Winds of Vengeance (33 page)

I also want you to know what you have meant to me. I have served for more than fifty years, and the navy has been my life. It has brought me glory, success, advancement to the very top of my profession. But the fleet is a jealous mate, and she had denied me things others take for granted. I am wedded to duty, and it cost me Elizabeth. If I had been another man, if my stature had been less, perhaps our story would have been different. But none of that matters now. She is gone, on the other side of the Barrier, and I will never see her again. I take solace that she will be better off without me, for the weight I carry taints everything around me.

Max, if you are reading this, it likely means that I have been lost. I hope my death was a worthy one, and that I died in the service of those who have followed me. I know you are grieved, for your affection has been as clear to me these past years as your unyielding loyalty. There is little I can say to ease your pain, save to say to you that which I so many times wanted to in the past.

You have been the son I never had, Max, and I am profoundly thankful for the time you spent at my side. I couldn’t have been prouder of a son of my own, and indeed, I couldn’t have loved one more than I do you. You are an outstanding young officer…and an extraordinary man. Do not make the mistake I have made. Do your duty, as always, but never forget Max Harmon, the man. You are more than an officer, more than a leader. Live…in every sense of the word. Leave more behind than I did…for all the statues they will build in my image, and the stories that will be told of my exploits are cold, empty. Your true legacy will be those you leave behind who truly knew you, who loved you.

Navy Headquarters

Victory City, Earth Two

Earth Two Date 01.03.31

Max Harmon sat at his desk, one of his desks, at least. Now that he had returned to active duty, he had an office at navy headquarters in addition to the one he still occupied as president of the republic. He wasn’t a legal scholar, but he doubted any reasonable reading of the constitution would allow him to hold the presidency and a military rank simultaneously…but then it didn’t allow the president to declare martial law and cancel elections either, and he’d done that.

He was dressed in uniform now, his collar adorned with the admiral’s stars he’d worn for all of eleven days thirty years earlier…before he’d reigned his commission to assume the provisional presidency. He’d dropped the ‘provisional’ part three months later after the republic’s first election, one that had seen him get over ninety percent of the votes cast.

That was a long time ago. You’d have been lucky to get thirty percent this time. It’s a good thing so much of the military was still in that minority of support…

He’d joked about wearing his old uniform, and he’d even gone so far as to treat Mariko to the show of him trying to squeeze into it. But he was thirty years older, and while he was still in reasonably good shape, the sleek, trim form of his youth was a thing of the past. He’d finally abandoned his efforts with the face-saving explanation that the navy had new styling, and he would have to get a new uniform anyway.

He had to admit, the new blues were an improvement over the old ones, far more comfortable…and practical as well. He’d thought it might feel odd to be in uniform again, but as soon as he’d slipped it on it felt like something he hadn’t expected. He felt home.

His eyes were fixed on the screen now, staring at the reports zipping by. The early days of habitation on Earth Two had been ones of paranoia. The colonists had endured two years of constant warfare, death nipping at their heels every step of the way. Back then, people were constantly looking for the next crisis, and the periodic suicide attacks by rogue First Imperium forces only inflamed their fears.

The ships of the fleet had been gradually decommissioned, as new, robot-enhanced vessels came online and the growing industry of Earth Two put a premium on civilian workers. But the fear was still there, and few of the old vessels were scrapped.
Midway
was decommissioned after it was discovered her spine was warped from repeated critical hits. Admiral Compton’s ship was preserved as a museum, but her days as a combat vessel were over. But to everyone’s surprise, Erika West’s flagship,
Saratoga
, which had been battered to the verge of utter destruction, had proven repairable. She had served as the republic’s flagship for almost ten years before she was decommissioned and placed in the mothballed reserve, amid many celebrations and solemn speeches.

