The FLASH priority message interrupted his work. A courier frigate had arrived in-system, bearing what were almost certainly bad news.
“Commander Grayson from Naval Operations wishes to meet with you.” The report from the bridge arrived seconds behind the eyes-only transmission saying the same thing.
“Have him escorted to my office as soon as he arrives on board.”
He closed his eyes, but he could still see that damned number.
* * *
Kerensky had met Commander Alfred Grayson before. The Navy troubleshooter normally could have stepped out of a recruiting video. Tall, blonde and fit, with a dimpled chin and an aura of almost insolent self-confidence about him, the man usually looked completely unflappable. His salute was crisp and his posture perfect, but something in his eyes betrayed the officer’s frayed nerves. He was the bearer of very bad news indeed. Something had happened, and it was dire enough to require a face-to-face meeting instead of even a highly-encrypted ship transmission.
“If I may, Admiral?” Grayson said after both men had exchanged the usual military pleasantries and sat down. “I have a classified communique to upload.”
“Go ahead.”
The sealed orders were sent via direct laser-comm and uploaded into his imp in a couple of seconds, mostly spent in validation and de-encryption procedures. They were short and to the point, and as stunning as a blow to the head.
“Congratulations, Admiral,” the commander said when Kerensky regained his composure and looked up.
“I’m to leave CRURON 23 and report back to Earth to assume command of…” he said, trying to ascertain if what he’d just read was true and not some implant-generated fantasy.
“Of Seventh Fleet, sir. I am to escort you there and assist you in any way you require until you assemble your personal staff.”
“Why?” Kerensky blurted out.
“It’s all in the attached report, sir. But to summarize, the Navy was targeted by a series of covert decapitation strikes. The assigned commander of Seventh Fleet, Admiral Henderson, was killed. Admirals DuPont, Conway, Finnegan and Herrera are also dead.”
“I see,” Kerensky said as he mentally scanned the reams of attached information he’d been too stunned to review.
He was glad to be sitting down.
The assassins claimed to belong to the Galactic Justice Army, a terrorist organization comprised mainly of human renegades. They were the kind of nutjobs that believed humanity was a cancer on Earth and the universe at large, and thus deserved to be exterminated. They’d never amounted to much, being about as popular as leprosy-inducing herpes among the general public, not to mention ruthlessly hunted by Homeland Security, so this was most likely a false-flag operation.
Starfarers abhorred decapitation strikes, since retaliation in kind would ensure anybody espousing such tactics would come to their own untimely end. As a war-winning move, the tactic wasn’t all that effective, either. That made it pointless, not to mention nekulturny. A polity whose survival depended on an individual or a few people was doomed without resorting to such unsavory methods. Assassinations just weren’t done. Except the enemy had just crossed that line, and in this case it might accomplish something substantial.
The initial attack had taken place during a meeting at the Hexagon in New Washington. How the GJA had managed to smuggle a bomb powerful enough to level a huge section of the highly-secure building remained a mystery. Within the ensuing seventy-two-hours, several assassin teams had struck across American space. The commanders of Second and Third Fleet had been murdered; other attempts on similar targets had been thwarted, although casualties and collateral damage had been heavy. Bombs, snipers and poison had all been used liberally. Admiral Sondra Givens of Sixth Fleet, a close friend of Kerensky’s, had barely escaped with her life.
No civilian leader had been targeted. This made sense if the attacks’ objective was purely military. While politicians were a dime a dozen, the experience and skills of those dead admirals wouldn’t be so easily replaced.
“The Lampreys,” he said. That sort of underhanded move just smacked of the treacherous bastards.
“That is everyone’s assumption, sir,” Commander Grayson said. “Although the Galactic Imperium cannot be discounted as a suspect. Just because the Gimps would never normally do this doesn’t mean much, sir. They consider this conflict a holy war of sorts after all.”
Kerensky nodded. “And when the enemy is the Devil, any and all measures can be contemplated.” The Imperium wasn’t given to religious mania, but humans had inspired them beyond logic or reason.
