Starforge unsec space bo.., p.150
Starforge (UNSEC Space Book 3), page 150
A timer than was almost at thirty seconds.
“Everyone hunker down if you can,” Anna instructed, hand to the side of her helmet as she laid down on her belly behind the concrete barrier. “The lower the better. If there are Sha’o drones nearby they may have shields you can use for additional cover.”
“Is that overkill?” one of the marines asked.
“No such thing,” she replied back. “But using a ship-to-ship weapon on a ground-based target might be close, so I’d rather be safe.” Twenty-five seconds.
Twenty. Fifteen. Ten.
The instant before the impact she heard the faint roar of something distant screaming through the atmosphere. She barely had time to acknowledge it before something flew past overhead, a fireball of smoke and flame descending out of the heavens like the hammer of a vengeful god.
There was a flash as it hit, followed by a crack that dwarfed everything she’d heard so far that day. The ground beneath her seemed to shove her away, a wave rolling through it that made her and every pebble around her bounce at least an inch into the air. The air itself seemed to grow heavy as the shockwave from the impact swept past, echoing and rebounding and rocking the world.
Then the initial blast was over, and Anna tilted her head to the side to see that the shield above them was glowing under dozens of impacts, the seashell drone that provided the barrier practically white-hot with heat. A moment later the shield flickered out, but it had done its job.
More small bits of concrete the size of pebbles began to rain down atop them, bouncing off of the rear of the battery, their armor, and the tops of the drones with clicks and pops. Anna rose, pushing herself up to get the first look at the gate to the innermost layer of the defenses.
The gate, at least what she could see of it through a massive cloud of dust and smoke, was just gone. Several larger pieces were scattered across the open ground in front of the door, while others were almost atop it, and it took her mind a second to figure out what had happened.
The strike came in low, hit the base of the gate, shattered it and triggered one set of explosions, but then continued on through to hit the concrete behind it for a secondary, blasting a lot of that debris toward us. Then the top of the gate caved in.
And we have our opening. “Forward!” she shouted, rising the rest of the way up and gesturing toward the gate. “Through the gate!” Then she jumped ahead, rushing for the opening. “Everyone move!”
Another distant boom sounded off to her right. A moment later Green team reported in, calling out the death of another orbital cannon. A second boom followed from her left, the southern team reporting the same thing.
There was a loud crack as something on the other side of the ruined gate fired a gauss shot through the dust, narrowly missing one of the annihilator drones. A second crack sounded in its wake, and the second shot struck home. An annihilator drone’s body exploded into pieces, the force of the impact collapsing its hard-light shields in an instant. Anna winced as bits and pieces bounced off of her armor. The drone itself—or rather what was left of it—slammed into the earth, skidding to a stop as its tendrils went limp.
“More tanks!” Anna called as she neared the now thoroughly ruined defensive emplacements at the base of the gate. “Darts: move through and hit them from the sides!”
The machines acted on her command, flitting through the now ruined gate even as scattered small arms fire began to pour out almost at random. Anna dropped into a slide, coming up behind the remains of a defensive turret as bullets began to slap against the far side. The fire slacked a moment later as the darts began to fight back, strafing around forces on the ground Anna couldn’t yet see.
The drones however, could, and highlights appeared on her hud, marking each target they were firing down on.
Two Wolves, a couple of Procyons, and a whole lot of armatures. Probably damaged or scattered from the blast, but still active enough to put up a fight judging from the ammunition they were spending. The dust continued to still, the world on the other side of the gate becoming a haze through which the largest shapes—the two Wolves—were visible.
Just as they both fired again. Anna’s other escorting annihilator blew apart, the shots powerful enough to continue onward as the remains dropped limply to the earth.
“More drones incoming!” Sweets shouted. “Plus a tank!”
“Marines, we’re pushing forward. Fire anti-armor missiles on the Wolves as soon as their hard-light goes down.” She ducked low, behind the rubble of the door, and began to crawl forward, eye flicking to the ammo counter on her hud. Twenty-seven shots left. In three-round bursts.
