Wing Commander #07 False Color William Forstchen (top 10 books to read .txt) 📖

"I read over the report you sent by hypercast, Vance," he said. "Anything you couldn't say there?"

"Not a damn thing, Max," Richards said. "The crap you've been getting from Williams comes straight from the top. The Confederation's just plain ignoring our complaints, and it looks like we're being thrown to the Cats. If we fight back, they might decide to come and stomp on us themselves, just like the man said."

"No, there's not really much chance of that," Kruger said. "Here's the way I've got it figured. Melek's trying to hold the Empire together while they figure out who should be the next Emperor. If he protested our fighting with Ragark, it might goad the confees into keeping us from fighting. But Melek and Ragark hate each others' guts. I'd say Melek would rather we stopped Ragark for him here so he didn't have to face off with him later for control of the Imperial heartland. No, the confees will let Ragark have us . . . and as far as everybody's concerned, the odds are all in his favor right now. Check?"

"Check," Richards said. "That's the way it would probably play out . . . unless we come up with something big. What about it, Max? Have we come up with something big?"

"The biggest . . . I hope. We've got a damned good lead, Vance. All that we have to do is see if it's feasible."

Tolwyn stirred beside Bondarevsky. "Would someone mind putting the visiting team in the picture here?" he demanded. "Or are you two going to talk in riddles all day?"

Richards grinned. "Sorry, Geoff. We've hardly dared say anything straight out about this even in private. Have either of you heard of the Karga?"

"It was one of the ships that raided Landreich late last year, wasn't it?" Bondarevsky responded, remembering his talk with Harper. "A Kilrathi supercarrier. I understood it was driven off by the FRLN, and presumed destroyed in battle with a pair of pursuing Confederation cruisers." He couldn't help but put a slight emphasis on the word Confederation, just to remind Kruger that he owed Terra something despite all his present problems with the Confederation government.

"Still a man for doing homework, I see," Kruger said. "That's right, Mr. Bondarevsky. Karga was probably the best ship in the Cat fleet operating along this front . . . certainly the biggest and the most modern. Not one of those monsters Thrakhath deployed against Earth, but almost as big and probably as mean. The admiral assigned as battle group commander was a cousin of Thrakhath's.

But they threw her at us with precious little support and a battle plan a kid could have predicted. Nobody was entirely sure what happened to the carrier and her last surviving escort. We were afraid for a while that she'd managed to destroy the two confee pursuit ships and escape back to Baka Kar, but Vance's intelligence net couldn't discover anything about her, and one of our informers claimed to have picked up a fragment of a message that said she was getting ready to self-destruct." "She must've been hurting pretty bad," Tolwyn said. "Not even the most fanatic Kilrathi captain orders a self-destruct unless he's well and truly in the bag."

"Right," Richards said. "Well, the way we figured it, that was the last we'd seen of the Karga, and good riddance. The battle fleet the Cats have mustered out there has carriers and escort carriers enough to knock us out of action by themselves. If they had a supercarrier on top of everything else I'd just go ahead and start learning to speak Cat, because we wouldn't have a snowball's chance on Hellhole to fight Karga and all those other ships together."

"That's what we thought," Kruger said, "until last month."

"We got the news from a frontier scout looking for salvage out on the border," Richards said. "We've been scrounging for anything we can find, and paying top dollar. This gal—her name's Springweather or some such—was checking out the Vaku system when she registered one goddamned big source of magnetic readings . . . and an automated beacon."

"Karga?" Tolwyn asked.

"We're pretty sure of it," Kruger responded. "The beacon was on a Kilrathi distress channel, but the coding was garbled by radiation. It was coming from orbit over a brown dwarf, so you can figure the kind of havoc that was screwing up the comm channels. The scout didn't get close enough to eyeball it in case the Cats were active, but she got all the readings she could through that junk and brought 'em straight back here. And our people have been going over them in detail ever since."

"You've had a report?" Richards asked.

Kruger nodded. "Mass about right for the Karga. Power signature low, but some of the harmonics match readings we got in the fights we had with her before she disappeared. Orbit is highly elliptical, and likely to decay before too long. No life signs, but we can't be sure if that's accurate with all the rads. And you have to figure that if the ship's intact at least some of her crew could have survived. Somebody had to light off that distress call."

"Unless her screens went down after a power failure," Bondarevsky mused. "Radiation would've killed everybody aboard in a few days or weeks if the screens were down—hell, they'd've run up lethal dosages in a few minutes, but it wouldn't have been a fast death."

"That's what we've been thinking, too," Richards said. "Think about it! That supercarrier's just floating out there in space. If she can be put back into commission . . ."

"A damned tall order, Vance," Tolwyn said. "You don't know how badly damaged she is . . . and working with alien engineering's bound to give us no end of problems."

"But if it was possible," Bondarevsky said softly, "we could sure as hell use a supercarrier when the bad guys come calling."

"If we can put her back in service