Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series (24 page)

• • •

The huge cruiser appeared again as Cumbre attacked another convoy. This time, it appeared bolder, and drove the raiders off, with a loss of one Kelly, one
velv
.

A week later, another convoy attack was broken, and this time there were two of the great ships.

• • •

Perhaps there was something in the air.

Haut Jon Hedley sat, nursing a drink in the Shelburne’s main lounge, watching the dancers in a not unpleasant melancholy and tapping a foot to the band.

A woman approached him. He admired her, graceful in a sleek, simple gown that iridesced slightly from purple to black at irregular intervals, with an occasional star-flash here and there.
A Rentier’s wife … no, not old enough, not hard-looking enough, more likely his daughter. Or mistress. Now why don’t I ever get lucky and …

The woman stopped at his table, and he recognized her, stood hastily.

“Dr. Heiser!”

“
Haut
Hedley,” the physicist, cohead of the Force’s Scientific Analysis Section, said. “May I join you?”

“Of course, of course. What are you drinking?”

“I’m not,” she said. “I came here to dance.”

“Oh,” Hedley said.

“Which is why I came over. It’s difficult when you’re as tall as I am, finding someone the proper height to trip the light whatever with.”

“Actually,” Hedley said, “I suppose being tall … at an early age … is why I never learned to dance. My coordination took a few years to catch up to my body.”

“You don’t know how to dance … Jon?”

Hedley shook his head.

“Then,” Heiser said firmly, “it’s time you learned.”

Hedley blinked, then a slow smile came as he stood and held out a hand.

“Maybe it is, Ann. Maybe it is.”

• • •

“When I was a wee tot,” Njangu said thoughtfully, “my mother gave me a present. That didn’t happen very much. Like never. Very expensive it was, and now I don’t want to think about where she got the credits to pay for it.”

Garvin listened carefully. It was very seldom Yoshitaro said anything about his family.

“It was a little spaceship, and when you touched little sensors, it would make a drive whine, and landing lights would go on, and a little voice would say ‘preparing for takeoff,’ or landing, or whatever.

“I loved it a lot,” he said. “Which is why I was afraid to take it outside and let the other kids play with it, or even show it to them, for fear somebody bigger’d take it away from me.”

He stared out the window, across the parade ground on Chance Island at Leggett.

“So?”

“Protector Redruth’s got a brand-new couple of toys, doesn’t he?” Yoshitaro said.

“Oh. That’s why he’s so damned cautious with those cruisers. Afraid to use them, for fear they’ll get blown apart.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s worth developing a scenario, isn’t it, to maybe confirm our buddy Redruth in his caution?”

“Maybe.”

“By the way,” Garvin said. “Whatever happened to your little spaceship?”

“My father came home drunk and stepped on it.”

Njangu’s voice was flat, as if it didn’t matter.

Now this is real remote control
, Ben Dill thought. He hung, in an
aksai
anodized and given special fittings and ECM capabilities not to reflect much of anything, from normal light to radar to any other detection device — or so the Force scientists thought — about one AU off Larix Prime.

Farther off the planet was his controlling
velv
, which hopefully wouldn’t be found out by Larissan detectors.

Puppet strings from Cumbre to the
velv,
from the
velv
to me, from me to …

Dill’s normal control helmet was in a niche beside him. He wore a larger, fatter headpiece that completely covered his eyes, and held a small box, with a single control stick with a small wheel atop it. And he wasn’t seeing the space around him, but rather the surface of Larix Prime, rushing toward him.

Far below, a tiny reconnaissance drone dived into the planet’s atmosphere, over one of its small seas.

Dill flew the drone through the control box, and saw what it saw, through a realtime camera in the drone’s nose.

Alarm lights bloomed, faded on either side of his vision as the drone closed on land.

