“I see,” said Pointer. “You live and you learn.”
“Does this mean we’re going to do absolutely nothing?” asked Hawkins.
Blake smiled. “No, Lieutenant. What it means is that we are going to do everything. We’re going to do whatever we can and hope that somehow everything comes out all right. What do we have to lose?”
“The worst outcome is that everyone dies anyway,” said Quinn.
“I haven’t worked out the details yet, Lieutenant. First things first: get me Lieutenant Cruz again.”
The connection took hardly any time, which was unsurprising given Cruz wasn’t exactly overburdened with other tasks.
“Have you got me that list of receptors?” asked Blake.
“I certainly have, sir. I have also sent a message to the command and control bunker to let them know where I am and also about the ES Lucid.”
“Excellent. I’ve received your list.”
Blake mumbled quietly while he checked the many open receptors on the Tucson base. There was a lot to get through and he heard Cruz stirring uncertainly on the Ulterior-2.
“Sir?”
“That’s it!” exclaimed Blake. “I see our old friend Lieutenant McKinney is still assigned to the task of whipping a sense of duty into the soldiers on the Obsidiar Storage Facility. Corporal Bannerman’s pack is showing open and available.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have two messages for you to send, Lieutenant Cruz. Listen up.”
Whilst Blake recited the details he wanted relayed, the rest of the crew listened with open mouths and a growing sense of disbelief. The level of trust involved was going to be such that even the slightest misstep or misunderstanding would cause everything to fail.
There were occasions when you just had to go for broke and Blake did exactly that.
The situation in the Obsidiar Storage facility was a poor one and about to get considerably worse.
Lieutenant Eric McKinney was in one of the two security control stations in the central building, pondering his options. The front wall of the room was covered in screens and most of the floorspace was taken up by a control console.
A few of McKinney’s men were with him and together they watched the unfolding events through the network of monitoring sensors in the outer wall. Corporal Bannerman had ousted the previous occupant of the central chair and he operated the monitoring system with ease.
“There’s their dropship,” he said. “Makes it sound small when you call it that.”
“Four hundred metres away from the outer wall,” said McKinney. “And big enough to fit a million troops onboard if you packed them in.”
“It’s going to look like a piece of cheese when the perimeter chainguns run out of ammunition,” said Ricky Vega.
The OSF outer guns had maintained a constant barrage against the Vraxar dropship from the moment it landed. They sprayed it with hundreds of thousands of high-velocity slugs, which drummed against the damaged metal plating. The automatic defences were programmed to fire continuously until their targets were either neutralised or the guns reached at certain temperature, at which point they would drop to a reduced rate of fire and maintain it till their magazines ran dry. Meanwhile, the roof emplacements were unable to hit the dropship once it descended beneath their firing arc.
Garcia snorted. “They haven’t got the penetration to get through something as big as that dropship.”
It was difficult at the best of times to agree with anything which came out of Garcia’s mouth, though there were times it was unavoidable. “You’re right,” said McKinney.
“Do you think they’re going to sit it out, Lieutenant?” asked Huey Roldan.
“They’ll be waiting a while if they do,” said Bannerman. “The OSF is equipped with the best shit the Space Corps can make.” He waved a finger over the six topmost displays. “There’s not one gun exceeded fifty percent of design tolerance for heat and each one could chop a hundred thousand Vraxar into rotting chunks of rat food.”
“What about the ammo?” pressed Garcia. “They can’t fire forever.”
Bannerman shook his head. “Sometimes I ask myself if you’ll ever be happy, Garcia. We’ve got enough in the magazines to keep this up for another twenty minutes.”
“Yeah, but twenty minutes and then they come for us.”
“Send him to the perimeter wall, Lieutenant. I’m begging you.” said Jeb Whitlock. “Or if you don’t send him, send me so I don’t need to listen to his crap any longer.”
“Whitlock’s right. Put a sock in it, Garcia,” growled McKinney. “I don’t want you going out there and telling all these inexperienced guys how they’re about to die.”
“Point taken, Lieutenant. I’ll only sing happy tunes from here on.”
McKinney sighed in irritation and didn’t pursue it. “Corporal Bannerman, can you get me a visual on the defence squads?”
“Certainly can. We’ve got five hundred stationed on the eastern outer wall, with another five hundred on the inner.” The sensor view showed the soldiers standing on top of the wide perimeter wall. There was plenty of cover, so in theory they would be able to fire freely into any approaching force.
“Doesn’t look like many when they’re all spread out like that,” said Roldan.
“Movement on the dropship!” said Bannerman.
McKinney watched the feed carefully. Along the length of the Vraxar dropship, wide sections of the hull opened outwards.
“Anyone behind those doors isn’t going too last long,” said Vega.
“There’s no way they’ll let…” McKinney started.
Without warning, a dozen of the external feeds shut off, whilst several of the remaining ones lit up in pure white. The security room was dimly lit to begin with and the glare caused the men to squint or shield their eyes.
“What the hell?”
Bannerman was on it at once, trying his best to get the sensors online again.
McKinney felt empty. “Don’t bother trying.”
