Planetary Assault (Star Force Series) Read online

  Chapter 10

  SystemLord kept four eyes in his hemiscreens and a pseudopod in continuous chemical link with Monitor as he watched the enemy through his living ship’s senses. He damned the Humans for suspecting the existence of the Weapon; and he cursed himself for not using his Sentries to search for their spy drones. Expending them in the initial close-range trap had been a mistake, he now saw, but all war was risk.

  No matter, they are prisoners of momentum now, he thought. They cannot alter course fast enough to avoid being targeted, and there is nowhere to run except, possibly, behind the planet. When the Weapon destroys most of them, the Underlings will see the inevitable and take action with their orbitals.

  ***

  “Conn: Sensors. All bogeys accelerating!” Scoggins wiped the main holotank of the moon’s image, replacing it with the fleet display. Flashing red icons with short virtual tails showing their direction of movement began to crawl forward. “They’re coming out to fight!”

  “Helm, get us onto as tight a tangent to the planet as you can, I want to shave it close. Ford, shift all the long-range beam fire to pick off some cruisers, before the alpha-strike.”

  Okuda nodded, too busy to speak. The fleet all lined up and pumped full fusion thrust to the side, driving each ship, from the largest to the smallest, onto a course that would skim the planet’s atmosphere on the side opposite the moon.

  With his expanded senses the helmsman experienced the enemy closing in from all sides, but mostly from what would look in a holotank view like the left front as the fleet skimmed to the right. To the left the virtual eye of the unknown moon anomaly flashed redly with a computer overlay, and between it and the planet, that double-ringed bullseye of cruisers. The enormous Guardian occupied the center and hung slightly back.

  It was now a race to see whether the main enemy fleet could get to within fusion beam range – the point-blank of perhaps a thousand kilometers – before Conquest and her flock got past the point of intersection and behind the planet. Of course, the enemy could easily follow them around, using brute acceleration to force themselves into their wakes, then overtake.

  “One enemy cruiser destroyed,” Ford called, then: “Initiating alpha strike.” Missiles blossomed from the frigates, and Conquest’s launchers opened their quadropartitioned outer doors, enormous slabs of armor shifting like puzzle boxes, for just long enough to release salvos before closing. The bridge crew could hear the groans of their ship’s structure as acceleration came off for a moment as the weapons cleared, then resumed. Gravplates whined as they transferred loads to compensate for the crushing forces.

  Three remaining battleships and Conquest began continuous railgun fire, near-solid streams of hundreds of thousands of high-tech cannonballs per second, all aimed to blanket the unknown installation. Okuda skillfully adjusted for their enormous propelling forces, his fingers and his mind playing battle-music across the pipe organs of fusion thrusters.

  Twenty-eight seconds after the last shots left the rails, Ford shifted the beams of the task force cruisers off of their enemy counterparts and onto the moon base. Coherent electromagnetics very nearly caught up with the solid ammo before both struck home, and directly behind came the first wave of heavy nukes.

  Staring at the holotank, an almost realtime feed from near-space sensors, Admiral Absen thought at first the alpha strike had obliterated ten thousand square kilometers of moon surface, so great was the energy suddenly streaming from its location. Shining like a laser bonfire it blazed forth, represented on the 4D tank as a dome of red light.

  “What the hell is that?” he barked.

  “Full-spectrum coherent EM pulse in the exawatt range, continuous duration,” Scoggins gasped.

  “Shift targeting, continuous fire on that location!” Absen yelled, something he seldom did, but the implications of a laser of such magnitude had overridden his calm.

  “Shifting!” Ford called.

  The dome of burning light reached out in a hemisphere as an almost-solid wave, defeated only by its exponential dispersion in three dimensions – every time it doubled in radius it dropped roughly fourteen-fold in power. This still allowed it to utterly vaporize anything within one hundred kilometers, imparting temperatures greater than a star’s corona to anything it touched. It kept pumping vast energies into the void, creating in essence a dome of destruction through which nothing could pass, not even other electromagnetics.

