Forge of War (Jack of Harts) (16 page)

Nearly two thousand lasers in point defense mode from both the fighters and the warships engaged the missile swarm, dotting space with explosions.  All around the tight formation of Peloran ships, the missiles moved in like a wall of fire where the flicker of lasers disappeared.  The wave front faded away short of the Peloran squadron, and Jack looked around at the ships surrounding them, floating in space.  One ship after another zoomed in on his cockpit and he recognized the Shang warships.  He frowned in thought.

“Why aren’t we firing back?” he asked.  He squinted at the Shang.  “And why aren’t they firing more missiles at us?”

“Warning shot,” Betty answered.  “They were just getting our attention.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure they got it,” Jack returned.

“True,” Betty said, her smile strained.

The comm. panel came to life with another face and Jack grunted.  Like most Shang, the man had dark hair, a vaguely yellow-brown tint to his skin, and slightly slanted eyes.  He could have walked the streets of any city in the world and anyone would have taken him for someone of Asian ancestry.  The man spoke in the same odd language as Aneerin and Jack glanced down to see the translation.

“Your name is famous, Aneerin ap Taliesin,” the Shang said with a bow of his head.  “It is an honor to meet you at last.”

“The honor is all mine,” Aneerin answered in a voice far more calm than Jack thought he could have managed in the situation.  “May I ask why you invited us here?”

Jack scowled.  Sometimes he really hated being right.

“You offered us the chance to retreat,” the Shang said in a hard tone.  “Now we make you the same offer.  Leave this space.  This sector belongs to us.  Leave it and we will not bother your people again.”

Aneerin let out a long breath, and spread his arms out wide in what seemed an innocent gesture.  “But it is such a nice little region of space,” he answered.  “I have grown very fond of the locals.  I would hate to see them lose everything they have worked for.”

“This is a backwater,” the Shang returned.  “It is not worth a war between our peoples.”

Aneerin beamed.  “Oh, I heartily agree with you.  So why don’t you return home and we can act like none of this ever happened?”

The Shang gave Aneerin a grim smile.  “We all know your nature, Peloran.  You will not fight for them to the knife, so end this charade and return home now before more blood is lost.”

Aneerin sighed and let his shoulders slump.  “I’m afraid that this time, you have attacked an ally.  We can not stand down.”

The Shang laughed out loud at the statement.  “An ally?” he said in amusement, still chuckling.  “These people?  They are too destructive to be a true ally.  They will always bite the hand that feeds them.  Dispense with this ridiculous charade, Peloran.  Leave and return to your own worlds, and we will make certain they
do no harm
to the rest of us.  We have no wish to fight your people over them.”

Jack scowled as the man talked.  “Do you think he knows we’re here?”

Betty shrugged.  “I don’t think he’d care if he did.”

Aneerin shook his head on the screen.  “You intend to harness them.  I have another plan.”

The Shang leaned back and blinked in astonishment.  “
You
?  You think
you
can lead them better than
we
can?”

Aneerin smiled.  “No.  Of course not.  I think
they
can lead themselves better than
either
of us could.”

The Shang laughed again.  “Are you serious?  They
destroy
everything they
touch
!  They are little better than children!  They can’t be trusted with…
this
!” the Shang said with a wave of his hand that seemed to encompass everything.  “They will destroy themselves
again
!  And if we don’t stop them soon, they will bring down more of us
with
them!”

Aneerin shook his head again.  “They are not children and you know it.  They do not need your ‘guidance’ to survive now.”

The Shang narrowed his eyes.  “They
were
a threat.  They
are
a threat.  They will always
be
a threat.”

Aneerin nodded.  “Yes.  They
can
be a threat, and a very dangerous one to those who wrong them.  I stand beside them.  It is not too late for you to make amends and follow the same course.  I doubt the Americans will ever forgive you, but there are other options.”

The Shang worked his jaw back and forth for several seconds before shaking his head.  “They are too dangerous to let loose.  They will be contained.  The only question, Aneerin ap Taliesin, is whether you wish to place yourself and your people on the same level as these people?  Do not answer me now.  Think about it, carefully.  We will contain them, with or without your interference.  But if you fight us, all of your people will bleed for them.  We have no wish to fight you.  We never have.  But if you do not stand down, if you prove that you are a
threat
to us, we will
burn
your worlds down around you.  Leave this space.  We offer you this one chance to leave and live.  If you do not take it, you will suffer the same fate as the Albion.”

The Shang nodded and his transmission cut out.  The convoy jumped out in a flash of light, and a second later the encircling Shang warships followed them into hyperspace with a series of flashes of their own.

Aneerin did not move for several seconds.  “Very well,” he finally said in a sad tone and shook his head.  “All ships, transit now.”

