Strike Battleship Engineers (The Ithis Campaign Book 2)

by Shane Lochlann Black

  Nearly a dozen more superheavy tanks punched horrifying amounts of energy against the mech’s forward armor, causing it to begin to glow an eerie blue color. It was a frightening backdrop to the destruction that poured back at the veteran armor column. It was the battlefield equivalent of two blood-crazed bar customers going at each other with metal wrenches and iron hooks.

  It was also a suitable environment for the 715th, also known as “Rickety’s Gun Shop,” to open up with its heavy artillery. From more than 40 miles away, electrically-charged 100-ton hypersonic shells began raining down on the far side of Hill 102, coming out of the lightning-torn sky at multiple-mach velocities. The first impact caused a white-hot explosion to lift more than a thousand tons of earth, rock, shrapnel, dust and gnarled vegetation into the atmosphere, where it was quickly blown hundreds of feet into the air and set afire by subsequent explosions.

  As each unit of Sixth Armor regained its momentarily disrupted short-range targeting capability, their interlinked battle computers automatically deflected the main batteries of all its even-numbered units west once again. White lances of uncontrolled plasma tore into the ground under the heavy tanks, and from within a literal hurricane of flame they returned fire against a second orbiting vessel.

  Just as the first mech began to stagger under the sustained barrage of ground-shaking artillery detonations, a second loomed behind it.

  “They brought a keg, sir!”

  “Alright, you bastards! Sixth Armor is all in! Tigerman! Signal all units! Take Hill One Zero Two! Cancel point Charlie and advance on Point Alpha. Maintain main battery fire and stand by to arm kinetics and point defense!”

  The second mech took aim as the remaining tanks of Tarcus’ company locked their own weapons on it and began to climb the incline. By now all pretense of tactics or finesse were gone. The combatants were just standing center ring and trading the ground combat equivalent of blows to the head with large clubs.

  The marine captain’s unorthodox approach had preserved most of his command by not allowing his units to get strung out along the visible ridge. By utilizing a more-or-less stationary advantage, Sixth Armor was in a position where they could cover enough of the hill’s visible approaches while the 715th pounded anything that tried to do an end run on the west edge.

  The problem was it was precisely the kind of standoff that Komanov’s marines wanted to avoid. And with orbital support approaching, time was growing short for a solution.

  “We’ve got to break this line, captain! Force command is estimating nine minutes to the arrival of orbital reinforcements, and this group isn’t going to try and target us from low orbit!”

  “Franklin, we’re stuck tracks in the mud until someone up there responds to our airstrike request. If we run, those mechs will get a foothold on the best vantage point we could possibly offer them. By the time we got back to the safety of the Badlands and the canyons we’d be ripped to shreds.”

  “Captain, this is Razorback Eight. The Gun Shop reports the proximate mech formation has reinforcements approaching from the northwest. If we don’t fall back, Commander 715th thinks we’ll be incinerated. We can’t cover all three approaches at once. If they take the western approach and we don’t maneuver, we’ll be surrounded!”

  Tarcus grabbed the communications handset. “Get me the repeater at Copernicus base and do it quickly!” The captain chomped while he waited for the line to switch over. “What? No! I said Copernicus! Who the hell else would I be calling for the love of all that is–What!? Say again!?” Tarcus bumped Corporal Fernandez in the back of the head with a boot. “Switch to speakers.”

  Fernandez straightened his helmet and switched the controls. The captain hung up the handset as static and noise roared from the huge tank’s internal sound system. Finally a faint voice was audible.

  “Come in Sixth Armor! This is Lieutenant Colonel Lucas Moody, DSS Argent Seventh Air-Ground Company! Acknowledge!”

  “Now that’s what I like to hear! Corporal! Acknowledge the colonel and add his group to the telemetry net. Give Rickety their bearings and switch the transceiver to my handset.”

  Fernandez yanked and punched the big tank’s chunky controls until the handset transmitter lit up and the bell rattled. Tarcus unhooked it and flipped the frequency match computer to manual. “Seventh Air Ground! This is Captain Leonard Tarcus, Sixth Armor. You’ve got a world of hurt coming down Broadway at zero point four our position. What have you got!?”

