'We're not hitting them just yet,' Verloff commented, emptying his glass. It was only water, as he was still on duty. Admiral Cindy nodded, eyeing the old Admiral with a hint of admiration that she was trying to hide from him. They hadn't left the bridge until the numbers had rolled in. It was a preliminary tally, given that the logistical fleet was still actively prowling through the debris field and finding damaged ships with pockets of survivors trapped within them. Nemesis' corvette units had paid a brutal toll. Slightly less than a third of them was still operational and most of those required a lot of maintenance. That was something Cindy still struggled with to accept. Those captains and crew had gone to their deaths knowing fully well what the likely outcome was. She was used to the concept of dying in the line of duty, of people undertaking missions that had a high chance of being a one way trip. It wasn't the concept of people willingly giving their life for the greater cause that she couldn't grasp. It was the sheer size of it. These weren't a handful of individuals. More than a hundred thousand men and women had died to make Verloff's gambit a reality. And that had only been the opening move.
Aside from the tiny, light ships Nemesis was, to her surprise, largely untouched. Sure, most battleships would require a metric ton of maintenance on their engines and inertial dampeners, plenty of weapons had been overheated, most of their ammo stores and missile racks had been depleted and tens of thousands of folks were wounded, ranging from minor burns to heavy radiation poisoning, but in the end the toll was so light it stretched disbelief when compared to the foe they had faced. Task Force Fenris, however, was off significantly worse, having taken the brunt of the enemy's desperate charge. They were effectively out of the fight. The few ships that weren't sporting extensive damage needed major refits because they had redlined their weapon systems to the point that half the generators supporting them had blown apart under the stress. Not to mention that the Ad Aspera was positively holed. Still, the survivors held their heads up high in pride. The favourite running joke was that they'd need a bigger ship at this rate, lest they run out of hull to paint all their kills on. 'What if we only count the dreadnaughts?' 'We already are!'
That feeling of victory only grew when you looked at the damage they had wreaked upon the Novicans. Verloff had put that list out in the open for all to see. Sure, the Empire had lost well over four hundred thousand men, with several thousand more still listed as missing, but the Novicans had, at a conservative estimate lost well over eight million. The numbers were staggering. More people had died in this single battle than the entirety of Naval Intelligence had at their disposal. Both numbers still went up. The logistics fleet had split into their own task forces and were pursuing their objectives with no less determination and eagerness than the combat forces. Repairs were being carried out at a breath-taking pace and the proud flagship of Nemesis was surrounded by support vessels as they cut loose damaged sections and replaced them with shiny new ones. Normally they'd be painted black as soon as they were installed, but that would have to wait until they returned to an Imperial shipyard. The support fleet had been stuffed to the brim with hull plating, cables, generators and the million other things that would be needed to refit the warships. Somehow nobody had found a niche to sneak several million tonnes of paint aboard.
Then there was the small matter of dozens of Novican vessels that were crippled, but not outright destroyed, floating about the battlefield. The logistic units were very lightly armed, but even their meagre armaments were more than enough to blast the survivors to kingdom come. Not a very fair or humane thing, but the Empire didn't feel any pity for the Novic Confederacy. The bastards had betrayed them, stabbed them in the back and caused the deaths of millions of Imperial men and women. That the Novicans had lost a good deal more in that same timespan didn't matter to them. They had been the ones to start this war. All the Empire had ever wanted was to be left alone. Now that they were provoked and brought to the field of war, they held nothing back.
'Still there?' came Verloff's amused voice, pulling Cindy out of her musings.
She looked up and found him giving her a grandfatherly smile as he waved his fork around. Which fits his age, she suddenly realised. 'I'm sorry. I was distracted.'
'You're right to be. This battle… Did you know it's the first time that such a large scale battle was fought in space? Between humans, I mean. Today was one for the history books. We'll be heroes, no doubt. Impossible odds. Victory despite an overwhelming disadvantage.' He snorted. 'Kola's going to be remembered as an idiot. He's not. He played every card he had right.'
