Vanguard

by Jack Campbell

  And now, thanks to sheer bad luck that had led a shot from the destroyer through the lifeboat nestled inside the hull of Squall, there was no way for anyone on Squall to survive if the battle was lost.

  Chapter 14

  “Follow me!” Mele Darcy shouted, the one hundred and twenty volunteers with her following Mele over the crest at a fast walk. It wasn’t a single line spread out to either side of Mele, but several lines with wide gaps between individuals to prevent creating groups of fighters close together for the enemy to aim at. In the still-dim light before dawn, the farthest figures were almost invisible.

  “We’re not running?” a volunteer near Mele asked.

  “No. It’s too far. We’ll run at the last.”

  An incoming message alert annoyed her. If Glenlyon kept distracting her—

  “Squall began engaging Scatha’s ships an hour ago,” the message reported. “Outcome remains unknown.”

  “Could be worse,” Mele mumbled to herself. She checked her control pad both for signs of activity at Scatha’s base and for the readiness of the mortars behind the hills. Ten minutes earlier, Riley’s group of thirty had stepped off, approaching Scatha’s base from the south. Scatha had lit off jamming gear, but satellite signals going almost straight up past the jamming and back down on the other side of the base were strong enough to punch through, so Mele could keep track of what was happening.

  But her ability to control Riley from this distance was limited by the improvised command and control gear she was using as well as by Mele’s need to focus on her own assault force. She couldn’t hold back and watch everything. If they were going to break Scatha’s defenses, Mele knew she had to literally lead the way.

  “Don’t get too deep into mortar range!” she sent to Riley. “You want to draw their fire but not get caught by it!”

  Mele looked to her right and left, seeing her lines of volunteers spread out to each side, walking steadily forward, grasping their weapons, the sky overhead still too dark to make out their expressions. It was probably just as well that it was too dark for any of them to see her expression, Mele thought.

  The satellite far overhead spotted activity around Scatha’s mortars, sending an alert to both Mele and Riley. She waited, tense, to see which way the mortars would fire. A moment later the shells started rising, aimed toward the south.

  Riley should be ordering his small group, already dispersed, to run back to the south, the southwest, and the southeast, and toss out chaff packs behind them.

  Hopefully, not too many of them would die while serving as a diversion.

  “Pick it up!” Mele called, raising her gait to a slow jog. She grasped her pulse rifle with hands slick with sweat, imagining every gun in Scatha’s defenses aimed at her.

  Scatha’s mortars fired again, this time aimed to the north, at Mele’s force. “Chaff and halt!” Mele ordered.

  Her volunteers stumbled to a halt and threw backpacks off before the packs exploded into clouds of improvised chaff. The mortar rounds, aimed to hit where Mele’s advancing force should have been, couldn’t spot any targets inside the chaff clouds and fell short, the closest rounds tearing up the shrub only a few meters in front of Mele. She hit the command for her own mortars to fire, scrambling to her feet. “Move it! Forward!”

  Scatha had fired another volley, aimed at the long, low chaff cloud where Mele’s force had been lying. But she was leading them at a run forward, out of the impact area, hoping that Riley was advancing again to draw some fire and wondering just how damned long it would take her own mortar rounds to hit.

  The area along the north side of Scatha’s defenses facing Mele’s advance vanished from sight in a flurry of air detonations of downward-firing fragmentation warheads, followed by a line of improvised chaff clouds bursting to cover the entrenchments and block their view of Mele’s force. She hit the command for the aircrews waiting back with the WinGs to reload the mortars with more chaff so they could automatically keep firing.

  Another alert pulsed frantically. The second warbird was taking off.

  Mele saw Scatha’s remaining warbird rising vertically above the chaff, then darting forward toward her lines, cannon fire already blazing toward her volunteers. “Launch air defense!” she shouted.

