Warworld: The Lidless Eye (10 page)

Somehow, they had made it. In Diettinger’s mind was an image of the Homeworld as they had jumped. Firestorms and mushroom clouds pockmarked the land. Even the seas churned as the Imperial warships sought out the undersea cities. A great red gash ran along the equatorial continent as the Imperial assaults split the planet’s crust, while in the sky above the bright lights of the Homeland’s hopelessly outnumbered fleet pulsed as each ship died. All but one.

Diettinger stood, stretched, and stepped down on wobbling legs to stand behind Second Rank.

It was quickly ascertained that a supernova explosion had caused a failure in the random Jump procedure that he’d used to set the course during their journey to the Wayforth Alderson tramline. Second Rank had speculated: “Theorists at the university speculate that a supernova explosion would produce extreme amounts of Alderson force, causing temporary super-long tramlines to form.” She further theorized that the Alderson disruption must have affected every Alderson tramline within the Empire of Man, meaning that—for now—the
Fomoria
had successfully evaded their Imperial pursuers.

Whatever the cause, the result was that they had landed in an unknown system hundreds of light-years away from the Comstock Alderson Point they had been aiming for. He ordered: “Summon Weapons and Engineering to the bridge; wardroom meeting of all command ranks in ten minutes.”

Second Rank Althene began calling the various personnel at their jump stations.

“Positional fix,” he said to the Navigation officer beyond Second Rank’s duty station. Navigation shook his head.

“Nothing yet, Dicta—Sorry, nothing yet, First Rank. Very low energy emission signals from the system overall. Looks like a real backwater.”

Diettinger frowned.
Good, and not good.
A place to repair and refit the
Fomoria
would have been ideal, but would likely be heavily defended as well. And they had no strength to secure such. Next best thing would
have been an area in which they could hide, and this system seemed to fill the bill nicely. But after their escape from three squadrons of Imperial heavy fighters, that would mean two pieces of extreme good fortune in a very short time.

Diettinger might believe in luck, but he did not trust that much of it at one time.

The hatch behind him opened, and Engineering stepped through. The Weapons officer accompanying him was bleeding from an arm wound—not serious. Few injuries that did not kill a Sauron outright were.

“Position identified, sir.” Navigation announced.

“Speak.”

“The Haven System is unusual in every way. Haven, the moon of the gas giant, is the only settled body. Byers IV—generally known as the Cat’s Eye—is located far outside the normal habitable zone for a G2 star; but being approximately one-point-three Jupiter masses, the gas giant provides sufficient radiant energy to keep much of Haven marginally tolerable.

“The moon is an old CoDominium relocation colony, Imperial since the Earth Exodus. We’re really on the fringes, sir. Files show no Imperial presence in this area of the Sector for almost a decade. The last Imperial Governor and his staff left in 2623.”

Diettinger nodded. Turning to the Weapons officer, he asked, “Status?”

“Point defense systems at thirty-percent. Main armament intact, auto-mechanisms down. Repair estimate of thirty hours with materials and crew on hand.”

Diettinger almost smiled. He did not expect interstellar fighter craft on a world abandoned by the Imperials. The Alderson malfunction had carried them far away from the front lines. So point defense didn’t really matter. But the main armament could shoot, if not yet aim. He had expected the news from Weapons to be far more depressing. On that account, Engineering did not disappoint him.

“Jump-Core failure. Total. Maneuvering fuel down to twenty-percent from a hull breach, four maneuvering engines down, one beyond repair.” That left
Fomoria
with two currently operational, out of six. “Internal systems now running on cells. Cells damaged. Forty-percent destroyed, twenty-percent damaged, forty-percent operative. Langston Field generator irreparably damaged during last Jump.”

“You have discretion on manpower and materials necessary for repairs,” Diettinger told Engineering. The loss of the Langston Field meant that any ship-to-ship action would be fatal. It also eliminated the possibility of erecting the Field on Haven. While the last Jump had gotten them outside the Empire’s authority, it had also destroyed their defensive capability. They were now fully committed to resettling in the Haven System—no matter what.

