Looming Deadlines

MICRO-SHORT- FEBRUARY, 2524. BLUE STORM RISING.

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The last four months had been stressful. The chaotic, pounding stress of open battle had faded, giving way to the new, creeping stress of suppression operations, Rama’s fleet having long taken the springboard jump to their untimely demise. It was unfortunate that she'd left them holding the bag with so little to show for it. The Minervan Republics had no desire for territorial expansion, let alone into such a hostile environment. Yet, here they were, running a forward staging base for an invasion that had just failed. Their mandate was in desperate need of a change, and everyone in charge seemed to be in too much of a panic, sending hurried, slapdash reinforcements off the Frontier to the front line, to do anything about it. If Denys was in charge, he would have abandoned the place as part of a peace settlement. They had bargaining chips. There was no point in holding this system, he thought. The soldiers had already assured the civilian populace that they'd leave when the war was over, after all. They already had enough terrorist attacks without throwing any broken promises on the fire. Why invite more chaos? The war was already over, in fact if not in name, if anyone had the wisdom to see. Unfortunately, he thought, his superiors did not share his pessimism.

“I donnae understand you, Denys.” The Colonel dipped his head. “First you’re telling us that we won’t be able to keep the city if the bombings continue. Then you tell us it’s bad they stopped bombing us. Every movement faced with great overmatch loses steam eventually. Do you think the Marathonians to be superhuman, Commander?”

“No, sir, but—”

“But from where I sit, you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth. You bloody intelligence types are always looking for piss in your coffee. Perhaps it’s the filter.” Standing in for his commanding General, Colonel Ahmad Pembleton, a stiff-jawed Scots-Kuwaiti from Dartmouth, Sligo Republic, was an infantryman through and through. He had a natural distaste for spooks, especially ones that weren’t his. Denys hadn’t been wrong much, but he had been wrong before, and once was enough for the Colonel.

“Let my man speak, Colonel.” Rear Admiral Ann-Marie Berhane was used to cutting the Sligoan’s grumbling off. She had little time for foolishness and less still for mistakes, let alone a man who had gotten here by being prone to both. She wished General Reyes was here. Ruthlessly competent with a meticulous streak that tended towards micromanagement, the General had gone on a visit to check on the troubled occupation forces in Lakeford, one of the planet’s other tether cities. “Commander Sato, your assessment?”

“Well, ma’am, terror bombings are down, there hasn’t been a riot in weeks, and the Marathonian National Guard hasn’t sent a sortie our way in thirty-five days. Electronic interference is also down, and we even had a group of militants turn themselves in.”

“I understand counterinsurgency isn’t my wheelhouse, Commander, but I fail to see why any of that’s bad… unless they’re gathering combat strength.”

“Well, ma’am, yes. I think that's it. After all, which of them are connected? The National Guard isn’t doing the terror bombings— usually— they just order them. They control the air forces, and the jamming, and really, the only thing here they don’t control are the riots, and we’ve mostly shipped everyone out who could join in. There’s one common factor. The Marathonian National Guard has decided to stand down, and rather abruptly so, at that.”

“You don’t think we should expect a surrender, then.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t think they’re getting tired, either. I think they’re getting ready.”

“Ready for what, Commander?”

“Some kind of attack, I don’t know. But they want their planet back. That much I do know. We’d be pretty pissed, too.”

The airbase’s Combat Control Center was always a busy place, even when nothing was happening. ST2 Johanna Maroun gasped when she first saw it, a collection of large and small blips on her console, approaching quickly enough. “Strike group, one-two-eight kilotons, passing through slipspace. No transponders, at least none we can read, and we have no scheduled transits. Assuming hostile.”

Her supervisor, Chief Kamolov, popped up behind her. “Back for seconds, huh? Good spot, Maroun. Any estimated trajectory?”

“They keep this up, they’ll be on the far side of the gas giant in twenty-four minutes. Likely coming out there.”

The Commander, the Colonel, and then the Admiral walked up behind the Chief, a conga line of authority forming over the Sensor Technician’s shoulder. “Sortie the quick response group,” Admiral Berhane nodded. “Attach the Saratoga battlegroup, and keep the Warsaw in reserve.”

A “Yes, ma’am,” rose from a nearby console, and an operator was on the line in mere moments.

“So,” Colonel Pembleton elbowed Denys. “Your wolf showed after all.”

“Thank you, sir. Can’t say I’m happy about it.”

The wait was nerve-wracking. Intelligence satellites, positioned strategically around the far side of Plataea, the gas giant the moon Marathon orbited, watched for the characteristic radiation spike of a slipspace influx, and soon they had it. Gatorheaded destroyers poured forth from the gap in reality, larger ships soon to follow, and one after another, the satellite picture slowly went dark.

“We’re in the blind until the ships arrive. Estimate two minutes.”

“I don’t like it, Chief.” The Admiral shook her head.

“Me neither, ma’am.”

Hang on, Denys wondered. “Admiral, why would they stand down their ground forces for a naval assault?”

