He’d not yet destroyed the orbital facilities, and he also hadn’t told the planetary government that he had been ordered to. He instinctively felt that if he did, it would cement the already considerable hatred felt by the thirteen million citizens of Orleans.
After a week, he sent an open letter to the government in which he described the agreements he achieved with his two previous assignments, and what his current orders were. He ended by requesting a meeting. He issued no ultimatums.
The government replied, demanding that his forces immediately vacate the system, and threatened to destroy them. John’s patience began to wear thin. He replied, again in the open, with a retransmission of the government response, and his reply, which was taken from Psalm 91, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.
Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.” He finished by adding, “The Lord of your Bible is all-patient; I am not. Please review your disaster preparations. As numerous Orleans orbital installations are quite large, you must anticipate that their destruction will result in a potential for loss of life and property on the ground. If your government, or other agency has a recommendation concerning safe windows of time, please broadcast them in the clear.” He didn’t actually expect Orleans to tell him when it was safe to destroy its orbitals, but he did hope and expect those same elected officials might lose a little sleep over the prospect of watching the planet’s future literally come crashing down around their ears.
The majority of the populace of Orleans was Catholic, and the academic in John just couldn’t resist a Bible quote. Plus, he was deeply frustrated. He’d warned the admiral, who most probably already knew that if a rebel system refused to surrender, it would be somewhere between difficult to impossible to take the system by force. The admiral had dumped the problem in John’s lap, an honor of dubious distinction, akin to receiving the President’s Award, pinned to the lid of his very own casket.
The federal navy had begun the war with a literal handful of barely armed military vessels, and had never even developed plans for a space-based attack on one of its own systems. After four years of war, it had built a significant number of first generation – meaning they barely performed their intended function – carriers, a handful of cruisers that didn’t even manage that level of proficiency, and was now just beginning to produce bona fide destroyers; fast, small, armed and lightly armored ships. As far as John knew, the military hadn’t even settled on a design for a ground assault vehicle, much less built any.
The Orleans government failed to reply, but John’s satellites picked up a lot of what sounded like incipient panic on the public networks. It was something, but not enough.
Meanwhile, he maintained constant fighter patrols in very low polar orbits. He issued orders that permitted his crews to use their weapons if they were fired upon, although they were prohibited from firing into populated areas, all of which had been clearly marked on their maps. By design, from time to time a light fighter would edge down into the upper atmosphere. John wanted to see just how far he could go.
His crews had been carefully prepped to watch for the activation of enemy targeting systems; as soon as one came up, his fighter accelerated up out of the atmosphere. It had already happened three times, and each time, his fighter climbed up out of the atmosphere where it was able to shut down its gravity drive and use its reaction thrusters to throw off the ground-based acquisition systems.
The fourth time, the rebels got cagey and allowed the fighter to get deep enough into the atmosphere that they were able to destroy it with energy fire before it could escape. Three heavy fighters emptied their racks at the ground site, destroying it, although it took nearly all their missiles to do it. So far, the Proof of Concept was following the theory.
John decided to concentrate on one area of ocean, on the assumption that it would be much harder to hide weapons systems. He began dropping large objects into the gravity well. He positioned forty heavy fighters in the area, and waited until the rebels fired. As soon as they had a target, his fighters launched large numbers of missiles. Within an hour, they’d run out of targets, but rebel fighters flooded into the area, and began circling over the ocean.
John expected this and sent multiple, heavy empty shipping containers down toward the distant sea. The rebels had no way of knowing what the objects were or contained, and were forced to fire, using their missiles. Their fighters only carried four missiles, and they were a long way from resupply, meaning the rebels had to send more fighters.
What had started out as a small probe gradually developed into a large engagement, with light missiles streaking in both directions. John’s fighters were harder to detect using active targeting systems, making them virtually invisible as long as their gravity drives were off. The rebels were at a disadvantage, and began losing fighters.
Three hundred plus rebel fighters entered the area, and in response John positioned five hundred heavy fighters overhead. He kept most of them well back, and followed his usual practice of emptying one fighters’ racks at a time, then sending it back to its carrier to reload. John hadn’t expected the engagement to grow so large, but it was developing nicely. He’d only lost one crew, while destroying seven of the enemy, and it looked promising – John had a lot of missiles.
Over the next eight hours, John sent seventy-three heavy objects into the Orleans atmosphere, all of them on the same heading. The rebels were forced to target each one with multiple missiles, and each time John’s fighters responded with dozens of their own. Rebel fighters were getting hit and either fell into the sea, or exploded. The rebels responded by pulling more fighters into the area, attempting to utilize their energy weapons to counter John’s missiles.
