Fleet of the Damned (30 page)

… and the log automatically recorded the readout monitoring the
Galkin's
condition.

Sten paced the control room of the
Gamble
, listening intently to everything Sh'aarl't said.

"It all looks perfectly normal," she reported. "Except for the fact that sometime after 2300 hours, every man, woman, and being on the
Galkin
decided to vanish."

Sten looked at Alex. The stocky Edinburghian looked very unhappy.

"Ah noo believe he ghosts," he said, "but—"

"Wait a minute! I think we got something!" Sh'aarl't's voice crackled excitedly over the monitor.

Sten waited much longer than a minute. He became impatient. "Report, Sh'aarl't! What
have
you got?"

"Well, according to the log—"

There was an eerie silence as her voice stopped in mid-sentence. It was if the
Gamble's
com system had gone dead. Before Sten could say a word, Foss sat bolt up in his chair.

"Skipper! I don't understand it! They're gone!"

Sten rushed to his side and looked at the screen. The large blips that had represented the
Claggett
and the
Galkin
had disappeared.

"It's gotta be some kind of malfunction with the system," Sten said, knowing even as he said it that it wasn't so.

"Not a chance, sir," Foss said, his voice cracking.

It wasn't necessary to give any orders—within bare moments, the
Gamble
was at battle stations, the drive at instant readiness. Foss ran every test and every electronic search pattern in the book, plus a few more he had invented.

Once again: nothing.

There was nothing on the radar, nothing on the intermediate or deep sensors, and no directional pickup on any broadcast frequency, including emergency. At one light-second, the two docked ships should have been on visual. But the screens were blank.

"Quarter power," Sten ordered. "Bring us up over that ship real slow."

All inputs remained negative.

"Back-plot the orbit. Mr. Kilgour, I want a figure-eight search pattern. Half speed."

"Aye, sir."

They searched in a gradually widening moving globe pattern for three full E-days. But the
Claggett
, Sh'aarl't, her two officers, and nine enlisted had vanished along with the
Galkin
.

There was no explanation. And there never would be one.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

T
hree hours out of Romney, the com began yammering onscreen, the message sent en clair:

ALL SHIPS… ALL SHIPS… CAVITE UNDER ATTACK. INVASION BY TAHN UNDER WAY. ALL SHIPS RETURN TO HOME BASE. ATTACK, REPEAT ATTACK.

Foss already had the fiche in the navcomputer.

"On command," Sten said. "Commit."

"Attack repeat attack," Alex snorted. "Tha' dinnae be a command! Thae's an invite't' Culloden."

Kilgour was right. No
Claggett
… no
Kelly
… Sten assumed the
Richards
was getting slapped back together on Romney. Sten had no intentions of plummeting his very thin-skinned tacship—or, come to think about it, his own rather thin-skinned body—into the middle of a fleet melee.

He turned the intercom on and read the broadcast from Cavite to his crew without allowing any emotion to enter his voice. Then he said equally flatly, "If anyone's got an idea on what we do when we hit Cavite, input, please."

Alex reached across and kept his finger on the intercom button. "A wee modification as wha' our commander's sayin'. Ideas tha' dinnae win ae of us medals what be posthumous. Mr. Kilgour's mum dinnae be boas tin' as her lad comes home ae a box."

There weren't any ideas.

"Great," Sten muttered. "We're about as thick in the tactics department as van Doorman."

"Dinnae fash. We'll do flash fakin't it."

Lady Atago and Admiral Deska had made very sure that there was no possibility of the invasion failing a second time. More than 500 ships swarmed the Caltor System. The Imperial 23rd Fleet wasn't outmanned so much as buried.

Mahoney had stationed Guard detachments on every world and moonlet of the system. Each detachment was given as sophisticated a sensing system as possible. That was not much, even though every detector that could be found had been stripped out of downed or civilian ships, and emplaced. The strike-back weaponry was equally jury-rigged.

