The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (27 page)

In the starboard auxiliary control room the effect was that of a shotgun firing buckshot.

Auro, at the panel closest to the bulkhead through which the fragments entered, felt several sharp stings, no worse than Windling Bug bites, but Lieutenant Neiburger and the others were all killed or mortally wounded. One ensign moaned and writhed iii agony, clutching where a jagged piece of shrapnel had tom away half her abdomen.

It took Auro only a few seconds to accept that there was nothing he could do for the others, and to realize, too, that he was now the sole person capable of giving the orders needed to maintain the strict discipline of Buchanon’s battle plan.

The next ten minutes rocketed by on an adrenaline high. Even under hypnosis during debriefing, all that Auro could remember was a feeling of unreal clarity and purpose. The ship’s records show that in that ten minutes Cadet Auro Lebarie gave over a hundred commands and doing so was able to maintain some semblance of order in the formation.

At some point he remembered seeing the indicator telling him a second control panel had joined in. Glancing over, Auro was surprised to see Captain Buchanon hunched over a second panel, wiping away splattered blood with one hand while entering orders with the other.

The tactician’s uniform was torn and his back was bleeding. Auro was to later learn the wound was caused when the training officer had to crawl through the jagged remains of a collapsed corridor to reach the auxiliary control room.

At about the same time, Auro became aware that his left hand hurt. He looked down and there was a sliver of metal, perhaps a quarter-inch wide embedded in the back of his hand. A trickle of blood oozed from the edges of where it had penetrated. When he passed his hand too low over the control panel and it snagged, the cadet was painfully informed that the sliver stuck out on both sides.

He forgot about it again while directing assistance to a cruiser being hard pressed by four of the larger Khalian ships, these being nearly all of the larger ships the weasels had left.

The splinter was still in place when the relief team from the bridge cut its way in.

It hurt like hell when the medic took it and three others in Auro’s back out.

By the time the cadet was able to return to the bridge, it was apparent the battle had ended. The throb of emergency power and thud of plasma cannons had been replaced by the hum of well-tuned sub-light engines.

Auro didn’t need a battle report to know they must have won.

He was still alive.

It felt good.

“The Khalia are definitely a classic barbarian culture.” Smythe scanned the faces of the Strategy Board. More than half of the admirals gathered at the table looked surprised. They had expected a speech by the Special Investigator for Fleet Affairs, but this wasn’t it.

“As you know, I have spent the last five months examining the records of nearly every contact we have had with the Khalians.” Smythe paused for emphasis. “During this time I have also consulted with experts from half a dozen planets.”

At this Meier looked surprised as well. He had no report of Smythe receiving any off-planet communications.

“The conclusions are inescapable,” the investigator continued. At the head of the table Admiral Meier offered a supporting smile.

“The Khalian culture is incapable of creating the ships or weapons they currently employ. We are not even sure how they manage to service or repair what they have.”

“They most certainly can fight them!” protested an admiral who had once lost half his command.

Smythe nodded knowingly. “The number of ships the Khalia operate is limited to a few types but number in the thousands. Their design is based on technology similar to ours, obviously derived from that of the old Imperium. The question then, is, where did they get them?”

“Or where
do
they get them?” Meier interjected.

This time Smythe nodded approvingly. Around the table, admirals muttered suggestions, most impossible, one obscene.

When silence had returned Smythe finished with a flourish. “We don’t know how the Khalia gained their ships. Finding out may be the key to victory.”

His voice softened. “Let’s hope that the landings on Bethesda furnish some answers. That is, if they succeed . . .”

AS THE ALLIANCE
destroyer
Haig
braked through ASD toward a flyby of Bethesda, Lieutenant Tolliver English was receiving the worst briefing of his life.

Everybody in the
Haig’s
situation room knew the score, so neither of the others was really shocked when Toby English stood up, his blue eyes blazing, and said, “You call this a situation report, Commander Padova? The whole Ninety-Second Marine Reaction Company’s going to drop onto that weasel-infested shitball of a planet, and this is all I can tell them?” He crumpled the single sheet of hard copy on the conference table before him and leaned over it, toward the destroyer’s commander, the situation report lost in his fist.

Jay Padova looked back at his line officer emotionlessly, then turned slowly to the ship’s intelligence officer. “Johanna, have you got anything else for him?”

Johanna Manning slapped down the lid of her porta-base decisively. “Not for general distribution, sir,” she told the commander, her sharp face showing strain under its short-cropped hair.

English looked at the woman who outranked him by a full grade and said, “Map number, flora and fauna, spaceport coordinates, and hit orders—that’s
it?
No target acquisition data? No topo scans? No tech parameters? You don’t even know what the enemy troop strength is down there, and you call yourself an intelligence officer?” His voice was so dangerous that the woman pushed back her chair and came out of it.

“Mister,” she said wearily, “marines aren’t supposed to think; they’re supposed to fight. You want guesses? I’ll give you guesses—
off the record,
and not for dissemination among your troops.”

