Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (15 page)

“My Dearest,” Jakob Adenauer began his latest diary entry, at 0800 on the morning after
Nefastio
. It would likely be his last for some time. That it might also be his last ever was in the back of his mind, as it always was for anyone who made war their profession, and as it should be. It was there that thought belonged, and there it would stay. Of much greater consequence was the thing he wrote next.

“The waiting is done. At last, we embark on the business at hand—it is a relief.” A tremendous relief, it was not too much to say. The planning had come together; the final simulations, held on board
Ilya Turabian
three days ago, were as encouraging as such things could be. He and Caneris had carried their main points, and there had been no sloppy foolishness in these exercises. The monitor had arrived without incident, and his tech staff had completed their system checks and cleared it for deployment.

The last minute decision to give CARDIV I to Vice Admiral Tomashevich, temporarily relieving Josephus Kline, was not entirely welcome, but Tomashevich was senior to Kline and, after the beating CARDIV II had taken at Miranda, Tomashevich was eager to redeem himself. CARDIV I had not yet fully jelled and suddenly putting them under a new CO would not help that, but nor was it quite agreeable to entrust such a vital mission—almost unprecedented—to the less-experienced Kline.

Most of all, it just wasn’t politically feasible to leave Tomashevich in port, overseeing the rebuilding of CARDIV II, while a much younger admiral was sent off to harvest the glory that would naturally fall to the man who would release the Bannermans and play such a crucial role in trapping PrenTalien’s fleet, thereby seeing to its final destruction.

Then there was the question of his people, and here too he had a mind more contented then it had lately been. “They will be at ease,” he added to his diary, “knowing their duty, and the Fleet will come together, the discords being set aside.”

He did not think he was being overly optimistic here. It was true that the newcomers—
Orlan
was particularly singled out—had been viewed as interlopers and not made to feel at home. The men and women of the Kerberos Fleet had come to take a perverse pride in their humble origins and rough colonial ways and enjoyed looking down on the ‘blueblood virgins’ who made up a large part of
Orlan’s
crew. Adenauer knew that in the mess or on grave watch—whenever they thought an officer wasn’t attending—the seniors of the fleet would jerk their head toward a port, wink, and say quietly: “We’ll get them aristo fuckers over there at the pointy end soon enough. Then we’ll see what color their blood
really
is.”

That was part of their spirit, well earned by now, and he’d turned a mostly deaf ear to it. In any case, regulations and stern admonitions from on high could not weld a fleet together. Only the shared experience of battle could fully accomplish that, and battle they would soon have. The ‘blueblood virgins’ would earn their place and be given their just due. Or they would not. Either way, there was nothing more to be said about it.

What mattered now, to the people of all ranks, was that after the disappointments of Miranda, they were going to get a chance to salve their injured pride, to prove their worth—to give their social ‘betters’ another one in the eye. That was merely right and proper, in their book, for all it would tear them away from the good food, cold drinks, and supple limbs afforded by a nice long port stay, and as much as they would gripe and grumble and bitch when it happened—and that was
right and proper
too. It was for good reason that they were called—and called themselves—the dregs of a hundred planets. He would not have led anyone else.

His stylus scratched on, at times squeaking faintly against the surface of the pad.

“It is odd perhaps to think of such a thing at such a time, but I cannot help but recall our wedding: how vast were the plans, how carefully laid, what debates on this detail or that one. And on the AM appointed, how nothing seemed to go right. The hairdressers were late, and there was not time for the coiffures intended. Someone lost her shoes—she borrowed a pair of boots from your sister with disreputable heels. Your maids’ gowns arrived without closures by some astounding oversight—I helped you sew them on the girls while our families fretted. What a terrible breach it was that we should be together before the ceremony—a frightful scandal. Your mother was absolutely white with it all.

“And yet, in the end, it all passed off rather well. No one knew and by the feast all was forgotten. So it is in war—as the first guns speak, the plans are found to be useless (though planning itself cannot be dispensed with). Someone critical is always late—something indispensable must again be dispensed with. Yet still may we stitch together a victory, though the means may look, to some, disreputable.”

He lifted the stylus for a final time, a private smile unstiffening his long features, then dipped it to the pad again. “Now, I must close. Keep yourself well and we shall meet again, at the time which Providence, in her wisdom, shall appoint.”

