ALL SHIPS... ALL SHIPS... CAVITE UNDER ATTACK. INVASION BY TAHN UNDER WAY. ALL SHIPS RETURN TO HOME BASE. ATTACK, REPEAT ATTACK.
Foss already had the fiche in the navcomputer.
"On command," Sten said. "Commit."
"Attack repeat attack," Alex snorted. "Tha' dinnae be a command! Thae's an invite't' Culloden."
Kilgour was right. No Claggett... no Kelly... Sten assumed the Richards was getting slapped back together on Romney. Sten had no intentions of plummeting his very thin-skinned tacship—or, come to think about it, his own rather thin-skinned body—into the middle of a fleet melee.
He turned the intercom on and read the broadcast from Cavite to his crew without allowing any emotion to enter his voice. Then he said equally flatly, "If anyone's got an idea on what we do when we hit Cavite, input, please."
Alex reached across and kept his finger on the intercom button. "A wee modification as wha' our commander's sayin'. Ideas tha' dinnae win ae of us medals what be posthumous. Mr. Kilgour's mum dinnae be boas tin' as her lad comes home ae a box."
There weren't any ideas.
"Great," Sten muttered. "We're about as thick in the tactics department as van Doorman."
"Dinnae fash. We'll do flash fakin't it."
Lady Atago and Admiral Deska had made very sure that there was no possibility of the invasion failing a second time. More than 500 ships swarmed the Caltor System. The Imperial 23rd Fleet wasn't outmanned so much as buried.
Mahoney had stationed Guard detachments on every world and moonlet of the system. Each detachment was given as sophisticated a sensing system as possible. That was not much, even though every detector that could be found had been stripped out of downed or civilian ships, and emplaced. The strike-back weaponry was equally jury-rigged.
Everything from missiles to private yachts to out-atmosphere runabouts to obsolete ships had been hung in space and linked to the improvised guidance systems. Even Ensign Tapia's tug had been roboticized, its control room a deserted spaghetti of wiring.
Most of these improvised missiles were either destroyed long before they found a target or went wonky and missed completely.
But some of them got through.
"Go for the transports," Mahoney had told his guardsmen. They tried. Troopships were ripped open, sardine-spilling Tahn soldiers into space or sending them pinwheeling and igniting like meteorites into atmosphere.
But the Tahn were too strong.
Mahoney watched from his new headquarters, burrowed a hundred meters into a hillock near Cavite Field as, one by one, his com teams lost contact with the off-Cavite detachments. Mahoney's face was quite impassive.
A tech glared down at her general from a com set on one of the balconies above the central floor. Solid imperium, she thought in fury. The clot doesn't even care.
In actuality, Mahoney was trying to analyze what he felt. Not one report, he thought with approval, of any of my people breaking. What about you, Ian? You've taken...let's see, about twenty-five percent casualties. What does that feel like? Not too bad, he thought. No worse, say, than getting your right arm amputated without anaesthetic. Don't feel sorry for yourself, General. If you do something dumb like crying or swearing, your whole division could break.
What arrogance, he marveled. And what would it matter if they did? This is the last time around, isn't it? There isn't going to be enough left of the First Guard to compose a suicide note.
Like you told Sten, he thought. All we're doing is building martyrs for the cause. And enough of that, Ian. You have work to do.
Mahoney pointed to an operator and was instantly linked to all surviving detachment commanders. "They're still coming in, people. Get your reserves out of their holes and ready to go."
The ground around Mahoney shuddered suddenly, and the lights flashed twice before finding a functioning emergency circuit.
The Tahn were hitting Cavite itself.
The lead elements of Tahn ships were unmanned strafers. As ordered, the naval and Guard antiaircraft teams held their fire. Ammunition and missile reserves were almost nonexistent. Wait, they had been told, for the real targets: manned ships. That was expected to be the second wave.
But Atago's tactics were different.
The second element was made up of twenty small assault transports. The transports broke up, and from each ship, six troop capsules dropped toward the city below. In each capsule was a team of Tahn commandos.
Unlike the larger Imperial troop capsule that used wings and tear-away chutes for braking, these capsules were fitted only with retrorockets, set to fire when the capsule was pointed downward and very close to the ground.
Some of them never corrected, and the rockets sent the capsules pinwheeling before they crashed at full speed.
Even the ones that functioned correctly only slowed the capsules down to approximately 50 kph. The internal shock bracing was supposed to provide the rest of the cushioning—of a sort. Thirty percent of the commandos were able to stumble out of their wrecked capsules, form up, and head for their assigned objectives.
That was quite satisfactory—Lady Atago had anticipated and allowed for an eighty percent loss on landing. The Tahn cynicism had gone still further—none of the assigned objectives were expected to be taken. This had not been told to the commandos at their briefing. Nor was their real mission revealed—to pinprick the Imperial defenders, to distract them from the main force landings.
One team of commandos did reach its objective—the Carlton Hotel that Atago had theorized might still be used by the 23rd Fleet headquarters. But it had been abandoned weeks ago—van Doorman had returned to the Swampscott, which was sitting in the deep revetment near Cavite Field. And the commandos were distracting, but only to the Guard teams who had been ordered to maintain street patrols. The Tahn commandos failed, but in failing they caused casualties and ammunition expenditures. The Empire could afford neither.
The third wave was the heaviest. Four battleships, including the now-repaired Forez, Atago and Deska's flagship; twenty cruisers; and a horde of destroyers raved fire at the planet. In the center of the formation were seventy-five fat-bellied assault transports.
Previously hidden Imperial missile launchers rose from bare ground, out of buildings and sheds, and even, in the case of one particular inspired team, from an abandoned double-decked transport gravsled. It was almost impossible to miss.
But it was equally impossible to hit all of the Tahn ships. Sixty-three of the transports grounded in a ring some 400 kilometers outside Cavite City, and their sides clamshelled and Tahn assault troops stormed out.
Lady Atago allowed herself a smile of satisfaction. To her, all that remained was mopping up.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The Gamble hung in space, hopefully hidden from the Tahn forces landing on Cavite by one of the world's moons. Sten's entire crew, less Foss, who was minding the sensors, was crammed onto the tiny mess deck reviewing the options.
The problem was that neither Sten nor Kilgour could figure out an attack plan against the Tahn that did not include their own destruction. As Alex pointed out, "As far ae Ah can ken, th' job description dinnae ken kazikami, or wha'e'er th' word is."
Sten might have accepted the military necessity of a suicide mission, given a strategic target that might stop the Tahn. But every idea that was suggested and run up on the battle computer showed that the Gamble had a ninety-nine-point-more-nine's chance of never getting through the Tahn outer destroyer screen; setting up and making an attack run on one of the Tahn heavies looked to be impossible.