by Jay Allan
Sending his people to fight while he remained behind was a nightmare for him, one he’d endured all too often since he’d set out in command of the White Fleet. But he’d known instantly that Atara was right. He had to stay on Archellia until he’d assembled enough forces to accomplish something of value. Gary Holsten had been sending out messages to his old espionage network across the Confederation, helping in his own way to spread the word…to find out what, exactly, had happened on Megara and who was behind it.
And to get word to the Confederation’s naval and Marine commanders that Tyler Barron needed their help to stop it.
Barron glanced back down at the tablet on his desk. The communique was another small victory. It was a report from Dannith to the Senate, from Admiral Winters. There had been a battle between Hegemony invaders and a force Winters had managed to cobble together, and one that had been reinforced at the last instant by the returning White Fleet.
Barron’s eyes had frozen on the accounts of the battle, and he’d felt a wave of relief amid the crushing stress, as Winter’s report made it clear Sara Eaton, Jake Stockton, Anya Fritz—most of his top people—were alive, and back in Confederation space.
And victorious…at least against whatever force the Hegemony had sent to Dannith. Still, Barron didn’t let his exuberance get out of control. A victory was a welcome surprise, but he suspected the Confederation had seen only a small fraction of the Hegemony’s true strength…that the worst by far was still to come.
That meant he had to resolve the discord in the Confederation…and he had to do it quickly.
Before the Confederation fell to the invader without a fight.
Chapter Two
Sagamore System
Two Transits into the Badlands from Dannith
Year 317 AC
“Let’s go…we need to hold those things back, and you all know how to do that by now!” Olya Federov shouted the—command, encouragement…both?—into the comm unit. The Hegemony ships were coming on hard, blasting at thrust levels she could barely believe she was seeing. The forward line of moderate-sized escorts was coming in at over 100g. The Hegemony had always had a clear advantage in ship thrust levels, but these were the fastest vessels she’d seen yet.
It wasn’t likely the maneuverable enemy ships mounted heavy weapons of the kind the Hegemony battleships did, railguns and massive laser cannons that could quickly disable or destroy Repulse. Still, she wasn’t going to take any chances, and she was sure Captain Eaton would agree. The Hegemony warranted extreme caution, which was why Captain Eaton’s sister, Sara, and Admiral Winters were back on Dannith now, preparing the planet’s defenses for the renewed engagement that virtually every spacer in the fleet knew was coming.
And from the looks of things here, it seems like that assumption is dead on…
Admiral Winters had been convinced all along the enemy would be back to Dannith, and probably sooner rather than later. Federov had held a bit less conviction, at least at first. But then, strategy wasn’t her area of expertise, fighter tactics was. Now she was just as sure as Winters was, perhaps even more so as she looked out at the rows of symbols on her scanning display. There were more ships on the screen than the last Hegemony scouting mission had brought, just weeks before, and more than had invaded Dannith’s system months before.
The enemy had withdrawn from that battle after the White Fleet arrived to bolster the battered defenders, but they hadn’t gone far. This system was just two transits from the Confederation border. With the power of Hegemony engines, the ships on her scanner could be back in the Ventica System in less than a week, launching a renewed attack on Dannith’s hurriedly replenished defenses that, despite her grim determination, Federov knew in her gut was likely to succeed.
Perhaps worse, there were detectable installations on two of the system’s natural satellites, ongoing construction projects that looked very much like the Hegemony was building massive bases…and there were more enemy ships coming from every direction. Every scouting mission had reported more hulls than the last, and more construction completed on the moons. The Hegemony was clearly massing for something, and, this close to Dannith and the Confederation, Federov had no doubt what that was.
A new attack on Dannith at the least. At the worst, a full-fledged invasion of the Confederation.
Captain Eaton had launched a vast spread of drones, intending to gather as much intelligence as she could, but she’d been compelled to order her forces to retreat before she’d gotten significant data from any of them. The enemy was just too close…and too goddamned fast. Repulse was a strong ship, but she and her escorts were essentially a scouting force…and no match for what the Hegemony had massed in the system.
Olya Federov had served under Tyler Barron for a long time…long enough to become spoiled and used to fighting alongside the very best. Still, despite her continued opinion that Barron was the best naval officer in the Confederation—and perhaps the best that had ever lived—she had nothing but praise for Sonya Eaton’s skill and coolness under fire. She’d been surprised when Commodore Eaton had approved her younger sister’s transfer from being her aide to active command duty. That had most likely happened at the insistence of the junior Eaton…and most likely also because the commodore and Admiral Winters were desperately short of reliable senior personnel.
Federov jerked her hand suddenly, reacting to vector changes in the closest enemy ships. The Hegemony escorts were as fast as her fighters, and damned near as maneuverable. She was used to focusing her efforts on heavy ships of the line—far easier targets than she faced now. The escorts were dangerous, something she’d found out the hard way on the last scouting mission. She’d lost a dozen fighters two weeks before, half of them because she’d let herself become cocky, and underestimated the ability of the smaller enemy warships. The Hegemony didn’t have fighters—thank God—but they did have defensive batteries, and they were getting better at using them with each passing engagement.
