Rika Coronated
Page 15
Before it was fully expanded, kinetic rounds and beams tore through the object, shredding it and leaving only a bit of white schmutz stuck to the station.
Nona’s response was to leap across the alcove’s opening, firing her e-beam at three targets before sending a pair of DPU shots after.
Crudge nodded to Skip, who followed her example, a straight line of blue-white lightning flashing four times. After waiting a moment, the lieutenant tossed another foam ball into the opening, smiling as it expanded and no rounds of defensive fire struck it.
Crudge hadn’t wanted to waste any of his nano, but decided it was the most expedient option at this point. He deployed a passel into a sticky blob and whipped it around the corner.
The nano released optical sensors, getting a better picture of the alcove than the rough blueprints showed. It was fifteen meters deep and five wide. Several smoking turrets lined the side, but there were five more that hadn’t fired in the initial salvos, and remained ready to take out the mechs.
Nona made a sound like she was yawning, but Crudge ignored her, sending the nano on its way, letting the tactical NSAI he carried control it.
While the computer did its work, he checked in on the other teams.
The RR-4 took a few moments to respond, and when he did, his mental tone carried a note of frustration.
Crudge sent an affirmation and then saw that the nano he’d sent into the alcove had disabled the remaining defenses. He gestured for the fireteam to move in and secure it.
* * * * *
Vargo breathed a sigh of relief at Crudge’s news and turned to Ashley.
“Feed the lieutenant priority targets and vectors. We’ll let him hammer them from the station while we run defense for any incoming rounds.”
“And missiles?” Ashley asked.
The captain looked at the forward display and set his jaw as he saw a wave of missiles heading toward Orden Station.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Gotta be a thousand of them.”
“Something like that,” she replied as scan completed the tally at one-thousand-and-sixty-three.
Vargo contacted the captain of the other destroyer.
The other captain snorted.
MOUNT GENEVIA REDUX
STELLAR DATE: 06.09.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GMS Pinnacle, Babylon
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
“I’m tired of fighting on this damn mountain,” Chase muttered as he strode down the corridor that led to the Royal Palace’s uppermost landing pad.
“Oh?” Rika asked, glancing to her right at the man—the mech—she’d grown deeply in love with over the past two years. “We’ve only fought on Genevia once. How can you be tired of it?”
He laughed, the good-natured tones calming her nerves. “Well, you’ve been busy with all your important queenly duties, so you haven’t been running as many sims as we have.”
“Wait. Aren’t you the head of my guard? Can’t you just mandate fewer sims?”
Chase snorted. “Right. And then I’d have Silva and Kelly up my ass about not taking the job seriously. Trust me, it’s easier to just run a ridiculous number of sims.”
Rika only laughed in response as she reviewed the data flowing in on the combat net. Mount Genevia and the Royal Palace were protected by three layers of security. The first consisted of police from several nearby cities under Commandant Perin. They were stationed on the roads and in the woods on the lower slopes. Currently they were holding back the encroaching enemy, but the enemy was bringing in more hardware, and she imagined that Barne would soon pull the police back.
The second layer of defense was made up of members of the New Genevian Space Force. Their numbers were small, but consisted of veterans who had been vouched for by mechs and trusted members of the resistance. Rika had hoped to deploy them to ships, but with most of her mechs shipping out to defend the surrounding systems and Genevia itself, the planet of Belgium was largely left on its own.
Her own guard and a few members of the palace’s security team made up the third layer of defense. Aside from Kelly, Keli, Chase, and Silva, Barne and Leslie were onsite, as well as Corporal Harlan’s fireteam. Barne had taken the K1R’s team to the lower levels. The docking bays at the foot of the mountain had been opened up, and were the palace’s least secure entrance.
A K1R, two AM-4s and an SMI would plug that hole nicely.
“I just can’t imagine they think they can get past all our lower defenses in a reasonable timeframe. Those ships are coming down with only one thing in mind. They plan to drop troops, and their best bet will be to land them on the upper pads.”
“Anti-air is going to take a lot of them out,” Chase said as they reached the door at the end of the hall. “Unless they think they can take out the mountain’s power systems down below.”
“Harlan will have something to say about that.” Rika pushed the doors open and strode onto the landing pad where two skyscreams waited. “Not to mention the improved SC Batts we installed. Going to take a lot more than a little power outage to stay our weapons.”
Chase gave the fighters a mistrustful look. “I can’t say I’m excited to have you take to the skies when we’re under attack from said skies.”
“Don’t worry,” Rika kis
sed his cheek before pulling on her helmet.
“Not very queenly behavior.” Chase’s words were laced with a note of knowing resignation. “And what if they figure out that it’s you in the skyscream?”
Rika thought about that for a moment before speaking on the command net.
The woman snorted a laugh over the Link.
As she spoke, Rika gave Chase a final wave and bounded toward her skyscream, slotting her arms and legs into the mounting system, which pulled them off and pulled her into the heart of the craft.
