by Rick Partlow
The sun was nothing but a faint glow on the western horizon as Shannon and Tom Crossman huddled behind a CeeGee armored vehicle, watching the feed from the combat lander on which they’d arrived as it hovered a few hundred meters above the enemy convoy. The vehicles were state of the art Republic Fleet Marine Corps APC’s, their dull grey coloring blending in nicely with the pavement, their insulated engines showing only a faint red even on thermal. And there were five hundred of them, packing the old interstate like an ancient traffic jam, rolling along at a steady 50 kilometers an hour, with another hundred corporate cargo haulers following them, each presumably carrying up to 50 biomech troopers as well as support equipment.
“Jesus Christ, there’re a lot of them,” Tom muttered, shaking his head.
“Target rich environment,” Shannon responded. Then she pushed the connection button on her ‘link’s ear bud. “Charlie Gulf Niner Niner, this is Charlie Gulf One. Your birds are cleared to fire.”
“Roger, Charlie Gulf One,” the pilot responded. “We’re coming in for our first pass.”
The view from the lander’s cameras shifted with roller-coaster abruptness as the combat craft banked hard out of its hover and swooped downward like a hawk after a rabbit. Smoke trails followed a fusillade of missiles that arced downward from the lander’s weapons bay and terminated on the trailing cargo haulers in the convoy, swallowing up three of them in a massive fireball. Then the aircraft was past the line of vehicles and angling around and the view shifted to the rear camera, showing the next lander coming in for a firing run…
…and suddenly coming apart like a paper airplane as the cockpit and the entire front end of the aircraft disappeared in a haze of glowing vapor, the heat trail of the weapon that had destroyed it barely visible on thermal, climbing back along its trajectory, straight up into the twilight sky.
Shannon’s eyes went wide and the roaring in her ears of the stunning realization nearly drowned out the panicked, redundant reports of the other pilots. “Get out of there!” she shouted desperately over their transmissions. “All aircraft evacuate the area and take evasive action! The enemy has orbital weapons!”
As she spoke, Shannon pulled up the controls for the orbital defense system and was totally unsurprised when the tablet told her that she was not authorized to access that operation. She shoved the tablet at Tom, spitting out a curse.
“General Kage!” she yelled into her ‘link. “Get your people away from the vehicles! Do it now!”
In the background, Shannon could hear the screams on the communications channels as one after another of the assault shuttles went down, reduced to burning fragments by remotely-steered tungsten darts barely two meters long, dropped from orbit. She fought back bile that rose in her throat, realizing that not only did each strike kill three good men and women, but that each one meant another second gone before those orbital weapons were retargeted…
“What is happening, Colonel Stark?” Kage demanded, his deep voice sounding small and distant in her ear. She knew he was less than a kilometer away from her position, farther down the old interstate. “What are you talking about?”
“The orbital defense network is compromised!” she told him quickly. “The landers are being destroyed by kinetic weapons! Once they’re gone, those weapons will target our vehicles… you have to get everyone away from the APCs!”
Behind her, she could already hear Tom yelling at the Special Ops team to move away from the vehicles and take cover in the tall grass and she began moving that direction herself in a quick jog as she spoke with Kage. “General, did you read me?”
There was no answer, and she was in the process of calling Ari when a CeeGee armored vehicle only a hundred meters away exploded. Shannon stumbled at a concussion that she could feel in her chest and a quaking in the earth from the 50 kilogram tungsten rod hitting the ground at around Mach 10, but she managed to keep her feet long enough to reach Tom’s position out in the middle of the field. She sprawled next to him, pulling on her helmet and securing it as she continued to try to call Ari.
“Ari, get them away from the APCs!” She switched to her helmet radio.
But the only reply she received was the endless roll of thunder as one after another of the armored vehicles was destroyed in a hideous overkill of liberated kinetic energy raining down from the sky like the wrath of an angry god.
Chapter Forty
Drew Franks grunted with a primal satisfaction as the Protectorate ramship vaporized in a cloud of plasma, its fuel stores ruptured by a fusillade of tungsten Gauss cannon rounds.
