Fortress Earth (Extinction Wars Book 4) Read online

  I ran some calculations and knew momentary relief. The edge of the vast sand wall would barely pass Earth. That was something. At least the grainy particles wouldn’t sandblast the planet or its atmosphere away. However, whatever was behind the sand wall would reach Earth in…twenty-seven hours.

  We only had a little time left. Was that enough time for Mars Fleet to join the battle? Maybe only if whatever enemy ships over there didn’t accelerate through the wall of sand to make a dash at our planet. If they did make that dash, though…

  I hated this. I didn’t know enough. How had the sand gotten where it was without anyone spotting it sooner? It seemed clear. The sand hadn’t used a jump gate. What motive technology had it used? I had a grim feeling that the sand had used Forerunner technology to teleport into place. It was the only explanation that made sense.

  That would be bad if true. It might mean that the ancient machines like Holgotha had finally turned against us. Fighting Forerunner tech would be like Stone Age tribesmen trying to defeat tanks with flint-tipped spears. It was something that wasn’t going to happen.

  Did that mean I was rushing to my death?

  I had no idea. So, I waited, trying to will the booster to greater acceleration. Instead, the engines quit as weightlessness returned to the rocket.

  “We’re out of fuel,” the pilot told me. “Someone must have screwed up at the spaceport. We should have had a lot more fuel than this.”

  This was just great. Now what was I going to do?

  -3-

  “Any change in the situation?” I asked.

  I walked onto the bridge of the George Patton, Rollo’s flagship. It was a big starship, built like a Jelk battlejumper. It was new from our orbital Earth factories, which put out one new battlejumper a month.

  The Mars booster was a chemical rocket, very short-ranged. That meant there hadn’t been any braking to match the George Patton’s velocity. That hadn’t been a problem, though. The battlejumper did the matching, a team helping me with my space leap from the booster to the flagship.

  Now, the George Patton accelerated to catch up with the rest of Mars Fleet. Gravity dampeners allowed the starship to do that without causing any discomfort to the crew.

  The various bridge consoles were aimed at each other in a circle. In the very center was a big holographic display, visible from any angle.

  Rollo moved away from his monitor. We shook hands, the big gorilla trying to crush my fingers as he pumped my arm up and down.

  I grinned at him, slapping him on the shoulder hard enough to make him take a step to the side. That caused him to release his rock-like grip.

  “Hello, Creed,” Ella Timoshenko said.

  She came to me, a thin Russian with a pretty face and breasts that wouldn’t quit. Her dark hair dangled to her cheeks like an erotic elf. Despite her Miss America-like beauty, Ella was an old-fashioned scientist, not like the ones we’d had just before the Earth died. Those had been easily swayed by the latest politically correct fashions. Ella only cared about what you could see and count. She’d never bought any of the Forerunner arguments about the Creator either.

  Like the rest of us, Ella had her dark side and a no-nonsense practicality when it came to saving humanity. She was the best at operating the Jelk mind machine, having put many Lokhars under it in the past. The present Lokhar Emperor had gone under the machine when he’d simply been Doctor Sant. It was one of the reasons Emperor Sant favored humanity to the degree he did.

  Ella searched for angles, for reasons and rationality. She had a burning desire to know why a thing was the way it was. If someone told her something that her observations said was BS, she would not hesitate to call the person out no matter their rank. It was easy to forget that about Ella Timoshenko when one looked at her.

  She hugged me, pressing her breasts against my chest, releasing me after a time to look up into my face.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  She gave me a curt nod, leading me to her station. “I’m thinking the same thing about you, Commander. But I’m curious. Why aren’t you with the Grand Armada?”

  An uncomfortable silence fell between us.

  Rollo cleared his throat, saying quietly, “Zoe died. Creed brought her body back to Earth so he could bury her here.”

  “Oh, Creed,” Ella said. “I’m terribly sorry. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known.”

