Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  After all, he told himself, my penchant for "playing a hunch" has a lot to do with the fact that I'm the last full admiral the Terran Federation will ever have.

  "It's not some arcane form of ESP in this case, Nimue," he said. "But where's the other scout? You know Gbaba scout ships always operate in pairs, and Captain Somerset's reported only one of them. The other fellow has to be somewhere."

  "Like calling up the rest of the pack," Alban said, her blue eyes dark, and he nodded.

  "That's exactly what he's doing. They must have gotten at least a sniff of us before we picked them up, and one of them turned and headed back for help immediately. This one's going to hang on our heels, keep track of us and home the rest in, but the one thing he isn't going to do is come in close enough to risk letting us get a good shot at him. He can't afford to let us pick him off and then drop out of hyper. They might never find us again."

  "I see where you're going, Sir." Alban looked thoughtful for a moment, her blue eyes intent on something only she could see, then returned her attention to the admiral.

  "Sir," she asked quietly, "would I be out of line if I used one of the priority com circuits to contact Gulliver? I'd . . . like to tell the Commodore goodbye."

  "Of course you wouldn't be," Pei replied, equally quietly. "And when you do, tell him I'll be thinking about him."

  "Sir, you could tell him yourself."

  "No." Pei shook his head. "Kau-yung and I have already said our goodbyes, Nimue."

  "Yes, Sir."

  * * *

  The word spread quickly from Excalibur as the Tenth Destroyer Squadron headed for the Gbaba scout, and a cold, ugly wave of fear came with the news. Not panic, perhaps, because every single member of the murdered Federation's final fleet had known in his heart of hearts that this moment would come. Indeed, they'd planned for it. But that made no one immune from fear when it actually came.

  More than one of the officers and ratings watching the destroyers' icons sweep across the tactical displays towards the scout ship prayed silently that they would overtake the fleet little ship, destroy it. They knew how unlikely that was to happen, and even if it did, it would probably buy them no more than a few more weeks, possibly a few months. But that didn't keep them from praying.

  Aboard the heavy cruiser TFNS Gulliver, a small, wiry commodore said a prayer of his own. Not for the destruction of the scout ship. Not even for his older brother, who was about to die. But for a young lieutenant commander who had become almost a daughter to him . . . and who had volunteered to transfer to Excalibur knowing the ship could not survive.

  "Commodore Pei, you have a com request from the Flag," his communications officer said quietly. "It's Nimue, Sir."

  "Thank you, Oscar," Pei Kau-yung said. "Put her through to my display here."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Nimue," Pei said as the familiar oval face with the sapphire blue eyes appeared on his display.

  "Commodore," she replied. "I'm sure you've heard by now."

  "Indeed. We're preparing to execute Breakaway even now."

  "I knew you would be. Your brother—the admiral—asked me to tell you he'll be thinking about you. So will I. And I know you'll be thinking about us, too, Sir. That's why I wanted to take this chance to tell you." She looked directly into his eyes. "It's been an honor and a privilege to serve under you, Sir. I regret nothing which has ever happened since you selected me for your staff."

  "That . . . means a great deal to me, Nimue," Pei said very softly. Like his brother, he was a traditionalist, and it was not the way of his culture to be emotionally demonstrative, but he knew she saw the pain in his eyes. "And may I also say," he added, "that I am deeply grateful for all the many services you have performed."

  It sounded horribly stilted to his own ear, but it was the closest either of them dared come over a public com circuit, especially since all message traffic was automatically recorded. And, stilted or no, she understood what he meant, just as completely as he'd understood her.

  "I'm glad, Sir," she said. "And please, tell Shan-wei goodbye for me. Give her my love."

  "Of course. And you already know you have hers," Pei said. And then, whatever his culture might have demanded, he cleared his throat hard, harshly. "And mine," he said huskily.

  "That means a lot, Sir." Alban smiled almost gently at him. "Goodbye, Commodore. God bless."

  * * *

  The destroyers did succeed in pushing the scout ship back. Not as far as they would have liked, but far enough to give Admiral Pei a distinct feeling of relief.

  "General signal to all units," he said, never looking away from the master tactical display. "Pass the order to execute Breakaway."

  "Aye, aye, Sir!" the senior flag bridge com rating replied, and a moment later, the light codes on Pei's display flickered suddenly.

  Only for an instant, and only because his sensors were watching them so closely.

  Or, he thought wryly, that's the theory, anyway.

  Forty-six huge starships killed their hyper drives and disappeared as they dropped instantly sublight. But in the very same instant that they did, forty-six other starships, which had been carefully hidden away in stealth, appeared just as quickly. It was a precisely coordinated maneuver which Pei's command had practiced over and over again in the simulators, and more than a dozen times in actual space, and they performed it this one last time flawlessly. The forty-six newcomers slid quickly and smoothly into the holes which had abruptly appeared in the formation, and their drives' emissions signatures were almost perfect matches for those of the ships which had disappeared.

