First things first. How long did he have before the charges turned the facility into a crater and a cloud of debris that would rain onto his head? He cycled through a bunch of status reports and alarms before he finally located the timer. There was still plenty of time, nearly forty minutes.
He regretted having set the timers so conservatively. The hour he’d calculated as sufficient time to evacuate the Marines ended up being time that, if they knew what they were doing, the defenders could use to deactivate the charges.
Speaking of the marines, where were they? “Can anyone hear me? This is Tristan from the 243rd. I’m pretty much all that’s left of the unit. Just got out of the enemy installation. Anyone out here?”
“This is Bettina from the 65th. I got posted to sentry duty. I saw you run past just now, I think.” The voice sounded very scared and much too young for a shock marine.
“Where are you?”
“Right next to the entrance. Glare was a bitch so I’m in the building’s shade.”
He looked. In the atmosphere-less environment of the moon, the stark light of the star created deep ebony shadows that looked like they’d been cut with a laser torch. He couldn’t find the marine in her suit until he switched to thermal imaging.
There she was. A green blotch over the blues, greens, and blacks of everything else.
“I’d get out of there, if I were you.”
“This is my post. Platoon leader’s orders.”
“Yeah, well that building’s about to blow, and your platoon leader’s inside it somewhere with a bunch of holes through him. Now get over here.”
“Shouldn’t we get in there and help out?”
“No one to help. I checked. Nearly got killed for my trouble.”
“No one?”
“There were some serious defenses inside. Now will you please get out of there?” He knew they had plenty of time to get clear of the blast zone, but knowing how many explosives they’d rigged was making him nervous. Plus, the further he got from those robots, the better he’d feel.
The marine came reluctantly, but she came. She was about halfway to where Tristan had taken cover when a new voice came in over the Tacnet.
“Hello, can anyone hear me?”
“Loud and clear, who is this?”
“This is Commander Melina Tau Osella. I’m with the fighter corps. Got knocked out of combat, unfortunately. I’m on the surface.”
“Yeah, I think I saw you go down. Where are you?”
His display blinked to inform him that he was receiving coordinates through the Tacnet. The fighter seemed to have gone down a little under two kilometers from their position.
“All right. We’ll be there in a little while. Hang on.” He toggled to the marine-only net. “What do you think, do we rendezvous with her or should we hold here for a while? I’m not really comfortable with leaving the defenders at our rear, but I don’t think they’ll come out of the bunker after us. My opinion is that we should go.”
“How should I know? This is my first rodeo. Hell, they left me outside on guard duty. It doesn’t seem that they trusted me either.”
“All right. I’m hoping that the enemy facility is going to blow up in a few minutes, so let’s move back. If they come out after us, we can have the fighter command pick them off.” Tristan set off in the direction of the stricken fighter, with Bettina on his heels.
“Well, that’s a lucky break, at least,” he said when the fighter finally came into sight.
It had landed right side up and looked pretty intact except for some damage to the nose. He paid particular attention to the cockpit area, relieved to see that it had maintained integrity and that the pilot was moving around inside.
The best thing about the landing site, however, was simply the fact that the pilot had ditched her fighter in the center of a crater twenty meters wide and maybe three or four meters deep. That beauty of it was that the rim would offer a certain amount of cover both against any of the facility’s defenders that might have followed them and the hopefully forthcoming explosion.
“Stay here and watch for some tracked cylinders. If any of those appear, shoot them and let me know. You don’t want them to see you first, so it might be a good idea to stay out of sight.” He loped off to where the pilot was gesturing to him from inside her cockpit.
“Can you do me a favor?” she asked over the Tacnet.
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Display says I’m venting air, but I can’t see anything from here, and it’s not telling me where. Do you have an oxygen sensor?”
“I do. Let me look around.”
It was the work of a few minutes. Waving the appendage—fortunately, the scanner was mounted on the suit’s left gauntlet—over the fighter and then following the intensifying levels of trace gas in the air led Tristan to a tiny crack in an air tube. He removed the protective paneling and used part of his own suit’s sealant to stop the loss.
“How’s that?”
“Worked like a charm. Pressure is building again, and I didn’t lose all that much air. Thanks! Good news is that the ship is spaceworthy. I may be able to get off the ground once the mop-up action above us is over. Just running a few more diagnostics.”
“All right. See if you can warn the fighters that, if everything goes well, the building over there will be exploding pretty vigorously in…” he checked his display. “A little under five minutes.”
“All right, I’ll let them know.”
Tristan ran back to the crater lip and took cover behind it. “You might want to hit the deck, Bettina,” he said. “In a couple of minutes, there may be a bunch of rocks flying around.”
She complied.
The final ten seconds of the countdown were agony. Had the defenders found the charges? If so, had they gotten them all? He suspected that, whatever the cylinder was, it was delicate. A single charge should be enough to take it down.
What would they do if it didn’t blow? The absence of an enemy fleet meant that they could send through another bunch of marine platoons, better armed and armored against the resistance they were going to meet and a complete overview of the facility’s layout. The second time around should be a cakewalk.
