Target: Earth (Extinction Wars Book 5) Page 29

  Admiral Sparhawk seemed to shrink inward. It was an awful process. I did not mean to demean him. But I didn’t want to lose the war in order to save his feelings.

  “What do we do then?” Briggs asked me.

  “Exactly,” I said. “The answer is that it depends. Who runs the fleet now?”

  “We have to form a committee,” Laval said.

  “You can’t be on it,” I told him, “because that’s an asinine suggestion. One man has to run the fleet, not some committee.”

  “You?” Laval demanded.

  “Why not, Creed?” Rollo demanded. “Creed’s led us to victory on more than one occasion.”

  “Never!” Laval snarled. “I’ll never serve him. Half the captains here will never serve him.”

  “Fine,” I said, “since I don’t want the command anyway.”

  “You’re suggesting him?” Laval asked, pointing at Briggs.

  “No,” I said.

  Briggs scowled. He held the political authority as Diana’s representative.

  “No offense, sir,” I told Briggs. “But you’re a general. You’re not an admiral. This is a fleet action. We need a fighting admiral.”

  “We don’t have a fleet admiral,” Laval said.

  “You are wrong,” N7 said. “Rollo Anderson used to serve as the First Admiral of Earth Force.”

  Everyone in the room looked at the hulking brute that was Rollo Anderson.

  “No,” Laval said. “That is out of the question.”

  “General,” I said. “What do you think?”

  Briggs shook his head. “I don’t know what to think. This is demoralizing. We’ve been led by a spy.”

  “We have to fight,” Rollo said. “We’re here. Now, we have to finish it.”

  “We’re here as part of a trap,” Briggs said.

  “How else do we win?” Rollo asked.

  We all looked at each other.

  “To win, you have to destroy the enemy,” Rollo said.

  “How do you propose to destroy the enemy when he knows our plans?” Captain Laval demanded.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Given the nature of the pocket universe, I have an idea that might turn the tables on them.”

  “What does that even mean?” Laval asked.

  “Consider what we know,” I said. “Ifness controlled the Admiral.”

  The old man looked more stricken than ever.

  I cleared my throat. I needed to be more circumspect with my words. “We don’t know that Ifness has been in contact with the enemy since we’ve arrived here,” I said.

  “That would be difficult given the nature of the pocket universe,” N7 said. “According to our tests, we can only send messages fifteen to twenty kilometers away.”

  “That’s more than interesting,” I said. “It proves my point.”

  Laval snarled quietly, saying, “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “The enemy expects us to follow a certain path,” I said. “Ifness is supposed to lead us a certain way. Well, Ifness is dead. Now, we have to hit the enemy in a new way. Our only real advantage is that the enemy doesn’t know that we know he tricked us.”

  The bulldog-looking Laval seemed to think that through. He finally nodded.

  “That’s where the nature of the pocket universe comes in,” I said.

  “How does that help us?” Briggs asked.

  “The pocket universe is the size of a small star system,” I said. “That’s what I learned in the Library of the Fortress of Light. That means it’s a limited universe. So, what happens? When we reach the limit, do we bump up against a wall?”

  “That seems unlikely,” Laval said.

  “Agreed,” I said. “I think instead that one travels around the universe. It’s like a man sailing around the Earth. If he sails long enough, he’ll come back to where he started.”

  “Meaning?” asked Captain Laval.

  “Meaning we head for the star,” I said. “We pass the star and eventually come in behind the enemy. The PDS will undoubtedly be on the other side of the dense planet, waiting for our attack in the other direction.”

  “I’m with you so far,” Laval said.

  “We rush the planet, circle it and hit the PDS from pointblank range. We board it if we have to. We beam it to death with massed graviton rays. Once it is destroyed, we grapple with the enemy fleet. It might even be that we’ll capture Jennifer on the PDS. That will cripple the enemy, and we’ll hold all the advantages.”

  “That’s a rosy picture,” Laval said. “How do you know it will work?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But it’s what Hannibal Lightning would do. A Great Captain of history—Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan or Napoleon—would dare to take the road less traveled in order to surprise the enemy. If we falter now, Earth will perish.”

  “Or we’ll all die in a fruitless voyage,” Laval said.

  “Have some courage, man,” I told him. “Think about it. We have a chance to surprise the enemy. That’s instead of walking into a perfectly laid trap. Or would you rather run home with your tail between your thick legs?”

  Captain Laval glared at me, but only for a moment. Maybe some of the words sank through his skull. Finally, he slumped into a chair and threw his hands in the air.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Laval admitted.

  “Briggs,” I asked, “do you know what to do?”

  The General shook his head.

  “Doctor?” I asked.

  The medical officer hurriedly shook his head.

  “Admiral Sparhawk?” I asked.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “What’s your suggestion?” I asked.

  Old Sparhawk stared at me until a tremulous smile appeared. “I thank you for asking me, young man. I’m unfit to command. That is clear. I say…I say do as you suggest. It’s bold. The only real way to handle a fleet is boldly. We’re here to fight. Well, by damn, let us fight.”

  “Yes, I agree with that,” Laval said. “But who will lead us?”

