Conquest (Star Force Series) Read online

  “Good point. Kerr out.”

  The first pass over Andros happened some thirty minutes later. We sailed by, scudding at the outer fringe of the atmosphere. Daringly, we brought our ship down to an attitude of around sixty-five miles. At our speed, there was good amount of friction and bumping even though the ‘air’ outside the ship consisted primarily of occasional hydrogen atoms.

  The missiles passed by the same spot some ten minutes later. We watched on our nanite screens of metallic relief, but the more comprehensible data was available on normal LED screens at our stations. Crow’s fleet hung up above us at that point, nearly a hundred vessels in low orbit. They all fired the moment we passed by and the missiles were in range. They only had a chance to fire once, but there were about a hundred and fifty shots.

  Beams stabbed out invisibly in space. Without anything to burn, the light emissions weren’t anything that would register on the human eye other than to blind and burn any retina in their path. Our sensors helped out, drawing bright green rays of pixels on our screens to show where the laser fire flickered and licked like momentary flames.

  Eleven of the missiles vanished. I smiled, happy to see the success of my plans. Fleet had taken them out nicely. With any luck at all, the missiles would be running out of power to bank around the Earth. Even if they did make the turn, we had time to complete the maneuver again and shoot the rest of them down. If we hit eleven the first time, hitting five on the second pass should be done easily. Both my ship and the missiles were going to have to slow down somewhat further on the second pass to keep close to Earth.

  The orbit took less than ten minutes. I let the missiles get closer this time, to keep them interested.

  “Sir…” said the helmsman, “the missiles are changing course.”

  “Where…?” Miklos began.

  I cut him off, shouting for a com-link to Crow. “Barbarossa, relay to Star Force control, move your ships. Repeat, scatter all vessels.”

  “Colonel Riggs is not command personnel.”

  “Send the message, Barbarossa!” Captain Miklos shouted. He had figured out what was happening.

  We were too late. The missiles, moving at tremendous speed toward unsuspecting stationary targets, were nearly impossible to stop. The formation of the Star Force ships was thoughtless. They were in a flat formation over Earth, spread out at approximately the same altitude. The problem was they didn’t have a free field of fire laterally toward something approaching at the same altitude they were. When the missiles swerved up to their altitude during the last seconds, half the ships could not fire on them without risking hitting their sisters.

  Confusion caused the fleet to shift slightly as the last five missiles zoomed up toward them. It wasn’t a scatter order, or an organized retreat. It was just confusion.

  “They knocked out one missile—no, two,” said the helmsman.

  We were all glued to our screens. I’m not sure anyone was even breathing. Three clouds puffed into existence less than a second later. The clouds were a brilliant white release of energy. They expanded into bumpy spheres, then dissipated rapidly, turning into tiny pin pricks of light and finally nothing.

  I wanted to put a hand to my face, but the big armored glove loomed close and I stopped myself before I pulled skin off.

  “Losses?” I asked.

  “Three hits, three ships. Two frigates and a destroyer—the Valiant, sir. It was her maiden voyage.”

  I nodded. No one said anything for a while as we decelerated and made our approach over Andros on our next orbit. Crow had played it badly, putting his ships too close to the kill zone and lining them all up at the same altitude. But I’d underestimated the intelligence of the enemy and hadn’t warned him about the possibility. I was supposed to be the resident expert on Macro behavior. It was my guess Crow would blame me for the losses.

  I reflected on the trick they’d played upon us. In my experience, Macros tended to choose a path and follow it doggedly, even if it was disastrous, like a line of mindless ants marching into a flame. But twice now they’d varied their behavior and shifted tactics when something didn’t work the first time. Could it be the new dreadnaught had altered their behavioral patterns? Could it be a command ship of sorts? Maybe it made them more intelligent, more adaptable. It was a chilling thought, but the evidence was there.

  “Admiral Crow is attempting to connect to you on a private channel, sir,” said the helmsman.

