Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (51 page)

Emily felt a surge of elation…and relief.  “Can we hold until they get here?”

Rafael grimaced and shrugged.  “I think so, but it will be heavy going.”

Emily looked around the Command Center.  The work consoles were scattered throughout the room.  Once the fighting got inside, all of her specialists would be exposed to enemy fire.  Fiona Campbell’s weapons console was just a few feet away from the breech in the wall that Raf had blasted; there was no way she would be able to handle the targeting of those two Duck cruisers once the bullets started flying.  She absently rubbed the bump on her nose as she thought about it.  How do you defeat the enemy without fighting?

She turned and looked at the captives huddled in the corner.  One of them bore the rank of Dominion Admiral.  Okay then.  Emily squatted down beside him.  “Admiral, you have a problem.”

“No, Commander,” Admiral Bohm retorted, “
you
have the problem. In about three minutes the DID will storm this place with their Dragon bots and you will be dead.  I suggest that you surrender to me now if you wish to spare your troops.”

Emily laughed.  “You know, last time a Dominion officer told me that, I had to blast her out of space.”  She reached forward to open his tunic.  He tried to squirm away, but one of the Refuge Long Range Recon soldiers grabbed him and held him still.  Emily felt inside the tunic and withdrew a large wallet.  In it was an ID card, a money chip, a card for a restaurant on Timor she had never heard of…and three photographs.  The Admiral looked at the pictures, his lips thin with stress, then turned away, feigning indifference.

Interesting.

Following her hunch, Emily  inspected each of the pictures.  The first was one of the Admiral himself, much younger, standing with a number of classmates at the Dominion War Academy.  The second was a picture of the Admiral with a petite, luminous woman, with raven black hair and pale, pale skin.  She was very pretty but, if Emily guessed correctly, she was also ill.  She flipped the picture around and saw the date was twenty-six years earlier.  She flipped it back and studied the Admiral’s face.  The woman was looking at the camera, but the Admiral was gazing at her with great adoration.  The look on his face was a mixture of love and a fierce protectiveness.

Emily looked up.  “I am sorry about your wife, Admiral; what did she die of?”

Admiral Bohm clenched his jaw.  “Her name was Julia.  She died of acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.”  He fell silent, but Emily had the distinct impression he had been just about to say something more.  A young Dominion warrior, perhaps already being groomed for an Admiral’s star.  A beautiful young wife with a cruel disease.  What else?  What was she missing?

She looked at the last picture.  All of the pieces abruptly fell together.

The last photograph showed a young man in a Dominion cadet’s uniform, with the gold braid of an honor graduate, standing in front of the Dominion War Academy.  He had dark hair and pale skin the color of moonlight, and he looked so much like his long-dead mother that it made Emily catch her breath.  And standing beside him, beaming with a father’s pride, was Admiral Bohm.

“Your son looks like his mother,” Emily said matter-of-factly.

The Admiral said nothing.

“Having children is a wonderful thing,” she continued, “and in your case doubly so because he is a constant reminder of his mother.  You must cherish him, for every time you see him you can see her living through him.”

Admiral Bohm kept silent, but there may have been the slightest nod.

There was something more, something the Admiral was still hiding.  She glanced at his uniform again.  Not black, so he wasn’t DID, just a normal part of the Dominion Fleet.  No way to know his politics.  But he was an admiral, he was in charge of the Dominion’s largest battleship, at least since the death of Admiral Mello.  She glanced again at the photograph of the son’s graduation.  What hopes and aspirations did he have for his son?  His only living child, his only link to his beloved wife.

And then she had it, mentally chiding herself for not seeing it earlier.

“Admiral Bohm,” she said evenly.  “We have just landed shuttles in your shuttle bays.  They brought with them Victoria’s version of your combat robots.  There are twenty of them,” she lied.  “They are each more armored and more heavily armed than your bots-“

“Dragons,” he supplied.

