A Line in the Sand

There was an old no doubt apocryphal story from the old Nation of Texas on Old Terra that before the siege of a garrison at a mission named the Alamo began, the commander of the garrison had told his people he would not retreat, then drew a line in the sand, and asked all those brave enough to stand with him to cross it and join him. The story went that only a few cowards left, and all of those brave men died.

Rebecca had found out what that man had felt when she began notifying those she and her officers had selected. Everyone else was given two hours to record any final messages they wished to send, and she had thought everyone would be clamoring for a spot.

She had been wrong.

The selection was simple really. Anybody on their first deployment, who wasn't in gunnery, missiles, tactical, engineering or medical were tapped. But it almost fell apart when half of those didn't want to go. Finally she had put her foot down hard. The ones chosen would go if she had to send the few marines she had left to throw them onto the boats.

She had chosen to inform only three herself originally. The officers who would command those dispatch boats, and Chief Lithgow himself. He was the senior of the two noncoms, but the one person in the JAG team she could best do without. But the conversation didn't go as she had planned.

When he was called to the com, he had them instead shift it down to where he was working on the prison. "All I need is some more time, Skipper."

"There is no more time remaining, Chief. I want you on that boat to Torch so you can deliver the reports from your team."

"Blow that for a game of soldiers, Ma'am. The reports are sealed and already aboard both of the dispatch boats just in case. They're using a four thousand bit encryption that is a serious piece of work to break, but I'll find it before they arrive if it kills me."

"If you don't I'll be killing you!"

"I knew that from what you told us at the service, Ma'am. I agree with Dollaryde. With this, or on this! So have me court martialed for disobedience of a direct order; after we get home."

"You're insane!"

"We're both Highlanders, Skipper! You know as well as I we're both insane; it's a tradition! But we're still fighting every step of the way to the gallows. So if you don't mind, I'm busy." Then he cut the connection.

The annunciator sounded, and she sighed, tapping it. "Yes, Ryan?" All of the marines had flatly refused to go. A packet of the records of their fallen, and the unit standard would in their stead. They had also, with her permission taken the twenty-five powered armored suits from the morgue and sent them off on another LAC missile to deny the enemy any trace of them. Ryan was one of the real hard cases, and had begun guarding her hatch as if expecting the Sollies to board and demand access any minute.

"Midshipwoman Riyal and Mr Kyle are here, ma'am. They seem to be upset."

"They can join the club." She snarled. "Send them in." The pair came in marching together, and before they could snap to attention, or salute, she said. "You're both going, and that's final!"

"Ma'am, I must protest! Jessica cried. "I owe it to Chin Li and Josh to send a proper honor guard to hell for them, and I can't do it running away!"

"And my men still need me here, skipper-"

"Shut up!" They stopped, stunned. She went on in a softer voice. "Now listen, Jessica. When and if the time comes we'll build a samadh for them. We'll kill so many here the Sollie bastards will be afraid of facing one our tug boats when we're done. Damn it, if Stacey was aboard, I'd either be having this argument with the both of you, or choosing which will die. But Stacey is in her LAC, and that leave you the short straw." She picked up a set of chip folders, walking around the desk to press it into her hands.

"Just like the rest of us, I'm trusting you with the important things, Jessica. This is a copy of my logs, and letters to my family. In a few years when you're a more senior officer, all of us will be watching, whether it is from heaven or hell, and screaming for you to send more of them to hell to repay for the pain you're suffering now."

She turned to Kyle. "Evan, it was a choice between you or Phiratcha Konagawa. I chose you for a very selfish reason. She leaned down, picking up Irene. "Except for my crew, Irene is the one person in the world I love the most. I can save her life by sending you, because Daedalus would watch over her, and not just keep her calm as we die. That means I can save two extra lives out of this. Take her home for me." He looked at her, unshed tears in his eyes, then nodded. She looked her thanks, then hugged the purring little monster. "I don't know if animals go to heaven, furball." She whispered. "But if they do, I'll introduce you to my father's cat when you get there." She rubbed her cheek against the cat's head, then slid her into the carrier.