More hard-light pods were raining down around them now, annihilators and packs of darts landing anywhere there wasn’t a hard-light barrier dividing the sky. “Drones,” Anna said, as she wormed her way to the base of the gate rubble, sliding up behind a cracked slab of concrete larger than she was. “Prioritize any hard-light emitter in the innermost line of defenses past the final ring. Crack the sky so we can get drops right down on the keep.”
One of the Wolves fired again, its shot streaking past above her to strike some other target nearing the gate. From the sound of the impact it was another annihilator. A fact she confirmed as she put her back against the rubble. Four—once five—more annihilators were rushing toward the gate at full speed, protected by more of the shield-generating drones. As she watched another shot from the Wolves slammed into one of the barriers generated by the smaller drones. It failed instantly, the smaller drone glowing with such heat it appeared to be melting, while the remainder of the shot grazed off of the annihilator with a boom that rattled the earth but didn’t take the machine down.
Meanwhile the now-glowing drone shot forward like a missile—exactly like a missile, Anna realized a second later as it detonated just past the rubble, the sound of the blast rolling over her. It uses the heat from the shields to … How?
It was a question better left for another time. One of the Wolves fired again, taking down another annihilator with a sharp explosion, and this time several traditional tank munitions opened up as well, peppering the other drones and making their barriers flash.
Now! Anna spun, rising over the rubble and sighting her rifle in on the closest Wolf. The vehicle was just in range, the hard-light barrier over its body active. A perfect target.
She fired three times, spitting nine shots at it before ducking back down, return fire striking the rubble around her. A second later she heard one of the marines call out that the barrier had dropped, and an anti-tank missile streaked past overhead. There was a sharp boom as it hit, followed by a second and then a third missile.
“Tank one down!” one of them reported. Anna nodded, giving them a quick confirmation that she’d heard as she slipped to another bit of the rubble. Darts were still flying past overhead, dropping down through the sky in massive numbers. But we don’t have an endless supply of them, she thought as she pressed herself up against another bit of rubble. So we need to move while we can—
She rolled her rifle over the rubble once more, giving her a brief glance of the burning, hulled Wolf they’d already killed, her eyes fixing on the one that was still alive. She fired once, twice—
And ducked back as a bullet slammed into the side of her head, her hard-light shields deflecting the strike at the last instant. She ducked beneath the rubble, looking back in the direction of the rest of her forces. The Wolf she’d fired at opened up, the closest annihilator rocking to the side, body sparking as the glancing hit took down its shield. So close the sound of the shot drowned out a message from the marines, and she slapped a hand to the side of her head. “Come again?”
“Shield is still up!” the marine called. “Again, Wolf shield is still—”
A hard-light missile rose up from where she’d left Jake and Sweets, rushing past her and detonating a moment later.
“No good,” the marine said. “It’s still—”
Two of the annihilators glowed, lobbing hard-light projectiles of their own even as conventional tank rounds bit into their armored skin. Both glowing orbs flew past Anna, cracks sounding a moment later, and then the marines fired, three missiles lashing out in rapid succession. Twin explosions sounded as two of them struck home, but the third never came.
“Anti-missile got the last,” one of them reported. “Tank’s wounded.”
“Good.” Anna rolled around her cover once more, squeezing the trigger and emptying the last of the power cell into the tank’s mangled front end. A second later there was an explosion, the turret lifting into the air from the force of the blast.
“All drones push forward!” Anna shouted as she ducked back into cover, ejecting the spent cell. “Marines, we push behind them!”
The annihilators obeyed, Anna ducking as one close to her took a tank shell across its face. They picked their way over the rubble with ease, firing as they went.
We’ll need more. “Green and Red teams,” Anna said. “When you near a gate, call for an orbital strike. Take down emitters and give the Overseer more space to land forces.”
Jake and Sweets were already picking their way over the rubble toward her, and she slapped a new energy cell home, nodding for them to follow her. Then she rose above the concrete, her rifle up and firing.
