Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5)

by Caleb Wachter

  “Move to the rear, ma’am,” the commander instructed, and Masozi complied. “We’ll lower you down,” he explained as he attached a heavy steel cable to a lift-ring on the front of her suit after she was standing before the APC’s stern cargo ramp, “but I can’t guarantee that any of us will be able to join you.”

  “What about activating the equipment in the tower?” she asked tightly as the pitter-patter of impacts on the outer hull intensified until it sounded like a violent hailstorm. A muffled explosion rocked the vehicle, but she kept her feet beneath her as the APC slewed ponderously to the left before re-stabilizing its path.

  “There’s a pair of techs there already,” he explained, “they’ve made preparations and are expecting you.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Masozi said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said sharply, his gaze as hard as granite, “just do your part in this: get that intel out of here like the General said. If you do that, we’ll have spent our lives for a good cause.”

  “Understood,” Masozi said, feeling appropriately rebuked as the commander nodded as the light over the cargo ramp turned from red to green.

  “We’ll hold position as long as we can,” he yelled after slapping the button which saw the ramp begin to lower behind her, “but you might not get a chance for a soft landing!”

  The ramp lowered and Masozi saw an inferno of weapons fire on the ground nearly a hundred meters below. Most of the weapons fire was coming from turrets built into a tall, robust wall lining the perimeter of the military base over which they now hovered.

  The APC slewed to the right and a tall, narrow tower came into view beneath her. There was a platform on the top of it that looked like it might have served as a landing pad for the APC, but the pilot was making no attempt to guide the craft to it.

  “Jump!” the commander yelled at her side just as the craft came into position over the platform—which was still at least ten meters below—and Masozi disregarded the fear she felt at doing so as she leapt from the rear of the APC toward the platform below.

  A trio of impacts landed against her suit as she descended, but thankfully none of them seemed to cause her, or her equipment, any harm. The cable came taut halfway down, snapping her head back violently and causing her to bite her tongue.

  Looking up, she saw the face of the commander looking down at her from within the APC. He gave her a ‘thumbs up’ sign—right before a rocket slammed into the bulkhead next to him, vaporizing his body in a cloud of fire which belched forth from the open cargo ramp. The force of the explosion quickly sent the APC slewing dangerously off-course, and the cable to which she was still connected went briefly slack.

  Acting purely on instinct, she reached up and pulled for all she was worth on the cable’s quick-release and fell to the platform with a crack as she landed on her left leg.

  She looked up just in time to see a pair of rockets slam into the side of the APC, which broke the heavily armored vehicle in two distinct halves that fell to the ground below where they exploded on impact.

  Masozi scrambled to the center of the platform, where a hatch stood ajar. A woman’s face could be seen below and that woman gestured for Masozi to approach as she flipped the hatch open all the way.

  It was all Masozi could do to squeeze her armored bulk into the stairwell beneath the hatch, but once she did so the woman before her asked tightly, “What coordinates do you need us to upload?”

  “Coordinates?” Masozi began blankly, only to have her monocle flash yellow and red. Her attention drawn there, she saw Eve standing beside a series of numbers, which she quickly repeated to the woman, “Three hundred twenty four degrees, by azimuth forty six.”

  “What’s the altitude we’re targeting?” the tech asked as Masozi carefully clomped her way down the thankfully short set of stairs and emerged into a circular control room which was clearly the communications command center of the military base.

  Eve said, “It’s in medium orbit; we’re just trying to get the signal up to a satellite I cracked when we first got here. It’s still operational, and I can use it to relay our signal to the Zhuge Liang’s rendezvous coordinates faster than we can do from here on the ground.”

  “Medium orbit,” Masozi said.

  “What’s the data packet?” the woman asked after slotting in beside her lone companion in the tower. A violent explosion rocked the deck beneath Masozi’s feet, but the tower remained upright as a giant cloud of black smoke rose into the air on the other side of the base.

  “They just took out the fuel depot…I’m calling in the air strike,” the second technician said grimly, and the woman shot him a briefly horrified look before nodding absently.

