Rebellion

by William H. Keith

  “Working on it!”

  “And bypass the secondary power feed to the Kv-70s!”

  “You got it!”

  A discrete flashed red to green. She had one missile launcher working again… and five M-490 rockets remaining in the left-side pack. Her chem-flamer was still fully charged, but that was a ten-meter weapon, knife-fighting range for a strider, and there were still friendly legger troops to Katya’s front.

  “Targeting!” The Manta was nearer now, forty meters and coming closer with a grim, step-by-step determination. Rocket fire and explosive high-speed cannon rounds were slashing into that flat, round hull, but it shrugged the fire off like rain and kept on coming. The ground beneath its heavy, flanged feet had been ripped and torn and churned into tortured hellground. “Fire!”

  With her laser out, there was no way to guide the volley, but at forty meters she scarcely needed a smart-guided launch. Four of the five rockets slammed home, twisting one of the laser “horns” on the Manta’s torso back and punching a hole in the glacis armor.

  “Okay, boss! Fire’s out!”

  The temperature in section five was dropping. Power levels came back for the laser, though it would take precious seconds to build to full charge. Thirty meters away, a Fastrider loped past the slow-slogging Manta and stepped across one of the hastily dug front-line infantry trenches. Katya could see armored men scattering to avoid the machine’s twelve-ton step.

  Chin turret laser at seventy-five percent power…

  It would have to do. Shifting her aim to the Fastrider, she locked in on the humped portion of armor that she knew shielded the pilot. The operator’s jacking slot was always the most heavily armored portion of any warstrider, but LaG-17s didn’t have that much armor to begin with. She tracked, slewing the Ghostrider’s chin turret, then triggered the shot.

  Armor exploded from the Fastrider’s back, fist-sized chunks of shrapnel spinning across the slope. The strider took two more steps, hesitated… and then with a metal-rending groan it crumpled to the ground, burrowing its nose in churned-up earth. Katya swung back to loose another bolt at the Manta… and saw that it was withdrawing, retreating… and so were the other Hegemony striders. Eight of their machines lay scattered across the lower half of the slope, hulls ruptured, smoke billowing into the thin air and chasing its own shadows across the ground and into the forest.

  “We got them on the run!” someone yelled, and several rebel striders started forward, firing into the retreating foe.

  “Hold your ground!” Sinclair snapped. “Hold your position, damn it!” Let the government forces lure them into the jungle and the rebels would be cut to pieces. “All units, report! Who’d we lose?”

  Three warstriders dead out of thirty-three. Two more badly damaged, but still fighting. Twenty-eight men KIA on the ground, all in exchange for eight kills, an unknown number of Hegleggers killed, plus several striders like that KR-9 hurt bad but still moving.

  “Not bad, people,” Sinclair’s voice said, calming, reassuring. “We held ’em. We held ’em good!”

  “I have movement on the front, range seven hundred…”

  They were coming again, smashing out of the forest, some of them limping, some still trailing smoke from the last exchange, but all still coming.

  Katya was already so tired she felt as though she was trembling, even though her LaG-42’s reactions and movements remained iceworld-cold and engineer-precise. She was out of rockets, though, which left her with only the laser and about twenty antiarmor grenades, short-range weapons better for fighting infantry than warstriders.

  And it didn’t look as though the government forces were even thinking of letting up.

  Gritting her mental teeth, Katya targeted a damaged Calliopede and downloaded her laser into its duralloy carapace.

  “They’re decelerating… must be three Gs,” Bev Schneider warned. “They want to make it a stand-up fight.”

  Dev rotated his mental view of the ship dispositions, which showed the Tokitukaze, both frigates, Eridu and the Tower of Babel, and the sweeping, slightly curved lines representing ship vectors and orbits. The enemy had loosed a small cloud of missiles, now dispersing across the narrowing gulf between them and their prey. By shifting his perspective, Dev was able to see past the missile salvo and study the frigates themselves. According to the navdata glowing next to the tiny ship-silhouette images, they’d flipped over to present their sterns and were decelerating hard on fierce-driven torrents of plasma from their main thrusters.

