by Rick Partlow
The cutters could dance through T-space and normal space like boxers ducking punches, and stuck there in the belly of a dropship, a sitting duck in the docking bay of a lightly-armed troop carrier, that seemed like a pretty good deal. Sure, we lost a lot of the little boats in battle, but since there were only two or three crew in each cutter, it still worked out to a better percentage than the Drop Troopers. No OCS for pilots, they were all Academy grads, but if I’d joined on my own instead of being forced into the Marines by the government, I could have gone Fleet and become a crew chief, eventually.
A depressing number of blue avatars winked out while I watched, but even more red triangles went black, and the number seemed to cascade, dozens of them fading as the cutters jumped in closer to the military space station the Tahni had constructed in orbit around Dionysus. What happened next was predictable, and in fact, someone had predicted it.
The destroyers were giant wedges of crimson on the threat display, three of them in a loose formation, thousands of kilometers between them. They’d been in orbit around Dionysus, waiting for a threat deserving their ponderous attention, and the destruction of three quarters of their corvette force had proven us worthy. I’d seen a nature video once in one of the more entertaining lessons they’d taught on one of the rare occasions I’d attended regular school as a child, that showed hyenas harassing female lions off a kill. They nipped at them and yelped at them and chased them hundreds of meters and when the lionesses had tried to strike back, they darted away, just out of reach. Then the male lion, who’d been resting in the sun like the lazy son of a bitch he was, woke up, shook himself off, and took care of business.
I’d never forgotten the majestic fury of that massive cat sprinting across the savannah like he’d been shot out of a mass driver, and the look on the queen hyena’s face when she realized she’d fucked with the wrong cat. The hyena ran as hard as she could, but the lion took her down with a single swipe of his paw, just snagging her rear leg and throwing her into the dust, helpless as he sank his fangs in and broke her neck.
The Tahni destroyers thought they were the lions, burning in on flares of annihilating matter and antimatter at six gravities of acceleration, closing the distance with our cutters by the second but really aiming at us, at the troop ships, the Iwo Jima and the Tripoli and the Belleau Wood, at the Fleet carriers, the Bonaventure, the Intrepid and the Essex. One swipe of the laser that ran up the center of each of the ships, fed directly from their reactor core, one strike through the core of one of the troop ships or the carriers, and they were gone, a short-lived supernova, and we were stuck here for the rest of our lives, which could probably be numbered in minutes.
But things weren’t always what they seemed, as I’d found out at that top-secret meeting on Inferno. The Tahni destroyers were the hyenas, blustery, annoying, and overconfident, and the lions roared out of Transition space, massive grey monoliths a kilometer long and two hundred meters across, bristling with weapons, buried under centimeters of BiPhase Carbide and nickel-iron armor, their oversized fusion drives new suns lighting up the outer system.
The Jutland and the Leyte Gulf were two fifths of the remaining cruisers left in the Commonwealth Space Fleet, cautiously hoarded in the Sol system and the core colonies to prevent another sneak attack like the Battle for Mars that had ushered in this war. Had the Tahni gotten wind of the fact the Fleet was pulling the cruisers out of the 82 Eridani system, leaving Eden and Inferno with only static defenses and a few squadrons of slower-than-light patrol boats, it would have been a perfect opportunity for them to strike deep into our defenses. But the military had done something right, for once and by a miracle, not a word had slipped out.
“Holy shit,” Scotty said, his voice an awed whisper. I couldn’t help but agree.
The cutters faded back, content to let the cruisers take their share of the glory, but the remaining Tahni corvettes threw themselves at the giants in frantic desperation and were swatted aside by laser turrets, their destruction barely notable against the great bulk of the capital ships. The destroyers seemed almost frozen by the sight of the cruisers, and I had to think the crews were trying to switch targets, knowing their anti-ship missiles wouldn’t be enough, trying to maneuver their spinal lasers into firing position.
They were too late.
