It was a ragged cone. Rollo and other flotilla commanders gave constant orders. Starkien leaders did likewise. Our cone had accidents. Several ships had to fall out. Still, we advanced toward the vast mass of dots ahead of us.
“This is insane,” Rollo confided to me in a whisper. “We’re all going to die.”
“Everyone dies,” I said.
Rollo stood beside me as we watched the enemy formation. Minutes passed and became a half hour. Space battles always took a long time to unfold.
“Sir,” a sensor officer said.
“I see it,” Rollo said. He turned to me.
I watched stoically. Inside, though, I was grinning.
Originally, Holgotha had given us a five percent chance of victory, provided the enemy did something stupid. For stupidity to help us, however, first the great Abaddon had to die.
Abaddon was dead, along with some of the most important Karg leaders. I’d slain some of those Karg leaders myself with the Curator’s force blade. Many of the most cunning Jelk were dead, gone or imprisoned by the Overlord. The cleverest Jelk of all was gone, Shah Claath.
How cunning was the Overlord? Maybe as important, did he have anyone on his side to bounce ideas off of? Maybe his best warlords had perished by my hand.
That was a nice thought. Seeing this was even better.
The Overlord made a move we desperately needed. He’d faced endless drone and missile assaults now for days upon days in every star system. How was he supposed to know we’d run out of missiles? For all he knew, he had to battle hordes more before he could reach Earth. Now, though, the Grand Armada was behind him and coming on fast. He was encircled after a fashion, something no space commander wanted.
Still, the Overlord clearly wanted to destroy Earth, but it now appeared he did not want to sacrifice the bulk of his moth-ships to do it. Thus, he made one of the worst blunders on the battlefield.
He began to split his forces.
While some of the greatest captains in history had done that and gotten away with it, the Overlord wasn’t one of those geniuses of battle.
He let the Jelk battlejumpers continue to advance upon the cone. Meanwhile, the moth-ships made a turning maneuver. It appeared as if the moth-ships were trying to do an exit stage left, maybe to swing wide and avoid the Grand Armada behind them.
I had an idea of what the battlejumpers were supposed to do: get close enough to Earth to launch whatever T-missiles they had left. Maybe some of those warheads would contain bio-terminators.
Before the enemy battlejumpers reached the range of our cone and its beams, they launched T-missiles. Those vanished, reappearing far away from us but near Earth and Luna. I hoped Ella could take care of them.
Now, the Jelk battlejumpers began a hard turning maneuver, following the Kargs well ahead of them.
As I sat watching, I nodded in appreciation.
The T-missile attack on Earth reminded me of the Japanese at the Battle of Midway. They’d tried to take out Midway airfield and the American carriers at the same time. That had been a terrible mistake. Concentration of effort was one of the key rules of war.
That was the lure of Earth I’d talked about before. The Karg Overlord had just tried to destroy Earth on the cheap at the worst possible moment.
An hour later, as our cone formation gained on them and as the Grand Armada accelerated, the Karg Overlord appeared to change his mind once again. Maybe his monitors showed him the T-missiles had failed to take out Earth. Ella had done her job with beams and fighters, having lost a quarter of her pilots in the process. The Overlord now re-maneuvered to try to bring his split fleet together again. I imagine he planned to blast through us and destroy the Earth before facing the Grand Armada.
It wasn’t the worst plan.
It gave us time to close the trap and possibly die.
The Super Fleet had become two smaller ovals. The battlejumpers slowed down and changed heading. That allowed the Kargs to catch up with the Jelk-commanded Saurians.
During that time, we changed the heading of the cone, coming at the reunited oval. The Karg-Jelk maneuvering had cost them precious time.
The Karg red beams struck farthest. It was like a thousand angry moths. They smashed against the front rim Starkien shark-ships. Shields glowed, stood fast for a time, buckled and finally collapsed one by one. The beams tore into those heavy hulls. The Starkiens didn’t have super-hulls, but these had thick ones. The red beams burned deeper, making molten work of them.
The first giant shark-ships went critical, exploding, taking three others down with it. Fortunately, the force shields behind them held fast.
Now, the moth-ships began to destroy the outer rim Starkiens with fierce regularity. No enemy T-missiles appeared. No regular ones slid to the attack.
What did happen was that the ragged cone reached its beam range.
On our flagship, Rollo gave curt commands. The engines purred. Our heavy beams joined hundreds of others to make one giant fist. Like an annihilating light, it smashed against an enemy battlejumper. The force shield and hull went down fast, causing an explosion.
