30
Huī Xing System
18:00 April 2, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
AT-032 Chimera Landing Group, Assault Shuttle Four
“This is Force Commander Kyle Roberts aboard Avalon, commanding Alliance Battle Group Seven-Two, to the Commonwealth forces in the Huī Xing system. This system is now in Alliance control. It is within my capacity to destroy your positions from orbit and vaporize the space stations that remain from beyond your range. I call on you to surrender to prevent further loss of life.”
Edvard Hansen listened to the Force Commander’s voice through his implants and shrugged at the Gunny.
“Think anyone will actually surrender?” he asked Ramirez quietly. It would, if nothing else, make Bravo Company’s upcoming assault on one of the prisoner-of-war holding stations easier if they didn’t have to assault it.
“Doubt it,” his senior NCO told him. “They know their fleet is on its way. I’d try and hold ’til it got here.”
“Yeah,” Edvard agreed. “Me too. A man can hope, though.”
His implant showed him the five assault shuttles carrying Third Battalion arrayed around Chimera itself. This wasn’t a high-speed assault, the shuttles screaming ahead of the assault transport at five hundred gravities.
The space around the prisoner-of-war holding stations had been seeded with short-range defensive satellites. Designed to shoot down missiles and debris, they were normally a commitment to the protection of the prisoners, but they’d also do a solid number on assault shuttles.
Chimera and Manticore, on the other hand, had the meters-thick ferro-carbon ceramic of warships. They led the way into the defensive satellites, their armor shrugging aside the lasers even as their lasers and light positron lances swept the satellites away.
Ten assault shuttles—one per holding station—followed them. Edvard, like the other company commanders, kept a careful eye on the assault transports’ computers’ assessment of the safety of the zone around the holding camps.
None of the shuttles waited for the area to be perfectly clear. As soon as the threat level dropped below an estimated forty percent chance of a hit, all ten ships lunged to the attack simultaneously.
“Let’s go get our people,” Edvard told his company as the shuttle engines blazed to life beneath him.
The howled response vibrated the shuttle as much as her rockets did.
Assault Shuttle Chimera-Four was one of the unlucky ones. Edvard found himself locking his armor’s magnetics to the side of the little ship as she rocked under repeated laser hits.
The assault shuttle wasn’t unarmored, per se. Her defenses paled into insignificance against her mothership but were more than capable of standing off a few laser strikes. Flying into an unreduced set of defensive laser satellites would have seen her ripped to shreds by hundreds or even thousands of hits.
The remaining satellites simply made the ride a little more jarring. The shuttle shed the handful of strikes, then slammed Bravo Company into the prisoner holding station the Brigadier’s staff had designated “Target Seven.”
“They’ll be waiting for us,” Edvard snapped to his people. “Move!”
This time, Delta Platoon had the point of the spear. Armored Federation Marines hit the hole the shuttle had blown through the side of the station with commendable speed, spreading out to cover their brand-new entrance before the Terran Marines responded.
Unfortunately, they weren’t the only Marines reacting with commendable speed. Charlie Platoon had only barely begun to move into the corridors of the station when Delta came under fire. Suit-carried battle rifles spat tungsten penetrator rounds both ways down the corridor as the Terrans responded to the intrusion.
Edvard regarded the feeds from his Marines for a fraction of a second before making a decision he hated.
“Grenades and advance!” he snapped. “We need a hole, people; push them!”
He had to hope that any prisoners were deeper into the station, outside the effective range of the hyper-velocity fragmentation grenades. Certainly, the interior bulkheads didn’t have the strength to withstand the weapons.
Delta’s men were linked to each other through their implants, running a live tactical net that allowed them to see what the others saw and practically read each other’s thoughts. Fighting with it was a learned skill, a hard skill—but it also meant that when Delta’s lieutenant interpreted Edvard’s orders as “one man in five grenades the Terrans,” there was no confusion as to which Marines got to play with explosives.
The Terrans were coming at them from both sides of the corridors, and Delta Platoon sent five grenades flying at each position. Fired from shoulder-mounted launchers, the weapons went farther and faster than they could be thrown—and detonated in the air based on sensors scanning the area around them.
It was hard to be sure how many of the Terrans went down from the grenades, but the weapons opened up enough of a gap—a moment of shock on the part of the Commonwealth Marines, if nothing else—for Delta to charge.
Edvard could only watch through the tactical network as his people went gun-to-gun and bayonet-to-bayonet with the Terran force trying to contain their intrusion. His headquarters section was behind Charlie Platoon in the queue, and even with Delta expanding the beachhead, only one of Charlie’s squads was in.
As his people pushed the Terrans back, more of his troops filtered in, turning the momentum. Terran and Federation Marines alike went down, stabbed by monofilament bayonets or shot down by tungsten penetrators.
Then, suddenly, it was over. The survivors of the Terran force withdrew in good order, their own grenades taking down half a dozen of Edvard’s troopers who tried to follow.
“They’ve got to have a fallback position,” Ramirez warned the Lieutenant Major. “They probably had platoons spread out through the exterior, but now they can lure us into their main force.”
