Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  “How far down we gotta put this thing?” Rodent asked, bringing himself beside me with a burst of his maneuvering gun.

  “The engineering crew on the Truthseeker said two hundred meters.” I turned to Ginger. “I’m going to take Rodent inside and set this bomb,” I told him. “You stay up here and watch our six. If the Tevynians figure out what we’re doing, they might send someone out from their end.”

  “Roger that, sir.” He grunted a humorless laugh. “I’d rather have something to shoot at than try to play spaceship with this stupid thing.”

  Ginger reoriented himself with the tunnel as his new “down” and anchored himself to the metal rim of the drive bell, a lone figure silhouetted against the star-filled firmament, his KE rifle at the ready.

  “Very dramatic pose,” I said. “I should take a picture of that and use it as a recruiting poster for the Space Force.”

  “Yeah, that’d be about as honest as the Army recruiting videos I watched when I was a kid.”

  “Says the man who got selected for Delta Force and then went on the first manned mission to another star system,” I reminded him, motioning for Rodent to follow me and firing a burst of gas to push myself into the drive tunnel.

  “Okay, fair point,” Ginger acknowledged. “I guess I don’t have much to complain about.”

  “And yet you manage to so often,” Rodent said.

  “Watch your drift, Rodent,” I warned. He had angled his last burst wrong and was heading into the wall.

  “Sorry, sir, damn it.”

  “I think that’s far enough. Anchor to the surface and break out the bomb.”

  I suppose it was very un-operator-like of me to call it “the bomb” instead of the “special munitions,” but I was just a Marine platoon leader at heart. Rodent made no comment, just pulled the pack off his shoulders and muscled it into place against the wall of the drive tunnel.

  “How long we gonna set the timer for?” he asked me.

  This was the part I wasn’t comfortable with, but it was unavoidable. There was no way to be sure we could get a signal to the detonator through all this metal and the jamming and I didn’t want to be the one using a line-of-sight transmitter to set off a fusion bomb in a tunnel that would channel the blast like a rifle barrel.

  “Five minutes,” I decided. “It shouldn’t take us more than a minute to fly out of here and get clear, so five minutes should be plenty.”

  “Why not twenty?” he asked, programming the timer. “I’d feel better with twenty.”

  “Because this is the ass end of a fusion drive,” I reminded him, “and if the Tevynians get access to the drive controls before that twenty minutes is up, then all we’re doing is injecting some NOS into their fuel intakes.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he acceded. “I knew there had to be a good reason.” He looked up from the bomb. “We’re set. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I let go of the breath I’d been holding and twisted around to aim the maneuvering jet down into the tunnel, giving it a split-second burst. I swear to God I’m not claustrophobic, but being inside that oversized birth canal set my teeth on edge and the only reason I didn’t squeeze the damn throttle and shoot out of it like a bullet was my profound desire to not float in space until my air ran out.

  “We’re heading out, Ginger. You seeing anything up there?”

  “Nothin’ yet,” he assured me. “Just stars, stars and more fuckin’ stars, and….”

  Silence

  “The stars are moving,” Ginger said urgently. “I think we got—”

  Lasers are invisible in vacuum, and I didn’t even have a handy tactical computer to draw a simulation for me, so there was no warning at all. One second, Sgt. First Class Moses McCormick was standing there, and the next, he was a Roman candle, incinerated by sublimated metal.

  And then he was gone.

  “Shit!” Rodent blurted. “Ginger, what the fuck?”

  “Fighters,” I said, hitting a braking burn, then curving the gas pistol overhead and pushing myself to the interior surface until my magnetic soles made contact it and anchored me, about twenty yards from the edge.

  I hadn’t seen them, but it was the only thing that made sense. The laser rifles the Tevynian infantry carried weren’t powerful enough to practically disintegrate a Svalinn suit and the man inside it. But two seconds later, one of the small, bulbous craft passed over the drive tunnel on a glow of white rocket exhaust, silent and ghostly, then a second a few moments after.