“The ETs won’t get a second chance,” Commander Grayson continued. “The War Powers Act passed Congress a few days before the attacks, and all likely alien sympathizers have been rounded up. A few assassins were captured alive, and interrogation uncovered some of their support network. Between that and improved security measures, the likelihood of another attack is near-zero, sir.”
Kerensky knew the reality behind the bloodless words: humans and aliens seized by grim-faced Homeland Security agents and dragged off into the night. Invariably, some of them would be innocent of anything beyond voicing the wrong ideas on social media. Collateral damage wasn’t limited to the front lines.
“In any case, the damage is already done,” he said out loud. “The bench is empty and they’ll give even a disgraced admiral a chance.”
“Sir, with all due respect, you are doing yourself a disservice. I studied the Heinlein campaign in detail at Naval Ops. Nobody blames you for what happened to Fifth Fleet.”
I do.
He didn’t voice that thought, however. Kerensky knew that he’d been broken by that defeat, and was no good for anything for several months after that. When he’d gotten over that funk, he had been happy to accept any sort of posting. The Hewer Administration – or Hewer Regime, as it was informally known – couldn’t afford the political capital needed to give a defeated admiral a major fleet command. Until now.
“Admiral Carruthers survived the attack on the Hexagon. He ordered me to ask you one question personally. Off the record.”
Kerensky nodded, turning off his imp’s recorders. Carruthers had been his mentor, and most likely the man who’d engineered this reassignment.
“Go ahead.”
“His words were: ‘Are you ready?’”
A simple question, deserving of a simple answer. The job was his for the taking. Assume control of Seventh Fleet, the force that would interpose itself between the vast Gal-Imp armada pushing implacably through Wyrm space towards its ultimate target: Sol System, the cradle of humanity, its largest population center and the fulcrum upon which his nation and species rested.
Could he handle a fleet command, one bigger than the last one, a command where the stakes were orders of magnitude greater? If he lost, it wouldn’t be fifteen million civilians who paid the price. It’d be six billion on Sol System alone, and a billion among all the systems in between. Seven warp transits between the edge of Wyrm space and Earth. Seven chances to stop the invaders cold, terminating at humanity’s doorstep.
“Yes, I am.”
Honor and compassion might be beyond him, but he might be able to achieve a measure of redemption.
USN Fighter Strike Tactics Instructor Program, Lahiri System, AFC 167
Emergence.
It was chaos and old night out there. The looming shape of a Lamprey dreadnought, all three kilometers of it, flashed like a Christmas tree: each burst of light marked a weapon hardpoint spitting death downrange. Not a welcoming sight when you pop out of warp close enough to see the target with the naked eye. Sort of like starting a knife fight with a grizzly bear.
Eat shit and die.
Lieutenant Gus ‘Bingo’ Chandler cut loose with two shots from his main gun while he thought his evil thoughts, cycling the weapon as fast as it could go, three seconds from the first shot to the next. The Lamprey’s force fields and composite armor buckled and burst open, spewing flam
es and sheer radiance; Gus vanished from the universe just as a dozen point-defense laser beams descended upon him like the angry glare of some pagan god.
Transition.
Blessed silence for a change. The smart guys at Medical had finally worked out Gus’ Melange dosage, and he could enjoy warp space once again. Somewhere not too far away, four of the other five pilots in his flight were there as well, all fine and dandy, cool as so many cucumbers. Problem was, the fifth one wasn’t cool at all.
It’s coming for meeee!
The thought came out as an endless scream, a psychic sound like nails on a chalkboard. Sounded like Martin ‘SOL’ Soledad was getting tagged by a Foo. Not good.
“Beta Flight, continue transit.” The steady voice of Lieutenant Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi cut through the screaming and the growing panic among the other pilots. “I got this.”
Gus had seen the spooky flight leader pull plenty of rabbits out of her proverbial hat; he didn’t even try to argue with her orders and concentrated on arriving at his preset destination. Grinner would get SOL out, or neither of them would come out of warp. There was nothing the rest of the flight could do to change that outcome, except by adding their name to the casualty list.
