The Unincorporated War (34 page)

“Who ordered the retreat?”

“I did,” Omad replied without a second’s hesitation.

“You should have pressed the attack,” J.D. managed through labored breaths. “It may be … be years before we get another chance.”

“Admiral, you can fire my ass right now if you want, but I hope we never get another chance like that again. It was a slaughter house. We lost twelve ships, and this fleet is
not
operational.”

“Keep your job, Omad,” answered J.D., smiling weakly. “When I fire people … for doing what they think is right, and possibly being right, well … that’s the day I need to lose my job.” She coughed, then focused her attention on Christina. “Captain Sadma, why so silent?”

“Admiral, I don’t see how we’re going to survive this. Most of the fleet and the salvage operation just can’t move at battle speeds. If the core fleet attacks now we’re done.”

J.D. nodded. “How long have I been out?”

“Nearly two days,” said Marilynn.

J.D. absorbed that information for a moment with her eyes closed. When she opened them again, they were clear and purposeful. “Christina, take three of the
ships and go to the resource belt and seed the space surrounding us with asteroids of all sizes.”

“Admiral, we don’t have anything left to mine them with.”

“They won’t know that.” She slowly sat up and began to put her feet on the floor. When Omad, Marilynn, and Christina began to protest she cut them off.

“Listen to me! The fleet is in danger. Whether it’s my fault for ordering the attack or bad luck that our command structure was taken out in the beginning of the assault doesn’t matter anymore. The fleet … the fleet is in danger. Frankly, I don’t know what the hell they’re waiting for. For what ever reason, Commodore Diep is hesitating.”

“She’s an admiral now, at least since the ass kicking,” said Omad with a sideways grin.

“Whatever. She doesn’t want to attack. We must encourage her in this course of action. I want every ship we have that can move, to participate in maneuvers. If they can only go slow, I want the rest of the fleet to practice with them on shipboarding exercises. I want a kid with a ten-credit telescope from the surface of Mars to be able to see what we’re doing.”

Marilynn spoke what they were all thinking. “We will do that, ma’am, but you don’t need to be out of bed for that to happen.”

“I need to be seen, Lieutenant. The fleet, the corporate core civilians, anyand everyone needs to see me. They need to see me preparing the fleet for the third Battle of the Martian Gates, that is, if we’re going to avoid the third Battle of the Martian Gates.”

“But ma’am,” answered Marilynn, head slightly bowed, “the scars.”

J.D. was confused but then had an intimation of what Marilynn was saying and touched her hand to her face. Instead of the soft skin she was used to feeling, her hand felt a hard, gnarled hide that was surprisingly painful to the touch. Almost as if that one reminder was all her body needed, the entire left side of her face started to throb and she felt a low-level burning sensation. She looked at the back of her left hand and saw that it too was scarred and blotchy with red and white tissue where her hand was exposed from the gown. “Mirror,” she ordered.

Marilynn, knowing the character of the woman she now served, had a hand mirror at the ready. What J.D. saw was the same as the back of her hand. She must have turned her head from the blast, because the burn was on almost half her face. But the left side was grotesque. Most of the hair on that side of the skull was gone or burned to stubble. Her eyebrow was gone, but she saw that her eyelid still had its pink, healthy skin, a fact that was strangely more disturbing than if her lid had been as scarred as the rest of her face.

“Graft?” she said, pointing to her left eyelid.

Marilynn nodded.

“Makes no difference; get me a uniform.”

“Admiral,” asked Omad, “you sure the spacers should see you like this?”

“Captain.” She coughed, steadying herself slowly as she got to her feet. “They need me now. As for how I look, they’ve earned the right.”

It took another fifteen minutes getting the medic’s approval to let her go, on the condition that she wore a microscanner and let him check in every four hours. Once his permission had been secured, J.D. headed out. Wherever she went she tried to apologize for what her actions had caused, but every single time, whether alone or in groups, the spacers refused to listen. Most times, they tried to apologize for failing
her
.

She came close to letting the pain and suffering of it all overwhelm her only twice in that week. Once was the first time she visited the wounded who, though their wounds were serious, were not being suspended, in hopes of getting them mobile enough to help the fleet. They’d turned one of the spent munitions lockers into a large ward containing over a hundred patients. When she came in on her cane and with her slight limp the entire ward, patients and staff, broke into thunderous applause. She saw people missing legs cheering, people with only one arm pounding their bunks. J.D. stopped and was unable to continue. The closest she’d ever come to running from a battle was this one, where she felt all this love from her spacers and thought herself unworthy of it. She knew that if she had the chance to do it again she would order another battle and another and another until these people were free of the threat posed by the evils of the corporate core. The other time she let it get to her was when she received a text message from the assault miner who’d written earlier to ask about J.D.’s doing the honors at her wedding. The woman had written to let J.D. know that her fiancé, the comm officer on the
Lucky Strike,
had p.d.’d in the fleet action, but she was at least thankful that the admiral had survived and would forever be grateful for the admiral’s initial pledge to officiate at her wedding. When Marilynn saw the look on J.D.’s face she took the DijAssist from her boss’s outstretched hand and read it. Marilynn immediately left the admiral alone and made sure she stayed undisturbed for at least an hour.

UHFS Star blazer—Mars orbit

Newly promoted Admiral Diep was waiting to enter a secure conference room on board her ship. She’d just completed a tour of every vessel in her fleet and the orbital
batteries as well. Everywhere she went she was applauded by her spacers and the civilians who insisted on coming up to visit. If it was up to her, she would’ve banned all the civilians, but they were corporate bigwigs. To make matters worse, many of her officers were also corporate executives who were planning to go back to the corporate world after the war was over, and so tended to bend over backward when one of their own asked for a favor or a photo op.

