1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

“We’ll try to keep it to a minimum,” Olivera promised. “But I’d like to test the procedures, just to give my people an idea of what to expect. Nieves, jump us as close as you can to planet three.” He squinted at Joon-Pah. “Does it have a name?”

  “No one has claimed it. It was considered too close to your system for any Alliance power to colonize. I suppose it is up to your people to name it.”

  “Let’s take a look at it first. Nieves, plot the jump. Baldwin, sound the warning.”

  For some reason, knowing the resonance was real made it worse. Reality winked at me, my stomach lurched and the screen blanked out for just a few seconds before the stars reappeared. And for a just a moment, I thought we’d somehow returned to Earth. The third planet out from Alpha Centauri A could have been her twin, blue and green and sparkling like a gem in the sky.

  “Good God,” I murmured. “Where do I sign up to emigrate?”

  Olivera glanced around, eyes sharpening enough for me to catch it even in the security camera view.

  “Clanton, if that’s you, I’d like to remind you when you use your issue comm unit to spy on the bridge, you should mute your audio input.” I winced, my ears warming with embarrassment when I saw Julie laughing. “I agree with you, though,” he said, nodding toward the screen. “It’s beautiful. You ever been down there, Joon-Pah?”

  “I’m a ship’s captain,” the alien replied. “I do not, generally, go on expeditions to uncharted worlds.”

  “Captain Kirk would be so ashamed,” Nieves lamented.

  “Here’s your closer look, Baldwin,” Olivera told the Tactical officer. “See anything worth the trip?”

  “Running orange slice scans of the planet,” Baldwin said, fingers playing the haptic hologram like harp strings. “And it’s got some pretty polar ice caps, maybe a mini-ice age going on. Five major continents and a whole bunch of islands, looks like a few active volcanos, two moons, each a bit smaller than Luna…” She’d been leaning over, squinting at the readout, but she straightened suddenly, twisting around in her seat. “We got a satellite in orbit around one of the moons, sir.”

  “Shit.” Olivera jumped out of his seat, leaning across her control station and staring into the sensor readouts. “Joon-Pah, tell me this is one of yours.”

  The alien captain made a slashing motion in the air, his shoulders hunched over as if he was getting ready for a fight.

  “No. I mean, yes, the technology is ours, but the Helta would never take such a risk so close to your system. It would have been like leaving a beacon for the Tevynians. But the Tevynians have stolen our technology, kidnapped our engineers and scientists. This is one of theirs, and this is so very, very unfortunate.”

  “It can’t transmit through hyperspace from here, can it?” I asked, ignoring the fact that I was sticking my nose in all the way from the shuttle.

  “No, it’s too small. They’d need a transmitter far enough from the gravitational pull of the moon to open a stable wormhole, and that’s not something we’d miss. It would have to be the size of a starship.”

  “Then they must come through here on regular patrols and download the surveillance data,” Olivera decided. “It’s definitely seen us by now.”

  “I can target it with the particle cannon,” Baldwin offered. “Take it out in a couple minutes.”

  “Opinions?” Olivera said, looking around. “That means you, too, Brooks, Clanton, Bowie.”

  “If we take it out, they’ll still know we were here,” I pointed out.

  “Agreed,” Brooks put in. “And they’ll know we know they’ve been here. We gain nothing.”

  “Worst case scenario,” Jambo cut in, “they come back here before we do, find out a Helta ship has been in the area. What do they do?”

  “The ship would transmit to their homeworld and ask for guidance,” Joon-Pah replied. “Given what I have seen from our previous history with them, they would probably be told to wait there for reinforcements.”

  “And if they come back and find it destroyed, the same thing happens,” Olivera assumed. “Okay, so worst-case scenario is, we find them waiting for us when we come back.”

  “Better to let them think we don’t know they’ll be here,” Brooks suggested.

  “Agreed.” Olivera motioned to Nieves. “Take us out of here, Julie.”

  I cut the feed from the bridge and shared an “oh, shit” look with Brooks.

