by Brown, Ryk
“Falcon, Jolly copies. What about the Answari security forces on our ass?”
“We’ll take care of the cops, Captain,” Loki answered.
“And that last gun?”
“Have faith, sir. C2s got a plan,” Loki assured him as he trained the interceptor’s cannon on the pursuing security forces and opened up again.
* * *
“Jump complete,” Mister Riley reported. “We’re in position to jump into orbit over Takara.”
“Remember, we need to be directly over that last gun and in as low an orbit as possible,” Nathan reminded his navigator. “I want to be able to shoot as soon as possible. The longer it takes for use to get into firing position, the more time that gun has to take us out.”
“Understood, sir,” Mister Riley assured him. “I’ve got the data from the Falcon’s last jump. I’ll get us in the right spot, sir.”
“I know you will, Mister Riley.”
“Captain, Lieutenant Commander Kamenetskiy has done all that he can to tighten up the targeting of the quad rail guns, but he warns that they have never even been test fired and calibrated. He cannot promise better than a zero point two five margin of error.”
“That’s a pretty big margin of error,” Nathan observed. “What does that translate into as far as surface area from our firing altitude?”
“A circular error probability of at least zero point five kilometers, I’m afraid,” Mister Randeen answered.
“Well, we can’t use the minis,” Nathan reflected. “Their velocity is much less, and their rounds will be more easily affected by the atmosphere. They might not do as much damage, but their spread could be ten times that of the quads. Besides, we’re only going to get one shot at this. We have to kill that gun on the first try.”
“Yes, sir,” Mister Randeen agreed.
“Flight ops reports the flight apron is full and ready to go,” Naralena reported from comms.
“How many did they squeeze in?” Nathan asked.
“Twenty-five, sir.”
“Half the atmospheric wing. Not bad,” Nathan commented.
“Jump plotted and locked, Captain,” Mister Riley reported.
“Our current speed matches that of our intended orbital speed over Takara, sir,” Mister Chiles reported from the helm.
“Very well, time to jump?”
“One minute,” Mister Riley reported. “The Falcon should be in position by then.”
“Very well.” Nathan sat back in his command chair, wondering about the wisdom of his next move. If Vladimir’s calculations were correct, there would be a lot of collateral damage, which could include hundreds of civilian casualties. Commander Taylor and Ensign Yosef had analyzed the recon images from the Falcon, just as Master Chief Montrose and his aides in the CIC had done. Most of the guns were either surrounded by industrial parks or were on the edge of the city in areas of sparse population. Unfortunately, that last gun had several large residential towers within the five hundred meter potential blast radius that the Cheng had predicted, as well as several sprawling residential tracts that had sprung up decades after the guns had been erected.
Nathan took little solace in the knowledge that his second in command in the C2 had taken all of this into account when making her recommendations. She knew as well as Nathan did that they had very little time to get their forces down in their entirety if they were going to be successful. Eventually, the Ta’Akar would find a way to get more forces into the area. Once they did, the Corinari would be overrun, and the diversion would be over. Without that diversion drawing their attention, Tug and his insertion team could easily be discovered and quickly executed. If the mission failed now, the Aurora would have to fall back to the Darvano system and try to mount a defense against the four ships that were en route to destroy them. That would take months, months that they would be away from Earth. He could try to send a jump shuttle with details of the jump drive and its successes, but even if they made it all the way back to Earth, it might still be too little too late.
Nathan tried to make himself believe that the hundreds that might die in his rail gun fire in the next minute would pale in comparison to the tens of thousands that had died on Corinair in the past months. He tried to use their deaths to justify his next action, but he could not. He remembered someone from Earth’s post-plague history, a general whose name escaped him, saying that part of being a leader was living with the terrible decisions one was forced to make. It was yet one more thing Nathan hated about the burden of command.
* * *
“Damn! That was close!” Josh exclaimed as he ducked the interceptor back behind the building. They had been working their way through the maze of buildings, trying to get to the same side of Answari as her last working air defense battery.
“One more left, then we break out into open territory,” Loki reported.
“How’s our time?”
“Fifteen seconds.”
“All right then,” Josh said as he pulled the interceptor into a hard left around the last tall building on the edge of the city. He finished his turn and leveled the interceptor’s wings, slamming his throttles up to full power. “Here we go!”
The interceptor accelerated rapidly, the force of acceleration pushing them back into their flight seats despite the inertial dampeners working to counter them. Had the dampeners not been working, both of their lungs would have collapsed under their own weight.
The buildings rapidly fell away behind them as the interceptor shot out into the open, streaking over the tops of the smaller buildings and homes that lay beyond the older city.
“She’s tracking us,” Loki announced. “She’ll have guns on us in ten seconds. Keep coming left.”
“Uh, I really don’t want to get closer to that gun, if you don’t mind,” Josh declared.
“If you don’t, she’ll have us in five. Come left!”
Josh pushed the ship slightly to the left. “Time?”
“Five seconds.”
“I meant time to guns,” Josh insisted.
“Same.”
Josh pushed the nose to the left a little more. “How about now?”
