Judgment day, p.8
Judgment Day, page 8
part #2 of Holy War Series
Johann sighed and handed the gun over to Filip. He was reluctant to let it go. It hadn’t been much, but it was some measure of security.
“Keep it safe,” he told the man, then followed Dak and Daniella out into the street.
It was surreal. Gennich had been a quiet place, the very image of a frontier town before the invasion. Now, it was a prison. Tahni soldiers patrolled every street, lumbering in their powered armor, scanning each building, each human who passed. Johann felt naked beneath their gaze, as if their sensors could see through to his soul, his thoughts.
He did not, he decided, miss the gun anymore. If it would have been inadequate against unarmored Tahni, it would have been as effective as a spitball on the powered armor of the line soldiers.
The only positive thing he could think of as they paced down the subdued, restrained streets was that the Tahni had cleared away the wreckage. It had seemed to him when he’d left the city on foot weeks and weeks ago that half the town had either been crushed or on fire, but the scar tissue of the invasion was a series of empty lots and bare foundations now.
Did the Tahni just hate disorder, or was this psychological, designed to keep them in line through a demonstration of the enemy’s power to make all the signs of their resistance disappear?
“I hate this shit,” Daniella hissed beside his ear. She smelled of sweat and dust…or maybe that was him. “Feel like a fucking bug on a plate.”
He agreed but said nothing. Dak had told him that feeding fear was like giving blood to a mosquito. It didn’t just make the fear bigger, it let it reproduce.
“Here,” Dak said, sooner than Johann would have thought. He motioned to the left, to a row of townhouses two streets over from where the constable’s station had been.
Johann recognized the buildings. They were the homes of the city controller, the colonial governor, the Corporate Council local rep…the important people.
“Who lived here?” Johann asked him as he followed Dak up the steps to the front door.
“I did,” Dak told him, knocking quickly before he pushed the door open and stepped through.
A figure darted out of the shadows of the entrance hallway and slammed into Dak, nearly knocking him over. Johann darted to the side, reaching for the utility knife on his belt, but then he realized that the figure was a woman and she’d thrown herself into Dak’s arms. The tall man kissed her passionately and resentment stung Johann, guilt hard on its heels.
“Thank God you’re okay,” the auburn-haired woman told Dak. She was pretty, though she shared some of the weathered and roughened feel of Dak’s own features.
“Hannah, this is Johann and Daniella.” Dak made the introductions as he pushed the two of them through the doorway and shut it behind them.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Hannah said, though the words seemed more rote manners than any honest good feeling. Truth be told, this Hannah didn’t appear happy about much beyond seeing her husband again. “Things are getting tighter here, Dak. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s in the air. People are getting nervous.”
“Will they see us in here?” Johann wondered, peeking out the shades, checking up and down the street. “Are they monitoring the houses? Will they know there are more people in here today than yesterday?”
Her laugh was sharp and humorless.
“The Tahni are ruthless bastards, but they aren’t much for internal security. If I had to guess, I’d say they don’t have much in the way of organized crime or espionage where they come from. They don’t seem to be big on surveillance and they must have shit for police.”
“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth,” Dak said, slipping an arm around her waist. “We’re not just here to check up, Hannah. We’ve received a coded message through the gate.”
“The hell you say.” Hannah stared at him, eyes narrowing, as if she’d been without hope so long she didn’t want to grasp at this sliver of it.
“They’re coming. Soon. And if we don’t find a way to evacuate this town, there’s going to be a shitload of civilians killed.”
She pulled away from Dak, shaking her head, arms wrapping around herself. Johann glanced around, noticing the furnishings of the house for the first time. It was spare, almost Spartan, a residence but not a home. Johann guessed that the rancher had only used the townhouse as a place to lay his head down while he was in town for business.
“The Tahni may not be efficient at security,” Hannah said bleakly, “but they’re pretty damned focused on one thing: keeping people inside the city limits. There are somewhere upwards of ten thousand people here who couldn’t get out during the invasion…the ones who survived. They want us as shields against just what you’re talking about and they’re not going to let us go. We can sneak a few people out at a time, but there’s no way to evacuate any larger groups, not covertly.”
“Not covertly,” Johann repeated. “What other choice do we have?”
Dak had the answer, without hesitation. He’d already decided, Johann figured, and had just held the decision back from them in case they were captured.
“We have to smuggle people into town,” he told them. “We have the weapons cached here. We just need to bring fighters in to use them.”
“To use them for what?” Daniella asked, seeming as dumbfounded by the revelation as Johann felt.
“The Marines are coming in from the spaceport side. We’re going to blast our way out the other side of town and evacuate everyone we can, get them out of town and to the shelter of the canyon, away from the fighting.”
“How?” Johann demanded. “On foot? They’ve confiscated all the vehicles except the trucks coming in from the farms.”
“The Tahni seized the vehicles,” Hannah agreed, eyeing Dak knowingly, as if she’d guessed his plan already, “but they’ve been kind enough to store them all in one place, on the athletic field outside the school. It’s fenced in, but the gates are mostly to keep out the deer and elk. If the guards are drawn away by the fighting, it shouldn’t be too hard to get to them.”
