Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  I hesitated, my rifle halfway up. There were an even dozen of them still alive. They were the enemy. They were fanatics who would throw themselves into battle with nothing but pistols on the chance they might kill us. They’d killed two of my people already…and yet.

  “Switch it back on,” I told Julie.

  Most of the Tevynian crew were three or four meters off the floor. When the gravity field re-engaged, they splattered, some with the unmistakable crack of breaking bones, and not a one managed to hold onto a weapon. I switched my translator to Tevynian and activated the public address speakers.

  “Surrender,” I told them, “and I’ll let you live. If one of you makes a move for a weapon, you all die.”

  There didn’t seem to be any attempt at reaching a consensus—most of them were too busy writhing in pain on the deck, clutching injured arms or legs or necks. I assumed the sale and stepped into their midst, kicking away their weapons.

  “Come on, Baker,” I said, heading for the bridge. “Bring Grunewald in here with us.”

  Baker grabbed the chief under his arms and lifted him easily, backing through the hatchway into the control center and I stopped at the security panel and hit the control to lower the blast shield. It ground slowly into place, cutting us off from the wounded, just in case any of them managed to recover enough to grab a gun.

  “Can you see what’s happening with Pops in engineering?” I asked Julie, going to the command station just behind helm, where she was strapped in.

  “Beats the hell out of me,” she admitted. “I can fly this thing because I learned how to on the Truthseeker, but that was the communications officer’s territory.”

  “That’s them right there,” Baker said, pointing at a small section of the holographic projection covering the front bulkhead.

  And it was. Cartimandua had left the security cameras activated. Less than two minutes had passed, but everything had changed. The engineering compartment was a charnel house, littered with dead bodies, obscured by a haze of drifting, swirling smoke slowly being cleaned by the ventilation system. The dead were black shapes on the deck, half-obscured by power conduit housings, columns running electricity from the fusion reactor to the drives and weapons systems.

  I tried to find Pops and the others, desperation metastasizing in my gut like a cancer as I imagined them all laid out among the other corpses on the deck. Then I saw a plasma blast flash from behind one of the power conduits, spearing something on the other side of the compartment hatchway. The view from the passageway was on a screen next to the one from engineering and both screens whited out from the intensity of the energy burst. When the picture cleared, a scattering of black-clad Tevynian soldiers were down, and charred spots on the deck marked where some had been vaporized.

  At least a dozen more retreated from the hatchway, pulling back from the firing arc of the plasma gun, and now I could see the team, or at least some of them. They were taking cover behind the power couplings, and only the two plasma gun emitters stuck out far enough to be seen from this angle. Out in the corridor, a smoking, melted, mass of slag was all that was left of the Tevynian plasma gun, flipped over on its side, only its caster-style wheels untouched by the shot which had taken it out.

  “Pops,” I called. “Do you read?”

  There was no reply, and I tried again.

  “Yeah, I’m here, sir.” The response was distant and static-filled, but even that wasn’t enough to disguise the pain in his voice.

  “Status report.” The words hurt to say, but I had to know. “Do you have control of engineering?”

  “We got it for now,” Pops told me. “There are still some more of them out there, but we’re holding it.”

  “See if you can get the blast shield down,” I said. I licked my lips, hesitating, staring at the bodies littering the deck. “Casualties?”

  “We’re all walking wounded at this point,” Pops said. “The ones still walking, anyway. Diesel took a hit in the battery pack and had to ditch his armor. Rodent and Gus are KIA.”

  I closed my eyes, leaning against the command chair, something emptying out of my soul.

  “I, um,” I began, then had to abandon the words and try again. “We lost Chief Grunewald, and Colonel Nieves is wounded, but not badly. We have control of the bridge. Get that shield down and hole up there until you hear from me.”

  “Roger that, sir.” Pops was all business, as if this was just another op, and someone hadn’t just stuck a red-hot knife into his heart, but I knew him better than that. They didn’t call him Pops just because of his age. The team was his family, and we’d lost three of them in one day.

  “Where the fuck did the bridge crew go?” Baker asked. Grunewald’s body was at his feet, as if he’d forgotten the man once he’d dragged him inside. “They wasn’t out there.” He jerked a thumb at the blast shield. “And there’s no way in hell they could have snuck past us on our way in.”

  Something occurred to me, something I hadn’t thought about before because Tevynians didn’t retreat, didn’t surrender. On the far side of the bridge, wedged between the holographic viewscreens and the blast shield, was an oval hatch flush with the bulkhead. I’d seen its like before on the Truthseeker, had gotten Joon-Pah to open the hatch and let me take a look inside.

  I touched a control beside the hatch and grimaced at what it told me. I didn’t even need my comm unit to translate.

  “What’s that?” Baker asked.

  “The bridge escape pod,” I told him, my voice sounding oddly detached, as if this was all happening to someone else. “There’s a shaft that leads all the way to the outer hull. It’s big enough to hold the whole bridge crew and has enough fuel to get them clear of the ship. Food, air, and commo gear.”

  I shook my head.

  “And it’s gone.” The bridge crew had escaped…and they knew humans were allied with the Helta. I’m such a fucking idiot.