Jack closed his eyes as the universe went bright white around him and opened them to see the multicolored hues of hyperspace again.  A glance confirmed that the comm. panel was empty again.  He frowned, not liking what was going on one bit.  None of it made sense.

“Jack?” Betty asked.

Jack shook his head and looked out on hyperspace as the squadron spun and accelerated back towards home.

“This doesn’t make sense.”

“Aneerin won’t abandon you,” she said in a reassuring tone.

Jack snorted.  “Not that. 
That
,” he said with a wave of his hand behind them.  “We just killed twenty Shang destroyers, and they didn’t even hit us once in return.  That doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh,” Betty whispered.  “I see what you mean.”

“I don’t care how important they think that message was, no one sacrifices anything if they don’t think they’ll get something out of it.”

“Well, maybe he just expected the Peloran to back off once he gave them the choice.  We always have since the Great War.”

Jack pursed his lips in annoyance, barely noticing the mixed language that betrayed her uncertainty as to whether she was Terran or Peloran.  “Maybe,” Jack said with a shake of his head.  “I just have this feeling that we haven’t seen the last of this.  There’s something…” he trailed off.  He had the undeniable feeling of another shoe hanging in the air, ready to drop.

“Well, I hope you’re wrong this time,” Betty said with a shake of her head.  “For now, Hal wants us to land for refueling.  Maybe we can talk to him about this.”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered.  “Maybe.”

Several hours later, Jack and Betty once again flew in a defensive formation around the
Guardian Light
as the squadron rose out of hyperspace.  He blinked and saw the inky black of space, stars shining bright around him.  Alarms began to wail and he flicked his eyes across near space.

“Oh no,” Betty said he saw the wreckage where the Peloran base was supposed to be.  He scanned further and saw the wreckage of warships surrounding it.  The screens began cataloging the debris, labeling some of it Peloran.  Most of it though came up with Chinese tags, and he watched as it analyzed one destroyed ship after another after another.

Jack scanned space, seeing more and more chunks of Chinese ships, and swallowed hard at the realization of just how many ships the Chinese had thrown against the single Peloran starbase and the three still-damaged Peloran destroyers at it.  And how many they’d lost doing it.

“Oh crap,” Jack said as he felt the other shoe drop.  The Shang actions finally made sense.  The Chinese had finally joined the war.

Jack watched the multicolored bands of hyperspace flow over him as he and Betty took their turn on patrol duty.  Ahead of them he saw the black mass shadow of a star sucking the colors into it like a maelstrom.  The trail of their enemies led into that.  He glanced around, confirming not a single ship was in sight.  The new Peloran-upgraded sensors could see further into hyperspace than the ones the Avenger was built with, but they still detected absolutely nothing.  He checked the displays that showed the locations of the other Cowboys, spread across a thousand kilometers of hyperspace.  They also reported nothing in sensor range.

Jack frowned.  The patrols just weren’t good enough.  The Shang trap at the convoy had proved that.  Neither the probes nor the fighters were really good enough to see everything around a fleet.  He shook his head.  They needed more ships, more hulls in hyperspace to keep an eye out.  There
had
to be a way to get more ships so they could detect the enemy before they came up and started shooting.  Accepting the situation as is was a good way to lose a war.

“OK, Jack, enough obsessing,” Betty said.

Jack shook his head.  “There just
has
to be a way.”

“I
said
enough obsessing,” she said in a more stern tone.

“Fine.  Fine,” he answered with a defensive wave of his hands.  “I just wish-”

“Jack!” Betty shouted.  Her twenty-centimeter hologram glared at him, fists jammed in her hips.  “Enough!”

Jack sighed and relaxed back in his seat.  “I’m sorry, Betty.  I just wish…”

“I know,” Betty said with a sad smile.  “You just don’t like the situation.  Trust me, neither do we.  We’ve been trying to find a solution to it for over two thousand years.  We’ve never found an acceptable solution short of throwing more ships onto the patrols.  Either fighters or dedicated scout ships.”

“And fighters take carriers.”

Betty spread her hands out.  “Which we don’t have here.”

Jack frowned.  He’d read that every Peloran Battle Squadron was supposed to have a support element that included scouts and a carrier.  He couldn’t remember what it was called but it was on the tip of his tongue.  He shook his head in annoyance.  “Where
is
his support?”

Betty sighed.  “Aneerin is not in high favor on Pelora.  Under the Albion, he commanded a Battle
Fleet
.  Now he has a Battle
Squadron
.  They ordered the carrier and the other ships home long ago to keep him in check.  And now we find ourselves in the situation you have been obsessing over.”

Jack chewed his lip and an idea began to form.  “The onboard fabricators can basically build anything, right?” he asked, waving a hand at the Avenger that had been mostly rebuilt in just that way.

