Revenge of the Damned (19 page)

Perhaps the tacship commanders were overeager. Perhaps the Tahn were expecting an attack from "below." Perhaps they had bad luck.

No one would ever know.

There were no survivors from those ships.

The Imperial propaganda made much of their doomed attack and made several posthumous awards of the highest degree. Propaganda also said how effective they were: Two Tahn battleships had been destroyed, and one crippled. One Tahn cruiser destroyed, two crippled. Four Tahn destroyers crippled.

Postwar analysis: One destroyer smashed. One cruiser lightly damaged.

But by then no one wanted to be reminded of the war, let alone the fact that some of their dead heroes had died
trying
to be heroic instead of succeeding.

Lady Atago's original strategy had been for one fleet to bombard Durer, a second to invade, and a third to be kept in reserve.

Command on Durer expected something similar.

Ready for the last grand stand, they were surprised when the Tahn fleets swept through the system, well outside engagement range.

And maybe they were a little disappointed, at least at first. After all, when someone screwed his courage to the sticking point only to find it not needed, it took awhile for the stupidity and the adrenaline to subside.

But the disappointment did not last very long as the Imperial Forces on Durer realized that they were alive, that they were likely to stay alive for a while, that the battle was being fought without them, and that they were in ringside seats for it.

That was perhaps why so many of the personal memoirs of the Durer-Al-Sufi battle(s) were done by Imperial troops on Durer.

They lived to dictate them.

Lord Fehrle admired perfection on the bridge of his command ship as the first four fleets swept, almost unopposed, out of the Durer System. Ahead of them were rich industrial worlds and then the heart of the Empire. And thus far, the Tahn casualties had been insignificant.

Once again he pointed out to himself the necessity for an overseer. No matter how inspired, the man or woman who was in charge of a task needed someone over him or her, someone who could step back, uninvolved, and see whether that task was destined to be a success, a failure, or, Fehrle thought, able to be taken beyond its humbler goals.

Lady Atago is most brilliant, he thought. But thanks to our system, there will always be someone beyond those brilliant leaders in the field, those who can think, those who can say: Here. Here is the grandness you have overlooked.

Fehrle was basking in that grandness when the Kali missile blew his command ship in half.

Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney was not at all surprised when the robot Tahn ships sent his big picture communications into la-la land. He had sort of expected something like that to happen.

In spite of the frownings and suggestions from his highly trained and educated specialists, Mahoney had insisted on setting up a series of links—locked and tight—with specific ships in each of the fleets under his command. Each broadcast came into a separate receiver, manned by an individual tech who was trained to report, not to interpret.

Probably, Mahoney thought, he was being an imbecile and trying to maintain the illusion that he was still a hands-on field officer. Probably all this drakh was going to confuse the hell out of him, make him get obsessed with trivia and lose whatever half-assed strategy he had to fight their battle.

On first contact, that was exactly what was going on.

And then the battle chamber became a kaleidoscope, all his computers started recycling previous information, and his interpreters found themselves with nothing to interpret.

Mahoney told them to keep interpreting, shut off the com links, and started listening to the field reports.

It was a stupid way to try to win.

The Tahn had opened the battle believing that they were masters of deception, without allowing themselves much of a margin for error. That was the single biggest error.

But there were many other mistakes that they made.

One of the largest—uncredited by historians because there were no visible heroes—was the failure of the Tahn automatic mine fields.

The Tahn, unlike the Empire, had spent many, many man-centuries developing those unglamorous objects that just sat and lurked until something made them explode. But once they had developed mines that could not only be rapidly deployed but had the sophistication to distinguish friendly from enemy targets and maneuver en masse by command, they had relaxed.

Some years earlier, a young tacship commander named Sten had discovered a fairly nasty way to subvert those mines. The Tahn, who were in the middle of other worries, never realized that. Sten had routinely sent a report through on his discovery.

That discovery, made by someone who was slowly crawling down the intermittently floodlit slope of a Tahn prison camp, was critical.

