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  Greg shook his head in dismay. “We didn’t lose quite that many, but they were using the same MO.”

  “We need more security transferred here before we redeploy to the next spaceport. A lot were lost in the initial fighting.”

  “We’re shorthanded everywhere,” Sheridan chimed in. “We don’t have much more to redistribute on the surface, but I have arranged for men to be brought in from orbital facilities. That’ll take some time though.”

  “Time we don’t have,” Sara commented. “4s and 6s have already secured their targets and moved into sector 45 from different vectors. 4s went in through the tram while the 6s used a dropship to hop onto an auxiliary pad and take a satellite facility, hoping to go in through the backdoor.”

  “8s are taking back a second non-Chinese spaceport with the help of the Knights, but they’re encountering more resistance than the rest of us, so I sent the 0s their way,” Greg said, filling them in. “We’re still waiting on word from the 3s, 5s, and 9s, but we’re all coming up short handed. We can take it to the enemy, but we don’t have the numbers to secure the territory we’re reclaiming.”

  “I think we need to bring in the others,” Sara said, repeating a conversation she’d been having with Greg. “Not all of them, but the top 10-20 teams to secure our backlines while we move forward.”

  Jason exchanged glances with Paul, who reluctantly nodded. “We concur, but we’re going to need a lot more support personnel to fill in the gaps, security or otherwise.”

  “I’ve already spoken with Davis,” Greg said, “he’s scrounging up an army of varied personnel, but it’ll be a few days before they can all get here.”

  “The longer we wait, the more dug in the Chinese will get,” Paul pointed out.

  “I know, which is why we need to reclaim our sectors as soon as possible. It’s probable that they’ve already got their own sectors entrenched by now, so those will just have to keep. Any chance I can convince you to send part of your team over to assist the 5s? They’re closest to your position.”

  “I’ll stay,” Paul offered. “I need to get in contact with the fleet and figure out where all these reinforcements are coming from.”

  “Go Jason,” Emily said, knowing that the dynamic duo didn’t like to split up. “I’ll stay with Paul and watch the back door.”

  “Alright,” Jason agreed, turning back to Greg’s screen. “And while you’re at it, have Knight teams 3,4, and 5 sent up with the others. I want them nearby if I need them, and they’ll make for good wardens for the prisoners.”

  Greg cracked a smile. “Good idea. My team is cleaning up the satellite facilities, so it’ll be a while before we can redeploy. Rex and I are covering the spaceport, and I’m stuck playing coordinator for the time being, so if you need anything route it through me.”

  “Will do. We’ll get under way in a few minutes,” Jason confirmed.

  “You take any hits?” Sara asked.

  “Nothing that got through armor, but Brian’s faceplate is messed up…that and my bladder is about to explode.”

  Sara smiled and shook her head. “Jace’s shoulder armor cracked from a grenade and part of it sliced into his arm, but other than that we haven’t had any casualties. He’s patched up, body and armor, so we’re still ten strong indoors but he’s not airtight anymore.”

  “Hopefully we don’t have to take a walk outdoors,” Greg suggested.

  “I’m more concerned about a hull breach, with all the explosives they’ve brought,” Sara explained. “Regardless, we’ve been kicking ass so far.”

  “Knight team1?” Jason asked.

  “The same,” Sara confirmed.

  “Good, let’s keep it that way. Paul,” Jason said, abandoning the seat and picking up his helmet as he swapped, then he looked over at Porter. “Mind pointing the way to the nearest restroom?”

  “Follow me,” the Chief said, no merriment in his voice. He knew how long they’d been fighting without respite. “If you can spare a few minutes, I’ll get some water and food up this way before you head out.”

  “Thank you, yes,” Megan said as the 8 of them headed out of the control room.

  “I’m going to roam about,” Emily told Paul. “Call me if you need me.”

  Paul nodded then turned his attention to the screens, glancing over at the staffer in charge of communications. “Get me that line to Atlantis.”

  6

  March 16, 2060

  “Captain, we just lost the Chinese transponder signals.”

  Voss frowned. “Which ones?” he asked, glancing at the main orbital display of Luna, which he was currently tasked to patrol. He had three ships in orbit, while the Turok was stationed just off the high traffic zone near Star Force’s Lagrange point station, located where the gravitational pull of the moon and planet evened out and held the station suspended between them rather than in its own orbit.

  “All of them,” the bridge officer replied. “Every transponder from every ship in orbit around Earth. They all went out within a few seconds.”

  “Damn. How many do we have radar on?”

  “I’m checking now…but I think we’ll lose a few on approach to Luna.”

  “Give me a status of the Chinese cargo ships in lunar orbit,” Voss demanded. They’d been holding position quietly ever since the invasion began, but there were six ships in total, spread out at various positions, while he only had his three ships to corral them with.

  Without transponders, the Turok bridge crew had to manually tag radar signatures, but with the monitoring stations in orbit there wasn’t anywhere the Chinese could hide from Star Force near the moon. It took a moment to confirm, but all six ships had begun moving.

  “Two are escalating orbits, the other four are…breaking up?”

  “What do you mean...,” Voss began, then realized the answer before the words were out of his mouth. “They’re launching dropships. Get the warships moving to intercept now!”

