Fleet of the Damned (32 page)

"But what do they offer? What do they promise?

"According to the Tahn, their victory will allow all beings an equal share in glory. What is this glory they promise? It is not more food. It is not greater security. It is not the knowledge that generations yet unborn will not be subject to the perils of this time. No. None of that is spoken of.

"Just this glory. Sometimes they call it the destiny of civilization. They mean
their
civilization.

"Those worlds and those peoples that have fallen to the Tahn and groan without hope or witness under their lash could tell us what this destiny brings.

"Despair. Degradation. And finally death. Death that is the only boon that the Tahn really grant, because only death will grant freedom from their tyranny.

"I said before that the Tahn have had their victories. I also said that these victories should be savored by them in haste. Because now the tide is on the turn.

"I speak now to those peoples subjugated by the Tahn. Be of good heart. You are not forgotten. The Tahn will be driven out. Peace will return.

"Now I wish to turn my attention to those who have listened to the blandishments of the Tahn, like dogs drawn to the sweetness of putrefaction. Consider the Tahn and their ways. Before this war, any alliances they made were shattered as soon as it became convenient. The only alliance the Tahn recognize is that between master and slave.

"Study their past. And think of an ancient saying: 'He who wishes to sup with the Devil should bring a very long spoon.'

"Next, I wish to speak directly to the enemy.

"You are very loud in your boasts of your strength. You blazon your winnings. You babble of the closeness of victory.

"Boast as you wish. But you shall find, as you reach out for this final conquest, that it shall recede and recede again from your grasp.

"Your soldiers and sailors will find nothing but death in all its unpleasantries. They will face not just an enemy armed and terrible in his armor in the battle lines, but the deadly anger of those they have outraged in their arrogance. The plight of your noncombatants will be great. They shall never see their young return. And, in time, their own skies will be flames.

"The Empire will return, with fire and sword.

"And finally, I am speaking to the warlords of the Tahn, whose ears are probably sealed in disdain from my words. You sowed this wind. Now you shall reap the whirlwind.

"Those who know me know I do not promise what I cannot fulfill. Therefore, today, I make but one promise. One generation from now, the word 'Tahn' shall be meaningless, except for historians walking the dark corridors of the past.

"You began this war. I shall finish it. The Tahn, with all your might and circumstance, shall lie forgotten in the dust!"

The Eternal Emperor pivoted and stalked from the podium.

He knew it was a good speech when he had written it.

He had upgraded it—the entire legislature was up and applauding. They'd clottin' better, he thought. And then he noticed that even the livie techs, the most jaded of observers, were shouting, their recorders abandoned.

Now all the Eternal Emperor had to do was find a way to keep his promise.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

T
he
Gamble's
damage-control computer found a semi-damaged redundant circuit, and Sten felt the ship's controls come vaguely back to life.

The tacship was less than 1,500 meters above the ground, ground quite invisible through the hanging fog that the ship was plummeting through. Sten's hands blurred over the control board. Nose thrusters—full emergency. Main Yukawa drive—full emergency.

Various blaring alarms and flashing indicators suggested to Sten that the controls' life span would be mayfly brief. He had time to kick the McLean generators to full power before the
Gamble's
board went dead again. The problem to be pondered was: If the
Gamble's
plummet was halted before it crashed, the ship would blast straight back up, into the probably waiting sights of the Tahn interceptors. If not, the possibilities were various in their unpleasantries. Sten slammed the impact lock on his control chair's safety harness and braced.

The
Gamble
was almost vertical when it struck.

Ship luck had returned for one final moment. Given the probabilities of hitting a mountainous crag, a glacier, or a scree field, the
Gamble
slid, tail first, into a high-piled snowfield. The snow compressed and melted, braking the
Gamble's
speed.

Another panel clanged into red life, drive tubes blocking was the central catastrophe. Sten's hand was poised over the emergency power cutoff breaker when the ship's computer decided that it might be dying but preferred something less Wagnerian than what would happen, and beat Sten to it.

