by Scott Warren
Sothcide's impressive combat record included fleet action against a race called the Pfelt in contestation of a mineral-rich moon in an independent system, in which he claimed four confirmed kills on enemy fighters and disabling shots on two light frigates. His second combat patrol he’d met the light of his horizon, Jalith, and offered himself for marriage to the young bridge officer less than a year later. By then, Sothcide had proved his merit and been given an assistant squadron leader position on a nimble support carrier, smaller than the Twin Sister by over half. In that position he completed four successful combat sorties against the Grah’lihn, or Graylings as the humans called them. His third tour, his squadron’s carrier was shot out from under him and he was picked up by Victoria and her Vultures.
Now, drifting about the sunward side of Juna, he led a full wing of able pilots at the controls of deadly fighter craft. The snow of the magnetic rails was gone from his screen, and he could see clearly ahead the pinpricks of light as Wing Commander Arda threw punch after punch at the hardened Gavisar line with missiles and tightbeam masers. In his rear viewscreen he could see that the Starscream and her sister ships had come out of hiding, piling on the acceleration with a brilliant flare on his thermal scopes.
"All craft, full burn. Maintain designated targets and soften those anti-missile defenses."
As soon as he gave the order, the thirty-two fighters and twelve bombers of the Starscream flared to life in a new constellation brightening the sky so far from Pedres. The whine in his own ship increased tenfold, manual controls bucking under his grip as Juna grew and his ship began to feel the pull of her gravity. His targeting systems began to pick up the profiles of the hulking Gavisar ships.
"Starscream fighter wing, this is Commander Arda. Enemy response has underperformed expectations and fighter presence is minimal. Perhaps there was something to your human’s report after all. I’m ordering the Trepid and the Vitacuus forward to cover your initial run with our point defense."
Arda was pushing her own cruiser closer to the front. The Vitacuus was one of the heaviest ships in the system, and once committed it could stand toe to toe with anything short of a Gatekeeper ship. Or Big Three, as the humans were wont to call the Malagath, Dirregaunt, and Kossovoldt.
"Understand all, Wing Matron. Our attack run will commence in thirty seconds, followed by an atmospheric braking maneuver around Juna. We’ll cover your withdrawal after the Starscream hits the picket. All fighters, report firing solution status."
Entering orbit at full acceleration the fighters would need the aid of Juna’s thick upper atmosphere to slow down enough to rejoin the fight. The relative speeds would make it almost impossible for Gavisar ships in orbit to react quickly enough to return fire, and the pressure wave from dipping into atmo would make targeting almost impossible. The fighter wings would be under the majority of the invasion fleet ships. The maneuver would take only a few minutes, compared to the hour a full orbit would waste.
"Twenty seconds to firing range. Report solutions." Sothcide said for a second time. The radio clicked in his cockpit as his other interceptors reported, almost reluctant with their status.
"Poor solution, Wing Officer."
"Poor solution, thermal can’t identify armament pods."
"Poor solution, active sensors show target is unstable."
Even his own gunner was struggling in the seat behind him. Sothcide could see the laser arrays adjusting their angle on his side monitor as the targeting solution tried to locate the anti-missile defenses on the ship ahead. But there was no time left, and no changing course.
"All wings, fire when in range, solution agnostic. Trust your eyes."
Visually targeting at this speed would leave only a fraction of a second to identify something to shoot at, and gunners would be firing wastefully on redundant targets. But anything was better than nothing. The ship began to buck as they began the evasion program, the point defense from the Vitacuus slapping down the sparse anti-fighter missiles that his display warned him of almost before his gunner could identify them.
Steady . . . steady . . . here it comes.
His displays dimmed as the power draw on the tiny fusion reactor drained to the capacitors and the lasers burned away at the Gavisar ships ahead of him. They cut through something volatile, and the resulting explosion left Sothcide wide-eyed and shaken. Not because it had been close or unexpected, but because in that brief moment before the interceptor passed the picket he had discovered why the firing solutions had failed. Gavisar civilian ships had no armament pods for the thermal sensors to track, and lashed together to mimic the size and mass of warships presented no solid silhouette for the radar to return. Certainly there were warships among the defenders—someone had to be offering return fire to draw the Maeyar fleet into the jaws of the trap. Arda had pushed in, and Vehl wasn’t far behind.
