap. She didn't dare assume that the enemy hadn't been paranoid, not when they were clearly preparing for something.

  “Launch the drone,” she ordered. “And keep a laser link fixed on its communicator.”

  Piece by piece, the system started to reveal its secrets as the drone moved closer and closer to the enemy fleet. A number of asteroids, all clearly hollowed out and converted into living space; fifty-seven starships, including five battleships and two battlecruisers ... and a number of colonist-carrier ships. Their presence puzzled her until she realised they were actually troopships. The troops could be held in stasis until they reached their target, whereupon they would be brought out of the stasis pods, loaded onto shuttles and sent down to fight.

  “There are nine heavy colonist-carriers there,” the sensor officer said. “Assuming they have their full complement of stasis pods, we could be looking at nine hundred thousand soldiers armed and ready to fight.”

  Mandy shivered. The hell of it was that the colonist-carriers she was studying weren't even the largest the Empire had produced. But they were large enough to carry thousands of settlers, willing or unwilling, away from Earth. And now they were converted i
nto troopships, allowing Wolfbane to flood a designated target with armed soldiers.

  “They’d be easy targets without an escort,” she muttered. “But they have enough of an escort to take out almost any target short of Corinthian or Avalon itself.”

  She shuddered at the thought as the display constantly updated. None of the signs that suggested ill-maintained starships were visible, as far as the drone could tell. Instead, the fleet appeared to be in perfect working order, armed and ready for action. Mandy knew, with a cold certainty that overwhelmed any other thoughts and feelings, that the fleet was preparing itself for an assault on the Commonwealth. Nothing else made sense.

  Nothing to defend here, she thought, coldly. And nothing to gain, save by being a few light years closer to the border – and Thule.

  “How long,” she said, turning to the analyst, “before they launch their offensive?”

  “Unknown,” the analyst said. “We simply don’t have enough data.”

  Mandy knew she wasn't being fair, but pressed ahead anyway. “Give me your best guess?”

  The analyst looked up at the display, reluctance written over his face. “There's no hint they’re waiting for anything other than the order to attack,” he said, finally. “They could probably leave now ...”

  “And be on top of Thule within a few hours,” Mandy said. If they pushed their drives to the limit, Thule was only nine hours from Titlark. It would be costly, if one or more drive components happened to fail, but they could do it. “Do you know what they’re waiting for?”

  “No,” the analyst said.

  Mandy considered it, briefly. Thule was in a state of war, with an insurgency draining the lifeblood of the planet, an insurgency that had support from off-world. Logically, Wolfbane was the only real suspect, the only power that would have the ability and motivation to ship in enough supplies to make the conflict far worse. But if they were planning an offensive at the same time ... could it be that they intended to overwhelm and destroy the CEF? Or did they want to burn the insurgency and the local forces out before they took over? It did make a certain kind of sense.

  She shivered, remembering a very old problem from her captivity. Someone had supported the pirate chieftain, a man who had called himself the Admiral. For all of the time she had spent on Sword, Mandy had never been able to gain any idea of who had been supporting him – or why. The Admiral had had delusions of grandeur, plans to build an empire of his own, and he'd come alarmingly close to succeeding. But, even after his defeat, his supporters remained a mystery. Had it been Wolfbane who had provided the practical support?

  Admiral Singh had seemed a more likely candidate, she knew, but Admiral Singh’s records had been carefully scrutinised after Corinthian had been pushed into rebellion and she'd been forced to flee. There had been nothing in her files relating to pirates, apart from reports of pirate ships destroyed or captured by her forces. Mandy didn't recall anything, even a minor hint, that suggested that Admiral Singh had backed the Admiral. But Wolfbane hadn't been linked to her ... hell, no one had even been aware of Wolfbane’s existence until eighteen months ago. Or, at least, no one had known that it had become the centre of a new interstellar power.

  “Get me a full rundown on their ships,” she ordered. There was a formidable force there, she saw, formidable enough to overrun her squadron, given time. The force shields would give them a slight advantage, but not enough to guarantee a victory. “And then prepare to withdraw from the system.”

  She smiled at her crew’s puzzlement. Sword had sneaked close enough to see what the enemy were doing, but not close enough to draw all the data they could from the enemy fleet. But they’d already learned the most important piece of data, one they had to take back to Thule. There was an enemy fleet within striking distance, preparing to move against the Commonwealth. There could be no other explanation. The war the Commonwealth had dreaded since Wolfbane had been discovered was about to begin.

