With Patagonia still taking positions, Gupta set about ensuring that if this was a trap, it was an undetectable one. He gave Arun the all clear.
“We’re secure,” Arun relayed to Xin and Nhlappo, who waited outside in the water. “Coffee’s brewing, chow’s cooking. Come on in.”
“Acknowledged,” Xin replied curtly. Too curtly. Just for a moment, Arun wondered just how disappointed Xin really was that Arun hadn’t been cut into bloody chunks by automated defenses.
Arun opened an FTL link to Beowulf. “Phase Guinshrike is go.”
“Launching Guinshrike, aye,” acknowledged Lieutenant Commander Lubricant, the XO since the humans had taken over the ship. After a moment’s delay while she relayed instructions, she said: “He’s a crazy old fool who tried to betray us all. If you ask me, he’s succumbed to a death wish. You should have supported me at his trial, McEwan, then maybe he’d have been executed like he deserves.”
“Good luck to you, too,” replied Arun, angry for the most part because he agreed with Loobie.
The mad bastard in question was Ensign Dock, who’d displayed such exceptional piloting skills last night. It had been Indiya and Xin who’d argued to suspend the mutineer’s death sentence.
Today Dock would prove which side was right.
— Chapter 49 —
As soon as Lieutenant Commander Lubricant gave him the signal from orbit, Ensign Dock set his Stork to drink freely of its dwindling fuel reserves before acknowledging: “Guinshrike underway, aye.”
To conserve fuel, after dropping off the expeditionary force 30 klicks away from Beta, Dock had kept his bird hidden at the bottom of a deep but slowly flowing river while the Marines had marched to their target. The craft had emerged from the water five minutes ago. To any onlookers, the sight of the river’s surface roiling as it birthed this military leviathan would have looked magnificent. Dock was still cursing himself for not having the foresight to have dropped off cameras to record the scene.
Still, he had to be grateful for small mercies. That the children and refugees running this show were on schedule was more than just a relief: Dock only had enough fuel to try this once.
“ETA three minutes,” he called through to the hold. “Triple check everything and then keep your minds and bodies relaxed. When we’re over the target, things are going to proceed too fast and too violently for you to think before acting.”
The three Resistance fighters in the back said nothing, but gave the impression of checking harness settings and verifying weapons status. Kraevoi, Pak, and Vanderman their names were. Enthusiastic kids, but their lack of language reinforced the Marine reputation of being dumb brutes who had regressed back to a more primitive form of hominid.
Mind you, that Lieutenant Lee showed promise. The giant girl could be positively scandalous when she wasn’t playing look at me, I’m an officer. And she mesmerized many of the kids with her beauty. Not Dock. He preferred his meat tougher, and it was just as well she didn’t have the same effect on him. It wouldn’t do to fraternize too much with these Marines, especially since Lee had become Dock’s protector, ever since he’d stumbled out of his court-martial with a suspended death sentence that could be carried out by any Navy officer without warning.
“Remember, boys and girls,” Dock told his passengers, “don’t scratch the furniture too much because Beta might be your home one day soon. All we’re doing up here in the sky is to throw a flamboyant pose that these hairy monkeys can’t ignore while your friends get dirty down below.” Dock pushed the Stork to attack speed. “And for fuck’s sake, people, if you ever do get to live here, make a little more effort with the name. I mean, really! Beta City… It’s embarrassing! Now, hang on, we’re going in…”
At Mach3, Dock hit the control to retract the doors in the hold. The bird immediately shook hard enough to dig through the buffer gel in his harness straps, promising colorful bruises if he lived long enough for them to bloom.
“Easy, girl,” he crooned, stroking the console. “I’ve got you.”
Once he’d stabilized the gunship, he glanced at the hold’s internal camera. No one had fallen out yet, which was a good start.
There was nothing he could do for his passengers now, so he ignored them and allowed the thrill of flight to wash over him.
“Yeeeahhhhaaahhhh!”
