She felt an odd flicker of discontent as the range closed, bringing the enemy ships within energy weapons range for the first time. Vanguard was her ship, but Admiral Harper would be the one giving the order to open fire - and she wouldn't even be repeating it to her tactical crew. But there was no choice. The fleet had to make its first shots count ...
“Firing,” Granger said.
Vanguard rolled in space, the turrets blazing out deadly pulses of plasma towards the enemy ships. Susan had the satisfaction of watching a cruiser explode under Vanguard’s fire, two more destroyers staggering out of formation as they fought for survival, a second or two before the enemy returned fire. Red icons flashed up in front of her, warning that the enemy battleships had targeted Vanguard’s drives. Thankfully, the armour seemed to be handling it.
For the moment, she thought. But we’re both firing at extreme range.
Absurdly, the enemy seemed caught by surprise. Their remaining smaller ships were rapidly wiped out, save for one that managed a dizzying series of evasive patterns that eventually ended with the ship taking shelter behind a battleship. They didn't even seem inclined to adjust their own fire to target humanity’s support ships! All five enemy battleships were concentrating their fire on the human battleships.
“Damage control teams report that enemy fire is weakening the armour in sections seven through nine,” Flinch said, over the intercom. “There are limits to what we can do during a battle.”
“Understood,” Susan said.
Her ship shuddered, time and time again, under the constant bombardment. The enemy battleships didn't seem discomforted by the loss of their escorts; instead, they just kept pounding the bigger human ships. Susan silently tallied the damage as point defence weapons and sensor blisters were blown off the hull, each one reducing her ship’s fighting power by a percentage point. They could be replaced - and they would be replaced - but it could only be done after the battle was over.
“Signal from the flag,” Parkinson said. “Admiral Harper wants to launch missiles, blunderbuss pattern.”
“See to it,” Susan said. They’d tried the tactic time and time again in simulations, but too much depended on the assumptions fed into the computers. The tactic might work - or it might damage the human ship instead of the enemy target. “Fire at will.”
She sucked in her breath as the missiles were launched. The enemy seemed to realise the danger, but it was too late; the warheads detonated one by one, sending deadly laser beams digging into their target’s hull. She watched, feeling a wave of cold vindictiveness, as one of the enemy battleships rolled out of formation, spewing atmosphere. There was no chance to get a nuke through one of the gashes in her hull, but she had the feeling it didn't matter. The ship was so badly damaged that it might be cheaper to scrap her and build a new one instead of trying to make repairs.
Unless they have some reason to think repair work is quicker, she thought. We still don't know anything about their industrial base.
The four enemy battleships kept firing, wiping out a spread of missiles before they could detonate and tear into another enemy ship. Susan was surprised they didn't retaliate in kind, but the more she looked at the display, the more she suspected they couldn’t. Two or three-stage missiles were huge, each one eating up three or four times the magazine space of a standard missile. They might well have shot their bolt during the early stages of the engagement, which might be why they were pressing so hard against the battleships. A long-range missile duel might well be impossible.
For them, she thought. And it would be a waste of missiles for us too.
A dull rumbling echoed through the ship as a second alien battleship started to pound at her hull. Susan gritted her teeth as damage reports continued to mount up. The armour was strong, but the hammering was steadily wearing it down. She needed time to make repairs, time she knew she wasn't going to get. The battle had turned into a battering match and she had a sneaking suspicion the aliens were going to win. A line of starfighters flashed past her to make another attack run on the alien ships, but the aliens picked off four of them before the remainder had a chance to salvo their torpedoes into their hulls. The only upside was that one of the torpedoes had destroyed an alien turret beyond immediate repair.
We need to adjust our tactics, she thought. Battering matches cost us dearly even when we win.
“Signal from the flag,” Parkinson said. “We’re to pick up speed to catch up with the carriers.”
“Make it so,” Susan ordered.
She winced as she heard an atonal thrumming echoing through the ship as the drives fought to crank out more power. The alien battleships were smaller than Vanguard, suggesting that they enjoyed a sharper acceleration curve. But would they choose to continue the engagement? There was no way to know if the alien reinforcements were closer than hers, although she would be surprised if they weren’t. A long running battle might leave the alien fleet battered into uselessness, even if they won.
Green icons flashed past Vanguard on the display, the remaining starfighters heading back to their carriers. There were replacement fighters in the transports, she knew, but getting them manned and ready to deploy would take time they didn't have. The Russians, thankfully, had cross-trained hundreds of their personnel ... she’d wondered at that, back during a dinner on Admiral Kuznetsov, but she had to admit it might just pay off for them. God knew that starfighters might be the difference between surviving the next few hours or dying hundreds of light years from Earth.
“They’re sticking with us,” Granger reported. “Their acceleration curves are quite impressive.”
Brute force, Susan thought. The analysts weren't certain, but it seemed logical. They actually crammed more drives into their hulls rather than seeking to improve their technology.
