by Nick Webb
Commander Proctor stepped forward. “We already know these are not the ships from last time. They’ve evolved. Or improved. Or whatever it is they do.”
Yarbrough took a deep breath. “Mobilize the ships that are here. Get me on the horn to all the captains—I’m taking temporary command of the portion of the fleet that is here and will run battle operations from this Command Center, with your consent, Admiral.” She nodded to Sheldon Tully—not that she needed his permission, since she outranked him by a star, but they were old friends. “Get all the civilians off the base and loaded back on to the transports immediately,” she said to her aide. “Captain Granger, I want the Constitution to escort them back to Earth—”
“What?”
“You heard me. The Vice President is here, not to mention the dozens of senators, congresspeople, and governors. And don’t forget about the kids. We can’t have them in a combat situation.”
“If that fleet makes it past Lunar Base, there might not be an Earth to go back to. Keep the Constitution with the fleet.”
“No. We can’t afford to lose such a significant portion of the civilian government if we fail here. No, get to Earth, and report in to Admiral Zingano at CENTCOM. That’s a direct order. Move.”
She shoved him out of the way and made for the command console where Admiral Tully was directing operations.
Commander Proctor fell into step next to him as he stormed out of the Command Center. “Well sir, looks like you’re stuck with me for awhile longer.”
Dammit.
Chapter 23
Earth’s Moon
Bridge, ISS Constitution
“Tim, what the hell is going on?” Commander Haws was still buttoning his old frayed uniform when he met Granger and Proctor in the hall on the way to the bridge. It seemed he had managed to escape from the decommissioning ceremony early.
“An unidentified fleet is en route to Earth.”
“Swarm?”
“Unknown.”
“Bullshit,” grumbled Haws as they approached the two marines standing guard outside the bridge.
“Exactly.” Granger paused before entering the bridge, glancing for a moment at the two officers. Proctor technically had operational control over the Constitution given the Old Bird’s decommissioning ceremony not an hour earlier, but given the emergency at hand….
“Commander Proctor, I’m re-assuming command of the Constitution. If you wish to lodge an objection with CENTCOM—”
“No need, sir. I understand,” she replied, with a curt nod. Good. She wasn’t going to pull anything stupid—when called upon, she seemed to be someone who understood the need for action. He’d prefer to just tell her to go to her quarters, but that would be going too far.
“Good. I’m assigning you as assistant XO. Commander Haws will delegate any duties to you that he sees fit—” He held up a hand of silence to Haws, who’d started to protest. “Not now, Abe. This is an emergency, and we both know that being on a war footing is different than being on watch duty for our entire careers. We’ll need all the help we can get, and I want her with you.”
He hoped his friend didn’t read between the lines: he really wanted Proctor shadowing Haws to make sure the old man, probably still hungover from over-indulging at the reception, wouldn’t make any sloppy, fatigue-induced mistakes.
“Fine,” Haws grumbled. Satisfied his friend would not give him anymore guff, Granger strode onto the bridge.
“Battle stations. Sound general alert status orange.”
The bridge, which had been half-deserted due to the decommissioning ceremony, fell to a shocked silence. The lieutenant sitting in the command chair opened his eyes wide.
“Sir?”
“You heard me, Diaz. Get back to ops and sound the alert. Get the bridge crew back here. Tell Commander Rayna Scott to report to the bridge—I want an update from her on engine status. And assemble the weapons crew chiefs—we need to know what the status is of the mag-rail cannons and the point-defense RPOs—”
“Sir,” interrupted Commander Proctor, “I’m afraid I had the point-defense rapid pulse ordnance turrets all decommissioned yesterday. I thought it wise to ensure civilians couldn’t accidentally activate them somehow during the simulations….”
Granger paused. “All of them?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, with the slightest of winces.
“Very well. Get the crew chiefs up here,” he turned to Haws and Proctor. “Get those RPOs back in service. As many as you can. You have thirty minutes.”
Haws grumbled an affirmative, and barked some orders to a few ops midshipmen to assist them. Granger strode over to the fighter command terminal. “Is Commander Pierce back from Lunar Base yet?” he asked the Lieutenant CAG sitting in for him.
“Aye, sir.”
“How many fighters are still in service?”
“Twenty-three, sir.”
Damn. Twenty-three out of eighty-two. They were effectively going to be a sitting duck, unless they could manage to convert some of the fighters that had been turned into simulators back into fighting craft.
He spun around to Proctor who was huddled over a terminal with Commander Haws, discussing the RPOs. “Proctor, tell me about the fighters. The simulators. How much were they altered?” He wanted to say, how much did you screw them over, but thought better of it.
“All live ordnance removed, and their power plants are all decommissioned. But other than that just some software upgrades.”
Granger squinted at her. “Define decommissioned.”
“The fuel cores have all been removed and the initiator matrices are all cold.”
Dammit.
“Fine. Let Haws handle the RPOs. You get down to the fighter bay and assist Commander Pierce in getting all those birds back into operational status. You have one hour.”
