Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  “That is true, Joe, but the Wurgalan don’t know that. A couple maser shots from the Dutchman should make them scatter their formation, preventing them massing for an attack on the Condors.”

  “You think.”

  “I do think, but you are the military tactician, not me. We have Kristang Dragon dropship that could be added to the fight-”

  “No. Those Kristang dropships don’t have enough technological advantage over the Wurgalan to make me comfortable about using them in combat. It’s my job to worry, Skippy, I’m captain of the ship. What do you know about the space station near the fourth plan- This is awkward calling it ‘fourth planet’. It’s like Mars, so we’ll call it, uh, ‘Barsoom’? Any objections?” I picked the name from some old sci-fi novels I read as a kid. “No? Good.”

  “The space station is very close to where I expected it. No issues there.”

  “Very close? It’s just coasting along in orbit. Why isn’t it exactly where you expected?”

  Skippy sighed like an elementary school teacher explaining something over and over to the dumbest kid in the class. “Because, Joe, almost nothing in space is ever exactly static. An orbiting station vents atmosphere, either from leaks or from airlocks and docking bays opening. Solar wind particles push on it unevenly. Launching and recovering dropships pushes the station around. Even personnel walking inside the station make it wobble, as their feet push on the floor and their mass shifts from one location to another. All objects in orbit need to perform regular station-keeping adjustments. And the station is only eighty freakin’ meters from where I expected it to be, based on data that is two years old. You big jerk.”

  “I got the message, Skippy. Colonel Chang, pull the senior leaders together in ten minutes and we’ll make a Go-No Go decision on the op.”

  The decision was Go. We spent two hours maneuvering the ship in normal space, to get it pointed in exactly the right direction and traveling at the exact speed required. Teams got into their dropships, we purged the docking bays of air and slid the doors open. The dropships ran their engines up and everyone involved double-checked things they had already triple-checked. Part of the reason we were not in a hurry was that Skippy had learned there was a briefing by a high-ranking official visiting the main airbase on Barsoom, so we expected few of their birds would be in the air at that time. Pilots forced to listen to a boring speech might be just a bit slower to rush toward their aircraft during an alert, allowing us precious seconds to destroy those dropships while still in their hangars. We hoped.

  Finally, I gave the order to jump, and the generic starfield outside was instantly replaced by a starfield with a red dot the size of a Ping-Pong ball that was the planet Barsoom. Ships come out of a jump almost blind and the Dutchman was no exception to that rule, especially now that Skippy no longer had many of his special abilities. To disable the space station, we had to hit it in the right places, and to do that we needed two things. First, to know exactly where the space station was located, and because we couldn’t afford for that info to be hours old, we jumped in only eight lightminutes away, on the far side of Barsoom where our gamma ray burst would not be seen from the third planet. The second thing we needed was for our final jump to be short, making it easy for Skippy to be extra super-duper accurate about where we emerged from the next jump. Our targeting sensors would still be resetting after the next jump, so Skippy had to pre-program precise firing solutions into our targeting computers before the jump; our weapons simply had to follow instructions.

  Skippy got an exact fix on the space station’s location and as soon as our overworked drive coils were ready, we jumped again to launch the assault. The reddish orb of Barsoom loomed large on the main display, and something zoomed past on the screen faster than my eyes could follow; fortunately Skippy’s firing solutions were deadly accurate and we nailed the space station’s defense shield projectors with three maser blasts before our ship zipped past. Missiles that were ready to go before our jump rocketed out of their launch tubes and impacted the surprised and now-defenseless station, tearing into its central hub and causing it to break apart, sending the rotating arms flying off into space. Less than eight seconds after the Flying Dutchman emerged from jump, the space station was no longer a threat to us, and no longer capable of providing cover for the planet below.

