Hausman sat in his raised command chair and surveyed the rising chaos. He was a portly sort of man who liked to be on view before his subordinates. He wore a very-recently fabricated dress uniform that gleamed white and gold, with all his old general insignia and awards, plus a dozen new ones that he himself had a hand in designing.
Around the walls of the command and control room stood the motionless figures of the cyborgs created for him by Taranis Industries—a distant corporate sister of NeuroTech and AgroMore. Their part-metal, part-flesh faces were completely impassive, and the particle-beam hands at their sides were totally impassive. Just as they always were.
“Steady, boys…” Hausman muttered to his crew. He knew the deal, or what Taranis and the Chosen of Mars had said was the deal: The Ru’at would take the colonies, and he would have Earth. He had already made the final move of his operation: to nuke the Confederate Council in New York and declare General Asquew the culprit.
The Ru’at had seen to the end of Asquew’s First Rapid Response Fleet, Hausman knew, which only left Rapid Response Fleet 2.
But Hausman hadn’t been overly worried about RR2, as reports from Neptune had indicated that Pluto had been a disaster for Asquew. She had lost one of her best battleships, and the rest of the RR2 had been engaged in a skirmish-conflict with the Ru’at jump-ships.
And if just eight of the Ru’at jump-ships could destroy the Invincible, then Hausman rather hoped that the rest would have made short work of RR2.
But then, why has the mothership come here, to Earth?
“We got visuals, General,” called one of his soldiers at her station.
“Overhead,” Hausman said gruffly, maintaining his stern demeanor at all times.
On the central view screen at one end of the command and control room, there appeared the overlaid images of the near-listening posts. The picture fuzzed and glitched before settling into an enhanced-color image of the gigantic Ru’at mothership as it powered around the Moon without thrusters or plumes of plasma.
Its size was vast, and Hausman could see the complicated, moving internal machineries, although he couldn’t make out what their purpose really was.
“Near-Earth Fleet set to ready, sir,” called one of his tactical officers.
“Maintain their positions, officer!” Hausman barked. He didn’t want to start an interstellar war with his allies just yet.
“The ship is cresting the Moon’s shadow in T-minus ten seconds, sir,” his navigation officer called. “She’ll be registered by Earth’s defense satellite network.”
Hausman knew what his officer was saying. That the sphere of missile-loaded defense satellites would ping the mothership for identification, and after it received none, it would wait until the mothership had breached the customary no-fly zone and fire automatically.
“Cancel defense satellite auto-fire!” Hausman called. Maybe they had come to parlay. Maybe they had come to meet the new leader of the human race, as equals.
The Ru’at had come to do no such thing, however.
Bzzt! Under Hausman’s large hands, the control pad on his armrests buzzed an urgent call. Private channel.
Sender: Jump-ship #34.
Channel: Alpha-Gold 01.
Hausman accepted the message, patching it through to his wireless earbud. Jump-ship #34 was part of the strike group he had sent to seize the ECH and destroy the Test Fleet. Rather annoyingly, he didn’t have the Tier 1 higher command codes in order to activate the Test Fleet himself, so he had known the correct tactical decision had been to remove it from enemy hands.
There was no way he was going to let Asquew get her wizened hands on it, anyway. And once the automated fleet was down, he would have all the time in the world to crack the ECH’s command codes.
Just as soon as he found out what the Ru’at wanted, that was.
“Speak,” he said out loud, and the message from Jump-ship #34 began.
“Urgent Priority 1 message for Commander-in-Chief Hausman. Operation Salt has failed—”
“What!?” Hausman jerked upright in his chair, earning a few more worried glances from the people around him.
“Someone activated the ECH Test Fleet against us. Request immediate dreadnaught deployment to secure the area. There’s only one CMC fighter remaining of the strike group, as well as the Marine transport, and of course ourselves…”
“Off.” Hausman banged his hand on the armrest, not even bothering to give stand-down orders or recognition of their efforts. He was not the sort of man who rewarded, or even recognized, failure.
Asquew must have reached the ECH. Somehow, she managed to find the codes or hack the Test Fleet, Hausman knew. How much of a problem would that be?
“A major one,” the man murmured to himself. It wasn’t that the Test Fleet was particularly much of a threat to his control—it was a small number of ships, all told—but now Asquew would be able to coordinate strike raids with the help of the super-black surveillance network, which would cause him no end of trouble in the months and years to come.
“Why didn’t they do their job!” Hausman glared at the Ru’at mothership. It was supposed to take out Asquew for him. This was meant to be a partnership!
But the Ru’at didn’t recognize allies. Especially not from biological humans with none of their own DNA inside them.
All around the room, the cyborgs suddenly raised their particle-beam hands, and Hausman heard the whine as they cycled up.
“What is going on? Stand down! I command it!” Hausman managed to shout imperiously, just before they fired.
Outside the glowing curve of the Moon, the Ru’at mothership emerged from the darkness like a predatory shark as it crested into view above the cradle of humanity.
Earth.
