Starfist: FlashFire (6 page)

“Then, goddamnit, let’s get some specialists in from those worlds who can deal with this! I’ll make a naval vessel available immediately! She can depart in—”

Almost in tears, Dr. Vance interrupted him. “General we can’t! We cannot do that. Since the Ordinance of Secession was issued, the Confederation has also banned all travel to our sector of Human Space. I have already contacted my colleagues on Manazanares, to no avail. They are as devastated as I am, but any violation of the ban will be met with drastic sanctions. We’re on our own, General. Let us hope that we can save Tommy and his case is an isolated one—or we could lose not only him but a whole generation of our children.”

“And a whole generation of our young men and women,” the bitterness in the general’s voice was almost palpable, “if this secession movement leads to war with the Confederation. Their goddamned Ordinance of Secession! The goddamned Confederation!” General Lyons had never before put much credence in the commonly held belief of his fellow Ravenites that the Confederation despised them as second-class citizens. But to have imposed the sanctions on their world was inhumane, worse than what the soldiers did at Fort Seymour when they fired on the demonstrators.

Dr. Vance said nothing, but as a physician he also deeply regretted the Coalition Council’s decision to issue the Ordinance because it would mean the loss of many lives he was dedicated to saving. But he kept that to himself because speaking against the war fever that had infected the people of Ravenette and their allies could be decidedly unhealthy. General Lyons, a respected hero, could be a bit more outspoken, and Dr. Vance knew he was dead-set against secession, but the doctor was discreet enough not to express his own opinion in the presence of anyone else, not even Varina Lyons.

Lyons took a deep breath and tried to get control of himself. “Doctor, will you remain here with Tommy and Varina? I’ve been called before the Coalition Council. Those goddamned politicians are preparing for war.”

“Yes, General. As soon as my contacts find what I need, I’ll have it rushed here, and I’ll keep you informed of our progress,” he extended his hand and they shook.

“Thanks for everything, Doctor, I know you have a lot of other patients who need your help.”

“I’ve been alerted for call-up, General. I’m in the reserves, you know. I may soon have the honor of serving with you in uniform.”

“I’m the one who’d be honored, but let’s hope it never comes to that. Thanks again for everything you’re doing for us.”

Vance let a wry smile cross his face, “General, we’re so backward here on Ravenette that we doctors still think we’re obligated to make house calls like this.”

General Lyons’s Plans and Operations officer, Admiral Porter de Gauss, had been sitting impatiently in a staff car outside the general’s home for over an hour, glancing repeatedly at his chronometer. The Council would have already started its deliberations and they weren’t even on their way yet! He leaned back in his seat. Well, if his son were seriously ill, he might be late for a meeting too. But—dammit!— this was an important meeting! War was in the air, you could almost taste it! War would mean a command. Maybe he could get out of the headquarters and back into the fleet again!

General Lyons slid into the seat next to him. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Porter. Driver, take us to the Council hall.” He put Tommy’s sickroom behind him now, confined it to a remote corner of his mind.

“General, they’ll have already started,” de Gauss reminded him as he inserted a crystal into his reader. “How’s Tommy, sir?”

“No change, Porter. Let’s see your crystal.” First up on the screen were several tables showing the readiness and strength of the military and naval forces available to the Coalition. Next, similar tables reflecting what forces the Confederation had at its disposal. There were many more pages of those figures than for the Coalition’s forces. “The Council will just have to wait. Hmm, how reliable are these figures on what the Confederation has?”

“They’re the most reliable we have, General, accurate we believe to within one or two percent. Considering how readiness in any military unit fluctuates almost daily, it’s impossible for us to know how many ships of the line they have ready for combat at any given period, how many armored vehicles, how many troops and so on. But all the Confederation units listed there are deployed in those places and in the strengths shown there. Personnel and equipment are according to their respective tables of allowances.”

“Ummm. What I’m interested in is where they are, what they’re doing there, and how quickly they can deploy to our sector if war is declared. I presume everything we have is ready?”

Admiral de Gauss nodded. “Since we’d only be deploying defensively we can concentrate our entire resources wherever they’re needed in this quadrant.”

“Good. Logistics? How are we on war materiel, production capabilities, spare parts, all the stuff we’ll need if we engage in heavy combat?”

