by Rick Partlow
“Oh, great,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Finally, she gave in and laughed. “We’ll be fine, Francis. Just man the Vulcan, I’ll take the laser. Don’t waste ammo.”
“What about our missiles?” he wondered, already toggling through the control board to transfer the 20mm rotary cannon mounted in the wing to the trigger on his steering yoke. “They can’t have much in the way of anti-missile defenses on those fighters.”
“We need the missiles to take out the anti-aircraft batteries,” she reminded him, making sure the capacitors for the laser were fully charged. “Just trust me.”
The fighters broke wide and banked around as she descended, trying to box her in and she shut out Acosta’s questions and ran down a technical brief to herself about the capabilities of the enemy birds. Starkad Falk Jagerfly air-superiority fighters, top of the line but mostly used for planetary defense. 20mm chin cannons but they couldn’t carry much ammo for them. A laser not much more powerful than a scout mech could carry, which wouldn’t do more than bake the paint on an armored assault shuttle. Four anti-aircraft missiles each, and they’d be counting on those to do the work for them. Their warheads weren’t large and they didn’t have much range, but they could kill her jets if they managed a tail shot and they wouldn’t do a damn bit of good for her control surfaces if they hit a wing.
She had the power and the speed, but the fighters were feathers on the wind, maneuverable as all hell, and they’d try to use that to keep her distracted so the ground batteries could deal with her. They also had next to no armor and could be brought down with harsh language if you could manage to hit them.
You’re the hotshot pilot, babe. Time to show these Starkad assholes how it’s done. Think you can outmaneuver me in those little freaking toys, huh?
“Hold tight, Francis.”
There were things you could do with a shuttle you wouldn’t even think of doing with a fighter, simply because they weren’t nearly as durable. She cut power to the main engines and used the maneuvering thrusters and belly jets to send the shuttle tumbling into what would have been a flat spin if she hadn’t immediately powered out of it, lighting up the drives again, pushing her back into her acceleration couch with a punishing, excruciating gee-load.
The air went out of Acosta in a high-pitched wheeze, like someone squeezing a balloon in their hands and she hoped he wasn’t about to throw up. She wouldn’t blame him if he did, because her lunch was knocking at the door of her throat. But the maneuver had flipped her end for end and put one of the enemy fighters right into the targeting reticle of her laser. Lightning struck, a static charge following the ionized air from the superheated blast of photons, as if Zeus himself was smiting the swing-wing dart out of the sky.
There wasn’t much left of it after the laser pulse cored it through the center. Plasma from the small fusion plant and pure, ambient heat from the high-energy photons turned thin BiPhase carbide and metal to vapor and spread it over the sky in a yellow and white brush stroke across the blue canvas.
“They’re launching,” Acosta warned her, his words muffled as if he were shoving them past the acceleration and the incipient nausea. “We have two missiles inbound.” She saw him reach out against the gee load and flip three switches on his control console. “Launching countermeasures.”
She heard the gentle bump-bump-bump of the electrostatically-charged chaff dropping from ports in the wings, saw them bursting with miniature sun-flashes of thermite, the perfect mix of ingredients to confuse the missiles on their tail. Katy banked left and climbed, using the shuttle’s superior power to her advantage, knowing the Falk Jagerfly fighters would have to follow. They’d committed, and whatever their nationality, they were pilots and she knew pilots.
“All three missiles scratched,” Acosta reported.
He really was good at this job now, though she’d never admit it to him. For someone whose training as a copilot had consisted of a two-week familiarization course from Military Intelligence before his assignment, he’d managed to make himself dependable at least as flight support. She still wouldn’t have trusted him to fly the bird himself, but then, she didn’t trust anyone to fly her bird.
“Two of them are pursuing,” he went on, his eyes glued to the sensor readouts. “One is circling in patrol above the base.”
“I see them.”
She’d pulled up into a steeper and steeper ascent until she had the assault shuttle standing on its tail, riding the candle, forcing the fighters to run their jets close to the redline. She knew they’d have to launch missiles again rather than continue to chase her higher into the edge of the atmosphere, and they did. Two more streaks of fire arced away from the Falks at twenty gravities of boost, more than a human could take and stay conscious.
