that might have been from a Turusch warship struck their crawler on the south rim of the crater. They’d been trying to get to a terraforming team trapped when the Aethiopis impactor strike had overturned their pressure dome.
The Tsiolkovsky Observatory was damaged and three astronomers killed when fragments scattered across the far side of Earth’s moon. Three of the ships waiting at the muster point between Earth and Mars took damage from high-velocity meteors-likely fragments from the battle.
The dazed human defenders began taking stock. On the one side, the invaders had lost forty ships, a hundred fighters, perhaps several tens of thousands of their military personnel. On the other, the humans had lost a handful of fighters…and perhaps sixty million people-most killed by the tidal waves on Earth.
The defense of Earth, it seemed, had not been so one-sided after all.
“Lieutenant Gray! Lieutenant Gray! Over here! Look over here, please!”
Gray stepped onto the deck, startled by the crowd. Close by were his squadron mates, pounding him and one another on the back, cheering, even singing. Farther out, though, there were civilians…news media personnel wearing the high-tech headgear that turned their heads into living high-definition cameras and recorders.
Where the hell had they come from? They must have been on the
“Lieutenant Gray!” one of the reporters yelled, her voice shrill above the mob noise. “Your CO says you’re a hero! What do you have to say about that?”
He turned his head slightly and caught the eye of Marissa Allyn. Presumably she was the “CO” in question. She just grinned at him, then gave him a jaunty thumbs-up.
Gray shrugged, and shook his head. “I’m not a hero,” he said. “The heroes are the ones that fought it out toe to toe with the Turusch.”
“The Turusch don’t
“Lieutenant Gray!” another called. “Your records say you’re from Old Manhattan. Are you aware Old Manhattan got washed away by a tidal wave?”
The news had only just reached the
“Lieutenant Gray! What do you think about the news that the Confederation Senate is going to talk to the Turusch about peace?…
“Lieutenant Gray!..”
He was too tired to answer, too tired to care. The next thing he knew, though, was that a dozen of his squadron mates-the kids of Green Squadron-had scooped him up and hoisted him to their shoulders, were chanting as they carried him toward the elevator down to the crew hab.
“
Good. If he didn’t have to listen to any more nonsense questions,
Manhattan washed away? There was a pang there…a lingering grief.
But it didn’t seem to matter any longer.
“Admiral? The last of the fighters are being brought on board.”
“Thank you. Tell Intel to stay off their backs for a little while, will you? The debriefs can wait until tomorrow. Our people deserve some downtime.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“What’s our SAR status?”
“Both SAR squadrons are still on deep-search patrol. We’ve recovered and towed in five Starhawks. The pilots of two of them were picked up alive, will probably be okay.”
“Good.”
Two out of…how many? It wasn’t enough.
“We’ve also recovered three Trash fighters with their crews alive…and are trying to communicate with the crew of one of their battleship asteroids. We may have as many as several thousand prisoners after this.”
“Keep me informed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Koenig looked again at his desk display screen as he cut the mental connection. He wasn’t particularly interested in Turusch prisoners at the moment. He’d just learned that one of their hivel rounds had hit Phobia CIC, or a dockyard facility right next door. Reports filtering out from the Inner System were still fragmentary and maddeningly vague…but it sounded like much of the Phobos command staff had been killed.
He felt so damned fucking
But it has turned out to be a terribly, terribly
For the moment, at least, the invaders were gone. Force Alpha, the ships that had hit Triton, had turned around and fled once news of the defeat of Force Bravo had reached them, out across on the far edge of the solar system. Almost contemptuously, they had demolished the surface of Triton, giving it a thick but short-lived atmosphere of gaseous nitrogen, and erasing all traces of the human presence on the frigid surface. The nitrogen would freeze out as snow soon enough; the question was why they had done it. A show of force? A fit of pique?
How did you interpret the emotions of an entity so alien as the Turusch?
A battlefleet was on its way out to Neptune now, partly to secure the region and make sure the enemy was gone, partly to dispatch SAR vessels to look for the five High Guard ships lost out there. There’d been weak radio signals picked up hours ago, signals that suggested that the
And they’d transmitted everything they’d seen, information vital to the final battle all the way across on the other side of the solar system.
“Admiral? Dr. Wilkerson wishes to speak with you.”
Koenig sighed as he opened the mental window. He would have to deal with the Turusch POWs after all.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Excuse the interruption, Admiral. I just wanted to know how many more Turusch you were sending us.”
“Unknown, Doctor. We may have a few thousand of them sitting in that battleship hulk out there.”
