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  The chief of space operations displayed a list of available ships. “We have two squadrons of Petrels. Cobra will engage the stations and then proceed to the surface to provide close air support to the landing forces. Asp will engage the Hetarek ships. We have four squadrons of Baseballs to serve as interceptors and fighter screens around the fleet. All fighters are manned and green.”

  “And capital ships?”

  “In addition to Columbia, we have the carriers Intrepid and Excelsior, three battleships: Indomitable, Redoubtable, and Trafalgar. For screening, we have six cruisers and fifteen gunboats. All are green across the board.”

  “Logistics?”

  “All supplies and ammo are in place. Repair crews are in position on each ship.”

  “Medical?”

  “All sick bays are fully staffed, with emergency response crews positioned throughout the fleet. We have MEDEVAC Quinalts standing by for casualties from the surface, and a forward medical unit heading down to the surface in the second wave for the wounded any the humans we’ll rescue.”

  The admiral scanned through his list and the collection of slides detailing every aspect of the operation. “Any last thoughts or concerns? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  He looked at each officer in the room, each shaking their head or uttering a confident “no sir.”

  The admiral swiped his signature on the tablet in front of him. “Operation Gemini Two is go. Good luck.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Routine, check-lists, and planning started each mission identically. First, they met on the launching deck, dressed in their flight suits adorned with enough emergency equipment that it was hard to move. The deck itself wasn’t much, separated from the remainder of the ship by a blast wall and cluttered with robotic arms and signs warning of explosives, vacuum, and thruster blast. A flight deck crew member in a brown shirt waited to inspect them, ensuring that the thousandth time that they flew they prepared as well as they had the first. His hands tugged and pulled until he was satisfied nothing loose should have been taught, or that anything taught should have been loose. The crew chief handed the pilot a completed check list and load out for signature and approval. Once both pilot and weapons officer had passed the inspection, the brown-shirt escorted them into a small airlock checked with yellow strips warning of the imminent decompression and loss of artificial gravity. They each connected themselves to the brown shirt with a safety tether, and the crew member tethered himself to the inside of the airlock. A red and yellow light flashed five times, and then the outer door opened with a hiss. Once the airlock completed decompression, all three walked out onto the skin of the battleship Indomitable, completely exposed to space.

  Here, they split up. The pilot used the bottom of his ship to guide him towards the hatch behind the nose. Once he had a firm grasp on the ladder leading into the ship, but before regulations permitted, he unclipped his tether and tossed it to the brown shirt, still standing in the airlock. The weapons officer glided back towards the three open weapon bays, where he inspected the center-hung torpedo, and the two multi-purpose missiles and two air-to-ground bombs hanging in their recesses on either side. Satisfied, he gave a thumbs-up to the brown shirt, who flicked a switch that closed all three sets of bay doors. The weapons officer followed his pilot back to the hatch, detached his tether, and climbed up into the cockpit.

  When he made it up the ladder, an easier task without gravity, he pulled himself into his station side-by-side with the pilot, and sealed himself into his private capsule. “Jean, you good?” Sasha’s voice came in crystal clear through the helmet. He looked to the pilot to his left.

  “Yep, I’m green.” The weapon’s officer looks to his right to the Petrel parked a dozen meters off his starboard wing. The heavy fighters had been engineered decades before, in another war, against a human enemy. Designed to deliver heavy payloads in vacuum and atmosphere, their spade-like shape earned them the colloquial term “Cobra.” No one referred to them by the name given by the now-privatized Ephemeris Engineering, the SA-17 Petrel. Even the official call-signs had adopted a more serpentine theme.

  As Jean Costeaux looked over his shoulder at the other ship, the figures inside were barely discernible in the pale red light of their instruments. “Dauod, you good?”

  “We’re good.” Jean watched the silhouette of a thumbs-up in the canopy of the other fighter.

  He keyed his radio. “Columbia Control, Cobra Flight Cobra Three and Cobra Four are green.”

  “Cobra Three, Cobra Four, roger, standby.”

  “I wonder how long we’re going to wait.” Sasha asked.

