To her surprise, all three rebels showed signs of recognition. Caid Ahmed leaned closer, and muttered something under his breath. Caid Harsaf paused in stroking his beard. And Alonzo Khouri frowned. “I know him. He told us his name was Hardesty, and he said he was a mercenary.”
“He has been supplying you with your modern Cygnan weapons, correct?” said Ranya. “He was spotted in Meknez with the latest arms shipment, which the Royal Guard intercepted. It turns out he has also been arming Bey Salem.” She adjusted the footage, expanding it to show Salem el-Fasi walking beside Bleindel on the palace grounds. “I think he has been playing us all for fools. While he was giving you the firepower you needed to attack my uncle, he was also arming Bey Salem’s forces.”
“To what purpose?” Khouri asked.
“So that Bey Salem could overthrow the sultanate,” Hadji Tumar answered for Ranya. “This offworlder armed you so that you would weaken or defeat Sultan Rashid, and make it possible for Bey Salem to seize power and sign a treaty of cooperation with Dremark. I know little about such things, but it appears to me that his plan is well on its way to succeeding.”
“Can you prove this?” Caid Harsaf asked Ranya.
“You know where your weapons came from. As for Bey Salem’s exact bargain with Dremark, I admit that I am guessing. But Salem el-Fasi’s troops are now sitting in El-Badi Palace, and Dremish troops are firing on the Royal Guard. What other explanation is there?” Ranya allowed the question to hang in the air.
There was a long silence as the three men considered her words. Finally Caid Harsaf spoke again. “Assuming everything you say is true, Amira, what exactly do you propose?”
“I am ordering the Royal Guard to disengage from all actions against your forces,” said Ranya. “We are turning our full strength to putting down el-Fasi’s coup attempt and fighting back against Dremark. I beg you for your help in fighting our common enemy, but if you cannot bring yourself to fight alongside the Royal Guard, I hope you will at least stand aside and let us fight for you.”
“For us? You fight to keep yourself in power,” Alonzo Khouri observed.
“That may be true today,” Ranya replied. “Tomorrow, it will be up to you. I will not reign without the consent of the people. Assuming I am not killed by Salem el-Fasi or his Dremish allies, I promise before God that I will convene an assembly to decide whether Gadira should have a sultan, what place our Quranist beliefs should have in our society, and whether we will welcome or shun offworld contact. But if you do not help me now, you’ll have to ask the Emperor of Dremark what kind of world he will allow you to live in.” Ranya looked at each of the men in turn, and then back to Khouri. “Gadira for Gadirans, isn’t that your slogan?”
The rebel leaders looked away, perhaps trying to gauge each other’s reactions or listening to people who were not on Ranya’s screen. The silence stretched on for long seconds, and then Caid Harsaf spoke. “Very well, Amira,” he said. “Speaking for the el-Tayibs, we will hold our positions if your Royal Guard does not attack us, and we will not move against you as long as you are fighting Dremark or Bey Salem. As for allying with you … I must think on it more.”
“The el-Manjouri will do the same,” Caid Ahmed growled.
“I can only speak for my own people in Tanjeer,” said Khouri, “but we have been fighting el-Fasi and his imperialist allies all day, and we will continue to do so. We will avoid engaging the Royal Guard if they do not attack us.”
Ranya let out a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. “I can expect no more. Go make whatever arrangements you have to; we will speak again later.” She looked at each man in turn, and gave them one small nod. “Now, if you’ll excuse me … I have an invasion to repel.”
22
CSS Hector, Gadira II Orbit
Panther was ready for trouble. The moment Hector opened fire, the Dremish ship accelerated and replied with her own K-cannons. At their current range, the flight time of the K-rounds was less than a second, not enough for any kind of deliberate evasion by either ship. Despite that, most of the cruiser’s salvos missed each other, simply because both ships were accelerating at full military power. A half second was enough time for Hector to change her vector by several hundred meters, and thus not be quite where she’d been when Panther returned fire. Panther had less of an opportunity to move, since Hector fired first, but even so Mark V rounds streaked past her, missing by a dozen meters or less in most cases—and for a kinetic round, missing by a meter was the same as missing by a thousand kilometers. Without direct impact none of the frightful kinetic energy of the tungsten-alloy projectiles could be turned into damage on the target, and a phenomenal amount of energy was thus wasted on missed shots.
But not all missed.
One of Hector’s shots grazed Panther’s stern, wrecking a main drive plate. Another gouged her belly, failing to penetrate her armor but creating a brilliant spray of molten metal that blossomed behind the Dremish ship. And one solid hit impacted just below Panther’s second main-battery turret, drilling a hole through the barbette armor. The Aquilan shot transformed instantly into a ragged spray of dense, incandescent plasma, driven to unimaginable temperatures by the transformation of sheer kinetic energy into heat. It vaporized the capacitor room below the turret, and compartments all around buckled or melted in turn. The Dremish cruiser shuddered under the secondary explosions, an expanding ball of white-hot plasma streaming from her wound.
“Hit!” Girard yelled, raising a fist in triumph.
Sikander grinned fiercely, and started to congratulate the ensign—but at that moment Panther’s return fire struck Hector.
Like Hector’s initial volley, most of Panther’s shots missed. But Oberleutnant Helena Aldrich’s gunnery team was every bit as well trained as Sikander’s, and Panther’s K-cannons were actually a little larger and more powerful than Hector’s. A grazing hit just aft of Hector’s superstructure sliced through the power conduit feeding the number-three main-battery turret, and a second round found Hector’s main hangar bay and incinerated a docked shuttle in its cradle. The ensuing fireball blew the hangar hatch completely free of the ship, but also ejected a good deal of the molten debris; two of Hector’s shuttles spun away from the ship as blazing meteors that would streak across the sky above the Bitter Sea ten minutes later. The hangar explosion jolted every compartment like a giant pounding the side of the ship with a sledgehammer. Sikander was wrenched sideways and bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood before the inertial compensators kicked in and suppressed the movement.
“Number-three turret out!” Sikander called, reporting the damage blinking on his console. He had no idea what had happened; the turret icon flashed red, and that was all he could tell. Other damage reports echoed around the bridge. He heard Magdalena Juarez on the command channel, reciting a list of damaged or off-line systems. Her battle station was down in the engineering control station, where she monitored the power plant and induction drives.
“Hit them again!” Randall shouted.
“Recharging main battery, sir!” Girard called back. The Mark V couldn’t throw ten-kilo slugs over and over again; each K-cannon had a firing cycle of about fifteen seconds. The deck lurched again under Sikander, and he realized that Chief Quartermaster Holtz was doing his best to throw the ship into every jink, roll, and sharp turn he could manage while climbing up out of Gadira’s gravity well.