“Two second lead. She’s firing.”
Massive bolts of energy leapt out from the gun in the distance off the port side. The bolts passed behind them, but not by much, and with each successive blast, the bolts of energy grew closer.
“Down to one,” Loki announced.
“Where the fuck is she?” Josh cursed as the bolts of energy continued to streak just aft of the interceptor. He moved the interceptor’s nose to the left one last time, hoping to gain another second in his lead over the gun’s track.
“She should be here by now,” Loki agreed. “Still at two.”
“I can’t turn anymore or we’ll start losing our lead, Loki.”
“Shit! Back at one!”
“Screw this,” Josh announced. “Hang on!” Josh yanked his control stick hard to the right and pulled his nose up slightly. The interceptor pitched up and began a tumbling turn to the right, rolling up and over the path of the air defense gun’s energy bolts as they streaked past the Falcon.
Loki barely had time to grab one of the hand rails with his right hand, his left arm flailing wildly and bouncing off the inside of the canopy that covered them. “What the hell!”
“Sorry, Loki, but I couldn’t hold that turn any longer,” Josh reported. “There were hills coming up and we would’ve had to climb. We would’ve lost airspeed and gotten fried.”
“So you thought turning back into the red hot bolts of plasma was the right move?”
“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?!”
“Where the hell are they?” Loki declared, practically pleading.
As if on cue, Naralena’s voice came across his comm-set.
“Falcon, Aurora. Bug out. Firing in fifteen seconds.”
“Finally!” Loki said.
“Hell yeah!” Josh cried.
“Aurora, Falcon copies. The gun is
breaking off of us and turning toward you. Estimate ten seconds until she has a firing solution on you.”
“Roll complete,” Mister Chiles reported from the Aurora’s helm.
“All four quads are loaded and locked on target,” Mister Randeen reported. “We’ll be directly overhead in three……”
“Sensors! Has the Falcon cleared the area?” Nathan asked.
“Two……”
“They just jumped, sir!” Mister Navashee reported.
“One……”
“Fire all quads!” Nathan ordered.
For the first time since she was launched, the Aurora’s four, massive, quad-barreled rail guns flashed in rapid succession as they sent thousands of sold metal-alloy slugs raining downward from orbit. The pilots sitting in the cockpits of the twenty-five atmospheric fighters waiting on the flight apron watched as the guns tracked ever so slightly, trying to compensate for both the Aurora’s orbit as well as the planet’s rotation below. In less than twenty seconds, the Aurora’s four guns had expended their ammunition, sending over ten thousand slugs down toward the last big gun defending Answari.
“Quads are dry,” Mister Randeen announced. “Twenty seconds until our first rounds strike the target.”
“Kill the gravity on the flight apron,” Nathan ordered. “Translate downward, Mister Chiles.”
“Translating downward.”
“Fighters are aloft,” Mister Randeen reported. “They’re moving away.”
“The gun is firing!” Mister Navashee reported.
“Escape jump! Get us out of here, Mister Riley!” Nathan ordered.
“Ten seconds until we can jump, sir!”
The first energy bolts from Anwsari’s last air defense gun struck the Aurora about the top of her midsection, smashing into the two quad guns on her starboard side.
“Roll the ship!” Nathan ordered as the impact of the energy bolts threatened to knock him out of his seat.
As the ship rolled to starboard, the endless stream of energy bolts walked across her midsection, obliterating the aft edge of her flight deck. As she continued to roll, the last few bolts slammed into her outer heat exchangers, causing massive damage to the first and second panels.
“Hull breach!” Mister Randeen reported. “Just aft of the flight apron, port side.”
“All contact lost in section twenty-seven, decks three and four!” Naralena reported.
“Coming over!” Mister Chiles reported.
Residents in the area of the air defense battery held their ears and huddled under tables and in closets in their homes, the sound of the massive gun’s two barrels thundering like angry Gods. Suddenly, the booming sound of the guns was replaced by the roar of thousands of sonic booms as ten thousand rail gun slugs the size of a man’s head rained down at four times the speed of sound. The slugs slammed into the ground, the buildings, the streets and parks, and especially the massive air defense gun itself, destroying everything they struck. The barrage lasted twenty seconds, and by the time it was over, a massive dust cloud had enveloped the entire kilometer wide area around the gun, and it was rapidly spreading outward. Funneled in some places by the corridors between the taller building, the destructive shock wave flipped over vehicles, pulled trees up out of the ground, and blew out every window for more than a kilometer beyond the initial impact area.
“Dear God,” Captain Waddell exclaimed. The ground had shaken with a ferocity he had never experienced and had continued to do so throughout the bombardment. Even at more than five kilometers out, he and his men had been forced to stop their advancement and grab something to maintain their balance. Now, in the distance, he could see the dust cloud expanding over the far side of the city.
“What have they done?” Sergeant Davidge exclaimed in disbelief.
“What they had to,” Captain Waddell mumbled. “What we had to.”
“Jolly, Eagle leader. Passing fifty kilometers. ETA to engagement area: two mikes,” the lead pilot in the air support wing called over the captain’s comm-set.
