Armageddon (40 page)

He didn’t expect Shallah to keep him waiting for very long. They’d already waited years while refitting their fleet with quantum jump drives. Now all they had to do was use them.

Omnius smiled.
Let them come.

Chapter 36

“T
en minutes to jump!” the helm reported.

“Battle groups one through fifteen standing by; all battalions and squadrons ready for launch,” Lieutenant Devries said from the comms.

“Good. Carry on,” Therius said.

Farah stood at the captain’s table with him, looking over the battle plan one last time. She caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, accompanied by a familiar
clanking
sound. Glancing that way, Farah spotted Drone 767 relieving one of the guards at the entrance of the bridge. The other guard was, Torv, the
Liberator’s
chief of security. Torv eyed the drone and hissed as it shuffled into position on the other side of the entrance. Farah wondered about that, thinking that 767 should have been in the hangar getting ready to launch with the rest of the drone battalion.

“Captain Hale?” Therius prompted.

“Sorry, go on.” Farah returned her attention to the captain’s table, and Therius went back to highlighting the key points of their plan.

The fleet was to jump straight from Origin into orbit over Avilon, maintaining a diffuse shell around the entire planet. That meant their forces would be spread out, which wasn’t an ideal formation to deal with any defending fleets that Avilon might have waiting for them, but recent intelligence showed there was no significant orbital presence, and most important of all, no Icosahedron.

“You’re sure that intel is reliable?” Farah asked.

“It’s only a day old,” Therius replied.

Farah nodded. It would have to do. Their intel from the Getties showed that the individual Facets of Omnius’s Icosahedron were still returning from their nanite-seeding missions to a local rendezvous. So far only about half of the Facets had arrived at that rendezvous, and since it was unlikely Omnius would want to present only half of New Avilon to his people, it would be some time before the Icosahedron was ready to leave. No doubt Omnius would start calculating a jump to Avilon just as soon as they attacked, but those calculations would take at least a week.

That was how long they had to conquer the planet. They had a window of opportunity, but it was far from wide open. Avilon had a garrison of millions of drone fighters, which was more than enough to repel the Union by itself. That was the reason they were jumping in so close to the planet. They had to bombard the garrison out of existence before it could launch more than a handful of fighters. There was a risk that they’d lose a few ships from accidentally jumping into the planet’s atmosphere, but they’d drilled this over and over again for a reason. Their jump algorithms were all as finely-tuned as they could get. Losses would be minimal.

“This is it,” Therius declared.

Farah pursed her lips and shook her head. She looked up and met Therius’s pale blue eyes with her darker ones. “What about the Armageddon Protocol?”

“That’s classified, Captain,” Therius growled. “We’ve already discussed it, and you’d do well not to open the discussion again here.”

Farah’s mouth opened halfway to object, but she caught herself.

“Trust me, Captain Hale.” Therius said, his blue eyes fierce with a fiery gleam.

But she
didn’t
trust him. They’d had more than a few discussions about the Armageddon Protocol over the past few days, and each time Therius had insisted that they wouldn’t actually need to use the nanites. The bombs were a last resort. Omnius would back down. But Farah wasn’t willing to bet the survival of the human race on it.

She had a last resort of her own. Therius was on board the
Liberator,
and it was her ship even more than it was his. His presence on the bridge over the past eight years had been fleeting at best, but hers had been constant. He wasn’t as familiar with the crew, and he didn’t know all the inner workings of the ship. Any orders Therius gave would have to be routed through the
Liberator’s
comm system, and Farah had set up an emergency lock-down program that would catch and block any outbound comms until she gave the encryption key to deactivate the program. If she determined that Therius was about to give the order to detonate the nanites, she would block the order and expose his plot. At that point, Therius would have a mutiny on his hands. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Are you all right, Captain?” Therius asked.

Farah regarded him with a grim smile. “Yes, I was just thinking about what it will be like when Avilon is ours. This day has been a long time in coming.”

Therius nodded. “It has indeed.” Turning away from her, he called down to the comms officer. “We’re ready for launch, Lieutenant Devries. Alert the fleet and put the countdown on screen.”

“Yes, sir.”

A moment later, the jump timer appeared on the main holo display, counting backward from five minutes. Everything was pre-calculated and synchronized, so as soon as that clock hit zero, all of their ships would jump.

“Comms!” Therius called. “What’s the status of the Eclipser?”

“Ready and waiting aboard Drop Ship One, sir.”

“Good. Remind them to activate it as soon as we arrive.”

Farah grimaced. Their entire plan hinged on that device. It was theoretically impossible to locate, so it wouldn’t be an immediate target, but capital ships like the
Liberator
would come under heavy fire during the battle, so the safest place to keep the device was actually on Avilon. The 1st Battalion was tasked with carrying it down and defending it. In order to keep it hidden, they’d disguised it to look like a piece of debris, but that would do nothing to prevent accidental destruction. Farah hoped for all of their sakes that nothing happened to the Eclipser.

She watched the timer run down, her heart pounding in her chest. She felt light-headed. This was it—over eight years of training culminating in one decisive engagement that would probably only last a couple of days.

“Ten seconds to launch!” Lieutenant Devries announced from the comms.

The countdown became audible, and Farah closed her eyes. She focused on taking deep, calming breaths. A deafening roar rose on the air. Wind began whipping through the bridge, tearing at her uniform and hair. A powerful radiance shone through her eyelids, revealing a spider’s web of veins. Then the countdown reached one, and a loud
bang!
sounded.

