CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Without ceremony, the new Forez hurtled into space.

Lady Atago might have been the ultimate Tahn, but she had been more than grudgingly acquiescent to the Tahn's cultural love of ceremonies.

There were rituals for warriors choosing to go into battle, seeking the final victory of death: the touching of the home-world's earth to one's temple. A last sip of pure water. An oath over one's personal weapon, preferably one that had been in the family for generations. Exact instructions as to how the memory of the about-to-fall hero(ine) was to be honored.

Lady Atago chose to die in her own fashion.

The livie crews could cobble together some kind of scene from stock footage. In fact, she imagined, they probably were already hard at work doing just that.

Atago did not care.

After lift, the Forez's second officer had turned to her, eyes glistening, and stammered something about it all being a dream. The old and the new, culminating in a moment of history.

Atago puzzled at him for a second. Old and new? Oh. Yes. She remembered. The officer had been something or other on the old Forez, which was now probably being cut apart and recast into something or other. Atago did not know or care. A ship, like a weapon, was a tool and nothing more.

But she managed a frosty smile and a nod of agreement to the officer. If those were the thoughts he chose to carry into emptiness, so be it.

Atago was busy with her final plans—such as they were.

Any culture that managed to admire the slaughter of other beings also lionized the fighter who went to war in a hopeless cause. But to qualify for legend, that fighter also had to accomplish something by his death, even if it was nothing more than keeping the bad guys out of a pass for an hour or so.

That had been true even on ancient Earth. For instance, before Roland was an acceptable hero, his pigheadedness at Roncesvalles had to be changed from a minor ambush by irked Basques to a grand last stand against several million Saracens. Custer and his people had to be doing something worthwhile instead of what they actually were to get to Little Big Horn—drunk, untrained, ignoring intelligence, and having less than no idea of what they would do when they got wherever they were going.

There was an exception: the kamikazes—Second Global War—who went out to die with only the forlorn illogic that somehow their deaths would work magic and change history. Other cultures had tried to explain by claiming they were psycho cases, drunk, or using drugs. Only their home culture had made them into heroes.

The Tahn would have understood the kamikazes quite thoroughly.

Lady Atago's "battle plan" was to drive directly for Cavite. Somehow the Forez would battle through the surrounding Imperial fleets and somehow attack Cavite itself. Of course they would all die.

But somehow that would turn the war.

The crew believed. Perhaps a bit of Lady Atago's own emotions did as well.

But more important to Atago was her honor and her expiation of failure. She had done something—and had no idea what—wrong. The war should have been over already. And the Tahn victorious. To consider anything else was impossible.

"Impossible" was also the word for her plan.

The never-to-lift-again Panipat was stripped of its missiles, armaments, supplies, and the few crew members who were properly trained.

But even so, the Forez launched with only eighty percent of full complement. They had, however, almost 175 percent more than the specified systems basic load for all weapons systems—weapons systems that had seen, at best, a single test firing during the ship's trial passage from shipyard to Heath.

A battleship was normally escorted by a fairly largish fleet—cruisers, destroyers, ECM ships, tacship carriers, and half a horde of auxiliaries.

The Forez attacked the Empire with one cruiser and seventeen destroyers.

Ensign Gilmer thought himself a clever man.

He came from a family that had served in the Empire's military for generations. Such service was obligatory for any Gilmer's first career. Ensign Gilmer had groaned into adulthood with the knowledge that he was sooner or later going to have to go out there and play with people who probably had evil intentions. But it was either that or disinheritance, a far worse fate.

He had hoped, without success, that at the very least the war with the clotting Tahn would end before his tender pink body saw its majority. No luck.

Gilmer joined up.

But he had a plan that would not only make his somewhat suspicious elders realize that Gilmer was true to the tradition but keep said pink body unscathed.

He volunteered for picket ships.

His fellow graduates at the academy were in awe—they had never expected the flaky Gilmer to become a firebrand. Picket ships, after all. Out in front of the rest of the fleet. Waiting for the enemy to come at them, in force.

Picket ships were even more suicidal than tacships.

A being could get killed doing that.

Gilmer took their admiration badly—the same way he had handled their earlier polite contempt—and gloated to himself.

Gilmer had been sent to hack one day in his first year at the academy and spent it doing some interesting research: looking for a future home. He discovered that picket ships indeed were in front of everyone.

But unlike the tacships, intended to shoot and scoot, picket ships just scooted. He ran a stat analysis on their casualties, all the way back to the Mueller Wars. Most interesting: less than two percent. Lower, even, than a transport. So much for cadet wisdom. And most of the losses, he discovered by wading through endless fiches on accident boards, had been due to inept pilotage.