“Continue firing,” Susan ordered. The enemy tactics didn't quite make sense, unless they believed they would come out ahead if they traded five battleships for three. They might, if they had an entire armada of battleships on the other side of the tramline. “And hold us on our current course.”
“Aye, Captain,” Granger said.
“And watch for ramming attempts,” Susan added. If the enemy were that determined not to let them go, an attempt to ram one of the battleships was all too likely. “Even a failed attempt to ram us could cause problems.”
And that, she added silently, is the understatement of the decade.
Chapter Twenty-One
There was no time for panic.
George felt it yowling at the back of her mind as she fought for control, knowing that tumbling helplessly into the planet’s atmosphere would mean certain death. The shuttle was spinning so rapidly that the gee-forces were tearing at her, despite the compensators; she prayed, desperately, that they wouldn’t overload and fail completely. It would kill everyone on the shuttle so quickly that they wouldn't have any time to realise what had hit them before it was too late.
Alert after alert blinked up in front of her, screaming warnings. She ignored as many of them as she dared, knowing that the shuttle had been designed to fly with half of its systems out and a third of the remainder badly compromised. But she’d never had to fly in such desperate circumstances ... the ATC was gone, but a glance at the near-orbit display was enough to tell her that enemy missiles were roaring towards the orbiting satellites and blowing them out of existence, one by one. There was no hope of rescue before it was too late. She couldn't even pull them out of the planet’s gravity well.
“Hold on,” she shouted, as she managed - somehow - to straighten out their flight. The hand of God Almighty slapped the shuttle as she crashed into the upper atmosphere, almost starting them tumbling again. Something flashed past them, but she barely had a second to register its presence - let alone figure out what it was - before it was gone. “We’re going down.”
The marines, thankfully, weren't panicking. They knew, probably better than she did, just how slim the odds of survival actually were. But they
remained calm, even as the shuttle started to spin again. George felt a dampness between her legs as the shuttle twisted - just for a second, the hull shook so badly that part of her thought they’d already crashed - and did her best to ignore it. She’d worry about it later, if they survived.
Turbulence slammed at them as they descended, gusts of wind hammering at the shuttle in a manner she hadn't seen anywhere but Tadpole Prime. And she hadn't tried to fly there ... she told herself, frantically, that the shocks weren't going to be deadly, even though she had a nasty feeling that the shuttle was on the verge of disintegrating. She wasn't flying a damn assault shuttle, or one of the craft that had been reengineered for Tadpole Prime. She’d certainly never expected to have to make an emergency landing from low orbit.
The gravity field flickered and faded for long seconds, then collapsed altogether. George scowled, then forgot about it as she struggled to locate a place to put the shuttle down. Half the drives - and the antigravity nodes - were out, rendering the craft barely a stage or two above a flying brick. She was mildly surprised, at the back of her mind, that the craft had held together after such a beating. The shuttle wasn't designed for combat operations or forced landings. Really, there wasn't much of a difference between it and a civilian design.
She allowed herself a sigh of relief as the flight straightened out, although she had no idea how long it would last. They couldn't stay in the air anyway, not when the enemy would be moving rapidly to invest and secure the high orbitals. A starship would have no trouble picking them off from orbit, no matter how desperately she tried to evade. She’d watched some of the recordings of military operations, during the later days of the Age of Unrest. A rogue nation simply couldn't fly aircraft when orbital weapons platforms armed with lasers and particle beams were ready to blow them out of the air. Hell, the Tadpoles hadn't been interested in occupying human cities on worlds they’d captured, but they’d definitely shot down air traffic and anything else that looked as though it might pose a threat.
The ATC was still silent. She hesitated, then gambled and sent a pulse message to one of the stealthed satellites orbiting the planet, requesting an update. There was no response. She briefly considered taking the risk again, then shook her head. The satellite would have replied, if it had been able to reply. Given how much firepower had been unleashed in the early seconds of the battle, it was quite possible that the aliens had swatted the satellite without ever noticing.
She glanced at the map, thinking hard. The shuttle didn't need the satellites to gauge its position, at least within a few thousand metres, but without a direct link to the ATC it was hard to be sure what was waiting for them on the ground. Unity wasn't Earth. Seven years of colonisation wouldn't have opened up more than a tiny percentage of the planetary surface for settlement. It was quite possible that they’d crash hundreds of miles from anyone who could help them, even though she’d spent the last few days shipping troops and equipment down to the surface. Ideally, she knew she wanted to put the shuttle down near Unity City ...
But that will be their first target, she thought. They’d have to be blind to miss the settlement.
The shuttle rocked, violently, as another drive node failed. George cursed, savagely; they couldn't stay in the air much longer, no matter what she did. She lowered their altitude as much as she could, doing her best to ignore the increasing cacophony of alarms. If she made it back home, she promised herself that she’d send the designers a very sharp note. There was nothing she could do about the damage, certainly not when they were on the verge of falling out of the sky. The alarms were a distraction at the worst possible moment ...
