by B. V. Larson
“All right, standard deployment behind the scouts. Keep spread out.” Watching as a full platoon filed into the tunnel, Bull turned to those bearing the three semi-portable laser cannons he had left. “Heavy weapons next.”
“Nobody behind us.” Repeth grabbed an ultra-wideband repeater off a nearby Marine’s back-rack – every troop had one filled with easily-accessible devices, ammo and special weapons – and activated its sticky side. Leaping high in the low gravity, she slapped it against the tunnel ceiling at the last corner they had turned, ensuring comms to the rear.
“Good thinking. All right you maggots, you wanna live forever?” Bull grabbed a corner of the first semi, hefting a quarter of its thousand-kilo mass with ease as he and three others lifted and set off at double time behind the line platoon. The crews of the other company’s two semis and the remnants of Bravo company’s marines followed immediately.
Repeth shook her head good-naturedly. Gotta flex those muscles, she chuckled to herself. Turning to the last platoon leader she said, “Lieutenant, bring your platoon in behind me, and watch those sides and rear. Turn seismic sensors to maximum, and if you get something, tell me. They have boring machines and they like to sneak in behind us.” With that she followed the heavy weapons.
Dialing in a picture from one of the scouts, she could see the woman ease toward a sharp corner with a vertical jamb and smoothed floor rather than the rough cut of the ones they occupied. Like a VR game the view slid leftward to reveal a short length of well-lit and polished corridor with two Hippos standing fifty meters down it. Beyond them a heavy armored door squatted, looking solid as a bank vault. .
Bull watched the same picture as the view pulled back and showed the scout popping another gnat off her partner’s back-rack. Activating it, she launched it up to fly on tiny gas jets down the tunnel. It made it about halfway down before one of the guards spotted it and blasted it with his plasma rifle. A wash of green swept past as the scout withdrew.
“Only two,” she reported unnecessarily. “Easy take.”
Too easy, Bull thought. “Scouts, put two rockets on the doors. Keep in good cover, just shoot and scoot. Sergeant Kelle, get four or five guys to start chucking grenades down that corridor with variable fuses. Use some smoke, too. That looks too much like a gauntlet to me.” Who knows what sneaky surprises they got – stealthware, mines, ambush ports?
By this time the ragtag unit had closed up and Bull could see the two scouts as the rest lined the corridor hard against the walls. Prepping rockets, they leaned out low and high and fired them one-handed, jumping back before they even impacted.
Clouds of debris filled the tunnel and drifted back to the scouts. Four Marines ran up and rapidly rolled frag, shock and smoke grenades around the corner like left-handed bowlers. Small bursts blew more dust and explosion gasses around, creating a brief artificial atmosphere that obscured all vision.
Bull ordered, “Semis, move up and emplace before that smoke goes away, three across. As soon as you can, light up the walls, floor and ceiling. Strip everything off the whole surface. Someone launch another gnat and send it right down the middle.”
Right down the middle it went, surrounded by the red-orange beams of the heavy lasers as they peeled the walls, floor and ceiling. Abruptly it vanished in a blast that came from the floor. “Hah! I knew it,” exulted Bull. “Send another one! Keep sending them, and a couple more in ground mode to crawl on the floor.”
Five more gnats gave their all before the sixth found the armored door with its tiny sonar. Scanning all around showed the remains of the two Hippos, and the door barely damaged. “As soon as you’ve stripped the walls, give me a concentrated drill on the left lower corner of the door,” Bull told the lasers. “Pull that drone back but keep it focused so we can see the impact spot.”
A moment later the three semis aimed their beams at the indicated place, questing for coordination as the gunners watched through the gnat’s infrared sensors. “It’s breaking through!” one of them cried after ten seconds of drilling.
“Cut upward together,” Bull ordered. “You may have to burn around the entire circumference, but I want that way opened. Keep aiming at the outside of the door; the rock it’s anchored in is probably weaker than the door itself.”
“Aye, sir,” the gunners responded in unison. A long moment later they had cut all the way up, over, and down, and the massive barrier seemed to teeter.
