Revenge of the Damned (18 page)

Sten had instantly put Kraulshavn and Sorensen to work on the Golden Worm. They had completed it a week before and, with St. Clair's expertise, had coded it into a cutthroat north-south pair of hands.

All St. Clair had been waiting for was the chance to plant it. The problem was that time was running out. She was going out the next night. If she did not succeed in planting it immediately, they would have to start all over again. But after the escape, the bloody reprisals might make the whole thing pointless. Because the Golden Worm was their only hope to keep the Tahn from cutting all their throats.

Sten walked into Virunga's cell. There was only the old man to greet him. From the dark, solemn look on his face, Sten knew mere was something very wrong. He assumed it had to do with failure. And that failure involved the Golden Worm.

"They caught her," he said flatly, meaning St. Clair.

"No," Virunga said. "She… was successful. But… there is another… matter."

Sten decided to quit guessing and let Virunga tell it.

"As you know… St. Clair has complete… access. To the computer."

Sten nodded. Fahstr pretty much let St. Clair noodle at will on the Tahn computer in her spare time. To have an opponent of any worth, St. Clair needed time to toy with new bridge strategies. But that had not seemed important to Sten.

The only records in there were the mundane details of Koldyeze life: Tahn payroll and personnel and the basic files of the prisoner. Sten could see little value in snooping and pooping in that area.

"St. Clair has… noticed something," Virunga said, interrupting Sten's thoughts.

He went on to explain: As St. Clair logged in and out of the computer, using Fahstr's code name, she had become familiar with the other people who used the same system and with how frequently they used it. Then another code name had popped up recently. It not only did not seem to belong to anyone in the camp, it was searching through the records with a regular one-plus-one-plus-one pattern that was slower than clot but guaranteed not to miss a single detail.

St. Clair had become curious about who that person was and what he or she was looking for.

"And did she find out?" Sten finally asked.

"Not the… seeker," Virunga said. "Only what was… sought."

"Okay. So what was the person looking for?"

"You," Virunga said.

That rocked Sten back. "But how…"

Virunga told him the rest of it. The unknown person was searching the records for someone matching Sten's description. It was a methodical search designed to see through any disguise or assumed identity. It was only a matter of time before Sten's file popped up.

Virunga assumed—with very good reason—that whoever was looking for Sten did not plan on throwing his or her arms around him and greeting him with a shower of gifts and kisses.

Bottom line:

"You… and Kilgour must… go!"

There was no argument from Sten. He and Alex would go out with the others. All he had to do was get his escape team together one last time and fill them in on what he hoped was the final hitch in their plans.

The news was greeted with silence by the others. They took a quick look into the roles they were supposed to play, checked to see how Alex and Sten would affect them, saw there was no problem, and just shrugged. The more, the merrier.

Then St. Clair stood up and announced there would be one other change in plans. She was no longer going out solo. She was taking L'n with her.

"That's the stupidest idea I ever heard of," Sten blurted out before Alex could dig an elbow into his ribs and suggest a more diplomatic way of dealing with St. Clair. Later on, Alex explained that Sten should have hesitated first—then told the woman she was around the bend.

"Just the same," St. Clair responded. "That's the way it's going to be."

Before Sten could do something so foolish as try to forbid St. Clair, she played her ace.

"Don't bother trying to stop me. We're both going out tomorrow night—one way or another. Through the tunnel with the rest of you. Or under the wire."

Sten had no choice but to give in. If St. Clair did another cowboy run, she would blow whatever chance the tunnelers had—and Sten was pretty sure that nothing he could come up with short of murder would stop her. But he always wondered why St. Clair had decided on that course of action. As far as he was concerned, it was way out of character—because with L'n along, St. Clair would certainly get caught. He wondered what St. Clair thought she would get out of it—because personal gain could be her only reason.

