by Jay Allan
“I have a communique I need to send, and I’d like to keep it from prying eyes.”
“What is it?” Andi had her share of experience with secret messages, but never in so crowded and controlled a space as the Confederation’s capital system.
It was Holsten’s turn to hesitate. Andi understood. The spymaster’s trade had compelled him to keep more secrets than even she’d had to, as an adventurer living on the cusp of outlawry.
Finally, he answered. “I have a file containing all the information about the Hegemony collected by Dauntless. Ship sizes, energy readings, thrust levels…everything. Even analysis of some bits and pieces of destroyed ships.” He paused and looked up at her. “You and I haven’t seen any Hegemony forces ourselves…but, with all that’s happened on Megara, Tyler still seems far more concerned with this new threat. Honestly, I think he’d have surrendered before firing on other Confederation ships if he wasn’t so driven by what he saw out in the Badlands. And anything that can scare the hell out of Tyler Barron has me fighting the urge to run for the hills.” Another pause. “Whoever these people are, we’re probably going to have one hell of a fight on our hands, and the quicker we can match their technology, the better chance we’ll have.”
“You’re going to send the data to the Institute?” She just realized what Holsten intended. The famed research facility was located on one of the outer moons, orbiting a gas giant in the Olyus system. It was the pinnacle of Confederation scientific study, and probably the best place to find people capable of decrypting strange new tech.
“Yes.” Holsten was silent for a moment. “Not through normal channels, but Confederation Intelligence has its eyes and ears in the Institute as well as in…other places. If we can get the data transmitted, I believe I can put it into trusted hands.”
Andi felt a strange feeling. Holsten was her friend, but it was uncomfortable for her to discover just how widespread Confederation Intelligence’s operations were…how much the agency spied on its own citizens. She’d been used to evading the authorities on the frontier, but she’d never really thought about just what kind of surveillance state lay beneath the Confederation’s pretensions of democracy, or how often normal people going about their daily lives were…watched.
“We had people there mostly to guard against Sector Nine attempts to infiltrate, of course.”
Andi nodded, but she wasn’t buying her friend’s explanation, not entirely. Confederation Intelligence would certainly be on the alert over foreign espionage in a place like the Institute…but she didn’t think that was the full explanation.
She trusted Holsten, and she knew his interests were to protect the Confederation. But what about whoever followed him, or came after that? She’d studied enough history to understand how liberty of the sort the Confederation enjoyed inevitably died…and usually without so much as a shot fired.
“Right there.” She shook away the deep and gloomy thoughts and gestured toward one of Pegasus’s three bridge stations. “That’s the main comm panel. The laser pulse controls are pretty standard.”
Holsten walked over and sat at the station. “Yes, I see.” He reached into the small bag he was carrying, and pulled out several high-density data chips. “I’m afraid it’s a lot of information. It will take a few minutes to send it all. Still, with the direct laser comm, we should be okay.”
Andi nodded, but she wasn’t sure she felt as confident. Direct laser communications were secure, but they were also in the busiest solar system in the Confederation…and any vessel, probe, or satellite crossing the path of the comm could pick it up.
“You’re all set, Gary. The laser comm is activated.”
Holsten just nodded, and then he leaned over the workstation. “You can start your approach while I’m sending the communique…it will look strange if we sit here too long. Keep it to a standard entry vector and thrust level. I can adjust the laser pulse to match that.”
“Okay…commencing thrust in five…four…three…two…one.” She moved her hands over the controls, blasting Pegasus’s engines at half a g, just enough to set up the required vector to approach Megara. They were about twenty minutes out, and that would give Holsten the time he needed.
Then they would dock…and if all went well, in two hours, they’d be on a shuttle to the surface. Pegasus was atmosphere capable, but she didn’t see the point in waving her vessel under anyone’s nose. Some random cargo ship docking berth would do just fine, and it would draw a lot less attention.
