Commodore (15 page)

"Yes, sir!" Heinrich replied, matching my grin. "You do that, just this once. And I'll see to it that you have a ringside seat."

27

On the face of things, our intercept of the Imperial light vessels appeared to be an incompetent attempt to parry an unexpected blow. Which, of course, was exactly the impression we aimed to convey. Heinrich ordered half of the Wilkes's defensive air force to make the attempt, then called three fighters back to simulate "mechanical difficulties". Prior to our arrival it'd been typical for a quarter of the Wilkes birds to be forced to scratch any given mission, but since then we'd made every effort to bring their maintenance up to date and provide the squadrons with more than the previous miserly flow of spare parts. The nine remaining fighters then began their long, painful intercept of a moving target almost a third of the way around the planet.

"They'll get in one pass, maybe two," Heinrich predicted. "Then they'll have to bingo for home."

I nodded. New Queensland was at extreme fighter-range, and our mainland-based squadrons would have to expend most of their fuel going to and coming from the combat zone. This reduced their effective strength to perhaps a tenth of what it might otherwise have been, and the geographical disadvantage was almost certainly a key factor in the Imperial decision to 'surprise' us by landing on the isolated continent. This also meant that the Wilkes pilots were about to risk their lives in a battle where to all appearances the odds had been stacked needlessly against them. Heinrich had asked me to discuss the likelihood of this coming to pass with them personally. "It's all part of a bigger picture," I explained over a steak-based lunch that practically no one else on the planet had the ration-points to afford. "I'm not at liberty to explain matters to you in detail but… Well, you must initially expect to be employed in what will certainly appear to you to be a sub-optimal manner."

"Of course," their commander had replied with a sort of half-bow. "Don't worry, Captain. We understand about subterfuge and won't let you down."

Still, I worried intently and drank cup after cup of tea as the blue and red dots raced towards their meeting point. Then in a flash it was over; one Imperial destroyer was spread across the ice-scape below and a scout-ship damaged badly enough that it was now lagging behind. On our side the cost was two fighters shot down by those Imperial weapons of small enough caliber to fire in an atmosphere, plus one severely damaged. By any standards it was a solid win for the home team, but not such an overwhelming one as to convince our enemies that they ought to pull back and rethink the matter. Indeed, the Imperial commander was probably pleased that things hadn't come out even worse.

Meanwhile the first wave of ship's boats had detached themselves from the converted passenger liner and were racing for terra firma, accompanied by a round dozen destroyers who would offer what limited protection their secondary batteries might offer. Once again it was a small wave, just enough to force us to use up our interceptors. Heinrich and I obliged in full, simulating a maximum-effort launch by scrambling the second squadron plus a reserve ship and one of the three laggards that'd aborted from the earlier strike. These fighters did even better than the first wave; they splashed almost a dozen boats and an escorting destroyer, plus likely crippled a second. But that of course wasn't enough to prevent the rest from landing their troops and zooming once more skyward for all they were worth.

"Landing zone B, sir," Jean noted. He probably felt even more helpless than I did; since it was Heinrich's zone that was being invaded command of all available forces had devolved to his marine colleague. But that was all right; both of us were certain that his time would come, hopefully when he was far readier.

"Yes," I agreed with a nod. We'd figured the Imperials would land in one or more of four possible locations in New Queensland, and had made our preparations accordingly. Our enemies had chosen the place we'd considered second most likely and thus defended the second most heavily. "Now all we can do is hope they don't tumble to it for a few more hours."

Time crawled past as I chain-sipped tea and the rest of the senior officers paced. We made two more interceptions with the Wilkes fighters before calling it a day; by then our losses were nine and the Imperial casualties numbered in the thousands. Our opponents probably though it was worthwhile though, since seemingly against all difficulties the Imperials had managed to land almost their entire troop force and establish what must've looked like an impossible toehold. Indeed, I could just picture the Imperial admiral breathing a sigh of relief and relaxing a little when…

…there was a huge explosion inside the tight, jam-packed Imperial perimeter. "It was one of our mines, sir!" Heinrich reported within five seconds of the event. "The Imperials must've found it and tried to defuse it."

