Operation Medusa Page 5

  Kyle stepped out of the single bedroom in their apartment and took the call in the living room. Running the communication through his implant, there was at least no need for him to get dressed or for Sterling to even know that he wasn’t dressed yet.

  “Oh, thank the Stars,” his aide said as soon as he answered. “I was worried you were asleep.”

  “You do have a priority alert that will wake me up,” Kyle observed.

  “And we all hate that thing,” Sterling confirmed. “I was about to use it anyway. You have Admiral Blake and three Senators scheduled to be in your office in sixty-three minutes.”

  His implants allowed him to control the spike of adrenaline that news delivered, and he considered the situation. Even though he and Mira had acquired an apartment together, both currently worked at the Fleet HQ and they hadn’t purchased a vehicle. They used New Cardiff’s network of self-driving transit pods, which ran a pathing algorithm to match passengers with destinations and get everyone where they needed to go as quickly as possible.

  On a good day, he was twenty minutes from his office. In rush hour, he could easily be forty—and he needed to shower and dress.

  “Can you get an aircar to the apartment?” he asked.

  “I coordinated with your security detail while I was waiting for you to answer,” Sterling confirmed. “Vehicle will be on your building’s roof in twenty-four minutes.”

  Barring some kind of incident, then, the military aircraft should get him to work in under ten minutes.

  “All right, Archie. Hold down the fort.”

  His aide laughed.

  “Sir, what in the Void gives you the impression that I’ve made it to the office or even into uniform yet?”

  Relegating Marines to taxi-driver status always felt silly, but Kyle had to admit that he’d never found a more reliable transportation service than a Castle Federation Marine Corps armored aircar with a Marine pilot.

  The aircar delivered him to the landing pad on Castle Federation High Command’s highest tower, where Archie Sterling was waiting for him with a reserved elevator.

  In the end, he reached his office with enough time to spare to inhale a cup of coffee and was waiting, appearing perfectly calm despite the unexpected rush to be ready, before his visitors arrived.

  When the Marines escorted Admiral Blake and her guests into his office, he rose with a salute and a cheerful grin.

  “Good morning, Admiral, Senators,” he greeted them. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Beer?”

  “Your beer fridge has a reputation,” Senator Maria O’Connell noted. The petite redheaded Senator for the planet Tuatha smiled. “That said, I’ll take a coffee. It’s a bit early in the morning, even for me.”

  “Coffee,” Blake grumped. “As big a cup as you have.”

  Senator Madhur Nagarkar of New Bombay took tea and Senator Joseph Randall took nothing. The blue-eyed man with the silver hair propped up the office wall in silence as the others sat. The first time Kyle had met Randall, he’d been a fading blond, but no hint of gold remained in his hair now.

  Despite their disagreements and a not-insignificant number of assassins, even Kyle had to admit that Randall had stepped up as a wartime leader in an impressive manner. He’d managed to line the Federation’s merchant houses, First Families, and industrial cartels up in a row that was churning out warships, starfighters, and missiles with phenomenal efficiency.

  It had taken its toll.

  “To what do I owe this unexpected visit?” Kyle asked as he served the drinks himself. Somehow, he suspected this wasn’t a meeting he wanted his steward in.

  “You rammed it past me,” Randall snapped. “Give him the damn thing, O’Connell.”

  The Senator for Tuatha chuckled.

  “Show some grace, Randall,” she replied—but she took a small jewelry box from inside her suit jacket and dropped it on the table.

  “The Senate has signed off on a new promotion list,” she told Kyle as he took the box. “Congratulations, Vice Admiral.”

  The box contained two pins, each with two gold stars, to replace the single star currently on his collar. Slowly, carefully, Kyle examined them, then laid the box back on the desk.

  “I’ve only been a Rear Admiral for six months,” he pointed out.

  “Sixteen major offensive fleets, Roberts,” Blake told him. “Operation Medusa was approved, and the Alliance doesn’t have sixteen O-9s and O-10s qualified to command a fleet action who aren’t trapped behind a desk.”