John ordered all but two hundred of his fighters to the area, and dumped the final three empty containers his fleet possessed. They dropped down in a compact group, and several dozen rebel missiles soared up to meet them. By now John’s fighters had good targeting information on roughly three hundred fighters. On command, two hundred heavy fighters began launching a total of thirty-two hundred light missiles.
As they powered down into the atmosphere they were hot enough for the rebel missiles to target, but the rebels only had a few hundred missiles.
At twenty thousand meters, the missiles began targeting individual fighters. Over one thousand were destroyed by a combination of rebel missiles and energy weapons, but the rebel fighters were over water, and had nowhere to go. Three hundred and four fighters were killed; the few that remained left the area. They had shown remarkable courage, none had panicked, nearly all of them died and the entire operation was almost totally unexpected.
John was prepared for such an eventuality, although barely, and sent down two hundred heavy fighters and four shuttles, full of soldiers. Their passage was uncontested. They established a beachhead on the edge of the continent. They only had two portable anti-missile installations, but the heavy fighters more than made up for the lack of firepower. From orbit, John provided real-time intelligence of millions of square miles of uninhabited territory.
The rebels launched a sortie with sixty fighters, but since even light missiles had enough range to target any spot on the planet, as soon as the rebel fighters appeared, several hundred federal missiles accelerated toward their targets. John had found the Achilles heel of this system’s defense.
The rebels didn’t have control of any orbital facilities, but they still had more than enough surveillance to give them warning. Their fighters dropped like stones and within less than one minute all of them had grounded and shut down their drive. All of his missiles lost their targets.
John frowned in thought. He had found a weakness
in their defense, but now the rebels had found one of his. As long as their fighters could go to ground, they could break missile lock, and they still held the middle ground over most of the planet.
He sent down another two hundred heavy fighters and eight more shuttles. Within four hours he’d established three small mutually supporting camps. He sent up the fighters with empty racks, and ordered his people to find or create replacements for the empty containers he’d run out of.
His success was unexpected, and for once he didn’t know what to do next. He called his commanders together. He told his CAG’s, “If we can continue to whittle down their fighters, we’ll eventually force them to surrender. As you know, I have been ordered to destroy Orleans orbital infrastructure. I was not given a time frame, and I’ll only do that as an absolute last resort. If you’re wondering why, just ask yourself how many days this war has been waged, and how many more days we have before it ends. The answer to the former is easy, the latter, unknown. Here, on Orleans, the government has decided it does not wish to surrender, no matter the cost. I am attempting to undermine its blind rejection of reality, and create conditions for a change that allows for a cessation of war, and the eventual transformation of hatred into love. If anyone doubts the sincerity of that last statement, make an appointment to see me. That is not a suggestion: I need my people to understand, clearly understand, what we must do to end the war. Merely overcoming rebel military forces will not lead to the end of the war, only change its form, and I believe, sincerely believe, that if we cannot find a way to regain the organic unity of the human race, we – humans - are doomed. Now, if there are no questions, we need to find some good sized junk so that we can resume depleting their resources.”
One of his CAG’s said, “Sir, what about the Baltimore?” John grinned. That ship had suffered a large number of malfunctions, none of them critical, but the ship had become the poster child for much of what was wrong with the federation’s war effort.
John said, “Commander, without the Baltimore, the Admiral Kuznetzov might end up taking the Baltimore’s place as the fleet harbor queen. As I recall, that is your ship. I therefore suggest that we search elsewhere for our junk.”
By this time most of his key people had been with him for over a year, and had spent many hours getting exposed to the former history professor’s theories on the roots of the war, and what he thought needed to happen in order to win the peace, as he called it.
Many high ranking federal officers, and most elected officials, harbored deep-seated and poorly hidden hatred for rebels. According to John, history was full of military victories that produced epic peacetime disasters. He knew that many officers and enlisted in his own force felt the same way, which is why he took every opportunity to educate them. In a sense, his own people were helping him to learn how to change attitudes.
On earth the admiral had very little political power, but in the war zone he was being given considerable leeway, largely because he was the first federal fleet admiral who was willing and able to fight, much less win battles. John’s relatively minor military successes had enabled the admiral to give him a great deal of operational freedom, but it was his successes following the takeover of those two systems that had shown the admiral that killing all the rebels wasn’t the optimal solution. Orleans was proving to be a far more difficult nut to crack, but if John could find a way to end the fighting without destroying the planet’s future, and then create the conditions necessary to begin the peace, it might help the admiral reproduce those results on the remaining rebel worlds.
