Vortex (27 page)

"Negative, Admiral," Sten said. "I sure as hell don't have your skill at deciphering blinking dots of light—and the digest box tells me just how shafted we are.''

''I await your orders.''

Sten had had about enough of Mason's behavior. "Admiral? If I may speak to you privately?''

Mason nodded for the officer of the deck to take the con and followed Sten into the admiral's day cabin.

"Admiral," Sten began, "I directly requested you for this assignment believing you were enough of a professional to follow orders and leave personalities out of it.

"I was wrong. From the time that we arrived on Jochi, you've behaved like a sulking bratling who's just got his bars and who thinks that makes him God."

"Ambassador—''

"We'll start with that. My civilian rank is meaningless. I have never resigned my military rank, nor asked to be placed on reserve status.

"On Jochi, you asked if I was assuming command. I said I was. Therefore, referring to me by my military rank is perfectly acceptable.

"You will remain silent, Admiral Mason. And I would appreciate your coming to attention. I have neither the time nor the energy to get into a testes-measuring contest with you, nor is it necessary. If you wish, we will step out of this cabin, and I will relieve you of your command in front of your staff and the officers of the
Victory
. You will find that order will be considered quite legal, and will be considered admissible procedure at your court martial.

"Do you wish that?"

Mason remained silent.

"You will, until advised otherwise, refer to me as Admiral. I, in turn, respect your rank, and will continue to channel my orders through you as suggestions. I have no intentions of undermining your authority. Nor do I think it admirable for you to continue to behave in such a childish manner. You lessen yourself and your rank in the eyes of your subordinates.''

That
got the clot. Mason flushed, stiffened, and took a moment to bring himself back to corpselike control.

"That is all I have to say. Do you have any comments or suggestions?"

"No. No, sir."

"Good. This problem will not repeat itself. Now. Shall we go out there and start keeping the peace?"

Mason's salute sonic-snapped; he about-faced and stalked back out onto the bridge.

Sten allowed himself a grin. Hell, all those absurd clichés that had been snarled at him as he rose through the ranks still worked, given that the person on the receiving end really believed all that drakh.

Oh, well.

He followed Mason—promising himself that when this was all over he
would
decoy the bastard into a dark alley and blackjack him for a week and a half.

Sten's next action was to "request" that Admiral Mason assemble his top four staffers and the
Victory's
XO in a conference chamber and link, on secure screen, the skippers of the escort ships.

"Gentlebeings," Sten said without preamble, "the situation is pretty obvious."

There were nods from the officers.

The
Victory
was plunging through a rift between two rich open clusters. On a screen corrected for human eyes, human spatial prejudices, and human conditioning, the tiny fleet was flashing into darkest night, with high-banked lightclouds on either side. A more detailed screen would show tiny subsidiary splotches of light to the left and right of the
Victory's
projected orbit. These were, respectively, the Bogazi hastily assembled fleet(s?) ready to defend their capital world and cluster on the left; and, to the right, in the middle of the darkness that was the rift, the attacking Suzdal fleets. The battlechamber, of course, would show each and every world and ship, to the limits of its preset range.

The
Victory
would go hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle between the two fleets, in—

"Contact timetick," Sten requested.

"Rough estimate, two ship-days, sir. Exact—"

"Not necessary. Thank you, Commander. Is there any data suggesting they know we're inbound?"

"Negative, sir."

That was unsurprising—one continuing advantage Imperial ships had was vastly superior sensory systems. And one very secret gimmick: before any AM2 was released to non-Imperial sources it was given a "coating" made from a derivative of Imperium X. Any non-Empire ship on stardrive would produce a slight purple flare on Imperial screens, a flare that could be picked up at a far greater range than the unaltered Imperial drive signature. It wasn't much—just enough of an edge to win a war every now and then.

"The object of our little game," Sten began, "is obviously to keep our Suzdal and Bogazi allies from slaughtering each other. And, incidently, to keep either or both of them from deciding that anybody who breaks up a bar brawl between friends deserves a good one upside the head."

There were suppressed smiles. Admiral Mason did not give briefings like this.

"Right," Sten continued. "Obviously the only way that we can accomplish this is with pure guano. Fortunately, Admiral Mason is, as you all know, one of the most skilled Imperial leaders in deception."

Sten really wanted to phrase it differently and say that Mason was fuller of drakh and therefore more guano-qualified than almost any admiral he knew, but he refrained.

"He and I discussed our problem, and he had some interesting plans. I had a couple of ideas that might be worth considering. There will be five stages to our plan. Stage One is appropriately evil; Stage Two is honorable; and Stage Four might give someone here a medal or two. Stage Five will be pure naked dishonesty, which I shall implement."

"Stage Three, sir?" The question came from the captain of the destroyer
Princeton
.

"That's my own cheap idea," Sten said. "All hands aboard the
Victory
have been spending their off-shifts working on it."

Sten flexed his fingers unconsciously. "All hands" was no exaggeration—his own itched from metal fragments and real wood splinters embedded in fingers and palms.

"We'll get to that in time. Stage One we will begin immediately, while the briefing continues. Order all weapons officers and all Kali crews to action stations."

The Kali missiles, now on their fifth generation, were monster ship-killers. The Kali V class were nearly thirty meters long by now, having grown not only in expense but in size as each generation was given newer and more sophisticated tracking, homing, ECM, and "perception" suites. Power was from AM2—the Kalis were, in fact, miniature starships. All that had not been necessary to improve from generation to generation was the pay-load. Sixty megatons was still enough to shatter any ship on any military register. Even the
Forez
, the Tahn battleship that remained the mightiest warship ever "launched," had been rendered hors d' combat by Kalis.