Ail power cut, and the
Gamble
shuddered to a halt.

There was very complete silence, except for the dim hissing as the hot shipskin was cooled by the melting snow around it.

In blackness, Sten fumbled toward a cupboard and found a batterypak light. Pearly light illuminated the battered control deck.

"All compartments—report." That was another virtue of a ship as small as the
Gamble
—Sten's shout could be heard in most compartments and was quickly passed to even the stern drive station. Sten unsnapped his harness and started to his feet. Suddenly there was a rumble, and Sten staggered. The rumble grew louder, and then the
Gamble
shuddered and pitched a few more degrees to the side.

There was alarm from crew members, then silence again.

"What the hell was that?" Sten asked.

"Ah dinnae ken," Alex said. "Prog some'at nae good, though."

Sten waited for something else to happen.

It did not. The
Gamble
was evidently in its final resting place.

Sten took stock.

Things were not good. One of the wounded sailors from the
Richards
had been killed in the crash. Of Sten's own crew, McCoy, the engine master's mate, had been electrocuted when one of his engine monitor boards short-circuited. Two other sailors were dead, and Sten had two sailors with major injuries. Everyone else had bangs, bruises, or minor breaks.

The ship was dead. The only transceivers functional were the shipsuits and the tiny individual rescue units, and Sten was not about to use them. First of all, he assumed that whatever was left of the Imperial Forces would be somewhat busy at the moment, and he also would rather not have any Tahn units homing on any broadcast.

They would have to rescue themselves.

Sten told Kilgour to break out the emergency gear while he and Tapia, who was now semifunctional, attempted to figure out how much rescuing they would need.

It looked to be considerable. The main lock was crushed history. Sten managed to muscle the emergency lock open slightly, then swore as icy water jetted into the ship.

They weren't trapped, at least. They could put on space-suits, put the casualties in bubblepaks, and get out of the
Gamble
. Which would leave them in very cold water—not a problem in spacesuits—but the water must be refreezing rapidly.

"So we swim out," Sten said.

"Looks like it, sir."

"And we better full-drive it. I don't think any of us except for Kilgour can bash through an ice cube."

Sten and Tapia found Kilgour in a bashing mood. He had just finished going through the ship's emergency supplies. For some reason, sailors never believe they may actually have to abandon ship. And so their emergency kits tend to be maintained perfunctorily and sometimes raided for necessities. The sailors of the
Gamble
were no different.

"We'll worry about that when we get to the surface," Sten said, "Move them out."

With everyone in the shipsuits and the casualties bubble-pakked, the emergency port was opened fully. Water flooded the compartment. Sten and the others had death grips on anything sturdy. The current boiled around them, and then the water rose over the sailors' heads into the next level.

Kilgour was the first to exit the ship. He held one of the two cutting torches from the
Gamble's
tiny machine shop. He set it at full power, aimed it up, and cut in his suit's rockets. He started slowly upward through the solidifying sludge of the rapidly freezing lake around the
Gamble
. A line was snap-linked from his suit to the other crew members.

Sten was the last man out. He hung in the black water outside the port for a moment. This was the end of his first command. At least, he told himself, we went out fighting, didn't we, lady?

Then the line went taut, and Sten started upward. There was something wrong with his suit's cycler. His vision was a bit blurred. That was the explanation. No rational being becomes sentimental over inanimate metal, of course. Definitely something had gone wonky with the environmental controls.

Kilgour's suit rockets, intended for use offworld, gave him just enough power to overcome the spacesuit's neutral buoyancy and drift him toward the surface.

"Be a mo," his voice suddenly crackled in Sten's headphones. "The situation's clottin' strange. Ah seem't to've hit air. But… Skipper, Ah'd like a wee consultation."

Sten undipped from the line and put more power on his suit rockets. He broke through a few centimeters of ice, surfaced beside Alex, and shone his suit light around.

