38
All eyes were glued to the huge 2D screen. The civilian-band quantum repeater had been replaced within days after the Centaur exodus, but the satellite beaming commercial broadcasts to the population had only gone up a few days ago. So, with the military comms being utilized by the command, the recreation hall was packed with close to a thousand Marines and sailors as they tried to find out what was going on.
It was frustrating because the civilian newscasts didn’t have all the answers, either, but it was better than nothing.
A powerful Centaur Navy had appeared well within the system, which in and of itself was unique. Even more so than humans, the Centaurs popped into real space well outside the gravitational pull of stars and planets, then transited in. It was one of the few things that gave the human navies a small advantage.
The surprise looked to be total, from what the talking heads were saying. The fighting was ferocious, with the Home Fleet taking huge losses but whittling away at the Centaur ships.
Titan had taken hits, too, with domes lost. Rev hoped the people had been able to get into the tunnels under the surface. But he knew that was wishful thinking. One reporter was at the Knipper Dome when it was hit, the feed disappearing in a flash.
“Should have terraformed,” Hussein muttered, something he had long held.
Rev ignored him. Since the signing of the Writs of Humankind, the only planet in the system to be able to naturally sustain life was the Mother herself. Titan and Enceladus were only allowed to be paraterraformed, with shells encompassing the existing domes at the time. Even today, the sections of the shells went by the old dome terminology. The intent was to keep the home system non-political. Ironically, however, when the Council of Humanity was formed two centuries later, it took possession of the two moons.
“Any mention yet of landings?” Strap asked.
“I think this is punitive,” Tomiko responded. “What good is Titan going to do them? If the Navy can’t turn them back, they’ll slag it.”
“I’ve got a cousin there,” Radić said quietly. “She’s working for the Council.”
“Shit, sorry, man,” Tomiko said. “I didn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen. I just meant that I think that’s what they want to do. But the Navy, they’re better than the tin-asses in-system. You know that.”
“If they do slag Titan, then you know we can’t stand for it,” Hussein said. “We’ve got to get to their homeworld.”
Easier said than done.
Rev was engrossed with the situation just as everyone else was, and there was a hollow pit at the base of his stomach, but would losing Titan, with fewer than a hundred million, or Enceladus, with . . .
“What’s the population of Enceladus?”
<Two hundred and thirty million.>
Would the losses of both moons be worse than the scouring of Yspliti or Beacon? Rev knew they had to find a way to crush the Centaurs, to make them keep out of human space, but just because the two moons were in the home system didn’t mean humanity could let emotions run wild and start making foolish mistakes. Whatever strategy the Council and military leadership could come up . . .
But the Council would be gone if Titan was scoured. Humanity would be headless. The national governments would be left in charge but fragmented and thereby less effective. Rev wasn’t sure why it took him so long to realize the ramifications of what was happening. It was a good, strategic move by the Centaurs. Cut off the head, then take on the body parts piecemeal.
“Come on, Navy. Do your thing,” he whispered.
The battle dragged on. Even with the short in-system distances, fighting took time. Ships had to maneuver in a game of 3D chess. Torpedoes needed time to transit, mines to maneuver. Energy weapons were quicker but less effective.
And one by one, ships were getting vaporized. Someone in the military was releasing information to the press, so every kill of a Centaur ship was announced to the cheers of the Marines and sailors. What Rev wanted was to know about human losses, too, as he juggled in his mind the flow of the battle, but that wasn’t mentioned.
“Do you think we can turn them back?” Tomiko asked Rev. “If we lose the Council and the military command, I don’t want to think of what will happen.”
Of course, Tomiko would have realized the danger, too.
“The home system’s got good defenses. I think you were right about this being punitive. They don’t want those two rocks. And if the Navy can just punch them in the nose hard enough, they’ll back off, like they’ve been doing for the last couple of years.”
“I hope you’re right, Rev. I really do.”
“. . . from the Naval Auxiliary Command on Enceladus reports that with the addition of the Final Stand Fleet, incoming reports indicate that the Centaurs may be retreating out past Neptune’s orbital plane . . .”
Whatever else she had to say was lost in the cheers. Rev had been a little concerned when the Final Stand Fleet, the mostly ceremonial picket around the Mother, made up of ships from every nation, had sent half of its strength to reinforce the main fleet, but he guessed that just showed how little he knew of naval tactics. Maybe that had been just enough to turn the tide of the battle. Now, it looked to be only a matter of time.
“Hey, Doc, what kind of ships were in the Final Stand Fleet?” Hussein asked.
“Hell if I know. I’ve been a Fleet Marine corpsman since I’ve been in. I know shit about ships,” Doc Paul said.
It wasn’t that funny, but Rev joined in the laughter. Relief had a way of making people giddy. And each report of another Centaur heading out, human ships in hot pursuit, made the relief even stronger.
“The Navy’s gonna make them pay,” Tomiko said as the newscast put up a graphic that tried to make sense of what was happening. “They lost too many ships to just let the tin-asses run.”
“They better not follow them into null space. That’s all I can say. For all we know, they’ve got a fleet waiting there in a trap,” Rev said.
“Stop being such a damn pessimist,” Tomiko told him. “Look, some of them are already jumping.”
