They couldn’t stop them all. Emilija Santiago died in a silent fireball. Three other CAGs died with her—and over three hundred starfighters and bombers went with them.
The following salvos were less coordinated without their motherships. More vulnerable to the siren songs of countermeasures and jamming that lashed them as they crossed through space. They took lesser tolls on Russell’s comrades…but when the dust settled, a full quarter of the Alliance fighter force was gone.
And then it was the Commonwealth warships’ turn. A thousand torpedoes crashed down on a mere six ships, their own seekers and jammers far more capable than the lighter missiles the starfighters had used on each other.
Dozens of missiles died as the warships’ defenses flared to life. Hundreds of missiles.
For a moment, Russell thought the defenses might actually manage to stand off the torpedo salvo…but numbers and statistics were a cruel mistress.
Both Volcanoes disappeared under hammerblows of fire. Three of the Herculeses followed them, and the fourth spun off course, her engines gone and most of her weapons systems offline.
Russell thought they could ignore her—and then a moment later, the crippled warship flared again on his scanners, launching a ten-missile salvo directly at the starfighters.
“They’ve got courage,” Ozolinsh said softly. “And this is their heart. Their home. Earth.”
The Fleet CAG paused.
“Take them out,” he ordered, his voice sad. “A hundred Starfires as we pass should do it.”
THE BATTLECRUISER’S death was almost an afterthought, a passing salvo from the half-dozen closest squadrons. It felt strange that the destruction of a capital ship, the deaths of five thousand or so spacers and crew, would pass with so little comment.
But that was the nature of the day.
“TFC is maneuvering their fortresses around the planet to face us,” Rothenberg announced. “We are beginning missile bombardment of the identified platforms. Commodore Ozolinsh, there could still be warships in Earth orbit, and the moon is between us and the Central Nexus.
“I want your starfighters to make a transit between Earth and Luna and engage the Nexus.” He paused. “It is not particularly well defended, but if they’re paying attention, I would expect those last four warships to be in position to guard her.
“There are also high guard corvettes somewhere in Earth orbit. They’re not warships, but I have every expectation that they will attempt to engage you. They may only be high guard…but this is Earth.”
Missile icons were now appearing on Russell’s feed as the Imperial and Federation warships behind him began to trade fire with the fortresses. The good news was that there had been fewer fighter platforms than expected.
The bad news was that there appeared to be even more modern missile launchers over there than they’d expected—and that whoever was in charge of Terra Fortress Command understood perfectly well that her mass drivers were no threat to the capital ships.
So, they were using them to lay a hailstorm of high-velocity metal in the path of the Alliance starfighters.
“One last note, everyone,” Rothenberg added as he was about to sign off. “We have confirmation from Rear Admiral Novacek—the Uranus q-com switchboard has been destroyed. TF Seven-Three has achieved their objectives and is withdrawing from Sol.”
One down. Two to go.
“TF Seven-Two has engaged the Ceres defense fleet. Ambrosia has been destroyed, as have three Resolute-class battleships. Manna is attempting to force a lance duel with Leif Ericson and her sisters.” The Imperial Admiral chuckled.
“It’s not going well for her.”
The Ambrosia-class superbattleship might outgun any one of the three Magellan-class battleships headlining TF 7.2, but at three-to-one odds, plus eight battlecruisers backing up the Magellans…
“Admiral Salvail reports that he expects to reduce the enemy starship and starfighter strength in next twenty minutes and engage Relay Alpha-One inside forty minutes. Everything is going according to plan.”
Even Russell knew that was asking for trouble…but it also seemed to be true. Sol’s defenses were turning out to be even weaker than expected.
This was the home system of humanity, the capital of the Commonwealth. There had to be another shoe coming.
42
Sol System
08:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Task Force Seven-One
“THAT…THAT’S A LOT OF MISSILES,” Hu said softly.
Eighty of Terra Fortress Command’s battle stations had relocated to this side of Earth, and each of them appeared to mount twenty modern capital-ship missile launchers. The only time Russell had seen that many missiles in one place before, they’d literally dumped them in space to allow for mass salvoes.
“Can the fleet handle that?” the gunner asked.
Russell shook his head.
“That’s not our problem,” he admitted. “That’s the Admiral’s problem. Our job is to cut through a gap that’s barely two hundred thousand kilometers wide at five percent of the speed of light and successfully turn a multi-kilometer space station into vapor.”
“Right. We got the easy job,” Hu agreed.
The Vice Commodore shook his head and chuckled. It would be almost ten more minutes before the starfighters reached the limit of the moon’s orbit. With the chaos in Earth orbit and Fortress Command’s quite successful objections to the Alliance’s Q-probes, they still had no idea what was going on around the Central Nexus.
He doubted it was going to be good news. At fifteen thousand kilometers a second, they would cross the moon’s orbit, dive past the Central Nexus and flash through Earth’s defenses over the course of about thirty seconds.
They were going to be an important thirty seconds.
“Do we have any visual on what’s behind the moon?” he asked.
