Virtues of War (42 page)

Thomas had unwittingly dangled the ultimate prize in front of his mentor, and in doing so, he had condemned them all.

T
he remnants of the EF moved south through the huge Sirian star system, spread out to avoid any unnecessary curvature of spacetime caused by their combined masses.

The five destroyers fanned out in an anti-stealth detection net millions of kilometers across, slowly clearing the path southward and across the Sirian ecliptic. The four stealth ships formed a second line of defense over a smaller area. The three invasion ships and three supply ships formed the main body of the force, with the sole surviving battleship serving as point defense.

The three cruisers and the remaining carrier served as rearguard against brane-based attacks, safe in the knowledge that no stealth ship could catch up to the force without giving its position away.

As they approached the coordinates of the gate, the EF moved into a much tighter formation, lining up in single column so the ships would pass through the gate in rapid succession.
Normandy
was far back in the column, behind all the fighting ships that would pave the way for her and her high-value sisters.

Kristiansand
’s Hawk managed to pinpoint the exact location of the jump gate, and a detailed ASW sweep revealed it to be unguarded on this side. The Hawk offered to jump through alone, to clear the other side, but direct orders from Commodore Chandler stopped such recklessness. While a Hawk was certainly small enough to avoid detection, the passage of a ship through the gate would stand out like a beacon to anyone in the vicinity.

No, Chandler had decided that the first Terran incursion into Centauri space would be a knockout punch.

* * *

The last two days had felt like the longest in Thomas’s life. He served his hours on watch as AVW controller, then tried to sleep the rest of the time.

Zero-g in an invasion ship took some getting used to, and many crew members suffered from space sickness during the first twenty-four hours. Thomas even contemplated sleeping in
Rapier
’s broken hulk in the hangar—at least within that little hull, zero-g was familiar. Mostly, though, he just existed from moment to moment, sharing the discomfort and unease of the crew around him.

Word had spread quickly about the plan, but Thomas sensed little enthusiasm for it. Most people didn’t even believe that there was a secret jump gate, and assumed the whole exercise was a waste of time. At his most pessimistic, Thomas flipped between wondering if the EF would be able to find it at all and, if they did, what sort of hostile reception they’d encounter.

Navigating around a corner on his way to his battle station, he bumped, literally, into Katja.
Normandy
’s passageways were large and difficult to navigate in zero-g, especially given the sheer number of people trying to get from place to place.

It was the first time he’d seen her since her return from Cerberus.

He steadied her at arm’s length with hands on her shoulders. She looked much the same as before, with big dark eyes and short blonde hair. She was wearing the Corps green instead of Fleet blue, he noticed.

“Hey, sorry. You all right?” Despite the awkwardness he felt, he was genuinely pleased to see her.

She pushed off his hands with surprising strength. Her glare was cool, if not angry.

“I’ve been shot, crash-landed, showered by artillery, and had filthy genitals shoved in my face,” she snapped back. “Bumping into you is hardly enough to upset me.”

He tried to back away slightly—difficult in zero-g.

“I heard it was rough,” he offered. “I’m really glad to see you.”

“Well, good,” she said as she pushed off the bulkhead to float to the far side of the passageway. “Because I’m not available if you’re ‘feeling messed up’ again. I hear you prefer fucking Breeze now, anyway.”

Before he could reply she maneuvered off down the passageway with the stream of people. He wondered how Katja knew about him and Breeze—or, more exactly, why Breeze would compromise herself like that.

As long as Chandler—and by extension Soma—never found out… Still, he felt bad that Katja had been hurt by the whole thing. Poor kid. He wished there was something he could say. But he had more important things to worry about.

He made his way to the bridge and took his usual seat at the command console. Chandler was already there, eyes focused on the central display. He gave a conspiratorial wink to Thomas then turned back to his thoughts. Thomas did a quick survey of the AVW situation, and made his routine report to the operations officer, who gave him a cool stare in response.

