But the honor of parentage was not hers to claim. She was at best its stepmother, moving in to carry on when those who had toiled and worked and paid with their very lives could no longer complete the fight. The father of this fleet, Gordon Lee, had never seen a single one of his children fly. Its other progenitors had been lost to the unknown, and in so doing had gained them the information they all needed if they were to have even the smallest chance of survival.
Every other person who had led this battle for all their futures had made the ultimate sacrifice. Was she truly a part of its wondrous, miraculous ascendance if she felt unwilling to pay the same price?
Her eyes misted as she stared through the screen, hardly seeing the icons of the ships any more. How much of what she felt could even be put into words? How much would someone like the Admiral ever believe? “I have always been here, Calvin. But I have not always been part of the solution. I’ve been referred to as the mother of this fleet. You just said much the same, yet,—in the beginning—I tried to abort the whole affair. What if I had not? What if I had done as Lee begged me to do and thrown the full measure of the government behind his project? What if I had contained that bastard Sykes earlier? Would we be where we are today? Could we have gone further? Could we be better prepared?
“The Deltans have stolen the lives of all the people who ever meant anything to me, and I owe them a reckoning for that. But I also owe the people—my friends—who have come before me, who faced this foe with a level of faith I was late in achieving. It’s a special sort of hell to be the one left behind. I’m certain you’ve been in that same position, given your career. You understand. I have to see this through. I have to face down the Deltans here. I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with my family and see this through to the end—here on the front line, facing the same threat they faced, not hidden away on Earth or cowering behind some asteroid. Admiral, I have to be here, because here is where I’ve always been, here beside the crew of the Sword of Liberty.”
Henson locked eyes with her, trying to ascertain her true feelings, her actual intent. To his shock, he saw a sincerity so true, a resolve so intense, that he had to look away from the fierceness of it.
Lydia followed his gaze down and touched his temple gently, drawing him back to her. This time she appeared softer, more vulnerable. “Please, Admiral, don’t force me onto the sidelines. Let me finish this.”
He glanced over at the screen, then back to her. He shook his head and raised his comm suite. Pressing a single button, he said, “Bridge, this is the Admiral. Cast off Nightingale and send them to the reserve point. There are no further passengers.” With that, he nodded to Lydia and turned to pull himself away.
She reached out an arm and stopped him with a gentle grasp. He looked back and saw her smile slightly, tears of gratitude welling un-fallen in the corners of her eyes. “Thank you, Calvin. You’ll never know how much this means to me.”
He grunted. “Ms. Russ, I’m not quite as sentimental as all that. I said you served no purpose on this ship, and it turned out I was wrong. It’s as simple as that.”
Lydia grinned more fully. “Oh, really? And what purpose is that?”
“Ma’am, you seem to have a faith and a will stronger than any single warhead, and everyone on this ship has seen that and been inspired by it. You are not a shooter—that’s true—and your value may only be symbolic, but the strength of that symbol may prove critical in the end. If this battle is as close a thing as I fear it may be, your spirit could be all that sustains us. I had forgotten, and for that I am sorry. Your place is here.”
With that, the commander of CRUDESGRU 1 turned and left, leaving Lydia alone in the Trenton’s wardroom, alone with her thoughts, her fears, her hopes, and with the converging icons on the tactical screen.
The battle was about to begin.
A tragically beautiful dawn came to the asteroid belt.
These inelegant remnants of the ordered solar system had never known any illumination beyond the meager sunlight of Sol, far, far beyond the orbit of Mars. And all that cold light had ever revealed were stark shadows dappled across slate gray ore and faded brown rock. The Belt may have held incalculable wealth as a resource, but it had never been exactly attractive.
That assessment changed with the arrival of the Patrons, though. The drive star still sprayed its photonic thrust wide, and the convoy continued to decelerate, still normalizing and circularizing its orbit over these long months and years of thrust. Even though they were well and truly captured by the gravity of the distant sun, they were not yet at their intended destination, wherever that might prove to be.
For both defense and maneuver, the drive star blazed on, burning and illuminating sections of rock that had never before seen light of any kind. Crystals and pure un-oxidized metals fumed and shone brilliantly from deep crevices. Striations of heterogeneous minerals stood out for the first time like the lines and whorls of some demented abstract canvas.
Dawn came to the asteroid belt, but vastly brighter, more revealing, and in direct opposition to the only light that had ever really touched them since the moment of creation. Here was beauty, but a terrible beauty wrought only by destruction.
The Patrons paid this truly unique spectacle no heed, however. They simply cruised on, either unaware or uncaring. Their four ships—the Polyp, the Cathedral, the reconstituted Junkyard, and the slightly smaller, yet more forbidding Control Ship—all orbited serenely around the drive star, protected by its thrust and unmolested by any mines or attackers for the last few weeks. The ships had all returned to their quasi-Lagrange positions, seemingly unworried about a different, more defensive configuration.
The convoy came upon a loose, arbitrary grouping of four asteroids separated by thousands of kilometers, seemingly no different from any other set of rocks in the Belt. It passed blithely through the center of the group, content to allow the proven effectiveness of the drive star’s radiance to defend it from any potential attack.
But a static, single layered defense was a weak one, no matter how effective it might originally have been.
The searing cone of light swept over the asteroids’ rocky surfaces, leaving behind fields of pitted, half-melted stone which ended abruptly at the mutual horizons on all four masses. The defensive radiance then passed on, leaving the shadow zones behind each untouched. From those shadows, the coordinated first strike flashed out.
Twenty-two warships each unleashed initial salvoes of thirty missiles—nearly a third of the load-out for the destroyers, but just a ninth the complement of the two larger cruisers. The 660 missiles which streaked out from the four asteroids toward their convoy targets were not the still, stealthy threats of the mines. This wave of devastation was like the Sword of Liberty’s attack: swift, directed, and erratic, but dozens of times larger and more deadly.
Missile trajectories blossomed into hundreds of disparate tracks, only converging upon one of the four possible targets at the last moment. One fifth of the wave exploded into fusion brilliance along a direct line between the targets and the shielding asteroids in an effort to obscure direct targeting of the warships now emerging from their hiding places. For a moment, the drive-star’s luminance was overcome by a halo of nuclear glory, and only then did the offensive wave truly take effect.