  I looked away as I stuffed my pain in a deep place. I would miss Zoe Artemis dearly, had been missing her for some time already. Maybe I should have said something sooner. I operated on the theory that if I didn’t think about it, my heart wouldn’t ache so much.

  “She was inspecting a laser coolant,” Rollo told Ella. “It blew up at precisely the wrong moment. Some of us suspect sabotage.”

  Ella made compassionate sounds as she patted one of my shoulders.

  I hardened my resolve. Aliens were trying to steal a march on Earth. We had to stop them. That meant total concentration of effort.

  “That’s the past,” I said hoarsely. “We have a terrible dilemma to solve today. So let’s get to it.”

  Ella squeezed my arm. The human contact felt good, but we had no more time for niceties. I took my memory of Zoe, placed it in a drawer in my mind and closed it so I could concentrate.

  Afterward, I faced the others, asking, “How did a wall of sand the size of a continent appear between Venus and Earth?”

  “Anyone have a theory?” Rollo asked his bridge crew.

  No one looked up from their monitors.

  “What does Earth Defense say?” I asked.

  “The sand appeared a half hour ago,” Ella told me. “One moment no one saw anything, the next it was there, heading for Earth.”

  I frowned at her.

  “I’m telling you exactly what I know,” she said, sounding defensive.

  I nodded. “We have to break through the sand wall and see what’s behind it.”

  “Earth Fleet is getting ready to launch T-missiles at it,” Rollo informed me. The “T” in T-missiles stood for teleport.

  “I want to see the situation,” I said.

  Ella manipulated her console.

  I looked up at the holographic display. Earth Defense was composed of layers. At the bottom, on the planetary surface, were giant missile silos and rail-gun domes. They would attack anything trying to breach the atmosphere. Huge laser satellites orbited Earth. They could reach farther out. Luna—the Moon—was a fortress. It had giant rail-guns, laser beam turrets and shorter-ranged particle beam emplacements.

  The original Lokhar dreadnaught would have never made past all those defenses to harm Earth. The planet had even more, though, boasting its own private fleet.

  Mars Fleet was the general force for the rest of the Solar System. Earth Fleet existed just to protect humanity’s home. Twenty large starships with forty smaller patrol boats composed the force. Currently, it headed out to do battle with the wall of sand.

  Rollo’s dozen starships—three of them battlejumpers—would add considerable weight once they reached the enemy.

  We’d come a long way from the ignorant savages we were before The Day, and we’d come almost as far since our Star Viking desperation.

  These days, if someone wanted to pick a Jade League planet to bust, Earth would be one of the toughest. That was by my design. I’d spent too much time trying to bring humanity back from the brink of extinction to want to do it all over again. Still, if I’d known the wall of sand would appear, I would have kept everything back home, having sent nothing to the Grand Armada.

  One battlejumper—the only one that belonged to Earth Fleet—inched a little father out than the rest of its sister ships.

  “The battlejumper is about to launch a salvo of T-missiles,” Ella explained.

  “Is the starship captain aiming behind the sand or on it?” I asked.

  “On, I believe.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Rollo said quietly.

  Ella and I glance
d at him.

  “There’s only one way that I know of that something just appears,” Rollo said.

  I kept staring at him.

  “Forerunner transfer technology,” he whispered.

  His words were like a blow to the gut. They actually hurt. That’s one of the ways to know if a thing seems reasonable or not. If it hurts, that’s probably because there’s a grain of truth to it. If you don’t care what’s said, it’s because the thing is not even a remote possibility. That’s why most insults that weren’t even close to the mark slid off most people. The true insults are the ones that sting the worst.

  Rollo was confirming my own worst suspicion.

  “Holgotha hasn’t moved from Ceres,” Ella pointed out.

