Storm Assault (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  “Of course,” he said, looking defeated. “We’ve lost nearly a hundred ships. We can’t take that kind of loss.”

  “No, you’ve only just begun rebuilding after the Macros came through this way last year. I understand. You did make a valiant effort. Earth always does. There is no shame in coming to terms, sir. Let us do so now.”

  Suddenly, he seemed to grow a spine. He straightened in his chair and brought his fist down upon the arm of it.

  “I won’t simply surrender. I won’t disable my ships, nor will I allow you to board them.”

  I almost grinned, but I stopped myself in time. Somehow, we’d gone from discussing the possibility of surrender—his surrender—to talking about how we were going to work out the details. We were talking terms, and that meant we’d already won the battle.

  I signaled Jasmine, and she gave me a quiet, knowing nod. She was already shutting down our attack. The fighters began decelerating, as did Phobos and the rest of the fleet. Marvin was still picking targets, but Miklos had stopped him from shooting down any more of their ships. The Commodore had picked up on the changing situation even before I’d told him to shift us into neutral.

  Admiral Newcome and I talked for several more minutes. For an Imperial, he was able to see reason very clearly. We worked out a plan that was acceptable to both sides. He would scoot his ships out of my path, setting them on a long, elliptical course that would eventually take him back to a refueling station on Mars.

  My fleet, in the meantime, would press on toward Earth. I learned that the Admiral and his senior people had been discussing the possibility of withdrawal even before they began to spar with my fleet. There were certain political officers who would have to be neutralized, but the rest would all join in the ruse when explaining the situation to their crews. They’d tell the rank and file they’d come to terms with the pirates, describing it as a ceasefire.

  None of this would be acceptable to Crow, naturally. But he was out of reach. The fleet would stop talking to Earth. By the time Newcome and his ships returned to Earth, it would all be over. The Imperial government would be toppled.

  Or so everyone hoped.

  “You look like the cat that has eaten the spinster’s pet bird,” Miklos told me.

  Being from Eastern Europe, he sometimes didn’t get our idioms quite right, but I knew what he meant.

  “The bird cage stands empty, my friend,” I said, laughing. I was in an excellent mood. Possibly, this was the best I’d felt since Sandra died.

  Miklos was happy it was over, but I could tell he was also slightly annoyed I’d won so quickly after he’d advised me to withdraw. It made him look foolish.

  “How did you know, sir?” he demanded when we had a private moment in my office.

  This sort of question is often posed to me, and it always represents a dilemma. I could tell him the truth, which was that I’d been unable to quite believe in those seven thousand ships. I’d only figured out they were fake when we kept shooting at them and missing the ones that had never done anything.

  But the truth isn’t always the best policy. It leads people to think you were just lucky, rather than amazingly good. I’d rather have people think I was some kind of wizard. Morale and discipline are much easier to maintain when people have almost supernatural faith in you.

  As usual, I took the middle ground. Something in-between the truth and claiming I was a full-blown oracle.

  “I’d begun suspecting something was up from the start,” I told him. “There couldn’t have been seven thousand ships out there—I knew that the moment I saw them. They just couldn’t be there. Earth’s fleet had been smashed less than a year ago. Unless they had a fantastic level of industrial output, those ships couldn’t be real.”

  “But why didn’t you test the theory immediately? You could have done so in several ways.”

  I nodded. Fortunately, I was ready for this obvious back-up question.

  “I wasn’t absolutely sure they were fake. I was worried, honestly, that when Crow captured the Bellatrix system he might have discovered and captured a number of Macro factories as we did. Just think of that. What if he’d found those new factories and managed to get them working over the last few months? That’s the only way I could believe he’d managed to churn out thousands of ships.”

  “Ah,” said Miklos, nodding. “I get it. If the Imperials really had these ships, that would be the only way they could have built them so quickly. With new production facilities we knew nothing about.”

  “Exactly. They could have been real if that had been the case. I also knew for certain some percentage of the ships were real. So, I made my moves conservatively. It looked bad, but I wasn’t willing to fold my hand and run for the door. If the ships were fake, we could win. Keep in mind, I didn’t know how many were fake. I was kind of thinking the first rank—meaning the first thousand—were real. If they had been, that still would have been a hard, hard battle.”

  Miklos nodded, staring off into space. He had an Irish coffee in his hand, and he didn’t drink much. His eyes were thoughtful and slightly glassy.

  I braced myself for the next question: But sir, why didn’t you tell us you thought most of the enemy ships were fake?

  But that question wasn’t asked. I’m not sure why not. Maybe he didn’t think of it, or maybe my spiked coffee and the natural relief of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat had made him not care.

  Whatever the case, the question never came. I stood up and put the bourbon bottle on the table.

  “Have another shot, Nicolai. You’ve earned it.”

  Then I left and went to review the damage. Overall, it was pretty light. Sure, we’d taken a beating on the surface of Phobos, but that was the one part of this fleet we could easily fix. Unfortunately, this was one repair job that was too big for nanites to do on their own. We’d calculated it would take months to get the hull back to full density, but we might as well begin now. Already, the transports were dragging chunks of asteroid rock and ice to drop into the biggest holes. Crawlers were rumbling over the surface of the ship, pushing loose material into the cracks and troweling over the scorch marks.