  Bev was right. In ship-to-ship combat there were basically two alternatives: sweep past the enemy at high speed, doing as much damage to him on the way as possible; or match course and speed with him, in effect moving in close and coming to a relative halt, pounding away with beam weapons, plasma guns, and missiles until he was dead or surrendered. The Imperial squadron commander had evidently chosen the latter.

  According to Tokitukaze’s warbook, a Kumano-class frigate had a crew of 130, plus twenty marines. Those marines were intended as armed shore parties and for shipboard security rather than for ship-to-ship boarding actions, but the rebels’ unconventional capture of the Tokitukaze would have alerted them to other possibilities, like crippling the captured destroyer and retaking her hand-to-hand. They’d probably been in touch with HEMILCOM and would know by now that there weren’t many rebels manning her. They might even have guessed that some of their compatriots were still aboard.

  In any case, it would make a hell of a lot more sense from the Imperial point of view to try to recapture the destroyer than to transform her into radioactive gas. Dead, Dev and the others would be rebel martyrs; alive, they would be rebel prisoners… and their mission a clear failure.

  Even more than that, perhaps, was the question of kao, of face. The Imperial Navy had lost face when the Tokitukaze had been captured so easily. Some of that face would be restored if she were destroyed; far more would be won if she were recaptured.

  That, at least, appeared to be the frigates’ goal as they backed down at three Gs on columns of starcore-hot plasma. With the damage she had already suffered, and with only four men jacking her thrusters, the Tokitukaze was simply not a maneuverable vessel at the moment. A toe-to-toe slugging match was the best tactical approach Dev could hope for… and pray they weren’t using nukes and pray the destroyer could stand up to a hell of a pounding, because otherwise those frigates were going to get off without a scratch.

  Dev ordered the Tokitukaze spun end-for-end, and, after warning those of his people not jacked in, he engaged the ship’s main thrusters. For long minutes, they decelerated at three Gs, slowing… slowing… and finally Tokitukaze began to accelerate again, heading back toward Eridu. He’d just made it a lot easier for them to match course and speed, an invitation saying “Come and get us.”

  Which was exactly what they were doing. They still had far more speed than the destroyer and were closing rapidly.

  “Orders, Captain?” Torolf sounded nervous.

  “Let ’em come. We’re not going to outmaneuver them, that’s certain.”

  “I’ve got an IFF decryption on them now, Captain,” Simone said. “Definitely Kumano-class frigates, the Shusui and the Gekko.”

  “The Sword Stroke and the Moonlight, eh?” Koenig said. “Pretty.”

  “And dangerous,” Dev pointed out. “If they decide to bombard our people from orbit, Sinclair won’t have any defense.”

  Then there was no more time for analysis. The missiles, twenty-seven of them, converged on the Tokitukaze, and Dev ordered the point defense lasers linked over to the ship’s AI. The Artificial Intelligence directing the ship’s systems could act and react faster than any human, and with far greater precision.

  The first phase of the battle was on them and past almost before they realized it. Eight missiles were vaporized as soon as they entered the Tokitukaze’s point defense envelope. Eight more were vaporized half a second later… and then seven more as one PDL short-circuited and failed.


  Four missiles remained, on radar-active homing, closing on the ship too quickly to perceive. Tokitukaze’s AI was jamming on all combat frequencies and one missed, but the other three all had locked on to the highly reflective returns of the tangled ruin portside and amidships, where the ascraft was still embedded in the ruin of Tokitukaze’s flank.

  Three missiles slammed home and detonated, one after the other in the space of two seconds; fragments of hull and ascraft shuttle spun into darkness. Buried in his cocoon, Dev didn’t feel the shock, but the cascade of systems failures and alarms flashing in his consciousness told him quickly enough that they’d been hit, and hit hard.

  More missiles were coming, but Dev ignored them. It was the frigates he was concentrating on now, for both were reaching gigawatt laser range, but even as they slid inside the destroyer’s targeting envelope, a pinpoint of light flashed between Tokitukaze and the frigates, then expanded into a shimmering sphere of reflected light, growing and drifting toward the destroyer at several kilometers per second.

