In the meantime, Valentina had made her way to where Steph still struggled. The former spy could see Steph’s mouth moving, but couldn’t hear anything.
“Steph!” She leaned closer to better see Steph’s face. “Can you hear me?”
Steph nodded, then pointed to her face mask. A tiny sliver of shrapnel from the hit that had taken the courier’s forward section had damaged the microphone’s electronics. Had it been a few centimeters to either side, it would have sliced into her mask and her face.
Looking down at the buckle of Steph’s harness, Valentina saw that shrapnel had done its work there too. Another shard had bent the buckle’s latch mechanism, somehow glancing away from Steph.
“God, you’re lucky.” Valentina pulled her combat knife from its scabbard and quickly sawed through the tough straps. “Come on!”
Valentina turned to make her way forward toward Mills after Steph was free.
But Steph didn’t follow her. Instead, she headed aft.
Valentina was about to go after her when she saw that Steph was going after the small case she’d brought aboard, and which had been stowed in one of the lockers near the smoking wreckage of the lavatory.
Steph grabbed the case and strapped it to her side.
While Valentina waited for her, she told Mills, “Steph’s all right, but her mic’s not working. She can receive but not transmit.”
“That’s not a bad thing for a woman sometimes,” Mills quipped as he helped Danielson move the second supply container.
“Fuck you, Mills.” Stallick, who was silhouetted against the spinning planet in the opening at the front of the hull, was holding down the first supply container and the ammo container.
The ship lurched again, and Stallick reached out to brace herself, taking hold of some bent conduits. The Kreelan destroyers had given up the chase, but the air currents were tossing the ship around as it plummeted toward the surface. “If you-”
The ship dropped, and the container that Mills and Danielson had been shepherding down the aisle toward Stallick got away from them.
“Down!” Mills tried to warn Stallick, but it was too late.
With a single bounce, the fifty kilo container caught Stallick right in the face and carried her out of the ship. Unconscious or dead, she silently spiraled out of sight.
“Goddammit!” Danielson turned to Mills, his eyes wide behind his oxygen mask. “That one had our commo gear!”
Mills slammed a fist into the bulkhead. “Fuck!” Not only had they lost Stallick, they’d also probably lost the container. She had been the one setting the automatic parachute deployment systems, and obviously hadn’t been able to take care of that container. It would just fall to the ground like a rock, smashing everything inside it.
We’ll have the devil’s own time trying to communicate with the other ground teams and the fleet when it arrived, Mills thought bitterly, but he knew that was something they’d have to sort out later. If they survived.
“Come on!” He gathered the others close together. “Let’s get off this bitch!”
Danielson checked that the chute controls for the other two containers had been set before kicking them out. Then Mills grabbed the three survivors of his team and leaped out the gaping hole where the cockpit had been.
As they fell away, Mills and Danielson spread their arms to control their fall, moving slightly apart. Valentina did the same, but held onto one of Steph’s hands to help stabilize her. Steph had said she’d made a few jumps in simulators before shipping out here, but had never made a real jump, and certainly not one like this.
The four of them fell toward the ground, keeping their eyes fixed on the black dots that were the two containers. They could also see Stallick’s body, still spinning lazily below them.
The hulk of the courier tumbled away from them, finally smashing into an empty field where it exploded.
“Stallick!” Danielson called. “Stallick, can you hear me?”
“She’s gone,” Valentina told him quietly. “Mills, how far from the target are we?”
“We’re in bloody bumfuck!” Mills fought to bring his anger under control. “We’re not even close to our planned drop zone. I think we’re over the right continent, but that’s about it.”
Looking down, Valentina could see orderly patches of farmland far below. The neat patches of the farms were interspersed with large stretches of forest.
“Well, at least we’re not falling into the ocean.”
“Now there’s a bright side.” Mills looked at the digital map display in the face mask. “At least there’s a town near here. Breakwater, it’s called. Maybe there are some Territorial Army blokes we can hook up with to help get us to where we need to be.”
They saw the chutes for the containers open below them. They were set to open at two hundred meters.
Stallick’s body continued to plummet downward, and Mills winced when it hit the ground. “Damn.”
“Altitude,” Valentina called. They were nearing three hundred meters. They could open the chutes lower, but she didn’t want to risk it with Steph never having made a combat drop before, and not being able to communicate.
Mills gave the thumbs-up. “Go!”
Danielson activated his chute, and it fluttered out of his pack to form a graceful camouflage-colored parasail.
Valentina let go of Steph and moved away to give her chute room to open. She watched as Steph hit the control to release it...and nothing happened.
Steph frantically worked the chute control again. Nothing. Wide-eyed with terror, she looked up at Valentina, who was already arrowing in toward her.
“Mills, Steph’s chute failed. I’m going to double up with her.”
“You’re too bloody low!” Mills warned. “Valentina!”
Ignoring him, she grabbed Steph and quickly hooked their harnesses together.
“Hang on,” she said grimly as she hit her chute’s controls. If hers didn’t work…well, they wouldn’t have to worry about it for very long.