“They just…” Acosta began.
“I know.”
She cut power and flipped the shuttle end for end in the space of three seconds, watching the missiles get way too close before she switched off the turbojets and hit the fusion drive for just a fraction of a second. They were high in the atmosphere, high enough and with the air thin enough she was fairly certain the plasma wouldn’t cause a shockwave and knock them out of the sky. A 300-kilogram sack of concrete slammed Katy back into her acceleration couch and she tasted blood in her mouth where she’d slipped and bit her own lip, but there was no time to give in to pain or weakness. They were plummeting planetward, depowered, a giant dart heading not just towards unforgiving land but right into the firing arc of all those ground defenses.
“Shit,” Acosta blurted. She could hear his breathing, heavy and frantic beside her as he watched their descent on the screen. She could feel it in her gut, the free-fall, zero-gravity sensation she’d learned to love.
She powered up the turbines with a touch on a control beside the steering yoke, but instead of pulling up, she added their boost to their own gravity-aided course. The free-fall sensation went away, replaced by the sheer terror of accelerating straight down.
“What the hell, Katy?”
“This is gonna hurt,” she warned him.
On the tactical display, the view of the Starkad base was magnified by the external cameras, a series of huge, fortified warehouses and smaller base housing, and at their perimeter were the two missile batteries. Rectangular pods mounted on motorized gimbals, the launch batteries were rising up on their mounts, spinning in place, hunting for her, guided by the radar dishes emplaced between them. She toggled her targeting screen to the shuttle’s multi-purpose missiles, guided the targeting reticle over the emplacement to the north of the base and thumbed the launch control.
She barely felt the missile separating out of the internal weapons bay, didn’t watch the tactical screen to see if it flew true. She put all her strength, all her concentration into yanking up on the steering yoke, throttling up the turbines as the shuttle slowly, reluctantly pulled out of the power dive. She hadn’t been lying to Acosta. It hurt. Every muscle in her body seemed to cramp at once and she let out an involuntary scream of pain, rage, and frustration, but she kept pulling on the stick and the nose came up and up and…
Sweet Jesus!
She didn’t even have the breath left to speak by the time the shuttle began to arc upwards, only meters above the roof of the central warehouse, each crack and rut and moisture stain in its tar-black surface visible in the finest detail as it slid by beneath her. A fireball rose above the roofline, red and angry against the afternoon sky, just a flicker of an image out of the corner of her eye before the shuttle pulled up and away. The missile had hit, hopefully on target.
Her forearms quivered with the effort of holding the steering yoke against its stops, keeping the belly of the shuttle only meters above the rising face of the rugged hill behind the paved landing field. She was sure the enemy fighters were still incoming, but she’d have to trust Acosta to watch them.
“The two we left up high are still five kilometers away,” he told her as if he’d read her mind. He was
squeezing the words past the stress, but he hadn’t passed out yet, which was impressive. “The last guy is coming in at our four o’clock, five hundred meters!”
“Priorities, Francis,” she growled, wishing he’d started with the last bit.
She jerked the control yoke to the port just as the warning chime let her know the fighter had missile lock on her. He’d taken a chance, launching from about three hundred meters away, and it was the wrong call. The missile streaked by, too close to have time to curve around and follow her, slamming into the hillside instead. Dirt and rock exploded away in a cloud that rolled across the valley, billowing up around the shuttle and twisting in tight curls as the jets roiled through it.
She stayed low, circumnavigating the edge of the valley, trying to stay below the firing arc of the weapons emplacements and keep the fighters from launching their remaining missiles at her. Buildings flashed by the edges of her wings, the surrounding hills blurring into a haze of green and brown.
“Get ready to fire,” she told Acosta, toggling to the laser. “You won’t have much time.”
She curved tight, kicking them around with a brief burst from the belly jets to claw an extra degree of turn, bringing the nose of the shuttle in line with the row of air defense turrets.
