“That’s impossible. What are they playing at?” Kyle replied. “Get our fighters into space,” he ordered. “I can’t help feeling we’re walking into a trap.”
Elysium trembled underneath him as her launch tubes came to life, firing starfighters into space with abandon. Hundreds of the tiny ships took up formation around his fleet, a shield against a hidden enemy Kyle couldn’t help but suspect was there somewhere.
The Presley System was one of the few where someone could hide, after all.
But…nothing. There was no reaction.
The Alliance fleet spent forty minutes on high alert, watching their missiles flash across the two light-minutes between them and Ambrose…and then watching them slam home. Eight starfighter launch platforms died in massive balls of fire that would be visible from the surface, without even a twitch to suggest they’d seen their death coming.
“Sir,” Vasilev interjected in her soft voice. “We’re being contacted from the surface—it’s via the Commonwealth Q-probe network, but it’s one of our covert operations authentication codes.”
Kyle sighed. “No complications” was starting to look like a pipe dream.
“Put them through.”
An icon of a holographic swimming dolphin appeared in front of him and a calm voice greeted him.
“Alliance commander, this is…Green Dolphin, let’s call me. I speak for Open Ocean, the organization dedicated to the freedom of Ambrose and the Presley System.
“I received this authentication code from a Coraline Imperium Intelligence agent who is unfortunately now dead. The Pacification Corps killed him, along with every other rebel and intelligence operative they could catch…and a few thousand innocents they threw in for good measure.”
That was consistent with what little the Alliance knew of the Corps’ operations. “Break a few eggs to make an omelet” summed up their methodology.
“As you may have guessed by now, we have taken control of the planetary scanner sensor and its communications.” The dolphin laughed in a way that Kyle was relatively sure the real animal physically couldn’t.
“If they’d thought to use their own sensors, they’d have seen you coming, but they decided to rely on the Q-probe net entirely,” Green Dolphin concluded.
“So far, the surface forces only know that the Zions are gone. We are moving in to secure the planetary command center as I speak, but any assistance you can provide could make all of the difference.”
“Do we have a live channel?” Kyle asked.
“We have a return frequency, yes,” Vasilev confirmed. “Your orders, sir?”
Kyle sighed.
“Complications,” he cursed. “Link me through.”
THE GREEN FLOATING dolphin icon returned a moment later.
“This is Vice Admiral Kyle Roberts,” Kyle introduced himself. “And while I understand, please realize I am less than enthused to be talking to a virtual projection.”
“Believe me, Admiral Roberts, there is nothing I would love more than to meet you in person,” Green Dolphin replied. “You have quite the reputation in Commonwealth space. I hope our little contribution to your arrival here was appreciated.”
“It was,” Kyle said cautiously. “Understand that my mission here is a counter-industry raid, not a liberation. I am neither authorized nor equipped to help win your revolution.”
“I didn’t expect you to be,” Dolphin told him. “But we couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Right now, the only armed spaceships in the system belong to you. We believe we have neutralized the bombs on our domes, which means we only need your assistance neutralizing the Pacification Corps positions on the surface.”
“I don’t have a ground-landing force,” Kyle warned the rebel. “And only limited safe ground-bombardment capability.”
One of his bomber squadrons would suffice to render a planet uninhabitable, but there was nothing any of his starfighters could do for ground bombardment. His capital ships had a small supply of special kinetic munitions like the one he’d used to take out Aswiri’s Governor. They could fabricate more—there were few simpler systems in their inventory—but their base load was only a few dozen rounds.
“We managed to preserve most of the equipment we acquired in the last uprising,” Dolphin explained. “We have people and guns and will shortly control the planetary command center.
“If you can provide us with armored Marines and orbital bombardment to deal with major Corps positions, we can secure the islands in three or four days. Five at most.”
“I’m not sure I can stay that long,” Kyle warned. “My mission is on a strict timeline…and I cannot leave your orbital industry intact either way.”
There was a long pause.
“We built it once,” Dolphin said grimly. “Then we built it again after the Commonwealth destroyed it. We can build it a third time.
“We know we are too far away for the Alliance to protect us,” he continued. “Our plan is to withdraw our entire population to the domes and demolish the surface spaceports.
“The underwater domes are highly resilient to orbital bombardment and a nightmare to try and take with ground troops. Once everyone is below water, Ambrose will be far too expensive for the Commonwealth to try and retake.”
“That’s leaves you hiding underwater for a long time,” Kyle noted.
“Most of us have already lived under the ocean. The rest will learn. Given the choice between never seeing the sky and being shot by the Pacification Corps, we know our course.”
Kyle waited, considering.
“Please, Admiral Roberts,” the dolphin finally said. “Please help us. I know we’re still asking a lot, but with your help, we can be free. Without it…we may have just got a whole lot of people killed for nothing.”
Vice Admiral Kyle Roberts sighed. When you put it like that…
“We’ll be in orbit in a few hours,” he promised. “If you’ll help us coordinate the evacuation of the orbital platforms to the underwater domes as well, we will help you secure your planet.
