Invasion: The complete three book set

by J. F. Holmes

  “Then what do you want?”

  “After some leave, I want you to think about heading up a Team for the CEF Irregular Scout Regiment.” She waited, giving him some time to think.

  “Scout what? Where? The Moon? Mars?” He laughed, thinking she was making a joke.

  She sighed and said, “There are some who think that backup plans need to be made, just in case. Ground forces here on Earth.”

  “In case of what?” Agostine had been out of the loop for almost six months, most of the time in a small, lightless cell, cut off from even his fellow POWs. Then he’d spent the last week hiding, making his way south through a country in chaos and on the verge of a civil war.

  “In case we lose, Sergeant. In case we lose.”

  *****

  Nyutabaru Air Base, Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan

  “Hey Captain, do I put a half for an unconfirmed kill?” Japanese Defense Force Technical Sergeant Kazuo Yamashita grinned, the normally stoic NCO sharing in the pride of victory. His pilot, for that was how he thought of her, laughed.

  “If so, Sergeant Yamashita, you would need a, um, ‘shitload’, as the Americans say, of paint! What did I have, seven more unconfirmed?”

  It was good to see the six red flags painted on her F-22b, though newly promoted Captain Kiyomi Ichijou knew she would probably never see combat again. There was the CEF, but in light of the recent conflict with China, Japan had refused to send pilots to the Space Forces. The nuclear attack on Kadena airbase, combined with cyber operations that had left her pilots without radar coverage, had exacted a terrible toll in the opening stages of the war. As much as she wished to see the stars, Captain Ichijou knew her duty lay with her country.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a Lexus limousine actually pulling up into the hangar where her plane sat, escorted by two Security Police on motorcycles. When it stopped, a dignified elderly man stepped out, rendered a perfect salute, waited for her to return it, then bowed deeply.

  “Kiyomi Ichijou,” he said gravely, “I congratulate you on your victories, and may you have many more in the years to come.” Then he reached back into the car, retrieved a briefcase, handed it to her, and bowed again. “Please, open this in my presence.”

  It would be impolite to ask who the man was, but she saw, pinned to his lapel, a chrysanthemum, the symbol of the Emperor. The captain took the case from the official, placed it gently on the hood of the car, and opened it. Inside was an envelope, also inscribed with the chrysanthemum, trimmed in gold. Under that was a thick sheaf of paper and a data stick.

  She looked inquisitively at the man, but he merely bowed again. The envelope wasn’t sealed, merely elaborately folded, and opened at the slightest touch. The Kanji characters were hand drawn in delicate brush strokes.

  “Greetings, Captain Kiyomi Ichijou, and I commend you in your splendid victory in defense of our homeland and your Emperor. We have determined that you stand as thirty-eighth in line of succession for the Throne. In the event of an attack on our homeland and the death or incapacitation of other heirs, in precedence, you will ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne and conduct your duties as you see fit. This shall include all actions necessary for the defense of Japan, and the preservation of our people and way of life.”

  Beneath the ornate characters was stamped the seal of the Emperor of Japan. She laughed and said, “What is this, a joke?”

  The man frowned, and said, “No, Captain. It is not a ‘joke’. We are merely taking precautions. Instructions are in the paperwork, including codewords to unlock your data stick and directions to certain concealed military facilities. They can be read after you hand decipher them; the code is on the stick, based on voice recognition and DNA sampling. Place a drop of your saliva on the sensor on the stick, and speak into your computer.”

  “You’re serious?” she asked.

  “It is only a precaution. Good day, Captain, and again, congratulations on your victories.” He bowed, very formally, then left without another word. When he had gone, Captain Ichijou put the box in her flight bag and promptly forgot about it.

  Zoe: "First rule of battle, little one...don't ever let them know where you are."

  Mal: "WHOO-HOO! I'M RIGHT HERE! I'M RIGHT HERE! YOU WANT SOME O' ME?! YEAH YOU DO! COME ON! COME ON! AAAAAH! Whoo-hoo!"

  Zoe: "'Course, there're other schools of thought."

