And he would rather play down the seriousness of what had happened. Killing half his force would cause a sensation and forever mark him as the flota who lost control of elite troops. The disgrace would plague his children’s children.
“You all know what punishment you have earned.” He let that hang over their heads for a few moments like the fabled hammer of Milieus. He could see the furtive glances on the bridge as crewmen wondered who would die.
“Unfortunately, I cannot afford to lose half my force at the moment. A large enemy fleet has just passed this station on its way to attack Dactar.” He was pleased to see their relief turn back to horror as they absorbed the news. They were showing more concern for Dactar than for their own miserable pelts. That might have influenced his decision, if absolute need hadn’t already done so.
“Rather than subject the fleet to quinqaugination, I have decided to convene a drumhead trial for Commissar Heig. He has abused his position as your counsellor, leading you on a fool’s errand while our people are in dire peril.”
He turned to the station security officer. “You will serve as a panel judge. State your name clearly.”
“Secondary Sub-Squadra Livtay Vel.” The officer looked as though he wanted to protest at the quick flow of events but he had already accepted Reis’ authority and, like most regular troops, he was more than a little afraid of the Krypteia.
Reis nodded. He turned to his own officer. “For the record, Judge Rus.”
Rus shot a quick glance at his sub-flota, still kneeling on the floor. “Tertiary Sub-Flota Tomyr Rus.”
“Tribunal president, Flota Reis Mas, presiding.” Reis looked down. “Sub-Flota Sablin Heig, Commissar, you are charged with treason.” The two judges looked at him in surprise, no doubt expecting a charge of mutiny. Mutiny would have left too many loose threads in the record. A mutiny, by its very nature, requires the complicity of a large portion of the crews. Treason, on the other hand, could easily be a one-man job.
Reis waited until Heig looked up. “Commissar, what do you have to say in your defence?”
The sub-flota was on the verge of weeping. He had come so close to achieving his goal. He had seen himself as the savior of the Republic, but now he faced the shame of an execution. “Our leaders are lying to us. Humans are invading us, and the Triumvirs still tell us that everything is fine,” he rasped, channeling his sadness into anger. “Theirs is the treason, and it must be exposed before the Republic falls.”
This one last time, my friend, Reis thought sadly, I can rely on you to act as expected. “Sub-Flota Heig has admitted his intent to turn military force against our elected leaders. He has violated one of our most sacred laws of founding, the separation of military and government. Worse still, he has done this in a time of war.”
Reis turned to the two judges. “Judge Vel, how do you find the defendant?” Reis could see the near-terror in the security officer’s features, and he reached out to take the sidearm from the security trooper who stood to Vel’s side.
Vel’s eyes were glued to the weapon in Reis’ hand. The message was clear. The presiding judge was ready to carry out the sentence and it would not go well for anyone who stood in his way. “Guilty.” He drew his own sidearm.
“Judge Rus?”
Rus spotted a discarded weapon on the floor and stepped over to retrieve it. “Guilty.” He armed the weapon, coming to stand beside his flota.
“Please,” Heig whispered, “not in the back.”
Reis pulled Judge Vel over to stand next to him. Vel was shaking, but he looked willing enough. “On your feet, Heig,” Reis ordered. “Face your fate.”
Tears on his cheeks, Heig nodded his gratitude. The exact manner of his death indicated much about the tribunal’s true feelings. If he had been kicked down to lie on his face, then his name would be cursed in the history files. From there, subtle variations of kneeling, standing and facing his judges indicated the possibility of mitigating circumstances. To die on his feet facing his judges meant that the tribunal had sympathy for his motives but were still constrained by law to carry out the sentence.
His words were a matter of record, and the manner of his death would ensure that his children would not live in shame for his actions. They might even feel pride in the manner of their father’s death, knowing he’d been a martyr.
“Judges,” Reis barked. “Place!”
Reis, in the center of the three judges, placed his weapon against Heig’s chest, just over the heart. Vel and Rus placed theirs over the secondary cardiac musculatures in the lower abdomen.
“Ready!” Reis called out. “Fire!”
Three pneumatic concussions, almost close enough to be a single sound, and Heig was flung back onto the deck. He convulsed twice and then the spark of life faded from his eyes.
“The prisoner is dead,” Reis announced for the record. “Tribunal is dismissed.” He put a hand on the security officer’s shoulder.
“Station command,” he ordered, hearing the slight addition of background noise almost immediately. “This is Flota Reis Mas of the Krypteia. I’ve learned of a pending attack on Dactar. I’m commandeering your defensive squadron and taking them with me to aid in the defense of our home world. Any attempt to counter my orders will be viewed as treason.”
And, just that quickly, Reis went from a prisoner in his quarters, to the commander of a force that was twenty percent bigger than the one he had lost.
Amazing what you could do with a deoderant cube.
Kicking in the Door
Dactari Space
A bright flash appeared just beyond the second moon of Dactar. One of the new Weiran shuttles, fitted with experimental short-jump engines, moved into view from the dark side. A second flash followed closely by a third announced two more scouts, drawing the full attention of the roughly two hundred vessels guarding the Republic’s home world. As half of them began to turn toward the new arrivals, the black of space turned to a fireball as almost sixty flashes announced the arrival of five Human carrier groups and assorted Midgaard warships.
