IronStar

by Hallman, Grant

  “Ma’am, to verify our non-hostile intentions, we are jettisoning our entire ordnance inventory, starting with the four Spit-4 missiles.” The face in her viewscreen looked up sharply at the mention of the deadly missiles. The clock read [260 / 517].

  Kirrah continued: “They will respond to your remote commands, code alpha five five five three. The other stuff can just burn up in the atmosphere.” On the viewer, Captain Wallace gestured sharply to someone off-screen. Kirrah saw her four missiles turn and take up positions around her own vessel. Fair enough, she’s entitled to a few precautions… nevertheless she could feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck at the thought of the instant annihilation now needing only the touch of a key at one of the Argosy’s fire control stations.

  “I most especially wish to call the Argosy’s attention to the presence of our complete complement of gravitics weapons,” Kirrah continued. “The actions we have taken today, and will shortly be taking, are entirely my responsibility and are not intended to involve the Regnum. They specifically do not involve the use of grav weapons. I am acting with the full approval of the Talamae head of state, who as you can now see is presently on board this shuttle.” Behind her, the large ex-blacksmith waved cheerfully into the vid pickup.

  “Also on board are three Regnum military personnel who have been taken into temporary custody on my authority; several members of the Talamae armed forces acting under my command; a family of refugees from an indig city; and Ms. Einarson, who is present for RegNet News under an active MacKenzie Bond.”

  On the screen, Captain Wallace turned away, conferred briefly with someone off-screen, returned her attention to the vid pickup. The clock read: [200 / 457]. Motion on the left-hand screen drew Kirrah’s attention. The image from the spyfly was back over the street where the small gathering was listening to the robed figure. Faces were turning toward the sky, some were edging away from the fringes of the gathering. Too late, sorry, unlucky, Kirrah thought. The right-hand screen flicked to a different pickup, and a familiar face looked at her across the void.

  “All right, Ms. Roehl,” said Admiral Dunning. “I see that you have disarmed yourself and given us control of your missiles. I see that you have put every possible person aboard who could give me disincentive to fire on you. I see that you have my Marines and pilot under restraint, how they got that way, to be determined. I’m listening. In fact, I’m fascinated.”

  “I apologize for the dramatics, Admiral Dunning. I believe once again our interests coincide. I assure you what is about to happen involves no use of Regnum arms. Indeed I have chosen for this attack, one of the Kruss’s own weapons. I believe it will be found to fall under the provisions of self-defense by the nation-state of Talam, especially given the Kruss’s actions against my city. In fact under Talamae law, we are simply returning an article left by our neighbors.”

  [162 / 419], read the numbers.

  “I’m sure you have read the written rules of engagement, Ms. Roehl. I am equally sure you understand my duty will be to destroy your shuttle, if you give me cause to expect those rules are about to be violated, in letter or intent.” Is this part of command? Kirrah wondered. To be able to look an ally calmly in the eye, and tell her you will unhesitatingly kill her and her hostages and friends, if she crosses your line?

  “Yes, ma’am, I understand fully and, except for the refugee family, we have all agreed to accept your decision. In fact that woman and her two young sons are in the father’s custody, and he has agreed on behalf of his family.

  “We argue that we are within the rules of engagement on two counts, Admiral. First, the rules state that the Navy will defend the city of Talameths’cha. Our actions are part of that defense, as defined by Talam’s supreme military commander - me.

  “Second, the rules state ‘We will not intervene militarily in the O’dai-Talam-Kruss conflict, except to provide passive intelligence, and transport when requested, where such activities will not likely bring Regnum forces under hostile fire.’

  “We assert that the present situation is a simple matter of the Navy providing requested transport, and that hostile fire is not likely in the circumstances.” The numbers were showing [91 / 348] in the corner of Kirrah’s screen. On her instrument board, their altitude was down to four hundred sixty-five kilometers and falling steadily. The four missiles were holding station, tracking them precisely. On her left-hand screen, the mob of O’dai were chasing the robed figure down the street. Just inside one of the eastern gates, half a dozen palace guardsmen were arguing with several figures driving a heavily laden cart, which they had accosted on its way out of the city.

