Shadow of Freedom

“You didn’t say anything I’m not thinking,” Thurgood confessed with a sigh. He shook his head. “I’ve warned Verrocchio and Hongbo something like this could happen, but I have to admit I didn’t really expect it. And I’d never have expected them to arrive in this kind of strength!”

He twitched his head in the direction of the master display. It was currently set to astrographic mode, showing the entire star system. The G0 star’s twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit was represented by a green sphere, and a glowing rash of red icons was just about to cross into it, headed for the inner system.

There were a lot of them.

“It does seem like using a sledgehammer to swat flies,” Howell Chavez, CO of SLNS Edgehill, Thurgood’s battlecruiser flagship, agreed. Thurgood glanced at the com display which linked his flag bridge to Chavez’ command deck, and the flag captain chuckled humorlessly. “I mean, I’m flattered and everything, Sir, but it is a little excessive, don’t you think?”

“It’s possible they think we’ve been reinforced,” Wayne said, but Thurgood shook his head.

“Possible, but not too damned likely. Not way the hell and gone out here.”

“Then why do you think they brought along so much heavy metal, Sir?” the chief of staff asked.

“Aside from the obvious, you mean?” Thurgood smiled thinly. “Your guess is as good as mine, Howell.”

“Actually, Sir, I might have an idea,” Captain Merriman said quietly, and all eyes turned to the petite, fine-boned intelligence officer. It was an open secret, at least among Thurgood’s staff officers, that he and Sadako Merriman were lovers. That was too common in the Solarian League Navy to merit comment, except that in this case Merriman had become Thurgood’s intelligence specialist on the basis of raw ability well before she’d become his lover.

“Fire away, Sadako,” he invited now. “We’ve got better than three hours before they get here, after all.”

“It’s just a theory, of course, Sir,” Merriman said, “but I’ve been thinking a lot about Gold Peak’s character ever since Admiral Byng ran into her in New Tuscany. She’s perfectly willing to kill anybody she has to—what happened in Spindle’s proof enough of that, too, I suppose. But I think she’d prefer not to kill anyone she doesn’t have to, as well. In fact, Spindle’s part of the reason I think that. She could’ve gone right on shooting without allowing Admiral O’Cleary to surrender, just like she could have taken out Admiral Byng’s entire task force. She chose not to.”

She shrugged.

“And?” Wayne prompted.

“And I think she deliberately brought along enough firepower to make it obvious to anyone we wouldn’t stand a chance against her,” Merriman said.

“Her way of giving us an out, unless we’re as pigheaded as Byng, you mean?” Chavez said thoughtfully.

“I doubt she thinks the Commodore’d be pigheaded enough to get all our people killed for nothing, anyway, Sir,” Wayne pointed out. “We’re Frontier Fleet, after all. That means we have working brains.”

One or two of the officers on Edgehill’s flag bridge actually chuckled at the comment, despite the situation, and even Thurgood’s lips twitched in an almost-smile.

“Probably not,” he said after a moment. “But Sadako could have a point. With this kind of odds, it’s a hell of a lot less likely some idiot—uniformed or civilian—is going to try to overrule any outbreak of sanity on my part. For that matter, I could be just as stupid as Byng or Crandall, for all she knows, in which case I’d need something pretty damned obvious to make the point.”

It was the first time he’d allowed himself to attach that particular adjective to those two paragons of tactical and strategic genius in front of anyone else. Under the circumstances, however, he doubted it was going to have any detrimental impact on the career which was about to come to a screeching halt. Sadako might very well be right about Gold Peak’s reasons for appearing in such strength, and no reasonable board of inquiry would expect him to oppose his single understrength battlecruiser squadron and its screen to that kind of armada. Despite which, he was about to go down in history as the first Solarian League naval officer ever to surrender a Solarian-claimed star system to an enemy.

Well, not to surrender one, precisely, perhaps. But what he was actually going to do would be even worse, in some ways.

Assuming we can get away with it in the first place. Which doesn’t seem all that damned likely, really, he reminded himself, looking at those acceleration numbers again. At least the exercise schedule means we’re starting with hot nodes, though, thank God.

“I suppose we’d better get Commissioner Verrochio on the com,” he said out loud.

* * *

“What the hell do we do now?!” Lorcan Verrochio demanded harshly.