The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ Catholic family, but he also knew she wasn’t herself a believer … at least not to the extent of going to Mass or accepting the word of the Papess in Rome as law.

      What the hell was her game?

      He didn’t trust the woman, not after her attempt to shut down the Marine Corps. He still wished he knew what her personal stake was in the Corps—why she seemed to hate it so. Further searches of available public data had turned up nothing more on her background. So far as he could tell, she was simply a political opportunist who saw in the current situation a possible way of making political capital at the Corps’ expense.

      That made her no less of a viper, however. She would need to be watched, and carefully, by the few friends the Marines still had within the Senate. He did not think it impossible that she might even be working for the PanEuropeans; the Québecois link, certainly, suggested that possibility. Quebec and France had been in each other’s pockets for centuries, since the First UN War at least, and possibly even well before that.

      At least the chances were good that the woman wasn’t working for the Xul. The Xul, Alexander thought with a wry and inward grin, didn’t work with anyone unless they were Xul, and even Madam Devereaux wasn’t capable of bridging a gap like that.

      “My ops planning staff has put together an assault plan,” Alexander continued, addressing the group at large. As he spoke, an animated diagram unfolded in the assembled minds of the audience. “The first ships in will act to set up a local defended space into which we can continue to drop ships and men. As you see here, there are two primary centers of interest within the Puller 659 system … here at the stargate, where our covert listening post is still in operation … and far in-system, here, at one of the moons of this lone gas giant. As of our last set of reports from the LP, the French fleet is in orbit around the gas giant. So far they’ve made no move at all to investigate the stargate.

      “We will materialize here. …” He indicated an area some 10 light-seconds away from the stargate, and nearly 30 light-minutes from the gas giant’s current orbital position. “With luck, we’ll be able to bring the entire MIEF into position before the PEs even know we’re in-system.”

      “Won’t they be aware of your ships when they arrive?” General Samuels asked. “Neutrino emissions from your ships’ reactors.”

      Samuels had a valid point. The QPTs or Quantum Power Taps utilized by Commonwealth naval vessels required massive input from conventional antimatter power plants to open the zero-point channels. Once those channels were open and functioning, energy from the zero-point field itself was more than sufficient to keep those channels open and working, but the power-up procedure required a lot of initial seed energy … and they wouldn’t be able to go through the paraspace translation with their power taps on. That, any good QPT engineer knew all too well, was an excellent way to release a very great deal of energy into a small volume of space in an accident—a “casualty,” in naval parlance—that would almost certainly result in the complete vaporization of Skybase.

      With a thought, Alexander switched on a doughnut-shaped swath of red light surrounding the glowing point of light that marked the Jovian gas giant. “We hope that the answer to that, General, is ‘no.’ At the moment the PE fleet is deep inside the radiation fields of the Puller Jovian. If their sensors are finely tuned enough, they might pick up our reactor leakage, but they would have to know exactly where to look to have much of a chance of picking us up. We’re hoping that the radiation belts in this area—and their own shields against that radiation—are going to keep them pretty well blind to our approach.”

      “Isn’t that a rather slender hope, General?” Devereaux demanded.

      “Not at all. According to our LP, the Republic forces have been paying no attention at all to the Gate. Even if they do pick up on what’s happening before our fleet is fully in place and ready to deploy, we anticipate being able to achieve local battlespace superiority in relatively short order. Their current fleet in the system consists of twelve ships. Of those, only two could properly be considered heavies—a monitor and a fleet carrier. The flagship appears to be a fast cruiser, and the rest of the ships are destroyers, escorts, frigates, and three supply-cargo vessels.

      “Because we’re trying to rescue our own personnel and because we wish to limit the scale of destruction, we intend to use Marine boarding tactics rather than ship-to-ship combat. That will give us our best chance to capturing the ships, freeing our people, and resolving the situation with relatively low casualties.”

      He kept to himself the corollary … that saving the lives of naval personnel on the ships of both sides meant spending the lives of a number of Marines, possibly a large number. The tactical situation, however, demanded it.

      “This is one instance where we absolutely need the Marines and their special capability in naval engagements,” he continued. He looked at Devereaux’s icon as he spoke, looking for a reaction, wishing again that he could read the emotion behind that bland, corona-haloed projection. “Modern space warfare is a notoriously all-or-nothing affair. Most missiles mount thermonuclear warheads. Beam weapons are designed to overpower shields and pick off point-defense batteries, so the nukes can get through. When a nuke gets through, usually, only a single one is necessary to obliterate the target vessel and everyone on board. That sort of thing would be very hard on the POWs we hope to rescue, and on the T.C. mutineers if they happen to be in the way. The Marines give us an alternative—the ability to burn our way onboard, capture or knock out the command centers, hijack their AI nets, and force each ship’s surrender.

      “We could launch a Marine strike solely with the personnel on board the strike carrier and on the assault transport, the assets that we will be sending through in the first translation. Tactical prudence, however, suggests that we wait until we have sufficient ships in place to provide us with decent fire support.

      “With that in mind, we will begin deploying our Marine strike forces immediately upon entry into the Puller system. We will not commit ourselves to the assault, however, until we have a naval force in-system that at least matches the PanEuropean fleet already present … say, a total of two to three translation runs. Are there any questions?”

      There were questions … most of them small and nagging and micromanaging bits of annoyance. The council appeared for the most part to have accepted at least the broad outlines of the plan. Technically, they couldn’t dictate strategy or tactics, but technically, also, the President could, in his guise as commander in chief of the Commonwealth’s armed forces. The council sought to understand the plan well enough to give the President decent feedback. And, slowly, thanks in part to the military and ex-military personnel within their number, and to their EA links to the Net, that understanding was forthcoming.

      But Alexander had tangled with politicians often enough to know that it was never that simple.

      Especially, he thought, when one of those politicians was Marie Devereaux.

       16

       0112.1102

       USMC Skybase

       LaGrange-3/Puller 695

       1750 hrs GMT

      Skybase drifted in empty space, alone and unattended, now, СКАЧАТЬ