A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [206]
All the concentrated firepower of standard weaponry had had little effect on the warglobes. The new carbon slammers and fracture-pulse drones had not worked as well as the EDF weapons engineers hoped, though they had caused some harm. The kamikaze Soldier compies had destroyed some of the enemy, but not enough.
Meanwhile, the new compy-crewed recon fleet had not yet sent any word from Golgen verifying that the massive Roamer comet strikes had exterminated the drogues there.
So far, the only time the deep-core aliens had truly reeled from a human blow had been during the original test of the Klikiss Torch—and that had been an accident.
More and more, though, the EDF and the Hansa found themselves considering using the Torch again—intentionally, this time—as a doomsday weapon, even if they didn’t understand all the consequences. After the obliteration of the technical observation platform, no one had closely monitored the newborn star at Oncier.
Pleased that he wasn’t going directly into another battle like the debacles at Osquivel and Jupiter, Admiral Lev Stromo led a small survey and analysis mission back to the Oncier system. Maybe there he could find some clue, some undiscovered hydrogue weakness.
General Lanyan authorized Stromo to take one Juggernaut, a green priest for fast communication, and a pair of Manta cruisers. Publicly, Lanyan claimed that such a minimal force demonstrated the EDF’s confidence that they had utterly defeated the hydrogues at Oncier; in truth, it reflected the grim reality that the Terran military had few ships to spare. The Admiral would have to make do with what he had.
Approaching the newborn star, Stromo doubled the sensor crews and dispatched a long-range Remora wing to monitor the fringes of the solar system for any sign of marauding warglobes. His three pitiful vessels couldn’t stand up against the hydrogues, and he had already made up his mind to beat a hasty retreat if threatened. After all, the EDF could not afford to lose more ships.
He stung from the humiliating defeat at Jupiter and had spent years leading parades and doing desk work rather than filling his command post for Grid 0. He knew the troops mockingly called him “Stay-at-Home” Stromo behind his back. Now he intended to regain his honor and possibly his backbone.
Oncier’s white-hot ball of gas filled the starscape in front of them. Glittering rubble from the four destroyed moons had spread out in a chaotic band and not yet stabilized into a ring. Originally, this had been one of the grandest cosmic engineering projects ever attempted.
As Stromo looked at the roiling hurricanes of ionized gas, he thought of how the hydrogues had been caught unawares by the Torch test, their home destroyed. But he felt no sympathy for the monsters, not after the merciless and indiscriminate retaliation they had visited on humans and Ildirans alike. Instead, as he stared at the man-made sun, the Admiral pictured it as a graveyard for humanity’s worst enemies. Served the damned hydrogues right!
“Deploy all probes. Let’s get a full scan of how this star is burning.”
A flurry of automated satellites dispersed from the two Mantas like metallic bees, taking up orbital positions around the hot dwarf sun. Some devices dived into the plasma layers and burned up, transmitting readings all the way; others skimmed through the streaming corona.
By now, Hansa scientists should have acquired six years of data showing the birth and evolution of the human-created star. By now, terraforming crews should have finished preparing the four moons for the first wave of hardy settlers…
Standing on the Juggernaut’s bridge, Stromo felt the anxiety among his crew. His perimeter Remora wing reported no signs of hydrogue warglobes. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. A routine mission, gathering important intelligence. That was all.
Stromo had risen in rank through shrewd political decisions, impressive training maneuvers, bureaucratic successes—all of which were important peacetime