by Jay Allan
Bomber crews were heavily cross-trained. It didn’t make sense to have a craft become combat ineffective if one crew member was lost, and the AI could fill a lot of roles too, when necessary. In addition to a commander/pilot, each bomber carried a weapons specialist, an engineer, and a plotting/targeting technician. His people could fill in for each other on an ad hoc basis, but they were veterans and extremely proficient in their primary roles.
The bomber wings attracted a certain breed of recruit. Wheaton thought of his brethren as adventurous, though many characterized it differently. He’d heard crazy, psychotic, and deathwish just to name a few. The wings were the highest risk jobs in the navy, with casualty rates that usually exceeded those of front line Marine assault units. He didn’t consider himself suicidal, but he had to admit that taking a 60 ton vessel measuring less than 28 meters down the throat of a half-million ton battleship took a certain bravado.
He’d run the diagnostic twice – and ordered the other five ships of the squadron to do the same, eliciting poorly muffled groans from the crews. Tough, he thought. I may not know what we have to do, but I’m sure we’re going to need everything we’ve got, so these ships need to be 100%.
He’d just gone through the report from his last bomber when the launch alert sounded. His squadron was going out second, behind the 4th, so they sat in place for two minutes before the ship began to move toward the launch track. He had very little to do; the Cambrai’s battle computer would manage the entire operation. He wouldn’t take over until they were in space and received their mysterious orders.
The magnetic catapult was capable of imparting significant incremental acceleration to a launching bomber. Wheaton and his crew wore their pressure suits and strapped into their couches, and he gritted his teeth against the bone-rattling acceleration of launch.
It didn’t come. The bomber slid slowly down the catapult’s track and gently out into space. That wasn’t the only surprise. Cambrai and the other motherships had positioned themselves to launch the craft to the rear, and what minimal force the catapults did apply served to reduce the intrinsic velocity of the bombers. The squadrons were launched away from the enemy, and they were falling slowly behind the fleet.
The main com screen activated, displaying Admiral Compton, his neatly trimmed hair still mostly blonde, despite the deep ridges in his careworn face. His voice was soft and conversational. “By now you have all launched, and your AIs are executing minor course changes to place your squadrons in formation. I have chosen to broadcast the recording of these orders to all bomber crews, and not just squadron or ship commanders.”
He paused very briefly. “As you all know, we are facing an enemy with significantly greater strength than us. We’re looking at an uphill fight, and we’re just not going to win it unless we surprise them somehow.” Compton didn’t really believe they could win anyway, but there was no reason to share that with the crews.
“Once positioned, your squadrons will follow the fleet. At your present velocity, you will be positioned approximately 200,000 kilometers behind the main body when the fleets engage at close range. You will be running dark, with no thrust and only minimal systems active. You will be on total radio silence, with communication only on direct line of sight laser transmissions…and that only if absolutely necessary. You will be a hole in space, undetectable until you fire up your thrusters.”
Compton’s eyes bored out from the viewscreen, his intensity building as he spoke. “We will not be launching a conventional bomber attack against the enemy fleet. I have kept four squadrons in reserve, configured as interceptors to face the enemy bombers. The rest of our bomber wings…all of you…” He gestured toward the screen. “…will remain hidden in reserve until we are engaged with the enemy fleet at energy weapons range.”
The crews watching the tape began to understand. A bomber attack on the enemy fleet at close range while it was heavily engaged with the Alliance forces would almost certainly achieve total surprise. If they could get in quickly enough, and make their runs count, they could inflict enormous damage.
“It is my hope the enemy will assume that we do not have a full complement of bomber squadrons, and that the combat space patrol is our full strength. As you all know, we suffered very heavy bomber losses at Gliese 250, and it is just possible that the enemy will deduce that we were unable to replace those in time for this operation.” He paused, his eyes glancing down momentarily as he spoke of the bomber crews in the fight at Gliese. He knew how much those losses had stung Garret, and they had affected him just as badly. He’d seen few such displays of selfless valor and he, like Garret, credited the victory to those pilots and crews.
“I don’t need to remind you that the fleet will be facing an enormous missile barrage before we even get into close range. We are almost certainly going to suffer major losses before you are given the signal to attack, and we are all counting on you, on your skills and determination, to help even the odds. When you attack you must make every shot count. I want all of you to focus on the Imperial and Europan capital ships. They are new to the conflict and their point defense and damage control are likely less efficient than that of the CAC and Caliphate forces. You are to target only capital ships. I know the escorts will be shooting at you, but I need you to ignore that take out enemy battleships.”
Compton hesitated again, for a bit longer this time. “You were all assigned to this fleet after the Battle of Gliese 250, but you are aware of what happened there. Your comrades redefined the word courage in that fight, and they paid for our victory with their sacrifice. Here, you fight not only for them, not only for this fleet and the thousands of naval personnel it carries. There are also 45,000 veteran Marines on the surface of planet four, even now fighting for their lives. Our orders are to hold at all costs, but even if they weren’t, even if they allowed for us to fall back and run for the warp gate, I would never leave this system and abandon General Holm and his troops to certain destruction. This fleet will win here, or it will die here. Before this story is written I will ask every man and woman in this command for every shred of devotion and valor they possess. As I am asking all of you now. I am counting on you; we are all counting on you. Godspeed and good luck to you.”
