New Frontiers- The Complete Series Page 4

  Flores’ transmission froze once more, but this time it was replaced by a waiting screen with the Alliance flag. Soon after that, the Confederate transmission also went to a waiting screen with their flag. Minutes passed. Alexander distracted himself by studying the two flags—the Alliance’s was essentially a map of their half of the Earth, with their member states shown in white on a dark blue backdrop. The Americas and Europe were marked, along with a few dozen islands at larger-than-life scale. Each member state had a gold star in its center, for a total of sixty-seven stars.

  The Confederate flag, on the other hand, was solid red with a yellow dragon in the top-left corner, which signified Tianlong Station and the Confederacy’s claim to having built the world’s first space elevator. The rest of the flag was made up of yellow stars. Just like the Alliance flag, there was one for each member state, but their stars were laid out in a hammer-and-sickle pattern.

  The waiting screens remained in place. How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten? Maybe they weren’t allowed to see the negotiations going forward.

  But then, to his surprise, the waiting screens disappeared, and rather than Admiral Flores on the right, this time they saw President Ryan Baker of the Alliance.

  “Chancellor Wang Ping,” Baker said, nodding. The chancellor’s transmission returned a few seconds later, and President Baker smiled. “It’s a pleasure to speak with you again, Your Excellency.”

  “Yes,” Wang Ping agreed after a slight transmission delay.

  President Baker went on, “Our intelligence suggests that your government has not achieved any more understanding of the technology you are offering us than what we have of the same. Therefore, you have nothing to trade us for our wormhole technology.”

  “Ah, yes, just as our intelligence suggests that the Alliance does not have the technology to create stable wormholes.”

  “And we haven’t. Not a traversable one, anyway.”

  “Do not lie to me, Baker. We have watched you send your probes.”

  If he was surprised the Confederates knew about that, to his credit, President Baker didn’t show it. “None of those probes returned,” he explained.

  “Yet they transmitted data from the other side,” Wang Ping replied.

  Alexander frowned. He was about to order his comms officer to cut off the transmission. There was no way they had the clearance to watch this. There had to be some mistake. Then again—Flores had given them permission.

  Baker appeared to confer with someone off-screen. They didn’t hear the conversation, but a moment later he turned back to face the camera. He looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, Chancellor. I’ve just confirmed that we received no such data. I’m not sure what you are talking about.”

  Wang Ping’s unsmiling face disappeared, and a few seconds later a slow parade of star maps, sensor scans, and other data replaced his hologram. Alexander recognized fully half of those images from his briefing with Admiral Flores. The jig was up. Operation Alice had been blown wide open.

  The Chancellor’s face reappeared, and this time he was smiling. “Did you recognize any of that, President Baker?”

  “Where did you get those images?”

  “Do you think we are blind?”

  The president’s lips formed a grim line. “If you want to begin a peaceful exchange of information, then you need to start by telling us how you have access to our classified documents.”

  “We are enemies, President Baker, and enemies do not disclose their secrets lightly.”

  “Then you will understand when I say we cannot share our knowledge of wormholes with you.”

  Wang Ping shrugged. “You do not have such knowledge, so it does not matter.”

  “We do have it,” the president insisted, “and that wormhole is Alliance property, in Alliance space. If you continue on your present course, you will be in direct violation of our sovereignty, and that will be a declaration of war. Is that what you are threatening, Ping?”

  “We leave that up to you, Baker. Our fleet merely goes to emphasize our equal rights to a unique and naturally occurring part of the cosmos. What you do about that is for you to decide.”

  “At the risk of repeating myself, that wormhole is not a naturally occurring—”

  “Save your lies for someone who believes them, Baker. We are no fools.”

  President Baker looked ready to say something else, but he stopped himself. “Then you will not recall your fleet?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Earth won’t survive this war,” the president warned.

  “War requires violence. We will not fire the first shot. If you are wise, then neither will you. Good day, Mr. Baker.”

  With that, the transmission ended on the Confederacy’s end. President Baker scowled, and his face disappeared a split second later. Silence fell on the bridge. The implications of what they’d witnessed were staggering.

  “Admiral Flores is on the comm, Captain!”

  Alexander blinked. “Put her through.”

  The admiral appeared back on screen looking even more furious than before. “Damn those red ants!” she spat. “Operation Alice is compromised.”

  Alexander nodded. “It would seem so, ma’am,” he croaked, his tongue rasping like sandpaper against the roof of his mouth.

  “Look alive, Captain! We are at DEFCON One, and I need all my captains in this with their eyes wide open! The Confederacy is threatening to take control of the Looking Glass. We can’t allow that to happen. The President sent you the recording of his negotiations with the Confederate Chancellor because you and your crew are the only ones who can beat them to Lewis Station, and you need to know the score.”

  Alexander blinked. So it hadn’t been a mistake. That also explained the long delay with the Alliance and Confederate waiting screens. The transmissions had been sent to them after the fact, not during.

  Admiral Flores went on. “Captain, you are to get to Lewis Station with all possible speed and join their defensive screen. The Reds planned their launch at just the right moment. Our fleet is still half an orbit away, and it’s going to take a while before we can catch up.”

