Alarm of War (28 page)

Murphy shook his head. “You owe me a pint of the best for this, boyo, and no mistake.
Dublin
out!”

One last call to put things in motion. Hiram took a deep breath and grinned shakily at the FIC crew who stood watching him, open mouthed.

The comm flickered on to show a man in an admiral’s uniform sitting before rows and rows of consoles and displays. He looked impatiently at Hiram under busy eyebrows and a thatch of white hair. “This is Prometheus Station Master, Admiral Sullivan.”

“Admiral, I am Lieutenant Brill, special adjutant to Admiral Douthat. Admiral Douthat has instructed me to order you to immediately evacuate Prometheus and to destroy your central computer.” He hurriedly explained about the Dominion attack and the two enemy fleets soon to arrive.

Admiral Sullivan bit back a reply and pursed his lips. “Tell you what, Brill. You get Admiral Douthat on the comm personally. I want to see her myself if I’m going to obey an order like this. And if you don’t get her, I’m going to see you court martialled. Prometheus out!” The display went blank.

For a long moment Hiram sat still; he didn’t know what to do. They
had
to clear Prometheus and-

“Who the hell are you and what the
fuck
do you think you’re doing?” a voice suddenly said. Hiram whirled around and found himself facing a very angry looking Admiral Alyce Douthat, admiral of the Home Fleet. Behind her was a squad of Royal Marines in full battle gear, looking blood stained and grim, and behind them stood Captain Grey of the
New Zealand.

Sweat broke out on his face; his stomach rolled and he felt faint. “I…I” he stammered helplessly.

Douthat looked at him in disgust. “You’re under arrest for treason.” She gestured to the Marines. “Take him-”

“NO!” he shouted.

Admiral Douthat stared at him with hard eyes. “Don’t “No” me, you traitorous son of a bitch. As of twenty minutes ago, we’re in a shooting war. What I should do instead of locking you up is just push you out the nearest airlock.”

Hiram was having trouble controlling his breathing. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to take a full breath. Black spots swarmed before his eyes.

“Dominion fleet is coming,” he gasped.

Douthat’s eyes narrowed. “What?” she asked, her voice full of menace.

“
Coup de main,
” he croaked. “Queen is dead. Two Dominion fleets will be here is twenty four hours.”

“The Queen
is
dead, and I think you had something to do with it,” Douthat snarled. “I just caught you red-handed ordering the evacuation of one of our most important space stations, using my name! You know, on second thought, I am just going to push you out an airlock-”

“The Queen is
not
dead!” a voice interrupted.

Four men in the blue livery of the royal armsmen crowded into the room, looking at everyone with hard eyes. Each carried a sonic blaster, held ready to fire. For a moment, everyone froze, then as one looked to the figure in the doorway.

“You are mistaken, Admiral,” said Anne Radcliff Mendoza Churchill, eldest daughter of the late Queen Beatrice. Beside her stood a grim-faced Sir Henry Truscott. Anne’s eyes were red-rimmed, but dry. She had grieved privately for her mother’s death; now her weeping was done.

“Your queen is alive and standing before you. With the death of my mother, I am now Queen of Victoria.”

“A
dmiral, we have been most grievously attacked. You are the senior surviving admiral of the Fleet. Why are you wasting your time here instead of coordinating the defense of Victoria?” Queen Anne asked sternly.

Admiral Douthat struggled to recover her composure. “Princess…Your Highness,” she managed. “This man just attempted to evacuate the Prometheus Space Station, using my name as authority. This implicates him in the attack that just destroyed two of our battleships.”

The new Queen turned and studied Hiram Brill, who was gasping for breath and struggling not to be violently sick to his stomach.

“What is your name?” she demanded.

“Lieutenant Hiram Brill, Fleet Intelligence,” he gasped. “I am an aide to Rear Admiral Teehan.”

“Rear Admiral Teehan is dead,” Queen Anne said evenly, “killed in the attack on the Palace.” Then her brows furrowed as she searched her memory. “Brill…you wrote the report predicting an attack by the Tilleke on Arcadian shipping.”

Hiram nodded, astonished that she would even know of the report, let alone the fact that he wrote it.

