Lani advanced, flashing her lights, and held out a hand. One of the toulies came, tentacles describing some enormous space in the water before her, and for a moment, Lani reconsidered the assurance that they weren’t unfriendly. The animal could have no idea that her armour made her infinitely more dangerous than all of them combined, and if it assumed she was just another creature, perhaps an odd-shaped crustacean, then surely it could assume her edible. But then, some very non-sentient animals just seemed to know, by some native combination of body language and synthetic smells, that sentient bipeds were a very different kind of creature, and not to be considered food. To a touli, no doubt anything that flashed lights was a ‘talker’, and in this lake at least, one did not eat one’s interlocutor.
Lani blinked icons on her visor to enlarge the coms display to her entire face. A command function could do that, when an officer needed a full screen look at an unfolding tactical situation. All armour suits had the capability, though privates did not use it much. Anyone ranked lance corporal or above, however, was technically a commander if not an officer, and in Phoenix Company even that distinction became a little blurred, given the amount of responsibility the Major entrusted her non-coms with.
Then Lani switched off her lights. Bright in the dark water, her visor display would light up the gloom. Commanders using it were warned of that effect, and how it could give away their position in dark places. Turning the visor’s glare protection up to full usually countered that, darkening the eyeslit so that little light escaped, but Lani deactivated that function entirely, and let the touli stare into the bright, white light emanating from where her eyes should be.
She played the signal from the data-core’s containment shell. It repeated, several times, and the touli flashed back, then stopped, as though uncertain. Several others took up similar patterns, then also stopped. Lani sensed confusion. What was the strange talker trying to say? Surely the message looked very different on this little eyeslit than when spread across the vast, beautiful calligraphy of touli-arranged tentacles.
Then, suddenly, the touli burst into pulsating light. It repeated a now familiar pattern that even Lani could follow, but faster than her own. Then its neighbours joined in, and all the dark water around her was alive with that same, rhythmic pulsing. This pattern, they knew. They’d learned it from their elders, who’d learned it from their elders, and on and on back into the mists of time, to a parren who’d once visited this lake, and taught these toulies’ ancestors this song.
Now the song changed, as touli began adding a new part to their tune. The others changed to accompany. Lani wondered what it meant to them. What was communication to these beautiful creatures? It did not indicate the location of food, nor did it appear a precursor to mating. Probably it was social, but how, and to what end? Or maybe they just liked to talk, and this complex memory-mechanism of theirs was just one of these odd, self-perpetuating things that evolution occasionally threw up for no better reason than the creatures who possessed it found it fun. No wonder parren had been studying them for so long.
“Styx, are you getting this?” she asked.
“I have confirmed and isolated a new part to the communication,” Styx confirmed. “It is only two seconds long, though I believe the sequence is of greater significance than the timing, given how much touli accents can shift over time, even as their numerical ordering remains precise. Surely Drakhil foresaw this.”
“I hope so,” said Lani. “Send it to Private Ram, and we’ll see if it works. Sheep, we know it has sensors, so probably it has optics. Play the full thing first, then if nothing happens, try just the new bit the toulies are giving us. Keep all your lights off, and use the full visor display — that worked for the toulies, it should work for the containment vessel.”
13
“We’ve got it!” came Lance Corporal Graf’s excited voice from Cephilae. “The containment shell just opened up, there was some kind of storage module inside and we’ve got it in hand! We’re clear!”
Thirty-nine seconds until the window vanished, Erik saw. “Phoenix, all hands prepare for combat. Arms, I want you to hit whatever survives our first strike, your choice. Operations, we are full withdrawal of all assets on my mark, coordinates to follow. Styx, you have full access to all coms, kill all hostiles.”
A chorus of terse assent came back, followed by the chatter of bridge officers laying down the law to their underlings, setting the parameters, preparing for events. Erik sank deeper into the full VR emersion between his headset glasses and the wrap-around screens that surrounded him. Readiness windows showed him trajectories, velocities, windows of fire, and the orbital ascent trajectories of their three grounded shuttles.
