by Terry Mixon
He’d only used nuclear weapons once before, and he’d stolen those from the Cadre—who’d stolen them from the Fleet, the only people supposed to have them.
“Not many,” Nuremburg told him. “The destroyers all have four. The cruisers have twenty each.”
“We use them all in the first salvo,” Brad ordered. “I’ll lock in my authentication codes before we reach range.” He shook his head with a shiver. “We can’t run radiation scans in mid-battle. Assume any torpedo they fire at the cruisers is a nuke. We have the firepower to stop their torpedo salvos, so let’s make sure they don’t hit anybody.”
“That’ll require focusing the destroyers’ mass drivers on defense,” Bailey pointed out.
“Agreed. We’ll use their drivers in the first pass, but once there are torpedoes heading our way, only the Bounds are to continue offensive mass-driver fire,” he confirmed. “We’ll pound them with the fifteen-centimeter guns until we’re out of range or they roll over.”
“And what happens when they do something you don’t expect?” Bailey demanded.
“They will do something we don’t expect,” Brad said quietly. “That’s war. When it happens, we improvise.”
In Brad’s experience, nothing ever went according to plan.
It was a surprise, therefore, when the battle started exactly when expected. There was no attempt by the OWN to evade. They couldn’t really, in any case, and had already adjusted their course to cut the engagement time to a minimum.
“Fleet is firing,” Abelli reported calmly as Incredible shivered around them. Torpedo icons appeared on Brad’s display by the dozens, joining the vaguer icons representing mass driver fire.
The sensors couldn’t track individual fifteen-centimeter projectiles, let alone individual fifteen-millimeter rounds. They could project where the heavy mass-driver rounds were, but for the smaller guns, the computers just drew in lines of fire.
An eight-barrel gatling mass driver fired a slug every one point five seconds at five hundred kilometers per second. There were hundreds of the weapons in each fleet, and the faint lines the computers drew in could easily have blocked out Brad’s entire display if they’d been marked more clearly.
“Incoming fire. Hostiles are focusing heavy mass drivers on Istanbul again,” Abelli confirmed. “Any orders?”
“Nothing new,” Brad said quietly. Istanbul was already falling back inside the dome formation, forcing the incoming fire to pass her sisters. At that range, they could use radar to locate the heavy rounds.
And what they could locate, they could shoot down.
“Enemy torpedoes are inbound as well. They’ll arrive just before ours do. Target is…unclear.”
Brad grimaced. Unclear wasn’t what he wanted to hear about weapons that were almost certainly carrying nuclear warheads.
“Clarify that,” he ordered. “Then shoot them down.”
The Fleet’s focus on defense was showing. The cruisers on both sides had taken heavy mass-driver hits, but they could take them. Cruisers were built to take a beating and keep shooting. That was why—
“Torpedo hit! Nuclear detonation!”
Brad’s gaze snapped to the screen showing his own fleet, and swallowed hard.
The Alliance commander had clearly decided they couldn’t take down the Fleet cruisers with their laser defensive suites. Instead, they’d set their torpedoes to look like they weren’t targeting anyone specifically.
Until the last moment, when they’d flung themselves at Bailey’s destroyers…and revealed that the OWA disagreed with Brad’s assessment on the value of sending nukes at destroyers.
Seven of his destroyers were gone, obliterated in balls of thermonuclear fire. Bound by Blood and Oath of Vengeance were still clear, he realized with relief, but half of his heavy escorts were gone.
“Good hit, good hit!” someone else snapped. “We got the cruisers, they’re gone.”
He yanked his attention to the enemy fleet as his nukes hit home. He’d fired over fifty thirty-megaton warheads at the two cruisers. It wasn’t clear how many had made it through, but most of them had died during their flights.
Enough had survived. Both Alliance cruisers were gone, obliterated by one of the few weapons they couldn’t take multiple hits from.
“All right,” he said grimly. “They’ve got their pound of flesh. Now let’s teach them the cost. Focus fire on the destroyers. Let’s work our way down the list until there’s nothing left!”
Chapter Thirteen
Without the firepower of the cruisers, the second-rate enemy ships weren’t able to effectively strike back at Task Force Seventeen. Brad’s ships took a little more damage but in the process eliminated both of the carriers—a strategic rather than a tactical victory at this point—and all of the enemy destroyers, and damaged most of the smaller ships.
With that accomplished, he ordered their ships to turn around and make best speed for Mars. As Brad had expected, the fighting there resolved itself before they’d made it even halfway back to the Red Planet. The loyal forces carried the day, but the cost in ships and lives was bad.
None of the defecting cruisers had survived the fight over the north pole, but only three of the loyal ships had made it through, all damaged. Maybe half of the other combatants were still operable in some form or another.
The combat in Mars orbit had been the equivalent of a knife fight in a suitcase. No one escaped uninjured, and far too many of the survivors might still bleed out.
The Goldmisers, reinforced by Harding’s Guardians and the Vikings, either destroyed or captured the remainder of the smaller ships that had rebelled, but the once-powerful Fleet presence at Mars was now shattered.
