Antares Crucible

by Warwick Gibson

  Let me just say that living through history is completely different to constructing it, at a distance, out of the comments and visual records of other people and other times!

  PART TWO: WAR ON THE GROUND

  CHAPTER 4

  ________________

  The Invardii groundships were now well established along the Andes. They were busiest over the foothills, where they pounded away at every subterranean echo that might mean a plasma cannon was hidden there. But others were ravaging the cities, and the industrial centers, of the South American continent.

  Cordez watched the pattern of strikes from his military headquarters. It was a bunker deep beneath the Andes, and not far from the source of the mighty Amazon river. The closeness of the Amazon basin always gave him a strong sense of belonging to the land.

  The South Am trading block had built a series of empty bunkers high in the mountains, and it was satisfying to see the groundships waste time and reserves pounding away at the decoys with their low-frequency weapons that detonated below ground.

  The real bunkers had escape tunnels. When the military comms system told the engineers the groundships were getting close, they deployed out of the bunkers and waited until the sleek, dark shapes had passed over them. If the bunker was destroyed, they made good their escape to places where they could rejoin the fighting.

  In the first hours above the South Am block, the black groundships had swarmed below the Reaper ship fleet as they were released, twisting and turning in long skeins of a hundred and more. Then they fell away toward the planet beneath. The sleek shapes turned red from the air friction that buffeted them as they descended, and then orange, before separating into smaller groups at ground level. They cooled as they roared away on individual trajectories across the continent.

  Many sought out the plasma cannons, and some rampaged across the countryside, leveling everything before them. The cities had already been abandoned, and Humanity waited out the battle in shelters deep under the ground. The shelters had been built well away from the built up areas the Invardii were likely to attack.

  The armada had reached Earth on the night side of the planet, over the North Am and Arctic regions. The battle for the surface of the planet was most advanced there.

  Groundships had already reduced the North Am cities to smoking plains of debris and shattered office blocks. Jagged remnants sat forlornly with steel girders poking into the sky like dramatically exposed skeletons. The resort centers in the Arctic sea had been sent to the shallow bottom, and many of their lofty spires were still visible above the waves.

  In the EuroRussian trading block the groundships had created a similar wasteland. Further south the Asian block was at the same stage of devastation as the South Am block, and the Pacific and African blocks were just now sighting their first groundships.

  An aide brought a message to Cordez, and he sat down slowly as he digested the news. One of the civilian shelters had been hit, and first reports put casualties in the thousands. It wasn’t possible to get rescue teams to the site with a war going on, so the people in the shelter would have to cope as best they could. They would already be caring for the wounded, and attempting to dig out the living and the dead from among the rubble.

  It had always been possible the shelters would be hit. They were well away from areas of interest to the groundships, and nowhere near the bunkers, but they might still show up on the groundship scanners. Or it could simply be a random blast that found one of them.

  Cordez felt for those who could not fight back, who were supposed to be non-combatants, but had got caught up in the war. It always happened of course. There was never a ‘clean’ war, one without casualties among the civilian population.

  A little later Cordez took another call, reporting a shelter destroyed in the North Am block. Then Emens reported in with news of several shelters damaged or destroyed in the EuroRussian block. Cordez could only hope they were all random blasts, and the Invardii were not targeting the shelters deliberately. Nonetheless, the people of Earth were having to endure their fair share of pain and suffering.

  There was little more he could do now but wait, and Cordez took the opportunity to make contact with each of the Regents in turn. They would be feeling the responsibility on their shoulders, and the only ones who fully understood were each other.

  Cordez saved the call to Asura for last. She was his touchstone, his link to a sane world in the midst of this insanity.

  They spoke for as long as he could spare the time, and he raised his hand to touch her cheek on the image in front of him. She couldn’t feel the contact, but she smiled just the same. During this time when the future of the Earth lay at stake, they were needed in their home trading blocks, and that separation hurt.

  They promised each other that when this was all over they would never be separated again, and if that meant both of them retiring as Regents, then so be it. It was a very quiet Cordez who cut the link to Asura when they’d finished talking.

  After a quick break for a meal, Cordez turned his attention back to the defense of the South Am block. He knew the situation on his home turf was about to get a lot more complex.

  The bunkers weren’t his only weapon against the Invardii groundships. The bunkers were there to take a toll of the sleek ships as they descended through the atmosphere, and do as much damage as they could when the groundships were rampaging across the surface of the continent. But they were also a way to concentrate the enemy ships in set places – over the bunkers and around the cities. That gave Cordez the opportunity to launch his next offensive.-

  His main weapons lay by the tens of thousands across the foothills of the Andes, and around the major cities. Each one was a single-shot plasma pulse weapon that had been manufactured as cheaply and simply as possible. The long tubes had been lifted onto transports at the factories, and fixed wherever they could be concealed.

  Cordez had impressed upon the Board of Regents that this was not a rearguard action. This was a winner-take-all battle for Earth. Whatever resources they had must be turned into defensive capabilities. If Earth lost by one pulse weapon, there would not be the opportunity to make any more. Ever.

