Fleet of the Damned (28 page)

And whatever van Doorman's other attributes were, being lucky was not among them.

The battle began perfectly. The task force was able to position itself close to Badung without discovery.

A Tahn convoy did appear—five fat and happy transports escorted by six destroyers, a cruiser, and assorted light patrolcraft.

Halldor ordered the attack.

And things went wrong.

Halldor's own destroyer was hit by something—a mine, space junk, never determined—in the weapons space and holed. He remoted command to a second destroyer while his own ship limped toward the cover of the
Swampscott
. The other three destroyers continued the attack.

Sten winced, staring at the main screen on the
Gamble
. He didn't need to look at the battle computer to see what had happened and what was—or in this case was not—going to happen.

The three destroyers launched their shipkillers at extreme range. The reasons were many—with the exception of Sten's people, none of the 23rd Fleet's weaponeers had seen much combat. In peacetime they would perhaps be permitted to live-fire one missile per year, and despite manufacturer's claims, simulators do not properly simulate.

Another reason might have been the rumors about the Tahn's own antiship missiles. Supposedly they had heavier warheads, superior guidance, and speed greater than that of most commissioned warships. None of those stories were true, although the Tahn shipkillers were very, very fast. The Tahn ships were lethal simply because their men and women had been thoroughly trained for years before the war started.

A third reason was the rapidly spreading rumor that there was something very wrong with the Imperial missiles. They did not go where directed, they did not compute as programmed, and they did not explode when or where they should. That rumor was absolutely true.

The three Imperial destroyers therefore swept only halfway through the Tahn convoy before reversing their action. Seconds later another destroyer was hit and destroyed. The after-action report claimed that the destroyer had been hit by an antiship missile launched by the cruiser. Sten, however, from a position of vantage, had seen the flare of a short-range missile from one of the transports. Evidently the Imperial cruiser's ECM crew wasn't paying attention or wasn't fast enough to acquire the target.

Two down.

The remaining two destroyers went to full power, retreating. As they fled toward the barely comforting umbrella that the
Swampscott
would provide, they launched three missiles each—untargeted as far as the computers on Sten's tacships could determine.

Later, they claimed hits. According to their reports, one Tahn destroyer was obliterated, the cruiser took a major hit, two transports were destroyed, and another Tahn destroyer was lightly hit. Five hits for six launches.

Unfortunately, all claims were wrong.

None of the Imperial officers or sailors reporting hits were lying—they saw missile explosions on their screens, near or fairly near the blips of Tahn ships, and assumed the best. That has always been the case in battle—people see what they want to believe.

There was only one hit.

Possibly Halldor had failed to relay the orders to put a size screen on the missiles, although he claimed otherwise. Or possibly the missile itself lost the program.

But that single missile hit perfectly, directly amidships on the
Kelly
.

Lieutenant Lamine Sekka, warrior of 200 generations, died with all his crew before his spear had been more than bloodied, along with two officers and nine sailors.

A quarter of Sten's command was gone in that one blinding flash.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

T
he return to Cavite was a glum limp. Not only had the task force gone zero-zero, Sten knew, but his crews were still in shock. Tacship service was not unlike the Mantis teams—normally they took very light casualties, being specialists in getting out of the way of the heavy artillery. But inevitably the numbers caught up, and when they did, very few friends would make it to the wake.

The task force limped home because, moments after the surviving ships rendezvoused with the
Swampscott
and the withdrawal started,
Swampy
had blown out one of her aged drivetubes. The tacships and the destroyers ended up escorting the cruiser back to Cavite.

To their surprise, Cavite was a boil of spacecraft. Huge ships—transports, assault landing craft, combat fleets—filled the skies and packed the fleet's landing grounds. Two battleships hung on the outer reaches of the atmosphere.

For a moment Sten thought that the Tahn had pulled an end run and landed on Cavite while the Imperial forces were stalking the convoy. And then his computer growled at him and began IDing the ships.

There was a full Imperial fleet plus landing and support ships for an entire Guards division.

