Alarm of War (39 page)

The supply ship next to the
New Zealand
was huge. Emily gaped like a tourist. She had never once seen another ship in space without the assistance of video cameras. Now she thought she could reach out and touch the supply ship – the
Togo,
the name was clearly visible on its hull. Emily tried to imagine the consternation the Dominion ships must have felt when they realized the Victorian ships were sailing alongside them.

“Betty, hail the
Togo.”

The Togo’s captain came on immediately, obviously waiting for her call. “Captain, this is the H.M.S.
New Zealand.
You are instructed to not make any radio transmissions or to launch any courier drones. Kill your engines. You and your crew have ten minutes to evacuate your ship. You will not be harmed as long as you comply.”

The Captain was an attractive woman in her forties. She looked at Emily shrewdly. “I am Captain Hantman. Since you don’t want any radio transmissions, I assume you want me to turn off my “friend-or-foe” transponder?” she asked innocently.

Emily smiled at having been caught out so quickly. “No, you can leave that on.”

“I thought as much,” Hantman replied. “You are playing a very close game here, Captain. Very close.” She paused. “There is a much better alternative here, Captain: Surrender to me. There is no shame in it. We outnumber you. We’ve captured your home world, and there is little doubt we will overtake your space station and capture it or destroy it.”

Emily blinked in surprise. “You are asking me to surrender?”

“Consider your position, Captain.” Hantman said the word “Captain” with a slight question in it. “The loss of these supply ships will cause us some temporary discomfort, but we have other supply trains, and more war ships entering your Sector with each hour. You have lost this war; now the only question is whether you will die in it.”

“Dominion missiles will arrive in two minutes,” Merlin said.

“Evacuate in ten minutes, Captain,” Emily said harshly, “Or the loss of your crew is on your head.”

Captain Hantman bowed her head slightly. “You are making a mistake, but for the moment it is yours to make.
Togo
out.” The com screen went blank.

“Ninety seconds,” Merlin said.

Now or never, Emily thought. “All ships, fire off remaining decoys, then go stealthy. Good luck.”

Three hundred and fifty missiles bore down on them. Everyone watched the holo display, unable to turn away. Betty McCann quietly wept. Alex Rudd swallowed convulsively. Chief Gibson stared fixedly at the holo display, as if force of will could make the missiles go away. Seaman Partridge kept nodding, as if everything was going according to plan. Other crew members crossed themselves or fingered religious talismans.

Emily was suddenly seized by terrible doubt. It had seemed such a good idea when Partridge suggested it, but now she watched with growing horror as the missiles relentlessly homed in. She was putting them all, her crew, the entire Coldstream Guards, in terrible jeopardy. Her mistake would kill them.

Emily closed her eyes and said a prayer.

“Sixty seconds.”

Then Chief Freidman swore viciously. “Sweet Gods! The Ducks are running for it!”

The four Dominion supply ships had abruptly turned and accelerated, each of them heading in a different direction. For a moment, the twelve Coldstream Guards ships sat naked before the missile onslaught.

Emily frantically signaled Alyce to open a call to the
Togo
. “
Togo
, cut your engines now or we will fire on you!”

Captain Hantman’s face appeared on the com screen. “Fire on us and take a risk that you’ll knock out our friend-or-foe beacon?” she asked in mock astonishment. “I don’t think you’ll take that chance,
New Zealand
.”

Emily cut off the com, slapping her armrest in frustration. She’d been suckered and then caught flatfooted.

“Pilot, steer to the
Togo
! Quickly! Tuck in as close as you can,” Emily ordered. “All ships, hug any supply ship you can reach.” But the supply ships had gone to full military power and were pulling away.

“Thirty seconds,” Merlin said calmly. Further proof computers were stupid, Emily thought viciously.

“Full power, Pilot!” The
New Zealand
seemed to leap forward as Bahawalanzai kicked in all four of the anti-matter engines. The
Togo
fired its anti-missile weapons at them, but the
New Zealand’s
armor shook them off and they closed in rapidly. Bahawalanzai killed the engines and deftly nudged the DMB brake. The pitted hull of the
Togo
once again filled their view screen. The holo display showed ships scattered about, some close to one of the supply ships…some not.

