Shadow of Freedom-eARC (17 page)

“Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there, Ma’am?” Tallman smiled fleetingly. “Just once I wish we could do it the easy way, though.”

“Oh, I do, too,” Kaplan told him, and then she showed her own teeth in a thinner and far colder smile. “I do, too,” she repeated, “but one thing Saltash is
not
going to be, people.” She looked around the conference table. “It isn’t going to be another New Tuscany. Not this time.”

* * *

“Any new thoughts occur to anyone since our last meeting?” Jacob Zavala asked.

His squadron was eleven days out from Montana and still four days short of Saltash by the clocks of the galaxy at large, although only eight days had passed by DesRon 301’s clocks, and his com display was split into four equal sized quadrants. Each quadrant was further subdivided into thirds to show the commanders, executive officers, and tactical officers of four of his squadron’s five destroyers. Commander Rochelle Goulard, Lieutenant Commander Jasmine Carver, and Lieutenant Samuel Turner of HMS
Kay
were physically present in his flagship’s briefing room, along with Lieutenant Commander George Auerbach, his chief of staff, and Lieutenant Commander Alice Gabrowski, his operations officer. Now he looked around the faces—electronic as well as flesh and blood—with one eyebrow raised.

“I’ve got something, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Rützel, HMS
Gaheris
’ CO said. He was a heavyset man with a face designed for smiling, but at the moment he was frowning slightly, instead. “Not so much a new thought as an observation, though.”

“Observe away, Toby,” Zavala invited.

“I’ve been looking back at the information—such as it is—we’ve been able to pull together on Shona Station, Sir. I know none of our data suggests the station mounts any anti-ship weaponry, but according to the best info we have, there’s an OFS intervention battalion permanently stationed there. I realize it’s probably going to have a lot of its personnel deployed as detachments on Cinnamon and elsewhere around the system, but if they’ve managed to hang on to any significant portion of that troop strength and we have to actually board the station, things could get ugly.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Captain Morgan, HMS
Gawain
’s CO and the squadron’s senior captain, spoke.

“Toby’s got a point, Sir,” he said. “Under most circumstances, it probably shouldn’t be a problem, but we’ve already had ample evidence the Sollies are willing to push things way past the point of reason. Especially when we don’t have a batch of Marines of our own to send aboard to help them recognize the logic of our argument.”

Zavala nodded soberly.

“You’ve both got points,” he agreed. “I’d like to think any responsible officer would recognize the need to stand down when we turn up in strength, but people have different definitions of ‘responsible.’ And let’s be fair here.
I’d
find it difficult to roll over and play dead if a
Solly
squadron came sailing into a star system I was responsible for defending and started throwing around demands.”

“And Frank’s right about our dearth of Marines, Sir,” Naomi Kaplan said a bit grimly. “Holding down crew size is all well and good, and I’m all in favor of the increased efficiency for
shipboard
operations, but not having
any
Marine detachment for moments like this is a pain in the ass.”

Abigail Hearns, by far the youngest officer attending the conference, nodded unconsciously in agreement with her CO’s observation. She seemed to specialize in being short of Marines when she needed them, Abigail thought wryly, remembering a really unpleasant afternoon on a planet called Tiberian and another, almost as bad, aboard a shattered hulk which had once been the Solarian superdreadnought
Charles Babbage
.

Never around when you need one
, she reflected wryly.
Well, aside from Mateo
, she amended, thinking about Lieutenant Mateo Gutierrez.

“There
are
moments when something more…flexible than a laser head seems indicated,” Zavala acknowledged. “Hopefully this won’t be one of them. We do need to be prepared in advance if it turns out it is, however. Now I wonder who among us might be best qualified by experience and training to oversee a little responsibility like this?”

His tone was almost whimsical as his eyes tracked across the com display. He smiled as they came to rest upon one of his officers’ faces, and Abigail found herself looking back at him.

“I believe
you’ve
had some small experience in matters like this, haven’t you, Lieutenant Hearns?”

* * *

“What’s this all about, Vice Admiral?” Damien Dueñas demanded a bit testily. He’d been in bed for less than two hours when the emergency com call came in, and he wasn’t one of those people who woke up cheerful.

