Well done, Okuda. They’re starting to jell. Thank God I made the tough choice and got rid of deLille.
***
Ten minutes went by quickly, with reports of continuing damage to the enemy frigate by their lasers. They had snuffed two of the enemy thrusters, but two more had appeared moments later. Perhaps it had self-repair capability or some kind of spares. Its surface was now mottled, and it was slowly drawing away. Range between the ships now exceeded seventy kilometers and climbing despite Okuda’s best efforts.
Time to throw the dice once again.
Captain Absen tapped the shipwide icon and spoke. “Now hear this, now hear this. Assault sled and pinnace launch in thirty seconds, all crew prepare for small boat launch in sequence on my mark.” He paused for the seconds to tick off. “Good luck and Godspeed. Mark.”
The bridge felt the slight shudders as thirty-one assault sleds were ejected by compressed gas from their tubes in several ripples. The sole operational pinnace followed a moment later, carried outward by the slight centrifugal force of five percent spin, firing its thrusters once clear.
Now it was time for Orion to keep pecking away at the enemy from long range, to lick their wounds, and to wait.
***
“Weapons, can the Arrowfish lock on from this range?” Absen’s voice was icy, intended to send Ford a clear message: you are out of favor until you put aside your personal feelings. He hoped the man understood; he was still debating relieving him and putting in his assistant. This was an eternal dilemma of command, to keep balance among each subordinate’s talents, competence, personality and weak spots.
“No, sir, but I can guide them manually in until they do. But they won’t do much damage; their warheads are just a few kilos of explosive.”
“I just want to give the Marines what cover we can for their assault. Can you make sure they won’t hit the sleds and pinnace?”
“They have IFF so they won’t target them, but there’s always a chance of a random collision. Space is pretty big, though.”
Helm spoke up. “My calculations say about one in two point six million chance of a random hit.”
Absen nodded. “Well within risk tolerance. Do it. Time them to hit the enemy starting a minute before the assault and end five seconds before. Can you cut it that fine?”
“Easy-peasy, Captain.”
“Good, then use most of them up. They’re useless against the enemy hypervelocity missiles, so we might as well get something out of them.”
Ford nodded. “Roger, sir, ripple firing now. Four hundred sixty-six rounds away, holding thirty-six in reserve.”
Okuda spoke up. “Sir, I see that damage control crews have gotten a second Behemoth back online. Might I suggest we use it? Not on the enemy, sir,” he said hastily. “I can angle the two of them backward and get some more acceleration as they throw the mass, and every lightening of the ship gives us a tiny advantage.”
“What about power and ammo?”
Ford replied, “We’ll have to shift power, the beam capacitors will charge more slowly. We have more ammo than we can possibly use, though, if the weapons crews can transfer it from the magazines of the damaged guns.”
“Right, good thinking Ford, make it happen. Any other ideas, anyone? Now is the time, it will be more than twenty minutes before the Marines hit them.” Carrot and stick, come on Ford, work with me.
***
Those last twenty minutes were agony on Absen’s bridge. Even so the delay allowed the crew to regain a routine, to configure the displays, and to open their helmets to nibble on ration bars and water. Every ten or fifteen seconds would come a gentle push, accelerating Orion after its quarry.
Absen watched the icons of the assault sleds on the screen, the pinnace behind them, as they crawled toward their target. Of his many worries now, his biggest one was wondering what kind of close-in defense systems the frigate had.
Hopefully the four hundred Arrowfish would absorb most of the counterfire, covering for the assaulting Marines packed twelve to a sled.
Hopefully the still-firing barrage of lasers would suppress whatever response the Meme had.
Hopefully he hadn’t just sent more than three hundred men to their doom in some alien deathtrap.
“Helm, can we afford a five-second burst from the Behemoths to support the boarding?”
“Superb tactic, capitaine mon capitaine. No problem.” He paused and directed the two weapons he had been using as crude rockets, turning them back into weapons for a moment. “Firing. Five seconds. Ended. Ordnance en route.”