At the rear of their formation were the mass drivers, captured from the Dactari three years ago during a failed attempt to either take Earth or destroy it.
At the center of the Alliance formation sat the Midway with Dwight Young buckled into one of the bridge chairs. He was completely buttoned up inside his EVA suit to minimize distraction. His job was to hold a channel open with Hu Gao and Caul, allowing Admiral Towers to coordinate the next phase of the battle.
With his Hothmoen implant, Dwight could maintain a channel with ships in distortion. Something that even the Dactari logistics module couldn’t do. He simply had to concentrate on keeping the link open to the two secondary task forces as they approached.
Towers watched the three-dimensional projection above the trace table, which was on but unused in favor of the new technology. He activated the link to Dwight’s implant. “Enemy is responding as projected. Current template is still in play, but accelerate drop by five percent.”
Both Hu Gao and Caul acknowledged.
By making last-minute adjustments to the velocity of the incoming forces, Towers would be able to maximize the initial damage to the enemy. The Dactari ships were a little quicker than expected in rushing to meet Tower’s force. I’d want to engage us as fast as possible too, he thought. They can’t help but see that we brought their mass drivers along with us.
The effect of the planet-killing ships had been underestimated because more than a hundred Dactari warships were now racing toward Towers’ little task force. In less than five minutes, the enemy rail guns would be coming into effective range. Markers were already showing inbound slugs of steel as captains took any chance to deal damage to the Alliance invaders.
“Still six minutes to effective bug range,” the weapons officer advised.
Towers would hold onto his Mosquitoes for longer than that. They were deadly weapons, but they could be swatted down if you gave the enemy enough time. The tri
ck was to get in nice and close and turn a massive swarm lose on them. That way, they’d overwhelm the enemy’s point defenses.
But it meant advancing into enemy fire without launching for six more minutes – an eternity in battle.
“Initiating approach profile,” the helm reported. The fleet would begin a series of random fluctuations in course and velocity, making it very difficult for the enemy to achieve anything more than a lucky strike at this extreme range. As the two forces drew closer, that difficulty would erode very quickly.
Towers looked down at the event clock, running in the center of the trace table. Two more minutes…
More of the Dactari ships were opening fire with their main batteries now. The first of their rounds were now passing through the Alliance fleet and the Midway shuddered as a projectile grazed the dorsal shielding and tumbled up toward the bridge.
The VDSA, or very dense shield array, was designed for just this type of scenario. Rather than one continuous sheet of shielding, the array was capable of providing a field of overlapping shields, each currently standing at a thirty-degree angle from the hull. When facing a frontal threat, the angled array bled off the velocity of an incoming round and directed it away from the hull.
The two-hundred-kilo slug quickly lost velocity as it ploughed through hundreds of small shield segments, going from ten times the speed of sound to little more than a thousand feet per second by the time it angled up toward the bridge.
Towers forced his body to stand still as the huge slug bounced off the side of the bridge shielding and hurtled away toward the Bosporus, now lacking the kinetic energy needed to penetrate.
One minute.
The projectiles were invisible to the naked eye except for where they made contact. “The Heracles and the Nile are both destroyed,” the tactical officer announced. “Kicking Horse, Wailuku and Leonidas are heavily damaged. They’re combat non-effective.”
Nelson and his force had to endure nearly an hour of this, Towers thought. And he didn’t have any way of stopping them until he sailed right into their midst.
The Midway shuddered again as the starboard side shielding deflected another heavy round.
And then it happened.
As the defensive ships hurtled toward Towers’ force, the space on two adjacent flanks suddenly erupted in terrible flares of plasma, smashing Dactari ships in a swirling crossfire. From Towers’ perspective, Gao and Caul had brought their two task forces out of distortion from port and from above, catching the enemy in a maelstrom of plasma and gunnery.
More than sixty of the enemy force had been destroyed by the drop wash and those who remained now found themselves caught against two hostile forces. Each Alliance leader had arrived with ten carrier groups as well as more than seventy Midgaard ships.
And they were close – very close.
Mosquitoes began to eject from launchers, separating into sub-munitions almost immediately. The enemy put out a hail of defensive fire, but they were on their heels now, and the hundreds of warheads soon began penetrating shields, stripping away sensors, shield emitters and point defenses.
The Dactari ships that had lost their offensive weapons opted to become weapons themselves. They weren’t fighting to add another planet to the Republic; they were fighting to preserve their own home world and they accelerated toward the Alliance vessels at top conventional speed.
One heavy cruiser made it through the hail of sub-munitions and ordinance to strike the Dan-no-ura. Even though the Dactari ship had been beaten into an inert lump by the time she struck, she was still more than one hundred sixty thousand tons of inert lump. She struck the forward shielding with enough force to tear the shield generators loose from their shock mounts. Within seconds, the defenses failed entirely and the cruiser hammered through the forward hangar doors, breaking into the huge central space and tumbling all the way to the rear at near full velocity.