  I nodded slowly. I knew my helmet was beeping at me. Without looking, I knew who was making that little green light blink. But didn’t answer the call.

  “Ignore it,” I said.

  I didn’t feel like listening to a tirade right now. I was doing a good enough job yelling at myself inside my own head. I should have just used all of Andros’ guns and knocked out the missiles on the first pass. It didn’t pay to be cagey when facing a swarm of nukes.

  -17-

  Sandra had greeted me with subdued enthusiasm when I clanked out of the landing pit. I’d come back to her, as promised. She took me home and promptly removed my armor. It needed a good spraying out. I’d sweated a lot over the last dozen hours.

  She joined me in the shower without a word. I really wasn’t in the mood. My mind was whirling with tactics and should-have scenarios. But she was insistent and impossible to deny. We ended up on the bed, wet and dripping. There was still soap in my hair, one eye was closed from burning shampoo. I didn’t care, and neither did she. Our homecoming celebration lasted for quite a while.

  The Macro battle fleet arrived the next day. Somehow, I managed to get a solid night’s sleep. At five a. m. we dressed and headed for headquarters. We reached the top floor, but no one called out a greeting. There was worry, if not outright fear, in every eye that met mine. I paused before opening the big doors at the end of the line of cubicles.

  “I’m giving a new order,” I said. “All non-combatant personnel are to evacuate the island. That doesn’t include essential services like medical staff and repair people. But all you keyboard jockeys are to head down to the docks and float your butts north to the mainland.”

  You would have thought I had announced a Christmas bonus. They were grabbing their stuff and packing their purses as fast as they could.

  I was still calling it my office, but since Crow had had no time to build himself a new one, we were really sharing it. He was there when I walked in and he was in a predictably sour mood.

  I stepped up to the desk without a word. The Macro fleet was at the north the edge of the screen, looking like a short-tailed comet. The Earth was on the south end of the table, with Andros island represented at a mass of green contacts. Crow had withdrawn everything to one central point—Fort Pierre.

  “Tell me how you do these things, Kyle?” he asked.

  I didn’t bother to look at him.

  “Tell me how you take one ship on a suicide mission, but somehow end up surviving while killing three perfectly good crews.”

  “Next time, don’t tell me we shouldn’t use the laser turrets.”

  “Oh, so that’s it, eh?” Crow asked, crossing his arms and glaring at me. “I’m the asshole here again, right? Somehow, I’m always the one cleaning up your messes and doing it wrong. Terribly wrong. So wrong, in fact, that millions of innocents are liable to be—”

  “Shut up, Jack,” Sandra said.

  Crow heaved a sigh. But he did shut up. It was a blessing.

  “On the upside,” I said, “we’ve bought something with the blood of those three crews. We’ve got a surprise in our pockets.”

  “All right,” Crow said. “How are we going to capitalize on it?”

  “How long have we got?” I asked.

  “About seven hours, sir,” Major Sarin said.

  “Long enough,” I said. “First, let’s move to our emergency facilities.”

  “Underground?” Crow asked. “Already?”

  I looked at him. “You can stay up here if you like. I don’t want to learn about an
y more enemy surprises the hard way.”

  Crow nodded and when we packed up to move eight stories down, he was the first one poking at the coffee and doughnuts. Normally the last man to show up for work, he was always first in line when food or personal safety was involved.

  The headquarters building, like most of the major building at Fort Pierre, had a deep bunker underneath it. We’d built bunkers under Andros long ago. It wasn’t easy. Underground facilities on this island tended to fill up with water. Even with pumps going night and day to draw air down and pump water out, the bunkers were always dank. The older bunkers were built of concrete, and in those upper chambers the walls sweated and smelled faintly of mildew. Digging down deeper still we’d gotten smarter and used a nanite bubble inside the concrete. They were like a liner in a bucket. We shaped them the way we wanted and kept the bilge water and rot out.