“But we must then withdraw.”
“I know. Thank you.”
25
Niagara System
15:00 September 23, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BB-285 Saint Michael
ABOUT THE ONLY GOOD news out of the mess was that it appeared that James’s analysis department had their heads on straight.
“Do we have any fucking clue what crawled up Brigadier Morrison’s ass that caused him to ignore a goddamn battle fleet?” the Marshal of the Rimward Marches snarled at the virtual conference. “Anyone? Anything?”
“General Coelho isn’t responding to any attempts at communication,” Corna said grimly. “What intelligence I’ve been able to dig out from secondary sources suggests that the entire planetary communication net has been compromised—and that Thirty-Fifth Corps’ planetary command center has been taken by rebels.”
James Walkingstick grunted. He was reasonably sure he knew exactly what 35th Corps’ job on Ambrose had been, but even he wasn’t entirely certain the rumored “Pacification Corps” existed. Certainly, 35th Corps had been sent to Ambrose to secure it against a second revolt, which was suggestive to anyone who believed those rumors.
“Which means that Morrison is dead,” James concluded. “Blown to bits with his defense platforms. And Coelho is either dead or captured.”
Which meant dead. Whether 35th Corps was guilty of the crimes James suspected or not, there was no way the commander of the occupying garrison would have survived capture.
“And Ambrose is in open revolt,” Corna confirmed. “We have no contact with any organized formations on the planet, but what I’m getting from Intelligence sources is that the rebels came out of the woodwork with weapons acquired from the garrison they wiped out in the first uprising.
“They don’t have the gear to deal with any of the hardpoints—so I have no idea how they took the planetary command center!—but they have the numbers
and the gear that it probably won’t take more than twenty-four hours to push Thirty-Fifth Corps back into their secured positions.”
“And with an Alliance Fleet in orbit, those secured positions won’t hold long,” Vasek pointed out, the shaven-headed Admiral linked in via q-com. “I have to wonder if all of this wasn’t a ploy to get us looking somewhere else while they took control of Ambrose.”
“Unlikely,” James replied. “His raids made us putting together something like your task force inevitable, Johanna. If they’d just moved in and punched out the Presley System’s defenders with the help of the rebels, they’d have had weeks to make sure we couldn’t take the system.
“No, this is the rebels taking advantage of a golden opportunity,” the Marshal concluded grimly, yanking on his braid. “And they’ve handed us a glorious trap. What’s your ETA to Vigil, Admiral Vasek?”
“Thirty-six more hours,” she said instantly.
“And from there, four light-years and four days to Presley,” Corna pointed out. “If the rebels convince Roberts to help them, he’ll probably still be there.”
“Five and a half days,” James considered aloud. “Not sure I’d be willing to stay that long in his place. He knows the risks of letting us catch him.”
Vasek cleared her throat.
“I have…discussed the situation with several key navigation officers aboard my fleet,” she told them. “Presley is sufficiently close to our vector to Vigil that they believe they can adjust our course and get us there without slowing down.
“Our current pseudovelocity is one-point-five light-years per day. They estimate it will take twelve hours of extremely careful adjustments to get us on course, and three and a half days to get to Presley.
“Four days, total. From now.”
James winced.
“That is…phenomenally dangerous, Admiral,” he pointed out. You couldn’t see anything from inside an Alcubierre-Stetson bubble. Nothing outside it could see you, either. Your course was set before you left, based on up-to-date information on your destination relayed through q-com networks and massive interpolating calculations.
Changing course in midflight was based on the worst kind of dead reckoning—and could result in you overshooting and trying to emerge from warped space inside a star. The risks were high, but the rewards…
Vasek had eighteen ships. None were as large or as powerful as Roberts’s ships, but they carried modern fighters, bombers and missiles. They could take the raiding fleet.
“It is,” Vasek agreed levelly. “But my people think they can do it, and stopping this bastard before he blasts any more systems’ industry to pieces is worth the risk.”
James sighed, studying the chart on his wall, then nodded slowly.
“I won’t order it, Admiral,” he said levelly. “And you won’t, either. If you don’t get all of your Captains and navigators to sign off on it, it’s a no-go. Understood?”
“Understood,” she replied, her voice equally level.
“But if they do…kill that son of a bitch for me, Admiral Vasek!”
26
Presley System
12:00 September 24, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Alliance Forty-First Fleet
KYLE WATCHED with hard eyes as the explosions stomped their way along the foot of the mountain range. The Terran Commonwealth Marines’ 35th Corps’ Third Division had dug themselves in along the base of Ambrose’s only mountain range, a set of stony spires that split Golden, the largest island on the planet, in half.
Of the five divisions on the planet, Third had made the most of a name for itself among the locals. As soon as the revolt had started, Third Division’s units had executed a clearly preplanned maneuver, abandoning their barracks and prisons in favor of prebuilt heavy fortifications in the mountains.