“Huh?”
“Look.”
It took a few seconds for the light to fade on the main building east wall sensors. When it did, there was no mistaking what had happened.
“The bastards hit us from orbit.”
McKinney’s anger overflowed. He swore loudly and it was hard not to punch one of the blank screens in front of the security console. Leaving those men on the walls had always been a gamble, but one which he’d felt pushed into taking. The perimeter guns were dumb tools and no replacement for the eyes and judgement of a trained soldier. Somehow, he’d convinced himself the Vraxar wouldn’t risk an orbital strike against the OSF and would rely on ground artillery backed up with overwhelming numbers.
Both the outer and inner east walls were smashed and ruined. There were two gaping holes in the outer wall and further to the north it had collapsed in parts. The inner wall was even more badly damaged and had been reduced to a pile of rubble and scattered everywhere. Here and there, the stone continued to burn in testimony to the heat of the plasma warheads which had struck the wall.
“Crap, they got all the east side guns,” said Bannerman. “Some of the north and south ones too.”
“Did they strike this central building?”
“Not as far as I can tell, Lieutenant. We’re holding the prize and they don’t want to blow it up.”
The sensors fixed to the main facility building were undamaged and through them, McKinney watched six huge doors on the dropship’s flank fall to the ground, forming ramps for the occupants to disembark.
“What’s that?” asked Roldan. “Doesn’t look much like soldiers.”
“It isn’t,” said McKinney. “They’re bringing out the heavy stuff.”
“They aren’t going to risk losing all this Obsidiar, are they?” asked Vega. “There’s no way they’re just going to blow the walls open and hope for the best.”
“Just when I think I’m learning something about our enemy, they show me how mi
staken I am,” said McKinney.
From each of the six doors came an artillery piece, their armoured metal frames floating a few inches above the surface. They were of a similar size – each about three metres square from the front - though with differing functions. Some had multi-barrelled guns, others had a single, larger bore cannon. A third type had a compact missile cluster mounted on top.
“What are they doing?” asked Garcia.
“Those ones are heading into the main area of the base,” said Roldan.
“What about us?”
“I’m sure we’re going to find out.”
There was little choice other than to watch. More of the artillery emerged from the depths of the dropship. McKinney was granted a side view of the mobile weapons and saw that each was eight or nine metres long. Smaller shapes were visible on the artillery - Vraxar soldiers stood on purpose-built platforms which offered shelter from any small arms fire which might come from the front.
Dozens upon dozens of weapons left the dropship. More and more foot soldiers came after – tens of thousands, who walked in the sheltered centre of the artillery formations. To McKinney’s surprise, the majority of them ignored the storage facility and moved out of sight behind the damaged walls, many heading south and the rest dispersing to the north and west.
“Most of the south wall sensors are still operational,” said Bannerman. “We’ll pick them up in a few seconds.”
Sure enough, the Vraxar artillery came into the sight arc of the first functioning south wall sensor. The enemy streamed by – sixty or more heavy mobile weapons, accompanied by a swarm of hulking Vraxar soldiers. The image was clear enough for McKinney to determine that nearly all of those on foot were Estral in origin. They strode without hurry, yet easily kept pace with the gravity-engined guns around them.
“They’re going for the Ulterior-2 and Earth’s Fury,” said McKinney.
“How do you know, Lieutenant?”
“What else is there across from the landing strip?”
“They don’t usually bother stealing spaceships,” said Sergeant Li.
McKinney was hit by another illuminating thought. “Maybe they only capture the spaceships that are good enough for their fleet. The Ulterior-2 was meant to be the most powerful warship in the whole Space Corps.”
“What about the Earth’s Fury?” asked Webb. “I was told it was some kind of new souped-up monitoring station.”
“With a gun on top?”
“Maybe it needs to shoot asteroids or something,” said Webb.
“You’ve said nothing all the time we’ve been in this room and then you come out with that crap?” laughed Roldan.
“Webb. you’ll believe any old shit,” said Whitlock.
Li didn’t want to miss out on the fun. “Someone’s got to be a gullible bastard, otherwise there’d have been no need to invent the word, would there?”
“Enough,” said McKinney quietly. “We’ve just lost hundreds of men and most of our defences. We’re holed up with nowhere to go and we’re facing that.”
He aimed a thick finger towards the eastern wall sensors. Eighteen artillery weapons remained, a mixture of all three types. There were plenty of converted Estral soldiers and they remained in cover. Behind, there were more – thousands more – and they kept flooding off the dropship. Some followed the others towards the Ulterior-2, whilst others remained facing the Obsidiar Storage Facility. In terms of what they required to break into the OSF, it was overkill.
“It’s not all good, Lieutenant,” laughed Bannerman sarcastically. “Now we know they’ve left a warship in space somewhere above the base. Even if we made a run for it, they’d turn us to cinder before we got two hundred metres away from here.”
McKinney picked up his rifle, intending to check if each of his teams was in place. The interior of the OSF was designed with defence in mind, though he sincerely doubted the Space Corps had anticipated it would ever be assailed by such an excessive force.
