Another missile struck the ship and the kettle rattled.
“Knock, knock,” some man yelled. I could not see who.
“Who’s there?” responded nearly every man in the cabin, and the men burst out in hysterics.
Inside joke, I guessed, and not a very good one.
And then the ride was over. There was the loud clank of metal dropping on metal as we lowered into a landing pad inside some GCF ship. The whining growl of straining motors echoed through the kettle as the heavy iron doors slid open and the hangar bay came in view.
I, of course, was still hanging from my harness. When my harness released me, I pushed through the crowd and hid near the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Granted, I did not see the space battle as it took place, but I had time to study it at length over the next few days. What I saw was the work of genius.
The first GCF ship to arrive in New Columbian space broadcasted in alone. It was a cruiser, the smallest class of ship in the GCF Fleet. It carried a crew of 130 men and, among other things, a fleet of three transports.
The captain of this ship played an interesting gambit. Instead of broadcasting his ship a few million miles out and risking remote radar detection, he used the Broadcast Network as camouflage. His ship materialized so close to the reception disc that the U.A. radar system recorded the anomaly caused by his ship’s appearance as a hiccup in Broadcast Network radiation. His ship was as black as space, making visual detection unlikely. To use an antiquated phrase, the cruiser flew in under the radar.
If the ship’s arrival near the Broadcast Network had disrupted the Network, the cruiser would have been quickly detected. Some kind of modification in the cruiser’s engine prevented the disruption, and the ship was never spotted.
This cruiser parked itself five hundred miles above Safe Harbor. It launched a single transport and waited.
So, was this lone cruiser picked up by radar? Nobody knows and the equipment that would have recorded the readings was destroyed during the ensuing battle. Somebody knew the space around New Columbia very well. The cruiser stopped in a blind spot—a seam between two different radar systems. There it stayed until the battle was over.
About the time that Colonel Wingate left Fort Clinton, the cruiser radioed the rest of the fleet, and that initiated the attack. Fifteen GCF ships broadcasted into New Columbian space—a slightly larger attack force than the one that sacked Gateway. There would be no missing the anomalies caused by fifteen GCF ships broadcasting in at the same time.
The Air Force responded by sending up all of its F-19 Falcons. The fighter carrier and destroyers guarding the discs also moved into position. Had the GCF ships been of recent design, this might have been an even fight—a fifteen-ship armada comprised of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships against nearly 400 fighters, two destroyers, one fighter carrier, and ground cannon. But the Joint Chiefs were not looking for a fair fight.
Hoping to rout the enemy, the Navy had an additional fleet of ships waiting near a set of broadcast discs. The moment the battle began, the plan was to feed these ships into the Network, and in less than sixty seconds, the U.A. Navy would have twenty more ships in New Columbian space.
But the Navy had to deal with the bottleneck of using a single reception disc. The GCF Fleet had no such restrictions. As the first of the Tomcats bore down from space and the Falcons flared up from the atmosphere, fifty additional GCF ships broadcasted into the battlefield.
The video feed from the battle looked like a misprint. So many anomalies tore into the open blackness that it looked like the fabric of space had begun to boil. Feathery white lines flashed and crisscrossed. Circles of light appeared from which shadowy black forms seemed to glide.
A dozen GCF battleships coasted into place in front of the broadcast disc and formed a line. Other ships parked behind the first waiting for a turn. When the first U.A. carrier emerged from the disc, the GCF ships opened fire as it materialized into space.
The hull of the carrier flashed and ignited. The tip of its wing sheered off and webs of flame danced along its shell. That was the worst of the spectacle, I think. Flames cannot exist in the vacuum of space. Those flames were feeding on oxygen pouring out of the ship.
Only two or maybe three fighters made it out of the launch tube as the carrier staggered forward. An enormous fireball burst out of the tube and dissipated. Two battleships left their place in the firing squad and followed the dying fighter carrier, bombarding her with bright red laser fire. In another minute, the hull cracked and spokes of flames shot through. It looked, for a brief moment, as if the ship had a yellow and orange aura that vanished as quickly as it appeared. Then streams of debris gushed out of those ruptures in place of the flames, and the lifeless ship floated sideways and drifted into space.
By this time, the next U.A. fighter carrier emerged from the Network and the massacre repeated itself. The firing squad bombarded the ships until they could not defend themselves. Then two ships finished the execution, and two more GCF battleships took their place in the firing line.
Once the U.A. ships entered the Broadcast Network, it was too late to stop them or save them. A few ships were rerouted, but more than twenty Unified Authority ships were destroyed.
Closer to the atmosphere, GCF ships prowled above Safe Harbor like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They traveled in groups of three and four, circling small territories and firing powerful lasers at planetary targets. A satellite captured video of this directly from above, and you could see the ships clearly against the blue and white glow of the New Columbian atmosphere.
New Columbia’s planetary defenses crumbled quickly. In the beginning, plenty of green and red beams fired up from the planet, but they seldom hit targets. The gunnery men on the ships homed in on those rays and returned fire. It took them less than two minutes to silence the cannons below.
The fighters fared no better. Rows of battleships bore down on the Falcons as they tore out of the atmosphere. Several more GCF battleships swarmed the fighter carrier and the destroyers that had been guarding the broadcast discs.
The battle took ten minutes, not eight. During that entire time, the line of civilian ships fleeing New Columbia continued to stream into the Broadcast Network. The GCF ships never attacked them. When the last of the U.A. ships exploded, the GCF ships broadcasted away.
You may or may not win an even fight, but you will certainly take casualties. By stacking the deck with sixty-five ships, the commander of the Galactic Central Fleet guaranteed more than victory, he guaranteed himself a rout. The Unified Authority lost three forts, twenty-three capital ships, and hundreds of fighters on March 24, 2512. The GCF lost one soldier, the guy I killed to get aboard their transport. I was about to even the score.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The landing bay was disorganized. Of course, the battle was still going on when the transport landed on a Confederate ship, but that did not explain all of the chaos. This was supposed to be a military operation. During my time as a Marine, the ships I served on either ran like clockwork or key officers lost their jobs. That did not seem to be the case in the Confederate Navy.
As the rear door of the kettle split open revealing the deck, I saw cargo movers driving large crates through a confused crowd. Men sprinted to get to their stations. The movers, rudimentary robots that looked like a cross between a forklift and a battle tank, used radar to keep from colliding with people and objects. The mob of crewmen running back and forth around the movers must have overloaded the radar.