“They know where Styx went,” said Lieutenant Alomaim from further down the cut-like trench. “Maybe they do know this place after all.” He was two hundred metres further down the trench, the closest of Bravo Platoon, with a clear line-of-sight to Trace so he could speak on lasercom without the deepynines observing or jamming.
“I reckon they could guess the general layout from looking at it,” Trace replied. The mini-drone on the trench-rim above fed visuals direct to her visor, also lasercom, also invisible to anyone not in the trench. “Styx showed them herself that she came down here with the data-core, and the geofeature is pretty central to the city. It makes sense that the primary power and control centre would be in the centre.”
The deepynine shuttles looked alarming, too. There were eight of them, disk-shaped with downward-curling wings to clasp neatly to the sides of starships. They did not look well-suited to atmospheric flight, but then the deepynines had been even less interested in planets than had the drysines. Even from this range, the dim vid-footage showed various leading-edge protuberances to the wings and nose that were almost certainly weapon systems. High-V warheads could be down here faster than anyone could find effective cover, and even tavalai or human warheads that size could kill entire Sections with a single blast. Likely deepynine warheads were worse. And while marine rifle fire would work well, any missiles fired upward would likely be jammed by countermeasures on those shuttles. Phoenix’s techs had upgraded some marine systems with hacksaw-related technology, but that was mostly coms, networks and countermeasures — they simply hadn’t had time to start on missiles or armscomp targeting.
The more Trace looked at them, the more certain she was that staying beneath ground, and not firing into the air from the surface, had been the correct decision. It had been an established tactic of warfare since the days of swords and arrows — do not engage from range, keep your defences hidden, let the enemy come forward to where they were most vulnerable, then envelope and crush. For a moment Trace thought back on those Academy days on Homeworld, listening to lectures in class as a teenager and thinking, somewhat arrogantly, that she was already so much more advanced than the rest of her non-Kulina classmates. Perhaps she’d been right… but the older Trace Thakur, looking back at that green kid in her rank-free uniform, could think of a few choice words she’d like to have with her about just how little she actually knew.
The wave of falling drones weren’t coming all that fast, thanks to light gravity. Everyone on the ground, parren or human, was hidden at least ten levels down, and watching the surface with only micro-drones less than the size of a palm. They knew enough about deepynine capabilities, thanks to Styx and captured deepynine remains from the TK-55 asteroid base, to know that their visual sensors weren’t that good.
“I’m not seeing any discernible pattern or formation deployment,” Trace added. It would be frustrating that she could only talk to Alomaim, if she let it be. “No apparent sections or platoons. Possibly they can coordinate so smoothly that fluid formations become possible.”
“They’ll need to maintain perfect coms for that,” Alomaim replied. “Once they’re down and inside, they won’t get it.” Among the countermeasures upgrades the techs had given them were vastly improved jamming capabilities. Styx said they should be effective against deepynines, but only at close range, and only ‘indoors’, where line-of-sight lasercom became impossible between all but the smallest units. Risky though it was to presume superiority in any field against enemies like these, Trace reckoned that if her marines had any truly significant advantage, it was in their ability to make smart independent decisions at the small-unit level when deprived of wider communications and coordination. Thus her preference to drawing the deepynines in to close-quarters combat, turning up the jamming, then shoot-and-manoeuvre where Koshaims gave marines a one-shot kill advantage that deepynine rotary cannon, though powerful, still lacked.
“Any word on those other ships?” Alomaim pressed.
“We know one of the five big ones are dead, two damaged. The damaged two went straight by, we don’t know if they can regain position to bring themselves back into play.” It wasn’t her speciality, but she knew enough orbital mechanics for that. She also knew, but wasn’t prepared to tell Alomaim, that she’d received no signal from any ship for fifteen minutes now. In the current situation, maintaining constant tactical updates to forces on the ground should have been every vessel’s second-most priority, after immediate survival. Although she could think of several reasons why that might be so, all but one seemed like wishful thinking.
“These guys are coming so slowly, looks like they might just ground and wait. What about those last three sard…” He paused. “What the hell is that?”