And now the old vessel was active again. She’d been towed out of her position orbiting Earth Two’s second moon and placed in space dock at the orbital shipyard. Her reactor core had been replaced, and her weapons systems overhauled…all in less than three weeks. She’d even been restored to her old glory. Harmon had made her the flagship of the gradually assembling Home Fleet. Erika West had left behind thirty-odd, mostly light, vessels when she’d taken the best of the republic’s remaining warships with her…and now that rag tag force was being augmented by the refurbished ships of the legendary lost fleet. Harmon had the shipyards working around the clock, the automated systems restoring a ship to active duty every three to four days.

The vessels were old, but many of their systems had been modernized. And there was something else, a hazy concept, but one important to an old spacer like Harmon. These ships were blooded, they had seen combat, performed again and again against the odds. They had seen their occupants to a new world, through all the death and power the Regent could throw at them. They were hallowed, sanctified by the blood of those who had died manning them. And Harmon knew they would do what they were called upon to do…now as they had so long ago.

He wondered about the men and women who would crew the newly activated vessels. They were all Pilgrims, the original officers and spacers who had served aboard these very vessels decades before. They had been a finely tuned unit then, almost fanatically devoted to Admiral Compton. But Harmon knew many of those men and women being called back to duty disliked him now. His popularity was better among the Pilgrims than the rest of the population, but nevertheless, thousands of the veteran spacers had been ready to vote against him. And now they were reporting for duty, preparing to fight in space once more at his command. Would they rally to the cause, rediscover their old élan? Or would they nurse their resentments toward him?

Harmon had done the best he could to mitigate the impact on the republic’s veterans. The old ships were all equipped with new AIs and legions of robots. They would never be as manpower-efficient as the ships built in recent years, but they would function with a fraction of their old crews. And that allowed Harmon to cherry pick those recalled to the colors, to try and avoid the ones most opposed to him. It was an imperfect system, but it was the best he had.

“Max…” Mariko came walking in, the aide posted outside the door following her helplessly.

“It’s okay, Lieutenant. You can let her through.” He didn’t envy a junior officer caught between the commanding admiral and his wife…and the fact that the admiral was also president pushed it off the scale.

“I need you to reactivate my commission.”

Harmon looked up at his wife, feeling his stomach tighten. Mariko Fujin didn’t look like much, barely a wisp of a woman standing there staring at him. He felt the same urge anyone would about loved ones, the desire to protect them, to keep them safe. But his wife had been one of the fiercest warriors the Alliance had ever produced, the protégé of the legendary Greta Hurley, and one of the deadliest pilots and experts on fighter tactics who had ever lived.

“Mariko…”

“Forget it, Max. Your loving urge to protect me is noted and appreciated, but I remind you that if the enemy manages to get close enough to Earth Two to drop an antimatter warhead on us, I’ll be every bit as dead as I would be in a cockpit.”

Harmon shook his head. There was an element of truth in her argument, but she had twisted the logic to make her point. He knew everyone was in danger…but he was also well aware that the fighter pilots in their twenty-ton craft were a lot more likely to die than someone sitting in Victory City waiting to see what happened.

She took a few steps forward and dropped herself in one of the desk chairs. “Max, I did some checking, and it turns out we’ve got a lot of operational fighters, new models…and even some of the old ones from the days of the fleet. We produced a lot of fighters early on, when we were trying to get as much defensive punch as quickly as possible. But then we made the breakthroughs in AI technology, and the fighter complements were scaled down to keep crew sizes small. A lot of those birds just ended up getting crated and locked away in the storehouses.”

“I see where you’re going, but who is going to fly those fighters? The Academy is only graduating forty pilots a year…and that’s been the case for a long time. We’ve got the pilots stationed in the defensive platforms and the ones assigned to the fleet’s ships, but not many more than that.”

“You’d be surprised. I did some research. You know as well as I do that there is a lot of turnover in the fighter corps. Even when we’re not suffering casualties in war…” She paused for an instant.

Harmon knew she was thinking of old comrades. The losses suffered by the fleet’s fighter crews had been staggering, and he knew his wife struggled to make peace with her own ghosts from the past.