On the furthest front and leftmost console of the airbase’s Combat Control Center, hastily re-appropriated from the Blues and jury-rigged to interface with Minervan hardware, a single pixel switched on in the top right corner of the display. It grew at a breakneck pace until only instants later the operator behind the console was alerted by a bright red flash around the border of the gravitometer’s Graphical Plot Interface. Confused, ST3 Aesha McDaniels thwacked the connector cables linking her terminal with the native hardware, hoping the thump would make what was clearly an error go away. “Chief? Could I get you to look at this? My hardware’s acting up. Contact just appeared out of nothing, no leadup or easein or anything.”

“Coming,” Chief Kamolov strolled over, hunching over the display. It indicated a wave displacement around 47 kilotons, single contact, high angle, closing fast. “McDaniels, they’re already here. I don’t know if that’s a glitch.”

“Chief, a high-angle run is suicide— and besides, we’d have picked it up before now if it wasn’t—”

“It’s stupid, not impossible! The approach angle is exactly what makes it harder to detect. It’s— hold on.” Another blip was starting to grow.

“I’m getting it here, too. I’m reading four. No, ten.” Maroun was starting to sweat. “High approach angle, and displacements and signatures looking like… well, carriers, Chief.”

By now, the officers had dropped their conversation, staring intently at the master display. Fifteen slipspace tracks dotted the arc of the moon. Seventeen. Twenty. Twenty-three, twenty-five…

“Goodness alive…” Colonel Pembleton’s jaw dropped.

“Colonel, ready your men and scramble the fighters.” The Admiral shook her head as the quick response force revealed the imposing force on the far side of Plataea to be a loose collection of destroyers around two cargo ships. “We’ve been played.”

INFLUX DETECTED, the console chirped. PROXIMITY ALARM.

“I’m getting influxes in low orbit!” McDaniels’ console was flashing all sorts of warnings she had no time to dismiss. “Count fifty-plus contacts and fifteen plotted influxes, more popping up by the second.”

INFLUX DETECTED, INFLUX DETECTED, INFLUX DETECTED…

“They’re transiting… coming in right over the city. They’re… hugging the atmosphere?”

“I see tube launches, strike craft!” An operator on the far side of the room shouted. “Doing everything I can to burn through their jamming! Spectrum’s a soup, ma’am, but that’s gotta be a thousand fast-movers, at least!”

“Shit,” Denys blurted. I hate being right.

“Long day ahead,” the Admiral nodded. “Let’s go win it.”

---

The Rhodes Arc will follow the Second Battle of Rhodes (February 6, 2524- July 31, 2524), the single largest urban battle since the Fourth World War (2037-2040). Dragging on for months and resulting in millions of casualties across both sides and the displacement of a hundred million people, the Second Battle of Rhodes marks the first contested orbital landing (i.e. an attempt at planetary invasion prior to securing orbital superiority) as well as the largest planetary landing operation in human history. A costly, but not pyrrhic, victory for the Marathon National Guard and the United Nations, the Second Battle of Rhodes and the Marathon Campaign that followed largely set the tone for the dying days of the Fools’ War— a lethal struggle featuring the Minervans trading territory for time and the UN trading blood for victories.

---

“That was the single worst day of my life.”

—Apocryphal, attributed to various sources

“They knew we had to be coming back, they just didn’t know when. They’d been evacuating the city for months, now, upending lives left and right for their own safety; moving people around more dignified than livestock, but not quite as dignified as men— perhaps like a fine china they were afraid of breaking.”

—Maj. César Wainright, Marathonian Republic Marine Corps
attached N-3/1 Marines (USMC)
First Wave, DZ Naegling

“Look, that's our home. We were gonna fight, bleed, and die for every inch. And we did.”

—PFC João Moriyama, Marathonian Army National Guard

“You know, I don't think I'll ever complain about anything ever again, after getting through that.”

—LT Marietta ‘Foster’ Höhme, European Union Defense Force
attached I/VFA(E)-156 “Le Linci”
ASF-17C ‘Panther’ Pilot, Operation DEADLINE

“The whole world was on fire, and if it wasn't burning it was smoldering. The streets were paved with broken glass and there wasn't a window on my entire block that was intact. The stench of death came a little while later, and it just wouldn't go away, and it wouldn’t wash out, neither. I wish I'd left when the soldiers told me to. It was hell. Pure hell. I think even surviving that was an act of God.”

—Jessica ‘Jessie’ Zakharovna, Rhodes resident

“The sky that day was mostly missile trails.”

—Cpt. Marcus ‘Taurus’ Abrams, Marathon Air National Guard
144th Tactical Fighter Squadron ‘Sabertooths’
F-51E ‘Mustang’ Pilot, Operation DEADLINE

“We were panicked, confused… In total disarray. We had no idea they were that brave, or perhaps that desperate.”

—Lt. Col. Johnny Mangayao Benavides, Federated Minervan Republics Marine Corps
2nd Battalion, 15th Marines
Occupation Forces at Marathon-Rhodes (OMAR-Rhodes)

“So here’s to you fighter pilots, victims of the war,
They're scraping off your blood’n’guts from downtown to the shore
Back home bread’s a hundred bucks, it’s all just fine and grand,
I think we managed to secure about three blocks of land!”

—Cynical UN take on an old aviator’s tune

“We understand this undertaking will be costly, but Marathon is one of us. Her valiant defenders have held out under the assurance that help would come eventually. Must they wait longer? Must they delay their country’s freedom? Marathon is one of these United Nations, and we will not abide a nation in chains!”

—United Nations Secretary-General Diane Jimoh

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