“The Chosen Mothers have been battered and broken. We will rise again, but for now I speak for Iron Peaks.”
“You will have your aid,” Sings promised. “So long as no one tries to shoot down our shuttles and doctors, at least.”
“Your human friends control our defenses,” Dancer pointed out. “There will come a time when that is a problem, but it will be weeks from now. You may approach safely.”
The two Vistans chirped assent at each other, then Dancer paused.
“You wished to speak to me as well?” she asked.
“The Shining Mother will visit your city tomorrow,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters told the Chosen Mother. “I answer to her now; let us not pretend things are false that are true. She wishes to meet with the Chosen Mothers, but she will speak to your people regardless.”
“She will be welcomed as an ally,” Dancer-In-Darkness said after a long pause. “We must work together to salvage our people. Iron Peaks will not acknowledge her as our Great High Mother, not here…but compromises can be made in the structure of our new home.”
“I do not believe Sleeps-In-Sunlight will care what title we hang on her,” the First-Among-Singers replied. “She would rather get on with the job of saving us all. She is…impressive.”
“Then I look forward to meeting her,” Dancer replied. “We will stand together against the storm, regardless. That decision has been made. She has already won.”
“None of us wanted victory over Iron Peaks, Dancer-In-Darkness,” Sings told her. “All we ever wanted to do was save everyone.”
“And we were deafened to the true sound of your intent by our own fears,” the Iron Peaks Mother replied. “Our ears are clear now. We stand together.”
“We stand together,” Sings agreed.
31
Both Shankara Linton and Lyle Reinhardt had never given Isaac a reason to doubt their skills or efficiency. He’d still hesitated to believe it when Linton had told him that Vigil and her escorts would be ready in two months.
Watching as the massive ship nudged out of her building slip, he admitted he’d underestimated them.
Fifty-one days. They’d accelerated the construction project from six months to fifty-one days.
Half a kilometer of warship didn’t clear a docking slip quickly. Her three escorts were already clear, the two-hundred-and-fifty-meter strike cruisers looking like half-scale clones of their bigger sister.
Romeo, Juliet and Othello were waiting for their big sister. The four of them were the only warships Isaac knew about that were capable of traveling at two hundred and fifty-six times the speed of light.
“Vigil will be clear and ready to begin her trials in ten minutes,” Linton told him. “Are you sure you don’t want to be aboard?”
“The last thing Captain Alstairs needs is me jogging his elbow when he has twenty-four hours to complete as much as he can of a two-week certification process,” Isaac pointed out. “The strike cruisers?”
“They got three whole days of trials,” Linton noted. “Two are done. They’ll run through further tests today, but we wanted them here to make sure Vigil made it out without issues.”
Isaac would have scoffed at the concept of protecting Vigil, a ship designed to chew up Matrix combat platforms and spit them out…except that he’d ordered Dante, alongside Lancelot and Roland, to come watch over the launch as well.
If they had any enemies who’d been watching and figured this was when the new battlecruiser was at her most vulnerable, they’d have a harsh surprise coming.
“What about the freighters?” he asked.
“Hope and Legacy are going through final work right now,” the Minister for Orbital Industry told him. “The second ship is costing us an extra few days, but…”
“It’ll be worth it,” Isaac agreed. The freighters were a miracle, in his mind. He’d been promised one ship, equivalent to the freighters that were running around the Exilium System.
Linton and Reinhardt had given him two. Built from scratch, they would be fifty-five days from initial concept to launch. Each would carry a hundred thousand Vistans to safety every seventeen days.
Each of those ships was worth as much as the entire shipping fleet they’d already sent. It would take them ninety days to get to Vista once everything was online, but they’d be worth the wait.
They would actually get the two-fifty-six task force to the Vistans before the task group under Commodore Giannovi. Isaac was still glad they’d sent those ships, though.
Sooner or later, the Rogue was going to try to finish the job. He wanted every ship he could put between them and the Vistans when the time came.
“Once she’s clear, I’m going to get out of everyone’s hair and go do paperwork on Orbit One,” Isaac told Linton. “More than busywork, but still…I think everyone will be happier to complete this process without the Admiral and the Minister watching over their shoulders.”
“Oh, I agree,” Linton said. “My plan is similar.” He shook his head. “My plans would be even more pleasant, but someone sent my girlfriend on a rescue mission.”
“You can sympathize with the President in about a week,” Isaac replied. “Nobody, not even Amelie, thinks Task Force Vigil is leaving this star system without me.”
Back in his office, Isaac turned one screen to tracking the battlecruiser’s progress. The first step had been testing the warp drive, running all four two-fifty-six ships out to the edge of the star system.
Anything except the warp drives could be fixed en route if necessary. The warp drives could only be fixed there or at the other end. A failure could render the entire purpose of the second task force irrelevant.
So far, there had been no issues. His reports on the weapons testing and regular maneuvers were going to be an hour out of date, so his attention was back on his current task.