The main gun of each of the cruisers, their raison d’etre, was a huge, spinal-mounted rail gun, using all the power of a dedicated fusion reactor and electromagnetic rails as long as the entire ship. I’d never seen them fired in person and wasn’t close enough to see it now, but I’d watched video of it. It was visually impressive, unlike any other weapon we fired in space combat. Every energy weapon was invisible in a vacuum, every coil gun a dark streak against the stars, but the railguns…they did this trick, something Captain Covington had found so fascinating he’d actually played a video of it for the whole company once. The longer the conductive surface of the rails, the more velocity the shot had. So the engineers who’d built the cruiser’s spinal guns had worked out a system where ionized gas was ejected from the muzzle of the railgun before each shot and ran an electrical charge through it. The charged cylinder of gas added velocity to the shot like an afterburner and, more importantly to us grunts watching the show, it was a yellow lance of flame extending out from the nose of the cruiser, a firework show in the vacuum.
The Tahni destroyers had electromagnetic deflectors, the same as the dishes they used to defend their ground-based installations and, theoretically, a powerful enough magnetic field could have sent the cargo-truck-sized projectiles careening off in another direction, but even the Tahni capital ships didn’t have a big enough reactor for that. The tungsten slug was invisible to the naked eye, but the threat display showed us its passage as a streak of yellow against the stars. Its impact didn’t need enhancement, didn’t need special effects. The lead destroyer in the formation erupted in plumes of ionized gas, the antimatter contained in the electromagnetic storage at its heart merging with the matter around it catastrophically.
The second of the Tahni capital ships was struck amidships as it tried to turn away and the bow of the destroyer had time to tumble away into the black before the containment bottles failed and another supernova filled the ever-night.
“Kick their asses, you Fleet pukes,” Scotty enthused. “Do something useful for once.”
The last of the destroyers didn’t even try to turn, just took counsel of desperation and jumped, retreating from the very universe in the face of the cruisers.
“Damn.” Scotty sounded disappointed. “He got away.”
“He won’t be back soon,” I predicted. “A ship that size, it takes them a while to build up the capacitor charge to Transition back and a while in T-space means tens of millions of klicks.” I grinned. “And those cruisers aren’t going anywhere.”
“Dropships, prepare for launch.” That wasn’t the crew chief, it was the Iwo Jima’s Tactical Operations Officer. I’d never heard the announcement when I’d been an NCO or enlisted; it went directly to the command net. “You are go in ten seconds.”
“But we are.” I switched from the private net with Scotty to the platoon frequency. “Third Platoon, launch in ten. The Fleet has done their job…now it’s our turn.”
19
Valius might have been habitable, but from where I sat, it looked pretty damned inhospitable. Snow-covered mountains harsher than anything on Earth climbed kilometers into the moon’s atmosphere, jagged and threatening, and I didn’t see how anything could live down there, much less humans. The dropship had deorbited on the other side of the moon from the target area and I assumed they’d used the cover of the Fleet attack to take down the satellite surveillance, but we had an assault shuttle running escort just in case the Tahni figured out we were here. The bird was behind us, a blip on the tactical board of the dropship, and an even smaller one in my helmet HUD.
Being an officer detached you from more than just the men. I was getting used to seeing things f
rom orbit, from sensor screens, on mapping overlays. It turned battlefields into a chessboard and us into tiny, disposable pawns.
I’d rather think of myself as a rook.
The mountains were a barrier from north to south, cutting the primary continent in half, but we didn’t cross them, instead following them southward. It was a good decision tactically, since it kept us off their sensor screens as we made our way down to the refineries at the southern tip of the continent, but the ride was a rough one, updrafts buffeting the dropship mercilessly. When I was a kid, I used to climb inside a rusty, old metal drum we found in an abandoned building and my big brother would roll me along in it until I got dizzy. Flying through those mountains in my suit, locked into the drop gantry, I felt like Anton had kicked that barrel down the tallest hill in the city with me in it and I began to long for the command to drop.