  “I understand. We’ll be ready, ma’am.”

  “I doubt that, Captain. Odds are forty-seven to one against you being ready.”

  Alexander set his jaw. “Then we’ll slow them down.”

  “Fleet Command thinks you can do better than that. We’re going to fire a warning shot across their bows. You are to fly ahead of the Confederates along their trajectory and dead drop as much ordnance as you can in their way.”

  Alexander’s eyes widened. Dead-dropping meant firing missiles with zero thrust from rail launchers to avoid enemy detection. They wouldn’t see the missiles coming until it was too late.

  “If all goes according to plan, we’ll take out half a dozen Confederate ships before they even know what hit them.”

  Such an attack was sure to provoke World War III. It was really happening. Alexander couldn’t believe it.

  Caty…

  “Captain, did you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he managed.

  “I’ll be in touch. Good luck. Flores out.”

  Alexander nodded stiffly, and the holo display faded back to the black of space.

  World War III was about to start. He watched the stars twinkle, like so many eyes watching him—judging him. His mouth was bone dry. Between the Alliance and the Confederacy, there were millions of megatons in orbit, not to mention what they had on the ground. Admiral Flores was asking him to start a war that could kill billions of people—including his wife.

  “Captain…? Captain!”

  Alexander turned to see his XO staring at him. He had a vague feeling that she’d been talking to him for a while. “I’m sorry, Commander, what was that?”

  “I said if someone doesn’t do something about this fast, then we’re all going to hell in a hurry.”

  Alexander’s lips twitched into a grim smile. “It’s too late fo
r that, Commander. The Second Cold War is over, and this next war is going to get hot enough to make hell look balmy.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Ordnance is ready, Captain. Standing by,” Commander Korbin said.

  Alexander hesitated. Six days had passed since they’d received their orders to start World War III. During that time President Baker had done his best to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict, but the Confederates insisted that they had a right to have access to the wormhole, and the Alliance insisted that they didn’t. Negotiations were at an impasse, and Alexander had just received clearance from Orbital One to open fire. In this case, that meant dead-dropping every nuke they had and letting the Confederates barrel straight into them.

  It wasn’t his place to question orders, but he couldn’t help it. The fate of humanity hung in the balance, and there would be no going back from this. Alexander’s thoughts went to his wife, Caty, back on Earth, and he grimaced.

  This was it.

  “Sir?”

  Alexander took a deep breath and let it out again. “Gunnery—” he said.

  “Yes, sir?” Lieutenant Cardinal replied.

  “Commence dead-dropping.”

  “Aye-aye… The first dozen are away.”

  “Williams, what’s the Confederate reaction?”

  “Nothing so far,” Lieutenant Williams reported from the sensor station.

  “Good. Let’s hope they don’t see it coming. Gunnery, please proceed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They dropped another nine waves of warheads, staggered enough to prevent simultaneous detonations.

  Once all one hundred and twenty nukes were drifting away behind them, and the Lincoln’s rail-launchers were empty, Alexander felt a shortness of breath that had nothing to do with the ship’s current rate of deceleration. Under the guise of slowing down to join Lewis Station’s orbit around the sun, they had bled off more momentum than they needed to in order to allow the drifting warheads to reach their targets before the Confederates could reach Lewis Station.

  That left the Confederates much closer now than they should have been, putting the Lincoln in danger of a retaliatory barrage.

  “Davorian, decrease deceleration to point five Gs. Let’s try not to have the Confederates breathing down our necks by the time those nukes hit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Silence fell on the bridge. Beside him, Commander Korbin shook her head. “How long do we have?”

  Alexander mentally summoned a tactical map from the holo projector between him and his XO. The Lincoln and her trajectory appeared on the map as a green icon with a line and an arrow pointing toward Lewis Station. Then came one hundred and twenty green dots with hair-thin vectors pointing in the opposite direction, each dot and vector corresponding to one of the nukes they’d dead-dropped. Finally, behind all of that, were the red icons of the Confederate fleet and the arrows of their trajectories.

  Alexander drew a circle around the first wave of nukes, then he selected the leading Confederate warship. Giving a verbal command this time, he said, “Calculate time to nearest intersect.”

  A new vector line appeared, connecting the wave of nukes to the Confederate warship. The difference in velocities was ten point six klicks per second in favor of the Confederate ship. Range between the targets was 697,562 klicks. Time to intersect—eighteen hours, sixteen minutes, and forty-seven seconds.

  Forty-six seconds. Forty-five…

  “So we have eighteen hours before World War III begins,” Korbin said.

  Alexander grimaced. He had to try really hard not to see his guilt in the matter. He had given the order to drop the nukes, even if that order had ultimately come from someone else.

  The minutes ticked away with agonizing slowness. Apart from the sound of life support cycling the Lincoln’s air, the steady drone of her thrusters, and the hushed verbal commands of her crew, Alexander could hear nothing but the sound of his own heart thudding relentlessly in his chest.

  “Captain!”

  Thud!

  Alexander recognized Williams’ voice a second before he saw the man sit suddenly bolt upright at his station.

