War Against the White Knights

by Tim C. Taylor

  While he shot up another wave of boarding craft, the first wave was throwing out clouds of defensive munitions, which grew so dense that Romulus could no longer see the boarding ships or even Beowulf herself. The roiling clouds of smoke, reflective strips and decoys lit up constantly with explosions. Romulus could only hope these were the signs of Beowulf’s point defenses extracting a high cost of her attackers.

  The XO wanted him taking out any boarders who made it through that maelstrom to Beowulf’s vulnerable hull, but to fly his Mustang through that sensor-blinding fog filled with defensive fire spat out by Beowulf would be suicide.

  Without looking away from his tac-display, he placed a hand on Janna’s thigh. Though there could be no heat transfer between their heavily insulated pressure suits, he still felt her warmth filling him through his palm.

  It wasn’t just his death warrant he’d be signing if he went in.

  But the XO needed him, and Janna would never respect him if he abandoned their home to its fate because he feared for her safety.

  Romulus opened his mouth to give Janna one of his trademark quips as he entered the defensive fog, but they had deserted him. This was the most insanely dangerous thing he’d ever done, and that was saying something. As he scoured the area with his eyesight – the sensor systems overwhelmed by the chaos – he had to blink back tears. He still traded off his reputation for pulling dangerous stunts, but he wasn’t a kid with something to prove any longer. He had too much to lose that was precious.

  His thumb hovered over the firing stud.

  No. Railguns weren’t an area effect weapon, not in space. But there was something else he could use that was.

  Romulus flew low and parallel to Beowulf’s hull, spinning about and coming to a stop right up against the Hardit Marine unit. His engine exhaust armor actually knocked a Hardit off the hull, sending the dirty monkey spinning into space. So long, pal.

  Then with a waggle of his Mustang’s backside, he applied a little thrust from his main engine, taking maximum care to ensure his engine exhaust was kept just clear of Beowulf’s hull.

  The Mustang’s engine was the same model of zero-point drive unit that powered Beowulf across interstellar distances. It worked by polarizing quantum fluctuations within the area of its effect cone, weaponizing the hidden heartbeat of the universe. To any equipment or personnel caught in the engine effect cone there was no defense.

  Romulus set his engine cone to forty meters’ length, firing a single millisecond burst every second. The effect on his Mustang’s velocity was minimal, but the Hardit Marines and the rear of their boarding pod vaporized. More Marines and equipment were spat out the missing rear of the pod, flailing helplessly with limbs and tails. But unlike the mystery tech that allowed their vessels to push against the void, these Hardits pushed against only vacuum. Without even thruster packs they were trapped in an inescapable vector away from Beowulf.

  That was all Romulus had time to care about.

  He took a deep breath and did it all again.

  He searched out more boarding parties, accelerating at an insane 30 gees just a few meters off Beowulf’s hull, dodging her storage lockers, heat radiators and weapon ports to come up close to the enemy and wipe them off the face of his home with a swipe from his zero-point engine exhaust. The slightest miscalculation and he would scrape against Beowulf’s hull or crash into one of the boarding pods. If he fired his engines at the wrong orientation relative to his home ship, his engine would cleave through its hull.

  “Rom! Look out!”

  Just in time, Romulus swung the Mustang’s nose up and away before colliding with Beowulf’s starboard nacelle.

  “Need a quick break for coffee,” he quipped. He shut his eyes. Even with the Hardit defensive clouds dissipating he had been concentrating so intensely he could barely see.

  Just need a few seconds…

  He opened his eyes onto something new. A larger craft racing down toward Beowulf. Romulus guessed this was a command vessel, Hardit officers coming in to command the boarding operation.

  Co-ordinate this, you furry bastards!

  Romulus swung round and poured fire into the Hardit command boat. The target refused to die, protected by some serious armor. It fired back too, but its targeting systems were not up to tracking the random dance of the Mustang with its momentum conversion system allowing its engine to open up without crushing the pilot and his passenger.

