by Rick Partlow
Three of the red diamonds were heading straight for us, skimming the upper atmosphere, unwilling just yet to give up the advantage their air-breathing jets and control surfaces gave them. The shuttles were a hundred yards long and half that wide, with plenty of space for a compact pebble-bed reactor and enough metallic hydrogen fuel for a flight from Earth to the Moon. The Tevynian fighters were more like what you’d get if you took an F22, shifted the jets outward and stuck a rocket engine between them. It was enough to get them to orbit and back, but they weren’t going to be taking on a shuttle in open space.
And they knew they didn’t have to, because we’d be coming to them. They just fired their lasers at extreme range and kept moving, the same as they did with Helta landers, and assumed we’d be just as easy prey as the fur-faces.
“Mayfield,” Lee bit the words off, “see if you can kill me some of those fuckers.”
“Launching missiles,” the gunner announced.
I couldn’t see what he did with his controls because I was pressed back into my suit, which was pressed back into its frame by the three gravities of thrust rocketing us toward the atmosphere, but the missiles shunting loose of the weapons bay smacked against the fuselage like a hammer blow. Their solid-fuel rockets were fireflies against the blue of Waypoint’s oceans, corkscrewing down and disappearing and I couldn’t find them in the cubist painting that was the bird’s sensor, but Mayfield’s fervent cursing told the story.
“No joy, Cap,” he told Lee. “Their ECM is too good for our targeting systems.”
Which made sense since they’d gotten it from the Helta. The fur-faces might not be much for making war, but they were hellacious at jamming signals and cracking codes, which involved no risk to life and limb. But missiles weren’t all we had.
“Transitioning to guns,” Mayfield announced.
“Can’t hand over control during reentry,” Lee reminded him, “not unless you’d like to bounce off the atmosphere or burn in.”
“Just line me up a shot then, Cap.”
The targeting reticle was easy to see on the screen even if nothing else was. It was big and red and hanging over a random point on the surface of Waypoint that our nose happened to be lined up with at the moment and if Mayfield had fired the coil gun right then, it would have likely kept on going right to the surface and a good way underneath it. But Lee was already nudging the nose up, moving it in line with one of the red diamonds.
“Sure be nice if this thing could fire independently of the spinal mount,” Mayfield grumbled.
“The coil is nearly as long as the shuttle,” Lee reminded him. “If you can figure out a way to fit an electromagnetic coil independent of the belly of this bird that we can still put armor over and land this thing, I’ll write up the recommendation. Now fire that thing.”
“Firing.”
The whole fuselage shuddered with the expulsion of a tungsten slug the size of my fist. It wasn’t quite as instantaneous as the lasers from the fighters, but the results were more satisfying. One of the red diamonds disappeared in a white globe, and I wasn’t sure if that was all computer animation or if the explosion was actually visible from where we were, but the fighter was gone. The other two peeled away, not forever, but long enough to get us into the atmosphere.
“We going to get any support from the Jambo?” I asked Lee.
“Unfortunately, no. Enemy cruisers are closing in and they had to bail. We’re on our own for the time being.”
“What about the orbital defense platforms?” I asked, squeezing the words out through the pressure on my chest. “I distinctly recall something about orbital defense platforms. We’re not going to be shot down by one of them, are we?”
Lee chuckled and I hated him for it. How the hell did these Airedales act like this acceleration was nothing? I was a Marine, for Christ’s sake! It was embarrassing.
“Naw, the Jambo took those out before we even launched, sir,” he told me.
Damn. How had I missed that?
“All we gotta worry about are these fighters…and their surface to air defenses of course. And however many ground troops they got, but that’s more your problem.”
The atmosphere buffeted the shuttle and the exterior cameras began picking up the flames from the friction, and Lee ignored that just as easily as he ignored the g-forces, guiding the ship down through the upper atmosphere in a broad spiral.
“How are the other birds?” I asked, reluctant to admit that I couldn’t figure it out myself but short on time.
“They took some fire, but they’re still in the air. We’ve taken down five fighters, but they’ve wised up and they’re staying out of our forward arc of fire, coming in from the sides. Hold on.”
Goddamnit, I hated when pilots told me to “hold on,” as if I had some other choice, like I was just going to let go, take off my seat restraints and fling myself across the cabin if they didn’t warn me things were going to get rough. And it also meant they were going to do their best to make the rest of us puke.
I didn’t, but it was a close thing, and I knew the rest of the team was hit even worse than I was for the simple reason that they weren’t talking. Delta has a reputation as quiet professionals, and maybe they are when they’re around civilians or regular grunts, but good God, can they talk when they’re among their own. But not even Pops was drawling in my ear, and I figured it was because he, like me, was holding his jaws together for dear life.
I don’t even know what Lee did with the bird because I had to shut my eyes and not look at the HUD, but it felt as if they turned the damned thing inside out and spun it end for end like a frisbee. All I could tell for sure was that, by the time we leveled off and I could finally breathe again, we were on the night side of the planet and threading the needle of a narrow pass through snowcapped mountains, lit up ghostly white by the planet’s single moon.