“We’ve confirmed a significant hyper footprint, Governor,” Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya replied from his display. “Gravitics make it five separate point sources.”

Dueñas stiffened and felt his face oozing towards expressionlessness. Merchantships didn’t travel in shoals like that in Solarian dominated space, and he wasn’t expecting any additional Navy visitors. Or not from his
own
Navy, at any rate.

“What else can you tell me, Vice Admiral?” he asked after a moment.

“Less than I’d like to, Sir.” Dubroskaya she didn’t much care for Dueñas, and she’d argued—respectfully—against his plan from the outset, which was one reason she took such care to address him as courteously as possible. “They’re headed in-system now, but they made their translation right on the hyper limit, and they’re still over nine light-minutes from Cimarron. It’ll be another couple of minutes before we can get any lightspeed sensor reads on them. I can confirm that they’re headed for the inner system on a least-time course for a zero/zero intercept with the planet in approximately”—her eyes moved to the time display in the corner of her own com—“another one hundred and seventy-one minutes, however. From their footprints and the strength of their wedges, CIC puts them in the hundred and fifty to two hundred-ton range, but their initial velocity was nine hundred and twenty-six kilometers per second, and they’re up to just over thirty-two hundred now. That means they’re accelerating at five-point-six KPS squared, Governor.”

Dueñas looked blank, and Dubroskaya reminded herself not to sigh.

“Sir, our
Rampart
-class destroyers are only half that big, and their
maximum
acceleration rate, with zero safety margin on the compensator, is only five-point-
zero-nine
KPS squared.”

Understanding blossomed in Dueñas’ eyes.

“Manties,” he said.

“I don’t see how it could be anyone else with that accel, Sir,” Dubroskaya agreed.

The system governor didn’t look very surprised, she thought. Unhappy, yes; but not surprised.

“Damn,” Dueñas said mildly after a moment. “I’d hoped to get some additional reinforcements in here before they turned up.” Dubroskaya stiffened visibly, and the governor shook his head quickly. “That’s no reflection on you or your ships, Vice Admiral, I assure you. But I’d be happier if we had an even greater margin of superiority. One thing these people have already demonstrated is that they’re not exactly likely to be reasonable.”

Dubroskaya contented herself with a silent nod, although she wasn’t sure “reasonable” was a word Damián Dueñas should be throwing around at a time like this. Impounding the merchant vessels of a sovereign star nation and jailing their entire ships’ companies without trial or bail didn’t strike her as meeting the dictionary definition of that adverb, either, no matter what theoretical justification for it he might have concocted. On the other hand, the decision wasn’t hers to make, and she wasn’t going to shed any tears about pinning the Manty upstarts’ ears back the way they needed.

“Even assuming there’s any truth to the rumors about Spindle, Governor,” she said, “we’re not picking up anything that could be transporting the missile pods they’d need to equalize the odds here in Saltash.”

Those rumors were a lot more fragmentary than she would have preferred, but they did seem to strongly suggest that Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall’s visit to the Spindle System hadn’t gone very well. The only problem was that no one in Saltash had a clue as to how
badly
it might have gone. The battle (if a battle had actually been fought at all) had taken place little more than two months earlier, and there simply hadn’t been time for any reliable account of it to reach a backwoods star system like Saltash.

One thing Dubroskaya was confident of was that the stories they
had
heard—like the ones about what had happened to Josef Byng in New Tuscany—had obviously grown in the telling. There had to be at least some core of truth to the wild tales of disaster, but the destruction of
dozens
of SDs while the Manties got off scot free? Ridiculous! Still, the SLN had clearly taken losses and, presumably, retreated from the system in the face of unexpectedly heavy resistance, and that was more than bad enough for Oxana Dubroskaya. The fact that a Solarian fleet had failed to take its objective for the very first time in the SLN’s history was a sobering—and infuriating—thought, and she was determined not to let overconfidence lull her into creating her own disaster, which was one reason she was less than enthralled by Dueñas’ strategy. She and her staff had analyzed the badly garbled bits and pieces of information they had as carefully (and pessimistically) as possible, however, and it seemed evident that the Manties must have managed to get more system-defense missile pods into the system than Crandall had realized. They’d probably been longer-ranged than Crandall had expected, too, judging by the limited accounts they had. That was the only explanation they could come up with…and as she’d just pointed out to the governor, missile pods in
Spindle
weren’t going to help them in Saltash.

