Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  “It’s pretty,” Cindy said, turning her head back to her console. Her body showed no sign of their lovemaking, Jake Ellsworth saw. She really would have been the perfect Rockrat. Her voice was as firm and disciplined as ever, without even a trace of real sentiment; she had taken one look at Earth and then returned to her station. “I have around one hundred and seventy smaller warships heading towards us, backed up by twenty larger carriers and…one hell of a lot of platforms.”

  Ellsworth nodded once. The Oghaldzon had worked like demons to fortify Earth ever since they had taken the orbitals and the Russians had counterattacked: they had to have meant to hang on to the planet even without knowing about Area 51 and the Chinese ships. Given enough time, they would have made the planet almost impregnable against any assault from the Belt, allowing them to win a long, drawn-out war.

  “I take it they’re scanning us,” he said. “Do you have a trace on their locations?”

  “I think we’ve got most of their craft identified,” Cindy said. “The analysts on the Enterprise are earning what we pay them; the aliens’ active sensors are also revealing most of their own locations to us. The motherships are hanging back, but that was expected and fortunate; those ships have formidable point defence. If they had been added into the main fleet…”

  “They wouldn’t have risked so many lives,” Ellsworth said. Admiral Waikoloa had tried to work out how long it would take the Oghaldzon to empty their motherships through their space elevators, but it depended on too many unknown factors. Did they have enough territory on Earth secure to land most of their population? Did they have the time? Orbiting elevators might make their logistics simpler, but even then there would still be logistical problems; would they take the risk of overloading the cables? “How long until we enter their engagement range?”

  “Roughly twenty minutes,” Cindy said. “The Admiral is starting the ten-minute countdown.”

  Ellsworth frowned. Everything depended, here, upon the aliens respecting their own engagement range. It was possible to send missiles out on a ballistic trajectory and then ignite them much closer to their targets; the aliens had done it during the first Battle of Earth. They might try it again, except a fleet was a much harder target than stationary, or predictably orbiting, stations and fortresses. The Combined Fleet would be able to take action, or, if worse came to worst, soak up the blows. The aliens…would be in for a surprise, but only if the new technology worked as Area 51 had promised. If it did not…

  He pushed the thought away and stared at his display. The aliens had divided their forces into three groups; the war fleet that was manoeuvring itself into position to intercept and engage the human fleet, the motherships around L1, and a smaller group of warships that had activated their drives and were moving towards the motherships at L1. Ellsworth smiled grimly; odds were that the aliens had decided that the humans might try to sneak around and hit the motherships from the rear, so they had left a tripwire in the form of a few of their ships in place to cover themselves from that direction. But now they’d deduced that almost all of the ships from the Belt were coming right at them, so those ships had been recalled…

  He hoped. Battle plans rarely survived past Round One.

  “Five minutes,” Cindy said, as calmly as ever. Ellsworth envied her; he hadn’t felt so nervous since his first solo prospecting trip through the Belt, hunting for ore and ice. The last battle hadn’t been so terrifying…had it? “The Admiral has asked if you wish to address the Rockrat ships.”

  Ellsworth smiled. He was second-in-command of the fleet and commander of the Rockrat contingent, a compromise that had pleased no one in the belt, but had prevented an argument that would have taken weeks to resolve. Personally. he thought the tradition of consensus had grown a little out of hand, but that was politics in the Belt; the people always had the final say, and everyone had to have their say.

  “Open the link,” he said with a cold smile. The fleet was using lasers to keep in touch, each ship serving as a multiply-redundant relay to ensure that the command net never went down, however many nodes were lost in the exchange of fire. He waited for Cindy’s nod before speaking. He knew just what to say. “My friends…

  “We have gathered here to face the terrible threat that faces our people. Across yonder blank field of space lies the cursed fleet of the Oghaldzon, misguided fools and idiots who must be destroyed and their bodies hacked to pieces, their homes and businesses destroyed, their land salted and cursed, and a large fifty-foot wall built around the area they call their territory so all that may know what happens when they assume they can commit genocide against the human race!”

