To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  “I feel worse for the Navy,” Corolla said before taking another swig of his beer.

  Russell and his new drinking buddy were in a dive that catered to Spec-Ops types. All the employees at the Headless Thompson Gunner Bar & Grill were prior service; the owner was a golden-oldie jarhead who’d been pushing ninety when E.T. first came to Earth to pillage and burn and had been rejuvenated for many decades of service before settling down in Malta. The place was one short elevator ride from Fort Osterman, where the Raiders and Wraiths were stationed, several levels away from Camp Puller and its ordinary grunts. The operators weren’t prohibited from venturing further into the gigantic space station, but they were on call even when off-duty and if you strayed too far from the base it could take two hours and half a dozen railcar transfers to get back. That was what you got when you lived in an artificial tube the length of the Moon. Might as well stay close.

  Besides, Russell had been told in no uncertain terms to stay out of trouble. His Wraith abilities could let him pull off all kind of neat tricks, everything from cheating at cards to grand larceny. Problem was, when your buddies and, far worse, your officers could read your mind, even thinking evil thoughts was out of the question. His bad old days of having all kind of questionable dealings on the side were over.

  His current posting was still better than being an ordinary ground pounder, though.

  “Navy is going to earn their pay, sure,” Russell told Corolla. “But Marines are going to bleed. I wasn’t there during the big Horde War – before I was born – but I knew people who served during it.”

  “Boarding actions,” Corolla said, understanding.

  “Hitting a ship is bad enough, but them asteroids are something else. There’s millions of E.T.s living in them. They lost entire Marine divisions in boarding actions, last time they tried it.”

  “Things are a lot better now, though. Better gear and portable catapults. They can exfil if they have to, unlike those poor bastards back then.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. After the Horde War was over, they stopped doing big warp assaults. They were too dangerous. But now that we’ve got better gear, top brass is going to be tempted to send Marines to the slaughter.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit is right,” Russell agreed.

  “What about us? We’ve got the best gear.”

  “We ain’t superheroes, man. If we get stuck in with the tangos long enough, they’ll bring heavy ordnance and wipe us out. And there ain’t enough of us to hold an objective.”

  “Hope the bosses agree, Russell,” Corolla said. “Or they’ll decide the best way to get their money’s worth is to send us into them flying rocks.”

  Russell nodded unhappily and ordered himself another drink.

  Felix-Five, Felix System, 199 AFC

  Matthew Fromm watched the long line of refugees through his suit’s sensors. There seemed to be no end of them.

  The road was choked with wheeled and ground-effect vehicles while shuttles and atmospheric fliers soared overhead. The rural population scattered around Port Hoover numbered a good seven million people. Getting everyone together was the most efficient way of evacuating them. What that meant was a continuous flow of people and their possessions towards the city. Matthew’s view screen zoomed in closer, watching the faces of farmers, ranchers, miners and their families as they slowly made their way towards the evacuation centers. Most of them looked tired and afraid. The Horde was coming and the Navy could not guarantee it could protect the planet.

  “Sucks,” he said.

  “They’ll be back after we kick the Hordies’ ass,” LC Brock said.

  Their company was on a forward operating base overlooking the road. Their job was to patrol the sloping valley leading towards Port Hoover and get familiarized with the local terrain. In other words, they were getting ready in case the Horde showed up and the Marines’ mission changed from evac assistance to defending the sixteen planetary defense bases on the planet. One of which was on Port Hoover.

  “I’d feel better if the civvies weren’t borrowing our ride home,” Matthew said.

  After offloading its Marine complement and all other cargo and gear, as well as red-lining its life support systems, a Marine assault ship could ferry fifty thousand civilians to safety, provided the civvies didn’t mind being packed like sardines in improvised quarters. The Marines were effectively stranded on Felix-Five until the evacuation was over. The measure showed how desperate the higher-ups were to get as many people out of harm’s way as possible before the Horde arrived.

