Extremis (77 page)

Krishmahnta nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And your old ops officer is still keeping the yards humming back on Tilghman.”

“That is also correct, sir.” Krishmahnta wondered how Trevayne could not only have read through, but retained, so many details on her staff in so short a time.

Trevayne looked at Krishmahnta’s tatterdemalion cadre roster. “Looks like you have enough bodies, but not enough experience, on your staff. A fellow like this young commander could help get them working in the same direction if he was your deputy chief of staff—assuming he has authority commensurate with a full commander.”

“With respect, sir, then I still don’t have a
chief
of staff.”

“I recommend you give that position back to Admiral Watanabe.”

“But he’s no longer on my flagship, sir.”

“And where is it written, Admiral Krishmahnta, that your chief of staff needs to be on your flagship with you?”

“Ahem…eh, nowhere, sir.”

“Precisely. This way, young Wethermere’s role as
deputy
chief of staff—a post suitable to his rank—won’t ruffle any feathers on your flagship. Of course, he’ll be operating as your actual chief of staff, while Admiral Watanabe will simply fill the slot on the table of organization, thereby furnishing that august position with all the rank and gravitas it requires. And young Wethermere—well, not so young after all, judging from his files—will be able to work as a filter for, and thereby adjunct to, both your fleet intelligence officer, and your own hull’s tactical officer.”

“Well, I suppose so, sir—but as the Admiral knows, putting the actual chief of staff on another hull—well, that’s a pretty radical departure from the routinely observed manners and fashion of how to structure the command ranks during wartime—”

“My dear Admiral Krishmahnta, as a great playwright of Old Terra—and, in fact, England—approximately put it, ‘you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of our profession’s fashion: we are the makers of manners and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults.’ ” Trevayne stopped and smiled hugely. “How satisfying. I’ve been waiting a long time to use that line.”

Krishmahnta mastered her boggled officers with a stern look, then pressed her point—gently. “Still, Admiral—Shakespeare’s wisdom notwithstanding—I can already hear the rest of my staff muttering over how my actual, functional chief of staff is only a lowly brevet commander.”

“And what do you imagine they will they say about this?”

“That it’s just not done, sir.”

“Oh, but it is—if I say so.” Trevayne smiled—but there was steel behind it.

34

While Ye May

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
—Herrick

TRNS
Li Han
, Allied Fleet, Demeter System

Ian Trevayne and Li Magda stood silhouetted, alone in the
Li Han
’s observation lounge, arm in arm, oblivious to the star-dappled vista before them—indeed to everything except each other.

She finally broke the silence. “Are you sure you really want to do this now?”

“Too bloody right I’m sure!” said Trevayne…and then hesitated, and for a fleeting instant he seemed not a day older than he looked. “That is, if you’re willing…?”

“You know you don’t need to ask that.” She raised her face to his, and they kissed.

“Well, then,” he said afterward, very briskly, “this is the perfect opportunity. Since your godparents arrived with the latest Kasugawa generators, they can stand in for your mother!”

* * *

“There are any number of things I never imagined I’d live to see myself doing,” said Senator Jason Windrider in what he thought were inaudible tones. “This is one of them.”

“Shh!” hissed his wife, jabbing him in the ribs. He subsided as the ceremony drew to its close.

Everyone had expected Ian Trevayne to insist on a Rim Federation Navy chaplain. But he had surprised them.
The master of the unexpected,
Magda Petrovna Windrider thought, and certain recollections brought a wince even across the gulf of more than eight decades. He had agreed to let
Li Han
’s chaplain officiate.

Not that it greatly mattered. The Terran Republic held so many religions—all of those that humanity had carried with it from Old Terra and also a dizzying variety of new ones—that the idea of providing a chaplain for each was absurd. The chaplaincy function in the TRN was a unified one, requiring its practitioners to master—in addition to a great deal of applied psychology—a set of conventions, ceremonies, and terminology that couldn’t possibly give offense to anyone. They might not give much in the way of inspiration to anyone, either, but at least they enabled everyone to get on with business like that currently transpiring in
Li Han
’s observation lounge, with the firmament as a backdrop for the two figures in full-dress uniform, the woman in the Terran Republic’s deep-blue, white, and gold, and the man in the Rim Federation’s comparatively austere black and silver.

