Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series (18 page)

A rocket coming from above missed an
aksai
by a few meters, exploded against a tower and the tower lifted as if it wanted to become a rocket, collapsed.

“Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha,” Ben Dill said, as he rolled over the top, acquired the Nana-boat that had tried to shoot down the other
aksai
, blew it apart.

A voice came in his headphone:

“All recovery elements, disengage. I say again, disengage and withdraw.”

“Aw,” Dill whined, “and Ben was just starting to have fun.”

• • •

Mil
Angara stood on the field at Camp Mahan, watched the formation of ships settle toward him.

“
How
long did you say the raid took?”

“Less than ten E-minutes,” Hedley said. “In, down up, and gone. Just like that.”

“I heard the report,” Angara said. “And I know all the goddamned tac manuals talk about the virtue of surprise. But I still don’t believe
no
goddamned casualties.”

“Actually, there was one. Some crewman on one of the destroyers broke his leg on a missile loader. But, yessir, no real casualties. Probably a bad thing, sir,” Hedley said. “Probably make them flipping overconfident, won’t it?”

Angara started to snarl, saw Hedley’s grin.

“Oh yeh,” Hedley went on. “Revision on that casualty list. A certain
Cent
Ben Dill reports a torn hangnail, getting out of his
aksai
, and wants another wound stripe.”

“Larix and Kura have taken enough from the brigands of Cumbre,” Protector Redruth ranted into the corns. “This last offense is intolerable.

“Cumbre has repeatedly refused any peaceful settlements of our differences, and has responded with outrageous force, proving that Cumbre has no intention of respecting our worlds and, in fact, clearly intends to take them over.

“Not only have we been attacked by these barbarians, but there have been certain traitors who’ve sold out their birthright to the Cumbrians for gold.

“Now is the day our enemies, both within and without, are to be extirpated!

“It is with deep regret, but remembering my duty to the men and women of Larix and Kura, I must announce that a state of war now exists between Cumbre and Larix/Kura.

“From this moment forward, force will be met with force, until our soldiers grasp ultimate victory, and the spoils of Cumbre are ours!”

Garvin Jaansma was awarded the Order of Merit, the Force’s third-highest medal, which he hadn’t wanted to accept, since the raid had been a failure. Njangu told him not to make waves. He himself was damned well going to take his Star of Gallantry, the second-highest decoration, and wear it on his goddamned kepi or maybe tape it on his nose, and Jaansma had best not screw up the ceremony. Garvin backed down, after a bit of consideration, took the medal, and thanked
Caud
Angara in a very humble manner.

The other military survivors got Silver Crosses, and the casualties posthumous Bronze Crosses. The enlisted also got promoted a grade. Monique Lir was now
Adj-Prem
, the highest enlisted rank the Force had, even though her job slot didn’t call for the rank.

• • •

Grig Angara, Jon Hedley, and Angara’s staff had finished a quiet meal in a private dining room of the Shelburne Hotel. The room had been swept for bugs, and three security techs lurked unobtrusively outside against electronic intruders.

“A question about work, sir?” Angara’s III Section, Operations,
Mil
Ken Fong, asked.

“As if we’ve been talking about anything else,” Angara said. “Go ahead.”

“Going to basics, just how are we going to fight Larix/Kura? Have you developed a strategy yet?”

Angara drank tea and considered his answer.

“Ideally, we’d be able to mount the old Confederation special: Send a fleet, punt some missiles in to get their attention, tell them they’re going to be good boys from now on, and if the slightest objection came, invade.”

“All we lack for that to be a flipping option,” Hedley said, “is a fleet. Assorted steel and alloys in shipyards still a-welding don’t generally fight that well.”

“Not to mention,” the Personnel officer said, “the Force is undermanned for any major campaign. Assuming the old rule holds true, that you need at least ten to one odds to win an opposed invasion.”

“Ah, but our morale soars and our hearts are pure, which gives us a mighty edge,” Erik Penwyth said cynically, and there was a ripple of amusement.

“There is a bit of truth to that,” Hedley said. “Yoshitaro’s reports suggest there’s some conscript sullenness in Redruth’s army. Which doesn’t mean they won’t die well under certain circumstances, or that certain elite elements in the army aren’t brave. Still.”

“And why aren’t our noble heroes present?” someone asked.

“This is just one of my unofficial-idea dinners,” Angara said. “I don’t pull people back from leave unless there’s an emergency.”

“It seems before there’s any kind of invasion, they’ll have to be whittled down somewhat,” Hedley said.

“I suppose, since I’m not one of those fools who believes strategic air does anything but make big holes in the ground, sir,” Fong asked, “there’s no way we could bash them somewhat, then ignore them?”

“I don’t think,” Angara said, “that Protector Redruth would accept a bashing, shut up, and mind his own business. He appears to be one of those sea monsters who’s got to keep swimming, or, in his case, looking for enemies, or he drowns.”