  The operational computer table down here wasn’t as big and luxurious as the one up in my office, but it was a lot less exposed and fully functional. Standing around it were Crow, Major Sarin and Sandra. I’d put everyone else upstairs into the effort of organizing the resistance on the ground. Kwon was a few floors above in this same command bunker with a platoon of marines in full battle suits. Major Barrera was at a remote location on the island, with orders to direct tactical fire. If this command post was knocked out, he was to take over operational command of the defense.

  I looked at Crow. He appeared far too comfortable to me with his coffee and doughnut. Chocolate sprinkles again. I wrinkled my nose.

  “What’s on your overly-fertile mind now, mate?” he asked.

  “You,” I said. “You are Fleet, and I think you need to take your ships out of here.”

  Crow looked a trifle more pale. “You want me to fly right into their teeth, do you?”

  “No, not that. I think you should pull the fleet back. If you hover over the island, you will be priority targets. Lift off and go somewhere else. Hide behind the Moon if you like. They’ll have a hard time hitting you there.”

  Crow appeared thoughtful. “Not a bad idea.”

  “But be ready to come back and hit the Macros in the butt when I call you. I’ve placed a platoon of battle suits on every destroyer. Remember to get them in close, then release them. With their grenades, they can do tremendous damage if you can get them in close enough.”

  Crow narrowed his eyes at me. “This isn’t just a way to get me out of your hair, is it, Kyle? Maybe you don’t want me spoiling your glory, eh?”

  I smiled. “Don’t worry, if any of us live to see another day, there will be plenty of glory to go around. The cavalry always comes in to save the day at the end. That’s you.”

  We talked and planned for another hour. Finally, he agreed and headed for the landing pits. I’d figured he would. He didn’t want to be at ground zero with a hundred Macro ships on the way anymore than I did.

  “You should go with him, Kyle,” Sandra told me. “Leave Jasmine and I here to man this command post. I don’t trust Crow to bring the fleet home at the right moment. He’ll hold back and screw us somehow.”

  I looked at the two women. Major Sarin and Sandra both looked at me with dark, pretty eyes.

  “Objections noted,” I said. “But I don’t think this is the end of the game yet. I’ve got a few tricks in store for the Macros.”

  “I don’t see any tricks,” Sandra said, studying the map suspiciously.

  “If you don’t, then they won’t either.”

  She made a face at me and I pretended not to notice. Major Sarin made a snuffling noise, it was almost a laugh. I wondered if Star Force was ever going to become as professional as a real military organization. Or if maybe we’d redefined how militaries operated. I figured that in time, we’d become tightly disciplined and bureaucratic. It seemed to happen that way in fledgling militaries throughout history. General George Washington’s army had been little more than ragged band of militia. Over the course of a few centuries, they’d transformed from the minutemen of Lexington and Concord into the most powerful, professional military force on Earth. It took time to develop a military tradition.

  Before I knew it, we were down to four hours. The Macros could fire missiles at us at any time, of course, but so far they’d held back. I suspected they wanted to get in close and make their salvos count. Maybe they believed they could take us out with their belly turrets alone and salvage more of the planet that way without worrying about fallout and the like. Or maybe they wanted to run their sensors over us carefully and pick the best targets.

  By the time the shooting started, Crow was in position with his fleet of ninety-odd ships behind the Moon. They could return in less than an hour if need be. I’d asked him to come back out into near Earth orbit once the fighting began to shorten that time span, but still remain safely outside of laser range. If the Macros decided to attack them, they should run. If nothing else, they would be drawing off forces from the main fight back at Andros.

  So far, the Macros had ignored our fleet maneuvering. They were on course for Andros and had never wavered from that trajectory. Their intent was clear. If they came here and obliterated our base of operations, our factories, command centers and troops, they could deal with the surviving fleet later. Or our fleet would have to come and commit to attacking their rear to save Andros. Either way, their move was the smart one. Andros Island couldn’t run away, so it was an easy choice as first target.

