Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) (6 page)

“Admiral,” the captain said on the tachyon net. “We’ll take down as many of those missiles as we can, but you should get the hell out. We’ll stay behind you.”

No, you won’t, thought Vier. That’s what she should have said. Instead, she was silent. All she could think about was getting herself and Shenks out.

The captain must have picked up on her silence because he said, “It’s not a matter for you to decide, Admiral. I’m the one making the decisions and I’m doing it. Just make sure everyone remembers me. Compton out!”

The net with the Dartmouth closed.

Vier bit her lip.
All four hundred crewmembers were on the Dartmouth. The captain is sacrificing them all in a split decision to save my life.

Her next thoughts weren’t even about gratitude, they were about making sure he succeeded. Otherwise, Captain Compton’s decision to stick behind her to ward off the missiles would be in vain.
She thought about it. Even if the Dartmouth tried with all its best ability, it probably wouldn’t take out all of the missiles heading for her. It might take out some. But as human and alien technological interaction has demonstrated so far, those missiles had some type of drive that was mostly impervious to gravitron countermeasures. She calculated the trajectories and accelerations then concluded that the Dartmouth would not succeed before some of those missiles hit her shuttle.
“Chief, can you accelerate faster?”

“We’re already beyond maximum tolerance, admiral. 1200 G’s is more than the shuttle’s structural integrity and inertial compensators can hold.”

“Push it further.”

“Admiral, that is not recommended. The shuttle will break apart at those accelerations.”

“That’s fine, chief. We’ll die otherwise, anyway.”

The shuttle chief paused. Underneath that brown helmet, he seemed to pause. “Alright, jerking to 1300 G’s. Hold on.”

Suddenly, Vier was pushed back into her seat even more. A metal groan sounded throughout the shuttle. People shouted in the passenger compartment.

“Structural limits far exceeded, admiral. I don’t know how long we’ll be able to hold this acceleration!”

Vier nodded. She kept her eyes on the minimap. The missiles came closer.

The human cruiser Dartmouth continued its acceleration behind her shuttle, staying behind her at a certain distance. Vier knew the Dartmouth had an acceleration tolerance that was significantly greater than her shuttle. It could, by itself, accelerate past her shuttle and translate into hyperspace before her, but Compton chose not to. It stayed behind to protect her.

The man himself—she hardly knew him. He was just another captain within the food chain who’d been assigned to her system because of some higher up in the military bureaucracy.

“Ma’am,” the shuttle chief said. “Even with this acceleration, we will not be able to escape the
accelerations of the incoming alien missiles.”

Vier nodded. “I know.”

The minutes ticked by. Hull stresses created loud jarring noises throughout the shuttle. People within the compartment voiced trembling concerns. “Are we going to be okay?” they asked.

Vier did not answer them. She kept watching the monitor. The missiles came closer and closer.

Then, when they entered the counterbattery range of the Dartmouth, the bigger ship fired all its gravitron beams. One missile was taken out. Then another. But there were dozens of them.

The Dartmouth isn’t taking out the missiles fast enough. They’re going to surpass the Dartmouth and hit us.

She watched in a stunned silence. Then something happened that utterly surprised her. Just as the leading missile was about to pass the Dartmouth and speed toward her shuttle, that missile detonated on the Dartmouth instead. Then another, and another. Every missile within the enemy missile salvo smashed into the Dartmouth.

Then she gasped. A sudden realization dawned upon her. The reason those missiles appeared to be targeting her shuttle
was
to get the
Dartmouth to slow its speed to protect her—the real target of those missiles hadn’t been her at all, it was the Dartmouth!

Our shuttle is just not that important. I am not that important.

The enemy believed that a human warship was far more important than whatever passenger her shuttle carried, so much that it used the shuttle’s apparent importance to the warship to prevent the warship from escaping into hyperspace.

“Open a channel to the Dartmouth,” Vier ordered.

“Yes, ma’am…Channel open.”

“Dartmouth, do you read? What is the status of your ship? Damage?”

There was screaming in the other end. People cried for help. The captain yelled amidst a flurry of activity. After a long pause, Captain Compton’s voice returned, “This is Compton. We’ve suffered severe damage to our primary propulsion systems. Our hyperspace translator is about to lose containment in its antimatter stores. We’re jettisoning it.”

“But you won’t be able to translate into hyperspace,” Vier stated.

“It doesn’t matter. Our gravitic drive is offline. We won’t make it to the edge of the gravity well before the enemy warship overtakes us.”

