Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  They were just as lightly armored, just as easily destroyed, but they weren’t designed for combat, just to deliver those fighters to the battlefield. And it was a perfectly workable tactic as long as you had thousands of pilots who didn’t mind dying for the glory of the empire. The Tevynians apparently had no shortage of those because swarms of fighters threw themselves at the lead Helta cruiser, dying in droves as lasers turned them into so much burning gas at a single touch, like crumpled-up paper thrown into a fire. But the lasers could only fire in so many directions at once.

  The cruiser had energy shields, just as ours did, but those shields were propagated via a field generated by discs built into the ship’s hull and they didn’t, I knew because I’d asked, run all the way to the skin of the hull itself. The fighters closed with the cruiser and fired their lasers at point-blank range, piercing her at dozens of places from the docking bay all the way to the engineering section. One of the small laser weapons, even a dozen of them, wouldn’t have been more than a pinprick. Hundreds of them, one after another, eventually hit something vital.

  “Shit,” Julie murmured, the glare of the fusion blast in the projection lighting up the side of her face.

  I couldn’t speak. Hundreds of Tevynians had died to take out the one cruiser, but it had been a good trade in their eyes. Hundreds of Helta and a ship that took months of work and the equivalent of billions of dollars to build had fallen to high-tech kamikazes. I wanted to ask what sort of belief would inspire a human to do that, but there were a depressing number of examples in our own history to draw from.

  “They wouldn’t withdraw,” Julie told me, not turning away from the screens. She was at one of the spare seats at the helm station, added when the crew of the Truthseeker had been instructing Space Force officers to prepare them to take command of the Jambo. “Joon-Pah begged them to.”

  A second cruiser exploded, the supernova dwarfing the firefly swarm of Tevynian fighters dying with it, and one of the Helta officers on the bridge wailed—a warbling, keening sound, almost a song. I didn’t ask what it was because I could guess. Mourning sounded the same no matter what species did it.

  The third and fourth ships were nearly abreast, a few thousand miles apart, and they were communicating at least, because they both began their turn at once, angling up off the system’s ecliptic, trying to use their warp fields to get distance with speed the fighters couldn’t match. It was a sound plan, and it would have worked except the carriers had hyperdrives, too…and one of them jumped right into the path of the two capital ships, disgorging its fighters like baby spiders scurrying away from their mother once the egg sacs opened.

  The cruisers fired on the carrier, their primary energy batteries slicing it to bits, sending glowing, melting slag tumbling away from it, but they were shutting that barn door long after the horses had left the building. What happened next was so inevitable, I didn’t even watch, turning away from the screens toward Joon-Pah. He seemed stunned, as if every nightmare he’d ever had was coming to life in front of him.

  “Get on the comms!” I snapped at him. “They’ll listen to you now! Tell them to jump out of there before it’s too late!”

  Joon-Pah made a motion toward his communications officer and after a moment, the captains of the remaining cruisers appeared on the screen.

  “Why aren’t you here with us?” one of them demanded. “They’re killing us and you sit back and watch!”

  “We are here to protect Helta Prime, as you should be,” Joon-Pah told the other Heltan. “The carriers are going to box you in if you stay where you are. You need to make as short of a hyperspace jump as you can to get clear of them, then come back to the inner system and force them to come to us and break themselves on the stronger defenses of the inner planets.”

  “That is the counsel of a traitor and a coward,” the other captain, a female I thought, spat the words. “We know what you have done, bringing the enemy to our very door! The Prime Facilitator will have you executed if you manage to live through this!”

  “Gafto-Lo-Mok is dead,” he said, delivering the news in a flat, emotionless tone, as if he was informing them it would rain later and they should remember to bring an umbrella. “She will be executing no one. The Council of Facilitators is rudderless and we must take control of the defense of this system or we will lose it and the war. If you would continue to condemn me, then do so from elsewhere, because you are seconds from utter destruction.”

