An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire

by David : Thomas, T Thomas Drake

  “Overload!” Firkin crowed.

  “Well done!” from Follard.

  “How soon until they can reconstitute the dome?” Mora asked Tad, shaking her head.

  “Not until they go in and pull our rogue filings off the propagating antennae,” Bertingas told her. “One by one. With tweezers.” Over the net, he said: “Suggest we begin making evasive. They’ve still got firepower.”

  “Roger, Blue Leader.”

  “Tell the boats to open up again.”

  “Relayed.”

  In the strat tank, the exposed surface of Batavia was notched and ridged with more gun turrets, landing pads, and ship cradles. As his dragon jinked side to side along a descending curve, Bertingas swept the island’s image with one eye and counted at least forty war vessels in various stages of construction. From what he could see, about half looked able to move, at least suborbitally. He compared the strategic holo with the screens reporting from his own ship’s slit cameras. The latter added details of real life: non-military vehicles moving on the causeway, inert cargo hulls lying in the water alongside the island’s quays, swarms of Human technicians and their alien servitors working on the warships in cradle.

  A lancing flash of ionized gas from one of the fishing boats cut across this scene. One of the towers in the center of the strat tank sagged and fell. Two more lines of plasma came from the attackers’ boats, doing more damage to Batavia’s superstructure. Then a dozen surgical beams cut out from high points on the island, criss-crossing the patch of water where the boats rode.

  A cough from inside the control space caught Bertingas’ attention. The Capuchin was seated at the control horns of their dragon’s own plasma gun, eyes screwed into the targeting cups. The alien coughed again, loudly.

  “Fire at will,” Bertingas ordered.

  The pumpkin sphere made a muffled whump, Whump! WHUMP!!

  The forward cameras of the dragon went white with light overload, and the vehicle’s forward motion slowed with the reaction from the blasts.

  “Gold and Silver Teams move forward,” Tad ordered on the command net. The ground assault would begin, building by building and cradle by cradle, until either his attackers or the Haiken Maru’s defenders ran out of troops and firepower.

  From the center of the island, two warships rose slowly. They began firing streams of plasma in among the warehouses where Bertingas’ attackers were concentrated. When one of the fishing boats tried to return a ship-killing plasma stream, the warships’ own e-mag screens dropped around them like black eggshells. Then they pulsed open again to shoot down among the island’s outer structures.

  The Capuchin swiveled and fired on the nearer of the low-flying ships. That seemed to arouse it. Its return fire lanced straight at them. The Cernian pilot put the dragon into a barely controlled tumble around the stream of liquid star matter. Bertingas heard a grainy, fizzy crackling from the port side of the ship.

  “Ablative shielding,” the Cernian said. “From where the stream brushed us.”

  “Don’t do that again,” Tad said, to no one in particular.

  “I won’t!” both gunner and pilot answered at once.

  “Gotcha!” Mora crowed.

  Tad turned toward the strat tank in time to see one of the warships, its shield coming down a fraction of a second too late after a salvo, take a square hit amidships from one of their boats. White fire splashed on its hull; the metal flashed from red to white to blue incandescence, but it held its shape. After the plasma stream had dissipated, they could see the glow on the ship’s side fade.

  “Damn! Nothing,” Tad cursed.

  “Watch,” the Capuchin told him.

  Stressed by the uneven heating and cooling, the bruised hull metal crystallized. In a few seconds, it blew out like a weakened embolism on an artery wall. Ship’s partitions, fuel, and a spew of jetsam came with it. The warship sank back on the island’s crown and exploded in a greasy ball of flame.

  Everyone aboard the dragon cheered.

  One ship down, but three more had risen into the airspace above Batavia. Their plasma batteries were more than holding their own against the second, third, and fourth waves of attack.

  For the next ten minutes, the tank was a random pattern of gas streams, pantomimed troop movements, and colored markers dilating and contracting around the island’s perimeter.

  “Can you break this stalemate?” Mora asked.

  Tad checked the chrono on the bulkhead. “Not for another three minutes.”