  A pause.

  “Hold on to your ass, captain!”

  What happened next would have brought the entire tank company to their feet in a roaring cheer had they not been strapped into shock frames. Three formations of heavy Paladin multi-role attack spacecraft streaked overhead at an altitude of perhaps a hundred feet. The high-pitched whine of their atmospheric turbines combined with the ground-shuddering roar of the sonic booms that blasted half-mile-wide holes in the still raging hurricane windstorm would have been enough on their own to make any sane enemy retreat. But the noise was the least frightening thing the Lethe Deeps forces faced.

  In their first pass, all eighteen paladins released phalanxes of old-fashioned momentum contact bombs from their external racks. Thousand-pound self-guided weapons whistled through the sky at Mach 12 and rammed into the ground like cannonballs slamming through structures made of glued-together popsicle sticks.

  The explosions strobed and ripped into the air. Bomb after bomb crashed through the enemy formations and their battlescreens, pulverizing artillery platforms, mobile energy cannons, infantry and transports. Wheels, hulls, mangled parts, bodies and weapons were thrown into the air. Whatever wasn’t obliterated on the ground by shockwaves and airbursts was incinerated in the screaming windstorm above. As the Argent formations passed, surviving ground units turned away from their approach vectors to engage.

  It was a near-fatal mistake.

  Captain Tarcus’ chomping cigar almost fell out of his mouth when he saw what happened next. A gunship that looked for all the world like a metal cross between a scorpion, a man-eating spider and a cobra hovered into position directly over Sixth Armor’s lead units. Even from their vantage point below they could see the enormous yellow and black unit designator on its port-side hull:

  DSS ARGENT BBV 740

  Right next to that was a gigantic image of a playing card spade icon with an enormous number eight in its center.

  “What the hell is that?!” someone shouted over the comm net.

  “Famous last words...” Tarcus muttered.

  Black Eight unfolded like an enormous and angry bird of prey. It coiled itself menacingly, nose angled down. It looked as if it was readying itself to confront the ominous shadow of the heavy mech rising from beyond the hill. The wind tore and slashed at the gunship’s battle screens but had no effect on the vessel’s aerodynamics. The ship’s deep space drive field kept it stable and at altitude. Tarcus grinned as he remembered Captain Hunter’s words. “Argent’s enemies have never seen what a T-Hawk can do in an atmosphere.”

  The mech opened up first. Beams of lethal energy ripped and snarled from its energy mounts, smashing into the gunship’s forward screens like well-aimed hammer thrusts. Again and again the mech pounded away. The impacts were intense enough to push the chunky and inelegant gunship back further and further from its original position. Finally the barrage ended. The gunship’s weapons glowed to life as it rotated carefully and returned to its original position like a prizefighter getting back to his feet with a savage fire in his eyes.

  “Reaper Eight” returned fire with its legendary brawler cannons. Fast moving egg-shaped bolts of explosive unstable energy exploded from the twin mounts and rammed into the center plate of the enemy mech like someone had fashioned a machine gun capable of firing ten-foot boulders at a hundred rounds a minute. The resulting explosions ripped through the air and caused white-hot blinding strobes of searing light to brighten the sky. The ground lurched and shuddered. Violent tremors rocked and pound
ed the tanks of Sixth Armor as the shock blasts from the T-Hawk’s weapon detonations slammed against the hard-packed earth. The tank’s polarization systems blacked out its out-facing ports as the intense light levels outside became dangerous.

  No other vessel, fleet, experimental or otherwise mounted the Tarantula-Hawk brawler cannon. It was designed for a spacecraft tasked with taking on much larger vessels in toe-to-toe slugging matches, and took full advantage of the T-Hawk’s unique and almost nightmarish ability to harness dangerous overload conditions in its own reactor systems.

  It was the natural weapon of choice for on-station aerial combat. Beyond a light planetary defense battery, there were no mobile field units that could come close to its sheer sustained destructive power. Tarantula Hawks were not designed to destroy a target efficiently or precisely. They were designed to just pound it into wreckage. Then pound on the wreckage.

