Hidden Empire (79 page)
Robb Brindle, who commanded the Thunderhead’s surveillance Remoras, grew more optimistic. He stood beside Tasia, looking down
at the lumbering ekti factories like fat cattle grazing on the upthrust storm systems.
“Two possibilities, Tamblyn. Either the hydrogues don’t live here, and we can keep processing ekti to our heart’s content.
Or”—he turned to glance behind him at the bridge crew—“our kick-ass fleet has scared the aliens away.” Tasia didn’t offer
the third explanation that came to mind: that the hydrogues simply hadn’t shown themselves yet. She did not want to shatter
his confidence, knowing that the happy bravado was, in part, a response to extended anxiety. “I hope you’re right, Brindle.”
Within three hours, however, the first alarms started to ring.
A Remora survey squadron returned, signaling instant alerts after they detected a flurry of deep lightning and fastmoving
meteorological disturbances.
Aboard the
Goliath
, Admiral Stromo wasted no time declaring red-alert status. Terran skyminers aboard the cloudharvesters were instructed to
stand down and prepare for immediate evacuation, if so ordered. Tasia issued quick commands to her bridge staff and sent all
Remora crews racing to their ships.
Robb Brindle squeezed her arm. “Showtime!” Without a further farewell, he raced down to the Thunderhead’s hangar bay to take
command of his squadrons.
Deep below, Jupiter’s sky ripped apart to disgorge eleven diamond-hulled hydrogue battleships. The fearsome spiked warglobes
rose above the clouds in a show of alien force that dwarfed even Admiral Stromo’s proud escort fleet.
“Here they come!” Patrick Fitzpatrick shouted, losing his usual arrogance.
When stunned curses echoed from the astounded bridge personnel, Tasia whirled and snapped at them. “Everybody focus! Save
the whining till you get home and complain to your mothers.” She pointed to individual stations. “Every soldier at your weapons
consoles! Power up all jazer banks. Charge the railguns and load the kinetic projectiles.”
“Do we let the aliens take the first shot, Platcom?” one of the men asked.
“Shizz, not on your life. We’ve all seen what they do.” She gritted her teeth. At last she would get a chance to avenge her
brother.
But Admiral Stromo sent an all-fleet signal, countermanding her orders. “Mantas, Thunderheads, and Remoras—hold your fire!”
He switched to a broadband channel. “Attention, hydrogues! I request an open dialogue with your commander.”
“As if that’ll do any good,” Tasia muttered. “They already blew up King Frederick. They don’t want to talk—they want us dead.”
Stromo waited a second, received no response. “Our mission is peaceful, intended only to acquire vital resources for the Terran
Hanseatic League. We are mining in our home solar system. We mean no harm to any hydrogue. But we will not be denied the resources
we need for our survival.”
The spiked warglobes climbed higher and moved toward the first Hansa ekti harvester. At the warglobe’s approach, the panicked
cloud miners launched their lifepods, which sprayed outward like spores from a mushroom. Without transmitting a word of response
to the
Goliath
, the deep-core aliens unleashed their crackling blue lightning. Hydrogue energy bolts ripped through the evacuated gas-harvesting
facility, detonating the ekti reactors and stored fuel tanks. The explosion set up a chain reaction, ripping from module to
module. No Roamer skymine could have been breached so easily, Tasia knew, but the end result would have been the same.
“That’s it!” she shouted in disgust. Not caring about insubordination, she turned to her weapons officers without waiting
for orders from the astonished Admiral Stromo. “All jazer banks open fire. Target that damned warglobe.”
The hydrogues continued their destruction against the first cloud-harvester. A second warglobe fired on the Earth battleships.
The EDF subcommanders screamed for orders, while some defended themselves. Admiral Stromo refused to respond.
Tasia stabbed her finger toward the screen. “Everybody on the same page, same bull’s-eye. Aim just below that spike there.
Let’s not dilute our firepower.
Now.”
With an angry whoop and snarled threats, the Thunderhead bridge crew fired lasers wrapped in sheaths of high-energy particles.
Jazer bolts hammered into the foremost crystalline warglobe, scratching it, scarring it.
“Kinetic projectiles next! Shoot the railguns—a full volley. Aim for the same weak point we just hit with the jazers.”