"You have your orders. Good luck, and godspeed." She watched them leave, staring at the hatch as she pictured what was to come. She heard a liquid gurgle, and looked up as Os lifted the bottle, pouring a second shot of the Irish whiskey; bottled in her own barony, for himself.

"Os, you could have gone with her."

"My place is here. Even in the afterlife, I think you might need a keeper." He handed her one glass. "What's that old Gaelic? Slanche."

"Confusion to our enemies." She replied, and they shot them back.

First they had to make sure the enemy wouldn't split their forces too much. To make sure, they had to sucker them into range as a group. If Sollies sent in destroyers or cruisers, she would not do enough damage to the main warships; the superdreadnoughts and battlecruisers, to even slow them down. So she had to convince them that Witch Maiden was as crippled as she really was.

It helped that as an ensign, she had been on a destroyer that was assigned to the Haven Front, and her squadron had been assigned to collect and disable the Argus arrays around the Alizon system. In doing, they had also worked alongside the colliers that collected them to return home to analyze.

She had worked with not only Naval ratings, but civilian techs that had been paid to examine them as each was collected, and she had learned a lot about the way the system had been laid out. What the Peeps had done was place enough platforms to cover the ecliptic, with the best passive sensors and stealth technology known in the Solarian League at that time just inside the hyper limit, with eight equidistant primary data storage units. They were drifted in from outside the hyper limit, to come to rest close enough to watch the inner systems of their targets.

But when the Manticorans had collected them, they had also examined the computers, especially the primary data nodes. Everything the sensor arrays detected was sent on to the primary nodes, and all of them stored it until pinged by a communications laser. When that occurred, a laser dish would deploy so all signals were now directional, so no one else would detect it. It had been pure chance when a Manticoran Destroyer had been inside the tiny 'kick' area of one right before the first war with Haven began.

The LACs went out, and found the 64 arrays set around this system, and the data nodes. Then her computer technicians went to work altering the take from when they had arrived, and especially the battle. They had been deployed close enough to detect her arrival, and the battle itself, so if they had left them alone, the Sollies would know that an enemy ship had arrived, been damaged, and that something they had not detected (the LACs) had killed the missiles.

But if they knew she had the LACs, they would send in scouting forces instead of proceeding in formation. In their flybys, the LACs had been detected at just under a light second, but again, all trace of them had been erased. Five days later, the 'sanitized' version was in their memory banks. In this version, all they saw was a single ship arriving long after the others, and that ship's wedge going down catastrophically, and not departing. Since they would have nothing else, and a ship lying doggo would not be detected at the piddling little three light minute distance, they would probably deploy a recon drone shell. When it detected her wounded ship, they would see exactly what she wanted them to see; a merchant cruiser with holes blown through her, but obviously still operational.

Everyone worked like slaves to prepare. The LACs towed pods out half a light second closer to the limit, arraying them to cover a wedge where the enemy (If the Sollie dispatch boat's arrival point was any indication) would arrive, all of this being done before the new version had been downloaded to them, so again, they would see nothing but one badly wounded ship.

Some of the damaged areas had brought back on line, and two of those shattered frames were braced enough to give them some limited mobility, but only at about forty gravities acceleration. But with an operational wedge, there was something to knit the sidewalls into. Even then, Hallie Murray had declared something even as simple as snap rolling to interpose her wedge would be too much.

Ensign Kyle's idea about the remaining LAC missiles had been considered, and between them, the senior officer had come up with a plan for them. All of the LACs had come in, and traded out their missile loads for shipkillers and decoys. rather than counter missiles, giving the Ferrets and Katanas a heavier offensive punch. While the Shrikes carried 20 missiles each (In this case four each of the Dazzlers and Dragons Teeth) while the Ferrets carried 56 (eight each of the ECM birds), and the Katanas 84 (Ten each). The dozen or so remaining recon drones had been deployed, and shuttle crews with missile techs assigned had carried six missiles to each as all of the others were brought in. Once in position, the drones had swarms of them deployed far enough apart that their wedges wouldn't interfere with them or the recon drone controllers. Now 20 drones sat silently in space, each controlling their own little stack of missiles a lot closer to the hyper limit. The remaining five were staggered above and below the ecliptic in their own primary role again.

