First Strike (7 page)

“It will be a hard war. I can offer no guarantees of victory, or even survival. But there comes a time when you have to stand up and fight, or submit to permanent slavery. Our fight – and our deaths – will buy every human a chance to breathe free. Earth expects that every man and woman on these ships will do their duty. I expect no less.”

Conrad joined in the cheering that followed, privately congratulating himself on deducing that they were heading off to more than just another exercise. Marines were shouting and slapping hands, before gently being urged back to their workouts. The thought of going into war drove them forwards. There would never be a chance to rehearse the operation, not before they landed on Terra Nova. What little intelligence he’d seen suggested that the Hegemony had a major military base on the planet, protected by a force field that ensured that it couldn't simply be smashed from orbit. The Marines would have to take the planet by landing on the ground and crushing the Hegemony troops.

“Back to work, guys,” he said. They’d have to review the intelligence on the Hegemony’s ground soldiers and their weapon later on. Well-briefed soldiers tended to last longer than those kept ignorant by their superiors. “We’re going to war.”

* * *

Adrienne sat in her cabin, unable to believe what she’d just heard. They were going to war? The fleet was going to assault a world held by the Hegemony, a galactic power that far outmatched the human race? They were all going to die… she found herself shaking helplessly, sweat beading on her brow. She’d been into danger before, but it had been under controlled conditions, escorted by soldiers who knew how to protect her if necessary. Now… she was on a starship she knew to be fragile when compared to the massed energy batteries of Association-designed capital ships. And she was expected to follow the Marines down to Terra Nova, assuming they managed to land without being slaughtered.

She stood up, trying to control the shaking that threatened to overwhelm her. Logically, the military wouldn't have set out to start a war unless it was certain it could win, but cold logic provided no reassurance. And to think that she’d accepted the chance to embed without realising that something more important than simple exercises, no matter how radical, was underway. Maybe she should have asked more questions, or maybe she wouldn't have learned anything more until the war actually began. No one, even the Association, could transmit from quantum space to normal space. There would be no way for anyone to blow the secret until it was too late.

And there was no escape. Even if she protested, the fleet would still go to Terra Nova and launch its assault. And then she would have to explain to Ward why she hadn't filed any reports from the front line. It would certainly cost her the chance to win another prize, even if he didn’t fire her on the spot. No one would trust her to carry out a sensitive assignment again.

She sat back down again and stared into the mirror, seeing her own face reflected back at her. She’d been in danger before, she reminded herself firmly, and she’d survived and reported back from the front lines. The danger wouldn't be any less if she hid in her cabin, or made a fuss and ended up in the brig. She would do her job to the best of her ability and survive the experience. After recording from Terra Nova itself, just after the liberation, there would be another prize for her. Assuming she survived the experience and the planet was actually liberated, of course.

By the time Barbie arrived to escort her on her first tour of the mammoth starship, she was ready to interview the entire crew for their reactions. None of them seemed in doubt about the likely outcome of the war. They were confident that humanity would win.

Adrienne could only hope that they were right.

Terra Nova had everything a spacefaring society could want, except a gas giant that could be mined for fuel. The Association had surveyed it while humanity was still mastering basic metalworking and deemed the system largely useless, not even bothering to plant a small colony on Terra Nova’s surface. They hadn't even established a quantum gate in the system; the gate that served Terra Nova had been built by the Federation, the third quantum gate produced by human engineers. Gates were, by long convention, open to all, but the galactic powers that felt confident in their strength charged access fees. The Hegemony, with a major battle fleet in the system, were quite willing to tax human shipping heading to Terra Nova.

Pelican
 
lumbered though the quantum gate and emerged into the Terra Nova system. Like most commercial shipping, the massive HE3 tanker possessed no quantum drive of her own and was completely dependent upon the quantum gates for FTL travel. Producing commercial ships was surprisingly cheap once someone had built the ship yards; after all, they really needed little more than life support and hull volume.
 
Pelican
 
looked crude, like a set of oil drums bolted together, but Captain William Zeller loved her. She was his ticket to see the universe.

Earth had established a cloudscoop over Jupiter shortly after Mentor had contacted the human race, providing vast quantities of HE3 to power the switch to fusion power and fuel Earth’s growing fleet of starships. The Hegemony had demanded that Earth continue to supply Terra Nova with HE3, even though Earth no longer controlled the planet and there were gas giants nearer to the system than Sol. The Federation had made nothing more than a muted protest, after ONI pointed out that sending the freighters into the system would allow them to take a careful look at the Hegemony’s fleet dispositions. One day, Earth would have the firepower to teach the Hegemony a lesson. Good intelligence would be needed on that day.
 
