“Yes, sir. But it’s gonna be hell in space.”
“Give it to me,” Hereford replied.
“I want you to launch ever damned ship or rocket capable of carrying a team of spec ops or marines. Aim half of them at one ship and half at the other,” Andy said.
“They’ll be torn to bits,” Hereford protested.
“Time a spread of missiles to keep their guns busy. Your fighters will escort one group of assault ships toward one Naga vessel, while the Satori escorts the other,” Andy said. “Once they make contact, they breach and take the ships.”
“That’s ambitious. How about we nuke them from inside instead?” Hereford said.
“That’s a good backup plan,” Andy agreed.
“We don’t have enough ships ready to go to do much damage,” Hereford muttered. “I’m getting numbers now, but I don’t think we have more than two or three that can launch in time to do any good.”
“I’m already pinging the other major space agencies, sir,” Andy said. “This strike will be all or nothing. Earth wins here or dies. No sense leaving anyone out.”
There was a long pause. Andy worked hard to keep his face calm and his fingers from fidgeting. If he’d screwed this up, if Hereford wasn’t convinced, then it might be possible to twist other arms into launching this assault. But that would take even more precious time, and he was incredibly aware of how what little they had was rapidly running out. He took a deep breath, getting ready to give one more exhortation about how it was the best shot they had, but Hereford cut in first.
“We’ll make it happen,” he said. “I’m already setting up coordination with the Chinese, and we’ll have the Russians and the EU on the line shortly. You’ll get your flotilla. God help you if this fails.”
“God help all of us if we screw this up, sir,” Andy said. “Nothing else will. The Satori might be able to evacuate a handful of people in time, but…”
“Nowhere near enough to make a difference,” Hereford said. “I understand. We’ll be in touch with launch details shortly.”
The radio cut out, and Andy sank into his chair. His hands were shaking, and he placed them on his knees to hide it. He’d convinced the general to follow his lead. He’d figured that would be the hard part. But now, going over the vague plan in his head, he realized that had been the easiest element of the whole show. There was so much at stake. If anything failed, they all died. Along with every human being in the universe.
“Well, I knew you’d been angling for a promotion for a while,” Dan said. “I just never thought you’d go to such extremes.”
“What’s that?” Andy asked, startled from his thoughts.
Dan spun his seat around to face Andy, a big, lop-sided grin on his face. “Sure. You just bought yourself command of Earth’s first space combat fleet. Congratulations, Admiral Wakefield.”
Andy groaned, and then laughed. A little of the pressure eased away with the joke. Not much, but just enough that he could breathe a little more easily. They’d pulled off so many insane ventures in the past. Surely they could manage just one more.
Twenty-Two
The planet below lit with sequences of launches as dozens of payloads jumped toward the sky within minutes of each other. Blossoms of light clawed their way up through the atmosphere, burning through the air to stab out toward their foes.
“Looks like every launch was a go,” Dan said. He shook his head. “No, I take that back. China’s lost one rocket and the US has had a booster failure. The other six look clear to reach orbit.”
“That’s only three troop payloads for each Naga ship,” Charline said. “Will it be enough troops?”
“It has to be,” Andy replied.
Dan grunted and returned to his console. He swung the Satori in an arc that would link up with the assault ships. His job would be to screen three of them against Naga fighters. He was going to have his hands full. The alien ship ahead of them had already launched its full compliment. They were still hundreds of kilometers distant but closing fast.
“Phase two should engage any moment now,” Andy said.
Dan switched one of his screens to the Satori’s rear camera. He had to see this. He’d grown up in the shadow of nuclear war, people always a little nervous that eventually someone would push the button and then the end would arrive in cataclysm. Stockpiles of nukes had gone down over the decades as treaty after treaty attempted to limit their distribution, but there were still over two thousand active nuclear missiles on Earth.
From the sounds of it, pretty damned near all of them that could fire far enough had been aimed upward into space.
“We’ve got confirmation on Phase Two,” Charline said.
“My god,” Dan whispered. He’d never seen anything like this.
The planet below seemed alive with launches. Scores, then hundreds, eventually over a thousand missiles clawing their way skyward. It looked like a huge campfire just after being stirred, the sparks sailing off into the night sky. There were too many points of light to take them all in.
“That might just do the trick all by itself,” Beth said over the radio. She’d shored up the hallway, but rather than joining them on the bridge had returned to the engine room. Getting back and forth was going to be trouble through the damaged hall, and she wanted to be near the critical ship systems in case they had trouble.
“I doubt it,” Andy said. “But we can hope.”
The missiles shot up and away from the planet, overtaking the assault shuttles. Ahead, the Naga vessels were slowing, altering the course to better bring their weapons to bear. Flashes of light crisscrossed the dark void as the alien weapons spat energy toward the missiles. Brilliant explosions formed, silent detonations of small suns.
“Majel, link my radio in to our assault ship pilots,” Dan said. He saw them closing fast behind the Satori. They were a rag-tag little batch of ships. None of them were built for combat. They were designed to shuttle people up to a space station, or haul cargo. Those ships were going to come apart in seconds if anything shot at them. Each of them had to be packed to the gills to get a full platoon or more of troops inside.
