observation lounge. I just stared out into space. I felt the shudder of the engines and heard the hull strain as we started to rise out of orbit. I couldn’t see the Earth from here.
24
I was relieved that Air Marshal Kaaria was co-ordinating the orbital defences. He’d struck me as competent. More to the point he’d struck me as someone with balls.
In a surprising move the politicians had actually agreed on the best man for the job to command the fleet: Admiral James Horrax, Royal Navy retired, known as ‘Big Jimmy’ by the people under his command. He had fought over a hundred and fifty fleet actions against Them in all four of the colonial systems. He’d won some of them as well. There were probably better admirals still on active service but they had been serving in the colonial fleets and were on the other side now. Probably possessed.
I had watched the feed of Komali Akhtar joining the admiral and Captain Penelope Grinstead on the bridge of the Thunderchilde. The prime minister was wearing full navy dress. I didn’t like the bridge. Too clean and new. It needed some dirt. It needed to look a little lived in.
‘If you can ignore my presence here I will drown you all in rum,’ she’d told the RSAF bridge crew. I was half impressed by her balls and half of the opinion that she wanted to die up here because it would be easier than what would happen on the ground if we failed.
We had climbed into the Hellions in prep. It was like wearing someone’s internal organs as a coat. I’d not liked the click of jacks sliding into the plugs at the best of times – it put my teeth on edge. I liked the way the Hellion’s connecting jacks just seemed to slither into my neck plugs even less. Interface exo-armour felt like an extension of your body. That was what it was designed to be. The coupling of flesh with the internal biotech of the Hellions was total. They were our bodies now. I just couldn’t shake the feeling of disgust, which was making my skin crawl.
The Hellions had contained Demiurge when we’d found them but it had been dormant. Morag and Pagan had cleared it out with a program derived from their analysis of the silver fire Nuada had used to exorcise Rannu. At least I hoped they had. We’d then invited someone else into the armoured suits.
Disgust or not, they were good. Their properties exceeded even those of the Mamluks that we’d used in the Dog’s Teeth. Each had a vacuum-capable flight fin, a ball-mounted black light point-defence system on the chest and four vertically launched missile tubes on the back. We had back tentacles that I wasn’t quite sure how to use yet and razor-sharp spurs of bone that extended from the forearm to use in hand-to-hand. Their stealth systems were excellent. The biological Themtech components cut down significantly on EM and heat signatures and their skin was coated in reactive camouflage.
We carried the latest iteration of the trusty Retributor railgun, except for Rannu and Merle, the two best shots, who were carrying light plasma cannons.
On this run we weren’t going to be comms blind. We couldn’t be. We needed to see what was happening both in the net and with the fleet. Pagan and Morag had created an application for the Pais Badarn Beisrydd that would allow us to receive feed from the net and the fleet without Demiurge knowing. We hoped. The big question was, did the enemy know that they had been compromised on Lalande 2? Demiurge and therefore Rolleston had seen Morag down in the boardroom. Did they realise she had been tranced in? If the cloak had worked, then there was no reason for them to think that she had been because she would have left no trace. Still everything relied on them taking the bait.
We were racked in the converted bomb bay of a stealth-capable, long-range strike craft just like the Spear, which we had taken to Sirius. I wasn’t dying of radiation poisoning this time. I think I felt worse.
The enemy were late. The fleet feed on my IVD showed empty space at the co-ordinates the intel we had stolen from Demiurge in the Citadel said they would be at. Late didn’t mean anything. It takes a long time to move a fleet, let alone four, but timing was critical to our plans.
Mudge started laughing over the comms. He was ferociously stoned. He’d offered me drugs and I had been tempted by some clean-cut, military-grade Slaughter. Something that would give me a little edge. I’d said no. I wasn’t sure why but I wanted to be clean.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I just realised that our plan, our grand scheme to save humanity, is based on network incompatibility,’ he said and continued laughing. ‘I haven’t been so disappointed since I found out They were space lichen.’
Part of me wanted to tell him to shut up. Be serious. But instead I just smiled.
‘That wasn’t what I said,’ Pagan said, sounding pissed off. ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously-’
‘If he was taking this seriously he’d be in his boxers and a string vest,’ Morag said. I knew she was smiling under all the metal and flesh. I recognised it in her voice. She had only spoken to me when it was necessary during briefing and prep. She’d not been angry, just distant, aloof, arguably more professional than me.
‘I am taking it seriously!’ Mudge protested. ‘I’ve got them on under my armour. In the unlikely event that we survive, I’m going to strip!’
More laughter. This time even Rannu and Pagan joined in. It almost felt like we were in this together again, like we didn’t all hate each other.
‘Are you guys really the terrorists that took down the Cabal?’ Merle asked. Even Merle sounded amused.
‘Contact… multiple contacts…’ The voice from C amp;C trailed off, then recovered and started reeling off co- ordinates.
Rolleston had co-operated with us. He’d appeared where he’d planned to. I imagined his surprise turning to anger as he found the Earth fleet waiting for him. Knowing that he had been compromised. I hoped he realised we had done that. His anger turning to confidence when he realised that even allowing for the orbital defences his fleet was larger, more modern and better armed. Then I got a look at it.
Leaving aside the vastness of it. Leaving aside the full scale of the ships neatly organised in formation, even now starting to fire their weapons, fighters and interceptors as dots of light between the large vessels. It was the other ships that frightened me. The Black Squadron frigates had evolved since we’d last seen them. Their sleek, teardrop-shaped frames had become more organic. There was something predatory about them. They moved like twisted mockeries of sharks once they had folded away the moth-like sails of their induction field generators. They were faster and more agile than our frigates and moved in with their fighters and interceptors on hard burn to skirmish with our own fast movers. Everywhere their black beams blocked out the stars, a fighter came apart in a hail of debris and frozen acceleration gel.
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