  “I am not interested in word games, Ms. Roehl. What are you planning to do?”

  “At this point, ma’am, the only thing I wish to do is rescue my adopted son. We simply want to be clear and on-record about actions already taken. We believe they are within the letter of your rules. They make no use of Regnum weapons, and they are fully sanctioned by Talamae authorities. We have thirty-eight minutes to deliver the Kruss’s food, according to its deadline. I would very much like to be about that task.”

  [71 / 328], said the counters. Admiral Dunning paused, carefully considering Kirrah’s words, made her decision.

  “You may proceed with the drop. You will then proceed back to Talameths’cha and return my shuttle and personnel. You will not approach within twenty kilometers of the enemy city. I am scrambling Attila’s shuttle to escort you back, and I assure you their weapons inventory is full. You will not make me the first Regnum Admiral to order action resulting in the death of an allied head of state. Are we clear?”

  [46 / 303]

  “Yes, Ma’am, and thank you. Shuttle One, by.” Altitude four fifty-seven. Thank Murphy, Doris had the fusion bottles already configured for reaction thrust, and had the shuttle aimed down. The main thrusters ignited smoothly, and they plummeted toward the ground below at a chest-squeezing three gees. Forty seconds into the burn, the clocks read: [0 / 257].

  Doris called, “Twelve hundred meps, T-one equals zero. They’ve just now got the whole gravtrace, wonder how long they take to figure it out?”

  A little over a hundred kilometers away on the main Tactical display of the Argosy, a blue line which had been growing toward the planet, terminated. The beginning of the trace on the screen had been noted automatically some hundred seconds earlier, when the grav wave from the start of Kirrah’s dance with velocity had begun. Their drive signature had been duly logged as a friendly vessel maneuvering toward the planet, traced in blue on the Tac plot, with no alarm.

  As the first number on Kirrah’s screen reached zero, the gravity wave they had created at the near end of their launch run, where they’d cut off the Tubedrive five hundred sixteen light-seconds out, arrived and was plotted. The Tac officer frowned at the odd trace, too weak for full Tubedrive, but obviously something grav-active.

  “Ninety seconds, turnover, two seven hundred meps,” Kirrah called. The big fusion rockets whispered to silence, and as fast as her vernier thrusters could accomplish it, the shuttle pitched nose up. With a stomach-twisting lurch, Kirrah stabilized the vessel tail-down and re-ignited the main thrusters to kill some of their downward speed before they hit atmosphere. The upper number in the screen was zero, the reading was [0 / 202].

  On the Argosy, the Tac officer flashed the Attention light on his Captain’s auxiliary display and routed the peculiar blue track to her screen. Sandra Wallace blinked, looked again, touched a control, entered a command. An AI scanned the data, ruminated a few nanoseconds, produced a projected plot. On her display, a thin yellow line projected from the near end of the anomalous blue segment. An AI-generated tiny yellow bead was moving down the yellow line, already near its planetside end and closing rapidly. She zoomed in on the view where the yellow line intersected the planet’s surface - a safe distance from her ship and any Regnum forces. Sandra’s worried-looking face took on a lopsided half-grin. She keyed open a comm line. “Admiral Dunning,” she
said. “I think you’d better have a look at this…”

  “Fifty seconds, turnover!” Kirrah cried. The fusion rockets fell silent again, and as she swung the shuttle’s nose back down in their direction of motion, the craft began to tremble and buffet slightly in the uppermost fringes of Sho’ito’s atmosphere. The forward view was now straight down, a screen filled with green and blue planet.

  “Not too bad. We touch sky at twelve hundred meps, that shouldn’t be a problem for this bird, should it, Margaret?” asked Doris. The clock readout passed [0 / 150], the lower number kept ticking down.

  “No, ma’am, in this air she’ll handle two and a half keps for a few minutes. Don’t expect a lot of maneuverability, though. And don’t touch the wings, right after.”

  “The only problem with this, Kirrah, is that we miss the best part of the show,” said Doris. “Although I suppose they’ll have cameras rolling on the Argosy - hey, let’s tell our camera-toting friend where to look.”

