by Tim C Taylor
“But the Marines below—”
“Are about to have their hands full, General. Besides, the cavalry is coming, but I need you up top right now. Don’t delay, man!”
Arun understood less than half of what Coombes had said, but this was the petty officer’s hangar, and Arun trusted him to read the tactical situation. “On my way to your position, Petty Officer.”
The air in the hangar was retained and pressurized even though the hangar doors far overhead were open to vacuum. Arun had seen something similar once on a Hardit mining base on the airless moon of Antilles. But at this scale? Guess he wasn’t on a third-rate cardboard ship any more.
Arun pressed on and hit an invisible boundary after which the air pressure dropped off rapidly. That was better. Guns were more effective in vacuum.
Coombes was already perched atop a gun emplacement two-thirds of the way up the hangar bulkhead. On his way to join the Hangar Boss, Barney alerted Arun to slow-moving projectiles incoming from space.
Arun watched, slack-jawed, as human body parts inside partial battlesuits rained down from above.
“The poor bastards never made it,” explained Coombes. “But they did manage to nix point defense. Repulsing the next wave is down to us. No, not with me, General. I need you at the paint cannon on the far side. Rissinger, give the General a hand.”
One of the deck guards flew out from Coombes’ group and led Arun to an emplacement embedded into the far wall. She explained the situation on the way. Three GX–cannons were mounted on the walls just above the air layer. Arun was to fire another weapon, a paint cannon, which would cover enemy Marines in a slimy goop that would attract the attention of the GX-cannons. It was a simple but effective defense against battlesuit stealth technology.
“We’re only Navy,” explained Rissinger. “Only human. But with that cyborg thing you’ve got going with your suit AI, you have the best chance of guessing where the enemy might be.”
Without even a warning from Barney, missiles spiraled down from space and into the hangar. Marine issue shoulder-launched missiles, not warship ordnance thank frakk, but lethal enough. Arun slammed his butt down into the gunner’s seat and activated the paint cannon. Rissinger didn’t need to explain its operation: long ago when he was a cadet, Arun must have had the cannon’s operational details fed into his mind while he slept. Barney took over and the two-meter-long, fifteen-centimeter caliber barrel became an extension of Arun’s will.
He set the range to the hangar’s opening into space and shot out spirals of paint shells. Seven enemy Marines were immediately caught in his fire. To the naked eye they were barely visible, the stealth technology fighting the paint to retain invisibility, but to Arun and the targeting systems of the three GX-cannons, the hostiles lit up like flares. They were obliterated by Coombes’ heavy guns, though not before their carbine fire took a heavy toll of the gun teams.
Arun sent up another barrage of paint, but this time no one was caught in his trap.
“Cease fire,” ordered Coombes. “That’s the last of them. Well done everyone.”
“Are you sure?” asked Arun. “Why would they attack with just seven?”
“They didn’t.” The Hangar Boss sounded confident, but Barney updated Arun on the fighting raging below. Most of the pilots were still racing for the X-Boats mounted on the spiral ramps. Weapons fire flared across the hangar. He was needed below.
“We’ll stay here, General,” said Coombes. “In case they come through from space again. Rissinger will have to do the best she can. Go take a spare X-Boat and give them hell.”
“Negative,” Arun replied, already screaming down toward the hangar floor. “We need to defend the deck entrance first. If they break in, they’ll destroy the boats.”
“Understood. Look after my pilots, General. You’d never guess, but they’re such delicate flowers really.”
Arun laughed all the way down. Laban Caccamo was one of those pilots, one of the best too. When all this was over, he’d tell Caccamo that a ship rat had called him a delicate flower. He would laugh so much the big guy would be in the infirmary for a week.
Then the smile disappeared from Arun’s face when a rumble filled the hangar and set his teeth on edge. It was a sensation that swelled his heart with pride but made him fight hard not to scream. This was the gut-wrenching sensation of being caught in the backwash from an X-Boat’s exhaust. His suit could handle the pressure wave, but that did nothing to protect against the blast of energy beamed out from space and time into somewhere else. To the Klein-Manifold Region, as Finfth called it.
