Final Assault (10 page)

L'Wrona's hand tapped the joystick, taking
Toy
off automatic, moving the ship forward at standard. "I invoke the immunity of the Covenant," he said. On the tacscan, the distance between the two ships was quickly shrinking.

"I'm sorry, but they said you'd do that," said Z'Than, "and that it was a procedural matter best decided by a tribunal. As a Line officer, I am merely to bring you in."

A line of text appeared beneath the captain's image, moving slowly across the screen. "H'Nar. He's armed his weapons batteries. Tacscan locking on. Touch your left earlobe if you want me to open fire now, while we still have a chance."

L'Wrona kept his left hand on the chairarm. "Z'Than," said the margrave. "You're from U'Tria, aren't you?"

The captain nodded.

"Do you have a signed order from Fleet ordering my arrest?"

"I have verbal authorization, My Lord." Even in the small pickup, L'Wrona could see the sweat on the other's brow. He and his family had been liegemen of the margrave since before the Fall.

"You can only bring me in with an order signed by the Grand Admiral, or an order signed by the full Council. Do you have either?"

Z'Than shook his head.

"Then get out of my way, sir. As first ship insystem, we have prior navigation rights. You are between us and our jump point."

gods! h'nar, jump now!
flashed the screen.

deviation will be only .00032. we can make it up in a few weeks.

"Cut your engines and prepare to be taken in on tractors," said Z'Than. On the tacscan, what little space there was between the two ships was vanishing. L'Wrona could see the destroyer through the armorglass now, a mile-long black hull bristling with weapons turrets and instrument pods. They were within seconds of colliding.

"Too easy," said L'Wrona. Pulling up on the stick, he sent the scout knifing up and over the destroyer's bridge, down along its hull and then off toward jump point, the big tri-tubed engines shrinking in the rearscan.

The destroyer commander's image vanished as the commlink broke. "He's switched off," said Dad as L'Wrona moved the scout up to flank speed. "And he's suspended weapons tracking. You won."

Reaching jump point, L'Wrona engaged the drive, feeling his stomach churn as space twisted in that crazy, familiar way, then it was over—they were in U'Tria system. Home.

Sighing, L'Wrona dropped Toy's speed down to standard.

"Mines!" shouted the computer. "All around!"

Cursing, L'Wrona cut speed, tried to nullify forward thrust, even as an alarm sounded. "Incoming missiles!" warned Dad. "Move and the mines get us, don't move and the missiles get us."

"Missiles from where?" said L'Wrona.

"Two heavily armed commercial vessels." It all came up on the tacscan then: the red of the minefield surrounding the jump point, the incoming red streaks of the shipbusters, the yellow Xs of the two hostiles, and standing well outside the minefield, the small, fragile green of
Toy.

"Origin of vessels?" said L'Wrona, seeing only one way out.

"ID'd as Combine T'Lan," said Dad.

The missiles penetrated the minefield and were destroyed—as planned. Noiseless, a spectacular wave of overlapping orange-red explosions licked toward the scout, a chain reaction racing from mine to mine.

"Short jump, backside," snapped L'Wrona.

Toy
disappeared as the blast reached her.

"Yes or no?" said the face in the commscreen.

The man wearing the uniform of a Combine merchant captain shrugged. "Maybe yes, maybe no. We think we got him, but the tacscan shows no ship residue. There should be at least some traces of the drive isotopes."

"He may have blind jumped. If so, he's as good as dead," said the other. "Remain on station until you hear from me again, Captain."

"Yes, Goodman T'Lan."

As the Combine captain's image disappeared, T'Lan, neither good nor a man, turned to the other human-adapted AI, one who could and did pass for his son and heir. "That's L'Wrona's home system. He probably jumped, but I doubt it was blind. We'll just have to watch and wait, strike when it shows."

The two stood in the underground command center of one of the Federation's wealthiest industrial combines—a combine created several hundred years ago by beings from another reality, intent on infiltrating and ultimately destroying the Confederation. The big room bustled with activity, coordinating the far-flung merchant fleets and maintaining communications with distant points in this and one other universe.

