The Landfall Campaign (The Nameless War)

by Edmond Barrett

  “Amen to that,” Damien muttered to himself as he stood up.

  ___________________________

  16:26 Hrs Douglas Base time

  “There goes the Marly James,” Colwell muttered as another transport was smashed apart. The Nameless probably only had a handful of the new rifle missiles but they’d forced Deimos to engage targets further out. That had thinned their fire, which in turn had allowed some conventional missiles to get through. Below Crowe could see lines of fire scorch their way across the face of Landfall as the remains of the SS Hong Kong tumbled into the planet’s atmosphere.

  For the moment though the situation had stabilised and Crowe needed that time to think. The original plan had been to orbit around Landfall and go back the way they’d come to rejoin Heavy Cover. But that would take them straight past Breaker’s Rock and as he watched their ammunition levels drop, that didn’t seem like a good idea. Rising from his seat he switched the main holo to navigation mode.

  “Lieutenant Colwell,” he ordered. “Give me the estimates of the convoy’s best speed with ships running on empty.”

  The information appeared on the screen and Crowe alternated between the navigation and tactical displays.

  “What are you thinking sir?” Colwell asked quietly from behind him.

  “That the plan didn’t include Breaker’s or these new missiles,” Crowe said slowly. He poked his finger into the holo. “It didn’t include them coming this deep into the Mass Shadow either.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “If we break orbit here and go in this direction,” he pointed into the holo, “then we can outrun the Nameless as we go for the Red Line and we’re shielded from Breaker’s by the planet.”

  “But sir, that takes us directly away from heavy cover…”

  “Who are too far away to support us and are frankly already doing a useful job chasing the enemy reinforcements.”

  “Also the SS Destiny has taken engine damage. Even empty she isn’t going to outrun anyone.”

  “Then we scuttle the Destiny.”

  Colwell hesitated.

  “No plan survives first contact Lieutenant. Ours was based on faulty intelligence. It’s time to choose another option. You can return to your station Lieutenant.” Crowe then turned and said: “Coms, take the navigation data from this console and disseminate it to the convoy. Signal the Destiny that if they cannot match the convoy’s acceleration they must either scuttle or be left behind. Inform Heavy Cover of my intentions. We’ll rendezvous with them at the first cool down point.”

  ___________________________

  “Admiral sir.” Eulenburg looked towards his communications screen. The Commodore looked tired. “I’ve just received a signal from the drop master. The last of your supplies are on the way down.”

  “Thank you Commodore. I know what this has cost you,” Eulenburg replied. “Have you uploaded my report?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Eulenburg paused, looking for the right words, then said: “Commodore, when you get back to Earth, tell them we will hold on and be the second front for as long as we can.”

  “I understand, sir,” Crowe replied grimly. He looked as if he was wondering whether to say more, something more suitable for the moment, but instead he settled for a simple “good luck, sir.”

  Eulenburg’s screen went black and his sense of loneliness, briefly dispelled by the convoy’s presence, returned. There were things he could and should be doing, but instead he watched the display, which showed the convoy breaking orbit and unexpectedly heading away from Heavy Cover. The Nameless clearly were also taken by surprise. Their ships had split into two groups, one pursuing directly, the other moving in the opposite direction ready to cut off the convoy as it headed back towards its original entry point. When convoy chose its new route, these were left floundering, while the group hard on the convoy’s heels lacked the strength to seriously test the escort.

  As Kite String disappeared from the view of Landfall’s

  battered detection grid, Eulenburg could see Commodore Crowe had got clean away, leaving Landfall behind.

  ___________________________

  20:20 Hrs Douglas Base time

  As she slowly dragged herself out through the hatch of Dubious Alanna felt more tired than she ever had before. After hours clenched round the control column, it was agony to even attempt to open her hand. The deck crew was already opening up the engine access panels. Dubious was their responsibility now. As she made her way across the ship, she passed members of the crew, all of them looking as weary as she felt. Entering the other hangar, the smell hit her even before she got through the airlock and the sight of C for Curious stopped her dead in her tracks. There was a massive breach near the cockpit and the rest of the fuselage was peppered with holes, while the portside manoeuvring engine was completely gone. How it had kept going, let alone been able to fight, was a minor miracle. That was her first thought, then the sounds of someone having hysterics and someone else throwing up penetrated her consciousness. One deckhand was huddled in a corner sobbing while the rest looked sickened. Up at the personnel hatch was Malm. In micro gravity it wasn’t possible for tears to stream down his face, instead water droplets hung in the air around his head, as he tried to pull the corpse of Weapons Controller Thomas Rackow through the hatch.

  ___________________________

  “Commander Hockley’s face looked peaceful. He still required an oxygen line but his breathing appeared strong. Deimos’s sickbay was pretty small, designed mainly to handle sickness rather than injury. The brutal reality was that if a plasma bolt burst inside a ship’s compartment, anyone inside would be instantly beyond the help of any doctor. In many ways they’d been lucky. The projectile that had hit them had punched clean through without hitting anything they couldn’t really do without. But it had sent out a spray of fragments that had inflicted terrible wounds on those unlucky enough to be hit.