How the hangar rats got used to it was beyond him. He barreled downward, fleeing from the inter-dimensional energy waves, as an entire wing of X-Boats launched. His body felt stretched to unbearable thinness, his mind pulled, re-knotted and recombined in impossible geometries.
It was more than Arun’s mind could contain. He slammed into the hangar deck at 90 meters per second.
He lay immobile for several seconds, lost in the bone-shattering vibrations thundering through the deck, and the energy exhaust flowing through him and on into K-Space.
“Barney!” he queried, not sure which was the strangest: that his AI hadn’t taken control and shifted Arun’s position or that he hadn’t been shot. Gotta move!
But Barney emanated a sense of calm, his tac-display summary showing the deck battle had been won for now. Marine reinforcements had come from space, taking the boarders from behind.
A gauntleted hand reached down for him.
Arun took it and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet.
Barney gave the figure the yellow halo that meant he’d identified this individual as the tactical commander. He didn’t display the Marine’s name. He hated it when Barney tried to play games.
The Marine officer was a head shorter than Arun. She blanked her visor, and his heart skipped in excitement.
Who else could it have been? Colonel Xin Lee looked up at him.
Barney gave him a tactical update: Xin had led a regimental-sized force to retake the carrier group’s flagship.
He stared back at her. Xin’s eyes blazed with vigor, but the seemingly carefree girl he had once shared a rack with on Antilles was long gone, replaced by a woman hardened, chastened and experienced, and no less a magnificent force of nature.
Arun fought to cage these badly timed feelings for this woman that welled from deep within.
“Thank you for saving my life,” said Arun, shaking Xin’s hand. “I’ve lost track of the score. Are we even yet?”
“That’s one difference between us, General. I will never stop counting. You’ve still saved my life more than I’ve saved yours. Don’t expect that imbalance to last long.”
He laughed. “I don’t. It’s good to see you.”
The stiffness left her a little. “Likewise, General Twinkle Eyes. Despite keeping our children secret from me… it feels good to be at each other’s side.”
You’re magnificent.
“Let’s not go all weepy eyes, General.” The corners of her mouth pinched with amusement. “And we both know how action makes you feel. I’ve may have eliminated the enemy boarders but there’s still a battle to be fought.” She grinned. “We’ll probably both die before the day’s out, so… oh, what the hell? I know you, Arun. Sitting this out as a passenger must be driving you nuts. Want to tag along with me?”
“It would be fun, Xin. But I’ve a better idea.”
She raised a teasing eyebrow. “Better than being at my side?”
Arun heart lifted, but then his spirits were shot down when Barney identified one of anonymous Marines guarding Xin as a person of interest. A painful text label appeared: Springer. “No, Xin. Not better. Not even close, but more useful, I hope. I’m going to help bag a flagship.” He shook her hand again. “Good luck, Colonel.”
He glanced up at Springer. His legs itched to move closer to her, but his head told him that would only end badly.
Instead, he sent her a
private message – “Stay safe” – before turning and running to one of the three X-Boats left stranded on the launch ledge because all the remaining pilots were dead or wounded. All but him.
Arun was proud of himself for succeeding in wiping Xin from his mind. She was a complication he found difficult to handle even at the best of times, and going into battle against a superior enemy definitely wasn’t that. As for Springer… no, he didn’t dare let his mind go there. She’d cut herself away from him and they could never grow back together now.
Arun’s suit took him up into the air and over to the only remaining Mustang on the launch ledge.
The two-seat Mark1 Mustang was the first of the X-Boat variants to be developed, and was essentially a shrunken Tactical Unit. With a spherical hull, and a centrally mounted engine that could swivel rapidly to connect with any one of the 12 exhaust ports drilled through the hull, it had seemed the obvious design. The single-seat Mark2 was a little faster but production had been abandoned in favor of the sleek one-seater Phantom fighters. The other X-Boat variant, the Swordfish fighter-bombers, had wings, not for lift but to release their disk-shaped bombs. But Arun had trained as a Tac-Marine, which meant he had expected to live his adult life inside a tactical unit. The Mustang felt like home.