This particular low orbital trajectory placed all three shuttle recovery windows in a rough line, reachable with a single burn manoeuvre, if they all launched in correct sequence and made the rendezvous coordinates at the precise required moment. Erik had no doubts that his pilots could do it, but the danger was that Aristan’s ships were unlikely to cooperate. There were five in orbital position, three low and two high. The low ones bothered Erik the least — they crisscrossed Cephilae’s surface on orbits adjusted to maximise direct overflight of the three grounded shuttles. Cephilae was cloudy, and neither Scan nor Nav suspected the parren had had much luck seeing anything on the surface, and thus remained in the dark about which location held the data-core.
None of those three ships were currently visual with Phoenix, the mechanics of low orbit making that unlikely. One of them was going to be, in approximately four-and-a-half minutes on current headings… but those headings were likely to change once the shooting started. It was the two high ships, each in high geostationary that had Erik concerned. The nearer ship was Toristan, the further was named Corelda. And Phoenix’s current orbital path, and the path she was required to take to rendezvous with all of their upcoming shuttles, took her directly under Corelda’s guns, with all the advantages of the ‘downslope’ gravity-well.
Lisbeth, he thought. But it was too late now. Aristan was going to try and kill all of Phoenix’s crew, on or off the ship. There was nothing he could do about it other than save those he could, and hope against hope that Styx’s unlikely message from Gesul’s operative was in fact true.
The countdown reached zero. “Styx, execute,” he said. And Phoenix transmitted, just a small signal, multi-directional and unimpressive.
“I have a return signal from Toristan,” said Shilu, squinting at some faint signal on his screens. “I’m not sure what it…”
“Toristan is disabled,” Styx cut in. “Geostationary to our rear is clear, the infiltration appears to have disabled ship systems.” A slight pause, and then, “Corelda has partially resisted my coms infiltration, but her primary bridge functions appear disabled. She can move, but has no eyes.”
“Arms, kill Corelda,” Erik said coldly.
“Aye Captain, Corelda is hot,” Karle said calmly, clearing trigger guards and unleashing ordnance with multiple, heavy thuds.
Erik hit thrust, burning along the pre-designated orbital-plus course that would see Phoenix travelling far too fast for unadjusted orbit. It wasn’t a hard burn, only two-G for now, as he had to line up the course Kaspowitz had laid out for him, intersecting a zigzag line across Cephilae’s upper atmosphere.
“This is Operations, all shuttles are departing hard, ETAs are a match!” So far, that meant, none of them had been delayed. PH-3 was last in the sequence, three-quarters of an orbit away and technically behind them. “All marines are confirmed aboard!”
“Multiple angry coms transmissions,” Shilu observed, predictably. “Our parren friends are not happy. I’m hearing a word that translates as ‘treachery’.”
“Fuck ‘em,” said Erik, and meant it. “Tell PH-4 to push hard, she’s going to need to gun it to make that rendezvous.” A query light blinked on his visor, polite and innocent, with a direct link to main coms beyond it. “Yes Styx,” Erik answered it. “What is it?�
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“Captain, the assassin bugs on Toristan have disabled the ship. Do you order Toristan’s crew eliminated as well?”
Erik hesitated for only the shortest moment. “Yes,” he said. “Prioritise senior officers.”
“Yes Captain.” It occurred to him, in the split second that was all he had to consider such things, that he should have thought more about that order in advance of this action. Killing Aristan was no small matter in the larger scheme of things, given all the implications for parren stability and beyond. But it was what it was, and Aristan had crossed Phoenix first. The penalty was death, and Erik did not mind if all the Spiral knew it. “Captain, there is no response from my other bugs, it appears we have only neutralised one ship.”
There was a flash on Scan, from high ahead. “Corelda is dead,” said Karle, with cool satisfaction to observe his work.
“Two ships,” Erik corrected Styx. “It’s enough, we’re good. Arms, I see Deara is burning hard to an overhead intercept. Fire high and keep her close to stratosphere.”
“Aye Captain,” said Karle, and aligned the guns on that position. Erik saw the trajectories line up, indicated a left roll for Karle’s benefit, then performed as Karle fired, the big ship rolling through 360 degrees to bring all weapons to bear in a continuous volley.
