by B. V. Larson
Straker raced ahead through the gap he’d created, splitting his targeting and firing left and right. The uneven ground allowed him to hit the soft underbelly of a car with his gatling for an easy kill, and his force-cannon bolt sliced through the side of a tank like it was made of cheesecake.
These Opters make poor ground warriors, he thought. They lacked heavies, missile tracks and battlesuiters compared to human forces—at least in this place. Maybe they had different force structures when planning on taking and holding ground. Perhaps this battalion was the equivalent of a few ship’s marines, hastily thrown together to try to take advantage of a weakness in the human defense.
And they’d never faced mechsuiters.
Well, he’d school them now.
Racing in an arc, Straker used the rocks and pits to keep solid ground between himself and anything not a target. This was one of a mechsuiter’s greatest strengths—his near-perfect situational awareness on the battlefield. The combination of mind, brainlink and combat-optimized SAI made his maneuvers as natural as a footballer maneuvering for position on a field, instinctively placing himself to best advantage.
As he did, he picked off his enemies two by two. In less than a minute, he’d eliminated both platoons.
Seventeen vehicles down, more than fifty to go.
Straker imagined what his enemies would do next. They had to be surprised and concerned that one opponent had already wiped out so many of their combatants. In their place he’d take no chances. He’d turn his entire force and try to surround and trap the mechsuiter before tackling further defenses.
Reversing course, Straker ran back the way he came, slipping out of the trap as the Opters tried to extend and encircle. As he did, he picked off three more cars and two more tanks, and ducked back among the rock formations.
Twenty-two down.
He became aware of activity above him—close above him, not the main space battle taking place kilometers higher. He sent out an air-defense radar pulse and identified two six-ship hexes of the largest enemy fighters, the ones that approached attack ships in size. Unlike the smaller drones, these had weapons that might severely damage or destroy him in one shot.
Those blasts started falling all around him, blowing rock into the sky and shaking the ground. He worked himself deeper into a small canyon and narrowed the arc where they could reach him. Glancing beam shots fell hot on his skin, but his field reinforcement and his superconducting layers shrugged off the heat.
For now.
Okay, they’d called in air support.
Well, he had some on-call air support of his own.
“Straker to Trinity,” he said. “I need you to clear my skies. Can you pop over here?”
“Aye aye, sir,” came Zaxby’s voice. A moment later, Trinity exploded into existence from underspace, emerging for no more than two seconds. In that time, twelve hard-driven secondary beams skewered the twelve attack fighters, leaving them tumbling and falling to crash into the surface.
Before the first one augured in, Trinity had disappeared again, and Straker marveled at what an AI-controlled warship could do. Her triple brain made Straker and his mechsuit look slow. He shivered with the passing thought that perhaps it was a blessing all AIs before Indy went mad. If they hadn’t, they might have transformed, or even replaced, humanity in ways he wasn’t sure he’d like.
Perhaps they still would, if Indy could be reliably replicated.
But until then, the universe belonged to organic life—and organics fought over territory. That meant at least this little corner of the galaxy would remain comprehensible.
Before the dust of the crashes settled, Straker raced at his enemies, using the confusion to shield him from their sensors. Disrupting unit cohesion was another specialty of mechsuiters—although he admitted that didn’t work on these Opters as well as it did on human troops. Even more so than Hok, the insectoids kept calm and fearlessly executed their plans. They could be surprised, but it didn’t seem their morale could be broken. They probably had very little individual sense of self-preservation.
At least, the servant-creatures of the Queens didn’t. Probably any being as intelligent as a Queen would value itself quite highly. He filed away that thought for later.
Inside the smoke and dust, he rampaged through them, killing whatever he targeted. Compared to their relatively basic combat vehicles, his mechsuit had sensors which were the height of sophistication. If this’d been an armored Hok battalion, he’d be constantly pinpointed by his own multispectral emissions, his radar and lidar, but these Opters didn’t seem to have high-end detectors.
