"I get that. If anyone asks, I'll tell them you're asleep in your Ready Room and not to be disturbed. I just won't be specific about which Ready Room."
"Good choice."
She hugged me.
On the way to Gunbus, I checked in on Angel. We cuddled for a short while, and I told her I had to go and do something, and would be very late back. She looked at me as if not happy hearing it. I turned to go.
"MEOW!"
I turned back.
"What sweetie?"
She trotted over to me, and for the first time since growing to her full cat size, she jumped up and shinned up my suit to sit on my left shoulder, draping herself around my neck. I looked at her.
"You want to come?"
She purred.
"It's going to be dangerous."
She licked my ear.
Have cat, will travel. I made sure she was braced for walking, and continued on my way to Gunbus.
No-one saw us leave.
Jane cloaked Gunbus before we undocked, and we sneaked into the jump point as invisibly as we could. In theory, anyone looking could have picked up our mass moving. The suit cloak was able to mask the ship ID and its electronic signature, but nothing could really mask the engine thrust if you were looking for it. The biggest problem with using the suit for cloaking a ship, was it couldn’t cover the engine thrust outflows effectively. Not and still have the engines work. But you could thrust forward, turn the engines off, complete the cloak, and coast through the jump point, which is what we did.
The aliens hadn't detected the engines when we were leaving Last Hope. It was a calculated risk going back there. I had wondered on the way out if they had a literal blind spot for anything bright. Our gunfire had mown them down as if they hadn't seen it. Maybe they couldn't see anything bright at all? It would explain why they removed the sun from planets before going there.
"Have you located what we need?"
"I think so. Setting a course now."
I settled down to wait. Angel slid down my front, jumped down to the deck, and jumped up again to her normal spot on the console. She turned back to me, cat winked, and settled down to watch space move.
At the speed Gunbus was now moving, it took us an hour to locate what we needed. Collecting and packaging it took almost as long. Four more to get back to Last Hope, the planet. I munched finger food I had to go find myself, and was glad I'd made the policy of keeping each ship stocked after I moved on to another one, on the theory you never knew when you'd be needing a meal, in a ship you didn't expect to be flying. If ever it had been demonstrated as wise, was now. There was even food for Angel, and for the first time, she ate on the console.
The last couple of hours of the approach was nerve wracking. The closer we got, the thicker was the concentration of alien ships. I kept expecting to be discovered at any moment, or worse, collide with one of them.
Jane hadn't said a word the whole time. As the planet began to loom large before us, she turned to me.
"Are we really going to do this?"
"Now you ask?"
"Just checking."
"I don’t want to. But like everything else we've done so far, we need to know."
She sighed. I boggled at her.
"Confirmed."
We did it.
Fifty
At the last moment, Jane redlined the engines, cut them out completely, channeled the thrust into the maneuvering thrusters, and rolled us downwards like I normally flipped the ships. A flip was out of the question.
"Releasing," she said.
Our cloak stopped, the ship suit shifting back to a belt around the middle of Gunbus, and for a few moments we were exposed to the aliens with only normal shields.
The asteroid we'd been towing shot ahead of us, and Jane completed our flip to be heading the other way. The suit shifted again to cover the whole ship, and once again we cloaked.
WHAM!
Thousands of aliens had seen us in the few moments we were vulnerable, and had correctly anticipated where we were going to be. Gunbus bucked from the impacts.
Jane took evasive action and the next shot missed us. She continued moving in a completely random way, until it was obvious they didn’t have a clue where we were, before putting us back on course to observe the asteroid.
I looked at Jane. She looked at me. Angel was engrossed in the view of an asteroid plummeting down onto a planet. This wasn’t a normal meteor, and it had nothing to do with size, even though it was big. It was the fact it had been thrown at a planet at the speed of a fast ship. Without the speed, it would do a lot of damage. With the speed, and the lack of any real angle, this was going to be major. This is why we didn’t need nukes any more.
"They blew the shields down, but the suit lost only five percent integrity," she said.
I had to mentally shift back to the ship hit we'd taken.
"Huh? I was expecting it to shred."
"I was too. But it appears the amount of energy it was able to draw from the Crystal, was sufficient for it to take the hit without any real damage."
"Wow!"
"Wow indeed. If only we had hundreds of these things?"
"We'd have an invincible fleet."
"Pity."
"Yes."
I thought for a few moments.
"Get Relentless set up with this suit as soon as you can after we get back. But reconfigure the energy distribution so the shields get augmented from the Crystal, and the suit is a backup."
"Damned right I will!"
The asteroid hit the atmosphere and plunged down. My eyes were glued to the lightshow going on below us, as the outer layer of the asteroid burned and crumbled. I wondered if the aliens on the ground could see the firestorm heading their way.
Fire started coming up from the ground, suggesting they could. The asteroid cracked and fractured, but held its overall shape.
And suddenly there was no asteroid. Instead there was a huge eruption of magma, fragments of asteroid, and chunks of the surface, which seemed to reach all the way up to touch the underside of Gunbus.
