A Call To Arms: Chapter Seventeen

BOOK THREE
1543 PD

    There was a soft tone from the repeater display in Llyn’s cabin aboard Score Settler. Starting awake from his light doze, he checked the readout.

    Finally — finally — a hyper footprint. McConnovitch and Hosney had arrived.

    Llyn rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, feeling a surge of relief. The bulk of the Volsung task force had been orbiting this uninhabited red-dwarf for the past two weeks, with only one of the battlecruisers still absent, and Gensonne was starting to get twitchy. The fresh data McConnovitch was bringing in from Manticore should allay the admiral’s lingering concerns about the particulars of the force he would be facing.

    Another ping came from the board, this one marking an incoming transmission.

    Llyn rolled his eyes. It wouldn’t be McConnovitch — Hosney was still a good nine light-minutes out. Undoubtedly Gensonne.

    And of course, it was. “Is that finally your man?” the Admiral growled.

    “Yes, I believe so,” Llyn said.

    “About time,” Gensonne said sourly. “He’d better have something good after all this.”

    “I’m sure he will,” Llyn said, sitting firmly on his patience. McConnovitch was a good man, and one of the best data scavengers in the business. But he tended to play a little loose with plans and timetables. Given the nature of his work, that wasn’t unreasonable.

    Gensonne, unfortunately, was at the opposite end of the spectrum, treating his precious schedules like they’d been handed to him on stone tablets. McConnovitch hadn’t kept to that schedule, and the Admiral hadn’t been shy about stating his view of such sloppiness on a regular basis.

    But the waiting was finally over. Once McConnovitch confirmed the RMN’s weakness, Llyn could turn the Volsungs loose and then head off to where his Axelrod superiors waited to hear that the operation was finally underway. By the time Gensonne had Landing and the Manticoran government under control, Axelrod’s people would be on their way to take over.

    Or rather, the nation Axelrod had now made a deal with to “invade” and “conquer” the Star Kingdom. The handful of Axelrod “advisors” who would also be aboard those ships would be staying very much in the background, guiding the actions only if and when necessary.

    And like any good puppet show, if they did their job properly, the hard-eyed critics in Haven and the League would never see the strings.

    The minutes ticked down; and precisely on the nine-light-minute timetable, Llyn’s com pinged. “I’m getting his transmission now,” he told Gensonne. “I’ll send it on after I’ve decrypted it.”

    Gensonne gave a little grunt.

    “Make it fast.”

    “As fast as I can,” Llyn promised. “But he’ll be running a semi-manual encryption, which means I’ll need to work through it partly by hand.”

    “You’re joking,” Gensonne said with another grunt. “You never hear of computer encryption algorithms?”

    “Sure,” Llyn said. “They’re the ones a good hacker can grab whole and use to open your whole com system to unfriendly eyes and ears. Sometimes the old classics work best.”

    “If you say so. Just hurry it up.”

    “I will.”

    Llyn keyed off and checked the new transmission. It was a data packet, and the origination ID was indeed Hosney.

    He frowned, feeling a prickling on the back of his neck. No greeting, no identification, just the data packet? That didn’t sound like McConnovitch.

    The transmission ended, and the report came up on his display. Frowning, Lynn began to read.

    And the prickling on his neck turned into a shiver.

    Green Force One, scout unit, call-signed Janus: four ships.

    Green Force Two, main Manticore/Sphinx defense unit, call-signed Aegis: nine ships, including two battlecruisers. Not one, but two.

    Red Force, Gryphon defense unit, call-signed Backstop: four ships, including yet another battlecruiser.

    Llyn leaned back in his seat, mouthing a curse. The ten-ship, one-battlecruiser enemy that Gensonne was expecting to meet was in fact seventeen ships and no fewer than three battlecruisers. And that didn’t even count the two battlecruisers and six other warships that McConnovitch marked as being currently in refit.

    Gensonne wasn’t going to be happy about this. Not at all. In fact, he might be unhappy enough to take his ball and go home.

