Rika Coronated
Page 14
Not on my watch, Piper thought as he ran an active scan sweep around his nearspace.
Every ship that came within a light second of Belgium was subjected to the AI’s prying gaze. He wasn’t about to let anything slip past his detection web.
Privacy be damned this one night.
Several ships had registered complaints with the local STC, and they had passed them on to Piper. He scanned those ships a second time, sending some of his drones to each, escorting them away from Belgium for their trouble.
It was heavy-handed, and he knew it, but if someone wanted to take the mechs and New Genevia down a notch, this would be the night to do it.
He’d followed the coronation ceremony with a feeling of pride swelling in his core—or his analogy to what he imagined humans felt as pride. It was a sense of rightness, that after all Rika had endured and sacrificed, she would get the recognition she deserved.
More importantly, this was the night she would be granted the full authority in the eyes of her own people to continue taking the fight to the Niets. Not that she required their formal approval, but Piper knew from experience that it was always nice to have the support.
He was watching the ship bearing Kora and Gary begin its descent to the spaceport at the base of Mount Genevia, when an alert reached him that there had been an attempt on Rika’s life.
There weren’t many details, so he clung to the word ‘attempt’ as he reached out to Niki.
Piper chuckled at her choice of words.
He passed Niki his scan feed, which showed forty civilian ships, mostly freighters with a few private vessels and one hospital cruiser mixed in, shift out of low orbits over Belgium and make for Mount Genevia.
The once-multinodal AI gave a gleeful laugh in response, surprised at how excited he was to begin his first major battle at the helm of his own ship.
Other than a pair of destroyers running on skeleton crews, which was the norm for much of the Marauder fleet, Piper’s Harriet Class carrier was the only military ship over Belgium.
Despite Niki’s words, his near-lone presence was more out of necessity than a desire to bait any enemies into attacking the planet or the ceremony below. They were weeks away from sorting out who was still loyal to the Niets in most of the system’s police forces, which had grounded all but a few patrol craft piloted by resistance members who had earned Marauder trust during the uprising.
Piper reached out to those ships and directed them to keep other vessels clear of the battlespace, and engage any enemy craft around the perimeter, but to stay at a five-thousand-kilometer altitude. To the pair of destroyers, he sent orders to drop out of higher orbit and move in to flank the ragtag fleet that was descending on Belgium.
His other orders were for himself, delivered to the first three hundred drones in his ship’s bays. Bank after bank of five-meter attack drones loaded up on the ladders and dropped from the carrier like a swarm of bees streaking out over the night side of Belgium. Their engines burned brightly, sparks of illumination twinkling across the dull glow from the rebel fleet moving toward the surface.
He didn’t bother with any demands for surrender. Rika had already sent up her own missive—which had been ignored—so when his fighters were clear of any unaffiliated civilian traffic, he opened fire.
The PLI fleet’s rearguard consisted of six large freighters. Two were insystem scows, each over ten kilometers long, and the other four were interstellar craft, only half the size of the others. All were loaded with tens of thousands of cargo pods, effectively creating ablative shielding that massed more than an entire dreadnought.
He swung a dozen drones around toward the engines of each ship, unleashing their beams at the craft, only to encounter stronger grav shields than he expected. None of his drones’ beams penetrated, and he loaded up a hundred heavy drones into the ladders, while directing the Overwatch’s four heavy rails to fire on the two insystem freighters.
Before his rounds even leapt from the rail accelerators, hundreds of cargo containers on the freighters opened up, spewing drones into space. A quick calculation showed there to be over a hundred thousand of them. Most appeared to be smaller, only a few meters across, but they swarmed his initial wave of drones, wiping them out in seconds.
A second wave erupted from the crates, these ones blasting through the screen provided by their predecessors, and then seeming to break apart.
Well, that’s just cheating, Piper thought with a sour laugh as he identified the mines that now lay between him and his prey.
Rather than wasting drones sweeping the mines, he directed his bots around the edges of the field, switching their targets to a pair of smaller freighters, while he turned the Overwatch and accelerated toward the minefield.
The drifting space-bombs lay only five thousand kilometers above the planet’s surface, and when the Harriet plowed into them, he was certain to the inhabitants on the planet below, the light from the explosions was brighter than at high noon.
The carrier’s stasis shields flared, and the CriEns spiked their energy draw, but the ship behind the protective barrier barely registered a shudder on its a-grav-dampening fields.
Even after seeing us destroy the Niets, they have no idea how to deal with ships like ours.
Piper unleashed a third wave of drones to escort his heavy hitters, which had remained behind the Overwatch’s stasis shields while the ship plowed through the mines.
The enemy drones had moved to the perimeter of the battle space to engage the first wave of drones, and the first rounds from the carrier’s railguns had hit the bulk freighters.
The enemy ships’ shields had only barely managed to deflect the massive kinetic strikes. Then the heavy drones lobbed their first wave of missiles, and the shields collapsed, leaving the freighters’ engines open for the escort drones to lase.
Fifteen seconds later—five minutes after the battle had begun—the two scows were dead in the water, slowly drifting toward the planet below.
