Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) (3 page)

The sleds were built to take it, but the lightweight stingships must have felt like they had entered a fusion-powered sandstorm. Even if they were not flash-cooked, they certainly lost sight of their quarries, and dozens slammed into the ground or the sides of the newly dug trench.

Right behind
Conquest
’s particle beam came a precisely calibrated burst of hundreds of ferrocrystal balls, accelerated by a Dahlgren Behemoth Fifty railgun to over 0.3
c
, fast enough to cause mutual contact fusion in whatever they hit. Each impact would create a brief, tiny thermonuclear explosion.

Down the dust-filled trench below the sleds these glowing projectiles flew to slam against the buried armor of the enemy command center. If the intel section’s educated guesses were right, that hellish impact would bore a hole into the Meme complex, providing both a breach and a disruption for the Marines and Ryss warriors to exploit. The resulting superheated plasma should expand through the constricted space and ignite everything inside the confined space, turning anything and anyone not armored or sealed behind blast doors into crispy critters.

Vango watched the assault sleds, specially reinforced for this mission, descend to enter the trench. Invisible to the naked eye beneath the billowing dust and dissipating plasma, they would follow the channel to its end using radar, there to do what Marines do.

Fight, kill, and die.

“Gotcha,” Vango exulted as the pursuing stingships pulled up, shying away from the obscured trench. Barely of animal intelligence, the little fighters hadn’t the wit to figure out what to do when their targets vanished in the hot haze. Instead, they climbed out of the cloud and turned nose-on to the two flights of Crows and stood on their fusion engines, clawing to reverse course.

“Follow me,” Vango ordered as he rolled
Weaver
left, parallel to Io’s bilious surface, in order to stay under the minimum engagement altitude of the Weapon lurking just over the horizon. Tagging one more stingship with his wing weapons, he skimmed low over mountains and ridges, keeping his speed high while describing a wide curve that would take them back the way they had come.

Charlie and Delta still whirled in their own furball far behind, Crows against stingships. Once Vango set course to rejoin the fight, he said, “Finish them off and then punch it, boys and girls. Execute the bugout plan for refuel and rearming.”

“Pulse out,” Captain Absen ordered.

Master Helmsman Okuda was already in the process of dragging
Conquest
’s prow around to a new heading. Once the dreadnought lined up, Absen felt the TacDrive kick in and hurl the vessel at lightspeed away from thousands of converging Meme hypers, which had been launched at
Conquest
over the last several minutes by the Meme bases on the Galilean moons.

A moment later,
Conquest
dropped out of TacDrive twenty million kilometers above Jupiter’s north pole and began falling, too slowly to matter. That distance was fifty times farther than from Earth to the Moon.

“Get the holotank up,” Absen barked as he stood to stare intently at the area where the holographic image would appear. The display flickered into lighted existence and over the next ten seconds populated itself with moons, satellites, captured asteroids, bases, weapons, and anything else of tactical significance.

From this vantage, looking down from Jupiter’s pole, Absen could see almost everything that went on in the Jupiter orbital system. Only a few enemy spy drones had been in polar orbit and
Conquest
had already burned them. Now, everything revolved generally in one plane beneath the dreadnought, like a crowd of children around a maypole.
Conquest
pointed her prow straight down and waited like an eagle eyeing her prey.

“Show me the trench,” Absen demanded, grasping the railing that kept him from falling into the helmsman’s pit.

“We don’t have a good line of sight on it, but…” Scoggins replied, “I can synthesize something from spy drones and the feeds from the sleds. Remember, this is more than a minute old due to the time-late light.”

A moment passed, and then the holotank view altered to show a cutaway diagram of the long trench the sledgehammer strike had dug. Eleven icons representing his tiny landing force flew in a single-file line, by necessity spaced well apart. Moving slowly in comparison to their open-space speeds, Absen knew in atmosphere ten kilometers a minute was plenty fast enough to stress the abilities of their pilots, flying on instruments between walls no more than two hundred meters apart to stay inside the dust cloud.

The display fuzzed and then lost its coherence. “Sorry, sir,” Scoggins said. “They’ve rotated out of sight on Io’s surface, and we’re not getting much from the sleds through the plasma haze.”

“Launch the first missile salvo. Go ahead and start firing at the orbital fortresses,” Absen ordered. Soon, Ford eagerly lined up and began extreme-range fire with bursts of railgun shot and particle beams. The ferrocrystal projectiles would be lucky to hit, and the beams packed no punch at twenty million kilometers. They would barely fuzz the enemy sensors, but Absen ordered it anyway. At least his people would feel like they were doing something more than just waiting, but
Conquest
had to stay here, both to remain out of the arc of the Weapon, and to coordinate the battle.

“Tactical, then,” Absen said. When his birds-eye view appeared again, he traced the progress of the sixty missiles
Conquest
had fired, twenty at each Meme base on the other Galilean moons of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. If he was lucky, at least one each would make it through to deliver its heavy thermonuclear payload. If not, the Crows would have to pick up the slack.

Turning his attention to the icons floating just over Jupiter’s north pole, he saw that the grabships were even now arming each StormCrow with two heavy nuclear missiles for their next mission.

Just then, an updated databurst caused Vango’s HUD to reset. Suddenly he saw three salvos of missiles curving outward from
Conquest
, reaching toward three enemy ground bases, the ones on Jupiter’s largest moons, save Io. Each of these command centers housed Meme, Blends and Purelings. Elsewhere, he knew ordinary humans slaved away in mines and orbital factories, producing goods and weapons for their own defense.

Defense, ironically, against the only free humans in the galaxy.