“I agree,” Hedley said. “Let’s face it. Sooner or later, unless they suddenly show up with wrapped presents, and saying they lost our com number and they’re ever so sorry, we’re going to have to go find out what happened to the Confederation. Which means prepared to deal with whatever enemies done ‘em in.

“And the last thing I want, when we do that, is a flipping open wound like Larix on my flanks.”

• • •

Maev had to lean close to Njangu and almost shout above the music:

“I love it!”

“Love what?”

“All this.” She waved her arm around the crowded, dimly lit club. “I can get roaring drunk, and there won’t be any goddamned monitors making sure I’m not thinking anything disloyal; there aren’t any assholes wondering if there’s some way they could back-shoot me and call it a duel; and nobody’s looking to hop in bed with anybody else because it’d help his or her career.” She sighed happily.

Njangu sipped his wine and stretched like a contented cat. Noise, people, music, good wine … why in the hell did he keep insisting on going into places without any of the basic necessities, especially when the people in those places kept trying to kill him?

He took the bottle out of the bucket when a large and drunk man stumbled up to the table.

“Hey cutie … wanna dance, dansh, oops.”

He pivoted through 180 degrees and fell on the table, which was insufficient for his bulk. The table collapsed, and the ice bucket and chairs smashed.

Maev still held her glass, and Njangu deftly emptied the bottle in the glass, dropped the bottle on the now-snoring drunk’s chest, and shouted for a cleanup crew and another bottle.

“Y’see,” he said. “I know how to take you to all the right places. Wanna dance some more?”

• • •

“I called this minisymposium,” Dr. Ann Heiser said, “not only to let our esteemed colleague have a chance to tell his tales of slaughter, but to pose a very serious question:

“Do any of us have any suggestions we might offer to the Force on how this war might be fought?”

There were two dozen men and women in the room, all civilians except for
Alt
Ho Kang. She’d been recently commissioned for her scientific research during the Musth War, and transferred to Force II Section as an analyst. She still didn’t quite believe her new rank, the pay that went with it, and that she wasn’t still driving a Grierson around the landscape.

“I’ll be more specific about what we’re looking for,” Froude said. He was still badly underweight from his time in the jungle, but the pallor and the fatigue had mostly gone. “Only because Ann and I discussed this before you were all kind enough to show up here and listen to my war story.

“Let me open with something you may find fairly surprising:

“No one knows very much about hyperspace, about the nature of the beast itself. Stardrive has been around for several millennia, but no one seems to have done intensive research in the area of what, exactly, we’re moving through.

“We know, or rather deduce, that N-space is quote real endquote, because it fits into our equations neatly, not to mention the empirical evidence that we actually get somewhere. We generally use certain predetermined navigational points, more for convenience than anything else, to travel from one place to another.

“We have machinery that can guide us from point to point. That machinery, should we make a blind jump, that is, a transition from a known to an unknown point, or unknown to unknown points, can tell us where, in normal space, we emerged.

“Generally, at least.

“In war, if our ships detect an enemy in normal space at a close enough distance, we can follow the enemy into N-space, launch a missile, and destroy that ship or track it as it jumps from place to place. If we are quick enough, we can even launch a special missile from normal into hyperspace, and the enemy can be destroyed. Or so it’s presumed, for those circumstances have happened often enough, without that enemy returning to bother us, to make such a generalization. It’s very interesting to note, by the way, that very seldom has a ship, to my knowledge, been hit once it enters hyperspace, then later return to normal space with damages. Does that suggest hyperspace acts as a conductor of shock, as water can? Or are the normal alloys used in ship construction weakened, during the time the ship is in hyperspace, so that it is extraordinarily vulnerable to shock?

“All these are most basic questions, and I’ve not been able to find an answer, nor can I find, anywhere in the literature, any research that’s significant, even in those two minor areas.

“There’s a great dearth of hard data. We know hyperspace is a finite entity, but — ”

“Pardon me, Doctor,” Ho Kang asked. “And forgive my ignorance. But
how
do we know it?”

“At least two reasons,” Froude said. “First is that we can consistently go from one point to another using the same amount of power and navigational settings. Secondly, it takes the same amount of internal, perceived and recorded, time to make that transition.

“But that’s no more, in my opinion, than a blind man who has learned to move around his house by rote, remembering the chair is here, the table there, and so forth. Move the furniture, and the man will become confused and possibly bark his shins.

“I wonder if the Confederation never commissioned a thorough investigation because its wars generally covered a huge area, with ships and fleets going from one place to another before battle commenced, just as ancient warship leaders didn’t much care about the oceans they crossed, other than that they were mapped for dangerous reefs to avoid.”