  “It got him in the lower back,” the surgeon told Crowe in a low voice. “He’s lost two vertebrae, a kidney and his bowel was perforated. I’ve stabilised his condition but when possible I would like to evacuate him to the Fortitude.”

  “What about his spinal column? I mean long term? Will he ever walk again?” Crowe asked.

  “Walk, probably. Run or jog, never. With the latest therapies sir, he’ll probably walk again in two or three years, but he’ll never regain anything even close to full mobility. He won’t ever be fit for service again.”

  “He told me once that he was aiming to make Admiral some day. He was ready for his own ship.”

  The surgeon started reply but another patient called out and he hurried away. As he looked down the length of sickbay at the various broken bodies, Crowe felt a profound sense of sadness. Had it been worth it? That was a dangerous question for line officers to ask themselves. Some day historians might answer it. But he could only focus on facts. In terms of their primary mission, they had landed perhaps sixty percent of their cargo. On top of that there had been the unexpected bonus of Heavy Cover forcing contact on the Nameless reinforcements, which had cost the aliens all three of their capital ships, a cruisers and two escorts. But on the other side of the balance sheet, of the fifty-nine ships went into the Landfall system, eighteen including four irreplaceable warships hadn’t made it back out. Of those that did, few had come away unscathed. No, Crowe thought, if Operation Kite String was a victory, then at the very best it had been an expensive one.

  Chapter Seventeen

  What We Missed

  10th August 2067

  K7 dropped into real space, nearly forty light minutes away from the system’s star. The modified courier did a quick jink to sweep its own stern quarter before the towed sensor array began to deploy.

  “So why are we here again?” Jeff Harlow asked as he looked over Lieutenant Driscoll’s shoulder. “We seem to be a long way out from the star.”

  “Yeah, the local star classes as a super massive, just about.
Twenty-six solar masses so it’s putting out a lot of power. With our hull, we have to be pretty careful.” The Lieutenant frowned for a moment. “Even this far out the passive array is going to be cooked by the time we leave, which is why it’s our last stop before we head back to Junction Station.”

  “Then why come?”

  “Aside from the fact the people with the braid told us?” Driscoll shrugged, “because no one in their right mind would come here, or stay here. That’s a reason for the Nameless to attempt to use it and for us to do an occasional sweep, just to keep them honest. We’ll jettison a beacon before we leave, just so they know we’ve been here.”

  “Could there be anyone here?”

  Driscoll brought up an overview of the solar system. There were only three planets showing - two rocky ones and a gas giant. The Lieutenant tapped the screen over the display of the rocky planet closest to the star.

  “That one, no one could even get to. The planet is inside the star’s mass shadow, so you’d have to make a real space approach and you’d need a purpose built ship.”

  Jeff gave him a questioning look.

  “Our hull would melt before we got there,” Driscoll explained, “and it wouldn’t be worth going. The planet is so hot it makes Venus look like Norway. The third planet is so far out and so small it barely counts as a planet at all. A battleship could fire on the surface without even entering its mass shadow, so no use for putting a base on or around that one.”

  “And the gas giant?”

  “Well that and its moons are the only places in the system that are worth diddly squat. It’s still pretty close to the star - twenty light minutes - which is close enough to be dangerous and like Jupiter it puts out a fair bit of radiation in its own right. So we’re going to move into position to sweep the dark side of it. Once we’ve seen there’s nothing there, then we’re out of here. If it wasn’t for this system being so close to Junction Station, I don’t think we’d bother to look at all.”

  Jeff took a couple of notes.

  “Y’know I don’t think this one is going to make it into my next report,” he commented.

  “Every time you’ve had something to report I’ve generally been scared shitless,” Driscoll grunted. “So where next for you?”

  “Home for a couple of weeks’ holiday…” Jeff trailed off looking embarrassed.

  “Alright for some.”

  “Well then the network thinks they can get me embedded on a cruiser in the Home Fleet. Apparently I come across as sympathetic.”

  “Still milking your big hit are they?” Driscoll had very calmly taken the news that following Jeff’s first frontline report, there was now a Lieutenant Driscoll fan club on the Internet.

  “Oh if they can manage it, they’ll be milking that long after we both become old and grey.”

  “Well it won’t be the same without you,” Driscoll commented. “More peaceful maybe, but not the same.”

  On the flight deck there was a sudden alarm from one of the panels.

  “Radiation alarm!” shouted one of the sensor operators as his fingers danced across the controls. “It’s a solar flare plume! Impact in forty seconds!”

  “Spooling in the towed array,” called out another rating.

  “Radshield to full. Helm. Hard turn. Bring the stern quarter to bear,” Driscoll ordered.

  “Roger,” replied the helmsman as he jerked the nose around to put the bulk of the engines between them and the radiation. Abruptly light poured through the bridge viewing ports and outside the radiation shield glowed as charged particles impacted.

  “Is the shield holding?” Driscoll demanded. There was a pause as the rating worked his system.

  “Negative, sir. That’s a negative. Internal radiation levels are climbing out of the green.”

  “Right,” Driscoll snapped as he popped his seat restraint. “All hands, this is the Skipper. All hands to the shelter! All hands to the shelter!”

