“Gotta hurry, guys,” she said over the platoon push channel. She had a timer running in her cupola vision panel, counting down the minutes left until the enemy ships would be overhead, along with a miniature view of the tactical display showing their inbound tracks. “I’m coming around to check how you look.” While her communications procedures reflected a less-than-military bearing in how she led her platoon, it was just one of her quirks. She put on the hard-core military façade when she absolutely had to, but otherwise she tossed it aside: it just got in her way. She’d been upbraided for what she called her own “gurlishness” on more than one occasion, but nobody gave her too much grief: she was the most competent tank commander and platoon leader in the entire regiment. And the reason she was platoon leader right now rather than platoon sergeant was that her company was short a second lieutenant, and the company commander had trusted her to take her platoon and go raise hell. Besides, in a regiment commanded by a man who wore spurs and a cavalry officer’s hat, and who used a cavalry saber as a pointer when he gave briefings, her own eccentricities hardly stood out.
Waiting until the sound of tinkling glass abated, she threw open the hatch and carefully crawled out onto the turret roof, crabbing along in the two feet of space between the turret and the building’s ceiling, her gloves protecting her hands from the shards of glass and wood covering the top of her tank. Swinging down from the barrel to the steeply sloped front glacis plate of the hull, she dropped to the floor of the shop, debris crunching under her boots. A crowd of civilians started to close in on her, shouting and making gestures that she didn’t need translated from Arabic and Chinese. She didn’t want to hurt anybody, but she drew her sidearm and held it across her chest where they could all see it: it didn’t shut them up, but they backed away quickly.
“Two minutes, sarge,” her gunner said tensely.
“Roger,” she replied as she ran out into the middle of the street. Turning around, she looked at her tank’s position: it was fully concealed from overhead, with two more floors above it that hopefully would mask its heat signature. There wasn’t even much debris on the sidewalk in front of the shop: most of it had imploded inward. She ran down the street, ignoring the passenger vehicles that still passed by, honking at her. Fucking morons, Coyle thought. Why aren’t they heading to shelter or something?
She checked the positions for the other three tanks in her platoon, happily noting that they were all fully concealed in the building. The Kreelans wouldn’t be able to see them unless they were standing right in front of them. And if they did that, she told herself, my tanks’ll blow the living shit out of them.
“Sixty seconds!”
Coyle sprinted back to her tank, quickly clambering back up to the turret, which had Chiquita painted in a flamboyant script in black against the green and brown camouflage paint of the vehicle. Dropping neatly into the cupola, she told her platoon, “Okay, everybody, make sure you’re buttoned up in case this building gets knocked down on top of us. The colonel would be really pissed if I lost anybody because they got hit on the head with a brick.” She smiled as her quip drew some less-than-respectful responses from her platoon. But they instantly did as she had ordered. They were wired and ready.
Just before she dropped into the turret and closed the hatch, she thought she heard the boom of distant thunder.
* * *
“They are networked,” shipmistress Elai-Tura’an informed Tesh-Dar, indicating the display of the land coming up to greet them. It was an unfamiliar term to her people, one that the builders had dug from the Books of Time as they built the ships and weapons to fight the humans. The Kreela of this age did not use such rudimentary technology, at least as any human would understand it. Tesh-Dar fully understood the concept, but it was for others to understand the details that made it work. Such technology was built into the ships of this ancient design, but, as with many of the electronic devices the builders had resurrected from those ages long past, the warriors had disdained to use them. Such things were from an age when nation-state warred against nation-state for dominance and resources, before the Unification and the founding of the First Empire. Since then, combat was waged as a means to glorify the Empress: it was a battle of spirit and will as much as force.
Thus had Tesh-Dar come to wage war against the humans face to face wherever possible, not to claw at them through layers of technology. She had allowed the human ships to use their data-links in the first encounter simply to give them an advantage, and because she did not yet have a feel for their skills. Many of their weapons she would allow as a challenge to her warriors, for if a human directed the weapon, it was still the human they fought. But she had no patience to fight the mindless calculations of machines. The humans had proven themselves worthy, and she decided that they did not need such devices in a battle that should be fought mainly with tooth and claw.