“Eagle leader, Jolly copies.” Captain Waddell shook off the horror of the moment, as there was still work to be done. “Let’s move out, Sergeant. We need to get to the new LZ. We’ve got a war to fight.”
* * *
“We’ve got heavy damage to our midsection,” Vladimir reported over the comms to Cameron in the C2. “A hull breach in section two-seven. Decks three and four in that section are open to space. Lost twelve crew and five more injured in that section alone. One heat exchanger is offline. Another is completely destroyed. We lost two quads, but we don’t have any more ammunition for them anyway.”
“Copy that, Cheng,” Cameron answered as she studied the data being transmitted from the Aurora’s Combat Information Center. Under normal circumstances, the Aurora’s CIC was where Cameron would be during battle. Instead, she could only get an update from her CIC when the Aurora either jumped back to the staging area or sent an update via another jump-capable vessel.
Cameron looked at the external cameras and zoomed in on the Aurora sitting off their starboard side. “Captain, if you roll forty-five to port, I can send you some good pictures of your exterior damage.”
“Not sure I want to see them,” Nathan admitted, “but I have a feeling Vlad will.”
“Da! Davai!” Vladimir chimed in across the comms.
“Any word on the collateral damage?” Nathan asked over comms.
“Not yet, sir,” Cameron answered as she watched the Aurora roll. She began transmitting images back to Vladimir. “We sent the Falcon back in to recon the damage and make sure the skies are clear before we start jumping troops back into the area.”
“Good thinking,” Nathan told her.
After an uncomfortable moment of silence, Cameron spoke. “It had to be done, sir.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“C2, Falcon,” Loki’s voice interrupted.
“Falcon, C2. Go ahead,” Cameron answered.
“C2, Falcon. Gun is destroyed, skies are clear, and our fighters are in place to provide air cover.”
“Copy that,” Cameron answered. She turned to Ensign Yosef. “Get the jumpers going again.” She returned to her comm-set. “Falcon, C2. Collateral damage?”
“C2, Falcon, hard to say, sir. There’s a huge dust cloud covering the entire area. It has got to be at least a few kilometers across by now. My scans show most of the buildings within one hundred meters have been flattened. From one hundred meters out to about five hundred meters, the damage varies, but even then, nothing seems to have been left undamaged.”
“Is that damage from rail gun rounds or from flying debris?” Nathan asked.
“Impossible to tell, Captain. My guess is the farther out you go, the more it’s from debris or the shock wave. Maybe after the wind blows the dust cloud away we’ll be able to get a better look…”
“Which way is the wind blowing?” Cameron interrupted.
“To the north,” Loki answered.
“Toward the palace?” Cameron asked.
“Yes, sir, I think. Yes, that would be toward the palace.”
“We’re getting his data feed now, sir,” Ensign Yosef commented.
“What’s our next move, Commander?” Nathan asked.
“Sir, we’re way behind schedule here. I suggest we take advantage of that dust cloud, as well as the chaos we just created, and get as many men down to the surface of Takara as possible.”
“Agreed. What do you want us to do?”
“Load up the heavy cargo shuttles and jump them to Takaran orbit. They can fly down themselves and get their Kalibris up and running. That will give our ground forces much better close-air support.”
“What about the other ships in the system?” Nathan wondered.
“The Avendahl still hasn’t shown any signs of powering up, and there are only four more ships that are in effective range. They haven’t received the distress call yet. According to Dumar, none of those ships carry more than a few hundre
d troops. If we get all our forces down now and get back on schedule, we can wrap this up before any other ships can react and move in to reinforce Answari.”
“But what about those four ships?” Nathan asked. “By the time we move the heavies into orbit, those four ships will be on full alert.”
“Two of them will, the other two will not. You can attack the two that are not first and still catch them by surprise.”
“Don’t suppose the closer two are frigates, huh?”
“No, sir, they’re cruisers. But you don’t have to destroy them, Captain. You just have to keep them occupied for a while.”
“Easier said than done,” Nathan commented.
“This is the best course of action, sir,” Cameron insisted.
“It would give us some time to get the heat exchanger back online,” Vladimir added.
“Very well, Commander. It’s your call. We’ll start loading the heavies now.”
“Understood. C2 out.” Cameron sighed as she looked at the images that had been transmitted of the blast area by the Falcon’s reconnaissance cameras. “Damn, Loki wasn’t kidding, was he?”
“No, sir, he wasn’t,” Ensign Yosef agreed in a hushed voice.
* * *
Three at a time, the jump shuttles appeared amidst blue-white flashes in the sky. They flew over the city with impunity, protected by circling Corinari fighter craft, no longer threatened by the mighty guns of Answari. Each time they appeared, they found an intersection near the column of Corinari ground troops that were marching toward the palace of Ta’Akar. No longer under fire, they landed in the streets and released their loads of fresh soldiers before rising up into the sky to disappear in a flash once again.
“We’re up to nearly seven hundred,” Sergeant Davidge reported to Captain Waddell as they marched down the main boulevard. “That’s three companies, sir.”