Assault: The Globur Incursion Book 6, page 1
ASSAULT
The Globur Incursion
Book 6
D. Rebbitt
ASSAULT: The Globur Incursion Book 6
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Copyright © 2021 D. Rebbitt
All rights reserved.
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Dedication
Dedications serve many purposes. A salute to some, an homage to others.
When I wrote Fulcrum, I thought it was a stand alone story – one I really just needed to get down on paper, like I was relating a story told by someone else.
I only realized when I was publishing Fulcrum that there was a very interesting story to be told before that. Thus came Contact and what followed. I am often asked how many books are in the series – and to be honest, I have no real idea. Let’s say 10.
As I write book 7, I am amazed that I have published so many books. Much more amazed and humbled that so many have found the stories engaging and been kind enough to tell me so.
This book is dedicated to the readers – those who I write for. I have even snuck one or two of those who posted great reviews into my books as characters (not those who die horribly).
Without you readers, I might still write, but I definitely would not enjoy it as much. Rest assured, there is much more of the characters you have come to expect in the story ahead.
The saga – or is it space opera will continue past book 7, but that will be in 2022. For now, please enjoy Assault. The marines get dirty but still have time to deploy some weapons grade sarcasm.
Foreword
The conflict continues to rage across the rim. The Fleet could not hold forever with only one task force on the rim.
Rear Admiral Jones has hit upon an effective defensive strategy that also aids in attack. However, the Globur are never fooled for long. They adapt and change their tactics and approach.
The system defense strategy has allowed the first Fleet offensive action of the conflict – and the first victory. The Senate expects more than just a single victory, and even the successful defense of the Mongolia system has not swayed them much.
The grand admiral continues to fight for more resources and some growing political opposition to the Fleet and its insatiable demand for more ships and crews. The marines are also recruiting had for the battles that surely lie ahead.
TF15 is at the Fleet yards in the Albion system, and things have changed a bit. The cheers for heroes are dying down, and the People for peace, although they are outlawed organization are developing a new face and broad influence.
Those in the fleet are singled out for derision and looked down upon with their dusky blue skin. PFP propaganda is having an effect, and some people are beginning to believe that the Fleet is the problem.
In Assault, the Fleet and their new equipment and weapons are sure to be tested, and the marines engage in their first major pitched battle with the Globur – Enjoy!
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
GLOSSARY
Chapter 1
John Forest was awakened when the small ship he was traveling on transitioned into normal space. The stillness of quantum drive was replaced by the distinct sensation of the gravity drive kicking in. The wave of wrongness that followed a transition dissipated quickly for him, as it always did.
John was in the rear quarters of the ship. He had one of the two cabins, and the two Marines who were his escorts had taken to rotating in and out of the only other cabin in shifts. They were no more talkative than when they had picked him up at the Fleet outpost in orbit around Aradin.
John swung out of the bunk and stood up. His leg was working just fine now. Despite close examination, he could not even tell where the newly regrown parts started, and his original tissue ended.
The ship had gone to the maximum of its gravity drive. John could tell by the vibration in the hull. Things a veteran knows, thought John involuntarily. His face quickly wrinkled in frustration. His memory was still just a haze. He was certainly a pilot and a Fleet veteran. He was sure had seen combat—other than the Markus Nebula despite what he had been told. He just was not sure exactly where.
He knew things about how the ship’s systems worked and had even been allowed into the cockpit to speak with the pilots. They had mostly kept to themselves as the cockpit was really a self-contained space. This ship was built to move VIPs as quickly as possible.
He used his augmentation to pull up the ship’s nav plot and saw they were right in the pocket for a least-time trajectory to dock at the Fleet yards in the Albion system. The flight crew had brought them in as tight as they could. The ship would begin deceleration shortly. They had built a good deal of velocity leaving Fleet Outpost 24 above Aradin in the Vandenyno system and carried that into Qdrive. The course plot told him they would be docking in just over an hour.
The least-time trajectory had meant no contact along the way. The ship used the longest possible quantum-drive jumps and recharged the drive whenever they transitioned back to normal space when the drive field decayed too far to be sustained further. It had been 13 days.
Things had been far from boring. John had been catching up and gathering any news he could on this Globur incursion. Like everything else, it just seemed slightly wrong. It was like a story he was being told that was not true. It felt like the narrative had been twisted slightly, and things were not quite what they should be. It was hard to explain. He did not have to explain it anyway, even if he’d been asked. There was really no one to talk to. He was the sole passenger along with his non-talkative Marines.
