The Midnight Sun (The Omega War Book 2)

by Tim C. Taylor

  The effect on living matter wouldn’t be felt for months or years. But the effect on the sophisticated technology of targeting and fire control systems could be devastating.

  Or they could be a complete dud.

  That was a problem with such munitions: x-rays were reluctant to interact with any matter they passed through.

  The Rietzken team was still scrambling over the southern lip of their impact crater when the enemy drones caught them.

  With their blasters, the howitzer team exchanged fire with the light drones mounted with machine guns. They took out three of the aerial devices, but the drones had succeeded in pinning them in position for the heavy drones that followed, launching salvos of rockets.

  A great column of sand, mud, blood, and Rietzken limbs was blown high into the air.

  Then it settled and remained still.

  The drones didn’t return to base. They kept flying south.

  On to the Midnighters and the beached Raknar.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 114

  Branco flicked up the visor of his scout helmet and wiped the sweat from his eyes. It was a wrench to open them again. Hell, he’d never been this tired.

  When he did look out on the scene with his visor back in place, he realized the sweat in his eyes had blinded him to the full horror of the situation.

  After being shelled by artillery from the Condottieri base and strafed by heavy drones, the beach where they’d made a stand had been scooped up by the destruction and settled on the only two fixed points on the beach – the Raknar, which had transformed into sand berms.

  The surviving Midnighters occupied the beach between the two Raknar – twenty feet of sand churned with mangled equipment, spent shell casings, and the blood that had poured so freely from the lightly-armored ship’s crew.

  It could have been much worse. Most of the enemy artillery had been knocked out by the Rietzken sneak attack. Jeha and elSha spacers had dug the rollers out from beneath the Raknar and used them to reinforce a makeshift bunker beneath the sand. When the barrage started, CASPers had leaned back against the Raknar so the spacers could crawl into the lean-to bomb shelters, taking cover beneath mecha ancient and modern.

  They survived the opening attack. Barely. But that had only been intended to soften them up.

  The ground shook.

  From the north, a metal stampede was headed their way at thirty miles an hour. Almost a hundred CASPers were running at full pelt through the sand, their pilots filled with the murderous intent to close with the Midnighters – to rend, crush, and burn the flesh of their enemies without mercy. To end this campaign once and for all.

  The charging CASPers threw up a great plume of sand behind them, which made Branco reconsider the Mark 509 laser rifle in his hands. With all the sand being thrown up, it would be useless at anything but point-blank range. But he was too weak to handle a weapon with serious recoil.

  “Don’t suppose you…you’re packing a…a…spare…hypervelocity pistol?” he asked the creature on whose back he rode.

  “I ate the only one,” the Tortantula replied. “Are you wounded, Branco?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  Branco would have laughed if he’d had the strength, because his situation was weird to say the least. He was lashed onto the abdomen of a needy alien killing machine who was hissing and clicking her fearsome jaws and pincers. But his translator pendant converted the suit-wetting noises into words of concern. All the while, she blinked at him with the band of eyes that ran around her head. He was still learning Tortantula body language, but he interpreted this blinking as meaning: I’m paying close attention, but I don’t currently intend to eat you.

  “It’s nothing, Branco. Forget it. Enjoy the battle.”

  Branco nodded at the blinking eyes and snapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. The gun trembled as the chemical reaction in the charge surged power into the laser’s capacitors.

  “What?” he snapped at the eyes in the back of the alien’s head. They seemed to be staring at him expectantly.

  Brrrp…brrrp. Along the line behind the Raknar berm, the twenty-five-millimeter autocannons crewed by the spacers were opening up on the charging CASPers.

  Betty was still staring at him.

  “Err…I hope you…hope you enjoy the carnage too, Betty.”

  He must have said the right thing, because Betty instantly switched her attention from him to the battle. Her eyes roamed the band around her head seeking targets; her ten legs bunched with explosive potential. Laser rifles were mounted on two of those limbs. Heavier models than his, instead of the brief power of a chemical charge pack, they were fed by the armored power pack that formed an explosive pommel to his makeshift saddle.

  It looked like the two of them would go down fighting, and Betty couldn’t wait to get started with the violence.

  The Condottieri came at them like a mailed fist, with such momentum that it would surely smash right through the Midnighter position. Here and there, defensive fire was taking its toll with the clearing rear edge of the sand plume revealing inert enemy CASPers strewn on the beach.

  Branco’s hands were trembling. He was sweating, his vision spinning and blurring. Was this what true terror felt like? Maybe he really was wounded?

  On they came, and still the Condottieri hadn’t troubled themselves to fire, a confidence in victory that was terrifying. Midnighter spacers screamed in fear. He knew some of the CASPer drivers would be too, in the privacy of their suits.

  The enemy were just a hundred yards away from the northern berm when Sun yelled through her suit speakers, “Light ’em up!”

  Refueled with jump juice overnight, the CASPer drivers tapped their jets to give them a few feet of lift, just enough to clear the berm and fire every rocket they had into the advancing mercs. The noise was ear shattering, but beneath their roar, Branco heard the fearsome whirr of chain guns emptying their entire 1,500 round load in a single three-second burst.

