Extremis (68 page)

Trevayne gently disengaged Mags’s arms and stood up.

“She won us the chance to beat a retreat to Demeter and rejoin the devastators there. Let’s not waste that chance.” He straightened, then paused for a moment and looked at the viewscreen, toward the blazing white sun of Charlotte. They had last seen the wreckage drifting toward it, to be caught in its powerful gravity well.

“It’s not enough,” she heard him say. “It’s not a sufficient funeral pyre. Not for her.”

Then he shook himself and began giving orders. And his face, for all its firm flesh and thick hair, was no longer the face of a young man.

Arduan SDS
Unzes’mes’fel
, Consolidated Fleet,
Anaht’doh Kainat
, Charlotte System

Narrok watched the last
murn
-colored blip withdraw through the warp point, signifying that the human attack on Charlotte had ended. As usual, the humans had inflicted more casualties than they had taken. Not counting the two SDSs, he had lost fifty percent more hull tonnage than the humans had lost. However, the Children had also lost many times more fighters (although none of those losses had inflicted any pilot casualties).

But the humans had been repulsed, sent fleeing back to Demeter for want of their decisive devastators. Furthermore, the warp-point modifying device had been destroyed, and prior to that had been subjected to a number of fairly detailed scans—detailed enough to facilitate ready and positive identification of such objects in the future. And the humans had left a treasure trove of information behind them: wrecks whose data banks would tell—either directly or by implication—where this new human fleet had come from, how it had arrived here in the Arm, how large it was, and, possibly, how large it might ultimately get.

Narrok let his shoulders relax, his tentacles uncoil—and was suddenly aware of the utter stillness around him. He turned—and found the entirety of his bridge staff staring at him expectantly. “Yes?” he pulsed at them.

He felt a barely suppressed surge of (admiration, approval, loyalty, exultation) behind their collective
selnarm
as his ops prime asked (with deference): “Your next orders, Senior Admiral?”

Narrok blinked all three eyes—for once, a pleasant
befthel
—and reflected:
Me? The
Senior
Admiral? Yes, I guess I am, now.

25

Marked Destiny

Our hour is marked, and no one can claim a moment of life beyond what fate has predestined.
—Napoleon

TRNS
Lancelot
, Allied Fleet, Demeter System

The mind-shattering violence had subsided. The blinding dazzle of antimatter warheads had died away, leaving only a galaxy of black dots in the eyes of any who had seen it in the view screens. The space around the warp point held only dissipating debris.

Ian Trevayne, standing on
Lancelot
’s flag bridge and keeping his exhausted body erect by sheer force of will, surveyed it all with a look of grim satisfaction. He had managed to extricate the Allied Fleet from the holocaust of Charlotte, though not without heavy losses. Now, with the fleet securing from general quarters, he permitted himself to turn to the straight, slender figure beside him.

Li Magda had held together through the nightmare retreat from Charlotte and the smashing of the Baldy pursuit, dutiful beyond grief, her face a solid but brittle mask damming up a tide of unshed tears. And now, here on the flag bridge in the sight of so many eyes, she still couldn’t let the dam burst—not yet. And he couldn’t do as he longed to do and take her in his arms and comfort her.

Instead, he approached her as closely as he dared let himself, and spoke carefully. “Mags, you know what I have to do.”

“Yes. You’re in command of the Fleet now.” Her voice was too calm.

“And you’re my second in command, as well as succeeding to command of the vanguard. I don’t want to leave you now, of all times. But we no longer can afford to risk both of us in the same ship—especially when it’s just a monitor. I have to transfer my flag to
Taconic.
”

“I know.” She kept her face carefully expressionless, as though fearful to crack the dam.

“I’ll be taking my own staff with me, of course.”
Almost all your mother’s staff died with her,
he did not add. “But I’m soon going to be making some reassignments, to add some Terran Republic people and make it a joint staff and not just a Rim/PSU affair. I’ll need your help with that.”

“I’ll get you a list of names.” Still no expression.

Trevayne stepped closer. Bidding military propriety be damned, he put his hands on her shoulders. “Mags, when I go over to
Taconic
, I want you to go with me. I’m going to be taking command of a predominantly TRN force. And they’ve just lost Li Han. And I’m…who I am. I need your help.”

