The Ajax Incursion

by Marc DeSantis

  Wilkes was the last in, with Cone and Tikhonov diving in just ahead of him. He dragged behind him a bloodied lower leg where a pellet had penetrated the lighter armor on the back of his left calf. The suit he wore was already flooding his bloodstream with painkillers, and targeted hemoclotters would soon stop the bleeding. Once he was ready to move again, his battle armor would compensate for the reduced strength of his left leg and restore the semblance of a normal gait. It took more than a minor wound to incapacitate a Republican marine. The M74 battle armor was a technological wonder crammed into a human-sized package. It was a strength- and speed-enhanced, computerized tank; a medical kit; a vacuum-excursion capable, life support unit; and an artillery battery able to lay down fire equal to that of a dozen ordinary soldiers. No armor was proof against all things hurled at it, but in its front quarter, the M74 suit was nearly invulnerable to anything but a direct hit by a heavy penetrator; sometimes, if luck held, not even that.

  The armor kept a marine safe, but it was the M22 gauss rifle that let him bring down a world of hurt on his opponent. The primary weapon of the M22 weapon system was the powerful gauss accelerator that launched hypersonic projectiles downrange. Modular in design, the M22 could also accommodate an attachable 25 millimeter over-under grenade launcher as required. These were not often needed at short ranges where hand-tossed grenades would work just as well or better. It did have its uses against a foe that was too far away for conventional grenades or sheltering behind substantial cover.

  Like now. Jenkins aimed his weapon down the corridor. The gunsight was connected via secure datalink to the display inside his helmet, allowing him to see what the weapon saw, so he didn’t have to expose his head to take a look down the corridor.

  He was glad for that benefit of advanced technology when he yanked his M22 back out of the path of a stream of incoming gauss pellets. They sped through the space where his weapon and hands had been before ripping into the wall of the corridor just aft of the operating room.

  Jenkins read aloud the distance to the target as gauged by his rifle. “Twenty-one meters,” he said to Cone and Wilkes. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Be our guest, lieutenant,” Cone said.

  Jenkins selected a high explosive 25mm fragmentation grenade and again thrust his M22 out the door while keeping his head and shoulders inside. The weapon calculated the flight time that the grenade would require to reach the Jaxers position, and inloaded this to the munition itself. Jenkins felt a soft kick as the grenade fled from his weapon. When, a fraction of a second later, it arrived beside the door out of which the Ajaxians were firing, it detonated in a spray of jagged, superheated fragments.

  Fire from the opposite end ceased, and Jenkins, Cone, Tikhonov, and Wilkes, joined by the other half of his squad that had sheltered in a storeroom on the other side of the corridor, moved forward until they reached the Jaxer emplacement. What remained of the two bodies was bathed in gore. Their weapon, a gauss squad support machine gun, had been ruined, shredded by the same hurricane of fragments that had slain its operators.

  *****

  The marines were on the bridge in less than two minutes, bursting through the ceiling after traversing the floor above. Jenkins dropped heavily to the floor, taking a Jaxer by surprise, striking him with a powered kick. The Jaxer’s knee bent sideways at a gruesome angle, and he yelped in pain as he rolled away. He tried to draw his sidearm but Jenkins’ boot smashed down on his cranium, ending his writhing with a sickening crunch. Brand laid low another Jaxer with a single round to the chest.

  There were three uniformed Ajaxians left on the bridge. The rest of the crew must have been native Aquitainians pressed into service when the hospital ship had been captured. These last were unarmed, and made no move to defend the bridge against the marines. They were instead hostages.

  The three Jaxers each held an Aquitainian at gunpoint, using their bodies as shields. They thought they were being clever. To the naked eye, any shot made by one of the marines was almost certain to hit an Aquitainian. Such was the accuracy of the M22, however, with its built-in stabilization and target acquisition and tracking systems, that it could hit a target at this range about the size of a grain of rice.