Wheaton stared intently as the now-blank screen, his jaw clenched, his eyes moist. He couldn’t speak for anyone else, but he was ready. He didn’t have to speak for anyone else…192 crew on 48 bombers felt as one. They would not fail.
Chapter 21
Near 1st Brigade HQ
Northern Spur of the Lysandra Plateau
Epsilon Eridani IV
“Give me another stim, Hector.” Erik Cain hadn’t slept for a week; the drugs were the only thing keeping him standing.
“Colonel, there is a limit to the dosages your body can endure.” The AI actually managed to sound genuinely concerned. Cain could never quite decide if he thought the quasi-sentient computer’s emotions were real or a carefully constructed illusion.
“Just give me the shot.” Cain was irritable, and he snapped his response, then sighed and softened his tone. “There is no alternative, Hector. I can’t exactly go take a nap right now, can I?”
Cain felt the injection, and within a few seconds the cloudiness began to clear from his head. He was grateful the AI didn’t feel the need to respond to his rhetorical question.
He hadn’t exceeded his orders when he attacked the enemy and seized this position, at least not technically, though he wondered if a board of inquiry would see it the same way. He knew in his gut they were in trouble on Carson’s World, and when he saw the chance to grab the northern heights of the Lysandra Plateau he took it. His attack went better than he could have expected, and 1st Brigade advanced deep into enemy territory.
His initiative had created an opportunity. His position was a knife thrust into the side of the enemy, and he was a threat to the flank of any advance they might make. They had to take him out before they could move south and overrun the rest of I Corps
. But the position was highly defensible, and 1st Brigade’s men and women were veterans…and totally devoted to their brash, stubborn, and unconventional commander. They would fight to the last if he asked them to, and they knew if it came to that, Erik Cain would be in the line with them.
The enemy had been attacking non-stop for days, and slowly and at great cost 1st Brigade was being pushed back. Cain had no idea how many casualties his people had inflicted; he’d stopped trying to keep track when he hit 10,000. But 1st Brigade had bled too, and well under half its 3,600 troops were still in the field. Companies were holding lines where a battalion would have stood a week before, and squads were covering frontages a platoon would be hard-pressed to handle.
They’d been cut off for four days, and supplies were running low. Cain had been everywhere, rallying the troops and personally checking every position, sometimes moving an auto-cannon or other weapon a few meters to improve the field of fire. Outwardly he was determined and optimistic; everywhere his troops saw him he was the avatar of victory, utterly certain they would prevail. In his own head, he was wracked with doubt and not at all sure they could hold. He’d even developed a contingency plan to withdraw his survivors into the mountains to the east and turn them into a guerilla raiding force if they could no longer hold a conventional position.
He knew this battle would add mightily to his pantheon of ghostly companions, the shades of troopers who’d died under his command. Cain had never managed to stop blaming himself for the Marines he lost, and this was probably going to be the worst of all. It had been his choice to seize the plateau, and while it was tactically a brilliant move in terms of the battle as a whole, it also placed 1st Brigade squarely in the line of fire. He had made that choice; his soldiers just obeyed his orders. The fact that, almost to a man, 1st Brigade would have volunteered to follow him into the deepest ring of hell, didn’t occur to him or ease his guilt. But Cain never let any of that interfere with his command decisions. In the field his purpose was to win the battle, whatever the cost. His guilt and self-loathing would wait until the fight was won.
He knew General Holm would be trying to break through to them, but there had been no communication for days. He’d never seen jamming this intense or covering such a wide area. He assumed they were facing something new developed by their enemies, though in fact it was more of a massive application of existing technology rather than any high tech breakthroughs. Even without confirmation, Cain was as sure that the general was coming as he was of his name. He just hoped the relief came in time.
At least his political officer was leaving him alone. Captain Warren had not been prepared to follow Erik Cain into the types of places he routinely went, and he’d spent most of the last week in the cave 1st Brigade was using as a combination HQ and aid station. The few times he’d come along to the front lines, Erik suspected he’d tested the limits on how much urine a fighting suit could reprocess.
Now he had Captain Teller on the line. The general had asked him to deploy his special action teams to try and find out why this planet was so important to both the CAC and the Alliance. Cain also agreed that there was some secret, though he hated detaching his best troops to track it down when he needed them on the battle line. Now, it seemed, they had found something extraordinary, so much so that Teller wouldn’t discuss it over the com.
Cain wanted to go; he wanted to see the secret of Epsilon Eridani IV. But there was no way he could leave the brigade…not now. Especially not now when he’d just lost his right arm. Jax had been hit by a sniper a few hours before when he’d gone up to the front to scout the enemy movements. The big ox would pull through, but he wasn’t taking command of the brigade anytime soon, nor was he heading 20 klicks over the mountains to check out whatever Teller found. Right now Cain’s soldiers needed him, and they came first. Whatever was in that cave would just have to wait.
