Rebel hell hells jesters.., p.4
Rebel Hell (Hell's Jesters, #3), page 4
“How many do we need to take down to cripple their web?”
Curry hesitated, turned to scan his holoscreen. “I estimate four, sir.”
Geiger nodded. “Modify our plans accordingly. Assimilate the battle package and prepare to transmit. Quickly, Lieutenant.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“How close does the Revelation have to get?” Harriet asked.
Curry hesitated. “She’ll need to be within at least a half a million kilometers.”
“Practically point blank,” the Captain snorted. She looked at Geiger. “The rebels are going to see what she’s doing. They’ll try to stop her.”
“Then we’ll have lured them out of their web,” Geiger replied and offered her a smile his scars no doubt made hideous. “We didn’t come here for a tickle fight.”
That sent nervous chuckles through the bridge and even humorless Harriet had to smirk in response. “Aye, sir.”
“We’ve come here,” Geiger rumbled, “to win this war.”
Finally.
In the eight months since Junction, the Alliance had done little but trip over its own dick. The politics of open civil war had stirred a predictable morass in the Assembly, committees formed, accusations thrown, and scandals kindled. But that snarl had spread to the Admiralty. They’d given Harrison another chance, one he’d botched on feeble half-thrusts into Union space, before finally “kicking him upstairs”, as the saying went, with a promotion to Grand Admiral Advising the High Council. The position meant nothing, of course, a salve to the fool’s ego while the politicians cleared the way for a fleet commander with real vision.
It’d still taken Geiger months to sort out the Fringe World Fleet, get his plan approved, and muster the resources. So much goddamned time wasted. But they were here, now, with Loudon in the noose. The rest of the Core Worlds would follow. With those snuffed out, the Union would die quickly.
And Loudon promised other rewards, of course. Geiger’s benefactors at Syntar had shown him the unearthed Survey Corps records. He knew what riches lay on the planet. He knew the riches a partner in this scheme stood to reap.
Victory, glory, and wealth!
It was a hell of a thing, standing on the bridge of his ship, with all the power in the galaxy and all the future opening up before him. Not for the first time, Geiger pondered something beyond the uniform, beyond the war. Really...what can stop me now?
His hand went to his face, scrawled at the itch of scars he long should’ve had cleaned-up, his trademark—his reminder.
“You think they’ll make a showing?” Harriet asked quietly.
He turned to her. Like most of the Immolator’s crew, she’d been with him through the long months chasing the Hell’s Jesters, before the war and during its early weeks. And though she hadn’t been present for it, she knew the story of how they’d given his hideous half-face, over Gallaton, back when the fighting had been war in everything but name—a nasty brushfire the Alliance hoped would just burn out.
Geiger had to consciously stop scratching. “It doesn’t matter.” He lowered his hand. “But if they do, they’ll die with all the rest.”
“Admiral,” Curry said from Tactical, “the package is programmed. It’s ready to transmit.”
“I can open the general address channel,” Chandler suggested, “if there’s something you’d like to say to accompany it, sir.”
“No need for theatrics, this time, Commander. Just one word to accompany: ‘attack’.”
Curry keyed his console. “Transmitted, sir.”
“All command are receiving,” Chandler added. He nodded towards the hologram. “And they are complying.”
Geiger’s great host lurched for Loudon. Almost immediately, flecks of fire lashed out from the asteroids, the stations there armed, obviously, and flinging particle beams and torrents of missiles from the safety of their web. Shields flared as Alliance ships absorbed the punishment. They fired back, quickly confirming the nature of the tractor beam tangle as their return blasts dissolved before reaching their targets.
“Let’s go,” Geiger rumbled—needlessly, as he could feel the acceleration of the ship building, despite its inertial compensators.
A formation with the Immolator at his heart and the Revelation at its side slid through the blazing battle line. A jolt went through the deck plates and Geiger had to steady himself with a hand on the back of Harriet’s chair. That’d been a lucky shot, to get through at this range. But he knew many more would follow.
“Let’s go...”
“Admiral!” Curry cried from his station. “We have hostile contacts to aft!”
