The tanks started to leave the ship a moment after the insertion capsules. Twelve hundred tons of carrier and vehicle, they were also shielded and stealthed. They also had the defensive and offensive weapons of the tank exposed and operating. The laser crosses on the side of the tank could pick off incoming weapons, while the main gun could take shore batteries under fire. And for each tank there was also a decoy coming down with similar automated defensive lasers.
At fifty kilometers above the surface the insertion capsules ejected their cargos. Over ninety percent of the troopers made it to this point, a very good number for a first wave. The capsules exploded a moment after the troopers fell out of them, filling the atmosphere with reflecting particles and debris that further eroded the ability of the enemy to track the incoming soldiers. Thousands of pieces of debris flared under fire in the next few minutes, along with a score of unlucky troopers. The rest continued to fall, gaining velocity as they accelerated under the pull of the planet’s gravity. The tanks continued to drop with the carriers, depending upon their toughness to weather the incoming fire. Of the twenty-two heavies, eighteen made it, along with four of the light scout tanks.
At five kilometers above the surface the suits started to decelerate under their grabbers. Now the troopers could fight back, and they did, firing their suit weapons at targets as they presented themselves. Here and there the signals of infantry reaching the ground blinked onto the map, followed by more, then a tank.
Baggett received the signal that his own first battalion was ready, and he switched his take as that unit went through the same procedure as the one he had been watching. He slaved his feed in with that of his Assistant Brigade Commander as that worthy was fired out by the Gallipoli. He could feel the acceleration of the firing tube as some of it bled past the carrier’s inertial compensators. The adrenaline pushed a rush of thoughts through the Colonel’s mind. Baggett could see what the man saw, transmitted to the suit by the optical sensors of the insertion capsule.
Space around the troopers was filled with fast moving objects and beams of energy. The atmosphere below was clouded by storms and masses of dust raised by kinetic strikes. Lightning flared below, then the flashes of weapons impacts. Baggett swore under his breath, looking through the Colonel’s systems at what appeared to be hell down below. And his men were dropping into that.
He was also keeping tabs on the biomonitors of all the soldiers of his first wave, and cursed as he saw some of the life signs suddenly cease. After a few minutes it was apparent that his first wave was going to suffer heavier casualties than the other one he had monitored. It was the luck of the draw, or maybe the enemy was getting a better handle on what was coming down on them. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it but look on in horror as men and women he was responsible for were blotted from existence.
He started breathing a little easier when the first battalion and its armor support was on the ground, including his ABC.
“We’re establishig a perimeter,” called up Lt. Colonel Thorwaldsdottir. “Action heavy so far.”
Baggett had to agree as he looked at the plot of the unit. The companies were forming, but some clusters of troopers were cut off and having to form their own perimeter until the rest of the battalion could get to them. Icons were dropping off the plot, troopers killed in close combat or by indirect fire weapons. The suits were tough, so the second method was unlikely to kill a soldier unless they were the victim of a direct hit. But from what he could see on the take from several troopers the ground was swarming with enemy soldiers, many of them in some form of combat armor.
“The second wave is heading down,” he told his first battalion commander on the com. As he was speaking the first insertion capsules were being fired from Gallipoli. They were scheduled to come down about thirty kilometers from the first battalion, establishing another perimeter and clearing the ground around them. Minutes later the capsules were plunging into the atmosphere, trailing fire as they built up friction. They lost about the same numbers as the first battalion, but were soon established on the ground.
“We’re ready to go, sir,” said Captain Kone, his adjutant, stomping up in her heavy suit.
“Let’s not keep the brigade waiting,” he said, letting her lead the way out of the ready room and into the hangar.
Their shuttle was just ahead, one among many in the hangar. Fifty meters in length, heavily armored and bristling with defensive weapons, the shuttle looked like the way to go in an invasion. There were limitations of course. Suited troops were boarding the other shuttles, brigade headquarters. Third battalion would be boarding their shuttles in another hangar, and as the Brigadier marched toward his ship he got the signal that the first of their vehicles were launching.
A naval rating pointed the Brigade Commander to his station, something not really needed. But the Fleet likes to pretend we can’t find our asses without their help. He stepped into the station, which locked around his suit as soon as his feet hit the floor of the cubby. He could hear other soldiers walking into their cubbies, and felt the vibrating clangs of clamps locking into place.
“Launch in one minute,” called out the pilot.
Baggett linked into the shuttle’s sensor suite and watched as they lifted from the deck and moved toward the now opening hangar doors. Several shuttles queued up ahead and left the hangar first. They thrust ahead at maximum accel, moving quickly for the atmosphere. Weapons were rising up from the surface to try and take them out, and the bombardment force let loose with a massive fire plan to blow those warheads out of existence.
The shuttle Baggett was on came out of the hangar and boosted ahead. At first the flight was smooth, in vacuum with inertial compensators working efficiently. Minutes later they were hitting atmosphere, and the ship started to buck with turbulence. Added to that the maneuvers the pilot was taking to avoid debris and warheads, and those warheads going off in nuclear blasts nearby.
