“Torpedo direct fire envelopes opening up now, sir,” said the CIC weapons officer.
The admiral ignored this. As did the rest. The man was just doing his job providing the required information in case the initial plan needed to be altered.
“Intensify fire one minute,” said the admiral.
“Extreme close engagement. All batteries engaged,” relayed a different CIC officer whose job it was to provide that data.
Now it was time to gamble, thought Admiral Ubesk. He’d known all along that the zhee had only a bare understanding of fleet tactics, much less of space warfare and ship-to-ship engagement. They’d come in the same way they did everything: full of sound and fury, firing and cutting, looking for first blood. If they found it, they’d suddenly swarm and concentrate. But they hadn’t bothered to put any effort into punching through any shields. Instead they’d just shot at everything, looking for an easy kill.
And here was the gamble: What if they rammed? What if they didn’t back off and they just rammed one of his destroyers? That would be catastrophic. But it wouldn’t be the battle.
Ubesk was gambling that they wouldn’t do this. That they’d had too much fun raiding worlds for plunder with their new House of Reason toys. That at the last minute they’d adjust course and fly by, shooting hard into his shields. And once they did that for long enough, and fast enough, they’d present their aft deflector array—with shields that were weaker than their forward-facing counterparts. Because a battle cruiser attacked. It didn’t run.
Except now Ubesk was forcing them to “run” speeding past his fleet. Presenting their rear deflectors. Thinking they would come about like every predator in the world for another pass at an easy, slow-moving kill.
“You may activate the Aegis Fire Control System, Commander,” said the admiral as one of the zhee battle cruisers, sleek and wicked, swept in over the Mercutio. It was so close that some crewmen on the bridge flinched, and others stopped to stare in wonder.
The zhee were at least holding a tight formation on this pass. Which was exactly what the plan called for them to do.
“All batteries, all ships…. slaved to Aegis Fire Control,” announced the CIC weapons officer. “Reporting in ready to fire on your command, sir.”
The admiral waited, allowing the zhee to reach maximum safe explosion distance. Yes, there would be debris and some tidal shock from the blast wave if this all worked according to plan. The angle of engagement was critical. There was only a moment in which this plan would work.
That moment presented itself.
“Now!” shouted the admiral. “Target center cruiser. All batteries fire. Target engines and engineering decks.”
Every turret in the Legion’s expeditionary fleet lanced out and struck the rear engines of one of the massive battle cruisers. That ship went up in a sudden explosion as the engines and all four of her reactors detonated at once. The blast wave struck the other cruisers, destroying another and vaporizing the deflector arrays of those closest to the blast. A few of these were pushed into the outlying cruisers; two collided, and another explosion ensued, sending burning wreckage into a half a dozen others.
Every battle cruiser’s deflectors were now down, and the zhee were electronically blind. Close-range explosions did that to delicate sensor systems. But of course the zhee hadn’t learned that in their limited experience of raiding near-defenseless worlds.
“Take the Aegis offline. Battery commanders have discretion to fire. Fire at will.”
Within five minutes the entire zhee fleet was a field of burning wreckage hovering dangerously close to Ankalor’s atmosphere. From the bridge of the Mercutio, the admiral saw the first battle cruiser, dead in space, burn in, igniting up along its spine, and then turning into a million flaming little pieces as it reached the planetary shield.
Ship-in-distress messages were coming in from the zhee and their lifeboats. Those messages were ignored as per a directive from the top of the chain of command. The rest of the battle cruisers would follow that first one that had gone in over Ankalor.
Over the next half hour the Legion’s fleet held station, and did not conduct rescue operations.
17
Legion Destroyer Intrepid
Ankalor System
“Well this is a damn nightmare!” Major Owens pounded his fist on the command console.
“Yes, sir,” answered an aide. The fresh-faced lieutenant seemed unsure of even those words. Owens knew the aide only tangentially—he was the non-appointed aide of the man Owens had replaced—but Owens had the sense that he was new to being this close to a command position. Which wasn’t surprising—the point Owens had replaced had tended to use non-appointed Legion officers as go-fers, caff runners, errand boys.
In the space before them both—the pit, as it was called—Operation Turning Point’s progress was projected through a myriad of three-dimensional holos, real-time holoscreen feeds, readouts, status reports, and more. At the heart of this display was a holographic representation of Ankalor. It was a small planet, rotating from day to night much faster than Utopion standard’s twenty-four hours. A blue layer, like a stasis field, had lit up around the planet—which meant the planetary shield was up. That was going to completely gum up the ground assault.
Intrepid had been the first destroyer to jump in. Their mission was to retrieve the kill team and launch fighters in the event that the zhee’s fancy new fleet showed up mid-battle. And the fighters had indeed been launched, but there was no kill team for them to recover. They were all dead—only their shuttle’s pilot remained. And judging by what was happening on the man’s live-feed, one hundred cuts in, he wouldn’t last much longer either.
