The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3) (27 page)

“Which is where we get to you,” Clarence continued. “
Black Prince
will be out of commission for months, but between Gauntlet and Dryad, you’ve turned a few heads and Headquarters isn’t willing to have you sitting around twiddling your thumbs while your ship is being duct-taped back together.”

He picked up a computer pad and handed it to her.

“I am therefore giving you command of the scout cruiser
Spectre
.”

Willis caught her breath at that.
Spectre
wasn’t a broken-down relic or something bodged together from of spare parts. A dedicated raiding cruiser, she was fast, discrete and just the sort of ship Willis had dreamed of commanding from the day she joined the fleet.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“She is currently under the command of Captain Weixian. He’s a fine officer but has been skippering her for five continuous years now. He was already due for a spell in a ground posting when the balloon went up. There hasn’t been a suitable opportunity before now in which to slot in a replacement. If we’re to be honest, right now still isn’t the best time for a new CO, but you have a track record for hitting the ground running, which makes you eminently suitable.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Clarence smiled.

“You won’t have much time to warm up. As I said I do promise one of these days to give you a posting with more than forty-eight hours’ notice.”

Guinness had been right after all. This was a step up.
Spectre
was a larger, more prestigious ship. However as the shuttle took her out to her new command, Willis couldn’t help but reflect that for all their modernity,
Spectre
and her sister ship
Phantom
were fighting a war they were ill equipped for.

Although
Spectre
was bigger than a Myth class cruiser, she carried less armament than the much smaller
Black Prince
. Designed as a long-range raider against the Aèllr, she was heavily stealthed and gave over more of her internal volume to fuel and stores. What she didn’t have though was suitable hard points on the hull to mount flak guns, so instead, the fleet’s engineers had built racks onto the cruisers’ wings to carry Starfox anti-fighter missiles. These offered
Spectre
some degree of active defence against Nameless cap ship missiles and could, she felt, be taken as a testament to the human ability to improvise from what was to hand. It was probably no wonder though, Willis thought to herself as she read through the briefing documents, that
Spectre
and
Phantom
had between them wracked up a higher than average officer burnout rate. When the shit hit the fan, even flak guns could feel like a pretty insubstantial defence, so a few retrofitted missiles would seem like even more of a fig leaf.

When she reached
Spectre
, she discovered that if Commander Berg had both been startled by and possibly not entirely pleased by her transfer, by contrast Captain Weixian was a man who knew it was time to leave and was profoundly grateful to do so. So six hours after handing over
Black Prince
, Willis was on the opposite side of the ceremony.

“How are you settling in Captain?” Admiral Nisman asked as Willis circulated around the small briefing room in the fleet’s groundside Headquarters. The staff officers were still setting up for the meeting and Admiral Wingate had yet to arrive, so the various officers present were free to socialise. As well as fleet officers there was a pair of marines. With the defeat at Landfall, Fleet Marines were now a rare breed, with those that remained fully engaged in training and rebuilding the Corps.

“Well sir,” she replied. “Captain Weixian had his ship in fine order.”

Unquestionably true. After being launched into two successive commands where everyone on board was new to the ship, it was slightly intimidating to be the only new arrival. But only slightly. It hadn’t taken the ship’s crew long to familiarise themselves with her combat record and work out she was far from an unproven commander. A week of manoeuvres out beyond Mars’ orbit was going a long way toward acclimatising her to the ship and vice-versa.

“Good,” Nisman replied. “As the scout cruiser, you’ll be the one out in front so I’ll need you to be sharp. How are you settling with your new officers?”

Willis kept the smile on her face but inwardly winced. Interpersonal relations were important for deep space work... and there were things in her formal history that would suggest that was something she could have problems with.

“No problems sir,” she replied. “I’ve had a lot of experience since the
Harbinger
mission – a lot of time to learn from past mistakes.”

Nisman nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Deep space work is hard going,” he said. “I commanded the
Rhine
on a pure exploration voyage back in the fifties. They were great days, no question about it, but a lonely job for a skipper. At least this time you’ll have fellow captains around.”

“That leaves you out again, sir.”

“That’s what I get paid the big money for, Captain. But I am looking forward to finding out where we’re going.”

“Into the black, Amiz.”

Willis turned towards the speaker and came sharply to attention.

“Well I sort of assumed as much, sir.” Nisman replied mildly. “But I hope you will at least point us in at least the general direction you want us to go.”

“And cramp your creativity?” Wingate said with a smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll at least find an interesting star to point you at.” Glancing at Willis, he added: “Well, let’s get on with it, Captain.”

With Wingate’s arrival, the other officers present started to take their seats. Once everyone was settled, Wingate took his place at the head of the room.

“Gentlemen,” he began. “I would like to first offer you an overview of the war situation as it stands. While the Battle for Earth was a great victory, the greatest in fact Battle Fleet has ever won, it has not given us everything we had hoped for. While the Nameless were routed from this solar system, it would appear that their surviving units recovered fleet cohesion much faster than we expected. In essence their retreat became orderly very quickly. Very few of their transport ships were lost in the fighting. In the immediate aftermath, those ships, both gate jumpers and those with their own drives, were shepherded clear of the fighting. The small number of combat units that we retained in Rosa and Hydra Stations attempted to cut off the enemy’s salient through the Junction Line, but the Nameless’s remaining combat strength held them off long enough for the salient to collapse in on itself.”