  “I’d say just over the port wing, isn’t that right, Lieutenant?” asked Elizabeth’s famous rich contralto professional voice. Doris Finch swiveled her head around to see the RegNet reporter belting herself hastily into the vacant jumpseat beside Ensign Piersall, her camera taking in the cockpit’s occupants and the spectacular view out the front window. “Would one of you please state for the record and our viewing audience, what has just been accomplished by our recent maneuvers?”

  Her camera continued rolling at the twin displays on Kirrah’s panel. On the left-side screen, the group of soldiers at O’dakai’s eastern gate had dragged the cart’s occupants out and were systematically beating and kicking them. Two of the soldiers were rummaging through the cart’s contents, occasionally pulling out some article or other. On the right-side display, the clock was down to [0 / 122]. As it rolled over to [0 / 120], Admiral Dunning’s face appeared behind it.

  “Yes, Kirrah Warmaster, I too would like to hear your answer to that question. Even though nothing is showing on Argosy’s high-res Doppler scans yet, I believe you have placed some object on a cee-fractional bombardment trajectory.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I have,” Kirrah replied to both women. “We accelerated toward the planet to seventy percent of lightspeed and released a one point two gram object which, if we’ve done our navigation right, will shortly strike the Kruss base with the force of a ten kiloton explosion. We hope, because of the vertical impact angle, that most of the energy will be released underground. Our objective is the Kruss base hidden beneath the O’dai palace.”

  “You understand this will result in Civilium sanctions.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I mean, I don’t think so, Ma’am. As I understood Dr. Pennington’s explanation, local forces can only petition the Civilium for wrongs against them, if they have actually joined the Civilium. It would only be justice, therefore, if we were not bound by Civilium law until we joined.” As she spoke, Kirrah continued to ease the shuttle’s nose up toward the horizon. At Margaret’s cue, she deployed the first notch of airbrakes. Air screamed thinly at their touch, and the feeling of weight reasserted itself in earnest. Skin temperature eight sixty Celsius, climbing, but slowly.

  “Kirrah,” the Admiral replied, “You cannot claim the protection of Civilium law to prosecute the Kruss Empire for crimes they committed days ago, and then turn around and break that law yourself, today. Your case against the Kruss is now mutually exclusive with your own violation of anti-bombardment laws.”

  “I understand, ma’am. It was the only solution I could find. In another… ninety-five seconds, there aren’t going to be any Kruss on my planet. Not a trace. Talam is prepared to forget the whole thing, apply for Civilium membership claiming Regnum sponsorship, dated as of tomorrow.”

  “And what of the remaining Kruss with your hostages? No Regnum weapons against it, I cannot compromise on that.”

  “Understood, ma’am. That was the plan from the start. I will capture or kill it on my own.” Under Kirrah’s hand, the shuttle’s nose was now pulled up to near-level flight, streaking north toward her rendezvous on the river Geera. Speed, Mach two point nine; altitude twenty-four thousand meters; skin temperature eight forty; all falling.

  “Lieutenant Roehl, I believe you will. Tell me one thing. What did you choose for your projectile?”

  Doris had resumed realtime control of the spyfly, which was now hovering twenty meters off the eastern parapet of the palace building. On the left-hand screen, a thin, black-robed old man was peering over a balcony railing at the tiny aircraft. He raised his cane and shook it. The clock read [0 / 55].

  Kirrah replied, “It’s one of the Kruss smartshots, ma’am. We’re expecting about forty terajoules on the ground.”

  “Huh. Nice touch, ‘Warmaster’.”

  “May I infer, Admiral, from the fact that we are still alive, that I have not completely disappointed you?”

  Mach two point eight, altitude twenty-three thousand meters, eight thirty Celsius on the leading edges of the wings. More of the high thin wind-scream penetrated the shuttle’s frame as they plunged deeper into the atmosphere. The controls shook lightly in the buffeting of high-level winds.

  On the left-hand viewscreen, a taller man joined Parsh’ap on the balcony. The face under his ornate headdress bore a strong familial resemblance to Paedako, the murdered prince. The man glared at the spyfly, reached under his robe, withdrew a thin metal tube, raised it, pointed it at the spyfly.