  Gambling that the warbird, if it launched, would be at low altitude and with little warning time, and with some of her volunteers not equipped with other weapons, Mele had equipped them with something one of the engineers had dreamed up. Setting the bottom of portable mortar tubes against the ground, canted toward the warbird zooming at them, they triggered the tubes.

  The warbird had automated countermeasures to defeat conventional weapons and skin designed to shrug off hits. It didn’t have anything to deal with the mad engineer’s design—shells that bloomed into widely spreading nets of woven thermite.

  Most of the nets missed, but two partially draped themselves on the warbird as they were igniting. Once on fire, the bird couldn’t shake them as the strands of thermite ate their way through its skin and equipment underneath.

  The warbird broke off its attack, rolling backward, but it didn’t complete the maneuver before parts of its front end and right wing began falling off. As the warbird staggered, the pilot punched out, flying backward and away as the chute rapid-deployed to try to fill before the pilot hit the ground somewhere inside the base. The bird itself rolled wildly, slid sideways, then vanished as it crashed behind the chaff.

  “Keep moving!” Mele yelled.

  The thermite nets that had fallen to the ground ahead were burning out rapidly, but Scatha’s troops were firing now, blindly through the chaff, but they had automatic weapons in entrenchments and could put out a lot of fire. Mele saw some of her volunteers fall, others going to ground in fear, as energy pulses thundered past and slugs snapped by their ears.

  The entrenchments weren’t that far ahead, but Mele realized she was the only one still charging. Cursing, she dropped as well, the enemy fire ripping by just overhead. Her mortars were firing more chaff, the aircrews reloading as long as they had chaff rounds left. That kept Scatha from targeting Mele and her volunteers, but the volume of unguided fire was heavy enough to make charging farther forward nearly suicidal.

  And sooner or later, the supply of chaff rounds would run out, and Scatha’s defenders would no longer have trouble spotting the attackers out in the open.

  • • •

  “What are we going to do?” Drake Porter asked Rob Geary.

  “We’re going to win!” Rob replied, almost yelling. “We’re still able to fight, and we’ll keep fighting even if all we can do is throw rocks at them!”

  “We might as well throw the lifeboat at them,” Danielle Martel muttered.

  He almost told her to shut up, then paused as her words hung in his mind. “Throw rocks at them.” “Might as well throw the lifeboat.”

  “Sergeant Duncan!” Rob called back. “How does the fuel look?”

  “The fuel?”

  “In the lifeboat. Is its propulsion still charged?”

  “Uh, it looks okay, sir,” Grant Duncan replied. “Propulsion reads functional, but maneuvering systems show completely out.”

  “Can the lifeboat still be launched?” Rob demanded, one eye on the curving tracks of Squall, the destroyer, and the freighter as they carved separate paths through space.

  “I don’t know, sir. You need a sailor down here to check on that.”

  Rob turned. “Drake, get down to the escape pod. It’s damaged, but I need to know if it can still be launched, and if we can vector the launch. There should be a limited ability to vector the launch to optimize escape chances. Do you know how to read that?”

  Drake shook his head.

  “I can read that,” Danielle said. “Are you planning what I think you are?”

  “Maybe,” Rob said. “If we can launch that lifeboat.”
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  “I’ll find out and get back here as soon as I can. Request permission—”

  “Get going!”

  “What’s going on?” Drake demanded, as Danielle ran aft. “The lifeboat’s gone? Useless?”

  “No,” Rob said. “It may not be useless.”

  “But if it’s been destroyed . . . we can’t . . . we have to . . .”

  Rob turned to look at everyone on the bridge, seeing the fear springing to life in them. “We have to what?”

  “If it’s hopeless, you know we can’t—” Drake began.

  “I’ll tell you what I know!” Rob said, hitting the button on his seat to broadcast his words through the entire ship, because he knew reports of the damage would be spreading and fear spreading along with it. “This warship, Squall, is the first and only defense our home has against Scatha’s ships! If we fail, our homes are left exposed and defenseless against the sort of thing done to Lares. You saw those images from Lares! You saw what ruthless people will do! Do you want that to happen to our home? To the families some of you have there?