  “How long?” I asked Rodent. He didn’t pretend not to understand the question. There was only one “how long” that mattered.

  “Four minutes, ten seconds.”

  Neither of us was trying to process what had happened to Ginger. He’d been a friend, one of our brothers in arms, and he’d be mourned just as surely as Jambo was, but there were more pressing matters. Like how the hell we were going to live through the next five minutes.

  I cursed under my breath and edged toward the rim of the drive tunnel. One of Ginger’s boots was still attached by its magnetic sole, glowing red in the darkness, and bile rose in my throat and was even harder to swallow in microgravity. I looked away from it and away from the charred, blackened section of metal beside it and scanned the space around us on thermal.

  The drive flares of the enemy fighters were flickering torches in the darkness, silhouetting the ships as they turned and hit a hard, braking boost, getting ready to come back for another run. I ducked instinctively and heat washed over me as a laser blast turned a section of the drive tunnel black and molten.

  “Julie, do you read me?” I transmitted. It was probably a waste of time. The jamming might or might not be gone, depending how far away the Tevynian ECM drones were, but the range on the suit radio was laughably small compared to the antenna on the station or on a ship. “Hey Navy, we need air support!”

  I walked around the inside of the rim, putting some distance from position I’d come out from the first time, raised the KE gun to my shoulder, pointing it where I’d last seen the fighters. Three more large, backward steps and they popped into view. I targeted the closer of the two, still a few dozen miles away, and fired a half a dozen rounds at full power, each kick of the rifle slamming me backwards like a low-speed car accident. The distance wouldn’t make any difference here, with no wind resistance and very little in the way of gravitational pull to change the trajectory of the darts, but whether they’d penetrate the fighter’s armor at any range was doubtful. Still it was better than harsh language.

  “Julie!” I yelled, as if the volume of my words would somehow make them travel farther. “I swear I will take you out for steak and champagne at the finest restaurant in Vegas next time we’re on Earth if you just tell me you hear me!”

  I separated my magnetic boots from the rim and used the gas gun to kick myself inside a dozen yards or so before reconnecting. I thought I saw a flash of burning metal from a laser strike behind me, but it might just have been my paranoid imagination.

  “Time?” I asked Rodent. He was shuffling across the surface of the drive tunnel just a few yards away.

  “Two minutes, thirty-three seconds.”

  No panic in the man’s voice. I hadn’t expected any, not from one of the team, but it helped keep me calm. No point in getting all hysterical about it; either we’d die or we wouldn’t.

  “In ten seconds we’re going to go over the edge and hit the jets, just enough to keep us low over the surface. It might keep us off their sights. We’re pretty small targets.”

  “Sure thing, sir,” he said, not bothering to tell me how full of shit I was. I didn’t need him to, I knew it very well. They’d pick us up almost immediately and blast us to atoms. But it was better than sitting there and getting killed by our own bomb.

  “On three then. One, two—”

  “Did I hear someone promise me steak and champagne?”

  I looked up, though the voice could have come from anywhere. But it hadn’t. It came from just
over our heads, from a massive, hammer-headed spacecraft blocking out the stars, holding directly above the drive tunnel. Something unclenched inside my gut.

  “And a five-star hotel,” I assured her, “and whatever shows you want to see.”

  “Hurry up and get in,” Julie said, suddenly serious. “I took care of those two assholes, but the place is crawling with fighters and I can’t sit still long.”

  A square of light outlined the belly ramp as it opened up invitingly, and I squeezed the control on the gas pistol, using the interior lights of cargo bay as a target. I nearly missed and had to adjust at the last second, then spin around and take the impact on the overhead bulkhead with my legs.

  “Close it up and go!” I told her as Rodent sailed through behind me, managing to use his maneuvering thruster to brake himself before he rammed into the overhead a few feet from me. “That thing’s about to blow!”

