“Right. We got the easy job,” Hu agreed.
The Vice Commodore shook his head and chuckled. It would be almost ten more minutes before the starfighters reached the limit of the moon’s orbit. With the chaos in Earth orbit and Fortress Command’s quite successful objections to the Alliance’s Q-probes, they still had no idea what was going on around the Central Nexus.
He doubted it was going to be good news. At fifteen thousand kilometers a second, they would cross the moon’s orbit, dive past the Central Nexus and flash through Earth’s defenses over the course of about thirty seconds.
They were going to be an important thirty seconds.
“Do we have any visual on what’s behind the moon?” he asked.
“Negative,” Ozolinsh replied. “We’ve got Q-probes trying to swing around, but we’re only going to have maybe two minutes’ warning before we run right into it.”
“Is it too late to consider a career change?” one of the other CAGs quipped. “I’m thinking…farmer. Farmer sounds great. Nobody shoots at farmers.”
“Last chance to do that was before we left Via Somnia,” Ozolinsh told them with a chuckle. “Time to fly or die, people.
“Hold on.”
The minutes blurred past as the fleet engaged the fortresses. Task Force Seven-One was only throwing two hundred missiles back in answer to each sixteen-hundred missile salvo. They were closing the range—intel suggested most of the stations didn’t have positron lances, which meant lance range would allow the Alliance to carry the day.
They certainly weren’t having much luck with missiles. As Russell watched the situation, the Heroic-class strike cruiser Jessica Anderson took three capital-ship missiles from the second salvo, the only Federation cruiser in TF 7.1 disappearing in a flash of fire.
Along with all five thousand or so of her crew.
An Imperial Guardian-class carrier joined her, the task force’s defenses withering under the hammer of Fortress Command’s fire. They’d be exchanging missiles for over thirty minutes before the battleships reached their range, unless the fortresses had amazingly weak electromagnetic deflectors.
Given the amount of mass-driver fire the starfighters were dodging, it was possible.
But it wasn’t likely.
“Eyeballs on the light side of the moon in twenty seconds,” Hu told him. “Bets on whether we’re going to die here, sir?”
“I don’t make stupid bets,” Russell replied, his attention now riveted on the data feed from the Q-probes sweeping ahead of the starfighter force. “I have to assume we’re going to live.”
The assumption took a blow a moment later.
The Central Nexus was exactly where it was supposed to be. Massive, foundational to the Commonwealth’s communication network, almost defenseless beyond sheer size.
Carefully positioning themselves between the Nexus and the oncoming fighter strike were two Saint-class battleships and over a hundred Hamilton-class high guard corvettes.
“Well,” Russell said quietly. “That’s going to be a headache.”
The high guard vessels barely even qualified as sublight gunships, hundred-thousand ton ships more purposed for boarding and search-and-rescue than combat. The Hamilton-class ships didn’t even mount missiles.
They did, however, mount hundred-kiloton-a-second positron lances perfectly capable of shredding starfighters and missile defense lasers that could gut the missile salvo.
And the Saints, of course, could do the same all on their own.
“What do we do?” Hu asked.
“Our job,” Russell replied.
“Sir?” he addressed Ozolinsh. “Recommend we split our forces—we’re not going to get missiles past the corvettes and Saints to hit the station. I suggest the Arrows and Vultures focus their fire on the Saints while the Falcons go for the Nexus itself.”
The Federation fighters would have to go through the high guard to get to the Central Nexus, but that was going to happen anyway. The Falcons had heavier lances than the Arrows—and the bombers didn’t have positron lances.
There was a long pause.
“Agreed,” Ozolinsh said. “I’ll pass the orders. Your group’s in front, Rokos.”
“We’ll take the tip of the spear,” Russell confirmed. “We’ll see you on the other side.”
The orders got passed and the formation began to shift slightly—and then the Commodore opened a private channel.
“I know I don’t need to say this, Rokos, but everything else going on here is a distraction now,” he said very, very quietly. “Seven-Two has the Ceres defense force on the run, Relay Alpha-One will be gone in moments. Most of the other strikes are already done.” He swallowed. “Losses have been brutal, Rokos, and it’s all down to this.
“If the Central Nexus survives, it’s all been for nothing. Seven-One will keep Fortress Command tied up, but even that’s just cover for us now.”
Russell heard the next words before they even came out.
“The Nexus is an all-costs target, Vice Commodore Rokos. No matter what happens, that station has to be destroyed.”
“I know,” Russell replied. “We’ll make it happen, Commodore.”
“I know,” Ozolinsh replied. “But you’re at the front. I had to say it.”
The defenders didn’t have much going for them in terms of velocity. Someone on the other side had first held back the battleships—likely in case the Alliance was using the attack on Uranus as a distraction—and then guessed TF 7.1’s actual target after TF 7.3 blew the secret switchboard station in the gas giant to pieces.
They’d then put the two battleships and the entirety of the Terran High Guard into the relatively tiny volume of space that the Alliance fighter strike had to pass through. There was no way around them. No clever maneuvers that weren’t contraindicated by the velocity they were arriving with.
