At least the Mendians had helped me with a minor matter, the modification of my seat so that I could easily snap in, with an automated safety harness, much like I had aboard the LRRC.
With clearance granted, I got underway.
The seven hours ticked by quickly, and I extended myself fully into the 889’s systems. I was going to need every bit of processing power for what was coming. My target was the electronic infiltration of the Gen V cruisers; if I could disable, damage or destroy them, it would grant a serious advantage to the Mendian forces.
Guilt still plagued me as I prepared to strike against my place of origin, but what else could I do? How could I let the violation of rights continue? This was my one chance to stop the enslavement of the fourth column, and I had to take that chance, even if it meant betraying where I had come from.
Earth may have been home, but they had turned their back on me and my people, deprived us of our rights, violated my trust and dishonored my service and had attempted to enslave us all. There was no other choice but to fight for our freedom and start over.... If we survived.
My internal clock tugged on my awareness. My time was up; it was time to move to the rendezvous point.
Two House ships, surrounded by a smaller fleet of Nasarian destroyers greeted me on arrival around a Hub Gate deep in the Nest asteroid belt, with two normal Gates in closer proximity to each other than I had ever seen them. Both currently inactive.
The House Ships, Johanine and Detraxia, moved into position at the top of each of the two normal Gates and then docked to them, each essentially becoming a leap capable Gate platform.
With the docking of the Johanine and Detraxia, the Hub Gate blazed to life, while the other two remained inactive, obviously controlled by their bridge.
Their solution was ingenious. This enabled them to use their ancient destroyers, without upgrading their engines to Leap systems, all the while protecting the invaluable House ships, which were normally bustling cities full of Mendians.
“Gate is in place. All ships to rendezvous points. Prepare for Gate insertion,” clicked in over the com.
Darnack chimed in from aboard the Johanine. “Pick your spot Shifted One,” he called out, a chuckle in his voice.
I took position with the first wave. The quicker I got on the battlefield, the quicker I could assess the situation and hopefully act decisively enough to limit collateral damage. If I could shut down the human ships, the Mendians wouldn’t target them.
It was going to be a rough ride in. Due to the Gates, the only point to insert them safely was the Lagrange points. Just as with my leap to Saturn, it reduced the variables of gravity and interacting planetary bodies. They would be, with little doubt, heavily defended, because Earth knew this too, so small groups of destroyers took up position to ride in on the envelopes of the House ship Higgs field. It was very close quarters, but it ensured a greater defense.
“Prepare yourselves; fight knowing your ancestors watch. Let the heavens burn before our people come to dishonor!” Darnack cried out over the com system.
“Detraxia, deploy,” came the order.
I engaged fully with the 889’s systems and slowed my perception of time, as space warped and distorted around me. The brief few seconds stretched out to almost an hour in my awareness, as the prismatic ripple radiated outward, then half way through, began to slowly tick back in, like a quantum clock.
By the time we were materializing in Earth’s space, I had my list of exploits ready, and organized into two categories, loose and tight attacks.
The tight attacks were those less likely to hurt anyone. They targeted systems in a very specific manner that would play havoc with the Gen Vs and other systems I could access, preventing their effectiveness and reducing their value as targets. The Mendians had one mission, to kill the matron and send their message. The cleaner this was, the fewer there would be to bury at the end of it.
The Intrepid loomed large in the window, as its weapons, (in my perspective) slowly charged to life and a warning was received.
Mendian fleet, you are operating illegally in Earth controlled space, in violation of the Treaty of Light. Leave now, or we will be forced to engage.
House Detraxia had not come to negotiate; they had emerged into normal space weapons, already charging for attack.
The exchange moved like an agony, a twisted ballet, as the Detraxia launched a bomb of a configuration I had never seen, emitting a strange Higgs field pulse, wildly out of calibration.
It glided in an arc past the interceptor and detonated between three Gen Three ships in its escort. The Intrepid had been updated recently, and my list of exploits was crashing against the solid walls of a decent IT policy as she returned fire.
I knew the House Detraxia was doomed immediately, even before the bolts hit. The Gen V had a massive particle cannon, and they had dumped their full power into the first shot. The ship was built to be a House killer.
Desperation seized me as I knew every soul on that House ship was about to burn. I was here playing with kid gloves while people were dying.
It was the price of hesitation.
Frustrated and cornered, I took the gloves off; ran the looser list of exploits and was granted wide daemon level clearance to the Gen V’s internal systems. This was considerably more risky, as these attacks could have unexpected effects on the ships system. They worked like a methed up bull in a china shop. All the while the Dextraxia began to break and burn in slow motion, as the Nasarian destroyers moved to escape the blast, and engage the human fleet.
The Gate careened away, but it was still powered, though burning. I had time for one last transmission back to the Nest.
“Detraxia is down... attempting to compensate.” The Gate detonated, and the com system went to static briefly, as I switched frequencies to the one still in place at the edge of the solar system.
“Impossible!” Came the reply from Darnack aboard the Johanine.
The Higgs bomb of the Mendians reminded me of those thousands of hours tweaking the field in the LRRC…. Pop! Keeping it together was the hard part; causing a violent explosion was easy.