  “What do you think happens when we come back through here and there’s a shitload of enemy ships?” I asked her.

  “Let’s just hope we have some more ships of our own when it happens,” she said. “Or this is going to be the shortest war ever.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I am,” I said earnestly to Jambo, “beginning to hate this fucking shuttle.”

  “Amen, brother,” he agreed, resting his helmet back against the upright rack the Svalinn armor was strapped into. “At least it’s for real this time.”

  I nodded, though he couldn’t see it. We’d been confined to the shuttle for every single emergence from hyperspace and Goddamn, there had been so many jumps in the last ten days. Or was it twelve? Every time we hit a transitory system, we’d come out for a nav check. This one was different, though. We all knew it, and the darkness in the shuttle was only a symptom, not the cause.

  The interior of the aerospacecraft was cloaked in shadow, the lights dimmed in the cargo and passenger compartments to keep the cockpit as free of distractions as possible for the pilots, or so I had been told. Personally, I thought it had more to do with tradition. Combat runs in V22s or Blackhawks were always blacked out, which meant nothing in space…but our pilots and, more importantly, our crew chiefs had been brought over from the Air Force and the SOCOM Air Wing, the Nightstalkers, and old habits die hard.

  I think the Delta boys preferred it that way and not just out of tradition. I know I did. Darkness carried with it a privacy, the chance to be alone inside your head and not worry whether someone else might see the fear in your eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said, mostly to myself, not caring whether Jambo heard or not. “It’s for real this time.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to play the details from Olivera’s briefing back in my memory. It was harder than it used to be. Once upon a time, I would have taken notes on every point, then expanded them for my platoon and spat them back out again in front of the men and, in the process, memorized every radio callsign and every map point. But this was the new, high-tech Space Force and everything was forwarded as a PowerPoint on our tablets and I didn’t have a platoon, or anything to do except keep my head on a swivel and try to be helpful.

  I’d still tried to be a good little Marine and pay attention in the briefing, despite Jambo’s constant sotto voce commentary.

  “Why do we have to do this in person?” he’d muttered to me while Olivera delivered his opening remarks to the two hundred humans and Helta gathered in the ship’s largest conference room. “This is the 21st Century…we could all be in our own compartments watching it on a video screen or a tablet.”

  “Maybe he was worried people would get distracted by something,” I’d suggested, glaring at him. “Like someone talking in their ear during the briefing, for example.”

  “This is the star system we know as Kepler 62,” Olivera said, getting to the meat of the matter. He pointed to a sun-like star hanging at the center of the projection near the front of the room. “It’s about 1200 light years from Earth and it’ll be our next stop in exactly forty-six hours and twenty-three minutes.”

  “And thirteen seconds,” Julie Nieves added from where she leaned against the hologram projector beside him.

  “Holy shit,” Pops said, a few chairs over from me, not even trying to keep quiet about it. “We traveled twelve hundred light years in less than two weeks? How fucking fast is this thing?”

  Olivera scowled, looking as if he wanted to chew the Delta Force weapons specialist out for talking out of turn, but Julie answered it for him.


  “Time and distance aren’t a factor in hyperspace.” She grinned briefly and I’d thought, not for the first time, just how cute she looked when she smiled. “The Helta don’t actually call it hyperspace, by the way, in case you were wondering. But it’s as good a name as any. What matters in hyperspace is the strength of the gravimetic attraction between the transit nodes, the star systems we’re flying between. And that doesn’t always mean how massive the stars are or how close they are, though don’t ask me why. What it boils down to is, it takes longer to fly the four and a half light years from Earth to Alpha Centauri than it does to fly the ten and a half light years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani.”

  “Sail,” I’d insisted, arms folded across my chest, jaw set. “The term should be ‘sail,’ not ‘fly,’ dammit.”

  “Oh, give it a rest for Christ’s sake,” Jambo said, rolling his eyes.