Flying through atmosphere was so much more violent than space. It was fucking brilliant!
He suddenly remembered his cargo. “Four seconds to go,” he told them.
Lee’s plan was to take out the Hardit air defenses first with these fancy blinder missiles. Dock shrugged. The kids running the show were desperate enough to allow Dock to retain his rank on probation, despite being caught on the wrong side of Beowulf’s mutinies. He ought to be grateful, he supposed, but he’d never promised to be good. For all her tactical sparkle, Lee was no flier. No one, but no one told Dock how to fly. Period!
Any flier would tell you that even the monkeys would think to layer their anti-air defenses, keeping some hidden in reserve.
They needed bait before they would reveal themselves to the blinders.
And bait was just what Dock was about to give them.
The tactical holosphere hovering above the control deck flared with color as the enemy acquired multiple target locks on the Stork. The locks were swiftly followed by missile launches.
Dock shouted through to the hold: “Now!”
The Resistance fighters were shaking so violently in their harnesses that the hold camera showed them as a blur. But they had wits enough to fire the first round of missiles out of the launchers secured to the deck on tripods.
It was a stupid lashed-up system, really. With a little more preparation they could have broken the need for human fire authority and run the whole lot through AIs.
The backblast from the launchers choked the hold, but the smoke barrage they’d laid down was working already. There was actual smoke, true, but Dock was far more interested in the false trails of heat, radar, and other signatures mixed in the smoke munitions.
The holosphere showed more missile launches rise from the ground, this time aimed at these false targets.
The passengers in the back launched another round — this time blinder munitions set to killer mode from the start.
Dock turned the Stork through 90 degrees, and then flew fast and straight out of the caldera.
Some of the Hardit missiles followed his path. Too many. About a dozen.
Fliers were natural risk-takers. Even Marines understood that. Taking risks didn’t always pay off, though.
“Breaking away,” he announced. “Cease fire!”
Combat maneuvers in atmospheres were all about channeling momentum through the fluid medium of air. There was none of the effortless pivoting he was used to in void flight. Aerial flight was a deliciously masculine mix of speed and brute force as you constantly pummeled against the resistance of the air, forcing it to yield lift and turning forces against its will.
Kind of like rough sex, but even noisier.
Dock closed the hangar and threw his craft around until its hull screamed in protest.
But the problem with atmospheric flight, he decided, was that you could never outmaneuver missiles.
Abandoning his evasive maneuvers, he sped away in level flight at maximum acceleration. The eight missiles that he hadn’t managed to throw off his scent were now closing fast.
Dock signaled for the blinder munitions that Major McEwan’s force had set hunting earlier to shift to kill mode. If he survived the next few seconds, those blinders should prove jolly useful.
Wait a little longer, he willed the oncoming missiles. Give up a little more of your delta-v.
When the Stork’s AI estimated four seconds before the first missile impact, Dock gave a maximum burst from the attitude thrusters to shove his nose straight down, presenting the belly of his craft to the missiles. Then he fed every last Joule of power to the underside Fermi defenses.
&n
bsp; The gunship fell out of the sky like a rock, a magnetized rock because the ship’s belly attracted the missiles with absolute inevitability. The missiles clattered harmlessly against the Stork, their fuses and triggers scrambled by the Fermi field.
Oh, yeah! Victory is mine!
When he’d finished punching the air, Dock checked the holosphere. It reported that they were clear and safe. Except for one thing.
The ground.
Shit!
Dock shook his head in frustration as he took up the flight controls and did battle with his death stall.
When will you ever remember that planets have grounds!
He managed to pull the nose up, but the gunship was shaking so violently in the turbulence that it wasn’t responding predictably.
Damn! He’d used up too much reaction mass in his dive to escape the missiles.
Instead of pulling out of his dive, he banked to starboard until the lift from the delta wings regained some stability. Dock clipped the top of a forest tree canopy as he finally wrestled back control and started gaining altitude.
