"Weapons, knock out those missiles."
"Too late, sir."
Jin Rai watched in horror as fires blossomed across half the continent. The six missiles each blossomed into a cluster of five and struck the planet at over a tenth of the speed of light, and each twenty-five-megaton warhead blasted everything within fifty kilometers of its impact point, seven hundred fifty megatons of destruction in all. The shockwaves propagated outward; they would eventually sweep all the way around the planet.
And that was just the first wave of missiles.
Tebrey had been slowed down getting to his armor and weapons.
The alarms started a few minutes after he left the interrogation room. Either the commodore had regained consciousness enough to call out the guard, or the MPs had stopped by the room and discovered the carnage within. Either way, Tebrey was in trouble.
He'd sent a data-pulse to the Arcadia, but he had no idea if it had reached them, or how they would respond.
In his armor, he was invulnerable to small arms fire, and he knew the enemy marines would be hesitant to use heavier weapons while he was still inside the base for fear of hitting their own people. He was surprised at how quickly they had become the enemy in his mind; not so long ago, they were his people.
He was still thinking that when the shock wave from the first orbital strike blasted him from his feet. Plascrete exploded around him as he was sent tumbling through a building. The chain-link of the perimeter fence barely slowed him down, and he tore through several small trees before rolling to a stop.
His powered armor hadn't lost integrity, but it hadn't been designed to protect the wearer from that kind of kinetic trauma. The missile had donated within twenty kilometers of his position. Tebrey's arms and legs had flailed wildly as he tumbled, often being bent in ways the human body wasn't meant to bend. Pain overwhelmed him. He was aware of twisted and shattered bone all through his body. His flesh, while tougher than that of most people, was torn and bleeding. His neural shunts were barely enough to keep him conscious, and his armor worked overtime pumping him full of pain medications, anti-shock drugs, and artificial blood.
He was aware of Hunter coming to find him through the howling winds. The neo-panther had been hiding in a culvert, waiting for Tebrey. That had saved Hunter from the worst effects of the shock wave. Fortunately, the blast had been far enough away to diminish the thermal effects.
Tebrey's suit sensors had been smashed when he went face first through the steel-reinforced plascrete wall of the building. His perceptions told him when Hunter was close, though. He knew that his companion was trying to drag him to the culvert. Hunter's metallic teeth made grating noises on Tebrey's armor, high-pitched and painfully loud inside his helmet.
You want to try dragging someone without your hands? Hunter thought.
Sorry, Hunter. I don't think I could move at all on my own.
I know, Hunter replied. Would I be dragging you if I thought you could? Worry tinged his thoughts.
Another presence made itself known. If you want to live, you need to come with me.
Hunter? Tebrey's could feel his mind fading.
Emerald is here, Hunter said. He says that there are more missiles on the way in. Some of them are aimed directly at us.
We can't survive direct hits!
We need to go now, Emerald thought to them.
Do it! Tebrey thought desperately. He didn't care what the consequences would be; he just didn't want to die.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Mushroom clouds blossomed across the continent as missiles slipped past the Manticore's defenses and blasted the planet. The bridge crew was stunned speechless in horror. They all knew someone on the planet below. They all knew that those people were dead.
"Communications, order those ships to stand down and prepare to be boarded." Jin Rai said coldly.
"No response, Captain."
"Sir, they are powering their engines!"
Captain Joseph Jin Rai shook his head in disbelief. He had never before heard of a Federation ship firing on civilians like this. The Fleet was even hesitant to fire on the cities of their enemies; Earth-like planets were a rare commodity. "We cannot allow them to get away with this," he said quietly. "Target their engines."
"Sir?"
"On my orders," he grated out. "Fire on those vessels, now. Don't let them get away."
"Captain! Now the Manticore is firing on the two ships that attacked the planet!"