Vier paused. “Do you have shields and weapons?”

“Gravshield generators are all operational. The main graviton shield has been broken, but we’re regenerating it with new gravitons. Primary power is still online. The main lances are fully powered.” He paused. “Think of it this way, admiral. You’ll get to witness how well our warships do against the enemy warships in a knife fight.” Compton then yelled at someone far away. “Sorry, I must go. The ship needs me. There’s little time before that thing gets here. Look, Admiral. You and I are pragmatists. We have to be to get this far in the chain of command. View the situation this way: you get a free ticket out of here. It’s obvious by now that they aren’t focused on taking you out or they could have easily done so already. I’ll transmit all our data logs to you until we’re unable. Admiral, make sure high command makes full use of it. Make sure they pay for what they did here. Closing channel. Compton out.”

“Goodbye, Compton.”

“Goodbye, Admiral.” Compton yelled again to someone far away, then the transmission went quiet.

There was silence in the cockpit as she stared at the minimap on the monitor.
“Time to hyper transit?”

“Twelve minutes, Admiral.”

More minutes passed. Idly, she watched as the two dots came close to each other. Then, the enemy warship entered weapons range of the Dartmouth. The Dartmouth fired its main Polaron beam lance, lashing out at the alien ship like an injured dog baring its teeth. The alien ship countered using some unknown weapon that the shuttle’s sensors couldn’t analyze. A sudden bright flash of light appeared right on top the Dartmouth and it careened in a random direction. Vier knew its gravitic drive was down, so its sudden movement couldn’t be because of an evasive maneuver the captain performed.

Maybe he got it back running just in time.

It didn’t matter. Because less than a minute later, the Dartmouth’s signal disappeared. Its dot on the minimap blinked out of existence.

“Do we still have the Dartmouth’s signal?” Vier yelled.

“No, ma’am…They’re gone. Sensors read debris and antimatter detonations.”

Four hundred crewmen. All dead. “How much data did we get?”

“All their sensor and ship logs until that point, ma’am. It’s safe with us.”

Vier clenched her fist. The smell of pale recycled oxygen in the cockpit lent a bitter feeling in comparison to the burnt smell of dead bodies and scorched machinery typical on board a heavily damaged warship during battle. Why? Why was she here and they there? Why did so many good men die today? Why was humanity attacked so ruthlessly, and so many star men murdered?

Minutes later as she gazed at the sudden bright lights that exploded outside the cockpit’s forward viewscreen—typical of hyperspace transition—all she could think about was the dead crewmen on board the Dartmouth and the vain sacrifice of its captain.
We’ll avenge your death, Compton. I’ll make sure they pay for what they did here.

CHAPTER TWO

4 hours later.

December 13rd 3986 AD

Planetary Defense Command, Meerlat

Operation Room…

C
olonel Arthur Streit did not like the fact that every human warship had been destroyed before they reached the hyper limit. He gazed at the holodisplay coolly as the last human cruiser disappeared in a massive antimatter explosion. So many trails of debris. The enemy was very intent on not letting any of humanity’s largest assets get away. At least, he thought, hundreds of smaller shuttles managed to escape. He couldn’t say the same about the fighters nor the slower moving civilian freighters. At least, the admiral got away.

Now, it was just him and his soldiers.

The operation room that controlled the ground forces for an entire planet looked like a giant theater. Rows and columns of workstations layered the giant room. A vast series of holographic projections littered the front wall. Embedded within twenty kilometers of rock, the room was safe as it could be from orbital and kinetic bombardment.

But that wasn’t what the aliens were after.

Or they would have done that hours ago. No, the aliens were after something else. Something that mattered more to them. The lives of the civilians on the planet were spared. But for what?

The giant hologram in front of the room showed that the aliens were just now positioning their largest vessels around the planet, in what was typically a pattern that provided orbital air cover to take out meaty ground targets. While their main ground forces—as seen by the troop transports that had hypered into the system hours ago—would land. As seen by the position of their orbital warships, their attack would center around the main population areas on the colonized planet, mainly the nine major cities on Meerlat, each filled with more than four hundred thousand people.

But what did they want with the planet’s civilian population? Interrogation? Experimentation? Slavery?

In any case, Streit was as prepared as he could be with his measly forty thousand marines, not including the planet’s police force. He was willing to defend the planet’s population from whatever the aliens planned to do with them. Or at least try. He doubted he had enough. There were too many unknowns. What type of technology did the alien ground troops have? What did they even look like? What type of tactics would they use?