“Two more rockets near the top – knock it down!” Bull called. “Semis keep firing, widen your beams.”
Two marines launched the explosive missiles over the heads of the semi-portable gunners and with a ponderous crash, the thing fell to the floor and the dust blew back at them with a rush of wind. “Atmosphere behind it is venting our way!” Repeth called.
Immediately the heavy lasers stabbed through the clear space the door had occupied, but not before something came back at them.
A creature out of nightmare, it resembled a chromed spider, filling the five-meter-wide corridor with skittering legs. Reflected light seared the walls in a blaze as the gunners focused on it, but its reflective surface simply turned the beams aside without difficulty.
“War drone!” Repeth yelled from behind. “Rockets and railguns!”
Too late. The monster belched plasma, incinerating one gun crew in a blanket of verdant flame. The two remaining crews dove back around the corner, abandoning their machines as others prepped rockets. Wind whistled around them as the base’s atmosphere continued to vent through their ingress tunnel.
“Back up, back up!” Repeth hollered, knowing that to try to fight the drone in its own tunnel was suicide. She pointed emphatically at a spot on the ground well back from the bend. “Line up HERE and engage it all together when it comes around the corner.” Roughly she thrust Marines into position, some prone, some kneeling, some standing: a phalanx of handheld weapons she hoped would be enough. Maybe we should have waited for those heavy tanks after all… She cursed as she saw Bull take a place in the line. “Hell…” she muttered, and got ready to jump.
Around the corner barreled the spider, met by a wall of anti-armor rockets. Most of them flashed right by, between its thin silver legs or over, but several struck its round abdomen and exploded. It staggered, but rose again, just in time to meet a hail of thousands of hard-driven railgun bullets. Leaping in the light gravity, Repeth added to the mix, firing over their heads before the burst pushed her backward and she drifted to the ground.
“Keep hitting it!” Bull called over his squadcomm, then as it began to advance against the sleet he snatched an antitank mine off of a nearby back-rack and dropped his PRG. “Cover me!”
Charging forward with the square cased charge in both hands he dodged the monster’s reaching legs. Plasma hot enough to crisp him struck off-target, splashing from a wall and deflecting into the end of the firing line. Three Marines fell with grievous burns, to be dragged back by their comrades.
An inarticulate battle-scream ripped from his throat as he raised the mine overhead to stick it against the thing’s torso. Railgun rounds ricocheted off the walls as the firing line avoided hitting their commander, covering him with rock chips as he rolled forward past the spider.
“Fire in the hole!” Bull called from out of sight, waited a beat, and then sent the detonation signal. Shockwave slammed the Marines down the tunnel in a jumble of flailing limbs, but their armor and their bodies were built to take that kind of pounding and they quickly picked themselves back up. Nothing but wreckage remained of the war drone.
“Get up there,” ordered Repeth “You diggers gonna let your commander fight them all himself?” That got them moving in a rush to support Bull. When they rounded the corner they found him righting one of the remaining semi-portables.
“Pick this up, and me on it. We go in firing, now,” he said, swinging himself into the gunner’s seat. Never made to be used this way, even so eight Marines grabbed the hardpoints of the laser and attached fusion generator a
nd, like palanquin slaves of some ancient warlord, carried the whole arrangement forward at the double time.
“Holy crap,” Repeth muttered, then, “get up there with him!” She hustled Marines up, shoving them along indiscriminately as Bull charged in his high-tech Marine-borne chariot, snapping off shots to his front.
This mob burst through the entryway, fighting the wind of the atmosphere still pumping against them. Air resistance slackened as they made it into the huge open space beyond, and Bull could see from his perch the explosions and skating orange laser beams of EarthFleet units attacking in other parts of the room, mingled with the green flashes of enemy plasma weapons.
In front of him loomed an enormous piece of complex machinery that thrummed with power. No idea what that is, but I bet it’s part of the moon laser, so… “Ground me, now!” Immediately upon setting down he pressed the firing stud. Red-orange light licked out, mostly invisible now that most of the dust had been blown down the corridors, but his aim point glowed red, then white, to melt through the casing. Whatever he was hitting was not armored, and was not made to stand up to a heavy weapon like this.
