First Strike (45 page)

The Funk fleet was slowly wearing down his own, even though three superdreadnoughts had been destroyed outright and a further four badly damaged. They’d been quick to realise the advantage they had over the ships humanity had bought from the Galactics, targeting them before Sun could realise that they were refusing to be tempted by his cruisers. Two of the would-be suicide ships had gone up in staggering explosions; a third had managed to ram a battlecruiser, vaporising both ships in a spectacular blast. Most of the modified freighters were gone, while humanity’s sole battlecruiser had been targeted and blown apart by a pair of Funk superdreadnoughts. The Earth Defence Force was slowly being worn down.

Pompey
 
twitched as she unleashed a spread of antimatter torpedoes. The enhanced torpedoes were about the only weapon the Funks couldn't counter directly and the human cruisers were firing them without worrying about ammunition stockpiles. There would be no time to return to Earth and rearm before the Funks managed to get into weapons range of Earth, although that hadn't stopped them from bombarding the planet already. A Funk superdreadnought staggered out of line as the torpedoes impacted directly on its shields, overloading and burning out the generators. One of his surviving cruisers took the opportunity to launch its own spread and vaporise the superdreadnought before it could escape, just before its two comrades bracketed the cruiser with their phase cannon. She twisted and turned, but she was unable to escape before her shields failed and the phase cannon ripped into her hull.

“
Drake
 
has been destroyed,” Wallenberg reported. By now, they were inured to losses. He could feel it in his crew, the cold awareness that they would not leave the battlefield alive twinned with the determination to kill as many Funks as they could before their ship was destroyed. A Funk heavy cruiser tried to intercept
 
Pompey
, only to be savaged by the cruiser’s phase cannon and left drifting out of formation. The smaller ships couldn't take anything like the punishment of the larger ones, but there was no time to complete its destruction. All that mattered was killing the superdreadnoughts.

The Funks kept firing, ignoring their losses and forcing him to stand and fight. His fleet was being torn apart, the last of the converted ships meeting a fiery end as it tried to ram a heavy cruiser. Another human-designed cruiser crashed into a superdreadnought and both ships blew apart in a sheet of fire; it was impossible to tell if one of the ships had rammed the other intentionally or if it had merely been an accident. Two cruisers left...

And his family were dead.

“Take us in to point-blank range,” he ordered, savagely. No-one demurred. “Right down their fucking throats.”

* * *

She was winning.

She
 
had
 
to be winning, even though it was shaping up to be the most costly victory in the Hegemony’s long history. No clan would have continued a war knowing that the only outcome was certain defeat and annihilation. Any of the lesser races would have despaired of victory and lost themselves in defeatism, but the humans kept fighting. Ships that shouldn't have had any place in the line of battle were lashing out, hacking away at her forces and weakening them piece by piece. Already, her superdreadnought losses had exceeded what she’d thought were her most pessimistic estimates. At this rate, only a handful of ships would be left when she finally managed to range in on Earth itself.

And then the human race would understand the true nature of power. Her superdreadnoughts could blow the entire planet into fragments – and they would, followed rapidly by the rest of the inhabited planets in this star system. And then they would attend to the remaining human colonies. The Tarn had started to invite humans to settle in their systems – no doubt hoping to tap human inventiveness for themselves – but they’d surrender the refugees once they realised they were facing a rogue fleet that no longer cared about the consequences of its actions. There were tales from the homeworld about warriors who had fought hopeless wars, terrifying their victims and even their own clans. They hadn't cared about the survival of their own people, only about how much damage they could do before they died.

The two remaining human ships were forming up for a final attack run. They would damage her fleet, perhaps even take two more superdreadnoughts into death with them, but that was acceptable. They’d be burned out of space before they could escape again. And Earth’s defences would be unable to stop missiles hurled into a planetary gravity well...

