Strength and Honor (11 page)

The grid defenses heaved out energy bolts, space javelins, chaser rounds, and beams, to put on a dizzying show. John Farragut could not tell from here if they were having any effect.

“Number and nature of hostiles?” he asked Hamster.
“Horatius
for one. Those will be your boarders if they can get close to a station to throw a corvus.”

“Won’t happen. They have to get through the grid first. Then a station field.”

“Eight cruisers and eleven destroyers are their pounders,” Hamster continued. “No
Gladiator.
No Striker.”

The attackers banged at the joints in the grid. Auto-gunnery sprayed beams at them. Missile silos hurled out hard ordnance.

“These ships are new designs,” said Hamster. “We don’t have their specs in our data bank. How can there be this many Roman ships?”

“It means Romulus started executing this attack at least three months before he declared war,” said Farragut.

It took three months to cross the Abyss. This attack force launched from Roman territory a while ago.

“There are drones everywhere,” Hamster reported. “Can’t give you a good count. We think we’ve been double and triple counting them. They jump to FTL and come back.” Then as if she had just been passed a note, “We have IDs on some of these ships. She read off the ship names and their commanders.
Gens
names like Trogus, Quirinius, Umbrius—”

“This reads like a list of everyone Romulus wants dead,” said Hamster.

“The psychotic bastard isn’t stupid,” said Farragut.

Romulus had sent his political opponents to a very hard target to field-test the new weaponry.

“This is nobody I want to kill,” said Hamster.

Romulus no doubt sent them out with standard Spartan orders: With your shield or on it. Victorious or dead. Romulus could not lose either way.

The legion carrier
Horatius
charged at the grid and immediately glanced off the energy barrier as if making too steep an approach to a planet’s atmosphere. The big ship spun out to space, winked out, gone FTL.

A pack of U.S. Rattlers that were outside the grid jumped past the light barrier to give chase. It was nearly impossible to chase an FTL target, but Rattlers had high threshold velocities and were probably hoping that
Horatius
had winked out because she was wounded.

As soon as the lockdown lifted from the dock to let the trapped travelers retreat back into the station, Farragut ran to the stationmaster’s office.

General Weld was not there. A cadre of Marines told him where the general had gone. Two of the Marines escorted him to the Fort Ike command center. They ushered him through a crush of reporters who were camped outside the command center hatch.

The reporters reacted with a horrified frenzy to see Captain John Farragut here, away from mighty
Merrimack,
in this time of crisis. Recorders followed him. He heard his name reported in voices of alarm and doom, talking about him like Samson without hair.
Merrimack
without her Captain Farragut. A mortal blow to station defenses. They transmitted their apocalyptic reports to Earth under huge banners: UNDER SIEGE!

Farragut made it through the hatch into the command center, where all the voices were low, quick, clear, and efficient.

General Weld was organizing his forces, taking in tactical reports. He glanced up. Double-took. Eyed Farragut up and down. Much calmer than the reporters, he said, “Well, this is unsettling.”

General Weld had the most formidable battleship in the United States on hand—except that its head was cut off. Figured.

“Commander Dent doesn’t play in the farm league, sir,” Captain Farragut defended his exec.

Weld returned to his com, demanding of someone: “Where’s the Striker? Anyone pick up the Striker yet?” It was a tired sort of demand.

Weld clicked off and gave his attention to Farragut. “If you have any suggestions, I’ll listen to them.”

Farragut jumped at the invitation. “You’ve got Rattlers outside searching for
Horatius.
Don’t let them get suckered into a chase. Marcus will just draw them out, turn around and eat them. If your boys and girls want to shoot at
Horatius,
don’t worry, he’ll come back. He’s not going to stay out there with nothing to shoot at. He has orders to take the fort or die trying.”

“Horatius”
Weld echoed. “That was one of yours.”

“Yes, sir.”

Horatius
had been a member of Commodore Farragut’s Attack Group One.

Weld issued the recall to the pursuing Rattlers.