Within twenty-four hours, John acquired enough large objects to resume his operation. This time, he chose an insertion point over the planet’s largest city, giving the occupants the opportunity to actually see the descent, and watch energy platforms send brilliant streaks of coherent light up to intersect what might have been a spacecraft. Unfortunately for the rebels, while several giga watts of energy could take out a fighter, they weren’t terribly effective against junk, so the rebels had to use missiles to ensure destruction. Some of the debris that was raining down had modified missile motors attached, and changed direction, slowed or accelerated, ensuring that the rebels just couldn’t know what that streak of light meant.
An hour later a single heavy missile was launched toward the federal beachhead. It followed the nap of the earth, making its destruction difficult. Approximately one hundred kilometers out a light missile was able to lock onto it and veered to intercept. The missile was either sending back data, or it was unusual and highly sophisticated. Moments before being hit, it detonated at an altitude above ground of less than one hundred meters, vaporizing everything in a radius of two thousand meters, and leaving a deep crater to mark the end of its journey. For the first time in centuries, someone had resorted to the use of a nuclear weapon. Fortunately, it had been hit far enough out that the federal soldiers weren’t injured or in danger.
Thirty minutes later John broadcast in the clear, “At approximately 1433 hours, a missile was launched from a location, identified as an adjunct of Universite Nacional. It was intercepted one hundred kilometers from a federal base. It contained a nuclear weapon that detonated, vaporizing every living thing within a diameter of ten kilometers of the epicenter. This is the first use of a weapon of mass destruction in over three centuries, and violates Article Seventeen of the Federal Constitution. Everyone connected with the creation of the device, its construction and/or its use are hereby declared to be guilty of war crimes against humanity, and are ordered to surrender themselves to the nearest federal military officer. If I have not received a response from your government within one hour, I will immediately carry out previously issued orders and destroy all space-based platforms, structures and satellites in orbit about your planet. Should it prove to be necessary, I shall take additional steps. You now have fifty nine minutes.”
John felt mingled fury and stark fear. Over the course of the war, in excess of one hundred thousand people had been killed; the introduction of nuclear weapons could potentially multiply that horrendous number into the billions.
He ordered two hundred fighters to take up positions in orbit to destroy Orleans infrastructure, and he sent down another two hundred fighters as escorts for the ten shuttles. Within two hours all ground based troops and equipment had been loaded back onto the shuttles and were returning to their carriers.
Exactly one hour after his announcement, dozens of missiles were launched, and moments later, decades of sweat and labor, and billions of dollars of investment disappeared in brilliant explosions. John had not received one single communication from the government.
He began sending flights of heavy fighters down through the opening in the system defenses, and sent up roughly equivalent numbers to give the crews some relief from the grueling patrols. Overall however, he was sending down more fighters than he was allowing back up.
John came to the conclusion that he had to attack as soon as possible. He had no way of knowing how many additional missiles Orleans may have built, nor did he know if the government had authorized the use of the one already launched; he just knew that he had to stop this before it metastasized into an unstoppable cancer.
Six hours after the destruction of one hundred and thirty seven satellites, platforms and large, habitable orbiting installations, he had still received no reply.
At three AM local time, seven hundred and eighty fighters accelerated toward Saint-Maur, the planetary capital, and home to nearly one million people.
Due to their decidedly un-aerodynamic design, his fighters could not safely exceed four hundred kilometers per hour. In fact, they flew far slower, allowing them to fly nap of the earth.
The rebels had a small number of shuttle sized craft circling over the distant city, presumably providing an ad hoc early warning system. Dozens of missiles streaked ahead of the fighters arcing up into the night. The atmosphere created the same problems for missiles as it did for his fighters. They were capable of achievin
g such high velocities that they would burn up from atmospheric friction. As a result, their motors shut down at an altitude of twenty thousand meters. They continued to soar up out of the atmosphere before they began to arc back down.
These missiles represented the pinnacle of hundreds of years of development, although most of those years had passed with little or no need for improvement. They had both active and passive seekers and were reasonably intelligent. Despite their stealthy nature, however, the rebels were able to track their very hot progress. Well before the missiles came within range, the shuttles landed at various locations within the city. John anticipated that, and the missiles retargeted on the city’s primary shuttle port, cratering the vast expanse, doing little physical damage but causing considerable panic.
As they approached to within one thousand kilometers of the city, rebel targeting systems began to illumine some of his fighters. This had also been anticipated, and each time this happened, the fighters slowed and dropped to hover a meter or two above the ground.
Hawk Genesis: War (Flight of the Hawk) Page 28