Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Thirty

Lieutenant Commander Hiroshi Hammond, SLNS Oceanus’ tactical officer, had the watch. At the moment, he was tipped back in the chair at the center of the light cruiser’s command bridge, trying unsuccessfully to think about nothing at all as yet another late-night watch crept towards its end with all the fleetness of a crippled snail. There hadn’t been anything for Oceanus to do over the last local week or so, thank God, but he hated nights light this. Sitting in orbit around a backwater planet like Mobius Beta with nothing to do had to be the most mind-numbingly boring duty in the entire galaxy even at the best of times, far less times like these, and he hated the way it turned his mind inward, left him no choice but to contemplate things he’d far rather not think about at all.

Still, thinking about some things damned well beat hell out of actually doing them. Hiroshi Hammond had been called upon to do some pretty crappy things during his career. That happened a lot in Frontier Fleet, whatever the recruiters said, and Hammond came from a well-established naval family. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t known that was the case going in. But the first week or so after their arrival in-system…that had been bad.

At least it’s going to be over soon, he told himself, gazing up at the deckhead, trying to close his mind to what was happening on the planet so far below his ship. One way or the other, it’s going to be over. And I’m not going to have to kill any more towns before it is.

Now if he could only figure out some way to absolve himself of his crushing sense of guilt for what he’d already done.

God damn Brigadier Yucel. The thought rolled through the back of his brain with the cold, measured precision of a prayer. His had been the hand that pressed the button, but the order had come from her, and if there was any justice in the universe—

“Hyper footprint! Multiple hyper footprints!”

The sudden announcement from the senior tactical rating of the watch twitched Hammond up out of his bleak reverie. He snapped his chair upright and turned towards, Lieutenant Gareth Garrett, Oceanus’ junior tactical officer, who was holding down the tac section at the moment.

It was obvious Garrett had been just as surprised as Hammond, but the JTO was already leaning forward, hands moving across his console as the icons from the combat information center appeared upon his display.

“CIC makes it thirteen sources, Sir,” the lieutenant reported after a moment, and Hammond felt his muscles tighten. “They’re half a light-minute outside the hyper limit,” Garrett continued. “That puts them at a range of two-one-five-point-nine million klicks. Current closing velocity niner-one-three KPS. Acceleration five-point-seven KPS squared.”

“Class IDs?” Hammond asked.

“We won’t have anything lightspeed for another twelve minutes or so, Sir,” Garrett replied in a curiously flat voice. “But from the footprints, CIC is calling it twelve cruisers…and a superdreadnought.”

“A super—?”

Hammond cut off the automatic—and stupid—repetition and closed his mouth tightly. Garrett was young, but not young enough to make that kind of mistake. If he said CIC had identified a superdreadnought, then that was what CIC had told him.

Even if the massive ship’s observed acceleration was a full KPS² higher than Oceanus could have turned out with a zero safety margin on her inertial compensator.

Manties, Hammond thought while icicles formed in his bone marrow. With that kind of accel, it’s got to be Manties. And if it is…

He decided not to think about that as his thumb reached for the general quarters button.

* * *

“Anything from them?” Commander Tremont Watson demanded as he strode explosively onto Oceanus’ bridge.

“No, Sir.” Lieutenant Branston Shang, the light cruiser’s communications officer, had managed to beat the CO to the command deck. Now he looked over his shoulder at Watson and shook his head. “Given the range, there won’t be for at least another three minutes, even assuming they know we’re here to be transmitting to, Sir,” he added respectfully.

Watson nodded curtly and crossed to the command chair Hammond had abandoned upon his arrival. It was an indication of the CO’s state of mind that he’d asked the question in the first place, Hammond thought. Or perhaps the original range figures simply hadn’t registered with him. Of course, if that was true, it was a pretty significant comment on Watson’s state of mind all by itself, he reflected as the CO dropped into the chair he’d just vacated.

“Any more details on them, Hiroshi?”

“Not really, Skipper.” Hammond shrugged unhappily. “They only made their alpha translation nine minutes ago, so we still don’t have any lightspeed confirmation, but CIC’s confident about their mass estimates and wedge strengths.”

“And about the acceleration numbers, I presume,” Watson said grimly.

“Yes, Sir.” Hammond wasn’t looking—or feeling—any happier. “They’re up to a closing velocity of just under four thousand KPS. GG”—he nodded at Garrett—“makes it three hours and fourteen minutes to a zero/zero intercept with the planet…and us, of course. Turnover in about an hour and a half. Velocity at turnover will be right on thirty-five thousand KPS.”

“Wonderful.”

Watson punched controls on the command chair armrest, deploying his own displays, then looked back up at Hammond.