But he wanted the sacrifice of the men and women lying dead under the soil of a moon a hundred light-years from their home to mean more than just decent intel. He wanted them to be a part of a human victory.
The ground shook and he smiled to himself. Deep beneath the ground, charges were going off.
The timers weren’t exactly perfectly coordinated. Each detonation shook the ground individually, and each represented sweet vindication.
He started to count, not sure how long they would need to stay under the relative cover of the crater lip before it would be safe to emerge. He was just about to crawl up the slope when the ground convulsed and threw him into the air.
A sudden shaft of brightness and debris exploded from the direction of the bunker. In the distance, it created an edifice of light.
“Secondary explosion!” he told Bettina. “Big mother, too. Stay down.”
The debris began to fall around them moments later. Small pieces at first, followed by chunks of building material and lunar rock dozens of meters across. Tristan barely dared to move as stones fell all around him, only rotating his head to see if the woman in the fighter had survived the initial barrage. The ship, amazingly, still seemed intact.
The end of falling stones was followed by a dust cloud that enveloped him and didn’t allow him to see anything further than ten meters away.
Tristan stood. “Bettina. It’s probably safe to get up now. Let’s go check on the pilot.”
He walked towards her.
“Come on, get up.”
But as his remaining gauntlet pulled on the suit, his heart sank. The helmet was dented and deformed, as if it had been impacted by something enormous. Her face was still intact, but the vacuum had already done its job. Lifeless eyes and a rictus of unbearable p
ain stared back at him.
He turned away, knowing it would be no use to try to close her eyes. They were frozen solid, and his suit wasn’t built for delicate operations.
“Marine, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, Commander, loud and clear.”
“Oh, that’s a relief. Thought you guys were goners.”
“Unfortunately, you were half right.”
“Oh.”
Tristan marched over to the fighter. “Your luck seems to be holding, Commander.” There were some new dents on the airframe, but other than that, the ship hadn’t taken any damage.
They waited as the dust dropped silently around them. “I’m arranging for pickup for you. I think I’ll be able to fly back,” the pilot told him.
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
He put the suit into power-saving mode and watched the planet the moon orbited come back into focus as the haze dissipated. Such a green, beautiful thing hanging in the sky.
The position meant that Tristan had a front row seat when the green planet suddenly turned black. Millions of tiny specks appeared on the surface and coalesced into a black cloud that resembled nothing so much as a swarm of angry insects on an agricultural world.
The cloud swirled, grew and then speared off the planet into space.
It headed straight towards the human fleet.
Chapter 9
Timini Persei Abdullah double-checked her monitors before calling out to her superior officer. “Captain,” she said, and waited for the man’s full attention before continuing. “Whatever was stopping us from reaching the planet just disappeared. Our missiles are getting into the atmosphere.”
“Good.” Captain Silenni was an officer whose long grey hair was tied in a tight braid. Every one of his bridge crew knew his story: he hadn’t volunteered for this mission; in fact, he’d been selected for evacuation to regions of space where the fighting was likely to arrive long after his death, but he’d been the commanding officer of the Centauri’s Courage for so long that, when the ship was pressed into duty, he’d elected to come along anyway. “Tell the fighter commanders to probe the area. If they can duplicate your findings, then order them to hit the planet.”
She relayed the orders over the fighter wing command Tacnet and watched her display as the fighters, who’d seemed to be milling about aimlessly, quickly re-formed their ranks and dove for the surface. A couple of exploratory missiles were, apparently, enough for the insane fighter jockeys to decide that the shield was actually down and drive straight into the spot where it had been.
Timini held her breath, half-expecting the blue dots representing the members of the fighter squadrons to disappear, atomized as they slammed into a shield which was somehow still there—or worse, into a shield that suddenly came back online.
But it didn’t happen. The fighters raced towards the surface of the planet with no further impediment. Her display wasn’t set up to show in-atmosphere action—others were assigned to that role—so she listened in on the command Tac to follow the action. A number of fighter wings approached the enemy and their commanders were discussing the lay of the land. Their voices seemed unconcerned.
“Enemy sighted, northern hemisphere.”
“I see ‘em. There’s a lot of bogeys out there.”
“Yeah, but remember what the people who attacked the moon reported. They don’t have much firepower.”
“They might not need it. I have visual and it looks like a black sandstorm in front of me. How in the world are we going to deal with that many?”
“Very patiently. Just don’t crash into them and you’ll be fine. I’m taking the twelfth wing in.”
“Good luck!”
Silence reigned over the command net for a few moments as the officers switched to their wing-specific frequencies to coordinate the assault with their squadron members. Timini held her breath as she waited to see what the results of the initial run would be.
The tension wasn’t unbearable, though. The news from the moon engagement had been encouraging. The defenders were severely limited in their capacity to shoot down fighters, and most of the fighters that had been lost in that action had succumbed to the mysterious failures that everything seemed to be subject to since their arrival. The majority of those had involved computer breakdowns, which was new, but were otherwise the continuation of a pattern. Knowing this beforehand allowed everyone to breathe a little easier.