  There were eighty million people in Felix System. They had removed about half of the population over the last three months. No telling how much longer the Horde would wait. And reports said there were close to three thousand ships and hundreds of asteroids in Goldman System. They’d be heading this way soon.

  Army and National Guard units had been mobilized as well. Some were helping with the evacuation; the rest were taking up defensive positions alongside the Marines. The landlubbers’ equipment wasn’t up to Marine standard but they’d be fighting for their homes and, if the evacuation wasn’t finished in time, their families. The Horde didn’t go for genocide burning runs, but by the time they were done despoiling an inhabited planet they didn’t leave behind many survivors, either.

  A quartet of Marine tanks glided above the FOB. The MBT-5 Vandegrift main battle tanks could go toe-to-toe with most alien battlecruisers and win. Unfortunately they came four to a battalion, so there were less than fifty of them on the planet. Third Fleet had deployed a division’s worth of Marines on Felix System; more were coming. Everyone was hoping for the best – destroying the Horde fleet before it could launch landings on Felix-Five – but preparing for the worst.

  I wanted to see some real action, Matthew told himself, watching the four tanks fly out of sight. Guess sometimes wishes do come true.

  Fourteen

  Felix System, 199 AFC

  Wilbur ‘Winner’ Lynch hated deep space patrols.

  Third Fleet was scattered in a loose spherical formation one light hour in radius around Felix’s star. Wilbur knew the job was important. The plan was to detect the enemy’s emergence point and ambush it when the Horde fleet would be at its most vulnerable, the long minutes it would take the alien ships’ crews to recover from warp transit. The American forces would need every trick in the book to deal with the thousands of ships the enemy could deploy.

  That meant that Wilbur and his fighter squadron were strung out all over the far reaches of the solar system, alone in the night, doing little more than napping or playing games while their sensors waited for the telltale gravitation disturbance that indicated normal spacetime was about to be torn apart to create a conduit between two far-removed points in space. Combat space patrols were standard operating procedure whenever a system was threatened and you had enough ships to conduct them. All potential enemies had learned the hard way that their fleets could and would be annihilated as they emerged from warp.

  None of that changed the fact that it was boring as hell. Until it suddenly wasn’t.

  Wilbur’s screen lit up. Multiple emergences detected.

  Goldman System was five warp-hours away from Felix. The hundreds of gravitational disturbances his fighter detected would open up in five hours. Plenty of time to assemble Third Fleet and give the intruders a warm welcome.

  He grinned at the display and felt the warm presence of his guardian angel behind him.

  “You sorry bastards are so screwed.”

  * * *

  “I don’t like it,” Tamir Givens confessed to his XO. “I don’t like this at all.”

  “Seven hundred ships,” Lieutenant Martin said. “Not their full strength, but too many to be a simple feint.”

  “Except it has to be a feint. And Third Fleet can either assemble to attack, or remain spread out and wait for a follow-up attack,” Givens added. “But it can’t do both.”

  “That’s true, sir. But we�
�ll take out a third of their fleet here.”

  “And that’s the job at hand. I hear you, XO.”

  The subvocalized imp-to-imp conversation went unnoticed by the Anzio’s bridge crew. The ship was on full alert, all weapons hot and ready to fire. Task force 311 had been assigned a large target ‘basket’ that comprised over a hundred emergence points. In a few minutes, their sensors would pick up the enemy vessels as they returned to the physical realm and firing solutions would be prepared. Firing on starships as they emerged from warp was as easy as it got in space warfare; the enemy would be coming in blind and dumb, its crews incapacitated and unable to fight back. It had all the charm of shooting some poor bastard while he was taking a crap, but it was just as effective.

  “Emergences detected,” the sensor officer announced as the first red Sierra icons formed up in the tactical holo-tank.

