Bellator: An Anthology of Warriors of Space & Magic

by A. L Butcher

  Please don’t let me die floating helpless in this damned tank, thought Benny. It was a feeling of total helplessness, floating there, unable to do anything to affect his own fate. The damned Fleet people had all the control, what little there was. He couldn’t even leave the tank, not without being crushed under thirty gravities, enough to break his bones and collapse his organs.

  “Prepare for jump to normal space,” said the voice on his implant.

  Benny checked the velocity figures and saw that they were almost down to point two light, the maximum speed the craft was capable of translation between the dimensions. The velocity hit the mark, and the lights dimmed for a moment. The nausea hit the private at the same moment.

  He had been on the cusp of not making it into the Marines, based on his reaction to translation. Most humans experienced a moment of nausea, and then were fine. Some experienced attacks of vomiting that made them wish they were dead. Benny fell nearer to that part of the bell curve. Curse my luck that I didn’t, he thought as he fought to keep from vomiting into his breathing mask. Normally his shortcoming was only a nuisance. In this situation, it could become much more, if he clogged his mask while still in the fluid of the tank.

  The Lodz stopped all deceleration as soon as she entered normal space, in an attempt to hide from the pursuing ship. While her grabbers were not activated and engaged in gripping the fabric of space she was not emitting gravitons, and so would be difficult to track. Or so the theory went.

  I need to get the hell out of this thing. Benny reached out and punched the emergency release panel, and the door to the tank slid open, dumping him and all the liquid onto to floor of the compartment. The mask soon followed, along with the contents of his stomach.

  “Get the hell off your belly, Slacker,” yelled Sergeant Traore. “Get your equipment on and be prepared to repel boarders.”

  “But,” gasped the private, looking up from the floor. “We’re in normal space. They can’t find us now.”

  “And if you believe that, you’re even dumber than you look. So get to the platoon armory and get into your shit.”

  The sergeant stomped away, obviously none the worse for wear. Benny shook his head and staggered back to his feet. He looked at the information coming over his implant, and gasped yet again when he saw the enemy ship on the tactical plot as it was dropping into normal space, less than five light minutes away. We’re so screwed, he thought. If the enemy had dropped out twenty light minutes away, there would have been a slightly less than even chance they could have escaped detection. Their heat signature wouldn’t even have reached the enemy position before the Cacas were likely to jump back into hyper and move on. There was absolutely no way that the Ca’cadasan could miss them from this range. In about four minutes it would pick up their heat signature, and then the twenty-five million ton battleship would pound their eight million ton battle cruiser to plasma.

  The ready room outside the armory was buzzing with activity as forty-six Marines tried to get to their equipment at the same time. Benny was bigger than most, and was able to push his way through to his cubby, where his fitted suit of medium armor was stored. With a push of a button the door opened and the armor swung open, ready for him to step in. He backed into the suit, the hard connections sliding into ports in the back of his skull and lower spine. The front of the suit swung shut, linking with the rear. A moment later the nanolinks joined the halves of the suit into one, no seams weakening the strength of the armor.

  Benny stepped away from the cubby, ten times stronger than when he had entered the suit, protected by the best armor that money could buy, eight million imperials per. They weren’t quite in the same class as the heavy armor the Marines Assault Brigades used for planetary operations, but they were much better suited for shipboard battles. Pulling up his HUD, he made sure all of his systems were online.

  “Get your ass moving, Marine,” yelled the platoon sergeant, waving the private over to the armory window. The armorer handed him his weapon, a particle beam rifle that could kill a suit like the one he wore, and the thought went through his mind that the enemy would have weapons just as effective.

  A moment later he was out in the corridor, dodging Spacers who were in their own version of battle armor. No one went into combat in skin suits. That was asking for death, if the ship’s compartments evacuated atmosphere, or fast moving objects broke loose. The only people who did that were the action heroes of vids, so the audience could always see their faces.

  “Make way,” yelled a commanding voice.

  Benny moved to the side of the corridor to allow a Fleet officer by, a couple of adult civilians and a little girl in tow. The civilians were all suited, not in combat armor, but hopefully something that would protect them if it came to the worst. The little girl, Benny thought she must have been seven or eight, had her visor up and was staring with wide brown eyes, a strand of black hair exposed on her forehead.

  The ambassador’s kid and her parents, he thought, remembering that they were aboard. Just their luck.

  “We have missile launch,” came the voice over the ship’s intercom. “All personnel. Prepare for evasive maneuvers.”

  Which meant the ship would be moving in all three normal space dimensions as it tried to evade the incoming missiles that would be seeking its life.

  “Get to your duty station, Slacker,” yelled Sergeant Traore, coming up behind him.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Benny automatically, holding back the curse he wanted to throw her way. His duty station was fifty meters up the corridor and to the left, near the outer hull of the ship. One of the counter missile control rooms, where he would stand as a redundant crewman on a station that was itself redundant. All defensive systems were monitored from a central control that had its own backup. This control center, manned by Spacers, was tasked with local firing of the mount if the central systems went down. Benny ran into the room and threw himself in the chair that locked his suit in place as soon as he hit, a control board rotating into place to his front, waiting to take over if need be. At least I’m not on damage control, he thought, about the only positive to the whole mess. Those Spacers and Marines had to report to any part of the ship that sustained battle damage, ready to repair what they could, and evacuate those who were no longer whole.

