Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (9 page)

“Yeah. None of this makes sense. Which means either the Ruddies are bugfuck insane, or they know something we don’t.”

“So what now, sir? We’re about to come into their line of fire.”

“Going to call higher first. Full stop.”

“Yes, sir.” Obregon didn’t sound happy as he issued the order to the rest of the convoy. Stopped vehicles were easy targets.

Fromm reached out to the Embassy. The RSO’s face came into view once again.

“We see them, Captain,” the security officer said. “We’re still unable to reach anybody in the Royal Court. Nobody with the authority to do anything about this, at least.”

“We’ve stopped. There’s no immediate threat but the drones are picking up movement on the outskirts of the city. We may have more armed mobs headed our way.”

“I’m going to speak with the ambassador. Don’t do anything else without running it by me first.” His face disappeared.

Fromm decided to do some intelligence gathering of his own while he waited.

The Ruddies had learned about modern communications only recently – most of their radio sets were human-made trade models, cheap electronics that didn’t use the far more reliable grav-wave transmitters Starfarers relied on. They hadn’t even developed the telegraph on their own, relying instead on long chains of semaphores and heliographs that spanned their continent. Upon making Contact, the Kirosha had fallen in love with wireless communications. Radio antennas had sprouted like so many mushrooms throughout the Kingdom, serving both civilian and military needs.

The Embassy routinely recorded all radio traffic in the continent; accessing it was just a matter of entering his security signature into the American intranet system. Deciphering and translating the last six hours took hardly any time. Massaging the data into a useful summary took a little longer, but the whole process lasted a couple of minutes. If only his other problems could be solved that easily.

Bottom line was, the Ruddies didn’t know what the fuck was going on, either.

Orders and counter-orders had flown back and forth over the airwaves all day long, some properly coded and encrypted, others sent out in the clear. Units had been instructed to mobilize, then to return to barracks, then to muster out and march away from the capital. Officers had been promoted, only to be arrested hours later. Generals had been countermanded by Magistrates, Magistrates by the Prime Minister himself, the Prime Minister by the High Queen herself. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, or was actively trying to sabotage it. This was a cluster-fuck of epic – no, mythological – proportions.

The tank platoon sitting bestride Fromm’s escape route had been ordered there by the colonel in charge of protecting the Foreign Enclave. Its orders were to prevent anyone from leaving or entering the area. Fromm couldn’t tell if the instructions were meant to protect the Starfarers in the Enclave or to get in the way of the ongoing rescue attempt. For all he knew, it was designed to do both.

On the other hand, he had someone he could talk to. Or have someone talk to him; his imp could translate English to Kirosha, but there would be a noticeable time lag and the software would likely make mistakes, since Kirosha wasn’t a widely used language. His imp would eventually work out any kinks in translation, but doing so while having a life-or-death conversation probably wasn’t a good idea.

Fromm contacted McClintock and briefly explained the situation.

“I know Colonel Loor,” she said when he was done. “He’s a political appointee. Comes from one of the bureaucrat clans in the capital; only reason he’s in the military is that his family couldn’t find him a better sinecure.”

“Great, a Rat in uniform.” Dealing with Rats always grated on Fromm. Military Rats were worse still.

“I’ll talk to him,” McClintock said. “Let me run it by RSO Rockwell first.”

She did; Rockwell agreed to her plan. McClintock tried the Ruddy’s personal phone line. She got through after a few rushed words with the officer’s secretary. Fromm listened in as she exchanged greetings with Colonel Loor.

“I am speaking to you on a matter of some importance and urgency,” McClintock said formally. “I and some guests of the Crown are trying to return to the Enclave. There has been some unpleasantness, and we are concerned about the military forces blocking the main gate.”

“I hear Americans have used artillery against royal citizens,” Colonel Loor said. “This is a violation of the Star Treaty, and a grave offense against the Queen and People of Kirosha.”

And we should give a shit because?
Fromm thought; he kept the comment to himself, though. At the moment the Kirosha’s opinion had a lot more weight than it would when a starship arrived in system and explained the facts of life to the locals.

“Such determinations are to be left to those greater than you or I,” McClintock replied levelly. “I wish to return to the Enclave. Will your men prevent us from doing so?”

