First Strike

by Christopher Nuttall

  She wanted to close her eyes, to blot out the display. Her failure was unmatched, even in the days before the Hegemony had been created. An entire fleet lost in battle, without significantly weakening the enemy. The Empress was almost certainly dead by now – and if she wasn't, she would be when news of this battle reached Hegemony Prime. There was never any shortage of ambitious females who wanted to make themselves Empress.

  And all she could do was run.

  * * *

  “Admiral,” Sooraya said, “the Funks are targeting Earth.”

  Tobias swore as new red icons glinted to life on the display, boosting toward Earth. Some of them would have antimatter warheads – and just one hit would be enough to kill eight billion humans. Those lucky enough to be on the far side of the planet might just survive a few months before they ran out of food and water. The Funks had presented him with a choice, which was really no choice at all; kill the superdreadnoughts and watch Earth die, or save Earth and give the superdreadnoughts a few moments to recover.

  “Intercept course,” he ordered. There really was no choice. “I want all of those missiles taken out before they reach Earth.”

  The gunboats, the only craft capable of matching speed with the missiles, raced after them, firing as soon as they had targeting solutions. Nimitz and the rest of the fleet followed, trying to pick off missiles that had lost their drives and gone onto ballistic trajectories. Earth’s defences, thankfully, hadn't come under direct fire from the Funks and could intercept some of the missiles for themselves. But Nimitz couldn't take chances. They had to intercept every missile before they lost track of them completely. An antimatter warhead floating around near Earth was System Command’s greatest nightmare.

  Now I know how the Funks felt when we mined Hammerfall, he thought. But those mines would never have survived a brush with the planet’s atmosphere. Poor bastards.

  “Admiral,” one of the sensor officers said, “I am picking up quantum gate energies emanating from the Funk superdreadnoughts.”

  “They’re running,” Sooraya said. She looked over at Tobias. “We could use the IDG system. This is what we invented it to do.”

  Tobias hesitated. The IDG projector had been designed as a last-ditch weapon – except it wasn’t actually a weapon. And yet it had its limitations. One of them was that it would force the Funks to stand and fight, alarmingly close to Earth. Underlining his concerns, the Funks chose that moment to belch another salvo of missiles towards the planet. At least this time the fleet was in position to intercept them without having to race to position themselves between the planet and the oncoming storm.

  But six superdreadnoughts could cause far too much havoc throughout the galaxy if the Hegemony came apart completely...

  “Activate it,” he said. The projector wouldn't be too difficult for the Galactics to figure out, once they realised what it did. They’d known the basic principle for upwards of thirty thousand years. Indeed, no one had been quite sure why the Cats hadn't built one for themselves. Maybe they’d felt that it was better left in the realm of theory than risk someone who disliked them building one. “But keep targeting the missiles first.”

  The display updated as the quantum gate started to open, ready to take the Funks into quantum space and away from Earth. It didn't look as if the projector was working...

  …And then everything went to hell.

  * * *

  The superdreadnought rocked violently as gravity waves struck her hull.

  “My Lady,” the helmsman screamed, “the quantum gate is collapsing!”

  Lady Dalsha stared. A quantum gate was normally a spinning disc of light in front of a starship, a hypnotic spiral that led directly into quantum space. But this one was different, a wildly-oscillating funnel that seemed to be forcing its way through the dimensions. Merely looking at the image from her ship’s sensors made her eyes hurt. The ship rocked again as the gravity field grew stronger, pulling them towards the gate. Normally, there was a smooth transit into quantum space, aided by precisely-modulated gravity waves that protected the ship as it made transit. This time…

  “Pull back,” she ordered, feeling gibbering panic threatening to undermine her rationality. Her crew was losing control; some screaming on the deck while others lunged at their fellow crewmen, claws extended as if they were preparing to fight for the right to mate. The scent of fear grew stronger in the air, pushing others over the edge into insanity. “Pull back!”

  The humans, she realised. They’d locked her out of quantum space! Or maybe… she’d seen images of what happened to starships that tried to make transit through a collapsing quantum gate, none of them pleasant. She could feel the colossal stress being exerted against the superdreadnought’s hull, almost hear a scream as impossible forces rent and tore at the metal holding her ship together, sense the buckling as the hull finally began to give way…

  She felt dizzy, suddenly, as the internal compensator field started to fail. Gravity snatched at her a second later, throwing her and her crew across the bridge and slamming them against a bulkhead. She felt bones breaking as she hit the bulkhead, just before the force grew stronger and stronger. It felt as if a giant foot was pressing down on her, threatening to crush her skull…

  …And then there was fire, and then darkness.

  * * *

  The researchers hadn’t been entirely sure of what would happen when the IDG projector was activated. They’d known since First Contact that energy discharges in quantum space excited the high-energy dimension, creating energy storms that could rip a starship apart in seconds, but deliberately creating an energy storm had seemed only a theoretical possibility. One remote danger, they’d warned, was that the energy would slash back into normal space, devastating an entire solar system. Tobias watched, white-faced, as three superdreadnoughts were torn apart when they tried to enter quantum space. The remainder managed to escape before the quantum gate finally gave up the struggle and collapsed.

