Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  His lips twitched. There was no point in borrowing trouble.

  “Missile separation,” Cindy snapped, her sharp voice cutting through the tension on the bridge – such as it was – like a knife. “No, wait; I confirm the launch of one Oghaldzon drone.”

  Ellsworth nodded grimly. The aliens would not want to dive towards Freeport One without some idea of the defences; the alien drone was already beginning to emit active sensor pulses, some of them extremely complex and powerful, others indistinguishable from human technology. He closed his eyes for a long moment as his own passive sensors began to pick up some responses from the alien sensors; the defence fleet, arrayed around Freeport One, was starting to become all too clear to their sensors.

  “Contact Pat,” he said, referring to the commander of the defence fleet. “I want that drone killed.”

  “Confirm missile separation,” Cindy said a minute later. They’d used a laser tightbeam to signal the defence fleet. The display lit up for a moment; there was no way that anyone could have missed the target of the alien drone, not when it was emitting so much in the way of active signals. The missile homed in on it and detonated, spraying a cloud of chaff into the drone’s path, which ran into it and exploded. “Target destroyed.”

  “Inform Pat that he can now bring up the fire control sensors on the surrounding platforms and engage the enemy at his discretion,” Ellsworth said carefully. The battle was already starting to take shape; move and countermove, each side jockeying for position. The aliens were bringing up some of their own sensors now, probably sharing information through secure laser links themselves; his tracking display updated itself as some of the alien craft revealed their positions. “Remember, we have to cover Freeport One itself.”

  Cindy looked up and grinned, a touch of malice in her eye. “Are you going to address the fleet?”

  Ellsworth would have preferred to have avoided it, but there was really very little choice. “Signal to all ships,” he said. He’d tried to compose proper words, but in the end he had settled for a modification of a stirring speech from a television show: “Today we are here to defend our independence and the true way of life. The corrupt and bloated culture of the Donkeys will not extend its fetid reach into our lands and if they do, we shall fight to the bloody end! So there!”

  He smiled as battle commenced in earnest.

  * * *

  Makra-Commander-Righteous Rage, positioned neatly on the saddle-like structure that served his species as an acceleration chair, examined the known Rockrat positions with a profound feeling of dissatisfaction. They’d had some idea just how many asteroids had been colonised – at least, they knew as much as the public down on Earth had known – but they hadn’t been prepared for the thousands of energy sources that they had detected right across the Belt. The Swarm, back home in their own star system, had been colonised… but with a much greater population and unity of purpose. The humans seemed to have gone mad; dozens of asteroids belonged to one religious sect or another, others belonged to governments, or private citizens, or the Rockrats. The Researchers, he’d been told, had developed headaches trying to understand it all; the humans just seemed to have decided on the location of their settlements at random.

  Freeport One itself, at least, made a certain kind of sense. It was a large asteroid, fully two hundred kilometres in length, rotating to provide gravity for the settlement inside. A dozen smaller asteroids orbited nearby; half of them providing additional living space, the other half sheltering industries and shipyards for the Rockrats. Orbiting those were hundreds of smaller platforms and stations, some of which would have been designed for defence against other human enemies… and now his force. Destroying it all would have been easy; Makra would have stood off at extreme missile range and launched wave after wave of nuclear-tipped missiles on ballistic trajectories, but that wasn’t in his orders. He had to capture the asteroid and as much as he could of its industry – intact. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  He clicked in the direction of his sensor officer. “Do you have a clear picture of their deployments?”

  “Yes,” the sensor officer said, who was interlinked into the ship’s main computer through her neural implants. Makra found the entire process fascinating; the chance to see with the sensors the ships used to look upon the universe was one not to be missed, even though not everyone could handle the experience. He’d heard that even the humans had experimented with such technology. “There are twenty-seven ships in a position to engage us; nearly a hundred more heading away from us on widely diverging courses.”

  “An evacuation,” Makra decided. It was something of a relief; if there was an accident, thousands fewer humans would die. The human ships hadn’t bothered with finesse; they’d placed themselves in a position where he would either have to engage them or boost past them, abandoning the fight and returning to Earth with his arms hanging down. It was a pretty impressive deployment, or it would have been if the humans had had fire control systems equal to his own; as it was, he had an advantage not only in firepower, but in accuracy as well. He reminded himself to assume nothing; the odds were that at least some of the orbiting platforms, perhaps even the asteroids themselves, would be armed. “Produce targeting sequences.”

  “Targeting sequences loaded,” the tactical officer said. “I have transmitted them to the other ships in the fleet.”

  Makra clicked once in agreement. Within a few hours, as humans measured time, they would come to rest relative to Freeport One; by then they had to have cleared the human opposition and overawed the inhabitants of the asteroid. Humans were better at hand to hand space combat than Oghaldzon; the smaller humans were simply more agile. He was prepared to start selectively venting sections of Freeport One to make his point, but he hoped that such measures wouldn’t be required.

  “Good,” he said. “You may open fire.”