  His point had sunk home. Factories had worked round the clock until they’d exhausted the stockpiles of materials sent to them. Then they had been torn down and sent as raw material to those factories still making weapons. When the industrial sector had finished, the number of pulse weapons all but swamped the capability of the trading blocks to transport them to where they would be set up.

  Cordez decided it was time to bring the pulse weapons into play. They were good for only one shot each, but played correctly, that would be enough. He hoped there would be enough of the weapons to make the Invardii believe they were inexhaustible.

  The Regent gave the authorization code, and thousands upon thousands of the long tubes along the Andes armed themselves automatically. Then they began scanning for groundships. They pointed randomly at the skies from their places of concealment, and waited for groundships to fly into their sights.

  When that happened, and the pulse weapons recognized the groundships for what they were, the plasma pulse came as a complete surprise to the sleek, black enemy ships. In what seemed to be a random order one groundship, then three together, then two with a short interval between them, tumbled from the skies.

  The groundships swept the foothills, looking for the new weapons that were being used against them. Cordez had to smile as the enemy ships traced the shots back to the long tubes in their places of concealment, and passed overhead time and again as they completely obliterated each site.

  That was the beauty of the one-shot system. Perhaps it was wasteful to build a weapon that fired only once, but it was also a strategy that was completely unexpected. It was tying the groundships in knots, as they tried to destroy what they thought to be entire batteries of the new weapons.

  Cordez gave another set of authorization codes for rings of pulse weapons on the edges
of the cities. Here the results were more spectacular. Whole flights of groundships crumpled out of the sky as they flew over the rings of concealed pulse weapons. For the groundships it was just a matter of time until they eventually flew into the pulse weapon sights.

  Cordez picked up feeds from the North Am block and the EuroRussian block. The images showed the pulse weapons getting the same high hit rates on those continents. As an added bonus, it seemed the random hits on the shelters had ceased. It looked like the groundships were too busy trying to cope with the pulse weapons to be making mischief anywhere else.

  Suddenly the battle for Earth didn’t seem so one-sided anymore.

  Cordez looked on with satisfaction as the groundships continued to fall from the skies across the South American continent. It must be driving the Invardii mad. There would seem to them no pattern to the discharges. Sometimes the weapons fired when the groundships were close, sometimes far away.

  Sometimes they fired when one groundship flew by, sometimes when there were many. The Invardii didn’t realize it was simply a matter of thousands upon thousands of pulse weapons, and the completely random chance that a groundship might fly into one of their sights.

  When almost half of the groundships battering the planet had been destroyed, they were recalled to the Reaper ships above. Cordez watched as the long skeins of groundships reformed, and spiraled up toward the edges of space. He didn’t like the look of that. It meant the Invardii had something else in mind, and Cordez was uneasy about what that ‘something else’ could be.

  For more than half a day an eerie peace settled over Earth. The remains of the cities and industrial areas slowly burnt out, and the gray wastelands of powdered concrete among steel reinforcing slowly cooled. But while the struggle for the surface of Earth ceased for a while, the battle in the skies renewed in intensity.

  Cordez looked at the numbers. The Sumerian motherships had cut a sizable hole in the armada when they’d first arrived, and the Hud squadron with Carlos’ new missiles had cleaned up the Reaper ships at Deimos. Both actions had reduced the Invardii numbers, but now the war of attrition was going against the Alliance.

  Outnumbered at more than two to one, they couldn’t afford to knock out one Reaper ship for every Javelin lost, but they were stalling around that ratio now.

  Cordez looked at the latest estimates on his work station. There were now 363 of the Javelins, and EarthGov ships changed to Javelin specifications, and 764 Reaper ships. This was an improvement in the ratio, but it didn’t take into account the more powerful Invardii flagships.

  It was clear the flagships were helping the armada gain the ascendancy in the battle raging above the North Am block, and he couldn’t see the situation improving. The bulk of the Sumerian warships had escorted the few remaining motherships out of the Solar System, and the Hud squadron with Carlos’ missiles waited with three Sumerian wings in orbit around Mars.

  Cordez knew it was time to leave the skies to the armada, and save the Alliance spaceships for the more important purpose of stopping any Invardii attempt to drive a moon, or an asteroid, into the Earth.

  The Regent found it hard to send the Javelins away. It seemed to leave the planet so exposed. Picking up the sub-space connection to Cagill, he gave the order to withdraw.

  CHAPTER 5

  ________________

  The Air Marshall’s forces tried to stay close enough to stop the Invardii sending moons into the Earth, but far enough away to allow the armada to take control of the area round the planet. It was going to be a delicate balancing act. Cordez had to drive home the point that the Alliance would allow some things, but not others. But could he force the Invardii to accept these terms?

  Cordez soon found out what the Invardii were going to do once the groundships had retreated from the surface. Bright points of orange light blossomed beneath the Reaper ships, and sped away toward Earth.

  Goddammit, thought Cordez in exasperation. Fireballs, exactly as Fedic had described them on Uruk.