  Holgotha was our Forerunner artifact, the one staying near the asteroid Ceres in the Solar System’s Asteroid Belt. We’d used the artifact a little over three years ago. When humanity had been down to one measly starship, I’d convinced the artifact to teleport from one spot in space to another many hundreds of light years distant. T-missiles only had a several hundred thousand kilometer range, not light years. We had no idea how the ancient machine could make those vast transfers in a moment of time. It was First One technology. If the Forerunner machines were the reason for the wall of sand…

  “Would Holgotha have remained near Ceres in order to make us think he had nothing to do with this?” Rollo asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “He wouldn’t care enough. No. The more I consider this, the more I don’t think the Forerunner artifacts are behind the attack.”

  “Why not?” Ella asked.

  “The machines aren’t inclined to direct bloodthirsty action,” I said. “It’s not their way.”

  “Look!” Rollo shouted. “The T-missiles are launching!”

  I watched the holographic display. The battlejumper heading toward the wall of sand launched over a dozen big missiles. Those missiles disappeared from view one by one.

  The first thermonuclear explosion blasted sand from the continental-sized wall. More T-missiles kept appearing at places hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from the first one. They also exploded, hurling more sand from the space wall.

  It turned out that the wall of sand was less than a centimeter thick. The T-missiles blasted gaping holes in it. The expanding explosions moved even more sand. Some of those forces collided. That also shoved sand, exposing the foe behind the wall.

  “Is that right?” Rollo asked in disbelief.

  Ella checked her monitor. “Yes,” she said.

  Along with everyone else, I stared at the holographic display. An asteroid had been behind the sand. It wasn’t an enemy fleet, but a very large chunk of rock.

  “How big is it?” Rollo asked.

  “A little bigger than our Moon,” Ella said as she studied her panel.

  That meant it was much bigger than most asteroids. No wonder the wall of sand had stretched out larger than the old United States.

  “Seeing that makes even less sense,” I said. “How did a moon-sized rock come to appear between Venus and Earth?”

  “What’s the moon’s trajectory?” Rollo asked.

  Ella ran some numbers. “It will miss the Earth just barely.”

  Rollo scratched his head. “I don’t get it. If it isn’t a threat—”

  “Look,” Ella said. She pointed at the holographic display.

  Giant blue-colored fumes lengthened behind the enemy moon. That indicated some kind of engine back there, propelling the moon. Yet how did one maneuver such mass? It would take extremely vast engines.

  “The moon is changing its trajectory,” Ella informed us. “It’s shifting onto an Earth intercept course. Maybe with its sand shield pierced, the moon’s pilot no longer cares if we see what it’s doing.”

  Rollo banged a fist against a monitor.

  The moon moved in a slightly different heading than the pocketed sand wall. My eyes widened as shock struck. Was I seeing this right? Not only did the enemy moon change heading, but now chunks of rock zoomed off its lunar surface.

  “What’s going on?” Rollo shouted.

  “Observe,” Ella said, manipulating her board. She managed to zoom in a little closer.

  We saw a giant rail system, an accelerator, shooting moon rocks from the object, launching them at Earth. It was like our own mining operation on Luna. We had tugs to catch those rocks, as the rocks leaving Luna lacked the velocity of the ones being hurled now.

  “Is that a spaceship instead of a moon?” I asked.

  Ella and Rollo looked at me as if I was crazy.

  “It has exhaust,” I said. “That means it has motive power. That makes it a ship in space, hence, a spaceship. Those are its missiles. Rocks. If it fires enough rocks it will overwhelm Earth Defense.”

  “Forget about the rocks,” Ella said. “If the free moon smashes into the Earth…it will mean the death of everyone on the planet.”

  A cold feeling swept over me. Just how were we supposed to stop something with the mass of Luna from colliding against the Earth? It looked as if after all our hard work over the years that our lovely home was about to die a second time.

  -4-

  “Are there any suggestions as to how we’re supposed to stop a moon-sized spaceship?” I asked.

  “It’s like a rogue comet,” Rollo said.

  “That thing is a lot bigger than any comet,” Ella told him.

  “I know that,” Rollo said crossly. “My point is: how do you stop a rogue comet? You blow it up. Well, that’s what we do here. We blow it up.”