  “Main thrusters, full power, now!”

  Tokitukaze lurched forward, accelerating slowly. Dev was watching the ever-shifting angles between the three ships and the cloudscreen, using the cloud’s own movement to best position the destroyer for a shot. He suspected that the frigates had fired too soon.

  They had, and they were lagging too far behind their cover. As Tokitukaze lumbered forward, Dev glimpsed the frigates in the cloud’s shadow. Two of the ship’s three gigawatt laser turrets could bear.

  “Fire!”

  There was no beam visible in the vacuum of space, no sound or other indicator of the torrent of energy unleashed across the void, but for a fraction of a second the Shusui shone more brightly than the local sun. “Hit!” DeVreis shouted… and then the Gekko was accelerating, pulling out from behind the drifting laser shield and loosing a salvo of laser bolts at the crippled destroyer.

  Under the AI’s guidance, all of Tokitukaze’s turrets that could bear swung and fired at the Gekko, but not before several tons of duralloy armor had boiled away and a cryo-H reaction mass tank had been holed and the destroyer’s main thrusters had been cored by a beam that had sliced through the ship’s vitals like a sword through a man’s belly. For a moment, laser light shone from the Gekko as Tokitukaze’s beams raked her, but then the Tokitukaze was tumbling, nose-over-tail, completely out of control as the cryo-H superheated and blew out through the hull like a tremendous blast from a maneuvering thruster.

  “Status!” Dev yelled. The stars were wheeling past his head, a complete rotation every few seconds.

  “Main thrusters are dead, and I don’t think we’re gonna get ’em back,” Langley reported. “We’ve got maneuvering still, and enough cryo-H. Gomez and Tewari are working on stopping our spin. They might manage it. We’re losing air aft of frame ninety; that won’t matter except to our Imperial passengers aft. We still have full power and all the weapons we started with.

  “The bad news is we don’t have our main thrusters. We can maneuver, but not accelerate with a delta V of more than a few meters per second. We’re drifting in the general direction of Eridu. I’m starting a pool, folks. Will we miss the planet, skip off the atmosphere, or dig ourselves a nice hole?”

  “What about the bandits?” Dev was searching the sky. They should be somewhere right about… there they were.

  “I think we got them, Captain,” Bev Schneider said. “No sign of life from either one.”

  “They’re not necessarily kills,” Nicholson added. “We hit them hard with a lot of juice. Probably vaporized every radio mast and antenna on their hulls, and most of their weapons mounts, too.”

  “As long as they’re off our backs,” Dev said, “and unable to help their friends on Eridu. Lara! What can you do about attitude control?”

  “I’m slowing the spin gradually, Captain,” Anders said. “We’ve taken a lot of stress amidships, and I don’t want to snap her spine.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Congratulations, Captain,” Simone said. He could hear her smile over the link. “A successful ship-to-ship action, even if we don’t get out of this in one piece!”

  “Let’s save the party until after we get this spin stopped,” Dev said. Already, though, the wheeling of the stars had slowed. Eridu drifted gently across the heavens, then came to an unsteady rest. Indicators on the image confirmed what Langley had said. The Tokitukaze was dropping toward Eridu now in free-fall, though it did appear that they would miss the planet by a good margin.

  Except for the maneuvering necessary to make certain they didn’t slam into the space elevator, it appeared that the Tokitukaze was now out of the fight.

  On the ground, though, things must be going hot and furious.

  Dev wished he could be there with Katya and Hagan and the rest of them, wished at least that they were close enough to take a tactical feed from the ground and find out what was happening. The rebels must be fighting the fight of their lives right about now.

  “Hey, listen up, people,” he said suddenly. “Engineering! I need some numbers from you!”

  “What?” DeVreis said. “You got an idea?”

  “Maybe,” Dev said. “How does this sound?…”

  Three times now, the line of Hegemony warstriders had advanced from the woods, walking across the hellfire-blasted slope toward the rebel line. Three times they’d made it half-way up or a little farther before the sheer deadly volume of fire from the crest of the hill, the realization that if they kept pressing forward every one of them would be destroyed, forced them to back down. The slope was littered now with the smoking wreckage of warstriders from both sides. Katya did a quick count: Sinclair’s forces numbered twelve warstriders now… fifteen if you counted three that couldn’t move but still had at least one functional weapon.