Footage from the militias that had broken into those empty facilities had eliminated Kyle’s last vestiges of hesitation. It had been over a year since the revolt—but there were fresh bodies hanging from the gallows in the barracks’ courtyards and prison entryways.
Even the rebels didn’t have any estimates of how many people the Pacification Corps had killed. Certainly, the Alliance ground troops who’d broken into 35th Corps’ bases hadn’t found any records of their executions.
Third Division had known they couldn’t hold the cities and towns, not against an enraged populace out for blood. They had, however, thought they would be the ones with orbital fire support. If the rebels had been forced to attack the fortifications along the Golden Mountains’ base, they would have died in their thousands.
Even with power armor, any assault would have been a massacre—and with the Zions in orbit to provide fire support, the Division would have been almost untouchable.
Instead, however, Forty-First Fleet held the orbitals, and kinetic rounds marched along the line of fortifications, collapsing caverns and shattering bunkers. Over ninety percent of Kyle’s bombardment munitions had been allocated to this strike.
His logistics ships were already capturing convenient asteroids to turn into more. It was going to be a long few days.
“Bombardment complete,” Captain Novak reported. “If there’s a single intact facility down there, our scanners can’t pick it up.”
“Have Major Konstantin’s Marines sweep it with assault shuttles at low altitude,” Kyle ordered. Jane Konstantin was the commander of Elysium’s Marine battalion, and the woman with the misfortune of being the senior ground force officer in Forty-First Fleet.
There’d been no plans for landing in the operation, after all.
“Understood,” Novak confirmed. “What’s the next stage?”
“From our discussions with Open Ocean, we get Golden clear of hostiles and then start island-hopping,” Kyle replied. “A good third of the populace is on Golden, so that will give them a head start on evacuating them to the domes.”
His flag captain shook her head.
“Do they have enough space in the domes for another couple hundred million people?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “If nothing else, they have the tools to build more domes, but…” Kyle sighed. “Given how harsh the fighting has been down there, I understand why they think the Commonwealth won’t want to pay the cost to take them back!”
Because of the breaching charges mounted on the domes’ exteriors, only two of the Pacification Corps Divisions had been in the underwater domes. Twenty thousand soldiers, against half a billion very angry people.
About half of them had promptly surrendered. The troops in the domes had been the least…actively vicious of the occupying force. They’d had a big-enough stick backing them up that they hadn’t needed to be.
“Eternal Void,” Aurangzeb suddenly cursed, the operations officer’s voice echoing across the flag deck.
“What is it?” Kyle demanded.
Aurangzeb was silent and white-faced, but he flipped what he was seeing to Kyle’s implant feed.
A spike of energy under the oceans. A thermonuclear charge, Kyle recognized half-absently, smothered by over a kilometer of water.
He closed his eyes. It didn’t stop the implant feed, but it at least made him feel better.
“Which…” He coughed to clear his throat.
“Which one?” he asked.
“New Carpathia,” Aurangzeb finally responded. “The Terran’s 35-4-3 Brigade was holding out but their positions were being overrun. They apparently got around the lockout on the charges.”
“Or had another nuke in their stockpile,” Kyle said quietly. “How many?”
“Six million people, give or take,” his ops officer said. “It depends on whether any of the internal systems held. With a nuke against the exterior of the dome, though…”
“Almost certainly not,” the Admiral confirmed. “Record everything,” he snarled. “Every piece of footage from their Gods-accursed barracks and prisons. Every scrap of data on that bomb. We’ll dump everything we find i
nto the interstellar data feeds.
“Let the Commonwealth pretend the Pacification Corps is only slanderous rumors then.”
IT TOOK another full day to fully secure Golden, running out Kyle’s original forty-eight-hour planned stay. They’d evacuated most of the orbital platform’s population to Golden itself, turning Ambrose’s largest island into a massive transit depot.
Shuttles landed from the space stations, off-loaded their cargos of confused and often-terrified civilians, and then returned to orbit as surprisingly organized collections of ragtag militia in green armbands corralled them, guiding them toward the fleets of submersibles that would take them to safety.
“We’re running out of time, Dolphin,” Kyle warned their contact. So far as he could tell, the colored Dolphins were the senior dozen or so members of Open Ocean, the survivors of the men and women who’d coordinated the original uprising. The organization and preparedness of Ambrose’s revolution were down to them—and they were being very careful that not even the mostly friendly Admiral in orbit was going to know who they were.
“Forty-First Fleet needs to be on our way,” he told Green Dolphin. “Our ops plan called for us to spend a maximum of sixty hours here.”
“We’ve still got an entire division and a half of Pacification Corps troops dug in across the planet,” Dolphin replied. “We need your help still. At least a hundred million people still need to be evacuated.”
“And are we going to pay with six million lives for every day this continues?” Kyle asked gently.
The dolphin icon shivered.
“I pray not,” he said. “Give me another three days, Admiral, please. Give us three of your support, and I’ll have hidden everyone underwater. We’ve secured the domes, removed the remaining charges. There should be no more mass murders.”
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 17