“Cease fire, reactivate drive field,” acting Captain Lee ordered.
“That’s four of them down,” Lt. Wolford reported, checking the sensor display. “Plus the two the Decatur took out.” He looked back at her from his station. “She’s still drifting, ma’am… and there are two ramships left this side of the wormhole, heading straight for her.”
“Shit,” Franks muttered, earning a dirty look from Lee.
“Can we reach them before they get to her?” Lee asked, looking back and forth between Wolford and Bevins. They looked at each other, then checked their displays and fed data to each other’s station before turning back to her.
“No chance, ma’am,” Bevins said, shaking his head. “The first rammer is less than fifteen minute away now. It would take us a half hour to get there at the maximum acceleration we could stand outside the tanks”
“She’s launching shuttles and lifepods,” Wolford put in. “They’re abandoning ship.”
“Set an intercept course for the ramships,” Lee said. “We can’t save the Decatur, but we’ll clean up those two bogies, then swing back and pick up the survivors.”
“They won’t be able to clear the ramship’s drive field,” Franks pointed out, his voice dull, trying to force down the rage he was feeling. “They’ll get ripped apart.”
“And what would you suggest I do about that, Lt. Franks?” Lee asked tautly but quietly, her dark eyes flaring with anger.
Franks didn’t answer her immediately, biting back the angry retort that rose in his throat like bile. Commander Lee felt just as angry and impotent as he did, he realized, and had absolutely no combat experience. “I don’t know what we can do, ma’am,” he finally said, “or what we could have done differently. That’s what gets me: I know there should have been, and I can’t help but think that if Major Stark or Colonel McKay were here, they would have done things better than I have.”
Lee’s expression softened and she chuckled humorlessly. “Hell, Lieutenant, you think I’m not wishing Captain Perez were sitting in this seat? Or Admiral Patel? This is not how I saw myself getting my first command. But as of a few minutes from now, we’re going to be all that’s left between the Protectorate and Earth, like it or not.”
“She’s moving!” Wolford blurted, leaning closer to the holographic display as if he didn’t believe it. “Her fusion drives are up… she’s moving away at two g’s!”
“She’s getting farther from the shuttles and lifepods,” Franks deduced.
“Get us in there, Bevins,” Lee snapped. “Two g’s acceleration, we have to take out those ramships before they reach the survivors!”
“Aye, ma’am, sounding acceleration alarms, prepare for high-g burn!”
Franks tightened his harness and leaned back into his couch just as the Helm officer fed power to the drives and space-time spat the ship out like a watermelon seed. On the main viewscreen, the ship seemed to jump forward, the stars streaking by around them, but Franks’ eyes were glued to the representation of the Decatur, which was still accelerating as well, a flare of fusion fire behind her drive bell. The lead ramship was bearing down on her, though, not moving terribly fast for an Eysselink drive ship but still outpacing the crippled Republic warship.
Someone-probably Wolford-put up a projection of the reach of the ramship’s drive field and a line showing how far away it would have to be for the shuttles and lifepods to survive. It seemed like the Decatur
was crawling away from the tiny green symbols that represented her shuttles, the blue tinged circle of the ramship’s drive field still on course to rip those green symbols apart.
“Why only two g’s?” Franks wondered aloud, pushing the words out past twice his normal weight on his chest.
“What?” Lee asked, eyes flickering over to him.
“The Decatur,” he clarified. “Why is she only hitting two g’s? They can’t be saving fuel-saving it for what? For a short run like that, the fusion drive could hit four g’s easy, get them out of the area faster. Why only two g’s?”
There was silence on the bridge for a moment as his question sank in, and then Bevins broke it, with a grim statement. “There are still people on board,” he said. “Someone’s running her manually.”
“Jesus,” Wolford hissed.
“Enough chatter,” Lee snapped, trying to sound tough, but Franks could see the pain in her eyes, hear the catch in her throat. “Just take us to that intercept.”
