That brought the Controller to life. "Er... thank you," she said with more than a hint of surprise in her voice. "Imperial P7350 and sixteen Starfuries are cleared for arrival on vector two four left."
Brim shook his head; the huge satellite was now clearly visible ahead. He would soon have a word with that Controller. Drawing more power from the big Admiralty gravs, he banked into his final approach. "Cleared for arrival two four left. P7350," he acknowledged, and passed the message to the four groups of Starfuries following close in his wake.
Constructed in stationary orbit approximately 150 c'lenyts above spin ward Avalon, FleetPort 30 was shaped like a flattened glove nearly three quarters of a c'lenyt in diameter. It was ringed about the middle by a transparent mooring tube and pressurized to the standard atmosphere on the surface below.
Complex antenna fields on both "poles" of the huge structure furnished clear communications throughout the galaxy; the mooring tube provided forty-five docking portals spaced equally around its margin, each equipped with its own optical mooring system and retractable brow. When docked, Brim's killer ships would protrude bow first from thirty-two of these portals, with a few of the remainder occupied by surface shuttles and transient ships. Both the interior of the structure and its moored ships were supplied with locally generated gravity distributed evenly on every level with "down focus" toward the center of the planet itself.
Using the excellent docking systems provided, Brim had the whole squadron moored less than half a metacycle later. However, with fewer than ninety irals' width at the docking rim, he hated to think what it would be like to moor a full-sized cruiser—or a Starfury with shot-up opticals.... Unfortunately, he had little time to worry about such future problems, or even to inspect his new command and space anchorage. Only cycles after his arrival, he and Moulding were on their way to the surface in a high-speed shuttle piloted by Aram of Nahshon himself. Barbousse scarcely had time to pack spare uniforms for them.
"Admiral Calhoun said he didn't care what you looked like after a long ferry mission. Captain," the A'zurnian explained. "He simply made it clear that you were to be at the briefing—and it would be my neck if he didn't see you there."
"Any kind of a bloody friend would have offered his neck," Moulding grumped in feigned wrath.
"Six days in a thraggling bus designed for nothing but day trips. Mark Valerian must be a closet Leaguer—maybe even a Controller. I haven't had a proper bath and shave since Gimmas."
Brim laughed in spite of his own discomfort. "Don't listen to him, Aram," he said. "Friend Moulding secretly hates to attend meetings, that's all."
From his seat at the little spaceship's helm, Aram grinned over his shoulder, "I think I know what Toby means," he said. "The way they've stripped down the Defiants we're using, you'd never recognize them—and I'd hate to take any of 'em more than a day's flight away."
"If anybody can tell the differences, you can," Brim said, remembering the days he and Aram had taken I.F.S. Defiant, the first Defiant MK1A, aloft back in the spring of 51998. It seemed like two hundred years ago. "How do they handle?" he asked.
"Rather nicely, now that you mention it," the A'zurnian replied with a nod of approval. "They're nowhere near as fast as your Starfuries, but they can turn on a ten-credit coin, and they'll accelerate with the best the League has put up yet. And," he added pointedly, "we've nearly twice the number of Defiants to face the Leaguers than you have Starfuries.,.."
That sort of half-joking braggado soon had Brim smiling with both pride and relief. It reflected the kind of positive outlook on life that could only come from a person who had little problem with his work. Now, maybe he could worry a little more about fighting a war....
As the shuttle swooped low over the capital, Brim could see that every gravity pool in the vicinity of Lake Mersin was filled with ships from the ragtag rescue fleet, and the overflow spread out hovering over the surface of the lake itself. Moulding summed the scene up accurately when he commented, "I think I could hike across the bay just by stepping from deck to deck...."
Aram set the little ship down on a vector that was kept open only by the hard work of a dozen police launches, then taxied quickly to wharf where they were flagged onto a gravity pad recently vacated by what could have only been an industrial barge, and a dilapidated one at that. It probably had been helping to ferry evacuees from an orbiting starship too old to qualify for surface license. As the clumsy spaceship lumbered out onto the lake, Brim shook his head. Every vehicle capable of spaceflight had helped in the evacuation. Little wonder the operation was called a "miracle."
Walking to the staff skimmer that would take them to the Admiralty, the trio passed between long lines of bedraggled soldiers who were giving their names to tired-looking officials with logic scribers, dropping what blast pikes and other weapons they'd managed to save into heaps, and climbing wearily onto hovering omnibuses. Nearby, steady streams of volunteers were bringing and sorting odd clothes, because many of the evacuees arrived with only blankets thrown around their tattered battlesuits. For the remainder of his days, Brim would remember a tall, blond woman heading for one of the buses in the badly scorched bottom half of a battlesuit and a man's formal jacket; the latter accomplishing little to cover a magnificent bust. For all her obvious fatigue, she somehow managed the panache to walk proudly, head up and alert, with the indescribable spirit that characterized Imperial military no matter where—or in what condition—they were to be found.
Probably the most amazing aspect of the operation, however—at least to Brim—was that he knew the scene was being duplicated in more than a hundred similar starports scattered over the Triad's Five planets. Most of the soldiers had lost their equipment, land crawlers, siege disruptors, and the like.
But equipment could be replaced quickly in comparison to how long it took to gain the experience of actual combat. These ragged professionals had faced the Leaguers in action—and had survived. They would teach new Imperial armies how to do the same thing. And—with a little help from Lady Fortune—new armies equipped with fresh equipment would depart from the same ports, this time headed for victory. If, Brim reminded himself, the Fleet could keep the Leaguers from the doors until the new Imperial forces were ready to march. Otherwise, today's inrush of refugees would only be rehearsal for what was to come. For a moment he shivered inside his Fleet Cape. It was a tall order indeed, and he knew it.
Brim got his first taste of the CIGA's new sense of assertiveness as his skimmer-pool driver followed a refugee bus through the front gates of the base. At least five hundred obviously well-dressed, pampered-looking men and women of all ages were shouting obscenities, hurling garbage, and waving placards as they strained against cordons of police in full battlesuits. Many carried animated placards proclaiming the CIGA motto, "Contemplate Galactic Peace." One—a fat, cherubic-faced woman with a bad complexion—was using hers to pummel an officer over the head while she screamed incomprehensible peace slogans through a mouth twisted by rage.
"Can't imagine that one 'contemplating' much of bloody anything," Moulding commented as the driver pulled around the slower omnibus and accelerated along the refuse-strewn boulevard.
At the same moment, the window beside Brim took a hit by something obscene-looking that landed with a dull splat and dribbled slowly along the curved surface of the crystal. The flying mass startled him, and he flinched, shaking his head the next moment in embarrassment. "Pretty ugly spectacle," he said lamely to Aram. "Try to remember that they're only a small percentage of our population."