“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. It would be nice for this all to have been a misunderstanding, not the opening shots of a war.”
“I’m not sure luring us away from Aballava’s defenses would be worth trashing the Imperium’s reputation with the potential neutrals,” Darius replied. “I just can’t see any reason why the Commonwealth would play these games.”
“Even if they are as actively expansionist as you think, sir, we’re still a long way from the nearest Commonwealth system,” his ops officer countered as they reached the shuttle bay. “You’re jumping at shadows.”
“I know,” he conceded. He linked his neural implant in to the battleship’s scanners, projecting an image of the space above Iceni in front of him. There was no hologram and no one else could see the virtual display as he looked at the floating daggers of his fleet.
A dozen fortresses and thirty guardships orbited Iceni, a powerful defense force by most standards. Against the six arrowheads of his battleships, they looked like toys. Even the fortresses were limited to six-hundred-meter mass drivers. If it came to a fight, his older battleships could take them all on their own.
But still, those fortresses were the real barrier there. They were the only thing the Boudiccans had right now that could threaten a battleship, so they became the focus of his attention as he brought up their stats on the virtual display.
Long practice allowed him to cross the hangar deck to the shuttle without being distracted by the display only he could see. One of the stations was larger than he’d thought, he realized. There was an eight-hundred-meter-wide platform in geostationary orbit above the capital, with three of the largest mass drivers he’d ever seen on anything other than a battleship.
His attention to the crown jewel of Iceni’s defenses meant he saw the moment its secondary weapons opened fire on their own capital.
7
Even if Darius had been on the flag deck and expecting it, he couldn’t have changed what happened. The command lag between running the fleet from a virtual system projected by his implant and being in the physical command center wasn’t that long, after all.
There was no time. Even if his ships’ defensive lasers had been online, they were optimized to stop mass-driver fire coming at his battleships—and their efficiency in that role already left much to be desired.
A dozen slugs fired from the station before someone managed to regain control, plummeting into the atmosphere like the fists of an angry god. They took just over twenty seconds to travel from the station in its forty-thousand-kilometer-high geostationary orbit to the capital city that station was supposed to protect, and no power in the galaxy could have stopped them.
Each of the slugs hit with the force of a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb, crashing their way across Iceni’s capital city with boots of fire and death.
“What the hell is happening?” Barre demanded, realizing her boss had stopped in his tracks and bringing up her own display. Her shocked silence after the question told Darius she’d seen the answer for herself—and his orders to check in with the locals died unspoken as the battle platform that had just murdered its capital city exploded.
It didn’t die alone, either, and Darius swore aloud as the reports trickled in. Every battle station in Iceni orbit had just exploded in the actinic blasts of matter-antimatter reactions.
“We need to get back to the flag deck,” he ordered. “Barre, get the fleet to battle stations and get every tactical analyst we’ve got on working out what in Starless Void just happened.”
“Someone fucked Iceni,” Barre told him. “And us. Stars guard us. There are twenty million people in that city and fifty thousand on those battle platforms.”
“Get everyone moving!” he barked, linking his implant com to Michaud as he turned back to the flag deck.
“Captain, you saw this?”
“I’m not sure what the hell I just saw,” Vagabond’s Captain admitted. “And I’m supposed to know when it happens this close to me. Our defenses are online, I’m scanning for threats, but…”
“There will be a follow-up,” Darius said grimly. “It’s a question of what kind. Get your coms people on raising the Boudiccan Fleet’s guardships. They’re the last thing this system has in orbit, and they’re going to be panicking.
“The last thing we can afford is for them to panic at us.”
“We didn’t do this,” Michaud snapped. She paused. “Right?”
“I didn’t order it,” he told her. “I’m reasonably sure no one else did. We control the situation, Captain, and that means we keep the locals from shooting at us while we work out the best way to help them.”
“Vagabond has twenty-two shuttles that are capable of search and rescue and a six-hundred-Marine strike battalion,” she reeled off crisply. “I can’t speak to the rest of the fleet, but I can put those boots on the ground for rescue efforts in under sixty seconds.”
That contingent was standard. Darius had over a hundred shuttles and thirty-six hundred Marines ready to go. It was overkill for most situations that required Marines and underkill for any situation that would require more than a few hundred.
For this, however, those thirty-six hundred pairs of hands—hands clad with radiation-impervious power armor—could save lives. Potentially hundreds of thousands of lives.
“Thank you, Captain,” he told her. “I needed that reminder.”
He flipped from the channel with Michaud to a channel with the Majors who commanded those battalions.
“Marines, I assume you are following the unfolding disaster around us,” he said crisply as he finally walked back onto his flag deck. His people were already filling the central display with updates on the status of Iceni City.
“Well, I was sleeping, but someone blew up a city and suddenly I was magically in power armor and halfway into a shuttle,” Major Dimitri O’Neill replied dryly. The Marine commanded England’s Marine contingent and he was the senior Marine officer in the Counter-Clockward Fleet.