“I know,” Edvard said shortly. “Get me floor plans,” he snapped. “I want to know where they’ll think they can catch us—and I want another route if you can give it to me!”
Edvard looked over the plans his headquarters section’s information specialist had pulled from the station’s computer before the Terrans had locked out this area’s computers. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth hadn’t just thrown the prisoners into cargo containers in a storage or transfer station. The facility he’d boarded was clearly specifically designed for the purpose to which it had now been turned.
It was the standard disk shape of a major space station on the outside, five hundred meters across and three hundred meters thick. The top eighty meters, and thirty meters in from the exterior on all sides, contained the quarters for the guard contingent, the technical support systems, the power generators, and all the general functional systems of a space station.
Then there was a thirty-meter-wide void inside the station, surrounding a one-hundred-and-thirty-meter-thick disk three hundred and eighty meters across. This was the actual prison, accessed only via two heavily armored columns attaching one side of the prison to the main habitation section of the prison.
Edvard’s people were on the far side of the station from those access points, leaving him with the unpleasant option of slogging his way through the series of ambushes and traps the Terrans were even now preparing, to reach either of the ways into the prison.
The command center for the station was in an even more awkward position, in the interior of the station and directly between the two big connectors. Edvard doubted his people could reach the armored capsule at all, let alone without crippling losses.
“This place is set up to make our job hell, boss,” Ramirez muttered. The Gunny was reviewing the same data. “There’s only about four routes we can take to the other side of the station, only the two routes to the prison itself, and the command center looks like it’s a damned fortress.”
“My dear Gunny, I do believe you’re thinking far too linearly,” the Lieutenant Major said dryly.
“Oh? Do you see another solution to this mess?” the Gunny demanded.
“No,” Edvard admitted. And it wasn’t looking pretty—they’d hit each prison facility with a single company, which, it turned out, meant the defenders actually had him outnumbered. On the other hand, the separation of the prison facility meant that the assault transports could hammer the exterior portions of the station with kinetic weapons without worrying about hurting their people.
Except, of course, for potentially killing the air, power, lights and other such minor necessities that kept them alive.
“I do,” another voice interjected, and Edvard looked over at his Delta Platoon commander. Senior Lieutenant Cruz Machado was the second-ranked of his platoon commanders, one of only two Senior Lieutenants in the company. He was also, unlike the Sherwood-born Lieutenant Major Hansen and Castle-born Gunnery Sergeant Ramirez, spacer-born. A child of one of the massive space stations in the Elpída system that fueled that system’s gas-extractor economies, he’d grown up on a platform like this.
“The place was designed by planet-born,” Machado pointed out. “Everybody’s thinking in terms of corridors and defenses and ambushes, but they built the biggest corridor on the station leading straight to the command center.”
Linked into the tactical net, Machado drew a simple curving line—it started with a straight line from their current location to the vacuum “moat” guarding the prison, and then arced its course around the prison—through the gravity-less vacuum—to intersect with the command center.
“Unless they’re idiots, they have defenses in the moat,” the Senior Lieutenant pointed out. “But we can move the whole company to have line of sight on whatever they throw up. We’re vulnerable—but so are they.”
“And if we take the command center, suddenly those two companies of Terran Marines are on the wrong side of the defenses protecting, oh, the consoles that control gravity,” Edvard said aloud, awed at how simple the point was when you thought about it from the right direction—a direction very few of the planet-born would think from.
“If this works, Machado, I’m recommending you for your gold circle,” he told the platoon commander. “You may have just saved a lot of lives.”
“Fire in the hole!”
The unnecessarily bellowed warning across the company tactical net cut off what Brigadier Hammond was saying, but the tiny image of the 103rd Brigade’s commanding General simply gestured for Edvard to attend to his own business.
Explosives flashed, the sound rapidly fading to silence as the air blasted out into the vacuum “inside” the space station. Bravo Platoon was out the hole in moments, weapons tracking the empty darkness as they left the station’s artificial gravity field.
“Clear,” a voice reported over the network. “About what we expected—no light, no grav, no bad guys.”
“Use your armor lights,” Edvard ordered. “We’ve got over half a klick to jet, folks; let’s get moving.”
A few moments later, he followed his Marines into the void. It was darker than almost anything he’d ever seen, with even the light of the stars cut off by the bulk of the space station that surrounded them.
“Starless Void,” he heard Ramirez mutter. “That is creepy.”
The Lieutenant Major couldn’t disagree. There was a reason a Void without Stars or light was the closest thing the Stellar Spiritualists had to Hell.
“I don’t plan on dying in here, Gunny,” he replied crisply, talking over a bone-deep fear he couldn’t show his subordinates. “Let’s move.”
Jets on their armored suits responded with practiced ease, moving the Marines through that void. Edvard quickly attached himself to Delta Platoon, dropping a private link to Machado.
“The other companies are skirmishing and holding the line,” he told the platoon leader quietly. “If this works, they’re going to try and duplicate it.”
He heard the younger man swallow.