Nevertheless, he’d ordered his marines to take camouflage in the cities hours ago, because he knew for a fact that they would be sitting ducks outside the cities where the enemy’s orbital fleet could bombard them to bits. The surface-to-orbital cannons and missile batteries outside the cities, on the other hand, would be safe because they were already camouflaged. Or at least he hoped. He would fire them at the alien landers when they came. Only then would he reveal their positions.

Why didn’t he have more marines? Because high command had never planned against a conventional ground army invading Meerlat, since its colonization fifty years ago. The only contingency was a simple pirate raid, and forty thousand marines was more than enough to take care of that. The Orion border wasn’t anywhere near Meerlat, so an Orion invasion of Meerlat was next to impossible. Besides, during the Orion War, the Orions didn’t have any use for civilians. They simply ignored them or bombarded them when they felt the civilians got in the way.

These aliens were different. They had use for them.

Streit wracked his brain trying to think of past situations but came up empty.

All he knew was that he had to protect the civilians with any means necessary. He was well aware that if the aliens had no problems destroying thousands of people
up there
, they would have no problems killing people
down here
.

“Alien troop transports are ejecting landing vessels,” the tactical officer announced.

He gazed at the hologram of the planet. He could see the smaller landing pods separating from the larger hyperspace capable troop ships. No doubt, the aliens had the same type of technology and tactics when it came to sending troops down to the ground. At least in this respect, he felt relieved. Technically, large kilometer long ships could descend down to a planet’s surface, but they would be exposed to anti-air fire. If the large ship went down, everything within it would be annihilated. It was much better to separate the cargo into smaller ships. Besides, there was the issue of logistics. It was much easier to deploy stuff
onto
the ground from hundreds of smaller transports once they reached the soil than it was to deploy everything from one big ship.

Streit stood aghast at the figures. The seven big troop transports were a dozen kilometers wide. But the
thousands
of smaller landing pods were only a hundred meters wide. If alien technology was anything like human technology, each of these smaller ships could contain up to thousands of ground soldiers. He was facing an invasion force of a million enemy ground troops. There was no way he could fight off this many even if the enemy had infantry technology—which they certainly did not. But perhaps he could prevent some of these ground troops from landing.

As the minutes passed, he watched intently as these landing pods descended through the planet’s uppermost exosphere by the thousands. 3275, to be correct. Their descent was slow, by human standards. They looked like gigantic roaches, with hundreds of small black feet scattered all across the bottoms of their hulls. Before long, he knew it was time.

“Open up the anti-air turrets, now,” Streit ordered. “Remove the camouflage.”

“Yes, sir,” the weapons officer replied.

“Set the targeting systems on each gun to fire at the nearest target. Missile targeting should be spread throughout their landing force, but still target those closest to them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Let’s see how their atmospheric shields hold up.
“Fire!” Streit didn’t know what to expect, but he was glad of one thing. Because they had split up their ground troops into thousands of smaller landing vessels instead of one gigantic troop ship, it at least gave a glimmer of hope that they feared that human anti-air technology could destroy or incapacitate a massive troop ship. If that was possible, then it was just as possible that his anti-air fire could destroy their landing pods.

...Or perhaps that’s the way they always did things. For instance, against races with equivalent technology as their own, they were forced into deploying landing pods to minimize casualties against
those
races.

Either way, he was about to find out.

First Escarot Tranport Sheras-Cree, in orbit around Meerlat

Dictator Room…

“Yes, Subjugator. I am gracious for you granting me control of our orbital guns. Our warriors are descending now!” Terrestrial Commander Sha-Vas lifted his paws from his black plated chest and bowed his gigantic armored body to the image of Fleet Commander Hal-Dorat.

When Hal-Dorat’s holoimage vanished, Sha-Vas returned his concentration to his interface globe and stared at the hologram of the planet beneath. To his temporary surprise, the ground Pra had launched missiles and other projectiles at his descending ground forces.

Immediately, he analyzed the sensor data about the Pra’s counter-fire...and laughed.

The missiles weren’t even gravity propelled! He knew for a fact that the Pra still used gravity as the primitive propulsion method to move their space vessels and space-born missiles, but apparently they haven’t even solved the atmospheric problem that prevented gravitic propulsion—primitive as it was—from being used within a gaseous environment. Thus, the Pra’s missiles, all 15,000 of them, were still chemically propelled. Chemically.

