Chapter Thirty-Seven
Harold Rolfson was drunk. Normally, he was exactly the kind of loud, friendly drunk people expected from his size and coloring, but there were also times when all he wanted was a locked office and a bottle of vodka.
There was probably some Russian in his background somewhere. Who knew? Twenty-third century humanity was pretty intermingled at the best of times.
It was hard to hate the Kanzi right now. He wanted to. He had years of practice; it should have been easy to just keep hating the blue-furred bastards.
But the truth was that only a portion of any race could actually be slaving, murdering assholes. Most of the tens of millions of dead Kanzi had been shopkeepers, accountants, wait staff…ordinary people who happened to have blue fur and be under a meter and a half tall.
It was impossible to watch anyone die in those numbers and still hate them. The feeling was rippling through Seventy-Seventh Fleet, a hard-won sympathy for the people they’d regarded as the devil.
They would have tried to stop this kind of mass murder anyway, but they understood what Fleet Master Cawl and his people had to be feeling.
So, Rolfson was a third of his way into a bottle of vodka, ignoring coms that weren’t flagged as urgent by his secretary, and morosely staring at the astrographic chart of the region.
The message that was actually flagged as urgent earned a disgruntled growl from him, and he checked to make sure it was actually a message—as opposed to a live com request—before hitting Play.
He didn’t check who it was from, so he was surprised when Ramona Wolastoq appeared above his hologram projector.
“Hey, you,” she greeted him. “I haven’t heard anything from you in a while. I know you’re wandering through hell, but some reminder that you’re alive would be nice. There’s not a lot of news being released to the public, but, well, I’m not the public.”
She smiled wickedly, but the smile faded as quickly as it appeared.
“Even what I’m getting isn’t pretty at all, so I can’t imagine what it’s like out there. If I know you—and I do—there’s either a bottle of vodka on your desk or in your near-term plans. Won’t tell you not to remake that friend’s acquaintance, but watch for the demon that comes with him, love.”
Ramona reached out toward him and sighed.
“Asimov is a fleet base, so people are used to knowing more than most about what’s going on, and rumors are flying. Everyone is terrified. I’m not, not really.” She smirked. “I know you’re between me and whatever might threaten us.
“I’ve sent my staff back to Earth, though. With Lelldorin gone, well, my Arend expedition is a bust. I’m researching new destinations from here. Most archeologists don’t have my level of access to the hyperfold relay network, so it could be worse.
“I’m just not going anywhere until I see you, Admiral. Take care of yourself. I know what your job is like, but you’re no good to anybody drunk, unconscious or heartbroken.”
She smiled to soften the blow.
“I love you. I’ll see you soon. Hopefully, I’ll hear from you sooner.”
The transmission ended and Harold sighed. He was already farther down the bottle of vodka than he should have let himself get, and he swept it into his desk. An inhaler was already in the drawer, and he studied the white device balefully for a moment.
He wasn’t going to record a message to his wife while drunk, however, so he picked it up.
Self-pity hour was over. Time to call his wife…and then get back to work.
The inhaler did its job exactly as it was supposed to, and by the time Harold returned to his bridge, the last vestiges of the alcohol, the hangover and the nausea from the inhaler itself were gone.
He strode onto his flag bridge once again projecting full control and dominance of the situation, taking his seat and studying the screens and holograms showing President Washington’s surroundings.
“Any update from Division Lord Peeah?” he asked.
“Nothing so far,” Ling Yu replied. She’d barely moved from where he’d left her, standing beside the main holographic projector. Her black braid was showing signs of wear where she’d been pulling on it.
“I’ll keep an eye on things, Nahid,” he told her gently as he looked around the bridge. “You’re the last person who hasn’t had a break on this deck since the feed from Alstroda. Go rest.”
“Can’t, sir,” she said quietly. “Can barely blink. All I see is—”
“Then go see the ship’s doctor,” he replied. “You’re no good to anybody, staring blankly at a tactical plot because you’re too tired to think straight, and if you’re having waking nightmares, you need to talk to the doctor.”
Ling Yu was silent, and he rose and crossed the couple of meters between them to lay his hand on her shoulder.
“Nahid, I’ll make it an order if I need to,” Harold said. “These are terrible times to live through, but we have to be able to do our jobs to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Do you understand me?”
His operations officer shivered under his hand and then suddenly had her face buried in his shoulder as she broke down into tears. He had twenty years and six inches on Ling Yu, and he gently held her as she sobbed.
“All we could do was watch.”
“I know,” he murmured. “Revenge won’t bring them back. Honor won’t bring them back. All we can do is make sure it never happens again.”
It took a few more seconds for her to regain her composure and realize she was crying into her flag officer’s shoulder. She pulled back and he let her go, leveling his best smile on her.
“That wasn’t appropriate, sir, sorry,” Ling Yu admitted.
“Nobody is going to hold it against you, Captain,” he told her formally. “But I’m going to reiterate my suggestion.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll make my way to Dr. Lehman’s office and check in.”
“Good,” Harold said. “Take care of my ops officer, Captain Ling Yu. She’s good people.”
