The Sumerian forces were standing their ground, but they were taking a terrible beating. As the Sumerian warships began to fall out of the fight in increasing numbers, some of the Invardii ships settled into the upper layers of the Sumerian atmosphere.
ParapSanni was still recording events from the surface, and he wheeled the sub-space camera around to follow what was happening. Cordez could see the sleek, needle-nosed figures of ground ships dropping from the nearest of the Invardii ships. As they emerged from the plasma cloak of the Reaper ships they turned black in the freezing cold of the near-space environment.
ParapSanni made a sharp chopping motion with his hand, and SarSanni spoke briefly to OrLock. They were beside a dozen strange machines, and a scattering of engineers, on the outskirts of a large city.
The first bolt from the great plasma cannons tore the molecules of the air apart, and a prodigious clap of thunder rolled over the city and shattered the nearest crystal polymer windows. The blast speared into the heavens as a long streak of intense brilliance.
ParapSanni could hear the screaming of Sumerians on the streets of the city nearby. His people retained much of the sensitivity to vibration that all deep sea creatures had, even though they had been land dwellers for eight thousand years. ParapSanni and his crews had bound themselves to deaden the effect of the monumental discharges, but others were not so lucky.
There had been no time to warn them, he thought, his eyes closed and his blunt, bullet-nosed head leaning forward in shame. There had been no time to get approval from the Sumerian government, and approval may not have been given anyway.
Preparing themselves to defend against Invardii ground ships was a treasonable action. It implied the Sumerian Deep Space Navy had not been able to keep the Reaper ships away from Uruk, and the governing Eight would never have admitted such a thing was possible.
The Reform Party and SarSanni’s production facilities had been working on the cannons for some time now. It wasn’t something new they had thought up on their own. It was old Rothii demolition technology they had found in old records and adapted for this new use. Now they were about to find out how effective it was.
The bolt of intense plasma energy cut through the descending ground ships and clung to one of the Reaper ships like sticky foam. It turned the ship a dirty white, and took several minutes to bleed off into space.
SarSanni had been examining the long-range visuals of the strike, and looked up as he spoke. “Four ground ships completely destroyed, and several others seem to have been disabled.”
ParapSanni hit the side of the plasma cannon next to him with a closed fist.
Yes! he exclaimed. They had something they could hurt the Invardii with, and they could hurt them good. He made a rolling motion in the air with his hand, and Sarsanni spoke to OrLock again.
The plasma cannons began firing as fast as they could recharge their plasma cores.
ParapSanni was all too aware of the suffering he had unleashed on his own people. The noise and vibration from the cannons was bad, but if the destruction on the planets of Saurok and K'Sarth were anything to go by, the choices for the Sumerians from now on were suffering, or death.
At the heart of the vast conflict above the planet, the two enormous Sumerian motherships moved into the fray. Cordez watched the sub-space feeds in fascination as a lance of the deepest blue snapped out from the dish on the side of one, and then the other, and fastened onto the two nearest Reaper ships.
Unable to handle the power of so many containment chambers in a pure energy form, the Sumerian scientists had converted the beam to a soup of elementary particles. These now savaged the Reaper Ship with the force of matter moving at the energy of light speeds.
The fiery orange hulls of both Reaper ships turned pure white, and expanded as they tried to resist the attack. There was a burst of brilliant white light and the sub-space feed darkened as it tried to cope with the overload. When Cordez could see again, both Reaper ships had vanished. The motherships rotated slowly in space to find new targets.
Cagill noticed the two brilliant flashes as the Javelins arrived above the planet, but he was more interested in the lightning strikes from the plasma cannons on the surface as they peppered the underside of the Invardii armada. He turned to his squadron leader and they both shrugged. This was something unexpected – and the Sumerians never did anything unexpected!