“It’s all on the crystal, sir, but it’ll take us a while to retool our industries for total war. We have planned to sustain material losses of up to ten percent in the initial phase of a war, personnel losses of about the same. Mobilization orders have been issued. Capture of the stores at Fort Seymour and the naval refueling base on Lannoy in the initial phase is crucial.”

Lyons scrolled through the pages dealing with the Confederation’s manpower status. Pressed, the Confederation could call up overwhelming numbers, but Lyons knew all the secessionists needed to do was defeat the regular forces badly enough to convince the Confederation’s politicians that the cost of keeping them in was not worth it. “How’d you get these figures on the Confederation forces?” Lyons asked suddenly, grinning.

“Our intel boys have their sources, sir.”

“I see old Joe Porter is Chairman of the Combined Chiefs. Related to you in any way?”

Admiral de Gauss blushed. “Distantly, yes, I think. One of my great-great grandfathers was a Porter.”

“I played poker with him en route to planetfall during one of the Silvasian wars. Long, long time ago. All right, I’ve seen enough. You stay near me and keep this stuff handy when they call for my evaluation.”

“What will you advise them, sir?”

“If we attack their garrisons on our worlds we’ll throw them out, no question about it. And it’ll take time for them to send enough ships and men to retake them. But something’s up, Porter, I don’t know what. They didn’t send that division to Fort Seymour to ‘oppress’ us! That’s nonsense. You’ve seen the data. Consider some of those more remote stations in your tables. Not so long ago most of them were no more than way stations to support exploration teams, or to protect new colonies from pirates, that sort of thing. But the Confederation’s increased the size of some of those garrisons tenfold. Why? Something’s up, and if we force them to fight us over our secession, the only thing we have in our favor in the long term is that their forces are so widely dispersed. But not for long.”

“But sir, we cannot forget what happened at Fort Seymour!”

“No, no, but Porter, who was the fool who organized that demonstration and let it get so far out of hand? Those troops were green to Ravenette and, as far as we know now, leaderless at the crucial moment. Mary Eddy’s dried up old teats, Porter, what would you expect them to do under the circumstances? Some of our own citizens need to swing for what happened that day. The incident alone does not justify war.” But, he thought, that incident at Fort Seymour and the embargo sure didn’t dispel the hatred most people felt toward the Confederation. He thought of his son lying on his—he dare not even think of the word “deathbed.”

“Then you’re against any aggressive act against the Confederation of Human Worlds?”

General Lyons hesitated before replying. “Look, they’re our own people, all of them! We know them, we’ve fought beside them, we’re related to them, we speak a common language! Sure, we have our differences but the last two hundred years haven’t turned us into another species, for God’s sakes! Yes,” he sighed, “I’m against war.” But as he spoke he really did not know if he believed himself.

“ ‘I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there,’ humdedum dedum.” Preston Summers hummed the old ditty under his breath. Yes, they’re all here, all right, all the “birds and the beasts,” he thought. The hall was full of the delegations from the Coalition’s worlds. They had been in session for days now, trying to form a unified government. Summers had been unanimously elected interim president, to preside over their deliberations. The delegates unanimously agreed Summers had represented them well in the failed negotiations with the Confederation and was the right man to preside over the Congress, perhaps even to lead the Coalition in the war all of them hoped would follow. A tentative cabinet had been decided upon, but they were about to hear from the military, whose testimony would be the final stone in the road to independence.

Tempers were running hot in the great hall. The Ordinance of Secession had been enthusiastically endorsed by everyone present on the first day and the Confederation’s response had been immediate: Total embargo and boycott. In the many speeches that had followed, nobody bothered to point out that the Confederation’s message announcing these economic measures had been conciliatory, not threatening, leaving the door open for further negotiations, apologizing for what had happened at Fort Seymour, the proximate justification for the Ordinance. The prevailing mood in the hall was for military action to expel the Confederation’s garrisons from the Coalition’s home worlds and nobody was willing to back down on that. Thus, General Lyons’s forthcoming testimony would be crucial. Could they prevail?

“Where the hell is Lyons?” Summers asked an aide for the umpteenth time.

“He is en route, sir. I understand there’s sickness in his family and that’s why he’s been delayed.”

