"We're tucked in, let's hit it," Tabby urged, orienting Rowdy on my starboard wing.
Jester Ripples zoomed in on the enemy ships. The worry I'd been nursing in the pit of my stomach for the last eighteen days in fold-space bloomed into a fresh rush of adrenaline. The battleship-sized potato we'd so easily evaded on our last trip had been joined by five frigate-sized, but no less potato-shaped, ships. They were spread out over several hundred thousand kilometers.
Floating tactical labels appeared next to the ships. Marny's doing, no doubt. Alpha-prime for the battleship and Beta-one through Beta-five for the smaller ships.
"Nothing changes," I said. "We hit Alpha-prime." I pushed forward and we hurtled toward the giant ship.
"We've been made," Ada said. "I'm taking a defensive vector." Our original plan had been to have Intrepid make a close pass on Cradle, keeping the battleship at a distance.
"Don't get trapped," I said. "We don't know the speed of those beta ships."
"Copy that." Her reply was a good indication of the stress she felt, as she rarely utilized military speak.
"They've seen us," Nick announced at the same time I saw a stream of smaller ships detach from the battleship. It was as if small portions of the Alpha-prime simply flaked off. Up to that point we had no idea the fighter-sized ships even existed; their hulls blended in with Alpha-prime's perfectly.
"Frak." I accelerated hard to port and with a declination of twenty degrees, wanting to move away from Intrepid’s flight path. The wave of Kroerak fighters mirrored our actions, albeit with no discernable formation. If anything, the fighters flew like a school of fish, maintaining positioning between themselves but easily trading places, no particular individual in the lead.
The good news was they weren't headed for Intrepid. We still had no idea how our weaponry would affect their armored hulls. The bad news was their acceleration was significant. My AI currently estimated the Tisons at a twenty percent advantage. In combat, speed and agility were king. If I could count on twenty percent, we'd be in good shape.
"We're going to punch up through them," I said to Tabby. The flock of fighters were curving down onto us, reversing their acceleration in an attempt to keep us from passing them at high speed and rounding their flank.
"They're firing," Jester Ripples said, highlighting a cloud of unidentified, incoming small projectiles.
"Evasive," I grunted and pushed downward and back.
Tabby spun off upward. We'd agreed beforehand on how we'd separate so as to avoid a collision. As with the battleship, the cloud of projectiles was fast, but had no tracking. My AI projected a curve of acceleration around the cloud and I adjusted accordingly. Then I saw my opening. The tail of the enemy flock would pass close enough for me to orient and take a swipe.
I was equipped with two heavy rockets and three missiles. The primary difference between the two was that the rockets were slow and had a sizeable payload, while the missiles were fast and had a smaller punch. I dialed in a single missile, locked the target and fired, then followed up with my articulating turret which had been converted to a hybrid: one barrel tossing slugs, the other a modified particle blaster. I'd been instructed to follow the fire as closely as possible so that Sugar's sensors would record the damage meted out. It was a feat easier said than done. Upon firing, the entire flock of fighters oriented on me. Suffice it to say, I bugged out, angling hard; away from the angry aliens.
"Sensors were obscured," Jester Ripples reported. "Low data quality."
We were now literally running for our lives. The Kroerak fighters fanned out as I pushed Sugar's acceleration hard. It was as if they'd constructed a wall behind me. A warning of excessive g-forces first showed on my display, followed by a narrowing of vision and browning out. The Kroerak fighters were fast. Whatever advantage I had in acceleration wouldn't get us away quickly enough.
"Shite, this isn't going to work," I uttered through clenched teeth and reversed the acceleration, flying directly at my opponents. I felt like my face slammed into a steel bulkhead as I abruptly turned into my attackers.
"They're firing," Jester Ripples said. "We can't escape."
Indeed, a cloud of projectiles had been launched. At least they were consistent in their thinking.
"Don't need to," I said and launched a heavy rocket at nothing in particular. I followed the path of the rocket which barely out-accelerated us and lay into my turret. As the rocket met the cloud, it exploded violently. Too far away to damage either my ship or the Kroerak, it had punched a nice clean hole for me to pass through.