There had been a brief powwow among the ship captains, the Legion commander, General Hannubal, and Owens. Priority one was the planetary defense shield. They had jumped into the system far enough away so as not to trigger the automatic defense mechanisms, and yet the shield was already raised when they arrived. A shield that the Republic was supposed to have had control over. Which meant that either the zhee had taken them, or the Republic had gotten word of Article Nineteen and had decided to do something about it.
The latter seemed more likely, given what had happened to Kill Team Zenith.
“Sir,” said a white-clad naval officer with bags under her eyes. “Captain Chhun has arrived to see you as ordered, sir.”
Owens nodded. “Thank you.”
Chhun was in full kit, except for his helmet. He looked stone-faced. All business. And he’d brought the rest of his kill team with him, though Owens had only called for Chhun himself.
“Cohen.” Owens gave a quick turn of his head, inviting the legionnaire to approach the command console. “C’mon over. Your team, too.”
“This about Zenith?” Chhun asked. He didn’t look at Owens for an answer. Instead he studied the various ship alignments and feeds in the pit below them.
Owens popped his gum loudly and pulled off his shades, rubbing his eyes with the tips of his fingers. “You know what happened?”
“Whole galaxy knows what happened,” Chhun said, nodding at a newsfeed that kept replaying footage of a naked Dark Ops legionnaire—a man Chhun had met several times—being thrown off of a two-story building. The crowd gave room for him to fall, then scooped the body up and carried it inside to be thrown down again. They were trying to utterly pulverize the man’s corpse. “Sir, we need to make the donks pay.”
“Yeah, well.” Owens punched up his console and brought up the feed of Cassius being tortured. “They don’t know about this. Repub has it blocked except for priority classified. That’s us.”
“Holy strokes,” mumbled Masters, watching with a stunned look as the stealth shuttle pilot moaned in agony with each new slice.
Chhun watched dispassionately, then turned to his men. He seemed to reach each legionnaire’s eyes. “Sir, Kill Team Victory volunteers to perform a rescue mission.”
Owens gave a melancholy smile. Chhun’s res
ponse was utterly Legion, and the situation was utterly this broken world. Another rescue of another doomed soul who was just trying to do right by the galaxy. Yesterday Herbeer, today Ankalor, tomorrow… who could say?
“I know,” Owens said, his voice soft. “I knew you would.”
The major hardened his voice and directed Chhun’s attention to Ankalor. “But there’s a planetary shield standing in your way. I’ll be frank. CWO Cassius will be dead by the time boots get on the ground. And that’s if we can even get them on the ground.”
No one from the kill team spoke. Now seemed a time to listen.
Owens continued. “We’ve got the brains putting together a plan. It involves a modified armored shuttle, a coordinated bombardment of the shield, and a kill team crazy enough to bet their lives on the two-second window we think we’ll have if everything works out.” He looked at Chhun and his team expectantly.
No one spoke, but each man gave a minute, solemn nod.
“How soon?” Chhun asked.
Owens didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or swear. “I don’t know. Still waiting.”
“Major Owens!” The cry came from a comm officer. “Urgent message from Legion command.”
“Send it over.” Owens punched up his holoscreen, and the image of Legion Commander Keller’s aide-de-camp came up.
“Major Owens, the Legion commander wanted me to inform you that we have assets on the ground who are en route to the shield generator. Keep your kill team standing by in the event this force is unsuccessful.”
“Who?” asked Owens, his spirits up.
“Mercutio ordered a quick reaction force to disregard the point making things difficult at Camp Rex. They listened.”
***
Task Force Grinder
Badlands, Ankalor City
The streets were thick with zhee as the QRF combat sleds and main battle tanks raced toward their objective. The trouble was, the zhee were never where you could do any damage—except for those few foolhardy donks who found themselves in front of a moving MBT, only to be crushed by the force of repulsors strong enough to keep a one hundred and fifty metric ton war machine floating eighteen inches off the ground.
Boomers One and Two were making a lot of zhee pancakes.
But not enough.
The majority of the zhee flowed around the element like magnets of the same polarity. They just seemed to disappear, pushing down the streets and alleys, and then reappeared behind the column, taking a few shots and then scrambling to avoid the returning blaster cannon fire before repeating the process all over again.
And so it went as the QRF followed the commands coming from Mercutio, verified by their own feed from the observation bots. There would be no surviving an ambush of full force, not with the city swarming the way it was. Their only chance at survival was taking down the shield generator and allowing in the destroyers that were lurking somewhere out of orbit.
“Hard turn left,” advised the Mercutio over L-comm.
Lieutenant Po confirmed that he saw the same. “Hard turn left… then we’re a dead run to target.”
“Affirmative,” said Mercutio.
Vix looked to his men. “Get yourselves ready to KTF.”
They were ready. He told them anyway. Because telling them made him feel like he was ready for what would come next.
The column of vehicles snaked around a turn, and it seemed that every twin blaster cannon opened fire. The tanks boomed with their heavy guns and chopped the air with their coaxial machine blasters.
“Sket, Sarge! It sounds like we just reached the war.”
Vix looked at the legionnaire who’d made the comment. LS-01, “Keystroke” Hayes. He was new to the unit, and had taken on the designation of an old leej whose tour had ended. Folks rarely re-upped on Ankalor.
