He glanced at his timepiece. “Launch marks, five minutes,” he ordered. “Select coordinates; Plan Three. Upload them into the fleet network and prepare to flicker.”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said, as he took his seat. He always felt nervous before flickering into combat, but this time, at least, they could be fairly certain that they wouldn’t be jumping straight into a combat zone. Earth presented almost-unique defence problems for anyone holding the system. The defenders would be concentrated around Earth. He had no intention of going there, yet. “Plan Three uploaded.”
The final seconds ticked down quickly. “Flicker,” he ordered. “Take us into battle.”
He winced as his stomach twisted. The shock was worse than normal, but he could tolerate it, although it wasn’t as if he had a choice. There were those that claimed that the flicker-shock was purely psychometric, but they were people who’d never experienced it. The flicker-shock was real. He knew it in his bones.
The starships burst back into normal space. “Emergence, sir,” the tactical officer said. “We are within predicted range of the planet Mars.”
“Excellent,” Admiral Wilhelm said. It was excellent, well within his expected arrival range and, with the flicker-drive being what it was, lucky as well. “Confirm that there are no starships within engagement range and bring the fleet to battle stations. They’ll know we’re here by now.”
Admiral Arun Prabhu found himself jerking awake as the alarm screamed a warning. No military force could remain on alert constantly, despite the delusions of politicians and civilians who thought of military men and women as barely a grade above robots, and he’d been trying to sleep when the alarm had woken him. The superdreadnaught General Grant, Colin’s former flagship and the Shadow Fleet’s current command ship, had been waiting for the attack everyone knew was coming, but the crew still had to rest, even their Admiral.
He hit the intercom as he dressed rapidly. One advantage of orbiting deep within the gravity shadow was that the enemy couldn’t appear out of nowhere, not unless they were very lucky. Earth’s defence system was the most advanced and sensitive in the entire Empire, with the possible exception of whatever the Geeks and Nerds had defending their secret bases, and he would have sworn blind that no one could have slipped a cloaked ship through without being detected. Even the best cloaking devices could only compensate for so much before they overloaded and started missing details that alert watchers could use to track the ship.
“Report,” he snapped. He was just glad that Colin had agreed, finally, to remain on one of the command fortresses, rather than the starship. Arun had been following events on the ground with mounting concern and Colin’s death would have ruined everything, including Arun’s private motive for joining the rebellion. Hindustan, the world that had given birth to the young Arun, was an offence against humanity, a world where caste was absolute, part of the genetic code. His pale skin and dark eyes marked him as a Brahmin, one of the rulers, free to use the lesser castes as he liked. He hated it. “I need a sit-rep, now!”
“We’re picking up a major emergence signature, looks to be at least two hundred ships, near Mars,” the tactical officer reported. Arun knew relief — they were not about to be attacked at once from cloak — and then fear. The enemy should have gone directly for Earth. The fact that they had attacked Mars instead suggested that they had something else up their sleeve. “The fleet is going to alert now and your presence is requested on the flag bridge.”
Arun forgot his jacket, scooped up his terminal in one hand and his cap in the other, and ran for the door. The flag bridge was only a few meters from his cabin, but he forced himself to walk calmly just before the hatch hissed open, allowing him access to the heart of the defences. The holographic display caught his eye at once. A mass of red light, icons blurring together into one contagious mass, hovered near Mars. It was, he realised numbly, far more than just four superdreadnaught squadrons.
“Why Mars?” He asked, cursing the time delay under his breath as he took his command chair. Mars was far enough from Earth to make intervention almost impossible, unless he took the fleet out of Earth’s gravity shadow and flickered out to engage the enemy. It might be what the enemy wanted. If they intended to lure the Shadow Fleet away from the defences, they’d picked a neat way of doing so. “What’s on Mars that is so important?”
He called up tactical data and swore again. Mars had only limited defences, compared to Earth; a handful of outdated fortresses, some ground-based planetary defence systems and a dozen or so gunboats. The orbiting moons and asteroids that had been converted into industrial centres and habitats were effectively naked. The enemy could send down a pair of superdreadnaught squadrons and Mars’s orbit would be swept clean of life.
“Send a pair of recon destroyers to Mars to obtain an accurate count on those starships,” he ordered, cursing the long-range sensors. Drive fields might send out gravimetric pulses that travelled faster than light, but the enemy fleet was bunched together so tightly that they couldn’t pick out each individual ship at such range. He called up the records from their emergence, but they’d come into the system together, bunched up to make reading out individual ships difficult. He’d seen that trick worked before, mainly at Macore when it had been used to slip a superdreadnaught squadron into engagement range of the Shadow Fleet, but here it was being used to far more effect. The enemy commander, whoever it was, had guts.
“Aye, Admiral,” the communications officer said. The recon destroyers had been orbiting up above the gravity shadow. Arun hoped — prayed, to gods he no longer really believed in — that they would be able to slip in and out unmolested, but if the enemy were alert, they might manage to catch the destroyers before they could flicker out. “They’re on their way.”
Arun nodded grimly as two icons vanished from the display, appearing a moment later near Mars, trying to remain close enough to the enemy fleet to see through the haze of ECM covering them while remaining out of weapons range. It wasn’t going to be easy, but destroyer skippers were used to such risks. If it could be done, they would do it.
We used to use the Freebooters to recon systems, he thought, grimly. He had barely known Daria and couldn’t say that he was affected by her actual identity, but losing the Freebooters was a shock. Who did he use to recon the system… or did he jump in without bothering with recon first?
“Get me a direct link to the command fortress, secure line,” he ordered. He had to confer with Colin. Knowingly or otherwise, whoever was commanding that massive fleet had placed them in a hell of a blind. They had an obligation to defend Mars, but honouring that obligation would leave Earth’s defences dependent on the fixed defences. It might not have been such a danger without the threat of Geek-level technology in enemy hands, including long-range multiple warhead missiles and other unpleasant surprises. “Colin, we need to talk.”
The direct link was secure. No one could hear them. “I know,” Colin said. There was a grim note in his voice as well. He was as capable as Arun at working out the possible consequences of either rushing to Mars’s rescue or abandoning it to its fate. “We don’t have a choice, but to make an attempt to drive them away from Mars.”