Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Read online

  “Let Hope know,” Harold ordered. “I don’t know what the Imperials have here for ground troops, but I doubt it’s something these guys want to tangle with.

  “Sadly, I don’t think our twenty-man security team is going to make any difference,” he continued, “so we’re going to make sure these people don’t get to go home. Let’s get these bastards out of the Empress’s skies, shall we?”

  #

  Two things rapidly became very clear as Liberty moved to cut off the destroyers’ retreat: firstly, that after firing off over fifteen hundred missiles apiece, the destroyers appeared to have finally run out of their scarily fast weaponry; and, secondly, they had no intention of avoiding action with the Terran cruiser.

  “We’re not much better off than they are for missiles, sir,” Lyon warned. “Maybe five more salvos.”

  “If they want to come to us, Commander Lyon, I suggest we let them,” Harold told her. “The lance capacitors are charged?”

  “They are,” she confirmed.

  “Then hold your missiles for the moment,” he concluded. “Let them close the range, then launch everything we’ve got at the lead ship at two million kilometers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  An eerie silence fell over Liberty’s bridge as the three ships rushed toward each other. Harold and his people knew this was a side show now—the real point of today was the shuttles charging toward Hope—but that didn’t make the next few minutes any less potentially deadly.

  “Any idea what they hit our people with?” he asked Saab, almost sub-vocalizing to make sure only the executive officer in the secondary bridge heard him.

  “Not a clue,” the other man replied. “Our sensors aren’t even sure they detected a beam. It was like a chunk of the Imperials’ armor just…exploded.

  “It appears to be a lot shorter-ranged than our beams, however.”

  “And they seem to be counting on their ability to no-sell our proton beams,” Harold agreed. “Let’s…see what happens.”

  There were eight hundred people aboard Liberty, and if he’d calculated wrong, he might be ordering them all to their deaths.

  “Two million klicks,” Lyon announced. “Missiles away, targeting Bogey Three.”

  There was barely enough time for the first salvo to hit home, sending light and energy cascading over Bogey Three’s shields, before they crossed the three-light-second mark.

  “Cuesta, break up,” Harold snapped. “Lyon: fire!”

  Liberty suddenly flipped ninety degrees in space, cutting away from the strangers at fifty-five percent of light speed. They were still gaining on her, but now Harold had almost forty seconds before they reached the apparent range of whatever they’d killed Division Lord Harrison with.

  Powerful electromagnets along the length of Liberty’s core flashed to life, creating a focused magnetic field that flashed out into space and latched itself onto the closest metal object: Bogey Three.

  Then six kilograms of hyper-compressed superheated plasma blazed along the channel at ninety-nine point seven five percent of lightspeed. Bogey Three didn’t know enough to try and break the connection, and the plasma packet slammed into her hull, heat and kinetic energy alike slicing through shield and hull with pathetic ease.

  To Harold’s surprise, Bogey Three survived—but her shields went down and their missile salvos were still in space. Thirty one-ton missiles arrived moments after the destroyer’s shield collapsed and tore the strange ship to pieces.

  “Bogey Four is breaking away,” Lyon reported. “I don’t think they were expecting the lance.”

  “After him, Cuesta,” Harold ordered. “Charge time on the lance?”

  “Thirty-two seconds and counting. Can we keep them in range that long?”

  Everyone looked at Lieutenant Commander Cuesta, who smiled, baring perfectly white teeth. “You’re going to have a two-second window, Commander Lyon,” he told her. “Make it count.”

  Seconds ticked down and Liberty’s Captain had to stop himself from holding his breath. His repeater screens happily showed him both the charging status of the plasma lance’s capacitors, refilling from the cruiser’s hyper-dense fusion-core secondary power plants, and the distance to the fleeing destroyer.

  “And…now,” Lyon murmured, barely loud enough for her Captain to hear her—and Tactical was right next to the Captain’s dais.

  Liberty shivered as the electromagnets flared to life again, reaching out to touch the enemy ship for a deadly few moments. This time, the destroyer tried to dodge—but all she achieved was to give Lyon a fraction of a second longer to make sure the plasma packet arrived.

  This time, the pulse hit the rear of the destroyer and continued clean through the entire ship, ripping a hole several meters wide through the vessel.

  For a moment, the intruder simply drifted in space, her engines, drives and power plants down.

  Then she imploded, her armor and hull crumpling inward as something crushed the entire ship into a tiny ball that then collapsed into a burst of stunningly white light.

  Harold studied the screen for a few long seconds.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked calmly.

  “I have no idea, sir,” Lyon admitted. “We’ve got full sensor records; we’ll forward them to the Imperials.”

  “Good.” Harold turned to Popovitch. “What news from Hope?”

  “The shuttles have broken atmosphere; they seem to be landing well away from the colony. The Marines and Ducal Guard are going after them. General Wellesley is on the ground and the Imperial Battalion Commander has deferred authority to him.”

  “James is here?” Harold asked. “Oh, those poor alien bastards.”

  #

  Chapter 3

  James Arthur Valerian Wellesley, younger brother to the Duke of Wellington after his father’s death, had done everything in his power to prevent Duchess Annette Bond from hanging a General’s stars on him.

