The Unincorporated Future Read Free Page A

It had been decided that having a bodyguard inside during Cabinet meetings sent the wrong message, and now Holke had to wait outside, a change in circumstance he’d taken every opportunity to inform his boss that he was none too pleased with.
    “Forgive me for being late,” started Sandra, “but we took a bit of detour getting here. She then looked over to the grand admiral. “Admiral Sinclair, if you wouldn’t mind.”
    Joshua Sinclair rose up slowly, the terrible strain of the war showing in his hunched posture and the dark bags that had formed beneath his eyes. “Madam President—” Sinclair turned his head slowly to note the others in the room. “—fellow Cabinet officers, there’s really no way to sugarcoat this.” Sinclair exhaled deeply as his mouth formed into a perfect scowl. “We are well and truly fucked, and I take full responsibility.”
    Sandra headed off the traditional march to resignation. “Fault is something we can assign after this battle is over, Admiral. Could you please tell us how we got into this situation and what we’re doing about it?”
    Sinclair nodded. The air had gone out of his once blustery sails, but he soldiered on. “Bastard brought his fleet around to attack our decoy ice ships, and like a fool I thought he’d bought our ruse. With his rear ships exposed, I concentrated our orbats to attack. The irony is he used our greatest asset, maneuverable orbats, and turned it against us. It cost Trang just about every support ship he had but he turned those ships into bombs, then blew a crapload of our defensive orbats with them.”
    “How long can he stay out here without his supply ships?” asked Hildegard.
    “Depends on how much and what type of supplies he offloaded before destroying his auxiliaries,” answered Sinclair. “There are no more supply ships coming from Mars, I can tell you that. Apparently between the commitments to pacifying the Belt and the loss of an entire fleet at Jupiter, even the UHF is at a loss for supplying their needs. The good news is that Omad’s … er … Suchitra’s flotilla really smashed the hell out of the Trans-Luna Shipyards. They won’t be making ships for at least two or three months. But even with all that, we estimate that Trang can hang with us for at least another week before lack of ordnance or fuel forces him to head home.”
    “So what’s happening now?” asked Mosh.
    Sinclair called up an image of Ceres showing the position of Trang’s forces. “I’ve had to move our remaining orbats to the entrance and exit of the Via Cereana. If he can get any sort of atomic into the Via and detonate it, Ceres will break apart like a fist holding a firecracker. Unfortunately, this strategy has left the surface of Ceres open to uncontested attack, and for the last four hours Trang has been systematically blasting every surface installation we have larger than a shuttle.”
    Sinclair’s DijAssist alerted him to an intrafleet communiqué. He quickly checked it and as he did his eyebrow shot up. “The bombardment has stopped.”
    “Interesting,” said Sandra.
    “How so?” asked Mosh.
    “Trang has enough ordnance to lay on the hurt for at least the next four or five days without letup.”
    “He wants to have a little chat,” laughed Kirk.
    “Certainly looks that way,” agreed Sandra.
    Padamir Singh looked up from his DijAssist at Sandra and Kirk. “You guys work this out with Trang in advance?” He then replaced the holo-image of Ceres with a local Neuro news broadcast. “This vid was just released on all bandwidths from what we believe to be Trang’s flagship.” Admiral Trang was seen sitting at plain desk in a drab, undecorated jumpsuit, with only his rank insignia giving it any distinction.
    This is a supremely dangerous man, thought Sandra as she watched Trang explain in an almost grandfatherly voice exactly how he was going to either occupy or destroy the Alliance capital and there was not a thing that the Cereans