I used to watch nature vids and remembered one in particular about a school of fish and how they reacted to a predator being dropped into their midst. It was chaos. Such was the Kroerak's reaction to my about-face and subsequent rocket attack. I picked out my prey and lay fire into it with both barrels, following with a missile. For a moment, the ship attempted to flee and I watched with disappointment as the damage from my turret seemed inconsequential. The missile, however, was another matter. A bright explosion on the enemy fighter's starboard wing - if you could call the irregular flat shape a wing - sent it spinning into a second ship. I continued to accelerate out the back side of the wall of fighters, when I saw a familiar object swoop down from the starboard side. Tabby, hot on our trail, had taken advantage of the chaos I'd created by laying into the injured ships, ripping the wounded pair apart with her fire. There would be no recovery for them, although we were still outnumbered thirty-eight to two.
"Point Masters!" she exclaimed.
"Bug out!" I replied. She'd picked up a tail and I turned to it, blasting away with my turret and loosing my final missile. "Head for Alpha-prime."
I didn't need to tell her twice. We'd gained necessary positioning on the fighters and it would be a foot race to the capital ship.
"Uploading combat data to Intrepid," Jester Ripples informed me.
As we raced ahead, the resemblance between our current fight and a podball game flitted through my head. Having jumped ahead of the defenders, we had a clear shot at the goal and the point was ours to lose. Of course, where this broke down was the fact that the goal would be shooting back at us. We also had an angry horde on our trail that wouldn't give up once we reached goal.
"We're receiving a hail from the planet," Ada informed me over the tactical comm.
"Ignore it." We were seconds from Alpha-prime's weapon's range and I didn't need the distraction.
"Follow me in, Tabbs," I said and squirted toward the already launched flight of spear-shaped missiles. We'd calculated the ship's reload time and would have to hit and run at top speed to have any chance at survival. Our mission had come down to this moment. Jacobs and the other tacticians had worked out a complex maneuver where the lead ship would attempt to lock in on one of the projectiles and deflect, protecting the trailing ship. It was generally understood, but unspoken, that the lead ship would be committing suicide in order to allow the second ship through.
"I don't buy this plan. We need to work around it," she said.
"Trust me. I've got this." I shot forward even faster, my vision once again narrowing into a tunnel from the G forces. That was fine. We needed speed and if it didn't work out … well, that wasn't an option.
I launched my final heavy rock, as Jacobs referred to it. This time, I targeted the back of the rocket and fired upon it just as the wave of missiles overtook our position. I blacked out as the blast wave rocked Sugar to the side.
"Liam!" I finally heard over the comm as I came to. It was Tabby. She'd stayed on mission and had cleared the blast in my wake.
"I'm up. Go!" I said and diverted, raking across the front of the huge ship and reversing acceleration in a complex maneuver that I'd dreamed of, but hadn't been willing to discuss with anyone. I slowed ridiculously hard and was thrown into the nav-gel, my face once again feeling like it had come into contact with steel.
Jester Ripples and I landed in the wash of the massive engines behind the Kroerak battleshi
p. I was out of rockets and missiles, but spun around violently to open up with my turret. The impacts chipped away at the outer edge of the peculiar engine housing. I wasn't having a lot of effect, but then what should I expect from a lone fighter plugging away at the massive, armored beast?
I jumped out from my position and watched for a signal from Tabby. Our next move had been Tabby’s idea and we'd briefed Nick and Jester Ripples as we loaded up. Predictably, another salvo of weapons fire from the behemoth sought to take us out. As planned, Tabby and I both veered back toward the ship. A clunk of metal on metal sounded through my nav-gel. We'd impacted something and nav-gel started draining from the hull.
"We're holed," I said and Jester Ripples sprang into action, applying an emergency patch. We'd lost nearly a third of our gel by the time he got the breach covered.
"Tabby, we can't make it back to Intrepid, we're losing gel" I said. "Those fighters will run us down."
"Plan B," she said.
"Frak!" We peeled off toward the planet. My ability to accelerate was severely limited. Without a full load of gel, the material would become a deadly wave each time we changed direction.
