Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  Watching the battle computer’s holographic display, I could see several fighters positioned around the globe ships, hovering just outside their launch portals waiting for the last of their number to get in position. The instant the last fighter was in place they all fired simultaneously, and the plan actually worked. There were eleven of the harsh, blinding actinic flashes, and when our holographic battle display cleared, there were eleven expanding balls of plasma where the globe ships had been.

  Hundreds of my fighters died making it all happen, they were too close when the big ships blew up but they knew this was our last real chance to take them out and they made their sacrifices count. When the globe ships exploded, the rest of the swarm went nuts. Some were firing at anything that moved, and some were buzzing around looking for the enemy they knew was there but couldn’t see. Then the DJ-3s went active, and those could be seen but were so fast their targets never had a chance. By the time phase two was over, the two and a half million ships that had been in the system had been cut down to less than three-quarters of a million and were still dying.

  As soon as the fighters shot themselves dry, they jumped out their carriers for rearming, and the bombers jumped in. As they did, small swarms of harvester missile ships started popping out of FTL all around my carriers in four of my fleets. We had held back the second wave of bombers and had all of our Swift Fangs deployed as perimeter security, that was the only thing that saved our bacon this time. My fleet train was a couple of light-centas away and I commed for our armoured freighters to drop in and launch their missiles on us giving them our coordinates and making sure our FoF beacons were active.

  I had my fighters jump to the fleet train with orders to rearm there then jump back if I called them. When I looked back at the holographic display, I saw half my carriers were gone but my bomber second wave was finally in the groove and taking out harvester after harvester before they could fire more missiles.

  It was no surprise to me that my fleet and the fleet on the bottom hadn’t been ambushed. Most people not trained to fight in three dimensions rarely think to look up or down for danger and half the time forget to keep an eye on their six. The Squids weren’t any different in that regard, and I was going to school them. Sol was commanding the bottom fleet, I had him stand by while I dispatched half of my second wave to help Chocolate who was getting mauled worse than all the rest combined. Her bombers were fighting like demons from hell but were barely keeping up with their attackers.

  Armoured Freighters started dropping out of FTL right above her, and the other three besieged fleets and the additional Cracker-3s began turning the tide. The Swift Fangs had been firing FTL dampers into the melee preventing the Plague ships from jumping away, and by the time a second armoured freighter had dumped its load at each fleet, we were able to kill off the rest of the attackers and resume cutting the main swarm to pieces.

  A Plague breaker/sorter ship made it through our cordon and tried to make a run for it only to find Chocolate’s Leopard in its way. Instead of trying to manoeuvre around her it rammed, overloading Leopard’s shields with its beam weapon and detonating its weapons load as it stuck Chocolate’s ship.

  Her ship and crew disappeared in a massive blast that blotted out my battle display momentarily. I felt a stab of pain in my heart that was almost unbearable, I’d lost a sister warrior and a good friend. All I could think of now was killing the rest of these terrors before I lost another person I cared for.

  It took another deca before I was finally able to shrink the kill-box down, depriving the enemy of manoeuvring room while my returning fighters finished them off. Sometime during the battle, I’d lost Blue and Sarah along with most of their carriers. I was going to be mourning two more of my close comrades when I got back to Sunrise.

  When the last of the swarm died, and we had recovered all of our fighters and bombers I sent my SAR teams out to look for survivors while our fleet trains came in with their escorts. I stood my forces down and went to my quarters for a few centas while my deputy, Tiger Lilly, stood watch. I shut the hatch, threw myself on my bed and cried. After a few centas, I was able to catch my breath and calm down. I went to the head and cleaned the tear streaks from my fur then went back to the bridge and updated the ship’s log.

  Sol and Frederik shuttled over to Tiger, and we talked for a while about the battle. Sol had commanded men in action before, so had Frederik but it didn’t make the loss any easier. After a few ales they went back to their ships, and when my deputy came back on duty two decas later, I hit the rack and didn’t wake until she called me to tell me it was time for breakfast. She’d let me sleep a deca into my watch. Tiger Lilly just smiled at me with tired eyes when she sat across from me, making sure I ate. I nodded to her once I was finished and she left to get some sleep. It’s the little gestures of kindness that make life worth living, and she’d shown me one that I would never forget. That extra hour made all the difference in my wellbeing. Johnny was right; feed the good wolf.

  We had too many bombers and fighters for the carriers we had left so we loaded them on some of the empty freighters for the flight back to Saturn. Of the three hundred carriers we brought, we were returning with seventy-seven. We lost three of our Leopard-Class ships, and that really hurt. We only had ten to start, and with the Squids out of the picture, we wouldn’t be seeing any more unless the Weasels could build them. Time would tell.

  I had my fleet do one more sweep through the system, then leaving one crewed Swift Fang and two AI Swift Fangs as pickets, we headed for home. If I never saw another Plague ship, it would still be too many. Our journey took nearly ten cycles. A fleet can only move as fast as its slowest ship, and after the battle, we had plenty of very slow ships.

