Collateral effects drop.., p.14
Collateral Effects (Drop Trooper Book 14), page 14
“You’re done, Alvarez,” Hallonen told me, slapping me on the arm.
“Thanks, Doc.”
I slipped my fatigues back on and took a step toward the hatchway before I turned back to Bob to give him the answer he deserved.
“I guess I have to.”
16
Space combat is strange.
My idea of war was formed going toe to toe with Tahni battlesuits, shooting at enemies who were close enough to see with the naked eye because that was the range of our best weapon. Missiles that traveled too far could be spoofed, and a suit could only carry so many of them. The missile load lasted maybe two engagements, three at the most, but battles could drag on for hours, sometimes with no resupply. That meant we did most of our damage with the plasma guns, the one weapon that didn’t need reloading. And since most of our fights were in cities, we stayed below the rooflines to avoid being tracked by their missiles.
We found each other by accident, killed each other at arm’s length.
Space combat had no cover, no concealment, not unless you hid behind a moon or a planet, but even then the enemy could find you pretty quick. No, space war was a chess board with pieces millions of kilometers apart. You couldn’t strike until you were close, but getting close required foresight, expert moves conducted with perfect timing.
Unfortunately for the analogy I’d built up while sitting on the bridge, waiting for the show to kick off, if this was a chess board, we only had two pieces. Four, if you counted the two Intercepts. Brandano and Villanueva were hanging at stationkeeping off our right shoulder, though I wasn’t sure what good they thought they were going to do. Intercept pilots always whined about being cut loose, and it wouldn’t hurt anything keeping them out there since they could micro-Transition just as well as we could. And hopefully would.
“They’re still just sitting there,” Wojtera said, shaking his head. “You’d think they’d at least give us an ultimatum or something.”
“There’s no need,” Lilandreth said, her voice sounding as if she was seated just behind me instead of a few thousand kilometers away. “They’ve sent another part of their fleet around toward the incoming gate to cut us off. In their eyes, we have no choice but to surrender or fight them.”
“Are you ready?” I asked her, not asking how she knew about the movements of the Nova ships when our sensors hadn’t picked them up.
“I am.” She turned in the image on the screen. “Dr. Spinner, are you certain you wish to remain here?”
The camera view changed to the Grey scientist. He was smiling. There was something off about the smile, something vacant behind his dark eyes. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and when he spoke, he sounded normal.
“Quite certain. I’ve dreamed of being in a spaceship going at relativistic velocities, and I wouldn’t give up the opportunity for anything.”
“All right then.” I tightened my safety harness. I wished Vicky were up on the bridge, but she’d told me the Marines needed her back in the troop bay, and it would have been a long trip up to the bridge again anyway. Still, I felt very alone up here without her. “Captain Nance, are we ready to micro-Transition?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be.” The older man shook his head. “I hope, if I live through this and get home, that I can get a job on a passenger liner or a freight ship and never have to micro-Transition again.”
I didn’t respond to his griping aloud, but to myself I agreed wholeheartedly.
“Okay, Lilandreth. Go.”
Just as Dr. Spinner had never been on a ship going at a good fraction of the speed of light, I’d never seen one going at those speeds before, and I stared at the screen carefully. The pale-green glow of the drive field shifted tone and glowed brighter as the cylindrical shape leapt forward like it had been shot out of a mass driver. The acceleration would have turned a human into a squishy, gelatinous blob on the deck if it had been from a reaction drive, but the Predecessor ship used a gravity field projected ahead of the ship to pull it as fast as the… well, honestly, I didn’t know the limitations of its acceleration other than I’d been told it still couldn’t go faster than light.
The cameras tried to follow it, but the ship was a green streak across the screen, leaving off one side before the focus could shift. I cursed under my breath, more from awe than annoyance, and shifted my gaze to the sensor screen instead. The computer tried to simulate the Predecessor ship the same way it did ours and the enemy’s, but there was a difference. I couldn’t enumerate it, but it wasn’t as realistic, didn’t capture the essence of the vessel. Still, it was the best we could do and I couldn’t look away. It was unreal, unlike anything I’d seen before… well, except for the other Predecessor ships I’d seen at Decision, and I’d mostly been on the ground for that fight.
“Judas Priest on a pogo stick,” Nance said softly. “What I wouldn’t give to have a drive like that on my ship.”
“What I wouldn’t give if her weapons worked,” I shot back. “Then this wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Eh,” he scoffed. “She wasn’t invincible even when the weapons did work. If she were, we wouldn’t have been able to damage her in the first place.”
That was fair. It didn’t change that I would have felt better if her weapons worked. The green glow was already almost to the Nova blockade, close enough that…
“Micro-Transition,” I ordered, then tightened my stomach muscles and gritted my teeth.
“Helm,” Nance said with a nod. “Execute.”
The first Transition wasn’t bad. Not any worse than usual, though I would never get used to that feeling. But to jump just partway down a Transition Line and come back out before the point of no return when there was no gravitational mass to anchor the exit meant we had to Transition back out within a few seconds. Not nearly enough time for the human body—or brain—to shake off the effects of the first jump.
