by Jay Allan
“CHQ…Captain John Horace, provisionally commanding 11th Brigade.” No one knew what had happened to Major Timmons. He was probably dead somewhere on the field, kilometers behind enemy lines. His transponder signal was out, which meant his armor was in bad shape, wherever it was. Horace kept telling himself Timmons was probably at one of the field hospitals, but he didn’t really believe it. “I have units all across the line low on ammo or completely out. We need resupply ASAP.”
“Negative, captain.”
Shit, Horace thought…that’s Major Morton on the line. He knew he wouldn’t get General Gilson’s top aide unless things were about to get worse.
Morton’s voice was grim. “We had a cave in on the main access tunnel to the primary underground supply dump. Enemy nuke went off target, hit the mountain. Dumb luck for them.” Morton exhaled hard. “We’re working on it.”
“Sir, if we don’t get resupply now, the enemy’s gonna rip through my lines like crap through a goose.” He tried to suck the words back in, but it was too late. “Excuse me, sir. Sorry for the language.” Morton was a superior officer, and Horace was a “by the book” kind of Marine…except when the world was falling apart around him. “It really is that desperate, sir.”
“Don’t worry about language, captain.” Morton knew what the Marines and their allies were going through on the surface, and it was tearing at him. “John, if I had anything to give you right now except the rounds in my sidearm, I’d bring it to you myself.” He wiped his face and stared at the pool of sweat in his palm. Disasters were coming in from every direction, and Gilson was still on the surface. He knew the troops needed her there, but that left him in charge of everything else. “You’re just going to have to improvise, captain. I’ve got everybody who isn’t on the surface fighting down in that tunnel digging out your supplies.”
“I hope they dig fast, sir. I’ve got Marines out here with nothing but their blades.” The molecular blades were a potent weapon, one that might even cut through a First Imperium battle bot…assuming anyone could get close enough to one and still be alive.
“You’ve got CAC heavies moving up to support you too, captain.” That was an exaggeration. Morton still hadn’t managed to get Colonel Lin moving. He hoped Lin picked things up before Gilson asked again, because otherwise there was going to be a shitstorm…and Lin would be buried under it. “So hang on there…however you do it. Redistribute some ammo…move some people around. Whatever.”
“Yes, sir.” Horace wasn’t satisfied, but he knew there was nothing Morton could do. “Horace out.” He turned and looked at his display. They were coming, and there were Reapers there too. He flipped on the unitwide com. “Alright boys and girls, here’s how we’re gonna do this…”
Gilson pulled herself slowly to her feet. That was close, she thought. Too close. Her AI reported her armor was fully operational, but she could tell by the pain in her arm she hadn’t escaped unscathed. Those cluster bombs are a nasty fucking weapon, she thought angrily.
“General!”
She could see them running up the hillside, and the panicked shouts bombarded her com. “I’m alright,” she snapped. “It’s just a fucking scratch. Get back to work.”
She straightened up, fighting the dizziness that almost took her. It was more than a scratch, and she knew it. Her arm hurt like hell, even with a heavy dose of painkillers injected by her suit. She glanced at the monitors. Fuck, she thought…the bone is shattered. She didn’t relish the thought of regenerating that arm for the third time, but she put it out of her mind. It certainly wasn’t going to keep her out of the fight.
She waved her other arm toward the cluster of officers hesitating on the hillside. “I said get back to work. I’m fine.” She hated being doted on…and they all had better things to do than stand there and stare at her. The lines were caving in, and she couldn’t even get ammo to her forces on the front lines. What the hell did she care about a shot up arm? Chance are they’d all be dead in another week anyway.
She stood still, looking out over the rugged terrain to the north. She couldn’t see much of the front line from here, but she knew it was just over the line of hills in front of her. There was a lull right now, with both sides dug in facing each other, but she didn’t expect it to last much longer. Her forces were close to breaking. They’d fought brilliantly, valiantly. But it just wasn’t enough. If she had time to regroup, to resupply…then maybe. But the enemy didn’t need that break. They fought without distraction, without fatigue. They didn’t feel pain from their wounds. No fears crawled from the psyche and gripped their spines. They just kept coming. She couldn’t imagine the current stalemate would last much longer. The enemy would not stay in their trenches much longer.