“Wanna bet the lady in charge over there is High Guard?” Hu muttered. “Forcing us to fly right through them? That’s an orbital officer’s thinking right there.”
“And in this case, it’s the right thinking,” Russell agreed. It was damn brave of them, too. They’d set up the optimal circumstances to throw a glorified police force in front of a starfighter strike, but those were customs officers and search-and-rescue crews.
His own duty meant he was going to have to blow a giant hole in their formation and vaporize the station they were trying to defend, but he still had to salute their courage.
“Seventy seconds to the lunar horizon,” Hu reported a moment later. “Any clever ideas, boss?”
“Only the one we’re already on,” the Vice Commodore told him. “Throw every damn missile we’ve got at the High Guard and punch through to use our lances on the Nexus.”
He was carefully ignoring the continuing missile duel between TF 7.1 and Terra Fortress Command. Those fortresses would massacre the starfighters if they turned that missile fire on Russell and his comrades, but TF 7.1 was quite definitely losing that duel.
For the first time in Russell Rokos’s experience, starships were dying to buy starfighters time.
“We won’t even have time for a second missile launch,” Hu warned.
“I know.”
Seconds ticked away. The moon came closer and their course curved. The planetoid’s gravity was nothing compared to the starfighters’ acceleration, but they had to cut the fine line between Luna and Earth’s rings of orbital industry.
“All missiles prepped and targeted,” Hu murmured. “Twenty seconds to the horizon.”
Half of what would follow would be decided by computers, but the whole point of having a human with a high-interface bandwidth in a starfighter was to add the randomness of the other half. Russell sank into the deepest symbiosis with his ship’s computers, becoming the agile starfighter.
Ten seconds. No one needed to speak aloud anymore. The Q-probes were whipping around the horizon ahead of them and dying in their dozens, TF 7.1 spending tens of millions of stellars of equipment eve
ry second to make sure the starfighters had the targeting data they needed.
Horizon.
Glittering stars appeared in front of Russell’s eyes as he saw through the Falcon’s far more capable senses. The two largest ones were the Saints. Somebody else’s problem, with hundreds of missiles ear-marked for each of them.
His problem was right in front of him, the solid and unwavering echelons of the Hamilton-class corvettes. Each of them was a dozen or more times the size of his starfighter, lacking her missiles but with positron lances that put hers to shame.
Their job might be customs inspections and search-and-rescue, but they weren’t going to let him hit their world without a fight. They’d been watching his people come through their own Q-probes, and beams of positrons lit up Earth’s sky as the Battle of Sol’s final desperate act unfolded.
The Alliance missiles were in space before the first lance beams struck home. Starfighters died around Russell as he danced his own starfighter through the deadly pattern that wove around him. Missiles crossed the mere tens of thousands of kilometers between him and his enemy in moments, hundred-thousand ton corvettes vanishing in the blink of an eye.
His friends and subordinates died around him, but Russell plunged through the High Guard formation, dancing around the lances as he lined up on the Central Nexus. His missiles hadn’t reloaded yet—their cycle time short but not short enough for this close of a range!
The only weapon he could use was his positron lance, and he lit up the space station with a beam of pure antimatter. Dozens of other beams joined his, slashing into the immense bulk of the switchboard station.
Vaporized metal and atmosphere blasted into space, short-lived spurts of fire bulging out from the station and dying as their oxygen supply ran out. The station endured. It was huge; even dozens of fifty-kiloton-a-second lances were barely scratching the surface.
Then his starfighter lurched, pain searing through him as “his” engines were destroyed by a glancing hit from one of the High Guard ships pursuing him. Linked into his neural implants, entire conversations passed by in seconds.
“We’ve lost three quarters of the engines and half the mass manipulators,” his engineer barked. “No repair. We can’t adjust course…maybe fifty gees of accel.”
“We’re not getting out of this at fifty gees of accel,” Hu replied. “What do we do?”
Denial. Fear. Regret.
Decision.
All of it passed through Russell’s mind in fractions of a second.
“We finish the job. The missiles can’t launch yet, but we can arm the warheads, right?”
“Yes, sir.” The pause before Hu spoke would never have registered on any other scale.
“Do it.” Russell’s own pause was just as infinitesimal. “It’s been an honor, gentlemen.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Hu snapped back. “I told you we wouldn’t live through—”
Their world ended in the fire of multiple antimatter explosions.
So did the Central Nexus.
43
Leopold System
16:00 October 10, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
BB-285 Saint Michael
“What do we do?” Lindsay Tasker asked softly.
The gap between her question and Mihai Gabor’s response wasn’t long, exactly. The three flagships were floating roughly fifty thousand kilometers apart, so the delay in two-way transmission was only a third of a second.
James Walkingstick and his officers, however, were twenty-eighth-century military officers. Their neural implants were capable of allowing them to consciously process time millisecond by millisecond if needed. It wasn’t a feature that was healthy to use on a regular basis, but their implants gave them a precise sense of time.
With a q-com, the communication delay between Tasker, Gabor, and James would have been nearly imperceptible even to them.
Without it…
“I say we take this damn fleet and shove it down the Alliance’s throat,” Gabor snapped. “They’ve got to have sent every damned warship they had into our space to pull this off. Their home systems have to be defenseless.”
