by Jay Allan
Perhaps they wouldn’t die for nothing at all.
Paolus watched as the guns on the platforms fired again, and moments later, as the waves of rockets finally reached the approaching enemy line. The small imperial craft were not without defenses of their own, and he stared at the screen as small point defense lasers gunned down the rockets. Hundreds of the weapons vanished in a matter of seconds, and less than 1 percent of those fired reached their targets. But those destroyed another twenty enemy ships. Combined with the repeated laser fire, Galvanus’s defenses had claimed sixty-four ships.
But then the imperial craft moved into range. Almost as one, more than a thousand ships of the forward line opened fire, and their lasers lanced out toward the Galvanus fortresses. The orbital platforms were stationary, and their ECM suites were hopelessly primitive trying to deal with imperial targeting systems. Shot after shot found its mark, and Paolus gripped the sides of his chair as the station shook wildly.
Sparks flew across the control room as circuits overloaded, and he could hear sickening creaks as the structural supports of the station twisted and buckled under the power of the imperial attack.
They were dying.
The control room was damaged, power lines failing and sections of the roof buckling, but his officers were still there, at their stations. But in the gun turrets and the reactor rooms and the surface scanning stations, officers and crew who served under him were incinerated and crushed under debris or blasted out into the icy vacuum. He couldn’t see the nightmare unfolding, save when he closed his eyes, and his mind re-created the destruction in horrific detail.
“All batteries . . . maintain fire at maximum rate.” It was a pointless order. At least half his guns were out of action, and the ones still capable of firing were doing just that. But the words served a purpose, giving him—and his people—something to do, to think about other than what awaited them.
The station shook again, and a massive girder slammed to the deck, followed by a cascade of debris from above. Paolus was staring at the main screen, counting the number of stations still in action, when it went dark.
“We’ve lost our lock to the data net, Captain.” The lieutenant’s voice was stronger than it had been before. That seemed counterintuitive, but Paolus understood. She had accepted her approaching death. He’d seen soldiers react that way to hopeless situations, and he’d seen others lose their grip, allow the fear to take control. He wondered how he would react, if he would manage to maintain his control. If he would die the way a Celtiborian officer should.
“How many active batteries do we have?”
“Three, sir.”
It almost didn’t matter. It looked like most of the scanners were down, and without a connection to the net, whatever shots the station could get off were not likely to hit. But fighting to the end did more than destroy enemy ships. If his people had to die, they would die as they had lived.
“Put me on stationwide comm, Lieutenant.”
“On your line, Captain.”
He glanced down at the small screen on his workstation. It was still active, though the image was staticky, displaying what data the last functional scanners could gather. The fleet, if that was the appropriate way to refer to the small squadron of Celtiborian ships assigned to Galvanus, was in no better shape than his stations. Half the ships were gone already, and those that remained were badly damaged, streaming atmosphere and fluids from great rents in their hulls.
He put his hand to his headset, and he took a deep breath. “All personnel, this is Captain Paolus. I know you’re all scared. I know you’re tired, worn, sweat soaked, and covered in blood. But, remember, you are Celtiborians, men and women who served under Augustin Lucerne . . . warriors who united our world, and then set forth to bring unity and prosperity to the Far Stars. We are outnumbered, damaged, struggling to remain in the fight, but we are not finished, not yet. Remember who you are, where you came from . . . and if it is our fate to die, then let us do it in a way that befits who we are. The marshal is with us, now as always. Fight as you want to be remembered . . . as you would want Augustin Lucerne to see you fight.”
He cut the line and he leaned back in his chair. There was nothing left to do. It wasn’t some fight on the ground, where he could throw his rifle aside when it was empty and draw a pistol . . . and then a blade. He’d done everything he could, given every order he could think of, done what little he could to encourage his people in their final moments.
Now, there was nothing to do but wait for death.
He heard a distant whine, and he knew at least one of the station’s batteries was still in the fight. There was a flash as his last screen went dark, and as he looked around the control room, he realized there wasn’t a single workstation still functional. The loss of the data net had left his fortresses fighting on their own, and now the failure of internal comm and data feeds left each section of the dying platform on its own. Yet it wasn’t over. Any gunners who still survived would be firing, at least as long as the power flowed to their lasers. The engineers still working in the reactors’ rooms, no doubt bathed in deadly radiation, would struggle to maintain energy production, with no real idea if anyone was left to make use of it.
Paolus was proud of his people, and he chose to believe they were grimly standing at their stations, that there was no panic, no loss of discipline. He didn’t have any real evidence to back that up, but it didn’t matter much then anyway.
His hands tightened on the armrests of his chair as the station lurched hard, spinning around, sending at least half his officers flying across the room, slamming into the walls and ceiling, until a few seconds later when the station stopped rotating, taking with it the sensation of gravity.
His people were floating through the control room, some of them struggling to grab on to any kind of handhold, others just giving up, drifting slowly across his field of view. Most of them were quiet, somber. A few were sobbing softly, but none he could see had given in to the panic.
