First Strike (43 page)

“They should get their heads out of their asses,” he muttered, as a line of rioters charged the police. Someone had been distributing weapons, probably one of the professional troublemakers who kept getting involved with peaceful protests and turning them into violent riots. “What the hell sort of good do they think that this is going to cause?”

The building rocked, slightly. “And what the hell was that?”

Betty checked her Ipad. “Security reports that some of the rioters just slammed against our doors,” she said. Ward had ordered them closed with the emergency shutters as soon as the riot had started to take shape. There was a fine line between reporting the news and becoming part of it. “They’re recommending that we evacuate the building, just in case.”

“Tell the crew that anyone who wants to go can go, if they use the tunnels,” Ward said, shortly. He hired brave journalists, men and women ready to put themselves into danger just for a scoop, but the editors and other supporting staff weren’t chosen for their bravery. “At least we moved operations to our country site.”

He looked down again and shook his head. The police had counterattacked, knocking the rioters down and securing their hands with plastic cuffs, pushing male and female protestors against the walls and forcing them to wait until they could be taken away. Most of the dangerous rioters scattered, intent on taking the fighting elsewhere. The police would normally have thrown up a cordon to catch them, but Ward had no idea if they had enough manpower to do it now that the entire city was on the verge of collapse. He caught sight of a pair of bodies wearing NYPD uniforms and shuddered. The young might talk of living without rules, but Ward was old enough to know that anarchy was never a good thing.

“Who needs the blasted Funks?” He demanded. “We’re perfectly capable of wrecking our own planet without them””

The television switched from a CNN update to another speech from the President. Ward rolled his eyes and changed the channel. The President wasn't the solution, not when he was part of the problem. People were scared and no amount of empty reassurance from politicians would change that. And no one had the moral stature to stand up and ask for calm, with the possible exception of Admiral Sampson. He could run for President based purely upon his war record and probably win in a landslide.

Assuming we have a next election campaign
, he thought. Even if the Funks didn't destroy the world, who knew what would happen after this week of anarchy?

And all the human race could do was wait for Judgement Day.

* * *

“We are approaching Earth, My Lady.”

Lady Dalsha opened her eyes and clambered out of the water bath in her quarters. Sleeping in water had once been an unimaginable luxury; even now, when they had access to the boundless resources of space, it was still regarded with awe. At one time, she would have considered it nothing more than her due. Now… she knew it was perhaps her last chance to experience luxury.

“Proceed as planned,” she ordered, as a force field flicked the water off her scales. “I will be on the bridge directly.”

Oddly, she found herself thinking of her hatchlings. All females were expected to contribute at least two clutches of eggs to her clan before going into danger, a tradition that dated back to the days where they’d struggled for water and resources. She'd never seen them since they’d been taken by the clan mothers, not knowingly. It was tradition. The clan came first, beyond any maternal instincts. And yet they would carry on her genes even if she lost the coming battle.

But what sort of universe would they inherit?

She put the thought aside as she donned her uniform and walked to the bridge. Everything had just become simple again. Either she would win, or she would die.

If the Hegemony had to fall, at least it would take the human race down with it.

“Admiral?”

Admiral Sun looked up from his desk, fighting back the urgent desire to yawn. He’d caught a couple of brief naps in-between reading reports and monitoring training simulations, but not enough to keep him from feeling sleepy. The doctors had given him a booster, adding strict warnings that he was not to even consider using it until the enemy actually arrived.

“Yes,” he said, “what is it?”

“Long-range sensors have detected quantum gates opening near Mars,” Wallenberg said. “CIC calls them Hegemony superdreadnought gates.”

“Understood,” Sun said. He pressed the tap against his bare arm and grimaced as it pumped the booster into his bloodstream. Users got nearly a day before they had to go to bed to sleep it off. A second dose was out of the question. “I'm on my way. Alert the fleet and dispatch a courier boat to Admiral Sampson.”

He glanced around his office, taking a final look at the wall he’d covered with medals and decorations from his career in both the PLAN and the Federation Navy, and then headed to the CIC. The booster was starting to work, leaving him feeling supercharged, as if he had eaten enough sugar to turn him into a hyperactive child. It was a shame that he couldn't feel so good permanently, but the doctors had made it quite clear; boosters were more addictive than even Joy Juice and breaking the addiction was almost impossible. Even an admiral couldn't order boosters without facing hard questions from the medical staff. He strode into the CIC, waving aside the Marine who was about to announce his presence, and took one look at the display. A handful of red icons clustered near Mars.

“Curious,” he said, aloud. CIC’s tactical staff had already started attempting to project the enemy’s intentions, yet their tactics made little sense. Even if the Funks intended to slip back into quantum space and reach Earth that way, the Federation Navy had already been alerted. Standard doctrine ordered starships to emerge as close to their target as possible, to minimise the time their enemies had to prepare their defences. “Tactical analysis?”