“And how the heck does HSN know that? That’s just some programmer putting it on their display.”
Rev didn’t know why he was being a cynic, but his statement was true. HSN, while the largest centralized news network, didn’t have the ability to track what was happening. They had to go with what was being fed to them by the government, and Rev had developed a healthy mistrust for what was released to the public.
“ . . . too early to tell the extent of the damage, but from all indications, the surviving enemy is in retreat. Our Navy, the combined ships from all corners of human space, has rebuffed the attack,” the talking head said, her face flushed with excitement.
Rev couldn’t blame her. HSN broadcasted from Titan, and she’d been in mortal danger herself. Rev knew what it felt like to have the battle adrenaline flowing, then coming out the other end alive. If she’d lost a little of her calm, professional demeanor, then that was understandable.
“ . . . darkest day in history, but it has also been one of the best, where with our combined might . . . wait, I’m getting something new right now.”
The look on her face silenced the general happy hubbub in the hall.
“Are you sure?” she asked somebody off-camera. “This has been confirmed?”
With a shocked look on her face, she turned back to the holocam. “Citizens of Humanity. We are getting reports that three Centaur ships have emerged from null-space just outside of the Mother’s exosphere.”
What?
Ships just didn’t exit null space within the gravitational pull of a body. The math became too convoluted, and ships and crews ended up strewn across vast distances. It had been surprising enough that the assault fleet had jumped into the Home System at all, but in Earth’s exosphere? No human ship would try that, and Centaur ships had always seemed to follow the same restrictions.
“I’m going to switch over to Leif Talmage at HSN’s Earth Weather Branch. Leif, are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here, Willa,” a young, scarecrow-looking man said as his feed took over.
Rev never understood the allure the weather on Earth had for so much of humanity. But HSN and several other networks had an interlocking system of satellites beyond the interdiction boundary and dutifully reported the planetwide weather to the junkies several times a day.
The feed immediately switched to a planetary view, the beautiful blue-green ball that evoked such deep emotions among all humans. Rev gulped, knowing that she was in danger.
“I’m bringing up some feeds now,” the weatherman said. “But all we know at the moment is that three Centaur ships appeared in the exosphere, which is about four hundred kilometers from the surface of the Mother. The Final Stand Fleet is engaging . . . wait, I have something here.”
The view switched toward the night side of the planet over Europe, and a bright stream of flaming debris was hurtling down. “I think this was a Centaur ship, if I understand the feeds right,” he said, his voice cracking with excitement.
Rev wanted to yell out in victory, but the sight of the debris flaming made his heart lurch. No weapons of war had touched the Mother’s skin in centuries, and these were Centaurs. It seemed like sacrilege. He prayed they would burn up in the atmosphere.
“Yes, I can now report that the explosion was a Centaur ship.”
Another graphic popped up, this one showing the tracks of three ships on the screen, one ending in an animated explosion. The human ships were not on the graphic. Navy ships had transponders that made them invisible to commercial satellites, but if they could track meteors, they could track Centaurs.
“I’m going to switch to one of the other tracks to see if I can pick another ship up.”
The feed changed again, this time to the daylight side over South America. The cameras zoomed in until a dark, cylindrical shape could clearly be seen. It seemed to shimmer—human meson cannons hitting its shields. But it didn’t take evasive action, nor did it seem to fire back.
“Leif, what can you tell us about the progress of the enemy ships,” the first talking head’s voice came over the feed.
“Well, at the moment, both remaining ships are still in space, if I can put it like that. But the one on the screen now is approaching the Kármán Line.”
“What is the—”
<The Kármán Line is a somewhat arbitrary line that separates a planetary body from outer space. For Earth, that is at one hundred kilometers. It is also the limit for the Final Stand Fleet to engage targets.>
“What? You’ve got to be shitting me, Punch. If they get past that line, we can’t engage?”
<Human forces can engage. They are just not allowed to according to the Writ of Humankind Amendments.>
“Punch says if they pass that Kármán Line the weather guy was saying, then we can’t fire on them anymore.”
“That’s bullshit,” Tomiko said, looking at Rev in shock. “This is a fucking emergency. Of course, they have to keep going to prevent those bastards from ever placing a withered foot on the Mother.”
Rev totally understood, and he agreed. All his thoughts about Titan and Enceladus and their relatively small populations went out the window when Earth was concerned. There might only be forty thousand humans on the surface, but this was their ancestral home. This was the Mother. The thought of a Centaur on the planet made Rev shudder in horror.
The question in his mind was if the Final Stand Fleet agreed. Would they pursue the Centaurs all the way to the ground if they had to?
Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that, he prayed.
A thousand Marines sat in absolute silence, while light-years away, the drama unfolded. It wasn’t until the ship on the screen passed the Kármán Line, and human fire ceased, that they erupted in shouts of anger, drowning out the reporter’s explanation of what was going on.
Legal analysts were brought on to give their opinions, but not many Marines paid attention as they followed the Centaur ship as it cruised lower and began to traverse to the Mother’s surface. The shouts rose in volume when the Centaur ship disgorged a small vessel, like a shuttle, over Mexico. They watched helplessly as it descended, and gently settled down over an overgrown jungle, stone pyramids rising over the treetops.
For the first time in recorded history, aliens had landed on Mother Earth.