Attaching an affectionate valedictory, he closed and locked the document and returned his attention to the cabin’s situation displays. He knew full well that throughout the fleet, all who could command a port or a screen or a console were keeping their eyes on the flagship, while those who couldn’t kept their eyes on those who could. But all of them were eagerly waiting for his inevitable signal:
All captains repair aboard Flag
; in joyful anticipation of yet another glorious cruise.

“The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them: we have to abide their outcome in the dark.”

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

“Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time.”

Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

Wogan’s Reef was binary system, a circumstance that resulted in its usefulness as a transit node along with some other notable characteristics. The primary was Wogan’s Star, a moderate red giant whose companion was smaller K1-type. For eons, the primary had been feeding off its poor relation, now reduced to not much more than a dim dwarf, and the primary’s gorging made it a fast-period variable.

The variability of Wogan’s Star complicated astrogation in the neighborhood, shifting the Teller rings and thus the favored jump sectors, as did two massive gas giants, trapped in uneasy, unpredictable orbits between the two stars. Another complication was that Wogan’s Star did not feed in a genteel manner: it sucked up its diet of hydrogen sometimes in sips but often in gulps, and frequently emitted great belches of plasma, which mariners facetiously referred to as ‘weather’. These posed no physical danger to ships, although small craft might suffer if caught in one, but they did play Old Harry with sensors and lightspeed communications.

The hydrogen and helium, with traces of heavier elements, swirling in to feed Wogan’s Star heated and ionized as they did so, creating a disk of plasma about the diner that gave it an unhealthy squashed and bloated appearance. Jump sectors could shift in and out of this disk; doing so did not make them unusable, but the plasma’s effects on navigation sensors greatly increased the risk. There were always those willing to run such risks, however: smugglers and pirates mostly, who used these occluded jump sectors to transit the junction undetected.

Finally, there was the reef in Wogan’s Reef: an accretion disk surrounding the companion star out to about 2 AU. The system’s complex gravitational interactions prevented the formation of anything larger than gravel, and the reef was composed of these pea-sized particles orbiting in a soup—quite thick by astronomical standards—of fine silt-like grains. Ships could not operate in this soup, but the gravity of the chaotically orbiting gas giants perpetually stirred the accretion disk, creating voids and eddies through which ships could safely transit, and in which they could—if need be—hide. For this reason, the reef had been heavily mined at the beginning of the last war, and these days no one knew how many mines were still there, and how active they might be. These factors played together to make Wogan’s Reef a very valuable bit of ether and also one that was especially difficult in which to operate.

Admiral Joss PrenTalien had this all in mind as he stood in the combat information center of LSS
Ardennes
, the most powerful dreadnought in the CEF Navy and now Third Fleet’s flagship as well, surveying a forward view screen upon which a schematic of Wogan’s Reef was displayed. The data, which were being collected by a constellation of probes within the system and a line of stealth frigates outside it, and then transmitted to the fleet by hyper-relay, was fifty minutes old. The fleet itself was assembled six hours out, at an otherwise undistinguished location PrenTalien had designated
Point Moira
, on the suggestion of his flag lieutenant. The young man had gone on to explain that
Moira
was the name Homer used for the Fates—he could be whimsical like that. The admiral, having grown up with a grandmother of that name (and it fit her to a ‘T’), happily fell in with the notion.

Now, thoughts of whimsy (or even beloved grandmothers) far from his mind, PrenTalien used his pointer to highlight a region between Wogan’s Star and the innermost gas giant, close to the edge of the former’s plasma disk.

“This is what worries me, Harry”—addressing Harry Bolton, the Captain of the Fleet, who was standing next to him. “This damn zone has moved twice in the last week. The Bannermans have been running smugglers and worse through this system for a century. I’m betting they can predict it. We’ve got no handle on it at all. If it moves anywhere here”—he swept out an area of the plasma disk—“they can jump in and we won’t even be able to see them, much less stop them.”

The Bannerman fleet at Callindra 69 was the object of his concern. Recent reports of the Doms’ activities had driven their faith in the blockading force’s ability to hold them there even lower.

“I’m afraid we may have given up too easily on detaching
X-ray
to reinforce them.” Bolton sounded uncharacteristically peevish, but then the last few days had been especially trying. “Hamish would’ve superseded Hollis, putting an end to all the nonsense. That alone would’ve been a victory.”

