Barbarians at the Gates

Chapter Forty-One

Jefferson/Lombardi System, 4097

“Shit! They came through the back door. Damn them.”

Caitlin had rarely seen Admiral Justinian so rattled, but the news was shocking enough to worry the strongest of men.

Her commander turned and studied the display. The Federation Navy was—presumably—advancing as fast as possible up the chain towards Jefferson. It would have to punch its way through four Asimov Points to reach the nexus star, but none of them were heavily defended. They certainly wouldn’t be taken by surprise, not once the warning had been passed up the chain, yet it wouldn’t really matter. The Federation Navy wouldn’t have launched such an offensive unless they believed that they possessed a crushing superiority.

“The report was vague as to their strength,” she said, scanning the final sensor readings the destroyer Danton had taken before she’d fled back to Jefferson. The ship’s captain had nearly burned out his drives trying to reach Jefferson before it was too late. The hell of it was that it might be futile anyway. “We only saw forty-odd superdreadnaughts.”

“They’ll have more,” Justinian said, dismissing her optimistic projection. “We need to stop them before they break into Jefferson.”

He was right, she knew. Local commanders would do what they could to parse—and then delay—the full strength of the attacking force before it reached Jefferson, but Caitlin knew that they couldn’t do much. Admiral Drake would hardly repeat the mistakes of the Retribution Force.

Jefferson and its nine Asimov Points served as the nexus for Admiral Justinian’s empire. If the Federation Navy contested the system—let alone captured it—they would break the chains holding the empire together. Some of Justinian’s more reluctant allies would switch sides, his junior commanders might turn into warlords on their own…it would be the end.

They couldn’t allow the Federation Navy into Jefferson.

Admiral Justinian considered the overall picture, thoughtfully. “At least we have the combined fleet in a position to make transit back to Jefferson fairly quickly,” he said.

Caitlin nodded. She’d already sent orders along the ICN to alert the fleet to be prepared to move.

“We bring them back into Jefferson and then advance along the Chain to”—he studied the display, apparently trying to gauge how fast the Federation Navy could move—”Lombardi, I think. I doubt we’ll get much further unless Admiral Drake feels like resting on his laurels.”

“He won’t,” Caitlin said. “He had the imagination to blaze right through Bester…”

“True,” Admiral Justinian agreed. “If we get the fleet into place before the enemy enters the system, we’ll set up a defense on the Asimov Point and stop them cold. If not, we will have to contest the system and force them to assault the other Asimov Point.”

He keyed his console. “In the meantime, I want tugs moving fortresses from the other Asimov Points to the terminus of the Sphinx Chain,” he added. “Even if the fleet fails, we can try to hold the Jefferson System.”

Caitlin considered it.

“It will take weeks to move enough fortresses over to the Asimov Point to make a difference,” she told him. Towing a multimillion ton fortress wasn’t an easy task at the best of times. “We could hold the fleet in Jefferson itself and force them to come to us.”

“Maybe, but we might lose control of the outer system,” Justinian pointed out. “And there is another concern.”

His hands danced over the console. “As you can see, a hostile attacker who takes Lombardi will be able to cross interstellar space and reach Harmony,” he explained. “There’s only forty light years between the two stars and if they secure Lombardi, they don’t need to attack Jefferson at all.”

“Unless they want to link up with the forces defending Boskone,” Caitlin reminded him. “If they opened up the Asimov Point chain for shipping, they could reinforce their fleet remarkably quickly…”

“I know,” Admiral Justinian said. “There’s little else that we can do.”

Caitlin felt a flicker of sympathy, for he was facing the same dilemma he’d inflicted on the Federation. He had too many places to defend, and far too few ships and fortresses to cover them all. Most of his mobile firepower was badly out of position and it would take weeks to concentrate it to reinforce his reserves. A loss now could cost him the entire war.

On the other hand, the Federation had had space to trade for time. Admiral Justinian didn’t have many stars he could trade for time, not now.

He suddenly looked up at her. “I will command the fleet, of course,” he said.

At her concerned look, he added, “It’s necessary. My men need to know I’ll die beside them, if need be.”

She nodded.

“I’ll let my wife know,” he told her. “Then we can depart on the Rampant Lion.”

Caitlin nodded, feeling a second flicker of sympathy. His wife had had dreams of being Empress since the day she’d been old enough to take part in High Society’s endless rounds of social backstabbing, character assassination and metaphorical bloodbaths. The Court she’d set up on Harmony had always amused Caitlin, even though she knew that Millicent Beauregard-Justinian took it far too seriously. The woman wouldn’t respond well to hearing that she would either have to flee, or be executed by the Senate.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I expected no less of you.”

