Samantha was convinced that more than one face who had sent them away today also found itself on some most wanted list back home for past crimes. Fat chance of getting that lot to move, especially if prison or worse was waiting for them. But the majority of people they met simply didn't see any need to move, and Samantha sympathized with them.
The man who had who had been a corporate drone back home and now owned a booming bar. The divorced mother of four who had fled to Tanith and now ran a successful consulting business. The hundreds and thousands more who had found new homes and new livelihoods here.
And now the past came knocking on their front doors in the form of Alpha Platoon, First Squad, and asked them to throw that all away because somebody more than fifty light-years away was fighting a war that actually didn't concern them – or Tanith, for that matter – one bit. Saying that the deck was stacked against their mission would have been an understatement. There was no clear and present danger and therefore no desire for the long-time residents to pack their belongings because the powers that be said so.
Some of the better informed expats had been rather explicit about the whole situation. One fellow had sneered at them and told them right away that he would rather bite off his own... foot than come with them just so Secretary Randolph won some brownie points for a future bid to the presidency.
“Oh, come on, you couldn't possibly believe that's true!” their guide Alyosha, a forty-something looking Eurasian woman, had exclaimed.
“Why not?” the man had snorted. “It's been what that political Rasenni newsfeed I've subscribed to has said and they've always been spot on so far.”
“Man, half of whatever they say probably gets lost in translation,” Grunt had interjected impatiently. “We're here to protect you from murderous cat people from outer space!”
“Fat chance of that one,” had been the response. “My Rasenni's fluent.”
“You speak Imperial standard?” Grunt had ogled him like a circus attraction. The Rasenni language was commonly seen as the gold standard of languages one could learn.
“Yeah, I mean, why would I?” the expat had rolled his eyes at him. “It's just the most spoken language in the known universe, Marine.”
That in turn had nearly caused an ugly outburst by Grunt for being called a marine, but the expat had slammed his door shut before the Sarge, Alyosha, or the cheeky soldier could have gotten another word in.
Well, after that episode the squad had agreed that if Grunt Kayser was to ever open his big trap in front of a 'mission objective' again without the explicit orders of the Sarge, they had permission to strangle him. “I'll write in my report that you had an unfortunate accident with your shoelaces,” Masters had growled.
During the past five hours they had probably talked to two hundred people and had rather little to show for it. Most simply didn't believe they were in any danger, and most of the conversations were them trying to explain to the expats that even though they were Union soldiers they were here as part of an international relief and evac mission to protect them.
Samantha had the impression that the only ones willing to leave were those who looked as if they hadn't been very lucky here on Tanith anyway. The local authorities weren't much help either as they were happy that part of their refugee crisis had just become somebody else's refugee crisis.
Moving through the crowded and narrow streets lined by two or three story tall apartment buildings and small enterprises, surrounded by humans and aliens alike, Sammy felt the time rushing by as a routine set in. Their guide would lead them to human houses, the inhabitants would need convincing, most the time it wouldn't work, they'd move on to the next place. Rinse and repeat.
Alyosha was busy explaining to an elderly couple that 'no, the Union hadn't invaded the place while they had been sleeping' when Sergeant Masters stiffened, his hand clasping the right side of his helmet. A moment later he was walking away at a quick pace.
“Change of plans, First Squad! We're moving back to the landing zone, at the double. Move it, people!”
Sammy and the rest fell in after him at a light run.
Alyosha had trouble catching up with them.
“What's going on? Where are you going?”
“We're getting you onto one of the shuttles. Then we'll leave, too,” Masters explained dispassionately.
“But why?” the local guide demanded. “We've barely scratched the surface of the community here. There're thousands more!”
“I just had the LT on the line, Alyosha. The Dominion has entered the system.”
U.V.S. JOHNSTON, North American Union Navy Cruiser
Tanith, Independent Star System, Pact of Ten Suns.
