Sometimes the lapdog can take on the mastiff.
Lavonne ordered flares and secondary armaments fired at will. He hoped that the explosions, and whatever clutter his ECM apparatus could provide, might be some kind of smoke screen.
Lavonne knew that the San Jacinto was doomed. All he could hope was that his ship might inflict some damage on the huge Tahn battlewagon now filling the missile station's sights.
He was only light-seconds from coming into range when the Forez launched its main battery.
Six Tahn missiles intersected with the San Jacinto's orbit as Lavonne's finger hovered over the red firing key.
And there was nothing remaining of the San Jacinto except a widening sextuplicate bubble of gas and radioactivity.
BOOK TWO
LET ALL DRAW
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Throughout their history, the Tahn were always a bloody accident waiting to happen to anyone unfortunate enough to pass their way. It was a civilization born in disaster and nurtured by many battles.
Even the Eternal Emperor could barely remember the feud that had started it all. The origins of the Tahn lay in a huge civil war occurring in a cluster far from their present homelands. Two mighty forces lined up on opposing sides and went at it for a century and a half. The cluster in question was so peripheral to the Emperor that it was more than convenient for him to ignore the whole thing and let them settle it themselves.
Eventually, the people who were to become the Tahn suffered a final crushing defeat. The winners gave the survivors two choices: genocide or mass migration. The Tahn chose flight, an episode in their history that they never forgot. Cowardice, then, became their race's original sin. It was the first and last time the Tahn ever chose life over even certain death.
Almost the entire first wave of the massive migration was composed of warriors and their families. This made the Tahn a group of people unwelcome in any settled society they approached. No one was foolish enough to invite them to share his hearth. This was another factor in the Tahn racial memory. They considered themselves permanent outcasts, and from then on they would treat any stranger in kind.
The area they finally settled was one of the most unwanted sectors of the Empire. The Tahn put down roots in a desolate pocket surrounded by slightly richer neighbors and began to create their single-purpose society. Since it was military-based, it was no wonder that it was so sharply stratified: from the peasant class to the ruling military council was as distant as the farthest sun.
The greatest weakness of the Tahn, however, became their greatest strength. They prospered and expanded. Their neighbors became edgy as the Tahn neared the various borders. Most of them tried to negotiate. In each case, the Tahn used negotiation only as a tool to gain time. Then they would attack with no warning. They would throw their entire effort into the fray, ignoring casualties that would have given pause to almost any other being.
The Tahn fought continually for over three hundred years. In the end they had eliminated their neighbors and carved out an empire. It was no matter that they had lost nearly eighty percent of their population in doing so. They had rebuilt before, and they could do it again.
The Eternal Emperor was now facing a revitalized Tahn Empire many many times its original size. The explosive growth had created a host of problems for the Tahn: there were more dissidents than ever before, and frequent and bloody ousters from the Tahn High Council were increasingly common.
Unwittingly, the Emperor had solved this for them. The Tahn were once again united in purpose and in their bitter world view.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A few weeks later, Sten was no longer a commander without a fleet. His four Imperial tacships, the Claggett, Gamble, Kelly, and Richards, had been off-loaded and lifted into temporary fitting-out slips in the huge Cavite naval yard.
But he remained a commander without a crew. The aftermath of the interview with Admiral van Doorman had produced exactly what Sten anticipated—zero qualified volunteers showed up.
But the 23rd Fleet did have its share of malcontents and such. After twenty interviews, Sten thought of the punch line from a long-forgotten joke of Alex's: "Great Empire, not that shaggy."
If Sten had been put in command of a destroyer, he might have been able to fit those applicant-losers into ship's divisions without problems. But not with four twelveman ships plus a skeleton maintenance staff.
Time was running short. On three occasions he'd had a "friendly" visit from one of van Doorman's aides.
The man had sympathized with Sten over his problems and had promised he would do everything possible to keep things from van Doorman's attention—just a favor from one officer to another. Sten surmised that the aide couldn't get his gravcar back to van Doorman quickly enough to report how deep in drakh this young misfit was.
Or maybe Sten was getting paranoid. It was quite conceivable—all his time was spent on the tacships. When he remembered to eat, he opened a pack of something or other, heated it, and ate absentmindedly, his mind and fingers tracing circuitry, hydraulics, and plumbing across the ships' blueprint fiches.
This particular day he had climbed out of the greasy boiler suit he had been living in, pulled on a semidress uniform, and set out to do war with the 23rd Fleet's logistics division.
Every military has a table of organizations and equipment giving exactly how many people of what rank are authorized in each command and what items of equipment, from battleships to forks, are also allowable. The organization with too many or too much can get gigged just as badly as one that's short of gear.
Sten had found out that the 23rd Log authorized one day's basic load for ammunition and missiles—that being the amount of firepower a ship, in combat, would use up at maximum. Resupply in time of war for Sten's tacships would mean breaking off their patrol routine and returning to Cavite's enormous supply dumps.
Sten had tried to reason with the officer, starting with the logical point that the aborting of patrols when the weapons ran dry was hardly efficient and ending with the possibly illogical point that maybe, in time of war, those supply dumps might just get themselves bombed flat.
The officer didn't want to hear about patrol problems, shook his head in irritation at the mere mention of possible hostilities, and laughed aloud at the idea that Cavite couldn't destroy any attacker long before it had time to launch.
It was shaping up to be one of those days.
Sten set his sled down outside the security fence surrounding the fitting-out slips and absently returned the sentry's salute at the gate.
"Afternoon, Commander." The sentry liked Sten. He and his fellow guards had a private pool as to when van Doorman would relieve the commander and send him back to Prime for reassignment. It would be a pity, but on the other hand, the sentry's guess was only a couple of days away, and drink money was far more important than the fate of any officer.
"Afternoon."
"Sir, your weapons officer is already onboard."
Sten was in motion. "Troop, I want the guard out. Now."
"But—"
"Move, boy. I don't have a weapons officer!"
The guard thumbed the silent alarm, and within moments there were five sentries around Sten, nervously fingering their loaded willyguns.