The Ajax Incursion

by Marc DeSantis

*****

  More was on the bridge, his thoughts his only company. He had many of them. As a cadet at Cold Bay, he’d rarely given thought to his own demise. Being young, he was immortal, and could not die. Perhaps some of his classmates might perish, but not him. Such was the invincibility of youth.

  Now his end was a certainty. He decided that he did not like it, though he was, on the whole, far more resigned to it than he would have expected had the notion been presented to him just days earlier. The weight of all of the choices he had been forced to make in the previous two years seemed to fall upon him all at once, after he had sent that message to Pran. Then, he began to suffocate.

  More knew that if he had sought counseling he would surely have been told that he was taking too much responsibility for everything that had occurred since that fateful displacement into Memnon. He was not responsible for the interstellar war that had ensued. He was not at fault for the unforeseen consequences of the decisions he had been compelled to make.

  That might have been the logical way of looking at the situation, but that was not how More felt. More the RHN officer could rationalize his every action, and justify them. More the human, the part of him that could never be fully submerged no matter how much military training he had, that would not be stilled no matter how much philosophy he applied to his life, could not accept them. So many had died since he’d encountered the Morrigan. Everything had seemed to go wrong ever since. It was time to end it. To pay the debt he’d accrued with his own life.

  The Ajaxian battleship that hunted him would accomplish that soon enough. Ally identified it as Cawnpore, a suitably gruesome name of the kind the savage enemy preferred, commemorating a massacre committed by the Ajaxians years before. The choice was repugnant, and convinced More that what he was doing was the right thing.

  Cawnpore hurled fusion shells at Albacore at long range by the score during the chase to Arles. None did serious damage, since his destroyer’s automated defenses had more than sufficient time to deal with them, but they didn’t have to. Each near-miss had done just a little more hurt, tore open already existing wounds just a bit wider, that it was a wonder that Albacore held together at all. The integral self-repair systems that were the wonders of modern Halifaxian warships had long-since failed. There had never been an extensive suite of them on the cut-rate Garnets, but for a while they had plugged many holes and gaps with nanotech foam and forcefields that held in the ship’s remaining atmosphere.

  No longer. Atmosphere leaked from a dozen breaches in the hull. The hyperspatial defensive shield that protected the ship was down to just a few percent. A direct hit would tear through it like paper, leaving the hull exposed to the full fury of a point-blank atomic blast.

  Albacore entered Arles Station, finding a temporary respite from the hail of shells unloaded by Cawnpore. A steady repetition sent out by a beacon deployed by the Steadfast informed all who cared to listen that Arles was now an open station, empty of people and troops. There was no need to ruin it.

  At More’s direction, Ally positioned Albacore just beside the central spine of the orbital. The many decks of the giant structure radiated outward from this, and within it nestled the fusion reactors that had been cobbled together over many years to provide the station with energy. Now they had been rigged to detonate. He didn’t need to be here to ensure their destruction. He did it so that he would have the choice of his own funeral pyre. Albacore would add its own last breath of fury to the fire that would consume them.

  Cawnpore entered, hulking and dreadful. Like a shark, it swam through the empty space unerringly toward its prey, its sensors instantly finding Albacore. More had done nothing to hide her. He wanted to be found. Now, for the last act.

  He swiped his holo, and opened up a comm. The face of an old, almost ancient man, appeared in front of him, flickering in the full color that was found in holos generated on civilian structures. He was exasperated, frustrated, and resigned, all at once. “We’re not going anywhere, Admiral More. We’ve heard your order and as we told Captain Pran, we’re not moving.”

  “You understand that the Ajaxians will not spare you?” More asked. “No matter what happens, your deaths are assured.”

  “We expect to die. They will kill us, but we will not be refugees from our home.”

  More nodded. “So be it.”

  The elderly man’s holo blinked out.

  More summoned another holo, and began a broadcast. “Ajaxian ship identified as Cawnpore, Ajaxian ship identified as Cawnpore, this is RHS Albacore actual. Do you copy?”

