Original Work Vendetta: Final Conflict

Chapter Twenty-Six

Area 51
12th July 2435

“Sally,” Janine called. “Long time no see!”

It was true, too. After Rubicon had reached Sol – and had been redirected to a top secret military research base two light years from the Sol System – Sally had returned to the RockRat capital at Wolf 359, where she’d reported to her people and helped to convince them to remain allied to the United Nations instead of fighting their own private war against the Trolls. Now that Capricorn had fallen, the Trolls had steadily slipped closer and closer to New Brisbane, raiding human worlds as they advanced on the linchpin of the inner defence line. Some of their assaults had been beaten off, or forced to retreat; too many more had succeeded in blasting their way through all opposition before hammering the orbital installations around their targets. Slowly, but surely, humanity’s industrial base was being worn away.

In numbers, the analysts suggested, the Trolls were vastly inferior to humanity. They made up for it with their advanced technology, allowing them to launch precisely targeted strikes with overwhelming force, coordinating their operations in a manner that humanity couldn't match. As StarCom nodes were destroyed, parts of the network fell apart, leaving the Navy largely ignorant of what was happening in five different sectors. Several emergency communications vessels had been rushed forward in hopes of patching up the holes in the network, but the Trolls had proven alarmingly good at tracking them down. At least there had been a small victory when one of them had been used as the bait for an ambush...

But the human race was losing the war. Both the UN member worlds and the RockRat colonies were being targeted, sending floods of refugees fleeing their homes and looking for a safety that was largely illusionary. The core worlds were doing what they could to produce homes for the refugees – the conscription effort was pulling many of them into the military, where they could at least try to strike back against the Trolls – but there were just too many of them. And that didn't include the civilians left behind on a hundred worlds, worlds that had been isolated or nuked by the Trolls. Leaving them behind threatened the very ethos of the United Nations.

Janine had expected to be sent back to the war, but instead Rubicon had been forced to wait at Area 51, leaving her and her crew with too much time on their hands. Cold logic told her that all they could do was die bravely, yet she still felt guilty for the time she was spending on the base while her comrades fought and died trying to stem the Trolls as they advanced on the core worlds. 9th Fleet had been heavily reinforced at New Brisbane – two more fleets had been called off the other borders and positioned at New Brisbane – but the Trolls could avoid contact as long as they chose. The fleets had to wait and watch helplessly as the Trolls raided dozens of planets, slashing through the self-defence forces and daring the UN to stop them.

“I know,” Sally agreed. The RockRat looked tired, but there was a new fire in her eyes. “I brought some vital information to the base – and they rewarded me by telling me I couldn't go home yet.”

“Poor you,” Janine said, unsympathetically. Rubicon’s entire crew had been in isolation ever since they had arrived at the hidden base. “What did you bring them?”

“Something that might allow them to give the Trolls a nasty fright,” Sally said, and refused to be drawn any further. RockRats understood the need for restricting some kinds of information; they just resented the United Nations deciding what information needed to be restricted for them. And besides, millions of RockRats had already died in the war. “I understand that you’re crucial to their plans.”

Janine’s wristcom buzzed before she could say anything else, summoning her to the Director’s officer. Director Dave Bowery had been a pain in the ass as long as she’d been at the base, a military officer whose main responsibility had been riding herd on the civilian and military researchers gathered on the station. At least he was dedicated to his job, she’d been assured; Area 51 was so isolated from the rest of the United Nations that base commanders had been known to go stir crazy. Bowery seemed to be reasonably stable.

He stood up to greet Janine and Sally as they entered, followed by Master Sergeant Thomas Mandell. The Marine nodded politely to Janine; unlike the rest of her crew, he and his remaining Marines had been taken to Earth where they had been extensively debriefed on what they’d experienced on New Marseilles. None of their stories had made reassuring reading; indeed, Janine had heard that the UN had classified most of them and forbidden the media to share them with the population. Enough had leaked out to convince far too many people that they didn’t want to be anywhere near the war front.

The third man in the room was Doctor Bruno Lombardi, a civilian scientist with dark skin, an untamed mop of hair and a reputation for thinking outside the box. He wore a uniform that didn't fit and looked about as unmilitary as it was possible to get, but unlike so many others he had refused to allow the Troll technology to daunt him. From what Janine had heard, he had a dozen theories for everything the Trolls had shown humanity and he'd been pushing for experiments that might – might – produce useable hardware. Janine hoped and prayed – and she knew that the rest of the UNNS did likewise – that he was right. If they didn't manage to match the Troll technology, they were going to lose the war.

“Thank you for coming,” Bowery said. He looked like a bureaucrat, even in military uniform. “We may have had a lucky break.”

He nodded to Lombardi, who stood up and took control of the compartment’s data projector. “As you are aware, post-battle analysis teams recovered samples of the Troll version of hullmetal from the rubble left behind by First Cadiz,” he said. Janine, who had watched helplessly as 9th Fleet fought its desperate battle, nodded impatiently. “That material was shipped to several different research bases around the United Nations – and we have had something of a breakthrough. We may not be able to duplicate it...”

“...Because some of the irreplaceable material was destroyed by your experiments,” Bowery injected.

“...But we can tell you something about how it works,” Lombardi said, ignoring the interruption. “In fact” – he shot an amused glance at Bowery – “our experiments told us a great deal about what the material could and could not endure.”

He clicked a switch and an image of a Troll Alpha appeared in front of them. “Early records from the battles proved that the Trolls have a remarkably omnidirectional offensive capability,” he said. He sounded fascinated, as if the issue was more of a scientific puzzle than anything else. Janine found it a hard attitude to comprehend. She’d watched starships and starfighters blown out of space by those hellish weapons. “Unlike our ships, which require weapons mounts, the Trolls can fire in any direction. We are now several steps closer to understanding how they produce that effect.

“Sparing the technobabble” – he shot another look at Bowery, who glowered back at him – “their hullmetal is, in effect, a giant superconductor. They can charge it with energy well beyond anything we can duplicate for ourselves. Surrounding this superconductor is a field that effectively serves as the gun barrel, when shaped to allow a burst of energy to be released. Basically, the Trolls can turn any part of their hull into a gun and fire a death ray towards its target.

“Once we had an idea of what we were looking for, we went back and studied the records again,” Lombardi continued. “The energy spike noted by our ships before the Trolls open fire is them charging their hullmetal, followed rapidly by the first discharges of their death rays. Given their rate of fire, we believe that they must be capable of charging up their hull metal at terrifying speed; they certainly have more efficient power generation facilities than our own. There is some evidence to indicate that there are limits to how many death rays they can fire at any one time, but their rate of fire means that this isn't really a handicap.”

“Certainly not against starfighters and missiles,” Janine muttered.

“Their targeting...well, their targeting sucks,” Lombardi added. Janine swallowed the response that came to mind. “They have destroyed vast numbers of starfighters and missiles, but proportionally they miss many more times than they hit their targets. It is quite possible that the nature of their weapons means that their targeting isn't always accurate – given time, we may even be able to come up with a detector that allows a threatened starfighter to evade before it gets hit.”

Janine rather doubted that that was possible. The death rays moved at the speed of light. Even assuming a couple of seconds warning, a starfighter pilot would have to react with incredible speed to get out of the way before the death ray fired. In theory, it was a perfectly workable idea, but in practice...she would have been astonished if it worked in the field.

Bowery cleared his throat. “As interesting as this is,” he said, “could you please get to the point?”

“We believe that the alien hulls are closely linked to their power generation systems, no matter how they work,” Lombardi said, not even remotely abashed. “It should be theoretically possible to overwhelm their hullmetal with a powerful burst of energy and cause feedback that would cripple their entire ship. If that happened, the Troll starship would be effectively powerless and helpless.”

“Ready to be captured,” Mandell said. He’d seen the point quicker than Janine herself. “But how could we use it in a battle? Surely their other ships would come to their aid?”

“I believe that that is why I am here,” Sally said. “If I may...?”

She took the controller from Lombardi, who shot her an admiring look, and changed the picture. “The Pegasus System is home to several million RockRats – consequently, we feel a certain urge to ensure that nothing bad happens to it. As there are no UN settlements in the system, we have tapped the local gas giant for HE3 and spread more extensively through the asteroid belts than was perhaps wise. We know that the Trolls have been launching small attacks on the system, jumping in, blasting a few targets and then jumping out again. So far, we’ve managed to deter them from hitting the colonies themselves, but it’s only a matter of time before they push in and eliminate the habitats.”

Mandell frowned. “That seems odd,” he said. “I thought that Pegasus was one of your more important systems?”

“It is, but their main war seems to be directed against the UN,” Sally said, seriously. “We – RockRat Intelligence – believes that they’re more interested in tying down elements of the system’s defence force rather than actually hammering the system. So far, their attacks have been conducted by only one or two ships at a time. They’ve been determined to avoid a general engagement and, so far, they have succeeded.”

Janine nodded. The RockRats armed all of their starships – and could put together a formidable military machine at a moment’s notice. Pegasus wasn't like Capricorn, a base that could support a war effort aimed at cutting the enemy’s supply lines, merely a particularly well-armed system. The Trolls had probably decided to bypass the system – raiding it to keep the RockRats on their toes – and deal with it after they had defeated the UN itself.

Bowery spoke into the silence. “Regardless of their motives, it gives us a window of opportunity to capture one of their ships,” he said. “Rubicon will be outfitted with a prototype pulse cannon...”

“...Pulse blaster,” Lombardi injected. “You have to admit that it sounds cooler.”

“...And attempt to use it to capture an enemy ship,” Bowery said. “Assuming the cannon works, the Marines will board the ship, kill all of the opposition – this mission is too important to try to take some of the Trolls alive – and then Rubicon will tow the ship back here, to Area 51.”

“One theory is that the Trolls use antimatter to power their starships,” Lombardi said. “If that’s correct, the pulse blaster will probably knock out the containment centres and blow the Troll ship into atoms.”

Janine shook her head in disbelief. “Is that possible?”

“Uncertain,” Lombardi said. “The general consensus is that their ships would explode more violently than they do if they had large amounts of antimatter on board – and they don’t seem to use antimatter in their weapons – but we don’t know for sure. If so, they must have a more efficient way of producing antimatter than we do – our experiments have never produced enough antimatter for more than a handful of experimental programs. All we can suggest is that the Marines are careful not to push any buttons before we know what they do first.”

Mandell snorted. “I think you can rely on my men to remain disciplined,” he said, tightly. “How long will it take before we can deploy?”

Bowery shrugged. “At least two weeks to refit Rubicon,” he said. “We have a tiny shipyard here and a small army of workers, but we’re nowhere near as efficient as a proper shipyard.”

“It will take another two weeks to reach Pegasus,” Sally added. “And then we will just have to lie in wait and see what happens.”

“A month,” Mandell shrugged. “They might get tired of the game by then, or launch a direct assault against New Brisbane...”

“We don’t have any choice,” Bowery said. “We looked at ways to speed the process up at little, but there wasn't anything that took more than a day or two off the first estimate – and that came at the cost of neglecting safety precautions. Captain...can you and your ship undertake the mission?”

Janine didn't hesitate. “I believe we can,” she said. “I would like to grant my crew some shore leave on Earth before we return to the combat zone...”

Bowery looked at her for a long moment, and then nodded. “They can take the Washerwoman from here and reach Luna,” he said. “I suggest that you warn them that Area 51 is a secret base and anyone who breathes a word of its existence will be spending the rest of their lives on a penal colony. Once the refit is completed, they can resume their stations on Rubicon and you can jump out to launch your attack.”

“I’d suggest firing the pulse blaster just before the Troll ship enters death ray range,” Lombardi added. “We think that the effect will be diluted over longer range.”

“I see,” Janine said, tightly. If the pulse blaster failed, Rubicon would be staring at an understandably outraged Troll starship that was in firing range of her position. Lombardi could mock their targeting all he liked, but her experience suggested that the Trolls generally hit starships when they aimed at them. Perhaps they had time to shape their ‘guns’ more effectively against starships. “And if the effect fails?”

“Immediate withdrawal,” Bowery said. “We will need hard data on what actually happened, Captain, and that means that you will have to escape before the Trolls can open fire on your ship.”

“Understood,” Janine said. “With your permission, then, I will start preparing training simulations for my crew.”

“I’ll have all the data forwarded to you,” Bowery said. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that it is all highly-classified...”

“Stupid,” Sally said, flatly. “The more minds you have working on it, the greater the chance of a proper breakthrough and the duplication of their tech.”

“That wasn't my decision,” Bowery said. “But if we did tell the universe, the Trolls would know what we knew...”

“Assuming that they bother listening to our broadcasts,” Sally said. “There isn't a shred of evidence that they have any interest in us beyond a determination to kill as many of us as they can catch.”

“The Admiralty believes that we cannot take that chance,” Bowery said. “I would remind you, however, that all data has been shared with the RockRats – and your leaders have agreed to maintain the secrecy policy. If we did manage to put together something that would change the course of the war, we wouldn't want the Trolls to catch wind of it before we were ready to hammer them flat.”

“If,” Sally said.

The meeting broke up, leaving Sally to head down to speak with the RockRat scientists – and Lombardi following in her wake like a lovesick calf. Janine shook her head and then smiled at Mandell, who seemed rather pleased at the chance to hit back at the Trolls. Not that Janine could disagree with that; so far, humanity had taken a beating even when they successfully repulsed Troll probes into the inner systems.

“Come and have a drink,” she said, finally. She needed some downtime, now that they had a mission to start working towards. “I think we'll need your input on how to carry out the operation.”

Her crew would get some shore leave; Janine would get none, even though she would have liked to visit her family. But Avalon was on the other side of the core worlds and, so far, largely unthreatened by the Trolls. Janine could only hope and pray that that would remain the case indefinitely. God alone knew what would happen if the Trolls started raiding into humanity’s rear areas. There would be no safe world for the refugees.

“Of course,” Mandell agreed. He knew what she had in mind, all right; both the official reason for sharing a drink and the loneliness – and desperation – that fuelled the unspoken reason. “Don’t worry, Captain. This operation is bound to work.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Troll-1, Deep Space
15th July 2435

“I think we may have something here, Commodore.”

Commodore Jess Venture looked down at the sensor officer’s console. UNS Magellan was specifically designed for long-range survey work; she had the best sensors the United Nations could produce along with drives and supplies that allowed her to operate for years without returning to a UN base for repair and refitting. Survey Flotilla Alpha-Nine had been on a rare return to Capricorn when the war had broken out and had been immediately dispatched to locate the Troll homeworlds. So far, several months of searching had turned up nothing apart from a handful of worlds that would have been suitable for colonisation, if the Trolls had never been encountered.

“Show me,” Jess ordered. “What have you found?”

Locating habitable worlds wasn't difficult; the UN deployed orbital telescopes along the edge of the outer worlds, each telescope capable of locating potential life-bearing worlds for upwards of fifty light years in any direction. Actually ensuring that they were habitable required a visit from a survey ship, a process that could take some time. Even the most promising worlds had sometimes proven to hold nasty surprises for unwary colonists, creating problems for the UN’s Colonisation Institute. Survey Command existed to certify that the potential colonies were safe to settle before the settlers actually started arriving.

With a hostile race somewhere within the area, matters became much harder. Any spacefaring race produced artificial emissions from modern technology, even if – like the RockRats – they worked hard to conceal their locations. Earth had been pumping out radio transmissions ever since radio had been invented, eventually attracting the Traders to Earth; every world the UN had colonised emitted both light-speed radio transmissions and FTL StarCom pulses that linked the United Nations together. The general theory was that the Trolls had located New Marseilles and the other targeted worlds through homing in on their transmissions and eventually launching an attack. It didn't explain just why the Trolls had reacted with such uncompromising hostility, or why they’d pressed the offensive so hard. The best theory Survey Command had been able to come up with was that humanity had settled alarmingly close to the Troll homeworld, but Jess wasn't sure she believed it. Quite apart from the Trolls clearly possessing an empire of their own, Survey Command had surveyed every world for fifty light years around New Marseilles and found nothing suggesting the presence of other intelligent life.

“There’s a G2 star five light years away,” the operator said. “It’s definitely emitting artificial radio pulses.”

“Interesting,” Jess agreed, calmly. The mere presence of radio transmissions didn't prove that the world was occupied by the Trolls, but if the Trolls were prepared to slaughter vast numbers of humans they probably wouldn't hesitate to exterminate any other race in their territory. They would have homed in on any new emerging race, just like the Traders and the United Nations. “Can you pin them down?”

“The telescopes place at least five planets in orbit around that star,” the operator assured her. “Two of them are definitely within the life-bearing zone, at least for life as we know it. The remainder are probably gas giants – plotting think that there are at least two other planets on the other side of the star. I think that the system could definitely support intelligent life.”

Jess considered it. The transmissions weren't much to go on, but it was the most hopeful sign they’d encountered so far – and they couldn't afford to ignore them. God alone knew what was happening back in the United Nations, but the Trolls seemed to know the location of humanity’s worlds and – so far – humanity hadn't been able to launch a counterattack. If they had stumbled on a Troll world, they had to confirm its existence and then send a message back to the United Nations. The UNNS could then make plans to pay the world a visit with a battlefleet.

“Start plotting out jump coordinates for a stealthy approach to the star,” she ordered, as she straightened up. “Magellan and Drake will make the first approach.”

Walking back to her command chair, she keyed the link to the remainder of Survey Flotilla Alpha-Nine and issued orders. While two survey ships would make the approach, the remainder of the flotilla would remain where they were in interstellar space and wait for their CO to return from the mystery world. If they didn't return within two weeks, the flotilla would send a ship back to the United Nations to report the existence of a possible Troll military base, one that would require the attention of a battlefleet. It was risky – survey ships knew that they might run into another Hexed System or something else equally weird and dangerous – but Occam’s Razor suggested that the Trolls held the newly-discovered system.

“Rig the ship for a stealthy approach,” she ordered, as the new jump coordinates blinked up in front of her. Jumping in unexplored space was always more variable than jumping within space the UN had charted, but there shouldn't be any difficulties in jumping into the outskirts of the system. The real delay would come when they crawled inwards, fearful of being detected and jumped by the Trolls. Humanity deployed watching satellites out at the edge of vital systems and she dared not assume that the Trolls did the same. “And then place the pickets on alert. They are to be ready to jump at a moment’s notice.”

“Aye, Captain,” the tactical officer said. Survey Command, unlike the regular Navy, allowed the flotilla’s commander to serve as her ship’s commander as well as commanding the entire squadron. Normally, Survey Command’s ships operated independently; operating as a group was unusual, certainly on such a scale. “I have to warn you that...”

“...Regulations strictly forbid attempting to launch a picket from the shuttlebay unless the situation is dire,” Jess recited. Activating a flux drive caused a gravimetric shock, which could damage anything close enough to be affected. Launching a picket from inside Magellan was risky as hell, almost certain to cripple if not destroy the mothership, but if the Trolls detected them that concern was likely to become moot. The picket might be the only ship to escape if the Trolls attacked her units. “Confirm condition three throughout the ship and then prepare to bring up the flux drive.”

“Condition three confirmed, aye,” the XO said. “Flux drive online and ready to jump.”

Jess smiled. Jumping into unexplored space was what she lived for, the chance to be the first person to set eyes on a new wonder of the universe. Survey Command saw plenty of nothingness, as the regular Navy joked, but they also saw wonders and glories beyond the imagination of those who restricted themselves to one planet. Even with the Trolls out there, watching and waiting for any intruders, she couldn’t suppress the old thrill. They’d spent too long drifting through interstellar space in search of anything that might lead them to the Trolls.

“Jump,” she ordered.

***​

There was no overt difference between the view from their position in interstellar space and their position twenty light minutes from the edge of the mystery star system, but Jess could feel something in her heart as she leaned forward to peer at the display. Up close, the plotting computers were already locating and charting large astronomical bodies within the mystery system, including a total of ten planets, three more than had been expected. They were close enough to the primary star that it was possible that they’d been concealed by the star’s gravity field, but she made a mental note to check that with the plotting department. Missing a planet within an unexplored star system could have disastrous consequences.

“I’m picking up more radio transmissions,” the sensor officer said. The system display began to sparkle with icons as new sources of radio transmissions were detected, plotted and logged. A number appeared to be in interplanetary space, suggesting the presence of asteroid mining facilities if not asteroid colonies. The Trolls might have RockRats of their own, or – unlike the UN – perhaps their early spacefaring powers had been able to keep a tighter control on asteroid miners. Jess had once had a RockRat boyfriend who had claimed that the RockRats were the ultimate expression of freedom, an inevitable development of space travel on a grand scale. She hadn't been able to refrain from pointing out that neither the Sutra nor the Polis had developed anything akin to the human RockRats. “At least one of the worlds in the life-bearing zone is heavily inhabited.”

Jess nodded, tightly. The telescopes would already be pointing at the planets, trying to get a view that could be analysed to determine if the biosphere was human-compatible. One thing they did know about the Trolls was that they shared similar tastes in worlds – if they’d been native to gas giants, it was unlikely that they and humanity would have had any reason to go to war.

“The other four rocky worlds are silent,” another sensor officer added. “No transmissions at all, at least not as far as we can detect.”

“Curious,” Jess’s XO said, out loud. “You’d think they’d make use of the entire system.”

Jess couldn't disagree. Humanity had terraformed Mars in the early days of space exploration – and the UN had terraformed nearly a hundred rocky worlds after the first version of the flux drive had been invented. By now, many of them were perfectly habitable, the colonies forsaking their protective domes for the planet’s countryside. Even though there had been vast numbers of inhabitable worlds, the UN had kept dumping engineered microbes into planetary atmospheres to start the long terraforming process. There was no reason why the Trolls would not do the same.

“Maybe this is one of their outer colonies,” the sensor officer suggested. “They might not have started the terraforming process yet.”

“Or maybe they’re not interested in terraforming at all,” the tactical officer added “The Saints were responsible for trying to impede the Mars Terraforming Project before the flux drive was invented. Perhaps the Trolls have similar beliefs.”

Jess shrugged. The Saints had been radicals, believers in a mythically pure early age of humanity that had been destroyed by the development of technology. Over time, their beliefs had mutated into unthinking opposition to anything that threatened the natural order, as defined by their leaders. If they'd been allowed free reign, humanity would never have reached into space and remained at the mercy of natural disasters such as an asteroid impact or a supernova, let alone a hostile alien race. Jess had visited colonies where technology was forsaken and none of them had been pleasant places to live. The Saints had eventually settled their own world, only to have their descendents walk away from their beliefs. But their stupidity had never quite been eliminated from the human gestalt.

“Signal to Captain Pollack,” she ordered. “Drake is to remain here and monitor our laser transmissions as we creep into the system. If anything happens to us, they are to jump out immediately and return to the flotilla. “

“Drake acknowledges, Captain,” the communications officer said. “She’s standing by.”

“Good,” Jess said. She settled back into her command chair and concentrated on producing an impression of calm in the midst of chaos. “Helm, take us into the system.”

The hours ticked away as Magellan crept further and further into the mystery star system. As they slipped closer, the sensors picked up more data, confirming the presence of a major spacefaring civilisation. A handful of other facilities were located in orbit around one of the gas giant, almost certainly cloudscoops for mining HE3; the Trolls had shown no interest in capturing humanity’s cloudscoops, but it was possible that they had developed technology that limited their demand for the fuel. Or perhaps they had started to capture them now. There was no way to know how the war was progressing, hundreds of light years in their rear.

“I’m picking up a drive field,” the sensor officer said, suddenly. Jess tensed; if an alien starship had just stumbled over her ship, the next moments were likely to be the end of them. “It is definitely more advanced than our own system, but it appears to be less efficient than the Troll systems we saw at New Marseilles.”

Jess shared a glance with her XO. It was possible – just possible – that they’d stumbled over someone completely new, an alien race that was only just starting to explore space. But if so, why hadn't they encountered the Trolls? Jess had listened with interest to the theories that suggested that the Trolls had a much better flux drive than humanity, yet it defied belief that they might be much further away from the UN than anyone had anticipated. Why would they have picked a fight with humanity if they were so far away that they wouldn't even have encountered humanity?

“It could be an asteroid miner,” the tactical officer added, as the mystery ship drifted away. “I think its larger than one of our designs, but most of ours are designed for use in a heavily populated system...”

He broke off as a new icon appeared on the display. “Trolls,” he snapped. “The drive field is a match for a Troll Alpha-class ship.”

“Inch us away from them,” Jess ordered, as the two Troll starships approached one another. Maybe they’d stumbled on a military exercise – or maybe the Trolls had seen them coming and dispatched ships to hunt them down. Or maybe they were up to something completely incomprehensible. “Keep updating Drake; they have to know that we have encountered the Trolls.”

The next two hours passed slowly, very slowly, as they picked up more intelligence about the enemy star system. Very little of it seemed to make sense; the Trolls had a presence on the planet’s surface, but surprisingly little in the way of orbital installations. They also had a gas giant mining operation, which seemed to be shipping HE3 to the asteroids rather than to the planet, which suggested that what little manufacturing capability the system possessed was in the asteroids rather than in orbit around the planet. The UN’s tactical doctrine called for minimising areas of vulnerability by putting industry in orbit around the planets, but the Trolls evidently disagreed. Or perhaps the split between the planet-Trolls and the asteroid-Trolls was sharper than in the United Nations. Her ex-boyfriend might have had a point after all.

Launching stealthed probes was a risk, but she couldn't risk the ship by taking her any closer to the planet. Data flowed in slowly, revealing that the Trolls had established settlements near to the oceans; indeed, half of their cities appeared to be built into the oceans. There had been no suggestion that the Trolls were amphibious, but it was a possibility. They also seemed to keep very large animals, creatures larger than Earth’s long-gone whales, as pets. There were hundreds of them swimming in the ocean, very close to the cities.

“I think that we’ve learned all we can from this system,” she said, finally. Covert survey work was always tricky; they had to survey the system without allowing the enemy to realise that they had been surveyed. Besides, obtaining hard tactical data on the system’s defences wouldn’t be possible unless they saw the defences in action. “We’ll pull out now and leave the system until the Navy is ready to enter in force.”

There was no way to know just how important Troll-1 was to the Trolls, she reflected as Magellan started to withdraw back towards Drake’s position. It certainly wasn't one of their major hubs, unless their industrial technology was light years ahead of humanity’s. There had to be more systems and shipyards further away from the United Nations, where the Trolls had built the fleet that was tearing through the United Nations like paper. Once two starships had been dispatched back to Capricorn to report to Admiral Davidson, the remainder of Survey Flotilla Alpha-Nine would continue surveying the nearby star systems. Logically, there had to be other Troll systems in the same general area.

As soon as they linked up with Drake, Jess ordered both ships to jump out and leave the Troll system hopefully unaware of their presence. Once they were clear, Jess started to write her report for the Admiral, stressing the fact that this was the only known Troll system to be discovered, at least so far. But it seemed to be barely defended, just ripe for the plucking. The Navy could slip into the system and repay the atrocities on a dozen human worlds in full, before destroying a part of the Troll infrastructure. She doubted – and she expressed her doubts to the Admiral – that the system was vitally important to the Trolls, but at least it would have them reacting to humanity for a chance. And humanity needed a chance to hit back.

“All ships are reporting in, Captain,” the communications officer said. There wouldn't be much to report – they'd just waited in interstellar space while Magellan and Drake took all the risks – but she had to check anyway. “They’re delighted to see us safe and sound.”

“Copy our findings to them, and then order Hope and Redeemer to prepare for detachment from the squadron,” Jess ordered. The two ships would make their own way back to the United Nations, ensuring that at least one of them would reach someone in authority. Unless the Trolls had reached so far into the United Nations that no fleet could be dispatched to destroy the Troll world...no, she refused to consider that possibility. If worst came to worst, her own flotilla could probably bombard the Troll world before jumping out and escaping their retribution. “The Grand Admiral needs to know what we found here.”

She settled back in her chair and brought up a chart of the local sector. “And then start plotting out a least-time survey of the nearest stars,” she added. “There have to be more Troll facilities in this sector.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Terra Nova
25th July 2435

By universal agreement, Terra Nova – the first extra-solar planet to be settled by the human race – had been a rather embarrassing failure. Unaware of just how many worlds there were out among the stars to be colonised, every member nation in the United Nations had insisted on sending along their own colonists, resulting in a community that was as diverse as any believer in multiculturalism could wish for. At first, it had worked surprisingly well, but once the process of taming the planet and building a colony had been completed, the various ethnic groups had started to fall out and then fight with their neighbours. The UN’s first attempt to solve the problem had only made matters worse – and with countless other worlds opening up for single-ethnic groups, Terra Nova had rapidly become a backwater with only one major export, people.

Commodore Roger Youngblood rolled his eyes as he studied the latest list of demands from the surface. Normally, a planet that had been settled for over fifty years would be handling traffic control – to say nothing of mining its gas giants and asteroid fields – but Terra Nova’s disparate nations hadn't been able to agree on anything as simple as a coherent policy for orbital traffic, let alone a united authority for establishing their rule over the rest of their system. They might spend years screaming about how the RockRats and various outside corporations were stealing their system’s resources, but they weren't willing to stop fighting long enough to do something about it. Although they might have had a point; the UN’s police mission in the system had caught a bunch of agents for one of the factions who had intended to push an asteroid onto territory occupied by their rivals. They hadn't realised that an asteroid that size would probably have wiped out every faction along with the rest of the planet’s biosphere.