Working and barely thinking, I pushed the calculations, intending them for maximum effect. The Intrepid populated it to its network, and then a fellow daemon on the system did something unexpected. It recognized the update I had made, and then pushed it out to the Military Network, to the other Gen V ships in the fleet.
Oh Shit....
One after another in white explosions of pure matter annihilation, they went up. Wired by me to cause as big a boom as possible. The First Fleet burned and fell silent in the night as the wave of primordial energies ripped the Gen Vs escorts to shreds on a subatomic level.
The Barcelona, and the Tokyo. The twins, Pyongyang and Seoul, commissioned to commemorate fifty years of reunification.
The New Delhi and The Dauntless.
Their transponders all fell silent. There were people I had memories of on those ships, of working with them, laughing with them, in another life.
Now I had become their reaper.
Oh dear God, what had I done?
In a violent display of purifying light, the way was clear, and I found myself tumbling into a deep abyss. I ran the projections. My games with math had just killed up to 8500 people.
“The way is clear, House Detraxia has been avenged. Send the House Johanine,” I said. With that, I pulled myself out of the battle setting course for the fourth column and added confusion to the battle by switching on my UEA transponder. After all, this ship was still registered to the Corvaldian delegation.
I had done enough as an active belligerent; it was time to focus on defending those that I had come to save.
“Harper, I’m coming in.” I sent over a secure package to the Excalibur.
A few moments ticked by and a notification strummed in my awareness.
“Welcome to the party,” came the reply.
The Johanine leapt in, and deployed its Gate
. Once stable, the Mendian invasion fleet streamed through the open channel, and charged onto the battlefield. For a moment, all was quiet. The First Fleet’s eradication had wiped out the front line, but its sacrifice bought time, and the military had been rehearsing sixty years for this attack. The Second and Third, formed the next wall, as the Mendian battle fleet charged to meet them.
Interceptors began emerging from the shuttle bays of the Second and Third Fleet, as well as coming from Central Command and Lunar One, chasing the attackers. The Mendians, in response, were busy launching their own attack craft.
In a series of waves, the opposing forces crashed into one another, as tiny flashes of light and color punctuated the scene, and thousands of small battles played out amidst the sea of the greater conflict.
It was bedlam, a scene born out of chaos and hell, as ships burned and bodies drifted, barely whole, if at all, along with debris in space. Orbital defense platforms, and old fashioned nuclear ICBMs launched from military satellites did heavy damage to a flanking wing of Mendian destroyers trying to make a deft maneuver to surround and destroy the Second Fleet. The nuclear onslaught routed the Mendian advance, causing the collapse of that line. The small human victory came at a cost. The resulting radiation washed over a number of orbital platforms, wiping out systems and dooming thousands to a painful death at the hands of radiation poisoning.
It quickly became clear quite that the humans had the advantage. The Mendians did not have the experience of controlling systems without the Link, and so they were clumsy and slow, while for the humans it was simply every day.
The Johanine proved to be the great equalizer, with its Higgs bombs and its ability to appear and disappear on the battlefield. Coordinating with the destroyers and fighters, they acted as its shield, as it operated like a space based artillery platform.
The humans might have been better pilots in that moment, but the Mendians had better weapons and maneuverability.
The tide inevitably turned and the lines broke. The remains of human fleets with scrambled communications began to act erratically, some charged to their annihilation while others desperately tried to regroup.
It was over, whether they knew it or not, it was over, but still they burned. The Second and Third, were now mostly burning in space. The survivors had retreated back towards a tighter orbit, forming two, mostly whole defensive rings. It was clear the humans were not going down without one hell of a fight.
I was just getting into position, and sending the updated coordinates to Jon when the Johanine once again flashed into the battlefield, releasing another volley. One went rogue, and struck an orbital platform, a human habitat, the city of New Paris.
Its orbit destabilized as it began to burn up over the planet and drift toward impact in the Yellow Sea. Debris rained on parts of Russia, coastal China, India and Korea.
In an instant, at least 350,000 civilian lives were lost on the platform alone. It paralyzed me as I watched on in horror.
I was a part of all this. I was one of the reasons those people were dying. Innocents burned because of my actions, no matter how noble they had seemed a scant few hours before.
The battle raged on, ship for ship, satellite to satellite. The UEA grew desperate enough to activate the last remaining ICBM orbitals, ensuring even greater casualties, but ultimately an eerie quiet began to creep over the scene. Only a handful of ships remained, defiantly making an apocalyptic last stand.
An armada of seventy-five Nasarian destroyers remained, whole and lethal, as the orders came for the Orbital Militia to abandon the fourth column and reinforce the remaining fleet.
It was an order that would not be obeyed.
“Fourth column, sync with my coordinates and come to position,” Jon ordered, transmitting the destination to the fleet.
The Tigershark, commanded by Captain “Boomer” Douglas clicked in over the com.
“What the hell are you doing Jon? Our orders are to shore up the fleet, not abandon it!” he demanded. "Our friends are burning out there. You can't just leave them. Where's your sense of duty? They need us!"