  The Hardit boat exploded in livid white fire.

  “Gotcha!”

  His head clear now, Romulus pivoted around for another run sweeping the filth from Beowulf’s hull. The space around his home was filled with the wreckage of Hardit attack boats, but the survivors of the boarding assault were over Beowulf like a black rash. It was too late. The knowledge pierced his heart that even his best wasn’t going to be good enough this time.

  All he could do was limit the number of Hardits the Legion Marines had to fight off in the hand-to-hand combat that must be opening up throughout his home. He glanced out toward the minefield and saw that fresh waves of boarding craft were still incoming.

  He gritted his teeth against despair. Job’s still got to be done.

  His comm flickered and buzzed. Probably someone from Beowulf but whatever they were telling him was being jammed.

  As Romulus began building up to his attack run, a sudden and total flash of light seared into mind, blinding him momentarily.

  When some semblance of function returned to his eyes, what they saw turned his blood to ice, locking up his entire body.

  His home… Beowulf… All that remained was a wave front of debris and a ball of hot, ionized gas.

  Captain Lubricant had given up hope. She’d hit the self-destruct…

  “Rom!” screamed Janna “Snap out of it!”

  Her cry unlocked his muscles and his hand stretched out for the flight control… but his hesitation proved fatal.

  The Mustang shuddered under a hail of fire. He burned away at maximum gees until the engine safety limiter cut in and a sudden weight crushed the breath out of his chest. The momentum dump system had failed. He was a sitting target. While jinking as best he could, he assessed the damage.

  Still numb from the loss of Beowulf, he could barely register what the Mustang’s system status was telling him. They’d been hit by corrosive munitions. His X-Boat’s armor was just about eaten away already, and the internal systems were failing one after another.

  Hardits! Frakk them!

  He had to look away from Janna so she wouldn’t see the terror reaching up from his gut to draw his lips into a tight white line. When pressed to talk about the time his Stork shuttle was eaten away around him in the escape from Tranquility, he’d brush it off like it was a joke, but every night since then he could only sleep if Janna was beside him. Without the protective aura of her love, he couldn’t hold at bay the terror that had never fully released him since that day.

  He stole a glance at the main status screen. A warning light flashed, telling him that a fatal pressure breach was imminent.

  In the last instant, he flicked a final glance at his lover. He and Janna both turned to touch the other, but too late… the automatic ejector system hurled them into space.

  They were clad only in an emergency pressure suit. With five hours of air, a distress beacon and only the most rudimentary of comms, the odds of getting out of a combat zone alive were not good.

  Janna, please forgive me!

  Without the enhancements of the Mustang’s sensors and AI, the battle for Khallini was eerily quiet and surprisingly far off, almost as if the deadly fight had left him behind. It was someone else’s fight now.

  He concentrated on finding Janna. He had no means to change his vector but just the sight of her would give him strength. Although she had a distress beacon same as him, he didn’t have any means of detecting it. His viewpoint span as he tumbled, making finding her even more difficult.

  Then the battle came to him in the shape of an
other Hardit command boat passing only a few klicks away.

  It came about in that peculiar manner the Hardit craft had.

  And then set off on a new bearing.

  Directly for him.

  — CHAPTER 06 —

  The Stork shook as it screamed up through the atmosphere. Unlike the three X-Boats it carried, the shuttle had only energy-emitting hull coatings and an old-fashioned heat sink to absorb the massive heat buildup from punching through into space at such speeds.

  Within one of the Stork’s carrier pods, the atmosphere in Remus’s Swordfish fighter-bomber was pleasantly cool, but his link to the Stork’s systems told him the shuttle’s hull had heated well into dangerous territory.

  “Ease off on the gas, Pilot,” Remus ordered. “We’re no use to anyone if we burn up in transit.”

  “Slowing ascent,” acknowledged the shuttle’s pilot who was well used to Remus’s strange Wolfish sayings.

  “Deploy in twenty,” warned the pilot.

