by Jay Allan
“Divert Task Force A and Task Force D to pursue. They are to inflict maximum possible losses on the enemy before they are able to reach the warp gate.”
“Yes, sir. Shall I order them to transit and maintain contact?”
“Negative, Captain. Did I order that?” Carrack’s petulance was mostly him taking out his frustration on his subordinates. He definitely wanted to pursue Garret’s fleet, to hunt down his ships to the end of space itself if need be, until every last one of them had been destroyed. But he’d been expressly forbidden to do so. The Triumvirate was cautious, too concerned that splitting their forces would allow their enemies to join up somehow, inflict an unexpected defeat on the Black Flag fleet. It seemed foolish to Carrack, but he didn’t dare disobey. The Triumvirate controlled him with the same use of stark terror he used on his own subordinates.
“My apologies, Marshal.”
“The rest of the fleet will form up and advance on Armstrong.”
“Yes, sir.”
Carrack turned toward one of the myriad screens against the far wall, one which displayed a bluish-white planet, beautiful, almost idyllic-looking. In just a few hours, no one will recognize that world…
“All ground assault vessels are to prepare. The bombardment will begin as soon as we reach Armstrong orbit, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
Garret is defeated, at long last. Now, it’s time for the Marines. We’ll have to go down there and dig the last of them out of their holes, no question. But, first, let’s see how they like a thousand gigatons or so tearing up that pretty little planet of theirs…
* * * * *
Cain stood, silent, still, staring at the small screen in front of him. The quarters were cramped, not the kind of headquarters a general who had led the entire Marine Corps was used to, but he didn’t care. He hardly noticed. His eyes, his mind, were on only one thing. The missiles entering Armstrong’s atmosphere. Hundreds of missiles. No, he thought, thousands…and he didn’t have a doubt every one of them was a nuke.
There had been discussions, even arguments, in the strategy sessions, about whether the Black Flag would honor the prohibitions against wholesale nuclear bombardments of civilian populations centers. Gilson had been uncertain, and many of the others had expressed confidence that there was no need to pack the population into shelters, that the invaders, however brutal they may be, wouldn’t resort to such extreme measures, especially when they could only expect the same in return one day.
No doubt they said the same things on Earth…right up until the missiles launched.
Cain had let the debate rage, for a while. Then he stood up, slammed his fist on the table and said, with a cold and hard tone no one had heard since his return from captivity, “They will launch a nuclear bombardment. They will destroy every city, every base, every building and warehouse on the surface. They will kill every Marine, soldier, civilian, or child foolish enough to stay unprotected. We have seen this again and again, and I have listened to one set of fools after another, underestimating enemies, superimposing their own ethics and logic on adversaries that do not think like them. I have buried friends, killed in the extended conflicts that followed such idiocy.” He’d reached down, pulled out his pistol and set in on the small table. “I will not watch this happen again. We cannot continually live this cycle, every victory against darkness followed by complacency, by lofty talk of morality and another descent into a fresh nightmare, an unwillingness to do what must be done…and more millions dead.”
He’d stood silently, glaring at everyone assembled. Some were old comrades, of course, others officers who’d come up in the years he’d been gone, weaned on his legends, but never having followed him in a crisis. “We will not underestimate this enemy. We will not withhold any means, any method that will advance us to its destruction. We will face our enemies with their tactics, with their same disregard for humanity…and we will win. Because nothing else matters. Nothing else matters worth a damn.”
He'd gotten no response, only acquiescence. No one had dared to argue with him. He wasn’t sure if he’d convinced them all, or simply intimidated them, but he was sure of one thing. He didn’t give a damn.
Now he watched his vindication, the assurance he didn’t need to prove he’d been right. The enemy fleet had engaged the orbital defenses, and blown them to atoms, and now they’d unleashed the devastating attack he knew they would. Armstrong’s ordeal had just begun. He thought of favorite places from his years of service on the Marines’ homeworld, spots he and Sarah had enjoyed together. All that would be gone in a matter of minutes now, replaced by the scars of thermonuclear fury. Every building, the monuments, even the one he’d been embarrassed to see to himself, when he’d returned, would be gone, vaporized.