    And given the unanticipated uptick in the RMN’s numbers, the contract Llyn and Gensonne had signed not only allowed the Volsungs to bail, but also required Axelrod to pay them a hefty cancellation fee.

    There was no way Llyn was going to let that happen. Not after coming this far.

    Taking a cleansing breath, he began combing methodically through the numbers.

    Looked at more closely, it wasn’t that bad. Not really. Green Forces One and Two were a formidable array, but the fact that they were split into two groups meant that Gensonne should be able to take them on one at a time. Even if he couldn’t, it was still two RMN battlecruisers against the Volsungs’ three.

    Even better, Red Force was way the hell over at Manticore-B. Those ships should be out of the picture until long after the battle was over. And of course, all the ships in dock for refit might as well not even be there.

    No, Gensonne wasn’t going up against anything he couldn’t handle. Not with his three battlecruisers, his fourteen other ships, and his massive confidence.

    There was certainly no reason to bother the admiral’s little head with silly numbers and needless concerns.

    He finished his editing, then keyed for transmission to Gensonne’s flagship.

    “I’ve decoded the report, Admiral. Sending it to you now.”

    “Thank you,” Gensonne said. “I trust nothing has changed since your last report?”

    “Nothing of significance,” Llyn assured him. “Nothing at all.”

    Commodore Rudolph Heissman, commander of the light cruiser HMS Casey and the other three ships of Green Two, was undoubtedly a very busy man. Nevertheless, from Travis’s point of view at the far side of Heissman’s desk, it looked like he was taking an extraordinarily long time to read through Travis’s transfer orders. Seated beside him, Commander Celia Belokas, Heissman’s exec, didn’t look to be in any more of a hurry than her boss.

    Finally, after a mid-size eternity, Heissman looked up. “Lieutenant Long,” he said, his flat tone not giving anything away. “According to this, you have great potential.”

    He paused, as if expecting some kind of response. “Thank you, Sir,” was all Travis could think to say. The words, which had sounded tolerably reasonable in his head, sounded excruciatingly stupid when he heard them out in the open air.

    Heissman apparently thought so, too. “You know what I hear when someone uses the phrase great potential, Mr. Long?” he asked, his expression not changing in the slightest. “I hear someone making excuses. I hear someone who hasn’t worked to reach the level of his or her ability. I hear someone who doesn’t belong in the Royal Manticoran Navy. I hear someone who absolutely doesn’t belong aboard HMS Casey.”

    “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. That response didn’t sound any better than the previous one had.

    “I don’t want to see potential,” Heissman continued. “I want to see results.” He cocked his head. “Do you know what the assistant tactical officer’s job is, Mr. Long?”

    “Yes, Sir.” The words sounded marginally better this time. “To assist the Captain and Tactical Officer in combat maneuvers and –”

    “That’s the job description,” Heissman interrupted. “What the ATO does is find patterns and weaknesses in the enemy, and avoid them in his own ship.”

    He gazed into Travis’s eyes, his expression hardening. “Captain Castillo talks a lot about luck. I don’t ever want to hear you use that word aboard my ship. Understood?”

    “Yes, Sir,” Travis said.

    “Good,” Heissman said. “As I said, part of your job is to know the weaknesses of your own ship and find ways to minimize them. Step one in that procedure is obviously to know your ship.” He nodded to his side. “In light of that, Commander Belokas has graciously agreed to give you a tour. Pay attention and listen to everything she has to say. Afterward, you’re going to need a lot of hours with the spec manual before you’re anywhere near up to speed.”

    “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. He shifted his eyes to Belokas. “Ma’am.”

    Heissman’s eyebrows rose a fraction of a centimeter. “Unless, of course, you’ve already spent some time in the manual,” he added, as if the thought had only just occurred to him. “Have you?”

    “As a matter of fact, Sir, yes, I have,” Travis confirmed, trying not to grimace. He’d only spent eighty percent of his waking hours during his two weeks of groundside time poring through everything he could find on Casey and her equipment. Which, considering all the bureaucratic hoops he’d had to jump through to even get the manuals, Heissman almost certainly already knew. “Just the surface information, of course –”

    “In that case, you can give the tour,” Heissman said. “You’ll tell Commander Belokas everything you know, and she’ll start on her list of everything you don’t know. That sound fair to you?”