The Alliance carrier was torn apart from the inside. Several secondary magazines were struck and critical systems were crushed beyond repair. Key structural elements, the very elements needed to survive the current punishment, were smashed in an instant and the entire ship began to flex and buckle as though experiencing an earthquake.
As the remains of the Dactari cruiser reached the aft end of the weakened carrier, her bulk struck the center support between the starboard and port recovery doors. The incredibly strong frame was torn loose, along with the aft-most section of the bridge deck and went tumbling out the back end of the ship to hurtle toward two escorting frigates who were too slow to react.
The Indus and the Zambezi had been following the Dan-no-ura, as part of a swine formation. They were below and slightly to port of their carrier in two successive layers of the formation, effectively putting them in a descending line from the stern of the stricken ship. As the rear section of the Dan-no-ura was torn clear, the ventral portion proved to be strongest and the combined mass of Dactari cruiser and carrier’s stern rotated and broke loose at just the right angle to swing down and smash the two trailing frigates.
A suicide mission on the part of the Dactari, but the results spoke for themselves. They had managed to smash four times their tonnage in the action.
Four other ramming actions were attempted by the desperate defenders, but three were against heavy Midgaard long ships and the massive vessels shifted nimbly out of the way before matching course and acceleration to insert boarding parties into their erstwhile attackers.
The fourth managed a glancing blow against the carrier Cape St. Vincent, tearing open the starboard side. The wound was almost deep enough to expose the hangar deck and, though she was still operational, her main batteries were out of commission and she retired from the line, moving off to set up a clear jump back to Weirfall.
Of the original response force of one hundred Republic ships, none remained in action.
Towers re-activated his link to Dwight’s implants. “Fleet wide… phase three,” he said simply.
Phase one was the decoy force. The scouting shuttles had jumped first to get the enemy’s attention, and then Towers had arrived with his temptingly small task force. He knew he would draw off a large portion of the enemy defenses because he had the mass driver ships, still carrying the asteroids harvested by the Dactari to sterilize Earth.
The Dactari, of all people, knew what those ships represented and they had deployed half of their defensive force, the half nearest the threat, to deal with the incursion.
That half was now gone, thanks to phase two – the arrival of the two additional task forces. The remaining enemy ships were scattered around the other side of the world. There was nothing standing between those mass drivers and Xo’Khov, the capital of the Republic.
The Alliance vessels pushed in toward the planet, knowing that the enemy would now rush into their guns in small desperate squadrons rather than waiting to consolidate into a larger, more potent force. Every single defender threw their vessel into a suicidal attempt to destroy the mass drivers that might launch an attack on the surface at any moment.
“You have to admire their courage,” Captain Hunter said in a low voice.
“We’d do the same,” Towers replied. “And we have. Remember the blue fleet, three years ago?”
The UN fleet had stood and died between Earth and the enemy. They had held the Dactari invasion off long enough for the real Chinese and NATO fleets, under Gao and Towers, to return from a distortion flight through the asteroid belt. Those asteroids, released as plasma on dropout, had hammered the enemy shortly after the arrival of Harry Young and his new Midgaard friends.
Though Towers had little use for the UN as a political entity, the men and women manning their antiquated ships had gone willingly to their deaths, knowing they were preserving freedom for their people. Men and women from dozens of nations had fought and died in ships left over from the first war, now a decade past.
And they had helped to preserve more than just freedom. The arrival of the mass drivers an
d their light escort, shortly after the retreat of the main Dactari force, had proven that the enemy were ready to destroy all life on the planet should the ground invasion fail.
They had passed through the same asteroid belt, but they had been harvesting asteroids that, if used, would have been enough to plunge the planet into low light conditions for centuries. Interrogation of those crews, stranded by their own fleet, became extremely vigorous. Few survived the process.
Now that those mass drivers were approaching Dactar, the planet’s defenders threw everything they had into a desperate attempt to save their world.
Hunter nodded. “Almost a case of history repeating itself, only this time…” He suddenly raised a hand to shield his eyes as a sharp shadow of a glazing support washed across his face, and then disappeared as the automatic window shading activated.
“Distortion alert!” tactical announced. “Multiple inbounds directly to starboard. Signatures confirm that this is the previous inbound group.”
Reis’ tail jabbed forward in an atavistic, subconscious gesture of attack as he watched the tumbling, scorched debris of the Alliance ships. That should take care of the primary objective, the destruction of the mass drivers. Nothing remained now but to damage the enemy as much as possible, buying time for the remaining defense forces to consolidate and join the attack.
“Flota, the mass drivers are still operational,” Rus, the new second, reported.
Hells and purgatories! Reis turned to look at the blinking icons in the central holo. How is this possible? Sure enough, the ships were in a new location. They would have had to move at top speed in the last ten minutes, far more drastically than any other ship. He had stopped his vessels ten minutes out from the battle and retrieved the latest tactical updates from forces already in contact.
His blood had turned to smoke in his veins when he saw the planet-killing ships approaching his home. Beyond the obvious threat represented by those ships, they also forced the defenders to attack piecemeal, hoping for lucky strikes against the mass drivers before they could wipe out Dactar. He had aimed to destroy those ships as his opening move, giving the defenders breathing room to organize themselves.
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