“All of them up and running in an hour? But that’s—”
“Crazy? Unrealistic? I’m sorry, Commander, but I didn’t set that particular deadline. The Swarm did.”
Proctor closed her mouth, frowned, and nodded. “Understood.” She rushed out the door, sweeping past another woman entering the bridge.
“Cap’n, what’s going on?” said Commander Rayna Scott. She didn’t have her characteristic smudged coveralls on but rather the dress uniform, having come straight from the decommissioning ceremony.
“Swarm.” He paused, watching her blue eyes enlarge. She opened her mouth, and closed it. “I need my engines, Rayna. What’s our status?”
“How soon?”
“One hour.”
She didn’t move, but her eyes flashed back and forth, as if reading some imaginary computer terminal in front of her face. After a moment she snapped back to attention. “You got it, Cap’n.”
“Good girl,” he murmured as she too rushed out the doors without another word.
What next? They had one hour to get a decommissioned battle cruiser, which hadn’t seen a day of real action in over seventy years, ready for the fight of its life. He breathed deep and closed his eyes, ignoring the sharp pain stabbing into his lungs. Dammit, not now, he thought, noting the pain had increased since the morning.
But no time to worry about himself. He had a crew to lead. A ship to protect.
A world to save.
Chapter 24
Earth’s Moon
Captain’s Quarters, ISS Winchester
“I thought you told me their fleet would stop at Jupiter, shoot the place up, and leave? What the hell are they doing? Straight towards Earth! They’re heading straight towards the damn Earth!” Vice President Isaacson’s hands were sweating, which didn’t help as he wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Ambassador Volodin was seated at the computer terminal in the captain’s quarters, which Captain Day of the Winchester had given up to his VIP guest. He frantically punched keys and commands, trying to backdoor his way into the Winchester’s meta-space communications transmitter.
“I don’t know. They should have stoppe
d. They should have turned around.” Volodin motioned for Isaacson. “Here. Enter your credentials. If you do it, IDF will never know we accessed the system.”
Isaacson snapped his head towards Volodin. “How do you know that?”
“We know a lot of things, Mr. Vice President. Hurry.”
Isaacson keyed in his credentials, and the access to the meta-space system popped up on the screen. “Is it too late to make them turn around? Do they commit to a target once they engage?”
“I don’t know.” Volodin took out a personal datapad and scrolled through it. Finding what he was looking for, he began tapping a message into the meta-space transmitter. “But I know the pattern that subverts their link to the homeworld. If we can disrupt their current mandate and replace it with something else, like a basic command that says return home, then we may be in the clear.”
Isaacson paced the room, looking up at Volodin every few minutes. He perused the captain’s bookcase and framed pictures, recognizing Fleet Admiral Zingano in one, shaking Captain Day’s hand in front of the IDF flag. “Well?”
“The message went out a few minutes ago. No reply yet.”
“They reply?”
“Yes,” said Volodin. “When we first disrupted their meta-space link a decade ago, we were as surprised as you. The Swarm had never replied to any of our attempts to communicate during the war. Not once. But when we first subverted the link, they not only replied, but acknowledged receipt of instructions. They obeyed. That was unthinkable, but when we directed them to hollow out a particularly large asteroid in the Beta Ceti system as a test, and they complied, finishing within days, well”—he looked up from the terminal—“that was when we believed it, and started to plan for how to use it.”
“Why didn’t the Russian government inform IDF about this?” Isaacson demanded. “We’re talking about a species that nearly wiped out Earth.”
Volodin sniffed. “Same reason IDF didn’t share smart-steel technology with the Russian Confederation. You don’t trust us. Never have. And when we found the aliens were not monsters, that they could be reasoned with, we believed we’d found our ally. Or, at least, a counterbalance to IDF influence out in the colonial sectors.”
“Counterbalance? Reasoned with? I thought you controlled them.”
“After a fashion, yes. But they still have will, and intelligence. After the initial test, where they hollowed out the asteroid for us, they required an exchange of knowledge. So they sent us schematics for better gravity field emitters, allowing our ships to sustain greater changes in inertia.”
Isaacson didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. “And what did you give them?”
“The Russian Academy of Science is at the forefront of quantum field technology. We taught them how our fusion cores use artificial nano-singularities. Increases our fusion efficiency by some five hundred percent over IDF’s. Seemed like a fair trade for their inertial compensators.”
“And how do you know that they’re not going to just turn around and use the tech on us? What makes you think they’re suddenly tame?”
“I told you, Eamon, we’ve been controlling them for years. The exchange happened nearly a decade ago, and in all that time they’ve never been anything other than docile and cooperative.”
A binary code flashed up on the screen, and Volodin tapped out an instruction for the computer to decode it into characters.
His face drained white.
“What does it say?” Isaacson yelled, pushing Volodin aside to look at the screen.
Only two words comprised the translated message.
You die.
Chapter 25
Earth’s Moon
Bridge, ISS Constitution
“Lieutenant Diaz, get on the horn to Lunar Base. Find out what the status is of the civilian evacuation, and when we leave to escort the civilian fleet.”
“Aye, sir.”
