Multiverse 2

by Chris Hechtl

  Zin was some sort of zealot, also according to the short bio they had on him, some sort of doctor. He was a diehard believer, which meant he was most likely going to fight to the bitter end. There was no point giving him a heads up and a chance to surrender; that would just give him time to disperse his forces or do something drastic to the population.

  Zin's second-in-command was a Major Alercon. There was little on him, not even an image of him. Nor of his any of his other officers, though one or two had names mentioned in the files. Apparently Race hadn't gotten that far yet.

  He sighed and set the tablet down, then rubbed at his jaw, and then scrubbed his tired eyes with his hands. Probes had been sent out through the solar system and all three ships maintained a vigilant watch with their long-range sensors. The sensors were almost useless, however, since most of them were civilian grade. They just confirmed the basic information about the star system that they already knew. It was a G class star system, a couple of Jupiter class gas giants and the three planets, one of which was Hidoshi's World. The planet was an Earth class, 1.03 atmosphere, 21 degree axial tilt; she'd been terraformed at some point to be habitable. That might explain her orbit. She was in a wide orbit, in for a short brutal summer, long cooling-off autumn, then an even longer brutal winter according to the Galactic Encyclopedia entry. He shook his head. Well, this was the time to mount a campaign. He hoped it was short.

  The probing did turn up a few minor treasures; the squids found a couple derelict ships and debris floating about the system. Apparently they were happy about that, though there was some doubt that any of the ships were salvageable.

  “Sir, we're getting a signal from the planet,” a rating said over the intercom.

  “Oh?” He looked up in surprise. “How did they know we were here?”

  “I don't know, sir; we're still three AU out. Captain Herschel implemented op plan Trojan horse under his authority.”

  Craig nodded. Trojan horse was simple; they would come in pretending to be more Horathians with additional troops and supplies for the garrison. That would make Zin's people relax and eager to meet and greet them. Every commander wanted more troops and equipment; there was never enough. And to pacify a planet? With a population in the low millions? With millions of places for people to hide? That took a lot of boots on the ground and a lot of work.

  Most likely Zin's people had taken casualties as well, at least he hoped so. The population might have rolled over initially, but hopefully someone somewhere had put up a fight, even if it was brief one. A guerrilla campaign would also be nice. A nice sniper, maybe an IED.

  Hell, technically he should be wishing Zin was complacent. It would make his job initially easier. In a way he was in the same role Zin was in less than six months ago. Hoping the planet was ignorant of his true intentions. What was that saying about surprise? He shook his head. He didn't have the time to look it up.

  “Is the captain sticking to the plan?”

  The rating cleared his throat in surprise. He had been about to cut the link, thinking the marine had forgotten about him. “Yes, sir, he is,” the rating replied.

  “Good. We don't want them to recognize one of our own people, now do we? It's too early to give the game away.”

  “Aye, sir. The skipper is sticking to audio only. He's using a scrubber to garble up the voice a little, and a healthy dose or two of static to cut the chatter down to a minimum.”

  “Which will make Zin's people want to get more information once we're closer or in orbit. Tell them they can wait for news,” Craig said, then a thought hit him. “You know what, see if you can slip in there something about special orders for Colonel Zin on a flash chip. They are to be turned over to him specifically. That should put him neatly in the cross hairs.”

  “Do you want us to get his location, sir?”

  “Don't be too obvious about it. If he insists on a hand off to a subordinate at the spaceport, just say it's his choice to countermand orders or something to that effect. Don't get too cute or piss him off.”

  “Aye, sir.” The rating paused. “Sir, we've backtracked the signal to its source. Sensors have found a ship in polar orbit of the planet.”

  “Can you dump it to my screen?” the marine asked, now concerned. There had been nothing in the debrief about a ship left behind. If it was really a ship, they could be in trouble. The ship could run and possibly even slip past the admiral. Hell, most likely could slip past him if he'd already jumped! They could even radio a warning to Zin. That was a problem.

  “It's odd, sir. Here is the image,” the rating said, sending the link to the marine's tablet. Lewis looked down at it, then picked it up as he frowned. The image was a spec but definitely a ship of some sort. It glittered; apparently, it had wings of solar panels. As he studied it, the sensor officer refined the image, putting up data in brief flashes of information around the ship. “According to this, no life signs have been detected within the ship? What's with the panels?”

  “That is correct, sir. According to the spectrograph she's a cold ship. No outgassing, no signs of life. Her thermal signature is also too low to support life.”

  “That is … odd.”

  “It is too early to speculate, but the captain believes it is a derelict that has been turned into a space station by the natives,” the rating stated.

  “But we don't know that for sure,” Lewis murmured.

  “No, sir. Um, the captain asked if you wanted to dispatch a boarding party when we get into orbit.”

  “Definitely. I'll alert my people. They've got six days to prep,” Lewis said grimly. “Ask the skipper if he or your communication's people can work out some sort of way to jam the ship's transmission without being obvious,” he said.

  “Simulating a solar flare might work, sir. I'm not sure. I'm the acting communication's officer, sir. I'll look into it and get back to you.”

