Planet Killer (A Captain's Crucible Book 4)

by Isaac Hooke

  The Gs were still hitting him hard. He started blacking out again, and managed to activate an injection containing epinephrine and a bunch of other goodies, and it pulled him back from the brink. The Gs still contorted his face from the bottom up as if he were repeatedly experiencing the water slap portion of a cliff dive into a lake, but at least he was mostly cognizant.

  He breached the Kármán line and passed through the hellfire of atmospheric reentry, emerging unscathed into the thermosphere as the aeroshell heat shield broke away.

  He descended into the fireworks. The streaks of light were flak, the starbursts the impacts when they struck an object. Whether or not he lived or died in the current moment depended only upon the whims of fate, a random roll of the die. He thought of how often he had depended on the mercurial hand of fate in the past to survive.

  Has my luck run out?

  He checked his overhead map and saw the multitude of blue dots representing both his mech platoon and other units that had dropped from the ten ships. The shade of blue indicated the unit type. Bright blue meant other mechs, either Knights or Titans. Medium, shuttles filled with Centurion combat robots. Light, the booster rockets that would take the mechs back into orbit. Each unit zigzagged wildly in an attempt to evade the incoming fire. The motion didn’t help all that much, because every few seconds one of those dots winked out.

  Rade shook his head. Not all of the Knights or Titans were manned, of course, but it didn’t matter, because AIs were sentient, too. Brothers one and the same, dead for no reason other than to satisfy a government that fought yet another alien war.

  How many wars have I been involved in in my life?

  He couldn’t even remember anymore.

  Chaffs, Trench Coats, and other countermeasures occasionally burst from Rade’s Knight, because of Pegasus. Whether it helped save his life or not, he didn’t know. But it was a comfort, knowing that the mech was at least trying to pull itself and its operator through to safety. He was helpless at the moment, completely reliant on the fast-reflexes of the AI to survive.

  To distract himself from the feelings of helplessness and terror that were coursing through him, he focused on the mission: take out the system responsible for all of the air and space defenses of the current sextant.

  His understanding was that the individual anti-aircraft guns ran on autonomous systems that acted independently of one another. An override existed, similar to the Emergency Action Messages for the nuclear launch sites on Earth. The moon was divided into six imaginary sextants, with different EAM networks per sextant for security purposes. The alien sleeper cells had disabled all save the sixth sextant, where he was dropping now.

  He would have preferred to land on the far side of the moon, away from the antiaircraft fire, and then make his way by land to the necessary site, but there wasn’t time. A massive enemy fleet lurked in orbit, impatiently waiting for their ships to reboot so that they could blow his own relatively tiny navy to smithereens.

  Sixty United Systems ships were up there trying to eliminate as many of those inactive vessels as possible, but Rade doubted they’d get them all in time. The fleet only had enough nukes and mortars to eliminate maybe eight hundred of the enemy. After that, they’d have to rely upon Vipers, which required ten minutes to fully recharge.

  Hell, he was jumping straight into the action, and even he doubted he would complete his mission before the enemy fleet awakened.

  He thought of the Payload Deployment Devices the Zarafe had given them to make the injection of the malicious code as simple as possible. They just had to secure one of the PDDs, or “packages” in spec-op lingo, to either of the access nodes, and the injection process would begin. The high-level explanation, as told to him by his Lieutenant Commander, was that those specific access nodes were running outdated alien software that was vulnerable to a certain privilege escalation hack; wirelessly, the package would engage the necessary backdoor to break into the node, and then deploy a code fragment masquerading as a software patch. Whether that code would actually make it past the different firewalls and all the way to the defense systems spread out across the sextant, Rade didn’t know. It was even possible the AI of that sextant had managed to inoculate itself against that particular piece of code. Then again, maybe the alien network wasn’t run by AIs at all.

  He could only hope.

