“Keep scanning,” Celesta said. “That bastard is out there still. Hopefully we can draw him out with this attack and keep him off the Star or the Relentless.”
“Yeah … hopefully.”
Celesta narrowed her eyes but couldn’t pinpoint where the sarcastic muttering had come from. Barrett, however, turned and gave a hard look to someone along the back row of terminals followed by some uncomfortable coughing.
“Auto-mag is loaded, charged, and locked on, Captain,” Adler said. “Ranging data is constantly updating.”
“Is the target still firing on the planet?”
“Affirmative, ma’am,” Accari said.
“Tactical, you are clear to assume helm control when ready,” Celesta said. “I want ten rounds fired immediately so that helm control is relinquished when we make our first pass over the planet.”
“Stand by,” Adler said. “Assuming helm control … tactical computer has the helm.”
“Confirmed,” the helmswoman said.
“RDS to zero thrust … adjusting attitude … still adjust—Firing!” The deck shook with each round that was fired. The cannon was hard-mounted to the ship’s structure so everyone aboard could feel each shot.
“Shrike One has detonated. Stand by for BDA,” Accari said.
“All rounds away,” Adler talked over him. “Safing auto-mag and relinquishing helm control.”
“Confirmed, I have the helm.”
“OPS?”
“Derelict is … destroyed,” Accari said in relief.
“Helm, come eight degrees to port, ten degrees declination,” Celesta ordered as she watched the main display. “All ahead full.”
“Coming to port, all engines ahead full, aye.”
The RDS surged again and soon the Icarus was racing towards the planet far too fast to even think about making orbit, but that wasn’t Celesta’s plan. With the Specter still out and hunting, she didn’t want to present too easy of a target. She assumed the Icarus was much faster after their previous tangle, so she would fire, pass the planet at speed to assess the damage they caused, and then use the awesome power of her subluminal drive to perform a maneuver that was impossible for any other Terran starship. She was going to come to a relative stop, come about, and be back over the planet before the Aludra Star even managed to plane out after her braking maneuver. She grinned slightly as she thought about Wolfe watching her destroyer on his tactical display while riding along in such a comparatively tepid ship.
“Impact in ten,” Adler called. The planet was now a brighter speck moving quickly among the other specks in the corner of the main display that showed an external view. It was twelve seconds later when they saw a brief, bright flash from that speck.
“At least four rounds hit it,” she said. “Likely the first four and then there was nothing left for the remaining six. OPS?”
“Confirmed, Tactical,” Accari said. “CIC shows four good hits and radar data is showing an expanding debris cluster where there used to be an enemy ship.”
“Excellent work, everybody,” Celesta said. “Helm, maintain course and acceleration and we’ll visually confirm kills on our flyby. Coms! Tell the Marines on the ground and the Aludra Star that we’ve cleared the sky for them.”
“Aye aye, ma’am,” Lieutenant Ellison said.
“Now the hard part,” Barrett said from her left.
“Indeed,” Celesta agreed. “Now we have to deal with our ghost.”
24
“The Icarus just destroyed both ships over the planet. Captain Wolfe should have a clear shot to launch his shuttles.”
“Good,” Rawls said. “Then we’ll move into an overwatch role since we won’t get there in time to provide cover nor does it look like we need to. Captain Wright seems to have pulled the teeth out of the Darshik blockade.”
“Still no sign of the ship that took out the Resolute,” the relief tactical officer said.
Rawls looked nervously at the main display and then the mission clock. They were close to the planet now and both the other Terran ships in the system were making no attempt to sneak around, both blaring active sensors and the Aludra Star’s main engines creating a magnificent thermal plume they could see from where they were at. Was there any point to trying to remain hidden at the point?
“Tactical, go active sensors,” he said finally. “OPS, put us back on the Link. Helm, I want—”
“I have that same echo!” the OPS officer shouted. “Just a hint of something when the actives came up. It’s closing on us from the port, aft quadrant this time.” Rawls’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth while the relief tactical officer, who hadn’t been on the bridge during the previous encounter, just looked confused.