  The planet. It was growing fast, too fast in the display. “All dropships away,” Chang announced in the CIC as my heart was in my throat from seeing the dusty red soil of Barsoom approaching way too fast. I mean, if I lived down there, I could see my house, we appeared to be that close. “Masers firing at surface targets. Second volley of missiles are away. We are clear.” As I opened my mouth to shout a panicked order, Desai executed pre-planned instructions and we jumped for a third time. This time, we emerged behind our prior course, as if we’d gone back in time. The ship was still racing toward the planet, but this time the planet was farther away and we were not in immediate danger of crashing into Barsoom.

  “Skippy?” I asked.

  Anticipating my question, he answered. “Jump drive is in acceptable condition, however we will not be able to jump again for another nine minutes. Jumping not recommended for at least thirteen minutes. The space station is disabled, and our maser cannons knocked out shield generators at the airbase. Hmm, that was good shooting, even if I am praising myself. Our missiles will be impacting in three, two, one, impact. Assessing battle damage now. Secondary explosions. Wow! That was a big one. We must have hit an ammo dump or fuel storage tanks.” One intelligence item Skippy had not been able to obtain had been a detailed schematic of the main airbase on Barsoom, apparently it was under constant construction and the Wurgalan were not good at updating their files in a timely manner. Due to lack of data, Skippy had been forced to guess which targets to hit while we were still outside the star system. “Picking up alarms now; yup, the octopussies are scrambling to launch all available aircraft. Which, I think, is going to be a lot less now that our missiles ransacked that base. Hmm, Ok, there is a formation of four dropships that were already in the air on a training flight. The good news is they are not carrying a missile load, so they only have masers to shoot with, and they are low on fuel. The bad news is they are within sixty kilometers of our target, and their leader has told her fellow pilots she intends to crash into our ships if that is necessary to stop us. And, more aircraft are launching now. Some of their aircraft were in hardened underground shelters. Uh oh, it looks like there are a lot of those underground shelters. They can’t all have aircraft in them! Damn it, those shelters weren’t on the current schematic of the airbase!”

  “We can’t afford to expend any more antiship missiles now,” I declared unhappily. “Can we target those shelters with our maser cannons? Hit the ones that have not yet launched aircraft?”

  “Joe, many of those shelters may be empty, hitting them would be like playing whack-a-mole by trying to hit all the holes. And our masers are not powerful enough to punch down through that hardened material to hit the shelters.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but if we keep up a constant fire on those shelters, aircraft will have to stay in there; they won’t be able to launch.”

  “Oh,” Skippy’s voice was chastened. “Duh. I should have thought of that. Targeting solutions are loaded into fire control computers now.”

  “Colonel Chang, let’s make the Wurgalan keep their heads down,” I ordered.

  “With pleasure, Sir,” he replied, and turned his attention to the people at the weapons stations in CIC.

  “Joe I have to caution you,” Skippy added. “While we are firing masers, we are still able to maintain stealth so the Wurgalan will not discover what type of ship this is, but they will get a lock on our position.”

  “Understood, Skippy, we will take that-” The ship rocked slightly.

  “That was a near-miss by a maser cannon on the surface,” Skippy warned. “No damage to the ship. Enemy has launched missiles at us. Seven missiles inbound.”

>   I knew we had an advantage from being at the top of the planet’s gravity well, and the missile’s wildly hot boost-phase exhaust was giving away their positions. “Any way we can hit those missiles from here, thin out their numbers?”

  “That would be waste of time from here,” Skippy advised. “By the time our maser bolts reach them, the missiles will have maneuvered out of the way. I believe our point-defense systems can cope with seven missiles of Wurgalan-level technology. But, Joe, we will need to pause our maser bombardment of the surface.”

  “All right,” I clenched my fists. “Chang, continue hitting those aircraft shelters until Skippy instructs you to break off. I don’t like leaving our dropships to fight by themselves.”