  At the point that the Ducal Guard under his command finished assembling its continental security forces, air division and suborbital division, as well as the security details aboard the Duchy of Terra Militia’s spaceships, he’d commanded just over seven hundred thousand people.

  Having the top of that rank structure be a Colonel had started to cause problems, so he’d caved and allowed Annette Bond to hang three stars on his collar and finally given up on being his old Captain’s personal bodyguard.

  Generals, though, had to make inspection tours, which had landed James on Hope when everything went to hell in a handbasket.

  Technically, he had no authority to be in the Imperial Planetary Command Center. His Ducal Guard were basically corporate security here on Hope, protecting the ownership interest of the Duchy of Terra in an Imperial-protected colony.

  In practice, the Command Center was a glorified precinct office with authority over two companies of Marines, one Yin and one Human. There wasn’t enough security to keep him out, and given that he had an entire battalion of troops to the Imperium’s three-hundred-odd troopers…

  “General Wellesley, sir!” the Yin Battalion Commander greeted him as he charged into the office. The Yin were a tall humanoid race with multicolored feathers over mostly blue skin and hard black beaks. They got along quite well with humans, enough so to be an occasional problem, given that Yin females like the Battalion Commander shared certain secondary sexual characteristics with human women.

  Battalion Commander Indus might be six and a half feet tall, with a black beak and dark green feathers, but she was also curvaceous enough to qualify as attractive to at least some humans.

  Which was part of why James was here, since he’d just had to send the Major commanding the Hope detachment home in disgrace for cross-species sexual harassment.

  “Battalion Commander,” he greeted the Imperial officer. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion, but I was hoping for an update.”

  Indus gestured the dark-haired General, who was tall enough to just barely be able to look
over her shoulder, over to the display she was standing next to.

  “Division Lord Harrison is dead,” she said flatly, the translator in James’s ear easily carrying her harsh, grim tone after years of practice with both humans and Yin. “Gleaming Dawn was destroyed, as were half her escorts. The enemy ships have broken off, but they have launched a major landing effort.”

  “Damn.” James studied the screen. Hope was scheduled to receive an orbital defense constellation, but the singular focus of the Duchy’s industrial efforts since Annexation hadn’t left them with a particularly diverse manufacturing base. They could upgrade and build warships, but defensive satellites weren’t inside Terra’s capacity.

  With the Imperial picket scattered, there was nothing to stop the fifteen assault shuttles the scans were showing him.

  “Any details on what we’re facing?” he asked.

  “None,” Indus told him. “Like the ships, the shuttles appear to be of Kanzi design, but they’re not a class we’re familiar with. We’re still localizing their approach vector, but I’m assuming they’re coming for the colony.”

  James nodded slowly.

  “The Guard has eight hundred troops on the surface,” he told her. “We have power armor for two of those companies and Marine-grade plasma weaponry for all four. I would be delighted to place those soldiers at your disposal.”

  Indus shook her head, a gesture humans and Yin shared.

  “That would make no sense, General,” she admitted. “I have two companies, though both are fully equipped with power armor and plasma weapons. You have far more experience in command—especially in commanding human troops!—than I do, and this Colony is owned by the Duchy of Terra.

  “I will gladly defer to your command, General Wellesley, as I think we can both agree that is the best way to protect this world.”

  James blinked in surprise. In his experience, the soldiers and spacers of the Imperial armed forces were loath to surrender any authority to the forces belonging to the homeworld Duchies. Neither he nor Indus knew Hope well, though—nobody did; the colony was barely a year and a half old—and she was right that he had more troops and knew how to lead humans better than the Yin officer did.

  “The Guard doesn’t have any heavy anti-aircraft or anti-space weapons,” he pointed out after a moment’s thought. “Do your Marines?”

  “We have two mobile surface-to-orbit missile launchers,” Indus told him. “That’s all we have for heavy equipment, though.”

  “Move them to the perimeter of New Hope City,” James instructed. “We’ll move the ground troops out to protect them—our priority has to be protecting New Hope, but if we can cover the external settlements as well, we have to.”

  “The launchers have horizon-to-horizon capability,” she replied. “With the satellite net intact, we can even fire over the horizon. They can’t avoid our launchers, but…”

  “I’m sensing another shoe here, Battalion Commander,” the General pointed out dryly.

  “Another shoe, sir?” Indus asked.

  “Never mind,” James said, shaking his head. “An unpleasant aspect I’m not expecting.”

  “We only have five missiles per launcher,” she admitted. “Unless those shuttles are inferior to ours, which wouldn’t be consistent with today’s insanity, we’re only going to take out three, maybe four of them.”

  “Damn.” He returned his attention to the screen. “Get me a close-up of those shuttles,” he ordered the tech next to him, then studied the resulting data.

  “Roughly the size and mass of a Kanzi heavy assault shuttle,” James concluded. “Depending on gear and if they’re carrying slave cages, anywhere from thirty to a hundred ground troops.”

  He shook his head.

  “Get me a map of the area round New Hope and a com link to all of the Guard and Marine company commanders,” he told the man who’d grabbed him the visual. “We’re going to need to place people carefully; the numbers are going to be more even than I’d like.”