"Jester Ripples, send the data-stream now!" I said as we came in contact with the atmosphere of the planet and his patch was sucked through the large hole.
I dialed up the controls and vented the remaining nav-gel from the cockpit, as it was now more of a liability than anything else.
None of the Kroerak fighters had followed us in toward the battleship as they'd been avoiding the ring of death caused by the ship's kinetic weapons. I now waited and watched our sensors, hoping against hope that they didn't possess the same capacity for atmospheric flight as did we.
"Let's just see how well defended this cow-town is anyway," I said and laid in a course, transmitting it to Nick.
"Cow town?" Nick asked.
"Livestock … I don't know," I said. "It was the first thing that came to mind."
With no evidence of pursuit, we rocketed across the sky at seven thousand meters above the surface toward our secondary objective.
"I see it," Tabby said as Nick lit up our destination and sensors started resolving visual images. We'd tracked the location from where the Kroerak Overlord had transmitted its previous messages. "I've got a rock left."
"Drop it." We streaked toward the alien looking city of rounded rock spires and hills that teemed with Kroerak warriors and vehicles. It looked like a child's clay art project. What I assumed were buildings looked more like lumps of mud, lacking any discernable features. More significant was the total paucity of the ordinary tell-tales of electromagnetic radiation.
"There could be people down there," Nick said.
"Too late," Tabby responded. We both peeled off, not wanting to get caught in the explosion that would level forty square kilometers.
"I'm not buying it," I said. "No way they'd have anyone but Belirand down there. And that was our secondary target from Munay. He gave it to me before we left, just in case we survived our primary mission."
"Frak, frak, frak," Tabby said. "All I saw were bugs."
"Knock it off, Tabbs, it was our mission. These shites came after us, we had to hit back hard," I said. "Munay's team thought that location was probably command and control. From what it looked like to me, that was a reasonable assessment."
"Liam. We're picking up an explosion on the planet's surface," Ada said over the comm a few seconds later. The delay period on her comm the result of her distance from the planet.
"Copy that, Ada. That was us following up on a secondary objective," I said.
"Munay arrived ten minutes ago," she replied. "The whole battle group jumped right on top of that butt-ugly potato. It was over before it started. One minute we were being chased by those frigates, the next Munay showed up and the gates of hell opened up. The Navy launched two wings of fighters and they're working on the remnant frigates. It's a complete rout." She’d loosed a fusillade of words, betraying her excitement.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"We're sailing in to join the battle group," Ada said. "We're still two hours out. Frak, there goes one of the Kroerak frigates now!"
"We're being hailed, Liam Hoffen," Jester Ripples said. "It is Lieutenant Sendrei Buhari."
"Ada, I'm going to take this."
"Understood, Chen out."
"Sendrei. I'd have thought you were tucked deep in a drop ship," I said. The plan had been that Sendrei would accompany the Marines and attempt to interface with the villagers. He couldn't be at every location but his local knowledge was critical.
"Aye, Captain. Can't give up operational details, but let's just say this is terrifying," he shouted. "The Major would like to extend his invitation for you and Rowdy to join the planet-side squadron."
"Roger that," I said. "We're all in." I accepted the tactical channel invitation that accompanied his message and shared it with Tabby.
"See you on the ground. Buhari out."
Instead of crossing the globe by flying through the atmosphere, I led us up and out. The cockpit was still open to vacuum, but as long as I kept the sudden navigational adjustments down, we'd be fine, not to mention we'd be able to meet up with the Marines more quickly.
Upon approach, our tactical channel lit up with targeting. I felt fortunate that Marny had already familiarized us with targeting priority principles. Wing on wing, Tabby and I sailed over the top of several mechanized squads engaged in ground combat with a veritable horde of Kroerak. Unlike our experience, the mechanized Marines were making good progress, although not quite the rout Munay had experienced above the planet.
