Constitution: Book 1 of the Legacy Fleet Trilogy (7 page)

LaPlace glanced up. Sure enough, the battered cruiser, still steaming air, smoke, and debris, had angled itself such that several starboard turbo-mag-rail cannons had a clear shot at the large fighters. He could almost imagine the pulsating rhythm of the shots—the cannons fired around five rounds per second at speeds approaching ten kilometers per second.

Several of the enemy fighters flared up into fireballs, but the rest accelerated at incredible speeds towards the
Vallarta
, and fired their own streams of high-velocity projectiles at the ship. The rounds exploded with ferocious energy into the side of the IDF cruiser, which spewed debris and fire—quickly extinguished by the vacuum of space. Soon, a gaping hole was exposed. But that was only the beginning. One of the large carriers, a massive behemoth of a ship lit by sickly green running lights, veered towards the
Vallarta
and unleashed a dazzling green energy beam.

The beam blazed toward the hole in the starboard side of the
Vallarta
. LaPlace glanced down at his sensor readout and knew what was about to happen without asking his ops officer, who nevertheless called out, “I’m reading a radioactive signature, sir! That beam’s got anti-matter in it, and it’s interacting with the—”

But the flash on the screen cut him off. Even though it was only a holographic viewscreen and therefore limited in the amount of energy it could put out, they all automatically shielded their eyes. When the screen desaturated, the
ISS Vallarta
was gone.

A moment’s silence permeated the bridge.

“Ensign, have you scanned those fighters for life-readings yet? I want to know who we’re dealing with and then get the hell out of here.”

“Working on it, sir. There’s some kind of odd interference messing with our sensors. I can’t get a good reading on what’s inside those things. At this point, could be human. Could be
...
well, even back during the Swarm War we were never able to get life-sign readings from the Cumrat ships—”

“Sir! The ships....”

LaPlace snapped his head back to the screen. The surviving belligerent fighters had changed course and were now flying directly towards them.

“Ensign! Now!” He yelled at the nav officer, who hit the q-jump initiation on his console with a jab of his poised finger.

The viewscreen held steady.
 

“Ensign, I said NOW!” The fighters appeared to speed up.

“Trying, sir. I think whatever is interfering with the sensors....” The ensign drifted off, tapping buttons on his console furiously.

LaPlace pointed at the ops officer. “Launch the data pod. Get that thing out of here.” He turned back to navigation. “Ensign, evasive maneuvers. Swing wide and Z minus fifty. Put some distance between us—maybe we can clear their distortion field.”

He felt the ship lurch as the inertial canceling system struggled to keep up with the maneuvers the nav officer was keying into the console. Movement on the screen caught his eye.

“Sir, they’re firing!”

“Keep swerving, Ensign!” He craned his neck around. “Is that data pod away?”

“Aye, sir!”

“Did it make the q-jump?”

An explosion erupted across the bridge and Laplace shielded his face from the flames. When the emergency system extinguished the fire, he looked back to ops. The officer was slumped against his console, his head and torso scorched black and blistery red. Glancing down at his own readout, he swore—the data pod had failed to q-jump.

IDF headquarters would not be warned.

“Ensign, maximum acceleration! Get us to the wreckage of the
Vallarta
! Maybe we can put some debris in between us and—”

But the nav officer never got the chance to acknowledge. Another explosion ripped through the bridge, and a giant section of bulkhead blasted away, revealing the blue-tinged atmosphere of the planet far below. As the air spewed out, sucking the nav officer with it, LaPlace glared at the enemy fighter speeding directly towards them. The forward guns of the other ship glowed, and, using his last breath which erupted out into the vacuum, he spat towards the incoming fighter out of spite before blacking out.

Chapter Seventeen

Halfway between L2 and Lunar Base

Fighter Bay, ISS Constitution

Captain Granger strode up to the doors of the fighter bay’s maintenance hangar, pointing to the two marines stationed there.

“You two, with me. Your orders are to arrest Commander Proctor at my signal. Understood?”

The marines looked at each other nervously. One of them cleared his throat.

“I said, AM I CLEAR?” he barked, and one of the marines stiffened his back.

“Uh, sir, she gave us the order that if you interfere with her work, we are to confine you to your quarters. Said she had authorization from Admiral Yarbrough herself.”

