Maelstrom Strand

by Rick Partlow

  “Marshall, don’t make me come down there and beat you to death,” she growled.

  “Colonel Laurent, the anomaly is a ship! I mean, it turned into a ship and it’s launching shuttles! I think those are drop-ships! Oh, Mithra’s bloody horns!”

  Laurent forced herself to remain calm. The man was about to hyperventilate, and her yelling at him would only accelerate the process.

  “Marshall,” she said, slowly and clearly, “my cruiser is still in orbit and so is your picket ship. Contact the captains and tell them they are ordered to engage the enemy vessel and launch assault shuttles to deal with their landers. After you do that, I want you to call down to Captain Scheer down in the hangar and tell him to fall out with his mech company and be ready to repel an assault. Do you understand all that, Captain Marshall? Repeat it back to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am, call Captain Waters in the picket and your captain on your cruiser and tell them to engage, then call Captain Scheer and tell him to fall out his mecha. Got it, ma’am.”

  “And there is just the one ship, right?” she asked, biting down on each word.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, definitely! There was only the one anomaly!”

  “Good. Then get to it.”

  She stood, unmoving for a moment after cutting the connection. It was an attack, perhaps by Spartan loyalists but more likely by the heir, Logan Conner. The sensor anomaly Marshall had described matched what they’d found when they studied the tiny transport Logan’s brother Terrin had piloted from Terminus to Trinity. She’d been afraid the Spartans might have found other ships, and time had proven her right.

  Logan had made a mistake coming here, though. She knew the losses he’d suffered during his escape from Sparta. Hale had reported he’d had to abandon his whole force of mecha during the evacuation. Their Imperial-tech starship might have gotten them here, but it wasn’t going to let them sneak past her security or break General Constantine out of…

  The sound was like distant thunder and she had to listen again for a moment to make sure she’d actually heard it. She tried to pinpoint it and finally decided it had come from above, through the next floor up, but what was it?

  There it was again, and suddenly she knew what she was hearing. Gunfire. Inside the building. When the alarm klaxons began to ring only a moment later, she was already moving, drawing her sidearm and heading for the stairs.

  “Security!” she yelled into her ‘link. “Get me all the Marines you have available to confinement level four now! We have enemy forces inside the base!”

  The loading dock…it had been them. They’d come in on the cargo shuttle, stowed away on the freighter. And there was only one person Logan Conner would trust to do that. Lyta Randell was here.

  How many more of these? How many more drops? How many more battles before my luck runs out and the percentages catch up with me?

  It was an odd set of questions for a mech-jock, not the sort Logan usually asked himself in the middle of an operation with his stomach rushing up into his throat from a drop. But he’d begun to ask them more and more since the death of his father. Every soldier thought about dying at some point, usually after the first time they heard a shot fired in anger, and he’d made his peace with it like everyone in his profession had to. Yet somewhere in the depths of his unconscious, he’d always thought that at some point, perhaps after ten years or even twenty, he’d leave the life of a combat soldier behind. Perhaps he would become an instructor or even work for his father as a military liaison.

  All the thoughts of the future had died along with Jaimie Brannigan on the fields of a small valley in the Bloodmark Mountains. He’d keep fighting because he was a Brannigan, and Brannigans didn’t give up the fight, but the odds of coming through all this alive seemed smaller every time he strapped into his mech.

  One fight at a time. Just take one fight at a time.

  “We’ll be in position for drop in one minute, boss,” Muller reported. Randy Muller had been Bohardt’s best drop-ship pilot and now he was Wholesale Slaughter’s best. “Taking minimal ground fire. The assault shuttles suppressed it good. I can see three…no, four fires burning where the air defense turrets were.”

  Katy had his back. She always did.

  “After we’re clear, I want you and Claremont to take off and swing wide,” Logan told him. Greg Claremont was the other drop-ship pilot, a man who he’d pulled over from the Cossacks. “I don’t want you guys taking damage in the ground battle and leaving us stranded here. I’ll call for you when we’re ready to un-ass the area.”