  Sparhawk looked around the room until he pointed at Rollo.

  “I agree,” I said.

  “I second the motion,” N7 said.

  “Yes,” Briggs said. “I will stand behind the former First Admiral and accept his orders.”

  “Very well,” Captain Laval said. “I agree with the majority. We might as well make it unanimous.”

  And that’s how Rollo came to command the expeditionary force into the pocket universe.

  -77-

  The fleet decelerated, came to a dead stop and began accelerating in the opposite direction. We were on a mad gamble to surprise the Plutonians. Our only real hope was that they expected us to follow an exact pattern of Ifness’s devising. Could we turn the tables on them?

  We gained velocity, plunging through the murky gases as they swirled past our mighty battlejumpers.

  One day turned into two, three and then four. The light increased in our direction of travel. So did the outside heat. We were clearly nearing the pocket universe’s star.

  I interviewed Saul each day, questioning him subtly about Ifness. The Abaddon clone did not appear to be part of the cabal of spies sent against us.

  I also began to run T-tests with Saul. The clone could easily teleport anywhere within a battlejumper. It was harder for him to go from ship to ship. He would concentrate and then abruptly teleport. We found that distance made no difference until the two battlejumpers were eleven kilometers from each other. At that point, Saul shook his head.

  “I cannot see the way,” the clone said.

  “Can you teleport into a dark room?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Can you teleport to any place that you can’t see?”

  “Maybe to a few close places, but that would be foolish.”

  “You might teleport into an object then?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Saul said, yawning, tiring of the interrogation.


  Under First Admiral Rollo’s orders, the captains launched staggered probes toward the brightness. The probes found several interesting properties. The gases began to thin out ahead, allowing one to see several hundred kilometers. The closer the probes came to the star, the longer the distances they could see with their teleoptics. Finally, they could see thousands of kilometers, tens of thousands of kilometers and then several hundred thousand.

  It is good to keep in mind stellar distances. Luna was only a little more than four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth, right next to each other in Solar System terms. That meant even at these new sight ranges, we would practically have to be on top of the enemy to see him and fire our beams.

  Missiles were different. Missiles were interesting. Maybe the best way to fight the Plutonians would be through long-range missiles that took several days or even a week to crawl to the enemy position.

  Through the murk of swirling gases, we saw the diffuse brightness of the star far, far away, like a bright light surrounded by fog. Thus, we never actually saw the star itself. The fleet changed heading so we would skirt the star, circling wide around it.

  The days became a week, then two, and then three. By now, the star was far behind the fleet and receding more every day.

  Did Jennifer wonder what had happened to us? Had Plutonian cruisers made more attacks on various regular star systems? Had they attacked the Earth again, or made contact with Emperor Daniel Lex Rex? Clearly, the main Earth Force Fleet had vanished. The enemy also would not have heard a peep out of Ifness.

  It was strange in a way. The Plutonian pocket universe was tiny, but the thick and, in a sense, stifling gases made the reality seem much larger than it really was.

  The weeks of travel as we sailed back into the gassy thickness taught our personnel how to act while here. It taught our sensor techs the best way to track. We became accustomed to the murk. Tacticians thought up plans, tricks and ploys. As practice, we staggered the fleet into a long thin line. Later, we spread out into a wide row. We changed formations constantly, testing theories. We had war games and refined our tactics. It was lonely. It was instructive. We were in our own tiny universe, and we had yet to find a way to leave it and return home.

  I worried about that for several days. What if Jennifer only had a single dimensional portal here, used to it leave and caused the portal to self-destruct afterward?

  Finally, Ella pointed out that there were supposed to be millions of sleeping Plutonians on the planet. They would have the tech to make more dimensional portals.

  Ella had been demoted from being the Demetrius’s battlejumper captain to a phase-suited commando with N7 and me, as she had taken Rollo’s place. The three of us practiced constantly, honing our silent, phase-out signals and various special tactics.

  The assault troopers also trained diligently, particularly on boarding tactics.

  It was interesting. The continuing weeks of travel and constant practice turned us into a more cohesive fleet with greater trust in each other’s abilities.

  At the end of that time, First Admiral Rollo issued our first slowing of velocity. The gases ahead had increasingly thickened and actually produced greater pressure against our hulls. Soon, it was like plowing through icy water, the gases dragging against the hulls.

  “This is a vile realm,” Ella said one day while we put away our phase suits in the GEV. “We can hardly see a thing. Why would anyone want to live here?”

  “I have a theory,” N7 said. “Creed once thought the First Ones did the Plutonians a favor by building them such a pocket universe. It would seem to have been what the Plutonians had once escaped. Maybe that is the wrong idea. Maybe the First Ones were punishing the Plutonians by putting them in this place, returning them to their previous awful existence. Maybe the Plutonians realized they had come from a…a strange and even sinister space-time continuum.”

  “Whatever the reason,” I said. “It doesn’t matter now. The pocket universe is dreadful.”

  The fleet soon slowed again, as the gases continued to thicken. Perhaps we approached the small, dense planet, the single one in this infernal realm.

