The Oncoming Storm (44 page)

“Aye, Captain,” the XO said. He paused, then opened a private channel to Kat. “Captain, it is unlikely they will be able to get close enough to the planet to open a secure channel to anyone.”

“I know,” Kat sent back. She thought, briefly, of the millions of crowns invested in Cadiz by various corporations, including her own. The Theocracy had gained a valuable prize when it overran the system. There had been no time to rig the facilities to self-destruct. “But we have to try.”

She settled back in her command chair, feeling very tired. It was her first major engagement and all she’d been able to do was run. And she was already tired of running. Part of her wanted to lurk on the edge of the system until her fleet was ready, then go on the offensive, but she knew it wasn’t possible. They didn’t have any supply dumps closer than Gamma Base. Admiral Morrison should have had pre-positioned stockpiles along the border. That he hadn’t, Kat knew, was yet another sign of criminal incompetence.

Or outright treason, she thought. But was that really possible?

“Set course for Gamma Base,” she ordered the helmsman. “Best possible speed.”

“Aye, Captain,” Weiberg said. “We’ll be there in four days.”

“Prepare to detach a destroyer to run ahead of us,” Kat ordered the XO. “She can take our reports to the StarCom.”

“Aye, Captain,” the XO said. “But it will only shave a day off our time before we can report in.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kat said. By now, someone would surely have noticed that they’d lost contact with Cadiz. All StarCom shutdowns should be notified in advance. Someone would surely draw the correct conclusion . . . and alert the Commonwealth that it was at war with the Theocracy. But what if someone hadn’t drawn the correct conclusion? Or what if something else had gone badly wrong? “We need to get our report out as quickly as possible.”

She rose to her feet, feeling almost too tired to walk. “I’ll write the report now,” she said. “You have the bridge.”

“Aye, Captain,” the XO said. “I have the bridge.”

Kat stepped into her Ready Room and closed the hatch behind her, then sagged onto the sofa and put her head in her hands. She’d failed, she told herself, as despair threatened to overcome her. Her father had expected her to gather proof the war was about to begin and galvanize the admiral into action, but she’d barely succeeded at the former and failed completely at the latter. And the end run they’d done round Morrison and his ass-kissing subordinates hadn’t been enough to save the fleet. They’d had no choice but to flee.

We made it out, she told herself. The fleet might have made it out, but it had been too badly battered to be considered combat capable any longer. We could have lost everything.

And she had lost Davidson. She cursed herself angrily, first for pulling him back into her bed and then for sending him to Cadiz. He could have called General Eastside from orbit and to hell with Marine protocol. It was easy to imagine him dead now, his shuttle slammed into the ground, his body lying in a ditch . . . or him having been taken prisoner by the Theocracy. She knew what they’d do to a trained marine.

She had loved him, once. She still cared deeply for him. And she had sent him to his death.

You’re too young, a voice whispered in the back of her head. You’re too unpolished to be put in command of a heavy cruiser, let alone a fleet.

And stop whining, you stupid bitch, another voice said. However you got it, you’re in command. You have a responsibility you cannot shirk. Or are you going to cower in your Ready Room like a stupid little girl and leave the officers under your command without orders? And prove that everyone who had doubts about you was right all along?

Angrily, she pulled herself to her feet and looked in the mirror. She looked awful, despite the genetic engineering that had gone into her body. Her hair was soaked with sweat, her uniform clung to her in awkward places, and her face looked tired and worn. She wanted to shower, then sleep for a week. Instead, she walked into the washroom, splashed water on her face, and then returned to her desk. She had a report to write.

And hope it doesn’t get me shot out of hand, she thought. She was the fleet commander now, at least until a senior officer was assigned to the fleet. There was no way her father’s influence could save her from a Board of Inquiry. And if she was found responsible for the disaster, she might well lose her career at the very least.

Shaking her head, she reached for the terminal and started to work.

“It is my duty,” Doctor Braham said, as William entered the compartment, “to warn you that Sickbay is critically low on personnel.”

“Duly noted, Doctor,” William said. He’d ordered two-thirds of her staff reassigned to the superdreadnoughts. Over five hundred crewmen had been injured and the head count had yet to be completed. Several of them would have to be shoved into stasis until the fleet reached safe haven. “Get back to work.”

“Aye, Commander,” the doctor said tartly. “However, regulations clearly state . . .”

“The regulations were written in peacetime,” William snapped. They were clear. Among other things, a vessel’s senior medical officer was not to leave her ship without the captain’s direct permission, while her complement of medical crew was not to be reduced by more than a third. “This is war.”

He sucked in a breath. How the hell had Fran’s late, unlamented commanding officer managed to get away with sending over half of his medical complement on leave at the same time? The fleet had been in orbit, with little real chance of disaster . . . but it should still have been a court-martial offense. Or had someone merely decided there was no point in trying to bring charges against one of Admiral Morrison’s cronies?

“Yes,” the doctor said. “But . . .”

“But nothing,” William said. He’d expected better from her. “Those are your orders, Doctor, which you may have in writing if you wish. We do not have the medical complement on each ship to avoid breaking regulations.”