“I’m glad to hear that, of course, Vice Admiral.” Dueñas nodded. “But I’d like to settle this without an exchange of fire if we can, and having more of our warships in attendance might help assure that outcome.”

“I’d just as soon not shoot myself, Sir,” Dubroskaya said. “If the Manties are crazy enough to push it, though, they’ll soon discover they shouldn’t have.”

“I don’t doubt that at all, Vice Admiral,” Dueñas replied. “My concerns have nothing at all to do with your ships or your people. I’m just thinking about the political and diplomatic as opposed to the directly military implications.”

“Understood, Governor.” Dubroskaya nodded, although the truth was that she was far from certain of exactly what Dueñas’ political objectives were in this case. Still, whatever his
intentions
, his
orders
had been clear enough.

He wasn’t especially shy about handing those orders out, either, she thought with more than an edge of resentment. She’d been a flag officer for over twenty T-years, and she didn’t enjoy being ordered around by the governor of a single star system on the backside of nowhere that wasn’t even officially League territory. Unfortunately, her deployment orders made the chain of command clear and unambiguous. And according to Tucker Kiernan, her chief of staff, Dueñas was well-connected back on Old Terra, which suggested that pushing back against his presumptuousness might not be a career-enhancing move, however much the pain in the ass deserved it.

What I’d like to do is squash him like a pimple
, she thought. But then she gave a mental snort.
Not like he’s the first arrogant civilian you’ve had to take orders from, Oxana! And at least the Manties only sent along light cruisers. However…questionable his strategy may be, you’ve got more than enough force advantage to keep a lid on the situation
.

“Thank you for getting this information to me so promptly,” Dueñas continued after a moment. “I need to confer with my people here in Kernuish. Please keep us apprised of any additional information that comes your way.”

“Of course, Governor.”

* * *

“What do you think, Cicely?” Damián Dueñas asked two minutes later.

“Probably the same thing you do,” Lieutenant Governor Cicely Tiilikainen replied from his com, and shrugged. “Dubroskaya’s right—they have to be Manties, with that acceleration rate.”

“But why haven’t they said anything yet?” Dueñas wondered out loud.

“Who knows?” Tiilikainen shrugged again. She’d never shown any particular enthusiasm for Dueñas’ plan, and he felt a flicker of anger at her obvious intention to stand back and make it abundantly clear it was
his
plan. “Maybe it’s some kind of psychological warfare ploy. They have to’ve thrown this together pretty quickly to get here this soon, so maybe they figure we don’t have any Navy detachment of our own. If that’s the way they’re thinking, they may figure that letting you worry about them for a while will soften you up for their demands.”

“Maybe.” Dueñas rubbed his chin, eyes narrowed in thought, carefully taking no note of the second-person pronoun in her last sentence. Then he gave himself a shake and straightened up.

“I’d better get dressed. Meet me in my office as soon as you can.”

“On my way now,” she said, panning her visual pickup to let him look out the side window of her air car as it sped through the sparse late-night aerial traffic of the city of Kernuish. “I’ll be waiting by the time you can get there.”

Chapter Eleven

“We’re getting back good data on the forward platforms, Skipper,” Abigail Hearns said, and Naomi Kaplan turned her command chair to face the tac section and cocked her head in response to Abigail’s tone.

“I’m seeing three merchies in parking orbit with the platform, Ma’am,” Abigail said, replying to the unspoken question. “They’re not squawking transponders, but we’re close enough for good visuals, and at least two of them look Manticoran-built to me. That’s not the interesting thing, though.”

“No?” Kaplan smiled thinly. “That sounds interesting enough to be going on with to me, Abigail.”

“Oh, I agree, Ma’am. But what I thought was
really
interesting were the four battlecruisers lying doggo in the inner system.”