Then the battle would really begin. The underground bunkers would survive any bombardment, most of them at least. The enemy could destroy cities, houses, the majestic buildings of the Academy, but if they want to wipe out the Marines, they would have to come down and do it tunnel by tunnel, meter by meter.
He looked behind him, realizing the few square meters he had to himself was a palatial extravagance. Most of his Marines were packed on top of each other, and the civilians were jammed together even more brutally. Cain knew the food supplies wouldn’t last, but long before starvation took a life, he’d have mass insanity, people losing control in the horrific conditions. He’d known his forces would be better able to fight without the burden of supporting the civilian population, and he’d tried to evacuate as many as possible before the Black Flag’s fleet cut Armstrong from the warp gates. He’d told himself he had to leave them outside, had to reserve the limited shelter space for the Marines who would fight the enemy, but for all his cold practicality, his hard cynicism, Erik Cain had simply not been capable of abandoning so many thousands to huddle together as the bombs fell.
He wondered if Darius would have done it…and he decided he didn’t really want to know.
“We’re picking up detonations, General.”
Cain sighed softly. He’d seen no shortage of destruction in his life, but it was still hard to watch Armstrong face its devastation. “I want all shelters to stay on top of their reactors and ventilation systems. It won’t take much of a malfunction to suffocate ten thousand people or open the ducts to lethal radiation.”
“Yes, sir.” A moment later. “All shelters report status green, General.”
He knew the response only meant the shelter systems were functioning, but he almost laughed at the absurdity of it. There was nothing ‘green’ about the current condition.
He watched as the scanning reports came in, fewer and fewer with each passing moment, as the antennae and dishes collecting the data succumbed to the nightmarish apocalypse. Cain could picture the Armageddon above, the miniature suns erupting all around, destroying everything man had built on Armstrong. He’d known, without a doubt in his mind, that the enemy would utterly destroy the planet’s surface, but even that was insufficient to hold back the flow of emotion he felt. Cain was all too familiar with nuclear devastation, he’d even wandered too close to a detonation once, a misstep that had cost him both legs and much of the rest of his body, and sent him to the hospital for his first experience of the pain of regeneration.
The hospital was gone now, and the base. The fields where he’d so recently drilled the recruits—men and women who had too little training, but would now experience a baptism of fire beyond anything they’d imagined. Everything. Gone.
Nothing left. Nothing save for the killing. And Cain was ready for that.
Chapter 16
Eagle Fourteen
Eta Cassiopeiae VII Outer System
Earthdate: 2321 AD (36 Years After the Fall)
John Grayson gripped the armrest of his chair, eyes on the main display, watching as his ship floated alongside Eagle Nine and pounded the enemy flagship. The massive Black Flag vessel was far from idle, and it returned fire, its guns as large as those possessed by
the Eagle ships and more numerous. The enemy behemoth was almost half again the size of Eagle Fourteen, and while Grayson had determined its crew wasn’t up to the standards of his own, there was no doubt the vessel’s technology was on par with that of the Eagles, or even a cut above.
The enemy lasers sliced through Eagle Fourteen’s armored plating, obliterating structure and spacers alike as they dug deep into his wounded ship. One by one, his batteries fell silent, hit directly or silenced by damage to the reactors and the power transmission systems. The situation was approaching critical, but as he watched the data coming in from Eagle Nine, he knew his companion ship had already reached that stage. Captain Ying’s ship was down to its last two lasers, and Grayson’s scanners showed sharp declines in energy readings.
“Get me Captain Ying,” he said, but almost the instant he finished, he saw the icon representing Ying’s vessel blink off the display, and the scanner readings spiked dramatically.
