Hero to the End (The Hunter Legacy Book 13) Read online

  "Survival is right for our people. I place myself under your command. Orders please."

  "Is there any reason we need to defend this jump point?"

  "Apart from defending Earth, there is no reason to defend this system at all. All our stations are now in Barnard's Star, and there is only a trickle of ships still coming out of our sector. The Vatican evacuated weeks ago. Monaco came through here a week ago, and Luxembourg's last ship went through yesterday. I understand some of your ships are the last ones coming from that way."

  "Yes. I had some evacuate my space ahead of the rest of us getting here. Seemed fitting Enterprise evacuated the descendants of her original crew."

  "Then we head to Earth?"

  "Yes. Take your fleet through. Once there, as many ships as possible will be put into our shipyard as can be handled. None of your ships are adequate for this fight, and before I risk you, you need some serious upgrades. Obviously the Battleships will be done first, but we have time, and the shipyard is massive now, as you'll see as it goes past you."

  "We'll see you there then. Where can I report to you?"

  "I'll call a meeting on Redoubt as soon as all ships and stations are where I want them."

  He saluted, and the channel closed before I could return it.

  "That went well," said Dick.

  "I've the senior Destroyer Captain on hold for you," said Jane.

  "Put him through."

  And it was a him. I wondered idly if there were any female captains in the whole Earth fleet.

  "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded. "I can't get through to the flagship, and suddenly you appear. What's going on?"

  "I just prevented your fleet from committing mass suicide. Your Admiral is stunned, pending further action to prevent him killing anyone."

  "Oh thank god!" said the man standing behind the Captain.

  He wore Lieutenant insignia, where his captain was a Commander.

  The captain glanced annoyed at his subordinate, and then stared at me for a moment, before he visibly sagged.

  "There was nothing we could do to stop him," he said.

  He braced himself to attention.

  "Sir, as senior officer of the Destroyers, I hereby relinquish command to you. Orders sir."

  "Follow the Italian fleet. Sometime in the next few weeks, all of your ships will go into a shipyard for upgrading. Until then, you will not be allowed to fight. There will be a senior officer's meeting on Redoubt when we're all in Earth system. Move out Commander."

  "Aye sir."

  The channel didn’t close until I'd heard his orders to get what remained of the Earth fleet moving towards the Earth jump point.

  The three Corporate sector Escort Carriers followed them without a word.

  "Is that it?" asked Alison.

  "Not quite," I said. "Jane, jump us back to Paris."

  A few minutes later, we were back there. Borgcubia was just lining up to jump. Behind her was my shipyard, which was joined together with all the other shipyards we'd collected so far. It was a massive structure, but one which jumped as a single unit without any trouble.

  Behind the shipyard structure, was another massive station structure, all of them mining stations. Docked at each were their mining ships. Each time it jumped, all the ships would deploy and seek out resources as the station complex made its way across the system. Before jumping out, all the ships docked and unloaded.

  Behind the mining station complex was Galactica and Prometheus, and their small fleets.

  Gunbus shot past them all, and continued past the American fleet, the Japanese fleet, and the remnant fleet from other sectors. We finally formed up on the French flagship. I opened a channel.

  Jane translated me into French for their benefit.

  "I understand you're not happy joining us," I said.

  The French Admiral looked shocked.

  "I have it on good authority you plan to betray us," I went on. "For your information, the Earth fleet is withdrawing back towards Earth as we speak. The Italians and Corporates have gone with them."

  "And how have you accomplished this?" asked the French Admiral.

  "It wasn’t difficult. The smaller ship captains were not at all happy over the notion of committing suicide for no real advantage."

  "And the Battleship captains?"

  "Were relieved of command."

  "I see. What do you expect of us?"

  "Make a choice. You join us, I have your ships upgraded to a specification which might keep you alive longer, and we all survive. Or you can turn around, go back to Paris, and die there for no purpose."

  "Why are you so sure?"

  "Because we tried assaulting the first disk, and they used it like a super weapon against us. Only vastly better shielding than yours prevented us from losing a ship, and the one which was hit, needed substantial work."

  "How are we to know this is true?"

  "You haven’t seen the vid?"

  "What vid? Earth command said all your vids were fakes."

  "Did they now. So you haven't seen them?"

  "No."

  "Jane, send them a full set please. Disk vid first."

  We watched them watch it. Blood left faces.

  "Your orders Admiral?"

  "Continue on to Earth, Admiral. There will be an RV there, and a senior officer's meeting on Redoubt."

  "Yes sir."

  He saluted, held it while I returned it, and the channel closed.

  Four

  Borgcubia jumped. It wasn’t so much a cube now, as well on the way to being two joined cubes. The first one wasn’t full, but building continued every time it stopped on the basis it would soon.

  I was just about where I’d started from time wise. It took about half an hour for the stations and other fleets to jump through, before Relentless and the rest of my ships followed.

  Time synced for me again. Five in the afternoon, on day sixty four since the invasion started. Being uninhabited, except for ship movements, there was nothing at all here for us to do, except bleed the enemy and give up-spine a few more hours. The plan had been to leave the job to someone else for a change, and get some down time in Earth orbit. We'd be going to plan B there too, now, and for once I was going to let the aliens have a system unfought. We really needed the downtime.