Arun settled into the pilot seat of Slayman Feg’s X-Boat and closed the cockpit. “Boss. Give me flight codes for X47- Alpha.”
“X47- Alpha is yours, General,” Coombes replied. “You’re cleared for takeoff.”
As the instigator of the training program that had turned Marines into Flight Marines, Arun had learned to fly himself. Piloting a shuttle was not much different from traveling through the void in a battle suit. Taking off and landing were another matter entirely.
Arun resisted the temptation to go full throttle, and slowly released a jet of reaction material from a maneuvering thruster. The Mustang lifted, pitched forward and then spiraled up out of the hangar, only once brushing the side wall.
“Squadron Leader Caccamo. This is Flight Marine McEwan, reassigned to your squadron.”
Laban Caccamo sighed. “Squadlead to 3rd Squadron. We’ve picked up a noob. A flight virgin called McEwan. I’m giving him the call sign FNG. You’re in Blue Flight, operating low protection. Keep low 10 klicks behind the Phantoms and Swordfish in the strike group. Can you handle that, FNG?”
“Roger.”
“And for frakk’s sake, FNG, try not to bump into anything important.”
“I’ll try.” Arun grinned. “FNG out.”
The rest of his squadron was already several thousand klicks away from the Lance. Arun checked his momentum dump system was operational and engaged main drive. His Mustang accelerated at 10g, then 15g… 20g… He was accelerating faster than a missile but in so much comfort that he could put his feet up and sip at a mug of coffee… if only his legs weren’t strapped in and his battlesuit helmet weren’t in the way.
His gaze was drawn constantly to his heat exhaust dial, which lifted from blue to violet, but kept well short of the red danger zone. This simple mechanical dial bolted onto the flight console was so crude it could have come from pre–Contact Earth. Its function, however, was anything but crude. The Klein-Manifold Region, which connected via D-Branes to conventional spacetime, was not a limitless store into which energy could be dumped without consequences. K-Space, as it was known, heated up just like normal spacetime, only cooling with glacial slowness. As Arun flew his Mustang through space, he also moved through the corresponding region of K-Space, and the dial showed the local heat in that higher dimension. Once they hit the red zone, K-Space would be too hot to push any more energy there. Deep in the red zone and K-Space would be dumping energy back into real space.
Within seconds he was in formation tucked behind and below the main strike force of 3rd Squadron, which was itself toward the rear of the spearhead formation that was 2nd Wing with its hundred human-piloted X-Boats. 1st Wing with its more varied mix of craft types and pilot species was forming up only a few minutes behind.
The heat dial pushed further toward the red line. Playing tail-end Charlie meant those dozens of X-Boats had already heated up K-Space.
They were burning impossible gees, making directly for the largest capital ship he’d ever seen. Three minutes out from the Lance and his velocity was over 100 klicks per second and rising fast. Compared to the enemy flagship, the X-Boats were minuscule, mosquitos trying to take down a grav-tank.
But the Legion had K-Space technology.
The enemy didn’t stand a chance!
— Chapter 50 —
Caccamo magnified the image of the target and examined it in realsight while he still could. He gave a low whistle. The 3rd Fleet’s flagship was a big bastard all right, over two klicks from nose to stern and about a third as much across the beams. Every square meter seemed to be loaded with armament.
The New Empire weren’t generous enough to share their ship designations, so the Legion had named this beast themselves. The Blunt Arrow they called it, and the warship’s outline did resemble a blunted arrow – a deadly one with main armament angled to point in a forward direction. With such a length, it would take several long seconds to swivel the Arrow around to any orientation it desired. To the Legion’s lumbering capital ships, burdened with irresistible levels of momentum, the Arrow could change bearing as near as practical to instantaneously. If Lance of Freedom tried to get on the Arrow’s tail, the enemy flagship would simply pivot through 180 degrees and direct its fire back along its direction of travel. But a nimble X-Boat could flit about faster than the Arrow could turn, always keeping just off the target’s bow, out of range of its engine backdraft and its main armaments.
