Riding the Red Horse

by Christopher Nuttall

  Three squads of four men launch themselves out from behind their APC, flying gracefully across the harsh landscape toward the battered ship, making minor adjustments mid-flight with their space-armor retros. Two squads aim for the underside, fore and aft, the third lands with a clang next to an airlock hatch. One of the middle squad marines flips up a cover next to the hatch and places his helmet against the com pad where contact sound conduction would carry to the pickup. He pushes the button and introduces himself. “Knock-knock, Assholes! Didn’t your daddy ever teach you to be sure of your target before you open fire? You wasted a perfectly good, though empty, suit of armor! Marine Corporal Mellow-Harsher of the ship Armadillo. Open and surrender or we make our own door.”

  After a long minute, the light clicks green. The corporal grabs the handle, turns it, and pulls then pushes the door to swing inward, while his squad-mates cover the door with their weapons. Using the weapon’s camera optic on his HUD they see nobody inside. Two of the marines clamber gracefully in. One of them covers the airlock interior cameras, the other then carefully attaches a lunchbox-sized item on the overhead with a piece of duct tape because the magnetic strip found no ferrous metal to attract. He nods to the squad leader, then touches helmets. “Got a signal” he reports. They exit and close the hatch, then wait.

  On the HUD in each helmet a small video link displays a camera view from the device they secured, showing the inner door of the airlock. The hatch opens and a grenade is hurled inside, followed by two rifle muzzles spraying around the inside of the airlock. “Rough neighborhood” the Corporal observes. A moment later the hatch opens the rest of the way. “Blow it.” The camera view disappears as the signal is lost, the mine attached to the camera spraying inward with a thousand tiny metal balls, shredding the light spacesuits of the men who were firing a moment before. “We can play that game, too.”

  Fore and aft, the other two teams set off their ring charges, blasting their own entrance into the cruiser, inner air pressure blowing the debris away against the rock below. The grav APCs add a few selective shots into critical areas, their lighter weapons limiting the damage to systems that needed to be disabled more thoroughly while the marines clear their areas.

  On Armadillo’s bridge, a screen showed the smiling face of 2nd Lieutenant Kashvili reporting back. “Data cores secured. Privates Danes and Vargas injured, nothing critical, but we’ll send them back with the hardware. Minimal resistance, just enthusiastic amateurs who appear to know and hate Armadillo personally, calling her a tool of Satan. We had to shoot about fifty of them before most of them understood the situation, but we’re still digging out a few hard cases. Loose words clearly indicated this is a setup; they’ve been here a week. Got about a hundred dead aboard, two hundred prisoners; just letting them try to patch the ship up, keep it airtight. What now, Captain?”

  Harrison acknowledged the report with a grunt and a satisfied nod. “Secure the ship and armor. Let us know if any new intelligence specifics come up. Spherical LP/OPs, passive only. Keep the APCs and troops, send back six of the tanks, camo the other two. Hole ‘em and hunker if things go completely non-linear. We’ll be back for you when we’re done out there.”

  “Roger that.” The young man’s face disappeared from the screen.

  “No obvious signs of ships moving since the initial attack, Captain,” the AI informed him. “They either have not noticed, or are biding their time.”

  “Cat and mouse, then. With some very big mice.” He turned to the other man in the doorway, who was wearing lighter space armor like the rest of the shipboard crew. “Are we sure on those transponder codes?”

  The chief engineer nodded confidently. “Damn straight. If Ship’s even partially right about who’s out there, once the Whistlers start squawking, everyone will wonder whose fleet set up whom.”

  “OK, then. As soon as the armor and returning men are secured aboard, get things spun up and ready, make sure nothing has changed, then start the first one.”

  The status readouts throughout the bridge were mostly green, and the tactical display was quiet. An icon appeared and started blinking amid a dense patch of the ring’s rocks, Pearl, then disappeared. Then A second icon lit up. Yangtze. “Do we have a clear shot?”

  “Affirmative,” Samper muttered, focusing intently on moving orbital debris between them, “for about another six seconds.”

  “Laze the Yangtze at two thirds power in four, nine beams.”

