Setosha - the Beating Heart
Copyright© 2010 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 29
Setosha, Aboard the Families Strike Carrier Phormio
“What were our losses?” Corey’s voice was faint and spiritless. She lay on her bed in her cabin, the lights dimmed and a cool, damp cloth over her eyes.
“Preliminary?” Tanya asked. Corey muttered something unintelligible that her Chief of Staff interpreted as agreement. “These are preliminary, ma’am. We lost three carriers destroyed, Tannenberg, Chalons, and Togo. The Suffren, Yi Sung Sin, Kolin, and Agrippa are all heavily damaged.”
“What about the other ships?” Corey’s voice faded to a barely audible whisper. “Everyone, Tanya. What were all of our losses?”
Tanya took a deep breath. “We lost 21 Cruisers, 26 Escorts, and 131 fighters destroyed. Everyone else has been damaged, some pretty badly. We’ve picked up a lot of our people, ma’am. Captain Hays is running the rescue operations, and she’s finding more every few minutes.” She paused, wondering if Corey wanted all of the news. “The preliminary estimate is between 1,500 and 2,000 dead, with at least another 2,000 wounded.”
Corey wanted to crawl under something and hide. Her stomach churned hard enough that she thought she might throw up. There had never been a worse day in the history of the Families Navy. Yes, they had won, but she took no comfort in that. So many had died, and not just their own. She could still see that incandescent blot as the Imperial battleships vanished one by one in that flaming cloud of antimatter death.
Everything she had worked for these last two months had been to make that happen. She had taken grave, almost foolish risks to do that, and now she almost wished she’d failed. She hadn’t realized, emotionally, what success would be like. So many deaths, and she was responsible for each of them.
She could still hear the cheers bursting out on Phormio’s Flag Bridge. She knew those same fierce cries had echoed in every Families ship present, and were probably matched by the people on the ground who happened to look up at the right time. She had made it possible for the Families Fleet to kill a whole generation of Imperial Naval officers and crew. This would free Setosha. With luck and careful strategy, it might even free the Families’ lost kin.
Corey wondered if she was the only one who felt the terrible price of that freedom. Each Imperial Battleship carried a crew of 900 officers and men. In a heartbeat, a few seconds, really, she had snuffed out more than 25,000 lives. That number was appalling, but when she added it to all the other deaths on all the other Imperial and Families ships, the total numbed her brain. Others might remember and cherish the victory fashioned by the Families Fleet at Setosha. She would never forget the awful cost of that victory.
“Imperial losses,” Tanya continued reading. “Most of these you already know, ma’am, but these are preliminary, too. As of an hour ago, 30 battleships destroyed or captured, 48 cruisers destroyed, including five of their battlecruisers, 92 destroyers gone, all eight carriers wrecked or dust, and 67 probable kills on their Fast Attacks. We also have another couple dozen destroyed or captured odds and ends like repair ships, hospital ships, and other stuff that we ran down during the pursuit. And before you ask, I don’t even know how we could begin to count the Imperial fighters we destroyed. Let’s just say it looks like the clean sweep Admiral Bridges wanted. If they aren’t dead, they’re hiding, and we both know how that’s going to end for them.
“Except for the battleships, these figures are all likely to go up as we cross-reference and confirm everything we know. For example, I’m sure we took care of all six of their battlecruisers, and we know their Fast Attacks don’t have interstellar drives, so if they aren’t accounted for yet, they soon will be. The largest surviving Imperial non-combatant ... well, that’s a toss-up between a repair ship and a research vessel. Several of the destroyers that were orbiting Setosha are in decaying orbits; we’d better fix that before they fall on our people on the ground. The girls who took back the ring did an incredible job, ma’am.”
Something Tanya had said earlier caught Corey’s attention. She pulled the damp cloth off her face, turned, and blinked owlishly at her Chief of Staff. “Destroyed or captured?” she asked. “You said battleships destroyed or captured, Tanya. Captured?”
“Aye, ma’am,” Tanya grinned. “The crew of the escort Uhu captured the Impie battleship Emperor Michael Triumphant. That was one of the battleships we smashed at the beginning of the battle. Uhu was wrecked, and so was that battleship. Uhu’s captain wasn’t ready to quit yet, so she boarded the monster. She didn’t run into much resistance. Most of the crew had already abandoned ship.”
“They captured a battleship?” Corey sat up, her headache and exhaustion forgotten. “How did ... no, wait, I’ll catch up on all the news in a bit.” She shook her head in amazement. “I want to meet those girls.”
“You and everyone else.” Tanya grinned apologetically. “Admiral Bridges is calling a conference on Oldendorf in an hour. I know the crew of Uhu is specifically invited, so you’ll get your chance.”
Corey sighed and flipped on the light next to her bed. Because of her position, she got to clutter her cabin with a desk and a pair of file cabinets. She stared at the mess on her desk with a tired frown. She wasn’t the Eldest of the Battle Group, but the paperwork was piled high on her desk as if she was, and everyone deferred to her judgment. She was an Eldest in everything but name.
Tanya sat on her own bed. “Feeling better, ma’am?” she asked, concern evident in her voice. “When the battle was over, you looked like a slab of meat that’d been tenderized and marinated for too many hours.”
“Some,” Corey admitted. “I lost all my energy by the end of the pursuit. Leah warned me about that. Running a battle really takes it out of you.” She drew a shaky breath. “I think I’m all right.”