'But you still won,' Cindy countered, putting down her own fork. She looked around in the large mess hall. They were seated apart from the others, hidden from sight as far as that was possible, allowing them a measure of privacy.
'I won. And he lost. But as I said, he never had the initiative and I never let go of it. I came up with plans that were outside his scope of expectations. Rolling battleships around? Wasting so many missiles just to create a smoke screen? A new type of fighter that outperformed anything in their arsenal by an insane margin? The galaxy didn't know our capabilities. If any of our units had performed slightly less than they had, if any of my tactics had gone wrong, if they had even an inkling of what our plans were, then we wouldn't be sitting here discussing the aftermath. It's why this battle was so imperative. We hit them with the full force of Nemesis and the full extent of what we are capable of in terms of tactics. We knew what they could do, but not the other way around. God knows that we paid for the difference in casualties with enough credits. Your spies, our ships, wargames, the training every crew member and officer went through… They didn't have that. Then there's the matter that I've actually fought in these large scale battles before.' Bitterness crept in his voice.
'Against the Kra'lah?' She took care to keep her voice neutral. She had read the reports coming from the frontlines when the war had first begun. Compared to the bloody slaughter that had occurred there, the entire Imperial-Novican conflict seemed little more than a picnic.
'Yes,' he confirmed, growling the words. 'Against those God-forsaken bug-bastards.'
'What were they like?' she asked.
'With the same ease that we broke through Kola's lines, they annihilated ours. Repeatedly. They're masters of plasma based weaponry. At horrifyingly long distances too. We were still racing to close in to them, only a select few of our weapons firing, when the first volleys hit. They kept it intact, somehow, guided the fucking projectiles through our jamming. I lost a tenth of Nemesis just to close in to them, and that was with Battlegroup Heracles fighting with them up close. Battlegroup Artemis was racing to link up with us. It was a desperate fight. The Kra'lagh were advancing towards Lilyabum and we were doing everything in our power to stop them. That's where I blew up the enemy dreadnaught, at the expense of Fenris. Three ships came out of that short clash. The Ad Aspera wasn't just damaged then. Half it was literally gone.'
He sighed. Deeply. His weary, exhausted soul showing. 'Heracles died that day. We were pushed back to the planetary defence grid and they just shot it to pieces from afar. Our massive guns sat there, barely able to reach the bastards. We got lucky. That's all there is to it. Artemis crashed their party and rushed them from behind and I took what was left of Nemesis and launched a counterattack on their flagship. Turns out their overal fleet cohesion was rubbish. They learned quickly, but not quickly enough. I managed to take down the big bug, Artemis slipped around the remaining dreadnaughts and forced the Kra'lagh to close with the planet. Between Artemis, Nemesis and the defence grid we managed to cripple their attack. We evacuated the planet to the best of our ability, destroying what we couldn't take. Not long after that a new attack hit us and we just ran for it, tail between our legs. We couldn't make a stand at all. Even as we ran we saw them bombard what little presence we had left on the planet, before sending out massive attack shuttles. I don't want to know what happened to the few folks left on the planet. I just hope they died quickly.
He looked up, pure, unbridled hate welling up from his dark eyes. 'That's what they're like. Without mercy. Overwhelming. Monsters.'
Cindy nodded, awed. She had lost her own fair share of operatives to the Kra'lagh invasion as they had carved deeply into Imperial territory, but that amounted to dozens of men. Not millions. 'I think I understand,' she eventually said.
'And that's why,' Verloff continued, twirling his knife around before slamming it into the small steak that constituted their victory meal, 'we have to kill Kola. Even as we speak, he's analysing everything that happened and you can be damned sure that I'll never be able to surprise him with the same tactics again. He has fewer means, but more men. He'll compensate. Calculate. And strike back. Every defeat that you survive makes you stronger as an officer. You learn, adapt and only grow more determined to get back at your enemy. And that's why I designated him as a target. That's why it's imperative that he dies. We cannot afford letting him survive. He'll move heaven and earth to get control of the armies, and if the Novican Parliament doesn't grant him that, he'll just take it and come at us guns blazing. That's purely hypothetical though. He's as good as dead. He just doesn't know it yet.'