There was a pause before Loor replied. “I have no orders to hinder you. You and yours may pass through the gate. I will issue direct orders to that effect.”

“I hear you and accept your words.”

Once the call was over, McClintock’s virtual icon turned to Fromm. “I think Loor is fence-sitting. Not sure which faction to back. A Modernist would have helped us out wholeheartedly, while a Preserver might have pushed the issue. Guess his family feels the same way, or someone would have given him definite marching orders.”

Fromm nodded at her and continued monitoring the Ruddies’ radio chatter. Orders were radioed to the blocking force: let the Star Devils pass.

“We’re clear.”

Rover Force drove into the broad avenue leading towards the Enclave, presenting a nice no-deflection target for the Ruddy tank platoon.

Nobody shot at them. They drove towards the tanks and maneuvered around them.

An officer was leaning out of the nearest tank’s turret hatch. He glared at the humans as they drove past. It was better than being shot at, but not all that great otherwise.

Fromm checked the time. He’d been planetside for about two hours.

Solar System, Year 29 AFC (After First Contact)

“Emergence detected, five light hours away.”

“Here they come, black as hell and thick as grass,” Captain Anthony Carruthers of the
USS Roosevelt
said as the first Sierras icons appeared onscreen. Everybody on the bridge loved the skipper, despite his penchant for using classical military quotes at every opportunity.

A few crewmembers chuckled; their laughter was on the edge of hysteria.

Commander Sondra Givens tried not to gulp as figures started running down the screen. Everyone could see them, but it was her job to verbalize the harsh reality of the situation. “It looks like the entire Risshah Armada, sir.”

“Snakes had to stop screwing around sooner or later,” Carruthers commented. The previous three incursions had consisted of single ships or small squadrons, all of which had been destroyed. “I guess they finally figured out nobody lost a fight because they brought too many ships to the event.”

“Twenty
Fang
-class frigates. Thirteen
Three-Claw
-class battlecruisers,” she went on, fear giving way to a burst of anger. The
Three-Claws
were the workhorses of the Snake fleet; one of them had immolated half of humanity.
Not this time, you bastards
. “Three
Dragon
-class battleships.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “And a
Merciless
-class dreadnought.”

The Risshah invaders would be met by the entirety of the US Space Fleet, the product of nearly twenty years of hasty, desperate efforts; some of its vessels had been commissioned less than a week ago. If the Snakes had waited another month or so, the
USS Ronald Reagan
would have joined their order of battle, but the latest
President
-class cruiser was still moored to the space docks in Low Earth Orbit, its gravitonic drive incomplete. Should the Snakes make it past the Fleet, the half-built ship would serve as an improvised space fortress, even though only one third of its armament was operational.

Of course, if the Snakes got into range of the
Reagan
’s guns it meant that the rest of the US Fleet had been obliterated and the Earth was hosed. One half-finished cruiser wasn’t going to achieve anything beyond making a futile last stand.

Sondra was terribly afraid that the operational Fleet – seven cruisers, nine ‘frigates’ most Starfarers would designate as corvettes, and eight assault ships – wouldn’t be enough to do the job, either. Even calling the American ships of the line ‘cruisers’ was rather charitable. A
President
-class was four hundred meters long and had a displacement of two hundred thousand tons. A Snake
frigate
was three hundred meters long and weighed in at a hundred and twenty thousand tons. Their battlecruisers were six hundred and half a mill, respectively, and their battleships ran a thousand meters long and encompassed three million tons of drive, shields and armaments that alone out-massed all seven American ships of the line combined. The dreadnought was slightly under a mile in length and its tonnage was just ridiculous. The discrepancy in shields and armament was, if anything, proportionally greater.

The Snakes hadn’t given them enough time to prepare, and the Puppies could no longer prevent the aliens from finishing the job they’d started.