    “Yes, Sir,” Travis said.

    “Good,” Heissman said. “You have two hours before you’re to report to Lieutenant Commander Woodburn, so you’d better get to it.” He nodded briskly and lowered his eyes to the report. “Dismissed.”

    “I trust you won’t take this wrong, Ensign,” Captain Adrian Hagros said stiffly as he floated at the back of RMN Hercules’s entryway, “but what the hell are you doing aboard my ship?”

    Crown Prince Richard Winton — or more accurately, the freshly-minted Ensign Richard Winton — suppressed a smile. Not because of the question or the impudence, but because he knew full well the looks the two King’s Own bodyguards behind him were giving Hercules’s commander right now.

    Which merely raised Richard’s opinion of Hagros another couple of notches. Awkward situation or not, the man refused to either shrivel or mince words. Now, more than ever, Richard was glad he’d made this decision.

    “I’m an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, Sir,” he reminded Hagros politely. “I’m here because this is where my orders sent me.”

    “Sure,” Hagros said. “And your orders didn’t send you to Invincible or Swiftsure because…?”

    “Because small-ship experience is as important as big-ship duty, Sir,” Richard said. “Because Hercules is where the normal assignment rotation had scheduled me. And because I don’t want any special privileges.”

    A familiar set of expressions flicked across Hagros’s face, mirroring the equally familiar thoughts likely going on behind them: first, that a broad range of experience was only necessary for a career officer, which Richard most definitely wasn’t; and second, that special privileges were practically a way of life for the Crown Prince, whether he wanted them or not.

    Richard knew that was what Hagros was thinking, because it was what everyone else had thought, every frustrating step of the way.

    But Richard had made it this far. He’d avoided cushy duty, he’d avoided abnormally prestigious duty, and he’d forced them to put him on a normal ensign’s track. He wasn’t about to be stopped now just because Hercules’s captain didn’t think a century-old Pegasus-class corvette was worthy of the Crown Prince’s presence.

    Maybe Hagros saw that in Richard’s eyes. Or maybe he just realized that the Crown Prince’s presence here meant better people than Hagros had already tried to send him to a more comfortable posting and failed.

    “Glad to hear it,” he growled. “Because you’re not going to get any here. The yeoman outside will show you to your quarters.” His eyes flicked over Richard’s shoulders. “And your men to theirs,” he added. “You’re to report to Lieutenant Petrenko in Forward Impellers in one hour. Any questions?”

    “No, Sir.”

    “In that case, welcome aboard, Ensign,” Hagros said, a little less severely. “A word of warning: corvettes are old ships, and their crews have to work their tails off. Be prepared to have yours worked off, too.”

    “I’m looking forward to it, Sir.”

    Hagros snorted as he gave Richard a sharp nod. And, perhaps, just the faintest hint of a smile. “Dismissed.”

    And as Richard floated down the passageway behind the yeoman, he found himself breathing deeper in anticipation. No more arguments with his father, no more persuasion of nervous bureaucrats in BuPers, no more need to define his position and stand firm on it. Finally, finally, he had a ship.

    He would work his tail off, all right. His current orders had him serving aboard Hercules for the next year. He would spend that year becoming the best damn officer Hercules and Hagros had ever seen.

    “Admiral Gensonne?”

    His eyes and attention still on Llyn’s report, Gensonne reached over and keyed the com. “What is it, Imbar?”

    “Hyper footprint, Sir,” Captain Sweeney Imbar, Odin’s commander, reported. “Looks like Tyr has finally arrived.”

    Gensonne grunted. About fraggy time. They’d been waiting on Blakely to get his butt here for four solid weeks, and the rest of the captains were getting antsy. Now, with the last of Gensonne’s three battlecruisers on site, they were finally ready to get this operation underway. “Send Captain Blakely my compliments,” he instructed Imbar, “and tell him to haul his sorry carcass in pronto so he can start loading supplies and armaments. We head for Manticore in five days, and if he’s not ready he’ll be left behind.”