The Kali was "flown" into its target under direct control by weapons officers. The control system was helmet-mounted and used direct induction to the brain. Actual control had progressed from the old manual joystick and tiny throttle to involuntary or voluntary neural reaction from the "pilot." The Kali could also be set to use other, automatic homing systems. But those were only used under special circumstances—weapons officers were chosen for their killer instincts, second only to potential tacship pilots, and they preferred playing cheater kamikazi.

Stage One was a launch of all available Kalis.

They burst out from their launch tubes on the
Victory
and its destroyers at full drive for thirty seconds, and then power was shut down. The missiles lanced ahead of the Imperial squadron.

Right behind them came the
Victory's
tacships, under the same full power/cut power/run silent orders.

This was Stage One—Sten's hole cards.

Stage Two waited for some time, until watch officers reported alarums from the Bogazi fleet. They had "seen" the oncoming unidentified ship that was the
Victory
. Since they were waiting for the Suzdal, their sensors were slightly more efficient, not masked by their own drive emissions. Sten waited a couple of ship-hours, having ordered that no response be made to any challenges from either Suzdal or Bogazi, then assembled his human actors for the next part of the plan.

All Bogazi and Suzdal com channels were blanketed by the
Victory's
powerful transmitters.

All receiving vid screens showed:

The well-known Imperial Ambassador Sten. Standing on the bridge of a warship, in full and formal garb. He was flanked by two equally grim-faced officers, Mason and his XO, also in full dress uniform.

The broadcast was very short and to the point. Sten informed both sides they were in violation of Imperial and Altaic treaties of long standing, as well as civilization's common agreements of interplanetary rights. They were ordered to return immediately to their home worlds and make no further aggressive moves.

Failure to respond would be met with the severest measures.

The broadcast was not meant to convince, or even to threaten. It was merely a pin in the map to legitimize the real bludgeon Sten had prepared.

The one he hoped nobody figured out was made of metal foil and lathes—quite literally.

The response was as expected.

The Suzdal did not answer the cast, either from their fleets or from their home worlds. The Bogazi, slightly more sophisticated, broadcast a warning that all neutral ships should stand clear of given coordinates. Any intrusion into this area would be met with armed response. Any errors might be regretted but would be considered within the acceptable parameters of self-defense.

There was no response from the
Victory
.

Sten hoped this would worry both sides.

Another timetick. It would be four ship-hours until the
Victory
would be directly "between" the two enemies.

And they, in turn, would be in range of the
Victory
in five hours, and each other in twelve.

The situation was developing in an interesting manner.

"Three hours, sir. And the Bogazi fleet is now under drive."

Sten rose from the weapons couch he had asked to borrow for a nap. This was calculated bravado, intended to prove to all the young troopies that Sten was so confident that he could doze before action.

Of course, he had not slept.

What bothered him was that in the old days he actually had nodded off every three or four times he tried the ploy.

Mason came out of his day cabin. "We're ready, sir."

"Very well."

Mason came quite close to Sten. "You didn't sleep, either, did you?''

Sten's eyes widened. Was Mason actually trying to be friendly? Had that absurd reaming-out caused the admiral to make an attitude check?

Naah. Mason was just setting Sten up so, come another time, he would be the one waiting in that dark alley with the sap.

"Perhaps we might begin Stage Three," he said.

"I shall give the orders."

Stage Three was a truly monstrous bluff.

Back on Jochi, Sten had run a fast list of ways to make people unhappy. He dimly remembered one, told as a joke but also as a mind-jog, back in Mantis training. The story went that aeons earlier, a young guerrilla officer was trying to delay a military convoy. It must've been in the dark ages, because the vehicles were evidently ground-bound, and there was no mention of air cover. The convoy had armor and heavy weapons. The guerrilla officer had twenty men, only half of them armed.

The guerrilla could have thermopylaed nobly and slowed the convoy for five minutes at the cost of his entire band. Instead, he looted a nearby farmhouse. He took all of the dinnerware in the house and carefully positioned each plate, facedown, in the roadway.

Land mines. Sten had objected—the armor's commander must have been a complete clot, since it was unlikely that land mines
never
looked like mess tins, even in those medieval times.

After Sten had finished doing the push-ups that every military school seemed to award its trainees at regular intervals for sins ranging from breathing to buggery, the instructor had pointed out that of course the track commander would not have mistaken them for any land mines
he
was familiar with. They could be something new. They could be booby traps. And if they were real, and he drove over them, and started losing vehicles, it would be his butt in front of the firing squad.

So slowly, laboriously, he had to send forward clearing teams to lift each plate, determine it was a plate, and move on to the next. The guerrilla leader further slowed progress down by regular sniping, in spite of the convoy's counterfire.

"The convoy was delayed by two full E-hours, so the story goes, with no loss to the guerrilla force. Think on that, troops. Mr. Sten, you can stop doing push-ups now."

Land mines… space mines. Yes, that was it. Mines—those lethal devices that just sat waiting for a target and then blew it up or, worse, lurked until the target came within range and then went hunting—were never popular weapons. In spite of the fact they were the most efficient, least expensive killers of expensive machinery and beings known. They seemed somehow slimy to "honest" soldiers. Or, anyway, not especially glamorous.

Sten had never imagined that killing one's fellow beings was glamorous. And if he'd had one iota, Mantis Section would have burned it out of him. He had also seen how effective the Tahn use of mines had been. The Tahn operated under the valid if uncivilized principle that killing was killing and needed no particular moral justification.

The Empire's conventional military, being "honorable," knew little and cared naught about mines—therefore, anyone they armed and equipped, such as the Altaic Cluster, would be unlikely to be expert, either.