  Cindy blinked. “Isn’t that a little strong?”

  “No,” Ellsworth said. He glared down at the display. The alien fleet was growing larger. “I stole it from a movie. Time to firing?”

  “Twenty seconds,” Cindy said. A harder tone entered her voice. “The Admiral would like you to remember that we want them to surrender if possible.”

  “If possible,” Ellsworth agreed. The countdown ticked down to zero. Firing commands, already pre-loaded into hundreds of computers and control systems, were finally triggered. “No quarter!”

  The fleet fired.

  Chapter Fifty-Five: Armageddon, Take Two

  Earth-Moon Lagrange Point One

  The Oghaldzon had detected the missile launch at once, although they hadn’t expected to see any engagement for another ten minutes. Radar had been actively pinging the human fleet ever since it had entered effective range, locking down the precise location of all of the human ships…in exchange, unavoidably, for revealing the location of the Oghaldzon radar and most of their own ships as well. Scanner techs on both fleets were working through the signals, their own, the enemies, the handful of pulses that had no definable origin, trying to locate as much of the enemy fleet as possible. When the humans fired, targeting sensors locked in on the missiles and kept lock as the missiles swept closer.

  The Oghaldzon were not unduly alarmed. They knew the rules of space combat as well as the humans; in their own ways, both fleets had fairly equal experience and knowledge of their enemy…or so the aliens thought. The humans had clearly decided to launch some missiles in on a ballistic course, a course they would assume as soon as their drives burned out, but it wouldn’t work. In the dominating environment, with the Oghaldzon probing space with active sensors, the missiles couldn’t hide in the empty regions of space. They would be detected and killed with lasers until they were all gone, before they could reactive their own drives and enter terminal attack mode. By then, they would all be dead…

  And then, everything changed.

  * * *

  “War Commander, we have missile separation,” Fanaya said, before she realised just what she was saying. The human missiles had been larger than previously-observed designs, but that wasn't too surprising; missiles tended to grow larger depending on just how far they were meant to fly under their own power, fuel usually being a respectable percentage of their mass. “They’re launching missiles from the missiles!”

  “A multiple warhead,” Dataka realised. They had seen something like that before, during the assaults on the beachheads, but most of them had been shot down by the ground-based point defence before they had been able to separate and launch their independent attacks. The Oghaldzon could still see their targets, they could still kill them, but now there were five times as many of them, each smaller and faster. The humans had produced tiny nuclear weapons before, as the forces on the ground could testify, but each of the smaller missiles carried a nuke that could destroy an entire ship if they hit. “Have point defences take them down as fast as possible…”

  He cursed as the human missiles revealed themselves. Some of them were obviously intended to destroy his ships, but others seemed to carry electronic counter-warfare loadouts, generating ghosts on his ships’ sensors, or were targeting themselves directly in on his sensor drones.

  The display sparkled again as
the humans launched a second wave of the new missile design and then a third, over a hundred missiles incoming through space against his forces. He sent orders into the processors, but most of the human missiles were separating just before they entered laser range, launching their nuclear submunitions just in time to avoid losing them all at once. The tidal wave of destruction was closing in rapidly and point defence was almost overwhelmed.

  Almost. “Keep the links up and running,” he ordered. A thought had occurred to him. “Deactivate all radar on the targeted ships or platforms; don’t give them anything to home in on, and…”

  “We have three incoming,” Fanaya reported, her voiced showing no trace of panic. Dataka was proud of her in his own way; she might never make Ship Commander, but she would certainly rise high as a sensor tech. “They’d closing in on our ship.”