The defenders on the far side of the gate were falling back now—and it wasn’t hard to see why. The ground on the other side of the final ring had been tiered, shaped and sculpted into rising levels of heavy defensive emplacements and bunkered positions. And above it all …
A squat, flat, multi-leveled structure that was the “data center.”
Eidre’s redoubt.
“Forward!” Anna shouted again, picking her way down the rubble on the far side of the gate and firing at a fleeing Procyon. It fired back with its pintle gun, her shields activating just in case as several shots came close. Her own fire won out, eating through the rear armor and killing the tank’s power supply. Two annihilators and a pack of darts descended on it a moment later, the former literally tearing the tank apart.
The marines surged through the now open gate, scattering in multiple directions and making it harder for the defenders to pick them off. Not that there was a need to, not with so many Sha’o drones pouring through the opening. Some of the defenses that were aimed skyward rotated downward, firing at their lowest elevation and knocking whole clusters of darts from the sky with vastly overpowered missile barrages. However, the elevated position of much of them—being placed atop the rising tiers rather than below—was working against the defenses, limiting their firing angle even as it gave the other defenders an elevated position.
Bullets shot past—meant for her, someone around her, or a drone out in front she couldn’t say. The temporary cohesion brought about by the tight confines of the gate was falling apart as the two sides slammed together, soldiers and forces scattering in all directions, taking cover against defensive fire or pushing ahead when it lessened.
Off to her left one of the barrier emitters cutting off the sky went down, darts covering marines as they set up and detonated a charge originally meant for an orbital gun. Another piece of the sky above them flickered, the semi-transparent haze of the hard-light shield weakening.
A static defense worked a spray of what looked like explosive rounds in her direction, and she dove for cover behind a half-melted Procyon tank, coming so close to the still-glowing wreck that her armor’s heat alert spiked. Jake and Sweets slid across the gravel behind her, joining her as explosive rounds tore into the tank’s other side.
“What’s the plan?” Jake asked, glancing at her.
“Like I said.” The spray of explosive rounds moved on, and she stood, popping off a quick burst of fire at the distant gun that didn’t quite reach it … But only because a cluster of Lohit’s drones shot up from the ground, intersecting the shots and sacrificing themselves in the process. “We kick the front door in. We get to Eidre, and we stop all of this.”
She rose without waiting for a reply, rushing forward once more, the first upward tier only a few hundred feet away. Broad, massive ramps made for a clear path up … but also one that was heavily contested.
She fired at any available target, the thrum of her rifle matched by the sharp staccato cracks of Jake’s rifle and the energetic hum and hiss of Sweets’ hard-light missiles—which he seemed to be lobbing everywhere. Bullets hummed back at them in return—some even coming close—but much of the defenses seemed more concerned with the rampaging annihilator drones now nearing the ramp or the hundreds of darts filling the air.
The first wave of annihilators reached the bottom of the ramp, firing as they moved up it and soaking small arms fire from dozens of sources. Even when their shields went down they continued on, shots heating their armor or sparking against it.
Twin Wolf tanks appeared at the top of the ramp, each rolling into view with a metallic squeal of treads. Anna ducked as both opened fire, the two lead annihilators detonating as the high-powered gauss shots ripped them apart. A metal fragment as long as her arm slammed into a barrier just inches from her face, and she looked up to see another protective seashell drone following the three of them, its small fins glowing as it shed the excess heat of the impact.
“Thanks,” Jake said as the fragments of the destroyed annihilator fell to the ground. Anna didn’t add her own voice, her focus already back on the twin tanks as their secondary armaments opened fire on the drones, each swiveling to bring its hard-light shields to bear as the annihilators returned fire.
Do we have orbital support? Anna thought, glancing up at the sky. No. The redoubt’s barriers were still up. There goes calling in a few railgun shots. And the tanks could just move anyway … She angled her course to the left, moving for the wall at the base of the first tier. Maybe we could sneak around?
