Fields of Fire (Frontlines Book 5)

by Marko Kloos

  “We have high-yield impacts on Mars,” someone else in CIC says. “Three misses on bogeys. One went by the planet and burned up in the upper atmosphere. Two impacted the surface near the equator, five hundred fifty klicks apart. Megaton-class thermal bloom.”

  “Ouch,” someone in my group says next to me. Three of the priceless Orions missed their targets, and two of them smacked into Mars at almost full speed, barely slowed down by the atmospheric friction upon entry. I find myself hoping fervently that the errant Orions took out a Lanky settlement or two instead of landing right on top of a bunker with human survivors in it.

  “Two more misses,” the audio from CIC continues. “Orion 90 and 99 went wide and failed to impact. Self-destruct in one hundred seventeen minutes.”

  The two Orions that missed their assigned targets continue on their trajectory past Mars and off into the deep space beyond, each having used up hundreds of the world’s remaining low-yield nuclear warheads for no gain. But most of the rest have done their jobs. There are a few minutes of tension and controlled confusion in CIC as the sensors from the task-group ships and the far-off Cincinnati attempt to sort out the optical, thermal, and radiation clutter in the section of space where we just unleashed planetoid-killing amounts of kinetic energy. Then the feed from Cincinnati burns through the noise, and the tactical display updates itself.

  “Splash ten,” the tactical officer says, and he makes no effort to conceal the glee in his voice. “We have ten confirmed seed-ship kills.”

  All around me, rousing cheers go up—not just in the Pod Country compartment, but also in the neighboring sections, so loud that they’re audible through the bulkheads. In the space of one second, we have destroyed more Lankies—both ships and individual creatures—than in the entire war against them so far.

  “Knock knock, motherfuckers!” our Spaceborne Rescue sergeant shouts, and pumps his fist.

  “Battleships are advancing to grid Delta Five-Seven for intercept,” the tactical officer in CIC narrates. I see the two battleships accelerating toward their assigned intercept coordinates on the plot, burning their fusion engines at flank-speed setting.

  “Contact,” CIC warns. “We have two bogies incoming from bearing zero-two-zero relative by negative zero-one-three, and zero-three-five relative by positive three-zero. Designate Lima-11 and Lima-12. FO reports they have a visual on both Lanky seed ships.”

  The two remaining seed ships are on the move, but it’s clear they don’t know what they’re hunting. They move away from Mars, accelerating as they’re going, and changing course slightly every few minutes. Cincinnati is much closer to them than the rest of the fleet, and the little OCS is keeping the two Lankies in her sights relentlessly, feeding precise targeting data back to the rest of the task group. By herself, she has no hope of fighting those two behemoths, but the battleships do, and thanks to Cincy they can plot perfect intercept trajectories.

  Neither the battleships nor the Lanky seed ships move at anything near the insane acceleration the Orions pulled earlier. The blue icons on the tactical display creep across the situational-awareness sphere, closing the distance minute by minute. I keep scanning the edges of the display for more Lanky ships, expecting to see a cluster of orange icons to come out of nowhere and head for the task group to close the trap they surely laid for us. But the display remains empty except for the tight cluster of blue icons in the center, the two orange lozenges at the far edge of the scale, and the two symbols representing our battleships halfway between. They have the acceleration advantage over the Lankies, and they have the guidance telemetry from Cincinnati. In the past, we got jumped in every engagement because we could never see the Lanky seed ships coming until they were already almost in weapon range. This time, the tables are turned. It’s clear from their course on the plot that the surviving seed ships don’t know where we are, or that two of our battleships are closing in to intercept them.

  Agincourt leads the battleship formation, five hundred kilometers ahead of her sister ship, and she reaches firing position first.

  “Lima-12 crossing laterally from bearing two-nine-zero, speed six hundred meters per second and accelerating. Range to target twelve thousand kilometers. Agincourt is signaling they have a firing solution.”

  “Agincourt, weapons free, weapons free. Light the bastard up,” the command comes in the background of the audio feed from CIC.

  “Copy weapons free,” the reply from Agincourt comes, equally muffled and tinny. “Reactor to pulse afterburner. Range ten thousand kilometers. Alpha mount, fifteen-shot burst, fire for effect.”