“Oh, fuck, did you see that?” a voice came through. “The twelfth just got wiped out.”
“Wiped out? How?”
“Blown out of the sky on their first run. All of ‘em. Whatever these guys are shooting, it’s not some watered-down ammo.”
“I’m closing in… man, those things are fast! They look like that wing the marines saw at the ice giant.”
Then there was silence again before a different voice spoke, a nervous voice. “Hello, calling the seventh and the fourteenth? Anyone out there? This is the fifth. We’re in retreat, but they’re running us down fast. Can you get them off our tail?”
Only silence answered the call.
Timini was brought back to the reality of the bridge by a sudden chime coming from her console. Her screen had lit up. Where there had once been a scattering of blue dots—representing the fighter wings that had gone down to the planet—the display showed a near-solid snake composed of red pinpoints. “Incoming!” she said.
“Direction?”
“From the planet. Millions of them. My system can’t give an exact count.”
“I see them… Oh, my God,” Silenni said. “All forward batteries, fire now, full power. Lateral defenses, full fire forward. See if we can hold them off long enough to turn around and get out of here.”
Blinding light streaked past the observatory deck towards the approaching swarm. It blinded Timini, and the ship shook around her with the effort of channeling that much power into energy weapons.
When she could see again, silence had descended on the bridge. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness and she was relieved to see that there was nothing outside. Just blackness.
Then she remembered that there should be much more than blackness in the viewport. There should have been stars, especially the bright illumination of the nearby HR 8799. The planet should have been visible. So should the moon, off to the right.
The black sky seemed not to care what should have been.
Upon closer inspection, Tinini saw that even the blackness wasn’t quite right. Where the ebony of deep space was a dark, inky shade, the darkness before her eyes was matte, graphite-colored, more deep grey than black.
And it was moving. Swirls and currents flowed within, as if a pitch-black curtain had been drawn over the viewport and was being shaken by unseen hands. It took her a few moments to understand that what she was seeing was a cloud of attacking spacecraft, too many to count, swarming around the Centauri’s Courage.
In the silence of the bridge, she felt the carrier shudder. Once, twice, and then more times in such quick succession that she lost count. Alarms bleated everywhere, but except for one or two officers yelling instructions and status reports, the people present were frozen, staring at the viewport.
Glimpses of light, evidence of colossal explosions, made it through the curtain of attacking craft. Smaller sparks from energy weapons and explosions on the ship’s hull were nearer at hand.
The crew ignored all that as they watched the viewport. It was made of armored transparent plastic, a meter thick and stronger than titanium. The cloud outside was hitting it with projectile weapons. Every so often, one of the attackers would misjudge a turn and crash into it. Each impact against the huge window was a dull thud that the bridge officers knew meant there was that much less material between them and the colossal energies being unleashed on the other side.
Timini wondered what it would feel like to be torn into wet gibbets by a round designed to penetrate hull armor, the weaponry that had destroyed four flights of fighters in unde
r a minute. Would death be instantaneous, or would she feel the agony as the bullet shattered her fragile frame? She didn’t even try to imagine what being torn apart by an energy beam would feel like.
A direct hit to the center of the viewport sent a spider’s web of cracks through the central panel.
The next impact landed almost exactly in the same place. Timini saw the plastic panel disintegrate inward with enough force to decapitate an aide sitting directly beneath it, and then the plastic shards, the dead aide, and everything that wasn’t tied down began to rush towards the gaping hole in the viewport under the inescapable pressure of the vacuum of space.
Timini never found out how it would feel to be torn apart by a massive round. She did, however, get to experience the agony of being simultaneously frozen, asphyxiated, and having all her blood vessels burst in the vacuum of space. Fortunately, it was quickly over.
***
“Move it, marines. We got a fight on our hands, so look alive!”
As far as Tom was concerned, it was completely unnecessary advice. Swooping black shapes blasted through the corridors, shooting at any structures they could identify in time, crashing into many others. The invaders seemed to be doing as much damage to themselves as they were to the ship. Pieces of black enemy craft littered the staging area.
Unfortunately, the enemy dead lay among the broken bodies of a number of platoons of marines who’d been boarding their dropships when the first wave breached the hull of the Bard and had been cut down where they stood. The center of an open square fifty meters to a side was not ideal for taking cover, and the platoons had been cut to pieces, even though they reacted instantly and fired back at the flying attackers. At least they’d taken a few with them.
“What are they?”
“How should I know? They look like the thing in the recording. The one the marines from the Minstrel ran into on the moon of the ice giant.”
Tom looked at one of the things that had fallen, intact albeit with a hole through the middle, near his position. His companion was right. It was dark and wing-shaped, clearly constructed of metal or carbon composites or something and slightly over two meters long. The body was oval in cross-section, bulging out more in the center than towards the wingtips.
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 10