“Sons of bitches,” Sterling snapped. There was no real heat in his curse, just resignation.
“Commander?”
“They’ve switched their missile targeting,” Sterling explained. “The missiles salvos are trying to bypass us and go after the rest of the fleet.” He paused. “To give them credit, that course change also minimizes the chance they’ll hit our evacuation shuttles.”
“I’ll give Walkingstick that much credit, yes,” Kyle agreed. “Can we still intercept them?”
“That’s a question for Novak’s crew, and I don’t want to interrupt them,” his chief of staff admitted. “It’ll be long-range, but I don’t see a reason not to try!”
“What about missiles? Can we return fire?”
Aurangzeb laughed bitterly as Kyle directed the question his way.
“Six launchers, sir,” he said flatly. “We’re not getting through anyone’s defenses with six launchers.”
“Release them to Novak’s control,” Kyle ordered. The entire fleet’s missile launchers had been linked to fire on fleet orders, focusing the missiles on a minimum number of targets. “She can use them for missile defense.”
Using all-up Jackhammers as counter-missiles was expensive but, well, he couldn’t use them for much else now.
Moments after the bridge regained controlled of the launchers, missiles began to flash out. He didn’t need to check their orders to know they were being sent out as counter-missiles. Even as he watched, Elysium adjusted her course, the big, crippled carrier charging into the heart of the missile fire from Bogey Bravo.
Bogey Charlie’s fire wouldn’t come anywhere near her, but she could gut Bravo’s salvos if they chose to ignore her.
And ignore her they did. Missiles slipped past—a single ship couldn’t stop those massed hundreds—but far fewer than would have hit Elysium if the salvo had been aimed at her. For five minutes, the big supercarrier was wreathed in explosions.
Ten minutes.
Fifteen.
Some missiles made it through everything, but Kronos and Gaia were trailing the rest of the fleet now, “dragging their skirts” to lure the missiles to them. Both superbattleships took hits, but they could.
“Gaia has lost a Class One,” Sterling murmured. “Thank the Stars for redundancies.”
Not every fleet gave their ships an extra Class One manipulator. The Federation had never stopped…and that had just saved one of their most modern battleships.
“There they go,” Aurangzeb added. “They’re clear.”
Cherenkov radiation flickered across Elysium’s scanners, and Kyle looked at the tactical feeds.
The big supercarrier was alone in Leopold now, facing almost fifty Commonwealth warships.
“There are, what, fifteen hundred missiles still out there?” he asked conversationally.
“At least,” Aurangzeb confirmed. “We’re…well, we’re fucked, sir.”
“I know.” Kyle shook his head.
“Captain Novak?”
“Sir?” his flag captain responded, her voice tired. She knew what order he was going to give.
“Samson Protocols, if you please. Make sure everyone gets to a pod.” He smiled grimly, making sure his determination crossed the channel.
“That includes you. We got everyone clear; now we need to make sure the Commonwealth doesn’t get a Sanctuary to dissect—and you will not go down with her at this point, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
BB-285 Saint Michael
HUNDREDS OF MISSILES swept across the Leopold System, obedient to James Calvin Walkingstick’s command. Already, they were all changing their courses, giving up their hopeless chase of the now-vanished Alliance fleet and hurtling toward the remaining Sanctuary-class carrier.
“I wonder,” James said aloud, considering. “Roberts always was a carrier man.”
“Sir?” MacGinnis asked.
“Two Federation carriers. Two Imperial carriers. I make the odds fifty-fifty that the Stellar Fox is on that ship,” James said conversationally.
“Then he is about to cease to be a problem,” his ops officer said with satisfaction, then looked surprised as James shook his head.
“If he’s aboard that ship, he’s already ceased to be a problem,” he pointed out gently. “And whoever is aboard that ship, they put themselves into a position where they were going to give their lives to protect the rest of their people.
“Besides, they’ll scuttle her before they let us capture her…but if we hold off the missile fire, they can evacuate in an orderly fashion before they do so.”
Part of him wanted to grind Roberts’s face in this defeat, incomplete as it had been. The rest of him knew the crew over there deserved more respect—and while James Walkingstick would admit, in private at least, that he was a Unificationist fanatic, he wasn’t a mass murderer.
Not when he’d already won.
“Order all missiles into holding pattern and send a transmission to that ship,” he ordered firmly. “We are prepared to accept their surrender.”
“And if they fire on us, sir?”
James smiled thinly.
“They won’t be that stupid, Commodore,” he replied. “But if they do, vaporize that carrier.”
38
Castle System
15:00 October 9, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
New Cardiff
DR. LISA KERENSKY gestured with one hand, rotating the holographic model of a human brain floating in the middle of her office. The holographic model of a very specific human brain, whose owner was sitting on the other side of the projection from her, looking at her with hope in his eyes.
“If you look here, Mr. Solokov, you’ll note that this set of serotonin receptors is glowing orange,” she told her patient. “That means they’re absorbing neurotransmitters with less efficiency than normal. They’re not entirely outside of the regular range, but it’s quite low.
“Now, normally, the brain compensates for this on its own,” she continued. “But take a look at this.”
