He was earnestly lying to himself when he said that he had no intention of stepping in. He had done everything possible.
The Tahn were moving into his trap quite nicely, the preliminary intelligence reports said—although he was astonished that somehow, somewhere, the anticipated twelve attacking fleets had become more than twenty. He had them cold. On toast. This, he thought to himself, is the beginning of the end. Or, his nonlinear alter ego whispered, the end of the beginning at least.
Bet me, Engineer H. E. Raschid thought. Suppose it's the end of the end?
And so he stood ready to save Mahoney's—and his own—cookies.
Unfortunately robot Tahn ships, intended only to blank off transmissions between the Al-Sufi and Durer systems, slipped through the Imperial perimeter, and the Eternal Emperor found himself sitting in the most sophisticated war analysis room ever installed on a spaceship, listening to static and watching pixels of misinformation interspersed with scattered bursts that showed either the Tahn or the Empire victorious and advancing or defeated and retreating on all fronts.
Durer, for the handful of Imperial tacships and destroyers assigned to hold and defend the system, was a very short battle.
There would be seven survivors of the eighty-nine ships that moved against the attacking Tahn fleets. Their orders were to stop the Tahn attack, to prevent landings on Durer, and finally to exert the maximum number of casualties possible.
They were, unknowingly, a suicide force.
The ships that had been assigned to Durer had been mainline attack units—neither obsolete nor state of the art. The Empire planned to maintain as long as possible the deception that Durer was underguarded and not expecting an attack.
The Emperor had therefore made the correct assignments, knowing he was sending people to their deaths.
"The Price of Empire," it might have been called if the Eternal Emperor had not been several centuries beyond believing such grandiose statements. Those were for the rubes, not the rulers. Besides, this was not the first time, the most murderous time, or certainly the last...
The Durer units' tactics were well-planned. One flotilla of destroyers came in on the same plane as the incoming Tahn. Two other flotillas waited above the system ecliptic until the forward elements of the Tahn were engaged. Then they dived "down" for the heart of the enemy. Shortly afterward, six wings of tacships came up from "below," each tacship under independent command with orders to find targets of opportunity.
All the sailors had done a fast head count of the enemy, realized they were doomed, and—at least for the most part—determined to make their dying quite expensive.
Very noble.
Unfortunately, such noble determination worked very seldom, and mostly in livies.
When the enemy had total numerical superiority, all the tactics in the world would not let the attacker get within killing range.
So it was with the ships from Durer.
The obvious flotilla vanished in long-range missile blasts from the incoming Tahn cruisers long out of their engagement range.
The two high flotillas got in among the fold—but for only seconds. Those thirty-two destroyers barely had time to acquire targets and make first launches before they, too, vanished. Results: Destroyed, four Tahn destroyers, five Tahn logistical support craft. Damaged: two Tahn cruisers, three Tahn logships.
On a battle chamber, or from a grand fleet projection, that left the space beyond Durer cluttered with trash, which the deadly little tacships would have been able to swim through unobserved and deal death.
Battle chambers and grand projections crunched light-years into centimeters. The reality was that the destruction of the Durer ships left whirling wreckage across some twenty light-years. A destroyer's screen, particularly one that was programmed to ignore destroyed targets, showed something different.
A raider, a guerrilla, a pirate—and that was what the tacships were—could not exist on a battlefield.
Perhaps the tacship commanders were overeager. Perhaps the Tahn were expecting an attack from "below." Perhaps they had bad luck.
No one would ever know.
There were no survivors from those ships.
The Imperial propaganda made much of their doomed attack and made several posthumous awards of the highest degree. Propaganda also said how effective they were: Two Tahn battleships had been destroyed, and one crippled. One Tahn cruiser destroyed, two crippled. Four Tahn destroyers crippled.
Postwar analysis: One destroyer smashed. One cruiser lightly damaged.
But by then no one wanted to be reminded of the war, let alone the fact that some of their dead heroes had died trying to be heroic instead of succeeding.
Lady Atago's original strategy had been for one fleet to bombard Durer, a second to invade, and a third to be kept in reserve.
Command on Durer expected something similar.
Ready for the last grand stand, they were surprised when the Tahn fleets swept through the system, well outside engagement range.
And maybe they were a little disappointed, at least at first. After all, when someone screwed his courage to the sticking point only to find it not needed, it took awhile for the stupidity and the adrenaline to subside.
But the disappointment did not last very long as the Imperial Forces on Durer realized that they were alive, that they were likely to stay alive for a while, that the battle was being fought without them, and that they were in ringside seats for it.
That was perhaps why so many of the personal memoirs of the Durer-Al-Sufi battle(s) were done by Imperial troops on Durer.
They lived to dictate them.
Lord Fehrle admired perfection on the bridge of his command ship as the first four fleets swept, almost unopposed, out of the Durer System. Ahead of them were rich industrial worlds and then the heart of the Empire. And thus far, the Tahn casualties had been insignificant.
Once again he pointed out to himself the necessity for an overseer. No matter how inspired, the man or woman who was in charge of a task needed someone over him or her, someone who could step back, uninvolved, and see whether that task was destined to be a success, a failure, or, Fehrle thought, able to be taken beyond its humbler goals.
Lady Atago is most brilliant, he thought. But thanks to our system, there will always be someone beyond those brilliant leaders in the field, those who can think, those who can say: Here. Here is the grandness you have overlooked.
Fehrle was basking in that grandness when the Kali missile blew his command ship in half.
Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney was not at all surprised when the robot Tahn ships sent his big picture communications into la-la land. He had sort of expected something like that to happen.
In spite of the frownings and suggestions from his highly trained and educated specialists, Mahoney had insisted on setting up a series of links—locked and tight—with specific ships in each of the fleets under his command. Each broadcast came into a separate receiver, manned by an individual tech who was trained to report, not to interpret.
Probably, Mahoney thought, he was being an imbecile and trying to maintain the illusion that he was still a hands-on field officer. Probably all this drakh was going to confuse the hell out of him, make him get obsessed with trivia and lose whatever half-assed strategy he had to fight their battle.
On first contact, that was exactly what was going on.
And then the battle chamber became a kaleidoscope, all his computers started recycling previous information, and his interpreters found themselves with nothing to interpret.
Mahoney told them to keep interpreting, shut off the com links, and started listening to the field reports.