How exactly that had happened was a question that still needed to be answered. If they could do it at Mars, they could do it at Earth. And if Earth fell this way, the Commonwealth was done. He’d sent a message saying so to Admiral Orcho as soon as he’d turned his ships for Mars.
When she finally replied to him, Orcho looked even worse than he felt. The distance between Earth and Mars precluded a two-way conversation, so her call was only a report to bring him up to speed.
She sat behind a large desk with the flag of the Commonwealth draped across the wall behind her. In contrast, she almost drooped with exhaustion.
“God, Madrid, this is a frigging disaster,” she said, rubbing her face. “Worst case, I expected you to take some hits at Saturn. I figured we had a solid base of defense at Mars. That’s gone and so is Saturn.
“The first-rate OWN ships showed up at Blackhawk Station right at the same time the second string tried to jump Mars. They were far more successful, though we don’t have any real information yet. All we know for sure is that they won. They’ve got control of Saturn.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Your warning about traitors in the various ships here at Earth was timely but would’ve been useless if I hadn’t taken some precautions of my own.
“I’d already been removing questionable officers, so that gave me a leg up in making sure none of the ships just took off. I had my engineers put hidden controls in the fusion plants to make sure no one got very far.
“Honestly, I’d already made my move before you’d called. As soon as I got the first reports of intership fighting at Mars, I killed every fusion plant here at Earth. Turns out they’d planned the same here, but that’s really hard when you can’t maneuver and fight effectively and a dozen known loyal ships are waiting to stomp on you.”
There was a long pause there, allowing him to digest just how bold his brother’s plan had been. He’d come within a hairsbreadth of clearing the board of his most powerful enemies in one move.
“My forces here will take weeks to get back online,” Orcho said in a low voice. “I can’t trust anyone, really. How many people did that bastard Mills and his Secret Service lackeys get onto my ships?
“As best I can figure, based on some last-minute shuffling of
crew, they pulled the mutinous elements off your ships as soon as I started forming Task Force Seventeen so they could have the best shot of repeating what happened at Mars here at Earth.
“My guess is that they expected the force you trashed to kill you with a surprise attack and wanted their people to be ready to use the chaos of the aftermath to do the same here on Earth. If they’d pulled it off, Jupiter could be captured at their leisure because they’d already have won the war.”
With a deep sigh, she shook her head. “Director Harmon is trying to figure out how that was done, but I don’t hold much hope of him identifying the responsible parties. Someone erased the personnel computers and all the backups. Even the ones off planet and the backups at Mars. That wasn’t supposed to be possible, but they did it anyway.
“What it means is that we don’t know who ordered what, which people might be dirty, or even which ones might not even be Fleet.
“The rot went right up to the top. Hell, Admiral Annenberg tried to kill me when I dropped the hammer, and I’ve known him since we went to the academy together. He was my friend!”
That last brought tears to the woman’s eyes, but she wiped them away angrily. “Anyone I leave in command, or with the ability to seize control, could literally stick a knife in my back with no warning whatsoever. Anyone at all.
“I’m doing what I can, moving everyone around to different ships and breaking up established command teams, but that’s going to play merry hell with even the capabilities of my remaining loyal people.
“The bottom line is that I’m not going to be sending you any reinforcements. Not when they could be traitors. You’re going to have to fight the OWA with what you can scrape together at Mars and Jupiter, if you can manage to convince them to actually participate in their own defense and allow you to help them.”
She sat up straighter and stared at the video pickup. “To do all this, I’m going to need you to up your game. You’ve pulled off a miracle, but now I need more. No one else has a chance in hell of making this work.
“As of this moment, you’re a full Admiral and I’m putting you in command of the newly formed First Fleet. You can have any elements you can recover from the disaster at Mars. Welcome to the big league and good luck. If you fail to stop your brother and his henchmen, the Commonwealth is doomed.”
Admiral Orcho had obviously also sent a message to Captain Jahoda, because the flag captain showed up at Brad’s office a few hours later with a small box in his hand.
Brad eyed it suspiciously. “What’s that?”
The other man smiled humorlessly. “Something you’ll need, Admiral. Props are very important in this kind of play.”
He handed the box over and Brad opened it. Nestled in the velvet interior were the rank insignia for a full Fleet Admiral. Four stars to replace the two he currently wore.
“You have the oddest things stored away, Captain,” Brad said wryly. “Were you expecting to need these?”
Jahoda chuckled and shook his head. “Not at all. I had someone in Engineering whip these up. I suspect they melted something down, formed them and coated them with what they had. Most likely all of this from the damage control supplies. They look shiny enough, but you’ll probably want to get an official set at some point.”
“Screw that,” Brad said firmly, plucking the stars out of the box and starting the process to swap them out with the previous set. “These came from my crew. Their support means a lot more to me than how shiny they are. Thank them for me. It means a lot.”
“Already done. I also made certain that they knew I wanted them to pass the word around about what they’d done. You’re new to Fleet command and this might otherwise slip under your radar, but this is their way to show you’re theirs and they are yours. Until this battle, you commanded this ship and this task force, but they weren’t yours. Now they are and you’re theirs.”