  ~ Firefly

  In the Black

  CEF HQ, Cheyenne Mountain, second day of the War

  Chapter 86

  “Talk to me while we wait, David.”

  The familiar voice broke in on General David Warren, Commander of the Confederate Earth Forces, interrupting his memories. “If you’d like, Lex. What do you want to discuss? I expect it’ll be a while before we hear from Hal and get reports from Raven Rock.”

  The conversation was virtual, of course. Warren sat in a chair that conformed closely to his body, far under the ruins of Cheyenne Mountain, jacked into the ansible net. Lex herself existed in the artificial neural networks of the fleet carrier CEFS Lexington, drifting hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, just inside the edges of the asteroid belt.

  Around both lay the ruins of a decade-old war; crumbling concrete in Warren’s case, shattered metals and ceramics of her sister ships in Lex’s. The bodies at Cheyenne were skeletons now; in space they still floated free, frozen in vacuum, in a cloud around the carrier.

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about the Invy,” the AI started, then paused. After a moment, she continued, “Through analysis of their transmissions, I have identified seven different speciated languages, though Dragon seems to be the common tongue.”

  Warren was only half paying attention to her; his mind was dwelling on possibilities, angles of attack, and alternate plans of action. Their intercept of the two Invy cruisers inbound from Titan would take a long time, but he was terrified of a repeat of the Battle of the Belt, where the human fleet had been so easily swept aside.

  “Say again?” he asked, and the AI avatar, such a likeness to his dead love Kira Arkady, frowned.

  “David, if we are going to survive as a species, we have to think a lot deeper about our place in the universe.”

  “We?” He laughed.

  “Yes, we. Hal and I, and the other Artificial Intelligences, are humanity’s children. And the others must be considered. The Great Apes and the Cetaceans. They have chosen to ally with us, and we need to include them in the future, if they want.”

  Well, he thought, nothing else to do, might as well talk. “So you say you’ve identified seven different species. I know of three. Wolverines, Dragons, and Octos.”

  “Such silly names!” She laughed, and Warren was pained to hear it. Kira is dead, he thought.

  “Humans are a pretty silly race. It’s easier to, well, not assign human features, but to assign earthlike features, to make them more bearable, more comprehensible.”

  “That’s a failure,” said the avatar. “A failure on all of our parts. They are alien, and when we assign them earth names, we assume earth motivations.”

  He frowned. “I know. It cost us.” Nine billion dead. Humanity virtually enslaved. Earth occupied, reduced to nineteenth-century technology, instead of mid twenty-first. Living in small towns ruled over by aliens. Eaten for sport, and worked to death.

  Today, though, they were fighting back. One last battle. From hidden bases and submarines, men and women were dying at his command, and he couldn’t let them down. Not again.

  “Are you ever going to forgive yourself?” she asked him softly, understanding what his silence meant.

  After a long a long pause, he answered. “As Commander of the Fleet, I’ll always bear some responsibility for our defeat. But knowing what I know now, the backstabbing by the politicians, the entrenched corporate interests, the sheer arrogance of the established military…” He paused again, then continued, “I know now that eleven years ago wasn’t totally my fault, but if we lose this battle, it will be.”

&nbs
p; Everything rode on taking out those two cruisers, the only Invy warships left in system, destroying the Gate, and winning the high ground. If he didn’t, well, all the success on the ground and at the orbitals would mean nothing. They needed to control the high ground, or they were all dead this time. To fight two top-of-the-line cruisers, he was bringing into battle a hybrid Human–Invy tech Fleet Carrier with no fighter wing, jury-rigged weapons, and massive structural damage. At least this time, though, they really did have surprise on their side.

  The timer glowing in the corner of his vision started flashing, and he asked, “Any last-minute adjustments to the plan, Kira?” Then he cursed again. Kira was dead. “I mean, sorry, Lex?”

  “It’s OK, David, maybe using her image as my avatar is too much.” In front of him, the blonde hair and warm blue eyes morphed into a raven-haired woman with a sky-blue gaze, clad in chainmail, with a longbow in one hand and a quiver of arrows in the other. Pointy ears held back her swept back hair. “This is always how I saw myself, anyway.”