Well, strictly speaking, it was his slipstream that had bent back the tree, leaving in his wake a cloud of purple leaves ripped from their branches. But his story of clipping the tops of trees with his wingtips would sound so much better in the wardroom.
“Anyone still alive?” Dock called cheerfully into the hold. He was answered by dull groans. One passenger unconscious, two barely, he judged.
Dock rolled his eyes. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake. I thought you lot were supposed to be g-hardened. I can’t believe you’ve just missed the most exciting bit.” He gave a long sigh. “Would you like me to set down and bring you coffee and a ginger biscuit until you feel better?”
No response.
While he circled over the trees to give the delicate lunks time to recover, he played back the results of the blinders. They’d been busy since Lieutenant Lee’s lot had released them, doing a fantastic job in tracking enemy targeting systems. And any that they hadn’t found had revealed themselves when they tried to shoot Dock out of the sky.
The holosphere showed small explosions flaring all around the caldera as the Hardit anti-air defenses were wiped out.
“Hello, am I through to the Hardit commander?” he said over the comm, deciding to have a little fun at his passengers’ expense. “Thank you. Now, madam, I know I called you a bakri-chodding dog fondler whose crimes against hygiene mean that even the fleas won’t touch you, but please understand, I only mean that with the deepest affection.” The Resistance fighters were sufficiently awake now to glare into the camera, looking thoroughly pissed off. That was good enough for Dock to change course back to Beta City.
“My passengers are only Marines,” he said. “Which means they’re feeling a little delicate. Would you be awfully decent and allow us to take a break for five minutes, so we can resume the attack when the poor darlings are feeling better? You would? Bloody marvelous. May I say that you are thoroughly decent for a xenocidal hairy skangat. See you soon. Over and bye bye.”
All the while, Dock kept his attention locked onto the tactical holosphere. No signs of enemy target acquisitions. If any SAM defenses had survived, they would have shown themselves by now. He was in the clear.
“Playtime’s over, guys. We’ll be over the target in 20 seconds. And remember what I said earlier: you need to put on a good show, make the poor monkey defenders think we’re softening them up for a land assault. Enjoy playing with your missiles, but don’t scratch the furniture.”
— Chapter 50 —
“Guinshrike a success,” Indiya reported to Arun over the FTL link, having taken over from the XO. “Used too much fuel, though, so your lift home will be waiting for you at the bottom of the lake instead of safely out of harm’s way. Make sure you set that bomb right because electronics are more vulnerable than Marine flesh. If your gamma burst fries the avionics on that Stork—”
“Then none of us are ever getting back to Detroit,” Arun said. “Let alone Beowulf.”
“Maybe. We do have other shuttles, but can’t crew them without risking critically important crew. Let’s hope you don’t force me into choosing between my ship and rescuing a stranded expeditionary force that didn’t know when to quit.”
“And I hope you remember that I am in command of all forces. You run your ship internally how you like, Captain Indiya, but Beowulf complies with objectives that I set.”
The connection was terminated abruptly.
Love you too, Indiya.
Arun glanced around the inside of the redoubt, but of course no one had overheard his spat with the commander of their orbital support. Everyone was keeping watch on the corridors outside.
The four airlocks they’d used to enter the city were connected by narrow zig-zag passageways flowed around two bastion-edged redoubts that covered the area. The passageways merged behind the redoubts before pushing on to one of the main helixes — gently sloping ramps that circled up and down a broad vertical shaft, connecting the levels. Xin was readying the gamma bomb in that helix now.
Arun, Puja and 1st Section were in one redoubt, Gupta, Laskosk and 2nd Section were in the other. Arcs of fire were perfect, covering each other, and every approach. The bastions were even armed with heavy weapons.
Arun still wasn’t happy. Hunkering behind static defenses made him nervous. Once behind a wall it was a difficult mental leap to abandon your position, and no matter how impressive the slab of armor between you and the passageway outside, there would always be munitions that could punch through any armor.
