Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit (2 page)

"Agreed, Captain," the officer
noted.  "All launches came from external hard points." 

Mora Grell wondered what the Primans were
intending with such a long-range first salvo, when suddenly things clicked
together and realized with stark horror what was heading their way.  She'd only
received the updated brief this morning and hadn't even had time to send it out
to her crew yet; the Primans were rumored to have field-tested some incredibly
advanced EMP weaponry.  There was no reason a torpedo couldn't be equipped with
the same tech.

"Start firing now!" she
yelled.  The weapons tech looked at her quizzically.  "I know they're
outside effective range, but those are EMP torpedoes; nothing we have can
protect us.  So start shooting now, dammit!"

The tech stabbed the override button on
the computer's standard programming and released the AA/point defense turrets
to fire at will.

Captain Orjon was standing on the top
deck of his hovertank, switching between his field glasses in one hand and the
comm unit in the other.

"Captain!" he heard from within
the tank.  His driver/gunner, a Drisk woman who was more proficient at
stringing together off-color curses than anyone else he knew, popped up from
the hatch and gave him a chilling look.

"What's wrong?" he asked,
immediately sensing that something was seriously amiss.

"It's the Aniteo," she said in
a rush.  "They're reporting the Priman fleet just launched a huge spread
of torpedoes at our ships and the planet itself."

"Well," he replied cautiously,
"that sort of what happens when two groups of people are at war with each
other.  They'll do something mean to us, and then we'll do something mean back
to them."

"No, dammit all," she
continued, frustrated.  "They warned us they were some new kind of EMP
weapon.  They said we might be on our own."

Captain Grell watched anxiously as her
fleet maneuvered.  She'd given the order to scatter, break apart as much as
possible in the hopes that the effective radius of the EMP torpedoes was
smaller than the volume of space her ships could occupy. 

She watched at her point defense
batteries choked space with rapid laserfire, chopping away at the incoming
weapons.  She wished these were just plain old torpedoes and she could roll the
hull and just let them hit Renown's heavily armored keel.  But there were just
too many of them...

The first wave lost most of its members,
only a half dozen torpedoes surviving to get within detonation range.  One
detonated on the aft of the Crusader class ship.  The hunter/killer showed no
apparent signs of trauma, other than the fact that over the course of several
seconds every last light extinguished.  The drives sputtered and went dark,
their mysterious energies dispersed.  The now-dark ship just coasted off in the
direction it had been going, inertia destined to keep it on the same course
forever, out into the reaches of interstellar space.

Two detonated against Aniteo, the huge
Marine Assault Ship.  A similar fate befell the behemoth.  The same went for
one of the two destroyers.  The last one found Renown, and detonated against
the battleship's starboard bow, a noncritical area that mainly contained the
feed mechanisms for the forward torpedo launchers.  For a second, Captain Grell
hoped against all odds that nothing would happen, but it wasn't to be.  There
was a series of snaps, like electricity conducting across a gap to a ground, or
a static electric charge.  Then, the bridge went dark.  It was eerie; she'd
been aboard in drydock when her ship had undergone major refitting and had been
almost entirely powered down.  But there had still been some background noise; distant
fans whooshing quietly as they recirculated the air, blowers and venting on the
bridge equipment, the occasional thrum through the deckplates.

This, on the other hand, was a simple
wrenching silence.  Even her crew was silent; nobody on the bridge made a
sound.  Renown simply carried on, dead and silent.  Even the gravity-generating
deckplates were dead.  She could already feel the reduced force of gravity from
them, their pull less and less effective.  In a few minutes their charge would
be completely gone, and her crew would end up floating through the corridors of
the warship. 

She raced to the forward viewports. 
Unlike newer ships whose bridges were encased in armor and used viewscreens to
show an outside image, the Starshakers had actual viewports.  She looked out
and saw more torpedoes exploding among her task force, both EMP and
conventional.  All her ships were dark now, and though she had thought it
couldn't get any worse, she was wrong about that as well.  She saw Priman heavy
cruisers moving in, firing on the defenseless vessels and tearing them apart. 
The Priman frigate-sized ships known as Reapers, a post-invasion design
bristling with AA batteries to counter the deadly threat of Confed's Talon and
Intruder fighters, screened the main body of the force, picking off the few
Confederation fighters that weren't already drifting lifeless in space.  Grell
swore an old epithet that she hadn't used since she'd made Captain.  Her ships
were being shredded and there wasn't a damn thing in the universe she could do
about it. 

On the other hand, the Primans were
leaving Renown alone.  It wasn't done out of mercy, though; her ship was headed
right towards the moon's atmosphere.

"Nav," she said quietly as she
turned her head a bit to look towards the navigation station.  "What do
you think?  Steep angle, isn't it?"

"Too steep," the woman replied
without having to think too long.  They were coming in way too fast.  There was
no hope they'd just bounce off the atmosphere and get kicked back off into
space, or even do a slow orbiting re-entry.  No, they were going in nose first
and would make a fiery show of it.

"Listen up," Captain Grell
said, trying to muster her command presence.  "Everybody get a vac-suit. 
We'll move through the ship as far as we can in the next few minutes.  Try to
kick loose some escape pods.  I know they might not have power, but it's our
only shot.  Tell anyone you pass.  We can go EVA and maybe last a few days. 
Maybe someone will check on us before the Primans settle in here.  Let's
go!"

She clapped her hands once to get their
attention, and in short order her bridge crew recovered and started to clear
the room.  She could have told them it had been an honor to serve with them,
that they'd all be avenged.  But that would have seemed like giving up.  Not
that their options were very bright in any case, but as long as there was some
hope, it was worth putting on the show that they'd live to fight another day.

