He did want to know. But he also…didn’t. If Medusa had failed, he had doomed his nation and her allies to the dustbin of history.
The Terran officer chuckled bitterly.
“That hasn’t happened. So far as I know, but since I no longer have real-time sensor data…” He shrugged.
“Your people did it,” Walkingstick concluded. “You may have singlehandedly wrecked the largest human civilization in history, Admiral Roberts. The entire Commonwealth q-com network is down. Do you have any idea of how many people this will kill?”
“The Commonwealth requires all of their systems to be self-sufficient in food and basic industry,” Kyle replied, pushing down a momentary desire to gloat. “I think your civilization will survive just fine.”
“You saw what happened in Presley,” the Marshal told him. “A dozen systems will go up in flames now. Maybe two dozen. Ships will mutiny; the Commonwealth will tear itself apart.
“Millions are going to die, Admiral Roberts. You can argue everything you destroyed was a legitimate military target, but the blood of those innocents is on your people’s hands.”
“And whose hands is the blood of the Kematians on?” Kyle asked. He’d watched a Terran battleship sear that world with antimatter fire. He’d hunted the ship responsible down and destroyed it, and he’d admit the Captain had gone rogue, but without Walkingstick’s war…
“Ours,” Walkingstick admitted without flinching. “Mine, even. It shouldn’t have happened, Admiral Roberts. Unification, bringing all of humanity together, is how we stop things like that.
“And now…now you’ve set more of those flames in motion.”
“You give me a bit too much credit,” Kyle replied. He’d drafted Medusa, but he’d been one of over thirty officers in the Joint Strategic Options Command. And hundreds of thousands of spacers, starfighter crew and officers had carried out the mission.
“Speed, aggression and shock used as psychological weapons?” Walkingstick said drily. “I can see the mind behind Tranquility and Hui Xing in this strike, Admiral. Other hands may have carried it out, but I know the fingerprints of the architect.”
The Terran shook his head.
“You remind me of myself, though with a poorer luck in birthplaces, I suppose,” he told Kyle.
“What do you expect?” Kyle told him. “I quite like where I was born, Marshal, but someone wrote ‘A Treatise on Aggression and Calculated Risk as Psychological Warfare in Modern Carrier Combat’ as a Military Strategy Theory thesis… and it wasn’t me.”
Walkingstick stared at him for a long, long moment.
“That should never have left the Commonwealth,” he said.
“Apparently, it ended up in the Castle Federation’s Academy library,” Kyle replied. “If I remind you of yourself, Marshal, it’s because I read your damn book.”
They glared at each other for several moments, then Walkingstick sighed and shook his head.
“You realize that I can no longer trust my people to take proper care of yours,” he admitted. “We are returning to the Niagara System, where I will be turning your people over to a civilian prison authority. I believe I can rely on their restraint more than my own people’s.”
He sighed.
“If nothing else, they have a smaller proportion of people actually from Sol,” he noted. “Attacking the home system has made your Alliance no friends, Admiral.”
“You came for our homes,” Kyle told him fiercely. “You came for our independence, our freedom, our right to live as we chose. You burned our worlds and killed our brothers and sisters, and you tell me that we have ourselves no friends?
“Every drop of blood shed in this war and whatever consequences this unleashes come back not only to the Commonwealth but to the man who set this in motion,” he snapped, watching Walkingstick recoil in surprise.
“Your choice, Walkingstick. Your war. You want to blame us for it? Look in a Gods-cursed mirror.”
For a seemingly eternal moment, their gazes locked again, and then Walkingstick inclined his head in a single sharp nod—and turned sharply on his heel, leaving Kyle alone in his cell.
His Operation Medusa had succeeded. The tide of the war changing.
If only he knew what the price was going to be for himself.
44
Castle System
15:00 October 12, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
New Cardiff
All that Mira Solace really wanted to do was take Jacob and Lisa Kerensky, along with Daniel Kellers, and bury them all in a bubble of soft blankets and armored Marines a million kilometers from anything from importance or weight.
Since Rear Admiral Mira Solace had a job to do, however, she was in a small briefing room deep beneath Castle Federation Joint Command as Fleet Admiral Meredith Blake personally briefed the flag officers actively in charge of Castle’s defense on the events of the last few days.
“All of you are aware that we have spent the last six weeks under an unprecedented communications lockdown,” Blake told them. “That lockdown lifts at zero hundred hours tomorrow. By that point, all of the Medusa strike fleets will have returned to FTL and be on their way home.
“Most of those fleets have already withdrawn. What’s left of Seventh Fleet, for example, held undisputed possession of the Sol System for less than two hours before they got the hell out of Dodge.”
The mutters around the table were soft, but the words Sol System were repeated too much to not be audible.
“Yes, Admirals, you heard me correctly,” Blake noted with a smile. “Some of you have heard the name Operation Medusa. Few of you in this room were aware of more than fringe elements of it, but I can now brief you on what it involved.
“We just threw fifteen major fleets totalling over two hundred warships deep into Commonwealth space to attack the key foundations of their communications network. We succeeded.”