Torenth closed his eyes in pain. He hadn't seen a world die since the Nurgg War, but there was little doubt that was what he was witnessing. A terrestrial-type world couldn't take this many hits and remain habitable. Over a hundred warheads had detonated on the surface in a span of minutes. Those who had died in the blasts were the lucky ones. Everyone else on Prism would be dead in a few weeks from the fallout and the bitter cold that would descend upon the planet – eternal night for a thousand years. The thought sickened him.
"Helm, jump us in close and support that destroyer," Torenth ordered." Do not fire weapons unless we are fired upon."
"Jumping in like that is going to scare them, sir. Those ships might fire on us out of surprise."
"I'm counting on it," Torenth said grimly. "What's the status of our contact on the planet?"
"Lt. Commander Tebrey's datalink went dead just after the first strike, sir."
Torenth nodded. "So he's dead. Relay the situation back to Fleet Command. This is going to be the diplomatic mess of the century."
The Arcadia leapt through space to appear ten thousand kilometers behind the FSS Manticore, the hydrogen wake from reentry briefly confusing the enemy.
Most of the crew of the Federation Cruiser FSS Steadfast died before the first missile had even been fired. The survivors cringed in terror from the horror that had devoured the rest. None of the crewmembers had wanted to fire on the planet, but the thing causing them pain gave them little choice. Death was not an option.
The captain was still alive, if the mewling, bloody creature crying on the deck could really be called alive. The thing had tortured the captain until the man had ceased to entertain it. That had been ample motivation for the bridge crew to comply with its demands.
They simply didn't want to be tortured like that – couldn't be. No one could face that kind of pain. The basic human need for survival took over, and they did what they were told, hoping that it would let them live if they did, knowing somewhere deep inside that the same fate awaited them anyway.
The thing had hissed in anger when the Manticore fired on the Harbinger. No one on the bridge had spoken to anyone on that other ship, but it was clear to them that the other ship had been attacked and subverted as well. Both ships had fired on the planet at the same time.
"Destroy that ship," the thing said. Its voice sounded like a medley of all the people it had ever made scream.
The Steadfast rolled on its z-axis and opened fire on the Manticore.
Space was filled with flashing particle beams and atomic detonations. The Manticore had succeeded in disabling the engines of the Harbinger, but the ship was still fighting even as it tumbled. The Steadfast's sudden attack had half blinded the Manticore. The ships were only fifty thousand kilometers apart at the beginning of the battle, and that distance had been closing steadily.
Missiles flashed between them, and overloaded point defense systems barely had time to target them before the ships were hit. The Manticore had been hesitant at first to fire upon the two ships with more than the intent to cripple. The two rogue ships had no such inhibitions. They wanted their attacker dead.
Direct and near-miss nuclear blasts rocked the Manticore, and her armor plating began to glow a ruddy orange. The thermal superconducting layer couldn't shed heat quickly enough. Inside the ship, thermal bleed-through boiled hundreds of crewmembers to death in hurricanes of super-heated air before blast doors could seal. As the gunnery crews were killed, the defensive fire tapered off, and the Manticore was left wide open t
o attack.
"She can't take much more, Captain."
Torenth clenched his fists in rage. He knew that any action on his part could be considered an act of war, but he couldn't sit and watch the Manticore die. He just couldn't.
"Activate our point defense," Torenth ordered. "Move us in between the Manticore and those two ships, and launch our fighters."
The CSS Arcadia was a top-of-the-line battle cruiser, her point defense much better than that of any Federation ship, even of equivalent class or higher. Incoming missiles were destroyed almost before they cleared the enemy's tubes.
The two ships redirected all of their attacks onto the Arcadia.
"I'd call that an act of aggression," Torenth said calmly. "Destroy those ships."Missiles and space combat fighters flashed out from the Acadia. The superior ECM of the Concord missiles confounded the weakened point defenses of the two Federation ships, and they were rocked by hit after hit as the Arcadia moved inside the minimum safe missile range. The smaller fighters curved along the hulls of the ships, picking off weapons batteries, further degrading their point defense.