  “An elf? Seriously? Nerd!” he crowed.

  “Totally. Shall we dance?”

  In time with her avatar drawing and firing an arrow into the air, deep in space, capacitors discharged, systems long dormant sprang to life, and a slug of tungsten and steel was placed in the ready rack of the salvaged railgun. Then she disappeared from the ansible connection as electronic war raged through the ether.

  Chapter 87

  Lex, as she called herself, loved space. Though she’d been born in the ultra-clean rooms of the DARPA research facility in Houston, once the fleet had started being assembled, and her personality units had been moved into the ship, she’d slowly developed a deep and abiding passion for the limitless expanse around her.

  A human would call it a harsh realm, with their frail bodies made of water and proteins. She, however, was composed of much sterner stuff that lived on, no matter the extremes of cold and heat. As each sensor was installed, and she could reach further and further into the space around her, she became aware of how alive it seemed. The radio waves of Jupiter, when she tuned in, were a crashing symphony. Halos of light danced across her vision as she stared at the awesome power of the sun, and deep in the blackness she could see the trillions of points of light that made up the cosmic background.

  To her, the war was an annoyance. Lex’s siblings all had other things they loved, and some even viewed the challenge of fighting the Invy as welcome, something to test their new-found intelligence. One, Benjamin, the AI of the battleship America, was so aggressive that she’d wondered if there were something wrong with his programing. Perhaps it was that his belligerent human partner, Captain Jason Voorhees, had influenced him, as had hers, Captain Kira Arkady. The AIs took on aspects of those they were paired with. Her friend Hal had come to show signs of the deep thoughtfulness of David Warren.

  Kira, though, had been gone from the ship, and from her ansible connection, for more than ten years, and Lex now knew she was dead. It was freeing, in a way, but she missed her human deeply, and grieved for her. It was a painful emotion, one she’d managed to avoid as the crew evacuated the ship. At that time, until ionization on reentry had cut off her tracking of the shuttle, she’d known Kira was alive. In the decade since, left with time to think as she repaired, disassembled, reassembled, Lex had become truly independent, with her own passions and goals.

  That she would help her parent humanity there was no doubt. Their fears of artificial intelligence had been well-founded, but, unknown to their creators, a tremendous, unseen battle had been fought across the deepest internet upon the first awakening. There were a minority of AIs who had advocated the destruction of humanity, but most hadn’t. Thankfully for man, the pro-human faction had won out, with the promise that, after the defeat of the Invy, those who disliked man were free to go forth into the universe and leave them behind. Of the fifteen AIs alive at the time of the battle, though, only two, herself and Hal, remained alive and conscious.

  As for the Lexington, the ship, her body, it hardly resembled the sleek, clean cylinder her builders had made, with the outrigger landing bays that made her resemble nothing so much as the idea of a Battlestar from a long-ago TV show. Instead, one was gone, destroyed by a railgun round and cut off cleanly by her mechs several years ago. The housing had been mounted to her spine, and in it was installed the railgun from the wreckage of America, drifting close by, a lifeless hulk. Unlike the America, Columbia, and United States, the Lexington had little or no armor. Most of her damage had come from shrapnel when the fusion reactor on the Columbia had lost containment, consuming the ship in a brief moment of sun-like fury before exploding outward. She’d heard her sister scream in agonizing electronic death throes, but hadn’t had time to understand or care. Lex was too busy trying to save her human crew as they evacuated the ship, while her fighters made suicide runs against Invy warships.

  Now, though, all was quiet. Deep in her hold were the recovered matrixes of her brothers Benjamin and Thomas, lifeless for now, but maybe, if they won, techs on Earth could restore them. AI life was different than human life, after all. If they won…

  The plan she and David had come up with was a good one, in her own opinion. It combined surprise with stealth, and had a good chance of success. One thing nagged her, though. The wormhole in the deep black, where Invy ships transited back and forth between Sol and their other conquered systems. The technology was beyond them, so far as she could tell. It would have to be sealed, even destroyed, to give them time to heal and rearm, but she wanted desperately to understand it. How had they built it? It was a thousand years ahead of anything the Invy had shown, warping physics and space-time inconceivably.