  Joon-Pah was standing off to the side, almost unnoticed, which is quite the accomplishment for a bearlike humanoid, but he stepped forward at a gesture from Olivera.

  “The system you call Kepler 62,” he said, his soft voice being amplified by some unseen microphone, “we know as Waypoint. It is one of our key industrial centers, and one of our largest colonies, with two habitable planets. More importantly for our needs, it is the location of one of our largest shipyards, where our commercial ships are retrofitted into military vessels for the conflict. The…faction of my government which supports this effort to bring the people of Earth into our conflict has many supporters in the Waypoint system, and one of them is the administrator of the shipyards in the system’s asteroid belt. We have exchanged numerous communications and he has assured me that he will have at least three starships in the same class as the Truthseeker in the dock and ready for us to commandeer when we arrive.”

  “This should not be a combat operation,” Olivera had stressed. “The ships will be empty and the Helta will recognize this ship as one of their own, with clearance to be there. But as always, we will treat it as a threat situation until we confirm it is not. Both shuttles will be loaded and ready to launch and the ship will go in weapons armed. Do walk-throughs of all emergency scenarios with your units. If there are any further developments, I’ll send out a fragmentary order to your comms.”

  There’d been no frag-o’s, so I assumed everything had stayed the same. I remembered what the old saying was about assuming, but I chose to be optimistic.

  “Jumping in thirty seconds,” the announcement came from Captain Holden, the pilot, Our Lady of Countdowns.

  “Whaddya think we’ll name the ships?” Jambo asked. “You think there’s already an approved list somewhere, written up by some subcommittee or presidential advisory board?”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “Something suitably inoffensive and noble-sounding, like the Friendship of the International Community or something.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Our pilot has seen too many fucking movies,” Jambo opined. “We really don’t do that shit.”

  “The sad thing is,” I said, “people like her are probably going to make it catch on and everybody is going to start doing countdowns.”

  “…two, one, jumping now!”

  Twisting, roiling, wrenching and more than anything now that I knew to expect it, a painful vibration, the resonance Joon-Pah had talked about. It was like being at a heavy metal concert and standing right in front of the speaker, except the speaker was the universe and God was playing the tune.

  I shook off the lingering haze and linked into the bridge security feed again, determined to keep my mouth shut this time. We’d come out of hyperspace deep in the black, in the system’s asteroid belt, Kepler 62 a glaring flashlight among the firefly swarm of stars and asteroids. The spacedocks were glowing spiderwebs in the darkness, lit up from without and within, the interior lights glinting through thick windows while floodlights shone bright white on the half-assembled skeletons of starships.

  Before anyone on the bridge said a word, I knew something was wrong.

  “There’s only one ship in the dock,” I told Jambo.

  Not that I was suddenly a starship expert, but it was hard to miss something as big as a Helta cruiser, and there was only one of them visible on the whole stretch of outer space scaffolding that was the Waypoint Shipyard. It wasn’t surrounded by the spiderweb structure like the ships still under construction, instead, it was nestled into some sort of pressurized docking port that led into the interior of the dock.

  “We’ve detected multiple explosions in orbit around the habitable,” Baldwin reported, talking over the confused chatter in English and Helta. “Also getting thermal flares from the planet’s moon and from the deuterium mines in the atmosphere of the gas giant.” She spun her chair around toward Olivera. “Sir, I think there’s some sort of battle going on.”

  There were at least a couple good things about having Space Force in charge of the mission instead of a Space Navy. Olivera didn’t sound any alarm klaxons or yell at the crew to get to their battle stations. Everyone already was where they needed to be if we got into any fighting.

  “We’re picking up a repeating transmission from in-system,” Joon-Pah said, interpreting the gabble from the Helta communications officer. “I’m setting the computer to translate.”

  A portion of the main screen lit up with a Helta dressed in what I’d come to understand was the standard uniform of the Alliance forces, the Napoleonic drummer boy outfit, except this one was charred on the left sleeve and the thin fuzz on the face of the Helta officer was burned away, leaving a weeping open wound. More evidence of carnage was visible behind the wounded alien, tendrils of smoke churning toward the air filtration vent on the bridge of their ship, nearly identical to the Truthseeker except for the blackened scars burned into the bulkhead.

