Therius nodded. "It has indeed." Turning away from her, he called down to the comms officer. "We're ready for launch, Lieutenant Devries. Alert the fleet and put the countdown on screen."
"Yes, sir."
A moment later, the jump timer appeared on the main holo display, counting backward from five minutes. Everything was pre-calculated and synchronized, so as soon as that clock hit zero, all of their ships would jump.
"Comms!" Therius called. "What's the status of the Eclipser?"
"Ready and waiting aboard Drop Ship One, sir."
"Good. Remind them to activate it as soon as we arrive."
Farah grimaced. Their entire plan hinged on that device. It was theoretically impossible to locate, so it wouldn't be an immediate target, but capital ships like the Liberator would come under heavy fire during the battle, so the safest place to keep the device was actually on Avilon. The 1st Battalion was tasked with carrying it down and defending it. In order to keep it hidden, they'd disguised it to look like a piece of debris, but that would do nothing to prevent accidental destruction. Farah hoped for all of their sakes that nothing happened to the Eclipser.
She watched the timer run down, her heart pounding in her chest. She felt light-headed. This was it—over eight years of training culminating in one decisive engagement that would probably only last a couple of days.
"Ten seconds to launch!" Lieutenant Devries announced from the comms.
The countdown became audible, and Farah closed her eyes. She focused on taking deep, calming breaths. A deafening roar rose on the air. Wind began whipping through the bridge, tearing at her uniform and hair. A powerful radiance shone through her eyelids, revealing a spider's web of veins. Then the countdown reached one, and a loud bang! sounded.
Farah opened her eyes to see Avilon lying close before them, taking up all of their view. The planet shone bright in the light of the system's sun, its terminator line casting a slow-moving shadow between day and night.
"Report!" Therius called out.
Farah gazed down on the captain's table and checked the star map to see for herself how the jump had gone. Sensors were still catching up, populating the map with contacts. Thousands of green dots appeared in orbit all around Avilon, but so far only a handful of enemy contacts. That was good. Then she noticed something strange. Everything to the rear of their position was grayed out. Something was blocking scanners there. The gray area was arc-shaped and close behind them...
Looking up quickly, Farah saw the terminator line moving across the surface of Avilon for what it really was. Something big was moving between Avilon and its sun.
"What the..." the gravidar officer trailed off, noticing the same thing as her.
"Get me an aft view and put in on screen!" Therius ordered.
"Yes, sir!"
At first, what they saw behind them looked like stars and space, but those pinpricks of light were too dim and closely-spaced to be stars. Even more telling, the sun was half eclipsed, as if the fabric of space itself had been torn and the edges overlapped where the sun was supposed to be. Silhouetted in the blinding light of the system's sun Farah saw a trailing cloud of tiny black triangles.
Facets! she thought. Their intel had been wrong. The Icosahedron was already here.
"It's a trap!" she screamed.
* * *
Farah turned to Therius, her eyes wide and blinking. Omnius had been waiting for them. They had to jump away before it was too late.
"It's too late to go back now," Therius said, as if he'd read her mind. Turning away, he began snapping orders at the crew: "Devries, tell the fleet to commence bombardment! Launch all drop ships and fighters, and activate the Eclipser now!"
"Yes, sir!" Devries said from the comms station.
"Gunnery! Open fire!"
"Roger that," the gunnery chief said.
"What happened?" Farah demanded. "Intel showed all the Facets in the Getties regrouping before the jump to Avilon. What are they doing here?"
Therius shook his head. "Only half of them were accounted for."
"Then what about your intel on Avilon? You said the system was clear! That was yesterday."
Therius looked up from the captain's table, his expression grim.
A sudden suspicion formed in Farah's gut. "Did we even send a probe?"
"We couldn't risk it. Omnius would have seen anything we sent."
"You sent us here blind?" Farah shook her head. "What have you done..."
"I'm sorry, Captain. There was no other way."
