The starfighter crews had much less to keep them occupied. There were only so many times a day you could double-check the same systems to make sure that nothing had somehow crept into them while they were shut down.
Exercises and training could only take up so much time as well, which left Russell’s people with too much time to get into trouble.
He wasn’t sure who had started the fight, but by the time he made it into the main mess hall, it had already spread. There were no coherent sides, no alliances, just a group of physically fit men and women taking their cabin fevered frustrations out on each other.
“Seal the doors,” he ordered, watching security barriers slam down in response. Now, at least, the trouble was going to be contained.
He stalked into the middle of the chaos. Someone, not paying enough attention, spun out of their most recent fight and took a swing at Russell.
The Vice Commodore caught the fist in his own massive hand and slammed the offending officer to the ground. He probably should have noted who it was, but he understood the nature of what was going on there.
He leapt on top of one of the still-standing tables and looked down on the chaos, shaking his head.
“ATTEN-HUT!” he bellowed, training and muscle allowing his voice to hammer through the noise. Starfighter crew weren’t the best-disciplined military personnel, but they’d gone through boot camp like everyone else in the Federation armed forces.
About half of his people tried to snap to attention. The other half kept punching—which left about a third of the officers in the room still standing, looking abashedly up at where Russell was standing above them.
“You bunch of idiots,” Russell said conversationally. “Do any of you even know what started this?”
An ashamed silence answered him.
“Right. Apparently, we need to up the tempo of the exercises to make sure you all don’t have enough energy to cause this kind of bullshit,” he continued. “You are soldiers of the Federation. What’s your excuse?”
His people remained silent and he shook his head.
“The stewards are not cleaning up this mess,” he told them. “Chief Lomond!”
The head steward for the mess—a Navy Chief Petty Officer—materialized next to the table Russell was standing on.
“Sir?” he asked politely.
“I’m turning control of the security system over to you,” Russell explained. “None of these fine officers of the Castle Federation Space Force leave until the mess hall is clean to your satisfaction.”
He smiled.
“Whether or not you want to give them any tools for that cleaning is entirely up to you!”
Later, in Captain Herrera’s breakout room, Russell found it significantly harder to find the humor in the situation.
“My people are feeling it the worst,” he noted to Herrera and the XO, Melanie Craven. “But everybody aboard is starting to get itchy. Long flights are hell on morale.”
“We haven’t even accelerated up to our maximum pseudovelocity yet,” Craven pointed out. “That’s ten days.” She shook her head. “And another ten to slow down at the other end. We only spend six days at full speed, though that’s a terrifying realization.”
“I don’t remember the last time I was aboard a ship that even reached ten light-years a day,” Captain Herrera admitted. “I’m not sure I ever have been.”
“I have,” Russell admitted. That mission was classified still, but he wondered if the super-long jump involved in Chameleon’s raid on Tau Ceti had been practice for this. “There’s nothing worse about it. Hell, there’s nothing about any FTL velocity that really bothers us.
“It’s just the isolation. Comms lockdown means all we get is recorded messages. No live chats with friends and family. Nothing.” Russell shook his head.
“It’s hard on the crew,” he noted. “Add being locked inside an invulnerable bubble offset from reality? My little brawl isn’t going to be the last issue we have. And, well…there is only so much work we can have our people do.”
“You underestimate my imagination,” Craven said dryly. “A tool I suspect I may not have given enough rein just yet.”
“We have twenty more days,” Russell replied. “After which we take our crew into battle against the most fortified star system in human space. We can’t let them spend that time getting into fights and trouble.”
“We also can’t take them into that battle exhausted,” Herrera said. “We need them rested and ready for the fight of their lives.”
“They won’t be that if we let them cause chaos for three weeks,” Craven said. “I think we need to link up with the other ships. Build some fleet-wide exercises. Work everyone like dogs until…mmm…D-day minus two?”
“And then give them two days to relax after we’ve worn them down?” the Captain asked. He nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll want to touch base with the Admiral, but you’re right. That’s probably our best shot.”
Russell shook his head.
“It’s all we’ve got,” he agreed. “So, we’ll make it work. But I think we also need to make sure our people understand the stakes.
“I’ve read the full brief, but we need to tell our people more of what they’re getting into. They need to know this one is for all the marbles.”
“We’re not cleared to share that much information,” Herrera objected.
“So, talk to the Admiral,” Russell suggested, “and get us cleared. Our people have been strapped into giant steel coffins for a week, with three more weeks ahead of them, and then one great mothering battle.
“They need to know why. We need to tell them enough that they know that the entire fate of the Alliance is riding on how this mission goes.
“If they don’t know that, we’re just going to have more trouble. If they do know that, I think we’ll have them behind us all the way.”
Herrera sighed.
“I’ll talk to Admiral Rothenberg,” he promised. “I doubt you’re the only one thinking that way, CAG. We’re asking people to do a hell of a thing—especially the Trade Factor crews with family in Da Vinci.