She watched as Holsten worked at the comm station. He was a capable man, and a good ally. But he wouldn’t be with her in what she had to do next. She’d almost told him. He was the sort who would have understood the need that drove her, but she’d held back anyway. Holsten had more than enough on his plate without adding her baggage to his…and she knew he already carried a load of guilt for involving her in the operation at all, for his role in her falling into Lille’s hands. He’d try to stop her, and he’d come with her if he couldn’t…but he had other duties now. To the Confederation. And to Tyler.
She would get Holsten to the station, and they would both take the shuttle down to the surface. After that, her job for Holsten and for Tyler would be done.
Then she could see to her own business.
Chapter Nine
CFS Constitution
1.400,000,000 Kilometers from Planet Dannith, Ventica III
Year 317 AC
Clint Winters stared ahead, his eyes cold, his hands clenched tightly into fists on the armrests of his chair. He was a fighting admiral, a man long known to his loyal—and frequently intimidated—spacers as, “The Sledgehammer.” His doctrine was simple. Attack, and keep attacking until you pound your way through the enemy. It had never been that simple in practice, of course, and for all his reputation as an almost wildly aggressive commander, Winters’s true approach was actually far more cerebral and cautious than his image suggested.
That thoughtfulness was in effect even as his fleet met the attacking enemy forces, and a strange sadness coexisted with the anger and determination that ruled him in combat. He would do all he could, and his people would fight like cornered wildcats, he had no doubt of that. But he also knew he would almost certainly have to retreat. That would mean leaving Dannith behind, the crushing responsibility of protecting its residents falling to Colonel Blanth and his ground forces.
Winters detested the idea of retreating, and it turned his stomach to think of actually giving the order to run. But his duty wasn’t to defend Dannith—it was to protect the entire Confederation. With whatever the hell was happening on Megara, his forces might be the only shield for a dozen or more systems. He would fight in Ventica…but he could not risk losing his fleet there. If—when—he had to pull back, turn tail and flee in order to fight again another day, that was exactly what he would do.
“I want all ships to get their squadrons refit and launched in fifteen minutes. We’ve got to get another bombing run in before that battle line gets close enough to open fire.” He’d watched the Hegemony battleships moving forward, and he knew the largest of them carried the deadly railguns. Many of the most forward ships had been damaged to various degrees by the first fighter strike, but more of the massive vessels continued to pour into the system, so many that even the “Sledgehammer” was losing his steely nerve.
“Yes, Admiral. From reports coming in, it looks like half the ships in the fleet will be ready to launch in fifteen minutes.”
“Did I say half?” Winters roared with an intensity that seemed to shake the bulkheads. “All ships are to commence launch operations in fifteen minutes…I swear to God, I will space every bastard responsible for so much as a minute’s delay.”
He could feel the tension of the bridge personnel as they recoiled from what he imagined sounded like rage. But he wasn’t angry, not really. Only determined. And something else, something he would hide form his people, whatever it took. As he looked at the lines of enemy ships forming up, as more tr
ansited into the system, he realized he was scared. Not for himself, necessarily, nor even for the people of Dannith. His concerns had gone well beyond that, and as he stared out at a force he knew he couldn’t defeat, he wondered if the Confederation’s entire fleet, formed up and ready for an apocalyptic fight, would have a chance.
Was he looking at more than defeat?
Was he looking at the end of the Confederation?
* * *
“Let’s go…move your asses!” Jake Stockton raced across Repulse’s flight desk, shouting out to the crews, driving them mercilessly to turn his ships around. Repulse’s squadrons were only a small fraction of the force he commanded, of course, and if he could have found a way to scream at the techs on all the other ships in the system, he would have.
