Then I saw us lose. This was what had delayed the attack on Earth, something we would find unthinkable to use. The heavy hitters on the fringes of Rolleston’s fleet fired. It was a planetary kinetic bombardment on a scale that dwarfed the destruction of California.
The feeds switched between footage showing us what was happening in space, orbit and on the ground. Tree-sized cylinders of dense metal tore through most of the orbital defences facing this side of the planet, once and for all destroying the myth of fortress Earth. We watched, as in an instant, orbital weapons platform and sky fortress after orbital weapons platform and sky fortress just ceased to exist, turned into powdered fragments at a frightening rate. Feed after feed went down, but there was always another.
It looked like the Earth was burning as the atmosphere lit up when the cylinders hit re-entry. We saw feed from Earth. It looked like the sky was on fire.
Then the Spokes. Colombia, Ecuador, Uganda, gone just like that. We watched the might of Atlantis explode on one side and then the other like a through-and-through bullet wound on a massive scale. The huge structure started to topple even as the kinetic round hit the water, creating an impact tidal wave and boiling water in front of it as it travelled into the Earth to cause a tectonic event.
How could humans to do this to their own home? They couldn’t all be possessed. We watched the second Brazilian Spoke fall, a horrible replay of the FHC.
Nyota Mlima fell. Air Marshal Kaaria died in an instant, and with him went the co-ordination of the remaining orbital defences, most of which were now on the wrong side of the planet.
Even this far from Earth, the fleet feed was able to pick up the impacts of the bombardment. On Earth those impacts would shake and drown their surroundings in earthquakes and tidal waves.
I wanted to say something. There was nothing to say. I wanted to tell the pilot to hurry but it was superfluous.
‘They will be good and angry now,’ Mudge said quietly. ‘I think you should send it.’
Pagan sent the package. A screaming God forwarded it. Every remaining person on Earth still hooked up to the net received our message. We shut down Sharcroft, fleet comms in C amp;C and the various intelligence agencies trying to scream at us for what we’d done this time. These people never want to share.
Now he had cleared a path, Rolleston started delivery. They looked like what they were: enormous seed pods fired at the Earth containing the latest iteration of Crom. Rolleston had called it Crom Cruach. Each pod containing uncountable bio-nanites designed to reproduce, grow, infect, consume and change. This was his bid to terraform the Earth. To remake it in his vision. The entire world a reflection of his sick mind.
There were attempts at interception. Some were even successful. The only thing we had going for us was that the delivery of Crom Cruach was a comparatively slow process.
We were taking more and more hits. Each one echoed through the metal structure of the ship. I could feel the difference in the strike craft’s handling. I knew that the pilots would be fighting it now.
There are no boarding attempts in fleet actions. Space is too big and nobody’s mad enough to try and board a ship full of their enemies. Except Merle. And now us. It’s just a matter of matching velocity. Hoping that the target ship doesn’t change course and then giving yourself a little push and trying not to wipe out on its hull. Simple, except that the maths involved is staggeringly complex, and here we were in the middle of the biggest fleet action in human history.
I hoped our pilot, whose name I hadn’t even bothered to learn, was really good, or we were going to be left with our cocks flapping in the wind.
‘This is as close as I can get you,’ our nameless pilot told us over internal comms. I checked our position. Saying it was hot would have been a vast understatement. There was silence on the tac net. Like everyone was waiting for something. The head of Mudge’s armour turned to look at me in my converted bomb cradle.
‘Ready?’ I asked. It seemed that I was back in charge of real-world security. They confirmed their readiness in turn. Right, time.
We came out of the bomb bay using our flight fins to adjust position in tiny increments. Initially we planned to stay close to our long-range strike craft, matching its velocity, trying to get our bearings. Rannu and I were out first, Pagan and Morag following, but the strike craft was coming apart around us. Metal buckled, broke apart and became fragments pierced by black beams and ruptured by exploding warheads, so Merle and Mudge exited what was now a high-velocity debris field. We set course and triggered burns on our fins as parts of the craft bounced off our armour, knocking us in random directions. We took a kicking getting out of the wreckage, our expert navigation systems constantly having to recalculate course. Free of the debris, we used one short burn and then hoped our stealth systems would mask us. Hoped that they would think we were also debris. Working for us was the fact that nobody had ever been stupid enough to try something like this during a fleet action.
It was like being born into light. The red of lasers, the blue and white of particle beam weapons, the white fire of plasma, the burn of missile engines multiplying as they exploded into submunitions. We could see long trails of railgun tracer fire. Point-defence systems killed incoming warheads. Armour-plated hulls melted and ran as plasma fire blossomed across them.
Screening remotes looked like swarms of insects around the bigger ships as they fired at fighters, interceptors, other remotes and incoming missiles. Skin mechs fired their weapons like a crawling artillery barrage at any enemy craft in range.
Some of our fighters shot by beneath us. They were little more than oversized engines propelling armoured, wedge-shaped weapons platforms filled with gel. Without gravity they were pulling manoeuvres at Gs high enough to powder unprotected and unaugmented bone. The fighters were pursued by one of the organic Black Squadron frigates, its black beam weapons stabbing out again and again as its point-defence system destroyed incoming missiles. The frigate’s engine glowed a cold blue like one of Their vessels. With every beam of black light one of the fighters split apart, bleeding frozen gel out into the vacuum. We were too small for the frigate to notice.
Everyone knows that war is horrific, and it is. What nobody will tell you is that sometimes it is beautiful. This was beautiful. This was like watching fireworks as a child. I was exhilarated but I was calm. This was so unreal. It was a beautiful chaos of light and fire and metal. It was balletic, and the only thing I could hear when I shut down the noise from the feeds to block out the screams and the panic was the sound of my own breathing.
I felt a surge of exhilaration as one of their battleships came apart under heavy fire from lots of different sources, including the bright blue lance of the Thunderchilde ’s main particle beam weapon.
All around us impacts blew off fragments of armoured hull. The faster ships flew by, skirmishing with each other — or dogfighting, as pilots insisted on calling it — risking missile fire at the bigger ships, drawing laser and railgun fire from screening drones.
Above us my vision was filled by the enormous organic and seething chitinous form of the mutated Bush. The Hellion’s passive sensor picked up an increase in radiation as the Bush ’s enormous entropy cannon fired and drew a scar down the length of the Thunderchilde. Good, I thought, it needed a bit of dirtying up. It needed to earn its scars.