  The display was centered on the Anzio’s target basket. The cruiser had been tasked with dealing with a single contact. If it turned out the ship had bitten off more than it could chew, Givens could ask for fighter support. Whether he would get it would depend on a multitude of factors. He watched the sensor readings with a bored expression, as if participating in the largest space action in the last three decades was the sort of thing he did every other day. It was supposed to help the bridge crew; from the calm way everyone was doing their job, it hadn’t hurt.

  “Sierra One-Oh-Nine,” a sensor tech called out. Within moments the ship’s systems had a targeting solution ready. S-109 was a battleship-class Horde ship, its jury-rigged appearance belying its lethality. It might look like something put together from a junkyard, but there was nothing wrong with its shields and weapon systems.

  “Fire,” Givens ordered.

  The USS Anzio unleashed every gun that could bear on the helpless target. Its shields were up but were quickly disrupted and overloaded. The visual display showed the rough shape of the Horde vessel, a mishmash of stolen components from dozens of different civilizations. The lumbering war machine soon began to burn as primal particles moving at relativistic speed turned metal, composites and flesh into dead scrap or mutilated meat. Givens briefly imagined what the alien crewmembers would experience if they were anywhere near the path of those massive graviton streams and frowned; the Horde had plenty of graviton weapons of its own, so he might get to find out firsthand.

  The enemy vessel launched automated missiles, hundreds of them. The destroyers attached to Givens’ ship dealt with them, engaging the incoming ‘vampires’ with anti-missile munitions or their own main guns. None of them reached the Anzio, which continued to pound the Horde battleship until it was consumed by a massive explosion. One of the ship’s reactors had been breached, releasing unbound subatomic particles that converted matter to energy with higher efficiency than antimatter. A two-kilometer long warship and all its crew ceased to exist. The visual sensors showed that all that was left of the vessel was an expanding cloud of radiation, invisible to the naked eye but converted by the ship’s system into a red and green haze.

  That was almost too easy.

  Givens had some leisure time to see how the rest of the battle was progressing while he waited for a new target. He frowned. The Horde ships were dying in droves. The enemy automated systems aboard the Horde ships were reacting and shooting back, but their ineffectual attacks had inflicted minimal casualties on Third Fleet. Intermittent flashes of light marked the destruction of the invaders. And more kept coming, only to die in turn. Anzio was given other targets and destroyed them as well. Over several hours, Third Fleet pounced on the mostly helpless enemies.

  Givens knew that the rest of the Horde fleet would use the sacrifice to emerge somewhere else. He could almost respect that, if it wasn’t for the fact that enemies so callous about the lives of their own had to be defeated at all costs. Millions of civilians would be at their nonexistent mercy otherwise.

  * * *

  Shento Daal of the Crimson Sun Clan watched his ship die and smiled.

  The other warriors in the crammed escape pod were less elated, of course. Consigning even those stripped out hulks to destruction wasn’t easy, even when done for a greater purpose. And there was the chance that they wouldn’t outlive their ships for long. The escape pods’ stealth systems sealed their heat signatures behind force fields, rendering them near-invisible in space. Many would die nonetheless, seared by their vessels explosions or irradiated to lethal levels; furthermore, in ten hours or so their stealth systems would fail and the thousands of pods that had ejected upon emergence would start shedding heat and be easily detected. By then, however, the damned dirt dwellers would have other things to worry about.

  As captain of the War Carrack Blood Debt, Shento had been in the last handful of pods, overseeing the battleship’s evacuation. Only a skeleton crew had sailed the doomed ship on its last Chaos dive, but that still meant dozens of crewmembers and many of those had hesitated before abandoning their posts despite their orders. A few had refused to leave altogether, trading their lives for the chance of firing a few shots and strengthening the ruse.

  “A heavy price, Shento,” Huro said. The second in command looked at the passive sensor screen where the once proud battleship was nothing but scattered bits of flotsam in a cloud of fading plasma.