"One of our units has the humans' only portal device," said the younger T'Lan.

"S'Yatan?" asked T'Lan senior, glancing at the status boards. Everything was on schedule —forward battle units of the Fleet of the One were approaching the Rift, about to penetrate into the K'Ronarins' Quadrant Blue Nine —the Ghost Quadrant.

The other AI nodded.

"He's had it since his ship was assigned to Terra," said T'Lan senior. "His crew's human and loyal. He can kill them but he can't run the ship by himself. And there's always an escort vessel. So . . . ?"

"He's convinced the crew they're fleeing an unlawful order, heading back for K'Ronar. The instant he leaves the Terran system, he can kill his crew, and one of our ships will meet him."

T'Lan senior nodded. "Having that device, we'll use it to bring in a second force, augmenting the one coming through the Rift. Nothing can stop us." A sudden thought gave him pause. "What unlawful order was he fleeing?" he asked, frowning.

The other AI looked at his senior nervously. "You recall Binor's advance force? The one

we thought the mindslavers wiped?" "Thought?"

"It seems that R'Gal, Guan-Sharick and some humans actually captured the flagship. It's at Terra now, and has been granted the device by the insystem commander."

The senior AI was absolutely still for a moment, absorbing the data. "No one," he said finally, "has ever taken a battleglobe. Not in all the long years of the Fleet of the One."

"Shall I alert home?" asked T'Lan junior, nodding toward a console manned by an AI wearing a terminal coupler plugged directly into his temples.

T'Lan senior held up a hand. "Not yet. Not until we've some success to report. That battleglobe can hurt us far worse back home than it can here—which is why R'Gal's trying to take it there."

Toy's
jump drive was a creation of the High Imperial epoch. Unlike contemporary star-ships, the little scout was capable of low-risk, insystem jumps—and had just made one.

L'Wrona looked down on the rugged highlands of the S'Htil, one of the planet's three continents and its commercial hub.

In the old days, before the war, the tacscan would have picked up hundreds of space- and atmospheric craft, coming and going from U'Triaport or traversing the planet. Now the tacscan was empty.

"Set us down in the old s'hlar grove, across the lake from the Hall," said L'Wrona as the ship plunged into the atmosphere, taking a sharp evasive tack against hypothesized missiles.

"Acknowledged," said the computer.

Unchallenged, seemingly undetected, the little ship sat down at dusk in the wooded hills just outside L'Yan, ancestral home of the Margrave of U'Tria. The sere autumn foliage was just catching the last rays of sunset when L'Wrona clambered down Toy's boarding ladder and stepped onto his home soil for the first time in ten long years.

Breathing deeply of the crisp, fresh air, he bent and picked up some leaves and dirt. Rubbing them slowly between his hands, he let them fall back to the forest floor, brushed his hands gently, then made his way toward the faint ruts of the old vehicle trail and the distant village.

10

"Here we sit
," said L'Guan, sipping his brandy, "two flag officers without a single ship, aware of enemies within and without, and reduced to the status of observers."

"There are the commtorps," said D'Trelna. The two men sat at a small table on the blue-tiled patio overlooking the waterfall, two glasses and a crystal decanter of S'Tanian brandy between them. Below, the mist from the tumbling water prismed the artificial sunlight into a rainbow.

"What, the ones
Implacable
launched coming in?" asked the admiral.

D'Trelna nodded.

"Line," said L'Guan, "what's the status of those commtorps?"

Ill

"All but one is intact, Admiral," said Line, its voice coming from beside the table. "They can be activated only upon signal from
Implacable,
though. Absent
Implacable,
they cannot be utilized."

"Surely the signal could be duped?" said D'Trelna.

"Authentication signals of a L'Aal-class cruiser—indeed, of most Imperial-made battleships—to any of its indiginous equipment is code-based upon the matrix set of jump drive impulses unique to that particular vessel," said Line primly. "The chance of our successfully emulating it during your lifetime, Commodore, is insignificant."