  “Got it,” Muller acknowledged. “The report from orbit is, that picket ship is launching assault shuttles to interdict, but they won’t get here before you and your people drop.”

  Nothing they hadn’t expected. This was all running close to the edge. Terrin had been right about that, even if he’d been angrier about his girlfriend going on the mission than he had about the risk to the rest of them. They were risking it all to this one toss of the dice. No, not they. He was risking it all. It was his call, it was on his shoulders. Everything was on his shoulders.

  “Ten seconds to drop,” Muller droned. “Nine, eight, seven…”

  Logan wanted to offer a prayer to Mithra, to the Spenta Mainyu, the Beneficent Spirits, for aid and safety and victory. He tried to think of one in the seconds before the floor dropped away and he fell into the dark, but the only thing ringing through his head was the graffiti he’d seen in the mech bay of every drop-ship he’d ever flown in: Here we go again.

  He could see the enemy already from two hundred meters up, a company’s worth of them, pouring out of a decidedly modern looking hangar behind the anachronistic lines of the stone tower, the power behind the illusion.

  “Launch on them now!” he snapped. “Don’t let them get into formation!”

  Jump-jets were roaring in his ears, shaking the structure of the Vindicator, but he managed a lock on the first Starkad mech heading out of the hangar, a Valiant. Starkad liked the machines, but he thought they were too tall, too slender, too big a target for an assault mech. He struck a blow for the Spartan choice, the Vindicator, with a volley of four missiles launched mid-flight. He wondered how many would manage it, if he could count on the mercenaries to get a lock in the midst of a drop, but the smoke trails from behind him answered the fear. Missiles rained down and the response was what he’d hoped.

  A proactive commander might have ordered a launch on the dropping Wholesale Slaughter mecha. A forethoughtful commander might have told his pilots to fire at the drop-ships as they passed slowly over, before they could pull up and head out for their patrol, taking out their hope of egress. This commander was neither. He just charged through the missile barrage and took the damage to try to get his troops into position for an attack. It wasn’t as bad as standing there, much better than retreating back into the hangar, but it told Logan what he needed to know about the Starkad Captain. He wanted to get into just the right formation, into just the right position to do what the book told him he ought to do. Just the type of commander who was begging for someone to get inside his OODA loop.

  Logan made a decision fifty meters off the ground.

  “Bohardt, Salvaggio, head for the flanks and box them in! Kurtz, Hernandez, follow me and take your platoons right down their Goddamned throats!”

  Another risk, another roll of the dice letting the whole pot ride. One after another, following his gut and praying to Mithra he didn’t lose it all again. He just didn’t know any other way to lead.

  Three of the Starkad machines were down, either destroyed or badly damaged by the missiles, all of them near the rear of their formation, the last mecha out of the hangar. It gave them a sort of leaning-forward formation, heading straight into the center of the flat table-land on which the base was built, with a gap in their left rear. It was there Logan aimed his jump, stretching out the flight until the heat warnings were flashing and the cockpit was a convection oven and his jets were about three seconds from sh
utting down or blowing apart.

  The Vindicator’s foot pads struck rock and the jets cut off, their absence a cool breeze through his cockpit. He’d spun around at the last second, facing the rear of the enemy formation even as they skidded to a halt, turning with obvious desperation, firing wildly. Lasers and ETC cannon rounds from the Starkad weapons ripped apart the gathering darkness, creating an impressive light show but not hitting a damned thing.

  When Logan fired his plasma gun, the round found its target, hammering through the rear shielding of an enemy Golem, sending up a miniature supernova as his reactor flushed violently and consumed half its torso with it. He didn’t even have to think about transitioning to the next weapon and the next target. His fingers worked the toggles automatically, nudging the control stick to rotate his upper torso just a few degrees until the targeting reticle lit up green and he squeezed the trigger. The 30mm Vulcan made a sound like a god clearing his throat, the tungsten slugs chipping away at the shoulder plastron of another Valiant, leaving the inner workings of the joint exposed and vulnerable.