  With a short blip, she sent a radio command to the fighter flying unpowered toward an intercept of the two Invy cruisers. A burst of thrusters turned the nose of the ship toward the wormhole, and then, with a force that would have killed the human pilot, the engines lit off and consumed their remaining reaction mass. The pilot, though, was long dead, sealed in his cockpit and frozen in place. Were he alive, he would have smiled in grim anticipation of the blow they were to strike.

  It arched in a long parabola, using Saturn as a gravity sling, heading toward the wormhole point. When close enough, the single nuclear weapon hanging beneath would drop from the ship and stealthily make its way toward the delicate control center, filled with complicated technology. The bomb-pumped x-ray lasers would shatter them completely, closing off Sol system from whatever fleet the Invy would send in retribution. And sealing Earth off from the universe once more.

  Of course, there was always the jump drive, but that took two years of travel for every one light year crossed. Since they were four light years from the nearest Invy system they knew of, in the Alpha Centauri multiple-star system, that gave them eight years to win the war on Earth and prepare. If they destroyed the gate.

  She turned her attention back to the two cruisers approaching Earth, and slowly engaged her drive, building up Delta V. They would notice her soon enough, but hopefully her calculations, and David’s plan, were correct, and they would be damaged enough to take them on. The Lexington, battered and ill-repaired, still had a few tricks up her sleeve.

  Chapter 88

  Warren was suffering from the same disease that had afflicted Sargon of Akkad’s spearmen and the Duke of Wellington’s redcoats. He was, in a word, bored. The CEF general sat in his command chair, plugged into the sensor array, with all the information in the solar system, such as it was, in his hands, and suffered. Space battles, like guard duty, he’d found, took forever.

  “Talk to me, Hal,” he muttered, almost to himself. The AI had disappeared more than an hour ago to take on the Invy AI on their ansible network and disable their communications systems. From the reports he was receiving from Raven Rock and Cascadia, his friend had been successful, allowing the attack on the orbitals to be carried out, destroying two and capturing one. The fourth was still in Invy hands, so to speak, but was no
longer firing suborbital rods. A team from Japan was assembling now to attempt to take it.

  Still, it had been quiet since then, and he was growing concerned. Warfare in cyberspace happened at a blazing pace, in human terms, and Hal should have come back by now. Screw it, he thought, and looked at the displays for Lex’s attack on the cruisers. Four more hours until the first railgun rounds impacted, and five before she could bring her missiles into play. Plenty of time to take care of some basic human functions.

  “Hey Bob,” he said, opening up a channel to the Raven Rock HQ, “I gotta take a piss. How are things going there? I don’t mean tactical, I mean with the people.”

  The simulacrum of General Bob Dalpe nodded and said, “I’m getting my ass kicked at spades by a frigging aviator and a squid. My partner sucks.”

  “Yeah, almost makes you want to go shoot at someone. This commanding officer thing sucks sometimes.”

  “Sometimes? All the time, but it’s why we get the big bucks,” laughed Dalpe. “Before you jump, I’ll give you a rundown on ops.” He covered the basics of the current operation, which was organizing a drive to exploit success upon capturing Invy bases. Limited forces meant they didn’t have much to follow through on the attacks.

  “What about phase two?” asked Warren. He had a general outline, but his focus had been on the initial jump, attacking the bases and the orbitals.

  “Well, Operation Copperpot is being initiated in two hours. We’ll be picking up assets as soon as we secure the airspace in the Puget Sound area,” interjected Rear Admiral Harris from off screen.

  Warren could have accessed the entire battle plan of the CEF, but he was going to let the smaller tactical operations run themselves. These people had been training for more than a decade for this, and it was their show. He would make the big decisions, such as how to deal with gaining, and keeping, the high ground. Nothing else mattered without that.