  At the last second, the Lanky seed ship seems to have sensed that someone else is in their neighborhood. On the tactical plot, Lima-12 starts changing its bearing toward the incoming battleships. But the course correction is too little and too late, and the particle cannon’s charge has virtually no travel time at what is almost point-blank range.

  “Firing Alpha in three. Two. One. Fire.”

  I switch to the visual feed from Cincinnati just in time to see the bloom from the particle cannon’s impact on the Lanky’s hull. Cincinnati is fifty thousand kilometers from the event, but her cameras are so good that I can clearly make out the oblong, organic shape of the seed ship against the blackness of the space behind it. Then the image washes out in a brilliant white flash. When the brightness subsides enough for me to make out anything again, the point in space where a Lanky seed ship just moved across the camera’s field of view at hundreds of meters per second is just an expanding cloud of superheated gas.

  “Target destroyed,” the tactical officer half shouts in CIC, and a cheer goes up again.

  “Holy mother of fuck,” I murmur into my helmet. The particle cannon mount on Agincourt just turned a three-kilometer seed ship with a hull twenty meters thick into a loose conglomeration of atoms with a second and a half of burst fire.

  “Would maybe be good idea to make many more battleships like that,” Dmitry says with a broad grin.

  On the plot, Agincourt breaks off its attack run to avoid the plasma cloud by swinging the nose of the ship to port. The particle cannon is a short-range weapon, and at Agincourt’s current speed, it takes only a few seconds to cover the ten thousand kilometers that are the outer edge of the cannon’s effective range.

  “Bogey Lima-11 is changing course to intercept,” someone else in CIC warns. “Aspect change from bearing zero-two-zero relative to zero-four-five. They’re going for Agincourt.”

  Whether the Lanky ships communicate with each other or the second Lanky simply could not miss the massive energy release that wiped out its companion, our presence is no longer a surprise. Contact Lima-11, the second surviving Lanky seed ship, comes around and heads for Agincourt, which is now swinging around to counter-burn its fusion engines and arrest the momentum that will carry it clean past Mars and into deep space otherwise.

  “Agincourt, you have incoming, bearing two-six-six by positive three-five.”

  “Alpha mount is off-line,” Agincourt sends back. “Repeat, we have lost function on the particle cannon. Unmasking rail gun batteries.”

  I’m reminded of the test-firing a few months back, when Agincourt lost all power after firing the main gun once. The particle cannons they built into Aggie and Archie are insanely powerful, but brand-new technology, mounted in experimental and uncompleted ships. At least Aggie still has her engines, but her rail guns won’t do her much good against the incoming Lanky.

  With the counter-burning maneuver, Agincourt’s acceleration advantage over the remaining Lanky disappears. The seed ship closes to thirty thousand kilometers, then twenty thousand, homing in on the battleship like a shark that has smelled blood in the water.

  “Arkhangelsk has a firing solution on bogey Lima-11.” The tactical officer on the SRA battleship sends his own updates in excellent English that has just the barest trace of a Chinese accent.

  The second battleship is coming in at flank speed to close the distance for an intercept bef
ore Agincourt gets overtaken by the Lanky. I can see just by looking at the plot that this is going to get ugly. The particle pulse cannons on the battleships are insanely powerful, but their short range means that the battleships have to be almost in knife-fighting range, tactically speaking. Agincourt had no time to counter-burn at the end of her attack run, so she had no choice but to move into range of the second Lanky seed ship, and Arkhangelsk is about to do the very same thing by necessity to save her sister ship.

  “Hold fire, Arkhangelsk. Agincourt is too close to the bogey.”

  The range between the seed ship and Agincourt is now down to five thousand kilometers and shrinking with every second. Agincourt is at full burn again to reverse her earlier course, and the seed ship just has to keep accelerating to catch the battleship from astern with her metaphorical pants down.

  Eleven seed ships destroyed, and we may still lose this right here, I think. If the last seed ship on the plot manages to destroy or disable the battleships, it will be able to carve through the entire task group like an axe through a soy patty.

  On the plot, Arkhangelsk is changing course to get a clean shot at the seed ship. The camera feed from Cincinnati frames both the seed ship and Agincourt hurtling through space on a near-parallel course. Agincourt’s stern is aglow with the fusion flare of her engines burning at full output.

