It was a short beard, trimmed to follow the curve of his jaw. He shaved the beard so that it fell short of his lower lip. The top of his beard followed the curve of his lips to create a well-trimmed look.
“Hello,” said Holman in a deep, throaty voice that did not sound clonelike. He had been sitting, watching the planet through a viewport, but he stood and saluted as I entered the deck.
I returned the salute, and said, “You put together a good operation.”
“Not good enough,” he said. “I understand there were looters.”
“You can bring a horse to water,” I said.
“But they shot Admiral Jolly. This is a blow to the Enlisted Man’s Empire.”
I gave him a sly smile, and said, “Not as much a blow as you might think. I understand he planned to retire right after the evacuation.”
“He never told me,” said Holman. He sounded suspicious.
“Yes, well, Admiral Jolly kept his plans pretty quiet.”
With that, we sat and we waited. Death arrived on Gobi six hours late. This had happened before. The virtual ghost of Arthur Breeze tended to err on the safe side with his predictions.
At 03:17 S.T.C. time, the Avatari ignited the Tachyon D particles they had pumped into the atmosphere, and the temperature instantaneously spiked to nine thousand degrees.
Unable to see the destruction through the viewport, Holman and I switched to a computer display. The first thing we saw was the destruction of Gobi Station. Several of the smaller structures around the base exploded. The base itself, a tall spindlelike building armed with cannons and radars and landing pads, seemed untouched by the heat for twenty seconds. Laser cannons exploded, launchpads melted, but the base remained erect.
The heat continued for precisely eighty-three seconds. During that time, the sand around Gobi Station turned orange and melted into a shallow ocean of glass. Outcroppings of rock exploded.
The superheating of the planet caused the atmosphere to rise in its own convection. As it rose, the atmospheric pressure lifted with it, and Gobi Station burst like a balloon. The inner framework remained, but the outer walls blew off the building, leaving the inner structure to wilt in the extreme heat.
When the eighty-three-second attack ended, the atmosphere cooled and fell back into place, crushing the remains of Gobi Station into a twisted pile of girders.
I thought about the looter I had allowed to escape. He’d probably died in the first second of the attack. One moment he’d have been looking at whatever swag he’d accumulated, and the next moment, he was dust.
At least he’d died happy, after all; he’d outwitted a dumb Marine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Earthdate: November 23, A.D. 2517
Location: New Copenhagen
Galactic Position: Orion Arm
Astronomic Location: Milky Way
The Japanese Fleet had begun its mission in 2514, right after the aliens were turned back on New Copenhagen. At the time they embarked, it looked like the war for the Milky Way had ended and the Unified Authority had won.
Yamashiro Yoshi recognized the decrepit state of the Unified Authority and saw it as dangerous. The Unified Authority was an empire in collapse. One more attack, be it from renegades like the Morgan Atkins Believers or aliens, and the empire would fall—it was teetering that close to the edge; but an empire teetering on the brink of extinction is also an empire on alert. Fearing that the U.A. Navy might start shooting before the crew of the Sakura could identify themselves, Yamashiro decided it would be safer to begin the journey to Earth by stopping by its nearest populated neighbor—New Copenhagen. He would go to the secondary planet first, identify himself and his ship, then continue on to Earth.
The Sakura broadcasted in ten million miles off New Copenhagen. The moment the ship cleared the anomaly, Captain Takahashi ordered his engineers to start recharging the broadcast generator ... a preventive measure.
Takahashi, Yamashiro, and Commander Suzuki Hideki stood around the map table staring into a three-dimensional holographic map looking for signs of ships patrolling the area. They saw no movement, but their radar found several wrecks orbiting the planet. They tried to signal the planet but received no response.
“Perhaps they have abandoned the planet,” suggested Commander Suzuki.
Yamashiro grunted his agreement. “Maybe so,” he said. “As I understand it, the cities were destroyed during the war with the aliens.”
“Should we proceed to Earth?” asked Takahashi.