  Jeff hadn’t waited for the order. As soon as he heard the radiation was too much for the shield he knew what was going to follow. A proper starship had radiation protection for most of the crew areas. Little K7 though couldn’t afford the penalties such a mass would entail, so instead there was one radiation shelter, or as the crew not so fondly referred to it ‘the lead coffin’. Jeff was the first in, with the engineering crew hard on his heels. He shoved himself into a corner as the crew all piled in and started to activate the emergency controls.

  “Well?” Driscoll asked after a few minutes.

  “A direct hit from a class four solar ejection,” came the reply. “We’re going to be going through this for anything up to the next several hours. We’re going to miss our look behind the gas giant.”

  “That won’t matter,” said the ship’s chief petty officer before looking at Driscoll. “Sorry, sir. We didn’t get it back in soon enough. The towed array is completely fried. Not even the self-destruct is responding.”

  Driscoll let out a long irritated sigh before looking up at Jeff.

  “And this is the other reason no one in their right mind would want to spend time around this fucking star. The bloody thing is unstable.”

  As was the way of these things there had been no warning of the solar ejection, a fact that was irrelevant to the two new constructions shadowing the alien scout ship. They had no radiation shields to power up and even if they had, they would not have exposed themselves by doing so. While the new constructions might be recoverable, their crews were undoubtedly lost.

  The question of recovery was not immediately important but their loss did however complicate an already difficult tactical situation. The scouts had been among the enemy’s greatest assets. Roaming behind the immediate frontline, they made it so difficult to build up the stockpiles required to break through the alien front. Experience had shown that these small vessels, while fragile, were elusive targets and quick to retreat when faced by armed opposition. If the first attack failed then it would be unlikely that a second chance could be gained before it jumped away. It was a problem the fleet had perhaps only now come up with a satisfactory solution to. Even if destruction was achieved, the aliens always sent either a second scout or armed force to investigate.

  The analysis section suggested that the crew of the scout might have been disabled by the radiation surge in the same way the crews of the new constructions were. While the idea of recovering an alien ship in working order was an attractive one, it appeared an… optimistic appraisal. While it was true the aliens had on occasion demonstrated the expected willingness to accept casualties, largely they appeared to attempt to avoid them. The question was what to do now? By its very presence the scout was inflicting losses. With an enemy ship in system the ships orbiting the gas giant had been forced to power down to conceal themselves. The crews were already being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and several ships are orbiting out from behind the gas giant. Against a star of this power, direct exposure would burn through a hull in minutes. Already a cargo ship and a cruiser had been lost. With the scout inside the solar ejection mass the ability to take action against it was limited. They must await developments.

  In the shelter it felt like it was getting warmer. According to the temperature gauge it wasn’t, but Jeff had decided that if it came down to a question of trust, he’d trust himself over some bloody bit of machinery. Of course it might just be the atmosphere in the shelter. Nearly a dozen people, stuffed into a space about the size of his bathroom back home, was never likely to be comfortable. It didn’t help that they were nearly blind as to what was happening outside. One after another K7’s systems were shutting down to protect themselves from the radiation. Its integrated passives had been overwhelmed before they even managed to get into the shelter. Driscoll had ordered the radar be brought up. It lasted thirty seconds before it started to suffer radiation related short circuits and the Lieutenant had to order it to be switched off. So now they were down to a few external cameras, but even if they did spot som
ething it wouldn’t matter. The helm wasn’t responding to the remote link.

  A couple of the crew were looking at pictures of loved ones. Jeff sort of wished he could do that. Suzie had dumped him weeks ago, which at the time had been a relief.

  “You okay?” Jeff started and nearly managed to head butt Driscoll as he detached from the bit of the wall he’d been floating against.

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Driscoll responded as he pushed Jeff back until his boot magnets locked on again. “You holding together?”

  “That depends. How are we doing?”

  Driscoll grimaced slightly.

  “We could be worse. It’s become a class five but this shelter is rated up to a class seven.”

  “Yeah but what happens if we’re spotted.” Jeff lowered his voice to a whisper when he saw several of the crew frown at him, “I mean we can’t do anything in here and no one can go out side the shelter.”

  “Yeah. But it cuts both ways,” Driscoll replied speaking normally. “Any missile would have to come through the same radiation and a missile can’t afford to spend mass on radshields or physical shielding. Its systems would be cooked long before it got to us - might be different if they used rail guns or lasers. But lucky for us they don’t.” Driscoll gave him a firm pat on the shoulder before he moved onto the next faint heart.

  For want of anything else to do Jeff dozed for a while before waking when the chief petty officer called out.

  “Skipper, the rads have dropped back into the green and they’re continuing to fall.”

  “The ejection is over?”

  “It was a pretty sharp drop off. I think we’ve gone out the side of the plume.”

  “Alright, everybody out!” Driscoll ordered.

  On the bridge there was a distinct smell of burnt insulation and several of the screens flickered madly. Driscoll looked around, his expression grim.

  “Suit up everyone. Something burning in here and I want to decompress and make damn sure it’s out. I want a complete systems check.”