Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series (26 page)

Someone coughed, and Garvin came back to military reality, and pulled back.

“Uh, the
Tweg
had something in her eye,” he started, then realized it was Njangu.

“Sorry, sir,” Montagna said. “I, uh, just — ”

“I saw shit,” Yoshitaro announced. “I just came to remind
Haut
Jaansma we’re running late. So if you’ll excuse us,
Tweg
Montagna …” putting emphasis on the rank.

He had Garvin by an elbow, a smile fixed on his face, leading him back into the bar.

“And I think it’s time we’re going,” he hissed.

“You aren’t kidding,” Garvin said fervently. “We should’ve been gone before I went to make that com. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Yeh,” Njangu said. “You’re bound and determined to stay in trouble, aren’t you? I assume that’s the person you were being so frigging vague about. Good goddamned thing I’m around to rescue you.”

• • •

The next morning, Njangu malevolently watched Garvin, suffering the torments of the damned, try to answer
Caud
Fitzgerald’s questions about Larissan intentions.

Before the staff meeting, while he sucked caff and chewed antacids in the Officers’ Mess, Garvin had plaintively queried him about hangover remedies. Njangu had thought about suggesting raw
giptel
eggs in hot sauce, or some of the other disgusting folk remedies he’d heard of, then said lots of ice water and mild analgesics were the only thing that’d help. Beyond going back to bed for the rest of the day.

Actually, Njangu knew a couple of real hangover cures. But they were high on the illegal-drug market and, besides, Yoshitaro had no idea where to score something like that these days.

He sighed for lost youth and concentrated on Garvin’s miseries. It kept him from remembering he didn’t feel all that much better, himself.

Neither of their conditions was improved when, an hour after the staff meeting ended, sirens screamed full alert.

The Larissans were on the move.

• • •

Dant
Angara had no intention of being caught at the bottom of any gravity well. As soon as the satellite had reported Larissan ships mobilizing off Prime, the Force went to combat positions.

The Cumbrian ships were already armed and fueled, and half of the troops assigned to the ships on board. The rest of the Legion drew arms and went to their duty stations at a dead run.

Landing fields on the human-occupied planets and moons of Cumbre trembled, and dust clouds swirled as ships lifted for space.

The first to take off were the
Kanes
, now nine strong. They moved into parking orbits just off their assigned planets, their controllers reeling streams of orders to the incoming ships while the rest of the fleet assembled.

There were more than just the
Kellys
and
aksai-
carrying
velv
in the formations. After the Larissan attack, every Force vessel a weapon could be lashed to became a warship, from tiny patrol boats to merchantmen to Force supply craft.

Against the rules of warfare, which Angara somehow thought Redruth didn’t have memorized anyway, civilian ships were armed, and the women and men who volunteered to serve on them given hasty instructions. The tough mining cargo ships of Mellusin Mining were particularly suited for this modification.

Space-rigged Zhukovs and even Griersons hung in space, their mission the close-in defense of the homeworlds.

Here and there were a scattering of yachts. Somehow, word had spread through the Rentiers across D-Cumbre that it’d be “awf’ly appropriate, old boy, if you actually stood up for something in this life, and anyway, wouldn’t it be kickers to see if that racer of yours’d be able to fight, say, one of those damned Larissans? Or make a stab at it, anyway.”

Word was that Erik Penwyth had been the one who came up with that idea, but he piously pleaded innocent. Another, more personal reason some of the playboys found their elaborate yachts floating in close orbit with drab merchantmen and the odd, shepherding
wynt
was that almost everyone in the close-knit Rentier community had lost someone in the bombing, or knew someone who had.

One of those yachts, unknown to Garvin, was the repaired
Godrevy
.

Angara’s staff had decided on the four most likely nav points the Larissans might use. Angara had rejected one as being too far away from Cumbre’s heart, another because it lay close to the asteroids, and might be considered a navigational risk to the newly expanded Larissan fleet with its less-experienced officers.