  “Medusa is approved?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “The Imperator is a big fan of yours,” Randall said. “So, it seems, are most of my fellows.”

  “If we’re going to take as big a risk as we need to take, we can’t justify doing less than going for the throat,” O’Connell told him.

  “We promoted a half-dozen new Rear Admirals as well,” Blake added, “and the main staff is going over JSOC’s operations plan as we speak.”

  “And JSOC?” Kyle asked.

  “Dissolved as of noon today,” the CNO told him bluntly. “You’ve done your job, and we need your collection of overaggressive mavericks on command decks as we launch this damn affair.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “Timing is going to be everything,” he noted. “Shifting command structures is going to be a pain, but—”

  “But we need our best on deck,” Blake finished his thought. “That’s not your problem, Admiral. Trust that it’s being taken care of.”

  “Your problem, Roberts, is that you’ve talked the Alliance into one of the biggest goddamn rolls of the dice in human history,” Randall told him. “So, tell me: what happens if you’re wrong? If this whole mess blows up in our face?”

  “Worst-case scenarios?” Kyle smiled. “There were a few in the briefing, but the big one is that Marshal Walkingstick kicks off his final offensive while our fleets are in the Commonwealth. We could destroy the Commonwealth and find ourselves Walkingstick’s new empire.”

  “And you had a plan for that, right?” the Senator demanded. “Or were you planning on dragging sixty star systems along with you on your usual headlong charge?”

  “Operation Medusa called for a stalking-horse fleet to carry out raids along the frontier, to keep Walkingstick distracted,” the newly minted Vice Admiral replied. “We’ll need to hold his attention, keep him watching his flanks, without letting him realize that the majority of our fleet is somewhere else.”

  All of this had been in the briefing, but Randall was clearly angling for something.

  “Joseph, if you’ve something you want the Admiral to say, you may as well ask him,” Nagarkar said bluntly. The dark-skinned New Bombay Senator looked tired, with bags under his eyes that showed on even his skin.

  “After everything he’s pulled, you expect me to be comfortable with the ‘Stellar Fox’s’ judgment?” Randall snapped. “We’re following his ideas into the dark, and I’ve never seen this man be anything but an overaggressive glory hog!”

  Kyle’s smile thinned.

  “No, sir. All you’ve ever seen in me is the man who caught your son committing treason,” he told Randall. “You’ve never judged me on any other standard than that—but the Federation needs us to be better men than that.

  “Doesn’t it?”

  It was probably the wrong thing to say. The tension in the room ratcheted from “nervous discussion of the war” to “an Admiral just all but accused a Senator of attempted murder.”

  But if the Federation—if the entire Alliance—was going to be following a plan Kyle had drafted, he and Senator Joseph Randall needed to clear the air.

  It was silent for ten seconds as he held Randall’s gaze. Twenty. Thirty.

  Then the Senator blinked and sighed, the tension draining away as what might have been tears glittered in the corner of his eyes.

  “Void take you, Roberts,” he snapped. “He’s my son.”

  “And he sold us out to the Common
wealth.”

  Randall was silent again, then nodded.

  “He did. Didn’t raise him as well as I thought.” He shook his head. “Void take you,” he echoed, but there was no heat to it. “Will this work, Admiral?”

  Kyle glanced over at Blake, who gestured for him to answer.

  “Fifty-five / forty-five,” he told the Senators. “If Medusa fails, there’s only about a one-in-three chance we get enough of the fleets back to hold out afterward.

  “Medusa comes with a thirty percent chance of losing the war in the next six months, but doing nothing leaves us with a certainty of losing the war in twelve to twenty-four months.

  “It’s the only option I’d recommend above surrender, sirs, ma’ams,” he concluded. “It’s a huge risk, but it’s a calculated one with an over-fifty-percent chance of winning the war outright.”

  “I’m not going to pretend I like you, Admiral,” Randall told him, levering himself off the wall. “But you’re right. I’ve misjudged your record because of that dislike. Do your damned job. Prove you’re worth that piece of gold my fellows gave you.”