    “Aye, Admiral,” Imbar said, and Gensonne could visualize the other’s malicious grin. Imbar loved relaying that kind of order.

    Gensonne keyed off the com, and with a scowl returned his attention to Llyn’s report.

    Seventeen warships. That was what the Volsung Mercenaries were bringing to the battlefield: three battlecruisers, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and one troop carrier. There were also be the four fuel and support ships that would remain parked outside the hyper limit, but those didn’t really count. The Manticorans, in contrast, had only thirteen warships with which to counter.

    Well, seventeen, technically, if you added in the group guarding Gryphon. But they were way the hell over at Manticore-B. If the Volsungs did their job properly, that force could be left out of the equation. Llyn’s spies hadn’t been able to get a complete reading on the ship types in each of the two Manticore-A groups, but the earlier report had said the larger force had a single battlecruiser, and there was nothing in this latest intel to suggest that number had changed. The additional ships in the new intel had to be small: destroyers or corvettes.

    Plus the fact that all the enthusiasm in the galaxy could mount impeller rings and graduate crewmen only so quickly. Even if Llyn’s current count was off by a ship or two, the Volsungs should be facing no more than the same number of ships they themselves were bringing to the battle.

    Still…

    Gensonne murmured a ruminative curse. The wild card in this whole thing, and a wild card that Llyn either hadn’t noticed or had deliberately downplayed, was this damn HMS Casey. The tables listed it as a standard light cruiser, but it was clear from the specs Llyn’s spies had been able to dig out that there wasn’t anything standard about it, certainly not for ships out here in the hinterlands. From the profile alone, he could see that the Manticorans had put in a modern grav plate habitation module, a high-efficiency radiator system, and had extended the length of their missile launchers. Possibly a railgun launch system; more likely just an absorption cylinder that would minimize the missiles’ launch flares. Nothing really revolutionary, and nothing Gensonne couldn’t handle.

    Still, it was far more advanced than it should be, and better than most of the Volsungs’ own second-hand and surplused ships. The report didn’t get into details about armament or defenses, but Gensonne had no doubt that Casey’s designers hadn’t neglected to pack some serious firepower aboard.

    And if King Edward had had the authority, the confidence, and the cash to turn his designers loose on Casey, he might well have used that same combination to speed up the de-mothballing of those other ships.

    The smart thing would be to put off the operation until Gensonne had time to send his own people to Manticore. Get a real military assessment instead of having to rely on Llyn’s paper-pushing guesswork.

    But all he had here were military ships, which would raise way more eyebrows than he wanted. The only civilian spy ships he had available were way the hell back in Silesia. Getting word back there, and then getting one of them to fly to Manticore and to report to him here would take over a year.

    Gensonne had no interest in putting off the operation that long. Llyn was even more adamant about the timing.

    The only other option was to use Llyn’s courier ship. But couriers were generally diplomatic vessels, and one in private hands would raise nearly as many eyebrows as one of Gensonne’s military ships.

    Besides, if he couldn’t trust Llyn’s spies to give him accurate data, he sure as hell couldn’t trust Llyn himself with the job.

    Gensonne scowled. The ongoing mystery underlying this whole thing was what in blazes the Manticorans could possibly have that was worth this much effort. Llyn was paying the Volsungs a huge sum of money to take over three lumps of real estate on the bloody back end of nowhere. Gensonne had tried on numerous occasions to wangle that secret out of the smug little man, and every time Llyn had calmly and artfully dodged the question.

    But that was all right. The Volsung Mercenaries weren’t without resources of their own…and if Gensonne still didn’t know the why, he now at least knew the who.

    Llyn’s employer, the shadowy figure quietly funding this whole operation, was one of the top people in the multi-trillion, transstellar business juggernaut known as the Axelrod Corporation.

    So the question now became why Axelrod would be interested in Manticore. Was it the treecats? Something else hidden in the forests of Sphinx or the wastes of Gryphon?

    “Admiral?” Imbar’s voice came from the com speaker.

    “Yes?”