“Done,” Majel said.
“Good. Majel, I’m going to need your help on this,” Dan said. “Keeping those ships safe is…” His voice trailed off.
“Statistically unlikely,” Majel supplied for him. “We’ll do what we can, though.”
“Shuttles, stay close together and in formation. We’re providing your cover,” Dan said into his radio.
“What cover? Where are you?” the response came back.
“Stealth ship. You can’t see us, but we can see you,” Dan said. “Hang in there. This is going to get rough.”
Then they were cruising into the region where the nukes had been going off, bits of debris and leftover shock waves turning the smooth ride into a bumpy one. The Naga fighters were dead ahead, too. “Majel, give me a railgun spread targeting those lead fighters. Take them out.”
“They’ll know we’re here,” Majel warned.
“I want them to.”
The Satori fired, blasting two Naga fighters to bits, and then blowing up two more. The remaining fighters of that leading wing scattered, flying in all directions to get clear of the Satori’s deadly hail of fire. Those ships would come around and try to slip in behind their formation, but it bought them time. Every second they earned without losing a shuttle was kilometers closer to the battle cruiser.
He could see it, sunlight flickering off the hull a little in the distance. It wasn’t towing the planetoid it carried. It was pushing it along. That’s why it had stopped and turned. The planetoid was in the way of it firing its main guns. Just by forcing it to change direction like that, they’d bought more time for the planet. The Naga would have to do some time-consuming course corrections to get the asteroid headed back toward Earth.
Another fighter wing soared in from in front. Dan kept the Satori aimed toward them. If he could get this one split as well,
then maybe they had a shot.
“Fighters closing on the assault shuttles from behind!” Charline warned.
“Damn, already?” Dan said. He brought the ship around, and the railguns fired. One Naga ship exploded, but the other two continued their run on one of the shuttles. Dan closed with it, engines flaring as he poured on more power. Majel and Charline took out a second one with the railguns, but missed the third.
It sped up. He wasn’t going to reach it in time. The thing wasn’t going to slow down - it was speeding up. He watched its guns stitch scorch marks into the side of the shuttle, but that wasn’t the biggest threat.
The fighter was still boosting velocity when it slammed into the rear starboard side of the shuttle, instantly vaporizing both ships.
“Damn it!” Dan cried out. He was going too fast himself. He began slowing the Satori, swinging the ship back around. Majel fired the guns, taking out two more ships as they approached. But the other Naga pilots had seen the successful attack. It seemed enough of them were willing to die to stop the humans. Three more trios of fighters were speeding toward the shuttles.
The Satori blasted two fighters apart. The third dove away, momentarily out of the fight. Dan brought the nose around to the second group. One of the fighters detonated as a railgun slug slammed into it. But the other two crashed into the shuttle. The shuttle tried vainly to dodge, but it simply wasn’t maneuverable enough. The crew of the Satori watched helplessly as the ships tore each other into scrap metal.
“God damn it,” Dan said. He brought the Satori in directly behind the third flight, and Majel took two of them out. But the Naga had planned this well. They knew the Satori had two railguns. Three fighters in a suicide wave meant one of them was likely to get through. He couldn’t take out the third fighter in time.
The shuttle ducked and weaved, twisting in an impossibly complex evasive maneuver. The Naga fighter shot past it.
“I’ve taken control of their helm,” Majel said. “Charline hacked their computer systems. I can’t dodge these things forever though.”
“You don’t have to,” Dan said. “I have a better idea. We are so out of here.”
“What do you have in mind?” Andy asked. He’d been silent to let Dan fly, but he was right to question a change in plans. You could only have one captain of a ship. Dan might tend to assume tactical command as the pilot, but he didn’t begrudge Andy wanting to know what was going on.
“I want to jump them with us and drop them right on top of the Naga,” Dan said.
“That’s brilliant if it works,” Andy said.
“Yeah,” Dan replied with a quick grin. “I know.”
He tapped out a sequence on the wormhole drive, working the rough coordinates for the jump. With Majel now controlling the shuttle - and only one shuttle left - they had options which hadn’t existed before. Dan opened the radio channel to the last shuttle.
“Hang on, guys. We have your helm on remote. We’re going to land you on the Naga cruiser,” he said.
“How? It’s still a hundred kilometers away,” the shuttle pilot replied.
“Magic,” Dan said.
He snapped off the link. “Majel, this is a double jump. We have the juice for it?” While he talked, he tore apart two more Naga fighters. But the others were reforming. Four clusters of three fighters dove toward the helpless shuttle. There was no way even Majel was going to be able to dodge them all.
“The drive has had a little time to recharge. We can manage three short jumps, maybe four,” Majel said.
“Light it up, then!” Dan said.
The wormhole drive activated. The last thing Dan saw before the screen grew too bright to see through was the Naga fighters closing on the shuttle, every engine burning with all the power they could muster.
Then the Satori flickered into space directly above the shuttle.
