“Operations,” said Erik, “inform our rescue party they have fourteen minutes until terminal impact on Tartarus.”
“Aye sir, fourteen minutes.”
Erik flipped channels. “Hello Major Thakur, you have fourteen minutes until terminal impact, Makimakala is inbound and will not adjust her velocity to help you get clear. If you’re still there when she arrives, you’re finished.”
* * *
“Styx,” said Trace. “Tacnet’s showing me something big near the core, can you confirm?”
The fighting swirled about Command Squad’s position, deepynines and drysines engaging with mechanical ferocity while the marines held cover in the middle and laid down supporting fire for their allies. Trace saw that Charlie Platoon’s position was the same, Lieutenant Jalawi maintaining good formation and not exposing his marines to too much enemy fire, having correctly seen that the deepynines weren’t expending much ammunition on humans.
“Major, there appears to be a ship,” Styx replied. AT-7 remained in close cover barely a kilometre away, now with another two of Jalawi’s marines aboard plus Arime — damaged or wounded and now of more use defending their escape ride. “There are pathways for rapid evacuation from the core, for smaller ships.”
“That’s the queen escaping,” Trace surmised, and fired at a briefly-visible deepynine, blowing off legs. “They’re going to move her out before Makimakala arrives. Neither of our ships is in position to stop her, she’ll dock with one of the pickets and disappear.”
So far the assault had been brilliantly if fortuitously managed. If Makimakala could get past the remaining pickets, Tartarus was finished — no mean feat considering what had been initially arrayed to stop them. But the deepynine queen was about to get away, and the humans could not advance beyond this position. The deepynine inner defences had held them up, and now Phoenix’s primary goal — intelligence on the queen — was about to disappear like smoke. Without that intelligence, Trace knew this whole mission was for nothing.
Finally she found that her brain was coming to visualise the broader fight. These drysines accompanying the human thrust toward the core were barely five percent of the total force. Drysines seemed to be winning control of two major shipyards, with at least three vessels relatively undamaged so far. That was Styx’s escape route, and by the defensive withdrawal many drysine formations were now commencing, it seemed that she was going to get as many of them out as possible before Makimakala torched the place. When that happened, Styx would have a choice to make. Turn on the humans, eliminate them and escape with her own kind on the captured vessels? Or stay as she was? Phoenix was an asset, and leverage with various organics — humans, tavalai via the Dobruta, and even kuhsi. Was Styx interested in simple survival, or did she have bigger strategic plans?
And then there were the drysines who’d peeled off this flank prior to the deepynine attack. She could still see them on tacnet, fighting a ferocious battle barely three kilometres away about an inner power complex that appeared to have no strategic value whatsoever. What was there that Styx would put her own safety in jeopardy to capture?
“Styx,” she called. “Do you have any angle on that deepynine queen?”
“No Major. She is inaccessible by any forces from our current position.”
“That’s what I thought.” It wasn’t technically true — there were various drysine formations that could sacrifice themselves if they charged, and possibly get a few units close enough to transmit visuals before dying. That Styx refused told Trace something about her priorities. The deepynines might be prepared to sacrifice everything to kill drysines, but the drysines were just trying to get the maximum assets out alive.
“Don’t you try it Major,” said Kono. “If you ditch us and make a run for it, I will shoot you myself.”
Trace nearly swore, jetted from cover as cannon rounds flashed about where she’d been, clanging her suit with shrapnel. She hit new cover, braced and stared out through the intervening structures, temporarily free of deepynines.
“Someone’s got to do it,” she retorted. “We have to know what that fucking thing is, it’s the reason we’re here!”
“Major I can temporarily blank you from tacnet and intensify jamming along a narrow corridor,” Styx told her. “I will attempt to rendezvous a transport for your escape but you must move now, there is no more time.”
“Major, hell no!” Jalawi shouted. “I’ll go, you stay the hell here!”
“You’re out of position,” Trace told him. “You have formation command, just make sure you get the hell out before the froggies turn this place to ash. Command Squad, follow me and keep as tight to cover as possible.”