  The screen was split between the two captains and the computer amalgamation of the optical and sensor data from the surveillance drones in orbit around Leviathan, and when the satellite view showed another of the carriers dropping in nearly on top of one of the Helta cruisers, it was easy to tell by the face of the female captain whose ship it was.

  “Fire!” she bellowed at someone off-screen. “Fire now!”

  Again, the main gun was devastating to the lightly-armored cargo ship, and again, they were too late. The captain’s panic only grew starker as hundreds of fighters descended on her cruiser and I knew she’d run, but I also knew she’d waited too long. Flares of light sparked across her hull and she screamed again, this time in sheer, undisguised terror.

  “Jump! Now!”

  They tried. I saw space twisting into a spiral in front of the ship, the wormhole forming to allow the hyperspace jump, but something had been hit, something crucial, and the opening wouldn’t stabilize. The twisted spiral fragmented, strands of it colliding in bursts of raw energy. The Helta cruiser didn’t explode, it disintegrated, fading into a glowing ball of gas that braided and elongated, sucked into the hole in space just before it shut.

  They were gone as if they’d never been.

  That was enough for the last survivor. He cut his transmission feed with the Truthseeker and his face disappeared from the screen, and I thought for a moment he’d be just as suicidal as the female, but then his cruiser popped out of existence, streaking into hyperspace only seconds before another of the Tevynian carriers jumped in nearly on top of where the ship had been.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, but it wasn’t much of a relief. We’d convinced one of them. One out of six, which left us with two cruisers, and one of them jumping right out of the system. The bridge had fallen silent at the retreat of the surviving cruiser, as if the combination of their losses and the realization we were all alone now was too much for them.

  “Sir,” the communications officer finally broke the silence, “we’re receiving a distress call from one of our mining installations in the outer belt. Tevynian shuttles have landed and are trying to take over the base.”

  “Why would they bother?” Joon-Pah said, touching a control on the arm of his command chair and calling up an image from the transmission, a video of ten Tevynian spacecraft anchored to the side of an asteroid at least ten miles across, remoras to its basking shark. “They have Leviathan and her moons. Why would they bother with a mining facility? They can’t be thinking of stealing ore in the middle of an invasion!”

  “Joon-Pah,” Julie asked, suspicion in her tone, “this base is inside an asteroid, right?”

  “Yes, one of our largest. It was carved out by lasers many decades ago and….”

  “And does it have any propulsion?” Julie interrupted. “Do you move it around to process the ore from the rocks you’re mining?”

  “It has a fusion reactor, gravity generator and a plasma drive built into it,” Joon-Pah confirmed. “We take it from one rock to another to handle the smelting and processing, then load the ore onto cargo ships."

  “Oh, Christ, of course you do,” I moaned, running a hand across my face as it suddenly became clear. I should have thought of it first and I could only claim exhaustion and trauma as excuses. Joon-Pah looked at me, uncomprehending. “Guess what one of those asteroids would do if they aim it at a planet.”

  The Heltan’s fingers tightened on the arms of his chair as if he were trying to steady himself.

  “They wouldn’t,” he insiste
d. “Not even the Tevynians would destroy a living world. What would it gain them?”

  “They probably wouldn’t do it to Helta Prime,” I admitted. “But what if they crashed one into your fourth planet….” I trailed off, fishing for a name I couldn’t remember.

  “Hoarfrost,” Julie supplied.

  “That,” I agreed. “They send an asteroid into Hoarfrost. And maybe you intercept it with this ship and maybe you don’t. Either way, you’re out here alone unless that other ship comes back, and you can’t stop them all. Then, once they actually land one of those punches, they tell you that you can either surrender or they’ll start throwing them at Helta Prime.”

  I shook my head. I’d just got out of the damned armor…

  “Julie, you want to give us a ride?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Lots of fighters between here and there.”

  I smiled, offering her a hand, and she took it, coming to her feet.

