Extremis (8 page)

Krishmahnta smiled sagely. “Unless you were going to sprout some admiral’s shoulder boards upon undertaking those initiatives, Mr. Wethermere, I predict you’d have spent a couple of years chasing your own tail with nothing to show for it. Tell me, who sent you on this assignment?”

“Well, my orders were cut by CINCTER—”

“No, Lieutenant. Who—what
person
—gave you your mission?”

“Erm…retired admiral Sanders, sir.”

Maybe not a fool’s errand after all
, thought Krishmahnta as she entertained the hope that Watanabe would shut his hanging jaw sometime within the next minute. “
The
Admiral Sanders? Admiral
Kevin
Sanders? Who was involved in the Bug War? Ultimately ran Naval—and then Federation—Intelligence?”
And God knows what else
. The antediluvian spymaster was rumored to have his sprightly fingers in almost everything.

“Yes, sir. That Admiral Sanders.”

And then Krishmahnta looked at Wethermere’s blue eyes again and knew. “You’re a relative of his, aren’t you?”

And the next thing that Wethermere did won Krishmahnta over so completely that it later annoyed her. Ossian Wethermere blushed bright red. “Uh, yes, ma’am—sir. He’s a relative. A distant relative.”

“How distant?”

Wethermere had to think. “I believe the correct term is a first cousin thrice removed.”

Watanabe blinked. “Damn. I don’t even know what that means.”

Wethermere folded his hands contemplatively. “Well, sir, as I understand it—”

Krishmahnta stood. “That will do nicely, Lieutenant. And thank you for bringing the report. By the way, you’re not in PSUN uniform. Have you deserted the Union?” A ready and winning smile flashed in good-natured response to her jest.
If he wasn’t so young, I just might—

“No, sir. I just made it off Bellerophon in time—but my gear didn’t. When I reported for duty, they pulled this from spares.”

“It suits you, Lieutenant. Dismissed.”

Wethermere snapped a salute, smiled, was gone.

Krishmahnta looked at Watanabe—who was already staring at her. “Look what I found in
my
soup,” he said, rolling his eyes after the departed lieutenant.

She shook her head. “Just when you think a day can’t get any stranger.… Well, we’ve got business to get to—but ’Nab?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Get me a dossier on Mr. Wethermere. Put the request—coded—in the packet back to Miharu. If anyone’s got a file on him, it will be her.”

“Yes, sir. What next?”

“Send word to Pinnace Group 17. I need them to depart along with the courier he came in on.”

“All five pinnaces, sir? Are they just confirming transit of the courier, or—”

“I need confirmation of each step of our signal relay, Yoshi—and separate couriers to Suwa and Achilles to relay them copies of the signal I’m sending to Miharu.”

“And what are the couriers transmitting, sir?”

“That we are executing contingency Sierra-Charlie, Captain.”

Watanabe released a long, low whistle. “Fast withdrawal from Beaumont? Any operational parameters?”

Krishmahnta nodded to her chief of staff and nominal captain of the
Gallipoli
. “Yoshikuni is to hold eighteen hours from this mark, then an all-haste withdrawal. No taffrails to the enemy, but no dawdling, either. And ’Nab, I need those pinnace jockeys to fly like their lives depend on it—because theirs just might, and ours certainly will. I need proof of message receipt at each system, or our closely timed double withdrawal could turn into a train wreck, with Baldy battlewagons ready to take advantage. So I need to know
exactly
when my order gets through to each system. And if there is
any
failure along the commo chain to Admiral Yoshikuni in Beaumont, I am to be informed immediately. Make it clear to the pinnace crews—this is the most important mission of their careers, and our eyes are upon them.”

“Yes, sir. Orders for our fleet, Admiral?”

Krishmahnta shook her head. “No, nothing yet. But in the event of a general attack, COs do not have discretionary release to employ their external ordnance. They keep what’s in their racks until they receive a Fleet signal indicating otherwise. Is that clear?”

“Crystal, sir.”

“Lastly, send the word that, when it is determined that the enemy from Jason is committed and attacking us in force, we are likely to employ plan Zulu-X-Ray, and the ships designated for that action should be prepared to respond at once.”

