“They’ll have slaves with them on their ships and bases,” Engels said. “Innocents—children even.”
Straker’s face turned grave as a stone. “I’m truly sorry about that. If we can rescue them, we will. But not at the expense of failure, or letting any Korveni escape. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Jilani’s people to be freed. That’s our primary objective. Commander Sinden, proceed with the briefing. Once we’re done, let’s plan for operational kickoff in two weeks.”
Chapter 25
Straker, aboard armed transport Caribou, Korveni base
Straker brainlinked with his Jackhammer ten minutes prior to transit into the Korveni’s main hidden base. This ensured he’d be ready to give orders as soon as Caribou, the armed transport he rode in, appeared from sidespace.
He and the rest of the Breakers were taking a risk, arriving together in a relatively small area of space around the Korveni planetoid—but transiting in piecemeal seemed a bigger risk. Simultaneity and surprise were more important than avoiding the possibility of collision with friendly ships.
When Caribou popped in and Straker’s HUD feed showed him the situation, adrenaline surged though his veins and he clenched his fists involuntarily. Fortunately, his mechsuit was locked down and its movement disabled.
The three Breaker cruisers, with Commodore Gray in the lead commanding Samarah, were already firing. They vomited forth precious shipkiller missiles even as they lined up and slammed particle beams into the biggest Korveni ships. With them, twelve Ruxin skimmers performed the functions normally reserved for frigates and corvettes—attacking smaller vessels.
Except for full-on fleet actions, traditional naval tactics dictated that warships always tried to engage vessels of the same or smaller class. It had been this way from the time of Old Earth sailing ships until now. In a perfect ship-to-ship melee, cruisers tried to engage frigates, frigates tried to engage corvettes—and corvettes hunted couriers, attack craft and drones.
Unfortunately, the Breakers had no frigates or corvettes—a matter of heated discussion among the naval officers. In the end they had armed and uprated six transports as faux frigates and drafted twelve skimmers as corvettes.
But the transports weren’t real frigates, and the skimmers weren’t real corvettes, so they’d come up with the solution to work in pairs like old-fashioned manned aerospace fighters.
Straker’s HUD showed him thirteen Korveni ships in space and several on the ground powering up. Those would have to lift off before transiting out—in fact, the tiny zone of curved space extended one or two kilometers above the planetoid’s surface, due to its gravity.
The Korveni ships were unusual in one respect—they fought obliquely, rather than nose-on like human ships. They fired broadsides of smaller weaponry, rather than heavy shots with large spinal projectors. This made the Korveni less effective against pure warships but more flexible and better against armed civilians, privateers and other general-purpose enemies—their prey.
It also meant they could evade more effectively, dodging obliquely while still maintaining full fields of fire. It was a generalist’s approach rather than the specialized punch of the Breaker cruisers.
They also had one favorite tech, that they prioritized above all others: the ability to board in open space, making them effective pirates. This involved getting close enough to an enemy and using a powerful magnetic beam to grapple—in combination with hard shields to handle the forcible collision. Once the ships locked together, the large Korveni crews would assault and seize their prizes—adding those to their fleet and the enemy crews to their slave pens.
Within a minute, Straker’s HUD dissolved into a swirl of battling ships. The Korveni didn’t know they were beaten from the start and reacted with predictable vicious aggression, charging directly for their enemies. One of the enemy frigates staggered, pummeled and holed by a Breaker cruiser, yet she nevertheless seized the Caribou in her magnetic grip and lay alongside to grapple.
Straker felt the shudder of the two ships crashing together even as he transferred his attention to his immediate surroundings. He released the clamps holding his mechsuit in place within the cargo bay and the suit came alive. Suddenly, instead of being a god with a grand perspective in space, he became a large metal man locked in a small metal room with three other metal men—and a bunch of heavily armed metal imps like action figures, the Ripper battlesuits of his attendant Hok.
