The Others Page 6

  “Unfortunately, First Citizen, I am compelled to agree with you, especially in light of the seeming endurance of the Confederation-Alliance treaty. If we must be prepared to face both powers—and that seems likely, certainly as long as Vian Tulus holds the Imperator’s chair—we will have to increase ship production, even from the current accelerated levels, and we will need at least three years to bring the fleet to sufficient strength, and very likely longer. Unless, of course, the Confederation again becomes engaged with the Hegemony.” A pause. “I am aware that past efforts to forge an alliance with hat power were not successful, but perhaps…”

  “Unlikely, Admiral. The Hegemony was clearly not interested in any alliances, and I find it hard to imagine that has changed. We will have to do this ourselves, and that means increasing production levels…fifty percent?”

  “Is that even possible, First Citizen? The economy is already on the brink of…”

  “It will require considerable austerity measures, Admiral, and some reduction in ration levels on most planets, but the people of the Union will endure what they must so our great nation can prevail. You see to the proposed roster of new ships, and leave finding the resources to me.” Villieneuve paused and glanced down at his chronometer. “If you will excuse me, Admiral, I’m afraid we both have other business pending.” Villieneuve stood up, and the admiral darted to his feet immediately after. “Yes, First Citizen, of course. I have executed all of your directives regarding the…other matter. Everything is in place, just as you ordered.”

  Villieneuve smiled. “That is good news, Admiral. Very good news indeed.”

  Chapter Seven

  HWS Hegemony’s Glory

  Venta Traconis System

  Year of Renewal 267 (322 AC)

  “All ships in attack group, maintain full fire. We may not be able to hit them, but it looks like the volume of fire is at least distracting them. All vessels not in the immediate firing line are to withdraw on the tube at once and begin transit operations.” Ilius watched the display as it became clearer and clearer that the enemy ships that had been pursuing Avia had altered their vectors to face the force of battleships and monitors he’d brought in to cover the cruiser’s escape.

  They’re making a mistake…giving us a chance…

  It was a tactical error, or at least it seemed like one to Ilius. He was surprised his attack had succeeded in its purpose. He hadn’t expected his adversaries to bite, especially since they’d seemed so intent on hunting down the fleeing cruiser.

  The enemy were not fools, that was clear. They’d immediately seen the danger in the fact that a Hegemony vessel had apparently managed to target and hit one of their ships. Their initial reaction, to destroy the offending vessel, had been tactically correct. It was a misstep, Ilius was sure, to give up on chasing down the cruiser so they could face a phalanx of battleships that were unable to effectively target them. Was it arrogance, the belief that whatever Avia’s crew had figured out, it wouldn’t really matter?

  Perhaps…but don’t make the enemy a favor of your own hubris. They may not have full information. They may believe that Tragus and his people have already shared their targeting secrets with the rest of the fleet, with the heavier units. That those battleships and monitors will be able to aim their weapons effectively. Perhaps that is why they have altered their attack vector.

  Ilius’s satisfaction at the success of his diversion quickly faded in the blinding reality that the enemy was coming right at him, too.

  “Yes, Commander. All battle line units acknowledge. All other ships heading for the tube at maximum thrust.” The report pulled his attention back to the bridge, to the main display. He’d acted on impulse, placed a large number of his ships in extreme danger to try to rescue a cruiser whose crew might have something useful the rest of the fleet could use to face the enemy next time. It was a wild gamble, and even if Tragus’s people had developed a way to lock onto the enemy ships, if he lost enough of his combat strength, it still wouldn’t matter.

  He turned back to his screen, twitching his nose as he did, trying to ward off the caustic smell in the air. Hegemony’s Glory had taken a hit, no more than a glancing blow, really, but even a seemingly minor strike from the enemy’s terrible weapons had caused significant damage. Ilius was just grateful the power systems and the engines remained more or less intact, but the flagship’s weapons array was down by about thirty percent. He tried not to think of what a direct hit might have done.

  Might still do…we’re far from out of this fight.

  His eyes moved to the edge of the display, to the small blip that signified Avia’s location. The cruiser, at least, was out of the fight, or almost. He looked down at his own screen, his fingers moving across, enlarging the small figures next to the ship’s icon. Three minutes to transit. Three minutes, and the small cruiser, the only ship that had managed to hit one of the enemy vessels, would be through to relative safety. And, in the quarter hour after that, a good portion of the fleet would transit, too, as close to a wild scramble to escape as Ilius thought possible without destroying morale or exposing his ships’ vulnerable rear sections to unfettered enemy attack.

  Many of those ships would escape without further damage, including a good portion of his initial battle line. But the monitors and battleships covering the retreat, including Hegemony’s Glory, faced a far more desperate outcome. Some would escape, at least it was likely they would. But losses were going to be heavy, and there was more than a small chance the flagship—along with the fleet commander—would among the vessels lost.

