War Against the White Knights Read online

  Indiya nodded. That seemed to be Homo sapiens’ role in this endeavor they called the Human Legion: to be the glue that stuck the disparate races together. But Cythien would have to wait for a moment, because this was too big.

  “Flag Lieutenant Hood, signal the fleets to move to battle stations. Scramble all X-Boat squadrons. Once that’s in train, get me Ambassador Sandure.”

  As Hood relayed her orders, she allowed time for her mind to embrace this change of events while her command chair sealed itself into an acceleration cocoon connected to numerous data feeds. She could run the fleet with her eyes closed, and began to do precisely that, splitting the focus of her augmented mind into dozens of separate cognitive threads.

  Despite all her mental enhancements and experience of command, when she closed her eyes, a primitive part of her brain often insisted on the need for ghost images in her mind. She saw small figures with three yellow eyes peering derisively down furry snouts.

  The Hardits…

  Naval intelligence was convinced the Hardits were a spent force, more concerned with hurting the non-Hardit races they detested so much than formulating a coherent war strategy. She had discussed this many times with Arun who remained convinced, despite the lack of supporting evidence, that Tawfiq was playing a game too cunning for them to fathom.

  Arun McEwan had been a constant in her life ever since that day when she had cryo-frozen him. They’d been kids then, really. Children sent to war. And now that he wasn’t there, it was as if she had lost a crucial organ of her body: she was incomplete. Without Arun, she had no one to explain what the chodding hell these wretched Hardits were doing on the eve of the final battle.

  She opened her mouth and allowed the oxygenating buffer gel to enter her throat. Signals intelligence had intercepted a heavily encrypted data burst around twenty minutes earlier. She had assumed it was an automated feed from a hidden New Empire sensor station that they’d intercepted by chance – she had no illusions of secrecy: everything they did was being viewed by the Imperial forces – but what if the transmission had come from the Hardits?

  “Sandure here, Admiral.”

  Indiya blinked a command gesture and meta data about Sandure’s call instantly appeared in her mind. He was on the Repulse, a fast cruiser in ‘Z’ Fleet. “I have need of a Xeno-diplomat,” she said, her voice using the same thought-to-speech translator system her non-human personnel used to talk to her. “Get across to Lance of Freedom ASAP. The Khallenes have information that could be vital, and we can’t afford to lose precious time to cross-species miscommunication,”

  “And my deputy?”

  Indiya briefly explained the situation, why the one person who could consistently make sense of the Khallenes was missing.

  “I suggest an alternate course of action, Admiral. The comm lag from Holy Retribution to Lance of Freedom is minimal. There’s no advantage to me being present at the Khallenes’ physical location. I shall establish contact with them while crossing to Holy Retribution. I could be useful to you personally, especially if the Hardits contact you, as I suspect they will shortly.”

  Indiya thought a moment. Sandure was closer to the Lance, and shuttling between craft was risky when they were at battle stations and could be in combat very soon. But the ambassador knew the risks. “Agreed. Meet me here and liaise with Captain Cythien while you transit. Indiya out.”

  The sensor officer pinged for her attention.

  “Picking up two ships a few hundred klicks out from Lance of Freedom. One looks outwardly like a Type-S36(A) ammunition carrier, but with power readings of a kind I’ve never seen before. The other is completely new, but is approximately the size of a stork shuttle.”

  The comms officer butted in. “Incoming transmission from Lieutenant-General Lee, Admiral. She is on one of the ships.”

  “Put her through, and then raise the priority on decrypting that signal intercept to maximum.”

  Lieutenant-General Lee began reporting her situation, explaining that she was reporting now because she’d just blown the stealth function of everything in a 10-klick radius. The implication gnawed at Indiya’s guts. The Legion had incorporated Hardit designs encountered near Tranquility and were only able to stealth small craft, smaller than that Hardit ship Lee was on. There could be an entire Hardit fleet out there…

  Indiya listened to Lee with a small part of her mind, but concentrated on protecting her command. “Admiral Indiya to all ships. Implement Case White. I say again, implement Case White. A possible Hardit fleet is present and invisible to our sensors.”