Time. If only she had more time. But the clock was ticking away the final minutes. This is it, she thought…35 years in the Corps. Three and a half decades since that first drop, a milk run with no casualties. She’d been in much worse places since then, and she’d risen to levels she couldn’t have imagined. “So,” she whispered softly, “this is how it ends. In defeat.”
Her morale wavered, just for a second. Fuck this, she thought…if you’re going to die, you’re going to go down alongside what is left of your Marines. She pulled her rifle around, not an easy task with one arm. She heard the loud click as her suit slid a clip in place. “Alright, you fuckers, let’s do this.” She started down the hillside, heading toward the front lines.
“General Gilson!” It was Morton, and the usually unflappable officer was clearly excited. “We have dropships inbound, general.”
Gilson stopped where she was and sighed. Things were bad enough already; the lines were on the verge of caving all across the front…and now the enemy is bringing down even more forces? Maybe that’s why they’ve paused – they’re waiting for reinforcements. Didn’t these shitheads ever run out of these godforsaken robots? She was so lost in gloom she almost missed the next thing out of Morton’s mouth.
“They’re not First Imperium craft.” His voice was excited, giddy. “They’re ours, general. They’re ours!”
Chapter 26
Bridge – AS Hornet
Beta 93A System
Warp Gate to Delta Leonis System
“Warp gate insertion calculations complete, sir.” Ensign Carp’s voice was raw, hoarse. He’d been a brick, rock solid through Hornet’s unprecedented run. Jacobs was going to get him his lieutenancy at the very least, but he really wanted to jump the gifted officer right to lieutenant commander if he could convince Garret to approve it. The young ensign had earned it, every bit of it. But even the seemingly tireless Carp was starting to wear down.
Jacobs had stopped trying to calculate the odds at least five systems back. They’d hidden on half a dozen occasions, waiting for First Imperium forces to pass by, but they’d remained undiscovered every time. Hornet had travelled all the way to a First Imperium world and made it back. Or almost back…all the Alliance worlds they’d passed so far had been lifeless ruins, a grim trail of destruction left by the invading enemy. For all they knew the First Imperium had ravaged human-occupied space, leaving nothing to come back to except desolate, depopulated worlds.
Jacobs wondered about Adelaide, about Cooper Brown. Hornet had come back through Adelaide’s system, but Jacobs hadn’t dared to stop at the planet. Hornet had been a forlorn hope when it left that world, a tiny ship caught behind the lines with little to lose by its daring. But now she and her crew were vitally important, their intel precious. As far as Jacobs knew, they were the only humans in the universe who had the location of a First Imperium base. His duty had become clear. If he could get that information back to Admiral Garret, that was the priority. More important than survivors on a distant colony. More important than anything else. But he felt bad not even stopping to see if Cooper Brown and his people were still alive. It’s not like there was anything we could do to help them, he told himself. Still, it nagged at him.
“OK, ensign. Let’s start the
sequence.” They had to execute another burn…another risk of being detected. How many times can we push our luck, he thought, before we get burned? As far as their scanners could tell, the system was empty; they hadn’t picked up a single signal. Jacobs knew that meant almost nothing. There were a myriad of ways the enemy could hide, just as Hornet had. But there was no choice…this was the only way back home.
Jacobs was proud of his ship…and his crew. Hornet had been through hell and back, but the old girl was holding together like a champ. They’d had a few malfunctions along the way but, miraculously, no serious breakdowns. In Jacob’s estimation, it was nothing short of a miracle.
“Sequence underway, captain. Engine burn in 15 seconds.”
Carp sounds tired, Jacobs thought…but how could he not be? Everyone on Hornet was exhausted, their nerves stretched to the breaking point. “Very well, ensign.” The burn was a small one, the minimum required to change Hornet’s vector to a course that would lead through the gate. Just four minutes, at less than 3g.
