The Hot Gate - [Troy Rising 03]

by John Ringo

  So they didn’t know them as intimately as they did Aggressors. But they did know a few things about them besides that they were ten kilometers long, a kilometer wide, shaped sort of like a truncated Kentucky rifle barrel and absolute rat bastards to kill.

  Each of the eight sides sported twenty-six missile launch tubes and twenty lasers identical to the spinal lasers of an Aggressor. For defense there were another thirty-two overlapping and interlocking shields, each three times as strong as those on an Aggressor and impenetrable to any laser on a human “light” platform such as the Constitutions and Defenders. On each facet. The only way through the screens was penetrator missiles. Thus the forty-nine laser point defense batteries, thirty-two short range mass drivers and, of course, the dual mode attack/defense main missiles. On each facet.

  They knew that the spinal laser of the AV was rated at sixty petawatts. While not a patch on the output of, say, Troy, much less SAPL, that would kill a Defenders screens in two point six seconds and a Constitutions in one point two. Armor lasted about a quarter of the time, so if a Defender stayed in the range of the AV’s main gun for as long as four seconds it was destroyed.

  Humans had managed to determine from the chunks, some large, of previously defeated AVs that they were sectional. And the Rangora were apparently big on eights since there were sixteen sections. The front three, besides supporting the side guns and defenses, were devoted to powering and managing the spinal gun. The next five were general power systems, primary life support, command sections and crew areas including mess. The last eight were devoted to maneuvering and engineering. While there were grav thrusters all along the facets—even shields could be used as such in a pinch—the main drive was the last eight sections. Six were devoted simply to powering the behemoth and the last two held the massive grav drives that permitted the two hundred and forty million ton superdreadnought a blistering six gravities of acceleration.

  Every single penetrator missile in the human inventory in E Eridani was concentrated on segment sixteen. And the human missiles were... smart. Humans had not only taken Glatun technology and used it, they had studied it and applied their own understanding. Applied it well. While not technically artificial intelligences, the brains in the Thunderbolt missiles were... close.

  Thus the missiles understood that they needed to not only drive through the defenses and drop the shields. They had to work together to do so and have enough survive the gauntlet to take out the massively armored engines.

  If they had been truly sentient, which they were not, of course, their conversation would have gone something like this:

  “I wanna be first! I wanna be first! Let me go!”

  “No, Jamie’s first! He gets to soak up the lasers.”

  “You’re a meanie! I wanna die from laser fire!”

  “I’m not a meanie! You get the fun part. You get to—”

  “I get to what? Oh, yeah, I get to hit the big mean ship in the engines.”

  “Yeah! You’re lucky! All I get to do is take down the shie—”

  “Wee, shields are down! I can go! I can go!”

  Okay, so not terribly smart.

  But smart enough.

  * * * *

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Damage control!”

  “Segment sixteen is gone, Captain. Estimate six missiles made it through all defenses. It’s simply... gone.”

  “Now we’re drifting in space,” Colonel Ishives pointed out.

  “I know that, Colonel.” There were times when the captain dearly wished it was the good old days when you could simply shoot subordinates and not worry about the paperwork.

  “And we have incoming laser fire from Thermopylae.”

  “What?” The internal laser power of the Troy-class battlestations was just one of many unpleasant surprises the humans had sprung on the Rangora. While not capable of immediately driving through an AV’s screens—

  “Inaccurate so far,” Ishives said. “But...”

  With the drive crippled and the Crusher unable to maneuver, the distant battlestation would eventually get their range.

  “And ... neutrino trace from the Thermopylae indicates they have gotten their Orion drive back online.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Neutrinos don’t lie, Captain.”

  * * * *

  “And PUSH!”

  As a younger lad, Butch Allen had thought about many things he might do when he finally grew up. When he was five he was going to be a cowboy. Then he found out that job skill had grown out of fashion and that it was no longer politically correct, or in fact legal, to shoot Injuns. Fireman looked good for a while. Police officer was on the list. By the time he was in junior high he had accepted that he would probably end up working the line at the GE plant, maybe be a shade-tree mechanic on the side.

  Desperately trying to cut open another melted hatch on the outside of a three-kilometer-wide door while a nuke went off less than a kilometer away had never even crossed his mind. Ever. Not even close. Not in the same universe.

  “Detonation in three... two ...”

  “Hang on!”

  “Do we push or hang on, Mr. Allen?”

  “Just...”

  Whatever Butch was about to say, and even he couldn’t remember afterwards, he hadn’t been following his own advice. The ten megaton pusher nuke that team six had installed on the other side of the door didn’t impart much energy to the Therm but it did impart enough to move it a bit. Just enough, and given some flexing on the part of the multimillion-ton, kilometer-thick nickel iron door, for Butch’s sled to slam into the inside of the mostly, in fact, nearly fully cut-away hatch.