  The tactical holo came up over his board as soon as his presence activated it, and he had a clear picture of what they faced. Moments after it did, he wished he hadn’t. The Caca battleship was heading at them under five hundred gravities acceleration. And that wasn’t the worst of it, as almost a forty arrows were arrayed ahead of the ship, pointing toward the battle cruiser as indications of their vectors, an acceleration figure of eight thousand gravities showing under each one.

  The battle cruiser shook as she sent her own missiles toward the enemy, twenty at a time through her bow and port accelerators, each engaging its own grabbers and heading for the Caca vessel at five thousand gravities, the limit for the weapons she carried. Five seconds later, another twenty left the tubes, then another, until over a two minute span they had fired over half of their complement. The enemy kept putting missiles into space as well, more of their faster weapons, all heading toward the smaller ship.

  Lodz rolled in space, bringing her stern and starboard tubes to bear, sending the other two hundred of her longest range weapons at the enemy. In minutes there were four hundred missiles in a score of packs, heading straight at the enemy. And only two hundred coming in, but more capable weapons in every respect.

  Missiles were long range weapons, and performed better at range. If given an hour’s flight time, the weapons of both sides would approach high relativistic velocities that made their gigaton class warheads almost an afterthought, compared to the kinetic energy they would impart with a strike. The human weapons actually decelerated toward the enemy, trying to overcome the point two light velocity of their launch vessel in the other direction. While the enemy missiles were already carrying a closing velocity of poin
t three light.

  Moments after the last missiles left the tubes, the battle cruiser shook with a different class of vibration, the counter missile tubes putting their interceptors into space. These were capable of ten thousand gravities acceleration for a much more limited time, and they sought out the enemy’s weapons that were on a course to kill their launching platform.

  Enemy weapons started falling off the plot, a few at a time, as interceptors struck them, or went for proximity kills that flooded the missiles with heat and radiation. The Lodz opened up with her laser rings at the same time, each of the three structures sending scores of beams on what were hoped would be advantageous arcs. At light minutes distance they only had a small chance of hitting anything, the main reason light amp weapons weren’t used in long range engagements. By luck one scored a hit, while counter missiles continued to try and knock down as many incoming as possible.

  At one light minute, the particle beams joined their fire to the light amp, with just about the same results. Counter missiles were still scoring hits, but not enough, as a hundred and fifty enemy weapons still bore in for the kill.

  As the distance closed, the beam weapons became more effective, and the ship switched over to the smaller short range counters that were designed to put a shotgun of debris in front of the enemy weapons. And at thirty light seconds, the hundreds of automatic cannons on the hull of the ship started putting hundreds of thousands of rounds into space in a last ditch attempt to kill the missiles.

  Benny prayed as he watched the duel. Soon there were only a hundred missiles boring in, doing their best to evade while their electronic countermeasures attempted to spoof the defensive firing systems. Then fifty, then twenty, and the private was beginning to hope they might weather this first storm, if not the next.

  Five missiles made it through and closed. None of them carried enough kinetic energy on their own to shatter the battle cruiser, but together they would probably do the job. Instead, they all detonated from fifty to a hundred meters from the six meter thick armored hull of the human ship.

  The ship shook with the power of five one gigaton antimatter warheads detonating in close proximity. Klaxons blared as the schematic of the ship sprouted dozens of red areas indicating hull breaches. It lost gravity for a moment, and the sensor skin on the starboard side was lost to the heat and radiation. Something punctured the wall of the room, and two of the Spacers manning the main boards were hit by fast moving pieces of bulkhead that tore through their armor and painted the compartment red with their blood.

  Benny closed his eyes to escape the gore, but couldn’t escape the information his implant painted onto his visual centers. Both starboard hangars were wrecked, and almost all of the lifepods on that side of the ship were taken out. Casualty figures came up next, hundreds dead, almost a thousand wounded, probably some people that the private knew.

  The ship rolled back to port to give those sensors a look at the action of their own missiles. The view was disappointing, as all but two of the weapons had been taken out before they could get to engagement range, and that pair was destroyed well short of any kind of effective attack distance.

  And now the enemy battleship was decelerating in their direction, and it was obvious why none of their missiles hit. They wanted prisoners, intelligence. And, worst of all, rations. Humans were compatible proteins, and the Cacas were not above eating species they considered less advanced than themselves, which meant everything not Ca’cadasan.

  It would still be some minutes before the aliens were able to match velocities and get within boarding range. Minutes the Marine could use to figure out how to get his ass out of this crack. But no matter how hard he thought about it, there seemed to be no solution. There were still shuttles in the port hangars, and the enemy would pick them up as soon as they left the battle cruiser. Then they would either destroy them, or capture them, and he wasn’t really sure which would be worse.

  “All crew,” came the call over his suit com. “Prepare to repel boarders.” His HUD flashed a schematic of his local area, with a blinking icon showing where his squad was supposed to gather.