Terra Nova was only twelve light years from Earth, but space traffic to the system was minimal, save for tourists, smugglers and the RockRats, who magnificently ignored the hotheads on the planet while they mined their way into the asteroid belt. Uniquely for any industrialised world, Terra Nova even imported its HE3 from Earth, rather than setting up a cloudscoop or even mining it from their two moons. The factions below preferred to waste their limited interstellar currency rather than cooperate on anything; no wonder, Youngblood reflected, that the smart folk were leaving the planet in droves. And no wonder that the factions were growing increasingly unhappy about the departures...

Orbit Station One had been modified extensively since the UN had wound up providing forces for orbital police work. From nothing more than a receiving station, it had become the sole gateway to the rest of the United Nations for Terra Nova, presenting a curious problem for the UN servicemen who manned the station’s systems. Every ship that wanted to land on the planet’s surface had to be searched for contraband, while the small fleet of corvettes had to be kept supplied. They were out of service almost everywhere else – the design was heavily outdated – but Terra Nova was backwards in more ways than one. And they had to provide security for the UN enclaves on the planet. At least the ROE allowed him to use deadly force if the factions tried to threaten any of the enclaves. Orbital bombardment could teach even fanatics a harsh lesson.

He looked up from his datapad and studied the command centre, the core of his small kingdom. It wasn't anything like as modern as the defences surrounding Earth, New Washington or any of the other core worlds, but it did the job. Between his tiny fleet, a network of stealthed satellites and a handful of RockRat colonies that were willing to share data, he could cover most of the system. But without a united government on the planet below, he had little authority to intervene when outsiders established their own colonies within the Terra Nova system. Someday, he reflected sourly, the problem was going to produce a great deal of money for lawyers.

“Commodore,” one of his sensor officers said, “I’m picking up something odd, right at the edge of sensor range.”

Roger scowled. One of the many problems facing the United Nations presence in the system was that competent officers and crew didn't want to be assigned to the system. Terra Nova was a dead end in more ways than one, which resulted in the UNNS using the system as a dumping ground for personnel who simply couldn't cut it somewhere else. There was a hard core of dedicated officers, including several who had practically grown up on the ancient corvettes that formed the core of his fleet, but not enough to keep everything running smoothly. Roger himself wouldn't have been anywhere near the system if there hadn't been an incident with a mislabelled cargo manifest on Nova Scotia, an incident that had caused a diplomatic incident and ruined his career. But at least he was trying to carry out his duties.

“Show me,” he ordered. The sensors surrounding the planet were so old that he doubted that they were completely reliable. Half of his budget was spent on producing spare parts, something that could have been done on Terra Nova itself if he had trusted the factions not to try to screw with the system. “What does it look like?”

“I’m not sure,” the sensor officer admitted. She had barely scraped through the training centre, according to her file. No one else had wanted her, apart from the dumping ground that Terra Nova had become. “It looks as if all of our radar sweeps are being scattered and reflected back at us...”

Roger swore. He’d been briefed on the war, of course, even though Terra Nova was so far behind the lines that no one had expected that anyone would attack the system. But a stealth field operating so close to an inhabited planet had to be enemy action. Standing orders allowed UN forces to fire on stealthed craft that crept so close without bothering to ask questions first. It had to be an enemy attack force.

“Bring the station and our defences to condition one,” he ordered, hitting the alarm switch and sending sirens howling throughout the massive station. Not that he had any illusions about their ability to stand off any attempt to take the system. Orbit One wasn't designed to serve as an orbital battlestation. “Send a flash message through the StarCom to Earth, requesting immediate reinforcements...”

“The stealth field just collapsed,” the sensor officer said. “I’m reading...nine, perhaps ten alien craft, unknown configuration. Enemy craft are moving towards us on attack vector.”

Roger nodded. Looking at the design, the enemy craft were definitely related to Troll Alpha-class ships, although they were little bigger than a standard UN-designed light cruiser. There was nothing small about their speed, however; they were lancing towards Terra Nova fast enough to be in orbit before the planetary defences, such as they were, came to full alert. His corvettes were powering up, but half of them were out of position and the other half were sitting ducks. If the Trolls had wanted to start their raiding campaign against the core worlds by striking an easy target, they’d definitely come to the right place.

“Defence grid armed, ready to fire,” the tactical officer said. He’d run into the command centre seconds after the alarm had sounded, his uniform wrinkled and stained. Roger cursed his own failures as a CO; he should have ensured that his crew shaped up or were discharged from the Navy. Instead, he’d let things slide. “Orbital missile launchers armed, ready to fire.”

The Trolls had faced missile clouds of over a thousand separate missiles, Roger knew; they were unlikely to be deterred by the handful he could throw at them. But he had to try; surrender was impossible, as was escape. Orbit Station One was far too large to jump through flux space and escape the Trolls.

“Signal the planet and warn them that the shit is about to hit the fan,” he ordered. If nothing else, there were so many weapons on the planet below that the Trolls would get a bloody nose if they tried an occupation. “And then order the missile launchers to open fire.”

The Trolls opened fire seconds after the missile launchers started to boost their missiles into space. Their death rays scythed through the missiles, wiping them all out before they reached anything like engagement range, followed rapidly by the destruction of his handful of corvettes. The tiny ships were ripped apart in seconds, the handful of lifepods following the rest of the crews into death a moment later. Roger cursed, yet again, as the Trolls swooped into orbit and started firing on the orbital satellites. None of them had been designed to stand up to weapons fire, not when there was little point in designing anything permanent for Terra Nova. They were wiped out of space seconds after the Trolls started firing.

“They’re firing on the planet,” the tactical officer said. “Targets...military bases, spaceports and several industrial centres. So far, they’re not targeting cities directly...”

Roger shrugged. There would be hundreds of civilian casualties during the bombardment – and more, probably, as social order on the planet below fell apart. If the Trolls weren't interested in occupying the planet, at least they didn't seem to be interested in mass slaughter. But then, if they had any idea how close they were to Earth and the Home Fleet, they would have to know that the human race wouldn't let them stay on Terra Nova.

“And that was the StarCom,” the sensor officer added. “They just cut us off from the rest of the universe.”

“Keep copying our records to the RockRats and any other corporate installation in the system,” Roger ordered. He had no idea why the Trolls hadn't destroyed Orbit Station One – it wasn't as if the station was armoured against their death rays – but he didn't expect it to last very long. They might just want witnesses to the genocide they were about to unleash on the planet, perhaps, or maybe they just intended to send a message by ignoring the station completely. It was easy to tell that he had nothing left to throw at them. “Warn them to go doggo and hide if they can't jump out of the system.”

He ran through what he’d seen in the last strategic update. Home Fleet had been heavily reinforced and there were powerful self-defence forces in several neighbouring systems, including the RockRat capital at Wolf 359. It was quite possible that a fleet carrier and its starfighters would arrive in time to take a bite out of the Trolls, assuming that its commanding Admiral agreed to send it. Terra Nova was less important to the United Nations than almost any world outside the outer colonies; it was quite possible that the UNNS would assume that the attack on Terra Nova was a feint and refuse to send anything to intercept the Trolls before they could escape. It would be different if the Trolls intended to hold the system, but so far they just seemed to be on a glorified hit-and-run mission.

“I’m picking up a distress signal from Celeron,” the sensor officer reported. Celeron was the fifth world in the Terra Nova system, claimed by an interstellar corporation in the absence of any powerful authority in the system. It had a small mining station with a surprisingly large entertainment section for miners on downtime, an attraction for some of Roger’s people when they were off-duty. Nothing as elaborate as Disneyworld, naturally, but few miners wanted anything other than booze and women. “They’re reporting that they’re under heavy attack – and then the signal cut off.”

Roger nodded, grimly. The Trolls hadn't just targeted the planet, they’d targeted the other installations in the system as well. Even if they didn't know the precise details of human politics, they would know that so much devastation would force the UNNS to try to divert more starships to cover the inner systems, which would weaken their ability to hold the line against the Trolls. Or, if the UNNS didn't take the bait, the Trolls would cripple humanity’s industrial base. The results would be devastating either way.

“We have to assume that they’re gone,” he said. He’d spent several days there himself, not too long ago, in the arms of a young woman called Candy. At least he hadn't become as besotted as some miners became with the whores, women who were trained in extracting all of a miner’s wages from him before he returned to the mines. The UN had logged any number of complaints that the system was effectively keeping the miners in permanent debt, but there were no grounds for intervening as long as the miners gave up their money to the whores willingly. “Continue signalling the rest of the system.”

The reports continued to flicker in from all over the system. Attacks on asteroid mining ships, the destruction of a RockRat colony, a brief, but savage attack on another mining station near the gas giant...the Trolls were taking their time, working over the entire system. Roger could do nothing, apart from watching helplessly and recording everything for later analysis. Unless a large fleet arrives to drive the Trolls away, they were unlikely to survive the day. He found himself fighting the urge to shout at the Trolls, to invite them to get it over with and stop fucking around while he watched helplessly. He’d taken an oath to protect the human race. And when he’d been put to the test, he’d failed miserably.

A thought struck him and he stopped, considering it. “We may have a window of opportunity to get down to the planet’s surface,” he said. There were five heavy-lift shuttles on the station. The Trolls would probably detect them and pick the shuttles off in flight, but when they attacked the station itself they would all be killed anyway. “Leave the systems on automatic and get down to the shuttlebay, now.”

He brought up his command display as the others raced for the hatches, heading down towards the shuttlebay, and activated the internal security system on a time delay. It was just possible that the Trolls intended to board the station and, in that case, they would get a hot reception. Once the computers were sealed – and primed for self-destruction if the wrong codes were entered – he followed the rest of his crew down to the shuttlebay and climbed into the last shuttle. The remainder were already drifting out of the shuttlebay and down into low orbit.

Assuming that the Troll sensors weren't magic – based on a technology so advanced as to be beyond human comprehension – they would have problems separating the shuttles from the rain of debris that was slowly drifting into the planet’s atmosphere. Or so Roger hoped; there were few other grounds for optimism. He took control of the shuttle and guided it towards low orbit, hastily deactivating the drive when the Troll starships came up, over the horizon, and advanced towards Orbit Station One.

“I think they’re targeting the station,” the tactical officer said. He’d managed to link the shuttle’s internal sensor system into the station's own datanet. “They’re...”

Roger nodded as the Trolls opened fire. The death rays sliced into Orbit Station One and cut through the structure, wrecking a station that had been in existence almost since humanity had discovered the flux drive. There was nothing left on the station to explode – he’d taken the precaution of dumping the remaining shuttle fuel into space – but it hardly mattered. The Trolls sliced through the remains of the structure until it finally came apart, showering chunks of debris into the upper atmosphere. Some of them were large enough to make it through the atmosphere and down to the planet’s surface, where their impact would add to the population’s suffering. But there was nothing he could do about it now.

Instead, he gunned the engine, praying that the debris would shield them as he guided the shuttle down into the planet’s atmosphere. The Trolls ignored the shuttles; instead, they drifted away from the planet and then jumped out, their starships vanishing in flickers of light. Roger felt relief, a sensation that faded as soon as he realised that the shuttle’s passage through the planet’s atmosphere was going to be rough. The air was chopping away at them as they dived lower, trying to avoid pieces of debris that would smash the shuttle if they struck the hull. Something did slam into the shuttle and for a terrible moment Roger feared that he’d lost control, before managing to wrestle the craft into a reasonably stable flight path.

“We’re going to come down some distance from the nearest town,” the tactical officer said. No one had bothered to update the maps of Terra Nova on the shuttles, if only because they often changed violently. “Do you think that the Navy will send a recovery mission?”

“Let's hope so,” Roger said. But with Earth itself at risk, how long would it be before a recovery mission arrived? “Until then, we’ll just have to stay out of trouble on the planet’s surface.”

And that wasn't going to be easy, he knew. Even before the Trolls had attacked the planet, the UN hadn't enjoyed a good reputation among the factions – or at least those of them who didn't want to escape the planet – and if they were discovered, they might be killed by their fellow humans. They’d just have to remain out of sight and pray that they weren't discovered before the UN arrived to rescue them. If nothing else, the sheer mass of debris falling through the upper atmosphere would make it harder for the factions to locate them.

“Hang on,” he added, as the flight suddenly became a great deal more bumpy. “Here we go...”

 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Pegasus System
1st August 2435

“Captain?”

Janine looked over at McLaughlin, who was manning the tactical console. She’d had to pull some strings to keep him for her ship – experienced tactical officers were worth their weight in gold, particularly now that the UNNS was reactivating every starship in the reserve – but she was glad that she’d succeeded. The last thing she needed was to break in a new tactical officer while carrying out a mission that could easily turn into a disaster.

“Yes?” She asked. “Has something finally decided to come hunting us?”

“I think so,” McLaughlin confirmed. “I’m picking up faint suggestions of turbulence on an approach vector. The drive field is scrambled, but I’m picking up enough to confirm that it isn't a human ship.”

Janine smiled. They’d spent nearly a week in the system, escorting a handful of freighters from one RockRat colony to another. The Trolls seemed inclined to raid small convoys, jumping in, blasting their targets and then jumping out again before anyone else could realise that their targets were under attack. A single cruiser from the UNNS wouldn't deter them, Janine knew, even though they’d been taught to respect starfighters. It was much more likely that the Trolls would regard Rubicon’s presence as just another target.

“Good,” she said. “Set condition two throughout the ship.”

The drumbeat echoed through the hull as she activated her console and studied the live feed from the ship’s sensors. McLaughlin was right; the turbulence field didn't look like a human field, even with a cloaking device masking most of the ship’s emissions. Humanity had learned enough about the Troll cloaking device – lessons that had come in blood and pain – to know that the Troll device was better than humanity’s, but it had flaws of its own. They should have several minutes at least before the Trolls slipped into firing range.

One disadvantage the Trolls had, they’d discovered, was that they literally could not fire while the cloaking device was active. Firing would betray the craft’s presence as surely as decloaking in the middle of a hostile fleet, but the scientists suspected that the cloaking device was incompatible with their death ray projection system. Even if they could run both systems simultaneously, they’d concluded, there would be too much energy radiated from the hull for the cloaking device to hide. Or maybe there were limits to whatever the Trolls used to power their ships. The UN had certainly found cloaking devices to be energy-intensive.

Sally came onto the bridge, followed by two other officers. The RockRat had taken up the position of XO, not something that had sat well with some of the crew. Prejudice against RockRats was strong and growing stronger as the RockRats consistently refused to put their fleets under UN command, resulting in a number of unpleasant incidents below decks. Janine hated having to hold Captain’s Masts, to punish crewmen who were feeling the stresses of the war just as much as herself, but there was no choice. Discipline had to be maintained.

“There's only one ship, as far as I can tell,” Lieutenant Polly Ransom reported. Bringing her along had required pulling more strings, because Polly was one of Area 51’s experts in sensor technology. Bowery had argued that she knew too much to be risked in war, but Janine had insisted that they needed every advantage they could get. Polly had also helped outfit Rubicon with additional sensor nodes, devices that would be worse than useless in a conventional battle, but might give the ship an advantage in springing the trap. “Do you want me to inform the RockRats?”

“Laser only,” Janine ordered. There were four sublight freighters accompanying Rubicon, all crewed by volunteers. If the ambush went badly wrong, Rubicon had orders to abandon the freighters and leave them to the wrath of the Trolls. It was something else that didn't sit well with her, but the Trolls had rewritten the tactical handbook. There was nothing that could stop one of their craft short of a wing of starfighters. “And remind them not to send anything back to us except through laser.”

She shook her head at Sally’s droll expression. The RockRats were born in space, knowing and respecting it as wet-navy sailors had done back on Earth, long before humans had started exploring outer space. They knew more about living in space than anyone born on a planet’s surface, including the simple awareness that a single mistake in space could kill someone – or everyone. No wonder that they considered themselves almost separate from the United Nations, the association of planet-dwellers. People who never left the surface of a habitable world didn't really understand the true nature of the universe. It was red in tooth and claw, just waiting to capitalise on a single mistake. And you could do everything right and still lose. In some ways, the RockRats were more fatalistic than any planet-bound apocalyptic religion.

On the main display, the Troll ship drifted closer. Janine found herself envying the grace it showed as it approached, marvelling at a power curve well beyond anything the human race had developed for itself. If they’d encountered one another peacefully, the Trolls could have taught the human race so much, but instead they’d simply opened fire on Admiral Hanson’s entire squadron. Janine shivered, remembering the battle that had marked the opening of a terrifying new war in space. Why – just why – had the Trolls simply opened fire without even trying to talk?

She pushed the thought out of her mind as new tactical icons sprang up around the Troll ship, trying to parse out its secrets before it decloaked. Polly was sure that there was only one Troll ship, which was something of a relief; Lombardi’s pulse blaster was only guaranteed one shot, and then they would be back to matching missiles against death rays. They might as well have matched bows and arrows against lightning. There might be another Troll ship somewhere in the system, although the RockRats were sure that there was only one ship raiding their shipping. It suggested that the Admiralty was right when they concluded that the Trolls intended to keep the RockRats pinned down rather than anything else. Taking Pegasus wasn't worth the effort involved, at least not until the UNNS was defeated.

Sally had admitted that some of the RockRats believed that the war was unwinnable, that the UN would be forced to accept a crippling peace – if the Trolls had ever shown any interest in anything besides unconditional surrender or destruction. They intended to slip away into interstellar space and head away from space known to humanity, or the Trolls. Janine wasn't ready to give up, now or ever, but she had to admit that they might have had a point. It would take years, perhaps centuries, to duplicate the technology the Trolls had demonstrated and produce starships that could match a Troll vessel one-on-one. Maybe the RockRats would one day return to liberate their planet-bound cousins from slavery, or bombard the Troll worlds to radioactive dust in retaliation for their destruction of their fellow humans.

A red sphere on the display marked the known Troll firing range. It was fussy, reminding her that they didn't have a precise location for the Troll starship. Just outside that sphere, there was a second sphere centred on Rubicon, the range of the pulse blaster. They should get a single shot before the Trolls had time to fire, assuming that the Trolls decloaked out of weapons range. But if they were wrong – and it was quite possible that the Trolls would prefer to decloak right on top of Rubicon – the cruiser might be in serious trouble.

“Get the pulse blaster ready to fire,” she ordered. The Trolls had to know that their turbulence would be detected by the human ships, but when? When would be a good time to reveal that she was aware of their presence? Back at the Academy, there had never been any tactical studies based around a similar scenario. The UNNS had learned hard lessons since the Trolls had taught them just how inadequate their imaginations actually were. “And prepare to bring up full active sensors.”

Standard procedure for dealing with a cloaked ship was to sweep the area with active sensors, watching for faint distortions and reflections that might signal the presence of a cloaking device. No one was quite sure how the Troll system would react to a sweep, but if nothing else, Janine told herself, it was one more question that they’d try to answer today. The Troll ship crept closer, matching course and speed with an elegance that Janine had to admire, before hovering just outside weapons range. Janine allowed herself a tight smile and nodded to Polly.

“Full sensor sweep, now,” she ordered. There was a pause as the active sensors came online, sweeping the area of space where the cloaked ship was lurking. “Tactical, target the Troll ship with the pulse blaster as soon as it starts decloaking.”

“It's decloaking,” Polly snapped. A new note of alarm was running through her voice. Unlike the rest of Janine’s crew, she had no experience at all in a combat situation, at least not outside simulations. “I confirm the presence of one Troll Alpha-class starship.”

“Understood,” Janine said, calmly. There was no mistaking the familiar silhouette of a craft that had brought so much death and destruction to the human race. The Troll ship shimmered into view, confident in its power and majesty, hanging effortlessly against the stars. It seemed convinced that there were no starfighters waiting to burst out of the freighters, a trick the human race had used before. Or maybe it was just ready to deal with the starfighters when they finally showed themselves. “Take aim.”

“Pulse blaster locked on target,” McLaughlin reported. He shot Polly a brief look. The sensor officer looked terrified, almost frozen. Janine motioned for one of the secondary officers to take over the sensor console. Polly had done her job. “The Troll ship is hanging just outside firing range.”

What are you thinking? Janine thought, wondering about her counterpart on the Troll ship. So far, they hadn't been able to deduce anything about the Troll command structure, assuming that one existed. But one had to exist, surely. They couldn't be a race of anarchists, not if they wanted to carry out a full-scale invasion of human space. Besides, the handful of worlds founded on anarchist principles hadn't worked very well in the long run. What do you want from us?

“The Troll ship is coming into range,” McLaughlin said. “They will be in firing range of us in ten seconds...”

“Fire the pulse blaster,” Janine ordered. “Now!”

The bridge lights dimmed as most of Rubicon’s power was diverted into the pulse blaster, which fired a pulse towards the Troll ship. Janine braced herself, knowing that there would be no escape if the Troll ship proved immune to the pulse blaster, before the Troll power signature vanished completely from the display. For a moment, she thought that the ship had been destroyed – even though there had been no explosion – or jumped out, before sensors revealed that the teardrop-shaped starship was still there. It was just...drifting.

Shaking herself out of her shock, Janine hit a switch on her console. “Marines, go,” she snapped. “Capture that bastard intact!”

***​

Master Sergeant Thomas Mandell braced himself as the assault shuttles undocked from Rubicon and raced towards the Troll starship at full burn. It was easy to imagine enough point defence being left intact to blow the shuttles to dust, so the cruiser launched a spread of decoys along with the Marines. But the Trolls didn’t fire on the shuttles as they roared closer, while the Marines braced themselves to board the alien vessel. Up close, the Troll starship looked to have been put in a very bad way. The silvery hull material they used in place of standard hullmetal was cracked and broken, while pieces of debris were drifting away from the wounded ship.

The Marines had wondered where to board the alien craft, as no one had ever managed to locate an airlock on the Alphas or their escorts. Now, Thomas could see that part of the alien hull had shattered completely, revealing a gash in the hull that the Marines could use to enter without being ambushed at the airlock. He barked a command and the Marine shuttle stopped just outside the gash, lights blazing brightly as they peered into the darkened recesses of the alien ship. Apart from a handful of bodies – of both kinds of Troll – there were no signs of the aliens at all.

“Go,” he snapped, and the Marines launched themselves out of the shuttles, into the alien ship. Like all alien ships, it was weirdly inhuman, strange enough to make his head hurt even if it lacked the nightmarish qualities of a Polis battleship. His armoured combat suit automatically analysed the remaining atmosphere and concluded that the Troll atmosphere was breathable by humanity. That wasn't a surprise – the Trolls had shown no difficulty operating on New Marseilles – but it was well to be sure. “Launch the nanoprobes.”

The tiny sensors started to produce an image of the ship’s interior as the Marines reached what had to be a bulkhead hatch. They would seal automatically in a human ship if the hull was breached, or the power was lost, and the Trolls evidently agreed with human ship designers, at least that far. The Marines set up a seal to keep the atmosphere intact and then blasted through the bulkhead hatch. Two Marines were immediately blasted down by a pair of humanoid Trolls, both of whom were carrying handheld energy weapons. The Corps had assumed that the Trolls didn't have handheld energy weapons, if only because their landing and occupation forces had only used projectile weapons, but it was clear that that assumption was in error. Thomas snapped a command and the Marines launched a spread of grenades into the Troll compartment, clearing the way for them to get into the alien ship.

He watched on his HUD as their chart of the ship’s interior grew by leaps and bounds. The Trolls seemed to have been badly scattered by the disaster that had hit their ship, but they never seemed willing to surrender and be taken prisoner. At first, the Marines tried to offer surrender, but after the third Troll died in place they gave up and started putting the Trolls down as quickly as possible. It was clear that they would attempt to destroy their ship rather than let it fall into human hands and Thomas knew that they could not risk them succeeding. They had to kill all the Trolls, even if it didn't sit well with them...

The fight raged for nearly an hour before the Marines broke into what had to be the vessels command centre. Unlike a human bridge, there was nothing more than a shattered tank – his suit’s analysis system informed him that it had held water – and a fleshy mass that had been destroyed, either by the pulse blaster or the Trolls themselves when they decided that their ship was lost. The mass seemed to have been tied into the starship, not unlike the neural links used by the United Nations, creating a horrific blending of biological material and more understandable computer systems. His Marines explored the command centre carefully, noting that most of the ship’s communications nodes appeared to have been shattered by the pulse blaster. Humans who were forcibly disconnected from neural links often suffered brain damage, even death. It was logical to assume that the Trolls had the same problem.

Inch by inch, the remainder of the Troll starship was secured by the Marines. None of the Trolls offered to surrender; they just kept fighting until they died at their posts. Thomas knew that some UN personnel would keep fighting until they were overwhelmed – something that had become more common after the Trolls had made it clear that they didn't take prisoners – but he had to admire their dedication. They came very close to detonating the ship’s reserve power cells and destroying the Marines, along with humanity’s one chance to capture and study their technology.

“Captain,” he said, finally. “The ship is ours!”

***​

Janine let out a sigh of relief she hadn't realised that she'd been holding. She'd known that any UN crew fighting the Trolls would try to destroy their ship, even though the Trolls probably didn't need to study human technology, and she’d feared that the Marines would be lost. Instead, the crazy plan had worked.

“Engineering, link us to the Troll ship,” she ordered. The second half of the operation was no less risky – and it would become a great deal more dangerous if a second Troll warship turned up to discover what had happened to the first ship. There hadn't been any StarCom pulses from the captured ship, but there was no way to know what orders they had about reporting back to higher authority. “And then prepare to carry the ship through flux space.”

She smiled as she settled back into her command chair. It would be risky – two ships jumping in tandem would screw up the navigational computers – but there was no other way to get it to the RV point. There, the Troll ship would be moved into a mobile shipyard and transported to Area 51. Once at the base, Lombardi and his fellows could unlock its secrets, perhaps coming up with something new that humanity could use against its foes. And who knew what might happen then?

The thought was reassuring, even though she knew what had happened at Terra Nova. Their enemy had entered the core worlds and started raiding, something that had never happened in all of human history. Janine knew, even if she didn't want to admit it, what the event signified. Unless humanity could develop something new to use against the Trolls, the war was within shouting distance of being lost.

 

Chapter Thirty

Luna
15th August 2435

“This is not a promising report, Admiral.”

Anton nodded, swallowing the response that came to mind. Terra Nova had merely been the first of the core worlds to be hit by the Trolls. Since then, no less than nine other worlds had been hit, although the Trolls hadn't enjoyed the same degree of success elsewhere. Their attacks on New Washington, Britannia and Edo had been completely wiped out by the local self-defence forces. The Trolls had handed out a beating, but they hadn't had it all their own way.

But they had managed to panic the civilians, at least the ones who hadn't panicked after Second Cadiz. The population had risen up with one voice and demanded more home defence, something that the politicians had been forced to answer. Units that had been pledged to the UNNS as reinforcements had been withdrawn, while the starships from 6th and 7th fleet had been broken up and parcelled out to the threatened worlds. It hadn't helped relationships between the inner worlds and the core worlds either. Several inner worlds had simply been abandoned to provide defences for the core worlds. The core worlds simply had more clout.

The civilians simply didn't understand some of the basic realities of the war. Apart from starfighters, the human race didn't have any effective counter to the Trolls, which meant that sending cruisers and destroyers up against the Alphas did nothing more than give the Trolls new targets. Dividing up the human fleet and scattering it over a dozen threatened worlds just offered the Trolls the chance to pick the ships off in small numbers. Concentration of force was the only thing that allowed the human race to deter the Trolls and the politicians were making it harder for him to concentrate his forces. Apart from Home Fleet, and the starships at New Brisbane, there were few concentrated fleets left in the United Nations.

It got worse. The fleets that were meant to provide border security against the Polis and the Sutra had been pulled away from the borders, ordered to jump back to the core worlds as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly, the border areas had seen a resurgence of pirate and raider activity, some coming out of the Triangle, others almost certainly from the Sutra factions. The Trolls were trying to cripple the United Nations economically and the raiders, intentionally or otherwise, were helping them. It wouldn't be long, according to the economic predictions, before what remained of the UN’s shipping along the borders had to simply stop servicing the area. The shipping companies couldn't take the losses for very long.

The real problem lay in the report that Anton had been given by his planning staff, which he’d passed on to the Security Council. HE3 was the backbone of the United Nation’s economy, an endless supply of cheap fuel for everything from starships to aircars and fusion reactors. Mined from gas giants, existing in such vast quantities that no one could hope to set up a monopoly, it powered almost everything in the galaxy. And the Trolls had discovered just how important it was to the United Nations. Their attacks against the core and inner worlds had targeted the cloudscoops, destroying them one by one. There were already shortages in a dozen sectors and the price of refined HE3 was rising steadily. The report Anton had been given suggested that the UN’s economy would grind to a halt in less than a year, unless something was done to prevent the Trolls from taking out more cloudscoops.

“No,” he agreed. “The situation has become desperate.”

The politicians muttered amongst themselves. Anton kept a sharp eye on political manoeuvrings on Luna, but he had been becoming increasingly aware that the politicians were discussing certain matters in private. One of them, he suspected, was his removal and replacement with another Admiral, which wouldn't have been so bad except his successor would be under immense pressure to deliver something – anything – and simply wouldn't be able to deliver it. Another was the threatened withdrawal from the United Nations by several core worlds, worlds that had already started to withdraw units of their self-defence forces from the front. If they called their naval personnel home too...Anton didn't know what would happen then, if only because it had never happened before. But then, humanity hadn't been brought to its knees in a few short months before either.

He had been careful not to tell them about the captured Troll starship, knowing that whatever they heard would leak out into the datanet and probably reach the Trolls. But there was another piece of good news he could offer them.

“However, we do have an opportunity to give the Trolls a bloody nose of their own, perhaps force them onto the defensive,” he added. “We located one of their worlds.”