“All right. You’re relieved. Take your station and send GG off to the Exec.”

“I stand relieved,” Hammond said formally, and twitched his head at Garrett. “You heard the Skipper, GG. I’ve got it; shag your butt down to Command Bravo.”

“Yes, Sir!”

Garrett popped up out of his station chair and left for the cruiser’s backup command deck at a run. Hammond settled into his place, taking over the tactical console and wishing he could believe anything he might do could make any difference at all to what was about to happen.

* * *

“I don’t suppose anyone’s tried to contact us yet, Atalante?” Sir Aivars Terekhov asked.

“No, Sir.” Lieutenant Atalante Montella looked up from her console and shook her head, her expression grim. “I wish someone would,” she added. “I’d a lot rather be dealing with that than listening to this, Sir.”

She gestured at the small display in front of her, where a man in the uniform of the Mobius Presidential Guard sat at a desk in front of crossed planetary flags, reading from his prepared notes. The sound was muted, but she’d shunted the feed to her earbug. Commander Pope, Terekhov’s Chief of Staff, and Lieutenant Commander Mateuz Ødegaard, his staff intelligence officer, were listening along with her over their own earbugs, and their expressions were as grim as her own.

Terekhov nodded in understanding. He’d listened to five or six minutes of the “news” transmissions from Mobius himself before he’d handed it off to Pope and Ødegaard. He’d felt guilty about doing that, but he’d also decided it would be far better to distance himself from it, at least for now. The last thing he needed was to be listening to that kind of crap when he might very well be making decisions about who lived and who died in the next few hours. He couldn’t afford to open himself to that sort of rage, however deserved it might be, so he turned to Commander Stillwell Lewis, instead.

“How much longer for the platforms to give us a good look at the planetary orbitals, Stilt?” he asked.

“Not long, Sir,” his operations officer replied. “They’re only about ninety-six light-seconds from Mobius Beta, now. In fact, if there’s anything in orbit with active impellers, it’s got to be on the far side of the planet from us at the moment, or we’d already have picked it up.”

“Good.”

Terekhov tipped back in his command chair, gazing at the master plot. Quentin Saint-James had reentered normal-space twenty-six minutes earlier. During that time, she’d increased her n-space velocity to just over ninety-four hundred kilometers per second and traveled just under 7.8 million kilometers towards the planet officially designated Mobius Beta. During that same interval, the Ghost Rider recon platforms they’d deployed as soon as they’d made their alpha translation had traveled ten and a half light-minutes—almost 200 million kilometers—at their vastly higher acceleration. In fact, they were already decelerating towards a zero/zero rendezvous with the planet.

He had a pretty good idea what those platforms were going to find. The “news” transmissions to the Delta Belt habitats which Quentin Saint-James had intercepted since translating back into normal-space made it abundantly clear that the Solarian intervention battalions the MLF had feared were underway had beaten his own force to the Mobius System. And that meant there had to be—

“We’ve got them, Sir,” Lewis said suddenly, and Terekhov’s eyes narrowed as a quartet of impeller signatures appeared on the plot, creeping around the icon of the planet. “The platforms are still ninety-two light-seconds out, but we should be getting good visual in another minute or so,” the ops officer continued. “CIC is calling them destroyers for now, but—”

He paused again for a moment, studying his displays carefully, then looked back at Terekhov.

“Correction, Sir. It looks like a Morrigan-class light cruiser and a trio of War Harvest-class destroyers. One of the tin cans could be a Rampart, though. With all the refits Frontier Fleet’s destroyer fleet’s been through—”

He shrugged, and Terekhov nodded. At this range, even Ghost Rider platforms were doing well to have given them that much information.

“Nothing else with hot nodes?” he asked.

“No, Sir. But we’re picking up a good-sized merchant hull on visual. If I had to guess, I’d guess it was the transport OFS used to haul in its troops, but we can’t confirm that at this point. I don’t see anything else they could’ve used, though.”

“Makes sense,” Terekhov agreed. He gazed at the display for another minute or so, then sat back in his chair again and looked at his chief of staff.

“If their nodes are up, I’m guessing it’s because they’ve figured out we’re coming to call, Tom,” he said.

“Probably,” Commander Pope agreed. “I can’t think of any other reason they’d be sitting in orbit putting time on the nodes, and even Sollies should’ve picked up our footprints at this piddling little range. Of course,” he smiled thinly, “if they’ve got a good read on our tonnages, they’ve got to be feeling mighty unhappy right now. Especially if they figure Cloud’s a waller!”