  It must have blown great chunks out of the enemy, but all Branco could see was smoke and sand, and Condottieri CASPers arcing overhead to rain down their own devastating fire.

  Bullets pinged off the buried Raknar. The sand beneath Betty’s feet flicked up sand trails of destruction. A fifteen-millimeter autocannon round ricocheted off the Raknar shielding Branco and embedded itself inside Betty’s laser power pack.

  His heart stopped beating – but the high spec miniature fusion plant declined to detonate. Before he could warn Betty, she was off and away, skittering through the melee, the harbinger of death that she was hatched to be.

  Just after it resumed beating, Branco’s heart leaped into his mouth as Betty jumped like a coiled spring, smacking into a hovering CASPer. The HUD in Branco’s scout helmet was too rudimentary to make sense of the confusing melee, but it registered this Mark 8 as the enemy. As Tortantula and mecha collided in midair, Branco pressed his laser rifle against the top of the CASPer’s torso and burned a hole clean through.

  He held on grimly with one hand as Betty skittered at high speed through the battle scene, never staying in one place, never presenting an easy target. Branco took shots where he could, but his laser rifle felt like it was weighed down by a ton of bricks, and he was using all his strength just to hang on.

  With an ear-piercing hiss, Betty jumped onto the back of an enemy CASPer, knocking it to the ground and wrenching its arm off in a scream of tortured metal, while the fallen Condottiere struggled to right his mecha.

  They’d surprised a squad of eight CASPers who’d flown right over the Midnighter position and were now attacking from the south. Betty’s counter-attack was a surprise to Branco too, who had no memory of having circled around behind the enemy squad.

  Branco shot at the nearest CASPer, but the Condottiere deflected his shot with the CASPer’s laser shield and raised a coil gun to finish off the Tortantula with the human rider.

  Branco squeezed the trigger of his laser, but he couldn’t lif
t it and shot into the beach, fusing an innocent patch of sand into glass.

  Around him, Rietzkens leaped into action, swarming over the CASPers, firing hand cannons at weak points, and ripping out cameras. The action was too fast for Branco to follow, but when Betty and the Rietzkens raced back to the position between the two buried Raknar, the Condottieri didn’t pursue.

  Branco had to face facts. He couldn’t lift his laser rifle. His head was swimming, and he hadn’t even realized that Betty had teamed up with the Rietzkens and circled around the Condottieri.

  He’d become a liability.

  The noise of battle died away. Expecting his end had come, Branco’s guts became a pit of despair. There was so much he hadn’t done…words he hadn’t said.

  But he wasn’t dying, not just yet. A lull had come over the fighting. The enemy was executing a fighting retreat, leaving the dead and blasted of both sides littering the ground between the two Raknar. His HUD identified Top, who was organizing ammunition redistribution; Venix, who was organizing medical aid; and Sun, who crouched down behind a heap of inert CASPers, which he hoped meant she was in conference with someone. Maybe the reinforcements had come?

  Betty was circling around their position, still fired up with nervous energy.

  Then he realized the truth. She was pacing up and down, but it was his head that was circling round.

  “Time for me to…to bow out,” he told her. “Sorry, my friend. I want to watch your back, but I’d only slow you down.”

  He unstrapped himself and slid down her abdomen, taking cuts from her razor wire fur before settling to the ground.

  “You have a fever,” she stated.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Will you die?”

  “Probably. Soon.”

  Betty clicked her mandibles and then attacked the sand, flicking up so much that Branco was blinded. He felt himself being lifted and placed into the hollow she’d scooped out. Was she burying him to eat later?

  When he’d cleared his visor, he saw she’d built him a foxhole with a sloping back and a ridge to brace his stumps against. One of the autocannons crewed by the spacers was now firmly wedged in front of him with its stock pushed up against the sand behind. The barrel poked out the hole at a thirty-degree angle.

  “There,” said Betty with enormous satisfaction. “I can’t fix human illness, but I can give you the chance to enjoy making a little destruction. Just take care to pick your targets.”

  “Thanks, buddy. But I won’t need to be selective. Anything in the sky is one of theirs.”

  “Untrue.”

  Branco had no strength to argue. He wanted to close his eyes, but he picked up a change in the mood amongst the Midnighters. Venix was waving his stick in excitement, his supposedly injured leg forgotten. He was pointing into the sky.

  “What’s gotten him so excited?”

  “I expect it’s the dropships descending on the enemy base. There are a great number of them.”

  He glanced at Sun, who still seemed to be in conference. He wanted to speak with her. It didn’t matter what words were said, so long as they were exchanged with her. But he let her be. There’d be plenty of time.

  Venix had noticed his interest and was hurrying over to talk with him.

  “Thank you for keeping the major safe,” the Zuparti told him. “It turned out that I was wrong not to trust you, but right to use the Raknar as—”

  A bullet smacked through the XO’s eye and exploded out the back of his skull.