For now, he was a wolf—no, a tiger—among sheep. He didn’t keep conscious count, but his SAI tallied his kills at fifty-five before the enemy broke.
Even then, they didn’t really rout. They merely withdrew as rapidly as possible, back the way they came, presumably to their dropships, attempting to preserve some forces.
Straker activated his comlink to Redwolf. “SITREP.”
“I’ve joined the defense forces, sir. They’re pretty thin, but we fought off a battalion of those combat cars and tanks, and we don’t see any more of them.”
“I think I’ve driven another battalion off,” said Straker.
“Alone?”
“You see Loco around here anywhere?”
“Hot shit, sir!”
“Thanks. Trinity helped… and these Opters aren’t nearly as deadly as Hok in ground mode. Any other attacks to your perimeter?”
Redwolf conferred with someone for a moment. “No, sir, but the monitor above us is in bad shape. Commodore Gray better get here soon or we’ll be overwhelmed.”
“Tell your new buddies relief is on its way.”
“I already told them you’re out there kicking ass, sir. It really helped morale.”
“Good. I’m pursuing the ground troops as they withdraw. Maybe I can take out their dropships, or at least gather some intel. Straker out.” He was already bounding low across the surface, keeping a sharp watch above his head with his ADA lasers activated and charged. This took extra power, but the beams—too weak to knock anything down, but good enough to blind sensors—were vital to his survival. They fired automatically from time to time as anything came close from above, and now and again he sent a force-cannon bolt skyward.
If he’d been the Opter commander on the spot, he’d have sent an overwhelming force—say, a hundred drones—to pound Straker from the air. He suspected that there wasn’t really an Opter commander in the human sense, though—not one that could adjust to surprises and give radically different orders. The Opters seemed poor at improvisation, or even at identifying what was important, when a Queen wasn’t around.
By contrast, both human empires had tried to incubate a thoroughly competent chain of command, from the lowest corporal through the highest flag officer, so every leader could take over in a pinch.
Of course, it was almost certain that the Opters didn’t know Derek Straker, the Liberator, occupied the pesky mechsuit. If they had, they might have done whatever it took to get him. It wasn’t undue pride that made him think so. He knew his value to the Liberation movement, if mainly to its spirit and direction.
He might have killed a few more of the retreating enemies, especially those slowed by obvious damage, but he chose to observe. He wasn’t sure how truly hidden he was, but there was no need to give the Opters help in targeting him, especially if their dropships had better sensors than their cannon fodder.
He peeked between two rocks at the crest of a low ridge to see the vehicles boarding, not the squat, blocky lifters he expected, but heavy fighter drones. It appeared the spacecraft each carried one armored vehicle in a conformal bay.
This may have explained the cars’ and tanks’ expendability. They were more in the nature of add-ons than true ground formations, utility vehicles used to seize or destroy certain targets on missions much as a human ship’s marines might perform. Probably only a limited number of the heavy fighter
s were so equipped.
Straker recorded everything, but didn’t bother to try to attack. His force-cannon wouldn’t penetrate the fighters’ armor at this distance, while their weapons might take him out with one lucky shot.
He tried to open a datalink to Trinity. It took half a minute, but eventually he was able to access a read-only feed.
From what he could sort out from the blizzard of information, not only was the AI-run ship destroying Opters by the dozen, but she was disrupting them badly with direct hacking attacks. No doubt they would improve their countermeasures later, but for now, there was a bubble around Trinity that no Opter could seem to penetrate. It must be defined by the nanoseconds of lightspeed within which, if the critters got too close, the AI’s hacking could overcome any defenses.
Straker chuckled. Cybernetic bug repellent. That’s what it was.
This went far toward explaining why Trinity and Rhinoceros hadn’t been overwhelmed. By standing back to back, as it were, the thick-skinned armored dinosaur of space and the slashing bird of prey had managed to fend off all comers.