Electromagnetic rails in the underdeck crackled, firing a pulsed salvo of solid projectiles made of superdense depleted uranium.
Traveling at near-relativistic speeds, they slammed into the diamond hull, each one with the kinetic energy of a small nuclear
warhead.
The other Thunderheads hesitated less than a second after Tasia gave her order to fire, while Stromo remained frozen and speechless.
Full of new recruits who had never seen battle and nervous commanders with itchy trigger fingers, the EDF escort group retaliated
when the hydrogues opened fire. Manta cruisers dove into the fray. Squadrons of Remoras shot out of their docking bays like
a hail of huge bullets. Each fast fighter drove in, targeting the enemy warglobes with their smaller but more precise ship-to-ship
defenses.
Over the EDF comm channel, Stromo spluttered orders and finally tried to regain control of the situation. In a moment, though,
he realized the futility and changed his mind. “All ships, all commanders. Fire at will! Let’s get these bastards.”
The huge
Goliath
descended into the midst of the firestorm, readying the fleet’s heaviest weapons. The Juggernaut, with ten times the weaponry
and armor of any Manta or Thunderhead, quickly demonstrated its enhanced abilities.
The crews of the other three Hansa cloud-harvesters launched their evacuation pods without instructions from the Admiral.
Tasia didn’t blame them one bit, but in the free-for-all of weapons fire that crisscrossed Jupiter’s cloud decks, she saw
the peril to the fleeing workers. She opened her channel. “Lieutenant Brindle, tell your Remoras to haul ass toward the harvesters.
Rescue as many lifepods as possible. Round ’em all up.”
Brindle hesitated just a moment. “My whole squadron? Shouldn’t we save a few Remoras to—”
“Lieutenant, if we don’t rescue those cloud miners, then we can’t claim much of a victory, can we?”
“No, Platcom.”
Trying to ease his frustration, she added, “As soon as you round up the evacuation pods, I’ll let you get back and cause as
much damage as you want—if the battle lasts that long.”
“Acknowledged.”
The first warglobe she’d targeted had suffered visible damage. All of the jazer strikes and kinetic-projectile impacts seemed
to have slowed it down. But the other ten hydrogue battleships approached without hesitation and opened fire on the Terran
escort fleet. One of the Mantas fell almost immediately, without scoring a single hit.
Enemy lightning swept across two Thunderheads, ripping through armored hulls, spilling hundreds of crew members to their deaths.
Other strikes vaporized entire flights of Remoras like seeds in a blast furnace. The small EDF attack ships had insufficient
shielding or maneuverability to avoid the hydrogue weapon. Tasia prayed that Brindle’s squadrons had not been among the first
victims.
When Admiral Stromo brought the
Goliath
into the fray, shooting jazers and kinetic projectiles, launching all of his Remoras, the Juggernaut resembled a terrible
hurricane. But the diamond-hulled warglobes concentrated their attack on the largest Terran battleship.
Brindle’s first Remoras began limping back to the Thunderhead, using tractor beams to drag lifepods salvaged from the ekti
harvesters. “Open our ship bays,” Tasia commanded. “Get all those refugees in before it’s too late.”
The Admiral shouted empty threats and warnings at the hydrogues over his broadband frequency, but Tasia could already see
how much damage the Eddie ships were suffering. Within seconds, the hydrogues obliterated another weapons platform, and all
the Remoras retrieving lifepods suddenly had to find another sanctuary.
Tasia turned to Patrick Fitzpatrick, who manned the comm station. “Signal those Remoras. Tell them to bring all the lifepods
here, if they can.” Fitzpatrick looked at her, unable to believe what was happening around him. “Do it
now
, dammit!” He bent over his transmitters, annoyed and abashed.
The warglobes opened fire and struck one set of the
Goliath
’s stardrive engines, melting the thick hull plating. Aboard the enhanced Juggernaut, Admiral Stromo yelled for damage reports,
demanded that all crews shore up life support and recharge the weapons systems.
The hydrogues fired once again, inflicting even more harm to the
Goliath
. Another Manta suffered severe damage from a blast and could barely crawl out of the war zone.