    “Captain Blakely’s compliments, Sir,” Imbar said. “He confirms hauling carcass as ordered, and anticipates fourteen hours to zero-zero.”

    Gensonne checked his chrono. “Tell him that if he doesn’t make it in twelve he might as well not bother,” he warned.

    “He anticipated that request,” Imbar said, his voice going a little brittle. “He said to tell you that fourteen should do just fine if you can get the loaders to haul carcass at even half the speed he’s doing it. If you can’t, he’ll just have to do it himself.” The Captain gave a little snort. “He added a Sir to that, but I don’t think he really meant it.”

    Gensonne smiled. Blakely was as arrogant and snarky an SOB as they came. But he was also a hell of a scrappy fighter, and Gensonne was willing to put up with the one if he could have the other. “Tell him he’ll be losing one percent of his profit cut for every ten minutes after twelve hours he ties up.”

    “Yes, Sir, that should do it,” Imbar said slyly. “I’ll let him know.”

    “Do that,” Gensonne said, his attention already back on the upcoming campaign.

    Standard military doctrine, of course, said that you went after the biggest ships first, taking them out as soon as you could clear away their screening vessels. But in this case, it might well be smart to seek out Casey earlier rather than later and make sure she was out of the fight. If she was the Manticorans’ modern showcase, her destruction might help convince them to sue for terms more promptly.

    Which could be useful. The accepted laws of war dictated that a planet was supposed to surrender once someone else controlled the space around it, a convention designed to avoid the wholesale slaughter of civilians in prolonged combat. Taking out Casey would give the Volsungs that control all the faster, and once Gensonne had King Edward’s formal surrender document any forces that remained at large would be legally bound to stand down.

    Gensonne liked quick surrenders. It saved on men and equipment, and it boosted profits. Especially since any Royal Manticoran ships that survived would become the property of the victors. That would definitely be a part of the surrender agreement, and even old ships could be profitably integrated into his existing forces. If eliminating Casey quickly helped bring that about, so much the better.

    And if Casey wasn’t, in fact, anything special?

    He shrugged. It was most probable the ship would have to be destroyed in the initial attack, anyway. It would have been nice to get his hands on the Manticorans’ one really modern vessel, but a man couldn’t have everything.

    “Admiral, I have a response from Captain Blakely,” Imbar once again interrupted. “He sends his compliments, and says he’ll see you in hell.”

    Gensonne smiled. “Tell him it’s a date,” he said. “I’ll be the one wearing white.”

    “Commander Donnelly?” Chief Lydia Ulvestad called from the com station. “Signal from Ensign Plover. He and the others have left Aries and are heading back.”

    “Thank you, Chief,” Lisa said, feeling yet another twinge of annoyance over this whole thing. Granted, she and the rest of Damocles’s crew had little enough to do these days. But there was still something fundamentally insulting about the RMN having to send ratings to one of their own former ships simply because the MPARS weenies couldn’t figure out how to make their new missiles work.

    Especially when Breakwater had already siphoned off some of the Navy’s own people to assist them. They were the ones who were supposed to be doing this grunt work, not Damocles’s people.

    “Did Plover say whether or not they got the missiles working?” she asked.

    “Sounds like it, Ma’am,” Ulvestad said. “From what I heard, it sounded like an electronics problem, and Mallare and Redko are good at fixing those.” She hesitated. “I don’t know if you knew, Ma’am, but Missile Tech Townsend is aboard Aries.”

    “Yes, I knew that,” Lisa said, feeling her throat tighten. Travis had mentioned that over a hurried lunch a couple of weeks ago, during one of the rare times the two of them were in Landing at the same time. He’d seemed to think that he might have had something to do with Townsend’s transfer, though he hadn’t gone into details.

    But except for that brief cloud, the rest of the time they’d spent together had been good. Actually, it had been more than just good. The people who remembered Travis as “Rule-stickler Long,” and those who used the strange travesty catchword that he’d somehow been saddled with — they all missed the point. Yes, Travis was rigid when it came to rules and procedures aboard his ship; but when he was off-duty, and if he could be persuaded to relax, he was surprisingly pleasant company. He was smart, quick with a quip, considerate, and attentive.

