Except of course for General Varen, who was leading the attack.
Karden made a call. Neem’s video screen system pulled up Varen’s serious face.
“General, are you sure this where you want to be? The Big Surprise is going to be a highly visible target, even among everything we’re sending. And,” he added with a wry expression, “Though I hesitate to point this out, it is no longer cutting edge.”
“Call me sentimental,” came the reply, and with it the hint of a smile, “Besides, with Neem’s latest retrofits, it is still the most formidable craft we’ve got. I think we’ve got a few surprises left in us.”
39
Space, above the planet Ground, was looking remarkably crowded. One hundred and fifty Neem-Jat rift generators fired into action. One hundred and fifty rifts opened, glints of the sun of Malachite visible beyond. One hundred and forty-nine System Defense Ships, and the Big Surprise, moved through the rifts. Behind them, row after row, were long files of MSSA-2 fighters.
On the other side of the rift, the scene had changed. There were now a hundred each of Warden Ships and Transports. The swarms of shuttles were gone, save a few here and there. The ships had more lights on.
“They were close,” muttered Varen.
He spoke into his communication system. “Prince Edad, is your group ready?”
“We are. To victory!” Came the bold voice on the other side. Fifty System Defense Ships and hundreds of fighters cruised toward the Elders on his right.
“Air Marshal Sellis, is your group ready?”
“Yes sir, we’re ready,” was the calm reply. It was strange to Varen to hear his old commander call him sir. Such was war. On the left, Sellis and his fifty System Defense Ships soared towards their targets.
“Center wing is ready,” said Varen, “Let’s go!”
One hundred and fifty vessels each carried an ICBM, strapped to their undersides by crude, hastily attached carriages. With one signal from Varen, the missiles launched.
The Elders reacted, as always, with coolness and speed. Within moments, fire was coming from the starbase, and a few of the ships. ICBMs broke apart or disintegrated as lasers and particle beams hit them. Varen was more than glad they wouldn’t be armed until they closed on their targets.
Behind the nuclear missiles came the Grounder fleet. What were now thousands of fighters fanned out, scattering to avoid presenting concentrated targets, then veered towards the elders. Thousands more were still pouring through the rifts.
On the other side of the rifts, Karden and his command staff watched everything through the small rift communicators placed on each of the commander’s vessels. They were taking and fielding calls to and from around the world.
From a panel, Neem’s voice said, “We can’t keep those portals open much longer, not if we’re going to get them back. Sending you my estimate now.”
“Thank you Neem,” Karden looked at the numbers, confirmed what he’d been told.
He made what was inadvertently Ground’s first interstellar call, through the rift communicators, “Varen, that’s it, tell the rest to stop. We’re closing the rifts.”
Varen, at Malachite, heard it and briefly considered he was hearing Karden’s voice from light-years away.
“Acknowledged,” was his reply.
Up ahead, they were losing a lot of ICBMs. On the other hand, the unmanned missiles were taking fire that would otherwise be targeting their ships.
“By the gods, I hope we have enough left!” exclaimed Edad.
“Prince, those Elder ships are packed pretty close together. I’m sure it helped with supply transport, and they weren’t expecting a fight, but it will help us now. Nuclear explosions carry a lot farther and more dangerously in space.”
The speed and effectiveness with which the Elders marshaled themselves was amazing. The entire fleet, transports included, had their shields up. The shields of the starbase glowed a bright, solid blue. Defensive fire was increasing, and he could see the reddish glow as some of the Warden Ships powered up their main engines.
He signaled his fleet.
“All units, on my command. Ready… NOW!”
The grounder ships slowed, keeping distance between them and what was to come. The ICBMs sped on, heedless and deadly.
///
Varen gave the word, “Arming missiles.”
Many Warden Ships were in motion, moving forward and fanning out. They weren’t fast enough.
In the silent void of space, sixty multi-megaton nuclear explosions went off at once, and in close proximity. Spheres of heat, force, and deadly radiation blasted outward in all directions.
Shields rippled, faded, flickered and went out.
In the middle of the fleet, ships simply vanished, their gigantic forms vaporized as if erased from the universe. Further out, Warden Ships came apart, melted, withered. The colossal starbase shook, its shields, more powerful by far than those of the Warden Ships, held for a few moments, then gave way.
The city in space became a collection of huge fragments, each tearing away at the edges. The transports in the distance behind ripped apart, like the seed pods of plants in a strong wind. From them scattered a dust, a dust made of once-living men, that burned ever so briefly and vanished.
In the foreground, a dozen Warden Ships escaped the worst of the blasts. The shockwaves had caught them and passed through. Their tough hulls held. Damaged but undaunted they cruised forward, weapons already firing. As they did so, they formed a cylinder, two rings of six, with their formidable underside guns aimed outward, and their vulnerable launch bays to the center.
The shockwaves arrived first.
“All units, brace for impact,” said Varen, his voice uninflected as if he was discussing a patch of turbulence on a windy day.