Tasia realized that the battle had turned into a rout. No amount of Terran defenses could stand against these eleven hydrogue
warglobes. Unless the Admiral came to the same conclusion—and soon—the
Goliath
, Earth’s greatest new battleship, would be destroyed.
Incomprehensible screams of panic filled the comm channels. Tasia contacted her surviving Remoras, recalling all squadrons.
“Lieutenant Brindle! Bring whatever survivors you can, but get your butt back here.”
Salvaged lifepods continued to pour into the Thunderhead’s docking bays. If Tasia didn’t get her ship out of there before
long, they could all be destroyed in one blast by the hydrogues. Even so, she could not let the
Goliath
flounder.
She issued a call to the other Thunderheads, hoping that their platcoms would listen to common sense. “All weapons platforms!
We need to fall back and defend the
Goliath.”
She changed to a different channel. “Admiral Stromo, sir, I recommend that you withdraw your battleship while the engines
still function. We will cover your retreat.”
Four Thunderheads, still looking puny in relation to the diamond-hulled warglobes, clustered around the wounded Juggernaut.
Another Manta disengaged to assist in defending the flagship.
Checking her weapons status, Tasia saw that three-quarters of her kinetic projectiles had already been expended, and her jazer
banks were drained to 10 percent of nominal energy reserves. “Keep firing! No sense saving anything for a rainy day.”
The surviving weapons platforms and cruisers bombarded the warglobes as they closed in on the
Goliath
. Two of them appeared sluggish and damaged, but the other nine remained just as deadly. The warglobes could easily pursue
them all the way to Earth, but Tasia hoped the deep-core aliens would break off as soon as the EDF fleet retreated.
Tasia didn’t think Admiral Stromo knew who had contacted him and issued the unauthorized but sensible order to withdraw, but
the Juggernaut’s engines fired up, using their remaining propulsion power to withdraw from Jupiter and into space.
“We have rounded up most of the lifepods, Platcom,” said her tactical subcommander, scanning screens to see how many of the
Remoras had returned.
“Then prepare to get us out of here,” Tasia said. She turned, her brows furrowed with concern. “Has Lieutenant Brindle reported
back in?”
“No, sir,” said the subcommander. Tasia ran to the comm station herself, opening up a direct ship-to-ship channel. “Brindle,
where the hell are you?”
“Coming!” His voice sounded cheerful but with a ragged edge. “I had some business to take care of first.”
Below them in the clouds, two hydrogue warglobes broke away to continue their systematic attack on the remaining cloud-harvesters,
destroying even the debris.
“All right, dammit. You’ve made your point,” Tasia growled at the aliens.
The
Goliath
pulled farther away, and the surviving Thunderheads and Mantas clustered around the damaged Juggernaut, collectively retreating
from Jupiter. As they fled toward the orbits of the innermost moons, she saw Robb Brindle and his last four Remoras struggling
upward from the fringe of atmosphere, heading toward them. With a combined tractor beam, the small ships hauled a large spherical
tank, dragging it up and away from the hydrogue cordon.
“What the hell are you doing, Brindle?” she transmitted.
“We salvaged the ekti storage tank from one of the cloud-harvesters!” he said. “Couldn’t just let it go to waste.”
She dispatched other Remoras to assist him, ushering Brindle and his ships into the Thunderhead landing bay. Later, in private,
she would upbraid him for his foolishness. A full skymine cargo tank contained only enough stardrive fuel to service the EDF
for a week. Not worth risking anyone’s life for.
Disastrously beaten, the Earth Defense Forces fell back from Jupiter. As they pulled out to the orbit of the innermost moons,
still accelerating toward open space, the damaged ships maintained watch on the huge planet. The rusty clouds now looked bloodstained.
The numerous warglobes hovered among the sky wreckage, still threatening. Stromo ordered all possible speed, and Tasia stared
at the alien warships, still visible in the Thunder-head’s long-range scans. The aliens waited, watched, but did not pursue
them into interplanetary space.
When they limped back to Earth, Admiral Stromo and the survivors of his escort fleet would have no joyous homecoming. The
hydrogues had proved far more devastating than even the most drastic predictions.
The Jupiter debacle had crushed all hope for a swift and gratifying resolution to this war.