There was little for me to do but observe. It was hard because I watched the enemy destroy the cone ship by ship. We hammered them, though. We devoured what seemed like an endless supply of Jelk battlejumpers.
Hull debris, water vapor, bodies—far too many of those—coils, spent casings, shredded bulkheads and other junk drifted by. The cone was gone. The oval net was coming around us. We had become bait, and the enemy ate our vessels.
“Creed,” Rollo said, staggering to me as a shuddering explosion rocked our battlejumper.
“Keep fighting,” I said.
Rollo nodded. He issued the same order to his ships.
The cone died. Our Earth Force ships were shattered. The Starkien Fleet had all but vanished from existence. There were a few of us left. We beamed, killing another enemy vessel, and we watched, drained of emotion, as the vast net sucking the last life from us quit firing in our direction.
We’d bought our side time. It had cost us dearly, but we had stood our ground like the ancient 300 at Thermopylae. It was a terrible and glorious thing.
The Grand Armada had finally come within firing range of the rearward Kargs.
I’ll give the Overlord this. He didn’t bother anymore with our handful of surviving vessels. He threw everything at the Grand Armada. I think he believed he could beat them, and maybe with the moth-ships he could have.
The two sides fought it out with brutal savagery, showing a blizzard of beams on our main screen. I began to wonder if the Overlord was smarter than I’d given him credit for. Those horrible red beams devoured the forward bombards and maulers. I couldn’t believe it. Once they died, nothing could stand against the moth-ships for more than few seconds. After all my work—
“Creed,” Rollo said in a harsh voice. “Do you see that?”
I rubbed my eyes. It was a grim decision, but I think I understood.
Baron Visconti must have ordered his fast strike cruisers and pursuit destroyers into the van of battle. Standard battle procedure called for them to stay on the sides and nip at the enemy. Instead, these cruisers and destroyers with their light hulls rushed to the forefront. They had the speed to do it, but no shields or armor to speak of, not compared to maulers and bombards. Those light starships died in droves, but by doing so they absorbed the fury of the red Karg beams.
The butchery made me sick.
What it did, though, was give the bombards and maulers time to close. Once near enough to the enemy, their heavy beams finally began to puncture Karg hulls.
That’s when it became the Grand Armada’s turn to butcher the enemy.
The next hour and half became legendary. At far-range, the moth-ships outmatched the maulers and bombards. At close range, they become equals. Our greater numbers and freshness told then.
It was brutal. It was a slugfest, and in this kind of encounter numbers counted as much as high technology. For o
nce, we held the advantage, and Visconti never let it go.
What seemed like a lifetime later, the terrible battle entered the mop-up phase. We had taken terrible losses, almost three-fifths of our starting numbers if one included both fleets. But we annihilated the enemy. The Karg-Jelk Super Fleet was no more than a handful of vessels racing for a jump gate.
That day, we won the greatest battle in the Orion Arm in a thousand years. In fact, the Jade League-Jelk Corporation War was over. The victory was decided in the Solar System in what became known as Fortress Earth.
Rollo clapped me on the shoulder. I punched him in the chest. Then we began the sober task of searching for survivors.
After years of intense suffering, it looked as if humanity might finally breathe a great sigh of relief.
-Epilogue-
A year and several months later, I sat on a bench in New Saint Petersburg, overlooking the Baltic Sea. The city was twenty kilometers from the blasted site of Old Saint Petersburg.
Russian birds sang in nearby fir trees. They had yellow breasts and tweeted louder than I could believe. Maybe they were happy to be alive. I knew I was.
A grand year and a half had passed since we’d destroyed the Super Fleet. Our scientists had scoured the wreckages for months, prying loose the advanced Karg systems. We had finally begun to implement some of the more interesting Karg technologies and were working on the rest.
I’m sad to report that there had been rumblings in the former Jade League. Instead of everyone rejoicing for the next century with glad tidings all around, former friends had begun to get angry with each other. It was simple, really. Now that the Jelk and Kargs were gone for good, former allies finally began to realize what bastards their neighbors really were.
History has taught us that that was the nature of wartime alliances. Once the enemy pressure left, people remembered past injustices. People—all aliens, I suppose—followed the path of their own self-interest.
It was the way of the universe, so why fight it? Still, it left me feeling sad. We’d all gone through so much together. We’d all sacrificed for the greater good. Now, lesser people squabbled and restarted old feuds.
On the home front, Diana was still our Prime Minister. So, we were doing pretty well in the scheme of stellar things. We’d already claimed several choice old Jelk frontier planets as ours. Nobody in our neck of the Orion Arm cared to mess with the little killers. I guess we had a pretty scary rep, especially now. Diana knew how to use that.