The second one was the same psychological impact as a two-meter-tall gang enforcer kicking me square in the balls. And yes, that had happened. Once. I’d crawled away and, later on, arranged for the TAPs to catch the guy on the train with a backpack full of Kick he hadn’t been aware he was carrying. I had no such recourse to get revenge against the laws of hyperdimensional physics, so I just had to sit there and take it.
“Sitrep,” I croaked, trying to get my eyes to focus again as I peered at the Tactical display.
“We’re twenty thousand klicks on the far side of the blockade cluster,” Wojtera said, tone crisp and businesslike as if he wouldn’t know what I was talking about if I asked him if he liked being kicked in the nuts. “Both Intercepts are with us.”
He paused, and I was finally able to get a good look at the Tactical board. There were dozens of Nova cruisers between us and the Predecessor ship, spherical just like their landers but dozens of times bigger, maneuvering to get a better shot at the speeding, green bullet.
“The Nova have opened fire on the Predecessor ship,” Wojtera added, as if we all couldn’t see the red flares of plasma on the screen. “They’re laying down bracketing fire… getting pretty close.”
I winced as some of the rounds drifted directly into the path of the ship, exploding like a mine laid out ahead of Lilandreth… and doing nothing. I started to say something, but my mouth hung open. I didn’t know a lot about physics, but I did know that velocities added together and the plasma blasts hitting a ship traveling at a decent fraction of lightspeed would hit even harder, should have gone right through her shields. They didn’t. Instead, she simply plowed through the center of their formation as if they weren’t there, shrugging off one shot after another.
She blew by us, moving so fast the ship was a broad, green laser shining through the ever-night, leaving the Nova cruisers gawking in her wake. Shooting right by us and through the jumpgate. Something on the other side of the wormhole held it open, which meant the Nova had forces on that side as well… which was why we didn’t immediately follow.
Not that we didn’t want to.
“Oh, I think they’ve noticed us,” Nance mused, rubbing at his chin casually, as if the dozens of Nova ships spinning on their axes toward us in an orchestrated motion like a zero-G ballet didn’t bother him at all. “How long we got, Woj?”
Which was my clue that he was nervous. Nance had gotten a little sloppier about trimming his beard, maybe less strict with his bridge crew, but he always—always—called Yanayev Helm and Wojtera Tactical. He might call the man Woj in the mess, but not on the bridge.
If Wojtera was surprised, he didn’t show it.
“They’re boosting our way. About… eight gravities. That’s gotta hurt, but I guess those octopus things are pretty stout. The nearest of them’ll be in range in just under ten minutes.”
“We’re thirty-five minutes out from the gate at one gravity,” Yanayev added, and Nance grunted.
Ideally we would have Transitioned closer, but there was a minimum safe distance for a jumpgate, just like there was with a planet. Not as far, but still too far, and the distance chafed at me, but I kept my mouth shut and let Nance do his job.
“Set course for the gate,” he said. “Give the alarm for emergency boost and take us to four gravities.” Which would take us through in nine minutes. Nance nodded to Chase. “Comms, pass the order on to the Intercepts.”
“We haven’t heard the all-clear from Lilandreth yet,” I reminded him, because this was part of my job. “If we build up that much momentum, we won’t have time to decelerate if she tells us it’s not safe.”
“We’re coming in near the north polar edge of the gate,” he told me. “Worse comes to worst, we can adjust course and scoot around the event horizon of the wormhole.” Nance made a face. “We’ll get some nasty static charges from the edge effects, but it’s still doable.”
The emergency boost klaxon sounded, annoying and obnoxious both for the sheer clamor of it as well as for what it signified.
“Four gravities acceleration,” Yanayev warned, and three hundred kilos plus smashed me into my acceleration couch like a baseball bat.
I didn’t think my nose was bleeding, but it could have been. Four gravities was a bad spot for me. Two or three Gs wasn’t bad, just made things uncomfortable, but I could power through it. If we went all the way to seven or eight, full emergency boost, I usually blacked out and didn’t have to endure all of the pain. But four gravities kept me conscious with a fist wrapped in my lapel, slapped me in the face and told me “no, fuck you, you’re going to have to sit here and suffer.”
I couldn’t even let my mind go hazy, my vision go out of focus to try to make the time pass faster, because I had to pay attention to Comms and Tactical. I couldn’t have sworn to how much time had gone by, though I wouldn’t have been shocked whether it was five minutes or five hours, the homogenous, dull pain that spread out over my whole body taking up my total attention.
“We’re getting a signal,” Lt. Chase ground out through clenched teeth, finally distracting me from the discomfort. “From the jumpgate.”
“On screen,” I told him. It wasn’t a stern, commanding order the way I’d intended it, more of a wheeze.
Lilandreth’s face towered over us, somehow seeming even larger than the actual size of the projection because of the boost smashing me into my seat. The perspective made her expression seem manic, almost diabolical.
“You may pass through without concern,” she declared archly. “This side of the gate is safe.”
I would have grimaced in disbelief if I hadn’t already been grimacing in utter discomfort. How the hell could the other side be safe when the Nova knew we were coming? Had they sent all their ships through to this system? That seemed short-sighted, though none of the command decisions the enemy had made so far had impressed me much.