From its underside emerged many small shapes, ejected from opening ports into the complicated body of the disk itself….
Ru’at jump-ships, dropping from the belly of their mother like a cloud of locusts. They had to number in the tens, twenties.
Perhaps even hundreds.
18
Endgame
With the many flashes and glares of erupting light, General Asquew and the last of her fleet rippled into the space around the ECH.
From the command chamber inside, Solomon watched the arriving stragglers, and his heart plummeted. They were a fraction of what they once had been. He could make out only two of the large, fat-bellied battleships, where once there would have been ten or more. He could see one—one!—Marine transporter loaded with CMC fighters on its docking arms. Perhaps eight or ten one-person fighter craft.
After that came a smattering of other sorts of craft, none of them enough to make their own battle groups—a few heavy bombers, a handfuls of scouts, and that was about it.
What did surprise him, though, was the fact that there was also quite a collection of tugs and hauliers that had arrived with them. These were civilian boats and completely unfit for combat.
“Administrator Ahmadi!” Jezzy said with a laugh.
“Huh?” Solomon had no idea who that was.
“She’s the Administrator of the Last Call, the Plutonian filling station. I helped her defend the Call from the Ru’at,” Jezzy said, indicating that all of the tugs were hers, as were the good-sized number of civilian jump-ships that Asquew had used to transport her straggling fleet.
“At least she’s still got the Resolute.” Solomon nodded at the giant pyramid of the Second Rapid Response Fleet’s flagship. It was a dreadnaught, just like the Invincible had been, and it gleamed bronze and gun-metal gray.
The dreadnaughts were almost as large as deep-field station-ships, because they were space stations and workhouses and garages and transporters all rolled into one. It was about four times the size of the entire ECH, but it already looked significantly damaged, with blackened lines indicating where entire floor levels had been breached.
“We came under fire in jump,” Asquew explained as her image flickered onto one of the overhead
holo-screens.
“Inside jump?” Solomon gasped. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“No.” Jezzy reminded him of how the Marine scout had been chased and caught up to by one of the faster-than-light Ru’at ships.
“Crikey… Right…” Solomon’s heart plunged just a little bit more. Was there no end to what the Ru’at could do?
“Commander Ochrie.” Asquew saw the form of the once-ambassador standing before the ansible. They watched as the general took to one knee and bowed her head. “Through blood and fire…” she recited the Marine Oath, and Solomon found himself murmuring the words alongside her.
‘Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.
‘I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.
‘Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!’
“Arise, Brigadier General.” Ochrie bowed her head. “And thank you. Although I think that I may only hold this position until a suitable replacement is found. Right now, we are going to need a bit of that blood and fire.”
Tier 1 Alert!
Several of the ECH’s command screens flared into warning red signals.
“What is it?” Ochrie said, and it was Kol who raced to read the messages.
“It says here, ma’am…that the Ru’at are attacking Earth!” he said, his voice thin with panic.
So this is it. Solomon shared a dark look with Jezzy. It’s begun.
“What’s the ETA on that orb, Ratko?” Solomon called out, not wasting time. People were dying. Right now.
Corporal Ratko was working at one of the console benches with her set of tools, wires snaking out of the orb and into the consoles and computers around her. When her voice came back, it sounded uncertain. “I think…”
“I need facts, Corporal,” Jezzy said, and Solomon could tell he had made a good call in promoting her.
“I’ve isolated the subspace signal that the Ru’at are using to coordinate all of their craft, but it’s a modulated signal,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Solomon frowned.
It was Kol who replied. “A modulated signal means that it keeps on skipping and changing along a set bandwidth, but always within that bandwidth range. It means that it’s incredibly hard to isolate the signal alone.”
“Incredibly hard isn’t impossible,” Solomon said. “Kol, help Ratko on it.”
“Aye-aye.” Kol, amazingly, didn’t hesitate to race to the other technical specialist’s side. “We might be able to block off the bandwidth outer frequencies.”
“Yes!” Ratko said. “We can apply quantum interference, and thereby shorten the bandwidth down, forcing them into one frequency!”
“But that will mean…” Kol said, looking up in alarm at Solomon, Ochrie, and the holo-projection of Asquew. “The Ru’at will know as soon as we start doing it.”
“Do it,” Asquew and Solomon said at once, before sharing a nod between them. There were people dying, after all.
“Initiating procedure,” Ratko said, starting to tease at the crystal wires with some sort of sensor as Kol’s hands blurred through holo-controls in front of them.
“Right.” Asquew cleared her throat, which was a weird thing to see a hologram do. “We know that the Ru’at have FTL drives, and it won’t take them long to trace what we’re doing.”
The command team raced into action. The Resolute was set above the ECH, where it could rain down fire against any attackers as the flights of CMC fighters and ECH Nightjars were arranged in loose battle groups in front of the hub.
Next came the assortment of Retribution and Vulture craft, along with the sporadic Rapid Response craft.
“Behind,” Solomon indicated on the command holo-map on board the ECH. “The Nightjars are automated—no life lost—so they have to be the first line of defense.”