Bolton was alluding to an eleventh-hour proposal to dispatch the strike force’s other DREDRON under Vice Admiral Hamish Burton (Third Fleet’s nominal CO) to Callindra 69, greatly strengthening the blockade and giving him something more active to do than hold the exit gate for them at Wogan’s Reef. But the Nedaemans were in no mood to reverse their earlier veto of allowing
Ardennes X-ray
to deploy out of Merope, and in any case, the plan would have put the entire strike force on the wrong side of the plate if things broke ugly. The suggestion had been allowed to die a quiet death.

PrenTalien shrugged the remark off. “No matter. We’ve crossed the Rubicon.” It was a joke he relished, coming at the expense of
Ardennes
’ sister ship, LSS
Rubicon
, the heart of
Ardennes X-ray
. Bolton was long used it.

“Yes, sir,” Bolton commented in a deeply dissatisfied tone. “But if they can boost their fleet in there in such a way we can’t detect it . . .” He left the thought unfinished. Everything depended on keeping the two enemy fleets separated. If the Bannermans managed to effect a link-up between their fleet and the Kerberos Fleet, the business would get very awkward indeed. Right now, they had something like parity with the approaching Halith forces, but the Bannermans could bring close to a hundred ships to the fight, though only about a quarter of those were major combatants.

As it was,
parity
looked like this: PrenTalien had ninety-one ships at
Moira Point
, thirty-two of which were heavies. Besides
Ardennes
, these consisted of three battleships, ten battlecruisers and eighteen heavy cruisers. Adding in light cruisers and the three light carriers intended to deal with the monitor (if it succeeded in making the trip), brought the total number of capital ships to forty-nine. No fleet carriers were present, as the Reef was hostile to fighter ops and it was not worth the risk of losing another.
Trafalgar
, along with the light carrier
Concordia
and the rest of TF 34, remained at Outbound. In addition to the carriers, Lo Gai had four battlecruisers there, supported by a mixed lot of cruisers and destroyers, tallying three dozen, to hold the station or act as a potential relief force, as need be.

Beyond these forces, there were sixteen stealth frigates, deployed far forward to monitor the likely approaches, and some of the unlikely ones as well. Of particular concern was a Bannerman sortie being launched from New Madras, which they’d captured early in the war. Such a move would be more than slightly insane—which was why it was a worry. Insanity and war marched arm in arm. The frigates were his tripwires against such maneuvers. PrenTalien did not have as many of these doughty little ships as he might have liked, and he’d given their skippers orders to exercise a modicum of caution. Knowing them as he did, he expected the order to fall on mostly deaf ears, but it was the thought that counted.

Last on the list was Commodore Shariati’s roving squadron, which was off lurking about the borders of Bannerman space, looking for chances to commit mayhem generally. She only had seven ships, led by the fast battlecruiser LSS
Artemisia
, but they fought far above their weight.

These, and a squadron of minesweepers, were the totality of forces PrenTalien had at his disposal. Arrayed against him, Adenauer could potentially muster one hundred fifty-three ships, but thirty-four of those belonged to CARDIV I, and it was an open question if he would risk them in the Reef. The idea that he would break up CARDIV I was anathema the Halith military mind. It was much more likely they would be employed as a reserve force outside the Reef, though nothing could be taken for granted.

Aside from CARDIV I, Adenauer had another hundred and nineteen ships he was sure to bring to the party, including his flagship,
Marshall Nedelin
, six battleships, six battlecruisers, and twenty-eight heavy cruisers. The numbers were exact because Captain Constance Yanazuka, skipper of the stealth frigate LSS
Kestrel
—whose ears were notably deaf in some ways, and who did not appear have the word
caution
in her lexicon—had been sticking her neck out very much farther than was consistent with achieving retirement age. Hovering about the margins of Tau Verde, she’d sent back a precise report as the Kerberos Fleet had sortied two days ago. Although the Doms had been determined to make her pay for that impertinence, she’d managed to sneak away without getting rattled around too badly.

