When she came to, the bridge was on fire again. She could taste blood in her mouth, and her vision was narrowing into a tunnel.
We failed.
That bitter thought followed her into the darkness.
Eighteen
“Remember, these bastards fire a wider beam than anything we’ve used before,” Russell told his buddies. “And the grav effect extends for a meter all around it. You can’t see it, but anything too close will sure as fuck feel it. Make sure you keep your distance from anything you don’t want to destroy. Anything within a meter of the blast is SOL. You ever heard the term spaghettification?
“Not really, no,” Grampa said.
“You ever seen an old-style spaghetti maker? Imagine you’re the dough. That’s what happens to you if you get too close to the beam.”
“Shit.”
All three of them were carrying portable grav cannons and their attached backpacks. They were still inside, behind Malta’s nice thick hull and the last remaining force field protecting the station. Sooner or later, though, they were going to open the airlock and shoot out of it. Russell had that lightheaded, this-ain’t-happening feeling he usually got when he was scared shitless. Funny how some things hit him worse than others. He’d felt less afraid at the pass on Parthenon-Three, even though he’d known the Vipers were minutes away from killing every motherfucker in the valley. The idea of having nothing between him and hard vacuum other than a force field, not matter how strong, was gnawing on him.
“Be cool,” he told himself.
“I’m cool,” Grampa said, thinking Russell had been talking to him. “Problem is, it’s going to get hot as hell in here.”
“What, got no stories about how hard you had it back in the day?” Gonzo asked. “Never picked a fight with a destroyer before?”
“Never even saw the ocean before I got posted to Orlando,” the goldie said. “And never walked in hard vacuum until boot camp. Still getting used to it.”
“Here they come,” Russell told them.
The Lampreys had matched speeds with the habitat as it orbited its bizarre quark star, and now they were slowly approaching it, too slowly to be stopped by its force fields. The tango ships creeped past the burning wrecks of the destroyer squadron, occasionally firing on any escape pod that hadn’t made it back to the base. The Fang-Faces weren’t taking prisoners. They rarely did.
It was Third Platoon’s turn to do something.
“Target is Sierra-Thirty-one. Engage at four thousand meters.”
Sierra Thirty-one was a Lamprey frigate. A pretty small one, but at six hundred meters in length, it was the biggest thing Russell had shot at in his career. This would be one for the books, assuming he lived to tell the story.
He shifted his grip on the portable cannon, a massive tube that weighed about twice as much as he did in full battle-rattle. The power pack strapped to his back was good for ten pulses or a five-second continuous beam. The fireteam’s plan was to hose the tango ship for the full five, then run for their lives. As a plan, it blew dead donkey farts.
Three hundred robots clinging to the exterior of the station followed his aiming point. A grav cannon would fry their delicate computer-brains, so they were armed with lasers powerful enough to degrade a starship’s shields. Their sensors fed their data into his imp. The destroyer was four klicks away. Close enough for government work.
“Hit it,” he told Gonzo.
His buddy had already entered the unlocking codes into the airlock’s control panel. He pushed the last button and a section of hull slid open, large enough for all three Marines. Elsewhere, the rest of the weapons platoon was picking their own targets. They would be engaging three destroyers and four frigates before the tangos launched their shuttles. Too bad they didn’t figure out bonuses by tonnage, the way they did in the Navy.
Russell locked his knees in place; they’d started to shake when the airlock door opened. He saw stars and burning wreckage in the distance and the tango ship four klicks away. His helmet sensors magnified the distant shape. It looked a bit like a snake with a large egg on each side, except for the head, which was more like a porcupine, each spine marking a spot for a sensor or comm antenna – or a big gun. Twelve-inchers, 304mm if you wanted it metric. Either way, nothing he wanted to see pointed in his direction.
“Fire!”
The recoil was a bit of a surprise even after putting an hour into a simulator to qualify for the damn things. The robots’ lasers hit the target a split second before the graviton blasts; the energy shield became visible as it sparkled in every color of the rainbow. It popped like a soap bubble a moment later. The three Marines played the three continuous beams back and forth, careful to stay well away from the airlock’s frame or each other. The destroyer’s hull glowed cherry-red for a few seconds before it ruptured, spewing smoke and flames.
“Nailed that bitch!” Gonzo yelled as they stepped back and closed the hatch.
“Annoyed that bitch is more like it,” Russell said. “Move it!”
They ran down the corridor. Russell could still see the frigate through the robot’s sensors. They’d done more than scratch it. In fact, it’d stopped moving forward and more fires were breaking through its hull. They’d hurt it bad, maybe actually scragged it, but there were other ships behind it and they were launching shuttles – and returning fire. Here and there, a robot’s sensor feed went dead when the enemy warships’ light guns breached the last force field around the station and turned an expensive war machine into burning garbage.
The fireteam made it through the second airlock and closed the door a moment before the outer one blew inwards. A plasma blast had gotten through. Russell watched, hypnotized, as a wall of white fire rolled towards the second airlock door.