  “What is it, Williams?”

  “We’re detecting the Confederate Fleet slowing down.”

  Alexander felt ice creeping through his veins. They couldn’t have spotted the nukes at this range. “How fast?”

  “Three Gs deceleration, sir. They’re slamming on the brakes.”

  “They must have caught on to our strategy. Do we still have remote access to those warheads?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We may have to bring them online.”

  “If we do that, they’ll be detected immediately, and the enemy’s point defenses will have plenty of time to shoot them down,” Lieutenant Cardinal said from gunnery.

  “One or two might still get through. That’s still enough for the purposes of a warning shot. Comms! Get me Lewis Station on the line.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A moment later, a man with a shiny scalp and a nest of wrinkles around his eyes appeared on the right-hand holo display. Text above his transmission read Admiral Gaulle. Going by the admiral’s appearance, he’d clearly waited too long to begin his gener treatments. Either that or he’d opted to take the incentives as a credit to his savings account instead.

  “Admiral, the enemy is decelerating. It would appear they’re on to us. Please advise.”

  “We see it, Captain, but it’s unlikely they’ve detected your warheads.”

  “Then they suspected that we might try something like this and they’re taking measures to evade.”

  “Even so…” The admiral shook his head. “In half an hour I want you to alter your trajectory. Make it look like you’re heading straight for the Looking Glass.”

  Alexander’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Our orders are to join your defensive screen, sir.”

  “And you will, but while you’re still a day away from us we don’t need you getting hit by a bundle of dead-dropped nukes.”

  Alexander’s eyes widened. The enemy might have slowed down to dead-drop their own missiles. But if that was the case, the Lincoln wasn’t the most significant Alliance target in the area. She was just over 300 meters long, while Lewis Station was a wheel-shaped megastructure with an outer ring that was over three kilometers in diameter.

  “Sir, they might not have dropped nukes along our trajectory. They may have dropped them on yours.”

  “There’s no way of knowing that yet, and it would take us the better part of a week to alter our heading enough to evade any missiles, so for now let’s just keep our eyes open, shall we? Let us know if you spot anything out there, Captain.”

  Alexander swallowed thickly and nodded once. “What about our missiles?”

  “Leave them alone for now. You can always fire them up later.”

  “Yes, sir,”

  “Lewis Station out.”

  “This is a mess!” Korbin said, turning to him. “For all we know the Reds just dropped a few thousand nukes; we’ve already dropped more than a hundred of our own, and everyone’s still pretending like no one has fired a shot! Lewis Station should be evacuating right now.”

  Alexander shook his head. “And give up the Looking Glass? We’d be playing right into their hands. The station has fighters and drones to watch their backs. They also have us. That should be good enough.”

  Korbin turned to him with a dubious look. “I hope you’re right, sir.”

  * * *

  Over the last day of the Lincoln’s approach, tensions reached an all-time high. They had managed to avoid any dead-dropped nukes that might have been heading their way by changing their trajectory multiple times during their approach. The Confederates had done likewise, and the Lincoln’s dead-dropped warheads would never reach them now.

  The opportunity for a surprise attack was gone, and now the Confederate Fleet was just fifty minutes from effective laser range (ELR) with Lewis Statio
n. Meanwhile, the Alliance’s Third Fleet was racing up fast behind them with an ETA of just twenty minutes to ELR with the Confederates. All of the respective forces were well within missile range and projectile range of each other, but so far no one had been seen to fire anything.

  The Lincoln now sat in a stable orbit beside Lewis Station. Over twelve hours ago, while still on approach, they’d launched both the 61st Squadron and a full squadron of accompanying drones to join Lewis Station’s fighter screen and help them scan for incoming dead-dropped missiles. Unfortunately, the only way to detect a piece of dead-dropped ordnance was to set it off. In this case, setting a missile off meant successfully bouncing active sensors off the missile’s EM-absorbing armor.

  Once detected, missiles would split into a dozen or more pieces, most of them armed with lasers rather than explosives, making them deadly long before they reached their targets. Standard sweeping procedure was to send drones ahead of manned fighters, giving them more time to intercept before the lasers started zapping.

  Tactics in space were all about jinking around and trying to hit each other with projectile weapons and missiles before getting into effective laser range, because once that happened, engagements typically ended in a matter of minutes.

  Alexander watched the squadrons of Rapier fighters at high magnification on the Lincoln’s main holo display (MHD). The red-hot glow of their thrusters at full burn made them look like a swarm of fireflies in space.

  “Nothing yet,” Commander Korbin whispered, her eyes on the Rapiers.

  Alexander shook his head. “Maybe the Chancellor meant it when he said they wouldn’t fire the first shot.”

  “And I was born a gener,” Korbin replied.

  A few of the bridge crew chuckled at that. McAdams wasn’t one of them. She was the only gener on deck.

  A crackle of static hissed over the bridge speakers, followed by the sound of the fighter group’s wing commander reporting in—Lieutenant Hayes had set the comms to the Alliance’s command channel and left it open so they could hear the updates.

  “Lewis Station, we’re entering engagement zone sixty-five now… stand by…”