The shockwaves hit the Grounder fleet. Though they were many kilometers further out, their craft were much frailer than the Elder ships. Some fifty MSSAs came apart. Something went wrong in one of Edad’s System Defense Ships, and it stopped moving, partially turned, and slowly tumbled backwards.
The Big Surprise pushed through the blast. Varen looked at the oncoming Warden Ships. He knew they were built specifically to withstand the hard radiation of deep space, but it was still astonishing that they’d survived. The Elders built things tough.
However, right now, that was a problem.
“All units, ready missiles. Lock targets. Fire.”
Thousands of small conventional missiles streamed forward from the Grounder fleet as MSSAs and SDSs fired in cycling volleys. The Warden Ships in turn were firing missiles of their own. Large ones were coming for the SDSs. Swarms of smaller ones, as at Bacchara, aimed for the fighters.
However, the odds were better than at Bacchara.
///
Nearly six thousand MSSAs swarmed toward their targets behind a cloud of missiles. Dozens of them vanished as Elder missiles struck home. The rest pressed on, into the withering fire of railguns and particle beams.
The Elder ships launched their fighters, all at once, hundreds of them in total. They moved in neat formations to the right of the Elder fleet, to Varen’s left. The launch bays closed behind them. The fighters glided forward, weapons firing.
Sellis and his group were soon running into trouble. The Warden ships were focusing fire at him to support their fighters. Some of their large missiles struck home. One of his SDSs vanished in a glowing explosion, then another, then several at once.
“Varen, I think they’re trying to roll us up on this side, trying to even the odds back up.”
“I’m coming to help.”
He signaled Edad, “Prince, take control of center wing, keep those Warden Ships busy.”
“I will show them why they should not have picked a fight with a Harrati. Good luck!” was the cheerful reply.
Varen, ten SDSs, and two hundred MSSAs veered off to help Sellis.
They came under heavy fire. Fighters exploded or ripped apart. Ahead, the left group was s
tarting to lose cohesion, getting separated into pockets by the sheer volume of enemy fire.
“We’ve got to even things back up again,” said Varen. “Gunners, ready with gatling rockets.”
For the last retrofit of the Big Surprise, Varen had requested Neem’s latest invention. They were new gatling rocket launchers, bigger and more powerful than the ones on the Little Surprise or the MSSAs, and with an even higher rate of fire. But that wasn’t why Neem called them ‘the best good stuff yet’.
The reason why was that each rocket had an antimatter warhead. A tiny amount of antimatter, but that was more than enough.
“Lock targets. Make them count.”
Tiny missiles, swarms of them, poured forth from the Big Surprise.
In the heat of battle, among all the targets and incoming weapons faced by the Elder fighters, they weren’t the most obvious threat. Until, in moments, dozens of them struck home. With each impact, an Elder fighter, full shields or not, vanished.
“Close in, drive this home.”
The Big Surprise and its squadron advanced, picking off Elder fighters. An SDS to his immediate right shattered as it was cut apart by particle beams. Then another exploded as an Elder missile found its target. Ahead of them, a large wave of Elder fighters was closing in with weapons firing. MSSAs were disappearing fast.
Then came a volley, coordinated and deadly, from off at the edge of the battle. Elder fighters exploded or ripped to pieces.
“Sellis here. We’ve regrouped, coming to help.”
The combined Grounder force regained the initiative, swept the remaining Elder fighters before them. They were taking heavy losses, at least two MSSAs for every Elder craft, but they had far more to spare than their enemies.
Varen sized up the situation around the Warden Ships. Every one of them had taken significant damage in the nuclear strike, but they were built with airtight compartments, independent redundant fire control, and lots of internal reinforcement. They could be broken almost into pieces and still fight. Edad was making good use of the greater maneuverability of his forces, sweeping in to put concentrated fire on one target, take it out, then retreating, banking and evading the return fire before turning for another attack.
“Left group and center detachment, all units ready. Let’s go help them.”
They swarmed in, weapons blazing.
///
One of the Warden ships must have seen it had a clear zone of fire. It brought its main guns to bear. With the uncanny accuracy of the Elders, it methodically picked off an SDS with each shot.
As Varen looked carefully at the arrangement of the Elder ships, he saw an opening. Edad had managed to destroy or disable all the main weaponry on one of the Warden Ships, and the others hadn’t had time to close formation.
“Sellis, I think I see our opening. Let’s get inside that formation.
“Acknowledged,” came the reply.
Then Sellis and his ship vanished as a main gun struck home.
“Slag. Left group, you are now under my direct command. Follow me.”
Varen, his thirty remaining SDSs, and a thousand fighters poured into the center of the Elder formation.
“Left group, all units. Fire reserve missiles.”
Inside the ring, and too fast for even Elders to react, they unleashed a massive barrage on the already heavily damaged Elder ships. Five more Warden Ships, now gutted hulks in space, ceased firing.
Varen saw another Warden Ship with its launch bays, all along the line, blasted open and the guns on either side gone. The ship was still using its main guns to pick off Edad’s ships. He took the opening, guided the Big Surprise in, down almost into the landing bay itself, and unloaded his remaining gatling antimatter rockets into the heart of the ship. The blasts ripped through the vulnerable interior and out through the main guns.