The enemy's powerful primary laser cannon carved away weapons and sensors from the Arcadia, and the shorter-ranged maser cannon punched deep into the forward decks. The Arcadia responded with plasma cannon fire and pinpoint graser beams that tore out the vitals of the rogue ships.
One of the beams hit a forward fusion reactor on the Harbinger, and the ship was wracked with chain reactions and secondary explosions. The Arcadia's fighters turned away and concentrated on the Steadfast. The Harbinger tumbled along, no longer firing, until it finally exploded as its engines went critical.
The Steadfast irrationally tried to fire missiles at the Arcadia from a range of less than five thousand kilometers; point defense fire destroyed the missiles while they were still in the tubes. Tortured hull-metal peeled back for a hundred meters along the flanks of the battered cruiser as the expanding plasma blew the ship open from within.
The Steadfast ceased firing and began to tumble, trailing atmosphere and debris.
"Cease fire." Torenth selected a com channel on his command screen. "Lt. Commander Kjartin Holstein," he said. Holstein was the Arcadia's marine commander.
"Captain," Holstein acknowledged.
"Send boarding parties over to that ship. I want prisoners for interrogation, Commander," said Torenth. "I want to know why they did this. Be prepared for anything, Commander." He didn't say Theta, but he didn't have to. He knew his commander well enough to know he'd take precautions. "Communications, try to raise the Manticore."
A few minutes later, ten assault shuttles left the Arcadia.
Chapter Fifty-Three
"I'd like you to explain to me just what the hell you thought you were doing," Admiral Joseph Macklin said irritably over the secure com channel.
"I did what I felt was appropriate, sir," Torenth replied calmly.
"Jesus Christ in an orbital shuttle, man!" the admiral exploded. "You weren't supposed to start an interstellar war! Why were you even in the system?"
"Sir, my orders came from Admiral Shadovsky. You know that I can't disclose the contents of those orders."
"Admiral Shadovsky is not your superior officer," Macklin growled. "He's not even a field officer!"
"No, sir, but he has filed those orders under Article Six. That means he has precedence in this matter. It was my understanding that the order had been cleared through your office."
"I'll certainly be taking it up with him, Captain. Don't think that you've heard the last of this."
Torenth's screen went blank; he sat back in his chair and rubbed his temples.
"Captain?" came a call from the bridge. "Another transmission for you, sir."
Torenth sighed. "Patch whoever it is through, Lieutenant."
"Well, Raoko," Mandor said a moment later, "you screwed the pooch on this one, didn't you?"
"Not you, too, sir."
"I'm not blaming you, Captain. I'm just saying that we have a hell of a shit storm coming down on us. Thank the gods the captain of the Manticore survived and sent over troops to support your boarding action. That was a bad spot of work if I've ever seen it."
"It was grim, sir. It is probable that the situation on the other ship was just as bad as it was on the Steadfast. If it had been up to me, I would have shot everyone aboard."
"Raoko! It wasn't their fault. What would any crew do under those circumstances?"
"You misunderstand me, Admiral. I would have shot them out of mercy. What is left of that crew is never really going to be called human again."
Mandor nodded in solemn agreement. He'd seen the transmission log from the marine teams who went aboard the Steadfast. The Theta that attacked the ship had had hours to work on the crew, and it had evidently taken great pleasure in destroying them in new and horrifying ways. Unlike most of the Thetas encountered, this one had kept the results of its labors still alive, after a fashion.
"There is another matter I wished to discuss with you, Admiral," Torenth said.
"What is it?"
"Hrothgar Tebrey was on the planet when the attacks began. We lost contact with his datalink just after the first missile..."
Mandor Shadovsky sat quietly in his office with the lights off after he talked with Torenth. He didn't know what to think of what had happened. War was coming, he was sure of that, but what about Tebrey? He had been so sure that the young man was going to be important to fighting the Thetas; the Rhyrhans had all but confirmed it. And what was he going to tell Ana, the young woman who often, painfully, reminded him of his own daughter?