  “It’s a lot of ships to form up. It could be a minute.”

  “It’s going to be pretty target-rich. Let’s shoot for one-sortie ace.”

  Costeaux laughed, more at the enthusiasm of his partner than at the thought of getting five kills over the next hour or so. They had not been partnered together long. His first pilot, Xian, had been a close friend after flying together and fighting Hetarek for six years. He’d chosen career advancement in another squadron but moved on in his career. Sasha, however, only recently began flying the manned fighters.

  Jean scrolled through the mission status screen on his display. “I don’t know how target rich it’s going to be once we punch through and do CAS.”

  “Cobra Flights, cleared for take-off and proceed to rendezvous point one.”

  “Okay so that was faster than I expected.” The pilot released the docking clamps and umbilicals, tapped the thrusters a few times vertically to put a few more feet between the bottom of the fighter and the hull of the ship, then jammed the throttle forward, launching both of them, hurtling towards a point in space designated only by a glowing dot displayed on their canopy. Around them, other heavy fighters launched from their mother-ships, dots of light smoothly arching towards the front of the formation. From his screens, Jean counted thirty-six heavy fighters. No light interceptors, yet. Those drones wouldn’t be launched until the other side. Effectively just spheres of engines and weapons, the drones earned their nickname “Baseballs.”

  Costeaux didn’t bother glancing over his right shoulder; he knew their wingman had tucked in just behind them as planned.

  The command ship boomed instructions over the radio. “All ships, all flights, prepare to jump. All ships, all flights, prepare to jump.”

  The Ahai ship, filled with supposedly friendly aliens buried somewhere in the formation, protected by the battleships and clouds of interceptors, fired up its generators. So deep in space, with so few points of reference, the wormhole it opened was hard to discern with the naked eye. The sensors screamed about it, though, and the computer displayed a widening circle representing the event horizon a few dozen kilometers in front of them.

  “Jump, jump, jump.”

  Sasha held on the speed, making their flight the first one through. The wormhole had depth, and inside the pulsing blue and red glow was almost soothing, a stark contrast to the violence of the physics around them. They flew on faith, losing all sensor contact and visual contact with the hundreds of ships that Jean knew to be around them. Rarely did the Free Humans jump en masse like this, but that was the point. This operation started an entirely new phase of the decades-long war. Hopefully, the final phase.

  The transit took less than two minutes. One instant, nothing but blackness appeared before them. The next, two planets orbited each other in a strange dance around a common point of gravity. Their constant close proximity led to their naming after the Gemini twins. One of humankind’s first expeditions outside the solar system had been to see the twin planets orbiting within their sun’s habitable zone. That trip ended in tragedy about the same time the Ahai arrived, opening up exploration to far more viable targets. Mankind had nearly forgotten about the Twins until the arrival of the Hetarek. Now, the planets were so close to the ship that they nearly filled the canopy. On the right, red-orange Castor; on the left, gray-blue of
Pollux.

  “All flights, Columbia. Weapons free, weapons free.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me a second time.” Sasha muttered to himself as he angled the fighter towards their first designated target. Costeaux had found the orbital station as soon as they emerged, right where the intelligence had said it would be. They had doomed the station when it first appeared on a targeting list weeks ago. Killing it seemed like a formality at this stage.

  “I’ve got four Scimitars inbound.” Jean called out when the Hetarek fighters appeared on his sensor screen.

  “Just four? We definitely caught them by surprise, then.” Daoud commented from his fighter.

  “Looks like it.” From the rear scopes, he checked the status of the interceptors. “The Baseballs aren’t going to make it. These four are on us.” He flipped a switch and the four inbound Hetarek fighters, still too distant to be seen, appeared as dots on the windscreen.

  “Cobra Three, you and Four take the first two.” Cobra One, their wing leader, instructed. “Two and I will get the second group. Get off your shots and punch through to the target. Mamba flight is right behind us. They’ll do clean up and cover our six until the Baseballs catch up.”

  “Roger, One.” Jean said.