Then Trace saw it too. The vid-feed on her visor was showing something bright, glowing upon the horizon. Trace flicked to her tacnet map — tacnet might be down, but it retained all data they’d collected on the city. That way was north — the big towers and canyons. The light was now growing steadily, not an explosion, just a glow. Like city lights, in profusion. And now, in the foreground, a dome-and-gantry structure began flickering to life, a blink of long-dead running lights upon skeletal steel arms. In the trench, through the engineering level directly opposite, overheads and floods began to dance and heat, spreading a patchy white glow upon surfaces left dark for twenty five millennia.
“They turned it on!” said Sergeant Neuman. “Dale and Lisbeth turned the whole fucking city on!” That was overstating it, Trace thought. A place this big would take days to power up fully. But somewhere deep, near the core of the moon, some great reactor, or series of reactors, were firing up and bringing power and light to the ancient city of Defiance. What else it might bring, Trace could only hope… and like all things that were beyond her capacity to influence, she put it from her mind.
In the dark sky above, the electric flares below were answered by thruster flares, as five hundred deepynine drones kicked full power to their propulsion, and dove.
“The enemy’s not happy,” Trace observed. “They know they can’t wait any longer, they’re attacking at less than full strength.” And she spared a moment to think of Phoenix and all her crew… and of Erik in particular. If he’d given his life for this, it was a sacrifice worthy of the Kulina. Now she had to make it count. “Here we go, people. Let’s make Phoenix proud.”
“Here they come,” said Lieutenant Jasmine Crozier, peering upward from her hide by a landing platform, five kilometres down a ten-kilometre-deep hole in the city. The geofeature was nearly two hundred metres wide and not a regular shape, with platforms, piping and other engineering forms breaking the symmetry of the outline, up and down. Directly above, at the tiny opening at the hole’s far end, there came a cluster of bright lights, swarming like fireflies.
About Crozier, Delta Platoon were arranged for ambush, their deployment spreading five hundred metres above and below her position. Forty-two marines, two short of the usual forty-four, all of Phoenix Company’s platoons had a few casualties from previous fights still unfilled. But Alpha Platoon’s Heavy Squad had been left at the base of the geofeature to guard Alpha’s back, and now Lance Corporal Wu agreed with Crozier’s assessment that that defence would be best served up here, midway down the hole. Wu and his eight-strong squad had climbed up on suit-thrust — improbable on a full G world, but simple enough here. They’d made several stops on wall platforms to allow thrusters to cool, necessary given the extra weight they’d carried in extra ammo from AT-7, the civvie shuttle now parked out of sight in a side bay.
Wu had dispersed his eight heavies in the lowest part of the ambush zone, with extra ammo dispersed at various locations for defensive reloads. They’d all been doing that, taking the full load off the shuttles and putting it where they could access it in a hurry. Then they’d checked fields of fire, and while the geofeature deployment had the look of a circular firing squad, Koshaim rounds could be set to explode short, and these would now not reach the far wal
l intact. Finally they’d scouted the escape routes, and where they’d retreat if some deepynines abandoned the killzone and flanked them. Once that started happening, Crozier knew, the whole defence would start to break down… but by then, the enemy might have been slowed enough, and hurt enough, to give Alpha Platoon a chance.
Below Delta were a similarly-sized unit of parren marines. Their commander’s name was Salil, and Crozier had left his deployments for him alone. The parren had smaller rifles, rapid-fire but solid-case, not explosive. Those bullets would not stop, and she’d requested Salil to remind his troops of that, when firing upward through human positions.
The deepynines were hurtling down the geofeature fast, full thrust toward the ground. Probably they suspected what was waiting for them. Crozier took a last look over her stored tacnet positions, did a final review of suit systems, with particular notice of damage control and anti-decompression active layer, then took the safety off her enormous rifle. Even in zero-G it felt heavy — as tall as she was in armour, and more comforting than a teddy bear to a small child. Its calibre wasn’t too great — a mere twelve milimetres — but the muzzle velocity was insane, a mag-chem ignition mix, all the speed of electro-magnetic fire with the added chemical charge for extra punch, and that alarming recoil.
