“With how they’ve reinforced Seventh Fleet…” Tasker trailed off.
“There will be fifty capital ships in Via Somnia once Roberts’s survivors arrive,” James said. “Fifty. The Alliance can’t lose fifty ships and sustain any significant offensive action, not without stripping their home-system defenses to the bone.
“I don’t intend to give them the time,” he told his subordinates. “It will take us a week or so to consolidate our forces at Niagara, and then I intend to move on Via Somnia with seventy-eight capital ships.”
That would leave most of the frontier lightly defended, but the Senate’s insistence that he pull Tasker and Gabor back to deal with Roberts, combined with the Alliance’s concentration of force at Via Somnia, gave him a chance to end the damn war.
“We will smash their fleet at Via Somnia and then move on to complete our operations against the Renaissance Trade Factor,” he laid out. “From there, we will reassess, but I expect to move against either Castle or Coraline.”
With the RTF and either the Federation or the Imperium out of the war, he was quite certain he could convince the rest of the Alliance to surrender.
“They have gathered the strength to make a serious attack on us but, in doing so, have given us a glorious target,” James Calvin Walkingstick assured his Admirals.
“The time has come. We will end this war.”
JAMES HAD MADE certain that the quarters put aside for Admiral Roberts and his senior staff were better than the brig. They were junior officers’ quarters, smaller than the O-6s and above they’d kept out of the cells would be used to, but they were at least actual quarters.
If the new morning saw Marines outside each door in the hallway and power-armored fire teams at either end to make sure any escape attempt ended quickly, well, James had to take precautions.
He stepped up to the door of Admiral Roberts’s quarters and traded nods with the Marine guard before hitting the admittance button.
“Admiral Roberts?” he said. “This is Marshal Walkingstick. May we speak?”
The door clicked open in response, and James stepped into the room.
The Federation Admiral laid aside a datapad as the Marshal entered, looking up at his captor. The prisoners quite distinctly did not have access to Saint Michael’s datanet via their implants. Even the datapad was linked to a specifically restricted library, pretty much purely light entertainment to keep prisoners from going crazy.
“I’d say welcome to my abode, but I have no illusions about which of us owns this room,” Roberts said cheerfully, a surprisingly broad grin on the prisoner’s face. “It’s your ship, your room, Gods, even your chairs.
“So, you may as well sit down.”
James did, using amusement to cover his surprise at Roberts’s reaction.
“You seem to take captivity well,” he said dryly.
“Given the alternative is fire and ash, I’ll take it,” the Castle-born man told him. “I must repeat what I said earlier, though. You won’t learn much of use from me.”
“Implant security protocols being what they are, I have no intention of even trying,” James told him. Roberts almost certainly knew many things of value to the Commonwealth’s campaign—he would know what Seven Fleet’s exact strength at Via Somnia was. He’d probably even know why the surveillance platforms had been destroyed—potentially even how they’d been localized.
The stealthed Q-probes were, after all, supposed to be nearly invisible.
But he’d never give up that information voluntarily, and his implant would probably kill him before he surrendered that information under torture or chemical interrogation. Walkingstick’s implant would, in the other man’s shoes.
“If you’d care to share any exact details of Via Somnia’s defenses or what forces have been sent to reinforce the Trade Factor, I won’t complain,” he continued, “but I have a certain degree of faith in the Alliance’s security protocols.
“And I prefer you alive.”
Roberts chuckled.
“So do I,” he admitted. “Though I’m guessing I might regret that. Are we resurrecting the old Roman triumph? Parading me in chains through the streets of Terra?”
James echoed the chuckle.
“That would take a while. Terra has a lot of streets. You are roughly correct in your role, though,” he admitted. “You are a trophy, and a shiny one at that. When this is over, we’ll probably try and convince you to put on a Commonwealth uniform.”
His prisoner winced.
“Gods, you bastards would, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head. “Forgive me, Marshal, but I don’t expect this to end in a way that has you making generous offers!”
James smiled thinly.
“I doubt the Alliance would have fought as long and as hard as they have if you thought differently,” he admitted. “A lot of blood has been shed that perhaps didn’t need to be, for a war that will end much the same as if you’d surrendered.”
“And we clearly still think differently,” Roberts pointed out with that same broad grin. “We’ll fight you kicking and screaming the whole way. You know that.”
“I am afraid of that,” James admitted. “But with both your fleet and Seventh Fleet at Via Somnia, you have finally given me a target worth unleashing the full might I have been given upon. With the defeat of those fleets, the Alliance will fall.”
Something in Roberts’s expression twisted, the grin not faltering but…smirking? The Federation Admiral was smirking at him?
“You will see,” James said calmly, even as he began to wonder if he could scout Via Somnia before he could arrive. If the Stellar Fox was smirking at him, there was something he didn’t know.
“We will all see,” Roberts replied. “Whatever comes to pass, we will all see.”
Before James could respond, his implant suddenly pinged with an emergency alert.
“What is it?” he demanded, careful not to vocalize aloud.
“Strategic Omega Alert,” MacGinnis said flatly over the neural network. “Sol is under attack. So is Tau Ceti. A dozen other systems; we’re still identifying where and what.”