Really, what type of barbaric civilization was he facing?

These missiles were small, too. Much smaller than their space-born missiles, and Sha-Vas wondered what types of warheads they contained. He probed deeper and saw that they were armed with standard fusion warheads. Good, at least this civilization hadn’t solved the size-constraint problem that prevented tiny vessels from being able to carry antimatter.

“All landing craft, fire M-D flak as soon as possible,” Sha-Vas ordered. “Take out those missiles.”

“Yes, Sturka!” replies came from his seven leading subordinates.

Eyeing the hologlobe, he watched as the Pra’s missiles rose through the planet’s atmosphere. At the same time, the first beams from the planet’s primitive laser cannons smashed into the shields of his landing craft. He saw the shields on his ships take the blow at full force, bending the beams of electromagnetism so that their impact on their hulls was much less damaging. Sha-Vas nodded with approval. His landing craft took the blow of the diffracted lasers, which only corroded their armor, but nothing else. Then he ordered, “All orbital vessels, fire kinetic rounds at the origin of their lasers and missiles.”

The acknowledgments came eagerly.

All fifty of the orbital ships of his superior’s fleet opened fire with their kinetic slugs on the ground below.

Planetary Defense Command, Meerlat

Operation Room…

“They’re firing on our missile and turret platforms!” the young lieutenant announced.

Streit nodded, fully expecting such an event. What he had not expected was that the enemy, those aliens, could deploy grav-shielding technology within a gaseous atmosphere. Human technology so far could not find a way to create stable gravitons within an atmosphere, but somehow the aliens circumvented this blockage. As a result, his laser beams did minor damage to the enemy’s landing pods. Then after the enemy’s kinetic orbital rounds slammed into his ground based laser turrets, those laser beams never will.

Now, it was up to his missiles to hit the enemy’s landing craft and perhaps take a few of them out.

As the minutes passed, Streit watched calmly as two things happened: one, the enemy’s kinetic-kill slugs slammed into every surface gun and missile position, destroying all of the human-made equipment into gigantic fireballs. And two, many of his missiles were neutralized by what appeared to be alien flak that seemed to disrupt space-time in dazzling cascades of god-knows-what.

At least those laser turrets were automated, Streit sighed. As for his ground based missile pods, he was glad at least that all his missiles had already been fired.

He eyed his subordinates as they cried frantically in the theater like command center. Humans were losing, of course. They were losing even before the battle happened. The tense situation within the command room had been like that, the moment everyone saw the seven massive troop transports hypering into the system.

“What is going to happen to us?” people around him asked.

He only told them that he did not know. But, he reminded them, they had to do their duty to their utmost. It was their responsibility to protect the population.

The civilian news channels were frantic, of course, talking about alien invasion even worse than the time the Orions had invaded. The civilians were truly in a panic. There was nothing he could do about that.

Soon, his remaining ground-based missile wave reached their targets. Streit watched as those remnants connected with the nearest alien landing pods, detonating in a brilliant flash of nuclear
inferno. He eyed the monitors with hope.

A feeling of joy perused his body when he realized some of the alien landing craft seemed to lose control. He could see the armor on those landing craft smashed to bits. Good, Streit felt slightly relieved. At least some of missiles had done some damage through their gravity shields. The ones that had been overwhelmed by a large amount of missiles seemed to have taken heavy damage. Still, it was only a very minor portion of their overall landing force.

When his final missile had detonated, fifty of those land craft had disappeared in nuclear fire, now falling over the planet as debris. About twenty of them seemed to have suffered lesser damage and lost navigation drive, free-falling out of control.

Yet—out of all those missiles, so few of them had actually made it through the enemy’s counter missile fire, and even fewer had penetrated the enemy’s superior gravity shielding before actually damaging their craft...

Streit sighed, again. What could he do?

He eyed the hologram as the thousands of landing craft continued descending, a bit fewer in number. That was it. It was over. The entire anti-air assault was finished.

He knew what would happen now. Those aliens would no doubt land, and he would finally get to see what they looked like and
how they fought on the ground. He feared what they intended to do to the people he had to protect.
“Lieutenant Holmes, contact the head of civilian police. Ask them about the condition of their preparations.”

It had been less than ten hours since the first alien ships had entered the system. At times like this, protocol dictated that civilian police relinquish authority of their units to him, the military commander of the planet, and he was to answer to Rear Admiral Kleingelt, the fleet commander of the system. But since the rear admiral was gone, that left him in charge.