'You seem awfully confident in the rest of this battle...' she ventured, eyeing the confident Admiral carefully. He had been equally confident before the naval battle and had been true to his word, but now he seemed much more relaxed. Probably because the orbital defences couldn't give chase and annihilate his fleet if things went south, if she had to take a guess.
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'Oh, but I am. You'll likely not have noticed it, but I held one more card in reserves. I have a small flotilla of five heavy cruisers in the back. I almost called them in when the Novicans came at me directly, but now I'm glad I didn't use them. No, their orbital defences are a thing to reckon with, but I have no intentions of tangling with them in the slightest.' He leaned forward and a mischievous glint was in his eyes as the years seemed to slide off him. 'I basically stole those ships,' he confided in her, before bursting out in a fit of giggles as the in-joke flew over her head.
'I don't get it,' she replied.
'No, I don't expect you do. Don't worry, you'll get it as soon as you see them in action. They'll blast a hole in the Novican orbital defences and we'll move in to widen the gap. Not quickly, oh no, I'll have to keep my fleet spread out to prevent Kola from pulling his stations together. Bring enough of those in close proximity and we will have to do it the old fashioned way and we don't have nearly enough firepower for that. If he does that, though, he'll open holes in his defence and that's what I want anyway. The moment that a gap appears in his defences, the ground forces will go through it and commence the invasion.' He gave her a confident smile, before returning his attention back to his plate, digging in with a lot more gusto than before.
'I take it you have something planned there as well?' she asked. She wasn't an expert in ground combat, but knew well enough that landing an army without orbital coverage was suicide.
'Of course. The armies will go in, begin establishing beach heads and start a slow, bloody push towards the enemy lines. They'll have to move rapidly, but their main objective is a solid push, which will require a careful offensive lest they lose cohesion. The Novicans are really well dug in on the planet, or so I've been made to understand. They can call in enough artillery to wipe out entire divisions in a couple of minutes. So we'll need to move in a metric ton of mobile shield generators to prevent that from happening. Their own shield generators are meant to stop fleet bombardments while their own heavy cannons take potshots at our fleet, so any return fire our artillery can provide the ground forces with will be stopped. It'll be an old fashion assault. Long-winded, slow going and very bloody.'
'That doesn't sound like any strategy we'd come up with,' Cindy muttered, before her eyes narrowed in a flash of realisation. 'You said armies.' It wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
Verloff grinned as he refilled his glass, before raising it in a toast. 'So I did,' he agreed. His eyes twinkled. 'Tell me, Miss Admiral of Naval Intelligence. What do you know of the Genesis Battalion?'
She snorted indelicately. Very unbefitting of her rank as an Admiral, but Verloff somehow succeeded in getting through her act of ice queen with blood-boiling ease. 'Very little, as you well know. Their existence isn't really a secret anymore.' Verloff raised an eyebrow at her at that. 'At least amongst the upper echelons,' she amended. 'But what they are actually capable of, their numbers, where they came from, names, records, members, all of that is well hidden. I know the battalion was created by you and Eisel, who's about as much as an enigma as his battalion is, and that they were sent on the suicide mission to reclaim the Kra'lagh fleet and were extremely successful. Other than that, I know nothing of them. Aside my brief meeting with them.' She gave him a withering glare as she recalled the events.
'Oh yes,' he said, smiling warmly at her. 'I do enjoy that memory.'
'So in short, I know very little of them or their co-creator.' Verloff smiled at that remark, although she couldn't fathom why. 'So why don't you enlighten me?'
He didn't reply and so she practised patience, contenting herself with resuming her meal as she waited for the Admiral to continue. When he didn't and instead picked up his cutlery, she raised an eyebrow at him. He didn't reply and the second ticked by. Then minutes. She finished her meal and kept waiting, feeling the tension rise. Verloff seemed perfectly at ease, but was pointedly ignoring her. She felt her hair rise and resisted the urge to fidget about. He was making her nervous and that was not a thing she was used to, or enjoyed for that matter.
