The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3)

by Edmond Barrett

  Willis steadied herself on one of the deckhead grab bars and looked over the shoulder of the Russian army officer as he worked through his checklist. Finally a green tick icon appeared on his screen and he looked up at her.

  “That is all of the warheads done, Captain,” he said. “I will have to check again before the attack, but I can certify these warheads as cleared for operation. The missile propulsion systems are your responsibility.”

  “Thank you, Major,” Willis replied as he straightened up. “I should be able to confirm the time of the assault to you within the next few hours, so that you can plan your check. On an unrelated matter the wardroom extends its hospitality to you this evening.”

  The grim-faced Russian smiled slightly.

  “A last supper before we go forth. I will be happy to accept,” he replied. He rubbed at his eyes. “I am still waking up, so I will have to beg to be excused if I fall asleep into my plate.”

  “You might not be the only one, Major,” she replied with a smile.

  After leaving Earth, the squadron had made its way across the front line and back towards the worlds of the Nameless. To avoid detection, most of their cool down jump in points had been to interstellar space, while most of the crew had been in Deep Sleep hibernation for the journey to save on supplies. The weeks of travel had been close to the sleep system’s safety limits and several of the crew were still shaking off the effects.

  “I’d imagine the fleet doesn’t often entertain national military officers. At least not outside of space dock,” the Major said.

  “True enough.”

  Willis looked around Spectre’s magazine. Missiles lay waiting in their racks, mostly standard anti-ship, but six of were for a very different purpose. Painted yellow and black so that there would be no mistaking them, they were five-megaton thermonuclear devices, each fitted with ablative nose cones to allow atmospheric re-entry and, worst of all – Cobalt Sixty tampers.

  Willis had never heard of them before they were brought on board her ship. God knows, she considered herself to be a hard-nosed officer who’d seen too much to get sentimental. But what she’d subsequently read about these enhanced weapons in public and military sources had been enough to send a shiver down her spine.

  The governments of the Council had never been comfortable with the fleet – an essentially stateless military – possessing nuclear weapons, while for its part, the fleet was equally content not to have them. In the vacuum of space, such weapons were far less effective than in atmosphere, which combined with other practical problems meant they offered too few advantages for too many practical, political and ethical complications.

  But for this mission, no other weapon would do.

  Leaving the magazine and the Russian major, Willis made her way up to the bridge.

  “Captain,” said the officer of the watch as she entered, “I was about to call you.”

  “What is it?” Willis replied as she glanced around the bridge displays, making sure everything was in place.

  “The reconnaissance ship has just jumped in,” he nodded towards the holo, set to wide view. “They’re three hours out but their transmission has just reached the flagship. The scout is making the approach in real space.”

  Willis nodded. Without a star or planetary bodies to get a fix on, jumps were pretty inaccurate out here and the scout’s commander had clearly decided to traverse the gap between them in real space rather than risk a jump that might end up even more off target.

  “Did we get the data upload as well?”

  “Yes. Captain. Flag forwarded it onto all ships.”

  He nodded to a rating and the scout’s reading appeared on the main holo.

  The information they’d gained from the captured data had been sketchy, navigation data but not much more. There hadn’t been time for scouts to be dispatched from and return to Earth with the detailed information needed to plan an attack. Instead Pankhurst had to give up three of her strike boats to carry scouts and, along with the rest of the squadron, had set off from Earth knowing that they’d have to work out the fine detail when they got there.

  Headquarters had designated the system KINGDOM and the star at its centre was slightly larger than Earth’s sun. It was perhaps a little older but still in its middle years, so stable. Orbiting it were seven major planets – two frozen rocky planets in the outer orbits, three gas giants with their attendant moons dominating the middle orbits and two more rocky planets occupying the inner orbits. Of these last two, one was smack in the middle of the star’s Goldilocks zone and reading at about two percent more massive than Earth. Atmosphere readings indicated oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen in ratios compatible with life, as they knew it.

  There were three large space docks in orbit along with one major station of a type Willis immediately recognised

  “That’s a space elevator,” she murmured to herself.

  It was no surprise the Nameless race could have such technology. Earth had one after all but Earth’s was at the centre of the human universe and was only used for the bulkiest of cargo. If they applied human criteria, this planet had a population that likely only ran to tens of millions. The elevator’s tether traced downwards to the edge of the only major city in the entire system. Planetary defences seemed to consist of several small starforts, an unknown number of weapons satellites and a small squadron of warships based around two capital ships. There was no sign of any carriers but there were various small transports moving around. Out on the edge of the Blue Line was a space gate with what looked like another two starforts as protection. Out in the wider system, there appeared to be a fuel industry hard at work around the second largest of the gas giants.

  “Call up Tactical,” Willis said. “I know flag is working on it but I want us to look into it just in case we spot something they don’t. First figure out which direction that tether will fall if we take out the station and if it will land on anything expensive.”

  “Would that be important ma’am? I mean if we...”