She herself was forced to go down to the capital of Mars for two hours to receive an idiot honor as the savior of Mars. She accepted it on behalf of her fleet. It was at that ceremony three days before that she was first asked the question: “When will you attack?”

Diep had always thought that Admiral Gupta was overly cautious when he refused to attack the Alliance and J. D. Black, but he’d always said they weren’t ready. Then J. D. Black had launched an attack and destroyed two-thirds of the fleet that had been carefully built up over all those months and then captured the biggest industrial prize this side of Luna. Although none of her officers would admit it now, Diep knew how close some of her captains had been to breaking orbit and abandoning Mars altogether. But now all of a sudden they wanted to attack immediately.

She even had communications from an old West Point colleague of hers, Samuel Trang, who had messaged from practically the other side of the belt on the Eros line. He seemed to think that she should attack immediately as well. As a matter of fact, he’d been pretty adamant about it. But it took her nearly a week just to get her ships ready for combat and then to get the damn civilians extricated from them. She’d decided to wait for a solid intelligence report before deciding what to do next. She hadn’t gotten as far as she had by allowing herself to be bossed around by others. She’d make her decision in her own good time.

When she entered the room all nineteen of her captains and her command staff rose to attention. “As you were,” she said as she went to her seat at the head of the table. They waited until she sat down, then found their seats.

“What’s the latest report on the enemy?” she barked to no one in particular.

Lieutenant Pollard, her intelligence officer, activated the holo-tank in the middle of the conference table and waited for the images to appear.

“Admiral, this is the latest on the Belter fleet—”

“Lieutenant Pollard,” she interrupted, “please refer to it as ‘the Alliance fleet’ or ‘those damn rebels.’”

That, Admiral Diep saw, brought a round of chuckles from the assembled officers.

“The enemy we face comes from more than just the belt, Lieutenant. J. D. Black and Justin Cord are of Earth, Joshua Sinclair is of Saturn, and Christina Sadma is of Eris.”

“That Sadma bitch never even had a corporate job or training,” offered one of the captains Diep had had to prevent from running at the height of the battle.

“The
bitch
you refer to,” seethed Diep, “ran down a ship practically to the or-bats and destroyed it in our front yard. Her title is ‘Captain’ Sadma and she comes from Eris. All of us must be accurate in how we refer to the enemy. If we’re not clear on who they are, we will be unclear on how to fight them. Continue, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, ma’am. The ‘Alliance’ fleet has twenty-four ships participating in maneuvers and four others retrieving asteroids and apparently mining the approaches to the shipyard. All except one path that seems conspicuously clear. High-definition scans show that most of the ships on maneuvers seem to be in very bad shape. Some of them literally have pieces falling off.”

“Have you been able to determine what they have in those asteroids?”

“No, ma’am. The consensus is they’re decoys, just rocks.”

“What about Black?”

Lieutenant Pollard fiddled with the holo-tank. An image of the battle-scarred J. D. Black appeared inspecting a group of assault miners. They looked tough and battle ready. It was now becoming a doctrine to prevent the Alliance miners from boarding UHF ships at all costs or risk losing those ships for good. Seeing the look of total devotion that was almost palpable even through the thirty-second holographic loop made each captain nervous about his or her own marine contingents.

“We picked this up from a civilian channel. Apparently some spacers in the Alliance were able to contact relatives off the civilian Neuro and pass messages back and forth for a day. The communication was cut off abruptly, which leads us to suspect that their intelligence officers found out about the leak. Of course this image appearing on the Martian Neuro net news did not help keep that channel of information open. This image did give us a very interesting clue, though. We’ve been able to identify this cargo hold as belonging to the
War Prize
. From outside images the ship looks like she’s ready for the junkyard, but this interior ship area is in remarkably good condition. We must conclude that the
War Prize
is not in as bad a condition as we have been led to believe.”

Diep took stock of the assessment but kept looking at the ghastly but compelling image of J. D. Black. In modern society there was almost no such thing as deformity outside of specialty clubs and Mardi Gras. If someone was hurt badly, they simply stayed inside until they healed. For someone to appear in public in the condition of J. D. Black was incomprehensible. But there she was. Diep realized that Black didn’t care. That the Alliance admiral was concerned with one thing and one thing only—a single-minded devotion to killing her enemies.

At that moment Diep knew her decision. “We hold here until the next twenty ships from Earth arrive next month.”

This brought a firestorm of protest. She let them bellow for a bit but then cut them off.

“Captains, let me make this clear.” She only had to wait a moment for them to respond to the iron in her voice. “If we go out there and fight that fleet, a fleet which outnumbers ours, a fleet that might not be as damaged as they are letting on. A fleet that will have the advantage of having prepared the space for battle with asteroids containing nothing or containing something so horrendous it could end the battle all on its own. If we go out and fight this battle
and lose
, the war is over. J. D. Black will come forward with the remains of her fleet and isolate each battery and destroy it in place. Then without our fleet to stop her she could take Mars and with it win the war. She may even capture the President as he achieves orbit around the newly lost core world.”

Diep rose, glaring down at her captains. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but J. D. Black is better at this than you are. I have another bit of news for you. Regardless of what 3N says about it in their idiotically fawning reports, she is better at this than me. The only difference between us is that I know it. She’s planning something. I can feel it. But in order for it to work we have to go to her. As long as we stay here she loses. When the new ships arrive we’ll be able to integrate them into our command and then attack with the knowledge that Mars is secure behind us. My guess is she’ll realize we’re not playing her game and return to the belt long before that happens. Does anyone wish to go on the record opposing my decision?”