  The weapon’s nomenclature was more than appropriate. T-Hawk crews often commented it felt like they were flying the space combat equivalent of a five-foot-six 275-pound head-shaven bar bouncer wearing cement boxing gloves and the kind of smile that tells you to prepare for nine rounds of a heavyweight beating you’ll still need icepacks for next Christmas.

  The heavier mech returned fire again and again, but Black Eight’s high-energy ablative armor absorbed the second barrage like someone had poured a glass of iced tea into a sponge the size of a swimming pool. Secondary impacts from the next brawler salvo strafed the enemy formations behind the mech, ripping six-hundred-yard gashes in the ground and causing superheated airbursts to flatten a dozen vehicles, including two mobile artillery platforms.

  It wasn’t until Eight’s sister gunships “Shadow Waltz” (Black Three) and “Night Fever” (Black Five) hovered into formation with their flight leader that the enemy mech tried to run. One T-Hawk was bad enough. But even the Lethe Deeps forces knew they were designed to operate in flights of three, and the tactical advantages that design decision afforded them made the relatively small gunships the scourge of known space. It was what gave their formations the semi-official designation “hunter killer.” The first two ships carried out the former roles while the third carried out the latter. It was like having a sniper hiding behind two battalions of field artillery.

  By the time the mech turned far enough to see what was happening behind it, the forward unit’s luck had well and truly run out.

  Seventh Air-Ground had flown as far as Bash Island and then circled back in the classic battlefield flanking maneuver favored by paladin commanders. The huge spacecraft accelerated low over the ground behind the Sarn column and appeared to somersault in mid-air as they deployed their mech configurations and landed. The first heavy paladin touched down only a half mile from the forward formation’s rear flank.

  Two gigantic metal “feet” crushed mud five feet down and began walking the Argent combat mech forward as its missile and energy batteries deployed over its “shoulders” and rapid fire plasma cannon locked into position at the ends of its arms. Five more joined it, forming a double-centered diamond-slot formation, known colloquially among the mechanized Argent marines as the “double duck.” Two side-by-side paladins sat in the “saddle” formed by the other four mechs. All six opened fire at once, strafing infantry and energy platforms with merciless rolling impact patterns, fast moving missiles and atmosphere tearing orange fireballs. They marched forward relentlessly, their hulls turning from side to side and pouring sustained weapons fire into the massed enemy formations, while most of the scattered return fire deflected from their high-powered battle screens.

  A second formation of paladins streaked overhead, dropping yet another wall of half-ton contact bombs. Row after row of explosions ripped through the battlefield once again while hurricane-force winds screamed overhead.

  By the time the forward column had redeployed itself to meet Sixth Armor’s reinforcements, they had lost more than a third of their strength. Instead of two battalions, now they had only one, and it was understrength. Complicating the situation was the fact that enemy battalion was now perfectly bracketed with Tarantula Hawks on their eastern flank and heavy paladin mechs advancing from the no-man’s land to the west.

  Moments after Captain Tarcus had ordered Sixth Armor to crest Hill 102 and resume their attack, Starhaven’s comm station finally responded.

  “Sixth Armor! Come in! Sixth Armor! Urgent!”

  Tarcus grabbed the handset. “Maintain main battery fire, Tigerman!” A nearby explosion shook the captain’s shock couch, almost knocking his helmet off. “Starhaven! What the hell is so urgent!?”

  “Force command reports new enemy spacecraft contacts approaching weapons range, Captain. Prepare for orbital bombardment!”

  A moment later, the bridge at Gunfighter’s Quarry was vaporized by a three kiloton explosion.

  Fifty-Seven

  “Commander on the bridge.”

  Annora Doverly moved swiftly to the center chair aboard Argent. She didn’t recognize anyone else on the deck other than her signals officer.

  “Force commander, sound off.” The doctor fastened her shock harness and brought up her sideconn.

  “Singleton, ma’am.”

  “Alright, Mr. Singleton, I’d love to give you the thirty-thousand-foot view but we’re up against it. Give me flight status on the Bucs and Sharks and an update on T-Hawk Green and make it fast.”