Even as he did it, he was watching the outgoing light horizon toward the incoming three ships from Tarimal. The light-wave would just be reaching them now, followed by a fast boost-up that they’d see shortly. Phoenix would have to complete the full orbit, collect all three shuttles along the way, and hope for no delays, or those three would be right on them, trailing a vast spread of incoming ordnance on a target whose position was not only made predictable by the shuttle rendezvous, but was at limited mobility at the bottom of a gravity-well. The saving grace was that the final intercept, on PH-3 and Charlie Platoon, was going to be on the far side of Cephilae from those incoming three ships… but once they started running, not for long.
He angled Phoenix nose-down toward Cephilae, the ongoing thrust now not to build further velocity, but to keep Phoenix in close orbit while carrying orbital-plus velocity, like a kid in an overpowered car sliding tail-out around a corner.
“Deara is diving low to avoid our fire,” Geish announced. “She’s gonna be skimming the atmosphere. I have no good read on it, but I’m pretty sure she’s already fired, I am plotting incoming max probability.”
“Arms hold fire,” Erik directed, as incoming talk arrived from PH-4.
“Course is good,” came Tif’s unmistakable drawl. “PH-4 is nax power and stratospheric. Orbit-plus V in two-point-five ninute.” ‘M’s or no ‘m’s, her accent was clearly improving. Erik glanced at his rendezvous point, and saw it was two-point-five minutes out, and Tif would match Phoenix’s velocity at precisely the point where she also matched her course. But now Phoenix had Deara on a parallel intersecting orbit from the side.
“Tif,” Erik told her, “Phoenix is about to manoeuvre. We’re going to push the intercept two hundred klicks downrange, intercept V plus one thousand kph.”
“Copy Phoenix,” Tif said calmly. “Downrange and faster, I adjust.” Meaning she didn’t particularly trust the numbers he’d just given her, and would watch Phoenix to see exactly what was required. For a good enough pilot, that was probably wise, and Tif was plenty good enough.
“Ordinance incoming!” Geish announced, as that string of blips appeared on Erik’s screen. It came from Deara’s direction, skimming the atmosphere.
“Paste it!” Karle instructed his junior, and Second Lieutenant Harris did that, engaging the secondaries in a crackle of outgoing defensive fire.
“Hold offensive fire,” Erik told Karle, all senses tracking in that hyper-aware slow motion that only happened in this chair, in combat. He could see his move coming, and he didn’t think Deara could survive it. “High-G manoeuvre imminent. Arms, fire on the pause.”
“Aye Captain, fire on the pause!”
Harris’s fire intercepted the incoming, lines of super-hot explosions vaporising onrushing warheads, and then Erik’s lines all matched. He swung Phoenix end-over and when they were tail-first and offset away from Cephilae, fired hard. Engines roared at five-G, then built quickly to eight, as everyone strained and gasped against the sudden blackness of vision.
Ten seconds and Erik cut, swinging the ship about once more as Karle hammered a full spread at Deara on that pause in thrust — his angle suddenly higher above the atmosphere, and the trajectory heading radically closer across the parren warship’s metaphorical bow. A second burst of thrust to regain previous V and course, Deara desperately evading the torrent that now descended on her from an unexpected position. At this intersecting range there was no hope, Deara’s defensive batteries fended the first wave, but were overwhelmed by the second, and the explosion was seen not just on Scan, but on visuals — a bright, tumbling fireball across the Cephilae horizon.
“Didn’t see that coming, did ya?” Karle snorted. Phoenix changed direction terrifyingly fast for such a big ship. Coming at her blind over the horizon of a close-orbit world was reckless bordering on suicidal, like charging an enormous predator across an open field while just hoping it didn’t look your way.
“PH-4,” Erik said coolly, “we are manoeuvre complete, fixing new interception point now.”
“PH-4 copy, Phoenix. Nice noove.”
“This is Operations, we are go for capture.”
“Tif,” said Erik, “you are Berth Two and I am rolling for position. We are target clear for five minutes at least, course change will immediately follow intercept.”
“Captain,” said Geish, “those inbound three just pulsed jump engines, they are moving to combat intercept.”