She gave him a weak snort in response, then saluted and left the flag deck in crisp step.
The Vice Admiral continued to focus on the tactical plot, carefully not registering the junior officers and technicians around him.
“I don’t think I need to remind you that no one saw that,” he said conversationally, not really addressed to anyone. “But if anyone here needs to talk to Dr. Lehman’s people, flag your relief and go.
“There will never be a time we’ll need it more…and I’d take the time while we have it, people.”
Some of his people drifted out. Replacements drifted in, and Harold very specifically did not pay attention. The last thing his people needed was to be shamed for getting the medical help that all too many of them were going to need.
The best example he could set, he supposed, was to go talk to one of Dr. Lehman’s people himself. There’d be time for that once they were in hyperspace, though. Right now, the Admiral was On Duty, and he was watching for the next stage in this nightmare.
He was unsurprised, somehow, when Fleet Lord Tanaka appeared on his personal com screen.
“Do I need to send you to a counselor, Fleet Lord?” he said with an only mostly forced smile.
“It’s on my to-do list once we’re in hyperspace,” Tanaka replied, echoing his own thoughts. “Our medical teams are doing a brisk business today—and it’s definitely better than the alternative.”
“I can think of one alternative that would be better,” Harold said darkly, then shook himself. “Apologies, Fleet Lord. There was nothing any of us could have done. These…people knew what they were doing from the beginning.”
“They got Cawl well out of position, that’s for sure,” she agreed. “Though I suspect their trap would have easily taken his fleet combined with Oska’s. I don’t think he’d have been able to let the outer system platforms burn either.”
Tanaka sighed.
“I wouldn’t have been able to let the space stations burn. These ku
sottare-me know where to hit our buttons.”
Harold snorted. His translator earbud was off, but he could guess the meaning of the Japanese curse from context.
“Kanzi think more like us than I would have figured,” he said.
“Not really a surprise, when you think about it,” Tanaka replied. “The A!Tol are amphibious ocean predators with a parasitical reproductive cycle, and they think much like we do. Civilization and sentience seem to have a shaping effect on the mind.
“And god knows humanity has produced enough religiously motivated slaver cultures,” she concluded. “Some of both of our ancestors among them.”
“If you’d asked me two months ago what my reaction to Alstroda being obliterated would be, I probably would have said good riddance,” Harold said. “Now I realize that would have been wrong regardless. But this mess…”
“You could argue it’s their own fault. They did attempt to exterminate the Taljzi, after all. Don’t cry too many tears for our blue-furred friends.”
“No one deserves to see their worlds blown apart around them,” he replied. “Whatever the Theocracy did three hundred years ago, there’s no one left alive on either side who was involved. And these Taljzi make my skin crawl.
“They couldn’t just attack the Kanzi worlds. They could have easily passed by our systems, and it would have taken a lot longer for the Imperium to get involved. Instead, they attacked. They sacrificed a strategic advantage to do…what?”
“To meet a religious imperative, so far as I can tell,” Tanaka told him. “They believe their god has commanded them to destroy all other races. So long as they believe that, I hesitate to blame the Kanzi for what they did to get rid of the Taljzi.
“I don’t know what we might have to do before this is done.”
Harold winced at the thought, but before he could reply, a new alert flashed up on his console.
“Sir,” Commander Yong Xun Huang interrupted, his coms officer looking pale. “We just got an update from Division Lord Peeah. Dark Sun dropped out of hyperspace twenty hours ago to update us.”
Harold traded a glance with Tanaka, who was getting the same report on her bridge, and left the channel open.
“What do we know?”
“He lost three destroyers tailing the Taljzi, but he’s confirmed their vector,” Xun Huang told him. “They’re heading for current LKI-651-V8.”
“That crosses the border, doesn’t it?” Harold demanded.
“Yes, sir. Their only likely target from that current is Asimov.”
Harold felt the ground fall out from underneath him and met Harriet Tanaka’s horrified gaze for several seconds before he turned to study the astrographic plot.
There were no major Kanzi systems in the area that the Taljzi could have reached except by brute-forcing their way through hyperspace. Between currents and geometry, the Kanzi and Imperial fleets could have met them at any major Kanzi system nearby.
There was no current between them and Asimov. The Talzji had a six-to-eight-day flight to the Imperial fleet base—five to seven now, with the time delay from Peeah’s transmission.
Seventy-Seventh Fleet and Alstroda Fleet were at least seven days away. Possibly as much as ten. There were a hundred million Imperial citizens, over three-quarters human, in Asimov.
Including Vice Admiral Rolfson’s wife.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Harriet took a single long moment to close her eyes and breathe, collecting her thoughts as she processed the geometry, the timing…the absolute disaster and horror show staring down at her.
Those few seconds were all she could afford.
“Orders to the fleet,” she snapped. “All ships are to set course for Asimov, maximum speed. Sier—I need you to coordinate cycling the sprint modes. The escorts can’t carry what’s coming on their own, so we need the capital ships there as soon as possible.”
Every capital ship in her fleet could make point five lightspeed. They could all sprint to at least point five five cee, but that wasn’t sustainable for seven days.