A stream of shuttles hurried towards the bays of the sleek old liner, each of the small crafts symbolized by a small green icon until it merged with a similar, yet far larger icon. Captain Beaufort's gaze followed each and every one of them with growing concern. Eleven minutes ago thirty Dominion vessels had transitioned back into normspace near the edge of the system. They were on a recon-in-force type mission and they took their sweet time in assessing the situation, something Beaufort was extremely grateful for. It gave him and his colleagues some more time to get their people off the ground and the hell out of here.
“Status, commander?”
“The GRANADA is taking on her last shuttle at the moment, sir. She's got around five thousand eight hundred civilians aboard,” Therese Ranaissa reported from her station.
Beaufort nodded silently, and his focus shifted to the Dominion vanguard. And it was a vanguard, he had no doubts about that. You didn't send thirty cruisers and escorts into a system just to sneak a peek. Once their curiosity was satisfied one of them would re-transition back into foldspace, make his report and return with the real deal in tow. They didn't have much time left.
“Get me Captain Summers on the comm, Therese.”
“Aye, sir.” She motioned to the cruiser's communications officer. A second later he gave her a thumbs up sign, and the main screen next to Beaufort's console switched from a sensor readout to a look into the liner's bridge.
Captain Annegret Summers looked up from a report in her hands. The worry on her features mirrored his own.
“Captain Beaufort.” A wry smile danced across her lips. “Seems like this little trip of ours just got interesting.”
“A bit too interesting, if you ask me, mon amie.” Beaufort's voice was level despite the smile he gave the merchant skipper. “What's your status?”
Summers punched a query into her console and frowned. “My crew's debarking the last two shuttles right now. In a minute or two we should have all the civilians out of the bays.”
“Good. Prime your drives and get ready to move. The minute you've got the refugees stored safely away we'll make a run for the edge of the gravity well and get you the hell out of here. I've got a feeling it'll get ugly in this neighborhood rather quickly now.”
Summers' eyes flickered to her own sensor plot and she grimaced. “Couldn't agree more with you there, Captain Beaufort. Starting pre-launch routines now. GRANADA out.” With a brisk nod Summers' face vanished off the screen.
“Sir, we still have droppers and people back on the planet,” Beaufort's XO cautioned.
“I know, XO. Commander Kapila, have you listened in?”
The face of the Long March 46-class missile destroyer appeared on screen. “I got the gist of it, and we've been monitoring the situation closely,” Subhash Kapila answered. The two massive sensor domes put the small destroyer on an equal or possibly even better footing than the Leyte-class JOHNSTON. “It appears as if the Ashani have gotten a good enough picture by now. They've started to engage,” he pointed out.
Beaufort's head rocked to the side to where the bridge's main plot was located. There he met Commander Ranaissa's eyes.
“The Dominion force has split up into hunter-killer groups and is going after Tanithan installations and merchant shipping in the outer system, skipper.”
<
br /> “The could be just the window of opportunity we need,” Beaufort mused and the Alliance officer from the Indian subcontinent on the other end of the line nodded. “Commander Kapila, we need to escort the liner out of here. However, I've still got people down on the planet, and it'll take some of them at least thirty minutes or more to reach their LZs. Once the GRANADA is safely on her way I intend to execute a fly-by pick up and get the rest of my people back aboard. There's no point in escorting her out into the fold. She can outrun almost every ship in existence out there, and should she run into concerted resistance, well...”
The destroyer's commanding officer nodded in understanding. If the liner did run into an Ashani blockade force her only chance was to surrender and hope for the best. Trying to fight their way through it with just a cruiser and a destroyer would most likely get them all killed.
“Since we don't know what the situation will be once the liner's out of here: care to find out whether your little ship can keep up with a Leyte-class on full speed?”
Kapila flashed a smile. “I hope you know a good bar on Orion Colony because I'll insist on you buying us the good stuff once my 'little ship' leaves you in the dust.”