Sondra Givens had been born in the year 3 After First Contact. The chief feature of those early years had been scarcity. Everything was rationed: food, fuel, clothes. The country – what was left of it – spent its first decade rebuilding infrastructure, adapting Starfarer Tech, and arming itself. She’d never starved – there had been enough food, just about – but she’d never had enough of anything. Her parents had told her repeatedly how lucky she was, how lucky America had been. Some countries, like Venezuela, had been effectively depopulated, ninety percent of their inhabitants wiped out during First Contact. China and India had lost every major urban center and the better part of a billion people each, all for the crime of being closest to the first wave of city-busting missiles. By comparison, the US had gotten lucky; they’d only lost half – half their people, half of everything they’d had.

The Hrauwah, better-known as the Puppies, had given them the means to lift themselves up from economic ruin. By the time Sondra was ten, eating until she was stuffed was no longer a special occasion, and blackouts didn’t happen regularly anymore. Things were going back to normal. When she turned twenty, she chose the Navy after her four-year Obligatory Service commitment was over.

The Snakes left them alone for almost three decades. At first, they’d been too busy fighting the Puppies, who had pushed them out of the galactic region that included Earth. The peace that followed gave the US more time to prepare. Things changed, however. A year ago, the Snakes’ patrons, an older and more powerful species known as the Lampreys, had intervened in their favor. Under pressure from the Lampreys, the Puppies had been forced to withdraw. Earth’s only friends had abandoned them. The Snakes hadn’t even bothered with ultimatums or declarations of war: weeks after the last Puppy ships departed, a Snake battlecruiser had invaded the Solar System – and been promptly obliterated. That victory had been meaningless, unfortunately. The war they’d been dreading was upon them. Nobody was coming to humanity’s aid. Nobody.

“Ready warp engines.”

“Ready warp engines, aye.”

“I expect all of us to do our duty,” the Captain said. “Let’s engage the enemy more closely, shall we?”

The
USS Roosevelt
joined her six sister ships in the battle for Earth’s survival.

* * *

A human visitor to the bridge of the dreadnought
Sunspot
would have found its environs murky and oppressive. Its atmosphere was dank, uncomfortably hot and full of toxic trace elements, which among other things generated a powerful stench. The lighting appeared to be weak, mainly because it heavily trended towards the ultraviolet spectrum. In other words, it was just the way the Risshah liked it.

The long warp jump had taken its toll. One of the dreadnought bridge crew was dead, most likely due to unbearable mental stress. It wasn’t the only casualty; out of the sixty thousand Risshah in the Armada, three had died, and five had become deranged and been summarily put down. More importantly, all crews had been incapacitated for nearly three hours, due to their lengthy exposure to the mind-destroying environment of warp space.

After those three hours, during which the Risshah Armada had been at the mercy of automated systems, order had been restored. High Admiral Purple-93,017 turned towards Pilot Yellow-2,301,117 and issued its first command in the enemy system. “Commence the planned advance.”

Its order was transmitted and the fleet made one short warp jump, placing them three light minutes away from Earth. After the five-minute warp recovery such a jump entailed, the Risshahh vessels began moving towards the fur-heads’ homeworld at cruising speed, slightly below 0.001
c
. They would be in position in fifty-three hours, plenty of time to prepare for battle.

The paltry fleet the humans had assembled was orbiting around the planet, and the Admiral wondered if it would sail forth to meet the Risshah halfway, or fight their futile last stand in orbit, where its demise would be visible from Earth. In either case, they were doomed. Now that the fur-faces had been forced to withdraw, this portion of the galaxy belonged to the Nest-Mothers and their brood, the People of the Egg. The local sophonts would be exterminated, the planet’s biosphere modified to suit the victors’ tastes, and in three centuries the blue sphere would be indistinguishable from the other seven worlds the Risshah had colonized.

“Emergence! Half a light-second away, master,” the tactical officer hissed, its sibilants distorted with shock and surprise.

“Change course! Battle stations!”

The fools! A three light-minute warp jump would leave the crews of the human ships incapacitated for at least thirty seconds, during which their ships would be in range of the Risshah’s main guns and missiles. Nobody made that sort of maneuver in the face of an enemy; it was tantamount to suicide. And while the Armada was unprepared for battle at such short notice, its crews could fire before the enemy recovered. At best, the humans could fire off a few automatic missile volleys, which would accomplish nothing. It was almost a pity. The Admiral had been looking forward to an actual battle, but a massacre would suit it fine.