“Blind them as we return fire,” Tesh-Dar ordered as her ship screamed downward through the atmosphere.
* * *
“Hell,” Tiernan cursed as the Ticonderoga wallowed in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere. Even the navigation computers were having a difficult time holding the ship and her sisters steady. His biggest concern now was whether the tactical computers would be able to take the atmospherics into account for the targeting calculations. Something else that they had never been designed to do.
“Thirty seconds!” the fleet tactical officer called out. On the tactical display, the two opposing forces were rushing at one another like out of control freight trains. The Kreelan ships were now thousands of meters below, well within the atmosphere. Some of their ships had broken off to head toward the smaller cities, but most were still arrowing directly for Foshan, head-on to the combined human fleet. “Hard target lock across the board, all weapons synchronized.” The data-link systems and tactical computers aboard each ship in the Terran formation had formed a massive distributed processing network that had identified each Kreelan ship and assigned weapons from one or more Terran ships to fire on it. The same was happening in the Alliance fleet that flew to the Terran fleet’s starboard side. Since the networks of the two fleets couldn’t coordinate their targeting, Tiernan and Lefevre had minimized the potential overlap with a simple expedient: Tiernan took all the targets on their relative left, Lefevre took the ones on the right. The human ships would be shooting right down the Kreelans’ throats as they passed below.
“Vampire! Vampire!” the tactical officer suddenly cried out: missiles had been launched from the enemy ships.
Tiernan whipped his head back to the tactical display in time to see a swarm of missiles fly from the Kreelan formation. While the human ships carried some missiles, in the age of laser defenses they were rarely used: their maneuverability and speed had never been able to keep up with laser technology, although missile designers kept trying. The only major exception were the torpedoes carried by the destroyers and some cruisers: they were large weapons that carried their own powerful drives and limited shielding. But a ship of a given tonnage could only carry a few, and even their ability to penetrate point defenses was far from guaranteed.
“Vector?” Tiernan snapped.
“They’re all over the place, sir,” the tactical officer replied, confused. “Some are heading this way, some to the surface. It looks like-”
His words were interrupted by a series of spectacular detonations that looked like a cascade of exploding balls of lightning that briefly overrode the brightness limits of the main displays on the ship.
“Jesus!” someone gasped.
“Were those nukes?” Tiernan shouted as he closed his eyes and turned his head away from the momentary brilliance of the display. The Terran fleet had no nuclear weapons, at the explicit orders of the president. He had argued mightily to have at least a few to use in space, but the president had been adamant, and so he had none. But that didn’t mean the Kreelans couldn’t use them.
“Negative, sir,” the tactical officer replied, shak
en, as the main flag bridge display faded to again show the perilously close surface of Keran. “No indication of ionizing radiation from nuclear weapons. I don’t know what those things were.”
“I do,” Tiernan growled, looking at the tactical display and the handful of icons that remained: just what Ticonderoga could see with her own sensors. “They knocked out the damned data-link. Do we still have weapons lock?”
“Only local, sir,” the tactical officer reported, quickly coordinating with the tactical officer on the bridge. The Ticonderoga still held the targets that had been allocated to her and for which she had her own sensor lock-on. The targets she was to have engaged based on targeting by other ships in the Terran fleet were either gone from the display or were tagged in yellow: the fire control system could see the targets, but didn’t have enough weapons available to service them. “The fleet firing solutions just went out the window.”
“Do we have communications with the other ships?” Tiernan asked quickly. Only seconds were left before their opportunity would be lost.
“Laser voice and vidcom only, sir,” the communications officer reported.
Tiernan held back a vicious curse. “Open a channel, fast,” he ordered the fleet communications officer.