Granger strode around the central command console to sidle up to his XO. “Where are we at, Abe?”
The old XO grumbled. “Tim, it’s going to take a lot longer than one hour to get all these RPOs operational.”
The captain pointed at the readiness summary on the console. “Focus on the lower-hanging fruit. Get as many as you can operational before the hour is up. And that’s just the time it’ll take the Swarm to arrive at Lunar Base. By then we’ll be escorting the civvies back to Earth, so we’ve got a little more time than that.”
“You think the ships we’ve got assembled here can stop them?”
Granger paused. “Who knows? CENTCOM is q-jumping a few more ships in from Earth, so Lunar Base is not exactly a sitting duck. And the base itself is not lightly armed either. They’ll put up a hell of a fight. If all goes well, we may not even need all these RPOs and fighters.”
The XO grunted. “Yeah, but if it doesn’t, I can’t imagine what one more ship will do to them if they decide to continue on towards Earth. Especially if that one ship is the Constitution.”
“She’ll hold,” said Granger, patting the console. “Hell, I’ll wager she’ll hold together better than most of those new ships IDF has pumped out in the last fifty years. Ten meters of tungsten shielding ain’t nothing to sniff at. Those new ships have barely a twentieth of that, and it’s all made of that new smart-steel. The stuff is supposed to be stronger than anything, but only if the computers are working.”
“What happens when the computers go down?” Haws glanced up at him sideways.
“The electron energy orbitals in the smart-steel are regulated by a central processing unit. Or some physics shit like that. Makes it a thousand times stronger than regular steel, and far more than that for short periods of time in anticipated impact zones. All I remember from my briefing is that if the computers go down, or if the attacker knows the quantum modulation patterns, the smart-steel becomes very, very dumb.”
“I can’t imagine CENTCOM would have cleared smart-steel to be used in starships if it’s not safe.”
Granger eyed his XO. “Abe, we’re talking about the same CENTCOM that has agreed with the Eagleton Commission about the need to strip down the fleet. I’m not sure I’d put all my faith in their judgement these days.”
His XO’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t think the fleet is at risk?”
“Of course it’s at risk. Whether it’s at existential risk remains to be seen.”
Lieutenant Diaz raised his head towards the captain. “Sir, Lunar Base reports that most of the civilian transports are loaded and ready for evac.”
“How many?”
Diaz glanced at his display. “Most of the political delegation came on the Winchester, but we’ve also got the Roadrunner, the asteroid mining ship Redeye One, and the Rainbow, along with a handful of merchant and industrial freighters that requested our escort back to Earth. The total caravan should be fourteen ships.”
Fourteen ships. That’s a lot to defend.
“Available armaments on any of them?”
“Negative, sir,” said Diaz, with a downward glance.
Granger sucked in a painful breath, careful to let his face remain steadfast. “Very well. We go to escort duty with the caravan we’ve got.” He stood up and called back to Diaz as he passed through the doors to the bridge. “Lieutenant, inform me immediately when all ships report ready. I’ll be in the fighter bay.”
“Aye, sir.”
The corridors were strangely silent, except for the occasional bustle of activity as a crew member ran past with whatever urgent business they had to get the ship on a war footing. Hardly any of them stopped to salute the captain as they sprinted past, but Granger didn’t care. In an hour, they could all be dead anyway.
No. He couldn’t think that way. She’d pull them through, he thought as he traced a hand down the corridor wall. The Constitution had performed admirably in the first Swarm War, suffering substantial damage, sure, but she’d always pulled through. After each battle, after each skirmish, the Old Bird carried her crew home—one of
the only ships during that war to do so.
But times had changed. The Swarm had changed, if the early sensor readings and intelligence were accurate. It was either a completely new enemy, or the Swarm had radically overhauled its technology and ship design in the past seventy-five years.
Granger strode through the doors to the fighter bay, saluting the two marines stationed at the entrance.
“Captain, we’re nearly done restoring about a dozen fighters back to operational condition—alterations had only just begun on those. But we’ve still got over forty fighters down,” Commander Proctor called out to him breathlessly from the command station near the side wall. The entire maintenance section—several hundred meters long and almost a hundred wide, was a bee’s nest of frenzied activity. Maintenance crews and whoever else Commander Proctor had managed to deputize were busy on about fifty fighters, frantically working to restore them to operational status. Granger was actually impressed at the scale of the operation that Proctor had managed to put together in such a short period of time.
“Very good, Commander. Excellent work. How many birds will I have in forty-five minutes?”
A hint of a grimace tugged at her brow. “Just shy of fifty, sir.”
Granger breathed a curse. “We’ll need more than that, Commander.” He saw her steel her jaw slightly. “Even so, excellent work,” he added with a curt nod.
“Thank you, sir. In another hour and a half we should be up to sixty fighters total. Unfortunately the twenty or so that have been completely stripped and outfitted for simulator service will take quite a bit more time.”
“Understood. Carry on.” As Commander Proctor turned back to her assistants, Commander Pierce came bounding up.
“Captain, you realize we don’t actually have fully trained pilots for all these fighters, don’t you?”