At the same time, even as they worked, everyone was praying. The dispatch boat would have arrived in Smoking Frog by now. Hopefully the Sollies there would have gotten off their asses and moved. But would the governor have anything to send? Rebecca and her officers knew that the entire Sollie 'fleet' presence in the Maya Sector was just an understrength battlecruiser squadron, with a flotilla of light cruisers and another of destroyers.

Even if every ship was in system and departed immediately, there wasn't enough weight of metal to do more than die gallantly in the defense of Witch Maiden. It was simple logic that there would be no relief. The cold equation of trying to rig a defense of their own against that juggernaut after it had eaten her command would have them deploying instead to protect the capital. She knew most of her crew not only knew this, but also had come to accept it. All they could reasonably do is hope to die with their teeth in the enemy's throat.

They counted down to the last day. Two of the Katanas had been kept in close, but as they actually ran out of things for the crew to do, she had begun detaching the survivors she could save. Instead of bringing the frail shuttles and cutter aboard, she had them access the ship through the secondary docking areas on the skin. Those already assigned to go in them were all centered near the locations, Each craft had been given enough supplies to keep them alive for three weeks if necessary. Hopefully they at least would survive. Even with her draconian commands, some people were changed out at the last minute. O'Malley had ordered Konagawa aboard, and returned to her station. As she joked with Rebecca, they might need a navigator who had been to hell to plot their course there. But finally they cast off with fifteen hours remaining before the anticipated arrival of the enemy

Rebecca ordered the crew to dinner on that last day, and both she and De Frees walked through the decks, saying their goodbyes. She had not believed after the time before the attack that the man had so much depth of character, and a sense of humor almost as arcane as her own. All of her preparations were in order, there was nothing more to do.

"I'm leaving the conn to you, Friday." She said at her hatch.

De Frees slammed to a stop. "I know all about the 'godlike powers' speech, skipper. But how the hell did you figure that out?"

She chuckled. "Simple ratiocination, Number One. Parents always seem to give their children the damnedest names, and a lot of time, you use initials or nicknames with your friends when that occurs." She crossed her arms. "Yours for instance. An Andermani immigrant marrying a Manticoran Naval officer. Your mother chose your first name, your father the middle name, and instead of her choosing to change her name, they put both together. Did she ever tell you who Temujin was?"

"Her grand uncle."

"No, the one best known was later named Genghis Khan. So Temujin, Geoffrey, Eisenhower - De Frees. If you leave out the 'De' it becomes TGIF, Thank God It's Friday."

"Eisenhower is spelled with an 'E'."

"Pronounced as an 'I'." She gave him a slow grin. "And knowing the people at Saganami Island, I expect they shortened it just the way I did."

He shook his head, grinning back at her. "Damn, you're good."

"It's those godlike powers, Number One. I am going to have three drinks, so I can sleep."

"Having trouble sleeping, Skipper?"

"Yeah." She opened her hatch. "I didn't think I'd miss Irene as much as I do. She would always cuddle up under the blanket with me, and it was like hugging a purring teddy bear. Now without her, I can't sleep. Good night, Friday."

It wasn't her alarm, or Irene's clamoring for food that woke her from her sleep. It was music. Harsh, pounding, ominous. She recognized it as the Mars Suite from Gustav Holtz's Planets Symphony. She looked at the chrono; 0400. She slapped the annunicator. "Talk to me."

"Hyper footprint. A big one, right on the ecliptic, three light minute away. Skipper. Still getting a count but, hold one... Twenty-two of the wall, twenty-four battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, seventeen destroyers, and eight in the fleet train. We'll have classes on all of them by the time you get up here." De Frees replied.

"Good work, Friday. One thing..."

"Skipper?" She knew if she saw his face, butter would have not melted in his mouth.

"Who gave you permission to lock out the klaxon?"

"I felt a little... mood music fit the occasion was appropriate."

"You are an evil, evil person, Number One, and if I didn't know any better, I would say today is when you get your just desserts. On my way."

The final day

She came out into the beehive the bridge was when going to battle stations. "Report."