Everything from missiles to private yachts to out-atmosphere runabouts to obsolete ships had been hung in space and linked to the improvised guidance systems. Even Ensign Tapia's tug had been roboticized, its control room a deserted spaghetti of wiring.

Most of these improvised missiles were either destroyed long before they found a target or went wonky and missed completely.

But some of them got through.

"Go for the transports," Mahoney had told his guardsmen. They tried. Troopships were ripped open, sardine-spilling Tahn soldiers into space or sending them pinwheeling and igniting like meteorites into atmosphere.

But the Tahn were too strong.

Mahoney watched from his new headquarters, burrowed a hundred meters into a hillock near Cavite Field as, one by one, his com teams lost contact with the off-Cavite detachments. Mahoney's face was quite impassive.

A tech glared down at her general from a com set on one of the balconies above the central floor. Solid imperium, she thought in fury. The clot doesn't even care.

In actuality, Mahoney
was
trying to analyze what he felt. Not one report, he thought with approval, of any of my people breaking. What about you, Ian? You've taken…let's see, about twenty-five percent casualties. What does that feel like? Not too bad, he thought. No worse, say, than getting your right arm amputated without anaesthetic. Don't feel sorry for yourself, General. If you do something dumb like crying or swearing, your whole division could break.

What arrogance, he marveled. And what would it matter if they did? This is the last time around, isn't it? There isn't going to be enough left of the First Guard to compose a suicide note.

Like you told Sten, he thought. All we're doing is building martyrs for the cause. And enough of that, Ian. You have work to do.

Mahoney pointed to an operator and was instantly linked to all surviving detachment commanders. "They're still coming in, people. Get your reserves out of their holes and ready to go."

The ground around Mahoney shuddered suddenly, and the lights flashed twice before finding a functioning emergency circuit.

The Tahn were hitting Cavite itself.

The lead elements of Tahn ships were unmanned strafers. As ordered, the naval and Guard antiaircraft teams held their fire. Ammunition and missile reserves were almost nonexistent. Wait, they had been told, for the real targets: manned ships. That was expected to be the second wave.

But Atago's tactics were different.

The second element was made up of twenty small assault transports. The transports broke up, and from each ship, six troop capsules dropped toward the city below. In each capsule was a team of Tahn commandos.

Unlike the larger Imperial troop capsule that used wings and tear-away chutes for braking, these capsules were fitted only with retrorockets, set to fire when the capsule was pointed downward and very close to the ground.

Some of them never corrected, and the rockets sent the capsules pinwheeling before they crashed at full speed.

Even the ones that functioned correctly only slowed the capsules down to approximately 50 kph. The internal shock bracing was supposed to provide the rest of the cushioning—of a sort. Thirty percent of the commandos were able to stumble out of their wrecked capsules, form up, and head for their assigned objectives.

That was quite satisfactory—Lady Atago had anticipated and allowed for an eighty percent loss on landing. The Tahn cynicism had gone still further—
none
of the assigned objectives were expected to be taken. This had not been told to the commandos at their briefing. Nor was their real mission revealed—to pinprick the Imperial defenders, to distract them from the main force landings.

One team of commandos did reach its objective—the Carlton Hotel that Atago had theorized might still be used by the 23rd Fleet headquarters. But it had been abandoned weeks ago—van Doorman had returned to the
Swampscott
, which was sitting in the deep revetment near Cavite Field. And the commandos were distracting, but only to the Guard teams who had been ordered to maintain street patrols. The Tahn commandos failed, but in failing they caused casualties and ammunition expenditures. The Empire could afford neither.

The third wave was the heaviest. Four battleships, including the now-repaired
Forez
, Atago and Deska's flagship; twenty cruisers; and a horde of destroyers raved fire at the planet. In the center of the formation were seventy-five fat-bellied assault transports.

Previously hidden Imperial missile launchers rose from bare ground, out of buildings and sheds, and even, in the case of one particular inspired team, from an abandoned double-decked transport gravsled. It was almost impossible to miss.