  Yet this was a defensive use, to preserve whatever enormous engine lurked beneath the moon’s surface from the continuous impact of human weapons. Ford intuited this right away and spread out the strikes so they dribbled in, forcing the thing to remain as a barrier. His newborn greatest fear was that the projector would have time to focus offensively. Rough calculations showed such a beam could reach out far past the million-kilometer mark with devastating power.

  Thus he ignored the chaos around him and any distracting commands in favor of diving into his link – which frankly he hated, no matter how useful – and fencing with this thing, thrusts and parries measured in milliseconds. Time after time he could see it begin to narrow its focus, only to re-broaden to catch the incoming human missiles that Ford now tried to bring in from every side, one at a time but with no gaps. The three-second lightspeed delay felt infinite and he could not react, only stack attack upon attack in patterns that he hoped would suppress the ravening beam.

  Angrily he observed a detachment of six enemy cruisers that swept in from the side to bolster the defense of their moon base. These interdicted enough of Ford’s missiles to allow the ground-based beam to focus and lash out at its narrowest for a full second.

  Three seconds later the beam cruiser Midas ceased to exist. All of the Meme weapon’s enormous power struck an area the size of a dinner plate, and the armor in its path converted from dense crystalline molecules to free relativistic particles within a nanosecond. This jet bored a hole through the ship and exited the other side, while the heat dump and plasma wave flashed immediately throughout the entire ship. A thermonuclear weapon detonated at the center of the vessel would have wreaked less havoc, and moments later the remains of the kilometer-deep cruiser expanded on the outside of a sun-hot teardrop-shaped wave of compressed debris.

  Commander Ford cursed through those seconds as, eyes steaming with rage, he redoubled his efforts to lay all available weaponry on the hated installation, knowing full well he could do no more than keep it bottled.

  With cleverness borne of desperation he targeted nukes onto the moon just outside the thing’s destructive radius, blasting mountains of debris into the moon’s faint atmosphere. Perhaps the detritus will diffuse the laser, he thought, or the ground shock damage it. One idea later he began to throw nuke after nuke into the same hole at the edge, waiting only long enough between blasts for the fireball to disperse before sending another deeper, as if trying to drill though the planet’s crust from an angle.

  Which he was.

  The squadron of enemy cruisers shifted – too soon, too soon! – to stop his ploy, picking off his missiles with their close-range fusion beams set wide. Despite all his efforts, the gargantuan laser licked out again and touched the battleship Nanjing, and that great city’s namesake also vanished in a brief and newborn sun. Ford pounded his console in frustration.

  A curtain fell then across his awareness, distinct, rapid but inevitable. The weapons officer realized Conquest and her escorts had passed behind Afrana, thus shielding the task force with the only thing that could withstand such a weapon – thousands of kilometers of planetary mantle.

  Unfortunately this brought them within close range of the Hippo orbitals lurking on the other side of the planet. EarthFleet weapons strained to reorient, in some cases a full 180 degrees, to try and fail to lock on and fire at the huge fortresses as they flashed through near-planet space.

  The holotank told the brutal story. For eight full seconds the fleet was caught flatfooted, sailing point-blank under the menacing guns of three Hippo b
attlewagons… which did nothing.

  “Hold fire!” Absen yelled as realization hit him. “All ships hold fire! The Hippos are staying neutral!”

  Surprised murmurs of assent and relief swept the bridge.

  So that moon laser was their surprise, the Admiral thought as he snapped out orders. And probably the Hippos were supposed to close the trap. It should have worked. That Meme commander is one smart bastard. A shudder went through him from the adrenaline of this near-death experience, feeling in his bones how close it had been.

  Chapter 11

  SystemLord sprayed a molecular howl of frustration as he watched the Underling orbitals let the Humans fly by without firing. Efficient and effective, his plan had drawn the enemy into a trap…and it had failed to close. He had been sure the battle stations would engage when the enemy fired upon them, and once they saw how certain the Empire was to triumph.

  But the enemy had not fired on the orbitals. Confusion reigned briefly in the Meme commander’s mind. Had the Underlings and the Humans somehow established communication? Yet this was impossible, according to his clandestine monitoring-creatures on and around the planet.