  “Yes, this is a tough situation. Yes, we may die in this fight. You all knew that when we started out. That leaves one question for everyone to answer. How do you want to be remembered? As the ones who gave up and consigned their world and their homes and their families to the domination of Scatha? As the ones who gave up and had to watch as Scatha bombarded their homes to make way for more settlers from their star? Or as the ones who kept fighting, who gave their all if necessary, to save something much more important than themselves? Do you want to be remembered as the ones who never gave up and saved their world?”

  He paused, waiting, dreading the answer, but they looked back at him, and he saw the answer in them, and it was what he hoped for and perhaps even a little more.

  “We won’t give up,” Drake Porter said. “Not as long as there’s any chance at all.”

  “There is a chance,” Rob said as Danielle Martel dashed back onto the bridge.

  “We can do it,” she said, out of breath. “If we come in at the destroyer from the proper angle, we can kick out the lifeboat on an intercept with them. I should be able to link the launch to the fire control system so that we launch the lifeboat at almost the same moment as our weapons fire.”

  “Won’t it be an easy target?” Drake Porter asked.

  “Very easy,” Rob said. “That’s the whole point. We can’t use the lifeboat to escape Squall, but we can use it to hit that destroyer, and it’ll be accelerating on its launch cycle when it hits.”

  Danielle Martel strapped back in at the operations station. “When we throw the lifeboat at them, their combat systems are going to have to target it,” she added. “They’ll probably blow it to pieces, but they won’t be able to take out all the pieces. Some of them will be big pieces. When the pieces of the lifeboat hit the destroyer’s shields, they will knock them down, which will give us a chance to hit their weapons while they’re busy engaging the lifeboat.”

  “And if we take out the destroyer’s weapons,” Rob said, “then we can beat it to hell at our leisure.” He adjusted Squall’s course, bringing her around to aim for intercept with the destroyer, which was already coming for Squall, intent on a kill. “Target the destroyer’s particle cannons and grapeshot launchers. This will be our only chance, everyone. Give it all you’ve got.”

  “Fifteen minutes until we meet the destroyer again,” Danielle Martel reported.

  A tone told Rob that someone was calling on a private circuit. He donned the ear set.

  “Did you run the calculations on this?” Danielle Martel’s voice asked in his ear.

  “No,” Rob said.

  “I tried running them. The systems can’t give an estimate. Too many uncertainties.”

  “I’m doing this on my gut,” Rob told her.

  “It’s the best chance we’ve got. And it ought to work. If it doesn’t, we were screwed anyway.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Rob said. “Might as well take the chance.”

  He looked over at where she sat at the operations station. She met his eyes and nodded as her voice murmured in his ear set. “Might as well. I told you that you never would have made it in Earth Fleet. I’m glad I had the chance to sail with you.”

  “Tell me when we get back to Glenlyon,” Rob said.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  He removed the ear set and watched his display.

  “Recommend coming right zero one point two degrees to optimize angle of intercept,” Danielle Martel said.

  “Come right zero one point two degrees,” Rob ordered.

  “The lifeboat launch is programmed and linked to the fire control system.”

  “Thank you, Ensign Martel.”

  The repeated changes of vector and alterations of speed to intercept each other again quickly had slowed both warships. They rushed together now at a combined velocity of only point zero two light speed. For the fire control systems on the Squall and Scatha’s destroyer, the targets might as well have been standing still.

  As the ships raced past each other, Squall jolted from the launch of the lifeboat and the firing of her weapons, the shock of enemy hits striking coming at almost the same instant.

  As Squall swept up and away, Rob stared at his display as red markers appeared all along it to mark damage to his own ship. He tabbed the command to replay in very slow motion the encounter that had just occurred.

  The lifeboat had roared out of the escape bay just prior to meeting the destroyer. Rob watched the destroyer’s weapons ignoring the lifeboat, slamming shots into Squall, until the last moment, when a hail of grapeshot aimed at Squall tore the lifeboat apart just before it impacted the destroyer’s shields.

