“And we clearly still think differently,” Roberts pointed out with that same broad grin. “We’ll fight you kicking and screaming the whole way. You know that.”
“I am afraid of that,” James admitted. “But with both your fleet and Seventh Fleet at Via Somnia, you have finally given me a target worth unleashing the full might I have been given upon. With the defeat of those fleets, the Alliance will fall.”
Something in Roberts’s expression twisted, the grin not faltering but…smirking? The Federation Admiral was smirking at him?
“You will see,” James said calmly, even as he began to wonder if he could scout Via Somnia before he could arrive. If the Stellar Fox was smirking at him, there was something he didn’t know.
“We will all see,” Roberts replied. “Whatever comes to pass, we will all see.”
Before James could respond, his implant suddenly pinged with an emergency alert.
“What is it?” he demanded, careful not to vocalize aloud.
“Strategic Omega Alert,” MacGinnis said flatly over the neural network. “Sol is under attack. So is Tau Ceti. A dozen other systems; we’re still identifying where and what.”
James couldn’t help himself, he turned an accusing glare on Roberts.
“Ah,” the Federation Admiral replied. “It has begun, I see.”
“What have you done?”
“Unleashed armageddon.”
41
Sol System
07:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-062 Normandy
Normandy flashed into the Sol System with an unusual degree of discomfort for her passengers. Russell closed his eyes for a moment, accessing his implant’s functions to control the sudden unexpected wave of nausea that swept over him.
That had been a long trip, and they’d clearly pushed the emergence by accident. Instead of emerging two light-minutes from Earth, trailing behind the planet’s orbit and on the far side of the moon, they’d emerged a “mere” thirty million kilometers from the homeworld.
Six million kilometers wasn’t much in the scheme of a voyage of a hundred and sixty light-years, but it was enough to make for a spectacularly rough emergence.
“Launch! Launch! Launch!” he barked as he regained control of his body. A dozen gravities slammed through the gravity field compensating for his acceleration, and his six-thousand-ton starfighter was flung into space.
He wasn’t alone. Normandy alone launched forty-eight starfighters in her first wave. A second wave followed fifteen seconds later, then a third, and then a fourth that was entirely bombers.
Sixty seconds after TF 7.1 arrived in-system, two thousand starfighters and bombers were forming up around the phalanx of capital ships and heading toward humanity’s homeworld.
Russell didn’t doubt that Terra Fortress Command and their accompanying warship fleet had known about their arrival the instant it happened. For that matter, he was quite certain they’d known about TF 7.3’s ten-minute-past arrival at Uranus the moment it had happened.
“All right, people, keep your eyes peeled,” he told his squadrons. “If we’re lucky, the Terrans are out of position, moving to deal with what they must think is a spoiling raid.”
His smile was predatory.
“If we can fight the warships and Fortress Command separately, I will officially call us the luckiest sons of bitches alive,” Commodore Ozolinsh told the senior officers. “And…it’s looking quite possible.”
The data feed from the capital ships’ passive sensors take and the first waves of Q-probes began to filter into Russell’s implant.
The Navy had reacted exactly as hoped, though their forces were lighter than anticipated. Four Hercules battlecruisers and two Volcano carriers had clearly been charging away from Earth at two hundred-plus gravities for almost ten minutes.
They were a million kilometers closer to TF 7.1 than the fortresses. They could turn around and fall back, but that would probably look bad.
And stupid as it sounded, Russell could understand that there was no way anyone on those ships or starfighters was going to risk looking cowardly here, above Earth, under the eyes of the Star Chamber itself.
“They are adjusting course to intercept us,” Hu noted. “They’re going full scramble on their fighters, and the fortresses are launching their ready squadrons.”
Hundreds of new icons speckled the feed, many dancing through the chaotic mess of Earth’s busy orbitals. The Navy ships alone threw out five hundred-plus starfighters, presumably including some bombers.
The fortress in orbit launched about the same, fewer than Russell was expecting. On the other hand…
“Well, there goes Intelligence’s happy daydream,” he said aloud on the command channel. “Those Zions just put six hundred Katanas in the air from their ready squadrons alone.”
“At least that’s only thirty Zions,” Ozolinsh replied. “Two squadrons each. TFC might be weaker than expected, even if they have modern starfighters.”
The Commodore’s evil smile carried perfectly over the implant network.
“In any case, until they have their non-ready squadrons up, the numbers are on our side.
“Let’s teach them how to dance!”
Despite the Alliance commander’s enthusiasm, the Commonwealth starfighters were much less willing to charge forward. The starfighters launched by the Navy ships stuck with them, while the fortress fighters remained with their fortresses for almost ten full minutes.
At that point, however, the Zions launched their other three squadrons, and all fifteen hundred starfighters swarmed out to meet them.
“Did we interrupt the regularly scheduled nap or something?” Russell asked dryly. “Ten minutes from unconscious to launched. My squadrons would never hear the end of it!”
“There’s a lot of ECM out there,” Vice Commodore Emilija Santiago, of the carrier Trafalgar, said. “But is anyone else getting the feeling they’re playing games with signatures?”