"Pedres fleet, abort abort! Picket is a scam, repeat, picket is a scam, majority non-combat vessels, abort ab-"
But his arc carried him across the horizon of the planet, cutting off communication. As it did, dozens of contacts began to appear above his altitude on the thermal scopes.
"Evade, evade! Damn it!" he called, and fire began to erupt in his formation. Then the fighters and the Gavisar warships passed within a few hundred miles of each other, too close for coincidence in the vast sea of space. The invasion ships had built up enough momentum across the starward side of Juna to intercept and crush both Arda and Vehl before either could escape.
Reports began to fill his screen of losses within the wing. Nearly two-thirds of the fighters and all but two bombers had been destroyed. Sothcide had been spared by virtue of leading the charge, riding past the anti-fighter defenses too quickly for the warships to gain a solution. The rest of his wing was not as fortunate. In solemn silence they dipped into the atmosphere to chip away their incredible velocity. It would take them four minutes to complete the maneuver. Would there still be a battle to join when it was over?
Ahead of the Condor, Gavisar loomed. There was no other word to describe it. "Two-fifty KK, Vick. Do you want me to take her around the planet?" Huian asked from the pilot’s station. The same distance between the Earth and the moon, but Gavisar filled the entire viewscreen.
Victoria shook her head, her attention pulling away from Jones’ last communication to the Yakima before opening fire. Her suspicions had been confirmed, and they’d left the slimy bastard back in Pedres to play havoc with the Maeyar. Stupid, stupid, stupid. "Not yet Huian, hold thrust and let’s growl the duchess. Avery, get me a tightbeam."
"Conn sensors, aye Vick. Sending the communication package and imagery."
"She won’t see it for another sixteen minutes, unless the Malagath can read radio waves before they arrive. You know what? I wouldn’t even be fucking surprised. But all she’s going to say is to bury our noses in the dirt. Let’s take a closer look at one of those orbital defense stations. Match our orbit, Huian. Low power, if any living xenos are listening out there we don’t need to paint a bullseye on our ass."
As the Condor descended toward the thermal signature of an orbital defense platform, Victoria eyed the readout for their relative velocity.
"Coming in a bit hot, Huian. Not like you to not factor in the increased gravity of a large planet."
Huian glanced back from the pilot’s station, a mixture of confusion and annoyance on her narrow face. "I did, Ma’am. Gavisar is pulling more than its size should suggest, even corrected for a nickel-rich composition," she said. As if to illustrate her point, she gestured to the orbital defense platform growing on the main screen. "The platform’s orbit is decaying too."
She was right, the orbital defense platform was falling, if slowly, into the planet’s surface. In a day or two the thing would either begin to break up in atmo or would crash into a cliffside down below. There was a certain sort of finality to that idea, Victoria decided. The scene would not be so dissimilar from Earth if the xenos managed to spot it. Not if, when. They would
have to be better prepared than Gavisar, and as it stood even the battered and bruised remnants of the fleet above Juna could wipe out the entire Union Earth Navy ten times over.
"Conn sensors, heavy radiation off that platform, recommend we don’t get much closer."
No one down below was going to fire back, but she had other reasons to slow down and so she leaned over and gave her pilot the order. Someone nuked the space platform, but the precise radiation profile didn’t match any nuclear device or particle cannon that humans had yet documented. It was closer to a horizon space transference.
"Alright, Huian, keep your distance from the platform."
"It’s not the platform, Vick. It’s the planet, the whole thing is irradiated. Not just the high background radiation we were expecting, it’s almost like it just left a horizon jump."
Victoria brought up the display on the main viewscreen, showing radiation hotspots across the valleys and deserts of Gavisar. For enough radiation to be reaching the Condor’s sensors at this distance, standing on the surface would be like taking a naked spacewalk near Sol, and would turn a human body to jerky in just a few minutes.