He smiled at their reactions. The UN had been far luckier than it deserved to be, for the survey ships had had no idea that Capricorn had fallen to the Trolls. If they hadn't taken the precaution of sneaking back into the system under stealth, giving them a chance to spot the Troll starships infesting the system, they might have been caught and destroyed before they could pass on what they’d found. Instead, they’d made it to one of the RV points listed in the contingency plans – contingency plans they’d expected never to have to use – and located a hidden StarCom unit. It had been used to pass word back to Earth, along with what tactical data they’d been able to discover.

The analysts said – and Anton couldn’t disagree with them – that the system the survey ships had discovered wasn’t a core system, but unless the Trolls were very alien hitting their system should force them to deploy their ships to provide cover to their rear areas. It might just give the United Nations a breathing space they needed desperately, as well as giving the Trolls a sharp lesson in the dangers of slaughtering vast numbers of humans. He intended to propose issuing General Order 24, authorising the assault force to target the Troll civilian settlements and destroy them. After the Trolls had killed so many humans, it was the least they could do.

“I intend to dispatch 6th Fleet from the core worlds to take up position in Troll space,” he said. “At the same time, I intend to order the survey ships to destroy the Troll world, along with its civilian population. It is time to hit them back as hard as they hit us.”

There was a long pause. “Admiral,” one of the Ambassadors said, finally, “if you slaughter one of their civilian populations, they will do the same to ours.”

“They’re already doing the same to ours,” the French Ambassador snapped back. “They slaughtered the entire colony on New Marseilles, remember? And that was just the first colony world to be wiped clean of life. Billions of humans have died ever since they started this damn war!”

The argument raged backwards and forwards, without any clear consensus. Anton found it hard to blame them; with humanity’s string of defeats steadily rising upwards, their positions were being undermined back home. Martial law couldn't prevent the population from expressing their discontent to their local politicians, which in turn weakened the Ambassadors who made up the Security Council. If they bombarded a Troll world and the Trolls retaliated against their homeworlds, they would get the blame.

It wasn't logical, Anton knew. The Trolls had started slaughtering human civilians a long time before the human race had discovered where to target an attack on their civilian population. Logically, the politicians couldn't be blamed for failing to deliver the impossible, but logic and reason rarely had anything to do with human politics. Their rivals were already promising greater security if they were elected into power, conveniently ignoring the fact that they couldn't offer anything more in the way of security than those who currently held office.

But, so far, the Trolls had only targeted outer worlds and a couple of inner worlds for mass slaughter. A single targeted core world would kill billions of humans in a single strike.

The Ambassador from Britannia, the only one with any naval experience of his own, learned forward. “A question, Admiral,” he said. “Do I understand that you intend to send 6th Fleet several months from the core worlds?”

Anton scowled, inwardly. He’d been hoping that they would miss that little detail. Typical – the first sign of any awareness of military realities and it had to be at the most inconvenient moment.

“Yes,” he said, flatly. “I believe that we have to have a striking force in position to take advantage of any additional targets that we happen to discover.”

“But that will weaken the defences of the core worlds,” the Ambassador said. “Why can't the survey ships take the targets out themselves?”

“The survey ships will be hard-pressed to target the largely civilian world they discovered alone,” Anton said. “Fundamentally, Survey Command’s specialist ships are not intended to serve as warships, even though they are armed; they certainly don't include any starfighter carriers in their squadron. If they are forced to engage Troll warships, they will be destroyed very quickly. 6th Fleet, on the other hand, has more than enough firepower to hit a target and – if necessary – withdraw under fire if it becomes clear that they have bitten off more than they can chew.”

There was another problem. Survey Command taught its crewmen how to survey new colony worlds and make first contact with alien races, not to follow orders without question. Crews that were, to all intents and purposes, half civilian might not accept orders to target and exterminate a civilian population, no matter what the Trolls had done to the human race. They’d certainly been isolated from the realities of the war, if only because they’d departed human space not long after New Marseilles had been attacked, opening the war.

He paused, and then pushed ahead. “There is a second problem,” he continued. “Right now, we have more targets to defend than we have ships and starfighters to cover. The Trolls can pick and choose their targets, weakening us while we are unable to weaken them in turn. If this continues, we are going to lose the war. Pinning down our fleets isn't going to do anything that might force the Trolls to look to their own rear areas. But if we go on the offensive, we might just buy time to rebuild and drive the Trolls out of our space.”

Spelling matters out so baldly for politicians was always risky, but there was no choice. He listened as the debate resumed, with the representatives forming up along predictable lines. Those who represented well-defended worlds wanted to go on the offensive, those whose worlds would be uncovered – at least slightly – by the departure of 6th Fleet were less inclined to send those ships several months from the core worlds. The Trolls definitely had an advantage, Anton had to admit; their flux drives could jump further than anything the human race had produced. It would take them less time to get from their colony worlds to the United Nations, giving them a decisive advantage.

“Is it possible,” one of the representatives asked, “for the survey ships to make a targeted attack on the enemy system, rather than just wanton destruction?”

Anton shook his head. “Those ships are not capable of standing up to Troll warships,” he reminded them. Outside of heavy carriers, Earth had nothing that could take on a Troll cruiser in single combat. “They will have to launch a hit-and-run raid, not something that allows for accurate timing.”

“I see,” the representative said.

The debate lasted nearly an hour before they finally came up with a consensus. Thankfully, 6th Fleet would be sent away from the United Nations, towards the Troll industrial worlds that had to exist near the colony world that the survey ships had found. The politicians had hesitated longer over authorising a general strike against the colony world, but Anton pointed out that there was no other choice, unless they wanted to wait until 6th Fleet reached the edges of Troll space itself. It would simply take too long to get the fleet into position. Humanity needed the reprieve now.

“Good luck, Admiral,” the representative from Edo said. Anton, who knew that Edo was one of the worlds considering a complete withdrawal from the United Nations, wasn’t impressed. Their departure – if they did depart – would unbalance the UNNS. “We need a victory, desperately.”

Anton nodded in agreement. The representative was right. They did need a victory.

***​

“The preliminary report on the Troll starship has been completed,” Commander Weaver said, when he returned to his office. “Do you want the summery right now?”

Anton nodded. “The pulse blaster worked,” Weaver said, seriously. “From the basic report, it is clear that the pulse fried their internal communications system as well as their power distribution nodes. Unfortunately, Professor Lombardi is convinced that the pulse blaster won’t work once they realise what they’re facing. He thinks that it won’t be difficult for them to configure their systems to resist the pulse, although it will come at a loss in efficiency.”

“Which may benefit us anyway,” Anton said. Anything that weakened the Trolls was worthwhile. “What else did he learn about the alien ship?”

Commander Weaver grinned. “Unlike our ships, which are powered by fusion cores, the Troll ship was powered by what Lombardi called an artificial singularity,” he said. “The Trolls apparently created one that they then used as a power source, a source that actually provided far more power than the ship required. Luckily, their safety precautions called for dispelling the singularity if the ship ran into trouble or the pulse blaster might have accidentally destroyed its target. Lombardi thinks that we can probably create a singularity of our own, given time, but we’d probably have to design a whole new class of starship to carry it. Even a fleet carrier would require a major refit to carry the generator.”

“But it can be duplicated,” Anton mused. “And their energy weapons?”

“Well, they were successful in capturing handheld energy weapons as well as the ship itself,” Weaver said. “Two of them have been taken apart; from the basic report, it seems clear that they project beams of directed energy towards their target. However, the shipboard weapons appear to be of a different class altogether, which suggests that the basic handheld weapon may not be usable on a starship. There may be problems with scaling it up to produce one that can be mounted on a starship. Experiments are apparently continuing.”

There was a pause. “So far, we don’t have a clear picture of what the Trolls use to produce their death rays – unfortunately most of that system was taken out by the pulse – but the scientists think that we can combine human and Troll technology to produce something that should even the odds. It may even have a longer range than the Troll death rays, allowing us to engage them from outside their own range.”

“Assuming we produce workable hardware,” Anton said. He had served in procurement during his first stint at the Admiralty and he knew how hard it was to move from theory to something that could be mounted on human starships. “What about their drive technology?”

“Lombardi claims – some of the other researchers don’t agree – that their singularity was worked into their drive system,” Weaver said. “We assumed that they’d somehow managed to scale up a starfighter-style drive to fit into a starship, but Lombardi thinks that they were able to use the singularity to produce an effective drive field. Again, research and experiments are continuing. Director Bowery requested permission to start building a new experimental test bed at Area 51.”

“Granted,” Anton said. If something useful could be produced before the human race ran out of time, it might save the UN from inglorious defeat. And if they were defeated, Area 51 could link up with the Iceberg Project and start building the fleet to liberate human space in secret. The Trolls would probably pick fights with the Sutra and the Polis next, whatever those races believed – or claimed to believe. It might give the resistance a chance to rebuild and then strike back.

“Their flux drive is also linked into the singularity, but in a manner that we have not yet been able to understand,” Weaver added. “Professor Rashid has a theory – one that hasn't been proven or disproven – that they use the singularity’s gravity field to fold space to a far greater extent than a standard flux drive. By his calculations, they might be able to jump somewhere between thirty to fifty light years in a single jump.”

Anton blanched. From their positions in the inner worlds, the Trolls could jump right to Earth – or to colony worlds on the other side of the homeworld. They could certainly shave time off the journey between Capricorn and New Brisbane. Hell, they could pull most of their ships off defence duty, knowing that they could jump reinforcements in at once if necessary.

“More importantly and disturbingly, the Trolls appear to have created a third form of life,” Weaver concluded. “We don’t understand how yet, but they didn't have a standard computer core on their ship. Instead, the command network was linked into another entity, a large biological mass. Unfortunately, we can’t say much about it because the pulse fried it completely. We just know that it was grown from Troll DNA, probably as a living computer node. What this says about the Trolls is rather worrying.”

“Dear God,” Anton said, shaking his head. If there were at least three different forms of Troll, which one was the real one? Coming to think of it, did they even know themselves? They seemed to have taken self-improvement to a far greater level than the RockRats had ever dreamed of doing. “What the hell are we fighting?”

 

Chapter Thirty-One

New Brisbane
25th August 2435

Paul had distrusted the very idea of promotion since he received his first command, long before humanity had known that the Trolls existed. Starship command had been his dream, the chance to command his own ship; few higher ranks ever had the ability to take command of a starship directly. Indeed, there were strong precedents that suggested that no Admiral ever had the right to assume command of a starship, although they did have the power to relieve the Captain of command. The one example that suggested otherwise had been during the Magana Wars, when a fleet carrier had been hammered by a sneak attack that had wiped out the Captain and his XO.

The Admiral’s uniform he'd been given still felt uncomfortable, even though his promotion had come shortly after Admiral Davidson had been confirmed dead. 9th Fleet – and the few combat-effective ships from 5th Fleet – had had to crawl to New Brisbane, always fearful that the Trolls would track them down and harass them before they could reach safety. Not that there was any such thing as safety in the United Nations these days; the reports suggested that the Trolls had even probed the Sol System, although the sheer weight of firepower held by Home Fleet had probably deterred them from actually attacking. A great many treaties had been signed in the days since Terra Nova had been attacked, linking all of the military bases in the system into one huge defence network. The Trolls would need a full fleet to attack it.

He’d chosen to fly his flag on Triumphant instead of transferring to Brisbane Base, officially because he intended to share the dangers his subordinates faced. Unofficially, it gave him an excuse to avoid politicians, reporters and corporate managers, all of whom seemed to believe that the commander of the defence force could put their interests at the top of his priority list. Unlike Capricorn, New Brisbane had a massive civilian population as well as the military base, something that hadn't been a problem until the Trolls had started to raid into the inner worlds. Politicians who’d managed to squeeze funding out of the General Assembly for Brisbane Base, correctly believing that it would give the local economy a boost, had suddenly realised that that put them at ground zero if – when – the Trolls attacked. It was surprising how many high-ranking politicians had left for emergency meetings on Earth ever since they’d awoken to discover that they were on a war front.

The corporate interests weren't much better. Paul had ordered them to deploy their ships to help move refugee populations away from New Brisbane, but they’d complained and dragged their feet and even called in favours from the politicians to gain exemptions from the order. They’d quietened down after Paul threw caution to the wind and had five of the worst offenders arrested – and then transferred to Brisbane Base – yet he had a feeling that it wouldn't be long before that came back to haunt him. At least the corporate shippers had been less inclined to quibble. Some of them had been very helpful – but then, anyone who lived in space was more aware of the fundamental realities than those who had spent all their lives on the ground.

New Brisbane was a curious system in many ways. Two stars rotating around one another; one bright enough to give heat and light to a human-compatible world, one so dim that it had only been discovered a few years before the human race took to the stars. The astronomers had claimed that there was something very unusual about the star system; they’d had a network of satellites and stations examining the lesser star, watching for signs of intelligent life. Paul was inclined to dismiss their suggestions that an unknown alien race had killed one of the stars, but it was true that the dim star’s planets had been shattered by a cosmic shock sometime in the very distant past. Their remains had produced some of the richest asteroid fields in the galaxy, mined by the RockRats and locals alike.

He shook his head as he glanced down at another report from the starfighter training centres. Many more maggots were being graduated ahead of time and merged into veteran squadrons, something that continued to weaken the Navy’s starfighter force. At least the Trolls seemed unwilling to challenge New Brisbane directly, giving him time to train his pilots as thoroughly as he could, but he knew that it was just a matter of time. The same logic that led them to Capricorn would force them to take New Brisbane – and they’d already started chipping away at the worlds nearest to the naval base. Paul would have been astonished if they gave him more than a few more weeks to prepare...

...But he would give them a bloody nose. New Brisbane had been settled for over three hundred years and the locals had built up a formidable industrial base. Ever since the declaration of martial law, it had been producing mines, missiles and other unpleasant surprises for the Trolls, as well as a small number of indigenous starfighters. Paul had used the largess liberally, spreading mines around the planet’s high orbitals and deploying others in position to intercept any attack on Brisbane Base itself. He’d even emplaced mines near the cloudscoops, knowing that the Trolls would probably target them first. If they cut off the flow of HE3 to New Brisbane, the planet’s economy would slowly grind to a halt. At least he’d been able to convince the miners to speed up their production efforts. There would be a fuel reserve for the locals to keep their economy going for a few months.

His wristcom buzzed. “Admiral,” his aide said, “Admiral Jackson and Admiral Sun are requesting another tactical conference.”

“Understood,” Paul said, gritting his teeth. By strict seniority, both of them were senior to him, with enough time in grade to automatically assume command of the combined fleets. But the Grand Admiral had ordered Paul to assume supreme command, pointing out that he had experience fighting the Trolls that the others lacked. They had cooperated – the Grand Admiral had used the state of emergency to relieve a number of officers more interested in politics than fighting – yet Paul knew that they were far from happy. They’d taken the opportunity to question every decision he'd made without ever – quite – crossing the line into insubordination. No one was even sure if they could, legally, be insubordinate to an Admiral who was technically junior to him, but they didn't want to challenge the Grand Admiral. Not openly, at least.

He stood up. Life had definitely been easier when he'd been fighting the Trolls as a Vice Admiral, with Admiral Davidson soaking up the political shit.

“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ll hold the conference in the main briefing room.”

***​

They weren't maggots any longer.

Connie led Blue Squadron towards the asteroid cloud, wondering just when the maggots had crossed the line into veteran pilots. Maybe it had been when they’d first faced the Trolls, or during the long retreat from Capricorn and the arrival at New Brisbane, when they’d prepared themselves to draw another line in the sand. There was little disrespect offers to her maggots now, at least not by the other veterans. But then, there was an endless supply of new maggots from the training centre, utterly unprepared for the realities of war. They grew up quickly or they died.

No one was quite sure what had happened to the planets orbiting the dim red half of the binary pair, but it had left behind something that only rarely occurred outside bad movies and worse novels – actual terrain in space. In peacetime, the rich and wealthy locals competed with one another to see who could fly through the asteroid field, threading their way between countless asteroids and making it out safely. Connie had heard that the sport claimed several dozen lives per month, but the authorities had never seen fit to ban it. The pilots had joked that the authorities were really using it to rid themselves of entitled brats who would only grow up into little monsters. Now they were using it as a training ground for themselves, the joke had become a great deal less funny. Most of the paths through the field had been charted, but there was a certain imprecision about even the best charts. Sometimes one asteroid hit another, sending it off on a random trajectory that could intersect with a third asteroid...it wasn't a safe place to play games.

“All right,” she said. “One at a time, follow me in – and watch yourselves. I don’t want to attend another funeral in this system.”

They’d attended too many in the weeks since they had arrived at New Capricorn. Far too many crewmen had been killed, along with Admiral Davidson himself and most of 5th Fleet. Connie had held one personally for the maggots who had died in Second Cadiz, knowing that the Navy would give her new maggots to train soon enough. At least she’d been spared that for a month, thankfully. One of the squadrons had been weakened badly enough for its remaining pilots to be folded into Blue Squadron while its veteran cadre had been ordered to reconstitute the squadron from new maggots. Connie didn't envy them their task.

Flying through the asteroid field safely wouldn't have been a real challenge, she reminded herself as she gunned the engine. The real challenge lay in flying as close to the asteroids as possible, flipping the starfighter around to avoid ramming straight into the asteroid she’d been using to play chicken. It reminded her of the simulations she’d run back at the training centre, where they hadn't been constrained by bothersome issues of reality. She'd been wiped out countless times in the simulations, flying through asteroid fields that made this one a piece of cake. Connie was smiling as she emerged from the tail of the asteroid field, flipping her starfighter up and over the asteroids as she returned to their starting point. Judging from the commentary, the pilots were having fun as they threaded their way through the asteroids and out into clear space. She allowed herself to relax as the last pilot escaped safely and returned to the flock.

“Hey, Maw,” one of them called. “Can we do that again, please!”

Connie snorted. She was effectively mother to eleven pilots – and she still wasn't quite used to it. “I think that we have to let the others have a go,” she said. The pilots had been staging through the escort carriers and a handful of modified freighters. “They need to...”

Her voice broke off as an emergency transmission echoed through the system. “...Is RockRat Colony Vin,” it said. “We are under attack by the Trolls; I say again, we are under attack by the Trolls. This is...”

“Form up on me,” Connie ordered. Vin – one of the larger asteroid clusters that the RockRats had turned into a small city – was only a few hundred thousand kilometres from their location. It was quite possible that they were the closest force that could respond in time. “Prepare to engage the enemy.”

She gunned her drives, tapping a command into the system to bring her weapons online. The improved missiles for the capital ships hadn't yet reached the starfighters – the latest scuttlebutt suggested that the techs were having problems slimming the warheads down to reach the required size for starfighter torpedoes – but the starfighters had already proved themselves against the Trolls. They might take savage losses, yet the Trolls would know that they had been kissed.

“This is Blue Leader,” she said. If the RockRats had been linked into the command datanet, she would have received a SITREP as well as a distress call. “We are approaching your position. Can you give me a situation report?”

There was a long pause, long enough for her to wonder if they were already dead. “Five Troll starships, unknown class,” a different voice said, finally. She sounded young – and badly frightened. “They're killing everyone!”

“I have them on my HUD now,” Connie said, as reassuringly as she could. The Trolls seemed to be standing off and bombarding the asteroid settlements after cutting through the modified freighters the RockRats had used as defenders with contemptuous ease. All five Troll ships were Charlie-class, a design the analysts claimed the Trolls used mainly for hit and run missions. “We’re coming in hot.”

The Trolls seemed oddly disinclined to fight – but then, they had already completed their primary mission. There had been nineteen habitats in the cluster, along with two industrial nodes – and all, but three of them had been destroyed. Instead of facing the starfighters, they started to move away from the asteroids, leaving behind the remains of a once-thriving civilisation. A handful of lifepods could be detected among the wreckage, screaming for help; for once, the Trolls simply ignored them. They were more interested in avoiding the starfighters; they knew, by now, that three or four hits could cripple or destroy their ships.

“Prepare to fire,” Connie ordered. “Go chaotic...now!”

The starfighters spun into their evasive patterns as the Trolls opened fire, a second before something shook Connie’s starfighter violently. As soon as she regained control, she realised that all five Troll starships had simply jumped out, timing their jump in the hopes that the gravitational flux would cripple or destroy the incoming starfighters. Connie cursed as she stared at where the Trolls had been, knowing that it was impossible to give chase. The bastards seemed to be able to make multiple jumps, ensuring that no one could follow them even if they did have a flux drive of their own.

“They ran,” one of the pilots exulted. “They were too scared to face us...”#

“They knew that they didn't have to face us to win,” Connie said, sharply. She switched the channel over to the main link to the carrier. “CAG, this is Blue Leader. The Trolls just attacked a RockRat settlement, and then withdrew at high speed. We are returning to the barn; I say again, we are returning to the barn.”

More reports seemed to be coming in as Blue Squadron altered course, heading back towards the carrier. The Trolls hadn't just limited themselves to one target; they’d hammered dozens of habitats and installations right across the system. So far, they hadn't targeted Brisbane Base itself, or the main body of the fleet, but everyone seemed to agree that it was only a matter of time.

Bastards, Connie thought, sourly. They can jump in, hit their targets and jump out again. And we can't do anything to stop them.

***​

Alarms were still howling through the massive carrier when Paul ran into the CIC and took his command chair. “Report,” he snapped. Red icons were flashing into existence all over the main display, some marked to warn him that the reports were already out of date. “What the hell are they doing?”

“At least thirty-seven raids have been launched against facilities in this system,” one of the tactical officers said. He’d managed to keep his original staff, even though he’d technically inherited Admiral Davidson’s surviving officers. “First reports indicate that they have wrecked their targets and then withdrawn from the system.”

Paul nodded, sourly. It looked as if the Trolls wanted to weaken the defenders before bringing in their main fleet to obliterate the base, but there was no way to be sure. The Trolls were versatile enough to launch raids they knew would alarm the human defenders, without bothering to follow through and bring in their main fleet. His ability to provide support to other systems that might be attacked would be badly crippled. More to the point, his inability to cover everywhere in the New Brisbane System itself would be made very clear. There was no way to know if the Trolls studied human politics, but if they were trying to force a command crisis, they could hardly have done it better if they’d tried.

“Show me the targets,” he ordered. A list flickered to life in front of him. Naturally, the Trolls had targeted the cloudscoops, but their attack had failed and they hadn't stayed around long enough to launch a second strike. That was odd; normally, they showed no lack of resolution until it became clear that they couldn't win. Had something happened to limit their deployable forces?

He shook his head. “My compliments to Commodore Francis,” he said. “His squadron is to jump out to the gas giant and provide support to the defenders there. The cloudscoop must be protected at all costs.”

“Aye, Admiral,” the tactical officer said.

“We’re picking up a request from General Atwell,” the communications officer said. “He’s requesting that you dispatch fleet units to New Brisbane to reinforce the orbital defences.”

“Denied,” Paul said, shortly. New Brisbane was heavily defended already, with enough starfighters to keep the Trolls well away from the planet. His priority was securing the fleet base and keeping his forces concentrated. It was the only way to produce a victory against the Trolls. “Launch the ready fighters, then bring up the secondary fighters and prepare to launch them at a moment’s notice.”

He nodded as the ready fighters fanned out to reinforce the CSP. The Trolls had to know that his fleet was near the command base – and they had to regard the fleet as their primary target. Nothing else made sense, unless they were so alien that their tactical doctrine was incomprehensible to human minds. But so far they’d fought a conventional war with unconventional technology. No, they’d go after the fleet. The only question was how.

“Admiral, I’m picking up...Jesus Christ!”

“I see,” Paul said, as new red icons flared into existence. The Trolls had arrived in force. “Launch all remaining fighters. Prepare to engage the enemy.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Two



New Brisbane

25th August 2435



“Dear God – how many of them are there?”



“Leave that for the moment,” Connie said. Blue Squadron had been lucky; they'd barely avoided having the Trolls land right on top of them as they approached the fleet. “Concentrate on linking up with the rest of the fighters.”



Every carrier was launching its fighters now, forming them up into a giant wedge that looked almost impossible to stop. But Connie knew how easily the Trolls could destroy the tiny craft – and how rapidly they could fill space with deadly bursts of energy that vaporised starfighters as they tried to enter firing range. No matter how many of them were out there, far too many pilots were about to die. It was quite likely that she would be one of those pilots; she’d pushed her luck ever since the first battle at Cadiz. Only a few hundred pilots had survived every major battle so far. More of them would die in this battle.



She pushed such concerns aside as the squadron slipped into the other starfighters and reversed course, ready to join them when they accelerated towards the Trolls. It was always difficult to coordinate a mass attack, but that very lack of coordination would give them an advantage, although she doubted it made up for the disadvantages. Besides, they'd be flying in behind missiles...and if the new weapons worked, the Trolls would be in for an unpleasant surprise. Maybe – just maybe – there would be time for her pilots to get in, land their blows and then pull out again.

***​

“I’m reading upwards of a hundred Alphas, seventy Betas and thirty-seven Deltas,” the sensor officer said. “It's hard to be sure; their damned stealth technology and drive field overlap is making it hard to get readings on ships at the rear of their formation.”



Paul nodded. They outnumbered the Trolls by over ten to one, but that probably wouldn't make much difference to the aliens. The bastards already knew how to use their technology to neglect humanity’s numerical superiority. But this time they would be in for a surprise, perhaps one that would convince them to back off and retreat. If only they knew just how many ships the Trolls had at their disposal. He might be able to deduce if bleeding his fleet white to stop them was worthwhile, or not.



“Two minutes to actual missile firing range,” the tactical officer said. “All missile-carriers report that they are ready to open fire. Starfighter squadrons are moving into position to support the missile barrage.”



“We fire as soon as they cross the line into actual firing range,” Paul ordered. If nothing else, they would be firing so many missiles that even the Trolls would be unable to stop them all before they hit home. “And then send the starfighters in after them.”



On the display, the Trolls moved in. They’d learned from the early battles too, Paul noted; their formation would allow their capital ships to cover one another from the incoming starfighters, as well as linking their death rays into a single defence pattern. The Trolls would be damn near unstoppable once they got into firing range – his fleet would be crippled very quickly – but until they reached firing range they were unable to actually damage the carriers. They would seek to close the range as fast as possible...



“Enemy starships entering actual firing range,” the tactical officer reported.



“All ships, fire,” Paul ordered. “I say again, fire at will.”



The Trolls had faced massive missile barrages before, but this one was an order of magnitude greater than any they had previously encountered. Paul half-expected them to jump out when they realised just what sort of hammer had been flung at them, but instead they held their position, clearly confident that their death rays could sweep most of the missiles out of existence. Under normal circumstances, they might well have been right. There were so many missiles in such a restricted area of space that most of their death rays would be certain to score hits.



“The Trolls are continuing to approach,” the sensor officer said. “They’re actually picking up a little speed.”



“Angle the missiles in towards the Betas,” Paul ordered. They’d analysed Troll firing patterns extensively and concluded that the Betas were generally ordered to cover the Alphas instead of themselves. As they were the worst threat to human starfighters, it puzzled him why the firing patterns weren't reversed, unless the Troll admirals wanted their big ships to stay intact even at the expense of losing their smaller ships. He'd known a few human admirals who had had similar thoughts. “And activate the warheads as soon as they enter firing range.”



The Trolls greeted the missiles with a hail of fire, launching so many bursts of point defence fire that parts of the missile barrage seemed to simply melt away. Paul watched, silently calculating the odds, as the missiles revealed their true nature. Every one of them had been designed to serve as the base for a bomb-pumped laser, lashing out at the Troll hulls with a weapon that they were completely unable to intercept. Just like Admiral Hanson’s force, back when the human race had first encountered the Trolls, they had been caught by surprise.



“Admiral! We scored a ninety percent kill rate on the Betas!”



Paul smiled, grimly. The Trolls had seen bomb-pumped lasers before, but it didn't seem to have occurred to them that they could be mounted on starships – or, for that matter, produced in such vast quantities. In all previous battles, human starships had been largely worse than useless, but that had just been turned on its head. The Trolls had just been given a very nasty surprise.



“Seven Alphas are gone too,” the tactical officer added. “The starfighters are moving in now.”



“Launch the second missile barrage,” Paul ordered. The Trolls were stunned, but that wouldn't last very long. And they could still win this battle. “And prepare to launch the third salvo.”

***​

Connie heard the pilots whooping with joy as most of the Betas were blotted out of existence, ripped apart by the bomb-pumped lasers. The Troll advance seemed to have almost stopped dead in shock, as if whoever was commanding the fleet was trying to decide what to do next – not that it stopped their point defence from firing madly on the starfighters. Their point defence crews had suddenly become very motivated, she thought with a droll smile. They had to know that their ships were suddenly vulnerable.



The starfighters went into chaotic formation as they lanced towards one of the Alphas, which was firing madly towards the five squadrons that had picked it as a target. There were so many starfighters in the fleet that they could afford to swamp their targets with dozens of starfighters, even though the enemy’s point defence seemed to be still coordinated. Chances were that they’d missed the command ship, if there was a command ship. The Trolls didn't seem to look for human command ships and none of the spooks had been able to isolate a Trill command ship from its peers. It was quite possible that their version of command datanet was spread out over multiple ships. The UN had experimented with a similar system.



“Fox two,” she snapped, the moment they came into firing range. Two torpedoes shot away from her starfighter, slamming right into the target. Several more pilots also fired their torpedoes, ensuring that the Troll ship had no chance to escape before warheads started detonating inside its hull. It vanished in a blinding flash, leaving the starfighters roaring away looking for new targets. Connie cursed as one of the surviving Betas almost killed her, just before it too was overwhelmed and destroyed. For the first time, she realised, the human race might inflict more damage than it took.



And then the entire Troll fleet jumped out en masse.



Connie stared. For a heartbeat, she thought that they had won – and then she realised that the battle had only intensified.