“Probably hiding bombers,” Russell replied. “It’s what we’re doing.” He checked the timing. “Speaking of bombers, they’ve screwed up royally. Our bombers will launch before their starfighters range on us.”
“We’ll lose some torps if we do that,” Ozolinsh said. “But…five hundred bombers versus six ships? We can spend them.
“All bomber squadrons, launch at maximum range,” he continued, turning Commodores’ debate into general orders. “Spread your fire evenly across the capital ships. Let’s punch these bastards out and leave the fortresses for the big boys.”
Two thousand-plus starfighters were accelerating out now, and Russell quickly reviewed the sensor data, feeding it into Hu’s targeting parameters.
“Santiago’s right,” he said. “There’s something weird with their ECM. Emilija, did you get a clearer look?”
“Redirected one of Trafalgar’s Q-probes into the middle of them,” she said with satisfaction. “We’ll have a view in a few moments… What the—”
“Vice Commodore?” Ozolinsh asked.
“There’s no bombers in the lead formation,” she told them. “Not a one. Just Katanas.”
“If the carriers don’t have bombers…” The Commodore trailed off. “I’m going to set up a mass hard pulse on that second wave. I wonder…”
Seventeen ships doing general radar and lidar sweeps were enough to provide a lot of information on any ship within a hundred million kilometers.
Seventeen ships, two thousand-plus starfighters, and several dozen sacrificial Q-probes washing directed and carefully sequenced radar pulses over a specific area made it damn hard to hide anything. If the fighter formation had been made of Falcons or Arrows, they’d have been able to conceal a lot.
If it had actually been made of Katanas, they probably would have been able to hide bombers.
What they couldn’t do was conceal that over a thousand of the fifteen hundred starfighters the Zion defense platforms had launched in their second wave
were Scimitars, not Katanas. The Scimitar was a capable sixth-generation fighter, a worthy opponent to starfighters of its own era.
It was just that “its own era” had been ten years before.
“So, no bombers, and half of them are Scimitars,” Santiago concluded. “Told you they were playing games with the signatures.”
“Yes, yes, you did,” Ozolinsh conceded instantly. “It doesn’t change much…other than the certainty that these poor bastards are doomed.”
There was a long pause on the command channel, then Russell sighed and shook his head.
“They might be outclassed, boss, but that’s Earth behind them,” he pointed out. “They’ll fight harder than we’ve ever seen before.”
The Commonwealth ships opened fire with missiles as their starfighters finally began to maneuver, the six warships flinging over a hundred missiles at the Alliance task force every forty or so seconds.
Russell watched the missiles fly toward and past the starfighter flotilla, clear orders coming down from Admiral Rothenberg that the starfighters were to avoid the missiles unless actively threatened. There was no point risking starfighters when the fleet’s defenses were more than capable of handling the incoming missiles.
The Alliance warships held their own fire, waiting for the starfighters to clear the path. The six warships and two thousand fighters were an obstacle, not an objective—and firing through them would risk the Alliance hitting something they didn’t intend to.
There was a lot of potential collateral damage in Earth orbit. Centuries-old construction guidelines restricted the orbitals into two perpendicular rings, one around the equator and one over the planet’s poles
The ring were densest around the orbital elevator linked to the anchor station where the Commonwealth Star Chamber met. The second densest point was anchored by a newer orbital elevator near Papua New Guinea. If the Alliance was here to wreck Earth’s orbital infrastructure, those two elevators and their counterweight stations would be key targets.
Instead, they spent thirty minutes closing the gap with the defending fleet, watching the range drop as the Vultures and Falcons alike prepared their devastating weapon loads.
Thirty-seven minutes after the Alliance fighters had launched, the bombers crossed an arbitrary line in space, some eleven-point-six-million kilometers from the defenders, and fired. Over two thousand Gemblade torpedoes flared to life, leaving the launching bombers behind as they accelerated away at a thousand and fifty gravities.
The starfighters were closer than the capital ships, but the Alliance strike wasn’t going to waste torpedoes on starfighters. They had their lighter Starfire missiles for that—and while those had the same Tier Four acceleration as the torpedoes, they had a quarter of the Gemblades’ ten-minute flight time.
They fired six minutes later, moments before the torpedoes penetrated the Terran formation. Eleven thousand starfighter missiles blazed clear of the Falcons, Arrows and Vultures of the Alliance formation.
Eight thousand more leapt clear of the Katanas and Scimitars swarming toward them, and then the Terran fighters charged after the Alliance torpedoes.
“Hold your remaining Starfires,” Ozolinsh ordered. “We may need a second salvo… We may need to finish this with lances, but there’s still over a hundred and fifty battle stations in orbit of Earth, and we’ll still want those missiles!”
The Terrans clearly didn’t expect to survive long enough to launch their missiles at the capital ships. Three full salvoes blazed into space before the first exchange reached them. The older Scimitars still carried another salvo, just in case they lived long enough, but twenty-four thousand missiles were going to be enough of a headache for the attackers.
“Spread the formation, give them holes to get lost in,” Russell ordered his own people. “ECM to maximum. Let’s dazzle the buggers—they aren’t that clever!”
