“Or boarding parties. We’ve been training for that.”
Her heart fluttered at the thought of her son teleporting onto one of those asteroids. She knew only too well how easily that sort of mission could turn into a one-way trip.
“Dad fought the Horde once,” Matthew said. “Right out of Ob-Serv.”
“Yes. A Horde pirate ship boarded an asteroid mining colony. Your father was in the Marine company that cleared the complex.”
“What’s it like, when it’s real?” Matthew asked. “Dad never liked to go into details.”
She knew what he was asking. Combat. Training could only teach you so much and although she’d only been through a fraction of what Peter had, she had more than enough first-hand experience to answer her son’s question.
“It’s chaotic,” she said. “If things go well, it’ll be just like training. The Marines do their best to simulate actual combat and their best is pretty damn good. But things don’t always go well. People make mistakes. The enemy has his own plan. When things go sideways, you have to improvise, change the plan.”
“Lieutenant Heinz is good, and Staff Sergeant Hansen is better. Not as good as my old NCO, but damn good. They think on their feet. Just like Dad said good commanding officers and non-coms are supposed to.”
“That is very good.”
Even with the recent reductions in force, the Marines had enormous reserves of institutional and personal experience to draw upon. Training and procedures had been drafted by combat veterans who had faced the best and brightest enemies in the galaxy and won.
She was still afraid for her son.
Twelve
Goldman System, 199 AFC
“Warp emergences detected. Multiple contacts.”
Commander Tamir Givens was on the bridge, bored out of his mind, when the alert sounded. For months, he and the rest of the task force his ship was a part of had been methodically combing the system, trying to uncover the ley line the Horde pirates had used. The chances they would find it in any time not measured in decades was tiny; the graviton scans required were so sensitive that ripples from million-year old black hole collisions would trigger the sensors and produce false positives. The twenty-ship formation was the high-tech equivalent of a handful of farmers sifting through a massive haystack in search of a needle. And now the Horde was back.
Task Force 311 was spread all over Goldman’s inner system; the other ships were anywhere from three light minutes to two light hours away from the Anzio. Luckily, their t-wave specialists could communicate with them instantly.
Tamir examined the holotank’s display, where enemy contacts began to show up as sensor readings were translated into useful data. Lots of contacts. Over forty of them so far, and none of them were tiny warp-rated boats, either. This was a decent-sized fleet. The Horde had arrived one light minute away from Goldman-Six. The enemy would methodically advance on the planet and force the American defenders to meet them in battle or flee and abandon the colony to its fate.
The decision wasn’t up to him, of course. Rear Admiral (lower half) Brannon was in charge of the task force. Two battleships, four battlecruisers including the Anzio, two fleet carriers, and twelve destroyers comprised TF-311. The American formation would rally at the planet and do whatever its commander decided.
Five dreadnought equivalents. Fifteen battleships. Two dozen cruisers. Fifty-odd lighter ships. None of those flying asteroids, thank Ghu.
Those weren’t particularly long odds: American fleets were used to being outnumbered in battle. Given their advantages, US ships were expected to defeat ten to twenty times their tonnage against all known Starfarer forces. All the vessels in the task force were modern or recently-refurbished classes, equipped with the best weapons and defenses in the known galaxy. A hundred Horde ships wouldn’t – shouldn’t, he corrected himself – pose a challenge.
Emergence. All twenty American ships were there, ready for battle. Admiral Brannon didn’t waste any time:
“Task Force 311 will maneuver and confront the enemy. The Horde will not claim one cubic inch of American space. I trust you all to do your duty. That is all.”
“Damn right,” Tamir’s XO muttered under his breath.
The Anzio took its place on the wall of battle, the three-dimensional formation that would allow most of the ships’ weaponry to bear on the enemy as TF-311 moved towards the spreading Horde swarm at three hundred kilometers per second. Anzio was assigned a target ‘basket’ containing five enemy battleships and a dozen lighter targets. Ambitious, although the task force’s two hundred Crimson Tide fighters would take out most of the enemy ships long before they were in range of Tamir’s guns. Carriers were the striking arm of the US navy, although fighting vessels still played their part.
Part of him wished he could be part of the outgoing sortie, popping in and out of warp space and delivering point-blank destruction onto the enemy. The rest of him valued his sanity too much to accept the honor.
* * *
Transition.
“Deus Volt,” Lieutenant Wilbur ‘Winner’ Lynch declared proudly as he met his guardian angel in warp space.
“God Wills It,” the glowing figure by Wilbur’s side replied. “Just make sure you are doing God’s will and not yours, my son.”
The ‘angel’ – technically a Null-Space Sophont but close enough to a divine being for government work – sounded a bit like Wilbur’s father, a stern but pious man that he’d always been terrified of disappointing. It looked nothing like his father, of course; the angelic entity was a vaguely humanoid figure made of bright golden light. Its presence filled Wilbur with a mixture of awe and exhilaration. Not every fighter pilot got himself a warp-totem, but all the good ones did; the spirits allowed them to do stuff no amount of training or gear could match.
Ghosting.