Then it was time for the Earth forces to engage the armada. The Tetrarchs dived eagerly for the thick of the fighting, but Cagill pulled the Javelins around to the edge of the fray. His pilots spread out, looking for individual targets. They were fully aware that the scything energies of the Reaper ships overlapped to dangerous effect when they fought in a tetrahedral group.
Then it was the moment of truth. Prometheus had tried and discarded weapon system after weapon system, aware each time that the Invardii were so technologically far ahead that they would have a counter to anything Prometheus tried. Then Matsu Fujimi – their own ‘mad scientist’ par excellence – had said, why don’t we go low tech? And he had devised a weapons system the Invardii wouldn’t be able to get their heads around. Something so primitive it wouldn’t occur to them.
The Javelins engaged, and broadside after broadside of fractal slugs raked across the Reaper ships. There was a moment when Cagill thought the new weapon hadn’t worked, and then Reaper ships started to rip apart in giant explosions. Some flickered and went out, leaving oddly-shaped constructions of spars and hubs that fell through the Uruk atmosphere until they disintegrated.
The fractal slugs were super-dense spikes fired from the Javelins at supersonic speeds, and they had no moving parts. There were no electronics for the Invardii shields to work against, and the slug’s composition had been carefully engineered so that it didn’t register as metal. The Reaper ships let the slugs through because they didn’t see them coming. It was a brilliant strategem.
The Tetrarchs weren’t so lucky. Apart from limited success in overwhelming numbers, the Earth ships had no real answer to the elliptical arcs of coronal fire the Reaper ships threw at them. Some were destroyed outright, but the majority were, in the end, forced to limp away from the battlefield to seek a place of safety.
Cordez watched the disintegration of the Tetrarchs as a fighting force in exasperation. The Tetrarch ships needed to be upgraded, and the Earth forces needed to work together. He wondered how he could bring all the allied forces under one overall command.
He wondered too what it was that the Sumerians were firing at the Reaper ships from the planet. A message from ParapSanni a little later gave him the answer to that question. Cordez was surprised. The Sumerians were, it seems, capable of at least a little adaption to the needs of the moment. Led of course by ParapSanni and his Reform Party.
Despite the things that were working, in the long run there could only be one conclusion to the battle. Cordez knew in the back of his mind that he would have to order a retreat at some stage. It would be when the Sumerians were ready to call it a day, so they would not be able to accuse Earth of running out on them.
Cordez remembered the words of Ebert Florez, his mentor. “You’re not there to win at all costs, you’re there to make good decisions. A moment’s rashness now can multiply itself into a losing position by the end game.”
I wish you were here now, Ebert, he said softly to himself, to see how far your poor-boy protégé has come from the back streets of Brazil.
In the Prometheus boardroom, Finch and the departmental heads were clustered around the sub-space screens. John MacEwart pointed at the four larger ships in the middle of the Invardii armada. They were drawing ominously nearer to the Sumerian motherships, and he was worried about them.
“Those ain’t supply ships,” he said, a warning note in his voice. “I think they’re command ships.”
Indeed, the intent of the great oblong ships was only too obvious. Rather than staying out of action at the tail end of the Invardii fleet, they were making directly f
or the Sumerian motherships. The long, square-shaped vessels looked to be almost as big as the massive motherships.
“But they haven’t fired at anything yet,” said Carlos Paula, “and they just look like damn great oblongs – warehouses in space. I don’t see how they do much of anything.”
“Looks can be deceiving, ladies and gentlemen,” said Finch chidingly.
They looked at him blankly, but he was already sending a sub-space message to Cagill to provide cover for the Sumerian motherships if he could.
The confrontation between the giants was already underway when Cagill got there. Two of the great Invardii command ships caught one of the Sumerian motherships between them. They pinned it in great spiralling tails of fire, both of them building the energies that now surrounded the Sumerian mothership until it disappeared behind accelerating coils of writhing fire.
To Finch it looked like the great tail of fusing hydrogen that ripped between the two stars of the binary star systems the Reaper ships liked so much. It looked like MacEwart was right. These were Invardii command ships, the flagships of the armada.
