"A'ready, boss, w' hae i' better'n Cavite." On Cavite, Alex had been in charge of evacking the civilians-and had sworn his own oath of never again. "Whae'll we do wi' th' embassy? Blow it? Or jus' leave some wee booby traps?"
"Negative on both. There might be another ambassador show up one of these years. Why make life hard for him?"
Kilgour's stare was glacierlike.
Who cared what happened with the next regime, or the next clot dumb enough to take the Imperial shilling?
But he did not say anything.
"Do you have a prog on the landings, General?" Sten asked.
"Tentative,'' Sarsfield said. "They appear to have come in with, oh, call it twenty divisions. Say five for the first wave, five for the second, the same for the third, and five for reserve. That's my guesstimate, and that's what I'd do. But none of the Intel progs disagree, so that's what I'm going with."
"GA."
"Right now, I'll say-and these are pretty firm-that they've managed to put no more than eight on the ground. The rest either were lost in the landings or are still in orbit after the invasion was aborted.''
Sten repressed a wince, even though the body count was enemy. The First Guards Division, at full strength, numbered about eighteen thousand beings.
Assume-and a screen nearby showing Imperial Intelligence's order of battle said the assumption would be fairly correct-the same book strength for the Suzdal/Bogazi landing force.
Three hundred and sixty thousand beings, and only eight made it-the invasion force had taken over fifty percent casualties before real battle had even been joined.
"Of course," Sarsfield went on briskly, "casualties were not total. Elements of all invading units are almost certainly on the ground. But as stragglers, casualties, and so forth-not to be taken seriously.''
Sarsfield was a true Guardsman, Sten thought. He didn't appear worried that at least 150,000 enemy were now on Jochi, reinforcing whatever Tork militia were deployed-probably around a hundred thousand beings, and then the half a million more serving in the Jochi army. Three-quarters of a million, versus eighteen thousand.
"I'm grateful they don't appear, at least so far," Sarsfield added, "to have landed any heavy armor or artillery."
They wouldn't need it, Sten knew. Douw and the Jochians had more than enough to go around.
Now, he wondered, how long would it take for them to reform and attack the city?
He knew that answer, too. No more than three E-days.
Imperial losses were slight-only five tacships had been shot down. But those five were irreplaceable.
Sten, Sarsfield, and Mason were on a three-way sealed beam, trying to plan what next.
What should have happened was that the Imperial personnel should have been onboard their ships and scooting for deep space and home.
But there were two small problems: the Suzdal/Bogazi fleet off Jochi, and the oncoming allied army.
Almost a dozen Frick & Fracks had been infiltrated and blown out of the sky before Kilgour had a firm report that the Altaic Confederation was on the march.
Sten had two advantages: First, Mason's ships off Jochi-which were enough of a threat to worry the Suzdal and Bogazi fleet admirals. Second, he had in-atmosphere aerial superiority, or at least enough units to make the air overhead contested territory.
The Suzdal and Bogazi heavies would be unlikely to hang in space and lob heavy missiles down on the Imperial Forces inside Rurik. None of the allied forces, including the two ET races, would define noble victory as having destroyed the longtime capital of the Cluster. That was a shade too Pyrrhic even for these beings.
Nor would the fleet, except as a last resort, sacrifice maneuverability and come down to smash these sprats that were tac-ships-sprats that very likely could kill more than one-for-one as they died, and no one would trade a battleship or cruiser for a fifteen-being spitkit.
On the other hand, Douw's advancing army would slowly provide an AA umbrella that would deny the air to the Imperial ships, so this was only a temporary standoff.
He suddenly found two more shafts of sunlight in his mental sky. First was he had a trained, disciplined force-the First Guards-who were fresh and not brought to battle. Second was the realization that, if he was able to get his Imperial bodies off Rurik, there would be only limited pursuit.
Just bashing the Empire out of the Altaics would be defined as enough of a victory.
At least that's what the Altaics would think.
He listened in silence as Sarsfield and Mason ran various options through and shot them down, trying to figure a way to get out of this Altaic sandwich the Imperial Forces were trapped in.
Something glimmered. He rolled it back and forth. It seemed worth exploring. It probably wouldn't work. Even if it didn't, the situation couldn't worsen. Could it?
"Mr. Kilgour," he asked formally to Alex, who sat somewhat off-screen. It slightly jolted Mason and Sarsfield-they had been unaware of Kilgour's presence. "Do we have a code that's sort of compromised? Not a complete joke, but something they'll be able to break, at least partially, without too much strain?"
Alex shrugged and called up the embassy code chief. Mason started to say something, but Sarsfield waved him to silence. Five minutes later, Kilgour presented a choice of three codes that the code chief was morally certain were splintered, if not completely busted.
"Very good. Why don't we..." and Sten outlined the first stage of his plan.
Sarsfield, since the first stage did not involve him or his command, didn't say anything. Sten could see Mason trying to be fair-but wanting to say that anything that clotting Sten could come up with was worthless.
"My biggest objection," Mason said after a while, "is that we already tried it."
"Not quite, Admiral," Sten said. "We tried the simple version of the con. Did you ever play which hand's got the marble?"
"Of course. I was a child once."
Sten doubted that, but continued. "First time you tried it, you just lied. Then you told the truth. Then you lied again. Escalating dishonesty.
"That's what we're going to attempt, unless someone's got something better-or can point out where I'm completely full of it."
And so the Bluff, Stage Two, was begun.
First a destroyer was detached from Mason's fleet and sent in the general direction of Imperial worlds and Prime itself.
Once beyond the range of any of the Suzdal/Bogazi units, it broadcast a coded message, both to Mason's fleet and to the besieged Imperial post on Rurik.
Sten waited for six hours, watching Alex's Frick & Fracks, as the Altaic army ground closer toward Rurik. Thank somebody, what the clot, give it to Otho's gods Sarla and Laraz, they were moving slowly. Sten attributed it both to caution, none of them ever having fought Imperial Forces before, and the inevitable incoherence of trying to coordinate an alliance, particularly one where everyone hated everyone else.
He had ordered his tacships up as aerial artillery, lobbing air-to-ground missiles at predetermined targets-crossroads, major roadways, and the like.
Then both his com officer, Freston, and Mason's equivalent officer reported: there had been a sudden flurry of intership transmissions in the Suzdal/Bogazi fleets, transmissions that had been sent in a rarely used—which suggested high-level—code. Blurt transmissions were also beamed out in directions suggesting they were intended for the capital worlds of the Suzdal and Bogazi.
"Mr. Mason?"
"Yes, sir. We're on the way."
The fish were nibbling, it would appear.
Sten had, indeed, just come up with a second version of that bluff he and Mason had run, pretending to send messages back to an oncoming Imperial fleet.