Bull still wished Captain Absen had brought a lot more troops, but these eight squads of six Marines each were all he had. They couldn’t even take more than a few of Conquest’s Recluse battle drones, one on each assault sled. Fortunately the pilots had proven quick studies, using their cyber-links to control the ground support machines.
Bull snorted. Aerospace. As usual, it would be Marine infantry that would do or die. Tip of the spear, end of the shaft, he thought.
Though he couldn’t forget the thirty Ryss he’d been forced to use. At least they had their own customized Avengers. Unwilling to link in to VR space, the aliens had trained for the assault in an enormous converted cargo bay. Even without cybernetics or nano-augmentation, they made fearsome warriors, if not as deadly as his own troops, pound for pound. They were just so very, very green.
Bull switched freqs. “Slash, you copy?”
“I hear, War Leader Bull.” Between the chip in Bull’s head and the translation software in his suit, the big Ryss officer he called Slash might as well have been speaking English.
“Three minutes. You good to go?”
“We yearn to spill blood and taste Pureling flesh, War Leader. Again, I request the honor of first assault.”
“No. You’ll damn well follow your mission orders or I’ll rip your fuzzy mane right off your neck, you got me?”
“I hear and obey, War Leader.”
Slash, like all the Ryss warriors, was young, a bare yearsmane. Scarcely adult, he had a good head and heart, but like most unblooded troops seemed terribly eager to die gloriously. More than once Bull had cuffed him hard enough to send the young warrior stumbling. Not a recommended method of discipline with human troops, Absen had been adamant that Bull use Ryss training methods on Ryss.
Once again, Bull wished Trissk hadn’t been sent off on some secret mission. The experienced Ryss warrior could have helped get the cat-boys ready, or better yet, led them.
Bull switched his HUD to the forward external view, looking at what the sled pilots saw. Before his eyes stretched Io’s hot yellow surface, colored with the massive amounts of sulfur dust thrown up by the moon’s many volcanoes. Unlike other moons, Io was a hot planetoid on the inside, with violent tidal forces pulling and twisting at its silicate crust and molten core, generating massive amounts of heat.
Despite this, its distance from the sun meant usually that seething heat remained trapped beneath the surface, except when it erupted as lava from a volcano. Most of its surface stayed cold, very cold, even if a few hundred meters down flowed rivers of magma.
The Empire’s command center over the horizon occupied a geologically calm area. Perhaps the aliens had stabilized it by draining the heat below and using that to energize the Weapon just beyond. That massive laser had the power to burn through the heaviest ship armor over ranges out to ten million kilometers, and thus controlled space all around Jupiter.
At least, it controlled the space within the laser’s ever-moving arc of fire. The Marines’ assault was coming in from below the horizon.
Bull looked up to see Reaper staring at him. “Awake now, are we?” he said.
She snorted. “Who can sleep through all your yakking with Slash?” As if in reply, the assault sled bucked again and picked up a harmonic as it skimmed lower, bleeding off speed in the moon’s chill atmosphere. “Besides, we’re about to get hit.”
“Crap.” Switching his HUD view to flight tactical, Bull watched as a swarm of Meme stingships fell toward them, trailing tongues of fusion fire. The enemy launched hypers, tiny ones that nevertheless could bring down something as small as the sleds they rode. “Where the hell’s our aero cover?”
Chapter 3
Above and behind the assault sleds, Major Vango Markis lined his StormCrow Weaver up on the first Meme stingship even while slowing his time sense by a factor of ten. Doing so allowed for precise targeting, and a fraction of a second after he fired his inline maser, the first shark-like living enemy died in a blast of microwaves calibrated for Meme ship physiology. Shifting to another bogey, he stroked the trigger and sent another stingship straight to boiling hell.
Around him Vango’s squadron did the same, and dozens of stingships fell to their beams. Unlike the Marines or the Ryss warriors, his pilots were thoroughgoing veterans, both of the battles to defend Earth so long ago, and of the fight to wrest the Gliese 370 system from the Meme. Cool professionals all, they lined up targets and one after another calmly knocked them down.