  Dataka didn’t spare anything for the gasp of the human behind him. “Engage the missiles at will,” he ordered the tactical officer. “Knock them down and keep them down…”

  “Nuclear detonation, seven nuclear detonations,” Fanaya snapped. Dataka glanced at the display and realised that the humans had added a second trick; they’d known that the Oghaldzon lasers were more powerful than theirs, so they had rigged their missiles with armour and dead-man detonators. When the sensors had registered the missile melting and vaporising under the laser fire, they’d triggered the nuke, detonating it and sending more electronic disruption into the ether. It could all be handled, in time; the question was if they had the time. “Sir...only a handful of them are detonating.”

  “Concentrate our fire,” Dataka ordered coldly, mentally clicking respect for whatever human had thought up this trick. There was one easy counter; take down the missiles before they could detonate. That required several lasers focusing at once on each missile, which in turn reduced to a fraction the number that could be taken down before they entered terminal engagement mode. “How long until we enter our own engagement range?”

  “Five milli-cycles,” Fanaya said. “I have already loaded firing patterns into the computers.”

  “Order them to fire as soon as we enter range,” Dataka ordered. An icon flashed once on the display, emitting a mournful sound before it vanished forever. Three more spacecraft died in the next moments. The human plan had hurt his fleet, hurt it…but it wasn't over yet. “Now it’s our turn…”

  * * *

  The main display on the Enterprise had started to haze out, a result of electromagnetic pulse blasts from the nuclear detonations, the confusingly shifting Oghaldzon electronic countermeasures, and the shifting patterns of fire. The new missiles had obviously been a success, but no one was certain just how successful they had been; meanwhile the Oghaldzon were coming into their own engagement range, similar to the range most of the Combined Fleet’s ships had. Kelly had done very good work, Waikoloa admitted without hesitation; the multiple-warhead missiles had clearly taken a bite out of the enemy.

  “Can you confirm,” he asked. “How many did we kill?”

  “I’m not sure,” the sensor tech admitted. “I think we got at least three, maybe four, but the resulting sensor chaos is making it hard to be certain of just what we hit. At least twenty warheads detonated too far from any hull to do any good, although we might have blinded some sensors if we were really lucky.”

  Waikoloa scowled. It would be mere seconds before they entered engagement range…when everything would become much simpler. He would have loved to have remained just outside the alien range, bombarding them until they surrendered or were wiped out, but there were only a handful of the multiple-warhead missiles left. Kelly hadn’t been able to slim them down; each ship could only carry a handful of them, including a handful of converted interplanetary transports. A bridge ship could have carried many more, but the remaining bridge ships were orbiting Saturn or Jupiter or even further out, trying to avoid the Oghaldzon for as long as possible.

  He glanced over at Brown. “Have we located a command ship yet?”

  “No,” she said, her eyes on her console. “It’s logically going to be one of the bigger ships, but we haven’t been able to identify which; they’re probably using lasers to communicate like we are. The smaller ones are the real problem, sir; they’re locking targeting sensors on, just now.”

  “Order all ships to open fire as soon as they enter range,” Waikoloa ordered. It would be bare seconds now. “We have to concentrate our fire and destroy as many of the smaller warships as possible before the range closes even further.”

  He leaned back as the first missiles launched from the Enterprise, followed rapidly by fire from the other ships in the fleet, concentrated on twenty-one Oghaldzon targets. The enemy had clearly linked their own point defence together, just as his own ships had; their fleet was forming up into a formation, like his, that looked as if it had been designed by the greenest cadet in the space academy.

  He took no reassurance from it; they all had seen enough to know how dangerous the Oghaldzon were. He had read countless novels where an alien force, both extremely advanced and dangerously incompetent, had invaded Earth; the Oghaldzon didn’t even have the decency to be stupid! They might look at the world – at the galaxy – through a different set of eyes, but they were far from stupid. That made them dangerous…

  The display suddenly sparkled with red light as the Oghaldzon missiles started to boost towards his fleet. The entire situation was starting to look like a line of ships and fleets; his force, advancing towards the first Oghaldzon fleet, the second Oghaldzon fleet behind it, the third formation…and the motherships. He had to punch his way through the first and second fleets to threaten the motherships; at that point, the Oghaldzon could surrender…or be left to the tender mercies of the Rockrats.