“No,” said Yamashiro. “Send down a transport. There may yet be people on this planet.”
“If there are people on New Copenhagen, then they are hiding. We’ve tried to signal them on every frequency, military and civilian,” said Takahashi. “They should have a robot transponder on this planet at the very least.”
“New Copenhagen was the Unified Authority’s final colony. The Linear Committee would not abandon its final colony without a fight,” said Yamashiro. “If they have abandoned the planet, I want to know why.” And then he said the words he wished did not need saying, “We may be defending a people who are already extinct.”
He gave his son-in-law a sympathetic gaze as he said this, but Takahashi looked away. She is my daughter as well as your wife. Your children are my grandchildren. We would share in the loss, he thought.
“Admiral, do you think the aliens have attacked Earth?” asked Suzuki. The conversation did not weigh as heavily on the commander as it did on Yamashiro and Takahashi. He was a bachelor.
Takahashi answered. “It’s been three years since we have had contact with Earth. Any one of a million fates may have befallen it during our absence. History may have left us behind. Perhaps the known laws of time do not apply in Bode’s Galaxy. By our clock, we have been absent for three years, but one thousand centuries may have passed on Earth.”
“Do you really think that is possible?” asked Suzuki.
“Possible? Anything is possible,” said Yamashiro. Then he spoke in a hollow whisper as he added, “Perhaps we only saw the first wave of a more massive assault before we set off for their galaxy.”
Time passed as the Sakura approached New Copenhagen. The mood on the bridge remained grim. “Admiral, do you want to send SEALs to search the planet?” asked Suzuki.
“Our transports will cover more territory from the sky,” said Yamashiro.
“Satellites are even faster,” said Takahashi.
Yamashiro began to brush off the suggestion as cowardice, then realized that what Takahashi had said was true. “Ah, satellites, they would be faster still.”
The transport deployed three satellites and returned to the ship. Fearing the worst, Yamashiro had the satellite feed sent directly to him. He sat alone in his office, reviewing a live video that confirmed the worst of his fears.
When the Joint Chiefs had briefed him about his mission, they told Yamashiro that the aliens destroyed cities and left them in ruins. He had seen footage of soldiers and Marines fighting battles in forests. General Alexander Smith, the head of the Joint Chiefs, complained that the aliens had “knocked us back to the Stone Age.”
The New Copenhagen Yamashiro saw in the video feed was not in the Stone Age; it looked like a planet that would not support life. Where there had once been forests on this planet, the trees had all burned away leaving fields of charred stumps and scorched earth. Yamashiro searched for leaves, moss, ferns, grass, and animals. He found no signs of life, not even around the rivers and lakes.
He studied the ruined landscape for fifteen minutes, then he shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his eyelids. He thought about the Onoda, the Kyoto, and the Yamato, reasoning that any weapon that could scald an entire planet could certainly melt a battleship into a lump of clay. Trying to repress the fear and anger he felt, he returned to the video feed and was hypnotized by the devastation.
The feed showed a city in which few buildings stood. He saw the frame of a skyscraper. The glass and skin of the
building had fallen away from the frame. He saw an old-fashioned brick tower that leaned as if it had melted. The tower reminded him of an ice sculpture left in the sun.
Scanning the remains of the city, Yamashiro did not see flagpoles, steel roofs, glass, or bridges. The ground sparkled like broken crystals. The deserts he saw might once have been pasturelands. Where there once had been deserts and beaches, the sand had melted into glass.
Yamashiro winced when the feed identified Valhalla, the capital city of New Copenhagen. A few buildings still stood in downtown Valhalla, but most had been crushed. The streets had melted. The remaining cars, mostly melted hulks without paint, tires, or windows, sat mired in the street, sunk down to their axles.
They escaped the frying pan only to perish by fire, thought Yamashiro. In this war, the first wave was invasion. The second wave was death by fire. There can be no question about my duty now, Yamashiro decided. He and his crew would return to Bode’s Galaxy. They would repay death with death.