  Willis glanced towards him.

  “Yes, you are likely right but worth considering anyway.”

  “I just wonder whether this is the right thing to do.”

  The question wasn’t put to the table at large. It was said during a gap in the discussions but and was heard by all. Conversation ceased as all eyes focused on the source of the question. It was the ship’s doctor and he had been talking to the purser.

  “We’re obeying our orders,” Commander Yaya said flatly.

  The Doctor briefly looked awkward at finding himself at the centre of attention, then his expression became defiant.

  “When you strip away the military language and political niceties, those orders are to burn a world to the ground,” he said. “We aren’t just targeting a civilian population; we intend to render even the land they stand on dead. We are planning to turn their world into a sterile, lifeless planet and we don’t even know that will work!”

  “It’s not as if they haven’t done the same to others,” the ship’s navigator dismissively retorted. “So sauce for the goose as far as I’m concerned.”

  “So we lower ourselves to their level?” the Doctor responded heatedly.

  Two officers started to reply with equal force but were cut off by the sound of a glass being tapped with increasing force. Everyone looked to the head of the table as Willis lowered her glass.

  “Calmly everyone,” she said, looking around the table.

  Spectre’s wardroom was a microcosm of a fleet at war, with pre-war officers holding the senior positions. By peacetime standards, most were young for their rank as they filled dead men’s boots. Next came the fleet’s reservists and, after them, those who had been transferred into the fleet from the national militaries – men and women from different traditions but still professional soldiers. Finally there were those who had volunteered and come directly from the civilian world. That last group in particular, came to the fleet with a different mindset, not necessa
rily worse, but different.

  “First and foremost, doctor, we are doing this because we have been ordered to,” she told him.

  “Some terrible things have been done by soldiers who then said ‘I was obeying orders’,” the Doctor replied sullenly.

  Yaya started to speak but stopped when Willis raised her hand.

  “That, Doctor, is unfortunately very true, but some even worse things have been done by men and women in uniform, who decided to pick and choose which orders they would obey. I’m not finished, Doctor. No one knows whether we can even successfully put in this attack. What we do know is that with their drone soldiers, in the war to date the Nameless have only suffered at most a few thousand ‘real’ casualties. This will be our first and probably only real chance to bring the true cost of war home to them.”

  “We do not know what effect a successful attack will have. Will it be shock and awe or something that they will ever after seek to avenge? No one knows. But we have been given an order by Council, a gathering of the governments of the majority of the human race and, as such, the most legitimate body that any military force in the history of the human race has ever answered to. We as individuals have the right to have private reservations, but as officers of Battle Fleet, our duty is to carry out our orders.”

  “You certainly slapped the Doctor down pretty hard,” Yaya observed as Willis poured a drink.

  With the conclusion of the meal she had invited Yaya to her cabin to cover a few last points before she retired for the night.

  “I would have said that was fairly gentle,” Willis replied as she slid over a glass. “Saying a soldier should disobey an immoral order is nice in theory, but when people say that, they always consider themselves to be on the right side of the moral argument. It never seems to occur to them that someone might take the same factors and get a different answer, which they to consider to be the moral choice.”

  “May I ask, Captain, whether you think this will work?”

  “Depends on what your definition of work is,” Willis replied as she swirled the drink round her glass.

  “I would say that preventing them from wiping us from the universe would be the pertinent one,” Yaya replied.

  Willis smiled slightly as she glanced at her second-in-command. They’d got along well since she first arrived on Spectre, principally because Willis had recognised Yaya as being very much a younger version of herself – although the Commander seemed to have avoided the worst of the career missteps Willis had made.

  “Well, if that is your definition, I think it’s already failed,” she said after a pause.

  “Captain?” Yaya said sharply.

  “If our definition of success is to pin down the Nameless reserves in defensive positions while the Home Fleet attacks, then I think we can succeed in that. But that’s a short term objective.”

  Willis smiled bleakly.

  “In the long term... The Nameless believes us to be a threat to their continued survival,” she continued. “If we succeed with this mission or even get close enough for them to know what we tried, we’ll confirm as fact what up to now they have merely believed.”

  Willis leaned back in her chair and sighed.

  “In some respects it’s a tragedy for the Nameless and everyone they have encountered. They believe so profoundly that we are threats, that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and now we have to become threats just to survive. Personally, I believe this will reinforce their attitude towards us – that we are a threat that must be destroyed. I don’t think this will be the last shots of this war but it will be the first of the next.”

  “But we’ll do it?”

  “Yep. I don’t have any better ideas on what we could do – and as I said, we have our orders.”

  “In six days time the Home Fleet begins its attack,” Commodore Tneba said as the holo displayed the system. “Given the distance between us, the exact moment is unknown and unknowable. But our attack has to go in first since the element of surprise is essential for us. So it will have to be the old bait and switch.”

  The commanding officers of the small squadron had been gathered on board the Phantom to hash out the details of the attack.