  The accuracy of the Invardii targeting systems wasn’t great through Earth’s dense atmosphere, but it didn’t matter. They intended to blanket the areas where pulse systems had been most active, and precision bombing wasn’t necessary.

  Fortunately, the fireballs weren’t a threat to the Human population. The people of Earth were safe from such an attack in their bunkers, but the pulse weapons were scattered across the surface, and they would be much more vulnerable to this sort of attack.

  Reports soon started to come in from the South Am bunkers, detailing the number of pulse weapons that had been destroyed. The fireballs were earthing themselves in great discharges of heat and light, and the pulse weapons had been quickly and lightly made. They were easy to destroy.

  It was too late to change anything now, muttered Cordez to himself. The continent was going to have to take the damage, and see what the final tally was. He clicked through the links to other trading blocks, and saw the same scenario being played out there.

  It was worse in the northern hemisphere, where it was the summer season. Plasma discharges in areas with sufficient material to keep the fires going was producing huge firestorms. The firestorms generated hurricane-force winds as they sucked oxygen into their centers, and threw soot and ash all the way into the upper atmosphere.

  The Invardii had destroyed the satellites around Earth at the beginning of the invasion, but Cordez turned to a drone visual of the Rockies. When that became obscured by smoke he turned to others, all showing the same extraordinary spectacle.

  The pine forests of the Rockies were ablaze everywhere, the result of being tinder dry from summer temperatures and bombarded by plasma discharges. Cordez called up the best long-range scanners the Alliance had left, mostly on the retreating Alliance forces, and tried to get a large-scale view of the fires.

  The Rockies were ablaze from end to end. It was one giant firestorm without a break. He switched to the EuroRussian block on the other side of the Arctic. The Siberian forests had split into several similar conflagrations. The cities blazed in points of light around the rest of the planet. Cordez swore soundly for a full minute.

  It was not just the damage to the planet’s ecosystem, and to the bio-resources they would need when this was all over. The temperature of Earth had been too high since the industrial era five centuries ago, and the hothouse effect of the smoke and other gases would mean further increases.

  It was rare to get ice in the Arctic now, and half of Greenland was forests and meadows. If the last great moderator, the kilometers-deep Antarctic ice cap melted as well, they would be redrawing coastlines all over the planet.

  As if he didn’t have enough on his plate with the armada!

  The rain of fireballs stopped later that afternoon. Cordez went through the reports on the damage they had caused as they came in.

  There had been wholesale destruction among the pulse weapons. Quickly manufactured, they weren’t particularly temperature resistant. Fortunately, they still remained a sizable force. The question was, would it be a large enough force to serve as a deterrent to the groundships if they returned again?

  The sleek, black shapes fell from the skies over the South Am block on the following morning. They avoided the cities now – there was nothing left there to destroy – and once again sought out the bunkers along the Andes.

  Cordez toyed with the idea of shifting the remaining pulse weapons around the cities to the mountains, but that much activity would be vulnerable to groundship attacks while it was underway.

  He wondered whether the Invardii could see that the destruction of Earth was not worth the loss in groundships. Perhaps they just kept mindlessly pushing forward, whatever the cost. Surely any intelligent species must realize when a goal was going to be too expensive to achieve.

  The few bunkers that remained took a toll of the groundships again, as they left the Reaper ships and entered the upper atmosphere, but this time the Invardii were determined to eliminate the bunkers completel
y. The pulse weapons continued to pick off groundships, but the bunkers succumbed one by one.

  Cordez watched the numbers of groundships and bunkers fall on both sides of the equation, and wondered if the Invardii would ever give up. He would soon have nothing left to defend the continent with, but the groundships were suffering just as much.

  An aide bought him a sub-space call from Cagill. The Air Marshall was waiting out beyond the orbit of Jupiter, with the remainder of the defending fleet. He was reporting a group of fifty Reaper ships that had left the armada, and were heading toward Deimos again.

  The Invardii are checking our resolve, thought Cordez. He watched as the Hud squadron and three Sumerian wings closed on the Reaper ships, and he took a special interest in the fierce fire fight that followed. He knew how few of Carlos’ special missiles the Javelins had left, and wondered if they could pull off a victory. The Alliance force had demolished eight of the Reaper ships for the loss of one of their own, when the enemy ships veered off and returned to the armada.

  That’s better, thought Cordez grimly. Now we’re getting a bit of respect. The Invardii didn’t know how limited the supply of shield-busting missiles was, and the more they didn’t know, the more uncertain they must be becoming. The situation was turning into a game of brinkmanship.

  Cordez turned his attention back to the battle for the South American continent. Activity was more sporadic now, with so few groundships and even fewer pulse weapons left. Then the sleek, black ships spiraled up toward the Reaper ships as evening fell.

  Half an hour later, Cordez made a desperate call to ParapSanni over one of the sub-space connections. Would the Sumerian Par’Sanni, now Supreme among the Eight in the Sumerian government, commit his warships to a plan to stop the armada from dropping a moon into Earth. If the situation came down to that?