  “I’ll verify the strike…” she said distantly as her face went white as a sheet. A moment later she made eye contact with Masozi and asked, “Your message?”

  “Jack the wrist-link into that panel, Soze,” Eve said, and Masozi did as she was instructed. A moment after she had connected the wrist-link with the thin wire attached the technician’s workstation, Eve nodded, “That’ll do it; I’ve sent them our rendezvous coordinates.”

  A few seconds later, the male technician spoke into his workstation’s microphone, “Confirmed: the fuel depot is gone. The base is overrun by enemy units; we estimate six minutes until total capture of this facility.” Tense silence ensued, but eventually the male technician nodded, “Correct: we are requesting immediate strikes around and inside the base. The tower needs to stand for at least ten minutes before we can complete this mission.”

  He handed the microphone to the woman after apparently receiving confirmation via his earpiece, and she audibly swallowed a knot in her throat as she spoke into the microphone, “Yes, this is Lieutenant Velasquez; I’m confirming the air strike request.”

  She sat back in her chair for a moment in stunned silence as the man said, “Copy that, Archangel; strikes will commence in twenty seconds.”

  Another explosion went off near the base of the tower, and Masozi looked as far down as she could through the angled windows. She was very nearly able to see the actual base of their structure, and the firefight she saw below them was like something out of a holo-vid.

  Armored turrets spun this way and that, firing precise shots off at airborne drones and taking them from the sky. There had to be hundreds of the drones flying around the base, and their own weapons made a seemingly chaotic field of criss-crossing fire as the invaders slowly, but surely, overcame the base’s defenses.

  One by one, the turrets beneath them went off-line—or exploded violently under concentrated barrages from the enemy drones, which were bolstered by a few track-mounted tanks that had only just begun to breach the base’s formidable perimeter wall.

  “Strikes to commence in three…two…one…zero,” the man reported, and a series of intense flashes caused Masozi to instinctively raise her hands to keep from being blinded.

  When she lowered her hands a few seconds later, Masozi saw that the glass of the tower’s windows had gone opaque. There were explosions shaking the floor beneath them, but they felt considerably less violent than the previous ones.

  The muted flashes on the other side of the opaque glass persisted for nearly ten seconds, after which time the windows of the tower slowly clarified to reveal an unthinkable hellscape beneath their feet.

  At least half of the base’s walls had been reduced to molten rivers of metal, and there was not a single bit of motion below them. None of the turrets were firing, and there were no drones to speak of. Even the massive, track-mounted tanks had been vaporized by what was clearly an orbital bombardment carried out by heavy naval weaponry.

  “Strike confirmed,” the male tech said into his microphone just as the elevator to the room opened with a ding.

  Masozi turned as quickly as she was able to do within the bulky suit, and saw a man with a badly burned chest and left arm—wounds clearly sustained mere minutes earlier—drag a pallet out of the eleva
tor. On that pallet was a pair of what could only be miniature jet engines, and the man collapsed before he could even drag the pallet out of the elevator.

  Scrambling to help him, Masozi moved toward the pallet and moved it the rest of the way out of the elevator.

  “Rick!” the male tech who had ordered the orbital strike said in surprise. “What happened?!”

  “They’re in…” the pallet-bearer said, his voice a hoarse whisper which quickly disappeared amid a series of bloody, hacking coughs. “Cut the cable!” he croaked, pointing to the elevator.

  Masozi moved to the elevator, along with the male tech. The tech input a series of commands into the panel beside the elevator’s door, causing the door to close and the elevator to descend. He then input a series of override commands, causing the elevator to cease its descent, and Masozi pried the doors open with her metal-gauntleted hands without needing to be asked.

  As she did so, the tech retrieved a power saw. Masozi took it and quickly cut the cable suspending the elevator, causing it to snap amid a shower of sparks and the elevator fell down several meters before its automatic safety locks engaged and held it in place.

  “That’ll buy us a few minutes,” the tech said anxiously, “let’s get back to the roof so we can get these jets onto you.”

