Alex Kilgour got very little sleep as the civilians were winkled out of their shelters, broken down into hundred-person loading elements, and assigned cargo orders. Each of them was permitted what he, she, or it wore. No more—including toilet articles.
Kilgour stood in one of the assembly areas. There were two scared children hanging onto either leg and a very adorable baby in his arms—a baby, Kilgour realized, that was piddling on his carefully looted expensive tweeds. And he was trying to listen to, regulate, and order from several conversations.
"... my Deirdre hasn't shown up, and I'm very..."
"... Mr. Kilgour, we need to discuss which city records should be removed with..."
"... I wan' my mommie..."
"... your behavior is simply incomprehensible, and I want to know the name of your superior, immediately..."
"... since y' be't th' boss, is there anything me an' some of my mates can do to help with..."
"... since you're our representative, I would like to protest the heartless way that those soldiers..."
"... when we reach safety, my lawyers will be most interested in the fact that..."
"Where's Mommie?"
Kilgour rather desperately wanted to be somewhere safe, like on the front lines facing a Tahn human wave assault.
The blurt transmission came through—the rescue force was twelve hours away from Cavite.
Sten was in the engine room of the Swampscott, trying to figure out why the ship's second drive unit was not delivering full power.
He was crouched under one of the drive tubes, listening to the monotonous swearing of the second engineer—who was not a van Doorman appointee and who was competent—trying to meter unmetered feed lines when he realized that he had been due at a command conference five minutes before.
He slithered out and ran for a port. There would be no time to change out of his grease-soaked coveralls.
Outside, on the concrete, he looked around for the gravsled that was supposedly assigned just to him. The driver had taken a break and was grabbing a quick meal. It took Sten another ten minutes to hunt the woman down.
Sten was very late by the time the sled lifted and hissed down a communications trench toward Mahoney's TOC. Very late—but still alive.
The Tahn missile was a blind launch.
The Tahn knew, of course, that the Imperial Forces inside Cavite City had gone underground. But they had little hard intelligence on exactly where the vital centers were.
Since they had a plethora and a half of available weaponry, they fired into the perimeter at random. The Imperial stronghold was narrow enough so that almost anything would do some damage.
Assembled under the ruined emporium were the top-ranking Imperial officers. Mahoney knew the dangers of having most command elements in one place—but it was necessary for him to give a final face-to-face briefing.
The Tahn missile was sent in, nap of the earth, across the front lines. It was not detected by any of the
Guards' countermissile batteries. Two kilometers inside the lines, following its programming, it lifted and looked for a target.
There wasn't much. The missile might have gone random, reverting to its basic instructions, and smashed in somewhere close to the perimeter's center if its receivers hadn't picked up a broadcast fragment.
The broadcast came from one of Mahoney's brigade officers, who had sent a "Received-Acknowledged" signal on his belt transponder before entering the TOC.
But that was enough for the missile to target.
Mahoney was beginning. "Six hours from now, most of you will be on your way out. Here's what's going to happen—"
And then the hardened rocket smashed through the upper floors of the emporium, through the shielding atop the basement, and exploded, centimeters above the basement itself.
Sten arrived to a charnel house.
The emporium was a smoking disaster. One of Mahoney's bodyguards stumbled toward him, leaking blood and muttering incoherently. Sten burst past him, down into the basement.
He found death and dying. Major General Ian Mahoney lay on his side, his jaw smashed, his face covered in gore, slowly strangling.
Sten's fingers curled, and his knife slid out of his arm and into his hand, as he rolled Mahoney onto his back. Very carefully, his knife V-incisioned into Mahoney's throat, cutting through the windpipe about three centimeters. He made another cut, Vd to meet the first, then thumbed the tissue out of the tracheotomy.
Mahoney was breathing again, with a gargle and bubble of blood.
Sten grabbed a power cord, cut it through, and ripped the center wires out of the cover. That hollow cover was forced into Mahoney's windpipe, and then Sten covered the incision with the outer foil cover, a dressing sealant from Mahoney's own aidpak.
Mahoney would live—if his other wounds were treated.
He would live. Ironically, since Mahoney had planned to stay and die with his Guardsmen. Instead, he would be evacuated as a casualty on the liners.
Sten stood as med people ran into the building.
He took stock.
Fleet Admiral Xavier Rijn van Doorman grinned down at him.
Sten thought that the admiral really didn't have that much to smile about, since the top of his brain case was missing, and gray tissue—almost matching the late admiral's hair color—was leaking out. Also, van Doorman was missing certain components, such as his right arm, his left hand, and, more importantly, his body from the rib cage downward. What little was left of his body was strung on a ruptured pipe.
I suppose I have a ship, Sten thought to himself. Now let's see if van Doorman's flunkies follow their orders.
He didn't have to worry about that—the XO, nav officer, and chief engineer were also dead in the ruins.
Commander Sten was now in charge of the 23rd Fleet.
Two hours later, the rescue liners signaled that they were approaching Cavite.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
For three days the air around Cavite City somewhat resembled gray noodle soup. It was part of the deception plan for the evacuation. Not only did the liners have to slip through the Tahn patrols beyond the Fringe Worlds—which they had successfully done—but then they had to land and remain undetected long enough to load the evacuees.
The Tahn total air superiority helped slightly. Since there were seldom any Imperial ships in the air, the Tahn aerial monitors and scanners were only cursorily checked.
The boil of smoke and haze over the Empire's perimeter radically reduced visual observation, and the "noodle soup" blanked almost all other detectors.
The "soup" was chaff, an invention that even predated the Emperor himself. Chaff originally had been thin strips of aluminum, designed to block radar screens. It was cut in lengths one-half that of the wavelength it was intended to interfere with and was dropped from aircraft. On a detector screen the chaff showed up as a solid, impermeable cloud.
This chaff was far more sophisticated, capable of blocking not only radar but infrared and laser sensors. And it was nearly invisible—many thousands of the strips could be fed through the eye of a needle.
Blasted into the upper atmosphere, the canisters exploded, and the strands drifted slowly down toward Cavite City. They may have been almost invisible, but they did not make breathing any more of a pleasure.
The Tahn had gone to full alert when their sensors suddenly became inactive, but as time passed, they decided that this latest tactic was merely a ploy to slow down the inevitable final assault on the city. They certainly did not need sensors—they knew where the Empire's troops were. And so the chaff clouds became nothing more than an annoyance.