  The display updated itself rapidly as the first missiles were fired, heading towards Freeport One’s defence force and burning out their drives as they entered terminal attack runs. Freeport One rapidly proved that its defenders were skilful enough to stand up to his force for a few hours; their point defence fire was much better than he had expected, picking off missile after missile, even as they fired back with older missiles, far less advanced than the ones the Oghaldzon had faced during the first battle with human forces. His ships picked them off as the range closed rapidly, his ships flashing towards the human position at speeds almost unimaginable… and barely anything compared to the size of space itself.

  “Alter course slightly,” he ordered. He’d been careful enough to leave his ships with a possible angle of escape without engaging the enemy at all, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that that wasn’t going to be needed. His missiles were starting to press the humans hard, coming closer and closer as they entered their terminal attack runs and forcing the humans to divide their own forces to counter his thrusts. His sensors were rapidly learning which of the human platforms were armed and which were not – or, at least, which were not engaging his forces. “Bring us onto a direct course.”

  The gravity started to build up as the fusion drive fired for ten seconds, altering their course as they closed in on Freeport One, racing to catch up with the asteroid and bringing their course precisely through the enemy positions. The Rockrats had to be feeling desperate by now, Makra hoped; they had to know that they couldn’t escape unless they surrendered. Even if they triggered their fusion drives and tried to flee, they wouldn’t be able to escape his missile envelope unless they got very lucky… and their sensors would be completely screwed up by the fusion flames. He had revealed the location of his ships to any watching Rockrat, but now it was too late for them to make any use of the information.

  Gravity vanished again as a series of faint shocks ran through the ship. “We are now on our own terminal engagement run,” the helmsman said. “Initiating evasive action.”

  Makra watched the display as fusion flames blinked out, one
after the other. There was probably no need to waste reaction gas, but it might save the Righteous Rage – a concept that humans seemed to share with the Oghaldzon – from a lucky hit by a mass driver or a rail gun. The human sensors were sweeping the fleet regularly; they probably had perfect targeting information, if they could use it. His display was struggling to keep up with the updates as missiles swept towards their position and his own missiles lashed back at the humans. He saw three of the small human craft vanish in blasts of nuclear fire, saw one of the human industrial platforms disintegrate under a lucky hit, saw…

  “The Token Not-Protest has been destroyed,” the tactical officer said. Makra clicked a curse to himself; he had started with twenty warships and one large transport ship, and now part of his point defence network had been knocked down by the human missiles. It hadn’t required much damage, either; the early indications were that the simple high-speed collision had shattered the Token Not-Protest. “Four more human craft have been targeted for destruction and…”

  Makra said nothing as the slaughter went on. They were winning, slowly but surely.

  * * *

  Explosions blossomed in the darkness of space, tiny pinpricks almost invisible to the naked eye at this range, and Rockrats started to die. Jake Ellsworth wanted to scream aloud as the aliens pushed closer and closer to Freeport One, their drives flaring as they pushed themselves onto terminal engagement trajectories. He had expected it; the Rockrats had shown a certain amount of weakness… and the aliens had moved to take advantage of it, but he hadn’t realised how horrifying it would be to wait in the Lead Pipe and watch as his fellows died. The aliens would almost certainly kill more of his friends, even if he engaged now… and if he engaged now, they might win the battle.

  A message blinked up in his private display. DON’T WORRY, JAKE, EVERYONE GOES THROUGH THEIR OWN PRIVATE HELL IN A BATTLE WHEN ALL YOU CAN DO IS WAIT, it read. He glanced over at Cindy, who was looking up, ever-so-briefly, at him, and winked at her; she stuck out her tongue in a defiant gesture. He relaxed slightly as the display updated again, computers running simulations of which side would win, which side would have a chance of escape if everything went pear-shaped, which side would…

  The timer ticked down towards zero. “Are we ready?”

  “Yes,” Cindy said. Her terminal was linked into the entire fleet of ships, her computers receiving constant updates from the other seventeen ships that had been placed into the combat area to wait for instructions. “We are in position and ready to move on your command.”

  Ellsworth smiled at her, finally prepared to admit that he cared about her. “Signal to all ships, then,” he said, and lifted his hand in a dramatic gesture. He brought it down hard in a single chopping motion: “Engage!”

  Chapter Forty-Nine: The Battle of Freeport One, Take Two

  Near Freeport One, Asteroid Belt

  “Incoming enemy fire!”

  Makra almost flinched as new icons appeared on the display, enemy missiles closing in rapidly on the Oghaldzon fleet from behind its positions. His first thought, that some human ship had managed to sneak close enough to launch the missiles at such close range as to make interception impossible, was wrong, but the damage was almost as great. The human ships had appeared out of nowhere, which meant that they had been lurking with all drives and sensors firmly shut down, and they were moving to come up behind him.

  “Reverse point defences,” he ordered, knowing that tactical officers throughout the entire fleet would already be executing that procedure. It wasn’t a matter of insubordination; it was a matter of life and death. The missiles had to be intercepted before they burned out, or there would be only seconds to intercept them once they entered terminal assault mode. “Sensors, carry out a full sweep of the launch points.”

