The Ghost Fleet

by Trevor Wyatt

  “No,” Jeryl muttered as the Sonali fired upon the planet, a never ending stream of particle beams cutting through the atmosphere of the colony. It took them over five minutes to destroy the major settlements on the planet, and everyone in the Officers Lounge simply watched in stunned silence as the Sonali silenced more than three million people.

  Human life has never been this been extinguished this easily before, Jeryl thought, his heart so tight he no longer felt it beating inside his chest. Not even during the Third World War did so many people die.

  “This can’t go on for much longer,” Flynn finally said, his gruff voice cutting through the silence that had settled around them. “We can’t take one more year of this.”

  “No, we can’t,” Jeryl agreed, never taking his eyes off the screen. Davos II’s atmosphere had acquired a red hue, and Jeryl couldn’t help but imagine how terrible it must have been for the people on the ground, knowing that death had come knocking at their door and that there’d be no rescue.

  “We got to put a stop to the madness,” Flynn continued, and Jeryl was no longer sure if the old Admiral was talking to him or simply trying to rearrange his own thoughts. Either way, Jeryl agreed with every word—they had to put a stop to the madness, one way or another. “Whatever it takes, son...we’ll do whatever it takes to stop them.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Jeryl repeated slowly, the certainty of his own voice scaring him. He knew that, if necessary, he’d kill every single Sonali with his bare hands if that meant the end of the conflict.

  And that scared him.

  They had been at war for four years, and Jeryl was already a different man than the one that went out searching for The Mariner.

  He was scared what four more years would do to him.

  Part III

  Book III

  Jeryl

  Five years.

  Five years of war.

  Five years of blood.

  Four billion humans dead.

  Jeryl hadn’t shaved in two days. He used to be clean-shaven every day; it was part of the Armada regulations. But somewhere along the line, he stopped. Maybe it was during one of the many of the battles over the last two years after Davos II where The Seeker kept diverting power from non-essential things like lights in crew quarters. Or when they were sneaking along in radio silence, and people were so jumpy that trying to shave would have resulted in a cut neck.

  In fact, the nagging thought in the back of his head had returned again.

  If he could go back in time to when they first discovered the ruins of The Mariner… well, then he would tell Admiral Flynn nothing. He wouldn’t even mention that damn ship.

  And then he would tell himself to turn the ship around and make the best possible speed back to Edoris station.

  Because it’s not like a lot of things went wrong. It was just one thing:

  Him.

  Jeryl wondered briefly why he was thinking back to that that moment. After so many battles, so many engagements, why go back to that one moment in time?

  He sat in one of the briefing rooms of Edoris station, surrounded by three other ship captains. There was a briefing that Admiral Flynn would be doing shortly. They would be going over their part of a new campaign that was being called the Wolf offensive; The Seeker had been tapped for a crucial role.

  No one knew what the Wolf Offensive entailed just yet, but hopefully, it was something that was going to bring the war to a close.

  Endless combat did more to Jeryl than not shaving. It made him dark. Edgy. Jeryl found himself thinking the most random things in the universe. Sometimes he wondered if there was something he could’ve done to prevent the war. He knew that the part of him that answered back with answers that he didn’t want to hear was the part that told him it wasn’t just something he could’ve done.

  It was everything he could’ve done.

  He could’ve turned the ship around. He could’ve not brought up the fact that The Mariner was destroyed when he talked to the Sonali. He could’ve filed a different report with Armada Command. He could’ve spoken up when Armada Command began to question whether it was the Sonali that destroyed The Mariner.

  From the very beginning, Armada Command believed that the Sonali were responsible and it colored everything that they did. So there was never any diplomatic interchange. There were never any cultural awareness expeditions. Instead, immediately after first contact, they were sent away from their territory into a border dispute prompted by what happened to The Mariner.

  The battle cry, “Remember The Mariner,” resonated throughout the Earth, throughout the Union, even throughout the Outers.

  Jeryl remembered the first engagement where he saw a colony bombarded orbitally from above—killing millions on the surface. It was so long ago, but he remembered it as if it were yesterday. He remembered having to strand fifteen thousand refugees as a dreadnought approached.

  He remembered Terran offensives. Lately, colony attacks were met with Armada retaliatory strikes. It took a while, but eventually, human savagery shone through. Something somewhere had snapped. Now Armada captains glassed Sonali planets—killing their civilians with something near glee.

  They’d gone mad as a race. Losing billions of people will do that to anyone.

  “What are we doing here, you think?” one of the Captains, a Gonçalo Richard asked.

  “I heard we’re going to lead a full-frontal assault during Wolf Offensive,” another captain responded.

  Jeryl’s ears perked up and he leaned forward. It was a rather optimistic tone from someone who’d been in a sector that had seen the heights of the war that no other area of the Terran Union has experienced.

  There’d been a lot of fighting. Entire worlds have been laid to waste, more than anything that ever happened to Earth during the Third World War.

  Jeryl realized that he had lost himself once again in thoughts about the war and he shook himself awake.

