There was nothing "over his shoulder" or "behind" him on the screens.
William Bishop the Forty-third, not believing in bluffs, in what had happened, or, more importantly, in what had not happened, returned to his orbit off Cavite, seriously thinking about the virtues of early retirement and then perhaps joining an intensely religious monastery.
Lady Atago stood in the litter of disaster and read the onscreen message, sent en clair from General Lunga's command post on Cavite:
Imperial units have broken through. Contact lost with fighting elements. Last reports say all positions resisting to last man. This post now three combatants, no remaining ammunition. Will attack. Repeat. Will attack. My apologies to the council and to my race for failure.
Lunga
Atago turned away. She had her own honor—and her own pledge—to fulfill.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Without ceremony, the new Forez hurtled into space.
Lady Atago might have been the ultimate Tahn, but she had been more than grudgingly acquiescent to the Tahn's cultural love of ceremonies.
There were rituals for warriors choosing to go into battle, seeking the final victory of death: the touching of the home-world's earth to one's temple. A last sip of pure water. An oath over one's personal weapon, preferably one that had been in the family for generations. Exact instructions as to how the memory of the about-to-fall hero(ine) was to be honored.
Lady Atago chose to die in her own fashion.
The livie crews could cobble together some kind of scene from stock footage. In fact, she imagined, they probably were already hard at work doing just that.
Atago did not care.
After lift, the Forez's second officer had turned to her, eyes glistening, and stammered something about it all being a dream. The old and the new, culminating in a moment of history.
Atago puzzled at him for a second. Old and new? Oh. Yes. She remembered. The officer had been something or other on the old Forez, which was now probably being cut apart and recast into something or other. Atago did not know or care. A ship, like a weapon, was a tool and nothing more.
But she managed a frosty smile and a nod of agreement to the officer. If those were the thoughts he chose to carry into emptiness, so be it.
Atago was busy with her final plans—such as they were.
Any culture that managed to admire the slaughter of other beings also lionized the fighter who went to war in a hopeless cause. But to qualify for legend, that fighter also had to accomplish something by his death, even if it was nothing more than keeping the bad guys out of a pass for an hour or so.
That had been true even on ancient Earth. For instance, before Roland was an acceptable hero, his pigheadedness at Roncesvalles had to be changed from a minor ambush by irked Basques to a grand last stand against several million Saracens. Custer and his people had to be doing something worthwhile instead of what they actually were to get to Little Big Horn—drunk, untrained, ignoring intelligence, and having less than no idea of what they would do when they got wherever they were going.
There was an exception: the kamikazes—Second Global War—who went out to die with only the forlorn illogic that somehow their deaths would work magic and change history. Other cultures had tried to explain by claiming they were psycho cases, drunk, or using drugs. Only their home culture had made them into heroes.
The Tahn would have understood the kamikazes quite thoroughly.
Lady Atago's "battle plan" was to drive directly for Cavite. Somehow the Forez would battle through the surrounding Imperial fleets and somehow attack Cavite itself. Of course they would all die.
But somehow that would turn the war.
The crew believed. Perhaps a bit of Lady Atago's own emotions did as well.
But more important to Atago was her honor and her expiation of failure. She had done something—and had no idea what—wrong. The war should have been over already. And the Tahn victorious. To consider anything else was impossible.
"Impossible" was also the word for her plan.
The never-to-lift-again Panipat was stripped of its missiles, armaments, supplies, and the few crew members who were properly trained.
But even so, the Forez launched with only eighty percent of full complement. They had, however, almost
175 percent more than the specified systems basic load for all weapons systems—weapons systems that had seen, at best, a single test firing during the ship's trial passage from shipyard to Heath.
A battleship was normally escorted by a fairly largish fleet—cruisers, destroyers, ECM ships, tacship carriers, and half a horde of auxiliaries.
The Forez attacked the Empire with one cruiser and seventeen destroyers.
Ensign Gilmer thought himself a clever man.
He came from a family that had served in the Empire's military for generations. Such service was obligatory for any Gilmer's first career. Ensign Gilmer had groaned into adulthood with the knowledge that he was sooner or later going to have to go out there and play with people who probably had evil intentions. But it was either that or disinheritance, a far worse fate.
He had hoped, without success, that at the very least the war with the clotting Tahn would end before his tender pink body saw its majority. No luck.
Gilmer joined up.
But he had a plan that would not only make his somewhat suspicious elders realize that Gilmer was true to the tradition but keep said pink body unscathed.
He volunteered for picket ships.
His fellow graduates at the academy were in awe—they had never expected the flaky Gilmer to become a firebrand. Picket ships, after all. Out in front of the rest of the fleet. Waiting for the enemy to come at them, in force.
Picket ships were even more suicidal than tacships.
A being could get killed doing that.
Gilmer took their admiration badly—the same way he had handled their earlier polite contempt—and gloated to himself.
Gilmer had been sent to hack one day in his first year at the academy and spent it doing some interesting research: looking for a future home. He discovered that picket ships indeed were in front of everyone. But unlike the tacships, intended to shoot and scoot, picket ships just scooted. He ran a stat analysis on their casualties, all the way back to the Mueller Wars. Most interesting: less than two percent. Lower, even, than a transport. So much for cadet wisdom. And most of the losses, he discovered by wading through endless fiches on accident boards, had been due to inept pilotage.
Gilmer was a superb spacepilot. Everyone agreed on that.
And so he went off to war.
His picket ship was not a happy one. The twelve beings in his crew hated Gilmer's guts—not that there was anything concrete they could dislike him for. The ship was tautly run. Promotions and punishments were handed down promptly and according to regs. But there was something wrong.
Gilmer had not been pleased when his picket ship had been attached to a flotilla assigned to the Pioneer Sectors invasion. But thus far he had kept well out of danger. He had flashed first contact reports, in fact, on several Tahn ships trying lone-wolf runs against the Empire, which should have gotten him a respectable gong or two to take into civilian life and his planned new career as a livie producer.
And he could see that the Empire was winning.
A few more weeks, and then it would be over. He planned for his ship to need a massive quarterly that would keep it out of the final battle against Heath.