  The pieces of the lifeboat crashed into the enemy shields, their mass given tremendous additional energy by the velocity of the impacts. The destroyer’s screens completely collapsed under the blows, letting through a destructive rain of fragments from the wreck of the lifeboat as well as the fire from Squall’s weapons. The hits pelted the lightly armored destroyer down two-thirds of its length, tearing through the equipment, systems, and crew members unfortunate enough to be under that barrage.

  “We beat the hell out of it!” Drake Porter whooped in triumph.

  “His weapons avoided targeting the lifeboat,” Danielle Martel said in disbelief, followed by growing understanding. “Lieutenant, his fire control systems were set to defaults! And the defaults don’t allow shots at lifeboats!”

  “We cheated, I guess,” Rob said. But his sense of elation died as he stared at the red damage markers covering his display. “How badly off is Squall?”

  “We can still maneuver,” Danielle Martel reported. “But the grapeshot launcher is out. Looks like everyone on that weapons crew was killed.”

  “Lieutenant!” The call from engineering held overtones of panic. “We got trouble!”

  “Give me a report!” Rob demanded.

  “Those last hits, we took damage in here, and they destabilized the core. We can’t hold it!”

  Rob kept his eyes locked on his display, where new information was coming in. Scatha’s destroyer was out of action. They had accomplished that much. And the freighter was heading back toward the jump point for all he was worth. But it didn’t look like Squall would be chasing him. “Engineering, execute emergency shutdown of the power core.”

  “Emergency shutdown is not an option! The stabilizing routines have flatlined. The core will not shut down.”

  “What can you do?” Rob asked.

  “What can I do? I can keep it from blowing up for a little while. That’s what I can do.”

  “How long do we have?” Rob wasn’t sure why he was asking. Why did it matter? With the lifeboat gone, there was no place to flee. No possible refuge out here far from the planet. Scatha’s freighter was fleeing, and the
enemy destroyer was drifting with no maneuvering control—

  The enemy destroyer.

  “I don’t know!” the engineer repeated. “I don’t know how long I can hold it!”

  Rob checked the projected course of the Squall. “Danielle, can we manage another intercept of the destroyer? Coming to a dead stop relative to it?”

  “What? Um . . . wait.” She ran the data hastily. “Yes, sir. We should be able to do it. Twenty-five minutes to dead stop relative to the destroyer.”

  “Engineering? Can you hold the power core for another twenty-five minutes?”

  “Twenty-five? I don’t know. Why twenty-five?”

  “Because if you can hold it for twenty-five minutes, we’ve still got a chance to get out of this alive! Keep that core from blowing for another twenty-five minutes, do you hear me?” Rob hit the circuit to talk to the entire ship again. “All hands, we are coming back around toward the enemy destroyer. It has been crippled, but our own power core is going unstable. Engineering says they cannot stabilize it and it will blow soon. Our only chance is to board and capture Scatha’s destroyer. The boarding team will include the entire crew of the Squall. Everyone goes. Draw available weapons, anyone whose survival suit is not yet sealed get it done, and everyone but engineering proceed to the air locks on the, uh, port side.”

  Rob paused to rub his face. “Ensign Martel, make sure the intercept with the destroyer is locked in and proceed to an air lock. All the rest of you, go now.”

  “Lieutenant Geary,” Danielle Martel said. “Excuse me, Captain Geary. We don’t want Squall exploding next to the destroyer. I recommend we set the ship’s maneuvering controls to accelerate at full ten seconds after we enter the command from . . . Air Lock One.”

  He looked at her, unexpectedly moved by her use of the title of captain for him. Such a small thing in the big scheme of things, with death looming, but the gesture of respect meant a tremendous amount to him at that moment. “I agree. Set the controls to accelerate after the command is entered at Air Lock One. Will that give Squall enough time to accelerate so we’re out of the destructive blast radius before she blows?”