“And drive bombs,” Schaeffer said.
Everyone on the bridge turned to look at him in surprise. “That’s true,” Huen said. “A valuable insight.”
Schaeffer shrugged. “I only thought of it because we were talking about Shan.”
“I can drop a bomb, or a series of them, with time delays, like falling mines, to try to catch them as they go under us,” the helmsman said.
“Do so, please,” Huen ordered. “Make sure we stand off far enough not to be damaged. And Weapons, make free with anything at your disposal, but remember they might come after us, so save sufficient power in case they do.” His officers acknowledged his instructions, and they watched as the group of four hundred or so blips descended toward the edge of the moon.
When they reached the point of tangency, in reality just a few kilometers above Callisto’s surface, Huen could see the enemy craft flaring with fusion engines on full power as they forced themselves into brutally decelerating low orbits. “I don’t think they even see us, or perhaps they do not care,” he mused.
“Repositioning to come above them,” the helmsman reported. “Setting up the bomb drop. Weapons, will you give me control?”
“You have control,” the weapons watchstander said after a grudging moment. Huen knew that the helmsman, with his multiplicity of cranial chips and his acute three-dimensional senses, was the best person to try to bomb the enemy as he raced past below.
The moment came, and the helmsman said, “Mark.” Six flashing dots fell away from the ship on the display, the view rotating to allow them to follow the weapons’ progress toward the surface.
“Damn. They’ve seen them.”
On the screen, Huen could see the enemy spread out, flowing around the falling bombs like a river of ants around a rock. Suddenly the icons flared and klaxons sounded on the bridge. “Proximity warning,” Sensors said.
“Got a few of them,” the helmsman reported. “We have inbounds.”
While most of the remaining enemy craft continued on their paths, a dozen or so altered course, zooming upward and heading straight toward Artemis. “What are those?” Huen asked.
“Looks like some kind of fighters, pointy-nosed hot ships,” the helmsman said before Sensors could. “The ones ignoring us look like turtles or something.”
“Guns, you are weapons free,” Huen reminded him, and the fire control watchstander nodded, pressing keys. Beside him, his assistant stood ready on her board.
“Firing,” he said tersely, and the two played their boards like concert pianists. Most of the lasers would be on automatic, but they could be guided by human hands and intuition in certain ways should the weapons officers so desire. “Got one! Got two…three…six…seven. They turned away. Driven off, out of range.”
“Good work, gunners. Those are seven that won’t hit the base.” Not enough, but something.
“If only we had some heavy lasers,” the weapons officer grumbled, then looked at Huen sheepishly.
Huen nodded in understanding. “Unfortunately Fleet cannot give every ship everything it wants, and we were not expected to engage in combat. Helm, follow the enemy around the moon. How long until we are above the base?”
“About fifty-five minutes,” the helmsman answered.
“Admiral,” Schaeffer said quietly, bending down to speak in Huen’s ear, “if Shan detonates that drive bomb…”
“Good point. Helm, make sure we stay above and out of damage range of a theoretical detonation of a drive bomb on the surface of the base.”
The helmsman looked over his shoulder at Huen and blinked once, then nodded.
Chapter 71
“Ruchek here,” the battalion commander broke in on Repeth’s channel – probably on all channels. “The enemy is three minutes out. Artemis says they took out a few on the way by, and are coming in higher than expected, but faster. Expect combat decel at the last minute, with their fusion drives providing cover. Disable your thermal targeting until they are all down. A missile entering a plasma envelope will just get fried. Use electromagnetic or polarized optics to avoid the drives and engage the vehicles themselves. Good luck, and good hunting.”
“You heard the man,” Captain Miller came on to the Bravo Company net. “If you can see it, shoot it. If you are getting overrun or get low on supplies, withdraw to the tunnels in accordance with the oplan. Watch your HUDs, listen to your leaders, and kick some ass. Semper Fidelis.”
One of the Aussies broke in. “By land, by sea, by space.”
“Who Dares, Wins,” came another voice, a Brit for sure.
