As he’d expected, the enemy ship dropped, slowing its speed to follow Endurance. Between the two ships, the missiles raced on, but now their trajectories were dipping, falling away, the gravity of the planet below reaching up to drag them down, pull them off course. Another rattle of fire from the point-defense cannons finished them, a series of explosions briefly lighting the sky as they dived past ten miles, the jagged mountains below reaching up to them, ready to gouge out the guts of the ship if Petrov made a false move.
The ship slid onto position, weaving from side to side, precisely programmed pulses from the thrusters to guide it along an invisible track. All the time, data flooded into his systems, giving him increasingly detailed looks at the planet flying past below, at the mountains, the crags, the craters.
“Three thousand meters,” Petrov said. “Descending.”
“Enemy cruiser is coming down,” Bianchi added. “Not so far, though. I think they’re holding at twenty miles altitude. That’s well within their capabilities.”
“Meaning that all we’ve done is put ourselves right into the gravity well,” Diaz said.
Mitchell looked up at the maps, trying to find a way through. They were travelling at thousands of miles an hour, too fast for anything but the crudest adjustments, but finally, he found what he was looking for, out on the far side. Two huge craters, their rims almost touching each other, forming a curved, thousand-mile canyon that would take the ship down almost to ground level.
“Got a new course for you, Spaceman. Did I say nine hundred meters? Try two hundred.”
Ikande turned to him, his eyes narrowed, replying, “That’s a bit too much, Lieutenant.”
“The enemy won’t be able to get any missiles down to us while we’re that low, and the course will take us nicely around a curve, put us in a perfect position for a hard burn once we get clear. They won’t be able to catch us, and we’ll have a change to…”
“Sir?” Bianchi said, “I’m picking up a heat signature along that flight path, a big one, subsurface.” She threw the image up on the monitor, and said, “Looks like the caldera of a supervolcano. The planet’s pretty active, tectonically.”
“How deep?”
“Maybe two miles.”
“Size?”
“Big. Bigger than anything ever recorded on Earth.”
“All sensors on that caldera, right now! I need a fault line!” Mitchell said. “Helm…”
Ikande looked up at the monitor, then turned sharply to Mitchell, and barked, “Wait just a damned minute, Lieutenant…”
“We need an edge, sir. We get one missile salvo in, it’ll hurt them, but that’s not enough. We’ve got to take them down. Otherwise they’ll run, and with the information they must have gathered from the surface already, they’ll beat us to the colony.” Looking at the planet, he added, “If there was nothing here to find, they wouldn’t be defending it. If we don’t destroy that ship, we’ll only have to fight it again, and that time they might have a greater advantage.”
“He’s right,” Diaz said. “We’ve got two Mark Twelve warheads…”
“What?” Ikande replied. “Who brought them on board?”
“Lieutenant Fitzroy, sir. I thought you knew.” She looked at Mitchell, and said, “They should be able to trigger an eruption, but the timing will have to be perfect, or they’ll be able to dodge out of the way.”
Mitchell’s hands passed across the controls, bringing up a new course projection, and he said, “I’ve got a trajectory plot, ready to go. And the target site is far enough from our people on the surface that they won’t experience anything other than an earthquake, as long as we get them to safety quickly enough.” He paused, then said, “There’s a gigaton-yield mine buried under the rock, sir. We’ve got to make use of it.”
“Do it,” Ikande said, settling back in his chair. He tapped a control on his arm rest, and said, “All hands, this is the bridge. Stand by for turbulence and shock wave. I repeat, stand by for turbulence and shock wave. That is all.”
“Coming into the passage now,” Petrov said, guiding Endurance smoothly into the narrow gap between the craters, the towering cliffs high on either side, rubble tumbling down all around them from the sheer force of their passage though the valley. Up ahead, the Coalition starship roared, ready to unleash the full force of its destructive fury when Endurance dared to stick her head out of the safety of the rock. Petrov nursed the ship along, weaving from left to right on the thrusters, ready to override the computer at a second’s notice, knowing it might be too late.