  Holy Retribution was already at battle stations, and now swung into even more frantic activity. Case White was a scenario of last resort, when the entire fleet was caught unawares by a hostile enemy. In a few moments, ships across this region of space would be firing clouds of defensive munitions: smoke, decoys, reflective and ablative powered streamers. In the confusion, they would scatter, seemingly at random, like lifting a rock to reveal a nest of scurrying insects. The difference was that Case White finished with the fleet converging into an offensive formation, ready to launch a counter blow.

  Indiya had complete confidence in her commanders. As soon as they began acknowledging receipt of her orders, she left her captains to carry them out and returned her attention to Lieutenant-General Lee’s voice as she continued her report, which concluded with a list of the Legion personnel who had leaked information to the Hardits – if the Khallenes were right.

  The security breach was real enough, Indiya decided. She daren’t wait for more evidence if they were about to go into battle.

  She issued orders to her flag staff. “Hood, everyone on this list is to be arrested immediately. Treat them well but I want them isolated.”

  Her flag lieutenant allowed himself only an instant’s hesitation before replying: “Yes, Admiral.”

  The list included over thirty captains and forty-five commanders of warships going through hard maneuvering. Had she been the one receiving orders to arrest them, she would have hesitated for more than a moment. Hood wouldn’t let her down.

  Indiya bit her lip. The list of suspected security leaks were all humans. This wasn’t going to look good with the non-human Legion officers.

  She addressed her other flag officer, Chief Staff Officer Arbentyne-Daex, an empath of a humanoid race called the Kurlei. “CSO, you’re to assume Hood’s duties until he has completed the arrests.”

  As the CSO acknowledged, Indiya’s attention flicked to a tactical display showing the New Empire fleet, outnumbered though it was, moving out from its station hidden among the captured comets and asteroids around Athena to attack the Legion fleet, which was still locked into its Case White maneuver.

  As if they knew…

  Dammit, of course they knew!

  Any final doubts evaporated when the tactical display showed a Hardit fleet emerge from behind the gas giant. The lead elements of destroyer-class ships made her heart sink the most because they hadn’t merely appeared from behind cover. They should have been in clear sight. One moment the tactical grid insisted there was empty space, and the next the destroyers had appeared out of nowhere. Even the ships behind Euphrates should have been visible to the Legion sensor stations on the far side of the gas giant.

  The only reason she was seeing the Hardit fleet now was because it had chosen this moment to reveal itself.

  I’ve led us into a trap. Indiya couldn’t shake the unhelpful thought, because it was true.

  Kreippil came online. “We will come out of Case White in about three minutes, facing the wrong way and about to fight on two fronts. If this enemy trap is destined to defeat us, then let us extract maximum revenge on the White Knight blasphemers. I say fend off the Hardits with a screening force and direct our full attention on the imperials.”

  “I agree, Admiral,” said Indiya.

  She heard the Littorane admiral give a slight gargle, and knew that if she could see him, his gills would be flapping in surprise.

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nbsp; “It is like a barroom brawl, Admiral,” explained Indiya, not that she had experienced one herself, but it was an analogy that stretched back centuries to the war strategists of old Earth. “Faced with two attackers coming from different directions, we fend off one as best we can while delivering a knockout blow to the weakest attacker. When they go down, we give our full attention to the other attacker. The New Empire forces are weaker, and so we smash them first.”

  “We rationalize our choices in different ways,” said Kreippil, “but both are rooted in the same divine inspiration.”

  “I hope you’re correct, Admiral.”

  In the long years of transit between star systems, Indiya and Kreippil had both insisted upon extensive contingency planning, including just this eventuality. “Admiral Indiya to all captains, we implement Case Blue as soon as Case White has concluded. Screening force led by Lance of Freedom to delay Hardit fleet. Main force to attack the incoming imperials. Let’s wipe the New Empire forces off this reality. Freedom Shall be Won!”

