by David Weber
Assuming any of us get to the surface, she thought grimly, acutely conscious of the flutter of her pulse.
“Oh, yes, I am terrified,” she told her Bolo.
“You are frightened,” Benjy agreed. “This is a normal and, indeed, healthy reaction to the prospect of battle and possible death. But your fear is far from paralyzing you or preventing you from thinking clearly. Nor is fear a bad thing for you to experience.
“Bolos do not experience that particular emotion in the same fashion as humans, Maneka, or so I believe. It has been said with reason that our personalities are more ‘bloodthirsty’ than those of most humans. As a result, we feel as much anticipation as anxiety at a moment like this. It is, quite literally, what we were designed and built to do. Our highest function.
“But do not think we are strangers to fear. We fear that we will fail in our mission. We fear we will prove unequal to the challenge we face. And, just as our internal diagnostic systems have been programmed to feel the equivalent of pain when we take damage, our personalities include a fierce desire to survive. It has been some time since the Concordiat made the error of believing that a warrior who embraces death without fear is the ideal. Fear is as much a tool as courage, Maneka. As too much ‘courage’ becomes suicidal recklessness, too much ‘fear’ can become paralyzing panic. But to achieve his most effective level of combat, any warrior—human or Bolo—must properly balance the cautionary impact of fear and the aggressiveness engendered by courage. This, I believe, you have done.”
“You have a better opinion of me than I do,” Maneka said.
“Because you perceive all of your faults from within,” Benjy said serenely. “I, however, am able to observe your responses and actions from without. You would not have been able to coordinate so well with Captain Belostenec had you been ‘terrified out of your wits.’”
“Maybe,” Maneka conceded dubiously.
Actually, she thought, for all of the time she and Belostenic had spent discussing possible tactical situations and responses to them, there hadn’t really been a great deal of planning they could do. Either they got to the surface of the planet alive, or they didn’t. If they did, Belostenec’s Marines would disembark their own light armored vehicles and form up to follow her and Benjy as the Thirty-Ninth Battalion advanced against the enemy. And after that, everything would depend on what happened next.
The Ninth Marines were a potent fighting force, at least the equal of any Melconian Army division, and arguably superior to two of them in actual combat power. But neither their personal armor nor their vehicles had the firepower and toughness to stand up to Melconian combat mechs. If the Thirty-Ninth could get it through the perimeter of the Melconian LZ, the Ninth would undoubtedly prove its worth, but getting it through that perimeter in the first place was going to be supremely difficult.
“Captain Jeschke informs me that we will be dropping out of hyper in approximately twelve minutes,” Benjy informed her suddenly, and she twitched in her command couch. That “approximately twelve minutes” had to have come directly from Jeschke, Tannenberg’s merely human commander. No Bolo would have been guilty of such imprecision.
The thought made her giggle unexpectedly, and she blinked as she realized her unanticipated amusement was entirely genuine.
Maybe I’m not quite such a hopeless basket case, after all, she thought.
“Understood,” she said aloud. “Please make sure Captain Belostenec also has that information.”
“I have.”
“Then I guess all we can do is wait.”
The relief force from Santa Cruz dropped out of hyper in a single, perfectly coordinated transition, and tactical displays aboard the Navy task force’s warships began blinking alive with a rash of ominous red icons.
Commodore Selkirk’s entire combat strength consisted of one four-ship battlecruiser division and one carrier, supported by eight heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, and twelve destroyers. From the reports Chartres Near-Space Command had managed to get out before the subspace communications satellites were taken out, he already knew that even after the attackers’ losses against Chartres’ orbital defenses—which had not been insubstantial—he still faced six Melconian battleships, five battlecruisers, and twenty screening “fists.” Like the Melconian ground unit of the same name, a naval “fist” consisted of three ships, in this case a heavy cruiser supported by a light cruiser and a destroyer. The comparative number of hulls—thirty-four human vessels opposed to sixty-nine Melconian ships—was bad enough. The tonnage differential was worse… much worse.
