by Marko Kloos
“Aye, ma’am,” the helmsman replies. “Rolling the ship.”
The Lanky penetrators aren’t nearly as fast as our rail-gun projectiles, but they have much more mass, and our hull isn’t twenty meters thick. I’ve been on ships that have been hit by those dense organic projectiles. They make two-meter holes in whatever they hit, and they go clear through the armored hull of a warship from port to starboard or bow to stern. Even though I know that Ottawa has been built with this scenario in mind, I still grasp the armrests of my chair hard enough to make the metal creak.
“All hands, brace for impact,” the XO shouts into the 1MC.
The cloud of penetrator darts envelops Ottawa like a fierce hail. I can hear the impacts of the darts on the armor, interspersed with the sounds of many minor explosions. Ottawa shudders under the onslaught but plows on, and the Lanky ship is astern of us in a matter of half a second. Then there’s a second series of impact sounds from the bow and starboard front of the ship.
“Passing through the debris cloud from Sierra-2,” the tactical officer says.
“Damage report.” Colonel Yamin’s grasp on her armrests doesn’t look any more gentle than mine. But we still have air in the compartment, and we didn’t blow up in a reactor explosion, so I loosen my grip just a little.
“Several hull breaches,” the XO reports. “Compartments open to space at frames 180, 224, and 366. Whatever hit us didn’t go all the way through. No hull breaches forward of frame 180.”
“The dorsal armor saddle deflected everything,” the CO says. “Send out the damage control parties. And kick me in the teeth the next time I expose our flank and stern armor.”
“Sierra-3 is starting to come about again,” the tactical officer says. “He’s spinning and counter—burning? I don’t know what. But he’s decelerating.”
“Coming back for another pass,” Colonel Yamin says grimly. “Let’s let him have a second serving, then. Status on the Alpha and Bravo mounts?”
“Eighteen seconds until charged.”
“Can we open the distance to use another Orion?”
“Doubtful,” the XO replies. “Not at their acceleration rate. He has to close with us to point blank because he doesn’t have long-range ordnance. And we have to close with him because we can’t open the gap again.”
“We’ll let him have both barrels,” she proclaims after a glance at the tactical display, where the distance between us and the seed ship is still widening. “Lateral aft boosters, full thrust. Bring us around and go to full counter-burn, all-ahead flank.”
“All-ahead flank on rotation, aye.”
I check my harness again to make sure I am strapped in with no wiggle room. The artificial gravity field is great for low-gravity maneuvers, but when the ship is pushed to flank speed turning and burning, things can get very bumpy.
Ottawa flips end over end again until our exhaust nozzles are pointed at New Svalbard once more. The distance between us and the Lanky has opened up to fifty thousand kilometers again in the span of twenty seconds, but our rate of divergence is slowing drastically as both ships counter-burn to put on the brakes. It’s like a slow and awkward joust with heavily armored knights and lances, but we’re on a rain-slick frozen lake, and the horses are on skates.
“The active defense system vaporized over half the incoming penetrators,” the XO says. He scrolls through the screens on the display in front of him. “The reactive armor deflected most of the rest. The civvie contractors are going to piss themselves with joy when they find out.”
“For more reasons than just that one,” Colonel Yamin replies.
For the next few minutes, we bleed backward velocity while the Lanky seed ship does the same. The distance between us opens to sixty, then seventy, then eighty thousand kilometers. Ottawa is first to the punch. When we have arrested our rearward slide and fly in the opposite direction of our ingress, the Lanky is still on the brakes and gliding away from us.
“We have a red light on the Alpha mount,” the weapons officer cautions. “Malfunction on the magnetic containment field. Alpha mount is offline, ma’am.”
“What about Bravo mount?”
“Still online and charged.”
“Damn it. Cut the main propulsion. Stand by on Orions. Get a firing solution on Sierra-3 and launch when ready.”
“Full stop, aye.” The helmsman pulls the throttle levers in front of him all the way to the idle position.
“Ma’am, we’re under half the minimum range for the Orions,” the weapons officer objects. “They may not crack his hull if they don’t impact with enough speed.”