Jacobs felt the vibrations of the engines as they fired. The pressure from the acceleration pushed against him. He forced a deep breath – 3g wasn’t a lot for veteran spacers, but they’d spent a lot of time at zero gee, and the difference was stark.
Jacobs wondered what they would find on the other side of the warp gate. They’d passed nothing but lifeless, devastated worlds so far, but now they were transiting into Sandoval’s system. The planet was a large and successful colony, the gateway to the worlds on the Rim. Jacobs wasn’t sure of the population, but his AI helpfully provided the figure. What are we going to find there, he thought…will we finally be home, or will Sandoval be a graveyard too, one with a million and a half headstones?
“Disengaging engines now, sir.”
Jacobs shook out of his daydreaming. The four minutes had passed in an instant. He was relieved to feel the pressure vanish and weightlessness return. “Very well, Ensign Carp. Time to transit?”
“We will enter the warp gate in one minute, forty five seconds, sir.”
“Very well.” Jacobs leaned back in his chair. He was one of those who felt little or no effect when passing through a warp gate, but he knew most of his crew would feel something. Most would be only moderately affected, but for some the transit would be unpleasant. No one had been able to determine why there was such a disparity in descriptions of the warp gate experience. Most research was currently focused on studying differing genetic patterns but, the truth was, no one had any real idea.
Hornet passed slowly into the blackness of the warp gate. Slow was a relative term, of course. By most conventional reckoning, an object moving at 1,800 kilometers per second was not slow. But for a spaceship it was a crawl. Jacobs didn’t want to zip too deeply into Sandoval’s system until he had an idea what was waiting. If the colony was still there, they’d pick up heavy civilian chatter almost immediately. Then they could all relax, at least a little. He wasn’t sure he remembered what that felt like.
The trip through the warp gate was short, some still-uncalculated fraction of a second, but to the Hornet’s crew it was instantaneous. The gate was deep, inky black on the entry side, a rotating disk in space that lacked detectable substance but blocked light nevertheless. It would begin to dimly glow around the edges, Jacobs knew, from the energy generated by Hornet’s passage. But no one on the ship would see that…they would be 13 lightyears away by then.
“Entering Delta Leonis system, captain. Engaging long range scan…” Carp stopped abruptly. He sat at his station frozen, his eyes glued to his screen, hands frantically working the controls.
“What is it?” Jacobs’ head snapped around. He could feel the tightness in his stomach. Anything that unnerved Carp required his immediate attention. “Report, ensign.”
“Sir…” Carp’s response was slow at first, but he recovered his focus quickly. “We are receiving multiple signals. But it doesn’t appear to be commercial.” He looked over at Jacobs. “Captain, it’s definitely military traffic. I’m picking up First Imperium signals and Alliance protocols.” He looked back at the screen. “I’m getting massive energy readings too, sir. Nuclear explosions, engine outputs…almost more than we can track.” He paused, but only for an instant. “Captain, it looks like we’ve transited into the middle of a battle.” Another brief hesitation. “A big one, sir.”
Jacobs blinked his eyes, trying to absorb what he was being told. He sat rigidly upright, almost like a statue. For an instant he was silent, and when he spoke, he uttered just one word. “Battlestations.”
Chapter 27
AS Lexington, Flag Bridge
Approaching Planet Sandoval
Delta Leonis System
“The Line”
Garret’s eyes burned. The smoke on Lexington’s bridge was acrid. He wasn’t sure what it was from, but it was hanging thick in the air. There was light debris scattered around, but the flag bridge was well-protected, and everything was still functioning. Other areas of the ship were definitely harder hit. Combined Fleet’s flagship had taken a pounding, but she was still in the fight.
Most of the fleet was battered, but the First Imperium forces had taken it hard too. Hurley’s wings had savaged their targets. Four of the Leviathans had been destroyed outright, reduced to plasmas and scattered fields of debris. The other two she’d targeted were gutted…one was still firing a few light particle accelerators; the other seemed completely dead. But there were four more in action, and the Combined Fleet finally got to see what a First Imperium Leviathan could do. It wasn’t pretty.