  The coming space battle would be with ships practically on top of each other. That wasn’t normal—for our universe, anyway. If the gases became too thick, could our graviton beams even work?

  Several days later, the fleet slowed to a dead stop.

  Rollo ordered probes launched and had them travel in a growing string, one right after the other. He was using up almost the last of our probes for this. Finally, word raced back from probe to probe to probe.

  One probe had found the planet. It was six hundred and ninety-eight thousand kilometers from the fleet. The probe had almost immediately withdrawn.

  We had a council of war several hours later. There was debate. Rollo asked for advice, and every captain, every marine lieutenant agreed: we must attack at once and annihilate the enemy. The sooner we did so, the sooner we could leave this awful universe.

  -78-

  The fleet began to move two hours later, heading in the direction of the single planet.

  Rollo had ordered a retraction of all the probes. The enemy mustn’t have any advance warning of our approach and attack.

  I paced in my GEV as the fleet crept toward the strange planet.

  It’s crazy how the imminence of danger focused a man’s thoughts. There was a saying about that—how death, or waiting at the gallows to hang, wonderfully concentrated a man’s thinking. The decisive moment had a way of burning away the excess.

  As I paced back and forth through the piloting chamber, a truth penetrated my thinking and grew stronger the more I thought about it.

  Jennifer was no one’s fool. She had known me once, had understood my thinking better than almost anyone else I’d known. Our fleet had disappeared. It had not returned to Earth. She must have established that by now. Could the invasion fleet have brought a dimensional portal with us? I suppose that was possible. I guess what I was hinting at was the truth that she had to know we were still in this Hell dimension with her. Jennifer must realize that I would try a daring attack. Since we hadn’t shown up at the ambush site, she must have figured out by now that we’d discovered Ifness’s trick.

  Was Jennifer waiting even now behind the strange planet? Was she waiting for us to pull a fast one? The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that we were sailing to our destruction.

  The Plutonian ships were made for this weird realm. Their beams would likely slice through the thick gases better than our recalibrated graviton beams. Our missiles—the enemy’s fantastic self-detonations and the gases that would carry the shockwaves for possibly tens of thousands of kilometers—Jennifer had all the advantages here, not us.

  I paced and kept going over and over and over again in my mind—I whirled around and dashed to the comm. Soon, Rollo in his First Admiral’s chair regarded me.

  “This could be a trap,” I said over the comm.

  “I don’t agree, Creed. We’ve tricked them. You’ve said so yourself more than once.”

  I told him my new reasoning.

  Rollo examined me, finally nodding. “I congratulate you, my brother. You’ve stolen my confidence. Now, I have no idea what to do.”

  “I do,” I said. “I’ll slink ahead in the GEV and do what I do best: effectuator tactics. This place is made for it. Think about it. Jennifer uses control devices in her Plutonians.”

  “If—and it’s a big if—what Ifness originally told us is correct,” Rollo said.

  “That’s true. But Ifness’s descriptions have been accurate so far. His only “lie” was that he was double-crossing us and controlling our commander, leading us into an ambush.”

  Rollo leaned forward. “We’re on their freaking doorstep, Creed. This isn’t the time to get squeamish. This is the time to harden our hearts against fear and head into the lion’s den.”

  “You can still do that, after I’ve had a chance to grab Jennifer and decapitate th
em, so to speak. If she has controls or wires in the Plutonians, maybe I can get them to do something incredibly stupid that will give us an easy victory.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs, Creed.” Rollo scowled. “It’s time to roll in with battlejumpers blazing and kill them all.”

  “I’m right,” I said. “I know I’m right.”

  Rollo hunched his massive shoulders, staring at me as if he planned to rip off my head and finish it with a pissing contest. Soon, however, in spite of himself, he began to nod.

  “You’re the man, Creed. I’ve seen you pull off a miracle play more than once.” Rollo sighed. “I’ll go with your hunch. But if you’re wrong and give away our presence…”

  “I know. It’s always a roll of the dice.”

  Rollo grinned, but it had a false feeling. He was finding this hard to do, as it went against his basic instincts.

  “How soon are you ready to try?” the First Admiral asked.

  “Give me an hour.”

  Rollo turned away, thinking, finally facing me again. “I’m going to take the fleet in closer during that hour. I’ll let you try your way, but I’m not waiting long to unleash some whoop-ass against these bastards. My gut is churning, Creed, and the only way I can get it to stop is killing them and burning their planet to the core.”

  “Right,” I said. “We each do what we gotta do.”

  -79-

  The GEV slid out of one of Battlejumper Demetrius’s hangar bays and began the lonely trek to the small, dense planet hidden out there in the thickening murk. There were three occupants in the stealth ship; Ella, N7 and me. We had the three phase suits.

  I heard a familiar rush of air, and found Saul standing beside me in the piloting chamber.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Creed, he has a gun,” Ella said.

  My heart sank as I realized Saul had a heavy caliber pistol in his huge paw. It was Rollo’s unique .55 hand cannon. I couldn’t believe it.

  I looked into Saul’s eyes, but to my surprise, I didn’t see any murder there, did not see my death. The big guy held the gun beside his right thigh.