A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

  Hundreds of kilometers and seconds of arc lay between even the closest of the independent, serenely rotating mountains of iron-nickel ore and silicates, shot through with veins of richer, heavier metals. Only upon a compressed, simulated view such as this one—from the main tactical screen aboard the bridge of the US task force flagship, where a major portion of the Belt could be displayed at once—did the belt seem as dense as common belief held it to be. Were the screen a window, however, she would be hard pressed to point out even a couple of dim rocks within view to lessen her isolation.

  Some of those asteroids were practically crowded now, however. Along the projected path of the Deltan approach and behind the bulk of four semi-close behemoths—each unnamed mass many times the size of Mt. Everest—were the total assembled forces of the planet Earth. As an ambush site, it was as ideal as they could make it. Of course, it had to be.

  This was the last stand, the line which could not be crossed, the best that mankind could collectively muster. Yet the numerous ships were dwarfed by the asteroids they hid behind, asteroids which themselves were dwarfed by the enormity of the solar system and space itself. As sparse as the asteroid belt was in reality, the defenses of the human race seemed even sparser in the presence of this unstoppable enemy. And beyond this were only the pitiful fixed emplacements back on Earth.

  Lydia forced her doubts away, convincing herself she felt nothing but fierce pride and determination. It was an act of will which was only sustainable because of where she found herself—here, where determination would be needed to see them through, rather than “safe” at home.

  Her presence and the confidence it implied was not an asset embraced with equal enthusiasm by everyone. A searing, disapproving gaze bore down upon her from behind. She hardly needed to note his reflection in the screen to realize who it was. It was a look he had favored her with routinely, ever since she had announced her intention to remain aboard.

  Lydia’s eyebrow arched slightly and she spoke in a patient, amused tone, not bothering to turn around to confirm her guess at his identity. “Can I help you, Admiral?”

  Rear Admiral Calvin Henson—former colonel in the US Air Force, original commanding officer of the Sword of Liberty, and current commanding officer of the US Aerospace Navy’s Cruiser Destroyer Group One—smiled tightly. He pulled himself next to Lydia, the “mother” of the entire USAN, and tried to address her face to face at the very least. He would do anything if she would just listen to reason. “Ma’am, our last rescue cutter—Nightingale—is ready to cut free and head for cover. I’m holding her for you. Please, Ms. Russ, you need to get aboard.”

  She turned and looked at him, firm in her resolve, but compassionate for his position. “I’m sorry, Calvin, but you know I won’t do that.”

  He pulled himself in closer, not in any attempt to intimidate, but as an opportunity to speak low and frankly in the presence of the few other personnel present in the wardroom, to save either of them embarrassment over what needed to be said. “Ma’am, this international fleet wouldn’t be here without all that you’ve done. God knows every single squadron owes you for its existence, but that gratitude was only enough to get you this far.

  “You simply have no place in my operational chain of command. You’re not a tactician, strategist, or systems tech. Frankly, all you are is a VIP and a liability. There is a very good chance that you’re going to be injured or killed when that fleet crests those asteroids, and all you are going to do then is draw resources and attention away from an injured or dying crewman. Not only that, but your loss would be devastating to the defense back home, and that’s something none of us can afford.”

  She frowned, and her eyes narrowed slightly. “I don’t know if I agree with the value you place on me, especially as far as that planet of sitting ducks back on Earth are concerned, but I’ll concede that I have no place in your battle organization. What do you intend to do about it? Throw me off?”

  His mouth tightened. “What I want you to do is see things from my perspective. Get on that cutter of your own free will.”

  The Admiral turned to glare at the handful of officers still populating the wardroom. Each of them realized his intent and quickly and quietly departed. Once they were alone, he turned back to Lydia, no longer glaring, but still intent on her concession or explanation. Neither of them said anything.