***​

“They did a tactical jump, Admiral,” the tactical officer snapped. “They’re behind us!”



Paul nodded, feeling a flicker of envy; no human flux drive could have produced such an accurate jump over such short range. The Trolls had neatly separated themselves from the fighters and avoided the mines near the base; instead, they were in the perfect position to start blazing into his rear. Several carriers were already under attack; as he watched, a fleet carrier blew apart into a blaze of light, lost with all hands.



“Order the destroyers to attack,” he snapped. The Trolls were within energy range of his ships – and that meant that they were in range of his destroyers. “They may fire at will.”



Bomb-pumped weapons were dangerously unreliable, which was at least partly why the UNNS had never seriously considered deploying them before the Trolls had arrived to force the human race to resort to desperate measures. Each bomb-pumped laser installation generated an incredibly powerful magnetic bottle to capture and direct the energy of a nuclear bomb, focusing it all into a laser beam. But if the magnetic bottle failed, the full fury of a nuclear blast would be released, vaporising the projector and the starship that carried it. That wasn't a concern for missile warheads – the missiles were doomed anyway, allowing the designers to skimp on the magnetic bottle systems – but mounting bomb-pumped lasers on starships, even small destroyers, was terrifyingly risky. But until the techs managed to produce death ray projectors for the human race, they had little choice, but to resort to such desperate measures.



The Trolls had known that they were safe; fleet carriers didn't mount enough missile launchers to overwhelm their defences, while the destroyers could be safely ignored. But they’d been wrong; each of the destroyers now mounted an energy weapon that tore through their hullmetal and deep into their hulls. Paul could envisage the hell that had been unleashed inside the Troll ships, perhaps worse than the hell they’d brought to the human targets they’d attacked. X-ray radiation was a major part of each bomb-pumped laser’s beam. It was quite possible that the Trolls on damage control duties would get radiation poisoning from the blasts. Or so the techs had promised.



Again, the Trolls seemed to stagger, giving the starfighters time to race through the fleet’s position and lance into the Trolls, looking for weaknesses they could exploit to prevent them from being killed the moment they entered weapons range. The Alphas opened fire, then changed their minds, jumping out back to where they’d started. Paul wondered if he was seeing the first sign of indecision among the Trolls, or perhaps their commander had been killed and there had been some confusion before the new commander took command. God knew that that had been a problem for humans ever since they had first gone to war.



“Admiral, a number of starfighters require rearming,” the CAG said. “They fired all of their missiles at their targets.”



“Order the damaged carriers to jump out,” Paul ordered. “They can meet up with us at the RV point. The remaining starfighters can rearm in relays.”



“Understood, Admiral,” the CAG said.



The battle seemed to have reached a lull as the Trolls hung just outside firing range, waiting. Paul studied them as the starfighters hastily rearmed, their pilots taking the brief opportunity to catch something to eat and drink before returning to the battle outside. The remainder of the fleet would have their own chance to refresh themselves, before the Trolls decided to resume the offensive. But for once they just seemed inclined to wait and see what happened next. The battle appeared to have stalemated.



“Update the Grand Admiral – and Augustus,” Paul ordered. For once, humanity could match the Trolls in one area; FTL communications. There were enough fleet carriers with their own StarCom units in the fleet to allow him to coordinate on a level no other human commander had enjoyed, at least since the human race had developed the flux drive. “And start rearming the destroyers. They’re not going to give us much time to prepare for the next round.”



But he seemed to be wrong. The Trolls were just holding position, waiting...but waiting for what? For him to attack them, perhaps, or for reinforcements to arrive? God knew they’d been hurt badly in the battle, even if it had come at terrifying cost. One third of his starfighters had been wiped out, seven carriers had been destroyed or damaged and nine destroyers had been destroyed by their own weapons. No doubt the techs would eventually come up with something that would be much safer, if the human race lasted so long.



“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, quietly. “All starships have completed their rearming process and are ready to begin operations.”



Paul nodded, a thought running through his head. If the Trolls were waiting for reinforcements, they were likely to become much stronger as soon as their reinforcements arrived. And he wasn't going to get any reinforcements, not since 6th Fleet had jumped out on a mission that – he suspected – was targeted on a Troll world. His strength wouldn’t increase unless he called up starfighters from the local self-defence force, which was unlikely to agree without hesitation.



But could he take the offensive?



His combined force was the strongest human formation outside of Home Fleet itself. Losing it would shorten the war, but for the first time they’d inflicted crushing losses on the Trolls. He had a window of opportunity to complete their destruction, or at least force them to flee the system in disarray. And yet if he pushed it, his own fleet would also take damage, perhaps enough to weaken the system so that the Trolls could overrun it on their second attack. That was threatening to become a habit.



“Orders to all ships,” he ordered, quietly. “The battle line will advance and engage the enemy.”



The fleet carrier hummed softly as she glided forward, her escorts and starfighters fanning out around her. Paul issued orders as the fleet advanced, designating targets for missile bombardment; the remaining bomb-pumped lasers would suffice to destroy the Trolls, assuming they didn't simply retreat. The starfighters could deal with whatever was left, if anything.



“We are entering missiles range, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. “Locking in targets now.”



“Hold fire,” Paul ordered. The Trolls would be able to eliminate most of the missiles if they were fired from too far outside their own range. Besides, the closer the fleet advanced, the easier it would be to hit their targets. He designated a point on the display and nodded to the tactical officer. “Launch missiles as soon as we reach that point.”



“Understood, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. The Trolls seemed almost stationary, as if they were waiting to lure the human fleet out of position. But unless they had a much larger fleet in reserve, Paul knew, they weren't going to be able to do anything with the opportunity. Brisbane Base itself was surrounded by mines, weapons platforms and its own swarm of starfighters. And New Brisbane was heavily defended. “Weapons online...”



They reached the designated point. “Firing!”



Paul watched as the latest swarm of missiles flashed towards their targets. The Trolls reacted finally, jumping out in a single body. Paul braced himself, expecting to see them appearing in his rear or attacking Brisbane Base itself, but they were gone. It looked as if they’d decided that they couldn't win the battle, so they were just pulling back and abandoning the attempt to take the system.



“No enemy ships detected, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. “Local space appears to be clear.”



“Return us to the base,” Paul ordered, grimly. Those ships had escaped to fight another day, along with the damaged ships that had broken off earlier. It was easy to envisage them being repaired and rearmed and then sent back into battle. At least there would be more opportunities to try to hit the Troll supply lines, he told himself. Maybe they could force a stalemate long enough to convince the Trolls that the war was futile. “And then signal the entire fleet. Well done.”

***​

It was an hour before they figured out what the Trolls had done, an hour during which the last opportunity to stop them had been lost.



“There’s no mistake, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. “They’ve taken up position in the asteroid fields, after clearing them of human settlements. The entire Brisbane-B system is effectively under enemy occupation.”



“They also took out the cloudscoops before they could be stopped,” another officer added. “Commodore Francis and the task force has been destroyed.”



“Understood,” Paul said. They’d beaten the Trolls, they’d won a tactical victory – the first real tactical victory that hadn't been immensely costly. But the Trolls had managed to cripple the system and, with their position secure for the moment, dislodging them would be difficulty. The scouts suggested that, for the first time, they were deploying automated defence platforms of their own. They clearly believed that they could hold Brisbane-B for as long as it took. “Get me a link to the Admiralty. I’ll discuss this personally with the Grand Admiral.”



He took one last look at the display and then smiled. “But don’t forget that we beat them,” he added. “We inflicted far more losses than we took. And we forced them to run. We won this battle.”



With that, he stepped through the hatch and past the Marine guards, walking down towards his stateroom. It wasn't until he was inside that he allowed the confident pose to drop. They had produced a tactical victory – at a terrifying cost - but it had turned into a strategic stalemate. The Trolls could keep wearing them down until the fleet was broken, and then finish off New Brisbane whenever the hell they wanted. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, the war was very far from won.

 

Chapter Thirty-Three



New Brisbane

25th August 2435



Hind had watched in horror from the hotel as Oz, the capital city of New Brisbane, dissolved into chaos. New Brisbane was simply too populated to be evacuated quickly, even if the shipping had been available, although the richer and more powerful citizens had managed to find convenient excuses to leave the planet. Panic had started the moment the Troll starships appeared in the system, only to be replaced by delight and relief as it became apparent that they were not going to bombard the planet. And as soon as their attack was beaten off, a massive city-wide party had spontaneously broken out. Huge crowds had flooded the city’s parks and gardens, while pubs and hotels handed out food and drink for free. Someone started singing the planet’s national anthem and thousands of voices joined in, followed by heartfelt prayers of thanks for deliverance. The fact that the Trolls had occupied the other half of the system seemed to have slipped their notice.



She walked through the streets, marvelling at the sights around her. Large groups of children were playing games on one field, running around chasing one another in delight. Their older relatives and friends were playing a game that seemed to be a combination of football and basketball, played with four balls and what looked to her like ten separate teams. In the shadows, couples kissed and made out, half-hidden from public view. Others were kissing madly in public, dancing through the streets. Everyone just wanted to be happy and how could she blame them? The Trolls had an unfortunate tendency to exterminate the human population on one-third of the worlds they targeted. New Brisbane had been facing the prospect of planetary bombardment when the Trolls finally arrived in their system. They deserved a chance to relax and enjoy themselves.



Glancing from side to side, she took thousands of pictures and video clips to be uploaded to Earth through the StarCom network. Her editor had said that he wanted good news – watching the Trolls hammering their way towards Earth was apparently distressing Earth’s population, along with the rest of the core worlds – and the party presumably counted. So did the weapons the UNNS had deployed, crude though they were, that had managed to give the Trolls a bloody nose. With humanity’s vast industrial base devoted to turning out more and more weapons, perhaps the Trolls could be stopped completely. Or maybe they had merely been delayed, not stopped.



A hand grabbed her and, before she could react, pulled her in for a kiss. Hind gasped in shock as she saw her assailant, a half-drunk man wearing a military uniform and a big smile on his face. He kissed her for a long second and then let her go, heading towards the next woman and kissing her too. Hind wiped her mouth and rolled her eyes, before making a mental note to ensure that that scene wasn't reported to Earth. Her mother would have a heart attack if she even suspected that her daughter was involved in something immodest.



Shaking her head, she walked onwards towards the self-defence force HQ. Like the rest of the city, it seemed to have joined the party, with dozens of personnel spreading out around the city sharing lies about the battle. She heard several different stories of Troll starships firing towards a particular person, even though she had been informed that the Trolls hadn't actually bothered to attack New Brisbane. That was interesting, suggesting that the Trolls might want to capture the planet’s orbital infrastructure rather than simply destroying it to deny it to humanity, but there was no way to know for sure, at least until the Trolls returned to the attack. They’d been beaten off from Capricorn before – Hind had been there, after all – yet they’d returned in force, once they had defeated Admiral Cicero and 6th Fleet. There was no reason why they couldn't make a second attempt at taking New Brisbane, along with the UNNS naval base in the system. Indeed, that was exactly what she expected them to do.



Inside the base, all was chaos. New Brisbane’s defence forces had impressed her as being professional, unlike some of the other self-defence forces, but the city-wide party had even penetrated to the heart of their headquarters. If Hind had been a terrorist, intent on attacking the base and killing as many servicemen as she could, it would have been easy to sneak a large bomb through the defences and detonate it in the middle of the base. But instead she wanted to interview General Atwell, the military CO of the self-defence force. He might have been happier with the bomb-carrying terrorist.



The General was in his office, chatting to someone on the telephone rather than joining the vast crowds outside in the city. He was a short man, with the build of a spacer, suggesting genetic enhancement somewhere in his family tree. New Brisbane prided itself on being more cosmopolitan than many other core worlds, but it was surprising that a genie had managed to reach such a high rank outside the RockRat communities. Or maybe it wasn't such a surprise; someone who ordered his children genetically-enhanced could be charged and jailed for his crime, but it was illegal to persecute the children themselves. And someone built for life in space would be very well suited to the military. Perhaps he’d simply worked his way up through the ranks.



He didn't seem too happy to see her, putting the phone down with an audible thump, but Hind was used to that reaction. “I would have called ahead,” she assured him, as she took a seat facing his desk. Papers were strewn everywhere, some marked with the red insignia identifying them as top secret documents. The military had probably been preparing to destroy the paperwork and purge the computers for fear the Trolls would capture them when they invaded the planet. “But I’m afraid that the phone lines were down.”



“Civilian lines are automatically shut down when the planet is under threat,” Atwell growled. Besides, even a modern network would probably be overloaded with so many people calling their friends and families to confirm that they were alive and well. “What can I do for you?”



“You can tell me what, if anything, you intend to do about the Troll presence in your system,” Hind said. “They’re still here, General.”



Atwell nodded. “I know,” he said, tightly. Hind doubted that he would tell her anything even remotely sensitive, but he might let something slip if she pushed him gently. “Right now, the government wants to focus on the positive rather than the negative.”



Hind, who had a habit of researching the local political situation wherever she went, suspected that there was more to it than that. Many local politicians had fled the system, heading to Earth in the belief that it was safer than New Brisbane. Now that the Trolls had been beaten off, their opponents would make plenty of political capital out of their flight – and elections were only three weeks away. The local government would probably try to avoid calling attention to the cowardly politicians if possible, citing the declaration of martial law and various statues relating to planetary security. But somehow she doubted that they would manage to cover up the names of the cowards in office. The local media would make sure of that.



“But isn't focusing on the positive instead of the negative precisely what got Admiral Cicero to stick her neck into a trap?” Hind asked, with wide-eyed innocence. The sweet little girl act had fooled better men than General Atwell in the past. “She didn't realise that the Trolls had baited a trap until it was too late.”



“That is outside my field of operations,” the General said, firmly. “As it is, I have a great deal of reorganising to do before the Trolls return to the offensive or we attempt to throw them out of the system.” He made a show of tapping his intercom. “Sergeant, please escort the reporter out of the building. I have work to do.”



Hind smiled to herself as the Sergeant guided her out of the building and outside the gates, before having a few sharp words with the sentries who were supposed to be on duty. The meeting had been largely useless, but it had taught her a few things about New Brisbane that might be useful in a later puff piece when the real news ran out. Unsurprisingly, the self-defence force had been more interested in political connections than actual fighting. Right now, that focus was a deadly danger to the entire planet, now that an alien threat had actually penetrated to the heart of the human race’s territory.



Grimly, she prayed that Home Fleet was in a better state. If the Trolls did manage to take New Brisbane, or merely force the defence fleet to withdraw, they would be able to advance right up to Earth itself. And then the homeworld of humanity would itself be under threat.

***​

“We won!”



Connie had to smile as the pilots lifted her up and carried her around the flight deck in delight, showing off their relief that they had not only survived, but beaten off the Troll offensive that threatened New Brisbane. A third of their fellow starfighter pilots were gone – Connie’s first look at the figures had suggested that they had mostly been maggots – but they were alive and the battle was won. It was time to party.



She caught sight of Flight Captain Jellico being carried around by his own pilots, just before her pilots put their heads down and charged towards the other pilots, still carrying her on their shoulders. Jousting was an old tradition in the Navy, but normally it was only done when a pilot earned his spurs as part of a starfighter squadron. It had been years since Connie had been carried around like a man mounted on horseback, yet she’d never forgotten the joy and relief of finally being accepted as one of their own. There had been so many maggots shipped out to the fleet in recent months that the tradition had been somewhat overused...



“Charge,” the pilots chanted, as they sped up. She winked at Jellico as the two groups collided, poking and prodding at each other, before melting apart into a handful of individual pilots once again. Connie poked Jellico and had the satisfaction of seeing him slowly falling off his perch and falling to the deck, just before she slipped down herself. All around her, pilots were slapping each other’s backs and sharing stories of death rays they had seen blasting towards them, only to miss by bare inches. According to one report, one starfighter had passed so close to a death ray that the paint had been scorched by the alien beam.



There was, if anything, even more celebration in the wardrooms. Alcohol was strictly forbidden onboard UNNS ships, but one of the enlisted crewmen had set up a still and handed out glasses of something that looked as if it should have been left in the horse. Connie took a sip, winced at the taste and then swallowed it anyway. One glass wouldn’t impair her if they had to abandon the party and run back to their fighters, she told herself, and besides they had had very little to celebrate since the trail of tears had begun. Her pre-war squadron had been reduced to three pilots, all of whom had been sent to lead squadrons made up of maggots and a handful of retired pilots who had returned to the ranks. Most of her friends had died in one battle or another.



A mob of enlisted crewmen – mainly flight deck crews – arrived as the party started getting louder and rowdier. Someone turned on a boom-box and started to play loud music, one of the recently-composed songs mocking the Trolls and promising revenge for the mass slaughter they’d wrought on a dozen heavily-populated worlds. It was so loud and unthinkingly awful that someone had suggested, mostly in jest, that they should use it as a weapon against the Trolls. The racket would certainly confuse them long enough for the UNNS to land several blows against their formations.



The stories got wilder and wilder as the evening progressed. One crewman had been recovered from a lifepod launched by Thermopylae, one of the destroyers that had mounted a bomb-pumped laser cannon on its hull. He claimed to have seen Troll starships sliced in half before their retaliation wrecked the older destroyer in her hour of glory. Connie didn't doubt his story, even though cold logic suggested that it had been nowhere near as dramatic. For the first time, human starships had gone toe-to-toe with the Trolls and inflicted actual damage on the nearly-invulnerable aliens. Even though the Trolls hadn't been thrown entirely out of the system, they had been hammered – and would have to be more careful where they chose to attack in the future. Indeed, Connie wondered what would happen if every starship was outfitted with bomb-pumped lasers. A fleet of shipyard tugs would be a more than fair exchange for a handful of Troll cruisers. The war might be far from lost.



“They’re going to hate themselves in the morning,” a voice said. Connie looked around to see one of the Petty Officers who supervised the refuelling and rearming of the starfighters when they returned to the ship. “All that alcohol and music and mess...”



Connie had to smile. “Let them have fun,” she said, and eyed him meaningfully. “You want to go find a privacy tube?”



He looked back at her, as if he couldn't quite believe her brash approach, before grinning openly. “I can’t think of anything better to do,” he said. “Shall we go?”



Connie couldn't think of anything better to do either. By the odds, she should be dead by now – and far too many pilots she barely knew had died in the battle. She had no doubts about her bravery, but the endless retreats and crippling losses – heavier for the human race, always heavier for the human race, at least until now – were taking their toll. Part of her just wanted to sit down and collapse, even if it meant her death. It hadn't escaped her notice that the number of pilots seeking counselling or stimulant drugs had skyrocketed over the last two weeks. They were on the verge of being burned out.



But they’d pulled off a victory, she reminded herself, and shook her head. Yeah, a victory...but one that was as much a stalemate as anything else. And it had cost them heavily; in hurting the Trolls, they’d taken a beating themselves. The nightmare, the one that drugs and sex and her duty couldn't defeat, kept returning to her mind. Earth and the various colony worlds, the core of the United Nations, being bombarded by the Trolls until they were completely depopulated. And that would be the end of the war.

***​

“I’m planning to raid their bases now,” Paul said. The scouts had returned from Brisbane-B, having located several Troll installations that appeared to have been shipped into the system. Unsurprisingly, the Troll fleet train appeared to be as capable as the fleet train the UNNS had built up to support its operations – and it had superior flux drives and other drive technology. “We can keep them on their toes until we can drive them out of the system.”



“I'm very glad to hear it,” Grand Admiral Ivanovo said. “The Security Council was very relieved to hear about your victory, Paul. I’m afraid there will be much kissing of babies in your future.”



Paul blinked. “Sir?”



“They’ve nominated you for the Golden Earth,” Paul said. It was a rare award, handed out by the entire General Assembly. Traditionally, it went to those who had performed a great service for humanity. Paul would join the inventor of the flux drive, the Admirals who had commanded in the Sutra Intervention and the Magana War, along with several doctors and survey officers. “I think they intend to recall you long enough to give you the award and then show you off to the media.”



“Oh,” Paul groaned. “Sir, with all due respect, I don’t have time. I need to reorganise my squadrons and replace the lost starfighters...”



“I understand your position,” the Grand Admiral said. “But I’m afraid that they are the civilian leadership and we have to obey, once they finally decide when and where to award you the medal. I’ll try to ensure that you have at least a week to prepare your fleet before you get recalled to Earth, but there are no guarantees.”



Paul nodded. “You’ve seen my report,” he said, changing the subject. “We're dangerously short on the new warheads, Admiral. Even when we win, the Trolls find new ways to gnaw us.”



“They do have an advantage with those death rays,” the Grand Admiral agreed. “I’m pushing warhead production as fast as I can – and I’m forwarding you some of Home Fleet’s stockpiles. There are also going to be a number of Weber and Kratman-class ships heading your way, pulled out of the naval reserve. They may be outdated today, but they can still carry a bomb-pumped laser cannon and a small crew of volunteers.”



“Good,” Paul said. It was going to be costly, but the UNNS could replace ancient cruisers and destroyers – even modern cruisers – faster than it could replace fleet carriers. “Have there been any new developments on the technological front?”



“Not yet,” the Grand Admiral admitted. “I have teams working on biological weapons, or even nanotech weapons, but progress is slow.”



Paul swore. Biological weapons had been deployed in combat, once. An entire colony world had been depopulated as part of a land-grab scheme, a world that was still quarantined two hundred years later. “Have we really fallen so far?”



“I’m afraid so,” the Grand Admiral said. “Right now, the Trolls are in our territory and grinding us down. We may not bring any new weapons to the table before they defeat us – and that will be the end.”
you that I got a

 

Chapter Thirty-Four



Troll-1, Deep Space

15th September 2435



The orders had been explicit – and supported by an update on the war ever since they’d left Capricorn. Jess was glad that she’d opened the file in the privacy of her stateroom, for the news had shocked her to the core. The Trolls had forced their way to the very edge of the core worlds, raiding the core of human territory at will. And that meant that the once-invincible UNNS was on the ropes. If Earth and the other core worlds were lost, the human race’s ability to continue to fight would be lost along with them.



She forwarded the orders – and the update on the war – to her senior officers, informing them that a briefing would be held in one hour. It wasn't a surprise when her subordinates started trying to speak with her beforehand, either to express their support or to protest their orders in horror. Survey Command was as much civilian as it was military and even the officers who had transferred over from the regular navy would regard their orders with some horror. They were charged with finding new worlds and boldly going where no one had gone before – it was even Survey Command’s motto – not waging war on the enemies of humanity. But there was no choice. The final update had made it clear that 6th Fleet wouldn't be in any position to support them for at least another month.



Walking down to the briefing compartment, she waited patiently for the holograms representing her senior officers to flicker into existence. No doubt some of them had been talking to their fellows, trying to build a consensus, although she couldn’t say if they were supporting their orders or protesting against them. Survey Command had always been more of a consensual organisation than a strictly hierarchical one, unlike the regular military. Even the old rule that a Captain was the absolute master of his ship was diluted in Survey Command. No one had realistically expected Survey Command to be forced to fight a war, or do anything more dangerous than escape from hostile aliens.



It galled her to have to take precautions against her own subordinates, to assume that they might be planning to effectively mutiny – against their orders, if not necessarily against her – and to take steps to ensure that any mutiny failed very quickly. She issued her orders, feeling like a paranoid fool, and then settled back to wait. It wouldn't be long before the die was cast.



“Our orders are clear,” she said, as the conference opened. “We are to return to Troll-1 and destroy the planet.”



“You mean commit mass slaughter,” Captain Hendry said. He was civilian through and through, a man who had never served in the regular navy. “Even if we only make one pass at the planet, we are going to sentence a great many Trolls to death.”



“You saw the report from the front,” Captain Williamson countered. He was regular navy, one of the gunslingers assigned to escort the survey ships and cover them as they retreated from hostile territory. Under the circumstances, Jess was very relieved that he was there, even if she would have preferred a fleet carrier or two. And then there would have been someone who could take command and remove the responsibility from her shoulders. “The war is in shouting distance of being lost.”



“I am not a military man,” Captain Prather said, “but it strikes me that the Trolls have only overrun newly-settled colonies, worlds that possessed little in the way of defences or industry to rapidly augment those defences. If we lost every outer colony world, even the inner worlds, we would not lose more than seven percent of humanity’s entire industrial base. The core worlds alone could keep fighting for years if necessary.”



“That may be true,” Williamson said, tartly, “but may I remind you that our last set of orders and updates are actually three weeks out of date? The Trolls may have attacked and captured the inner worlds; they have definitely launched raids against their infrastructure. Hell, the reports themselves admit that the Trolls have definite advantages over us. As long as they are sniping away at the core worlds, they have an advantage that they can use to keep us off-balance until they bring up the main body of their fleet and crush the last sparks of resistance from the human race.”



“But our orders are to hit the civilian population of an undefended planet,” Hendry protested. “We cannot follow those orders.”



“General Order 24 was ordered by the Security Council,” Williamson snapped. “As such, it is a legal order – and an effective response to the mass slaughter of human civilians by the Trolls. We may deter them from continuing their slaughter of human civilians by reminding them that their own worlds are under threat.”



“Assuming they think like us,” Prather said. “They may care nothing for their civilians – if indeed we are looking at their civilians.”



“It is still mass slaughter,” Hendry said. He crossed his arms firmly. “Commodore, I believe that we should reject those orders.”



Jess held her tongue for a long moment, silently gauging his support – and those who would support her, or those that were undecided. Perhaps Hendry took it for weakness, for her started to speak again, suggesting that they should send a note back to Earth requesting clarification before they did anything. Jess composed herself as best as she could and tapped a command, issuing orders to her Marines. Hendry could not be allowed to prevent them from carrying out their orders.



“We will be carrying out the orders,” she said, flatly. She looked around the compartment, looking from face to face. “Let me be clear on this, gentlemen and ladies; the human race is in serious danger of losing the war, perhaps of being wiped out completely. We still don’t know why the Trolls started the war in the first place, but the blunt truth is that we are losing the war. And defeat may mean the end of everything.



“We are in a war emergency situation, declared as such by the Security Council and the General Assembly, and accordingly we are under military orders,” she continued. “We are the only ships that can carry out their order and we will carry out the order. Our entire civilisation is in danger. It is our responsibility to defend it.”



“By slaughtering tens of thousands of helpless civilians,” Hendry scowled. “I reject your militaristic view of the situation...”



Jess spoke over him. “Right now, we are at war and the standard protocols for governing survey missions no longer apply,” she said. “Captain Hendry, under the power vested in me by regulations, I am relieving you of command. The Marines onboard your vessel will take you into custody for the duration of the military emergency. You may file a protest if you like and I will see to it that it is entered into the mission log.”



“This is outrageous,” Hendry thundered. “You cannot take my command simply for refusing to follow illegal orders...”



His image vanished in mid-outburst. Jess carefully concealed her flicker of amusement and then looked over at the other commanders. “If any of you wish to protest these orders, you may do so and it will be entered in my log,” she said, sharply. “However, these orders will be carried out. Any further defiance will be regarded as mutiny while in a state of war and treated as such.”



Someone with genuine military experience would probably have found a better way to handle them, but Jess hadn't been able to think of anything else. “I have drawn up a preliminary attack plan for discussion,” she added, when no one else bothered to protest. They’d be demanding her discharge from Survey Command after the war, no doubt, but for the moment they were cowed. “We will hash out the complete operation here and then proceed to Troll-1.”



She lowered her voice, now that her point had been made. “I know that this isn't easy for any of us,” she said, “but we have no choice. Right now, we’re all that the human race has to strike back at the Trolls.”

***​

Given the intelligence attached to the first report, Jess half-expected that the Trolls would be there to greet them when they jumped back into their system. But instead the squadron appeared in empty space, several light hours from the inhabited planet. Jess had considered attempting to take out the asteroid bases as well as the cloudscoop, but Captain Williamson had discouraged her. The Troll starships were far deadlier than any of her ships and the last thing she wanted was an engagement with any of them. A single Alpha could destroy her entire squadron.



“Everything appears to be clear, Captain,” the sensor officer said. “I’m picking up nothing that suggests a Troll presence within encroachment range.”



Jess nodded, feeling the tension rising throughout the bridge. An engagement with the Trolls here, no matter how disastrous, would have spared her from having to launch a strike against their populated planet. Hendry’s angry protest, forwarded to her by the Marines, had called her a mass murderer and worse, promising that she would be known as Bloody Jess the Executioner when they returned to human space. He was probably right, Jess told herself, but it hardly mattered. The Trolls had to be deterred from bombarding humanity’s core worlds.



“Take us in,” she ordered. This time, almost every ship under her command would be travelling into the system under cloak. She had picked their arrival coordinates with some considerable care, bringing them in above the system plane. The Trolls, like humanity, seemed to keep most of their activity within the system plane, suggesting that anywhere above or below would be less intensely monitored. Or so she hoped. The real nightmare was the Trolls picking her up and plotting an ambush as her fleet glided into the inner solar system. “Prepare to flash-wake the flux drive if anything escapes the cloaking field.”



The hours ticked by remorselessly as Magellan led the way into the inner system, her passive sensors endlessly scrutinising every tiny piece of radiation for signs of Troll activity. A new base, one they hadn't picked up the first time, was revealed, orbiting alarmingly close to the local star. Perhaps the Trolls, like humanity’s more dedicated researchers, were heedless of their own safety when it came to studying interesting stars and planets. Survey Command had lost several starships in the early years when astronomers had sought to get just a little bit closer to dangerous stars.



“Picking up three starships in orbit around the planet,” the sensor officer said, finally. Jess had taken the opportunity to have a nap and ensure that the rest of her squadron was rested, knowing that the Trolls were unlikely to pick them up until they approached the planet itself. “One of them is definitely a Beta; the other two are of an unknown class.”