“Tactical! Sustained NOTA fire! All port cannons, full randomized spread!” Rawls shouted, coming out of his seat a bit. To his credit the relief tactical officer turned immediately and executed the order. A non-target associated (NOTA) sequence overrode the tactical computer’s desire to have an object or location clearly defined before firing weapons. Rawls had essentially ordered his entire port flank worth of pulse laser cannons to open up and continue firing wildly at all angles.
“Firing!” the tactical officer called.
“Impacts!” OPS shouted. “Target is twelve thousand kilometers off our port flank!”
“Target those impacts! All cannons, full power!” Rawls shouted, but it was too late.
“Target lock is lost,” Tactical said. “Fifty-two separate hits on target confirmed, but nothing of sufficient duration or power to do much damage.”
“Not exactly,” OPS said. “CIC is reporting that we did moderate damage to the hull coating on the prow of the enemy ship and when it was retreating we could see it clearly on radar. The coating was actually almost one and a half meters thick.”
“You ran them off right as they were coming in for the kill,” the XO said softly before raising his voice. “Captain just saved our asses!” A hearty cheer came from his bridge crew and some people actually started applauding. Rawls, thoroughly embarrassed, waved them to silence.
“We’re not out of danger yet,” he said seriously. “Coms, inform the Icarus and the Aludra Star that we may have compromised the Specter’s stealth capability, maybe temporarily, maybe not. Forward them the data from the engagement.”
“Aye aye, sir!” the coms officer said with far more enthusiasm than was necessary for a routine ship-to-ship communique.
Rawls desperately wanted to escape the bridge even if just to go to his office and splash some cold water on his face. His crew was looking at him with a newfound respect that bordered on adoration and it made him want to throw up. The stunt with the NOTA firing sequence had been a bizarre knee-jerk reaction that had its roots in a running joke among his classmates in post-Academy training.
The command is usually executed when a CO wanted to test all his laser cannons with live fire and get real data on the power and control subsystems; it was why the relief tactical officer knew exactly how to do it. When he was doing bridge simulation training the instructors used to throw in ludicrous odds at the end of a session just for fun and, in a moment of levity, a young Ed Rawls had given the same order he had moments ago and claimed that he’d destroyed all the targets. They’d all had a good laugh and he’d never thought of it again … so what in the hell possessed him to shout it out when he was about to piss himself with fear?
If he’d actually known what he was doing he would have ordered the power cranked up on his laser cannons; the pre-configured NOTA script had the projectors so dialed back that all he’d done with over fifty hits at relatively close range was burn away some radar absorbent hull coating. He felt like a fraud and he felt like a fool, but mostly he just felt drained and wanted to escape the burgeoning hero-worship he saw blossoming on his bridge.
“Sir, you okay?” his XO asked.
“I’m fine,” Rawls nodded, swallowing hard. “Any word back from the other ships?”
“Bo
th Captain Wolfe and Captain Wright send their congratulations on bloodying the Specter’s nose,” his com officer said, pausing the conversation he was apparently having in his headset. “The Icarus is reporting that they’ve cleared the planet and are going hunting and that they’ll try to box the enemy ship in between us and them.”
“Excellent,” Rawls said without much enthusiasm. “Very well … let’s maintain alertness everyone. If Captain Wright chases that bastard back our way we want to be ready to finish the job.” This was met with another round of cheering and another wave of self-loathing from him, albeit smaller than the last. In truth he was hoping that Celesta Wright ran the son of a bitch down and ended the fight with her more powerful ship before he was forced to square off with it again. He had to imagine the enemy commander was pissed and embarrassed by his maneuver and might right now be working his way back to take another shot at the Relentless. Damn the luck.