  “Raptors, this is Raptor Lead,” Samantha ‘Fireball’ Reed heard in her headset. “Dutchman needs to break off their attack to deal with vampires, it’s up to us now.” The combat air patrol leader used the American standard brevity code ‘vampire’ to designate a hostile antiship missile, in this case alien antiship missiles attacking their star carrier. The pirate ship that was their only ride home. Sami’s hand clenched when she heard the Dutchman was under attack, then she forced her hand to relax so she could control her Falcon dropship. There wasn’t anything she could do to directly help the Dutchman; what she could do was perform her own assigned task quickly and efficiently, so the mission could be completed and the Dutchman could jump away to safety. Or to comparative safety, in a galaxy that was entirely hostile to a ship full of pirate humans. “Raptor Two,” the flight leader called Sami, “there are four bandits southwest of us at Angels thirty one, you are cleared hot to engage. Be advised Skippy says those four bandits do not, repeat, do not have missiles, so any birds in the air will be yours.”

  “Roger that,” Sami acknowledged with a tight smile.

  “Fireball,” the leader added, “splash those bandits if you have to, but the priority is to keep them away from the Condors.”

  “Understood,” this time Sami’s smile inside the visor of her helmet was broader. She saw the four enemy aircraft on her display, they were maintaining a tight formation and gaining speed and altitude rapidly, closing the distance to her even before she turned. With a flick of the little finger on her left hand, she designated the four bandits as hostile and locked targeting sensors on them. “Fireball is engaged.” With another finger she throttled up her engines, snapping her expression to a frown as the turbines spooled up only partway. Before the mission, Skippy had loaded revised software into all six Thuranin dropships so they would perform as if they were Kristang craft. In an emergency, there was a red button Sami could press to override the new software and restore the flight control system to its nominal Thuranin specs for full performance, but that would need to be an extreme emergency indeed. Until then, the Falcon was limited to performing like a Kristang Dragon dropship, which Sami had to remind herself could blow away the hottest combat aircraft on Earth.

  With her Falcon accelerating downward toward the four enemy aircraft, the distance was closing rapidly. Sami knew her duty was not to be a hotshot glory hog; she also knew the surest way to keep those four Wurgalan fighters away from the vulnerable Condors was if those Wurgalan craft were hot pieces of shrapnel raining over the dusty red surface of Barsoom. “One missile each,” she advised her copilot, “let’s not waste ordnance until we know what these octopussies can do.” Unlike the dropships, their Thuranin air-to-air missiles were not restricted to operating as if they were Kristang weapons; the thought was that in the heat and confusion of battle no one had time to notice missiles flying slightly faster or more accurately than expected.

  “Roger that, we are now within the engagement envelope,” Sami’s copilot Wu acknowledged. “Birds affirm,” she announced as all four missiles synced with the Falcon’s fire control system and acquired their assigned targets. “Birds away ripple,” she stated as the Falcon rocked slightly, adjusting automatically as four missiles were ejected simultaneously.

  On the wraparound display that substituted for cockpit windows, Sami could see four bright flashes, then four wispy white contrails. Immediately, she reduced power and turned to the right. “Switch to guns,” she ordered. “I’m putting us between the bandits and the Condors.” On the display, she saw the four bandits breaking formation and splitting apart in reaction to the incoming missiles, and she saw her missiles streaking after the enemy. A Falcon carried sixteen multipurpose missiles. Sixteen seemed like a lot when Sami had been used to a fighter carrying four or six missiles in the US Air Force, but with alien aircraft possessing defensive maser beams that could intercept missiles, in a worst-case scenario she may need all sixteen just to kill four Wurgalan fighters. The distant flashes of their star carrier’s maser cannon pummeling the airbase had stopped, and Sami could see more enemy aircraft launching from the airbase at the edge of her sensor coverage. Two of the Falcons had moved to intercept, while Raptor Three was flying cover close to the pair of descending Condors. “This could turn into one hell of a furball,” she murmured worriedly, “let’s hope the ground-pounders get this over with ASAP.”