The conflict with the Globur had started in a system that had been discovered during an exploration mission. Contact had happened as the first formal planetary survey was underway. It was normal for a great deal of time to pass between a planet being identified by Imperial Survey Service as a possible colony site and finally dispatching a planetary survey team.
A find of some kind had triggered the dispatch of a small Fleet task force to secure the site, and the system, as any potential alien artifact could be priceless. What was known for sure was that the Marines securing the site of the original discovery had also found some kind of facility.
Best guess was that they had triggered some sort of security system. Sometime after the Marine’s discovery of the facility, six alien ships had appeared, making for the planet. The sole Fleet destroyer on system overwatch had approached… Not much was known after that. The entire Fleet force had been destroyed. It had been a small force, but formidable, comprised of a cruiser, frigate, and two destroyers.
The force had been commanded by Captain Blout aboard the cruiser Gneisenau. He and his ships had been detached from Task Force 3 at Gateway, the nearest Fleet outpost that had now become a full base in the fight against the Globur.
The captain of the destroyer on overwatch had made visual contact with the alien ships. Captain Ortiz of the destroyer Wind had described the alien ships as globular. The talk about globular ships had evolved into Globur, giving the aliens their name. All attempts to communicate with them had failed. It was difficult to understand why they did not communicate; it was assumed they were indeed receiving the transmissions.
The team from the Imperial Survey Service had attempted to flee the system in their emergency shuttle. They had been under maximum acceleration to the system quantum limit, outside the system star gravitational field, where it was safe to transition to quantum drive. The emergency shuttles were simple craft with a quantum drive basically grafted on. They had no defensive weapons. The shuttle had been destroyed by a Globur missile.
Luckily, a specialist team dispatched to evaluate the find on the planet was close enough to receive a partial download of the survey team mission logs before their shuttle was destroyed. That was the only information that made it out, other than the Marine platoon that had remained on the planet. The ship carrying the specialist team had barely escaped. It had unintentionally led the Globur to the nearest human system.
The Marines had been rescued in a daring high-speed pass through the system. It was they who had brought the first scans of the Globur. They were ruthless, aggressive, and tough to ki
Systems across the rim had fallen to them like dominoes. There had been few successes at staving off Globur attacks. In some areas, the Globur had similar technical capabilities to the Fleet, but their technology was in other ways much more advanced. Globur ships and technology were much more biological than human technology. Their weapons were very different, especially their devastating beam weapons. In the first engagements, those had passed right through shields meant to deflect lasers, not electron beams. The beams crashed power systems, even in warships hardened against electromagnetic pulses and overloads.
Humanity had been at peace for hundreds of years before encountering the Globur. The Fleet was small by any standards, and its ships were old. The Fleet was something that helped show the imperial flag and protect outposts and systems from pirates. They also were tasked with the security of imperial facilities and relays. The Fleet relays allowed almost instant communication between imperial systems and formed the backbone of the interstellar communications network.
In the last 200 of human history, few shots had been fired in anger, and those were mostly at small pirate bands who rose to the notice of the Fleet. There were Fleet Marines garrisoned on every imperial planet, but they remained under imperial control. System or planetary governments could raise their own military if they saw fit. Few did.
The Globur conflict was termed an incursion because the imperial government refused to declare it a war and so had not mobilized the population or industry to a war footing. In this way, the imperial government had avoided conscriptions—and panic. John knew that refusal hampered the Fleet’s ability to carry the fight to the enemy. A little panic might be helpful, he thought, recalling what he’d seen of the incursion.
Worse, it seemed that the Fleet must fight on two fronts. In addition to the conflict with the Globur, the newsfeeds also talked about the PFP. The People For Peace were a banned organization, but that did not mean they were without political influence. The PFP was convinced the Fleet had started a war with the first truly sentient species humanity had ever encountered.
The PFP argued that no advanced civilization was inherently aggressive or warlike. The imperial government was trying to keep what was actually going on out on the rim, far from the core worlds, out of the newsfeeds. Most people did not know, or want to know, what had happened in the systems lost to the Globur. The fact was no one actually knew, despite repeated reconnaissance efforts.
Because of the lack of information about what had actually transpired when contact was made, the PFP claimed that the Fleet had provoked the Globur, and the Fleet had fired first, forcing the Globur to defend themselves. The lack of other reliable information meant this story fell on some sympathetic ears. The People For Peace put together a Peace Fleet made up of pleasure yachts and merchant vessels. It had started in the core systems and was to carry a message of peace and cooperation to the Globur.