Farragut heard someone else in the command center signaling Fort Ted. “Fort Roosevelt. This is Fort Eisenhower. Are you under attack?”

The answer came back negative. There had been no attack on the Near Space terminus of the Shotgun. Damaging one end was all it took to disable the Shotgun. With one end out, the other was useless.

Tactical reported: “Roman drones inside the containment zone.” Weld put off any exclamation of shock and impossibility that came to mind. He told the controller to put
Merrimack
on the interior drones.

The controller complied.
“Merrimack. Merrimack. Merrimack.
This is Fort Eisenhower Control. I have trade for you. Seek and destroy enemy hostiles within the containment zone.”

Only then did Weld say to one of his officers, “How in bloody hell did they get inside the grid? Locate the breach.”

“Grid holding solid, sir,” Tactical advised. “Nothing came through the containment field.”

Closer flashes appeared now, clearer without the distortion barrier in between. The new lights would be
Merrimack
annihilating Roman rovers inside the fortress’ energy sphere.

Farragut turned his com to the Marine harmonic so he could listen to the Swift pilots’ excited chatter, shooting skeet.

“Mine mine mine mine— Oh, you hog!”

“Don’t polish that cannonball, Darb! Take the foxtrotting shot!”

“Ho! Shitska! Didja see that!” That was the voice of Alpha Six, Kerry Blue.

“See what?”

The station controller evidently saw what Alpha Six saw. Reported: “Drones appear to be getting inside the containment zone by displacement.”

“How?” Weld demanded. “Are they jamming our jammers?”

“No, sir. We don’t have any jammers outside the stations. The station jammers are all functioning. We just never put jammers in the empty space between the stations.”

“We have a fifth column,” Weld concluded. “Who planted displacement receivers in
space?”

It had been known to happen before—the placement of Roman landing disks (LDs) in space. No bigger than dinner plates, LDs looked like space debris. This attack had been three months in the approach. The local mole had three months to figure out how to sneak LDs out there between the many stations of the space fort.

“Merrimack. Merrimack. Merrimack.
This is Fort Eisenhower Control. Seek and destroy displacement equipment in the vacuum.”

“Fort Eisenhower. This is
Merrimack.
Already on it. Aye.”

The voices coming over the Marine channel sounded like kids on a coin hunt, calling out their victories.

One Swift fired on a displacement disk at the precise instant that a Drone flashed into existence on the disk. Vaporized both of them. “Yahtzee!”

“Didja see that! Didja see that!”

A boom tremored the deck of the command center. The sound came from a com, not from an explosion within the station, but so loud they all felt it. Six more explosions in chain reaction followed.

“Not encouraging,” said Weld. “What was that?”

A missile silo on the perimeter had taken a shot up the nose. And its magazine had an insufficient firewall to contain the eruption of its contents.

Because of the distortion shroud, the command center was having trouble assessing the damage.

Tactical reported:
“Horatius
back in range.”

Weld’s graying brows gave a little lift, marking Farragut’s successful prediction. The command center was receiving feeds from various U.S. media transmitting from Near Space. One featured interviews with anxious families at Fort Ted waiting for their loved ones stranded in the Deep End. The reports lamented in dire tones the inability of the U.S. to send reinforcements to the besieged Fort Eisenhower while the Shotgun was shut down. They forecast what destruction of the Shotgun could mean to the U.S., its people, its economy.

President Marissa Johnson made an appearance, decrying the attack. Her staff had immediately figured out that this attack began before the declaration of war. She called on the League of Earth Nations to break its neutrality and take a stand against the belligerent Roman Empire.

General Weld glanced up at one of the monitors. Saw the Near Space media feed cut over to visuals of the missile silo at the perimeter exploding. “Are we on broadcast?” Weld asked, then answered himself, wearily, “Of course we’re on broadcast.”

The perimeter explosions were out there for the whole galaxy to see.Then rerun, because they were spectacular— the initial blast, six more explosions, the anxious voice of the reporter with background screams inside the station.