Dill was muttering mightily: “No, you don’t see me, right, keep on sweeping, you moron goddamned early-warning point, prob’ly thinking about somebody you want to boff, right, maybe there’s something up there in the sky way over the next continent, go look for it, and forget about me … awright, now we’re closing, bring this puppy back level, come on you, don’t tumble on me, there we go, now down, down, don’t eat a tree, Dill, they aren’t good for you … over the beach now …”

The drone shot inland, on a semiprogrammed course. Ahead was a large military complex which might have interesting things to tell the Force. If the drone succeeded in transmitting data, unlike the last five that’d been tried on other parts of Larix Prime.

The Force still lacked an enormous amount of intel on Larix Prime, but Larissan antiaircraft crews were entirely too proficient and alert.

Dill swore the problem was that the drones were piloted by technicians sitting comfortably on a
velv
, and a real pilot ought to be given a chance, from as close as he dared get, to make sure he had the proper feel.

He was given that chance, as were Alikhan and Jacqueline Boursier. The three were attempting simultaneous penetrations, on the theory if one was spotted, the ensuing hue and cry might make life easier for the other two.
Or
, Dill thought cynically, a
great deal harder if all the goddamned skywatchers quit daydreaming and started paying attention to business
.

He slowed the drone to just above stall speed, saw treetops reel past just below him, saw a housing district and banked to avoid it, as other alarm lights flashed.

“So far, so good … and Mama’s favorite Benjamin is under their goddamned screen … ho-ho, and here we come up on that thingie what we hope’s a base, and punt it up a few meters so we get good coverage and start the recorders and make Big Daddy happy …”

The drone went to full power, and images flashed … open land … perimeter fence … a swept, bare death zone … another fence … guard tower … rows of barracks … a landing field over there … maybe a parade ground …
goddamned construction equipment, almost bagged that crane
… high-stacked steel plate … industrial building … a rolling mill? …
hell if I know
… high, closed hangars.

“Now we have it, now we have it … look at that, hangar door wide-open, and look at that goddamned prime mover with a frigging cruiser on its back, how many frigging rows of tracks … biggest goddamned thing I’ve ever seen on ground … whup, almost ate that hangar, two, four other building ways, no ships on them, camo cover, easy to see from down here, and holy kee-ripes!”

Smoke blossomed close to the drone, and Dill banked hard, went even lower.

“Shoot at me now, you silly bastards, bet your goddamned launchers don’t depress that far, and we’re coming on to another shipyard, or maybe finishing yard and …”

And the screen flashed to black. Ben had only a millisecond to see something very big loom as the drone smashed into something … another crane, a ship,
who the hell knew, hope it was expensive
.

“Aw crap,” Dill moaned. “Everybody’s gonna break my balls because Ben went and rammed something instead of paying attention like he should’ve been doing.”

But no one did. Alikhan’s drone had been shot out of the sky on entry. Boursier’s had returned, but the industrial area she’d investigated had nothing at all happening of interest.

“Think we could get away with that again?” Dill wondered.

“Why not?” Boursier said. She was a very thin, very intense brunette who, as far as anyone knew, had no life beyond the cockpit.

“We certainly should try again,” Alikhan agreed. “There are another six drones in the hold of this
velv
.”

The watch officer came in, holding a com printout.

“You glory hounds can sack out if you want. We’ve been recalled.”

“Why?”

The officer shrugged.

“You three are required for some sort of special mission. They don’t tell us common flyboys anything, you know that.”

Garvin finished briefing the I&R troops who’d volunteered to beef up the crews on the half dozen destroyers in his plan’s forward element. There’d been some debate as to how much anyone beyond command staff should be told. Hedley’d argued that, if things went wrong, as they could quite easily, everyone should know “everything about our flipping cleverness while they’re turning into vacuum-packed corpses.”

Garvin finished, wished he could find something inspiring to send them into battle with, then turned the detachment over to Njangu, who told them to report to their ships and dismissed them.

Jaansma noticed, as the troops moved away, under the harsh midnight glare of the dock’s floodlights, Darod Montagna. She saw his gaze, and smiled. Then she was gone.

He got into his lifter, told the pilot to take him to his own ship. Garvin wanted to know what destroyer she was crewing on, knew better than to ask. He wished he’d not seen her, for he didn’t need to be thinking of those six ships as anything other than bait.