  Not having to fight in Wolf 359 was a bonus. We'd fought fourteen battles in the last forty three days, and while the gaps between were fighting free, the troops were exhausted. I was exhausted. With each system lasting an average of barely more than three days, the main focus was on evacuations, so those on the ground had only the time between planets to rest in.

  Enterprise and her support ships met up with us, having jumped in through the Luxembourg jump point. With not a large population, every single person on the planet Enterprise had easily fit onto Enterprise herself, which considering their origins, seemed fitting. They'd probably stay there. John Slice's station was with them. They joined up with the long convoy of ships and stations as we headed away from danger.

  Gertrude Simhausen's Privateer Squadron launched from the station which had been their home port for the last eighteen months, and docked at Redoubt instead. We'd picked up six other Mercenary squadrons over the last few weeks.

  We'd been fortunate not to lose anyone. We'd had a few close calls, with shields going down resulting in damage, but we'd always been able to save the ship and crew. The shipyard had been busy upgrading ships which joined us, in addition to its normal building activities.

  Sector fleets on the other hand had been a completely different story. I pondered the failures as we crossed Wolf 359, now alone in the CCC of Relentless, as everyone else took downtime. The few of us who didn’t spend most of our time planet side, were the least exhausted. It didn’t mean we weren't.

  I was constantly planning ahead, dealing with fleet wide issues, and keeping in touch with the development teams, and the combined Central Command in Hawaii. Dick and A-Jane were dealing with a consta
ntly growing security problem, as the number of stations and ships heading up spine continued to grow, and Borgcubia took on more and more people. Amy was almost continuously dealing with media people covering the evacuation of their homes. Melissa was on the move most of the time, doing ferry jobs for everyone else. Ship captains and crew looked less tired than anyone, but I'd noticed George developing black bags under his eyes. And he wasn’t the only one.

  The marine and SAS teams were functioning on stimulants most of the time now. Between planets, most of them did nothing but sleep. The medical teams weren’t much better off. We'd been collecting medical personnel all along the way, and these teams were using Melissa and the other Lightning's to do emergency medical visits to ships without adequate medical facilities.

  The pilots were if anything, the worst off of the lot. In addition to the jump point battles, most of them were active on the ground as well. I'd had to yell at the squadron leaders to make sure their people had enough sleep.

  Jane had summed it up a few days before.

  "If we die at the next jump point, we'd never know it. Our zombies would just keep doing the job."

  It had gone down flat, but I’d started wondering why Jane was viewing and reading zombie stuff. Did we really look that bad? I guess we did. I couldn’t actually recall the last flat screen or hollo I’d watched. Downtime. Need!

  A lot had gone right. We were very good at getting people off planets now. Instructions to congregate were now sent to planetary authorities well before we arrived, and this made evacuating people a lot easier, even if they were in remote places.

  The African sector had done better than the Latin sector in evacuating people, but their fleet had made a last stand at the Sudan jump point in Egypt, to ensure the last of their station's made it out. Miriam had pulled off a miracle in saving some of their ships by towing them out of the danger zone after they were hit, saving some of the crews. Her Excalibur's had been nimble enough to avoid being hit badly, and they hadn't stayed long enough to be in serious danger. It'd been a huge risk she'd taken without anyone's approval, and both Hallington and I were really worried about her recklessness now. She had of course earned another Silver Star. We were also worried she was now competing with Greer, since he'd been promoted after doing something equally dangerous.

  Unfortunately, I'd been right about some of the sector fleets not listening to reason.

  The Indians hadn't had much of a fleet to begin with, and they simply attacked before I could stop them, and been blown away before anyone could do anything. The biggest loss of life up until then had occurred when we lost the Indian sector, simply because they'd failed to organize themselves effectively. There'd been too much of an 'every man for himself' attitude, with the result only the rich people had been able to leave in a timely fashion, and while the stations left full, there hadn't been anywhere near enough station space for everyone. We evacuated a large part of Delhi, but the rest of the sector was beyond our ability to help. The Darkness poured in, and we had to turn off the feeds of Indian planets being attacked, because it simply was too depressing to watch.

  The Chinese managed to save about two thirds of their people. But as I found out too late, they saved only those deemed worthy of being saved. The rest were forcibly left behind. We took off as many as we could from Beijing, but once again, there was nothing we could do for the sector's other planets.

  The Chinese fleet was large, but they had nothing bigger than Cruisers. At first, they refused to leave the Delhi jump point when I ordered them to, and they started losing ships. Only after the four star in command died with his ship, did a few of the captains break off and head for safety. The rest followed their orders to hold to the last ship. It was saddening seeing them go one by one, while we held our lines on the other side of the jump point, protecting our ships as long as we could. Such a gigantic waste. We managed to hold about a half hour extra, but it wasn’t worth it in my opinion.

  The Japanese were already gone when we jumped into Nippon. They left behind their fleet of one hundred Corvettes, and twenty Super-Gunbus. They also left behind a three star Admiral, and a two star. The former commanded the standard Corvettes, more than half of which were Gunbus. The latter commanded the brand new Supers.