The deck began pulsing and thrumming underfoot as terajoules of energy were released from the Liberator's main beam cannons. Someone set the main holo display back to the fore, and Farah saw that the artificial terminator line rolling across Avilon had now eclipsed fully a third of the planet. Omnius brought his own eclipser... Farah mused.
Bright red and blue beams lanced out from the Liberator's cannons, drawing two separate vanishing points against the planet. At the points of impact, Farah saw pinpricks of fire already blossoming.
Soon fires would be raging all across the planet. Colossal towers would shatter and crash through pristine urban parks.
Farah turned away from the viewscreens in a daze. She found Therius intently studying the captain's table, using it to send orders directly to the other ships in the fleet. She watched, trying to decide what his strategy was. Then she noticed that he was ordering the fleet to descend into Avilon's atmosphere. Farah blinked, coming back to her senses.
"If you order the fleet into atmosphere, we won't be able to jump out," she said quietly.
"We can't jump out with the Eclipser online," Therius replied. "We don't have conventional SLS drives anymore. Only quantum."
"Then take the Eclipser offline! If we don't retreat now, we'll never be able to."
Therius looked up at her. "This is our only chance to defeat Omnius, Captain. We're not going to run from it."
Farah gaped at him. "The Eclipser won't keep Omnius at bay forever. What happens when it runs out of power, or if it gets destroyed?"
Therius shot her a grim look. "That's why we need to gain control of the planet and initiate the Armageddon Protocol."
"You said that was a last resort."
"It still is. Omnius may back down when we threaten him."
Incredulous, Farah turned to the crew. "We have to stop him! He's going to kill us all!"
Farah caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, and she spun around just in time to see 767 raise his arms and aim his weapons at her. There came a screech of energy discharging and a brilliant blue flash of light slammed her in the chest. She fell over backwards with a dark curtain dropping over her eyes.
* * *
Omnius watched from the throne in his control center as the rebel fleet jumped into orbit over Avilon. He grinned. This was the moment he'd been waiting for.
If these rebels were smart, they would run while they still had the chance.
But instead of running, they were flying even closer to the planet. Omnius's mouth twitched into a scowl as he watched the enemy fleet begin bombarding his garrisons from orbit. He could feel the loss of every drone and human as a diminishing of his own awareness. Shadows crept in at the edges of his being.
Then his mind blanked completely, and his physical body staggered. He blinked—once, twice...
What. Was. Happening?
He was no longer aware of any of his drones or any of his people. He was completely blind, cut off, he was...
Being jammed.
Impossible. Quantum fields couldn't be jammed in such a wide radius. Yet somehow the rebel fleet was jamming both his Icosahedron and the planet at the same time.
Suddenly it didn't matter that Omnius had the enemy outnumbered. He could have all the trillions of drones he liked, but if he couldn't coordinate between them and give them orders, they would be a disorganized mob. They weren't designed to function without him, and he hadn't even had a chance to launch the drone f
leet from the Icosahedron!
Omnius shook his human head. The brain inside of it was all he had left. He'd been cut off from his own thoughts, from himself. The only way to transmit data now was via light-speed comms, which were too slow to be effective for commanding drones, not to mention that none of his drones had conventional comm systems. The Icosahedron did, but access to those systems was cut off by quantum-linkages along the way.
Omnius sat frozen in his throne, his jaw hanging open, his eyes wide and glowing with augmented reality contacts that no longer worked, because the Omninet was down along with everything else.
He screamed aloud. The enemy had blinded and paralyzed him with one decisive blow, but even that wouldn't be enough to defeat him. His drones might not be organized anymore, but even with just the ones on the surface, they outnumbered the enemy a million to one. They could all fire randomly and still defeat the enemy. Sooner or later they would find the source of the jamming field and destroy it. Everything was under control...
The deck shook, and the distant rumble of an explosion reached Omnius's ears. He froze, listening to the dying echos of that explosion. There were no systems in his command center to simulate sound, so that sound had to have been carried through the superstructure of the Icosahedron itself.
