Iron & Blood: Book Two of The Expansion Wars Trilogy

by Joshua Dalzelle

  He arrived at his spartan quarters and as soon as the door clanged shut the exhaustion he’d been carrying around since being summoned to the planet surface overwhelmed him. He kicked his shoes off and was asleep in less than a minute, sprawled out on the couch, one leg hanging off. The agent would occasionally twitch or mumble as he was tormented in his dreams by visions of a Starwolf-class destroyer being reduced to slag by a Darshik warship with twin hash marks on each side of its pointed prow.

  Interstellar space was a terrifying place, Celesta concluded. There was the nothingness of the void between the planets, but the gaps between the stars was truly humbling. The Icarus had been forced out of warp by a variance in the forward distortion ring that the computers couldn’t correct while the drive was running. Her Chief Engineer, Commander Graham, had quickly isolated the problem and assured her it would be quickly corrected. It didn’t make her feel any less queasy about sitting powerless in deep space.

  The Darshik ship had done more damage than previously thought with its glancing blow, and once they’d been in warp flight for the better part of three days the issue began to make itself known. The power cable that was spooled out to feed the port, forward emitter had taken damage, not from the plasma lance itself, but from bits of the hardened alloy of the ship’s structure that were blown inward by the hit. The cable assembly had been inspected, but the damage had been undetectable until the drive powered up. The cable was damaged just enough that it caused interference with the drive’s control system.

  The Icarus carried four spare warp drive emitter power cables so it wasn’t a catastrophic failure, just a time-consuming one. First the emitter had to be fully retracted, the hatch closed and the chamber pressurized, something it normally wasn’t. Then crews would climb in and dig out the old cable and detach it from the emitter/arm assembly. Once the new cable was installed Engineering would redeploy the emitter and then begin the forty-three-hour process of testing and calibrating the entire drive. Since the new cable would have a different impedance, no matter how miniscule, it required the full calibration so the new numbers could be entered into the drive controller tables.

  To add insult to injury, when Celesta had ordered another of their point-to-point com drones launched to make sure someone at CENTCOM was aware of their position in deep space they found even more damage. The launch bay had been hit and the metal that had been broken loose inside had damaged the launcher for the nine drones she had left. They still had all their standard com drones, but they would be of no use in their current position.

  “What update do we have from Engineering?” she asked for the tenth time since coming on watch four hours prior.

  “They just finished the extension and retraction operational test, ma’am,” Accari said. “The emitter/arm assembly cycled ten times without any binding or problems. Engineering is preparing to power up the drive and begin the calibration. Commander Barrett says they may have it done in twenty-eight hours if all goes well.”

  “Commander Barrett?” Celesta asked, just then noticing that her XO was absent.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Accari said. “He’s been coordinating the efforts down in Engineering so that Commander Graham can be with his crews in the forward port warp emitter bay.”

  “I see,” she said. She didn’t say so, but Barrett being down in Engineering was likely slowing them down more than helping. He was a tactical officer and before that had been an OPS officer … he’d always served on the bridge of a starship and his background wasn’t in engineering. Still, she doubted Commander Graham would tolerate him being underfoot if he was actually slowing his crew’s progress. He felt personally responsible for that strange Darshik ship’s warp transition flash being overlooked, and it was that same ship that killed their mission and damaged the ship. If it made him feel better to sit with the people fixing the ship so be it; it was a sentiment she well understood and he wasn’t needed on the bridge otherwise.

  “How are we with mapping out local space and getting a fix on our position?”

  “Our position has been verified; we drifted just over three hundred thousand kilometers off course,” Accari said. “Commander Graham assures me that it was because of the drive variance that eventually shut us down. High-power radar scans have verified that local space is clear dead ahead out to a distance of sixty-two million kilometers, and accelerometer data isn’t indicating any unusual gravimetric anomalies. CIC and Science have both cleared us for transition along our current course.”

  “Very well,” Celesta nodded, still fidgeting. “Make sure everyone is rotating out for extended rest periods. Even if we were tracked out of that system I think we’re exceedingly safe sitting out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Aye, ma’am, I’ll handle it,” Accari said.

  “You have the bridge, Mr. Accari.” She rose quickly, startling the ensign sitting at the tactical station. “Let me know if I’m needed.”

  “I have the bridge, aye.”

  Her restlessness was not only unprofessional and distracting for her crew, it was contagious. There was no reason to think they were in any danger in the random place their drive had failed, so there was no reason to get them worked up and agitated. It wasn’t the situation they found themselves in that galled her, it was the unshakable feeling that things were going very, very badly in the Juwel System.

  Celesta had complete faith in Captain Wolfe, perhaps more so than he had in himself, but the Aludra Star was an obsolete ship the moment the bottle broke on her hull during the commissioning ceremony. Not only that, but she was an assault carrier, not a destroyer, and certainly not a battleship. If the 508th hadn’t been able to clear the blockade it wasn’t likely that Wolfe had been able to get the slower, lightly armed ship all the way down to Juwel to deploy his drop shuttles. But she knew he’d try anyway.