“You are a genius at the helm, Mr. Bahawalanzai,” Emily said fervently.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Bahawalanzai replied matter of factly.

“Five seconds to impact,” Merlin intoned.

“Gods of our Mothers,” Betty McCann sobbed. “Protect your children now in their hour of need.”

The missiles reached them.

Emily had the fleeting impression of shadows flickering on the view screen, then more shadows, then…nothing. The bridge crew looked at each other in wary disbelief. On the holo display the tide of missiles surged past them…and kept going.

“They missed us,” Chief Freidman said, an astonished grin spreading across his face. “By Christ and all the Saints, they missed us!”

But they hadn’t missed everyone. Two flashing Code Omega symbols blinked on the holo display. The cruiser
Southampton
and the frigate
Kilimanjaro
were both gone. More than a thousand men and women. Emily glanced urgently at Chief Gibson, who shook his head. “No sign of life boats,” he told her.

A deep wave of coldness washed through her then. She was neither sad nor angry, but her heart ached and part of her wanted to weep with frustration. I brought these people into harm’s way, she thought. My people. And they died under my orders, because I wasn’t clever enough. Hundreds,
thousands
of men and women who depended on me to keep them alive. And
I
wasn’t clever enough.

And the cold seeped through her, through her limbs and into her stomach. And finally, blessedly, it reached her anguished heart and gave her respite.

“Lieutenant Tuttle?” Betty McCann said softly. “It’s—it’s the
Togo
. Captain Hantman wants to talk to you. She says she is prepared to surrender.”

Emily turned and stared at her. McCann fell silent. Emily turned to Alex Rudd and Chief Gibson. They both stared back, then nodded.

Emily opened a channel to the surviving Coldstream Guards. “All ships, fire at will until the supply ships have been destroyed.”

“I
’ve got thirty five war ships left,” Admiral Douthat reported. “And almost all of them have damage of some sort or another. The
Brisbane
is shot to pieces; in normal times she would be sent to the dock for scrap, but she can still fly and still has a couple of operating lasers and missile tubes, so she stays in the game. And we’ve still got the arks,
Javelin, Battle Ax,
and
Kite Runner
, with forty five heavy gunboats. I’m saving them for when I absolutely need them,” she said grimly. “The intensity of the fire means that the gunboats won’t last long once they’re committed. We’ll be lucky to get one good attack run out of them.”

“And the enemy?” asked Queen Anne. It was the end of the third day since they had fled from Cornwall. They sat in the Queen’s quarters in one of the hotels that had been taken over by the Queen and the Fleet. Admiral Douthat and Captain Eder were bleary with fatigue, their uniforms rumpled and dirty. Hiram Brill sat in one corner with his tablet, trying to both keep up with the flow of data and information from their patrol ships and reconnaissance drones and remain inconspicuous at the same time. Peter Murphy was there, dressed in a grease-stained jumpsuit that looked out of place among the Fleet uniforms. And sitting next to the Queen was Sir Henry, looking dour and preoccupied. Sir Henry, normally formal and dapper, had not shaved that morning, which Hiram found deeply unsettling.

Admiral Douthat gestured wearily for Hiram to answer. Douthat was running on nerves and coffee; her exhaustion hung on her like a ratty old coat.

“Of the ten Hedgehog anti-missile platforms that we know of, Admiral Douthat’s counter-attack killed seven and may have damaged some of the remaining three,” Hiram explained. “We also destroyed or badly damaged five other Dominion ships, three destroyers, a frigate and one of their cruisers. We don’t have an exact count, but we think that the particular task force that has been chasing us – Bogey One - may be down to as few as fifty war ships out of their original eighty five. Of course, they still outnumber us, and there is still the Bogey Two force that appears to be stopped near Cornwall. We think Bogey Two has some sixty five ships. Call it one hundred and twenty ships to our thirty five.”

Sir Henry flinched, but the Queen seemed unperturbed. “But there’s more, isn’t there? You’re looking very tired, Admiral, but not panicked.”

Douthat smiled wryly, or tried to. It came out more like a ghastly baring of teeth. “They have more ships, but they have to come to us. We have hundreds of missile pods, an enormous number of laser mines and many antimatter mines. We have laid out the minefield in a sphere around us and we are towing it with us as we move toward Refuge. Getting to us won’t be easy, Your Majesty. And now that they’ve lost most of their Hedgehogs, they’re more vulnerable to our missile fire,
much
more vulnerable.”