“No pressure, huh?”
“Welcome to the hot seat, son,” Edvard told him dryly.
“Incoming,” one of the lead Marines snapped. “Jamming and evading—we have seeking missiles launched from the command center’s chunk of the hull!”
“Take them out—hard!” the company commander snapped, jetting forward with his people.
Smart battle rifles identified the automated turrets and opened fire. Self-propelled armor-piercing rockets flashed across the void, the rocket flashes lighting up the dark spaces. Grenades followed, detonations rippling along the chunk of hull Edvard’s computer identified as the command center itself.
All of it occurred in eerie silence, the armor and the weapons identifying the environment and using appropriate munitions. One of Edvard’s people flashed red in his tactical display—a victim of the Terran defenses.
And then there was darkness again.
“Targets down,” Bravo Platoon’s Lieutenant reported. “All turrets disabled. We’ve done a number on the hull, but it looks the armor shell held. Demolitions forward!”
Edvard landed just behind the demolitions expert, magnetic boots latching his armor suit to the torn-up metal. It looked like the command center had been encased in warship-grade ferro-carbon ceramics.
“Can we pierce this?” he asked the demolitions Sergeant, actually worried for the first time since Machado had given him the plan.
“Oh, Voids yes,” the Sergeant replied. “Flashing you an approval request. Gonna need a lot of safety radius. Everybody back!”
Edvard knew better than to doubt the expert. He approved the request without even a cursory glance, then jetted off from the metal surface again. It took several moments to clear the flashing orange sphere the sergeant had dropped onto the tactical net.
“Everyone clear?” the Sergeant demanded. She waited for a moment to check, then continued. “Fire in the hole!”
That was the moment when Edvard realized he’d approved the use of positron charges. Pure white fire lit up the interior of the station in a tight circle, forcing his armor to black out his vision to avoid damage to his eyes.
“Go!” he snapped, resolving to have a word with the Sergeant later.
He was one of the first through the hole, diving into the command nexus of the space station. The exterior hatches were slamming shut to contain atmosphere loss and people were diving for cover. Shipsuits were sealing, protecting them from the loss of atmosphere—but some of the people were Marines.
They went for guns.
The tactical net tagged them, lighting up the soldiers with weapons in bright red. Edvard tracked across the room with his battle rifle, the smart weapon linking with his implant and firing as it aligned on each of the armed Marines.
They needed the command center intact, and that tactical data was loaded into the weapon. Low-velocity stun rounds spat from the barrel, self-calibrating shock weapons that punched through lightly armored shipsuits to deliver incapacitating charges.
“Surrender!” he bellowed. “Drop your weapons.”
There was enough air to carry the order, and the chaos slowed—and stopped. The handful of red icons dimmed as they dropped their weapons and rose above consoles, hands above their heads.
“Get me an emergency airlock on that hole,” he ordered to his people. “Then get the information team in here. I want control of this station now.”
31
Huī Xing System
01:30 April 3, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Prison Platform Huī Xing—Lambda
Edvard inched down the corridor connecting to the prison platform very, very carefully. The Marines aboard had surrendered once his people had started turning their local gravity up on them—stations like this one were designed with the ability to produce fifteen gees for a limited period for a reason. Even powered armor couldn’t do much more than keep the wearer alive in those conditions.
That didn’t mean there weren’t any traps or tricks hidden in the accessway to the prison camp. His information pe
ople assured him they were in control of the automated systems, but he knew Marines.
Finally, the point woman in Alpha Platoon—no one would have let him take this trip alone, even if he was that stupid—signaled the all clear, and he walked forward to join her at the hatch sealing off the prison camp itself. With only two accesses that didn’t lead straight to vacuum, the designers of the platform had lavished those connections with security and defenses.
“Open it up, Ramirez,” he ordered the Gunny—currently in charge, despite his protests, of the station’s command center.
“Is it too late to remind you that point is not the company’s commander’s job?” his senior noncom asked.
“Point may not be, but coordinating with the prisoners themselves is,” Edvard replied. “You’re sure there are no guards inside?”
“They do random sweeps, but otherwise, the guards only enter the actual prison camp to deliver food or if there’s an emergency,” Ramirez told him. “I guess with the prisoners cut off from everything by thirty meters of hard vacuum, they figure they can mostly leave them to their own devices. Though, believe me, everything—and I do mean everything—is monitored.”
“Any sign they know we’re coming?”
“None. How would they?” the Gunny asked. “Opening the hatch now,” he continued. “Good luck, sir.”
“Thanks, Gunny,” Edvard muttered, standing back while the massive metal hatch slowly and noisily retracted.
Alpha Platoon’s point squad swept in, weapons at the ready as they surveyed the immediate perimeter. Another all clear signal, and the Lieutenant Major followed his people into the actual prison camp part of the station.
It was better than he’d been expecting. The access tunnel opened into an open area roughly a hundred meters long by fifty wide, with actual greenery in it. Mostly the space was a gathering and sports area, but there were little clusters of bushes providing natural oxygen.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 88