Even so, hundreds of the swift little enemy fighters remained. Roughly half turned away from the assault sleds to attack the StormCrows while the rest held their courses toward the assault force.
“Damn,” Vango said conversationally to his fighter jocks. “I was hoping they would all come after us. Alpha and Bravo Flights, with me. We punch through and hit the bogeys chasing the sleds. Charlie and Delta, keep them busy.” All of his Crows couldn’t dive to protect the sleds; if they did, the lagging half of the stingship group would roll in behind them and crawl up their asses.
“Roger, Alpha lead,” came the clipped acknowledgements from his three flight leaders, each with eight Crows.
Vango led Alpha with Bravo flight right behind as they rolled and stooped like falcons through the oncoming formation of stingships. Pushing his time sense up over one hundred to one, the universe slowed to a crawl and Vango let loose with the lasers and railguns in his wing pods. On automatic, the weapons pumped fire into the noses of the oncoming enemy fighters, nice low-deflection shots that could hardly miss, sending them tumbling as the weapons clawed their eyes out.
The Crows knocked out a score of stingships, but not without cost. “Just lost Red Dog,” Bravo’s leader Tex called, his accelerated VR voice sounding tinny through the link. Vango looked over his shoulder within VR space and pushed his time sense up to maximum, almost two hundred to one. Sending his viewpoint toward the expanding explosion where Red Dog’s Crow used to be, Vango could see nothing left but plasma and bits of wreckage in a spray, so he turned back to the slow-motion battle in front of him.
“Shit. He’s gone. Keep your heads in the game, people,” Vango replied in a frozen voice. What he really wanted to do was curse the dead man and everyone else for carelessness. Or maybe the stingship had just gotten lucky. The enemy fighters were fast but predictable, not too bright, and they didn’t have the many advantages of EarthFleet’s tech.
On the other hand, they were dirt-cheap, so that a hundred-to-one loss ratio was still an ugly proposition for Conquest’s aerospace squadron.
None of Vango’s pilots used their inline masers, saving full charges for later targets. Instead, they flashed through the enemy formation to swing onto the tails of the other group of stingships, the ones trying to line up on the assault sleds skimming over the surface far below. “Watch the red zone as you come out of your runs, people,” Vango called, referring to the slice of space high enough for the Weapon to have line of sight on them. One sweeping wide-area beam from the gargantuan laser waiting beyond the horizon would burn anything it touched. Titanic enough to gouge chunks out of Conquest’s glacis, the StormCrows would die like insects in a bug zapper if its sun-hot touch ever reached them.
The fifteen remaining Crows took shots at the stingships even as the enemy began to fire at the assault sleds in front of them. Tiny hypers leaped toward the Marine craft, and Vango passed the information via link to the blinding lasers mounted on the rears of the landers. Flashes sparkled in the void as beams crisscrossed intervening space. While the defensive lasers of the sleds sought to dazzle the sensors of the incoming hypers, stingship biolaser shots targeted the assault craft themselves.
Fortunately these new sleds had been fitted with extra armor for this single high-risk landing, and while Vango could see hits, none of the Marine sleds did more than wobble on damaged thrusters. Unfortunately, the stingships were just stupid enough to follow their suicide orders, and they were considerably faster than the sleds, which already decelerat
ed for their landings.
“Dammit,” Vango muttered as he burned enemy after enemy. He hadn’t expected quite so many stingships.
“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango heard Commander Rick Johnstone’s VR voice in his comm.
“Sledgehammer in ten seconds actual,” Vango echoed to his flight leaders. “Check your lines and make sure you’re well out of the firing path.” He kept knocking down stingships as fast as his weapons would recharge, locked in accelerated time sense, determined not to waste any fraction of a second.
One stingship, pulling ahead of the others, dove for the rearmost assault sled, and Vango desperately concentrated all his fire on it, but his maser was out of juice for the next few seconds, and his wing weapons didn’t have the range or punch.