Me? I’d written a big fat book about my adventures. Most aliens believed me as well as Marco Polo’s contemporaries had believed him, which was to say not at all. Still, the aliens and humans had bought lots of copies of my adventures. That meant my bank account was doing fine.
For the first time in years, I felt as if I could unwind. I’d left the assault troopers several months ago, becoming a private citizen. For two months, I’d hiked in the wilds, tramped through our new cities and went to a few book signings, drinking too much coffee and eating endless donuts.
I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. No more aliens were breathing down our collective necks. And…
Okay. I’ll level with you. I kept thinking about Jennifer. I wondered about the Curator, the real scoop concerning Abaddon, the Ve-Ky and the Creator. What was it all about anyway? What did the Forerunner artifacts do in the center of the galaxy? How come our galaxy was split into zones?
I sighed, stretching my legs, watching sea gulls wheel overhead. I guess I’d never know those things. That had started to bother me.
Maybe twenty minutes later, I saw a babe walking down the path from the nearby university. She knew how to use what she had, all right, and those breasts straining against her blouse…
“Hello, Creed!” Ella shouted, as she waved to me.
I stood up, waving back.
Ella ran, slowing as she neared me. Finally, she held out her hands. I took hers. I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t know if I should.
“What’s the matter, Commander?”
I shook my head. “It’s just Creed these days.”
She looked into my eyes. “Do you want to sit down?”
“Sure.”
Ella sat beside me on the bench. After a time, she threaded an arm through mine, snuggling up next to me. We watched the sea gulls.
“You keep thinking about her, don’t you?” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“Creed, you need to find something to do.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I think Earth has become too small for you.”
“Come on,” I said. “That’s bogus.”
“No. I think that’s the curse Abaddon gave you. You killed him—”
“The Curator did that.”
“Only after you softened up the most dangerous being in the galaxy,” Ella said. “Anyway, as I was saying. Abaddon cursed you. Remember in your book how you said the Curator said Abaddon corrupted everything he touched?”
“I remember.”
“He’s corrupted you.”
I didn’t want to believe that. “No,” I said. “I already was corrupt.”
“Not like that,” she said. “I mean being able to enjoy yourself. I don’t know if you can anymore. You need adventure, the spice of terrible adventure.”
I wondered if that was true.
She squeezed my arm. “I have to go. I have an appointment. Will come to my place later?”
I shook my head.
Ella let go of me, standing. She glanced into the distance and then studied me closely. “Why do I have the feeling I’m never going to see you again?”
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
“Good-bye, Commander Creed,” Ella said. “It has been an honor knowing you.” She bent low and kissed me on the cheek. When she straightened, there were tears in her eyes.
“Ella, what’s gotten into you?”
She swallowed. Then, she glanced behind me in the distance, turned back to the university path and hurried away.
I thrust my hands into my pockets. That had been weird.
Five minutes later, I heard the scrape of shoes behind me. I didn’t turn. I didn’t want to see who was there.
A massive old man with a huge white beard and dressed in a great coat came around to sit with me on the bench. For a time, the Curator and I simply watched the waves.
“I spoke too prematurely some time ago,” he told me.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“I am going to need your services after all.”
“As your effectuator?” I asked.
He nodded.
“What about Jennifer?”
“We will deal with that if and when it comes up,” he said. “For now, you will be far from the Fortress of Light.”
I turned to fully face the old man. “What does an effectuator do anyway?”
The Curator considered that, finally saying, “He helps me take care of delicate problems.”
“How?”
“With his mind, with his cunning and sometimes with barbaric weapons,” the Curator said.
It was crazy, but I felt a new excitement well up in me. I hadn’t felt this way since…since we’d beaten the Super Fleet. Maybe Ella had it right. I needed to do something, something important to feel right.
I stood up. So did the Curator.
“Are you willing to come with me?” he asked.
“Sure, why not?” I said.
“Then, let’s go. I don’t like leaving my ship on automatic any longer than I have to.”
I walked with the Curator, wondering if I’d ever see the green hills of Earth again. The feeling didn’t last long, though. My curiosity about what lay ahead took hold. I could hardly wait to get started as the Curator’s newest galactic effectuator.
The End
To the Reader: Thanks! I hope you’ve enjoyed Fortress Earth. If you liked the book and would like to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review. Let new readers k
now what’s in store for them.
—Vaughn Heppner
Fortress Earth (Extinction Wars Book 4) Page 28