“Now!”
Katy triggered the laser and it seemed to split reality in two, cleaving through concrete bunker and metal framework with a scalpel that could slip between atoms. The remaining missile launch pod vanished in a fireball of flash ignition, engulfing everything around them, including the radar dishes and the machine gun turrets guarding them. She pulled away from the expanding inferno, not even noticing Acosta had managed to get a shot off until she heard him whooping loudly.
“I got the coilgun!” he bragged, pounding a fist against the console like a rookie just out of flight school scoring his first kill.
“Good shot,” she said, without sarcasm for once. It had been. He’d had maybe two seconds to target and fire, while under about four gees of pressure.
She risked a look at the rear cameras as she pulled up to meet the remaining fighters, saw the entire grassy plain behind the base burning, clouds of inky black smoke pouring off the defense emplacements.
“Drop-ship One,” she transmitted, “you are clear for landing.”
“What about the fighters?” he reminded her, gesturing above them.
“Oh, I think we can take care of those.” She toggled to missiles, now that she didn’t need to save them for the air defenses. “If they’re stupid enough to stick around now, they deserve what they’re about to get.”
Seat restraints bit into Logan’s shoulders and he bit down on the mouthpiece inside his helmet to keep his teeth from clashing as his chin thumped against his chest. Hundreds of tons of drop-ship and mecha and human cargo jolted back and forth as the craft settled into the played-out hydraulics of the landing gear. The touchdown was much rougher than Logan was used to, but he didn’t know whether to blame it on the Bohardt pilot or the half-assed cargo shuttle the woman was forced to fly. He hoped it was the ship, because he didn’t have any spare pilots.
“Wholesale Slaughter, follow me!” he yelled, hitting the control to free his Vindicator of its restraint gantry as the boarding ramps lowered.
This would have been a perfect time for an air drop, but half their mecha didn’t have jump-jets, they had no single-use drop harnesses and the damned ship wasn’t equipped for it anyway.
So, we do it the old-fashioned way.
He stomped down the ramp, feeling it lurch beneath him, the weight of his mech wrenching its hydraulic lift mechanism beneath him. He hit the jump-jets right off the end of the metal, an awesome sense of freedom filling his chest as the Vindicator flew. He hadn’t flown in so long, had felt for a year as if his feet were nailed to the ground, weights strapped to his shoulders.
He heard a whoop in his headphones and would have believed he’d uttered it unintentionally if he hadn’t seen Kurtz’s Golem arcing down beside him, landing within a few meters of his. First Platoon rumbled out behind him, the last of the Wholesale Slaughter mecha, two more Golems, a Valiant and the Scorpion, piloted by the surviving senior officers from his company. Behind them were the reserves, the heaviest mecha in Bohardt’s Bastards, who were the best trained and equipped of the mercenary units they’d signed on. David Bohardt led them personally in his Valiant assault mech, and he wasn’t worried nearly as much about the man or those who followed him as he was about their machines.
Just have to take care of that today.
“Here they come, boss,” Kurtz said.
Logan missed the sensor arrays and command-and-control consoles from the Sentinel, but he didn’t need sensors to see the enemy. They were rushing out in front of God and radar, piling through the broad doorway of a massive hangar, two heavy platoons, all of them assault mecha. His mouth watered at the thought of what else was in the hangar, but he kept his thoughts on the task at hand.
“Bohardt,” he ordered, breaking into a long, loping run towards the enemy, “my people are going to engage. Circle around and secure that hangar before they get any more pilots geared up!”
“Gotcha covered, sir.” Bohardt’s tone was relaxed and laconic as usual. Logan wondered how the man had ever wound up a hired gun. If he’d been one of Logan’s platoon leaders, he would have had him heading for Command School as soon as he was eligible.
“Wholesale Slaughter, spread wide and take these Starkad assholes down.”
He launched a spread of missiles from his shoulder pod, the Vindicator’s stride dragging a half-step as the weight shot away. A dozen other streaks of white arced out alongside his, and the Starkad mecha were launching as well, the missiles crossing each other in mid-air like a volley of arrows at the onset of some medieval scrimmage from old Earth.
