Strength and Honor (14 page)

Ranza replied: “No, you lost it. I get to kill this one.”

“Are we high enough?” Dak Shepard sent. “I wanna roast this weenie.”

Ranza: “Keep going, Alpha Two. You are still in atmo. Alpha Seven, what the hell are you doing?”

“Uh, fugging myself,” Cole Darby replied, who was absolutely no good at herding missiles. This was a new scenario for him. It was new for all of them, but Darb did not pick up physical games quickly.

Ranza: “Cain, pick up the Darb.”

Cain Salvador, Alpha Three, was good at everything. He collected Cole Darby’s diving missile and booted it spaceward again.

Twitch Fuentes, Alpha Five, intercepted a diving missile head on, attempted to duck just under its nose to bump it up at the last instant.

At the last instant the missile also dipped to avoid the head-on collision and so the two collided so hard the missile detonated.

“Twitch!”
Carly Delgado’s shriek filled all the headsets.

Cain: “Yo ho, hombre, you there?”

Kerry Blue: “Twitch!”

Ranza: “Alpha Five, what is your status?”

Twitch: “Hot hot
hot!”
And Alpha Five streaked toward the ionosphere.

The Swifts’ cooling systems were not really made for operations within an atmosphere.

“Carly, spot Twitch.” That was Ran/.a. But Carly did not need telling. She was already on her way, flanking Twitch’s climb to colder altitudes.

Dak: “Heads up, the Old Man is in atmo.”

Cain Salvador: “Flight risk.” That was the term for a colonel at the controls of a fighter craft. Steele: “I heard that, Salvador.”

“Oh, fug.” Cain fumbled his missile. It turned on its back and dove. “Did you think you were on a private channel, Marine?” Steele punted Cain’s missile back up. Cain gave the missile a final kick to escape velocity and opened fire.

Upon Ranza’s command all the Swifts of Alpha Flight rose to cool off in the way high. They collected Twitch and Carly, then dove back down to round up another batch of Roman missiles out of the U.S. skies.

Kerry Blue thought she would turn all thumbs with Colonel Steele flying with her. Instead she was brilliant. She dropped none of her missiles and picked up one of Darb’s.

Steele pretended to ignore her, except once to ask, “The boffins get your crate put back together right, Alpha Six?”

“Yes, sir.” This was an open channel. And he was not asking about her crate. “She’s okay,” said Kerry Blue, afraid everyone could hear the silly grin in her voice.

Thinking the Shotgun destroyed, Romulus had launched his attack on the Continental U.S. before
Merrimack
and
Monitor
were actually cut off from Earth. As Marcander Vincent at Tactical put it: “We got Rom to jack early again.”

“We did that,” Farragut had to agree. Gypsy Dent said, “But what if the Roman warships turn around in the Abyss and go back to Fort Eisenhower?”

“A concern, but not a disaster,” said Farragut. “Playing dead wasn’t our last-ditch effort to save the Shotgun. I just wanted to make the Romans go away the easiest way possible.”

“And we did not want to fight
Horatius,”
said Gypsy.

“We
did not,” Farragut confessed. Captain John Farragut had a very soft spot for Legion Draconis. “We erased all the rovers inside the perimeter shield and Weld’s people caught Rome’s inside man, so I really don’t think Fort Eisenhower is in serious danger anymore. Thank God I told General Weld not to exempt Rob Roy from questioning.”

Gypsy’s eyes appeared white all around. “You mean Calli’s young man?” she said, astonished, horrified. “He
wasn’t!”

“No, no, Rob Roy wasn’t the spy,” said Farragut quickly.

“Who was it?”

“One of the station Intelligence officers.”

“Oh, my God.”

Farragut nodded.

“How can that happen?” Gypsy’s own loyalty was unshakable, so the crime was unthinkable.

Farragut shrugged. “Frontier greed.” That was the name of the syndrome. Bribery cases were twice as common in the Deep End as in Near Space. “It was actually the Intelligence agent General Weld charged with investigating visitors to the main station burn unit.”

“Weld handed the flock over to the wolf!” said Gypsy.

“He did. He didn’t know it—how could he? But that’s exactly what he did.” And the wolf had eagerly questioned the sheep. Among the subjects of his inquiry he found the perfect patsy on whom to pin his own crimes. He needed to identify
someone
as the Roman traitor if he ever hoped to stop the hunt for himself.