“Open sir,” the woman replied immediately.
“All ships, this is admiral Tiernan,” he said quickly as the countdown on the tactical display spun down to zero and the range rings of Ticonderoga’s weapons intersected the lead Kreelan ships far below. “Local targeting mode, fire at will!”
He was instantly rewarded with an extended rumble from Ticonderoga’s heavy weapons turrets on the bottom of the hull. They fired at full rate until they ran out of their basic load, which only took a dozen seconds. As the guns fell silent, the looming horizon of the planet rapidly rotated counterclockwise in the flag bridge display as the ship’s captain immediately flipped Ticonderoga on her back to unmask the turrets on the top of the hull. As soon as the ship stabilized, those guns belched fire at the rapidly fleeing Kreelan targets. It was an outside chance, at best, that any of those rounds would catch the enemy ships. But in this situation Tiernan was not about to be stingy with his ammunition. Ticonderoga had plenty of that. Even now, the gun crews were moving the next loads of shells for their guns from the magazines as the captain brought the ship’s bow up toward the reassuring blackness of space, the engines thundering with power to get her clear of the deadly atmosphere.
Tiernan silently watched the tactical display, willing the enemy ships to start falling prey to the human fleet’s attack.
“Inbound kinetics!” the flag tactical officer suddenly shouted. The collision alarm sounded throughout the ship, and Tiernan and the rest of the crew braced for impact.
* * *
While the fire from the human ships had been far less deadly than it would have been with their data networks intact, more than a few of their rounds had found their mark. Several of them hit Tesh-Dar’s ship, causing extensive damage to the engineering sections, and one of them penetrated the hull’s armor to explode directly beneath the bridge. The resulting explosion had not been powerful enough to blow completely through the deck plating and vent the bridge to vacuum, but it had buckled the deck with such force that several of the heavy support frames had snapped. Tesh-Dar and several of the bridge crew had been slammed into the bulkheads by the force of the explosion: two of the bridge crew were dead, and three others injured. Tesh-Dar herself had been dazed momentarily.
Elai-Tura’an, the shipmistress, had been pinned to the deck by a thick support beam that weighed as much as ten warriors. Had she not been wearing her armor, she would have been killed instantly. As Tesh-Dar stumbled to her side, still dizzy from the impact and coughing from the dense and acrid smoke that now flooded the bridge, she could see that Elai-Tura’an was bleeding badly inside, with bright arterial blood streaming from her mouth.
Tesh-Dar gripped the lower edge of the beam with her hands, and with a roar of fury lifted it and tossed it aside with a horrendous crash. Kneeling by the woman’s side, she placed a hand gently on her shoulder and said, “I will summon a healer.”
“No,” Elai-Tura’an replied, gripping Tesh-Dar’s arm in a fierce grip as she looked into the priestess’s eyes. “No...time. Must get me...to the navigation station.” She spat out more blood from her pierced lungs, a mixed expression of pain and annoyance on her face. “Then get the warriors...off.”
Nodding, Tesh-Dar picked her up and carried her to the navigation station, gently setting her down in what was left of the chair. The warrior who had been serving as navigator was one of those killed by the explosion below, her body and the upper part of the chair having been knocked aside by one of the flying support beams. Kneeling beside her, Tesh-Dar gripped Elai-Tura’an’s arms in the way of warriors. “May you find Her light and love for eternity,” she whispered.
“And may thy Way be long...and glorious, my priestess,” Elai-Tura’an replied, bowing her head. “Now go. I will control the ship from here. Get all the others...away, before we are too low.”
Turning her attention to the navigation panel, Elai-Tura’an took direct control of the mortally stricken ship as it continued to plunge toward the surface.