  “Hang on back there.”

  Rodent and I both anchored our magnets to the overhead and I tried to ignore the upside-down orientation as acceleration slammed me into my suit, squeezing the breath out of me. I forced my right hand toward my left wrist, scrolling through the control sleeve menu, tying into the tactical feed from the shuttle’s external cameras.

  The asteroid was far enough away that I could see the curve of its surface, and I estimated we were probably a good twenty or thirty miles away when the nuke went off. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, wasn’t exactly sure of the yield of the thing, but what I got was a glowing hemisphere of white light expanding from the mouth of the drive tunnel, then dissipating slowly.

  “Everyone okay back there?” Julie asked.

  I exchanged a bleak look with Rodent through our visors.

  “We’re okay,” I replied. “But we’re not everyone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “They’re all on board,” I reported over my helmet radio, just wishing to hell I could take the helmet off and get a breath of air that didn’t smell like my own armpits. “Close it up and cycle the atmosphere in here.”

  The team was floating through the cargo bay, some of them pushing off the walls like pinballs, trying to get their boots anchored to the deck before the shuttle hit the drives again. I sought out Pops, who had been the last one out of the docking bay. I hadn’t asked how he and the others had made their way out—it was enough that they had, and I was sure it hadn’t been easy or simple. Dog had his chest armor off. Gus was treating his wound and Rodent was applying a quick seal to the armor to restore it to airtightness.

  “I hate abandoning those Helta engineers,” Pops told me, shaking his head behind his visor. “But there’s just no way for us to get to them, and no way to get them off the station even if we had. I hope maybe the Tevynians will take off once they realize they can’t use the base for anything.”

  I didn’t bother to point out that they couldn’t take off because we destroyed their shuttles. I felt bad for the Helta crew, too, but we were one shuttle with basically a single squad of fighters and there was other shit to think about.

  A green light flashed on the control board of the airlock, telling us the atmospheric pressure had normalized in the cargo hold. I pulled off my helmet and sucked in a lungful of air, savoring the freshness of it. It might still have been canned air, but at least the can was bigger.

  “I can’t believe Ginger’s gone,” Dog said, staring at the visor of his helmet like the answer to all his questions could be found in the reflection of its polarized surface. “Jesus, I mean, he’s been with the team since I got here and that was six years ago.”

  The look on Pops’ face gutted me. It was like Jambo all over again and I didn’t know what to say. I was spared the necessity of coming up with something by the airtight hatch between the cargo bay and the cockpit hissing open.

  “Everyone lock down,” Julie told us, pitching her voice to carry since we’d all removed our helmets. “We have to boost out of here in a few seconds. Andy,” she said to me. “The Truthseeker just got a signal through to us.”

  I tromped across the deck to the stairs, then cut loose and pulled myself up beside her, squeezing into the empty acceleration couch between her and the gunner’s position and extending the restraints to fit around my armor.

  “Boosting,” she announced, sliding a control forward.

  What felt like about half a gravity of acceleration pushed me into the seat, enough to make it feel like I was secure without any discomfort.

  “I’m sorry about Ginger,” Julie said, reaching over and putting a hand on my arm, a gesture more than anything else since I couldn’t feel it through my armor. “He was a good guy.”

  “One second he was there,” I said, the image flashing in front of my eyes in an unbidden memory, “and the next he was gone. Nothing left of him, just ash.” I shook my head. “At least we blew up the drive before they could use the rock as a weapon.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re trying something different,” she warned me. “Listen up.”

  The communications board lit up with an image of Joon-Pah, his ears twitching and spread wide, his teeth slightly bared. He was harried, nearly overwhelmed.

  “Colonel Nieves, Major Clanton. I don’t know if you will receive this through the jamming we’ve been experiencing, but I needed to try to update you. We saw the explosion at the mining installation and I have to assume that means your mission was successful. I can only hope you did not pay too great a price. Unfortunately, the enemy saw the explosion as well and they’ve come up with a backup plan.”