Piper tagged them for the tugs that had begun to form up in high orbit, and focused his attention on the next four freighters. They fell to the same tactic, and with that, the screen of ships protecting the rest of the advancing enemy fleet was gone.
The pair of destroyers had taken out seven other ships, leaving twenty-five still headed for the planet’s surface. The hospital cruiser was at the center of the enemy formation, and Piper tagged it as his primary target, sending his heavy drones, along with an escort of attack craft.
A dozen of the enemy freighters fell back to engage, beam fire between the PLI fleet and the drones creating an almost solid sheet of energy above the planet.
The range of mountains amidst which Mount Genevia rested was coming into view around the curve of the planet, and Piper expected the lower vessels to begin braking in order to have more than a minute to pummel the mountain.
None of them did, however, and he adjusted his assessment of their tactics.
The AI took a moment to wonder why he assumed the humans wouldn’t want him on their primary network, and laughed at his own uncertainty.
Too long in the dark, Piper, too many bad habits formed.
He joined in on the network, and his laugh turned to a shocked gasp as the full scope of the attack unfolded in his mind.
FLYING MECHS
STELLAR DATE: 06.09.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Royal Palace, Mount Genevia, Belgium
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
“You hardasses wanna live forever?” Lieutenant Crudge bellowed as he turned and ran toward the bay’s open doors with N Company’s squad one/one following after.
He leapt into space, not even bothering to look back at the New Paula to ensure that the twenty mechs were on his tail. He might as well double-check that the star was still burning while he was at it.
The mechs would be there. They would always be there. That was what he loved most about being in Rika’s Marauders. Everyone fought. No one stopped.
That one simple rule was exemplified by Rika herself, and in Crudge’s opinion, it was why they won. Plus, no one wanted to look bad in front of the CO.
He cleared his mind of the sentimental thoughts and shifted focus to the target ahead: Orden Station.
Not caring about spin-grav, Orden was a sprawling mass of interconnected platforms that spread for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. The thing struck Crudge as an inefficient waste, but no one had asked his opinion.
Granted, no one on the station had asked him to come in either, barrels hot and blazing, but he was going to do that as well.
The sergeant only gave a laugh in response, and ten seconds later, clawed feet met station hull.
A round of ‘Ree-kah’s met his statement, and the two fireteams split up.
Crudge snorted.
His pronouncement was punctuated by a heat signature tagging his , and he dove behind a raised ridge on the hull.
The other four mechs spread out, combat net lighting up with six origin points for the inbound fire. Working like the well-oiled machine they were, the mechs of one/one selected targets and unleashed a salvo of depleted uranium rods at each.
Crudge nodded as he rose from cover, watching for any movement on the station’s hull, knowing that more defensive crawlers could appear at any time.
Despite the certainty he spoke with, Crudge knew it was possible that there actually were enough Niets on Orden to stage a coup—he just didn’t want his mechs to hesitate if any Genevians drew on them.
The billion or so Niets now living in Genevian space was a problem that people higher up the pecking order than Crudge were going to have to deal with. If it were up to him, he’d send ‘em all packing back to the fatherland, but given that Rika planned to cross the border before long, there was no reason in sending the enemy reinforcements.
Should just lock ‘em all up, or stick ‘em in cryo, then put ‘em on some freighters and send ‘em into the black.
Cryo freighters were a common form of prison ship. Most automated, and most set to spend centuries in the black before returning—if they ever did.
He took a moment to wonder how many popsicle prisoners were drifting in the dark, then laughed at the moniker he’d just made up.
The mechs had made it almost halfway to the defense node, when one of its secondary guns powered up and swiveled toward them.
A proton beam streaked out from the defensive turret, striking the hull where Skip had been a few seconds earlier, burning through surface equipment and ablative plating. Another shot streaked right over Crudge’s head, causing his EM deflection systems to spike as stray particles hit his armor.
Nona had taken a glancing blow from the gun. One of her shoulder-mounted cannon was gone, and the left side of her helmet was warped and blackened.
Crudge snorted, and assigned Lais and Nona to cover the team’s six while he and the other two mechs worked their way around the hulking defensive array toward where the signal relays should be nestled.
Crudge considered the wisdom of decompressing a few corridors on the station, and decided that he didn’t care much.
Crudge felt the smallest tremor in the hull beneath his feet five seconds later.
Then, James reported,
Skip snorted, and Crudge chuckled as well, tapping into the other fireteam’s feeds to watch enemies streaming past the mechs, several without helmets screaming silently as they shot into space.
Then the mechs moved into the twisted remains of the airlock, kinetics streaking out from their weapons toward the few armored enemies who had managed to maglock to the deck before being pulled into the void.
He kept an eye on their advance, but focused on his team’s progress. They’d reached an alcove in the defensive array, where the relays that connected each of the massive guns to the targeting and scan systems inside the station resided.
The lieutenant grabbed one of the small orbs from a rack on his forearm and lobbed it into the alcove’s opening. As soon as it passed into the entrance, it cracked open and bubbled into a four-meter sticky ball that attached to the hull.