Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) by Lee Guo Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t be because of an evasive maneuver the captain performed.
    Maybe he got it back running just in time.
    It didn’t matter. Because less than a minute later, the Dartmouth’s signal disappeared. Its dot on the minimap blinked out of existence.
    “Do we still have the Dartmouth’s signal?” Vier yelled.
    “No, ma’am…They’re gone. Sensors read debris and antimatter detonations.”
    Four hundred crewmen. All dead. “How much data did we get?”
    “All their sensor and ship logs until that point, ma’am. It’s safe with us.”
    Vier clenched her fist. The smell of pale recycled oxygen in the cockpit lent a bitter feeling in comparison to the burnt smell of dead bodies and scorched machinery typical on board a heavily damaged warship during battle. Why? Why was she here and they there? Why did so many good men die today? Why was humanity attacked so ruthlessly, and so many star men murdered?
    Minutes later as she gazed at the sudden bright lights that exploded outside the cockpit’s forward viewscreen—typical of hyperspace transition—all she could think about was the dead crewmen on board the Dartmouth and the vain sacrifice of its captain. We’ll avenge your death, Compton. I’ll make sure they pay for what they did here.

 
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    4 hours later.
    December 13rd 3986 AD
    Planetary Defense Command, Meerlat
    Operation Room…
     
    C olonel Arthur Streit did not like the fact that every human warship had been destroyed before they reached the hyper limit. He gazed at the holodisplay coolly as the last human cruiser disappeared in a massive antimatter explosion. So many trails of debris. The enemy was very intent on not letting any of humanity’s largest assets get away. At least, he thought, hundreds of smaller shuttles managed to escape. He couldn’t say the same about the fighters nor the slower moving civilian freighters. At least, the admiral got away.
    Now, it was just him and his soldiers.
    The operation room that controlled the ground forces for an entire planet looked like a giant theater. Rows and columns of workstations layered the giant room. A vast series of holographic projections littered the front wall. Embedded within twenty kilometers of rock, the room was safe as it could be from orbital and kinetic bombardment.
    But that wasn’t what the aliens were after.
    Or they would have done that hours ago. No, the aliens were after something else. Something that mattered more to them. The lives of the civilians on the planet were spared. But for what?
    The giant hologram in front of the room showed that the aliens were just now positioning their largest vessels around the planet, in what was typically a pattern that provided orbital air cover to take out meaty ground targets. While their main ground forces—as seen by the troop transports that had hypered into the system hours ago—would land. As seen by the position of their orbital warships, their attack would center around the main population areas on the colonized planet, mainly the nine major cities on Meerlat, each filled with more than four hundred thousand people.
    But what did they want with the planet’s civilian population? Interrogation? Experimentation? Slavery?
    In any case, Streit was as prepared as he could be with his measly forty thousand marines, not including the planet’s police force. He was willing to defend the planet’s population from whatever the aliens planned to do with them. Or at least try. He doubted he had enough. There were too many unknowns. What type of technology did the alien ground troops have? What did they even look like? What type of tactics would they use?
    Nevertheless, he’d ordered his marines to take camouflage in the cities hours ago, because he knew for a fact that they would be sitting ducks outside the cities where the enemy’s orbital fleet could bombard them to bits. The surface-to-orbital cannons and missile batteries outside the cities, on the other hand, would be