Wingate paused, his expression grim.

“The Nameless did something that in many respects was very impressive. They recognised as a result of their losses, they were in not position to hold the gains they made as a result of their breakthrough of the Junction Line and made no attempt to do so. Instead throwing good after bad, they ruthlessly cut their losses. They had built a network of over a hundred space gates leading to Earth and facing the Junction Line. Now our scout ships have confirmed that they have not just abandoned these gates, they’ve destroyed them.

“When it came to it, The Nameless did not hesitate to write off the fruits of over a year’s worth of fighting at a single stroke and fall back along their supply lines. By doing so, they have freed up ships that were committed to the defence of those gates and denied us targets. Our ships on the Junction Line report there has been some skirmishing, but nothing beyond a handful of ships committed at any one time. During these skirmishes, they’ve made our support ships their prime targets. They have traded space for time in which to rebuild their fleet and seek action only to impair our strategic mobility. This indicates exactly what we feared – the Nameless are not beaten. They intend to return and finish what they started.

“That, Ladies and Gentlemen, gets us up to date. If this war is to be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, we need to find a way of landing a crushing blow. Your task group, composed of the cruisers
De Gaulle
and
Spectre
, the strike boat carrier
Pankhurst
, plus three support ships, all under the command of Admiral Nisman, will proceed first to the Centaur planet, then beyond. Your objective will be simple: find where we can hurt the Nameless.”

Wingate nodded towards the two marine officers as he continued.

“We have no way of knowing what if anything you will find out there, so you will be assigned a larger than usual marine complement – a full company under the command of Major Kerr. That is the overview, you will now be taken through the mission in more detail...”

3rd July 2068
 

As the metaphorical crow flew, the journey to the Centaur planet should have taken in the region of four weeks, three, if
Spectre
had been on her own. But between the slower speed of the support ships and the need to use isolated systems when they made real space re-entry to cool down the engines, the trip took closer to six. They didn’t stop for long or even enter the system. Instead, the
Pankhurst
deployed a scout to quietly check it. A year and a half earlier, when Willis landed on the planet, it had been scoured of all intelligent life, with just the mouldering ruins of cities to declare their previous existence. Now there was a Nameless space gate on the planet’s Blue Line and a handful of their transports loading or unloading from a small space station, all protected by a few warships. As a target it was well inside the task force’s weight class but the Admiral shook his head. This wasn’t what they were here for and there was no point tipping the Nameless off that they were there for the sake of such a paltry prize. So they turned their back on known space and headed out into the unmapped void. After all, they could always attack on the way back.

“There’s one thing I just don’t get,” Lieutenant Yoro,
Spectre
’s communications officer said. For the first time since leaving Earth,
Spectre
was alone, in jump space en route to another star system whose name was just a computer-assigned string of letters and numbers. The
Pankhurst
and
De Gaulle
were waiting behind in the previous system. There were several possible routes forward. Admiral Nisman had decided to stop his force at the edge of a small and unremarkable solar system and deploy the two scout ships carried by
Pankhurst
forward along with
Spectre
. For the first time since Dryad, Willis was out on her own, without a senior officer looking over her shoulder.

“Just one thing, Coms?” Willis replied mildly. “I’m impressed.”

The young man blushed and started to stutter a reply.

“Just a joke, Lieutenant,” she interrupted with a smile. “What is it?”

“We’ve been picking up Nameless transmissions for weeks. Mostly faint but always behind us. If we’re heading towards Nameless territory, why aren’t we hearing anything from in front?”

“I’ve been wondering that for weeks,” said Commander Yaya.

As the ship’s second-in-command, she’d been on watch when Willis came up to the bridge. With the ship in jump space there weren’t many personnel on the bridge. The small Chinese-American officer had worked hard to ensure Willis’s smooth integration with the rest of the ship. Willis’s transfer in had likely delayed Yaya’s promotion to a ship of her own, but she seemed to take developments calmly.

Beyond Yaya, the main holo was set to navigation mode. Before they’d left Earth, modifications had been made to the software. It now displayed lines to indicate systems that were thought to be close enough for the Nameless to jump. This far beyond explored space, the charts were based on astronomical observations from Earth and as a result, the estimated distances between stars were a bit sketchy.

With the Nameless limited to individual jumps of four point seven light years, gauging the distance between systems was important. If the gap was too wide, it could be eliminated as a route forward.

They’d expected to be able to follow the Nameless space gates like breadcrumbs, but unlike the ones closer to the combat zone, out here they were deployed in interplanetary space. So unless they were active, they were devilishly hard to spot. In fact, by now they hadn’t seen one in over a week. Whether that was because they weren’t spotting them, or because they simply weren’t there, was the big question.

“Well, the most obvious reason is that there is nothing ahead of us to hear,” Willis replied as she leaned against a support column.

Groundsiders never really understood how bloody big a galaxy was. Too many people seemed to think that a line could be drawn on a chart from Earth, through the Centaur world and onwards to the Nameless world or worlds. One of the three task groups was indeed following that path. Problem was a degree or two ‘off’ that line, rapidly equated to scores of light years. In fact, the course they were on was not particularly promising. They were moving slowly toward the edge of the galactic arm Earth resided in. The average gap between stars was opening and soon those gaps might be wider than the Nameless ships could jump.