Relations with Commander Erikson had taken a recent dive, Thomas had noticed. He’d wondered if this was due to the OpsO’s disagreement with the current plan—which everyone now seemed to think of as Thomas’s plan. But he was beginning to suspect there was something else at play. Perhaps envy at his easy rapport with the commodore?

Thomas shrugged mentally. It wasn’t his fault that Chandler thought highly of him.

Preparations for the passage through the secret jump gate were already underway.
Normandy
, like all the other ships, was going to battle stations in anticipation of a hostile reception.

Through the bridge sphere, he could see the blue symbol of
Artemis
positioned squarely in the middle of the carrier’s visible, black hulk that eclipsed the stars. It was rare enough to be able to hold a visual on one of the other capital ships, let alone to see it blacking out a section of the sky five degrees wide. Behind them,
Troy
held station three kilometers astern of
Normandy
.

First to transit through would be the battleship
Jutland
, the mightiest ship in the Expeditionary Force, and the most capable of dealing with any threat on the other side. Right behind would come a cruiser to help against brane-based vessels, and a destroyer to help against enemy stealth ships. Next the EF’s stealth ships, then more fighting ships, and ultimately the carrier, the three invasion ships, and the supply ships.

One cruiser and one destroyer were holding back as a rear guard, to avoid leaving the main body vulnerable.

It was a sound plan, but Thomas still felt his stomach tighten as
Jutland
approached the gate. The general murmur on the bridge faded to silence as all eyes watched the long line of ships swiftly approaching the invisible point in spacetime.

Four new blips popped into existence on Thomas’s scope—the four Terran stealth ships phasing onto the brane for transit through the gate.

“Sixty seconds to
Jutland
at the gate,” Erikson reported.

“Status report,” Chandler said.

“AAW condition white,” the commander on Thomas’s left reported. “No hostiles inbound. Go for jump.”

“ASW condition white,” the lieutenant on Chandler’s other side reported. “No stealth contacts. Go for jump.”

Thomas made a final sweep of his sensors.

“AVW condition white, no hostile vessels,” he said. “Go for jump.”

In theory, the first ships through the gate would assess the situation and jump back if things were too hot. In reality, however,
Jutland
and her escorts would have about twenty seconds to assess and—if required—withdraw before the next ships in the column jumped through. And then the freight train of ships would appear on the other side at the rate of one every two seconds. It was supposed to be an overwhelming show of Terran force. But it had the potential to be a shooting gallery of Terran targets.

It all depended on what was waiting for them on the other side.

Jutland, Admiral Halsey
, and
Cape Town
closed in on the datum that pinpointed the secret jump gate, then merged with it. Thomas glanced up, and thought he saw a slight ripple in the star field ahead. Then another, and another.

The long line of EF ships continued to close on the gate. Thomas locked his eyes on the 3-D display, waiting for one of the three ships to jump back and warn them all off.

Nothing lit up on the display.

The seconds ticked by. Somebody made a redundant report that there was no change. Everyone else was silent.

The first stealth ship reached the gate. Every two seconds a blip disappeared from Thomas’s display, and
Normandy
pushed forward with the column. He just had time to see
Artemis
ripple and shrink out of sight before he gripped his chair and waited for the mind-bending moment of extra-dimensional travel.

Whatever fate awaited them, there was no turning back.

T
roopers in general were renowned for not sweating the political implications of their actions. But even the most jaded trooper in the surviving regiments of Fifth Brigade paused in consideration at the upcoming mission. This under-strength brigade, with a battered collection of Fleet ships to support it, was going to invade one of the most populous, heavily defended planets in the human sphere—second only to Earth itself.

The officers in charge realized this, and fell back on an age-old method for preventing troopers from thinking too much—constant activity.

The Corps hangar in the bowels of
Normandy
practically writhed with movement. At the after end, rows of hover tanks hummed in position above the deck, their turrets shifting as they engaged simulated targets. Inside the tanks, troopers were embroiled in their second four-hour simulation of the day.