  That's going to be a nasty surprise for the Gbaba, Pei told himself coldly. And one of these days, it's going to lead to an even bigger and nastier surprise for them.

  "You know," he said, turning away from the display to face Lieutenant Commander Alban and Captain Joseph Thiessen, his chief of staff, "we came so close to kicking these people's asses. Another fifty years—seventy-five at the outside—and we could have taken them, 'star-spanning empire' or no."

  "I think that's probably a little over-optimistic, Sir," Thiessen replied after a moment. "We never did find out how big their empire actually is, you know."

  "It wouldn't have mattered." Pei shook his head sharply. "We're in a virtual dead heat with them technologically right now, Joe. Right now. And how old are their ships?"

  "Some of them are brand new, Sir," Nimue Alban replied for the chief of staff. "But I take your point," she continued, and even Thiessen nodded almost unwillingly.

  Pei didn't press the argument. There was no reason to, not now. Although, in some ways, it would have been an enormous relief to tell someone besides Nimue what was really about to happen. But he couldn't do that to Thiessen. The chief of staff was a good man, one who believed absolutely in the underlying premises of Operation Ark. Like every other man and woman under Pei's command, he was about to give his life to ensure that Operation Ark succeeded, and the admiral couldn't tell him that his own commanding officer was part of a plot against the people charged with making that success happen.

  "Do you think we gave them enough of a shock that they may start actively innovating, Sir?" Thiessen asked after a moment. Pei looked at him and raised one eyebrow, and the chief of staff shrugged with a crooked smile. "I'd like to think we at least made the bastards sweat, Sir!"

  "Oh, I think you can safely assume we did that," Pei replied with a humorless smile of his own. "As to whether or not it will change them, I really don't know. The xenologists' best guess is that it won't. They've got a system and culture which have worked for them for at least eight or nine thousand years. We may have been a bigger bump in the road than they're accustomed to, but the formula worked in our case, too, in the end. They'll probably be a little nervous for a century or three, if only because they'll wonder if we got another colony away somewhere without their noticing, but then they'll settle back down."

  "Until the next poor dumb suckers come stumbling into them," Th
iessen said bitterly.

  "Until then," Pei agreed quietly, and turned back to the display.

  Eight or nine thousand years, he thought. That's the xenologists' best guess, but I'll bet it's actually been longer than that. God, I wonder how long ago the first Gbaba discovered fire!

  It was a question he'd pondered more than once over the four decades it had taken the Gbaba Empire to destroy the human race, for two things the Gbaba definitely were not were innovative or flexible.

  At first, the Gbaba had clearly underestimated the challenge mankind posed. Their first few fleets had only outnumbered their intended victims three- or four-to-one, and it had become quickly and painfully obvious that they couldn't match humanity's tactical flexibility. The first genocidal attack had punched inward past Crestwell to take out three of the Federation's fourteen major extra-Solar star systems, with one hundred percent civilian casualties. But then the Federation Navy had rallied and stopped them cold. The fleet had even counterattacked, and captured no less than six Gbaba star systems.

  Which was when the full Gbaba fleet mobilized.

  Commander Pei Kau-zhi had been a fire control officer aboard one of the Federation's ships-of-the-line in the Starfall System when the real Gbaba Navy appeared. He could still remember the displays, see the endless waves of scarlet icons, each representing a Gbaba capital ship, as they materialized out of hyper like curses. It had been like driving a ground car into crimson snowflakes, except that no snow had ever sent such an ice-cold shudder through the marrow of his bones.

  He still didn't know how Admiral Thomas had gotten any of her fleet out. Most of Thomas' ships had died with her, covering the flight of a handful of survivors whose duty had been not to stand and share her death, but to live with the dreadful news. To flee frantically homeward, arriving on the very wings of the storm to warn mankind Apocalypse was coming.

  Not that humanity had been taken totally unawares.

  The severity of the opening Gbaba attack, even if it had been thrown back, had been a brutal wakeup call. Every Federation world had begun arming and fortifying when the first evidence of the Gbaba's existence had appeared, ten years before Crestwell. After Crestwell, those preparations had been pressed at a frenetic pace, and a star system made an awesome fortress. The surviving fleet elements had fallen back on the fixed defenses, standing and fighting to the death in defense of humanity's worlds, and they'd made the Gbaba pay a hideous price in dead and broken starships.

  But the Gbaba had chosen to pay it. Not even the xenologists had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Gbaba flatly refused to even consider negotiations. They—or their translating computers, at any rate—obviously comprehended Standard English, since they'd clearly used captured data and documents, and the handful of broken, scarred human prisoners who'd been recovered from them had been "interrogated" with a casual, dispassionate brutality that was horrifying. So humanity had known communication with them was at least possible, yet they'd never responded to a single official communication attempt, except to press their attacks harder.