“Great,” said English, crossing his arms, still holding the crumpled situation report. “Let’s hear ‘em.”

“Fine, Lieutenant,” said Manning, her lips pinched from the effort it took to keep her temper. “Enemy strength may be four to one over the indigs, where you’re going. Khalian ships at the port, ground intelligence thinks, number about twenty scramble fighters, plus three destroyer class. Electromagnetic/optical shielding over the port makes spaceborne reconnaissance unreliable, Mister. You hear it, don’t count on it. What I’m telling you is all there is that’s verifiable—all we’ve got that’s worth hearing.”

“It ain’t enough, not when we’re risking—”

The woman interrupted him with all the skill of a winning desk jockey. “What JCSOPSCOM wants is for you to get into that port. Blow the small stuff if you can, even though they’re reveted, if you’re looking for brownie points, or as a diversionary action if it seems appropriate. But
before you leave the area,
you take care of those three destroyers—get one of their fusion bottles to cook off maybe, with a delayed-fuse, shaped charge—we’ll give you whatever we’ve got, Or find another way; how you do it, Lieutenant, is up to you. But if you want off that drop zone, you
do
it. You’ve got an extraction point and a two-hour time-coordinate fuck-factor. Better than that, you oughtn’t to need.”

Manning had outright threatened him—on reflection, not him alone, but his entire company. English had only two choices: reach across the table and strangle the briefer in mute protest, or sit down. With Padova there, he sat down, telling himself he must have misheard her, or misinterpreted what she’d said.

His mind replayed her words:
But if you want off that drop zone,
she’d said—a pure and mortal threat. He’d never dreamed that JCSOPSCOM—Joint Chiefs of Staff Operations Command—would be that overt. His men weren’t convicts or conscripts; they were highly trained reaction marines—fifty of them. English could feel the flush creeping up his neck as he considered formally protesting the mission on the grounds that it was suicide.

He’d have to do it anyway, of course—or his men would, with a different line officer. Now English knew why the Ninety-Second’s task force commander wasn’t present at the briefing. Nobody at Alliance HQ wanted nonparticipating witnesses, or more privy parties than absolutely necessary, in case something went wrong.

So it was just English in the situation room tonight, with the lady officer named Manning, and Padova. And Jay wasn’t saying word one.

There were good reasons to lodge a protest—go on the record, so that any casualties his company sustained had a better chance of recourse, higher disability pay, or pension credit. If anybody ever saw the record on this one.

But since English was pretty sure nobody ever would, especially if his boys never got extracted, he didn’t try it. He said instead, as scathingly as he could manage, “Let me get this straight. You want me to drop with fifty marines onto a hostile planet where the Khalia have a major base, with no logistical support whatsoever, take out a whole spaceport, if possible by causing a nuclear explosion that’ll trash everything within a klick, and hike ten klicks to an unmarked extraction site in pitch dark with
two hours leeway?
You sure you
want
us to come back?”

“I’m not sure that’s a relevant question,” said the briefer, still standing, who picked up her porta-base and turned to Padova. “With your permission, sir? I’ve got other work to do.”

“Dismissed, Manning,” said Padova, and reached for a cigar as Manning charged the door. Its electronics scrambled to move the panel from her path before she bashed into it. After two deep puffs, Padova looked through curling blue smoke at English and said, “Well, Toby, this is your big chance. Anything special you’d like from the non-regulation pool?”

Padova’s eyes glittered when he mentioned the “special” equipment that the
Haig
carried. Because of Jay Padova, the
Haig
was the fightingest destroyer in the Alliance flotilla; she had electro-intelligent mods that were so aftermarket as to be borderline illegal. But it made the little destroyer one monster of a fighting machine, and every man aboard her was as proud of their regulation-skirting commander as of the things their vessel could do.

“This is my big chance at what?” English’s head came up defiantly. “A posthumous medal? I already
got
the longest coup-coat in this outfit, and another few weasel tails ain’t worth what this go’s going to cost.”

“Chance at promotion. You’re functioning at task force command level on this one; pull this off, and I’ll see you get the paycheck and the rating to match.”

That was nice English had to admit that Padova was one hell of a psychologist. English knew better than to ask how come the regular task force commander wasn’t in on the briefing for this one. In this outfit, you didn’t ask questions if you knew the answers, especially when the answers were affirmations that the
Haig
was way out on a limb all by her lonesome again—so far and so lonely that she’d either get a commendation or a condemnation in the aftermath of the operation on Bethesda.

These kinds of missions were Jason Padova’s stock-in-trade, and English had known that when he’d jockeyed for a berth with the paunchy, cigar-smoking, tactical genius who was still waiting for a relevant response from English to his offer of promotion.

“You know, sir, six months ago I was standing down on Budweiser, and some guy in a bar was telling me how he’d been out here in ASD, dropping a dozen hardware specialists and some penetration agents. How come, you think, that wasn’t in Manning’s report?”

“You know, if you weren’t so damned useful where you are, English, I’d desk your butt. You’re too smart to be a marine. I was about to explain that . . .”