The briefing room was silent as that sank in.
“Succeeded how?” Mira asked.
“As of approximately nine hundred hours on October tenth, the Terran Commonwealth no longer possesses any functioning q-com switchboard stations,” Blake explained. “Their faster-than-light communication network has been destroyed.
“Along the way, a number of key systems—including the Sol System—at least temporarily fell to our fleets, though most of our attacks were more on the order of raids.”
The Federation’s Chief of Naval Operations shook her head.
“The Battle of Sol should have remained a raid, but it became necessary for the entire fleet to deploy against Terra Fortress Command to extract a portion of Admiral Rothenberg’s forces. As of our last update from Sol, TFC and the Commonwealth Home Fleet have been completely destroyed.”
She shrugged delicately.
“We have reason to believe that a minimum of twenty other capital ships are now headed to Sol and fully support Admiral Rothenberg’s decision to withdraw as soon as possible rather than remain to facilitate, say, cease-fire negotiations.”
An astrographic chart filled the room.
“All fifteen strike fleets are being directed to the Via Somnia fleet base, where they will rendezvous with Forty-First Fleet,” Blake noted. “Given the damage and losses all of these fleets—including Forty-First—have taken, Alliance Joint Command is hesitant to commit to further offensive action.
“If nothing else, it will be six weeks before all of the fleets have returned, and damage may force additional ships to be abandoned en route.”
“How many did we lose?” another Admiral asked.
Blake sighed.
“Including the loss of Elysium—as Admiral Roberts’s endeavors along the frontier were a related operation—we have confirmed the loss of sixty-eight Alliance capital ships.”
The room was now very quiet.
“None of our major allies escaped unscathed, and many of the smaller powers committed everything they could spare…and lost it.
“In exchange,
however, we may have destroyed the Commonwealth,” Blake pointed out. “We have confirmed the destruction of ninety-six Commonwealth starships, at least five hundred Commonwealth defensive platforms, and approximately twenty thousand starfighters.
“Reports are vague, especially in situations where subordinate task forces were badly damaged or destroyed, but we may be looking at as many as fifteen to twenty additional Commonwealth starships destroyed, and possibly as many as forty sufficiently damaged as to be incapable of offensive operations.”
Mira joined the rest of the table in inhaling sharply. That was…crippling. The Alliance losses were crushing, a brutal loss that would take years to recover from, but the Commonwealth Navy had just been gutted.
“While this may seem like the perfect time to launch a new offensive, I must note that we know Walkingstick has accumulated a striking force of sixty-plus capital ships,” Blake continued grimly. “Admiral Roberts bought us that knowledge at the highest possible price.
“There are too few ships currently in Alliance space for us to prepare a counter-operation. It will be three weeks before the first Medusa fleets return home. Six before the last ones do.”
She paused.
“We expect to hear from the Commonwealth Star Chamber in approximately four to five weeks. At that point, whether or not the war will continue will be a political decision.
“Until then, however, we must act on the assumption that Walkingstick may resume his offensives at any time. He lacks many of the tools we rely on in combat these days, but we would be fools to write him off,” Blake said grimly.
“We have every reason to believe this war may be soon be over, but until it is, we must all stand ready to defend our homes!”
Normally, Mira was driven around by Marines or used an override on the usual transit-car network to get around. Today, however, she walked from the towers of the Joint Command to her apartment. Being a flag officer of the Castle Federation Space Navy, that meant that at least two Marines had to walk with her.
They hung back, though, letting her wander silently through the crowds in Castle’s second-largest city. The people around her didn’t have the news she’d had. That Operation Medusa had even occurred, let alone been a complete success, was still restricted to the military.
That their hero, her fiancé, was dead had been leaked. If the story of the war was impacting the lives of the people around her, that was the one they knew. There were still newsreels feeding what little footage had been given; someone was advertising a plan to do a documentary on the life of the Stellar Fox…
It was all the tasteless garbage she would expect around a hero who’d lived large and died in defeat…except they hadn’t even held a funeral, because no one was even certain that Kyle was dead.
And explaining that to a twelve-year-old had been one of the worst tasks Mira Solace had ever taken on.
It sounded like they’d won the war, but no one could be sure yet. There were still shadows and possibilities that could bring everything down in chaos, but Mira Solace had now read the classified psychological profile that had underwritten Operation Medusa.
Without the q-com network, the Commonwealth couldn’t prosecute a war. They might not even be able to hold together as a nation.
And if the largest human civilization in history came down in flames and apocalypse after killing her lover, Mira Solace couldn’t bring herself to cry for them.
45
Via Somnia System
14:00 October 13, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Alliance Forty-First Fleet
It was a strange sensation to be back aboard Avalon for Michelle. It was an even stranger sensation to be, without question, Avalon’s acting CAG.
Every Castle Federation Space Force officer senior to her was dead, though, so that didn’t leave them many options. Hell, she was the only CFSF Vice Commodore left, Wirt having died in the Leopold System along with so many others.
