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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Parnassus Tower

City of Kórinthos

Planet Odysseus

Bellerophon System

January 12, 2553


“General Dudina’s HQ is down and setting up in Agrino,” Major Anthony Bisgaard said. “She’s about an hour ahead of schedule.”

“Because the damned Odyssians completely evacuated the damned town,” Colonel Rayko Hepner growled. “Fucking bastards. I’d hoped Kamisa would have the chance to make the point to them.”

Thirteenth Corps’s fair-haired, slender chief of staff probably weighed no more than two thirds as much as Taskin Alaimo, but under the skin, and allowing for a certain lack of polish on Hepner’s part, they were very much alike. And he’d been with Alaimo for a long time…including the time they’d spent beached after doing what had to be done in Gobelins.

At the moment, he and the rest of Alaimo’s staff were in the process of settling into what had been Mollie Ramsay’s comm center. It was a little cramped for their needs, but both its surface-to-space capability and its links to the planetary datanet were excellent.

And there was a certain symbolism to putting Alaimo’s HQ there.

“Now, now, Rayko.” Alaimo waved a chiding finger. He’d shed his armor in favor of fresh, crisp fatigues, and he smiled gently. “I expect Lake Orestiada’s made the point. Once it percolates through their brains, anyway. I’m sure Kamisa would have preferred to decorate a few streetlights with traitors, but she’ll have her opportunity later. After all—” his smile sharpened “—they’ll all be coming home to her shortly. She’ll know what to do when they do, and in the meantime, there’s no one underfoot to get in her way while she settles in.”

He smiled. He’d assigned General Kamisa Dudina’s First Division as his lead ground component because he trusted her mettle more than he did General Filenkov’s. Filenkov, who commanded the Third Division, sprang from a powerful Five Hundred family, or he wouldn’t have been here, but he was obviously less…committed than Dudina to what had to be done. He’d be fine as a combat commander—probably—if the traitors were stupid enough to fight after Alaimo’s modest object lesson, but he didn’t have enough fire in the belly to command Alaimo’s lead echelon.

“I know she will, Sir.” Hepner grimaced. “I guess I’m just naturally impatient. And these goddamned traitors have run up a pretty steep bar tab after what they did to Admiral Hathaway.” His jaw tightened and he shook his head. “This never would’ve happened if the Government hadn’t run so scared after Gobelins.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Alaimo replied. His tone was almost serene, although that fooled none of his staffers. “And at least they’ve decided to let us take the gloves off this time. But don’t be so impatient! A good baker knows it takes time to bake the perfect cake.”

“Of course, but—”

“Excuse me, General.”

Hepner broke off as Captain Yerlikaya, Alaimo’s comm officer, raised his voice. The chief of staff looked irritated by the interruption, but Alaimo only smiled. Despite his reputation with the Federation at large, he was almost always patient and pleasant to his personal staff.

Of course, he chose…compatible people for that staff.

“Yes, Arsal?” he said.

“You have an incoming communications request, Sir.”

“Really?” Alaimo’s smile broadened. “Odd. I don’t remember giving anyone on Odysseus my comm combination. Who is it?”

“I don’t know, Sir,” Yerlikaya said. “The sender’s ID is blocked. And when I tried to put a trace on it, we came up cold.”

“Excuse me?” Hepner asked sharply, and the captain shook his head.

“I’ve traced it back to the point at which it enters the datanet, Sir. It’s a processing node in a little town north of here—Vyronas, I think it’s named. But it looks like the feed’s coming from an Agni drone, and I can’t trace back beyond that point.”

Alaimo raised an eyebrow at Hepner. The chief of staff looked back for a moment, then shrugged.

The Agni was the Federation Army’s standard battlefield communications drone. It was small, fast, and very stealthy, yet provided an enormous bandwidth. In this instance, however, it clearly wasn’t one of their Agnis…which underscored the point that Bellerophon enjoyed the next best thing to Heart World levels of wealth and technology. Unlike the raggedy-assed, piss-poor Fringers in Gobelins, the Bellerophon System Defense Force was equipped with first-line military hardware, just as good as the Federation Army’s own. That was a sobering thought, since the BSDF outnumbered Thirteenth Corps by a considerable margin. On the other hand, its atmospheric component was largely a dead letter—manned air-breathing aircraft simply couldn’t live in the air if someone else controlled the space around a planet—and it had never had any heavy armored vehicles. Still, if they were foolish enough to fight, it could get nasty.

That might just be the point Alaimo’s mysterious caller wanted to make.

“Put it through, Arsal,” the general said.

“Coming up on your Number Four display, Sir.”

Alaimo looked down and a black-haired man in the green tunic and brown trousers of the System Defense Force appeared on it. His collar bore the same pair of stars Alaimo’s did, and a data crawl blinked across the bottom of the display as the computers compared his features to the database. It stopped blinking almost immediately, and Alaimo cocked his head.