He found a guileless lawyer, who looked young as a boy, and who had made a pest of himself trying to get into the burn unit where security was tight around the American captain and the Roman Senator.

Rob Roy Buchanan looked like the perfect mark.

But the interrogation had gone horribly wrong. The interrogator found his own verbal maneuvers fed back to him by this junior lawyer, and then he committed a fatal error.

“He told Rob Roy to shut up.”

“An Intelligence officer never ever tells the subject of an interrogation to shut up,” said Gypsy. “And not while the fort is under siege and the subject is supposedly a suspected traitor.” The first rule of interrogation was to keep the subject talking.

While Rob Roy Buchanan kept his interrogator talking, other Intelligence officers dug into the interrogator’s business transactions and searched his living compartment. They found a million dollars in very cold cash in the freezer, data pointers to a numbered account in his private records, and some unsatisfactory explanations for solo trips through the fort that provided opportunity to disperse Roman landing disks between the fortress stations.

The image in the final report made Rob Roy Buchanan look even younger than usual. His eyelashes were very faint so his eyes appeared to be just the two brown disks of his irises. He had shaved. He looked fifteen years old, except that, he stood between six-two and six-five depending on his posture. He looked utterly disarming.

And Farragut had almost,
almost
told General Weld that Rob Roy did not need interrogating. “That’s a good man,” said Gypsy. “Calli should keep him.”

Many of the Roman missiles and drones hitting the Continental United States were coming from carriers, cloaked in distortion and ready to flee faster than light as soon as they were sighted. But U.S. scanners picked up some other possible sources, moving in plain sight—registered internationals, flagged as cargo vessels.

Some nations would flag a paper airplane if the fee were paid.

Scanners located a suspicious hulk—claimed to be an Eastern Alliance trader—bearing a Freelander flag. Roman missile trails led back to this cargo ship.

Traders normally earned premiums for early delivery. The Freelander’s course led back on itself in a wide circle around nothing, in a hurry to get nowhere.

Merrimack
was riding in its shadow now.

“Want to shoot it?” Gypsy asked, standing next to Farragut on the command deck.

“I do,” said Captain Farragut. They were so close they could hit the cargo ship with their lights and actually
see
it.

The neutral Freelander flag was posted all over it.

“If this goes bad, it will fall on your head,” Gypsy gave a dutiful warning. “Hard.”

“Oh, my head’s used to it. I have identified the plot as an enemy hostile. Commander Dent, destroy the Freelander.”

“Aye, sir. Targeting, acquire the Freelander.”

“Target acquired and tagged, aye,” said Targeting. He turned around at his station. “It’s right
there.
Should we get some space between us if that thing’s carrying what we think it’s carrying?”

Targeting was still speaking as the com tech reported, “Freelander is screaming that he’s neutral.”

“Advise personnel aboard the cargo ship to take to their lifeboats and get behind us. Helm, make a few hundred klicks between
Mack
and the target.”

Helm responded: “Adjusting separation, aye.”

Tactical: “Target is showing life craft.”

Helm: “Separation achieved.”

The cargo ship was no longer in visual range. But the tags would assure that any ordnance from
Merrimack
would connect with the target. Gypsy looked to Farragut, “What kind of chaser do you think?”

“I think if we could light a match in there it might do the trick,” said Farragut. “Fire Control. Single torpedo, standard load,” Gypsy ordered.

“Torpedo ready, aye. Fire Control standing by.”

“Fire torpedo,” said Gypsy Dent.

“Torpedo away, aye.”

The torpedo hissed upon leaving the ship. It instantly disappeared into the dark in search of the cargo ship.

The damn thing turned out to be a space munitions dump. The cargo ship became visible like a supernova. All
Merrimack’s
viewports dimmed under the intense light.

Marcander Vincent stood right up at his station and shouted as if across the vacuum: “Hey, Caesar! This is what real up-blowing looks like!”

A haze hung in the atmosphere over the United States. Dark clouds rolled across the continent, visible from space, and rains fell like after a volcano. Winds swept the skies clear to brilliant sunsets.

There was a lull in the missile strikes, but no peace in the silence. America waited for the next wave of attacks.

