Judgment day, p.16
Judgment Day, page 16
part #2 of Holy War Series
“Changed to what, Ms. Rousseau?”
“They’re cutting straight across our trajectory, sir…and the enemy squadrons are following them. If they maintain course and speed, we’re going to be right in the middle of them in less than ten mikes.”
“That can’t be a coincidence,” he mused, squinting at the clusters of red and blue icons on the Tactical display. They were practically in spitting distance for space combat.
“I have a coded burst transmission from Joker One,” Lake announced. “Laser line-of-sight, not microwave.”
Travis raised an eyebrow. If Leer was transmitting coded-and-over-laser LOS, it was because she didn’t want the enemy to realize she was calling them.
“Play it.”
“Herculean, this is Reaper. We are Winchester on ammunition and running close to Bingo fuel. If you have a couple minutes and some ordnance to spare, I wondered if you wouldn’t mind scraping these assholes off our backs? If you’d be so kind, I would be ever appreciative and would definitely buy the ship’s captain a beer should the opportunity arise.”
Patrice Damiani laughed softly from the rear of the bridge. Looking at her, Travis couldn’t have guessed she’d just been through a high-gravity space battle. Not a hair was out of place, not a trace of a wrinkle in her designer clothes. For all he knew, she could have been a holographic projection, some cutting-edge AI sent by the Corporate Council to screw with him.
“I like this woman,” she said. “She’s as cool as the other side of the pillow, even when she’s basically begging for help.”
“She’s a fighter pilot,” he said, hoping that would explain things to her. “Tactical, I need a targeting solution for those fighters. What do we have left besides the main gun? I believe shooting a space-fighter with a railgun might be considered overkill.”
“We’re clean out of Sunstreaks,” Rousseau told him, which wasn’t surprising. The heatseekers were designed for anti-spacecraft work, but they also did wonderful things against enemy missiles, and there’d been plenty of those to use them on. “Even the point-defense turrets are nearly dry. All that leaves are the lasers. Painting a targeting solution now, but you’re going to have to make sure the Venoms have good separation.”
“We can’t send her a transmission,” de Jesus warned from the Flight Control station. “She’s suckering them in. If they think you’re heading in to engage, they’ll break off, or worse, try to mix in with the Venoms, and our birds can’t stop them.”
“Well, that’s a problem,” Rousseau told him. “If that laser so much as touches one of our birds, it’ll burn them to vapors.”
“Have you ever hunted ducks, Captain Miller?” Patrice asked. Miller frowned, twisting around in his seat to stare back at her. “When you hunt ducks flying in a formation,” she went on, “you aim for the last one in the V and work your way forward, and the ones at the front sometimes don’t even notice.”
Travis looked a question at Rousseau and she nodded, a smile slowly spreading across her normally businesslike face, as if being careful not to spook her with its presence.
“It just might work. Targeting the rear of the formation now.” She shook her head. “And hoping those Fleet Strike hotshots are smart enough to notice.”
“Laser!” Brad snapped. He was, Leer thought, getting close to the edge.
She didn’t blame him. It wasn’t just the G-load, wasn’t just the hours of physical strain and immobility, it was the inability to shoot back. It was getting to her, too, and they hadn’t even lost anyone yet.
They would, eventually.
“Fucking bean-counters,” she murmured, putting the Venom into a radiation-dispersal spin. She’d told them the fighters needed lasers, but did they listen? No, of course they didn’t. They were more interested in downtime, maintenance costs, how to squeeze the energy out of the reactor, and how much they’d have to allocate in the budget. Fleet got all the money and the toys and Fleet Strike made do. It was the story of her career, the story of the whole service.
But I’m going to get those damned lasers. Assuming I live through this.
And to top it all off, she was getting the beginnings of motion-sickness for the first time in her whole life, and someone was going to pay for it. She tried to focus on the tactical display, tried to make it her horizon, tried to wish the Herculean closer.