Through heroic effort, the main body of the fleet was brought back into the Jefferson System, just in time to hear that another star system had been taken by the advancing Federation Navy. Admiral Justinian waited long enough to make certain of his supplies, and then led the fleet through the Asimov Point and up the Sphinx Chain. If they were lucky, they would intercept the enemy fleet well short of Lombardi and Harmony.

Caitlin tried to convince herself that they were bound to succeed—the last time the Federation Navy had tried to reach Jefferson, they’d been smashed—but no amount of mental argument convinced her that their success was guaranteed.

Marius watched as tumbling wreckage drifted past his fleet, the remains of a pair of fortresses that had tried to bar the fleet’s passage to Jefferson. Admiral Justinian had left the outdated fortresses in position and all they had been able to do, despite the advance warning of his coming, was die bravely. They hadn’t even surrendered, although he was fairly sure that they’d been damaged and destroyed before their commanders had realized just how badly the odds were stacked against them.

“All ships report that they’re secure, sir,” Raistlin reported. “The Marine unit dispatched to the planet has reported that the planet has surrendered and is awaiting occupation.”

“There’s no time,” Marius said firmly. “Order them to destroy the planet’s defenses, and then return to the fleet.”

He ignored Williams’ surprised look. The political commissioner had been determined to occupy all the worlds the fleet passed as it advanced up the chain, and Marius had been happy to oblige, but they’d run out of Internal Security troopers to detach from the fleet. Besides, the further they advanced up the chain, the greater the chance they would run into something hard enough to stop them, and he needed all of his destroyers with the fleet.

He keyed his console as he checked the reports from his officers. The battle hadn’t been very costly, at least in men and starships, although he was sure that the bean-counters at the Admiralty would complain about the number of assault pods he’d wasted on the outdated fortresses. Marius found it hard to care. Assault pods could be turned out easily by industrial nodes, but starships and trained crewmen took longer to produce. There was no point in spending lives like water when there was an alternative.

Sixteen starfighters, two destroyers and one heavy cruiser had been blown to atoms in the brief and furious battle. A handful of other ships were slightly damaged. They could carry out their repairs underway.

“The fleet is to resume its course toward the Lombardi Asimov Point,” he ordered. “We will reunite with the Marines and assault cruisers before we charge into the next system. Deploy scout gunboats to cover our flanks and don’t hesitate to launch sensor probes if you think you have a ghost of a target.”

He smiled as he cut the channel. The last system had seemed undefended until a handful of destroyers had appeared from cloak and cut into a pair of his ammunition freighters. It wasn’t a bad tactic if the enemy merely wanted to slow down his advance, as he’d been forced to redeploy some of his destroyers and escort carriers to protect the freighters. The farther they advanced up the chain, the more firepower the enemy would be able to hide under cloak until the time was right.

Magnificent shivered slightly as her main drive went to full power. “The captain’s compliments, sir,” Raistlin reported, “and he wishes to report that we will be at the Asimov Point within twelve hours.”

Marius had to grin at the formality.

“Tell him and his bridge crew to get some rest,” he ordered. “The remainder of the fleet can stand down to condition-two unless the enemy shows his face.”

He’d need some rest himself, although he knew that he wouldn’t sleep well, even in Tiffany’s arms. Bringing her along was in some ways a breach of regulations, and he’d thought long and hard about it as it also risked exposing her to enemy fire. But she’d pointed out that he’d let her go into the Bester System without a second thought, and won the argument.

He turned back to the display, silently counting down the hours until the moment they encountered the enemy fleet. There were just too many unknowns; what had seemed like an excellent—indeed, brilliant—plan when he’d drawn it up in the privacy of his own head now seemed like an act of madness.

Where was Admiral Justinian’s battle fleet? If he’d kept it at Jefferson, the Grand Fleet would have encountered it by now, but they’d seen nothing apart from a handful of light squadrons.

And where was the admiral? It was too much to hope that he’d scattered his fleet all over his little empire, but had he been taken in by the deceptions? Or had he simply not seen the false intelligence at all? Had Marius overestimated his intelligence apparatus on Earth?

“You seem concerned, admiral,” Williams said. “Is the enemy not dancing to your tune?”

The political commissioner had come up behind him, moving silently across the deck. Marius would have been impressed under other circumstances.

“The enemy will do whatever he can to frustrate me, as I will do whatever I can to frustrate him,” Marius quoted from a book of Navy proverbs. “That’s why he’s called the enemy.”

He shrugged. “How much, commissioner, does the enemy know about us?”

“I thought you fed him your fake plan, hook, line and sinker,” Williams protested. “You told me he was fooled.”

Marius shrugged again. He’d exaggerated a little to keep the Commissioner happy, or at least quiet. “The enemy now knows that we are on our way, hammering our way up the chain towards Jefferson,” he said.

