The Landfall Campaign (The Nameless War)

by Edmond Barrett

“Contact separation! They’re firing.”

  “Target?” Eulenburg snapped.

  There was a pause.

  “They’re targeting satellites, sir. No particular group, just anything that gets close. We’ve lost one of the orbital passive arrays.

  “To be expected,” Eulenburg murmured to Reynolds. “That’s going to affect our communications with the other shelters.”

  “After what the Home Fleet did to them sir, they might well be leery about mines,” Gillum added.

  “Possibly Captain.”

  “Command, the closest group is shifting orbital track… sir, they’re lining up on New Lexington.”

  “Shit,” Gillum muttered.

  “Sensors, confirm that please,” Eulenburg asked quietly.

  “That’s confirmed sir. The enemy taskforce is now on correct orbital track to pass directly over New Lexington, in… seven minutes, sir.”

  “Well, that’s that,” Gillum said.

  “Yes,” Eulenburg replied.

  Reynolds stared at them both.

  “You don’t know that they’re going to… do anything, they could be just looking from orbit.”

  Gillum gave a faint but derisive snort.

  “You don’t need to go directly over the top of somewhere to get a good look from orbit, or to fire for that matter. It does make the firing solution easier though.”

  “Is there nothing you can do?” Reynolds demanded

  “No. The fighters can’t rearm in time. They’d be hopelessly vulnerable as they tried to break atmosphere. It was a mistake to support Hampton Roads, we should have held them back,” Eulenburg replied without taking his eyes off the display. “All we can do is watch and learn what we can.”

  The near silence returned but at the edge of his hearing, Eulenburg could hear the communications officer holding the connection to New Lexington, begging whoever was on the other end to run.

  “Contact separation! Ordnance inbound!” called out a sensor operator.

  “Firer was unidentified enemy warship,” called out another, “provisionally identifying type as Bombard.”

  “Ordnance entering atmosphere, forty-three seconds to splash.”

  Those were the longest seconds of Eulenburg’s life. On one of the displays was video from a surviving weather satellite. He could see a fiery streak as the projectile plunged down through Landfall’s atmosphere. Then abruptly it disappeared in a sudden brilliant flash, which in turn disappeared as thousands of tons of earth and rock were thrown skyward. The cloud expanded blotting out the surface.

  “Oh my God,” Reynolds said in a stunned voice.

  The British Governor’s breathless exclamation was like a trigger for Four C to leap back into life.

  “Confirm, direct hit on New Lexington. New Lexington airfield control tower has ceased transmitting.”

  “Command. Projectile appears to be a kinetic strike weapon, estimated yield twenty megatons.”

  “Sir, we have a report channelled from Endeavour Base. The tracking station at Canavan has just been destroyed.”

  “I think the Americans had that one fully automated, at least I hope they did,” Gillum said. “There aren’t that many places still transmitting. Looks like the methodical bastards plan to hit them all.”

  “Command. The enemy task force that just hit New Lexington is altering orbit again.

  “Are they coming for us?” Reynolds asked. For all her horror just moments before, her voice was remarkably steady now.

  “We’ll find out very soon.” Eulenburg replied.

  “Orbital track stabilising. Command, enemy task group has altered course towards us. They’ll pass over Douglas in nineteen minutes sir.”

  “There’s our answer,” Gillum replied. “Admiral, permission to bring missile defence to full readiness.”

  Eulenburg looked up at one of the displays showing the surface of the base. The resolution wasn’t high enough to make out individuals, only the thousands of men, women and children waiting to get back into the shelter. This was the moment he had feared. Douglas Base was minutes away from changing from a glorified storage depot to a place of war, while he made the final switch from staff officer to military leader.

  “Yes… set the missiles to standby, order fire control to start generating a firing solution.”

  “Sir, should I inform Brigadier Chevalier?” Gillum asked.

  “Yes, yes we’d better do that,” the Admiral agreed after a long pause.

