Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (6 page)

Yep, the shit was definitely in a stir out there. Only this time, they weren’t going to use her people for the stick. And if anyone tried to, they were also in for a big fuckin’ surprise—she’d make sure of that.

The flank of the enemy dreadnought nearly filled the assault shuttle’s forward screen, growing as they approached, until Captain Lewis could make out the lines of the hatches on the millimeter-wave display. A dozen assault birds were ghosting up on the dreadnought’s port hanger deck, abaft the triple line of gun ports. Another ten were targeting the gundeck hatches amidships. Ten more shuttles came behind, ready to support either thrust, or even attempt the starboard boat deck, if need be.

“Sappers in position, sir,” Major Bradshaw, the XO, relayed over the command link. The 50-ton demolition charges the sappers had attached to the engine housing would guarantee a mobility kill, if nothing else. “Point-defense mounts disabled, starboard side aft. Captain Talbot is primed.” In theory, taking out the starboard point-defense should freeze the defenders, as long as the decoys held. Talbot’s people would seal off the gundecks and the forward weapons spaces, then isolate the bridge. Lewis’s company would board through the hanger, take the main junctions, then secure engineering and CIC.

“Very good, Major.” Lieutenant Colonel Kerr sounded pleased and switched to the all-hands circuit. “Okay, people. This is it. Get hot! Shipbreakers away!”

A platoon of shipbreakers deployed from their shuttles, boosting in with suit thrusters. Their specialty was blowing hatches and cracking ports. Here, their goal was the hanger doors and a small hatch forward through which a team led by Lieutenant Martin could access a maintenance space where they could cut the cable runs, portside, that controlled weapons, hatches and anti-boarding measures.

Up ahead, the shipbreakers latched on and set their shaped charges. Waiting twenty seconds for the shuttles to come in range—the moment those charges detonated, the defenders would know they’d been pulled to the wrong side—they fired them. Lines of bright violet flared along the seams as the metal seals boiled.

“Lead shuttles, kick in!” barked Kerr.

A quintet of specially fitted shuttles shot forward. Across the nose of each were large plates that welded on contact, four to the hanger doors and the fifth to the maintenance hatch. There was a moment of agonizing tension as all waited to see if the shipbreakers had done their work. Then the shuttles tore open the hanger doors and jettisoned them, sending the large sheets of armor plate twirling away.

Immediately, the shuttles coming up behind fired a salvo of antipersonnel charges into the hanger and skidded in through the explosions. As they touched down, the hatches popped and Kerr hollered over the net, “Fox platoon, take the left! Kilo, you hold this ground! Victor platoon, with me!”

In the back of the third shuttle to land, Troy Anders touched his helmet to Minerva Lewis’s. “What the hell does he think he’s doing? Makin’ a vid?”

“You wanted him field polished, Lieutenant.” The slow smile was evident in her voice. “Now you’re gettin’ your wish.”

“Oh gawd,” muttered Anders, shifting his assault rifle to hand as he prepared to disembark. “I hate this shit.”

*     *     *

“Fire teams, open out!” ordered Lewis. “Watch those corners!” She clicked to the command link. “Whatcha got, Anders?”

“Looks like they’re holed up at the main spline junctions. Got perimeter plasma rigged all around.”

Next to her, Kerr, listening on the same circuit, nodded. “Concentrating their defense and relying on the plasma to disrupt us.” He did not sound as if he approved. They were at the entrance to the right-side main passageway, leading from the hanger deck into the central part of the ship. “If we move now, we and Captain Talbot’s people can catch them in a crossfire.”

“That plasma
could
disrupt us, sir,” Lewis cautioned. “Might wanna wait a minute more for Lieutenant Martin to get those control lines cut.”

“No, Captain.” The colonel spoke adamantly. “Speed is the essence of attack.”