“We’re five minutes out from the settlement,” Lee told me. “They call it a city, but it’s damned small for a city in my opinion. We still going with the LZ at the front of the city?”
I tried to stare down at the ground moving below us, using the view from the belly cameras in my HUD overlaid with the maps the Helta had given us from before the invasion. No, I didn’t want to just set down in that LZ, not when the original plan had been predicated on us getting detailed info from the spy drones that we didn’t have.
“No,” I said. “I want you to send the other birds into a holding pattern while you run us a low pass over the city and the military base.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” Lee asked, turning in his chair to look at me despite the press of the boost and the fact we were both wearing helmets. “Sir?” he added belatedly. “There’s a shitload of ground fire gonna be coming up from the air defense turrets. We make a low pass, we may as well hang a target around our necks!”
“Do it, Lee,” I said. “It’s an order.”
Which I didn’t give too often to the shuttle crews because we were in separate commands and they knew their jobs. But I was in tactical command until we were boots on the ground and this was one of those times. Doubt gnawed at my guts, but I punched it in the face and told it to get back to the rear with the gear. Doubt could get you killed quicker than making the wrong decision.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he replied sourly.
“We know what we’re doing?” Pops asked me over our private net.
“We do.” We hoped.
The bottom dropped out beneath me as the shuttle went into a steep dive, made worse by the fact that I had to watch through the camera view because otherwise, this was just meaningless aerobatics. It was early morning on the eastern end of the northernmost continent on Waypoint, the only one with a settlement because the southern continent was a morass of swamp and desert. The northern continent was beautiful, the whole stretch of it reminiscent of western Europe if the Europeans hadn’t ruined the whole thing. The Helta hadn’t strip-mined the place or overbuilt it with one city after another because that wasn
’t who they were, but they’d come here for a reason, and not just so the workers at the shipyards would have a planet to visit on R&R, and that reason was the biological treasures the place had to offer.
So, there were algae farms off the coast, soy farms on the plains, huge citrus orchards because apparently, bears loved them some oranges, as well as groves full of some sort of plants they called clearflower that I didn’t know and hadn’t bothered to follow up with the science staff to see if they knew because I really didn’t care. The algae and soy farms were automated and would still be running unless the Tevynians had destroyed them out of spite, but the orchards and groves were tended by hand because, according to Joon-Pah, the fruit and whatever clearflower was reacted better to a gentle touch.
The groves and orchards were organized in clean rows, but not straight and square like in Florida and South America, but instead, sweeping curves and circles and all sorts of geometric shapes. The Helta believed agriculture was an art rather than a science. I tried to imagine what they would look like at the break of dawn, but the cartoonish enhancement of the shuttle’s computer systems to make up for the low light made them look too fake. The important thing was, there were no enemy troops or air defense turrets in the groves or among the machinery of the farms, which were only a few miles out of the city.
“Let’s designate the flats out in front of the soy fields as LZ Alpha,” I said, bringing the other shuttles into the net. “If we need an emergency dust-off, Alpha will be the primary LZ. How copy?”
“Good copy, Gunfighter One,” a static-filled voice replied. It was weak, barely penetrating the jamming coming from the Tevynian military encampment, but I still recognized Dani Brooks. I didn’t get anything else and I suppose I was lucky that much came through.
“I’m picking up a thermal signature from the settlement,” Mayfield warned. “Smells like an air defense turret to the targeting computer.”
“We’re going in anyway,” Lee said, and I couldn’t see his dirty look but I could feel it. “Launch a spread of heatseekers and see if we get lucky.”
I couldn’t even feel the missile launch because I was too busy being tossed from side to side by Lee’s juking and deking, and I didn’t know if he was doing it because we were actually being targeted or if he was just getting even with me.
“Yes!” Mayfield exulted, raising a fist. “We have positive impact! Thermal bloom! We took out the laser turret!”
“And we have visual on the settlement.”
We did, and this one was easier to follow than the sensor readings. It was a city. Or it had been. Now, it looked more like a prison.
Helta cities are a different animal than any human town, having more in common with the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse than an urban area. They tried to live in harmony with nature in ways the most ardent tree-huggers in the history of tree-hugging had never managed. I’d seen pictures and video from the Truthseeker’s database and usually, they built in and around existing redwood and sequoia forests. But here was different. The farms and the groves were in a very temperate valley, filled with oaks and other trees that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the woods of Georgia or South Carolina, not quite thick or sturdy enough for that sort of structure.
Instead, they’d built their homes out of local clay, which was, I suppose, as eco-friendly as they could manage. They reminded me of the adobe houses I’d seen in New Mexico, except more curved, rounded at the top instead of squared off, and arranged in the same sort of odd geometries as the groves. They had a certain charm to them…or I imagine they had before the Tevynian occupiers had made their additions.
They’d used the quickest, easiest material they could find to confine the Helta, which just happened to be those trees. They’d lasered them down and left the stumps, and hadn’t even bothered to strip the bark off before they’d laid them into a wall surrounding a section of the settlement about a quarter mile on a side. It was the ultimate fuck-you to a culture that prided itself on being close to nature.