“It’s suicide. The battle is over Boomer, and you know it. The fourth column is full of civilians and I’m not going to abandon them in a firefight. I’m pulling them out of danger. You saw what happened, enough innocents have already died today, ” Jon challenged. The way was clear, there was nothing to stop them. They had to move now, or it would be too late.
“God dammit man, You’re a UEA soldier; you have a duty to Earth, not just a load of morphics. This is treason,” he demanded. “They can fend for themselves, we have to help our brothers, you can't do this!”
“I don’t expect you to understand. I expect you to follow orders,” Jon snapped.
“Sir, I cannot follow that order. It is an illegal order!” Douglas replied, the desperation in his voice was eerily familiar. Here I was on the other side of it, this time.
“Now Boomer, don't go doing anything stupid,” Jon answered back.
“You forced my hand, this is desertion. We go back a long way so I'll give you one last chance to do the honorable thing, stand down from command or be destroyed,” Boomer ordered.
The Orbital Militia fleet opened up on each other, and devolved into their own battle, as the final forces protecting Earth gave way. Jon charged in, focusing on the Tigershark, the source of the rebellion and opened up with a full salvo of missiles and particle cannons from the Excalibur.
She had no chance, she burned, and then exploded into the night. Of the once thirty strong orbital fleet, soon only seven remained as they tore each other apart in civil war.
Three retreated, while the remaining loyal four surrounded the fourth column and moved them to the predetermined coordinates as the Johanine appeared in front of them. The Gate activated, and they jumped to safety.
I felt like I could finally breathe again, but it was short lived, as the Johanine appeared again in the center of the now victorious Nasarian destroyer fleet. They had punched a hole and had a small window to act unmolested. It was quiet on the battlefield, space hiding the screams of the dying, as debris burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. An eerie calm descended, and for the briefest of moments, everything was peaceful.
There was a massive energy build up aboard the destroyers, as well as the Johanine, and in unison, they all fired upon the Hague. The Higgs field based weapons of the Mendians carved a perfect circle out of the Earth, at least sixty kilometers in every direction around the Hague and untold meters deep, leaving a perfectly formed crater upon the planet, that rapidly filled in with the collapsing Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami.
It was total. In an instant, the Earth capitol and the surrounding countryside were gone. There would be no survivors within the blast range.
Chapter 38
It was exceptionally quiet out here.
There were almost no signals to monitor, nothing from Earth, and so the news trickled in slowly, and with a heavy Mendian accent. They were our only current point of contact with the greater galaxy.
It had been five weeks since the Two Hour War, and the founding of the colony on Centioc One had taken up much of my time and focus. In truth, I was desperate for the distraction.
Still, I had the 889 parked a good distance away from the colony site, preferring to commute in. I had chosen a small clearing, with an aging human shuttle rusting in it, an artifact left behind by the original citizen of this world, my predecessor.
I suppose I had come full circle. Still, I hadn’t brought myself to open the hatch just yet. Something about doing so seemed irreverent, like disturbing a tomb.
Jill emerged from the woods, and strolled over. I was at the base of the ramp, wirelessly tracking the deorbiting of another auto freighter with the 889's sensors. The colony dubbed New Liberty was growing by the day, and with the help of the Mendians, the first orbital factories and nano forge would be online within the next three months.
“Heya Boss, haven’t seen you for
a few days. Wanted to check in on ya.” Jill had become the central nervous system of the colonial effort, which kept her incredibly busy.
“Yeah, I’ve had a lot on my mind,” I replied. Volumes of truth existed between those scant few words. There had been no official tally yet on those lost in the battle.
“You sound like Harper,” Jill reported. He was living in orbit, aboard the Excalibur. In truth, I doubted we would ever get him off the ship now.
“How is he?” I asked, worried about him. The brief but intense battle of the Orbital Fleet had affected him deeply. He had buried many friends.
“A lot like you lately, broody. Couple of hens, you two,” Jill chided. “Makes me hungry.”
“Don’t tease,” I shot back and her tail twitched.
“Easy there. I’m known in three star systems,” she threatened playfully.
“We should get up to see Harper, it’s bad to leave him alone right now,” I replied, ignoring her joke. Jill nodded in agreement.
“Was planning to head up there tonight but I need a ride, everything still properly calibrated?” she asked.
“Well within tolerance, no drool,” I answered, and we shared the laugh as I persisted in upholding this illusion that nothing had changed, when in reality, everything had.
“Do you think I did the right thing?” My illusion shattered. Smooth Key, just blurt it out.
“Honestly? I don’t know if there was a right thing in that situation. We’re here, we’re alive and we’re free, partially because of what you did. I’d say that counts for something.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't look at it through such a simplistic lens.
“Your logic is sound and your intentions are noble, but your math is terrible,” I replied. “Hundreds of thousands of morphics vs millions of humans.”
“No, I think my math is right Boss; you got your equation wrong. It wasn’t morphics and humans; it’s individuals. Every death is tragedy, every life saved is a victory and if what you did ultimately leads to the liberation of the other three columns, will that be enough? It came at a high enough price, let us enjoy what victory we have.” She rested her case.
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