Fighting off boarders—not what I expected, Straker thought. He’d figured the ground troops would be set down on the planetoid in order to assault the base, destroy the defenses, kill Korveni and rescue those they could—but now the Korveni turned the tables.
So be it.
“Open the cargo bay doors, one meter wide,” he comlinked on the bridge channel. “Better to let them inside.”
No acknowledgement came, but a moment later the big double doors opened slightly in the middle, stopping at about one meter. The three Guard Jackhammers with him crouched slightly with the natural body movements of their pilots, gauntlets aimed toward the opening like men readying for a Kung Jiu match. The Hok marines took positions around the perimeter in three dimensions.
Movement showed at the crack, then Korveni battlesuiters poured in like a swarm of man-seized insects. They were humanoid, but their suits had blades and projections on them and were highly individualized with garish paint, gilding and chrome highlights.
Straker waited a moment, letting the others fire their weapons first. Inevitably, there were leakers, and he concentrated on snapshotting those who sneaked by the phalanx of fire. The Breakers cut down dozens of surprised Korveni within seconds.
But it wasn’t all one way. At least one of the enemy had carried a bomb of some sort—a huge grenade or charge that exploded near a bulkhead and blew three Hok to bits. As usual, though, mechsuits were proof against all but the heaviest weaponry, proving their worth once again.
As soon as the initial boarding assault waned, Straker comlinked, “Open the bay doors full.” When they began widening he moved carefully forward, cognizant of the confined quarters—until he emerged into open space. Stepping out with magnetics activated, he walked around the curve of the hull until he could see the Korveni frigate.
The two ships were a match in size, but the Korveni vessel was much more heavily armed and armored than the Caribou. Fortunately, the enemy frigate was mangled badly, with large slagged holes and most of her turrets destroyed by cruiser fire.
Most of them. One turret was still active and swung toward him—its laser waveguide turning like a rifle as its operator detected him.
Its armor was heavier than any heavy tank—warships simply built everything bigger than ground vehicles could—but the real value of a mechsuit was its pilot, its precision. Straker, his brainlinked SAI and training flowing perfectly, lined up his aiming reticle on the base of the waveguide and triggered a force-cannon bolt.
He could feel the magnetic tube extend from his weapon even as the capacitors discharged their energy and the bimetallic wafer dissolved, providing a sun-hot jet of plasma which shot arrow-straight in a glowing line from his fist to his target. It sliced the wand-like structure in half, and when the Korveni laser mechanism fired, its unguided beam dispersed harmlessly—except to itself. The coherent light’s disrupted exit melted and sparked, shattering the weapon to uselessness.
“Spread out and hunt active weapons on the hull,” he told his three fellow mechsuiters. “Hok, counterattack into their ship and let us know if you run into anything you can’t handle.” He’d take his Jackhammer into the Korveni ship if he had to, but he was much more comfortable out on the hull, with room to work.
Five minutes later, all the turrets were silenced and the Hok squads had cleared the Korveni ship of enemies. They reported at least twenty noncombatants—evidently slaves that had survived and were now pleading for rescue.
“Delta squad, remain aboard for security. Captain Desautel, send over some spac
ers as prize crew and take control. Help the friendlies as you can, but stay vigilant. We’re re-boarding Caribou—head out as soon as you’re ready.”
Clamped into the cargo bay again, Straker turned his attention to the overall battle. Several Korveni hulls drifted, powerless. More had managed to grapple Breaker ships, but all of those attempts had been defeated—defeated by foreknowledge and careful preparation. Every Breaker ship was chock-full of marines. Automated add-on antipersonnel weaponry was welded to the bulkheads at every intersection. The Korveni assaults, so fearsome to the unprepared, were brutally shredded by entrenched defenders—and immediately the other Breakers counterattacked and seized the Korveni vessels as Straker himself had.
Even the lightly armed skimmers were bolstered with defenses, but none of them needed the help. They simply skipped into underspace with SAI speed when an enemy tried to grapple, moved away and reappeared firing.