  Hitting the small parts of the Jaxers that were exposed was not the problem. Taking them out before they could do harm before they died to any of the three Aquitainians was.

  The M74 had several channels over which Jenkins could comm to any member of his squad, or to all of them at once. With their helmets on, they could not be heard by any of the people to their fore.

  “Anybody have a shot?” Jenkins asked over the full squad tacnet.

  “I have the ugly guy in the middle,” replied Cone.

  “I can take out the back of the skull of the one on the right,” promised Brand.

  “Good,” Jenkins said. “I’ll take the one on the left, in front of me. On three, we fire.”

  “Copy that,” Cone answered.

  “Roger, lieutenant.”

  The Jaxer leader, a Domain Navy officer judging by his gaudy, gold-braid-laden uniform, sneered as the marines stood silently in front of him.

  “The ship you can have,” he spat. “Allow us to depart peacefully and we will release these three. . .”

  The officer’s head erupted as Jenkins’ slug bored a hole through the meat of his brain and skull. He collapsed before he could depress the trigger of his own weapon, as did the other two Ajaxians, each of whom had been dropped by the other marines.

  One Aquitainian fell to his knees. He began to soil his trousers, with yellow liquid dribbling onto the deck at his feet.

  “There, there,” consoled Cone, speaking through his external mike, helpfully pointing to the bloody, pulpy mess that used to be his captor. “He’s no threat now.”

  “That was amazing,” the Aquitainian heaved as he struggled to regain his breath. “How did you know that you wouldn’t hit any of us?”

  Cone chuckled. “Frankly, it was a bit of luck. I’ve never been in a hostage rescue situation before and I wasn’t going to let this go to waste by negotiating.”

  The man looked up quickly to Cone towering above him, his eyes wide with shock.

  “Oh, just kidding!” Cone assured the stunned sailor. “We practice these things all the time. You were never in any danger.”

  Over the private channel, Jenkins sighed. “Gunnery excellent, sergeant, but you need to work on your diplomatic skills.” To the others he said, “Come on. Let’s go check on the rest of the ship and see what we’ve won.”

  *****

  The cargo was not, it turned out, spent nuclear fuel as had been first thought by the marines. It was nonetheless extremely radioactive, and far more lethal. "Ultra-high strength neutral particle emitters," Howell said as he finished taking his readings of the deadly material inside the hospital ship.

  "In non-engineeringese, if you don't mind, for all of us non-techies present," requested More.

  "They are neutron weapons," Howell explained. "They kill living organisms but leave machinery and structures intact. If Arles had been exposed to what is in these, it would have killed just about everyone on the orbital inside an hour."

  Captain Petrov swore, as did Colonel Duran. Rodney Winders, the civilian governor of Arles, paled. "When the Ajaxians were forced out twenty years ago, it was the happiest day of my life. I knew they would try and come back if they could. I didn't think they'd resort to extermination to get their way."

  "They are a rough bunch, governor," More said. "They've committed atrocities before. Still, this is particularly awful, even for them. A clear violation of the Accords. I will make a report of it to my government immediately." He turned to Governor Winders. "What exactly is on this station that would impel the Ajaxians to mass murder?"

  Winders raised his hands. "I don't know. Arles is very ordinary. It's not new. Everything here is very run of the mill, technology-wise."

  “There must be some equipment that they wanted without having
to risk the destruction of the station,” Howell said.

  Petrov swore again. "I think I know," the Arlesian fighter pilot said.

  *****

  "There are a lot of them," Howell said as they took in the array of nuclear fusion reactors at the heart of the orbital. "I've never seen so many in one place."

  More had never seen as many fusion reactors in operation together in one installation either. There were five that were large enough to power a ship of Steadfast's size and dozens of lesser ones that would be sufficient to run a destroyer. A few others were smaller still.

  "This is not the most efficient way to power an orbital," Howell observed. He looked quickly to Winders. "No offense intended, governor."