* * * * * * *
The STAR OF GRANADA slipped gracefully from this universe, leaving only a dissipating cloud of tachyons in its wake. Getting her outside the gravity well's inner restricting boundaries had taken more than an hour, a time the Ashani vanguard had put to good use in furthering its work of destruction. An asteroid mining base out in the vast belt the locals called the Pearls of Heaven vanished from the plot, and Beaufort watched calmly as an Ashani cruiser and its two destroyer escorts cut through a trio of Tanithan gunships like hot knives through butter. It was an disparate battle, but it wasn't his battle.
“We have Dominion vessels moving towards the transition limit and the dust disc on the other side of the ellipsis,” Cmdr. Ranaissa warned.
The main plot's focus shifted, illuminating a dozen Ashani vessels, cruisers and destroyers and frigates, burning towards the vast disc of stardust and ice and lonely planetoids that surrounded the system's star and the planet of Tanith.
“Adjusting projections for vector and speed, skipper,” JOHNSTON's XO intoned, and the red icons of the Dominion flotilla suddenly were accompanied by curves indicating their course and time of arrival.
Beaufort juggled the numbers in his head before he sharply sucked in breath. That was just what he had needed to make a bad situation worse. “Bring us about. All engines ahead full!” He didn't wait for confirmation and punched a combination on is console.
Subhash Kapila's face appeared on the accompanying screen.
“I'm afraid I'll have to insist on that race I mentioned earlier.”
“I know,” came the reply. “We'll be hard pressed to make it to the planet before the Ashani, but we'll give it our best try. Don't worry, we'll be able to keep up with you.”
“Thank you, Commander. JOHNSTON out.”
At least they now knew one thing, Beaufort thought with wry amusement: the Alliance's sensors really were as good as they had suspected.
The distant hum of the cruiser's engines increased to a soft rumble as fusion reactors spewed superheated plasma into the void, accelerating the one point seven million tons of JOHNSTON, with the help of its gravitics systems, to a speed of thousands of kilometers per second within a few minutes. Burning a long lance of plasma from its concentrated engine blocks the Alliance destroyer had no apparent problems keeping the pace.
Beaufort settled into an uncomfortable waiting stance in his command chair, one eye always on the sensor plot. Even with all their technological wizardry their turnabout maneuver had carried them far away from Tanith. It would still take them half an hour to reach top speed, and even then the time to fire the braking thrusters would come too soon for the captain's liking. But the dropships still stuck on the planet couldn't match the cruiser's speed, and the maneuver he intended to have them perform was difficult enough even under ideal circumstances, which these quite clearly weren't.
“ETA, Therese?” he asked quietly.
“Ninety minutes at current estimates, skipper,” his XO replied just as calm. “I'm in contact with the ground detachment. Panic's broken out on the planet and several squads are still stuck in the city trying to get to the LZ.”
Beaufort grimaced, then steeled himself. There was nothing he could do about that. “Tell them they've got one hundred minutes until pickup. If they aren't airborne by them...” He didn't have to finish the sentence. What was inside the star system now was but a scouting force. The real deal wouldn't be far behind. He had absolutely no desire to remain near Tanith when its defenders and the Ashani engaged each other in open battle.
Settling back into his command chair he kept his eyes on the central holographic display as the minutes crept past and JOHNSTON sped back into the inner gravity well, towards the planet Tanith. An eerie atmosphere had descended over the cruiser's bridge as they found themselves reduced to the status of onlookers while a formerly peaceful star system was swept away in the waves of war. Local comm frequencies were a shambles, with hundreds of individual vessels filling the ether in a vain attempt to cry for help or report their situation. A long throng of ships had broken Tanith's orbit and were speeding towards the well's edge in a motley convoy restricted by the slowest member's commercial drives' speed. A few gunships and alien warships coasted outward next to them.
Beaufort really couldn't blame any of them for trying to get the hell out of Dodge as fast as they could. This was just the prelude, and he, too, did not intend to be here when the hammer fell.
Around twenty minutes into their fall back to Tanith a change in the Dominion vanguard's behavior caught his attention and he focused on a newly formed flotilla constituting about half the Ashani total strength in system. They had formed up and were now burning towards the inner system for a converging vector at speeds even slightly faster than JOHNSTON.
