The primary shone with the typical yellowish-white of a G0v star, and the still-distant planet was the same blue as every other life-bearing waterworld. So why, Corin wondered, did the sight in the flagship's main screen cause his flesh to prickle and his heartbeat to accelerate?
At least, his covert glances around the flag bridge told him, he wasn't alone in the reaction. Probably no one present had ever seen the world which had been humanity's womb.
"Commodore," a diffident voice from the comm station informed him, "we've received an acknowledgment. They're asking us to cut our drive out here."
"What?" Garth rumbled from the special command chair that had been installed for him. "I thought the deal was that we were to take up orbit around Earth."
"What about it?" Corin passed the question along to the comm officer.
"Something about traffic regs, sir. Also, they say Prime Minister Chewning is standing by to talk to the General."
"Aha!" Garth's misgivings about the order to halt evaporated. The massive heavy-planet man stood up and moved with his always-surprising speed to stand before the comm screen's pickup. "Put him on."
Corin turned to the communicator in the arm of his command chair and gave the necessary orders to the flag captain. The drive was deactivated, as were the impellers, and the blue dot that was Old Earth ceased to wax visibly in the screen as they proceeded along a hyperbolic orbit around Sol, only slightly skewed from the ecliptic. Corin glanced at the holo tank and gave an unconscious nod as he saw that the Deathstriders' entire flotilla had done the same, performing as a tightly coordinated whole. But most of his attention was on the face in the comm screen.
Damiano Chewning wore the kind of richly somber clothes appropriate for a prime minister, even of an "Empire" largely restricted to Sol and Alpha Centauri. His smile showed that he wasn't really buck-toothed, but he should have been—his face, with its plump cheeks and small receding chin, was unmistakably rabbitlike. Graying black hair was slicked back from a retreating hairline, as oily as his manner.
"Welcome to the home system of us all, General Krona," Chewning said with perfectly modulated sincerity. "I speak not just for His Imperial Majesty Ferrand II but for everyone at Sol. Your arrival comes as a vast relief to us all."
"Thank you, Prime Minister." Garth attempted a smoothness to which his voice was ill-suited. "Naturally I moved up my departure date as soon as I learned of the danger His Imperial Majesty faces."
"Yes!" Chewning summoned up all the indicia of indignation. "All loyal Imperial subjects must rally against the archtraitor Liang, who is about to add an attack on the sacred soil of Old Earth to his list of crimes—a list which is already long and black. And you, General, are especially noted for your steadfast and unswerving loyalty to the dynasty."
"So I like to believe, Prime Minister." At least Garth had the requisite ability to keep a straight face. "And while I may have had to make certain practical accommodations to the unsettled conditions of recent years—"
"As have we all, General," Chewning interjected unctuously.
"—nevertheless my basic allegiance to the legitimate Duschane dynasty has never wavered. And any doubts as to my proper course of action vanished when I heard the news of Liang's murder of the late Emperor Oleg and his entire family."
"Indeed, General, your blood must have boiled in your veins!" Chewning wore the look of a solemn rodent. "It must be clear to all loyal subjects that their allegiance belongs to His Imperial Majesty Ferrand II, who is the last remaining torchbearer of the lawful succession."
"And who has repealed the late Emperor Armand's prohibition on possession of heavy space-based weaponry by free companies," Garth added pointedly.
"Of course, General! I have advised His Imperial Majesty that changed conditions have rendered that statute outdated and unenforceable. Given my not inconsiderable influence as His Imperial Majesty's guardian during his minority" —an insinuating smile— "I'm sure the repeal of which you speak is a foregone conclusion."
A frown gathered beneath Garth's poker face. "It was my understanding that the decree had already been issued."
"A mere formality, I assure you. Consider it an accomplished fact. Whatever minor legal technicalities may remain will be finalized as soon as our united forces have repelled Liang's murderous hordes . . . which you, as a man of action, will surely agree must take precedence."
"Hmm . . ." Garth's bass was almost below the threshold of hearing. "Well, Prime Minister, if you put it like that—"
"Then we'll say no more about the matter!" Chewning beamed with innocent happiness. "Such minor issues will undoubtedly resolve themselves, fading into insignificance beside our common resolve to stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of His Imperial Majesty against—"
Janille sidled up beside Corin. "Garth's stomach must be even stronger than the rest of him," she muttered.
Corin grinned. "We both know he's a man of many hidden talents." For a moment they watched the General make appropriate responses as Chewning proceeded from insincerity to platitude to bromide and then back to insincerity. "Still, you have to wonder how he can keep his lunch down. It's hard enough for me, and I don't even have to pretend to be taking it seriously."
Janille gave him a slantwise glance. "You've got no right to complain. You advised Garth in favor of this alliance. And you couldn't possibly have had any illusions about Chewning. In fact, I know you didn't."
"Garth had been planning on this move all along!" Corin heard the defensiveness in his own voice.
"But he'd been having second thoughts since Chewning rummaged up this nonentity Ferrand and set him up as a puppet Emperor. It made it impossible for him to form an alliance with Chewning without seeming to support Ferrand's claim."
"What claim?" Corin demanded irritably. "Everybody knows Ferrand has every quality of a joke except humor."
"So you argued when you advised Garth to stick to his original plan. That was why he decided he could afford to go through the motions of pretending to return to the Duschane fold. Not too surprising—he's more and more inclined to follow your advice. You've gotten to be a regular power behind the throne."
"I'm a little young to be a Gray Eminence. Besides, Garth has to have a throne before I can be the power behind it." Corin glanced at Janille in search of a lightening of her moodiness. Seeing none, he felt his irritation redouble. "Look, what's bothering you? This just happens to be the ideal time to put Garth's long-standing plan into effect. We've known that ever since Liang openly denounced Ferrand as a pretender and Chewning as a traitor, and declared his intention of wiping out both of them. Now Chewning needs us. We'll never be in a better bargaining position."
"That's all true, or at least arguable. But it's not the real reason you wanted us to ally ourselves with Chewning."