Captain Farragut received a message from his father.

The judge wanted to move the family to the outer colonies.

“No, sir,” said Captain Farragut, an order. And to the judge’s outraged bluster, he asked the old hunter, “What’s more likely to get shot—a pheasant lying low in the field or a pheasant taking to the air? Stay low!”

“There are missiles over my house. OVER MY HOUSE!”

“Then go up the road and stay with the Lees or the Wilkens,” Captain Farragut answered. “Just keep to the ground and do not get into anything that looks like a government vehicle.”

“They’re doing this to get at you, you know!” the elder Farragut accused.

The missile flights directly over the Farragut house—yes, those probably had been aimed to get the younger Farragut’s attention. “Yes, sir.”

“Then
you
make them stop!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Captain Farragut.

The attacks had already stopped. For this moment. That was part of the terror. The not knowing when they would start again.

It was unclear what Romulus had hoped to achieve. The three surviving giant Roman gunships had vanished faster than light. Those could be anywhere.

The attacks on U.S. military installations had not made a single penetration.

So far there had been no strikes on utilities or on civil ian transports.

“If he’s not going after utilities, that strongly suggests his intent is occupation,” Farragut observed.

The Pentagon was adding up the damage, and keeping watch for the next strike, and expressing indignation.

“I suppose this means we’ll be bombing Palatine,” Gypsy said.

“I think we might oughta better,” said Farragut.

“Ya ha and hoo ra!” a Marine guard at the hatchway let loose. Shut himself up, looking contrite. There came no rebuke for the outburst. “Can’t we hit Fortress Aeyrie too?” Tactical asked. “Would,” said Farragut. “If we knew where it was.”

“Palatine is the better target, sir,” said Gypsy. “Especially if Caesar is not there.”

That would let the Roman populace see the might of Caesar, hiding in his mobile fortress while U.S. ships were bombing Palatine.

Farragut nodded, but warned, “They’ll be ready for us. They must know the Yanks are coming.”

“Lunaris, tell me about World War Two submarines,” said Romulus with a voice of silk.

Lollius Lunaris explained, “There was a tactic—it may even have been a fiction, but it was recounted so often that every American knows it. A submarine under attack would crash dive and jettison debris and an oil slick to make it appear dead to the hunter ships on the surface.”

Caesar said, “You had information that the destruction of the Shotgun was likely a ruse and you failed to pass it on.”

Lunaris opened his mouth.
I tried to tell you.

The words went unspoken, but Caesar heard them anyway. “This is the Imperial Palace. There are no half measures. It is your job to make certain that vital information gets where it needs to go. There is no excuse for doing half a job.” He swept his hand at the space vista that took up one enormous wall of the audience hall—the scene of a crippled Roman gunship drifting amid the widely scattered wreckage of another.

“You killed those ships, Lunaris. You are dismissed.”

Lunaris tottered out of the throne room, not sure how he managed to stay vertical.

He ordered a sword and fell on it.

President Marissa Johnson dispatched an official protest of Rome’s violation of the articles of surrender and of Caesar’s groundless declaration of war.

Caesar Romulus opened a visual communication with the American leader. Marissa Johnson had the jowls of a second term President. They were expected, almost required.

In Rome, a man of wealth was expected to be beautiful, whether the wealth was inherited or manufactured. Visually, Caesar was a beautiful man, with those lush brown curls, his petulant lips, his deep brown eyes, and his nose perfectly Roman. His voice was a masculine baritone. Caesar Romulus answered President Johnson serenely. He was much less paranoid and strident since the Roman Senate had ratified his position. “With respect, Madame President, violating the surrender is rather the point.”

“The terms were lenient,” said President Johnson. “Unreasonably lenient.”

Rome’s armed forces had come under U.S. command in order to mount a concentrated offense against the Hive. Rome had been permitted to keep its internal government and all its laws.

“We were joined for the common good,” said President Johnson. “And the alien threat is still here. Your obligation is not fulfilled.”

“The alien threat is in your yard, Madame President. Clean it up yourself. Rome has no obligation to you. I am not a pirate or a thug. Here is how it is: when you pry pledges out of a drowning man as you dangle the lifeline over his head, do you expect the pledges he makes to be binding? Not in any court, Madame President of the United States of America. Not even yours.”