Fleet of the Damned (Sten #4) by Allan Cole Chris Bunch

Author:Allan Cole, Chris Bunch [Bunch, Allan Cole, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ingram Distribution
Published: 2011-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

STEN ITEMIZED CHAOS as he slowly steered his combat car over the rubble that had been Cavite City’s main street. This was not the first city or world that he had been on when the talking stopped and the shooting started. But this appeared to be the first time he had been in on the ground floor of a Empire-wide war.

Experience is valuable, he reminded himself, which avoided his worry about Brijit.

Sten had brought his miraculously undamaged ships down onto Cavite Base at nightfall. Sometimes dishonesty pays—he had located his supply base in a disused warehouse in the test yards. As a result, the weaponry and supplies that Sutton had acquired had not been touched by the Tahn attack.

He ordered his boats to resupply and return to low orbit immediately. He would try to find out from fleet headquarters how bad things really were.

Cavite Base was a boil and confusion of smoke and flame.

Sten commandeered a combat car and headed for the Carlton Hotel. If it still stood, he assumed that what remained of van Doorman’s command staff would be there.

Cavite City hadn’t suffered major damage, Sten estimated. Imperial Boulevard—the central street—had absorbed some incendiary and AP bombs or rockets, but most of the buildings still stood. There weren’t any civilians on the night-hung streets other than rescue workers and fire-fighting teams. Contrary to legend, disaster generally made people pull together or retreat into their homes—rioting in the streets had always been a myth.

Sten veered the combat car aside as a gravsled, hastily painted with red crosses on the landing pads, whistled past. In the distance, he could hear the sounds of combat. That was the storming of the Siglnt center—since the Tahn had not been able to land, those revolutionaries who had occupied the center had died to the last man.

Sten did not know, or much care, what the shooting signified—the situation was bad enough right now for him. He grounded the combat car outside the Carlton and started for the entrance.

Security, he noted wryly, had improved—three sets of SP men checked him before he hit the main doors. But some things did not change. The two dress-uniformed patrolmen still snapped their willyguns to salute as he came up the steps. Sten wondered if either of them realized that their uniforms were now spattered with muck, blood, and what appeared to be vomit.

If Cavite City was chaos, Admiral van Doorman’s headquarters was worse. Sten desperately needed to know how bad the damage was and what his orders should be. He started at the fleet operations office. It was dark and deserted. Only the computer terminals flashed and analyzed the disaster of the day. A passing tech told him that all operations personnel appeared to have died in the attack.

Fine. He would try fleet intelligence.

Sten should have known what was going on when he saw that the door to the intelligence center yawned wide, with no sentries.

Inside, he found madness—quite literally.

Ship Captain Ladislaw sat behind a terminal, programming and reprogramming.

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