The Unincorporated War (54 page)

Omad pretended to think about it. Going so far as to rub his chin and stare at the ceiling for a moment. “Well, since you asked so nicely.” He then made an outlandish, if not somewhat awkward, bow toward Christina. She couldn’t help but allow a laugh to escape her lips. Omad straightened up and moved toward her. “It’s good to hear you laugh, my beloved,” he said as they took each other’s hands. “I don’t get to hear it enough.”

She put her head on his shoulder, and whispered softly into his ear, “It must be my dour Erisian demeanor.”

The corners of Omad’s mouth curved up.

“When this war is over I swear I’ll get one laugh out of you a day … and three smiles.”

She led him to her small bed. “I sometimes think this war will never end.”

They lay down together, neither one of them taking off their uniform. “It will end, my Erisian flower,” Omad said softly, “and when it does we’ll get married, have a passel of kids, and move to Ceres.”

“Eris,” Christina said sleepily.

“We’ll discuss it later.”

“And …,” Christina said, knowing what he would promise, having heard it many times before, but wanting to hear it again.

“And …,” continued Omad, “we will never, ever put on one of these godforsaken uniforms again as long as we both shall live. We will never hear a shot fired in anger. We will never order anyone to battle, and we will know peace all the days of our lives.” When he heard no response he peeked down at her and saw that she was asleep. He smiled wearily and soon was asleep contentedly beside her, snuggled up on a bed made for one.

Ceres

The shuttle drifted off the Gedretar shipyard moorings, powered up, moved to the center of the Via Cereana, and then accelerated to the maximum allowable speed. It was in all ways an unremarkable vessel like thousands that could be seen in operation around the main Alliance fleet. But unlike those thousands of others this one, once free of its moorings, was immediately surrounded by four tactical fighters that proceeded to escort it to the
War Prize II,
flagship of the Alliance fleet.

The
War Prize II
was a substantially larger ship than her namesake, being part of a new design that had been rushed into production and practically thrown off the assembly line at the Jovian Shipyards. Like many ships, she had been fitted out as she flew to the battlefronts. This form of hyperefficient construction had been the brainchild of Omad and Kenji. The way it worked was once the hull had been completed and the heavy elements added—including propulsion, weapons, and fusion reactors—the ship was sent to the battlefronts trailed by ships, called flying gantries, ingeniously created to be mobile shipyards. These ships would then provide work crews who would spend the time in transit getting many of the vital but ancillary systems installed, aligned, and programmed; systems that didn’t really need for the ship to be immobile. The only drawback was that from time to time a ship could arrive at the front lacking certain amenities. In one of the more infamous incidents the AWS
Pickax
actually arrived from Gedretar at the Battle of Jupiter’s Eye without functioning toilets, the lack of which saddled an otherwise honorable and worthy ship with a rather unfortunate nickname. Within the gantry systems the same “buildup” ships could then escort damaged ships back to either the Gedretar shipworks or the Jovian Shipyards and begin repairs en route. It had taken most of a year to get the kinks worked out and get enough flying gantries to make the system effective, but the rise in ship production and repair had been off the charts.

The lone shuttle approached the new flagship, the first of a line of “supercruisers,” then slowly drifted into the main shuttle bay. The four escorts waited patiently for the shuttle to be swallowed up by the cruiser, then broke off and made their way over to a large spacecraft carrier, yet another naval innovation.

Inside the cavernous bay of the
War Prize II
over four hundred officers and crew were assembled in dress uniform. The shuttle came to a stop in front of a lone woman of average height also garbed in the dress uniform of the Alliance
fleet. Her lapels showed the insignia indicating the rank of lieutenant. As the shuttle door opened, all those assembled came to immediate and stiff attention.

J. D. Black looked over her new shuttle’s interior and had to admit she wasn’t too displeased. She’d been saddened by the destruction of
War Prize I,
a result, she felt, of her poor leadership. Her only solace had been that she’d been able to ram the listing vessel into the enemy’s flagship. The tactic had worked, though, in that it broke the enemy line and gave the rest of her fleet a chance to unleash enough unreturned main gun fire to force surrender. Her personal shuttle was one of the few things left from
War Prize I’
s brash assault, and she’d used it while moving her flag temporarily from one ship to the other. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been up-to-date enough to warrant a retrofit and inclusion within her new supercruiser. And so she now found herself eyeing the interior of her new one.