“Even beyond the casualties we suffered back in the day, we’ve always had transfers, crew members moving to other positions. We’ve got a good number of officers and crew with fighter experience currently assigned to different positions on the home fleet ships and defensive fortresses. They could be reassigned back to the fighter corps.”

“Washouts? You want to build an expanded fighter corps out of people who couldn’t cut it?” He knew the words were harsh as they left his lips, but they burst out anyway. He didn’t really think a failure to fit into the specific culture of the fighter teams was a character flaw, but it wasn’t likely to be predictive of success in one of the deadly craft either.

“I can work with them, Max. If they know how to fly—or how to work the weapons or keep the engines running—I can turn them into an effective force.” She paused. “Of course, I will need the old veterans, but I have no doubt they will rally back to the colors.” There were a few seconds of silence. Both of them knew how few survivors there were from the old fighter wings.

“Mariko…”

“There are over two hundred fifty fighters available to us, Max…more than half of them never used. Do you realize what that does to our defensive capability? And our ability to track down missiles? One of those crated fighters could be the one that picks off a warhead before it gets to Earth Two.”

Harmon fidgeted in his seat. He hated the idea of Mariko back in the cockpit of a tiny, frail fighter…and he knew she’d never agree to command the corps from the relative safety of one of the fortresses. No, he remembered what she had been like back in the days of the fleet. Crazy…as absolutely single-mindedly insane as any pilot he’d ever known. Her record of kills was beyond impressive…he doubted he’d have even believed it if he hadn’t seen her in action. It had been hard to watch her climb into her craft back then, when they were just two officers engaged in a passionate romance, jumping into bed every time the two managed to get off duty at the same time. Now, she was his wife of thirty years, and the mother of his children. He knew the republic was in deadly danger, and he was sure Mariko could get more out of the fighter corps than any other living man or woman. But all he wanted to do was protect her, keep her from the deadly danger.

Mariko reached across the desk, put her hand on his. “I know this is hard for you, my love. But you married a fighter jock, not a meek little science officer or comm specialist. I am what I am…and you know I can help defend Earth Two.”

Harmon looked at her. His mind was scrambling, trying to find a reason to refuse her request. But he knew it was pointless. He loved his wife, but he respected her too, and he knew she had earned the right to be part of the defense of her adopted home world. She would die just like everyone else if the battle was lost. And he knew Earth Two’s prospects, its chances in a desperate battle, were far stronger with Mariko Fujin leading her squadrons into battle.

He hated the whole thing, and the part of him that was Max Harmon screamed inside to say ‘no,’ to refuse her request. But the naval officer in him, the president—the successor to Terrance Compton—couldn’t say no. Mariko Fujin was one of the most accomplished officers of the fleet, a bona fide war hero…and that trumped her place as Max Harmon’s wife. At least when every man and woman on Earth Two lived under the threat of a First Imperium attack.

He struggled to tell her he would approve her request, reactivate her commission. But he couldn’t force the words out. Finally, he just nodded.

She smiled. “I’ll get started immediately. I just need you to authorize me to transfer the personnel…and of course, to reactivate the old veterans.”

Harmon sat still for a few seconds. Then he nodded again.

“Consider yourself on active duty, Captain Fujin.” He paused, looking across the desk at her, noticing the glint in her eye. Mariko Fujin had adapted to peacetime life…and a position teaching fighter tactics at the Academy. But Harmon knew she’d never lost her edge. The predator that lived inside all true fighter pilots was alive and well…and for all the fear he felt over the danger she would face, he almost pitied any enemies she would face.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

From the Personal Log of Erika West

Are you out here? Are you in trouble? I am coming…and I pray that I am not too late.

Why did I let you go? You deserve your rank, certainly, and no one has served the republic with more intelligence and loyalty than you. But you have never commanded a fleet in combat, not in a situation like this. Did I underestimate the danger of a major First Imperium incursion? Or was I simply too weak to look at you and tell you I didn’t think you were experienced enough for this mission…and see the hurt in your eyes my lack of confidence would surely have caused?