  Eventually, Henson’s face softened and he slumped in as much as anyone can in freefall. “I’m not going to throw you off, ma’am, but you at least owe me a reason why you have to be here. And not simply as a sign of your confidence in us, like you told Trenton’s CO, because everyone knows that’s just some PR bullshit.”

  Lydia smiled at him. “Such a cynic, Calvin. I’m shocked, just terribly, terribly shocked.” She turned back to the display screen with its false color representation of their ship, the USS Trenton (CA 1) and the five escorting Sword class destroyers that made up CRUDESGRU 1, tucked in behind a mountain of iron and silicates.

  CRUDESGRU 2, similar in composition but headed up by USS Lake Erie (CA 2), lay about 2000 km further on behind another rock, while two other asteroids were held by allied UK/CAN/AUS and EU squadrons, adapted Sword class destroyers all. Support ships, minelayers, and rescue cutters from a variety of countries—countries allied not only by the desire to aid in the defense of Earth, but also by the obligation to produce such vessels as the price of receiving the required technology and designs—fled from the planned ambush site to hide behind still other asteroids, deeper in the Belt. Each fleeing vessel was careful to remain within the shadows of the large asteroids shielding the four strike-groups, lest they give away the slim hope of a surprise attack against the Deltans.

  Most, but not all of the tonnage out there was American—they had, of course, started first and were the original developers of the tech—but all the designs were Windward’s, either directly or as a close adaptation. In a very real sense, Henson was right. This fleet would not have been here defending the Earth without all that she had done.

  But the honor of parentage was not hers to claim. She was at best its stepmother, moving in to carry on when those who had toiled and worked and paid with their very lives could no longer complete the fight. The father of this fleet, Gordon Lee, had never seen a single one of his children fly. Its other progenitors had been lost to the unknown, and in so doing had gained them the information they all needed if they were to have even the smallest chance of survival.

  Every other person who had led this battle for all their futures had made the ultimate sacrifice. Was she truly a part of its wondrous, miraculous ascendance if she felt unwilling to pay the same price?

  Her eyes misted as she stared through the screen, hardly seeing the icons of the ships any more. How much of what she felt could even be put into words? How much would someone like the Admiral ever believe? “I have always been here, Calvin. But I have not always been part of the solution. I’ve been referred to as the mother of this fleet. You just said much the same, yet,—in the beginning—I tried to abort the whole affair. What if I had not? What if I had done as Lee begged me to do and thrown the full measure of the government behind his project? What if I had contained that bastard Sykes earlier? Would we be where we are today? Could we have gone further? Could we be better prepared?

  “The Deltans have stolen the lives of all the people who ever meant anything to me, and I owe them a reckoning for that. But I also owe the people—my friends—who have come before me, who faced this foe with a level of faith I was late in achieving. It’s a special sort of hell to be the one left behind. I’m certain you’ve been in that same position, given your career. You understand. I have to see this through. I have to face down the Deltans here. I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with my family and see this through to the end—here on the front line, facing the same threat they faced, not hidden away on Earth or cowering behind some asteroid. Admiral, I have to be here, because here is where I’ve always been, here beside the crew of the Swo
rd of Liberty.”

  Henson locked eyes with her, trying to ascertain her true feelings, her actual intent. To his shock, he saw a sincerity so true, a resolve so intense, that he had to look away from the fierceness of it.

  Lydia followed his gaze down and touched his temple gently, drawing him back to her. This time she appeared softer, more vulnerable. “Please, Admiral, don’t force me onto the sidelines. Let me finish this.”

  He glanced over at the screen, then back to her. He shook his head and raised his comm suite. Pressing a single button, he said, “Bridge, this is the Admiral. Cast off Nightingale and send them to the reserve point. There are no further passengers.” With that, he nodded to Lydia and turned to pull himself away.

  She reached out an arm and stopped him with a gentle grasp. He looked back and saw her smile slightly, tears of gratitude welling un-fallen in the corners of her eyes. “Thank you, Calvin. You’ll never know how much this means to me.”