“We won’t save that much time,” her chief of staff noted. “But a few hours could make all of the difference. I will make it happen.”
Her single set of orders set her entire staff into motion. There were support sections located around her flag bridge, and every one of them was now linking into squadron and individual ship communication networks.
“Harold,” she turned back to the channel to Admiral Rolfson. “Thunderstorm-Ds. What’s their sustained top speed?”
“Point five seven,” he said instantly. “The rest of the Thunderstorms are point five five—which is the Bellerophon’s flank speed.” He shook his head. “The Vindications and Manticores are all point five cee ships.”
One of her Imperial squadrons was made up of Thunderstorms. A second squadron was a different design of the same vintage, same point five five cee engines. All of her destroyers could match that speed, and the Duchy of Terra Militia ships were all Thunderstorms.
Eighty-eight cruisers. Two Imperial squadrons, three and a half Terran squadrons. Plus three battleships that could punch well above their weight.
“We’ll hold half the Imperial destroyers back to escort the main fleet,” she finally ordered. “The other half, plus all of the Militia destroyers, will form on the Bellerophons and all point five five cee–rated cruisers.
“Vice Admiral Rolfson, get your butt and your flag staff aboard one of the Bellerophons ASAP. You’re taking command of our new Task Force Seventy-Seven–One. You’ve got a ten percent speed edge on the rest of the fleet, which means you’ll get there at least sixteen hours ahead of the rest of us.”
She grimaced.
“That makes you the only ships we have that have any chance in hell of beating the Taljzi to Asimov. You’ll need to hold them, Harold. At any cost. Do you understand me?”
He nodded slowly, and his eyes told her he understood exactly what she was ordering. The destruction of the entirety of TF 77–1 and the deaths of the over eighty thousand sentients aboard those ships were an entirely acceptable price to buy those sixteen hours.
“My staff and I will be moving over to Bellerophon in the next ten minutes,” he promised. “77–1 will be on our way within twenty.”
“The rest of the fleet will be behind you,” Harriet told him. “We will relieve you, Admiral. You just have to hold until we get there.”
He saluted.
“I’ve got half the S-HSM launchers in the universe, sir,” Rolfson pointed out. “If anyone can hold them, it’s these ships, these crews.”
“God speed you, Harold. We’ll see you in Asimov.”
Harriet made sure everything was arranged for Harold’s task force and the movement of the rest of her fleet before she checked in on the Kanzi.
“Sier, what is Fleet Master Cawl up to?” she asked after the seventh—possibly eighth; she wasn’t sure anymore—round of reassignment and movement orders had been transmitted.
“Not much,” her chief of staff admitted, the blue Yin snapping his beak as he studied the screen. “He started preparing his ships to move about five thousandth-cycles after we did, but they haven’t said anything. I’d guess he’s waiting for you.”
For a moment, she was tempted to let the Kanzi wait. That wasn’t entirely fair, though. Cawl had made the first serious efforts towards peace between the Imperium and the Theocracy in decades, and he’d been relatively straightforward with her.
“Get me a channel,” she ordered with a sigh. “I owe the smurf an explanation.”
Sier might have lacked the cultural context behind the slur, but it had managed to infiltrate large swathes of the Imperial Navy—especially units like Seventy-Seventh Fleet that had been positioned in Sol for extended periods. He knew who she meant.
When the channel opened, she found herself looking at the Kanzi’s flag deck. The layout and design philosophy were very different—her staff’s sections were in separate spaces detached entirely from th
e flag bridge, where the Kanzi put them in pits around the raised central area occupied by the commander, for example—but the function was clear.
Cawl was seated in the hologram, showing no sign of his usual infirmity or his earlier brush with depression. Activity swirled around him, but he met her gaze calmly.
“Fleet Lord Tanaka,” he greeted her. “I presume you have identified the Taljzi’s destination. May I ask where we are headed?”
That was…not quite what she’d expected.
“The Taljzi are crossing the border into Imperial space,” she told him. “We believe they are headed for our equivalent of Alstroda.”
“Ah. That would be Asimov, correct?” he asked. “We have the coordinates, of course, but I wonder if we should move our fleets together to avoid confusion and make certain we deliver the strongest blow possible to the Taljzi.”
“I…” Harriet swallowed, refocusing her thoughts. “They are not heading toward a Kanzi world. Asimov is my responsibility, not yours.”
“These Taljzi are my responsibility,” Cawl told her. “They were forged by my ancestors, and any measure they take today, even if it is against the Imperium, is targeted at my people. Regardless of where they go or who they attack, I will fight them. We share an enemy, Fleet Lord Tanaka. I will not ask you to face them alone.”
She bowed her head and realized she’d done the alien in the projection a disservice. She’d had every intention of deploying to defend Kanzi worlds—and yet it hadn’t even occurred to her that the Kanzi fleet would deploy to defend Imperial worlds.
“Most of my fleet can pull half of lightspeed,” she told him finally. “A small portion can sustain point five five cee. I’m sending them ahead. If you have any capital ships that can keep up with Admiral Rolfson’s Task Force, their assistance would be invaluable.”
He shook his head, a very human gesture for all that he was blue.
Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Page 22