The marine flinched as Granger marched up to him. Unbelievable. She’d crossed the line. He stood toe to toe with the marine and yelled in his face. “I am the captain of this ship, soldier! How would you like to spend the next five years rotting in the brig for insubordination and mutiny?”

He hadn’t realized he was waving his fists in the air, and he self-consciously lowered them. Dammit. He’d lost his ship. Five days ahead of schedule.

“Tim?” Granger turned to the voice. It was his CAG. Commander Tyler Pierce.

“What the hell do you want?” he replied gruffly, still eyeing the nervous marines, who clearly were quite torn. What was the military coming to? Had the decades of peace and prosperity made them all fat and complacent? What was Yarbrough thinking, undermining him like this?

“Just wanted to show you something, sir.” The CAG thumbed in the direction of the Air Group’s mission room. He was a younger gentleman, clearly the son of some patrician senator or oligarch on one of the more prosperous worlds, perhaps York, or Versailles, judging by his decidedly upper-class accent and the overly conservative part in his hair.

Still glowering at the two marines, he followed his CAG into the mission room—a mini-amphitheater surrounding a podium in front of a holoscreen. Several technicians were busy installing a few extra rows of seating in the front and another was fiddling with the terminal on the podium.

“What are they doing?” Granger asked, indicating the techs.

Pierce’s expression betrayed his annoyance. “Do you really need to ask?”

“Proctor?”

Pierce nodded. “They’re turning this into a fighter combat simulation room. Bring fifty tourists in at once, show them a cute battle sequence up there on the screen, brief them on their mission, then off they all go to sit in the cockpits of the fighters out there.” He thumbed in the direction of the fighter bay, which Granger now had zero desire to see, even though Proctor was in there and he was itching to blast her out one of the fighter bay airlocks.

“Is it bad? Are they all stripped down?”

The CAG shrugged. “Well, not all of them. Just twenty or so. And all of the fighter’s systems are still intact. They’ve just rigged them with dummy torpedoes Proctor printed out in the fab, and upgraded ... uh, downgraded the computers with some new battle simulation program she brought with her from the Smithsonian. But they’re all roped off and repainted some god-awful shade of purple and yellow—she thinks it’ll make them look more futuristic for the visitors, you see....”

The captain groaned. “Purple and yellow?”

“Yeah, tell me about it. But Tim, this isn’t why I asked you here. Come into my office for a moment.”

Granger followed him into the CAG’s office and took a seat next to the terminal next to Pierce. He smiled at the pictures of the man’s family displayed neatly in dark metal frames on the desk—two little boys sitting on the lap of a gorgeous blonde woman posed in front of some pine trees. “Family’s on York?” He nodded towards the picture, the faintly purple tinge to the deep blue sky clueing him in to where it was taken.

“Yes, sir. My family’s lived in Londinium for centuries. Fourth great grandfather was one of the first settlers there. Helped build Londinium from the ground up. Well, at least his workers did. Never did enjoy getting his hands dirty, the old sod.”

“You talk about him like you knew him.”

“I did. He only died twenty years ago. Right before I joined IDF.”

Granger looked at him askance. “Your fourth great grandpa died just twenty years ago?”

“Well, when you own half the city of Londinium you can afford all sorts of age extending procedures. Replaced half his body at least four times before he finally came down with a common cold and died of pneumonia. One hundred and eighty-nine. Oldest man on York when he died.”

Captain Granger whistled. And to think he was going to die at a paltry sixty-four. Sixty-five, if he was lucky. Unless they came up with a miracle cure for stage four lung cancer, a malignant brain tumor, and pancreatic cancer that didn’t involve replacing his entire body and flooding his head with high-energy protons to zap the free-roaming malignant cells. He breathed in as deeply as he could, stifling a wince at the pain. “What did you bring me here to see, Tyler?”

The CAG flipped the computer on and brought up several star maps and fleet movement schedules. “The British and the Russian fleets were supposed to conduct joint training exercises in the Britannia system yesterday. I know because my father commands the
ISS Gallant
, which is the flagship of the third British fleet. We talk every other day for a few minutes, and this morning he mentioned something that struck me as quite odd.”

“Yes?”

“The Russian fleets never showed up.”