  “We’re not in position to do that,” one of the remote pilots pointed out.

  “Get as close as you can,” he urged, watching the untagged blips adjust their trajectories on the orbital display. The Turok’s computer had course projections painted as faint lines leading out from each dropship, and as Voss watched those lines began to angle in towards the lunar surface.

  Unlike Star Force, the Chinese didn’t have any stations in orbit, so all the cargo transfers they made came directly from surface landing pads up to their orbiting freighters. Several other nations utilized Star Force dropships for the up and down hauling, opting to dock with a public starport and transfer cargo over internally rather than try to own and operate their own dropship fleet. The Chinese had preferred to purchase dropships directly from Star Force and bypass the bureaucracy, which saved time, fees, and inspections…as well as giving them the ability to reach the surface without Star Force’s blessing.

  Voss’s three ships in orbit were a destroyer and two corvettes, with the lighter, faster ships having been deployed closer to Earth in station-hopping patrols. This meant the closure rates weren’t as high as Voss would have liked, but his warships were still multiple times faster than the cargo-laden dropships, especially the non-Star Force models which lagged behind the others as they spread out in a wide formation, either headed for different landing sites or scattering to increase their odds of making it to the surface.

  Intercept estimates appeared on Voss’s screen, with lines from his warships arcing out to intersect with the lines from the enemy dropships, only one of which was going to be a safe catch. The nearer corvette was easily going to intercept a klunker before it got within the deceleration zone to drop down to the surface, but the others had too great a head start. The destroyer had a shot at an intercept, but the timing estimates were too close to be sure, and shooting down at the surface was problematic.

  “Cargo ships are reversing course…now moving out from the moon,” the radar officer announced as Voss watched the tracking lines begin to move
out to higher orbits

  “Track each dropship…I want to know what sectors they’re heading to,” he turned to his comm officer. “Get me a comlink to one of the Archons on the planet.”

  Paul was waiting on the docking ring as the first Star Force dropship arrived with supplies and reinforcements scavenged from other lunar sectors. It had taken a short ‘hop’ across the surface in a shallow orbit from sector 23, a third of the way around the moon. Direct tram lines to that area had yet to be constructed, plus they couldn’t carry the amount of cargo that a dropship could, nor move as fast. As it was, dozens of already grounded dropships had been refueled and redeployed into troop transports, with the first just beginning to reach the conflict zones.

  As the dropship docked and Paul waited for the umbilical to extend and connect a security guard ran up noisily behind him, skidding to a halt when he had trouble checking his low gravity momentum.

  “Sir, we have an urgent transmission from the Turok for you.”

  “What is it?” Paul asked, jogging back the way the guard had come towards the nearest elevator.

  “They wouldn’t say. Wanted to speak to you in person.”

  Paul frowned beneath his helmet, but said nothing further until he returned to the command center atop the spaceport and slid into position behind the video screen. “Report.”

  Voss’s face suddenly replaced the image of his comm officer. “Bad news. The entire Chinese fleet, warships and civilian ships alike, have cut out their transponders. Four cargo ships in orbit have launched dropships. We’re in pursuit now, but there’s no way we’re going to catch even a tenth of them. It’s hard to pinpoint this early, but their trajectory looks like they’re heading for the lease zones rather than their own territory. We’ll transfer landing coordinates to you when we have them.”

  Voss visibly stiffened. “What are your orders?”

  Paul didn’t hesitate. “Take out as many dropships as you can before they reach the surface. Do they have any warships nearby?”

  “No, they’re keeping to low Earth orbit for now…but without the transponders some of them could be redeploying without us knowing.”

  Paul thought for a long moment, knowing what he was about to say but thinking it through several times before he issued the order. “Captain, are you recording this transmission?”

  Voss looked at one of his bridge crew, who nodded. “Yes.”

  “Retransmit the following orders to Harper and Minsk…you are to hunt down and confront all Chinese warships in play, demand their surrender and removal to an empty orbital track of your choosing. There they will wait to rendezvous with one of their cargo ships to remove the crew, after which you will destroy their ships. Don’t worry about the debris, and don’t try to board them. I don’t want to risk our crews with their penchant for self destruct devices. If they do not surrender, destroy them on the spot.”

  Voss stared at Paul’s red reflective faceplate for an agonizingly long two seconds, realizing what this meant. “That will take some time.”

  The Archon’s helmet nodded. “I know, but we can’t risk them launching an assault on our unarmed orbital facilities. You have to get to them first, take them out of the equation.”

  “What about you?”

  “We’re going to have our hands full, by the look of it. Don’t let any Chinese ship…check that, don’t let ANY ship from any nation near the moon. Define a holding orbit far enough out that you’ll have plenty of time to intercept any landing attempt and shuffle everyone outside that perimeter. They won’t like it, but at this point we can’t take the chance that some of them might be working with the Chinese.”

  Voss nodded, agreeing with the wisdom of that caveat. “What about the cargo ships that launched the dropships?”

  “Aside from making a kamikaze run, they’re irrelevant at this point. Let them go and focus on the warships.”

