Throne of Stars (106 page)

“Logic, Sir?!” Erhardt looked at him in something very like disbelief, and it was his turn to shake his head.

Marjorie Erhardt was very good at her job. She was also fairly young for her rank, and she had a falcon’s fierce directness, coupled with an even fiercer loyalty to the Empress and the Empire. All of that made her an extremely dangerous weapon, but it also gave her a certain degree of tunnel vision. Henry Niedermayer remembered another young, fiery captain who’d suffered from the same sort of narrowness of focus. Then-Vice Admiral Angus Helmut had taken that young captain in hand and expanded his perspective without ever compromising his integrity, which left Niedermayer with an obligation to repay the debt by doing the same thing for Erhardt. And he still had a few minutes to do it in.

“The fact that they’re fighting for a bad cause doesn’t make them cowards, Marge,” he said, just a trifle coldly. She looked at him, and he grimaced.

“One of the worst things any military commander can do is to allow contempt for his adversaries to lead him into underestimating them or their determination,” he told her. “And Adoula didn’t seduce them all by dangling money in front of them. At least some of them signed on because they agreed with him that the Empire was in trouble and didn’t understand what the Empress was doing about it.

“And however they got into his camp in the first place, they all recognize the stakes they agreed to play for. They’re guilty of High Treason, Marge. The penalty for that is death. They may realize perfectly well that their so-called ‘leader’ is about to bug out on them, but that doesn’t change their options. And even without
Trujillo
they’ve got only one less carrier than we do. You think they are just going to surrender and face the firing squads when at least some of them may be able to fight their way past us?”

“Put that way, no, Sir,” Erhardt replied after a moment. “But they’re
not
going to get past us, are they?”

“No, Captain Erhardt, they’re not,” Niedermayer agreed. “And it’s time to show them why they’re not.”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Admiral Minerou Mahmut breathed as his tactical plot abruptly updated. The icons of the seven carriers waiting for him were suddenly joined by an incredible rash of smaller crimson icons.

“Bogeys,” his flagship’s Tactical Officer announced in the flat, hard voice of a professional rigidly suppressing panic through training and raw discipline. “Multiple cruiser-range phase drive signatures. BattleComp makes it three hundred-plus.” More light codes blinked to sudden baleful life. “Update! Fighter-range phase drive detection. Minimum seven-fifty.”

Mahmut swallowed hard. Helmut. That incredible bastard couldn’t have more than a single cruiser flotilla with the force which would be settling into Old Earth orbit within the next twenty-five minutes. He’d dropped the others—
all
the others—off with the carrier squadrons he’d detached for his damned ambush!

Even now, with the proof staring him in the face, Mahmut could scarcely believe that even
Helmut
would try something that insane. If it hadn’t worked out—if he’d been forced into combat against a concentrated Home Fleet—the absence of his cruiser strength, especially with the carrier squadrons diverted as well, would have been decisive.

Which didn’t change the fact that Mahmut’s six carriers, seventy-two cruisers, and five hundred remaining fighters were about to get brutally hammered.

He spared a moment to glance at the secondary plot where
Trujillo
was still generating delta V at her maximum acceleration. The distance between her and the rest of the formation was up to almost a million kilometers, and to get at her, Helmut’s ships would have to get through Mahmut’s. A part of the admiral was tempted to order his ships to stand down, to surrender them and let the Sixth Fleet task group have clean shots at
Trujillo
. But if he’d been in command on the other side, he wouldn’t have been accepting any surrenders under the circumstances. His own small task group’s crossing velocity was so great that it would have been impossible for anyone from the other side to match vectors and put boarding parties onto his ships before they crossed the Tsukayama Limit and disappeared into tunnel-space.

Besides, some of them might actually make it.

Commander Roger “Cobalt” McBain was a contented man. To his way of thinking, he was at the pinnacle of his career. CAG of a Navy fighter group was all he’d ever wanted to be.