  “I didn’t really feel like dogfighting today anyway.” Sasha quipped sarcastically.

  Jean focused his sensors on the closest pair of fighters, illuminating them and developing a firing solution.

  “All flights, Columbia, be advised we have two-zero bogies departing Target Epsilon, en route.”

  “I think the Baseballs will’ve caught up by the time we hit them.” Quinn, Dauod’s weapons officer, reported, knowing that Jean would be occupied at the moment, prepping a firing solution rather than calculating intercept times.

  Red lights started flashing on his screen. “We’re being painted.” Costeaux announced.

  Sasha put them in an evasive pattern, with the thrusters randomly flinging the ship in various directions while maintaining its vector. Jean made the sensors focus on their targets. Numbers began scrolling, counting down the distance in kilometers between them and the Hetarek. He punched a yellow button. “Door two open, one missile hot.”

  “Guns and laser?” Sasha asked, trying to keep the fighter pointed at the targets that were now in evasive maneuvers themselves.

  Jean kept his commentary to himself, flipping a pair of toggles and ignoring the inevitable power drop. “Hot.” Through the computer, he programmed the missile to calculate where the enemy fighters would appear. “Guns going dumb and burst.”

  Sasha may be relatively new, but Jean had already spent enough time with him to know when he would pull the trigger. As soon as the computer gave them a sixty percent chance of impact, he called out. “Fox One.”

  They watched the missile streak forward. The entire cockpit then began flashing red while a persistent tone echoed in their helmets. “Where is it?” Sasha demanded, throwing the ship into even more evasive maneuvers. The twin planets spun and danced in front of them so much that Jean had to focus on his instruments, not just to find the incoming missile, but to keep from being sick.

  “Shit, we’ve got two inbound, homing. Countermeasures.” He dumped scrambling signals into space, hoping they would make the incoming weapons lose their precision. Sasha veered the ship sharply away, nearly ninety degrees from their previous path of flight. The maneuvers and the countermeasures worked. Jean saw bursts of red and yellow beneath them as the warheads detonated.

  “Four, you still back there?” He called.

  “Yeah, we’re a little dinged up but we’re good.” Quinn replied.

  Below them, more streaks went outbound as other fighters took their shots at the incoming fighters. He could see the swarms of Baseballs that nearly caught up to them. The spherical drones, built for speed and maneuverability, bristled with thrusters and guns. Operators sitting in comfortable chairs buried deep within the command ship gave them rudimentary commands while artificial intelligence did the rest.

  “Did we get him?” Sasha asked, and, for a moment, Jean wondered whether his pilot would ignore instructions and return to score more kills. Instead, he turned the ship towards the orbital station.

  “I can’t tell. We’ll have to look at the gun camera later.”

  The computer recalculated the correct angle to their primary target, displaying a path for Sasha to align with. Target Gamma was an orbital defense station, one of two that blocked the path of the incoming landing craft.

  “I’ve got another fours Scimitars breaking off from that formation and heading towards us.” Quinn called out.

  “The Baseballs will get them.” Jean replied. Sure enough, nearly a dozen of the miniature fighters changed course to protect the Petrels.

  The target’s defenses came on. Rounds and light missiles started streaking out towards their small flight. Again, Sasha set the ship into a random series of jinks. As their distance to the target closed, so too did the margin of error.

  “Bay Three open, torpedo hot.” Jean called, seconds before release. The station loomed larger, silhouetted against the planet behind. The computer displayed the release zone. At the last second, Sasha stopped his evasive maneuvers, settled into the release zone designated by the computer, and squeezed his trigger. “Rifle.”

  The giant warhead shot forward, accelerated much faster than a typical missile. Beside them, Dauod’s torpedo sailed past.

  Sasha didn’t wait any longer. He nosed the ship down towards the closest of the two planets. Enemy rounds continued to sail by. A countdown timer dropped to the last few seconds. Costeaux pounded on the cockpit divider to get the attention of the hyper-focused pilot. “Splash.” He yelled. Both craned their next to look up and their fighter plummeted towards the atmosphere. Suddenly, two fireballs enveloped portions of the station, and lights began to flicker out.