She thought back to her last encounter, now called the Battle of Jupiter’s Eye.

Admiral Tully had somehow managed to convince UHF fleet command to give him another chance. He must’ve had some amazing connections with the corporate world to still have that much pull after his first resounding defeat. But he’d sold them on what he’d promised would be his brilliant war-winning move. J.D. couldn’t fault the UHF for wanting to try something different. The war was bleeding them dry. They hadn’t been able to defeat the Alliance in any major battle for over a year and a half. What they had managed to do was fight to a draw. And that draw had been purposely and expertly managed by the Alliance. Rather than meet the UHF head-on in any open ship-to-ship fighting, the Alliance had seen fit to engage their enemy on more familiar territory. So the pitched battles were often in and around any asteroid the Alliance had decided to mount their assaults from. At this point the advantage had belonged to the side fighting for its survival within the familiar crevices, caves, and grottoes of their own territory. That series of battles over the year and half they’d so far waged had collectively come to be know as the Battles of the Dodge. But, thought J.D., the tide was beginning to turn as the UHF was slowly beginning to push out of Eros and edge its way ever nearer to Altamont. The fighting at the 180 had become the most constant and bloodiest of the war. Trang, to J.D.’s chagrin, had kept on attacking a vast area of the belt, taking and securing it one blasted settlement and rock at a time. It was slow and the UHF was paying a heavy price, but given the distance from the main centers of Alliance industry it was only a matter of months before that now-fabled settlement fell, and with it the heart of the Alliance. For with Altamont in the UHF’s hands the belt would effectively be cut in two.

Given the huge amount of losses the UHF had been suffering—the war had already cost over four million p.d.’s, and it was increasing almost exponentially
month by month—it had been easy for Tully to portray Trang as “the butcher of the belt” and proffer an alternative plan. J.D. also knew that Tully could not let his hated former subordinate get the attention and fame that he felt was due to him. So Tully had cajoled and sold his great stratagem and Fleet Command had bought in.

Fortunately, the Alliance had learned of Tully’s plans through surreptitious means. It seemed the admiral was planning nothing short of the conquest of Jupiter itself. It hadn’t been a bad plan, all things being equal. The UHF would wait for the Alliance to commit to some sector of the belt’s front and then skip over it rather than go straight through. The tactic was novel in that it bypassed the deadly ambushes that would have awaited them in the belt itself, but it was also pointless—why go around something you’re going to have to conquer anyway? But that hadn’t been the point. Tully wanted a grand victory, and seizing Jupiter was just such a victory. He could always go back later and take the pesky rocks one at a time. The big problem, however, was that by jumping over the belt without first securing all the rocks below and between, Tully would have a dangerously exposed position as well as a much-lengthened supply and retreat line if something was to go wrong. It was, thought J.D., the type of bold move the UHF should have done earlier in the war but had been afraid to. As it turned out, she’d justified their fears.

J.D. knew she’d need to draw Tully out, but in doing so she’d have to take a gamble. She’d have to send at least one hundred ships—masked to appear at least double that number—far enough away that they’d effectively be useless in the ensuing battle. She chose to have them shoot the core in a feint to make it look like they were going to attack either Luna or Earth. By losing the use of those hundred ships J.D. would have to rely on skill over numbers to secure a victory. Tully had bought the ruse and immediately left for Jupiter with a large contingent of the UHF fleet.

He’d read the comm traffic and indeed it seemed like he’d caught the Alliance by surprise. Shadow fleets of four to five ships scrambled, and Jupiter appeared to be in a panic as even more ships fled from one moon and settlement to another. J.D. had even let Tully destroy two half-finished warships from the Jovian Shipyards to make him believe he’d finally caught the Alliance unawares. J.D. wished she could’ve seen his face as he circled Jupiter and was not met by a helpless Jovian capital preparing for surrender but the Alliance fleet that had circled around from the opposite direction. The ensuing battle had been as nasty as any fought in the war so far.