It was new ground to Stockton, unleashing his ferocity on the men and women refueling and rearming the fighters. For all his years in the strike force, he’d almost always stayed out of the way of the flight crews, a habit he’d probably picked up serving under Dauntless’s old deck chief, Nick Evans. Dauntless’s bays back then had been run on the sheer bottled rage of its chief technician, a man who’d ignored the officers that outranked him and the hapless spacers serving under him with equal disdain. Whether pilots or flight control personnel on his staff…all were treated to endless fury from the same barely-restrained force of nature. Evans had only submitted fully to one member of Dauntless’s crew, then-Captain Tyler Barron, though he’d come out meeker than anyone had expected from the encounter after he bumped heads with Anya Fritz.
Stockton had never admitted it, but the cigar-chomping old warrant officer had scared the shit out of him like no enemy ace or broadside of defensive lasers ever had. Evans was retired now, pensioned off to some frontier world, probably, where he no doubt terrorized his neighbors. Stockton had hated the chief, of course, as all his comrades had…but now he wondered how many fights had been won by the margin of Evan’s fiery temper, and his ability to push ships out of the bays just a little faster.
Stockton walked up to a crew working on one of the fighters, three techs who were working on the ship, but not as quickly as he wanted to see. “Did you hear what I said?” He imagined one of Evans’s rants as he stood there, but he just wasn’t ornery enough to match the blast furnace the old chief would have unleased on the hapless spacers.
He did, however, have sufficient intensity to scare the hell out of the three techs.
“We’re almost done, sir,” one of them managed to reply, his voice clipped and high-pitched. “We’ll be ready to launch in less than ten minutes, Captain.”
Stockton stood where he was, staring at the technicians…until he heard a voice on his headset.
“Jake, stop harassing my techs…they’re working as fast as they can.”
Stockton turned away from the three men, not so much in response to Stara’s directive, but because he didn’t want them to see the smile that slipped onto his face when he heard her voice.
“They are now,” he said, walking away from the group as he responded. “We’ll be lucky if we can get in a second strike if everybody is operating at one hundred percent. And those three weren’t even close.” He hesitated, unsure he should say what was trying to come out. “You need to kick some ass down here, Stara. Old Chief Evans is probably rolling over in his grave to see this…”
“I’ve got flight operations under control…without your help, Jake. They’re yours once they launch, but here, they’re mine.” A pause. “And Chief Evans is alive and well, the last I heard.”
There was a moment of silence, and then, she added, “Jake…I know we’re in trouble here, but promise me you won’t do anything really stupid out there.” He could hear the concern in her voice, and nine times out of ten, he would have said something to sooth her worries. But the situation now was just too serious, the outlook too grim. He didn’t want to climb into his fighter having lied to her the last time they spoke.
“Stara, you know what we’re facing. We don’t have a chance in hell of holding Dannith, but if we can hurt these bastards…maybe we can slow them down, give them a second thought about continuing on deeper into the Confederation.” He didn’t believe that at all, but he didn’t count it as a lie, exactly. It was what they were trying to do, or at least his best guess at why Admiral Winters hadn’t pulled the whole fleet out when he saw the scope of what was coming.
Stara was silent for a while. Then, clearly trying to hide her emotions, she said, “Two of your squadrons are ready to go, Jake. You can start launch operations immediately.” A few seconds later, she added, softly, “Good luck.”
* * *
“Are your forces ready, Colonel? We have to be prepared if the fleet is unable to repel the enemy.”
Steve Blanth looked back at Cantor, still struggling to deal with the planetary administrator’s newfound backbone. It was good, though the Marine couldn’t help but wonder if it would last through the expected enemy landings, the full-scale invasion he knew was coming. Blanth was no expert in space combat, but he’d seen the latest reports from the fleet, and there was no way Admiral Winters was going to be able to defeat the vast force that had transited into the system.
Was still transiting. As of the most recent communique, enemy forces were still coming through the point. The Hegemony ships in the system already vastly outnumbered the entire Confederation fleet, and they dwarfed Admiral Winters’s desperately assembled defense force. The enemy was going to land on Dannith—if they didn’t decide just to glass the planet from orbit this time—and the invasion forces would be vastly larger than those in the previous engagement.