She swung her thrust vector around almost ninety degrees in the X-Y plane and brought her engines up to full power. She’d been ready for the enemy to engage her squadrons, but now she realized they intended to blast right by…and hit Repulse and the other ships of the task force. It was dangerous for the enemy to ignore her fighters, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. If the escorts could damage Repulse’s engines, cut the battleship’s thrust just long enough for a force of the Hegemony behemoths to get into shooting range, Eaton’s flagship—and Federov’s current mothership—would never make it back to Dannith.
She checked her weapons status for the third time. Fully charged and ready. She had a plasma torpedo in her bird’s bomb bay, ready to arm and launch as soon as she got in range of a target. Federov had spent most of her career flying an interceptor, but in this war, every fighter went out fitted for bombing missions. The dogfights that had dominated her war service before were completely missing from this conflict, and she and the Confederation’s entire fighter corps were going to have to come to grips with a vastly changed doctrine if they were going to win the struggle being forced on them.
She angled toward the closest target, resisting the urge to micromanage her squadrons. Most of her pilots had been with the White Fleet, and they were the closest thing the Confederation had to veterans at fighting the Hegemony. They didn’t need her shouting out commands like they were a bunch of new flight school grads.
She was focused on the fight she was in, but she was also frustrated. In all her actions against this new enemy, she’d gone after massive vessels, seeking to knock out the Hegemony battleships and their deadly railguns. But the big ships were a million kilometers or more from Repulse, and they wouldn’t become a factor unless the escorts could damage and slow down the Confederation battleship.
Unless her people let them reach Repulse with enough strength to damage the big ship…
Her eyes narrowed on her chosen target, and she tapped her controls, adjusting her vector and bringing her
ship right at the target. The enemy’s velocity was high, close to two percent of light speed, and that meant she wouldn’t be able to keep up once they’d gotten past her. It would take hours to get her fighters up to that kind of velocity…and she had, at best, ten minutes.
She activated her targeting computer, adjusting the parameters based on her observations, her scanner readings…and the feeling in her gut. She was going to come in close—that had become the new doctrine against an enemy that lacked its own defensive fighters—but she couldn’t close to the insane distances her people had in some of the other engagements. The targets were moving too fast for that kind of precision. All her pilots could do was plot out interception points…and struggle like hell to compensate for any enemy evasive maneuvers. They’d have a chance to hit the escorts, but it wouldn’t last long…and then they’d have nothing to do but watch the ships they’d let past them close on Repulse. The battleship’s primaries far outranged anything on the small attacking ships, and Eaton and her crew would take their toll…but there were a lot of vessels coming in.
“It’s almost showtime…everybody better have a target picked out by now.” The impulse to give her people one more reminder had been too strong to ignore, and the flood of enthusiastic replies made her feel a little better. Her pilots were on the ball, and, from the sound of things, as focused as she was.
Her head snapped around as a warning bell went off in her cockpit. The scanners had picked up enemy weapons systems powering up. She’d already known she would have to run a gauntlet past the fire of her target’s defensive turrets, but that expectation didn’t stop the tension from taking her in the gut. She was a longtime veteran, but you never got used to blasting straight into a web of incoming fire.
It wasn’t more than a few seconds before the scanners updated, and flashes on the screen showed the enemy laser pulses. They were far away, and they didn’t look like much on her small display. But any one of those beams could vaporize her tiny fighter.
She increased the intensity of her evasive maneuvering, shaking her head and complaining silently to herself about how sluggish the fighter was with the bombing kit installed. She longed for the precise responsiveness of her interceptor, and despite the fact that she’d led torpedo-armed ships against the Hegemony many times by now, she still wondered how any fighter that handled so badly could possibly get past the enemy’s fire.
She swung her arm to the side, sharply changing her thrust angle. Her hand tightened on the throttle, and she could feel her heart beating in her chest, like a drum banging out some desperate march. The cockpit, despite her knowledge that it was perfectly maintained at ideal room temperature, began to feel hot, stifling. She remembered her days as a newly minted ensign, a rookie pilot so scared she could hardly keep her hands from shaking. She’d looked around then at the more experienced pilots, and wondered how long it would be before the fear left her, as it so obviously had vanished from those vaunted colleagues.
She was still waiting for that. But now she knew those cocky fighter jocks hadn’t learned to banish their fear…they’d learn to lie about it, to hide it, even from themselves.
A pair of laser bursts blasted close by her ship, less than three hundred meters away. She couldn’t actually see them, of course, and she wouldn’t have been able to, even if she’d opened the blast shield over her cockpit’s small forward window. The lasers were invisible, save for where they passed through a dust cloud or some other area heavy with particulate matter. But her scanners could pick up the energy, and the readings confirmed the blasts were as strong as those she’d encountered fighting the enemy’s battleships. The escorts were faster and more lightly armed in general…but it seemed they carried the same point defense guns.