Geiger’s gaze leapt to the tactical hologram. Icons blurred into being at its edge. A quick correction of Curry’s pulled the perspective out to take in the full star system. More of the icons were coming, lashing around from behind the closer gas giant. A pointer brushed over one of them and a familiar schematic materialized in a smaller globular.
“Of course...” Geiger looked at Harriet with bared teeth. “It appears they didn’t intend to miss this.”
“War book identifies them as ‘Hellhounds’, sir, Hell’s Jesters!”
“I know who they are, Lieutenant,” Geiger growled to calm the young man. “Near space patrol screen is to move to engage.” He folded his arms to keep from scratching his scars and riveted his gaze on the real prize today. “My orders stand for all other ships: press the attack.”
KELLY HARRISON DOVE into hell.
“Watch that!”
Her warning came a heartbeat too late as a spray of missiles converged on her wing mate. A one-two-three pattern of blasts lit the Hellhound to port in anti-matter white that Kelly winced away from to save her eyes. A glance back showed her the star fighter still impossibly there for a moment, wreathed in sparks and slag and beginning a tumble. An energy bolt took it in the nose an instant later and the mortally wounded ship crumpled into a silent fireball.
Kelly wrenched the control stick to starboard and put her Hellhound into a shuddering bank as Alliance Valkyries shot through her formation. “Go through them!” she barked into her communicator. “Go for the support ships!”
Her three squadrons of Hellhounds punched through the Alliance patrol screen only to meet a storm of anti-starfighter fire. Energy bolts carved the vacuum around her into a thousand slivers of flame. Alarms squalled from her control console to warn of hostile targeting and incoming missiles. Another Hellhound icon flashed and was gone from her display.
“Welcome to Loudon!” she cackled without humor.
The sheer scope of the clash around them threatened to overwhelm the senses. Icons as numerous as stars spun around her, lacerated with energy streaks and roiling balls of plasma. Their ripping light gleamed off the hulls of the rival fleets like sunlight off the fins of shark packs, backgrounded by the blue-green orb of Loudon and the granite sprinkling of the asteroid belt. She’d been at New Jefferson, at Junction. Those had been scrimmages compared to this cyclone of death.
“Chief of Staff Harrison,” the Hellhound AI said, its pedantic, lecturing tone contrasting the anarchy, “we have a target.”
A globular materialized to Kelly’s upper right, showed a war book schematic. Kelly nodded at the AI’s selection. The lumbering craft looked like a pair of flattened, stretched hexagons laid parallel to one another and linked with an intricate webbing of superstructure and gantries: a mobile fleet repair dock. Nearly seven kilometers long, Geiger had likely brought it along anticipating the possibility of a lengthy siege and the need to repair capital ships on the fly. Also, the bastard likely saw a lengthy occupation after that. Either way, the dock would be an expensive loss.
“That’s the one,” Kelly told the AI. She keyed the tactical network. “Harrison Wing,” she touched the icon on her hologram—would, in turn, transmit it to her teams, “that’s our target!”
“We’ve still got ghosts!” one of her squad leaders squawked.
Kelly looked to the tactical, saw the hostile blips swarming behind them. The Valkyries they’d raced by on the way in had pulled tearing turns to come about on their tail. And despite all the upgrades Cory and the Jester engineers had made to the Hellhounds, it was obvious as the distance closed between them that the Valkyries still had the advantage of raw speed.
Leadership is a series of compromises and sacrifices. Kelly gritted her teeth as she recalled her father’s words. At least the Admiral isn’t here, this time, on the other side of the battle lines. But the words bit with their truth.
“Third Squad, beak off,” Kelly ordered. “Scramble them up! First and Second Squads, stay on me!”
She heard the acknowledgements, tried not to notice the hint of accusation in Third Leader’s voice. She’d gotten the shit job, tangling with pursuers who both outmatched and outnumbered them. Sacrifices, Kelly thought with a sick turn of the stomach as Jester and Valkyrie icons rushed at one another, mixed, and flashed.
The ripping glare of anti-starfighter blasts came as nearly a relief.