She pushed off, across the habitat and through a gap rear-side from the deepynines and into open space. Then she jetted hard and selected a course in tight past several habitats and support structures. Command Squad followed, and she held thrust down and watched the velocity build. Using marine suits as spaceships was ill-advised — she had nothing like the power of a shuttle, nor even a hacksaw drone, and once at velocity she’d dodge like a loaded bulk carrier. But if the deepynines were only going to shoot at drysines, then maybe, just maybe…
…and abruptly her coms blanked to static, visor displays flickering as she lost tacnet and even basic scan. That was Styx, upping the jamming as she’d promised. How the hell she was doing that… but Trace was no engineer and had no way to guess. Probably she was coordinating some kind of mass effect from her drysine army, dozens of drones coordinating jamming fields in unison.
She skimmed a habitat at full thrust, now travelling dangerously fast. If something got in her way, she wasn’t going to be able to dodge, and even at low thrust a suit could accumulate plenty of V if you were stupid enough to hold the button down in one direction. And if the deepynines came back…
Something silver flashed from behind the habitat structures, heading away — deepynine, a scout covering this flank, and Trace tracked even as she flew, then fired. Heavy recoil threw a wobble in her trajectory, thrust compensating on auto as the deepynine flashed, tumbled, then smacked into one of Tartarus’s thicket of steel frames and bounced like a broken thing.
Ahead the structures were ending, and open space loomed between cathedral-like spans of steel. Trace hit hard thrust offset, and tried to cut the curving trajectory as closely past a support as possible — with her visor display a static-flecked mess, she had to do it entirely by eye, no simple thing without navcomp aligning course for her. The steel flashed by at perhaps three hundred kph, and she cut thrust briefly to rotate and glance behind. Command Squad hurtled after her, also cutting thrust to coast, Rolonde and Rael at the rear now firing backward with a staccato hammer of rifle fire. So something was chasing them, though without coms Trace couldn’t hear a thing… and several missiles streaked around the corner they’d just turned, accelerating fast but losing acquisition and detonating on either side with bright flashes that would have knocked her tumbling in an atmosphere, but made barely a jolt in vacuum.
A deepynine appeared behind, chasing at high speed… and died immediately to Rolonde’s fire. Rael got the second, and Terez drifted wide enough to kill the third, which sprayed chain gun fire as it tumbled before exploding. A1 had been impressed with Koshaim rifles, and it was a comfort to know that even deepynines had reason to be worried about marines at close quarters. But the only reason those missiles kept missing was Styx and her jamming. Deepynine drones seemed missile-reliant, and struggled to adjust when they missed. Where Command Squad was headed, Styx’s jamming would not reach, and for the first time since the shooting started, Command Squad would be on their own.
36
Lieutenant Crozier’s instructions to dock were too fast for Tif to follow, and overlapping with marine-chatter and occasional gunfire in the background. But Ensign Lee flashed the extraction point to Tif’s screen and she went without question, a hard burn away from her cover-orbit and straight toward the remains of a blasted shipping doc
k. It looked a mess, and Tif rotated to consider it through the top of her canopy as she braked hard on approach.
“Tif can you get in?” Lee asked from the front seat. “Or do you want me to blast something?”
“Blast you make more bad,” said Tif, picking a path with her eye through the drifting remains of a sublight runner and a lot of connecting umbilicals and framework. “We go. Watch guns, I no kill sard and fly.”
“PH-4, I have a reading on approaching forces,” came Lieutenant Jersey’s urgent voice. “Looks like some nearby sard have won their fight and are heading our way. Make it fast, you’ve got two minutes.”
Tif said something very bad in her native tongue, kicked thrust and rolled into the debris field at a speed her academy instructors would have suspended her for. She could see the airlock ahead, an organic-looking nodule on the side of a huge cylindrical habitat, but there was barely enough room between it and the drifting hulk of the crippled runner — not a large ship, but ten times the mass of PH-4 and worse, it was still drifting.