James raised a hand.
“We cannot make our decisions based on emotions or revenge at this point,” he told his senior subordinates quietly. “We have no updates. No information. We know nothing of what is happening in the core of the Commonwealth.
“And perhaps more importantly, we know nothing of what is happening on the fringes of the Commonwealth,” he noted. “There are worlds that were brought into unity recently enough that they will see this as weakness. As an opportunity.
“We have no command-and-control loop. No ability to acquire intelligence. Admirals, we don’t even have real-time sensor data in this system. If we make war on the Alliance now, we will face an enemy who has all of those things.”
He shook his head.
“What information we have suggests that Home Fleet and Terra Fortress Command are either shattered or just plain gone. Tau Ceti Sector Command is gone; every ship was debris by the time the Alliance fired on the q-com station.
“Most systems are somewhere in between. The Alliance just did to the Commonwealth what we were planning to do to them at Via Somnia: the Commonwealth no longer has the ship strength to reasonably support offensive action.”
Tasker looked tired.
“So, what, do we take our fleets back to Sol? Help hold the Commonwealth together from the center?”
James shook his head again. From Gabor’s expression, he knew what his Marshal was thinking, even if Tasker hadn’t caught up.
“I am a Marshal of the Commonwealth, Lindsay,” he told her. “I have a very clear and distinct area of responsibility—and if I leave that area without direct authorization from the Senate, I am legally deserting my post.”
He chuckled.
“And if I were to bring a fleet with me to Sol, my commission would make that treason, regardless of my intent,” he admitted. “My own personal Rubicon. What I give up for the Marshal’s mace, Admiral Tasker, is my general authority over the Commonwealth Navy.
“I have absolute authority in the Rimward Marches…and am legally forbidden to command Commonwealth forces outside the Marches.”
“We can’t just let the Commonwealth burn!” she objected.
“No, we can’t,” he agreed. “However, it seems that all of our plans and schemes to thwart this exact kind of attack failed. We need to consider what the final orders we sent to our people were.”
“Gather at Niagara,” Gabor replied, after that slight but all-too-noticeable delay. “All of our secondary forces were heading there.”
“And that is where the Senate will expect to find us as well, if they do have new orders for us,” James reminded them. “For now, we will return to Niagara.”
“What were our plans for this kind of attack?” Tasker asked. “My people have checked. Every entangled-particle block in the fleet is dead, spewing garbage radiation data if they’re receiving anything at all.”
“The Uranus facility was our emergency continuity-of-government facility,” the Marshal replied. “Officially, it didn’t exist, and only current or former designated flagships even had entangled blocks for it.
“But the Alliance knew where it was. It was the first one they took out,” he noted grimly.
“We only had one secret facility?” Gabor asked.
James chuckled.
“We were supposed to have three. One in Sol, one in Tau Ceti and one in Sirius.”
“There’s nothing in Sirius,” Gabor objected.
“That was the point.” James’s chuckled turned bitter. “The program was canceled after the Uranus platform because we discovered the Federation was building eighty-million-cubic warships. The budget was put into building the Ambrosias.
“Not that those seemed to help.”
The destruction of both superbattleships in the defense of Ceres was one of the confirmed losses from the Battle of
Sol.
“We fall back to Niagara and get our prisoners off our warships,” he continued. Niagara had proper POW facilities in orbit, thankfully. “There’s too many people with potential access to them while they’re aboard our ships.”
“You don’t trust our people?” Gabor demanded.
“Our prisoners wear the same uniforms as the people who just attacked Sol, Mihai,” James said flatly. “Some people are not going to be thinking rationally. We have obligations to our POWs, and we will see them respected.”
Even if, in the back of his head, James Walkingstick suspected that Kyle Roberts had more than a little to do with the chaos that had just been unleashed upon the galaxy.
Kyle was amused that the man with quite literally life-or-death authority over him still asked permission to enter the tiny quarters they’d locked him in. Unless he missed his guess, the room they’d put him was normally shared by two Lieutenants or similarly larval officers, but they’d scooped out a bed in favor of a couch when they’d decided to put an Admiral in there.
Even as a prisoner of war, rank had its privileges. They didn’t, he expected, actually extend to refusing Walkingstick entry to his quarters—but at least the Marshal asked.
“Well?” Walkingstick demanded as the door closed behind him, looking at Kyle like he wanted to ask a longer question.
Or, potentially, like the Terran officer wanted to strangle him with his bare hands. Given what it sounded like the events of the last twelve or so hours had entailed, that was also quite possible.
“Well what?” he asked.
“Don’t you want to know how your Alliance’s grand offensive, the plan I can see your fingerprints all over, went off?” Walkingstick asked.
Kyle sighed and leaned back in the couch, gesturing around him.
“Marshal, I have a datapad that is linked to an entertainment library that has nothing less than ten years old in it, and four walls that make for a somewhat comfortable prison,” he pointed out. “At this point, unless an Alliance fleet has arrived and forced you to surrender, the result of the war isn’t going to change my fate.”
Operation Medusa Page 28