Technically, his actual position was that of “Commander 643rd Fighter Group,” the hundred and twenty-five fighters assigned to HMS
Centaur
. CAG was an older term, which had stood for the title of “Commander Attack Group” until three or four Navy reorganizations ago. There were those who claimed that the acronym’s actual origin was to be found in the title of “Commander
Air
Group,” which went clear back to the days when ships had battled on oceans, and the fighters had been air-intake jet-powered machines. McBain wasn’t sure about that—his interest in ancient history was strictly minimal—but he didn’t really care. Over the years, the position had had many names, but none of them had stuck in the tradition-minded Navy the way “CAG” had. If one fighter pilot said to another, “Oh, he’s the CAG,” whether the ships were old jets or stingships or space fighters, everyone knew what he meant.

From his present position, he might well be promoted to command of an entire carrier squadron’s fighter wing, which would be nice—in its way—but far more of an administrative post. He’d get much less cockpit time as a wing CAG, although it would look good on his resume. From there, he might claw his way into command of a carrier, or squadron, or even a fleet. But from his point of view, and right now it was damned panoramic, CAG was as good as a job got. A part of him wished he was with the rest of the squadron’s fighter wing, preparing to jump Adoula’s main body. But most of him was perfectly content to be exactly where he was.

And it was interesting to watch Admiral Niedermayer at his work. Obviously, the Old Man had learned a lot from Admiral Helmut . . . although McBain had never realized before that clairvoyance could be taught. But it must be possible. If it wasn’t, how could Niedermayer have predicted where HMS
Trujillo
would be accurately enough to deploy the 643rd ten full hours
before
Gajelis and Adoula ever arrived?

“Start warming up the plasma conduits,” Mahmut said. “Any cruisers that make it through are to be recovered by any available carrier.”

“Yes, Sir,” his flag captain acknowledged crisply, even though both of them knew how unlikely any of their units were to survive the next few minutes.

“Open fire,” Admiral Niedermayer said, almost conversationally, and the next best thing to eleven thousand missile launchers spat fire. Four hundred fighters armed with antifighter missiles salvoed their ordnance at Mahmut’s fighters, and another three hundred and fifty sent over seventeen hundred Leviathans at his cruisers. None of the ship-launched missiles bothered with the sublight parasites, however. Ultimately, the cruisers and fighters had no escape if the tunnel drive ships were crippled or destroyed, and Niedermayer’s fire control concentrated on the carriers with merciless professionalism. He’d waited until the range was down to just over ten million kilometers. At that range, and at their current closing velocity, that gave him just under four minutes to engage with missiles before they entered energy range. In that four minutes, each of his cruisers fired a hundred and fifty missiles, and each of his carriers fired over four thousand. The next best thing to eighty thousand missiles slammed into the defenses protecting Minerou Mahmut’s carriers.

At such short range, countermissiles were far less effective than usual. They simply didn’t have the tracking time as the offensive fire slashed across their engagement envelope, and they stopped perhaps thirty percent of the incoming birds. Point defense clusters fired desperately, and there were thousands of them. But they, too, were fatally short of engagement time. They stopped another forty percent . . . which meant that “only” twenty-four thousand got through.

Maximum effective standoff range for even a capital shipkiller laser head against a starship was little more than seven thousand kilometers. At that range, however, they could blast through even ChromSten armor, and they did. Carriers were tough, the toughest mobile structures ever designed and built by human beings, but there were limits in all things. Armor yielded only stubbornly, even under that incredible pounding, but it
did
yield. Atmosphere streamed from ruptured compartments. Weapon mounts were blotted away. Power runs arced and exploded as energy blew back through them. Their own fire ripped back at their enemies, but Niedermayer’s sheer wealth of point defense blunted the far lighter salvoes Mahmut’s outnumbered ships could throw, and his carriers’ armor shook off the relative handful of hits which got through to it.

By the time CarRon 15 and what was left of CarRon 14 reached energy range, three of its seven carriers and forty-one of its seventy-two cruisers had been destroyed outright.

By the time the traitorous carrier squadrons crossed the track of Niedermayer’s task force, exactly eleven badly damaged cruisers and one totally crippled carrier survived.

“Admiral,” Lieutenant Commander Clinton said with a gulp. “We just got swept by lidar! Point source, Delta quadrant four-one-five.”

“What does
that
mean?” Adoula demanded sharply. He was sitting in a hastily rigged command chair next to the admiral’s.