He was proud of them, and he tried to focus on that, to hold off the grief and fear . . . but he could feel his resolve slipping away, even as he struggled to endure another moment. He saw his father, killed years before in the wars, and his mother, back on Celtiboria alone. She would endure the grief again, the raw agony of losing one close to her to war. He thought of Caralla. They would have been married as soon as his posting to Galvanus was over. Now, that would never happen.
He felt the sadness growing, the fear becoming too strong to resist. He could face death, but not the shame of losing his resolve. He fought with all he had to hold his strength . . . and then the enemy saved him from himself.
He didn’t see the incoming shot, nor the reactor it sliced into, but the station erupted into the fury of nuclear fusion, and Captain Arnaud Paolus and all his people who still remained died in a fraction of a second.
Chapter 11
The soldiers were lined up in serried ranks, thousands of them standing at attention on the ground outside the palace. Astra Lucerne hated the capital, and even more the pointless luxury of the great structure that served as her residence there, as well as the center of her government. She greatly preferred the rural beauty of the countryside around the old Lucerne family stronghold, the compound from which her father had directed his campaigns and united a planet, but duty called, as it seemed to do every waking moment of her life.
She walked out into the parade grounds, looking out over the assembled soldiers. She had come to give out medals, and the assemblage looked like a hundred others she could recall, dating back to her earliest memories as a young girl, watching from the balcony of the stronghold as her father rewarded his most loyal and courageous warriors.
But this grouping was different, in ways that escaped simple notice. Ways that saddened her greatly. The warriors set to receive decorations were true heroes, hardened veterans as always, but the great majority of soldiers standing at attention were young and green, many of them fresh out of t
raining camp. The great veteran army Augustin Lucerne had forged over a lifetime was spread out all through the Far Stars, fighting on a dozen worlds, and struggling to maintain the peace on as many more. They had suffered grievous losses, too, and many seasoned soldiers who’d served under Augustin Lucerne had joined their master in death. Uniting a world had been costly; forging one nation from a hundred planets was a bloodbath.
She walked up to a small group of officers in bright red uniforms, their breasts covered with medals and ribbons. She looked at the man standing in the center and smiled at her commander in chief.
“General DeMark, you are looking officious as always. Ostentation suits you.” It was an inside joke. DeMark was notorious in his hatred for pomp and ceremony, and she could only imagine the hell he’d put his valet through cramming his bulky muscular physique into the tight and binding dress reds.
“Thank you, Marshal Lucerne. I am as at home here as you are in an assembly hall full of politicians and diplomats. Life will play its little jokes on us, will it not?” DeMark spoke to her in a far more casual and friendly tone than anyone else. With Blackhawk and his crew off . . . somewhere . . . DeMark was the closest thing she had to a real friend on Celtiboria.
“It will indeed, General . . . and we have no choice but to smile and endure.” She nodded, but she didn’t continue with the thoughts in her head. They were entirely too dark, and they had no place just then, not when she was there to encourage men and women to fight for her.
To die for her.
“Shall we proceed, General? I have read the reports, and we have some soldiers here well deserving of our recognition and gratitude.”
“Yes, Marshal, we do. That has always been the case with our Celtiborian fighters. I remember the first day your father pinned a medal on my chest. I was loyal already, but that day bonded me to him—and to his house—for all time.”
Astra held back a sigh. She was well versed in the methods—tricks, she sometimes thought—that attached fighters to her cause. She tried to reward her people, to provide care for her wounded and the families of the lost, but she was well aware that too many of them found only death in her service. Uniting the Far Stars, eliminating the despotism and barbarism that so plagued it was a noble cause, she didn’t doubt that, but she wondered if it felt as such to those whose loved ones had died on the field, lost to them forever.
Was uniting Celtiboria worth losing your father? Would the Far Stars be enough of a price for that loss?
She reached out to the officer standing to DeMark’s left. “Colonel, let us proceed.” She took a wooden box from the man, and she turned and walked toward the mass of troopers lined up, their eyes fixed as one on her.
“Soldiers of Celtiboria . . . of the Far Stars, as always, you have distinguished yourselves. You have served with courage unmatched, endurance beyond expectation. You have prevailed in every conflict, and you have continued a legacy of victory that stretches back thirty years. My father would be proud of you, as I know he was all his life. You were his children as much as I, and his heart swelled for all your achievements, as he shed tears for each of you lost in battle.” She paused. She’d been surprised after taking over for her father just how good she was at giving motivational speeches . . . and how devoted the soldiers, even the hardened veterans, quickly became to her. She’d had her share of adventures, most of them one manner of trouble or another, born of youthful rebellion rather than pursuit of a cause, but she hadn’t fought battles alongside her troops, and she couldn’t help but feel there had to be some doubts among them, questions about whether she could truly take her warrior-father’s place. Yet they always seemed to hang on her words, as if she wasn’t the imposter she felt like.
“If I could, I would honor each and every one of you, but that is not possible. So, as your comrades come forth and receive the recognition they have earned, I would have all of you join with them, and accept my thanks and admiration for all you have done in the service of our great cause.