“Keystroke, I tell you what: the war just reached the donks.”
Vix stood aside, allowing his men to get a better look at the holoscreen that sat on the dividing wall between the troop transport bay and the driver’s cockpit. It was set to forward view, and it showed the zhee that had taken up positions to guard the shield generator. They were being blown to pieces. Utterly destroyed.
“How hard is it to crack one of these generators?” asked a legionnaire.
“Easy for an orbital bombardment, hard for a bombing run,” Vix answered. “We’ll have to send someone inside to blow it. But once you take down a primary hub, the whole system goes down. All the relays, everything.”
Keystroke shook his head. “That’s dumb. Why wouldn’t they have redundancies on something like that?”
Vix motioned at his reflective armor. He’d been around long enough to know the difference between what he had now and what the Legion used to have. “Why do we have this? Because lives are cheap and the House of Reason only spends top-shelf credits for places they really care about. Trust me when I say”—the sled rocked from a nearby explosion—“trust me when I say that Utopion’s planetary shield is a whole different story.”
“Boomer One,” Lieutenant Po called over the comm. “Can you make a hole for us in the generator’s exterior housing?”
“Copy that, Grinder One.”
There was a sustained volley of booming cannons. The sleds continued to fire, this time swinging their twins around to face the trailing enemy. It must have dawned on them what the QRF’s intentions were. Then again, maybe it hadn’t. Maybe they just wanted more dead legionnaires.
“Think you can fit through that?” asked Boomer One’s tank commander.
Vix looked at the display. A fully extended Raptor could probably fly through the hole they’d left.
“Grinder,” called out Lieutenant Po, “assume defense pattern Exodus. Leejes, prepare to dismount.”
Vix read his orders through the visor of his bucket. His team would storm the actual generator. They had all the det-cord.
***
The hole provided by the tanks was more than big enough, and when the squad slipped inside, they found themselves in a supply room. Cleaning solvents pooled on the floor, every carton shattered and leaking from the blast. Toppled boxes of spare parts for bots lay partially submerged in the creamy blue pools. Vix heard himself slosh through the mess like a child stomping through a rain puddle.
The leejes stacked up beside the door leading further into the building, and Keystroke swung it open. They stormed into the hallway, looking both directions as overhead lights flickered.
A schematic appeared on Vix’s HUD, showing the building’s layout and indicating the route they had to take to reach the massive underground power couplings. He motioned for his team to follow him down the hall.
“So there’s going to be some sort of security element,” he said, moving at the front of his squad. “And they’re probably going to want to find out what caused the boom, so…”
As the team moved along their route, more booms sounded from outside. The lights flickered and went out completely, and a soft red emergency light came up in their place. Vix found himself wishing it would go out, too. It would be easier to just move in the dark, relying on their buckets to see for them.
They moved down a stairwell, the ultrabeams on their buckets and rifles illuminating every corner. Still there was no sign of any security detail—or anyone at all, for that matter. Until they poured out of the door onto the sublevel containing the power couplers. Right next to the stairwell was a speedlift, and Vix could hear a conversation in Standard coming from behind the lift doors. An occasional thump suggested that someone was jumping up and down.
“Looks like someone is stuck in the lift,” Keystroke said.
The legionnaires stacked up on either side of it. Vix’s voice bellowed from his bucket’s external speaker. “Republic legionnaires! What’s your situation?”
He braced for blaster fire to rip through the lift doors. Instead he heard a relieved voice.
“Oh, thanks to Oba. We’re building security. We were just heading up when the power went o
ut.”
The legionnaires pried apart the lift doors, revealing an open car that had traveled up just high enough for them to see two men from the knees down. Both men stepped back upon realizing that the ultrabeams shined up at them were attached to the rails of the legionnaires’ N-4s and N-6s.
“Don’t shoot, guys,” one said.
“Weapons on the floor, then slide out,” Vix ordered. “My guys can’t hold these doors apart forever.”
The security guards did as instructed, sliding themselves out legs first and dropping on the ground. A legionnaire took each man aside while a third jumped up and retrieved their rifles. When the lift was empty, they let the doors close again.
Vix examined the guards. Their body language showed no hostility… and no discomfort at being disarmed by a group of leejes. Vix didn’t think these two saw him and his men as enemies.
“You run security on the shields?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Marines?” It was a guess. They were dressed like Republic marines—tan fatigues with kneepads and combat boots—minus a few key unit patches.
“No,” answered the two guards in unison.
One man then spoke for both. “We used to be marines, but we’re private contractors now.”
“How many more?” Vix asked.
“Just us inside. Twelve-hour shifts split up by six contractors. The other guys are probably stuck in the Green Zone. What’s going on out there?”
Vix wasn’t ready to answer that question just yet. “What about security outside?”
Now the other contractor spoke. “Oh, dude. Republic farmed that out to the zhee. We watched them bug out hella quick maybe a half hour before you arrived.”
“Zhee are fighting the Legion on planet,” said Keystroke.
Turning Point (Galaxy's Edge Book 7) Page 18