She watched, flexing her claws, as the human ships closed in. One staggered under a fusillade of phase cannon bursts, but kept going until it finally blew into a sheet of flame. The other held out for longer, closing in on a superdreadnought that had been barely scratched by the fighting until it rammed straight into its target. No ship could survive such an impact.

But the way to Earth was clear.

“Advance,” she ordered. No more human tricks would stop her. “Prepare to…”

“Quantum gates,” the sensor officer snapped. “Opening up right on top of us!”

They had messed up the timing.

Not disastrously, Sampson realised, as
 
Nimitz
 
blew her way into open space, but quite bad enough. Opening a quantum gate at a precise predetermined location was tricky – and First Strike Fleet had taken too long to fix its location and open the gate. Reports from the stealthed platforms deployed by Earth’s defenders made the picture far too clear. Admiral Sun and the Earth Defence Force had been destroyed by the enemy.

And Earth had been bombarded. Not by antimatter weapons, thankfully, but even nuclear-tipped missiles could kill untold numbers of humans. The reports scrolled up in front of him, an endless liturgy of death and destruction caused by the Funks. Was there no end to the atrocities they were prepared to commit against those less powerful than themselves? Did they have nothing reassembling common decency? Of course they didn't, he reproved himself angrily. They were aliens. Human concepts were
 
human
 
concepts, not always shared by races that had had a very different evolutionary history.

“Take us into weapons range,” he said. He barely recognised his own voice. “Prepare to engage the enemy.”

The Funks had been battered, with half of their superdreadnoughts and most of their smaller ships destroyed, but they were still fighting. Tobias would have expected a rational enemy to retreat once they realised that human reinforcements had arrived, yet the Funks might well believe that they had nowhere to go. The last reports from Hegemony Prime had informed him that the civil war was well underway. Who would have time for the Empress’s last loyalists if she was blamed for the destruction caused by the war?

And if a force that consisted of five advanced cruisers and a hundred outdated starships could hold the line, the Funks were going to hate what
 
twenty
 
advanced cruisers could do.

“Weapons online,” the tactical officer ordered. “Entering range in twenty seconds.”

“Take us right down their throats,” Tobias ordered. “All ships; target the superdreadnoughts and fire at will.”

Four squadrons of gunboats launched from the carriers as the Federation Navy closed in on its foes. Tobias thought he saw a new determination among his people, a determination that far exceeded the lust for revenge after the Funks had bullied Earth into surrendering Terra Nova. It was almost as if they sensed that this was the final battle, fighting to stop the Hegemony’s last desperate attempt to prevent the human race from surviving the war and taking its place on the galactic stage. There had been no official announcement of the strikes on Earth, but rumours would have probably already spread through the fleet. His people wanted revenge – and more.

Back at the start, the planners had worried that the Federation Navy would be torn apart by political infighting. Tobias had shared that fear; indeed, the semi-autonomy enjoyed by the Navy had been devised in the hopes of preventing political fragmentation. But now there was something new, a naval identity that had been forged in the heat of combat. The Federation Navy was an entity now, a service that wouldn't be broken so easily. Earth’s defenders had more than proved themselves against Earth’s most dangerous foe.

Nimitz
 
opened fire, her weapons slashing out and tearing into an enemy hull. The Funks didn't seem to be able to reinforce their shield harmonics, at least not any longer. Admiral Sun had damaged almost all of their ships, according to the downloads; the tactical computers were already noting weaknesses that would normally be spotted only during the post-battle analysis phase. It was quite possible that most of the superdreadnoughts had lost some of their shield generators while facing Admiral Sun, or that their jury-rigged modifications had simply failed in the heat of battle. No-one had even thought of the need to produce two separate shields until the human race had invented weapons that could shoot through a single shield.

And when they duplicate our weapons, they’ll discover that they won’t shoot through our shields
, he thought, wryly. Even if the Funks couldn't perform R&D themselves, one of the other Galactics would probably manage to duplicate the weapons once they knew they existed. But humanity would have an edge. Some of the weapons proposed by the Next Generation Weapons project were truly frightening. One of them held the promise of being able to dissemble a superdreadnought with a single shot, if it ever proved practical.