“I’ve read the user manual, Lieutenant. Now float out the bird. Unless you’re comfortable betting your life that Bravo mount will not malfunction in the next five minutes.”
“Aye, ma’am.” The weapons officer blanches a little and returns his attention to his screens.
“It may not destroy him, but it may crack him open. Or rattle his cage enough to break off,” Colonel Yamin says.
“Sierra-3 is starting to close the gap again,” the tactical officer reports. “Bearing zero degrees by zero, CBDR, ninety thousand klicks and closing.”
“Tube one is locked on target and ready to fire. Firing in three. Two. One. Fire.” The weapons officer looks at the colonel. “Tube one is clear. Bird away, ma’am.”
“Very well. Keep that Bravo mount locked on target in case we miss.”
The Orion III starts its acceleration run thirty kilometers in front of Ottawa’s bow. Once again, the display lights up with a chain of nuclear explosions that blind the cameras momentarily with each burst. Our frontal sensors can’t see through all the radiation and electromagnetic noise from the nukes detonating between us and the seed ship, but the auxiliary feeds from the drones give us a perfect picture from several different angles.
The Orion covers the distance between us and the seed ship in a relative blink. If the Lanky ship senses the incoming warhead, it doesn’t have much time for evasive maneuvers. Less than ten seconds after the launch, the twenty-five-hundred-ton Pykrete warhead of the Orion III slams into the bow of the Lanky ship at several thousand meters per second. The bloom from the impact is far less spectacular than a hit from the particle cannons because there’s no flare of gamma radiation. The warhead just bulls against the hull of the Lanky with brute kinetic energy. The impact cloud disperses, and for a second or two, the seed ship looks untouched. Then a big piece of the frontal hull slope tears off and starts spewing a trail of debris in the seed ship’s wake. It reminds me of the results of the desperate action of NACS Indianapolis a few years ago above Earth, when we had no Orions or particle cannons to take on the approaching Lanky seed ship, and Colonel Campbell decided to turn his ship into an improvised kinetic warhead.
“Direct hit on Sierra-3,” the tactical officer announces. “He’s damaged. We cracked the hull, ma’am.”
“Wonder if they have spall liners on their ships,” Lieutenant Colonel Barry muses. “There’s got to be armor shards tearing from bow to stern in that thing right now.”
“Sierra-3 is still holding course and maintaining acceleration.”
“We didn’t quite hurt them enough,” Colonel Yamin says. “Weps, open Hades silos one through four. Nuclear-fire mission authorized. Hand off target marking to the nearest drones and aim for that crack in the hull. Fire when ready.”
“Aye, ma’am. Opening silos one through four.”
On the sides of the forward hull, right next to Ottawa’s heavy dorsal armor saddle, four silo hatches open silently. Each of those silos contains a heavy nuclear-armed missile for antiship or surface-bombardment use. Against an intact seed ship, they’re a waste of good plutonium. But I know from the Battle of Earth that if we hit that hole in the hull, the atomic warheads will tear the ship to pieces from the inside.
“Distance sixty thousand, still CBDR.”
“Firing missile silo one. Three. Two. Four. Missiles away.”
Another low rumblin
g sound reverberates through the hull. On the plot, four light blue inverted V icons leave the center of the display and head toward the incoming seed ship. They aren’t as fast as the Orions, but the distance is shrinking steadily, and the missiles cover the gap in just a few minutes. The seed ship plows through the radiation debris from the nuclear propellant charges the Orions left in their path, damaged but still intact enough to put a hurting on us.
The Hades missiles meet the remaining Lanky seed ship forty thousand kilometers away. Two of them detonate against the undamaged portion of the hull in impressive but ineffective fireworks. Another Hades shoots past the gash in the hull and misses the Lanky by what looks like a few meters at most. But the last Hades disappears into the seed ship through its broken exterior. A second or two later, the hull of the Lanky ship heaves outward, and the entire dorsal front quarter of the ship bursts open. I know that the seed ship hulls are impervious to radiation, but that works both ways, because the gamma radiation from a half-megaton warhead just bounced around in that hull and cooked everything in it several times over.