"Oh?" With an effort, Corin kept his voice down to the low murmur in which they'd both been speaking. "Then what, pray tell, is my real reason?"
"Simple. You've never really forgiven yourself for leaving the Imperial Fleet. You need to offer your services to the nearest thing to a legitimate Duschane successor available—and that's Chewning's puppet Ferrand, now that Ivar Brady-Schiavona has deposed his Duschane puppet. The way things are these days, it's the closest you can come to returning to your Imperial allegiance."
"That's the most—" Corin's voice jarred to a halt as stubborn self-knowledge caught up with anger, bringing with it the realization of why he was angry. When he resumed, what came out was mortifyingly weak. "But when Brady-Schiavona was officially acting in Julian Duschane's name, I never advised Garth to join him."
"Of course not. At first, you were afraid he'd be death on a Fleet deserter like you. Then, by the time it became clear how lenient his policy was, even to his own former enemies, his power base had gotten too big. In any partnership between him and Garth, it would be only too obvious who the junior partner was. No such problems with Chewning, of course. He's got no principles to offend; and, as you say, he really does need us to save him from Liang." Janille's expression softened a trifle. "That's the odd thing: it's entirely possible that your advice was correct. Probable, even."
"Then what are you worried about?"
"Just your ability to sell yourself a bill of goods about your own motives. You can rationalize so well that you believe your own rationalizations. That's dangerous—and the more influence you exert on Garth, the more dangerous it gets."
Corin opened his mouth to protest, with a vehemence he wouldn't have felt at an accusation that hadn't touched a nerve ending of unresolved and long-denied emotions. But Janille shushed him, for Chewning was finally showing signs of getting down to practicalities. The face in the comm screen lost some of its rabbit semblance as its owner spoke in matter-of-fact tones.
"And now, General, I suggest that your staff confer with that of Admiral Kirpal, commander of the Sol System Defense Command. It will be necessary to coordinate our joint efforts with a view to making the most efficient use of the forces available."
"Certainly, Prime Minister." Garth had agreed in advance that Kirpal was to be in overall operational command—this was Chewning's system, after all—but as a coordinator only. He'd had his own independent command of the Deathstriders spelled out to an elaborate degree of specificity; when dealing with Chewning it was best to get things in writing.
The arrangements were made, with further exchanges of courtesies, and Chewning signed off. Garth returned to his command chair and sank into it gratefully. "Whew! I'd rather face nanoweapons than deal with a slime mold like that."
Janille was in no mood to commiserate. "Get used to it. If . . . sorry, when you become Emperor, you'll spend most of your time blandly exchanging pompous lies with politicians."
Garth grinned in his beard. "Well, on second thought, I suppose it has its rewarding aspects."
"In the meantime," she inquired, unmollified, "do you really think you can trust Chewning?"
"Of course not," Corin answered for Garth, a little too quickly. "Nobody's ever thought that. He's congenitally incapable of honest dealing except under duress. But that's precisely what we're looking at here."
"Right," Garth nodded emphatically. "He'll deal straight with us because he's got no choice."
"Then why is he waffling on his commitment to repeal Armand's statute limiting the weapons allowed to free companies?"
"Because to him, waffling is like breathing," Garth said, an impatient edge entering his voice. "He's a politician, remember. But it doesn't mean anything. He's got his nuts on the chopping block, and needs us to fend off the axe. He's in no position to bring us to book on some technical violation."
Janille looked from Garth to Corin and back again. It did seem to make sense—so much sense that she couldn't articulate an objection to it, any more than she had back at Epsilon Eridani. But she would have felt better about the reasoning if she hadn't known she was hearing it from an incurable optimist and a man predisposed to see the bright side of any course of action that seemed to offer a chance to expiate his own imagined sins.
"I hope you two are right," was all she said.
The flag bridge was unchanged save for Janille's absence. Even the star configuration in the main screen hadn't been visibly altered by the passage of a few standard days, for they were still falling along the same orbital path. It was as good a place as any to await an attack which could come from any direction. Nowhere was it written that Liang's forces were required to proceed directly from Lambda Serpenti.
Garth approached from the comm station, looking uncharacteristically moody. "Well, at least she's there and settled in."
"Of course she is," Corin said soothingly, deploying his length more comfortably in the command chair. Janille had departed with the bulk of the Deathstriders' surface forces for the fourth planet—Mars, Corin reminded himself.
"I ought to be there myself," Garth rumbled.
"Nonsense. She's perfectly capable of coordinating with Chewning's local ground commander and handling our end of the planetary defense. And you're needed here. There's a lot more to the Deathstriders now than just the ground component." Corin indicated the holo tank that displayed their flotilla. The battlecruiser and two cruisers he'd brought with him into the Deathstriders Company were almost lost in the array. They even had two Impregnable-class battleships, including the flagship Impervious, which they'd acquired along with Epsilon Eridani. No, the Deathstriders could no longer be characterized simply as a powered-armor outfit, even though Garth continued to use the title "general" and wear the original version of the uniform. The tail had gotten more than big enough to wag the dog. That bothered some people. Corin sometimes wondered if Garth was one of them.
Maybe, he reflected, that was part of the reason Garth had never solved the whole legal problem of the mercenaries' new battle-line capability by solemnly swearing allegiance to the provisional government he himself had created at Epsilon Eridani, dissolving the Deathstriders, and instantly reconstituting them as the militia of that provisional government. It would have simplified things, but Garth had never seriously considered it. He liked his freedom of action as commander of a mercenary company, even one whose size and complexity had relegated him to the role of chairman of the board.
Garth's own thoughts seemed to be following similar channels. "I could be some use to her there," he insisted. "All my experience is in ground combat. Here, I'm nothing but a very high-ranking passenger."
"What would you be there? She's operationally under the command of Chewning's man on Mars. Your place is wherever we may need command decisions made—which is here." Privately, in some sealed-off part of himself, Corin wondered if the general was being honest with either of them about his reason for wanting to be closer to Janille.
"You're probably right," Garth muttered, and started to turn away.