  ___________________________

  “Sir, sir!” the command radio operator called out. “Signal from Four C. New Lexington has just been hit. Orbital strike, they blew it off the map!”

  “Is that all?” Chevalier snapped back him.

  “The enemy squadron is coming for us. ETA, under twenty minutes.”

  “That’s the important information,” Chevalier snarled at the young man before turning away.

  Hundreds of soldiers with raised voices, fists and rifle butts fought to keep order. Groups of civilian policemen from the colonies raced back and forth to hot spots, trying to calm tempers, and settle arguments about people’s place in the queue. The sense of barely contained panic was so strong Chevalier could almost taste it in the air. He flicked his radio over to one of his sub-commander’s frequency.

  “Colonel Pickette.”

  “Pickette here.”

  “Colonel, we have enemy starships inbound. Missile defence will almost certainly have to fire within the next fifteen minutes. We must move these people further back from the silos.”

  “I can tell you right now sir, that just flat out isn’t going to happen,” Pickette’s voice crackled back. “We’re barely holding them back where they are now. The only thing that’s going to force these people back is lethal force and that would sort of defeat the purpose.”

  “Keep trying Colonel. Over and out.”

  Chevalier glanced up at the grey sky and then back at the squat grey silos. If those missiles fired, with people as close as they were, there were going to be casualties. Then abruptly things got worse.

  Close to the nearest silo, a siren began to sound a long mournful wail. After a few seconds the concrete caps started to slide aside. Even the dimmest civilian knew what this meant. The effect was instant and disastrous.

  Up and down the line there were screams and shouts as people panicked en masse. The hundreds of soldiers trying to hold the line were simply overwhelmed as thousands of people start to run between the silos directly for the shelter entrance. Everywhere Chevalier looked people were running, falling or being trampled.

  “Get away from the silos!” he shouted, but his voice was lost amidst the pandemonium. “Take us in!” he shouted at his driver and with a spray of dirt the scout car took off. The driver took the car into the middle of the swarm as Chevalier shouted but it was hopeless. Then thirty metres away he saw a woman carrying a toddler get knocked off her feet. As he watched she tried to rise but the stampede forced her down. Even as she was trampled she tried to shield her child.

  Chevalier reached over and yanked the steering wheel round. They didn’t get far before they reached an almost solid wall of humanity and his driver stood on the brake. As the scout car slid to a halt, Chevalier was up and out of the machine. There was no way an average man could have made his way through the throng, but with his personal armour and its strength amplifying frame, Chevalier forced his way through and dragged the bloodied woman to her feet, her child still clutched in her arms. As he turned to drag them both to the safety of the scout car he heard a rumble in the distance. Chevalier looked round with an expression of horror to see smoke billowing out of two silos. From deep within came the rumble of chemical rockets lighting up.

  Chevalier virtually threw the woman into the sheltered lee of the scout car before throwing himself over her. His driver vaulted out of the car and joined Chevalier on the ground. Then two missiles erupted from their silos, belching out flame and smoke.

  Brigadier Chevalier
had time for a prayer that he might be just far enough away, then everything went black.

  ___________________________

  “Hostiles are now in range,” came in the report from radar. “Hostiles will be in optimum position to fire on us in four minutes.”

  “Command, Coms. Anshan Base has signalled that the second bombard is approaching them. Tracking data is provided.”

  Gillum examined the data from the Chinese base.

  “Looks like the hammer is going to fall here first, sir,” he observed.

  Eulenburg had to swallow several times before his mouth managed to generate any saliva.

  “Fire Control, report,” he asked.

  “Command, ready missiles are at condition two. We have a firing solution generated for the Bombard plus its escort. I recommend firing from silos B and D.”

  “Recommendation accepted.” Even as he spoke, Eulenburg hoped that the tremble he could hear in his voice was just a figment of his own imagination.

  “Command, I request authorisation to open silo doors and set missiles to condition one.”

  “Authorisation granted.”