Good Christ
. “Schorr! Mininger! Warblers, now!” Corporal Schorr and PFC Mininger side-armed two of the Ping-Pong ball-sized warblers down the passageway, triggering the plasma. As the flames dissipated, Lewis called, “Cover teams, go! Techs, go!”

They might have only thirty seconds before the plasma generators rearmed, but she guessed it’d be more like a minute—thirty seconds would only allow for a reduced blast that their armor could survive. It would be a race to see if either her techs or Lieutenant Martin could silence the plasma before they fried.

Eye on the op-timer at the lower-left corner of her HUD, Lewis watched the seconds count down from sixty. At seven, Tech Sergeant MacDonald signaled “Plasma down!” just as the overheads died and the emergency reds came on. Lieutenant Martin’s voice came over the link a moment later. “Control lines cut, sir. Plasma deactivated portside. All their internal hatches have gone into emergency lockdown.”

“Well done, Martin,” Kerr acknowledged. “Can you run a bypass to break the seals on hatches—” He paused to check the ship schematic on his HUD. “Hatches O6, O4, and O1?”

“I’m on it, sir. Looks like we can override the hatch controls from here, as long as they don’t manually isolate them.”

“Understood, Lieutenant. Wait for my signal.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Kerr tapped Lewis on the shoulder. “Turn ‘em loose, Captain.”

Allowing herself a brief eye-roll, Lewis clicked over to her platoon commanders. “Tallmadge, move on the O6 hatch—standard clearing procedure. Drake, secure that junction up ahead. Set your nets left. Get rolling.” The monofilament nets would block antipersonnel charges, grenades, and other nasty surprises that might come from that direction. Drake’s heavy weapons detail could deal with the rest.

“Yes, ma’am!” Drake called back. “Roll tide!”

Yeah, Drake—we all know where you’re from.

Tallmadge, much more laconic, contented himself with a simple “A-firm, Captain.”

Lewis gave Kerr a tap. “See you back here, Colonel.”

Kerr turned and regarded her reproachfully. “Certainly not, Captain. I’m leading this assault.”

Lewis sighed inwardly. “Then after you, sir.”

*     *     *

“Cover teams up! Hatch breakers, ready!” Lewis ordered as they approached the junction leading to the O6 hatch. “Tallmadge, are you hearing anything up there?”

“Negative, Captain.”

Nothing showed on Lewis’s HUD either. The passageway beyond the hatch showed quiet. “Anders, report status. Anything new on your sensors?”

“Negative, Captain,” Lieutenant Anders reported from the hanger deck. “Situation unchanged.”

Lewis blink switched to their wholly unofficial private circuit. “Troy, watch your back.”

“Gonna break bad, ma’am?”

“You’ll know in a minute, but I think we gotta case of
Hoppin’ John
here. Alert Drake.” She switched off and raised the colonel. “In position, sir. Shall we break the hatch?”

“Negative, Captain. Martin says he has the override rigged. Faster if we have him pop it.”

“But sir—”

“Pop her, Martin,” Kerr called out over the command link. The hatch lights cycled from red to green and seals cracked. “Go!” he rapped out. The cover teams vaulted through the opening hatch. “Move up! On the double now!” The colonel was among them, really entering into the spirit of the thing. Lewis and the rest of the marines followed. The lead section moved swiftly to secure the junction up ahead—to the left was the O4 hatch, with the defenders massed beyond.

Swearing exploded over the all-hands circuit. “It’s wired, sir!” Sergeant Mason yelled. “The whole damn place is full of it!” His video was up on her HUD, and Lewis could see the faint shimmering filling the passageway in both directions. Monofilament wire—coils and coils of it.

“Dammit!” Kerr shouted. “It’s a trap! Fall back by sections! Secure that—”

Before he could get the word out, the hatch behind them slammed shut and locked down, and the overhead popped open. Looking up, they all stared into the muzzles of a platoon’s worth of assault rifles, the marines aiming them holding adaptive grenades in their off hands.