Gunfire lashed out at their position, lasers and bullets sweeping over their protective shield. Anna fired back, wincing as her own response opened the shield for a brief moment, bullets licking the ground around her feet and in a few cases bouncing off of her armored boots. Her shots detonated against the top of the wall but did little to deter the defenders aside from making most of them duck.
The pack of darts that swept over them a moment later probably did more damage, even as return fire cut them down.
One of the Wolves fired again, the thunderclap created by its weapon almost as jarring as the devastation it wrought. An annihilator that was almost on top of it blew apart, the impact of the high-Mach projectile too much to deflect.
“Anna!” Sweets shouted, pointing at something behind them. “Sha’o tank fire incoming!”
An actual tank? She turned just in time to see something bounce over the rubble of the gate on six massive tires, its body wide and long and flat and aglow with energy. That’s a tank?
But there was no denying the smooth lines of the turret atop the multi-wheeled machine, nor the way parts of it began to glow as it swiveled in the direction of the Wolf tanks.
A strobing, pulsating glow emanated from the vehicle’s barrel, a rolling cascade of thunder sounding through the air. The Wolf’s hard-light barrier glowed for a brief instant under the impact of what looked like several explosions—though they came so close together it was hard to tell where one ended and another began—and then failed, the explosion not so much striking the tank as enveloping it.
Then the shots were through it, the Wolf detonating in several places as its insides expanded into a fiery cloud, blasting outward with a colossal bang that rolled and echoed over the battlefield. The other Wolf reacted in an instant, shifting its focus and firing at the newcomer with its main gun. There was a flash of light as the shot slammed into the Sha’o tank’s prow, a hard-light barrier for an instant glowing like the sun … but that was it, the Sha’o tank rolling forward without a scratch on it.
Then it fired back, again a rolling cascade of shots that seemed physical from the sound and sensation that echoed and rolled across her armor, but were so quick and strange she had no idea if they were or not. Their effect, however, was just as pronounced on the second tank as it had been the first. A rolling cloud of explosive impacts rippled across its hard-light shield, and then when that failed, across and through the front of the tank, blasting out the back. The Wolf jerked to a halt, the fire from its secondary guns ceasing as the turret seized. Multiple explosions blossomed along its side, small puffs of flame and smoke bleeding into the air.
“Whoa,” Jake said, his voice awed. “What kind of gun was that?”
“No idea,” Anna said as she rose to her feet. The remaining annihilators, no longer pressed by the tanks, marched over the defensive ramparts, laying into the armatures and turrets on the other side. “But I’m glad it’s ours!” She rushed after the annihilators, Jake and Sweets again taking up flanking positions on either side.
The battlefield was chaos now. Marines were calling out commands and targets to one another as the combined force swept over the defenses. Another emitter failed, taking a chunk of the barrier over the complex with it. Anna slowed, sweeping her gaze over the defenses that lay beneath the now-open sky and marking an orbital defense cannon for an orbital strike. A marker appeared on her hud even before she’d turned her gaze back to the ramp, a timer appearing seconds later. To her right Sweets fired his cannon, the immolator rounds burning through the back of an armature shooting at an annihilator. They were moving up the ramp now, flanked on both sides by Sha’o drones tearing into Eidre’s defenders.
Are there any humans among those defenders at all? Anna wondered as she watched an annihilator rip the head from an armature, flinging it across the battlefield. Or are they all just machines?
She slowed near the top of the ramp, moving herself up against one side so that she could use the remainder of the wall as cover for a better view of what lay atop the first tier. Which was … Not much, she concluded. Flat concrete, maybe a hundred feet from the lip to the base of the next tier upwards, broken only by mounts built for and currently sporting defensive gun emplacements, or the occasional blocky concrete structures that could really only be defensive bunkers of some kind. Fire was pouring out of one of them, licking at the sides of an annihilator, and she fired a single burst of plasma through the small slit at their base, silencing whoever was inside it.