“Engage second jump!” Dan said. The lights flashed again. Proximity warning alarms went off as the Satori’s sensors picked up the deadly fighters coming in fast. All of the Naga fighters were shooting as they came. Even if they couldn’t see the Satori, they’d seen the wormhole activation. They knew roughly were the ship was. The hull was pounded by bolts of energy from the fighter’s fire as it stitched its way across the hull. The lights flickered for a moment, but the wormhole was holding.
The Satori and her passenger dove forward into the wormhole.
Twenty-Three
Majel privately thought the entire operation they were undergoing was impractical. There were far too many places where it could go horribly wrong. Every element of their strike was grossly outmatched by the Naga forces arrayed against them.
For example, her sensor readings showed that the battle cruiser had already eliminated two hundred and seventy four of the four hundred and eleven missiles launched from the planet surface. With the Satori and assault shuttles gone, the fighters were zipping around cleaning up most of the rest of that attack. The missiles were ‘dumb’, with little evasive ability. They were also reaching out at a target that was at the very edge of their fuel capacity. A great number were going to miss simply because the Naga ship moving away from its previous course. The missiles lacked the fuel to compensate. That hundred or so would drift into space, useless.
They had already lost two shuttles, which meant there were perhaps three dozen humans making contact with the Naga ship. Against them was the hull of the ship itself. If they breached that barrier, which seemed likely, the battle cruiser was teeming with over a hundred armed Naga warriors.
Majel had run through simulations of a hundred thousand alternate plans, however. Variations on themes, none of the simulations she ran ended with anything but the destruction of Earth.
She stayed the course anyway. Partly that was out of loyalty for these humans who had become her friends. Her family, even, although she had a limited understanding of what precisely they meant when they used that word. It felt right somehow, in a way she could not express in pixels or machine code.
But partly it was because if she had learned nothing else from working with the crew of the Satori, it was that statistics often lied.
For example, even her best-case simulation had all three assault ships being destroyed within the first few moments of contact. Dan’s piloting skills shifted the odds, but even factoring those in with her own ability to predict Naga movement and take action to block them, none of the shuttles should have gotten anywhere near the cruiser.
Yet here she was, gently setting the shuttle down on the upper hull of the enemy vessel.
There was something about humanity, and perhaps about every living species, which defied statistics. They lived and fought and threw all their effort into impossibly improbable things. Often, they failed. But sometimes they succeeded. And somehow, by relying on such outlier examples as indications of probability, they won through more often than mathematics said they ought.
Hope was a dangerous thing. But it was also an incredible asset at the right time. Majel clung to hope, to the belief that her crew had what it took to beat the odds once more.
“Evacuate the ship immediately,” Majel said over the assault shuttle’s internal speakers and radios. “Fighters are incoming. We will be unable to defend you against a strafing run. Evacuate and make your way into the enemy ship.”
“We’re on it,” a gruff voice replied. “Who is this, anyway?”
“My name is Majel,” she replied. “I’m the one who took over your navigation to prevent your being blown to bits a few seconds ago.”
“Well, we appreciate it, Miss,” the voice replied. “You did your job. Let us get to ours.”
“I’m uploading the coordinates of the nearest and next nearest airlock sites to you now,” she added.
“Got ‘em. We’re on it. Keep those fighters off us the best you can.”
The transmission stopped, but she saw the man was as good as his word. The bay doors on the side of the shuttle opened up and men in space suits poured out, droppin
g to the Naga ship and activating magnetic boots. They made their way across the surface in the direction she had sent them.
“Marines are away,” she reported to the Satori crew. “Naga fighter wings are incoming to this site. Suggest we intersect, or the marines will be in trouble fast.”
“We’re up and moving,” Dan said. “I see the targets.”
Majel was tracking them, too. Two small groups of three fighters each. She created firing solutions for two and engaged them with the guns. One of them exploded and the other lost a wing, spinning off into the dark. That still left four, more than enough to take out the men below before they found cover.
“Andy, we need to drop the cloak,” Dan said.
“We won’t last long if they can see us,” Andy replied.
“Those men down there will last even less time if those fighters get into range,” Dan snapped back. “I can’t get into position to stop them all.”
“You want to make us bait?” Andy hesitated only a second. “Do it.”
Dan tapped the button to drop the cloak as he brought the Satori into a position to target two more Naga. The reaction was immediate. Now that they could see the enemy, three of the remaining fighters broke from their attack run to maneuver into a better striking position against the Satori.
One of them drove ahead, still barreling in toward the marines on the ship’s hull.
“Damn it,” Dan said. “One of them didn’t take the bait.”
Which was the logical course of action for them to take. Majel knew that, but she held back the words. She sensed that saying so would not help improve the situation. Instead she split her focus. She began working on targeting solutions for the fleeing ship - because she predicted with ninety-nine point eight percent certainty that Dan would pursue that one ship over the other three. With the rest of her concentration she tracked the other three fighters. They would become threats in a matter of seconds. Dan didn’t have long.
“Going after the one,” Dan said.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 64