That was that, then. As much as I'd have liked to wait for the entire force to land, it was time to take action. "You have a free hand, Heinrich. Fight the battle as you like. It's all yours."

"Aye-aye, sir!" he acknowledged. Then he picked up a microphone and began barking orders. Soon there were more explosions under the Imperial's feet—dozens of them, as our ten-ton mines were detonated one by one. Meanwhile marine artillery units slipped out from where they'd been concealed under holoscreens. Within seconds they were pound-pound-pounding away. The crowded landing site transformed itself with great suddenness into a mass of bursting ordnance, with explosions erupting both above and below ground.

"The last wave's breaking off," Jean observed.

I nodded. "We'll get most of them regardless." And it was true, for already the marine's four squadrons of aerospace fighters were in action. Three of them zoomed across the sky shooting down Imperial boats and light naval units, while the fourth dropped bombs and thereby added further tons of mayhem to the abattoir that'd once been a tolerably well-organized landing zone.

"Third and fourth battalion, attack as planned!" Heinrich ordered. And then it was all over but the cleanup as five hundred marines climbed out of their camo-sacks and revealed their existence to their shocked and bewildered enemy by laying down a withering fire. Then they remorselessly advanced into the ruins of the Imperial hopes, killing everything that lived and failed to surrender quickly enough.

"Excellent work," I said to Heinrich when it was all over. We'd lost forty or so men, nine fighters, and had expended most of our military-grade explosives. The Imperial casualties were truly horrific—those not killed outright were left to freeze to death. "Well conceived, well planned, well executed. A textbook operation."

He smiled and stood a little straighter. "As the professor used to say—if you ever catch yourself fighting fair, you've made a serious mistake somewhere along the line. Maybe they'll finally acknowledge that I won one, sir?"

I smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. "Don’t hold your breath! But
we
know that you won, just like before." Then my expression faded as more imagery of the distant battlefield came in. This victory, as with all the others I'd ever been part of, was hardly a cause for celebration. A nice, clean snowfield had been transformed into a frozen bloodstained hell, populated almost entirely by corpses. At least the cold would keep the stench down. I mused, and make things a little easier for Graves Registration when eventually they arrived to put things back to rights.

Then I sighed and turned to Jean. "Heinrich and his marines did well, Commander. They just bought you roughly another four or five months.

"I suggest you use them wisely." 

28

Preparing for Jean's battle wasn't at all like getting ready for Heinrich's had been. The Imperials had taken their one shot at a rapid, improvised victory, and they'd been badly burned indeed. Once again they faced two choices, but this time the options were even harder to swallow than before. The Battle of New Queensland was an enormously lopsided victory for our side; the entire continent was littered with the shattered wrecks of boats and light vessels thrown away for no gain, and if our enemies hadn't lost eighty percent of their available troops I was a woodchuck's uncle. Because of this, the first of the two Imperial options—accepting defeat and re-establishing their base back where it'd been before—would be more difficult for them to swallow than ever. In fact, I dismissed it out of hand. Their other possible course of action—waiting months for a marine force to arrive and then invading again— was very nearly as bad.  This would call for the admiral in charge to keep his entire fleet juiced up and combat-ready, racking up hours of service on who knew how many critical components per ship just as quickly as he possibly could, and all this without a base available to perform necessary maintenance.  Meanwhile he'd also be consuming fuel at a breakneck rate as well, since there could be no possibility of anything like adequate resupply. The cost of such a course of action was mind-boggling to even contemplate, not just in terms of credits but in pent-up downtime for the ships themselves. And all this with a navy whose ships were designed with a bias towards capability over reliability—the better to fight the Emperor's short, decisive wars declared only when he was good and ready. Soon a major turret's energizer-coil would fail, then an engine would suffer a sticky control rod. Eventually the grand, imposing Imperial line of battle would be little more than an orbital scrapyard. And through all this the food lockers and fuel tanks alike would grow steadily emptier and emptier. After losing at New Queensland, the Imperial admiral really should've shaken his head, cut his losses and skedaddled for home. From that point forward his potential risks far outweighed any possible gains, and the odds would skew that way more and more with every day that passed.