  The data flowing back from the drone kept mounting in the holographic display. Mandy had to admit, reluctantly, that it looked like Wolfbane knew how to take care of their ships. The battleships alone took plenty of maintenance – as the Commonwealth had discovered after capturing a handful from Admiral Singh – but Wolfbane seemed to have enough technicians on hand to do the work. Mandy really didn't like the implications; given the resources of a more developed sector and a complete lack of interference from the Empire, just how far could a Governor go? Far enough to train up new technicians who actually knew what they were doing? Or was he conscripting spacers and anyone else who might have the skills he needed?

  We should hope it’s the latter, she thought, sourly. They might be tempted to rebel.

  “I think we’ve reached the limit of what passive sensors can tell us,” the analyst said, finally. “The drone cannot alter course without running the risk of being detected.”

  “Let it go, then set the self-destruct to destroy it on contact,” Mandy said. The beancounters would probably have a fit when they realised she’d sacrificed an expensive drone, but Admiral Delacroix was a serving officer herself. She would understand Mandy’s decision and override any complaints from the bureaucrats. “Helm, take us about and back to the Phase Limit, best possible speed while avoiding detection.”

  She kept a wary eye on the enemy fleet as it receded into the distance, seemingly unaware that it had been located. If they had realised that Sword was there, she knew, they would have attempted to trap her ... wouldn't they? Or would they simply bring their plans forward and arrive at Thule hard on Mandy’s heels? That was what she would do, she knew, if she was commanding the other side. Surprise would have been lost, so the only real option was to attack before the defenders were ready to withstand attack. Thule wasn't undefended, not by a long shot. Her defences would take one hell of a bite out of an attacking formation.

  But there was no sign they'd been detected as they crossed the Phase Limit. “Take us FTL,” she ordered, shortly. “Set course for Thule, best possible speed.”

  She yawned, despite herself, as the flickering lights of Phase Space appeared on the display. They were safe now – it was extremely difficult to track or intercept a starship in Phase Space – and on their way back to Thule. Once they were there, she would have to devote all of her attention to preparing the planet to withstand a siege ... or withdraw, if the entire enemy fleet came to Thule. There was no way she could sacrifice the entire squadron merely to delay the enemy for a few hours.

  “XO, you have the bridge,” she said, standing. Another yawn threatened to escape, but she held it down, somehow. “I’ll be in my office.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the XO said. “I’ll alert you as soon as we reach Thule.”

  Mandy nodded, stepped through the bridge hatch and into her office. As soon as the hatch had hissed closed, she lay down on the sofa and closed her eyes. Tension drained out of her mind slowly, to be replaced with fear, fear of what would happen if they were unable to reach Thule in time. But somehow, eventually, she managed to calm her thoughts and fall asleep.

  ***

  “There was a contact,” Rani stated.

  The sensor operator looked uncomfortable. She was young; like most sensor operators with genuine talent, she had been rushed through the training course and pushed into active service, rather than being given the seasoning of other officers. And she wasn't even remotely comfortable in Rani’s presence. But it didn't matter.

  “Just a rough contact on the passive sensors,” the operator confirmed. “But it could easily have been a starship.”

  Rani considered it as the operator showed her the readings. The contact had been very brief, brief enough to make her think it was just a sensor glitch ... but there was something about it that bothered her. Reaching out, she minimised the star system on the display and sucked in her breath as she realised the contact was real. It had been on a least-time course to the Phase Limit ... and on a course that would allow it to fly directly to Thule.

/>   “Thank you,” she said, finally. She was too experienced an officer to expect all of her plans to work perfectly, but it was irritating to have to change operational plans at such short notice. But there was no alternative. The Commonwealth knew the shit was about to hit the fan. “You may go.”

  She watched the operator leave her office, then keyed a switch. “General signal to all ships,” she ordered. “Our plans have to be moved up. I want all ships ready to depart to their assigned targets within an hour.”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Carolyn said. At least she didn't sound surprised. “I’ll alert the fleet at once.”

  Rani smiled. There would be opposition, of course. Changing the plans so close to their scheduled departure date would cause one hell of a lot of confusion ... and some of the spies would wonder just what she was doing. But there was no choice. If the Commonwealth had time to prepare, the fighting would be far more costly than either she or Governor Brown wanted. Their plans for a quick victory were about to be tested in fire.

  “And then summon a courier boat,” Rani added. “Someone has to inform Governor Brown that the war is about to begin.”

  She paused, then continued. “And assign a second one to me personally,” she said. “I want to send a message to our operatives on Thule.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  This ensured that the best of the social scientists, the ones who did the most ‘research,’ still had a very skewed view of the crisis. Their perceptions were often at variance with reality. For example, the principle aggressor in the conflict, despite being responsible for genocide, attempted genocide and a number of other war crimes, was constantly referred to as responding to outside aggression. Small incidents (post-war investigations suggested they were staged to serve as causes for war) were used to ‘justify’ the war in the eyes of the Grand Senate.