  “Sorry they got by us, sir.”

  “Don’t sweat it. We still don’t know how they landed so many troops in the first place…speaking of which, keep a close eye on the Chinese territorial zones. I’m probably going to be out of communications range, but if they so much as twitch over there let one of the other teams or security know so they can get the message through. Or, if you’ve got a ship close enough, transmit on frequency 23.8 at full power and we might be able to receive on our helmets, but we won’t have enough power to respond.”

  “Can’t the spaceport act as a relay?”

  “I don’t think the equipment is set up that way, but even if it was it won’t do us any good when we get to the enemy-held zones. They’re not going to retransmit for us.”

  “We’ll make do then,” Voss said, unsatisfied. “I just wish they’d sent you a mobile transmitter strong enough to stay in contact.”

  “A suggestion for the techs later…along with a lot of other things,” Paul said, acknowledging many design flaws or oversights that they hadn’t been previously aware of. “Start making a list in your downtime. I’ve got fresh security forces coming in that I need to organize. Anything else I need to know before I step away?”

  “Do you want us to try for any type of orbital bombardment?”

  “Not unless one of us explicitly calls for it. Not much you could shoot at anyway, this whole fight is indoors.”

  “I was thinking more about the Chinese territorial bases.”

  “Hold that idea in reserve, we have to deal with them on our turf first.”

  “Yes, sir. Good luck.”

  “Take all I can get,” Paul said, signing off.

  Above Luna the three Star Force warships ran their engines up to full power, forcing their way across the orbital paths in a more or less straight line, building up an insane amount of momentum in order to try and intercept the Chinese dropships before they got out of range…knowing that their closure rates were far too high for a decent weapons lock, taking the rail guns and lasers out of the equation.

  As one of the corvettes approached the area where three of the slower Solaris Industries-manufactured dropships were beginning to rotate around to align for their descent burns, it opened its protective armor plating over top of its missile racks and slammed in its forward engines, attempting to bleed off as much momentum as they could as the ship slipped beneath the dropships’ altitude and shot by underneath as fast as a bullet.

  Using radar installations in orbit, the corvette’s pilot tagged the three dropships as targets and launched all of his missiles up towards the where the enemy was going to be and watched them disappear into the distance.

  Each of the missiles had been reprogrammed for the unusual intercept, using their thrust to slow their approach rather than accelerate towards the target, given that they were already approaching too fast to assure good hits or even detonations, meaning they had actually been launched away from the dropships and were now sliding backwards toward them, trying desperately to slow themselves down.

  It didn’t happen in time, and the missiles passed by the dropships like drops of rain heading down to the moon’s surface, as the corvette sped off towards the horizon ahead of them, soon to disappear from sight entirely. The little raindrops, however, still had fuel left and continued to bleed off speed on the other side, essentially sitting them in place below the dropships as they came down towards them.

  The ‘pause’ didn’t last long and the missiles began to inch their way back up, tracking the dropships thanks to the orbital radar relay, now that the corvette was obscured by the curve of the moon. They began to adjust course to target each of the dropships when their fuel ran out, one at a time in the sequence that they had been fired.

  The missiles passed by the dropships harmlessly as they began their descent burns…save for the last few launched, which the corvette had bled a bit more speed off from, saving that little bit extra amount of fuel. They too ran out before impact, but they were close enough that several coasted into their targets and detonated against the hulls of two of the dropships, cracking
them open to space in a hail of debris.

  That debris shredded the interiors, killing some of the crew and troops on impact, then exposing the rest of them to the explosive decompression of space. One of the dropships shredded under the impact of two missiles, while the other was hit by three, with enough auxiliary damage to detonate the fuel cells, utterly destroying the craft in a firework-like spherical explosion leaving little but a cloud of space junk behind…one that would soon fall to the surface of Luna as dangerous meteors.

  Voss regretted that, knowing that if the debris landed on an inhabited section of the moon it could damage or even depressurize any structure hit, and even with Star Force’s hardened structures, hit them with enough inertial energy and they would crack. Even worse would be any exterior crews, with nothing more than an armored work suit to protect them.

  He did not regret, however, taking out the two ships. Yes, he’d probably just killed a lot of Chinese troops, but letting them land and go into battle would have put the Star Force personnel on the surface at risk, and if he had to choose between the two then the decision was a no-brainer. Still, something about the pointless loss of life gnawed at him, but he pushed the feeling away, knowing he needed to focus on protecting those still alive.

  As he watched, his destroyer cored through one of the Star Force models with its rail gun, having gotten beneath it slightly so it could shoot at an angle that wouldn’t threaten the surface…or any orbital facilities, he hoped. His pilots had an automated warning system that calculated post impact trajectories…

  “Please tell me you placed that shot?” he asked the pilot, seated just a few meters away from him in the heart of the Turok.

  “Yes, out orbit from Luna and Earth, nothing with a transponder in the path.”

  Voss knew that meant the Chinese ships could have been in the way, but at the moment that was their problem. As he watched the visuals being transmitted from the destroyer a plume of missiles shot up and away, honing in on another nearby dropship as it started to decelerate and fall in towards the moon, with the missiles fighting hard to catch up.