  “I need help,” Julie said, ignoring the escape pod and its implications. “The chief is dead and I can’t fly this thing and shoot the main gun at the same time.”

  She seemed to grow impatient with the claustrophobic view through her helmet visor and yanked at the gasket release, twisting the helmet off of her head and tossing it onto the deck. It hit with a clatter and rolled a foot away from her seat, and she sucked in a deep breath.

  “You want to man the tactical station? You’re always complaining you don’t like space combat because you don’t get to shoot back. Well, here’s your chance.”

  Under other circumstances, I might have laughed at that. Instead, I started stripping my armor, since there was no way I was going to fit into the tactical station in the Svalinn suit. A few months ago I would have had to get Baker to help me, but we’d made some changes to the suit after our first combat experience in it and added quick-releases. Before I clambered out of the exoskeleton, I locked the heel magnets to the floor, just in case. If the gravity went out or we got hit hard enough to overload the shields, I really didn’t want the suit flying around the compartment like a 600-pound cannonball.

  The restraint harnesses on the Tevynian seats were slightly different than ours, though they were intuitive enough for me to figure out in a few seconds. The readouts, though…

  “How the hell do I control this thing?” I asked, fingers floating over the touch screen controls, afraid to touch anything.

  Julie clucked impatiently and loosened her restraints, leaning over to my station and tapping through one menu after another. She had to be doing it by memory, because she didn’t read Tevynian any better than I did, and she wasn’t going slow enough to be using a translator. In an impressive, economical four commands, she brought up an external view on my display and I was looking at the ass end of what I was pretty sure was the other enemy cruiser. Beyond the massive, wedge-shaped starship, the Truthseeker was still maneuvering, trying to get her spinal mount impulse gun aligned with the Tevynian vessel.

  That fight is still going on? How the hell lo
ng has it been? How long have we been on board this ship?

  “See this circle?” Julie said, pointing at a red ring near the bottom of the display. At my nod, she went on. “When it turns blue, put your finger against it and drag a line toward whatever you want to fire the main laser at. Then touch the circle again and hold it. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Julie strapped in with one hand, the other dancing over the helm controls. I felt nothing, but the view on the screen changed, like we were playing some elaborate computer game instead of twisting and bending the fabric of spacetime to propel a hundred-thousand-ton starship at a million miles an hour. We’d fallen back from the engagement between the two ships, though I couldn’t tell exactly how far from the readouts because even if the numbers were there, they certainly weren’t Arabic.

  “Just another second,” Julie said, her brow furrowed in concentration as she tried to keep up with the frantic attempts of the embattled cruisers to gain each other’s flank. “Keep your eye on the ball.”

  I didn’t know if that was a football thing or a naval aviator thing, but either way, I watched that little circle like a hawk, waiting for the color to change. When it flashed blue, my fingers were moving before Julie could yell at me to fire. I traced the line just like she’d described, stretching it from the blue circle to the drive pods of the Tevynian cruiser, then jamming my finger against the circle and whispering a prayer I was doing it right.

  Someone was listening, whether it was the God of my father or maybe the Elders hanging out on the spiritual plane somewhere. The computer simulated trajectory with a blue line connecting our ship to theirs. When it hit, it felt like all of reality shuddered from the impact. It was actually their drive field losing stability as it absorbed the energy of the blast, and something flared white-hot next to the port drive pod, a halo of expanding gas, proof the shot had penetrated to the actual skin of the ship.

  “Got the fucker,” I murmured.

  It wasn’t enough to disable the enemy ship, but it sure as hell got his attention. He was turning and Julie was turning us to counter his move, trying to keep us out of his arc of fire.

  “Takes the capacitor banks a little time to recharge,” she reminded me.

  I nodded, eyes fixed on the red ring, concentrating on not looking up at the enemy. I couldn’t do anything about him except shoot back.

  “He made a mistake,” Julie said, her voice gleeful. “He forgot about Joon-Pah.”

  But Joon-Pah hadn’t forgotten about him. He’d only needed a distraction. I didn’t actually see the impulse gun fire, but I sure as hell saw when it hit. The Tevynian ship was huge, over half a mile long and half that wide, but it blew apart like a plastic model with a firecracker stuffed into the end. The reactor burst into a globe of star-hot plasma and pieces of the ship went spinning away, imparted with an impossibly complicated spin from the impact of the tungsten slug and the lateral propulsion of the reactor explosion.

  I threw off my safety harness and went to the communications console-or where was on the Truthseeker—and pulled out my comm unit, pulling up a Tevynian translation program.

  “You think you can raise Joon-Pah?” Julie asked me, though I wasn’t sure if she was guessing at what I was trying to do or expressing doubt I could pull it off.

  “That’s the idea.” And if my answer was noncommittal, it was only because I had no idea.

  The translation program didn’t help at all, so I switched to the bridge crew tutorials and followed the step-by-step instructions on the video until I thought I had it down. I touched the final control and crossed my fingers.

  “Truthseeker, this is Andy Clanton on the USS…” I trailed off, looking to Julie for help, since she was the Navy officer.