“Picket vessels,” the AI announced, highlighting a pair of icons on the tactical. “They are falling back to screen the mobile dock.”
Kelly grunted as she juked the Hellhound to dodge an energy bolt. They were corvettes, retrofitted with extra plasma blasters for close-in work. But blossoms of missile tracks erupting from each showed they’d still saved space for other things. Proximity and tracking alarms warbled, reached an insane atonality.
“Second Squad, divide and distract those busybodies! First Squad, let’s take care of business.”
“We have no less than fourteen hostile targeting locks,” the AI lectured as the alarm chorus intensified to even greater heights of nerve-rending.
“Do something about it!” Kelly snapped.
On the systems hologram, the chin-mounted plasma blaster blinked as the AI took control. Kelly felt a shudder through the hull as the weapon ripped the vacuum, firefly patterns of cyan questing into the oncoming torrent, smacking missiles into strobes of oblivion.
Keying the number four scatter pack, Kelly added a bit of insurance to the mix, felt a thunk as the cluster loosed from its hard pack and eight engines lit, sent a fusillade writhing into the Alliance projectiles. The space before her snowed over in antimatter flashes. More missiles coursed into the hell storm as her wing mates fired spoiling volleys, churned the stars into a momentary slice of Judgment Day.
Impact slammed through the Hellhound. Kelly’s helmet saved her skull but not the wrenching of her neck as something jolted the fighter’s nose upwards. The controls went sluggish in her grip a moment and sparks limned the corners of her vision. Yellow damage lights glimmered from the systems display. A desperate glance showed her shield damage, but no lasting harm to the hull.
And then she was through the fracas with the dock spreading before her.
Shit! We’re right on it!
A one-two body blow struck the Hellhound, flung it sideways before she could right it. The corvette that’d raked her fell away to aft, tearing the space around it with fire as Hellhounds from Second Squad engulfed it.
Dense, azure bolts licked the vacuum and Kelly put her fighter through another roll to evade. The mobile dock had no weapons to speak of, but the tug towing it carried basic heavy armaments, meant for ship-to-ship work, but enough overkill to scorch a fighter in one hit if they connected. Sensors showed debris clouds and wisps of escaping atmosphere at the joints between the tug and dock.
Not damage...she’s trying to pull clear to fight!
Kelly put the Hellhound’s nose down, dove into the space directly aft of the dock and into the blind spot where the tug’s weaponry couldn’t find her. Targeting halos slid over its onrushing silhouette, went crimson. Kelly squeezed the trigger till her finger numbed, pumping a torrent of plasma fire into the dock’s deflectors, adding the stab-stab of her particle cannon. The dock shields fluttered and died, its rudimentary generator coils blowing out in gouts of spark along its paired hulls.
“All power to engines and shields!” Kelly gripped the stick in both hands, aimed it for the space between the dock’s halves. “Key up the number two and three scatter packs to fire, aft release, delayed launch!”
Acceleration slammed Kelly back into the flight couch as energy surged to the grav drives. A cliff face of hull plate and gantry superstructure raced towards her. She tasted sweat and bitten tongue as the shadow of the dock swept over her, followed by the under belly of the tug, beginning to tilt away.
“Release and launch!”
She felt the t-thunk of the scatter packs dumping out behind her before goosing the rest of the Hellhound’s power to engines. The starfighter groaned around her. Inertial compensators couldn’t keep up and black crept at the edges of her vision as g-forces ground down. A white flash to port warned of the tug’s crazed fire. She had an instant to wonder if she’d miscalculated before throwing power back to the stern deflectors. But no further blasts chased her and she was coasting free.
Cataclysm washed across her aft view screens.
The scatter packs she’d dropped lit their engines as momentum carried them in slowly-spreading clusters under the dock. Death sprayed out in every direction, the short-range rockets arching up into the midst of the gantry superstructure, into the docking station halves, slamming with such kinetic force that their antimatter warheads were almost redundant.
