Rogue Powers (29 page)

"Now let me be honest enough to tell you what you've already guessed. One very good reason that I left the rest of the fleet behind is all your commanding officers are dead. They were killed in the first moments. The junior officers commanding the ships I left behind are all we have. When we were feeing an unknown enemy coming from an unknown direction at unknown strength, I could not risk His Majesty's ships in untried hands.

"The odds are better now. We've gotten a look at the Guard ships and what they can do, and I think if we use you properly, we can bounce the Guardian fleet to pieces. So far, to quote, 'We have scotched the snake, not killed it.'

"And I must ask you a question. The lives of your crew, the survival of the Britannic fleet—and the safety of Britannica itself—rely on your answer.
Can you young fellows handle those ships in battle, completely on your own?
I will not be able to help you. The
Impervious
will have her hands full. Say no, and whether you are wrong or right, the Britannic fleet will survive, and these Guard ships will escape, and possibly destroy a ship or two of ours. That will be a small price to pay for the survival of the fleet as a fighting force. Answer yes, and be wrong, and we face disaster. I order you to think before you answer, to confer with your fellow acting commanders,
and consider well. Answer on your honor, not on your pride. That is all." Thomas cut the contact.

"And it's bloody well enough," he said half to the comm officer, half to himself. "But sometime you've got to trust in untried judgment, or you might as well pack up and go home. You need a little faith in people."

"Yes, sir."
You've proved that,
the comm officer thought
. I
never would have risked my neck to your judgment if I had a choice. But it's sodden-drunk old Cap'n George that kept us alive.
A light glowed on the comm console. "Sir, we have a secure line to Albert Leader."

"To my headset, please. Thank you. Commander Larson. We have some tactics to discuss. ..."

Ten minutes later
Mountbatten
sent a signal: "'Let our just censures attend the true event, and we put on industrious soldiership.'"

Sir George grunted and said nothing for a moment when he heard it. Did Pembroke know his spacemanship as well as his
Macbeth?
Well, a sense of history never did anyone any harm, though Sir George felt, on the whole, he would have preferred a simple ‘yes’.

He transmitted his instructions to Pembroke, and decided to switch from tea to coffee. Black. Strong. He wished for a little something to brighten it up, but brandy wouldn't do at the moment.

The
Impervious
's engines roared into life, bearing down on the thirteen Guard ships to starward. The Wombats and frigates turned to harry the Guardians as the
Imp
brought her firepower to bear on the enemy.
Mountbatten
lead the rest of the Britannic fleet in an all-out assault on the twenty-six inbound Guards, intent on blowing the tanker at all cost.

Sir George, still wearing a pressure suit over a much-wrinkled formal dress uniform, sat in his borrowed flag officer's chair in his backup Bridge, surrounded by half-trained junior officers doing their best. This was it. The Guards were in trouble, but either side could win. If the
Imp's
lasers were powerful enough to thin the enemy ranks before the
Imp
was within their range—

They were. The lasers killed three of the Guards.

If the Wombat pilots weren't too shaken up and exhausted, if they had fuel and ammo enough to fight—

They did. They herded the Guard ships practically right into the
Imp's
torpedo tubes, and accounted for a few more kills themselves.

If the
Imp
could hold together, survive inevitable battle damage—

She could. Commander Higgins reported only a few more hits, from fairly small and slow-moving armor-piercing missiles of an unknown type. Strangely, the missile warheads didn't explode. The things just bored into the ship, crashed through a few bulkheads, and came to rest. Sapper teams were taking a look at them.

And, the biggest
if,
if the
Mountbatten
and the other ships were skippered by
wunderkinden
and not cocky fools—

And oh, thank God, they were, they were. Pembroke led them in a classic interdiction maneuver, making masterful use of the bulk of Britannica to hide his ships, boring straight in for the fuel ship, ignoring all other targets until that one was gone, then chasing the attack fleet, fragmenting it. Two large Britannic ships and two more frigates lost. A few smaller ships reported hits by the same strange slow missiles.

It ended in a rout. Both Guardian formations were broken. Within eight hours, the Guards lost twenty-one more ships, including the last tanker. Ten Guardian ships were unaccounted for. Probably all or some of them managed to slip through the debris and confusion of battle away, get far enough out to jump to C
²
. The remainder were chased down, pursued until they ran out of fuel, overtaken and destroyed. Several Guardian ships were invited to surrender. All refused. Not a single Guardian prisoner was taken.

As of that moment, the Britannic fleet lost one cruiser,
four corvettes, five frigates, eight Wombat fighters. Historians might call it a British victory, but both sides were bloodied, and the British had dead enough to mourn and holes enough torn in the chain of command. Fending off a raid is never a triumph.

But there was time to rest, and heal, and sleep, and patch up the ships. For the survivors, that was victory enough.

Aboard
Impervious, Warsprite,
and
Mountbatten,
the sappers worked on the odd missiles and were baffled to find no warheads there to disarm. Only some odd off-white pellets of various sizes, packed in what seemed to be sawdust, that spilled out and floated around in zero-gee. Some of them were small enough to get sucked into air vents, others got caught in odd places, nooks and crannies of equipment.

By the time they thought to x-ray the pellets, and found they were eggs, the first of them was hatching deep inside
Impervious's
air system. The shell cracked and, in the darkness, a pale, frail, worm-like thing writhed and twisted mindlessly to get free. It crawled away from the egg, clinging to the wall of the air vent with hair-like cilia. It found a plastic coverplate over an airpump.

It began to eat the coverplate.

It lay its first eggs two hours later, without pausing in its feeding.

It died shorting out the pump.