“Your people will have to get the civilians to the school,” Dak told her, “and drive them out. Our fighters will clear the way and blast the gates.”
“What about the emergency shelter under the municipal building?” Johann suggested, snapping his fingers and pointing back toward the center of town. “It might be safer to try to get as many civilians as we can down there and just seal it up. There’s no way they could break through the emergency seal.”
“No, there isn’t,” Hannah agreed. “And the Tahni know it too, which is why they’ve made the shelter their emergency fallback position. The whole place is surrounded by defenses, packed with troops. It would be a nightmare to take even if we had the troops and the equipment to do it, which we don’t.”
“This whole thing is going to take some dead-ass timing,” Johann grumbled, trying to imagine it. They had to wait until the landings started to start taking people out….
“It is,” Dak agreed. “And no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. But we have to improvise, adapt, and overcome.”
“You were in the military,” Johann said. “You told me that much. But when did you ever see a battle?” There hadn’t been more than a few brushfire skirmishes since before he was born.
“I was in the United States Army, son,” Dak told him, “back when there was a United States…and an Army. And I saw combat in the Sino-Russian War.”
Johann stared at him, unable to speak. That had been a century ago.
“How old are you?”
Dak Shepherd grinned.
“Old enough to know better. Young enough to do it anyway.”
Chapter 6
Travis Miller was balanced on the tip of a spear, waiting for God to wind up and throw it.
At least that was how it felt, standing on the bridge of the Herculean with the rest of the fleet poised behind him, the massive metal defense platforms arrayed ahead of him and the gate station holding the wormhole open with a fusion-fed laser. It all seemed frozen in place, as if they could stand and watch and wait until the heat death of the universe, but that was as much of an illusion as the roiling whirlpool of the tactical display’s simulation of the jumpgate. In reality, it would be invisible until they were right on top of it, and rather than being suspended motionless, they were accelerating towards it at one gravity.
The gate, and their destiny beyond it, were racing to meet them.
“I wonder,” Patrice Damiani said, her footsteps so soft on the deck as she came up behind him that he wondered if she’d ever been a dancer. Or an assassin. “Do you think the Tahni have as much on the other end of the gate as we do on this side?”
“They don’t.” He sounded so much more confident than he felt. “We’ve sent probes through into every system they’re holding. More into Aphrodite to keep their attention there, but enough here at Brigantia. Most are destroyed in minutes, but they last long enough to get signals back through. Aphrodite is packed with as much as they could ship through in the last two months, but here…a single defense platform. Crewed by live Tahni, since they don’t believe in automated weapons. Plus, regular patrols of their corvettes. That’s what we’re calling them anyway,” he added when he noticed her look of incomprehension. “They’re about a quarter the size of their destroyers, capable of interplanetary flight, but they’d have trouble making it through more than two gate connections without refueling. They’re more defensive weapons, shipped into a system and left there.” He shrugged. “They’ll still be a problem, of course. And we’ve seen from two to three destroyers in-system at times, though that could change if they’re shifted through the jumpgates.”
“I can’t understand why they haven’t already reinforced it more,” Olivia Rousseau said from her Tactical station. Other captains, Travis thought, might have scolded one of their bridge officers for woolgathering at a time like this, but the comment showed thoughtfulness, and it was in his interest to encourage the trait in someone who might have to take over for him in an emergency. He was about to answer when Damiani surprised him by doing it first.
“Logistics, Commander Rousseau,” she said. She smiled thinly. “My specialty. There are many more jumpgate transitions between Brigantia and the Tahni systems than there are between them and Aphrodite. That means more fuel requirements, and until they build fuel refinement facilities at the gas giants in the intervening systems, that means they have to bring all that fuel with them. Which means huge, ungainly, vulnerable freighters making multiple runs back to their home systems. To build refineries in all those systems, or to build enough cargo ships to haul fuel all that way to every one of the occupied worlds would take a population in the hundreds of billions. Which we already know they don’t have.”
“They’re stretched too thin,” Travis cut in, not wanting Rousseau to think he didn’t know anything about the subject. “And we’re going to make them pay for it.”
“Thank you for agreeing to let me observe from the bridge, Captain,” Patrice told him, putting a hand on his arm. He could feel the warmth of it through the fabric of his uniform, through the skinsuit beneath, and he resisted an urge to pull away.
I don’t recall being given a choice.
“It’s as safe a place as anywhere on the ship,” he said, noncommittally, turning back toward the main viewscreen to hide the irresistible scowl tugging at the corners of his mouth.
Her being here bugged him and he couldn’t clearly define why. Maybe it was just the sense that someone was looking over his shoulder, but he was used to that. It could have been that she was a civilian and didn’t belong on the bridge of a military vessel in combat, and he was ready to just accept that idea and move on, but he knew it wasn’t the truth. It was her. Not what she represented, but her. She exuded an air of command, of being in charge of whatever situation she walked into, much like Admiral Worthington, and it bothered him here, on his bridge, where he’d been the captain for so many years now.