She highlighted a blue line that ran right through the receptors in question and down into Wesley Solokov’s amygdala.
“That is one of the data trunks for your neural implant. It’s not supposed to have anything to do with neurotransmitters, but it has a clean, smooth polymer surface. The excess neurotransmitters are following that surface down into your amygdala, which is triggering your anxiety attacks.”
She smiled gently at him.
“In most cases, your implant would detect the neurotransmitter imbalance and automatically adjust, but because the balances look correct on the surface, the implant thinks everything is fine—even while the implant itself is part of the problem.”
“Can you fix it?” Solokov asked softly. “That sounds…complicated.”
“That’s why your local hospital couldn’t identify it,” Lisa told him. Most cases of anxiety and panic attacks could be dealt with by ordering the implant to adjust for the neurotransmitter imbalance. It could take days to identify the exact imbalance—the implant would automatically deal with the most common issues—but once the instructions had been given, the implant could fix most cases in under seventy-two hours.
In Solokov’s case, the neurotransmitter levels all looked normal. They were just moving in a way they weren’t supposed to because of overlaid random factors.
“But they sent you to me,” she continued with a smile. Even after Kyle Roberts had disappeared out of her life, leaving her with a baby and a high school education, he’d continued to pay a maximum amount of child support—and his mother had taken Lisa and Jacob in.
His distant help had seemed too little at the time, but it had helped her get galaxy-class training and skills—and hence this office.
“We could try having your implant do a target adjustment of your neurotransmitter levels,” she noted. “That would be the extent of what your local hospital could do if they’d identified this, but that’s attacking the s
ymptom, not the source.
“What I’d like to do is a two-fold solution,” she continued. “We can use a nanotech treatment to adjust the receptors to regular efficiency and mo—”
The door to her office swung open and she looked up in surprise. None of the staff at New Cardiff Central Hospital would interrupt her when she was meeting with a patient. She had her implant com and schedule set to DO NOT DISTURB.
“Dr. Kerensky,” the young man in blue scrubs in the door said apologetically. “I’m sorry for interrupting, but main reception just called. There’s an Admiral at the front desk asking for you—she says it’s urgent.”
An Admiral? But Kyle was on duty…
“She?” Lisa asked. “Did Reception give you a name?”
The young nurse coughed.
“I think Sana is being terrified by stars, Doctor,” he admitted. “Tall black woman? Rear Admiral?”
Solace. What was Jacob’s stepmother-to-be doing here?
“Mr. Solokov, I think I need to speak with this caller,” Lisa said slowly. “A family matter. If you’ll excuse me?”
“It’s fine, Dr. Kerensky,” he promised. “I’ll talk to your staff and schedule the appointment. We’ll proceed as you suggest.”
With a distracted nod, Lisa left her office, barely avoiding breaking into a run.
There was no good reason why Kyle Roberts’s fiancée would be in her hospital.
AS LISA ENTERED the main reception area for New Cardiff Central, she released the do-not-disturb on her implant. A single text message from her own fiancé flashed to the top of the priority list.
Cancel your next meeting. I’m on my way. Dan.
She’d spent ten years becoming the best neurosurgeon on the planet. One of the skills Lisa had needed to learn was the ability to look a patient she couldn’t save in the face and be calm. She’d had trouble with it, but she could present a façade now.
It took every scrap of that hard-won skill to remain even outwardly calm as she saw Mira Solace. The Rear Admiral had always been fully composed and utterly put-together when Lisa had met her.
Now the tall black woman was leaning against a pillar next to the reception desk, waiting for Lisa like a puppet with her strings cut. Her eyes were red as she turned to see Lisa, and she tried to force a smile—and failed.
Lisa didn’t even remember crossing the hall, wrapping the older woman in her embrace.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“I can’t give you details,” Solace gasped out, her voice gravelly with shed and unshed tears. “But…Elysium was lost. Kyle was aboard.”
Lisa was leaning against the pillar herself. For ten years, she hadn’t cared what happened to Kyle Roberts—she thought, at least—but they’d carefully danced a friendship back together the last few years, when the war gave them time.
But…gone? He couldn’t be gone!
“Dr. Kerensky?” Sana Macar asked quietly, the darkly tanned receptionist looking worried. “Can I…help?”
Lisa swallowed, forcing her façade back up as she delicately turned to the staff member.
“Sana, dear, can you contact my staff and have them cancel the rest of my appointments for today?” she asked quietly. “I…” She swallowed. “I need to go tell my son his father is dead.”
DANIEL’S ARRIVAL was preceded by a pair of Assembly Security Force officers in black suits. Technically, Lisa was sure, they should have declared the area secure or some similar official term that meant there were no assassins waiting to leap out at New Cardiff’s MFA.
Instead, Daniel Kellers was barely two steps behind the guards, the chubby man wrapping both women in a warm embrace.
“I figured I’d find you here, Mira,” he told Solace. “How much do you know?”
“Standard MIA next-of-kin message,” she admitted. “But knowing what he was doing…”
“I know more,” the Member of the Federation Assembly said quietly. “Not in public. Are you both free?”
