Christopher Nuttall - The Trafalgar Gambit

Dear God, how high had the casualties been? What had happened onboard EDS1 to slaughter the defenders of Earth?

“Sir, EDS1 is gone,” the pilot said, answering his unspoken question. He’d been flicking through what remained of the flight control network. “The station has been completely destroyed.”

Marius cursed. The attack was internal, then; there was no way to smuggle a nuke or an antimatter bomb onto a defense station without help. It had to have been an internal detonation. Nothing else, not even a bombardment with compressed antimatter, would have obliterated the station so quickly. He accessed the network again and swore, angrily. EDS2 had gone silent. The senior officer was still a mere commander.

“This is Vice Admiral Drake,” he said as he linked into the communications network. “Here are my ID codes and command authority. I suggest that you verify them, then open a secure link.”

There was a long pause.

“Admiral, I’m Commander Jacob Fallon, in command of EDS3,” Commander Fallon said. He sounded as if he were on the verge of coming apart, either through shock or relief. No one had expected an attack on Earth, let alone what had to be an internal rebellion. “Thank God you’re alive!”

Commander Fallon sounded relieved to discover that someone was senior to him and could therefore take charge. Marius accessed his implants, briefly skimming through Fallon’s file. It was not a distinguished one.

“Just so,” Marius growled. He would have to work with Fallon, no matter his limited experience. “We’re still alive and I, for one, intend to stay that way. You have my command codes. Declare a Case Omega and run through the network, then let me know if there is anyone senior to me…”

“But sir,” Fallon protested. “I don’t have the authority to declare Case Omega.”

“You’re in command of a battlestation,” Marius snapped. “You have the authority! Now, get in touch with the network and find out who’s in charge.”

He disconnected from the network and looked over at the pilot. “Set course for EDS3,” he ordered. Fallon sounded as if he was on the verge of panic, which meant—if nothing else—Marius had to be on the scene to relieve him, if necessary. “Call up a flight of starfighters for escort and get them to fly top cover.”

His implant buzzed as Fallon contacted him. “I ran a Case Omega, sir,” he said. “You’re the senior surviving officer within the Earth-Luna Sphere.”

Marius nodded. The attack had clearly been carefully planned. Had they held off for another few minutes, he would have been in Navy HQ when it was destroyed. But if he’d maintained his original plans, he’d have been there at least ten minutes sooner. Which meant that if Senator McGillivray hadn’t wanted to talk with him, Marius himself would already be dead.

The attackers, whoever they were, had planned to decapitate the defenses and they’d come alarmingly close to success. Their tactics showed a chilling level of ruthlessness. Breaking the taboo on using weapons of mass destruction on inhabited planets showed a single-minded determination to succeed, if only because of what the Federation would do to them if it won the war.

“Right,” he said. “I am assuming command of the defenses of Earth. Give me a situation report, now.”

“Sir, the datanet has been crippled,” Fallon said. “I barely know anything…”

“Then give me what you have,” Marius said patiently, checking the shuttle’s ETA at the station. “What do you know about what’s going on?”

“Ah…EDS1 has been destroyed, sir,” Fallon said. “I have dispatched SAR gunboats and shuttles, but they don’t hold out much hope of finding survivors. EDS2, EDS7 and EDS9 are non-responsive; they’re intact, yet they’re not linked into the command network and are refusing to respond to hails. I don’t know their exact status. And there are dozens of enemy starfighters flying around, engaging the defenses.”

Marius scowled. Starfighters needed a base—either a starship or a station—to operate. Their life support packs wouldn’t last indefinitely, which meant that someone had to have launched them. But from where?

He glanced at the holographic near-orbit display as the shuttle rose out of the atmosphere and considered it. The starfighters could have come from the silent battlestations, yet if that was the case, there should be more of them. And then the treacherous commanders would have had to convince the fighter jocks to support them, too…no, it wasn’t possible to form a conspiracy of that magnitude without Federation Intelligence or ONI getting wind of it beforehand.

He looked at the display again, and knew the answer.

“There are too many freighters in orbit—breaking orbit now,” he said slowly. Converting freighters into makeshift carriers was an old trick. And now that the fighting had begun, hundreds of innocent civilian craft were breaking orbit and fleeing, unaware that some of their comrades were actually enemy starships. “Ten gets you twenty that at least one of them is working for the enemy…”

He frowned. “I want a general broadcast,” he ordered. “All civilian ships within the Earth-Luna Sphere are to cancel their drives and prepare to be boarded. Any that refuse to stop will be fired upon and destroyed.”

Fallon sounded shocked. “But, sir…”

Marius ignored the protest and drove onwards. “Have you re-established the command datanet yet?”

“No, sir,” Fallon said. “The coordinating systems were mounted on EDS1, and were destroyed by the blast that took out the station.”

And it never occurred to you to try to work around the problem ? Marius thought, wondering what connections Fallon must have such that he had avoided being sent somewhere harmless, perhaps an asteroid mining station.

“I see,” he said as coldly as he could. “Your station may not have been designed to serve as a command station, but the computers will be able to handle it for at least a few hours. And by then, we will either have won or lost the coming battle. Reboot the system and prepare for operations.”

“Sir, the manual clearly states…”

“ Fuck the manual ,” Marius swore at him. “This is war! Doing what the enemy expects us to do is a certain way to wind up dead, with the enemy laughing at us. Now, forget the manual and reboot the fucking system, right fucking now!”

“Sir, our escort has arrived,” the pilot interrupted. “We should be on the station in ten minutes, unless we hit unexpected trouble.”

Marius nodded absently, thinking hard. He’d warned the Senate about the dangers of largely unknown alien races, but he knew that no alien race could have launched such a devastating and precise attack. The level of access the unknown attackers had demonstrated they had internal help, which meant that whoever was behind the attack was trying for a coup, rather than destruction for the sake of destruction. Destroying Earth would have been easy—a single antimatter bomb would depopulate the planet—but anyone who wanted to replace the Federation with his own rule would need Earth’s legitimacy.

And that suggested there had to be a second level to the plan. Destroying EDS1 and Navy HQ would cause confusion, but the disarray wouldn’t last. Even if Marius hadn’t stepped up to the plate, someone would have taken command sooner or later. There had to be an incoming enemy fleet heading towards Earth, having somehow been smuggled into the system. That, at least, was no longer impossible. The stardrive had seen to that.

“Ah, the network is up and running,” Fallon said. He sounded relieved. Marius wondered how he would cope in a battle where multiple antimatter detonations would disrupt the network effortlessly. Coordinating a fleet in combat wasn’t easy. “The three silent stations are continuing to refuse to respond.”