  Ilius had never been a coward, but he’d also spent most of his career commanding in a position of considerable superiority. Even on the Rim, where the enemy had been fierce and intractable, the Hegemony forces had always held the technological advantage. Now, they were the underdogs in every measurable way, and Ilius struggled to adapt to that reality. Dying in the war was a grim enough prospect, but facing his end in the first battle, before his people had endured the true challenge ahead, shook his normal resolve.

  A bright flash caught his eye, a near miss, one of the brilliant blue beams ripping by less than five hundred meters from Hegemony’s Glory. It had been close enough to short out some scanner antennae on the ship’s port side and to light up Ilius’s board with a series of damage control reports, mostly shorts and burnouts in the outer sections.

  It was also enough to batter further at the veteran commander’s crumbling resistance. In the terms of space combat, that shot had been as close as a miss came, and he knew his ship—and he and his crew—had escaped death by the merest slightest of fate. It was a stark realization, even for a hardened warrior, and Ilius could feel the sweat matting his uniform to his hot and slick flesh.

  “Double cycle the rate of evasive patterns.” The order snapped out of his mouth, almost without conscious thought. The increase would make Hegemony’s Glory even harder to track and hit, but it would burn through the available sequences twice as fast. When the preset random patterns were gone, the ship would either repeat them in a different order or it would rely on the AI’s imperfect random number generation subroutine. Either way, there would be some kind of discernible, trackable pattern, one Ilius was sure the enemy’s AIs would quickly analyze. He’d just set a definite countdown on Hegemony’s Glory’s survival, and that of the other ships in the line, but even after he’d abruptly issued the command, he nodded, reaffirming his intent. He was worried about surviving after the next twenty minutes, but his primary concern just then was getting to twenty minutes later.

  “Yes, Commander. Nav routine updated per your command.” A few seconds’ pause. “Megaron, Avia is about to transit.”

  Ilius turned and looked over at the main display, watching as the small dot representing the light cruiser, such an unlikely great hope for the Hegemony, moving into the final approach. Ilius didn’t know if he would survive the battle in progress, or if his fleet would be mortally crippled by the time it had completed its
withdrawal. But Tragus and his people would escape to show their comrades just how they had managed to establish a target lock on one of the enemy ships. That was the closest thing Ilius was likely to get to a victory in what was otherwise turning into a crippling defeat.

  He wasn’t sure that made all that much sense, but he chose to embrace it as such.

  * * *

  “Twenty seconds to transit, Commander.” Avia’s bridge was almost eerily silent, save for the sound of the officer’s voice reporting its approach to the transit tube. The crew was focused, disciplined, but their growing relief at the prospect of escaping Venta Traconis hung over the chamber, almost palpable in its essence.

  Tragus sat stone still in his chair, in the center of his command crew, his eyes fixed on the main display, a single number in the forefront of his mind.

  Seven.

  That’s how many battleships and monitors he’d seen destroyed. Not in the battle as a whole…just in the group that had intervened to allow his small vessel to escape. Seven vast ships, behemoths that took years to construct, crewed by thousands of highly-trained Kriegeri. All gone. It had been an appalling trade for Avia in terms of tonnage and lives lost, and he was feeling the pressure inside him grow with each passing second.

  His people had managed to hit an enemy ship, there was no question about that, and it appeared they were the only vessel in the fleet that had achieved that milestone. Still, he was far from sure his tracking method was reliable, that the hit had been more than a fluke. Each passing instant, with every great Hegemony warship with its thousands of Kriegeri crew added to the butcher’s bill, only increased the pressure, the grinding need, that what his people had discovered indeed make a difference.

  “Ten seconds, Commander.”

  Tragus remained silent, even as a flash on the display increased the fateful number of sacrificed ships to eight. Procedure specified an acknowledgement to each report his officers issued, but there was no need. His crew was well-trained, capable. They understood what was happening, even as he did, and they knew he’d heard their words. They were veterans, warriors of great ability, and they would serve well in whatever struggle had come upon the Hegemony. How they would deal with the fact that thousands had traded their own lives to save them would be a personal matter for each to face, as likely as not, alone in the dark.

  “Five seconds.”

  Tragus took a deep breath, and through the guilt and the pressure, another feeling forced its way out, one almost primal in its nature.

  Relief.

  He’d long considered himself a courageous warrior, one ready to make whatever sacrifices were required of him. He’d faced danger before, even thought he was going to die once out on the Rim. But now, he wanted to live, a fact he’d tried to set aside, a realization that seemed somewhat at odds with his creed of service, to the end if necessary.

  The war had just begun, and any reasonable analysis offered little hope of victory, or even survival. The Hegemony faced by far its most desperate moment, and even if his people had indeed developed a way to target the deadly enemy ships, that wasn’t even close to evening the score. The enemy was superior in every way, its ships faster, more powerful. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where he would survive the war. Yet, escaping from the ongoing fight, fleeing from the current system, buying even a few more days, weeks, months, of life…it filled him with a sort of energy, a drive to put all he had left into getting out of the system. He let out a long exhale as Avia slipped into the tube and began its transit.