  — CHAPTER 21 —

  This was the biggest space battle of the Civil War and Indiya had placed Legion forces at a disadvantage by leading them into a trap. She fought hard to keep this indulgent sense of guilt at bay and allow her captains and fleet commanders to carry out the roles they had trained for.

  Indiya had lived in space all her life and knew how short life could be here in this lethal environment. The Marines and other non-spacer passengers felt snug and secure within their pressurized bubbles inside sturdy bulkheads, but any ship rat knew that the separation between life and death was always wafer thin.

  And that was during peacetime.

  Consequently, Indiya had insisted on a minimum of triple redundancy for all posts to account for both campaign attrition and battlefield casualties. Captains ordered commanders and lieutenants to train in their place, in case of rapid battlefield promotion. Commanders, in turn, did the same. As Indiya often told her subordinates: any Navy personnel who were indispensable were also liabilities. From senior Admiral to junior spacer, if you weren’t confident that at least two other people could fulfil your role if you are unable to carry out your own duties yourself, then you were not fit to serve in the Human Legion Navy.

  With scores of senior officers suddenly placed under arrest, at the very moment when the Legion was caught in a trap and had assailants coming from either side, Indiya’s policy could not have been tested more comprehensively.

  She saw the proof of her Navy’s resilience in the tactical map in her head, and the command chatter she eavesdropped upon. The changeover was as slick as one watch relieving another as the replacement officers slotted into their new roles bringing replacements, in turn, to fill their own posts.

  Lance of Freedom led a defensive screening force to keep the Hardits at bay. This formation was rich in combat drones, and missile defense picket ships. With so many unknown Hardit ship types, and their frequent upgrades that outpaced even the combined efforts of the freaks, Khallenes, and others to upgrade the Legion war machine, Indiya struggled to assess the strength of this new enemy fleet accurately. The brave force led by Lance of Freedom was heavily outnumbered and outgunned, that much was certain. Nonetheless, there was a surprise in store for the Hardits, the hidden sting in the tail in the form of a mobile reserve of stealthed X-Boats launched from Lance of Freedom.

  The Hardits were holding station about ten minutes’ hard burn from the main portion of the Legion fleet that was racing toward the White Knight homeworld of Athena. Until this point, the campaign for the system of Olympus-Ultra had been deliberately aimed to drive out New Empire forces from every world and moon until the survivors were bottled up in orbit around Athena. Indiya’s forces had made frequent faints and sorties over the past few weeks to wear down the enemy and keep them constantly off balance. If she had received any inkling of an oncoming Hardit fleet she would have launched the final invasion much earlier.

  That couldn’t be helped now. The New Empire forces were taking on a fresh burst of life, screaming out from orbit around Athena.

  Kreippil had tactical command of the combined naval forces attacking these revitalized New Empire warships. As was conventional, both sides had thrown out a cloud of AI-controlled combat drones, skirmish screens that now thudded into each other in a high-speed slugfest too fast for the unaugmented human eye to track.

  Behind the screen, the Legion forces swiveled about in a synchronized maneuver to keep their sterns facing the enemy, and then applied hard thrust. She watched with pride in the competence of her fleet as the center of its formation accelerated away from the enemy at the most brutal pace, until the Legion’s disposition began to take a concave form, like a dish with the smaller enemy formation enticed inside the bowl, allowing the edges of Kreippil’s formation to curl inward like fingers of a clenched fist crushing whatever it caught in its palm.

  Would the enemy fall for this old trick? She doubted it, but she did expect the maneuver to seize the initiative as the enemy sought to escape the trap.

  Indiya allowed the drama near Athena orbit to play out by itself for a while, devoting more and more of her mental resources toward the Hardit threat.

  In absolute contrast to the Imperials, who were stampeding into the attack, the Hardits were holding position, safely out of the effective range of the missiles and beam weapons of the screening force centered on Lance of Freedom.

  She opened a comm link to Lance of Freedom’s captain. “Any idea what the Hardits are playing at, Cythien?”