  "None taken. We didn't install these. They were put in during the Ajaxian occupation about forty years ago. They were using Arles as a repair depot for their ships. These units are reliable and each individual reactor doesn't require much maintenance, but since there are so many, we've always got headaches of one kind or another."

  "You must have had something else beforehand," guessed Howell.

  "We did. Three giant units. Very good Halifaxian models too. Old but very powerful, with lots of life left in them. Ajax stripped them out and replaced them with what you see here."

  "They went to a lot of trouble to swap out working reactors with so many replacements," observed Howell.

  "They took the three reactors to power battleships," Petrov noted. "Their own industry could produce nothing better. When they left after the war with the Republic they had to get out in a hurry, and were forced to leave a lot of stuff behind, like these. Now they want it all back."

  "Then they are going to a great deal of trouble to collect things that they could just as easily make for themselves," Howell said. "They shouldn't have to mount a military operation to obtain them."

  "There's something to what Captain Petrov suggests," said More. "The Domain Navy has been focusing its building on lighter ships. Their strategy has changed to conform to their much more limited resources. The RHN has been counting swarms of new ships of destroyer size or smaller coming out of Ajaxian yards. They could outfit a few destroyer squadrons with what you see here."

  "But these reactors are antiques," Duran protested. "Surely they are not fit to be put into new ships?"

  The DN isn't thinking long term," More said. "Most of their ships are going to be reduced to wreckage in only a short span. Putting a brand new and expensive fusion unit into a hull doesn't make all that much economic sense to them, since the ship it’s in likely will be lost in a hurry."

  "I will not pretend to understand them," Winders huffed. "They occupied us for generations and could never see beyond, or rise above, their militaristic ideology."

  "I'm not a fan of them either," said Howell. "So they were going to kill everyone on Arles. Then they were going to strip out the reactors. What could they hope to accomplish with a powerless orbital?"

  "Not very much," replied More, "but here’s a possibility. Arles would be a useful launchpad from which to conduct further operations against the outer system planets. Perhaps they were going to leave just a few of these reactors in place to provide limited power to the station while the rest ended up in ships."

  More opened a hologram of the system, the projection rising from his wristcomp. "Arles will be within easy striking distance of two of those worlds, Strasbourg and Maxime, for several months given their relative positions in their orbits. Since we still hold Arles it can’t be used as a base, but that doesn’t mean the enemy won’t try to attack anyway. It would simply mean longer jumps and more difficult logistics. The Aquitainian fleet already has enough to do protecting their outer planets from Ajaxian raids, so we can forestall any major move against them by keeping the enemy occupied around the inner planets. And even if the Ajaxians hadn’t intended to move against the more distant worlds just yet, we can still lend assistance to the resistance on Pessac with the same strategy.” More swished the hologram, expanding it so that the core of the system grew exponentially. “See here,” he said, tracing a line with his finger from Arles to Pessac. “Arles is also in a good orbital spot from which to mount our own operations against DN forces there."

  Winders eyed More warily. "What exactly does that mean for Arles?"

  Howell grinned. "It means this orbital is now on the front line."

  Chapter Seven

  Aboard Savor the Moment, vicinity of Pessac, Aquitaine system

  Skippering a small freighter was perilous in the best of times, Captain Cordell Pran believed. Space was infested with pirates and there were always the ordinary hazards of space travel that one had to contend with. Misjumps, reactor malfunctions, unplanned shield drops, impacts with high-speed debris, and life support failures could, and did, happen to the most careful of crews and the best of ships. Space travel was inherently dangerous. All of the technological advancements that humanity had made since it had taken its first steps off of the birthworld of the species could not alter the fundamental hostility of the void. Wise space voyagers never forgot that, and always accorded the void the respect it was due.

  Pran laughed. Then there were people such as himself. He was deliberately courting danger. He was about to run the blockade of the heavily-guarded world of Pessac. Sensible captains ran from the hint of trouble. He was speeding toward it.