  They had it easier. They just had to destroy the Combined Fleet.

  “Here they come,” Brown said. The Enterprise had been rolling, launching its missiles as its tubes were brought to bear; now, the lights dimmed slightly as power was redirected to the lasers and railguns targeting the oncoming missiles. He felt a moment of nervousness as the missiles entered their effective range envelope; had the aliens thought of rigging theirs to pre-detonate first? No missiles exploded in radioactive fury and he breathed a sigh of relief; they had started to cut through the warheads without problems. “One down, two down, three down…they’re all down.”

  “For the moment,” Waikoloa said grimly. The fleet was shaking out now as it continued to concentrate its fire; seven Oghaldzon spacecraft vanished in balls of fire. It was turning into a pounding match, but one that could still go either way; the main body of the Oghaldzon fleet was trying to open the range a little, just enough to make the humans work harder for their hits. They had offered him an opportunity…

  “Callie, raise Task Force Five,” he said. The display updated itself again; four craft, three Chinese, one Rockrat, had been blown to dust. “They are ordered to begin Operation Clean Sweep.”

  * * *

  “That’s a go signal,” Basil Durham said, as the signal came in. “Trigger the drives…”

  The converted freighters Lightning Roasted Lemur and Ferret on Crack fell out of their position in the rear of the formation, heading towards LEO and the Oghaldzon platforms that had been left in orbit. The Oghaldzon fleet’s movements had given them an opportunity and neither crew intended to miss it, not least because it was a chance to extract revenge for their dead comrades in the Battle of Freeport One. The Oghaldzon ignored them; they had to know that the freighters had fallen into a blank zone, just outside engagement range, but effectively helpless as far as continuing the war was concerned. It didn’t matter…

  “I have targeting information,” his wife and executive officer said. There were only four crew on the Lightning Roasted Lemur; it was that sort of ship. “Platforms have been targeted.”

  “Open the holds,” Durham ordered. Neither ship had been refitted with missile tubes; there was little point. The ship shook slightly as air started to
vent out of the holds. The aliens had to be wondering just what they were doing. “Launch the missiles into space.”

  “They’re gone,” his wife said. “One minute to activation.”

  Durham was already triggering the drives, sending the Lightning Roasted Lemur heading up and away from the missiles, followed closely by the Ferret on Crack. The aliens had to have worked out what they were doing by now, but it no longer mattered; they no longer had a chance to stop them before they deployed their missiles. Behind them, the holds’ worth of missiles activated their own drives and sped downwards towards Earth…and the orbital weapons platforms that were holding Earth hostage. They had all been targeted; the only Oghaldzon in orbit that had been spared were the anchors of the space elevators.

  “I think they’re pissed,” his wife said, as the Oghaldzon weapons started to wipe missiles from the sky. A single ship the size of the Lightning Roasted Lemur could carry hundreds of comparatively small missiles; the aliens would have their work cut out for them when the missiles entered terminal attack paths…and, he saw now, other missiles were rising from the surface of the planet. Durham was a Rockrat to the core, but he was impressed; the coordination had worked almost perfectly. Some of the platforms survived the experience, others vanished in balls of fire, destroying the weapons and cutting down on the damage they could do to Earth. As one platform vanished, others tried to take up the slack in their point defences, but it wasn’t going to be enough…

  “Yup,” Durham agreed, as the aliens locked targeting sensors on the Lightning Roasted Lemur. He ignored them; if the aliens had had anything close enough to harm them, it would have done so by now. “I really do think they’re pissed.”

  * * *

  Dataka watched the human missiles detonating with a profound feeling that the battle was running away from him. The humans had somehow managed to coordinate a joint strike against the orbital weapons platforms. That meant in turn that the quiet discussions his diplomats had been having with some of the humans on Earth had been decoys, intended to make him think that some humans would come over to their side, or at least recognise their authority, had been deceptions.