The two remaining were between C- and D-Cumbre, and just inside the orbit of H-Cumbre. Angara thought the first not the most likely. Redruth, or rather Celidon, who most certainly would actually be commanding the invasion fleet, would need some time and space to assemble his forces before attacking. Nevertheless, Angara had a full twelve destroyers guarding that point.

The bulk of his fleet he ordered positioned just beyond the H-Cumbre point, in the orbital plane of the ice giant.

There they waited, for almost two E-days.

An
aksai
was the first to report the Larissan fleet as they burst out of hyperspace at the predicted H-Cumbre nav point.

They blinked into being in concave arcs. The horns of each arc were secured by patrol ships and destroyers. The cruisers were mostly in the forward elements, two at the rear. In the center of the rows were the troop transports, some design-built assault ships, vastly more hastily converted merchantmen, each packed with even-more-hastily trained soldiers.

All their search apparati must have been aimed at the occupied worlds, for long minutes passed without any sign they’d noticed the Cumbrians waiting “behind” and “below” them.

That was long enough for Ho Kang and the other controllers to determine the exact Larissan orbit — directly toward D-Cumbre, in the least-subtle strategy — and run programs sending orders to each of the Cumbrian ships.

Kellys,
velv
, went into hyperspace for an instant, coming out just on the fringes of the Larissan mass. Others appeared in front of the Larissans, a long gauntlet to D-Cumbre.

• • •

Alikhan, without realizing it, was making a low humming sound in the back of his throat as his sights swept down the nose of the Larissan destroyer, back up, centering on the bridge. His paw rested over the launch sensor, touched it.

One of his three Goddards hissed out of the tube, targeted the destroyer and sped off.

As ordered, Alikhan returned to N-space, jumped to his second destination. He never saw the Goddard rip the Larissan’s bow open, leaving the rest of the crew to die behind automatic airlocks in a slowly rotating tomb.

• • •

Mil
Liskeard got lucky, or so he thought at first. His jump coordinates put him in the middle of the Larissan transports. His collision alarm blatted, and his hyperdrive kicked him back in, out of N-space, barely avoiding a collision. He was close, too close, to the enemy ships.

His screen showed him at the rear of a fairly coherent wave of ships, quickly ID’ed as assault transports. He ordered his weapons officers to seek targets and fire at will, and for his navigator to put him across the rear of the formation.

The
Parnell
arced down the row, missiles volleying. A patrol ship tried to intercept, and was destroyed. Liskeard was close enough to the Larissans to use visual screens as the transports bucked and exploded. One ship, still boiling fire, was close enough to be seen through a porthole, and Liskeard put a zoom on one screen.

A moment later, he almost vomited over his control panel. The screen showed the freighter, wrack and ruin consuming it as it sprayed tiny white objects into space, white objects that had been men, soldiers who would never survive to land on any planet, hostile or friendly.

Liskeard ignored his churning stomach, ordering his Kelly back the way it came, all available hands helping the weapons crewmen reload the ship’s tubes. The
Parnell
struck again. Liskeard called his control ship, and the controller put three more destroyers and a dozen
velv
in on his signal. They savaged the transports, men spewing out of the ruined ships like the guts of depth-exploded fish.

Finally, the Larissan ships’ screams were heard, and two cruisers flashed into being. A
velv
was hit, but the other Cumbrians went back into N-space, calling to their controllers for more targets.

Except for the two
aksai
— Ben Dill and Boursier — who’d been vectored in on the holocaust. The cruisers and their escorts were looking for big ships to take revenge on, not one-man mites. Dill and his wingmate, masked by pinwheeling wreckage, cut through the carnage on luck and very fast reflexes. A destroyer loomed “close” — no more than a thousand kilometers, and Boursier gutted it with a missile.

“Ben Dill’s boy is after bigger, bigger game,” Dill snarled. “And this time no goddamned ‘claimed as damaged’ will be allowed … and there you are, dead center, you big fat pig.” He launched two Goddards, changed his point of aim to the cruiser’s stern, fired his last missile.

All three struck almost at once, and the cruiser vaporized.

“Ho-ho,” Dill said into his open mike. “Ben Dill wants another medal and a pay raise.”