The general-quarters klaxon, which Impervious' skipper was under orders to sound the instant hostiles were detected approaching the Sol system, seemed to shatter the very air of the flag bridge.
Garth whirled back around, and his eyes met Corin's with a gleam that made the latter reconsider his furtive thoughts of a moment before. "They weren't supposed to get here quite this soon."
"No, they weren't," Corin answered absently. With most of his consciousness he activated his private holo tank.
Once upon a time, he knew, the offensive had held a terrible edge in space warfare. When ships could outpace the energies of sensors, attackers could arrive before the tidings of their coming. It was one of the things that had enabled the young Republic of Sigma Draconis to give the tottering, rotten edifice of the United Nations its final push, seventeen centuries before. But with modern sensors, it was a different matter. The robotic early-warning stations out in Sol's Oort Cloud had detected the incoming hostiles far outside the borders of the holo tank's system-scale display. So only the green icons of friendly units were visible so far. But as Corin watched, the computer automatically added a scarlet arrow, representing the invaders' projected course. It pierced the edge of the display at about eight o'clock—to use a terminology whose origin few remembered any more—slightly above the ecliptic plane.
Garth was watching too. "So they've come straight from Lambda Serpenti," he remarked. "Liang must have been in a hurry to put his forces into this system. Maybe he thought he could beat us here."
"He almost did," Corin muttered. He studied the positions of the green icons, all orbiting clockwise as per the display's orientation. Their own flotilla was at about six o'clock, between the orbits of Mars (currently at nine o'clock) and Jupiter (four o'clock). Earth, closer to the yellow light of Sol than any of them, orbited at about one-thirty. He needed no computer to tell him the hostiles' most direct course to the homeworld.
"They'll have to follow a hyperbolic course across the inner system, between us and Sol," he told Garth.
"Right." The general did some calculations of his own, then turned to Corin with a hunter's grin. "Which means that Kirpal will be in a perfect position to intercept! Yes, they must have put this operation together in a hurry. And if we get our heads and asses wired together in time to do a really tight turn, we'll be able to get into an intercept course too."
"Our ships are powering up—the reports are coming in now. But shouldn't we wait until we have more information? After all, we don't know for certain that they're going to obediently follow our projected course."
"Negative. We've got no time to lose. This is going to be a difficult maneuver—practically a reversal of direction. I want it commenced the instant all units are ready." Quietly: "That's an order, Corin."
Things weren't often phrased that way between them. Corin's "Aye aye, sir" was just as quiet. He gave the necessary orders to the flag captain. Presently the flotilla engaged its drives and began to apply its impellers to the task of curving tightly out of orbit onto a new—and almost diametrically opposite—course. It would have been impossible in the days of reaction drives. It was strenuous even in the present age. Garth's probably right, Corin reflected. We don't have a minute to lose. . . . But then a new set of readouts caught his eye.
"The computer is downloading some more input from the early-warning stations," he reported. "They're in a position to refine their course projection." They both stared at the tank for the heartbeat it took to download the new data. Then, so abruptly that a blinked eye might have missed it, the scarlet arrow jumped upward a few degrees. And a dotted red line snaked forward from its tip, curving not below Sol as they were viewing the system display but above it, in a hyperbola that intersected the green icon which represented Mars—and Janille.
Garth's deep voice held a vast calm. "Well, you were right—we should have waited for all the data. That's the last time I'll overrule you on anything outside an atmosphere. Get us turned back around, into a new intercept course."
Corin didn't trust himself to reply directly. He just gave the orders that sent the flotilla into yet another near reversal of course. Fortunately, they hadn't had time to alter their vector beyond all hope of restoration. The computer projected that they'd be able—barely—to achieve an intercept. That was the good news. The bad news was that Kirpal's forces couldn't possibly arrive in time to influence the outcome of the coming battle. Instead of proceeding almost directly toward Jupiter, Liang's fleet was curving away from it.
"I suppose," Garth's too-calm basso interrupted Corin's thoughts, "Liang planned this a little better than we thought."
Corin nodded miserably. They had fallen into the elementary, inexcusable error of assuming stupidity on the enemy's part. Any Fleet database in the Empire could forecast the positions of Sol's planets at any given time. Liang couldn't have relished the prospect of sending his forces into the waiting jaws of the great Fleet bases on Jupiter's moons. Besides, he knew Earth itself was strongly held. So he'd opted to seize Mars instead, on the far side of Sol from Earth and Jupiter. It would give him a foothold in the Sol system from which he'd be hard to dislodge, given the universal reluctance to employ the ultimate weapons against a life-bearing planet—even one that hadn't always been that way.
Corin mentally reviewed what he knew of that planet. About ten percent the mass of Earth, with just under forty percent of its gravity, it had lost its liquid water before life could achieve a foothold—the common fate of planets below a certain mass, beyond a certain distance from their suns. Nowadays, nobody bothered with such worlds. But in the first century of the space age, when the scientific consensus had offered no hope that interstellar flight would ever be more than marginally practicable, Mars had seemed an attractive candidate for terraforming. Ice asteroids had been nudged into collision courses with it, biological packages had seeded the new atmosphere those impacts had produced, and species of ever-increasing levels of complexity had been introduced over the course of two and a half centuries. The General War had barely produced a hiccup in the process, for afterwards the reconstructed United Nations had supported it as a prestige-generating government project which neither required nor created any forbidden technological innovation. As the wave front of colonization had moved on to the stars, the planet had become a backwater—but an attractive backwater, whose inhabitants cultivated the air of romance that was renewed every time classic early-twentieth-century space opera underwent one of its periodic revivals. (The canals could be justified in terms of water distribution, but rumor had always insisted they were really for the tourists.) Mars' ravaging by the Zyungen, like Earth's, had stopped short of total destruction of the biosphere. By now, few people were even aware that Mars hadn't always been inhabited.
Corin came out of his woolgathering as the hostile fleet itself appeared at the edge of the holo tank, following its projected course like a bead sliding along a string. Force-composition analysis was being downloaded, and an order of battle began to appear as readouts. Corin and Garth both studied them, until the latter grunted with a kind of satisfaction. "We were right about one thing, at least: Liang launched this attack in a hurry, with whatever forces he had available. It could be worse—a lot worse."
