A Rising Thunder

Chapter Twenty-Three

Fleet Admiral Imogene Tsang sat up as the attention signal on her bedside communicator chimed. She raked hair out of her eyes, glanced at the bedside time display, and grimaced. She’d been down for less than three hours, her eyes felt dry and scratchy, and the throbbing ache behind her forehead suggested that last pair of tequila sunrises might have been just a bit too much.

The com chimed again, and she stabbed the voice-only key with a vicious forefinger.

“What?” she snapped.

“Sorry to disturb you, Ma’am,” Admiral Pierre Takeuchi said quickly, “but the dispatch boat just came through the terminus.”

“It did?” Tsang turned sideways, sitting on the edge of her bed and planting her feet on the decksole. “How long ago?”

“Just over three minutes, Ma’am.” She sensed Takeuchi’s unseen shrug. “It took Lieutenant Trudeau, the dispatch boat’s skipper, a couple of minutes to spot Ranger and for Ranger to relay to us.”

“Understood.” Tsang felt a spike of irritation she knew was completely irrational (and probably owed at least a little of its strength to her headache). There was no way this Trudeau could have known where TF 116 was located relative to the Beowulf Terminus before he actually arrived. And it wasn’t as if the slight extra delay was going to make any difference to Tsang’s movements.

She’d deliberately held the task force ten million kilometers clear of the terminus. It was inconvenient as hell, and it was going to take the better part of an hour to reach the terminus with a zero-zero velocity and make transit, but it had the benefit of keeping her far enough out to avoid offending Beowulfan sensibilities any worse than she had to. She’d considered deploying recon platforms and communications relays closer to the terminus, where she could cut down on any confusion on the part of the incoming courier boat. That would have been pretty blatant, though. It would undoubtedly have undone her efforts to placate Beowulf’s ire, and it wasn’t as if the Beowulfers were going to sneak up on her and attack!

Even from here, though, her gravitic sensor sections had monitored the impeller signatures of at least sixty or seventy Beowulfan freighters shuttling back and forth through the terminus. Obviously, while that terminus might be closed to other Solarian shipping, the Beowulfers were doing quite a bit of trade with the Star Empire. She’d gone so far as to ask the system government for an explanation, and been informed that what she was seeing were “humanitarian relief” efforts, not anything so crass as “trade.”

Sure, and I can believe just as much of that as I want to, she thought sardonically. Oh, I don’t doubt those cargoes are being used as part of the Manties’ rebuilding effort, but I’ll bet Beowulf’s making a pretty centicred off their “humanitarian” concern!

Beowulfan profiteering hadn’t been very high on her list of concerns, however; steering clear of any avoidable incident had been, and so she’d contented herself with observing their activities from afar. And she’d also concentrated on staying far enough out from the terminus that none of those freighters were likely to see very much of her actual strength. There was no telling which of the merchant skippers sailing back and forth through the terminus might be tempted to tell friends in Manticore about the enormous SLN task force hovering on the far side. Fortunately, commercial-grade sensors weren’t going to pick up diddley at just over half a light-minute.

She’d gone ahead and posted a single destroyer, SLNS Ranger, closer in, however, with her transponder online. The courier boat ought to have spotted that without too much difficulty, even allowing for the limitations of dispatch boat’s sensor suites, but there was no point pissing or moaning over a couple of minutes either way.

“Have you already waked Franz?” she asked, massaging her temples with both hands.

“I told Sherwood to get him up while I got you up, Ma’am,” Takeuchi said wryly, and Tsang snorted. Admiral Franz Quill, her operations officer, tended to wake up grumpy, and he didn’t like Captain Sherwood Marceau, her com officer, very much anyway.

“As soon as you and I are done here,” Takeuchi continued, “I’m getting Captain Robillard up, too. I already put out the general order to bring up the task force’s impellers, and I figure she’ll forgive me for waking you up first.”

“Probably.”

Actually, Tsang wasn’t all that sure about Sanelma Robillard’s forgiveness. Robillard was good, or Tsang wouldn’t have picked her as her flag captain, but she was also a prima donna, even by the often prickly standards of the Solarian Navy. She was likely to make herself a pain in the ass if she decided Takeuchi had trespassed against her prerogatives by passing an order which would have her engineering department up and stirring before she was informed, even if he was the task force’s operations officer.

“All right,” the fleet admiral said. “It sounds like you’ve done everything right so far, Pierre. I’ll meet you and the rest of the staff on Flag Bridge in twenty minutes. Clear.”

* * *

It was actually twenty-five minutes later, not twenty, when Tsang, headache banished by a quick squirt from her preferred morning-after inhaler, stepped onto SLNS Adrienne Warshawski’s flag deck. Not that the extra five minutes really mattered. A quick glance at the readiness display showed that Warshawski’s impeller nodes were still fifteen minutes from full readiness.

“Where are we, Pierre?” she asked brusquely.

“We should be able to get moving in another fifteen or twenty minutes, Ma’am,” he replied, twitching his head in the direction of the display Tsang had already consulted. “Franz transmitted the preparatory order for Arbela twenty minutes ago, and all tactical crews have acknowledged. And Sherwood’s copied Lieutenant Trudeau’s transmission to your console if you want to view it personally.”

“I’ll take a look at it in a minute,” she said. “Unless there’s something in it you think would affect Arbela?”

“No, Ma’am.” Takeuchi grimaced. “All he knows is that the system was reported under attack. Well, that and he did confirm that assuming the Manty traffic control people were giving accurate time chops, they really do have FTL com capability.”

“Marvelous,” Tsang said sourly. It wasn’t that much of a surprise by now, but the confirmation emphasized the Manties’ tech capabilities unpleasantly. Especially now, when Operation Arbela had moved from a future probability to a present certainty.

“All right,” she went on a moment later. “I’ll take a look at Truman’s message. Meanwhile I think you and Franz should probably get on the net and touch base with our squadron commanders. Be sure we’re not looking at any unanticipated delays.”

* * *

“Captain Robillard would like to speak to you, Fleet Admiral,” Sherwood Marceau said, and Tsang looked up from her CIC repeater.

“Put the Captain through,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

The image of Adrienne Warshawski’s commanding officer appeared on Tsang’s com a moment later.

“Sanelma,” Tsang said. “What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to report we’re ready to proceed, Ma’am,” Robillard replied, and Tsang suppressed an ignoble temptation to smile. Her flag captain’s tone could not have been more respectful, yet there was a certain tartness to it. She was obviously still irritated by Takeuchi’s decision to wake Tsang — and to order the entire task force (including her ship) to bring up its impellers — before he woke Robillard. She must have been sitting there, watching the engineering displays with her thumb on the call key to make sure she got Tsang notified before Takeuchi could. For that matter, she might even have instructed her engineer not to simultaneously report readiness to her and the task force operations officer, as SOP required.