Two skimmers were heavily damaged by direct fire, though, and would have to be repaired or strapped on for recovery and transit, but Straker considered this a small price to pay. Surprise and preparation had won the day.
“Straker to Gray. Any Korveni get away?”
“Happy to say no, General. We had a scare when one corvette tried to transit out with a skimmer grappled to her, but her generators overloaded and she stayed here.”
Zaxby’s voice broke in. “I must point out that this was my own skimmer, the Darter, under my command. It is now quite severely damaged because of my heroic actions. The enemy corvette tried to ungrapple, but in a brilliant stroke of genius, I routed my own reinforcement field through my superconductors to create a powerful magnetic grapple of my own, holding fast to the Korveni in order to keep it from escaping. In fact, I’d go as far as to say I have again saved the day, and I expect songs and poems and festivals in my honor—”
“Oh, sorry Zaxby, you’re breaking up,” Straker said, talking loudly over the top of the Ruxin’s interruption. “Commodore Gray, transmit a surrender demand to the Korveni base and prep for ground assault. Straker out.”
He switched channels to the Caribou’s bridge. “Desautel, as soon as the commodore clears it, put us on the ground.”
“Aye, sir.”
“General Straker, Gray here. The Korveni say they’ll kill all their prisoners if we don’t withdraw.”
“We can’t worry about that now. Hit them fast and hard, balls to the wall, and clear us a safe landing zone. The best we can do now is smash them so fast they don’t have time to think about atrocities. Isolate any prison areas or slave pens if you can, but they key is to blitz them fast.”
“Understood. Gray out.”
Straker watched fire fall from the sky upon the dry, rocky planetoid and its sprawling base. There weren’t many turrets or missile launchers. The Korveni relied on speed and ferocity, not fixed defenses. Gray’s cruisers used their secondary weaponry to carve the complex up into sections, trying to isolate areas that might contain large numbers of the innocent.
“All transports—we’ve wiped out all their ADA,” Gray said on the general channel. You’re cleared hot to land.”
Straker saw the armed transports were already descending to land in a ring. His HUD map was continuously populating with information, highlighting enemy battle formations and presumed noncombatant areas. As soon as the Caribou touched down, her cargo bay doors swung open and he leaped out onto the airless surface.
Above him wisps of nebula gas glowed which turned the sky to a rainbow rife with color—color his HUD usually filtered out when showing him the space battle. By contrast the surface was monochrome and painted in shades of black, white and gray.
The domes and sealed buildings of the base were the exception. They were decorated with a colorful variety of grim motifs—alien skulls drenched in blood, faces contorted in pain or rage, murals of Korveni attacking and seizing ships and pornographic pictures of Korveni with many species.
Straker noted all this in passing as he bounded toward the nearest concentration of enemy. Small-arms fire sparkled from around and atop the steel-shod buildings, and he put a force-cannon bolt into its nearest viewport. The other viewports exploded outward as everything inside flash-ignited. After that, he concentrated on picking off any suited Korveni outside, punching short gatling bursts into each armored thug.
His three Jackhammers followed, as did the Hok and the Ruxin warrior-marines. They needed no further orders to sweep inward toward the center just as the other six mechsuit-battlesuit teams from the other transports did. The Jackhammers smashed the opposition while the marines mopped up.
The Korveni simply didn’t possess anything that could stand against mechsuits—as expected. They particularly didn’t have anything to stand against a monstrous four-armed, four-legged mechsuit like Zaxby’s, which Straker met as he arrived in the middle of the base.
“You’re not supposed to be here, Zaxby,” Straker said, annoyed by the Ruxin’s glory-hounding. “You did great with your skimmer, but here, you’re nothing but in the way. Let the professionals handle it.”
“The Darter is incapacitated. You ordered a maximum assault, so I heeded your call to battle. Balls to the wall, you said.”