Between the density and the radiation, the people of Gavisar must have been damned near impossible to uproot once they settled into the tunnels and caverns of a planet. If they had been aggressively expanding, they’d be a force to reckon with in the local neighborhood. And Earth would have been one of their potential habitats. There were only a few oxygen-tolerant species around, but just as few oxygen-rich planets that the UE had surveyed. Even with advanced human optics and remote study, the only thing that could give accurate compositional detail was an atmospheric probe, and to deploy those you had to be in-system. Ithaca had been the first. And between the growing human population and infrastructure, and the utter inequity of the defenses arrayed around the planet, by some metrics, in more danger than Earth.
The orbital platform spun as it continued its orbit, a lazy derelict hulk of metal and rock. The light of the system’s star revealed the enormous laser arrays capable of cutting down capital ships that strayed within almost a hundred thousand kilometers by their estimation of Gavisari advancement. Impressive, though less than half the range she’d personally witnessed the Dirregaunt capable of reaching. Crystallized coolant from the platform’s reactor left a frozen trail of vapor behind it in a gentle, expanding spiral. The power required to operate such a weapon could have lit half of Europe for a year. Or burned London in an instant. The silent display was almost serene, were it not for the fact that someone had struck down those awesome arrays without leaving a trace.
"Perhaps it was civil war, Skipper," said Huian, mirroring Victoria’s own thoughts on the absence of perpetrators.
Victoria shook her head. "That would account for only seeing Gavisari ships, but not that conga line of hulks all trying to claw their way to the jump. Besides, thinking they get all rowdy, nuke the surface of their planet ‘til it glows, and then decide to go find a new one? I don’t fucking buy it. Spacefaring cultures don’t nuke themselves," she said. She eyed Huian, who might have grown up far enough west in China to have had family in the fallout zone from the nuclear exchange in north India. "With some notable exceptions."
"Xenos don’t nuke themselves and survive," Huian pointed out. "The Gavisari haven’t survived yet, they’re still barely holding on."
"Shit, that’s a fair point. Still, smart money isn’t on civil war. Whatever happened here happened quick, and it happened to Gavisar. This stinks. Let’s finish the recon and let the Duchess know we found fuck-all."
The investigation of the orbital defense platform wasn’t revealing anything beyond the gaping holes torn into the side of the structure. But as it carried them over from day to night, her thoughts were interrupted by her sensor officer.
"Conn sensors, superluminal contact. Photon doppler coming from the star."
Before he could even finish the report, sirens blared on the conn as the hulk of the Duchess’ yacht appeared only a few thousand kilometers away, and her face once again commandeered the majority of Vick’s screens, though her command repeater remained on the exterior visual feed of the planet’s dusk band.
"Shit," said Victoria, as much in surprise at the Malagath countenance forcing its way onto all her monitors as at the light speed maneuver that had announced their presence to anyone with sensors capable of detecting the approach of a superluminal vessel. "Duchess Tora, hello, hi, a pleasure as always."
"Be silent, fool, and attend. I thought these images you sent were in jest, or you had found your way in ignorance to the wrong planet. But this is Gavisar and something is terribly, terribly wrong."
Victoria looked at the images of Gavisar, the deep valleys and high mountains that marked its barren surface. But it wasn’t supposed to be barren, was it? Victoria mentally recited the brief description the young Maeyar wing officer had left her. Large, dense, fresh . . . Shit!
Sothcide mentioned Gavisar to be the home of vast freshwater oceans that were in no way apparent in any of the imagery. The entire rock was bone dry. But how? Entire oceans didn’t just disappear. Where the fuck had they gone? It was like someone had pulled the plug on a planet-sized bath.
The Condor fell into shadow as it crossed the sunset below, and there on the starward side of Gavisar was the cosmic drain valve.