“Log it for the report to the Admiralty,” Jess ordered. The Trolls might have shown the class to the UNNS by now, but if not it would be another piece of intelligence about their mystery foe. Even now, she found it hard to believe that so little was known about the Trolls. What sort of race could prosecute a highly-successful war without even bothering to communicate with its targets? How could they be so alien that communication was futile? But it wasn't; the Trolls had managed to demand unconditional surrender. They just didn't seem aware of the possibilities of a negotiated surrender, on terms. Perhaps it was lucky that they didn't even seem aware of the possibilities of coming to terms, then breaking them once the human race was no longer able to defend itself. “Can you pick up anything else surrounding the planet itself?”



“A handful of satellites,” the sensor officer said. “They’re emitting radio transmissions; I think they’re probably communications satellites, rather than orbital defence installations. If there are any orbital defence stations, they’re not going active.”



Jess nodded. Standard procedure in the UN was to keep a number of defence stations stepped down, just to ensure that wear and tear on the equipment didn't ruin it before it was actually called upon to fight. The Trolls evidently agreed...although, of course, it rather looked as though they had only located a newly-settled colony world. New Marseilles wouldn't have looked any more impressive whenever the Trolls had discovered it.



“All right,” she said. “Once we reach Point Alpha, hold us in place and prepare to start rolling missiles out of the shuttlebay.”



“Aye, Captain,” the helmsman said. There was a long pause as Magellan finally came to a halt, relative to the planet. “We’re in position.”



Jess had originally intended to slip as close to the planet as possible and then open fire, counting on surprise to keep the Trolls from shooting down the missiles before they reached the planet. Captain Williamson had pointed out the flaw in that reasoning; the Troll point defence was vastly superior to its human counterpart. It was quite possible that they could wipe the missiles out before they struck home, before engaging the survey ships and destroying them. Instead, they were rolling missiles out into open space at Point Alpha, using gas canisters to propel them towards the planet. Unless the Trolls had something so far advanced over the human race that it might as well be magic, the missiles would be almost undetectable until they were far too close to the planet.



“Missiles away, Captain,” the tactical officer said.



Jess nodded, feeling sweat trickling down her back. “Move us to Point Beta,” she ordered. Long minutes ticked past as the squadron altered position, separating from the missiles that were now racing silently through space towards their targets. “And prepare to drop the cloak.”



“We’re in position, Captain,” the helmsman said, finally.



“Take us in towards the planet, full speed,” Jess ordered. “And drop the cloak.”



Magellan lurched as she built up speed rapidly, heading right towards the target. From the Troll point of view – she hoped – they would see a human attack force appearing out of nowhere, racing towards a world that they had to defend. Standard human tactical doctrine called for engaging an enemy attack force as far from the planet as possible; everything depended upon the Trolls agreeing with human tacticians. Logically, they should – but their technology had allowed them to circumvent human tactical knowledge in several previous encounters.



“The Beta and the unknown ships are moving,” the tactical officer snapped. “They’re advancing to block us from Troll-1.”



Jess smiled. “Start firing as soon as they enter range,” she ordered. It would be a surprise if any of her missiles lasted long enough to reach their targets, but it would give the Trolls something else to think about. “And prepare to jump us out just before we enter their range.”



The Trolls weren't trying anything fancy; they just deployed into a position that allowed them to target any missile that might otherwise hit the planet and advanced on the human ships. Magellan opened fire the moment the range closed enough for powered flight, her missiles racing away from her tubes and directly towards the Troll ships. They opened fire with their death rays, sweeping the missiles out of space with effortless ease. Jess braced herself as the distance between the two squadrons narrowed rapidly. Any jump through flux space at high speed would have her crews vomiting on the deck.



“The missiles are going active...now,” the tactical officer said. The Trolls seemed to halt, just for a second, as the missiles they’d carefully launched towards the planet came to life and roared at their target. Their warheads had been carefully programmed to target military installations and then cities – a sop to her Captains who didn't like the idea of bombarding civilians first – and she'd fired enough of them to ensure that several would definitely get through the defences. “The Trolls are reversing course...”



Too late, Jess thought, coldly. They’d been lured out of position and it would take them several minutes to get back into position – and by then it would be too late. The missiles were entering the planet’s atmosphere now, plunging down towards their targets. A handful of defence installations on the surface opened fire, but most of the missiles survived to detonate nuclear warheads over Troll cities. Jess watched as dispassionately as she could as massive fireballs swallowed the cities, sending the strange whale-like creatures fleeing for their lives. It was difficult, almost impossible, to tell how many Trolls had been killed, but it hardly mattered. The safety of their rear areas had been proven to be nothing more than an illusion.



“The Trolls are reversing course again,” the tactical officer said. “They’re heading right towards us.”



“Jump us out,” Jess ordered. There was no point in allowing the Trolls to engage them now that they had completed their mission. Bloody Jess the Executioner echoed though her mind as the flux drive powered up. “Now!”



The universe seemed to go dim around her, a second before her chest heaved violently. There had been no time to calculate a precise jump, leaving some of her officers coughing and vomiting as Magellan returned to normal space. If the Trolls had managed to track them, they would have easy targets as the survey squadron fought to recover from the lingering effects of jump shock, but the Trolls had other problems. The planet had been nuked; any survivors would be in desperate need of medical attention.



I killed them, she thought, feeling guilt twisting at her soul. The orders had come from Earth, but she had carried them out. I murdered millions of alien civilians...if they hated us before, what will they do now?



She shook her head, angrily. The Trolls had started to slaughter human civilians first; they couldn’t complain if humanity responded in kind. It was inhuman, but survival trumped everything. The high ideals of the United Nations no longer mattered when humanity was facing an alien race that could exterminate the entire human population.



Or so she told herself.

 

Chapter Thirty-Five

Area 51
20th September 2435

“It didn't work?”

“I’m afraid not,” Bowery said. Janine nodded, sourly. They’d hoped that the Troll ship they’d captured had been alone. Now, it seemed as though it had either managed to get off a transmission or had been quietly shadowed by another Troll starship. “The Irons was destroyed when the Trolls somehow neglected the pulse blaster and returned fire.”

“I told you that that would happen sooner or later,” Lombardi said. The little scientist had been pulled out of the captured ship to take part in the conference, something he’d loudly protested at the time. “They use shaped energy fields to direct their death rays. Once they knew what they were facing, they were able to reshape them to absorb the pulse from the pulse-blaster. I suspect it probably inflicted some damage, but not enough to fry their entire command network.”

“Right,” Janine said. Once again, she had been put on the sidelines of the war, helping to refine ideas from the scientists and producing actual hardware that could be used against the Trolls. “They also know that we have bomb-pumped lasers. Can they use their energy fields to counter them?”

“I doubt it,” Lombardi said. “A standard bomb-pumped laser may be a great deal less subtle than the pulse blaster”- he paused, long enough to admire his invention – “but it is also considerably more powerful. They may manage to bleed off some of the bomb’s energy, which may explain some of the weirder results from the Battle of New Brisbane, yet it won’t be enough to completely neutralise the blast. In fact, two or three strikes at roughly the same moment will completely overload their system and prevent them from bleeding off any energy at all.”

He smiled, looking rather pleased with himself. “By combining technology we reverse-engineered from the Trolls and some of our own technology, we have actually managed to produce a heavy energy weapon of our own,” he continued. “It isn't really the same as the Troll death rays, but linked to a singularity of our own it should produce a devastating blast – and our simulations suggest that it will actually have a considerably longer range than the Troll death rays. I don't think I need to tell you just how much of an advantage that would give us in future battles.”

Janine nodded, unable to conceal her glee. The Trolls wouldn't be able to intercept human-designed energy weapons, any more than they could intercept bomb-pumped laser beams. And if the human race had the range advantage, they could simply obliterate the Trolls from outside their own range, massacring them before they could escape. After what the Trolls had done in almost every encounter, at least until New Brisbane, the thought of slaughtering their starships was a dangerously seductive proposition.

“However, the energy weapon demands vast amounts of power,” Lombardi added, ruefully. “There are theories for minimising the requirements, but only theories. I believe that we can create our own singularity power core for Phoenix, yet if the core were to destabilise the battlecruiser would rapidly become helpless.”

“Or at least disarmed,” Janine said. “I was under the impression that the battlecruiser still had all four fusion cores.”

“For the moment,” Lombardi confirmed. “But we may have to pull one or two of them out of the ship – or relocate it – if we need more room for the singularity core. Luckily, she’s a very big ship.”

Janine nodded. Fifteen years ago, the then-Grand Admiral had allowed a Doctor Macpherson, a starship designed from Nova Scotia, to construct what he’d been told had been the first of a next generation of combat starships. Unluckily, Doctor Macpherson’s genius hadn't accounted for the limitations of modern technology and his battlecruiser design had been massively underpowered for its size. Phoenix, the single unit to be constructed, had been eventually towed to the fleet yards orbiting Mars and abandoned, while the Grand Admiral had been urged to take early retirement. Naturally, the system being what it was, Doctor Macpherson had spent the intervening years complaining about how the Navy had failed to build his grand starship. The fact that the starship was next to useless seemed to have escaped his mind.

But combined with a singularity core, it should be able to fly and fight properly – and as the starship was already largely constructed, there was no point in building a new testbed starship from scratch. A pair of tugs had transported Phoenix to Area 51 and the base’s team of dedicated yard workers had already begun refitting her – and then adding new modifications to the design as more and more of the Troll technology was unlocked.

“There will be other problems,” Lombardi admitted. Unlike Doctor Macpherson, he did seem to have some understanding of basic military realities. “The main one is that the big gun will be unidirectional; you can blast anything in front of you, but you won’t be able to cover your own rear. If the Trolls manage to get into your blind spot, you can kiss your ass goodbye.”

“That...isn’t really a good thing,” Janine pointed out, with what she felt was magnificent understatement. “Is there nothing you can do about that?”

“Well, we are working on scaling up their handheld energy projectors and duplicating their force fields they use to direct their fire, but nothing has yet come out of it,” Lombardi said, slowly. “One piece of good news is that we have managed to design a new form of armour coating that will be much more resistant to their death rays. Once we have ironed out the kinks in the formula, we will be able to apply it to normal starships as well as our testbed, giving them some chance for survival against the Trolls at close-quarter range. However, the armour won’t stand up to their fire for very long...”

“Every little helps,” Janine said, dryly.

“What we have managed to come up with is something that may give us another advantage,” Lombardi added. “We have been doing a great deal more research into railgun systems and magnetic fields lately and we think we have a way to create a semi-autonomous magnetic field that can be used as a containment field for supercharged plasma, perhaps even antimatter. Put simply...”

“Please,” Janine said.

“...The device effectively produces plasma projectiles that can be used against enemy starships,” Lombardi explained. “Think of it as a machine gun that shoots bursts of energy instead of bullets. Unlike standard missiles, the plasma pulses shouldn’t react badly to being hit by their death rays; the worst that will happen is that the magnetic field will lose containment early and then release the plasma. We’re not sure what this will do to a Troll hull if it happens to hit, though.”

Janine nodded. “Can you produce a working model of the device?”

“Fairly quickly, although swapping over to mass production may be difficult,” Lombardi said. “But that led to a whole new area for prospective research.”

He grinned. “Do you want to know what else you can use a singularity for?” He kept speaking before Janine could answer. “I think you can use it to produce antimatter in vast quantities.”

“Except the Trolls don’t seem to be in the habit of using antimatter weapons,” Janine pointed out. Lombardi’s enthusiasm was infectious, but she’d seen too many bright ideas fail to work in the cold light of day. “Why don't they use it for themselves?”

Lombardi shrugged. “Their technology seems more geared to producing energy weapons than projectiles – which isn't too surprising when you consider what they can do with their energy weapons,” he said. “Any missile we launch can be shot down by the Trolls before it reaches its target, unless it happens to mount a bomb-pumped laser. They may feel that antimatter is simply too dangerous to mess with unless there’s no other choice – and so far they haven’t really had any reason to question that assessment.”

Janine considered it, slowly. “But you think you can produce vast amounts of antimatter,” she said, thoughtfully. “What can we do with it?”

“I’m still working on that,” Lombardi said. “Antimatter warheads are one obvious answer, because if they happen to be hit by death rays their antimatter containment fields will fail and the antimatter will explode. I think even their sensors would have problems coping with the energy released by a swarm of antimatter projectiles...”

“So will ours,” Janine said, coldly. “And so will any starfighters that happen to be following the missiles into the engagement zone. I think that this is one weapon that is more likely to work for them than for us.”

“There are other possibilities,” Lombardi protested. “We might be able to produce an antimatter cannon, something that can be targeted on their ships from a distance...”

“I’d hate to be onboard a ship that carried so much antimatter,” Janine said, wryly. “One hit and the explosion would vaporise the entire squadron.”

“So it would seem,” Bowery said. “Perhaps we don’t want to interest the Trolls in what antimatter can do for them.”

Lombardi flushed angrily, but nodded. “There are two other possibilities,” he concluded. “One is provisionally termed the fission beam. It causes limited nuclear fission when targeted against a solid object, causing a major explosion. We managed to get the beam to work in the labs, but so far we haven't been able to produce one that can be used in the field. The second is actually far more frightening. We’ve termed it the decoherence cannon.”

“And what,” Janine asked, “does that do?”

“It causes decoherence,” Lombardi said. “Basically, it is an upscale version of the fission beam, but unlike its parent the effect propagates through its target and releases almost all of the energy bound up inside the solid object. You could turn it on a planet and it would go up like a supernova. Imagine all the old nightmares about grey goo coming true.”

“My God,” Janine said. “What...what would this weapon do to a Troll ship if we hit it?”

“Destroy it, completely,” Lombardi said, flatly. “They wouldn't stand a chance. The whole ship would simply be wiped from existence.”

“We need it,” Bowery said. “How long until you can produce a working model?”

“Several weeks, probably longer,” Lombardi said. “Actually, almost certainly a great deal longer. We’d have to make the jump from theory to practice and we don't have much from the Trolls to guide us in this direction. Besides, we may want to do the experiments some distance from the base. I really don't want to lose control of a decoherence field right here.”

Janine frowned. “What prevents a fission beam from losing control too?”

“The fission beam causes an effect that outruns the fission field, therefore destroying its own source of reaction mass,” Lombardi said. “Depending on the target, the results could be anything from a minor explosion to a nuclear-scale explosion that is actually part of the target’s hull. The result could be spectacular.”

“True,” Janine agreed. The UNNS built starships to resist nuclear strikes, but multiple hits were always immensely destructive even if the ship itself remained intact. But the Trolls circumvented that by using death ways to bore into the hulls and slice through the vulnerable matter beyond. If Lombardi was right, the fission beam would actually turn that solid defence against the starship, transforming its armour into a deadly liability. “How long will it be until you can produce something we can use?”

“Several weeks, I think,” Lombardi said. “We’re trying to solve most of the problems now – it helps that we've actually proved that the technology works. Once we have a working design, we can pass it on to the industrial nodes in the core worlds. And in the meantime we can keep working on Phoenix.”

***​

The experimental battlecruiser was over six hundred metres long, a flattened cylinder with drive nodes that tapered out from her rear. Up close, she was an impressive starship and it was easy to see why Professor Macpherson had believed that she would be the model for all future starships. Seeing her, Janine wanted her, even though she knew all of the design’s manifold weaknesses, weaknesses that might be corrected now that the human race had started unlocking the mysteries of Troll technology.

Grand Admiral Ivanovo had stated that Rubicon’s crew would be transferred to Phoenix as soon as the battlecruiser was ready to be deployed, but there was no guarantee that they would see battle at once. In fact, there were strong reasons to forbid Phoenix from ever encountering the Trolls until the human race had produced enough of the new weapons to have a decisive effect on the battle. Janine resented those reasons even as she understood the logic; if the Trolls had advance warning of the new technology, they would presumably start working on defences and countermeasures. And yet...

...The Trolls had been stopped at New Brisbane. That much was clear, but they had been stopped at Capricorn too and they had returned to the system shortly afterwards. And they had continued raiding, first into the inner worlds and then into the core worlds themselves. It was impossible to know just what they knew about humanity, but their raids were keeping vital war material pinned down guarding priceless installations. A raid on the Scorpion Shipyard had destroyed two fleet carriers before they could be completed. If the Trolls managed to destroy the remaining shipyards, the war was as good as lost. It had taken centuries to build up Earth’s vast infrastructure, let alone the factories and industrial nodes in the core worlds. The Trolls could destroy entire industrial nodes in a single lucky strike.

The Grand Admiral had briefed her personally on a contingency plan she hadn't even anticipated, until she’d understood just how disastrous the entire war had become. There were plans to continue the war even after the loss of Earth, to rebuild in secret and then return to the fight. If Earth fell, a contingency that was all too possible, she had orders to take Phoenix and the captured Troll ship – and most of Area 51 – to a hidden base, where they could continue their research and development. It wasn't a good plan, Janine considered, but it was the best one they had. Other starships had apparently been issued sealed orders to be opened in the event of complete disaster. She wouldn't be alone in resisting the Trolls if the worst came to worst.

She shook her head as she walked away from the observation blister and down towards the intelligence station. The Troll starship had proven a mine of useful insights into the nature of the Troll campaign, even if its command network – and computer databases – had been completely fried by the attack that had captured it. One piece of intelligence had been some working information on the miniaturised Troll FTL communicator. Given the right sensors, a human starship could actually search for Troll rendezvous points and track their jumps from their mysterious homeworld to the battle front. Like humanity, they had a fleet train, even if their logistics were significantly better than the UN’s. That had been a disconcerting surprise. The UN had been used to thinking of itself as the foremost expert in interstellar logistics.

“Captain,” Commander Slater called, as Janine entered the compartment. “Take a look at this!”

Janine studied the holographic star chart, thoughtfully. Red icons represented locations where the Trolls had made transmissions, presumably reporting their safe arrival to their high command. There was no way to tell just where the transmissions were going, at least not directly, but signals intelligence had picked up a handful of promising leads.

“The important detail,” Slater said, “is that they have run no less than ten convoys through the same general location. Right here, they have been running the ships through the point at a rate of one every five days. I think they’re probably reinforcing their foothold in the New Brisbane system.”

Janine nodded. Now that the Trolls had established themselves in the system, they were raiding human bases – and humans were doing the same to them. It made little sense to her, unless they were trying to wear the humans down; why didn't they just retreat back into interstellar space, secure in the knowledge that human starships couldn't track them down? She wasn't the only tactician to question their actions, but they’d created a position that forced the UN to come to them. They couldn't be left alone to build up in the New Brisbane system, or they’d eventually produce an impregnable fortress.

“They may not realise that we can track their transmissions,” Slater said. Janine wouldn't have taken that on faith – the Trolls did know that the human race had StarCom technology – but the only way they could have prevented detection was to shut down all transmissions completely. And doing that would scupper their ability to use coordination against their enemies on Earth. “If we were to forward this to Admiral Howard, he might be able to take advantage of the opportunity to run a set of ships into raiding position.”

“Might work,” Janine said. At least it was action. “How long do they stay there?”

“I’m not sure,” Slater admitted. “Their drives seem to recharge quicker than ours. I think that they don’t stay at the RV points any longer than ten minutes, but the only thing we have to go on are their transmissions.”

“True,” Janine agreed. Any data from Area 51 was scrubbed before it was couriered to Earth and then transmitted out of the core worlds, but it still bothered her. If the Trolls launched a surprise attack on the base, they would be able to destroy Phoenix, the scientists and the single captured ship. It would set Earth’s research efforts back decades. “Have it prepared for transport to Earth. Admiral Howard will know what to do with it.”
onal

 

Chapter Thirty-Six



Deep Space (15LY From New Brisbane)

25th September 2435



“We promise you one hell of a show,” Captain Chen said. He grinned, openly. “This is what our ships were designed to do.”



Hind nodded, impatiently. The 24th Cruiser Squadron – otherwise known as the Avenging Angels – dated all the way back to the early years of the Magana War, where they’d raided deep into enemy territory before the UNNS took the offensive and eventually pushed the Magana back to their homeworld. She wasn't quite sure how the same offensive sprit transferred from the original officers and crew to their successors, but the military seemed to take it seriously. And besides, they’d been offered a chance to take a crack at an unsuspecting Troll convoy.



“Assuming that the Trolls aren’t waiting for you,” she said, finally. The briefing officer had pointed out that the Trolls could be setting a trap, even though they seemed to prefer to attack targets that humanity had to defend rather than bait traps in the hope that it would draw attention. “I thought they could use any coordinate in interstellar space as an RV point, so why do they keep using the same one over and over again?”



Chen smiled. “The same reason we do,” he said. “If something were to happen to a starship as it made the jump, it might not be able to continue from one RV point to the next. By using the same RV points, they make search and rescue missions something more than an exercise in futility. We assume that they would prefer not to expend starships randomly.”



“I see,” Hind said. It didn't strike her as too convincing, but she was hardly a military officer. Besides, given the sheer scale of the fighting that had raged over the New Brisbane system ever since the Trolls had occupied half of it, it was a chance to catch the Trolls with their trousers down. “And what if they don’t bother to walk into our trap?”



“Then we will eventually have to give up,” Chen said. “But we do know that the Trolls can be out-thought. They may not have realised that we can track their StarCom transmissions. The Magana certainly never did.”



“The Magana stole their technology off another advanced race,” Hind pointed out. Far too many people seemed to believe that that was true of the Trolls; they’d simply been uplifted to spacefaring status by another unknown race. It suggested a way that they could have gained advanced technology without the moral insights and social development that they should have developed along the way. But the human progress towards technology hadn’t been one smooth walk towards social justice and equality. “Should we really assume that the same is true of the Trolls?”



Chen shrugged, seemingly growing impatient with her questions. “I think that if we assign the Trolls the status of supermen we are going to lose,” he said. “So far, the war has raged for months and the Trolls have not put any new weapons system into deployment, while we have produced the bomb-pumped laser and – if rumour is correct – other weapons that can be used against the Trolls. Even if we force them to do nothing more than reroute their convoys from their homeworlds, we will be forcing them to react to us for a change.”



And that, Hind knew, was the core of the problem. The lustre of the victory at New Brisbane had faded as the Trolls regrouped, occupied half the system and then started raiding deeper and deeper into human space. Humanity needed victories to keep its morale high, or the UNNS would come apart as political leaders started trying to make their own deals with the Trolls. Rumour claimed that a couple of rogue worlds had already signed agreements with the Trolls; Hind knew that no one had managed to uncover any proof, but the rumours were still spreading. All the faultlines within the UN’s great edifice were threatening to come apart as the war pressed closer and closer to humanity’s homeworld.



“Captain,” the sensor officer said, suddenly. “I’m picking up starships jumping into the area!”



“Battle stations,” Chen snapped. Red icons were flickering into existence, all Troll; Hind counted nineteen before she gave up. “Set condition two throughout the squadron; I say again, condition two.”



Hind nodded as she took the seat that had been reserved for her. Even knowing the rough location of the Troll RV point, it was quite possible that their convoy would arrive millions of kilometres from where the UN starships had positioned themselves. Chen and his fellow commanders would have to decide if they should sneak closer under cloak and open fire, or let the Trolls go and wait for a better target. Given that they’d been waiting for three days before the Trolls finally arrived, she had a feeling that Chen would prefer to be aggressive rather than wait in hope.



“Their jump sequence appears to have been completed,” the sensor officer reported, two minutes after the first Troll starship had arrived. “I counted forty-two jump signatures, all consistent with Gamma-class starships or higher.”



“There will be escorts,” Chen said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Helm, take us closer to the Trolls; tactical, start plotting firing solutions. All stations, prepare to engage the enemy.”



The distance between the two squadrons closed rapidly, but the Trolls appeared to be under very good signal discipline. There was little energy radiating from the Troll ships, nothing to identify them to watching human sensor officers. Logically, most of them would be Gamma-class freighters, Hind told herself, but identifying Troll starships at a distance wasn't easy. A ship that had been identified as a Gamma could easily be an Alpha or something that the human race hadn't encountered beforehand.



And yet they had to hurry. Observational data had confirmed that Troll warships could recharge their flux drives far faster than any human starship. What no one was sure about – what the plan was counting on, to some extent – was if that was true of Troll freighters. If the Gammas took longer to recharge, there would be a window of opportunity to catch and destroy them. If not...well, as Chen had pointed out, at least they’d give the Trolls a fright and pick up some more data for the intelligence staffers.



“I’m starting to pick up individual ships,” the sensor officer said. “Thirty-seven of them appear to be Gammas, although five of them may be a variant on the class or something completely new. The remainder are Alphas. They’re conducting short-range sensor sweeps of the surrounding area of space.”



“Tactical, target the Gammas and upload your firing coordinates to the remainder of the squadron,” Chen ordered. Hind blinked in surprise, wondering why they weren't trying to target the Alphas. Chen must have noticed her confusion, because he provided an explanation. “We don’t have the numbers for a duel with their warships, so we hit the freighters and jump out when they launch a counterattack.”



“Targets locked,” the tactical officer said.



The display washed red. “They have us,” the sensor officer snapped. An electric charge seemed to flash through the bridge. “Their sensors just penetrated our cloaking fields.”



“Fire,” Chen snapped. “All ships, fire!”



UNS McQueen shuddered as she unleashed a full broadside from her missile tubes, firing directly towards the Gammas. One advantage the bomb-pumped laser missiles had over standard contact or proximity nukes, Hind had been informed, was that they had a longer effective range than the more typical missiles. The Trolls might just assume that the humans had panicked and fired too early, but even if they didn't they were going to have problems evading or destroying the missiles before it was too late.



At least until they put a countermeasure into place, Hind thought, grimly. Humans had a reputation for being innovative, but the Trolls were presumably innovative themselves. At worst, they could simply copy some of humanity’s weapons and countermeasures. They’d certainly captured enough wreckage to reverse-engineer human systems if they found their own insufficient. But why should they believe that they had to copy humanity’s tech? It was far more likely that they would adapt their own technology to match humanity’s innovations.



“The Alphas are moving into defence positions,” the sensor officer said. “They’ll be in a position to take out the missiles before they reach firing range.”



“That's some quick thinking on their side,” Chen observed. It looked risky, for the Trolls, but if Hind understood what was going on properly it wasn't really a risk at all. The targeted ships might not have been able to intercept the missiles before they entered their own attack range, but the untargeted ships could put themselves between the missiles and their targets, scything them down before they could reach engagement range and detonate. “Switch the salvo to the Alphas; launch a second salvo at the Gammas...”



The display updated, terrifyingly quickly. “Sir, the Alphas jumped out,” the sensor officer said. A handful of red icons flashed and vanished from the display. “The missiles wasted themselves on empty space.”



New red icons flickered into life behind the squadron. “And now they’re behind us,” the tactical officer added. “Closing into engagement range...”



“Squadron orders; all ships, evasive action,” Chen snapped. “Fire at will; I say again, fire at will.”



He looked over at the sensor officer as McQueen rolled through space, launching missiles from her rear tubes. “How the hell did they do that?”



“Unknown, sir,” the sensor officer said. He hesitated, studying his console, and then looked up at his CO. “They must have been watching the missiles very carefully, with their drives on a hair-trigger. The moment they picked up signs that the bombs were about to detonate, they jumped out of the way.”



“And the bombs wasted themselves on empty space,” Chen snarled. The second salvo had detonated, taking out three Gammas and savaging two more, but it hadn't been the decisive attack he’d planned. “Retarget the remaining Troll freighters and fire as you bear.”



“Cooper Hawk is under attack,” the tactical officer snapped. Hind winced; she’d visited the Hawk only a day ago to conduct a handful of background interviews. Now, the cruiser was being torn apart by a Troll starship. The range had dropped so far that the Trolls could take out bomb-pumped laser missiles before they could detonate. “Shane and Dalhousie being targeted...”



“Spin up the drives,” Chen ordered. His orders had given him the latitude he needed to cut his losses if the operation proved to be a failure. “Jump us out of here...”



“Captain, three of the Gammas appear to be manoeuvring themselves into firing position,” the sensor officer said. “I’m not picking up targeting emissions, but they wouldn't need them with so many other warships in the area.”



Chen swore. “It must be their version of a Q-Ship,” he said. “Continue firing!”



“Drives spinning up now,” the helmsman added. “Thirty seconds to jump.”



Thirty seconds too long, Hind thought, as an Alpha fired on McQueen. The entire cruiser shook violently as the death ray dug into her upper hull, just before the tactical officer fired the three bomb-pumped lasers mounted on her armour. Hind allowed herself a moment of relief as the Troll starship seemed to stagger backwards, just before a dull thump echoed through the entire ship. A dozen consoles went black, followed rapidly by the gravity failing as the ship spun out of control. The Troll ship had inflicted enough damage to cripple its target.



“Flux drive is still active,” the helmsman said. But Hind knew that jumping while they were so badly damaged could put them anywhere, including inside a star. “Captain?”



“Jump us out, now,” Chen snapped. Another Alpha was twisting itself into firing position, it’s death rays locking onto the hull. “Jump now!”



Hind felt her chest heave as the flux drive activated, and then the entire ship shuddered so hard that she was convinced it was about to break up. The world seemed to dim around her, as if something was pressing down on her eyeballs, just before McQueen shuddered her way back into normal space. There was a final tearing sensation running through the vessel’s hull and then nothing, but silence.



“Jump completed,” the helmsman said, into the silence. Hind was suddenly aware of liquid – blood and vomit – floating through the air. There seemed to be a very light gravity field...no, it was the air circulating through the compartment, pushing the balls of liquid towards the bulkheads. When they struck solid metal, they exploded into countless smaller balls that drifted everywhere. A body spun past her and she jerked back, knocking her entire body into a spin that eventually knocked her into a bulkhead. “Captain?”