There hadn’t been any significant problems when he’d taken the first Task Force Vigil to engage the Rogue, but there had been enough hints to worry him. That was why he’d promoted Giannovi to Commodore, with the intention of leaving her in charge when he left.
Instead, he’d sent her off in advance and found himself facing the same problem he’d left behind last time: the Exilium Space Fleet didn’t really have flag officer postings. The handful of ships running scouting missions operated independently, and everything else was in Exilium with him.
He’d kept meaning to promote more people, but there’d always been something more urgent. At this point, his Captains had basically been in command of the same ships since they’d fought the Rogue. Seniority divided his senior officers, but they were all the same rank.
That was a mistake, he realized—to be fair, he’d known that all along—but it had been an easy thing to keep dropping to the bottom of the priority list.
His first impulse was to run his list by Giannovi, but she wasn’t due to check in for another several days. He’d had Lauretta Giannovi as his strong right hand for a long time now, and it almost felt like he was missing an actual hand.
Isaac looked at his list for a long time and his gaze eventually slipped to the second name on the list. He tapped a command and waited a second for Orbit One’s capable communications staff to get online.
“Sir?”
“Get me Captain Anderson,” he ordered. “Live video link as soon as she’s available.”
That would take a few minutes—there was no priority like an Admiral calling, but battlecruiser Captains weren’t known for sitting around in their quarters, drinking tea and moping.
That was an Admiral’s prerogative.
“How can I assist you, Admiral?” Captain Margaret Anderson asked when she appeared on his screen just over four minutes later—without a teacup in sight.
Her desk aboard Dante was almost certainly more regularly used than Isaac’s aboard Orbit One—which was only one of about six places the Admiral might be working on a given day—but it was also much more organized than the pile of datapads and used coffee cups I
saac had spread out.
The datapads, at least, would leave with him. The two coffee cups were…well, he had to admit they were just from today.
“I’m looking at promotion planning, Captain, and I doubt it’s the best of plans for me to decide an entirely new section of our rank structure on my own,” Isaac admitted. “I’d normally run this by Commodore Giannovi, but she is out-system. While we’ll want the Cabinet to sign off on some of these, I wanted a second opinion from one of our key officers.”
“I am…somewhat biased, at least with regards to my own promotion, sir,” Anderson admitted. “I’d be pleased to help you with the rest.”
Isaac pointed a finger at her in a facsimile of a magic wand or ancient knighting ritual.
“Boom, you’re a Vice Admiral as soon as the Cabinet signs off,” he told her with a grin. “Giannovi gets bumped as well. I’m eyeing four Commodores to back you two up, and then we’ll need to adjust the commands to account for my yanking five Captains up to flag rank.”
Anderson paused, taking a second to digest that.
“You have a list, sir?” she asked.
“Transmitting,” Isaac told her. “Take a look.”
Anderson already was. He couldn’t see her screen, but she was silent for twenty seconds or so as she skimmed the list.
“It’s a good list,” she told him. “I can tell you one problem we’re going to have, though.”
“Oh?”
“You’re jumping half a dozen people past Cavan, who is technically our most senior Captain,” she said. “And he’s been making friends in the Senate who might question what’s going on there.”
Robert Cavan commanded Demeter, one of their Icicle-class destroyers. He’d been skipped when Isaac had picked officers for the strike cruisers, and skipped for the missile-cruiser slot that had opened up from that.
Now, having already promoted one officer past Cavan specifically to command Vigil, they were opening up three more commands…and none of them were going to Robert Cavan.
Nor were any of the four Commodore slots.
Isaac sighed.
“I can deal with him being unhappy. He’s a damn Fleet officer; he should know when to sit down and shut up.”
“I hate to be the asshole’s advocate,” Anderson replied, “but he actually didn’t raise a fuss over the strike cruisers when we all expected him to. He caused trouble when he was the senior-most Captain without anyone officially over him…but it wasn’t that much trouble.”
“Are you saying we’re not giving him a fair shake?” Isaac asked.
“I don’t like Robert Cavan,” she admitted. “But I have to recognize that he’s a perfectly competent officer whose crew admires him and we’ve frankly been beating him up for his misstep while you were gone for three years.”
“You know what being his advocate is going to get you, right?” Isaac pointed out. “With your promotion, he actually becomes our most senior Captain. If I’m moving him at all, there’s only one place he can go—and I expect you to fly your flag from Dante.”
Margaret Anderson leveled a calm death glare on him, but he’d faced down his mother. There weren’t many humans left in the galaxy who could intimidate him.
“I was hoping to put him on, say, Roland,” she admitted. “But you’re right. Let’s move Captain Silas to Roland and given Cavan Dante. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure I can teach him whatever limits he’s forgotten.”
Isaac smiled. He hadn’t considered the degree to which they had been leaving Cavan behind as a legitimate gripe on the man’s part, but Anderson was right. Cavan had never actually done anything to deserve the black mark he’d struggled under.
And if Admiral Anderson was prepared to take him on as her flag Captain, then that answered that question.