As soon as Brad had the new insignia in place, the flag captain straightened, snapped to attention and rendered Brad the sharpest salute he’d ever seen. “It is my great pleasure and honor to command this ship under your flag, Admiral.”
Brad rose to his feet and returned the salute as best he could. “Thank you, Captain. I’d like the names of the engineers who created this for me. I want to personally thank them.
“Of course. I’ll have my yeoman send that to you at once. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to my bridge and get Incredible ready for whatever surprises are left in Mars orbit.”
Once the other officer was gone, Brad sat again and rubbed his face with his hands. What they knew about the other half of the Battle of Mars was bad. Nothing good was waiting for them there.
Well, he had to base his plans on the worst-case scenario anyway. If anything was better than expected, he’d take it, but he couldn’t count on it. Defeating the OWN forces at Saturn, especially with the battleship and its support group out there somewhere, was going to be damned hard, but they had no choice other than to fight them.
First, though, he needed to salvage what he could at Mars to make First Fleet more than a paper tiger.
Brad brought the task force to battle stations before they entered weapons range of Mars, including the defenses at Deimos. Yes, those were supposed to be in friendly hands, but the targeting systems were still locked down by the infected computers. It was always possible they’d open fire with no warning and no ability for the Fleet personnel to stop them.
All that caution proved anticlimactic. No one opened fire and the captured Fleet ships sat quietly under the guns of the surviving loyal units and the mercenary forces. Not that Brad expected much resistance from them, since there were armed and armored boarders on the traitorous vessels seeing that the bad seeds were taken off and located somewhere they couldn’t cause any more damage.
Knowing his enemies, Brad had insisted that the prisoners be locked up somewhere that they couldn’t be killed by an unexpected outside force. He actually wanted to get some questions answered this time.
That place ended up being Deimos base. Or, rather, one of the older segments of the base that was no longer used for operations. It was isolated from the sections of the base that controlled the defenses and could be sealed off by dumping the air from the connecting tubes.
As protection for the prisoners, Brad had ordered his ships to both position themselves to defend the base and to send down Marines to guard them. They’d take no unnecessary chances this time.
Rather than go down to meet with the commanders, he decided he’d use his rank and have them come to him. Being a cruiser built to house a flag officer, Incredible’s wardroom was large enough for everyone. Barely.
More than one person had complained that they had plenty of work that required them on their ships—and they were right—but Brad needed to meet each of them face to face. These commanders were key to his success in fighting the OWN, and he had to form the right kind of bond as quickly as possible. He had to know he could trust each and every one of them.
Once that was done, he had to go down to Mars and convince Sara Kernsky to go to bat for him with the other Mercenary Guild directors. He’d need that overriding contract if he was to have any hope of pulling this off.
That supposed he was even able to convince the political leaders in the Jovian system to support him. The OWA would waste no time in moving on Jupiter and the Trojans now. They had to secure those colonies or they’d have enemies at their backs while they fought for the Inner System.
Brad put his head in his hands as he sat at his desk. He was there alone because it wouldn’t do to have the commander of the fleet waiting in the conference room as his subordinates straggled in. He’d arrive when they were gathered, to assert his command position.
A rap at his door brought him upright. A check of the clock told him it was still far too early for his aide to be coming for him. There was something else wrong.
“Enter,” he said, preparing for more bad news.
One of the Marines guardi
ng his door stuck his head in. “Commodore Hunt to see you, sir. She said she has an appointment.” The last part was said with a bit of a smirk.
“I do,” his wife said as she breezed past the guard. “And this is an important strategy meeting. We’re not to be disturbed unless someone starts shooting. We’ll need a ten-minute warning before the meeting is ready to start. Clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Marine said, seemingly ignoring the fact that she wasn’t in his chain of command, or even Commonwealth service at all.
Michelle faced Brad as the hatch closed behind her. “How long until you have to be in the wardroom?”
He did some mental calculation. “It’ll be an hour before everyone is aboard, I think.”
She smiled and headed for his desk, already working at her uniform tunic. “That’ll work. I need to make sure my husband is relaxed for this important meeting. It wouldn’t do for him to be wound too tight.”
He wanted to argue, but her mouth claimed his and his resistance vanished. They’d fought and could’ve died. There was time to live before he planned the next stage of the war.
Chapter Fourteen
“Attention!” the Marine at the wardroom hatch shouted as Brad walked past him, almost causing him to twitch in surprise. Everyone seated around the conference table rose to their feet, the Fleet officers at once and the mercenaries a few heartbeats later, and waited for him to sit at the chair at the head of the table.
“As you were,” Brad said. “There’s no need for that. We’ve got a lot to discuss and I don’t want to have ceremony get in the way. Please be seated.”
He caught Michelle’s eye as she sat a few seats to his right. His wife’s knowing smile might be lost on all the other officers present, but he felt his face heating just a little.
She’d slipped out of his office when the Marine guard had given them the ten-minute warning, so that they’d arrive separately. All right and proper.