I am so glad we are in heavy suits, thought the Brigadier, looking down on the planet through the shuttle sensors as they made for the surface on a least time approach. He doubted anyone in a light suit would survive in the inferno the landing sites had become, and wasn’t too sure about mediums either. He focused in on the edge of the battlefield, shaking his head as he watched the Lasharans in what had to be light suits, and many with no armor at all, hurrying to their deaths. He thought the radiation alone had to be killing most of them. But the fanatical warriors didn’t seem to care. They just wanted to kill his men and women, no matter how many they lost.
A flash appeared on the ground, and behind it a mushroom cloud rose into the sky. It was right on one of the positions a company from the first battalion was holding, and several icons blinked, then fell off the net. If they had been wearing any of the lighter armor suits it would have been a whole lot more. As it was most of those men would have received a heavy dose of radiation. Hopefully something the nanotech could take care of.
The shuttle reached the deck, then flew low toward the landing site where third battalion was going to insert. The shuttle juked all over the landscape, avoiding fire that was trying to hit it. It was doing alright, and was a minute away from the site when something hit a wing, and the shuttle flipped over in the air for just a moment. The pilot fought the shuttle and righted it, just in time to catch a missile in the nose. The explosion ran back through the body of the craft, propagated in the air of the vehicle, threatening the lives of all aboard.
The outer skin hatch blew off, and Baggett was flung out into the air by the ejection system that would have sent him out over the landing site. The other infantry were fired out at the same time, and all floated quickly toward the ground, the suits taking over for operators that were still confused. The shuttle flipped over again in the midst of its explosion, then slammed into the ground to finish the process of blowing apart.
Baggett landed and immediately took stock of where they were. Ten of his team came down to soft landings. One other was hit
by another antiaircraft missile in the air and pieces of suit rained to the ground. The Brigadier grimaced, recognizing the suit as belonging to a young soldier who was one of his security detail, on his first combat assault. And a young man who would never make a second drop.
“Set up a perimeter and prepare to repel attackers,” he ordered his team over the short range com.
“Shouldn’t we fly over to the next unit?” asked one of the com techs on the team.
“You get your ass in that air right now and you’re just a big dumb target,” said Sergeant Major Terry Zacharius. “You listen to the General and keep your head down and feet on the ground.”
A moment after the words left the NCOs mouth they were under attack, waves of Lasharans coming at them and trying to overwhelm them. The only problem being that mass human wave attacks into heavy firepower normally resulted in severe losses, mostly to the attackers. Eleven suits covered the area with a firestorm of lasers, particle beams and hypervelocity pellets, leaving thousands of underequipped Lasharans in smoking piles on the ground. Radar picked up indirect fire coming in, and the team moved away from the area before it impacted. Baggett took the rear and waved his particle beam back and forth, partially vaporizing scores of skinny red skinned natives. He popped grenades over the sweep of the beam, while a com tech laid down fire with his mag rifle, sending ten five millimeter rounds out each tick of the clock at a thousand kilometers a second. The grabbers of the man’s suit took up the recoil, holding it in place, and the rounds splattered their targets, punching through creature after creature in what looked like a simultaneous line of explosions.
Another trooper fired with a heavy laser, while more grenades came looping over, each blasting a ten meter spot clear of bodies. The Lasharans kept coming, as another trooper joined in with a mag rifle, until the volume of fire was more than they could stand. The last hundred beings went screaming off the field, though very few made it. The humans had their orders, and they didn’t include letting opponents who might come back at them to make it to cover. Baggett took a quick sip of water from his helmet nozzle, not really necessary, as the suit was keeping him hydrated. Still, the mouth dried out under stress, and it was comforting to be able to suck down some liquid.
The team moved out, cutting their way through Lasharan resistance that varied between good to very poor. At one point they were actually overrun by a swarm of lightly armed natives, and they found themselves in a hand to hand fight. Baggett waded through the Lasharans, cutting down males and neuters with the monomolecular blades that extended from his gauntlets. Rounds bounced from his armor like raindrops on a metal roof, and he cringed at the sound, always wondering when something heavy or fast enough would come in to punch through. One Lasharan struck him in the arm with a sword that must have sported a monomolecular blade itself. The blade penetrated a centimeter into the tough armor. Baggett smashed his other fist into the face of the Lasharan, and the alien’s visage exploded into a mass of purplish blood and white bone fragments as his body flew away through the air. A swing of both arms cleared the fanatics away for a moment, then a blast of his particle beam rifle opened a path the team could run through. And run they did, pushing the suits up to a hundred kilometers an hour. Unfortunately, the clear run only lasted a couple of kilometers, then they were bogged down yet again, only able to survive because of the orbital support they could call in.
They were low on ammunition, mostly reduced to using lasers, which had a difficult time reaching through the obscuring smoke, when the men from the nearest company fought their way to them. By that time eleven had been reduced to six, and Captain Corilla Kone was not among them. Baggett had last seen her burst open suit, smoking from the torched meat inside it, five kilometers back.
