She stopped in her tracks. “Oh, my God. Did you tell the admiral about this?”
“No. And what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I’m sure I can trust you to keep my secret.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way he treats you. I bet you’d be happy to keep him in the dark”
“Probably not. He can be pretty cranky, but that would still be a really lousy way to treat one’s father.”
He swallowed, but before he could answer, a maintenance tech in mechanic’s coveralls, tattered and broken like every other uniform on the ship, approached. “We’ve managed to get this one flying, but I wouldn’t try anything too fancy.”
Ian looked over the flyer. It looked fine, solid and gleaming, but if there was one thing that he knew from experience, it was that the techs knew these birds inside and out, and a pilot ignored their misgivings at his own risk. “Why, what’s wrong with it?”
The mechanic scratched his head and looked it over. “Nothing, in theory. It’s just that all the parts we use seem to be worn out. Brittle. We took the ones that worked best and also tested the ship as much as possible, but when you don’t trust the parts, you never feel quite right about the ship. All I can say is that it works for now, and it passes all the tests.”
“All right, let me try it on for size.”
It was a standard Recon flyer. This two-person unit was the backbone of the corps. It could drift through space completely undetected in standard patrol and observation trajectories. It was designed to leak absolutely no radiation. Even its surface was painted with a special treatment that reflected most wavelengths in precisely the same way that a random supercool space rock would.
Communications were by tightly focused line-of-sight laser modulations, which were about as difficult to intercept as anything could be.
Ian knew from long experience that flying a real Recon mission in one of these things was uncomfortable as hell, and when you were two-up, privacy was inexistent.
But they did their job very well. Ian knew he owed his life to the thoughtful, thorough design’s performance under real surveillance conditions at least twice over, both during the same battle.
He had a soft spot for these little flyers, even if the fighter jockeys insisted on calling them ‘beetles,’ on account of their insectoid appearance. And he trusted them with his life—they’d delivered the goods before.
He climbed in and powered it up. Although he knew he technically hadn’t flown one of these for four hundred years, his muscles remembered where every toggle and lever was, and he soon had it hovering gently in the hangar. “How’s it look?” he asked the tech over the radio.
“All right so far.”
“OK, then let’s try it in space. A few klicks to the Ismala should be a good test. Open the hangar door.”
“Can’t. The ion air shields aren’t working yet. If I open the main door, we’ll vent all the atmosphere. Can you fly it out of the airlock?”
Ian sighed. “If I have to.”
“You have to.”
It was a tight fit for a flyer, but the cargo lock was big enough that an experienced pilot could navigate it without knocking off his antennae. Five minutes later, he was in space, gingerly testing the thrusters: if one of the stream nozzles failed, there was enough energy in the fuel cells to atomize him.
Everything seemed to work correctly, but the tech still felt the need to tell him: “I’ll feel a lot more comfortable if you keep everything under sixty percent load.”
“All right. Steering for the Ismala.”
The flight was uneventful, even boring. Ian feathered the throttle and approached the carrier from above, waggling his extremely stubby craft at the startled crew in the bridge. This was strictly forbidden by every single regulation in the book, but with the Ismala’s comms out of commission, it was the only way he could think of to let them know he was there.
He made his way to the upper landing pad, touched down, and let his pressure tube find its own way to the airlock. Once it was safe to do so, he opened the inner hatch and descended into the carrier, delighted to find that light, air, and gravity were all present.
Also present was a woman. In her late thirties, with short dark hair, she had rings under her eyes. That seemed to be the norm. Everyone on Heavy Gunship IV sported a set just as dark.
But there was something about this woman that made Ian suspect that more than exhaustion was at work. Her look was tinged with barely controlled grief. She fought to keep it under, but Ian could see it lurking just beneath the surface.
“I’m Commander Coloni, of the fighter wing,” she said. “What’s going on out there?”
He shrugged. “All I can really tell you is that they’re pulling the fleet back together as fast as they can. Most of the ships seem to have been pretty badly damaged in transit. If the enemy fleet had already been here, they would have cut us to ribbons before we could even move… or know they were out there.”
“Yeah, I gathered that. Good to know everyone’s alive, though.”
“Not everyone. We lost the Troubadour.” She nodded, taking this information, the loss of a full third of the ground troops, without blinking. He went on, “The admiral sent me over here to find out how you were doing. Your comms are down.”
“We’re working on that. We had other priorities.”
“More important than getting your orders from the admiral?”
“If he’s offended, I’ll apologize later. I just thought that in a battle zone, it might be better to actually be able to move and fight back before worrying about the other stuff. I know exactly which ships are on my side, and I was planning to shoot at everything else.”
“You? Why you? Where’s the captain?”
“He turned out to be allergic to asteroid strikes. So did the rest of the regular crew. Turns out, I’m the ranking officer now. First thing I do once I get the comms up is to ask the admiral for some regular navy types. This tub is a bear to fly. We nearly crashed into the Lapland as we were moving back into formation.”