“Maybe they intend to blow up the Marine facilities at Olympus Mons,” Wallenberg suggested. “Or perhaps they intend to destroy Scarlet Base.”

“Or Robinson City,” Sun agreed. And yet that didn’t quite make sense either. None of humanity’s facilities on Mars were in any way
 
vital
, certainly not compared to the Luna Yards or Island One. There might have been a few million humans on Mars slowly turning the planet into a decent place to live, but why bother to target them…

…Unless the Funks aimed at total extermination. The thought made him shiver, despite what the sociologists had claimed time and time again. They pointed to Funk history and asserted that the Funks didn't destroy their enemies; they merely assimilated them into the victorious clan. But that hadn't worked out too well for the Gobbles, or anyone else unlucky enough to fall into their claws. Multiracial breeding was just as impossible for the Funks as for any other race, limiting how far outsiders could blend into the victorious Hegemony.

Not for the first time, he found himself cursing the limitations of active and passive sensors. Opening a quantum gate generated a pulse that travelled faster than light, but all other sensors were restricted to light-speed. The Funks could be bombarding Mars now and Earth wouldn't know about it for several minutes. Mars would send an update as soon as possible, yet even if Mars
 
was
 
under attack the Federation Navy couldn't move out of position to cover the red planet, not when Earth was threatened. The separatists on Mars would make vast amounts of political capital out of it.

“Earth has issued a warning,” Wallenberg said, a minute later. “All emergency procedures are going into effect.”

“Keep the Federation Council informed, but don’t give them an open channel,” Sun ordered. There was no point in the Council issuing orders, not now, but few politicians would realise that. Maybe it would cost him his career… if, of course, enough humans remained alive afterwards for him to be put in front of a court-martial board. “Inform me if anything on Earth requires my attention.”

It shouldn't, he knew. All civilian aircraft would have been ordered to the nearest airport, regardless of who they were or where they were going. The shelters, such as they were, would be taking people in, while others headed for basements or homes in the countryside. Everyone had been advised to prepare for several days without food or drink, causing a rush on supermarkets and drugstores. The results were chaotic, but assuming Earth survived, they should be tolerable. He’d had plenty of time to ensure that the Federation Navy’s entire complement of personnel – including reserves – were called up for duty. Down on Earth, national formations would be taking up their own defensive positions, or hiding in the countryside to launch an insurgency against alien occupiers. Sun knew he wouldn't live to see the insurgency. One way or another, he had no intention of surrendering his command to the Funks.

“Update,” the sensor officer snapped. “Enemy fleet is moving towards Earth.”

Sun frowned as the display updated. The Funks seemed to have chosen to ignore Mars completely, yet why had they decided to come out so far from Earth? Unless...they
 
wanted
 
the human defenders concentrated? Did they have some new superweapon? The Funks might have been very bad at basic research – ONI estimated that they had only a handful of really competent scientists – but they might have bought something from one of the other Galactics. Some societies were far better at keeping secrets from the human race than the Funks.

“Order Commodore Yu to prepare to engage,” Sun ordered. The Hegemony force bearing down on Earth was too powerful for him to stop if he played by the rules, at least as the Galactics understood them. But he had other ideas. Humanity had had plenty of time to think of nasty tricks, some of them coming from science-fiction writers who had been thinking about space warfare long before Earth had started to build a fleet to defend the planet. “And send in the gunboats as soon as Yu deploys. We need to keep him covered as long as possible.”

* * *

The planet the humans called Mars was worthless, at least to the Hegemony. Apart from establishing a tiny observation post on the planet hundreds of years ago, the Association had largely agreed. There were plenty of habitable worlds without intelligent races in the galaxy to settle, so why bother colonising Mars? The human terraforming project had been viewed as a sign of weakness by the Hegemony, an admission that humanity didn't have the nerve or the strength to establish itself as a galactic power. Lady Dalsha wondered, instead, if it was a sign of something else, a grasping nature that rivalled the Hegemony. How many worlds could the humans have claimed by now if the galaxy had been largely unpopulated?

She pushed the thought aside as her fleet shook down into battle formation. Two of her subordinates had revealed their nervousness by questioning her orders. Thankfully, they’d had the sense to do it privately, saving her the need to assert herself by having them both killed. The humans seemed to promote their officers based on merit rather than political connections; indeed, they seemed to
 
disapprove
 
of nepotism. Lady Dalsha found it difficult to grasp why human clans weren't expected to boost their members where possible, but she had to admit that it worked out for them. Squashing potential rivals from other clans might not have been the best strategy since the Hegemony had been invited into the stars. But that was something they hadn’t been able to change.

It was tempting to send a message back to the Empress and learn what was happening on Hegemony Prime, but she’d forbidden all communications. The civil war was probably underway by now, with the Navy fragmenting along clan lines and Household troops fighting for dominance. It was quite possible that the Empress was dead. Not knowing was agony, yet if she had known… what could she do about it? Nothing, save ensuring that the human race was in no condition to take advantage of the coming power vacuum. Revenge was all they had left right now.