Finaeus had offered to upgrade the skyscreams to allow the mechs the ability to merge with them without removing limbs, but Rika had declined. There was nothing like feeling like you were the attack craft itself, its wings your own arms, its beams your claws.
Kelly was first in the air, and Rika followed after, streaking out over the edge of the landing pad, skimming treetops as she angled upward, hurtling her body toward the heavens.
The pad had blocked the sound of the battle below, but once over the slopes, the echo of projectile and kinetic rounds rose up to meet her, their staccato rhythms punctuated by periodic explosions.
Rika’s suspicions were confirmed, and a few moments later, Barne sent out the command for the police forces to move back to the secondary line, letting the military forces move to the fore.
As much as she wanted to drop down and strafe the enemy’s ground troops, she shifted her focus to the skies above, where five freighters had made it past Piper’s defense. They had just appeared on the horizon, bright flares from their engines lighting up the night sky.
Kelly banked away, and Rika continued to boost toward the rightmost ship. It was sleek for a freighter, its grav systems creating a low-pressure pocket for the ship to slide through. Targeting an emitter near the ship’s starboard engine, Rika fired a salvo of rail slugs, following them up with a stream of HE rounds.
The kinetics weakened the ship’s shields, straining the systems that were already pushing the planet’s atmosphere back, and the HE rounds hammered their way through, hitting the graviton emitter and knocking it offline.
A second later, atmosphere tore through the opening and tore at the ship, dragging it sideways and swinging the other side around toward Rika. She was only fifty kilometers away, but it seemed easy to lock onto the ship’s starboard emitters and repeat the shots.
The second shield umbrella went offline, and she tagged the target for the ground batteries.
Rika was onto her second ship when one-ton slugs slammed into the first freighter’s engines, turning the ship into a ball of fire falling toward the planet.
The second ship was a tougher nut to crack. She lobbed rail shots at ship’s rear umbrellas, but they were too tough to wear down with a single pass. As her skyscream shrieked over the freighter, Niki highlighted a section of its shields.
Rika spotted the weak patch on the top of the ship. No critical systems lay beneath it, and time was tight before the enemy vessels reached the optimal distance to disgorge their landing craft.
Without another thought, she fired her electron beams at the weak spot, and dove after, punching her skyscream through and sliding between the ship and its shields. Her beams raked the ship’s hull, and she dove under the craft and angled toward its engines.
Point defense beams lanced out at her attack craft, several scoring hits, but most unable to track a ship moving so close to the hull. Firing on an emitter next to the engines, Rika killed the rear shields and tore through, passing out into the planet’s skies and tagging the ship for ground batteries.
Rika swore as she realized they were drones. Kelly’s second target was also bleeding drones, even as the ground batteries fired on it, holing the ship from stern to bow.
The fifth ship had fallen back, and half the swarm of attack bots fell back to cover it, while the other half swept in toward Rika and Kelly.
The ships had slowed their approach to three hundred kilometers per hour. They were only two hundred and fifty klicks from Mount Genevia, and Rika knew that they were down to the final minutes.
The AI sounded genuinely sorry, and Rika wanted to tell him it would be OK, when another voice joined the command net.
Kora laughed.
A streak of light lit up the horizon as another ship tore through the atmosphere and then rotated, firing its engines directly at the final enemy freighter.
Rika wondered if the freighter could pull it off, but stared in awe as she watched the ViperTalon manage the maneuver.
The Talon’s engine wash swept across the drones escorting the final ship, knocking dozens of them out of the sky. The enemy freighter fired back, but its beams couldn’t push through the flaming wash in atmosphere, and the ball of fire streaking toward it carried on unabated.
After a few more seconds, the ViperTalon cut its burn and turned, its own beams raking the final freighter, but the drones took the brunt of the attack.
Rika boosted toward them, her own beams and weapons lashing out, felling drones as she went, but the leading swarm followed after, and she spent as much time battling them as the group defending the ship.
She monitored Kelly during the desperate fight, making sure her teammate was alright, slicing through attackers that were on her tail more than once. As they fought, the drones seemed to slow down to a crawl, their movements languid and predictable.
Rika lobbed kinetics and fired beams at weak points she identified, and the robotic attackers dropped from the skies in droves. Even so, there were still hundreds more, and a screen of them lay between her and the freighter.
A quick review of scan showed her that the ship’s shields were nearly down, so she tagged it for the ground defenses to hammer.
The aerial battle was now only one hundred kilometers from Mount Genevia, and the six rounds from the ground defenses took only seconds to reach them.
Each one was blocked by swarms of drones that moved between the shots and the surface-to-air slugs.
Missiles streaked out from silos in the mountain, trails of smoke following their twisting paths, but only two reached the freighter.
Explosions blossomed in the night, and scan updated to show that the ship’s forward shields were down. Rika didn’t hesitate to boost forward, twisting through the beam fire that tracked after her from the drones.
Like before, they were too slow, easy to predict. She evaded their shots with ease and focused on the freighter’s forward sensor domes, blowing them away before dropping to its hull, sinking her talons into the ship’s ablative plating to slow herself down.