And the horrors the bastards unleashed on Judd will be repeated a millionfold, she told herself glumly. The Theocrats hadn’t aimed at occupation, not this time. They’d set out to make the planet’s inhabitants miserable, and they’d succeeded. How long will it be until another world is hit?
Her mind was elsewhere as she followed her close-protection detail to the nearest airlock. She’d downloaded a tactical update as soon as they’d dropped out of hyperspace, but all it had been able to tell her was that the Theocrats hadn’t shown themselves . . . not in the last few days anyway. The bastards could attack a world on the other side of the sector and she wouldn’t know about it for weeks, if she was lucky. Next time, they might manage to ensure that no word got out until it was far too late.
She kept mulling the situation over and over in her mind, paying no heed to the shuttle’s brief flight through the atmosphere. The pilot was good enough to bring the craft in for a smooth landing, somewhat to her relief. She’d never minded flying through turbulence when she was in command of the shuttle, but being a passenger worried her. She wasn’t in control when someone else was flying the craft. Logic told her there was nothing to fear—the shuttle’s automatics could handle almost anything—but her emotions told her something different. She liked to be in control.
I really shouldn’t have let them promote me off the command deck, she thought again. She shook her head in annoyance. Maybe I can trade my admiral’s rank stars for a post on a starship . . .
It was a nice thought, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She would never command a starship again, not really. A squadron or a fleet . . . but not a starship. Unless she bought the ship herself. There was enough money in her trust fund to buy a midsized freighter, if she wanted it, but . . . She sighed as she rose and headed for the hatch. She and Pat had planned a future together, after the war. That future was now as dead as Pat himself. And, somehow, she had to go on.
You have your duty, she reminded herself severely. Both as an admiral in the navy and as a privy councilor.
Lieutenant Kitty Patterson met her outside the shuttle. “Admiral,” she said, saluting. “The remainder of your officers are waiting in the conference room.”
“Good,” Kat said, striding past her. She didn’t relish the thought of going straight into a meeting, but there was no choice. “Have food and drink sent in, if you please. It’s going to be a long day.”
She felt a flicker of grim concern as she walked into the conference room. A giant holographic starchart hung over the table, bright spheres showing the ever-growing volume of space hiding the enemy ships. Civilians might think that the sphere could be searched, but military officers knew better. The sphere was so unimaginably vast that a billion superdreadnoughts would go unnoticed. Kat had no doubt the Theocrats had taken every precaution to escape detection.
And they won’t have attacked the closest world to their base anyway, she thought. They’ll have done everything in their power to escape being detected.
“Be seated,” she ordered stiffly. The stewards rolled in a trolley of food, then withdrew as silently as they came. “I assume you’ve seen the reports from Judd?”
“Yes, Admiral,” General Winters said. “It doesn’t look good.”
“There is no way we can provide the level of support they require,” Major Shawna Callable said. Her voice was very cold. “They’re going to be thrown back on their own resources.”
“They need help,” Kat said.
“We don’t have the equipment or manpower,” Shawna informed her. “The vast majority of our supplies are already earmarked for one world or another. Even if we switched them all to Judd, just getting them there would be a problem. We’d have to gather the transport and then provide an escort . . .”
“And we might simply be giving the enemy more targets to shoot at,” Winters added. “They will be watching for any chance to weaken us.”
“Or to make us look like idiots,” Kat snapped. She glowered at Janice. “What’s ONI’s take on the recordings?”
“Five enemy superdreadnoughts, at most,” Captain Janice Wilson said. “Long-range scans were disrupted by their ECM, which appears to have been significantly upgraded, but I think we can be fairly sure there were no more than five superdreadnoughts present at the engagement. The vast majority of enemy contacts simply didn’t produce any drive turbulence or rogue energy signatures. A handful of analysts actually believe there were no more than three, but not everyone finds their case convincing.”
It’s what we’d want to believe, Kat told herself.
She took a breath. “And the smaller ships?”
“About half of them were real, if the scans were accurate,” Janice said. “But they were bunched up.”
“They’re also immaterial,” Commodore Fran Higgins said. “They won’t pose a threat without the superdreadnoughts.”
“Someone is supplying them,” Winters rumbled. “Who?”
“We don’t know,” Janice admitted. She leaned back in her chair, looking tired. “On one hand, they seem to have indigenous weapons and sensors . . . simply heavily modified. The handful of nonindigenous systems are devices they could probably buy on the black market. We were never as effective as we might have wished in cutting off supplies from outside the Theocracy.”
Because the other Great Powers wanted to test their weapons on the battlefield, Kat thought cynically. If the war had done anything, apart from killing millions of people, it had taught the spacefaring powers that their imaginations had