He’d also served under Darius for almost twenty years in one unit or another, and had a better idea than most of what he could get away with.
“That’s where you need to be,” Darius replied. “How long to drop, people?”
The responses were nonverbal, transferred along the datalink, and he was surprised by the results. Three-quarters of his Marines were already in armor, and half of the armored Marines were in shuttles.
None of his battalions were going to need more than another sixty seconds to drop.
“Drop simultaneously in seventy seconds,” he ordered, giving them the extra few seconds. “There are millions of people in the blast zones alone, tens of millions in the shrapnel zones. We’ll attempt to make contact with rescue authorities from here, but the local government is gone.
“Coordinating the disaster response across Iceni City may well fall on you. Can you handle that?”
He was expecting the wolf-howl that answered, and it still hurt his mental “ear.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he concluded. “Get going, people. I look to you to save the innocents tangled up in this mess.”
“We’re Castle’s damned Marines, sir,” O’Neill told him. “We’ll save everyone we can.”
The channel dropped and Darius shook his head sadly as he closed the channel and took his seat.
“Barre?” he said softly.
“I’m here, sir,” his ops officer replied. “Fleet is at battle stations and all scanners are sweeping the area. There is nothing to suggest that the battle stations were fired upon.”
“No,” Darius confirmed. “That was antimatter containment failure, Commander. I’ve seen it before. Someone got bombs—potentially quite small ones—into the most critical and secured portions of those stations.
“The Boudicca System was betrayed and I’m not convinced they’re even the target.”
He was searching the scan displays for what he knew had to be there.
“What’s the radius
of our q-probe net?” he asked softly. The q-com-equipped sensor probes were the closest thing he had to FTL scanners. By getting the robotic spacecraft out into space, they gave him real-time eyes wherever they were.
“We’ve established a net at one light-minute, sir,” Barre told him. “We didn’t want to expend the drones for more.”
“I want a net out to ten light-minutes,” he ordered. “I want a maximum thirty-light-second delay for anything that happens in that radius.”
“Understand, we’re on it,” the woman replied. “What are we looking for, sir?”
“The only other invitee to this party I know of,” Darius told her. “Admiral Trinh Hoa von Santiago.”
The Coraline Imperium.
“Alcubierre emergences!”
Darius had been waiting for the report. Now he waited patiently for the expanding network of sensor probes and his tactical teams to tell him just what he was looking at.
“We’ve got eight emergence signatures,” Barre reported as the data flowed to her console and implant. “Engines are online; we’re looking at about eleven million tons apiece. Resolving volume as they close, but that sounds like neutronium-armor battleships to me.”
“And me,” Darius confirmed. “And the right number of ships to be Admiral von Santiago.”
“What do we do, sir?” Barre asked.
“What we have to,” he said calmly. “Formation Delta-Zulu-Nine on their approach vector. Maintain battle stations and get me an ETA for their arrival.”
“Understood.”
DZ-9 appeared straightforward enough, but its true purpose was to conceal Vagabond from the Imperium. For the opening salvos, at least, the rest of the Counter-Clockward Fleet would cover the new battleship from the enemy.
Even as Barre was passing his orders, Darius was running the timeline of von Santiago’s arrival. Something didn’t add up.
“Barre, take a look at this once the orders are passed,” he told her quietly, tossing what he was looking at onto the main display. It was timing. It was all timing.
She blinked away the coms and studied it.
“They would have arrived just in time to see us launch the Marines,” Barre noted. “Gives them quite the casus belli, sir. Whoever set this mess up for them did a damn good job.”
“Indeed,” Darius murmured, considering the situation. “I need the q-probe net adjusted as so,” he continued, sending her new layout. “Standard battle focus on the Imperials—but let’s keep our eyes on the asteroid belts. As we move out to intercept von Santiago, we become more vulnerable to an A-S ambush.”
“I don’t think anyone is foolish enough to thread the needle like that, sir,” she replied.
Taking a warp-space bubble within about ten light-minutes of a star or a couple of light-minutes of a planet or gas giant was dangerous. Activating one in that gravity shadow was effectively impossible, but you could take a ship into the shadow under the Alcubierre-Stetson drive.
It required a careful balance of power, gravity and navigation. Meeting the perfect requirements to do so without wrecking your ship was possible, but incredibly difficult—hence “threading the needle.”
“An in-system jump like that would be preprogrammed,” he noted. “You wouldn’t be jumping into the shadow of Iceni, just pushing the edge of Boudicca’s grav well. It would be safe enough.”
“Short-range jumps take days to get calculated. It wouldn’t be worth it,” she argued.
“Except they hit Defiant days ago and haven’t done anything since,” Darius countered. “That fleet has had days to program their jump. And if they’re coordinating with von Santiago, they knew where she’d come in from.”
“Even if they didn’t,” Barre admitted, “there was no reason to do anything fancy. Sir…what do we do?”
“Von Santiago’s sensor data is going to be pretty damning,” he told her. “She arrives at a planet that’s clearly been bombarded, with the fortresses wrecked and the capital burning—and then sees us drop Marines.”