Pelican’s
 
sensor suite was military-grade, far more sophisticated than any commercial ship would need for its routine activities. William would have expected the Hegemony to insist on searching his ship and demanding explanations for the advanced sensors, but they’d never bothered. He was unable to tell if that was arrogance or simple carelessness. What could tiny Earth’s puny fleet do against five superdreadnoughts and their support ships?

“I’m picking up a challenge now,” his pilot said. No separate disciplines on
 
Pelican
, even if she was a Federation Navy ship in all, but name. The crew officially worked for the Jupiter Consortium; unofficially, they were Federation Intelligence and ONI. “They’re demanding that we pay our access fees or get back into quantum space.”

“Charming,” William said. A quick glance at the sensor take showed that the Hegemony’s fleet was already coming into view, surrounding Orbit Station. Humans had built the station, back when Terra Nova had first been colonised, only to lose it to the Hegemony. These days, a tiny human staff maintained the station for their masters. They were one of the best sources of intelligence that humanity had. “Ship them some credits and request an orbital slot.”

He waited patiently for the reply. The Association’s currency was still in widespread use across the galaxy. Some of the younger races had their own currencies as well, but the Association credit was interchangeable throughout the entire known galaxy. Some economists had predicted that that would change rapidly once the Association collapsed completely, perhaps reducing interstellar economics to barter unless a successor power with the same clout as the Association arose rapidly. William hadn't bothered to try to follow their arguments. It was enough that Earth’s small stockpile of credits was still good.

“They’re telling us to dock at the fuel dump and start the transfer,” the pilot said, after a moment. “Should I take us in?”

“The alternative is hanging around here,” William pointed out, dryly. “Take us in.”

Terra Nova grew rapidly on the viewscreen as they approached the planet. Like Earth, Terra Nova was a blue-green world, although there were only two main continents. No one was quite sure why some worlds evolved intelligent life and others didn't produce anything more interesting than versions of sheep and wolves; Terra Nova had produced few creatures larger than lizards or rodents. Crops and animals brought by humans from Earth had swiftly spread across the first continent, competing with the local fauna. Unlike Clarke, which was dominated by savage plant and animal life, Terra Nova’s local wildlife hadn't been able to cope. Humanity had effectively terraformed the planet far quicker than either Mars or Venus.

The Hegemony battle squadron was orbiting the planet, sensors and weapons stepped down to prevent wear and tear. Each of the five superdreadnoughts possessed enough firepower to blast a planet into atoms, or dominate the skies so thoroughly that resistance would be impossible. They were hulking brutes, their hulls designed so that all who saw them would know just what they’d been designed to do. There was little of the elegance the Association had built into its explorer or cruise starships, none of the fancifulness that they worked into pleasure craft that didn't have to obey Newton’s laws. The ships were intimidating, even from a distance. All of Earth had seen footage of similar ships in action, in the brushfire wars that had started to appear along the edge of Association space. Everyone
 
knew
 
that they were the most powerful and capable warships in existence. Nothing could stand up to them.

He tore his gaze away from the sensor feed as the tanker approached the fuel dump, a separate station in orbit around Terra Nova. It too was human technology, allowing vast quantities of HE3 to be stored well away from the planet’s surface – and the civilians who had colonised the new world. The planners hadn't realised that having the fuel dump would make it far easier for a hostile force to dominate the planet – or perhaps they had, intending that
 
they
 
would be the hostile force. William had heard a hundred conspiracy theories about what the Federation intended to do with Terra Nova in the long term. Doling out fuel to power the colony’s fusion reactors was such an easy way to control the planet that he’d be surprised if it had never occurred to the planners.

The tanker shuddered gently as she made contact with the platform and started to transfer the fuel. William left the automated systems to get on with it while he reviewed more of the sensor take from the system – and the planet below. The Hegemony military base, established right on top of Gagarin City, seemed to have grown larger in the months since he’d last surveyed the planet. They kept the human population under strict control, forbidding any further expansion, although many humans had managed to slip out of the city and into the undeveloped regions of the planet. Some reports suggested that there was even a small insurgency underway on Terra Nova. It couldn't come close to evicting the Hegemony from humanity’s planet.

There were no new orbital fortifications beyond a small network of orbital weapons platforms. The Association, which had produced much of the Galactic military doctrine, had believed that starships were a better investment than orbital fortresses, pointing out that starships were mobile and could be moved from one system to another. Some of the most important worlds had heavy fixed defences – the Hegemony homeworld was supposed to be heavily fortified – but most colony worlds were barely defended. The OWPs could stand off a pirate ship, yet a small squadron could blast its way through them in minutes. Privately, William suspected that the Association needed to rethink its doctrine. It had been so long since the Cats had fought a proper war that they’d lost the habit of continually questioning and rewriting their contingency plans. If human military forces had lost that habit in a few years of peace, and had to redevelop it in a hurry when war appeared out of nowhere, how much harder would it be for a race that hadn't fought for thousands of years?

