As far as Geary could see, no other dark ships were maneuvering to attack Mistral. Now that she was inside the dock, the dark ships appeared to have completely lost interest in her. “Good work, Commander,” Geary sent. “The dark ships are not continuing to target Mistral. But don’t forget that the dark ships may well be trying to work around whatever prevents them firing on that facility and on you. We don’t know how much time you have.”
New virtual windows had popped up next to Geary’s seat, showing the views from the armor of Marines who were already charging off Mistral and storming the facility. If he wanted to, Geary could call up the view from the armor of any Marine in the assault force, but at the moment he had a job to do dealing with the dark ships. He couldn’t waste his attention riding the shoulder of a Marine lieutenant or sergeant or private.
Still, the windows were there, visible to a glance to the side, so Geary could remain aware of what was happening with the Marines without focusing his attention on them. He saw assault teams hacking the controls on hatches to allow access to inside the facility before he was called back to the larger picture by Desjani.
“We just got the ping back from the hypernet gate,” Desjani said. “You were right. The hypernet gate is reporting that there are no other gates accessible from it. It’s blocked.”
“I wish I’d been wrong on that one.” Geary touched a comm control. “Victoria, the gate is blocked. We need to know how to unblock it.”
“I was already assuming the worst, Admiral,” she replied. Rione had not yet left Mistral but was poised to follow the Marines inside the facility. “It saves time in situations like this. If that information is on this facility, I will find it.”
“Five minutes to bombardment launch,” Lieutenant Yuon said. “Uh, combat systems are still requesting confirmation of plan and authorization to launch, Admiral.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Geary said. He called up that data again, saw that nothing had changed to alter his intentions, confirmed the bombardment plan, then authorized the launch to take place automatically as his warships reached the right points along their paths. “Do you ever think it ought to be harder to cause this much destruction, Tanya?”
Desjani gave him a disbelieving look. “No. It’s too hard as it is. If something needs to be destroyed, let me destroy the blasted thing.”
“Not everyone has your sense of restraint, Tanya.”
“Excuse me, Admiral?”
He didn’t answer as Geary’s fleet swept through the orbital region holding the docks and warehouses. The docks were huge, rectangular structures, with almost-as-large superstructures on their backs that contained repair and fabrication facilities, offices, living spaces for workers, life support, and a variety of other necessities for a typical shipyard. On the fleet’s sensors, all of those areas intended for human use looked dark and cold, kept just warm enough for equipment to function properly, or with all life support shut off, as frigid as empty space. The docks were lifeless by any biological definition, but power usage within provided clear signs of the mechanical “life” that ruled within them. “Like haunted houses,” someone whispered.
The warehouses resembled enormous beehives, rounded structures with external access and loading docks located all around them on different levels. The main cargo off-loading docks were at the top and bottom of the warehouses to allow new material to be distributed throughout the structure using very large cargo elevators in the core.
Each of the docks and warehouses also boasted a single propulsion unit whose thrust could produce a significant change in their orbits given enough time. It was an expensive addition to such facilities, but if the Alliance fleet had been able to launch a bombardment from light-hours away, the structures would have had ample time to make the relatively small alterations in their orbits that would cause the bombardment projectiles to completely miss their targets. However, with Geary’s warships planning on launching so close to their targets and the rocks moving so fast, in this case the propulsion units would be totally useless.
The size and numbers of the structures rivaled that of a major shipbuilding region of space in a wealthy star system. If the Alliance had been forced to retreat here, these structures would have allowed the Alliance to continue to launch raids on the Syndic conquerors.
Geary wondered what point that effort would have had. Victory would have been impossible unless the Syndicate Worlds had been so badly stressed by winning that it fell apart and left an opening for the Alliance government to reoccupy the ruins of Alliance star systems. But by the time Geary had been reawoken after a century of war, there no longer appeared to be any point to most things about the war. Neither side believed they had any chance of winning, but the Syndicate Worlds would not stop attacking, and the Alliance would not surrender, and nothing else mattered, no other courses of action were considered possible.
He was about to destroy a symbol of that stubborn insanity.
A hail of bombardment projectiles launched from Geary’s warships, hurtling toward the vast structures designed to support ships like them but now dedicated to the dark ships.
The solid metal projectiles nicknamed rocks by fleet personnel had no warheads, no explosives, but were traveling at more than thirty thousand kilometers per second. Each carried an immense amount of kinetic energy, and when they struck anything, that energy was released.
Under the impacts of dozens of hits on every target, docks shredded, flying apart into clouds of large and small pieces. Warehouses exploded, those containing weapons or fuel cells vanishing in rapid successions of gigantic explosions as their contents self-detonated, their contents and their structures becoming a mass of small particles flung outward. In the space of seconds, structures built at immense cost in time, money, and labor were turned into a huge field of debris.
“No matter what happens to us here, it was worth it to blow away all that,” Desjani said, smiling at her display. “Someday, thousands of years in the future, that ring of debris will have spread to form a thin ring within this binary star system. That’s something to imagine, isn’t it?”
“An asteroid belt composed of the ruin of war,” Geary mused. “We’ll name it Tanya’s Ring.”
“A debris field big enough to form a belt in a star system, named after me? Now I can die happy.”
He glanced at her and confirmed the impression he had from Tanya’s tone of voice.
She wasn’t joking.
And with all five dark ship formations coming back at the Alliance ships again, and the hypernet gate still blocked, there seemed to be all too great a chance that it might happen before this day was out.
Fourteen
“Admiral,” Lieutenant Castries reported in amazement, “the fleet has detected a jump point for Hardinga.”
Geary checked his display. The jump point had popped into existence over five light-hours away, leading to a moderately-well-populated star system near this binary. Near as interstellar distances went, anyway. “How long—”
“It’s unstable,” Castries continued, then realized she had interrupted Geary. “I’m sorry, Admiral. Our sensors assess that the jump point is unstable. I’ve never seen that before.”
“You’ve never been in a close binary star system before,” Desjani said. “Look at that. Our sensors are estimating the jump point has an eighty percent chance of collapsing within seven hours of coming into existence.”