“And so,” concluded the chaplain, “by the authority vested in me by the Terran Republic”—he cast a slightly apprehensive glance at Trevayne, who remained serenely impassive—“I pronounce you husband and wife.”

They kissed, and the small audience of staffers and task-force commanders applauded. Andreas Hagen looked relieved that he had carried off his duties as best man without a hitch. The godparents took turns hugging Admiral Li-Trevayne Magda, and Jason Windrider extended his hand to her husband.

“I was just philosophizing to my wife about the unfathomable strangeness of the workings of fate,” he said, his brown, high-cheekboned face wreathed in a smile. “Now I’ve decided it isn’t really so strange at all.”

“You’re probably one of the few people who think so,” said Trevayne ruefully.

“Well, anyway, let’s get busy celebrating.” Windrider indicated the bar and buffet that had been set up. “For a while, anyway. I know you two will want to depart on your honeymoon.”

“Yes,” said Mags. “Probably the shortest honeymoon on record.”

Her godparents knew what she meant.

The assault on Polo was scheduled to begin in two standard days.

Allied Fleet, Polo System

Intensive probing with recon drones had revealed that the Baldies had managed to get a few system-defense ships built in Polo; several others were detected still under construction. The SBMHAWK bombardment that preceded the attack by targeting those SDSs was not the most intensive such bombardment in history, but, as Trevayne put it, nobody was likely to get rich on the difference.

Still, the fact remained that
anything
the size of an SDS could absorb a lot of hits. And they did so now, as the space around them became an almost continuous stroboscopic eruption of antimatter warheads. The barrage did not destroy them, but it did rock them back as the supermonitors began to emerge from the warp point.

The SDSs held their distance, pouring missile fire into the leading waves while launching clouds of fighters. Those fighters, like the arrays of heavy superdreadnoughts, moved into position but also held back, awaiting the appearance of the Kasugawa generator that would be the target of their single-minded, casualty-oblivious attack.

They were beginning to wonder what was keeping the generator when certain of their sensors began to pick up some very strange energy readings from the warp point.…

They hadn’t noticed the sudden emergence of a swarm of escape pods from one of the SMTs, indistinguishable from the rest. And even if they had noticed, it wouldn’t have meant anything to them. They wouldn’t have dreamed that the Kasugawa activation sequence had been going on all along inside that nondescript SMT hull.

And suddenly
they had other things on their minds as the first of the superdevastators materialized in the newly blown-open warp point.

They had seen devastators before, and were no longer taken aback by them. But their almost wholly unannounced arrival was a shock. At once they scrapped their plan and launched an all-out, but somewhat disorganized, attack.

Waves and waves of fighters—five hundred from each SDS—went in first, like a swarm of locusts around a herd of elephants. But after the initial wave, the SDTs were accompanied by assault carriers, and some of those were
Orion hulls
from the PSU that had been joining Trevayne’s force in ever-increasing numbers. Although steeply outnumbered, their pilots burned lanes of death through the dense Arduan formations, filling the comm nets with eerie, flesh-crawling howls of triumph as they did their warrior’s work.

But the SDTs were now the primary targets of the missile salvos from the Arduan SDSs. They advanced steadily through that torrent of death, and the heavy superdreadnoughts that came within range of their searing firepower died like moths in a flame. They were not maneuverable ships by most standards, but compared to the SDSs they were positively nimble. And by drawing the SDSs’ fire, they had allowed many of the still more maneuverable
SMTs to survive and come into knife range of the behemoths, working their way into blind zones and delivering gutting strokes.

It was a protracted, brutal outpouring of violence, almost inconceivable in its intensity. But in the end the SDSs died, unable to escape due to their slowness, succumbing like mastodonic beasts that took toll of their tormentors while sinking to the ground. Some of the lighter Arduan units fled across the system to the BR-02 warp point when it became clear that their crews could accomplish nothing by their discarnation, harried by the fleeter ships that had entered from Demeter with the later waves.