The Tahn had liberally sowed their mines between Al-Sun and Durer, expecting them to serve not only as a block against the inevitable counterattack but as an early warning system.

Imperial destroyers, part of the fleets lurking in emptiness between and beyond the Al-Sufi and Durer systems, had long ago seen the minelayers seeding their deadliness, registered the mine fields, and then rendered them completely harmless, one by one. The effort was massive and successful. Any specialists who had made a small mistake defusing the devices would not be recognized until after the battle.

To the Tahn, the Imperial fleets lanced out of nowhere. Their battle computers, however, quickly analyzed the attack. Conventional. Tacships were screening the attack, with cruiser antiship killers in the forward screen. Behind them came destroyers and then a conventional structure—destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and tacship carriers.

The computers provided the proper response, and the Tahn admirals complied.

The Imperial Forces, however, were not what they had expected.

Mahoney knew good and well that he was a little untrained for grand strategy. Maybe he could have come up with some kind of superplan. He had done a little private research before leaving Prime on what kinds of things grand strategists did to make their living.

The record was kind of grim.

The one-roll-of-the-dice generals had as great a failure rate as success, from Darius to Phillip to von Schlieffen to Giap to M'Khee to P'ra T'ong. Mahoney, figuring he was not even in their class, decided to run war the way he knew how—which was to keep it simple and keep it unexpected.

The tacships were what they appeared onscreen. Mahoney figured that with the confusion he planned behind them, they would have a good chance not only of survival but of wreaking some damage.

Those cruisers were in fact lumbering, unmanned transports with false electronic signatures. Their missiles were set up on a launch-and-forget basis—and were so primitive that they had best be forgotten unless some complete incompetent stumbled into their trajectory.

The destroyers were also false. They were phony-signatured Kali missiles, modified for long range.

After them came the real warriors.

The battle opened.

The tacships swarmed.

The "cruisers" were quickly converted into gas clouds, and the Tahn felt reinforced as to their superiority. Their acquisition gear turned to the destroyers just as those "destroyers" went to full drive and homed on capital ships.

Warriors generally made an assumption: Someone who was attacking behaved in a certain manner. When a dangerous swordsman turned into a berserker, or a bomber into a kamikaze, it took a while to readjust.

The readjustment cost the Tahn most of their cover destroyers and threw the lead three fleets' battle array into disorder.

That was not a disaster. Admiral P'riser, who had automatically assumed overall command of the battle when Lord Fehrle's ship fell out of communication, ordered the three stalled fleets to engage and the banked fleets behind them to attack through.

The arrow sped onward.

Lord Fehrle glummed inside his suit helmet as technicians swarmed around the control chamber of the crippled command ship.

Go here and do this, he thought. He could order, he realized, any of the people around him to breathe space on general principles. Or he could program commands for the fleets he commanded.

Neither of those options would change his situation—the battle was out of his hands, he was getting absolutely no information as to what was going on, and his ship was spinning in emptiness far behind the lines of battle.

The fact that there was a good possibility that the ship would explode in hours or become a vanished derelict was hardly important to his thinking.

Lady Atago's ships dove in against the Al-Sufi worlds almost unopposed.

Six outbound convoys loaded with AM2 were cut out and seized. Their escorts were quickly smashed.

Lady Atago, following orders, had determined that the feint against Al-Sufi would be as deadly and determined as she could make it.

Her attack ships swept destruction across storage worlds, creating havoc and hell that would take generations to rebuild.

Then, in the midst of a battle of triumph, Lady Atago realized what had happened.

She was wreaking havoc not because of her brilliance but because Al-Sufi was nearly undefended. Her success was merely that the Imperials had made no plans for
any
Tahn attack against the systems.

Which could only mean that her grand plan against Durer had been found out. The Tahn fleets were advancing into a trap.

Lady Atago had no hesitations at all. Less of a person, less of a Tahn, would have let Lord Fehrle and the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned civilians take the blame as they would have taken the credit.