  Samper smiled. “Matching the Homburg’s weapon pattern…now.” Status lights on his board lit up, and a moment later the Yangtze’s icon changed as the ship disappeared from direct observation.

  “All beams target the mine layer, full power.”

  “Aimed and ready, sir.”

  “Fire.” Across the weapons console, capacitors discharged, dumping terawatts of energy for microseconds, then began recharging. Almost three seconds later, the tactical display began showing initial damage assessments based on the light from the explosions where beams found targets. “Likely disabled, damage at least fifty percent.” Another stream of results flowed across the screens. “Damage at least eighty percent. Out of action, beyond damage control near certain.”

  “Squawk Homburg.”

  The com specialist nodded, and punched a pre-programmed sequence. The tactical display lit up showing another ship. Moments later, two more transponder icons appeared: one the real Homburg, the other reading Köln.

  “Oops,” Armadillo said. “That's not good. Beta isn’t the Wiesbaden. It's Köln, she's a frigate.”

  “Lots of radio traffic now,” specialist Gungey announced from his communications consol. “Some narrow-beam apparently aimed at the San Clemente. Some broadband open freq. Sounds like an open com–what-the-hell?”

  “BFR impacts gunship rock in three,” Samper reminded the bridge. On a side-screen with a high-res visual of the rock, there is a sudden flash and a cloud of dust appeared as the mass slams into the tiny rock to which the three gunships, blowing it apart. The explosion sends high-velocity rock fragments and plasma from the impact into all three tiny craft, seriously damaging them and sending them spinning, out of control. “Looks like they are out of the equation, now.”

  “OK, lift and head for moonlet Bravo.” The pilot works the controls, space-dust surrounding the ship glows, and for the first time in days something like real gravity is felt as the acceleration, anti-grav, and acceleration compensators work high-tech magic. On the tactical screen, indications of a long-range laser duel start lighting up, as ships start firing at others unknown to them, and captains try to sort out who’s who.

  Armadillo accelerates inward toward another moonlet a mere thirty thousand kilometers away, taking a slightly arcing path to avoid a few rocks drifting along, vaporizing others in their path with the tanks’ beam weapons. “Incoming laser fire. Maneuvering,” the AI reports, as beams fired from a half-light second away try to predict her trajectory and intercept her. “Only four megajoule beams. Likely from Yangtze.” Another cruiser icon appears on the tactical display, flashing Pearl, near the far side of the rings, then another one flashing Homburg somewhat closer, as the Whistler rounds squawk, followed briefly by Kittyhawk, Sungari, Dresden, Taurus, and San Gabriel.

  “Firing chaff rounds” Samper reported, as a series of barely audible thuds echo through the ship.

  “Everyone moving,” Armadillo said, speaking quickly but blandly. “Another ship detected, far side of moonlet Bravo, big drive signature ramping up, badly regulated. No visuals, no good guesses.”

  “Go around the opposite way! See if we can circle close behind them, catch them on the horizon!” Captain Harrison commanded. “Load canister in the tanks. Evacuate the cargo deck, get ready to drop the APCs to act as gunship cluster!” Orders are passed, and the cargo bay becomes a beehive of activity as thin carbon nanotube cables are passed and secured between the dozen remaining APCs on the deck, suits are sealed, and three-man crews and an extra climb aboard the angular armor
ed personnel carriers getting ready to be cast adrift if needed to act as a remote firing platform.

  Armadillo bounces randomly about, altering acceleration vectors to reduce the chance of a laser hit, though a few lucky strikes cause hot spots or damage less robust pieces attached to her armored hull. A weapon pod is holed, destroying two missiles, a tank’s railgun is damaged, and the unknown craft is still lurking behind the moon as they begin reducing velocity and vector around its curve. The tactical display gets more complex as target Alpha lifts off from under her camo; she is clearly not a military tug, but has a number of retrofit weapons attached to it emitting the transponder data for a defunct cruise liner. Likely a pirate.