  #

  “General, Battalion Commander,” a Yin tech, his feathers ruffling with distress, interrupted the radio conference.

  James and Indus were about halfway through ordering the deployment of the Guard troops and Marine sub-companies—units of identical size at this point, despite the different names—throughout New Hope.

  “Hold one, Captains,” he told his COs, and turned to the technician. “What have you got, son?”

  The Yin might have three inches of height on him, but it had been some time since James could regard anyone under the rank of O-5 or E-5 as anything but a kid. His husband said he was getting old.

  His husband was probably right.

  “We’ve got a final vector on their approach,” the tech told him quickly. “They haven’t deviated from their course since they cleared beam range of the Navy picket.”

  “Where are they headed? To New Hope?”

  “No. They’re going to almost the exact opposite side of the planet, somewhere near the Corellian Plateau,” the enlisted alien told him. “All eighteen of them are on the same vector, we’ll be able to target them with surface-to-orbit missiles in just over two minutes, but…”

  “That’s a long way out of the way,” James concluded. “Captain Sommers,” he addressed the man whose company had been on Hope the longest, “what the hell is at the Corellian Plateau?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Naheed Sommers replied. “I don’t think anyone has even set foot on that continent—we did overflights before the colonization and again last year for mapping, but the Plateau is a frozen mess of ice and rock.

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “Well, eighteen hundred heavily armed aliens apparently disagree with that assessment, Captain,” James told him. “Which changes our plans dramatically.”

  “What do you want to do, General?” Indus asked.

  “I want you, Battalion Commander, to stay here with my Charlie and Delta companies,” he told her. “I’m going to take every suit of power armor we have, load them onto our assault shuttles, and go after the bastards.

  “I don’t know what they’re after, but everything on this damned planet belongs to the Centauri Development Corp and the Duchy of Terra, and I am not going to let them get away with blowing away half a Navy picket.”

  “We don’t have shuttles for our force,” Indus admitted.

  James grinned.

  “And that, Battalion Commander, is why I’m leaving two of my companies behind: because I have shuttles for them and I’m taking your people instead.”

  “You’re taking, sir?”

  “Oh, yes,” the Ducal Guard’s commander confirmed. “I’m taking command of the counter-strike myself.”

  #

  The Ducal Guard’s Asteroid-class assault shuttles were purchased from the Rekiki, another member race of the A!Tol Imperium that the humans had come to get along with well. Like the orbital satellite constellation that James was wishing Hope had, Terra hadn’t got around to establishing military-level shuttle factories.

  They had some home-built military shuttles, but they weren’t enough to meet the voracious needs of both the Militia and James’s Guard, so they’d purchased the Asteroid-class ships from the Duchy of Reki.

  The Asteroids were smaller ships than their enemy had brought, only able to carry fifty humans or Yin in power armor each, but the Ducal Guard had primary responsibility for search and rescue in Alpha Centauri. They’d brought sixteen of the sublight ships—enough to carry the entire battalion.

  Now those shuttles blazed through Hope’s frigid atmosphere at several dozen times the speed of sound. They could go faster if they went higher, a suborbital skip would get them to the Corellian Plateau ahead of the incoming shuttles, but that would make them more vulnerable to their enemies.

  Demonstrably, James didn’t want to expose his people to whatever godawful weapons the attacker’s shuttles carried.

  “We are tracking the incoming shuttles,” Indus told him
over the tactical net his people were running. “Opening fire with the SOM launchers.”

  “Good luck,” James replied, continuing to check over his gear. Unlike the bulky armor worn by the Guards and Marines around him, he wore a low-profile suit designed for Imperial Commandos. At three times the price of the standard armor and only somewhat less survivability, the only suits of Commando armor in the Duchy were used for the protection of high-profile VIPs.

  The leader of the Ducal Guard qualified and it wasn’t like he’d had time to be fitted for a regular suit of power armor before boarding the shuttle.

  “We got one!” Indus reported. “Lead shuttle is coming apart over the oceans…what in blue suns?!”

  “Battalion Commander?” James asked after the curse settled to silence.

  “They disappeared, General,” the Yin told him. “We nailed one of them with our first pair of missiles and mighthave got a second—and then the rest disappeared. Some kind of stealth field, I’m guessing, but that’s—”

  “Way out of what’s supposed to be the Kanzi’s league,” James agreed. “We’ll maintain course for their estimated landing site. Contact Governor Harper. She should be able to retask the survey satellites to give us overhead.

  “Between that and our shuttles’ scanners, we should be able to find the buggers once they touch down.”

  “Understood, General. Good luck.”

  #

  The shuttles came in low and fast, skimming over the frozen plains of Hope’s southern hemisphere. This section of the planet would have been called a desert if it weren’t so cold, which left it classed as simply “useless”.

  Running down the middle of the plains of permafrost, nearly featureless at this height and speed, was a mountain range where two of Hope’s continental plates collided. The rocks were icy and jagged, though some stubborn scrub that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Terra’s Arctic clung to their slopes to soften their starkness with Hope’s dark green vegetation.