  Running was an apt description. His Savor the Moment was a relatively new ship, built to make fast runs among the close-together moons of a gas giant subsystem. Since it was so fast at sublight, and was only going to conduct short journeys, it didn't need to be fitted with an expensive FTL drive. A much smaller unit fit for intrasystem jumps only would suffice. That kept the cost down to where an independent shipper such as him could afford it. Oh, he had been so proud when he had taken possession of the ship. Savor the Moment had only one owner before him and that man had parted with her when he had decided to move up to interstellar trading.

  Pran was content to stick to intrasystem route hauling. Margins were thinner but the risks were not as great and there was no hassle involved in keeping a starship-grade displacement drive in shape. Pran had been making hops around the planet of Strasbourg in the outer Aquitaine system for over a decade before he had gotten the summons.

  It was more of a request. The government of Aquitaine had politely asked him to run the blockade around Pessac. He could have refused. He had business to attend to around Strasbourg. He hadn't. His sense of patriotism had overcome his own self-interest.

  He remembered the Ajaxians with zero fondness. He'd do what he could to hurt them in any way possible. There were other Aquitainians who needed help. He would give it to them.

  His ship would be perfect for the run, he'd been told by his government and its allied RHN advisers. Okay, he'd replied. Why not let him use his tiny displacement drive to run the blockade, pop in right behind the blockading Ajaxian ships and dump the cargo then?

  No, that's not the way it worked, the advisers had said. Civilian DP drives were not that precise, especially so deep inside a gravity well. Warships would struggle with the same thing too. If Pran’s ship displaced inside an atmosphere with his original velocity he might burn up instantly, his shield too weak to handle the intense heat.

  Then why not displace his ship moving very slowly? That was out of the question, the Halifaxians had said. A ship popping back into normal space inside a gravity well, with close to zero velocity, would be a sitting duck, unable to accelerate fast enough to avoid enemy fire. That explained everything, or so Pran had been told. He had to do it this way.

  He’d also gotten the strong feeling that his civilian freighter was eminently expendable, and that had accounted for his ship’s selection.

  Savor the Moment was traveling, at what was for Pran, an unsafe speed. Had he been bringing in a cargo on an ordinary run he'd have already flipped his ship around and been decelerating so that he didn't overshoot his destination. His velocity was nothing close to relativi
stic, of course, but it was much faster than he would ever have moved but for the need to blow by a blockade. At the speed he was making, he'd be in range of the Domain Navy’s guns for fewer than fourteen seconds.

  Fourteen seconds didn't sound like much but it still gave the Jaxers time to engage a ship and atomize it. The danger was not theoretical. Saburo Huizinga's Cash Flow had bought it only the week before. No survivors. The week before that, Tom Pedro's Salt Shaker had been taken out by a Jaxer Switchblade interception missile. Also no survivors.

  It had to be done, whatever the risks. Half of Pessac was still resisting the Ajaxian invasion. The resistance needed supplies. Someone had to bring it to them. That someone was Cordell Pran in Savor the Moment.

  He was carrying very basic stuff. Mostly small arms, ammunition, spare parts, and medical supplies. Each cargo pod was stuffed inside a grav harness that would retard the fall of the pod so that it didn't burn up in the atmosphere or obliterate itself on landing. Slow-moving objects made juicy targets for prowling DN gunships, so each pod would be dumped in the company of twenty other decoy pods. Ajaxian sensors would struggle to identify the real thing from the fakes, and this would, according to the law of probability, ensure that most of the real pods made it to the ground safely. The Jaxers could still go hunting for the grounded pods, but then they would have to expose themselves to fire from the surface. Good luck to them braving that barrage! Several uncautious gunships had been brought down by ground fire when they had dared to descend into the atmosphere to take out a few more pods. For the prospect of a negligible gain the Domain Navy had lost four light craft.

  They had a lot of those to spare, unfortunately.

  "Thirty seconds," Pran's helmsman, Enrique Urant announced.

  "Any sign they know we're coming?"