James couldn’t help himself, he turned an accusing glare on Roberts.
“Ah,” the Federation Admiral replied. “It has begun, I see.”
“What have you done?”
“Unleashed armageddon.”
41
Sol System
07:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-062 Normandy
NORMANDY FLASHED into the Sol System with an unusual degree of discomfort for her passengers. Russell closed his eyes for a moment, accessing his implant’s functions to control the sudden unexpected wave of nausea that swept over him.
That had been a long trip, and they’d clearly pushed the emergence by accident. Instead of emerging two light-minutes from Earth, trailing behind the planet’s orbit and on the far side of the moon, they’d emerged a “mere” thirty million kilometers from the homeworld.
Six million kilometers wasn’t much in the scheme of a voyage of a hundred and sixty light-years, but it was enough to make for a spectacularly rough emergence.
“Launch! Launch! Launch!” he barked as he regained control of his body. A dozen gravities slammed through the gravity field compensating for his acceleration, and his six-thousand-ton starfighter was flung into space.
He wasn’t alone. Normandy alone launched forty-eight starfighters in her first wave. A second wave followed fifteen seconds later, then a third, and then a fourth that was entirely bombers.
Sixty seconds after TF 7.1 arrived in-system, two thousand starfighters and bombers were forming up around the phalanx of capital ships and heading toward humanity’s homeworld.
Russell didn’t doubt that Terra Fortress Command and their accompanying warship fleet had known about their arrival the instant it happened. For that matter, he was quite certain they’d known about TF 7.3’s ten-minute-past arrival at Uranus the moment it had h
appened.
“All right, people, keep your eyes peeled,” he told his squadrons. “If we’re lucky, the Terrans are out of position, moving to deal with what they must think is a spoiling raid.”
His smile was predatory.
“If we can fight the warships and Fortress Command separately, I will officially call us the luckiest sons of bitches alive,” Commodore Ozolinsh told the senior officers. “And…it’s looking quite possible.”
The data feed from the capital ships’ passive sensors take and the first waves of Q-probes began to filter into Russell’s implant.
The Navy had reacted exactly as hoped, though their forces were lighter than anticipated. Four Hercules battlecruisers and two Volcano carriers had clearly been charging away from Earth at two hundred-plus gravities for almost ten minutes.
They were a million kilometers closer to TF 7.1 than the fortresses. They could turn around and fall back, but that would probably look bad.
And stupid as it sounded, Russell could understand that there was no way anyone on those ships or starfighters was going to risk looking cowardly here, above Earth, under the eyes of the Star Chamber itself.
“They are adjusting course to intercept us,” Hu noted. “They’re going full scramble on their fighters, and the fortresses are launching their ready squadrons.”
Hundreds of new icons speckled the feed, many dancing through the chaotic mess of Earth’s busy orbitals. The Navy ships alone threw out five hundred-plus starfighters, presumably including some bombers.
The fortress in orbit launched about the same, fewer than Russell was expecting. On the other hand…
“Well, there goes Intelligence’s happy daydream,” he said aloud on the command channel. “Those Zions just put six hundred Katanas in the air from their ready squadrons alone.”
“At least that’s only thirty Zions,” Ozolinsh replied. “Two squadrons each. TFC might be weaker than expected, even if they have modern starfighters.”
The Commodore’s evil smile carried perfectly over the implant network.
“In any case, until they have their non-ready squadrons up, the numbers are on our side.
“Let’s teach them how to dance!”
DESPITE THE ALLIANCE commander’s enthusiasm, the Commonwealth starfighters were much less willing to charge forward. The starfighters launched by the Navy ships stuck with them, while the fortress fighters remained with their fortresses for almost ten full minutes.
At that point, however, the Zions launched their other three squadrons, and all fifteen hundred starfighters swarmed out to meet them.
“Did we interrupt the regularly scheduled nap or something?” Russell asked dryly. “Ten minutes from unconscious to launched. My squadrons would never hear the end of it!”
“There’s a lot of ECM out there,” Vice Commodore Emilija Santiago, of the carrier Trafalgar, said. “But is anyone else getting the feeling they’re playing games with signatures?”
“Probably hiding bombers,” Russell replied. “It’s what we’re doing.” He checked the timing. “Speaking of bombers, they’ve screwed up royally. Our bombers will launch before their starfighters range on us.”
“We’ll lose some torps if we do that,” Ozolinsh said. “But…five hundred bombers versus six ships? We can spend them.
“All bomber squadrons, launch at maximum range,” he continued, turning Commodores’ debate into general orders. “Spread your fire evenly across the capital ships. Let’s punch these bastards out and leave the fortresses for the big boys.”
Two thousand-plus starfighters were accelerating out now, and Russell quickly reviewed the sensor data, feeding it into Hu’s targeting parameters.
“Santiago’s right,” he said. “There’s something weird with their ECM. Emilija, did you get a clearer look?”
“Redirected one of Trafalgar’s Q-probes into the middle of them,” she said with satisfaction. “We’ll have a view in a few moments… What the—”
“Vice Commodore?” Ozolinsh asked.