“It’s their entire fleet, in close formation!” There was a pause as the Tactical Officer struggled to accept its sensor readings. “They are maneuvering, master!”

The Admiral could not believe the images in the tactical holotank. The human vessels had come out of warp but were maneuvering under manual control. The rumors were true, then; humans could withstand warp space better than any other known species. The enemy fleet started firing within seconds of their emergence, before the Risshah were at battle readiness, and the Admiral felt cold doubt running through its circulatory system.

The largest human combatants, little more than oversized frigates, mounted eight heavy graviton cannon each. They struck the Risshah column when it was at its most vulnerable, its formations designed for ease of travel rather than protection. Their initial volleys destroyed two frigates and severely damaged three more. The Admiral hissed in impotent rage while the Armada’s weapon systems were made ready and began to return fire.

Each Risshah battlecruiser had ten main guns, each more powerful than their American counterparts; the battleships had eighteen guns apiece, and the
Sunspot
twenty-four. Their initial response was sluggish, as crews rushed to their posts and brought their weapon systems online. Only fifty-three heavy graviton cannon unleashed their power, out of a possible two hundred and eight; terrible performance, but understandable, since no vessel had been at battle stations when the engagement began. Still, each human pocket cruiser was targeted by no less than seven streams of coherent gravity, designed to shatter force fields and shred anything they touched. The beams crossed the distance between the fleets almost instantly. They all scored hits.

“No effect! Master, no effect!”

The beams hit
something
in front of each human vessel and vanished without inflicting any damage.

“What happened”

“I… I’m not sure, master. We are detecting warp signatures, too small for a jump. Purpose unknown.”

“Warp shields,” the Admiral said. The very concept was insane. No sophont could endure being in the presence of an ongoing warp aperture for more than a few seconds without dying, going insane, or both. And yet, there they were; their presence was the only explanation for the unscathed ships in the tactical display. “Keep firing! They cannot keep those shields up for long!”

More energy volleys were exchanged; the Americans had stopped advancing and were maneuvering to keep their warp apertures between them and the Armada’s fury. They return fire kept scoring hits, and a growing number of those hits became kills. They kept targeting the Risshahh frigates, steadily whittling away the most maneuverable element of the fleet.

Missiles from both sides began to add their power to the fray. Some of the human weapons detonated while still over five thousand kilometers away; the explosions channeled the energy of their thermonuclear warheads into coherent beams of x-ray and gamma radiation. Ingenious, if one was reduced to using fissionables as a weapon, and dismayingly effective. The beams were devastating against frigates and were able to inflict some damage even on ships of the line. Three more ships fell out of formation, their breached hulls leaking gasses like the dying breaths of some great beast. Their crews were doomed, after being exposed to brief but lethal bursts of radiation.

The human vessels kept fighting in close formation, protected by shields made of defiled space-time. Follow-up volleys turned four more
Fang
frigates into burning, lifeless hulks and damaged half a dozen more. More salvos of radiation-disgorging missiles flew forth, followed by regular graviton and plasma warheads: the humans had saved their most modern weapons until they were at close range, where point defenses would have less than a minute to detect, engage and destroy them.

“Concentrate fire on enemy cruisers,” the Admiral ordered with an assumed calmness it did not truly feel. The Armada disgorged more missiles and its secondary batteries – laser and plasma weapons – added their fire to the heavy graviton guns. Most of them were stopped by the American warp shields; a few managed find unprotected spots, but not in enough volume to batter down the enemy’s regular force fields. “Spread out! We must maneuver to strike their sides!”

The Fleet struggled to carry out the unconventional order. Normally there was no need to target specific sectors in a ship, as they all were equally well-protected by force fields, except for the rare occasion when disabling a vessel was a desirable goal. The Armada’s crews were as well-trained as any formation in the known galaxy; they did their best, even as the enemy’s own missiles and beam weapons bled them dry. Twelve Risshah frigates were down already; the rest were all damaged to some degree, and a battlecruiser turned into an expanding fireball when a brace of thermonuclear missiles struck just as a graviton beam salvo temporarily shut down a force field section.