“Obstruction, up ahead!” Bianchi yelled.
“Fitzroy, fire as your guns bear!” Ikande shouted, leaning forward on his chair. All eyes were fixed on the sensor display, showing the rockfall ahead of them. Fitzroy would have to wait until the last second, getting his aiming perfect, or they were all dead. Petrov couldn’t alter course, not while preserving the bombing run and avoiding the enemy fire.
“Come on,” Mitchell muttered. “Make the shot, make the shot…”
The lights flickered, and the particle cannons fired, ripping into the rock before them. The shot was harder even than he had thought, the energy pulse strong enough to send the rocks flying in all directions, carving a path through which Endurance could fly for a split-second before sealing it up again behind them, the sides of the canyon collapsing in their wake.
“Nice shooting!” Diaz yelled.
“We’re clear, sir, all the way,” Bianchi added, wiping the sweat from her forehead.
“Target coming up,” Mitchell said. “Helm, you’ll need to give a full lateral boost as soon as the missiles are launched, or we’ll get caught in the blast range. And watch your orbital calculations, or the plume will hit us on the way back around. This is going to be big.”
“It’d better be,” Ikande replied, “or we’ll be giving them an open shot through our defenses.”
Diaz leaned over her console, her right hand nimbly dancing across her controls, and said, “I have a targeting solution. Firing in five seconds, mark.”
“I have the mark,” Petrov said. “Preparing evasive pattern, maximum acceleration.”
“Three seconds. Two. One. Launch.”
Endurance hurtled into the sky, Petrov using every ounce of acceleration to hurl the ship clear of the impending explosion. Diaz had fired both warheads. One would have been sufficient, but the targeting window was less than half a meter. If she missed, there would be nothing but an anticlimactic cloud of rubble. Mitchell watched the sensor display, the Coalition ship moving in, thinking that it had an easy kill, while the missiles sped towards their target, flying almost at ground level.
“Impact!” Diaz said, and two explosions erupted from the rock, brief flashes of light that send columns of dust hurling into the sky. For a second, it looked as though they had missed, as though they’d failed to reach their target, but a collection of warning lights burst into life, one after another, alerting the crew of ever-increasing seismic activity underground. Cracks opened, widening all around, as the lava forced its way to the surface, bursting through the ground a heartbeat later, billions of tons of molten rock hurled into the sky all at once.
The Coalition commander must have realized the danger. Belatedly, he attempted to alter course, trying to avoid the plume, but he’d left his decision just a little too late. The ship slammed into the fountain of fire, the molten magma pummeling into the sky, and tore his ship to pieces, a thousand hull impacts at the same time. There had never been a chance that he could get away.
“My God,” Bianchi said. She looked down at the display, and said, “It’s gaining! More speed!”
“I’m red-lining the engines now,” Petrov protested. “I can’t give any more!”
Mitchell watched as the eruption cracked across the face of the planet, a dozen plumes opening beneath them, hurling flaming rubble at orbital velocity. Warning lights winked on as the ship drifted closer, Petrov struggling to gain altitude, until finally the shoc
k wave began to recede, falling away behind them, Endurance moving smoothly into orbit.
“Not bad, people,” Ikande said.
Bianchi turned to him, and replied, “We’ve got a problem, sir. All that debris is going to come down, and a lot of it is going to come down soon. Most of the planet is about to face the worst meteor swarm it’s ever seen, and our people on the surface will be right in the middle of it.”
Mitchell looked at his display, and said, “If a shuttle launches now, it should be able to make it down to the surface in time.”
“Make that happen, Lieutenant,” Ikande ordered. “I just hope we haven’t destroyed what we came for.”
Chapter 16
Thiou struggled to her feet, the ground rolling underneath her, suit sensors warning her of a full-magnitude earthquake, all the way across the planet. She looked across at the others, lying still on the ground, waiting for it to subside, and finally yielded to sanity, dropping back again, every vibration running through her body. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the shaking stopped, and she looked across at Romanova, her eyes wide in disbelief.
