As one, the eight strike boats belched out the rest of their missiles, then turned their formation to make their escape. As the missiles approached, the alien escorts began to fire their own, targeting the approaching projectiles. Only one human missile got through, grazing one of the escorts. As the Nameless continued to accelerate, the strike boats attempted to reverse course. With the range dropping fast, missiles started arcing out from the Nameless ships and now it was the humans’ turn to defend. The gunboats at the rear of the formation blazed away at the approaching missiles and deployed chaff. The gunboats and strike boats were too small to target precisely with cap ship missiles, but it hardly mattered, the smaller dual purpose weapons were equal to the task. One of them found its way through and a strike boat took a direct hit. Its engineering section was blown apart, leaving the gutted remains of the command deck to coast forward.
A light minute away, the scout ship quietly jumped away.
“Sensors, Bridge. The scout ship is back.”
“Captain,” Yoro said, “we’re getting an information download from the scout.”
“My screen please,” Willis ordered.
The Nameless were in hot pursuit, being drawn away from the large station and towards the Red Line. They’d known almost immediately when the attack had gone in after detecting a sudden flurry of Nameless FTL transmissions.
“Captain, signal from flag: Proceed as instructed.”
“Bridge, Navigation, start spin up for jump. All hands prepare for high acceleration.”
Willis looked around at Kerr. The marine officer was standing in his combat gear, his suit and armour making him substantially bulkier than everyone else on the bridge. The task group’s entire marine complement, a whole company, was now squeezed aboard Spectre and the chief engineer was muttering darkly about over taxing the life support systems.
“Ready, Major?” she asked.
“Raring to go,” came his sardonic reply.
If Willis was any judge, Kerr was a conflicted man. The marines had suffered a higher proportion of casualties than any other branch of the fleet so they were keen for payback but just as eager to avoid getting killed doing it. From astern came the faint rumble of the engines as Spectre started to slide round the large asteroid they’d been using to break the line of sight to the Nameless. Forty kilometres off to Port, the De Gaulle also accelerated on a slightly different course. Along with their support ships, Pankhurst waited out beyond the edge of the system.
“Coms, send to De Gaulle: Good hunting.”
“They’ve signalled back, Captain: You too.”
Spectre cleared the asteroid. Eight light minutes ahead was the planet and the Nameless station.
“Go full burn on engines,” she ordered.
The rumble from astern became a throaty roar. Willis felt herself being pushed back hard into her chair. Kerr grunted as he started to slide before his safety line brought him to a halt.
“Navigation, Bridge, we are now at safe jump speed.”
Willis glanced at De Gaulle’s icon. The heavier ship had a shallower acceleration curve. She was still two minutes away from the velocity at which she could jump without the portal closing on her stern. That was close enough. Without conscious thought, Willis tightened her seat restrains.
“All hands brace for jump. Helm, execute jump!”
Across such a relatively short distance, the time in jump space was only a few seconds before Spectre jolted back into real space. The main holo blanked out and then started to fill up again as the first radar returns began to come in. Off to port was the planet, the station behind it, beyond it the Nameless ships and beyond them the strike boat. Willis winced as she counted only seven human ships.
“Helm, come to two, nine, three dash zero, zero, four – engines full burn.”
On the far side of the mass shadow, the three Nameless warships had detected Spectre as she turned in towards the planet and were breaking off their pursuit. They were inside the Red Line but beyond the Blue. Once they’d slowed enough to jump, the Nameless ships could cross the distance between them in seconds. Spectre’s course couldn’t have made her objective more obvious. Three to one, especially at close range, would be a fatal encounter. Had they calculated accurately enough or had they tried to pull off too ambitious a plan with too little planning? On the holo the strike boat formation opened and scattered, each on its own course, just as De Gaulle jumped in right on the Red Line.
“Yes!” Willis hissed.
The Nameless ships were caught facing the wrong way, with little velocity and within gun range of the Red Line. The De Gaulle’s first salvo blew the Nameless cruiser’s engines apart. As it tumbled away in a crippled state, Pincuc’s ship quickly shifted target to the first of the escorts.
“That’s the first milestone, Major,” she said over her shoulder.
Ahead the Nameless station orbited into view. As the fastest ship in the task group, Spectre was the one that could close the range most quickly. They still didn’t know what, if anything, the station was armed with. If it turned out they were charging a Star Fort, then things could be about to get excessively interesting.
“Bridge, Coms, the target is transmitting again on FTL frequency.”
“Understood. Inform me if we hear any replies.”
Twenty minutes passed as Spectre thundered in and the Nameless station continued to squawk with its FTL transmitter. No missiles arched out towards Spectre, while, on the other side of the mass shadow, De Gaulle accelerated in past the wreckage of her victims. On the bridge holo, the green circle indicating the range of Spectre’s guns got closer and finally overlapped with the station.
“Helm, cut engines. Fire Control, engage the target,” Willis ordered.