Which was why she happened to be looking at the sensor readout for the Tahni fighters when they began winking off the screen. She knew what was happening immediately and knew exactly what she needed to do.
“Max Gs!” she snapped. “All fighters, hit max Gs now!”
It sucked. It sucked worse than almost anything besides radiation burns, but those sucked worse, so she kept the throttle open, kept the fighter to almost nine gravities of acceleration, right at the edge of passing out.
And the others did it, too, without questioning, which always made her proud and also nervous as hell. What if she fucked up? What if, just one time, she did the wrong thing and got them all killed?
Not today.
The laser swept crosswise, expanding, too diffuse to do damage to a Tahni destroyer, too broad of beam to even take down an in-system patrol boat, but plenty energetic enough to burn through the skin of one of the Tahni fighters. They went up like paper lanterns in a fire, each kiss of photons killing an alien crew. Killing the one that was shooting at her, and she cut the spin but kept the boost for just another minute, until the rest of the Tahni fighters were gone.
“Cut thrust!” She gasped the words out. “Cut thrust and commence deceleration burn at three gravities immediately!”
This was the tricky part. The bad guys were gone, but the biggest antagonist for a space fighter pilot was always gravity. Thrust, free fall and, worst of all, planetary gravitational pull.
The Venom spun on vapor trails from the maneuvering thrusters, and the three gravities was almost gentle compared to its heavier sister who’d sat on Leer’s chest moments ago. She eyed the control panel, teeth gritted, and not at her own apparent weight. They had plenty of time to brake into a stable orbit around Brigantia…the question was, did they have the fuel? They’d used up too much in the dogfight, and if their tanks emptied one second early, what would have been a stable orbit would become a helpless plunge into the atmosphere in a ship as well built for flight in the soup as it would have been for underwater operations.
But the luck that had carried her through situations where skill and planning had done their best and still couldn’t guarantee survival pulled her out of the fire once more. The navigational systems signaled an end to the burn just as the critical fuel indicators began blinking.
She sighed and cut thrust, relaxing in the free fall.
“Thanks for the assist, Herculean,” she transmitted, in the clear this time, via microwave. “We’ll be hanging out here whenever you guys get around to picking us up.”
“We’ll be back around for you as quick as we can, Joker One.” It was, to her surprise, Travis Miller himself. “After all, you owe me a beer.”
She was glad Brad was behind her so he couldn’t see her blithering-idiot smile.
Chapter 14
“What the hell’s taking them so long?”
It wasn’t Franks complaining this time, which shocked the hell out of Ryan Hendrix. This time, it was Torrey.
Is that what being a platoon sergeant means? Do I just get to listen to E5’s bitch instead of lance corporals?
Still, he supposed he could understand why Torrey would be on edge. He’d lost a Marine, had another badly wounded enough that they were out of the fight. Ryan remembered very well what that was like, had the whole experience seared into his brain after Eden. But he couldn’t let squad leaders bitch. It was bad for morale.
“It’s a starship, Torrey, not an assault shuttle. It’s the size of a city block. These things take time to get into position. And we should be grateful it’s there, or we’d be charging into that fucking shelter, and most of us would get killed taking it.”
Then he broke off and ducked down further into the hole as the coilgun turret opened up again. The rounds couldn’t penetrate the meters of rock and dirt and pavement to get into their hasty fighting position, but it sure did throw up a cloud of debris and made a huge racket.
Not to mention it scares the shit out of everyone.
“Goddammit!” Torrey blurted, covering his helmet with his hands, sinking down the decorated tile that lined the interior of the pit.
The fountains that lined the front courtyard of the swimming facility were as much of an extravagance as the pool itself, and he wondered how a colony as new and as small as Brigantia had rated them.
Somebody’s brother, or sister, or cousin. No one with real pull would be out on this small of a settlement, but extended family, maybe. Just a word into the ear of someone in the Colonial Authority and suddenly, money allocated for buying another industrial fabricator gets shifted to a city pool facility.