“I assume,” Anne said dryly, “that it will not be that easy.”

Douthat snorted. “That is an understatement, Your Majesty. They outnumber us, they are more maneuverable than we are, and they know where we are going. Taking out those Hedgehogs gives us a chance, but this is still going to be very ugly.”

“And the Coldstream Guard?”

Admiral Douthat sighed. “We’ve had no contact in ten hours. We’re pretty sure they killed Bogey One’s supply train, and that would explain in part why Bogey One has broken off action. There were two more Code Omega drones, from the
Southampton
and the
Kilimanjaro
, but nothing since then. Either the rest of the Coldstream Guards have been driven deeper into space, or they are swinging wide around the Dominion forces to return to the Atlas and have gone stealthy to try to avoid contact.” She shrugged. She did not have to state the third alternative, that the rest of the Coldstream Guard had been destroyed to the last ship.

“And Second Fleet?”

Douthat shook her head. “Nothing, nothing at all. Based on the report from the
Bawdy Bertha,
it looks like the entire Second Fleet, and all of the Third Fleet with it, has been lost. Until we reach Refuge, Your Majesty, we are on our own.”

“And when shall we arrive, Admiral?”

Douthat glanced at Peter Murphy and nodded. Murphy cleared his throat nervously. Like the others, he was going with too little sleep, too little food and too much anxiety. But with the possible exception of Sir Henry, Murphy was the oldest person in the room, and it showed. His skin was grey, his cheeks sunken and his eyes red. Hiram noticed a nervous tick by Murphy’s left eye that had not been there before.

“We should hit the worm hole in forty seven hours and –” he checked his tablet – “ten minutes. We are making better speed than we had originally estimated. We’ve had about one hundred tug boat failures, with over-stressed tractor beam generators, but we’ve been able to swap them out from stores on Atlas. So we’re making good speed.”

“That’s wonderful, Captain!” the Queen said, but then faltered as she took in the somber faces around her. She looked from Murphy to Admiral Douthat, then back to Murphy. “Perhaps it would be best if you just tell me what the problem is, Mr. Murphy?”

“Well, Majesty,” Murphy began, then restarted. “The thing of it is, Majesty, we’re pulling the Atlas in a straight line. She’s big,
really
big, and it’s very hard for us to alter course…if we have to, I mean.” His voice trailed off.

“Will someone please tell me what is going on?” Queen Anne snapped.

Hiram sighed and put his tablet down. “The worm hole into Refuge
moves
, Majesty. It changes location often, perhaps several times a month. Sometimes as much as a thousand miles per day, other days not at all. The orientation of the entrance is always the same, thank God, but from the perspective of our plane of advance, the worm hole can move left or right by a considerable distance with very little warning.”

Anne digested this for a moment. “And if moves?”

Murphy jumped back in. “We can make course corrections up to twenty four hours out, but once we’re inside of twenty four hours, if it moves very much left or right, we won’t be able to change course fast enough to hit it.”

“We could save the ships in this eventuality, but the Atlas would overshoot the worm hole,” Admiral Douthat said.

“And if Atlas overshoots the worm hole?” the Queen asked.

Murphy shrugged. “There’s no way to turn her around if we overshoot,” he said matter-of-factly. “She’s too big to turn around in less than a month.” He tried a tired grin. “We’re on course right now, Majesty. If the worm hole doesn’t jig on us, we’ll hit it dead center. But if it moves, well…”

Anne turned back to Admiral Douthat and Captain Eder. “And the Dominion? Can we withstand another attack with so few ships?”

The fatigue in the admiral’s face seemed to burn away for a moment and she grinned wolfishly. “They may have more ships, Majesty, but we may have more actual ‘throw weight.’ The Atlas has several hundred missile pods and mines, and it’s building more even as we speak. We’re slaving the missile pods to all of our capital ships and even to the tug boats. No matter which way the Dominion comes at us, we can make it very hot for them.”

“That’s the importance of killing the Dominion Hedgehogs, Majesty,” Sir Henry spoke for the first time. “Without the Hedgehogs, our missile penetration will be significantly more successful.”