“What the hell was that?” she asked. “We don’t have any bombs that big, do we?”
“Not that I know of, and as far as I’m aware, neither do the Commonwealth.”
“Gigaton-yield,” Thakur said, grim-faced. “Lieutenant, that’s about what we’d expect from a starship crashing into the surface at full speed. No atmosphere to slow it down, and if the reactor gave out on impact.” He looked around, and added, “We’re in trouble, ma’am. We can expect a lot of debris thrown out. Enough that we’re going to have it coming down on top of us, any time now.”
“What can we do about it?” Thiou asked.
“Realistically, probably start working on our epitaphs,” Romanova replied. “Even if we could find a deep enough cave, it’d turn into a tomb.” She paused, then said, “That crater, over to the right. We get to the bottom of it, light our beacons, and see if anyone’s able to pick us up. At this point, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s the Coalition ship or Endurance. We’ve got to get off this planet in a hurry.”
Nodding, Thiou turned, climbing the side of the crater in fast, anxious bounds, the others just behind her. Gurung fired a burst on his thrusters, sending him racing ahead of the others, rifle in hand, sweeping the horizon. As far as they knew, there was nobody else on this planet, but the veteran soldier wasn’t about to leave that to chance.
Thiou reached the crest of the crater, looking out over the surface. She could see tracks crossing back and forth, old ones, presumably left behind by the first expedition, hundreds of years ago. She ought to be down there with her sensor web, searching for their records, uncovering the history of those long-forgotten days. If Thakur was right, all of it was about to be destroyed, lost forever, buried under thousands of tons of rock.
“Come on, we’ve got to keep moving!” Romanova said, racing past her. “There’s no time to wait.”
Nodding, Thiou bounded down the slopes, a bright, white light erupting at the core of the crater as Gurung lit the first flare, quickly setting off four more in a rough circle. Anyone in orbit would see it easily, assuming there was anyone left to watch. The ground rumbled again, an aftershock almost as bad as the first one, and huge cracks opened in the rock, shafts leading into eternal darkness. One wrong step, with her thruster tanks empty, and there would be no way back.
As the ground settled down once again, she stumbled into the middle of the crater floor, looking up at the sky, sweeping the horizon with her sensors. She could just make up the rocks coming up, soaring into orbit, her suit sensors identifying them as molten magma, rapidly cooling in the vacuum of space. She looked at Romanova, who frowned, reaching up to adjust her suit sensors.
“With that much debris in orbit, we’ll have trouble spotting a ship coming in. Maybe if we splice all our communicators together, that might help. Kamal, how much have you got left in your thrusters?”
“One good burst, at full power.”
“Go for altitude. You’re our antenna. We’ve got to get the strongest signal we can.” She reached for controls on her armrest, and said, “I’m feeding all of our systems through you. Just be careful to hold enough in reserve to get down again. This isn’t a one-way trip.”
“Understood,” he replied, firing his thrusters. Thiou watched as the soldier soared into the air, rising over the plain, her suit pulsing the beacon signal through his communicators. She looked around the horizon again, knowing that her sensors would pick up an incoming ship long before her eyes, but desperate enough to try anything.
“I can’t hear…” Gurung began, as a faint crackle came over the speakers.
“Quiet!” Thiou yelled. She reached into her pocket, jabbing a datacard into the support slot, bringing up one of her specialized archaeological programs, a signal enhancer. “Should have thought of this before,” she muttered. “I think I’ve got something. Trying to clean up the signal.”
“….landing party. Shuttle Three calling landing party. Lieutenant Romanova, Doctor Thiou, respond, please.”
“Thiou here,” she replied. “I read you faint. Can you see us? Look for four beacons in a circle. Four beacons in a circle. Do you read me?”
“Midshipman Mizrahi here. I read you, Doctor. Keep signaling.”
“Impossible,” she replied, looking at Gurung, already sliding back to the surface. “We can’t maintain signal strength. Watch for the signal on the surface.” A roar of static filled the speakers, and she said, “Come in, come in! Shuttle Three, do you read me?”