  When they were about three hours out and decelerating hard, they fired a salvo of missiles. This was much more terrifying than the first sixteen they’d sent after my ship. Each cruiser had sixteen missiles according to our estimates. They sent about half their total arsenal at us—over eight hundred missiles.

  It was hard not to feel sick as the red contacts swelled on the screen. Dotted lines flickered into life all over the screen. Each of them led directly to Andros, representing the computer’s estimate of every missile’s trajectory. As they accelerated toward us, they left a solid line behind them, showing their path back to the firing ship. As we watched in stunned quiet, the trails began to curve and form gentle arcs.

  “It’s too many, Kyle,” Sandra said. “We couldn’t even stop sixteen before—how can we stop this? Nothing will live on the entire island.”

  “Not if they get here,” I said. “But we’ve got better than a thousand automated guns aimed at the sky right now. And we’ve got some other moves to make. ETA on those missiles, Major Sarin?”

  “They are still accelerating. The computer says…forty-nine minutes, Colonel.”

  I glanced at Major Sarin. Sandra was biting her lip, but Sarin was still cool. I wasn’t sure if that was due to a greater trust in my abilities as a commander or a natural personality flaw that kept fear at bay.

  “Major Sarin,” I said, “we need some help. Get General Kerr on the line.”

  This time, there was no delay. Kerr was indeed sitting on his phone.

  “Looks like you’re toast, Riggs,” he said. “Sorry to see it happen. Can’t say as I’m surprised, though.”

  “Thanks for that vote of confidence, General. I need your help. You know those twenty-odd subs you have floating around Andros, hugging my shores?”

  Kerr hesitated. “That is on a need-to-know basis—”

  “Screw all that,” I said. “I think it is clear we both need to know. I know because we have better sensors than you might realize, and because you once invaded Andros with troops from those same submarines.”

  “If you are asking me to unload marines on your doomed island, Riggs, you had better think again.”

  “Not at all, sir. I want you to unload something else. According to my intel, six of those subs are Ohio-class boomers, sir.”

  Kerr made a strangled sound.

  “Don’t bother to deny it,” I told him. “Like I said—we have nanotech, better sensors, etc. I need those six subs to surface and fire their nuclear missiles. I need atmospheric bursts in the path of the Macro barrage. Lots of t
hem. All at more or less the same time, with interlocking blast patterns. The concentric shockwaves will knock out the enemy missiles.”

  “Riggs, I don’t have the authority—”

  “You are sitting in NORAD. Get the authority. Talk to the President. Talk to God, I don’t care. Just get those missiles armed and fire them. If you don’t stop that barrage, you’ll lose the subs anyway from concussion.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. We’ve plotted out every impact point. You’d better believe I’m not going to fire on anything that’s coming down over the water.”

  “It’ll take time, Riggs. I don’t guarantee anything.”

  “Those are Ohio-class subs. I’m not sure what mix of tridents and tomahawks they have aboard. I’m hoping for tridents so they can reach up to a sub-orbital altitude and stop the missiles, but even low-flying tomahawks should be able to put up a concussive barrier. I’ll feed you all the target coordinates and recommended timing from our brainboxes.”

  Kerr fell quiet for a time. I knew there were a lot of people around him, listening in. For all I knew the entire war room had circled around the phone in the background.

  “General Kerr…?” I said after nearly a minute had gone by. Major Sarin had helpfully put a clock up on the screen. I was down to forty-four minutes. “Are you there, sir?”

  “The President has given his approval, over the objections of several others.”

  “He’s there in the war room with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him he has my vote next fall, if I’m still technically a citizen, and I’m still alive.”

  “He says thanks. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Feed us those numbers.”

  I signaled Major Sarin urgently. I put the General on hold and opened the command channel so Major Barrera and his team could hear me, as could Crow in his ship, which had already lifted off.

  “That’s it, people,” I said, standing up straight. “We’re all set up.”

  “We’re ready, sir,” Barrera said evenly.

  “Best of luck to you, Colonel Riggs,” Crow said. “It’s been a pleasure.”