  “We might not have enough warheads—thermonuclear or antimatter—to do that,” Ella said. “Maybe, just maybe, we have enough to splinter the moon into pieces. That won’t help us, though. The pieces have the same mass as the whole. It’s enough to wipe out life for a million years.”

  “The thing is too big to think of it as a comet,” I said.

  “Correct,” Ella said. “It’s like an asteroid, an errant one. We had plans in the old days to deal with something like that from hitting Earth.”

  “Something that big?” I asked.

  “Maybe not quite that large,” she admitted. “But the principle is the same.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You nudge it off course,” she said.

  “With nukes?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You have a problem,” I said. “That’s not a big asteroid. That’s a vessel. Look at the exhaust tail. That means it has engines. It can steer itself. If you use nukes to nudge it out of its path, the ship will simply steer itself back onto target.”

  “We should steer it ourselves then,” Rollo said.

  I clapped my hands, grinning at him. He’d come up with the answer.

  Ella shook her head. “Creed, you can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “I am,” I told her.

  Rollo glanced from her to me.

  “We go old school,” I told him. “We’ve done it before. Do you remember when we grabbed Shah Claath’s battlejumper out from under him?”

  Shah Claath had been our original employer, a red-skinned Jelk. During a grim battle, we’d used an enemy T-missile to teleport back onto his battlejumper. It had cost us assault troopers. It had wrecked a lot of the interior starship, too, but it had worked after a fashion.

  “How are you going to know where to teleport inside that thing?” Rollo asked.

  “We’re not going to appear inside it,” I said. “We appear outside above the surface.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ella said. “But that doesn’t help you. The moon has forward momentum. You will appear with your own momentum, going exactly the wrong direction, toward it. Instead of landing on the surface, you will splat like bugs. Every assault trooper who teleports will die.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, undaunted. “So I’ll figure out a different way to land.”

  “What way?” Ella asked.

  “You’re the scientist.
Give me a solution. Isn’t that what Russian scientists are supposed to do.”

  “No,” she said. “This is an impossible situation.”

  “Balls!” I said. “I already have an idea. We pop behind it instead of in front. Then, we accelerate to land on its dark side.”

  Ella blinked several times. Finally, her fingers flew over a computation pad. She ran numbers and velocities. “That’s out,” she finally said. “It wasn’t a bad idea, but the moon-ship has too much velocity. Supposing we sent a regular missile with the T-missile—if such a thing is possible—the regular missile won’t have enough fuel to accelerate you fast enough to reach the moon-ship.”

  I tapped my chin, my gray cells alive to the problem. I had the right idea, I was sure of it. Otherwise, I didn’t see how we could stop the mobile moon from smashing against the Earth.

  “The Earth Fleet ships will have to launch assault troopers onto it,” Rollo said. “Once they’re close enough to the enemy—”

  “Tell me this,” Ella said in a scathing tone. “How are the Earth Fleet ships supposed to do this thing?”

  “Easy,” Rollo said. “They brake—”

  “They’re heading at the moon-ship,” Ella said. “To brake completely and then accelerate to catch up with the passing vessel…There isn’t enough time and room to do all that. The moon-ship has too much velocity. This is the perfect attack. That as much as the rest of the evidence leads me to suspect the Forerunner machines are behind it.”

  “It isn’t a perfect attack,” I said. “We just haven’t come up with the solution yet.”

  “We’d better do so in the next few hours,” Ella said. “Otherwise, we’re not going to have the time to implement your plan of steering the moon-ship away from Earth—given that it’s possible to capture.”

  I glared at the holographic display. Putting my hands behind my back, I began to march around the consoles that circled the display. How could we land assault troopers on the moon-sized object? We couldn’t appear in front of it, or the surface would rush up and crush each one of us.

  “It’s a matter of having enough fuel, right?” I asked.

  “You mean concerning the missiles appearing behind the moon catching up with it?” Ella asked.