  “Good man,” Lewis murmured, getting to his feet. He had orders to pass on. “You do that. In the meantime, I'll be with Ensign Xe.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  >*…*<>*…*<

  A nervous week later Lewis dispatched Ensign Xe and a marine team to board the courier yacht in orbit. They took one of the civilian shuttles over, a cargo shuttle, really a flying barge according to Captain Herschel. When they boarded Xe reported that there was no atmosphere on board. “We're knocking, but no one is home, Lieutenant,” Xe told him over the encrypted radio.

  “Keep to protocol. And keep the running commentary down,” Lewis ordered watching the marines’ vital signs and camera views. They had an open encrypted link, but he wasn't keen about giving away the show to the enemy on the ground. One sniff of an encrypted signal could make anyone wonder what they had to hide.

  He had to hand it to Xe's marines; they were performing superbly considering the conditions. The dark, half-frozen ship made even the watching lieutenant nervous. There was the occasional LED light, to light a compartment slightly, but nowhere near enough. It made some of the shadows even murkier. The instinct was that something lurked, that something was waiting to jump out of the shadows the moment you turned your back on them.

  He wished he could have sent along a drone or mech. It was stupid, but it was human to wish it. They were packed away in the holds of Deinara, and she was still lagging three days out. Besides, the drones wouldn't have done much good in the null G environment. He winced when he heard a private lose his lunch over the open com. Barfing in a suit sucked. He made a note to make sure Padre had the unfortunate misfit clean his suit thoroughly … and have a medic check him out in case he inhaled any of the regurgitated stomach acid.

  “If you're done, Kolson, go find the builder's plaque,” Xe ordered.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Kolson said after he cleared his throat.

  The marine found her builder’s plaque, which led to her name when they brushed off the ice encrusting it, DC99134S1E. Lewis entered it into his ship's database and wasn't surprised that there was little there to go
on. DC stood for Diplomatic Courier, which meant she had been a civilian ship before the Xeno war. That was about all he could glean out of that limited intel. Other than the E, which stood for Epsilon, the highest band she could jump into. Fat load of good that did him, he thought.

  He recognized he was dithering and tried to focus on the mission prep. Xe had the situation on the boat under control, so he focused on checking on Padre and the marines. Race Bannon had been tasked with sorting through the computer take. He'd pressed a couple squids in to lend him a hand. Since they didn't have a dedicated AI, they had to make do with what they could figure out on their own. Fortunately, Commander Sprite had sent along software tools to help organize intel. Since Race had a leaning of intel gathering, Lewis had left the job in his hands. He was curious about what he'd find out.

  They discovered the ship's hyperdrive had been pulled as well as a lot of her hardware. “She's been scavenged,” the sergeant murmured when he checked her tiny main engineering compartment. Her reactor was gone, but she still had her sensors, communications, and computers.

  “They did a good job picking her clean. That explains the solar panels tacked all over the thing like butterfly wings, sir,” the Ensign reported. Lewis judged she was being used as an unmanned outpost/satellite.

  Once Race had the intel in hand, they secured the ship and put their own software into her computers so they could monitor what passed through her communication's suite. Until he was ready, Lewis just wanted to monitor what the enemy had to say and to who they were speaking to. When his people landed, he'd cut their communications off. The marines gratefully returned to Collier 2 and went back to their final prep work.

  >*…*<>*…*<

  They deployed satellites and remotes to get a lay of the land. What they found was a war torn planet. Colonel Zin's pirate battalion had been savage in subduing the native population. They had burned farms and plantations for fun. Orchards, some possibly hundreds of years old, were in ruins and ashes. Cities and towns, those that weren't craters, had occupational forces that took up residence in the area's police quarters as well as mounted patrols. From the look of the patrols and their equipment, Race determined that they were highly trained. A few were lax in that they hit whore houses and the bars, but he insisted they were off duty personnel.

  The capital city had been spared kinetic strikes, but mainly because it had most of the planet's industry as well as the large spaceport and a very large junkyard of shuttles and ancient equipment nearby.

  There were some natives who had signed on to help pacify their own people. Some were former prisoners and others volunteers; the drones picked them out from the lack of Horathian uniforms but for the black armbands they sported. A few were armed; others were apparently filling the role as some sort of monitor. Of course, they were all humans. Lewis's mouth tightened when he saw a pair of teenagers drag a neodog out from under a porch and then kick it to death in the street. No one objected; no one intervened. The natives were too cowed by their black armbands to do anything. But they didn't help or cheer them on either, he noted. The quislings were a problem; according to Race's estimates, they had quadrupled the Horathian's numbers. The job went from scary difficult to possibly impossible.

  Shock and awe, that was what it would take. That would be the determining factor in their mental state. Would they stay or break? He hoped they broke and ran, tried to meld back into the population as if nothing happened. They wouldn't be able to, not everyone. People made a note of such as they; they'd be marked men and women. Even if they hadn't committed any atrocities, they were still at risk of being lynched by their own former friends and neighbors. He had no pity for them. They had made their bed in their effort to suck up to the enemy.