  The jets were surprisingly light, and Masozi found that she was able to carry one while the tech carried the other. A minute later, they were standing atop the tower’s uppermost platform—the same one she had landed on just a few minutes earlier—and began to attach the jet engines to the shoulders of her suit. The heat rising from the ruined fortress beneath them was enough to force the unprotected tech to wrap his head with his uniform’s jacket to protect him while they worked.

  The attachment process took less than five minutes, after which Eve declared, “Looks good to go, Sis.”

  “Are you sure they’re waiting for us?” Masozi asked, risking a skyward glance.

  “I got a reply from the Zhuge Liang,” Eve said confidently, “we’ll get picked up before we run out of fuel.”

  Masozi nodded, turned to the tech and said, “Thank you.” She realized she didn’t even know his name, and was about to ask for it when an explosion rocked the structure beneath their feet.

  “Go!” he yelled as he ran back to the hatch, and Masozi had no choice but to do as he advised as she felt the platform begin to teeter beneath her.

  “Just grab the levers near the bases of the engines,” Eve prompted anxiously, “and pull for all they’re worth!”

  Masozi did as instructed, and her head snapped back as the engines fired instantly. Her body rocketed away from the top of the tower, and much as she wanted to do so she was unable to look back and see the tower’s last moments. She did, however, hear a loud, crashing sound that could have only been the structure’s collapse over the surprisingly quiet jet engines now attached to her shoulders.

  “Look up, Soze,” Eve said, “and treat the handles like they’re joysticks.”

  It took her a moment to grasp how to operate the jet packs, but when she finally did so she was able to direct their flight upward along a path which Eve somehow managed to show her via the monocle.

  “All right,” Eve said approvingly, “now let’s give it full power!”

  Masozi complied, and they hurtled upward with several gee-forces of acceleration as they rocketed away from the surface of Rationem.

  “The Zu Mao’s engines have failed,” the Tactical Officer reported. “The Han Dang is holding position, but they’re reporting severe damage to their forward hull.”

  “Stay on target,” Captain Kotcher rasped, knowing their only hope of succeeding in this act of defiance was if they could get the disguised Virtu-Plaza carrier into striking distance of the Union Fleet’s heaviest warships.

  Virtu-Plaza was a smaller corporation, but they had made quite the niche for themselves with node-based virtual solutions which would permit distributed intelligence processes of a kind surpassed only by the best Imperial technology. Apparently, they had agreed to participate in the defense of Rationem on the condition that they be permitted to field test their latest fighter control algorithms—a test which they had insisted be carried out in a purely offensive capacity.

  As a result of VP’s relatively modest stature—its official holdings were no more than five percent those of Hadden Enterprises, and less than thirty percent those of Fusi-Corp’s—the corporation had only a handful of Corporate Security Vessels. The Huang Gai—Virtu-Plaza’s largest officially-owned warship, which had been renamed specifically for this operation—was a converted bulk freighter. It was, essentially, nothing but a giant cargo hauler with shield generators added that provided robust protection that was incredibly similar to that of the Union flagship, Alexander.

  The Sun Jian shuddered as the Alexander’s fission beams slammed into her forward shields. “Forward defensive grid down to 23%, Captain,” the Tactical Officer reported. “Time to deployment of the Huang Gai’s fighters: two minutes eighteen seconds.”

  “Fire on the near Destroyer,” Captain Kotcher snarled. “I want it out of our path before we deploy Virtu-Plaza’s fighters.”

  “Plotting solutions,” the Tactical Officer reported clinically before nodding, “firing.”

  The Sun Jian’s forward batteries erupted, resulting in a handful of direct hits against the Union Fleet Destroyer. The enemy warship’s shields buckled an instant before Captain Mohrmann’s Fusi-Corp squadron—which had already lost one of its original four vessels—finished it off during the brief opening created by Kotcher’s weapons.

  “Destroyer is neutralized, Captain,” the Tactical Officer—whose name Kotcher had not cared to learn in the three days he had spent as the Sun Jian’s commander.

