by Isaac Hooke
The difficulties inherent in such close flying were offset somewhat by the computer systems: the Dammerung’s AI relayed intended movement signals to the Callaway’s AI, which then transmitted them to Barrick so that he could keep Valor informed of any changes to the velocity vector, hopefully with enough lead-time to ensure the Talon remained in cover and didn’t collide with the Dammerung, destroying both ships.
After firing at the incoming dart ships, other vessels in the human fleet maneuvered into position for the requested “Penetration” formation, with many sliding in behind the Dammerung for the protection the charged field afforded, forming a long, single-file line relative to the incoming enemy. Such a formation provided no guarantee of protection, of course—the opponents only needed to hold off firing until they had a clean shot of the hiding ships as they passed by. However, by then the enemy would be flying into the line of fire of the Viper turrets mounted on the human vessels, too.
The minutes ticked past. The dart ships closed. Some were struck by one of the successive waves of missiles, mortars, and nukes, despite evasive maneuvering to avoid them.
The lead enemy ships neared firing range...
twenty-three
Jonathan thrummed his fingers impatiently on his armrest, waiting for the order to fire.
If she doesn’t give the command soon...
“If you have a Viper shot,” the admiral finally sent. “Take it.”
Vipers fired as enemy ships tore past at ranges varying from ten thousand kilometers all the way down to a harrowing five hundred meters. Enemy vessels split in half as Vipers tore into them from multiple vessels. Sometimes the dart ships got off a shot beforehand, sometimes they didn’t.
The enemy seemed to have finally decided they wanted to destroy the Dammerung rather than capture it, because those particle beams that did engage were concentrated on the destroyer. Thankfully, the charged field held.
After several solid strikes against the Dammerung, the enemy apparently realized what was going on, and began holding their beams in reserve until they had a good shot at the ships converged behind it. Human ships began to be ripped apart left and right.
The Viper volleys began to slow down—the human laser arrays needed ten minutes to fully recharge. Several enemy began to pass by relatively unscathed. According to the tactical display, they were decelerating to make another attack run.
And then the slower enemy fighters, launched before the capital and pyramid ships went offline, arrived. They unleashed slugs and lasers as they flew past, harrying the Dammerung and the other ships. The assault was brief, but intense; two United Systems ships broke apart in direct collisions with enemy fighters, but in moments the smaller craft were past.
More dart ships flew by. Most of the Vipers had recovered enough power by then to allow the battle group members to combine their shots with other vessels in the fleet, multiplying the damage to near fully-charged levels.
“As you exhaust your Vipers, switch to mag-rail slugs to counter the enemy,” the admiral transmitted.
Jonathan relayed the command to Miko.
“It looks like the dart ships are beginning to reboot,” Lewis said. “I’m reading the expected drop in heat signatures.”
“Finally,” Jonathan said.
He glanced at the ship count on his aReal.
It only took the loss of twenty of our ships.
On the tactical display, most of the dart ships remained on flyby courses. However, none of them were issuing the expected micro-corrections to their trajectories. They indeed appeared to be offline.
“The unmanned enemy fighters are drifting back there,” Lewis said. “It looks like they’ve lost their link.”
Jonathan tapped in the Talon. “Wethersfield, those fighters are yours.”
“We’ve just finished linking them,” Wethersfield returned. “And are turning them against the manned units. I’m sending over the fighters you’re to mark as friendlies.”
“Maxwell,” Jonathan said. “Transmit the friendly tags to the fleet.”
On his display, most of the red dots representing the enemy fighters out there turned blue.
“We have a moment of respite,” Jonathan told the bridge crew. “Enjoy it while you can.”
“Deploy for final attack run,” the admiral sent fleet-wide. “Battle Unit Malefactor, stay behind and begin the clean-up process. Launch nukes, mortars and kinetic kills. Target everything you can. Main Battle Unit, fire Vipers at will at any ships that come into range as we pass them.”