  “Aye, ma’am.” Major Greg Singleton turned back to the Skywatch Spacelane Traffic Control console. Scarcely four days ago, he was running the atmospheric air traffic tower on a marine reserve base on Core Four. He had all the training, but even he had to admit suddenly being put in charge of flight control for twenty-three fighters and eleven gunships was a bit overwhelming. All this aside from the fact he was a marine officer serving on the bridge of a fleet capital ship.

  “Tactical, I want a second-by-second track on our next pass over the strike point. If someone down there gives us a dirty look I want you to howl like a pack of redbone hounds, clear?”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Helm, take us to flight launch velocity. Signals?”

  Zony looked up from her station. “Ma’am?”

  Doverly smiled. “What the hell are you doing on the bridge?”

  “Praying for war, commander.”

  “Find someone to relieve you and take point for Tigershark Six Zero. You’ll be the strike leader for the Jack wing. Good hunting.”

  Zony hesitated a moment, weighing the prospect of leaving her Executive Officer alone on the bridge. Then she realized how many replacement pilots were loose on the flight decks. She had to agree having at least one native Argent pilot in the attack wing might be a more worthy idea. “Affirmative. Jets in five.” Lieutenant Tixia vanished into the corridor towards the magneto-lifts. A young man grabbed the headphones and hastily took the signals station.

  “Open a channel to the Minstrel.”

  He fumbled through the procedure. Once incorrectly. Then again. “Aye... ma’am. You’re on.”

  “Normally Jayce would have you float, captain. What are your thoughts?”

  “How about we join the strike wing? I’d offer you an escort, but I wouldn’t want to make Argent’s gunnery section look bad,” came the snappy reply from Lieutenant Islington.

  Annora grinned. Skywatch skippers had a long tradition of ribbing one another.

  “Very well, Minstrel. Coordinate with strike leader designator Jackrabbit Nine Nine Four. Give ‘em hell.”

  “That is affirmative, Argent. See you on the beach.” DSS Minstrel pinged Argent’s transponder channel with the customary farewell code and banked out of formation towards the strike wing’s rally point. Annora was well aware of how much firepower and combat experience Rebecca’s crew could bring to the fight. She also knew enemy captains were rarely prepared to face a 28,000-ton starship pretending to be a fighter.

  “Ma’am, I have a priority signal from Nemesis Eight. Requesting emergency executive conference
on battle frequency Juliet Nine.”

  Annora configured her sideconn. “Go ahead, Nemesis.”

  “Skywatch confirming primary tracking on inbounds. Numbering four, five, six heavies. Signal main body. Recommend alert one. Condition status override. Enemy vessels now inside our defensive perimeter and closing.”

  “Acknowledged, Nemesis. Stand by to establish datalink telemetry and upgrade alert status.” Doverly switched channels on her sideconn. “Pilot, bring the Argent about. New course one one six mark ten.”

  The marine pilot at the helm acknowledged and began gently banking the enormous battleship to starboard. This time, she pulled out of orbit with flawless precision and pivoted gracefully towards the oncoming enemy attack force. Annora keyed her sideconn again.

  “Signals, upgrade alert status all decks. Scramble flight. All designators. Now hear this. Now hear this. Sound general quarters. All hands battle stations. Force commander, stand by to launch strike wing on my signal.”

  The clear channel alarm sounded on every fleet transmission frequency. Skywatch officers, marines and pilots all heard the pleasant female voice issue the simultaneous alert. “Attention all stations. Attention all stations. This is Argent Force Command on emergency channel Juliet Nine. Message from the Flag. Battle stations. Battle stations. Deck officers report alert status to the first officer. Engage emergency conference on this frequency and stand by for strike operations.”

  Meanwhile, on Flight Three, the pilots of Skywatch Marine Squadron Four-Four, known as the “Fighting Frogs,” had acclimated themselves as well as they could to their new 2G Yellowjacket fighters and the shark-themed warpaint. Squadron leader Lieutenant Colonel Brock “Bubba” Taylor took his engines to launch power and aggressively saluted the ensign. Moments later, the deck signals shifted green. He slammed his feet down on the release locks and held the controls as Tigershark One bolted into space. Over the course of the next 71 seconds, the rest of Argent Squadron Six Zero followed. Once the entire wing was in space, they formed up and raced towards the rally point.