The Long-Range War

by Christopher Nuttall

  Her eyes narrowed as the first human ships started to advance through the gravity point. It was incredible! They were going on the offensive ... wait. She looked closer, feeling her heart start to race as she realised the human ships were actually pulling away from her warships and heading into deep space. An entire stream of starships ...

  “They’re running,” she said. Understanding clicked. The timing hadn't been too badly off, then. The reserve fleet had arrived, as planned, and trapped the human ships. And the humans were fleeing through the gravity point. It was madness, but it might just give them a chance to survive. “Order the fleet to advance. We’ll slam the door closed, once and for all.”

  ***

  Hoshiko had always been told that a naval officer, particularly one with her heritage, shouldn’t leave her people behind to die. It gnawed at her, as Defiant passed through the gravity point, that she had left too many people behind. Commodore Yu and his crews had known the risks, they’d all volunteered knowing the risks ... and yet, she felt as if she’d betrayed them. She had betrayed them.

  The display filled up rapidly. Hoshiko sucked in her breath as, for the first time, she saw the full might of the alien fleet. It was immense. It looked as if the vast number of losses had barely even weakened the fleet. And it was advancing right towards the gravity point. She didn’t dare let it get too close.

  “Launch one barrage,” she ordered, as tactical combat groups were hastily reorganised. Her order of battle was an absolute mess. The neatly-organised squadrons were a thing of the past. She silently blessed her commanders and crewmen for training so hard. Throwing together a combat group on the fly would be difficult, but doable. “And then set course for RV Point Orange. We’ll jump into FTL as soon as the fleet clears the gravity point.”

  The latest update - a constant liturgy of disaster - scrolled up in front of her, but she ignored it as her fleet unleashed a barrage of missiles. A handful of ships were still popping through the gravity point, bringing with them the final messages from the fortresses. She felt another pang of guilt. She’d given Commodore Yu the authority to surrender, if he felt it wise, but there was no way to know how the Tokomak would react. They certainly wouldn’t be pleased if Yu refused to allow human technology to fall into their hands. That was something that might anger them to the point they slaughtered all of the remaining humans without further delay.

  “The fleet is clearing the edge of the gravity field,” Yolanda reported. “But there are elements that will not be able to jump for several minutes.”

  “Order them to prepare for evacuation,” Hoshiko said. Her missiles were striking home, roaring through the enemy defences to slam against their targets, but it wasn’t enough. She’d been cut off from her supplies too. The weapons she had with her were the only ones she’d have until she fought her way back into Apsidal or died. “We can’t afford a delay.”

  She looked at the enemy fleet. What would it do? Try to chase down her fleet? It had the firepower and numbers to do it, if its CINC wished. Or ...secure Apsidal? It would be the smart move. Did they have enough ships to do both?

  Yolanda’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Admiral, the fleet is ready to drop into FTL.”

  Hoshiko took a breath. “Then take us into FTL,” she ordered. “And hope they don’t follow us.”

  ***

  “The enemy has jumped into FTL,” the aide reported. “Shall we pursue?”

  Neola fought down her delight and considered it. Giving chase, running the wretched fleet down, was a very tempting thought. She certainly had enough ships to keep advancing her combat elements forward while keeping track of the enemy fleet’s location. But the human fleet was cut off from its base, in a sector where it could expect little in the way of sympathy and nothing in the way of actual help. The only place the humans could get supplies was N-Gann and the base was practically impregnable. No, they’d wither and die on the vine.

  “No,” she said. “We’ll take the fleet to Apsidal instead.”

  ***

  “Fortress-Two has taken heavy damage, sir,” Commander Ella reported. “Fortress-Nine has been effectively destroyed.”

  Commodore Yu nodded, feeling nothing but cold hatred for the aliens. They’d mouse-trapped the human fleet - somehow - and he and his men were going to die. There was no way out. The contingency plans had never considered that the aliens would somehow manage to get a fleet on the wrong side of the gravity point, but he had known there was a chance that his fortresses would have to be abandoned. He didn't blame Admiral Stuart. The fleet - and the fleet train - was far more important than the fortresses.

  I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, he thought, wryly.

  “Continue firing,” he ordered, shortly. “Throw everything at them.”

  “Aye, sir,” Ella said. “Including the kitchen sink?”

  Yu grinned, despite himself. “Why not?”

  He sobered as he watched the next wave of enemy ships popping out of the gravity point. The fleet must have escaped, then. He hoped it had escaped, even though he knew he would never know. The aliens were pushing the offensive, steadily wearing down his defences and punching missiles through his shields ...

  “Incoming hammers!” Ella’s voice was filled with alarm. “They’re targeting us!”

  “Deploy countermeasures,” Yu snapped. He had to hand it to the Tokomak. Their countermeasures were crude, but they were better than their human counterparts. “And then ...”

  “Too late, sir,” Ella said, grimly. The enemy hammers were coming in too fast to be stopped. “Incoming!”

  “Abandon the station,” Yu ordered, sharply. “I say again ...”

