He ordered his boats to resupply and return to low orbit immediately. He would try to find out from fleet headquarters how bad things really were.
Cavite Base was a boil and confusion of smoke and flame.
Sten commandeered a combat car and headed for the Carlton Hotel. If it still stood, he assumed that what remained of van Doorman's command staff would be there.
Cavite City hadn't suffered major damage, Sten estimated. Imperial Boulevard—the central street—had absorbed some incendiary and AP bombs or rockets, but most of the buildings still stood. There weren't any civilians on the night-hung streets other than rescue workers and fire-fighting teams. Contrary to legend, disaster generally made people pull together or retreat into their homes—rioting in the streets had always been a myth.
Sten veered the combat car aside as a gravsled, hastily painted with red crosses on the landing pads, whistled past. In the distance, he could hear the sounds of combat. That was the storming of the Siglnt center—since the Tahn had not been able to land, those revolutionaries who had occupied the center had died to the last man.
Sten did not know, or much care, what the shooting signified—the situation was bad enough right now for him. He grounded the combat car outside the Carlton and started for the entrance.
Security, he noted wryly, had improved—three sets of SP men checked him before he hit the main doors. But some things did not change. The two dress-uniformed patrolmen still snapped their willyguns to salute as he came up the steps. Sten wondered if either of them realized that their uniforms were now spattered with muck, blood, and what appeared to be vomit.
If Cavite City was chaos, Admiral van Doorman's headquarters was worse. Sten desperately needed to know how bad the damage was and what his orders should be. He started at the fleet operations office. It was dark and deserted. Only the computer terminals flashed and analyzed the disaster of the day. A passing tech told him that all operations personnel appeared to have died in the attack.
Fine. He would try fleet intelligence.
Sten should have known what was going on when he saw that the door to the intelligence center yawned wide, with no sentries.
Inside, he found madness—quite literally.
Ship Captain Ladislaw sat behind a terminal, programming and reprogramming. He greeted Sten happily and then showed him what dispositions would be made on the morrow, moving the gradated dots that were the ships of the 23rd Fleet across the starchart covering one wall.
The Tahn would be repelled handily, he said. Sten knew that most of the ships he was chessboarding around were broken and smoking on the landing field at the base.
He smiled, agreed with Ladislaw, then stepped behind him, one-handed a sopor injection from his belt medpak, and shot it into the base of the ship captain's spine. Ladislaw folded instantly across his printout of impossibilities, and Sten headed for van Doorman's office.
Admiral Xavier Rijn van Doorman was quite calm and quite collected. His command center was an oasis of peace.
Sten saw Brijit peering in from the half-open door that led to van Doorman's quarters and thanked Someone that she was still alive.
Van Doorman was studying the status board over his desk. Sten glanced at it and winced—the situation was even worse than he had anticipated. For all intents and purposes, the 23rd Fleet had ceased to exist.
At dawn that morning, the 23rd Fleet strength consisted of one heavy cruiser, the Swampscott, two light cruisers, some thirteen destroyers, fifty-six assorted obsolete patrol-craft, minelayer/sweepers, Sten's TacDiv, one hospital ship, and the usual gaggle of supply and maintenance craft.
The status readout showed one light cruiser destroyed, and one heavily damaged. Six destroyers were out of action, as were about half of the light combat ships and support elements.
The oddness was that the Swampscott was untouched. It had survived because of Sten's attack on the Forez. The Swampscott had been one of Atago's self-assigned targets.
Sten's orders were simple—to keep his tacships in space. Van Doorman would provide any support necessary until the situation straightened itself out. Sten was given complete freedom of command. Any assistance Intelligence or Operations could provide was his for the asking—one madman, and corpses.
Just wonderful, Sten thought.
Yessir, Admiral.
His snappy salute was returned with equal fervor. He saw the blankness in van Doorman's eyes and wondered.
In the corridor, Brijit was in his arms and explaining. Her mother had died in the attack. There was nothing left. Nothing at all.
Probably Sten should have stayed with her that night. But the coldness that was Sten's sheath, the coldness that had come from the death of his parents years before on Vulcan, the coldness that had seen too many drinking friends die, stopped him. Instead there was a hug, and he was hurrying toward the com center. He wanted the Gamble in for a pickup.
As the Gamble flared in, settling in the middle of the boulevard outside the Carlton, Sten found time to be amazed at van Doorman's ability to control himself.
That was another cipher. But one to watch very carefully, Sten thought, as the Gamble's port yawned and he ran toward it.
He had already forgotten van Doorman, Brijit, and the likelihood that he and his people would die in the Caltor System.
His mind was hearing only "independent command..."
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The eternal emperor spotted something and waddled, bulky in his radiation suit, through the nuclear ruin that had been one of his rose gardens. Behind him, willyguns ready, moved two suited Gurkhas—Captain Limbu and a naik. Above and to their rear floated a combat car, guns sweeping the grounds.
Limbu had been successful in shoving the Emperor into the McLean-controlled slide tube that led 2,000 meters into the underground sanctuary and control center under the castle, then had dived after him. Radiation-proof air locks had slammed closed as they fell.
Very few others aboveground had lived—there were only a handful of Gurkhas, less than one platoon of the newly reformed Praetorian guard, and fewer than a dozen members of the Imperial household staff. Arundel and its immediate grounds were leveled. The outer layer of the bailey walls had been peeled, but there had been little damage to the administrative offices inside them.
The only structure still standing inside the palace grounds was the Imperial Parliament building, some ten kilometers from ground zero. This was ironic, because its survival was owed to the fact that the Emperor, not wishing to look at his politicians' headquarters, had built a kilometer-high mountain between the palace and the Parliament building, a mountain that successfully diverted the blast from the twinned bombs.
Civilian casualties on the planet were very slight, most of the destruction having been restricted to the Emperor's own fifty-five-kilometer palace grounds.
The Emperor bent, awkwardly picked something up from the ground, and held it out for the Gurkhas' admiration. Somehow, one solitary rose had been burnt to instant ash yet had held together. The Gurkhas looked at the rose, faces expressionless through their face shields, then spun, hearing the whine of a McLean generator. Their guns were up aiming.
"No!" the Emperor exclaimed, and the guns were lowered.
Floating toward the Emperor was a teardrop. Through its transparent nose, the Emperor recognized the black and tinted-red body of a Manabi. Given the circumstances, it could only be Sr. Ecu.