At those last, simple four words, she looked up at him, and her eyes, which had held nothing but dead hurt, awoke with something else: the need to be needed.

“The night we first met,” he pressed on, “you told me the peoples of the Terran Republic looked back on me as an historical figure along the lines of Irwin Rommel. Well, what if Rommel had been reborn after eighty years—and a group of Israeli officers had been called on to serve under him against a common enemy? How should he have dealt with them?”

She spoke slowly, but with a perceptible quickening of life. “He should have let them know that he understood, and appreciated, just exactly what it meant to command an outfit like the Israeli army.”

“Yes…Yes, you’re right.”

She continued to hold his eyes. “We don’t have to leave just yet, do we?”

“No. I don’t suppose we do,” he answered, recognizing her need.

They departed the flag bridge, oblivious to all the eyes that were ostentatiously not watching.

* * *

Adrian M’Zangwe’s face was like ebon lava frozen into a mask of grief. But the chief-of-staff-become-flag-captain rose to his feet smartly enough and called out, “Attention on deck!”

The officers filling
Taconic
’s flag briefing room rose as Trevayne entered, followed by Li Magda, and proceeded to the dais. They were all in space-service grays, pretty much the same for everyone, but trimmed with the colors of the services to which they belonged. For Trevayne’s staff and a few others, it was the black and silver of the Rim Federation and the Pan-Sentient Union. But for the majority it was the deep-blue, white, and gold of the Terran Republic. It was the latter group that Trevayne watched keenly as he received a series of more-or-less routine reports, which gave him time to observe. He found no surprises. These people were behaving with every evidence of professionalism, but also with a mechanical quality, as though they had awakened into a new reality they had not yet accepted.

“Before I issue any specific orders,” he said after the last of the reports was in, “I wish to speak in general terms about our position here. Our immediate priority, of course, is to secure this system. Then we can turn our attention to the portions of the Bellerophon Arm behind us, on the far side of Mercury, while waiting for reinforcements—especially the new superdevastators, and the additional Kasugawa generators we now need, including the new ones that can allow passage of those superdevastators. Only then will we be able to resume this campaign as originally planned, and complete the liberation of the entire Arm, up to and including Bellerophon itself.”

“But…but, sir—” M’Zangwe began.

Trevayne overrode him, and his deep baritone, without getting any louder, somehow filled the room to the exclusion of any possibility of other sound. And now he frankly spoke to the TRN contingent. “Yes, we all know what we’ve lost,
who
we’ve lost. But in a very real sense, it’s not going to matter. Not when we resume our advance. Because wherever the Baldies face us…in every Terran Republic officer, they will find a Li Han.”

An electric current seemed to run through the room.

He’s made them his
, thought Li Magda.
Mother always said he had a way of doing that. She said a room seemed to get bigger when he left it. I never knew what she meant until now.

M’Zangwe stood up, and now his was a living face again.

“What are your orders, Admiral?”

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, Main Van, Consolidated Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, Charlotte System

For the first time in weeks, Narrok luxuriated in solitude. And his brief sequestration was not just a means of finding relief from the demands of being the new senior admiral. It was a necessary moment of privacy so that, in the stillness of his own mind, he could touch and explore a thought that it was unwise to approach in the presence of others, for fear that they would get some hint of it, or the associated sentiments.

Torhok was discarnated.

Narrok was not given to profound displays of emotion—not even as a Youngling—but now, for the first time in many years, he had to acknowledge (albeit easily suppress) an impulse to jump, trot about, shout, and otherwise cavort in joyous triumph and relief.

But soon enough, he became solemn, considering the small holoplot in his chambers: yes, Torhok was dead—but had he died soon enough? Narrok reviewed the staggering losses in combat hulls and trained personnel, as well as the withered industries and engineering staffs who had no new ships classes or other technologies on the way
because Torhok had forbidden expenditures on any initiative other than the one he had decreed: attack, attack, always attack.