  With that admission, the Senator for Castle calmly walked out of Kyle’s office.

  “Well, that was more positive than I was expecting,” O’Connell muttered after Randall left. “Put the damn stars on, Admiral Roberts. You and Admiral Blake have work to do.”

  Shaking his head, Kyle obeyed, replacing his single gold stars with the pairs in the box.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  O’Connell downed her coffee.

  “I was here to give you the stars,” she pointed out. “Nagarkar joined me after Randall attached himself, just in case we needed an extra set of lungs to shout him down. Apparently, we should have just left you to deal with him on your own!”

  “The Senator and I disagree on many things, but we serve the same cause,” Kyle told her, allowing his normal cheer to return. “When the Federation calls, he and I will both answer in our own ways.”

  And if that call stopped Randall sending assassins after him, Kyle would take it as a win.

  “Which benefits us all,” Nagarkar rumbled. “Thank you, Admiral, for your service and your honesty. Good luck with your mission.”

  The two Senators stepped out, leaving Kyle alone with Admiral Blake.

  “And my mission?” he asked her.

  “Waving your reputation under Walkingstick’s nose,” she told him. “We’re still sorting out exact strength levels, but you’ll be assembling a new Forty-First Fleet for the purposes of your stalking-horse raids. I’ll freely warn you that you won’t have nearly the strength you’d like: no matter how we harped on the need for an all-out strike, we’re still reserving twenty percent of our starship strength for home defense.”

  “That still leaves us two hundred ships,” Kyle concluded. “We could be a lot worse off.”

  “About the only thing that’s certain right now is that you’re getting Gaia and Elysium,” Blake told him. “And that’s only because they’re both in the Castle System and Elysium doesn’t even have an assigned CO yet.”

  “Is she even combat-ready?” he asked. DSC-080 Elysium was the latest Sanctuary-class ship, the newest sister to his old Avalon.

  “Undergoing space trials as we speak. Gaia has been headlining the Home Fleet since she was finished, but, like sending you, sending either of the Titan-class battleships is a message outside all numbers.”

  The Federation had only built two modern battleships before deciding to give up on the type for the foreseeable future. Kronos and Gaia were the only eighty-million-cubic-meter battleships in existence. There were also six Sanctuary-class carriers and four Conqueror-class battlecruisers of a similar size—and those twelve ships, the Castle Federation’s most modern, were the only eighty-million-cubic-meter ships around. At all.

  “You’re probably going to end up with a fleet of our best and the Imperium’s best,” Blake told him, “something that will punch well outside what its numbers might suggest, but we’re also going to be sending you right at Walkingstick.”

  “That’s the job, ma’am,” Kyle told her. “A half-dozen eighty-million-cubic ships will turn more heads than twice that in thirty-million-cubic ships pulled from the reserve. I can make Walkingstick hunt me if you give me one ship, ma’am, but I’d rather a fleet.”

  “You’ll get a fleet. That’s why you got the second star,” she said. “And it’ll be a fleet worth taking into battle; I promise you that.”

  “We need sixteen of those,” he admitted. “Logistics are going to suck.”

  “You gave us the outline. Now it’s up to JD-Logistics to make it work,” Blake replied. “You have this office until you move spacewards, but we’ll make sure the flag deck on Elysium is clear for you in a few days.

  “I suggest you take some leave first,” she continued. “Once we kick this off, all leave is canceled until it’s over. And you and your fiancée will want to celebrate.”

  “I’m still wrapping my brain around the star at all, ma’am.”

  Blake chuckled.

  “You won’t be the only one,” she told him. “Mira got her first star, though she won’t be part of Medusa. She’ll be taking command of the gunship flotillas around Castle, one of several officers tasked with the fallback if this strike fails.”

  It was a job that needed to be done, but a thankless one. The fleets of sublight gunships that guarded the Alliance’s core worlds wouldn’t stop a vengeful Commonwealth Navy from crushing the Alliance if Medusa failed, but they’d have to try.

