Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 83
Just twenty kilotons. A small tactical warhead, not a city buster. But that close to an arcology. Gods.
“Flash traffic from fleet command,” Bosworth shouted into the din. “Planetary Defense Condition 1. I repeat, all military units in the Rhodia AO are ordered to Planetary Defense Condition 1.”
The voices died down, and a moment of shocked silence followed. Then Dunstan heard a few sobs. PLADEC-1 was the highest readiness level for the military. It meant that command expected war to be imminent and all but unavoidable. Whatever else it would mean for him and his crew, PLADEC-1 also meant they just had their enlistments extended indefinitely, to serve according to the needs of the navy until the crisis was over. The last time the Rhodian military had gone to PLADEC-1, war had broken out two days later, and Dunstan hadn’t come home again on leave for a year and a half.
“XO, all-ship announcement,” he ordered, then looked up at his rattled executive officer when the open-channel signal didn’t come right away as expected.
“Lieutenant Bosworth.”
Bosworth was so shaken that it took him an uncharacteristically long five-second span before his hands could manage to punch the right data fields.
“You’re on, sir.”
Dunstan took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
What have I done to piss off the gods that I’d have to live through times like these twice? he thought before he touched the TRANSMIT field.
“All hands, this is the commander. There has been a surprise attack on our home world. The fleet is now at Planetary Defense Condition 1.”
He paused, momentarily unsure of how much information to give his crew, who were all ready to go home, none prepared to unpack their shipboard bag again and face an unlimited deployment. He still remembered how he had felt when the declaration of war had come across to the fleet nine years ago. The tensions had ramped up gradually back then. Everyone had been able to see it coming. This was brutal in its suddenness. Minotaur had a little over 250 crew members, and statistically speaking, it was likely that at least a few of them would be from arcology Norfolk-9. Telling them about the nuclear strike would only add the agony of that uncertainty to the shock of the PLADEC-1 announcement.
“I will share more information as it comes in. For now, we are safe, but we’re adrift with no power, propulsion, or gravity. We sent out an emergency request for assistance, and we’re just a few hundred klicks from Rhodia One, so we will get assistance to get us the rest of the way. We will rise to this challenge just like we have done before, and we will come out just like we always do.”
He closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts for a moment before continuing. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that every member of the AIC was looking at him.
“I won’t try to claim we’re the best and most powerful ship in the fleet, or that we’re blessed by the war gods, or some other horseshit another commander would serve up to motivate his crew,” he continued. “We all know that the old girl was a hard-ridden hand-me-down already when we got her. And don’t any of you tell me that wasn’t your very first thought when you reported to your new command, and you stepped on that shitty worn-out deck liner at the main airlock for the first time.
“But she took care of us, and we took care of her. And I will claim that we have the best crew in the fleet, and I’ll fight to the death anyone who tries to shed doubt on that. Nothing that happens after we dock at Rhodia One will take that away from any of us. We may not be the shining heroes in the spotless flagship. But we all know how to do our jobs, and we do them well with what we are given, because we are very good at what we do.
“Whether we serve together or apart, don’t ever forget where you were when all of this started. Don’t forget the faces of those who stood the watch with you. When we cleaned pirate gunships out of our shipping lanes. When we went toe to toe with a heavy gun cruiser twice our size and four times our firepower and fought them to a draw.
“All of this will be a footnote in a history book someday. But those of us who were there will know what happened, and who made it happen. And now I am wasting emergency power, so I’ll cut this short. But know that I am proud to have served with you all. And know that I would be happy to let any of you buy me a drink in any bar in the system. Commander out.”
Dunstan closed the channel and leaned back in his couch with a sigh.
“I have a news feed that has a current visual from Kelpie Peninsula, sir,” Lieutenant Mayler said.
“Can you bring it up on a bulkhead screen, please?”
“Aye, sir.”
Mayler opened another screen and flicked it against the forward AIC bulkhead, where it expanded to fill the available space. The footage was shot from a very high altitude, but the visual was unambiguous. Norfolk-9 was a thousand-meter pyramid of titanium, composites, and steel, a hundred million tons of mass anchored twenty floors into the ground, and not even a tactical nuke going off in close proximity was enough to bring an arcology down. But there were thousands of fires large and small burning on the shattered eastern and southern facades, and it was clear that many thousands were dead down there, maybe even tens of thousands. The angry-looking dark smoke from the fires was already billowing thousands of meters into the sky. To Dunstan, it looked like a funeral pyre of world-shaking proportions.
“All leaves have