We Few

When the police had secured the scene and the firefighters could get to work—mostly keeping the fire from spreading; Siminov's building and the two on either side of it were already a total loss—Subianto walked over to where Despreaux and Catrone were breathing something purple at the rear of a Fire Department medical vehicle.

"You two need to get moving," she said, bending down and speaking quietly into their ears. "There's a problem at the Palace."

"What do you think he's going to do, Sir?" Commander Talbert asked quietly.

He sat beside Admiral Victor Gajelis on the admiral's flagship, the Imperial Navy carrier HMS Trujillo, studying the tactical readouts. Carrier Squadron Fourteen had been under acceleration towards Old Earth for thirty-one minutes at the maximum hundred and sixty-four gravities its carriers could sustain. Their velocity was up to almost five thousand kilometers per second, and they'd traveled almost seven million kilometers, but they still had eighty-five million kilometers—and another three hours and thirty-eight minutes—to go. Theycould have made the entire voyage in less than two hours, but not if they wanted to decelerate into orbit around the planet when they reached it. On a least-time course, they would have gone scorching past the planet at over seventeen thousand kilometers per second, which would have left them in a piss-poor position to do anything about holding the planet for their admiral's patron.

At the moment, however, Talbert wasn't much concerned with what his own squadron's units were going to do. His attention was on the information relayed from General Gianetto about Carrier Squadron Twelve.

"What the hell do you think he's going to do?" Gajelis grunted. "If he pla

"Maybe it was only temporary, Sir," Talbert said diffidently. "You know some of our own units had problems with their Marine detachments, and Prokourov's squadron's perso

"Be nice if that was what happened," Gajelis growled. "But I doubt it did. Even if Prokourov wanted to take back control after he'd lost it, I don't think it mattered. I never did trust him, whatever the Prince thought."

"Do you think he was part of whatever's happening from the begi

"I doubt it," Gajelis said grudgingly. "If he had been, he wouldn't have just sat there for almost twenty minutes. He'd have been moving towards Old Earth as soon as those other four traitors started moving."

He glowered at the frozen secondary tactical plot where the information relayed by Terran Defense HQ's near-space sensors showed the four carriers which had taken up positions around the planet. Those sensors were no longer reporting, thanks to the point defense systems which had systematically eliminated any platforms not hard-linked to Moonbase, but they'd lasted long enough to tell Gajelis exactly who was waiting for him.

Talbert glanced sideways at his boss. The commander didn't much care for the way this entire thing was shaping up. Like Gajelis, he knew who was in command over there, and he wasn't especially happy about it. Nor did he expect to enjoy the orders he anticipated once Carrier Squadron Fourteen managed to secure the planetary orbitals. But he didn't have much choice. He'd sold his soul to Adoula too long ago to entertain second thoughts now.

At least they didn't need the destroyed sensor platforms to keep an eye on Prokourov. Ship-to-ship detection range for carriers under phase drive was almost thirty light-minutes, and Carrier Squadron Twelve was less than ten light-minutes from Trujillo. They wouldn't be able to detect any of Prokourov's parasites at this range—maximum detection range against a cruiser was only eight light-minutes—but they could see exactly what Prokourov's carriers were doing.

Still, he'd have felt a lot more confident it he'd been able to tell exactly what was happening in Old Earth orbit. Corvu Atilius was a wily old fox, and Senior Captain Gloria Demesne, Atilius' cruiser commander, was even worse. Six-to-four odds or not, he wasn't looking forward to tangling with them. Especially not if Prokourov was about to bring a fresh carrier squadron in on their asses.

"Admiral," a communications rating said, "we have an incoming message for you on your private cha

Gajelis looked up, then grunted.

"Earbud only," he said, then sat back and listened stolidly for almost two minutes. Finally, he nodded to the com rating at the end of the message and looked at Talbert.

"Well," he said grimly, "at least we know what we're going to be doing after we get there."

Francesco Prokourov leaned back in his command chair, considering his own tactical plot. The situation was getting... interesting. Not to his particular surprise, the other carriers of his squadron and his parasite skippers were more than willing to follow his orders. A few of them had opted to pretend they were doing so only out of fear of the squadron's Marine detachments, which was a fairly silly (if human) attempt to cover themselves if worse came to worst. But while Prokourov might not be another Helmut, he'd always had a knack for inspiring loyalty—or at least trust—in his subordinates. Now those subordinates were prepared to follow his lead through the chaos looming before them, and he only hoped he was leading them to victory and not pointless destruction.

Either way, though, he was leading them towards their duty, and that was just going to have to do.

But he had every intention of combining duty and survival, and unlike Gajelis, he had access to all of Moonbase's tactical information, which gave him a far tighter grasp on the details than Gajelis or the other Adoula loyalists in the system could possibly have. For example, he knew that Gajelis had not yet punched his cruisers (or had not as of ten minutes earlier), which made a fair amount of sense, and that Admiral La Paz's Thirteenth Squadron—or what was left of it after the original Fatted Calf defections—was coming in from astern of him. But La Paz was going to be a nonissue, whatever happened. His lonely pair of carriers wasn't going to make a great deal of difference after Gajelis' six and the combined eight of Fatted Calf and CarRon 12 had chewed each other up. Besides, CarRon 13 was at least six hours behind CarRon 12.

No, the really interesting question was what was going to happen when Gajelis crunched into Fatted Calf Squadron, and at the moment it was fairly obvious that Gajelis—who, despite his first name, was not a particularly imaginative commander—was hewing to a standard tactical approach.

Each of his carriers carried twenty-four sublight parasite cruisers and one hundred and twenty-five fighters, which gave him a total of one hundred and forty-four cruisers and seven hundred and fifty fighters, but the carriers alone represented thirty-eight percent of his ship-to-ship missile launchers, thirty-two percent of his energy weapons, forty percent of his close-in laser point defense clusters, and forty-eight percent of his countermissile launchers. Not only that, but the carriers were immensely more heavily armored, their energy weapons were six times the size of a cruiser's broadside energy mounts, and their shipkiller missiles were bigger, longer-ranged, and equipped with both more destructive warheads and far superior penetration aids and EW. And as one more minor consideration, carriers—whose hulls had two hundred times the volume of any parasite cruiser—had enormously more capable fire control systems and general computer support.