"We make the Superdreadnoughts as two Vega Class fifteen Scientists, and five of the old Member Planet Class. According to what our recons drones can see, they haven't even replaced the old chain gun point defense with lasers on three of them." Carruthers reported. "The battlecruisers are all Indefatigables. Cruisers are Mikasa class. Destroyers are Ramparts, and there's one Bridgeport as a destroyer lead. The Tarawas are there, three Vesuvius class colliers, and two Kaiser class repair ships." She looked back. "They've just been sitting there for the last few minutes, Skipper."

"The cooks are rushing to prepare something to eat, skipper." De Frees reported from his own station. Then he signaled the rating to take over, and went over to take the A-TAC console.

"Any signal, Saya?"

"No, Skipper. I think they were waiting at first for St Kitts or the prison to signal them, now they're waiting for the take from the sensor arrays while their drones approach. We'll take them out as they close after the first few see our condition. Once they get that data, and get tired of wasting drones, I expect them to call. Say another twenty minutes at least."

"Be ready to take down the sensor array and blow it on command, Saya. Once they commit, we don't want to have them go out and try another vector."

"You think they will?" De Frees asked.

"Oh no, Friday, I expect them to see a lame duck waiting for them to come in and feast. First they'll offer to let their repair ships build us a new hyper generator so we can leave, if we do so in peace. When it doesn't work, they will try to convince me to surrender to save my crew. All of that wrangling will give us maybe another half hour. Then I expect them to try sending in their marines covered by about half of the destroyers, which the deployed LAC missiles will kill at the same time the LAC squadron shreds the fleet train. They can't move the missiles without bringing in the colliers to offload their present magazines, and until we're dead, they won't very well risk having a lucky shot kill one of them, so I expect the remaining destroyers will hang back to cover the fleet train and the rest will come in bold as brass, daring us to shoot."

"Won't they just leave when they find out the mission is blown?" She looked to O'Malley at her own navigation console. "Even if you're right, and they just leave and try again later, all of their targets will have time to prepare."

"True, Siobhan." She didn't look up. "But this admiral... From what I see in the ONI file, he's like the Persian God Kings of four millennia ago." She looked up as she said that last. As she had assumed, O'Malley did look confused. "The Sword of Damocles? 'Maybe the horse will sing'? Killing the Messenger? Those delightful ideas all started with the kings of that ancient empire. Whether we like it or not, he came into the system like a child at Christmas, and instead of the toy he wanted, he's getting an 'educational' toy." She smiled sadly. "And unlike that child, he has a lot of ways to show his displeasure at that."

She brought up her screen. "5,000 missiles... We know we can kill an SD with five hundred, but that would shoot us dry and only take out ten of the big boys. From what they did in Saltash, I'd say less than a hundred of the Mjolnirs will kill one of the Battlecruisers." She murmured as she worked it out. "All right, we're going to spread the pain around. Abbie, set the salvos for the SDs first. 150 each." When she looked back confused, Rebecca shrugged. "We can't kill them all, Guns. The best we can do is hurt all of them. Some of the shots will be decoyed or destroyed, but some might be golden BBs. If nothing else, we'll inflict damage they have to repair before going on.

"Set sixty each for the battlecruisers. Again, we hope we'll tear them up as much as possible. Considering missile salvos of 120 MK16s killed four Sollie battlecruisers at Saltash, we might kill them if we don't cripple them all. That leaves only 60 for the Heavy cruisers. Send five each at them. We don't want them to feel left out."

Abbie merely shook her head, her own manic smile hidden, though Rebecca could hear the humor in her voice. "On it skipper. It will take a few minutes. Joseph, Callie, I want you controlling the different queues. Commander, I'll let you smack down the SDs with Joseph backing you up, while I take the battlecruisers with Callie backing me."

"On it, Ensign."

Rebecca liked the professional sound. "Saya, how is 'Kiss Me Kate' going?"

"Better than I might have thought when you described it, skipper. We'll be ready."

"Good. Call Azrael for me, please."

A moment later, the communications officer turned. "On the line, skipper."

"Becca, you know what to do."