“Sierra-3 is still CBDR,” the tactical officer warns. We may have just killed everything in that ship, but the hull is following the laws of physics, and absent any other physical influences, it will continue on its trajectory.
“Evasive action,” Colonel Yamin orders. “All-ahead flank, forty-five degrees by zero. Get us out of the way.”
The helmsman acknowledges the command and throws the throttle lever all the way forward again. I try to watch the plot and the cameras at once as we swiftly move out of the path of the incoming seed ship. When Sierra-3 barrels through the space we occupied not too long ago, we are five hundred kilometers away and accelerating. If the seed ship spews out penetrators as it hurls past our point of closest approach, we’re too far away to detect them.
“Bring us about,” Colonel Yamin orders. She looks like she just aged five years in the last few hours. “Track that bastard and prepare for follow-up shot with the Orions.”
“He’s on a collision trajectory with New Svalbard,” the tactical officer says. He hurries to the holotable and brings up the trajectory projection for the seed ship.
“Where is he going to hit?”
“Right here.” The tactical officer points to a spot on the northern plateau, four hundred klicks away from New Longyearbyen. “If he doesn’t break up in atmo first.”
“He won’t,” Lieutenant Colonel Barry replies. “He’ll make a crater the size of Central Park when he hits.”
“Comms, warn the garrison they have incoming wreckage. Let them know the approximate impact point so they don’t wonder why they suddenly have a minor earthquake.”
“I don’t think they’re going to overlook that hull coming through the atmosphere, ma’am. Not even from four hundred klicks away.”
I let go of my armrests and let out a long, shaky breath. The whole engagement only lasted a little over three hours from the time we launched our drones, but it feels like I’ve run a marathon through a live-fire range even though I didn’t move from the TacOps station once.
The seed ship hull is clearly out of control. It enters the upper atmosphere of New Svalbard and begins a drag-induced rotation around its vertical axis. It makes the trip through the atmosphere broadside on, a lifeless, ragged three-kilometer lump of alien matter trailing bright contrails of superheated gas on the way down. Our cameras track the seed ship until the wreckage disappears in a cloud bank. A few minutes later, a huge thermal bloom billows up on the infrared spectrum.
“Impact,” the captain at the electronic-intelligence station calls out. “They went in hard. I’m transmitting the site coordinates to System Control.”
“The plot is clear,” the tactical officer says. “We have no hostiles within twenty million klicks.”
The cheers in CIC are much more subdued than after our first kill. We won, but Ottawa is still bleeding air, and we’re down one of the particle cannons, our main anti-Lanky firepower at short range. And if we had hull breaches, we probably have casualties as well. Ottawa has performed much better against the Lankies than any ship before it, but this short and violent battle should serve to dispel any illusions among her crew that the war will be a cakewalk from now on.
“Tell Michael P. Murphy that the coast is clear. Have them make best speed to New Svalbard and rendezvous with us in orbit.” Colonel Yamin lets out a percussive breath and runs her hand through her hair. “The day is not over, people. In fact, we’ve only just started.”
She walks over to the holotable and changes the scale of the display to show only New Svalbard and its immediate vicinity.
“Tell the SI regiment to get ready for a drop. We are landing the Second Battalion first. Keep the First Battalion in reserve for now. And I want the first attack wing out of the clamps and on their way to provide close-air support in thirty minutes.”
I send a priority alert to my special tactics team and order them to get into battle gear. Then I send a direct message to Master Sergeant Garcia, my second most senior combat controller. He’s assigned to Alpha Company of the Second Battalion, and I order him to relieve me in CIC thirty minutes early so I can take his spot on the drop ship. I’m familiar with the territory down there, and I feel that I’ve spent enough time watching events while sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned command center. I don’t know if the people I knew five years ago are still on that moon, but I want to be in the first wave of the rescue mission. We fought for the civilian administration on New Svalbard, and we paid for their continued right to exist independently with the blood of good men and women. This is the place where I met my friend Dmitry for the first time, and where I firmly bonded with Master Sergeant Fallon over the most potent cocktails in the settled galaxy. And if there’s a fight going on to keep the Lankies from stomping it all flat, I’ll be damned if I sit in the second row for it.