Sixty vessels—the ships designated as part of Malefactor—separated from the main fleet. Their job was to destroy as many of the enemy as possible while the remaining ten continued onward to the colony. The converted alien fighters out there were already cutting into the enemy ships. Carriers among the Malefactor unit launched their own Avenger squads to add to the mayhem.
The main unit, which included the Dammerung, Talon, Callaway, and the admiral and vice admiral’s ships, among others, left behind the disabled enemy fleet and neared the upper atmosphere of the moon, their target.
“Stack formation,” the admiral sent.
The members of the main battle unit positioned themselves so that they were stacked above the Dammerung relative to the moon’s surface.
“Ops, did the Trojan take out the orbital defense platforms?” Jonathan asked.
“They appear to be offline,” Lewis said. “Considering that their heat signatures have dropped, like the ships.”
“If they weren’t offline,” Miko said. “Those platforms would have opened fire by now.”
“Eliminate the defense platforms,” the admiral sent.
The ten ships fired at different defense platforms, shooting lasers at the closer ones, and launching missiles at the farther. Nukes were deployed to terminate the platforms residing on the far side of the colony.
“I’m reading two heat signature spikes on the moon’s surface,” Lewis said. “And now particle beams are striking the Dammerung. The charged field is holding.”
The stacked formation prevented any of the other vessels from being targeted by the surface defenses, which resided upon an entirely different network than that used by the space systems, and were therefore unaffected by the starship-based Trojan.
“The surface sleeper cells missed those two defenses,” Robert said.
Jonathan nodded. The Zarafe sleepers were supposed to inject a different Trojan into special access nodes on the surface that connected to the defenses. Those nodes were located in six sextants spread out across the moon. “They weren’t expected to get all of them.” There was a good chance other land-to-air defenses were intact down there as well, ready to take out anything that descended into the lower atmosphere. That meant the planet killer couldn’t be deployed, not yet, not with any chance of success anyway.
Jonathan tapped in Wethersfield. “What’s going on?”
“Apparently the sleepers missed one of the six sextants,” Wethersfield replied. “All defenses are still online in that one. However, the good news is the other five are down. Valor is searching for vulnerable access nodes in the remaining sextant as we speak.”
Jonathan relayed the news to the admiral.
“Fire moon-side Viper volley,” Admiral Ford said. “Target those two defenses.”
Valor had previously informed them that neither nukes, missiles, mortars, nor Vipers would have any effect on the major surface targets, but apparently the admiral wanted to make that determination on her own. Jonathan would have done the same.
The vessels stacked above the Dammerung slid from cover to fire Vipers; when they completed the volley, the warships thrust back into their former positions in the stack. Among them, only the Talon hadn’t participated in the strike.
“Ops, what happened?” Jonathan said.
“No effect,” Lewis said. “According to the information transmitted by the Dammerung’s CDC, the two surface-to-space defense units seem to be covered by giant
versions of the Raakarr darkness generators. Each one covers an incredible swath of terrain down there, almost the size of a small city... the power requirements must be through the roof.”
“That would explain why the Raakarr aren’t able to equip their ships with that tech,” Miko said.
“The power requirements are probably almost as high as those of the Dammerung’s charged fields,” Robert commented. “Though it’s too bad Lieutenant Myers didn’t have any luck upgrading our Viper systems to penetrate those giant tartaans.”
While the chief scientist had successfully jury-rigged a solution for troop weapons to penetrate the personal darkness shields individual Raakarr wore, she had yet to come up with an upgrade for the fleet heavy lasers, at least one that didn’t require a complete redesign of the Viper systems plus a substantial layover in dry dock to install the upgrade.
“Too bad,” Jonathan agreed.
“Fire nukes and decoys next,” the admiral transmitted. “I want twenty missiles targeting each of those two emplacements.”
Once more the human ships broke cover to engage the targets. On the tactical display, one of the blue dots winked out.