"It's bad enough, though," Corin said glumly. The Deathstriders were outnumbered in every class of ship. He looked wistfully at the green arrowhead which had awakened to life in the holo tank near Jupiter, where Kirpal had departed orbit. Together, they would have been a match for the invading fleet. As it was, Kirpal couldn't possibly rendezvous with them in time to do Mars any good.
On some isolated level, Corin took an instant to note that neither he nor Garth was even mentioning the possibility that they might simply decline to engage Liang's numerically superior forces, in the absence of support from Kirpal. They could do so with honor, it would be a perfectly defensible decision . . . and it was altogether out of the question. Janille was on Mars.
"The good news," he said after another moment's study of Liang's order of battle, "is that what we're looking at isn't really a fighting force. It's a convoy."
"Right." Garth thrust his massive head forward and gazed at the auxiliary tank where the enemy formation was displayed. His old self began to reawaken. "They're escorting a flock of assault transports full of Marines to be dropped on Mars—and they can't leave them undefended. So they're in a tactical straitjacket. We, on the other hand, are free to maneuver any way we want. That's our edge. We've got to . . . but no. This is your show out here, Corin. However you want to run it, I'll back you to the hilt."
At that moment, for all the subsurface ambivalence of their relationship, and for all his realization that Garth's judgment was sometimes flawed, Corin saw clearly why the Deathstriders had always been willing to do a little more for the big heavy-planet man than was humanly possible. He contented himself with an acknowledgment, brief to the point of curtness, then turned to his displays and readouts.
With the drive's inner field off, he had plenty of subjective time to contemplate his options. Certain fundamental facts of space combat defined those options. Perhaps the most self-evident of these was that a ship under drive, outpacing light, could not be attacked from astern with energy weapons. He could have brought his flotilla sweeping in behind the invaders, but it would have been pointless. Likewise, cutting across the oncoming enemy's course at a right angle—"crossing the T," in ancient wet-navy parlance—would have allowed for only a single, immeasurably brief moment of unthinkable violence, after which Liang's fleet (damaged, no doubt) would have been free to proceed on to Mars while the Deathstriders fought to reverse course and come around. So Corin gave a series of orders which sent his force curving along a course which would intersect the enemy's at a slight angle. The "line ahead"—or its three-dimensional equivalent—had been reborn in space warfare, for ships on parallel or converging courses under drive could engage each other in a beam-weapons duel, aiming not at their targets but at points where their near-sentient brains predicted those targets would be when lightspeed energies reached those points.
Time passed, and Corin watched as the two icons drew slowly together in the system display, the invaders coming in from about eight fifteen on the imaginary clock he mentally superimposed on the holo tank, and the Deathstriders curving in from "below" at a shallow angle. Presently the two forces entered missile range, and tiny new red icons began to pop into existence, speeding away from Liang's battleships under the thrust of their suicidally overpowered impellers. Corin gave an order, and the deck shivered beneath his feet as Impervious, along with her sister ship Implacable, replied in kind. Liang had more battleships—the only kind of ship capable of carrying drive-equipped missiles—and as the red and green missile icons interpenetrated, Corin saw that all too many of the former were getting through. Some of his outlying ships began to report hits. It wasn't disastrous, for the missiles were too large and expensive to be employed en masse. Still . . .
Garth spoke up. "Maybe we'd better increase the percentage of decoys in the warhead mix for our next wave of missiles, Corin."
"Too late to make a change like that—or for it to do any good," Corin relied absently. "We've just got to get into beam range faster." He gave a series of commands to the flag captain, and the green icon in the tank shifted course a few degrees to starboard, heading toward a rendezvous with its scarlet counterpart.
"This is going to take us straight through them, Corin." Garth's voice held neither jitters nor condemnation. He was merely making an observation.
"Not quite `straight' through them; we'll still be only at about a thirty-degree angle. But our original plan of drawing into a parallel course with them and slugging it out with beams isn't going to work." Corin winced as a cruiser died in the auxiliary tank that displayed his ships individually. "Besides, if I'm right we ought to be able to . . ." His voice trailed off as he thought furiously. He shot a series of questions and problems to his ops officer, who transferred them to specialists with the talent for direct neural interfacing with computers. Garth kept quiet; his promise not to countermand Corin evidently still held good. So did the enemy formation the sensors had reported: like a funnel of warships with the small end forward, protecting the assault transports inside.
Then they were in beam range. And even at the compressed time-rate at which they were existing without their inner field, a soul-shakingly short time passed before they were in among Liang's formation, and then out of it. In that brief interval, X-ray lasers raved against deflector screens, and transposed antimatter warheads—it almost never worked any more, with routine sensor-confusion countermeasures preventing precise placement, but it was always worth a try—died in detonations whose energies strained the fabric of space itself, explosions actually visible in the main screen, like fireflies against the star-strewn blackness. Then they were through, and Corin was rapping out orders and scanning reports.
His guts clenched painfully at the thought of their losses. But they'd come through better, and inflicted more damage, than he'd dared let himself hope. Not that he hadn't expected his people to give better than they got against the garrison units Liang had mustered in the long-quiescent Serpens/Bootes region. And Garth had been right: the enemy was locked into a rigid formation and an unvarying Marsward course. Screaming through that formation in a single quick pass, they'd been able to defeat in detail a limited number of their predictably moving opponents, without having to take on the entire array. And now Corin saw that his orders were being carried out. His helmsmen were wrenching their ships into a tight turn to "starboard" (as viewed in the tank), bringing them around for another pass. He'd calculated that there would be time for three more such passes before the battle reached Mars.
"Corin," Garth spoke quietly, "we need to consider targeting the assault transports."
It was a decision Corin had been putting off. His orders had called for concentrating on the enemy combat units; they'd flashed past the troop haulers inside the "funnel" without giving them courtesy of a shot. But . . .
"You realize," he said carefully, "that the more of our fire we divert from the warships, the more losses we're going to take."