Then she peered about her doorway corner once more, past the long-dead frame of a loading trolley on rails. Two kilometres, and approaching fast. She reckoned there might be a hundred of them, probably more. And raised the rifle to vertical, still clear of the doorway least one of them register that movement. Forty-five degrees around the geofeature’s wall, she saw her XO, Master Sergeant Tim Wong, similarly crouched and looking at her. The targets crossed one K and she stepped out, and aimed the rifle.
“Fuck ‘em up!” she yelled, and fifty marines stepped clear and fired at once. Deepynines returned fire immediately, and the enormous shaft filled with ripping red tracer and incoming missile flares… but ten deepynines died in the opening volley, exploding violently or sent spinning and limp, and the rest went evasive, thrusting sideways and darting to avoid the murderous Koshaim fire. Suit countermeasures activated as missiles rushed down, but Crozier saw them headed elsewhere, and stayed where she was, picking targets and firing.
Marines yelled warnings, ducked back and displaced as explosions tore the walls and sent debris spinning across the void amidst a hailstorm of ricocheting chaingun fire. Shots hit the platform directly before her, and Crozier hit full forward attitude thrust — in low-G combat, there wasn’t enough grip on the ground to dodge quickly, so marines used super-charged thrusters to kick their evasive manoeuvres. This one blasted her back off the platform, smacking hard off a wall as she checked the suddenly active tacnet. It showed a mess — manoeuvres, firing, yelling, several possible casualties, lots of static breakup.
She ducked right to the opposing side of her doorway, then stepped out to fire again. The sight was incredible, deepynines now streaking in at high-V, sacrificing accuracy for making themselves hard to hit, while others hung back and laid down cover fire. Marines snapped shots from wall cover, like contestants at a shooting range aiming at clay pigeons with extreme deflection. She shot at one that streaked by, missed, then stepped out a little more for an angle on a downward plunging drone at less deflection… it fired on her, rapid rounds snapping off nearby steel, then vanished in a hail of fire from one of Heavy Squad’s suits that took out a stretch of wall behind it, and had her dodging deepynine parts as they tumbled past.
Now the lower-placed heavies from Alpha Platoon were joining in, and the space within the shaft became a true killzone, with more fire, flame and carnage than Crozier had seen in her life. Drones came apart in rapid succession, dismembered with incredible violence, the shrapnel of explosions large and small clattering off walls and marine armour. The lower-down parren then joined as well, and the fire-volume doubled to hurricane force. For several wonderful, adrenaline-charged moments, Crozier thought they might win easily, and that maybe deepynines weren’t so smart after all.
Then the downward rush stopped, as the drones behind assessed the devastation that had befallen the first wave… and then went sideways, burning hard for the safety of the walls.
“They’re in the walls!” Crozier shouted, over the whooping and excited swearing of her marines. “Watch your backs, cover those access ways! They’re going to try and flush us out!”
“Two over here!” she heard Sergeant Lai yell from somewhere above her. “They came in right next door, watch it! Watch it!” Then the rapid boom!boom!boom! of Koshaim fire, and the explosions of point-blank missiles. “Smat! Dammit, Smat’s down! Iji, don’t let him flank you, he’s too fast!”
And Crozier watched the small blue icon of Private Ehud ‘Smat’ Melsh disappear from tacnet, and abandoned any thought of rapid victory as quickly as it had come.
Command T-3 was ten metres from the bridge down the main trunk corridor. Wedged between Emergency Standby and the Commander’s quarters, it was where the backup bridge systems congregated, and was even more heavily armoured than the bridge, with sensitive electronics encased in hard ceramic.
Erik floated beside Petty Officer Morales from Systems, one of Phoenix’s best network techs, now attempting to rig bridge controls away from the bridge to this place. The coms on Erik’s headset crackled constantly with grim news, and Erik kept himself propped between a wall and structural support to stop the ship’s erratic motion sending him into a collision.