“Strange,” said Granger. “The Russian Confederation space is right there next to British space, out towards Sirius. Practically neighbors. Did he have any idea why they didn’t show?”

“No. But that wasn’t the only odd thing. He received some special orders from IDF High Command to go patrol the border between British and Russian space. Out near the Veracruz Sector.”

“Did he say why?”

“He didn’t. The orders were classified priority one top-secret. Hell, he shouldn’t have even told me what he did.”

Granger stroked his chin. Damn the Russians. Slippery bastards as always—Earth nearly lost the Swarm War because of their antics, refusing to coordinate planetary defense with the allied powers right up to nearly the last moment. It took several Swarm nukes over St. Petersburg to finally convince them that it was in their best interests to cooperate with the rest of the civilized world. What were they up to this time?

“Probably just on guard against whatever President Malakhov has up his sleeve,” said Granger.

“Oh, they’re calling him President now?”

“He did win the last five elections.” He paused and smirked. “Albeit with only ninety-eight percent of the vote.”

“Sounds like they love the guy. I wonder what he promised the voters?”

“Probably made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Promised to take the Veracruz Sector and re-annex Mongolia, all while masturbating shirtless on top of a bengalese tiger.”

Pierce snorted, and shook his head. “Yeah, it’s probably just his regular old chest-thumping. Still, my father sounded genuinely worried. He knew something he wasn’t telling me. Has anything come down from High Command?”

“To me? Hell, they didn’t tell me about my own ship’s decommissioning until a week ago. I doubt I’m high on their list of officers to keep up to date on hypothetical Russian aggression.”

The CAG picked up a picture frame and looked at it, his two boys smiling back at him. Granger wondered how long it had been since he’d seen them. “Well, let’s hope nothing out of sorts is going on. I know Malakhov is a crazy bastard, but this isn’t like him. The politicians have never been friends, but we’ve always had good inter-military relations. They’ve never missed a joint training exercise.”

Granger studied the star map. Sure enough, eight IDF carriers, a handful of heavy cruisers, and an assortment of lighter vessels—missile frigates, destroyers, tow barges, and supply ships—were gathered at the outskirts of the Britannia system, the main population center of British space. Nearby, Russian space shimmered red, and opaque, as the Russians no longer shared near-real-time sensor data with the rest of IDF. There could be a Russian fleet just on the other side of the border—in the Liv system, and they’d never know it until they decided to show up.

“You think something’s up? I mean not just the Russians? You think the Swarm is back?”

Pierce shrugged. “The Swarm? They’ve been gone for over seventy years. Not so much as a peep out of their space in all this time—assuming we know where their space is. Hell, we don’t even know what they look like. All we ever found in the debris from their ships was gray goo.”

After their first engagement with the Swarm, humanity tried to study the ships they’d managed to cripple or destroy. It wasn’t easy work since most of the defeated ships self-destructed—any vessels that survived intact were heavily damaged, and there were never any survivors. No bodies, either. Somehow, they’d managed to program their ships to either be entirely automated, or to automatically vaporize any dead bodies. All that was left behind was a thin sheen of organic liquid coating the floors and walls. The hallways and compartments were so small that IDF supposed that the aliens couldn’t be more than a few feet tall, if that.

And yet their technology was stunningly advanced. They used energy weapons—some form of accelerated negative ion beams. Anti-helium particles, if he remembered his academy classes correctly. Granger wondered if the new armor every new ship had been constructed with since then would make a difference—hell, even the
Constitution
only survived the war because of her ten-meter-thick tungsten plating. She was practically built out of an asteroid back in the last century—SG10551 was the rock’s designation. By the time she was finished, there was hardly anything left of the asteroid.

But not only were their weapons advanced, they seemed to be able to achieve huge accelerations and tolerate massive changes in inertia—changes that IDF’s inertial cancelers could only dream of handling. As such, the Swarm fleets were far more maneuverable and faster compared to IDF. That, and their computer control systems put IDF’s to shame—each fleet they encountered was so well coordinated, each fighter so well connected to the whole, that it was like fighting one large organism rather than a few hundred little individual ships. Their own targeting computers and command and control centers were simply no match. They’d had to rely on the grit and gumption of their individual pilots, and in many historians’ estimations, that made all the difference.