  He was about to fire his plasma gun into the naked shoulder joint when someone else fired a laser into it from just behind him and blew the arm off in a shower of sparks and a cloud of sublimating metal. The Valiant stumbled away, the pilot trying to regain his balance, and Logan fired off the plasma round into the jagged, charred wound where the arm had been. The plasmoid pierced through the cockpit and the Starkad mech’s knees locked up in mid-stumble, sending it crashing sideways, nearly colliding with the Agamemnon fighting beside it.

  “Pour it on!” Logan yelled, urgency roiling in his gut.

  Maybe it was fear and panic sublimating itself into something more palatable to a soldier’s mind, but somehow, he knew they had to finish this quickly, that delay would mean disaster. He knew it as surely as he knew his name, something was about to go wrong.

  16

  Oh, shit,” Tara murmured. Kammy had seen that look on her face before, usually after a hard night out on shore leave when she’d had too many tequila shots and was about to decorate the street.

  “What is it?” he asked, the question automatic. He was already searching the tactical screen, looking for… “Oh, shit.” There it was.

  “That’s two ‘oh, shits,’” Terrin said from behind him. “That can’t be good.”

  The kid was trying to sound light, bantering like one of the bridge crew, but Kammy could tell he was scared. He has every reason to be.

  “The Starkad captains aren’t stupid,” Kammy told him. “They’re not just accelerating at us balls-out the way the others have.” He pointed at the main screen, where the sensors displayed the positions of the enemy vessels in relation to the Shakak, the planet and the jump-points. “The cruiser is staying up at the L5 position, while the picket ship is maintaining a geosynchronous orbit. And they both just launched anti-ship missiles at us.”

  “We can outrun those, right?”

  It was a dumb question. The kid knew, better than anyone, that they could outrun the missiles. But Kammy didn’t get impatient because Captain Osceola hadn’t become impatient with him when he’d been a dumb kid.

  “We could,” he explained instead, “but they know we can’t. We can’t be running all around the system dodging missiles because we have to be available to pick up our shuttles.”

  “Oh.” Terrin’s voice was small and so was his posture, as if he were trying to shrink down into his chair.

  “Orders, Captain?” Bergh asked from the helm.

  Good question. Damn, I miss Captain Osceola.

  “We’re going after the picket,” he decided. “We’re going to fight him in close, make sure the cruiser can’t stand off and take potshots at his leisure. Take us to him, full acceleration. Tara, target those missiles.” He nodded toward the red dart shapes accelerating far too quickly towards them on the screen. “Wait until the last second to take them out, though. I don’t want to advertise our range.”

  He glanced back at Terrin, a thought creasing his forehead.

  “Hey, Engineer, I got a question. We did all our testing out in Spartan proving grounds in the system’s asteroid belt. So, tell me ‘cause I got no idea, how close to the planet can we use the stardrive?”

  “When I took the courier out of Terminus,” Terrin said, fingers working as if he were moving thoughts around in his mind, “I’m pretty sure it activated the stardrive somewhere around the LaGrangian points between the planet and its moon.” He shrugged. “But I was unconscious from the acceleration of the ship’s atmospheric thrusters, so I can’t say for sure.” Terrin winced, as if he’d just realized how that sounded. “Give me a couple minutes of computer time and I’ll figure it out.”

  “You got a minute and thirty seconds until we hit high orbit, Terry,” he said, unable to keep from calling the kid by his old nickname or to keep the exasperation from his voice. “Work fast.”

  The dark, swirling mass of a continent-size storm was already taking up most of the main viewscreen’s optical camera feed and the planet seemed too damned close as it was, but it didn’t seem to be affecting their drive yet. In fact, he was fairly sure he could see the first of the anti-ship missiles cutting across the blue swathe of endless sea, visible now on the optical telescopes, which meant…

  “Firing,” Tara announced.