At the forward end of the hangar, engineers conducted quick construction drills, assembling short bridges and fortifications. And in the vast, open center of the hangar, the infantry fought their way through a maze of hastily constructed alleys and three-story buildings.

Katja paced in the observation gondola perched above the deck on the port bulkhead. She was getting used to the magnetic boots that kept her down in the zero-g, but she wasn’t used to the churning in her stomach. Some of the other officers had complained in the morning meeting that troopers couldn’t effectively train for ground combat in zero-g, even with magnetic boots, and Katja agreed. Movement wasn’t as natural, and loose objects still floated.

At least once an exercise some eager trooper would attempt to leap into the fray, only to find himself floating helplessly away from any handhold.

Commander Vici met the complaints with her usual icy disdain for stupidity. The EF was moving into the very heartland of the enemy, and the Centauri foe was nothing like the primitive, disorganized Cerberans. Centauria—like Terra—had a system-wide tracking system, generally used for rogue asteroids, which would easily detect a cluster of artificial gravity wells moving inbound.

At most it would be a matter of hours before the Centauri Space Guard detected them and sounded a red alert. The sheer gravimetric size of a warship would suggest a body the size of a small moon, and would stir the hornet’s nest.

Katja knew that their only hope was utter secrecy, and while the zero-g and magnetic boots impeded training, nausea was a price she was willing to pay to avoid being singularized by Centauri stealth ships.

Recalling the invasion ship
Sicily
vanishing in orbit over Laika she looked around the giant hangar in
Normandy
, and realized that size only made them a target.
Sicily
had been an identical twin to
Normandy
, and despite all her strength and thousands of troopers, she had simply ceased to exist in a microsecond burst of gravitons.

Katja shivered. Better to die from a bullet, facing your enemy, than to go like that.

“Ma’am,” one of the simulation operators said, “your platoon is approaching the ambush.”

Katja chastised herself inwardly for letting her mind wander, and moved to stand behind the sim operators.

The buildings and streets on the hangar deck were real enough, yet all of her troopers on the exercise were wearing their special training helmets which superimposed a photo-realistic landscape, to give the impression of a real Centauri town. It was fully dynamic with projected civilians as well as combatants, along with smoke, dust, and all the other aspects of the fog of war.

When acting as a participant, Katja often found it easy to completely lose herself in the simulation, but as an observer, she found it looked odd to watch her troopers moving through empty corridors linked with plastic barricades.

Commander Vici had told Katja that morning that her platoon was going to have their chain of command tested—Katja was going to be “killed” in the drop ship descent, so that one of her sergeants would have to take over. She hadn’t even stepped planetside.

To his credit, Sergeant Rao had taken command quickly and was doing an admirable job of directing the platoon through the early stages of the attack. Katja had actually recommended to Commander Vici that Sergeant Chang be the platoon second-in-command, but Vici felt it best to keep a long-serving member of Fifth Platoon at the top, in part to avoid resentment from the troopers. Thus, Chang was leading the reserve group.

Fifth Platoon had returned to
Normandy
from their disastrous raid on Cerberus with heavy casualties, and the ranks had been filled in by members of the other FAC strike teams. Scott Lahko’s Second Platoon had been similarly reinforced. Platoon personnel could be wary of replacements, especially just before a battle, but fast-attack troopers were chosen from the very best, and were generally quite senior.

Fifth Platoon now had two extra sergeants who were serving as squad leaders, and five extra squad leaders who were reduced to grunts, but Katja hoped that the extra experience would overcome any ego issues, especially when the bullets really started flying.

And when people were getting killed, each squad had an experienced member who could take over.

There had never been any real question, upon their return from Cerberus, of whether Katja would remain in command of Fifth Platoon. She hadn’t assumed anything, but had simply reported to Commander Vici, fully prepared to relinquish her position. Vici had conducted a thorough debrief and sent Katja on her way. Katja carried on filling in as platoon commander, and waited for new orders—which never came. It might be that everyone was just too busy to worry about whether she was supposed to be commanding Fifth Platoon.