  His face faded away and took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. It was something dark and vaguely round in a sort of clumpy, rockpile way, with a few dozen white lights shining like tiki torches on the patio of a beachfront nightclub on one side. Then the perspective shifted and it was clear. The spherical rockpile was a small asteroid, probably less than a mile around, and the torches were the exhausts of dozens of the Tevynian space fighters.

  “How the hell—” I began, but Joon-Pah beat me to it.

  “The Tevynians have begun anchoring their space fighters to smaller asteroids and using the combined force of their drives to propel the rocks toward Hoarfrost.” He rubbed the back of his hand against his cheek in an instinctive cleaning gesture the Helta used when stressed. “I don’t know how they managed to stockpile so many of the fighters. They keep pouring into the system on the converted cargo boats…all of our shuttles are on patrol shooting them down, but there are just too many. The asteroids will take weeks to reach Hoarfrost at their rate of travel, but the planet’s defenses are already close to being overwhelmed and I fear they couldn’t stop all of them. There is one effective way of dealing with this tactic.”

  Something hit the asteroid, something traveling so fast it wouldn’t have been visible if the camera hadn’t slowed into extreme slow motion, revealing a dart-shaped projectile I recognized because I’d helped to develop the weapon system in the first place and there were, as far as I knew, only two deployed in the whole galaxy. It was from the impulse gun on the Truthseeker, launched at relativistic speeds using the ship’s warp field. The launch velocity was adjustable, but the highest one of the projectiles got in testing was close to two-thirds the speed of light, though that took every ounce of energy the ship’s reactor could spit out.

  This one had to have been going that fast, because when it struck the asteroid, it blew it into bite-sized chunks flying away from the original course.

  “The problem is,” Joon-Pah said, his face once more on the screen, “that there is only one of us, and when we stay in one place too long….”

  Back to the view from what I understood now to be the external cameras of the Truthseeker, showing the remains of the asteroid still spreading out along its new orbit. The ship was moving now, I could tell from the motion of the stars in the background, and the tactical overlay showed another asteroid a few light-minutes away, ready to target.

  Before they had the chance to adjust the sh
ip’s attitude to line up the impulse gun, two Tevynian cruisers burst out of hyperspace only a few thousand miles away, their lasers already firing.

  A Heltan yelled in the background and the translators told us they were shouting, “Jump now!”

  The external view recorded the formation of the wormhole and then they went black for several heartbeats until the Truthseeker popped out again, light-minutes farther away.

  “They’re on us constantly,” Joon-Pah said, bitterness twisting the words. “And if I had even one more cruiser, I might make a fight of it, but….” His rumbling sigh came through the speakers. “The cruiser Lifequester has not returned from her earlier hyperspace jump and I do not think we can count on her help. I fear we’re going to lose Hoarfrost. The planetary government will surely evacuate as much of the populace as possible, which will tie up our defense forces and keep them from fighting the enemy when they invade. After that, with a bridgehead in our system, it is only a matter of time before they possess Helta Prime. I urge you to get to the Truthseeker as soon as possible. If the enemy cruisers manage to corner us again, I may be forced to jump out of the system entirely and seek the nearest reinforcements before we can return and resume the fight.”

  The comm screen faded to black. What the hell were we going to do now?

  “They need a ship,” Julie said. I met her eyes, frowning in confusion. “They need another cruiser to stay in this fight,” she amended.

  “Yeah, but the Jambo won’t be here for hours, assuming it takes them as long to get here as it took us. And we don’t know where the other Helta cruiser went or if it’s coming back.”

  “But we do know where a couple other cruisers keep showing up,” she pointed out, the corner of her mouth curling up. She nodded back down to the cargo bay. “You think your boys are up to taking on a Tevynian crew all by themselves?”

  “Shit,” I muttered, the idea sinking in. “Getting on board will be the hard part.”