Ursis rolled his eyes to the heavens. "Probably not," he said, "but since both of us work for him now, I see little choice in matter."
"Evening:3:00, Commodore," Brim repeated. "I'll have them here." Then, saluting once more, he started back along the top of the gravity pool. As usual, he had a lot of work to do and only a limited time in which to do it.
By Evening:2:40, with still ten cycles to go, Sacha Muromets's cavernous main hold was filled with nearly eleven hundred IVG mercenaries. Only a few duty officers remained with their various warships. Everyone had heard about the legendary Baxter Calhoun; few, however, had ever as much as seen his face.
A speaking platform of packing crates had been jury-rigged against a forward bulkhead; the IVGs sat on the floor or stood three and five deep around the periphery. At precisely Evening:2:48, Barbousse climbed to the rostrum, paused for the crowd to notice him, then shouted "THE COMMODORE!" in his loudest voice.
It took a few moments before that many people could scramble to their feet and come to attention, but at precisely Evening:3:00, Commodore Baxter Calhoun, R.F.S., mounted to the boards in utter silence, his footfalls and the ship's distant generators were the only sounds that could be detected in the giant chamber. He stood for a long moment, handsome and ageless as he had been when Brim first encountered him aboard I.F.S. Defiant at the beginning of that ship's tragically short career. Then he seemed to relax and his face twisted into what passed for a grin of approval. "Seats," he said. He hardly had to raise his voice.
Moments later, when quiet had again returned to the room, Calhoun placed his hands on his hips and began, legs akimbo, as if he were braced on the deck of some ancient surface vessel. "Fellow Imperials," he held forth in a strong, confident voice, "we are aboot to embark on a desperate an' dangerous mission. 'Tis o' wee importance whose uniform we wear: blue capes or white, the enemy wull be the same—and but little changed from the last cycle o' war we lived through. Leaguers are capable, brave, an' utterly merciless. I've seen them up close as well as their ships. Both are excellent—and dangerous." He let the words soak in for a moment before he continued. "In a lot o' places these days, they are already considered to be invincible. But," he said with great emphasis, "they can be beaten! I hae seen it done with gr'at regularity by ill-equipped forces o' much smaller size. An' I am here to show you how it is done...."
For the next solid metacycle, he delivered a top-level glimpse of the Leaguers and the tactics they used. "To beat them," he urged, "learn how privateers fight their battles. They are always outnumbered by squadrons of defenders, but they seldom find themselves deprived of the quarry they seek." He described how privateers battle in pairs, using ultra-fast ships to drive through hostile formations, shooting quickly and accurately with heavy armament, then breaking away before massed superior firepower can be brought to bear against them—often without scoring clean kills. In his view, serious damage spread widely among the ships of an enemy squadron could win more battles than actual kills. He claimed he'd seen the principle proven time and time again as the outnumbered ships of Beta Jago slashed squadrons from The Torond to ribbons. "And the poor Beta-Jagans war usin' surplus ships from the last conflict," he asserted. "Your Starfuries were literally made for this kind o' fighting—the right ships at absolutely the right time...."
At the end of his discourse, the assembled IVGs broke into wild applause that lasted until the grinning Calhoun was forced to hold up his hands and demand silence. When the chamber had again quieted sufficiently that he could make himself heard, he called Brim and McKenzie to the platform.
"Startin' today," he continued in a clear voice, "I hae decided to group your ships into two squadrons; we'll call 'em the Reds and the Blues for the moment. Brim here will command the Reds, our offensive element, with eight ships; McKenzie's Blues will patrol near Ordu as a base defense with the remaining three reserve ships...."
Immediately after the meeting, Brim asked Moulding if he would lead the second attack quad.
"Probably signing you up for suicide," he said, only half in jest. "But then, you already did that when you came aboard the IVG in the first place."
The aristocratic Moulding smiled grimly. "You and I made a bloody good team against the League during the Mitchell Trophy races," he said. "It would be a damn shame to deprive Nergol Triannic the benefit of our services over something so inconsequential as death."
They started their campaign early the next morning....
Within three weeks, nine Starfuries had been damaged in training accidents and thirty IVGs had gone back home because of the utterly primitive existence at Varnholm. Calhoun doggedly drove Brim and McKenzie to instruct their charges in tactics and put them through wartime maneuvers in the new starships—that continued to suffer damage by crews unfamiliar with the powerful craft under conditions of maximum performance. One waggish Commander painted five Fluvannian flags over the main hatch of his Starfury; he'd caused an accident that laid up five other ships for a week, thus qualifying himself and his crew as Leaguer aces. Even the practiced Moulding, accustomed to quick, near-vertical landings in Sherrington racers, nearly wiped out one evening after a tiring mock battle because the infinitely heavier Starfuries were designed for long, gentle approaches. He then poured on too much power when he lifted the porpoising starship off for another attempt at landfall and nearly blew up a whole row of generators.
Gradually, however, the accidents subsided, and the hard-working IVGs began to hammer their squadrons into tough, capable fighting units.
Unfortunately, the training had cost Calhoun many of the spares Brim so carefully hoarded. And none of the ships had yet seen actual combat of any kind....
During the next six weeks, relations between Fluvanna and the League rapidly deteriorated, the latter taking issue with nearly every element of foreign policy introduced by Mustafa's Foreign Ministry.
Almost on a daily basis, OverGalite'er Hanna Notram's Ministry for Public Consensus filled all possible news channels with her demands for "justice" on one trumped-up pretense or another.
Then, on 273/52010, R.F.S. Rurik, an ancient Fluvannian armored cruiser, disappeared without a trace in close proximity to a League-Torond battle exercise. When Fluvannian Search and Rescue squadrons converged on the last reported position of the old vessel, they were brusquely warned off with tremendous disruptor fire from strange new warships in the conformation of double chevrons. And the powerful barrages were clearly not fired in warning; they were ranging shots.
After a few weeks, the old ship was written off and added to the long catalog of vessels that had simply vanished into the great maw of the Universe. But R.F.S. Rurik—and her crew—were not easily forgotten, either in Fluvanna or the Imperial Admiralty. And whispered accusations surfaced from one end of the galaxy to the other.
The situation was headed rapidly from bad to worse when Brim abruptly received another message from Ambridge, Margot's chauffeur. The Princess would again visit Magor during the next Standard Week, this time on what the old servant termed a "last-moment peacekeeping mission." Of course, she hoped that Brim would be available for an evening rendezvous; she would contact him when she arrived.
Tissaurd was distinctly negative when the subject came up during an early morning with Brim in Starfury's wardroom. "And I'm not alone in this, Skipper," the tiny officer declared, shaking her finger at him. "The Chiefs upset, too. I asked him."
Brim frowned. "The Chief?" he demanded. "What does Barbousse know about all this?" He paused. "And how did you find out about it before I told you?"