  The missile died spectacularly, if predictably, the explosion enhanced by its proximity to the outer reaches of the atmosphere. Auroras spread downward through the magnetosphere, the polychromatic display of a massive fusion blast, bright and beautiful as a poisonous flower warning the world of its deadliness.

  “We got another coming in off our firing arc,” Tara said. “Taking helm control.”

  “Helm control to Tactical,” Bergh confirmed, a formality. Since she doubled as Executive Officer, Tara had override at her station.

  The view on the screen tilted off in the direction of the nearest of the planet’s twin moons, towards the enemy cruiser.

  “Ten seconds to recharge,” Tara said. “Missile impact in two minutes.”

  Another formality. He could read the display as well as she could. But you said it out loud so everyone on the bridge could have a picture of what was happening in case there were casualties in the command crew and one of them had to take over. Kammy wished he could say it was an academic precaution, but he’d been there when it had happened.

  He knew Tara would be concentrating on the missile and the main gun, so he kept an eye on the enemy ships. The picket ship was content to stay where she was, knowing they’d have to come to him, counting on his heavy armor and help from the cruiser to destroy the Shakak before she could get too close. The cruiser though, she was moving.

  “The enemy cruiser is accelerating at six gravities,” Tara warned before he could announce it himself. “She’s running in hard on us, Kammy. She’s not going to let us get away with it.”

  She was right. Whoever was commanding that ship was outthinking him, guessing his capabilities and not letting it take them off their game. The cruiser was burning hard to intercept them before they could do to the picket ship what they’d done to the missile. He wouldn’t launch again, not when they were this close to the other Starkad vessel, but…

  “How long till she’s in laser range?” he wondered.

  “About…”

  There was that damn rumbling again, the effect the drive field threw off when it was destabilized by external energy, a vibration not through the superstructure of the ship, he knew, but through the fabric of spacetime.

  “Now,” Tara finished, wincing.

  The screen had gone red with the computer’s representation of the laser strike and a warning was sounding, a day late and a few credits short.

  “We lost ten percent power to the field on that shot,” Terrin told him. His eyes were flicking back and forth from the engineering readouts to the hand-held tablet he’d been using to input the calculations on the field. “Back to full power now. By the w
ay, I think we can use the drive field up to the edge of the atmosphere. If we try to use it any lower than that, the gravitational warping effect of the planet is going to pull us right into it. Like, towards the center of the planet.”

  “You think,” Kammy repeated. “Well, that’s just something I’d like to know at this juncture, Terry.”

  “Firing,” Tara Gerard put in. He’d almost forgotten about the missile…

  The laser hit just as she tried to fire the main gun and something happened. He didn’t know what it was, but he could tell it wasn’t good. There was the normal disruption of spacetime, though Mithra alone knew when he’d started referring to that as normal. But there was a flash as well, like a wall of static electricity crackling through the space around them, as impossible as he knew that was. The displays flickered in and out and it seemed as if his consciousness did as well.

  When the tactical readout came back to life, the missile was still there, still coming. Tara looked at him wide-eyed, shocked, which so wasn’t a good sign.

  “Commander Gerard,” he said sharply, trying to snap her out of it. “Can you tell me what the hell just happened?”

  “Mithra’s balls!” she blurted. “How the hell would I know?”

  “It’s the drive field,” Terrin said, hands gripped to the arms of his seat as if he expected to float away. “The particle accelerator uses the field to focus the beam, at least that’s what we think happens. The laser hit just as she fired and there was extensive particle scattering, which weakened the drive field even further.” He scrolled through the display, making a face like he’d been kicked in the gut. “We’re down fifty percent and it’s building back up slowly.”

  “Yeah, our speed’s way down, Captain,” Bergh noted. “Maybe five gravities acceleration analog, down to about three kilometers a second.”