  Fifty percent casualties. The rebel line had already endured more than most warriors were ever asked to endure, and they’d held. She felt a furious, burning pride in their behavior, in the way they’d stood their ground, a pride that much sharper because she knew that the training she and the Thorhammers had passed on to raw rebel recruits was at least partly responsible for their good showing today.

  But she wondered if pride was what she should be feeling, when the likeliest outcome was going to be death or capture for all of them.

  What had happened to Dev? Laser fire had not dropped from the sky, scouring the rebels off the hilltop, so perhaps his mission to take the Tokitukaze out of the fight had succeeded. Earlier, there’d been a garbled report from Babel, something about the Tokitukaze leaving Shippurport… and something else about incoming Imperial frigates. Then nothing.

  It was enough to wait and see what actually hit them without worrying about who-was… ghosts about which they could do nothing.

  She thought again about the Xenophobes, about what might happen if they surfaced in the middle of a battlefield, then shuddered as she turned her mind away from the thought. Xenophobes, here.… No, she didn’t want to face that. It was as though those subterranean horrors had replaced her old dread of closed-in spaces. At least they hadn’t simply popped up when the battle had begun hours before, which meant that the Self was waiting for some specific and easily recognizable signal.

  Would it be disappointed? Did it even understand such a concept?

  “Lieutenant!” That was Darcy, off to the right. “I got movement!”

  “What do you see?”

  “Aircraft, incoming fast! I have five… six… no, eight aircraft, bearing one-eight-nine, range two-five.…”

  “On your toes, people!” Sinclair rasped. “They’re trying something different for a change!”

  Somebody laughed over the circuit, but it sounded brittle, and Katya knew just how close to crumbling the rebel line was. Another good push, another few striders lost…

  Then the ascraft were banking low overhead, the light of Marduk glinting from their wings. Chung’s RLN-90 staggered as a bolt from the sky str
uck him, knocking his machine to the side.

  “Fire!” Sinclair yelled. “Everybody fire!”

  But there were too many of them, and too few rebel striders. The Hegemony warstriders were advancing for a fourth time from the woods, charging now with an almost joyful enthusiasm as the reinforcements from the south arrived over the battlefield. Katya could see a half dozen ascraft settling to the ground well out on the right flank, west of the monorail, and the death gleam of jet-black Imperial warstriders dropping from their riderslots and advancing on the rebel flank.

  “On the right!” Katya yelled. “Imperial Marine striders on the right!” The trap yawned before her understanding now like an open pit. The rebels were trapped, trapped between Hegemony, marines, the city, and the sea cliffs. Darcy’s Fastrider was moving toward the right, blazing away with its laser, and then it was savaged by a pair of plasma bolts from the great, lumbering Katana that was pushing beneath the elevated monorail and advancing toward Katya faster than a man could run. She pivoted her Ghostrider and fired her laser, and that black armor seemed to drink the beam, absorbing it, dissipating it, and still the monster was thundering toward her.

  The jaws of the trap were closing.

  Chapter 33

  In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.

  —The Art of War

  Sun Tzu

  Third century B.C.E.

  The Tokitukaze had made several course changes in the past half hour, as Eridu loomed larger and larger in the perceptions of her crew. On their original course, they would have missed the world by nearly fifty thousand kilometers—farther, even, than Babylon was from Towerdown—then looped into a wide, extended orbit.

  They would be shaving the planet much more closely now, thanks to the course corrections they’d been able to make despite the damaged main engines. Tokitukaze’s AI had painted a concise and holographic picture of their encounter. By killing their speed and allowing the planet to turn a bit more, they could—with one course correction more—shift their perigee to a point just south of the space elevator and lower it to an altitude of somewhere between one hundred and five hundred kilometers. They would come in from the southwest, miss the Tower of Babel by between thirty and eighty kilometers, cross the equator over the Dawnthunder Sea, and loop on past the planet, entering a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of about sixty thousand kilometers.