“What just happened?” Jonathan said.
“The Mirage was hit by a surface-to-space particle beam,” Lewis said. “It’s gone.”
As the ships returned to their cover behind the Dammerung, forty yellow dots appeared on the tactical display, followed by an equal number of white dots. The yellow dots represented nukes, the white, decoys. The moment the yellow and white dots penetrated into the lower atmosphere, they began to wink out. In thirty seconds, only about ten of each remained. By the time they reached the surface, that number was reduced to five.
“Ops, how many hit?” Jonathan asked.
“Two struck the first defense emplacement,” Lewis said. “Three the second. Half detonated in the upper atmosphere, and a quarter in the lower atmosphere, thanks to the land-to-air defenses of the sextant.”
“The nukes exploding early like that can’t be good for the fleet...” Jonathan said.
“It isn’t an ideal situation,” Lewis agreed. “Not only are we being bombarded by EMP events produced by the detonations themselves, but also by secondary EMPs generated by the expulsion of gamma radiation into the mid-stratosphere. The Dammerung is bearing the brunt of it; so far, her hull seems to be successfully dissipating the high voltage, and her armor is keeping out the gamma rays.”
“And what about us?” Jonathan asked.
“All systems are good,” Lewis said. “And no gamma radiation is penetrating our decks.”
“Do you think our nukes actually did any damage to them?” Robert asked. “At the very least, knocked out some power grids with those EMPs?”
“They’d have to be running ancient infrastructure for that to work,” Miko said.
“The two surface particle beams just fired again,” Lewis said. “The Dammerung’s charged fields successfully deflected the attack.”
“That answers that question,” Jonathan said. “Even if we had actually taken out the main defenses, we’d still have to deal with the secondary land-to-air platforms. You saw how many nukes were eliminated before impact.”
“But that’s because we’re above the one sextant down there that hasn’t been taken down,” Robert said. “We can deploy our nukes to the other five sextants.”
“We can,” Jonathan said. “But who can say how many more of those darkness generators are active in the other sextants? Besides, I suspect the major population centers are in the current sextant.”
“Precisely why we shouldn’t touch it,” Robert said.
“You know why we’re here,” Jonathan said coldly. He wasn’t about to get into an ethics argument, not then. The survival of the fleet was at stake at the moment, and completing the mission was the only thing that would save them. He would deal with Robert’s conscience, and his own, afterward. “Maxwell, given the size of the moon, how many of the planet killer delivery vehicles have to penetrate to the surface for the weapon to be successful?”
“Given the current yield of each delivery vehicle,” the Callaway’s AI responded. “At least eighty percent of the DVs must arrive intact.”
“Those eighty percent have to be distributed across the entire moon, correct?” Jonathan asked.
“They do,” Maxwell replied.
“And considering what happened to the nukes, what’s the estimate on how many will actually make it?” Jonathan pressed.
“Seventy-five percent.”
“All because of that one sextant with defenses still active below...”
“That is correct,” Maxwell said.
Jonathan glanced at Robert. “We’ll just have to manually disable the defenses in that sextant, as we suspected we might have to do. I’m just glad there’s only the one.”
“I’m detecting small craft attempting to leave the surface,” Lewis said. “They’re coming from all sides of the moon. Escape vessels, I think. The land-to-air defenses are shooting down those fleeing from this sextant. Only about half are making it through.”
Jonathan shook his head. “They don’t even let their own citizens flee.” He wondered how many of those were sleeper cell members.
Wethersfield tapped in. “Barrick tells me that Valor’s team has completed its vulnerability scans of the remaining sextant. They’ve pinpointed the two unpatched access nodes the sleepers missed, located outside of the alien cities. I’m sending the coordinates now. You only need to upload the malicious code to one of them.”
Jonathan received the coordinates via his aReal.
