Their frigates weren’t the worst news. That was their capital ship, which was much slower in folding away its induction sails. It looked like a technological slug with moth wings. It was covered in huge slabs of armoured chitin. I recognised the ship. I’d been on it. As the most advanced and largest super-carrier in the colonies, we had expected it to be their flagship, just as it had been in the Sirius system when I’d served there. I hadn’t expected to see it like this. Its dimensions and shape had even changed slightly. We expected hard cold technology to be a constant but Rolleston had even changed that. He had made the USSS George Bush Junior look like a giant diseased maggot.
‘What’s he done?’ Mudge said, appalled. More so because he knew that was where we were going.
I heard metal scrape against metal as the docking clamps released the strike craft from the Thunderchilde and the pilots fired their manoeuvring jets to push us away from the larger ship.
The night began to light up. Our fleet was coming in above Rolleston’s, hoping to trap it against the heavy weapons of the orbital defence platforms that ringed Earth. Our strike craft moved off slowly towards their fleet. We had to give them time to mix it up a little first. Space went blue as the Thunderchilde fired her massive particle beam weapon at the Bush. It was too far to see if it hit. We were losing more and more images of the enemy fleet as they took out our probes and targeting, long-range sensor arrays. ‘Here they come,’ the pilot said calmly over the internal comms.
Then panic.
They had been fired almost as soon as we had provided the co-ordinates we’d got from the Citadel. They’d been fired from all over the Belt. The biggest rocks they could load into the industrial mass divers. Warfare through maths. The co-ordinates and timing had all been minutely calculated. All of the rocks had been aimed at different vectors in the vast area of space that the enemy fleet was due to arrive in.
The enemy would have been aware of the incoming rocks from the moment their fleet arrived. That wasn’t the point. It took a long time to move a big ship, let alone a fleet of them. We watched as manoeuvring engines lit up, burning bright to move massive metal behemoths out of the way. Heavy weapons fired, creating fast-moving shrapnel, making life difficult for the smaller ships.
Few of the rocks actually hit but chaos reigned in the enemy fleet. I hoped Rolleston was angry. Multiple windows showed us various images of the confusion. I watched a rock smash into a light cruiser, breaking its back. The vessel silently split, venting gas, debris and people into vacuum. Unfortunately the enemy ships were too far apart for collisions.
Then the darkness truly lit up as Earth’s orbital weapons opened up. Particle, plasma and lasers reached out for the enemy’s ships. Reaching them, scarring them, bursting some of the smaller ones. Thousands of missiles curved round the Earth from the defences on the other side of the planet to fragment into submunitions. The number of engines burning towards the enemy multiplied exponentially. Rolleston’s fleet seemed to explode, but it was just the detonation of chaff and other countermeasures to take out the incoming warheads. The enemy’s screening drones fired point-defence lasers and in some cases physically rammed the incoming missiles.
The two fleets exchanged fire with particle beam weapons, mass drivers, heavy plasma and heavy laser cannon. The missiles that penetrated the enemy’s countermeasures detonated. Bursting ships, some of them big ones. Rolleston had put some of his heavy hitters on the fringes of his fleet, leaving them in harm’s way, prey for the orbital defence network.
As we watched enemy ships coming apart but continuing on their course as debris, it felt like we could win. This was the biggest fleet engagement I had ever seen. It was the largest in history. Even though it was space combat, I understood the tactics, the strategy and the cold hard facts of beam, round and missile trying to break through armour. I wasn’t paying much attention to the net feed.
On the net, Earth was represented as a huge, glowing, spherical, neon infoscape. A curtain of gossamer neon threads linked it to the orbital defences that ringed the planet. More threads connected it to the fleet in orbit. Even this far out I could make out the information reflection of the Spokes on this side of the planet. I found Atlantis’s tower of water strangely familiar and comforting. It had been the birthplace of God on the net.
The majority of the vessels from both fleets looked like stylised ancient sea-going warships drawn in high-quality computer graphics. Each nationality and unit worked to a theme. The hackers/signal people also had themed icons. The Black Squadron frigates were biotechnological insectile dragons. The Bush looked like a huge biotech funeral barge from some ancient and obscene forgotten part of history.
Behind us a huge red sun rose over the Earth’s infoscape horizon. God.
From each of the enemy fleet’s ships came a stream of what I first thought was black liquid but on closer examination turned out to be flies. Each stream rose into the air and formed into a massive virtual object. Four burning black suns. One each from Sirius, Lalande, Proxima and Barnard’s Star. One from each of the colonial fleets.
Then Demiurge reformatted the net. The net’s space reflection had a ground now. It was a plain of black glass. Reflected in the glass was the burning sea of red flame that rolled across the sky. Then God started screaming.
‘Gods save us,’ Pagan whispered across the tac net.
The enemy fleet’s hackers/signal people came flying across the plain of glass towards our own. Each should have been in the uniform of their own country’s icon. They weren’t; all were featureless, sexless, obsidian-skinned winged demons wielding weapons of fire like the angel that had destroyed the net reflection of High Nyota, Mlima’s C amp;C, when Rolleston had escaped Earth orbit.
The demons met the hackers from our fleet and those rising from the more distant net reflection of the orbital defences. The hackers on our side were armed with copies of the software Pagan and Morag had developed, derived from what they had learned from the godsware and inside information on Demiurge. Weapons of moonlight and silver fire. Weapons that just about allowed them to hold their own against the demons. I suddenly found myself missing Vicar.
Then flights of angels emerged from the dark suns and the dying started in earnest. I could only watch in horror as angelic weapons and white fire cut swathes through our hackers.
When you work in abstract about how outclassed you are, it’s just words, it’s just numbers; then you have it driven home like this.
I minimised the net feed and enlarged the fleet. I watched from various angles. Rolleston’s fleet was still in disarray but starting to regroup. Engines of all sizes from the largest to the smallest lit up the blackness as the two fleets closed. Our fleet was desperate to get in among the enemy. They wanted to keep us at arm’s length.
Our strike craft was shaking and bucking with the repeated shock waves of enemy warheads detonated by our countermeasures. I heard railgun fire rattling thunderously across the strike craft’s hull. We couldn’t even hear the impact of the beams that I knew must have been scorching its armour. Instead we heard the servos of its own weapon systems moving as it returned fire. Stealth wasn’t an option now and we didn’t even have a fighter escort. It would have drawn too much attention.