“For those about to die, we salute you,” quoted Warrant Officer Massimo.
Well, what do you expect from a Roman. Repeth spoke on the company channel, “This is your first sergeant. Pipe down, ladies. Here’s a better one. ‘We are surrounded. That simplifies the problem.’ Now shut up and look to your guns.”
“One minute,” Massimo said on the heavy weapons section channel.
Dasko and his squad stood leaning against the wall, their weapons in the loopholes pointed toward the horizon. Despite her desire to join them, she was the company first sergeant, and couldn’t afford to get bogged down in shooting. Yet. Although when they took their first casualty, she would step up.
Instead she pulled her HUD view back and rotated it to high overhead. Twenty kilometers to the west she could see three green icons hovering just above the surface: the Aardvarks. Twenty klicks sounded like a long way, until she remembered that they sported masers and targeting systems made to reach out to a thousand. Maybe they would do some good after all.
Suddenly red blips blossomed as the base sensors picked up the enemy. “Incoming,” she said. “Fire free.”
“Light them up!” Massimo cried, and his heavy trinity began to spit death. A whoosh of vapor briefly filled the long room they were in as the cold launch charge of the Hades anti-armor guided missile spurted, shoving the projectile out the firing port. A moment later its rocket engine ignited as it accelerated toward a target.
Beside it the railgun they had bolted to the floor rocked with each burst of magnetic discharge as it accelerated groups of ball bearings toward the enemy at ten thousand meters per second, while the heavy laser, with no recoil, flashed brightly as its coherent light vaporized dust motes and visible gases.
Repeth watched her HUD for a moment more as the Aardvarks maneuvered, spreading out and jinking low near the surface of Callisto, firing their centerline masers. While small for space combatants, the beam strength far exceeded the Marines’ ground weapons, though not nearly approaching that of the now-useless fixed weapons arrays. Note to self for the after action report, she thought. Make sure the big guns can depress to the horizon. And, do not assume the enemy is stupid.
The HUD common operating picture was not so detailed that she could tell the specific effects of the Aardvarks’ shots, but as she looked at the wave of hundreds of craft come over the horizon she saw several dozen wink out. Switching to an optical view from a remote camera, she observed plumes of dust and debris as some of the enemy augered in. Others wounded tumbled above the base, the low gravity insufficient to bring them down for kilometers.
Because she had no control of the camera feed, she could not focus well on one of the enemy craft to examine it, but in the flashes and glimpses she thought they looked like bugs, beetles perhaps, curved on top and flat on the bottom, with struts or legs all around. She wasn’t sure at this point whether they were organic or mechanical.
That question was answered when they began to land. Now and then one would crumple and die from some invisible source, presumably the Aardvark masers. Those were earning their keep, and Repeth wished now the base had kept a squadron back for close-in defense.
Another lesson learned, if we live through this.
Then that equation changed as five shark-like vehicles with stubby wings roared over the base at high speed and low altitude. As she watched, they launched tiny missiles that accelerated at inc
redible velocity, and a moment later the Aardvark icons winked out.
Damn.
Now her view blurred and filled with explosions, subliming ice vapor and dust. Her HUD view showed about three hundred remaining beetles, and she brought her attention back to her surroundings. No casualties yet, though rock dust blew through the firing ports and the structure shook, showing some kind of fire incoming.
“Adjust laser for organics,” Massimo yelled, and the heavy beamer’s color reddened almost to invisibility. “Those beetles are alive, and they’re deploying something.”
Repeth belatedly switched her view to the section sensors they had emplaced. Now the flying beetles that had descended in a swarm turned into gigantic monsters, as if she herself had been shrunk to tininess, bringing a visceral terror that she had to force down. Unlike a natural insect, these had turrets that fired green plasma like focused flamethrowers.
A Marine anti-armor missile roared off the launcher and immediately slammed into a nearby beetle, blowing a hole in its head-shaped front portion. It halted, its joints locking and swaying in an apparently automatic response to damage. The turret on top swung in their direction.