She swung around again, a move based on pure instinct, and she looked over at the display again. Thirty thousand kilometers. Within range. A perfectly respectable distance from which to fire…against an enemy that had interceptors nipping at the bombers’ heels. But doctrine for fighting the Hegemony had quickly evolved into desperate torpedo runs closing to unheard of, seemingly impossible ranges. It was reckless, a tactic that would never be formally accepted by the Academy, or by the stuffed uniforms that wrote the “book,” but her pilots—all the fighter jocks of the White Fleet, and those who’d served under Admiral Winters at Dannith—had written their own rules, the ink drawn from the blood of their comrades who’d come in just a little too close, or failed to pull out in time. Federov knew exactly how many that had been in the White Fleet, but she had no idea how many of Winters’s pilots had slammed into the vessels they’d targeted.
The crashes caused massive damage to the affected vessels, but the Confederation’s fighter corps, as wild and daring as its cadre was apt to be, had not adopted suicide runs as standard tactics. Not yet, at least. She wondered if that would change if the enemy cut through the Confederation’s defenses, plunged forward to planets that had been safe from any enemy for a century or more. If millions died. Billions. Desperation was a grim rallying cry, but history was full of examples of the deeds it could inspire.
She stared straight ahead, her eyes locked on the vessel before her, growing rapidly on her screen. She was under twenty thousand kilometers now, and the enemy fire was getting thicker, closer. She was leaning forward in her seat, her muscles tense, tight…her whole body sore. But she worked the controls, brought her ship in on a wild zigzag, maintaining her overall course, while doing all she could to confuse the enemy’s targeting systems. More fire zipped past her ship, but she managed to evade the enemy’s fire, even as the range counter dipped below ten thousand.
The attack run was different from most she’d done. She wasn’t coming on at an approaching enemy so much as trying to intersect one whipping by her position. It was harder than usual to respond to the target ship’s vector changes, and the efficiency of her own evasion techniques had suffered…that those of all her squadrons had. She could see the casualty figures growing, the number of pilots—her pilots—who had been shot down already. The losses were bad, worse than in most of the White Fleet’s engagements with the Hegemony, and the attack wasn’t over yet.
The thought of growing casualties distracted her, but only for an instant. She was too old a veteran, too much of a professional, to let such things interfere with the mission. Getting herself killed because she wasn’t paying attention wouldn’t bring back one of her dead pilots.
Five thousand kilometers. Close…very close.
But she was going to go in closer yet. She knew damned well what a single torpedo hit could do to a ship the size of the escort in front of her…but she also knew just how maneuverable those vessels were, how able to evade her shot. The massive velocity would actually help her targeting to an extent…a ship moving at two percent of light speed couldn’t alter its vector much in a short time, even with a massive burst of thrust.
She felt her hand tightening almost on its own, her index finger moving, feeling the cool metal of the firing stud. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, her focus becoming all-consuming. A moment before, she had been part of the fleet, the commander of seventy veteran pilots…but now, there was only her, and the chunk of metal she was heading for, the one she was going to blast to wreckage.
She saw the range display out of the corner of her eye as it dropped below three thousand. Then, almost without conscious thought, her finger tightened…and the fighter lurched as the torpedo blasted out of the bay, on a course directly toward the enemy escort.
Normally, at such a short range, she would have converted the warhead to pure plasma at once, but these targets were too maneuverable for that. She had to take the risk, allow the projectile to retain its physical form for as long as possible. She could see everything on her screen as her arm ratcheted back, changing the angle of her engines and blasting at full power to clear the target ship. The torpedo’s engines were also firing, its onboard AI responding to the enemy vessel’s attempts to escape and dodging the incoming fire
that had stopped targeting Federov’s fighter, and was now focused on trying to blast the rapidly-approaching warhead.
Seconds had passed…five, perhaps six or seven. She could see clear space ahead of her, and she knew she was clear. If a collision with an enemy ship lay ahead of her, it was in the future. Unless a last-ditch shot from the enemy point defense took her ship, she would survive this latest attack.
In a few seconds, she confirmed that her enemy wasn’t so lucky. She watched as the torpedo struck the escort vessel, feeling a rush of elation as she saw the positioning of the hit. Her gut told her it had been a solid impact, perhaps a critical one. That was far from confirmation…for another eight seconds, at least.
Then she saw the power surge on her screen…an instant before the AI confirmed the target vessel had lost containment…and turned into a tiny sun before slowly fading away to a cloud of radiation and atomized dust.
Chapter Three
Planet Calpharon
Sigma Nordlin System
Year of Renewal 262 (317 AC)
The room was immense. Vast, grand, titanic…nothing seemed remotely adequate to express the enormity of the chamber that stretched out before Akella. As an example of advanced materials and engineering it was without equal. As a display of the incredible wealth and resources of the Hegemony, it defied all comparison.
Save, perhaps, for all that lost long ago…that which even we have not yet fully regained.
Akella was forty-two, still quite young to be the ruler of so powerful a realm as the Hegemony. In fact, she was not just the monarch of the systems the Hegemony actually controlled, she was the leader of all humanity. Her sovereignty extended to wherever it mankind existed, whether small groups clinging to survival on worlds not yet rediscovered…or out on the Rim, where the most recent intelligence reports confirmed billions of humans had indeed survived the Great Death. The Hegemony’s doctrine on such matters was clear. All humans everywhere were its subjects, and they would submit.