“Negative,” Ozolinsh replied. “We’ve got Q-probes trying to swing around, but we’re only going to have maybe two minutes’ warning before we run right into it.”
“Is it too late to consider a career change?” one of the other CAGs quipped. “I’m thinking…farmer. Farmer sounds great. Nobody shoots at farmers.”
“Last chance to do that was before we left Via Somnia,” Ozolinsh told them with a chuckle. “Time to fly or die, people.
“Hold on.”
The minutes blurred past as the fleet engaged the fortresses. Task Force Seven-One was only throwing two hundred missiles back in answer to each sixteen-hundred missile salvo. They were closing the range—intel suggested most of the stations didn’t have positron lances, which meant lance range would allow the Alliance to carry the day.
They certainly weren’t having much luck with missiles. As Russell watched the situation, the Heroic-class strike cruiser Jessica Anderson took three capital-ship missiles from the second salvo, the only Federation cruiser in TF 7.1 disappearing in a flash of fire.
Along with all five thousand or so of her crew.
An Imperial Guardian-class carrier joined her, the task force’s defenses withering under the hammer of Fortress Command’s fire. They’d be exchanging missiles for over thirty minutes before the battleships reached their range, unless the fortresses had amazingly weak electromagnetic deflectors.
Given the amount of mass-driver fire the starfighters were dodging, it was possible.
But it wasn’t likely.
“Eyeballs on the light side of the moon in twenty seconds,” Hu told him. “Bets on whether we’re going to die here, sir?”
“I don’t make stupid bets,” Russell replied, his attention now riveted on the data feed from the Q-probes sweeping ahead of the starfighter force. “I have to assume we’re going to live.”
The assumption took a blow a moment later.
The Central Nexus was exactly where it was supposed to be. Massive, foundational to the Commonwealth’s communication network, almost defenseless beyond sheer size.
Carefully positioning themselves between the Nexus and the oncoming fighter strike were two Saint-class battleships and over a hundred Hamilton-class high guard corvettes.
“Well,” Russell said quietly. “That’s going to be a headache.”
THE HIGH GUARD vessels barely even qualified as sublight gunships, hundred-thousand ton ships more purposed for boarding and search-and-rescue than combat. The Hamilton-class ships didn’t even mount missiles.
They did, however, mount hundred-kiloton-a-second positron lances perfectly capable of shredding starfighters and missile defense lasers that could gut the missile salvo.
And the Saints, of course, could do the same all on their own.
“What do we do?” Hu asked.
“Our job,” Russell replied.
“Sir?” he addressed Ozolinsh. “Recommend we split our forces—we’re not going to get missiles past the corvettes and Saints to hit the station. I suggest the Arrows and Vultures focus their fire on the Saints while the Falcons go for the Nexus itself.”
The Federation fighters would have to go through the high guard to get to the Central Nexus, but that was going to happen anyway. The Falcons had heavier lances than the Arrows—and the bombers didn’t have positron lances.
There was a long pause.
“Agreed,” Ozolinsh said. “I’ll pass the orders. Your group’s in front, Rokos.”
“We’ll take the tip of the spear,” Russell confirmed. “We’ll see you on the other side.”
The orders got passed and the formation began to shift slightly—and then the Commodore opened a private channel.
“I know I don’t need to say this, Rokos, but everything else going on here is a distraction now,” he said very, very quietly. “Seven-Two has the Ceres defense force on the run, Relay Alpha-One will be gone in moments. Most of the other strikes are already done.” He swallowed. “Losses have been brutal, Rokos, and it’s all down to this.
“If the Central Nexus survives, it’s all been for nothing. Seven-One will keep Fortress Command tied up, but even that’s just cover for us now.”
Russell heard the next words before they even came out.
“The Nexus is an all-costs target, Vice Commodore Rokos. No matter what happens, that station has to be destroyed.”
“I know,” Russell replied. “We’ll make it happen, Commodore.”
“I know,” Ozolinsh replied. “But you’re at the front. I had to say it.”
THE DEFENDERS DIDN’T HAVE MUCH GOING for them in terms of velocity. Someone on the other side had first held back the battleships—likely in case the Alliance was using the attack on Uranus as a distraction—and then guessed TF 7.1’s actual target after TF 7.3 blew the secret switchboard station in the gas giant to pieces.
They’d then put the two battleships and the entirety of the Terran High Guard into the relatively tiny volume of space that the Alliance fighter strike had to pass through. There was no way around them. No clever maneuvers that weren’t contraindicated by the velocity they were arriving with.
“Wanna bet the lady in charge over there is High Guard?” Hu muttered. “Forcing us to fly right through them? That’s an orbital officer’s thinking right there.”
“And in this case, it’s the right thinking,” Russell agreed. It was damn brave of them, too. They’d set up the optimal circumstances to throw a glorified police force in front of a starfighter strike, but those were customs officers and search-and-rescue crews.
His own duty meant he was going to have to blow a giant hole in their formation and vaporize the station they were trying to defend, but he still had to salute their courage.
“Seventy seconds to the lunar horizon,” Hu reported a moment later. “Any clever ideas, boss?”