He was wrong on both counts. For once in her life St. Clair was not being selfish. She knew what the news of Sten's escape would do to L'n. Without the crutch of her ideal, L'n was doomed. Second, although St. Clair could not know it, L'n's presence would save both their lives.

Sten curled his fingers, and the knife leapt into his hand. He smoothly cut through the dirt, carefully easing it away at first and then clawing at it with growing impatience. Then the night air bit through, chilling them all to the bone, drying the sweat, and clearing the smoke-laden air.

Sten found himself tumbling through. He came to his feet—numb and a little in shock. Below Koldyeze he could see the dim outline of the city with the blackout lights gleaming here and mere. And then he felt Alex come out from behind him, grabbing him around the shoulders and pushing him on.

They were free.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

D
urer was a major victory.

The general history fiche, to which all Imperial worlds subscribing to the Imperial education scheme subjected their secondary-level students, portrayed the battle in a few, sweeping arrow strokes.

At this time, the attack was made… here. A red arrow, moving across systems. It was backed by a secondary attack… here. It was met… here. A blue arrow.

The results were… this.

The more curious might acquire a specialty fiche and, given access to a battle chamber, project more details of the battle.

At that point, the bewilderment would begin.

First, Durer was variously called the Durer-Al-Sufi Battles, the First Imperial Counterattack, the Second Tahn Offensive, Fleet Encounters of the Midstages of the Tahn War, and so forth, into degenerative and confusing accounts of the ships involved.

Still more confusing for the eager student were the accounts of anyone and everyone involved in that battle.

The battle(s) became a favorite study of both amateurs and professionals, all of them seeking a perspective that would enable them to understand what had happened during those weeks and, possibly more important to historians, to see some grandness in what otherwise appeared to be a bloody, blindfolded brawl in which several million people had died.

They would look for that understanding and perspective in vain.

Because that perspective never existed.

* * *

A Mantis Section captain named Bet sat in a spacesuit, watching what looked like the entire Tahn Navy float toward her, and wished that Vulcan had given her a god or six to pray for.

The Emperor had coppered his bets. Yes, he believed that the real attack would be made on Durer. Al-Sufi would be nothing more than a feint. He had so allocated his forces under Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney.

But still…

Light-years beyond Durer drifted what appeared to be the ruined hulks of some Tahn destroyers. A complete flotilla thereof.

They were just exactly that.

What the Tahn did not know was that the flotilla had been ambushed many, many months earlier in an entirely different galaxy by an Imperial battlefleet. Their screams for help had been blanketed and had never been received on any Tahn world. To the Tahn, the flotilla had simply disappeared, probably doing something or other terribly heroic.

The hulks had been recovered, and strong-stomached salvors had cleaned out the ship interiors. Then those destroyers had been given shielded power sources, sophisticated sensors, and shielded com beams and positioned in place, beyond Durer.

They had been crewed with Mantis teams and given orders to sit and wait.

Bet and her team, and other teams, had done just that, fighting against boredom and the feeling that they were being stuck in nowhere for a meaningless mission.

All the teams viewed the assignment as a glory run and swore at the head of Mantis Section for the medal- and obituary-winning idea. Why hadn't far more sophisticated and unmanned sensors been used?

The head of Mantis was not to blame. The idea was completely that of the Eternal Emperor and Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney. Certainly those zoot capri sensors could have been scattered in front of where they felt the Tahn forces would make their real attack. But suppose one of those sensors was found? Would the Tahn not conceivably guess that the Imperial Forces were waiting?

Instead, it appeared far less logical for the Empire to have some dumb troops inhabiting hulks. Plus, cynically, Mahoney pointed out that it would be very unlikely for any Mantis troopie to surrender and be deprogrammable, unlike the average machine.

Cursing, smelling, and sweating, the teams waited.

And then the sensors lit.

More Tahn fleets than even Bet's high-level briefing had suggested swam through space toward her hulks.