The scene
was
strange. They floated in a small, rapidly freezing lake created from the water melted by the
Gamble's
drive and skin heat. Next to them was the battered nose of the
Gamble
, protruding about half a meter above the ice scum.

That alone was not too strange—but just a couple of meters overhead arced a low, icy ceiling.

"This makes no sense at all," Sten thought out loud.

Tapia surfaced beside him. "Maybe it does," she said. "Do you know anything about snow, sir?"

That wasn't one of Sten's specialities—most of his experience with the stuff came from the snowscape mural that his mother had hocked six months of her life for, back on Vulcan. There had been a couple of Mantis assignments on frozen worlds, but the weather had been just another obstacle, not worth analyzing.

"Not a clottin' lot," he admitted. "As far as I'm concerned, it's just retarded rain."

"That rumble we heard? Maybe that was an avalanche."

"So now we're
really
buried?"

"Looks like it."

Tapia was exactly right. What had happened was that the
Gamble
had buried itself in the deep, perpetual snowfield. Its nose was within a few meters of the surface. But 500 meters above the valley, the ship's driveshock had weakened a snowy cornice. It broke free, and a thousand cubic meters of snow and rock avalanched down and across the valley.

The wreckage of the
Gamble
was buried more than forty meters below the snowfield. When they had opened the emergency port, the water pouring into the ship had lowered the level of the minilake around the
Gamble
. The ice that had formed at the base of the snow slide now formed the roof of the dome above them.

"Th' problem then," Alex said, "is how we melt on up. Th' suits dinnae hae power enow to gie us airborne. An' tha' snow up there dinnae be load-bearin't."

There was a solution—one that had all the neatness of a melee.

They paddled clumsily, towing the bubblepaks toward the edges of the under-snow lake. Paddling became crawling atop the ice, breaking through, crawling on again, until eventually the surface was solid enough to hold them.

From there, all they had to do was tunnel.

Being in spacesuits, they fortunately didn't have to worry about smothering. Kilgour half forced, half melted his way, curving upward. "Y' dinnae ken Ah wae a miner in m' youth," he said, burning a particularly artistic hairpin bend in the snow.

"Are you sure we're headed up?" Sten asked.

"It dinnae matter, lad. Ae we're goin't up, we'll hit air an' be safe. Ae we're goin't doon, we'll hit sheol an' be warm an' in our rightful place."

Sten scraped snow from where it was icing up on one of his suit's expansion sleeves and didn't answer. Then he noticed something. There was light. Not just light from their suit beams or Kilgour's cutting torch but a sourceless glow all around them.

Seconds later, they broke free onto the surface of Cavite.

Sten unsealed his faceplate. The air tasted strange. Then he realized that he had not breathed unfiltered, unrecycled air for… he realized he couldn't remember.

Helluva way to fight a war, he thought.

And speaking of war, the next step would be finding their way down out of the mountains. And the question was, Would their suit power last long enough for them to hit the warm flatlands? An unpowered suit was as useless as the
Gamble
, ruined in the ice below them.

One catastrophe at a time, he told himself. Probably his sailors, who had less than no experience at ground combat, would get jumped and massacred by a Tahn patrol first.

It would be warm, at least. Sten turned back to his people and started organizing them for the long march.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

O
n the third day after the Cavite landings began, Lady Atago transferred her flag from the
Forez
to a mobile command post on the planet itself. Her headquarters were in a monstrous armored combat command vehicle—dubbed Chilo class by Imperial Intelligence. The huge—almost fifty meters wide by 150 meters long—segmented ACCV traveled on forty triad-mounted three-meter-high rolligons, cleated, low-pressure pillow wheels that gave the vehicle amphibious capabilities as well. Any obstacle the rolligons couldn't pad their way over caused the triad mount to rotate, bringing another wheel into use atop that obstacle. Also, the ACCV was segmented and could twist both vertically and laterally.