“Then I think we have a list, Captain Anderson—which means that, unless the Cabinet is more obstreperous than I expect, you will shortly be hanging some stars on your collar.”
“Great,” she replied flatly. “I’m so looking forward to that headache—especially since this means you’re leaving me in command, doesn’t it?”
“And we see the proof that you are definitely smart enough to be an Admiral,” Isaac confirmed with a grin.
32
Isaac woke up to find Amelie leaning on her arm, examining him in silence.
“Well?” he asked, studying her in turn without really rising. “I have some evidence you like what you see, but what’s up?”
“Mostly that you’re heading out on another damn-fool expedition that’s going to take you out of my life for months upon months,” she told him. “What’s the chance you’ll be back before my term is up?”
“Low,” he admitted. A little over eight months were left before Amelie’s role switched to a caretaker position while the election ran. Even if he turned around immediately upon reaching the Hearthfire System, he’d be gone for six of those.
“I’m probably going to be out there, either at Vista or Refuge, for at least six months,” he told her. None of this was news, really, but it had a new impact now.
All six two-fifty-six ships had passed their trials. None had done so with flying colors, per se, but all of the minor and medium issues raised on the four warships and two transports could be fixed in warp.
At noon Starhaven time, Isaac would report aboard Vigil to take command of the battle group and leave Exilium for at least a year.
“I swear I should have married someone less likely to run off without me,” Amelie noted, still looking down at him. “Maybe with less of a sense of duty. I’m sure the President could have found someone willing to be a kept man.”
“You’d have been bored with a kept man in a week,” Isaac replied. “Face it, my love. The very things we love about each other are why we keep dragging ourselves apart. Someone has to go to Vista with the fleet, and I’m not sending anyone else. Not when we’re looking at a serious extended war with a Regional Matrix.”
If nothing else, Vigil was the only ship in their arsenal with a chance in hell of engaging a Regional Matrix’s defenses. The upgrades and light particle cannons meant that the rest of his fleet could go toe-to-toe with the usual array of Matrix combatants, but they had no idea what a Rogue Regional Matrix might have assembled to protect itself.
He didn’t even know what XR-13-9 had for defenses. The core brain behind their ally had never been so open as to tell them where it was, let alone what it guarded itself with.
“I’m leaving you with Vice Admiral Anderson, Dante and the bulk of the fleet,” he told her. “Hamlet, Puck and Macbeth should be online within six months. That’ll give you a battlecruiser and three strike cruisers, plus an entire armada of destroyers and old cruisers, to keep the planet safe.”
“I know.” She sighed. “The Senate is meeting on the budget request for Watchtower tomorrow. Emilia says you’re getting your battlecruiser, but it’s not fixed until they approve it.”
Watchtower would be a clone of the new Vigil. She was expected to take a year less to build than Vigil, but he still wouldn’t have his third battlecruiser for two years.
If he wanted a third Vigilance-class ship, he’d have to scrap Dante. Not because the Cabinet and Senate wouldn’t give him the funding, but because Exilium’s population and industry couldn’t truly support four battlecruisers.
He wasn’t entirely sure, some days, how they supported the fleet they had.
“The good news is that everything we’re seeing out of Vista is starting to sound hopeful,” he told her. “The Matrices’ help has been nothing short of extraordinary. They’re on track to have the entire population in space in six more months.”
Three months after the oceans started to freeze over, but before the planetwide storms rendered Vista inaccessible as well as uninhabitable. The terraformers the Matrices had dropped on Vista might one day restore the planet, but Isaac wasn’t betting on it.
It would probably take XR-13-9’s Matrices dropping more terraformers on
the planet to save it.
Amelie finally bent to kiss him, pressing herself against him with a desperation he shared.
“I have to go,” he finally confessed.
“I know. I won’t ask you not to; I know better! But be careful, my love. Promise me?”
“I will,” he promised. “I’m coming back.” He gestured vaguely at her naked form. “I mean, seriously, have you seen who’s waiting for me?!”
Isaac was used to the immense length of battlecruisers. He’d even done close-in inspection tours of the new Vigil when she was being built and had spent time aboard Liberty, the Confederacy’s only dreadnought, before the Exile.
It was still shocking to approach the immense structure of the new battlecruiser and see it moving under its own power. According to Lyle Reinhardt’s research, Vigil was the biggest human-built ship to ever carry a warp drive—an honor previously held by the amalgamated wreckage of Dante and the old Vigil.
Dante had ended up as a hybrid, torn in multiple directions between the old Confederacy battlecruiser she’d been, the combat platform the Matrices had tried to refit her into and the new-generation battlecruiser they’d already been designing when she was rebuilt.
She would never truly be any of those things. Vigil was a purely human-designed ship, enabled equally by the massive exotic-matter production of the Republic of Exilium and Matrix power-generation and weapons technology.
The idea of a battlecruiser with not just a spinal particle cannon but multiple turrets mounting more would have seemed impossible to Isaac ten years earlier. The gamma ray lasers she used as secondary heavy weapons would have been purely theoretical to that younger officer.
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