Pete Gesseti opened the door to Mac's cabin without knocking, switched the light on, saw Mac in his bunk and tossed the oversized, bright red envelope marked
Secret
to him before Mac had time to do more than wake up.

Mac's reflexes snatched the envelope out of the air and he sat up in bed. "Pete, what the hell—"

"There are two reports in there, and they change everything. You're going to have two questions, so let me answer them before you can ask. Yes, Joslyn is safe so far as I can gather, and no, you didn't give the frigging Guards any ideas. They had to have planned the raid long before you said a single word."

Mac felt the bottom fall out of his stomach, and he ripped open the envelope. Two loose-leaf folders.
Naval Action Report: Guardian Attack on Britannic Fleet, aka "Battle of Britannica."
And the second.
Report on the loss of His Majesty's Ships
Impervious, Mountbatten,
and
Warsprite. "Oh, my God," Mac said. He rubbed his face, trying to wipe the sleep out of it, swung his legs out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bunk. "Oh my God, they got the
Imp."

"These two reports came in to State and the Navy Castle fifteen hours apart," Pete said, "and they wouldn’t have gotten to Columbia until like next year, if they had gone through channels. But when they hit, all hell is going to break loose, and the big brass is going to need this base, and my boss put me on a high-gee shuttle to get these to Driscoll soonest so she could know what's coming. I sort of got two copies instead of one because I thought you'd want one. Shove that one under your blankets for now and read it later. Get dressed because I'm on my way to kick Captain Driscoll's door down now and I want you with me. Oh, as soon as my office saw these we put in a call to the Judge Advocate's office and it just so happens that your conviction was reversed and your permanent rank boomed up to captain about thirty-eight seconds after they knew we had heard about the
Imp.
They're going to look bad enough without you rotting away in a training job for warning them. The power of the threatened news leak."

It was too much. Still half asleep, Mac decided that when Pete Gesseti brought the word, the news was
always
too much. Shocked by the news, groggy and unshaved, relieved that his wife was all right, Mac changed into a work coverall, put on socks and shoes, and followed Pete out into the corridor.

"I always get lost in this underground maze of yours," Pete complained. "Lead the way."

Mac nodded and turned down the corridor. There were a hundred things he wanted to ask, but Pete talked on before he had a chance to say a word.

"Our Navy is going out of its tiny little
mind.
If this could happen to the Brits, we could be next," he said, following Mac through the corridors of Survey Service Base. "HMS
Impervious
and two other major combatant ships were eaten by
worms.
Not the steel hulls apparently, but every kind of plastic, pressure suit fabrics, graphite structural supports, insulation, you name it. Also any foodstuff—and corpses. They'd eat through something,
and lay eggs, and the eggs would hatch and eat something, and lay eggs . . . one malfunction, then two malfs, then twenty, a hundred at once. And the cute little buggers excrete some kind of slime that reacts with oxygen and foams up.
That
eats up ship's air, so pretty soon there's none left to breath
and
the blobs of foam block air vents and feed pipes and what have you. There's some sort of poison gas, too, but no one is sure if the worms produce that directly or if it's a byproduct of the reaction that locks up the oxy in the foam. People dying because the worms ate through reinforced fabric and their pressure suits were swiss-cheesed. Ammo going up because the fucking worms ate through the
trigger safeties.
Airlocks shorting out and opening pressurized interiors to space. Fuel tanks rupturing. And the worms breed incredibly fast. It took about thirty-six hours for them to wreck the
Imp.
Captain Thomas—except he'll be an admiral by about next Tuesday because he's all they've got left, there were one hundred fifteen senior Brit officers killed, and some from other planets, too—Thomas finally realized it was hopeless and gave the order to abandon ship. They starting taking crew off and the worms got aboard the rescue ships before anyone figured out what the hell was going on.'

Mac had been walking more and more slowly, listening to Pete's hurried words. Now he stopped dead and turned to look at the older man. All those people dead . . . and something popped into his mind. "Pete—wait a minute. It just registered. You didn't say Joz was okay. You said something like you
thought
she was okay."

Pete tried to look Mac in the eye, and couldn't. "Yeah. That's right. I
think
she's okay."

"Pete! What the hell does
that
mean?"

"Well—" he shrugged, "—the casualties were real bad, and survivors got shuffled to a half dozen places, a lot of them without ID and in bad shape, unconscious. They won't have a complete accounting of personnel for a while yet. But she's not on the casualty list, and there was a specific mention that three Wombat pilots were killed. I
found three pilot names in the casualty list and Joz wasn't one of them. I dunno, Mac. That's the best I can tell you. Believe me, Mac, I tried. I tried like crazy. But she wasn't listed as dead, and that's all I could find.'

Mac restrained an urge to grab at Pete, shake him, as if he could squeeze more information out of him. Mac felt a terrible emptiness open up inside him. Joslyn was supposed to be safe, at home, in the midst of a great fleet deep in friendly territory. And now she might be dead— and not a clean, clear report of exactly how, not when he was prepared for the news because he knew of the danger. No. She would be missing and feared dead, but the news never certain, an agonizing time when he dared not hope because he was an astronaut and he knew what the odds were, and yet could not help but hope because he loved her, but still not
knowing
until the last corpse had been accounted for. . . .

"Mac. Mac. Stop. This isn't the time. We have to see Driscoll. Now."

Mac looked up sharply, and suddenly realized he
had
grabbed at Pete, had his hands clenched around the diplomat's shoulders, gripping him hard enough that it must hurt. He let go his hold, and tried to breathe deeply, calm down. "So let's go. But for God's sake tell me everything you know."