  4 billion people…dead.

  It was almost too large of a number to comprehend. Add the countless Sonali dead and the last five years had been brutal. Entire colony worlds that had been around for generations, some with populations that numbered in the hundreds of millions—glassed.

  The Sonali had begun the process in bombarding planets initially. But oh, how quickly the Terrans had caught on. Both sides didn’t even bother to invade or send any sort of ground forces after a while. They came, they bombarded, they destroyed all life on the surface, and then they retreated.

  Unconventional warfare also reared its head. Terran Armada Intelligence began to play a greater role in the war.

  They used pirates to smuggle thermonuclear packages into their worlds. They sent suicide runs of ships who took out entire worlds. They had attacked their star bases, their planets, and their shipping lines.

  After the destruction of Davos II, The Seeker was assigned to the Edoris Station Battle Group to patrol the Edoris Sector. They had started with 240 starships. There were 78 left from the original fleet. They’d had replacement ships and crews – but one by one, ships fell. People died.

  Jeryl knew Admiral Flynn had a hell of a lot to deal with. He’d seen so many captains reporting to him that ere no longer around. He was probably never going to live down the death of the billions of people whose blood he had on his hands.

  But even with those theoretical weapons they’d developed, they were at best fighting to a stalemate. It used to take several Armada ships to bring down a Sonali. Now, it only took two Armada vessels to be destroyed to bring down one Sonali cruiser.

  Do I sound bitter? Well, that’s because I fucking am, he thought to himself.

  It had gotten to the point where failure was not an option. Failure meant death. There was no other way to put it except this. It has become the defining conflict of their lives.

  That part of Jeryl’s brain that he didn’t want giving him any ideas, the one asking him questions—it was what made him laugh. He was thinking back to the people wh
o served on The Seeker.

  No man, including him, had ever fought in a war this large and this devastating. But entire classes in the Academy today were graduating having only known war. The Sonali were relentless. They came and attacked with a ferocity that no one would ever expect.

  Sadly, it took no time for humanity to match that ferocity. The one thing that had come out of this, thought Jeryl--a fucked up silver lining—was that the technology advancements that they had gotten through the war had really expedited the rebuilding of Earth.

  Not that that really mattered if the Sonali came into orbit of New Washington or Earth and began bombardment on those cities—that would make World War III look like a walk in the park.

  Jeryl worried about Earth every day. His crew felt it.

  They all thought about their home planets. He could see it in their faces as well. Every time a colony world fell, they got word that a settlement had been attacked; he saw it in their faces. Did they know anyone there? Did they have any family there? Did they have any friends? Could it happen to their home planet?

  It kept them up at night and never let them sleep. But sometimes, that was a good thing, because sleeping tended to turn those thoughts into nightmares.

  Surprisingly, the morale had been pretty good within the Armada the last year or so. Command had seen fit to reorganize along much better lines of command than anything they had ever had before. They got a new president of the Union who actually seemed to want to prosecute this war and preserve humanity. He campaigned during the second year of the war on a platform that was both morbid and funny—‘Preserve Humanity’.

  Of course, that meant more corporate involvement. Jeryl wondered what new corporate shingle would be hanging outside the briefing room on the Edoris Station Promenade when he went out.

  Maybe another Trinidec Pleasure Palace? Or a billboard from the Astra Corporation?

  Would it even matter if the Sonali came out of nowhere and vaporized this station in a coordinated assault? Before they break through the lines and go destroy humanity?

  Sounds kind of melodramatic, doesn’t it? Jeryl asked himself, shaking his head.

  In truth, that was what a lot of people were worried about. That these were the last days of the human race.

  By now, Jeryl had counted at least 100 engagements with the enemy. He’d seen ships destroyed in front of his eyes.

  Sure, there had been technological advancements. They’d encountered other alien races as they jumpstarted their exploration through the sector. Multiple contacts with multiple species as a result of war.

  Thank God we didn’t get into more conflicts with them, the captain told himself.

  And perhaps one of the biggest things ever—the Terran Union and the Armada finally looking outward rather than just inward. Of course, they’d their backs to the wall. Today, they were fighting for survival. But there was a chance that maybe, they could get out of this alive and not go extinct as a species.

  Admiral Flynn walked in, disrupting Jeryl’s ruminating. The sliding doors closed and he took the dais.

  “Thank you for being here, gentlemen,” he said as he looked into each of the three faces. “We are here today to discuss your role in the Wolf Offensive. A campaign we hope that will turn the tide and end this war.”

  Admiral Flynn continued. “Within several days’ time, a fleet of over 400 starships from the Armada will be amassing at this station. We will be striking at the heart of the Sonali defenses in this sector. You will not be a part of it.”

  Jeryl’s eyes opened wide and leaned forward. If they weren’t going to be part of one of the greatest offenses in the history of human warfare, then he wanted to know what they were going to be doing.