“Valentina!” Mills shouted again. Cursing in frustration, he deployed his own chute. He was too heavy to risk going any lower, or the chute wouldn’t be able to slow him enough before he hit the ground.
Valentina’s parasail blossomed from her pack and snapped full open. She guided it toward a field not far from where the two containers had fluttered to the ground on their chutes.
Steph clung to her like a terrified child, her eyes fixed on the ground. They were coming down fast, really fast.
Valentina judged the distance. It was going to be close. Really close. “Okay Steph, roll with me when we hit. Ready...ready...now!”
They slammed into the ground. Valentina took the brunt of it as the two of them awkwardly collapsed and rolled into the soft earth of the field. Steph wound up on top, panting heavily.
Valentina undid the buckle that linked them, and Steph rolled off onto her back before tearing off her face mask and throwing it aside.
“Jesus,” she gasped. “And to imagine that some idiots pay good money to do this sort of thing.”
Valentina, taking off her own mask, couldn’t help but laugh. “Actually, for something like this, you’d have to pay extra.”
That had them both laughing, happy to be alive.
“I’m glad you two girls are getting along so well,” they heard Mills call from where he was busy gathering up his chute about fifty meters away, “but it’s time to stop socializing and get to work, dearies. Go get the containers and haul them into the woods, then inventory what we’ve got and divide up the ammo we need. Danielson, you’re with me.”
“What are you going to do?” Valentina asked.
Mills turned to her, his expression grim. “We’ve got to bury Stallick.”
* * *
Ku’ar-Marekh withdrew her second sight from watching the humans fall from the sky, returning her spirit to the sanctum of her body.
Her heart again began to beat, and her chest slowly rose and fell as she
began to breathe. After a moment, she opened her silver-flecked feline eyes.
With the pyres still burning brightly, she moved off into the forest, toward where the humans had landed.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Commodore Ichiro Sato stood on the flag bridge of the newly commissioned battleship CSS Orion, intently watching the combat information display that took up the entire forward wall of the compartment.
Orion and her three sister ships, Monarch, Conqueror, and Thunderer, made up the Confederation Navy’s First Battleship Flotilla, and were the most powerful warships humanity had ever built. Yet even as the four ships were being launched, larger and more powerful ships were being designed.
For their main armament, Orion and her sisters had twelve thirty centimeter main guns, able to fire a variety of munitions ranging from basic armor-piercing to what amounted to a gigantic shotgun shell to repel Kreelan boarding parties. While their rate of fire was slower than the fifteen centimeter guns carried by most heavy cruisers, the shells were nearly fifteen times larger by mass, packing an incredibly massive punch.
The battleships also had a pulse cannon running along the keel that could spear even a heavy cruiser. Having learned both the power and the limitations of the weapon through bitter experience during the battle of Keran, Sato had worked with the shipwrights who designed the Orion class to maximize the weapon’s advantages and minimize its limitations.
The ships had an impressive secondary armament of both kinetic weapons and lasers, which by themselves would be more than a match for any Kreelan warship the humans had yet encountered.
But even as powerful as the new ships were, Sato knew that the enemy had vessels that were vastly beyond humanity’s technology. He had seen them with his own eyes. For reasons of their own, the Kreelans had chosen not to use them, instead preferring to match the humans, “dumbing down” their own weapons and systems.
He knew the advantage that Orion and her sisters would enjoy during their first battle would be short-lived, for the Kreelans would soon build ships to match them. But he believed that for at least this once, the four battleships would reign supreme.
Half of the display he was watching showed the bright blue and white curve of Earth as the battleships and their escorts maneuvered away from the naval base at Africa Station. The other half showed a tactical map with the icons of the ships of Home Fleet, including Orion and her sisters, that were preparing to jump.
The formation, Sato saw with satisfaction, was perfect. All the crews had trained hard for this mission, and Sato had drilled the battleship crews nearly to the point of mutiny.
The battleship captains, all of whom were senior to Sato in time in service, finally complained that he was driving their crews too hard.
“Let me make something perfectly clear,” Sato had told them, his voice cutting through the conference room when he’d finally called the captains together to hear their complaints. “This is the first time since the war began that we may have a chance to beat the Kreelans. You’ve all seen combat and you know some of what the enemy is capable of.” He paused, his mind replaying the nightmare visions of the first contact encounter with the Kreelans, of which he had been the sole survivor. Their giant warships had technology that centuries, and perhaps more, beyond what his own people had. “They are relentless, merciless killing machines, and the only way we stand any chance of winning this war...”
He paused in spite of himself, knowing in his heart of hearts that it simply wasn’t possible that humanity could win against the Empire. Just the few gigantic, fantastic ships the Kreelans met the Aurora with during the first contact encounter would have been more than enough to obliterate the entire Confederation fleet.
“The only chance we have,” he went on, “is to be like them in combat. To be the blade of a sword, forged in the hottest flame. And that is what these ships are, the true swords of the fleet. We can’t afford to be easy on our crews, because the outcome of the coming battle may very well depend on what those men and women do when all hell is breaking loose around them. We have to be merciless with them, and they have to be merciless with themselves. They must be ready. And they will be, no matter the cost.”