The fool, the utter fool,
thought Narrok. The strategic holoplot of the Bellerophon Arm showed the immensity, and dire consequences, of Torhok’s megalomaniacal follies. If his limited information was correct, the humans would not be able to bring their DT-class hulls through seven strategically significant warp points. And among these seven systems, his strategic goal was to hold Ajax, Charlotte, and Polo, which formed a protective umbrella around the approaches to New Ardu—but only if their warp points remained unaltered.

Of the three systems, Charlotte was the linchpin: if it fell, the enemy had a straight run through two other systems to Bellerophon—and all of the warp points on that path were already navigable by the humans DTs. So Charlotte had to be defended at all costs. Looking to his left flank, if Ajax fell, Narrok could withdraw to Achilles, fight there as circumstances permitted, but ultimately could withdraw to Suwa, behind the safety of another DT-proof warp point.

However, on his right flank, Polo was of greater concern. It had no forts in it yet, nor SDSs, and if the humans could hit Polo before those defenses were improved, then the fallback would have to be BR-02, which had even fewer ready defenses that Polo.

This presented Narrok with a thorny choice. If he pushed all his new defensive assets into Polo, he might be able to hold it against even an all-out attack. But if the humans struck before his defenses in Polo were truly impregnable, then he would lose everything he had committed there—and BR-02 would be profoundly vulnerable.

The conundrum of how to divide his limited defensive assets had no definitive, quantitative solution, but the humans had a saying: “Never put all your eggs in one basket”—and Polo was but one basket. And after all, that basket was also in ready reach of adversaries who, when it came to breaking eggs with their technological and strategic surprises, had already proven themselves quite adept.

Quite adept indeed.

26

The Avenging Sword

To arms! to arms! ye brave!
The avenging sword unsheathe,
March on! march on! all hearts resolved
On victory or death!
—de Lisle

Headquarters, Confederation Fleet Command, Luzarix, Hyx’Tangri System

The Tangri didn’t use carpets, so Atylycx couldn’t be called on one. But that was the general idea.

He stood in the great hexagonal chamber at the heart of the Confederation Fleet Command’s fortresslike headquarters and sweated—Tangri did do that—under the pitiless gaze of Ultraz, the Dominant One, speaker of the
arnharanaks
of Horde leaders, and Heruvycx,
arnhahorrax
of the CFC. Other high CFC officers surrounded the circular table, reclining on the frameworks that served their race for chairs, but he himself was ostentatiously left standing. Slightly back from the table was Scyryx, well known to be a devious political ally of the Dominant One even though he belonged to the widely despised Korvak Horde.
He would sell himself for a pile of shit,
Atylycx thought
. And he would thereby make the better bargain.

Aloud, Atylycx protested, “But I followed the plan to the letter!”

Heruvycx half rose to his feet in fury. “Are you implying that the plan itself was at fault?”
The plan that I authored and the Dominant One approved
, he did not need to add. “Is that how you are attempting to excuse your failures, Fleet Leader?”

“If, indeed, what you lead can still be dignified by calling it a fleet,” Scyryx added with their species’ equivalent of a sneer.

Atylycx’s belly seethed with his desire to go for the oily, supercilious Korvak’s throat. But Scyryx was too well protected. So Atylycx had to be content with conspicuously ignoring him and answering Heruvycx as though the interjection had never occurred or was beneath notice. “I merely point out that the behavior of the new prey animals—the
Baldies
, as we’ve learned the humans call them—was not as we anticipated. They did not respond favorably to our proposal of an alliance.”

“A proposal which you obviously bungled! Then they went on from Treadway to take not merely Tisiphone and the BR-07 starless warp nexus, but even our outpost just beyond BR-07.”

“But,” Atylycx objected, grasping at straws, “they have made no further advances since then.”

“Yes,” said Scyryx with disdain too blatant for any male to pretend to ignore. “Their intelligence must be at fault regarding the quality of the opposition they would encounter.”

“You miserable Korvak male cu—”

“Enough!”
roared Ultraz before Atylycx could finish saying the unsayable. Startled, they all adopted submissive postures in the face of the Dominant One. He shot Scyryx a quick warning glance, then resumed in a normal volume. “Bickering serves no purpose. Let us turn our attention to the reality in which we now find ourselves.