  And if Medusa succeeded, they’d never see action.

  “Lucky her,” he murmured. “Who’s letting her know?”

  “She’s meeting with the head of Armada at lunchtime,” Blake replied. “Don’t let the cat out of the bag before then, or her boss will make your life hell.”

  “I’d prefer to leave that task to our good friend Walkingstick!”

  6

  Via Somnia System

  15:00 August 7, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  DSC-062 Normandy

  Task Force Midori shut down their Alcubierre-Stetson drives with a quivering tension. Q-com channels with Seventh Fleet had told them that Via Somnia remained in Alliance hands, but Vice Commodore Rokos agreed with his fellows.

  Normandy, like the rest of the Task Force, entered Via Somnia with her weapons online and every starfighter manned. If the former Commonwealth fleet base had been retaken, they were as ready to fight their way clear as they could possibly be.

  Via Somnia was an uninhabited system, but when Seventh Fleet had taken it away from the Commonwealth, they’d managed to take the massive Navy base mostly intact. What damage had been done had been repaired, and the immense facility continued its orbit of Dreamer, Via Somnia’s dead rock of a third world.

  Four capital ships orbited with the base, and two more swam through the outer system on a continuous patrol around Dreamer’s Alcubierre-interfering gravity well. An immense battleship loomed over Task Force Midori as they emerged, a fifth again the size of the TF’s largest ships.

  “Launching CSP,” Russell’s flight controller chanted, and acceleration slammed the Vice Commodore back into his chair. There was a pause as the officer switched over to a private channel.

  “What the hell is that?!”

  “The sign we’re in the right place,” the CAG replied with a chuckle. The immense warship was adjusting her course, arcing to come in protectively behind the battered task force like a worried sheep dog. “That’s Kronos. Nothing else is that big!”

  “Well, Normandy’s scanners disagree with you,” the Lieutenant replied. “I’ve got another ship at the navy base that’s just as big.”

  Russell checked, and a moment of nostalgia rushed over him as he recognized her.

  “That’s Avalon,” he told his officer. “Feels wrong to see her anywhere without the Fox in command.”

  “So, we’re safe?”

  “I figur
e that’s Rothenberg's call,” Russell replied, “though I’ll admit it: I’ll question his orders if he sends us after Seventh Fleet!”

  “All right, everybody, we can stand down,” Vice Admiral the Elector Parth Rothenberg instructed his senior officers a few minutes later. “I’ve touched base with Vice Admiral Conners”—the Renaissance Trade Factor officer commanding Seventh Fleet—“and we’re clear to move in and dock.

  “We’ll be replenishing all of our supplies from the navy base and replacing our starfighter losses from the defensive squadrons. If you weren’t flying Falcons already, well, you’re going to be flying Falcons,” he concluded dryly.

  The Castle Federation had taken the point of the assault and lost several ships taking Via Somnia. So, by a logic that Russell couldn’t bring himself to disagree with, it had been the Castle Federation Space Force that had moved in two starfighter groups to help secure the newly-captured base.

  “Once we’ve docked, we’ll rationalize our fighter deployments and make sure our repairs are up to date,” Rothenberg concluded. “I haven’t been told much, but my understanding is that there’s work coming down the pipeline for us.”

  “Are we going back to Midori?” someone asked.

  There was a long silence on the channel, and then Russell felt the Admiral shake his head through the implant link.

  “Even I’m not being fully briefed on what’s coming,” he admitted, “and I’ve been told I can’t share what the Joint Chiefs have told me. Unfortunately, it’s been made very clear that we’re being earmarked for other operations.

  “For the moment, Midori is going to remain in Terran hands. I don’t like it any more than you do, but I am assured that the President was involved in that decision.”

  Rothenberg let that hang, waiting for further commentary.

  “Set your courses, people,” he ordered finally. “And make sure your crews get some rest. After this last week, they’ll need it.”

  FTL was safe. There wasn’t even much to do while under Alcubierre-Stetson drive, so Russell knew his people were, in one way, quite well rested.