“Well. If you’re sure, then.”
“Blanche”—Lieutenant Captain Hong—took a small glass of mig brandy from the tray that his servant was passing around the company.
Hong was scrupulous in his use of code names, but at the moment this seemed unnecessary. He was meeting with his eleven team leaders in his own apartment, a spacious penthouse with a terrace and garden, and of course they had all trained together and knew one another’s names perfectly well.
“My lords and ladies,” Hong offered, “I drink to the Convocation.”
“The Convocation,” the others murmured, and sipped their brandy. Sula, who hadn’t realized a toast was coming, offered a smile as the others drank.
“What I called you together to discuss,” Hong said, “was the matter of taking action against the Naxids when they first arrive on Zanshaa. Now that the ring’s gone, they’re going to have to come down on large landing strips, using shuttles with chemical rockets.”
The chemical rockets were a necessity: antimatter engines would sterilize rather too much ground.
“There are only two airfields of sufficient size near the capital,” Hong went on, “and only one of these has suitable facilities for maintenance of ground-to-orbit craft, and that’s Wi-hun. We can be reasonably certain that’s where the Naxids will land.” He smiled. “They won’t know that the spacecraft maintenance facilities will have been dismantled before they arrive.”
He called up the wall display, and a map appeared of the area between central Zanshaa and the landing field at Wi-hun.
“Once the Naxids secure Wi-hun,” Hong said, “we expect they’ll advance on Zanshaa and occupy the seat of government in the High City. There are three plausible routes.” These flashed on the map in green. “Our Action Group has been assigned the Axtattle Parkway. When the Naxids begin to load up, we’ll receive the word from our sources, assemble, and strike the enemy as they enter Zanshaa. We’ll then retreat to the city and lie low till the next action.”
One team leader raised a hand. “How about a truck bomb?” she said.
“Very good,” said Hong. “We can park it along the boulevard and wait till the Naxids are adjacent before setting it off. From vantage points in the buildings alongside, we can open fire, shoot down as many of the surviving Naxids as we can, and then fade away in the confusion.”
The planning began. Hong was meticulous and assigned several of the officers to examine possible sites for the ambush. Another was told to requisition a truck from the Fleet motor pool. Sula was ordered to work out escape routes once the actual ambush site had been decided.
“We’ll meet tomorrow to receive reports and make our final plans,” Hong said. “Please leave one by one so you don’t attract attention.”
That afternoon Sula took a stroll along the Axtattle Parkway. The road was broad, six lanes wide, and lined on either side by rows of ammat trees that shaded the pedestrian walks with their long, spear-shaped leaves. The neighborhoods on either side of the road were Terran, which explained why Action Group Blanche had been assigned this particular corridor. Along the road were medium-sized businesses or apartments, the buildings old but well maintained, with gables and mansard roofs. The district had a prosperous air.
Axtattle Parkway was a high-speed artery feeding Zanshaa’s heart; the roadbed was elevated above other roads, and access to the highway limited. Only a few major roads connected with the parkway—the smaller streets in the residential areas led away, not toward, the ambush site. The pursuers would be stuck on the limited-access highway, with no way into the neighborhoods except on foot, a fact that would make escape easier.
Sula smiled. Blanche would be pleased.
FIFTEEN
Warrant Officer Shushanik Severin thought of the cooking oil in the lifeboat’s galley. There were several kinds, each in its own high-gee-resistant resinous container, and each type was one hundred percent fat.
He thought about lifting a container of cooking oil to his lips and drinking the contents like the finest wine.
Fat. Fat was good.Fat makes warmth.
Severin was visualizing the sensual pleasure of licking the cooking oil from his lips when the alarm rang, and he bounded from his rack to the door of his sleeping quarters, and pushed off for the control room, flying easily in the microgravity of Asteroid 302948745AF.
With his hand he scrubbed frost from the displays and gaped.Engine flares. After all these months, warships had finally come through the torus-shaped Protipanu Wormhole 2. And they had come in hot, because the radar detector was chirping out the message that the lifeboat was repeatedly being hammered by blue-shifted radars. They were looking for an enemy.
What they didn’t know was that the enemy was about to give them more than they were ready for.
There were crashes and flailings of arms and legs as the rest of his crew of six arrived in the control room. Severin batted away a floating thermal blanket that had come adrift from someone’s shoulders, and said, “Take your places.”
To his second-in-command, Gruust, who was strapping himself into the acceleration couch before the comm board, he said, “Gruust, prepare for transmission.”
And then he turned to his chief engineer, and could not stop the blissful smile from breaking out on his lips. “Begin the engine startup sequence. And let’s get some heat in here.”
The squadron commander led Chenforce from her own hardened Flag Officer Station more or less at the cruiser’s center of gravity: she was the fulcrum of the ship literally as well as metaphorically. Martinez, as her tactical officer, sat facing her in a separate acceleration cage: another cage behind her held her two signals lieutenants and a fourth a warrant officer who monitored the state of the ship.
Two bulkheads separated the squadcom from Captain Fletcher, who sat in a separate command station forward, with a full staff of lieutenants and warrant officers to controlIllustrious and its weapons. Auxiliary Command, aft, was in the charge of Lieutenant Kazakov, who would only be called upon to issue an order if her captain were killed.
Fletcher had done his best to ornament the unpromising material of the Flag Officer Station: he’d made the little boxy room seem larger by employing murals that made the station seem to be part of a vast pillared hall through which citizens of the empire, dressed in antique fashions and armed with nets and spears, pursued fantastic animals. The illusion, however, was spoiled by the large surface area that had to be devoted to the various navigation and weapons displays, and around which the little sentients and beasts were forced to vault or climb. In all, the room had to be considered one of Fletcher’s lesser efforts.
Ignoring the hunters and prey on the walls, Martinez kept his eyes fixed on his tactical displays, for all that there was very little on them. Protipanu was a brown dwarf so faint as to be nearly invisible to human eyes, and earlier in its history, as a red giant, had consumed its inner planets and demolished others through gravitational stress. The result was a lot of asteroids, with the four surviving planets quite far out, and at the moment widely scattered. These were gas giants, with some of their outer atmosphere blown away but with their heavy cores still intact.
Chenforce was heading toward the nearest of these, Pelomatan, intending to swing around it on the way to another planet, Okiray, and on to Wormhole 3 and the transit to Mazdan. It had been possible to plot a course directly from one wormhole to the next, but both Martinez and Lady Michi had rejected that notion because the roundabout route gave more options in the unlikely event that any enemy warships were still in the system. Because Chenforce had decelerated so much since leaving Zanshaa, the transition to the next wormhole would take nearly eight days.
“Message!”The astonished cry came from Coen, the red-haired signals lieutenant. “Incoming message!”
“Where from?” Michi demanded. “The wormhole station?” The squadron had just blasted past the station, which had been out of touch with its counterpart at Seizho since the wormhole had been moved out of alignment. It was barely possible, Martinez supposed, that the Naxids had ignored the useless station and that loyalists were still occupying the place.
“No.” Coen put a hand to the side of his helmet, as if it would help him hear better. “The message is coming
