by M. D. Cooper
C’mon, Tanis whispered to herself. Where are you bastards?
“They’re firing antimatter warheads!” someone on scan called out. “We’ve lost a hundred ships!”
Tanis saw that concentrated antimatter detonations were enveloping many of the ISF ships, overwhelming the already taxed reactors powering the stasis shields.
She issued orders for human and AI crewed ships to fall back, positioning the I2 between the fleets.
The battlespace was almost incomprehensible. Fighters from both sides swarmed around ships, entire regions of space were filled with high-velocity debris, deadly radiation, and kinetic rounds.
It was unlike anything Tanis-Angela had ever imagined, a small part of her mind—the bit that wasn’t frantically attempting to guide thousands of ships to their targets and away from their demise—boggled at the horror of it. She could not imagine that many battles of this scale had ever taken place before, with this much energy expended.
So far, miraculously, the I2 had taken no damage. The Trisilieds ships gave it a wide berth, though many not wide enough, taking beamfire and sweeps of its molecular decoupler, as Captain Espensen guided the ship to where it was most needed.
Four minutes later, only seven hundred ships remained functional in Fleet Group 1, bolstered by five-hundred from Symatra’s group. Over ninety percent of her ships were gone.
The bulk of the Trisilieds ships were now on the far side of Carthage, executing wide arcs beyond it to come back in for a final pass. There were still five thousand of them, and Tanis knew that the battle would be decided long before Sanderson’s ships arrived.
“Enemy fleet admiral hailing us,” the comm officer announced.
“Put it up,” Tanis replied, opening her eyes once more to the bridge around her.
A woman appeared, sporting a haughty expression on her face and six stars on the collar of her ornate uniform. She was tall and slender—disproportionately so—and Tanis wondered if the woman had grown up on a low-g world or station.
“Admiral Richards, I am Admiral Myra,” the woman said without preamble. “You, and all remaining vessels in your fleet, are to power down your weapons and shields, and exit your vessels in escape pods.”
“Never happen,” Tanis replied. “It is you who should surrender.”
“Admiral Richards,” Admiral Myra said, still looking smug. “You are beaten. Our forces are invading your cities, we’ve taken one of your stations, and the other is not far behind. You have no more defenses, and your other fleets cannot reach you in time. Surrender now.”
“Myra,” Tanis’s lips twisted into a sneer as she spat out the woman’s name, “it is you who will surrender now, or none of you will ever leave this system. New Canaan will be your grave, and now that you’ve spilled so much of our blood, I will stretch my hand across the stars to the Pleiades and destroy your entire civilization.”
Sera sputtered out loud, and Tanis saw her eyes narrow in anger. She cut the communication with Admiral Myra before Sera spoke.
“Tanis!” Sera cried aloud. “The Orion Guard? Here? How many?”
In an instant, everyone on the bridge turned to stare at Tanis. It wasn’t the way she wanted this information to come out; she had hoped to have another option, but it was not to be.
Tanis sent a mental affirmation to Sera before speaking aloud. “Their stealth tech is good, better than yours, on par with ours,” Tanis said calmly. “Our scan shows at least seventy thousand ships. Based on what you’ve told me, it’s a sizable portion of their forward fleets. Its destruction will decrease their power-base in the Inner Stars considerably.”
“Even if you can convince your parliament to allow the use of picobombs, you can’t take out that many ships in time,” Sera said, her face now ashen.
“Parliament reversed their decision ten minutes ago,” Tanis replied with a frown. “Too little too late for…for the dead—but that is not how we will end this battle.”
“Then how?” Sera asked, and Tanis saw the same question on the face of everyone on the bridge.
A wicked smile slowly twisted her lips. “We will devour them.”
Confusion showed on the faces of everyone on the I2’s bridge, everyone except for Sera and Finaeus.
“You can’t,” Finaeus whispered. “You won’t be able to control it…them…the things…it’s not possible.”
Tanis shook her head. “Those creatures have been controlled for some time. I wondered by who, until you explained what’s in the galactic core. Those AI made the dark layer creatures to slow us down, but your jump gates ruined that plan. Now they will throw humanity back into another dark age to slow us one more. Don’t you see? The Intrepid, Kapteyn’s streamer, our jump forward in time with picotech. They always intended it to happen. We’re the great filter, here to make a war to end all wars and keep humanity in check.”
Finaeus shook his head. “That may be, but how will you do it? Those things, they’ll destroy us all.”
“No.” Tanis shook her head. “They won’t.”