“I saw Adana Korina shortly after the end of The Raid,” Tanya told her. “You could have knocked her over with a feather.” She touched Corey’s shoulder. “You looked the same as she did back on the Bridge, and you don’t look much better now. I’ll make sure you get a chance to rest some more on the way over to Oldendorf.”
“I feel ... I feel...” Corey shook her head. “I don’t know what I feel, Tanya. Sick, hollow, empty...” She shook her head again. “I don’t know.”
“We won, you know, if that matters.”
“We lost 50 ships and 131 fighters,” Corey said. “That’s a lot of people.”
“But we’re rescuing a lot, too, ma’am.”
“Fifty ships means probably 2,000 dead. K-303 was a walk in the park compared to this.”
“The people on our ships chose to be here,” Tanya reminded her. She put down her papers and leaned forward, resting her hands on Corey’s shoulders. “We all knew it would be bad. Everybody knew it was going to be the worst fight we’d ever been in. I was scared the whole time, ma’am. It wasn’t like any other battle I’d ever seen. I was in the Second Battle of Setosha, and I was at K-303. Those battles were bad, but nothing like this.
“Today, when I was on the Flag Bridge, I could see the Damage Control repeater screen from my station, and I could see how badly we were getting hit. I could see the reports from the other ships in the Battle Group and what was happening to them. And every time I looked up, I could see those missiles coming in, wave after wave of them, just like we were planning to do to the battleships.
“I was scared, ma’am. I really thought I was going to die. Then I looked over at you, concentrating, pacing, doing your job, and I realized something. I might have been scared to the point where I nearly messed my pants, but if someone had given me the chance to be anywhere else, I wouldn’t have taken it. I wanted to be here.”
She smiled, staring at something only she could see. “I knew we were doing something nobody else had ever done. I knew this had to be done, and I was trained to do it, and you and Admiral Bridges gave me a chance to do it the best way I possibly could. I thought about all of us on the Flag Bridge, helping you get everything just right, and I knew I could tell my sibs and kids that I was at the Third Battle of Setosha when Corey Andersen smashed the Imperial Fleet. I was on the Bridge and helped her do it.”
She rocked back on her bed, holding her knee with her hands. “That’ll be something, you know, ma’am. Not very many will ever be able to say that. I saw you make it all happen. I helped you make it happen. Oh, you did the thinking for us, but it took all of us. It wasn’t just you killing those battleships, it was me, too, and it was Colleen, and it was Captain Boone, and my sib-sister down in the hanger, and ... and everybody!”
Tanya was right, Corey realized. Everybody had been part of the victory. Lots of them had survived achieving that victory. Leah Bridges and Volyn Carter could easily find someone who could take over now. “I can go home,” she said softly. “I can go home and not think about the war for a while.”
“You can go home and have those babies you keep talking about,” Tanya said, smiling and tugging Corey to her feet. “Now, come on. The Admiral wants to see you. Lots of people want to see you. Things have changed since you left the bridge. An Imperial convoy jumped in a few minutes ago and Josie’s cruisers and the girls off de Ruyter, Kolin and Sadowa are tearing them to pieces. They’re still fighting on the ground, and I’m sure there are other things we’ve got to finish, too.”
Numb and aching, but feeling a little better than she had immediately after the battle, Corey followed her cabinmate.
An hour later, when Corey entered the conference room on Oldendorf, Admiral Bridges was leaning against the table, relaxed, smiling, and chatting with the officers clustered around her. “I think what impresses me most is how fast she sees things,” she was saying in a casual voice. “She quickly perceives the flow of the action and decides right away how she can make it work for her. When we talked during the battle...” She paused, seeing Corey. “Come in, Captain Andersen, come in.”
Corey had managed to wolf down a ration bar and a cup of brew during the trip to Oldendorf. She was still tired, but she felt better than when Tanya had come to get her. “Ready for our debrief, ma’am?” she asked, forcing a smile.
Admiral Bridges laughed, and the years seemed to melt from her face. “Corey, if you think I’m going to suffer through another six-hour review with you over this latest fight...”
Her voice trailed off, and she glanced speculatively at the other officers in the room. “Then again, aye, it might be a good idea, at that. Some of you know this, some don’t. After every fight we’ve had this last month, Captain Andersen and I have reviewed the action, taking it apart in as much detail as we could, looking at it from all sides. This hasn’t been like the After-Action sessions you all know about; we’ve gone into detail you wouldn’t believe. This usually takes us about six hours, and by the time we’re done, we are both completely wrung out.” She laughed briefly. “We’ll do that, Captain, but it’ll have to wait; we have a few more important things to take care of first.” She looked around the room again. “Time to get to work, ladies.”
Admiral Bridges took her seat at the head of the conference table and waved the other officers to their chairs. “Things didn’t go quite as easily as the people on the ground thought they would,” she told them, “and there’s still heavy fighting going on. Casualties have been worse than expected. The Imperials are dug in around Setosha City, but that’s the only place they still hold on the surface. There’s extensive fighting north of the city. South and east of the city, we’re pressing hard against the Imperials.”
“They didn’t have to fight,” one of the officers said. “Once we won the battle up here, there was no point in a ground campaign.”
“That’s logical,” the Admiral said. “But the people on the ground felt they had to strike back. There’s a practical reason, too. Some of the prisoners we took have spoken of some ground-based planet-killing weapons that are supposed to be on the planet. If the Imperials still control those, they could set them off and destroy the biosphere. I put Marine Captain Johnson in charge of coordinating with the people on the ground, and she’s following up on that.”
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