Chen was bleeding from a wound to his forehead, the blood bubbling away from his wound and drifting through the air. “Did the rest of the squadron make it out?”



“Unknown,” the sensor officer said. “We jumped out on a random vector; they presumably did the same. They could be anywhere. Our sensor systems are badly degraded.”



Hind saw the implications and shuddered. “The Trolls could be right outside!”



Chen snorted. “I wouldn't worry about it too much,” he said, flatly. Hind lifted an eyebrow as she tried to pull herself down from the ceiling. “If they are outside, we’re dead anyway. I don’t think there’s any point in wasting time worrying about it.”



He keyed his wristcom. “All stations, report in,” he ordered. From what Hind had been told, the wristcom units had been reconfigured after Rubicon’s experience at New Marseilles. Right now, they didn't depend on the starship’s internal communications system to function properly. “Sound off by compartment.”



The tactical officer caught Hind’s hand as she spun down towards the deck and passed her something that looked like an oversized gun. It took her a moment to realise that it was a vacuum cleaner to suck in all of the liquid running through the air. Two of the crew appeared to have been badly injured, but there was little she could do to help. What medical training she’d had hadn't been in a null-gravity field.



“We lost two of the fusion cores,” a voice said. Hind looked up to hear the Chief Engineer’s voice, drifting out of the Captain’s wristcom. “The flux drive is still active, but I wouldn't put much money on it surviving long enough to do more than two more jumps. In fact, I’d strongly suggest jumping to Pegasus rather than trying to make it back to New Brisbane. We can reach Pegasus in a single jump.”



“The helm can start working out the calculations,” Chen ordered, grudgingly. Pegasus was a RockRat system; the UNNS would prefer not to seek help from them, even though the RockRats were fighting the Trolls alongside the United Nations. Right now, such a thought struck Hind as thoroughly absurd. “How’s our structural integrity?”



“Poor,” the Chief Engineer admitted. “The framework was sliced through in two places, Captain. It’s quite possible that the rest of the ship will come apart under impact of one more jump.”



“Another good reason to go to Pegasus,” Chin muttered. “Helm, plot us a course to Pegasus, but do not engage the drive without my permission.”



He looked over at what remained of his bridge, and then scowled. “We’ll have to float here until we have checked the entire ship and done what repairs we can,” he added. “Start moving the wounded to sickbay and hope like hell that the stasis tubes are still working.”

***​

Hind had seen horror before, but the interior of a badly-damaged starship was something out of her nightmares. Pressed into service as a medical orderly, she helped manoeuvre the wounded into sickbay, often fighting to keep them under control as they thrashed about and made their wounds worse. There seemed to be an endless series of dead bodies; crewmen who had been caught up in the damaged parts of the ship, or simply slammed into bulkheads when McQueen made her final desperate jump. Parts of the ship seemed to have lost their integrity, atmosphere leaking out into space through dozens of tiny gashes in the hull. The internal monitoring sensors had been destroyed, leaving the only sign that there was a leak the faint hiss as the air escaped into outer space.



The medical and engineering staff seemed to be badly overwhelmed, even with most of the rest of the crew seconded to them for the duration of the emergency. Hind helped as best as she could, even though she was so tired that she just wanted to crawl into a bunk and collapse, before finally returning to the bridge at the Captain’s command. Two engineers had refitted the helm console with a computer node they’d brought up from storage, but it was clear to her that McQueen was in no state for trouble. They’d just have to pray that the RockRats found them before the Trolls.



“I think we’re as ready as we’re going to be, Captain,” the Chief Engineer said, finally. “We’ve braced the inner superstructure as best as we can, but the struts are composed of hullmetal and we don't have any onboard – or the tools to cut it, for that matter. I’m not even sure why parts of the hull appear to have aged and cracked. The Trolls might have been experimenting with a new weapon.”



Hind saw the awful logic of it and shuddered. Hullmetal was far from indestructible, as the Trolls had been proving ever since the first battle, but it was incredibly tough. It simply didn't suffer any form of metal fatigue. To see such effects on a combat starship was downright alarming. Maybe it had been an effect of the random jump, or maybe the Chief Engineer was right and the Trolls were experimenting with a new weapon.



“The RockRats will probably know what happened to us,” the Captain said. “For now, all we can do is limp to Pegasus and hope that whoever finds us first is friendly.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Seven



New Brisbane

27th September 2435



“So was it a new weapon or not?”



“We’re not sure,” the analyst admitted. Paul swallowed the urge to tell him to go away and not come back until he was sure, one way or the other. “McQueen jumped to a random set of coordinates, with a fluctuating flux field, heavy damage and an alien starship firing on her. It is possible that some combination of those effects produced an aging effect in the hullmetal...”



His voice trailed off as Paul glowered at him. “Hullmetal isn't supposed to age,” he said, flatly. “Was there anything unusual about McQueen’s hull?”



“Nothing that was recorded during her last refit,” the analyst said. He wasn't the best in the Navy, naturally. New Brisbane might have defeated the Trolls, but that hadn’t stopped the base being stripped of all non-essential personnel, along with shipyard workers from the planet’s orbital industries. It was just a matter of time before the Trolls destroyed them, even if they were reluctant to challenge the combined fleet again. “And she was the only ship in the squadron to suffer such effects...the only surviving ship, I mean.”



Paul’s lips twitched. The analysts never seemed to grasp that behind every statistic was a set of lives destroyed or ruined by the Trolls. They might have regarded the Trolls as a fascinating puzzle, but the rest of the military had to regard the Trolls as a deadly enemy, one who might just have produced a new weapon out of their assholes. Or maybe it was just a coincidence and the Trolls had had nothing to do with it.



But if the effect had spread further, merely trying to jump would have destroyed the ship – and seven Avenging Angels hadn't – yet – returned home. Three had been confirmed destroyed by Troll death rays, but what had happened to the others? Had their hullmetal weakened so strongly that they’d shattered when they’d tried to jump out? Or were they floating in interstellar space, unable to jump home? There was no way to know.



“Keep working on it,” he said, finally. The RockRats had custody of McQueen’s wreckage and they were good at figuring out technological puzzles. He just hoped that they’d bother to share the results with the UN when they were done. “Has there been anything new from the communications intercept stations?”



“No, Admiral,” the analyst said. “Their last report stated that the Trolls appeared to be altering their convoy routes.”



Paul nodded and waved his hand in dismissal. The analyst fled, leaving him alone to read the details of the report from the post-battle assessment teams. They seemed to be in two minds if the Trolls had planned an ambush or not, but one thing was definitely clear. The Trolls were altering their convoy routes and it might not be possible to stage another attack on their freighters. And that meant that they could build up at leisure.



He tapped a switch, looking up at the chart of the system. Ever since the first battle, the Trolls had been moving more and more firepower into the asteroid fields surrounding Brisbane-B. Their starships were jumping in, raiding a couple of targets and then fleeing, while the UNNS lacked the firepower to dislodge their bases from the system. New Brisbane was effectively under siege, while Brisbane Base was repelling attacks almost every second day. The analysts thought that the Trolls had been badly weakened, but their only real proof lay in the negative; the Trolls hadn't made a second serious attempt to capture or destroy Brisbane Base, let alone the entire system.



At least he’d received some reinforcements. His starfighter compliment had been rebuilt to almost pre-battle levels, while the makeshift Joe Buckley-class of starships had arrived to help hold the line against the Trolls. The whole idea of suicide ships struck him as thoroughly unpleasant, but there was apparently no shortage of volunteers for manning ships that were really nothing more than tugs with bomb-pumped lasers mounted on their hulls. Some of the volunteers had lost friends and families to the Trolls, others were heeding the call for holy war issued by a joint religious commission. The latter were particularly dangerous. One simply couldn't trust fanatics to go haring off after the right targets.



But the blunt truth was that the United Nations was losing the war. Each raid into the core systems didn't just damage civilian morale. It also cost the human race vitally important industrial nodes that couldn't be replaced quickly, if at all. Paul had studied the Magana War, humanity’s greatest war prior to first contact with the Trolls, back when he’d been at the Academy and one thing had been clear. Victory had gone to the side that had been able to out-produce the enemy while destroying the enemy’s industrial nodes.



It wasn't something that sat well with many Academy cadets, and the young Paul had agreed with them. There was no room for bravery, loyalty and honour in cold economics, the same cold economics that determined the outcome of the Magana War. In the end, the human race had produced thousands of starships and the Magana had simply been swamped, while producing new classes of weapons and defensive systems to ensure that the Magana were unable to trump quantity with quality. It wasn't a pleasant thought, but Paul had been having visions of the last human starship in the war destroying a Troll ship, only to see another one jump in from their mysterious homeworld. As long as the Troll industrial base remained intact, supplying their front lines, the human race was doomed.



The real question, the one that kept his analysts up late at night, was just what the Trolls were preparing for humanity. They’d won all of the early battles through superior firepower, right up until the moment humanity had produced bomb-pumped lasers, evening the odds to some degree. Right now, they had to know that they couldn't trade ships for bomb-pumped lasers, not unless their fleet was vast enough to raise the question of why they hadn't attacked Earth already. Logically, they had to be preparing their own surprise...but what? And how long would it take them to get whatever they had in mind out to the front lines?



Producing bomb-pumped laser warheads had been easy. They weren't that different from standard nukes, certainly not enough to require massive retooling before the industrial stations started churning them out. But what could the Trolls do to counter them? The analysts believed that they would attempt to increase the range of their death rays, yet Paul suspected that that wasn't the only answer. That still put them on the defensive. Human doctrine said that taking the defensive – in any field – was akin to accepting defeat; there was no evidence that the Trolls disagreed. They’d certainly been quick to launch a second attack against Capricorn.



So what were they planning that would upset the balance of power once again?



His intercom buzzed. “Admiral, this is Davis in CIC,” it said. “We’re picking up a handful of Troll ships jumping into the base’s outer defence sphere.”



“Understood,” Paul said. If nothing else, the constant attacks were wearing down his personnel and putting colossal wear and tear on his equipment. Fleet carriers normally required at least three months in the yard for every year on active service; his fleet should, by rights, have sent at least seven fleet carriers back to Earth for refit. There hadn’t been any time to do that, so the equipment was wearing down...eventually, the ships would be inoperable. “I’m on my way.”

***​

“This is the CAG,” a voice boomed. “Condition three has been declared throughout the ship, all ready pilots to their planes; I say again, all ready pilots to their planes.”



Connie dropped her handful of cards on the table, scooped up her helmet and ran for the hatch leading down to the flight deck. Her pilots followed her, one complaining that he had a full house before he’d had to abandon his cards; another chuckling over his misfortune. Two others joined them, hastily zipping up their flight suits; Connie made a mental note to reprimand them sharply. They might have been so worn down since the first battle that they were taking what comfort they could in each other’s arms, but they were also breaking regulations. Sleeping with people in the same squadron, or department, was forbidden, for a whole series of very good reasons. One of them would have to be transferred if they couldn't keep out of each other’s pants.



The starfighter was ready for her and so she scrambled up into the cockpit, after completing the quick series of visual checks to ensure that everything was fine. At least they hadn't been ordered to scramble; their instructors had rammed it into their heads, time and time again, that they could take nothing for granted. A full scramble meant relying on the flight deck crew to have checked everything, replaced or serviced everything that needed some tender loving care, and then reset the computers to suit each pilot.



“Link into my plane,” she ordered, as she brought up the HUD. Condition three meant that the ready pilots wouldn't be launched unless the CSP had run into something they couldn't handle, or had to be redeployed to cover other parts of the fleet. At least the engineers had come up with drop pods for life support, finally. They could operate at extended range if necessary for several hours. “Draw the tactical situation from fleet command and prepare yourselves.”



The HUD came to life, revealing a set of red icons at the very edge of the fleet’s combat zone, where any target would be automatically engaged by the fleet’s defenders. Either by accident or by design, the Trolls had scoped out most of the fleet’s defence zones, often flying starships outside the zones to dare the human ships to give chase. After two merry chases which had ended with the Trolls jumping out and escaping, the Admiral had ordered that all further probes were to be ignored unless they were heading right into the combat zone. This time, twelve Troll starships were hovering along the edge, waiting to see what sort of response they would draw.



“Looks like we won't have to move, Lead,” one of the pilots said. “The CSP can easily deal with those losers.”



“There's nothing easy about anything the Trolls do,” Connie said, tartly. The Trolls might just have been trying to annoy them, or maybe they were just waiting for the starfighters to expose themselves before they sprang their trap. “We wait in our planes until the all-clear is sounded or until we have to get out there and reinforce the CSP.”



She frowned as the pilots acknowledged, ready and waiting for the order to move. Just what, she asked herself, were the Trolls doing? A simple observation mission, an attempt to poke the defenders...or what? All they could do was wait, and see.

***​

“They’re right on the edge, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. “CSP Lead is requesting permission to engage the enemy.”



Paul shook his head. “They’ll see them coming and jump out,” he said. Driving the Trolls away would be a victory, of sorts, but they’d just jump back. They’d learned through bitter experience the high cost of allowing the Trolls to lure the starfighters into a futile chase. The pilots got tired and sloppy, their starfighters started to need more maintenance, if not outright replacement by a new craft. “Order Commodore Hausa to prepare to jump her squadron towards them.”



The tactical officer looked up, surprised. “You mean to send a single cruiser squadron into battle against the Trolls?”



“Perhaps,” Paul said, irritated. On the face of it, the tactical officer was right to be worried; even with bomb-pumped lasers, no cruiser squadron had beaten the Trolls in an even fight. But it was worth the risk to a single squadron if it revealed just what the Trolls were planning, before his entire fleet fell into the trap. All of his instincts were screaming that the Trolls were up to something...



He resisted the urge to pace the deck as the seconds ticked away. The Trolls did nothing, almost as if their ships were nothing more than derelicts waiting for a salvage crew to arrive. On instinct, Paul ordered a full sensor sweep of local space, along with the launch of multiple sensor probes; it was quite possible that the Trolls were using one squadron as a distraction while the rest of their fleet slipped into firing range. They’d used that tactic against 5th Fleet successfully and they might think that it was worth trying for a second time...



...But maybe not. Admiral Cicero hadn't been prepared for a close-quarter duel when her opponent had death rays, but he had bomb-pumped lasers and the suicide ships. It would be costly, yet perhaps worthwhile; God knew the human race could replace the Joe Buckley-class ships far quicker than the Trolls could build their Alphas, unless they had some building technique right out of science-fiction. Perhaps they used nanotech on a vast scale to build their ships, or maybe they had the power to replicate entire starships out of energy...no, that was sheer science-fiction. Besides, if they had that sort of technology, they could have simply swamped the human race by now.



“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, suddenly, “I’m picking up new starships jumping just outside the combat zone.”



Paul swore as the display started to fill with red icons. Five hundred Troll starships, two hundred of them Alphas...and the remainder mostly Betas. Here and there, there was a starship that defied easy categorisation, including what seemed to be a squadron of modified Gammas, but the remainder of the fleet was easy to classify. They probably wanted the human race to see what was coming in their direction. The Trolls were outnumbered four to one, yet Paul knew that that wouldn't be enough. Even if they won the battle, the combined fleet was going to take one hell of a beating.



“I’m picking up a StarCom transmission from the planet,” the communications officer said, suddenly. “They’re reporting seventy additional Alphas holding position just outside engagement range. They want reinforcements.”



“So do I,” Paul snapped. The Trolls were behaving...oddly and he didn't like that, if only because it suggested that they had something up their sleeves. Simple common sense wanted that dividing one’s forces in the face of the enemy was asking for defeat, which implied that the Trolls were either very confident or believed that their FTL communications capability was good enough to coordinate two attacks at once. “Order them to hold their starships in orbit and...”



“Admiral,” the tactical officer snapped. “The Troll fleet is advancing on our position.”



Paul nodded. “Launch all starfighters,” he ordered, tightly. There was no longer anything to be gained by keeping the ready and reserve flights in their launch tubes. “General orders to the fleet; all ships are to implement formation delta-bravo; I say again, delta-bravo.”



“The fleet acknowledges, Admiral,” the communications officer said. Paul nodded. Manoeuvring two thousand starships at once was proving a tricky task; it hadn’t been carried out or even exercised since the renowned Admiral Kinnison had led the final attack on the Magana homeworlds that had ended the war. In hindsight, perhaps the UNNS should have tried to revise the Z9 fleet control protocols before running into the Trolls. “They’re advancing into position.”



The Trolls weren't trying to be subtle; their formation was a blunt hammer, aimed right at Brisbane Base and its defending starships. Unsurprisingly, they had deployed the Betas where they could cover the Alphas, forcing the defenders to either target the Betas first or watch helplessly as the Betas swept the missiles out of existence. Paul’s formation wasn't particularly subtle either; the suicide ships were in the lead, with the bomb-pumped laser cruiser following them. At the rear, he’d placed another flotilla of cruisers and suicide ships, just in case the Trolls repeated themselves and jumped behind his ships. This time, they would be caught between his cruisers and the deployed missiles surrounding Brisbane Base.



“All starfighters away, Admiral,” the CAG reported. Controlling twenty thousand starfighters was, if anything, harder than coordinating the starships, although they had practiced endlessly since they’d taken up defensive positions at Brisbane. “First Attack Wing is moving into position to support the cruisers.”



“Order the cruisers to target the Betas,” Paul ordered, flatly. The starfighters would have a better chance against the Alphas; besides, once the Betas were destroyed the Alphas would be exposed to his bomb-pumped laser missiles. But the Trolls had to know that...so what the hell were they planning? “Fire as soon as the Trolls enter engagement range.”



There was a pause. “Admiral, they appear to be moving the Gammas forward,” the sensor officer said, finally. Paul felt a shiver running down his spine. “They may intend for them to soak up our fire...”



Paul doubted it. The Trolls might have been aliens, but their logic was comprehensible. “Order three missile sections to target those craft,” he ordered. “And fire!”



The display seemed to overload with green icons as the cruisers launched their missiles towards the Troll starships. Hundreds of thousands of warheads, each one ready to pump a laser beam into its target, advancing towards the Troll ships...it seemed impossible that anything could stand in their way.



“Admiral,” the sensor officer said. “I'm picking up...oh, my God!”



Paul saw it too. Emerging from the cloud of Troll starships were the signatures of small craft, larger than starfighters, moving towards the human missiles at terrifying speed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was faster than a starfighter in space, until now. The Troll craft – not much smaller than pickets, Paul realised – were going to tear hell through the missiles...



“Order the starfighters to advance and take them out,” he ordered.



He knew that it was already too late.

 

Chapter Thirty-Eight



New Brisbane

27th September 2435



“What the hell are those things?”



“Stay in formation,” Connie snapped. There were so many objects moving through the same general area of space that the HUD was having problems tracking them all, something that she hadn't seen outside simulations intended to demonstrate to cadets just how quickly a situation could go to hell. They hadn't practiced dogfighting with enemy starfighters because they had known that the Trolls had no starfighters; in hindsight, that had been a deadly mistake. “We need to take those things out before they can tear us a new asshole.”



The Troll craft – her HUD insisted on identifying them as gunboats, although they were really little more than three times the size of starfighters – were already firing, their weapons lashing out and vaporising the missiles before they could enter attack range and detonate. A handful of missiles appeared to have retargeted themselves on the gunboats, but even when they took a gunboat with them they were destroyed themselves. Connie had to admire what the Trolls had done even though they had probably crippled the fleet; they’d fired a vast swarm of missiles towards the enemy fleet and most of those missiles were about to die uselessly.



A report from the battle analysis team flashed up in front of her. The Troll gunboats seemed to have the same omnidirectional firing capability as the rest of the Troll starships, although they also seemed to have a slight blind spot towards their rear. There was no way to know if the Trolls were flying them personally, or if they were under remote control from a flagship or even an AI, but it hardly mattered. The starfighters had to take them out before it was too late.



“Clear guns,” she ordered. Starfighters carried railgun cannons for close-quarter engagements with other starfighters; they would just have to hope that they would be sufficient to take out the gunboats. Firing a starfighter railgun at a carrier’s armoured hull wouldn’t do more than scratch the paint. “Mark your targets and watch where you aim.”



Up close, the Troll gunboats looked like spinning tops, although it might have been an illusion. Their death rays were less powerful than those mounted on their capital ships, but they were more than powerful enough to kill missiles and starfighters. Connie threw her starfighter into an evasive pattern as a pair of gunboats targeted her, before flipping the starfighter over and lining up her guns on her target. The Trolls had learned their lessons well – their gunboats were gyrating around randomly, making it hard to target them – but she fired a long burst directly into the gunboat. To her relief, the gunboat exploded in a flash of light.



“We can kill these things,” she snapped. There was no longer any point in trying to control the dogfight, not when there were so many starfighters and gunboats engaged in the same general area. All she could do was shoot at every gunboat that wandered across her sights and pray that none of them had an opportunity to take a shot at her. It might have gone far worse for the starfighters if the gunboats hadn't had to worry about the missiles. Their ability to fire in all directions gave them an advantage that more than compensated for their larger size. “Keep firing!”



Flashes of light raced past her starfighter as another gunboat targeted her, before being picked off by a human starfighter. The entire battle had dissolved into chaos, with the starfighters scattered, each one fighting its own battle against the Trolls. Connie cursed as the inexperience of many of the pilots worked against them, even though some of the former maggots had had a chance to practice dogfight skills in the training centre. The Trolls had managed to practice, probably in interstellar space, before revealing their new surprise at an appropriate moment.



“I’m hit,” a voice said. “Going down...”



Connie saw the flash and killed the gunboat, too late. For a moment, she flew into empty space and glanced at her HUD, trying to take in the overall scene. Starfighters and gunboats were dropping like flies, but the gunboats seemed to have an advantage that made up for their lack of numbers. And a new flight of gunboats was leaving the Troll fleet...



Shaking her head, she threw herself back into the battle.

***​

Paul forced his face to remain expressionless as the starfighters engaged the gunboats, trying to distract them from taking out the missiles. But the gunboats had done their work well; only a handful of missiles survived long enough to inflict damage on the enemy ships, not enough to clear the way for the starfighters to engage the enemy. And there was another wave of gunboats leaving the alien fleet.



“Move up the Second Attack Wing to intercept the newcomers,” he ordered, as the gunboats evaded the combat zone between their fellows and the human starfighters, gunning their engines and racing straight for the fleet. “And put all of our point defence stations on alert. I want them to engage the gunboats as soon as they enter weapons range.”



Point defence had been neglected ever since the Trolls had arrived; they didn't deploy starfighters and the only defence against a death ray was not to be there when it was fired. One of those assumptions had just been destroyed, Paul knew; the Trolls had decided that the starfighters produced unacceptable losses and had produced a countermeasure at terrifying speed. Assuming that the gunboats hadn't been a previously-unseen technology, which was possible, the Trolls had started working on gunboats just after First Cadiz, when they’d discovered just how effective starfighters were in vast numbers. Producing a whole new weapons system in around six months said unpleasant things about Troll R&D, to say nothing of the size and power of their industrial base.



The gunboats didn't slow down as they flashed past the Second Attack Wing, which reversed course and gave chase in a futile attempt to catch the Trolls. High speed didn't stop them from firing at anything that could be a target, taking out over two dozen starfighters before they zipped out of engagement range. The CSP was also moving to intercept, but they probably wouldn't have much better luck. They’d all grown up believing that nothing could outrun starfighters; now, the Trolls had turned that assumption upside down.



“Point defence AIs are calculating firing patterns,” the tactical officer said. “They’re engaging...now!”



AIs, at least, weren't stunned by small craft moving at speeds that were generally assumed to be impossible. They opened fire, launching tiny railgun slugs at the incoming craft, vaporising seven gunboats before the remainder went evasive and started to close in on their targets. Unsurprisingly, they were ignoring the cruisers and homing in on the carriers, even though that meant having to fly through the wall of point defence fired by the cruisers and support ships.



“Jutland, Midway and Cuba appear to be the focus of their attack,” the tactical officer reported. “Their CSP is attempting to beat off the attackers, but they only get one shot at the gunboats before they’re out of range.”



Paul said nothing, watching grimly as the gunboats strafed the assault carriers with their death rays. Thankfully, they didn't seem to have anything like the power of the death rays mounted by their larger cousins, but they were still devastating. One gunboat – deliberately or otherwise – slammed into Midway’s starboard flight deck, sending a chain of explosions ripping through the long tube and effectively disabling the entire deck. The others pulled back long enough to assess the results of their strike, and then swooped back down to the attack. This time, the point defence AIs wiped out a handful of gunboats, forcing the others to break off and await reinforcements. They would not be long in coming.



“Order all cruisers to launch a second missile salvo, targeted on the Betas,” Paul ordered. If they were lucky, the second salvo would force the first swarm of gunboats to concentrate on preventing them from reaching their fleet, rather than disengaging from the starfighters and attacking the rest of his fleet. “Midway is to jump out and meet us at the RV point.”



“Understood, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. There was a pause, and then a green icon vanished from the display. “Midway has jumped out, sir.”



“Good,” Paul said. Midway was no longer fully combat-effective; her flight deck would have to be repaired, along with the other damage, before she could return to duty. At least he’d had the foresight to base most of the fleet train, along with the mobile shipyards, in interstellar space. Midway would have a team of dedicated engineers to start repairs as she limped back to Earth. “Order the suicide ships to advance towards the enemy lines.”



The battle grew more savage as the second salvo of missiles approached their targets, despite hundreds being vaporised by the gunboats. Thankfully, the enemy didn’t seem to have brought more than seven hundred gunboats to the battle, even though that was enough to inflict grievous losses to his starfighters. Some of the missiles were slipping through, targeting the Betas and wiping them out of space. A handful even managed to take out a trio of Alphas.



“Admiral, certain patterns seem to be appearing in the data,” one of the analysts said. “The Trolls do not seem to have a certain doctrine for deploying the gunboats for best advantage...”



Paul wasn’t sure that he agreed. The Trolls had known about the danger of bomb-pumped lasers – and they’d needed a counter, or their fleet would have been crippled before it got into engagement range. Meanwhile, trading a gunboat for a fleet carrier – or even a cruiser – wasn't a bad bargain at all from their point of view. And it forced him to keep back some of his starfighters to serve as a CSP, even though it was apparently futile...



“Order the gunboats to cover the suicide ships,” he ordered, dismissing the analyst as the two battle fleets started to close in for the kill. Both sides were about to take one hell of a beating. “Tell them to try and lure the gunboats away from them.”



The Trolls seemed confused by the suicide ships, right up until the moment one of them fired on a Beta and sent it limping away, badly damaged. Immediately, the gunboats swooped to the attack, smashing through the wave of suicide ships and ignoring the starfighters as they covered their capital ships. Behind them, some of the starfighters altered course and launched attack runs on Troll starships, taking out several of their targets. But their losses were mounting upwards and Paul and very few starfighters left to spare.



“Move the CSP up to engage the enemy ships,” he said. The CAG shot him a sharp glance, but complied. There was no point in maintaining a CSP when their only hope was to cripple the enemy battle line before it engaged weapons range. “Start rotating the point defence datanet through our ships; I don’t want a lucky hit to cripple us.”



“Admiral,” the CAG said, “a third of our starfighters have to return and rearm. Right now, they’re short of everything they need to fight.”



“Order them to return to their ships,” Paul ordered. The Troll gunboats had another advantage; they could keep firing indefinitely, while his starfighters would eventually run out of railgun slugs. Recalling the starfighters to rearm was the only countermeasure they could use, but it risked losing the starfighters if their carrier was destroyed while they were rearming. “The CSP is to cover them and attempt to protect the missiles from the gunboats.”



He grimaced as the Troll gunboats rotated and roared after the retreating starfighters, suddenly very vulnerable to their weapons. Some of the CSP gave chase, attempting to hack down the gunboats before they could pick on the unarmed starfighters; the others attempted their own runs against Troll starships. And a new flight of Troll gunboats was roaring towards the carriers...

***​

It happened at terrifying speed. Connie had been preparing to follow the rest of her pilots onto Nelson’s flight deck when a gunboat appeared out of nowhere and started firing on her. Desperately, she yanked the starfighter away from the flight deck, passing within a bare metre of the hull, trying to evade her unwanted pursuer. The carrier’s point defence was firing savagely at the gunboat, some of the shells coming too close to Connie’s own craft for comfort, but the Troll pilot managed to evade them all. Connie would have been impressed if he hadn't been trying to kill her, while tearing up the carrier’s hull with death ray blasts. He seemed to be firing at random...



...No, she realised; he wasn’t firing at random. He was targeting the carrier’s point defence, creating blind spots where other gunboats could slip into firing range and begin tearing the carrier apart. And then he drifted back to the flight deck and started firing into the ship’s interior. It was heavily armoured, to trap and deflect a crashing starfighter, but not enough to stand up to death rays. The Troll could disable the entire flight deck before anyone could get into position to stop him...



...Except for her. Connie acted without thought, knowing that there was no other choice. There was one weapon left to her, the starfighter itself. Quite calmly, she pointed the starfighter at the Troll gunboat and rammed her craft right into its hull. Both craft vanished in a brilliant flash of light.

***​

“Nelson has been badly damaged, Admiral,” the tactical officer reported. “Her Captain is requesting permission to withdraw.”



Paul gritted his teeth. The battle was swinging against the human race, now that the Trolls were crippling his carriers, defending themselves against his missiles and steadily advancing into death ray range. Four carriers had been lost completely, seven more had been forced to withdraw. The chances of holding the system were looking less and less promising by the minute.