Sten and Alex exchanged glances. They didn't say anything—Foss and his ears were on the command deck. But the thought was mutual—perhaps they weren't all doomed. Maybe this war was not going as badly as they thought. With these reinforcements, they might be able at least to hold the Tahn.

The icing on the cake was finding out that the unit was the First Guards, perhaps the best of the Imperial elite, headed by General Mahoney, Sten and Alex's old boss in Mantis.

They landed and ordered Sutton and the ground crews to get the three boats fueled, supplied, and armed for immediate takeoff. Kilgour made a slight change. Ground crews always felt as much a part of their assigned craft as any combat crew person. And Alex knew that the support teams of the
Kelly
would not only be mourning but endlessly wondering if something they had done quickly or maybe not exactly could have contributed to the ship's destruction. The
Kelly's
ground crews were taken off duty and given six hours liberty.

Liberty in shattered Cavite City wasn't much. Large portions of the city, still occupied by Tahn settlers, were off limits and most chancy to enter with anything other than an armored gravsled. Half of the stores owned by Imperial immigrants were shuttered or burnt out, and their proprietors had fled.

Passage price on any of the merchant ships that were daring enough to make the passage to Cavite and skillful enough to evade the Tahn patrols was simply set—How much do you own in liquid assets? Only the quite rich need apply for a corner space in a stinking cargo hold.

Sten filed his immediate after-action report. Then he and Kilgour freshened up, put on their least tired sets of coveralls, and started looking for Guards headquarters.

They found General Mahoney in a cacophony of underlings. Division headquarters was set up in a collection of armored carriers half a kilometer from the landing field. Sten wondered why Mahoney wasn't working out of his command assault ship.

Mahoney spotted them standing outside his personal carrier. Four gestures in sign language: Stand by. Ten minutes. I'm in the drakh.

It took twenty minutes before the last officer had his orders and was scurrying away. And then Mahoney brought them up to speed.

There may have been icing, but there wasn't any cake, the general informed them rather grimly.

"Quite a fleet," he said, indicating a monitor screen.

"Admire it real fast, gentlemen. Because it's only going to be around for another fourteen hours or so. I don't know what they nomenclature this kind of operation in Staff College, but I'd call it Dump and Depart."

"An' there's a reason?" Alex asked. "Or is the wee navy afeard a' gettin' their tunics messed?"

"Clot yes, there's a reason," Mahoney said. "And if I didn't have a staff conference in… twenty minutes, I'd pull up a bottle and give you all the gory details. But I'll give you an overall.

"First of all, the Empire's up against it. Bad. I assume you two thugs have accessed van Doorman's 'Eyes-only' sitreps from Prime?"

They had—Sten through a computer tap and Alex by making friends with a semilovely cipher clerk on the
Swampscott
. The reports were uniformly disastrous.

"The real status is even worse," Mahoney said. "This big chubby fleet that's all around us? Maybe it'd give you a start if somebody said it's the only still-intact strike force for a quarter of this galaxy?"

Sten blinked.

Mahoney smiled grimly. "The Tahn, and all their new allies who're scrambling aboard, haven't missed much. Two things you might find interesting—so far we haven't been able to mount one single offensive. Not against Tahn systems, not even to recover any of the systems we've lost. The fleet gave my transports cover—and as soon as we're off-loaded, they're going to load up every dependent and any Imperial settler whose got brains enough to evacuate. Then everything except a few of the assault ships and patrol boats haul ass for safety."

Sten grimaced.

"There aren't a whole clottin' lot of other options," Mahoney said. "The Empire can't take the chance of losing this fleet."

"It's none of my business, sir. But why're you here? Seems to me," Sten said, "like all that's going to happen is the First Guards'll go down the sewer pipe with the rest of us."

"Your CO's a cheery sort," Mahoney commented.

"Aye, sir. He's thinkit tha's a sewer pipe to go doon."

"Okay. This—like the rest of the drakh I've said—is classified. We're supposed to hold Cavite. Sooner or later what goes around'll come around. And the Empire will need a springboard to strike back from."