    In fact, what had begun as a dog-sitting favor and grown into a friendship was slowly blossoming into —

    Lisa shook the thought away. She didn’t know where her relationship with Travis was going, and wasn’t at all sure she wanted to. She’d tried the romance thing once before, and had gotten herself thoroughly paint-stripped for her efforts. She wasn’t in any hurry to rush into that thorn bush again.

    Though with Travis it would probably be different. There’d been warning signs with Rolfe, red flags which she’d ignored in the rose-colored haze, but which were painfully obvious in the cold light of day. There were no such flags with Travis.

    Of course, that might only mean that there were different signs there which she was also deliberately avoiding. No one was perfect, after all, and Travis probably had a dozen habits or quirks that would make him hard to live with.

    Still, she did enjoy his company.

    “Signal from Aries, Ma’am,” Ulvestad said into her thoughts. “Captain Hardasty’s compliments, and her thanks for lending us Mallare and Redko.”

    At least Hardasty was being polite about it. “My compliments in return,” Lisa said. “Did she give any indication that the problem has been fixed?”

    “Nothing directly,” Ulvestad said. “But Plover did mention he’d heard both Aries and Taurus would be staying in Manticore orbit for a while to run some tests.”

    Lisa nodded. A sensible decision — it would be foolish for the two corvettes to head directly to their new Unicorn Belt postings until they were sure their missile systems were up and running. Manticore-B might be MPARS’s stronghold, but most of the real weapons expertise still resided here at Manticore.

    Unless Hardasty wanted to head in from the Belt later to Gryphon and ask Admiral Jacobson for help. Given that Aries had been pulled out of Jacobson’s Red Force before being handed over to MPARS, Lisa doubted that such help would be cheerfully given.

    “Well, do remind her that we’re scheduled to leave in three hours to rendezvous with the rest of Aegis,” she said. “If she needs assistance after that, she’ll have to get it elsewhere.”

    “Yes, Ma’am.”

    Lisa checked her chrono. Captain Marcello would be arriving for his watch in about half an hour. Lisa would want to make sure the shuttle was properly squared away and that Damocles was ready for her departure to join the rest of Admiral Locatelli’s force.

    And then it would be a trip to the officers’ mess for a quick dinner. Alone, probably. Certainly not with anyone who understood her and could make her laugh.

    It really was amazing, she decided, how much she missed Travis.

    “Well?” Gensonne asked drumming his fingers impatiently.

    “We’re ready, Sir,” Imbar said. He listened a moment longer, then keyed off the com. “All ships are in position; all synch timers are zeroed. We await your order, Admiral.”

    Gensonne nodded. Which was as it should be. All ships, all crewmen, all awaiting his order.

    All ships, of course, except for Llyn’s courier. Gensonne had invited him to come along and watch the show, but he’d made his excuses and taken off, no doubt to report to his Axelrod masters. Perish forbid that someone from such a genteel, dress-suited establishment should soil his hands with something as disagreeable as actual combat.

    But that was fine. Gensonne could have found something useful for Llyn and his ship to do, but he hardly needed them. All he needed was Llyn’s money, and he had the first portion of that safely in hand.

    He would also make sure he had all the rest before he and his ships left Manticore. Maybe he would make a little ritual of handing over the keys to King Edward’s palace in exchange for the last set of bank chits. That would probably appeal to the little man’s sense of humor.

    In the meantime, the Volsung Mercenaries had a job to do.

    “Signal all ships,” he ordered Imbar. “Translate on my mark.”

    And they would carry out that job with skill and precision, he promised himself. The skill and precision that Gustav Anderman had always prized, and which the old lunatic had claimed Gensonne didn’t have.

    Well, the Volsungs would show him. They would show everyone.

    And when this was all over, maybe Gensonne would take the new ships and crews he could buy with the money Llyn was paying and go back to Potsdam. And he would show his former chief just how skillful and precise an attack could be.

    It was something worth thinking about.

    In the meantime…

    “Ready all ships,” he called. “Ready: mark.”