The starship shuddered as she unleashed a spread of antimatter torpedoes. Their target fired back, phase cannon sweeping through space as she tried to target the cruiser, the enemy crew no doubt cursing their failing sensor network. Admiral Sun had shown them that human ships could break their weapons locks, but even though there was a simple countermeasure the Funks had yet to deploy it. They’d probably needed time to reflect before working it out and Tobias hadn't given them any more time than necessary.

“Five direct hits,” one of the weapons officers announced. Intercepting an antimatter torpedo before it struck home was difficult, but the Funks had managed to take out two of them. Their crews had suddenly become very motivated. “Target shields down; firing again…”

An antimatter torpedo flashed into a gaping wound on the superdreadnought’s hull and detonated inside the vessel. For a long moment, Tobias could see the ship’s superstructure glowing brightly as the force of the explosion tore through the weaker internal structure, just before it all came apart in a blinding flash. The metal the Cats had invented to build their starships was
 
strong
. No wonder everyone worried about a ship ramming a planet. It would survive the trip through the atmosphere and hit the ground with a force of an asteroid strike.

“Target destroyed,” the same tactical officer reported. “Gunboats covering us against enemy escort ships.”

Tobias pulled his attention away from
 
Nimitz
 
– her Captain would handle her part of the fighting – and looked at the overall picture. The Federation Navy was tearing its opponents apart, its crews fuelled by rage and hatred over what had happened to Earth. One of the Funk destroyers managed to ram a cruiser, taking out both ships, just before three more were picked off by antimatter torpedoes. He tapped his console and issued orders for the cruisers to keep their distance from the smaller enemy ships. There was no point in allowing the Funks a chance to ram more ships if it could be avoided.

Another Funk superdreadnought died, leaving six – all badly damaged. The enemy seemed to have halted completely, laagering up into a formation that might have provided some protection against another fleet of superdreadnoughts. They spat fire toward their human tormentors, covering each other from human fire, but they were being slowly worn down. And each lost superdreadnought weakened the entire fleet’s defences…

“Continue firing,” he ordered. It crossed his mind that he should offer the Funks a chance to surrender, but in truth he didn't want to give them a chance, not after what they had done to Earth. They might claim that humanity had started the war – and they had – yet the Federation Navy had never bombarded innocent civilians. “Designate targets for battlegroups and engage.”

Nimitz
 
wheeled in space – a manoeuvre that no other comparable starship design would have found possible – and lunged towards the enemy fleet. The Funks turned slowly to meet the human ships, another tactic that would have worked against superdreadnoughts, but worse than useless against the fast cruisers.
 
Nimitz
 
could get into firing position easily before they could even complete their turn.

Tobias smiled coldly as
 
Nimitz
 
opened fire. One way or another, it would all be over soon.

* * *

Lady Dalsha stared at the display, unable to believe how rapidly she’d gone from victory to defeat. And she had been defeated. There was no hope of even managing to destroy Earth before her fleet was overwhelmed and destroyed. The first human fleet had inflicted enough damage to ensure that the second could destroy her, damage she’d accepted because she’d believed that once she’d crushed the first fleet, Earth would be easy to destroy. How had the humans done it? Coordinating an attack across interstellar space was incredibly difficult, even with tachyon-burst communicators. Had they invented some advanced form of FTL transmitter, or had the Clarke raid – intended as a diversion – brought back their strike fleet from Hegemony territory?

Or had it all been chance?