This didn’t mean they remained pristine. Trinity’s system status telltales showed at least half yellow and red. Many of her weapons were down, and her armor, never thick in the first place, had enough holes to fill a Sachsen whorehouse.
Rhino looked even worse. Parts of her burned with stubborn oxygen fires, and most of her weaponry was gone. What looked like insectoid battlesuiters crawled on her surface or entered her skin through rents in her armor. As Straker watched, an explosion gouted plasma into space, perhaps from a mine or bomb set by the Opter marines.
Trinity continued to orbit the monitor, stripping away attackers wherever she could, but she was only one ship, and despite her valiant defense, she was losing the fight.
Straker cursed at himself, trying to figure out what he could do. He could use his drop jets to blast out into space, but his mechsuit was no fighter. Without cover or maneuverability, he’d be shot to pieces in short order.
“Trinity, how close are Gray’s ships?” he asked, desperate for hope and good news.
“They’ve already begun arriving, but only corvettes in numbers. They’ve been unable to reach us.”
“What about the frigates and destroyers?”
“They’re minutes from engagement. Even then, it will take time to fight through.”
“If you can hold on for just a little longer—”
“I am aware of this fact, Admiral Straker. No amount of encouragement or micromanagement on your part will change the situation. You can’t do anything to help.”
“The hell I can’t. Straker out.”
But Straker had no idea how to make good on his words. He just knew he couldn’t sit on his ass and do nothing.
He turned his attention back to the Opter heavy fighters retrieving their ground elements. There was one per tank or scout car, and as each vehicle locked into place, the aerospace craft took off.
One light tank lagged behind the rest, struggling with damaged tracks. It gave him an idea.
He worked his way around the flank to a position directly astern of the grounded fighter, the most likely place it lacked sensor coverage. He then crept up on it, staying as low as possible, using the rocky terrain for concealment.
When the struggling tank got close to its fighter, and was turning itself this way and that, trying to line up to enter its small deployment bay, Straker rushed forward. He scooped up a five-ton boulder on the way and smashed the tank’s turret with it from behind, gambling that this would destroy any of its sensors and antennas, and possibly stun the driver. With any luck, from the fighter pilot’s point of view, the tank would simply go dark.
He had no idea whether the fighter had sensors so close to its skin. Everything he’d seen about these Opters suggested rugged simplicity, with few extra systems. Their philosophy seemed to be that everything was expendable. This was highly efficient when lives were cheap and numerous.
Biologically, much of humanity’s instinct to value people came from the steep investment in each human—twenty years or so until adulthood and usefulness to society, with enormous amounts of education for any technical role. Opter drone pilots, on the other hand, probably developed much faster, and, he guessed, needed only enough training to fight and die for their Queens.
Straker quickly dragged the tank closer to the fighter, hoping this would make it appear as if the vehicle were still trying to get aboard. When it was close, he shoved it into a small depression, and then scooped up rocks and soil to bury it under a shallow layer of surface material.
Then he stepped aboard in its place and braced himself in the deployment bay.
Would the pilot have sensors inside his bay? Or would the creature merely have telltales that told it when the tank was aboard? Or perhaps only something simple, like pressure detectors in the deck? That tank looked to mass about the same as his mechsuit, perhaps fifty tons.
And if the pilot wasn’t fooled, well, at least he could tear the fighter apart from the inside.
Straker waited a long moment.
And then another.
Finally, the fighter rocked a bit and lifted.
Straker watched the ground fall away beneath him. He was braced in the bay, facing outward like a paratrooper in an aircraft’s exit door waiting for the command to jump. The bright stars of space spun across his visual field, clouded by the sparkles of drives and thrusters and weapons fire.
Where would the Opter fighter go? Would it flee for the Nest Ships waiting far off? He thought not—not unless they believed they’d lost the battle. No, there were still a few minutes until the trickle of Republic ships became a flood. The Opters still had a chance to finish off the monitor, and Trinity, and overwhelm the Beta-2 base.
