Vortex (47 page)

The transport bulked large in the screen. Readouts blurring on either side, indicators moving across it, read, deciphered, understood yet ignored by La Ciotat.

"Closing… closing… range… range…" her weapons officer droned.

"Standby…"

The transport grew larger.

"Downgrade launch from Kali," La Ciotat snapped, and the weapons officer changed the weapons choice from the huge, long-range ship killer to the medium-range Goblins.

"Range… range… range…"

"Stand by…"

La Ciotat felt herself drakh-hot as a pilot—but more importantly, she had a secret: she was
not
a drakh-hot shot. So she never launched outside point-blank range, and preferred to get closer.

"Standby… clot!"

The transport's sensors must have seen the incoming tacship and emergency-launched its troop capsules, spattering long tubes full of troops into Jochi's atmosphere.

"Transport…"

"Still acquired."

"Launch One! Cancel backup!"

She flipped the weapons helmet to the back of her head, ignored the ghost image of the missile slamming into the transport as it futilely lifted for space, fingers and boots dancing on the controls, and brought the tacship back—a lethal hawk swooping as the waterfowl scattered.

"Range… range…"

"Goblins… Multiple launch, single target distinction… set!"

"Set! Range… range…"

"On automatic… fire!"

The tacship held eight Goblin missile launchers, each loaded with three missiles. The launchers chugged… the tacship shuddered as the 10 nuke-headed missiles blazed out.

Nineteen troop capsules shattered, spewing screaming, dying soldiers into the high atmosphere, soldiers clawing at emptiness as gravity spun them down and down toward the ground far below.

Suddenly for La Ciotat these targets stopped being inanimate simulations on a battlescreen and became beings—whose deaths had come swiftly in the blast, horribly as their lungs froze in the frigid atmosphere, or mercifully as they spun into unconsciousness.

And "Bull's-eye" La Ciotat saw the deaths from very close range. Her stomach recoiled. She was violently sick, vomit splashing over the screen and controls.

She turned back for another pass, to kill the twentieth and last capsule.

Sten watched the slaughter from a battlescreen in the embassy's control room, refusing to let his mind translate those points of light appearing and vanishing into what they represented. He could have gone out of the subbasement to an upstairs window and seen the great battle raging over the mountains ringing the valley that contained Rurik. But that would have been still worse.

Around him the last embassy staffers hurriedly packed what files and equipment they would take offworld.

Outside, in a courtyard, high fires raged, as the rest of the embassy's records were destroyed.

Sten had been somewhat surprised that there had been no panic or trouble. Kilgour had explained: he had borrowed a company of Guardsmen for embassy security, told the Bhor and Gurkhas to rack their weapons and help with the evacuation. With one experienced combat veteran to every four civilians, it was hard to start a proper panic.

"A'ready, boss, w' hae i' better'n Cavite." On Cavite, Alex had been in charge of evacking the civilians—and had sworn his own oath of never again. "Whae'll we do wi' th' embassy? Blow it? Or jus' leave some wee booby traps?"

"Negative on both. There might be another ambassador show up one of these years. Why make life hard for him?"

Kilgour's stare was glacierlike.

Who cared what happened with the next regime, or the next clot dumb enough to take the Imperial shilling?

But he did not say anything.

"Do you have a prog on the landings, General?" Sten asked.

"Tentative,'' Sarsfield said. "They appear to have come in with, oh, call it twenty divisions. Say five for the first wave, five for the second, the same for the third, and five for reserve. That's my guesstimate, and that's what I'd do. But none of the Intel progs disagree, so that's what I'm going with."

"GA."

"Right now, I'll say—and these are pretty firm—that they've managed to put no more than eight on the ground. The rest either were lost in the landings or are still in orbit after the invasion was aborted.''

Sten repressed a wince, even though the body count was enemy. The First Guards Division, at full strength, numbered about eighteen thousand beings.

Assume—and a screen nearby showing Imperial Intelligence's order of battle said the assumption would be fairly correct—the same book strength for the Suzdal/Bogazi landing force.