Michelle wasn’t even sure how or why she was still alive—but she was. With their losses, most of their starfighters fit on Avalon. Enough had landed on the battlecruisers and the Imperial ships that the big carrier’s flight deck seemed empty. Unfilled.
If Flight Control felt strange as she watched the countdown to emergence click down on her implant, it wasn’t because the room was different. Avalon and Elysium shared a lot of structure and design, and the primary flight control center looked identical.
But the crew was completely different. Her flight controllers had died with Elysium and Admiral Roberts.
“Emergence in sixty seconds,” someone reported aloud. “Combat Space Patrol ready to go.”
Via Somnia should be safe. They still had links to the systems there via q-com—and the crew had been briefed on Operation Medusa this morning.
Their sacrifices had held Walkingstick’s attention for long enough for the Alliance to sucker-punch the Commonwealth. It was worth it; Michelle knew that.
Didn’t make the empty bunks in flight country hurt less. Didn’t make the fact that she’d lost a carrier hurt less.
It sure as Void didn’t make losing the Admiral hurt less.
“Emergence!”
Avalon’s acting CAG had no business on the CSP. Neither did the fleet CAG. That left Michelle in the flight control center, watching sixty of her people go into space without her.
In theory, Via Somnia was safe. In practice, they’d stripped it as bare as they could without it being obvious, but there still, thankfully, didn’t appear to be any Commonwealth ships here.
Hopefully, there was enough equipment left for Forty-First Fleet’s desperately needed repairs.
For the second time in barely more than a week, the starships of Forty-First Fleet tucked themselves into the repair yards at Via Somnia. There were no yard workers to help them out this time, though. The repairs would have to be done by the crews themselves.
Gathering aboard Avalon with the other CAGs and Captains, Michelle wondered what the news was going to be. No one was even sure who was supposed to be in command of Forty-First Fleet at the moment. Everything was in question.
Elijah Hammond, Avalon’s Captain, was standing at the head of the room with Lord Captain the Elector Maria von Kita of the Righteous Sword, however, so that was somewhat suggestive.
“Everyone have a seat,” Hammond ordered. “I believe now is as good a time as any to pull us all together in person and go over what our plans for the next four weeks are.
Four weeks? That sounded quite specific.
“Lord Captain von Kita and I, as the senior Captains, have been in discussion with Alliance Joint Command as to what we are going to do from here on out,” he continued. “Lord Captain von Kita is senior to myself, so I have officially yielded command to her.”
“Avalon remains our largest and most powerful unit, however,” von Kita continued as Hammond stepped aside, “so Captain Hammond will continue to act as my second-in-command until I am relieved.
“And we have confirmed with Joint Command that I will be relieved,” she noted. “What we were briefed on today that has not yet been made public knowledge, even in the fleet, is that the Medusa fleets will be falling back on Via Somnia.
“All four of the Federation’s Myth and Truth-class mobile shipyards are on their way here, as well as an unspecified—but likely large!—number of freighters and transports carrying supplies, parts, starfighters and replacement personnel.
“The first fleets will be returning in about nineteen days. Seventh Fleet under Admiral Rothenberg is expected on November tenth. At that point”—von Kita smiled predatorily—“we expect to have consolidated approximately one hundred capital ships in the Via Somnia System to be repaired and rearmed.
“We hope to have our own vessels fully functional by the time Admiral Rothenberg arrives,” she noted. “My understanding is that Seventh Fleet took severe damage and may not have a significant number of combat-capable units.
“Other fleets will be
following, however, and while the exact execution date is going to be left to Admiral Rothenberg’s discretion, the information Captain Hammond and I have received from Joint Command is that, barring a Commonwealth surrender, the Niagara System will fall before December.
“One way or another, people, Command intends to make sure that James Walkingstick does not threaten our worlds again!”
46
Niagara System
18:00 November 8, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Ontario Orbit
“What in Void is that?”
James Calvin Walkingstick chuckled at the disconcerted tone of his flag staff sensor tech’s voice.
“That, Specialist, is an Alcubierre-Stetson drive courier ship,” he explained, studying the strange, bulging ship on the display. His neural feed was time-stamping the data, informing him that the Cherenkov radiation pulse of the ship’s emergence was over two minutes old.
The courier’s commander had taken no risks with his emergence. Given that he must have left Sol within two days of the destruction of the q-com network and come directly here, that made sense to James. If the message was important enough for that rush, it was important enough to spend the extra hour or so of sublight transit time to not risk having the courier vaporized.
To an eye used to the massive, kilometer-plus lengths and solid hulls of modern A-S drive warships and freighters, the courier was strange. The four Class One mass manipulators that powered her Alcubierre drive made up roughly eighty percent of her volume, massive bulging spheres attached to a central hull barely large enough to keep the Class Ones from just being welded together.
The only part of the ship that remotely rivaled the mass manipulators for size was the engine pods at the rear of the ship. Antimatter engines were already blazing to life, accelerating toward Ontario and the Niagara Fleet Base at five hundred gravities.
Operation Medusa Page 29