“Yes,” Betty said in a doubtful tone.

“Could they build new scout ships?”

Betty winced.  “I suppose they
could
.  But there’s only twenty-four hours in the day, and the fabricators have been working at maximum to repair the damage we’ve taken.  Rebuilding the Avengers with Peloran tech has taken up most of the rest of the cycles.”

“But if we get ahead of the damage, we
could
build more fighters, right?”

Betty shook her head.  “We’d need more pilots to fly them.  And the carrier with the living space for them and repair facilities for the fighters.”

“Right, right.”  Jack rubbed his jaw, turning his idea over in his mind, looking for holes.  “And that’s the hard part, isn’t it?  Getting transport for the fighters that give us eyes.”

“Exactly,” Betty said in a sad tone.  “We just have to hold out until the Battle Fleets arrive.  Then
everything
will change.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, still rubbing his jaw.  “The people who took his fleet away to keep him in check will be so happy with him for pulling them into a war that they’ll give him a fleet and all its recon assets so he can do whatever he wants,” he continued in a sarcastic tone.  “Yeah.  I totally see that happening.”

Betty glared at him before shaking her head.  “Fine.  You have a point there.”

Jack shook his head.  “We keep on thinking that all we have to do is hold out until the promised Battle Fleets arrive and then we’re saved.  What if they aren’t coming here to save us?” he asked and waved his hand behind them.  “What if they’re coming to keep Aneerin in check?  To stop him from entangling them in some backwater?  That Shang seemed real certain Aneerin would back off.”

Betty met his gaze and chewed her lip.  “I don’t like where you’re going with this,” she whispered.

Jack laughed.  “Yeah, neither do I.”

Betty’s eyes went wide and she jumped to her feet, straightening her dress and hair with quick moves of her hands.  “Hal!” she said in an excited tone as the comm. screen came to life.

“Hello, Betty,” Hal said with a smile.  His face turned to Jack and he added “Hello, Jack.  We are approaching Alpha Centauri.”

Jack glanced back at the maelstrom before them.  That fact was real obvious.

“Our last information on the situation there is eight hours old,” Hal continued.  “We need real time intelligence.  Are you up for it?”

“Of course,” Betty said, holding her hands behind her back.  “Is there anything else we can do for you?”

Jack put a hand on his chin and smiled.

“Be safe,” Hal answered in an earnest tone.

Betty gave him a shrewd look.  “You want us going in quiet?”

“Very,” Hal said.

The comm. panel lit up with another signal.  “This is Cowboy One to all Cowboys,” Charles transmitted.  “Clear for surface action.  We are going in soft.  Full EMCON, eyes only.  Stay away from any large fleet formation if you can.”

Jack raised an eyebrow at Hal.

Hal shrugged.  “So, maybe I was looking for an excuse to talk to my favorite fighter,” he said with an innocent voice.  “Sue me.”

Betty gave him an amused smile, not seeming angry with him at all for finding the excuse.

“Well, I declare, Hal,” Jack said in a high-pitched southern drawl as he waved an imaginary fan.  “If you keep this up you will make me blush.”

Betty turned a shocked gaze to him, but Hal chuckled and shook his head.

“Worry not, little lady,” he said in western drawl and tipped an imaginary hat towards Jack.  “My intentions are pure and direct.”

Jack sniffed at him and continued to wave his imaginary fan.  “Well, I declare, but you are a forward young man.”

Betty stomped her foot down on the console.  “Jack, I swear I will throttle you in your sleep if you do not stop this instant!”

Jack waved his imaginary fan and gave her an innocent look.

Betty glared at him.

Charles interrupted their standoff.  “Surface in three…two…one…now.”

Jack closed his eyes, felt the universe flash around him, and opened them to see the blackness of space with stars dotting it and the golden orb of Alpha Centauri A hanging in the distance.

“We’re not done,” Betty said in a huff.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Jack said and tipped an imaginary hat towards her.

“Better,” she said with a sniff and the displays began to fill with information.

The Alpha Centauri Trinary System was home to the oldest Terran colonies, first the Chinese as their first step in the space race, and then the Western Alliance colony three years later.  The Chinese still claimed the whole system belonged to them, though the Western Alliance ignored that claim.  The tensions of that arrangement made it the most heavily fortified system short of Terra itself.  It also happened to be the most heavily
industrialized
system short of Terra, and Jack swallowed as their sensors began to log the titanic amount of refinery and factory stations in stationary orbit over the world the Americans and their allies called New Earth.  Unsurprisingly, the Chinese had a different name for it but Jack neither knew nor cared what it was.