Erik could see that without needing to be told, but bridge procedure was to announce it anyway in clear coms, so everyone knew. “Arms, put some fire in their path in case they’re dumb enough to hold that V all the way in.”
“Aye Captain,” said Karle, aligning that spread. Phoenix warheads were reaction-driven, self-guided and capable of thrust for short periods at twenty-Gs. Fuel limited their potential V-change, but any ship caught at close range with a twenty-G warhead and unable to jump could not possibly outrun it. The trick was not allowing oneself to be caught in that position, and onboard combat computers, and a Captain’s innate sense of such things, ran at furious speeds to try and calculate all the ways of avoiding it. Arms Officers like Karle and Harris in turn played tricks on those calculations, laying spreads at variable V and position to predict future manoeuvres, and impart a risk to each. Against a warship the size of Phoenix, that could lay down this volume of advanced high-tech warheads in their path, smaller parren cruisers would be wise to slow down and calculate.
“Captain, they’re dividing,” said Geish. “They’re going to come past Cephilae on all sides to make a crossfire. I calculate probable V projection gives them an ETA of twenty-one minutes.”
“We’ll be done in fifteen,” said Erik, watching as PH-4 emerged from Cephilae’s upper atmosphere ahead, a tiny dot on a trail of flame, burning hard toward the new intercept. The first time he’d tried this kind of recovery mission in an Academy simulation, he’d collided with a shuttle and damaged both ships. The second time, he’d botched the second intercept, had taken thirty seconds longer than the course required, and missed the third intercept completely. Happily, he’d improved a lot since then. “Scan, have we got a fix on those other two low orbitals?”
“Not yet Captain, they’re farside and silent, I’m looking.”
“I’m getting something behind us,” came Ensign Singh’s voice in Lieutenant Regan Jersey’s ears. Unlike on a warship bridge, she couldn’t hear anyone else in the cockpit in combat, even when they were sitting directly in front of her. The big helmet, and the howling roar of full thrust, isolated her from everything save the friendly green scrawl of her visor and heads-up overlay, telling her everything about the state of her ship. “Trans-sonic, hi
gh altitude, it’s probably anti-aerial. I’m tracking a solution for countermeasures.”
“Hello Phoenix,” said Regan, thankful the parren hadn’t destroyed the orbital satellites needed to talk to a ship on the other side of Cephilae. Evidently the parren needed them too, and couldn’t find a way to stop Styx’s communications short of that. “We are tracking inbound AAs, it looks like one of those parren close-orbitals is on top of us.”
“It’s dividing!” Singh said tersely. “Multiple inbound, I’m reading Mach 15 and decelerating, ETA one-fifteen.”
PH-3 was only at three thousand metres and climbing — being the last in Phoenix’s string of pickups, they’d had more time to finish up before launch. She’d even managed to hover above the lake surface to help Charlie Platoon haul up the last bit of equipment in the lake — the coms buoy — not wanting to leave any clues behind for parren techs to run diagnostics on. Regan wondered what the toulies would make of the big, angry beast howling above their lake, and whether they’d be talking about it ten thousand years later.
Now she roared through the cloud layer without much care for turbulence, defeating the rough air with sheer force as they thundered and bumped. AA rounds were space-launched and self-guided, always trans-sonic and designed to pluck atmospheric vehicles from the sky, where spaceships otherwise found them near-impossible to target. Regan hoped the parren AA rounds weren’t as good as the human variety — Phoenix’s were murderously good, and had saved the Captain and Major’s life on Stoya III. Very little could match the alo for technology, and much human technology, including Phoenix, was alo… but then, the parren had been in space forty thousand years longer…
“PH-3, this is Phoenix, we copy. Stay low, we’ve time to adjust the pickup, just stay alive.”
“PH-3 copies Phoenix, that’s the plan.” A firing solution appeared on armscomp, and Regan fired — counter-missiles leaped from the underside racks, streaking around in a wide arc to go behind them. She fired two more on a different spread, then headed deeper into the thick of the cloud — if assault shuttles didn’t like thick, moist air and turbulence, trans-sonic rounds would hate them, relying on very thin air at high altitude for stability. “Hang on down the back,” she told the marines, “it’s gonna get real bumpy.”
Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Page 19