“Sir,” called Puja who had been engrossed in her sensor block for the past few minutes.
“Stand by, Narciso.” Arun waited until Barney had set up a comm-relay to include Gupta, Majanita, Nhlappo and Xin. “Go ahead.”
“The latest data burst from the recon drone at the shoreline confirms what I’m reading with my sensor unit. Enemy-controlled weapons systems are going online in the upper levels. Not many, but looks like the garrison is gearing up for a surface attack. I’m detecting energy signatures on the move. It’s consistent with reserves moving up the levels to reinforce topside defenses. It’s intermittent, but I did detect similar signatures moving to our location on Level 6. I’m not picking up anything nearby now. All I can say is that I’m not seeing heavy weapons coming our way. It could be a single scout coming to check why the hatches opened, or could be ten thousand militia armed with dumb chemical-powered rifles. If it’s the latter, I won’t know until they’re nearly upon us.”
“Thank you, Corporal,” said Arun. “Looks like Ensign Dock’s taken the heat off us. I’ll present him with my compliments when I see him next. And that won’t be as long as we thought because he’ll be waiting for us at the bottom of the lake. Says our bird’s running too low on fuel to ride out the bomb blast farther out. Lieutenant Lee, how long do you need?”
“Device is primed,” Xin replied. “Just need to set the blast pattern and we’re outta here. A few minutes. No more.”
There was nothing for Arun to do but wait. He double checked the ammo state of his SA-71. All was fine. He knew it would be, but he hadn’t lost the habit of checking and re-checking equipment was functioning and placed where he expected it to be. So long as his NCOs were alive and uninjured, they knew what to do better than he did. For now, he was just another Marine with a carbine. The familiar heft of the weapon was a comfort as he waited.
“Contact!”
“The alert came from Sergeant Majanita. Madge had taken charge of 3rd Section who had been dropped off in the hidden embrasures that ran along the passageways connecting Force Patagonia at the underwater entrance to the main helix where the rest of Force Kenya were readying the gamma bomb.
“Scouts heading our way from the north,” Madge added. “Four so far.”
“Have they seen you?” asked Nhlappo.
“Negative.”
“What do you see, Narciso?” asked Xin.
“I’
m not seeing any energy signatures,” Puja answered. “Must be lightly armed militia.”
“We’re keeping silent and dark in the helix,” said Nhlappo. “Let’s hope they’re here to inspect why the airlocks opened, and don’t think to head our way.”
“They’re passing our position now,” whispered Madge. “Headed your way, Major. I can confirm they are rifle-armed militia.”
“Let them pass, Majanita,” said Nhlappo.
Majanita and 3rd Section gave Arun good eyes on the Hardit advance. The vanguard of four Hardit scouts hesitated within touching distance of the hidden Marines and sniffed the air. They weren’t the elite soldiers who were connected with Tawfiq. They were half-starved militia who looked as if they hadn’t cleaned themselves since long before the civil war broke out. Their clothes were so tattered that they would soon be naked other than their matted fur. Arun’s contempt was stoked still further by the way their tails held their rifles as if the weapons were smeared with excrement. These monkeys had no pride in themselves.
But Arun knew it would be a mistake to underestimate the danger from these miserable wretches. Despite the stench from their bodies, their sense of smell was acute. Their noses would have confirmed the airlocks had been opened. And even though the Marine battlesuits were all scent-sealed, the enemy might be able to smell them indirectly: perhaps from the slight warming of the hinge lubricants for the door into the redoubt where Arun was hidden.
The Hardit scouts relaxed, resting there listlessly until their main force joined them. A dozen more militia arrived first, sniffing the air for themselves. These reinforcements acted more agitated than the scouts. Growls broke out. Arun felt sure the aliens had discovered the human threat, but then… nothing. The newly arrived Hardits relaxed, and the enemy rested on all fours until further reinforcements arrived, swelling their number to over fifty.
Renegade Legion (The Human Legion Book 3) Page 19