  The lead ground-pounder would have heartily agreed with Sami’s sentiment as he braced himself with his knees in the Condor, which had completed its non-stealthy and fiery entry to Barsoom’s thin atmosphere. Over the cockpit channel, Major Smythe could hear the two pilots tersely discussing how the dropship’s shields had been strained by protecting the Condor’s leading edges and belly from superheated plasma created by the falling craft burning a hole down through the air. As the pilots were not yet worried about the condition of the shields or any other onboard system, he mentally tuned them out and concentrated on understanding the tactical situation.

  The six dropships had launched from the Flying Dutchman just above the upper edge of the atmosphere, and had scorched their way downward on a minimum-time-to-target flight profile. With only thirty minutes for the entire operation, they could not waste time getting down to the surface, so stealth had been thrown out the window along with any attempt to conceal their objective. The two Condors had flown directly at the objective, with the four Falcons flying cover between the objective and that main airbase.

  Smythe had been in bad helicopter rides during his time in the military, when he had prayed for the aircraft to stop bouncing up and down in a vicious storm. The ride down to the surface of Barsoom was worse. The Condor, a remarkable piece of advanced Thuranin engineering, had bounced and rocked and rattled until Smythe thought it would shake itself and him apart. Even with sophisticated systems to compensate for external forces and protect the occupants from being crushed during the six-Gee descent, Smythe had found it hard to breathe, as if an elephant was sitting on his chest. Now that the decent was over and the Condor was racing at low altitude toward the objective, Smythe pulled up the tactical display in his helmet’s visor and was almost shocked to see that, so far, everything was proceeding according to plan.

  “Executing pop-up in three, two, one, now.” The pilot advised, and Smythe was first pressed down into his seat, then briefly experienced zero gravity at the top of the arc, as the Condor and its twin leapt up to gain altitude and a line of sight to the objective.

  Their objective was part of an Elder facility that had been discovered in ancient times by the Maxolhx, who had also long ago removed everything they thought might be useful or interesting. The Maxolhx had no interest in the star system that was far from any active wormhole, so the planets there had remained uninhabited until a wormhole shift made the system more accessible. The first species to stake a claim had been the Kristang, but because of a long-standing dispute between the Kristang’s patrons the Thuranin and the Wurgalan’s patrons the Bosphuraq, the Kristang had been encouraged to give the system to the Wurgalan. As this ‘encouragement’ was delivered in the form of orbital bombardment by a trio of Bosphuraq battleships, the Kristang were quickly persuaded of the strength of argument in favor of the Wurgalan. Since the time Wurgalan took up residence in
a star system which had nothing special going for it, they had also taken possession of the Elder site on the fourth planet, which they had absolutely no idea what to do with. The site had been fairly stripped by the Maxolhx, so even though the Wurgalan were desperate to gain a technological advantage over their hated rivals the Kristang, they could not find anything useful among the Elder artifacts. No wanting to appear ungrateful that their patrons had given the star system to them, the Wurgalan constructed a dome over the Elder site and then, as years and then centuries passed without anyone knowing what to do with the site, they mostly forgot about it. The remaining Elder objects under the dome became curiosities, with rare VIPs who bothered to visit the fourth planet occasionally being offered a tour. Every four or five centuries, a Wurgalan scientist requested to examine the Elder equipment, and when no new knowledge or insight was gained, the dome went back into its peaceful slumber.

  “The objective looks abandoned, just as Skippy said,” Smythe noted with satisfaction as his helmet visor displayed images from the Condor’s nose camera. A layer of red dust coated the dome, piling up thick around the ribs and thinner toward the middle of the glass sections. The actual dome was long-neglected, however the underground military base that had originally been established to provide security for the dome was still active, as evidenced by the presence of two transport aircraft parked on their landing pads. Smythe could see miniature pink dust devils swirling across the pads as those aircraft spun up their turbines for takeoff. “Can you knock out those transports?”