Should we go to Earth? he asked himself. Few of his sailors knew that they had returned to their home galaxy. Yamashiro decided to show the video feed to Takahashi and the master chief of the SEALs. They would decide together whether or not they should return to Earth.
That was Yamashiro’s strategy before the attack. After the attack, he changed his mind.
Three ships broadcasted into New Copenhagen space less than one million miles from the Sakura. The ships glowed. Captain Takahashi had never seen ships that glowed like these ships, and the Sakura’s sensors could not identify them.
The ships were long and narrow. The only naval ships Takahashi had ever seen were wide and wedge-shaped.
“Can you hail them?” asked Takahashi.
His communications officer said, “No.”
His helmsman reported that the ships were closing in at thirty-nine million miles per hour. The fastest Unified Authority ships Takahashi had ever seen had a maximum speed of thirty million miles per hour.
With the ships only one minute away, Takahashi gave the order to broadcast out, and the Sakura returned to Bode’s Galaxy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Location: Gobi
Galactic Position: Perseus Arm
Astronomic Location: Milky Way
The Unified Authority sent a spy ship into space near Gobi. The ship dropped a communications satellite and broadcasted out. The satellite carried a video feed that the Unifieds wanted us to see ... a warning. It showed the fleet of ships we had patrolling Magus, a planet in the Sagittarius Arm.
On the screen, the ships and the planet are plainly visible. A pair of mile-wide discs, the Magus broadcast station, floats in a distant corner of the screen. The station blends into the vastness of space though an occasional flare in its electrical field gives its position away.
Made up of ships from the Sagittarius Inner and Central Fleets, the fleet patrolling Magus includes one fighter carrier, seven battleships, and a fringe of destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. The ships sit in a loose cluster, the smaller ships toward the edge and the fighter carrier in the center.
The first two anomalies appear between the ships and the broadcast station. They look like budding flowers made out of electricity. Unified Authority battleships emerge from the anomalies.
The shields protecting the U.A. ships glow the color of a fading sun. The hulls of the ships are sharp and sleek, they seem to slice through space as they approach the patrol.
Our carrier launches her fighters. Our battleships fire torpedoes and particle beams. Our destroyers fall into place, flanking the intruders, allowing our ships to hit the enemy from every angle. In past battles, the Unified Authority’s new shield technology has been strong but not impenetrable. Hit it with a sufficient amount of strength, and it will break down. In a prolonged fight, our fleet has more than enough torpedoes to break through the shields.
A third U.A. battleship broadcasts in on the other side of our fleet, between our ships and the planet. The enemy approaches our ships like wolves attacking a flock. They are predators, unafraid, ready to kill.
If our ships had broken formation and run, some of them would have made it to the safety of the broadcast zone. The U.A. ships are self-broadcasting, they cannot follow ours into the broadcast zone without being destroyed.
With his fighters launched, however, the captain of the carrier cannot cut and run, so our battleships slowly shift into position, forming a border around the carrier.
The Unifieds have a new toy that they want us to see—upgraded torpedoes.
As the U.A. ships muscle their way into our formation, they fire torpedoes at our battleships. Instead of stressing the shields, these new torpedoes obliterate them. They strike the clear, electric panes that form our ships’ shields and explode in a glittering flash of red and yellow and gray. The shields light up like glass reflecting bright sunlight, then they vanish.
Admiral Liotta, the newly appointed commander and chief of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, froze the video as a torpedo struck the forward shield of the fighter carrier. He let the feed run for another second, froze it, then pointed to the antennae that projected the shields. “Do you see what’s happening here? Right here. Look at the antennae. Did you see how they caught fire and exploded. Did you see that? These new torpedoes make our shields overcharge.
“Now look at this. See here, on the shields.”