  Lucinda Dunning replied, “You have dealt each of us an interesting hand, both on the ground and before the Civilium courts. I believe I’ll play mine as dealt.”

  “Thank you, Admiral Dunning. Thank you very much.” On the corner of the right-hand screen, superimposed over the Admiral’s image, the clock reached [0 / 0]. On the left-hand screen, the signal feed from the spyfly went dead.

  In Elizabeth Einarson’s camera, the sky to the southwest split vertically as though cloven by a white axe. In the thousandth part of a second, the relativistic smartshot slammed into the upper atmosphere and began to explode.

  The tiny fireball, spreading at fifteen kilometers per second, had just enough time to expand to a twelve-meter ring of tortured atomic fragments before it penetrated the planet’s atmosphere at over two hundred thousand kilometers per second, and impacted just inside the north wall of the O’dai palace. The still-relativistic gram of matter, along with a dense shower of subatomic debris swept along its pass through the atmosphere, plunged through the building’s stone and masonry like so much tissue paper. In another microsecond, the entire moving mass deposited its colossal kinetic energy into a column of soil and stone fifteen meters wide and two hundred meters deep under the palace’s foundations. Two thousand tonnes of bedrock converted instantly into incandescence, some of it as plasma hotter than the core of a sun. The fire surged horizontally outward, met deep rock, forced its way into the stone. The stone yielded, shattered, flowed. At the top of the column, however, the incandescent fury met the least resistance. The palace and everything within seventy meters of it blew into the sky in a cloud of debris like the cork from a champagne bottle, followed by a brief roman candle of searing white-hot vaporized basalt and olivine.

  On the highest-speed vid playbacks, in one frame the palace was standing, in the next frame, it was replaced by a blinding column of white light, with a thread-thin incoming tail standing straight up to the top of the atmosphere like a preternaturally straight bolt of white lightning.

  To human eyes viewing from the three hundred kilometer distance of the descending shuttle, the impact looked instantaneous. An intense white flare one hundred fifty meters across vomited up from under the palace, shooting two kilometers or more into the air. Far above, a second huge, diffuse aurora of light flared high in the dawn sky as some of the now-diffuse exhaust gases from the shuttle’s maneuvering thrusters impacted the upper atmosphere at point seven cee. Half a heartbeat later the shock wave in the surrounding stone found its way to the surface, and another larger and slower b
last lifted earth, stone and debris in a dust cloud almost half a kilometer across. As it climbed, the original white flare faded to orange, then cooled to a light brown dust.

  The tremendous heat from the initial flare incinerated anything organic within two hundred meters around the palace and started fires for a kilometer in all directions. Twin shock waves swept across the city in geometrically precise rings of destruction: first the ground shock flattening adjacent buildings and shaking great chunks out of structures up to eight hundred meters farther away. Then the slower-moving air blast tore roofing tiles and shattered windows for another two or three kilometers. Sailing ships rocked and swayed in the harbor as the water surged and heaved in the grip of the shuddering earth.

  Ten kilometers out on the plains, the lucky ones, some eighty percent of O’dakai’s population, started and cried out at the sight. Hundreds fell to the ground a few seconds later as the earthborne shock waves made the earth dance and tremble under their feet.

  Thirty seconds later the first sound reached them, a huge SNAP! sounding like the crack of doom, then the roar of outraged earth. In a hundred-kilometer high column above ground zero, air fell back into the vacuum created by the passage of the descending fireball, and an enormous clap of thunder pealed on and on, diminishing only after a full three minutes of reverberating boom.

  Chunks of bricks, stone and various cooling fragments massing one to several hundred kilograms began to rain down on the city and surrounding area. The hail of debris continued for five or six minutes, raising splashes in the river and making small craters where the heavier ones landed on the not-grass or in a city street. A wind began blowing toward the ruined palace grounds from all directions, feeding the rising pillar of smoke and dust. Under the cloud, the well of lava where the palace had stood slumped into a steep funnel-shaped depression almost two hundred meters across and fifty deep. The center of the pit would glow white-hot for an hour, orange-red for a day.