“No good,” Gurung replied. “I’m coming back down. I don’t see him, either. Lots more rubble, though. Coming in fast.” He fired a final pulse from his thrusters, slowing to an easy landing, and continued, “If that damned kid wasn’t paying attention…”
“He can’t miss the flares,” Romanova replied, “and he was in communication for long enough to get a signal track to at least our rough location.” Turning to Gurung, she added, “And he is an officer in the Interplanetary Guard and will receive your respect whether he can hear you or not. Is that clear.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, settling back on the surface.
“Best-guess,” Thakur said, “I’d say we’ve got about nine, ten minutes to impact.”
“I did a deep scan,” Gurung added. “No caverns, nothing underground we might use as a bunker. Odds are that given the speed those rocks are travelling, it wouldn’t matter anyway.”
“Wait, I’m getting something,” Thakur replied. “Over the horizon, coming in hot.” She glanced at Thiou, and added, “He’s going too damned fast! If he doesn’t slow down…”
“He doesn’t have time,” Romanova replied. “We’ve got to get out of the blast radius, and that probably encompasses the whole damned planet!” Looking around, she said, “Get ready to board as soon as he lands. We’re going to have no time at all to get clear.”
Thiou could spot the shuttle now, her heads-up display highlighting the rapidly descending dot. The pilot had to be insane, pushing his ship far beyond the recommended tolerances, but the cloud of debris moving behind him gave him little choice, if he was to snatch the survivors on the surface clear of the destruction that was about to be wrought.
Landing thrusters pounded into the soil, sending dust flying in all directions, the first, microscopic particles of rock already beginning their furious onslaught. The four of them raced towards the shuttle, the outer hatch open and waiting, jumping into the cockpit in easy bounds. Mizrahi might have been crazy, but he’d known enough to depressurize the passenger compartment, allowing them to simply glide in. As the last one, Romanova, pushed through the doors, the outer hatch slammed shut, and the engines roared, kicking back to full power as the shuttle raced for the safety of orbit.
With a loud rattle, the lifesystem burst into life, filling the compartment with oxygen, and the four of them hastily removed their spacesuits, hurling the components i
nto the wall lockers, before strapping into the nearest couch. The acceleration was already building, and it was only going to get worse. Warning alarms sounded, a cacophony of discordant noise that burst through their ears, proclaiming both an excess of acceleration and the imminent danger of collision.
Thiou looked up at her suit, then shook her head, tugging her restraints as tightly as she could. Were they to be struck by a meteor, wearing a spacesuit would be a meaningless gesture. They’d be dead, struck by a bullet travelling at tens of thousands of miles an hour. A kinetic projectile that would destroy them, without a doubt.
“Midshipman,” she said, yelling into the intercom, “Can you patch a signal through to Endurance? I have information that I need to pass to Captain Ikande.”
“No can do, ma’am,” the young pilot replied. “We lost all of our relay satellites when the supervolcano went up, and I’d never get a comm laser through the clutter anyway. It’ll have to wait until we dock.”
“My God!” Gurung said, looking at the side viewport. Thiou turned to look, and her eyes widened at the nightmare on display, a massive molten wound ripped into the planet, surrounded by a smaller, rapidly dimming halo. In short order, the rocks being hurled from the surface would either impact on the ground or form a ring system, briefly making the planet one of the wonders of space. In a century or three, give or take.
A loud report rattled the shuttle, the constant alarms growing in intensity, diagnostic data streaming across the displays. An impact, low down, close to the lateral thrusters, which easily bunched through the outer hull and came close to penetrating the inner hull. Had it been a little heavier, a little faster, they’d be dead.
The shuttle slid from side to side, following a wild trajectory to avoid clusters of debris, the rattle on the hull growing louder as the particles grew larger, slowly beating their way through the hull. No matter how he tried, Mizrahi couldn’t evade them all, the debris forming an ever-growing shockwave through which he had to push. Nor could Endurance help. If she tried to come down to rescue them, she’d be torn to pieces in the rubble.
Exiles of Earth: Rebellion Page 13