Terekhov snorted in agreement. Just his cruisers would have been enough to make mincemeat out of those obsolescent vessels, even without Mark 16s. With Mark 16s, his flagship could have killed all of them all by herself. And a superdreadnought—any superdreadnought, far less an SD(P)—which was exactly what Captain Simone Weiss’ CLAC had to look like to the Sollies’ gravitic sensors, could have obliterated them with a single broadside.

Of course, if these…people had any idea what modern LACs were capable of, Cloud would probably scare them even worse than an SD, he thought. And the acceleration numbers have to be giving them furiously to think, too.

“Now that we’ve found them, do you want to talk to them, Sir?” Pope asked after a moment, and Terekhov scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“An interesting question,” he decided after a moment. “In fact—”

He turned to look at his youthful flag lieutenant.

“Tutorial time, Helen,” he said with a slight smile.

“Yes, Sir?” If Ensign Zilwicki felt any trepidation she hid it well, he thought.

“Opinion, Ms. Zilwicki. Do we talk to them now, or do we let them wait?”

Helen’s eyes narrowed as she considered the question. She was too busy thinking to notice the way several of Terekhov’s staffers looked at one another with smiles, not that it would have bothered her if she had noticed. She’d grown accustomed to Terekhov’s impromptu quizzes, and she knew it was a serious question, despite his quizzical tone.

“I think not, Sir,” she said after a moment.

“Why not?” he asked.

“As you and Commander Pope just said, they have to know we’re here by now, Sir. And from our acceleration numbers, they’ve got to have a pretty good guess who we are. Under the circumstances, I think it makes more sense to let them sweat until either they break down and talk to us or we’re good and ready to talk to them.”

“Why?”

“Anyone with a working brain would have to realize they’re toast if it comes to a fight, Sir,” she said. “On the other hand, these are Sollies, and we all know how reasonable they are. And to be fair, they probably haven’t heard anything but bits and pieces—if that—about what’s been going on elsewhere. Since they came from Meyers, they have to know what happened at New Tuscany and Spindle, but they probably haven’t heard anything about Saltash.” She shrugged. “If they haven’t, they may think the same way Dueñas did and figure we’ll hesitate about pulling the trigger if it comes to it. So I think it’d be a good idea to let some of that Solly arrogance soften, and if we let them sweat, we take the psychological advantage no matter who finally winds up opening communications. If they end up driven to talk to us, they start out in a position of weakness, and Sollies just aren’t used to finding themselves places like that. And the longer we wait to talk to them, the longer they have to see our ‘superdreadnought’ coming at them and think about all the things it can do to them.” She smiled nastily. “I don’t care if they are the Invincible Solarian League Navy, that’s gotta make ’em nervous, Sir! And if we use a Hermes buoy when we finally do talk to them…”

Her voice trailed off, and her expression turned absolutely beatific.

“I see.” Terekhov regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “Works for me,” he said, and smiled at Pope. “And now that Ensign Zilwicki has so masterfully summarized her proposed approach, let’s give some thought to making it work most effectively.”

* * *

“And I don’t give a good goddamn who the hell it is!” Brigadier Francisca Yucel snapped.

“But, Ma’am,” Commander Watson began desperately, “that’s a superdreadnought! We can’t fight a super—”

“That’s enough!” Yucel barked. “You don’t even know who it is yet!”

“At those acceleration rates, the only people it can be are the Manties,” Watson replied. “And if it is—”

“And if it is, they have exactly zero right to be here,” Yucel shot back. “Mobius is a sovereign star system. The Manties have no legal standing here at all!”

“Ma’am, I realize that. But given what happened at Spindle, I think we have to assume—”

“You’re not going to ‘assume’ anything until I tell you to, Commander. Is that perfectly clear?” Yucel glared at him from his communications display, gray eyes flinty. He stared back at her for a handful of seconds, then nodded jerkily.

“Better,” she said in a marginally less angry tone. She sat back in her chair and waved one hand in an impatient gesture. “I understand why you’re anxious, Commander Watson, but let’s not let panic start dictating our reactions, all right? Yes, they hammered Admiral Crandall at Spindle. And, yes, as far as I can tell the Manties don’t have a single functional brain cell among them. But not even Manties could be stupid enough to actually open fire on a Solarian Navy squadron in the territorial space of a Solarian ally!”

“With all due respect, Ma’am, they fired on Admiral Byng in New Tuscany,” Watson responded, and her nostrils flared.

“Yes, they did, Commander,” she agreed coldly. “But New Tuscany wasn’t a Solarian ally at the time, either. And whoever this is, it’s not that crazy bitch Gold Peak, either—not in command of a force this small. No.” She shook her head. “This is some captain or commodore or junior rear admiral, and whoever it is probably doesn’t even know we’re here yet.”