  Over the time that we had been using the FTL drive, we had learned a little about how it worked. Essentially, it used a higher dimension, in our case the eleventh, to access dark-space which was an overlay or perhaps more accurately, an underlay since the lowest four dimensions couldn’t exist without it. In any case, dark-space was full of peaks and valleys upon which the first four dimensions reside. In our normal four-dimensional universe, the first four dimensions appear linear. When we look at a star many light-kilocycles away, it is like seeing the object on a geometrical plane with us on one edge and our destination on the other and the space between relates directly to the time it would take to get from one point to another at any given velocity.

  In the multi-folded fabric of the eleventh dimension that planar surface becomes irrelevant since the space between the two points has been folded such that they are back-to-back and we can move directly between the two points that are now relatively close together, the distance between them no longer defined by the fourth dimension, time, but rather by velocity. The faster we are travelling when we jump to the eleventh dimension, the closer we are to our destination, the sooner we get there. I’ve seen the math used to describe the process, but I can’t say I actually understand it. I leave that to the people with the big brain-pans. I know it works, and that is good enough for my purposes.

  We dropped out of FTL four cycles after Jase had returned from Terra and we were just glad to be home. Jase commed as my ship was landing in the hangar bay almost directly above headquarters and he said, “Welcome back, Ginger and well done to you and all of your fleets.

  “Rather than report in just send your logs and AAR to Silent and take the next twenty-five cycles as downtime. We are doing all we can for Terra, and it is going to be that long before we can even begin to plan what comes next. After you have spent some time with Tuxedo and Squirrel Paws, we can get together and informally talk about the future, but right now most of us are just too beat to do much more than react to what is happening as opposed to responding.”

  I took his advice and spent time with my family just glad we had all survived.

  44

  TWENTY-FIVE CYCLES AFTER GINGER returned from her mission down our back-trail she was sitting in my office with Sol, Silent, Rust
y and Tuxedo. We had lost some of our carriers in the home fleet, and of the thirty-five I’d started out with I was down to twenty-three. Eleven of the seventy-seven that Ginger and Sol had brought back were damaged so severely it was only superior ship handling and sheer grit that got them here. They would be stripped of usable materials and recycled either as reaction mass or for rolling out new sheets of hull-metal for construction. We were down to eighty-nine carriers, and we were trying to decide whether we should promote more senior commanders and make up smaller fleets or leave things as they were and just keep sixteen for a home fleet.

  Rusty solved that problem when he asked, “Why would we need any fleets at all if we are to be leaving soon to try to find a new home? Wouldn’t it be better to mothball them on the outermost hangar deck and keep them in case of need rather than move through foreign star systems with a huge flotilla around us? In my mind, that speaks of invasion and conquest rather than displaced beings looking for a new home.”

  Tuxedo started laughing, and Rusty looked mortified. Tux held up one of his huge mitts to keep Rusty from starting to apologize. When he got control, he said, “I’ve heard a Terran saying most appropriate right now, ‘Out of the mouth of babes’. In this case, the youngest and smartest person in the room has seen the obvious and pointed it out. We have been overthinking this and Rusty has the right of it, we don’t want to knock on someone's door asking for shelter with all of our guns out. He may also be the wisest, at least for the moment.

  “I agree with him, we don’t need the expense or appearance of a war-fleet while we are exploring. If we meet up with hostile forces along the way, we can simply duck into FTL and move away from them. If they attack us before even asking who we are and what we want, we probably don’t want them for neighbours anyway.”

  The rest of us looked at each other, and Sol spoke, “I very much see Rusty’s point. I grew up in and defended a land that was created for us in extremely hostile territory. One can’t jump a country around to find a safe, peaceful place for it so it must present a strong face to the world or get ploughed under. This is not true of large ships. If someone contests our presence, we can simply go somewhere else. When we do find that somewhere else, we should still visit our neighbours and make sure they don’t have a claim on our new system. If they have an issue, then we can bring out the hardware if we choose. The sheer size of Sunrise is intimidating enough.”

  I saw Ginger nodding, and when I turned my gaze to her, she said, “I would prefer scouting ahead with just Tiger, Panther and Cougar leading the way, or even better, Thermopylae and Destiny. The latter two are not obvious warships and make good exploration platforms. We could even take turns rather than both of us being out at the same time.”

  “I agree, those two ships are perfect for gathering intel and while they are large enough to say, ‘don’t mess with us’, they are not immediately threatening,” remarked Silent over our implants.

  “Unfortunately, we only have the two Talons left now. I would prefer we use the Leopards since we have four in reserve and they have more room for warriors which you may need. So, is everyone in agreement that we mothball our fleet? If so, let’s see a show of hands,” I asked.

  It was unanimous, and I read it into the log. Then I announced the next topic, a review of what was being done about the Squids and their remaining Arks.

  Tuxedo and Bebe had led her Cohort now numbering ten Centuries of warriors to the Squid Ark ship that had been damaged after we were attacked by Mother of Vengeance and their find was very disturbing. Along with large tanks of the usual methane and various materials only some of which I could guess the purpose of, they found thousands of Droumb bodies who had been living in the warren of tunnels carved all through the supply Ark. They had died from explosive decompression and froze solid. Signs were indicating they were being used as a food source and when I showed the images to our three captive Squids, Blue Point the only one who didn’t retch suggested we check the remaining Arks as well.