“Nine seconds,” Ford called. “Seven… five… three. Impact.”
Tiny stars winked along the enemy ship’s elongated length, brought close by the Orion’s surviving forward optics. Some were reddish, explosions of Arrowfish missile warheads and fuel. Some were white and soft, undoubtedly a response to the incoming, some kind of short-range fusion beam perhaps. Interspersed they saw a line of black, stitching in two separate places along the flanks of the frigate, railgun impacts.
-58-
Major Anton Stallers strapped himself in to the crash couch nearest the pinnace’s cockpit. It wasn’t really logical, but up there he felt like he had some small influence over what might happen. At least he could see out the windshield. Spaceshield. Front cockpit window. Whatever they called it in vacuum.
Not that there was much to see, just the two Marine assault pilots running their preflights one more time, and every time he looked, he felt like he might fall into the cockpit. Right now it was pointing nose-out toward the skin of the ship, meaning forward felt like down. He was glad to turn to examine his men.
Not much frightened Stallers, but he was as close to fear as possible right now – not because of the thought of assaulting the enemy ship, but because of the sheer vulnerability of his Guard Marines. Forty-seven remaining men, his eggs all in one basket. It went against his instincts – he wanted to spread out, so that one enemy missile couldn’t burn them all without ever coming to grips.
He fervently wished that Earth had had time to develop some kind of powered assault suit, so that they could fly individually through space to the enemy ship. Even the assault sleds were better than this, holding only a dozen men on each. But the Colonel had said that they couldn’t afford to leave the pinnace out of the fight and that the Guard Marines, with the full commando nano, had the best chance of making it even if they did get hit.
MacAdam was right, of course. If they got close enough, his Guards could shoot across by jumping or on suit thrusters, and like all the Marines, they had magnetic boots and gloves. If that didn’t work, they had sticky-pads they could activate, adhesive that was supposed to work in vacuum and on anything.
His men cradled their XM-33s, a hybrid weapon more like an automatic shotgun than any other terrestrial firearm. The Marines had taken to calling them “blasters.” They fired low-velocity exploding rounds, and vented the gas from their caseless cartridges backward past the wielder’s firing arm to reduce recoil. They’d test-fired them in low-G exercises inside the launch bay and found it still took a lot of practice and skill to keep from being knocked around in low gravity.
Stallers felt the pinnace shift, then its magnetic launch rails shoved them gently outward, aided by the ship’s spin. Now he was glad to be able to see out as he watched the walls slide by and give way to open space, and then weightlessness came. The view swung, and suddenly they were flying next to a massive cylinder, with rents and broken fixtures reaching outward as if to claw at them as they passed. Thrusters fired and a moment later they were away, on their short, fraught trip to the enemy frigate.
“Put your comms on the suit channel,” Stallers said to the pilots. A moment later chatter filled their helmets, clipped sounds of sled jockeys and the controllers back at the Marine’s combat direction center. Now he strained to see forward, trying to glimpse the cockpit sensor screens. Frustrated, he activated his magnetic boots and went to stand behind the pinnace drivers
and try to make sense of what they saw.
The brutalized but still potent enemy frigate sat in the center of one screen. As far as he could tell, range was now six klicks and falling fast. Five. Four. Three. He could see the thing now out the front window, a white sliver directly off the nose. Two. One.
Nose thrusters fired, forcing Stallers to grab onto the pilots’ seats or fall. His eyes remained fixed out the cockpit windows, staring at a sight new to the eyes of men.
The truncated length of the frigate lit with bright flashes where lasers impacted. Dark spots spewed bits of debris and showed holes that disappeared after a moment. Stallers could see sleds to the left and right, small and far but closing in rapidly, converging on the enemy.
Abruptly hundreds of lights flared all around them in the darkness and Stallers’ heart leaped into his throat. Some kind of alien defensive weapon?