  The display updated itself rapidly, revealing eighteen indistinct human ships, all apparently much harder to detect than they should have been. Their fusion flames were easy to detect as they lunged after the Oghaldzon fleet, but their hulls seemed to be covered in stealth coating, which would make tracking them much harder for missile sensors, or even for the more advanced sensors on the transport. It was a neat innovation, one that the Oghaldzon themselves had never considered; by the time they had expanded into space, the race had been united and there had been no major enemies left to fight.

  The math was easy; Makra could have carried it out in his sleep. He’d made a mistake and had been mouse-trapped, just like a feral Oghaldzon would have been trapped by one of the soldiers; he had committed himself to engaging the defence force surrounding Freeport One without realising that a second enemy force was about to engage his fleet from the rear. If he continued on his original course, they would have to punch their way through Freeport One’s defences, while if he changed course his ships would still be firmly inside the human engagement range… until it was too late. If he decelerated, he would still have to engage the second human force, and do so with all the tactical disadvantages caused by the fusion drive.

  He hesitated, unsure of himself; he had never faced a real trap before, but duty asserted itself. “I want the drives to be triggered on a straight-line course,” he ordered. “Take us right through the defences of the human asteroids.”

  He allowed the plan to develop in his mind. It would hurt; the odds were that his force would suffer badly before they broke through and had the chance to run to save what they could from destruction. On the other hand, there was no other option that could save any of his fleet from disaster… and they would have a chance to hurt the enemy while they passed through his defences. He muttered orders to the different departments; the transport, in particular, was suddenly a very inviting target. He was tempted to order it to surrender, but the humans might not even notice in time to spare its thousands of soldiers from cold deaths in vacuum.

  The display updated itself again; the first wave of incoming missiles was closing in at terrifying speed. The Oghaldzon ships were preparing to handle the incoming fire as best as they could, but they had been caught unawares and now – he winced mentally – they were going to have to pay the price.

  * * *

  “They’re triggering their drives,” Ellsworth’s sensor officer reported nervously.

  He bit down the curse that rose to his lips; Damn, but someone over there was fast! The enemy commander had realized he’d been caught bent over a table with his trousers and boxers down, so he had moved to minimise the maximum gain of his opponent. He had to know that taking Freeport One intact was impossible now, so he was both trying to escape… and moving into ideal engagement range for rapid destruction of the entire network of asteroids that made up Freeport One. Had he fought in space before? Ellsworth didn’t know, but his regard for his opponent went up a notch.

  “Understood,” he said. He thought quickly; if they had known for sure that the aliens weren’t intent on destruction – and they didn’t – he might have been willing to allow the aliens to escape in exchange for them leaving the asteroids and the surrounding platforms intact. He didn’t dare; the aliens might want revenge for the motherships the Russians had killed – the Russian warship had joined the force that was defending Freeport One and seemed to be attracting a lot of enemy fire – or they might just know perfectly well that if they took out the industrial facilities, the humans’ dream of building a fleet that could crush the aliens in Earth orbit would come to an end. “Helm, take us after them!”

  The display fritzed slightly as the effects of the fusion drive started to confuse the sensors. The USSF had figured out a way around the chaos caused by the fusion flame; they’d suggested the emplacement of remote drones that would stealthily observe and transmit their observations to the Lead Pipe. The thought made him smile; the Rockrats had insisted on the right to name their own ships – hence the appearance of the Flamewar, the Quoting Wikipedia and others that no one dared write down – but the USSF had its own solutions to problems. The mere fact of losing almost all of their fleet to th
e aliens had concentrated their minds wonderfully…and the Rockrat fleet was reaping the benefits. Whatever happened in the future, Ellsworth was convinced that, one way or the other, the Belt had gained something from the forced association, even if it was only more tolerance for the spit-and-polish crowd.

  The aliens were flaring their drives almost randomly, but he could see – now – what they were doing. Like the USSF, they had knitted their individual ships into one fighting whole; that whole was now trading information to enable the point defence units to engage the missiles, despite the distortion caused by the fusion drives. The growing chaos as his ships fired wave after wave of missiles into the enemy formation was matched by the rear tubes of the alien ships turning slightly to fire on his ships; one advantage of their position was that the aliens could only bring a few of their weapons to bear on his ships without sending their missiles through convoluted courses just as likely to send them spiralling off helplessly into the interplanetary void than actually coming close enough for his ships to be endangered.

  “They’re bringing up all of their sensors now,” Cindy reported grimly. “I think they’re trying to gain targeting coordinates for more organized fire targeted on our ships.”

  Ellsworth nodded, grateful for the analysis. It had become a slugging match, the more so because the two fleets and the defences were heading towards each other at speeds that would have astonished anyone on Earth, but were tiny when compared to the vastness of space. It would be still ten minutes before the aliens tried to pass through the human defences, but by then they had to have worn away enough of the fleet and the fixed defences to have a chance of passing within such close range without being destroyed with ease. The aliens were expanding their own firing patterns; who knew what they would target next…?