  “Incoming ordnance,” Agincourt sends. “Taking fire from the bogey.”

  I can’t hear anything on the channel for a few seconds, and the camera resolution from Cincy is not good enough at this distance to see the clouds of penetrator rods shooting out from the flank of the seed ship and hurtling through the space between the two ships, or the impact blooms on the battleship, but I know they are getting peppered with superhard quills right now that can go completely through the hull of any capital ship in the task group. Agincourt and her sister are built to withstand this sort of kinetic attack, but they’ve obviously never been tested in battle until today. When Agincourt sends again, there are warning klaxons in the background of the transmission.

  “We took multiple direct hits on the hull. Penetrations in three sections, but the armor plating kept most of it out. Propulsion unaffected. Alpha mount is still off-line. If Arkhangelsk has the shot, let her take it.”

  “Lanky is changing course again,” the tactical officer cautions. “They’re closing the distance. I think they are going for a ramming kill.”

  The Lanky seed ship, millions of tons in motion, will do to Agincourt what the battleship did to the other seed ship just a few minutes ago if the ships collide at their current speed. Armor plating or not, Agincourt will get smashed like an egg on a sidewalk.

  “Ready to fire,” Arkhangelsk sends. “Agincourt, change course to relative zero by negative zero-nine-zero on my mark. We will fire a three-shot burst from the Alpha mount.”

  “Copy course change to relative zero by negative nine-zero on your mark. Call it. And try not to miss,” Agincourt’s tactical officer replies.

  I see what Arkhangelsk is trying to do. They want to scrape the Lanky seed ship off Agincourt’s back with a short burst that may not have the energy output to kill the Lanky outright, so Agincourt has a chance to clear the impact range without getting caught in the energy release. We are now calling tactical shots on the fly with weapons we’ve never used outside the gunnery range, with hundreds or thousands of lives riding on a guess.

  “Reactor to pulse afterburner. Range twelve thousand kilometers. Target is locked. Agincourt, break away in three, two, one, mark.”

  Agincourt’s helmsman lights off the dorsal-bow thrusters, and the ship ducks away from the Lanky behind it and goes through a ninety-degree rotation along its lateral axis far faster than I would have expected a ship of her size to be able to move. The angle of separation to the Lanky seed ship widens momentarily, and then the Lanky ship starts dipping its bow end to follow the battleship. On the plot, both icons are almost on top of each other. On the camera feed from Cincinnati, I can see that there are no more than ten kilometers of space between the ships.

  “Alpha mount, three-round burst. Fire.”

  The particle beam coming from Arkhangelsk’s main armament isn’t visible in space, but its effects on the seed ship are, and dramatically so. The short burst Arkhangelsk just fired doesn’t blot the seed ship out of space instantly like Agincourt did with her own target, but there’s a blinding flash of thermal radiation that once again triggers the filter on the camera lens, and the sudden and instant energy release shears the Lanky in half somewhere around the front third of its hull. The two parts of the Lanky ship continue their forward momentum, trailing streams of superheated plasma, huge chunks breaking away from both pieces of the broken hull. Some of the wreckage parts slam into Agincourt’s hull and bounce off the dorsal armor plating of the ship, but one piece of superheated hull fragment finds its way to the battleship’s stern and into Agincourt’s fusion-rocket engine pods. I see the bright plumes from her engines go out almost instantly. The Lanky, clearly broken, continues on the trajectory it had started when it tried to match the battleship’s evasive maneuver, but it’s clear that the seed ship is out of control. It yaws around its own lateral axis and then flips stern over bow, inert mass carried by its own momentum.

  “Target disabled,” Arkhangelsk sends. “Alpha mount is recharging.”

  “All units, Agincourt. We have lost main propulsion. Heavy impact damage to the fusion-rocket array. Reactors are safe, but we are coasting ballistic.”

  Agincourt was counter-burning to negate the acceleration from her attack run when the Lanky intercepted her, but the burn wasn’t nearly enough to reverse her course. She’s drifting stern first, still moving at over a thousand meters per second, and the projected trajectory on the plot will carry her clear past Mars and into deep space. With a broken propulsion system, she’ll travel at that speed indefinitely, and there’s not a tug in the combined fleet that can catch up to a 150,000-ton warship going more than a kilometer per second and stop its momentum. The skipper of Agincourt really has only one choice if he wants to save his crew, and it doesn’t take him long to exercise it.