  Said hatch, responding to the laws of physics, then tumbled outwards. Into the plasma wash of the nuke. Followed by Butch’s sled.

  What saved Butch’s life was distance, angularity and the door. The nuke had been installed in a crater made by one of the Rangora missiles that had closed the Therm’s door oh so effectively. Thus most of the blast was upwards and away from Butch’s position. Most. Virtually all of the rest hit the hatch. Since a kilometer matters in space, it had both cooled a good bit and spread out. There was still some serious velocity, however, which tumbled the hatch back into Butch’s sled, cracking it and spinning it back into the maintenance tunnel to carom until it hit something solid. Which it quickly did when it hit Jinji’s suit.

  Jinji’s suit was fairly robust, and since joining the Apollo team they’d made sure it was fully up to snuff. So it withstood the relatively low-velocity impact. Butch was wearing his own suit so the cracks in the sled were not immediately fatal.

  Butch had survived being in the blast front of a nuke. Few could say that.

  The question was whether he’d ever get a chance to tell anyone. Because while he had physically survived, and the nuke being “super-clean,” he had no danger of death from irradiating radiation, that left one last tiny issue.

  Electromagnetic pulse.

  EMP was rarely an issue in space. EMP from nukes was caused by atmospheric atoms being stripped of their electrons and thus creating an electrified “wave front” which in turn did all sorts of damage to complex electronics. Even the clean fusion reaction didn’t create the issue.

  However, when a clean fusion bomb is detonated in contact with nickel iron, the nickel-iron atoms are stripped of their electrons. And any delicate electronics, such as a suit’s navigation and atmospheric control pack, shut off.

  Butch took a suck of air and... there wasn’t any. Not vacuum, just... not circulating. No more air was entering his helmet. Probably ever. He could suck and suck and suck and he wasn’t going to get any air.

  Apollo, with the exception of the placement of ship fabbers, planned well. There was a plan for this. There was even training. All that Butch had to remember was to remain calm and, oh, yeah, that long-ago training class.

  There were, in fact, two choices. Both involved exiting the sled.

  Some of the Apollo systems had been designe
d with the input of experienced professional divers. One thing that technical divers know is that air is a good thing when there’s not any around you. So there was a way to extend a line from the suit to another suit and “borrow” their air.

  Butch thought there might be a couple of issues. While he knew where the emergency air link was on Jinji’s suit, and that they were compatible, he wasn’t sure if it needed a functioning suit on his side to work. And he wasn’t willing to try one thing and not have it work. Since he had, like, zero time. So that left plan B.

  On the exterior of the sled was an emergency body pack. It had an air recirculation system. Butch didn’t know why all his electronics had gone dead—EMP was barely a concept to the welder—but he knew something had screwed everything electronic. However, the air pack in the body bag was manual. Just a little oxygen valve attached to an unfortunately small air-pack. Nothing electronic. Butch didn’t know that a junior engineer, when they were designing the emergency survival pack, one each, pointed out that in the event of an EMP or similar space event such as a coronal mass ejection, they wanted something manual. And for a wonder the more senior engineers and even the engineering managers nodded and stroked their beards and wondered if the little jerk was angling for their job but went with it anyway.

  All of that went through his head when he sucked and there was nothing there. No air. No air. The second thought that went through his head, instantly suppressed, was to tear his helmet off and breathe the nice vacuum around him. Immediately following that was the word “MOMMY.” Clear as a bell.

  Butch was never sure, afterwards, exactly how long those thoughts took. He knew he took one more breath, just to be sure, then decided he wasn’t going to keep trying. The air wasn’t coming back.

  He calmly hit the quick release on his harness, then the fast hatch on the sled. The fast hatch was to be used only in emergencies. It blew the hatch off with a light jet of nitrogen and required that the entire hatch be essentially rebuilt. Bottom of the list on what was going to have to be rebuilt on this sled. And this was, definitively, an emergency.

  No air.

  Butch calmly grabbed the hatch and pulled himself into the corridor. Jinji started to reach for him, using one of his waldoes, and Butch, making sure he didn’t tumble, waved the waldo away. The wave was somewhat wild, panic sneaking through his hard-held calm. It triggered his trying to take another breath and one leg kicked a bit too hard, almost sending him out into the corridor in a tumble. That would have been... bad. So he controlled himself.

  No air.

  He moved his hand to the grab bar, then pulled himself to the rear of the sled. At that moment it occurred to him that what with everything else the bag’s container might have been damaged or lost. But there it was, a small ovoid like a big orange pill.

