Rika Unleashed
Page 17
“Some place that was too damn polite. That’s why I joined up with the Marauders: so I could get my daily dose of abuse.”
Rika laughed and led the way down to the pinnace, which they found ready to depart with Corporal Yig standing at the bottom of the ramp.
“Colonel, Captain,” he said with a nod. “Your chariot awaits.”
“You yahoos coming with us?” Vargo asked as he slapped Yig on the shoulder.
“Yeah, Captain Chase sent us to make sure you two didn’t get all blowed up. Goob’s up front, and Fiona and Cole are in the back. They’ve got spare ammo, if you need any.”
Rika gestured for Yig to precede her up the ramp. “I’m ready for bear. Vargo?”
“Get them to bring me some,” Vargo said with a worried look. “I don’t trust Goob in the cockpit. Dork always messes with my seat.”
Yig chuckled and retreated to the small bay at the rear of the pinnace while Rika followed Vargo to the cockpit. To his credit, Goob was sitting in one of the rear seats, looking perfectly innocent.
A little too innocent.
Vargo gave the private a sidelong glance as he looked over his seat—which looked to Rika like it was situated properly.
“We don’t have all day,” she commented as she settled into the copilot’s chair.
“Right.” Vargo turned and sat, only to have a feminine voice emanate from the forward console.
“Hey, big boy, I love it when you sit there. You can pilot me any day.”
“Goob!” Vargo shouted as he turned to glare at the AM-4, only to have Niki laugh in their minds.
“What?” Goob lifted his hands. “I didn’t do a thing.”
“And here I thought we were friends, Niki,” Vargo muttered as he ran through a quick preflight check.
Rika only shook her head as she brought up the exterior scan view of the two ships.
The Torrent of Fire was drawing close to the Asora, far closer than Rika would have approached, were their positions reversed. Based on their vector, she suspected that the Nietzscheans planned to perform a shield breach.
It was a maneuver that required getting within roughly a hundred kilometers of an enemy vessel before launching assault craft, while at the same boosting toward the target and extending forward shields.
The idea was to protect the assault craft as long as possible, but never push your shields past the hull of the enemy ship, or it could fire directly on your vessel.
What Captain Aleena didn’t suspect—at least Rika hoped she didn’t—was that the Marauder ship was going to perform the same maneuver. With a twist.
“They’ve launched six assault craft,” Vargo commented as the Torrent of Fire continued to close with the Asora, its shields extending before the approaching craft exactly as Rika expected them to. “I have the Asora slaved to my console. You OK with flying this bird out of the bay?” he asked Rika.
“I’ve never flown a dropshop other than in sims, but I can fly a Skyscream in vacuum, so I think I can do this.”
“I’m brimming with confidence,” Vargo muttered.
“No,” Vargo blew out a long sigh. “If anyone’s sending my girl to her grave, it’s me.”
The Torrent of Fire’s assault ships passed the five-hundred-kilometer mark, turning to slow as they approached the Asora.
With one eye on the scan, Vargo peered out into the small bay and whispered. “You’ve been a good ship.”
Then he hit a control on the console, executing his pre-programmed routine. A second later, the deck lurched beneath them as the Asora fired its maneuvering thrusters and rotated on its axis, turning so the ship’s port side faced the Torrent of Fire.
“Here goes nothing,” Vargo muttered, and hit the command for the destroyer’s shields to activate.
There was a moment where nothing happened, and then the Asora’s grav shield umbrellas kicked on, eliciting a cry of delight from Goob.
“Sorry, I was worried for a second,” he said meekly when Vargo glanced back at him.
His dirty look delivered, Vargo turned back toward his console and hit the boost sequence. With the internal a-grav and dampening systems now completely offline, the deck shuddered again as the Asora’s starboard grav drives activated, pushing the ship toward the Torrent of Fire while also advancing its own shields.
Three seconds ticked down with agonizing slowness, and then the shields from both ships touched and passed right through the other’s.
“Shit, it worked!” Vargo exclaimed.
Niki replied.