“Sergeant Malcolm Ghavas . . . step forward.” She opened the small wooden box and pulled out the silver medal hanging from a blue ribbon. She looked up, standing straight and still as a large man, almost two meters tall, and, she guessed, close to one hundred twenty kilos in weight marched up to her. He was clearly struggling to hide a limp, and she could tell, despite his grim efforts at masking it, that he was in considerable pain. Glory in war came at a cost, and Ghavas had paid for his medal with three different wounds, and two months in the hospital.
It was a moderate price, she knew. She had two dozen rewards to grant posthumously. They would be last, and they would feed the sadness and self-loathing that would take her once she left the field. But that was hours away, and she had a long way to go until the solitude she craved—and dreaded—would be hers.
“Sergeant Ghavas, a grateful Celtiboria salutes your courage . . . and I give thanks to have a man such as you in my service. Please accept this decoration as our thanks, and our recognition for all you have done.”
She reached up as the huge man leaned forward, and she put the medal around his neck. Then she reached out and shook his hand . . . before she pulled back and watched him move back to the formation. Then she pressed on. It was what she always did. What she had to do.
“Lieutenant Walton Dragoner . . . step forward . . .”
“Is this even possible? Could it be some kind of trick? Subterfuge from one of our enemies, trying to disrupt our operations.” Astra stared down at the small portable screen and watched the scanning images for about the tenth time. The readings weren’t all that extraordinary in nature . . . save for the size scale. The ten ships on the display were beyond massive, twenty kilometers in length and billions of tons of displacement. They were massively larger than anything in the Far Stars, and she knew without analysis or reports from her admirals that just a couple of them could blast her entire navy to atoms. They were a nightmare come to life, and unless the crew of the scout ship had all lost their minds, it was actually happening.
“Those are imperial battleships.” Rafaelus DeMark’s voice was grim, not certain, but not really doubtful either. “What else could they be? We’ve heard of the emperor’s giant warships all our lives. I fear now we are about to see them ourselves.”
“But why now? And how? I always heard battleships were too large to cross the Void, that the navigation was impossible, that any that tried would be lost in space. If that wasn’t true, then why hasn’t the empire invaded before? Years ago, centuries even.” Astra stared at her staff, at least those she’d been able to assemble on short notice. She’d become used to a nonstop flood of problems in her three years as Celtiboria’s marshal, but this was the first one she’d faced that seemed utterly impossible.
“Clearly, the stories of the Void were true,” DeMark said. “If not, you are correct, the empire would have invaded long ago. Yet problems do not last forever. We have developed technologies and procedures to solve our problems. We can only assume the empire has found a way to move their great warships across the Void.”
“You are right, of course. The alternative, that someone in the Far Stars was able to build a fleet like that, without our knowledge, seems downright absurd, to the point I think we can set it aside as a possibility. So, assuming this is an imperial force that has somehow crossed the Void, it leaves us one other question: How do we face a force like that—what tactic, what plan can give us even a chance of victory?” She knew even as she asked the question, though, that there really was no answer.
Her staff echoed that sentiment. “There is no way we can meet them head-on, Marshal,” Emile Desaix, the supreme admiral of the Far Stars armada, said. “Our fleet, massed together—assuming we can recall our strung-out units quickly enough—could possibly defeat one of those ships, maybe even two. But that would be at the most.” This jibed with what Astra thought as well. While the fleets under Desaix’s command were vastly superior to anything that had existed during Augustin Lucerne�
�s war to unite the planet, it was still a force under construction, and nothing remotely capable of standing up to major imperial forces.
“And, of course, there are ten of them, not two—at least according to this scan. That would seem to be a problem, wouldn’t it?” It wasn’t really a question, and definitely not one seeking an answer. “So where does that leave us? It seems that we have to find a way to divide their force, to engage the ships one at a time, or, at most, two.”
“I’m not sure how that is possible, Marshal,” Desaix said. “We would have to rely on considerable foolishness on the part of the imperial commander, and that’s not something I would count on. Whoever is in charge of that fleet, he or she has to know how unlikely it is we can stand against it. All the imperials have to do is stay together and present an overwhelming force in every engagement. They will reclaim Galvanus, no doubt, regardless of how heroic a defense General Halvert’s troops mount.” He paused, and the room was silent for a moment, as every officer present realized, with sudden and final reality, that Stanton Halvert, a man they all knew and had fought alongside, was as good as dead, along with every one of his soldiers.
If they weren’t all dead already.
When no one else spoke up, he finished what he’d planned to say. “Then, no doubt, they will come to Celtiboria. We are fortunate, to whatever extent that word can apply to our situation, that they chose to reclaim their old provincial capital before moving on us here. I would call that a tactical error, albeit one unlikely to cause them significant harm. Had I been in their place, I would have moved directly against Celtiboria, knowing without a doubt it is the primary source of military strength. As outmatched as we are in any case, without Celtiboria, and its armies, fleets, and industry, the Far Stars would be as good as conquered. We don’t have much chance to defend the planet and to beat off the enemy forces, but I strongly suggest we abandon all other systems and pull everything back here now. Every ship that can get here in time. Every ship.”