A tiny purple icon flashed somewhere above him and interfaced with his tarsus lenses, allowing him to access the symbol. ‘Let them in,’ he told the command centre, with only a small hint of resentment.
The door behind him opened. Emilja Jurich and Ainsley Zangari walked in. For once, neither of them had their aides with them. As always, Emilja looked imperious and dignified in a high-collared black silk dress, while Ainsley had shrugged into a navy and burgundy college varsity jacket as if he were on his way to a frat party. Johnston managed not to frown at the sight of him; Ainsley had been absent from council meetings for months. There were rumours . . .
‘Don’t worry, General.’ Ainsley chuckled. ‘We’re not going to interfere. We’re here to observe. This is history.’
‘And provide you with some moral support,’ Emilja added. ‘Some of the decisions that led to today are ethically questionable – and that’s just from Ainsley’s point of view.’
‘Fuck you! I was right about those Olyix shits all along.’
‘I believe you may have mentioned that occasionally.’
‘I appreciate the political support you’ve given me over the last couple of years,’ Johnston said neutrally. ‘The Sol Senate doesn’t exactly share your opinion.’
‘Bunch of fucking politicians,’ Ainsley growled. ‘They’re the ones who didn’t give you the weapons we needed to defend Earth, then they blame you. Assholes. We should have dumped the lot of them in Leipzig. Show them how hard reality can bite.’
Emilja smiled coldly. ‘Are we ready, General?’
‘Yes. If it doesn’t work today, then it never would have.’ He ran a fast gestalt review, checking the positions of the Olyix ships in the Sol system; the stealthed expansion portals around Earth; the status of the massed warships at Delta Pavonis, Puppis, Eta Cassiopeiae, 82 Eridani and Trappist 1; the Knockdown team – ‘How’s it going?’
‘We’re ready, sir,’ Loi replied. ‘Everything is in position, and sensor coverage is excellent.’
‘Good. Stand by.’ And finally: ‘Avenging Heretic, we are go for Strikeback.’
‘Roger that, General,’ Yuri replied. ‘We’re ready.’
‘Godspeed, Avenging Heretic. See you on the far side of eternity.’ Johnston consulted the dense panorama of data. The G8Turing splashed up suitable opening moves. He studied them for a long moment. A squadron of three hundred Olyix mid-level transport ships was curving down out of their thousand-kilometre orbit, the lead vessel heading for the glowing blemish that was London – still defiantly existing. He gave them a vindictive smile. ‘Not that easy, motherfuckers.’ A series of stealthed portals splashed across his vision, eager amber stars high above the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Initiate phase one.’
*
Three thousand kilometres above Earth, in the centre of the inner Van Allen radiation belt where the concentration of hazardous electrons and protons was at their greatest, forty expansion portals opened to their full eighty-metre diameter. The ships that came through had been built in the vast industrial facilities orbiting Nanjing, the third Trappist 1 world to be settled by China. As soon as the invasion began, all those facilities that had been involved in the terraforming venture were reconfigured to build habitats for the exodus, and the new Yi Xian class of attack cruisers.
Designed mainly as weapons platforms, the cruisers were basic dodecahedrons sixty metres in diameter, accelerated by a trio of fusion rockets. Their protection came from close defence shields that wrapped the carbotanium fuselage in a five-metre-deep cloak of nitrogen, locked into a density gradient by bonding generators, like a cross-section of a gas giant’s atmosphere – with a gaseous outer layer that quickly thickened into a shell of unnatural solidity and toughness. The simplicity and modularity of the design allowed for mass production. By the time S-Day arrived, Trappist 1 had produced more than eight and a half thousand.
Two thousand of them deployed out of the expansion portals at the rate of one every five seconds. Each one came out on a vector slightly different from the previous ship’s, and ignited its fusion rockets, accelerating away at four gees. They didn’t have quite the manoeuvrability of the Olyix transports, but they made up for that in sheer numbers.
The Olyix ships above Earth immediately began evasive manoeuvres, streaking away from their orbital track at seven gees. High above them, the Yi Xian cruisers kept coming, spreading out like a falling storm cloud. The first forty to emerge fired an octet of conventional fusion rocket missiles that accelerated down at fifty gees. They ignored the Olyix ships above the mesosphere and plunged on down into the stratosphere, where the transports were powering up through the ozone layer in their bid to escape.
Earth’s damaged atmosphere was hit by multiple hypersonic shockwaves rippling out from the missiles as they tore the beleaguered air apart. All of them ejected a barrage of tiny sensor spheres that spread out in mimicry of a meteorite shower to provide unparalleled observation data to Strikeback command’s G8Turing. With the lead Olyix transport ship still a hundred kilometres west of the Azores, and travelling at Mach eighteen, the missiles began to explode their twenty-five-megaton warheads in a carefully calculated sequence.
The sensor spheres observed the intense atmospheric devastation, tracking energized blastwaves and radiation surges, scrutinizing their effect on the exposed Olyix craft. Alpha Defence had designed the nukes with an enhanced gamma emission effect. The transports seemed to have very little resistance to the radiation. As soon as the bombs started to explode, they began to lose acceleration. Those closest to the blasts lost power altogether and began to tumble out of the sky. Then the colossal blastwave struck the remaining ships. Several disintegrated, and the remainder were slammed about helplessly, spinning out of control towards the glaring breakers far below. The sensors tracked every aspect of their decay and death for the G8Turing to analyse.
A second batch of missiles was fired from the Yi Xian cruisers. These had smaller warheads and detonated to the west of the first barrage, close to Bermuda, where the desperate Olyix were racing for the top of the mesosphere. Their fate provided another tranche of detailed