Those workers had done a good job. The Jupiter system was heavily fortified. Leftover EarthFleet-style lasers and railguns were everywhere, at least one on every satellite and facility. Now those weapons fired frantically at whatever cluster of missiles came nearest to them. Sixty became fifty, then forty, as they were picked out of space, but Vango figured Ford must have set the missiles’ paths as far from the defenses as possible while still getting them to their targets.

More stingships rose from hidden bunkers and hurried to intercept the diminishing groups. Vango watched as a missile from each group turned toward the nearest clusters of enemy fighters and, moments later, detonated itself among them. He didn’t much like Ford – hell, hardly anyone did – but he had to admit the man was good at his job. The missile clusters, like the ones being loaded onto the StormCrows, formed their own tiny pseudo-AI networks, programmed by
Conquest
’s own AI. Combined, the weapons’ brains were smart enough to take sophisticated actions, such as to sacrifice one so the rest could get through.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Several more sacrificial nukes vaporized most of the remaining stingships, as well as six particularly dangerous orbital weapons platforms, but none reached their target bases. Still, the swath of destruction they had blazed toward the three enemy command centers would make it that much easier for Vango’s pilots to finish the job.

“All right, people,” Vango said as he noted the grabships rearm and refuel the last of his birds, “Godspeed, and execute phase two.”

Four flights of seven Crows each accelerated in different directions from their position immediately over Jupiter’s pole, far below
Conquest
. Skimming low over the great gas giant, they flew as close to the edge of its atmosphere as possible, using the horizon to hide them from their enemies as long as they could.

Bravo, Charlie and Delta flights aimed themselves toward the still-surviving Meme bases on Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, while Vango and Alpha flight accelerated to maximum in order to become visible to the enemy first. By the time they came over Jupiter’s horizon, they had achieved high escape velocity and centrifugal force overcame the gas giant’s gravity. The seven StormCrows rose inexorably upward, and as they did, five more orbital weapons platforms came into view.

“Alpha flight, all ships, Fox One.” Long ago, the Fox number,
One
or
Three
especially, referred to the type of missile being launched from an air-to-air fighter, but the convention had evolved to simply mean “Fire the missile,” rather like “Fire in the hole” meant something was about to explode.

Seven nuclear missiles released from the StormCrows and, a moment later, seven fusion engines lit, driving the heavy weapons at more than one hundred Gs toward their targets. “Fox Two,” Vango called, and the process repeated. Now his birds were clean, each with two hundred tons less mass to drag around, fit to dogfight.

Two missiles streaked toward each of the five weapons platforms and the other four missiles splayed out toward the positions of unseen targets around Jupiter’s curve. Maybe they would get lucky and surprise the enemy. In any case they would keep the defenders busy.

Vango tried not to think of the humans manning these defense outposts. They would be the most reliable – or the most deluded – of enslaved people, probably young and never knowing freedom, fed propaganda from birth about how wonderful it was to be a part of the Meme Empire. They surely didn’t know it yet, but this was a civil war, a war of liberation.

Vango steeled his heart against the ugliness. “All right, boys and girls, let’s cause some trouble. The other flights should be Fox One in less than thirty seconds.” Vango kicked
Weaver
around into a screaming turn, burning fuel at a prodigious rate as his fusion engine held him pointed ninety degrees to his changing flight path, rotating continuously. This threw him into a three-dimensional corkscrewing power slide, making engaging him a matter of extreme chance. The rest of his pilots followed.

His HUD gave him innumerable targets as near-Jupiter space filled with the materiel of war. Hypers converged on him by twos and threes, railgun bullets and beams crisscrossed his path, and Meme Sentry drones dropped their stealth and took up attack postures, launching more hypers. Vango cranked up his time sense to maximum, and the universe slowed to a crawl. Now he had all the time in the world to twitch
Weaver
’s nose left and right, lining up for perfect shots on anything in range. Drones, hypers, and the odd stingship fell to his centerline maser, his strafing run limited only by the molasses-slow buildup of power in his capacitors, stuck in realtime. If ever the Crows could be converted to antimatter powerplants as Commander Ekara wanted, what wonders of combat flying he could perform!

Higher and higher Vango led his flight, even when Lily “Cupcake” Martin vanished in a burst of plasma as something, maybe a lucky railgun bullet, converted her StormCrow into vapor. She’d paid the price as they performed their mission, drawing fire and defenders away from the other flights, giving them that extra few percent chance to get their missiles through. Vango told himself that with fourteen nukes at each Meme base coming in by surprise over Jupiter’s horizon, at least one should make it to strike each.

Vango realized he wouldn’t know the outcome for some time, as the bulk of Jupiter remained between him and the rest. Only
Conquest
, on her perch over the pole, could see everything at once, and she was sixty light-seconds away. Add that two-minute radio round trip to the time sense compression and he might as well not worry about anything but his own fight. His HUD received periodic updates, but they seemed ages apart.

The waiting ended as stingships, hypers and railgun bullets chased the six survivors out into the black of interplanetary space and Vango was able to let his time sense catch up to reality. He had the grim satisfaction of seeing four of the five orbital platforms explode in atomic fire, mitigated only by the sense of waste. Those were real people manning those satellites, and each one he killed pushed humanity a step closer to extinction.

Lieutenant Victor Cheng nodded stiffly from where he stood at Tama’s elbow. “Do not lose heart, Sergeant. The Empire will prevail.” He glanced over at the commander of this Sentinel orbital fortress, Captain O’Rourke, who stood silently staring at the tactical display.

That readout mapped the Jupiter system in exquisite detail, which made the defense’s losses all the more painful. Not only had this sector lost nearly half its Sentinels, but three of the four Empire bases had been vaporized by the forbidden thermonuclear weapons of the rebels, and the main command center on Io was under assault. Cheng’s horror at the loss of Meme and Blend life was only sharpened by the doubt gnawing at his vitals.