He didn’t raise a shield to fend off the flight of enemy projectiles, though. His strategy was to not be there when they hit. He jammed his heels into the jump-jet pedals and the Vindicator soared upward, topping the downward arc of the incoming missiles. Lasers and ETC cannon rounds ripped past him, but none of the enemy rose to meet him, and he’d fought enough battles to know why. Starkad warriors were many things, but cowardly wasn’t one of them. Being a coward in the Supremacy military was a good way to get yourself executed, which meant they weren’t holding back because they were afraid.
They were holding back because their leader was hesitant, probably either young or long past their prime, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, guarding weapons for other men and women to use, to go obtain glory for the Supremacy. Hesitant leaders trained their troops to be hesitant, and they didn’t lead from the front.
He zeroed in on an Agamemnon positioned between the two parallel wedges of mecha, right where a by-the-book, unimaginative armor officer would be. The Agamemnon tried to raise its arm-mounted laser, but it was too late, Logan was already firing. A gout of ionized gas heated to plasma by the Vindicator’s fusion reactor, held together and accelerated by a magnetic field, caught the Starkad mech in the right shoulder and burned through the armor, the actuators, the power couplings and most of the joint, leaving the right arm hanging by a fragile thread of metal cable, the charred end of the power coupling sparking fitfully. The Agamemnon stumbled, off-balance from the sudden shift of weight, and had no time to adjust before Logan’s Vindicator landed nearly on top of it.
Logan’s plasma gun would take a few more seconds to recharge, but his 30mm Vulcan was lined up perfectly with the Agamemnon’s cockpit and he’d toggled his firing control to the rotary cannon before the mech’s feet touched the ground. He saw the man’s face through the transparent aluminum slats of his cockpit canopy, through the narrow opening of his helmet, just revealing the nose up to the forehead, pale and glistening with a thin sheen of nervous sweat. His eyes were wide, beneath the rim of his helmet, the muscles of his face tensed as if he were biting down on his mouthpiece and Logan was sure he could sense fear in the man,
not of dying but of something so much worse: failure.
Logan squeezed the trigger and the Vulcan roared its indifference to the Starkad pilot’s fear. 30mm tungsten slugs blasted through the BiPhase Carbide frame and the transparent aluminum panels and all the young man’s dreams of glory and fears of failure disappeared. His mech didn’t fall, just stood motionless, a ghost machine waiting for orders from a dead pilot.
Logan used the ghastly memorial as cover, stretching his Vindicator’s right-hand plasma gun around the side and firing a blast of starfire at the closest machine in the second wedge formation, a Lykos, long-limbed and rangy with an ETC cannon mounted along its right arm. The enemy mech’s cannon thundered almost simultaneously, the round slamming through the back of the dead Agamemnon, coring its fusion reactor in a spray of plasma plumes. Logan jumped backwards, just a tap on the jump-jet controls with the balls of his feet, enough to take the Vindicator ten meters, clear of the blinding spray of ionized gas and the halo of burning metal and give him a straight shot at the Lykos with his Vulcan.
The plasma blast had charred a crater in the right chest plastron of the Lykos, but hadn’t nailed the cockpit and hadn’t managed to disable the right arm and the cannon it held. The mech was slow to react, the movements of its arm jerky and spastic as it tried to realign its main weapon, and he wasn’t sure if that was from damage to the machine or the effect of the heat of the plasma impact on the pilot. He was about to try to finish the job when someone took care of it for him, a glowing spear of tungsten moving so fast, all he could see of it was the heat of its passage ionizing the air behind it. The Lykos was caught in mid-step and unlike the Agamemnon, it went down, crashing into pavement already cracked by seasonal temperature swings and fracturing it to small chunks of cement.
Logan scanned back and forth, searching for a target, but there were none. The enemy mecha were burning, motionless, two ejection seats floating back to earth on parachutes the only indication of survivors.