“Yes sir,” she said, hoping that his plan would at least make their deaths meaningful.
Chapter 13
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. Thomas Carlyle
“Missiles coming in, ma’am,” called out the voice of the fort’s tactical officer. Vice Admiral The Countess Esmeralda Gonzalez had just received the message about the missiles from the fighter strike that was still heading out to meet the enemy. Less than ten seconds later and they were picking them up on active sensors. Four of the bastards. Not that many, and definitely not enough to saturate the fortress’ defenses. But at point nine four c hit on the planet could kill a million or more citizens, depending on where it landed.
“Fire long range interceptors,” she ordered, “and prepare close in systems to engage.”
As she said the words the station fired fifty of the long range interceptors at the incoming missiles, followed by another fifty just seconds later.
“Prepare to move the station, ma’am?” asked the tactical officer in a hopeful tone.
Nobody wanted a large missile hitting them at a substantial fraction of light speed. And the station could, in an emergency, dodge at a little over five gravities. But the station commander was thinking of the planet, and what a hypervelocity strike could do to the people on the surface.
“Six hundred gigatons,” she said shaking her head.
“Ma’am.”
“That missile would strike the surface with six hundred gigatons of energy,” she said. “That’s about one three hundred fiftieth of the dinosaur killer the records say struck Earth millions of years ago. Not enough to kill all life on the planet. Enough to cause considerable havoc. Especially if it hits on the settled continent. Or in the ocean just off that continent.”
“So we won’t be moving the station ma’am?”
“No son,” she said, looking at the tactical display of four red arrows and two waves of a hundred green arrows converging. Three of the green arrows intersected two red and the dots faded from the screen. The two red arrows continued on as the remaining forty-seven defensive missiles of the first wave flowed on. Then the second wave hit the two missiles and they faded away.
“I guess there wasn’t a need, ma’am,” said the tactical officer as the remaining green arrows were sent destruct signals and disappeared.
“Not this time,” she agreed, looking into his eyes. “Now I want your department to look at all the data we gathered on those missiles. I think the next time we face them it will be at saturation levels. And make sure the fire plan for Admiral Heinrich is up to date. I’m sure we’ll be firing offensive missiles well before we need the defensive tubes.”
“Aye ma’am,” said the young Commander, hurrying back to his station. The rest of the command crew looked away as she scanned the deck.
I’m sure that saturation is going to come, she thought, unless Gunter can pull off a miracle.
* * *
“Commodore Chung should be here in fifteen minutes,” said the com officer, taking off her headset and looking back at the temporary commander of the fort.
“I don’t think we’ll be here,” said Captain Laura Montenegro, watching the tactical display that showed a mass of red arrows approaching the planet.
Forty missiles traveling at point nine four c, she thought. And we’re the only target worth hitting, unless they’re trying to hit the planet as well.
“Fire counter missiles,” she ordered. The fort released all tubes, sending thirty counter missiles toward the oncoming flood. Another launch followed seconds later, and then another.
“Fire off all of the offensive missiles we can cycle,” she ordered. They had already launched fifty of their own fusion powered, fusion warhead missiles to seek out whatever they could find coming in from the outer system. She thought they might be able to get another thirty out of the tubes before they were vapor.
“Set orbital batteries for automatic,” she said to the frantic tactical officer. “Override safety protocols on my authority. I want them taking anything entering their range under fire.”
“What something friendly comes calling,” called the tactical officer.
“I don’t think we need to worry about that,” she answered, as she watched the first wave of her counter missiles reach out toward the incoming enemy ship killers. “We don’t have anything in the system worth worrying about.”
“Commodore Chung?”
“Signal him my intensions and suggest that he hide in the outer system,” she replied. As she spoke the fort sent out another salvo of counter missiles, bringing the total to one hundred and twenty in space.
The red arrows reached for them, as the time on target figures decreased with the ticking of the clock. The first salvo of counters would reach them when they were about ten seconds from the fort. The last when they were three seconds away.
She looked around the control room, smelling the fear on the crewman. Everyone was doing their jobs, at the same time lost in their own thoughts of the death that was coming for them. The wave of green arrows that were the counter missiles reached out, accelerating at eight thousand gravities. Ten larger arrows followed the wave, accelerating at five thousand gravities, the offensive missiles.
People watched and waited with bated breath as the lines moved together. They met, and a half dozen green arrows intersected four of the red arrows, flaring and then fading from the display. In the dark of space four brilliant dots flamed for a couple of seconds and then were gone.
The second wave of counter missiles met the incoming weapons. Thirteen green arrows become one with seven of the red arrows, blotting them from existence. The third wave only knocked out five of the incoming missiles, the fourth wave eight. Leaving sixteen missiles still closing on the orbital fort that was the primary target.