Just then, the ten seconds on his display ran out, and the dirty amber surface of Io erupted in a line of fire. The finger of one primary particle beam fired from Conquest ripped a hundred-kilometer-long trench pointing arrow-straight at the side wall of the Meme command center buried deep underground. Incidentally, the burst of superheated dust and burning sulfur thrown up engulfed sleds and pursuers alike.
The sleds were built to take it, but the lightweight stingships must have felt like they had entered a fusion-powered sandstorm. Even if they were not flash-cooked, they certainly lost sight of their quarries, and dozens slammed into the ground or the sides of the newly dug trench.
Right behind Conquest’s particle beam came a precisely calibrated burst of hundreds of ferrocrystal balls, accelerated by a Dahlgren Behemoth Fifty railgun to over 0.3c, fast enough to cause mutual contact fusion in whatever they hit. Each impact would create a brief, tiny thermonuclear explosion.
Down the dust-filled trench below the sleds these glowing projectiles flew to slam against the buried armor of the enemy command center. If the intel section’s educated guesses were right, that hellish impact would bore a hole into the Meme complex, providing both a breach and a disruption for the Marines and Ryss warriors to exploit. The resulting superheated plasma should expand through the constricted space and ignite everything inside the confined space, turning anything and anyone not armored or sealed behind blast doors into crispy critters.
Vango watched the assault sleds, specially reinforced for this mission, descend to enter the trench. Invisible to the naked eye beneath the billowing dust and dissipating plasma, they would follow the channel to its end using radar, there to do what Marines do.
Fight, kill, and die.
“Gotcha,” Vango exulted as the pursuing stingships pulled up, shying away from the obscured trench. Barely of animal intelligence, the little fighters hadn’t the wit to figure out what to do when their targets vanished in the hot haze. Instead, they climbed out of the cloud and turned nose-on to the two flights of Crows and stood on their fusion engines, clawing to reverse course.
“Follow me,” Vango ordered as he rolled Weaver left, parallel to Io’s bilious surface, in order to stay under the minimum engagement altitude of the Weapon lurking just over the horizon. Tagging one more stingship with his wing weapons, he skimmed low over mountains and ridges, keeping his speed high while describing a wide curve that would take them back the way they had come.
Charlie and Delta still whirled in their own furball far behind, Crows against stingships. Once Vango set course to rejoin the fight, he said, “Finish them off and then punch it, boys and girls. Execute the bugout plan for refuel and rearming.”
Chapter 4
“Sledgehammer away,” Commander Ford called from Conquest’s Weapons bridge station. Then, “Missile strike away.”
“Pulse out,” Captain Absen ordered.
Master Helmsman Okuda was already in the process of dragging Conquest’s prow around to a new heading. Once the dreadnought lined up, Absen felt the TacDrive kick in and hurl the vessel at lightspeed away from thousands of converging Meme hypers, which had been launched at Conquest over the last several minutes by the Meme bases on the Galilean moons.
A moment later, Conquest dropped out of TacDrive twenty million kilometers above Jupiter’s north pole and began falling, too slowly to matter. That distance was fifty times farther than from Earth to the Moon.
“Get the holotank up,” Absen barked as he stood to stare intently at the area where the holographic image would appear. The display flickered into lighted existence and over the next ten seconds populated itself with moons, satellites, captured asteroids, bases, weapons, and anything else of tactical significance.
From this vantage, looking down from Jupiter’s pole, Absen could see almost everything that went on in the Jupiter orbital system. Only a few enemy spy drones had been in polar orbit and Conquest had already burned them. Now, everything revolved generally in one plane beneath the dreadnought, like a crowd of children around a maypole. Conquest pointed her prow straight down and waited like an eagle eyeing her prey.
“Show me the trench,” Absen demanded, grasping the railing that kept him from falling into the helmsman’s pit.
“We don’t have a good line of sight on it, but…” Scoggins replied, “I can synthesize something from spy drones and the feeds from the sleds. Remember, this is more than a minute old due to the time-late light.”