“Than your Dragons.  We call our combat robots ‘Marvins.’   With twenty of them on board, I can pull our soldiers back to secure areas and let the Marvins roam around until they have killed everyone on board the
Vengeance.
Every last person, do you understand?”

“You wouldn’t do that,” he protested, but she could see the doubt.  After all, he knew what the Dominions had done.

Emily leaned over until her mouth was just an inch from his ear, invading his psychological space and forcing a sense of intimacy that would put him off balance.  “Admiral Bohm, we didn’t start this war.  You ambushed our Fleet, then you attacked Cornwall.  You dropped nuclear weapons on our home world and killed our queen.  You took two of our soldiers as prisoners and your Dominion Intelligence Directorate thugs raped the woman for six months and chopped the hands off the man.”

“I had nothing to do with-“

“And then,” Emily pressed on, “Citizen Director Nasto ordered that Cornwall be bombed with antimatter bombs until it was nothing more than ashes and everyone was dead.  We stopped that,” she told him, choosing to omit that one of his fellow admirals was really the one who intervened. “But we still lost over twenty-five million souls.”

“So here is what I am going to do.” She held up the picture of his son.  “First, Admiral, I am going to send your son’s photograph to all of the Marvins with instructions that they are to scour the ship for your son, and when they find him they are to shoot him in the head and then drag his body back here for you to see what you could have prevented.  Then I am going to send orders to every Victorian soldier on board this ship, telling them that they are to hunt down everyone on board and shoot them.  No prisoners.”

Bohm stared at her with a mixture of cold fury and pure horror.

“Your son will die within the next hour unless you surrender this ship and tell your security forces to stand down,” Emily told him in a flat tone.  She could see he believed her. 

Admiral Bohm scowled at her.  “You are a ruthless, immoral witch.”

Emily nodded in agreement.  “You decided to wage total war against Victoria, Admiral. 
This
is what total war feels like.”

Fifteen minutes later the last of the Dominion Security Forces had piled their weapons in a corner and were being led to a shuttle bay under the guns of ten Marvin combat bots.  The last of the Dominion Dragon bots had been deactivated.  Then Emily had Bohm order the two Dominion cruisers to surrender.  One shut down its weapon systems and turned off its power plant, but the other tried to run, accelerating wildly, spitting chaff and jammers.  The missiles and energy beams of the
Vengeance
caught it within seconds and sent it tumbling, airless and shattered.  A few life pods shot out, set a course for Timor and soon vanished from sight.

“They’ll warn the Ducks we’re coming,” Fiona Campbell cautioned.

“Yes,” Emily replied.  “They will.”  She smiled.

* * * *

It took three days of frantic, round-the-clock activity to ship all of the Dominion prisoners to POW camps back at Refuge.  They decided on Refuge rather than Victoria because Emily was afraid that the prisoners would be lynched if they were housed there.  It had become a war of ghastly horrors, and Emily did not want to add another one.

Admiral Bohm was reunited with his son.  Bohm had never been a demonstrative man – few career military men are – but when he saw his son, alive and well, the Admiral covered his face with his hands and wept.

More crews were brought in from Cornwall to man the Dominion battleship and cruisers.  The Victorian Fleet had just added three large capital ships to their ranks.  The H.M.S.
Vengeance
was now the largest ship in either the Victorian or Dominion fleets.  Emily transferred back to the Refuge carrier
Rabat,
which now had a full complement of grogin gunboats with full crews.

On the fourth day, the new Assault Force, made up of one battleship, four cruisers, six destroyers, four carriers, a Hedgehog, a repair vessel and a gaggle of Owls and tugboats, moved deeper into Dominion space to meet up with Captain Eder and Admiral Douthat.

Phase One was complete.

    Chapter 47

The Final Battle

Admiral Kaeser had two insurmountable problems. 