  “Negative, Admiral. I am tempted to probe them with a small force of combat drones, but you humans have a saying for this situation. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  A pang of loss stabbed at Indiya. She’d never heard that expression – it must have been from old Earth centuries ago. Loobie would have known, but Indiya’s best friend wasn’t here anymore. The expression’s meaning was clear enough, and pertinent. The screening force was meant to keep the Hardits at bay, but they must surely be up to something, she just couldn’t see what was yet.

  “Prepare your probe, Captain Cythien,” she said, “but I concur – hold fire until we know more.”

  The memory of Loobie reminded her of another childhood friend. Indiya activated an instantaneous communication link across scores of light-years to the Legion’s strategic hub at Khallini, and an undersea prison in which one of the sharpest minds in the Legion was incarcerated.

  “This is a surprise, Admiral,” said Finfth. His brain was boosted to capabilities far beyond human, and yet the weaknesses in his character were all too human.

  “We are in trouble, Finfth, caught in a Hardit trap. I’m sending you a status report. My question is–”

  “Why have the Hardits not attacked?”

  Still cutting straight to the point? You haven’t changed. “Well? Any ideas?”

  “I believe the answer is obvious… to someone with my unfortunate experience of life.”

  “No grandstanding, Finfth. Everything is at stake here.”

  “Then shut up, and pay attention, Admiral. The word you’re looking for is betrayal.”

  “Betrayal? We’ve had a serious security breach. We’re caught in a trap, because the Hardits and New Empire forces coordinated the movements. They knew where and when we would be.”

  “The betrayal runs deeper than that.”

  “The Hardits!” Indiya had been talking with Finfth in her mind but her excitement was such that she screamed out loud, the sound muffled by buffer gel. “The Hardits’ alliance with the New Empire is a sham, it has been all along, leading up to this moment. Thank you, Finfth.”

  “Happy to be of service,” he replied. “Do come and visit one day, I still keep–”

  Indiya cut the link to Finfth’s prison under the seas of Khallini, and open a channel to Captain Cythien. “Avoid contact with the Hardits,” she ordered. “I think they have appeared merely to draw out the New Empire fleet. It’s a double cross.”

  “I
t would be a characteristic Hardit behavior, Admiral,” agreed Cythien.

  “Too frakking right, Captain. Keep your X-Boat reserve hidden, but take a rotation of squadrons off the highest alert to keep them rested. If I know the Hardits, they won’t move until they’re ready to gloat, and how long that might be, I do not know.”

  Back at the Athena end of the engagement, the Imperial forces were proving to be too smart to be drawn in to the Legion’s trap. They were turning about, firing missiles at the outer rim of the Legion formation, firing everything else they had at the swarms of AI drones pursuing them, as the superior weight of Legion drone numbers began to tell.

  The Imperial warships were taking casualties now, but a hidden gauntlet still awaited them. The Imperials were breaking out of their encirclement by diving into Euphrates’ gravity well, unaware that five squadrons of stealthed X-Boats were racing to intercept, and the inertialess drives of the X-Boats meant they could accelerate far beyond the dreams of White Knight ship designers.

  “Admiral, I’m picking up a transmission from the Hardits,” said Holy Retribution’s Sensor Officer, a young Littorane called Yoh-Daen.

  “Wrap it in maximum firewall protection. Audio only. And then put it through, Lieutenant Yoh-Daen. The Hardits are ready to gloat, sooner than I thought.”

  As she waited for the transmission to be made safe, she observed a flight of X-Boats – Mark Six Phantoms – de-stealth beneath an Imperial destroyer and concentrate all their fire on a single point of the enemy warship’s hull. The destroyer’s point defense systems would be going wild, trying to swat away the attack from these upstart little warboats. But the same technology that allowed X-Boats to dump their momentum into D-Space also allowed them to shift away the kinetic energy of the destroyer’s point defenses, at least for the handful of seconds they needed to bore a hole through their target’s hull armor.