  “All units, Agincourt. We are abandoning ship. I repeat, we are abandoning ship and releasing pods. Godspeed, and come collect us when you can. Agincourt Actual out.”

  “Goddammit!” I shout into my helmet. Agincourt and Arkhangelsk did their jobs precisely as designed, and yet we’ve just lost an irreplaceable piece of hardware, one of only two ships in the entire fleet that can take on a Lanky head to head and destroy it. But there’s no other call to make for the skipper, and I’d do the same in his place. If they stay on the ship and then fail to repair the fusion engines, they’ll be out of reach of the rest of the fleet within hours, and then they’ll just coast through space until everyone on board starves or suffocates. Maybe they can catch up to the battleship after we’ve won Mars, and maybe there’ll be a way to repair or salvage her, but the crew needs to get off the ship while they’re still in range of friendly forces that can pluck the escape pods out of space.

  “Alpha mount, ten-round burst, fire for effect.”

  Arkhangelsk’s commander is leaving nothing to chance. The Lanky seed ship, clearly broken and now only a little more than half the size it was just a few minutes ago, disappears both from the plot and Cincinnati’s camera feed. On the plot, its icon merely winks out of existence. On the camera image, the broken seed ship disintegrates in a brilliant flash, leaving nothing behind but a glowing cloud of atomic debris that expands into a sphere and then begins to dissipate.

  “Target destroyed,” Arkhangelsk reports.

  For a heartbeat, the world seems to come to a standstill. Then another cheer goes up, and this one doesn’t just come from the neighboring compartments of this ship, but also over the fleet’s tactical command channel. On my screen, there are no orange icons remaining, just our cluster of blue lozenge shapes, and nothing between us and Mars but empty space. The sucker punch worked beyond
my most cheerful expectations. In just a little under an hour of combat, we have wiped out the entire fleet of Lanky ships guarding Mars. There may be more out there, patrolling the Alcubierre nodes or prowling deep space, just like last year during Indy’s stealth run back to Earth. But wherever they are, they won’t keep us from landing our troops. Right now, the door to Mars isn’t just open—we took a running jump and kicked it right off the hinges.

  “All units, all units. The beaches are clear. Repeat: the beaches are clear. Initiate Phase Two. Execute Battle Plan Quebec.”

  Overhead, the ascending two-tone trill of an all-ship announcement from the bridge cuts through the radio chatter and ends our courtesy narration of the unfolding battle.

  “Now hear this: all hands, seal your suits. I repeat: all hands, seal your suits. We are advancing toward the Lanky minefield. All bio-pod personnel, prepare for launch.”

  Up ahead on the forward bulkhead, the readiness light changes from red to green. I get out of my sling seat, grateful for the opportunity to stretch my legs again briefly before having to wedge myself into the tight bio-pod.

  “That’s us,” I say to Dmitry. “Remember, just like in the simulator. The pod flies itself.”

  “Too much sitting in chair,” Dmitry says, and stretches with a groan. “But I do not think we will be bored again very soon.”

  We do a last-minute armor check and walk over to our pods. The pod riggers help us into the tight containers and strap us in with quick and practiced movements. The rigger working on my pod connects my suit to the life-support system and the data bus and gives me a curt thumbs-up, which I return.

  “Give ’em hell, sir,” he says, and I nod.

  The pod doesn’t have a hatch, because it would be a weak point for superheated plasma to enter during the atmospheric descent. Instead, the top third of the pod is a separate part that gets lowered by a mechanical arm and then sealed into place with titanium bolts from the outside. Until I pull the handle for the explosive separation charges once I am on the ground, I am sealed into the pod as if it’s a natural chunk of space rock. It’s a supremely claustrophobic setup, but I’ll take the discomfort for a little while if it decreases the likelihood of burning up in the planetary atmosphere or getting shot out of space by a Lanky mine. The most unnerving part during a pod launch is that my fate is totally out of my hands and dependent on the ballistics computer of the dorsal missile tubes.