  On the display the red dots signifying the alien ships continued to creep towards them.

  “Admiral!” Eulenburg spun towards the shout. A junior lieutenant pointed up at one of the displays of the surface. Thousands of people were running directly for the shelter entrance, through the blast zone of the silos.

  “Oh no,” Eulenburg whispered.

  “Command, enemy ships approaching optimum firing position. Request weapons release authorisation,” asked the Fire Control officer.

  Eulenburg stared at the screen, horrified by what he saw.

  “Command, request weapons release authorisation. Do I have permission to fire?”

  “Admiral,” Gillum shouted, “we have to fire! We have to fire our missiles!”

  “But the people…”

  “Sir, they will all be dead if we get hit from orbit!”

  Eulenburg closed his eyes.

  “Weapons Control, Fire.”

  Deep within Silo B the missile waited. Although seventy metres tall, the nose of the missile was still another fifty metres below the surface. The missile had already deployed sideways out of its storage bay and into the launch position. The three other missiles that shared Silo B still waited behind their blast shields. Above a tiny blue grey circle of light was visible where the silo cap had opened.

  Targeting data downloaded into the missile from the fire control computers far below in Four C. Fuel started to flow into the reaction chambers of the first stage chemical rockets. Then at a final electrical command the rocket motors fired and the missile lifted away.

  It took three seconds for the missile to clear the silo. As the engine nozzles cleared the lip they vomited flames over everything and everyone within hundreds of metres, killing scores of the very people they were designed to protect. But the missile’s computer wasn’t programmed to notice such things. A thousand metres away a second missile burst from Silo D and together they climbed into the sky, their internal radars already seeking the target. At an altitude of seventeen kilometres their chemical rockets shut down and fell away. With barely a pause the fusion engines came online and the rate of acceleration increased fivefold. In spite of this rapid progress at this stage of their climb the missiles were still vulnerable. At fifty kilometres, dispensers started to launch chaff to confuse any possible counter weapons.

  The Nameless ship couldn’t have missed seeing the launches from the surface but they were slow to react. The bombard began to take evasive action but it wasn’t a ship designed for great manoeuvrability. Its escorts were starting to close on their larger brethren when the two human missiles breached Landfall’s atmosphere.

  Small charges fired within the missile nose cones, breaking them into segments that fell away like the petals of a flower. Revealed within each were four sub-munition missiles and their three companion decoys. As counter missiles from the escorts curved downwards to intercept, the submunitions blasted clear of their housings, leaving the burnt out husks to be blown apart. Rather than two big targets the Nameless were abruptly faced by fourteen small ones. The six decoys raced ahead, their transmitters squealing noise across all the radio bands while jettisoning reflectors that matched the radar profiles of the missiles behind. The bombard and its escorts were faced with too many targets and too little time to sort through them. Of the eight missiles, three were destroyed, two missed completely, one demolished an escort and the final two punched into the bombard.

  The missiles gouged out two massive wounds, atmosphere gushed out and secondary explosions wracked the ship. The mutilated starship crossed over the top of Douglas but was no longer in any condition to respond in kind.

  Far below in Four C there were no cheers or shouts, just the sound of men and women analysing the information from their computers. In the command booth Eulenburg said nothing as he watched.

  “Admiral, the bombard is breaking orbit. It’s withdrawing, sir.”

  “Sir, Anshan is signalling that the bombard on approach to them has pulled away. Looks like they’ve figured out we have teeth.”

  “Yes,” Eulenburg replied, “Now we find out what its cost us. Coms. Please raise Brigadier Chevalier.”

  “Yes sir,” the coms officer replied, “marine command online.”

  “Sebastian, what’s the situation?”

  There was a pause on the line and then a voice, not the one he expected replied.

  “Admiral, this is Colonel Pickette.”

  “Colonel, where is the Brigadier?” Eulenburg asked, who even as he spoke could feel his gut twist in anticipation of the answer.

  “I’m sorry sir, the Brigadier is down.”

