"To Chief Warrant Officer, Cap'm. But all that's a bunch of Gorksroar anyway. No matter what they want to call me, I'm still a Chief and mighty proud of it..."
Brim shook his head. Notwithstanding a friendship that went back to the day he'd joined the Fleet, life would be hard without Barbousse. The fine hand of Onrad was in this, too. "Chief," he said with as serious a mien as he could muster, " I just got a reassignment, too."
Barbousse clapped a hand to his forehead, "Sweet sufferin' Universe," he swore. "What's happened to m' contacts?" He shook his head as if he were recovering from a physical blow. "Beggin' the Cap'm's pardon," he asked, "but, um... where to?"
"FleetPort 19," Brim said.
Barbousse did a perfect double take, then wrinkled his nose, closed his eyes, and nodded. "You got promoted, too, didn't you, er... Admiral?"
Brim nodded with a grin that was a lot more emotion than smile. "Congratulations, my good friend," he said, grasping the big man's hand. "There is nobody more deserving than you."
"Except you, Admiral." Barbousse stood back and saluted. "My most heartfelt congratulations to you, sir."
"That's my first flag salute," Brim said, returning the compliment solemnly. "How fitting it should come from you."
"Beggin' the Admiral's pardon—for the first time—but I think we make a fine team," Barbousse observed.
"We'd better," Brim said. "The Emperor's counting on us."
"Aye, sir," Barbousse said. "I was beginnin' to suspect he had somethin' to do w' this." He shook his head. "I mean, my contacts never get fooled like that."
"Think your contacts can find us a ride to FleetPort 19?" Brim asked. He presently had less than one Standard Day to organize for a battle that could decide the fate of the whole empires—and most assuredly his own neck.
"I'll have a shuttle waitin' in a few..." Barbousse started when Moulding suddenly burst through the door.
"Wilf!" he clamored. "What's happened to you? I've just been ordered to take over your job here at FleetPort 30?''
"It's a long story," Brim said with a tired smile.
"Um... I'll get transportation ready," Barbousse said, starting for the door.
"Oh, Chief!" Brim called. "Schedule a meeting for tonight— FleetPort 19's wardroom. Group and Squadron Commanders. Twilight and two."
"Aye, Admiral," Barbousse said, knuckling his forehead. "Twilight an' two." Then he turned to Moulding and grinned. "Oh, an' congratulations, Cap'm Moulding," he said.
"Thanks, Chief," Moulding said, then looked at Brim in puzzlement. "How'd he know that?" he demanded, but Barbousse was already hot-footing down the hall.
"As I said," Brim muttered, offering his old friend the chair and desk he was now vacating, "It's a long story..."
At precisely Twilight:2:0, Barbousse stepped to a table that had been placed at one end of FleetPort 19's once-elegant wardroom, now a mass of pressure patches and splintered wood paneling.
The Warrant Officer paused for a moment while the room quieted, then, taking a deep breath, he announced, "The Admiral!"
With a scraping of chairs, thirty-odd men and women who steered the efforts of 13 Group struggled to their feet and stood as straight as their various stages of fatigue permitted. It was not a time to demand smart military protocol, and Brim knew it as he strode through the door to the table. "Seats!" he said crisply.
After the second round of shuffling and scraping ended, he grimaced. "First," he said to the sea of haggard faces—even the magnificent Eve Cartier showed a bit of age tonight—"I appreciate what it has cost most of you to come here tonight. Metacycles of precious sleep, if nothing else. But I doubt if many of you are more tired than myself—for the self-same reasons." He paused for a moment, then nodded.
"Well, Hoth Orgoth's little operation could very well come to an abrupt end as early as tomorrow."
That got their attention. The coughing and foot shuffling that had almost immediately formed a background for his talk stopped, and many of the slouching bodies straightened in their seats. Glazed eyes suddenly focused.
"That's right," he said. "For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of plowing through TSIBs three times a day, Triannic's given Admiral Orgoth only through tomorrow to put up or shut up."
Here and there around the room, Brim watched more of the nearly enervated eyes begin to come alive. Were the thoughts behind them of opportunity—or simply apprehension at yet another battle to be fought against ever-increasing odds?
"This time," he continued, nodding at Barbousse, "we've got a few nasty surprises for the zukeeds." He frowned as the big Warrant Officer activated a globular projector that displayed a three-dimensional, holographic representation of the new space mine prototype. A number of eyebrows instantly rose in curiosity. Toward the back of the room, Eve sat with the same kind of tired little smile she always had after they'd made love. Earlier that evening, his promotion had made her as happy as if she'd been promoted herself—now she trusted him to lead her in battle. He took a deep breath. That was responsibility! He paused to let people study the image as it turned slowly above the projector.
"It's what we call a 'Loiterer'," he began presently. "An outgrowth of the inconveniently secret technology that's permitted some of us to help you pick off a few extra Leaguers the last few days. And this," he said, changing the view to an animated representation of the Leaguers' new BKAEW beam aiming system, "is how we're going to use them to break the back of Orgoth's big attack tomorrow..."
Dawn: 2:78, with the last details they could think of resolved— or at least as much resolved as possible—the collected Sector and Squadron Leaders from Group 13 rose and snapped to attention, then raced for the starships that would return them to their bases. Reconnaissance flights over a number of Effer'wyckean planets were already reporting the land of activity that normally presaged a heavy raid on Avalon. Only this activity involved the greatest number of war machines that had ever been recorded.
All along the Effer'wyckean frontier, habitable spacecoast planets were crowded with every kind of space barge known—packed with land crawlers, siege engines, and hordes of ground troops. All destined for the Triad and Avalon City.
As Eve Carrier took her leave, she quietly placed an ancient RuneStone from their native Carescria in his hand. "I weel know there's na magic, Wilf Brim," she whispered. "But this ha' alway' brought me guid fortune—an' m'forbearers, too. Today, m'blue-eyed lover, you'll need it mair than any of us..."
Reports from Moulding in FleetPort 30 indicated that day was dawning beautifully below in Avalon City. Over Ariel in the torn wreckage called FleetPort 13, Barbousse woke Brim to inform him that matching gravitational conditions had returned throughout the Triad; they both knew that the Leaguers would soon be active. The Carescrian arrived at his Starfury just as nearby BKAEW plotters picked up forty plus enemy starships assembling in the Eppeid area of Effer'wyck, then a force of twenty plus, followed by a second force of forty plus.
Now, the Leaguers moved toward Avalon without their usual feints and subsidiary attacks to lure Defense Command starships into space prematurely. Clearly—at least to Brim—they were acting in as much desperation as himself. Half a metacycle later, he personally led all of the sixteen squadrons his five sectors could muster in a "Big Wing" formation. In their wake flew a raffish gaggle of ten commandeered civilian cargo packets crewed by Imperial starsailors and loaded with some forty Loiterers each. The crews were ready to release their mines as soon as the Leaguers' aiming beams began to appear.