We picked priority targets from the local Marine platoon leader and lay fire into the swarm. Best I could tell; the Marines were constructing a beach head right on top of one of the five main Kroerak defense installations. The planet-side Kroerak airships proved to be no match for Sugar and Rowdy's turrets. Not only were the alien ships dependent on airfoils to keep their ships aloft, but their weaponry was forward facing. They'd certainly caused our mechanized infantry problems by dropping explosives, but once we arrived we ripped through them.
After an hour of heavy fighting, the Kroerak's defense of their installation started to wane as fewer and fewer Kroerak poured from the ravaged buildings. Finally, the Major ordered his Marines to switch to explosive rounds and raze the defensive installation. As was obvious from the influx of warriors, a massive network of tunnels existed beneath the Kroerak's rounded stone structures.
"Sappers," Major Wiggsly called over the tactical channel as our fight turned from battle to cleanup. A squad of Marines jumped to the forefront, standing on the rubble of the ruined buildings. Their suits were emblazoned with a sledge hammer driving a lightning bolt into the ground and the digits four and nine. From special weaponry, they started lobbing what I suspected were explosive charges into the tunnels and then covering them with foam.
"FIRE IN THE HOLE!"
"Shite!" I wasn't sure how big of a blast they were expecting, but every Marine below was running pell-mell from the site. I banked away and dropped lower to the ground.
"What does ‘fire in the hole’ mean?" Jester Ripples asked.
"Incoming explosion," I explained just as the ground buckled beneath us and collapsed in a spider web of veins leading out from the original detonation site.
"You are such a mix of the literal and the figurative," he mused.
"We're Oscar-Mike," Wiggsly announced. "Appreciate the assistance Sugar, Rowdy." And with that he jumped over the pit and charged forward.
With two hundred mechanized infantry on the ground, I couldn't imagine that anything we'd seen would stand in their way. From my viewpoint, they could have achieved the same objective with a quarter of the force they'd brought. When pressed, Alderson had scoffed at the notion. Overwhelming firepower, he'd said, was what he wanted to bring. He had a point, I'd seen the flip-side in the battle for Colony-40, where the Red Houzi dreadnaught Bakunawa had done much the same
to a substantial Mars Protectorate fleet. I wondered how much of this battle had been shaped by that drubbing.
The fight continued well into the night, pockets of Kroerak showing up from who knows where, some obviously having run from a great distance. By the time Cradle's star was cresting over the horizon, however, the mission turned from combat duty to sentry duty. I'd just taken my second hit of Navy provided stimulants when I received a message from Commander Munay. He was requesting our presence on George Ellery Hale.
We signed out with the Ground Forces HQ and made way for space. I smiled as we set down on Hale's flight deck next to Hotspur. She'd been left out of the action for once and looked great, not a fresh crease anywhere. A wave of nostalgia rolled over me. It felt like the end of something, seeing Hotspur sitting out the battle.
A Marine Lieutenant greeted the four of us as we exited the fighters. "Greetings, Captain Hoffen. James Pugno." The young lieutenant offered his hand. "I've been asked to accompany you."
I smiled, it was a much warmer reception than we'd first received aboard the Hale. "Nice to meet you Lieutenant Pugno. Lead the way."
He handed each of us a med patch and then explained. "We're reading combat stims in your bios. Be best for everyone if you weren't amped up when talking with the commander, if you don't mind." He had a good point, I was feeling pretty frakking edgy.
We walked deeper into the ship than we'd ever been and I wouldn't have thought we could have gone any lower when Pugno finally stopped and gestured to a hatch. "Far as I go," he said and palmed the door.
The room we found ourselves in was a plainly decorated meeting room, with steel chairs and a utilitarian table. The room looked onto another, separated by armored glass. Inside of that room were four of the smaller, more colorful Kroerak. I recognized the Overlord of the North as one of them.
"They can't hear us," Munay said, standing up from his chair. "But they can sense us, even with a hermetically sealed room. That's not even armor glass, but a vid-screen. Going to drive the lab-coats nuts."
The Cradle's Overlord looked directly at me as I crossed the room. "Yeah. That's officially creepy," I said as I paced backward just to make sure it was actually tracking me, which it was.
Give No Quarter (Privateer Tales Book 10) Page 30