“Captain,” Ensign Mittal was telling him, “main atmospherics are okay, the processors are all fine but the feeds are gone, so it looks like only half the cylinder is getting fresh air. Reports are the rear of the ship is still attached, but it’s pretty screwed, sir, we’re trailing guts everywhere, total cripple. Engineering’s answering, they’ve got casualties, Lieutenant’s Rooke’s okay but Ensign Hale is dead. They’re concentrating on lifesupport, casualty rescue and attitude control.”
Erik thought of his buddy Remy Hale, second-in-command of Engineering from all the rapid promotions after Phoenix had lost a quarter of its crew going renegade. She’d been in a not-so-secret relationship with Lieutenant Alomaim of Bravo Platoon — a curious choice as she was so bubbly, while he rarely smiled. Remy had been Engineering deputy on Second Shift, overlapping mostly with Third Shift on the bridge, of which Erik had been commander as LC. Back then, when he’d sat Phoenix’s command chair and asked to talk to Engineering, as often as not he’d gotten Remy on the line. And off-duty, she’d always been first to sit with him over a meal, and treat him not only like a respected officer, but as a friend.
“Access to Medbay?” Erik asked, working on a screen to activate emergency code for attitude systems.
“Barely, sir, the entire rear cylinder past H-Bulkhead is a mess, that second hit caught us broadside in the rear and cylinder, peeled us like an orange. Casualties look pretty grim, sir.” Mittal looked in functional shock, as were they all, eyes intense behind his breather mask. But not especially frightened, as they were all well past fear. In an actual disaster, old spacers knew, the fear grew less the worse things got. You functioned or you died, and right now everyone was doing their jobs just to stay alive, the emotional brain temporarily deactivated in a rush of desperate necessity. “Sir, I think you should really put your helmet on, the regs say…”
“I’m aware of what the regs say, Ensign, but I can’t access attitude control with a helmet on. If we get another breach I’ll have time.” The bridge crew, and some non-bridge officers, were now in EVA suits. In centuries past, Fleet had tried combat operations fully suited, but as anti-breach and other damage control technologies advanced with the flow of alo assistance, that policy had been abandoned in favour of allowing crews to actually move. Erik was less concerned about the helmet, in truth, than he was with the gloves, which he’d now also removed to allow him to touch icons and use the reserve control sticks without impossibly fat sausage fingers. All this tech, but even the alo hadn’t managed to
make EVA gloves slim. Lower ranked crew stayed out of suits, with only face breathers that would not save them in a full decompression, and hoped the active damage tech would hold. So far it had.
“Sir, I can’t get you an accurate casualty estimate right now, there’s too much of the ship we still can’t access from here. We’ll have a lot of air pockets, we had seven from K-Bulkhead Systems just get out in suits, we didn’t even know if they were still alive…”
“Just do what you can, Ensign,” Erik said firmly, “I can’t think about casualties now, I have to try and fly the ship. Kaspo, what can you tell me?”
“Another thirty seconds, Captain,” said Kaspowitz from nearby, grimacing into his own makeshift setup, trying to make sense of jumbled signals from Scan. Mittal took that as a dismissal and left — Erik felt bad that he had to ignore casualties, but it truly wasn’t something he could help, and the big dogs who truly ran the ship outside of the bridge, like Chief Petty Officer Goldman and Warrant Officers Chau and Krish, knew far more what to do than he did. He was in no more of a position to tell them how to manage casualties than they were to tell him how to fly the ship.
The slim figure of Lieutenant Dufresne pushed past Mittal at the door and came in. “Lieutenant,” Erik told her, “get in a damn suit. That’s an order.”
“Sir, I’ve been in the bridge dismantling controls with the Emergencies,” Dufresne retorted, workman gloves on her hands and black smears on her face. “I can’t fit in the damn access if I’m wearing a suit, and we need those command controls disabled if we’re going to reroute here.”
“Fine,” said Erik, seeing no choice but to trust her judgement. “What do you want?”
Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Page 46