Emergence.
Another massive object filled his screen, but it was a welcome sight this time: the USS Schwarzenegger, a converted Governor-class cruiser deemed too fragile for actual combat and relegated to the role of training carrier vessel. He’d made it home yet again.
Five other fighters arrived within one second of his, including Grinner and SOL. The warp witch had pulled it off again. She might be spooky as hell, but she’d saved the lives of everyone on Flight B at least once, which made her a damn good witch. She’d also kept many of them from a medical discharge, followed by some time in sick bay while the docs put their brains back together. You didn’t just risk your life when you signed up for TOPGUN: your mind and possibly your soul also ended up on the table.
The training sortie had been successful, at least. The simulated Lamprey ship was dead in space, a confirmed ‘kill.’ If this had been for real, everyone on Flight B could paint the silhouette of the dreadnought on their War Eagles’ fuselage. Too bad it was all for show. Especially since they’d almost lost a guy – KIA or MIA in warp, you were just as gone as if this had been actual combat.
“Sorry guys,” SOL sent out through their t-wave link. “Kinda lost it there for a second.”
Training or not, the fact they were making actual warp jumps – no way to simulate those – made those sorties almost as dangerous as actual combat missions. No flak meant you couldn’t die on this side of the universe, but the other side remained ‘dark and full of terrors,’ in the words of some pre-Contact writer one of their instructors was fond of quoting.
“Shit happens,” Grinner said. The flight leader’s mental voice was as cool and collected as her real-life one. In the six months since she’d assumed command of Flight B, Fourth Squadron, Fourth Carrier Space Wing, she’d put her hard-earned experience to good use, whipping everyone into shape. Most of them had gotten their flight wings a fairly recently. The TOPGUN program was brand-new; CSW-4’s aviators came from the first graduating class of the SFTI program, and they needed all the training they could get before they went into actual combat.
And that was going to happen sooner rather than later.
Grinner hadn’t said it in so many words; neither had the squadron’s commander, Captain ‘Papa’ Schneider, but everyone had figured it out: they were getting rushed into combat, ready or not, because they needed fighters very badly, and they needed them now, not in the seventy-three weeks the manual had called for originally. As it was, training attrition had been nasty: of Bingo’s class of three hundred candidates, only two hundred and twenty had made it to graduation. This last shakedown might cause a couple more – SOL among them – to lose their wings, reducing that number even more.
That’d be a shame: they’d all gone through their naming ceremony a few days before, after getting certified and licensed like a pack of good doggies. Gus had earned the handle Bingo during a training sortie; he’d miscalculated and barely managed to return to base with a near-dry bird, a.k.a. bingo power. The War Eagle’s miniature gluon power plants could run out of power on you if you weren’t careful, and he hadn’t been. Still, he’d made it back, and that was good enough to keep him in the program.
Of course, there were worse things than washing out. Like a close encounter with a Foo. He still had nightmares about his first time. And the second and third, for that matter. Being chased by Warplings wasn’t the sort of thing you got used to.
Warp ghosts were nasty, but all they could do was scare you or bum you out. Warplings, Foos, or demons, whatever you wanted to call them, were different. If you did enough jumps in a row, they spotted you and started giving chase. The one that had come after Bingo had been like a giant shark; he hadn’t really seen it, but that was what his gut had told him. Huge, hungry, and cold.
Gus shook his head as the flight went through docking procedures. While in theory it might be possible to warp directly into a carrier, warp arrivals were as destructive as a large bomb, so it was easier to arrive near the mothership and make a conventional entry instead. Of course, in combat that meant trying to enter a hangar bay when you and your target were moving at three hundred kilometers per second, give or take, and the neighborhood was full of energy beams and missiles. Graviton grapples did most of the work once you got close enough, but your ass still hung out in space for several nerve-wracking seconds. Some mornings, Bingo woke up wondering why the hell he’d ever volunteered for the Navy fighter pilot program. Marines were crazy enough to do this kind of shit, but those in the senior service were supposed to have more sense than that.