“The fuck you doing?” Gonzo yelled and yanked Russell away just before the second airlock burst open. Lucky for them this whole section was depressurized or they’d been shot right back out the now open airlock. Some fire vented into their corridor, but not enough to get through their new personal force fields.
“Sorry,” Russell said as the two Marines picked themselves up. Grampa was waiting for them around a corner, where they all were supposed to be.
“You froze up, brah,” Gonzo told him. “Snap out of it.”
Russell shrugged. He’d been so sure he was dead that he’d almost let it happen. Fucking vacuum always got to him.
“Let’s go,” he told his buddies. “Two hundred meters to the next airlock.”
Outside, the robots were picking off shuttles as they approached the station at crawling speeds. They were running out robots faster than the enemy was losing shuttles, though. The only good bit of news was that the frigate they’d tagged exploded and took several shuttles down with it. They felt the deck floor vibrate slightly when it went.
One bandit down.
How many Marines could say they’d shot down a warship? If they made it out alive, they’d have one hell of a story to tell.
Or someone else would get to tell it next time they drank to fallen comrades.
* * *
The docking bay that had once been mated to the Brunhild was empty except for two understrength squads of Marines from Second Platoon. The cruise liner had been sent away before the Lampreys arrived, carrying off those too badly wounded to fight, the lucky bastards. The bay’s external doors blew up under concentrated energy fire. A moment later, a shuttle rushed inside, its open side doors already disgorging the Spaceborne Popular Front troopers it had brought to the battle.
“Fire!”
Suckass had traded his SAW for a heavy laser gun. He flipped the selector to its highest setting and drew a continuous beam at waist level, hosing the dozen or so Lampreys rushing out of the shuttle’s left ramp. Force fields and the tangos behind them popped and burned like overloaded lightbulbs. The beam kept going, cutting into the rear of the shuttle and sending it crashing into a fireball a moment later.
“Yeah!” he yelled while he drop
ped the spent power pack and reached for a reload.
The rest of the squad mowed down the few surviving tangos just as another shuttle came through the hole and fired its plasma cannon at them.
They were behind the squad’s area shields plus the station internal ones. One energy bubble went down, but the other held long enough for Howard and the other heavy gunner to reload and tear the second shuttle apart. A few Lampreys managed to scurry away and find cover behind some machinery, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that a third and fourth shuttles were coming through.
“Fall back!” Sergeant Weiner called out. A moment later, a plasma blast got through and turned the NCO into gobbets of burning meat and flying shards of ceramic-metal alloy.
“Fuck!”
Even their new and improved armor and personal shields did you no good if a plasma cannon tagged you.
The squad pulled back through the airlock. A Lamprey shooting behind cover volley-fired six rockets. Three splashed against the area shield before draining its power pack. The other three got PFC Barton. The new armor couldn’t handle three armor-piercing rockets, either.
All in all, nine Marines made it through the airlock before it slid shut. Howard was the highest ranking grunt left. Which sucked ass.
“Come on!” he yelled, leading them to their next rally point, an intersection fifty meters further down. Internal force fields came to life behind the remains of the squad. They would help keep the incoming down for as long as they lasted, but they weren’t much tougher than the ones you’d find at a regular starbase. From the looks of it, the Snowflakes hadn’t figured enemies would ever make it that far into their big fancy home. Their internal fields were there mostly to prevent explosive decompression, not hold off lasers and plasma.
They ran into reinforcements along the way. Agent in Charge Petroysan and a dozen Protective Detail pukes, all in full body armor and carrying Iwos. The AIC took over from Howard, which was fine by him. They didn’t pay him enough to be a boss.
Petroysan was a jarhead and she’d trained with Charlie Company. She quickly arranged the twenty-odd troops along the intersection and set multiple overlapping fields of fire to welcome the Lampreys before the tangos at the docking bay rallied and broke through the airlock door. It was always good to work for someone who knew what the fuck she was doing.
They had a few seconds to chill out. Suckass spent them thinking about Barton. Damn it. He’d liked that fucker. He was going to make the Eets pay for that.
The first few Lampreys that stepped into the hallway got shredded. That made the rest hang back and think things over. Just to keep them busy, AIC Petroysan sent a volley of 20mm guided munitions flying down the hall, where they turned a corner and blew up inside the docking bay. The ensuing explosion was a lot bigger than what normal twenty-mike-mikes produced, so she must be using enhanced Snowflake ammo.
“Those fuckers ain’t getting past us,” one of the DS agents said. He sounded pretty sure of himself. Another Devil Dog, probably. They turned up at any job where there was a chance someone would get shot.
Unfortunately, the Lampreys figured out the same thing.
A destroyer came to a gentle stop, a mere three meters away from the habitat’s exterior, and opened fire with the three twelve-inch guns that could bear on the target. The triple blasts ripped through three hundred meters of internal bulkheads and compartments, including the intersection where the Marines and DS agents waited for the enemy.
Howard ‘Suckass’ Montero never saw it coming.
* * *
“It’s almost ready,” Heather said. Nobody believed her.
“We’ve got about a thousand tangos inside, and another thousand about to board us,” Mario Rockwell said. “You are literally out of time, McClintock.”