The bridge was silent, not a sound save that of the equipment, a few beeps and whirs and nothing more. The Eagles had not fought this desperate of a fight, perhaps ever. Grayson didn’t know how the battle would progress, whether the feared mercenaries would finally be defeated by an enemy or if they would prevail, hold out and secure a costly victory. But he knew one thing, as well as everyone else on Eagle Fourteen’s bridge.
Eagle Nine was gone, along with every man or woman onboard.
The silence only lasted a few seconds. There was still a battle to fight, and Grayson’s people were still Eagles, however stunned and devastated they might be at the loss of their comrades.
“Captain, battery seven has suffered a blowout. We’ve got two confirmed dead, and three still missing.”
“Very well.” Grayson knew he’d killed those two crew members, and probably the other three as well. His orders to fire all guns on overloads did not come without risk. But there was no choice. Any victory now would be by the slightest of margins, and he needed to maintain all the power he could against the enemy.
Eagle Fourteen rocked again, and from the direction of the movement, Grayson realized the shot had not come from the enemy flagship. His surprise move, the desperate lunge forward through the gap in the enemy lines, had given him a jump on the responding Black Flag ships, but now they were closing, and the fire coming in was intensifying.
That’s going to be where we fall short…we could take this thing, I know we could, but those ships are going to get to us first…
Grayson felt helpless, and his psyche rebelled, a part of his mind demanding he come up with some tactic, some way to endure the attacks, to defeat the ship he’d come so hard to destroy. But there was nothing, no way.
Then, almost as if in answer, one of the attacking enemy ships vanished from the screen. Then, seconds later, another. It took him a few seconds to focus, to figure out what had happened. And then he saw Eagle Three, blasting forward at 8g, directly toward his position.
He knew immediately that General Cain had sent the ship to aid him and, as he had countless times, he found himself amazed at Cain’s seemingly unworldly instinct for battle.
Eagle Three wasn’t in range of the enemy flagship, but she was taking the focus off his vessel, coming up in the blind spots of the ships closing on Eagle Fourteen.
“Let’s go,” he said, renewed vigor in his voice. “Eagle Three is taking the heat off. Let’s finish this big bastard…now!” He slammed his fist down on the armrest and said, “All gunners, that ship’s got three or four big hull breaches amidships. Keep pounding there. You are all Eagles, the best. If anybody can thread that needle, it’s you!”
He leaned forward and watched, his fists clenched tightly, sweat running down his neck in long rivulets. The enemy ship was less than twenty thousand kilometers away, incredibly close range by the standards of space combat. His gunners were hitting with virtually every shot, one blast of energy after another, ripping great rents in the hull, sending spouts of flash-frozen air and fluids into the frigid wastes of space.
His own ship was battered too, but unlike her target, Eagle Fourteen still had active thrust, and her navigators were cycling through random, miniscule course changes, a zigzag pattern that didn’t meaningfully alter her vector, but gave targeting computers fits. The Eagle’s program was the best, but at such close range, even the sophisticated AIs running Tom Sparks’s system couldn’t escape every shot.
Eagle Fourteen shook again, and then again almost immediately. A row of lights on the port workstations flickered for a few seconds before returning to normal, and Grayson knew his ship couldn’t take much more, not without a break for her engineers to repair some of the damage. But whatever respite might await them, it wasn’t now.
Hit after hit slammed into the enemy ship, and Grayson sat, stunned. He’d never seen anything soak up so much damage and still endure, but the Black Flag ship was still there…and Eagle Fourteen shook again, as the pursuing ships continued to fire. Eagle Three was chasing the vessels, blasting them to scrap, but the enemy ignored the deadly battleship on their tail and continued toward their flagship, utterly mindless of their own survival.
Two more of Eagle Fourteen’s shots slammed into the enemy ship, dead amidships, and a massive blast poured out from what was now a three-hundred-meter tear in the hull. Then, as he was watching, another shot hit right in the center of the hull breach.
