Shadow of Freedom-eARC (57 page)

One or two of the officers on
Edgehill
’s flag bridge actually chuckled at the comment, despite the situation, and even Thurgood’s lips twitched in an almost-smile.

“Probably not,” he said after a moment. “But Sadako could have a point. With this kind of odds, it’s a hell of a lot less likely some idiot—uniformed or civilian—is going to try to overrule any outbreak of sanity on my part. For that matter, I could be just as stupid as Byng or Crandall, for all she knows, in which case I’d need something pretty damned obvious to make the point.”

It was the first time he’d allowed himself to attach that particular adjective to those two paragons of tactical and strategic genius in front of anyone else. Under the circumstances, however, he doubted it was going to have any detrimental impact on the career which was about to come to a screeching halt. Sadako might very well be right about Gold Peak’s reasons for appearing in such strength, and no reasonable board of inquiry would expect him to oppose his single understrength battlecruiser squadron and its screen to that kind of armada. Despite which, he was about to go down in history as the first Solarian League naval officer ever to surrender a Solarian-claimed star system to an enemy.

Well, not to
surrender
one, precisely, perhaps. But what he was actually going to do would be even worse, in some ways.

Assuming we can get away with it in the first place. Which doesn’t seem all that damned likely, really
, he reminded himself, looking at those acceleration numbers again.
At least the exercise schedule means we’re starting with hot nodes, though, thank God
.

“I suppose we’d better get Commissioner Verrochio on the com,” he said out loud.

* * *

“What the hell do we do now?!” Lorcan Verrochio demanded harshly.

“Assuming Thurgood’s sensor reports are accurate, I don’t see that we have a lot of
choice
, Lorcan,” Junyan Hongbo replied tartly from the com on the sector governor’s desk after a brief delay.

“The bastard could at least
try
to fight instead of just running away!”

“Why? What possible good could it do?” Hongbo asked bluntly. “We’re talking about twenty-eight ships-of-the-wall, Lorcan.
Manty
ships-of-the-wall!” He shook his head. “Thurgood’s ships would be toast against anybody’s wallers, but against Manties—?”

“But he’s just
running
for it!” Verrocchio half-wailed. “He’s abandoning the entire star system!”

“Which is the smartest thing he could possibly do, under the circumstances,” Hongbo shot back after another of those delays. “At least this way the Navy doesn’t lose his
ships
, too.”

Verrocchio started to say something else, then stopped, and his eyes narrowed suddenly. Unlike the sector governor, Hongbo wasn’t in the capital city of Pine Mountain. For that matter, he wasn’t even on the planet of Meyers. No, he was aboard Meyers One, the primary freight handling platform orbiting the planet. Or that was where he was supposed to be, anyway. But if he were on Meyers One, the com delay should be scarcely noticeable.

“Where are you, Junyan?” Verrocchio demanded.

“Why do you ask?” Hongbo responded.

“Just answer the damned question!”

“Well, as it happens,” Hongbo replied after that same brief but discernible delay, “I was aboard
Wanderlust
discussing those shipping arrangements of yours when Commodore Thurgood gave the alarm. I’m afraid Captain Herschel was adamant about getting underway immediately, and since her impellers happened to be hot at the moment—”

Hongbo shrugged, and Verrocchio’s jaw muscles clenched as his teeth ground together. Captain Martina Herschel of the merchant vessel
Wanderlust
had been the sector governor’s primary conduit for the clandestine movement of personal property acquired under…questionable circumstances for T-years. Hongbo had had some business of his own aboard Meyers One this afternoon, so Verrocchio had asked him to drop certain items off with Herschel before her scheduled departure.

A departure whose schedule had obviously been moved up substantially.

“Of course there wasn’t time for you to get back aboard the station,” he grated after a moment, and Hongbo shrugged again.

“The Captain was very insistent, Lorcan.”

“I see.”

Verrocchio glared at the vice commissioner, yet even as he did, he knew he would have done precisely the same thing in Hongbo’s place. Of course, Hongbo was abandoning a sizable chunk of personal wealth and possessions, but like every other Frontier Security commissioner or vice commissioner—including Lorcan Verrochio—he’d squirreled away the majority of his assets elsewhere. And it was unlikely any of his colleagues or superiors were going to fault his conduct in running for it if the opportunity presented itself. It wasn’t as if there were anything he could have accomplished by staying, especially if the system’s naval defenders had already decided to hightail it. And the final responsibility for what happened here in the Meyers System and in the Madras Sector generally was Lorcan Verrocchio’s, not his.