A moment passed, and then the holotank view altered to show a cutaway diagram of the long trench the sledgehammer strike had dug. Eleven icons representing his tiny landing force flew in a single-file line, by necessity spaced well apart. Moving slowly in comparison to their open-space speeds, Absen knew in atmosphere ten kilometers a minute was plenty fast enough to stress the abilities of their pilots, flying on instruments between walls no more than two hundred meters apart to stay inside the dust cloud.
The display fuzzed and then lost its coherence. “Sorry, sir,” Scoggins said. “They’ve rotated out of sight on Io’s surface, and we’re not getting much from the sleds through the plasma haze.”
“Launch the first missile salvo. Go ahead and start firing at the orbital fortresses,” Absen ordered. Soon, Ford eagerly lined up and began extreme-range fire with bursts of railgun shot and particle beams. The ferrocrystal projectiles would be lucky to hit, and the beams packed no punch at twenty million kilometers. They would barely fuzz the enemy sensors, but Absen ordered it anyway. At least his people would feel like they were doing something more than just waiting, but Conquest had to stay here, both to remain out of the arc of the Weapon, and to coordinate the battle.
“Tactical, then,” Absen said. When his birds-eye view appeared again, he traced the progress of the sixty missiles Conquest had fired, twenty at each Meme base on the other Galilean moons of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. If he was lucky, at least one each would make it through to deliver its heavy thermonuclear payload. If not, the Crows would have to pick up the slack.
Turning his attention to the icons floating just over Jupiter’s north pole, he saw that the grabships were even now arming each StormCrow with two heavy nuclear missiles for their next mission.
Chapter 5
Thirty-two StormCrows had sortied from Conquest. Twenty-eight remained, losses that hurt Vango to think about. Three friends dead and one waiting in an ejection pod, floating somewhere in space and hoping for post-combat pickup before he was dragged into a gravity well and went splat. As the grabship fastened the big missiles onto the ordnance racks of Weaver’s fuselage, Vango fervently hoped and prayed that no more would be lost.
Just then, an updated databurst caused Vango’s HUD to reset. Suddenly he saw three salvos of missiles curving outward from Conquest, reaching toward three enemy ground bases, the ones on Jupiter’s largest moons, save Io. Each of these command centers housed Meme, Blends and Purelings. Elsewhere, he knew ordinary humans slaved away in mines and orbital factories, producing goods and weapons for their own defense.
Defense, ironically, against the only free humans in the galaxy.
Those workers had done a good job. The Jupiter system was heavily fortified. Leftover EarthFleet-style lase
rs and railguns were everywhere, at least one on every satellite and facility. Now those weapons fired frantically at whatever cluster of missiles came nearest to them. Sixty became fifty, then forty, as they were picked out of space, but Vango figured Ford must have set the missiles’ paths as far from the defenses as possible while still getting them to their targets.
More stingships rose from hidden bunkers and hurried to intercept the diminishing groups. Vango watched as a missile from each group turned toward the nearest clusters of enemy fighters and, moments later, detonated itself among them. He didn’t much like Ford – hell, hardly anyone did – but he had to admit the man was good at his job. The missile clusters, like the ones being loaded onto the StormCrows, formed their own tiny pseudo-AI networks, programmed by Conquest’s own AI. Combined, the weapons’ brains were smart enough to take sophisticated actions, such as to sacrifice one so the rest could get through.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Several more sacrificial nukes vaporized most of the remaining stingships, as well as six particularly dangerous orbital weapons platforms, but none reached their target bases. Still, the swath of destruction they had blazed toward the three enemy command centers would make it that much easier for Vango’s pilots to finish the job.
“All right, people,” Vango said as he noted the grabships rearm and refuel the last of his birds, “Godspeed, and execute phase two.”
Four flights of seven Crows each accelerated in different directions from their position immediately over Jupiter’s pole, far below Conquest. Skimming low over the great gas giant, they flew as close to the edge of its atmosphere as possible, using the horizon to hide them from their enemies as long as they could.
Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Page 2