  Admiral Sato had immediately been stripped of his rank and command. It took a lot of finding out he'd never had authorization for his squadron to join me, and the Japanese had been covering this up to save face. Now it seemed it didn’t matter. I immediately offered Sato a two star rank with Hunter Security, and gave him Camel to fly. It put him on the same rank level with Susan Bentley, he commanding the smaller ships, and she the larger ones. She continued to be Fleet XO, with Hallington fully occupied with the Carriers and fighter squadrons. While the same rank, he followed her lead as far as ship dispositions were concerned.

  There'd been a lot of angry communication going on in Japanese as the aliens formed up to jump into Nippon, a lot of it coming from Camel. As I was about to order a nuke fired through, both Japanese Admirals, and forty of their mainly older ships, had gone to full speed and jumped through yelling 'Banzai!' A thousand years of life didn’t last a thousand seconds. They managed to disrupt the cylinder being formed as if I’d fired the nuke, but it hadn't been worth the loss of ships and crews. But with the remaining Japanese ships responding to Sato's orders, we'd been able to hold an extra hour. Once the battle was over, I suggested Sato transfer to one of his Super-Gunbus, but he refused, saying he preferred to stay with the weaker shielded ships so his judgement wasn’t impaired. I bowed to him solemnly, and he reciprocated. At the next battle, his command was layered, so we had very little in the way of loss of firepower when the smaller ships had to disengage.

  The Russians were waiting for us at the Moscow jump point in Nippon. They also had an impressively large fleet, including a half dozen recently built Battleships. But they refused to follow us into Moscow, their four star Admiral telling me they would meet the aliens outside their territory and deny them entry. Well they did, for a while, forcing the cylinder to form up much further away from the jump point, but in the end, it was all futile. The remains of their fleet jumped back into Moscow with the cylinder right behind them, and one by one, they were all picked off before they could get to safety, simply because they no longer had the shielding to take even a moderate hit. All in all they bought us an extra half hour.

  After the battle, it took Aline an hour to stop me ranting about suicidal stupidity. I don’t recall ever having lost it so badly.

  And then something completely unexpected happened, on the much worse end of the scale of things. We arrived in Moscow orbit to find not a single station or ship had left up spine, from the entire sector. Worse, the Moscow police, groundside, on stations, and in space fighters; were shooting anyone who tried to leave.

  I spent ten minutes yelling at the local commander, using Jane to translate, before I simply ended it with a 'Fuck it!', and sent in the troops.

  We had to gun down the entire Moscow police and military forces. Many of them were killed because they couldn’t be stunned. I went down and shot the four star General in command myself. It had to be done to get lower ranks to start thinking like reasonable people. Lacey's squadrons spent a half hour dogfighting with fighters we could have used as allies.

  The moment we had the upper hand, ships started streaming away towards the Finland jump point. We took the stations, and any ships refusing to take people away, and began to evacuate as many as possible. Anyone who got in our way, was shot. The thankfulness of people saved, didn’t help us do the shooting though. We left those we'd had to stun behind, taking only those who wanted to go.

  Only a small fraction of the Russian population was saved. It wasn’t saddening, it was sickening.

  Our jump point defense was now a well-oiled machine. We averaged five hours hold up at each point, and we withdrew up the spine through Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Each was ready to go, but needed station tugs to mo
ve their stations, and evacuation of those they hadn't been able to load on stations. We completed full evacuations in plenty of time, leaving behind only those who refused to leave. The decisions each time not to forcibly remove them, was killing me bit by bit.

  The Portuguese had a small fleet of Privateers and heavy fighters. They lined up within Redoubt's shields, and the pilots took up permanent residence there after the battle. The three planets themselves were already largely empty. We took the last remaining people who wanted to leave off Portugal, and moved on.

  The Spanish fleet joined us in Gibraltar.

  A frantic appeal from Iceland had me sending the Prometheus fleet there to help them complete evacuation, which they did in comfortable time. At the same time, I sent the Enterprise fleet off to Enterprise on the other side of the French sector, to evacuate my citizens there. The station they had was too small to take everyone, and I wasn’t taking the chances the French wouldn’t let them leave. There wasn’t a lot of love lost between them these days, since they'd joined my Duchy.

  The Spanish planets were largely deserted now, after they'd made a huge effort to move people to Gibraltar. We evacuated the last of them there.

  The Swiss were ready to leave. We evacuated the last of them from the planet in an orderly manner, and I think this was the first time we actually left no-one behind. I'd never understood why some people had simply decided to stay home, doomed or not. The Swiss though, all left without any complaints.

  In Paris we’d found an agitated but compliant French fleet. The sector itself was like a disturbed ant hill. Most of the ships and stations still on the wrong side of the spine, were heading out through Luxembourg, where they had slightly more time to escape than through Paris. It'd been close, but with the six hour delay we'd managed with the French fleet's help, pretty well all their stations and ships were going to make it out in time.

  As I said, we were all exhausted.

  By midnight we'd jumped into Earth, and Aline came into the CCC to get me.