  “What happens then?”

  The command network answered for him, with Halan Follard’s voice. “Skyfall’s come early!”

  Within the tank, the random pattern of plasma shots stabilized in an unusual pattern: down from above, out of the upper range of the tank’s reports. A lot of beams were coming down. The armed merchant ships drifting over the island were starting to direct their beams upward, firing longer, exposing their delicate skins more to the stabbing beams.

  “What is that?” Mora asked.

  “Friend of yours,” Tad replied. “Code name Skyfall.”

  Chapter 20

  Terrel Thwaite: SUMO MOVES

  Thwaite was in real trouble.

  The Planetary Monitor Charlotten Broch was falling through the thin upper atmosphere of Palaccio much too fast. Something had gone wrong in the computer systems as they had retro’ed to put her in a lower orbit. Instead of a ten-point-two-second burst on the secondary thrusters, meant to nudge the huge ship into a deep suborbital skim over Batavia, the circuitry had gone haywire. The main reaction drives had burned for a perilous thirty-one-and-a-somethingth seconds. Full braking.

  He was re-entering a ship that had never been meant to touch down on a planet’s surface. One whose internal bracing was designed to withstand the stresses of reaction and battle maneuvering—but never to support their own weight against the pull of gravity. They had two minutes and forty seconds to impact.

  The plan had been so simple.

  Terrel Thwaite had gone aboard as part of the joint “defensive preparations” with Cluster Command. His personal gig was still attached to the 270-degree docking port—and would probably shear off its moorings when this wild ride was over. Thwaite had been on the bridge when a message had come over the command circuits for the monitor’s own commissioned captain, Colonel Bernoit. It was an operations message directly from “the governor.”

  “Colonel, we have an emergency situation here.” Pause.

  “Yes, Ma’am?”

  “A commando team under my orders is at this time invading the Haiken Maru stronghold at Batavia. They should be coming up on your horizon in 140 minutes.” Pause.

  “Indeed so, Your Excel—?”

  “Good. I want you to turn over tactical command of your ship to Captain Thwaite, whom I understand is aboard. He has personal experience with the maneuver I have in mind. Captain . . . ?” Pause.

  “Yes, Madam Governor?” Thwaite responded.

  “At the Battle of Niosh, you commanded a monitor similar to this, did you not?”

  “I—”

  “Over a light-metal world such as Palaccio? And you brought your vessel into a technical re-entry without actually landing?” Pause.

  “Yes.”

  A further pause. The governor looked just past Thwaite. “I want you to effect the same maneuver, starting immediately, to bring the ship at perigee over Batavia. Your orders are to eliminate any large, spaceworthy vessels that may be defending the island while you avoid damaging any atmospheric craft—no matter what their posture and distribution. Can you do that?” Pause.

  “Yes, I believe we can.”

  “Very good. I am granting you acting command of the—um—Broch for the duration of the maneuver. Good shooting, Captain.” The governor had given a regal nod of the head, almost a salute, and the transmission had ended.

  If it was a forgery, as Bertingas had claimed he could arrange, then it was a damn good one. Peremptory tone. Air of contained excit
ement in crisis. Short pauses for inconsequential answers. Masterful. If it was, indeed, a forgery . . .

  Then Thwaite’s career was at an end. Now he wasn’t merely trading word puzzles with old Dindyma. Thwaite had, as an officer of Center Fleet, taken command of a Sister Service vessel under fraudulent conditions. Of course he could claim, with Colonel Bernoit, that he had believed the governor’s transmission, but too many witnesses were still alive—Bertingas himself, Mora Koskiusko, Halan Follard, Colonel Firkin, surely others, too—who would know that he knew the transmission was a fiction.

  Even if they all held steady beside him and told the same story, this gaffe with the main thrusters would end his career for him—if not his life.

  “Put the e-mag screens up to full power,” he ordered the Defense Section.

  “Going a little deep, aren’t we?” Bernoit drawled.

  “We are.”

  “You might want to consider—just as a thought—” the colonel said sarcastically, “swinging the ship, putting the main thrusters back on, and getting us back up to orbit!”