First, he had fewer ships than the Victorians and the ships he had were smaller, with fewer missile tubes and lasers.  And second, he was hamstrung by Citizen Director Nasto and that little weasel, Hudis.  Despite all of his arguments and pleadings, they insisted that the Fleet be kept in orbit around Timor, rather than let him aggressively patrol and then meet the Vickies in a moving battle.  In a moving battle he could use stealth, deceit and maneuverability to compensate for his fewer numbers, but tied to the planet he would be forced to go toe-to-toe with a heavier opponent.

He had already received word that the battleship
Vengeance,
the Dominion’s pride and glory, had been captured.  Not only did he have to suffer its loss, but it was actually in enemy hands and would be used against the Dominion.  Captain Astrid Drechsher of the frigate
Draugr
had volunteered to go hunt for the
Vengeance
and destroy it, but Kaeser had told her no.  He thought the battle – and the war – might take a different turn, and if it did he would need as many Astrid Drechshers as he could find.

The enemy force that had come through the wormhole from Victoria had now moved deeper into Dominion space.  Kaeser had sent out scouts, of course, but the Vickies had detected the scouts and destroyed them, so now Kaeser was not sure where the force was.  Worse, it was a relatively small force, only fifteen ships.  Where was the rest of the Victorian Fleet?   There was another battleship out there somewhere, plus a bunch of Victorian heavy cruisers and God knew how many destroyers.  And the cursed carriers, though in his mind Kaeser still could not think of them as a serious threat.

But where were they?  From which direction would they come?  He shook his head.  If the Citizen Director would not let him send out patrols to locate and fix the Vickies, then he had to have as many ships as he could find to protect Timor.  The Citizen Director had insisted that Kaeser leave twelve ships to protect the Might of the People Ship Works, but Kaeser knew that was not enough and that he really needed them here, at Timor, where they might do some good.

Taking a breath, he mentally stepped back.  Every enemy has a weakness, a flaw that can be exploited if the time and the conditions were right.  For the Vickies, it had always been their insufferable arrogance.  It was a cultural conceit, a personality flaw of an entire people. That had allowed the Dominions and the Tilleke to lure the vaunted Victorian Fleet into the ambush in Tilleke space, and that had allowed Admiral Mello to make his surprise attack against the Vicky home world itself, with devastating results.  The Vickies’ arrogance had been rubbed in their faces, but had they really learned anything, or even now could he take advantage of their Achilles heel?

He stared moodily at the hologram of Timor’s defenses, mentally figuring out how he would go about defeating them if he were the Victorian Admiral.  He studied the hologram for a long time, then nodded briskly to himself.

Some risks were worth taking.

* * * *

“One of the Owls is scouting out the MOP Works,” Toby Partridge called out.  “Sensor packet coming in now.”

The original plan was to bypass the MOP Works altogether and proceed directly to the planet, but it never hurt to look.

“Put it up, Toby,” Emily said.  The main hologram flickered as the new data was added.  The forts protecting the MOP Works were still there, but oddly, there were fewer of them.  Where there had been eleven active forts, now there were only four.  And the defending ships…  She leaned forward to look at the information bars, then frowned. “Can this be right?” she asked.

Chief Gibson folded his arms and shook his head.  “That’s what the sensors say, but we need to confirm it.”

“Which Owl reported in with this?” Emily asked.

“
Laughing Owl,
Ma’am,” Partridge replied.

Emily’s eyebrows went up and she exchanged a glance with Alex Rudd.  Captain Zahiri was the most experienced of all the Owl captains.  She would have sent an annotation if she thought the data was either wrong or incomplete. 

“Well, this is tempting,” she said to Rudd.

“Very tempting.”

She took a breath.  “Okay, here’s what we have.  The Ducks have pulled back most of their forts and ships from the MOP Works shipyard to defend the planet.  Good news for us.  Sensors only pick up twelve destroyers and four forts.  No battleships, no cruisers.  This looks too good to pass up.  The forts look like they are positioned such that they can’t support one another, so we are going to take out just one fort to give us a path into the shipyard, then concentrate on taking out the destroyers.  I don’t want to lose anybody, so let’s keep a distance and just chip away at them.”

