showed them the familiar area of their recent operations, which by stripping
away vital personnel and leaving chaos on the stations left one lone untampered
station like the narrowing of a funnel toward Pell, toward the wide straggle of
Hinder Stars. One station. Viking. Signy had figured the pattern long since, the
tactic old as Earth, old as war, impossible for Union to resist, for they could
not allow vacuum in power, could not allow the stations they had struggled to
gain to fall into disorder, plundered of technicians and directors and security
forces, deliberately allowed to collapse. Union had started this game of
station-taking. So they had rammed stations down Union’s throat; Union had then
to move in or have stations lost, had to supply techs and other skilled
personnel, to replace the ones evacuated. And ships to guard them, quickly, one
after the other. Union had had to stretch even its monster capacity to hold what
it had been given to digest.
It had had to take Viking whole, with all the internal complications of a
station never evacuated… take it latest, because by ramming stations down
Union’s gullet in their own rapid sequence, they had dictated the sequence and
direction of Union’s moves of ships and personnel.
Viking had been last.
Central to the others, with desolation about it, stations struggling to survive.
“All indication is,” Mazian said softly, “that they have decided to fortify
Viking; logical choice: Viking’s the only one with its comp files complete, the
only one where they’ve had a chance to round up all the dissidents, all the
resistance, where they could apply their police tactics and card everyone,
instantly. Now it’s all clean, all sanitary for their base of operations; we’ve
let them throw a lot into it; we take out Viking, and hit at the others, that
are hanging by a thread in terms of viability… and then there’s nothing but far
waste between us and Fargone; between Pell and Union. We make expansion
inconvenient, costly; we herd the beast to its wider pastures in the other
direction… while we can. You have your specific instructions in the folders. The
fine details may have to be improvised within certain limits, according to what
might turn up in your sectors. Norway, Libya, India, unit one; Europe, Tibet,
Pacific, two; North Pole, Atlantic, Africa, three; Australia has its own
business. If we’re lucky we won’t face anything at our rear, but every
contingency is covered. This is going to be a long session; that’s why I let you
rest. We’ll simulate until there are no more questions.”
Signy drew a slow breath and released it, opened the folder and in the silence
Mazian afforded them to do so, scanned the operation as it was set up, her lips
pressed to a thinner and thinner line. No need for drill: they knew what they
were about, variations on old themes they had all run separately. But this was
navigation that would try all their skill, a mass strike, a precision of arrival
not synched, but separate, disaster if jumpships came near each other, if an
object of mass like the enemy just happened to be in the vicinity. They were
going to flash in close enough to Viking to give the opposition no options, skin
the hair off disaster. The presence of any enemy ship where it statistically
ought not to be, the deployment of ships out from station in unusual
configurations… all manner of contingencies. They took into account too the
positions of worlds and satellites in the system on their arrival date, to
screen themselves where possible. To flash out of jump space with nerves still
sluggish, to haul dazed minds into action and try to plot instantly the location
of friend and enemy, to coordinate an attack so precisely that some of them were
going to overjump Viking and some underjump it, come in from all sides at once,
from the same start—
They had one advantage over Union’s sleek, new ships, the fine equipment, the
unscarred young crews, tape-trained, deeptaught with all the answers. The Fleet
had experience, could move their patched ships with a precision Union’s fine
equipment had not yet matched, with nerve Union conservatism and adherence to