Despite that, Selkirk had certain offsetting advantages. One was that unlike the deep-space arrays which had given Chartres two full days of warning before the Melconians’ arrival, even a battleship’s detection range against a unit approaching through hyper was severely limited. The Melconian CO had been given less than four hours’ warning before Selkirk’s ships came piling out of hyper, and his combat strength was still out of position. Another advantage was that every one of Selkirk’s ships possessed a fully self-aware AI… and that those ships’ command crews were neurally linked with them. They literally thought and fought at the same hyper-heuristic speed as Bolos.
None of which changed the fact that the battleship component of the enemy force alone out—massed his entire task force by more than two-to-one.
Orders flashed outward from Selkirk’s flagship. He had arranged his approach very carefully, and his task force and the accompanying transports deployed with smooth efficiency. The commodore had deliberately dropped most of his warships back into normal-space well inside the three-light-minute sphere of the Chartres jump point. That was precisely where the Melconians had been expecting him, although he still managed to emerge into n-space outside their immediate engagement range. But the transports, accompanied by the carrier Indomitable and two of his destroyers, had made the transition to normal-space out on the very rim of the jump point at its closest approach to the inner system.
It had been a calculated risk, since it was always possible the Melconian CO might have anticipated the maneuver and deployed to smash the transports first, but it had paid off. The main body of the Melconian fleet was exactly where Selkirk had hoped it would be—well out—system from the transports’ emergence point, with the commodore and his main combatants between it and the transports.
The eight transports, trailing their three escorts, arrowed straight towards the planet while Selkirk and his brutally outnumbered force squared off to keep the Melconians off their backs. Maneka felt physically sick to her stomach as her tactical plot showed the sea of hostile icons sweeping towards the commodore and his handful of ships. She wasn’t trained in Navy tactical iconography, but she didn’t need to be to recognize the dreadful imbalance between the two forces.
She didn’t have a great deal of time to think about that, however. Four Melconian “fists” had apparently been providing orbital fire support for their ground forces, now that the deep-space defenses had been suppressed, and now they came peeling out of Chartres planetary orbit as the transports steadied down on their approach.
“Incoming missiles,” Benjy announced. “The Enemy is targeting the transports.”
“Stand by for antimissile defense,” Maneka replied—more, she was aware, for something to say than because Benjy needed any instructions from her.
“Standing by.”
On each of the Sleipners, pairs of Bolos brought up their battle screen, activated tracking systems, and waited with psychotronic calm as the Melconian missiles shrieked towards them. And, to her own immense surprise, Maneka Trevor felt her own pulse steady as she watched the arrowhead-shaped missile icons race to meet Tannenberg.
More icons blossomed on Benjy’s tactical plot, and Maneka recognized them as Indomitable’s outgoing fighters. There were eighty of them, and they headed straight for the enormously larger Melconian warships under maximum power. The missiles targeted on the transports ignored them, and Maneka bared her t
eeth as she recognized the Melconians’ error.
They should have tried to nail Indomitable before she launched, she thought. And they’re about to find out that they just wasted their entire initial salvo.
Hypervelocity countermissiles were already spitting outward from the Bolos. Designed for planetary combat, they moved slowly compared to the deep-space weapons charging to destroy the transports, but “slowly” was a purely relative term. They moved quickly enough when they were directed by a Bolo’s targeting and computational systems, and groups of them relentlessly bracketed each incoming missile, boring in through defensive electronic countermeasures.
One-by-one, the Melconian missiles were picked off far short of attack range. Only fourteen got through the countermissile interception envelope, and thirteen of those were picked off by infinite repeater fire far short of their targets. Only one got close enough to actually detonate against the battle screen protecting its intended victim, and that battle screen—reinforced by the full power of the Bolo on the opposite side of the transport’s hull—held.
And while those missiles were attacking, the fighters from Indomitable flung themselves upon their leviathan foes.
Twenty of them died before they got into engagement range. It would have been even worse, Maneka thought, sickened by the carnage, if the Melconians had held back that initial missile launch, targeted it on the fighters they ought to have known had to be coming. But twenty-five percent losses before the surviving fighter pilots even crossed the missile envelope was quite bad enough.