  In death ground, Tobias thought. Admiral Sun had coined the term, pointing out that Sun Tzu had warned that preventing the enemy from retreating forced him to fight savagely – or surrender. Unable to retreat, unable to complete their mission and destroy Earth… what would the Funks do? And what would happen in the future if the Galactics realised what the human race had invented? Interstellar commerce would be badly impeded if terrorists devised their own versions of the projector and used them to blanket vital systems with energy storms.

  “Transmit a signal to the Funks,” he ordered. Watching the superdreadnoughts die had changed him, somehow. There were natural forces in the universe far greater than the human race. No starship could have survived a transit into an energy storm. “Tell them… tell them that we will accept their surrender.”

  “Yes, sir,” the communications officer said. With Earth safe, the Federation Navy could capture its opponents and then deploy to assist the planet with its relief and recovery efforts. The reports made it clear that there was already a high death rate from the missile strikes, to say nothing of governments being crippled by losing their capital cities. “Sir...I’m not getting any response. I’m not getting anything, not even internal starship transmissions. They’re badly damaged enough that there should be some leakage.”

  Tobias frowned. Could they all be dead?

  He keyed his console. “Colonel Jefferson, I want a team of Marines to inspect the Funk superdreadnoughts,” he ordered. If the internal compensators had failed, the entire crew would have be dead before they knew what had hit them. “Volunteers only. This could go badly wrong.”

  It was nearly thirty minutes before he had his answer. “Admiral, the Funks appear to have gone mad,” Jefferson said. He’d led one of the Marine teams in person. “They’re fighting each other.”

  “Deploy capture gas,” Tobias ordered. At least they had a working knock-out gas for the Funks now. “Thank you, Colonel.”

  He keyed his console. “Transmit a message to Earth,” he ordered. “Th
e battle is over – and the human race has won.”

  For now, he added, in the privacy of his own thoughts. Who knew what would happen at the peace table?

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “While we cannot condone the occupation of Garston,” an Ambassador was saying, “we see no good reason why the human claim to the system called Terra Nova cannot be upheld.”

  Ambassador Li Shan smiled. Four weeks had passed since the Battle of Earth, four weeks of careful diplomacy and long-winded speeches from various members of the Association Commune. Not that there had been much doubt about the outcome, although that hadn't stopped all sorts of people from having their say – even if they didn't have much to do with the Earth-Hegemony War. The Hegemony’s civil war was still underway, with queens on a dozen worlds declaring independence and setting up their own clans. It was possible that a new Empress would arise out of the ashes on Hegemony Prime and reunite the Hegemony, but it would take years, years that the human race could use to prepare for round two.

  There was little hope of forcing the Funks to pay an indemnity, or to acknowledge that they were responsible for the war. Great Lady Vanla was still their Ambassador – if only because it would have taken over a year for a replacement to be nominated and reach Center – and she had been firm on that point. Negotiations had been tricky – the ruling power on Hegemony Prime seemed to change daily – but none of them seemed prepared to concede more than they absolutely had to, at least to the human race. The Tarn had declared their support of the Gobbles and moved a squadron of superdreadnoughts into the rebel system. It was quite possible that the other powers surrounding the Hegemony would take advantage of its weakness and crush it before it could grow strong again.

  At least the Commune had ratified Earth’s possession of Terra Nova – and of the other Nine Stars, including Earth itself. The next aggressor would have to attack without the veneer of legality sought by the Funks, launching an aggressive strike against human technology that grew more advanced by the day. Shan had heard all kinds of rumours, rumours that seemed to grow more astonishing by the day. If humanity had possessed some of the weapons they’d been credited with, the war would have lasted no less than a day and the Hegemony would have been completely destroyed. She hadn't been trying to debunk the rumours. It would probably help with the peace terms if the Galactics thought that Earth was too strong to push around.

  But then, she reflected, over thirty superdreadnoughts had been captured or destroyed. That in itself was a pretty impressive display of power.

  It might have other long-term consequences. The Funks had had minimal research and development capability, but that wasn't true for the other Galactics. Shan had heard that R&D programs across the Association had been kick-started into high gear, starting a project to duplicate and exceed the new human weapons. It wouldn't take them too long to duplicate most of them, Shan had been warned. Most of the weapons were simply radically new takes on existing Galactic-provided technologies.

  She smiled as another Ambassador started to speak. The only sticking point was Garston, but she suspected that humanity would manage to hang on to the multiracial world. Quite apart from humanity having weapons no one could match – yet – Garston simply didn't have a working government. There was no one who could speak for their world. Humanity would have to rule a Funk population as well as the other alien races on the surface. From what she’d heard, the largely Russian and Chinese occupation forces had started the task of separating the Funks from the rest of the population. Maybe in a hundred years they’d be able to meet again without starting a war. For the moment, it would keep the peace.