“Ma’am, you’re senior to me,” Watson said. “But their track record suggests to me that they might just go ahead and pull the trigger after all.”

Francesca Yucel closed her eyes and counted to ten. What she really wanted to do was to rip someone’s eyeballs out. Watson’s preferably, but almost anyone else’s would have done in her present mood.

Why? she wondered. Why does every single idiot in a Navy uniform think the frigging Manties are ten meters tall? Why can’t any of them see that it doesn’t matter how good their damned missiles are? They’re one little pimple of a “star nation,” and Frontier Security should have squashed them years ago instead of letting them get so fucking full of themselves. Them and their precious wormhole. They think it makes them the lords of creation, that their shit doesn’t stink! But they’re about to find out differently, aren’t they? That maniac Gold Peak’s gone too far, and now her precious Star Empire knows exactly how a cockroach feels before the hammer comes down.

Personally, Francisca Yucel couldn’t wait for that moment, and she was getting sick and tired of so-called officers who couldn’t get their heads out of their asses long enough to realize that any Manty with a brain bigger than a radish had to be scared shitless of pissing the League off even worse.

“Commander,” she said after a long, fulminating moment, “there’s no way the Manties would risk another shooting incident with the SLN, especially in a podunk little system like this one. Whatever they may have managed to do to Admiral Crandall at Spindle, I doubt they brought their damned system defense pods along with them. And even if they have, they have to know what would happen to them in a real war with the League. Gold Peak might be crazy enough to push it, but by this time, their government has to be trying to figure out some way—any way—to crawl out of the crack she’s gotten them into. If these bastards had gotten here before us, managed to help the frigging terrorists overthrow President Lombroso and then signed some sort of treaty with the ‘new government,’ that might be one thing. But they don’t have even that much of a legal fig leaf. That leaves them with no standing at all under interstellar law, and the League would have every right to assist Lombroso in resisting any demands they might make. That’s a tripwire nobody in command of a force this small is going to want to cross.”

Watson looked at her com image, trying to believe she might be right. Unfortunately, he didn’t think she was. And even more unfortunately, she was in command.

“So what, exactly, do you want me to do, Ma’am?” he asked finally.

“I don’t want you to do anything, Commander. Just sit there. They’re the ones intruding into Mobian space, so let them do the talking when they finally realize we got here before them.”

“And if they start making threats, Ma’am?”

“Then you tell them to go straight to hell, Commander,” she said flatly.

* * *

“Coming up on thirty-one million kilometers, Sir,” Commander Lewis announced.

“Thank you, Stilt.”

Terekhov took another sip from the cup of coffee Chief Steward Agnelli had just delivered to him, then looked at Lieutenant Montella.

“Are you ready to transmit, Atalante?”

“Yes, Sir.” Montella grinned at him. She was rather looking forward to this. “Whenever you are, Sir.”

“Fine. Helen?” Terekhov smiled at Helen and held out his coffee cup. “Take care of this for me for a few minutes, would you? It probably wouldn’t help my hard-bitten commodore’s image.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Sir.” She smiled back as she took the cup obediently. “Personally, I think it might actually underscore your aura of confidence.”

“Of course it would. Just don’t go drinking it!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Sir. Joanna would hurt me.”

Terekhov chuckled with a bit more amusement than he actually felt, then turned back to face the com pickup.

“All right, Atalante. Let’s do it.”

* * *

“Sir!” Lieutenant Shang announced. “I’ve got a com request from the Manties!”

Commander Watson looked up quickly. The announcement was scarcely unexpected. In fact, the tension of not hearing from the Manties had been twisting his nerves tighter and tighter as the silent juggernaut of those tactical icons swept steadily towards his own outnumbered and outgunned command.

They’d been in-system for almost two and a half hours now. In fact, they’d made their turnover and begun decelerating forty-eight minutes ago. The range was down to thirty-one million kilometers—under two light-minutes—and he’d started sweating the moment it dropped to forty million. If they’d brought along any of the missile pods they’d used on Admiral Crandall, he was inside their envelope, and they were still better than twenty million kilometers outside his.

He knew everyone else on his command deck could do the math as well as he could, and he seen the tension growing in his officers’ faces as the minutes crawled past. Yet there was something about Shang’s announcement…

“Calm down, Branston!” Watson said. “Let’s not get too excited here.”

“But, Sir…they’re asking specifically for you. And they’re transmitting from less than forty thousand kilometers out!”

“What?” Watson straightened in his command chair. “What do you mean, specifically for me? By name?”

“Not by your name, Sir, but they’re requesting SLNS Oceanus’ commanding officer.”

