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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Command Post

Third Regiment

Bellerophon System Defense Force

Planet Odysseus

Bellerophon System

January 12, 2553


“And I want a better update on our recon assets.” Colonel Minos Palides looked around the faces of his regimental staff. “We’re going to start losing drones as soon as anyone picks up their transmissions, so make sure the uplinks are secure. These bastards have the orbitals. That gives them the high ground, and that makes our air-breathing platforms even more critical. I don’t want to lose my eyes any sooner than I have to!”

“Understood, Sir.” Lieutenant Michail Tolallis nodded. “I think Captain Vallakos has enough on his plate at the moment, though. I’ll take it.”

Technically, Zaharias Vallakos, as Third Regiment’s S5, in charge of its communications, was responsible for the security of their platforms’ uplinks, not Tolallis’s. But Vallakos would have his hands full maintaining the regiment’s comm net, and as Palides’s S2, in charge of the Third’s intelligence assets, Tolallis was the logical person for him to hand off to.

“Good man,” Palides said with a quick smile.

That smile didn’t do much to lighten the tension in his expression, and he moved his attention to where Captain Demetra Fotidi, his operations officer, sat with her attention glued to the maps on her tactical display. She looked up as if she’d felt his gaze, and he arched an eyebrow at her.

“Not much new yet, Sir,” she said. “It looks like not everybody in Kórinthos got the word about standing down. And the Feds came in hot.” She shook her head, her expression angry. “We’re getting the feed directly from the Alpha One bird right now. I don’t know long she’ll last—the Feds have to spot her pretty quickly, I’d think—but from the imagery, the bastards bypassed Ithaca House and went for Parnassus, instead.”

“Parnassus?” Palides frowned. “Not Ithaca House?”

“Actually, that’s not entirely correct,” Tolallis said. He tapped his own number two display, throwing the imagery into the main holo at the center of the buried CP. “They’re all over Ochi Square,” he continued, nodding his head at the holo. “The President evacced as soon as we got word these people were coming. Wasn’t even a caretaker staff in the mansion. I’d say the Feds probably put a squad or so into it and then moved on to what looked like bigger fish to fry.”

“Michail’s right.” Fotidi nodded. “I should’ve said their assault elements bypassed Ithaca House. But they put three Perseus-class shuttles down in the Parnassus Gardens.”

“Probably to ‘rescue’ Governor Ramsay,” Major Toccou, Palides’s XO said. “Recovering the ‘legitimate’ system governor has to be pretty high on their list for reestablishing Fed authority.”

“Don’t think so, Sir,” Tolallis said grimly. “They came in mighty hot even there. This is about thirty minutes old.”

He flipped more recon imagery to the main holo. As long as the Alpha One satellite stayed online, they had as good a look-down capability on the capital as the orbiting TFN warships. They probably wouldn’t have it for long, of course, but while it lasted—

“Shit,” someone muttered as they watched Federation Army assault teams storm into the tower.

“I thought you said Ramsay had ordered her people to stand down,” Palides said sharply, and Tolallis nodded.

“She did. Apparently, either they weren’t listening or they just didn’t care.”

“That’s not good,” Toccou said quietly, and Palides snorted.

“That’s one way to put it,” he agreed.

The CP was silent, aside from the unending background matter of comm traffic, as they watched the imagery. Then the colonel shook himself and inhaled sharply.

“This is going to get ugly fast, people,” he said. “I’m willing to bet we’ve got a hell of a lot more bodies than they do, but they’ve got the orbitals. That gives them a hell of a lot more KEW capability than we’ve got, and I guarantee they’ll use it. In fact—”

“Flash traffic incoming!” Vallakos’s sharp interruption cut Palides off. “Priority One from Delphi.”

“Put it up!” Palides said, and Tolallis’s satellite imagery disappeared from the main holo, replaced by what looked like an older clone of the lieutenant.

A clone with a tight, angry expression.

“I want this message relayed to every man and woman in BSDF uniform,” he said curtly. “Everyone sees it.”

He paused for a moment, letting that sink in, and then his nostrils flared.

“This is General Tolallis,” he said. “I know a lot of you—a lot of us—have questioned whether or not our secession from the Federation was really necessary. Whether or not it was justified. It was. Five minutes ago, we learned who the Schleibaum Government sent to drive us back into our kennel.”

He disappeared from the holo for a moment, replaced by file footage of an immaculately groomed Army officer. There was something familiar about him.…

“This,” Tolallis continued, “is Taskin Alaimo.” Someone swore softly and viciously behind Palides. “The Federation’s sent the Butcher of Gobelins to Bellerophon. According to our best current information—which is still fragmentary—he’s arrested Governor Ramsay. We can’t confirm that yet, but we can confirm that he’s announced that he is now our governor in the Federation’s name. And if there’s any remaining question in anyone’s mind about how the Federation—or its representative here, at least—intends to address our ‘treason,’ allow me to resolve it.

“He announced his ‘legal authority’ with a K-strike on the Lake Orestiada evacuation center. Current estimates are that there were very few—if any—survivors.”

The command post was deathly quiet with the still, stunned silence of disbelief. That was—

“There were a quarter of a million Odyssians—Odyssian civilians—in that evacuation center.” General Tolallis’s voice was frozen battle steel. “He killed them all. That’s what the Federation’s sent to our star system, our planet, to destroy our homes and murder our people. That’s the twisted, corrupt Federation we seceded from. That’s what we’re fighting…and Alaimo obviously doesn’t give a single good goddamn about open cities or collateral damage.”

He paused again, letting his words settle into them.

“This is going to be even uglier than we’d feared,” he said then, very quietly. “God only knows how many more people this murderous son-of-a-bitch will slaughter out of hand just to make a point. But if he’s willing to murder a quarter million civilian men, women, and children just to announce his arrival, I think we can assume he plans on murdering a lot more of them before he’s done. He has a point to make. The point that as far as the Heart Worlds are concerned, we don’t matter. We already knew they didn’t consider us full citizens; now we know they’re willing to massacre our women and our children if we don’t fall down and lick their boots the instant we see them. And now that the gloves are off, we know they’ll do that to anyone who doesn’t acknowledge them as the rightful gods of creation.

“Laying down our weapons, surrendering, won’t stop this. He’ll go right on, and the only thing standing between our civilians and him is us. You and me, the men and women of the System Defense Force. We’re it until and unless someone from the Free Worlds gets here. And the way we protect our people is to take the fight to Alaimo and his butchers. We hit them hard, wherever and whenever we can. We make them concentrate on us instead of our civilians.

“A lot of us will die doing that. But that’s our job. That’s why we’re here.

“I want all of you to fight smart. Remember they own the skies. Get in, hit hard, get out fast. That’s the way it has to be. I never wanted to fight Federation troops. I never wanted to fight anyone right here on Odysseus. But they’re here now, and they brought this to us, so I want every one of you to remember Lake Orestiada. Remember every single civilian who died there. The order is: God defend Bellerophon…and damnation to the Feds!”



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