  “I would, Colonel, except that precious pile of sticks and sliding beads you call a computer system can’t seem to get the ignition circuits reset.” He pointed to the condition read-outs, which were red, bright red, and had stayed red ever since that thirty-one-second burn had chopped off so raggedly.

  “Well, you can’t re-enter a Diplomat-class monitor.”

  “I know that! If you had a workable inverter in this bucket, we could punch out of this problem sideways, but you don’t. So we’re going down. At least, our defensive screens will absorb the worst of the heat and neutralize most of the atmospheric buffeting.”

  “It’s neither the heat nor the buffeting I worry about, but the hole we’re going to make when you finish this wild ride. A ship this size doesn’t even have landing jacks.”

  “Right. You’re going to lose a couple of lower decks, aren’t you.” Thwaite snarled. “I suggest you go and start placing your non-GQ personnel topside, get them under restraint and shock mounted. They’ll live longer that way.” He turned his attention to the rest of the bridge crew. “Plot! Give me an angle on that island.”

  “Eighty-eight degrees, Captain. We’re right over them.”

  “Screens, release gun portals along the forward limb.”

  “Hull heating, Sir!” the lieutenant at that station reminded him.

  “So, let the hull heat up a bit. We still have a mission to perform. Guns. Select your targets on declination minus ninety. Nothing smaller than a G-class freighter, per the governor’s orders.”

  “Aye, Sir. Three targets in range and closing rapidly.”

  “Fire at will.”

  The monitor’s quad batteries opened up. Thwaite could feel a slight trembling beneath his boots, but whether it was the guns or the hull’s first contact with the denser lower atmosphere, he could not tell.

  “Targets returning fire, Sir.”

  “Noted. Keep them busy. Plot. What’s our, um, elevation?”

  “Above the planet, Sir?”

  “Yes!”

  “Instruments show—twenty-eight kilometers, Sir.”

  “Rate of descent?”

  “Now at 548 meters per second, Sir. Fifty-one seconds to planetfall.”

  “Fire secondary thrusters, if you can.”

  “Secondaries now firing.”

  Thwaite breathed out a quiet sigh. “Thank you, Kali,” he muttered.

  “Rate of descent slowing to—231 meters per second. Planetfall in 113 seconds now.”

  “Maintain thrusters. Guns. Widen your attack. Pick off hardened targets on the island itself: gun batteries, shield termini, communications. However, avoid the graving docks and power centers. Coordinate your targets with the computer’s navigational profiles for that installation.”

  “Aye, Sir.”

  “Sir!” from Guns. “One ship down.”

  “Excellent. Continue firing.”

  The Broch bored in, with no further change in her rate of descent, firing almost steadily on the island and its puny, inadequately shielded defenders. She destroyed two more warships in the air and an unconfirmed three on the ground. After a minute more, Colonel Bernoit reappeared on the bridge.

  “Captain, may I suggest . . .?”

  “Yes?”

  “That we retire to the emergency control center and let the bridge personnel strap in?”

  “Good idea. Which way?”

  “Through here, into the core stack.”

  “Guns. Cease fire. Defense. Close the shield. Tune to maximum gauss and radius. Then evacuate this compartment. Well done, everyone.”

  “Come on!” Bernoit pulled at him.

  The collision harnesses in the emergency center were old-style primitive: a steel cocoon lined with a body-shaped membrane to be pumped full of high-viscosity jelly at three atmospheres. A glazed rubber mask covered the face and provided a breathable mix, under pressure. Once the occupant was in place and squeezed, the cocoon rotated to put the body’s longest axis at right angles to the impact. That spread the shock over the widest possible area, like a judoka flattening out in a fall.

  “Will these things stand up to an impact at 800 kilometers per hour?” Thwaite asked, halfway into the can. He was holding the mask in one hand and probing the lower reaches of the interior membrane with his bootsoles.

  “Better than my hull!” Bernoit snapped.

