Echo of Tomorrow: Book Two (The Drake Chronicles) (59 page)

“
Incoming!
” the sensor tech screamed in panic.

“That is clear, young one.” The battle board showed the incoming hewman missiles.

“From astern!” the youngling screamed.

Commander Zulia punched up his rear viewing screen, his crest turning from the bright blue of combat to the sickly gray of fear.

“Impossible …” was all he managed to say before the first cloud of hewman missiles struck his unprotected rear elements.

He watched in horror when one after the other, ship after ship at the rear of the fleet vanished into a soundless ball of expanding plasma and debris. Trapped between the oncoming blizzard of missiles from the hewman fleet in front, and the avalanche of missiles coming at him from the rear, he had no way to turn. This couldn’t be happening. There was no way the hewman ships could carry that many missiles! And where were the capital ships behind him that launched them? With so many soundless explosions going on at his rear, it was impossible to see where they were coming from. How the hewmans had managed to hide capital ships that size from his sensors was unknown, but it suggested some sort of cloaking technology. Whatever the reason, bit by bit the hewmans were decimating his fleet as they’d decimated First Fleet, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Order all ships to break formation and return to the warp point as quickly as possible.”

“Retreat, Commander?” It was unheard of for a front-line fleet to turn tail and run. Only harvester ships did that. Before he could even countermand, or send the order, his battle ship was struck three times in quick succession.

“Drive system inoperable, Commander … power system failure, all weapons …” Zulia never heard the rest of the report; his fusion bottle fractured and exploded in a white-hot flash hotter than the surface of the sun. In a microsecond, the commander and all his crew were nothing but expanding gas and particles.

* * * * * *

“Release the gunslingers and let’s finish off the stragglers.”

“Aye, aye, skipper. Wipeout time.”

That put everything in a nutshell, and Scott just smiled at the woman’s exuberance. For a moment he slumped down into his combat seat and breathed a long sigh of relief. It was over. Or at least a major portion of it was. With both major fleets destroyed, all that remained was the ground attack fleet, but that didn’t consist of many heavy units, and the
New Zealand
and her escort should be able to handle that.

“Lady Gray. Order the ghost riders to finish off the remaining ships, and detail the gunslingers to assist until all alien ships have been destroyed.”

“
Yes, my admiral, orders transmitted.
”

“Good. Order the fleet to turn and head for Earth and the remaining lizard fleet.”

* * * * * *

Ground Force Leader Lecar, along with a hundred of his fellow soldiers, dragged themselves off the shuttlecraft into the bright sun and looked around. Lush vegetation surrounded them, but it wasn’t the wet, swampy land he’d grown up in. A short distance away he could see a shoreline, blue water washing across gleaming yellow sand. As the last warrior walked away from the shuttle, it took off, so another one could land to disgorge more warriors.

“Find out where we are,” he ordered his security team leader.

More shuttles came to land, disgorging more warriors of the Horde, now stripped of their weapons and body armor, all under the watchful eyes of the autocannon mounted on the top and sides of the shuttle. Lecar snarled, his crest lifting in anger. Even if there were hewmans out in the open, he’d found out the futility of attacking one of them. Smaller they might be, but far stronger than any reports he’d ever seen. Watching several of his warriors beaten to death in hand-to-hand combat by these meat animals, he learned these were no herd animals as reported, but seasoned warriors without mercy. Any show of resistance, and they simply shot whoever it was out of hand. Not that it surprised him; he would have done the same, and sent the body down to the kitchen for processing if his larder was low. No, it was the sheer difference between what he’d been told about these hewmans, and what he’d seen. Whatever weapon they used against his attack force wasn’t atomic in nature, but just as devastating. Out of the twenty thousand ground troops and ten thousand reserves, barely a thousand remained. So far he’d seen none of the space fleet crewmen, and suspected they were all dead, or floating in space, frozen to death.

“Force Leader … I have to report.” His team leader stopped speaking and looked around, his crest flat and gray. “We’re on a small island.”

“You are wrong on both counts.”

“How’s that, Force Leader?”

“I am no longer a force leader of any kind, and we are not on an island.”

“Then where are we then?”

“We’re in the land of the dead. There is no escape from this place, and rather than waste ammunition on us, they have simply left us here to die. They don’t want the smell of our rotting corpses to pollute the air they breathe.”

CHAPTER NINE:              
…Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind

                  one lonely sheepdog…
LTC (RET) D. Grossman

“You are probably wondering why I have asked you all to come here today,” Scott began while he looked around the huge conference room at the faces of the 345 remaining men and women of the 3rd Marine Division.

He knew each of them personally, his brothers and sisters, his family, all sharing a common heritage forged in blood and the chaos of war. These few were all that remained of the men and women he’d taken over the border of Iraq to avenge the destruction of three American cities. They’d followed him through the gates of hell and back, and followed him into the future without complaint. They’d given their all and helped build a new future in the strange new world they found themselves in, yet now he had to ask them to make a difficult choice, one that would profoundly change their lives in ways they couldn’t even imagine at the moment.