He watched her storm off, then turned back to the endless stream of reports. Admiral Morrison had done a good job of suppressing initiative too, he noted. William was being asked to approve matters that should, by rights, have been handled by local officers. He should have told them to promote themselves to captains, as long as they were in command of starships, but it was unlikely they’d accept such orders. It was certainly unlikely he had authority to issue them.

But they’re in command now, he thought sourly. They should be captains.

He pushed the thought aside as he reviewed the first after-action report. Most of 7th Fleet’s deficiencies were hardly news to him, but there were a few interesting points. Notably, the shield generators had been out of harmony on several superdreadnoughts, weakening their shields under the onslaught from the gunboats. Missile hits that should have been shrugged off had done real damage to starships that not only cost far more than a single gunboat, but took much longer to produce. He read the rest of the report, then dropped a copy in his private subsection of the datanet. If there was an attempt to whitewash Admiral Morrison in the wake of his presumed death, William was damned if he was going to let it succeed. A few independent media outlets would be very interested in the files.

“Commander,” Roach said, “I have a detailed tactical report of our performance as a fleet command ship.”

“Shit-awful,” William snapped. He forced himself to calm his temper with an effort. It was hardly Roach’s fault that the battle had gone so badly. Hell, it couldn’t be blamed on the captain either, although she’d issued the order to retreat. “How badly did we do?”

“Not as badly as I thought,” Roach said. “We did manage to organize a tactical withdrawal under fire . . .”

“Call it a retreat,” William said. It was a tricky maneuver to pull off under fire, he knew, but fancy words didn’t change the fact they’d lost and left the enemy in possession of their target. “Or would you like to come up with a suitably stupid term for surrender?”

He felt a moment of pain for the captain. William was far from blind and it was alarmingly clear, at least to him, that the captain and her Marine CO had been lovers, once upon a time. They’d certainly served together on an earlier ship. But they had been professional, at least in public, and she hadn’t hesitated to send him to Cadiz . . . where he was missing, presumed dead. They didn’t even know if he’d managed to land at the spaceport before it had been overrun and destroyed.

She’s too young, he thought. The captain didn’t have the seasoning to handle losing someone so close to her, not in a situation where she could blame herself for his death. And she certainly would. Unlike far too many aristocrats, she was aware of crewmen and officers as people, not things to be moved round on her own personal chess board. He stared down at his console, trying to decide what to do. But he knew there was nothing he could say.

Roach coughed. “Commander?”

William scowled. Roach had been speaking and he hadn’t heard a word.

“Say that again,” he said. “I was hundreds of light years away.”

“Yes, sir,” Roach said. “The other piece of tactical information we picked up is that their datanet leaks.”

William leaned forward. “It leaks?”

“Yes, sir,” Roach said. “They seem to use tight-beam radio as well as lasers to maintain the datanet. I don’t think they entirely trust their laser links.”

“Odd,” William said. There were several reasons why maintaining laser links over a vast distance was difficult, but none of them should have applied to a fleet operating in formation. “Do you have any idea why?”

“No, sir,” Roach said. “But it does give us an opportunity to ID the command ship. There will always be some backwash from the radio transmissions.”

“Difficult to spot in a firefight,” William pointed out. He shrugged. “See if you can devise a program for identifying their command structure, then run it through simulations and see how it might work in practice. If it works, we would know which ships to target in a major fleet engagement.”

“Assuming they don’t use a staggered command structure,” Roach said. “We certainly do.”

“It’s a possibility,” William agreed. There had been no shortage of experimental programs intended to track and decode enemy signals during a battle, but none of them had ever worked in practice. Or, at least, they hadn’t provided actionable intelligence. “See what you can pull out of the records.”

He watched Roach go, then turned back to his console. Maybe it would work, in practice; certainly, there had been odder theories that had actually produced workable hardware. But he knew better than to count on any silver bullet to win the war. It would be won by superdreadnoughts and battle cruisers, missiles, bullets, and beams. And the Theocracy had already scored a significant victory.

Shaking his head, he went back to work.

Four days passed slowly, slowly enough for Kat to tour several of the superdreadnoughts and meet the men and women under her command. None of them looked anything other than tired; they were working double shifts, just trying to get the ships back into service before the Theocracy caught up with them. Kat did what she could to help, even to the point of cannibalizing components from the yard-bound vessels, but it wasn’t enough. She was feeling the stress again by the time the fleet finally opened a series of vortexes and returned to real space in the Gamma System, well away from the naval base.

“Send an IFF signal,” Kat ordered once she was satisfied there was no one waiting in ambush. The thought of the Theocracy striking so far behind the lines had kept her awake at nights. “And then link into the local StarCom. Send a copy of our report to Tyre.”

“Aye, Captain,” Ross said.

“I’m picking up multiple capital ships,” Roach reported. “Several are definitely superdreadnoughts.”

Kat felt her blood run cold. Had they been outraced by the enemy ships?

“IFF signals are Commonwealth; I say again, IFF signals are Commonwealth,” Ross said. “They’re the 6th Fleet!”

“Thank God,” the XO said.

Kat nodded. The 6th Fleet had an admiral of its own. She wouldn’t be fleet commander any longer. It was odd, but she couldn’t help feeling relieved.