“Hey! How you all doin’ down there?” a cheery voice declared over the exercise broadcast circuit.

Minerva Lewis, imagining the grins behind the darkened visors up there, shook her head. “No can do, sir,” she told Kerr gratuitously. “We’re dead.”

*     *     *

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

Back at HQ on Tenebris, Minerva Lewis—fed, rested, and wearing a fresh uniform—stood at a comfortable parade rest in front of Lieutenant Colonel Kerr’s desk, while he leaned back in his chair, tapping a stylus on his knee. The exercise summary and evaluation was open on his desktop. It was not pretty sight. From his expression, it did look like the parade gloss was a little scuffed.

“Captain, I’m sure you appreciate how much more difficult things will be in this command if I don’t enjoy the full confidence of my officers.”

“I certainly do, sir.”
You can start by earning it
.

“Then I’m sure I can count on you, in future.”

“You can definitely count on me to do my duty, sir.”

Kerr gave her an intent look. He sat up and tossed the stylus onto his desktop.

“About that wire—” He stopped abruptly.

“What about it, sir?” Lewis had the distinct feeling he suspected she might have known about the wire all along. The mockup had been full of it—every passageway leading to the critical areas. Captain Talbot’s people were caught the same way. To add insult to injury, one of his tech sections had blown a hatch, only to find that what was supposed to be the maintenance access to the forward weapons spaces actually led to the plumbing for the lower deck’s heads. Major Bradshaw and Lieutenant Anders had extracted their remaining force, with the final operational losses amounting to forty percent. Tolerantly, she said nothing regarding
shambles
.

She could feel tolerant because, to be fair, the exercise really wasn’t. Using monofilament wire entanglements like that would not be very practical on a real dreadnought, and it would have been next to impossible to hide several platoons of marines in the overhead spaces. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to teach them to expect the unexpected. And maybe that lesson was starting to sink in.

Kerr had evidently used the pause to rethink his question. “Did you see that coming at all?”

“Can’t say I did, sir. But in hindsight, I’m not surprised.”

“Why is that?”

“The bad guys were from the 32nd Engineers, sir. They have access to monofilament wire—
lots
of monofilament wire.” They also knew how to rig the hatches so that when the override was applied, they’d open obligingly and then slam shut using a simple mechanical timer rigged to the manual locking system. That also would not have been well advised on a real ship, as it could badly complicate the defender’s position if things went wrong. But here too, the principle of expecting the unexpected applied.

“Quite so. And that trick with the hatch.” Kerr picked up his stylus again and underlined something in the report. “What would be your suggestion for dealing with the situation we faced?”

To have not done everything by the book
. But instead, she offered, “Well, sir, seeing that kind of wire, it’s sometimes best to break out the plasma knives and bash on regardless. That’ll hang your people up, of course, so you might also want to lay down all the pulsed EMI you’ve got and go hand to hand.”

Pulsed EMI would shut down the electronics in suits and weapons, reducing things to plasma knives or even steel. It tended to be messy. Even seasoned troops could shy away from getting up close and personal with a knife.

“Yet you did not elect to mention that approach.” Kerr was probably thinking of her being forward enough to suggest breaking the hatch open, which might have left them a way out.

“You ordered an immediate withdrawal, sir. Am I to understand I have the liberty to countermand your orders in combat?”

The young colonel’s lips tightened beneath his moustache, and he scratched out a note he’d begun to write. “Well, Captain, I must say it’s been an . . . edifying exercise. Dismiss.”

Damn straight
. “Yessir.” Lewis tossed a crisp salute and left him to contemplate that edification.

“My Amelia,

“At breakfast this AM, it was pointed out to me that we had just passed our thousandth hour in port. A wearisome number, and I cannot but admit that for many of those hours I could have wished this waiting over. A long port stay is the death of discipline. The people require serious work, and yet I fear—”

Admiral Jakob Adenauer, commanding Halith’s Kerberos Fleet, raised his stylus from the coded private entry of the diary he kept in the form of a serial letter to his wife—a document that in the normal course of events would never be read, most certainly not by the wife he held dear—and considered how far he wanted to follow these thoughts into the murky realm of potentially treasonous comment.