OURI’S BAD DAY
STELLAR DATE: 04.01.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Landfall Space/Air Traffic Control Center
REGION: Knossos Island, Carthage, New Canaan System
“Fuck! They’re flinging dropships down here like their capital ships are fucking piñatas!” Henderson hollered from his position on the scan station.
“Henderson, pipe down,” Ouri barked at the man. There were a lot of days that she loved being out of the military, back in the colony’s biology mission, but there were a lot of times she missed the discipline of the ISF.
Henderson cast a pair of wide eyes in her direction, and Ouri held up a hand beside her head and lowered it to her waist. “Fleet will be on station before long, FROD Marines are going to hit the dirt behind those Trisilieds dropships. Don’t you worry.”
The man opened his mouth to reply, but Ouri cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes. Henderson nodded slowly and turned back to his console.
The civilian team running Landfall’s Space/Air Traffic control systems were competent people, but they weren’t trained to handle the mental strain of an incoming assault of this magnitude. Ouri wasn’t entirely sure that she was, either.
Still, with nearly every member of the ISF crewing ships in the fleet, it would fall to them to manage Carthage’s main planetary defenses, along with Murry, the Planetary Management AI.
At first, Ouri had bristled when Tanis gave her this assignment. She had thousands of hours conning the Intrepid; she had held FleetConn when Tanis and the rest of the command crew had nearly been captured by rebels back on Victoria.
She knew how to command a starship.
However, now that she was on the ground, she realized that these people needed someone with her experience. To them, she was one of the legendary figures who had fought the rogue AI in Estrella de la Mue
rte, and played a pivotal role back at Victoria.
With a few exceptions, everyone present in the SATC had been in stasis, or not yet born, during most of the Intrepid’s journey.
“OK, people,” Ouri addressed the ten men and women with her in the control room. “We’re going to operate from this facility for as long as we can. It has line-of-sight communications with most of the installations, and since we’re sixty klicks from Landfall, the enemy will think this is just a secondary installation.”
“Our comm traffic is going to give us away, though,” one of the air-traffic control operators replied. “They’re going to know we’re here.”
“That’s why we start by routing all comms through remote stations,” Ouri replied. “As they fall, we pull back.”
“They’re still gonna figure it out before long,” Henderson said, barely holding it together.
“Get a grip!” Sammy, a young woman to Henderson’s left, shook her head. “Now, activate those AA batteries on the north continent. Murry has enough to do with the last shuttles dropping in and lifts coming down the strand!”
“’Kay, ’kay, batteries are coming online,” Henderson said. “NSAI are suggesting closest dropships are priority. Do I go with that?”
“Yes!” Ouri and Sammy shouted at the same time.
“’Kay, ’kay, just checking…”
Ouri replied.
Ouri couldn’t imagine the stress of knowing one’s kid was in battle. Her daughters were safe in one of the undersea biomes, and she was still worried sick about them.
Ouri laughed, the girl’s enthusiasm was infectious.
“Yeah! Got some!” Henderson called out.
Ouri turned her attention back to the holotank and frowned as she watched hundreds of dropships enter the atmosphere. Henderson was right about one thing: this was going to be the fight of their lives.
The majority of the Trisilieds’ assault craft were headed for Landfall, which made sense, given the enemy’s goal of taking the planet’s population hostage to force their surrender of the picotech. However, that goal gave an advantage to the Carthaginians. The enemy would be hesitant to use weapons of mass destruction on her people, while she would have no such compunctions about using WMDs on them.
“They’re approaching the eastern installations,” Amy called out form her station. “I have the first salvo ready to fire.”
“Give ’em hell,” Ouri replied.
The holotank showed the first wave of dropships pass below the ten-thousand-meter mark as they raced over the ocean to the east of the archipelago where Landfall was situated.
Below the crashing waves of the Mediterranean Ocean, twenty robotic submarines launched a hundred surface-to-air missiles at the enemy dropships. The SAMs carried one-megaton nuclear warheads, more than enough to put a crimp in the Trisilieds’ approach vector.
“I can’t believe we’re detonating nukes over our own world,” one of the men said as he maneuvered low-altitude drones, launching chaff clouds into the skies ahead of the missiles. The reflective clouds of aluminum and lead would refract and block optical and x-ray lasers—with luck, they would protect at least half the SAMs as they streaked into the path of the oncoming ships.
Red markers appeared on the holotank as thirty-two of the missiles took air-to-air fire and fell back into the ocean. Then, the remainder of the warheads detonated amidst the enemy dropships.
Ouri was glad for the row of volcanic peaks to their east that blocked the intensity of the flash, not to mention the antigravity systems that would push most of the radiation into space, along with the smoke and ash from the volcanoes.