And then another drive node failed.
“Hang on,” George shouted. The shuttle yawed, threatening to roll over and slam into the ground. Normally, the automatic systems would have compensated for the loss of the node, but they seemed to have gone offline too. “Brace for impact ...”
She yanked the shuttle back around, fighting to come down as gently as possible, a moment before the ground came up and hit them. There was a moment of blackness - it took her a second to realise that she’d been stunned for a moment - and then the shuttle seemed to come apart at the seams. They tumbled, crashing forward, until they finally came to a stop. She sagged, silently relieved that they were alive. Under the circumstances, they’d been incredibly lucky,
Strong hands caught at her, undoing her strap and pulling her away from her chair. “Come on,” a voice snapped. She was so dazed that it took her a moment to recognise Stott. “We can't stay here.”
She couldn't move. Her entire body seemed limp. Stott lifted her up, despite the cramped conditions, and threw her over his shoulder. Someone was shouting outside, George registered; she wondered, dimly, what had happened to them. Her mind seemed to be spinning in and out of awareness, as if she was concussed. Had she hit her head at some point? She couldn’t recall ...
Something jabbed the side of her thigh. She jerked awake, feeling oddly cold. A pair of hands were roaming over her body; she tensed, then realised that the medic was checking for wounds. Her eyes opened - she hadn't even been aware they were closed - and saw a young man bending over her, holding a portable sensor in one hand. He held the sensor against her forehead, then looked relieved.
“You’re unwounded,” he said, softly. “How do you feel?”
“... Odd,” George managed. Her mouth felt like she’d been drinking heavily, the night before. “What did you give me?”
“A very basic booster,” the medic said. He held out a hand and helped her to her feet. “I would have preferred to give you something stronger, but the boss overrode it.”
George nodded, slowly. The shuttle was some distance away, lying on the ground. She didn't need to be an expert to know that the craft was beyond repair. The hull was cracked in a dozen places and smoke was rising from the drive section. And, beyond it, hundreds of trees were lying on the ground. Any halfway competent orbital observer would have no difficulty locating the crash site, even if the shuttle hadn't been clearly visible from orbit.
“George,” Byron said. The marine corporal looked relieved. “Can you walk?”
“I think so,” George said. Her legs still felt wobbly, but nothing was actually broken. “Was ... was anyone hurt?”
“A couple of the lads got banged up, but everyone’s intact,” Byron reassured her. “You did very well, really.”
George looked back at the shuttle and smiled, despite her growing tiredness. Her instructors had told her, more than once, that any landing she could walk away from was a good landing, although the cadets had suspected that deliberately crashing the shuttles was a good way to get kicked out of the Academy. But then, when disaster struck, there was no longer any time to worry about anything, beyond landing as safely as possible. She'd got them down alive - she’d got them all down alive - and that was all that mattered.
“Thanks,” she said.
“We can't stay here,” Byron warned. “We’re keeping radio silence, but I would be astonished if the aliens haven’t secured the high orbitals. The next step will be a landing in force.”
He glanced past her. George turned; Stott was kneeling near a tree, sorting through a collection of supplies. “Are we ready?”
“We’ve got everything useful, sir,” Stott said. George was surprised at his formality. But then, they were on deployment. “There are a few more things we could take from the shuttle, but we don’t know how much time we have.”
There was a flash in the sky. George looked up and winced. Pieces of debris were falling from high orbit, the remains of the orbital defence grid burning up in the atmosphere. The sky was blue - it was late afternoon, if she recalled correctly - but she didn't need to see the alien ships to know they were there. And a single transmission would be more than enough to draw a KEW down on their heads.
“Get ready to march,” Byron ordered. “We’ll put some distance between ourselves and the shuttle, then decide where to go.”
<
br /> He glanced at George. “Stay with Stott and Kelly,” he added, nodding to the medic. “If you have problems keeping up, tell them.”
“And we won’t hesitate to put a foot up your arse,” Stott added. “We have to keep moving.”
George nodded - she knew he wasn't joking - then watched as the marines hastily grabbed their weapons and started to move out. She’d never had any illusions about Byron and Stott - Fraser had made it clear that they were both very dangerous men, even if they were friendly - but she’d never realised what it was like to be surrounded by marines. They moved through the jungle as if they were born to it, weapons constantly at the ready. She followed Kelly, wishing she’d thought to exercise more on the ship. There was no way she was anything like as fit as the marines.
She glanced up, sharply, as she heard a low roar passing overhead. A shuttle was visible in the sky for a few seconds before vanishing in the distance. She tried to calculate its course, but gave up within seconds. She’d tried to put them down close to Unity City ... yet she wasn't remotely sure where they’d landed.
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