He turned to Weapons. “Dismantle half of the remaining point defense systems and pack them for transport. All repair is to be directed toward returning the main armament to ready status. Rig all ordnance for planetary bombardment. Calibrate beam stations for precision surface interaction ops.”

Weapons barely raised an eyebrow as he saluted and turned to follow Engineering out the hatch.

Diettinger turned back to Second Rank. She was frowning in obvious puzzlement.

“Wide scan status, Second.”

“No interplanetary traffic or communications, First Rank. An automated refueling station in orbit around an inner gas giant. Source of all non-automated signals and emissions is the same gas giant’s moon.”

Diettinger scowled.
That makes three pieces of luck
, he thought. Well, perhaps he was garnering some of the lost good fortune from all the billions of members of the Race they’d left for dead, on and above Sauron. The scowl became a rueful smile. Now he was really becoming superstitious.

He consulted the chronometer implanted in his skull: two minutes to the wardroom meeting. Diettinger turned back to Second Rank.

“When Engineering has maneuver up and running, make for the automated refueling station. Approach from Haven’s blind side. Avoid at all costs any detection or other satellites. Inform me when we’re on final approach to the station.”

John Hamilton knocked on the heavy ironwood door.
Why doesn’t anyone tell me what’s going on around here?
he asked himself for about the fiftieth time. According to the latest kitchen rumors, Ingrid Cummings was on her way to Whitehall.
Not if I have anything to do about it.

“Come in,” his grandfather’s voice called out. It was a gravelly voice used to command. John couldn’t help but jerk to attention.

“It’s me, Grandfather,” John said.

His grandfather was seated at his work desk, a former oak partners desk that some long-deceased lawyer had brought to Haven in a fit of optimism. For as much as it weighed, he could have brought in a small auto-car instead.

“I heard that Ingrid Cummings was coming to visit—”

The Baron shook his head. “Too many busybodies in this castle. Yes, Ingrid’s coming to stay with us.”

“For how long?” he interjected, unable to hear the old man out.

The Baron banged his hand on the oak desk hard enough to bring one of the retainers into the chamber.

“Is everything okay, Your Lordship?”

“Yes, Duncan. You can leave.”

“Thank you, Your Lordship,” the servant replied.

John was still amazed at how quickly the staff had taken to their new roles and life in the refurbished castle.
It’s like they shuck off another century every time I turn around.

“The Brigadier asked me if Ingrid could stay for a while as a personal favor. It’s not safe for a young woman these days in Castell City; you know that? If you don’t, you should.”

The Baron wasn’t usually this waspish.
Things must be going to hell faster than I thought
, John surmised. “I know that the constables are having trouble maintaining order there.”

“According to Gary, it’s worse than that. He’s getting ready to pull out the Volunteers; he says it’s not safe for them anymore. The gangs and criminals have taken over the city. The Brigadier doesn’t have enough men to restore order, nor does he want to. ‘Soldiers make bad cops,’ was his last word on the subject.”

The Baron snorted. “What’s Haven coming to when her soldiers are no longer safe on the streets of the capital.”

John started to open his mouth.

“Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.”

“But why send her here?”

“Because I told him that if he ever needed a refuge for his family, we’d take care of them here in Greensward. We owe him a lot; without his help we’d have been at the mercy of that band of marauders who were raiding the countryside last fall.”

John nodded, remembering the caravan of ramshackle cars and trucks that had made their way into the province; it was similar to King David’s attack twelve years ago. The raiders had hit several small farms before the Baron found out about them. When he did, he’d sent
their liegemen (too few to call an army) to fight them with some of the neighbors. The raiders hadn’t expected to find an armed opponent and were quickly dispatched. The armored cars had taken quite a toll of their vehicles, less than a dozen of them had escaped. The rest had been killed; those that had been captured had been hanged from the nearest trees as warnings. He still had to stifle a gag as he recalled the scores of hanging men, their faces a livid purple, some with distended tongues…the stench was ghastly.