“Cover!” Dasko barked, and the line Marines dropped immediately to their knees, heads below the loopholes. The heavy weapons crews, with their gun shields filling their holes, didn’t bother, but kept firing.
Green plasma washed into their embrasures, filling the room with heat and igniting the ceiling panels, the light fixtures and, briefly, even the paint on the concrete walls before flaring out from lack of oxygen.
Another good reason to fight in vacuum.
“Son of a bitch!” Massimo spat. “Pull that laser back. Get a new barrel on it.” Repeth saw the emitter had warped from the heat, rendering it useless. “Target that turret!”
The heavy railgun, its snub nose made of tougher stuff, shifted fire and slammed a stream of steel into the plasma gun atop the beetle, shredding it and leaving it slewed sideways, smoking and popping.
“Back on the line,” Dasko said before Repeth had to, getting his people into their loopholes again. “They are deploying ground troops.”
“What the hell are those?” one of the Marines said as she let loose with her recoilless machinegun. Railguns had been miniaturized to the level of the crew-served heavy, but most line Marines still carried weapons descended from the assault rifles of terrestrial forces, firing caseless ammo.
Dropping from the bottom of the beetles from holes in their bellies, Repeth could see some kind of…creatures. Three meters tall, they moved ponderously, their skins or exoskeletons armored with plates that looked more organic than mechanical. Insectoid centaurs of a sort, with four legs on an abdomen below, an upright thorax with two arms, and a head with wide-set, glittering eyes, rather like mantises.
They also seemed to have no problem with vacuum, and each carried a firearm in its left hand, which discharged short-range energy pulses, perhaps particle beams. Each also had a meter-long metal blade in its right.
Swords?
“They are going to close,” Repeth called on the local channel and then switched to the company net. “Captain Miller, the enemy appears to be large insectoids armed with short-range energy weapons and blades. This makes me suspect they are willing to close and use their superior size and strength in hand to hand combat. The only sense that makes is if they are trying hard to take this base intact, and minimize damage.”
“Understood, Top. Will pass to Battalion. Break.” Miller’s voice dropped off.
Just then a blue crackling explosion blasted one of Dasko’s line Marines backward from his loophole. A moment later an insectoid leg reached through the hole and ripped at its edge, widening it like a miniature backhoe.
Repeth stepped up with her machinegun and fired one-handed into the hole, and the limb jerked back. Then she reached to her grenade dispenser and popped one into her hand, rolling it out the opening. “Use grenades if they get too close,” she barked, turning to check on the fallen Marine.
The man was unconscious but alive, his armor showing a rebooting sequence. “Those energy blasts will take down your armor and cyberware, people, so duck! I need live Marines, not dead heroes!” She manhandled him over to the door and tossed him into the corridor in hopes he would recover to fight, then turned back to the firing line.
Two more Marines were down, one still moving and one as immobile as the first. “Defensive grenades, people,” Repeth repeated, dropping her gun to its sling and pulling four grenades off the fallen man’s backrack. Activating them as she moved, she rolled them out the three empty firing ports and then past Dasko’s shoulder. “Sergeant, get your squad using their grenades. Pull them off the wounded. There are too many of these things out there to just stand and deliver.”
Dasko turned from his loophole just in time to dodge the brunt of a blue bolt, but it caught his arm and he stumbled back to the wall. A moment later Repeth had her hands full as one of those swords came probing through the opening.
Her steward-level cybernetics exceeded even the standard Marine package, otherwise she would not have been able to execute the technique that occurred to her as she grabbed the “wrist” of the giant limb in a bear hug. At the same time she lifted her right leg to brace against the loophole’s inner edge, her left on the floor, and torqued her body backward, levering the chitinous limb sideways in a direction it was clearly not designed to go.
Roaring with effort, Repeth forced the thing’s exoskeleton to flex like a lobster shell, and then it cracked. She felt rather than heard its squeal of pain as it let go of its sword and tried to withdraw. Finally it slipped out of her grasp. She had to fight the instinct to deploy her claws to tear into it, but unless she wanted to expose her naked hands to vacuum, that was a bad idea.