  As he neared the surface, he saw that the greens from orbit were actually lush forests filled with many strange trees. He saw gelatinous yellow-orange structures protruding between them. Black shapes crawled over the surfaces of said structures. He zoomed in. The shapes were Raakarr absent their personal darkness generators. It looked like they were climbing up to get a better view of the sky.

  He was still hurtling forward as the thrusters continued to dial down his speed in increments, bringing him closer to the intended target.

  Below, the trees slid away, replaced by alien buildings. Unlike the rectangular structures common with humanity, these were mostly flat triangles, with cylinders and pyramids thrown into the mix. The ground between them was a green-gray metallic sheen. Thick black tubes ran between different buildings, spanning to several other structures. The layout reminded him of an old-school circuit board.

  Those buildings went on, and on, and on. He expected to find only a few small cities on the surface of the colony, not a sprawling megalopolis. The buildings were interrupted occasionally by parkland, with everything tinted yellow thanks to the atmosphere.

  He saw the towering mushroom cloud formed of multiple nuclear impacts to the south, where one of the surface-to-space defenses had been attacked, and knew he was getting close to his target. He checked the external radiation levels. The Knight’s shielding would hold. But he wouldn’t want to leave his mech for very long, if he had to.

  A blindingly bright beam of light erupted from the tip of that cloud, searing into the heavens. So that’s what a particle beam looked like when fired in an atmosphere. The defense emplacement that fired the beam was hidden by that cloud, but obviously its targeting was controlled from somewhere else.

  The local flak still hadn’t let up. He wished the enemy defenses were offline so that the United Systems could deploy air support to aid the boots on the ground. Then again, if the antiaircraft units were down, he wouldn’t have been sent on the mission in the first place.

  The aerospike thrusters fired and the air brakes deployed. He landed at a run, similar to a parachute deployment. He took cover behind one of the thin triangular buildings. Its surface was etched with strange symbols, similar to the bulkheads on the alien ships. Blue filaments threaded through the metal. More of those buildings resided on all sides, providing cover.

  A persistent wail sounded in the distance. It was the kind of terrible screeching he thought an injured dinosaur might make. The Raakarr equivalent of an air raid siren, maybe.

  He glanced at his overhead map. The rest of his platoon, labeled P1, was scattered between different buildings nearby. There was no real semblance of streets, but there were vague city blocks, demarcated by the clustering of the buildings. Nearly everyone from his particular unit had landed safely, except for two autonomous mechs. No enemies had been encountered yet, judging from the absence of red dots.

  Four other platoons had landed in the area. Or rather, their survivors. Three intact drop crafts containing combat robots were also located in the alien neighborhood. As of yet, none of the units had encountered any resistance.

  The mission objective, the access node, was only two blocks to the west of Rade’s current position.

  Well, talk about a precision drop.

  “P1, gather at my coordinates,” Rade sent. “Centurions from drop craft B21, join us. Mac, are we still in contact with cove?”

  Although the fleet hadn’t launched any comm repeaters into the lower atmosphere because of the aforementioned antiaircraft defenses, the local AIs were supposed to keep track of the position of the main fleet, which was to hold to a geosynchronous
orbit. Thus, in theory the comm nodes of the mechs could direct a concentrated beam directly to the vessels. Unless of course the fleet had decided to leave orbit, which had happened disturbingly enough during operations Rade had been involved with in the past.

  “We have the Callaway, yes,” his communications officer confirmed.

  Good. So while they didn’t have air support, they had space support, which was even better.

  Helium’s Knight was the first to reach him, and took up a position at the edge of the building opposite Rade. The autonomous mechs Crunch and Cycles joined shortly thereafter, as did the eight Centurions from B21, and several of the hovering, helmet-sized HS4 drones that were with them. The armed newcomers split up to form individual cigar shapes around Rade and Helium, away from the gap in the building that separated those two lead Knights. That was the default formation programmed into the AIs, and was meant to cover every approach angle.

  “We’re pinned,” Mac sent over the comm.