Three hundred and sixty thousand beings, and only eight made it—the invasion force had taken over fifty percent casualties before real battle had even been joined.

"Of course," Sarsfield went on briskly, "casualties were not total. Elements of all invading units are almost certainly on the ground. But as stragglers, casualties, and so forth—not to be taken seriously.''

Sarsfield was a true Guardsman, Sten thought. He didn't appear worried that at least 150,000 enemy were now on Jochi, reinforcing whatever Tork militia were deployed—probably around a hundred thousand beings, and then the half a million more serving in the Jochi army. Three-quarters of a million, versus eighteen thousand.

"I'm grateful they don't appear, at least so far," Sarsfield added, "to have landed any heavy armor or artillery."

They wouldn't need it, Sten knew. Douw and the Jochians had more than enough to go around.

Now, he wondered, how long would it take for them to reform and attack the city?

He knew that answer, too. No more than three E-days.

Imperial losses were slight—only five tacships had been shot down. But those five were irreplaceable.

Sten, Sarsfield, and Mason were on a three-way sealed beam, trying to plan what next.

What should have happened was that the Imperial personnel should have been onboard their ships and scooting for deep space and home.

But there were two small problems: the Suzdal/Bogazi fleet off Jochi, and the oncoming allied army.

Almost a dozen Frick & Fracks had been infiltrated and blown out of the sky before Kilgour had a firm report that the Altaic Confederation was on the march.

Sten had two advantages: First, Mason's ships off Jochi—which were enough of a threat to worry the Suzdal and Bogazi fleet admirals. Second, he had in-atmosphere aerial superiority, or at least enough units to make the air overhead contested territory.

The Suzdal and Bogazi heavies would be unlikely to hang in space and lob heavy missiles down on the Imperial Forces inside Rurik. None of the allied forces, including the two ET races, would define noble victory as having destroyed the longtime capital of the Cluster. That was a shade too Pyrrhic even for these beings.

Nor would the fleet, except as a last resort, sacrifice maneuverability and come down to smash these sprats that were tac-ships—sprats that very likely could kill more than one-for-one as they died, and no one would trade a battleship or cruiser for a fifteen-being spitkit.

On the other hand, Douw's advancing army would slowly provide an AA umbrella that would deny the air to the Imperial ships, so this was only a temporary standoff.

He suddenly found two more shafts of sunlight in his mental sky. First was he had a trained, disciplined force—the First Guards—who were fresh and not brought to battle. Second was the realization that, if he
was
able to get his Imperial bodies off Rurik, there would be only limited pursuit.

Just bashing the Empire out of the Altaics would be defined as enough of a victory.

At least that's what the Altaics would think.

He listened in silence as Sarsfield and Mason ran various options through and shot them down, trying to figure a way to get out of this Altaic sandwich the Imperial Forces were trapped in.

Something glimmered. He rolled it back and forth. It seemed worth exploring. It probably wouldn't work. Even if it didn't, the situation couldn't worsen. Could it?

"Mr. Kilgour," he asked formally to Alex, who sat somewhat off-screen. It slightly jolted Mason and Sarsfield—they had been unaware of Kilgour's presence. "Do we have a code that's sort of compromised? Not a complete joke, but something they'll be able to break, at least partially, without too much strain?"

Alex shrugged and called up the embassy code chief. Mason started to say something, but Sarsfield waved him to silence. Five minutes later, Kilgour presented a choice of three codes that the code chief was morally certain were splintered, if not completely busted.

"Very good. Why don't we…" and Sten outlined the first stage of his plan.

Sarsfield, since the first stage did not involve him or his command, didn't say anything. Sten could see Mason trying to be fair—but wanting to say that anything that clotting Sten could come up with was worthless.

"My biggest objection," Mason said after a while, "is that we already tried it."

"Not quite, Admiral," Sten said. "We tried the simple version of the con. Did you ever play which hand's got the marble?"

"Of course. I
was
a child once."

Sten doubted that, but continued. "First time you tried it, you just lied. Then you told the truth. Then you lied again. Escalating dishonesty.