If Ryan knew who had approved it, he would have tracked them down and kissed them on the mouth, because those damned fountains were the only thing keeping his Marines alive. They were dry, for which he’d given profuse thanks to God and perhaps the Tahni commander who’d ordered them turned off, but most importantly, they were wide and broad enough to hold the entire platoon between the three of them, as well as impressively deep. A meter and a half deep, which was plenty to let the Marines crouch down and avoid the intermittent fire from the coilgun nearly a kilometer away.
There were other structures between the municipal building and them, a few city storage shacks, a few sculptures, and a plaque commemorating the founding of the colony, but repair for those would have to be allocated on the budget before any more swimming pools. The coilgun rounds cut right through them, and by now, the view was nearly unobstructed.
They hadn’t tried to fire back. Not yet.
“Sir,” he bugged Dornan, knowing what the officer would say because he’d said it twice already and yet feeling the need to be the gadfly, “maybe we ought to think about using those missiles. They’re made for situations just like this.”
Dornan was in the next hole over, the one farthest to the right, so Ryan couldn’t see him, but he imagined that the man was standing casually upright, unbothered by the incoming rounds.
“They are indeed, Sgt. Hendrix, but that’s not the mission. We’re not supposed to be driving them out of the shelter, we’re supposed to be making them feel invulnerable, like they can hold out there forever. Blowing up their turret emplacements might spook them enough to make them run, and then we’d have to chase them. I’d rather not chase them, particularly with as many casualties as we’ve had already.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
It was a good point, a reasonable one, and yet Ryan didn’t feel incredibly reasonable. He felt a bit more like Torrey, ready for the damned Fleet cruiser to start earning its pay and taking out the damned building, collateral damage be damned.
“Any word on when the ship will be in position, sir?” he asked. He felt like a goober asking it, but he wanted to know as much as anyone else.
“She’s in position now, Sergeant.” If Dornan was impatient or annoyed with the question, he didn’t show it. “I’m painting the target now. Just waiting on confirmation.”
Shit. He didn’t think Dornan would be aiming the laser designator himself. That took balls, since it would make him a prime target for that coilgun.
“Hey, I got someone running up on our nine o’clock!”
That was Kusama, in the empty fountain to his left. Ryan risked standing upright long enough to get a look at what the acting squad leader was talking about. And there they were. Not a Tahni, because no Tahni had long, blonde hair bound in a ponytail, and the enemy had not, as far as he knew, brought any females with them. This was clearly a female, despite the pragmatic coveralls and work boots.
“Don’t shoot!” he reminded everyone, because it seemed like something a platoon sergeant should do. And she was armed, an assault rifle slung over her back and a sidearm at her waist, and the Marines were all trigger-happy after taking so many casualties.
The woman was coming from the northwest, from inside the city to Ryan’s left, having wormed her way around the municipal center somehow without getting shot. She seemed to have a sense for such things, because she threw herself into the fountain beside Kusama just as a burst of coilgun fire blasted a fountain of obliterated pavement into the air only a meter from where she’d been a second before.
She didn’t stay long. Ryan couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he saw Kusama jerk her thumb back towards his fountain pit and the blonde woman vaulted back out with the lithe grace of a gymnast and covered the few meters between the two pits in two long strides before she was beside him. This close, he could see the little details. The gray eyes with barely perceptible lines etched beside them from years of squinting against the wind and sun. She was very pretty, he thought inanely, in an outdoorsy sort of way…the way he preferred.
“I’m Deputy Constable Danni Roberts,” the woman told him, her voice raspy and out of breath. “I need to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“This way!”
Ryan didn’t know why, exactly, he decided to lead her out of the fighting position and personally take her over to Dornan’s position instead of just directing her over there and calling ahead. It might have been the painkillers affecting his judgement, or it might have been the restlessness of just sitting by and watching the Tahni shoot at him without being able to shoot back. Or it might have just been that she was pretty and he hadn’t so much as talked to a female who wasn’t in the military in months. Whatever it was, he hopped out and sprinted across, trusting her to keep up.