Angus Frasier was crouched in a deep foxhole, counting down the seconds from sixty. The colonel of the Scottish Regiment of the Royal Marine Division, he was positioned dead center in the six kilometer position occupied by his waiting troops. To a man they were in heavy cover; in just a few seconds the enemy lines would be rocked by six nuclear explosions, and the Black Watch, as they unofficially called themselves, would drive right through the chaos to link up with Erik Cain’s Americans on the beleaguered northern end of the Lysandra Plateau.
Frasier had come to know Cain fairly well since both of their units had been selected as part of I Corps OB. He’d found somewhat of a kindred spirit in the gritty Yank, as he’d taken to calling him. Yank was a term that had fallen largely into disuse since the formation of the Alliance, but the Scots in the service clung fiercely to any shred of tradition, and the Black Watch even more so.
Frasier had a similar history, having found his way from the worst of the Edinburgh slums to a highly placed military command, and the two were similarly devoted to their soldiers. The stubborn Scot had no intention of letting Cain’s troops be overrun, not while there was breath in his body. The rest of the Royal Marines had driven this far, and suffered heavy casualties in doing so. Now it was up to Frasier’s Scots, along with James Prescott’s Canadian Regiment deployed 12 kilometers south, to cut through the final enemy line and relieve 1st Brigade.
When he got to ten in his countdown, Mack, his AI, gave him an automated warning, and he crouched lower – they were deployed very close to the blast radius, and anyone caught unprotected was likely to end up a casualty.
In armor you don’t feel the wind from the shockwave or the heat from the blast, but you can hear the rocks and debris bouncing off your suit. Visors automatically deactivated and blast shields slammed shut, protecting the eyes of the Scots from damage. Their suits measured the outside temperature and monitored radiation levels, but their tactical plan was based on timing, not analysis of data. Sixty seconds after the blasts, the soldiers of the Black Watch leapt out of their covered positions and attacked.
Across the field, largely unheard by the armored enemy, the sound of bagpipes filled the air. The music was recorded, of course, blaring at deafening levels from a number of small bots that accompanied the advancing troops. More tradition, and while largely ineffectual at intimidating the enemy, it did have a morale effect on the Scots themselves, who heard the music on their suit coms. Frasier imagined what it must have been like, centuries before, when troops marched to the fight to the sound of live pipes.
Frasier’s troops swarmed quickly across the open field, largely ignoring cover in order to maximize the effects of shock from the nuclear attack. They took sporadic fire from a few surviving enemy strongpoints and suffered light casualties as they moved quickly through the devastated zone, splitting into columns and avoiding the worst of the hotspots.
The enemy was bringing up reserves to backstop the stricken position, mostly second line Europan troops – no match for the veterans of the Black Watch, who tore into them savagely and sent them fleeing to the rear. But modern war is messy, and the Scots were starting to take heavier losses as they drove the last stretch toward 1st Brigade’s position.
Frasier looked at the schematic on his visor. One last attack and they would break through to Cain’s position on the plateau. One last group of enemies to face. If these are more reservists, Frasier thought, we should reach the Americans in less than an hour.
But they weren’t reservists; they were frontline Janissaries, and there were a lot of them. “There’s no going back, Angus,” he muttered to himself. He set his comlink to address the entire regiment. “Listen to me, Black Watch!” He was worried about this attack, but his blood was up, and it came through in his speech. “The American 1st Brigade has been cut off for days now, attacked relentlessly from all sides. We are going to relieve them, and we are going to do it now! In front of us is the last group of enemy between us and our comrades.”
He paused, allowing his words to hover briefly in the air. “Scots, are you with me? For I’ll not come back from this battle unl
ess our brothers and sisters come back with us.” He reloaded his mag rifle, and held it at the ready. “Let’s go, Scots! Our friends are waiting for us, and we cannot abandon them.”
He lunged forward, disregarding all tactical directives on the proper place for a colonel in his unit, another trait he shared with Erik Cain. The entire regiment advanced, but they were bogged down almost immediately by heavy fire. The Janissaries were veterans just like them, and the two formations savaged each other. All along the line, heavy weapons teams grabbed any vantage point and poured fire into the enemy line. Troops crawled forward, desperately struggling to gain a few meters, and paying dearly for it.
Frasier was in the thick of the fight, and he picked up a minor wound on his arm. He wasn’t at all sure they’d be able to break through. The Janissaries wouldn’t surrender, and they wouldn’t retreat either, not until they were shattered. And the Black Watch was running out of soldiers and ammunition.
The savagery of the fight increased, with neither side willing to back down, and it looked as if the two units would annihilate each other. Suddenly, Mack alerted Frasier to another body of troops moving up behind the enemy force. His heart sank – if the enemy was getting reinforcements the battle was as good as over. But a second later the transponders identified the new arrivals as friendlies. Whoever they were, they slammed into the rear and flank of the Janissaries, while Frasier and the Black Watch redoubled their effort from the front. In a few minutes the Caliphate troops were broken, most of them dead, the rest in flight.