“Are you talking about me,” Tanya asked, “or yourself?”
William said nothing. He could see her point. Tanya was a trained and certified lawyer, but her degree was worthless on Asher Dales. Her father might find a role for her, or he might not. It would look bad to put his daughter in a position of undeserved power, even if she was the best-qualified person he had. Perhaps Tanya would be happier going back to Tyre.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. He’d come to realize, long ago, that there was nothing to be gained by living in the past. “I used to tell myself that I would go home, one day. And I kept telling myself that until I couldn’t go home. But living here doesn’t look too bad.”
“Maybe not for you,” Tanya said. “But for me . . .”
CHAPTER TWELVE
JUDD
“We will enter realspace in five minutes, Admiral,” Commander Chanson Barrie reported, grimly. “We have not yet picked up any traces of enemy vessels.”
Kat nodded, unsurprised. HMS Violence and her sisters had pushed their drives to the limits, cutting down the transit time between Ahura Mazda and Judd to three days, but she was fairly certain the enemy would have departed long ago. She’d had plenty of time to second-guess herself as she’d sat in her cabin, reading and rereading the tactical staff’s assessments of the recordings from Judd. She had to see what had happened but, at the same time, she’d arguably abandoned her post.
“Bring the squadron to battlestations,” she ordered. The superdreadnought commanders had allowed their training to slip. A mere year after the war and they’d have a very hard time coping with a Theocratic squadron. She silently kicked herself for not keeping their noses to the grindstone. “And prepare to engage the enemy.”
She settled back in her command chair as the timer counted down the last few seconds. She’d be astonished if they actually did encounter the enemy—anyone with half a brain would have fled the system before reinforcements could arrive—but it was well to be careful. Whoever was in command of the remnants of the Theocracy’s fleet could have decided to stake everything on one roll of the dice . . . or been replaced by someone with more fanaticism than common sense. ONI’s estimates for how long the Theocrats could keep their fleet operating had been badly wrong. Kat wondered, sourly, if they’d missed a major enemy base somewhere. The Theocracy’s record keeping had been poor even before they’d started to deliberately destroy their files. It was easy to imagine an enemy fleet base just vanishing from the paperwork.
They wouldn’t have been able to afford it, Kat thought. The more she looked at the figures, the more she wondered how the Theocracy had managed to survive for so long. But then, they’d never faced a peer before. The single greatest challenge they’d faced before Cadiz had been a lone system with a tiny defensive fleet. They’d smashed them flat in an afternoon. They simply weren’t prepared for modern war.
The superdreadnought shuddered as she sliced her way back into realspace. Kat leaned forward, bracing herself. The odds of being ambushed were very low, but that didn’t mean she could afford to ignore them. War was a democracy, after all. The enemy got a vote. Her lips twitched at the thought—the Theocrats had forgotten that when they’d started the war—then thinned as the display began to fill with data. There were no enemy starships within sensor range, while the planet itself was as cold and silent as the grave.
They didn’t drop an antimatter bomb, she told herself. Judd’s population had been dispersed, first by the settlement planners and then by the war. The Theocrats would have to render the entire planet uninhabitable if they wanted to slaughter everyone. There’s that, at least.
“Raise the planet,” she ordered, trying to suppress her doubts. The Theocrats could have nuked everything bigger than a village and her ships wouldn’t know about it until they got much closer. “Inform them . . . inform them that we are entering orbit.”
Her eyes narrowed as she studied the display. There was no sign of HMS Gibraltar or Edinburgh, not even cooling wreckage slowly falling into the planet’s atmosphere. Kat wasn’t entirely surprised, although she was pissed. Captain Layman had clearly been asleep at the switch. Kat promised herself that she’d make damn sure that everyone knew that they had to remain on alert, at least until the enemy force was hunted down and destroyed. She suspected she knew what Captain Layman had been thinking, but she didn’t care. Layman should have been in a position to break contact and escape.
“Admiral, I have been unable to establish contact with the planet,” the communications officer said. “However, I am picking up a stealthed recon drone. It responded to our sweep.”
“Download its memory core,” Kat ordered as an icon flickered into existence on the display. Hopefully, the drone had recorded enough of the battle to be useful. “And put the recordings on the main display.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
“And keep trying to raise the planet,” Kat added. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if they couldn’t contact anyone on the surface. Land shuttles at random in hopes of finding someone in authority? Was there even any authority left on the surface? The Theocrats had clearly bombarded the planet heavily. Judd’s unity might have been shattered beyond repair. “Let me know the moment you make contact.”
Her console bleeped. The data download was ready to view. Kat keyed the display and watched the whole engagement from beginning to end. Captain Layman had definitely been caught with her pants down—her mind provided a whole string of cruder metaphors—and two cruisers had been blown out of existence without even managing to scratch the enemy’s paint! Kat felt a sinking feeling as she reran the record, watching the engagement for a second time. The enemy missiles seemed to have extended range, more than she would have thought possible. Captain