“I’ll make sure to mention that to the admiral.”
“No need. You’re not going back.”
“What? Admiral gave me orders to tell him what I’m doing here.”
“I know. And I’ll apologize for that as well. But my maintenance people have forbidden me to let your flyer off the hull. They told me that fixing the comms would normally take hours, but patching into your ship’s system would take minutes. So the good thing is that you won’t need to wait to watch the admiral tear me a new one.”
But the admiral didn’t comply. Far from berating her for stealing his only working flyer, kidnapping its pilot and motoring around incommunicado, he commended her for taking swift action and getting her ship closer to fighting form than anything else in the fleet. He also said a few choice words about the men who designed the ships.
Finally, he asked her to honestly tell him when she’d have a complete fighter wing for him to use.
“Not until the factory starts sending us parts. The maintenance team thinks they can salvage maybe one in five, but it’s going to take them weeks to build them. We don’t have too many mechanics on this crate.”
“Yeah, Dart and Centauri’s Courage are singing the same tune.”
“This makes no sense, Admiral. For so many ships to fail at the same time, in the same way… I’ve never seen a single ship fail on such a short jaunt, much less several. Hell, I’ve never even heard of something like that. And I’ve been in this war quite a while.”
He chuckled. And then self-consciously realized what he’d done. “I’m sorry. It’s just that when you get to be my age, young lady, claims of being in the war for a long time become matters for humor. It’s been a good chunk of my life.”
“With all due respect, Admiral, it’s been all of mine. I was at Epsilon Canis. I’m pretty sure I’ve been fighting the blobs, or running from them, since before your great grandfather was born.”
&
nbsp; His eyed widened and she saw him repeat her name under his breath one time, and then another and another in succession, as if trying to place it. Out loud he said: “So that’s where I heard your name. Tau Coloni. I would say it’s an honor to serve with you, but I imagine you’ve heard it a bit too often.”
“Plus, I no longer find honor in being next to people when they’re vaporized. I’ve lost too much for this war to be anything except for something I want to forget about... even if that means dying during a suicide mission.”
“Fair enough. You might get your wish pretty soon. I’ve ordered an assault on the moons of the ice giant.”
“When?”
“As soon as I have enough suits and dropships. Two days, tops.”
“We can’t get you fighter support in two days.”
“I know. Concentrate on the big guns for now, in case the blobs have ships hidden behind the planet or something.”
“And if they’ve got fighters?”
“All the way out here? Without carrier support?”
“Yes.”
“Then the shock marines are going to have a very bad day.”
Chapter 4
He’d gotten a viewport this time. It almost never happened that way, because the squad lieutenant and sergeant traditionally got the two window seats, with the lieutenant getting planetside, and the sergeant getting shipside. The thinking was that by having the decision makers have a view of the battlefield beforehand, they might see something that they could use to the platoon’s advantage.
But that only applied when the platoons were at full strength. Each dropship held ten suits, the exact size of one unit. The math worked perfectly.
Of course, on this drop, units had been haphazardly melded together, and the assignation of seats was pretty much random. That meant that Tristan got a view of the pale view ice giant floating serenely in the distance. It was nearly a million klicks away, but he could still feel the power of its presence. It was an impressive chunk of frozen gas.
Awe pushed aside the fear of the forthcoming battle for a few moments. He wondered how there could be a war in a galaxy where resources were nearly infinite and space was not at a premium. Fear? Lack of an ability to communicate with enemies? Or were humanity’s enemies truly so implacable that coexistence was not an option?
The questions were well above Tristan’s pay grade, but the sight of a massive blue-white planet hanging in the darkness made him wonder. He spent some weightless minutes following the contours of the ring system with his eyes, attempting to count the number of distinct rings. He gave up at ten.
Then, the dropship shook and brought him back to the present. The moon they were approaching was more like a small planet. Perhaps half an Earthmass, it was big enough to have a methane atmosphere with weather patterns. The gas buffeted the unstreamlined dropship as they approached the surface at high speed.
As the shock marines converged on the selected landing zone, other dropships appeared in the viewport. Tristan could see four of them, black spots against the rusty red sky. They closed formation. The spots became recognizable shapes just as a sudden gust of wind or pressure change buffeted them.
When the shaking stopped, Tristan saw that one of the dropships was in trouble. Small chunks of hull stripped away before it finally disintegrated into a cloud of debris and fell back, out of view.
Tristan knew that the exoskeletons could withstand the fall, and most of the troops should survive, unless whatever had taken the ship apart caught them, too.
He spoke over the Taclink. “We’re under fire. Dropship four… no, three, destroyed.”
“The suits?” It was the voice of their dropship driver. Tristan felt respect for the man. One of his colleagues had just bought it—the drivers were the only people on board without exoskeletons—and he was still asking questions relevant to the success of the mission.