Gilmer was a superb spacepilot. Everyone agreed on that.

And so he went off to war.

His picket ship was not a happy one. The twelve beings in his crew hated Gilmer's guts—not that there was anything concrete they could dislike him for. The ship was tautly run. Promotions and punishments were handed down promptly and according to regs. But there was something wrong.

Gilmer had not been pleased when his picket ship had been attached to a flotilla assigned to the Pioneer Sectors invasion. But thus far he had kept well out of danger. He had flashed first contact reports, in fact, on several Tahn ships trying lone-wolf runs against the Empire, which should have gotten him a respectable gong or two to take into civilian life and his planned new career as a livie producer.

And he could see that the Empire was winning.

A few more weeks, and then it would be over. He planned for his ship to need a massive quarterly that would keep it out of the final battle against Heath.

Therefore, Gilmer, that clever man, was not pleased when a screen lit, showing a single incoming blip at full drive.

He enlarged the scope, cutting to a sensor he had planted several light-years away, and then gurgled as the monstrous bulk of the Forez swam at him. It was, a second screen told him, not an illusion. The Forez's orbit, indeed, would pass less than one light-minute away!

His com team was already yammering its close-beam report back to the fleet. Gilmer slammed full power, programmed a random evasion pattern, and looked for something else to do. Frantically he ordered a weapons panel up and then blind-launched two missiles.

The four missiles with which the picket boat was armed were about as useless as a weapon could be.

They were single-lobe homers less than a meter long. In theory, they were to be used to stop an enemy picket boat or maybe even a tacship from sucking up a defenseless ship. In fact, they were intended to give the picket boat crewmen something to do before death if they were inept enough to be caught.

Gilmer gnawed his knuckles, waiting to stupidly fulfill one of the family's other traditions: death in battle.

But nothing happened.

None of the Tahn ships bothered to launch against his ship, let alone go in pursuit.

Gilmer then knew he was not only a superb pilot but a master tactician as well. For a moment he even considered staying on in the military after the war. No, he caught himself. Don't be arrogant. Take the big medal they're going to give you and be content.

He did at least receive the medal. And it was a very large one.

The picket boat survived for one reason: Lady Atago wanted the Empire to know she was attacking—and to come out to face her. Perhaps that picket boat had given the alert a little earlier than she would have liked, but no battle was ever fought exactly to plan.

She did not even notice when one of the picket ship's missiles actually hit the Forez.

A junior damage-control officer saw a screen report a hit somewhere near the ship's stem. Damage was through the outer skin of the ship, and an unknown object had lodged in the baffling just next to the second skin before exploding. The damage-control officer tapped keys, dumping fire retardant into the baffling area, ordered the evacuation of the storeroom next to the impact area, and also filled that compartment with retardant.

He wondered what had hit them, then concentrated on other screens.

Mahoney paced his command center.

He was angry.

Again, he looked at the screen. Great, he thought. So some Tahn clot in some kind of new battlewagon wants to count coup before we put him away. Real noble, he thought. Nobody ever told him, Mahoney's thoughts ran, that ain't the way modern war gets fought. All that happens is they wait for you to ride out and then open up with the machine guns.

Pity some people who don't want to be heroes generally get killed in the process. Clotting clot, he thought, as his mouth routined moving entire fleets out against the doomed ship. Maybe part of his anger, he thought with a flicker of humor, was that way down deep he thought counting coup was a better way of making war than machine slaughter.

A tech shouted at him, and Mahoney whirled.

"Who the hell trained you to report like—"

And Mahoney gaped, staring at the screen the tech sat in front of.

On it was Lady Atago.

"What the hell is that?"

"Broadcast on all channels from that incoming Tahn ship. It's a still. No audio, no other vid."

"Holy Kee-rist," Mahoney swore. "Com link. Immediate. Sealed beam to Prime. X-ray code."

That code would put the cast straight through to the Eternal Emperor.

Not only had his carefully planned trap of the Fringe Worlds attack nailed the kits, but now the mother dire wolf was on her way.

Two tacship flotillas made the first attack. The first bored in, straight on, hoping that their angle of attack would, roughly, keep some of the weaponry masked. Their orders were simple: Kill the battleship.

That was incorrect—the Forez's target acquisition systems had been designed to pick up attackers from any angle, and the weapons systems to have the same launch capabilities.

The tacships should have been obliterated light-years beyond even the screening destroyers.

The ships were hit—and hard. Five out of twenty-five survived the battle. But they were not obliterated, and it took a while for the twenty to go out.

The first disaster should have been a nasty little surprise. For the first time, the Tahn had built a battleship fitted with four internal hangars, housing sixteen tacships.

Ports slid open, and the tacships struck.