***
The Captain watched the reddish flashes and the black line on the frigate disappear, but the white pops did not. Several larger red-orange blossoms followed. Absen winced and Scoggins let out an audible moan as the bridge realized what those represented: dying sleds, twelve brave Marines in each, snuffed out in an eyeblink. They all watched for a bigger explosion, of the larger pinnace and its fifty troops inside, but thankfully it did not come.
It’s a price we all willingly pay, Absen thought, clamping down on his grief. To lead well, you must love your command, and to command well, you must kill what you love.
Then the white blooms ended. The assault troops were down.
If I was their captain, he thought, I would have spun my ship violently, making it impossible to land. Am I smarter, more flexible in my thinking, or are they just overconfident? Are they unused to real combat? What must it be like to cruise through interstellar space for tens or hundreds of years? Do Meme get rusty? In any case, now we have a chance.
***
As Stallers followed the flares toward the frigate he realized they must be something launched by Orion. That surmise was confirmed as he watched white fusion fires erupt from points around the periphery of the enemy ship, and the human weapons were rapidly picked out of the sky, with stunning precision.
Dozens burst and disappeared each second, then one – two – three sleds exploded with sickening suddenness. Stallers knew a dozen brave men and women were snuffed out with each flash, then saw the lead sleds fire their automatic retro-thrusters and launch their grapples. If those three were all they lost, then twenty-eight sleds had made it onto the skin of enemy ship.
Each sled sank its ferrocrystal-tipped grapples deep into the alien, and in one of the serendipitous happenings of war, the enemy frigate did not resist their grasping claws. Its semi-intelligent skin that adapted to any attack made a mistake. Thinking the familiar ferrocrystal was somehow friendly, the integument allowed the grapples in, then closed over them as it detected foreign material.
Winches reeled the sleds down and spinning ferrocrystal saws cut holes where they pressed to the enemy hull. In moments the Marines were in.
Stallers realized the frigate was truly looming large in the front windows of the pinnace, a section well away from the Marines in the sleds. He watched the pilots reach forward and flip red covers upward, exposing switches that they rapidly toggled. “Breaching missiles armed,” he heard the lead driver say, then, “Launch.” The man mashed a button and he heard a half-dozen clunks and thunks.
Stubby missiles streaked forward, struck the enemy, and exploded. Their hot shaped charges burned holes in the biomechanical skin, but the pits immediately started to fill – to heal, Stallers thought. The lead pilot slapped his throttles and the pinnace leaped forward, lined up on the ring of explosion points. “Brace for impact!” yelled the copilot and Stallers rapidly strode the five steps to his crash couch, his boots snapping on and off the deck. He had just clicked the harness on when he felt the shock.
The nose of the pinnace punched through the outer layer of alien biomachine, and its own healing action sealed it tight in place. The copilot hit a large red slap-button and the whole cockpit split, hinging apart in four pieces with a hydraulic whine. A cross-shaped exit appeared, leading directly into the enemy ship.
“Up and at ‘em, lads,” Stallers called over the Guards channel, and his armor-suited men leaped up and clumsily ran across the deck to the nose and into the throat of the dragon.
The world morphed into an unearthly gauntlet of heaving organic shapes. The first man in was thrown upward to ricochet off the ceiling, then to float spinning through the air. The next fired downward into the undulating floor, causing it to draw back and away. The third yelled, “Use grenades!” and those behind did so.
Each Marine carried a full suite of bomblets in an armored box attached to his front. There were the standard straight high explosives, shrapnel, and thermite. They also carried some of the deadliest chemical weapons mankind had ever produced: the most advanced nerve gas, blood and blister agent.
“HE first,” Stallers called as his men pushed into the room, firing at the pulsing walls, ceiling and floor. A dozen high explosives flew forward to blow chunks out of the landscape. But the stuff closed up almost as fast as they could damage it, organic healing like its own Eden Plague. Too bad their version doesn’t make them feel guilty about genocide, Stallers thought.
“Thermite!” he ordered next, and the hot-burning devices arced into the room. With their external pickups the Guard Marines heard hissing as of roasting meat, and the living material pulled away from the hot sunlets until they drifted weightless in a larger, less-crowded space.