“You’re right. They have to know what they’re part of.”
24
Presley System
05:00 September 23, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Alliance Forty-First Fleet
“Welcome to the Presley System,” Sterling intoned as the starships flashed back into reality. “Home to the planet Ambrose, known for its tropical paradise of constant rain and wind, complete lack of holiday appeal, tidal power, and fish.”
“You’ve visited, I take it?” Kyle said dryly as his implant feeds updated him on the star system. Ambrose was a very wet world, over ninety percent water with a scattering of large island chains that supported a quarter-billion or so humans.
The rest of the planet’s eight hundred million people lived underwater, in domes that protected them from the vicious elements of Ambrose’s surface but were reputably quite comfortable and well appointed. From those domes, Ambrose’s population had access to some extraordinarily rich deposits of transuranics as well as the strange and wonderful wildlife of an ocean that had spent four billion years above those transuranics.
Other than that one wet-but-habitable world, Presley was a whirling mess of a star system. It didn’t have asteroid belts so much as the entire system had a mobile rock infestation. Ambrose’s large moon protected the world from most of the potential problems, but there was a reason most of the planet’s life was underwater.
A single undersized gas giant, Anderson, orbited outside the swarm of rocks that probably had been several rocky inner worlds before some kind of planetary scale catastrophe had occurred. A single lonely cloudscoop in its orbit provided fuel to the orbital platforms tucked under the protective cloak of Ambrose’s moon.
Those platforms, however, made the Presley System one of the more important in this region of space. Mass manipulators were required for starships to function at all�
�they played games with the mass of both fuel and ship to allow for efficient acceleration, played other games to create gravity fields, and did a thousand other minor chores essential to modern technology—and that was before getting into the big ones required for Alcubierre-Stetson drives.
Mass manipulators were built around carefully calibrated coils of exotic matter. That exotic matter was a massive endeavor to produce—and the factories that did so had a voracious appetite for exactly the transuranics that were so common on Ambrose’s ocean floor.
The chaotic swarm of meteors and asteroids that filled the inner system made Presley an unwise place to put shipyards or even large exotic-matter coil production facilities, so Presley didn’t build starship coils or starships. There was no military production here, and Presley didn’t fuel the Niagara fleet base at all.
The facilities in Presley, however, produced something like three percent of the exotic-matter coils used in civilian industries in the Commonwealth.
“I never visited the surface,” Sterling admitted. “I came through here as part of a merchant venture about fifteen years back, buying exotic-matter coils for civilian industry.”
He shrugged.
“They were cheap and high-quality, so we imported them. Made sure none of them went to military applications,” he noted with a grin, then shook his head as the smile faded.
“Feels weird to come back here like this.”
“It should,” Kyle told him. “In any case, this meteor cloud is making me nervous. It’s not a threat…but it’ll make it far too easy for the locals to hide from us. Anything out there in terms of starships?”
“Negative,” Aurangzeb replied. “I’m picking up six Zions in orbit, but that’s it.”
“That’s it? That can’t be right,” the Admiral replied. “This system should have a lot more than that. A lot more.”
“They had more,” Sterling added. “When I was here, they had at least twenty defensive platforms. Not Zions, older platforms, but still…”
“Get the CSP up,” Kyle ordered. “And everyone keep your eyes open. Something stinks and I don’t think it’s the fish.”
“There was a mutiny,” Commander Aysel Vasilev said softly. Kyle’s dark-haired and petite intelligence officer rarely spoke any other way. “About twenty-two months ago. The orbital defense platforms went rogue, seizing control of their systems and declaring a new, independent republic.
“The local populace went along quickly enough that the Commonwealth thinks it was all prearranged. It didn’t save anyone—not with Walkingstick and the Niagara fleet base barely a week’s travel away,” she concluded.
“The entire orbital defense matrix was destroyed and a Pacification Corps was deployed.” Vasilev shivered. “Communications out of the system have been badly restricted, and our own agents were swept up in the pacification.”
“So, we assumed that Presley’s defenses had been completely replaced,” Kyle concluded. Assumptions were risky things, but at least this time, Intelligence had erred on the side of caution. “Do we know anything about the current situation on Ambrose?”
“Very little. We’ve managed to get our hands on the Pacification Corps reports, but—”
“But those are a garbled mess of bullshit because even the Commonwealth would have to prosecute if half of what those bastards did became public knowledge,” he finished for her.
“The good news is that we can handle eight Zions,” he told his staff and captains. “The bad news is that if they’re run by PC crews, they are not going to surrender.”
The Pacification Corps was staffed with fanatics and psychopaths. Officially, they didn’t exist, simply being regular Marine Corps units with some organic Navy support. In practice, they were the counterargument to revolution: brute squads sent in to restore order by any means necessary.
Most of those means were illegal by Commonwealth law, something the Senate turned a blind eye to and was careful to make sure nobody else found out about.