Jane actually flinched, and Angel sat up suddenly, jumped off the console and bounded up onto my lap, where she leaned into me. I instinctively cuddled her. Jane had us moving away from the display of violence below us now, but the cams kept recording. Nothing I'd ever seen prepared me for the devastation I now witnessed.
"What have I done?" I whispered.
You need to do more releases now.
I shook my head. For once, there was coldness in Kali's voice, and it was in stark contrast to the heat being demonstrated below.
"Projections?"
"Total devastation of the biosphere. We didn’t quite set the atmosphere ablaze, but there's enough hot material blasting around the globe that we may as well have. This planet won't support life now for a long, long time."
"How long until it's all gone?"
"Within a day there won't be an unburnt patch anywhere."
"How close did we get to the main landing areas?"
"The asteroid hit on a different continent from the village. Not that there was anything left of it."
"How do you know?"
"No cam signals. The last few would only have been discovered if the entire village was gone."
"So we can't really tell what's going on down there?"
"Not unless we go down, and I really don’t recommend that. At least not yet."
"Not at all then."
"No?"
"We need to be back on the other side of the jump point in a shade under two hours now."
"Oh. Point taken. So we probably never will know how badly we affected this planet."
"My math suggests we can wait a little longer and see if any of the aliens escape."
"Logic suggests some will."
We waited. But not for long, as a cloud of ships erupted out of the still normal looking side of the planet, fleeing the firestorm.
"Oh shit," said Jane suddenly.
&n
bsp; Every alien ship had turned onto a heading directly for the Morocco jump point. All of them, over all of the system we had covered.
"Jon?"
"Jane?"
"I think this was a bad idea after all."
"Why?"
"Because instead of the normal number going to hit the jump point, now all of them are. And I think we seriously pissed them off."
"How can you tell?"
"How they're flying is pretty much the same as after we nuked them the first time."
"Oh. Better get us back then."
"Confirmed."
I started doing releases. It wasn’t really about the aliens this time, but all the animals, birds, fish and insects which I'd killed, or was still in the process of killing. Tens of thousands of aliens didn’t really compare to billions of little critters, which all had lives and souls, and none of them asked to be barbequed unexpectedly. Then there were the trees and plants, grasses and moss. All had souls as well. All deserved a release and a request for forgiveness.
Fifty One
The cylinder was already forming when we arrived back at the jump point. Jane slowed us down, and we took the precaution of no thrust, and just coasted past them. At the very last second, Jane goosed the side thrusters and we jumped.
The fleet was arrayed around the jump point in a layered triangle formation. My fleet had the longest side, and the larger units of the two sector fleets formed the other two sides. The Destroyers made up a layer by themselves, and the Corvettes made another layer. Several Frigates were with the Corvettes.
I asked Jane who was commanding what, and as I suspected, each three star was commanding his own side of the triangle, with Bentley in command of mine, and Sato in command of all the Corvettes and Frigates, regardless of where they were.
We snuck through unnoticed, and parked in Relentless' hanger. I picked up Angel and pushed her up onto my shoulders again, and we made our way to the CCC.
The whole team were there when I walked in.
"Where the fuck have you been?" asked Amanda.
I put a grin on my face, and put Angel on her pad, before seating myself.
"Well Jon?" asked Aleesha.
My grin got bigger.
"I hate it when he grins like that," said Dick.
There was silence for a full minute.
"Jon sweetie," said Aline. "Would you like to tell us where the fuck you've been?"
Her voice changed from sweet to hard at 'where'.
I think they might have been annoyed with me. I opened a vid.
"Central Command. Mission accomplished. Although I'm not sure the results were worth it. Jane managed to find an asteroid which matched the specs you gave us, and we successfully threw it into the atmosphere of Last Hope. The atmosphere itself didn’t ignite, but it may as well have. The asteroid impacted the northern continent, which wasn’t the one which had been settled. Most of that continent was devastated within minutes, and we estimated the entire planet would be engulfed in the firestorm within a day. It's going to be a long time before it's habitable again."
Everyone around me was looking shocked now.
"We estimate as many as fifty percent of the aliens on the ground were able to flee, and here's the downside. Every single alien ship in the system we could see on the navmap altered course directly for the jump point. They were almost exact in doing it together. And what's worse, is the ones close to the planet were flying the same way the ones which survived our nuke the other day were, like they were high or something."
"The result is, we have the entire system coming here now, instead of the ones earmarked for it. If anything, I think we made them very mad, and it's going to make holding here harder than anticipated. We do however have the local sector fleets with us, so our firepower is better than expected as well."
"Jane will send you details of what we did through her AI links, as I don’t trust this to any other channel. For now, we have a single ship capable of pulling off a stunt like this. The belt suit technology worked, even with such a huge asteroid, proving it will also work with a Dreadnaught sized ship. The problem is the power requirements, which even a Dreadnaught cannot supply at the moment. We not only successfully cloaked the asteroid, but the ship took a major hit after we re-cloaked from letting it go, at a hit level which should have destroyed us instantly, proving the technology can act like armour for a ship. But only if you have enough power for it. Relentless is being given this protection as I speak, but we have the means for only one ship. To be really useful, we need a breakthrough in power generation."