"Umm," Captain Orjon's gunner
said as she looked up into the sky.  "Is that one of ours?"

She was pointing at a large starship,
burning its way through the moon's atmosphere and headed straight for the
ground.  It was already almost unrecognizable; the re-entry had peeled off much
of the superstructure, which created a flaming debris trail far aft of the
doomed ship.

"All units," Orjon said into
his comm unit.  "Regroup on my position.  I say again, everyone regroup
here on the double.  We may lose comms at any time."

He knew what was going to happen.  His
gunner, Rola, had read the full text of the Aniteo's last orders.  'EMP weapon,
no known defense.  Effective on impact, unknown abilities with proximity
burst.  Orbit is lost; you're on your own.  Good luck'.  They were pragmatic,
simple words that glossed over the fact that six mighty Confederation warships
were most likely gone with all hands aboard.  And they'd said to expect a
surface bombardment next. 

It was unbelievable.  All Confed systems
were shielded against EMP; it was standard, had been for as long as anyone
remembered.  But the text from Aniteo was very clear: it was an EMP weapon, and
he couldn't do anything to protect his people from it.

A minute later, all his units or at least
advance runners from them were gathered around his tank.  He heard a deep
'boom' from up high and lifted his head to look.  He saw contrails in the upper
reaches of the stratosphere; he'd heard the sonic booms of the torpedoes
entering the ever-thickening atmosphere as they descended.  Finally, he saw
them air-burst.  It was sort of anticlimactic in a way; just little explosions
like dud fireworks, four of them scattered across the sky.  They were not
representative of what power the weapons held.

He didn't feel anything; no blast wave,
no heat.  He sort of expected some sort of physical effect.  Instead, there
were clicking sounds from inside his tank, the lift generators on the bottom
surged once, twice, and then fell silent.  The tank dropped unceremoniously to
the ground with a crash, crumpling the skirt armor under its own weight.

"Holy sheifah," murmured Rola.

His troops started to murmur, the
low-grade commotion of people who needed to hear something that would give them
some answers.

"Alright, folks," Orjon yelled
as loudly as he dared without seeming angry or off-balance.  "Short version;
our fleet's taking a pounding and we've just been hit with an EMP weapon.  It's
all new stuff, but we can't sit here and stare at each other."  He
surveyed the crowd and saw he was getting them back with him.  He turned to his
gunner.  "Rola, get back in the tank and see if you can tell what exactly
happened to our electronics."  He picked out the next unit commander he
saw and pointed.  "Take an inventory of all your unit's weapons; tell me
if anything at all is still working."  He pointed at the other unit
commander, a Trin who was built like a professional fighter.  "Hilt, I
need you to get us organized.  The Primans probably see this town from orbit. 
With our vehicles humped, we need to make a stand.  Get me a plan to defend
this city, and then get me a plan to retreat through it.  I'm not sure where
we're going yet, but until we know what we're up against, we need to plan for
both options."

"Captain!" Orjon heard from
behind him.  He turned to see two soldiers approaching with another man between
them, hands cuffed in front.  He was human, athletic, maybe thirty or so. 
Didn't look exactly like a soldier, but he was no mine rat, either.

"What's this?" Orjon asked as
the party of three drew up to his now-silent tank.

"This guy approached us out of town
after we got your message to RTB," one of the men began.  "He said
he's with Confed."

"You scanned the city earlier and
found no life signs, correct?" Orjon confirmed.

The men nodded.

"I didn't want to be found.  Until
now, that is," the stranger said.  "My name's Mithus; I'm a SAR
operative."           

"Sure you are," Orjon said
easily.  "Me too, in fact.  It's easy to claim that since you know SAR
personnel records aren't something I can access."  He turned to the two
that had brought Mithus in.  "Go find a place to stash this man while we
get ready."

The two placed their hands on Mithus and
started to turn him around to march him away.

"Check the general code
database," Mithus called as he was grabbed.  "You know there's a
physical hardcopy in every Confed command vehicle.  I have a recognition code
for you."

At that, Captain Orjon paused.  This man
Mithus was right; every week, some low-ranking officer from Aniteo's
Intelligence branch had to go and stuff hardcopy printouts of certain
procedures, codes and plans in every place a commanding officer might need to
access them.  The bridge, C3, fighter craft belonging to the CAG, briefing
rooms, vehicles, even the escape pods designated for bridge crew.

Grudgingly, Orjon looked down into the
tank to see Rola looking expectantly at him.  She already had the small sealed
folder in her hand.   He'd always mocked the anachronism of printing out orders
on physical transparencies, something he'd thought was just busy-work to give
the Intel nerds something to do, but suddenly it all seemed perfectly logical.

He held out his hand and his gunner
gently placed the envelope in it.

Mithus shrugged out of the grip of the
two men holding him.  "Go to this week's recognition code for detached
covert operatives," he began.  He hated to break cover, especially in
front of all these people, but it was acceptable under the circumstances.  In
addition, he had to allow for the possibility they might all be killed or
imprisoned soon anyway.  "The sequence is
Plaza, Turn, Seventy-Six
."

Orjon flipped through the pages, creasing
the thin printouts and dropping a few out of the sheaf he held.  He didn't
notice.  Mithus had given the correct passphrase for the week. 

"Last week's should still be in
there as well," Mithus continued.  "It was
Quality, Valet, zero four
.  Next week's will be
Motor, Enjoy,
forty-three
."

"I was under the impression the
words were generated randomly the day before issuance," Orjon said, though
not as doubtfully as he would have imagined.

Mithus just chuckled.  "You'd be
surprised.  I know a guy."

Orjon waved at the men who held Mithus
and they backed off a few steps.  Mithus shrugged his arms and removed the
stunner cuffs from his hands.