No matter the cost. Sato’s own words echoed dully in his mind as he considered the price that he himself had paid. After his return from the battle at Saint Petersburg he had become obsessed with the war. He had spent every waking moment at Naval Headquarters or in the yards at Africa Station, working on the new ships and the tactics to employ them, focusing on the day that he knew must eventually come, the day when he would again be able to sail into harm’s way. For that, he had given up everything. Even his wife.
A dull pain welled up inside him as he thought of Steph. He hadn’t simply drifted away from her, but had intentionally isolated himself, pushing her away, so he could focus his entire being on the fight against the Empire. It had broken his heart when she finally told him that she was leaving him.
The cold, calculating part of his brain considered this a step forward, while the man and husband inside him wept bitter, lonely tears. She had begged him to help her understand what was going on inside him, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, tell her.
Part of it was the illogical pursuit of vengeance for what had happened to the crews of all three ships he had served on since encountering the Kreelans. The Aurora, the unlucky ship to make first contact; the McClaren, named after Aurora’s captain, which had been destroyed in the battle for Keran; and the heavy cruiser Yura, Sato’s first true command, which had been destroyed at Saint Petersburg.
Many in the fleet thought he was an incredibly lucky man. He thought he was cursed.
Sato knew he carried an enormous amount of grief and guilt inside him, but he had used it to help forge the weapons that would now finally strike a decisive blow against the enemy. He knew that in the interstellar war the Kreelans had begun, his own personal feelings weren’t important. But that didn’t keep him from feeling the pain in his heart every time he thought of Steph, which seemed like every minute of every day.
At least she’s safe on Earth, he consoled himself, knowing that she was doing vital service as the president’s press secretary. She was as safe as anyone could be.
He only wished that he’d had the courage to at least call her before he again sailed into battle. He had told himself every day since this operation had been announced that he would. Every day his hand had hovered over the comm unit as he sat at his console in his cabin, wondering what he would say.
And every day he had taken his hand away, then gone to the flag bridge, his heart a cold stone in his chest.
“Admiral,” the operations officer called, breaking him from his reverie, “Guadalcanal has initiated the jump timing sequence.”
“Very well,” Sato told him, shoving his regrets aside. “First Battleship Flotilla,” he said over a communications circuit that repeated his voice to the crews of the four battleships under his command, “prepare for jump. Guadalcanal has primary control.”
While each ship did its own jump calculations, the assault carrier Guadalcanal, which was Admiral Voroshilov’s flagship, made the primary calculations that were fed into each ship’s navigation systems to help ensure that their jump emergence would put every ship where it was supposed to be. Across human space, other groups of warships were going through the same process, with all of them timed to appear over Alger’s World.
The ships would be using a single jump, with no mid-course correction or staging points. The navigation for every ship had to be perfect to avert disaster over the target.
Sato could tell that the crew was tense, and with good reason. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before, and everything now rode on this one calculated risk.
“Standby for transpace sequence,” an automated female voice announced over the Orion’s public address system, and Sato could sense a slight change in the tremor of the ship’s rhythm, a deepening of the thrum that was the beating of her metal
heart. “Transpace sequence in five... four... three... two... one...Jump.”
Humanity’s four most powerful warships and the bulk of Earth’s Home Fleet vanished into hyperspace.
* * *
It had taken four days of slow and deliberate movement for Mills and the others to make their way to the outskirts of Breakwater. They had been forced to lay low for hours at a time to avoid groups of patrolling Kreelan warriors. And the closer the team moved to the town, the larger and more frequent were the patrols.
Mills was convinced that there was some sort of a buildup in the town, and they had finally found a spot on a wooded hill a few kilometers away that had a view into the town center.
“Okay, I see the town square.” Mills zoomed in more with his binoculars, the digital stabilizer keeping the image steady. “Or what’s left of it. Looks like they’ve cleared out more buildings.” He took the binoculars away from his eyes, then looked again. “A couple of the surrounding buildings look like they’ve been partially sliced away, like someone hacked them apart with a knife.”
“What are they building?” Valentina was looking at the town through the scope of her sniper rifle. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“I’ve never seen anything like this from any of the combat footage that’s come in.” Steph was looking at the town through her vidcam, while Danielson lay prone beside her, his own binoculars fixed on the town and a grim look on his face. “I feel like we’re looking at something through a time tunnel back into ancient history.”
They watched as well over a thousand straining warriors moved huge stone blocks with primitive cranes and winches made of trees, using thick rope and block and tackle rigs to lift and tilt them into position. More stones, resting on wooden sleds rolling over cut logs, were being moved into position.
The construct was circular in shape, maybe twenty meters across, with some stones, each of which must have weighed hundreds of tons, placed vertically, while others were being raised to bridge the tops.
“Where the hell are they getting the stones?” Valentina checked her mission data. If it was up to date, the nearest quarry was nearly three hundred kilometers away.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 93