  It was this gut feeling that had her constantly uneasy and snappish while she waited for her skilled crew to repair the Icarus and turn her back over to her captain so they could be on their way. Three Intrepid-class destroyers were nothing to sneeze at, but she had little faith in the men who commanded them, even knowing them by reputation only. She just wished CENTCOM would take the Juwel invasion seriously. There were two Dreadnought-class boomers sitting in the DeLonges System that could be moved in to deliver a crushing blow to the ongoing blockade.

  As she walked the corridors of her ship, intent on passing along words of encouragement and checking on the general readiness of the crew, she knew it wasn’t logistics that kept CENTCOM from deploying their big guns to save the people of Juwel. It was fear. After the attack on the DeLonges System the halls of power on the New Sierra Platform positively reeked of it. The hollow excuses they used for holding the bigger ships back—to use less ships to protect more assets while deploying the smaller destroyers forward—were pathetically transparent. And so here they were again it seemed: the whole of the Federation made weaker by the timidity and fearfulness of the people put in place to protect it.

  “The more things change the more they stay the same,” she snorted in disgust, startling two enlisted spacers as she walked in front of a side corridor, her face a thundercloud of anger that she couldn’t keep from showing.

  “Maybe I’m the one doing more harm than good wandering around the lower decks,” she mumbled to herself, taking the next cross corridor to make her way back to the lifts that ran up to the superstructure. She would contain her outbursts and foul mood to her office until the Icarus was ready to get underway.

  16

  Jackson Wolfe paced the bridge, his nerves stretched thin as his people went about their jobs, not needing him to provide guidance as the Star was made ready to get underway. Lieutenant Colonel Beck was back up on the bridge working over the data that was coming in from the drone Jackson had ordered repositioned. Surprisingly it had taken the Darshik twelve full orbits of the little craft, broadcasting real-time telemetry, before they finally destroyed it.

  Not surprisingly, Colone
l Beck was also an expert at aerial imagery analysis and was skillfully making use of the Star’s formidable computing power to analyze all the high-res, radar, and multispectral data to try and coax some sort of motive out of the mess for the Darshik’s bizarrely run ground war. Jackson instinctively felt that Beck was correct in his assessment of the issue despite having zero experience commanding troops on the surface or fighting a ground engagement himself. He was also becoming quite impressed with the cool, calm Marine lieutenant colonel who went about his work with a smooth efficiency that delivered results while seeking no accolades. It was a breath of fresh air in a time when Starfleet was still struggling to purge a lot of bad officers from its ranks in the wake of the failures during the Phage War.

  “Main engines are available, Captain,” Ensign Dole reported. “All plasma chambers are hot and the nozzle constrictors are stable. Engineering reports the powerplant is now providing full combat power.”

  “Excellent,” Jackson said. “Tactical?”

  “All expendable munitions are responding and passed self-tests, laser batteries are charged and primed, and our orbit-to-surface guns are ready, Captain,” Commander Simmons said. “Sensors are ready to go active at your command; still monitoring passives.”

  “Very well.” Jackson forced himself to sit down. “Go ahead and retract the towed sensor array and secure it. OPS, plot us a course that puts us in a decaying orbit intersecting Juwel. Don’t be overly aggressive with your flightpath, I want to conserve velocity without needing to light up the sky with the mains any more than absolutely necessary. Coms, any word from the 508th taskforce?”

  “Nothing has come back to us, sir,” Epsen said. “We’ve been receiving chatter on a Fleet channel that looks like the three ships talking to each other but nothing directed our way.”

  “Were you able to decipher anything being said on that Fleet frequency?”

  “No, sir,” Epsen said. “We couldn’t pick up enough to determine the encryption they were using. I can tell you it wasn’t any of the codes that were in rotation for this mission, however.”

  Epsen had given him the information he’d wanted without being asked, and the answer made him clench his jaw in frustration. Rawls and his commanders were talking amongst themselves, broadcasting for the entire galaxy to hear, using encryption codes he wasn’t privy to. That didn’t bode well for how the mission would likely be executed from there on out. The Darshik were no doubt closing in on their positions. They knew the Terran ships were in the system and enough time had passed without a mad rush or the system being flooded with high-power active sensors that Jackson was certain they were planning some nasty surprise for the handful of ships that had squeezed in past their picket line.

  They were almost certain to be in for the fight of their lives soon and Rawls was still playing fucking games and trying to pick a side strategy that would allow him to not actually bring his ships into harm’s way. The former Merchant Fleet officer was in for a rude awakening. Although the Darshik weren’t especially advanced, they were dogged and they were aggressive. Jackson knew that the four Terran ships in the system had already delayed too long to just simply escape; the Darshik would be moving now to cut off their routes of egress, the known jump points, and using their other assets to begin corralling them into a kill box where they could bring their plasma lances to bear. He was still determined to get his shuttles to the surface where they needed to be, not to mention unload the Star of forty percent of her current mass, but he knew they’d have to fight their way out.

  “Have we received a Link request from the 508th ships?” Jackson asked.

  “No, sir,” Dole said. “Our Link transponder isn’t broadcasting while we’re observing EMSEC protocols, but we should still be receiving the telemetry feeds from the three destroyers.”