He shook his head.
“What’s the local fleet doing? Is anyone sufficiently in charge that I need to be talking to them?”
“They’re in full SAR mode,” Barre told him. “I don’t think we’re getting a guardship out of Iceni orbit, even in the face of an active threat.”
He felt as much as saw her grimace.
“At this point, they’d probably surrender to the Imperium for the two hundred shuttles on board von Santiago’s fleet.”
“Any coms from von Santiago yet?” he asked, feeling Vagabond shiver beneath him as the battleship began to move. All six of his ships were accelerating now, moving away from the planet to protect it from its potential conquerors.
In the long run, the truth would probably come out about what had happened there. By any rational standard, though, von Santiago would be justified in finding out that truth through the wreckage of his fleet.
Where he, on the other hand, had every justifiable reason to think the whole mess stank of a setup. He couldn’t let von Santiago’s fleet approach Iceni.
“Nothing yet,” Barre reported. “She came out six light-minutes away and is burning in at a hundred and twenty gees.”
“We’ll match that shortly, which puts us two and half hours or so from weapons range,” Darius noted.
“Far less for missiles and positron lances, sir,” she pointed out.
“I know,” he conceded. “But…let’s hold off on those unless they use them, shall we?”
“Admiral? Surely, an alpha strike before they expect us to engage is an advantage we can’t give up?”
“It also commits us to a battle before they can act,” Darius said softly, his thoughts running away with him. “If we fire first, if we assume they are the enemy, the war forever rides on us.”
“Sir, who else could it be?” Barre demanded.
“I don’t know, Commander. Not with certainty. But it comes to one simple question of faith.”
“Sir?” Barre repeated, a tired-sounding echo. She shared his own Stellar Spiritualist beliefs, a path that didn’t lend itself to much faith in any active divinity…only in the strength of humanity, seemingly alone in the universe.
“Would the Coraline Imperium, expansionist as it is, murder this many people they promised to protect?” Darius asked softly. “Do I believe they have fallen that far? Or do I have faith in their humanity—in their honor—and believe they meant the promises they made?”
He gestured at the star map in front of them.
“Because if the Coraline Imperium isn’t responsible for this, Admiral von Santiago thinks we are—unless she, in her own terms, faces that same question of faith in our honor.”
“We would never bombard a neutral capital!” Barre snapped.
“I know. So tell me, Senior Fleet Commander Itzel Barre…you have faith that we didn’t do this. That our officers would defy those orders. Why would you expect the officers of the Imperium to do any different?”
She was silent for a long time as the velocity and range numbers on the displays continued to change.
“I don’t know them,” she finally asked. “And they are threatening my fleet, my comrades. To assume they are innocent…”
“Requires faith,” Darius said softly. “And it requires a new question, as well. If I know that we didn’t do this and I have faith that the Imperium would not sink so low…who would?”
He sighed.
“Unfortunately, I can far too easily see what our mysterious player wants.”
“I don’t, sir,” Barre snapped. “This still looks like an Imperial plot to take Boudicca and ambush our fleet to me.”
“Look at the screen, Commander, and realize that we are hours away from turning the cold war between us and the Imperium hot,” he told her gently. “Unless you and I and Admiral von Santiago can find the faith to find a different way, the two most powerful nations in this sector of space are about to expend that power fighting each other.
“If you were an outsider, someone planning a war to bring this region under your control, what could you desire more?”
She was silent again.
“If this wasn’t the Imperium, why isn’t von Santiago contacting us?” she asked softly.
“Because according to her sensor data, my Marines are currently assaulting Iceni City,” he told her. “Given time, she’ll realize her error. But I don’t know if she’ll realize it in time.”
“What do we do, sir?”
Darius looked at the red icons of the incoming fleet and sighed.
“Move the q-probes closer to the asteroid belt,” he ordered. “Do it quietly. I’m not sure how close we need to get to see a fleet hidden in those rocks, not with that much radiation in play.”
None of the asteroids were putting off a lot of radiation, but the aggregate effect of billions of tons of slowly decaying material over millions of years left a lot of confusion in the belt.
“There are eight battleships bearing down on us, sir,” she pointed out calmly. “Our missiles have a range of over fourteen million kilometers against them. Even Vagabond’s positron lances can rip them up at three or four light-seconds. Add ten percent of cee to our main guns, and we and the Imperium have a range of about two light-seconds there. We’re giving up a massive advantage if we hold to mass-driver range.”
“I know,” Darius conceded. “But I think, Commander, that we need to have faith. And we need to make our mysterious third party dance.”
Barre studied the screen for a few more seconds, then turned to look at him.
“You may have faith, sir, but if I may make a suggestion?” she asked.
“Carefully, but certainly.”
“Make contact with von Santiago,” she told him. “We’ve got two hours before we’re in any kind of weapons range—and we’re blowing through mass-driver range in seconds, if it comes to that. If we’ve got a third party in play, we can’t radio her without attention.
A Question of Faith: A Castle Federation Novella Page 4