“Have a nice voyage,” the sector governor said sarcastically, and cut the connection.

Bastard
, he thought, burying his face in his hands.
Wonder how much he promised Herschel for his passage?

He sat that way for several seconds, then straightened. Unlike Hongbo, he was expected to ride the ship down in flames in a situation like this. Or that was what the rulebook said, anyway. But no Solarian sector governor had ever actually found himself in “a situation like this” before, so when it came down to it…

Verrocchio’s eyes narrowed. There hadn’t been very much hyper-capable shipping in Meyers when the sensor platforms picked up the Manties’ arrival, and Thurgood had ordered all of it to get underway and scatter towards the hyper limit as soon as possible. That was exactly what
Wanderlust
had done, but two other freighters had been in parking orbit at the same time, and he wondered suddenly if they’d be been able to get
their
impellers online quickly enough to run for it. According to Thurgood, the Manties were still three hours out. Assuming they opted for a zero-zero rendezvous with the planet, that was. Which they had to be planning on, didn’t they? But if either of those other two freighters
could
get their impellers up and running, it would be his duty as the Madras Sector’s governor to see to the protection and orderly governance of the
rest
of the sector, wouldn’t it? From one of the uncaptured and still-defiant star systems like, say…McIntosh. Which just happened to be fifty-plus light-years away from Meyers.

Of course it would!

He reached for his com again.

* * *

“Sort of reminds you of cockroaches, doesn’t it, Ma’am?” Captain Armstrong remarked, and Michelle Henke chuckled. Cockroaches were one of the Old Terran species which had become as ubiquitous as mankind itself, and she had to admit Armstrong’s simile fitted.

Tenth Fleet—or most of it, at any rate—had made its alpha translation seventy-three minutes ago, a half-million kilometers outside the hyper limit and just over eleven light-minutes from the planet of Meyers. Since then, her command’s closing velocity relative to the planet had risen to 23,576 KPS, and she’d traveled over fifty-three million kilometers. In just over twenty-seven more minutes, her superdreadnoughts would be making turnover and beginning their deceleration towards the planet.

In the meantime, every hyper-capable ship that
could
get underway, had. She wasn’t especially surprised to see the Frontier Fleet detachment running hard for the hyper limit, and she didn’t blame Commodore Francis Thurgood one bit. In fact, she’d expected no less out of him. She and Cynthia Lecter had made it their business to study every scrap of information they could dig up on him, and it was obvious he was no Byng or Crandall. She’d been confident he’d recognize his responsibility to rescue whatever he could from the wreck for future service, and given that they’d obviously caught him with hot impeller nodes for some reason—an exercise, perhaps?—he was doing precisely what she would have anticipated.

Too bad,
she thought.
Takes a certain degree of moral courage for an officer who knows her duty to cut and run in the face of the enemy. Lots easier for a coward to make that decision, really. He deserves better than what’s going to happen
.

“I assume Captain Morgan’s staying in touch?” she asked now, glancing at Lieutenant Commander Edwards, her com officer.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Edwards acknowledged with an evil grin. Bill Edwards, who’d spent a lot of time at BuWeaps with Admiral Sonja Hemphill, wasn’t exactly a typical communications specialist. He was actually a lot more of a “shooter” than a technical weenie, and Michelle shook her head at him fondly.

“Bloodthirsty, aren’t you?” His grin only grew broader, and she shook her head, then glanced at Commander Adenauer.

The dark-haired operations officer had lost a lot of family in the Yawata Strike, and it had taken her a long time to regain her lively sense of humor. Indeed, there were shadows behind her eyes even now. It hadn’t affected her work, though, and she looked up and raised one eyebrow as she felt her admiral’s gaze.

“Yes, Ma’am?”

“What’s the latest on those merchies, Dominica?”