  No matter. The Weapon had killed two more of their capital ships, and the Underlings had only delayed the inevitable. SystemLord’s ships now had enough time to gestate nearly half of their maximum missile capacity, as the enemy was speeding away at thousands of kilometers per second. He remained in possession of the planet and the Weapon, and his fleet was still powerful.

  ***

  “Helm,” Absen called as the fleet exited planetary near-space, “do everything you can to keep the planet between us and the moon. Ford, fantastic work, you saved all of us. Scoggins, keep some drones far enough out so we can see beyond the planet. Commander Johnstone, is there any chance you can hack into their signals?” Like you’ve done in the past…come on, Rick, give me another miracle.

  “I’ve been trying, sir. No luck.” Rick closed his eyes again and immersed himself in the world of electronic warfare.

  “Okuda, how long do we have before we are under that gun again?”

  The Helmsman responded, “I can keep us shielded by the planet and moving away indefinitely, assuming their fleet doesn’t chase us. We’re like a bunch of hunters hiding behind one single tree, though, and falling back. The farther away we get, the harder it will be.”

  The admiral looked at the holotank, observing that the enemy fleet was not following. It appeared to be regrouping around the planet. “Can anyone tell me what the effective range on that thing is? How far away do we have to be before it can’t hurt us?” Absen waited as silence fell across the bridge, his officers running their calculations.

  Scoggins spoke first. “I’d say at ten million klicks it will be no more powerful than a cruiser beam at point-blank. At twelve million it won’t light a cigarette. That’s about forty minutes travel from now.”

  “And that thing can defend itself against almost anything,” Ford ground out.

  “Anything it can see,” Absen responded. “We just have to maneuver outside its range and come in behind its arc of fire.”

  “Already on it, skipper.” Okuda relaxed slightly and opened his eyes to blink at his admiral. “We’re headed for Gliese 370.”

  “The star?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll swing around it at about six hours from now, slingshot using the gravity well and come back at them from an angle behind the moon. It’s a lot safer than reversing course out here in the open…skipper, we do need to recover all of our small craft right away.”

  Absen nodded. “Because they won’t be able to take the heat and radiation.”

  “Yes, sir. With your permission, we’ll be cutting it as fine as possible, taking a heavy rad dose. Eden Plague should be able to handle it but we may have a few casualties.”

  “Right.” Absen looked toward Horton at BioMed. “Make sure you pass all of that to the medical folks. Prep everyone for heat and radiation. Comms, sound secure from general quarters and maximum rest protocols. Primary Watch, go off in ten minutes and everyone get a few hours sleep. Turn it all over to the auxiliary bridge with the tertiary watch standing. No arguments.” He took a deep breath, let it out and stood up to pace. “They sprung their trap and we dodged it. Now we know about it. Intel, I need all the analysts working on this thing. I need a way to beat it. And what in the hell is it there for anyway?”

  “I think I know, sir,” came a new voice from the main hatchway as it swung open. Everyone turned to look as an unknown civilian entered the bridge. Chief Steward Tobias, ever watchful, leaped from his acceleration niche to point his sidearm at the intruder.

  Behind the civilian followed Spooky Nguyen, with Shades Schaeffer trailing. The Vietnamese motioned to Tobias to lower his weapon, and the new man went on, “Sorry to startle everyone. I’m Ezekiel Denham, and yes, I’m a Blend.”

  “I know what you are,” grated Absen. “What do you want?”

  “He wants to explain what’s going on, sir. I think you should listen to him,” Shades said.

  “You think. What about you, Nguyen?”

  Spooky bowed slightly and nodded in silent acknowledgement. Behind him Shades removed his trademark tinted glasses and shrugged with a wry smile.

  Absen returned the smile, but it failed to reach his eyes. “It really worries me when you’re all in agreement. It means either you’re right – or very, very wrong. Let’s let these fine officers get some rest. You three come to my quarters.” He stood up and exited by his private door, and they followed one by one under Tobias’ watchful eye.