So much for the numbers. They were never the whole story, and especially not here. To begin with, the ‘phantom’ monitor had demonstrated its existence three days ago, when
Kestrel
caught it boosting out from one of Tau Verde’s gas giants where it had been fueling. PrenTalien had received his tech exploit department’s assessment of the monitor making the trip without a major failure. They put it at two-thirds, but being conscientious, they’d included error bounds to account for the spotty intelligence and lack of time to do a detailed workup on the engineering. The full range spanned from just less than half to almost ninety percent. In PrenTalien’s experience, the universe did not always play fair with probabilities (privately, he blamed entropy), so he was going with the high value.

Of course, the Doms also knew he now knew about the monitor, but if they assumed this was his first inkling of its existence—and they had no reason to think otherwise—it was too late for him to do much about it. At least, he hoped they had no reason to think otherwise. If they believed the realization might make him more cautious, that was a misconception he’d be happy to encourage. More disturbingly, CARDIV I had sortied a day ahead of the rest of the fleet, though that could explained by the monitor. Moving that much mass through the junction at once was tricky and shrunk the available windows. It made sense to send the carriers first. Yet he failed to find much comfort in this comforting argument.

Next, Halith ships were generally larger and more heavily armed than their CEF counterparts (except for dreadnoughts, where the CEF had the edge). In the popular view, this disparity in size and throw weight was offset—or more than offset, depending on the degree of chest beating involved—by the League’s superior technology. Pundits could afford to prate about this presumed advantage from their cozy offices back in the Homeworlds. Out here at the sharp end, things looked rather different. It was certainly true that the CEF’s missile technology was better than Halith’s and that their cooperative engagement capability was more effective, particularly on the attack. Halith did not emphasize CEC for offensive purposes to the same degree, and their area-defense nets were more dependent on fewer prime nodes and thus arguably more brittle.

While these advantages were real enough, they were primarily the result of doctrine. The CEF had trended more and more towards missiles in recent years, augmented by sophisticated torpedoes as stand-off weapons, while the Imperial Navy still considered missiles primarily defensive weapons and espoused disruptive torpedo attacks followed up with massed railgun fire. So whatever Mr. and Ms. Comfy Pundit liked to spout off about on their daily shows, seen from the perspective of how the fleets actually operated, the technology ‘gap’ was greatly diminished, or (if the small, vocal, curmudgeonly band of pro-gun-power officers was to be believed) actually favored the other side.

PrenTalien took an ecumenical view of the missile-gun debate, although his overall sympathies tended to lie with the gunners and his fleet had rather more gun-purists like Captain Lawrence than not. But you danced with the girl you had—or the fleet that brought you (as the case may be). Pining for chimerical ideals—whether girls or fleets—profited a man nothing.

Lastly, there were the conditions that Wogan’s Reef itself imposed on operations. Gravitic technology meant that space warfare was not quite the Newtonian free-for-all that it had been in former times. The keels of hypercapable ships, where the grav plants were housed, created local fields strong enough to deflect projectiles, and even light, with the result that the ship was invulnerable over a narrow cone—the cone angle depended on the ship’s virtual mass rating but was never greater than thirty degrees—oriented in the direction the keel was pointed. In addition, when ships were close enough together, these fields would merge, producing a fatter cone that could defeat any attack made from within it.

Fleets used this principle to create a ‘floor’ through which an enemy could not attack. At times, fleets would invert half their ships, making a ceiling as well, although this meant crowding ships closer together, effectively reducing their offensive firepower and risking gaps in the floor or ceiling if ships did not maintain precise station.

A fleet could even form itself into a tight ball, keels outward, rendering the whole formation safe from any attack, but this also meant that the ships could not employ their weapons. It was a purely defensive formation—called
podding
in most navies—which allowed a battered fleet to try to reach a jump zone and escape. Podding was not perfect tactic by any means: maintaining a pod required exact station keeping, difficult at any time and much more so with damaged ships, and since all the ships of a fleet could rarely manage to translate together, a pod would break up as the fleet jumped out, allowing a pursuing enemy to snap up stragglers.

The whole upshot was that fleets tended to form disks or annuli that looped and circled, rather like belligerent amoebas trying engulf one another, until one weakened to the point where it could no longer maintain the integrity of its defense net. Then the survivors would usually pod up and try to break out. But in systems where movement was constrained (Wogan’s Reef was just such a one), formations could be employed where one or both ends were anchored to planetary bodies or, in this present case, the reef.