by B. V. Larson
“All the repellers are down?”
“Yes, though number six has merely lost its associated generator.”
“You mean if we got power to it, it would function?”
“Theoretically.”
I stood up. “That’s what we have to do. Galen, get that repeller working. Put your two best technicians on it. Kwon, you take over here. Assign me a squad for security, but I don’t think they’ll be landing any more troops until they’ve drilled as far as they can.”
“Okay, boss, but we’re blind outside of sector four. Nobody here in the command center can see the ships if they do something else. You sure you don’t want me to escort the technicians instead?”
I knew Kwon would rather take the mission, but there was a distinct possibility that my own technical knowhow would be needed to get the repeller working, something Kwon would be useless at. “Sorry Kwon, not this time. I need you here. All right, squad. Let’s go.”
I sealed up my suit and led the two Elladans and the Raptor squad through the corridors, using my HUD for reference. Those blast doors still intact opened in front of us, showing that our little command staff was on the job.
“Cybele,” I said conversationally as we walked, “how many marines did you have to defend this station?”
“Marines?”
“I mean soldiers—close-combat warriors.”
“Forty-eight, divided into eight squads of six.”
“That’s about what I have, yet your people didn’t seem to put up much of a fight.”
“The lower orders must be compelled to risk their lives. It’s a difficult task to force them to fight.”
I stopped short, causing the others to do the same. “You mean your soldiers don’t want to defend their homes? I would think that even your ‘lower orders’ would be motivated, at least to avoid being eaten or killed.”
“They didn’t believe we could lose. In fact, I didn’t believe it myself.” Her ridiculously perfect face twitched. “It’s terribly inconvenient.”
I guffawed. “Inconvenient? You need to get a grip on reality, girl.”
She leveled a stare as patrician as any Adrienne had ever given me. “I’d rather die with my composure firmly in place than run around uselessly like some hysterical plebian work-wench.”
My smile leached away. “Okay. I can respect that, if you’re not simply denying reality.”
“I deny nothing, and I’m doing my best to help. Shall we go now?”
“Sure.” My estimate of the Elladans went up a tiny notch.
Soon, we reached the repeller. Galen was right, the mechanism seemed intact. It was the size of an old hydroelectric turbine. A cave-in had crushed and disconnected the cables running through a short tunnel.
“The generator is behind the rubble,” Cybele said.
“Okay, let’s get this cleared.” I told Kwon to have them turn off the grav-plates in the tunnel and reduce the pull on the others nearby. The Raptors and I soon had the way opened, and the Elladans spliced the cables.
“Kwon, tell Galen to use the repeller to rotate the station continuously.”
“You want to start rotating now?”
“There’s no need to wait,” I told him.
A rumble went through the base as the repeller applied lateral movement to the lumpy sphere of the fortress. I could see the alignment of the Demon lasers abruptly shift, and then the beams shut down. The ships moved to try to regain their angle, but it was too difficult to maintain the precision they needed.
By the time we reached the command center again, they’d stopped trying. Unfortunately, this only bought us a half hour or so until the Demons figured out a nearly perfect counter-tactic.
They landed on the station.
It wasn’t clear from our cameras how they clung to the armor—maybe magnetics, maybe cables or external grav-plates—but once they were down, they started drilling with their lasers again.
Now it didn’t matter how we twisted and turned. Their ships remained clamped in place, always in the same positions relative to the center.
“Dammit. That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. They’ve landed.”
Kwon perked up. “Now’s the time for a raid!”
“Yeah, but how would we do it without everybody dying?”
“I got some ideas,” Kwon said with confidence.
“Hold on a minute.”
I stared at the displays, and then tapped on the screens, changing to every shot and angle we had. The enemy ships were hidden inside the clouds of billowing hot gases and dust vomiting forth from their bore-holes. Maybe Kwon’s surfboard idea could work after all. I told him about the self-generated smokescreen, pointing out the edges of it on the other sector screens.
“That’s the key, boss. They won’t be able to see us coming over the horizon.”
I pointed overhead. “The assault carrier is still hovering out there. They’ll pick us off like flies.”
“Then we create a diversion. Be back in a few minutes.” With that, he stomped out.
I shook my head. Whatever he came up with, it was bound to be simple and effective, as long as he hadn’t missed any obvious disadvantage—obvious to me, that was.
Ten minutes later, Kwon called. “Come to the sector three airlock, Captain.”
I eyed Galen. He stared flatly back at me. Could I trust him?
“Call me if you need me,” I said after a moment’s consideration, and I left the Elladans with half a squad of Raptors.
Galen nodded and stared after me.
At the sector-three cargo bay nearest the airlock, I found Kwon with six surfboards and an equal number of grenades nano-welded near their centers of gravity.
“I programmed these to fly toward the assault carrier and blow up,” he said.
I immediately saw what he intended. “Did you put in a delay?”
“I sure did. Thirty seconds.”
I wasn’t sure if that would be enough—you could get to the enemy ships, but could you escape the blast radius?
“I’ll pilot one of them,” I said.
“Hell, no!” he objected. “You’re too important. I was planning on blowing up our dumbest Raptor.”