“Rawls did that?” Jackson asked, regretting the tone the moment the words left his mouth.
“Yes, sir,” Dole said.
“Not bad,” Jackson said. “I wonder when he came up with that move?”
“Unsure, sir,” Dole answered the rhetorical question. “Commander Chambliss reports that all shuttles are loaded and green for launch. Lieutenant Colonel Beck has also checked in and said his Marines and equipment are secured and ready.”
“Very good,” Jackson said. “Tell Flight OPS they are free to clear and open the launch bay doors.”
“Aye, sir,” Dole said. “The Star is on course and we’ve reached our target launch velocity.”
“The Icarus is holding position above and behind us, sir,” Simmons said. “No sign of the ship that attacked the Relentless.”
With the Star having slowed to a veritable crawl in order to safely launch her drop shuttles the crew was on edge; they’d yet to pick up any sign of where the Specter may have retreated to. Nobody truly thought that the danger was over just because the Relentless had managed to knock some of the hull coating off, and they were now right in the middle of the most dangerous part of their mission, not to mention when they’d be the most exposed and helpless.
Jackson knew the crew expected that once they launched their shuttles they’d be able to push out at full power to their jump point and head home, but the longer the Specter remained hidden the less likely he knew that would be. The ship might have been making repairs to its specialized radar-absorbing hull coating, or it may be loitering out near the outer system, content to let them come in as they tried to escape. The Darshik seemed to have a pretty good idea where most of their jump points were and had no issue camping out and waiting for a Terran ship to transition in and then pounce on it.
“OPS, make sure we’re able to get a good look at the secondary target,” Jackson said, looking at the planet on the main display. “Specifically, I want to see if there’s any support infrastructure being set up that we might be able to target from orbit.”
“Secondary target is locked in, sir,” Dole confirmed. “We’ll adjust our course slightly once the last shuttle is away and that should take us almost directly over the site.”
“I’m giving Flight OPS the authorization now to launch when ready,” Jackson said, providing the biometric reading on his terminal to authorize Commander Chambliss to launch when ready. The course, speed, and release point had to be precisely controlled so what he was doing was essentially authorizing the Star’s computers to fly her to the launch point and spit the shuttles out at the exact instant they need to be.
“Flight OPS confirms launch authorization,” Lieutenant Epsen said from the com station.
“OPS, give a warning on the shipwide to stand by for launch,” Jackson said. “Tactical, keep an eye on the horizon as we’re coming across the terminator. The Icarus won’t be able to cover us completely from where she’s at off the stern.”
“Eyes on the horizon, aye,” Simmons said.
Jackson had no issues taking a starship in close to a planet at speed; he’d even dipped his previous destroyer down deep into the murky layers of what used to be the habitable planet of Xi’an, but he’d never performed launch operations while being so close. He’d only had two opportunities to deploy drop shuttles out of the Star for training purposes, and both times it was only two shuttles and they did it deep in the DeLonges System, far away from any stellar bodies.
Commander Simmons had served on assault carriers and the much larger fleet carriers his entire career, so Jackson was depending on him to speak up if he was about to screw up too badly. The truth was that the ship, despite being a vintage design, had been fitted with state of the art avionics and computers and she required very little operator input to successfully launch the shuttles and come around the other side without incident.
He could feel the engines running up and down on their own, fine correcting the ship’s insertion vector as the final seconds counted down. The main display automatically opened a new window that showed a real-time view of the ventral hull looking aft so that they could watch the shuttles as they dropped out of the bays.
“Drop Shuttles One and Two … deploying.” The voice of Commander Chambliss came over the overhead speakers as two sleek, lifting-body cargo shuttles were lowered from the belly of the Aludra Star on a series of rams that held the craft for a split second before releasing them. Jackson watched for a moment, fascinated as the smaller ships fell away and began maneuvering on their own attitude jets towards the planet below.