As the engines stopped, the tremble she could feel in the deck disappeared. Spectre continued to coast along but now as a perfectly steady gun platform. The cruiser’s two turrets came slowly to bear as the gunner made fine adjustments. Then the first plasma bolt belched out. A hundred thousand kilometres down range, the bolt missed the station’s connecting structure by only a dozen metres, perhaps prompting it alien inhabitants to realise that mere destruction was not the invaders’ objective. By then the gunner had already corrected his aim. The second shot missed by less than two metres, while the third slammed in, all but severing the connection. The FTL transmissions from the station ceased in mid-flow.
“Well that’s shut them up,” Willis muttered.
She signalled to Helm and the engines once again began to rumble.
“How long until we’re alongside?” Kerr asked.
Willis glanced towards navigation.
“Seventeen minutes to the turnover, Major, plus another thirty-five minutes of braking to bring us to a relative halt alongside the station.”
A lot of time for the occupants of the now crippled station to react. Spectre could pull a braking manoeuvre and keep her bows and guns facing the enemy, but she couldn’t brake as hard that way. For best performance she needed to about face, which would leave the cruiser attempting to see through her own engine plume. They could, and would, deploy sensor drones to cover the blind spot, but if the Nameless retained or managed to cobble together any kind of anti-ship capability, then Spectre would be a sitting duck.
“I’ll move aft to join my men at the turnover,” Kerr replied.
Another forty minutes passed, during which the station remained inert. As the engines overcame the acceleration they’d built up, the rate at which they were closing became increasingly slow. That had always been the plan – to come to a halt within a hundred metres of the station. Unless they matched velocities perfectly, the marines would be incapable of spacewalking the last part without becoming small organic projectiles. With the most critical part of the attack now imminent Willis remained perfectly silent, keeping a close eye on the holo for any activity on the station. If it gave any sign of attack, she might have only seconds in which to swing Spectre around in defence. As they cro
ssed through the hundred-kilometre mark, the cruiser’s point defence guns stabbed out, knocking away aerials and sensor domes, to further blind and render the target impotent.
With a final burst of her engines, Spectre slotted into a parallel orbit only ninety metres away from the station. Through one of the internal cameras, Willis could see the marines lined up at the main airlock. With the ship decompressed, both airlock hatches were open and she could see her chief petty officer leaning out with a tether gun in his hands. As Spectre came to a relative halt, he fired, propelling a rocket-assisted line. Normally it would have been tipped with a magnetic grapple, but on this occasion it was fitted with a hull-piercing head bodged together in Pankhurst’s machine shop.
A small puff of venting gas confirmed that the shot was good and had bitten into the hull. Inside, the head would be releasing sealant foam, which would stop the air loss and make it impossible to quickly knock out the head.
The Chief swung out of the lock and hung onto the outside of the hull as the marine breaching team snapped onto the line and pulled themselves hand over hand. The success of the mission was now out of her hands and Willis could only wait and watch. If the Nameless sent troops outside to engage the marines, then Spectre would offer support, but once the marines got in they’d be on their own.
Within twenty seconds the marines were on the hull. A few clamped their boots on and formed a perimeter while the rest started to stick thin hoops of explosives onto sections of the hull identified as likely areas to blast inwards. With the explosives in place, they quickly clamped on temporary airlocks. The hatches were left open to allow the explosive shockwave to travel outwards. The sergeant in charge gave a quick thumb’s up back to Spectre. Across the command channel, Willis could hear Kerr shouting just as the blasting charges fired.
“First team, go, go, GO!” he roared.
Across the hull there were five circular flashes. Then the pressure behind blew five metal discs of hull plating outwards and the airlocks slammed shut. The first of the breaching teams reached the locks and started to work their way through, one at a time. Willis could see confusion at one of the locks and marines floundering there. But at the other four there were rhythmic flashes of escaping gas as each lock dumped atmosphere each time the outer hatch opened for the next marine. Across the radio link Willis started to hear the sound of combat within.
___________________________
De Gaulle and Spectre lay on either side of the station. The surviving strike boats had rearmed, returned and were now patrolling at the edge of the mass shadow. Four hours after the first marines had stormed aboard, the last of the fighting was petering out. There were still a few pockets of resistance where the marines couldn’t get in, but the defenders couldn’t get out.
Beyond that the situation was far from clear.
“Lieutenant Kinberg here, Admiral,” a marine reported from the temporary command post they had established close to one of the airlocks.
“I’m not sure how many people we’ve lost – the Major and most of his command section was taken out. At a guess, I reckon we’ve lost about a third of our fighting strength in dead or wounded.”
Nisman’s expression tightened. That was a lot of marines.
“Who’s in charge over there now, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“Right now, sir, I think that would be me,” Kinberg replied. “I’m pretty sure I’m now the only officer still standing. The enemy has retreated towards the core of the station. There isn’t really room to bring everyone to bear on them so I have teams sweeping the rest of the station, but it’s a bloody maze over here.”
“Thank you Lieutenant,” Nisman replied. “And well done. I’ll be in touch shortly.”
“Sir.”
Kinberg disappeared from the screen.
That left Willis, the Admiral and Captain Pincuc still on the link-up. They’d picked up distant Nameless FTL transmissions an hour earlier. They were short and identical. They couldn’t read them of course, but the pattern suggested some kind of status request.