“There’s no bombers in the lead formation,” she told them. “Not a one. Just Katanas.”
“If the carriers don’t have bombers…” The Commodore trailed off. “I’m going to set up a mass hard pulse on that second wave. I wonder…”
Seventeen ships doing general radar and lidar sweeps were enough to provide a lot of information on any ship within a hundred million kilometers.
Seventeen ships, two thousand-plus starfighters, and several dozen sacrificial Q-probes washing directed and carefully sequenced radar pulses over a specific area made it damn hard to hide anything. If the fighter formation had been made of Falcons or Arrows, they’d have been able to conceal a lot.
If it had actually been made of Katanas, they probably would have been able to hide bombers.
What they couldn’t do was conceal that over a thousand of the fifteen hundred starfighters the Zion defense platforms had launched in their second wave were Scimitars, not Katanas. The Scimitar was a capable sixth-generation fighter, a worthy opponent to starfighters of its own era.
It was just that “its own era” had been ten years before.
“So, no bombers, and half of them are Scimitars,” Santiago concluded. “Told you they were playing games with the signatures.”
“Yes, yes, you did,” Ozolinsh conceded instantly. “It doesn’t change much…other than the certainty that these poor bastards are doomed.”
There was a long pause on the command channel, then Russell sighed and shook his head.
“They might be outclassed, boss, but that’s Earth behind them,” he pointed out. “They’ll fight harder than we’ve ever seen before.”
THE COMMONWEALTH SHIPS opened fire with missiles as their starfighters finally began to maneuver, the six warships flinging over a hundred missiles at the Alliance task force every forty or so seconds.
Russell watched the missiles fly toward and past the starfighter flotilla, clear orders coming down from Admiral Rothenberg that the starfighters were to avoid the missiles unless actively threatened. There was no point risking starfighters when the fleet’s defenses were more than capable of handling the incoming missiles.
The Alliance warships held their own fire, waiting for the starfighters to clear the path. The six warships and two thousand fighters were an obstacle, not an objective—and firing through them would risk the Alliance hitting something they didn’t intend to.
There was a lot of potential collateral damage in Earth orbit. Centuries-old construction guidelines restricted the orbitals into two perpendicular rings, one around the equator and one over the planet’s poles
The ring were densest around the orbital elevator linked to the anchor station where the Commonwealth Star Chamber met. The second densest point was anchored by a newer orbital elevator near Papua New Guinea. If the Alliance was here to wreck Earth’s orbital infrastructure, those two elevators and their counterweight stations would be key targets.
Instead, they spent thirty minutes closing the gap with the defending fleet, watching the range drop as the Vultures and Falcons alike prepared their devastating weapon loads.
Thirty-seven minutes after the Alliance fighters had launched, the bombers crossed an arbitrary line in space, some eleven-point-six-million kilometers from the defenders, and fired. Over two thousand Gemblade torpedoes flared to life, leaving the launching bombers behind as they accelerated away at a thousand and fifty gravities.
The starfighters were closer than the capital ships, but the Alliance strike wasn’t going to waste torpedoes on starfighters. They had their lighter Starfire missiles for that—and while those had the same Tier Four acceleration as the torpedoes, they had a quarter of the Gemblades’ ten-minute flight time.
They fired six minutes later, moments before the torpedoes penetrated the Terran formation. Eleven thousand starfighter missiles blazed clear of the Falcons, Arrows and Vultures of the Alliance formation.
Eight thousand more leapt clear of the Kat
anas and Scimitars swarming toward them, and then the Terran fighters charged after the Alliance torpedoes.
“Hold your remaining Starfires,” Ozolinsh ordered. “We may need a second salvo… We may need to finish this with lances, but there’s still over a hundred and fifty battle stations in orbit of Earth, and we’ll still want those missiles!”
The Terrans clearly didn’t expect to survive long enough to launch their missiles at the capital ships. Three full salvoes blazed into space before the first exchange reached them. The older Scimitars still carried another salvo, just in case they lived long enough, but twenty-four thousand missiles were going to be enough of a headache for the attackers.
“Spread the formation, give them holes to get lost in,” Russell ordered his own people. “ECM to maximum. Let’s dazzle the buggers—they aren’t that clever!”
Pulses of jamming swept out from the Alliance flotilla in waves, some sections making themselves larger targets, others making themselves near-invisible behind walls of static—and then switching places.
The Terran starfighters took their toll on the Gemblades, blasting over half of the Alliance torpedoes out of space…but their success cost them their focus when the starfighter missiles targeted on them arrived. Two thousand-plus starfighters, half of them obsolete, collided with eleven thousand of the best missiles the Alliance had ever built.
There were no survivors.
Russell had expected the strike to be decisive and crippling. He hadn’t expected it to be a massacre.
The first wave of missiles swarming their own ranks was no less deadly, however. The Alliance pilots and gunners weren’t distracted by stopping torpedoes, and they had the full electronic warfare capabilities of two thousand seventh-generation starfighters and bombers to protect them.
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 27