The sixty survivors ignored the destroyers shooting at them. Instead, they charged straight towards the cruisers. Close-in weapons opened up on them, but the fighters bored in grimly, holding their fire. The fleet little vessels carried plasma torpedoes-triple-barreled, short-ranged weapons with an even heavier punch than Benjy’s Hellbore, but slow-firing. The launchers took long enough to recharge that each fighter would be able to fire only a single salvo per firing pass. But their other energy weapons were intended for dogfighting against other fighters, too light to significantly damage something as heavily armored as a warship, and the pilots were determined to make their single launch each count.
Half of them died before they reached the range they sought and salvoed their torpedoes, but unlike missiles, plasma torpedoes were light-speed weapons. They ripped in, impossible to intercept, and all four of the heavy cruisers and one of the light cruisers disappeared in the hellish glare of impacting plasma. Each torpedo was the equivalent of a shaped-charge fusion warhead, slamming its target with a megaton awl of brimstone, and battle screen failed and armor and hull plating vaporized as those man—made thunderbolts disemboweled their targets.
One of the three surviving light cruisers was severely damaged, staggering sideways in a shower of shattered debris and the telltale shroud of venting atmosphere. Her emissions signature flickered uncertainly, and her drive field went down completely, but her consorts had been luckier. The fighter group targeted on one of them had taken murderous casualties on its way in. Only two of its pilots had survived to fire, and their launch sequence had been badly desynchronized. The plasma torpedoes came in as separate, individual attacks, without the focus and precise timing which had killed the cruiser’s fellows, and the ship’s battle screen managed to deflect most of their effectiveness. She was hurt, but not badly, and she continued to belch missiles at the transports.
But the fourth light cruiser had clearly taken heavy damage. Her weapons fire ceased almost entirely, and her battle screen fluctuated wildly for a fraction of the second before it came back up to full strength and steadied. But there was nothing wrong with her drive, and she changed course abruptly.
“Collision vector,” Benjy announced, and Maneka bit her lip as the cruiser’s projected path intersected with Indomitable’s.
The carrier’s AI altered course, dodging hard, but her evasion options were too limited. The geometry was against her, and although her light shipboard weapons fired desperately, carriers weren’t supposed to get this close to enemy main combatants. They were supposed to operate under the cover and protection of an entire task force, providing a fighter umbrella to operate at ranges of up to several light-hours from their flight decks, or on independent operations at extreme range from anything but the enemy’s fighters. And so they were equipped primarily with antifighter weapons, designed to provide volume of fire against swarms of attacking fighters, not to batter their way through a cruiser’s battle screen. But Indomitable had had no choice but to go to meet the enemy this time, as she and her escorting destroyers fought to clear the way and keep the Melconians away from the transports which had to reach the surface of Chartres.
She was too far ahead of Tannenberg and the other transports for any of the Bolos to engage the cruiser before impact, and yet it was so agonizingly close. She was barely a hundred kilometers outside Benjy’s engagement range when the damaged cruiser slammed through her battle screens like a quarter-million-ton hammer and both ships vanished in a kinetic fireball brighter than the system’s sun.
Maneka swore bitterly as both icons disappeared from her plot, but even as she cursed, and even as she felt the horror of the deaths of almost three thousand fellow human beings, she knew that at this moment, right here and now, Indomitable had been expendable. And she and her massacred fighter group, of which only eleven survived, had done their job. Only one of the intercepting Melconian cruisers remained, and a merciless corner of Maneka’s mind wondered if the crew of that ship truly realized what was about to happen to it.
The cruiser and all four enemy destroyers bored in, and the Concordiat destroyers went to meet them. They were faster than the Melconians, more maneuverable, and fought with a deadly efficiency, but there were only two of them, and if their AI-human fusions used their weapons far more effectively, they were outgunned by over five-to-one. It was a short, vicious engagement—a knife-range battle which stripped away much of the combat advantage human ships’ superior coordination and defensive systems normally conferred—because it had to be. The destroyer crews knew they had to clear the transports’ path before any additional Melconian units managed to break past Commodore Selkirk or suddenly appeared unexpectedly from the far side of the planet. And so they took the Melconians on at the enemy’s most effective range.