  Chapter Seven

  Diplomatic Feelers

  13th January 2067,

  “So, anything come up over night?” Temporary Ambassador Chris Byrne asked as he padded into the main Embassy situation room.

  “The file is just being compiled. Coffee, sir?” the secretary, his secretary now, asked.

  “Yes, thank you Craig,” Chris replied with a smile. It was definitely nice being the boss. If he played his cards right he might even make it permanent. “What’s the weather like today?”

  “Minus seven degrees centigrade.”

  “Hmm, positively cosy.”

  Rather than sit he wandered over to the quadruple-glazed main window and looked out at the tundra beyond. The Combined Earth Embassy on the world of Phton was the most important diplomatic posting anywhere within the service and in some ways the most dreaded. Phton’s orbit around its star was a wide ellipse. Which meant that approximately a quarter of the planet’s four-hundred-and-fifty-three day year was spent beyond the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone, the orbital region in which water could exist as a liquid. So every year Phton plunged into a mini ice age, to emerge four months later. Even during the height of summer it was bloody cold and definitely not a climate that in any way suited humans. Ambassador Hinson had been sent home a fortnight earlier with pneumonia. It was no wonder the Mhar, the planet’s dominant life form, bore at least a passing resemblance to Earth’s polar bears.

  If it had been for just the Mhar themselves, then the Embassy would have been much smaller. Indeed, humanity might not even have kept a permanent embassy at all. But both humans and the Aèllr discovered Phton at roughly the same time, approximately fifteen years after the end of the Contact War at a time when the ensuing cold war between the two former belligerents was well under way. The Mhar were just about a spacefaring civilisation, although not at that stage capable of interstellar travel. For a while both sides jostled for position, trying to bring the Mhar into their camp. Then finally a different route was taken, the Three Planets Treaty was signed and the Mhar became the hosts of the only point of direct contact between Earth and the Aèllr Confederacy of Worlds. That made it the most important human embassy in existence. If you could survive the cold, you were m
ade.

  “Good morning Mister Ambassador,” said Battle Fleet Commodore Latawski, the Embassy’s military liaison officer. “I have the morning briefing.”

  The Commodore was as usual immaculately dressed and as he took the computer pad Chris felt a brief twinge of guilt at still being in his dressing gown. Most of what was on the pad was very run of the mill, prompting Chris to think to himself that it would be nice if something significant were to happen. His attempt to open diplomatic contact with the Nameless the year before had been a failure, but it had raised his profile. That had got him the Assistant Ambassador post and it would be nice if he could now turn his temporary elevation into a permanent one. As that thought crossed his mind Chris scanned across the last item on the list, then abruptly read it again.

  An Aèllr personnel transport had arrived in orbit overnight, dropping a single shuttle. It didn’t look unusual on the face of it but the devil was in the detail. The new arrival was from the Aèllr world of Otiu - the most recently founded of their daughter worlds, settled only about forty odd years earlier. Its population was tiny - barely into the six-figure range and its government had no direct contact with any other outside the Confederacy. So one of their ships certainly had no reason to be orbiting the Mhar homeworld.

  “Who did this transport deliver?” Chris asked as he tapped the computer pad.

  “We don’t know, sir,” Latawski replied, before adding ruefully: “this climate always gives a very good excuse for people to be heavily wrapped up and concealed. That was one thing sir, our source at the space port seemed to think this arrival was unexpected by the Aèllr Embassy.”

  “Oh?”

  “They didn’t have anyone waiting.”

  “That is odd.” Chris tapped the pad against his palm as he thought. Could mean something or could mean nothing at all. There were those, both on Earth and in the Embassy, who believed it was only a matter of time before the Confederacy took some kind of advantage of humanity’s preoccupation with the Nameless. “Alright, I’ll be getting dressed. I want us to put out whatever feelers we have. Aèllr don’t go in for winter sports, whoever this is must be here for a reason. Anything else?”