“If you have anything left,” the com said, in accented Basic, “sssome help could be provided for me.” It was Tvem, another of the Musth mercenaries. Dill touched sensors, saw two Larissan destroyers closing on Tvem’s
aksai
, and went to full power.

Boursier, not needing any orders, was not more than a thousand meters to his side. A third
aksai
came from nowhere, and Alikhan’s voice came over the com:

“We are on our way.”

Tvem barely avoided a double launch, fired back at one destroyer. His missile was destroyed by a countermissile, and then the three
aksai
were in range.

Dill, in front, fired one of his four remaining Shadow countermissiles at the lead destroyer and was astounded to see it strike home. Two Goddards hit just behind it, and the destroyer was debris. The other destroyer fired a missile at Tvem, and the
aksai
was a plume of fire, then as if it’d never been.

Dill heard a hiss of rage from Alikhan, then the destroyer exploded. Alikhan’s
aksai
slashed low, near the ruined ship, came back and fired once more. Then there was nothing left to take revenge on.

“Let us return for more rockets,” Alikhan said, and his voice held hissing rage. “I desire to kill more of these Larissans.”

• • •

First Brigade’s fighting troops were either standing by in loading bays or airborne in Griersons and Zhukovs, flying in the high stratosphere, waiting.

Garvin sat in the rear of a command Grierson, listening to the battle in deep space, grinding his teeth.

He looked at another screen, showing the interior of Fitzgerald’s Grierson. She didn’t look any happier to be out of action than he was. She was also unhappy because Angara had borrowed her heads-of-section until he could build a staff of his own, so Njangu and the other section heads were off with Angara, while Garvin had to fart around in circles in D-Cumbre’s atmosphere.

He was not at all sure he liked being a field-grade officer, even if it’d most likely keep him alive a lot longer.

• • •

In spite of heavy casualties, the Larissans pushed on, closing on D-Cumbre.

Two more cruisers were hit and destroyed.

An electronics officer hurried to
Dant
Angara, aboard the
al Maouna
.

“Sir, we have a message intercept, and a tentative decipher. It’s from someone who calls himself White Leader … ELINT suggests it’s most likely their admiral, Celidon.”

The signal read:

“And what does
that
change?” Angara muttered to himself.

Njangu was watching one of the main screens. He thought he saw something, grabbed a mike, keyed it to Ho Kang in her chair, and asked a question. She changed frequencies to one of the control technicians below and suddenly, on the big screen, a scattering of red lights flared. A loudspeaker went on.

“All stations,” Ho said. “We appear to have an interesting development. Observe the highlighted ships. These are some of the Larissan battle cruisers we have been monitoring as the most important threat, about half of their known contingent.”

Green arrows came on-screen, and Njangu heard another staff officer gasp.

“You’ll notice,” Ho said calmly, “all of the observed capital ships have changed orbit, and appear to be withdrawing, repeat withdrawing from the system.”

“Son of a bitch,” someone said slowly. Njangu realized it was his voice.

“Redruth’s leaving his soldiers to cover the capital ships’ retreat. I’ll bet good credits he’s not with the transports,” Angara said grimly. “Now it’ll get bloody. Patch me through to the troops onplanet.”

• • •

Not only the cruisers, but the destroyers as well were retreating, going at full drive for the nav point they’d dropped out of.

Haut
Johnny Chaka, once a hot-rod Zhukov flight commander, now a hot-rod
velv
group captain, with four ships under his command, swarmed their rear.

“One missile per ship,” he told his weapons officers. “All we have to do is cripple them, then we can come back and finish them off later.”

One of his ships took a hit, broke formation, reported the damage was repairable, but she was out of the battle.

Chaka’s lips pursed for an instant, but he showed no other sign of emotion as he harried the stragglers, hoping he’d kill enough of them to get a chance at one of the cruisers.

• • •

The transports arced in past D-Cumbre’s largest moon, Fowey. A handful of destroyers had disobeyed Redruth’s orders to abandon the transports, and defended their charges, dying in the attempt.