The displays continued to fill with tags for Western and Chinese installations, and finally starships began to appear.  Jack frowned as the battle lines rendered and he realized they were warships.  Flags began to appear over the Western Alliance ships, showing a massive British fleet of over one hundred ships, with a dozen or so German and French ships in support.  Jack’s eyes widened as he recognized one of the British Dreadnoughts, surrounded by a squadron of battleships that looked small next to it, firing broadsides of gravitic cannons and missiles like they were going out of style.  Chinese flags began to appear on the massive wall of battle facing the British, and Jack licked his lips long before the sensors confirmed what he had begun to suspect.  The Peloran had tracked their prey across five light years, half a dozen destroyed convoys, and now here the Chinese lay in his sights.

Nearly two hundred Chinese warships, half of them heavy cruisers, were arrayed in a wall of battle and firing massive missile salvoes into the British fleet.  Light cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and fighters of both sides hovered between the two main fleets, intercepting missiles from either side with their point defense batteries, and sometimes with their own deflection grids.  A French destroyer speared a Chinese destroyer with a grav cannon, and nearly half a dozen missiles homed in on the wounded ship.  Jack blinked as its deflection grid failed completely and a dozen nearby British destroyers and light cruisers shredded it with rapid-fire laser arrays.  It simply ceased to exist under the assault, but the British paid a price.  Several Chinese missiles snuck through the momentarily reduced point defense and ripped into a British light cruiser.  It bucked as explosions sunk into it and then something deep inside the ship exploded, ripping the ship apart from the inside.

Jack shook his head as another grav cannon salvo from the Dreadnought and its escorting battleships ripped into a squadron of Chinese heavy cruisers, piercing their deflection grids and ripping armor away, flinging it away from the wounded ships.  Their missile salvo died far short of the cruisers though, the Chinese screen absorbing them.

“Wow,” Jack whispered as he just took in the magnitude of the battle.  Fort Wichita had been a mere couple squadrons compared to this and he thought it big.  Now, for the first time, he could see true fleets of war at battle with each other, and the scope of it all amazed him.

“Yeah,” Betty answered.  “
This
is what a true battle looks like.”

“Well, we caught them.  What the Hell are we going to do with them now?” Jack whispered.  They only had six ships compared to all of that.

Betty smiled.  “We’re giving the Peloran a real-time feed from ten perspectives on everything going on right now,” she said, and the other Cowboys spread out and flashed on the screens.  “They’ll know exactly where to strike.”

As if on queue, six Peloran warships flashed into normalspace right behind the Chinese formation.  Weapons fire connected them and a dozen Chinese heavy cruisers reeled away, wreckage spraying from their ruined flanks.  Fighters exploded from the Peloran launch bays and the plot came alive with missiles.  Point defense batteries shifted to deal with them, and Chinese fighters swung around to meet the Peloran fighters.  The Peloran Battle Squadron fanned out, spreading the fire across the Chinese fleet and more cruisers belched flame and atmosphere as the British missiles began to break through the point defense.  Explosions wreathed the Chinese fleet from one end to the other.

The sensors began to note gravitic surges from the Chinese fleet and Betty gritted her teeth.  “They’re running,” she reported as the Peloran fighters spread out, sweeping across the Chinese fleet.  Missile tracks at point blank range appeared and disappeared almost faster than Jack could see.  The Chinese fighters fired at them, but seemed more concerned with ducking back inside their motherships before they dove for safety, and only a few of the Peloran fighters spun away or exploded.  Spread out as they were, the Peloran fighters could do little more than tag them with a few missiles apiece that did little more than dent armor.

Jack grunted.  It might be good psychological warfare to show the Peloran could hit them all, but it didn’t seem to be doing much actual damage to them.  A series of flashes worked their way across the Chinese fleet and it faded away, leaving behind a couple dozen smashed and spinning hulks.

“Well, that’s that,” Jack said with a shake of his head.  “It’s a real pity we couldn’t destroy more of them before they ran.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Betty said with an intrigued look on her face.  “I don’t think it’s over.”

Jack raised an eyebrow and waved a hand at the screens.  “They’re
gone
.  We can’t track ’em in hyperspace!”

“Not usually,” Betty answered with a smile.  “But I think Aneerin just changed the rules.”

Jack was about to ask how when Aneerin’s face appeared on the comm. screen. It showed he was speaking on a scrambled signal, broadcasting to the entire allied fleet.  The man smiled.  “I am Aneerin ap Taliesin and I wish you all good health, now and forever.”  He raised a hand to forestall any answers.  “I know the song and dance when allies meet.  We do not have time for it.  The Chinese are attempting to escape.  We have seeded them with homing drones that can be tracked while in hyperspace.  We will follow and destroy them.  We welcome all allies to the hunt.”