“Take us towards Earth,” she ordered, flatly. Coming out near Mars flew in the face of tactical doctrine, but it made it harder for the humans to surprise her. And perhaps her tactics would confuse and worry them. Humans had more imagination than most of her kind, so maybe they’d imagine all kinds of superweapons she didn’t possess. Another lesson from the clan wars prior to the First Empress was that care, deliberation and an unflinching refusal to allow herself to be bullied into making mistakes could keep even a weaker force from being trapped and forced into surrender. “Launch recon probes on a constant transmission loop.”

No one questioned the order, even though it too flew in the face of tactical doctrine. Recon drones were stealthy, but not stealthy enough to escape sensors. Some reports suggested that human sensors were considerably better than Galactic designs, probably allowing them to track the drones easily. There was nothing to be gained by ordering the drones to remain silent if they could be detected and picked off before they could transmit.

Slowly, as the fleet crawled the distance between Mars and Earth, data started to flow into the tactical network. The human fleet didn't seem to be anything like as powerful as the fleet that had struck fear into the heart of the Hegemony, although she had to caution herself not to take anything for granted. A freighter armed with the cursed human phase cannon could probably inflict some damage on a superdreadnought before it was destroyed. Five cruisers, a design she had learned to hate, led the human fleet, but the remainder were all old model ships from the Association. The largest of them was a battlecruiser that looked to be over five hundred years old. It didn't seem as if its drive had ever been replaced, let alone updated.

“Tactical analysis suggests that the older ships are operating on minimal crews,” one of the tactical officers said. He was unusually imaginative for a male, channelling the natural competitive instincts of the male mind into his struggles to understand what the humans had created. “They must not have the manpower to crew them properly.”

Lady Dalsha hadn’t put any faith in what Hegemony Intelligence had been reporting about human development since they’d smashed her squadron at Terra Nova, but even they had to have limits. Training up personnel for their crews took time, perhaps longer than they had had before kicking off the war. Galactic starships might be largely standardized, thanks to the Cats, yet each ship had its differences. The Hegemony had had its own problems when it had been restricted to purchasing starships from other powers.

“So it would seem,” she agreed. A battlecruiser required upwards of a thousand humanoids to crew it properly. The Cats, for reasons no one understood, had placed limits on the development of automated systems for starships, even though they would have saved manpower considerably. Not that it really mattered. Fifteen superdreadnoughts could crush even the human fleet waiting for them.

“Incoming ships,” the tactical officer said, suddenly. “I’m picking up… seven freighters, Type-56 medium transports.”

The human squadron seemed to be racing directly towards them, which was nothing more than suicide. Or so it seemed. The humans had taken out an entire command fortress with a starship crammed with antimatter. Why wouldn't they try to repeat their feat against a fleet of superdreadnoughts? But the freighters didn't seem to mount military-grade shielding. They’d be blown to dust long before they got into ramming position. Unless the humans had invented a way to compress even more antimatter into a freighter…

“Order the destroyer screen to intercept,” she ordered. Splitting her fleet was yet another tactical innovation, but nine destroyers didn't represent a significant part of her combat power. And if the freighters
 
were
 
loaded with antimatter, sacrificing the destroyers would be an acceptable trade. “And then slow the main body of the fleet. Force them to come to us.”

The minutes ticked away until the display changed rapidly as the human formation separated into two groups. Thirty gunboats appeared, as if from nowhere, and lanced forwards towards the destroyers, while the freighters they were covering turned and ran back towards Earth, trying to hide from the wrath of her superdreadnoughts. They’d taken the gunboats into battle intending to launch them close to her fleet! The freighters had to be another form of gunboat carrier, just like the one that had hammered Garston and sneaked up to Hegemony Prime. Of course the humans would have more than one design suitable for carrying the accursed little craft.

But without their carriers, the gunboats would rapidly run out of life support and their pilots would expire.

“Increase speed,” she ordered. The freighters didn't seem to have military-grade drives either. Her superdreadnoughts could run them down before they reached the shelter of Earth and the Federation Navy. “I want those freighters destroyed the moment we enter range.”

The gunboats were savaging her destroyers, despite the best efforts of their crews. Destroyers carried plenty of point defence weapons, but their hulls couldn't take a constant bombardment from implosion bolts without being rapidly overwhelmed and destroyed. Her fleet closed into range, firing on the gunboats in the hopes of picking them off, yet the gunboats merely turned and fled back towards Earth. Hegemony Intelligence claimed that one of their best sources on Earth had said that there were over five
 
hundred
 
gunboats assigned to the defence of Earth, but she knew that they were wrong. So many gunboats could have destroyed the entire Hegemony Navy.