Dornan didn’t move from his position, the laser designator unfolded over his left shoulder from its slot in his backpack, but Ryan knew he was looking at them out of the corner of his eye.
“Who might this be, Sgt. Hendrix?” he asked with exaggerated patience.
“Lt. Dornan, this is Deputy Constable Danni Roberts, and she needs badly to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“Lieutenant, they sent me to make contact with you Marines. You need to know, the Tahni grabbed a whole class of primary-school children and their teachers before they pulled back to the municipal center. They have them inside the emergency shelter right now.”
The punch in Ryan’s gut was nearly more painful than the shot in his leg.
“Oh, fuck.” Dornan’s voice was drawn-out, hopeless. When he switched to the command net, he took Ryan with him, and the newly minted platoon sergeant wasn’t sure why. Did Dornan think he deserved to know, or was he trying to spread the blame? “Captain, this is Dornan. We have a civilian here who says the Tahni have at least fifty children hostage inside the target building. Please advise? Should I institute an insertion-and-rescue plan?”
“Negative.” Whistler’s reply was a judge’s gavel declaring a death sentence. “Maintain your position and continue observation.”
“Sir, we need to call the Herculean and cancel the strike. We can get those kids out….”
“Negative. Lt. Dornan, the Gauss round has already been fired.” Whistler’s sigh was a burst of static in Ryan’s headphones. “It’s going to hit in thirty seconds. There’s nothing we can do.”
The air went out of Dornan like someone had stuck a pin in him, and Ryan’s gut twisted with the knowledge that he’d have to be the one to tell her. And he couldn’t do it through his external speakers. He flipped up his visor and the stench of burnt pavement and powdered tile assaulted his senses.
“We…we called in an orbital strike,” he stammered. “We didn’t know. It’s too late.” He closed his eyes, letting his head sag. “I’m sorry.”
“No, Goddammit!” Danni exploded, lunging forward, about to throw herself over the side of the fountain.
Ryan caught her around the waist by instinct, before he’d even registered Lt. Dornan’s words shouted over the general net.
“Everyone, get under cover!”
Danni pounded at Ryan’s arm with her fist, smashed her elbow into the side of his helmet, but it had as much effect as a toddler smacking at her mother’s chest. He’d just had the thought that he needed to get her back down, to the floor of the pit, when the Gauss round finally hit.
Ryan had never been on the ground for an orbital strike. He wasn’t sure if anyone had. The attack had only been tested on military firing ranges on airless moons, and he’d never read if they’d put observers on the worlds. This was a historic first, but it wasn’t one Ryan had hoped to be present for.
The world exploded.
He knew the science of it, knew that the tungsten round had superheated the air ahead of it coming through the atmosphere, knew the immense concussion wave that slammed down into the building like a hammer from the gods was the wave of air more than it was the actual tungsten slug. The air was what threw him and Danni off their feet, and only his armor saved the both of them, cushioning the fall and the impact just enough.
But it wasn’t pleasant. Ryan had fallen out of a tree once when he was ten, trying to climb up higher than his best friend, Conner. He’d been young and flexible enough that it hadn’t broken anything, but the ground had hit him like a giant fist squeezing his chest shut, forcing all the air from it, and this was just as bad. Pure sound pounded at his eardrums through his open visor, which, in retrospect, hadn’t been his best decision.
And then came the tremor. Earthquake was his first thought, but this wasn’t earth, so it was a tremor, a temblor, but that wasn’t it, either. It was a piece of tungsten the size of a groundcar punching through the pavement down into the emergency shelter beneath it. Ryan and Danni were already on the ground, but the others toppled like redwoods, their Aegis armor unable to keep them stable in a world suddenly unstable.