Queen Anne turned on Admiral Douthat. “Had we paid proper attention to this man’s report months ago, perhaps we would not be here today, Admiral. Do you really want to arrest one of your more insightful intelligence officers, or would you be willing to listen to what he has to say before you…” she pursued her lips, “…push him out of the nearest airlock?”

You don’t get to be an admiral without learning about political realities. Admiral Douthat’s political reality was staring her in the face in the form of the twenty year old Queen, who would be the major figure in Victorian government for the rest of Admiral Douthat’s career. With a conscious effort, she let the anger drain out of her, saving enough to give Brill a very hard look. “Make it good, Brill.”

Hiram sagged with relief. “Gandalf! Show display of Bogeys One and Two.”

The display blossomed, showing Victoria, the two mammoth space stations, and far to either side of Atlas a small swarm of ships, one labeled Bogey One and the other Bogey Two. Queen Anne stepped forward and studied them intently.

Douthat frowned. “Two freighter convoys, so what?”

Hiram shook his head. “Not freighters. If I’m right, those are two Dominion invasion fleets trying to pass themselves off as freighters. And they’ll be here in less than twenty four hours.”

Douthat glowered at him. “This is bullshit, Brill. The Dominion doesn’t have that many ships. How many are there, one hundred and thirty?”

“One hundred and fifty,” Hiram corrected, earning him another glare. “And we have only the First Fleet, three Battle Groups totaling sixty ships. Fifty eight, now,” he corrected himself.”

“The Dominion does
not
have that many ships,” the admiral repeated sternly.

Hiram felt a flutter in his stomach, ignored it, and forced him to stare back at Admiral Douthat. “Admiral, it makes no sense for those freighters to fire on our battleships and to attack the Palace
unless
there was going to be a follow-on strike of massive proportions. We’ve got two large fleets coming in, one from Cape Breton and one directly from the DUC. Anyway, we know the Dominion was involved in the attack that destroyed Second Fleet-”

“Second Fleet!” Alyce Douthat had gone pale. “What are you talking about?”

Belatedly, Hiram realized that no one outside of the Intelligence Center had heard the message from
Bawdy Bertha.
“Gandalf! Play the message from Captain Zizka.”

Captain Zizka’s somber face appeared and told his story of desperation and death once more.

“What does this mean?” asked Queen Anne once the message had ended.

“It means that Brill is probably right,” Douthat replied grimly. “Second Fleet is gone, and Third Fleet with it. The Tilleke, the Dominion and Cape Breton are somehow working together. These two “convoys” are really invasion fleets, so Home Fleet is outnumbered more than two to one, and most of our admirals died in the attack on the Palace.” She smiled thinly. “The only reason I wasn’t there as well is because Sir Henry wanted me here to escort you to one of my ships for safe keeping.”

“But can you stop them?” the Queen demanded. “Can you protect Cornwall?”

Douthat studied the holo display, then shook her head wearily. “Maybe if we hadn’t lost
Isle of Man
and
Invincible
, but without them we’re just too weak.”

“They’re not here to attack Cornwall,” Hiram said. The Queen turned to face him. “Explain,” she said.

He opened his arms wide to encompass everything around him. “They want this, Atlas and Prometheus, the industrial titans of the human universe. This, and our Victorian space with its wonderful network of wormholes.”

“Bloody hell,” murmured Sir Henry.

“But if the Fleet can’t protect Cornwall, how can it protect Atlas and Prometheus?”

“We can’t,” he said shortly. “We cannot fight and win, but we can
run
,” Hiram replied, his own sense of certainty for once suffusing his voice with confidence. “And we’ll take Atlas with us.”

“T
here they are,” the Sensors Officer breathed. “Sweet Gods, look at ‘em all!”

H.M.S.
Annapurna
hung motionless in space five thousand miles away from Bogey One. Two hours earlier it had launched a dozen spy drones and sent them across the travel lane favored by traders going from Cape Breton to Victoria.
Annapurna
was a scout frigate, specially fitted to be stealthy and with a powerful assortment of passive sensors. Just for practice, it routinely stalked freighters and other ships traveling along the main trader routes. Even more fun was stalking other war ships in the Home Fleet. Captain Culver delighted in sending her fellow captains copies of the sensor reports showing how close she had gotten to them, completely undetected. She called them her “love letters.”