Alex Rudd and Chief Gibson looked at one another, then shrugged. “How do you want to take the fort?”

Emily considered this, absently rubbing her nose.  “Well, shoot, let’s start by asking them to give up.”

It took almost thirty minutes to get the commander of the MOP Works defense on the comm screen.  Finally a balding, pudgy man of about fifty appeared, wearing the uniform of an admiral.

“I am Admiral Manfred Duerr,” he said solemnly.  “To whom am I speaking?”

“I am Commander Emily Tuttle of the Victorian First Assault Force,” Emily said crisply.  “Admiral, I am calling to give you a chance to surrender.”  She was sending her reply not only to the MOP Works itself, but to all of the Dominion forts and destroyers.  “You must realize that we have a force strong enough to defeat you.  Perhaps more importantly, you must know that Timor has abandoned you.  There will be no reinforcements, Admiral.  You are on your own.  I am giving you this chance to save the lives of the men and women under your command.”

Admiral Duerr looked at her with disapproval.  Emily was reminded of a French general during World War II on Old Earth who insisted on surrendering only to someone of equal rank.  “Commander, you presume too much,” he said haughtily.   “I can assure you that your force is insufficient to penetrate our defenses and that if you try, you shall die.  Moreover, I have been assured by the Citizen Director himself that if I call for reinforcements, they will come.”

This was just what Emily expected.  She opted for planting a seed of doubt, if not for Admiral Duerr, then for anyone else listening in on the broadcast.  “I rather doubt that, Admiral.  We have been eavesdropping on the Citizen Director’s communications.  He has no intention of supporting you, that’s why he had those other forts towed back to Timor.  That’s why most of the warships were recalled.  The Citizen Director is hoping that before you fall, you might take a few of my ships with you, soften us up, so to speak.”  Emily smiled.  “That is not going to happen.  We’re going to start with the fort nearest us.  We’ll begin in twenty minutes.  If you want, order them to take to their lifeboats now, because in a little while it will be too late.”  Emily cut the communication.

Rudd looked at her, amused.  “We’ve been eavesdropping on the Citizen Director?”

Emily shrugged.  “No, but if we had that’s what I expect we would have heard.  You never know, it might make Duerr a little less confident.”  She turned to Toby Partridge.  “Get me Captain Zahiri of the
Laughing Owl
on the comm, Toby.  I’ll take it in my Day Room.”  A minute later Emily was seated in the privacy of her Day Room and Sadia Zahiri was looking at her from the comm screen.

“It’s time, Sadia,” Emily told her.  “I need to send you on your errand.”

No lifeboats left the Dominion fort.  Two hours after the conversation with the Admiral, the first asteroid was maneuvered into position and sent hurtling toward the fort from thirty thousand miles away.  The fort fired a volley of missiles on the ships involved, but at that distance there was enough time to spoof the missiles, shoot them down or evade them.

The first asteroid missed, as did the second.  The fort caught the third with three missiles, causing it to break up into several pieces.  Two of those pieces slammed into the fort, pushing it very slightly out of its fixed orbit around the MOP Works, giving it a spin and a wobble.  On the
Rabat,
Emily frowned, then ordered the next asteroids to be released closer to the fort.  “Bring it in to twenty thousand miles,” she said.

Next to her, Alex Rudd shifted his feet.  “Don’t get impatient, Emily,” he said in a low voice.  “We’ve got time, reel ‘em in slow. We have to make them believe. And we don’t want to lose any of our ships for nothing.”

Emily stifled a retort, then mentally shook herself.  “Disregard that order!” she corrected.  “Release at twenty-eight thousand miles.”  She glanced at Rudd, who smiled and nodded.  “Impatience is the hobgoblin of little admirals,” he said pompously.  “Keep it up, Cadet Tuttle, and I might let you graduate from my Tactics Course yet.”  Emily snorted rudely.  Rudd chuckled.  From the Communications Console, Toby Partridge cast them an inquisitive look, which made Emily turn away to hide her smile.