Lifting his long lantern-jawed face, he automatically checked the large situation displays that alone ornamented the bulkheads of his day cabin, which served as his office, dining room, or alternate CIC as occasion demanded. An admiral’s stateroom was luxurious in the article of space, if little else, but this was of real consequence to a man as tall as Jakob Adenauer, one of the loftiest officers in the Halith Imperial Navy. To be sure, the luxury was sensibly diminished by the amount of equipment that cluttered the space, nor was there much that was personal about what comfort there was. Admirals did not form the deep attachments to the ships they served on that captains did—an admiral was in the position of an honored guest in another’s house, as it were—and most observed this distinction by keeping their quarters spare and relatively unmarked by any individual character (though by no means all: one admiral, of whom Adenauer strongly disapproved, habitually turned his quarters into a space-going bordello). Adenauer himself was not adverse to comfort, but he was no sybarite, and moreover his prime comforts were of the less material variety: his library, the regular dinners he held for his officers, and his diary.

Currently, the cabin had assumed its peaceful, administrative character, with the tactical consoles and the big battle management computer against the starboard bulkhead in their stowed positions, and his highly professional eye scanned the screens with a mind mostly detached. Nothing required his immediate attention, so with a frown, he applied his stylus: “—these new plans are insufficiently tested. On charts, it all looks well enough, of course (these things always do), but I wish I could be more easy about them. Altogether too much depends upon the Bannermans, and they are a doubtful quality. Already they have missed one favorable conjunction, and I greatly fear their missing another. The Bannermans can be bold to the point of rashness (a dubious point in their favor, I might add) but they cannot seem to be made to understand the critical nature of timing in strategy. They are opportunists, first and foremost, always ready to rely on a providential tomorrow, where before this we might have commenced the business at great advantage. Coming after the setback at Miranda—”

Here, he lifted his stylus again. What
had
Vansant been thinking, leaving his transports undefended? His mission was to support the invasion, not fight a fleet action. That, of course, was the heart of the matter. The CO of the Duke Albrecht Fleet had never before fought a major fleet action. His fleet held Kepler and had participated in the conquest of Deneb, but there was little glory to be had there. Adenauer, far down the list, had the battle honors he craved. Employing him that way had been asking for trouble. Deciding this dangerous digression did not merit recording, he erased his last incomplete sentence and continued.

“And yet from the Bannermans I get nothing but affable delay and tolerably vague excuses.”

Pausing again, he recalled the last few dispatches from his troublesome allies: stores not all in, system and weapons upgrades yet to be completed, units delayed, units that must be exchanged to cope with situations elsewhere, real or potential (or simply more immediately profitable, Adenauer thought unkindly); all to be rectified within days or perhaps a week, but almost certainly not much longer. This sort of thing was part and parcel of an admiral’s vexations—Adenauer had known them his whole career—and they did not explain his chief and most vexing concern. Twirling the stylus as he considered his words, he took the plunge.

“But where I am truly ill at ease is on the question of how they will stand strain in a really serious action. This slash-and-grab business is well enough for commerce raiding, but how will they take the kind of pounding PrenTalien can deal out? I cannot but worry that the business could end badly if they are hard put to it. And to think”—here he paused again, but he was already in deep, so went on—“that before Miranda, we might have conducted this operation without the Bannermans, leaving them to distract and harass the League”—
instead of me
, he might have written, but did write: “which they excel at.”

*     *     *

The uncomfortable fact that lay behind Adenauer’s vexation was that Halith’s string of uninterrupted victories had put the Supreme Staff on the horns of a dilemma. Having achieved great things in what seemed a remarkably short span of time, they had found themselves unprepared for what came next. For the past few months, a large amount of hot air had been stirred about and a great flood of bytes had been expended in wrangling over various options, but when all was said and done, it really boiled down to just two choices. Predictably, the Supreme Staff had split over them.