J.D. still remembered every detail. The UHF had fought well, as well as her own spacers, in fact. If they’d been better led, they may have even achieved a draw, which given their location in the heart of the Alliance would have been a
disaster. But Tully had wanted J.D. too badly and, in an effort to get to her, put his ship out of line, forcing his tightly packed formation to follow suit. It would be the last command he’d ever give. J.D. saw the chink in his armor and gave the order. She rammed his flagship, putting hers out of commission, and so disrupted the UHF fleet that they never recovered. Jupiter’s gravity well offered no rapid escapes. With the flagship out, the battle turned into a slugging match. When it was over the bulk of the UHF fleet had been destroyed. Sadly, the enemy had fought so well that much of J.D.’s fleet had been too badly damaged to launch an immediate assault on Mars, which had been her ultimate plan. Still, so great was the loss in men and ships to the UHF that she’d believed it should have been enough to sue for peace. And if not for Samuel U. Trang it just might have been.

Trang had found her decoy raiding party and had not been fooled for a second as to its true size. So he set his own trap. Twenty merchant ships filled with enough uranium to keep the Alliance in the war for another dozen years. Guarded by a mere thirty warships, the merchant ships were too tempting a prize for Commodore Cordova to ignore. He should have known better, but he’d fallen under that most dangerous of spells: underestimating the enemy. Cordova fought hard and the warships protecting the merchant ships eventually succumbed to his relentless onslaught. They fled, leaving Cordova to proudly corral his prize—that is, until all twenty of the uranium ships blew up, taking twelve of Cordova’s ships with them. The explosion also managed to incapacitate dozens more. It was then that Trang’s most loyal and able officer, Captain Abhay Gupta, and forty UHF warships appeared from the other side of Mercury. They’d hidden their presence by using the sun’s interference and a new communications protocol that mimicked solar static. By the time Cordova’s replacement had been able to organize his remaining ships the battle was begun. Captain Lu should have ordered an immediate retreat, taken his losses, and run but felt the tide turning in his favor. Had he bothered to ask himself why someone who’d planned a battle so well would attack with so few ships perhaps he too would have lived. Lu hadn’t been aware of Trang’s twenty-five warships until they’d cut off his retreat.

Of the one hundred warships that J.D. sent, only seven managed to return. She’d lost Cordova, Lee, and Lu, all of whom died with their ships. The only solace she took was that she’d never have to worry about telling them apart again. It was a defeat on par with the loss of Eros, in some ways even worse, as it came at just the right time to mitigate the UHF defeat at Jupiter. That hadn’t been the biggest disaster for the Alliance, though. Trang was finally promoted to Grand Admiral and put in charge of all UHF forces. Even his most ardent foes could do nothing to deny the “hero of Mercury” and the “savior of the core” supreme command after that. Not that Hektor would have listened to them. J.D. had hoped Trang would try to do something flashy, like launch a premature
attack on Altamont or even try a foray out of Mars. At least if he did that she could encircle him while his forces were still recovering from the Jupiter fiasco. But Trang hadn’t done anything rash at all. And with his fleet so diminished it would have meant he’d need to rob Peter to pay Paul, or draw ships and experienced personnel from the 180, which he wasn’t about to do.

What Trang had done instead was send Gupta, newly re-promoted to admiral, back to Mars to outfit and train the new ships already replacing the losses at Jupiter, gambling that J.D. would not be in a position to attack anytime soon. Then Trang went back to the unglamorous, grinding, and thankless job of cutting the 180 in half. J.D. knew it was the correct course of action because it was exactly what she would’ve done in his place. Why give up the fruits of a two-year campaign and certain, if expensive, victory for the risks of battle on the other side of the belt?

So J.D. spent the months following the Jupiter victory getting her fleet ready for operations and was given, along with a brand-new ship, a brand-new shuttle she currently found herself being transported in. The shuttle had been made to her specifications, and even though she’d ordered nothing special beyond that which would’ve enhanced per for mance, the techs at Gedretar had purposely disobeyed. Her shuttle had a simulated polished wood interior with bathing facilities, sleeping accommodations, and an entertainment system worthy of GCI’s last real Chairman.