“Much better,” Rudd told her softly.

The next three asteroids missed, one by a scant hundred yards.  Finally, the last asteroid squarely smashed into it, buckling the fort’s armor plate and rupturing its hull.  The fort staggered further out of orbit, venting a huge cloud of air behind it.  A few minutes later lifeboats shot out of the fort’s shuttle bays, turned and headed for the MOP Works.

The tactical map now looked like a sack.  By taking out this fort, they had opened the sack on one end.   In the middle of the sack lay the Might of the People Ship Works.  Above and below the shipyard were two forts, with a third far behind the shipyard forming the end of the ‘sack.’   The twelve Dominion destroyers were about even with the shipyard.   The shipyard in turn was within missile and laser range of each of the three forts, so whoever went into the sack to get the shipyard would be exposed to fire from at least one of the forts.

The door to the MOP Works was open…a little. 

Emily’s best move, she knew, was to now take out a second fort, leaving a much larger and safer hole through which to attack the MOP Works.  And she would have done that…if the MOP works had been the real objective.

“Bring the tugs in closer – twenty thousand miles – and throw the next batch towards the shipyard,” Emily instructed.  She glanced a little anxiously at Chief Gibson.  “Master Chief, anything?”

Although the Combat Center was cool, Master Chief Gibson was sweating, droplets of water reflecting in his grey hair. 
God of Our Mothers, the Master Chief is getting old,
Emily realized with astonishment.  “Nothing yet,” he said.

The Dominion destroyers shot mountains of chaff into the zone between the shipyard and the Victorian forces, fogging the Victorian’s sensors and daring Emily to move closer.  But Emily raised the dare.  She didn’t need to move closer because recon drones on the other side of the chaff cloud told her precisely where the shipyard was.  The first asteroid missed the shipyard and went tumbling harmlessly into space.  The second and third got closer, but still missed.  The fourth looked dead on, but laser and missile fire from the shipyard and the forts broke it up just in time, the pieces flying either side of the shipyard.  The Dominion destroyers began to creep up to the left and right side of the ‘sack,’ anticipating that the tugboats would have to move closer in if they hoped to score a hit.

“The destroyers are creeping up,” Master Chief Gibson warned.

Emily grinned at Alex Rudd.  “Almost time.”  She got the rest of the Assault Force on the comm and snapped out orders.

* * * *

In orbit around Timor, Admiral Kaeser had been following the battle closely, using information beamed to the
Fortitude
directly from the Might of the People Ship Works and the three remaining forts.  It had pained him to lose the fourth fort, but he needed the Vickies solidly committed.

“Admiral Duerr,” he said.  “How are you holding up?”

Admiral Duerr grinned wolfishly.  “We’ve had a couple of close calls, but we’re holding our own.  The Vickies are still throwing rocks at us, but I think they’re getting ready to send in their ships to take a crack at the destroyers.”

“Keep their attention, Admiral, that’s all I ask.  Keep their attention.”

Duerr laughed again, a man who enjoyed a good fight.  “It will be my pleasure, Admiral Kaeser.  It will be my pleasure.”

* * * *

Emily watched the battle hologram.  Yes, the Duck destroyers
were
creeping in.  “Mildred, tell me when they have reached missile range.”

“Yes, Commander,” Mildred replied.

Another asteroid missed the shipyard, this one by a wider margin. 

The Dominion destroyers crossed the invisible line in space that brought them within range of the Victorian missiles.

“
Now!
” Emily shouted.

“
Now!
” Admiral Duerr cried.

Many things happened in an instant.

The Dominion cruisers volleyed one hundred missiles against the Victorians, then accelerated madly forward, laser beams stabbing out.