Sally frowned from her console. “He always had a silver spoon in his mouth,” she hissed, with a bitterness I had come to realise had become part of her personality. “No wonder he won’t see sense and surrender, or even vanish with his battleship and turn renegade.”
I shrugged. The Kofi Annan wasn’t a cruiser. It needed a day in a shipyard for every day it spent on duty and it hadn’t been getting it. I studied the emissions thoughtfully, trying to see if there were any weaknesses we could exploit, but nothing suggested itself. Roger wouldn’t have skimped on the basic maintenance unless he had had no choice. Still, there would be no hope of keeping it running out in the Beyond. He didn’t have much choice. He either fought or surrendered. The Colonies wouldn’t help him.
“Enemy vessel now coming into range,” Carolyn reported. “I have weapons locked on target.”
“Hold fire,” I ordered, tersely. Perhaps we could prevent a fight. “Roger, what are you playing at…?”
“Missile separation,” Carolyn snapped. “They’ve opened fire.”
“All ships, fire at will,” I ordered, sharply. Carolyn’s hand fell on her console and we fired our first spread of missiles. Between all of the ships, we could fire over a hundred missiles per salvo. Roger would face his ship’s worst nightmare; repeated volley fire from multiple launch platforms. “Evade as required.”
Roger wasn’t playing games himself. He’d fired fifty missiles in his opening salvo and all, but ten were targeted on us. The missiles would be basic UN-standard, I suspected, instead of Heinlein-designed surprises, but that wouldn’t stop them being lethal if they touched home. We had a surprise ourselves; I had enough starships with me to produce a genuine point defence network, rather than merely each ship for itself. I watched as the missiles roared closer and smiled when they started to vanish, one by one.
“The Kofi Annan is picking up speed,” Sally reported, grimly. “Estimated ETA Earth orbit is twenty minutes.”
“Understood,” I said, shortly. The missiles were still falling to our lasers, but Roger had fired a second salvo and then a third. I ran through the calculations in my head. His point defence was just as good as ours — maybe better in some ways — and he had the power to back it up. We had to give him a ore complex problem to deal with, yet we couldn’t do that without risking our own point defence network breaking up. “Keep firing…”
I tapped my console, issuing orders to the other starships. At my command, four of them opened wormholes and jumped around the Kofi Annan, emerging dangerously close to the battleship. Before Roger could react — and I was sure that he would have his gunners on hair triggers, after Heinlein — they fired their missiles and reopened the wormholes, slipping away. Roger’s point defence found itself struggling to cope with newer targets coming in from different vectors and I smiled as one missile detonated against the drive field. My election vanished as I realised that the Kofi Annan was almost undamaged by the blast and was still firing.
Get into Earth orbit and regain control, I thought. That’s what they will have told him to do. Get back into Earth orbit and reclaim the orbital defences. How can I use that against him?
“Incoming missiles,” Carolyn snapped. “I doubt we can take all these down.”
“Pilot, jump us out,” I snapped. A wormhole enfolded us and we vanished, emerging far too close to the battleship for comfort. Carolyn fired another spread of missiles before we vanished again. I had a mental image of a powerful beast being tormented by coyotes or hyenas. Every time it turned to deal with one problem another jumped in and attacked the creature’s back. “Carolyn, continue firing!”
The position was untenable, I realised. We couldn’t coordinate our fire, so we could only harass the battleship, not destroy it. Roger knew that as well as we did, so all he had to do was keep moving towards Earth. We’d either have to stand and fight, or pull back and admit defeat. We scored two more hits on the battleship, but they weren’t coordinated and the battleship seemed undamaged. The dance was going to end in Roger’s victory by default.
I found myself grasping for possibilities. Could we recall Kitty in time to make a difference? She’d have come the moment she repaired her weapons systems, but she wasn’t here, which suggested that they still weren’t repaired. Without her battleship to counter the Kofi Annan, we couldn’t stand and fight. Would we have any choice? If we let them enter Earth orbit and drive us away, all of this would have been for nothing.
“Damn you, Roger,” I hissed. “I’m not going to let you end it all.”
“Captain,” Carolyn snapped. “A new wormhole is opening!”
I allowed myself a moment of hope. It might have been Kitty, but instead Devastator emerged from the wormhole. I stared in stark disbelief. Devastator was a monitor. She wasn’t designed for the line of battle. Captain Shalenko had had to have lost his mind. He couldn’t be planning to intervene, could he?
“Receiving a transmission,” Samantha said. “He says he’s sorry.”
Before my eyes, Devastator plunged towards Kofi Annan and crashed right into her. The media suggested that starships collided on a regular basis, but the truth was that even the most insanely incompetent pilot would have struggled to make two ships crash, unless it was deliberate. Even then, it would be hard, but Roger had unintentionally aided Devastator on her final cruise. The two starships exploded and vanished inside a massive fireball.
“Captain Yamamoto would like to surrender,” Samantha said. I barely heard her. I was still staring at the remains of a man I’d once called a friend, and a commanding officer who’d prevented me from throwing away my own career. What had gone through his mind in the final few minutes? Had Shalenko intended to kill himself, or had he realised that he had committed vast crimes and sought a means of redeeming himself. “Sir?”
“Accept the surrender,” I said, softly. “Check around with the other ships and find one that has an intact platoon of Marines and send them onboard to secure the ship. What about the other cruiser?”
“They’re apparently under the control of mutineers themselves,” Samantha said. I didn’t smile. We were mutineers as well, unless we won outright. Winners got to write the history books. “They’re asking to join us.”
“Find out who’s in charge and see if they’re one of us,” I said. “If not, find a second platoon of Marines and send them onboard, just in case.”
I looked down at the display. “And prepare to return to Earth,” I added. “This isn’t quite finished yet.”
A moment later, another wormhole materialised and Kitty’s starship appeared. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. Five minutes sooner and Captain Shalenko wouldn’t have had to commit suicide to stop Roger and his battleship. I doubted we’d be building any more such ships ourselves. They were just resource hogs.
“It’s good to see you,” I said, once we’d filled her in on what had happened in her absence. She had been as surprised as we were to discover that Roger had returned to the system; had they known something, or had it just been a hideous coincidence? “What’s happening at the asteroids?”
“They’ve all declared for us,” Kitty said, seriously. I thought that she’d never looked more beautiful in her life. “There were some problems with some of the overseers, but the prisoners took care of them and threw most of the bastards into space. I think that most of them will want to go home, but they’ve agreed to support us as long as we need them.”
“That might be a long time,” I said. Even if we started training up proper engineers again, it would still take years to replace all the conscripted workers…but I owed them a debt of honour. I’d helped put some of them in the work camps and now I’d get them back home, even if it made my operations difficult. I relaxed slightly as it dawned on me that I’d won. We held the Peace Force — and I was going to rename it something else once everything else had been done — and Earth’s high orbitals. Yesterday, the UN had controlled hundreds of star systems and billions of people. Today, it only controlled one planet. They couldn’t get at us any longer. Given time, I was sure that each of the garrisons would be wiped out, even as we were clearing their baleful influence from the fleet. “Still…we can maintain the fleet now.”