CHAPTER 20
GHOSTS IN THE SNOW
It feels good to be back in battle armor. Securing all the fasteners and triple-checking connections and suit functions is the routine that signals my brain I’m about to go to war. I’ve been wearing nothing but blueberries or a vacsuit ever since I got on this ship, and I never realized just how much I missed the armor and the feeling of readiness and competence it bestows until just now. It’s like wrapping your hands and putting on gloves right before you step into a SIMAP ring.
When my armor is sealed and all diagnostics show green, I go back to my locker and open the personal compartment with my biometrics. I take out the ancient M17 pistol and stick it into its holster on my chest, right above the magazine pouches for the carbine. I tuck the loaded spare magazines away into their respective pouches. Then I close the locker and leave my stateroom to go to the armory by the flight deck.
The flight deck is abuzz with hectic activity. Several platoons are already lined up behind drop ships for transport, and when I cross the deck threshold, four Shrikes are in the clamps and on the way to their launch bays simultaneously. Their stubby wings are loaded to capacity with air-to-ground missiles and cluster munition canisters. I am carrying an M-95 instead of my usual lightweight PDW buzzgun—there’s no doubt that we are facing a standup fight against superior numbers, and if the perimeter gets breached, I want to be able to shoot back with something more effective than a people-shooter.
“Alpha Company?” I ask a trooper in the nearest gaggle.
“Yes, sir. Third Platoon.”
“Where’s First?”
The trooper points at the drop ship on the far end of the line, which is being boarded already. I jog over to the tail ramp and follow the troops into the cargo hold.
The senior officer in the hold is the company commander, a captain named Porter. He raises his helmet visor when he sees me and gives me a slightly puzzled look.
“Captain Grayson,” I say. “I’m the STO. I’ll be your combat controller for this drop.”
“What happened to Master Sergeant Garcia?”
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“He’s probably sipping a nice hot cup of coffee up in CIC right now,” I reply. “I’m more familiar with this AO than Sergeant Garcia, so I decided to replace him for this mission.”
“Fine by me,” Captain Porter says.
I take my seat at the controller console by the back bulkhead, stow my weapon in the clamp, and plug my suit in. Then I activate the consoles and do the customary check-in with the pilot for permission to access ship systems. Finally, I check my comms back to the CIC.
“Talk to me, Garcia,” I say on the TacOps channel.
“Radio protocol, Captain,” Garcia replies with a soft laugh. “But you are coming in loud and clear.”
“The command element of Alpha Company is going to set up on the airfield. Once we are skids down, I’m going to make a beeline for the tower and get the bigger picture from there.”
“Godspeed, Captain. And don’t get killed. If Taggart becomes the new senior combat controller, he’ll be absolutely unbearable.”
“Copy that,” I reply, suppressing a chuckle. “I’ll check in from the ground. Tailpipe One out.”
The Dragonfly’s tail ramp closes swiftly and almost silently, and the illumination in the hold switches to combat red. The screens in front of me automatically adjust to the darkness. I bring up my usual combination of plot and external camera views. The ship I’m in is assigned to Assault Transport Squadron Eleven, not Halley’s ATS-5. It occurs to me that even though I’ve flown in a drop ship with her behind the stick several times, she’s never actually been my pilot on a proper ground-assault drop.
We are in the clamp a few minutes later, briefly hovering three meters above the hangar deck for our quick ride to the drop bay. I look around for the ships of ATS-5, but I don’t see my wife in or near any of them. They are tasked to ferry down the reserve battalion in case we need it, so she will launch in the second wave if at all. But once I’m on the ground and she’s overhead in her drop ship, she has to become just another air asset to me, an aerial weapon for me to direct onto a target. I want to believe that I can make that switch in my brain, despite my better knowledge. But Halley is the best pilot I know, and she can take care of herself while she’s in the air and behind a stick.