A woman stood. “Even though practical physics isn’t my area of interest, I agree we know little, damned little about this convenient dimension called N-space. But I don’t see how that pertains to your opening statement about fighting this conflict with Larix/Kura. Other, of course, than basic research has historically been well fueled by a good solid war.”

There was laughter as the woman sat down.

“I’m not sure, either,” Froude said. “All I know is that when two men are going to have a flight, and neither one knows anything about the field of conflict, the one who finds a map, or better yet visits the potential battleground, has an infinite advantage.

“I’ll simply — I hope — clarify what I’m stumbling around with this illustration.”

He went to the old-fashioned greenboard, picked up a marker.

Froude put a large
K
on one side of the board, an
L
about half a meter away.

“Here we have Kura, over here, Larix. Kura is the food basket for Protector Redruth’s empire. Larix is the industrial complex. Eliminate Kura, and the Larissans starve. Eliminate Larix, and the Kurans go back to harvesting their crops with hand tools.”

Froude drew a circle around one letter, then a tube to the other, and a circle around it. His sketch looked like a weightlifter’s dumbbell.

He drew an
X
on the tube.

“Here, then, might be the vulnerable area. Strike here, in the hyperspace between the two systems, or at the nav points where a ship emerges from hyperspace to reset its navigational apparatus before jumping again, in a manner I haven’t the foggiest about, and the results might be most impressive.”

• • •

“I think,” Ben Dill said, speaking precisely as he picked up the pitcher of beer and drank directly from it, “the next stage oughta be going over and hammering those goddamned Kurries and Larries.”

“Ah, but where, specifically?” Alikhan asked. He wasn’t in much better shape than his friend, having eaten a container of the spoiled, spiced meat the Musth used for a narcotic.

There were about twenty soldiers in a corner of the comfortable, old-fashioned noncommissioned officers’ mess. Almost all were I&R people. Alikhan and Dill were the only officers, present by invitation for a quiet wake for the three I&R soldiers lost on Kura. The only other raider there was medic Jil Mahim, who claimed the best vacation imaginable was to lie in bed, listen to the shouted orders, old-fashioned bugle calls, and loudspeakered commands, then roll over and go back to sleep because none of them was for her. Dill had already accused her of Strange Thinking, and been punished with a pitcher dumped in his lap.

“Why,”
Tweg
Lav Huran, Oct Team Leader, Second Troop, I&R, “where they are, of course.”

“Who in hell promoted
that
man to warrant?” someone said. “Outstanding frigging talent for the obvious.”

“That,” Alikhan said, “will be determined in the course of events, I suspect. I have a better question: What do you humans plan to do with these people after you win the war?”

“You see why I love this guy?” Dill bellowed. “He always assumes on the sunny side of the street.”

“I’d guess,” said
Tweg
Rad Dref, a Grierson aircraft commander with I&R, “we’ll hang that Redruth and the rest of his war-criminal ossifers by the balls, and let the other people go on about their business, leaving us alone.”

“Or maybe we oughta sorta scoop ‘em up,” another noncom said. “Import ‘em to Cumbre to do our scutwork.

“Especially the cute ones,” she added. “Leaving their balls intact.”

“I asked the question,” Alikhan went on, “because of what I’ve heard about these people. Unless all of you are exaggerating, the people on Larix and Kura seem to have little free spirit or independence.”

“ ‘Ats what the intel has,”
Senior Tweg
Als Severine, II Section Senior analyst, said. “We’ve gone out and talked to a lot of the Rentiers an’ such, who used to go over to Larix for shopping and getting in trouble they didn’t want to get back here, back before the Confederation went and vanished on us.

“They all talk about how the Larissans would be terrified of anybody who had more clout than they did, and, if they couldn’t get out of the way of those anybodies, they couldn’t be enough of a slave for em.

“I wouldn’t believe a Rentier about anything,” Mahim said. “But didn’t these Larissans have that evil little side glance you get when you’re on the bottom that says someday your back’s going to be turned, and I’ll have a big long knife, and then you’re for it?”

“Believe it or not, Jil, I know what you’re talking about, and that was one of the questions we asked,” Severine said. “Nobody claimed to have seen anything like it.”

“Hmmph,” Mahim said skeptically. “Hard to believe the trampled class doesn’t want to do paybacks.”

“We also checked any old holos from Larix or Kura,” Severine said, “when we were building our profile of your average, mythical kind of Larissan. We knew goddamned good and well those holos didn’t report nahthing but sweetness and light, but still looked for stories about, oh, some servant wiping out all of the children he was put in charge of, or some chauff … shoof … sorry, a little too much alk … some pilot doing a headfirst into the ground with his employers in the backseat.

“Nothing.”

“So far, this bears out my question,” Alikhan said. “If these people appear to have been beaten down by this Protector, and I guess he was the third generation to do this, what happens after the war?”