The ship split in half.
“That was well done! We are coming to help. To victory!” roared Edad through his communicator.
From outside the ring, Edad poured his forces through the now gaping holes in the formation. After that, it was mopping up.
///
Back on ground, Karden watched it all happen through transmissions from the rift communicators. He gave the signal. “They’re nearly done over there. Let’s get them home.”
Seventy-five unmanned Neem-Jat rift generator satellites powered up. They created seventy-five rifts. Elder shuttles and MSSAs towed the other seventy-five satellites through the rifts to Malachite. On the other side, those satellites created seventy-five new rifts, back to Ground. Varen, his fleet, and the shuttles returned home. Behind them, the satellites left at Malachite self-destructed, leaving no fragments larger than pebbles.
40
News of the spectacular victory swept the world. Euphoria replaced apprehension. There were parades, ceremonies, impromptu street parties, and celebrations in millions of homes. A few pundits theorized that having delivered such a powerful blow to the Elders, now they would have peace.
Not everyone was so sure. Information on the sheer scale of the Galactic Protectorate, and size of the Elder’s military forces was by now common on the nets, and almost immediately some began wondering when the counterattack would come.
There was a growing third camp. Haral Karden’s ideas had not been idle. Knowing that out there in the galaxy were tens of thousands of intelligent races, trillions of people, unwillingly subject to the rule of the Elders gave hope that with a victory against them, something might crack, and a revolution would come - a revolution that would, however indirectly, save Ground from conquest or destruction.
But that assumed that all those trillions of others would ever know of the victory.
A small group of people were, even then approaching the problem in earnest. They were meeting at the rooftop conference room of GDC headquarters, as rain fell steadily outside.
“Karden! You’ve moved up in the world. Quite a spread you have here. Seems a little sterile though,” said Viris.
Karden smiled, “You’d be surprised at how little military efficiency and comfortable clutter go together. I’ve gotten used to it.”
“So let’s start the revolution!” added Viris, with a bright smile.
“To do that, we need to have a way to get the word out.”
“That’s what you have me for, well, and Neem. We’ll just hack more satellites in their network.”
“It isn’t as simple as that. You know that to get around their failsafes, we have to physically modify the satellites. That means fanning out across the galaxy. The rifts are limited to what is, on that scale, relatively short range, and so we have to go in careful stages.”
“But there is more. Satellites that we modify can be modified back, or shut down, once the Elders figure things out. Even then, it isn’t clear they will serve our purpose. We haven’t found anything to support the idea that they use them for public broadcasts.”
Tayyis had been listening thoughtfully, and added, “Language is also a problem. It is true that members of other species we’ve met thus far have spoken Elder, but they serve in the fleet. Between the galactic map and the databases, it is clear that most of them don’t. In fact, the Elders have put some effort into keeping it that way.”
“So we need to stick to video images, with as little narration as possible. At least at first. I’m making it a project to collect information on the native languages of the worlds in our part of the galaxy, but the Vigilant was a warship, and didn’t have extensive information.”
Karden considered. “We’ll need to get a good video editor on the job, and I think it would be extremely useful to get input from any of the non-Elder prisoners that might be willing to talk to us. Tayyis has one to start I think. We can’t assume that our sense of how something impacts the viewer will carry over to such a different culture.”
“Or set of cultures,” added Tayyis, “Though from what I’ve learned so far, the Ara’kaa at least aren’t as alien in their thinking as one m
ight imagine. I think the same basic steps – showing Elder atrocities, showing us resist, and showing us win – would be a good start.
“Why bother with their satellite network at all? Why not just send messengers out? I’m already working on the design for our new scout ships. They’ll be cheap and fast.”
“We could use them to set up a network of our own, actually,” considered Karden, “Then we would have instantaneous communications under our control, and we could be sure to build the satellites to broadcast.”
“Except,” noted Viris, “the Elders will find them sooner or later and get rid of them!”
“The Elders disguise a lot of their satellites as random rocks in space,” replied Karden.
Neem thought for a moment, then became agitated, excited, “There is an even better way. Remember the stealth technology used by that team that…?”
And by their pained expressions, it was clear the others did.
“Sorry. What I mean is that we could use the Elder stealth technology. It is a bit expensive in terms of power, and it works poorly with energy shields and weapons, but we don’t need those for little spy and communication satellites anyway.”
“They could still eventually trace the signals back to our satellites, like we did theirs, once we knew what we were looking for,” said Karden, considering Neem’s idea.
Viris had a sly look on her face, “Only if we use ‘em all the time. Like hacking, it is good to be unpredictable. We could do broadcasts randomly, with gaps of silence in between.”
“If we built the satellites to change trajectory every now and then, they’d be really hard to trace,” said Neem, already busily working in his notepad.
Karden pondered it. “There is still the problem of the rift transmissions out. Those aren’t as visible as wormholes, but at some point they’ll still notice. Neem, I know Jat said you can’t project the rifts in small enclosed spaces, but do they have to be projected at all?”
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