Both the motherships now had locks on one of the attackers. Stabs of bright blue flame cut through the sheets of surrounding orange, but they had little effect.
CHAPTER 25
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Cagill led his squadron against the nearest of the Invardii command ships. The Javelins raked it with sustained rounds of their fractal slugs, but to no apparent effect.
Seeing the Javelins attacking one of their command ships, the Reaper ships targetted the squadron, and slashed at them with coronas of lethal fire. Cagill breathed out long and slow when the Druanii shields worked perfectly. The Javelins emerged from the attacks unscathed, time and again.
The damage the mothership had now sustained was too much for it. One side of the mammoth upper hemisphere began to disintegrate, and then the deep blue beam connecting it to one of the attacking command ships abruptly went out. The mothership detonated soundlessly in space, blowing cooling towers like shrapnel across Sumerian warships, Prometheus Javelins and Reaper ships alike.
Finch’s people in the boardroom at Prometheus saw it all. Ursul Vangretti, head of deep space communications, swore roughly. Finch almost laughed – her language would have been perfect for a gut-busting mining environment.
One of the Invardii command ships turned away, retreating to a safer position within the armada. That left an ongoing duel between the last mothership and the remaining command ship.
One on one the deep blue beam and the savage spiral of orange fire fought back and forth. The Invardii must think themselves invincible, muttered Finch to himself. Well, we’ll see about that. All we need is a little luck to fall our way.
The Javelins continued to have no effect on the giant Invardii command ship, and Cagill led the squadron into an area of space where the Sumerian warships were hard-pressed by more numerous Reaper ships.
A wing of Sumerian warships swarmed to help the last mothership in its desperate battle against the Invardii command ship, to be swiftly engaged by a protective escort of Reaper ships. One of the warships slipped past the screen of enemy ships, just as the mothership reached the limits of its endurance.
The warship had already been badly damaged in its fight against the armada, and the crew must have seen the outer layers beginning to peel off the mothership as it succumbed. Accelerating as it swerved desperately from side to side, the warship slammed into the Invardii command ship, its star drive unit overloading as it did so. The sky over Uruk lit up with a miniature sun.
“By all the heavens, did the warship do that on purpose?” murmured Finch, watching from Prometheus. Moments later the mothership disintegrated. Explosions savaged the wreckage, and it was reduced to a cloud of floating debris.
Then the coils of spiralling fire from the flagship stopped abruptly, and its outline flickered, and went dark. Finch snapped a terse message to Cagill. Yes, as far as the Javelins could tell, the Invardii command ship appeared to have lost power.
“Goddammit, it’s dead in the water,” muttered Finch, hardly able to believe they could have been be so lucky.
“Destroy it!” he yelled over the sub-space radio, and Cagill’s squadron wheeled to the attack. Some of the Sumerian warships followed, and added their energy weapons to the bombardment of fractal slugs.
Ayman Case lead the squadron from the front. As a fly boy Ayman had some real talent. Skimming the surface of the giant, disabled flagship, the Javelins pumped everything they had into it.
The command ship did not have its plasma shields to protect it, and the Javelins started doing some real damage. They flew around the screen of Reaper ships trying to defend the giant ship when they could, and through the arcs of coronal fire when they had to.
Slowly, like the rendering down of some great whale, the Javelins dug holes along the length of the command ship. Bits of its structure began to float away into space. When the end came it started with the sudden glow of a meltdown in the middle of the flagship, and then a series of explosions that ripped along its entire length.
The Javelins wheeled away before they could be caught in the flying debris, and the Prometheus team could hear cheers from the flight deck of Cagill’s Javelin.
On the ground, ParapSanni could see the final moments of the Invardii command ship, and it gave him heart. He talked briefly with Prometheus about the next phase of the fighting. Then he looked around at the Sumerian city he was defending, and up at the Invardii fleet above him. Several explosive thumps shook the ground as a salvo of plasma cannon bolts ripped up through the sky.