"Yes, we can do it again. It would be best if we could send multiple asteroids in at the same time, hitting all the main landing areas the aliens are using. I don’t see the point, unless we can effectively destroy their whole force on the ground in the first few seconds. So for now, I recommend we don’t try this again, at least until we have more ships able to survive doing it."
I paused, gathering a thought.
"Now, if someone could come up with a way of seeding an atmosphere with so much oxygen that it could be ignited by the last ship leaving, that would be useful. We could deny them planets to land on as we pulled back. But I personally would hate to be the one who set a still inhabited planet on fire. On the one hand though, we knew Last Hope was empty of higher life forms, except for aliens, and some larger animals in parts the aliens hadn't reached yet. On the other hand, the likelihood is, most of our planets will still have people on them after we've retreated. On the gripping hand, I don’t know which is worse. Being eaten by an alien, committing suicide before being eaten by an alien, and being burnt to death by a firestorm."
I sighed.
"Sorry, it's been a long day, and the battle here hasn’t started yet. I'll report again when we're falling back to Morocco. Hunter out."
I closed the vid and looked at Jane.
"Send that AI to AI, with the complete feeds."
"Confirmed."
"You didn’t!" said Alison, sounding as shocked as she looked.
"He did," said BA, looking like she was pissed I hadn't taken her with me.
Alana's eyes flashed at me, and I was pretty sure she was pissed I hadn't taken her as well. But then, she loved explosions and fireballs.
"Movement," said Jane, and we all shifted our attention back to the HUD.
I looked at the list of ship shielding. The Latin and African fleets weren’t on it.
"Second list of shielding please Jane. All the Latin and African ships. Put it on a side screen, but right next to the existing list. Our new friends don’t have our shielding, and it would be better if they don’t stick around too long."
"Confirmed."
Fifty Two
Maybe it was because I’d already had a full on day, and it was now the middle of the night, but these battles were starting to blur.
We hit them hard. We kept hitting them. The fighters started cycling through to be rearmed. The Corvettes withdrew. Rinse and repeat started to take on new meaning.
And then everything changed. In the blink of a blurry eye, we lost a Latin Cruiser. Then an African Destroyer. Blink there, blink gone.
I was suddenly yelling for both fleets to withdraw. Ships shot away on their pre-determined courses, but another Cruiser was hit before they made it out of range.
"Jeeves! Stimulant. Now."
Seconds later, I felt a sting in the back of the neck, and suddenly I was in hyper-drive. I rechecked the shield values on all the other sector ships. All of them had fallen below forty percent now. And I hadn't noticed them fall so far.
"What happened Jane? How did I screw that up?"
"Let me show you something I should have thought of before."
Next to the shield values of all ships appeared another number. Redoubt had one hundred. All other ships had less. The African ships had half of what a similar ship in my fleet had, and the Latin ships were slightly worse again.
"Fuck!"
In effect, while fifty percent
was safe for my ships, the African sector ships were not much better shielded than my Corvettes. I'd never thought to check.
"Sorry Jon. I didn’t think to cross-reference this either."
"No-one did," added Annabelle.
"Jane, have Admiral Sato bring the Corvettes back to where either the African or Latin line was."
"Confirmed."
The battle went on. The Corvettes returned, and left again, being replaced by a mixed group of African and Latin Cruisers. I paid a lot more attention to them this time, and sent them away again well before they became vulnerable. The Corvettes returned a third time, and I sent them away early as well.
Finally, around two in the morning, I ordered all fighters and Privateers to land or dock. Redoubt was down to sixty five percent by now, and it wasn’t going to be long before the rest of us were below fifty.
"Where's my suit armour?" I asked Jane suddenly.
"You can have it now if you want, as long as you don’t want to fire guns."
"Erk."
Gunbus hadn't used her guns at all while we were in Last Hope. The problem with the suit was it covered over everything, so in order to fire guns, there had to be a hole there when the pulse was released. This needed to be designed, along with turret movement, missile and torpedo launches. Either each hole had to be permanent, or an AI had to interface with the suit processors to dynamically change the design as each gun, missile or torpedo was fired, with three states to worry about. Not firing, open as about to fire, and close after firing. It was no wonder at all it hadn't ever been done before.
As I thought, I watched shield values. I started sending the lighter shielded Cruisers off. More alien ships started getting through. I thought I noticed something.
"Jane?"
"Jon?"
"Are they getting more ships through than they were?"
She was silent for ten seconds.
"They are. I think the rate is up about twenty percent. Tighter cylinder putting more ships through each jump."
"That explains why this battle isn’t lasting as long," said Dick.
Hunter Legacy 12: Hero in Darkness Page 23