But it was equally impossible to hit all of the Tahn ships. Sixty-three of the transports grounded in a ring some 400 kilometers outside Cavite City, and their sides clamshelled and Tahn assault troops stormed out.

Lady Atago allowed herself a smile of satisfaction. To her, all that remained was mopping up.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

T
he
Gamble
hung in space, hopefully hidden from the Tahn forces landing on Cavite by one of the world's moons. Sten's entire crew, less Foss, who was minding the sensors, was crammed onto the tiny mess deck reviewing the options.

The problem was that neither Sten nor Kilgour could figure out an attack plan against the Tahn that did not include their own destruction. As Alex pointed out, "As far ae Ah can ken, th' job description dinnae ken kazikami, or wha'e'er th' word is."

Sten might have accepted the military necessity of a suicide mission, given a strategic target that might stop the Tahn. But every idea that was suggested and run up on the battle computer showed that the
Gamble
had a ninety-nine-point-more-nine's chance of never getting through the Tahn outer destroyer screen; setting up and making an attack run on one of the Tahn heavies looked to be impossible.

"What about slingshotting?" Contreras, ex-cop, now the
Gamble's
bosun's mate, asked. "Full power around this moon, then around Cavite and hit 'em when we come back through."

"Won't work," Sten said. "The Tahn'll pick us up the minute we come out from shadow. That'll give them more than enough time to set up a prog and nail us on the way in."

Contreras tugged at her ear and sank back into thought.

"We can't just sit here, sir." McCoy said. An ex-jailbird, he was now master's mate, engine room.

"Do we have any idea what's left of our fleet?"

"We're still picking up broadcasts that Foss says are from the
Swampscott
. And there seem to be a couple destroyers still in the air."

"Maybe we do wait," McCoy tried. "Sooner or later, somebody down on Cavite's gonna try one. We hit the Tahn from the other side when they do."

Sten gnawed a fingernail. "Crappy plan," he said finally. "Anybody got a better one?"

There were negative head shakes all around.

"Okay, McCoy. We'll give it a shot. Everybody not on watch get their heads down."

Hypno-conditioning let any of them go instantly to sleep and return to full alertness at command. But the ship's detector alarms went off before any of them had made it to their bunks.

Sten sprinted to the command deck. Foss indicated one screen with a solitary blip to one side.

"That's the
Richards
, sir. Correct IFF response. And that…"

Sten didn't need an explanation—the second screen showed another, larger indication. Tahn, of course. Probably a heavy destroyer.

Foss touched keys and moved the two images onto the larger center screen. "It's closing on the
Richards
."

Sten had the mike open and broadcast power at full, breaking com silence. The Tahn ship would certainly pick up his broadcast, but he might be able to save the
Richards
now and worry about his own skin later.

"
Richards… Richards
… this is
Gamble
. Bogey on intersection orbit. Closing on you. Bogey location—"

The
Richards
cut in. "
Gamble
… we have him. I shackle… X-ray delta… Two. Unshackle. Over."

Lieutenant Estill—Sten noted that his voice stayed quite calm—was using a simple voice code. X-ray: main engine. Delta: damaged. Two: fifty-percent power loss.

"This is
Gamble
. Heading yours, over."

Sten hit the GQ alarm. "I want an interception course, Mr. Foss. Engines!"

"Ready, sir."

"Primary drive full emergency. Secondary drive full standby."

'Sir."

"All weapons stations report launch readiness."

"All live stations ready, sir."

"Mr. Foss. What do we have?"

There was now a third blip on the main screen. A red line threaded from the third blip—Sten's ship—toward the Tahn destroyer and the
Gamble
. Suddenly the dot on the screen that was the
Richards
shimmered, coming out of AM2 drive.

"
Gamble
… this is
Richards
. Status now I shackle X-Ray delta four. I say again four, over."