  Began the escape that so many thousands had died to provide.

  * * *

  Ilius sat quietly, something he found far more difficult in the current situation than shouting out a series of rapid fire orders. His silence was an admission of helplessness, of his inability to do anything to increase the chances that his ship, or the others still in the system, would escape.

  The enemy ships were in pursuit, their weapons lancing out, deadly shafts of still-mysterious energy, bringing destruction and death to any ship they struck. The enemy seemed almost godlike in its power, invincible, unstoppable. But Ilius’s mind, the part of it clinging to cold logic and rationality, came to a different conclusion, one devoid of the fear and foreboding closing in on him elsewhere. The enemy was awesomely powerful, and a deadly adversary, perhaps one that would destroy the entire Hegemony. But they weren’t invincible. Their targeting, for one thing…it was accurate and sophisticated, but it wasn’t prescient. The enemy gunners or AIs or whatever system was controlling those deadly beams, still struggled to overcome random evasion patterns. Their beams were deadly, powerful enough to cripple a battleship with a single well-placed shot, but most of the enemy fire ripped harmlessly through empty space. Ilius didn’t doubt the enemy targeting was superior to the Hegemony’s, but the difference there was marginal.

  Of more concern was the inability of the Hegemony vessels to effectively hit the enemy ships. Ilius’s gamble, his sacrifice of a dozen ships of the line to allow the escape of one cruiser, had been directed at that problem. Maybe, just maybe, Tragus and his people could lead their comrades closer to parity with the enemy.

  Ilius winced slightly as he saw one of the beams rip by Hegemony’s Glory. He almost looked down at his own screen to see just how close the shot had come, but he stopped himself. There was nothing to be gained by knowing.

  He did check another distance, the range to the tube. The flagship was about two thirds of the way back, and even as he reviewed the remaining distance, the ships of his rearguard were already transiting. He had tried to maintain as much order in the formation as possible, but his sub-units all had explicit orders. Blast across the next system at full thrust. Ilius didn’t know if the enemy would pursue closely or not. Such maneuvers tended to be difficult, since the pursuers still in the current system had no idea what thrust increases and vector changes the already-transited vessels might have initiated. A well-executed transit could usually be turned into an effective escape…though Ilius was well aware he had very little hard data on the Others’ maximum thrust capacities.

  Even as he was still staring at the display, another of his ships vanished. Melachon, a monitor. He’d lost dozens of ships and tens of thousands of veteran Kriegeri already, but seeing one of his largest vessels obliterated less than one hundred thousand kilometers from the transit tube was like a hard punch to the gut. He’d rushed to Venta Traconis to save the advance fleet, but by the time the last of his ships escaped, there was a good chance he’d have lost more vessels than those he’d originally come to rescue. All for nothing.

  Or perhaps not nothing, not if Avia’s data, the secret to Commander Tragus’s targeting, proved to be worth it all.

  Chapter Eight

  Hall of the People

  Liberte City

  Planet Montmirail, Ghassara IV

  Union Year 225 (321 AC)

  “Let’s go…stay quiet and keep it moving.” Victorine Lechamps squinted, staring as far as she could down the dimly-lit corridor. Her people were security troopers, mostly her own, and all carefully selected for reliability. They were risking their lives, every one of them, and one misstep could bring a world of hurt down on them in minutes.

  “We’re almost there,” she added, her eyes moving down the small column of armed men and women. The hallway was used mostly for maintenance and repairs, and it was perfect for slipping her people into the utility control center unnoticed. Almost thirty armed soldiers would be noticed immediately anywhere in the open, and they would, at the very least, attract scrutiny. Lechamps didn’t know how Ciara had managed to get the access codes to the hidden corridor, but she felt a small burst of relief, a realization that the leader of the coup even then underway had been careful, and had planned everything well.

  In a few minutes, we’ll control the city’s water and electrical power…

  She had a precise list, conduits she had to cut, areas of the city that were to be plunged into darkness, even as the other
groups struck their targets all around the Union’s capital. The broadcast center was near the top of that list, along with every main communications nexus. No word was to get into or out of the capital, not until the announcement of the new government was broadcast.

  “Everybody, check your weapons.” The entrance to the utility control complex was less than a hundred meters ahead. There would be guards inside—six according to the most recent data Ciara had been able to obtain—though Lechamps knew it was dangerous to rely too heavily on that. Her people shouldn’t have any real trouble with a force that size, or even one a bit larger, but combat was always an uncertainty. There was no time for mistakes, or for less than total preparedness. Errors, carelessness, delays…they all killed.

  She reached around her back, sliding her own rifle around and holding it out in front of her. She’d read the schematics, checked the plans again and again. The access door would let her people out just down the hallway from the main control center. Her people would be out, and a quick five or six meter jog later, into the main workspace.