  And besides, Earth needed Garston. Humanity’s reserves of Galactic currency had been drained by the war. The revenues from the shipping lanes would help refill Earth’s coffers and give humanity a chance to expand without having to build everything on Earth. It was lucky that no one cared enough to turn it into a major issue. She’d already assured a hundred Ambassadors that there would be no rise in shipping fees by the human administration. That should keep them from making too great a fuss.

  Or so she hoped. Humanity had shocked the Galactics. Who knew what would happen in the future?

  * * *

  Rain was falling as an honour guard of Federation Marines carried an empty coffin from the church to the graveyard in Southampton. Adrienne watched as they reached the appointed space and lowered the coffin into the grave, shaking her head sadly as the dead Marine’s friends and relatives threw dirt onto the coffin. A girl who looked far too young to be a widow was crying, one hand on her growing chest. The child would never know his father.

  Politician after politician rose to speak about the dead man, talking about how he had been a true son of England and how he had died bravely so that others might live. Adrienne suspected that the Marine would have preferred a more low-key funeral, but elections were coming up and politicians wouldn't want to appear uncaring about the dead. The waves of jingoism sweeping Earth in the wake of the war would destroy any politician who tried to stand in their way. Adrienne had heard that the Federation’s member nations had already approved a vastly increased budget for the Federation Navy, while a new wave of settlers were already on their way to Terra Nova. The planet has forged an odd society in the years they had spent under Funk occupation, leaving Adrienne to wonder just how welcome the newcomers would be. Terra Nova had already elected a new planetary governor, despite the Federation Council. Adrienne saw trouble brewing in the future.

  A number of people recognised her, pointing when they thought she couldn't see them. Her stories from the war had won her fame, if not fortune, although she had been offered everything from her own newspaper column to a live talk show. The former would be fun; the latter tedious beyond belief. She certainly didn't want to simper and show off her boobs on live TV, or play the bitch to guests who hadn't quite realised that they’d only been invited so they could be publicly humiliated. But there were other possibilities too. The first memoirs about the war were already being published and she’d been offered a book deal. It would sell very well, according to her agent.

  The congregation sang one final hymn and then dispersed, the widow and her father heading off before the media could intercept them. Adrienne had been told that they’d cut a deal with the politicians, one that allowed them to leave under escort in exchange for the political figures having a chance to pontificate. It didn't seem fair to Adrienne – she definitely intended to write an article slamming the political assholes who had turned a funeral into a circus – but the media wasn't known for playing fair. The less-principled reporters, denied access to the war front, had been running background interviews on the war’s heroes. Some of the questions they asked people were absurd. Others were just plain insulting.

  Shaking her head, she set off to follow the politicians. Who knew? Maybe one of them would slip up and say something important.

  * * *

  “So it seems that I will be keeping Formidable for a while,” Markus said. “Will you stay on as my Squadron Leader?”

  Carola pretended to consider it. “I suppose so,” she said finally, and laughed at his expression. “If we can face death together, we can probably conspire to violate the regulations to some degree...”

  Markus shrugged. They’d married long before he’d been promoted. If the CNO didn't like the idea of them having a relationship he should never have ordered Markus into the center seat on a starship. Not that he intended to stay there for long. Perhaps he could point out that he was ignoring the regulations and get demoted back to gunboat pilot.

  Formidable would be going back to Garston as soon as the replacement gunboats were loaded onboard. That was good news, as far as Markus was concerned; the media was hounding each and every crewman from the carrier – and the surviving Marines. One of the Marines was currently in the brig for knocking out a particularly unpleasant reporter, although Markus intended to let him off with a stern warning as soon as they were away from Ea
rth. The reporter had deserved it.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Are you going to help me with the supply tables…?”

  “I was thinking there was something else we could do,” Carola said, as she began to unbutton her shirt. “Why don’t we be the first to screw on a Captain’s table?”

  * * *

  “I’m surprised you came,” Joshua said. “Don’t you have a bodyguard detail or something?”

  Admiral Sampson shrugged as he sat down. The bar was a multiracial environment in the middle of Garston’s largest and most cosmopolitan city. Two humans might stick out on Garston, but it was unlikely that they would actually be recognised. Or so Joshua hoped. The Federation Council hadn’t done anything to attempt to arrest him, despite disowning him, yet they weren't the only ones who had put a price on his head.

  “I left them behind,” Sampson said. Joshua had heard that he was making a brief visit to examine the security arrangements and review the local troops recruited by General Chekov. “The fewer witnesses the better, don’t you think?”

  Joshua nodded. “I think we can agree that I did better than you expected,” he said. “And Earth now has a whole race of allies.”

  “So you did,” Sampson agreed. He hesitated, as if what he had to say was unpleasant. “You do realise that you can't come home again?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Joshua said, sardonically. “Wouldn't it be embarrassing for the Federation Council if they arrested me, me being a hero and all?”

  “Very embarrassing,” Sampson said. Joshua’s exploits had made him a hero on Earth, at least to the ordinary citizens. He’d poked the Hegemony right in its red eyes and liberated an entire planet of cuddly teddy bears. The media had built him up into a hero, despite governmental opposition. “It would be a great deal easier if you just stayed with the Gobbles and rebuilt your shipping empire with them.”