  “While the system defences aren’t that impressive, they are enough to fend off any direct assault we could make. Fortunately, the Sherlock doesn’t have to get particularly close to the planet to do her thing, but she does need time to establish her position and work out the firing solution. That is something that cannot be done if she’s taking hits.”

  “For best effect,” added Commander Bronsman of the Sherlock, “we need to strike at the side of the planet with the city and space elevator.”

  “As I understand it,” Willis said, “with these weapons, it hardly matters which part of the planet we hit.”

  “That’s assuming the Nameless aren’t as casual about the lives of their civilians as they are with their military.”

  Tneba paused and shrugged.

  “There’s simply no way to know, yet,” he resumed. “If we hit towns on the far side of the planet, the city won’t be affected by the initial bombardment but the fallout cloud will reach them within two or three weeks. Just a few hours of exposure from Cobalt Sixty will be fatal and the radiation levels will remain so too long for anyone to wait it out in a shelter. No, if the Nameless place any value on their civilian population, they’ll attempt to evacuate and that’s when we’ll know. But right now, we need to land our strike on or near the city.”

  There were grim expressions around the table but no one objected.

  “So we need to draw the mobile units away and pull the orbital defences over to the far side of the planet,” Tneba continued. “That requires splitting our forces.”

  He pressed a control and the holographic solar system twirled and spun.

  “There are two targets in the system that the Nameless will defend if threatened – the fuel industry around the gas giant and the space gate over the inhabited planet.”

  He pressed the controls again and the holo froze.

  “This position occurs roughly every seventeen hours. The space gate is on the opposite side of the planet from the space elevator. I plan to dispatch Pankhurst’s strike boats against the gate during one of these orbital periods. Irrespective of whether they destroy it, the very act of it being attacked should compel them to start moving most or all of their mobile units up and out of the planet’s mass shadow. Simultaneously with our strike boats pulling away, I will then take Phantom in against the gas giant’s fuel industry, thus forcing them to pursue into that planet’s mass shadow. Once they’ve cleared, Spectre will escort and protect the Sherlock as she attacks.”

  “That will put you a very long way into the gas giant’s mass shadow, sir,” Willis commented.

  “And in danger of being cut off,” Bronsman added.

  “True, true,” Tneba said, “but if we are to get any action, we’ll have to show a little leg.”

  “Would the Spectre be a better choice than the flag ship, sir?” Willis carefully asked.

  Tneba shook his head.

  “The ship covering the Sherlock will have to get into position well ahead of time and once there will have to stay silent. I need to remain in control and Phantom’s engines are in slightly better condition than Spectre’s, no offence. Spectre simply has more kilometres on the clock and for this purpose, speed is more important than armour. I could shift my flag to Spectre but I believe the critical tactical decision will be when Phantom makes her move. The big decision at this point is finding somewhere to put Spectre and Sherlock so that they can see developments around the planet, without being so far back that time lag becomes a problem.”

  “My own tactical team, sir, believes we have found such a spot,” Willis said as she pointed into the holo. “The readings from the reconnaissance ships picked up a comet, a big one about four light minutes out from the objective. Its current position means nothing around any of the planets with activity have line o
f sight behind it.”

  “That’s a pretty tight jump in,” Tneba said, slightly dubious.

  “Ideally, sir, we’d want to be jumping to make our attack as the mobile units chase you across the Blue Line into the gas giant’s mass shadow. The closer in we are, the better we can make that judgement call,” she continued. “It is achievable. We’d have to make a couple of jumps in quick succession but the first will allow us to get a good enough fix to make the second. If we can take one of the reconnaissance ships with us, then we can use its towed array to watch and stay completely behind the comet.”

  “Alright, but I’ll want my own staff to check the maths on that,”

  “Of course.”

  Because God knows, Willis thought to herself, if we’ve screwed up the navigation calculations, I’d rather find out now.

  The following few days managed to be both intensely busy and interminably drawn out. Even at this late stage, there was always a chance that an abort order could be issued. Each time Communications reported an FTL transmission, Willis found herself going tense but every time it was identified as Nameless. In the engine rooms and weapons bays, systems were checked then double-checked. In the personnel section, all unnecessary fittings and personal effects were stripped out and sent over to the support ships. Every gram removed was mass that wouldn’t have to be accelerated when the time came and that tiny difference might be vital. As captain, Willis was the only person on board without enough to occupy the days and eventually she found herself alone in her cabin with an old fashioned pen and a sheet of paper.

  She’d got as far as Dear Mum and Dad, before stalling.

  She had written them a goodbye letter years ago, back when she was a junior lieutenant, before the war, when death was more likely to be the product of an accident than anything else.

  Since the start of the war she’d periodically thought about updating it, but the thought had only occurred when combat was imminent and time too short. Before they left Earth would have been the time but she hadn’t got to it, probably as much a mental defence as anything else. A goodbye letter was an acknowledgement of the possibility of a future you wouldn’t have a place in, a line of thought not many people would wish to pursue.