Instead, she diverted and drove her swiftest battleships toward the Durer systems, broadcasting an alarm on all frequencies.

It was, by then, quite too late.

The man's name was Mason. And, from his no-rank-tabbed flight coverall to the scar seaming his face, he looked to be a killer.

He had been that—a highly decorated tacship commander, seconded after a crippling injury to flight school, and more recently Sten's nemesis. His injuries prevented him from ever skippering a tacship again. But the war had promoted Mason. He was a one-star admiral, commanding a fast light-destroyer squadron.

He ran it as he had run his tacship flotilla. His crews hated him. He insisted on obedience, dedication, and originality. An error of omission or oversight produced a very rapid court-martial.

The story was that one of his destroyers had bounced a Tahn ship that turned out to be filled with Imperial prisoners. One of Mason's bosuns had seen the cheering rescued ex-prisoners streaming through the air lock and then bellowed "Get back, clots! Don't you know when you're well off?"

Mason was permitted to be in command for only one reason. His flotilla had the highest kill ratio of any equivalent unit in
any
of the Imperial fleets.

Now he led his destroyers, scattered in fingers-four formation, into the rear of the Tahn fleets.

Eleven Imperial fleets had been hidden far beyond Durer, with orders to attack only after the Tahn were initially engaged.

A surprise.

More of a surprise was their makeup. Sullamora's shipyards in the Cairenes, supposedly shattered with labor problems, had done very well. The Emperor had expected twelve more battleships to be ready.

Instead, thirty heavies attacked the Tahn—ships that were not leaky botch jobs but supersophisticated engines of destruction, completely unknown to the Tahn.

The slaughter began.

Even if, somehow, an all-bands receiver could have listened in on the battles, coherency would have been a joke:

"Samsun, Samsun… I have a target… damage report as… incoming observed… six Tahn ships now without power and… launch, you clortin' bastard… Samsun, are you receiving… units, stand by for… change orbit, Eight, you're acquired… I have a launch from… Samsun, this is Whitway. Do you receive this station… this is an all-stations broadcast… Nostrand units, redeploy to Sectors one by thirteen…
squaawk
… Allah give us strength… Samsun, Samsun… Kee-nst, did you see that one go up?… All units, this is… Samsun, Samsun… do you receive…"

Four broadcasts, all set en clair:

To Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney:

"Comm One, Comm One, this is Liberty Seven. There ain't nothin' left to shoot at…"

To Lady Atago:

"Unknown approaching units… this is the Tahn battleship
H'rcana
. We have you ID'd as friendly. Do not continue your present orbit, over. Request you stand by for recovery assistance."

To Lord Fehrle—unreceived:

"Command… Command… this is P'riser. Plan Heart-strike canceled. Plan W'mon activated."

To all Tahn ships:

"All units. All units. Begin retirement. Support, if possible, friendly units under drive."

In eyes-only code, Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney to the Eternal Emperor:

"Tahn seared. Repeat, all Tahn seared. Question—how to serve? Second question—what wine?"

Confused though it might have been from its name to its step-by-step execution, there were some completely obvious conclusions from the battle(s) of Durer-Al-Sufi:

The Tahn had been smashed.

Their major war-winning offensive had been blunted and turned back.

The nearly-total destruction of the Tahn's finest units meant that it would be years before they could mount another such offensive.

The Emperor hoped—and knew he was full of hops—that those conclusions were equally evident to the Tahn.

It might have been the beginning of the end—but getting there was still going to be a long, bloody, and certainly not foreordained process.

And the Eternal Emperor could afford to make no other mistakes.

BOOK THREE
KOBO-ICHI

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

T
he Tahn reeled back from the awful blow of Durer like a man struck in the stomach with a lead-weighted bat. They were left doubled over, mouth gaping, lungs emptied of air and blood hammering at the temples, threatening to hemorrhage at the ears.