But maybe it wasn't entirely a bad thing, from humanity’s point of view. Most of the Galactics had learned from the Association, concentrating on starships instead of orbital defences. There would be flaws in their doctrine, weaknesses that could be exploited by a human naval force with the willingness to fight back against the Hegemony and the other galactic bullies. They’d learn, of course – some of them had probably been learning in the brushfire wars – but could they learn as fast as humanity?

The Association claimed that most races shared the same basic level of intelligence. Some races had traits that bent them towards one kind of thinking or another, or lacked the emotions that drove humanity, yet there were no races that thought significantly
 
faster
 
than anyone else. The cultural stasis that had gripped most of the galaxy came from the Association, from its stagnation and slow decline, not from anything intrinsic to the Galactics. As the established order continued to disintegrate, war would break out again and again until a new order was established, one dominated by a race that had managed to adapt quicker to the change in the galactic balance of power. It was hard to imagine the Funks having such imagination, yet they’d come to terms with the existence of other forms of intelligent life quicker than humanity. And they’d been in the Iron Age when they’d been contacted by the Association.

He glanced up as the console bleeped, warning him of a flight of shuttles heading towards the tanker. They flashed past at full speed, lighting the ship up with their weapons systems as they made their approach before vanishing into the darkness of space. Such crude intimidation was typical of the Hegemony, an unsubtle reminder of their power. But then,
 
Pelican
 
was not only unarmed – she was defenceless. A single burst from a phase cannon would cut right through her hull and destroy the ship.

The tanker shivered again as the final drop of HE3 was extracted into the fuel dump, which disconnected itself rapidly from
 
Pelican
. There was no point in asking for shore leave on Terra Nova, even if his orders hadn’t specified that he was to return to quantum space as soon as possible. The Hegemony mostly refused to grant permission, and even when they did Gagarin City was a depressing place these days. William was old enough to remember the hope felt by the colonists that they would build a new world, a new melting pot that would take the best from humanity’s disparate cultures and create something newer and stronger than Earth. Their dreams had come to an end the moment the Hegemony had bullied Earth into surrendering the planet. He looked down at the blue-green globe and shivered, despite himself. The humans on the planet below were living in bondage, slaves to an alien race. They would never be anything other than a client race, if they were allowed to live at all.

“Take us back to the gate,” he ordered quietly.

His orders had stated that he was to attempt to determine if the Hegemony had placed any watching starships in the outer system, if possible. Humanity had established a small asteroid mining station before the Hegemony had taken over, but the Funks had shown no interest in either forcing the miners to work for them or shipping in their own labour to take their place. It was so much easier to bully Earth out of raw materials – and efficient, if they weren't actually paying for it themselves. A handful of commercial drive fields could be detected near a couple of the mining asteroids, but nothing else. It didn't really mean anything and only a politician would think otherwise. Space was vast and a starship that stepped its drives down to the bare minimum – or cloaked – would be almost impossible to detect with passive sensors. The entire Hegemony Navy could be hiding there and they’d never know about it.

The viewscreen shifted as
 
Pelican
 
continued to lumber towards the gate. To human eyes, the gate didn't look very impressive. It seemed to be nothing more than a ring of metal over twenty kilometres in diameter. To advanced sensors, it was far more complex, existing simultaneously in normal space and quantum space. William didn't pretend to know how they worked. Few did, outside the research laboratories – and the Association itself. The Cats were normally obsessive record keepers, with a mania for paperwork that made even the worst of humanity’s bureaucrats look like a piker, but they were curiously silent on how they first discovered how to open a permanent gateway into quantum space. Some of humanity’s historical researchers, mining the records of a society thousands of years older than humanity, speculated that the breakthrough had happened by accident. Others, the more controversial researchers, claimed that someone
 
else
 
had given the Cats the technology. William privately believed the former. Apart from rumours, there was no proof that there was any spacefaring race older than the Cats – and they had built the Association.

“Transmit our ID and request that they open the gate,” he ordered. The Funks would probably hit them with another service charge, just to rub their superiority into the puny humans one more time. Or maybe they’d just be glad to see the human ship leaving the system. A starship, even a freighter, could make one hell of a mess if it deliberately rammed the planet. “Pay them if necessary.”

“Another fifty credits,” the pilot reported. He shook his head. “They do make a good thing of it, don’t they?”

“Bastards,” William agreed. Ahead of them, a shimmer of light appeared inside the gate ring, a chink in the normal universe leading directly to quantum space. As always, it fascinated and repelled him in equal measure. There was something profoundly
 
unnatural
 
about quantum space. It wasn't a realm for humanity, or any other race. “Take us out of here, and then set course for the RV point.”