The assigned task force, TF2, had shadowed the Peace Fleet to each system, not daring to intervene as the PFP rhetoric claimed that the Fleet was harassing them at every turn. The Peace Fleet had been able to gather enough supplies in the Castellan system, after taking over an orbital station, to make a run for the rim, something that TF2 was ordered to prevent from happening.
It had all gone horribly wrong in the Castellan system when a PFP ship, a yacht, had appeared to have a drive failure and asked for assistance. A Fleet destroyer had moved to dock with it. As the destroyer docked, a fusion-warhead detonation had destroyed the ships. The PFP had claimed it was the Fleet, and they had tried to push past the task force that had been assigned to prevent them from actually meeting the Globur.
The result had been that TF2 fighters and ships had fired upon unarmed ships to disable them. That had been another first in hundreds of years. The largest PFP ship, a liner, had been pushing hard for the quantum limit. It had tried to transition too far inside the system gravity well and been destroyed. The PFP claimed that the Fleet had fired on the ship and destroyed it.
While the records of what had happened in the Castellan system were clear, they were the records of the Fleet. The planetary scanners of the nearest planet had been taken out when the PFP had taken over the primary orbital station, which was where they had come into possession of a fusion warhead (according to the Fleet).
The PFP public relations was very good, and even though the events in the Castellan system had led to the imperial senate labeling it as an outlawed organization, there was still a large group that believed their version of events and termed themselves peace activists. The imperial government had, understandably, sided with the Fleet, but it did not seem in any hurry to shut down the PFP propaganda and the growing peace movement.
On the Fleet’s first front, out on the rim, all fielded human task forces had been destroyed, with the exception of TF2, which had been sent to the yards for upgrades. Ships were being built at a frantic pace, but the shortage of trained crew had led to Project Armet. A change had been made in imperial law to allow Fleet personnel to be augmented with armor that deployed through carbon nanotubes in their skin. John’s augmentation just felt like a natural part of him. He did not understand why some people considered the Fleet personnel abominations. The original law forbidding cybernetic augmentation existed because of the Cyborg Wars hundreds of years before and had never been changed because body modification was considered abhorrent throughout the empire. Not that John remembered that.
The armor was only part of the augmentation that Project Armet had put into his body. The systems were run by an AI, and they included a medidoc that synthesized compounds from bodily fluids and allowed users to activate stimulants, tranquilizers, or other helpful compounds, such as clotting agents. The AI managed wounds and injuries with nanomachines. It could also control his autonomous reactions to allow him to respond to threats instantly.
Project Armet also included weapons. A laser in the dominant arm and a plasma charge projector in the other. This was all powered by an advanced (at least for humans) biological power supply that shared an energy accumulator for the use of weapons or other high-power functions, such as a gravity field. A fusion plant would have been more efficient and effective but carrying a nuclear bomb into a combat situation just never seemed like a great idea.
The armor had proven it could keep people alive in the vacuum of space for days. The carbon fibers infused into bones gave Fleet personnel greater resilience, and the biological modifications gave enhanced vision, hearing, strength, speed, and agility.
It also made all those soldiers augmented a light-blue color. In a society that was repulsed by any sort of body modification, the Fleet personnel became a group apart. There was no way to reverse the process.
Early engagements with the Globur, before Project Armet, had seen human task forces trying to protect the inhabited planets in systems. This had resulted in the loss of the task forces and the loss of the systems. Only TF15 had been successful by using a new strategy—system defense. Rear Admiral Jones had devised a strategy that allowed the Fleet task force to have better odds by simply looping through two systems that were fairly close. The advantage of velocity and vector had led to the first success outside the Chard system in the Markus Nebula.
The cost of victory had been high, and John was told that his intervention in the experimental fighter had been critical to humanity’s first victory. His wounds had been severe when they pulled him from the wrecked fighter, and his memory was gone.
He was now the Hero of the Markus Nebula, on his way to Fleet headquarters to be decorated. TF15 had already made it back, and the news had been full of Rear Admiral Jones securing victory with the newest task force and the new strategy. The holovids always took care to mention that TF15 had included the Hero of Harlow. Captain Zenke’s ship Phoenix had been the one that had rescued John and transported him to the medical facility at Outpost 24.
Now John was an hour away from Fleet headquarters, recovered from the injuries he’d sustained. He had been assured by the public relations officer assigned to him that he would be attending a lot of events after he was formally decorated for his role in the battle of the Markus Nebula. It still seemed to him he was in a story being told by someone else.