“That’s it,” said Farragut.

Fire ships clustered round the Shotgun, spewing blue fire suppressant onto the piers. The sensor stations were coated with the stuff. Tire displacement equipment belched enormous plumes of smoke into space. The dirty clouds spread, curled inward at the energy grid. Bottled inside the energy barrier, the thick clouds made Fort Eisenhower look like a gargantuan murky crystal ball portending an ominous future.

The media picked up the images, sent them across the known galaxy in an instant on resonant feed with the news:

FORT EISENHOWER SHOTGUN DESTROYED

The dialogs. III.

A:
There is no elsewhere. This is the universe.

JMdeC:
If there is no “elsewhere,” then whence the original Bang? It is terribly parochial to think that this is the only everything there is. The Greek word cosmos meant universe. It also meant world. Because the world was their entire universe at the time the word was coined. But there is more to the universe than planet Earth. Can we assume this cosmos, the one that we can observe now, is the only one? You must admit the possibility of universes other than this putative everything. Admit that something beyond our conception and perception could exist.

A: I allow the theoretical existence of alternate brane worlds in higher dimensional space, but I reject out of hand your implication that you are going to evade the entropy of this universe by faith.

PART TWO
The Return

7

^R
OMAN RECONNAISSANCE DRONES
skimmed the rock surface on the night side of the world. All was dark, airless, silent, dead. At less than twenty light-years from Earth the planet would make a good platform from which to stage an invasion. But this solar system was League of Earth Nations territory, which made its planets neutral worlds.

That made the world off-limits to the U.S. military as well as to Rome. But Caesar Romulus was certain he could trust the U.S. to cheat.

If Roman drones could find a U.S. military installation on the planet, Rome could contest the world’s neutrality and build its own base on it without bringing the LEN into the war.

Allegedly there was nothing on the planet except an ancient archaeological site.

The Milky Way galaxy was fifteen billion years old. In the beginning, the universe consisted of nothing but hydrogen. All other elements were created within stars from the primordial hydrogen. Those first stars began to form nearly twelve billion years ago.

The lifetime of a star ranges from as short as a few million years to as long as a few trillion years, depending on the mass of the star.

The biggest stars lived fast. After a few million years of existence, the mammoth stars blew up.

Not one of the smallest stars had died yet. The universe was not old enough. The smallest stars burned slow and long and would eventually fade out.

The color of stars varied by mass, appearing in nearly the same order as the colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, white, blue, indigo, violet—from lightweight star to heavyweight star.

Mid-weight, where logic suggested the stars ought to appear green, the stars shone white instead.

The light produced by middleweight normal stars peaks in the green wavelength. But all stars emit all wavelengths to some degree along with their strong suit. In stars strongest in the middle green wavelength, the short blue wavelengths and the long red wavelengths meet in the middle with equal strength, so the star shines a balanced full visible spectrum. The full visible spectrum appears as white light.

There are no green stars.

The biggest, heaviest violet-blue stars burned very fast, spun very fast, blew up very fast. Habitable planets were never to be found orbiting a violet, indigo, or blue star. A few million years was not time enough for matter to cool and for life to evolve around them. The biggest stars tended not to form planets at all. They spun so fast that they kept all their mass close to themselves rather than trailing some out in an orbital plane to form worlds. Metal ionized in the hellish internal furnace of a blue end star. Even helium, which holds onto its electrons more tightly than any other atom, ionized inside a violet star.

A supernova was a gargantuan star in its spectacular death throes. Supernovae scattered their newly created heavy elements far and wide.

The element-rich debris then coalesced into new stars.

Once upon a time, supernovae were common. These days, a supernova appeared once in a hundred years in the skies over Earth or Palatine.

Most habitable planets orbited second generation, middleweight stars—those stars which inherited the heavy elements ejected from the early supernovae.

In first generation stars any element heavier than iron was extremely scarce, including the precious metals of gold, silver, and platinum, as well as some elements that were extremely precious if you didn’t have them, like iodine and zinc.