Marine-chatter was telling her something about status at the airlock, but she let Lee handle it and slid the shuttle sideways past some tumbling debris, then a pivot past some unexploded pressure tanks, then purposely hit some light plating just to get it out of the way. Attitude thrust leaped and danced in rapid white puffs as she manoeuvred, then a light kick of the mains, followed by another spin and zigzag. The dead nose-thruster nearly tripped her several times but her hands recovered with fast little movements when the nose-yaw failed to fire as expected. A final braking thrust blew the visibility before her into white clouds, and then she was wedged in tightly, barely four meters’ clearance to the ship hull while slamming the dorsal hatch against the airlock.
“Go go go!” Lee told the marines, and suddenly Tif found several of them outside and coming past her canopy, thrusting out to cover positions in preparation for Jersey to pick them up. Her ears did not pop at the crash entry to the rear hold — the cockpit doors were closed, separating her and Ensign Lee from any pressure changes behind. But freed prisoners were filling their hold, Tif had no idea who or how many, being far too busy staring at her scan and seeing the alarming signal that Jersey had identified, fading and strengthening in waves as the static came in and out. Enemy suits and ships, probably sard, approaching fast. One minute ten.
More fast coms between PH-3 and Lieutenant Crozier, marines clustering fast for a pickup as Lieutenant Jersey made a much easier approach, avoiding most of the debris as the marines simply jetted out to meet her. But the freed prisoners had no suits, necessitating an airlock match. Tif felt the fear surge, seeing that signal getting closer. It ticked below a minute. The tavalai ship’s incoming ETA was now under thirteen minutes, and then all this place would become the fires of hell. Hekgarh, she told herself firmly, resisting the temptation to rip the shuttle away from the airlock early. Hekgarh, fear like the hunter, not the prey.
“All in!” came a marine’s shout, and “Go Tif!” from Lee. Tif broke contact so fast Lee nearly lost a docking grapple, forward view a storm of white as she backed out hard. Stopped with a slam, spun, thrust then spun again as she rotated through the mess, trying to judge with her eyes what the shuttle could survive hitting, and what it absolutely could not.
“Tif!” called Jersey. “Major Thakur just made a run toward the core with Command Squad! She’s got no evac, AT-7 can’t fly in there, it’ll get killed! Tif we can make it, we have a clearer path from here, we’re not far from the core!”
“Save Najor Thakur?” Tif asked, crashing some light framework. Major Thakur had saved her and Skah from the chah’nas. If there was one thing Tif’s people believed in, it was payback — both the good kind and the bad. “You give course, we go.”
She finally got clear and burned hard as Jersey’s new course appeared on her screen. It was completely insane — directly toward the core of Tartarus, deeper into the maze when they should have been running hard back to Phoenix. But Lieutenant Jersey was a gun military pilot who would never say to do something that wasn’t possible. And having made the decisions in her recent life that she had, Tif knew that she simply had no choice.
She burned hard toward the core, seeing PH-3 in fast pursuit with Crozier’s marines back on board… and a fast glance out her canopy showed her drysine escort firing at something else. Gunfire joined them from the back of PH-3, where military shuttles had no fixed weapons… and then she realised — Delta Platoon marines had somehow lashed themselves to the shuttle’s outer hull and were acting as Lieutenant Jersey’s tail gunners.
“Fast Tif!” Jersey told her. “You fly crazy Tif! Crazy is our only chance, understand?”
“Fry crazy,” Tif agreed, holding down thrust until they were well past the safe zone for proximity flying, and kept thrusting. Cannon fire cut past from behind, sard suits and ships approaching, and something big exploded to one side. “You watch taiw, I watch front. We go kuhsi crazy, you keep up.”
* * *
Trace was barely half-a-klick from the core perimeter when it became clear that Styx had lied to her. Ahead, half-hidden amongst the heavily built power-core shielding and layered, dense structures, a huge firefight was in progress. Tacnet insisted that there were no drysine drones in this area, and Styx had said that no forces could be committed to intercept the deepynine queen — and yet Trace could see the distinctive red storm of chain gun fire, the now familiar movements and patterns of a zero-G drysine assault.