They died. But they took three of the four intercepting destroyers with them, and the fourth was so badly damaged that it reeled out of the engagement with its battle screen entirely down.
The light cruiser burst through the engagement, streaming atmosphere but with its energy weapons intact, and all her surviving batteries opened fire on CNS Tannenberg, which happened to be the lead transport.
Maneka felt her face locking in a snarl of triumph as the cruiser spat death at her. The battle screen which now protected the transports was Bolo battle screen, designed to deflect the fire of Benjy’s own main armament at anything beyond point-blank range, and it sneered at the lesser energy weapons mounted by a mere light cruiser. Benjy’s screen brushed the long-range fire aside almost contemptuously. Then his main turret traversed slightly and fired once.
When the Mark XXVIII had first been introduced, its main armament had been equivalent to that mounted in the Concordiat Navy’s current-generation ships-of-the-line. Technology had moved on since then, into newer, deadlier, more powerful weaponry, but even today, nothing lighter than a battlecruiser—and precious few of them—mounted anything approaching the lethality of his 110-centimeter Hellbore. Certainly no light cruiser did… and none of them had been designed to survive its fury.
Benjy’s target shattered, blowing apart and then, abruptly, vaporizing as the ship’s antimatter powerplant’s containment fields went down. The fierce, blinding flash of the fireball polarized Benjy’s direct visual display, and Maneka heard her own soprano shriek of triumph as the cruiser disappeared.
The remaining crippled cruiser and destroyer died almost as spectacularly seconds later under the vengeful
fire of other Bolos, and then the transports were clear, racing towards the planet they had come to save or die trying.
Despite its population, which was certainly of respectable size for any world outside the Core Sectors, the planet of Chartres had been touched relatively lightly by the imprint of mankind. All of its developed, terraformed cropland was concentrated on only one of its three major land masses, along with virtually all of its citizens, two-thirds of whom had lived in a relatively small number of large urban centers surrounded by rolling farmland or virgin forest.
But Chartres was lightly touched no longer.
Benjy’s assault pod separated from Tannenberg and dived roaringly into the planetary atmosphere, and his infinite repeaters fired steadily as he and the rest of the Battalion systematically eliminated every piece of orbital debris that didn’t carry a Concordiat IFF code. Melconian stealth systems were good, but they weren’t perfect, and the Battalion’s relentless assault burned away the reconnaissance platforms the invaders had deployed.
Maneka studied the visual images from Benjy’s optical heads as the assault wave howled downward.
Laroche City, the planetary capital, with its population of over thirty million, was a smoking, blazing sea of ruins. Provence and Nouveau Dijon were little better, although at least a rim of Nouveau Dijon’s suburbs appeared to have survived partially intact, and the same was true for at least two dozen of the planet’s other cities and larger towns. The green and brown patchwork of farms and the dark-green woodlands surrounding what had once been the habitations of man were dotted with the wreckage of missiles and air-breathing attack craft which had been destroyed by the ruined cities’ perimeter defenses, and towering pillars of smoke and dust seemed to be everywhere.
Although Chartres’ population had been tiny compared to one of the Core Worlds like Old Earth, it had been large enough, and the star system’s industrial base had been extensive enough, to provide quite heavy ground-based defensive systems. The local planetary and system authorities, with the assistance of the Concordiat’s central government, had taken advantage of that and spent most of the past six Standard Years fortifying and preparing against the probability of an eventual Melconian attack. But with the Line grinding back only slowly across the Camperdown Sector, the planning authorities had given higher priority to systems and planets under more immediate threat. No one had anticipated that the Empire would show the daring to strike this deeply into the major star systems inside the Concordiat’s frontier, and the local defenses, however formidable, had not been formidable enough.