Farah opened her eyes to see Avilon lying close before them, taking up all of their view. The planet shone bright in the light of the system’s sun, its terminator line casting a slow-moving shadow between day and night.

“Report!” Therius called out.

Farah gazed down on the captain’s table and checked the star map to see for herself how the jump had gone. Sensors were still catching up, populating the map with contacts. Thousands of green dots appeared in orbit all around Avilon, but so far only a handful of enemy contacts. That was good. Then she noticed something strange. Everything to the rear of their position was grayed out. Something was blocking scanners there. The gray area was arc-shaped and
close
behind them…

Looking up quickly, Farah saw the terminator line moving across the surface of Avilon for what it really was. Something
big
was moving between Avilon and its sun.

“What the…” the gravidar officer trailed off, noticing the same thing as her.

“Get me an aft view and put in on screen!” Therius ordered.

“Yes, sir!”

At first, what they saw behind them looked like stars and space, but those pinpricks of light were too dim and closely-spaced to be stars. Even more telling, the sun was half eclipsed, as if the fabric of space itself had been torn and the edges overlapped where the sun was supposed to be. Silhouetted in the blinding light of the system’s sun Farah saw a trailing cloud of tiny black triangles.

Facets!
she thought. Their intel had been wrong. The Icosahedron was already here.

“It’s a trap!” she screamed.

* * *

Farah turned to Therius, her eyes wide and blinking. Omnius had been waiting for them. They had to jump away before it was too late.

“It’s too late to go back now,” Therius said, as if he’d read her mind. Turning away, he began snapping orders at the crew: “Devries, tell the fleet to commence bombardment! Launch all drop ships and fighters, and activate the Eclipser
now!
”

“Yes, sir!” Devries said from the comms station.

“Gunnery! Open fire!”

“Roger that,” the gunnery chief said.

“What happened?” Farah demanded. “Intel showed all the Facets in the Getties regrouping before the jump to Avilon. What are they doing here?”

Therius shook his head. “Only half of them were accounted for.”

“Then what about your intel on Avilon? You said the system was clear! That was
yesterday.
”

Therius looked up from the captain’s table, his expression grim.

A sudden suspicion formed in Farah’s gut. “Did we even send a probe?”

“We couldn’t risk it. Omnius would have seen anything we sent.”

“You sent us here blind?” Farah shook her head. “What have you done…”

“I’m sorry, Captain. There was no other way.”

The deck began pulsing and thrumming underfoot as terajoules of energy were released from the
Liberator’s
main beam cannons. Someone set the main holo display back to the fore, and Farah saw that the artificial terminator line rolling across Avilon had now eclipsed fully a third of the planet.
Omnius brought his own eclipser…
Farah mused.

Bright red and blue beams lanced out from the
Liberator’s
cannons, drawing two separate vanishing points against the planet. At the points of impact, Farah saw pinpricks of fire already blossoming.

Soon fires would be raging all across the planet. Colossal towers would shatter and crash through pristine urban parks.

Farah turned away from the viewscreens in a daze. She found Therius intently studying the captain’s table, using it to send orders directly to the other ships in the fleet. She watched, trying to decide what his strategy was. Then she noticed that he was ordering the fleet to descend into Avilon’s atmosphere. Farah blinked, coming back to her senses.

“If you order the fleet into atmosphere, we won’t be able to jump out,” she said quietly.

“We can’t jump out with the Eclipser online,” Therius replied. “We don’t have conventional SLS drives anymore. Only quantum.”

“Then take the Eclipser offline! If we don’t retreat now, we’ll never be able to.”

Therius looked up at her. “This is our only chance to defeat Omnius, Captain. We’re not going to run from it.”

Farah gaped at him. “The Eclipser won’t keep Omnius at bay forever. What happens when it runs out of power, or if it gets destroyed?”

Therius shot her a grim look. “That’s why we need to gain control of the planet and initiate the Armageddon Protocol.”

“You said that was a last resort.”

“It still is. Omnius may back down when we threaten him.”

Incredulous, Farah turned to the crew. “We have to stop him! He’s going to kill us all!”

Farah caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, and she spun around just in time to see 767 raise his arms and aim his weapons at her. There came a
screech
of energy discharging and a brilliant blue flash of light slammed her in the chest. She fell over backwards with a dark curtain dropping over her eyes.

* * *

Omnius watched from the throne in his control center as the rebel fleet jump into orbit over Avilon. He grinned. This was the moment he’d been waiting for.

If these rebels were smart, they would run while they still had the chance.

But instead of running, they were flying even closer to the planet. Omnius’s mouth twitched into a scowl as he watched the enemy fleet begin bombarding his garrisons from orbit. He could feel the loss of every drone and human as a diminishing of his own awareness. Shadows crept in at the edges of his being.

Then his mind blanked completely, and his physical body staggered. He blinked—once, twice…

What. Was. Happening?

He was no longer aware of any of his drones or any of his people. He was completely blind, cut off, he was…

Being jammed.

Impossible.
Quantum fields couldn’t be jammed in such a wide radius. Yet somehow the rebel fleet was jamming both his Icosahedron and the planet at the same time.

Suddenly it didn’t matter that Omnius had the enemy outnumbered. He could have all the trillions of drones he liked, but if he couldn’t coordinate between them and give them orders, they would be a disorganized mob. They weren’t designed to function without him, and he hadn’t even had a chance to launch the drone fleet from the Icosahedron!