The first choice, favored by Grand Admiral Andros Osterman with vigorous support from Chief of Strategic Operations Admiral Bucharin and Chief of Ground Operations Marshal Halder, who together led what was known as the ‘Staff Faction’, was the Karelia option. Firmly in control of the Kepler Junction, and thus Deneb, and with the new forward base at Asylum becoming operational, these men had felt the time was ripe to strike at Karelia. Adding the republic’s conquest to their current achievements would accomplish the Dominion’s longstanding strategic objectives—their position would be essentially unassailable. There were limits, they cogently argued, to the amount of blood and treasure the League would pour into defending regions not their own.

These arguments were well taken, but
strike
was not quite the right word for what they had in mind.
Whittle
might be more appropriate, as the strike actually contemplated was against Miranda. By controlling Miranda, the CEF base at Epona would be rendered untenable. The Imperial Navy could then threaten the lines of communication between Karelia and the League. Without League support, the former would eventually be unable to resist invasion and might well see it to be in its best interest to capitulate rather than undergo another long and bloody conflict. (Personally, Adenauer felt those who believed this were ingesting something illegal, likely of Maxor origin.)

The glaring problem, of course, was with the words
threaten
and
eventually
, as the so-called ‘Fleet Faction’ (who often set themselves in opposition to the Staff Faction) pointed out, again and again. Halith could not cut off all aid to Karelia from the League without taking Regulus, and—at this point certainly, and for the foreseeable future—that was out of the question. What they could do from Miranda was raid, and raiding would hinder, but not halt, the support Karelia needed to survive.

Indeed, the Fleet Faction had brought this up well over a year ago and advanced a plan involving a surprise attack on Regulus, aimed at crippling the CEF Fifth Fleet there. Combined with the political turmoil their agents had been assiduously stirring up, that would incapacitate the League long enough for an offensive to overrun Karelia. Presented with a
fait accompli
, a new and more pliant Speaker (as had been confidently—and correctly—predicted) would acquiesce without a fight.

They lost that debate when Jerome Paul Augustus, the more powerful of the two ruling Proconsuls, vetoed the plan. To strike at Regulus was not just to strike at the heart of the League, he’d reminded them, but to strike directly at Sol, under whose authority Fifth Fleet was. Sol—and the Belt most especially—would never suffer such an attack without a maximum response, and all their investment in undermining Speaker Huron’s majority to force his retirement would have been lost. Nothing would have solidified his faltering grip on power more than a sneak attack on SOLCOM’s largest base.

Instead, the Proconsul directed them to adopt the Rho Ceti plan, which offered the swift and easy conquest of a weak adversary with the prospect of seizing the vital Kepler junction, if circumstances appeared propitious. They did indeed so appear, and there followed an unprecedented string of victories. Ironically perhaps, those victories considerably strengthened the Fleet Faction’s hand in the debate over strategy. While the Fleet Faction used as its spokesman Admiral Vansant, its leader was in fact Admiral Christian Heydrich, the Chief of Halith Military Intelligence, and the prime architect of the Rho Ceti operation. Heydrich was also of an old and noble family: he held the title Lord Meremont, which gave him a seat on the Council of Ministers; and to this formidable combination, he now added the cachet of victory.

Tall and good-looking in a severe and distinguished fashion, impeccably mannered, deeply incisive and utterly ruthless, he heaped gracious scorn on the ideas of those who dared oppose him. Careful not to directly indict his own immediate superior, Grand Marshal Van Diemens, Chief of the Supreme Staff, or the politically powerful Grand Admiral Osterman, he instead picked off their wingman, the Chief of Strategic Operations. Beginning with the obvious, he made the point that time was not on their side: the economy of Sol alone dwarfed the combined economies for the Halith Core Systems. The League would grow stronger, not weaker, as the war progressed: if the war was allowed to go on too long. its industrial might would make good its losses and the balance would inevitably swing back in their favor.