  Rade glanced at the map. Red dots had appeared all over the place. So much for no resistance. Thankfully, so far no such dots had appeared close to Rade’s position.

  “Going to try a space strike,” Mac said.

  Three city blocks to the east, Mac was hunkered down with the remaining ten mechs from P1, scattered behind and within different structures. All of those other Knights were autonomous, save for Piercer. Five red dots blocked their advancement.

  Rade glanced at the other platoon positions on the map. Similar tangos now impeded most of them, too. Only P4 hadn’t encountered any enemy so far. And Rade’s subset of P1, of course.

  “Space strike has proved ineffective,” Mac said. “Enemy units have activated darkness generators.”

  So much for space support. Well, they would just have to make do with the weapons on hand.

  He glanced at the disk device attached to his Cobra laser system. Chief Scientist Connie Myers had been working extensively with the Zarafe over the past year, via the telepath Barrick, to come up with an upgrade to their laser systems. The Zarafe hadn’t been too forthcoming, but apparently they had told her enough to achieve a breakthrough, and the disk represented the fruit of that labor. Rade wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, but the gist was that when he pressed the trigger, the weapon fired a concentrated LIDAR beam to detect the penetration frequency of the darkness, tuning the laser in realtime to compensate, so that when the actual Cobra fired a microsecond later, it would pierce the enemy shields. The smaller rifles wielded by the Centurions contained similar upgrades.

  Unfortunately, as far as he knew, Lieutenant Myers had yet to come up with an upgrade to the heavy lasers found aboard the starships; the lieutenant commander had warned them during the mission briefing that the fleet would be unable to provide support against darkness-cloaked units.

  “We’re coming in from your seven, P2,” a voice said over the comm. The HUD labeled the speaker as Insectide, chief of P4. Rade knew him from an operation from some years back. Excellent soldier. “Hang on.”

  “Negative,” Lieutenant Commander Pine of the USS Malicious sent. He was the officer embedded with P2; he was also in charge of the overall drop. An Artificial. “All units that are able, advance. It is imperative that we secure the package at the target site as quickly as possible.”

  “So that the planet killer can blow us to hell all the sooner,” Helium muttered over the comm, P1 band only.

  Rade lifted the huge laser rifle connected to his arm assembly past the edge of the building, toward the target in the west. Then he switched his viewpoint to the scope. He studied the side street. A strange gelatinous substance was strewn between the buildings there, similar to what he had seen while passing over the forested area on the way down. It was hung like a webbing between the buildings, and resided about three meters above the ground. Just enough space for a mech to pass underneath, if it had to.

  Rade spotted a small Raakarr; as he watched, the creature swung inside an opening near the top edge of the gelatin like a monkey. He had never seen an alien as diminutive as that before, and he had to wonder if it was a child.

  “Did you see that, chief?” Helium said.

  “Yes,” Rade replied.

  “It looked like a kid. I thought these aliens hatched their children in special breeding grounds or something. Inside Elder vessels.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Rade said. But you still have to raise a child after you hatch it. He wondered if the structure was a family residence of some kind.

  “Do we take it out with a couple of well placed missiles?” Helium asked.

  “No,” Rade said. “Do that, and I guarantee you, we’ll bring down the enemy on our position.”

  “What if that damn little Raakarr brings them down on us anyway?”

  “I have rules...” Rade said.

  “I know I know,” Helium said. “Don’t kill civilians.”

  “The Lieutenant Commander clearly defined the rules of engagement before deployment,” Cycles said. “We have full authorization to engage any target. Any. Every Raakarr on the colony is dead when that planet killer goes off, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Rade has his own moral code that precedes the rules of engagement,” Helium said.

  “But surely his code doesn’t apply in the current circumstances,” Cycles said.

  “It applies,” Rade said.

  “A soldier’s conscience must never interfere with his duty,” Cycles persisted. “Nor with the rules of—”

  “Quiet,” Rade said softly.