  “Columbia, Cobra Three, Cobra Four had good effects on Target Gamma.” Jean managed to report through the vibrations rippling through the ship as it began to cut through something other than pure vacuum.

  “Good shooting, Cobras. Retask to CAS, contact Beast One-Five once in atmo.”

  “Roger, Columbia.”

  Orange crept up the nose of the fighter, pouring over the wings and canopy as the friction engulfed the fighter in superheated plasma. Jean kept his eyes on his instruments. Even the auto-darkening canopy wouldn’t keep him from being temporarily blinded. Besides, it unnerved him that he could reach up and press his hand against the fire, with only a few millimeters of canopy to stop him. He found the homing beacon planted by the team on the ground and directed his pilot towards it. The fireball outside kept communications dark. He couldn’t even reach Dauod’s ship less than a hundred meters away.

  The buffeting of reentry lasted nearly two minutes, an eternity in combat. But the fire outside began to dissipate. Jean looked over his right shoulder, and saw Dauod still in position. He immediately switched his attention to the task at hand.

  He switched communications channels to the preset for the ground and announced his presence to the ground team.

  "Beast One-Five, Cobra Three and Four with you. Two by AGM Two-Two-Fives, two by GBU Three-Twenties each. Play time two-five mikes, over." He read off their remaining armaments and available time on station as the fighter dive through the atmosphere towards the beacon. The team on the ground now knew exactly what they had to work with.

  "Welcome, Cobra. We copy all. We're on the southern ridge triple flashing."

  He looked out the canopy at the mesa below. He could see muzzle flashes and tracers across the surface of the rock. The HUD superimposed a strobe flashing a three burst pattern at the focus of the firefight. On the northern ridge, the tell-tale triangle formation of an anti-aircraft battery fired upward. He focused on his screen. Sasha would keep them from getting hit.

  "I have you Beast One-Five."

  "If you could hit that emplacement to our
north east point we'd appreciate it. We're lighting it up now with tracers."

  Sasha didn't wait for instructions. He banked hard so that his co pilot could get a good look. A long string of red streaks lanced out from the team’s position. He could just make out the outline of a bunker buried in the rock. Without the team's fire he never would have seen it.

  "I got it."

  "Awesome, Cobra.” The man’s voice remained calm, even casually conversational, even over the sound of an intense firefight outside. Every time he worked with them, Jean thought of the Special Forces soldiers on the ground as somehow broken, either too at ease in such combat or so numb to the constant proximity of death that another bomb, another bullet, another near miss, became background noise.

  “Cleared hot one AGM Two-Two-Five, hitting south to north. Approving commander’s initials Kilo Mike. Thanks much."

  "Beast One-Five, Cobra Three copies approval Kilo Mike one by AGM Two-Two-Five, from the south. Engaging."

  His hands recorded the team leader's initials, a requirement for the follow-on investigation that would never come, and gave Sasha approach instructions. These men on the ground were professionals who knew exactly which weapon they wanted, where they wanted it placed, and how they wanted it placed there. It made Costeaux’s job easier.

  The fighter turned hard south. A few flashes of the anti-air fire appeared outside the canopy but he largely ignored it. He couldn't do anything about it and he had a weapon to program. The terrain twisted beneath him on his screen. He pinpointed the target and told the middle where to go.

  Sasha leveled out. He flipped a switch. "Bay open." The box on his HUD expanded rapidly as they approached the release point. It flashed green. "Cobra Three: rifle." The fighter bounced slightly in atmosphere as the weight of the warhead dropped away.

  "Beast One-Five copies: rifle."

  The missile streaked down. The computer highlighted it so Jean could track it since it left no contrail behind. Sasha banked hard. Anti-aircraft fire tore through the air around them. Keeping one eye on the missile track, Jean switched on the countermeasures hoping to buy some space from the incoming fire. With the aerodynamics of atmosphere, the navigation computer couldn’t just randomly juke the aircraft around the way it did in space. Only Sasha’s skill kept them from being blown out of the sky.