ΔV Pt. 09

Had she made a mistake?

Had she been played? Had Dale put on sweet words and crooned sweet nothings into her ear, and told her about the evils he wished to deconstruct and the utopia he wanted to build, simply to get her into his spell. Was there nothing underneath his mask but a cruel, grasping tyrant like the ones she wanted to help to topple? She looked into his eyes, willing him to break. And she saw the pain in those eyes. And she saw the moment that snapped. Dale closed his eyes and hissed. "D-Damn them. Damn the elves, damn the dwarves, damn the gnomes, and most of all...damn me!" He turned away from her and threw the lock of hair to the ground. The impact was less than dramatic. But Dale flinched as it struck, his shoulders tightening.

Annie stepped up behind him and placed her palm on his back, then swept it up to his shoulders. She squeezed him, then leaned in and kissed his cheek as a gutteral German voice spoke in her head. The Warsaw power plant had been grabbed. Other voices were coming in. Some spoke in tongues she had never heard. Some spoke in English. But they spoke of victories -- the capturing of vital infrastructure, of vital people.

"Now...for the hard part," Dale said, his voice soft.

"What?" Annie asked.

"Telling your parents," Dale said.

Annie laughed.

But it wasn't even funny. The two trudged, tired and spent, towards the enclave -- and towards the gathering sounds of pandemonium. As they walked through the suburbs that had once been the homes of millions, ghostly figures shimmered around them -- the dead millions that had dwelled in California before the plagues and the white men came. Dale hooked his arm under Annie's and Annie watched as the ghostly figures stepped from the darkness. They began to kneel, then bow their heads to her -- and Annie saw a kind of servility in their spectral faces and their glowing eyes. As they bowed, she turned her head to Dale's shoulder.

She didn't want to see them.

"We'll free them," Dale promised.

But Annie felt her stomach lurch again.

And she prayed she had not made a horrible mistake.

***

The various astroforces of the great powers -- Russia, the EU, the United States, China and India -- were scattered across the solar systems. Some were even engaged in the slow, deadly ballet of long ranged space warfare when the news began to propagate through the solar system that something very wrong was happening on Stark. But the majority of those forces were clustered in their own orbits around humanity's homeworld. Each one had a few spy satellites in a polar orbit, but the rest of their navies were clustered around the great stabilization points. Also known as Lagrange points, each Lagrange point was a place where the gravity of the Earth and Luna balanced one another out.

It made it easy to do stationkeeping -- ships did not have to waste expensive ΔV to keep themselves in position, and space stations did not need to burn up resources to do likewise.

In total, there were nearly a hundred ships in orbit.

Within twenty four hours of the invasion, there were thirteen.

The USAF Ticonderoga pinged the sudden movement of tanks a few dozen kilometers from the Kursk arcology. Hundreds of vehicles, in flagrant violation of ecological treaties, all of them heading west in a single massive group. When that was followed up by what appeared, to the other American and European ships, to be a massive attack of stealth aircraft over Western Europe and Britain...the obvious conclusion came that the Russian Federation had somehow constructed an immense ground force without being detected by sats or spies and were blitzing the EU.

This had been war gamed out.

And the idea followed Cold War tactics down to a T: Immediate and exponential response. The theory-crafting went that if the enemy began to lose the conventional war, they would go straight to the nuclear option. That meant that the first person to grab for the nuclear option was the first person to have a chance at a total victory. This had been updated to include the space variable -- with the aim towards attaining immediate orbital supremacy.

The United States launched their entire fleet of drones and missiles all at once, following preprogrammed orbits. The drones burned every last ram of their liquid mercury reaction mass. The high density fluid with the high thrust engines made them very fast. Their orbits, rather than being parabolas, were closer to straight lines. The Russians had enough time to launch their drones and their missiles before the United States drones flew through their fleet.

Each drone was essentially an electric engine, a brick of caseless ammunition, and rapid fire machine gun that fired a bullet at every single spot that a ship might be. They shot through the Russian formation and their bullets struck -- not just with the acceleration from the cannons, but with the velocity imparted by their incredibly fierce burn. Armor buckled. Radiators ripped to pieces. Crew compartments ruptured. People ruptured. Several ships peeled apart and blew into pieces. There were no dramatic flashes, no orange flares of light. Instead, ships simply flew apart.

The drone fleet, having attained escape velocity with ease, hurtled outwards into deep space.