The process repeated in rapid-fire succession until all twenty-seven shuttles had been released out of the cruiser and the armored bay doors all swung up and locked with a series of booms that resounded through the hull.
“All drop shuttles successfully deployed, Captain,” Chambliss said. “Relinquishing helm control now.”
“Helm, execute our pull-up maneuver and get us over the secondary target,” Jackson ordered. “Coms! Inform anyone you can get a hold of on the ground that their reinforcements are inbound and tell them where the shuttles will be landing. Let the Icarus know that we’re continuing around the planet to get eyes on that atmospheric processor and then we’ll be pulling up into a higher parking orbit.”
“Aye, sir,” Epsen said. “I’ve already been in touch with Colonel Rucker’s people and have handed them off to the lead shuttle’s copilot. Contacting the Icarus now.”
It galled Jackson to have to leave the processor intact on the west coast, but the enemy had forced his hand when they began attacking Neuberlin in earnest. The obvious answer would be to strike the enormous machine from orbit with the Star’s lasers or let the Icarus take a crack at it, but they’d put the damn thing right in the ocean. If they destroyed it he had no idea what sort of contamination nightmare he’d release into the water. It’d be conceivable that he would have fought all the way down to the planet to reinforce the Marines only to kill everyone anyway by contaminating the ocean. His hope was that the low-altitude pass they were executing would allow them to take detailed multi-spectral imagery of the machine and from that find a better way to eliminate it. Barring that, he was hoping for a safe way to disable it. He had to assume that any alien terraforming machine would be releasing some type of microbial life into the atmosphere that wouldn’t be compatible with Terran flora and fauna. Keeping that contained would need to be their highest priority and he now had serious doubts about what he’d just done in deploying the only fresh ground troops within a hundred lightyears to defend a single city.
25
Willy Barton was in excruciating pain. Major Baer was motionless on the ground to his right, and he didn’t know where Castillo was. All he knew was that getting hit with one of those fucking Darshik weapons hurt as bad as it looked when he’d seen others take fire. The initial impact wasn’t so bad, but whatever they used it burned and burned once it was inside you.
He coughed wetly and he knew he was done. There was still sporadic fighting around him, renewed pockets of resistance where Marines
had met up and banded together, but the enemy had found them and was now advancing in earnest. Not only were the defenders falling quickly but there was nowhere to be medevac’d to so his wound, though not initially fatal, was surely mortal since he could go nowhere for treatment. After another bought of coughing he bit down on the emergency pain relief tab he’d pulled from a pocket on his harness with shaking fingers, chewing through the packaging because he knew his bloody hands would have no luck tearing it open.
“Ahhhh,” he sighed, lying back and staring at the clouds above as the powerful narcotics coursed through his system. He pulled his sidearm from its holster and rested it across his chest, ready to take at least one more of those assholes out with him when they came to make sure of him.
A dull, throbbing rumble had begun after he’d taken the pain tab and he’d assumed it was a side-effect of the drug, but now he could definitely feel the ground shaking. Maybe the Darshik were finally bringing up mechanized units to finish them off quickly. Good. He hated waiting.
Soon the rumble had increased to a harsh roar and Barton caught movement off to his left. When he turned his head he had to blink a few times because he was sure he was hallucinating. If he wasn’t, it sure as hell looked like there were at least a dozen Terran fast-assault drop shuttles descending out of the clouds and lining up for a landing somewhere to the east. He vaguely recalled there was a private airfield over that way. He was so engrossed in what was happening over to his left that he didn’t hear the footsteps until he saw the shadow fall across him and knew it was time. When he tried to yank up his pistol a heavy boot came down and pinned it to his chest. It wasn’t an alien boot.
“Easy, Sergeant,” Colonel Rucker’s face appeared over his head. “Don’t want you getting jumpy and shooting me just before Colonel Beck rides in to the rescue. Where are you hit?”
Iron & Blood: Book Two of The Expansion Wars Trilogy Page 23