“Do you have balls, Zaxby?” Straker turned restlessly, searching for further targets.
“I have organs that function in roughly the same manner—”
“Then kindly remove them from your mechsuit, and make yourself useful since you’re here. Take charge of the Ruxin marines, and search the base for survivors.”
“Happily, Liberator. Do you want Korveni prisoners if we are able to capture any? They might have information.”
Straker chewed his lip for a moment. “No. They’re all condemned to death. No mercy. If your people don’t want to issue the coup de grace themselves, hand them over to the Hok for immediate execution.”
“Oh, we Ruxins will happily execute your orders—along with any Korveni.” Zaxby paused, a smirk in his voice. “Did you notice my clever wordplay? I said execute—”
“I got it. It just wasn’t that funny. Get to work.”
“You’re no fun. You really ought to lighten up now that we have won. Oh, that rhymes! I—”
Zaxby’s monologue was interrupted by a sudden blast. One of the domes had gone up in an explosion that demolished a tenth part of the base. Several Hok and Ruxin marine transponders went offline.
Straker growled, “Looks like some Korveni booby-trapped something. You still having fun, Zaxby? Because it’s not over till it’s over. Now get your ass in gear—and be careful. Rescue anyone you can and leave the rest. We’ll burn this base down to bedrock from space after we’re done.”
“Aye aye, Liberator sir. Though I would like to say—”
“Get moving, War Male!” Straker roared.
“I’ll ride herd on him, boss” Loco comlinked in Straker’s ear. “Maybe you should cut back on the caff, though.”
“Thanks, Loco. Good work.” Straker took a deep breath to calm himself and then switched to the general channel. “Good work, everyone. We’re almost done.”
Over a hundred prisoners were rescued from the Korveni base. Searchers reported as many captives killed—collateral damage—but Straker refused to let himself feel any guilt. He had smashed the Korveni, and those prisoners who weren’t set free were mercifully dead.
Better death than to live as a hopeless slave in the Korveni pens, destined for a hellish life ending in dismemberment and kitchen-bound…for the Korveni were inveterate carnivores and had no compunctions against dining on sentients.
Technically, it wasn’t cannibalism.
Technically.
Still, it roiled his guts as bad as the underground slaughter-factories on Terra Nova.
When Straker inspected the base, he saw the Korveni bodies and thought to himself that if ever there were real monsters, these were they. The creatures were all teeth and spines—cruel, heartless predators, but lacking the clean ruthlessness of an animal who simp
ly needed to eat.
Korveni gloried in the pain of others, taking sadistic joy in the worst vices imaginable and were always on the lookout for helpless victims. The one nearest him had died with its claws in the guts of a rag-doll figure, a humanoid girl of seven or eight—terror still etched on her face.
He ordered the child’s remains removed from her tormentor and laid to rest alongside a dead woman of the same species. The image stayed with him for a long time.
Straker wasn’t leaving the base intact. In fact, he used a nuke on it, carefully emplaced below the surface for maximum destruction, as a statement in case any far-flung Korveni ships returned.
With luck, they’d be out of fuel and stranded forever.
The nuke buried the dead together, innocent and guilty alike, along with the last shred of sympathy he might have had for those of Korveni blood. If ever an entire race were wholly damned, it was this.
* * *
Straker allowed twelve hours to make repairs, deal with the rescued beings—all from environments close to human or Ruxin—and get ready for the next phase of the operation. There’d been some argument in favor of returning to Premdor to repair and replenish, but that would lose time. Instead, the Breakers split into five smaller forces to raid the other Korveni bases and meet at Utopia in four days.
Never change what you don’t need to, Straker mused. It just invites mistakes.
On the two sidespace jumps, Straker had time to take a look at the freed captives, who were pitifully grateful. There were at least twenty different types of aliens, mostly humanoid or even human. Those more suited to aquatic environments, including two Ruxins, were quartered aboard the skimmers.
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