The other captains were seldom amused; Culver thought it was hilarious.

Two of the spy drones had bracketed the incoming fleet, collected data from their sensitive passive sensors and beamed it back to
Annapurna
by whisker laser.

“Put it up on the board, Donny,” Culver said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Warrant Officer Donald DiFusco typed in a command and the holo display blossomed. The spy drones had gotten close enough for visual sightings as well as picking up radio, sensor and anti-matter emissions. Culver maneuvered the display controls to zoom in until they could clearly see individual ships.

“My, my,” she said. “And who is that knocking at my door?” She hummed the tune from a popular song as she panned the camera angle back and forth, occasionally zooming in to examine some detail.

“I see eighty seven ships, Captain,” DiFusco reported. “Eighty five have military grade power plants and engines, two are definitely civilian freighters.” He shrugged. “They may be using them as colliers. We are not – I repeat, not - picking up T-band broad spectrum sensors or S-band targeting sensors, just normal navigation BB-band that you’d expect to see with any freighter. No radio traffic at all. They are locked down tight, being as stealthy as a big ass fleet of ships can be.”

“Origin?”

“Mildred classifies most of them as Dominion, but there are a bunch that have drive signatures that are not in our data bank. Similar to known Dominion drives, but different, like they might be the next generation.”

Culver frowned. Next generation engines? She didn’t like the sound of that. “Size and strength?”

“Looks like eighty five war birds, including one really big sonofabitch, bigger than our standard battleships. Then we’ve got…um, thirty cruiser size ships, another thirty destroyer size, then a bunch of smaller ships, mostly frigates and smaller.” He looked up. “Interesting, though, near the back of the fleet, there are two large ships, but I can’t figure out what they are.” He spun the aiming device, then zoomed in on two ships that looked like two large ovals.

Culver frowned. The two ships did not appear to have any significant offensive weapons, unless they were hidden in the hull. There were several rows of short, stubby weapons that she guessed were for anti-missile defense. Colliers? They were much bigger than any colliers she had ever seen. She zoomed in further. There were dozens of radio dishes spotted along the top of each ship, more than any collier would need. She mentally shrugged; let the boffins back at Atlas have a go at it.

“Close down the drones and let’s back out of here, quiet and slow,” she told her deck crew. “Julianne, do we have a clean shot for the comm laser back to Atlas?”

“No, Captain,” the Communications Officer replied. “We’ll have to route it through one of the satellites.”

“Set it up. Download all of the drone data and send it off ‘Priority Alpha.’ Mark it for attention to Home Fleet Command, with a copy to this Lieutenant Brill, whoever he is.”

Captain Culver sat back in her chair, ignoring the subtle tremor as the ship crept away under chemical thrusters. She zoomed the display out until she could see the entire fleet, colored red by the computer as hostiles. A deep thrill of fear coursed through her. How would they stop so many ships?

A
strong man could shape the universe to his will.

Bend it, if need be.

Admiral Mello knew this to be true. Task Force One was now twenty hours inside Victorian space and still undetected. They’d reach Cornwall and the precious space stations in another twenty four hours. Every mile increased the chances they would be discovered, but so far there was no reason for the Vickies to be suspicious. They were just another grain convoy from Cape Breton, larger than most, perhaps, but not threatening in the least. They were just plodding along, getting closer and closer to their objective.

“Any word from Admiral Kaeser?”

“Nothing yet, sir. Since he doesn’t know exactly where we are, he can’t reach us by laser, and he probably doesn’t want to risk a courier drone.”

Mello shrugged. He hadn’t really expected anything, not yet. “Anything on the holo?”

Commander Pattin shook her head. “We’ve seen a few freighters, but at some distance, too far away for them to paint us with commercial sensors. We’ve had the usual sensor ghosts, but nothing worth investigating.”

Dominion Task Force One plowed on. Six thousand miles away, the H.M.S.
Annapurna
found a clear line of sight to one of the Fleet’s communications satellites and beamed its message of warning.

• • • • •

The Fleet ship closest to Bogey Two was a destroyer, the H.M.S.
Glasgow
, captained by Captain Robert Manforte, known by his crew with affection as Madman Manforte for his daring and boldness during Fleet maneuvers.