  Hopeless, he thought, going to the gathering point because he didn’t know what else to do. It was unlikely they could stop the Cacas from taking the ship. And if they did, the damned aliens would simply destroy them. It was a lose-lose situation any way he looked at it.

  The corridor was completely evacuated of atmosphere, and when he got to the gathering point he could see why. Where there should have been outer hull on twenty meters of corridor, there was now an open gash looking out on space. Some of the liquid metal inner lining of the armor had filled in, but the gash was too wide, and there was a five meter by three meter opening, big enough for the large aliens to come through.

  “Slacker,” yelled Sergeant Traore, pointing to a support that had fallen from the ceiling. “Get that thing over here. And, by the Goddess, move like you have a pair.”

  Benny held the reply he wanted to give and moved quickly to the support beam, picking it up with the power of his suit and carrying it to the barrier being erected across the corridor. As soon as he laid it in place, a Marine engineer sprayed it with nanites that would bind it to the rest of the hasty fortification. Chu and Gandra came running up with the large, boxy structure of a portable electromagnetic field generator between them, which they placed at the center of the barricade, making sure the projector nozzle stuck through a hole that had been left for just that purpose.

  “Chu and Gandra, you take the middle,” called out Sergeant Traore. She turned to look at two more Marines, pointing. “Jones, Mutambe, you take the right.” Then she turned her gaze toward Benny. “Slacker, you and Khan take the left.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me that, Sarge,” said Benny, looking at the barricade with a jaundiced eye.

  “Then quit being one,” she told the private, before turning to her two heavy weapons Marines. “Rudolph, take your heavy beamer and set up through that port beside the generator. Martis, you’re with me,” she told the grenadier. “Now you Marines get to work cutting the firing ports, unless you want your big, dumb heads exposed over the top of the barricade.”

  Benny went to work on his port, cutting through the carbon/metal composite with his suit laser. The ease in which he cut through gave him little confidence in the material. And the continued shaking of the ship gave him little confidence in their overall chances.

  Linking in while he finished the hole, he caught the tail end of the enemy vessel moving into matching velocities. The Lodz fired every weapon in her inventory that was still functional, two laser rings and a pair of particle beams. The enemy ship retained all of her weaponry in the unequal duel. After a couple of minutes of close range exchange, both laser rings were down, sliced through by the enemy weapons, and only one particle beam was working. The enemy battleship came over the top of the battle cruiser, dropping down to have access to the most severely damaged side, taking out nine of the human vessel’s grabber units during the maneuver.

  The hangar doors of the massive ship opened, and assault shuttles came speeding out to loop over the human ship and attack the other side, while hundreds of Ca’cadasan Marines boosted between the ships on their suit grabbers, heading for any opening they could find. Which included the one Benny’s squad guarded.

  The sergeant launched a microdrone that flew to the opening and looked out. “Be sharp, people. Here they come.”

  Benny tightened his grip on his rifle as he watched the feed from the drone on his HUD. It looked like at least a dozen Cacas moving toward the hole, and that was only what he could see. There could be many more. And then the feed died at the same moment an angry red beam came through the hole and the floating drone went up in a cloud of vapor. The beam melted a gouge in the inner wall of the corridor for a moment before switching off.

  The squad waited, and Sergeant Traore launched another drone from her command suit. It floated through the corridor on antigrav, stoppi
ng just before the hole and inserting a thin probe from the cover of the hull. The feed came back, showing a couple of Cacas planting objects on the solidified liquid metal that filled most of the gash. They backed off, and the devices exploded in silence, sending large pieces of the composite through to strike the opposite wall. It was not made of six meter thick armor, and the projectiles ripped into it, penetrating in places.

  The private sighted his rifle on the enlarged hole and let out half a breath, sure that something was going to present itself any second. He was still surprised when the enemy probes came flying in, over a dozen of them, spreading out and giving the enemy a look at the corridor on both sides of the entry.

  “Take them out,” yelled the sergeant over the com, her rifle sending an angry red beam into one of the nearer probes, blasting it out of existence, leaving only metal vapor to mark where it had been.

  Benny fired at another. His shot hit dead center, despite the probe maneuvering to evade fire. It exploded in silence in the vacuum of the corridor, its vapor dispersing quickly. The squad continued to fire, at least the riflemen, until all but two of the probes were gone. At which point something much more dangerous came through the hole.

  One three meter long Caca soldier came through the hole at first, its particle beam firing at the barrier that the probes had shown it. Four human weapons fired as one, sending red beams of protons into its body. Each only touched for a second, which was enough to put two holes through the torso armor, incinerating much of the flesh underneath. The next three big aliens came through at the same time, all firing.

  The Marines were sheltered behind the barrier, and had the further advantage of an electromag field that slowed down and sometimes bent the proton streams. They had not activated their suit fields yet, which had the disadvantage of giving them away to passive sensors. The Cacas carried very large, more advanced rifles, capable of killing even through the electromag field generator’s shielding. Two beams burned through the barrier and hit Chu, punching a hole through his weaker faceplate and killing the Marine in an instant.