His gamble paid off. As he’d hoped, within seconds the fighter climbed and maneuvered to drop its combat vehicle on the skin of Rhinoceros. Only, that combat vehicle was Straker.
When he planted his magnetized feet on the armored hull of the monitor, he sent a force cannon bolt into the fighter’s guts, in the direction he figured the pilot should be. The hot jet of plasma cut deep and fires began to burn.
Straker placed both gauntlets against the stricken fighter and shoved. He was happy to see it drift and begin to tumble, apparently dead. “Thanks for the ride, bug-buddy.” He chuckled.
The burn of a beam on his skin reminded him how exposed he was out here on the hull. It would be stupid beyond measure to try to fight across the naked plain of the monitor’s curving hull, with every fighter in his line of sight—and he in theirs.
Quickly, he ran for the nearest rent in the armor and dove into the ship’s interior. Now, he was in his element.
Straker began to kill Opters.
He hunted the bugs though the interior for five long hours. It didn’t matter that he fought Opters in Opter battlesuits. Battlesuits of any kind were simply no match for him. He was a giant among pygmies, with weapons that killed with one shot, one thought. Tanks couldn’t have operated inside the monitor, but a mechsuit could.
Sometimes he had to crouch. Sometimes he ripped through walls. Sometimes he wished his suit was half its size—but always, always, he slaughtered them as he found them.
He relieved, and then led, scattered and demoralized groups of marines. They accreted around him like lost souls around a savior. He was an angel, the only one that could lead them out of Hell. Though weary, they followed him, supported him, guarded his back.
Long before they killed the last bug, Commodore Gray’s capital ships turned the tide of battle. When it became obvious they would lose, the drone fleets turned as if of one mind and fled, saving as many as they could. Gray’s grim warriors, angered at their losses, pursued them, killing all they could, until the Nest Ships fled into sidespace.
Gray’s flagship, too slow to chase the enemy drones, boarded Rhinoceros with her own marines. Once his ship was secured, Commodore Pearson landed his sorely wounded monitor on t
he moon’s surface, which allowed base forces and repair vehicles easy access.
Straker and the surviving marines soon stood proudly on top of the enormous ship as if upon a metal hill, surveying the battlefield. Most of the ground turrets, strongpoints and facilities of the shipyards remained intact, preserved by the tenacious defense of the heroic monitor crew and Trinity. Fleet ships cruised above in formation, and the moon’s landscape swarmed with activity.
Away, on the horizon, he noticed a similar metal hill, and a line of vehicles heading toward it. He remembered there had been two monitors. That must be Hippopotamus, Rhino’s fallen sister ship. He silently saluted her hulk for a moment and hoped there were survivors.
Commodore Gray comlinked from her flagship. “Congratulations, Liberator,” she said, her voice devoid of its usual faint disapproval. “You managed to hold.”
“We managed,” he replied. “Thank Trinity and Pearson’s people—and yours. Everybody fought hard today. Unfortunately, there are plenty of good men and women to add to the rolls of our fallen heroes.”
“This is a private comlink, Admiral. No need for speeches.”
“It’s how I feel, Ellen. If that’s a speech, okay, I’ll own it. Now what did you call about?”
“I’ve got someone for you to meet.”
“Oh? Who?”
He never could have predicted her answer. “An Opter defector.”
Chapter 4
Straker, on the surface of moon Beta-2
Commodore Gray continued her surprising comlink report to Straker about the Opter defector. “He says he wants to talk to you, and you only.”
Straker considered for a moment. “He, huh? It’s male?”
“No doubt.” Gray seemed amused by something.
“Send him to Trinity. I’ll meet him there. Straker out.”
He then called Trinity for pickup.
The Opter defector was brought aboard in shackles, snug duranium bracelets and anklets linked with chains. A heavy, treaded maintenance robot held a portion of the chain with one metal claw.