Garret sent his missiles in on the heels of the bombers. The enemy fleet had taken three successive blows – attack ships, bombers, missiles – and ship after ship went down. First a group of Gargoyles…then another Leviathan. But now the enemy was shooting back, and Combined Fleet’s own losses mounted.
The PRC’s Shogun was the first capital ship to go, closely followed by Blenheim…both victims of the enemy missile barrage. Then the particle accelerators opened up, long before Garret’s own lasers were in range. Sword of Mars, the largest ship built by man, was next. She wasn’t destroyed, but her reactors were down and 90% of her crew was dead. The last Garret heard before her com went out, a lieutenant was in command, and he was trying to get her pulled out of range on emergency power.
Garret knew the range and effectiveness of the enemy’s energy weapons, and he’d prepared his own response. Every remaining fast attack ship in the fleet had been loaded up with x-ray laser buoys, and the suicide boats zipped forward as the enemy savaged the fleet’s battle line. They dropped their deadly cargoes along both sides of the occupied enemy fleet and bugged out, losing only two ships in the process.
Now Augustus Garret sat in his command chair, a feral expression on his face. His fingers played over a large red button, one recently installed on his workstation. There was a clear plastic lid covering the button, but Garret had already pried it open. His staff was busy, chattering loudly with the various task forces of the fleet, directing over 70,000 naval personnel in the biggest space battle in human history. But the commander-in-chief – fleet admiral and supreme military leader of the Grand Pact - sat quietly. He glanced down at the glowing red control under his finger. This was something he was going to do himself.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t check his displays, didn’t even take a breath. He just calmly pressed his finger down. The signal would take 20 seconds to reach its destination, and another 20 would pass before the scanner confirmed the results. Five million kilometers from Lexington’s flag bridge, 600 atomic bombs detonated. They weren’t missiles or mines, but they were deadly nevertheless. Each one was a power source, pouring its energy into one fleeting x-ray laser blast.
The signal reached each buoy at a slightly different time, but in less than 3/1000ths of a second, 600 deadly lances of x-ray energy shot toward the First Imperium fleet. The blasts were invisible to the eye, and each one lasted a small fraction of a second. But when t
hey struck the enemy vessels, they tore through their dark matter infused hulls and inflicted enormous damage. The buoys were positioned on both sides of the enemy fleet, and the First Imperium ships were caught in a deadly crossfire.
The chatter on Lexington’s flag bridge rose in pitch. The enemy fire was suddenly disrupted, its intensity significantly lessened. Then the damage assessments started coming in, ship after ship torn apart by the focused nuclear energy. Another few minutes and the ships of Combined Fleet would open up with their own lasers. The human vessels were moving in slowly, and the First Imperium ships were almost stationary. This was the final stage of the battle, a close in knife fight, both sides standing toe to toe. A fight to the death.
Garret was ready. “Commodore Harmon…now, if you please.”
Harmon flipped a few switches and looked back at Garret. “You are on fleetwide com, sir.”
“Attention Combined Fleet.” Garret’s voice was strong, soaring. He was by no means certain his people would win this fight, but he was relieved to finally stand and have it out with the invaders. No more fencing with the enemy, no more hit and run. Victory or death. And that’s how he wanted it. “We have waited for this moment for a long time. Our worlds, our comrades, have been attacked without provocation. The blood of uncounted thousands is on the hands of the enemy. Now it is time to pay them back measure for measure.”
He paused, taking a deep breath. Every eye on Lexington’s flag bridge was on him, just as every ear in the fleet listened for his words. “You have fought brilliantly, valiantly. You have made me proud. All of you…my Alliance brethren and valued allies, new and old. You have stood up to the enemy, matched their technology with your courage and steadfastness. Now we stand, for the first time on the verge of defeating a major First Imperium fleet. You have given much, but now I must ask more of you. Stand with me now. We will not stop while any enemy vessel remains in this system. Now, my friends, my allies, my comrades…fight with me now!”