“Bring up the flamethrowers,” Stallers ordered as his men continued to pump explosive rounds into their surroundings, driving back the walls of alien flesh. As soon as the four men with the devices got there, he directed, “Hit the thermites, force them against the walls.”
The four did as ordered, streams of flaming napalm shoving the still-burning thermite grenades deeper into the interior like carnival squirt guns on bobbing balloons. As the interior filled with fire, the stuff of the ship drew back further and further, until all of his command was inside the frigate in a space the size of a volleyball court.
Stallers called to the pilots, “Pinnace, this is Alpha One. Prepare to launch another round of breaching missiles straight into the interior on my mark. I don’t want this thing recovering. And use the forward thrusters to burn it if you have to.”
“Roger Alpha One,” came the laconic reply. “By Land, By Sea, By Space.”
“Bloody well right. Flamethrowers, cease fire. First and third squad, keep up a suppressing fire. Second and fourth, set breaching charges as soon as the fire goes out.” The flame liquid contained its own oxidant, as no one had known for sure what the atmosphere would be like inside the enemy ship.
Just then openings like sphincters rent the walls, the ceiling, and the floors. In fact, weightless as they were, there were really no walls or ceiling or floor. Through these holes poured things like octopi, ropy soft-looking white spiders that nevertheless caught the nearest men setting the charges and tore limbs off.
“Flamethrowers!” Stallers yelled. “Their armor is proof, danger close, do it!” The flame wielders sprayed their napalm back and forth, until the octopuspiders twitched crisping in flame. He tried not to think about the men whose suits had already been breached by the attackers, and the fire that even now licked at their flesh. The nano will heal them, he thought.
He hoped.
Stallers switched channels while they finished setting the charges. “Colonel, Stallers here, do you copy?”
“Here, what is it, Major?”
“Sir, we’re in off the pinnace. We’ve been hit by spidery things and I have several casualties; am placing breaching charges now. Flame seems to be the most effective thing we’ve found.”
“Use the chems when you run out of flame, Major,” Colonel MacAdam replied.
“Aye, sir, will do. Stallers out.” He waved an arm. “Get those men
back in the pinnace.” His two medics maneuvered the broken bodies of his casualties back toward the relative safety of the boat. If there was life left in them, they might recover.
“Fall back! Fire in the hole!” Fourth squad leader called, and as soon as his troops had gotten some distance the massive breaching charges detonated. Gobbets of flesh flew and a greenish mist filled the atmosphere, making Stallers glad he was breathing suit air. Holes gaped now in the perimeter, and Stallers ordered his men forward. “Quarter and search by squads, just like the plan,” he called, watching his men exit the room through the new doors.
He scrambled back into the pinnace until he could get his mag-boots on the floor, then checked his fallen. Four bodies lay lined up and two others sat in crash couches attended by the medics. Six down, forty-one left. “You two, catch up with your squads. I’ll do what I can here.” The medics bounded off. He heard them using suit thrusters as soon as they crossed into the interiors. Why didn’t I think of that?
Stallers got the two live ones bottles of proto-nutrient drink to provide their nano with fuel and told them to help hold the pinnace against any counterattack. Then he clomped over to the edge of the floor where it met the interior of the alien ship.
He opened the fitted box on the front of his torso and selected a nerve agent grenade. “Pinnace, close the nose and pressurize, clean up your air.” As the hydraulics whined he stepped to the edge, keeping his magnetic boots attached long enough to walk onto the outer skin of the boat as it closed. Then he pulled the pin and tossed the chemical grenade.
These weapons were not actually in gas form – rather, they were liquids that would rapidly aerosolize. The grenade flew lazily across the room to explode against the quivering wall.
Immediately the area turned black and began to shrivel. The process proceeded and the blotch widened and travelled, to eventually slough off a chunk of flesh the size of several beef steers. Not very efficient here, where there’s so much flesh, but should be good in enclosed spaces.
The Orion Plague Page 25