Wilbur hung inside warp space and opened fire. A blast from the 10cm particle beam cannon on the fighter’s nose tore a hole through the Horde battleship’s force fields, opening the way for a pair of continuous beams from the fighter’s twin 15cm graviton cannon. The enemy ship had been damaged by another sortie; his volley was the coup de grace. The result was spectacular even from a two hundred kilometers: the alien vessel vanished in a flash that temporarily overwhelmed his sensor filers and blinded him for a moment. Only the fact that his fighter was still in warp space kept it from being obliterated by the blast. Wilbur didn’t wait for his vision to return: the Crimson Tide fighter jumped towards its next target.
Two seconds later, he returned to real space and splashed a battlecruiser. The Horde was fighting dumb; the enemy ships weren’t arrayed closely enough to support each other, and their point defense was downright sluggish. Just as well, because they were pouring out a lot of energy in every direction, and with a little more accuracy they might have achieved something.
Time to return to base. Another warp jump took Wilbur’s fighter to its cradle inside the bowels of the USS Boxer, one of the two fleet carriers in the task force. He felt a slight tremor under his seat, which meant the single heavy graviton battery on the ship was firing. Part of Wilbur thought the ship would have been better off with fewer guns and armor. That volume could have been used to expand the carrier’s current complement of a hundred and twenty fighters. The rest of him felt better knowing that his landing pad could take a beating and deliver one as well. The Boxer’s broadsides weren’t as devastating as her fighter complement but they were nothing to sneeze at, either. The vibrations from the massive ship meant its 100cm cannon were on full rapid fire; he almost felt sorry for the alien bastards on the receiving end.
The flight crew busily replaced any components used up or burned out by the sortie.
“How goes?” Wilbur asked one of the Navy spacers.
“We’re kicking ass, sir. Half the bandits are gone. Two thirds of their heavies. One sortie was all it took.”
“Good.”
“Looks like they were expecting War Eagles, which means they’
re the same bunch that raided the Crabs a few years back. Too bad for them.”
“Yeah,” Wilbur agreed. Thousands of the thirty-year-old fighters were still in service, but they were very different from the Crimson Tides. Tactics that worked against the older craft were useless against the cutting-edge ship killers, which were as hard to kill as most non-American capital ships even before counting their warp capabilities.
“All right, gotta get back to it.”
“Happy hunting, sir.”
Wilbur ran a quick checklist of his own: everything was working fine, which meant in five minutes he and the rest of Flight A would be going hunting again. Unlike the primitive War Eagles they’d replaced, Crimson Tides fought alone. He had three targets for his next sortie: another battleship and a couple of cruisers. Should be easy enough.
Inside his head, he heard his guardian angel praying for the souls of those he was about to kill.
Star System Claw, 199 AFC
It is hard, to send warriors to their deaths knowing defeat is certain.
Warlord Fann of the Crimson Sun Clan kept the thought to himself. His war chiefs were disheartened enough and the continuous reports from the Oracles as they recounted the death of the probing fleet did not help matters. The sacrifice had been deemed necessary by the new ruler of the Host, and Fann had delivered ten vessels, including two war carracks, as his clan’s share of the forlorn hope. Only a large force could survive long enough to learn the capabilities of the dirt-huggers at the other end of the chaos road and pass the information along. The Oracles who’d gone off to die would keep transmitting data until the end. They had been the only ones who’d known the fleet had been sent forth on a suicide mission. Warriors who entered Chaos expecting death rarely emerged on the other side, so they needed to believe there was a chance for victory. Fann himself had dared himself to hope for it; the fleet had been powerful indeed, more than capable of defeating most foes the Host had encountered.
Not this time, however.
“We have fled a nova only to fall into the heart of a neutron star,” one of the lesser Oracles cried out. “Only a handful of war carracks remain. These dirt-huggers are as bad as the Nemeses!”
“Nonsense!” Fann roared. “The Nemeses would have eradicated those ships in a tenth of the time and with negligible losses! Only a fool raised in the comfort of the seers’ tunnels cannot see the difference!”
A curt gesture sent two warriors down to the central pit in the Hall where the warp seers gathered; it was time to teach the impudent vermin some manners. The beating was not fatal – Oracles were too valuable for that – but it was enough to silence any further outcries. The other Oracles stood aside; most of them were too busy observing the death of the sacrificial fleet to care about or even notice the punishment of one of their own.
Fann stepped into a side alcove where his wives waited for him. They were his most prized counselors and confidants, for it was only among them that the clan chief could reveal what lay in his heart without fear or shame. The sanctity of the conjugal chamber was guarded by the terrible fate that awaited any wife who dared break it.
“The truth, my love,” said Noo, the eldest wife. “Was the coward right?”
“He wasn’t wholly wrong,” Fann admitted while he lay on the traditional cushions on the floor, surrounded by his beloved trio. “These planet-bound vermin are the most dangerous we have encountered in our travels through the spiral arm. Their mastery of the Chaos arts will make them very difficult to overcome.”
“Must we fight them, then?” Thelda asked. The youngest but perhaps wisest of them went on: “The other star-kingdoms are far weaker. A successful predator never goes after the strongest prey.”
