Shadow of Freedom

The three merchantmen who’d broken away from the planet complicated the situation a bit more, but not enough to do Thurgood any good. They were slower, they’d gotten started later, and even though each of them had headed off in a different direction, her warships had ample acceleration advantage to run them all down. She could have diverted a single destroyer—or even a LAC from one of her carriers—to deal with each of them. For that matter, she could have sent a massive LAC strike screaming after Thurgood and brought him to action long before he reached the hyper limit. Of course, more people would probably get killed that way before Thurgood formally surrendered what was left of his command, but there was no doubt she could have done it if she’d wanted to.

There was a much simpler and more elegant way to do the same job, however.

“All right, Dominica,” she said after a moment. “Update the merchies’ course profiles. As soon as she’s done that, Bill,” she turned back to the communications officer, “pass all the tactical data on to Captain Morgan. Tell him I don’t want any of those freighters getting out with news of our arrival.”

* * *

“Message from the Flag, Sir,” Commander Frank Ukhtomskoy’s com officer announced.

“Ah?” Ukhtomskoy turned his command chair towards HMS Talon’s com section. “Our marching orders, I presume?”

“Yes, Sir. Latest update on enemy movements and target assignments for the intercepts.”

“Good.” Ukhtomskoy nodded and looked at his astrogator. “In that case, I suppose we should be going,” he observed.

Thirty-two seconds later, the destroyer disappeared quietly into hyper-space 198.2 million kilometers from the star called Meyers.

* * *

“That’s it, Sir,” Captain Wayne said quietly, taking the message board Lieutenant Commander Olaf Lister, Thurgood’s communications officer, had just sent to the briefing room. “Colonel Trondheim’s officially surrendered.” The chief of staff shrugged and handed the board back to the flag bridge yeoman who’d delivered it. He twitched his head at the briefing room door, and the yeoman vanished as Wayne turned back to Thurgood.

“Not like he had a lot of choice once they dropped into orbit around the planet and demanded his surrender,” the commodore observed. “In fact, if I’m surprised by anything, it’s that it took that long for the Manties to find someone to do the surrendering!”

And that we actually got the chance to run for it, he added mentally, trying to feel grateful for his good fortune.

To be honest, he’d never expected the Manties to simply let him go, not with their acceleration advantage. They could easily have dropped a handful of cruisers into Meyers orbit and sent everything else after him, and he’d never had any illusions about what would have happened if they had. The fact that they’d opted to simply ignore him and continue on their profile to secure the capital planet had been an enormous relief, yet there was a part of him which almost…resented it.

That wasn’t the right verb, and he knew it, but it came close. It was as if he and his ships were so sublimely unimportant that the Manty admiral couldn’t even be bothered to send someone to squash them. Francis Thurgood had never been one of those Battle Fleet idiots, and he’d never felt any particular urge to die for the honor of the flag. The lives of the men and women under his command were far too important to waste doing stupid things. But still that sensation of being casually brushed aside…

Better that than being turned into glowing wreckage

, he reminded himself. Not that your career isn’t going to get turned into wreckage when Old Terra finds out about this. Alonso y Yáñez will probably realize you did the right thing, but that prick Rajampet sure as hell won’t. The civilians are going to be looking for scapegoats, too, and you can bet your bottom credit they aren’t going to put any of the blame on Verrocchio. Hell, they’ll probably turn him and Hongbo into martyrs! The courageous civilian administrators who stayed at their posts while the military cut and ran on them. Blech.

“I suppose we should head back to Flag Bridge,” he said out loud, pushing back from the table. Wayne and Commander Merriman followed him out of the briefing room, and he tried hard to shake free of the numb dejection which had flowed over him in the last three and three-quarters hours.