The Russian drone fleet met the American missile fleet. Several American nuclear missiles registered that they were close enough to the drones to have a chance to do some good. Several stars flared to life in orbit and drones were cooked to a crisp by radiant energy. Plenty came through. Russian drones doctrine preferred explosive to solid projectiles. Slower rate of fire, fewer projectiles. The end result turned out to be essentially the same as American ships were shredded.

By this time, the reports of Kashmir and China had set the Chinese fleet flying at the Indian fleet, and the European fleet at the second Russian fleet. Nuclear weapons arced through orbits like cargo transfers, while civilian ships burned as hard as they could to try and fling themselves out of orbit and away from the maelstrom. There were countless moments of absolute heroism in those hundreds of ships. Crewmen who scrambled into spacesuits at remarkable speeds to do damage control. Captains who made immediate calls and activated point defense lasers just in time to immolate incoming nuclear weapons. Shuttle pilots who adjusted their orbits, intercepting missiles that would have struck their mother-ships.

Each moment was lost to history -- lost in the mind numbing horror of the cascade.

It is a fact that collisions in space were rare.

Until one happened.

When a single object struck a second, that impact tended to create more objects. Fragments. Chips of paint. Screaming humans. Each of those objects increased the chances of hitting other objects -- and thus, those objects would create more objects. The trend tended to be exponential. For most of human spaceflight, dealing with space debris had been about scrambling to keep ahead of that exponent. Fortunately, modern engines tech and modern telescopes made tracking space debris easier than ever, and quite a few automated systems had been invented to keep things limited. Nets, drones, long ranged beams controlled by Switzerland -- who had been entrusted with the ownership of the debris burners by a United Nations vote.

The One Day War took that exponent and pushed it to the singularity. The graph went vertical as ship after ship exploded, ripped to pieces, or was torn in half by a kinetic kill vehicle. A lot of debris was energetic enough to whip into deep space, or to tumble from orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. But enough of it remained in orbit to create a series of chaotic waves -- rippling outwards, ripping apart satellites and tearing apart communication infrastructure. Solar stations were shattered. Solar mirrors were knocked from orbit and began to tumble towards the Earth. Space stations were perforated, as if they had been shot to pieces by machine guns.

The thirteen ships that survived -- three Russian, one American, five Indian, two Chinese and two European -- only survived because they had been dry-docked on Luna in the various lunar spaceports. Their crews, also, survived because they weren't the ones who fought during Luna's own destructive, short lived conflict as marines shot at one another in corridors and blew holes in domes with a worrying abandon. But slowly, the fighting started to ebb as officers began to ask the very simple question: Who were they fighting and why?

And then the Lunar colonies saw the orbital debris fields glowing with eldritch, purple energy. Every sensor that they had -- radar, LIDAR, even the more exotic arrays of neutrino detectors buried underneath the New Ganges dome, the X-ray telescopes, all of them -- said that nothing was happening in orbit. But their eyes showed that something was. The decision was reached through a flurry of messages that were passed through the ranks of each armed forces...not by their official channels -- which were currently buzzing with static and screams. Rather, it was by the still extant local civilian networks.

In other words, the exodus from Luna was managed entirely through ancient chat programs and text messages.

The thirteen ships burned hard and nearly emptied their remass tanks, arcing towards the outer system. Towards Ceres. Towards Ganymede. Towards their outsystem fleets, and their still drifting logistic support ships -- logistic ships that were being hurriedly redirected. Orbits were crunched and burns began across the SOL system. And as the communication systems of the ships were linked together in a web of laser light and shared messages, messages that spread information throughout the disparate fleets of humanity.

The United Nations had been taken.

The White House was flying no flag -- the American flag had been toppled.

Millions of Indians from the 20^th century, starved in the nearly genocidal mismanagement of the British Raj, were marching through New Delhi -- carrying scavenged weapons and chanting in Hindi so old fashioned that large swaths of the city didn't understand half of what they were saying.

The drowned dead of every seafaring nation on Earth were sailing ships -- catamarans from Polynesia's diaspora. Tattered sailing ships that had exploded at Trafalgar. Ships sunk in the battle of Jutland. They steamed and they sailed, they chugged and they shambled towards the ports of major cities. Under the shadow of their spectral guns, millions of stunned humans watched as their own honored ancestors stepped off the gangplank and gave a single demand.

Surrender.

The whole planet seethed with the immediate, instinctive reaction of many different peoples.

Gunfire.

Bombs.

Fire.

Screams.

A whole planet -- wreathed in a thousand minor skirmishes. But as the fires were beat down by the skeletons and the zombies, the ghosts and the ghouls, billions more people woke to find the entire invasion a fait accompli.

The Earth had fallen.