“The Lord of Warlords has ruled it must be so,” Fann said through gritted teeth; admitting another’s authority over him grated even now. “The Oracles have traced the other Chaos lanes; they all double back towards sectors the Nemeses now control or will eventually invade. Flight through them only brings us closer to our doom. Only here lies some hope of escape.”
Thelda cast her eyes down in demure acquiescence. Noo and Rinn glared at their sister and rival before turning to their husband.
“There are no good choices, but this is the one with a chance at survival,” Fann concluded. “The deaths of our warriors have given us the information we need. Even now our armorers are preparing to deploy the weapons the Witch-King will soon hand us.”
“Forbidden weapons,” Thelda said, persistent as always. “Their use will cost us dearly.”
“Survival is the ultimate good, for which any price must be paid,” countered Rinn.
“The weapons were stolen from the Nemeses,” Noo noted. “The Witch-King used them to escape from them.”
“He did so, against the traditions of the Host,” Fann said. “The price our Oracles and Pilots will pay will be severe.”
“And should the Host fall, what will those traditions matter?” Noo asked him.
Fann looked at each of his wives in turn. Only Thelda opposed his decision. That disheartened but did not stop him.
“I pledged the Clan. I have already paid in blood. We will now pay in broken taboos.”
Thirteen
Goldman System, 199 AFC
“One thousand three hundred and nineteen contacts.”
Tamir Givens felt disconnected from reality as he saw the swarm of Sierras crowding the tactical holo-tank. Hundreds of capital ships and dozens of asteroids had emerged from warp space. The Horde had never fielded a force of that size. Nobody had, not even at the height of the Great Galactic War. And more contacts were showing up every few seconds.
He looked at the bridge crew. They’d gone to battle stations as soon as the first emergences were detected, but people had paused as the enormity of what they faced sunk in. A few seconds later, fleet orders arrived and were uploaded into his implant. They were what he’d expected, but he couldn’t suppress a sigh of relief.
“Don’t heat up any coffee, ‘cause we ain’t staying,” he muttered before saying out loud: “Prepare for transit. The task force is retreating to Felix System. The rest of Third Fleet will meet us there.”
Goldman-Six had been evacuated already, except for a handful of nutjobs who’d opted to stay behind and however many Hordelings had survived the Marine sweeps on the planet. The Horde would find a mostly uninhabited system, with anything of value carted away or destroyed. The massive enemy fleet would no doubt loot everything down to the planet’s landfills, of course, but that would hopefully give Third Fleet time to concentrate its forces in Felix System. Two hundred and eleven warships against more than six times their number. The disparity was even worse when you counted respective tonnages even if you left the mobile asteroids out of the equation. When you threw those flying planetoids into the equation, it sounded hopeless.
Third Fleet has over a thousand fighters, he reminded himself as the Anzio completed its preparations and jumped into warp space. The thought gave him some comfort, but not enough.
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 199 AFC
“Looks like you were right, McClintock,” Guillermo Hamilton said in an almost accusatory tone. Nobody liked the bearer of bad news, or the prophet of worse tidings.
The news of the Horde emergence, delivered by QED-Telegram from Felix System, had shaken everyone. Felix was a mere three warp jumps away from Xanadu and the largest warp node in American space. If the Horde made it there…
Ridiculous, Heather thought. Regardless of their numbers, Third Fleet will slaughter them. Not to mention Malta is impregnable.
Out loud: “If that is the Horde fleet’s total strength, that makes it the fourth largest incursion we’ve found in our research.”
“Only the fourth?”
“Well, assuming the histories don’t exaggerate. Many Starfarers are given to hyperbole. ‘Ten thousand ships’ could be a figure of speech, rather than an actual number, for example.”
“It’d better be a figure of
speech.”
“We’re still combing through the records. One big problem is that most of the reports we have found about major incursions are second- or third-hand. Mostly because there were no survivors capable of providing first-hand accounts.”
“That gives me the warm and fuzzies.”
“The conventional wisdom that the Horde was merely a band of primitive pirates was founded on recent events. Nobody expected ancient history to repeat itself.”
Guillermo looked at her, and she was shocked to see how haggard he looked. He was more than worried; he was in a state of near despair.
“They sacrificed an entire fleet to test our defenses and now they’re committing their full strength,” he said. “If they can communicate through interstellar distances, what does that tell you?”
She couldn’t help following his logic to its ultimate conclusion. “It tells me that they now know our weapons and tactics and they think they can overcome them.”
“Yep. That’s what I thought.”
“The Galactic Imperium, the Lampreys, the Vipers – they all thought the same thing. And they were wrong.”
“I keep telling myself that, McClintock. But I have a bad feeling about this.”
So did she.
And her son was part of Third Fleet.
* * *
“There are days when I miss being a plain old 0331,” Russell said. “But today sure as hell isn’t one of them.”
Ever since MSOT-1 had returned to Malta, the unit had been cooling its heels, which for operators meant continuous training in a variety of generic missions, just to keep everyone sharp until the next op came up. They’d been enjoying some well-deserved town time after a thirty-six-hour simulation that had them wipe out a Jellyfish op-force when the news came of the giant Horde fleet that had shown up in American space.
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