“General Tolallis,” he said. The name came out liltingly, almost caressingly, and he smiled. “I assume you got my message about the evacuation centers.” His smile broadened. “Is this your surrender call?”

“No,” Tolallis replied.

“Then to what do I owe the somewhat dubious pleasure?”

“You sent a message with Lake Orestiada,” Tolallis said coldly. “I thought it would be only courteous to send you a reply.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” It was Tolallis’s turn to smile thinly. “I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a butcher like you thinks in terms of mass casualties. However, you should be aware of two things. First, we’re not going to roll over for you. We’ll be perfectly happy to give up enough dirt to bury every Fed butcher your brought with you, but if you want the rest of our world, you’ll goddamned well have to fight for it. And, second, we’re aware you have ships in orbit around Odysseus—a hell of a lot less of them than you expected to have, I’m sure, but still there—and you’ve just demonstrated what you’re willing to use them to do. What you may not be aware of is that we have more than a dozen Telum systems deployed in hides across this continent. For that matter, we deployed twenty-plus Fulmen platforms before you got here.”

The muscles around Alaimo’s eyes tightened. That was the only sign he gave, but it was more than enough for those who knew him as well as his staff did.

The Telum was a ground-based KEW platform. It was mobile, for certain values of the term, and although its 25 KPS launch velocity was little more than two thirds of a Navy K-gun’s, its projectiles were far larger. First, to make up for their lower velocity—they were almost twice as massive, which gave them almost as much destructive power, despite their lower velocity—but also because, unlike the naval weapon, they incorporated airfoil control surfaces. They could change flight profiles after launch, which allowed for indirect fire and ground-skimming flight paths. The launch platforms were easy to find and kill from orbit…but not until they unmasked and fired, and they were remote-commanded systems. Killing the launchers wouldn’t do a damned thing to the people who’d just fired them.

The Fulmen was even worse.

Alaimo had brought along a couple of hundred Fulmens of his own, although he hadn’t bothered to deploy them yet. A capital ship’s K-guns were more than adequate for anything he might need. But the Fulmen was an extremely stealthy drone that fired a 2.5-tonne slug of SCM—over three times the mass of a capital ship’s K-gun slug—wrapped around a Hauptman coil capable of 3,000 gravities of acceleration. From a launch altitude of three hundred kilometers, it produced 5.2 kilotonnes of kinetic energy.

“I’m sure your Navy officers—the surviving ones, anyway—will tell you even something as stealthy as a Fulmen isn’t that hard to find in a close planetary orbit,” Tolallis continued. “That’s why we didn’t put them there. They’re much farther out, but that just gives the KEWs more time to build velocity. The coils are only good for about four minutes, which means we had to put them within less than nine hundred thousand kilometers of the planet, so it’s not impossible for you to find them. Eventually, at least. On the other hand, they’ll be megaton-range weapons, coming in from that far out.”

Tolallis paused, letting that sink in, then shrugged.

“I’m sure someone like you is already thinking about using our civilian population for cover. It’s the sort of thing you would think of. And I won’t lie, Alaimo—we don’t want to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of our own people, so forcing them back into the cities will give you a certain amount of cover. But there’s a curve. A point where what you do may just convince us to go ahead and pull the trigger anyway. And if you start throwing around city-killers of your own, we’ll reach that point in a hurry. If you want to come after us on the ground, fine—you bring it. You start killing our cities, and we will fuck you up. I just wanted to make sure you understand that, without any ambiguity.”

“That sounds very impressive,” Alaimo said after a moment. “Assuming there’s anything to actually back it up, of course.”

“And I knew you were going to say that, too,” Tolallis said. “It would give me great pleasure to resolve any reservations you might have about my veracity by dropping a KEW right on your head, but so far, you haven’t pushed it to that point, given where you happen to be hiding your cowardly ass. So I guess I’ll just have to settle for a front row seat at your firing squad and find another way to resolve those reservations, instead. I’m sure something will come to me. Goodbye, General.”

The display went blank.

Alaimo sat for a moment, gazing at it almost thoughtfully, then shrugged.

“It would appear this cake’s oven needs a little higher temperature than I anticipated,” he said almost whimsically. “Since that’s the case, perhaps we—”

An alarm howled suddenly.

“Hauptmann signature inbound!” Major Bisgaard barked as a bloodred icon flashed into existence on the master plot. “Launch point, two hundred thousand kilometers!”

Alaimo’s eyes snapped to the plot, and his jaw tightened as that glaring icon’s velocity spun upward.

It accelerated for just over a hundred seconds. Then, still ten thousand kilometers out from the planet, it went ballistic at a velocity of 3,343 KPS.

Three seconds after that, a 3.4 megaton explosion vaporized the heart of the city of Agrino—and half of Kamisa Dudina’s First Division, Terran Federation Army—in a four-kilometer fireball.



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