“Spread out and engage!” Repeth ordered, waving her arms left and right to emphasize her words. Marines moved forward to cover Bull on the semi, firing across the whole arc of the enormous, machinery-filled room. “Target the ones along the walls,” she said, plying her own PRG.
Hippos and war drones defended other openings along the edges of the huge amphitheater, stymieing Marine assaults even as theirs had been, until concentrated fire from her ragtag band killed the Hippos at the nearest armored door and began to pick at the nearest war drone. With the pressure off, the Marines in that tunnel charged forward and barraged the spider with rockets, allowing them to maneuver two more heavy lasers into the room.
But rockets and lasers couldn’t stop the spider drones before and they didn’t now, as the creature surged forward and cooked two nearby Marines with its plasma weapon, then skittered sideways and speared two more with pointed blades on its leg tips. Everyone in that platoon opened up on it with their railguns and it staggered backward, but clearly this advantage was only temporary.
Screw me sideways, I’m gonna be a hero again, Repeth snarled to herself as she bounded toward the hapless platoon. Several of her Marines followed out of sheer instinct and loyalty, but she was far ahead of them as her jets assisted her in a long leap across the open space. Snatching a mine from a back-rack, she crouched and sidled forward, looking for an opening.
Suddenly something knocked her flat. “Sorry, Sergeant Major,” a voice said – Sergeant Kelle, she thought – as the figure snatched the mine from her hands.
“Bloody –” her curses cut off as the man jetted forward to land atop the recovering war drone, slapping the twenty-kilo rectangle against its bulbous body. His leap to escape aborted abruptly as a spider-leg reversed and speared him, dangling him quivering in the air like a pig on a pitchfork. Then the mine detonated, knocking everyone within twenty meters to the ground.
Pieces of Marine and spider rained down on the rest as a collective gasp went up, but Repeth was already moving toward the stunned troops. “Get moving, wake up, don’t just stand there gawping, pick a target and attack something else! Lieutenant,” she screamed hoarsely, “one of my people just gave his life for us, so get these diggers moving and make it count. Now you know how to kill them.”
Staggering among them she cajoled and shoved the punch-drunk Marines into some semblance of discipline, aided by their platoon leader. In reasonably good order they turned and charged along the wall toward the next cluster of aliens. Repeth fell to one knee as fatigue caught up with her.
Abruptly the lights went out, accompanied by a sound like ten spoons in a sink disposal. Her HUD automatically brought up low-light vision and she sagged to the floor as she saw all the war drones freeze in place. Broadcast power, she thought, or maybe their remote control failed. Bull must have burned through to the generator.
The Hippos fought on, but without their spider machines they were meat for the Marines. None of them surrendered, not even when Bull ben Tauros, trailing a jumbled mix of every Marine he could scrape up, broke into the moon laser control center and captured three pure Meme in their teacup-shaped control chairs.
Repeth watched it on her HUD, content to lay there gasping and let him have all the fun.
***
Each of the bridge crew made his or her peace with whatever they believed during the long moments four emptied capital ships sped toward the Guardian. They watched as first one, then the final two computer-controlled beam cruisers, blunt kilometer-wide missiles with all guns blazing, slammed into the enemy moonlet like golf balls striking a melon, and then blew their fusion engines.
Gaps appeared along the edges of the enemy behemoth, flaming bites that burned and vomited debris the size of buildings as it rotated the damaged sections away, healing even as they watched on the optical screens.
“It’s not going to be enough,” mumbled Scoggins.
“Yes it will. You’ll see,” growled Commander Ford in a low, intense voice.
“Sir,” Commander Johnstone spoke, “General MacAdam reports on all channels that they have disabled the laser and will soon mop up resistance on the moon.”
Absen responded, “Excellent news. Too bad they couldn’t have seized control of it in working order.”
Ford shook his head in cynical negation. “Real life is never that easy, sir,” he declared, pulling on his outer gloves. “We’ll see how they do when Flensburg hits them. She’s eight times the mass of the cruisers.”