  “This is Gara-Shan, Captain of the Illuminator,” the ship’s computer translated the message into English for us. Somehow, it still managed to convey the weariness and pain in the Helta’s inflection. “Any Alliance ships, this is the Helta vessel Illuminator. I am invoking our treaty and calling for aid. The Waypoint system has come under attack by Tevynian forces and we are being overrun. We only had three functioning cruisers in-system, and two of them were out at the shipyards in the asteroid belt, and only enough crew on hand for one of those to take flight. The Destiny was destroyed early in the battle and the Illuminator has taken heavy damage. Our main drives are down. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out, but we will keep firing at the Tevynian ships, trying to keep their attention on us so the civilians can continue their evacuation.”

  Gara-Shan reached off camera for a control and the image switched to something I thought must have been recorded earlier. The green and blue arc of the Helta planet filled most of the screen, a placid background for something far less pleasant. A thread of iridescent lightning streamed from the surface, though the atmosphere, the beam disappearing as the atmosphere thinned out, but its effects clear when it struck what I assumed was a Tevynian ship in high orbit. A sphere of destruction expanded outward from the wedge of silvery metal and burning gas spewed like a giant maneuvering thruster from the port bow, sending it skewing off to starboard.

  Into the gap left by the wounded Tevynian cruiser, a swarm of huge, spherical spacecraft blasted out of the atmosphere, wildebeests fleeing a lion. I tried to count them but they kept coming, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred maybe, boosting out of orbit on glaring white drive flares, a dozen times brighter than one of our shuttles. The lead ships were almost to the orbit of the planet’s moon when they made the jump into hyperspace.

  I hadn’t seen it from the outside before and I nearly gasped. Space itself seemed to split apart like a weak seam on a pair of pants, beginning like the slit pupil of a cat, then expanding into a circle, ringed by a shifting, glimmering rainbow. Where the inside of the hole should have been, the camera glitched, fuzz and distortion filling the screen until the spherical ship was through and the hole repaired itself.

&n
bsp; Before the next opening wormhole could disrupt the picture, the image switched back to the Helta captain.

  “Tens of thousands have made it off-planet, mostly from the areas around the spaceport, but there aren’t enough ships in the whole Alliance to evacuate the whole population. If you can hear this message, we need military support…”

  “Captain!” a voice yelled from behind the Helta. The officer turned and the image faded in a burst of multicolored lights.

  I winced, knowing I’d probably just witnessed the deaths of everyone on the ship.

  “It just keeps repeating,” Joon-Pah said. The computer wasn’t translating for him and his own ability at English, while much improved, lacked the proper inflection to convey his mood, but I could still sense his fear and agitation. “I believe Gara-Shan recorded it onto an emergency beacon and launched it, because the sensors do not detect her anywhere in-system.” He paused. “We are, however, detecting numerous unregistered ships similar to Helta design all over this system.”

  “Are you getting any other transmissions?” Olivera asked him. “From the habitable or any of the outer space facilities?”

  “There seems to be widespread jamming of all transmissions from our world Fairhome, as well as the mining facilities at the gas giant. This would be in accord with Tevynian methods of operation when invading a system.”

  “We’re too late,” I said to Jambo, making sure I muted my mic. “The enemy got here first.”

  “Oh, that’s unfortunate,” he said mildly. I figured he’d want to hear what was going on, so I tapped the control on my forearm and shared the feed with him and the rest of the Delta team.

  “There’s still one cruiser at the shipyards,” Olivera said, pointing at the familiar delta shape nestled against the structures there.

  “There may also be unmounted hyperdrives here and here,” Joon-Pah told him, pointing to two of the skeletal superstructures one level in towards the center from the completed cruiser. “If we can procure those, you could, with our help, build your own ships.”