Corporal Bannerman jumped as if he’d just noticed a fifteen-legged tropical Atlantis tarantula running along his arm. “Wait up, Lieutenant!”
McKinney turned in puzzlement while Bannerman reached beneath the security console for his comms pack.
“Is it picking something up?”
Bannerman didn’t answer immediately. He turned one of the dials and moved a couple of the sliding tuners.
“It’s the Ulterior-2!” he said in disbelief. “Lieutenant Maria Cruz.”
“What’s your girlfriend doing on the new Hadron?” asked Roldan.
McKinney gave him the finger and elbowed his way next to Bannerman.
“How is she?” The question wasn’t likely relevant to the reason she’d made contact and he corrected himself. “What does she want?”
“I can’t ask, sir. The Ulterior-2 must have new super-duper comms. I can hear what she’s saying, but I can’t give a response.”
“How are we going to…”
“Shhh, Lieutenant. She’s speaking.”
McKinney listened in. What he heard was about as unpleasant as he’d expected and when he stopped for a second to think about it, realised what a truly awful position it put him in.
Chapter Ten
The Tucson base had been built on land specifically chosen for its stability and lack of seismic activity. The reinforced landing strips had enough to bear carrying thirty billion tonnes worth of Hadron battleship without them having to also contend with underlying shifts in the tectonic plates.
As a consequence of this necessary stability, there wasn’t a mineshaft – either active or abandoned - anywhere within twenty kilometres of the base. This presented a problem when it came to the Last Stand project. In order for the blast of an Obsidiar bomb to be properly channelled, the geologists, engineers and experts in theoretical explosives, decided it would be best for the devices to be stored deep underground in order to guarantee that a dud bomb which exploded with less than expected force would still kill everyone living.
Obsidiar bombs were new technology and came with a certain degree of uncertainty and unpredictability, hence the reason for this concern. However, Benediction was so far removed from everything before it, even if its blast realised only a few percent of its expected median diameter, it would be more than sufficient to destroy New Earth several times over.
Unfortunately, the design advancements on Benediction came several months after Fleet Admiral Duggan had ordered a suitable shaft dropped into the earth for the storage of the device. The bomb was inside Facility LT3 now, deactivated and awaiting someone with the necessary authorisation to arrive and allow it to fulfil its terrible potential.
Duggan was that man and though he hated it, he would have given the responsibility to no other.
The airlift doors leading to the surface above the command and control bunker were ahead of him. Duggan stood straight in the confines of the room, while the men and women around him finished their preparations.
“Sir?” asked Lieutenant Tom Richards. His earnest face and confident manner made him an ideal officer.
“Are we ready?” asked Duggan. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the unfamiliar weight of the spacesuit’s material resisting the movement of his limbs. Duggan wasn’t out of shape but there was no way his body could compete with that of a younger man. He was especially glad he wasn’t carrying one of the plasma repeaters which many of the others wore as if they were no more of a burden than an extra cotton shirt. R1T James Lopez carried the plasma tube and he leaned against it with the kind of nonchalant air which was common amongst soldiers trained to use this particular weapon.
“Yes, sir. We need to move. We don’t know if the Vraxar attack on the OSF is the extent of what they intend.”
“Have you planned a route which takes us away from the OSF?”
“As best we can. It’s three klicks and keeps us under cover most of the way. Facility LT3 is to the north-east – we’re going to pass within a thousand metres of where the dropsh
ip came down. If they’re only interested in the OSF, we’ve got nothing to worry about. If they’ve got bigger plans, we should be able to get through before they secure the area. As long as we move fast.”
“Three klicks on foot,” said Duggan wryly. He lifted a hand, forestalling the response. “I’m aware we don’t want to be hit by a missile from that battleship.”
“No, sir. The more of us we bring, the better the chance they see us from the air. Particularly if we’re in a vehicle.” Richards took a gauss rifle from one of his soldiers and handed it to Duggan. “I hear you can shoot.”
Duggan reached out and grasped the barrel. A feeling of excitement rushed through him like a drug and for the tiniest of moments he knew exactly what it was to be young again. “That I can, Lieutenant. I hope I won’t be needing it.”
Lieutenant Edwards was admirably thorough and he repeated the mission instructions for anyone who’d been thinking of lunch when he’d spoken them the first, second and third times.
“Listen up! I don’t want any pissing around on this. We’re going to move straight to the objective, following the route I’ve given you. Part of this route takes us through an area hit by enemy missiles so the going is likely to be tough. Keep under cover where you can and with any luck we’ll be able to stay inside for most of the journey.”
A few of the assembled soldiers nodded and muttered their acceptance. Richards continued.
“The comms aren’t working, so we’re going to leave our visors up as much as possible. Only use them if you get lost and need to refer to your map, or if there are toxins in the air. We have Fleet Admiral Duggan with us and I want you to do your utmost to impress him with your skills and your professionalism. Is that clear?”
The response was loud and enthusiastic. “Yes, sir!”
Someone spoke up from the back. “Can you tell us what this is all about yet, sir?”
Earth's Fury (Obsidiar Fleet Book 4) Page 10