A Call to Arms by Bradley Hutchinson

Author:Bradley Hutchinson [Hutchinson, Bradley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

It had been quite some time since James had been to the birthplace of humanity. He’d visited the Sol system several times in the last few years in his capacity as a naval officer, but he’d never actually ventured down to the hallowed surface of the human homeworld in over a decade – any business he’d had in the system had been conducted on any number of space stations that dotted the star system, or orbited the planet.

The Sol system in the 25th Century was a hive of activity, akin to an insect colony. Swarms of independent vessels traversed its spaceways, linking Earth to its colonies on the moon, Mars, and the experimental facilities on Titan, Europa and the like; still more vessels sought to connect Earth to the inner colonies, with large passenger and cargo ships angling past the asteroid belt before flying off into FTL speeds.

The actual defence of Earth began all the way out at Saturn, with Apex Station, a medium-sized sprawling facility that was the home base of fifteen warships – led by the dreadnaught Excalibur – and dozens of fighter squadrons and defence satellites. Apex Station was also home to an academy where expert pilots went for special training, and also housed the thousands of miners that prospected the moons of Saturn.

Jupiter had a similar defence arrangement as Saturn, but it was at Mars that an invading force would start meeting intense resistance. Mars was the site of the largest shipyard in the Commonwealth, with well over a hundred berths, established in the 2090s to alleviate congestion around Earth’s orbit. Mars was protected by a trio of dreadnaughts, as well as more than thirty other warships and a classified number of fighters and defence platforms, which was military-speak for a fuck-tonne.

But even that paled in comparison with what protected the Earth and its singular moon. Nine space stations of a similar design to Apex Station orbited at a distance of a million kilometres, each station housing hundreds of fighters on their own, with a trio of frigates supplementing them and acting as Customs vessels. Inside that perimeter were dozens smaller defence platforms, each one possessing the firepower of a destroyer or light-cruiser. And there were still more ships, including five of the first Vanguard-class dreadnaughts ever produced.

These sights, however, were of no comfort to James. In the weeks since James had learned his mother had died – killed in a freak car accident amidst Thanksgiving traffic – he’d gone from despondent, to angry, to depressed, to repeating the cycle when he realized that the delay in being granted compassionate leave meant he would miss the funeral – still a ritual these days, despite most people opting to be cloned and re-lifed – by almost twelve days.

“You made good time, Captain,” he told Captain Dawson. “I wasn’t aware the Ignatius was capable of such speed.” It had taken the cruiser nearly eight days at flank speed to get to Earth – it would have taken the Englewood, James’ current command, at least eleven.

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