“Can we be sure the Elk AIs haven’t inoculated their systems against the planned cyberattack already?”
“We cannot,” Wethersfield replied. “And it’s also possible they’ve changed the parameters of their firewall equivalents to disallow access from said nodes. Human systems would do that, after all.”
“So basically, we could be wasting everyone’s time,” Jonathan said.
“Basically,” Wethersfield replied. “But we already knew that.”
Jonathan had Lazur inform the admiral of the access coordinates.
A moment later Admiral Ford came over the common band: “Captains, inform your designated MOTHs to proceed with the drop. These are the destination coordinates. The package only needs to be applied to one of them.”
Jonathan confirmed that the coordinates hadn’t changed, then he told Miko: “Let the MOTHs know they’ll be dropping in thirty seconds. Open up the bay doors and extend the plank.”
Jonathan thought of all the nukes the fleet had lost on the way down. Knight mechs wouldn’t offer much more protection against antiaircraft defenses like that.
The MOTHs certainly had their jobs cut out for them.
Jonathan just hoped they succeeded.
twenty-four
Rade clenched his jaw and stepped off the drop platform. The Callaway slowly drifted away. He felt the rough, scratchy texture of his liquid cooling and ventilation undergarments around most of his body, save for the feet and hands, where the cold, silky feel of the bare suit enveloped his skin. His breath reflected from the faceplate of his helmet, the region in front fogging very slightly with each exhale, the noise of his respirations loud in his ears, matched only by the thumping of his heart. The recycled air smelled stale and slightly burnt, punctuated by the subtle stench of his own sweat when he moved. And was that a faint mildewy odor he sensed? He wondered if mold was growing in the feed line again.
He extended his field of view with his Implant so that the tunnel-like restraints of the helmet receded, the external video feed from the head-mounted cameras filling his vision. Without those cameras his vision would be completely dark of course, as he resided inside the closed, windowless cockpit of a Knight mech, his jumpsuit enveloped in a cocoon of actuators that translated his every movement to the external limbs of the battle machine.
He had no sense of up or down, left or right. He floated in a direct
ionless void, his body and mech seeming the only objects in the universe at that moment.
He tasted iron and realized he was still clenching his jaw. He forced himself to relax and his teeth slowly parted. He had made drops like this a hundred times. A thousand. And without fail the initial zero-G always made his stomach churn. The feeling wouldn’t last long, of course. Once he began his true descent, and the G-forces hit, well, that was when things would really get stomach-churning.
He glanced down. Below, the moon consumed his vision. So many vibrant colors. The aliens had done an excellent job of terraforming that place. In fact, the brilliant greens and blues reminded him a little of Earth, and if not for the odd continent shapes and the slight yellow hue the alien atmosphere imbued everything, he might have believed he was on his way home. He felt a tinge of regret, knowing that everything below was about to be destroyed, and that he would play a big part in seeing that destruction through.
The pristine scene of the surface was occasionally punctuated by streaks and starbursts, sprightly, almost celebratory sights that hinted at the death he would face when he penetrated into the lower atmosphere. As he observed those ‘fireworks,’ he was vaguely aware that the thumping of his heart sounded louder in his ears, as did his breathing.
He glanced at the rear-view camera feed near the top of his vision, and judged he had enough clearance from the Callaway and the other ten vessels.
Well, no point delaying the inevitable.
“Pegasus, activate braking thrust,” he said.
“Affirmative, Chief,” the mech’s AI responded.
The Knight quickly decelerated. The Callaway and the other ships spiraled away upward. Below, the spherical moon spun rapidly. His vision began to become black and white, and he realized he was on the verge of blacking out.
“Stabilize...” Rade said through gritted teeth.
The gyroscopic thrusters fired, stabilizing him. “My apologies for your discomfort,” Pegasus said.
Color returned to his vision.
Rade checked the coordinates. The autopilot was adjusting his fall rate, compensating to bring him within one klick of the target.