  “Shall I send them a request to activate their Link connections, sir?” Epsen asked.

  “Negative, Coms,” Jackson sighed. “We’re beginning our own course correction and I’d like to remain hidden as long as possible. Let the 508th be as much of a distraction as possible for the time being; whether they’re doing it intentionally or not, they’ve been making a hell of a racket near the system boundary. OPS, how long until we’re ready to fire engines and start back downhill to Juwel?”

  “Forty-three minutes until we intersect our projected flightpath down,” Dole said, still tapping furiously at his terminal. “I’ve sent the new course to your terminal and the helm, sir.”

  “Very good.” Jackson stayed his hand from checking over the ensign’s work immediately. He would have plenty of time to make sure there weren’t any snags in the young officer’s new course without giving the impression he didn’t trust him to do his job and was looking over his shoulder at every turn.

  “Captain, a word, sir?” Colonel Beck said quietly from Jackson’s left.

  “Of course, Colonel.” Jackson motioned to the seat Beck was standing behind. “What can I do for you?”

  Beck produced an oversized tile and took the seat, bringing up a series of images to show Jackson, many of them the same photo with different processing enhancements to highlight detail.

  “The Darshik have something off the western coast that they’re protecting with orbital bombardment and the distraction of the undermanned infantry push towards Neuberlin,” Beck said, showing him a structure of some sort that was clearly visible just under the water’s surface.

  “What is that?” Jackson asked, leaning in for a closer look at the three accompanying false-color images Beck had put up with the original picture captured by their now-destroyed drone.

  “Without a frame of reference this is just a guess … but I think this is an atmospheric processor,” Beck said hesitantly. “And if you’ll look at the scale of how big this one is—”

  “It’s the size of a damn fleet carrier,” Jackson whispered as he saw the scale lines Beck had imposed over the image.

  “Yes, sir,” the Marine nodded. “In my unqualified opinion, this is likely being used to modify enormous volumes of atmosphere as it passes through the machine.”

  “Terraforming,” Jackson grunted. “We have atmospheric composition data from a Darshik world thanks to Captain Wright’s mission, and Terran worlds aren’t a match.”

  “Yes, sir,” Beck said calmly. “I looked that up. The drone we launched didn’t have the capability to analyze the gas composition around the machine remotely, but with the help of your Engineering section I was able to make an educated guess that three such machines would be able to shift the atmosphere enough that the Darshik could live there within five to ten years. A lot of that depends on the machine’s efficiency and capacity, of course, but Lieutenant Commander Sharpe was fairly confident in his numbers given velocity and volume of air capable of coming out of that main stack.”

  “So over the next five years Terran flora and fauna will quickly choke off and die … including the humans that live there,” Jackson said.

  “Essentially, sir,” Beck said. “Maybe not quite that quickly, but humans sure as hell wouldn’t be able to stay there without the aid of a rebreather.”

  And just like that, Jackson now fully understood the Darshik strategy for Juwel. Along with that understanding was the realization that it would be very difficult to stop with the assets they had in the system currently, doubly so given the difficulty he was already having with Senior Captain Rawls.

  The strategy was as brilliant in its simplicity as it was brutal in its execution. There was no need for an invasion force large enough to displace the humans on Juwel, they just needed to keep them focused on the distraction of the Darshik ground forces while they slowly shifted the atmosphere to the point where the humans that couldn’t evacuate with the blockade in place would asphyxiate and die over the course of half a dozen years. By the time they realized what was happening it would be far too late for them even if they managed to destroy the single atmospheric processor that was almost up and running.

 
“Given the state of Starfleet right now and CENTCOM’s reluctance to commit a larger force to repel the Darshik in this system, a strategy of conquest that takes years doesn’t seem so farfetched,” Jackson said slowly. “If we can’t accomplish our mission now, then by the time Fleet gets around to fielding another underpowered battlegroup to come back out here it will be too late.”

  “That’s my take on it as well, sir,” Beck said. “But … I’m just a lowly ground pounder.”

  “False modesty is not a virtue, Colonel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It would seem your mission has just changed,” Jackson said. “Given this new information and the degree of accuracy you feel you have with the help of Lieutenant Commander Sharpe … deploying your forces to reinforce Colonel Rucker doesn’t make a lot of sense now.”

  “I’m relieved to hear you say that, Captain.” Beck nodded. “I’m formally requesting that my mission objectives be changed and the Aludra Star’s drop shuttles get us on the ground near that processor.”

  “No offense, Colonel, but I don’t think your group of Marines are going to be much of a threat to something that big,” Jacksons shook his head. “We’ll have to hit it from orbit and I wouldn’t want you too near the thing when we do.”

  “I’m confused then, Captain,” Beck said. “Where would you have us put down if not Neuberlin and not the coastal area where the processor is?”

  “I want to put you in between these two coastal cities.” Jackson gestured to the two large cities, each built up around natural harbors on the western coastline. “They aren’t building that massive of a construct with no ground support. I think we’re missing a large number of camouflaged troops, engineers, and construction crews to support the effort.”

  “You want us to take them out?”