  Several seconds passed, and the voice of another man rose around More, pumped through Albacore’s bridge speakers. “Admiral Ronner of DNS Cawnpore,” he announced with a sneer. “Prepared to surrender?”

  “I want to negotiate. Can we switch to visual?”

  “Very well. It is your end we are about to discuss.”

  Ronner’s face appeared on the viewscreen at the fore of the empty bridge. “Well?” Ronner then blinked. “Ah, I know you, the infamous Andrew More, the Butcher of Memnon! The captain who fires upon civilian ships. What do you want?”

  “I have just become aware of the presence of civilians on this station. I am sending you proof of their presence on Arles as we speak. I request time to evacuate, and then I will surrender this ship and the station to you. I simply wish to preserve the lives of the civilians in my care. I ask only for ten minutes to extract the civilians and. . .”

  “The answer is no. I have no idea what kind of game you are playing, but I will not participate in it. Your reputation for deception is well-known across the Great Sphere. I would be a laughingstock if I trusted you in the slightest.”

  “I can assure you that this is no deception.”

  “My sensors detect no lifeforms anywhere on the station. It is empty. You lie to me.”

  Of course you can’t detect them. They hide among the reactors, which your sensors can’t penetrate because of their heavy radiation shielding.

  “Ronner out.” The Ajaxian admiral’s image dissolved, leaving a darkened screen behind.

  *****

  Stahl’s holo appeared beside Ronner. “Admiral, you are inside the orbital now. Beware! Even if the station is empty, a stray shot risks the prizes inside!”

  “Prizes? There is an even greater prize right before me! The Butcher of Memnon himself - Andrew More! He’s worth more to me dead than a thousand reactors!”

  “But admiral, attacking him with atomic weapons risks all that we have striven to. . .”

  Ronner disdainfully swiped away Stahl’s pleading holo. Some officers did not understand glory and what it was worth.

  Cawnpore resumed its bombardment of the stricken Albacore, which maneuvered as best it could to avoid the battleship’s attacks. Ronner was using nuclear shells, flinging them with abandon at the scurrying destroyer. Arles was enormous, but no station had been designed to survive atomic strikes within its structure. Great gouts of superheated metal vapor rose in towering plumes as the shells detonated against its inner walls.

  Just outside the station, More’s plea and the subsequent murderous torrent of the Cawnpore was recorded by a Halifaxian courier capsule before it created its own displacement bubble, and jumped away.

  *****

  Ally, calm as ever, interrupted her monotonous reports of failing systems and irreparable hull damage to announce the presence of another human on Albacore.

  More had thought himself benumbed to everything, in these, the last moments of his life. He was surprised to find that he was not. “What?” He swiped a holo into existence. “Who is it? I ordered everyone off!”

  The holo resolved hazily, struggling to depict the other. The face of the crewmember was unmistakable, once it did. She was on the bridge less than a minute after More saw her.

  “Ensign Hu!” he shouted, shooting to his feet. “I ordered everyone off of this ship! Why are you still here?”

  Hu stood at attention and saluted. “I haven’t come
to die with you, admiral. I’m here to take you off.”

  “You are, are you? Who gave you this order?” More had told no one of what he intended to do. It could not have been one of his captains.

  Hu smiled. “I’m acting on my own volition, Admiral More.”

  “Is that a fact? May I remind you that this is not the Academy! Orders are orders in the void!”

  Hu was unphased by More’s outburst. “I figured out what you have planned, admiral. I admire your cunning. It is far more ruthless than I anticipated. To sacrifice the civilians remaining on this station to wake up the rest of the Sphere to Ajaxian barbarism. To goad the enemy admiral into using weapons of mass destruction on a civilian-inhabited structure. That’s a clear violation of the Accords. You’re hoping that it will bring about a response from the other states, despite the war, that will force the Ajaxians out of Aquitaine, since Halifax can’t - won’t - do it on its own. I’m right, yes?”