He guided his ship until the grapples took over. That gave him a few moments of peace and quiet. Truth was, he wouldn’t trade being a pilot for the world. Ever since he’d undergone the treatments to increase his warp tolerance to superhuman levels, he’d changed. Improved, you might say. It was worth it, even if you could get killed in two dozen different ways in the course of a sortie.
At least, that was what he kept telling himself.
“You all right, sir?”
Gus sat up. A team of spacers was done servicing the outside of his bird and was waiting for him to get out of their way. From the tone of that imp-to-imp call, he’d spaced out a little too long for their liking.
Their thoughts popped into his head. He sleeping in there? Fucking space cadet.
“Heading out,” he said. An imp command released the hatch over the cramped cockpit. The War Eagle wasn’t much to look at, or fun to be inside of for that matter. It was little more than a big-ass battleship main gun with a pilot compartment welded on top, plus miniaturized warp generators and power plant, and a few other gizmos, mostly converted from orbital shuttle systems. A teleporting cannon, in other words, driven back and forth by a crazed warp pilot who might be getting crazier with every jump. Despite all those shortcomings, a flight of six of those mothers could reduce a dreadnought to boiling plasma in two or three passes. Pound by pound, that made them the deadliest things to ever fly in space.
The spacers let him climb down in grudging silence. He caught a couple of unspoken comments – mostly variations of ‘Asshole’ – with his special powers. He wondered what was going to happen when more people learned how to look inside the minds of their fellow humans. Nothing good, he figured.
Gus shrugged at his own thoughts as he joined up with the rest of the squadron. Most of them were laughing and joking around, except Grinner, who was kind of half-smiling and looking all wise and enigmatic. She’d been doing witchy stuff for a long time, so if anyone knew what the future held for humanity, it would be her.
Not that he was going to ask her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her answer.
* * *
They had their sailing orders at last.
“Seventh
Fleet,” Bingo said. He and the rest of CSW-4, all forty-eight fighters of it, had been assigned to a brand-new fleet carrier, the largest one ever built. The USS Enterprise; the ‘Big E’ would ferry two full Space Wings into battle, ninety-six fighters total, effectively giving her more firepower than any ship in the galaxy. The carrier had originally been designed as a dreadnought, her plans changed halfway through construction after the Battle of Parthenon. They’d taken out all its main gun batteries, made room for fighter bays, and added a ton more point-defense emplacements and two layers of force fields; between those and its overlapping warp shields, the Big E was going to be very hard to sink.
Good thing, Bingo thought. Because as soon as the enemy figures out what it is, every motherlover in range is going to try and sink her.
The carrier and the rest of the fleet were headed for New Texas System, which was threatened by the Lampreys and, now that the Wyrms were giving up, the Gimps. They might even get to fight both sets of ETs at the same time. Talk about a target rich environment.
“Under Kerensky,” Lieutenant Mike ‘Mooch’ Kowalski groused. “Bastard had one fleet shot off from under him. That’s not good.”
“They wouldn’t give him a second chance if they didn’t think he could cut it,” Gus said.
“He’s good,” Grinner joined in. “I served under him my first time around, in the Ohio.”
The USS Ohio had fought in the Gremlin War and been decommissioned after it was over. At the time, Bingo’s father had been in second grade. Just another reminder that Grinner Genovisi was pushing a hundred and had been a weirdo even before becoming a fighter pilot. She’d started out as a warp navigator, and those had been the weirdest peeps in the fleet until the War Eagle jocks had come around.
“Good skipper, good man in a storm,” Grinner went on. “He’s still hurting after the Battle of Heinlein, but he’s up for the job.”
Nobody asked her how she knew that last bit. They didn’t have to. Spooky shit, but they were all getting used to it. Gus was still a noob when it came to Warp Hoodoo, but he could pick up other people’s feelings if he put his mind to it. Nobody played poker with fighter pilots anymore. He couldn’t blame them.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 7