“That was a near miss,” Trevor said confidently. “I’m guessing our viewpoint ship’s own Point Defense Fire system got an Arat Kur missile?”
Downing nodded tightly, never taking his eyes off the screen. After a lull in the flashes that signified the deaths of smaller human ships and drones, a much larger blue-white sphere expanded to dominate the center of the screen. “That’s the Egalité.” murmured Downing. “Destroyed when we thought she was still safely out of range.”
Another sphere bloomed in the upper left.
“And the Beijing.” he added.
The picture shifted to a distant side shot of a third naval shift-carrier. Its forward-mounted hab ring was already missing two sections and spewing bright orange flame. A moment later, the bridge section at the bow blasted outward into an expanding hemisphere of debris. Pointing toward the epicenter of the cone of destruction, Downing commented, “Definitely a laser—and a bloody powerful one. Only a focused beam could inflict so much damage to such a small area.”
The spalling, splintering, and outgassing of that hit had imparted a small tumble to the ship. The nose of the crippled carrier began pitching down, the engine decks at its stern rising slightly. As it did, the hull spat out two small white ovals from behind the torus’s rotator coupling: escape pods. Another one came out of the engineering decks—
Almost too fast to see, a pair of stars streaked into the picture, one striking the keel just abaft the torus, the other slicing into the engine decks. Blinding light rushed outward, swallowed the ship, the pods, the whole screen—then, static.
Downing sighed and turned off the screen. “And that was the Shanghai. I received the final loss list from The Second Battle of Jupiter just minutes before you all arrived. It is not reassuring.”
“How bad?” asked Elena quickly.
“Both of the Chinese carriers and the Egalité were destroyed, as you saw. So were ninety percent of their complements. The other Euro carrier, the Tapfer, managed to cut across the primary axis of the engagement and is making for the outer system. But the fleet is effectively destroyed as a force in being. By all assessments, the strategy of closing quickly with the Arat Kur to inflict more damage was more disastrous than long-range sniping. We’d need a significant numerical superiority in hulls and drones to make such a tactic advisable.”
Opal looked up slyly. “What about the drones we haven’t shown them yet, the ones hidden in deep sites?”
Downing started. “How do you know about those?”
“I’ve been hanging around you sneaky intel types long enough now. I know how your minds work.”
“Very good—I think. At any rate, we had none in range of this engagement. Most are committed to cislunar defense, but we have no way to use them at the moment. Having established full orbital control, the Arat Kur can jam any ground-based control signals, other than tightbeam lascom. And they are not going to tolerate any of the latter. They proved that right after their exosapient ‘solidarity forces’ began landing in Indonesia at the invitation of now-President Ruap.”
Elena narrowed her eyes. “So is that why the Arat Kur made those limited orbital strikes against a few of our cities, and wiped one off the map in China?”
Downing nodded. “Yes. When the second Arat Kur fleet arrived by shifting into far cislunar space, they blasted all our orbital assets, including all our control sloops. The Chinese, who have an immense number of remote-operated interceptors, did not want to cede the high ground. So they launched a wave of antiship drones, all controlled from their large lascom ground station in Qinzhou.”
Opal’s voice was tight, angry. “And so the Arat Kur bombed it—and Qinzhou itself, for good measure. And now they’ve got how many ships floating over our heads?”
Downing aimed his palmtop at the flatscreen, pressed a button.
A brace of Arat Kur ships—all gargantuan shift-carriers—glided out of view, huge spindly gridworks crammed with an eye-gouging assortment of subordinate craft, rotating habitation modules, cargo canisters, and other objects of less determinable purpose. Arrayed around them were the less gargantuan, but still massive shift-cruisers: smooth, single-hulled oblongs, flared and flattened at the stern. Other ships of the line—each a freight-train composite of boxes, modules, engine decks, rotating hab nacelles and fuel tanks—looked drastically smaller, both because they were only a third the displacement of the shift cruisers and because they were more distant, arrayed in a protective sphere around the shift vessels.
“Those tinier guys don’t look so tough,” said Opal with a false bravado that fooled no one.
“Actually, except for when a shift cruiser uses its drive capacitors to charge its spinal beam weapon, the slower-than-light craft are far more deadly. They have no heavy, unipiece hull. No shift drive and no antimatter power plant to drag about. Far fewer fuel requirements. They are built purely for maximum speed and firepower.”
“But once the STL ships are detached from their carrier—”
“Yes, that’s the rub. Once they are deployed, they’re stuck in-system until they make rendezvous with a carrier.”
Opal looked back at the screen. “Do they have anything else up there, maybe hulls we haven’t seen?”
“Doubtful, but we can’t be sure. We haven’t wanted to risk our last orbital assets taking new pictures unless ground observatories detect additions to the blockade.”
“Wait. We still have orbital assets?” Trevor asked. “I thought they smacked down everything.”
“Everything except our old ‘disabled’ satellites,” Downing corrected.
Trevor frowned. “You mean we’re getting pictures from broken satellites?”
Downing smiled. “We call them Mousetraps. Seven years ago, we started replacing the innards of failed satellites with dormant military systems. Some contain lascom control relays, others are communications transfer hubs, some conceal weapons.”
Opal sounded indignant. “So why didn’t we use these, uh, Mousetraps to attack the Arat Kur’s orbital fleet?”
“The armed Mousetraps don’t contain weapons large enough to use on the big ships. Not all of which are blockading Earth, by the way. Most of the fleet we engaged at the First Battle of Jupiter has moved to the Belt, primarily to take possession of our antimatter facility on Vesta.”
“And the remainder?”
“Still controlling Jovian space.”
Opal drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “So, they left some guards at the self-serve gas station.”
“Just so.” Richard smiled at her archaism.
“So this means that right now, all told, Earth has lost—?”
“—nine of its eleven military shift carriers, Major Patrone.”
“Can civilian carriers be used to replace them?”
“Not really. While any carrier can pick up and shift a payload to another system, fleet carriers are designed to do it on the move and under fire. They have far more thrust potential, far more system redundancy, far better weaponry, and autonomous docking systems for high-speed deployment and recovery.”
Elena sighed. “So it seems like we have very few military options left. Which makes me wonder what answer First Consul Ching is going to give the Arat Kur tonight. Any guesses, Uncle Richard?”
“Elena, I’m not even sure what the invaders’ new surrender terms are. But I do know someone who’s been talking about that with the president today.” Downing looked at Trevor meaningfully.