“Only the one we’re already on,” the Vice Commodore told him. “Throw every damn missile we’ve got at the High Guard and punch through to use our lances on the Nexus.”
He was carefully ignoring the continuing missile duel between TF 7.1 and Terra Fortress Command. Those fortresses would massacre the starfighters if they turned that missile fire on Russell and his comrades, but TF 7.1 was quite definitely losing that duel.
For the first time in Russell Rokos’s experience, starships were dying to buy starfighters time.
“We won’t even have time for a second missile launch,” Hu warned.
“I know.”
Seconds ticked away. The moon came closer and their course curved. The planetoid’s gravity was nothing compared to the starfighters’ acceleration, but they had to cut the fine line between Luna and Earth’s rings of orbital industry.
“All missiles prepped and targeted,” Hu murmured. “Twenty seconds to the horizon.”
Half of what would follow would be decided by computers, but the whole point of having a human with a high-interface bandwidth in a starfighter was to add the randomness of the other half. Russell sank into the deepest symbiosis with his ship’s computers, becoming the agile starfighter.
Ten seconds. No one needed to speak aloud anymore. The Q-probes were whipping around the horizon ahead of them and dying in their dozens, TF 7.1 spending tens of millions of stellars of equipment every second to make sure the starfighters had the targeting data they needed.
Horizon.
Glittering stars appeared in front of Russell’s eyes as he saw through the Falcon’s far more capable senses. The two largest ones were the Saints. Somebody else’s problem, with hundreds of missiles ear-marked for each of them.
His problem was right in front of him, the solid and unwavering echelons of the Hamilton-class corvettes. Each of them was a dozen or more times the size of his starfighter, lacking her missiles but with positron lances that put hers to shame.
Their job might be customs inspections and search-and-rescue, but they weren’t going to let him hit their world without a fight. They’d been watching his people come through their own Q-probes, and beams of positrons lit up Earth’s sky as the Battle of Sol’s final desperate act unfolded.
The Alliance missiles were in space before the first lance beams struck home. Starfighters died around Russell as he danced his own starfighter through the deadly pattern that wove around him. Missiles crossed the mere tens of thousands of kilometers between him and his enemy in moments, hundred-thousand ton corvettes vanishing in the blink of an eye.
His friends and subordinates died around him, but Russell plunged through the High Guard formation, dancing around the lances as he lined up on the Central Nexus. His missiles hadn’t reloaded yet—their cycle time short but not short enough for this close of a range!
The only weapon he could use was his positron lance, and he lit up the space station with a beam of pure antimatter. Dozens of other beams joined his, slashing into the immense bulk of the switchboard station.
Vaporized metal and atmosphere blasted into space, short-lived spurts of fire bulging out from the station and dying as their oxygen supply ran out. The station endured. It was huge; even dozens of fifty-kiloton-a-second lances were barely scratching the surface.
Then his starfighter lurched, pain searing through him as “his” engines were destroyed by a glancing hit from one of the High Guard ships pursuing him. Linked into his neural implants, entire conversations passed by in seconds.
“We’ve lost three quarters of the engines and half the mass manipulators,” his engineer barked. “No repair. We can’t adjust course…maybe fifty gees of accel.”
“We’re not getting out of this at fifty gees of accel,” Hu replied. “What do we do?”
Denial. Fear. Regret.
Decision.
All of it passed through Russell’s mind in fractions of a second.
“We finish the job. The missiles can’t launch yet, but we can arm the warheads, right?”
“Yes, sir.” The pause before Hu spoke would never have registered on any other scale.
“Do it.” Russell’s own pause was just as infinitesimal. “It’s been an honor, gentlemen.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Hu snapped back. “I told you we wouldn’t live through—”
Their world ended in the fire of multiple antimatter explosions.
So did the Central Nexus.
43
Leopold System
16:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BB-285 Saint Michael
“WHAT DO WE DO?” Lindsay Tasker asked softly.
The gap between her question and Mihai Gabor’s response wasn’t long, exactly. The three flagships were floating roughly fifty thousand kilometers apart, so the delay in two-way transmission was only a third of a second.
James Walkingstick and his officers, however, were twenty-eighth-century military officers. Their neural implants were capable of allowing them to consciously process time millisecond by millisecond if needed. It wasn’t a feature that was healthy to use on a regular basis, but their implants gave them a precise sense of time.
With a q-com, the communication delay between Tasker, Gabor, and James would have been nearly imperceptible even to them.
Without it…
“I say we take this damn fleet and shove it down the Alliance’s throat,” Gabor snapped. “They’ve got to have sent every damned warship they had into our space to pull this off. Their home systems have to be defenseless.”
James raised a hand.
“We cannot make our decisions based on emotions or revenge at this point,” he told his senior subordinates quietly. “We have no updates. No information. We know nothing of what is happening in the core of the Commonwealth.
“And perhaps more importantly, we know nothing of what is happening on the fringes of the Commonwealth,” he noted. “There are worlds that were brought into unity recently enough that they will see this as weakness. As an opportunity.
Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Page 28
