The Phantom Fleet

Battlestations

You know the feeling when you've just printed out a perfect three-layer sandwich, poured yourself a cup of coffee and loaded a cool video to watch while you eat? You're not even started, but the anticipation of it is almost better than having it. Awesome, right? On the other hand, I bet you don't know the feeling when your sandwich is yanked out of your hand by a sudden barrel roll, your coffee thrown up in your face and your video replaced with a battlestations alarm.

"WTF! Saku!"

"Sorry Lexi, evasive maneuvers. We might have nukes headed our way."

I wiped my face with one hand, buckling up with the other. "Bollocks!"

"Hurry it up, mate. I'm prepped up for burn. This is serious."

"What do you mean, serious? We get a red alert every few weeks. Martians have been more and more..."

"This is different, mate. This is big."

Saku didn't even wait for the suit to finish latching on. The acceleration hit me like a kick in the face. Hard to do any thinking after that. The console was flashing updates on my helmet's visor faster than I could absorb. Weapons systems hot, stealth down, distress beacon up... Distress beacon?

"Saku..."

"I know, I know, but this is big, I'm telling you. To be honest, we have almost no chance of surviving this one. I started a backup of both of us. I'm already done, but you need another kilosecond. I doubt we'll last that long."

Blood couldn't drain out of my face, with the suit regulating my circulation. I couldn't even piss in it if I tried. I called up the map. It was quite a sight to behold.

"Fuck..."

"You said it."

"I didn't even know Mars had that many ships."

"Spot on. This is more ships than we knew they had."

"Saku. This could be..."

"Spoofing? Mate, if they can spoof a fleet that size, we might as well surrender to them out of shame."

"So this is it... And we're first wave."

"Someone's got to do it, mate."

"Right."

"Engaging in 300 secs."

I shook my head in disbelief. Earth and Mars had fought over Ceres and Mercury and it had been bloody. But nobody had expected that any side would be crazy enough to go for a proper invasion. Not in a gigasecond. I looked up at the sky. Static stars against a backdrop of black emptiness. Nothing moving even as we were thrusting at fifteen gees. A few megameters away, the largest fleet to have ever been assembled was screaming down on us. The stars of Cassiopeia twinkled idly at the impending doom of the Terran hegemony over the solar system... Waitasec... Cassiopeia?

"Saku..."

"Busy here. I'm running at capacity. But you'll be glad to know that Space Command just dispatched everything they had from the Moon's orbit. The first squadron of wasps will be with us in 500. Unfortunately, we'll probably be flotsam by then."

Stupid AI.

"Saku, the altitude is wrong. No path from Mars ends this way."

"Really? Because I just happen to have detected Martian signatures on intercept courses. We're engaging those instead. 100 secs."

"Shit!" Why was the fleet coming from off the ecliptic? That made no fucking sense. I dialed in Support.

"Axxo, why are the Martians coming in from fucking Cassiopeia?"