Close in defenses kicked in by computer control before the fourth wave of counter missiles reached their targets. Fifty tubes on the outer side of the station spit out short range interceptors at twenty thousand gravities. They went through four cycles of missiles, two hundred total, in the time they had. Nine of the hypervelocity incoming were taken out by the short rangers. The station opened up with lasers and automatic projectile weapons at three seconds out. Missiles dodged a dozen times a second, pulling hundreds of gravities with each maneuver. Some missiles pulled into beams or streams and were vaporized. One bore in straight, its brain hoping to fool the defenses with a constant path. Gigawatts of laser energy from a half dozen beams took it in the nose, destroying it down to the warhead containment that exploded, sending tiny pieces of missile on millions of vectors.
Three missiles made it through the defensive fire. One was hit a ten thousandth of a second out, shredding the body of the missile. Large multiton pieces struck the station, blasting great holes into the body of the fort and killing most of the crew. The second missile came in whole, striking and detonating with thousands of gigatons of kinetic energy and antimatter warhead. The station blew out into a cloud of vapor and debris. Small sections, none more than a fraction of a ton, were propelled into the atmosphere where they burned up from the friction. There were no survivors, none even having time to launch an escape pod.
The third missile flew through the cloud of vapor and debris at point nine four c. It broke up and it fell into the cloud, the warhead section detonating from the impact that sent antimatter against matter through the containment field. Four large sections went through a hundred kilometers of atmosphere like streaks of light, super heating but still solid in the four ten thousandths of a second they moved through the gas.
The remains all struck within a hundred kilometers of each other. Fortunately for the humans on the planet the point of impact was the relatively uninhabited northern continent of the planet, an Australia sized island of forests and grasslands. Unfortunately for the few humans who
did live on the continent the strike was not survivable unless they had been near enough to a shelter.
The twenty ton piece struck fifty kilometers in from the west coast of the continent, generating a force of four hundred gigatons, blasting out a one hundred kilometer crater and punching through the planetary crust. The western edge of the crater would have immediately begun filling with water, except for the six ton section that hit with two hundred gigatons of energy, vaporizing water as it gouged out a fifty kilometer crater and setting fluid in motion that would form five hundred meter tall waves when it hit the continent six thousand kilometers to the west. Two other one ton sections hit within the forming crater of the largest piece, adding their forty gigatons of energy to the mix. The mushroom cloud from the impact reached to the top of the atmosphere and spread. The wall of heat washed over the continent, incinerating everything within two thousand kilometers of the impact. The blast wave followed close behind, swirling the ash of the skeletons of trees and knocking over what hadn’t been totally crisped.
Hundreds of kilometers from the impact the thirty ton predator crouched. The matriarch of the pack, she watched the herd of herbivores as other pack members crept into position. The sky to the west brightened with a flash as the herd stirred with a low moaning sound. The matriarch rose on her haunches, turning toward the light with a nervous growl. The ground bucked beneath her feet and she fell over on her side. As she struggled to her feet she gave a howl of alarm to the pack, signaling for them to run and hide. Too late, as the wave of heat washed over her, setting her fur aflame. Before the howl of agony could leave her mouth she was turned into an ash caricature of herself. An ashen statue that was scattered by the blast wave that followed quickly behind the heat.
The eighty ton adult herbivores scrambled to their feet as the sky flashed. Mothers looked for calves as the herd started to run away from the flash, lowing into the night. The shock wave through the ground knocked many off their feet, while others struggled on. Not that it did the ones that retained their feet any good, as the entire herd was burned to ash at the same instant as the predators who had stalked them.
An hour later the elder son of McGurky Freehold, who had ridden out the disaster with the few members of his family who had made it to shelter, came out of the ground. He stared open mouthed at the devastation. There was no vegetation in sight, only the swirling ash that was the remains of trees and meadows. Most of the outbuildings were gone, and the manor house of the freehold was scorched on its outer walls and leaning at a severe angle. He looked to the west and saw the red fountains of magma arching tens of kilometers into the sky, hundreds of kilometers away. The man looked at that reddened sky and shook his fist, tears coming to his eyes.
The entire planet shuddered from the earthquakes that would move through the crust for hours, setting off aftershocks that would continue for days after the event. Those on the coast of the continent to the east, who saw the streaks of light followed by the burning trails of the remains of the fort, knew what had happened. While they grabbed their belongings and prepared to leave the danger zone for seismic waves the first tremors hit, knocking people off their feet and objects from shelves. In an earlier time the shocks would have toppled buildings as they opened crevasses through the soil and rock. Walls swayed and rocked as windows compressed and expanded. When the first tremors passed the buildings stood, their carbon fiber construction up to the test of massive quakes. The residents decided not to chance their sturdy construction to crushing walls of water, and left the coast in a flood of air cars.
* * *
“What the hell was that?” yelled Cornelius Walborski as the ground moved beneath his feet.
“Stay away from the shelves,” called out Sergeant McFadden, his squad leader. “Or keep your damned helmets on your heads so nothing hits you there.”
“What’s going on, Sergeant?” said Walborski after another shock hit the shelter where the squad was gathered to rest.
“They took out the orbital fort,” growled the NCO, trying to look fierce and only succeeding in looking as scared as the rest of the squad. “Hit it with long range missiles and blew it out of the sky.”