  “Remember your briefing,” Remus told the two Flight-Marines of his scratch flight. “We’re fitted with some kind of experimental EMP bomb. Hit each planet killer and move to the next target. Don’t worry about finishing them off and keep your eyes on the targets. Wing Commander Dock promises to keep the enemy fighters off our backs.”

  “Five seconds…”

  Remus shook his head. Talk about making things up on the run. The three X-Boat pilots had been briefed while sprinting nearly half a mile from the mess hall to the Stork waiting for them at the shuttle port.

  It was only by chance that it was down here to be fitted with the latest prototype churned out by the fertile collaboration between human and mudsucker engineers.

  “Good hunting,” said the shuttle’s pilot, and hit the launch control.

  The Stork was carrying a total of four modified quick-deployment modules, each one originally designed to throw two squads of armored Marines out into space. Within a second of the pilot hitting the control, the outer door had retracted and all three Swordfish launched into space.

  “Let’s bag us some planet killers,” said Remus.

  “You got it,” agreed Cragger, flying the Swordfish on his starboard-rear position.

  “What’s keeping you?” laughed Avanti, the third member of the scratch flight as he raced ahead, pushing his momentum dump to its limits as he directed his craft to close with the planet killers.

  Wing Commander Dock was en route from the dockyard, as were X-Boats detached from flying Combat Space Patrol around the Beowulf. Romulus should be flying in that group. Friendly drones were zipping back from patrolling the region outside of the minefield.

  The cavalry was coming, but for now it was down to Remus, Cragger, and Avanti with their untested new weapon.

  A sudden thought occurred to Remus. “Do not fire your railguns,” he ordered the other two members of his flight.

  “Why?” asked Avanti.

  “If I’ve understood right,” replied Remus, working this out as he spoke, “our new weapons are like cyber grappling hooks. Snag them onto the enemy ships and our muddy friends will cyber-board.”

  “So?” Avanti’s philosophy centered on his firing stud.

  Cragger tended to think a fraction of a second longer than Avanti before firing. She answered his question. “Because there’s no point hooking your grapple onto something you’ve already blasted to drent.”

  “Got it in one,” said Remus. “Here we go. Avanti, you take Papa-Kilo Seven. Cragger take Six, and I will take Niner. We deploy payload and then come back for Eight using Attack Pattern Delta.”

  Remus flew his Swordfish in a corkscrew pattern at his target. Papa-Kilo Niner steered away, but it was such a lumbering behemoth that its maneuver made little difference to the nimble X-Boat. He screamed into the target before halting just 20 meters from the planet killer’s outer layer – Remus couldn’t think of the roughly finished mass as a hull – and let loose his new weapon. Something spun out of his X-Boat’s crescent wings. He didn’t even know what his new ordnance looked like, but it registered a hit.

  Without obvious weapons, the planet killer had nothing to fire back at him. He flew away at maximum gees anyway, before turning back for Papa-Kilo Eight.

  Remus wasn’t sure what to expect from his first target. There was no explosion, no change in bearing other than to continue its slow turn. In perfect tactical coordination the three Swordfish crisscrossed over Papa-Kilo Eight and loosed another salvo of their new ordnance.

  He led his flight away to a safe distance and observed the result. The outer layers of the targets began to strip away. Was this the effect of the new weapon, to make the target tear itself to pieces?

  “Reckon we were too late, Reamer.”

  There was a catch in Cragger’s voice and it took a moment for Remus to understand why. The fragmenting outer surface of the targets was breaking into needles. Giant darts the length of his X-boat.

  The targets, the strange-looking hulls… they were each a swarm of kinetic torpedoes.

  “Do we go after them?” demanded Avanti.

  “Negative,” Remus replied grimly. “We’re too late. Against beasts that size, all our railguns would do is detach the kinetic torpedoes for them. Am assigning fresh targets.” As he began painting into the tactical net a new trio of planet killers farther out from the planet – their next targets – he couldn’t help but look on with horror at the planet killers. The torpedoes had miniature thruster engines, just enough to spread them out into a deadly rain. Already the dart tips glowed with the heat of atmospheric braking. By the time they hit the ground at terminal velocity their momentum would be ferocious.

