Кристофер Банч - Vortex

On the other hand, Douw's advancing army would slowly provide an AA umbrella that would deny the air to the Imperial ships, so this was only a temporary standoff.

He suddenly found two more shafts of sunlight in his mental sky. First was he had a trained, disciplined force—the First Guards—who were fresh and not brought to battle. Second was the realization that, if he was able to get his Imperial bodies off Rurik, there would be only limited pursuit.

Just bashing the Empire out of the Altaics would be defined as enough of a victory.

At least that's what the Altaics would think.

He listened in silence as Sarsfield and Mason ran various options through and shot them down, trying to figure a way to get out of this Altaic sandwich the Imperial Forces were trapped in.

Something glimmered. He rolled it back and forth. It seemed worth exploring. It probably wouldn't work. Even if it didn't, the situation couldn't worsen. Could it?

"Mr. Kilgour," he asked formally to Alex, who sat somewhat off-screen. It slightly jolted Mason and Sarsfield—they had been unaware of Kilgour's presence. "Do we have a code that's sort of compromised? Not a complete joke, but something they'll be able to break, at least partially, without too much strain?"

Alex shrugged and called up the embassy code chief. Mason started to say something, but Sarsfield waved him to silence. Five minutes later, Kilgour presented a choice of three codes that the code chief was morally certain were splintered, if not completely busted.

"Very good. Why don't we…" and Sten outlined the first stage of his plan.

Sarsfield, since the first stage did not involve him or his command, didn't say anything. Sten could see Mason trying to be fair—but wanting to say that anything that clotting Sten could come up with was worthless.

"My biggest objection," Mason said after a while, "is that we already tried it."

"Not quite, Admiral," Sten said. "We tried the simple version of the con. Did you ever play which hand's got the marble?"

"Of course. I was a child once."

Sten doubted that, but continued. "First time you tried it, you just lied. Then you told the truth. Then you lied again. Escalating dishonesty.

"That's what we're going to attempt, unless someone's got something better—or can point out where I'm completely full of it."

And so the Bluff, Stage Two, was begun.

First a destroyer was detached from Mason's fleet and sent in the general direction of Imperial worlds and Prime itself.

Once beyond the range of any of the Suzdal/Bogazi units, it broadcast a coded message, both to Mason's fleet and to the besieged Imperial post on Rurik.

Sten waited for six hours, watching Alex's Frick & Fracks, as the Altaic army ground closer toward Rurik. Thank somebody, what the clot, give it to Otho's gods Sarla and Laraz, they were moving slowly. Sten attributed it both to caution, none of them ever having fought Imperial Forces before, and the inevitable incoherence of trying to coordinate an alliance, particularly one where everyone hated everyone else.

He had ordered his tacships up as aerial artillery, lobbing air-to-ground missiles at predetermined targets—crossroads, major roadways, and the like.

Then both his com officer, Freston, and Mason's equivalent officer reported: there had been a sudden flurry of intership transmissions in the Suzdal/Bogazi fleets, transmissions that had been sent in a rarely used—which suggested high-level—code. Blurt transmissions were also beamed out in directions suggesting they were intended for the capital worlds of the Suzdal and Bogazi.

"Mr. Mason?"

"Yes, sir. We're on the way."

The fish were nibbling, it would appear.

Sten had, indeed, just come up with a second version of that bluff he and Mason had run, pretending to send messages back to an oncoming Imperial fleet.

The destroyer he had ordered sent out had transmitted a message, in that breakable code, that appeared to come from the vanguard of a heavy Imperial strike force. This mythical strike force ordered Mason to abandon his position off Jochi—the besieged forces on the planet would have to fend for themselves for a while—and serve as a forward screen for this strike force.

The transmission continued, saying that Mason would be fully briefed at a later date, but that this strike force had been specially detached to punish the dissident Suzdal and Bogazi—cleverly making no mention of any human dissidents—by attacking the ET capital worlds, returning tit for tat.

Sten was too elaborate in his deception—he forgot to allow for the fact that this was exactly what any of the races or cultures in the Altaics would have done if they were in the same situation as the Empire.

Three E-hours later, the Suzdal and Bogazi heavies broke orbit and struck, at full speed, for their own systems.

Sten, trying to keep the elaborate geometry of astrogation in his mind, thought they would probably set a course in x direction for their home worlds. A course that would be more direct than the one Mason was supposedly on, and certainly one that was predicted never to coincide with the y direction or directions the huge Imperial strike force would most logically track.

Uh-huh. All this exotica from someone who had needed coaching in basic one-ship astrogation back in Flight School. It would not work—at least not for very long. Sten hoped it worked long enough for the next step, and for Mason to duck around the Suzdal/Bogazi fleet and get back to where he would be needed.

Regardless, at least one layer of the sandwich had been stripped away.

Four hours later, scout elements of the Altaic Confederation's army entered the outskirts of Rurik.

Sten had told Sarsfield his hopes, not his orders. He did not want the First Guards to feel they were being commanded to pull some kind of impossible Bastogne or Thermopylae.

Stop them. Try to get them to dig in. Make them think we're counterattacking.

Sarsfield, like Sten, had counted noses. Neither of them thought this third ruse would work. It's very hard, after all, to bluff someone who's got three aces and the joker showing and both elbows keeping his hole card from being turned over, when you've got four different suits and one slice of bologna.

The enemy scouts proceeded unmolested.

However, their nerves were tested. Here they found an abandoned barricade. There vehicles were overturned. Up there, some kind of antenna spun. Cryptic codes had been sprayed on the pavement.

The scouts proceeded, more and more cautiously.

They saw no signs of Imperial soldiers.

It was unlikely they would—the Guards' forward recon elements were specialists in not being seen.

The Confederation's progress was reported.

Frick & Fracks were behind the lines, waiting for the first heavy armor and gravsleds to creep into the city. No one likes to risk his expensive track or even more expensive gravlighter in the rat trap of city fighting. But the Altaic soldiers had no choice.

They were in the trap.

Sarsfield ordered the artillery to open up. His own cannon and surface-to-surface launchers opened up on predetermined targets, targets that were now obscured by enemy vehicles.

The tacships were launched from the mother ships, which were grounded near the huge park back of the embassy, where Sten had ordered the transports grounded.

Drakh-hot pilot Hannelore La Ciotat popped her tacship up, saw the track platoon's cannon begin to swivel, blasted a volley of rockets from the rack jury-rigged on her ship's belly, ran two cases through her forward chain gun, and disappeared.

La Ciotat was swearing almost continuously. Clot. She might as well have joined the clotting infantry . She gunned her tacship down a street, well below the building roofs, looking for another target.