“Screw it,” she growled. Ten or fifteen more minutes would have been ideal, but ideal wasn’t on the menu today. “Send out the word. We’re a go in forty-five seconds.”
* * *
“Repeat. Go to laser-comms only. Shut down all grav-wave systems. Repeat. Shut down standard communications. Do not keep any regular channels open. Photonic comm only.”
“Fucking laser comm don’t work for shit inside a starbase, man,” Gonzo bitched. His words had the slight stutter-reverb that came from being converted into light pulses. “Line of sight only, that’s no good in here.”
“I’m sure they’ve got their reasons,” Russell replied. “And never mind that shit. Here they come.”
The bulkhead they were watching began to glow red. Someone on the other side was using a short-ranged plasma beam to burn through it and its protective force field.
“Wanna wait for them to break through?” Grampa asked.
“Nah. Let’s give them a nice surprise.”
The fireteam leveled their portable cannons at the bulkhead, taking care to respect the one-meter clearance around their weapons. They could ding a starship, so they were going to make a mess of the tangos on the other side, and most anything for several klicks downrange.
Not that it mattered. As soon as they killed enough Lampreys to make themselves noticed, they’d end up like the poor bastards from Second Platoon. The Lampreys wanted the station, but they were willing to blow up some of it to get rid of the humans inside.
I shoulda sent out that email, he thought.
“Been nice, Russet.”
“Yeah, brah. Fire.”
* * *
When a habitat the size of a moon began to shake, you knew you’d run out of time.
“Force Field Three is down. Multiple penetrations. Someone just depressurized about ten percent of the inhabited sections of the station.”
The forty-five second countdown wasn’t finished. Some people might still have their comms up. No choice.
Heather hit the switch.
At one point, Xanadu had been able to communicate and guide thousands of ships at the same time, back during the heyday of galactic civilization. The grav-wave communication array had fallen into disrepair, but even the fraction that still survived had as much available bandwidth as any heavily-developed planet in the known galaxy.
Heather used it to send the Executioner devices’ killing signal to every active receiver within one light-year of the habitat.
The device the Tah-Leen had used to murder their living toys required enormous amounts of power to be effective on a large scale. Distributing that power among the twelve hundred Executioner devices Heather had located had been a bitch and a half, and she hadn’t been finished by the time she was forced to pull the trigger. As a result, two of the thirty-six active power plants in Starbase Malta failed catastrophically. The station shuddered yet again as several dozen cubic miles of its internal volume were consumed by a pair of runaway gluon reactions. Fortunately, most of the damage was contained in the uninhabited sections of the habitat.
If she’d had another ten or fifteen minutes to spare, that wouldn’t have happened. But in ten minutes the Lampreys would have destroyed the command center and killed every human in the habitat. Heather had to roll the dice or lose everything, and every minute she’d spent getting the weapon ready had been paid for with someone’s life.
“All enemy ships are drifting in space. No life forms detected.”
Heather slunk down in her chair while everyone around her cheered wildly. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and sleep.
* * *
“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Russell said.
“Join the Corps, see the universe,” Grampa replied.
They’d been about three layers deep inside the habitat when they fired their grav cannons, and the triple blast carved a hole all the way out into space, a hole twenty meters wide and three hundred meters long. A Lamprey battlecruiser was on the other end of the jagged tunnel; it was beginning to drift away now that nobody was at the controls. Further out, a frigate was spinning along its axis like a toy. Then something impossibly huge flashed right by the opening
, obscuring everything for almost a minute before it was gone. Whatever it was, it gleamed gold and silver and was moving very fast; Russell thought it might have been one of the fancy-looking thousand-klick-long wings he’d seen on the outside of the station. Something or other must have broken a piece of it.
“How’d they do that?” Gonzo asked. There was no enemy movement anywhere. Something had wasted every tango as far as the eye could see.
“No clue. Guess it had something to do with turning off our comms.”
A couple poor bastards hadn’t gotten the word or decided to be assholes about it, and whatever happened to the Lampreys happened to them as well. Shit happened. You were just as dead if friendly fire got you. Sucked to get killed that way, though.
“I really thought we were done,” Grampa said.
“Yeah. Been happening a lot lately.”
Okay, I’m sending that goddam email as soon as we get comms back, Russell decided.
“Is it too late to transfer to the Navy?”
* * *
The cavalry arrived a day late and a dollar short.
Admiral Gabriel Verdant had been in a somber mood when he set off for Xanadu. The sight that welcomed Third Fleet as it emerged into normal space cheered him up at little. There were dozens of dead Lamprey warships drifting aimlessly along the habitat’s orbital path. A few of the hulks were still streaming gas, but a surprising number of them appeared to be intact. Finding enough prize crews for all those vessels was going to be difficult, but that was the kind of problem you wanted to have.
Starbase Malta looked very little like the gigantic jewel it once had been. One of its massive wings had been sheared off, and much of its ornate façade had been ripped apart by enemy fire and what appeared to have been some impressive internal explosions. It was still operational, however: Third Fleet was greeted by a nineteen-gun salute, fired by one hell of a gun.
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 32