Bet burst-transmitted the information, then shut down. Her view of the battle—if there was going to be one—was complete. All she had to do was hope that none of the Tahn battleships or destroyers passing—almost within visual range—bothered to investigate her wreck for survivors.

The Eternal Emperor sat aboard the
Normandie
, his personal yacht/command ship. The ship was as far forward—and three more light-years—as he could logically go without potentially becoming involved in his own battle. His battle chamber was set to give full and complete reports of any and all intelligence forthcoming.

The Emperor figured that Mahoney would very rapidly become involved in the grind of the battle. The Emperor hoped to be able to stand off and help if Mahoney lost track of the grand strategy.

He was earnestly lying to himself when he said that he had no intention of stepping in. He had done everything possible.

The Tahn were moving into his trap quite nicely, the preliminary intelligence reports said—although he was astonished that somehow, somewhere, the anticipated twelve attacking fleets had become more than twenty. He had them cold. On toast. This, he thought to himself, is the beginning of the end. Or, his nonlinear alter ego whispered, the end of the beginning at least.

Bet me, Engineer H. E. Raschid thought. Suppose it's the end of the end?

And so he stood ready to save Mahoney's—and his own—cookies.

Unfortunately robot Tahn ships, intended only to blank off transmissions between the Al-Sufi and Durer systems, slipped through the Imperial perimeter, and the Eternal Emperor found himself sitting in the most sophisticated war analysis room ever installed on a spaceship, listening to static and watching pixels of misinformation interspersed with scattered bursts that showed either the Tahn or the Empire victorious and advancing or defeated and retreating on all fronts.

Durer, for the handful of Imperial tacships and destroyers assigned to hold and defend the system, was a very short battle.

There would be seven survivors of the eighty-nine ships that moved against the attacking Tahn fleets. Their orders were to stop the Tahn attack, to prevent landings on Durer, and finally to exert the maximum number of casualties possible.

They were, unknowingly, a suicide force.

The ships that had been assigned to Durer had been mainline attack units—neither obsolete nor state of the art. The Empire planned to maintain as long as possible the deception that Durer was underguarded and not expecting an attack.

The Emperor had therefore made the correct assignments, knowing he was sending people to their deaths.

"The Price of Empire," it might have been called if the Eternal Emperor had not been several centuries beyond believing such grandiose statements. Those were for the rubes, not the rulers. Besides, this was not the first time, the most murderous time, or certainly the last…

The Durer units' tactics were well-planned. One flotilla of destroyers came in on the same plane as the incoming Tahn. Two other flotillas waited above the system ecliptic until the forward elements of the Tahn were engaged. Then they dived "down" for the heart of the enemy. Shortly afterward, six wings of tacships came up from "below," each tacship under independent command with orders to find targets of opportunity.

All the sailors had done a fast head count of the enemy, realized they were doomed, and—at least for the most part—determined to make their dying quite expensive.

Very noble.

Unfortunately, such noble determination worked very seldom, and mostly in livies.

When the enemy had total numerical superiority, all the tactics in the world would not let the attacker get within killing range.

So it was with the ships from Durer.

The obvious flotilla vanished in long-range missile blasts from the incoming Tahn cruisers long out of their engagement range.

The two high flotillas got in among the fold—but for only seconds. Those thirty-two destroyers barely had time to acquire targets and make first launches before they, too, vanished. Results: Destroyed, four Tahn destroyers, five Tahn logistical support craft. Damaged: two Tahn cruisers, three Tahn logships.

On a battle chamber, or from a grand fleet projection, that left the space beyond Durer cluttered with trash, which the deadly little tacships would have been able to swim through unobserved and deal death.

Battle chambers and grand projections crunched light-years into centimeters. The reality was that the destruction of the Durer ships left whirling wreckage across some twenty light-years. A destroyer's screen, particularly one that was programmed to ignore destroyed targets, showed something different.

A raider, a guerrilla, a pirate—and that was what the tacships were—could not exist on a battlefield.