War Dog by Andrew Beery

Author:Andrew Beery [Beery, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-10T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14: Broken Dog

It seemed whoever was in charge of the last enemy ship, was intent on carrying out their mission, even if it meant their own death. While I had expected them to self-destruct like the other enemy ships had done… I had assumed it would be in the form a massive antimatter explosion.

It was not.

Moments after the last of our stealth nukes had gone off… the fourth enemy ship disintegrated. Any other time this would have been a cause for celebration. The ship had shattered into pieces as large as a bus to as small as an office stapler. Each and every one was traveling at near relativistic speeds. Every one of them was on a direct course for the Earth-Moon system… and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it. In four days the Earth would become the latest casualty in a war we didn’t start and barely understood.

***

I had spent the morning on the horn with Admiral Spratt. Lori’s father looked even more haggard than I felt. The Earth Defense Force which was tasked with maintaining the peace in and around the Earth, as well as the Federation, had deployed as many ships as they could. We all knew it would not be enough… not by a longshot.

Development of the advanced tech that the Galactic Order had provided had barely gotten off the ground. Sadly, given a few years, systems based on the knowledge provided could have easily defended against such an attack.

The Earth’s best defense remained the Gilboa, but my ship was only being held together with duct tape and a whole lot of praying.

The ideal solution would be another antimatter bomb to vaporize what was left of bogey four. Sadly, there had only been four in system and they all belonged to the bad guys. The Gilboa’s computer library had the specs for what was called a zero-point bomb.

The mechanism was easy to build, but to generate enough material to make a big enough boom was going to be an issue given the amount of time we had. The closer we got to Earth, the more of the vaporized bad guy would hit the atmosphere.

Conversely, the farther away we were the higher the probability most of the enemy debris could be deflected from hitting the Earth.

Vaporizing the bad guy was not a perfect answer. It wouldn’t be as bad as actually hitting the planet with a solid bit of bad guy the size of a bus… but stripping away half the atmosphere was bad enough.

“What can we do to make this go faster?” I asked for the umpteenth time.

The answer was always the same. Not a damn thing. The engineering team was working as fast as they could and if they made even the tiniest mistake, the Gilboa would go up in the brightest explosion ever seen anywhere near earth.

Given that we could wake-up dead any moment, I decided we needed to pursue other options. We had a stockpile of roughly six thousand nuclear warheads… apparently the Galactic Order folks liked to collect them.

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