Blanth knew his troops didn’t have any more chance than the fleet did in a straight up fight. He was already planning to salvage as much as he could after resisting the landings, to pull his best forces back to the prepared positions and conduct a desperate guerilla campaign.
He wasn’t sure how Cantor would react to all of that. The administrator’s attitudes had improved markedly, but Blanth wasn’t sure how the man would adapt to living in a cold, wet bunker, or running from strongpoint to strongpoint, just ahead of the enemy’s seek and destroy raids. Cantor probably saw himself as his people’s savior, and Blanth expected trouble from the politician when he ordered the forward defenses abandoned almost immediately.
The Administrator undoubtedly expected a major fight to hold the cities, but Blanth didn’t really give a shit about Cantor’s opinions or his political ambitions. His Marines could fight like hell while the enemy was landing, blast as many of the inbound craft as possible and hit small pockets of disorganized Hegemony forces…but once the invaders had landed enough forces, his choice would be a simple one. See his small army utterly destroyed in a matter of days, even hours. Or retreat, take to the hills and the woods, and keep a spark of resistance alive.
If Cantor gave him too much trouble…well, he still had Tyler Barron’s permission to shoot the fool, and however soft the legal ground was under that authorization, he just might take advantage of it anyway.
* * *
“All right!” Stockton slapped his hand down on his fighter’s console, an impromptu celebration of the hit he’d just scored. Not just a hit, but a direct, precision shot that landed his torpedo right through a gash in the Hegemony battleship’s hull.
He’d had to replay the scanner recordings to see just where the weapon had hit, twice before he was certain. He’d been focused completely on pulling away from the hulking target as the torpedo actually reached its mark, and as much as he’d wanted to watch the warhead make its way in, he’d wanted to avoid slamming into two hundred million tons of Hegemony battleship more.
It had been a pinpoint shot, not just a hit, but the proverbial splitting of the arrow, and he stared at the readings coming in, trying to determine how badly he’d hurt the already-damaged behemoth. For an instant, he’d let himself hope he’d see a massive explosion, that his strike would have taken out the battleship completely. But the H
egemony fleet had larger ships deployed now than even the monsters the White Fleet had faced off against out in the Badlands, giant battlewagons that dwarfed the newest and largest Confederation equivalents.
It was a lot of tonnage to take out with a few plasma torpedoes…even with a perfect shot.
Still, he’d bet a year’s pay the thing didn’t have operational railguns anymore…and that gave Repulse and the rest of the battle line a real chance to finish the beast, along with a dozen others his squadrons had pounded.
His eyes darted to the medium range scanners, and he could see a cluster of fighters moving in on the same target, one of the hard-hit enemy vessels. It was basic fighter training…finish off the wounded enemy. But that was something his people were going to have to forget for this war, a lesson that had been drilled into their heads, and one that they would have to unlearn. The bombers had to knock out as many of the enemy’s railguns as possible, and nothing else was as important as that goal. That meant Stockton’s people couldn’t expend firepower taking down ships that were already seriously damaged. Finishing battered Hegemony hulls was work for the Confederation battle line, and as difficult as most of his pilots would find it to give up the chance to score kills, he knew it was what they had to do…unless they wanted to see their launch platforms blasted to dust before any of them could return fire.
“Calveigh, Victor…pull your squadrons up. That ship is hard hit, and we’ve got two more fresh ones coming at 123.308.009.” He’d made it clear to his pilots—and especially to his squadron commanders and wing leaders—that their primary mission was to damage as many battleships as possible. But fighter pilots had a culture all their own, and it died hard. Orders or no orders, the instinct of just about every man or woman flying one of those Lightnings drove them toward a weak target. But Admiral Winters needed them to hit the fresh ships coming up, and Stockton was going to see that they did just that.