Extremis (11 page)

“Admiral, the enemy fighters around us are breaking off en masse. They’re heading back to protect their dreadnoughts.”

“As expected. All beams: right up their ass.”

“All beams on the fighters, aye, sir.”

That was when the bulk of McCullough’s missiles started hitting—and his fighters started disappearing from the tacplot in swathes. But they were no longer disappearing as fast as Wethermere had expected: several of the Baldy datanets had died along with their SDH master-hubs.

Yoshikuni pulled forward against her shock harness as if she wanted to jump to her feet when she gave the order. “Fleet order to all missile batteries. Best rate of fire. Second screen to flush its racks. Internal magazines launch until they are ten birds away from dry.”

The admiral’s flagship, the RFNS supermonitor
Jellicoe,
began—and kept—trembling as though a freight train were speeding through its bowels: outbound missiles. Hundreds of them.

With many of their datanets gone, the enemy ships had been forced to concentrate even more of their less-effective defensive fire on the Flight Brigade’s fighters. Ironically, most of McCullough’s pilots had already launched all their ship-killing weapons. And now, before the van of the Baldy fleet could yet again shift the primary focus of their ill-coordinated defenses back toward Yoshikuni’s massive missile salvo, the first of those immense weapons began to strike.

Inside the red mass of the Baldy fleet, the steady trickle of enemy Omega icons suddenly escalated into a flood. Wethermere tried to match the humble death symbols with his imagination of the titanic forces being unleashed upon those enemy ships. A dozen or more light-seconds away, antimatter warheads were violently blossoming into sudden, blue-white spheres of pure, obliterating, noiseless energy. Wave-front halos pulsed out from those micro-stars, tossing, and tearing apart, warships that were almost a kilometer in length. Shields died with rainbow flares; armor buckled, melted, even sublimated wherever the energies actually touched them. And in many cases, the munitions and power plants of the stricken ships joined in the orgy of destruction, consuming themselves with a suddenness that an anthropomorphizing observer might have wrongly labeled as “furious.”

Over the course of forty-five seconds, Ossian Wethermere watched almost a quarter of the bulging, diseased sac of red icons deflate, sagging limp where markers of dead enemy ships hung motionless in the plot. The bridge was silent—and then cheering broke out as the sac began retracting, attenuating as its rearmost extents began pulling away from Yoshikuni’s fleet.

“Losses?” Yoshikuni’s voice was a stern reminder that the stunning victory had not come without a price.

Ops’s voice was subdued. “SMT
Hipper
, MTs
Marston Moor
,
Ting-Hsien
, and
Quebec
. SDs
Harrower
,
Resolve
—”

“Just the number lost.”

“Six SDs, sir. And a number of pickets. No tenders or auxiliaries.”

“And the Flight Brigade?”

“Sir—”

“
And the Flight Brigade?
”

By way of answer, the Communications Officer interrupted by clearing her throat. “Brigadier McCullough on priority channel, sir.”

Yoshikuni nodded. “Can you get us his data feed?”

“Trying, sir.”

McCullough’s voice sounded oddly young, almost cheery. “Quite a ride, out here.”

“Brigadier, how are you? How are your—?”

Tac muttered low. “Sir, he has only ninety-eight birds left.”

Yoshikuni seemed to swallow back whatever words she had planned on uttering. After a moment, she said, “Well done, Flight Brigade. Time to head back to the barn.”

“With the Admiral’s pardon, we’re not quite done. We are right in amongst them.”

“And getting chewed to pieces by their fighters.”

If McCullough had heard, he gave no indication of it. “We can get you a second salvo opportunity, can keep them on us a little longer if we—”

“Brigadier, you are disobeying a direct order. You are to—”

Ops interrupted softly. “Admiral?”

“
What?
”

“Sir—his data feed. Look.”

Yoskikuni did—and went very pale. “My god. They’re running their tuners over the limit.”

Ops nodded. “Sir, the rads—”

McCullough had either heard or figured out what the silence meant. “Admiral, you never said it—and nor did I—but we both knew this was a one-way mission. Old hulls, old shielding, old tuners, old pilots: we had to push and spend it all if we were going to get this job done. Now let me talk to the people I have left—”

“Brigadier, I order you to—”

But the priority line snicked off with a buzz; they could still hear McCullough through his data feed, though.

