“Ralph, you are going to be the death of my senior advisors.”
“Then they can come back from the beyond and persecute me. Am I free to give the order?”
“If any of these possessed use this as an opportunity to try and break out, I want them in zero-tau within a day.”
“Understood.”
“Very well, General Hiltch, give your order.”
Al had moved to a suite a couple of floors up the Hilton where all the utilities still worked. The doctors needed a reliable electrical supply, fancy phone lines, clean air, that kind of crap. They’d turned the new suite’s bedroom into a treatment room, raiding Monterey’s hospital for equipment and medical packages. More stuff had been flown up from San Angeles. Stuff that gave Al the creeps: bits of other people, living organs and muscles and veins and skin. Emmet had run a planet-wide search for a pair of compatible eyes, eventually tracking them down to a storage vault in Sunset Island. A priority flight had brought them up to Monterey.
The doctors said it was going well. Jez was out of danger. They’d replaced her blood and grafted on skin and tissue where Kiera had burned down to the bone, implanted the new eyes. Once the operations were over, they’d covered her in medical packages. Now it was just a question of time until she healed over, they’d assured him.
They didn’t like Al visiting too much. Jez looked so helpless smothered in that green plastic substance he got all worked up, which screwed up the packages. So he didn’t get too near, just hung out by the door and watched over her. Like a guy should do for his dame. It gave him time to think a lot.
Mickey, Emmet, and Patricia came into the suite’s lounge. Al had one of the stewards hand round drinks as they sat round the low brass and marble table, then ordered everyone else out of the room.
“Okay, Emmet, how long till they get here?”
“I figure some time in the next ten hours, Al.”
“Fair enough.” Al lit a Havana and blew a long trail of smoke at the high ceiling. “On the level, can we fight them off?”
Emmet took a sip of the bourbon and replaced the glass on the table, studying it keenly. “No, Al, we’re going to lose. Even if they only use the same level of force as they did against Arnstat, we’ll lose. And they’ll be carrying enough combat wasps to fire two or three times as many at us. Everything in orbit above New California will be wiped out. The ships can jump away. But they’ve got nowhere to go except for the last couple of planets we infiltrated. And I’m not too sure they’ll even manage that. We think the Navy’s voidhawks pursued a lot of our guys from Arnstat and blew them up after they’d jumped away. There weren’t too many made it back here.”
“Thanks, Emmet, I appreciate you being straight with me. Mickey, Patricia, what’s the word among the soldiers?”
“They’re getting jumpy, Al,” Patricia said. “No two ways about it. There’s been enough time for what that bitch Kiera said to start registering. The Organization’s put us on top, but that makes us a target. We know we can’t take over another planet again, New California is all we’ve got. A lot of them want to go down there.”
“But we’re holding them, Al,” Mickey said. His nervous tic was palpitating away. “I don’t take no shit from any of my people. They’re loyal. You made us, Al, we’ll stay with you.”
His blind enthusiasm made Al smile faintly. “I ain’t asking no one to commit suicide for me, Mickey. They wouldn’t do it anyway; they all came out of the beyond, remember. They ain’t gonna go back just because I ask nice. Party’s over, guys. We had fun for a while, but we’ve reached the end of the road. I got a bum rap from history once, I ain’t having that again. This time people are gonna say I did the best for everyone. They’re gonna show me some genuine respect.”
“How?” Patricia asked.
“Because we’re going out in style. It’s gonna be me who stops the slaughter. I’m gonna make the Navy an offer they can’t refuse.”
The Ilex was one of the voidhawks who had taken up an observation position two million kilometres out from New California in the wake of the mass hellhawk defection from the Organization. The Yosemite Consensus had soon found out about Almaden. Hellhawks had been delivering non-possessed survivors to the habitats, a repatriation deal for rebuilding the asteroid’s nutrient refinery, they said. Consensus hadn’t finished reviewing the implications of that yet; it seemed unlikely that they could maintain the machinery for more than a few years. However, that the hellhawks so actively sought to avoid combat was a particularly welcome development. Capone’s actual motives for allowing and even assisting such an action were highly questionable.
Whatever the true reason, it left Yosemite with an excellent opportunity to re-establish its observation of New California and the Organization fleet. Ilex had been assigned to review the low-orbit SD network in preparation for the arrival of Admiral Kolhammer’s attack force. They deployed their spyglobes and waited for them to complete the long fall down below geostationary orbit. There was still an hour to go before the little sensors started to return useful data when a communication beam from Monterey was aligned on them.
“I wanna talk to the captain,” Al Capone said.
Auster immediately informed the Yosemite habitats. Their Consensus came together, reviewing the situation through his eyes and ears. “This is Captain Auster. What can I do for you, Mr Capone?”
Al grinned, and turned to someone out of view. “Hey, you got that on the dime, they’re as prissy as the Limeys. Okay, Auster, we all reckon that the Navy is due here any minute now. Right?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny such an event.”
“Bullshit, they’re on their way.”
“What do you want, Mr Capone?”
“I need to talk to the guy in charge, the admiral. And I need to do that before he starts shooting. Can you fix that for me?”
“What do you wish to talk to him about?”
“Hey, that’s between me and him, pal. Now can you set that up, or do you wanna sit back and let a whole load of people get slaughtered? I thought that was against your religion or something.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Illustrious emerged in the centre of the voidhawk defence sphere formation, 300,000 kilometres above New California. Admiral Kolhammer waited impatiently for the tactical display, cursing the delay while the warship’s sensors deployed.
Lieutenant Commander Kynea, the voidhawk liaison staff leader, called out: “Sir, local voidhawks have received a communications request. Al Capone wants to talk to you.”
It wasn’t something Motela Kolhammer was expecting, but the probability was always there. Capone didn’t have to be a genius to work out where the attack force was heading after Arnstat.
The tactical display was coming on line, supplemented by information from the Yosemite voidhawks. The news that the hellhawks had departed was extremely welcome. Though even without them New California had a prodigious defence network; its strength had determined the ultimate size of the attack force. So far, none of the platforms had fired.
“I’ll listen to him,” Kolhammer said. “But I want our deployment to continue as planned.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Illustrious aligned one of its communication dishes on Monterey.
“So you’re the admiral, huh?” Al Capone asked once the link was established.
“Admiral Kolhammer, Confederation Navy. Currently commanding the attack force emerging above New California.”
“I guess I must have frightened you people, huh?”
“Guess again.”