"What brainburn came up with
that
?"

"Your ex-boss," Mahoney said.

Sten backwatered—even though this was most informal, he didn't think it quite bright to be insulting the Eternal Emperor. "Sorry, sir. But I still don't think it's going to work."

Even though there was no one else in the carrier, Mahoney lowered his voice. "I don't either, Commander. I think the Emperor still thinks that he's got time to play with. Because sooner or later, we're going to win. He's putting his chips on sooner."

"Personal question, sir. What's your opinion?"

"I think that you and I and the Guards and van Doorman's fleet are going to end up providing some top-quality martyrs for Imperial recruiting," Mahoney said frankly. "Oh, well," he finished. "I guess things aren't going to get much worse."

Mahoney was wrong.

Three hours later, even before the fleet had finished offloading Mahoney's supplies, two Tahn destroyers hit Cavite Base. Missiles killed one of them, and the second was battered into retreat by one of the battlewagons.

But the fleet admiral had absolute orders. If the Tahn made
any
attack, he was to abort and withdraw at once, regardless of mission status on Cavite.

Ports hissed shut, and the Imperial fleet whined into the air and vanished into AM2 drive, leaving the skies of Cavite as bare as they had been before—leaving more than 7,000 Imperial civilians abandoned.

Two days after that, Tahn bombs thundered down on Cavite. The invasion bombardment had begun.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

T
he first attack was successful. Too successful.

Forty nonnuclear bombs had been skip-launched by Tahn ships, darting into the upper reaches of Cavite's ionosphere and then away. All of them had similar targets—Imperial communication and/or computer centers. Thirty-one of them hit on target, or close enough to cause significant damage. Six more sent the com centers offline for at least an hour. Two were destroyed by a very alert Guards surface-to-air missile team, and the last was blown out of the sky by a patrol boat.

Of course the bombs had to have been guided. Mahoney and his superskilled Guard technicians had less than three hours to make their analysis.

Could the bombs have been remote-flown by operators in the Tahn ships? Highly unlikely, because not only were the fixed centers of the 23rd Fleet hit—including two strikes on the critical Siglnt center—but three of Mahoney's semimobile sites were hit as well. It would be almost impossible for any human operator to have reflexes fast enough to spot the antenna array and significantly divert a downward-plunging bomb quickly enough to make a hit.

Also, none of Mahoney's ECM experts had picked up any transmission on any band aimed at the bombs.

Van Doorman, whose electronics ability stopped just short of understanding how electrical current in a cable can alternate and still work, had his own theory: The Tahn had developed a secret weapon.

Unsurprisingly, all estimates from fleet technicians echoed his theory. They knew on which side their circuit boards were buttered.

Mahoney listened to the admiral's theory politely, made noncommital noises, and got off the com. He already had his own ideas—and teams—in motion.

Any military is a juggernaut in more ways than the amount of force it can exert. It also tends to stick with any plan that has worked once or twice until it is proved that the enemy is on to it. That translates to friendly casualties, sometimes appallingly high, and sometimes even then the lesson is not learned.

For instance, during one of Earth's periodic wars, Earth Date a.d. 1914-1918, the military situation stalemated itself into trench warfare, with both sides fighting from fixed positions dug into the earth. The commander on one side, a certain Haig, ordered his troops to attack frontally and in parade-ground lines. Sixty thousand men were killed on his side in the first day alone.

After that, anyone not entirely gormless would have either relieved himself for terminal stupidity or else found a different set of tactics. But with only a few exceptions, that same battle plan was used until the war ground to an exhausted halt—each time with a casualty rate almost as catastrophic.

The Tahn were guilty of this mental laziness as well. Their system of using an agent in place to laser-guide either a bomb or a missile had worked extraordinarily well previously on a hundred or more worlds. There was no need to come up with a different method for the initial bombardment of Cavite that would precede the invasion. Especially when there were Tahn agents in place and many trained and eager members of the various Tahn revolutionary organizations available, despite the losses taken after the failure of Empire Day.