"Skipper, we'd rather be inside, the hitting the SDs."

"I know. But if they decide to send in some of the destroyers to fly cover for assault shuttles or pinnaces as I expect, they'll probably leave the train partially uncovered, and that means you'll tear them up, and those destroyers will come after you, keeping them off us. Vipers are hell on wheels for a small craft, but with only one laser rod, they're kind of light for anything larger than another LAC, and more than half of what we have deployed out there are Vipers so a lot of them will be hitting the destroyers they send in because we're going to use all of them first. But your people can do what we can't from here. We need those colliers and repair ships killed, and you're in position for that."

"Ma'am, we've been talking it over out here... If we can get one of the repair ships to strike their wedge..."

"The Sollies will just grab her back if the captain is that stupid. They have too much firepower here for us to guarantee living through it. But if we're dead and those repair ships are still operational, they could get most of their cripples out of here, and like I said at the memorial service, they'll be back when we least expect them. So I repeat, those repair ships and colliers must die."

"We understand ma'am. We just don't like it."

"You think I do? People fed?"

"Yes, ma'am. Chief Du Puy here makes a mean egg sandwich."

Rebecca looked up as Os, followed by four mess ratings, came in bearing food for the bridge crew. "I see we will be joining you, Becca. Bon appetit."

She broke the connection as Os set up the small tray he had designed to mount across her lap. Behind him, the girl carrying the tray uncovered it, and set down a perfectly beautiful mushroom ham and spinach omelet and hash browns. Rebecca sighed with pleasure, then looked up and her first words died in her mouth.

"Cook Striker Wagoner. I distinctly remember your name on the list to go in Black Cat." She finally said.

"I believe I was supposed to go, yes, Ma'am." She said setting a napkin and cutlery beside the plate. "However when I was assigned to the wardroom galley, Chief Oscelli and I came to an understanding. I wanted to make sure I could cook well enough to satisfy you, and he has always felt he could teach the right student if I wanted to become a steward instead of just a cook."

Rebecca arched an eyebrow at the offending chief, and Oscelli shrugged as he poured a cup of coffee, and flavored it exactly. "You didn't think I learned to be this good and arrogant by luck, did you, ma'am? Every chief steward picks someone to teach. It's a tradition."

"And as an old comedic writer said, if you're not willing to bow to tradition, no matter how stupid it looks or sounds, you might as well be a foreigner." Wagoner added.

She sipped her coffee, her eyes still locked on the chief. "We will discuss this, Os."

"Of course we will, ma'am." He reached across, sliding the vase a few millimeters, oh my god, she thought. we're all going to be dead in the next hour or so, and he took time to put a rose in a vase for my last breakfast on the bridge because he knows I like roses! "Bon appetit."

Arrogant Presumption

Admiral Tregaskis glared across the flag bridge of SLNS Arcturus at his staff tactical officer, Commodore Adrienne Peel. "Well?"

Peel sighed, her back to the admiral. "We're still waiting for the full download from the array, sir. It should be... wait, there it is." She leaned forward, running the record faster than usual. Anything to get this slimy son of a bitch off my Back! "The last of the colliers arrived, then a Mesan dispatch boat, then our dispatch boat-" She frowned. Then rewound to look at something. "Then an unknown merchant ship arrived. Followed by a catastrophic drop in the last ship's wedge. I would say the collier destroyed or seriously damaged them." She ran it forward. "No, they must have killed the collier somehow. I have two traces that show both dispatch boats departing. One on a least time course to Smoking Frog, the other... Least time to Torch."

"Damn." Tregaskis almost snarled. I knew the wheels would come off! "What about our recon drones?" He asked mildly.

"Coming up on sensor range now. We have one ship located one half million kilometers from the station. There a lot of debris... looks like the merchant ship is still there, and the collier is history." She flinched. "And they just blew the first three recon drones to hell."

"And how many merchant ships do you know that could take on a fleet collier? Even one from some podunk little group like Mesa?" He asked.