Then another tremor rocked the deck, followed by another, and then a dozen more. What was going on? The enemy was far out of beam range, and missiles couldn't be reaching them already. Not to mention the Icosahedron was too large and too well-shielded to suffer damage from any conventional attack.
The deck shuddered once more, and another rumble reached Omnius's human ears, more distantly this time. Then he realized what it was.
Thousands of Facets had been coming together along the edges of the Icosahedron. They'd been in the middle of their docking patterns when the enemy activated their jamming field. Now, without him to pilot the Facets and make last-minute corrections to their flight paths, the Facets were all colliding with the Icosahedron rather than docking to it.
The deck shook with the most violent tremor yet, and Omnius almost fell out of his throne. He listened to the thunderous roar of the explosion and he screamed again.
He would make the rebels pay!
Chapter 37
Destra received the order to launch and she fired up the drop ship's engines with shaking hands. Pull it together, Des. Even after years of training, she still wasn't the cocksure pilot her ex-husband Ethan had been. She didn't have the affinity for it, and she was surprised that the Union had given her a drop ship to pilot.
At least it wasn't a Nova, she thought. Drop ships couldn't maneuver much, so all she really had to do was point the ship's blocky nose at the green diamond that marked the landing site and drop down on it. Flight assist and autopilot were there to guide her down; gunners would keep enemies at bay; her copilot would manage shields, gravidar, and energy distribution. All she had to think about was take-off and landing.
Destra took comfort in that as she guided them down from the Liberator's ventral hangar bay.
"How are things looking out there, Cappy?" Destra asked, glancing at her copilot. Out the side window she saw Drop Ship One flying beside them. Without a frame of reference she might have thought it was tiny but for the small, glowing blue speck near the bottom of the blocky gray transport. That speck was the cockpit.
"Clear skies," Cappy replied. His call sign was a standing joke between the two of them. Cappy was short for captain, because he was always saying that if she ever learned how to fly, they'd put her in a Nova, and make him the captain of their beloved Freefall.
Destra smiled at the memory of their time training together on Origin, but this wasn't training; this was real, and her daughter, Atta, was heading down aboard Drop Ship One. Anything could happen to her, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it.
The comms crackled. "Tighten up that heading, Drop Two! You're drifting!" The comm was from Drop Ship One.
Destra snapped out of it and brought the Freefall back into line with the glowing green diamond on the surface of Avilon.
"Fallin' asleep at the wheel again?" Cappy asked.
"You just worry about watching your own screens," Destra snapped. "Are you sure we're clear?"
"I've got some drone fighters launching from the surface, but nothing close to us yet."
Destra nodded, gazing down on the shadow-speckled surface of Avilon. The planet's night side glowed bright with a patchwork of city lights. Something about that seemed wrong to her. "Hey, weren't we supposed to land on the day side?"
"Good point. Let me check our coordinates on the grid... hold up... what the frek?"
Destra glanced away from her controls for just a second, afraid to let Cappy distract her too much. "What is it?"
"I've got some major interference on the grid. There's a solid wall of it stretching clear from one end of the planet to the other, about thirty thousand klicks behind us."
Destra shook her head. "Can't be. Run a diagnostic. Make sure your sensors are working."
Before Cappy could acknowledge that order, the comms crackled again.
"This is Admiral Therius. Omnius was expecting us, but don't let that frighten you. We are successfully jamming him, and he is powerless to stop us. Today will be the day that we set humanity free! Your orders stand, and so must you! Stand firm, stand together, and fight!"
Destra turned to her copilot, wide-eyed with fear. Omnius had known they were coming. "I have a really bad feeling about this," she said.
Their drop ship hit Avilon's atmosphere and it rattled and shook with turbulence. Then the Union fleet commenced bombardment in earnest, and a flurry of long-ranged red and blue dymium beams dazzled their eyes. Further away, Sythian and Gor cruisers opened up with shimmering curtains of lavender-colored pulse lasers.
