“Right,” he said. “I am assuming command of the defenses of Earth. Give me a situation report, now.”
“Sir, the datanet has been crippled,” Fallon said. “I barely know anything…”
“Then give me what you have,” Marius said patiently, checking the shuttle’s ETA at the station. “What do you know about what’s going on?”
“Ah…EDS1 has been destroyed, sir,” Fallon said. “I have dispatched SAR gunboats and shuttles, but they don’t hold out much hope of finding survivors. EDS2, EDS7 and EDS9 are non-responsive; they’re intact, yet they’re not linked into the command network and are refusing to respond to hails. I don’t know their exact status. And there are dozens of enemy starfighters flying around, engaging the defenses.”
Marius scowled. Starfighters needed a base—either a starship or a station—to operate. Their life support packs wouldn’t last indefinitely, which meant that someone had to have launched them. But from where?
He glanced at the holographic near-orbit display as the shuttle rose out of the atmosphere and considered it. The starfighters could have come from the silent battlestations, yet if that was the case, there should be more of them. And then the treacherous commanders would have had to convince the fighter jocks to support them, too…no, it wasn’t possible to form a conspiracy of that magnitude without Federation Intelligence or ONI getting wind of it beforehand.
He looked at the display again, and knew the answer.
“There are too many freighters in orbit—breaking orbit now,” he said slowly. Converting freighters into makeshift carriers was an old trick. And now that the fighting had begun, hundreds of innocent civilian craft were breaking orbit and fleeing, unaware that some of their comrades were actually enemy starships. “Ten gets you twenty that at least one of them is working for the enemy…”
He frowned. “I want a general broadcast,” he ordered. “All civilian ships within the Earth-Luna Sphere are to cancel their drives and prepare to be boarded. Any that refuse to stop will be fired upon and destroyed.”
Fallon sounded shocked. “But, sir…”
Marius ignored the protest and drove onwards. “Have you re-established the command datanet yet?”
“No, sir,” Fallon said. “The coordinating systems were mounted on EDS1, and were destroyed by the blast that took out the station.”
And it never occurred to you to try to work around the problem? Marius thought, wondering what connections Fallon must have such that he had avoided being sent somewhere harmless, perhaps an asteroid mining station.
“I see,” he said as coldly as he could. “Your station may not have been designed to serve as a command station, but the computers will be able to handle it for at least a few hours. And by then, we will either have won or lost the coming battle. Reboot the system and prepare for operations.”
“Sir, the manual clearly states…”
“Fuck the manual,” Marius swore at him. “This is war! Doing what the enemy expects us to do is a certain way to wind up dead, with the enemy laughing at us. Now, forget the manual and reboot the fucking system, right fucking now!”
“Sir, our escort has arrived,” the pilot interrupted. “We should be on the station in ten minutes, unless we hit unexpected trouble.”
Marius nodded absently, thinking hard. He’d warned the Senate about the dangers of largely unknown alien races, but he knew that no alien race could have launched such a devastating and precise attack. The level of access the unknown attackers had demonstrated they had internal help, which meant that whoever was behind the attack was trying for a coup, rather than destruction for the sake of destruction. Destroying Earth would have been easy—a single antimatter bomb would depopulate the planet—but anyone who wanted to replace the Federation with his own rule would need Earth’s legitimacy.
And that suggested there had to be a second level to the plan. Destroying EDS1 and Navy HQ would cause confusion, but the disarray wouldn’t last. Even if Marius hadn’t stepped up to the plate, someone would have taken command sooner or later. There had to be an incoming enemy fleet heading towards Earth, having somehow been smuggled into the system. That, at least, was no longer impossible. The stardrive had seen to that.
“Ah, the network is up and running,” Fallon said. He sounded relieved. Marius wondered how he would cope in a battle where multiple antimatter detonations would disrupt the network effortlessly. Coordinating a fleet in combat wasn’t easy. “The three silent stations are continuing to refuse to respond.”
Treachery or equipment malfunction? Marius thought. There was no way to know for sure.
“Link into Marine HQ at Camp Heinlein,” he ordered. Unless the Marines had been hit as well, Major General Tobias Vaughn would still be alive. And Vaughn, who had once been the senior Marine on Marius’s first command, was one of his closest friends. “Inform the Major General that I want armed Marines in the air and heading for the three stations. Once they board, they are to secure the stations and confirm their status, then prepare to start searching the civilian ships. If they meet with resistance, they are authorized to use deadly force.”
“Yes, sir,” Fallon said. At least he’d learned to take orders without objecting. “Ah, four bulk freighters are continuing to accelerate away from Earth, heading towards the Dead End.”
Marius smiled, feeling the old excitement shimmering through his mind. The Sol System possessed two Asimov Points, but one of them—the Dead End—led only to a single useless star system, without even a handful of asteroids to arouse the interest of the RockRats. The Dead End was defended, of course, yet it was simply not as important as the Gateway, the second Asimov Point within the system. And there was no logical reason for anyone to want to go there, unless they had something illegal in mind. And that, to his mind, effectively confirmed their guilt. Converting a bulk freighter to a starfighter carrier was easy.
“Order the starfighters to intercept and move up gunboats in support,” Marius ordered calmly. “If the bulk freighters refuse to surrender and hold position, the pilots are authorized to open fire. No further warnings.”
Fallon clearly swallowed an objection. “Yes, sir,” he replied. “I shall pass your orders on to the pilots.”
Marius nodded. In five minutes, he would be aboard the station and ready to take command of defensive operations. But where was the enemy fleet? Their commander would have to strike a balance between secrecy and the need to strike hard before the defenders reorganized.
How close…?
“We should do something,” Raistlin protested. “We shouldn’t stay here.”
Roman couldn’t disagree. For cadets, spending any time in the Safe Locks was a foretaste of hell. They were armored rooms, isolated from Luna Academy’s life support system and, in theory, anyone inside could survive a disaster that took out the remainder of the academy. Now, with over seventy cadets from all five years crammed inside this one, tiny room, it felt claustrophobic.
“And what, pray tell, do you think you could do?” Proctor Amanda Wallace demanded. She was tall and, to the cadets, a force of nature. The proctors didn’t teach, not formally; they supervised the cadets and, when necessary, provided discipline. “Do you think we could take Emprise and Enigma out into battle?”
Raistlin flushed red, while a handful of cadets tittered. Emprise and Enigma were the two old starships that had been assigned to the academy for training purposes, but they were far from state-of-the-art. Roman, and every other cadet, even those who had no intention of going into Engineering, had spent months crawling over the two ships, eventually flying them throughout the Solar System. They were in perfect working order, but hopelessly outdated. Any modern warship would scythe them down in seconds.