“I think just about everyone who’s going to get her impellers online before we hit orbit already has, Ma’am.” The ops officer twitched her head in the direction of the master plot. “The only one that’s really got a chance to make it across the limit is that first one, the one that bolted the instant they picked us up inbound. Well, I suppose I should say the only one that
thinks
it’s really got a chance to make it across the limit is probably that one.”

Her lips twitched, and Michelle sighed.

“Bloodthirsty lunatics. I’m surrounded by bloodthirsty lunatics.”

“In all fairness, Ma’am, I don’t think ‘
lunatics
’ is exactly the right word,” Cynthia Lecter said respectfully.

“Oh, really? And what noun would you choose instead, Cindy?”

“I think
enthusiasts
would be the best way to describe them,” the trim, blonde chief of staff replied.

Michelle considered the suggestion for a second or two, then nodded.

“Point taken,” she acknowledged, and turned her attention back to the plot once more.

Thurgood’s battlecruisers had been accelerating away from Meyers for sixty-five minutes, and they hadn’t been wasting any time about it. In fact, they were accelerating at almost 4.8 KPS
²
, their maximum military power, without the inertial compensator safety margin upon which SLN doctrine insisted. As a result, their velocity away from the planet was up to 18,712 KPS, and they’d traveled 36.5 million kilometers. Assuming constant velocities, Thurgood would reach the hyper limit on the far side of the primary twenty-six minutes before Michelle could, which meant his battlecruisers would be able to slip away into hyper before she brought him into her Mark 16s’ effective powered envelope. She would have been able to get inside her Mark 23s’s much longer powered envelope, however, and her SD(P)s would have made short work of his battlecruisers and lighter units under those circumstances. It would have required the units she committed to the attack to simply overfly the planet without decelerating, but she had far more firepower than she’d ever need to deal with Meyers.

The three merchantmen who’d broken away from the planet complicated the situation a bit more, but not enough to do Thurgood any good. They were slower, they’d gotten started later, and even though each of them had headed off in a different direction, her warships had ample acceleration advantage to run them all down. She could have diverted a single destroyer—or even a LAC from one of her carriers—to deal with each of them. For that matter, she could have sent a massive LAC strike screaming after Thurgood and brought him to action long before he reached the hyper limit. Of course, more people would probably get killed that way before Thurgood formally surrendered what was left of his command, but there was no doubt she could have done it if she’d wanted to.

There was a much simpler and more elegant way to do the same job, however.

“All right, Dominica,” she said after a moment. “Update the merchies’ course profiles. As soon as she’s done that, Bill,” she turned back to the communications officer, “pass all the tactical data on to Captain Morgan. Tell him I don’t want any of those freighters getting out with news of our arrival.”

* * *

“Message from the Flag, Sir,” Commander Frank Ukhtomskoy’s com officer announced.

“Ah?” Ukhtomskoy turned his command chair towards HMS
Talon
’s com section. “Our marching orders, I presume?”

“Yes, Sir. Latest update on enemy movements and target assignments for the intercepts.”

“Good.” Ukhtomskoy nodded and looked at his astrogator. “In that case, I suppose we should be going,” he observed.

Thirty-two seconds later, the destroyer disappeared quietly into hyper-space 198.2 million kilometers from the star called Meyers.

* * *

“That’s it, Sir,” Captain Wayne said quietly, taking the message board Lieutenant Commander Olaf Lister, Thurgood’s communications officer, had just sent to the briefing room. “Colonel Trondheim’s officially surrendered.” The chief of staff shrugged and handed the board back to the flag bridge yeoman who’d delivered it. He twitched his head at the briefing room door, and the yeoman vanished as Wayne turned back to Thurgood.

“Not like he had a lot of choice once they dropped into orbit around the planet and demanded his surrender,” the commodore observed. “In fact, if I’m surprised by anything, it’s that it took that long for the Manties to find someone to do the surrendering!”

And that we actually got the chance to run for it
, he added mentally, trying to feel grateful for his good fortune.

To be honest, he’d never expected the Manties to simply let him go, not with their acceleration advantage. They could easily have dropped a handful of cruisers into Meyers orbit and sent everything else after him, and he’d never had any illusions about what would have happened if they had. The fact that they’d opted to simply ignore him and continue on their profile to secure the capital planet had been an enormous relief, yet there was a part of him which almost…resented it.