  “Two Angels,” she decided. “That was a French ship seized by the US under a letter of marque in the 1800s.”

  “This is Major Andy Clanton on the USS Two Angels,” I transmitted. “Do you read me?”

  “We read you, Andy,” Joon-Pah replied, his voice coming over the speakers built into the bridge bulkheads. “Thank the Elders you’re alive. What would you have us do?”

  My eyes bulged. Why the hell was he asking me what to do? I looked at Julie, shaking my head helplessly.

  “Don’t look at me,” she insisted, raising her hands palms up, “I just fly this thing.”

  “Keep going after the asteroids,” I told Joon-Pah. “You’ve got the only thing that can take them out. We’ll do our best to keep the fighters and cruisers off your back.”

  “What about sending you a bridge crew? Surely you can’t handle the ship with just Colonel Nieves.”

  I frowned, considering it. I really wanted to get the Delta team back to the Truthseeker for medical attention, but…

  “No,” I decided. “The hangar bay is trashed, we wouldn’t even be able to get to it. Plus, we still have a few armed hostiles running around inside the ship. We have engineering and the bridge secured, but escorting noncombatants would be too big of a drain for our people. We’ll make do with what we have.”

  “Just head for the next target, Joon-Pah,” Julie told him, fingers stroking the control screen like a potter sculpting clay on a mold. “We’ve got your back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Do I gotta do this?” Sgt. First Class Ryan Baker asked, a plaintive note in his voice as he looked up at me from the glowing display of the engineering console. “Couldn’t I just stay in my armor in case someone tries to break through the blast shield?”

  The man really hadn’t liked getting out of his Svalinn, not least because of the wound on his leg, which looked so much worse without the armor covering it. He could barely walk enough to get himself to the chair before his leg had nearly collapsed under him.

  “It’s simple, Baker,” Julie growled, her patience obviously worn thin from his incessant whining about being out of his suit. “You see those power level meters?” She jabbed a finger at the half dozen column-shaped readouts on his board. “As long as the level is in the blue, we’re good. If it dips into the red, that’s bad. If it jumps up into the yellow, that’s even worse. All you have to do is watch the damned things and let me know if either of those things happen.”

  “But what does that shit even mean?” he asked.

  I could see Julie’s temperature rising, her ears turning red the way they did when she was about to blow a gasket, so I stepped in. I didn’t know much about the ship, but I thought I at least knew enough to satisfy Baker, whose knowledge of the physics involved was even less complete than my own.

  “This ship has a reactor, right?” I asked him. “Fusion reactor, big-ass thing that puts out all kinds of power. But when we fire the laser batteries or do a jump to hyperspace, it takes a big spike of energy. And for those, the ship uses huge, superconducting capacitors. Those are hooked up to the power couplings, but they’re not supposed to charge until and unless they’re drained. If the couplings were damaged when the team took engineering, they could start trying to charge before the capacitors discharge and that could cause them to blow. That’s when you’ll see the yellow. Also, the reactor has to provide a pretty much constant charge to the drive field, also through those couplings, so if it dips into the red, that means we’re losing power. You got that?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he muttered. “Don’t know why I couldn’t have kept my armor on, though.”

  “Don’t grind your teeth,” I warned Julie. “It’ll give you a headache.”

  “Just keep your eyes open for something to shoot, jarhead,” she snapped, not amused by my attempt at humor.

  I gave up and turned my attention back to the tactical display, trying to figure out exactly what the sensors were trying to tell me. I knew that the Truthseeker was the big, orange-colored arrowhead on the sensor screen because we still had it in visual range, and I had to assume orange was the color the Tevynians had assigned to enemy ships. The ship I’d fired on earlier had been red, and that must mean friendly, so I had
to switch those around in my head. Red meant enemy, which was convenient since it was how we did things on the Jambo.

  The Truthseeker was the only orange on the sensor screen, and the only cruiser, but there were dozens of tiny red dots out there, most of them attached to the gray circles the sensor display had assigned to the small asteroids. Well, “small” was a relative term. Each of the rocks was bigger than the cruiser, the largest nearly two miles across, and any one of them would destroy a city if it hit Hoarfrost. And the fact that it might take weeks for the rocks to get there didn’t make any difference, because if we just ignored them and fought off the Tevynians first, by the time we got back, blowing them to pieces wouldn’t do anything but make the impact more devastating.

  Of course, the Helta could use spaceships to shift their course again, but God alone knows if they’ll have any intact spaceships when this is over.

  “Those rocks are close together,” I said, guesstimating from the relative size of the Truthseeker in the sensor readout.

  “On a cosmological scale,” Julie allowed. “Maybe one or two light-seconds apart. Probably because the fighters have a limited range, so they just hopped off the carrier in this vicinity and latched onto the closest rocks they could find.” She frowned. “Still, they’re are closer together than they would be in our asteroid belt. I bet the Helta herded them together to make it easier to mine them.”

  “They just collected a bunch of stones for the Tevynians to sling at them.” I grunted. “It’s all very Biblical.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said drily, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t have a preacher for a daddy.”