“All of us came from a place called the United States of America. A place now buried three hundred years in the past, a place with almost three hundred years of history behind it. That history was rich in detail, both good and bad, starting in 1776 when America separated itself from England. Now, all that has gone, including the Constitution we all swore to uphold and defend.” The foot shuffling and murmur of voices grew louder.

“Hold it down, people,” Brock called, but not overly loud.

“It might seem I’m rambling, and maybe I am, but I wanted you all to remember where we came from and what America stood for.”

“We all understand that, Admiral, so what’s the point?” Pam asked.

“Right now we have one of two roads to travel, and I’m going to leave it up to you all to decide which one we should take.” Scott stopped and took a deep breath. After much soul searching, he knew which road he was going to take, but then again he didn’t have the same perspective on the question as the rest did. His mother was English and he’d grown up under a different legal and governmental system until his father was reassigned back to the United States.

“It has been suggested that all military forces join together into one combined unit under one flag, one authority, and one all-encompassing legal system.” Murmurs broke out again and he could see the puzzled looks on their faces.

“Even now, the King of the United Kingdom and the Emperor of Japan are sitting down and working out a mutual agreement. Not through diplomats, or politicians who muddy the waters, but leader to leader as they should. From here on out, we have two roads to walk down. The first is that we continue as we are under the ad hoc systems we have created here. The other road is that we amalgamate with the forces of England and Japan under the flag and authority of a combined government.” He expected an uproar of disapproval, but instead he got silence. At first they looked at one another; the unspoken questions played on their faces. At last, as if by some tacit agreement, Pam stood and asked the first question.

“So, if we go it alone, what can we expect?”

“Not much different than we have now. Both countries will support us. The rest of the world will help with resources and such if that’s what you mean.”

“Partly, sir. But what does it mean for the future?” There it was in a nutshell.

“That is the one question I’ve been wrestling with. In the short term, things would pretty much remain the same, but what about our children and their children? What sort of world will we leave to them? At the moment we have no real government, no real legal system, and no real everyday infrastructure or local government.”

“This means that some desk weenie somewhere is going to decide who, what, where and how we fight, like before?” It was a good question.

“That was one of the things I brought up at the meeting to discuss this issue. All too often the military has been hamstrung by the government, either by too little funding to supply us with the right weapons and support we need, or cutting us off at the knees when we should have gone in and taken care of something before it became a problem.”

“What was their answer?” someone asked, and Scott blew out his cheeks.

“That was the sore point, but I had to agree with them that an uncontrolled military isn’t the answer. But then again, neither is a hamstrung military always begging the government in power for more funds, or permission to go do what we know must be done. My suggestion was that New Zealand be separate from any governing body, and can be on called to act in a military capacity when all else fails.”

“Yeah,” Bill Higgins, a Brit, spoke up, “even under my … I mean the UK government, we had the same problem.”

“Did you come up with an answer, sir?” Pam asked.

“Yes and no,” Scott answered, “I sort of demanded that funding and resources to supply us with what we needed had to be absolute. That included R&D to develop new weapons and such. We would also be the sole military force in the Sol system and act as the Earth Defense Force from here on out. That would give us the independence we need to act outside of Earth itself.”

“And the answer?”

“The PM … the prime minister put forward the suggestion that a separate, nongovernment commission be set up, comprised of both civilian and military personnel to oversee all aspects of military supply, logistics, and weapons development. He also suggested that in times of crisis, or imminent danger, all diplomatic means be used until a point is reached where the situation is turned over to the military for a solution. Without further interference from the government or restriction of the methods we use.”

“The ‘Final Option’ protocol,” Brock put in.

“Exactly,” Scott agreed.

“Sounds like a plan. Anyone who has a disagreement with the government would know that at some point military action will be taken against them if negotiations fail.”

“It’s a working solution, but the details of when that option would be used would be decided by the Prime Minister, and the Minister of Defense.”

“What about the rings?”

Scott was prepared for that question. “I have talked to the Ellises and Devon Hawking, and they have agreed to set up a private corporation to develop and manufacture the rings. All rings for the military will be free of charge, and they will charge a lease fee for civilian use. We can’t let any of that technology fall into the wrong hands, that’s an absolute. We have to protect the secret at any cost.”

Between the Ellises, Devon, and his EOD team, they’d reengineered the rings so it was even more difficult, if not impossible, to take them apart to learn their secret. You couldn’t even x-ray or ultrasound the interior, drill or cut them open, without the resulting explosion wiping out half a city. Any tampering was immediately reported back through the ring systems to the base. Now, any one ring could be locked out of the systems and deactivated. If necessary, they could cause the ring to melt down or even explode in the event one was stolen.