Garth gave a rumble of assent. "Yes. And you realize that the more we concentrate on the warships, the more of their Marines are going to make it to Mars."
And Janille, Corin didn't add. He chewed his lower lip, but only for a moment—this decision would have to be made quickly. "I'll have alternate-numbered cruisers target the assault transports. The battleships' and battlecruisers' heavier weapons are needed to crack the warships' defenses."
"Good enough," Garth sighed. He sat back while Corin gave the necessary orders, just in time for their next pass. He hoped that this time the invaders would still be shaken from the previous exchange. He was rudely disappointed. Liang—or whoever was commanding in his name—had been able to steady them, and this time they knew what to expect. The return fire was steadier and more precise.
Shouts of "Incoming!" began to penetrate Corin's near trance of concentration on the battle pattern, and Impervious bucked as the energy transfer of a hit momentarily overcame her inertial compensators. Nothing serious, he thought with a quick glance at the damage control readouts. His momentary shift in focus almost made him miss the moment when they interpenetrated with the assault transports. Those had military-rated drives, of course—otherwise they would have been death traps. But their deflector screens were weaker than those of warships, and the cruisers' weapons savaged them. Corin stole a glance at Garth, whose expression was complex. It must be only too easy for him to identify with troopers waiting out a battle of which they knew nothing, each one alone with the knowledge that he could at any instant be obliterated without warning by forces he could do nothing to combat. At least death would be quick, as death in space combat tended to be.
The paroxysm of high-energy violence was over, and Corin was left staring sickly at their loss figures. He looked away, only to meet Garth's eyes.
"Another two passes and there won't be enough of us left to make a difference, Corin." The lack of blame in Garth's voice somehow made it even worse. He put his unreserved trust in me, and I failed.
"Commodore!" The comm officer's voice intruded on Corin's misery. "Implacable reports that impeller damage makes it impossible for her to keep formation." In confirmation, a green icon in the auxiliary tank began to drop behind as the rest of the flotilla performed its turnabout maneuver.
"Tell Captain Avila to drop back and take up a course parallel to the hostiles, out of beam range. She's to try to give us missile support, as long as her missiles last." As Corin gave the order, his thought tolled in counterpoint: Fifty percent of our battleship strength . . . He took a moment to master himself, then turned to meet Garth's eyes again.
"Garth, it's no good. If we spend ourselves out here, there'll be nobody to contest their control of Martian orbital space when they get there. Our ground forces will be at their mercy. We've got to break off this engagement and proceed directly there. We can be in position when they arrive."
"And maybe Janille can give us some support," Garth suggested. It was the first time either of them had mentioned her by name. "While you're giving the orders, why don't I send her a squeal?"
"It won't reach her much before we do. But it can't hurt."
As Corin transmitted through the flag captain the orders that would halt the flotilla's swing back into combat and send it on a course parallel with the enemy's, he heard Garth muttering a message to the comm officer. The "squeal" was misnamed, because a message sent from a ship under drive to someone existing at normal time in the outside universe was, from the latter's standpoint, too brief to qualify even as that. Indeed, it was too brief to be picked up at all, unless the intended listener was very alert for it, and knew exactly where it was coming from. In Janille's case, the second was certain and the first nearly so. Once she'd received it, she could have it slowed down by a factor of hundreds of thousands. She could not, however, reply; they'd be at Mars while she was still clearing her throat to do so. Such communication was, of necessity, one-way.
Corin kept his attention on the tank. His ships were following instructions, a little raggedly but in good time. They settled into their new course, out of beam range of the invaders, and kept up a desultory missile duel. On the far side of the opposing formation, Implacable did the same, although it fell further and further behind. He noted with relief that Liang's admiral didn't detach ships to finish off the lamed battleship, but continued to keep formation.
The squeal was, of course, ahead of them. In fact, the tachyons of which it was composed had arrived at precisely the instant they were sent, or at least with no time lag anyone had ever succeeded in measuring. But they weren't far behind it. Soon Mars grew into a ball in the main screen, rushing toward them. Then they reached the Chen Limit—a fairly close-in one, for this was a small planet—and deactivated their drives. The ball seemed to slam to a stop, but actually continued growing at a much slower rate as their impellers braked their intrinsic velocity down, turning into a pale-blue-and-tawny globe. (Once, Corin knew, it had been known as the "Red Planet"; but terraforming had changed that.)
They'd barely begun to assume orbit when Janille hailed them. She appeared on the comm screen clad in the regulation bodystockinglike liner, against a background of frantic activity as support crews, moving in the distinctive way permitted by Martian gravity, brought up attachable modular components for the Deathstriders' powered armor. Corin recognized those components for what they were, and knew what Janille was up to before she even spoke.
"I got your squeal," she told them. "We don't have much time, because they're right behind you. I've got an idea."
"We're open to them," Garth said drily.
"Then get your ships into positions where Deimos and Phobos can support them." Mars' two tiny moons—captured asteroids, really—had long ago been partially hollowed out and turned into defensive installations which, though obsolete by now, had to be taken seriously here inside the Chen Limit where ships could not make themselves irresistible and invulnerable with their drive fields. "They'll have to fight you. And we'll—"
"Yes!" Garth, too, had seen what she had in mind. "But do you really think you can make enough of a difference to justify the risk?"
"Depends. Has your computer identified the enemy flagship?"
"Not yet. They've been in a rigid formation, with no patterns of movement to be analyzed. But when they arrive here, and have to redeploy—"
"Put your computer into linkage with mine so it can download the analysis immediately. By then we ought to be ready to transpose down here. For now . . . good luck. Signing off."
They were barely settled into orbit thirty-four hundred miles above Mars' surface, trailing Phobos by about thirty degrees, with Deimos—fortuitously on the same side of the primary planet at this point in its seven-and-a-half-hour orbit—below and in position to offer support, when the hostiles reached the Chen Limit and killed their drives. As Janille had foreseen, they immediately began to deploy to attack the satellite bases and the Deathstrider ships. Things hadn't changed fundamentally since the wet-navy days of pre-spaceflight Earth, when it had been axiomatic that no amphibious invasion could succeed without command of the sea. Nowadays, a successful planetary assault required that the defenders' orbital assets be neutralized. Impervious' brain watched and analyzed as the attackers' formation dissolved and reconfigured itself; with the assault transports and some light escorts safely behind. And the battle they'd broken off resumed.