  Personally, Pei wondered if they were actually still capable of a reasoned response at all. Some of the ships the Federation had captured or knocked out and been able to examine had been ancient almost beyond belief. At least one, according to the scientists who'd analyzed it, had been built at least two millennia before its capture, yet there was no indication of any significant technological advance between the time of its construction and its final battle. Ships which, as Alban had suggested, were brand-new construction had mounted identical weapons, computers, hyper drives, and sensor suites.

  That suggested a degree of cultural stagnation which even Pei's ancestral China, at its most conservative rejection of the outside world, had never approached. One which made even ancient Egypt seem like a hotbed of innovation. It was impossible for Pei to conceive of any sentient beings who could go that long without any major advances. So perhaps the Gbaba no longer were sentient in the human sense of the term. Perhaps everything—all of this—was simply the result of a set of cultural imperatives so deeply ingrained they'd become literally instinctual.

  None of which had saved the human race from destruction.

  It had taken time, of course. The Gbaba had been forced to reduce humanity's redoubts one by one, in massive sieges which had taken literally years to conclude. The Federation Navy had been rebuilt behind the protection of the system fortifications, manned by new officers and ratings—many of whom, like Nimue Alban, had never known a life in which humanity's back was not against the wall. That navy had struck back in desperate sallies and sorties which had cost the Gbaba dearly, but the final outcome had been inevitable.

  The Federation Assembly had tried sending out colony fleets, seeking to build hidden refuges where some remnants of humanity might ride out the tempest. But however inflexible or unimaginative the Gbaba might be, they'd obviously encountered that particular trick before, for they'd englobed each of the Federation's remaining star systems with scout ships. Escorting Navy task forces might attain a crushing local superiority, fight a way through the scouts and the thinner shell of capital ships backing them up, but the scouts always seemed able to maintain contact, or regain it quickly, and every effort to run the blockade had been hunted down.

  One colony fleet had slipped through the scouts . . . but only to transmit a last, despairing hypercom message less than ten years later. It might have eluded the immediate shell of scout ships, but others had been sent out after it. It must have taken literally thousands of them to scour all of the possible destinations that colony fleet might have chosen, but eventually one of them had stumbled across it, and the killer fleets had followed. The colony administrator's best guess was that the colony's own emissions had led the Gbaba to them, despite all of the colonists' efforts to limit those emissions.

  Pei suspected that long-dead administrator had been right. That, at any rate, was an underlying assumption of Operation Ark's planners.

  "At least we managed to push their damned scout ship far enough back to give Breakaway a fighting chance of working," Thiessen observed.

  Pei nodded. The comment came under the heading of "blindingly obvious," but he wasn't about to fault anyone for that at a moment like this.

  Besides, Joe probably meant it as a compliment, he thought with something very like a mental chuckle. After all, Breakaway had been Pei's personal brainchild, the sleight-of-hand intended to convince the Gbaba they'd successfully tracked down and totally destroyed mankind's last desperate colonization attempt. That was why the forty-six dreadnoughts and carriers which had accompanied the rest of his task force in stealth had not fired a missile or launched a fighter during the fight to break through the shell of capital ships covering the Gbaba scout globe around the Sol System.

  It had been a stiff engagement, although its outcome had never been in doubt. But by hiding under stealth, aided by the background emissions of heavy weapons fire and the dueling electronic warfare systems of the opposing forces, they had hopefully remained undetected and unsuspected by the Gbaba.

  The sacrifice of two full destroyer squadrons who'd dropped behind to pick off the only scout ships close enough to actually hold the escaping colony fleet on sensors had allowed Pei to break free and run, and deep inside, he'd hoped they'd manage to stay away from the Gbaba scouts. That despite all odds, all of his fleet might yet survive. But whatever he'd hoped, he'd never really expected it, and that was why those ships had stayed in stealth until this moment.

  When the Gbaba navy arrived—and it would; for all of their age, Gbaba ships were still faster than human vessels—it would find exactly the same number of ships its scouts had reported fleeing Sol. Exactly the same number of ships its scouts had reported when they finally made contact with the fugitives once again.

  And when every one of those ships was destroyed, when every one of the humans crewing them had been killed, the Gbaba would assume they'd destroyed all of those fu
gitives.

  But they'll be wrong, Pei Kau-zhi told himself softly, coldly. And one of these days, despite everything people like Langhorne and Bédard can do to stop it, we'll be back. And then, you bastards, you'll—

  "Admiral," Nimue Alban said quietly, "long-range sensors have picked up incoming hostiles."

  He turned and looked at her, and she met his eyes levelly.

  "We have two positive contacts, Sir," she told him. "CIC makes the first one approximately one thousand point sources. The second one is larger."

  "Well," he observed almost whimsically. "At least they cared enough to send the very best, didn't they?"

  He looked at Thiessen.

  "Send the Fleet to Action Stations, if you please," he said. "Launch fighters and began prepositioning missiles for launch."