“Kwon, I don’t think—”
He laughed loudly. “I’m kidding. I don’t trust Raptors with bombs. They’re as dumb as the goat-people with them. I’m flying this thing with the Raptors following me. Go back to the control center and watch how it’s done.”
I nodded reluctantly. “Okay. Kick some ass, but remember I need you alive to keep watching my back. Turn that detonator up to ninety seconds.”
“You think so? That’s a long time.”
“You have to get out of the blast radius.”
Kwon’s eyes lit up.
“Ah, right. Good thinking. I’ll see you soon.”
Two squads of Raptors began filing into the cargo bay. Eight of them carried grenades. I stuck around long enough to give a short speech and a salute to those about to die. I had little doubt there would be casualties, maybe heavy ones, but if we could damage the two Demon ships badly enough, even destroy them, we could buy ourselves more time.
That’s what this was about.
Buying time.
-22-
When I returned to the control center, my adrenalin was pumping. Cybele flashed me her Helen-of-Troy smile, but I didn’t go for it. Even if my libido wanted to go down that rabbit hole, my better judgment overrode it. Why was it that soldiers always think of sex right before a battle?
Was it really cheating if the girl wasn’t really human? Then again, she looked human enough. And if we were about to die anyway…
No. I firmly told myself to stay focused on business.
I watched on the station sensors as Kwon and the Raptors jogged down the corridor to the airlock and opened it, easing out onto the surface in six small groups. Each picked up a surfboard and, on a designated signal, they began
throwing the boards laterally into space.
Given the dust and gasses, the small objects should go undetected until their repellers were activated. I watched as they abruptly oriented themselves according to Kwon’s instructions and headed in the direction of the assault cruiser.
At the same time, Kwon and his troops skittered along the surface of the base and into the dust cloud. They would come over the horizon two hundred yards or less from the enemy, and I hoped the swirling gases and debris from the drilling would hide them well.
Of course, the reverse was also true. How were my men going to see their targets?
The carrier commander would have been wiser to stand off at a good distance, but he’d made the mistake of hovering at the edge of the cloud, which gave him very little time to react to the surfboard grenades. Even so, he shot down all but two. The last grenades detonated close enough to do some serious damage.
Kwon’s little force was angling too far to the left. He could have turned on his suit’s active sensors, but that might have given away their position.
I called him on the ansible. His suit was the only one equipped with the device other than mine. “Kwon, adjust right ten degrees. The cruiser is about ninety yards in front of you. Throw a grenade and hunker down. I can detonate it at exactly the right time.”
“No you can’t, boss. Grenades don’t have ansibles.”
“You’re right. Then tell your suit to relay my ansible signal into a radio signal.”
“Okay. Suit, do what the boss said.”
“Define ‘boss,’” I heard his suit say.
“The boss is Captain Cody Riggs, you dumb-ass machine!”
“Nomenclature updated.”
The ghostly figure of Kwon rose up and hurled a basketball-sized grenade toward the enemy. It flew straight but off-target as he couldn’t see the Demon ship. It also naturally separated from the curving surface below as the base generated almost no gravity.
When it got about halfway there and twenty feet off the ground, a laser snapped from the Demon cruiser and destroyed the mini-nuke.
“Damn,” I said.
“It must have automated point defense. We have to crawl closer and stay in the ground clutter.”
“Your call, Kwon, but not your job. Sneaking in and planting mines on things is for grunts.”
“None of my guys are expendable, boss.”
Grumbling, he sent in Raptors. Kwon was right, of course. None of my troops were expendable. But sometimes people had to do dangerous things to win a battle. This was one of those times.
I watched as a Raptor crawled forward, a grenade clipped to his back.
“Tell him to keep his tail down!” I snapped, and Kwon relayed my order, just in time as a laser cut a hole in the fog above.
“He’s made it to about thirty yards from the nearest Demon ship, the cruiser,” I reported. “As long as he keeps his tail down…twenty-five…twenty…”
Soon the Raptor had almost reached the enemy vessel’s shadow, if it’d had one. Critters appeared on the surface of the Demon ship and leaped to the ground.
“Tell him to drop it and crawl back fast!” I yelled, but it was too late. Both sides were blind in the swirling gasses, but with forty or fifty Demons spreading out for a point-blank search, I had only about three seconds to make a decision.
Gritting my teeth, I sent the detonation code. “Everyone hug the dirt!”
A bare eye-blink later, the relayed signal blew the grenade in place. Its high-effect radius of about thirty yards touched the skin of the Demon cruiser and tore up some of it, and the shockwave ripped the ship loose from its moorings, spinning it laterally into space, out of the fight.
The Raptor that carried the grenade was vaporized instantly, along with the searching Demons.
The ground shock also tossed one Raptor off the base, but he was able to use suit repellers to come back.
I realized Kwon had been right. Sometimes you just had to get up-close and personal to get the job done.
The Demon battleship immediately deployed its own ground fighters, which spread out in a ring about sixty yards out. “Hold in place, Kwon. You got company. They’re guarding the other ship with bugs.”
