Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles)
Page 43
* * * * * *
“Sir… I have a … a sort-of incoming transmission from the gunslingers.”
“Sort of?” Scott looked at his communication officer. “Put it on the main speaker.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” He shot Scott a quick smile over his shoulder as he did, and Scott understood when he heard the first sound. Someone on one of the gunslingers’ ships was playing an altered version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” The heavy drumbeat behind the song echoed throughout the ship, and even Scott felt its pull. He remembered another battle, long ago in time, but not where he’d heard that song.
“Oh yeah! Lady Gray. Pipe it to all ships and keep playing it.”
“Yes, my admiral.” Scott could hear the note of puzzlement in her voice even as she answered. She’d probably badger him after as to why he wanted it played over and over again. The new guys wouldn’t understand, but even now he could see a few of them tapping their feet in time with the song.
“Comm, give me an open channel to the fleet.”
“Aye, aye sir. You have an open channel to the fleet now.”
“All hands: sing it out loud and clear, boys and girls.” Even with the altered words, it pulled them all in.
There’s a yellow rose on Terra,
that I am going to see,
Nobody else could miss her,
not half as much as me.
She cried so when I left her,
it like to broke my heart,
And if I ever find her,
we nevermore will part.
She’s the sweetest little rosebud
that Terra ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds,
they sparkle like the dew;
You may talk about your Clementine,
and sing of Rosalee,
But the yellow rose of Terra
is the only girl for me.
When the Rio Grande is flowing,
the starry skies are bright,
She walks along the river
in the quiet summer night:
I know that she remembers,
when we parted long ago,
I promise to return again,
and not to leave her so.
She’s the sweetest little rosebud
that Terra ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds,
they sparkle like the dew;
You may talk about your Clementine,
and sing of Rosalee,
But the yellow rose of Terra
is the only girl for me.
Oh now I’m going to find her,
for my heart is full of woe,
And we’ll sing the songs together,
that we sung so long ago
We’ll play the banjo gaily,
and we’ll sing the songs of yore,
And the yellow rose of Terra
shall be mine forevermore.
She’s the sweetest little rosebud
that Terra ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds,
they sparkle like the dew;
You may talk about your Clementine,
and sing of Rosalee,
But the yellow rose of Terra
is the only girl for me.
Scott couldn’t help but sing along, the drumbeats driving them forward into the heart of battle. As predicted, the cloud of missiles did what he hoped, forcing the outer ships to turn to protect themselves and thereby weakening the forward defense shield. Without instant communications, the enemy commander couldn’t order those ships back into formation before the gunslingers hit their weakened shield. As he’d hoped, the gunslingers punched their way through and wreaked havoc inside the alien fleet … now hull-to-hull, their ion cannons and particle beam weapons ripped into the guts of every ship they passed. Ships tried to turn to confront this new threat while orders and counter orders flowed slowly from one ship to the other and from the command ship. The Australia didn’t get away scot-free though, and Scott felt the hammer blows of enemy missiles detonating against his hull.
* * * * * *
As Fleet Commander Writh had foreseen, the lead portion of the Earth fleet struck like a white-hot needle penetrating soft butter. It was like what his hewman collaborators had described to him as a knife fight in a phone booth, with one side hobbled by indecision and lagging communications. Even so, his Horde fought bravely, turning their ships to present the strongest part of their shields to the enemy and frantically firing at pointblank range. Unlike the lizards, with almost unlimited power available, the Earth ships had more than enough power to supply all their shields. Even so, Writh was gratified when some missiles penetrated and he saw them spurting air and liquid as they fell out of line.
At the once-forward edge of the alien globe, some unknown ship commander snarled his anger at the vanishing hewman fleet, thankful that he still had a ship to stand on. Orders and counter-orders flashed back and forth from the command ship and the sub-battle group command ships until it was impossible to know what to do.
“Commander!” a voice screamed across the smoke-filled bridge. He only had time for one quick look at the battle board, his crest turning gray in fear.
The sensor tech didn’t need to tell him; the incoming death showed clearly on his screen. Hundreds, if not thousands of missiles bore down on him in an avalanche of unstoppable destruction. He didn’t even have time to sound a warning before the first missiles struck his ship and turned it into an expanding cloud of white-hot plasma and debris. While the salvo did its deadly work, demolishing the remainder of the lizards’ first fleet, the Earth fleet had already passed through and like a well-flung spear headed directly at the second enemy fleet behind the first.