Or so Caccamo had explained to his squadron before training them in these attack tactics.
Keeping on the enemy’s tail was just one of the X-Boat ideas that were either brilliant or batcrazy dumb. They would soon discover which.
The Arrow loomed closer.
The other warships of the enemy fleet were closing in to protect their flag. A short distance behind Caccamo’s squadron, the Legion’s 1st Wing were holding position in reserve. Holding position meant spraying defensive munitions, fighting off attacking warboats, and taking hits from long-range missile attacks, but 1st Wing could handle the heat.
All that mattered was his wing and the Arrow. One or the other would die over the next twenty minutes.
Caccamo blinked sweat out of his eye. Shit! His squadron could be wiped out within seconds. The thought terrified him, and the realization that he was scared made his heart pound. He could hardly breathe.
They were making this drent up as they went along. All that confident talk of victory he’d given his pilots… that made him a liar. A fake whose lies could lead his people to their deaths.
His AI nudged out a memory to calm him.
The time was a year earlier. The pilots and deck crew were paraded on the deck of the Lance’s X-Boat hangar in front of Puja and the squadron leaders. By that time, it was only when paraded that Caccamo looked into the eyes of his pilots and thought their mix to be strange. Diminutive ship rats were invisible if they stood behind the flight-trained Marines who comprised the majority of the X-Boat pilots. Even the Marines came from various design models and from more depot planets than just Tranquility. They looked strange lined up at attention, but what mattered was that these volunteers had graduated top of the flight-training school. All had earned their place in those lines, as had the AIs they had partnered with.
“Will this crazy X-Boat idea work in a real to goodness space battle?”
The question was aimed at the parade by General McEwan. It had been Arun who’d first pushed Marines to cross-train in Navy roles to fill the roster gaps on Beowulf.
“If you haven’t asked yourself that,” continued Arun, “then you don’t have the imagination to deserve a place on this hangar deck. Your first battlefield test will be against the New Empire 3rd Fleet, the unbeatable force that has swept asi
de everything the Old Empire has thrown against it as it makes it way to the home planet of the White Knights. Your mission is to beat the unbeatable 3rd Fleet.”
The pilots listened. Arun wasn’t the kind of pompous skangat who thought his rank elevated him to godhood. The only way to assess the pilot training program was to go through it himself. He’d said that right from the get go. General McEwan had graduated flight school himself. He’d earned his place on this hangar the hard way.
“Many of you will feel terror. Some of you will doubt. That doesn’t matter, not so long as you carry out your missions. If your resolve falters, remember this. You will be tasked with destroying immensely powerful capital ships. But we are opening up a new chapter in warfare where it isn’t length, mass, or volume of the target ship that matters, it is the heat it generates. And bigger means hotter.”
The memory vanished the moment Wingco’s voice came over the command channel. “Cacco, your squadron gets the honor of the first attack. Proceed immediately. Good luck.”
Wing Commander Narciso’s voice was a steady as a ship’s gyro-stabilizer, but then Puja had always been as hard as ceramalloy.
Which was how others described him…
“Roger that, Wingco. Initiating attack run.”
Caccamo felt floods of relief to hear the steel was back in his voice. The wait had nearly crushed him. But now there was no time to think, and barely enough to act.
He broadcast to his squadron. “SquadLead to all call signs. Pleasure cruise is over… thank frakk. Remember we’ll be diving into heat, so keep watching those dials. Hell, I don’t need to tell you that. 3rd Squadron, Attack Scenario One. Go! Go! Go!”
Caccamo pitched down the nose of his Phantom and gave his AI permission to perform constant evasive maneuvers. The world in realsight blurred into a smear.
He switched to virtual tac-view in which the continual shifts of speed and direction were smoothed out. In this, less chaotic, view of space, the squadron was a box of layered flight elements swooping in a wide arc toward the rear of the enemy flagship.