• • •

“You be careful now,” Froude told Ho Kang.

She grinned. “I’m always careful, Danfin. Generally it’s the other fellow who isn’t.”

“I just want to make sure you come back,” he said.

“Oh, I’ll be back,” Kang promised, then told him, rather explicitly, what she wanted to do with him on her return.

He blew a kiss, cut the connection, turned and saw Ann Heiser looking at him slyly.

“Private coms on Force time, Doctor?”

Froude colored, then realized Heiser was grinning at him.

The com buzzed, and the technician on the board said, “Dr. Heiser … it’s
Haut
Hedley, from Force Headquarters. He wants to say good-bye.”

It was Heiser’s turn to flush. Froude wasn’t too much of a gentleman not to deliberately arch his eyebrows before going back to his sketch panel.

Drones were sent to just out-atmosphere, and Kuran planetary patrols reported two of them.

An E-day later, seven ships that might’ve been freighters, but could also have been armed Larissan fleet auxiliaries, lifted and formed a convoy off the planet. Five destroyers were escorting them.

The convoy was clumsily shadowed by two small Cumbrian patrol ships to the standard nav point, and went into hyperspace.

The two patrol ships jumped after it using full power, came out of N-space at the nav point they hoped the slower convoy would use.

A few seconds later, the convoy appeared in the same space, as if everything was quite normal, and the shadowers hadn’t been detected.

The six waiting Cumbrian destroyers moved in for the attack. The Larissans took a standard defense formation. Intent on the attackers, the Larissans paid little mind to the distant Kane control ship, whose presence they’d grown used to.

In its battle room, Hedley and Garvin watched Ho Kang’s chair as it boomed back and forth in the compartment, Ho calmly giving orders into a headset.

Hedley caught Garvin’s expression, grinned.

“Ain’t it a bitch when you’ve got to sit there and watch other people get their balls in the flipping wringer on your orders?”

“Damned uncomfortable, sir.”

“Get used to it,” Hedley advised. “I had to, the farther away I got from being up to my flipping belly button in the mud and blood.”

Ho’s chair dropped down over one technician, who was reading a screen. Suddenly her voice came through speakers next to the two officers.

“Your trap’s sprung. Two of the
Naarohns
, plus escorts, have entered this space.”

Garvin looked at the big screen, reading it well enough to see the two blips that suddenly simmed into tiny holograms of the Larissan battle cruisers.

Kang was giving more orders, and other, tinier, holograms appeared not far away from the two cruisers and their four escorts.

“Vann First Elements, this is Vann Control,” Ho said. “The biggies have shown up … you haven’t seen them … let ‘em close on you … all right. You’ve spotted them. Now general panic as practiced.”

The six destroyers, almost ready to engage the Larissan convoy escorts, broke into new courses. Two fired countermissiles behind them as they fled.

“All right,” Kang said. “You’re not jumping back into hyperspace yet … you think you’ve got speed on those Larissans … right … there’s a chance you’ll be able to come back on the convoy …”

She switched channels.

“This is Vann Control. You weren’t spotted. Go after them on independent control.”

Half a light-second away, in empty space, seven
aksai
lay doggo. They’d been released by mother
velv
, who went back to N-space in seconds.

“I want him, I want him, I want him,” Ben Dill chanted as his fingers danced across sensors.

His canopy was full of ships — the convoy to his left, their escorts just right of them, down and in the front the “fleeing” Cumbrian destroyers, far to his right and up was the Kane. Dead “ahead” were the two cruisers and their escorts.

“Proctologically speaking,” Ben said, “Dr. Dill is delivering a surprise. Launch one … launch two … launch three.”

More missiles spat from underwing mounts of the other fighter ships at the cruisers.

On the Kane, Kang keyed a sensor.

“Vann First Elements, this is Vann Control … on the count of five, jump for hyperspace … four … three … cancel that, jump now!”

She’d seen the flash from one of the cruiser’s escorts, realized the
aksai
or their missiles had been detected and the Larissan was firing.

Countermissiles were hastily launched by the Larissans, to mixed effect.