Chapter 12 – Raksava Moves
Sothcide heard the screams on the radio before he finished the full circuit of the planet. Even with his screen completely washed out by the hypersonic pressure wave riding his bow, the signal bounce from the moon revealed the fate of Vehl’s battlegroup with crystal clarity. The battleships who had disguised themselves as derelict drifters were the heaviest hitters of the Gavisari fleet. Sothcide had seen Raksava, the Gavisar Home Defense Fleet’s admiral. Or at least his flagship, the Bulwark, in a state of disrepair. It still towed the induction tether, a banner to all those still stranded in Juna’s orbit. The same gunners aboard the Bulwark poised to intercept Sothcide’s wing of fighters had delivered firing solutions that crippled the Starscream and destroyed several of her escorts. A second wave of Gavisar frigates and destroyers had followed and finished Wing Admiral Vehl before Sothcide could even rejoin the battle. There was barely a battle left to join. The loss of a heavy carrier, two light cruisers, four destroyers, and two artillery cruisers with accompanying light frigates and fighter wings had crippled the forward line and would leave open the shortest route to Pedres.
Now the admiral was leading the detachment around the moon to use its gravity to double back and catch the second battlegroup, even as the remainder of the fleet closed in from the starward side of Juna. Vehl pressed the attack, and was now in a poor position to retreat. Momentum and gravity both pushed against her escape. Gavisar fighters dotted the battlegroup, climbing and using the gravity of Juna for maneuvering.
"Wing Commander, this is Sothcide of the Starscream, we’re coming to cover your retreat."
Arda’s harsh voice clicked over his fighter’s radio as he accelerated to engage the wing of enemy fighters. His gunner offered solutions on a few of them, and wing assignments filtered down through his squadron. "Vehl’s gone. The Starscream is a total loss. We’ve only got a few minutes before the Bulwark catches up."
There was a flash on his side monitor as one of the Gavisar fighters took out the external propulsion couplings on a heavy frigate. Sothcide swiveled his interceptor and put on a burst of acceleration, lining his gunner up for a barrage of laser fire as the larger craft emerged across the bow of the frigate. The lasers sheared off a section of wing, but the ablative coating on the belly of the fuselage absorbed most of the weapon’s energy. Tough ships, they could take a lot of punishment. Even with Sothcide’s pilots among them, the Homeworld Defense Fleet’s fighters were focused on the engines and propulsion components of Arda’s ships, to the exclusion of the enemy fighters or even the exposed anti-fighter defenses that hammered away at the HDF’s ships.
Tough
as they were, the Gavisar fleet was losing fighters at an alarming rate. But if they held Arda’s battlegroup long enough for Raksava to swing back around, then the tradeoff of a few fighters for a battlegroup’s worth of frigates and light cruisers would be incredible for the invasion fleet. Not to mention the Vitacuus, and two of the Maeyar’s experienced wing commanders in the span of a few minutes.
Arda’s battlegroup boasted an impressive sixteen warships, with half again as many frigates. If she died here at Juna with the majority of her strength, Pedres would not hold. Her survival was paramount. But he could not see a way for her to escape Juna.
A light on his communications panel got his attention, the channel he assigned to the Privateer frequency winked at him, and having received the codec from Victoria, the familiar voice of Human Aesop filled his cockpit as he switched the channel to active. He listened as he climbed out of Juna’s gravity for another attack run on a fighter harassing the Vitacuus.
"Attention all Maeyar forces, communication may be compromised, reply on encrypted frequency only, Gavisari Fleet is hiding among civilian derelicts," it said.
Regrettably late, unfortunately. Warnings blared in his cockpit as an indirect Gavisar laser scored a sizzling white cut across his portside ablative plating. A missile took the heavy fighter before he could finish the job on Sothcide. His eye scanned the frequency modulator, the message was coming from closer to the planet, one of the tethered ships passing below. The signal quickly faded as the orbit carried the humans away from the battle and the ships falling into the thick atmosphere of Juna.
What followed in its absence was a fleet-wide broadcast from Wing Commander Arda.
"All craft, dive dive, make best speed for Juna low orbit, Break line-of-sight in the storms and maintain close proximity. Repeat, all craft dive."
Sothcide relayed the orders to his own squadron, "All craft, disengage and dive. Break break break, make for the cloud tops, make altitude sixty thousand meters and maintain spacing. Repeat, Wing Six is diving."