In orbital space, with the scope for maneuvering strictly limited, it was a brutish slugging match of sheer firepower against targets with predictable vectors. Fighters rose from the subsurface vaults of Phobos, along with the missiles which, not having to hold their own drives, could be employed in large numbers. The capital ships also belched forth salvoes of such missiles, along with torrents of directed energy. It was a holocaust of high-intensity violence, carried on in what would have seemed to some an eerie silence . . . except, of course, when some ship's deflector screens failed for an instant and the naked metal hull within gave way to a segment of hell.
Corin was steadying himself against the concussion of such a hit—a minor one, in a remote and nonessential area of Impervious' hugeness—when the call came from the sensor station. "Commodore, the computer has picked out the enemy flagship." In the tactical tank, one of the hostile battleships now appeared surrounded by a red circle, from whatever angle one viewed it. "The data was simultaneously passed on to Colonel Dornay. And . . . yes, now!" Tiny green dots had begun appearing in the tank.
They would not, Corin knew, show in the enemy's holo tanks. The powered-armor suits that had begun popping out of nothingness in Martian orbital space, transposed up from the surface, had too little mass to have been detected even had sensors been trained on that precise area of space at the time. But those suits' transponders spoke to the Deathstriders' command instrumentation aboard Impervious, and more and more of the little tiny icons, like a swath of green fairy dust, appeared in the tank . . . and, under the thrust of the suits' impeller modules, began to move, converging on the scarlet-haloed battleship.
Deflector screens resisted material objects with a force directly proportional to those objects' velocity. High-speed ones usually burned up with the heat of their own shedded energy. But slow-moving ones could pass through with no more resistance than that of a stiff breeze. The Deathstriders, trained in EVA combat, converged on the enemy flagship whose occupants didn't even become aware of their presence until they were close enough to activate point-defense radars. They took some losses from the lasers those radars controlled. But most of them lived to attach themselves with magnetic clamps to the battleship's outer skin, which they then punctured with breaching charges. Then, like microbes entering a doomed organism, they blasted their way in through bulkhead after bulkhead.
Corin, listening to fragmentary reports, tried to imagine the pandemonium that flagship's interior must have become. Every warship carried a Marine detachment, but they probably hadn't been in their powered armor, and while they were getting into it the Deathstriders must have been unstoppable, incinerating any ordinary security forces that tried to bar their way. And their suits' minicomputers were linked with a database that held the deck plan of every Fleet ship class. Now that they knew which class of battleship they were dealing with, those plans appeared on helmet HUDs. Inexorably, the microorganisms ate their way inward toward the leviathan's nerve centers.
Corin became aware of the background growl from the comm station, as Garth tried to raise Janille at the surface base. "What do you mean she's not available? Who am I speaking to? What did you say? What was that?" Garth turned an aghast face to Corin. "They say she's with the assault force, aboard the enemy flagship!"
"Well, you started the Deathstriders tradition that the C.O. leads an attack in person."
"But . . . but that was different!"
A hail on the priority channel cut Garth's protestations off—Janille's voice, shouting to make herself heard above a background din. "This is Colonel Dornay, reporting from the Combat Information Center of the battleship Indestructible, flagship of the self-styled—"
"Janille, cut the crap!" A catch in Garth's voice spoiled the full-throated bellow he'd intended. "What's going on over there?"
"We're in control here at the CIC—" A loud boom caused Garth's ruddiness and Corin's swarthiness to pale. "—although some counterattacks are still in progress. Our other elements are still working their way toward the bridge. The point is, they can't coordinate their fleet properly, with us here."
"Yes, I see!" Corin exclaimed. The ever-fluctuating display of figures, and the motion of the moving lights in the tank, had already begun to tell a tale that trained eyes could read. "Garth, we've got to turn into them, go for close action."
The general looked dubiously at the tank. He wasn't as attuned to the nuances of space combat as Corin, but he could see the relative numbers of green and red icons. "Are you sure?"
"Look at the computer breakdown. They're still putting out as much firepower, but less of it is getting through. That's because nobody's allocating their fire to overload our defenses at specified points. And look at the way they're moving, like . . . Well, just take my word for it. It'll be almost like attacking a gaggle of individual ships—or, at best, individual squadrons—milling around with no command-and-control."
If Garth hesitated, it was for no appreciable length of time. "It's your battle, Corin. Fight it."
Without even pausing to give a formal acknowledgment, Corin addressed Janille, wishing they could have gotten a visual. He hastily outlined his intentions. "Hold out there as long as you can," he concluded.
"Hold out, hell! We're going to take this sucker! Just be sure you don't attack it. Be a hell of a note to get our asses vaporized by friendly fire. Signing off."
"Good luck," Corin said quietly, but she'd already cut the connection and there was no response but a soft, crackling hiss. He put her out of his mind, and began issuing orders.
Presently, the green icons in the tank began swinging simultaneously into an almost ninety-degree course change, plunging into the scarlet battle-mass. Their opponents, already shaken badly by their loss of central control, buckled under the unexpected move and recoiled from the impact of what passed for point-blank fire in space war: beam weapons used at their optimum range, and missiles launched in "sprint" mode, practically unguided and barely interceptable. It was a battle in which there could be no thought of defense, save the purely passive sort represented by deflector screens. There was only mutual offense, at hellish levels of intensity and suicidally short ranges. Ships began to die rapidly—far more of the invaders' ships, Corin saw, but enough of his own, too . . . enough and more than enough. Still, with the enemy's fire control reduced to chaos, the advantage was clearly with the Deathstriders. He wondered, as he sat strapped into his command chair on a flag bridge that periodically bucked to the harsh music of the damage-control klaxons, if that advantage would be enough to let them outlast the enemy's numbers.