“Flight Brigade, report.”

And they did:

“External ordnance gone, Brigadier.”

“Racks dry.”

“I’m out.”

“What now, Skip?”

Instead of answering, McCullough toggled back to Line One, his voice thoughtful. “Admiral, the Baldy sensor arrays are phased, but they get their terminal lock on us with targeting lasers, yeh?”

“Yes, Brigadier, but—”

McCullough cut her off again. “Okay, in we go, boys and girls. Here’s the plan: wait until they graze a lock across you. Then dance away quick and give your computers time to get reciprocal telemetry on the source of
their
targeting lasers. Once you’ve got that, go to continuous fire with your beam weapons. We might not be able to kill these giants—but we can stick our needles straight into their eyes.”

And so the last seventy-four fighters of the Flight Brigade rushed in, a flurry of furious gnats attacking a herd of elephants.

And the elephants balked.

None of the behemoths died, but in the tacplot, the red icons shied away from the gnats, possibly believing they still had missiles, or possibly trying to protect against the venomous, gouging bites that were stinging, even momentarily blinding, the eyes that guided and aimed their defensive batteries.

“Admiral, there’s further disruption in the Baldy datanet. They’re having to reshuffle their sensor coverage in order to— By God, McCullough is doing it, sir.”

Yoshikuni strained at her harness. “General order to all units: launch all remaining birds. Sustained fire, all systems, until your capacitors are red lining.”

“All fire, aye, sir.”

“And McCullough, punch out, damn it—punch out!”

But the sons and daughters of Beaumont, made of the same uncompromising, gritty material that gusted across the deserts and wastes of their rugged homeworld, stayed in their hulls and died—and assured that Yoshikuni’s ships sent improbable numbers of the enemy into oblivion. Wethermere watched as the larger green icons of the human fleet lashed out at the roiling enemy mass and another wave of new Omega icons spattered cross it.

Tactics’s announcement kept the mood somber. “Flight Brigade down to nineteen, sir.”

Yoshikuni slammed back the shoulder bars of her harness and jumped upright. Wethermere saw an evanescent glitter—an incipient tear?—at the edge of the Iron Admiral’s left eye. “For God’s sake, McCullough, punch out. Don’t—”

“Admiral?” It was McCullough.

“Yes?”

“Fight your ship—and remember us.”

“McCullough—” But the carrier wave of McCullough’s data feed died with a hiss. “God, no,” Yoshikuni whispered, and although her voice did not falter and neither her lips nor her brow buckled, a single tear traced a long, glimmering curve down the length of her smooth cheek.

“Admiral?” It was Ops.

“Yes?”

“They—they’re gone sir. All of them.”

She did not look away, did not even move. Wethermere had the insight—sudden and sure—that she did not dare try to do either. Then she straightened. “Tactical: report.”

The Tactical Officer’s voice was pitched as if he were delivering a eulogy—which in fact he was. “The final attack of the Flight Brigade broke the Baldies up even more. We took out at least another three SDHs and twelve SDs. Overall, they’ve lost forty percent of their force since entering the Beaumont system.”

But as they watched, the red icons began to not merely move back but away from what had been the axis of their retreat, spreading out radially, evolving back into the screen formation they had compromised upon closing with Yoshikuni’s line. They were not withdrawing: they were re-forming.

Yoshikuni sat, and the way she almost fell into her chair left Wethermere with the impression of a person who had just finished running a marathon. “Ops, what’s our slowest unit’s ETA to the Suwa warp point?

“Including travel both within and beyond the Desai limit, forty-eight minutes, sir.”

“And the fastest Baldy unit’s ETA to the same warp point?”

“Fifty-nine minutes, using the same metrics, sir.”

Yoshikuni leaned back. “Comm, pass the word: well done.” She looked down into the plot, and Wethermere was fairly sure she was staring at the now-receding brown marble that was Beaumont. He unlocked his harness, stopped his recorder, and approached Yoshikuni slowly, carefully. When he was about a meter away, he saw that her lips were moving slightly, and was startled to hear the Iron Admiral of the RFN whispering what sounded like a shred of poetry: “Into the volleys of death flew the four hundred.” She looked up slowly. “Mr. Wethermere.”