“Five minutes,” the crew chief said an eternity later.
I echoed the announcement to the platoon, clearing my throat first so I wouldn’t sound like I was about to puke inside my helmet. Five minutes…I tried to go over the op order in my head one last time, looked at the mapping overlay, re-hashed the order of march and the names and positions of the Force Recon platoon and still had two minutes left when I was finished. I started thinking about Vicky, wondering if she had made it to her platoon yet.
“One minute.”
Would she be thinking about me, wherever she was? Or would I just be a background hum to the noise of her life?
Focus, Alvarez. Not the time for needy-boyfriend bullshit. You got along just fine for nineteen years mostly by yourself, you can do it a little while longer.
I didn’t even hear the countdown, just the command to drop, and I echoed it out of rote habit, not even realizing what I was saying.
“Drop! Drop! Drop!”
How do you get used to falling out of the sky at four hundred meters up in a suit heavy enough to plow itself a few meters into the ground if the jets fail? How does that become an ordinary thing that doesn’t register, doesn’t provide an adrenaline spike anymore? Somehow, it had happened. I’d lost count of the training drops I’d done, and the combat drops were all running together in my memory. The only one that stood out was Brigantia because I’d nearly died about four times in one minute.
That didn’t happen this time and I’d barely had time to get an IFF signal from the rest of the platoon when the ground rushed up to meet me and I was down. Just like that, barely a jostle. Dropping on a low-gravity world had its advantages, and my spine gave silent thanks for the lower impact.
I’d barely had time to look around on the way down, but I took a moment as I waited for Scotty to get the platoon in formation, waited for the Force Recon troops to land. They’d take quite a while longer, falling under the synthetic silk canopies of parachutes. There should, I thought, be something better, something higher-tech than a big piece of fabric designed watching spiders sail on the wind, conceived of by a Renaissance artist nearly a thousand years ago and actually tested over six hundred years ago. But jet packs were heavy and expensive and disposable, not to mention carrying a high thermal signature, and no one had been able to figure out anti-gravity yet, so men and women who’d travelled to another world through a different dimension on a starship powered by a fusion core as hot as the heart of a star glided slowly and anachronistically to the ground.
They fell in an orderly line up and down the same mountain pass where my platoon had landed, gentle slopes heading upward from either side of the broad path through the foothills, shrouded in shadows. My enhanced optics showed everything daylight bright, but with a hint of unreality that came from the veneer of computer interpolation, filling in gaps in visible and infrared light with a translation of thermal and sonic sensors to something I could see and understand more easily.
The road looked artificial, not a natural path, and I knew it had been blasted by the Corporate Council mining venture that had settled this moon, probably not long after the refineries were built. I didn’t know where it led or why they’d wanted to leave the shore of the equatorial sea to head into the hills, but I was sure it had some sort of profit motive, because the Corporate Council didn’t do anything unless there was a profit in it.
Something about the size of a weasel or a large rat popped its head up in the rocks beside the road, then darted from one side to the other before disappearing into a burrow. I blinked at the sight, surprised there was animal life here, though I don’t suppose I should have been. It was probably something imported from Earth, originally, likely from somewhere high and cold.
“Alvarez,” Lt. Palmer said, jogging up beside me, faceless inside her light armor, her helmet’s visor too dark to see her face, even with my suit’s optics. “We’re all present and mobile.”
“This your first combat jump, Palmer?” I don’t know why I asked. Maybe I felt like a complete doofus for turning her down before. It was a fair question, though. Force Recon generally ran down the ramp of a dropship instead of throwing themselves out the back of it five hundred meters up.
“Second,” she corrected me. “Are you jackheads ready to move?”
“Don’t worry,” I cracked, grinning even though she couldn’t see it. “The big Drop Troopers will protect you and your tiny little Force Recon Marines.”
Her laugh was low and seductive and I sighed at what might have been.
“Then by all means, you go first,” she invited.