  The hood slammed down on hydraulics. A great, gooey hand gripped him around the feet and fingers, wrists and ankles, thighs, groin, chest, neck, and shoulders. The hard edges of the mask pushed against his chin and forehead. It pumped cold air against his face.

  Nothing . . .

  Relax, he told himself.

  Nothing . . .

  Limp, like a rag doll, he made himself.

  Nothing . . .

  Thwaite’s stomach suddenly fell against his backbone. His spine bent like a sapling in a high wind. His lungs collapsed under a surge of pressure. The face mask pressed against his eyeballs, igniting a dance of white fire.

  Like pulling a boot out of deep, sticky mud, his body rebounded from the shock. Then a secondary pressure wave caught him and pushed him back. Once more he unbent. And that was it. The cool jelly was sucked away from the membrane about his body, and the hood slammed open on the pod.

  They were in a noisy red darkness filled with drifting, acrid smoke. The loudest sound was the shriek of twisting metal, overlain with the screaming of sirens.

  “Damage report!” That was Bernoit.

  “Sir! Yes, Sir!” A jumble of voices answered him, separated into individual reports by the communications computer. “Circuit paths below Deck 33 are nofunctional. Southern hemispheric defense screens are down. All thruster engines report dynamic interruptions. Quad batteries from infra starboard to infra port are not responding. Medical reports fourteen deaths, thirty-six injuries—mostly from improperly activated harnesses. Hull breached in twenty-two separate places. Deck 31 reports . . . flooding . . . with water, Sir. The Charlotten Broch is . . . sinking!”

  Bernoit and Thwaite made their way out of the core against an unusual force—planetary gravity. They actually had to walk on the deck surfaces, and the ship wasn’t even under spin. Those surfaces slanted at what, to Thwaite’s newly adjusted inner ear, was about a thirty-degree angle. He could feel that angle steepen as the ship settled lower in the . . . water.

  The bridge looked unchanged. Only the drifting smoke and a pattern of darkened control panels—where certain offensive and defensive systems, and the entire bank of reaction engines, had been damaged beyond response—showed that the ship was not in normal space. Crew members were filing in, staggering against the unaccustomed gravity, and finding their stations.

  “What’s the status on our—um—buoyancy?” Bernoit called.

  “Where’s the island?” Thwaite asked simultaneously.

  “What difference does that make?” the colonel demanded. “If this shi
p fills with water and sinks, we all drown.”

  “Where’s the damned island?” Thwaite repeated.

  “Bearing 160 degrees, Sir,” the Defense talker called. “Range 5,600 meters.”

  “If I correctly recall our charts of the objective,” Captain Thwaite said, “the waters surrounding Batavia are relatively shallow. At this range, they are no more than thirty or forty meters deep. The Broch is 525 meters in diameter, is it not, Colonel? So your ship should—”

  A mild shock came up to them through the deck plates.

  “—be settling on the bottom about now.” Thwaite turned to Guns. “Do we have any functional units on the northern hemisphere?”

  “Ten batteries, Sir. Six quads, four singles.”

  “Power for them?”

  “All the power you need, Sir.”

  “Then lock on the island. Same targets as before. Fire at will.” He turned to Bernoit, who was slumped against the navigational station. “We still have our mission, Colonel.”

  Chapter 21

  Taddeuz Bertingas: MOP UP

  Without thinking, Bertingas scrambled over to the dragon’s top hatch and undogged it. Enough with the strat tank—he wanted to see what was happening. With the hatch open and a gale pouring over the forward coaming, Tad put his head out and craned his neck, searching the hard, blue sky overhead.

  Directly above, he saw a glittery point of green-white light. It was sputtering like the fuse on a birthday sparkler and slowly widening, or getting longer. He had a hard time telling the difference from his angle of view—right below it.

  So far, there was no sound at all.

  Something tapped his chest and he pushed back against the hatch coaming. Mora brought her head up alongside his face.

  “What is that?” she asked, raising her voice above the wind and the noise of the dragon’s fans.

  “I think it’s the Cluster Command’s planetary monitor, Charlotten Broch,” Bertingas shouted back.