"That's what we're going to attempt, unless someone's got something better—or can point out where I'm completely full of it."

And so the Bluff, Stage Two, was begun.

First a destroyer was detached from Mason's fleet and sent in the general direction of Imperial worlds and Prime itself.

Once beyond the range of any of the Suzdal/Bogazi units, it broadcast a coded message, both to Mason's fleet and to the besieged Imperial post on Rurik.

Sten waited for six hours, watching Alex's Frick & Fracks, as the Altaic army ground closer toward Rurik. Thank somebody, what the clot, give it to Otho's gods Sarla and Laraz, they were moving slowly. Sten attributed it both to caution, none of them ever having fought Imperial Forces before, and the inevitable incoherence of trying to coordinate an alliance, particularly one where everyone hated everyone else.

He had ordered his tacships up as aerial artillery, lobbing air-to-ground missiles at predetermined targets—crossroads, major roadways, and the like.

Then both his com officer, Freston, and Mason's equivalent officer reported: there had been a sudden flurry of intership transmissions in the Suzdal/Bogazi fleets, transmissions that had been sent in a rarely used—which suggested high-level—code. Blurt transmissions were also beamed out in directions suggesting they were intended for the capital worlds of the Suzdal and Bogazi.

"Mr. Mason?"

"Yes, sir. We're on the way."

The fish were nibbling, it would appear.

Sten had, indeed, just come up with a second version of that bluff he and Mason had run, pretending to send messages back to an oncoming Imperial fleet.

The destroyer he had ordered sent out had transmitted a message, in that breakable code, that appeared to come from the vanguard of a heavy Imperial strike force. This mythical strike force ordered Mason to abandon his position off Jochi—the besieged forces on the planet would have to fend for themselves for a while—and serve as a forward screen for this strike force.

The transmission continued, saying that Mason would be fully briefed at a later date, but that this strike force had been specially detached to punish the dissident Suzdal and Bogazi—cleverly making no mention of any human dissidents—by attacking the ET capital worlds, returning tit for tat.

Sten was too elaborate in his deception—he forgot to allow for the fact that this was exactly what any of the races or cultures in the Altaics would have done if they were in the same situation as the Empire.

Three E-hours later, the Suzdal and Bogazi heavies broke orbit and struck, at full speed, for their own systems.

Sten, trying to keep the elaborate geometry of astrogation in his mind, thought they would probably set a course in
x
direction for their home worlds. A course that would be more direct than the one Mason was supposedly on, and certainly one that was predicted never to coincide with the
y
direction or directions the huge Imperial strike force would most logically track.

Uh-huh. All this exotica from someone who had needed coaching in basic one-ship astrogation back in Flight School. It would not work—at least not for very long. Sten hoped it worked long enough for the next step, and for Mason to duck around the Suzdal/Bogazi fleet and get back to where he would be needed.

Regardless, at least one layer of the sandwich had been stripped away.

Four hours later, scout elements of the Altaic Confederation's army entered the outskirts of Rurik.

* * *

Sten had told Sarsfield his hopes, not his orders. He did not want the First Guards to feel they were being commanded to pull some kind of impossible Bastogne or Thermopylae.

Stop them. Try to get them to dig in. Make them think we're counterattacking.

Sarsfield, like Sten, had counted noses. Neither of them thought this third ruse would work. It's very hard, after all, to bluff someone who's got three aces and the joker showing and both elbows keeping his hole card from being turned over, when you've got four different suits and one slice of bologna.

The enemy scouts proceeded unmolested.

However, their nerves were tested. Here they found an abandoned barricade. There vehicles were overturned. Up there, some kind of antenna spun. Cryptic codes had been sprayed on the pavement.

The scouts proceeded, more and more cautiously.

They saw no signs of Imperial soldiers.

It was unlikely they would—the Guards' forward recon elements were specialists in not being seen.

The Confederation's progress was reported.

Frick & Fracks were behind the lines, waiting for the first heavy armor and gravsleds to creep into the city. No one likes to risk his expensive track or even more expensive gravlighter in the rat trap of city fighting. But the Altaic soldiers had no choice.