Our little fuck-you back was evident from the column of black smoke rising from the laser turret at the east corner of the barricaded city, and it was gratifying that there was at least one enemy target our US-built missiles could take down, because they didn’t seem to do much to their aerospace fighters.
We were going fairly low and slow for the shuttle, which could burn up the sky with the engines the Helta had helped us build, but we still zipped by the city in seconds, coming out over the line of stumps that had once been a stand of trees. Beyond them was the landing field, the only sin against nature the Helta allowed themselves, cleared of grass, the dirt burned to volcanic glass by the takeoff jets of their shuttles. It was where the Tevynians had kept their fighter squadrons, and where they’d left the cargo haulers they’d used to bring in the construction equipment for their military base.
It was impressive, given the limited time they’d had to build it, about two hundred yards square, the walls sloped and thick and ten yards high, more than enough to absorb the crew-served plasma guns that were the most powerful infantry weapons either the Helta or the Tevynians possessed, maybe even enough to take a couple shots from the laser on one of their shuttles. And before the shuttles got that close, they’d have to deal with the laser turrets.
“Fuck!” Lee blurted and I lost track of the fortress along with my breakfast in a barrel roll. “Laser fire!”
“Launching,” Mayfield said, and I finally caught a hint of the strain from the maneuver in his voice, which was satisfying, but not as satisfying as not dying. “Oh, damn! Those fighters are back, Cap!”
“They never fucking went away, Mayfield,” Lee snapped. “Gunfighter Three, can you pull back to cover for us?”
We were running low, maybe twenty yards up from eyeballing it, though I couldn’t have sworn to it since I couldn’t focus on the numbers of the readout with everything screaming by and my vision narrowing into a black-rimmed tunnel.
“Coming, Gunfighter One,” came the reply. “Give me ten seconds to break off.”
“Oh, we may not have ten fucking seconds, Three….”
We didn’t.
“It’s on our six!” Mayfield screeched and I knew that tone. It was the tone of a man who knew things were about to go bad.
“I hope you got a good Goddamned look, Andy,” Lee said. “Hold on!”
“Oh, Jesus.” I snapped, the servo-assisted fingers of my gloves gripping the armrests of the frame so hard I could hear the metal creak at the pressure. “What the hell else am I gonna do?”
And then we crashed.
Chapter Eleven
“How much longer, sir?” Chamberlain asked me, hissing the words in my ear.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten, and would have kept them closed the whole time if I hadn’t been trying to keep track of the Delta team moving up the street. They were black shapes now, barely visible even with the enhancement of the goggles, moving beneath a covered walkway around the edge of the apartment building, barely wide enough for them to walk single file, led by Jose. And then they were gone and I pulled off the nylon cover to check my watch.
“Ten minutes, Chamberlain,” I said. “Don’t breathe in my ear unless you’re buying me dinner.”
The RTO withdrew, grimacing in embarrassment. I edged back into the alley and motioned to Gunny Moore, who was crouched down beside Marinelli, speaking to him in low, quiet tones that didn’t travel far enough for me to pick up more than a murmur. The platoon sergeant waddled over to me, still crouched down, taking a knee beside me.
“They’re out of sight,” I told him. “I been checking out the street up ahead and there’s an alcove up to the corner with a trash bin.” I shrugged. “It looks like it hasn’t been emptied in about a year, but it should be big enough for you to get two squads in there. I want you to head down now and stage in the alcove until it’s go time, then have Marinelli initiate suppressive fire on enemy positions on that side of the building.”
“And you’re going to disable their vehicles?” he asked, mouth twisted into a scowl.
“I am. Why? You think it’s a bad idea?”
“No, I just don’t like spooks. These Delta boys are too much like spooks for my tastes.”
“They are,” I agreed. “And the whole thing smells dirty to me. But this Jambo guy seems to actually care if we get out of this in one piece, so we’re going to do it his way. Copy?”
“Good copy, sir. Good luck.”
The noise they made moving out of the alley set my teeth on edge, but there was nothing to do be done about it. Boots on concrete made sounds, equipment rustled and there was no getting around it. There was a certain background hum to the streets, something you tuned out after a while, and I just had to hope it would drown out their maneuver.
With their absence, Gregory moved up with his squad to take their place. The young E-5 came up beside me, moving smooth and casual, like we did shit like this every day.
“We moving out, sir?” he asked me, just a little breathless, eager to get into a fight. His M27 had an M320 grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel and his left forefinger was tapping against it like he wanted to load up a round right now.
“Yeah. You see that alley about a hundred meters up this road?” I pointed ahead of us, the way the Delta team had gone. They had turned at the front of the next building across from us, cutting down the covered sidewalk, but the route I indicated was past that and would bring us out on the other side of the target building, where our HUMINT asset Jose had told us the cars were parked.
“Got it.”
“We’re taking that left and moving up the next street over. Get across this street fast and get us down that alley, but hold up midway through. I don’t want anyone near the target spotting us before the Delta team gets into place.”