  Butch carefully detached it, one mistake and he was never ever going to breathe again, and pressed the red button on the ovoid with both thumbs. The bag deployed smoothly, flex metal components opening it into an orange tunnel, closed at the bottom, open at Butch’s end.

  No air, no air...

  Butch realized that his vision was closing in but ignored it. He was either going to get in the bag successfully, get the air going and open his helmet or... he wasn’t.

  He carefully slid both boots into the rather narrow opening, then reached down, one careful hand at a time, and pulled the two red tabs on either side of the tunnel. They wouldn’t give until his boots hit the bottom, at which point the top of the bag snapped shut. And, according to everything he’d been told, the oxygen system should flood the bag with O2.

  Butch carefully reached up and popped his helmet seals. The rush of gases coming out of his suit, not to mention the icepicks in his ears and the sucking on his eyeballs, almost panicked him again. But he exhaled as he’d been trained, to prevent pulmonary embolism. Probably took a second for the bag to pressurize. That was all. Few seconds, max. Or it had a puncture he hadn’t seen when he skipped the step “examine the exterior for cracks, dents or punctures.” What the hell, he could breathe vacuum for a looong time.

  Eternity.

  * * * *

  “Status on the nukes?” Admiral Clemons asked.

  “One team is down,” Guptill replied. “Caught part of a blast when they were opening their hatch. The rest are still working the problem. Five teams. About ten minutes apiece to get them in place. Two minutes apart.”

  “That’s fine,” Clemons said, nodding. “We don’t want to actually close. Just give the impression we can.”

  “Getting ready to fire the laser,” Dexter said.

  “I hate everything about this battle,” Clemons said. “I hate the feeling we’re not winning. I hate the casualties. I hate that we’re essentially trashed. Why do I like this part?”

  “Because it’s the first thing that’s felt like a really science fiction laser fire?” Guptill asked.

  “Straight out of the movies. Okay... fire.”

  “All hands! All hands! Prepare for momentary loss of power!”

  Every light in the already dim CIC except the readouts themselves shut down as did the air recyclers. There was a somewhat unpleasant hum as overworked and jerry-rigged transformers tried to handle the fortunately reduced power. Then the air started again and the lights came back up.

  “Laser shot complete,” Guptill said. “Clean miss.”

  “That’s tellin’ em,” Clemons said. “Now get me more power.”

  * * * *

  “Admiral Marchant.”

  “Field Marshall,” Marchant said, nodding at the system commander.

  “Just get out of the system,” Marshall Hampson said. “You may continue to engage the enemy, but maximize running away and surviving.”

  “Yes, sir,” Marchant said bitterly. “Sir, with the AV unable to engage, we have numerical superiority. We can still win this one.”

  “We’ll be back, Russ. Sooner than you’d expect. Just get clear of the gate.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * * *

  “Humans have changed their posture,” Colonel Ishives said. “They appear to be heading for the gate and are maximizing defense over attack.”

  “Good,” Captain Be’Sojahiph said. “They have seen reality. Even with our damage they cannot hold the system.”

  “However, they are so far into our fire basket... I’m not sure it matters.”

  * * * *

  The Aggressor groups had been holding back behind the AVs until the loss of the first AV. At that point they had started to move forward, their fire combining with that of the AV.

  Fortunately, they were in gate exit posture. Marchant’s force simply had to screen past them.

  Simply.

  The Aggressors had oriented their axis towards the retreating human force, their spinal lasers combined with the fire from the AV pounding the human shields.

  “Let’s try fourteen X-ray,” Marchant said. “Get the Indies out of this fire. They don’t have the screens for it.”

  “Fourteen X-ray, aye,” Captain Whisler said. “Kansas is out. Still there but no longer under control. Bush is—”

  “Gone,” Marchant said. “Close formation.”

  “At least we’re exiting the AV fire basket.”

  “Small mercies.”

  * * * *

  “So you ask us to be merciful?”

  Envoy Ve’Disuc recognized a breakthrough when he saw one. Speaking directly to the American President, functionally the Alliance Supreme Commander, was a breakthrough.

  “The mercy cuts two ways, Envoy,” President Robards said. “There are tens of thousands of stranded spacers from both sides. Temporary truces to clear the wounded from the battlefield are common in even Rangora history. No more than that. Enough time to get noncombat ships into the system to clear the wounded. Your Marines on the Thermopylae, for example, are in a rather difficult position. They are short on consumables, cut off from resupply, outnumbered and in most cases frankly lost. We’ll supply t
hem with consumables and permit them to be evacuated. You can have them back. No prisoners taken on either side. Remaining Rangora ships to be towed off by the Rangora, same for human ships. E Eridani to be in a state of cease-fire until such a time.”

  “And the Thermopylae?”

  “Will take some time to move out of the system,” the President said.

  “Unacceptable. Madame President, we hold the system.”