“Why don’t they?” Rousseau asked, and Travis frowned at the non sequitur. “Why don’t they have a population that large?” she clarified. Commander Rousseau reminded him of his sister in many ways, although Travis had never been able to get away with giving Franny any orders. But they were both intelligent, no-nonsense women, and Travis wouldn’t have wanted to take on either of them in a boxing ring. “I mean, the Intelligence reports say they’ve had a unified government for a thousand years, and the males are pretty much always horny. Why wouldn’t they just keep reproducing and fill up all those worlds they seem to think are theirs? They should have been knocking on our door instead of us knocking on theirs, right?”
“That would be the result of their family structure and religious foundations.” Travis turned toward the unexpected voice. It had come from the entrance to the bridge, from a slender, petite young officer with flaming red hair that offset her black Fleet Intelligence uniform.
“Major Barger,” Travis said, nodding. “I didn’t know you’d be joining us on the bridge.”
“How often would I get the chance for a firsthand view of history being made?” the younger woman asked, smiling with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. “We’re about to attempt the very first jumpgate transition into an occupied system.”
“Yeah, how exciting,” Meyer said softly from the Helm station, not trying to conceal his sarcasm.
“Anyway, to answer your question, Commander Rousseau,” Shannon Barger went on, “the Tahni apparently went through a long period of repeated cycles of savagery brought on by their biology until their first emperor finally figured out they needed to find a way to control their urges. Whoever that gentleman was, he separated the sexes into different settlements and created the current system of negotiations between males and females to produce children. It’s time-consuming and complicated and requires that the male be financially secure before the female’s family will agree to the arrangement. And it has to happen for every single child. It’s slowed their birth rate and led to a huge drop in population growth over the last few hundred years. And since their religion restricts what sort of genetic manipulation they’ll allow, their lifespan is less than a century and the females are only able to reproduce for half of that.”
“Jesus,” Patrice Damiani said softly. “In that case, how do they even replace themselves?”
“Oddly enough,” Barger said, seeming pleased to have someone who wanted to discuss the subject, “I think they spread out to other worlds to make it easier to reproduce. If status is a key to securing a mate, then colonizing another world makes complete sense. It’s easier to gain status in a smaller population.”
“Impressive analysis,” Travis allowed. “Is it yours?”
“Oh, just the last part, sir. I submitted it for consideration a week ago but no one has gotten back to me yet.”
“Tell me something, Major,” Patrice said, eyeing the woman in the sort of blunt assessment Travis usually associated with a senior office evaluating a junior. “I am no sort of expert on military ranking systems, but it seems odd to me that the rest of the Fleet uses a different nomenclature than the Intelligence branch. Why is it, for example, that you’re a major while someone of the equivalent rank on a ship or a fighter would be a lieutenant-commander?”
Barger chuckled, as if she’d heard the question before.
“It’s a little complicated, Ms. Damiani. It has to do with the fact that Space Fleet originally evolved from the old United States Space Force, which used the ranking system of the old US Air Force, which happened to have the same officer ranks as the old US Marine Corps and Army. Now, as Fleet evolved, and as the technology to patrol farther and farther from Earth developed, some far-sighted individual realized that it made more sense to model the whole structure of the service after the Navy rather than the Space Force, and the rank system was changed to accommodate that philosophy.”
“But not Intelligence?”
“No, ma’am. Intelligence kept the old ranking system, and here we are, forcing everyone to translate O-4 from major to lt.-commander in their head so they know who to salute.”
Patrice offered a smile that might have been genuine by way of a “thank you.”
“Well, now I know more than I ever wanted to about military ranks, but what I’d really like to know is, how are we going to get past that defense platform and those corvettes on the other side of the gate without turning into a giant, glowing ball of gas, Captain Miller?”
There it was again. That command voice. She was in charge wherever she was. It was probably a desirable characteristic for a Corporate Council executive.
“Watch those defense platforms,” he told her, nodding toward the front screens, to the skeletal structures connecting armored weapons pods.
At the center of each was a control module crewed by humans, though not for the same reason as the Tahni versions. ECM jamming could block remote control of the platforms, and no one trusted autonomous weapons. Blue-on-blue casualties happened, but when they did, there was always a human being to hold responsible.
“They’re for more than just defense,” he added, checking the countdown on the tactical display. “Ms. Damiani, Major Barger, you should find a seat and strap in. Lt. Lake, sound battle stations, then hit the emergency boost alarm. Two minutes.”
Travis slipped into his harness, cinching it tight and making sure his shoulders were flat against the gel cushions of the acceleration couch, his hands stretched comfortably across the controls on his armrests. Klaxons sounded as Lake sent out the warning, but Miller let the words slip past him, concentrating instead on the viewscreen.
He almost missed the first launch. The missile was a lone flare of light against hundreds of thousands of others, a single star in the universe. But then more joined it, swarms of fireflies in the night, streaming out from the weapons pods, leaving a nebula of burning gas in their wake.
“Each one of those warheads is a plasma lance,” he explained, “homing in on thermal signatures, radar and lidar, and EM transmissions. If there’s anything on the other side of the gate, they’re about to be way too busy to worry about us. Lake, pass it on to the rest of the squadron. Follow us in.”