Grayson watched, feeling the tension in his stomach, as the great ship shook from the explosions spreading through its depths. The behemoth sat where it was, dead in space, cracking and breaking open along its spine. Then, a cheer went up on Eagle Fourteen’s battered bridge as the enemy vessel simply vanished, nothing remaining but pure energy and an expanding cloud of very hard radiation.
He felt a wave of satisfaction, and he threw his clenched fist in the air and yelled, delighting his crew with the sight of a Black Eagle captain cheering alongside them. But the celebration was short-lived, perhaps half a minute. Then Eagle Fourteen shook again, another hit from the ships coming up behind her.
“Alright, Eagles,” he said, his voice back to its stony command tone. “Well done, but there are a lot of enemies still out there. We’ve got a battle to fight, so let’s get to it!”
* * * * *
“Eagle One and Eagle Eleven, adjust thrust vectors to 234.101.033. Let’s bracket that task force between the ships and the Nest’s guns.” Darius Cain was alert, focused, adrenalin flowing through his bloodstream. He’d watched Grayson’s defeat of the enemy flagship, an event that had fired up morale throughout the fleet. His Eagles, always focused and capable, were now fighting like wild beasts.
“Yes, General.” Ana snapped back the acknowledgement, and she turned to her workstation and relayed the commands.
The Black Flag fleet was losing ship after ship, and Darius no longer doubted his people would have the victory. The cost…that was something even the coldly analytical mercenary had put out of his mind for the moment. His Eagles had never been tested like this, and he felt immense pride in how that had endured, and the ferocity with which they’d fought.
He wondered what was happening on Columbia. Teller had managed to get a few short transmissions through, a bit sketchy on details, but suggesting confidence that the situation was manageable. Darius trusted his lifelong friend completely, both in terms of loyalty, and also in confidence, in his ability to see a task completed successfully. But he was still edgy, wondering if his ground forces were enduring the same nightmare that had come upon his fleet.
He had analyzed the situation around the Nest, his mind working as it usually did, tirelessly, meticulously. The enemy was going to lose, but his Eagles would suffer grievously before they had destroyed every enemy ship. Which, he realized, was what it would take. The one thing he’d seemed to glean from his experiences with the Black Flag is they didn’t surrender, not ever. He was less sure about retreat, but the enemy ships, battered and disordered as they were, had made no signs at withdrawal. Their command sh
ip had tried to run, but Eagle Fourteen had put a stop to that. The others continued to fight his ships, even in places where they were trapped and locally outnumbered.
This, too, was something new for Darius and his Eagles. They had long been accustomed to their fearsome reputation accomplishing half the victory for them before they even landed. But this battle, they’d had to win the hard way, and they’d paid for it in blood. Were still paying…
“Deactivate the point defense network,” he said, his eyes fixed on the bank of screens around his station. “Divert power to the heavy guns.” The Nest had not escaped without damage any more than his ships had, and three of his reactors were silent, the reactions shut down to protect against breaches in the magnetic containment systems. He was pretty sure the enemy had expended all their missiles, and the fighter battle was pretty well over too, what few enemy birds had survived the wrath of his own battered squadrons too low on fuel and ordnance to threaten his base. And his main batteries could make better use of the energy.
“All power diverted to primary guns, General.”
He turned and exchanged glances with Elias, who nodded at his gaze. His brother had been silent, watching the battle unfold.
The enemy had come close to the Nest, and for a short time it looked like they might breach the defenses and get through. The command center, like everything else vital, was far below ground, a hard target for any orbital bombardment to take out. But Darius hadn’t been anxious to test that out. He’d been spared that necessity, by Grayson as much as anyone else. The desperate recall the enemy flagship had evidently sent out had pulled the last of the attacking ships from the Nest, sending them, along with most of the Black Flag fleet, on a desperate—and ultimately futile—attempt to save the command vessel.