It had gone on longer—and with more slaughter—than Corin would have believed possible, when two things happened. First Janille appeared on the comm screen against the backdrop of a battle-devastated bridge, to announce that the enemy flagship had been secured. Mere seconds later, what was left of the enemy formation began to dissolve as its component ships broke off the engagement and scattered, each fleeing along the vector best calculated to take it out of danger. One by one they passed the Chen Limit and receded into the starfields more swiftly than light. The flag bridge crew was too stunned to cheer.
Garth was the first to recover. "What happened, Corin? Did they panic because their flagship had surrendered?"
"No—they'd probably written it off already. No, it was that." And Corin pointed to the main holo tank, at what they'd all forgotten about.
Kirpal's fresh, undepleted force, its transit of the inner Sol system completed, had crossed Mars' Chen Limit.
"So," Garth said slowly, "they saw that they couldn't possibly hope to resist him—not with the losses they've taken." He heaved a sigh. "We held out long enough, and inflicted enough damage. But at what a cost!" His eyes looked haunted as they scanned the columns of lost and damaged ships. No mercenary leader could ever be as stoical about really heavy casualties as an officer who had the resources of a state behind him and could view his command as expendable in pursuit of an objective. With mercenaries, the unit was end as well as means; it must be preserved, for it was its own raison d'etre. Garth had lost sight of that in the heat of the battle they'd just endured, and the realization shook him.
"Well, let's have comm put us in touch with Kirpal," he finally said. "Hey, look, they're coming in right behind Implacable."
It was true. The crippled battleship had finally labored gallantly up and cut its tortured drive. Kirpal's formation was looming up astern of it, still invisible of course, although Implacable herself was now showing as a tiny gleam of reflected sunlight in the main screen.
Corin felt delayed reaction to what they'd been through begin to seep into him. It's over, the thought sighed through him like a spring breeze. It's over, and Janille's alive. He let lassitude take him as he sank back into his command chair and watched that little gleam in the screen. . . . But then something in the main tank, something not quite right, caught the corner of his eye.
Minute green dots, appearing in space ahead of the oncoming flotilla. And they seemed to be converging on Implacable. What . . . ?
In the main screen, the small point of light that was Implacable flared like the birth of a sun, dazzling their eyes for a fraction of a second before the automatic glare-damping circuitry could kick in. Then there was just an expanding cloud of superheated debris, cooling rapidly, guttering out like dying embers.
Garth was the first on the flag bridge to recover, though a full heartbeat passed after the explosion before he surged to his feet. "Raise Kirpal!" he roared at the comm officer.
It was unnecessary, because Chewning's admiral appeared on the comm screen and spoke without preamble. "I am ordered by Prime Minister Chewning, in His Imperial Majesty's name, to inform you that you are in violation of the Imperial edict on possession of weapons of mass destruction by free companies—which is still in force. You are therefore liable to be treated as outlaws, subject to summary suppressive action by the Fleet." The screen blanked as unceremoniously as it had awakened, but there was no silence, for the air of the flag bridge was clamorous with panic-stricken calls from other ships, and robotic alarms of incoming fire. And in the tank, Kirpal's ships swept down on them, preceded by a wave front of missiles like those that had obliterated Implacable. Other missiles also appeared in the tank, for the Deimos and Phobos bases were also pouring fire into their erstwhile allies.
"General order to all elements!" Garth thundered. "Every ship for itself. Save yourselves any way you can." He seemed about to say more, but a hit on Impervious' physical hull rocked the great ship and sent him staggering back against his command chair. He strapped himself in hurriedly, for much of the missile storm was converging on the flagship.
The Deathstrider ships were endeavoring to follow Garth's orders, but many of them were caught flat-footed and died in silent flares of superheated plasma. Still more were impaled by searing X-ray lasers as Kirpal's ships drew into beam range. But some reached the Chen Limit and vanished. Impervious strained to follow them, while struggling to fend off her attackers.
"Garth!" Corin shouted above the din. "Don't forget Janille. We've got to get her off that ship."
"It's too late, Corin." Garth spoke low, but his bass made itself heard as he pointed at the tank. The new attackers must have been monitoring their communications, and known that the flagship of Liang's fleet was now in the Deathstriders' hands. It was no immediate threat to them—the mercenaries who'd captured it hadn't the training to take it into battle. But Kirpal had spared it an offhand barrage, and now its icon blinked on and off in the bloodless way the holo tank had of denoting critical damage, and its course was beginning to sag downward toward the planetary atmosphere below, whose friction would consume it.
Corin, his mind already afloat in a limitless universe of horror, found himself sinking down into an even lower level of the unthinkable. With practiced swiftness, he clamped his consciousness into automatic thought processes. There'll be plenty of time for a breakdown later, he thought. But then he studied the damage board. No, there won't, he amended. Little by little, Impervious died under several ships' fire.
"Raise Kirpal," Garth said, in a voice Corin had never heard the big adventurer use. "Tell him we surrender."
"I'm trying, sir," the comm officer reported. "No response."
"They're not interested in accepting surrenders," Corin heard himself say.
Garth squeezed his eyes tightly shut for a heartbeat, then spoke with the calm of ultimate despair. "Pass the order to abandon ship."
They ran through the endless passageways with all the other hurrying figures, periodically staggering as the ship reeled from a new hit. But the ship's brain continued to operate the defensive systems, and a battleship that was actively defending itself took a lot of killing. They ought, Corin thought, to be able to make it to the docking bay, with its lifeboats and drive-equipped pinnaces.
Then the deck jumped, and the hellish sound of tearing metal stunned them. Ahead, flame billowed out into the passageway, consuming human bodies like moths in a flame. They picked themselves up and hurried in the opposite direction.
"I don't suppose we'll reach the docking bay after all," Garth said in the same strangely calm voice.
"But there's one thing we might be able to reach: the forward transposer room."
Interest seemed to shake loose from under Garth's blanket of hopelessness. "But where could we transpose to? I have a feeling Chewning's people on the surface are wiping out whoever Janille left down there."