Brigadier Gary Edmund Cummings, commander of the Haven Volunteers, stared out of the Turbocopter’s cockpit and down at Castell City. The city’s linear streets were almost empty of motorized traffic with the exception of an occasional white motorcar. For the most part, only horse-drawn wagons, carts, coaches, bicycles and pedcabs traveled the thoroughfares of the capital. All motorized vehicles were under government control and ownership. Traffic was light, especially for the major arteries of a planetary capital—no matter how humble. Except for an occasional smoke plume from some factory, he might have been back on Earth in the Eighteenth Century.

Cummings’ thoughts drifted back to when he’d first landed at Splash Island—eighteen years ago—to organize the evacuation of the Seventy-seventh Division of the Imperial Marines. In those days Castell City had been a bustling metropolis; nothing, of course, compared to major cities on Sparta, or even Churchill, but respectable. The streets were full of motorized vehicles, private cars and trucks, all the modern conveniences of a major city.

Castell was a city in rapid decline; there was no denying it. Imperial Plaza was still the hub of the city, with streets radiating out in strict geometric precision. The former Imperial Viceroy’s Palace was a mound of blackened rubble—another relic of the War of Liberation, along with hundreds of other ruins that had once been factories, buildings and apartment blocks.

He ran his fingers through his black hair. Everyone, including his wife, thought he dyed it, but he didn’t. If he did, it would be to dye it grey. The regeneration treatments he been given on Tanith had worked even better than the doctors had predicted. Now everyone around him
was growing old, while he appeared never to age.

On the other side of the Plaza rose the Chamber of Deputies, a stone monolith. It was too bad the rioters hadn’t burned it along with the Palace when King David Steele’s reign came to a well-deserved and violent end. Deputy Booth, one of the Brigade’s “friends,” had called him with information that the Speaker, Martin Sanderson, was about to put through another measure to place the militia under Chamber rule.
Why not
, he thought,
they’ve already given up every other asset—including the goodwill of the citizens of Castell—they ever possessed
.

It was true the Empire had strategically pulled back—make that abandoned—this sector, but that hadn’t changed his orders. Originally a citizen of Churchill, Cummings had been put in command of the Seventy-seventh’s Second Regiment back in 2609, when it had been unstated Imperial policy to put ‘trusted’ commanders in charge of frontier military units, as more and more planets joined the Sauron Coalition of Secession.

It had taken him a few years to prove himself as one of the commanders of the Land Gators. Initially, the Seventy-seventh’s Haveners had not been pleased to have a Churchillian in command of one of the Division’s most decorated regiments. It wasn’t until the Liberation of Lavaca that he’d earned their trust as well as their respect. Now he was as much a Havener as any of his original command, many of whom had died in battles on one or another of the forgotten worlds spanning the Empire.

He had been as surprised as anyone when he’d been given orders by Marshal Blaine to ‘retire’ from the Land Gators and become the Imperial watchdog on Haven. And, while he had his regrets about leaving the Imperial hub, commanding the Haven Militia was not one of them. Just keeping the Volunteers together and out of civilian control, during decades of economic upheaval and civil war, had taxed every bit of his energy and ingenuity.

Thanks to his old friend, Albert Hamilton, he’d been able to work out a compromise that solved most of his payroll problems. The best part was that it had left him independent of local politics. In exchange
for a few hundred metric tons of useless durasteel and obsolete weapons, the old Baron had supplied him with enough hard specie to keep his troops fed and clothed. Meanwhile, the Baron had provided positions for retiring soldiers and officers at his estate in Whitehall. In exchange, he had given the Baron the best intelligence he could obtain in these days of decline and technological breakdowns.