“I know the science behind it,” Vargo said in relieved tones. “But it’s nice to see things work in practice.”
The Torrent of Fire’s forward momentum, combined with the grav drives boosting on the Asora’s starboard side, kept the ships rushing toward one another.
Rika watched the six assault craft that the Torrent of Fire had disgorged slide off their attack vectors to avoid colliding with the fast-approaching destroyer.
The enemy cruiser slowed its approach, but it wasn’t fast enough. A second later, the Asora slammed into the Torrent of Fire’s shields, the ship shuddering for a moment before Niki inverted the destroyer’s shield field, nullifying the enemy ship’s shields long enough for the Marauder ship to slip inside.
They had a clear line of fire on the Nietzschean hull a scant hundred kilometers away.
Rika hoped the Asora could deliver a powerful enough strike on the Nietzschean cruiser. To hide the fact that they were planning an attack, the Asora’s reactors were running at low power—just enough for the shield maneuver—while also trickling energy into the SC batteries. It was just enough for a single full-power salvo.
“Lighting them up,” Vargo said, as the ship’s portside beams activated and fired at the Nietzschean cruiser.
The two functional railguns—the others had been lost in the dark layer—added to the barrage, each getting one shot off before their reserves ran dry.
Normally, such an assault from a destroyer against a cruiser would have little to no effect. But given that they were within the larger ship’s shields, every shot from the Asora struck true.
While they could have dealt crippling damage to the enemy ship, the shots were focused on the cruiser’s weapons, disabling as many as possible to make way for the twelve dropships that suddenly burst from the Asora’s starboard bays.
Joining in, Rika hit the emergency release on the bay doors, and punched the pinnace’s engines as it rocketed down the rails and out into space. She banked the ship around the Asora, pursing her lips at the sight of the vessel’s crumpled hull and the strange warps and bends from whatever the things in the dark layer had done to it.
Tearing her eyes from the destroyer, she boosted toward the Torrent of Fire, firing at one of its still-functional beams before launching a salvo of missiles at an enemy assault ship. Her beams disabled its engines, while the pinnace’s shields managed to shed the return fire the craft delivered.
“The Asora’s shields have two, maybe three minutes left on them,” Vargo announced, broadcasting to the Marauder assault craft. “Once those are down, they can hose us with point defense fire. You all need to board that cruiser any way you can!”
Staying just behind the Asora’s still-advancing shields, Rika made for a forward bay on the cruiser, firing two missiles at the doors. One was shot down by a point defense beam, but the other hit its mark, blowing one of the bay’s doors off.
She punche
d the engines and passed beyond the Asora’s shield coverage, swooping in close to the Torrent of Fire’s hull, firing on other defense turrets and bays as she angled toward her target.
“Shit, you’re not bad, Colonel,” Vargo said.
Rika nodded, her teeth gritted. “Just giving our people as much cover as I can.”
On scan, she watched as the twelve Marauder dropships closed the final twenty kilometers between them and the cruiser. What beams the enemy ship still had were blazing against the Asora’s shields, but the defense still held, keeping the dropships safe behind its barrier.
Then, when the leading Marauder craft were a kilometer from the Torrent of Fire, the Asora’s shields failed. Rika watched the dropships all initialize jinking patterns, and prayed that they’d all make it. Point defense beams reached out from the enemy cruiser, slashing through space, desperate to track the small ships, but they failed to move fast enough to maintain focus on the inbound craft for long enough to do significant damage.
Then the dropships were upon the Torrent of Fire.
Two breached destroyed bay doors and disappeared inside the cruiser, while another three settled on the enemy ship’s hull. Rika was close to her forward bay, but turned back, sweeping across the enemy ship once more in an attempt to draw as much fire as possible.
One of the dropships was angling for a bay, but the doors weren’t yielding under its beams, and Rika fired a missile at the doors to lend a hand, while firing another at a defense turret.
The bay doors blew open, and the ship made it in, but then a nearby explosion caught Rika’s attention. She glanced to her left and she saw one of the marauder ships auger into the cruiser’s hull.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed, trying to take comfort in the fact that every other one of her dropships had made it.