He grinned at the commissioner’s sallow face.

“He has to know, because they had plenty of time to get a message out,” Marius explained. “But…does he know our strength? We’ve kept parts of the fleet under cloak, or used ECM to exaggerate our strength…how much does he know? Does he think that we only have fifty superdreadnaughts, or did one of his skippers have the guts to slip close enough to peer though the ECM?”

“I thought you could always detect a ship under cloak if it came close enough to read the letters on the hull,” Williams said.

Marius sighed, concealing his irritation. Whatever criteria the Senate had used when it came to selecting commissioners, it hadn’t included any military background, let alone experience.

“Or are our sensors worse than you suggested?” Williams pushed.

“The enemy may have left a ship in our path, lying doggo,” Marius said. “Risky, very risky; if we detected the ship, we could pop off a single missile and vaporize her. On the other hand, very little chance of detection unless we used full-power active sensors. And her passive sensors would be enough to give them an accurate count of our ships.”

He made a show of checking his wrist terminal. “As there’s no way to know what is going through Justinian’s mind right now, I suggest that you get some sleep, commissioner. In twelve hours, we go through it all again…unless we run into the enemy first.”

Midway and her consorts had been racing toward the Asimov Point that led into the Lombardi System. There were no fortresses guarding that end of the gravitational distortion, but there was a single light cruiser, watching the loyalist fleet as it advanced.

“Captain, the light cruiser is retreating,” the sensor officer said.

“Pity,” Roman said. “I wonder if…”

The icon blinked once—the yellow flash that signified a successful transit—and vanished.

“She went down the rabbit hole, sir,” the sensor officer reported. “There are no other enemy ships detected within the general area.”

Unless they’re cloaked, or lying doggo, Roman reminded himself. The last two systems had been nightmarish; the cloaked enemy ships hadn’t been able to do more than sting, but they’d stung hard. Midway had accounted for two enemy destroyers and what his tactical officer had believed was a converted freighter, yet it hadn’t been enough. If the fleet had been operating with a long fleet train, they might have been in real trouble. Losing the supply lines would be disastrous.

“Launch recon probes,” he ordered. “Let’s see what’s on the other side of the rabbit hole.”

Only one of the probes returned, but the news it brought back was very encouraging. There was only one fortress facing the loyalists, another outdated design that dated all the way back to the Inheritance Wars. It would suffice to stop pirates and rebels in peacetime, but it wasn’t designed to stand up to a frontal assault. The hastily-laid minefield on top of the Asimov Point was clearly unprepared for action, but that wouldn’t stop it from being deadly. Roman conferred with his fellow captains and the commodore in charge of the assault force, and then checked with Admiral Drake. As he’d anticipated, the order was simple: attack.

Midway transited into the system hard on the heels of the first set of assault pods. Most of the minefield had been destroyed by the assault pods, allowing his point defense crews a chance to pick off the remaining mines before they recovered from the assault and started to target the attacking ships. The commander of the fortress, he was relieved to discover, was a realist. Once he’d updated his superiors on the composition of the fleet that had forced the Asimov Point, he surrendered. A small team of Marines was sent to secure the fortress while the remainder of the Grand Fleet transited in, one by one.

“New orders from the flag, sir,” the communications officer said. “We are to proceed at once to the Roslyn Point and secure it.”

Roman felt a tingle run down his spine. Roslyn wasn’t just a fully-developed system with a vast array of space-based industries and a formidable planetary defense network; it was the final stop on the way to Jefferson. If they could get into the system before the enemy reacted, they could threaten Jefferson from two Asimov Points at once…

He shook his head, reminding himself that the attempt to coordinate two assaults over interstellar distances at the same time had doomed the Federation Navy’s attempt to seize Sapphire during the Blue Star War. Admiral Drake would not want to repeat that particular mistake.

“Helm, lay in a course,” he ordered. “Maximum safe speed.”

Midway hummed as she accelerated through space, heading right at the Asimov Point. The Lombardi System reminded Roman of his home system, even though his home system possessed no Asimov Points and had remained undiscovered until the Federation had developed the stardrive and used it to survey the worlds near Earth that had been settled via interstellar slowboats. The RockRats who’d settled the system had been astonished to discover that Earth had not only cracked the FTL problem, but had been exploring interstellar space for generations through the Asimov Points.

“Captain,” the sensor officer said, “I think we have a problem.”

“Show me,” Roman ordered.

“There’s a fleet coming through the Asimov Point,” the sensor officer reported. New red icons flashed on the display. “I think that Admiral Justinian has sent his fleet to intercept us.”

“I think you’re right,” Roman agreed. “Take us into cloak. Communications, signal the admiral and inform him that the enemy fleet has arrived, and that we will continue to forward data as long as we can.”

“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said.