  He grunted. “Ms. Russ, I’m not quite as sentimental as all that. I said you served no purpose on this ship, and it turned out I was wrong. It’s as simple as that.”

  Lydia grinned more fully. “Oh, really? And what purpose is that?”

  “Ma’am, you seem to have a faith and a will stronger than any single warhead, and everyone on this ship has seen that and been inspired by it. You are not a shooter—that’s true—and your value may only be symbolic, but the strength of that symbol may prove critical in the end. If this battle is as close a thing as I fear it may be, your spirit could be all that sustains us. I had forgotten, and for that I am sorry. Your place is here.”

  With that, the commander of CRUDESGRU 1 turned and left, leaving Lydia alone in the Trenton’s wardroom, alone with her thoughts, her fears, her hopes, and with the converging icons on the tactical screen.

  The battle was about to begin.

  A tragically beautiful dawn came to the asteroid belt.

  These inelegant remnants of the ordered solar system had never known any illumination beyond the meager sunlight of Sol, far, far beyond the orbit of Mars. And all that cold light had ever revealed were stark shadows dappled across slate gray ore and faded brown rock. The Belt may have held incalculable wealth as a resource, but it had never been exactly attractive.

  That assessment changed with the arrival of the Patrons, though. The drive star still sprayed its photonic thrust wide, and the convoy continued to decelerate, still normalizing and circularizing its orbit over these long months and years of thrust. Even though they were well and truly captured by the gravity of the distant sun, they were not yet at their intended destination, wherever that might prove to be.

  For both defense and maneuver, the drive star blazed on, burning and illuminating sections of rock that had never before seen light of any kind. Crystals and pure un-oxidized metals fumed and shone brilliantly from deep crevices. Striations of heterogeneous minerals stood out for the first time like the lines and whorls of some demented abstract canvas.

  Dawn came to the asteroid belt, but vastly brighter, more revealing, and in direct opposition to the only light that had ever really touched them since the moment of creation. Here was beauty, but a terrible beauty wrought only by destruction.

  The Patrons paid this truly unique spectacle no heed, however. They simply cruised on, either unaware or uncaring. Their four ships—the Polyp, the Cathedral, the reconstituted Junkyard, and the slightly smaller, yet more forbidding Control Ship—all orbited serenely around the drive star, protected by its thrust and unmolested by any mines or attackers for the last few weeks. The ships had all returned to their quasi-Lagrange positions, seemingly unworried about a different, more defensive configuration.

  The convoy came upon a loose, arbitrary grouping of four asteroids separated by thousands of kilometers, seemingly no different from any other set of rocks in the Belt. It passed blithely through the center of the group, content to allow the proven effectiveness of the drive star’s radiance to defend it from any potential attack.

  But a static, single layered defense was a weak one, no matter how effective it might originally have been.

  The searing cone of light swept over the asteroids’ rocky surfaces, leaving behind fields of pitted, half-melted stone which ended abruptly at the mutual horizons on all four masses. The defensive radiance then passed on, leaving the shadow zones behind each untouched. From those shadows, the coordinated first strike flashed out.

  Twenty-two warships each unleashed initial salvoes of thirty missiles—nearly a third of the load-out for the destroyers, but just a ninth the complement of the two larger cruisers. The 660 missiles which streaked out from the four asteroids toward their convoy targets were not the still, stealthy threats of the mines. This wave of devastation was like the Sword of Liberty’s attack: swift, directed, and erratic, but dozens of times larger and more deadly.

  Missile trajectories blossomed into hundreds of disparate tracks, only converging upon one of the four possible targets at the last moment. One fifth of the wave exploded into fusion brilliance along a direct line between the targets and the shielding asteroids in an effort to obscure direct targeting of the warships now emerging from their hiding places. For a moment, the drive-star’s luminance was overcome by a halo of nuclear glory, and only then did the offensive wave truly take effect.