  More exhaled breath was as slow as cold oil pouring from a bottle. He sat back down. “You’re very bright, Ensign Hu. My best student at Cold Bay. What gave me away?”

  “Bright, yes. But I’m also the bridge officer who oversees comms, among other things. It didn’t take much to put this together. Elementary traffic analysis. You didn’t send the courier capsule back immediately with a response to High Command, as is standard procedure. That was odd. Instead, right after receiving the courier’s message, you sent an encrypted message to Captain Pran, containing something you plainly didn’t want anyone else to see. I couldn’t tell what was in that message, but you didn’t share anything concerning its contents with your squadron captains, not even Captain Kim, which I thought was also odd. I knew you were planning something.”

  “You heard everything just now?”

  Hu waved her data tablet. “I’m still linked to Ally’s comms. It all fell together. Cawnpore follows you inside what Ronner thinks is an empty station, guns blazing. Then you tell him there are people still here. You send him proof. That makes it a war crime if he uses nukes. But you know that Ronner will never believe you, never take your word for it, not once he knows who you are. He’d never trust you, the crafty and treacherous Andrew More. That’s why you asked for a visual. To make that certain. Ronner would want the honor of taking you out, the station be damned. You could have sabotaged the reactors a long time ago but you held off, so you could have this moment. Now you have it recorded for all to see that he’s firing nukes on a structure with civilians on it. When you learned before that there were old people who refused to leave Arles, you let them have their way because you saw a chance to allow Ronner to commit a war crime. If he had landed soldiers and killed the civilians with bullets and knives, that wouldn’t be a violation of the Accords, but atomics? That’s a clear breach, and. . .”

  “. . . and I hoped that other nations would intervene and wreck Ajax. The courier capsule is on its way to Memnon as we speak to broadcast what happened here to our side and to the Armada of Tartarus,” More said. His voice was soft and sad. “I was going to sacrifice myself too.”

  “So you were.”

  Explosions rocked the Albacore, which had by now lost much of its remaining power.

  “Suicide disguised as a captain going down with his ship,” said Hu. “Absolution achieved by self-immolation. An expiatory ritual that our ancestors on Old Earth would have understood. It is out of place in an officer of the RHN, especially one that is needed for the fight against the enemies of Halifax.” Hu looked around nervously as the Albacore lurched. “You must come with me, admiral,” Hu urged. “Captain Kim has left. I told her I would be on the next escape pod, but turned back. Let’s get the hell off this boat. There’s not much more time.”

  “You won’t leave me here? Even if I ordered you to do so?” More asked.

  “I will follow your orders, but that would be a dumb thing to do, admiral. Halifax needs its best officers, and you’re one of them. You are willing to pull a trigger when no one else will.”

  More let go a bitter laugh. “There must have been something that made you suspicious, in the first instance. None of the other officers on this ship stayed behind to come and find me. Why you?”

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  More spread his arms wide. “That’s all that you’ve been doing so far.”

  The ensign tilted her head to one side, a pensive frown on her face. “Very well then. I never bought the story that was put out by the Navy after Victory Base. It didn’t add up. It all made sense if I started with the premise that you had acted without sanction, and the Navy grudgingly ratified what you did only after the fact. A naval hero promoted to flag rank and sent to teach at the Academy? Give me a break! So I knew that you would do what you thought was necessary, orders from the Navy brass be damned. I figured you were up to something. I can’t say I disagree with you altogether. Thirty-seven lives willingly sacrificed for the greater good, even if none of them knew what you had in mind. You saw your opportunity and made the most of it. Will it work out? I don’t know. Thirty-seven dead. That’s not too many. I hope the evidence of their presence you sent is convincing. It’s iffy if the rest of the Sphere will take action, even if it is. There’s a chance though, the Accords are sacrosanct. . .” Hu’s voice trailed off. “So. . . here we are.”

  “Here we are,” More repeated as Albacore shook violently under the impact of another near-miss. “Let’s go.”