  He knew that Admiral Flynn would tell them in time. He also knew that he was going to keep as much information, as he wasn’t allowed to share it himself. But he knew this as well—that Admiral Flynn wanted this war to be over. He was right there with Jeryl when the Captain thought about how it started.

  Not with the demands back-and-forth to re-compensate them for the destruction of The Mariner. Not the speeches by the politicians who tried to whip the crowd into a frenzy for war. Not even from the decision within Armada Command to make the first strike. That first strike was not the start of this conflict.

  The first salvo in this conflict, the first conversation about a potential war, all that occurred over one coded slipstream frequency when he reported back on the state of The Mariner debris to Admiral Flynn.

  Earlier, Jeryl remembered thinking there were a lot of things he could’ve done. Well, he bet that Admiral Flynn thought that there were a lot of things he could’ve done, as well. In fact, the Captain thought the Admiral went over his actions five years ago with a fine tooth comb.

  A half-dozen orders just within the few hours of discovering the wreckage would’ve altered today and the state that they were in. He knew that Flynn was thinking none of these would’ve happened if he had given those orders. And not just Jeryl. Other people were probably thinking something similar as well.

  It looked like all of them would pay for any mistakes he’d made. After watching humans die and forced to kill Sonali, he didn’t really know if he had the ability to care anymore.

  It’s like you go numb inside after the first billion deaths, he thought. It’s like with every death that I see or cause, another part of my soul is on its one-way trip to hell.

  “Your target…” the Admiral continued, and Jeryl raised his eyes to shake himself awake and pay attention.

  “…is none other than the central planet of all Sonali religion,” he finished.

  Well, this should be interesting.

  Ashley

  “The best I can do is 26 hours,” the Edoris station engineer said to Ashley.

  “26 hours is too long. That’s just way too long to repair the deflector screens,” she answered back to the engineer. His gray eyes bore into her, as if he was trying to look into her soul.

  “Look, Commander Gaines,” he said. “You’re not the first person who’s come up to tell me that my repairs take too long. You’re not even the highest ranking person who’s come up to me telling me my repairs take too long. Let me ask you this. You want me to put together a half ass job so that when you go out there and fight the blue skins you end up falling apart faster and having to limp back and I got do this job all over again?”

  Ashley was silent.

  “Or do you want me to do a good job, get your good deflector screen upgrades, so that when you fight those fuckers and kick their ass, you don’t have to come crawling back to the station—if it’s even around—to get an upgrade?” he finished.

  A part of Ashley had to be absolutely honest: the engineer made a very good point. But the key statement in that entire diatribe that stuck out to her was whether the station was still going to be around the next time they come back.

  It had been a long war. The destruction over the last five years had been unprecedented—even to The Seeker. They were doing with an upgraded battle cruiser using the name nowadays. An encounter at New Sydney six months after the fall of Davos II had led to the destruction of the old frigate. She couldn’t say that she didn’t like the new ship, but a part of her sometimes missed the old one. It had become home after a lot of years.

  “16 hours is fine,” the commander finally said. “There’s a problem with the inertial dampers too. Think you could take a look at that while you’re under the hood?”

  “You got it,” he said to Ashley and started inputting orders into his tablet.

  “How many ships are in the queue?” Ashley asked. He looked at her and gave her a rueful smile.

  “You don’t even want to know,” he said with a chuckle. “Fix up one, another three get in line. But I guess it’s better for them to come back damaged than not come back at all.”

  The engineer had a point. At the very beginning of the war, the number of Terran Union ships that it took to bring down one Sonali vessel w
as staggering. It seemed like every ship that they had was ill-equipped to fight the graceful and superior design of the Sonali. There were encounters where it took five ships to bring down one Sonali vessel.

  But that wasn’t to say that the scientists and the corporations didn’t do their damnedest to try to even those odds. Three years ago, during one of their largest offensives, humankind finally began to hold their lines. And not just hold their lines, but turn the tide.

  But the cost of resources? The cost of manpower? All those people for 2 ½ years who died just to halt an invasion?

  That could never be recovered.

  It had been a long war, and not just for their crew. For the first time ever, the rebuilding of the planet Earth was put on hold to ensure the survival of humanity.

  Not that there hadn’t been some good that had come out of it. For the first time, the Outer Colonies, seeing Earth at the losing end of a war and facing extinction, finally began moving towards a path and towards meaningful diplomatic contact.

  For Ashley, it was surprising to hear; she was someone who had only known the Outer Colonies as belligerent isolationist, and uninterested in anything to do with the Terran Union. But for the first time, emissaries were arriving on Earth to begin the process of opening a dialogue.

  Where the dialogue was going, Ashley didn’t know. That was beyond her pay grade. But what she did know was that if there was some meaningful progress on that front, then maybe there was hope for them as a species in surviving this.

  “I’ll start working with the dock master to get the ship detailed and ready to go in the next two days with all the things we talked about,” the engineer said to her.

  Ashley nodded. Her mission while the crew was docked at the station was to make sure that the battle damage The Seeker suffered got repaired to the best of this station’s abilities.