“We have to assume the worst,” the admiral replied. “Mister Okuda, make sure we have enough separation from Flensburg .” He licked his lips, took a breath, and committed them. “…and as soon as she’s blown her engines, I want you to shove us straight down that stinking thing’s throat.”
“Sir?” Not only the helmsman, but all the rest of the bridge officers turned to stare at their Admiral.
“We aren’t going to self-destruct – not with all the colonists we have. But maybe, just maybe, a collision with Conquest will be enough. We’re big enough and going fast enough to do a hell of a lot of damage just with kinetic energy, all our weapons firing from inside its guts, and our six fusion drives burning. Maybe it’ll choke on us and die.”
“I don’t think we’ll survive that impact, sir,” Okuda said distinctly. “Even if we spin and go in drive-first, sealed inside our crash couches, in suits and with overloaded gravplates…”
“You don’t think?”
“The computer says perhaps five percent of the crew will live through it.”
“And the colonists in their cocoons?”
“A moment.” He ran the numbers. “Ninety-five percent. That’s fifty thousand deaths.”
Absen steeled himself. “So with a crew of five thousand or so, there will be over two hundred people left aboard to fly the ship. Some of them will be on this bridge or the auxiliary bridge, because they are well-protected areas with the best gravplates. With a hundred people and the automated systems, and the enemy all dead, we can still colonize this world.” He stared coldly back at his officers. “This is what we signed up for, people. The Ultimate Liability Clause. Anyone who doesn’t like those odds can run for an escape pod right now.” The admiral looked deliberately at the holotank. “You have about two minutes.”
No one moved.
Commander Ford cleared his throat and spoke for the rest when he said, “To hell with that, sir. We’re with you.” The rest nodded soberly.
Absen sat back and folded his hand, eyes hooded. “Then pass my orders, and make sure the computers know what to do if we’re unconscious.”
“Already done, sir.” Johnstone smiled wanly.
“Good man. Now everyone button up.”
As they moved to seal suits and enclose themselves in their crash couches, Scoggins suddenly bolted to her feet, staring at the holotank. “Sir – look!”
Like the machines they were, the linked display computers faithfully depicted reality. In this case that odd reality consisted of three lines reaching out from the forgotten Hippo orbitals, intersecting the Meme superdreadnought from the rear.
“What is that? Are they firing on it?” Absen stood up convulsively to put his face almost inside the space the holographic projection occupied.
“Affirmative, sir. Some kind of charged particle weapon. It’s…sir, the Guardian is turning away!” Scoggins brought up a realtime optical image of the enemy ship to fill the main flatscreen, where they watched it ponderously wheel.
As it rotated, great bubbling valleys of inflamed tissue came into view, burn scars a testimony to the destruction wrought by the battleship-sized orbitals’ primary weapons. A bilious glow formed a nimbus around their enemy and then, a few seconds later, all activity from the Guardian ceased. Then, so did the particle beams.
“They could have fired those at us any time,” Ford breathed in wonder. “They could have killed us and won. Why did they attack their own ship?”
Scoggins whooped, leaping to hug Ford and kiss him full on the lips. “You idiot, don’t you remember the planning meeting? Didn’t you read the Admiral’s memo? He was right! The Hippos are rebelling against the Meme! They held off on attacking us, hoping for a chance like this! Once they saw the moonbase laser was disabled, they took their shot – at the Guardian!” She kissed him again, and this time he returned the lip-lock with mounting enthusiasm.
“All right you two, that’s enough, back to your posts,” the admiral said without rancor. “We’re not done. Get the Crows and grabships working on retrieving the escape pods. Tell the computers to shut down lucky Flensburg’s self-destruct and rejoin us, I want her back in action post-haste. Cease all weapons fire but keep solutions locked on that thing. Get analysts started on deep scanning, I want to know whether it’s dead, dying, or just knocked out. Remember, their ships are alive and have tremendous regenerative capability.” Absen took a deep breath and let it out. “Fun’s over, people. Now the hard work begins.”
