Star Dragons by James David Victor

Author:James David Victor [Victor, James David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE AFTERMATH

ALL UNITS REPORT TO STATIONS. IF YOU HAVEN’T RECEIVED ORDERS ALREADY, REPORT TO NEAREST SUPERIOR OFFICER.

The words scrolled across Keel’s vision as he and the rest of the 3-3 stood on board the Judgment as it positioned itself higher in orbit.

The comms were haywire, but the chaos felt removed to the five remaining Marines as they, unlike the others, were told to await their next orders.

“Holy sun!” Venez snarled as they stood and watched the horror outside. It was a cataclysm they could do nothing to avert—that they were ordered to do nothing about. “We should be out there! Why the hell were we promoted, if not for this!?”

Keel, for once, could only agree. The three Jaali ships had stayed around long enough to fire down at the orbiting imperial fleet, but the spectacular light show had only lasted a few minutes before the alien ships had scintillated with plasma energy and sped away in a glimmer of fire and light.

Imperial Attack Groups 1, 2 , and 3 had given chase, but no one in the room had any confidence they would catch them. Their strategy lessons had taught them plenty about the realities of space-based combat. You could track where a ship was likely heading given a computer-assisted analysis of their plasma burn, but it still was often just firing half-blind instead of entirely blind.

Among human vessels, the analysis could be fairly accurate. The Imperium had only ever fought pirates and separatist groups before, whose ships were generally slower and far out-classed by the imperial heavy military. The Marine Corps could predict, within a couple of systems, just how far a plasma burn would take a fleeing ship, and sometimes they could even fire their own larger and more efficient engines to arrive there faster.

None of this, however, was true for pursuing the Jaali ships. Their engines were alien. They nearly had teleportation technology, and their jump technology on every ship was of a level that only the largest of the human vessels could employ. So, the Imperium had frack-all chance of actually getting their hands on the Jaali. Besides, Ceta right now had far more immediate problems.

“It was a trick. They’re just trying to cause mayhem,” Lafferty, usually breezy and far more optimistic than this, grumbled. Given what they were watching through the curved wall, Keel thought that was pretty obvious.

The five remaining Marines of the 3-3 Squad watched as Ceta burned. They stood in a blue-gray, mirrored steel room and watched as others fought to save the Cetan Orbital Platform from crashing into its mother planet.

Large chunks of the COP had already made planet-fall, and even as they watched, another section about a third of the size of the Judgment pulled away with excruciating slowness and started to fall toward the atmosphere.

As soon as the wedge-shaped section buckled and twisted from its housing, there were blasts of white and vents of gases as the domes split. Clouds of debris sprang out from the vast section, and its lower edge took on a burning crimson-orange hue as it started to burn in the atmosphere.

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