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= FAR WARS =

a novel in the Empire of Time series

by John Argo

Chapter Six: Defenders

18.

A holog from Zara came to me on the second day of war, when she stood before my eyes—or her shimmering image in a darkened flight bay—in an olive-drab flight suit, holding a black glowing bubble helmet under one articulated arm. Her beautiful wild honey hair lifted in an oily hangar breeze.

I had just been given a window office on a twentieth story tower, formerly a hotel owned by Trask of course, now a civil defense emergency headquarters. The windows were gone, shattered, and smoky air drifted by. Fires still burned and smoked across the city. Those who had been injured were dead or silent. The only sounds that came up were the occasional belch of ak-ak fire, puffs of black smoke in the sky, and the screaming of some fighter craft—whether our own, or a probing Kaarrk scout plane we had no idea. The CD people fired at anything that moved, even our own stuff, so jittery was everyone. I finally had to order a cease fire just so our own people would not injure each other.

The first damage reports were horrific. The Holy Mother and the general staff had all perished. The death toll climbed into many digits. All defense communications nerve centers on the planet had been punched out. The Kaarrk surprise attack had been extremely thorough and successful. We tried calling the perimeter stations in space, but everything was dead. Tellerine has three small moons—all three were knocked out of com net. The satellites and solar stations had all been wiped out. Worst of all, our surviving field detection grids revealed the ghostly outlines of at least four separate Kaarrk invasion fleets.

Everywhere in space for parsecs around were dogfights, in which our defenders died one by courageous one. We were outmanned, outgunned, and out-planned. Our situation grew more desperate, even hopeless, by the hour.

Yesterday, when I last spoke with Zara, that flight bay was filled with ships and pilots. Today it looked almost empty. Only off to one side were a half dozen reconnaissance fliers of an antiquated type. I knew from the many sources of criss-cross radio traffic intersecting at my GHQ that the mechanics had begun patching up old, abandoned scout fliers, outfitting them with primitive bombs and outdated lightgray shooters. Anything that would fly into orbit or beyond was being patched together in our desperate effort to avert annihilation, or at least hold the Kaarrk Swarm back long enough for a rescue fleet to arrive from far Karayol or Tulearth in a matter of days via the Temporale—if the Kaarrk were not destroying that ancient netpath itself, which vectored space and time lines.

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