Yoshi Watanabe stared. “Which plan did you say?”

Krishmahnta could not look him in the eye. “Plan Zulu-X-Ray. We didn’t discuss it much.”

Watanabe had already found it on his data tablet. He looked up, expressionless. “This is pretty risky. Could be a death sentence.”

“For a lot more of them than us,
if
we play it right.”

“That’s a mighty big if, Admiral.”

“It always is, in combat, ’Nab. Send the word to the cruisers first. They should be moving out to a flanking position before the Baldies get here. No reason to—”

The alert klaxon howled. The automated call to battle stations began droning under it.

Krishmahnta was on the bridge by the third peal of the klaxon. She looked down quickly into the holotank. And swallowed the sudden rush of responding bile with utter aplomb: “Here they come again.”

In the holotank, red motes swarmed out of the purple hole like angry hornets. And although some were already beginning to flash amber—indicating potentially disabling damage from the combined firepower of the human monitors and supermonitors—the hornets kept coming, swarming, climbing over each other in their mad, burning desire to kill.

To kill Erica Krishmahnta’s fleet.

2

Theirs Not to Reason Why

Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die
—Tennyson

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, First Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, Beaumont System

Narrok looked over at Urkhot, who was absorbed,
selnarm
infolded, as he watched the fleets grind against each other.
In the bridge’s holopod, the titanic struggle appeared to be waged by scintillant gnats that swarmed, tangled, and expired at a very leisurely pace. Theirs was a slow-motion ballet of death—which represented massive ships hurtling through space at twenty percent of the speed of light, intermittently being incinerated or shattered by the scaled-down supernovae of antimatter warheads. At close ranges, the behemoths—here represented as actinic mayflies—actually sliced into each other with matter-annihilating force beams, knife-fighting to the death across light-seconds of open space.

Or, rather,
mostly
open space. The human admiral had kept its second line out of the battle, and wisely so: those rearmost enemy ships were beyond the range of most of Narrok’s weapons but were still able to fire long-reaching missiles of great destructive power—HBMs—even while being resupplied by tenders. Narrok had engaged these distant menaces as best he could, but his missiles were of the shorter-ranged CBM and SBM varieties. These smaller missiles launched quickly and were wonderful at overwhelming the humans’ defensive fire: the burning, blackened shells of three of their dreadnoughts and two of their monitors were compelling evidence of that capability. But Narrok did not have enough HBMs to overcome the massive and extraordinarily well-coordinated defensive fire of the farther human ships.

The victims of the enemy’s steady HBM barrages—fifteen of Narrok’s older generation of SDs, and four of his newer ones with the Desai drive—were dull, lifeless
vrel
-colored cinders, motionless in the holopod and dropping rapidly behind the van of his fleet.

“Admiral Narrok,” sent his sensor second.

“Yes?”

“We have detected multiple signatures from the Suwa warp point, sir.”

Urkhot returned from his absorption in the unfolding battle. “Does this mean they are retreating? At last?”

“No,
Holodah’kri
. I believe the warp activity indicates that the two human fleets are regularly exchanging information by couriers. Which means they have seen through my ruse, as I thought. They are coordinating their responses to our two separate attacks—here and in the Raiden system.”

“What will they do?”

(Humor, rue.) “If I knew that, esteemed Urkhot, I would be Illudor’s twin. But I may conjecture. Ultimately, they will withdraw. Had they enough force to hold the warp point, they would have done so from the outset.”

“So, let us smash them in their weakness and move straight on to Suwa as you suggest.”

“I do suggest that,
Holodah’kri
. I also suggest that we make haste slowly. Just because they have insufficient force to defend the warp point does not mean that they have insufficient force to inflict major damage on us here.”

“Well, if so, why haven’t they used it? And why have they not stayed in the swift reaches of space beyond this…this Desai limit.”

“That is what I am pondering,
Holodah’kri
. It may be that, by engaging us within the limit, they wish to keep our newest, fastest ships slowed to half of their maximum speed. This will work to buy more time for their comrades to withdraw from Raiden. Or there may be a trap hidden in the pattern of their current deployment. I am particularly troubled that they have not only put all their forces inside the Desai limit, but have now retreated so far back into it that they are near both the planet and the other side of the limit.”