“Impossible to tell. They fell back behind us. It didn’t look like an explosion. More like the dropship took some damage and the atmosphere peeled it like an onion.”
“All right. Thirty seconds to touchdown.”
Tristan braced himself. The transport was shuddering violently now, and the suits were rattling like ball bearings in a tin can. Things would only get worse. Dropship braking was legendary: the pilots would wait until the last second to apply a combination of backwards thrust and air braking, thus giving any ground troops shooting at them the smallest window possible. The G forces were extremely high, and the guys in the exoskeletons often passed out, something which the pilots in their G suits enjoyed immensely.
When that happened, the exoskeletons would simply inject you with a compound that brought you around immediately. Tristan had once asked what the side effects of that mule kick were, and the sardonic medic had quickly replied: “I have no idea, but I imagine they’re probably less than the side effects of standing around on a battlefield without being able to move.” He was probably right, even though a single dose of the stuff was enough to keep you awake for three days afterwards.
“Brace yourselves, fellas. Braking in five… four…”
It felt like he’d been kicked in the back. His eyeballs made a bid for freedom, doing their best to jump out of their sockets and splatter against the suit’s visor.
It only lasted for three seconds. “All right, folks. Get the hell out of here before they start shooting at me. Remember, I’m not wearing armor.”
“Probably serve you right for giving us a fake countdown,” one of the troops replied sourly.
“Didn’t want you tensing up. Now get out.”
They didn’t need to be told twice. Or even once for that matter. No one wanted to be stuck in an immobile dropship while the enemy demonstrated how good they were at blowing up static targets. Almost before the floor had finished retracting, the troops had released the magnets holding them to their clamps and were dropping to the frozen surface.
“It’s some kind of rock. Good footing and doesn’t melt,” the team’s first-footer reported.
“Perfect. What’s the friction?” Cora asked him. She’d been given command over the remnants of her own unit and two others that had lost officers.
“Zero-point-eight of Standard.”
That was pretty good for a world this far out from the star. At least they wouldn’t slip all over the place as they went.
“Roger. Proceed towards the target.”
Their objective was a small building which scanners had shown to be the entrance to a large underground complex. It was just on the other side of a small ridge which they’d landed behind because it was the only cover available for miles.
Two marines scaled the ridge and reported back. “No enemy fire, and I don’t see anything that looks like it could be a weapon. All I see is a dark spot on another dark spot, even in thermal imaging. The facility is nearly as cold as the terrain around it.”
“Something shot down one of our dropships, soldier.”
“With all due respect,” Tristan chimed in. “How do we know it just didn’t stop working due to faulty parts, just like everything else?”
“We don’t. But we can’t discard the possibility that someone out there is taking pot shots. Now shut up and get moving.”
The scouts moved ahead and Cora and Tristan replaced them at the top of the ridge.
“They’re right,” Tristan said. “The building looks just as cold as everything around it.”
“I can see that for myself. Maintain radio silence.”
One of the scouts’ voices came in through the net. “The entrance looks to be clear.”
“All right. Get inside. And be careful.”
Cora motioned for Tristan to follow, and he moved out. The icy ball in his stomach had been replaced by excitement. He’d been on the ground against the blobs before and knew that a well-guided exoskeleton could deal with most of what the aliens had in their ground arsenal.
It was a pleasure to be loping along in a powered suit after some time in s
tasis. The exoskeleton made easy work of the cold rock and topsoil—its combination of heated rubber pads and crampons allowing excellent grip—as Tristan loped along.
When he reached the entrance, he studied it in detail with his helmet’s thermal imaging function. The door was hangar-sized, and the area inside the building was big enough to hold one of their dropships, or some other kind of small transport vessel.
“Are we sure the radiation signals came from here? I’m not getting anything at all.”
“The techs on the Minstrel were pretty certain, yeah. But the way those ships are working, who knows? This place might have been abandoned ages ago.”
“I’m going to look at the far end.” Tristan knew he would run the biggest risk. The scouts would be advancing carefully along the two lateral walls, trying to spot defensive measures, but it was always necessary for someone to go down the middle, in the time-honored tradition of every marine corps from the days of ancient Earth onwards.
Some guys liked to take it slowly down the middle, but Tristan took it at a run. Anything nasty would see him regardless of what strategy he took and moving quickly meant that they might miss, and it also gave him some velocity he could use in his favor while taking evasive action.
Three-quarters of the way across, the lights went on inside the chamber, a dull reddish glow. Tristan instinctively jumped to one side, rolled as the suit landed, and pulled into a crouch. He held his hand on the trigger and moved his eyes to control the suit’s scanner system. There was no movement, and nothing seemed to be shooting at him.
“You think the motion sensor only activated the lights?”
“That might make sense. All the way out here, you might not get visitors too often, so you can’t keep the lights running all the time. And the few who did come probably wouldn’t know where to look for the switch. But I’ll admit that it would make more sense for a civilian installation.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 4