  “Then it’s a good thing,” I said, shooting her a smile, “that you are the hottest damn space pilot in the galaxy.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Jesus Christ,” Chief Grunewald swore. “Where the hell are all these guys coming from?”

  I was about to agree with him when the shuttle’s main drive cut off abruptly and free-fall spun my stomach for a moment. Maneuvering thrusters pounded a staccato rhythm against the hull and pushed us up at a right angle from our previous trajectory. I grabbed instinctively at the the acceleration couch between the pilot and gunner positions, wishing I was in it. I knew the magnetic soles of my armor would hold me in place, but knowing it and believing it were two different things.

  The fighters swarmed in the blackness like clouds of mosquitos and I wondered if the damned things even had enough reaction mass to make it back to their carriers after their missions. Two gravities of boost kicked me in the ass again and the shuttle rocketed forward on a slightly different heading, leaving an approaching squadron of enemy fighters on the wrong trajectory. An alarm beeped an insistent warning over the cockpit speakers and I thought I felt the temperature inside the shuttle go up a few degrees.

  “We took a hit,” Julie confirmed. “Nothing too serious. They’re too far away to do anything but mess up our paint job. Chief, you want to see what you can do to service those targets?”

  “On it, ma’am,” he grunted, “just get me a lock.”

  The gunner should, by all rights, have been an officer, but when we’d launched on this mission, no one had thought we’d need to shoot at anybody, which had, in retrospect, been short-sighted. But Grunewald was cross-trained on every system in the spacecraft because he was the crew chief and, as he’d said, “if an officer can figure it out, it can’t be that hard.”

  “Right there.” She nodded at a sensor blip, a red triangle a few miles off our bow. “Get ready.” She nudged the control yoke and brought our nose in line with the Tevynian fighter until the targeting reticle lit up red.

  “Guns,” Grunewald announced, touching the firing control.

  The shuttle lurched backwards from the discharge of the coil gun, the back and forth motion wrenching the muscles in my back and pushing the air from my lungs in a whoosh. The round sliced through the enemy fighter, catching the little spacecraft nose-on and coring it like an apple. A globe of white glowed briefly in the darkness as both reactor and reaction mass went up. It seemed a poor trade-off for the tungsten coil gun round when we only had a few hundred in our magazine and the Tevynians had endless hordes of space fighters, but missiles would be an even worse investment, not that we had any.

  “We need a laser on this thing,” I mused.

  “Are you shitting me?” Julie said, twisting around slightly to cast a baleful glare at me. “Aren’t you the one who kept complaining about how the Helta use laser weapons almost exclusively? That they’re inefficient power-hogs that put out a huge thermal bloom and hang a target on the ships and troops that fire them?”

  “Well, yeah,” I admitted. “Usually. But when you got hundreds of those shitty little fighters out there and you can only carry so much ammo, something’s got to give.”

  “I think I can manage,” she said, shooting me a smile. She nudged the yoke again and lined up another of the tiny, disposable spacecraft. “Take him, Chief.”

  “Guns.” Grunewald ignored our byplay and did his job.

  Another jolt, another fighter disintegrated, another hammer-blow of maneuvering jets and one of the glittering stars among the hundreds of thousands on the main screen expanded with alarming rapidity into a looming sphere of dull gray, only the reflection of the distant primary star on bits of metal protruding from the interior structure making it visible to the optical cameras at all.

  “That’s no moon,” I muttered, “it’s a space station.”

  “I thought it was an asteroid,” Julie said, frowning in confusion. At my outraged squawk, she laughed softly and cut the main drive, kicking the nose around with a long burst of maneuvering thrusters. “I’m just fucking with you, Andy. I am not that culturally illiterate. Tell your boys to get ready for a rough braking thrust.”

  I touched the control at my wrist and switched my helmet radio’s frequency instead of trying to twist around and shout at them down the steps in the cargo bay.

  “Hey Pops, we’re about to pull some heavy g’s. Make sure no one breaks their magnetic lock.”