With one last look at her dying shipmistress, Tesh-Dar uttered a silent prayer for her soul to the Empress before she gathered the rest of the bridge crew and made her way quickly to the lower decks where her First had gathered the rest of the warriors. Li’ara-Zhurah awaited her, holding Tesh-Dar’s other weapons, which the priestess quickly fastened to her armor. Li’ara-Zhurah offered the priestess a set of the special descent equipment the other warriors now wore, but the great warrior priestess refused: Tesh-Dar had no need of such things.
“As have Her Children for countless ages past,” she told the gathered warriors, her voice booming over the howl of the air streaming past the ship’s hull, “we go to battle with the enemy, face to face. Fight to honor Her, my children, and seek glory in battle and in death.” She paused, looking over the hundreds of faces around her, taking in the Bloodsong that echoed from each of them, pulsing in her own veins. “So has it been-”
“-so shall it forever be,” they echoed in a thunderous chorus.
Tesh-Dar nodded to Kamal-Utai, her First, who touched a control on the central console in the large ventral compartment the warriors now occupied. There was a momentary hissing of air as the pressure equalized with the outside atmosphere. Then the side panels of the compartment opened to the air streaming by. Humans would have looked at instruments to tell them the altitude and speed of the ship, to know if it was going too high or low, or too fast. None of the warriors here needed such things: they knew such things by instinct.
“Go now,” Tesh-Dar ordered above the shrieking airstream, and instantly the warriors began leaping from the ship, their arms and legs spread wide to control their fall.
Tesh-Dar waited until all but Kamal-Utai and Li’ara-Zhurah had gone, then she ushered them from the doomed ship before it flew too low for their descent equipment to function properly.
Satisfied that they were away safely, Tesh-Dar flexed her hands in anticipation, her great talons drawing blood from her palms. Then she leaped from the ship and was carried away by the roaring winds.
* * *
The grains of sand in the time-glass of shipmistress Elai-Tura’an’s life were rapidly running out. With grim determination she kept her ship on course for its glorious ending. Making adjustments to compensate for the failing engines, she guided her last command to its destination.
With a smile on her lips, her heart enraptured by the glory it would bring to the Empress, she slammed her cruiser into the very center of the city of Foshan.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Of the sixty-seven Kreelan ships that attacked Keran, fourteen suffered serious damage and six were destroyed outright from the humans’ daring attack. Seven of those that had sustained damage would have to land, for they were in no shape to climb ba
ck into space with the other ships. And, of course, Tesh-Dar’s ship had come to its own glorious end as it struck the human city.
The senior surviving shipmistress of the attack wave knew of Tesh-Dar’s wishes regarding the humans, and observed over the shoulder of the warrior who served as the equivalent of a human tactical battle officer. While the human data-links had been effectively severed, there were still many human combat units that were broadcasting data, even though their companion units could no longer receive it.
Nodding to herself, the shipmistress designated targets for the tactical officer. “The humans at these locations,” she said. “Destroy them.”
With a brief flurry of her fingertips over the controls, the guns of the Kreelan ships fired as they flew over the human positions, then began the long climb through the atmosphere to reach open space. While most of their shells and lasers found their targets, the devastation seemed inconsequential after the spectacular detonation of Elai-Tura’an’s cruiser.
* * *
One moment, Steph was sitting in the regimental command vehicle as Sparks barked orders to his battalion commanders over the vidcom after the strange Kreelan missiles took down the data-links. The next, she found herself lying on the floor of the vehicle, groggily looking up into Colonel Sparks’s concerned and bloodied face. The command compartment was dark except for the red combat lights that shone dimly through swirling dust and acrid smoke. She thought it made Sparks look like Satan.
“Are you hurt, Miss Guillaume?” he said as if from very far away.
Steph’s ears were ringing, the sound so loud she could hardly hear a thing. “No,” she said, her tongue feeling like it was three sizes too big. She tasted blood. “At least...I don’t think so.” As she came to, she took stock of her body: aside from some scrapes and bruises, plus a big knot on the back of her head, she couldn’t feel anything wrong. “What happened?”
In Her Name: The Last War Page 29