Those that didn’t find purchase in the docks twined out to catch the tug as lumbered free of its doomed consort. Its shields washed through the visual spectrum to white-hot in a fraction of a second as antimatter blasts punished it. They died with a last polychromatic flutter of dying projectors and one’s secondary explosion chewed through a gravity drive nacelle, sent it into a slow motion tumble.
Twin flashes from the fireball consuming the dock made the tug’s death spasms an afterthought. Thermonuclear hell spewed out from breaching fusion cores to merge into a single writhing ball of annihilation. Without protection, the tug blackened in the glare and dissolved, embers blown free of a firestorm.
“Whoa!” Kelly blew out a breath as the pressure on her lungs eased. “That got ‘im!”
Similar scenes played out wherever she looked, Hellhounds rampaging into the midst of the supply ships, streaks of cyan and white, and explosions painting the hard cold of space in momentary orange-red blooms. The first round of the fight had gone to the Jesters, a brutal body shot to the kidneys of the invasion force. In ten minutes they’d possibly wrecked any designs Geiger had for an immediate landing and occupation of Loudon.
A globular blinked into being to Kelly’s left, contained a mahogany face creasing from ear to ear with a ferocious smile. The Jester’s leader rarely wore a helmet—said she was too pretty to die by concussion or inertial compensator failure—and let the red-dyed shock of hair that’d been her namesake for years ripple free and fiery in the cockpit.
“I don’t suppose you planned on leaving anything for the rest of us?”
Kelly grinned in response. But a glance at the roster hologram kept it subdued. The stomp across Geiger’s rear area hadn’t come cheap. Her wing had lost six Hellhounds, alone, with several more damaged. Casualties had landed most heavily amongst the recruits. She’d protested taking them all, the fully-rebuilt organization risked in this one fight.
But Red had prevailed; if they weren’t saving the Jesters for a fight like this, she’d said, what were they preserving it for?
A terrible flash snapped across the asteroid belt. By the time Kelly found its source on the tactical, one of the asteroids was expanding in a cloud of gas and debris across a space the size of a small continent. A glimmer went through the display as power signatures shifted throughout the defenders’ tractor beam barrier, re-directed, reinforcing. Its vibrancy returned, but fluctuations hinted at weakness.
“Red...”
“I saw it,” the Jesters’ leader replied. “Planet-buster...they’re using it to pick apart the web. And here comes the counter-attack.”
Icons rushed out of the web and into the teeth of Geiger’s fleet, a frantic charge of fighters and faster ships. A tracery of energy fire and missile trails drew insane patterns between racing ships, enveloped them. Fire filled the space between. Squadrons of vessels meant nothing in that conflagration, crews blasted to ash before they had time to see to their systems, pilots swept away without ever seeing the foe that claimed them.
“That’s the end of the world there,” Kelly whispered—she thought to herself, but Red was chuckling.
“That’s where we’re going, Commander.”
“You’re serious?”
“Greer is signaling. They need all the help they can get.”
Kelly scanned the tactical. They’d torn a chunk from the support wing and pulverized its defensive screen, but the job wasn’t done. Survivors were scattering by acceleration, running as fast as they could while the Jesters, disorganized by success, struggling to reform. A few Jester flights were still on the hunt, chasing far afield.
Tim. Kelly hated admitting the relief she felt upon finding his icon intact. He was one of the far-flung pursuers, of course, always just on the edge of out of control. She could almost smile now at the way he infuriated her; could almost see his crooked grin in response.
Stop that. She couldn’t let him be any more than another pilot now.
“Jesters!” Red was saying across the tactical network. “New targets! Form on me!”
“I presume the target’s the planet-killer?” Kelly asked on a private channel.
“Smart lady.”
“That’s the nucleus of their fleet, Red.”
“Then I guess we’re going to need something heavy to break through.”
Kelly blew out a long, calming breath. The Jesters were built for cut and feint, for slashing raids and guerilla warfare. Every time they came out into the open like this they took it on the chin. And it seemed the call for the Jesters to stick their necks out got ever more common.
“I’ve got just the thing,” Kelly replied, forcing determination into her voice. She changed channels, keyed up another Jester who meant far more to her than just a name. “Jerry? You there? I’ve got a job for you.”