  “Right,” he drawled. “Because one of us might need to go to the can or something?”

  “Depends,” I said, deadpan, and heard him laugh at the old joke.

  No one had admitted to needing them yet, but it was standard for us and the Rangers who used the Svalinn armor to wear adult diapers under our clothes, because you really couldn’t stop and strip off your armor to go to the bathroom during an op.

  “Six gees,” Julie warned and suddenly no one was laughing.

  I abruptly weighed half a ton and the armor creaked from the added strain. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe and began to wonder which was going to give way first, my electromagnetic anchors or my ribs. I wanted to curse and couldn’t work up the energy to get the words past my chest, could barely keep my brain working enough to think of a curse word. I wondered how the hell Julie managed to keep control of the shuttle through the crushing deceleration, then considered she might have programmed the flight computer to cut off the engines automatically when the braking maneuver was completed.

  I tried to count the seconds in my head, then I realized she hadn’t told me how long the burn would last and I couldn’t ask her. I clenched the muscles in my legs and gut, remembering reading about fighter pilots doing that to try to keep the blood in their brain during high-g maneuvering, but I stopped when it hurt.

  Fuck it, I don’t need to be awake for this, she does.

  But I didn’t pass out, which was disappointing, because of the aforementioned part where it hurt. Every muscle in my body was beginning to cramp up and I’d totally given up on breathing and shit! When is this going to stop?

  And then it did and I felt my stomach roil like I was going to puke, and when I didn’t, I decided it was because I hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday. Damn it, now I was hungry and that made me want to puke even more.

  “Sorry about the rough ride, gentlemen,” Julie said, sounding as if she’d just finished a brisk two-mile jog rather than being crushed under the weight of a bull rhino. She said to Grunewald, “Kill that for me, would you, Chief?”

  “Guns.”

  Another thump, a kick in the gut after I’d already been kicked there by an elephant wearing steel-toed boots, and another Tevynian space-fighter disappeared in a cloud of sublimating metal.

  “That should be the last of them for a while,” Julie said, her words nearly drowned out by the cacophony of the maneuvering jets turning us to face the asteroid base. “The rest took off after the Truthseeker. Hopefully, Joon-Pah will be smart enough to play keep-away instead of trying to plow through them like those other idiots.”
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br />   “Oh, I think the loss of five of the six other cruisers was a good enough object lesson for him,” I said. “Do me a favor and make a strafing run before we dock, just so we can make sure there are no reserve troops in those landers.”

  “Teach your grandma to suck eggs, ground-pounder,” she replied sourly, kicking the engines again, taking us to what felt like about a half a gravity of acceleration.

  “Why the hell would I want to teach my grandma to suck eggs?” I asked. “Why is that even a saying?”

  “You tell me, you’re the writer.”

  The shuttle came in low over the curve of the spherical asteroid, just below what looked, at first like a giant hole bored through to the center of the thing. Then I saw a glint of reflected sunlight off of magnetic coils and I realized the hole, over a hundred yards across, was the base’s propulsion, the plasma drive Joon-Pah had told us about. My mind boggled at the sheer power it would take to move an asteroid ten miles across through the belt like one a giant mining machine creeping across the landscape.

  Other, smaller openings pocked the crust of the massive ball of rock. I couldn’t discern their size or purpose from this distance except that they weren’t the airlock we were looking for. The shuttle seemed to creep around the asteroid, and from what little orbital mechanics I’d mastered during research for my books Julie was limited as to how much gas she could give it because escape velocity for this rock was probably laughably low.

  Finally, we curved around the edge of a ragged impact crater and there was the docking bay, a ring of burnished metal rising twenty or thirty yards above the surface. Inside should have been an open cylinder, the atmosphere held in by an energy field, but an emergency seal had closed over the opening, a remarkable piece of prevention by the Helta crew, given how unprepared for this everyone in the system was.