Peel felt the cold hand of lunacy on her back. She was protected by Fleet. But would Fleet know when this crazy mother went off? "They got lucky." Peel shrugged. "All of the merchant ships out on the Verge carry some armament. It might be a pirate, which means they might have been as well if not better armed." She hissed. "Whoever they are, their point defense lasers are damn good. Nothing is getting closer than half a million kilometers after the first three."

Tregaskis leaned back in his chair, hands steepled before him. He was the picture of the benign uncle every family seems to have. A seraphic smile on his face. However as one author pointed out long in the past, some people are not fully paid up members of the human race.

To him no one else was really something he had to worry about. There were people that could help his career, there were people hinder it. Beyond that, every other human being he had met were mere cardboard cutouts. Women especially. Even as a child he had been that way. His parents, who were already wealthy citizens of the Core or 'Old' League had just thought the physical abuse he had dealt to other children (or their pets if they had only known) was just a phase he would grow out of.

Unfortunately the first time he had forced himself on a woman; a fellow cadet from the Shell, had been after he had been accepted into the Solarian Fleet Academy that trained both Battle and Frontier Fleet. It had been hushed up, but the normal way to deal with this problem; psych adjustment, didn't work on military officers. In fact thanks to an attempt made at 'reprogramming' serving officers in Frontier Fleet by one of the 'Liberation Fronts' on one of the more recent shell worlds back in 1105PD had caused every military with the technology to find ways to stop it from happening again.

If he had been sent to Frontier fleet after graduation, it might have been better. After all if some woman on a newly annexed planet had complained, who would have listened? But the patronage system worked against that. Scions of houses that would have been considered noble if the League allowed such weren't sent off to be Frontier Fleet officers, they were given plum assignments in Battle Fleet instead.

But psych adjustment didn't really cure anything, did it? It simply crammed in an additional set of compulsions which forced the adjusted individual to act as if he had been cured. That was all very soothing to society, no doubt, and might well prevent an "adjusted" serial killer from killing again, but some League planets, and the Fleet (Like the Manticorans) considered that it was both simpler and more ethical―and moral―to shoot someone than it was to lock him up for life in a prison inside his own skull. Worse yet, with the safeguards put into place by the Fleet, it would have been something they had to address every few years.

Faced with someone creating the 'ideal officer' in his head, Tregaskis had learned to create a sweet gentle persona that hid the monster within. He had learned to ape the 'proper' officer so well that he had gone for over six decades with very few noticeable bobbles.

Even then, his proclivities had only gotten worse. The three women the League did know about were just the tip of a sordid iceberg; try fifteen by his own count, and most of them had not been mere beatings. It had come to a head almost two decades earlier when a fellow officer had suggested a very special 'house' on a Fringe World for a vacation. One run, though neither knew it, by a Manpower affiliate. The girls were genetic slaves, and again, though they didn't know it, everything in the house was recorded.

When he had finished, sated and happy, rising from her brutalized body, the woman had screamed that she was going to report him not only to the madam of the house, but to his superiors. When she did, he had leaped upon her like a panther, and began beating her even harder that he had before. In fact when he finally stopped, more from exhilarated fatigue than anything else, he had beaten the woman to death.

But nothing had come of that. Well, actually, an offer of special visits to houses like it closer to the Core had come of it. By the time he had been caught that third time, he had discovered the enjoyment only a blade could satisfy. A year before they arrived at Inferno, Manpower had offered him a literal harem of women he could use, abuse, and dispose of as he wished. Why, just a thought... how about medical support? Had he considered how long someone might live while he worked on them with full medical life support? Just carry out one little mission...

If you believed that Satan would offer to buy your soul, for him it was the perfect offer. Oh, he had resisted. After all, he was a serving Admiral in Battle Fleet. But every one of those twelve women he had tortured, raped, then (With seven of them) murdered were trotted out in glorious color. If it had been revealed, fleet wouldn't even try to cover it up. They would simply arrange an accident.

So he had given in. If he had to talk to lawyers, he would have said under duress. But they had laid out his view of humanity. Things he could test and torment to destruction, and the rest he had to deal with. A life in heaven...

But now his dreams lay in ruins, and someone was going to pay for that. And that someone was in orbit ahead.

"Sylvia, contact them." He gave a smile as the monster stretched. "Let's be friends."