The Reform Party had defended Uruk, and the Sumerian way of life, bravely, and they had destroyed many of the detested ground ships. In the beginning it had been easy, and ground ships had been obliterated with every cannon blast, but then the Reaper ships had stopped dropping them into the atmosphere.
The plasma bolts hadn’t had much effect on the Reaper ships themselves, but Orlock and his team kept firing the bolts anyway, mostly in moral support of their own warships.
But now the tide of battle was turning decisively toward the armada, and the Earth forces would be withdrawing soon, their supplies running low. As if to emphasise that point, the Reaper ships started disgorging ground ships again, in much larger numbers. ParapSanni knew there were not enough plasma cannons to stop their greatly increased numbers.
He could see the long, twisting skeins of thin, black shapes high in the atmosphere, about to drop like stones to ground level before they spread out and destroyed the Sumerian civilisation. The plasma cannons would be one of their first targets, he knew that.
The Sumerian warships would probably fight to the last ship in defence of Uruk, he thought to himself, and then Cordez came through on sub-space radio. It was a heated conversation, as Cordez tried to convince the Reform Party leader to abandon Uruk so the Sumerians could live to fight another day.
“My place is here,” answered ParapSanni slowly. “I believe you Humans have a saying, ‘the captain goes down with his ship’.”
“And a damn stupid saying it is, too!” said Cordez in exasperation. “Your other planets can still build warships, and if you act now you can save many of the ones fighting here today!”
He came back to his first request of ParapSanni.
“Evacuate whatever you can to your reserve ships on the other side of the planet. We will cover your retreat, and you can have your revenge for the destruction of Uruk some time in the future!”
ParapSanni shook his head wearily. Cordez sensed his resignation to his fate by the silence on the line. A series of rocking thumps heralded more discharges from the plasma cannons.
“Rokar is undamaged, my friend,” said Cordez quietly, “and you have other Sumerian colony planets to save. What will the Hall of Records say if you leave your work unfinished?”
Cordez waited patiently. This was his last bid to get through to the Reform Party leader. If he could appeal
to ParapSanni’s sense of historical judgement on what he did today, perhaps he would keep the Sumerian resistance going.
If that didn’t work, he would try to make him see the fate of all the innocent Sumerians on the remaining Sumerian worlds. It was blackmail, but it was all Cordez had left. Somehow, he had to fire a spark of defiance in his Par’Sanni ally.
There was a pause. “You would cover an evacuation of Uruk?” said Parapsanni. “You would provide resources and ships to continue the fight, if we needed them?”
“We’re in this together!” said Cordez urgently. “If one of us falls, we all fall. If we help each other, we might yet make an end to these troubles that beset us.”
There was a much longer silence at the other end of the sub-space line. Cordez forced himself to wait again. There was a massive “crump” in the background, as a plasma cannon fired at the swarming mass of ground ships, now beginning their descent.
“There is not much time,” said Parapsanni suddenly. He seemed to have woken from his reverie about possible futures for the Sumerian Empire. It was a good sign. The ground ships would be ripping up the plasma cannons before much longer.
“It’s too late for an evacuation,” said ParapSanni, “and it wouldn’t be possible anyway, not under attack like this.”
“Leave that to me,” said Cordez quickly. “Can you set the cannons to fire automatically?”
“Why? They would fire at nothing. No one would aim them.”
“It’s a distraction,” said Cordez. “Hurry, please, just get it done.
“Can you get in touch with the Eight?” he added.
There was no time to lose, and the Sumerian supreme bureaucracy could still make things impossible – even when there was no Empire left to govern.
ParapSanni opened his official channel to the Great Hall of the Sumerian government. Somewhere within the massive construction of sharp crests and reef-like prominences the Eight – the most powerful of the Para’Par’Brahmad leaders – had convened to oversee the defence of Uruk.
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