With a loud clink he put his fork and knife down and finally deigned to look her in the eyes. The glare she received was surprisingly cold and calculating. 'Genesis serves General Eisel,' he began, stressing the man's rank. 'General Eisel serves me. I serve the Emperor.'
Cindy froze at that last word. He knew. The realisation hit her like an avalanche and she found herself clutching the knife so hard that her knuckles went white. She forced herself to relax. Of course he knew. He was the de-facto commander of all Imperial naval forces. It would have been stranger had he not known.
'As such, it is my belief that you should focus your investigations outwards, Admiral. Not inwards. And have some faith in your brothers in arms. You know better than most why some secrets must be kept.' He smiled again and there was nothing warm about it this time. It was cold and menacing and made her liver fold in on itself. 'Now if you'll excuse me, Admiral. I have a battle to plan. I suggest you make use of the lull in the fighting to freshen up, maybe get some sleep. I think you might have a need for it. I am aware that you might see me as heavy handed for addressing you in such a patronising manner, but forgive an old man. I merely responded in kind.'
As the Admiral got up and gave her a polite bow, Cindy felt a knot forming in her stomach. Someone in Naval Intelligence had dropped the ball on this. Somehow, someway, someone in Nemesis, or in Eisel's employ, had caught wind of the internal investigation running on both Verloff and the doctor. How? They had been so careful! They knew how secure Nemesis and it's R&D wing were, how well Eisel protected his secrets and how virtually no back door existed that wasn't guarded. Yet somehow the cat had gotten out of the bag and Verloff was now aware that her presence here wasn't merely to cooperate and give her agents down on the surface a chance to escape when the Empire hit them like a meteor. She still didn't know how they were going to do that, but at this point she no longer doubted it.
Verloff had made one thing clear to her. He wasn't merely the Admiral of the Empire, an unrivalled genius in fleet battles. The man knew the politics that surrounded his station and despite his outward, brutish appearance, he played the game well. He had been well aware of her true intentions from the start. He had simply been polite right up to the point that her attempt at conversationally dragging out some intel out of him had rankled his good mood. Best for her to make a swift retreat, for now.
A short while later she found herself in her assigned room. It was small and spartan, fitting the Imperial mentality. She sat down on her cot and pulled her desk closer to her, calling up a view of the outside. Massive ships glittered in the dark, sporadic shield discharges indicating where debris impacted them. Resupply vessels were criss crossing the large fleet and docking with warships, not worrying about the damaged Novican fleet that was still stuck on their outbound trajectory and was trying to slow itself down without functioning engines. Tenders, repair craft and fabricator vessels flitted about, fixing what they could and replacing what they couldn't. Nemesis was rapidly rearming and reloading and then the assault on the orbital defence grid would commence. Only a few more hours left. Tug vessels were dragging large wrecks around to separate piles. If the heap of metal was Novican in origin, they'd be used as impromptu mass rounds. If not, they'd be hauled back to Imperial space for repairs. She spotted the troop carriers, slowly coasting forward, accompanied by an enormous mass of destroyers and handful of corvettes. She tried to discern which of those ships might be carrying Genesis, but she somehow knew that whichever vessel might be transporting the elusive battalion, she wouldn't be able to find it. The only thing that Naval Intelligence did know about them was an approximate estimate of their cost. Which had been absurdly and worryingly high.
She rested her head against the cold, sturdy screen and sighed. She couldn't focus on the assault. That wasn't her task. She had come here to find out all that she could about Genesis, about Verloff and Eisel. About their intentions, their loyalty to the Empire.
So many questions. So few answers. She wanted to trust Verloff, take him at his word. But that wasn't what her job was about.
'We serve the truth, and nothing but the truth. Cloaked in deceit we chase it. Hidden by lies, we stalk it. At the cost of ourselves, we uncover it and so we serve the truth and the Empire,' she recited her oath.
Then, with a grimace, she added the unofficial oath.
'Ours is not to do or die. Ours is but to reason why.'
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