“Roger.”
Checking the two floating damaged ships, I noticed they seemed to be sniping at us with their remaining lasers, but were ineffective due to the dust and debris.
“We haven’t got much time before they can get a good shot at us,” I said, turning my attention back to the remaining battleship. The big hulk continued to bore deeply into our station. The shaft was less than half an hour from us now. If we couldn’t stop them from drilling, we’d have to evacuate to a different part of the base. Putting the control center in the exact middle for security might make sense, but in this case it made us easy to locate. They didn’t even have to see us.
“There’s a force of thirty to forty Demons moving out in your direction, Kwon. It doesn’t look like they can see us yet. They’re spread out in an arc and moving slow and blind, but they’ll run into you in a minute or two.”
Kwon laughed. “No problem. I got this.” I saw him and his Raptors backing up, still crawling, until they were around the curve of the station. “Can we get up now, boss?”
“Yes. The Demons can’t see you right now.”
Kwon then began skimming over the surface on repellers, heading directly away from the enemy, his troops following. Since the battle station was roughly spherical, they were approaching the enemy from the opposite side within minutes.
“The bugs searching for you are out of position,” I told Kwon. “Send in a couple guys now, before they come back. I might be able to guide them between guards to get close to the battleship.”
I detonated one of our planted grenades near the searching force when they went by, catching a dozen of them in the blast. After that, I focused on giving the two Raptors with grenades point-by-point directions as they crawled ever closer to the battleship.
One got caught by a patrolling scorpion and was killed after a brief but vicious hand-to-hand battle. The other Raptor crept closer and closer, expertly using what cover there was to stay low and in the clutter.
If I’d been the Demon commander, I’d have paused in the drilling every couple of minutes and let the area clear to check it, but fortunately he didn’t. The Raptor got all the way to the edge of the battleship and dropped his grenade in a divot next to one of the struts that held it on the surface. Then he began sneaking out of there.
It was agonizing to watch him slink away. The bomb was set, but we had to wait until our man was clear. The rocks were crawling with scorpions. At any moment, I expected them to discover the nuke, in which case the plan would fail.
“Captain, the laser has broken into the interior of the base and is now drilling through improved areas,” Galen said in my ear. “We have perhaps five minutes before it strikes the armor of the command center.”
“Hang on for a few more seconds,” I muttered, watching the Raptor crawl through another brief gap in the enemy lines.
They found him then. Two scorpions fell on the marine, and our troops hugging the rocks took pot-shots at them to help.
“Kwon, I’m going to have to blow the grenade. Our guy should be outside the blast radius, but the explosion will probably leave the area clear of dust and gasses, and then you’ll have to deal with whatever survived.”
“Okay, boss. Everybody hunker down!”
I bit the bullet and sent the code. “Come on, marine, make it,” I muttered as the huge Demon battleship shuddered and broke free on the end where the grenade exploded. It hung on its moorings at the other end like a giant air tank on a hose.
The shockwave touched the Raptor, but he held on, after having been warned. Most of the Demons around him didn’t, they were blasted off into space.
“Watch the sky, Kwon! Some of them are coming back.”
Kwon and the Raptors fire
d as they spotted targets, some out in space but unhurt, some on the ground. Getting organized far faster than human troops who’d just had a nuke detonated among them, the Demons who were left formed up and charged at my force.
“Kwon, turn around and haul ass along the surface.” That would take them at an oblique angle to the two forces trying to catch them in a pincer move.
Lasers popped and sizzled through space, crisscrossing the dispersing gases. Like football players converging on the guy with the ball, the Demons angled inward, moving faster than my troops in a desperate effort to catch them.
“The sector one airlock is fifty yards in front of you,” I told Kwon. “Galen—”
“We’ve opened it, Captain.”
“The airlock should be open, Kwon, so dive in. Quit fighting back and run!” Their covering fire wasn’t slowing the Demons down anyway.
We lost seven or eight more Raptors before we had to close the airlock. One of them, wounded but carrying a grenade, played dead until all our guys were inside before blowing the weapon in place, taking himself and half the enemy with him.
“Hell yeah,” I said, standing up and stabbing my pointing finger at the Elladans. “That’s the way you have to fight. If you’re going to die anyway, kill as many of the bastards as you can.”
“They might have merely captured your Raptor,” he replied. “Why die when you don’t need to?”
“Because that’s what wins wars, kid.” It seemed appropriate to call him a kid, even though he looked to be about my age. Right now, I felt ten years older than when I’d first set foot on Valiant. “Multiply his sacrifice by a million, and there would be no more Demons.”
“There I must disagree with you, Captain. The Demons are bred and hatched far faster than we can repopulate. Their combat power is limited only by their industry to build ships.”
“You people have the brains to win, but you lack balls.”
Despite me making my point as plainly as I could, Galen remain confused. I guessed that his upbringing and culture made it impossible to see certain things.
Galen was smart and competent, but effete. There was no point in ranting at him. The best I could hope for was that this experience would sink in and change his fundamental thinking about this formerly clean, distant war they were fighting, a war that had finally come to the pretty people of their perfect planet.
