Кристофер Банч - Fleet of the Damned

Sten was the last man out. He hung in the black water outside the port for a moment. This was the end of his first command. At least, he told himself, we went out fighting, didn't we, lady?

Then the line went taut, and Sten started upward. There was something wrong with his suit's cycler. His vision was a bit blurred. That was the explanation. No rational being becomes sentimental over inanimate metal, of course. Definitely something had gone wonky with the environmental controls.

Kilgour's suit rockets, intended for use offworld, gave him just enough power to overcome the spacesuit's neutral buoyancy and drift him toward the surface.

"Be a mo," his voice suddenly crackled in Sten's headphones. "The situation's clottin' strange. Ah seem't to've hit air. But… Skipper, Ah'd like a wee consultation."

Sten undipped from the line and put more power on his suit rockets. He broke through a few centimeters of ice, surfaced beside Alex, and shone his suit light around.

The scene was strange. They floated in a small, rapidly freezing lake created from the water melted by the Gamble's drive and skin heat. Next to them was the battered nose of the Gamble , protruding about half a meter above the ice scum.

That alone was not too strange—but just a couple of meters overhead arced a low, icy ceiling.

"This makes no sense at all," Sten thought out loud.

Tapia surfaced beside him. "Maybe it does," she said. "Do you know anything about snow, sir?"

That wasn't one of Sten's specialities—most of his experience with the stuff came from the snowscape mural that his mother had hocked six months of her life for, back on Vulcan. There had been a couple of Mantis assignments on frozen worlds, but the weather had been just another obstacle, not worth analyzing.

"Not a clottin' lot," he admitted. "As far as I'm concerned, it's just retarded rain."

"That rumble we heard? Maybe that was an avalanche."

"So now we're really buried?"

"Looks like it."

Tapia was exactly right. What had happened was that the Gamble had buried itself in the deep, perpetual snowfield. Its nose was within a few meters of the surface. But 500 meters above the valley, the ship's driveshock had weakened a snowy cornice. It broke free, and a thousand cubic meters of snow and rock avalanched down and across the valley.

The wreckage of the Gamble was buried more than forty meters below the snowfield. When they had opened the emergency port, the water pouring into the ship had lowered the level of the minilake around the Gamble . The ice that had formed at the base of the snow slide now formed the roof of the dome above them.

"Th' problem then," Alex said, "is how we melt on up. Th' suits dinnae hae power enow to gie us airborne. An' tha' snow up there dinnae be load-bearin't."

There was a solution—one that had all the neatness of a melee.

They paddled clumsily, towing the bubblepaks toward the edges of the under-snow lake. Paddling became crawling atop the ice, breaking through, crawling on again, until eventually the surface was solid enough to hold them.

From there, all they had to do was tunnel.

Being in spacesuits, they fortunately didn't have to worry about smothering. Kilgour half forced, half melted his way, curving upward. "Y' dinnae ken Ah wae a miner in m' youth," he said, burning a particularly artistic hairpin bend in the snow.

"Are you sure we're headed up?" Sten asked.

"It dinnae matter, lad. Ae we're goin't up, we'll hit air an' be safe. Ae we're goin't doon, we'll hit sheol an' be warm an' in our rightful place."

Sten scraped snow from where it was icing up on one of his suit's expansion sleeves and didn't answer. Then he noticed something. There was light. Not just light from their suit beams or Kilgour's cutting torch but a sourceless glow all around them.

Seconds later, they broke free onto the surface of Cavite.

Sten unsealed his faceplate. The air tasted strange. Then he realized that he had not breathed unfiltered, unrecycled air for… he realized he couldn't remember.

Helluva way to fight a war, he thought.

And speaking of war, the next step would be finding their way down out of the mountains. And the question was, Would their suit power last long enough for them to hit the warm flatlands? An unpowered suit was as useless as the Gamble , ruined in the ice below them.

One catastrophe at a time, he told himself. Probably his sailors, who had less than no experience at ground combat, would get jumped and massacred by a Tahn patrol first.

It would be warm, at least. Sten turned back to his people and started organizing them for the long march.

On the third day after the Cavite landings began, Lady Atago transferred her flag from the Forez to a mobile command post on the planet itself. Her headquarters were in a monstrous armored combat command vehicle—dubbed Chilo class by Imperial Intelligence. The huge—almost fifty meters wide by 150 meters long—segmented ACCV traveled on forty triad-mounted three-meter-high rolligons, cleated, low-pressure pillow wheels that gave the vehicle amphibious capabilities as well. Any obstacle the rolligons couldn't pad their way over caused the triad mount to rotate, bringing another wheel into use atop that obstacle. Also, the ACCV was segmented and could twist both vertically and laterally.

It rumbled forward, escorted by a full squadron of tanks and armored ground-to-air missile launchers only a few kilometers behind the fighting lines.

The few Imperial ships still airworthy would never be able to penetrate the AA umbrella—but Atago chose to take no chances. The site she had chosen for her next CP location had several advantages—it was very close to the most promising salient that had been punched through the Tahn lines, there were open areas for ship landings nearby, and there was no need for elaborate camouflage.

The camouflage would be provided by a very large building. It had formerly been a university library in one of Cavite City's satellite towns. And under the new Tahn rule, neither repositories of Imperial propaganda nor education would be necessary.

Six McLean-powered gravsleds were positioned just under the building's eaves, and then the ACCV reversed into the building. Three floors crunched and fell around the vehicle's mushroom dome, but the building held. From the air, Atago's command post was invisible. She was sure that her support ECM units would successfully spoof Imperial detectors.

Also, the tacship division that had plagued the Tahn had been destroyed. Lady Atago was mildly sorry that the division commander, Sten, had not been captured. A show trial could have been arranged, with a suitable punishment broadcast over Imperial com channels. That might have served to discourage some of the more aggressive officers still resisting the Tahn.

But still, Lady Atago was not particularly pleased with the course of the invasion.

The Tahn did have the main Imperial fighting units sealed in the perimeter around Cavite City and were slowly closing the noose. The perimeter had shrunk to less than 200 square kilometers. There were scattered Imperial forces still resisting elsewhere on Cavite, but their destruction would be accomplished within a few days.

The Imperial area now enclosed just Cavite City—and Tahn penetration patrols were already reaching the outskirts of the city—the naval base, and the heights beyond it. Tahn subaqua units had already interdicted any possible retreat by sea.

But the cost was Pyrrhic.

Three complete Tahn landing forces—about the equivalent of four Imperial Guard divisions—had been landed, together with their support units.