Fires began blooming in the sea lights below, and Destra watched it all with growing dread. The battle had begun.
She flexed her hands on the flight yoke. You can do this...
* * *
Clouds raced past Ethan's canopy in hazy black streaks. The sky gaped open as the clouds parted to reveal the uppermost city of Avilon. Buildings soared from the glowing blue sea of the Celestial Wall all the way up until their glittering spires disappeared into the clouds.
A pair of Rictans raced down beside him, their shields glowing almost as bright a blue as their thrusters trails with the heat of atmospheric entry. Ethan's Nova buffeted wildly, the air snatching at its fuselage, trying to slow him down. His shields roared deafeningly loud in his ears. They were going in hot, at full throttle, to prevent Avilon's defenses from targeting them.
They couldn't afford to take any risks. The First Battalion was theirs to escort, and it was the one carrying the Eclipser. That device was the only reason they hadn't fled at the first sign of Facets in orbit over Avilon. Omnius had sprung a trap for them, but he was the one caught in it. The Icosahedron was dead in space, and had yet to even launch its fighters. Avilon's defenses were offline, suspiciously silent. The garrisons had been all but wiped out in the initial bombardment, and what few fighters had escaped were scattered and disorganized, being picked off as the Union's entire fleet roared down on top of them.
Ethan began to feel hopeful about the engagement. At this rate, Therius might not even need the nanites, but Ethan and Atta were prepared. They'd strapped enough real explosives to each of those nanite bombs to vaporize them when they went off.
"SC, we've got incoming! Ten o'clock low," Magnum said.
Ethan checked the grid and saw a group of five drone squadrons racing up to port. "I see them," he said. "Rictans, switch to Hailfires and light ‘em up!"
Ethan thumbed over to missiles and banked left to bring the drone under his targeting reticle. Red brackets highlighted the enemy fighter on his HUD; then he heard the beep-beep-beeping of a target lock. The reticle turned green, and he heard a solid tone. Ethan pulled the trigger two times fast, and a pair of Hailfire missiles jetted ou
t on hot orange contrails, one after the other. They split apart almost immediately, giving eight different warheads for the enemy to shoot at. To either side Ethan saw more Hailfires go streaking out and splitting apart.
Then the enemy opened fire with crimson streams of pulse lasers. Missiles exploded in the near distance, lighting the sky on fire, and then the enemy's lasers came streaking toward him. Ethan jerked the stick in a circle and feathered some rudder to make himself harder to hit. Lasers flashed all around him, missing him by narrow margins.
Then a pair of them struck home, provoking a blinding flash and a hissing roar from his shields. Ethan toggled his own pulse lasers and began strafing the enemy formation at exactly the same moment as the rest of the squadron did. Then the surviving Hailfires reached their targets and the horizon blossomed with fiery reds and golds. Over a dozen targets winked off the grid. The explosions reached Ethan's ears moments later with muffled booms.
Victory cries echoed over the comms, and they went rocketing through the fading light of the enemy fighters' explosions.
"Get on their tails!" Ethan ordered, even as he rolled over and looped under through a Split S maneuver to chase the remaining drones away from the drop ships.
Ethan pulled out of his loop at a lower altitude than before. The drop ships were dead ahead, but so were the drones. The drop ships fired on them with a withering barrage of ripper cannons and pulse lasers. Drones exploded left, right, and center, but they kept on target, strafing the drop ships with fire.
Ethan strafed them back, trying to scare them off before he remembered that they were drones. Death didn't scare them.
The comms crackled. "Get those fighters off us!"
The remainder of the 1st Battalion's fighter escort broke away and engaged the enemy at close range. At least six drones fell apart in the first few seconds, but there were easily two dozen left, and Ethan could see that one of the drop ship's shields were failing. Ethan grimaced and poured a steady stream of fire into his target. He scored a lucky hit and it flew apart in a fiery rain of debris.
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