On the screen, the blue halo moved almost imperceptibly away from the shuttles. Franks watched it, wishing he could somehow make it disappear…
“What’s the range on the sensors?” He asked suddenly. Wolford looked at him blankly. “The modified sensor beams we used to destabilize their drive fields… it’s gotta’ have a longer range that conventional beam weapons. It’s travelling FTL for Christ’s sake!”
A light came on in Wolford’s eyes and he hit the intercom control. “Commander Infante!” he nearly shouted into the audio pickup. “What’s the effective range of the sensor mods to destabilize an Eysselink field?”
There was a long silence and for a moment, Franks thought that Infante hadn’t heard the transmission, but then the Engineer replied, her voice slow and hesitant. “I can’t say for sure, Lt. Wolford,” she said. “It depends on the strength and size of the field you’re targeting and…”
“Give me your best Goddamned guess, Commander!” Lee interjected with an impatient snarl.
“Perhaps… 100,000 kilometers at the power levels we’re using,” the Engineer estimated, a bit of pique in her voice at Lee’s tone.
Franks glanced to Lee and she shot him a fierce grin. “The hell with McKay and Stark, Lieutenant,” she said. “You’re doing all right yourself.” She turned to Bevins and Wolford. “Tactical, I need a firing solution for that ramship! Range is 100,000 kilometers! Helm, get us there in time!”
* * *
Larry Gianeto squeezed through the lifepod hatch and the narrow docking umbilical, into the pressurized cockpit of the shuttle. The cabin was crowded with a dozen crewmembers, two more than it was supposed to be able to hold safely, and two dozen more were crammed into the lifepods in its unpressurized cargo hold. Larry moved through the press, coming up to the back of the pilot’s seat.
“Commander Irvine,” he spoke loudly to be heard over the hubbub in the crowded cockpit. “Do we have all the lifepods secured in the shuttles?”
Irvine turned back to him, sweat beading on his dark-skinned, hawk-lean face from the heat of the massed bodies in the small cabin. “They’re just closing the cargo bay doors on the last one, Commander Gianeto,” he reported, strain in his voice. “The Decatur is under way… she activated her fusion drive about a minute ago.”
“I want every shuttle in a full-power burn in the opposite direction now,” Gianeto ordered. Irvine glanced at him dubiously, not least because they were both the same rank, but then nodded and turned to relay the order.
“Everyone strap in!” Irvine yelled back into the cabin. “One g burn in ten seconds!”
Gianeto glanced around, heartbeat quickening as he saw that every acceleration couch was occupied, but then Irvine’s co-pilot jerked a thumb back to a fold-down seat next to the airlock. Gianeto scrambled back to pull it down into position and barely managed to get the harness around him before the shuttle’s engines flared to life. He was pushed back into his seat by a familiar 80 kilograms as the shuttle’s small, onboard particle-bed reactor heated up the liquid hydrogen reaction mass and expelled it at hypersonic velocities.
Gianeto felt his heart rate increasing and fought to stay calm. There were dozens of crewmembers in the shuttles, and yet his attention kept drifting back to the Decatur and Captain Minishimi, now just a distant star of fusion light on the viewers.
“Which lifepod is the Captain on?” Irvine asked him, as if reading his expression.
“She’s not in a lifepod,” Gianeto told the pilot. “The navigation computers were fried by the feedback from the field collision. Captain Minishimi is in the Engineering bay of the Decatur, piloting her manually.”
Irvine’s head snapped around, his mouth dropping open and he wasn’t the only one. It seemed to Gianeto that everyone in the cabin was staring at him aghast. A sour taste was in his mouth and he felt like a coward. “I tried to make her let me do it,” he said, shaking his head. “She said it was her duty as Captain.” He felt a surge of anger and put it in his voice. “She ordered me to look after the crew and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
Irvine nodded, acceptance reluctantly entering his eyes. He paused, closing his eyes and whispering a prayer under his breath, then crossed himself; Gianeto saw a few others join him. He wasn’t Catholic, or much of anything, but for a moment he wished he were: right now, it would be very comforting to believe in an afterlife.