  “Good work,” Kotcher grumped, knowing that Captain Mohrmann had deliberately stolen his thunder by claiming the kill for his corporation’s ships. Mohrmann’s efforts had produced little in the way of tangible results thus far, but that was only to be expected given the overwhelming firepower arrayed against him and the Gonfaloniere’s Third Squadron of the defensive triad formation. If that Destroyer kill kept Mohrmann’s ships in the fight a little while longer then Kotcher would grudgingly grant it to his rival-turned-ally.

  “The Alexander’s weapons are cycling back to full charge,” the Tactical Officer reported tightly. “She’ll open fire in twenty seconds.”

  “Keep us between the Alexander and the Huang Gai,” Kotcher ordered. “Comm.,” he continued, forwarding a message to his com-tech, “send the following encrypted message on point-to-point to the attached coordinates.”

  The com-tech nodded, “Sending now, Captain.”

  Kotcher looked back to the main screen to see that his ship had successfully interposed itself between the Alexander and the Huang Gai.

  “Enemy batteries ready to fire in three…two…one,” the Tactical Officer reported but before he could count ‘zero,’ the Sun Jian was rocked so badly that Captain Kotcher, for the first time, was genuinely relieved to have been securely fastened to his chair in such a restrictive fashion. Several crewmembers were thrown from their stations in spite of their harnesses, and Kotcher saw at least two of them begin twitching in death spasms as the others moved to regain their seats.

  Clearing the cobwebs from his head, Kotcher snapped, “Damage report!”

  “Main engines are out,” the Damage Control stander reported with a slurred voice, “forward defensive grid has collapsed…working to reinitialize.”

  “Status of the Huang Gai?” the ship’s commander demanded, and was forced to wait several seconds for his Sensor operator to regain her station.

  “Still on course, Captain,” she reported belatedly, “the Huang Gai has entered outer launch range.”

  “She’s on her own now,” Kotcher muttered sourly. “Present our starboard broadside to the enemy formation,” he instructed, and the helmsman did so immediately, “let our inertia carry us into them while we clear
our guns at gunnery’s earliest convenience.”

  “Captain,” the Sensors operator said with a hint of alarm in his voice, “I’m reading a new transponder—she’s moving fast toward our position!”

  “Good,” Kotcher glowered at the screen as he saw the new icon blink into existence as it made an attack run—at seemingly impossible speeds, fully twice that of the fastest Corvette in the Chimera Sector—toward the heart of the Union Fleet’s formation.

  “It’s the Zhuge Liang, sir!” the Sensor operator reported with relief, but Mike Kotcher knew exactly what the new warship was—and he knew exactly what it wasn’t.

  “Carry on,” Kotcher snapped as the Huang Gai moved past the outer layer of the Union Fleet’s defenses. The Union Fleet’s fire concentrated on the modified freighter, and even the Huang Gai’s robust shields began to sag with alarming speed as the full weight of a dozen warships’ combined armaments slammed into them. “Launch, you hotheads…” Kotcher growled, watching as the Huang Gai’s shields dipped dangerously below minimal strength, prompting the Captain to strike the arm of his chair and roar, “launch, damn you!”

  Just as he struck the arm of his chair with his good hand, a veritable cloud of more than two hundred individual signals blossomed outward from the Huang Gai’s battered icon.

  “Fighters away!” the Tactical Officer reported mere seconds before the Huang Gai’s icon winked out of existence. “The Zhuge Liang is making her attack run behind the fighter swarm, Captain.”

  “Get my engines back online,” Captain Kotcher bellowed, his vox amplifying his voice well beyond what an ordinary human larynx could produce. “I want Blanco’s hat in a trophy box before he tucks tail and runs!”

  As the Virtu-Plaza fighters fanned out in a giant, nearly perfect cone formation, the streaking vessel which the Sensor operator had mis-identified as the Zhuge Liang—a deception made necessary by the circumstances of the moment—opened fire with its potent arsenal.