"Mandor?"
"Come in, Bruce. Sit down."
"What's the matter?" Bruce asked. "I've never seen you like this."
Mandor took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "You know that the Arcadia was diverted to Vesuvius to rescue Lt. Commander Tebrey, right?"
"Yes."
"They recued Tebrey and the remaining crew of the Centaur – damn Macklin for not sending a ship; less than two hundred of the crew survived – and Torenth took them to Prism for medical aid."
"Seems reasonable," replied Bruce. "The Federation didn't fire on the Arcadia, did they?"
"No. But some of the ships seem to have been subverted, and they nuked the planet. It looks like a total loss. Three to four billion people dead, including Tebrey."
"Oh," Bruce said quietly. "You had high hopes for him, didn't you?"
"I did, and I've become fond of his wife. She is a good woman and deserves better than this."
"No one deserves to die," said Bruce. "Was it a clean death, or did the enemy…?"
"He died when the base was nuked."
"Any chance…?"
"Not a chance in hell," Mandor replied. "No ships made it off the surface. The base he was in got hit multiple times with twenty-five megaton warheads. No one could have survived that."
Bruce nodded in sympathy. "So what now?"
"I think Ana deserves to be told in person, not through a message. She'll need her friends with her. Bring them in when they all gets back from Cedeforthy."
"Do you want Bauval and Mason?'
"Yes, bring them in, too. She's going to need the support."
"What's wrong?" Ana asked as they entered the office.
Mandor could only look at her sadly.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "No, it isn't possible." The color drained from her face, and she looked close to fainting. Ana had said that something was wrong but hadn't been able to tell what it was. She had been feeling disoriented for the last week. Mason now knew that Ana's strange feeling was from her husband going missing from her life. She didn't know how Ana was going to survive without him.
"What's going on?" Mason asked.
"I received word while Ana was in transit," said Mandor. "Prism was attacked and destroyed from orbit a week ago."
"Tebrey?" asked Bauval.
Mandor shook his head slowly. He was watching Ana. "I'm so sor
ry," he said.
Mason helped Ana to sit, and Bruce brought over a tray with hot tea, and then left.
Tonya was standing near the door. She looked confused and conflicted.
"It is possible he survived, though, right?" Mason pleaded. "They can't have done a complete sweep for survivors yet."
"Our ship in orbit was monitoring his datalink," said Mandor. "Transmission was lost just as three multiple-warhead missiles hit the base where he was stationed. The combined force was around three hundred seventy-five megatons. He could not have survived."
"How could something like this happen?" Bauval asked. "Was it the Empire?"
"The reports are mixed," Mandor said, shaking his head again. "Our ship in orbit, the Arcadia, says that two Federation ships opened fire on the planet for no apparent reason. After the battle, they determined that the ships had been subverted by Thetas. Another ship in orbit, the FSS Manticore, tried to defend the planet but was badly damaged in the fighting. The Arcadia assisted the Manticore in destroying the other two ships."
"What is the response from the Federation?"
"They are claiming that the Arcadia fired on the planet in an unprovoked act of aggression."
"Dear God," Mason exclaimed. "That will mean war."
"Yes," Mandor replied. "I'm afraid it will."
Ana laid her head on his desk and began to sob. No one knew what to say. There was nothing anyone could say that would ease her pain.
Tonya moved across the room, knelt and held Ana. Ana clung to her and cried. They had become close in the weeks that they had been together. Ghost pressed her head against Ana's back, and the three of them sat uncomfortably in the center of the room.
Mason was still in shock. She didn't know what to say or do. Ana was like a daughter to her. They had known each other for almost a year, and Mason regretted that she had refused to go to Cedeforthy with her. Mason had lost her own family when they thought her dead on Cedeforthy. After she returned, they hadn't known how to act toward her. Her children were grown, and her husband had moved on. She and Bauval had an understanding, but she missed her family. She had been very close to Tebrey, as well.
The Fallen Page 28