Pulses of jamming swept out from the Alliance flotilla in waves, some sections making themselves larger targets, others making themselves near-invisible behind walls of static—and then switching places.
The Terran starfighters took their toll on the Gemblades, blasting over half of the Alliance torpedoes out of space…but their success cost them their focus when the starfighter missiles targeted on them arrived. Two thousand-plus starfighters, half of them obsolete, collided with eleven thousand of the best missiles the Alliance had ever built.
There were no survivors.
Russell had expected the strike to be decisive and crippling. He hadn’t expected it to be a massacre.
The first wave of missiles swarming their own ranks was no less deadly, however. The Alliance pilots and gunners weren’t distracted by stopping torpedoes, and they had the full electronic warfare capabilities of two thousand seventh-generation starfighters and bombers to protect them.
They couldn’t stop them all. Emilija Santiago died in a silent fireball. Three other CAGs died with her—and over three hundred starfighters and bombers went with them.
The following salvos were less coordinated without their motherships. More vulnerable to the siren songs of countermeasures and jamming that lashed them as they crossed through space. They took lesser tolls on Russell’s comrades…but when the dust settled, a full quarter of the Alliance fighter force was gone.
And then it was the Commonwealth warships’ turn. A thousand torpedoes crashed down on a mere six ships, their own seekers and jammers far more capable than the lighter missiles the starfighters had used on each other.
Dozens of missiles died as the warships’ defenses flared to life. Hundreds of missiles.
For a moment, Russell thought the defenses might actually manage to stand off the torpedo salvo…but numbers and statistics were a cruel mistress.
Both Volcanoes disappeared under hammerblows of fire. Three of the Herculeses followed them, and the fourth spun off course, her engines gone and most of her weapons systems offline.
Russell thought they could ignore her—and then a moment later, the crippled warship flared again on his scanners, launching a ten-missile salvo directly at the starfighters.
“They’ve got courage,” Ozolinsh said softly. “And this is their heart. Their home. Earth.”
The Fleet CAG paused.
“Take them out,” he ordered, his voice sad. “A hundred Starfires as we pass should do it.”
The battlecruiser’s death was almost an afterthought, a passing salvo from the half-dozen closest squadrons. It felt strange that the destruction of a capital ship, the deaths of five thousand or so spacers and crew, would pass with so little comment.
But that was the nature of the day.
“TFC is maneuvering their fortresses around the planet to face us,” Rothenberg announced. “We are beginning missile bombardment of the identified platforms. Commodore Ozolinsh, there could still be warships in Earth orbit, and the moon is between us and the Central Nexus.
“I want your starfighters to make a transit between Earth and Luna and engage the Nexus.” He paused. “It is not particularly well defended, but if they’re paying attention, I would expect those last four warships to be in position to guard her.
“There are also high guard corvettes somewhere in Earth orbit. They’re not warships, but I have every expectation that they will attempt to engage you. They may only be high guard…but this is Earth.”
Missile icons were now appearing on Russell’s feed as the Imperial and Federation warships behind him began to trade fire with the fortresses. The good news was that there had been fewer fighter platforms than expected.
The bad news was that there appeared to be even more modern missile launchers over there than they’d expected—and that whoever was in charge of Terra Fortress Command understood perfectly well that her mass drivers were no threat to the capital ships.
So, they were using them to lay a hailstorm of high-velocity metal in the path of the Alliance starfighters.
“One last note, everyone,” Rothenberg added as he was about to
sign off. “We have confirmation from Rear Admiral Novacek—the Uranus q-com switchboard has been destroyed. TF Seven-Three has achieved their objectives and is withdrawing from Sol.”
One down. Two to go.
“TF Seven-Two has engaged the Ceres defense fleet. Ambrosia has been destroyed, as have three Resolute-class battleships. Manna is attempting to force a lance duel with Leif Ericson and her sisters.” The Imperial Admiral chuckled.
“It’s not going well for her.”
The Ambrosia-class superbattleship might outgun any one of the three Magellan-class battleships headlining TF 7.2, but at three-to-one odds, plus eight battlecruisers backing up the Magellans…
“Admiral Salvail reports that he expects to reduce the enemy starship and starfighter strength in next twenty minutes and engage Relay Alpha-One inside forty minutes. Everything is going according to plan.”
Even Russell knew that was asking for trouble…but it also seemed to be true. Sol’s defenses were turning out to be even weaker than expected.
This was the home system of humanity, the capital of the Commonwealth. There had to be another shoe coming.
42
Sol System
08:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Task Force Seven-One
“That…that’s a lot of missiles,” Hu said softly.
Eighty of Terra Fortress Command’s battle stations had relocated to this side of Earth, and each of them appeared to mount twenty modern capital-ship missile launchers. The only time Russell had seen that many missiles in one place before, they’d literally dumped them in space to allow for mass salvoes.
“Can the fleet handle that?” the gunner asked.
Russell shook his head.
“That’s not our problem,” he admitted. “That’s the Admiral’s problem. Our job is to cut through a gap that’s barely two hundred thousand kilometers wide at five percent of the speed of light and successfully turn a multi-kilometer space station into vapor.”
Operation Medusa Page 27
