Кристофер Банч - Fleet of the Damned

"You tell me when you're running out of credits, and I'll get you some more."

"What about the accounting oversight?"

"There won't be any. But if I catch you stealing too much from me, or buying junk, I'll kill you. Personally."

The Emperor was not smiling at all.

Sullamora changed the subject slightly. "Sir. May I ask you something?"

"GA."

"You said you'd explain why you need ten of my liners."

"I shall. This is ears-only, Tanz." He paused. "I made a bunch of mistakes when this war started. One of them was thinking that my people out in the Fringe Worlds were better than they were."

"But, sir… you sent the First Guards out there."

"I did. And they're my best."

"And they're winning."

"The clot they are. They're getting their ass whipped. The Guard—what's left of it—is hanging on to a teeny little perimeter of one world. About a week from now, they'll be overrun and destroyed."

Sullamora swallowed. This was not what the livies had been telling him.

"I put the Guard out there to hold the Caltor System, because sooner or later things are going to change, and I'm going to need a jumping-off point to invade the Tahn systems.

"I blew it. I thought that I'd get more backup from my allies than I have. I also didn't know the Tahn were stamping out fleets of warships like cheap plas toys. Mistakes. Now I've got to save what I can.

"There's a whole bunch of Imperial civilians on the capital world of Caltor, Cavite. I want your liners in to get them out. Get them out—and some other people I'll need."

The Emperor read Sullamora's face and smiled grimly. "Things look different when you're on the inside, Tanz. You're going to see a lot more ruin and damnation in the next few days."

Sullamora recovered. And asked the big question. "Are we going to win this war?"

The Emperor sighed. This was a question he was getting a little tired of. "Yes. Eventually."

Eventually, Sullamora thought. He took that to mean that the Emperor was very unsure of things. "When we do…"

"When we do, I shall make very damned sure that the Tahn systems have a very different form of government. I do not ever want them to return to haunt me."

Sullamora smiled. "War to the knife, and that to the hilt!"

"That wasn't what I was saying. I want the way the Tahn run their government changed. I don't have any quarrel with their people. I'm going to try to win this war without dusting any planets, without carpet bombing, or any of the rest. People don't start wars—governments do."

Sullamora looked at the Emperor. He thought himself to be a historian. And just as he collected heroic art, he admired heroic history. He sort of remembered a statement a heroic Earth sea admiral had made: "Moderation in war is absurdity."

He wholly agreed with that. Of course, he wasn't enough of a historian to know that the admiral in question had never commanded his fleet in anything other than a minor skirmish, or that by the time the next war occurred both he and the superships he had ordered built had been obsolete and retired.

"I see, Your Highness," he said coldly.

The Emperor did not understand Sullamora's frigidity. "When the war is over, you'll be given the appropriate awards. I assume some sort of regency appointment might be in order, covering the entire Tahn areas."

Sullamora suddenly felt that he and the Emperor were speaking entirely separate languages.

He stood, leaving his drink barely tasted, and bowed deeply, formally. "I thank you, Your Highness. I shall be prepared to assume my new position within the week."

He wheeled and exited.

The Emperor stared after him. Then he stood, walked around his desk, picked up Sullamora's drink, and sipped at it thoughtfully. Possibly, he thought, Sr. Sullamora and I may not be communicating on the same wavelength.

So?

He set the drink back down, went back to his desk, and keyed the com on for the latest disaster reports. He was worried about his Empire. If he held it together—and in spite of his bluffness, the Eternal Emperor was starting to wonder—he could worry about individual people later.

The hell he could, he realized.

He put the com on hold and activated a very special computer. There was one individual he had to talk to. Even though that conversation would be one-sided.

General Ian Mahoney looked at his reflection in the shattered bits of mirror and considered.

Contrary to what two of the Emperor's favorite and long-dead doggerelists—Mahoney vaguely remembered their names as Silbert and Gullivan—there were two models of a modern major general. One was that of the general, immaculate in full-dress uniform, posing, three-quarter profile, some sort of harvesting cutter in hand, in front of his assembled troops, all of them dripping medals. The second would be the same general, in combat coveralls, willygun smoking—they did that only in the livies—grenades hanging from his harness, cheering his men forward into some sort of breach or other, in the face of onrushing hordes of Evil Sorts.

Major General Ian Mahoney was neither.

He was wearing combat coveralls, and he did have a willygun slung over one shoulder. But the seat of his coveralls was ripped out; his willygun, thanks be to his security, hadn't been fired—yet; and his coveralls were stained in mud, pink, and mauve.

The Tahn had finally run cross-locations on the command transmissions, found Mahoney's command center, and sent in an obliteration air strike.

Tahn tacships had either suppressed the few antiaircraft launchers around Mahoney's headquarters or absorbed the few missiles left in their launch racks. Mahoney's headquarters was left naked.

Mahoney had been bodily yanked from his command track seconds before a Tahn missile hit it. He had gone down—into the muck of the street. That accounted for the mud.

As the second wave of Tahn tacships came in, he had pelted for shelter—any shelter. He had found it, diving facefirst into a semiruined women's emporium. Into, specifically, the shatter of the makeup department. That explained the pink and mauve.

The emporium had a huge basement, which Mahoney found convenient for his new headquarters. Backup com links were brought in, and Mahoney went back to fighting his war, morosely scowling at his reflection in the shatter of a mirror lying nearby.

A tech clattered into the room. "Two messages sir. From ImpCen. And your G4 said you'd need this."

ImpCen: Imperial central headquarters. Prime World. And the case the tech held contained one of Mahoney's most hated security tools.

He looked at the messages. The first was a conventional fiche. What was unconventional about it was the case that the tech had brought in with him. That case, set to a fingerprint lock, contained single-use code pads. These were pads that the encipher wrote his message onto, and the receiver would decipher using a duplicate of that same pad. After one use, both sheets of that pad would be destroyed. It was a very old, but still completely unbreakable, code system.

And Mahoney hated coding almost as much as he loathed formal parades.

The other message had been transcribed onto a rather different receptacle. Mahoney's signal branch had only half a dozen of them; they were the ultimate in security, reception fiches sealed into a small plas box. Whatever had been transmitted onto that fiche could be seen only by Mahoney himself. There was a single indentation on the box, keyed to Mahoney's thumb poreprints. Once Mahoney put his thumb in the notch, whatever was on the fiche would begin broadcasting. If he removed it, or thirty seconds after the message ended—whichever came first—the fiche would self-destruct.