“We’re coming through,” I told her, squeezing the words out from my diaphragm. “But we have the entire fucking fleet about a minute behind us, so don’t wait, just get moving to the exit gate. Hold it open for us if there’s no existing mechanism.”
I had to suck in a desperate breath after expending that much oxygen. Lilandreth looked disgustingly comfortable, and like Nance, I envied her the gravity drive.
“Do not slow your acceleration when you come through,” she instructed. “I’ll take care of them.”
“What?” I blurted, but the screen had gone dark. “Chase, get her back.”
“She’s not responding to our hails,” he told me after a moment.
“Should we go through?” Nance asked me. Sure, defer to my authority when you’re afraid of being wrong.
“We don’t have any choice. Do as she said, don’t reduce acceleration until I give you the word.”
The wormhole filled the main screens, eclipsing the empty space around it, swallowing the stars in blackness. It was salvation, at least temporarily, but for some reason the hazy unreality of it terrified me. On the other side was the unknown… and now, that included Lilandreth.
Passing through the gate wasn’t unpleasant, not after the micro-Transition, just an unexpected step down off a stoop to the ground by comparison. And on the other side was carnage.
“Jesus Christ,” Nance whispered, barely audible over the roaring in my ears. And the screaming inside my head.
The Nova hadn’t been reckless or stupid after all. They hadn’t sent all their ships across to the other system. They’d kept at least half of them on this side. Every single one of them burned fiercely like leaves dumped into a bonfire, shattered into drifting bits that littered the space in front of the gate. And sitting there, holding open the wormhole for us like it was a mundane task, was Lilandreth’s ship.
No other vessels approached her, and if there was anything left alive in this system, it surely wasn’t in space. A faint blue sparkled off to the left side of the screen, a planet millions of kilometers away, and according to the Tactical display no ships orbited the world, none lifted off its surface.
“What the hell happened?” Wojtera demanded, nonplussed. “She… she doesn’t have any weapons.” He looked over at me, despite the strain of the boost. “Does she?”
“You may begin deceleration.”
The voice wasn’t on the speakers, wasn’t in my earbud. It was everywhere, as if it had come from the air on the bridge.
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Chase demanded, looking around for the source of the voice. “We didn’t get any transmission!”
“It’s Lilandreth,” I said. I knew what was happening. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I knew. “Turn us around. Begin deceleration at one gravity. Pass it on to the Intercepts.”
I pushed aside the things I didn’t want to consider and concentrated on what I could control. The Intercepts didn’t have the Resscharr-tech photon drives and would burn through their on-board fuel pretty damned quick if we didn’t allow them to cut thrust.
“Helm, execute,” Nance said, driven back to the curt professionalism I was used to from him by what was undoubtedly sheer confusion.
The pressure lifted, and I sighed with relief too instinctive to be quashed by the situation. Free fall twisted my guts… or maybe that was just the fearsome knowledge that I hadn’t shared with the others. When the steering jets thudded against the hull to turn us, I was half convinced it was my heart beating out of my chest.
The Orion turned slowly, inexorably, almost reluctantly, as if the ship herself knew what we were about to witness and didn’t want that for us. Nothing could save us from that fate. The Nova flooded through the jumpgate, still burning at eight gravities, willing to accept any pain, any pressure to catch us, to catch her.
“She’s holding the gate open,” Yanayev breathed. “Why doesn’t she just close it?”
“She wants them here,” I told the Helm officer. “She wants them where she can deal with them.”
“Deal with them how?” Nance asked, glaring at me, as if he sensed I was holding something back.
“Watch.”
As the Nova came through the jumpgate, it was as if they ran headlong into a physical wall, solid enough to stop even a cruiser the size of an office building boosting at eight Gs. The spectral wall shredded the warships, each erupting in a ball of antimatter destruction, starbursts of energy reaching out to touch the tendrils from the ships exploding around them.
I should have been happy to see it. These Nova were the enemy who’d killed two of my Marines, who would have slaughtered every one of us to get what they wanted. They’d been an unbeatable swarm of massive warships… and now they were a fireworks show, soap bubbles popping as they reached the ceiling. And yet, all I could feel was dread, foreboding that wouldn’t be comforted.
The bridge was silent. Not even profanity broke the spell of what we were seeing. No words were spoken, even as the last of the enemy ships erupted and vanished into fiery death. Once they were gone, the Predecessor ship darted from her position beside the jumpgate, moving faster than she had before, as if it wasn’t gravity propelling her anymore but pure will.
Lilandreth’s face appeared in the main screen, though Chase had made no move to connect her.
“You have many questions,” she said. “I would answer them.” Her eyes somehow found me, staring straight through to the core of me. “Come to my ship and we will speak.”
She vanished from the screen and everyone on the bridge stared at me, waiting for an explanation. They weren’t going to get it right now. Not until I had something coherent to tell them.
“Get a lander prepped,” I told Nance. “I’ll be heading over to the other ship.”
“Who do you want to fly you?” Nance asked, but I was already shaking my head.
“No one. I’m going alone.”
17