  *****

  Deep inside the station, where the beating hearts of Arles pounded in thermonuclear fury, explosive charges deftly placed by a squad of Halifaxian marines detonated, causing the containment fields around the reactors to fail. For the briefest of instant, the center of Arles Station was as bright and hot as a star.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Aboard RHS Steadfast, Galicia Base, Aramis system

  Howell, Chandler, and Venn sat in the Steadfast’s officers’ mess. Several other knots of officers, seated at tables nearer or further off, were locked in low conversations, just as the three were. Outside, to port, the screen showed the resurrected Galicia Base undergoing repairs. The damage that the station had taken had been horrendous, but the basic structure was still sound. The installation’s strategic location on Halifax’s Sphereward frontier made it imperative that it be rebuilt as swiftly as possible. Howell watched as immense beams of plasteel and giant slabs of titanium were nudged into place by swarms of robotic tugs. Other small craft, impish, determined, and armed with plasma welders, carefully joined the pieces together, as if they had been drawn from a gargantuan metal and composite puzzle kit.

  He mentioned this to Chandler and Venn.

  Chandler nodded his agreement. “You’re not wrong,” he said. “Most of the new sections will be exact reproductions of the destroyed ones. Quicker and cheaper to do it that way.”

  “That’s all material that won’t be going into new ships,” Venn said, stirring milk into her coffee. “The war’s not over.”

  “It isn’t,” Chandler said. “It’s just on hiatus.”

  “I never thought something like this would come to pass,” Howell observed almost dreamily. “The states of the Sphere coming together, acting in concert, to punish a violation of the Accords.”

  “Red and yellow Armada ships right beside the blue and yellow of the RHN,” Venn said. “The Sphinx knew he could score political points. That’s why he did what he did.”

  Once news of the Arles Atrocity had been broadcast to the Great Sphere, King Evander of Tartarus had been the first and loudest proponent of a collective retaliation against Ajax for the use of weapons of mass destruction against a civilian-occupied orbital station. This forced Halifax’s hand, which agreed to a three-month truce so that warships from the Monarchonate, the Republic, the Sellasian League, the Venezian Confederation, and a half-dozen of the smaller Sphere states to group together to wipe out the Ajaxian presence in a lightly-inhabited star system on the Dominion frontier named Dunhuang. The punishment, meted out unde
r the authority of the Accords, had to fit the crime, and so a handful of nuclear weapons were used to erase the Ajaxian planetary surface station there. It was a terrible lesson, but an unmistakable one too.

  The Domain was also made to evacuate Aquitaine and Stone altogether. The people of Pessac, who had held out against the Ajaxians for so long, were now naming babies after the ‘brave Admiral Andrew More.’ With his last desperate act of defiance, he had flung his ship at the reactor complex of Arles Station, depriving the enemy of them that had so cruelly slain old men and women with atomics, before escaping from the station. The titanic explosion had been more devastating than expected. The orbital burst, obliterating the great battleship Cawnpore that was still inside. Admiral Timoth Ronner and all of his crew had been slain. Howell was glad that his cousin was a hero, but he was not the only person to have gained in the aftermath, and this infuriated him.

  “The Sphinx has come out of this looking good to too many people in the Sphere,” Howell lamented. “He only did it to gain a breather for the Armada. He’s a warmonger, a breaker of treaties, and now he’s being praised as a defender of civilization. The irony is more bitter than this coffee. Where did the Navy get this crap?”

  “It’s probably recycled Aramisian tree bark, mixed with some sawdust swept up from a lumbermill floor, and flavored with engine lubricants,” snarked Chandler. “Something like that.”

  “I’ll be happy to have our gang back together,” Venn smiled. “Even though we’re going back into the war when this truce ends. We’ve missed you, Julius.”

  “I’ve missed you too. You ought to know that my record with warships is not the best. They have a habit of exploding not long after I take over engineering.”

  “I’ll trust your competence, anytime,” assured Chandler. “With Captain Heyward being moved on to Star Eagle, and taking many of his officers with him, we had a need for a top-notch chief engineer.”