"I had to ask," sighed D'Trelna.

"And what good would it do?" said L'Guan, looking at the Commodore.

D'Trelna's head jerked up, eyes narrowing. "The people would rise," he said, stabbing a thick finger at the admiral. "Fleet would join them, and Combine T'Lan—its bases, its ships, its agents—would disappear overnight. They're large, but they can't hope to stand against an aroused people backed by their military."

"Chaos is what you're describing, Commodore," said the Admiral. "Our ships scattered, our cities burning, fighting in the streets —just as the AI invasion force sweeps in."

"I disagree," said D'Trelna. "But it seems a moot point for now.

The Final Assault
"So what do we do?"

"We could wait," said L'Guan, restopping the decanter. "If there is an AI invasion coming, it'll come out of Quadrant Blue Nine. Automatic pickets have been posted at all known jump points leading from there toward the Confederation. When and if they come, we'll know, D'Trelna."

"You know I made a deal with the mindslavers," said the commodore. "They're waiting in Blue Nine, ready to take on the AIs in return for . . ."

"In return for dangerous concessions from us," said L'Guan. "I know. If they can stop the AIs—and we and they survive—those concessions will probably be granted. But chances of that are slim to none."

"So you plan for us to just sit it out, Admiral, safe in the heart of Line?"

L'Guan smiled wryly, shaking his head. "Not even this charming sanctuary will be safe when the Fleet of the One gets here, D'Trelna." He sat looking at the waterfall for a long moment. "An admiral without a fleet and a commodore without a flotilla." He looked back at D'Trelna. "I've always rejected the desperate over the safe. But there are no safe moves left."

"I didn't know we had any moves left," said D'Trelna, staring glumly into the tropical twilight now falling over the jungle glade.

"Let's be thankful we survived today," said

L'Guan, rising. "I'm going to bed. You might do the same."

"Admiral," called D'Trelna.

L'Guan turned.

"Thank you—for getting me out."

L'Guan shrugged. "How many times have you and
Implacable
saved our lives, D'Trelna?"

"You'd have gotten me out if I were a first-year cadet," said the commodore.

"No one gets at my people," said the admiral, shaking his head. "Not if I can stop them. Good night, J'Quel."

"So, Line," said D'Trelna as the admiral disappeared into the tropical twilight, "what do you think our chances are?"

Line spoke after a moment. "The situation is more complex than the admiral cares to believe," it said. "If all factors now in play are resolved in our favor, we will win. If even one of them is not resolved in our favor, we will lose."

"Wouldn't care to say what all those factors are, would you?" said the commodore, reaching for the decanter.

Beside him, the guide sphere vanished and twilight stood suspended. "Certainly," said Line, as D'Trelna poured himself another glass. "One. The captured battleglobe must reach AI space and foment revolt. Two. The Margrave of U'Tria must find S'Yal's last citadel and retrieve the recall device. Three. The last fleet of the House of S'Yal must be recalled from the stasis in which it's snared. Four. Combine T'Lan and all its minions must be destroyed, chaos or not. And five . . ."

"Five?" The commodore frowned, glass almost to his lips.

"Five," said Line. "The Emperor must return."

"You crazy bitch!" shouted N'Trol into the pickup. "You can't keep pushing her this hard—she'll overload, tear herself apart!" Behind him, in engineering, the high-pitched vibration of machinery at the breaking point filled the air.

"You really love this old hulk, don't you, Engineer?" said A'Tir with a vicious little smile. The smile vanished. "Final jump point by watchend or I start spacing your crew." The commscreen went blank.

N'Trol turned to his four engineering techs, standing behind him at the master panel, watching. "You heard her, lads," he said. "Let's do it." Glancing at the armed corsair pacing the catwalk above, he lowered his voice. "Now's our chance to do a little tinkering. Come look at the drive schematics—I'll show you what I mean."