Ten minutes later he knew why. The outbound convoy moved on a course relative to the Union cruiser on the coreward side of the planet in a forty degree angle up the zed. And the Ashani flotilla was on a hard intercept course. Over the course of the next twelve minutes more and more eyes aboard the cruiser's bridge began to follow the warships' path until it converged with the civilian fleet.
Complete and utter silence descended over the bridge crew. It was a quiet born of stomach churning horror. The ships trying to reach the edge of the gravity well were freighters, mostly unarmed and stuffed to the hilt with civilians whose only wish was to get away from the war. But the Ashani weren't willing to grant them that wish. While the freighters crowded ever closer to one another like a herd of frightened deer the Dominion cruisers almost leisurely lashed out at them with missiles and lasers and even their accompanying fighter wings. Lasers bore through hulls, turning the atmosphere inside their targets into superheated furnaces. Nuclear warheads bathed barely shielded vessels carrying women and children in plumes of heat and lethal gamma radiation. The frantic cries for help from a hundred different captains on a hundred different vessels formed a hellish cacophony as they blurted from the Union cruiser's speakers.
For a few moments the human sailors just stared at their consoles. The reality of what happened out there hadn't quite caught up with the men and women on duty. It was as if their brains were idling in neutral as they tried to process the horrific images.
“Why would they do that?” Commander Ranaissa whispered, her hushed tones reaching out into the silence. “Those ships aren't any threat.”
“Psychological warfare.” Beaufort's voice was cold. “They want to scare their enemies, make them afraid to fight, show them what it means to stand against the Dominion. They want the defenders to lose hope.”
“It'd just make me angrier, sir.” JOHNSTON's weapons officer shared his feelings, his voice clearly having a hard edge to it. As the realization began to settle, the crew's shock gave way to anger. Everyone h
ad heard the rumors of Ashani brutality. Now it was confirmed.
“Captain, local defense forces are moving to engage the Dominion ships,” Ranaissa reported. “Reading two destroyers and about two dozen gunships and cutters.”
“Chances of success?”
Ranaissa shook her head. If ONI's estimates were true that group would be hard pressed to land a single decisive hit before it faced annihilation.
“Captain Beaufort,” the comm officer piped up. “Planetary Central Command is asking for help. They want all nearby ships to protect the convoy.”
“Any responses yet?”
“Well, the Komerco cruiser squadron's just passed the edge of the well. Reading tachyon fluctuations... and they're gone. They just transitioned to the fold,” Commander Ranaissa scorned.
“So much for them adhering to their role of Tanith's guardians,” Beaufort mused. A detached part of his mind wondered what that would mean for the Timocracy's future standing in the Pact. If that was what they had decided to do for their clients, their word wouldn't count for much anymore after Tanith. “The Rasenni dreadnought?”
“Coasting toward the edge with half a dozen transports in tow. They'll be ready to jump out in twelve minutes. Doesn't look like the Ashani are keen to get on that beast's bad side.”
Which only fit the picture Beaufort had formed of the Dominion too well. They were bastards, but they weren't stupid bastards. “Anybody else out there?” he asked.
“A few Agama gunships, skipper. They're heading towards the convoy. We've got them sending a warning to the Ashani in the clear.” Ranaissa motioned to the cruiser's comm officer to put the message on speakers.
...will engage! Repeat: This is the Navy of the Faithful Ship ALLARA. Cease your
attack or we will engage! Repeat: ...
The Agama were an eccentric bunch: fiercely religious in a universe that could explain life down to its smallest components, strongly puritanical while many other societies had made it their goal to push all boundaries farther, bit by bit, often reclusive to the point of xenophobia. But in his long decades of service, Beaufort had never stumbled across an Agama who wouldn't have gladly laid down his life if it meant he or she could stop evil from overcoming innocents. And despite all the points that made the Agama what they were, here and now Beaufort felt a deep respect for the aliens and the stubborn stance to face injustice and cruelty. Out there, millions of kilometers away, two more blips vanished from the plot as the Dominion flotilla took its sweet time with its victims.
Opening Moves Page 48