  Lewis went over all of this with his people during their last briefing before D-day. He gauged their mental state as he spoke. They seemed eager, nervous, and not at all happy at the balance of forces. But they were ready, ready as they ever would be he thought. And this time, they had the edge in hardware, training, and equipment. More than that, they held the high ground.

  “It looks like we've got a serious fight on our hands, people. But we're going to show them we can be as merciless as them,” he growled.

  “Hoorah!” the compartment rang with the grim cheer.

  “Yeah, we're only outnumbered by what, three hundred to one,” the sergeant quipped.

  “Is that all? You think we should wait until they can bring their numbers up to ten thousand then?” Lewis asked, cracking a smile.

  That kicked off a sparkle of nervous laughter and titters.

  “We've got the training, we've got the equipment, and we’re going to be holding the high ground. We're going to show them just what we can do with it,” Lewis said as they quieted.

  “Sir, prisoners?”

  “If you can take them safely, do so. Our orders are to turn them over to the planetary authorities if they don't have anything useful for intel. Since most of these will be cannon fodder, I doubt we'll hang onto them for long.”

  “And the bastards will deserve whatever justice the natives dish out,” the sergeant said. There was a grim mutter of agreement from the marines.

  “What about hostages, sir? And … slaves?” Julian asked. That darkened their mood further. “We didn't really run many scenarios with them in the mix. What do we do?”

  “That is a problem,” Lewis said when the sergeant looked his way. “If possible, contain the situation and wait them out. Give them the option to surrender. That is your ROE. If not or if we have to take that area …,” he frowned, looking away for a moment then back to the quiet marines. “Trust me, I think even if we killed them, they'd rather die free than endure another day of what those bastards have in mind for them. We've all experienced what the bastards can do to us. To others,” he said. They nodded. A few shivered. “If we can save them, do so. But we have to hit hard and fast. We're going to break some heads, and unfortunately, some of those will be friendlies. We'll mourn the dead later. For now, let's kick ass.”

  “Hoorah!”

  “Let's get some shut eye. Boots at 0400, inspection by 0530, so don't frack your gear up. We're hitting atmo by 0615. Get as much sleep as you can; believe me, if you thought the ride out was harsh, think again.”

  “Sleep. Spirits of space, just a full shift of sleep is a luxury,” the sergeant said as the officer paused. “Sir,” he said with a nod to the lieutenant.

  “Dismissed,” Lewis said. “Beer is on me when we finish this,” he said. The compartment rang with cheers at that news.

  “If we finish this,” he murmured softly to himself when they were gone. He shook his head. He had to keep up the brave face, to fix in his attitude and his own mind that they would win.

  >*…*<>*…*<

  Once Deinara was in orbit, she went to work. The spaceport was in the north which was gripped in the last stages of winter. She had kicked out the satellites from her holds earlier on to give them the lead time for intelligence, then she had docked with Collier 2. The marines had taken on the thirty mechs and forty drones, making their ship even more crowded. For now the additional ammunition, weapons, and equipment Deinara carried would have to remain in her holds. The long-ranged drones and shuttles wouldn't be on the combined ships for long, however, just long enough for them and the satellite network to establish air superiority over the planet.

  Once they had a good grasp of the targets and their priorities, the lieutenant started the clock on D-day. Orbital KEW strikes from Deinara hammered tungsten rods and crowbars into the barracks, HQ, and other dense Horathian military centers. Race confirmed Colonel Wizenbek's death after the first strike.

  Even before the dust and smoke had blown off, the Skyhawk and shuttles finished their drop over the capital city. Padre's squad led with the powered armor to take the airfield where the pirate shuttles were right off. They formed a perimeter around the spaceport while their own shuttles climbed back to orbit to pick up the next wave.
<
br />   Once they had taken the Horathian's primary base offline to create command confusion and Lewis felt his beachhead was secure, he moved his people out, hitting the largest pockets of remaining Horathians as they tried to recover and reorganize for a counter attack. It was imperative that they take any heavy weapons down as well as any SAM units before they could recover and scatter.

  Any communications from the enemy were tracked, monitored, and either jammed or destroyed with the drones or from orbit with kinetic strikes they had held in reserve aboard Deinara. These like the previous Kinetic Energy Weapons had been made in situ from materials the freighter and tanker had picked up in the Oort cloud and while transiting across the system to the planet. For the first week after D-day, the freighter's crew was still shaping darts, keeping only just ahead of their use.

  They had six precious long-range air drones, five of them were unarmed recon drones. There were ten medium-range drones, five ground and five air; fortunately, all of those were armed. Many of them were the ship's security drones re-purposed for their mission.

  The majority of their drones were twenty short-ranged drones, ten air and ten ground. They were small; the largest was less than a meter in size. These drones were good in urban fighting, but their short range was a problem. Half of their number was armed; the other half had tools or equipment to allow them to breach a building or air duct, then set up surveillance of the occupants.

  He wasn't sure what to classify the four robotic dogs. They weren't quite mechs, not one had the ability to fight with a weapon, though apparently a few of the techs had made noises about modifying them to do so. He wasn't about to delay the assault though so they could figure it out. Besides, any weapons they did manage to mount would have to come from somewhere; most likely a mech that had been designed to use it correctly in the first place.