Delp and First squad led the way and I stepped in behind them. The march was going to be nearly five kilometers, and normally we could have made that in ten minutes, particularly on a low-grav world, but we had to slow down to accommodate the Recon troops. They were running, knowing the longer we were out here, the more chance we’d be spotted, but it would still be a twenty-minute slog.
We’d barely set out when I felt the first quake. I stopped and threw my suit’s arms wide, maintaining balance as the ground shook beneath us.
“What the fuck was that?” Scotty blurted, though he’d still been composed enough to keep it on our private channel.
“Earthquake,” I told him, grateful I’d spent so much time memorizing every section of the op order. “One of the main reasons this section of the moon is habitable is volcanic activity. They get a lot of them here.” I switched over to Palmer’s net. “Everything good to go, Lieutenant?”
“Just a little shaken up,” she said, more of the same sarcastic humor in her tone. “Takes more than that to stop us. You tin soldiers can pick up the pace if you want. We’re not the ones who let the machines do all the work…we can keep up.”
“Anything you say.” I switched to Carson’s channel. “Pick up the pace just a bit. The Recon Straight-legs are getting bored.”
“Roger that, sir.”
The path climbed upward on a gradual slope, taking us through a narrower cut as the hills closed in on either side and it almost seemed as if the engineers had sliced through the cut with a laser instead of blasting it with explosives. The cut wound around the corner out of sight, but I noticed a few piles of slide rock near the sides of the walls.
I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t know shit from geology and rocks were rocks, I thought. Maybe if I hadn’t spent most of my life in the Trans-Angeles Underground, I might have put two and two together, earthquakes plus slide rocks. But we were jogging now, loping along with the Recon Marines keeping up at a good clip in a hopping, low-gravity run.
We’d hit the curve when the next quake came, and this one was worse than the last, enough to throw me off my feet even with the suit’s internal gyroscopes. My shoulder slammed into the padding and blackness billowed up around me, impenetrable even with thermal and sonics, just a solid wall of rock and dust. Something banged off my helmet, then my back, and the suit was rocked from one side to another and I couldn’t talk, couldn’t even think with the rattling inside and out.
I hadn’t even noticed the constant background rumble and roar until it ceased and
everything inside my helmet was silence.
“Scotty!” I yelled and my voice sounded obscenely loud. “Scotty, are you there?”
I saw his IFF signal in the display, blinking yellow. They were all blinking yellow except a few who had drifted into red, but thank God, none were black.
“Yeah, I’m here, Cam,” he said, sounding a bit dazed. “Jesus Christ, what happened?”
“Get me a platoon damage report,” I told him. “And see if you can move.”
I tried, shifting first to the right, then to the left. I had no idea how much weight was resting on top of my suit, but it hadn’t been enough to break it. To the right was a brick wall, unyielding, and I slammed into it without any result but a sore shoulder, so I tried the left. To the left, something gave, shifted, and I slammed back against it, feeling more than hearing shifting rock and dirt.
“Palmer,” I called, strain in my voice. I wasn’t using my own muscles to move the tons of rock, but I was throwing my effort into it to let the armor know how much force to use. “Palmer, are you there? Can you give me a status report?”
I had an IFF signal on all of the Force Recon Marines, but it wouldn’t register damage, wouldn’t show me if they were hurt or conscious. It would just turn black if their hearts stopped beating. I counted quickly, each black strip a punch in the gut. There’d been forty-two of them, and now half were gone. Just like that.
“We’re all alive,” Scotty reported. “Miracle of miracles. First is all up, and Delp wasn’t even buried. He’s helping to dig out Carson. First has minor damage, nothing that would deadline their suits. Second is buried deepest and they’re going to need help getting out. They have three suits running red, major joint damage and one with a deadlined plasma cannon, but no injuries. Third and Fourth took a beating, but they’re nearly free now and only two have mobility issues. Delp says it was a landslide, a bad one. The whole side of the cliff just caved in and fell on us.”