  “If you found such on one there are bound to be more on the others. You may also wish to fly out to the supply Arks the domicile Ark took with them when they left. I would bet my life you will find more of this, this despicable sign of my people’s debasement there as well.”

  “We will, Blue Point, we will.”

  After we destroyed the Mother of Righteous Anger, I had Bebe’s warriors do precisely that, and Blue Point won his bet. When Tuxedo’s advanced group found scuttling charges, he and Bebe cleared all of their people off the supply Ark. The last to flee the ship was one of his best ordinance people who became pink mist; the Squids aboard the supply Ark had gotten free of the cabin in which they’d been confined and touched off the charges. He lost a good warrior, but after gathering so much image data from the two Squid supply Arks, he had them dead to rights. By the time he got back to the Squid Arks still in Saturn’s rings, their crews had scuttled them, and there was no more physical evidence.

  When all of this was brought before the Confederation Council, no one was surprised. They judged that the Squids should be eliminated as a threat. They had broken many of our fundamental laws and had attacked us directly twice, by proxy several times and had tried to destroy the home-world of one of the confederation members.

  The Warm representative spoke up, “My Cold colleagues and I have discussed this and while we have provided the ordinance to the war effort and many of both our peoples have flown into combat we feel that we have yet to pay our full share. When we have completed moving all of our people to the Sunrise, we will use our two Ark worlds to destroy the Squid Ark and remove this foul pestilence from this galaxy. We expect to be fully installed in Sunrise in another twenty cycles. Most of our population is already aboard, but we have much-specialized equipment to move and set up. We will expedite the move and finish the set-up after we have fulfilled the commitment we have made.”

  This was the longest speech I had ever heard either of the two species make. I’d heard they didn’t talk much amongst themselves and the pilots I knew had remarked on their quiet demeanour even when socializing in the squad bays but they were exemplary flyers and made the best wingmen of all of the species. Every pilot wanted to fly with one on his wing.

  When we were done reviewing the data, we were satisfied that everything that could be done was being done and all we had to do was support the Warms and Colds. The final item was to review the Terran situation.

  We were doing everything we could to help the people on Terra’s surface. Literally billions had died directly from the KEW attacks, and thousands more were dying every day from injuries, starvation, exposure and violence with no end in sight. Only a handful of governments had survived, those that had been fortunate enough to have shields over them or the countries whose geography placed barriers between them and the horrendous energy that poured from the strikes. We had hundreds of Elsies now that the fleets were back and most of them were deployed over the most problematic regions on the planet.

  Canada was the most well off in the western hemisphere and was doing what they could to help out in other parts of the world but didn’t have nearly enough resources to put more than a dent in the problem. The same was true in Israel and the smaller countries of the Eastern Consortium. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Bhutan were doing ok. They were starting to send relief to other countries in their region but didn’t have the shipping necessary to get food and other survival necessities to countries who needed them. Those countries no longer had any ports where ships could unload or the means to distribute the materials even if they could get them ashore.

  When India tried using overland means, trucks were stormed by mobs of starving survivors who had turned to banditry; and when they tried using what rail transport still existed the trains and goods were seized by “government forces” who were nothing more than better-organized bandits who had no more ability to distribute them than any official organization. Japan, which as a country imported a massive quantity of food, tried to
help out with their sizeable fishing and merchant fleets. They ran up against the same problems India did on the land routes. Not many naval ships had survived the tsunamis but those that did now ruled the oceans and did so ruthlessly, often sinking the vessels in the act of misguided revenge against a country that had the foresight to protect itself. Whenever we found a vessel operating at sea, we would stop and board them and sink the ones we could prove were pirates.

  Mainland China’s merchant fleet was all but destroyed. Their people only managed to survive because their society was so regimented and their populace so well indoctrinated. They also had no arms to resist if they had wished to do so. They quickly built new ports where ships could land cargoes using the same brutal methods their forebears did when communism first took over in that country. One of the Chinese who immigrated to Mother of Glory when we started bringing Terrans aboard, had told me that if any country survived the Plague, it would be China. She said, “At the moment China’s population is her greatest problem. After a major disaster like the one you foretell, China’s population will be her greatest asset. They will be spent like coins to buy China’s survival.” I was seeing the truth in that now, but in doing so, China was saving a large portion of Terra’s non-Chinese population as well.

  The Confederation had over a thousand shuttles that no longer had a home after the destruction of Mother of Glory and Mother of Peril, and they were being put to good use, but we could use a few thousand more. We were moving water purification and power plants built in the Eastern Consortium to any country in the world that needed them. Often they had food or other necessities to trade. Africa was the largest supplier of grain after Canada, and they were closer to many of the European countries who needed food. Egypt and some of the other cotton producers were setting up more cotton mills and producing canvas that was taken to countries who had labour available but not much to trade. Tents and clothing would be cut and sewn by just about everyone who could operate a machine. The goods were exchanged for food, and the food was taken to countries producing cloth goods.