But he couldn't, of course. Because unlike James or his eternally-understanding grandfather, the Emperor would utterly destroy any admiral who came home so bloodily beaten from what looked like a milk run. "His Majesty," Sir Jason had mentioned in his letter me, referring to his uncle, "hungers for a victory." The fate of the man who'd failed to deliver one would be quick and certain—if he was lucky.

Jean and Heinrich and I were so certain that our enemy would hang on until enough reinforcements arrived to try again that we never even discussed any other possibility. Yes, some of the political types needed convincing. But not anyone who'd ever held a commission and understood what it meant to hold command responsibility. So we threw ourselves into preparations, racing against the clock on every front.

Some of our tasks were obvious. Wilkes Prime did a lot of mining, so there were large explosive-works already up and running. Working through the governor, we put them to work making warheads for our little single-shot missile launchers. They were so successful at this that we designed a timer to fit the warhead, designated the result a mine, and set our volunteers to training on that as well. Sadly, however, that was our only major industrial success-story. Our cheap, inaccurate blaster-rifles shouldn't have been that terribly hard to produce—they'd been designed specifically to be made and used by insurgents, and in theory could be cranked out by anyone with even a basic machine-shop. But somehow we couldn't quite seem to get the river flowing. One day I visited three weapons-assembly lines in an effort to convey our sense of urgency. The first was shut down for want of batteries when I arrived, but had more grips than they knew what to do with—cases and cases of them! The second was waiting for trigger mechanisms, but had tons of batteries on hand. And… You guessed it. The third was wallowing in trigger mechanisms, but had no grips to work with. This wouldn't have been so bad, but…
They were all in the same building!
I was still tearing my ears out and screaming when Nestor finally dragged me out the front door.

Most of my work, however, wasn't strictly military in nature. In fact, I spent most of my waking hours among my fellow Rabbits and at no point did I ever feel that this was a misappropriation of my time. After seeing how eager and proud my steward-bunny during the Battle of New Queenstown was of his yellow ribbon, for example, I made an effort to get to know him better. His name happened to be David too, and I made it a point to invite him and his entire family to lunch with Nestor and I at one of the finest restaurants on Wilkes Prime. He'd never dreamed of entering such a place as anything more than a bus boy, and the experience marked one of the high points of his life. When he stuttered out his counter-invitation for Nestor and I to come dine at his slave-quarters, well… Certainly the food was better there. So was the company, even though it felt like every Rabbit for miles around had gathered in the hope of at least catching a glimpse of the mythical David Birkenhead who they'd heard so much about but was really just another Rabbit in person after all. I very carefully blocked out six hours for the event, taking the time to converse with every Rabbit I could and most especially bunny-hug each and every ribbon-wearing volunteer. During dinner Nestor and I steered the conversation towards the meanings of freedom and responsibility—or at least we did when we weren't discussing food! The affair seemed to be a big success, so we repeated the effort over and over again, carefully choosing bunny-volunteers from all over the planet and every caste of servitude. First we invited them to dinner, then we accepted the inevitable counter-invitation and touched as many lives as possible. When the Dogs joined up in numbers we did the same for the canine set—though we never,
ever
discussed food with them! Wilkes Prime had a small population of Horses as well, and I paid them two visits more out of a sense of fairness than anything else. Horses were pleasant enough creatures, and as fully sentient as anyone else. Their gengineers, however, hadn't been nearly so kind to them as the rest of us slaves. Horses were created strictly as rich-men's toys, to be ridden in traditional activities like polo games and fox hunts. Save only for a difficult-to-detect bulge in their skulls they were physically identical to lower-case horses, and since the humans were far more interested in having their mounts understand and obey commands than offer their own opinions they were as mute as real horses as well. Equines were by far the least common of the slave-species—many planets boasted none at all. Even back during the startup days of the fencibles I'd made it a point to at least mention the possibility of Horse-volunteers if an effective means could be found for them to serve, but it was really all just lip-service. I wanted for them to be free as much as anyone else—a society with only a few slaves is in most ways as big a mess as one with many. And yet… "Please be patient," was the best I could offer them once they finished rearing and whinnying and kicking their approval at my arrival. "You're not forgotten, but we'll call if we need you. Until then… Accept your reduced rations stoically. It's all we can ask of you."