*
ELYSIUM, JULY 7TH, 1001.
“The damned Knockermen led us into a trap,” said High Lord Grarakakak to the human Ambassador to the Elysium Empire, Horatio Alexandropolis. “We didn’t realize that they had as many ships as they had.”
“Does your intelligence service have any idea from where they got these ships?” asked Horatio, hoping that the answer wasn’t from his people.
“They appear to be of Fenri construction,” said the High Lord with his species' equivalent of a scowl. “Oh, there were enough differences to give that Empire some deniability. But the design is essentially theirs.”
“You know we’re at war with them?” asked Alexandropolis with a raised eyebrow.
“So our intelligence service has told us,” said the avian. “Or at least as much of a service as we still have in their space. From what we can gather, they had planned this little adventure by the Knockermen well before they plotted their attack on your Empire. Good show on the preemptive strike by the way. Our governing body might have raised hell about that before we found out about their supplying the Knockermen. Now they will want to give you an honorarium for hitting those little bastards.”
The servant came into the office with refreshments, including some pastries made with the distinctive Brakakak sugar. Horatio accepted a plate with some of the delicacies, then nodded for a refill of his bourbon. They waited for the servant, also a Brakakak, to leave before resuming their talk.
“How badly hurt were you?” asked Horatio after swallowing his bite of pastry.
“Badly enough. We destroyed their force entirely, but lost about half of the fleet we had in pursuit of them. Not that much of our total fleet, maybe a tenth. But now we can’t afford to release any for other actions at this time.”
Meaning to help us, thought the Ambassador around a swallow of good whiskey imported from his Empire.
“I had a brother with that fleet,” said the High Lord, placing his empty glass on the end table by his chair. “He commanded the battle line.”
“Is he OK?” asked Horatio with a sinking feeling.
“He died in the first minutes of the ambush, his flagship blasted from space.”
“I am so very sorry, High Lord,” said Horatio, closing his eyes for a moment. He had met the High Lord’s brother several years before, and knew how important family was to the avians. He doubted that the Knockermen would have much of a proponent in the High Lord after this. They were going to face a harsh retribution at the end of their revolt.
“I have come to a decision, my friend,” said the High Lord, his luminous green eyes looking into those of the human. “While I cannot release any ships at this time, I am willing to send a party of officers, for, let us say, a liaison mission. So that we may more easily integrate our militaries when the time comes.”
“Why, that is great news, my Lord,” said the Ambassador. “I am sure our military leadership will be happy to allow your people access to our command structure. Who are you thinking of sending?”
“I would like to send High Admiral Gronakaba,” said the High Lord with a very human smile.
“The commander of your fleet,” said Horatio, almost dropping his glass and spilling whisky on his jacket. “That, uh, is quite an honor, my Lord.”
“He’s not doing us any good here in our space,” said the High Lord with a sigh. “I am afraid that crushing the remainder of the Knockermen revolt will be more a series of small unit actions. I see no better use for our best naval commander than getting him acclimated to an alliance command structure.”
“And we will be getting a battle fleet from the Elysium Empire?” asked Horatio, hating to have to keep harping on that question.
“Most assuredly,” said the High Lord, picking up a pastry. “The Fenri are implicated in a rebellion our realm, and are now in an alliance with your enemy. Even the obstructionists will not be able to stop me now.”
The High Lord took a sip of whisky, then looked into the human’s eyes. “From what we can determine this might become a long war, your Empire against these Ca’cadasans. We are increasing our military production, and I have ordered the doubling of our shipyards. If we are to come in on your side we must win. From what our intelligen
ce service has learned, a loss would mean the end of our way of life. So we are determined that we, and you, must not lose.”
And that is good news for us, my friend, thought Horatio, leaning back in his chair and taking another sip of whiskey. Coming on top of such horrible news about the death of a sibling. I’m sorry it had to hurt your people, and you, but if it helps mine, I’m happy that it happened.
Chapter Twenty-three
A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron. Joseph Stalin.
CAPITULUM, JEWEL, JULY 8TH, 1001.
“And unless the Emperor comes to meet with us, alone, the woman will die,” said the masked man on the holo. “And I can assure you that her death will not be quick, or painless.”
The holo zoomed in on Jennifer, sitting in a chair with police style restraints on her wrists. She looked frightened, but also angry, as her eyes glared at one of her captors off the view.
“And if you do not come, we will know you for the coward that you are. And so will the people of the Empire.” The holo faded, leaving the viewers with their thoughts.
“You of course will not meet with them,” said Senior Agent Catherine Mays, head of the Imperial Security Detail. Behind her Colonel Ian McCaffrey, the CO of the current Marine regiment deployed for the Emperor’s protection, nodded his head.
“I will not let her die,” said Sean, turning on the two people responsible for his protection. “We will get her out of there, no matter the cost.”
“Your Majesty,” said Colonel McCaffrey after clearing his throat. “It would be a disaster for the Empire to lose you at this time.”
Exodus - Empires at War 04 - The Long Fall (Exodus Series #4) Page 36