  ***

  “The enemy fortresses have been destroyed,” the aide said. He slapped his chest in glee. “The gravity point is clear.”

  Neola smiled. She’d won. The greatest space battle for a thousand years and she’d won. It was her victory. None of her rivals would ever be able to take it from her. People would be studying the battle for centuries, learning from her success ... and her enemy’s mistakes. It was definitely her victory. She was so pleased she couldn’t even bring herself to be annoyed at her aide. Maybe she’d keep him around after all.

  “Very good,” she said. Apsidal appeared to have been cleansed of the human infection, but she knew that was an illusion. Their remaining ships had either slipped into cloak or fled into FTL. “Order the fleet to advance towards the planet. It’s time to take it back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “The fleet is gone?”

  “For the moment, we have to assume the worst,” Martin said, as the squad took up positions near the massive spacedock. “Major Griffin knew little more than anyone else.”

  He gritted his teeth. The fleet was gone, fleeing through the gravity point to escape certain destruction. Yolanda was with them ... he hoped. He didn’t want to think of her being dead instead, her body reduced to free-floating atoms in space. It was a horrible thought. He pushed it away, savagely. The Tokomak were on their way. It wouldn't be long until the marines were engaged.

  The spaceport was ... odd. It felt more like a planetside spaceport than a space-based facility, although there was no air outside the Apsidal Ring. And yet, freighters could land on the ring - dock with the ring - and unload their cargos as casually as if they’d landed on a planetary surface. The giant hangars, set within the ring, allowed freighters to be maintained and, perhaps, warships to be concealed. Martin couldn't help wondering if the Tokomak had missed a trick there. They could have hidden hundreds of starships inside the ring and the invaders wouldn't have known until it was far too late.

  But the ring would draw fire, if they turned it into a naval base, he reminded himself. And if chunks of it broke up and started to fall on the planet below, it would be disastrous.

  He felt a flicker of awe as he accessed his implants and contemplated the spaceport through the embedded sensor network. It was immense, far larger than the giant spac
eport he’d seen on Mars, a network of docking ports, warehouses, personal quarters and hotels for wealthy travellers. A visitor to Apsidal could spend his entire stay in the spaceport and miss nothing, apparently, although that struck him as stupid. Why bother travelling hundreds of light-years just to stay in a spaceport? But then, the Galactics never seemed to realise that planets were big. The human spaceborn had the same problem.

  Which is stupid, Martin thought. Earth is more than just religious fanatics, corrupt governments and millions of people too cowardly to breathe free.

  The enemy shuttles came into view, firing decoys as they dropped down fast towards the spaceport. They were unchallenged, but their pilots were taking no chances. Martin nodded in approval, even though he knew he’d be fighting and killing some of the aliens in a few hours. The Tokomak soldiers weren't taking anything for granted. They knew the Apsidal Ring was infested with humans and rebels. And the lack of any attempt to stop them from landing probably worried them. Martin knew there were times when he was happier taking incoming fire than waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  He smiled, grimly, as the shuttles grounded themselves in the warehouses, rather than the docking ports. It was good thinking on their part, he noted; he’d have been suspicious of the docking ports himself, even though he happened to know they hadn't been sabotaged. Instead, the Tokomak flowed out and into their warehouse, their weapons at the ready. Their bodies moved oddly - he felt a shiver running down his spine as his mind fought to accept their mere existence - but there was nothing wrong with their technique. A little unpractised, perhaps ...

  “They’re not Tokomak,” Sergeant Howe subvocalised. “I don’t know what they are, but they’re not Tokomak.”

  Martin blinked in surprise, then nodded. The Tokomak wouldn't want to waste thousands of lives - thousands of their own lives - on the Apsidal Ring, not when they had millions of servants to throw into the fire. He studied the suited figures for a long moment, wondering just which species they actually were. One of the ones that wanted to get out from under the Tokomak? Or one of the servant races that regarded them as gods? But there was no way to know, at least for the moment. The invaders wore black armour that covered their bodies from head to toe.

  “They’re going to be moving through the warehouse,” he said, as he checked his terminal. A pair of sensors had dropped out of the network, their final reports suggesting that they’d been destroyed. The Tokomak would presumably not be keen on their servants destroying their population control systems, but as long as they didn’t actually command the network it was nothing more than a liability. “We’ll meet them as planned.”

  He checked his rifle as they waited, watching a handful of additional sensors go off the air. They’d been warned that the Tokomak wouldn’t let them keep the network - that it would be destroyed if there was a chance the enemy would regain control - but it still felt as if he’d been struck blind. Martin kicked himself, mentally. He’d been trained to fight in the fog of war. It was really too much to expect the enemy to put up beacons and IFF signals to make them easier to identify and kill.

  Fighting on Earth taught us some bad habits, he thought, crossly. The insurgents and terrorist shitheads they’d faced on Earth had never realised just how good the Solar Union’s surveillance systems really were. Martin had had no trouble identifying and isolating his targets, from terrorist masterminds to the thugs who enforced religious laws on entire communities. The Tokomak have far more understanding of what we can do than any of our human foes.