Humans worshipped an entity they saw as a big man in the sky. The Hegemony had no such concept. Their early evolutionary history had left them focused on bare survival, rather than the fripperies that were embraced by races that had evolved on kinder planets; they
 
knew
 
that the universe didn’t care about them on any level. And yet it was easy to believe that someone had orchestrated events from the shadows, planning the Hegemony’s defeat for years before starting the first conflict. The Cats, perhaps. They were old, with a lifespan that allowed them to plan for centuries beyond any other race – and perhaps they weren't truly blind to the threat the Hegemony represented. And a rogue Cat had given the humans the keys to the stars. Had Mentor really been a rogue?

The superdreadnought rocked again as a spread of antimatter torpedoes impacted on her rear shields. Lady Dalsha cursed the humans and their inventiveness as alarms buzzed and damage control teams raced to the overloading shield generators. Even superdreadnoughts couldn't stand up to antimatter warheads detonating against unshielded hulls. If the shields went, her fleet – all that remained of her fleet – was doomed. And they were doomed if they stayed in the Sol System. They couldn't even inflict enough losses on their enemies to make up for losing the superdreadnoughts.

“Target missiles on Earth,” she ordered. This time, the missiles
 
would
 
go ballistic and be easy to destroy, but it would win them some time. The humans wouldn't allow the missiles to hit their homeworld, not if there was anything they could do to prevent it. “And then bring up the quantum drive.”

She wanted to close her eyes, to blot out the display. Her failure was unmatched, even in the days before the Hegemony had been created. An entire fleet lost in battle, without significantly weakening the enemy. The Empress was almost certainly dead by now – and if she wasn't, she would be when news of this battle reached Hegemony Prime. There was never any shortage of ambitious females who wanted to make themselves Empress.

And all she could do was run.

* * *

“Admiral,” Sooraya said, “the Funks are targeting Earth.”

Tobias swore as new red icons glinted to life on the display, boosting toward Earth. Some of them would have antimatter warheads – and just one hit would be enough to kill eight
 
billion
 
humans. Those lucky enough to be on the far side of the planet might just survive a few months before they ran out of food and water. The Funks had presented him with a choice, which was really no choice at all; kill the superdreadnoughts and watch Earth die, or save Earth and give the superdreadnoughts a few moments to recover.

“Intercept course,” he ordered. There really was no choice. “I want all of those missiles taken out before they reach Earth.”

The gunboats, the only craft capable of matching speed with the missiles, raced after them, firing as soon as they had targeting solutions.
 
Nimitz
 
and the rest of the fleet followed, trying to pick off missiles that had lost their drives and gone onto ballistic trajectories. Earth’s defences, thankfully, hadn't come under direct fire from the Funks and could intercept some of the missiles for themselves. But
 
Nimitz
 
couldn't take chances. They had to intercept every missile before they lost track of them completely. An antimatter warhead floating around near Earth was System Command’s greatest nightmare.

Now I know how the Funks felt when we mined Hammerfall
, he thought. But those mines would never have survived a brush with the planet’s atmosphere.
 
Poor bastards
.

“Admiral,” one of the sensor officers said, “I am picking up quantum gate energies emanating from the Funk superdreadnoughts.”

“They’re running,” Sooraya said. She looked over at Tobias. “We could use the IDG system. This
 
is
 
what we invented it to do.”

Tobias hesitated. The IDG projector had been designed as a last-ditch weapon – except it wasn’t actually a weapon. And yet it had its limitations. One of them was that it would force the Funks to stand and fight, alarmingly close to Earth. Underlining his concerns, the Funks chose that moment to belch another salvo of missiles towards the planet. At least this time the fleet was in position to intercept them without having to race to position themselves between the planet and the oncoming storm.

But six superdreadnoughts could cause far too much havoc throughout the galaxy if the Hegemony came apart completely...

“Activate it,” he said. The projector wouldn't be too difficult for the Galactics to figure out, once they realised what it did. They’d known the basic principle for upwards of thirty thousand years. Indeed, no one had been quite sure why the Cats hadn't built one for themselves. Maybe they’d felt that it was better left in the realm of theory than risk someone who disliked them building one. “But keep targeting the missiles first.”