Rika only nodded silently as she angled toward the bay near the cruiser’s bow, spinning the pinnace at the last moment and firing the chem thrusters to brake the ship as it slid past the half-destroyed bay doors.
“Well, if there was anyone in there before…” Vargo muttered as the pinnace slid to a halt on a cushion generated by its grav drive.
Rika saw a defense turret in the corner of the bay turn toward the pinnace, and she fired the ship’s forward beams at it before turning them on the doors that led out of the bay, burning holes through them in seconds.
Niki said.
“OK, people, let’s move,” Rika said as she rose and followed Goob out of the cockpit. When she and Vargo reached the top of the ramp, they paused, waiting for Yig to declare the bay clear
Once he had, she walked off the ship, taking care to step on the coolest parts of the deck on her way to the inner doors.
Behind her, she heard Vargo moan in dismay. “Aw, look at her, my poor girl.”
Rika glanced over her shoulder to see the Asora drift past the bay’s outer doors, gouts of flame erupting from hull breaches, while a stream of plasma came from the rear of the ship.
Vargo made another pained sound as they reached the doors. Yig waited in the passageway while Cole covered the sternward direction and Fiona advanced toward the bow.
“You heard the lady,” Rika said aloud. “Let’s get rolling.”
* * * * *
Chase was the first one out of his dropship, the PR-109 in his right hand blazing as he turned to fire on a pair of Niets to his left. They were only lightly armored, and when Kelly came out behind him and added her GNR to the mix, they were torn to shreds.
He stepped aside to let Keli and Shoshin out, and then peered back into the dropship to where the two medics crouched next to the medpod containing Ashley.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Good until that final maneuver,” one of the medics said. “Her heart rate’s been erratic since. I have her on a drip to help steady it, but I’m afraid she might get a bleed going again.”
“Sorry about that,” Ferris said as he appeared in the entrance to the cockpit. “It was either that or eat missiles.”
“Can you treat her here?” Chase asked.
The two medics looked at each other, then one shook his head. “I don’t think so. The pod can keep her stable, but we were in the middle of rerouting her femoral arteries to get the caps on her legs when we had to stop and get to the shuttle.”
“What he means is that she’s in a precarious state,” the other man said.
“OK,” Chase said with a nod. “Ferris. Grab a helmet and a weapon, we’re headed for the Niets’ medbay.”
“You’ve been good to me, girl,” Ferris said, patting the hull.
“You captain the Undaunted.” Chase frowned at the man. “How is a dropship ‘your girl’ now?”
Ferris shrugged. “Every ship I fly is my girl. Plus, the girls I fly….”
“Ferris. Just get a helmet on already.”
“OK, OK.”
The sounds of weapons fire came through the open doors into the passageway, and then Chase saw a Nietzschean run past, only to slam into an AM-4’s fist.
Or maybe that was the other way around.
Crunch nodded as he turned, yelling something into the passageway.
Kelly turned back to Chase from the bay’s entrance.
Chase glanced back at the medics pushing Ashley’s pod out of the dropship.
Fireteam one/one moved down the corridor in the direction Kelly had indicated, while one/two hung back to cover the rear.
The medics had just pushed the pod out into the passage with Ferris right behind them, when Chase spotted motion out of the corner of his eye and turned to see one of the Nietzschean assault ships that had been bound for the Asora heading straight for the bay.
* * * * *
Rika sent a pair of drones around the corner and down the next passage.
Cole twisted side to side as she strode down the passage.
The corporal dove backward, hitting the deck as a grenade bounced off a bulkhead and exploded a meter from where he’d been standing. The blast was followed by weapons fire, and the mechs pressed themselves up against the bulkheads, while Yig rolled over and then sat up.
Rika nodded.
She reached the cross corridor where the grenade had been thrown and caught a glimpse of the Niets firing on the mechs.
There were two shooters in heavy armor, with another ten in similar gear behind them. They held the sorts of weapons one rarely saw on a ship: rails, electron beams, high-powered slug throwers.