  “Here they come,” Sergeant Howe muttered.

  “Take your places,” Martin ordered. “And prepare to bug out.”

  The Tokomak infantry appeared at the far end of the giant warehouse, advancing forward with the familiar mixture of determination and squeamishness of untried troops. One group advanced forwards while the other provided cover, then held in place to allow the other group to leapfrog to the next position. Martin felt an odd sense of kinship, even though the aliens were as alien as could be. No, that wasn't entirely true. The Tokomak and the other Galactics weren’t that alien, not compared to some of the non-humanoid races. Their thinking wasn’t too different from humanity’s. And the soldiers in front of him were very familiar.

  They advanced forward, picking their way through the maze of giant storage boxes as if they expected to be jumped at any moment. Martin didn’t blame them for being nervous. The rebel factions on the planet below expected precisely no mercy from their former masters, not if they managed to retake the Apsidal Ring. They’d probably planned on the assumption that every last inch of the Apsidal Ring would be turned into a booby-trapped nightmare to rival Fallujah, Tripoli or Beijing. The absence of any visible threat would probably unnerve them more. But then, the ring was huge. Billions of aliens could be lurking further along the torus and the invaders would never know.

  Martin tapped his terminal, once, as the aliens reached the centre of the room. The IED detonated violently, blowing a dozen alien troopers into atoms. Their body armour was good, he noted, as his men opened fire. The IED hadn't taken out more than a handful of the invaders, even though several more had been caught in the blast. They were injured, but alive.

  The remaining aliens hit the deck, then returned fire with a savage intensity. Martin took cover, noting that the alien weapons didn’t seem to be particularly advanced compared to the samples captured during the Battle of Earth. Perhaps the Tokomak had not seen fit to give their sepoys their best weapons. Or, perhaps more likely, they’d seen no need to issue advanced weapons to alien troopers they considered expendable. It didn't make any difference, Martin thought. Their plasma blasts were burning through the human position at a terrifying rate.

  He unhooked a grenade from his belt, counted to two and hurled it into the enemy position. Two of his men followed suit, setting off a series of plasma explosions that silenced the enemy weapons for a few seconds. Martin covered his eyes, despite his implants, from the blaze of white light, then sounded the retreat. The platoon crawled backwards with only minimal grumbling, leaving a handful of traps in their wake. Martin understood the desire to just stay where they were and keep shooting, but real life wasn’t a video game. The enemy would bring their immense firepower to bear on his position and that would be disastrous.

  We don’t want to die so early in the game, he thought, as they entered an access shaft and slid down to the next level. Behind him, he heard an explosion. One or more of the booby traps had been tripped. They might risk firing on us from orbit if they knew we were so close to the ring’s outer shell.

  He tapped out a message to Major Griffin, then uploaded it to the ring’s communications network. Relying on the network was a risk, no matter what the WebHeads and AIs said about how easy it was to hack Galactic computers, yet it was safer than sending microburst transmissions from place to place. The engineers swore blind that the Tokomak wouldn't be able to localise a microburst transmitter - not in time to do any good, in any case - but Martin found it impossible to take that for granted. Even a rough location would be enough for a killshot if the Tokomak decided to unleash some of their nastier weapons. An old-style MOAB blockbuster would kill them all without damaging the ring.

  They passed through an airlock, then paused to assess the situation. The enemy troops were spreading out to secure the spaceport - all of the spaceports - before they started to drive on the control centres. It wasn't a bad tactic, he supposed, although he would have preferred to capture the control centres before they could be destroyed. But then, the human troops had had plenty of time to destroy the entire ring. The Tokomak might see little point in hurrying.

  “They’re moving to secure the transit tubes too,” Sergeant Howe observed. “They may think they can use them to outflank us.”

  Martin nodded. The vactrains themselves - trains that moved at awesome speeds through the transit tubes - had been shut down, but the tubes themselves could be used to move soldiers and shuttles through the ring. He w
ondered, idly, if they’d have the nerve to fly a shuttle through the tubes. It would give them a chance to bring considerable firepower to bear on the human positions, if they were willing to take the risk. He might have tried it, if he’d been attacking the enemy ...

  “There are other units in place to counter that possibility,” he said, as another explosion echoed in the distance. The enemy would have problems getting out of the transit tubes, unless they used the stations ... and that would force them to emerge at an easily-predictable location. “Right now, we have to make them pay.”

  He tensed as he heard a rattling sound in the distance. The aliens were advancing forward again, flooding troops down the corridors. He checked their position, then motioned for his men to take cover behind the airlock. The control system was already disabled. There was no way to open the hatch, save by brute force. He wondered, as he took up position himself, if the Tokomak would have the patience to cut the hatch open or if they’d simply blow it to pieces. It would be a difficult task. The interior airlock wasn’t particularly inferior to a docking port. Whoever had designed the ring had been very careful.