* * *
“We’re two minutes from effective range, Captain,” Wolford reported, the glowing light of his holographic display playing over the worry lines in his face. “The enemy ship’s drive field will impact the Decatur in exactly two minutes and forty five seconds.”
Franks hissed involuntarily, watching the two computer-simulated avatars coming closer together on the main screen. That wasn’t a hell of a lot of room for error.
“Even if we can take out the ramship’s field,” he said, “she might still ram right into the Decatur.”
Then he blinked as the fusion flare at the rear of the Decatur abruptly faded and the ship’s acceleration ceased.
“The Decatur has ceased its burn!” Wolford announced, worry in his voice.
“What are they doing?” Bevins muttered.
“I read a lifepod ejecting near the Engineering section,” Wolford said. His head snapped up, looking to Captain Lee. “Whoever was on board has abandoned ship, ma’am!”
“They can’t know we’re going to be able to stop the ramship,” Franks observed. “Why are they ejecting?”
“Hope, perhaps,” Lee murmured a speculation. “Let’s make sure it’s not false hope. Are we in range, Lt. Wolford?”
“Ten seconds, ma’am,” Wolford told her, “assuming Commander Infante’s estimate was correct. I have control of the emitters.”
“It was a rough estimate,” Lee mused. “Bevins, take us down to one gravity. Wolford, open fire now… let’s see what the outer envelope is on this thing.”
“Aye, Captain,” Wolford said with eagerness in his voice-or perhaps it was relief at the extra weight on his chest disappearing. “Activating emitters now, three second burst.”
The sensor display froze as the gravimetic emitters switched function from analysis to offense, and then the images were in motion again… and the blue halo of the ramship’s Eysselink drive field was intact. Franks bit back a curse.
“Their drive field destabilized slightly,” Wolford said, looking at his readouts, “but not critically. We have less than thirty seconds till the drive field intersects the lifepod’s course.”
“Fire again!” Lee snapped. “Longer this time! Get that field down!”
“Ten second burst,” Wolford said, adjusting the controls. “Firing.”
This time the sensor display went completely dark and Franks thought the lighting on the ship flickered and dimmed as well, but that could have been the displays flickering on and off. His hands were clenched on the arms of the acceleration couch and he found himself holding his breath.
“Emitters off
,” Wolford said, hitting the control. He shook his head. “It’s going to take a few seconds to get the sensors back up and calibrated.”
Franks forced himself to breath, forced his fingers to relax as the seconds dragged on, interminably long and he saw acting Captain Lee begin to open her mouth, as if she were about to ask how long it was going to take. Then the main viewscreen and the Tactical display both snapped to life and the images of the two ships began to form once again, hazily at first, flitting back and forth like ghosts until they came into sharp relief… and merged in a glowing ball of star-white plasma.
“What just happened?” Franks demanded, leaning forward against his restraints despite the acceleration trying to push him back.
“That was a collision…” Wolford said helplessly, trying to analyze the data that was coming into the newly-activated sensor.
“No kidding,” Bevins muttered.
“Shut the hell up,” Lee hissed at Bevins with venom in her tone and her eye and the young man blanched, swallowing hard. “Where is the ramship, Wolford?”
“I can’t find her…” Wolford admitted, shaking his head. “Ma’am… I think we must have taken down her drive field, then she hit the Decatur and they both went up.” He anxiously grabbed at a section of the Tactical holographic display and pulled it into larger focus. “Yes!” he yelled. “The lifepod is still there, ma’am! We did it, we got the ramship!”
“Thank God,” Franks said softly.
“We’ll come back for the lifepod,” Lee decided. “Set a course for the last ramship: we have to take her out before she can get near the survivors.”
“Aye, Captain,” Bevins said, happy to have an order to follow to take his thoughts off her previous anger. “Setting intercept course.”
“She’s still seven minutes out,” Wolford began, then frowned as he pulled up a section of the sensor display. “Ma’am, I have another Eysselink drive signature coming in, but it’s not coming from the gate in the Belt.” His eyes grew wide. “And it’s a lot bigger… Captain, I think it’s one of our cruisers! I can’t tell which one yet.”