“Hold on.” English raised a palm to politely forestall the part of his briefing so secret that Manning wasn’t privy to it. “Before we get to the ears-only, I want to take you up on your ‘special tech’ offer. I’d really like a-no-see-em for the drop, sir. And a matching APC to get to the extraction point. Ain’t no need to have every weasel on Bethesda running around the woods with their nostrils open, looking for air-dropped marines. How about you make this look like a high recon overflight, and let us coast in on the diversion cone?”

“I was going to suggest it myself, if you didn’t ask,” said Jay Padova, turning his cigar in his fingers. “And as for whatever else you think of later, you’ll find blank, signed requisition orders waiting for you with the pool sergeant.”

That way, Padova could always claim, if things went bad, he hadn’t known what English was doing—not really. The more Toby English found out about this mission, the more he disliked it. If he’d had living kin, he would have made a will.

But he didn’t, and Jay Padova was telling him about the “infrastructure” of infiltrators that shouldn’t have been on Bethesda, a whole bunch of on-the-spot (o.t.s.) agents who’d get with him on the ground with ready support, guidance, and maybe some diversionary capability.

“Diversionary?” Toby asked Padova. “Shouldn’t infiltration agents be conserved?”

“These are, I’m told, expendable,” said Padova bluntly. “More expendable than your marines.”

“Nice to know somebody is. Want ‘em lifted out, if we can, before the cook-off’?”

“No. The Fleet’s coming in, full strength, after we take out the spaceport and its big guns. They’ll need the o.t.s. contingent right where they are.”

English left that meeting wondering whether he, a poor misguided marine lieutenant from Eire, hadn’t been leading his whole life under mistaken assumptions and false pretenses. He was feeling like a babe in arms, a naive kid from the sticks; he’d been exterminating weasels for most of his adult life, and he thought of himself as a hardened, seasoned veteran—until now.

What bothered him wasn’t just that the Ninety-Second Marine Reaction Company had suddenly become overtly expendable; it was the brass’s willingness to cash out their groundside agents, rather than boost them. They must want that spaceport something fierce, back at JCSOPSCOM, to be willing to sacrifice agents put in place at such great risk and cost. Because that was what would happen. Once the port was blown, whatever humans were left on Bethesda were going to bear the brunt of weasel wrath. And weasel wrath was a whole lot worse than dying of a big bang.

As English was riding the elevator down alone from the command pod to the requisitions bay, it hit him: this wasn’t just about destroying a spaceport—it was about piss-poor performance on the part of penetration personnel. It was about intelligence failure on a pretty massive scale. And whatever screwup this mission was covering up, nobody really wanted those penetration agents, those poor o.t.s. people and the OPS-COM agents running them, back alive—or back any way at all. It had been clear as targeting data in Jay Padova’s eyes.

And it had been clearly missing from the single page situation report he’d uncrumpled and now had in his pocket. As far as JCSOPSCOM was concerned, those fools on Bethesda were already dead. Or ought to be. Nobody was going to thank the Ninety-Second for opening a closet full of spook-type skeletons. One thing English had learned about this man’s Corps was that when they didn’t tell you something, they meant just what they hadn’t said.

So Padova giving him so much off-the-record leeway had to mean that the old man didn’t agree with his own orders.

Damn, this one was going to be lots more complicated than point and shoot.

* * *

The
no-see-em
was just what its name implied: a troop transport with onboard countermeasures including electro-optical shielding and signature suppressors. If it was true that the Khalia couldn’t detect light cones from a planetary source, and had no spaceborne snoopsats, then maybe the Ninety-Second didn’t need to risk their ultra-secret, non-reg, tricked-up APC hauler. But you never knew what was true about the enemy’s capabilities.

You didn’t even know what was true about your own. The no-see-em AI ate any waveform bounced at it, and substituted whatever an unremarkable response might be: if there was an expected return signal that the no-see-em was blocking, it would simulate that response. So if you were coasting down between mountain ranges, the no-see-em showed the mountain range it was blocking to any questing source.

The one trouble spot was heat from plasma burns, and theoretically the no-see-em could fake up enough data to fool anything but the naked eye. If nobody was watching, the no-see-em transport in glider mode would be invisible to surveillance until it burned on out of the atmosphere of Bethesda, long after it had dropped its no-see-em APC with surgical precision, nine point nine clicks from the targeted spaceport.

Overflying the spaceport itself was just crazy enough to work, and the Ninety-Second was doing it for a good reason: their own AIs needed target acquisition data that wasn’t hearsay, and with the electromagnetic shield up over the port, they were counting on the blind band swath the Khalian shield created at one hundred thousand feet, where the shield’s effect arc was polarizing.

It was a weird feeling, flying a silent, non-burn glide arc right over the enemy’s head, in so close that cameras could see what looked like gun positions, when a half-mile above, you couldn’t see a damned thing, and a half-mile below, you’d be auto-tracked, acquired, and blown out of the sky in less time than it took to realize you’d dipped too low.