“Yeah,” Lisa said quickly. “We need to tell Jacob.”
“Agreed. But we also need to be sure we tell Jacob the right thing.” Daniel looked grim. “Someone—I can’t say who—has already leaked this to the media. My car is right outside. Let’s go.”
Lisa took a moment to check in her implant that her appointments had been canceled—she did have responsibilities, after all—then followed her fiancé out.
“Did you bring a car, Admiral?” Daniel asked politely.
“Marine aircar,” Solace confirmed, gesturing up. “Already linked to the pilot. They’ll fly overwatch.”
Lisa followed Solace’s gesture and saw the black vehicle hovering above the hospital, using one of the building’s towers to hide its presence from a casual glance. Her understanding was that the Marine vehicles weren’t armed, but from the way the vehicle was positioned, she suspected that wouldn’t save anyone who decided to mess with Mira Solace today.
“Good,” Daniel replied. “My car is armored. If someone tries something stupid, they won’t get to regret it for very long.”
He led the way into the black government car, the two suited guards piling themselves into the front seat as the vehicle moved away from the hospital. Whatever instruction Daniel had given the driver had been by implant, and he sealed a privacy barrier to leave the three of them alone.
“Everyone is going to be leaping on the ‘Kyle Roberts is dead’ bandwagon pretty damned quickly,” he said grimly. “Whoever leaked it to the media didn’t really fudge the facts, but they kept enough details of the affair under wraps to satisfy Navy classification and let the reporters draw their own conclusion.”
“So, he’s not dead?” Lisa demanded.
“We don’t know he’s dead,” Daniel corrected. “Forty-First Fleet got neatly mousetrapped by a mind-bogglingly overwhelming force. Admiral Roberts managed to extract most of his fleet, but several vessels were badly damaged.
“Including,” he sighed heavily, “Elysium. What information I have is that Elysium wasn’t capable of keeping up with the fleet or warping space, so Admiral Roberts ordered the fleet to leave them behind.
“Her q-coms were damaged, so our last report is from shortly after Forty-First Fleet warped out,” he concluded. “The Q-probes left behind weren’t going to be of any use to Elysium, so the self-destruct codes were sent to keep them out of Commonwealth hands.”
The MFA shook his head and took Lisa’s hand.
“As of our last information, Elysium was intact but facing an incoming salvo of approximately seventeen hundred capital-ship missiles,” he told them. “It is entirely possible that Admiral Roberts and Captain Novak abandoned ship before her destruction, but we have no guarantees.
“So, Elysium is missing in action along with all crew aboard her at that time. They got thirty percent of her crew out by shuttle, but there were still over three thousand people on that ship.”
“So, Kyle might be alive?” Lisa asked. “…What do we tell Jacob?”
“Just that,” he replied. “We can’t tell him everything I just told you. Chunks of that are classified. But we need to make sure he knows that Kyle is only possibly dead.
“Because the media is sure as hell going to spin it as ‘definitely dead’.”
Lisa rubbed her eyes, brushing away tears that were trying to fall.
“Typical Kyle,” she half-whispered. “Can’t even die in a way that lets us be sure what’s going on!”
39
Deep space, en route to Sol System
18:00 October 9, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-062 Normandy
RUSSELL CLOSED the latest message from his wife—almost certainly the last he’d see before this entire mess exploded in Seventh Fleet’s face. One of the several silver linings he could find in this insanely extended mission was that, one way or another, once it was over, he could go home to her.
For now, however, delayed messages run through the coms lockdown were all they could ex
change. He’d want to record one for her before they arrived in Sol, but he only had an hour before the final meeting of the major officers.
Tomorrow was going to be a long day.
His door buzzed.
“Enter,” he told the air, allowing Captain Herrera to step into his office.
“How’s it going, CAG?” Normandy’s commander asked.
“We are twelve hours away from the most insane stunt pulled in the history of warfare,” Russell pointed out. “It’s a little late to be checking in for doubts.”
Herrera chuckled.
“If you didn’t have doubts, I’d suggest you to talk to the ship’s doctor,” he pointed out. “We are attacking Sol, Vice Commodore.”
“Believe me, I know,” Russell replied. “Do we know the status of the rest of the Medusa strike forces?”
Herrera nodded.
“I believe the Admiral will be filling everyone in, but there are channels,” he confirmed. “Everyone else is in position, ready for emergence at the appointed minute. Fifteen simultaneous strikes across over a hundred and twenty light-years.
“What lunatic came up with this?”
Russell laughed softly.
“The Fox. Who else?” he told his Captain. “They gave Roberts the job of designing a strategy to win the war, and this is what he came up with.”
“If it works, it will be something new in the galaxy,” Herrera said. “I don’t even know what the consequences will be.”
“I suspect we’ll find the Commonwealth is more fragile than we think,” the CAG said. “There’s too many people in there who want out, who were independent before a fleet showed up and told them they weren’t.
“Without the ability to coordinate their government and their Navy…I think they’re fucked.”
“And I’m guessing that’s what Roberts thought, too,” the Captain agreed. “Damn.”
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 25