But the war had been hard on Tahn pilots; it had been especially lethal for the young beings who chose to strap themselves into the semiguided missiles called tacships. The sixteen pilots had, combined, less than 8,000 real E-hours' experience. Before the war, that would have qualified a Tahn as graduate trainee and nothing more.

The Tahn tacship pilots scorned such niceties as evasive tactics and spoofs—not that they would have been capable of running them, especially against the highly experienced Imperial officers they faced, all of whom had thousand-thousand-mission stares and steel teeth.

The tacships lived for only seconds before ceasing to exist. They made only one hit—and that was on one of their own destroyers. But the clutter of missiles fired served nicely to fragment the already nearly chaotic Tahn battle formation.

Atago, standing on the bridge, kept her face immobile. She had not expected much from the tacships—but this was absurd. But it was. She issued further orders.

The chief weapons officer had already decided on the system. He ordered a massive Nach'kal launch—self-homing ship-to-ship missiles, medium range.

The second disaster was the inept, un- or undertrained Tahn weaponeers. Computer simulation did not equal combat reality.

Acquisition techs misreported targets, and aimers "lost" aim points or, worse, missiles themselves after launch. Gunners fumbled through firing sequences that should have been genetically imprinted by then.

Loaders hit the wrong buttons and sent missiles back into storage bays or made them jam half-loaded.

The third disaster was the new untried weapons systems themselves. The Nach'kal launch should have been 100 percent. In fact, less than seventy-one percent of the tubes fired.

Others refused to admit that they had been loaded or had acquirable targets or simply sat there. One entire bank of launchers went on automatic—but did not order the missile's drive systems to activate after launch. Several dozen Nach'kals were jettisoned into space before a volunteer short-circuited the bank's computer—electrocuting himself in the process.

But the tacships took hits even as they launched their Kali shipkillers.

One hit the Forez, exploding in a now-empty tacship hangar bay. Damage-control crews fought their way into the roaring fire and managed to damp the flames in minutes.

And then the first flotilla was trying to get out.

Five made it.

But the Tahn's attention was taken up by the second flotilla. Their orders were to kill the escorts.

They mostly did.

The Tahn destroyers maneuvered frantically under individual control. After the disaster of the Nach'kal launch, the Forez's weapons officer was reluctant to give them support.

Nine destroyers incandesced before the officer ordered the launch.

Twenty operator-guided long-range shipkillers spit out from the Forez and went looking for targets.

The flotilla, under tight control, spewed Fox countermissiles and Goblins keyed to home on the large Tahn shipkilling missiles. The operators, confused, lost targets and control. The missiles, told they were no longer in contact, obediently self-destructed.

The Imperial tacships came in again. Four of them struck for the cruiser.

Three of them hit the old ship, and it shuddered and broke in half. The halves, orbiting aimlessly but still moving at their initial velocity, were next sighted three E-years later by a survey ship. By then, it was of course far too late for the handful of Tahn who had survived the initial explosion.

The tacships broke once more and headed for home.

They had done enough.

Waiting in the wings were the heavies.

Atago ordered the first launch against the incoming Imperial ships at extreme long range.

Twelve self-guiding monsters floated out of their ports, and then their AM2 drives cut in. Each of them had multiple guided warheads with enough KT to kill a city the size of Heath's capital. The missiles, so new that they had not even been given a code name by Imperial Intelligence, worked superbly.

They ignored, as per last-minute instructions, any of the destroyers screening the larger Imperial ships, homed, and exploded. Their warheads had been instructed to not split on final acquisition. They disobeyed.

But the effect was still grim enough:

Two Imperial battleships destroyed.

One put out of action and later scrapped.

One cruiser destroyed.

One cruiser badly damaged.

Four cruisers forced out of battle.

Mahoney had been correct in anticipating the damage potential of the berserker.

Seconds later, in-range, the Imperial ships launched.

More than 30 Kalis, each operator-guided, homed on the Forez.

It was a confusion—Kalis were homed on each other, were operator-lost, and were even lost in sympathetic explosions after nearby missiles went off.

But the huge area of space occupied by the Forez and its escorts was a hell of explosions.

The remaining Tahn destroyers were dead or smashed out of battle.

The Forez itself took two hits.

But it was still coming in, still under full drive—and still firing.

The weapons officer was slightly pleased.

Recognizing the incompetence of his weapons crews, he had come up with a plan. The Nach'kal missiles were aimed for the incoming Imperial ships, but with little expectation of success. Also, they were set on rapid fire.

More effective were the close-range weapons: the ballistically aimed Don rockets and the volley-fired Mirkas. Even the chainguns were yammering at the Kalis when they got in range. The explosions were wreaking havoc with his electronics and sensors—but his ship was still alive.