  On the bridge, I met with Jasmine and Gaines. The Major had recovered significantly, only a day after any competent medical person would have pronounced him dead.

  We shook hands all around.

  “I can’t believe you talked them into pulling out without blasting a single ship of ours.”

  “Hold on!” I said. “Have you seen the surface of this vessel? I’d say we were blasted pretty heavily.”

  “Exactly where we wanted to take the damage, right on this rock’s face, the only place we could withstand the punishment.” Gaines shook his head and looked at me with honest disbelief. “I thought we were dead—did you know that?”

  “Happens all the time,” I told him. “This is Riggs’ Pigs, remember.”

  “It’s unforgettable. Well sir, I guess I’m heading amidships for some R&R.”

  “Whoa,” I said, “hold on there. I know you’re a little banged up, but you still have a large command full of damaged marines to look after, Major.”

  “Yes sir. They’ll come first.”

  After he’d left to go back to the barracks, I looked over the flight plan with Captain Sarin. She had it all worked out.

  “We’ll head toward the inner planets at maximum velocity,” she said. “In one way, the location of the Tyche ring is a helpful starting point.”

  “How so?”

  “This ship—this drive system, I mean—it’s kind of like sailing, sir. Any large gravitational pull works like the wind. Because the largest wind in any system is the central star, and we want to go almost directly toward it, we’re in luck.”

  I looked over the charts, nodding. I saw our position, far, far out from the Sun. From this position, the inner planets were a long haul. The angle of approach was almost the same for Earth as it was for the Sun itself.

  “All we have to do is a
im at the Sun and let it pull us,” I said. “I can see how that would be easier than crossing a system from one ring to the next. The rings themselves don’t have big gravity fields and we have to work with lateral forces pulling and pushing us.”

  “Right,” she said. “Navigating a system like Alpha Centauri was much harder and slower. The drive isn’t built for it. You have to kind of tack your way—taking pulls and pushes from planets along the route. Again, it’s like navigating a sailing ship with a crosswind.”

  “How long until we reach Earth?”

  “You mean if they just sit there and wait for us?”

  I nodded.

  “Over a week. Eight days, plus a little bit.”

  “A long time. But less than I’d thought it might be. I can see Earth is pretty well lined up with the Sun. That makes it even easier.”

  “There are no incoming contacts, either,” she told me before I could ask. “At least, nothing we’ve detected. No missiles, no ships, no transmissions.”

  “Excellent!” I said.

  She nodded. There was a pause in the conversation. I sensed she wanted to say something, so I kept quiet. Finally, she started to speak, stopped, then started again.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” she asked suddenly.

  “Do? We’re going to take out the Imperials. We’re going to demand they lay down their arms and surrender. And they’ll do it, too. Just like their fleet did.”

  Jasmine zoomed in on Earth. We had some readings from our homeworld by now. I was as transfixed by the image as she was. There were newly scorched areas, I saw. Places that had been green were now brown streaked with gray-black. I noticed a lot more cloud cover than there had been in the old days as well.

  “The ecosystem has taken a beating,” she said. “They still haven’t recovered from the Macro assault. There were bombings—a lot of dust was kicked up into the upper atmosphere. Crops have failed in many key areas.”

  I looked at my world. It felt odd to be coming home like this. In the past, we’d been accounted heroes. Now, people gazed up at the sky and feared when they heard Star Force ships were coming.

  I frowned. “I’m going to fix all that.”

  “The planet?”

  “No—yeah. I mean, not just that. I’m going to get people to believe in us again.”

  She looked up and met my eyes. “What if they don’t surrender? What if they fight out of fear or stubbornness? How many will we have to kill?”

  That was a hard question. The hardest I’d heard all day.

  “I don’t know, Jasmine,” I told her quietly. “I guess it’s up to them, really.”

  “Not entirely. We’re the ones with the ships and the bombs. You could stand off in space and blast them to dust.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” I said with feeling.

  “No, but do you really think we can invade? We have a few thousand marines…but not enough to take over a planet with billions of inhabitants.”

  I lifted a finger and shook it at her. “You need to take a better look at history. Sometimes, grand political events go down without vast bloodshed.”

  “Civil wars are traditionally bloody.”

  “Granted. But I don’t think this is one. This is more like a coup—or the reversal of a coup. The people don’t love Crow. I’m not an outside invader they’ll resist to the last man. They may be frightened of me, but if we play this right, they may come to welcome us with open arms.”

  “I hope you’re right, Kyle. I really do.”

  I was just as worried as she was, but I couldn’t say that. I gave her a smile and walked away nonchalantly. I did everything I could to appear calm, confident and in control. Fortunately, these things come naturally to me.

  -33-

  We sailed onward through space, heading toward Earth. I felt like I was riding an extinction-event asteroid—like the one that was supposed to have killed off the dinosaurs.