  Once in his spacious private office he waved them all to seats. “All right. We have ten to twelve hours before we have to fight again, so let’s hear it – but keep it brief. We all need some rest. Denham, you first. You said you know why it’s there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ezekiel said with folded hands. “It is a terror weapon to keep the Blends in line.”

  Absen sat back in his own chair and absorbed that statement. “So you’re saying that without something like that, the Meme might have a rebellion on their hands?”

  “Yes, sir. Bits of molecular memory handed down to me by my Blended mother – remember, I’m really only one quarter Meme – combined with what we recovered from some of the enemy ships indicates those who Blend with ‘lower beings’ tend to identify with their new race. This is exacerbated by the bigotry and prejudice of the pure Meme.”

  Absen waved a hand as if fanning away smoke. “I’ve heard all these theories.”

  “Theories perhaps - but don’t you see, sir – it lines up perfectly with this weapon. If it was built to defend the planet it would be facing outward, or they would have made two to cover the whole sphere of fire. If they had, they could have picked off many of our ships as we fell straight toward it. You’re a tactician, sir, look at it from their point of view. Where would you put it if it was to secure the world below from alien – from human – invasion?”

  Absen nodded slowly, reaching over to his desk drawer and pulling out a carton of cigarillos. He took one and lit it while he pondered, then pushed the box across his desk at Spooky, who passed it around after putting one in his mouth. Soon the room filled with fragrant smoke, an Admiral’s luxury.

  “It makes sense,” he finally said. “But so what?” I can see some implications, but I want to hear it from you.

  “It means, sir, that if we get rid of that thing, I think the Hippos of the planet will gladly join us – especially if I am the ambassador. They should see me as one of them, in a sense. Tell me, did the orbitals fire on us?”

  “No. They had us dead to rights and they held fire.”

  “That proves it then! They want us to win. Ask your analysts and I bet you’ll see.”

  The admiral steepled his fingers and stared at his hands. “Let’s say you’re right. What do you propose?”

  Ezekiel turned to Spooky, who put down his smoke and stood up to pace. “I suggest,” he said, “that we engage th
e enemy fleet to cover a ground assault on the moon base with the Marines. It’s the only way to get close enough. Come in beyond the horizon, deploy where the laser can’t reach us, dig them out. There have to be tunnels. If we can’t find any, we’ll just bore in from the sides.”

  “That’s going to be expensive. We’ll have to send all the Marines to have a chance, and that’s all we’ll have – one chance.”

  Spooky’s mouth twitched and he shrugged. “If we take that base, we control the planet and a lot of the space around. We have the stronger fleet, barring any more surprises. The positions will be reversed. If we own the mega-laser and get it functioning, they will have to deal with it – and we will also have the ultimate bargaining position with the Hippos.” He flicked a glance at Ezekiel.

  “What, after all this nice-nice,” Absen said with a sweep of his hand, “you don’t trust our potential allies?”

  Spooky picked up his cigarillo and dragged, his eyes narrowing over the curl of smoke. “Admiral, I don’t trust anyone.”

  “Of course.” Absen blew a smoke ring. “All right. Let’s say we do it your way. What about your team and your mission?”

  “Why Admiral,” Spooky replied, waving at his two comrades, “we are the team, and the mission. You don’t think the Hippos will parlay over a commlink, do you?”

  Absen shook his head in resignation. “I suppose not. What happened to Sergeant Major Repeth?”

  Spooky’s nostrils flared as he took a calming breath. “She declined my offer.”

  “I thought she might.” Absen smiled without humor. “Can’t have it all your way, Nguyen.”

  “I’ll quote that back to you sometime, Admiral.”

  “You do that,” he responded roughly. “Now brief me on your intended mission.”

  ***

  Ezekiel laid a hand against the softly thrumming hide of Steadfast Roger, his personal corvette. Part of the vibration was from Conquest herself, but part was the quiver of Roger’s living processes. Open, he said via molecular transfer from his fingertips, and a doorway irised to let the three men in.