  As they rapidly approach the moonlet, Armadillo’s pilot aims to hook around in a low, tight orbit, going the same way the faintly detected ship on the far side appears to be heading, trying to catch it from behind. When they are only one diameter away, Samper empties and dumps two missile pods, the barrage of mixed ordnance going the other way to meet the newcomer head-on, transmitting live video so they can identify the ship and abort if needed. The missiles arc over the nearby horizon. A shape appears on the screen for just a moment before it freezes, the missile sending it destroyed by counter-fire.

  Samper looked as puzzled as everyone else, as he stared at the image. “That's not a silhouette I recognize.” A scale appears on the side, and high-contrast lines delineating the outline and features rapidly appear as the picture is hastily analyzed by the ship, including a number of shapes around it nearby. An engineering drawing appears on the screen.

  “Senkaku,” Armadillo declared. “No reports of having been completed, last estimate was at least another six months. Battleship class. Forty eight thousand tons, sixty fighters, one hundred laser turrets. Unknown railgun, missile launch tube, or conventional cannon configuration. Light armor design, with heavy compartmentalization and redundancy.”

  “Shit” the captain swore under his breath. “Relative acceleration?”

  “Estimated at half ours.”

  “OK. Only a few fighters launched. Fast is good. Tell the APCs to drop two crewmen, prep to get ejected on a ballistic path for low passing highly elliptical orbit. We want them to come over the horizon a moment before we do, but from the opposite side. As soon as they are out, reverse course. We’ll meet Senkaku head on, firing over the horizon for time on target.” Harrison’s expression is emotionless and set as he rattles off orders. The APCs were all but doomed, and he knew it. They were a distraction, little more, but a hopefully precious one.

  The relative motion of the moonlet below them slows dramatically as the drive fields bite hard into the fabric of space, warping and shoving on trans-dimensional opposition to alter vectors in this universe. The cargo bay ramp drops, the inner airlock doors sliding aside, and two articulated mechanical loading arms grab the front two APCs and pull them hard out the gaping doorway in the momentarily zero-G environment. They fly away in a huddled mass of armor, bristling guns and small missile launchers, rapidly jockeying with their interacting grav-fields to all point the same way as they arc away in the moon’s puny gravity well.

  Once clear of her, Armadillo’s drive field leaps out and intensifies with the hard acceleration of reversing course to meet the larger ship in time, so the men’s imminent sacrifice will not be in vain. The drives are pushing hard enough to make the whole ship vibrate, and the whine of overstressed power systems trying to charge all weapons capacitors and drive at flank acceleration makes more than a few foxhole conversions among the crew. On the bridge, the pilot, weapons officer, and AI consult to ensure the best possible timing and coordination of the weapons, knowing they will only have one chance.

  On the tactical display, a bright white icon of a mushroom cloud appears in a corner. “San Clemente appears to have detonated a two megaton warhead. Survivors improbable,” the AI informed them quietly. “Thirty seconds.”

  The seconds tick by. “APCs report hits, they're returning fire. Still broadcasting.”

  A Senkaku reconnaissance drone appears over the horizon, and is lased a millisecond later.

  Armadillo rotates at an angle, flying somewhat sideways and bringing eighteen of her twenty four tanks’ guns to bear in the direction she’s streaking. Her pulsing drives fall silent, and she drifts for a few seconds before the 120mm conventional cannons open up, thumping out rounds every three seconds, chaff, canister, terminal guidance HE, high velocity penetrators, and more chaff, while missile launch tubes fire a salvo of self-guiding hell, and some of the hard-point missile pods are emptied and discarded, before Armadillo rotates around to fly bow-forward to align her main weapon, the biggest railgun ever mounted in a spaceship, with the expected location of the opposition. The conventional cannons and railguns that can continue to fire, filling space with tens of thousands of pieces of hardened metal, small mines, and sensor-disrupting chaff, with velocities and launch times coordinated to sweep the Senkaku’s expected course as a dense cloud, just seconds ahead of Armadillo.

  Armadillo alters acceleration, then coasts ballistic for a few brief moments to time her arrival precisely, and appear without any over-the-horizon” drive glow to announce her on passive sensors. “Engage the enemy more closely,” Armadillo’s avatar murmurs, anticipating the action, drawing grim smiles from one or two of the better-educated members of the bridge crew.