  “Our weapons made no difference at all,” Remus said softly.

  A new voice came through the speaker. “I never knew you sucked alluvial mud through your teeth, boy.”

  Remus stiffened in his seat. The comm signal was coming from Wing Commander Dock.

  Remus’s flight was already coming into range of their new targets. He signaled to hold back while he had time to interpret Dock’s riddles.

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Wake up, boy! You’re not a damned mudsucker. Not ugly enough for a start and not half as smart.”

  “But, sir. If we hit the outer layer of the Papa-Kilos with our new ordnance, the target just sheds its skin, and our cyber bombs with it.”

  “We don’t know that means they’re ineffective, Flight-Sergeant. Anyway, I’d already considered that. I’m passing fresh targets. Time your attack well. Dock out.”

  Remus’s Swordfish received fresh target data: a four-ship formation of planet killers farther out, just inside the minefield. His flight changed course to intercept the new targets.

  As they moved to intercept, he watched the pane on his tac-display that showed the scene behind as the planet killers they’d abandoned carried out their deadly function. The layers of torpedoes had fallen away to reveal the central core of the planet killers: two cones stuck together at their bases. Unlike the kinetic torpedoes, which tipped into the lethal equations of orbital mechanics that Remus understood all too well, the central core turned about in a long, lazy arc that defied the laws of physics, until its nose pointed straight at the planet’s surface. He had the sense that an invisible force other than gravity reached up and pulled the 700 meter-long ships downward. A sharp tug and they disappeared out of view, leaving shockwaves in their wake that raced out through the atmosphere until the entire hemisphere churned with angry clouds.

  Bright lights lit the sky, the clouds softening the searing blasts of energy so they looked pretty, even delicate. Whether they were the planet killers hitting home, or the defense from the zero-point air defenses, he couldn’t tell.

  The wing commander was wrong. Their weapons had done nothing to prevent the ship striking Khallini. Dock was a strange old geezer, and Remus wasn’t sure that he respected the man even though he did respect his rank. For an old guy, he could outfly most of his command and s
cuttlebutt had it that he’d been made an officer by the Jotuns in the days before Momma had joined General McEwan in his revolution. The rumor mill spun other dark tales about Dock too, and all of it was probably drent.

  All Remus could say of the commander was that he always had his reasons for doing anything.

  And now, with mounting excitement, Remus could see why Dock had reassigned their targets. A dark cloud flew in from space and surrounded the four planet killers.

  Avanti whooped. “It’s the frakking cavalry!”

  Remus thought the incoming wave of friendly AI-drones looked more like a swarm of bees than mounted soldiers. He quickly revised his comparison to a plague of locusts. Dock must have given his little AI-controlled gun platforms highly unusual instructions because when Remus was ready for his attack run, the drones peeled away from the enemy ships to reveal they had been picked clean. The thick layers of detachable kinetic torpedoes had been shot off to reveal the vulnerable hull beneath.

  The three Swordfish made two efficient passes that flung the mudsucker weapon out of their crescent wings, hitting all four enemy vessels.

  Remus waited for some effect. But there was nothing. The planet killers picked up speed, still on course to penetrate Khallini’s atmosphere.

  The weapons were ineffective, and when another wave of planet killers appeared just inside the minefield, Remus realized so too would be their defense.

  But they had to do their best. “Let’s hit them again,” Remus ordered. “Use railguns this time.”

  Before he could change course to come in for another attack a whistle came over the comm channel. Was that Dock or the side effect of a cyber-attack?

  Then a piercing shriek drilled into his head. Instinctively he tried to clamp his hands over his ears to block out the aural attack, despite the fact his helmet was in the way.

  But the noise cut out and Remus watched open mouthed as every planet killer simultaneously made a quarter turn anti-clockwise along its central axis, righted itself, and then made a quarter turn clockwise.