“It means someone’s out there,” Gajelis snapped. He’d left his handful of cruisers and fighters behind to assist Mahmut. His flagship was going to be fighting whoever it was with only onboard weapons.

“Captain Devarnachan is sweeping,” Tactical said. “Emissions! Raid designated Sierra Five. One hundred twenty-five fighters, closing from Delta Four-One-Five.”

“Damn Helmut!” Gajelis snarled.
“Damn
him!”

“Leviathans! Six hundred twenty-five vampires!”

“Three minutes to Tsukayama Limit,” Astrogation announced tautly.

“They’ll only get one shot,” Gajelis said, breathing hard. “Hang on, Your Highness . . .”

“Damn and blast,” McBain snarled as the distinctive signature of a TD drive formed. At such short range and with such short flight times,
Trujillo
’s countermissiles had been effectively useless, and over fifty of the Leviathans had managed to get through the carrier’s desperately firing point defense lasers. They’d ripped hell out of her, and he’d hoped that would be enough to cripple her, but carriers were pretty damned tough.

“We got a piece of her, Cobalt,” his XO replied. “A big one. And Admiral Niedermayer kicked hell out of the rest of them. Doesn’t look like any of
them
got away.”

“I know, Allison,” McBain said angrily, though his anger certainly wasn’t directed at
her
. “But a piece wasn’t enough.” He sighed, then shook himself. “Oh, well, we did our best. And you’re right, we did get a piece of her. Let’s turn ’em around and head back to the barn. Beer’s on me.”

“Damn straight it is!” Commander Stanley agreed with a laugh. Then, as their fighters swept around through a graceful turn and began decelerating back towards their carriers, her tone turned more thoughtful. “Wonder how things went at the Palace?”

“Your Highness, your mother’s been through . . . a terrible ordeal,” the psychiatrist said. He was a specialist in pharmacological damage. “Normally, we’d stabilize her with targeted medications. But given the . . . vile concoctions they used on her, not to mention the damage to her implant—”

“Which is very severe,” the implant specialist interrupted. “It’s shutting down and resetting itself frequently, almost randomly, because of general system failures. And it’s dumping data at random, as well. It has to be hell inside her head, Your Highness.”

“And nothing can be done about it?” Roger asked.

“These damned paranoid ones you people have, they’re designed to be unremovable, Your Highness,” the specialist said, with a shrug which expressed his helpless frustration. “I know why, but seeing what happens when something like this goes wrong—”

“It didn’t ‘
go wrong,
’” Roger said flatly. “It was made to fail. And when I get my hands on the people who did that, I intend to . . . discuss it with them in some detail. But for right now, answer my question. Is there anything at all we can do to get this . . . this
thing
out of my mother’s head?”

“No,” the specialist said heavily. “The only thing we could do would be to attempt surgical removal, Your Highness, and I’d give her a less than even chance of surviving the procedure. Which doesn’t even consider the probability of additional, serious neurological damage.”

“And the implant, of course, responds to brain action, Your Highness,” the psychiatrist noted. “And since the brain action is highly confused at the moment—”

“Doc?” Roger said impatiently, looking at Dobrescu.

“Roger, I don’t even have a degree,” Dobrescu protested. “I’m a
shuttle pilot
.”

“Doc, damn it, do not give me that old song and dance,” Roger snapped.

“All right.” Dobrescu threw his hands into the air almost angrily. “You want my interpretation of what they’re telling you? She’s totally pocked in the head, all right? Wackers. Maybe the big brains—the people who
do
have the degrees—can do something for her eventually. But right now, she’s in one minute, out the next. I don’t even know when you can see her, Roger. She’s still asking for New Madrid, whether she’s . . . in or out. In reality, or out in la-la land. When she’s in, she wants his head. She knows she’s the Empress, she knows she’s in bad shape, she knows who did it to her, and she wants him dead. I’ve tried to point out that you’re back, but she’s still mixing it up with New Madrid. With all the drugs and physical duress, on top of the way they butchered her toot, they’ve got her half convinced even when she’s got some contact with reality that you
were
in on the plot. And when she’s in la-la land . . .”