  The glow of Senkaku’s drive field shimmers over the horizon, shortly followed by the turning outline of her broadside hull firing at the APCs. The resonating PING of the BFR breaks the relative quiet of the briefly drifting ship, followed by the whine of power surging to drives and weapons systems. The flicker of firing guns aimed the other way changes rapidly as the wall of ordnance Armadillo has thrown out registers on the defensive systems and they start, too late, to respond, unable to separate a hundred million harmless bit of flat aluminum chaff from tens of thousands of tungsten cubes at similar velocities. Senkaku’s near-side railguns and cannons start firing, but many of her numerous beams, already warm from firing at the cluster of APCs lobbing missiles and rounds at them, rapidly heat-limit. Her computers choke trying to sort and prioritize the incoming tungsten, aluminum, and steel, separating ballistic trajectories from accelerating and guided rounds suddenly appearing at close range when most of the guns are aimed the opposite direction.

  Most of Armadillo’s dense storm of ordnance misses its target, but twenty grams of hard metal impacting at a relative velocity of more than three kilometers per second leaves a mark. Thousands of them, along with a variety of missile warheads, armor-piercing HE rounds, and five-kilogram penetrator rods scour the armor of the ship, holing every surface compartment, damaging every sensor, disabling every major weapon, and sweeping most of its close-flying escort of fighters from the battlefield action. The ten kiloton-equivalent BFR projectile isn’t perfectly aimed down the center of the huge ship, but passes through one drive core, the main power system, primary life-support, and secondary engineering control, punching a hole clear through the ship side-to-side, rendering it checkmated in space. The rounds fired by Senkaku start impacting Armadillo’s heavy hull armor, making her meter-thick plating ring like a tin roof in a hailstorm. Damage indicator lights start blinking and lighting up as tanks, hatches, and systems are hit.

  Passing her by less than a hundred meters away, Armadillo rakes Senkaku’s other side as well with her dozen remaining tank guns, targeting weapons that survived the initial broadside hit, continuing to fire at any remaining fighters that are not fleeing at max acceleration with weapons not aimed at the much larger, but now battered, ship.

  Captain Harrison looks at the mangled mass of wrecked APCs drifting through space. Two of them continue to fire at the larger ship. Without being told, the pilot reverses course, accelerating hard at an angle to match trajectories with the nearly parabolic APC path.

  “No primary hull penetration. Four hatches seriously damaged. Eight tanks damaged, five destroyed. Two launch tubes damaged. No
remaining missile pods. Drive, power, and life support systems nominal. Prepare to take on the APCs, or search them outside and just recover survivors?” The AI’s avatar looks somber, and its synthetic voice has an edge to it.

  “We have to move fast. Take them on, then search, but keep the cargo bay evacuated so we can dump the extra mass in a hurry if we have to.”

  Velocities matched, the mangled mess of armor is brought aboard, then swarmed by marines searching for the crew on each one. Miraculously, because of heavy armor and good luck, nine men are pulled alive from the vehicles, though all the APCs are slagged beyond repair.

  On the bridge, the com specialist perks up, motioning to Harrison. “Incoming message, open freq. Yangtze.” The captain nods and motions to the screen. A moment later, the Chinese captain appears on it.

  “You have fired on an unarmed Republic ship! You must surrender! This violation of sovereignty cannot stand!”

  Harrison stared at him coldly for a few long moments as the time lag from light-speed catches up. “No. We were fired upon by the San Clemente, and the data cores we took from her were quite revealing. The log will show Senkaku fired first. And then, there is the matter of who laid the minefield at our planned entry points, is there not?” He waits for the transmission to reach the Yangtze, which is still exchanging fire with the slightly more distant German ships. “Captain, you were set up, just like we were. These rings are pretty spectacular, but you don’t think the Köln just happens to be here for the scenery, do you?”

  A few seconds later Armadillo’s avatar appears on the screen, chewing a cigar stub thoughtfully. “If you're interested in my capabilities, I would be happy to give you a close and personal demonstration, as I did for Senkaku.”