Command Squad wove past huge interior bulkheads, decelerating with feet toward their target even as that target became visible. It was a ship, only small, probably a sublighter. At this range, past the obstructions, Trace could see that this part of the cavernous interior formed a passage, like a tunnel to the surface, snaking at points and broken by docking ports and security barriers. A small ship here could make rapid progress to clear space, though doubtless the passage was heavily defended at most times.
Now those defences were being torn to pieces by a relentless drysine onslaught. Trace could see the wreckage of destroyed shuttles and many smashed drones, others attempting to create crossfires from cover positions about the ship only to be outflanked in turn and decimated beneath a hail of chain gun fire. Several of the ship’s weapons were still operational, laying down close-range carnage on any drysines that drifted within their view. But without any space to manoeuvre, it was doomed, and even now drysines were clamping onto its hind-section, cutters blazing at weak-points to open holes in the hull and disconnect vital systems.
“Hold up!” Trace commanded. “Cover positions five hundred meters to the ship’s rear, we’re not getting too close!”
“That’s the damn deepynine queen in there,” said Kono. “Shouldn’t we help dig her out?”
“They didn’t want our help, Styx said she couldn’t intercept the queen. We watch what they’re up to, we’d only get in their way.”
Trace picked a deceleration course between structures and emerged at a near-stop half-a-klick behind the conflagration. That was plenty close enough, with near space filled with flashing, bouncing rounds and shrapnel, and a few surviving deepynine defenders streaking in desperate, wide orbits trying to find a way back in, pursued by merciless drysines.
Trace clamped herself to a support, magnetism halting her drift, explosions announcing the end of the ship’s defensive weapons. “Major, seven minutes,” said Kono.
“Dammit, where is she?” Trace muttered. “Styx didn’t want us to see her, probably wanted her captured without us knowing. We have to get in closer…”
“New contacts!” announced Rolonde as she saw it, no need for scan because suddenly they could all see it, roaring in like a giant silver wave from further up the passage. “Holy shit!”
A wall of deepynine counter-attack hit the drysines, and Trace yelled for cover as the firing became the most intense that she’d ever seen in her life. Braced to the support, she could hear the impacts through the vibration in her suit, and i
t sounded like a hailstorm on a tin roof.
When she looked again, surviving drysines were scattering amidst the carnage, pursued by the new arrivals… and a new ship was coming down the passage, small like the first, but undamaged and different. Out of it were pouring humanoid armoured suits unlike anything she’d seen before, but they were fast, mobile and heavily armed, spraying fire every bit as deadly as the deepynine drones at any drysine in range.
Others raced to the damaged ship and tore inside. Trace saw one hit, and a deepynine rushed to grab it, and stop it from spinning. Several others made common formation with deepynines, and combined fire as though they were coordinating with a single mind. A badly damaged deepynine with torso and thrusters mauled was dragged by another humanoid suit, back toward the new ship, and escape.
These pressurised suits housed organics, Trace knew. They were not so different from human marine suits, though perhaps a little more advanced, and certainly more mobile in zero-G. And they were doing more than coordinating with the deepynines. They were fighting with them. Fighting for them. Dying for them, as the deepynines were fighting and dying as well. This looked like more than a mere alliance. This looked like a bond of blood.
“Alo!” she gasped as she realised. “Alo came to rescue the queen.”
“Stan Romki you son of a bitch,” Kumar muttered. “You were right all along.”
“There!” said Rael. “Mid-hatch, I see her!”
From a mauled middle-hatch in the non-rotating crew compartment, there emerged a huge, gleaming dark-silver beast. She had wide legs, multiple body segments, and bristled with attachments that Trace could not identify, but guessed were mostly weapons. She was perhaps four times the size of her attentive drones, and even now they formed around her in a phalanx, deepynine and alo alike, blazing fire at any threat and darting to obey every flicking gesture of her limbs.
Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) Page 48