As the clouds from the explosions cleared, remote sensor stations showed hundreds of Trisilieds assault craft plummeting into the ocean, though hundreds more survived the nuclear fire.
“Second salvo!” Ouri called out.
“It’s insane,” someone whispered from behind her. “How can they just fling so many ships down here like this…they’re not giving them any fleet support!”
“Look above the poles,” Ouri said without turning. “Fleet Group 1 just jumped in. Those assholes up there are in for the fight of their lives. You can see where several of their capital ships were dropping into low orbits, but are pulling back out now.”
“Symatra really did a number on them, too,” Sammy added. “She took out all those carriers. If they had made it, those assault ships would have serious fighter shields, not just this smattering.”
The submarines fired off three more salvos of SAMs, each having a diminished effect as the drones ran out of chaff, and the enemy drop ships spread out wider and wider.
As the assault transports passed high over the string of volcanos, there were still over a thousand intact enemy ships bearing down on Landfall. Ouri estimated that each had to contain at least a platoon of soldiers, which meant that the Trisilieds were about to land thirty thousand troops on Carthage.
Ouri sighed. Well shit.
BRITANNICA
STELLAR DATE: 04.01.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: OGS Britannica
REGION: Stellar North of Carthage, New Canaan System
“Thing about pico,” Jessica said as she queued up with Cargo, Usef, Misha, and Trevor in the airlock, “is that it has a damn short shelf life. It doesn’t take much to mess up those tiny bastards—unless they’re carrying out orders to go eat a starship, then they’ll replicate a hell of a lot faster than the Casimir effect tears ’em apart.”
“I can’t even begin to describe how nervous this makes me,” Misha said, casting a worried eye at the small device Jessica held. “That shit’s pico…it makes nanotech look like a bludgeon. It can weasel its way in between electrons and neutrons. How is it even a thing? What’s it made out of?”
“Seriously, Misha,” Jessica shook her head. “Do you really want to discuss how pico can take apart a neutron bit-by-bit right now?”
“Now that you mention it,” Misha said with a broad grin, “that does sound fascinating. What say we just put off this crazy mission and talk about pico for a bit?”
“Nice try,” Cargo said and slapped Misha on the back. “You always have a case of the butterflies before we do an op. Like Jessica said, we’ve got this in the bag.”
“OK, when we go in, I have tactical command,” Jessica said. “Not because I need to be the big girl, but I know how we work, and I know how Usef works.”
“Sure got the big girls, though,” Misha snickered and Cargo cuffed him on the back of the head.
“Seriously, Cargo? Was that necessary?”
“Was either me or Trevor,” Cargo shrugged. “Should I let him do it next time?”
Misha glanced at Trevor’s biceps, each the size of his torso.
“Uh, thanks, Cargo. Did me a solid there.”
“Damn right I did.”
“Sorry, Sabrina,” Jessica said as she placed the pico-package in the airlock and cycled it. “Can you guys believe Tanis snuck onto a Transcend ship the old fashioned way just six days ago? When she sees a need, she sure makes certain it gets taken care of fast.”
“Pretty deep there, big man,” Misha chuckled.
“What? I used to carve little crystal trinkets. I can totally be deep.”
Jessica’s hand went to her throat, reaching for the chain which held the small dolphin Trevor had carved for her long ago. She felt a moment of panic when her fingers didn’t feel the chain, but then she recalled. Trevor had convinced her not to wear it—it was against Orion Guard regs to wear jewelry, and though the Orion uniforms they wore would hide it, it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Yeah, you’re like an ocean,” Cargo grunted. “It looks like our little friend has rewired the lock over there. If it worked, we’ll slip right in. If it doesn’t…well, I guess we’ll all see how we look with holes in us.”
Jessica checked her sidearm one last time as the team stepped into the airlock and Sabrina pulled the ship within a meter of the Britannica. A small grav-tunnel joined the airlocks and the team rushed through and sealed the Britannica’s airlock behind them.
“OK, team, one more time while the package makes sure the passageway out there is clear,” Jessica said, looking from one member of the strike force to the next. “Now that we have Usef here, it’s not going to like last time—being an officer, he can pass for one.”
“I think I did really well last time,” Cargo said.
“Seriously?” Misha asked. “You were a major and you called a private sir. Sure, they ‘sir’ sergeants in some militaries, but no one calls a private ‘sir’.”
“You sure?” Cargo asked Jessica and Usef.
“Nope, no one, nowhere,” Jessica shook her head.
“Goes against nature,” Usef added.
“If he’s the one who can’t tell a private from his privates, how come I’m PFC Jerrod, here?” Misha asked.