* * * * * *
Even a few light seconds can make the difference between life and death in space battles. Set off to the side of all three fleets with a small cluster of support ships, Lord Commander Takeell of the Horde looked at his tactical screen and the battle board, silently cursing that lag. He saw the Earth fleet move into the spear formation, grunting in satisfaction at the hewmans’ stupidity at such a move. They would be englobed and destroyed in such a desperate maneuver, as many other inferior alien fleets had been so destroyed in the past. For a few moments Takeell concentrated on his side screens and the ongoing battle on Earth. So far that wasn’t turning out the way he’d planned, and his ground forces were meeting a great deal more organized resistance than he expected. So be it, that’s what ground forces are for, he thought, watching. How else is one to obtain advancement than by thinning of the ranks above you?
He was disturbed by the destruction of his landing force on the small island in the southern ocean. If reports were to be believed, this was the source of the hewmans’ resistance. Wiping out that infestation was, or had been, one of the primary goals of this mission. From the scattered reports coming in, the entire ground force had been obliterated by some as yet unknown weapon. It wasn’t atomic in nature, that he knew by his readings. So what had the cursed chofar come up with now? More to the point, where had these passive food animals gotten it from?
“Lord Commander …” The strangled cry snapped his attention back to the main battle board.
This couldn’t be, was his first thought. The data has to be wrong. While the seconds ticked by, the board firmed up, and he watched in growing horror while his first fleet disintegrated into a ragged, burned-out shell. All of the capital ships were gone, and if the tracks were to be believed, the remainder were being slowly decimated by a seemingly endless stream of missiles. At this distance and time lag it was difficult to see what had become of the hewmans’ fleet. Had they been destroyed in the confrontation? The seconds ticked by while light from a battle that had ended five minutes ago crawled across the vast distance. If only, if only. Compared to the distance involved, the speed of light was like a snail crawling its way across a dark, desolate plain.
Slowly the board updated itself and imparted the news the lord commander d
idn’t want to see. Not only had his first, and most powerful fleet been totally destroyed, the Earth fleet had survived and was now headed toward his second, least powerful fleet. This he’d kept in reserve to clean up any remaining ships, and assist in the decimation of the planet. He felt the stirring of the dark one behind him, but the creature said nothing. In some way that was more terrifying than it saying anything at all.
* * * * * *
With instantaneous communication ability, Colonel Brock had real-time updates from the entire battlefield, both Earthbound and in space. His comm tech, an old-timer, let out a rebel yell and almost burst everyone in the CIC’s eardrums.
“What the hell has your panties in a knot, Hernandez?”
Hernandez looked over his shoulder and simply leaned over and flipped a switch. The sound of the gunslinger’s battle song flooded the room. “Oh yeah!” he added as he broke out into song.
“Oh shit yes!” Brock started humming himself. “Put it out on all frequencies, now!” This is just what the doctor ordered.
Across the battlefield the song sounded; in every tank, gun position, and battle helmet, newcomers and old-timers felt the pull of the tune. Rebel yells broke out in many places even as they fought for their lives. Newcomers looked on in awe when the “immortals” plunged into battle like people possessed. They too couldn’t help being pulled in, quickly learning the song, and like crazed men and women did things they never thought they could do. The lizards reeled back in shock, where moments before they thought to overrun a hewman strong point, only to be driven back by demons from the dark pit. The smaller hewmans plunged into their midst with a ferocity they couldn’t understand or hope to match. Slowly they were driven back on all fronts, and no matter how many hewmans they killed or wounded, the remainder just kept coming, seemingly driven by the strange music they heard.
Ordinary people huddling in buildings and basements came out of hiding, running forward to help. Some picked up the wounded and took them to safety; others ran to gun or mortar positions and offered their help in passing ammunition and shells. Others picked up strange weapons and quickly learned to use them. The time of innocence had passed as they woke up from their dreams. Gone was the safety and security of the state, and once again the human race saw the horror and destruction of total war. No matter how much the state tried to eliminate humankind’s violent streak it was still there, buried under three hundred years of peace. That was all in the past, for now they had a true enemy, one determined to eradicate their kind from the face of this planet. No longer would a man or woman fight and kill his fellow man. They now knew the face of the enemy, and all the bottled-up anger boiled over and spilled out. They showed no mercy to the lizards, butchering the wounded where they lay, and men, women, and children took up arms that day and would never put them down again.
Brock looked on in amazement, shifting his feet, desperate to be out there in the thick of the fighting. This was what he was born for, not hiding in some bunker while his brothers and sisters fought and died.
“Hiro. There’s not much we can do here now. The battle is set, and nothing you and I can do or say will change the outcome.”
“What do you suggest, Brock-san?”
Brock looked around the control room for a moment and understood what Scott must have felt when he stood here. “Saddle up people, we’re going to do what were born for. Let’s go to war.”
Lighting a fresh cigar, he walked over to the rack and pulled down a weapon. Without a word the rest followed. Brock shrugged into his battle harness and checked that he had sufficient ammo before dropping a mag into the well and tapping it home.