Cornelius knew that the Sergeant had served a ten year basic enlistment in the Imperial Marines, and so probably knew things he didn’t. But he still couldn’t imagine missiles taking out the huge bulk of an orbital fort.
“How big were their warheads?” he asked, still trying to grasp the power needed to blow up the huge station he had seen under construction in orbit on coming to the planet.
“From a hundred megatons to a gigaton,” said the Sergeant, looking over at the Private.
“Is that enough to destroy a fort?”
“Probably not,” agreed the NCO. “Maybe the gigaton range could do it. But those forts are built as sturdy as battleships, with a lot more mass. It was most likely a kinetic hit, the missile coming in at near light speed. And one that missed the station and hit the planet instead. Those could generate thousands of gigatons.”
“Why even put a warhead on them then?” asked Walborski, trying to get his head around that much destructive power. “That seems like a piddling amount of energy compared to what it generated just from momentum.”
“They don’t always get to pile on that much velocity,” said the Sergeant. “Especially in ship to ship. Or they’re fired at objects moving away. Or they don’t get a hard hit, and have to detonate close enough to do some damage.”
“You think they’re going to hit us with more missiles, Sergeant?” asked another of the privates, fiddling with his rifle, which now seemed to all of them a pitiful weapon compared to what they were talking about.
“Not much we could do about it if they did,” said McGurty . “But I think they’ll land and take this world away from us. At least I hope so.”
“Why do you hope that, Sergeant?” asked Walborski, confused. “It’s not like we’re going to stop them from coming here and killing us.”
“That’s true,” said the NCO with a feral grin. “But if I’m going to die I want to take as many of them with me as I can.”
* * *
Jennifer Conway started in her sleep when the earth shook beneath her bed. She looked blearily at the room as she tried to shake the sleep from her eyes, calling up the time on the net. She had only been asleep for an hour when whatever it was had awakened her. She dove deeper into the net as another tremor hit the bed and knick knacks trembled on the shelves of the guest room.
“You all right, doc?” called out a voice after a knock sounded on the door.
“Yes,” she replied just before the net opened up to her mind after a slight delay. “What’s happening?”
“We don’t know yet,” said the man, popping the door open slightly. It was one of the Montero grandsons, his voice filled with worry. “The ground started shaking is all I know.”
The delay of the net was very uncharacteristic. The doc looked over its information with a catch in her throat. All those people dead, she thought as she looked over the report of the orbital fortress destroyed. Almost a thousand crew vaporized in an instant. And then the ground fall of the parts of a missile onto a, luckily, sparsely inhabited continent. But an entire ecosystem obliterated as if the creatures that made it up had never evolved.
“We’re getting some information on it now,” said the grandson, still standing behind the partially opened door to shield her for modesty’s sake.
I’m sure I’m getting more, she thought. As an emergency responder she would of course have a higher level of access than a freeholder. And the information she was getting was not good.
The hospital is going to be busy, she thought. Modern buildings of course didn’t collapse from tremors. They had to take a direct hit or a near miss by something really powerful. But people still fell from high places, or had things fall on them. There were hundreds of reported injuries that would require medical attention. And she, one of only a score of fully trained physicians, was a th
ousand kilometers away from the nearest major hospital.
“Get your grandfather for me please,” she said as she pulled herself out of bed, her mind made up. “I need to tell him something.”
* * *
“So that’s what we have, Colonel,” said Brigadier Klein on the holo. Baggett and his staff officers were sitting in their command bunker listening to the transmission that was telling them the only effective orbital defense for the planet had been taken out. All that were left were the defense platforms on automatic. And he didn’t have a lot of faith in those.
“Any damage to us here on the ground?” asked Baggett, looking into the face of the holographic image.
“Nothing on that continent as far as ground defenses, no,” said the General. “We still have the full capabilities of our ground based assets, such as they are. And the orbital platforms are intact. I understand they will take the enemy under fire at the optimal range programmed into their AI’s.”
“No man in the loop for them?” asked Baggett, raising an eyebrow.
“We still have override control on them,” answered the Brigadier. “But with a significant delay we have to let them do their own fighting without ground based oversight.”
“Any estimate on the arrival of our friends?”
“We’re missing the sensors of the fort, of course,” said the ground force commander. “But infrared from the defense platforms put them at a three hundred gravity decel. Heading our way with an ETA for insertion of eight hours. The heavies will get here an hour behind them, with the troop transports following probably another hour or two.”
“So we start getting hit in eight hours,” said Baggett, looking at his staff and seeing the worried expressions on their faces. “Ground assault in ten to twelve hours.”
“That’s about it, Colonel,” agreed the Commander. “How are your forces?”
“All of the regulars are where we want them to be,” said the Colonel. “I have about eighty percent of the militia still in place, with a twenty percent desertion rate. I still hope those bastards will fight when their families are at risk, putting some pressure on the invaders. But they’re not going to help the main effort.”
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2 Page 21