He had his orders. If there was a good chance of losing the entire fleet, particularly the carriers, he was to withdraw, even if it meant abandoning the base and New Brisbane. It wasn't as if New Brisbane was undefended, but he had no illusions about how long it would hold out when the Trolls started to attack it directly. A sitting target against a heavily armed mobile force? The fight wouldn't last very long and there would only be one outcome.



A dull shudder ran through the carrier as a gunboat spewed bursts of deadly fire into its hull, forcing him to make up his mind. “Order all starfighters to pull back and return to their ships,” he ordered. “Reprogram the final salvo of missiles to target the gunboats, if possible; if not, order them to attack the closest enemy ship. And then start powering up the flux drives for immediate departure.



Withdrawing under fire was one of the most complex and dangerous military manoeuvres, not least because the enemy had a chance to shoot your personnel in the back. Paul watched, grimly, as the remaining starfighters fled, only to be chased by the gunboats and harried until they entered point defence range of the fleet. Even then, the gunboats pressed the offensive, several ramming carriers and inflicting severe damage. A number of cruisers reported that they’d lost their flux drives and wouldn't be able to retreat. Paul ordered them to hold the rear, knowing that he was sentencing them to death. Admiral Cicero had killed herself for something similar, but he couldn't afford the luxury.



“All starfighters have returned to their ships,” the tactical officer reported. “The gunboats are pressing the offensive.”



Paul nodded. “Jump us out,” he ordered. Brisbane Base would have to hold out as long as it could; not long, he knew, with the gunboats harrying them while the capital ships waited outside missile range. “And rearm the starfighters. We may be followed to our RV point.”



One by one, the combined fleet jumped out of the maelstrom and escaped.

***​

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve just been informed that the Trolls are advancing on the planet,” the pilot said. “All civilian starships have been ordered to jump out of the system, immediately. We will jump as soon as the drive has powered up.”



Hind braced herself in her small compartment, staring down at the terminal in her hand. If she hadn’t visited New Brisbane...no, there was no point in tormenting herself with what might have been. As it was, she was very lucky to have secured a space on a passenger liner, one that was crammed full of rich and powerful citizens – and those lucky enough to live in orbit, near the starship docks. The White Swan, one of the most famous and expensive luxury liners in the known universe, was overcrowded with fleeing civilians.



The terminal was illegally linked into the planetary datanet, which was in turn linked into the StarCom network binding the system together. It looked as though the UNNS starships had retreated, leaving nothing behind to defend the planet – apart from its own self-defence force. And no one placed much faith in an outdated military machine that hadn't purchased a new starship for upwards of a hundred years, at least before the crisis...on the display, the Trolls were racing towards the planet, daring the humans to stop them. It didn't look as if there was anything left that could even slow them down.



“Jump in twenty seconds,” the pilot’s voice said. White Swan had a military-grade drive, she’d been told. It should be good enough to jump out of the system, even so close to the planet’s gravity well. “Ten...nine...eight...”



Hind took one last look at the planet through the porthole, just as there was a flash of light and the planet vanished, to be replaced by stars. Whatever was happening to New Brisbane, she’d escaped in time...leaving the rest of the civilians behind. God alone knew what the Trolls would do to them...



Tears welled up in her eyes as she remembered those who had celebrated the first victory, when the Trolls had first attempted to take the system. What would happen to them now?
th u

 

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Luna
27th September 2435

“Red alert; I say again, Red Alert,” a voice thundered. “This is not a drill; I say again, this is not a drill.”

Anton snapped awake, grabbing for his uniform as he rolled out of bed. The Sol System had been running defence drills ever since the Trolls had started a war, but no drill had been planned for this night. It had to be real – and that meant that the one event everyone had dreaded had just come to pass. The Trolls were attacking Earth itself. It might be a raid, or it might be a powerful enough fleet to take the planet. And if Earth fell the United Nations would fall with it.

Pulling his jacket on he walked swiftly to the hatch and out into the Naval HQ. Earth had never been attacked in all the years the human race had been expanding into space – even the Magana had never dared attack the core of the United Nations – and a certain level of complacency had grown up throughout the system’s defenders. Thankfully, the Troll offensive had given him a chance to identify and cut out much of the dead wood in the command structure – to say nothing of replacing outdated equipment – but he knew better than to be sanguine about the coming fight. Even if the Trolls hadn’t produced any new surprises, they would still take a bite out of the system’s defenders.

The Pit was the very core of Sol’s defences, a bunker buried five miles under the lunar surface and linked to the various defence bases though a buried StarCom. Anton strode into the bunker, nodded to the officer on duty and took his seat in front of the holographic display, ready to exercise command. He would have preferred to command from a fleet carrier, or even one of the experimental flagships that had been developed over the past ten years, but everything else the Grand Admiral had to do kept him firmly on Luna. Right now, he cursed himself for not transferring his flag to a fleer carrier and to hell with the consequences. It was a long tradition that the UN Admirals shared the same risks as everyone else, a tradition that he was failing. But there was no time to take a shuttle to one of the carriers near Earth.

“Situation report,” he snapped, as red icons came to life in the display. The StarCom network would give him real-time information, but it could be deceptive. Red icons were hovering near Mars, while others were flickering into existence near Jupiter and Saturn. Outside of Earth’s orbital halo, the three planets made up a sizable percentage of the system’s industrial base.

“Enemy starships have jumped into the system,” the tactical officer said. “Home Fleet has gone to full alert, but so far the enemy have not entered any of the defence zones.”

That was...odd, Anton thought. The Trolls had to know that they would be detected; they certainly hadn't bothered to cloak, or even try to hide behind a stealth field. And that meant that every second they hesitated before attacking gave Home Fleet time to rush to battle stations, launch starfighters and activate the vast network of automated weapons platforms that protected the system. Sol might never have been attacked by an alien race, at least not until now, but it was the most heavily-defended star system in the United Nations. The Trolls were about to take a beating.

“Get me a breakdown on the enemy craft,” he ordered, flatly. Maybe the Trolls were just mounting a reconnaissance in force, although upwards of a hundred Alpha-class cruisers seemed a little excessive. “And then order Home Fleet to prepare to intercept the Trolls.”

The tactical officer worked his console as data flowed in from over the system. “I’m reading roughly two hundred Alphas and ninety Betas, as well as several starships of an unknown design,” he said, finally. “That much firepower could make a serious attempt at taking Earth.”

“It could,” Anton agreed. And if it had arrived just after the Battle of New Marseilles, it would probably have beaten Home Fleet and won. Now, however, Earth’s defenders had plenty of bomb-pumped lasers, starfighters and minefields to make it harder for the Trolls to use their advanced technology against the human race. But on the other hand, as long as they remained outside the planetary defences engagement range, they could just sit there and wait patiently. Their mere presence would force him to send Home Fleet out, away from the defences, or cede the outer solar system to the Trolls.

Earth itself was heavily defended, but the defences around Jupiter and Saturn were much weaker, certainly nowhere near powerful enough to stand off the Trolls. They could punch through the defences, taking out the industrial facilities and cloudscoops in the process, and then retreat, content in the knowledge that they had just strangled Earth’s massive industrial base. Or they could assume that Home Fleet would be forced to engage them, giving them a chance to destroy the fleet outside the planetary defences...

His mind was spinning in circles. Angrily, he pushed the thought aside and concentrated on the display. “Order Home Fleet to prepare to jump to Jupiter if necessary,” he said. At least the Trolls couldn't hope to punch through Earth’s defences before Home Fleet could jump back – unless they had another surprise up their sleeves. “And keep monitoring the Trolls.”

The communications officer looked up. “Admiral, the Security Council wants to speak with you,” he said. “They’re requesting an immediate conference.”

Anton swallowed a curse. Of course the politicians wanted to talk. The greatest threat ever to materialise in Earth’s solar system, a fleet manned by a race that wanted to fight a war of genocide, and the politicians wanted to distract him! Didn't they realise that distracting a commanding officer at the wrong time could be disastrous? He shook his head, ruefully. Of course they didn't recognise it. They were accustomed to making the universe bend to their will.

“Put them through to my headset,” he ordered, pulling it out from under the chair and placing it on his head. “Inform me the moment the Trolls make their move.”

“Admiral,” a voice said. The Ambassador from the United Stars, surprisingly. “I understand that we have visitors.”

“Yes, sir,” Anton said. The Security Council had full access to the live feed from all over the solar system. They’d be able to count the number of enemy starships as easily as the UNNS tactical staff. “Home Fleet is currently preparing to defend the system.”

There was a pause, long enough for him to feel a sensation of doom trickling down his back. “It is imperative that the enemy be driven from this system as soon as possible,” the Ambassador said. “Why have you not ordered Home Fleet to engage the enemy?”

Anton blinked in surprise. Surely the politicians could not be as blind to military reality as that question suggested. “Right now, the Trolls are not attacking any target,” he said. “If I order Home Fleet to engage them, the Trolls will have an opportunity to jump past Home Fleet and hit their targets, forcing Home Fleet to wait until its flux drives are recharged before it can return to engage the enemy.”

“But the Trolls can wait out there indefinitely,” the Ambassador said, after another pause. It suggested that the Security Council was itself divided on the question of what to do. “We do not have that luxury. Panic is already sweeping across Earth and the Halo. We need the Trolls gone now.”

Anton glanced at the live news feed from the Galactic News Network. The Ambassador was right. Earth was dissolving into chaos, far worse than the madness that had gripped any other world threatened by the Trolls, while everyone who had a private starship was attempting to board it and escape. Even if the Trolls retreated without doing anything more than taunting the defenders, Earth’s economy would take a severe blow. And Earth was the linchpin of the United Nations.

“Right now, we can stand them off if they attack any defended planet,” Anton said, forcing his voice to stay calm. “If we attack them, however, we risk putting Home Fleet out of position while the Trolls rip through Earth or Mars.” He hesitated, and then committed himself. “That is a military judgement, sir, and while I recognise the principle of civilian control of the military, that principle only works outside of actual combat.”

There was a pause, so long that Anton could imagine the heated debates raging through the Security Council’s chamber. He’d never spoken to them like that, ever. But he had no choice. He was charged with defending the United Nations against outside threats and he didn't dare risk putting Home Fleet out of play, even for the relatively short time it would take for Home Fleet to recharge its flux drives. There were just too many Troll starships in the system for Home Fleet to be committed until they knew what the Trolls intended to do.

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, sharply. “The Trolls have jumped into a position near Earth!”

Anton looked up at the display as the Troll force rematerialised just outside the Earth-Luna defensive perimeter. Without the StarCom network, the Trolls would have seemed to be in two places at once, at least until the light-speed sensors picked up the jump. Now, their entire force was hovering outside the defence perimeter, silently threatening humanity’s homeworld.

He spoke into the microphone before the Ambassador could say a word. “The Trolls have just jumped into a position to threaten Earth,” he said. “With your permission. I must deal with them now.”

“Of course,” the Ambassador said. “Earth must be defended at all costs.”

Anton closed the channel and looked over at the tactical officer, silently grateful for all the exercises Home Fleet had carried out ever since the first contact with the Trolls. “Home Fleet is to assemble at Point Delta and prepare to advance on the Trolls,” he ordered, calmly. If the Trolls were prepared to give him time to assemble his forces, he wasn't going to complain. Unlike their previous location, they couldn't lure Home Fleet out of position and then attack Earth or the gas giants. Home Fleet could simply jump after them if necessary, although it would take time to land all of their starfighters and then follow the Trolls. But that could be what the Trolls were counting on...

Home Fleet moved with majestic slowness; cruisers and suicide ships in the lead, followed by the carriers and their swarms of starfighters. The minutes ticked away as the fleet concentrated, followed by a steady advance towards the Trolls, who were still holding position just outside the Earth-Luna perimeter. Anton knew better than to try to exercise tactical command from a distance – Vice Admiral Lyudmila would direct Home Fleet as it engaged the enemy – but the Troll behaviour puzzled him. Maybe they wanted to lure Home Fleet into a battle outside the orbital defences, yet they could have done that simply by waiting until he was forced to engage...

A green icon vanished from the display. “Admiral,” the tactical officer snapped. “The fleet carrier Taranto has just been destroyed!”

Anton stared in disbelief. The fleet carriers were well outside the range of enemy death rays – and there was no way that the Trolls could have mined the solar system and then lured the fleet onto the minefield. And yet Taranto had been blown apart, almost as if the carrier’s warheads had all detonated inside the ship. Another explosion flickered out inside Home Fleet’s formation, followed by a series of others that sparked into existence and then vanished. A handful of other ships were destroyed for no apparent reason.

“Analysis,” Anton snapped. Whatever it was, it had to be a weapon – something new that the Trolls had produced and deployed against Home Fleet. It didn't seem to be very accurate – the explosions outside starship hulls weren't doing anything beyond swatting unlucky starfighters – but it seemed to be unstoppable. “What the hell are they doing to us?”

“This is Weaver in Analysis,” a new voice said. “Admiral, I believe that they’re fluxing warheads at us.”

Anton had read the research paper that had outlined the theory, years ago. Everyone knew that if one starship happened to materialise in a location occupied by another starship, both starships would be destroyed as they interpenetrated, simply because two objects couldn't share the same location. According to the paper, it should be possible to generate a flux field that would jump something – a warhead, perhaps – from one location to another, without the object actually needing a flux drive of its own. Like a great many theories, the hardware hadn’t been able to match the theory and create a new weapon, but the Trolls had evidently overcome the problem and produced a working model. And they’d lured Home Fleet into a killing ground.

“It can't be very accurate,” Weaver said. The destruction of the fleet carrier had to be a lucky shot, or so Anton told himself. But if the Trolls could target the flux warheads so precisely, the war was lost. “But they could throw anything at us and a single interpenetration would wreck an entire starship...”

Anton nodded. “Immediate orders to Home Fleet,” he snapped. “The fleet is to jump back to Earth orbit, right now.”

The Trolls couldn't use it against a planet, even a planet’s orbitals – if they could, they would have wiped out everything in space by now. Logically, that made sense; flux drives grew less and less precise the closer the arrival coordinates to a planetary mass. The Trolls must suspect that their weapon couldn't work against anything within a planet’s gravity field...but it wasn't as if they were short on ammunition. They could simply set up base in an asteroid field and throw rocks at Earth through flux space. There might only be one or two hits per day, but it would work out in their favour.

Home Fleet jumped, leaving its starfighters behind. Anton opened his mouth to issue orders, but they had already received the orders they needed. The starfighters boosted forward, lunging at the Troll starships, which rapidly began to deploy small craft of their own. Anton wasn't too surprised to see them, although the pilots would have to discover their capabilities the hard way. The Trolls knew that they were vulnerable to human starfighters; it was only logical that they would seek to build starfighters of their own.

There was a brief, violent engagement – and then the entire Troll force jumped out at once. Their small craft – gunboats, according to the analysts – followed, without returning to their motherships. Anton swallowed a curse; the Trolls didn't just have a better flux drive system than the human race, they’d managed to miniaturise it enough to slot into a craft smaller than a picket. It would give them one hell of a tactical advantage.

“Admiral,” Weaver’s voice said, “we believe that we have identified the ships that were carrying the flux gun. They were emitting high levels of flux radiation during the engagement with Home Fleet.”

Anton allowed himself a moment of relief. Being targeted by an invisible and unstoppable weapon would have destroyed the Navy’s morale. The Trolls had kept the gunships well back in their formation, but now they knew what they were, they could target them with starfighters and take them out. Indeed, the power requirements had had to be so high that the Trolls would have difficulty firing the weapon for long periods of time. Perhaps they couldn't randomly bombard Earth’s orbits from the asteroid belt after all.

“Admiral,” the tactical officer snapped. “The Trolls are attacking the Jupiter industrial facilities!”

“Order Home Fleet to detach its cruisers and prepare to jump out to Jupiter,” Anton ordered. The Trolls were forcing the human defenders to react to their movements and he didn't like that, but there was no other choice. “They are to jump into close range of the Trolls and engage them from the rear.”

The direct link to the Security Council began to buzz. Anton picked up the headset again, reluctantly. At least he’d issued the right orders.

“Admiral,” the Ambassador said. “You are hereby ordered to keep Home Fleet concentrated in orbit around Earth.”

Anton had too much experience to show his shock openly, but even he found it hard to talk for a few seconds. “Sir,” he said, flatly, “if the Trolls destroy the industrial facilities at Jupiter it will take us years to rebuild, years the Trolls are unlikely to give us.”

“That may be true, but we cannot afford crippling losses to Home Fleet,” the Ambassador said. “Admiral, we are the supreme authority for military operations...”

“...But I am the local commander,” Anton snapped, “and in my opinion we cannot allow the Trolls to wreck Jupiter without at least trying to stop them.”

“We understand your position, Admiral, but our orders stand,” the Ambassador said. “Home Fleet is to remain at Earth.”

Anton gritted his teeth. “Very well,” he said. Maybe a political gambit could untie his hands. “But I insist on receiving your orders in writing, allowing me to lodge a formal protest.”

“Very well, Admiral,” the Ambassador said. “But Home Fleet is to remain at Earth.”

***​

Four hours later, the Trolls jumped out for good, leaving behind nothing, but wreckage orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Anton watched them go, grimly certain that they’d be back, once they’d finished consolidating their forces after their victory at New Brisbane. They’d launched a raid intended to keep Home Fleet tied down while they attacked New Brisbane, punching open the route to Earth. The politicians were about to discover that their homeworlds were under serious threat.

“Stand down from battle stations,” he ordered, tiredly. His personnel would need a rest before they did anything else. “And inform analysis I want a counter to their flux gun. We need it as soon as possible.”

He shook his head, bitterly. Right now, he would have to face the politicians, who would have realised just what losing Jupiter and Saturn meant for Earth. He would sooner face the Trolls naked, without any weapon at all. The worst the Trolls could do was kill him.

 

Chapter Forty



Luna

1st October 2435



“They kicked our asses,” Vice Admiral Howard said. “And then they pulverised New Brisbane.”



Anton gritted his teeth. The Trolls had bombarded human planets before, but they’d clearly decided to make an example out of New Brisbane; they’d bombarded the planet with antimatter warheads. Antimatter warheads had been purely theoretical until recently – Area 51’s experiments with Troll technology had suggested a way of mass-producing antimatter – yet the Trolls appeared to have yet another advantage over humanity. New Brisbane had been hammered so badly that the entire planetary ecosystem seemed to have collapsed. The radiation levels were so high that there was little point in searching for survivors.



No one could have expected what the Trolls had done, even after the handful of human worlds they’d depopulated along the way to New Brisbane. Anton had tried to classify the reports from New Brisbane, but enough had gotten out into the media to convince the entire United Nations that the Navy was unable to protect the core worlds any longer. The earlier panics now seemed like nothing as the core worlds took desperate steps for their own defence, recalling their crewmen and starships from duty with the combined fleets. If the Trolls had intended to shatter humanity’s fragile political consensus, they couldn't have done a better job – unless, of course, they had managed to flatten Earth. The entire planet now believed that Home Fleet was all that was standing between Earth and the same fate as New Brisbane.



Anton had spent the last few days moving from ship to ship, speaking with ordinary officers and crewmen while doing his best to avoid the politicians and their uniformed sycophants. He hadn't been surprised to discover that morale was falling sharply, with some officers openly questioning the value of continuing to fight. Even with the proof that their damnable new weapons weren't as effective as they looked, a growing despair and demoralisation was taking root in the UNNS. If the Trolls had offered halfway reasonable surrender teams, he suspected, the politicians would probably have accepted them. Instead, they’d destroyed an entire world with a population of billions of humans. There was no way to know what they would do if the human race surrendered unconditionally, the only thing that was keeping the politicians from making the offer.



They’d panicked in other ways too. Every starship that could fly and energise a beam had been called back to the core worlds. The borders with the Polis, the Sutra and the Triangle had been abandoned, leaving them at the mercy of raiders and pirates. Anton had heard the reports of increased pirate activity in the abandoned sectors, but there hadn't been anything that he could do about it. At least the Polis had taken over some of humanity’s policing duties; the Sutra had said nothing, yet Anton suspected that they intended to take advantage of humanity’s desperate situation. They had long coveted some of the worlds humanity had settled along the border and their leaders had to be tempted to grab them now, while they had a chance. It was even logical, from a defensive point of view. If the Trolls came gunning for them next, the human worlds they’d occupied would serve as an excellent buffer to give their navy time to build up its forces and face the Trolls. No doubt their intelligence service already had excellent data on every weapon humanity had built to throw at the Trolls, along with the reports of what weapons the Trolls used against humanity. They would learn from humanity’s woes.



Not that it really mattered, Anton knew. The United Nations was fragmenting, shattering the fragile economy that had bound humanity together. Edo had merely been the first world to present its withdrawal papers to the United Nations, recalling all of its personnel and starships from the Navy. Anton doubted that their attempt to seek a separate peace with the Trolls would get anywhere – the Trolls had merely repeated their demand for humanity’s unconditional surrender – but he couldn't blame them for trying. It was growing increasingly evident that the Navy couldn't stop the Trolls before the Trolls crushed the human race into radioactive debris.



They would have relieved him, Anton knew, in their desperate search for a scapegoat. Right now, the human population was demanding answers – and heads were rolling all across the United Nations. If the orders he’d been given, the orders forbidding him to defend Jupiter, hadn't leaked out into the media, he would already have been relieved of command. But as it happened, there had been massive riots across Earth after that had leaked out, because losing Jupiter had crippled Earth’s economy. The Halo, the network of asteroid stations and manufacturing facilities orbiting Earth, was grinding to a halt. Once Earth had used up its stockpile of HE3, there would be no more until the cloudscoops were rebuilt, or the mining stations on Luna were reopened. And that wouldn't come close to meeting Earth’s demands.



The remains of Admiral Howard’s fleet had linked up with Home Fleet; naturally, the politicians had refused to allow Admiral Howard to redeploy to another of the core worlds. It had sparked off yet another round of recriminations and backstabbing – and withdrawals – in the General Assembly, but the politicians had had no choice. Earth was the cradle of the human race; they couldn't take the risk of it falling to the Trolls. But the human race stood at bay, preparing for its last stand – and only a handful of people knew that Anton had started preparations for a post-war resistance. It was a secret he could never share with the Security Council, let alone the General Assembly.



“I wouldn't suggest saying that to the politicians,” Anton said, although there was no point in trying to hide the sheer scale of the defeat. At least Howard had managed to get most of his fleet out of the New Brisbane system – and they’d managed to update their exercises to deal with the new gunboats the Trolls had deployed. “They’re still intent on pulling everything back to Earth to stand shoulder to shoulder in the defence of humanity’s homeworld.”



Howard blinked at him. “They’re abandoning the rest of the core worlds?”



“I think that they haven’t realised just how dire the situation has become,” Anton admitted. “They were even talking about recalling 6th Fleet – even though the survey ships have found a new Troll world to target. I had to spend every last piece of my political capital to ensure that 6th Fleet was cleared to attack instead.”



“I see,” Howard said. “Admiral...can we win this war?”



Anton knew better than to attempt to dissemble. “Right now, the Trolls have the advantage,” he said, simply. “And they have effectively shattered our economy while theirs is as strong and vital as ever – and rather ingenious too. We may – may – be able to produce new weapons that will give us an advantage, but the Trolls will do their best to ensure that we have no window of opportunity to deploy them.”



Howard nodded. “We might be unable to put them into mass production before it is too late,” he said. “Or discover that they have their weaknesses. Superiority all over again.”



Anton had to smile. Superiority was a short story, written in the pre-space era by one of the men who had helped to shape humanity’s dreams of the future. It had focused on a space navy that had developed more and more advanced weapons, hoping to leap ahead of its smaller and weaker opponent. But each of the new weapons had produced new problems for the developers, eventually leading to their defeat by their technologically inferior enemy.



In some ways, the Trolls had that problem facing humanity. They could be hammered by bomb-pumped lasers fired from outside their own range, while starfighters could press the offensive through their point defence and take out their cruisers, despite absorbing staggering losses. In some ways, the short range of their death rays was actually a weakness. But the Trolls had adapted, produced new hardware and thrown it into the battle. Their gunboats not only countered the starfighters, it gave them the kind of striking power that they’d lacked before, allowing them to press the offensive against humanity’s carriers. Maybe the design had weaknesses, but so far nothing had become apparent. The human race was, once again, desperately trying to catch up with the Trolls.



“I took advantage of your arrival to send Admiral Singh and Admiral Mahomet out to New Washington and Unity,” Anton said, changing the subject. “In the event of something happening to me, you will assume command of Home Fleet while Admiral Lyudmila will become the Grand Admiral. While Singh and Mahomet have seniority, neither of them have enough combat experience facing the Trolls.”



Howard looked at him oddly. “Are you expecting to die, sir?”



“The Security Council – what’s left of it – is desperate,” Anton said, flatly. “I believe that they will respond badly if we suffer another defeat, probably by relieving me of command. In that case, Home Fleet needs the most experienced officer we have to hand in command.”



“I lost New Brisbane, sir,” Howard said. “I was expecting to be relieved when I brought the fleet back to the Sol System.”



“There aren't enough experienced officers for us to relieve those who lose to the Trolls,” Anton said. “The manpower situation is becoming desperate and morale is sinking rapidly. We cannot risk wholesale purges of the fleet’s command staff or efficiency will also fall through the deck. Right now, it’s all I can do to keep them from appointing political officers to...supervise commanding officers.”



Howard stared at him. “Are they crazy?”



“I had to relieve Commodore Van Sylmar for making remarks that the politicians regarded as threatening,” Anton said. “The politicians are scared, Paul. They fear that they have lost control over the Navy, that we might turn on them if they are blamed for the crisis – or that some of us will take advantage of the situation to launch a coup. Van Sylmar was openly suggesting taking over the reins of government for the duration of the war – God knows, we’re already in a state of martial law.”



He shook his head. “The United Nations survived as long as it did because it was built on compromises,” he added. “Each of the powerful states ensured that they would get a voice in affairs equal to the amount of money they invested in the United Nations. The smaller states ensured that their internal affairs would be left inviolate, no matter how far they strayed from anything anyone else would consider civilised. And the Navy was built up around the concept that it would be dominated by those who paid the bills.



“But the system never came under such extreme pressure before, not even during the worst years of the Magana War. Right now, the larger worlds are demanding that the Navy provides additional defence forces, while the smaller worlds are claiming that they have been abandoned to the Trolls. They want defences too...but if we try to meet all of those demands, the Navy will be spread so thin that defeat will be a certainty. And the politicians didn't help by openly interfering with military operations. There are even suspicions that some politicians took advantage of the declaration of martial law to take steps against their political opponents, or feather their own nests. Enough has leaked out to confirm those suspicions.”



Howard looked down at his hands. “So what do we do about it?”



“We hold the line for as long as we can,” Anton said. He wanted to brief Howard about Iceberg, about the plans to continue the war, but he was the only one left on Luna who knew about the project. If there was one advantage from all the chaos sweeping through the United Nations, it provided more than enough cover to hide the division of resources from the Navy to a secret base. According to the reports from Area 51, Phoenix was completing her trials; the hybrid ship would be ready for operations soon. Anton intended to bring her to Sol, to convince the politicians that the war was still winnable, but events might move too quickly for such a ploy to work. “And we hope that we can produce a diplomatic solution.”



“You mean surrender,” Howard said. “What happens if we lose Earth?”



“We lose almost all of our remaining starships,” Anton said. “And that means the end of the war.”

***​

Luna had a reputation for being an orderly place; four hundred years of being inhabited by people who knew the dangers of their own environment ensured that even political protest remained peaceful. But it wasn't peaceful any longer. Armstrong City, the largest of the underground cities dug under the lunar surface, had played host to a riot that had threatened to tear apart the city’s fragile gardens. In the end, the police had resorted to mass stunning and knocked out the entire crowd.



Hind picked her way through the rubble, shaking her head as the police moved past her, collecting the stunned bodies and moving them to recovery chambers. It was worse on Earth, she’d been told; even a global declaration of martial law hadn't been able to stop the panicking crowds from rioting. Everyone who had the money was trying to buy a seat on a starship away from Earth, heading to Innocence or one of the other alien worlds that had signalled a willingness to take in human refugees. The Sutra had closed their borders, while few wanted to go to the Polis. They might have been a remarkably civilised race, but they just happened to touch off the worst of humanity’s phobias.



“Halt,” a policeman snapped. He looked tired and beaten down, his body armour splashed with blood that wasn't his. “Where do you think you are going?”



“I have an interview with the Commissioner,” Hind said, quietly. She didn't like the way he was waving his stunner around, or the heavy automatic pistol he was carrying on his belt. Policemen on Luna rarely carried anything heavier than stunners, fearing the results of firing bullets through fragile chambers. One shot in the wrong place and the atmosphere would start spilling out of the city. “He asked me to visit him.”



“Well, I’ll just check that,” the policeman sneered. He took her ID card and placed a call into the network. Hind couldn't tell if he was just being an asshole, or if he was too tired to be police and well-mannered. It could have been a great deal worse. Some of the riots on Earth had resulted in massive bloodshed. “You appear to be cleared. Stan?”



“Yes, boss,” a policeman called.



“Escort this...reporter” – the way he said it made the word sound like whore – “to the Commissioner,” the policeman ordered. “Make sure she doesn't take the opportunity to loot along the way.”



Hind swallowed the response that came to mind as Stan escorted her away from the gardens, into the set of offices that served as Armstrong City’s Town Hall. They were surrounded by policemen, several holding automatic weapons openly. She was searched by a female police officer before being allowed to enter the Town Hall and escorted to the Commissioner’s office. The Commissioner looked around as she entered and gave her a tired smile. He looked like a man who hadn't slept for several weeks.