The three hits were acceptable. One had taken out a combat information center near the stern—but there was a secondary center. Another had blasted the Nach'kal's main computer. No loss there. The third shattered the crew living spaces. No one should have been in them, anyway. The fires would soon be brought under control, he assumed. Besides, that was a task for damage control.

The fourth Kali, from the Imperial second launch, smashed into the Forez at that moment. A quarter of the Leviathan died in seconds as the nuclear blast ravened.

The bridge's lights died. Atago heard a suppressed shriek in the blackness. Then the secondary lights went on. She scanned faces. Who was the weakling?

There was no clue.

"Admiral," she snapped to the Forez's CO. "Damage?"

It took a long moment. Half the bridge's screens were out or blinking nonsense. But eventually she had her information:

Engine Room: Capable of fifty percent drive. Yukawa drive units defunct.

Weapons: Percentages… percentages… Atago scanned on. Not good. The long-range missile system was dead. But she still had most of the shipkillers and even some of the Nach'kai systems left. The close-range systems had about twenty percent capability.

Casualties… Atago turned away. That was meaningless. She could still fight.

Another screen showed that the Forez would be within the heart of the Imperial fleet in minutes.

Atago's honor would be redeemed.

One of the more pointless and trivial pastimes military historians always had was trying to discover the specific person who got credit/blame for killing a great warrior/tyrant. Arguments as to whether von Richtofen was shot down by a fellow in-atmosphere pilot named Brown or potted out of the sky by a nameless Australian grunt were endlessly boring. Another Earth example: Which atmo-pilot had actually assassinated an admiral named Yamamoto—Lanphier or Barber?

More recently: Was Mordechi, battle leader of the Mueller, really killed in hand-to-hand combat by the mortally wounded Colonel Meinertzhagen, or did he in fact stumble on top of an antipersonnel mine?

So it was with Lady Atago and the Forez.

There were two main claimants.

One was a destroyer weapons officer named Bryennius. She had launched her Kali and then let it go

"dead" in space, directly in the orbital trajectory she had calculated for the oncoming Forez. At the right second she brought the missile alive and aimed it at the heart of the Tahn battleship.

The other was a particularly skilled tacship commander named Alexis. He had decided to fight his mosquito battle at the same time as the big boys and had tracked the Forez. When he assumed that the Tahn had other things on their minds, such as the recent three hits, he had launched his own Kali. He had screened it against the close-range rocket and chaingun fire by punting all eight of his Goblin XII missiles in front of the shipkiller.

Neither one of them was the hero, even though both Kalis were hits.

The historians, not for the first time, were wrong.

Lady Atago and the Forez were killed by Ensign Gilmer.

Or maybe the Forez killed herself.

The tiny hit on the Forez, hours before the battle had begun, had come from the tiny missile launched from Gilmer's picket ship.

It had, as the damage control computer said, only punctured the ship's outer skin. But it had not just lodged in the baffling. A small rip was made in the inner skin.

The compartment having been evacuated, no one noticed.

It was also not noticed that:

The fire retardant system between the ship's skins failed to operate.

The storage compartment's retardant system had never been filled.

The fire alarm itself was out of circuit, as was the alarm system for that entire subsector.

And there was a fire.

It was quite a small one, glowing, barely a spark. If the hole in the center skin had been larger, the fire would have gone out in the resultant vacuum. But the ship's atmosphere system kept pumping air into the compartment.

That was enough to feed the spark.

The spark grew. Flickered.

The compartment walls should have been treated with retardant. They were not. They were also made of a relatively low-temp synthetic. The compartment itself had nonmanifested crates of waste rags.

The compartment walls melted—but not into the other corridor, where the fire could have been seen.

Instead, it spread down the ship's side, toward the stern.

The damage-control computer still reported that nothing was wrong.

Finally the fire ravened, gutting through compartments. Crew members died before they could scream.

Maybe, at that point, one of the computers made a report. If so, it went unnoticed in the heat of battle.

Eventually the blaze hit a firebreak. Two huge chambers ringed the ship, one above and one below the AM2 fuel storage. The chambers not only were filled with a completely inert and nonflammable material but were given multiple antiblast, antiradiation, antianything drop shields.

They did not drop when the outer wall went down.

Nor was the nonflammable substance perfection.

The Forez exploded microseconds before the two Kali's struck what had once been matter and now was energy.

Lady Atago might not have been that disappointed with her death. She had not reached the heart of the enemy, but she was firmly in command of her ship and about to issue an order—still in complete control.

But nearly instantaneously, she ceased to exist.

Along with more than 5,000 other crew members.

There were worse ways to die in a war.

Lady Atago had been responsible for many millions of people discovering almost all of them.