Since those means were also illegal by interstellar law, the Pacification Corps weren’t known for surrendering to outside forces, either.
“We will engage the platforms at maximum range with missiles,” Kyle concluded. “I’m not certain we want to get involved in the situation on the surface, but we can carry out our mission without doing so.”
“Most likely, the Corps has secured control of the underwater cities by threatening to breach the domes,” Vasilev half-whispered. “Any attempt on our part to assist will only make things worse.”
“I intend to operate on the assumption that Presley is a Commonwealth system,” Kyle told his people. “We will complete our mission and withdraw. The destruction of the Zions and our continued distraction efforts should keep the Commonwealth response to any further events on Ambrose delayed and understrength.
“Intentionally trying to make contact with the locals puts them at a risk we cannot provide any reasonable return for,” he admitted. “We could potentially take Ambrose with their assistance…but we can’t stay. So, it would do them no good whatsoever.”
“It would probably make things worse,” Vasilev pointed out. “Presley is too far into Commonwealth territory for the Alliance to be able to protect them. Any attempt to liberate the system will end poorly for them.”
“So, we won’t,” Kyle said. “We move in as planned; we move out as planned.
“No complications.”
Reloaded and rearmed before leaving Starkhaven, Forty-First Fleet’s warships adjusted their courses, each ship changing her alignment to line up the largest number of missile launchers with the defensive platforms. It would change the final arrival time of the missiles by only fractions of a second, but those fractions of a second could make all the difference to the survival of the missile that destroyed a target.
Almost one hundred and eighty missiles flashed away, flying toward a mere eight targets.
Targets that didn’t react.
“Shouldn’t they be doing something?” Sterling asked. “I mean…without their starfighters, they don’t have the missile defense to survive that salvo.”
“They should have already launched,” Kyle realized aloud. “We’ve been in-system for thirty minutes. They can’t have missed us.”
It was an over forty-minute flight time for the missiles, but still…the defensive platforms should have reacted by now.
“Is there any sign that they know we’re here?” the Admiral asked.
“None,” his chief of staff replied after a few moments. “They don’t even have fighters in space. It’s like they didn’t see us arrive, let alone launch missiles.”
“That’s impossible. What are they playing at?” Kyle replied. “Get our fighters into space,” he ordered. “I can’t help feeling we’re walking into a trap.”
Elysium trembled underneath him as her launch tubes came to life, firing starfighters into space with abandon. Hundreds of the tiny ships took up formation around his fleet, a shield against a hidden enemy Kyle couldn’t help but suspect was there somewhere.
The Presley System was one of the few where someone could hide, after all.
But…nothing. There was no reaction.
The Alliance fleet spent forty minutes on high alert, watching their missiles flash across the two light-minutes between them and Ambrose…and then watching them slam home. Eight starfighter launch platforms died in massive balls of fire that would be visible from the surface, without even a twitch to suggest they’d seen their death coming.
“Sir,” Vasilev interjected in her soft voice. “We’re being contacted from the surface—it’s via the Commonwealth Q-probe network, but it’s one of our covert operations authentication codes.”
Kyle sighed. “No complications” was starting to look like a pipe dream.
“Put them through.”
An icon of a holographic swimming dolphin appeared in front of him and a calm voice greeted him.
“Alliance commander, this is…Green Dolph
in, let’s call me. I speak for Open Ocean, the organization dedicated to the freedom of Ambrose and the Presley System.
“I received this authentication code from a Coraline Imperium Intelligence agent who is unfortunately now dead. The Pacification Corps killed him, along with every other rebel and intelligence operative they could catch…and a few thousand innocents they threw in for good measure.”
That was consistent with what little the Alliance knew of the Corps’ operations. “Break a few eggs to make an omelet” summed up their methodology.
“As you may have guessed by now, we have taken control of the planetary scanner sensor and its communications.” The dolphin laughed in a way that Kyle was relatively sure the real animal physically couldn’t.
“If they’d thought to use their own sensors, they’d have seen you coming, but they decided to rely on the Q-probe net entirely,” Green Dolphin concluded.
“So far, the surface forces only know that the Zions are gone. We are moving in to secure the planetary command center as I speak, but any assistance you can provide could make all of the difference.”
“Do we have a live channel?” Kyle asked.
“We have a return frequency, yes,” Vasilev confirmed. “Your orders, sir?”
Kyle sighed.
“Complications,” he cursed. “Link me through.”
The green floating dolphin icon returned a moment later.
“This is Vice Admiral Kyle Roberts,” Kyle introduced himself. “And while I understand, please realize I am less than enthused to be talking to a virtual projection.”
“Believe me, Admiral Roberts, there is nothing I would love more than to meet you in person,” Green Dolphin replied. “You have quite the reputation in Commonwealth space. I hope our little contribution to your arrival here was appreciated.”
Operation Medusa Page 16