  It occurred to me that slamming this rock into Earth would pretty much wipe out humanity. My people were so fragile, living out on the surface of an exposed scrap of dirt under an open sky, hurtling through nothingness. The whole thing was crazy. I’m not sure if anyone other than a few Cold War presidents ever felt the kind power I had in my hands today.

  As we rolled closer, I kept expecting a new storm of missiles to rise up. Or an entirely new fleet. Hell, they could have at least put up a projected fleet of illusions.

  But they didn’t. We got closer and closer, and I became uncertain of my next move. If they had nothing, Crow would have called and tried to talk me down, at least. They were up to something down there, I could feel it.

  As we had days to go before reaching orbit over Earth, and nothing with obviously deadly intent was coming at us right now, I decided to head over to check on our wounded. That would give me the opportunity to talk to Dr. Kate Swanson—a significant bonus.

  I found a surprisingly large pile of new bricks in the area. Miklos had said something about trusting Phobos now and transferring more personnel from the transports into the interior of the big ship, but I hadn’t quite understood the scale he was considering.

  There had to be something like four hundred bricks now, stacked three or four stories high. Each was about the size of a railroad car and self-contained. We’d been using these simple systems since we’d first ventured into space in the belly of a Macro transport. The design had stuck because it was easy to produce and worked very well.

  With magnets at every corner, the bricks operated optimally on a metal surface. We didn’t have a high ferrous content on the inner hull of Phobos, so we’d had to make do. Each brick was nailed down with nanite spikes. These were barbed and sunk into each corner of every floor-level brick. The upper ones, when we stacked them up, used their magnetics to clamp onto one another.

  The nanite spikes were pretty cool, actually. The best thing about them was that you didn’t have to hammer them in. You just put the point where you wanted to drive it in, and the nanites sort of ate their way down to an optimal depth. At that point, they shot out flanges—barbs, really—and hardened into a single mass of metal.

  I reached an impressive stack of twenty or so bricks with the painted-on designation MEDICAL. I passed through the airlock and found there was a bustling office inside.

  A nurse began to challenge me with a huffy tone, but her attitude changed when she realized who I was.

  “Ah…Colonel? Can I help you, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I understand Dr. Swanson was stationed here. Could you direct me to her office?”

  This seemed to fluster the nurse. I wasn’t quite sure why, but she turned a new shade of pink. I suspected she’d heard rumors about Kate and I, and was shocked to be in the middle of things.

  “I’ve got a locator right here,” she said.

  I raised my hand, interrupting her. “No, don’t buzz her. Just tell me where she is.”

  She stared at me for a half-second then regained her composure. “Yes sir. Brick Seventeen, Medical One.”

  I left before she could ask the questions I knew she was burning to unload on me. All of us had com-links, of course. They served to pinpoint a person as well as provide instant, selective communication. But I’d wanted to surprise her. Walking in on a woman, I’d learned over time, was very effective when you wanted to get a strong reaction. Right now, I was the hero of the hour, and I wanted to collect some laurels while the collecting was good.

  I found Brick Seventeen after wandering around for a few minutes. I grumbled about the organization of this non-building. It was a snarl of tubes, ladders and airlocks. The whole time I was wondering if the nurse had already spilled the beans by calling Kate and telling her I was on the way. There were any number of sneaky ways to do this, and that nurse had looked capable in that department to me.

  When I finally found her, I wasn’t surprised to see she was working on seriously injured marines. We’d taken our share of losses during our battle with
the cyborgs. In many ways, those creepy monsters were the most effective thing the Imperials had hit us with yet.

  “Colonel,” she said, flashing me a smile. She finished up with her patient, who was going through a four-limb regrowth, and turned her attention to me.

  We smiled at one another for a minute.

  “I suppose you’re expecting a hero’s welcome,” she said.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She hugged me then, and gave me a kiss on the neck. The reaction from the PFC on the bed was comical. He lit up and grinned behind her back. He would have clapped if he could have. But his hands were only worms of flesh in plastic baggies full of brown stuff and nanites.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” I said.

  Kate led me to a cubical in the aft end of Brick Seventeen. It was her office. It was cramped and full of boxes, but she’d only just moved in.

  “It isn’t much,” she said.

  “It’s the work that counts.”

  She beamed at me. I honestly had never seen that look in her eyes before. She wasn’t maintaining an aloof, professional attitude today. In fact, she looked positively hot.

  Kate and I had a strange thing going on. Since Sandra’s death, she’d made it clear on a number of occasions she was interested in me. There just hadn’t been time for us to get together, however. We were very busy people.

  We just stood there and looked at each other for another second or two, smiling. I could see her tongue in her mouth, pressing against her teeth. What did that mean?

  “To hell with it,” I mumbled, and grabbed her.

  She melted. I felt relief. Sometimes when I pull that move, it ends up going badly. Not this time. She embraced me and we got busy.

  We’d been making out for a good five minutes when my com-link started buzzing.

  I almost turned it off. I swear I almost did.

  Kate pulled away. “You’ve got to answer that.”

  I heaved a sigh, retrieved my headset and checked the incoming channel.

  “Riggs here. What is it, Captain Sarin?”