  Fully half of the remaining missiles made their objective the Control Ship, with the remaining split between the other three lesser targets. 264 missiles corkscrewed in toward the lead vessel, becoming over 1500 individual warheads, each one a step in a fiery spiral ending in immolation. The space above each target began to froth with the white globes of nuclear flame and the lobed spears of coherent x-rays as the warheads worked their way down toward the endgame.

  The first few hundred beams flayed into the Control Ship and the museum vessels without opposition and very nearly ended things there. The critical weakness of the Patrons was also one of their greatest tools: stasis. The game-changing nature of the alien technology meant that the Patrons and their equipment could survive any shock, thermal load, or duration that the stasis machinery itself could survive. Short of a direct hit or the indiscriminate battering ram of transfer energy, the invading force would survive even this onslaught—provided they could stop the attack before those direct and indirect assaults pulverized or vaporized even the hardened areas of the fleet.

  And that was the Achilles Heel of the device that enabled the Patrons to survive the vast distances between stars. Stasis made them slow. It introduced an unavoidable pause in whatever reaction they might take, and as mankind had exploited it twice before, they did so again.

  The Control Ship erupted in apocalyptic fissures of light as beam after beam flayed it or stabbed deep, rending deck after deck, layer after layer of alien technology. Entire sections of the vessel were cut free to spin wildly away from the pseudogravity around the drive star. Patrons died by the dozens as the warheads worked their way ever closer.

  Rear Admiral Calvin Henson smiled slightly, deeply satisfied but cautiously optimistic. He keyed his mike to the flag battle net, his link to his group’s commanding officers, as well as CRUDESGRU Two and the two allied destroyer squadrons. “All stations, CRUDESGRU One will remain on a southern approach, centered on the Control Ship. Group Two, detach and proceed at best speed to the opposite side of the drive star, make your approach out of the magnetic knot to the north. Your objective remains the Control Ship. Recommend detaching Sword of Industry as command and control relay to coordinate additional salvoes after you pass the limn of the star. DESRON Alpha, break east and engage the Polyp and the Junkyard. DESRON Bravo, make for the Cathedral and continue.”

  Commodore Dan Torrance, his old XO from their mutually stolen bid for command of the Sword of Liberty, responded first. “Roger, Admiral. We’re headed for the backside and we’ll meet you again up front, hopefully with nothing but a debris field between us.”

  “DESRON Alpha, aye.” A clipped British voice—Commodo
re Lawrence aboard HMS Conqueror.

  “DESRON Bravo, will comply.” And this, a slight German accent—Flotillenadmiral Krueger of NAE Bismarck.

  From within the confines of his acceleration coffin, Henson nodded as best he could. Almost all the first wave’s missiles were committed, with outstandingly destructive results and virtually no reaction from the enemy vessels. Yes, optimistic, but cautiously so. “Tactical teams, release second wave per the op plan and prepare for direct fire when within range, at ships’ discretion.”

  All his subordinates’ voices together. “Aye aye, sir!”

  Uncomfortably cocooned within her own “coffin” inside her stateroom aboard the Trenton, Lydia Russ fretted with the wealth of information she’d been offered by Calvin Henson. Despite her lack of a place within his tactical organization, he had seen fit to provide her with a direct view of the action, just as his tactical watchstanders saw it. The veering icons, lines, and splashes of color proved to be a three-dimensional mess, however. She silently complimented whatever training program enabled the tacticians and technicians of the aerospace navy to make any sense of the gobbledygook she had become privy to.

  After a short while, though, she began to get the gist despite herself. All the available information appeared overwhelmingly lopsided toward man’s victory. And as she felt her body vibrate with the multiple ejections of the second wave of missiles, it only seemed as if it would shift even more in humanity’s favor.

  She could not help thinking, however, that were she in gravity, she’d be listening for the other shoe to drop.

  preparations undone