“Is this world—Beaumont—a great military power?”

“No. It has a small population and minimal industry. Our scans confirm this human data as correct. But worlds can be dangerous in other ways.”

“How do you mean?”

“The gravitic forces near a planet can further degrade the efficiency of reactionless drives, particularly large ones.”

“This is to our advantage. At last we will be able to send forth our flocks of fighters and overwhelm them.”

“So it would seem—and this is precisely why I am not quick to take that action.”

“What? Why?”

“Because if we can see the tactical implications of the enemy position, the
griarfeksh
commander can certainly see it, too. My question becomes: Given the ground it has chosen, what plans is the
griarfeksh
commander trying to hatch that I do not see?”

Urkhot’s lesser tentacle tips switched fitfully. (Impatience.) “Admiral, even in war, things often are simply as they seem. You have said it yourself: the enemy wishes to extend this engagement. Perhaps, in order to do so, they have had to put themselves in a position where they are more vulnerable to our fighters—which they have yet to see us employ in numbers. This could be their oversight…or simply the choice they made between two imperfect alternatives.”

(Consensus.) “This could, of course, be exactly what we are witnessing,
Holodah’kri
. But so far, caution has—”

“—has made you suspect in the eyes of the Council,” interrupted Urkhot with a pulse of (remonstrance). “Decisive action
now
might do much to restore Torhok’s opinion of you.”

And there it was—a direct threat, indicating how Urkhot’s report might influence Narrok’s future command of the Fleet. But if Narrok was going to bow to that influence, Urkhot would need to become more insistent—and direct—in his urgings: much more direct.

“
Holodah’kri
, are you saying that you convey Torhok’s direct and explicit wishes in this matter?”

Urkhot’s
selnarm
retracted for a moment, then flexed forth again (hauteur:) “I know his mind, and his opinions, well enough, Admiral. And it would be his opinion—”

“To attack? Regardless of the uncertainties?”

“Of course to attack! You have assessed the risks and the advantages as much as you may. Further delay reveals only a lack of resolve, perhaps even an insufficient ardor to ensure the safety and future of our race.”

“So Torhok would wish me to attack at this moment?”

“Yes, of course. Have I not made this plain enough?”

(Compliance, calm.) “Plain enough,
Holodah’kri
,” affirmed Narrok, who, with a
selnarmic
flick, instructed the computer to make ten recordings of their exchange, make them code-access only, and hide three of them as distributed data-packets throughout the system’s active memory, reassemblable only if summoned together by a twenty-digit cipher of his own creation. Then he turned back to his bridge personnel. “Ops Prime.”

“Admiral?”

“Summon Fleet Second Mretlak back to the bridge. Fleet orders: target these enemy vessels”—he encircled four older monitors with a quick looping of a lesser tentacle—“with all our fire, including full launch of external ordnance commencing in fifteen seconds. Flight Prime?”

“Sir?”

“Eighty percent of fighters prepare for rapid launch, steady sequence. Mission profile
Tofret-ulz
.”

Urkhot wondered. “You will strike at their flank? Not their center, which you will weaken by destroying those four targets?”

“
Tofret-ulz
is a two-pronged attack,
Holodah’kri
. An initial attack to the center, a far-flung sweep by a third of the squadrons to the right—in an attempt to catch their larger ships maneuvering inward to reinforce the center—”

“—and thereby expose their rear blind spots to the approaching fighters.”

“That is the theory behind this ploy.”

“And are there counters to your ploy?”

(Patience.) “There are always counters,
Holodah’kri
.”

RFNS
Jellicoe
, Task Force One, Further Rim Fleet, Beaumont System

“Admiral Yoshikuni, signal from Admiral Krishmahnta.”

About damned time
. “Give me the short version, Ops.”

“She sends ‘contingency Sierra-Charlie,’ sir.”

Miharu Yoshikuni smiled crookedly, and watched the Baldies finally come forward to engage her at close range, right on the heels of a devastating missile barrage. “Well, we’ll oblige as soon as we can, but we’re in the thick of it now. Pity that signal didn’t get here thirty minutes ago.”

“Admiral, the
Dawntreader
—she’s…”