Watson stared at the communications officer. None of his ships had activated their transponders, so how the hell could the Manties possibly know his flagship’s name? And what was that about forty thousand kilometers? How could anybody get a communications relay that close without any of his sensors even noticing it on its way in? And why should they bother to, even if they could?

My God. The thought hit him like a sudden bucket of ice water. My God, they didn’t just get a com relay that close; they got sensor platforms that close—close enough to read ships’ names off our goddamned hulls—and we never saw a frigging thing!

The implications were terrifying, and he suddenly wished Francisca Yucel was up here in orbit and he was safely down on the planet.

“Very well, Branston,” he said as calmly as he could, suppressing a sudden urge to lick his lips. “Put it on my display here.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The small communications screen deployed from his command chair came to life with the face of a dark-haired, olive-complexioned young woman in the black and gold uniform of the Star Empire of Manticore. For a moment, nothing about struck him as peculiar, until he suddenly realized she was in uniform, not wearing a skinsuit.

“I am Lieutenant Atalante Montella, Royal Manticoran Navy,” she said. “Am I addressing the commanding officer of SLNS Oceanus?”

“You are,” he said, his mind still grappling with the absence of that skinsuit. It was like a deliberate declaration that the lieutenant on his display was beyond any range at which he could possibly have threatened her. Which was true enough, he supposed, but still…

“I’m Commander Tremont Watson, Solarian League Navy,” he continued. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?

He sat back to wait out the two hundred-second lightspeed delay, but—

“Please stand by for Commodore Terekhov,” she said, less than two seconds later.

He twitched, his eyes flaring wide open. That was impossible! They were still more than thirty million kilometers away! Nobody could—

Oh, shit, a little voice said almost calmly deep down inside. They do haveFTL com capability! And if they’ve got recon platforms that close, platforms that can send back targeting data faster-than-light…

He closed his eyes for a moment as the implications crashed over him.

“Good evening, Commander Watson.” A blond haired, bearded Manticoran officer replaced Montella on his display. The Manty wore a commodore’s insignia, and his blue eyes were remarkably cold. “I am Sir Aivars Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy.”

Every Solarian officer in the Madras Sector knew that name, and Watson felt a solid lump of ice materialize in the pit of his stomach as he recognized it and remembered a star system named Monica.

We are so fucked, that same little voice whispered.

“Commodore,” he replied out loud, fighting to sound normal…and knowing he’d failed. “May I ask what brings you to Mobius, Sir?”

“Yes, you may.” Terekhov smiled thinly, and his voice was cold. “We’re here in response to an urgent request for humanitarian assistance.”

“Humanitarian assistance?” Watson heard the faint, sickly edge in his own voice as he repeated the words.

“I think that’s a suitable way to describe it,” Terekhov said. “Certainly in light of the ‘news broadcasts’ we’ve been monitoring for the past couple of hours.”

Sweat beaded Watson’s hairline, but this time he said nothing. There was nothing he could say, really.

“Let me put this as clearly as I can, Commander,” Terekhov continued after a moment. “I intend to put a stop to the butchery the Solarian League has been actively abetting in this star system. I intend to put a stop to it now, and I intend to take whatever steps are necessary to accomplish that objective. Which brings me to you.”

“In…what way?” Watson asked, cursing the slight catch in his voice.

“As I see it, you’re part of the problem,” Terekhov told him flatly. “You escorted the intervention battalions currently operating on Mobius Beta from the Madras Sector, and you’ve been supporting them since your arrival.” Those icy blue eyes turned even colder. “We’ve already recorded the evidence of kinetic strikes, Commander Watson, so let’s not waste anyone’s time pretending you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m willing to assume—for the moment, at least—that you’re not the senior officer of this abortion of an operation. As such, I presume you were following someone else’s orders, which gives you at least some legal cover. As one serving officer to another, however, we both know exactly what you should have said when given that order, don’t we? So I’m afraid the technicalities of your chain of command don’t buy you a whole lot with me.”

Something shriveled inside Tremont Watson—in shame, this time, not in fear—but Terekhov gave him no opportunity to defend himself.

“You have two options, Commander, but only one chance to pick between them,” the Manticoran said. “You can choose to take to your escape pods and small craft and scuttle your ships. Or you can choose not to, in which case I will blow them, and you, and every other man and woman aboard them, straight to hell from a range at which you won’t even be able to scratch my paint. As a general rule, I don’t much like butchering people who can’t fight back. Given what’s been happening on this planet, I’m willing to make an exception.”

Those ice-blue eyes bored into Tremont Watson’s soul.

“You have ten minutes to decide whether or not I do. Terekhov, clear.”