“Let’s do it, people.” And with that, he hit the door button and exited the bunker.
* * * * * *
Taking advantage of the chaos of battle, the lord commander’s special tactical group maneuvered around the outer edge of the battle for the Capitol, at last finding a way through the momentarily shattered defense line. Three heavy shuttlecraft edged their way through the smoke and landed undetected outside the capital building. Here they swiftly dispatched the gray-clad, ineffective security force who’d had little or no training or concept of deadly force. Shock batons and harsh words did nothing to stop the armor-clad invaders. Quickly they spread through the building, driving the frightened government officials before them. It wasn’t hard to separate out the council members and hustle them aboard the shuttle, and within less than an hour they lifted off and climbed into orbit.
The lord commander smiled in satisfaction. At least one part of his plan succeeded. Now he would learn the truth about these new weapons and their source. As to the rest of the battle, he knew it was lost. There was nothing, he, or his now-defeated fleets, or ground troops could do to stop the hewmans. He didn’t look forward to explaining his defeat to his high council. His only hope was in extracting sufficient information from his “guests” to mitigate some of the blame. Someone had to be helping these pathetic herd animals, since nothing in the last fifty cycles suggested they had the will, or the intelligence to devise all these new weapons he’d seen, by themselves. Even with the intelligence supplied to the High Council by the hewmans themselves, it didn’t explain the base in the southern ocean.
He’d studied all the reports and vids brought back by the harvesters’ fleet and none had shown any evidence of these creatures having any sort of weapons at all, not even spears, or bows. They were just what they seemed, nothing but an overfed herd of meat animals, incapable of offering any form of resistance to the harvesters. So how, in less than twenty solar cycles, had they gone from no weapons at all to ones that could not only stop a well-prepared fleet, but utterly destroy it? The thought of having to spend a cycle or two in a pain chamber paying for his failure drove him to extract the maximum amount of information he needed by any means possible. The ones that died under interrogation would add to the ship’s meat supply. Not as good as the younger ones, but if prepared well, the fear juices in their bodies, while they screamed in agony as they died, would add that extra-special flavor he loved. One fat specimen he saw coming aboard looked particularly appetizing, and he gave special instruction on its preparation.
* * * * * *
President Skinner wasn’t particularly happy about his rough treatment at the hands of these strange animals. Way too violent for his taste, with all their pushing and shoving. He was thankful they’d rescued him and the other council members before any of those barbarians from New Zealand got into the capitol building. There was no telling what they might have done to him. It was rather disturbing that their rescuers quickly separated him from the rest, two armed guards pushing him ahead down a long passageway. Skinner wrinkled his nose at how badly the alien ship stank, a sort of rank musky odor that became worse when the alien guards moved close to him. The plush carpet on the deck told him they were taking him to better quarters, and he hoped they were civilized enough to offer him a bath. He felt positively filthy and sweaty with all this running around, not to mention the smoke and dust. Even his normally pure white caftan was covered in dust and dirt, and if that wasn’t enough, his feet hurt: the soft comfortable slippers did nothing to protect his poor feet from all the walking and running. At last they reached a large hatch, or doorway, which slid open when they approached, and he stepped into a large, richly appointed room. Here the rank odor was even worse, and Skinner held up a perfumed hanky to his nose in the hope of masking the smell.
“President Skinner?” an impressively large lizard asked. Skinner suppressed a shudder of revulsion when he heard the electronic translation module on the creature’s desk speak his name.
The lord commander wrinkled his nose and held his hand up so the creature wouldn’t come too close. The facial expression was lost on Skinner, and he misinterpreted it as a smile of welcome.
“Yes, that is I.” With nowhere to sit he was forced to stand several feet from the creature’s desk on his aching feet.
“Forgive treatment. Need infor
mation,” the box announced.
“Information? I have no information about anything.”
“Who— hewmans on island in southern ocean?” The lord commander licked his lower jaw, seeing the creature shudder. Hopefully that was a sign of fear. If so, so much the better.
“Island in the southern ocean … oh, you mean New Zealand. Whose people are just a bunch of hideous rejects from a failed medical experiment. They are all mad you know. That’s why my predecessor put them there. Out of harm’s way.”
“Predecessor - you know nothing then.” In one way it was disappointing; he would have loved to hear this thing screaming in agony under interrogation before it was butchered. On the other hand, if it didn’t possess any useful information, there was no need to keep it alive.
“You - dinner tonight.”
“Oh my. Thank you, you are so kind, even if you are, well, whatever you are.” Skinner felt relief this creature hadn’t pressed him on the origin of the people in New Zealand. Being invited to dinner with this creature was an honor, and obviously recognition of his position as President of the Earth’s World Council.