“This probably wasn't the best time,” he said, dryly. Hind couldn't help, but agree with him. “The riot you might have witnessed wasn't even the worst on the moon.”



“Oh,” Hind said. “What started this riot?”



“Some asshole started a rumour that the Mayor of Armstrong City had pulled strings to get himself and his family out of the solar system before the hammer came down,” the Commissioner said. “It wasn't true, as far as anyone could tell, but word spread and anger blossomed and...we ended up with a riot. You’d think that people on Luna would know not to riot in public. There are democratic ways to deal with any problem.”



“They probably thought that they wouldn't work fast enough,” Hind said. Luna’s government was a legacy from the days where national and corporate interests had dominated political discourse. The elected officials couldn't be recalled without a long process that probably wouldn't trap the Mayor on Luna, if he had managed to get tickets to escape the solar system. Hind had done a little research and discovered that it cost millions of UN credits to buy even a small space on a freighter. “God knows that the politicians have let us down badly.”



The Commissioner didn't bother to disagree. “You can go back to your...organisation and tell them not to incite more riots,” he said. “This one could have done real damage to the lunar infrastructure that keeps us alive. You want to know what could have happened next?”



Hind shook her head. “I think I know,” she said. “I do have other questions...”



The Commissioner shook his head, looking down at a message on his terminal. “I have just been asked to send two hundred officers to New Vegas,” he said. “Apparently, the rioting there has gotten completely out of control.”



Hind shook her head. New Vegas had started life as an entertainment centre for lunar miners, providing drink, gambling and women. Not the sort of place her mother would want her to go, naturally. Now...



She smiled. “Can I accompany your men?”



“I’m afraid not,” the Commissioner said. “The report suggests that the rioting may be impossible to quench without bloodshed. I’d prefer not to have a civilian in the area at the time.”



“Bearing witness,” Hind said. If there were any inquests, let alone trials...the Trolls might reach Earth before anyone could hold any trials. “I see what you mean.”



“Tell your bosses what I told them,” the Commissioner said. “We don’t need more reporters encouraging the masses to riot.”

 

Hah - got them all uploaded, whew!

Chris

 

Great to see you go them all up, great read as always

 

Thanks for the updates, it's a great story. This hot weather has made this a great weekend to catch up.

 

Chapter Forty-One



Troll-2

3rd October 2435



Admiral Beatty had been polite, but firm.



“I’m afraid that the war situation demands desperate measures, Commodore,” he’d said. “We must launch an attack on the system immediately.”



“They know we’re here,” Jess had said, sharply. It was true. Troll-2 was much more heavily defended than Troll-1 – and the Trolls had caught and destroyed one of the survey ships as they probed the system, collecting tactical data for 6th Fleet. There was no escaping the fact that Troll-2 was very definitely a naval and industrial centre for the Trolls, or the fact that they had assigned over seventy starships to defend it. 6th Fleet would out-number the Trolls, but that had been true of almost every battle since the war had begun. It hadn't stopped the Trolls from pushing humanity back until they reached the core worlds themselves. “We should look for another target.”



“Except there isn't time for another target,” Beatty had said. “The Trolls have reached Earth!”



His words echoed in her mind as Magellan approached the Troll world, under cloak. Troll-2 was heavily industrialised, with a number of industrial stations in orbit around the largest gas giant and a handful of smaller stations orbiting the inhabited world. Unlike humanity, the Trolls seemed to have placed most of the system’s industry near the gas giant, splitting their defensive capabilities in two. Jess couldn't tell if that was overconfidence – or if the Trolls had good reason to be overconfident. Seventy Troll starships was nothing to laugh at, even when they were in stationary orbit around the planets. Instead, they were sweeping space close to the gas giant, hunting for more survey ships.



The display lit up as 6th Fleet jumped into the star system, without even trying to hide itself. Jess had argued that they should make their approach under cloak, but the Admiral had pointed out that there was no way three hundred starships would be able to reach firing range of either of the planets before the Trolls detected them, even if the Trolls hadn't been running search patterns through local space. Instead, they would come into firing range with all the subtlety of a punch in the face. Jess found herself praying that the Admiral was right as 6th Fleet started to move in towards the industrial centres. A moment later, the Troll starships jumped into position, forming a line between the human ships and their targets.



“The Admiral is launching starfighters,” the tactical officer reported. Jess nodded as new icons flashed into life, each one representing a single human starfighter. The Admiral had informed her that he’d had his pilots drilling endlessly, as soon as the survey officers had handed over the tactical data on Troll-2. Janine hoped they were right. The news from Earth had warned that the enemy were now deploying small craft of their own. “No sign of any gunboats yet.”



Jess frowned. Logically, the Trolls would have been rushing all the gunboats forward to the war front with the human race. It was quite possible that they had neglected to deploy them to worlds they had believed were secure...if they still believed Troll-2 to be secure. They’d detected and destroyed a survey ship already, enough to tell them that Troll-2 had been located. Simple logic suggested that they would have brought more starships up from deeper into their territory, as well as all the gunboats they could muster. Unless they believed that the survey ship had been alone...no, that wasn't likely. Whatever else could be said about the Trolls, they weren't particularly stupid – or optimistic.



A moment later, the Admiral’s fleet started belching missiles towards the Troll starships, each one armed with a single bomb-pumped laser. The Trolls tightened their defensive formation, but otherwise didn't react, although there was little they could do until the missiles entered energy range. Unless, of course, they jumped out of the way...but in that case the Admiral’s tactical staff had added a new wrinkle. The missiles would head onwards, following a ballistic course, until they reached the industrial stations, whereupon they would detonate and destroy the targets. Or so they hoped. The Trolls were no doubt producing their own new surprises for the human race.



“The fleet is approaching the planet’s gravity shadow,” the tactical officer added, a moment later. “They should be safe from any flux guns...”



Safer, Jess thought. The best the analysts had been able to suggest for coping with the latest surprise from the Trolls had been to hide within a planet’s gravity shadow, counting on the gravity to provide some cover from the flux gun. It might work, at a cost of making it harder to jump out of the system if the Trolls proved too strong for 6th Fleet to overcome. But there was no other choice. The alternative was to run up the white flag and surrender.



The missiles reached engagement range – and detonated, firing powerful laser beams towards their targets. Jess watched, first in exultation and then in puzzlement as only a handful of Troll starships vanished from the display. The probes the Admiral had launched were showing Troll starships surviving direct hits, without revealing any damage at all. As the hits mounted, the puzzle only grew stranger. There was too little debris drifting where the Troll starships had been destroyed...



“Son of a...” The tactical officer caught himself and looked up at Jess. “Captain, those Troll starships are decoys!”



Jess saw it a moment later. The Trolls had known that the system was being watched, so they’d planned a trap, using decoy drones to trick 6th Fleet into expending its first missile barrage on a non-existent enemy fleet. And that meant that their starships had to be elsewhere... The Admiral evidently agreed, for he was launching drones himself, sweeping local space for Troll starships hiding under cloak. His starfighters turned back, unwilling to expend themselves on drones...



...Just as new red icons flickered into life. Jess saw the ambush taking shape as the Troll ships materialised near 6th Fleet, rushing in towards the fleet’s rear. They’d hidden in interplanetary space and then jumped in, bringing the range down with terrifying speed. The Admiral’s cruisers opened fire the moment the Trolls entered firing range, but the Trolls were running evasive patterns that nothing short of a starfighter could match. Only two Troll starships were hit before the remainder got into firing range.



Death rays flared out, lashing into the fleet carriers that made up the bulk of the Admiral’s striking power. Jess watched in horror as they cut into drive sections, slicing through solid hullmetal and deep into their vitals, destroying their ability to pull back and jump out of the system. Up close, the bomb-pumped lasers mounted on the human starships could and did firer back at the Troll ships, but the Trolls pressed the offensive. A fleet carrier vaporised, followed rapidly by an assault carrier and a pair of makeshift carriers built on freighter hulls.



The starfighters roared through the human formation and fell on the Troll ships, desperate to save their mobile bases from the Trolls. Their enemies didn’t hesitate; they fired their death rays as the starfighters closed in, sweeping deadly beams through space and wiping out hundreds of starfighters before the remainder entered firing range. A dozen Troll starships died in fire, but the remainder kept pressing the attack, slicing into the rear of 6th Fleet. Jess found herself praying that the Admiral would order the remainder of the fleet to escape, yet it was already too late. The Trolls had crippled or destroyed all of the fleet’s carriers.



A human cruiser rammed a Troll starship, destroying both vessels; other cruisers moved up and attempted to cover the damaged carriers. The Trolls fired on them, slicing through their hulls and sending them staggering out of formation, before returning to the fleet carriers and picking them off, one by one. Jess could only watch helplessly as the remaining carriers started to take heavy damage, explosions ripping through their hulls until they were no longer able to function. Seconds later, they started to explode as their crews jumped into lifepods and blasted away from the ships, hoping for rescue before the Trolls could pick off the lifepods. But 6th Fleet had been shattered. The Admiral was dead and tactical command had been lost.



The remaining jump-capable ships jumped out, leaving the stranded survivors to face the wrath of the Trolls. Jess heard two of her officers cursing as the Trolls finally destroyed the remaining ships, before targeting and obliterating the lifepods. The offensive had turned into a complete disaster, yet the Trolls weren't even trying to take prisoners! Surely they realised that if they picked up survivors and made them prisoners other human ships would surrender. Or maybe they just didn't care. It boded ill for the future of the human race.



One by one, the Troll starships fell silent, leaving the remainder of the fleet – a vast field of debris – drifting silently through space. For a moment, they almost seemed to be paying their respects to the fleet, before they jumped out and vanished. Jess watched them go, wishing for FTL sensors – or a StarCom network – that would allow her to tell where they had gone. They might be lying in wait for other starships, or they might be going home to tell their fellows what they had done to an imprudent human fleet. There was no way to know.



The entire engagement, she realised suddenly, had lasted less than fifteen minutes. Less, really; the Admiral had held his fire until they entered firing range of the decoy ships, intending to force them to fight at a disadvantage. Instead, the Trolls had outthought him and this was the result. Jess looked at the shattered remains of a dozen fleet carriers, twisting helplessly in the vacuum of space, and shivered. 6th Fleet had been destroyed so rapidly that the Troll industrial stations had taken no damage at all. The fleet had been destroyed for nothing.



It was difficult to tell if there were still lifepods operating within the debris field. Before the war, lifepods had been equipped with beacons that had signalled their location to any passing starship, but that had been before the Trolls started burning them out of space. These days, lifepods only activated their beacons in response to a specific signal from a SAR craft, which suggested that there might still be other lifepods within the wreckage. Taking her starship close enough to search for survivors was risky, but she owed it to the Navy to try. They had left too many people behind ever since the war had begun.



“Take us in close, then pulse the lifepods,” she ordered. The Trolls might miss her if she kept her ship under stealth, but she would be ready to run if their fleet returned to pick off the last surviving human ship in the system. “Engineering; keep the flux drive ready to go on a moment’s notice. We may have to run for our lives.”



The bean-counters aren’t going to be happy about that, part of her mind whispered as Magellan approached the debris. Each flux drive cost the Navy plenty of money – and keeping them on standby, flexing power through the system, placed plenty of wear and tear on the jump generator. Just by keeping it on standby, the lifetime of the generator would be sharply reduced. The Trolls had somehow found a solution to that problem, but as far as she knew the human race hadn't come close to cracking it for themselves. Or maybe it was an illusion. The Trolls could simply be replacing their drives every few missions.



A silence fell over her bridge as the debris field came into view. The remains of a cruiser – sliced in half by a Troll death ray – drifted out in front of the ship, spinning helplessly through space. Countless pieces of debris spun after it, separating from a piece of wreckage so badly damaged that only its size marked it as part of a fleet carrier, posing a very real threat to anything that happened to pass through the field. A fleet carrier loomed into existence, looking deceptively intact until she saw the damage inflicted on its forward hull when a Troll death ray had sliced through the ship and deep into its vitals. Her crew, Jess hoped, would have died instantly, rather than remaining trapped in isolated compartments as the life support slowly ran out.



As a young officer, Jess had been one of the first people to respond to an explosion onboard a passenger liner that had crippled the luxury starship. Some lucky passengers had survived, but most of the vessel’s complement had died in the blast, or moments later when the air spilled out into space, leaving those who had survived the blast without air. The naval crewmen had picked their way through the debris, searching for survivors in places the specifications suggested that there should have been trapped air and spacesuits, yet some of the passengers had died before they could be located. It had taken too long to search the remains of the massive starship. Right now, Jess knew that they simply didn't have time to even start poking through the wreckage.



“I have a handful of lifepod beacons,” the sensor officer said, finally. “Two of them appear to be very low power; the remainder are nominal...”



Jess keyed her console. “Shuttles, you are clear to pick up the survivors,” she ordered. She hesitated, and then added a second order. “You are authorised to skip standard safety precautions when departing and returning to this vessel.”



On the display, the shuttles skimmed out from Magellan’s position, combing their way through the debris field and picking up the lifepods. Jess watched grimly as they passed a hunk of debris from a fleet carrier, before the first shuttle located its target. The pilots didn't attempt to report in, knowing that too many radio transmissions could attract the Trolls; they merely picked up the lifepod, linked airlocks and brought the lucky handful of survivors into their shuttle. One by one, the handful of lifepod beacons were silenced as the survivors were recovered.



“I have been unable to locate any more beacons,” the sensor officer said, grimly. “I could repeat the signal at greater power...”



Jess considered it before dismissing the idea. “I think that that will risk attracting attention,” she said. Why hadn't the Trolls sent their own post-battle assessment teams out to sift through the wreckage? The UNNS always sent assessment teams to every battle, at least ones where the UNNS had driven their enemies out of the system. Were the Trolls so contemptuous of human life and technology, or did their leaders fear what would happen if their people actually met humans face to face? Maybe the Troll government was a fascist state, constantly expanding by war and crushing everything in its path. It would have been unusual, but it wasn't as if there was a certain development path that every race had to follow. “Recall the shuttles. We’ll jump out of the system as soon as they return to the ship.”



The tactical officer stared at her. “Captain...”



“That’s an order, mister,” Jess snapped. She understood why he would want to dissent, why they would all want to dissent, to protest their orders. There might be any number of crewmen left in the drifting wreckage, dying slowly as their air ran out. But there was no choice. They had to leave the system and report in to the Admiralty to inform them that 6th Fleet had been effectively destroyed by the Trolls. And then...? Jess had no idea what they would do next. 6th Fleet had been the largest unit that the Admiralty had been willing to cut loose from the inner worlds. They certainly wouldn't agree to send another fleet so far from the core worlds. “Recall the shuttles, now.”



She settled back in her command chair as the shuttles returned to the ship. Between them, they had pulled fifty-seven survivors out of the wreckage; fifty-seven, out of a crew complement that had been over twenty thousand human beings. Even the worst days of the Magana War hadn't seen such one-sided slaughter. God alone knew how many losses the Trolls had taken, but it wouldn't be anything like as heavy as the losses the human race had suffered. And their industrial plant remained intact, ready to produce replacements for everything they had lost.



“Captain, all shuttles have returned to the ship,” the helmsman said. “Jump drives are online and ready to jump us out of here.”



Jess stared at the handful of icons representing the Troll industrial facilities. If only there was a way to strike back at the Trolls, to make them pay for what they had done to the human race. Perhaps she could slip missiles into the system and point them at the planet, boosting them up to near-light speeds and rendering interception almost impossible...



She shook her head. Hadn't there been a time when she had been terrified at the thought of slaughtering millions of unarmed civilians?



“Jump us out of here,” she ordered, already composing her report to the Admiralty. They wouldn’t be pleased to read it, but there was no choice. The Admirals had to know that 6th Fleet had been wiped from existence. “And take us to the first RV point.”



The Troll system vanished from the display, to be replaced by the featureless stars of interstellar space. 6th Fleet’s colossal fleet train – a hundred freighters stocked with missiles and other supplies – had been waiting for them, intending to rearm the fleet...a prospect that was now no longer possible. Jess watched as the ships exchanged signals, trying to come to terms with the scale of the disaster. God alone knew what they would do now. The fleet train carried enough weapons to fight a war for several months, assuming that they had had any warships to fight with...



“Activate the StarCom,” she ordered. “I need to transmit the report to the Admiralty.”

 

Chapter Forty-Two



Luna

5th October 2435



The Security Council had hired new guards, Anton noted. Normally, their chambers were guarded by United Nations Marines, a specialist unit trained in protecting the politicians from any of their constituents who might feel like taking their dissent into a more violent sphere than local politics. Now, they had produced new guards, wearing uniforms that he didn't recognise and holding him outside until the Security Council deigned to receive him. It didn't bode well for the future.



But then, nothing boded well for the future. The news from Troll-2 had come in only seven hours ago, yet it had already leaked out into the datanet. An entire fleet lost, without inflicting serious damage on the enemy...Earth was panicking, even more than it had been after the first Troll raid on the system. Anton had gambled by sending 6th Fleet so far from the core worlds and lost. The Trolls had obliterated the fleet for minimal losses – and ensured that the Security Council would never approve a second deployment on such a scale.



Not that it really mattered, he reflected. Even if he hadn't been sure that the Trolls were watching the system, they simply couldn't afford to risk uncovering Earth or any of the other core worlds for so long. The news was an unmigrated liturgy of horror; Troll attacks on the core worlds, pirate attacks along the borders and rioting on all of the worlds that humanity knew must be defended. Piece by piece, the United Nations was coming apart; right now, Anton wouldn't have bet on the Trolls arriving to finish the job before the politicians did it for them. There were so many recriminations in the General Assembly that armed guards had had to separate some of the politicians before they could kill some of their fellows. The cynical part of Anton’s mind wondered if that wouldn't have been an improvement on the current situation.



He looked up as the door opened, revealing a guard who spoke rapidly to another guard, passing on a message without using the local datanet. Anton shrugged as the guards beckoned him forward and motioned him through the door, before they started scanning him with various security sensors. He had never had to go through a security check before entering the council’s chambers, but it was just another sign of their growing paranoia. On Earth, the police and military had had to put most of the cities into lockdown, just to keep a lid on the growing violence. The media just kept feeding the chaos with reports of more losses, police overreactions and economic damage. Even if the Trolls just blinked out of existence tomorrow, the United Nations would never be the same again.



“He’s clean,” the guard said, finally. Anton had never been treated with such disrespect either, but right now it didn't seem particularly important. “You can take him through into the chamber.”



Inside, there were more armed guards, some of them eyeing each other nervously. It took Anton a moment to realise that there were actually several different groups of armed bodyguards inside the chambers, each one as paranoid about their fellows as they were about outside threats. Anton knew that that would be a recipe for disaster under normal circumstances, but right now it was the only way the politicians probably felt safe. They’d brought in units from their homeworld to protect themselves from a military they no longer really trusted, not that it mattered. Anton also knew that a single KEW from lunar orbit would destroy the entire chamber without putting boots on the ground. He didn't bother to point it out to any of the guards. It would only have upset them – and their masters.



A strange sense of fatalism overwhelmed him as he was escorted into the main chamber. Five of the Ambassadors were missing, he realised at once; their worlds had effectively withdrawn from the United Nations. Not that it had saved them; Edo had suffered a devastating attack only two days ago, with the Trolls sweeping through the system, destroying everything within range and then retreating, leaving the self-defence force to stare after them in important fury. The only reason the Trolls hadn't pressed the offensive and occupied the system, Anton suspected, was that they didn't have to occupy the system to cripple Edo. Their attack had already done enough damage to keep the system out of the war until they chose to occupy it.



The news never grew any better. They’d started running convoys of HE3 from the core systems to Earth, but the Trolls were continuing their pressure on the remaining cloudscoops. It was strange to realise that something as...common as HE3 could become scarce, yet the Trolls had discovered a weak point in humanity’s industrial base and were exploiting it for all it was worth. The UN was slowly grinding to a halt, with shipping shortages everywhere – and entire fleets of refugees stumbling around, no longer knowing where to go to find safety. There was even a report that a freighter commander had sold a few thousand refugees into slavery with a pirate group. Anton had no way of knowing if that report was serious, but it showed just how badly the world was breaking down. The UN was dying.



“Admiral,” the Ambassador from New Washington said. “You have presided over the greatest disaster to strike the human race.”



So he was to be their scapegoat, Anton realised. It wasn’t really a surprise. He’d done the best he could, as had the rest of the Navy, but the Trolls had simply kept coming and coming until they had brought the human race to the brink of total defeat. No previous war could match the number of civilians and military personnel who had died in this war, not on the thousands of dead starships or the planets the Trolls had bombarded. Even the Magana had blanched at the thought of such wanton slaughter.



“You have persistently failed to bring us victory,” another Ambassador said.



Anton was tempted to point out that no one, not even the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, could have hoped to bring the human race victory, at least without knowing far more about the Trolls than he had known at the start of the war. But he knew that it was human nature to seek out scapegoats, to find someone who could serve as a focus for resentment and terror, no matter the lack of logic. The Trolls had opened the war by firing on Admiral Hanson’s squadron, back at New Marseilles. No one could have prevented them from opening the war.



But had there been points when disaster could have been averted? Could he have reinforced the outer worlds quicker? Or could he have convinced the Security Council to declare martial law and get humanity’s industrial base rationalised much earlier? Everything he’d done had seemed logical, at the time; they’d just persistently underestimated the Trolls. And their greatest victory, the capture of a Troll starship, had never been advertised to the UN’s population. It had had to remain a secret.



Not, in the end, that it really mattered. He could play the game of ‘what might have been’ for the rest of his life, if necessary, yet it wouldn't change the simple fact that the human race stood at bay, waiting for the Trolls to launch their final offensive. Home Fleet had been massively reinforced by every starship, spacecraft or starfighter the Admiralty had been able to scrape up, but Anton knew that it wouldn't be enough. Once the Trolls had gathered their forces, they would move on Earth and shatter the core of human resistance. And that would be the end of the war.



Some worlds would probably be left alone for months; the RockRats would hide themselves, but they might not be able to win. The only hope for freedom – and victory – lay with Project Iceberg, the one project he had been unable to share with the Security Council. God alone knew what they would do with the knowledge, perhaps offer it to the Trolls in exchange for their lives and power bases. Anton knew that they were still trying to talk to the Trolls, to end the war – and right now, they might just have steeled themselves to accept the single offer the Trolls had made to them. Unconditional surrender.



“We have no choice, but to relieve you of duty,” the Ambassador from New Washington said. Was there shame in his voice? Anton couldn’t tell, but it seemed unlikely. “You will pass command of the Navy to Admiral Dennison.”



Anton gritted his teeth. He knew there was no point in trying to defend himself, but he had to plead for the future of the Navy. Admiral Dennison had advanced in the ranks through an absolute willingness to do whatever his political patrons had wanted him to do, from serving as their eyes and ears in the Navy to following orders, whatever they happened to be. And he was an abject coward. Admiral Dennison had spent the war in the relatively safe naval base at Bandwidth and had never encountered the Trolls.



“Admiral Dennison is not suitable command material,” he said, finally. “He does not enjoy the confidence of his subordinates.”



And that was a colossal understatement. It was inevitable that Admirals with political connections – and the right accidents of birth – would reach high rank, but Anton had spent much of his time trying to keep unqualified officers out of senior posts. Admiral Dennison’s performances at various fleet exercises – where his principle response to failure was to pick scapegoats from among his subordinates and blame them for his mistakes – hadn't even managed to reach mediocre.



“Admiral Dennison is an officer with a superb understanding of the political realities,” one of the Ambassadors said. The fix was in, Anton realised. Someone had come up with a political compromise that had pushed Admiral Dennison to the forefront of their minds, in exchange for...what? There was no way to know. “We feel that he will be able to reassure the fleet...”



“He won’t,” Anton said, flatly. “This is not an issue where political realities are important. The defence of Earth requires an officer who knows what he’s doing – and can pull the best from his subordinates. If you put Admiral Dennison in command, it will shatter the fleet’s confidence in its command structure and that will be disastrous.”



There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “Admiral,” one of the Ambassadors said, finally, “what are you saying?”



Anton threw caution to the winds. “Admiral Dennison is an idiot who will get a great many people killed,” he snapped. “If you want to bargain with the Trolls, you’ll be in a better position to do it before the Trolls destroy Earth’s defences.”



The Ambassadors exchanged glances. “Very well,” one of them said, finally. “We will allow you to nominate your own successor. And then you will resign your position.”



Anton nodded. “If you no longer have faith in me, I can no longer serve,” he said. Oddly, even though he knew that the human race was in a desperate position, he still felt a little relieved at passing the responsibility on to someone else. “I will see to it that the next Admiral takes command, followed by resigning.”



He stood up, saluted them and marched out of their chambers. There was work to do, including his final set of orders to the fleet – and to Iceberg. And then he could go home and reflect on the fact that, for once in his life, there was nothing more to do.

***​

Anton had never owned an apartment of his own until he’d been promoted to Admiral and spent more time on Luna than on starships. He’d purchased a fairly small flat and fitted it out as a place to rest when he wasn’t in the Admiralty HQ, resisting the temptation to purchase a much larger building for himself. Anton had never married – all of his girlfriends had eventually gone onwards, leaving him alone – and right now he felt alone. And his heart felt heavy with the weight of the secrets he'd taken with him when he left the building for the final time.



By now, Area 51 would be evacuating its personnel and equipment to Iceberg, abandoning the UN’s most secret research establishment. Phoenix would be on her way to Earth, in the hopes of using her existence to convince the politicians that the war was not hopeless, a final desperate gamble. And then Phoenix would jump back into interstellar space and prepare to resume the war once the Trolls completed the destruction of human independence. She would be the last best hope of mankind.



He could understand how the politicians felt, even though they should know better. It was hard enough for him to accept that the human race was staring right down the barrel of racial extinction, or at the very least permanent servitude. There was something about the human mind that simply refused to tolerate the prospect of absolute failure, or that the end might finally have come. Even with the Trolls slaughtering vast numbers of human civilians, it was hard to imagine that they would get them all. The UN had settled over three hundred colony worlds; the RockRats had spread themselves across countless asteroids, seeding settlements in locations that everyone else had dismissed as unimportant. And there were sooner colonies that had headed out far beyond the limits of explored space.



And yet the Trolls might bring all that to an end.



There was no way of knowing why the Trolls had opened the war. All attempts to open up a diplomatic dialogue with them had failed. There was no shortage of theories, but nothing that could be proven; the Trolls were silent, enigmatic, and focused on their goal. The destruction – or enslavement – of humanity. Some people wondered if the human race had accidentally started the war, some wondered if the Trolls had interpreted the first contact package as a declaration of war...and some believed that the Trolls were just nasty bastards. It would be humanity’s luck that they ran into an antidemocratic society that had somehow managed to make its way into space. Even the monarchist Sutra had more social mobility than any of humanity’s antidemocratic societies.



He shook his head. It didn't matter, any more than the regret the Navy had shown when he’d announced his resignation and Admiral Lyudmila’s succession to the rank of Grand Admiral had mattered. Anton had been relieved, in the end, to discover that the Navy had held him in some regard, but again it didn't really matter. All that mattered was that he had failed in his duty to protect the human race.



Admiral Cicero had committed suicide after her shattering defeat at the hands of the Trolls. Anton had considered following her course and ending his own life, but he had been unable to take that final step. There was still too much he wanted to see and do in this life, if he ever had the chance. To go skydiving on Jupiter, to walk along the strange alien cities on Lovecraft, to actually play tourist rather than remaining on Luna and watching helplessly as the human race faced extinction...maybe he’d have a chance to indulge himself. There was nothing else he could do.



There was a tap on the door. Anton stood up, surprised. Word of his resignation had spread rapidly, but no one knew where he lived. Or so he thought; someone might just have bribed someone else at the Admiralty to reveal the location of his bolthole. For a moment, he considered just leaving the interloper outside, but then he walked towards the door. Perhaps he could finally have the pleasure of telling one of those media vultures what he thought of them.



The door opened, revealing a man wearing a black trenchcoat and carrying a small gun. Anton jumped back, not quickly enough. There was a faint hiss and something slammed into his chest, breaking through his skin. A moment later, he lost control of his legs and staggered to the floor. The assassin looked down at him for a long moment, watching as Anton’s eyesight started to fade, before walking away and closing the door behind him. Anton felt his strength shimmer away into darkness...

***​

Hind had received the tip-off from a contact she’d made at the local police department, but she still had to call in two other favours before she could see the crime scene. None of the neighbours had known that they were sharing an apartment block with the Navy’s Grand Admiral – the former Grand Admiral, Hind knew – but they’d been more than happy to talk to her. The problem was that they’d seen and heard nothing until someone had come from the Admiralty to hand over the Admiral’s possessions and discovered the Admiral lying on the ground, quite dead.



The body was unmarked, save for a single bloodstain on the Admiral’s white shirt. Two doctors were bending over it, making notes for the police record, while a set of armed Marines watched them closely. There seemed to be a tension between the police and the Marines, Hind realised, as the doctors did their work. She’d heard enough rumours to thoroughly alarm her. The Admiral was dead...and God alone knew how the Navy would react.



“There's no traces of what killed him, at least none detectable with portable equipment,” one of the doctor said, finally. “But from the wound, I’d say that he was shot with crystallised neurotoxin. The poison will have broken down in his body before he died, rendering it almost impossible to detect.”



“Swell,” the Marine grunted. “So who killed him?”



“Unknown,” a policeman said. “A forensic team is on its way. It will locate any traces of the killer and help us to track him down.”



The Marines didn't look convinced. And, Hind realised, she wasn’t convinced either. Only one group of people had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the former Grand Admiral – apart from the Trolls. And the Trolls had never hired humans to do their dirty work.