"Probably. But what other choice have we got?"
"None, of course. Lead the way."
Incredibly, the transposer technicians were still manning their posts when they got there, sending one group of tattered fugitives after another to the Martian surface. "General . . . Commodore!" their chief cried. "We're still functioning, even though our power supply keeps getting disrupted. We can still send the two of you down. . . . Wait a minute, somebody's signaling for acknowledgment." She turned to the comm station that every transposer facility had. Its screen flashed into life, revealing a figure in battle-soiled powered-armor liner, against the backdrop of a small spacecraft's interior.
"Janille!" shouted Corin and Garth in unison.
"Thank God it's you! There's nobody on the flag bridge, but your ship's brain had the initiative to try all the locations where you might be." She swept back matted auburn hair and drew a deep breath. "Look, there's not much time. Have them transpose you to the location of my link."
"But—but where are you?" Garth demanded.
"I managed to get off Indestructible in a pinnace. Most of my people also got away—but in lifeboats, which can only get them down to the surface of Mars, where Chewning's butchers will get them. There were two others with me, but the boat bay took a hit just as we were getting in—I'm the only one who made it into the pinnace in time." She angrily shook off the clinging ghosts. "Look, we haven't got time for this. Transpose now."
"We've got a fix on her link, sir," the chief technie announced. "She's out there, barely within range."
"And I can't stay here much longer," Janille added. "They haven't noticed a pinnace out here, this close to Impervious, but that won't last."
"And neither will Impervious," Corin said grimly as another hit rocked the deck. "Let's go, Garth, while we still can."
They mounted the transposer stage. "Put this thing on automatic and get yourselves off as soon as we're gone," Garth ordered the chief.
"Will do, sir. Good luck." She reached for her controls . . . and the transposer station vanished from their ken, replaced by the tiny cargo hold of a pinnace, with a link lying on the deck.
As always, the transposer acted as a sink for potential-energy differentials, and the pinnace seemed steady under them. But then, as they scrambled for the hatch that led toward the little bridge-cum-passenger cabin, the craft bucked like a scalded animal, sending them staggering against the bulkheads. Garth recovered first and hauled Corin to his feet. They stumbled the rest of the way, arriving just in time to see an expanding, dissipating plasma cloud in the viewscreen beyond Janille's head.
"Impervious," Corin stated rather than asked.
Janille nodded. "She blew just after you got off her. That was the shock wave that we just felt." It would have destroyed them, Corin knew, if there had been an atmosphere to carry it. As it was, the wave front of superheated gas that had been a battleship had sent the pinnace tumbling across the sky. The screen's artificial stabilization of the outside view, and the artificial gravity holding them to the deck, concealed the fact that Janille was still trying to bring the little craft under control.
"Let me," Corin said, elbowing her aside. She didn't argue. He had far more training and experience at vessel handling than the minimal amount she'd picked up—it was a wonder that she'd been able to pilot the pinnace to a near rendezvous with Impervious. He worked with single-minded concentration, not letting himself think of the transposer technicians who had died an instant after lingering to save him and Garth.
After a moment, the gas shell that marked Impervious' grave began to recede rapidly in the view aft, as did the occasional flashes that were all that was visible of the diminishing battle—or, rather, massacre. "We're under control," Corin announced, "but I couldn't be too picky about our course."
"Never mind that," Garth replied. "Just get us out of here."
Presently Mars ceased to be a world below and became a planet in the distance—funny the way one always knew when that particular threshold had been crossed, Corin thought. Then they were past the Chen Limit, and he engaged the drive. Mars instantly began to fall away at an impossible rate, dropping down an infinite well—as, presently, did Sol.
Corin sat back, finally taking the time to notice that he was drenched with sweat and that his hands were trembling. "We're safe," he said dully. "Our heading is toward Aquila, but we can afford to change course now."
"No." Garth's voice brought his two companions' heads turning toward him, for it was deeper than they'd ever heard it, a subliminal rumble below the normal bass range. It was also emotionless—too emotionless. "We don't want to change course—at least not toward Epsilon Eridani. That would be suicide."
"Why?"
"Think about it, Janille. Chewning saw a perfect opportunity in the way the battle developed, with us on the receiving end of Liang's attack. He let us stop Liang for him, and bleed ourselves white doing so. Then, and only then, he took advantage of the opportunity to rid himself of a potential rival, by turning on us when we were uniquely vulnerable. Having done so, he's not going to just let us go back to our base and recover, is he?" Garth's voice was still level, which somehow heightened the horror of his words. "No, I guarantee that after Kirpal has finished mopping up he's going to head directly to Epsilon Eridani, before our people there have even heard what's happened. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he's already en route.
"No," Garth went on after a pause, and under its calm surface his voice began to build in volume gradually and, at first, almost imperceptibly. "I say we're headed exactly where we want to go: toward sectors that Ivar Brady-Schiavona controls, through his son Roderick. Because now our only option is to offer our services to him."
"But," Corin interrupted, "what about our ships that escaped from Sol? Aren't they going to return to Epsilon Eridani?"
"I doubt if many of them will. You and I have never trained our officers to be mindless robots. They'll be able to figure out which way the wind is blowing, just as we have. And they'll reach the same conclusions. Yes, we'll be seeing them again, out Aquila way. They know as well as we do that Brady-Schiavona has a reputation for generosity to whoever joins him, regardless of background. And . . . sooner or later, he's going to put paid to Chewning. I want to be there when he does!" Now the increase in volume was no longer gradual. It grew to a bull roar, hurting the ears, reverberating through the structure of this confined space as the rage that had been banked under layers of shock and exhaustion came thundering forth at last. "Kirpal was just following orders—he gets a clean death, if he begs for it hard enough. But as for Chewning, I'm going to personally cut his heart out and feed it to pigs! I swear it!"
Abruptly, with the echoes still chasing each other around the little compartment, Garth flung himself down into a passenger couch and sat glaring silently. Corin and Janille were equally silent. They all stared into the screen. The pinnace fled on into the galactic night.