Admiral Bucharin and Marshal Halder had anticipated all this, of course. They’d directed their staffs to craft unimpeachable rebuttals, especially on the question of what constituted
too long
, but they were unprepared when Heydrich blindsided them. Bucharin erred, he averred, in focusing on Karelia. The
true
strategic center of gravity was the Sultanate of Andaman and Nicobar. If the Porte (as the Sultan’s government was called) could be made to flip, it would deprive the League of a critical resource: the rich antimatter fields of the Antares Region, especially the Shaula Traps. Turning the Sultanate into an ally would present the League with a two-front war, without adequate fuel reserves to fight it.

Better yet, Halith owned a bargaining chip that could be turned into a wedge: Crucis Sector. Crucis was rich, but not in resources, and it would take many years to see a net economic gain from it. Objectively, Deneb was worth much more to the Dominion at that moment. The Pleiades sought the recovery of Crucis above all else, and that made the sector an excellent point to start a negotiation from a position of strength. With the Sultanate on their side, they could offer the League the choice of a bloody protracted war or treaty that would recognize Halith’s other gains and new
relationship
with the Porte (he’d smiled as he said it) in exchange for Crucis.

Not only was this likely to get strong support from the Pleiades (especially given their pacifist tendencies), but the Meridies might go along as well. Of all the League’s Homeworlds, the Meridies alone had significant fuel fields in their sphere. Indeed, loss of the resources the Sultanate controlled would fall most heavily on Sol, with whom the Meridies were often at odds. He foresaw great things eventuating if this wedge could be inserted in the League’s already turbulent political environment.

It was all quite well-thought-out and masterfully delivered—except for the one essential. The Sultanate had not flipped and there were no firm signs it was about to. The Porte’s relationship with the League was a source of great profit, and everyone knew that the Sultanate derived its power from following a strategy of aggressive neutrality, playing one side off against the other. To abandon that policy risked reducing Andaman and Nicobar to separate vassal states.

Having baited his trap, Heydrich sprung it. Their conquests to date, properly understood, were not aimed at the League, but at convincing the Sultan that the League had not the strength to defend him. True, he was not convinced of that yet, but he could see the League’s internal turmoil and the ineffectiveness of the current Speaker as well as anyone. If Hazen Gauthier had not induced a total paralysis of will into the Plenary Council, she’s come close enough. If they could lure a significant portion of the CEF into battle and crush it, the combination would make clear to the Porte the dire position they were in. The Sultanate and the League were not natural allies—they shared neither culture nor ideology. Handled well, the Porte could be made to see that a relationship (he used the word pointedly again) with the Dominion was a happier match.

That was all well and good, Admiral Bucharin had retorted, his hackles raised, but the League was not foolish enough to accept such a battle right now. They would sit tight in their bastions while valuable time was lost—time that might be spent weakening both them and Karelia, without the risks attendant on Heydrich’s plan. Had he not considered what might happen if they
lost
his big battle?

Here, Heydrich gave the admiral a polite nod and commented smoothly that he was sure, given the brilliance of their recent victories, that Bucharin and the worthy fleet commanders would not let any such thing happen. But he allowed the point and said the solution was to attack an objective that the League would have to defend, and to do so in a way that the CEF thought it might have a chance of succeeding. He had just the place. Bringing a map up on the table’s holographic display, he highlighted it: Wogan’s Reef. If they secured Wogan’s Reef, he explained unnecessarily, they could threaten the Pleiades on a new axis and also Canopus. It was not a threat that could be ignored, and they had a direct route via the Novaya Zemlya transit from their main base at Tau Verde. In addition, support could be provided by the Bannermans, who would be on the League’s flank at Wogan’s Reef.