“So, do your respective coms sections have any thoughts on how far off those transmissions came from?” Nisman asked, “Or more importantly, how long before the ship that sent them could get here?”
“Going by our records of past incidents and signal strength, twenty-four to thirty-six hours,” Willis replied. “And that’s on the optimistic side.”
“We have to make best use of the time then. Captain Willis, we need to do something deeply irregular. I need a senior officer over there to take command of the intelligence gathering. I know this is more appropriate a task for a commander, but this time, we need someone with greater seniority directly on the scene. If Nameless reinforcements arrive, we may have to withdraw with haste and De Gaulle will have to cover that retreat.”
“I understand, sir,” Willis replied as she felt her heart start to hammer.
___________________________
Nameless, faceless, voiceless – ever since the Mississippi Incident two years previously, they had been nothing but raw and unexplained belligerence. Humanity had fought a war of survival without knowing who or what it was even fighting. Now there was a possibility that mask was about to be lifted. As she stood still to allow a rating to fit an extended support pack onto her survival suit, Willis realised she was one part scared to one part excited.
“I still think we should send you over in a shuttle,” Commander Yaya said as the two of them peered through the open airlock.
“There’s barely room between us to deploy a shuttle, Commander. Besides, there’s still no airlock we could lock onto. Don’t worry though, I’m rated for space walks.”
“Still, the Admiral should be sending me.”
“You just worry about your job, Commander.”
Willis tried to remove any sting from her words by adding with an awkward smile: “Besides this is a win-win scenario. If you went over and got shot, I’d have to fill in tons of paperwork. But if I go over there and do something stupid, you might get that promotion you deserve.”
“Yes, Captain, but then I’ll have to do the paperwork.”
“True, but I’ll be dead so I won’t care,” Willis grinned.
“So win-win for you and win-win-lose for me! I can live with that. Just the same, Captain – be careful.”
Lieutenant Kinberg met Willis at the airlock as she pulled herself through.
“Welcome aboard, ma’am,” he with a salute, as a pair of ratings assigned as her assistants followed behind.
Willis barely heard him, instead focusing her attention on her first look at enemy territory. At first glance, it was all very mundane. But then there were only so many ways to build a space station. There were scorch marks from the explosives and several weapon strikes. With her experienced eye, a second glance revealed details that were just wrong – like the covering on the he bulkhead behind Kinberg, which showed signs of wear like those that might be seen on a floor.
“Yeah,” he said glancing, over his shoulder. “This place is like an onion – it’s like layers of decks going inward. One of my sergeants was the first one in. She claims she could feel a gravity effect pulling towards the centre. Not much, a fraction of a G – at least that’s what she thinks.”
Humanity could simulate gravity by either spin or acceleration. There were true artificial gravity methods she’d read about in the technical journals. Some worked under laboratory conditions, others purely on paper. Either way, they were far from practical systems. It seemed the Nameless had developed some kind of system that worked. The next question was – could they find and identify it?
“With respect, ma’am, this isn’t really somewhere we want a ship officer running around. We lost the Major because one of those bastards popped out of a section we thought we’d cleared, so I’m assigning you Marines Jahmene and Keys for your security.”
“That’s all right, Lieutenant,” Willis replied. “I won’t try to tell you how to do your job, but we’ll
have to rip as much out of this place as we can.”
“Well then, follow me. We haven’t had a chance to ID much so far, but you might as well get to meet the enemy.”
It was hard to know what she’d expected, hard to know what even to expect from a race that had acted with such automatic hostility – certainly something more impressive. It wasn’t big and probably massed less than she did. It had four limbs and, even twisted in death, its posture made clear that the normal axis of its body was horizontal like a dog or a horse rather than vertical like a human. Its limbs were much longer in proportion to a human and had four points of articulation. The back pair – dedicated legs – ended in something like a hoof. The front pair seemed to be dual-purpose. There was a hardened area at the wrist, which could presumably be used to walk on, but beyond that there was definitely a hand – very definitely by the way it still gripped the weapon it had been using when the marines cut it down.
She took a grip of its long neck and pulled the head round. Like a snake, or maybe worm, was the closest Terran comparison. The head wasn’t much wider than the neck and tapered to a blunt point. It only had one eye, or at least it only had one now. The shot that killed it had blown open one side of its head, spilling a turquoise fluid. The surviving eye was forward facing, which was to be expected – every known sentient race had evolved from hunting species. The mouth was a lipless line that went back towards the neck and opened left and right. The overall effect was a cross between a horse and a giant worm.
“Ugly,” muttered one of the ratings.
“Eye of the beholder,” Willis said absently as she prised open the jaws with a pencil. Its teeth at the front were sharp meat cutters and the broad grinding teeth at the back those of an omnivore. A proper biologist would probably observe more. Such knowledge was unlikely to have any military relevance, but her curiosity demanded satisfaction. Looking around the chamber, that satisfaction soon disappeared. Although poorly equipped compared to the marines, the Nameless soldiers had shown no reluctance to fight and, defending familiar ground, had exacted a terrible toll on the invaders. There was a splash of human blood on the bulkhead opposite where they had nailed the first marine through the hatch.
The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3) Page 25