Instead she picked up the sword. With two hands, she had plenty of strength to use it, a bit awkwardly perhaps. Who would have thought a frickin’ sword would be useful in high-tech combat? But in this case…
The next limb to come through became the test – a leg with a shovel foot that sought to widen the hole. Repeth chopped at it, missing the first time and almost vibrating the awkward sword out of her hands. The second time her strike bit deeply, and her third chopped it off entirely.
The next few minutes turned into a haze of chopping, blue blasts, staccato orders and automatic weapons fire. Somewhere along the line the laser, with its more delicate mechanism, had been punched back through its larger firing hole and now a blizzard of incoming fire spewed through that opening. Half of the Marines were down.
“Fall back!” Repeth ordered, overriding everyone on the local net. “Fall back now, everyone. You too, chief. They’re getting in!” She wasn’t overstating the case, as one of the buggers forced its full upper body through the hole, sword swinging and energy cannon blasting.
Dasko came up next to her, emptying his machinegun into the creature, driving it back. “You too, Top! Get back, I’ll handle this.”
He was right, so Repeth bounded over, dropping the sword to grab Chief Massimo by the back-rack. “Come on, Chief. Fall back. Captain’s orders! We can’t lose your guns.”
The warrant officer snarled but echoed, “Weapons section, withdraw now. Leave the laser.” That mechanism lay broken on the floor, so the rest of the Marines unbolted the railgun and the missile launcher and withdrew, carrying their casualties as well.
Repeth was unable to tell who was dead, wounded, or just a victim of electronic overload, so she grabbed one of the fallen in each hand and dragged them easily out the door as other mantises began to force their way in. “Don’t leave anyone behind.”
Checking her time and oxygen levels, she was startled to see that they had only been fighting for sixteen minutes. It had seemed an eternity. “Leapfrog to the next redoubt,” Repeth ordered, dropping an icon onto a secondary position the HUD showed was unoccupied.
As the ragtag group hustled down the access corridor away from the edge of the base,
a railgun burst slammed into the wall in front of her, causing her to drop to the ground. “Hold fire, hold fire,” she called after switching to Delta’s freq. “Use your goddamned HUDs, you morons, you’re shooting at friendlies!”
“Sorry, First Sergeant,” came a shaky voice, and she grabbed her two casualties again and bounded forward again, pitching their armored bodies over the barricade she’d come upon.
“Make a hole, damn you. We have wounded and heavy weapons,” she snarled at the corporal and his fireteam manning the position. “We’ll set up at the next designated position. You hold as long as you can, then fall back on us. We won’t shoot at you.”
“Got it, First Sergeant. No excuse, First Sergeant.”
Repeth waved the rest through the opening in the barricade, with Massimo leading and Dasko on rear guard. She was tempted to put the railgun down here to stiffen Delta’s line Marines, but the position was already too crowded.
“Listen, Corp,” she said, grabbing the man by the shoulder. “They’re big bugs, and we killed a bunch of them. They die just fine. You’re in an excellent defensive position. Roll some grenades down there, set on command detonation, and be ready to throw some more. These things are tough, but they’re clumsy. Just keep pouring disciplined fire into them, and when they get too close, throw some more grenades and haul ass for our position. They have electromagnetic weapons that screw up the armor and cybernetics, so make sure you recover anyone that isn’t obviously dead. Got it?”
“Got it, First Sergeant,” the man replied in a much steadier voice.
“Here…” She stepped back to her two fallen, one of which was finally stirring, and emptied their backracks of grenades, coming up with seven. “These are coded two-four-two-Bravo. Punch it in.” While the corporal set his HUD for the command detonation function, Repeth pitched the spheres down the corridor toward the direction the enemy would come, where they scattered randomly. “Blow them when they get close.” She clapped him on his shoulder. “Good luck.”
Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer Page 32