“And our heavy cavalry—” Jezzy meant the larger fighters and bombers. “—can offer gunnery support when they—”
FZZZT! Out in the darkness, there was a flash of blue and white light as the Ru’at jump-ships rippled into space, already firing their weapons.
“Activate Nightjars!” Solomon shouted as he ran to the nearest command console and, just as before, the holo commands of the different battle groups jumped up under his fingers.
As the two technical specialists worked to narrow down the subspace band that the drone Ru’at were using, the battle outside only intensified.
Lines of blue-white fire lanced through space from the advancing wave of Ru’at drone fighters. There are so many, Lieutenant Colonel Solomon thought as he worked, sliding first one Nightjar group forward, and then the next around in a sweeping movement.
The ECH controls were far better than the tactical commands that the scout had. They matched Solomon’s already-Serum 21-enhanced reflexes, and many kilometers away from him, the Nightjars could react at the same speed too.
>Full Offensive
His hand flickered through the attack mode, until he realized just what he was trying to do.
Ahead of him flew a vast cloud of the Ru’at jump-ships, their obsidian rings blurring as they operated at much higher speeds than his Nightjars could.
Group 1 Vessel 2 COMPROMISED
Group 1 Vessel 4 COMPROMISED
And compromised, Solomon could see, meant destroyed. This approach wasn’t working. Not against the faster and deadlier Ru’at jump-ships, and certainly not against the gigantic shape that had appeared behind it: the mothership.
The idea of holding off the Ru’at with the automated ECH Test Fleet had been short-lived. The Ru’at jump-ships had swamped their position almost immediately, and now they were trading fire with the heavy fighters and bombers of both the ECH Test Fleet and the Second Rapid Response Fleet.
And the Resolute. Solomon saw lancing missiles fire in salvos down into the Ru’at forces. There were so many of them that all the Resolute had to do was auto-detonate when they were in range—
FZZZ!
But then came a bolt of blue-white energy as the mothership fired—not against the ECH, but against the much larger Resolute hanging above them. It was the same sort of particle-beam weapon that all the Ru’at used, but it was much larger.
On the viewing screens, Solomon saw the entire pyramid shudder as one of its corners was blown, and the entire thing started turn slowly to one side.
And accelerate forward.
“What is she doing!?” Jezzy shouted from where she worked beside Solomon, commanding the rest of the ECH Test Fleet. But Jezzy answered her own question. “She’s doing what the Oregon did…”
Solomon was still struggling to keep his own Nightjars alive as he asked in a panicked voice, “What did the Oregon do!?”
“It flew straight for the Ru’at in a suicide charge,” Jezzy said.
“Oh, crap.” Solomon knew that Asquew was trying to buy them more time. The Resolute could probably soak up the most damage of all their ships.
“Ratko! Kol! How we doing on that interference?” Solomon shouted as he directed the Nightjars forward.
“We’re in a .5 frequency band! We’re almost there!” Kol shouted back.
But will it be fast enough to save Asquew’s life, and countless hundreds of others?
Solomon slid his hands to every ECH battlegroup he had at his disposal.
>Protect
He changed their attack mode and threw them forward around the Resolute in a glittering whirl of anger. Solomon’s enhanced synapses kicked in as he controlled the ships minutely and individually as best he could.
Target Acquired!
Fire.
Solomon’s Nightjars opened fire on the jump-ships that sought to cut into the Resolute as it charged behind them. Rings blew apart under artillery shells, but many of the beams still got through, puncturing holes into the last dreadnaught they had.
FZZZZZ!
The mothership fired again, straight into the heart of the Resolute, where it shuddered and started to tu
rn over, end over end, as its top cone began to separate. It spilled metal guts and squirming bodies out into the vacuum.
“Got it!” Ratko shouted.
“Initiate!” Solomon shouted desperately, and—
—there was a flare of light from the ECH’s top antennae.
As suddenly as it had begun, the war ended.
Epilogue: A New Era
Without their subspace frequency controlling them, the Ru’at ships—even the mothership—fell silent. Their strange propulsion systems refused to operate. Their murderous beam weapons refused to fire.
But what was even stranger was the fact that the ships themselves started to fall apart, as if they had been held together by nothing more than—
“Electromagnetism,” Kol said in awe.
“Quantum-entangled electromagnetism,” Corporal Ratko corrected him.
That had been why the EMP was so effective, of course, Solomon and the rest now saw.
More than a million miles away across the vastness of space, the cyborgs that had been attacking Luna fell to the ground, their metal and mechanical parts finally giving way to the wishes of their dead hosts.
Further still on the Red Planet, the hundreds of meters of silver-steel of the Ru’at colony once again stopped working. The brainwashed Chosen of Mars stopped receiving their subliminal messages from the Ru’at orbs that fell lifelessly from their posts, and the humans started to shake their heads, looking around and wondering where they were and what had happened. Of course, they were immediately thrown into a fight for their very lives as they struggled to restart their air filters and atmospheric generators.
Conquest of Earth Page 13