  The crack of a high velocity rifle assailed Branco’s ears a moment later as Commander Venix keeled forward to shower Branco with his blood.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 115

  “Fine shooting, Corporal Etienne. My compliments, and the promise of a case of the finest Cognac in recognition of your skill.”

  The Dove’s expansive smile died the instant he cut the connection to his sniper. The feed from the micro-drone over the battlefield showed that the corpse of the Zuparti commander who’d outsmarted him was not the only broken body in the bloody cockpit between the two sand-buried Raknar. But the enemy still retained the will to fight, and the ticking clock imposed by Commodore Noikaa had pushed him into a costly frontal assault that he hadn’t wanted and hadn’t quite paid off.

  And yet the Raknar were so very close. Two of them, anyway.

  Reserves were on their way, and now that his initial attack had been beaten off, he was forced to call upon them. But the cost of fielding them in addition to the existing death benefits for his Condottieri would be unbearable. The Veetanho would be sure to charge him; that was the way the arrogant creatures liked to screw over their “allies.” He’d be financially ruined whatever happened now, but he could still fight for his people. And for Earth.

  “Attention to new orders,” called that alien bastardo, Commodore Noikaa, from her flagship in orbit.

  “I’m listening,” Dove replied.

  “I’m detecting multiple contacts at the emergence point. Identity unknown.”

  The Dove’s jaw dropped. His Condottieri battlecruiser, Regina Margherita, had already alerted him to the arrival of new ships, but he’d assumed they were on his side.

  “I’m changing your priorities,” the Veetanho told him. “Destroy the Raknar. Destroy the enemy completely and with all haste. Then evacuate the planet. Anything left on the surface in one hour will be targeted for destruction before we abandon this system. Acknowledge.”

  “I read you,” said Dove.

  “You will comply without hesitation or face the consequences.”

  The Dove opened a link to the commander of Seven Hills. “This is the Colonel. The battery will shell the enemy immediately. Mix in armor-piercing and maximum-yield fusion shells. Destroy those Raknar. I repeat – Raknar are now highest priority targets.”

  “Roger that,” came the grim acknowledgement from Captain Fiorentino, who understood as well as the Dove that the Condottieri had lost, whatever happened now. So too had the Midnighters, but the Dove found that gave him no consolation.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 116

  Out to sea, something was moving.

  Thruster engines fired up around the base of the ancient battlecruiser. With all her main reactors now off-line, and one leaking radiation, Midnight Sun struggled to rise from the seabed.

  From inside her sealed cocoon station in CIC, Captain Blue felt every protesting groan of the battered old warrior; the radiation leaks registered as burning pain in her guts, and the dwindling reserves of the emergency power plants was the kind of exhaustion her sister must have felt at the end of those ridiculously long races from Athens to Sparta.

  Back when her sister dreamed of being an athlete. The dream she’d given up to look out for her ruinous sister.

  “Now it’s my turn to rescue your ass, big sis.”

  The symbiotic control interface worked in both directions. Blue was the ship. And Midnight Sun felt her pilot’s need to act.

  The ship strained. Every last ounce of strength, every last joule of the capacitors, and every last drop of blood was drained to rise from the water, to burst through the barrier of wave tops and out into the air, lifting through a cascade of bubbling water like an ancient and angry goddess.

  It wouldn’t be enough.

  Midnight Sun’s sight was failing. She lacked the power to talk with her sister fifteen miles to the south. And of the fortified impact crater the Dove had named Seven Hills, she could no longer listen in on their communications or subvert their sensor grid.

  Her breathing had stopped. Thruster engines were almost spent. All she could feel were the stinging blows as shell fire from Seven Hills began to rip her body apart.

  Blinded and fading fast, Midnight Sun/Captain Blue nonetheless remembered the location of Seven Hills, not quite two miles to the east. She took one heaving gasp of air, draining to the very last dregs of her emergency power, and sent everything she had into a primal scream of fear and magnificen
t rage at the enemy base.

  She felt her enemy burn.

  Then she was spent.

  She was sinking.

  Below the waves, shattering the coral-like blooms on the sea bed as the ship rolled away.

  Midnight Sun was dead, but a spark of life remained in her human captain. Silence reigned inside her cocoon, no longer disturbed by the comforting hum of the attached life-support unit. Blue felt the peace she hadn’t felt since she’d changed her destiny forever one night at that damned spaceport.

  But she was Captain Blue, dammit! Peacefulness didn’t suit her. She banged at the lid of the coffin with her fists, but there was no one on the ship to hear.

  She reached out with her pinplants, but there were no active nodes to connect with.

  “If anyone’s coming to get me,” she said, “best thing to do is stay calm and conserve air.”

  She kept calm for about a second.

  “You’d better live, sis,” she bellowed, “or I’ll haunt your ass so badly you wouldn’t believe.”

  She banged on her coffin lid, shouting all the way.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 117

  They’d taken such heavy casualties, Sun was shocked to feel a fresh lash of icy despair to see Venix had joined the ranks of the dead. He hadn’t been much use as a fighter, but she realized now that she’d relied on the Zuparti’s optimism to keep her going through the long march through the swamp to their last stand at the beach. He’d been the spark of light in her darkest hours.