  “We were promised a new ship,” Shento replied. “And stripped this one of all but the most basic systems. A steep sacrifice, but worth it.”

  “The final tally has yet to be seen.”

  “True.”

  The killing had only begun. Hundreds of warriors had already died aboard their hollowed-out ships before they could reach their escape pods. The mission had been extremely dangerous. But forcing the dirt-huggers to concentrate their forces meant that the Host would have a chance to inflict many times more losses on them.

  “It will not be easy, but we will have victory today.”

  * * *

  Twelve hundred ships, all cruiser-sized or bigger. A hundred and eighty flying asteroids, including sixty motherships.

  As expected, the Horde armada – the real Horde armada – had entered Felix System while Third Fleet was busy destroying the formation that had been used as bait. There had been no choice; refusing the bait would have meant leaving seven hundred ships loose in the system. The Hordelings in the second and third waves – a second flotilla had emerged before the main body – had all the time in the world to arrive, recover, rally after a second jump placed them five light minutes out from Felix-Five, and proceed at cruising speed towards the main inhabited planet in the system, daring Third Fleet to meet them in a space action.

  Abandoning Felix System was out of the question. Only half of the planet’s population had been evacuated; the rest would be at the Horde’s nonexistent mercy if Third Fleet failed to stop the invaders. The next two systems up the warp chain were thinly populated, thankfully. Beyond them, however, stood Xanadu System, which held almost eighty million inhabitants and a hundred jump points leading all over the known galaxy.

  To oppose them, Third Fleet had eight dreadnought-carriers, four dreadnoughts, ten fleet carriers, forty light carriers, sixty battlecruisers, the Anzio included, and a hundred destroyers. A reserve force centered around Third’s ten battleships waited in Xanadu; sixty space combatants all told, which would be nice to have along for this battle, but they couldn’t risk every US ship in the quadrant. Felix-Five’s orbital defenses, including a dozen space fortresses and forty monitors, would join in if the Horde ever got within three light-seconds of the planet, for all the good they would do. The only bright point was the fact that this battle would see the largest deployment of warp fighters in history: over a thousand WE-3s and eighteen hundred CT-1s. That should be more than enough to win the day.

  He was still worried. They had been suckered once already. The Horde had sacrificed hundreds of ships for a chance to fight a decisive battle and the Navy was going to oblige them. Giving the enemy what he wanted only worked if you knew something the enemy did
n’t. Givens wasn’t sure this was the case here.

  “We’re ready, sir,” XO Martins said, snapping him out of his gloomy thoughts. “We got Gun Battery Three back to one hundred percent.”

  “Good.”

  Stuff broke aboard a ship all the time, especially after seven hours maneuvering at full power and firing all weapons. You couldn’t push ships and men to one hundred percent capacity for that long without consequences. And you usually didn’t expect to fight a second engagement on the same day. Third Fleet had suffered few casualties – only one ship, a destroyer, had taken enough damage to require going to Felix-Five for repairs – but crews were tired and systems had been stressed and were more likely to fail. Givens knew his people, had trained them to prepare for the worst and to give their best. His engineering department had replaced every component that looked even remotely iffy, damn the budget. He only hoped everyone else was doing the same. Decades of peacetime meant that bean-counting became more important than combat readiness; that attitude could have a bloody cost when energy beams were fired in earnest.

  As far as he could see, though, the American force was in fine fighting fettle. A wall of ships stood against the Horde as the alien armada moved forward at one thousandth the speed of light. The Anzio had a target: another battleship-equivalent that consisted of half a dozen smaller spacecraft welded together. Nothing that crude should be able to maneuver, let alone fight, but it did both and its shields were at least as good as any Starfarer warship in the same weight class. It was yet another mystery among the many surrounding the aliens. The Horde was perhaps the oldest species still traveling the stars; who knew what they had learned in the ensuing millennia?

  Guess we’ll find out, Givens thought as his target continued to approach.