* * *

Admirals Trevayne and Li-Trevayne stood on
Li Han
’s flag bridge and tried to concentrate on the reports flooding in, despite the noise of the ongoing damage-control work.
Li Han
was in no danger, but she had taken enough hits to shake even her titanic frame. As had so many others. And still others had been less lucky.

Trevayne’s eyes strayed to the viewscreen. They might as well have been in a starless warp nexus, for Polo’s primary was an M5vi red dwarf, barely visible from here: a sooty stellar cinder with only a few lumps of uninhabitable frozen rock for planets.

His wife of a few days read his thoughts. “How many died for this worthless cosmic afterthought of a system?”

Trevayne drew himself up and shook off the mood. “This wasn’t what they died for. They died to
bring the end of this bloody damned war a little closer.”

“Yes. And so now we’ll have to choose among the options of how best to achieve that.”

Their eyes met. They had discussed this enough to have thoroughly explored the strategic implications of a reconquest of Polo. And to know that some hard choices now had to be made.

35

Wisdom of the Monstrous Regiment

“The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.”
—Knox (pamphlet title)

TRNS
Li Han
, Allied Fleet, Polo System

Li Han’
s flag conference room was appropriately large, with a long table in the form of a hollow rectangle surrounding a holo-display tank. One had to be at least a task-force commander to rate a seat at the table, but each had brought two or three staffers. Erica Krishmahnta had brought the newly minted Commander Ossian Wethermere. Looking across the table, she noted that Li-Trevayne Magda wasn’t present, although her ops officer was. Trevayne’s staff was already arrayed behind the chair at the head of the table.

At a quiet “Attention on deck!” from a master-at-arms beside the door, they all rose to their feet. Admirals Trevayne and Li-Trevayne entered together. The latter went to her place at the table, near its head where Trevayne sat down with a curt “As you were.” He activated the display, which showed the relevant portions of the Bellerophon Arm.
“I have called this meeting to discuss our next step. Our liberation of the Polo system”—he manipulated controls, and the newly green icon of Polo flashed for attention—“has burst open the strategic picture and opened up new possibilities.”

“Yes!” Claw of the Khan Khzhotan leaned forward avidly on the specially designed chair provided for him, luxuriant whiskers quivering. “Now we have a war of movement again—an alternative to inevitable assaults on a single front, in which these
chofaki
can optimize the defensive firepower of their SDSs.”

Trevayne nodded. “Quite. But now that we have alternatives, we must choose among them.” He exchanged a quick eye-contact with his wife before resuming. “From here in Polo we have two further avenues of advance open to us. The first is to return to Demeter and assault Charlotte with as little delay as possible. The second is to proceed onward from Polo and attack the BR-02 starless warp nexus.”

Trevayne ran his eyes around the circuit of the table. “After all the battles we have been through together since entering the Bellerophon Arm, you all know that you are free to contribute your own ideas without fear of disfavor. So I will tell you forthrightly that the Charlotte option is my personal choice.

“The Baldies will be expecting us to follow up our success here by continuing on to BR-02, and I’m willing to wager that they’re rushing every available mobile unit there. So this is just the time for an unexpected assault on Charlotte. If we take it, we open a direct line of approach to Bellerophon
.

“However, as I said at the outset, we need to consider all options. And there is a case to be made for BR-02 as our next objective. I will now ask Admiral Li-Trevayne to set forth that case.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” said Mags into the general stunned silence, fully equaling her husband’s deadpan propriety. “Bluntly, no matter how many of their mobile units the Baldies may be deploying away from Charlotte, we know that they have at least a dozen system-defense ships there. On the other hand, we found the Baldies still in the process of assembling SDSs here in Polo, with only a few completed. This indicates that there will probably be few if any of them in BR-02. Furthermore, capture of BR-02 would open up two axes of approach to Bellerophon: one through Madras and Pegasus, and the other through Elein. Of course,
capture of Charlotte would also give us a second axis of approach, but that one is far longer than either of these, and is impassable for DTs without the use of Kasugawa generators.”