“Sir.”

“I want you to carry a message to Suwa. And on to Admiral Krishmahnta. And by drone to Achilles, programmed to broadcast once it gets there. It is a priority message, with instructions for mandatory pass-along and rebroadcast through any and all friendly warp points.”

Wethermere felt his left eyebrow rise involuntarily, but all he said was. “Yes, sir. What is the message?”

“Only this: a full recording of the actions—the charge—of the Flight Brigade of Beaumont. You are to append one word to that recording.”

Wethermere waited. Yoshikuni, face impassive, finally got the word out in a completely level tone. “The word is: ‘Remember.’ Send immediately.” She looked up at him. “Immediately.”

What Ossian Wethermere saw in her eyes—a pain and ferocity and strange, savage longing for which there was no single word—made him start and lean away slightly. What was radiating from her did not bear close approach, and for a moment he couldn’t even define it, but then he discerned the dark emotional amalgam: respect for the dead—and guilt for not being with them. “Yes, ma’am—sir,” he muttered and quickly moved off.

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, First Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, Beaumont System

Narrok relaxed his tentacles as Urkhot left the bridge, silent, yellow-pasty from top to bottom, and his
selnarm
infolded so tightly that he seemed to have separated from the Children of Illudor and become his own race.

In the plot, the human forces drew over the Desai limit and sped to the warp point. Pursuit had been pointless: Narrok had too few of his Desai-drive SDHs left to form up a reasonable task force. And his older superdreadnoughts could never hope to catch the enemy fleet. So he had elected to remain closer to Beaumont, retrieve the crews from his drifting hulks, and scuttle what could not be repaired. As the slow, bloody business began, several
murn
-colored pinpricks rose up from the planet itself.

“Sensor Second, identify the contacts.”

(Calm, relief.) “Only a few of their interface shuttles, sir.”

“And what do they seem to be doing?”

“Given the intermittent nature of their motion, and a few weak radio pulses we detect in the area, I suspect they are attempting to rescue some of their pilots, perhaps retrieve the bodies of the discarnate.” (Distaste, revulsion, perplexity.) “We do still have some of our fighters on patrol in that area, and they could easily—”

“Sensor Second, are the enemy shuttles armed?”

“Not apparently, but—”

“Could they, in any conceivable fashion, carry ordnance that would pose a threat to any of our ships at one-light-second range?”

“No, sir.”

“Then avoid them and leave them about their business. When they have returned to the planet, transmit our customary message to the local government. First, ‘Stop fighting.’ Then ‘Stop moving.’ Is that clear?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Narrok turned away from the plot, stared out the single viewport up into the distant stars, and thought,
What a bitter lesson we learned today.
And then:
I would like to meet the admiral that taught it to us.
Oddly, and somewhat unsettlingly, the thought did not strike him as outré or distasteful.

In fact, it seemed quite normal.

3

Warring in an Unhabitual Way

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way
—William James

RFNS
Gallipoli
, Main Body, Further Rim Fleet, Suwa System

Lieutenant Ossian Wethermere had been on the bridge of the RFNS
Gallipoli
for all of thirty seconds when he was handed the flimsy announcing his promotion. It was done without any ceremony; in fact, Wethermere didn’t know what the letter contained until he opened it.

Looking after Captain Velasquez, who had handed it to him, Wethermere queried, “Uh, sir?”

“Congratulations.” The monotone of Velasquez’s response was somewhat muffled: the captain’s head and shoulders were already buried inside a console’s access panel, which reeked of battle-fried command circuits.

“No—I mean, thanks, but—why? It doesn’t say.”

“Oh, nothing you’ve done.” Velasquez reemerged from the console. “The admiral apparently got your dossier along with the rest of the data your courier downloaded to us when we popped in-system from Raiden. She noticed you were past review date. We’ve got casualties, you haven’t screwed up, so—congratulations. War is hell. Now I’ve gotta fix this. Scram.” Velasquez wriggled back up into the service niche.

Wethermere stepped away, stared down at the flimsy again—and heard a voice behind him. “I believe congratulations are in order, Lieutenant.”

Wethermere turned: Captain Yoshi Watanabe, and he was almost smiling. “Thank you, sir.”