Fire smoldered where the torpedo had struck the shield of a battleship. It wasn’t a flaming fire, not the kind of fire that gets extinguished by the vacuum of space. This looked like phosphorous, as if the chemical had somehow attached itself to the shield and fed on itself.
“One hit. One hit. All they needed was one specking torpedo to knock out our shields,” he said. “There’s no telling what other damage it did inside the ship.”
He started the video feed rolling again, this time closing in on one of the Unified Authority battleships as it attacked.
The U.A. ship fires a second torpedo, striking our unshielded carrier just below the bridge. The armor gives way immediately. Flames burst out of the ruptured hull and disappear. As the disintegration spreads along the hull, armored tiles break off like scales, and the ship seems to decompose before us.
Admiral Liotta stopped the feed. “It appears they are using two kinds of torpedoes, one for shields and one for ships.” He replayed the attack, this time without pausing for explanations.
Shaped like a knife, the Unified Authority’s new battleships have torpedo arrays on either side of their hulls. The ship charges in, hitting multiple targets, leaving them moldering in her wake. A destroyer, two cruisers, and a battleship, are demolished with two shots as the U.A. battleship streaks toward our fighter carrier.
Hoping to stop the inevitable, our fighters swarm the enemy battleship. Fast and small, they are well suited for attacking battleships, baffling their guns and torpedoes with agile maneuvers; but they are too weak to damage the U.A. ship. Their cannons and rockets peck at the shields, causing no damage. They are like bees attempting to defend their hive from a bear. No, it’s even worse. They are like minnows attacking a shark.
With our fighters pecking uselessly at her shields, the first of the U.A. battleships fires a torpedo at the fighter carrier. The forward shield lights up. It shimmers and erases as a second torpedo strikes the carrier across her bow.
The front of the carrier caves in on itself, coughing up huge sprays of debris and fire. Bodies fly out in the eruption, men who died the instant the torpedo hit the ship and men who died when they entered the vacuum of space.
The U.A. ship fires one final torpedo, which erases any chance of survivors. When that last torpedo strikes, it breaks the fighter carrier in half.
Seen in real time, the demolition looked even more brutal than it did in slow motion. The Unifieds knew they only needed two shots to destroy our ships. The first shot was the jab. The second shot was the fatal blow.
We all sat in silence for several seconds after the f
eed ended. “Damn,” I whispered quietly so that no one else would hear me. Why should we even try to defend ourselves? I thought. If the Unifieds attacked those ships to send us a message, the message they were sending was, “Give up all hope.”
“We did not lose every ship in that encounter. After they destroyed the fighter carrier, the Unifieds allowed our remaining ships to escape,” said Liotta.
“What were the damages?” asked Admiral Wallace. “How many specking ships did we lose?”
Liotta looked at his notes, and said, “Nine ships. Seven fighters.”
“Only seven fighters?” I asked.
“We’re in contact with the other fighters. As soon as we are sure the coast is clear, we’ll send a carrier out to retrieve them.”
“Admiral, who shot the video?” I asked.
“Unknown,” said Liotta. “We should assume the Unifieds sent a spy ship to record the battle.”
“The sons of bitches sent a spy ship to record a specking massacre,” said Wallace. “What a nightmare. What a specking nightmare.”
“Well?” asked Liotta. “Any suggestions?”
“It seems obvious,” said Captain Holman, who had been the late Admiral Jolly’s right-hand man. Holman and I were still orbiting Gobi, still in the Perseus Arm. Liotta and Wallace appeared through the magic of a confabulator.
“What’s obvious?” asked Liotta, shooting Holman an icy glare. He did not like having a captain at a summit for admirals; and he especially disliked having that captain participate as if he’d been invited to speak.
Holman looked around the table to see if anyone had seen whatever he had seen. If he was looking for support, he had wasted his time. Not finding any backers, he turned to Admiral Liotta, and said, “We don’t need to fight them, they’re not trying to take our planets from us. They want their barges back; but they can’t fire at the barges because they need them as much as we do. You with me so far?”
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