A whiff of rotting flesh floated across the table from Tork, and Lord Chen lifted his hand to his face and took a discreet sniff of the cologne he’d applied to the inside of his wrist.
“Two ships, my lord,” Lady Seekin insisted. “Two ships to defend the whole of the Reach.”
“Two ships, yes,” said Lady San-torath, the Lai-own convocate. “There will be no confidence in the Reach unless you can protect them somehow.”
Useless,Lord Chen thought. When the war broke out he’d been part of a faction insisting that Hone-bar and the Reach had to be defended, but that was before the Battle of Magaria. Lord Chen had given up trying to protect the Reach—now he was just trying to get what he ownedout. He had to agree with Tork: the capital was more important.
Lose the Hone Reach, he thought, and you have a chance of taking it back. Lose Zanshaa and you lose everything.
The Fleet Control Board met in a well-appointed room of the Commandery, all low-key lighting, polished wood, and pale, spotless plush carpet. Overhead glowed an abstract map of the empire, connected by lines that represented wormhole gates. Hone-bar and the Hone Reach stood out in fluorescent green.
The map was not a star chart: a map of stars would be irrelevant. The wormholes overleaped nearby stars, jumping anywhere in the universe—sometimes to places so remote that it wasn’t clear where they stood in relation to anywhere else.
There were three wormholes in the Hone-bar system, one that led to the fourteen systems of the Hone Reach, and two that led elsewhere in the empire. Whoever controlled Hone-bar controlled access to those fourteen worlds where so much of Lord Chen’s wealth remained at hazard.
At the opening of the rebellion, Lord Chen and the other members of the Hone Reach faction had insisted on sending Faqforce to the Hone-bar system. Now those two squadrons were urgently needed to defend the capital, and were to make a wide, fast swing around Hone-bar’s sun to return as fast as they could.
“It will be close,” said Senior Fleet Commander Tork. “The enemy could be here before Faqforce makes its return.”
The elderly Daimong, who was twirling in his fingers the dry strip of dead flesh he’d pulled from his pale face, let it fall in silence to the carpet. Tork chaired the nine-member board, which consisted of four civilian convocates and five active or retired Fleet officers, some of whom were also convocates.
“Can we order them to increase speed?” one of the civilians asked.
“No. They’re already traveling as quickly as the Lai-own physique permits.”
“But, my lord”—this came from one of the Fleet officers—“the light squadron doesn’t have any Lai-own ships, does it?”
After a long moment of chagrin, Tork gave orders ensuring that the light squadron, under Captain Martinez, would separate from Do-faq’s squadron and return to Zanshaa with the greatest possible speed.
“After the battle the enemy would need at least two months to decelerate, dock with the Magaria ring, and fill their magazines with fresh missiles,” Tork said. “Then another two months to accelerate to fighting speed and begin their journey here. And that’s if the enemy is willing to push gee forces to their maximum, with their personnel already on the point of exhaustion, and also if they are willing to dock their entire fleet at once, and risk it being destroyed by a raid.”
These facts were familiar to all present—all knew almost to the day the moment when they would begin to dread an enemy attack—but all had also learned not to interrupt Tork when the chairman was in the middle of one of his speeches. An interruption only inspired Tork to greater didactic emphasis, not to mention greater length. It was strange how the Daimong voice, normally chiming and bell-like, could at such moments be altered into such an insistent, nagging tone of declamation.
“The Home Fleet will also need to decelerate and take on new armament before they can again build up enough delta-vee to be of use in defending the capital…”
Lord Chen wearily reflected that it was entirely like Lord Chairman Tork to refer to the six battered survivors as “the Home Fleet,” as if it still resembled the armada with which Fleet Commander Jarlath had set about the recapture of Magaria.
“I’m concerned for the well-being of those crewmen,” Tork said. His round-eyed, startled-looking face was incapable of showing fear, concern, or any other emotion, but from the tone of the fleetcom’s voice Chen knew that the concern was real. “By the time their ships are in position to join the defense of the capital, they will have suffered more than six months of high acceleration. The degradation of their mental and physical state will be acute.”
“Yet what choice do we have?” asked Lady San-torath. “As you say, the capital must be defended.”
“We have sufficient personnel on Zanshaa to crew an entire new fleet,” said Tork. “I propose that we move entirely new crews aboard when the Home Fleet comes in to rearm.”
“Ships with new crews?” Junior Fleet Commander Pezzini was startled. “But they won’t have time to learn their ships before they may have to take them into combat!”
“And all the experienced officers will have been taken off the ships,” added the Lord Convocate Mondi, a retired Fleet captain and the second Torminel on the board. “It would be folly to remove the only officers experienced in battle.”
“Fleet doctrine is established,” Tork said, “and experience should make little difference in how the battle is fought. And as far as the officers go, one Peer is the equal of another—thatis doctrine, too, my lords.” Pezzini tried to interrupt, and Tork’s voice took on its dreaded merciless hectoring tone as he outshouted his junior. “The new crews will have a month to shake down before an attack is likely to come! And beforehand, they can accustom themselves to their new ships in virtual!”
There was argument, but in the end Tork had his way. New crews would be assembled on the ring station and would begin training in virtual ship environments immediately. There was more argument as they appointed commanding officers—each board member had clients and favorites—and then a further brisk discussion in appointing a squadron commander.
“We must appoint an overall commander for the defense of the capital,” Tork went on. “The two squadron commanders, Lady Michi and Lord Do-faq, are young officers with no experience in maneuvering an entire fleet. Wemust pick a fleetcom.”
This was problematical, as most of the qualified officers had died with Jarlath at Magaria. The new commander would have to be Terran, since he would command from one of the Home Fleet survivors, all Terran ships. Again, each board member had his candidates, and when they deadlocked Lord Chen simply suggested they promote his sister to fill the place.
Well, he thought, it seems worth trying.
The motion had no support whatever, and Lord Chen withdrew it. The board reached no agreement, and Tork deferred the matter till the next meeting.
“If one Peer is as good as the next,” Pezzini muttered, “I don’t see why this always takes so blasted long.”
There followed more decisions in regard to the Fleet’s logistical support, and this was where Lord Chen began to earn the money that Roland Martinez was paying him. He managed to snag a delivery contract for a shipping concern owned by a Martinez client, and a supply contract for state-of-the-art laser communications systems for a Martinez-owned firm on Laredo.
“Have you noticed how many contracts seem to be going to Laredo?” muttered Lord Commander Pezzini. “I thought the place was a rustic paradise full of strong-thewed woodcutters and bucolic shepherds, and now I find it’s some kind of industrial powerhouse.”
“Really?” asked Lord Chen. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Why did we lose at Magaria?” From the display in his command cage, Caroline Sula gazed at him with her face drawn by fatigue and deceleration. From her gasping voice Martinez could tell she was undergoing three gees or more.
“There were lots of reasons,” she said. “They were ready for us, for one thing, and they had more ships. They out-planned us, though I can’t fault Jarlath for that, I suppose his plan was as good as he could make it, given what he knew.” She drew in a breath, lungs fighting gravity. “The main reason is that we didn’t starburst early enough. Whole formations got overwhelmed at once. The enemy’s tactics showed the same fault, but they
