“Sledgehammer away,” Commander Ford called from Conquest’s Weapons bridge station. Then, “Missile strike away.”
“Pulse out,” Captain Absen ordered.
Master Helmsman Okuda was already in the process of dragging Conquest’s prow around to a new heading. Once the dreadnought lined up, Absen felt the TacDrive kick in and hurl the vessel at lightspeed away from thousands of converging Meme hypers, which had been launched at Conquest over the last several minutes by the Meme bases on the Galilean moons.
A moment later, Conquest dropped out of TacDrive twenty million kilometers above Jupiter’s north pole and began falling, too slowly to matter. That distance was fifty times farther than from Earth to the Moon.
“Get the holotank up,” Absen barked as he stood to stare intently at the area where the holographic image would appear. The display flickered into lighted existence and over the next ten seconds populated itself with moons, satellites, captured asteroids, bases, weapons, and anything else of tactical significance.
From this vantage, looking down from Jupiter’s pole, Absen could see almost everything that went on in the Jupiter orbital system. Only a few enemy spy drones had been in polar orbit and Conquest had already burned them. Now, everything revolved generally in one plane beneath the dreadnought, like a crowd of children around a maypole. Conquest pointed her prow straight down and waited like an eagle eyeing her prey.
“Show me the trench,” Absen demanded, grasping the railing that kept him from falling into the helmsman’s pit.
“We don’t have a good line of sight on it, but...” Scoggins replied, “I can synthesize something from spy drones and the feeds from the sleds. Remember, this is more than a minute old due to the time-late light.”
A moment passed, and then the holotank view altered to show a cutaway diagram of the long trench the sledgehammer strike had dug. Eleven icons representing his tiny landing force flew in a single-file line, by necessity spaced well apart. Moving slowly in comparison to their open-space speeds, Absen knew in atmosphere ten kilometers a minute was plenty fast enough to stress the abilities of their pilots, flying on instruments between walls no more than two hundred meters apart to stay inside the dust cloud.
The display fuzzed and then lost its coherence. “Sorry, sir,” Scoggins said. “They’ve rotated out of sight on Io’s surface, and we’re not getting much from the sleds through the plasma haze.”
“Launch the first missile salvo. Go ahead and start firing at the orbital fortresses,” Absen ordered. Soon, Ford eagerly lined up and began extreme-range fire with bursts of railgun shot and particle beams. The ferrocrystal projectiles would be lucky to hit, and the beams packed no punch at twenty million kilometers. They would barely fuzz the enemy sensors, but Absen ordered it anyway. At least his people would feel like they were doing something more than just waiting, but Conquest had to stay here, both to remain out of the arc of the Weapon and to coordinate the battle.
“Tactical, then,” Absen said. When his birds-eye view appeared again, he traced the progress of the sixty missiles Conquest had fired, twenty at each Meme base on the other Galilean moons of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. If he was lucky, at least one each would make it through to deliver its heavy thermonuclear payload. If not, the Crows would have to pick up the slack.
Turning his attention to the icons floating just over Jupiter’s north pole, he saw that the grabships were even now arming each StormCrow with two heavy nuclear missiles for their next mission.