“Humpf,” was all Summers said. He went back to pretending he was listening to someone from Cabala who was droning on and on about how the Confederation of Human Worlds had persecuted the followers of some religious sect on that world by denying its ministers chaplaincies in its military forces, blah, blah, blah. Everybody had their grievances and over the past days they had all come out, interminably.

Heads turned at a sudden disturbance at the rear of the hall.

“Wall, Gen’rel, welcome!” Summers voice, magnified by the public address system, thundered and the hall went immediately silent. General Lyons, followed by Admiral Porter, walked down the central aisle, nodding here and there to some acquaintances, stopping briefly to shake hands with others. As Lyons approached the podium Summers permitted himself a sly grin. The general’s entrance was grand and triumphal. As Lyons mounted the stairs to the podium, delegates rose and began to applaud and instantly everyone in the hall was on their feet and the place resounded with cheers and whistling. “See, the conquerin’ hero comes,” Summers snorted sotto voce. He shook his head. What was it someone had once said about the general? I studied dramatics under Lyons? The old boy sure knew how to play to his audience. Well, time to get on with the show.

“Remember, thou art mortal,” Admiral de Gauss whispered in Lyons’s ear and laughed. Lyons began to laugh too and immediately everyone in the hall was laughing. Lyons held up his hands for silence.

“Time’s a-wastin’,” Summers thundered. “Gen’rel Lyons, have a seat.”

Lyons took a seat on Summers’s right. Summers’s face seemed more florid and blotchy than Lyons remembered from their last meeting. The effects of his Old Snort. Everyone knew Summers for a boozer. “I hope you’re well, Preston,” he said in a whisper.

“Tolerable, Gen’rel, tolerable,” Summers whispered back. “Sorry to hear there’s sickness in your fambly.”

“Thank you, Preston.”

“Wall, Gen’rel, lay it on. Do we or don’t we have the muscle to toss these bastards out?” Summers whispered.

For the next twenty minutes General Lyons presented a detailed analysis of the military readiness of the Coalition’s forces as opposed to those of the Confederation of Human Worlds. During this time the great hall was completely silent. “In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, if military force is used against the Confederation’s forces in our sector of Human Space we shall achieve initial success, but the possibility of a clear-cut military victory over the Confederation is highly doubtful. The best we could hope for after a very destructive campaign would be a negotiated settlement and, if I am not mistaken, Madam Chang-Sturdevant’s message to us clearly offers that initiative as an alternative to war. While I realize it is not within my province to make such a recommendation, I urge you to take her offer. Thank you.”

The great hall remained silent for a long moment. “General Lyons!” it was someone from Ruspina. “Sir, if it is the decision of this body to use military force against the Confederation, will you lead it?”

Lyons hesitated for the briefest instant. “No. If you go to war against the Confederation I shall resign. War would be a foolhardy and criminal act we could never justify with victory.” That response was based on the undeniable facts he had just reviewed, not on how he felt as a man.

Again, total silence reigned throughout the great hall as the delegates took in these words. “No!” someone shouted at last and that started an uproar of protest.

“Order! Order!” Summers shouted, “The Gen’rel has given us his professional opinion,” the way Summers pronounced the word “professional” dripped with sarcasm, “ ’n we must consider what he’s told us. I hereby adjourn this session. You all have the Gen’rel’s remarks, his tables and figgers, return to your rooms, and discuss them among yourselves. We will reconvene for a vote tomorrow morning at eight hours.” He turned to General Lyons, “Guess you better be gettin’ on home now, Gen’rel, see to your boy. I’ll let ya know how the vote goes, ’less you want to be here when we do it tomorrow.”

“Very well,” Lyons nodded to de Gauss, who gathered up his briefing materials. De Gauss glanced out of the side of his eye at Summers and shook his head slightly. As Lyons walked out of the hall his passage down the central aisle, in contrast to his splendid entrance, met with stony silence from the delegates.

“We’re lucky we weren’t lynched,” de Gauss commented as they climbed into their car.

“I almost wish I had been, Porter,” Lyons replied glumly. They sat in silence as the driver headed back to the general’s home. The onboard communicator shrilled suddenly, causing de Gauss to start. Lyons