  Going against his own moral code and shooting civilians directly? Couldn’t do it. If the LC disciplined him when the mission was over then so be it.

  It was hard enough completing the mission knowing that his team was basically the harbinger of death to this world. It helped, though, knowing that he wasn’t the one who would actually be pulling the trigger on the planet killer.

  Then again, placing the package is the same thing as pulling the trigger, isn’t it?

  He resolved that if his platoon subset reached the access node first, he would be the one to place the package. He wouldn’t let anyone else live with that burden. Not even an AI.

  Rade highlighted the lingering red dot on his display that marked the last position of the child Raakarr. He changed it to yellow, indicating a civilian.

  Then he directed his scope toward the street beyond the gelatinous substance and zoomed in to continue scanning the area. He saw more of those flat triangles, some directed edgeways toward him, others plane-wise.

  “Looks clear,” Rade sent.

  “I got nothing,” Helium agreed.

  According to the overhead map, Mac was still pinned. Rade labeled Mac’s squad S2 and his own S1.

  “We’re going to proceed toward the target,” Rade said over the main comm. Then he glanced at Helium. “Traveling overwatch. Two fire teams. You take Crunch and four Centurions. You’re up first. Deploy HS4 scouts in an aerial overwatch position.”

  “Roger that,” Helium said.

  His Knight traveled between the two buildings with the assigned units. They formed Fire Team 2, or T2.

  Meanwhile Rade and the others provided overwatch from cover.

  He held his breath as Helium and Crunch ducked underneath the gelatinous substance.

  Nothing happened.

  The four Centurions hurried after them without incident.

  In moments T2 had taken cover behind another triangular structure up ahead.

  “T1, with me.” Rade switched his viewpoint back to the external forward facing camera of his mech, then emerged from his hide.

  He approached the hanging “residence” and ducked his Knight underneath the gelatinous web to continue forward. Around him, the metallic structures remained lifeless. While the stamp of feet and the hum of servomotors from his mech and the units with him were muffled by stealth-mode, the muted noises still seemed too loud to him. Above it, he heard the sounds of distant fighting—the rapping of flyi
ng rubble, the thundering of missiles and electrolasers.

  As he passed Helium, the blue filaments on the surrounding buildings turned red.

  An alert sounded on his HUD. The HS4 scouts had detected enemies ahead: five red dots appeared on the overhead map.

  Motion drew his gaze forward, where five large, two-legged, mech-style robots approached. They were like walking gunships with those wicked-looking weapons mounted under either side of their T-shaped torsos. In the front protruded two small, grasping forelimbs. Above them he caught a glimpse of black alien bodies behind translucent cockpits.

  “Fire at will.” Rade launched five missiles and took cover immediately.

  He peered past the edge of the building, and when the dust cleared he saw five black mists standing in place of the robots. They had activated darkness generators.

  His first thought was, why not keep the tartaans online the whole time? Then he remembered the experiments Lieutenant Myers had performed on their own captured tartaans: the protective abilities were reduced significantly as the size of the cloaked subject went up. To be effective, the shields he faced now probably incurred an immense power drain on the enemy units.

  Meaning that, in a proper battle, Rade could have waited them out. But this wasn’t a proper battle—he had no time.

  “Now we get to find out if our chief scientist’s little enhancements to our Cobras work,” Helium said.

  Rade aimed the turret of one of his modified Cobras at the center of mass of a dark blob, and allowed Pegasus to direct the second turret at another tango. He fired. The two targets toppled.

  “They work,” Rade said.

  Ahead of him a building fell down, burying two Centurions hidden there. Their blue dots remained active on the overhead map; with luck, they would soon dig themselves out. Rade would come to their aid when he was able.

  “I don’t think they liked that,” Helium said over the comm.

  “Who, the aliens or the Centurions?” Rade scrambled to his feet. With that first building down, his was next in the line of fire. He wasn’t going to stick around waiting for the follow-up shot to come.